Living Things

Autism. Beasts.

Imagine. You think. You have a thought. That thought has a mass and a liquid form. And it can move in multiple directions at once. Sometimes it’s steel-sharp and fast. Sometimes it gets slow. When slow, it can get damn sticky, connecting to views that fit it, and spitting sparks. Analogies blink. Flicker. Metaphors. It’s slow, but growing fast. Heavy on all it eats, a particularly interesting thought. It pushes through. Big and slow is hard to miss.

Every thought lives and breathes. It either sits, repeats itself, or runs — somewhere — where I can follow it or not. Sometimes, the thought will just let me know it’s there, in the backyard, playing with other thoughts, and that’s it. It does what it wants. And I can do my things. At other times, it grows. It gets so big and loud that I must go with it; so I go, or I risk being eaten. Not a great choice.

A beast of a thought is strong. And my world is full of beasts.

It’s not as scary here as people might think, not at all. (Ok, maybe on rare occasions, it is. But, let’s not digress.) Every bestiary, when you look closer, has a set of rules. Connections and patterns. Remarkable wonders — and how they work. Magic grows on logic. You can make a spell and break a spell, you can feel under a charm or life-soaked. And even the biggest dragon, in the craziest story, can die and feed the ground, as a dead ant would do. Magic lives, magic lives. Ouroboros smiles.

Every thought for me lives. And it has a form. And it loves to show me other forms. There are not many words living in my mind. A lot of structures, instead, that like to grow on everything I look at. Because things are rarely flat. A migraine when they grow more than 10 heads at once — too many to follow, yet all on sight.

Tell me how to speak when my head, so often, gets into ten other heads of a hydra I look at.

Communication. The bridge between. I need words to do this. But where do you find words? Where do I? When I look at something, I see it, as it is, no subtitles needed. The beasts I observe. Their essence — how they react, with what they dance, what they avoid, what they like, how they grow. Beautiful structures, systems and patterns. But no words. No.

Words are like cages to my “word”. They can define a detail or a very simple thing, but they refuse to contain the littlest of all the beasts I see. It’s a foreign code. Words annoy me. I keep them because I must — yes, a large collection of words — but bringing them to my world takes time. And even when I have that time, they never fit. Words rarely want to CONTAIN what I think. So. Incredibly. Inelegant. Code. Yet the main one people use. (Or do they?) 

If you live only in the world of words, we probably won’t hang out (or we will, but painfully for both sides). Because for me, it’s always been an odd, distant land. Words. Believe me, I’ve tried. I try. Others also tried to fix me. But my software runs on a different code.

If I must fit in this code of words, with my beasts, then something of my world gets out to let me breathe. And as my world is all about patterns, it comes to speech as it is: with the rhythm or in breaking the rhythm — because you cannot break something that isn’t there. Rhythms and patterns are my air. You need air to breathe. So. Em dash – jump. A beast lives. Line and rhyme, another runs free. Between the words, I survive. Never within.