Fiction. I don't write it. I write poetry. But if I did write fiction, I would start with a run-on sentence, one that makes itself unclear, one that makes the mind continue in a way it's not comfortable doing, leading towards questions, endless questions, about proposal and separation and whether purple has a sound.
Oxford says synaethesia is "the fact of experiencing some things in a different way from most other people, for example experiencing colours as sounds, experiencing shapes as tastes, or feeling something in one part of the body when a different part is stimulated." I say I'm Elvis. I've been in cryostasis. I know there is no life after death.
It's OK. I'm not the first. Joyce. Faulkner. Dylan. To have more punctuation than sense at times. You have to pan these words and wash away the fine tailings to find even a glimmer. But if they deserve a Nobel Prize, then so do I, don't I?
"Aretha/ crystal jukebox queen of hymn and him diffused in drunk transfusion" is how Tarantula starts, and I'm out there howling in the back yard about how "a pinch of old salt" only occurs once on the internet to the ghost of the great Irish author.
So, I feel like I should give you something to hold on to here. I'm told a good narrative has characterisation. This means I need to talk about someone other than myself. Famous writers don't count. So consider Julie. Julie has blonde hair and blue eyes. She was born in the late '80s, and grew up in Dayton, Ohio. Julie is married with three children.
One day, Julie was never heard from again. And that's the last I'll say on the subject, because I need a setting. I am in Antarctica, and it's cold, and it's white and lonely, and you don't believe me anyway, because who actually gets to go to Antarctica?
The cats do who rule the world. And Sally and her software are their domesticated caretakers. If you've understood a word I've said up until this point, then I'm doing something wrong.
The world is a tale told by an idiot, and that idiot is me. Scene five. Dunsinane Castle. Shakespeare enters. "Shall I introduce some dialogue at this point?" He asks. But Aretha's singing, "Who's zoomin' who?" And I'm grateful I don't have to answer. At least we know for certain we can take the tunnel from the South Pole to Scotland.
And the sound of sighing and crying within the walls is all in your head. And there 'you' are. You creep in here, asking questions about fragmentation. And you tell me this doesn't count as prose. There is no story arc. But what I say to you, and to the famous writers, and Sally, and what I would tell Julie if she were here is, "You don't need to hold on so tightly to reality all the time. Sometimes it pays to just let go."
(Image original work by AlmightyMelon.
Contains short quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary and from Bob Dylan's Tarantula.)