Letters 1

Adam,

Over the amber flame of your eyes, we join hands for this seance where you will explain for the first time, and possibly the last time, this dormancy.  As things born without names, inside the other, we began life nebulous and strangely-defined, like shadows.  When did you know me and when did I know you?  It really wouldn't ever matter, until this moment, when I'm asking you with a certain fierceness to tell me so I can let this run through me, finally.

We would do well to make this a collection of our letters, I know, and have always known.  But what I want is

Evelyn,

I can remember as a child, watching the television which was running a nature program narrated by a voice I know you sometimes hear in your head, a man's voice, with infinite patience, iterating to my prepubescent self that it is both natural, and mammalian, for mothers to let the weakest offspring die.  If I was aware of you then, it was as a dark force beyond my comprehension; a cabal to which only the most dubious of my acquaintances belonged.

I have a memory of which I've never spoken, of the first instance I watched my mother shield me from the fists of my father.  He had been aiming no necessarily for me, but I had been in the way, heedless as any toddler, not understanding that his jibes had become malicious and whatever game we'd been playing had become an entrapment.  My mother moved her slight body with a swift motion to stand between us, and if she'd had a fire-poker on hand, I know I would've grown up an only child.

In the ensuing years, I would watch him, or something only hear him, elicit from her throat the meek whimper of her submission, but on this day, she growled low and animal, and I feared - reptilian, possibly, from primordial sections of my developing mind - that if I fell behind, I would be devoured by her, as surely as he would.

Adam,

There could have only ever been the pain.  Confusion, humiliation.  I can't face what I've done, any more than I can face what I am.  I'm methodical in this rage, and always was.  Was this surviving?  No, you don't understand that the mother leaves her offspring to die, yes, but most especially, when trapped, she will devour her own limbs to escape.

Evelyn,

Terrariums are an interesting concept, much like ant farms: a habitat designed to sustain itself, in an isolated microcosm.  I believe the knowledge it can work in science is partially the reason I tried to enact it in life.

Art, it is wondered, can imitate life and vice versa, but I wonder if the same could be said for science.  Does science (the pure experiment) somehow capture the pure experience?

Adam,

I want to be taken away, is the problem.  You don't understand, or couldn't, that I want to be taken on the wave of something which matters and makes the rest of the world dim.  I want there to be a diminishment of sound, to a dark place where the mechanics of things are understood in a simplistic way.

All this might be attributable to a desire I have to get back to the garden. 

Eve,
I've begun to arrange my thoughts, by color.  Softest is where I find you, hiding beneath a green both secret and muted.  Let me find it for you.

#5F956E

Adam,

Every time I feel like I'm onto something, a stray wind comes to shatter the cobwebs and I wonder if perhaps nothing is gentle enough, or soft enough, to contribute to the perfect den in which I can touch old parts of me which have retreated far below the surface.  I was going to ask you to do it, but the song changed, and