IV. my hand is through the wall
The fourth fragment. The Department notes that the handwriting is smaller, more precise, and more evenly spaced than in any previous section, as though written by a steadier hand - or a different one. The content has shifted from argumentation to clinical reporting. The horror is in the calm.
- Department of Antiquities, University of Rivermount
ᐴᐁᐺᑁᐨᑁᐥᑁᐕᐎᐙᐌᑁᐣᐎᐏᑁᐕᐋᐠᐌᑁᐫᐔᐎᐟᐟᐌᐚ
nothing is the home you have forgotten
I. [three lines illegible]
II. i can see through my hands. i am reporting this as an observation, not a metaphor. the flesh has become translucent in the manner of parchment held before a candle. i can see the stone beneath my palms through the meat and bone. the veins are visible. they have always been visible from the outside. what is new is that they are emptying. not of blood. of purpose. the blood is still there but it moves slower each day, as though it is forgetting why it circulates. or remembering that it circulated before the veins were built and the veins were an interruption, not an improvement.
III. [five lines illegible]
IV. i have stopped eating. not from grief or intention. the body has stopped requesting food. it is receiving something else. i can feel it entering through the palms when i press them to the ground. the body knows how to eat from the ground the way a root knows. this is not a skill i was taught. this is a skill the body remembers from before it was told it was a body. the mind is a tenant. the body is the building. the building has its own purposes and the tenant was never consulted about the architecture.
ᚲᚾᚱᚸᛠᛄᛠᚿᚱᚹᚲᚾᚱᚸᛠᛄᛠᚿᚱᚹ
break the sealbreak the seal
V. [four lines illegible]
VI. i peeled the skin back from my left hand today. the entire hand, from wrist to fingertips, the way you peel a glove. it did not hurt. i need you to hear that. it did not hurt. underneath the skin the hand is more beautiful than anything i have seen in forty years of studying beauty. the tendons are silver. the bones are the colour of old ivory and they are carved. there are marks on my bones that are not growth-marks. they are inscriptions. they are in the same script as the unidentified fifth script from the destroyed sections of the Codices. the script that no one can read. it is written on my bones. i have been carrying a text inside my skeleton for my entire life and the text is in a language that predates the languages i was taught to read and i cannot read it but my hand can read it because my hand has been shaking for weeks and the shaking is not tremor. the shaking is my hand trying to write what is written on the bones. my hand is translating itself.
VII. [six lines illegible]
VIII. i put my hand through the wall. i am writing this with one hand because the other hand is through the wall and on the other side something is holding it. not the way a person holds a hand. the way water holds what enters it. surrounding. accepting. the temperature on the other side is exactly the temperature of blood. i know this because i have been wearing my blood on the outside for some days now and i can compare. the warmth on the other side of the wall is the same warmth. which means the other side of the wall is the inside of something alive. which means we are not inside a world. we are inside a body. and the wall is the skin of the body. and my hand is through the skin. and what i am touching is the flesh of something that contains us the way i contain the inscriptions on my bones. and it is holding my hand with a tenderness that i have no framework for. the closest i can come is this: my mother held my hand like this once when i was sick with fever as a child. she smelled of bread flour and lamp oil. her hands were rough from work. she has been dead for thirty years. whatever is on the other side of the wall holds my hand the way she held it. and i think it has been waiting to hold my hand for a very long time. and i think my mother was a practice. a rehearsal. so that when i finally put my hand through the wall i would recognise the holding and not be afraid.
IX. [seven lines illegible]
dissolution is not death
X. the longing in your chest. you have felt it. everyone has felt it. the religions explain it as the soul yearning for the divine. i have cut into the place where the longing lives. it is behind the sternum, slightly left, in a pocket of tissue that does not appear in any anatomy text i have consulted. the tissue is warm. warmer than the surrounding tissue. it pulses with a rhythm that does not match the heartbeat. when i touched it with the tip of the stylus it produced a sound. not a sound i heard with my ears. a sound i heard with my teeth. a low hum. the same frequency as the pulse i felt beneath the Third Seal. the longing is not a feeling. it is a receiver. it is tuned to a signal. and the signal is coming from the other side of the wall, where my hand is, where the warmth is, where the holding is. you are a receiver that has been told it is a person. the signal is the only real part of you and you have been taught to call the signal loneliness.
XI. [remaining text is a single symbol repeated. The symbol does not correspond to any known script. It appears to be the same symbol each time but no two repetitions are identical under magnification. The Department has counted three hundred and twelve repetitions before the stone surface ends.]