Part 1

I sit in the sun, wishing I could still dance. My body got broken, snapped and gnarled, weakened, in those moments was only matter and my will couldn't will it any different. This body has become it's own thing, and if I could dance, it wouldn't move that way. My will is full of white spite.

And so it is a garden that I am in , more often than not. I say I like the birds. My body seems to like them: it tries to move to them. My head copies their heads: it bobs and darts. They puzzle over me, come too close, cannot see the point of this thing in the chair. I am unrecognisable, even to the birds.

Not that it seems that important, to me or to the birds or to anyone, but I simply cannot remember if I am a man or a woman. Somebody once - in a hospital, say - might have once told me just to look, but I tried, and it makes no difference. My will is teasing, so that when I am one, I think I am the other, and when I think I am one, sometimes I am both. Sometimes I am both, and I wish my will had a body so it could sit next to me and talk to me, I miss natural conversation. I think that I can talk, but as my will once willed, if you talk and no one hears you, are you really talking? So, no, I cannot talk. My mouth was crushed in that moment of impact, I breathe through other holes, I think inside as I sit in the out. You can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, I once told myself. You can't measure the sea with a shell.

So, I sit, being, in a garden. I get out, either I just do, or there are wheels involved, or it is my will. I do not think there are any other parties involved, although of course, I could be wrong, I've been wrong so many times about so many things. I thought I could look at myself to solve things and find answers: I was wrong. I thought I might touch myself to see what happened: I was wrong then too. So much is impossible when you don't feel alive, when your body just dangles and even the birds won't come too near. I tried to talk to one once, called him Mister: he squalled impertinently and that was the end of that.

I've tried it all out here, everything imaginable. So much is wrong to do, or impossible. Tried to count time, reasoning that as a second could be as long as a loud sound, I stood a better chance of catching time by counting the leaves around me. I counted, but leaves turned to people, before my very eyes inside. Time in leaves is skitterish, and so I am left with no choice.