Obscurantisms

Every room I’ve ever been in with other people has, from the ceiling’s plane downwards, had the same order of stacked horizontal planes: Ceiling, air, air, hair, skull, eyeballs and brains (my second least favorite plane), teeth and tongues, chest hair, nipples, chest hair again, bellybuttons, guts, underwear elastics, more holes, knees, shins (least favorite), foot hair, toe hair and ground. I know, to you, it must sound like witchcraft, as I know that while reading of my findings your head cocked, at first bemused and then in horror, at the sameness of our lives. You realized that every room you’ve ever been in was composed of identical planar dissections. I am sorry. I’ve awoken you from ignorance, a one-way portal to hell. I’ve killed you, in a sense, exposed you to truths I have not the heroism within me to quietly die with. I am sorry, truly.

And it only gets worse. Think of cars. Think of restaurants. Any place, in fact, where there is a building with people in it, this structure reigns supreme.

But there is a secret I’ve discovered, one which causes a terrible headache, a painful ringing of the ears after long enough, even amputation, if the engagement lasts long enough. Through grueling training lasting many weeks, I’ve reinvented the social bipedal as the social bipedal, inverted. Upon my feet I approach and ring the doorbell, but it is my hands I enter atop, striding into dinner parties with feet flopping above triumphantly, on my knuckles I chat with cousins removed, sipping from a straw from a cup conscientiously placed on the ground by someone’s child. It’s always children who help— the world’s first truth-seers, aren’t they? They understand. And so gradually, then all at once, I am free from my predicament entirely. Whether dinner parties and reunions no longer exist or my mail has been rerouting, I’ll never know (toes too large to dial). I’ve upended, in my small way, the tyranny of that odiously deterministic structure of our world. All we have to lose are our chains.