(6,080)

Batter my heart, five-eye’d God,

I don’t know how you’ve grown so large. I’ve tried cutting you down to a more manageable size, but there you sit, between lean parentheses, staring blindly ahead out of hollow eyes. In a way, you are me, or at least some expression of me transmuted to numerical form. You are a tattered amalgam of how I interact with the world—how it reacts to me. However, you are sorely incomplete, and not simply because you do not encompass the depth and breadth of my existence (much of which occurs away from you), but because on more than one occasion, I’ve taken a knife to you. I’ve cut out numbers for this reason or that. Be it shame, heartbreak, contempt, utter indifference, or the simple desire for a smaller number. I would say that the lack in you helps paint a fuller, true picture—a chiaroscuro of my life—but alas, some aspects I’ve expunged so perfectly that scarcely anyone might deduce how dearly I once held them in various corners of my heart, or indeed that anything had been held there at all. There are bouts of time during which I slavishly observe you—I obsess in full surrender and acknowledgement of my humiliation. I gaze at you in your neat confinement, which always accommodates your size, and will you—downright beg you—to grow by a single digit, merely One. I am a lot of things, but avaricious I am not. Perhaps this is no virtue, for One enriches my soul with the potency of a hundred thousand. Oh, how I long for that hollow, rightmost, vacuous Zero to give up its seat in favor of a stately One. Despite how much I’ve cut and manipulated, erased and hidden, filed and forgotten, surely you know me well enough to know why, for whom, and for what I yearn. Of course you do, you who carry tenuous links to souls and collectives near and far, you who convey words for me, representing them to my dismay or delight. Until I cut those words, or they cut me. How they hound me into dreams, where a dream becomes hound sic’d onto my heart’s obsession. But no, not always does the change from Zero to One gladden my heart. In fact, most times it is utterly banal, a mockery of my feverish focus. When some inconsequential, grounded, distant, real, future-determining sliver gets added onto the pile, to be read and endured, read and internalized with great sorrow, read and archived in dry disinterest. In such cases, that pretender of a One is voided back into a Zero full of potential. Thus, with each One, I am spent. Thus, I maintain you. Thus, I keep you, giving you infinite opportunities to warm me, wound me, woo me, in distraction from the slow drift and disintegration of this life I struggle to loosely steer in a dignified direction.

I know this to be blasphemy, and yet you enthrall me. From thee, may I never be free, my six thousand and eighty.