People like to look at patterns, people like to look for logic and continuity. You can look in everyday places and see people with meaning glowing like half moons in their fingernails. Women at train stations playing shoe guessing games, university students with spagetti letters trying to predict their next grade, men on escalators wondering if the woman passing is his because she peels an orange like a planet.
You can as with this documentary look through a bright box and make paper clip connections plain as railing silhouettes. You can take pictures of the wind and watch a season throw out sticklebacks and then later in Photoshop crop out the swallows and watch light move on water to a soundtrack.
To explain to someone in crisis that leaves are just geometry, that the sky might as well be made of string for all the swan bellies that blot it like cats cradle, is a kind of cruelty. They look at you as if you have stripped them of a skin and start to explain about cathedral construction and the symmetry in the way we lay the table for supper. I find disorder and illogic to be a kind of beautiful childhood bed, pattern a quilt that might fall off while sleeping.
At Christmas I spent a lot of time staying with my sister who was in a coma, a kind of quilt which is off the end of the end of the bed. Having a conversation with a coma patient is not a jigsaw piece for any philosophy and I had a problem with getting anything other than dictionary fingers. I asked other families why they found it so easy, and they told me that the slightest possibility of a loved one feeling alone is enough to make anyone want to tell stories.
I looked for a long time at the symmetry of her face, at her coat hanger collarbones and butter bean eyes and I found a blood pattern of memories in her ribcage. I told her about how we laid the table for tea, that I bet she was dreaming of potatoes wiping dirt out their eyes so that that they could see, that I carried Tesco bag of rubbish to work instead of my satchel and only realized halfway through the first meeting.
It occurred to me to shake her and her blankets clean off the bed as my brother tried, or to whisper to her about the Christmas tree all knitted with gifts of good thoughts. But her symmetry and quiet needed plainer things.
I told her what I wanted. That I hoped she had more time to examine meaning, that she needn't have worried about biting back, that she should have rifled through another's things, found a diary and laughed, fucked in someone else's bed, scribbled insults on a wall at eye height and never cried for an apology.
I told her all the stories that I knew, the tall man with the marbles, the two legged cat, the slice cut out of Clare bridge and the bear with a nose stud and no leading ring. I told her that the trails behind swallows are energy and that the shape of leaves more than geometry, that most days the sky is white and not just a ceiling for impossible things. I told her that disorder is something to hold hands, to take it home in a jar when she woke up.
So now, when she calls me on her first week of university and asks for a story I tell her that you cannot break a lake and that exceptions are everywhere.
