22

The sweat moment. The moment that runs seamless into other moments, moments that blur and tangle into an irreversible yarn, a gnarled reel. And it is only when you try very hard, much later and with much effort to extract this moment from the others that it pops up pink like poison. And maybe you can isolate it – that moment that stretched into the eternity of a choice. If you study it quite closely, place it under a microscope, spend years looking at it, making it your life’s work, your night’s dreams, then perhaps you will begin to understand how it all started. You have never believed in the predestined, the supernatural. You prefer to see it as table sagging with the weight of multiple cakes whose sweet and light and caloric and dangerous edges wink and wink at you to Choose me, take me, pick me, unbake me, love me, leave me, be me. They say you are what you eat, so when you swallow, you have those second thoughts. As a matter of fact your thoughts are full of seconds and thirds and ten thousands, as if ruminations could change things, as if repetition could beat things into submission. Alas, your moments and your cakes have been chosen, eaten, your time has expired, your thoughts have stopped, your moments have become indistinguishable. Finally.