I’ve been reading a lot about liver health. I’m told to stop eating 2-3 hours before sleeping. I’m told to avoid stewing and practice loving detachment and stoicism. I feel that this track, kite’s “evening,” understands the way that this leads me to leak into aimlessness.
I take to walking like the Stockholm Syndrome-suffering protagonist in Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye, which I’m also reading. This track understands her inability to move while moving. I make my way to undone places that materialize my current muddy pace of my being present, alone, and away.
Drones of rotting refrigerators implant their sighs in my eardrums. Voices sound far off, as they roll through the outskirts of the city on rusty, overgrown tracks. As I listen, I think of the manifestation, perhaps the projection, that saves her one evening.
A woman was already standing in my favorite spot on the rusty tracks. Her long coat had a high collar that resembled the gills of a tropical fish. On her head, she wore ornaments that looked somehow extraterrestrial. Perhaps she was a singer who had fled from the stage of an opera with futuristic sets. What could be the reason for her hurrying here without her removing her makeup and changing clothes? She was older than I was, and had something extraordinary about her. Her presence even seemed to be changing the consistency of the air around her. The clear forms of her lips held her flesh together like overripe fruit, and the two ends sometimes dipped down slightly, as if they were remembering a bitter taste. The woman’s spine described a straight line of justice not dependent on any existing law. Each time I blinked, her body dissolved for two seconds into colorful micro-grains.
The darkness around us thickened. The woman gave me a dutiful nod as if the two of us had an understanding. My heart began to pound violently. It was up to me to take action. Today was the chosen day. I had a vague memory of our having arrived at an agreement in a dream, though the specific terms of the agreement were unknown to me. Suddenly the woman lay down on the tracks and pressed her face to one of the ties.
In the shadows, there it goes, call it, my liver, dragging three knees.
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