*
In the beginning was the water. The earth was without form and void, darkness hovered over the deep. Life formed in the water, and remained in the water. In the beginning was the water, and it won’t let us go. Each new life begins again in water. The fetus in its mother’s womb resembles the fetus in an egg. The fetus in an egg resembles the fetus in the sea. The egg white and amniotic fluid both imitate the primordial sea from which we arose. This imitation, this moveable sea, is a condition for life on land. And it required a certain degree of luck—the right mutation at just the right time.
*
Because you kissed me and asked: Are you in? Because you lived across the street from the party. It was practical. Because there are others worse off than me. At least five of the varieties of stick insect reproduce by self-cloning. Which means that they’re all identical, which means that they haven’t had sex for over a million years. There are others worse off than me.
*
I am reading in the library. I’m reading about deoxyribonucleic acid, how the four bases are assembled as triplets. One triplet is encoded to specify one amino acid. There are twenty amino acids. The whole gene encodes for one protein. A countless number of proteins exist. Everything is based on these codes. I take my mobile from my pocket and see that Dad has called. The Latin letters on the screen are encoded to specify his name. Yet, there are others who identify with the same name, the same code: in Norway alone there are thirty thousand three hundred and eighty-one. In order to identify Dad more precisely, one needs a national identity number, which, unlike a name, is not something that one can identify with.
*
About this form and content stuff. Forms are not constant. An organism’s form, function, and appearance are not constant, the interaction between organisms is not constant. But its contents, the hidden secrets of the cell, its acids and chemical bases, those are constant. The contents of the secrets, the sequence of the codes, are not constant. The form of interactions is not constant. Yet the fact that interaction is perpetual, an infinite movement, that is constant.
*
Do something new every day! Certain people live by this rule, certain people can just bounce out of themselves and say yes, yes, I am going to do that, certain people are yes-people. And it’s actually been proven that the brain forms more and deeper memories in its cells when we do something new or intense than when we simply go through a routine. Not only do we remember new and unfamiliar things much better than usual, but we also remember them more expansively. And when you remember better and more expansively, it presses at time’s edges, time seems to stretch and elongate, like a cat on the windowsill. Doing new things makes memory larger and time longer, so that, in a sense, life also becomes longer. One should probably do something new each day, to prolong your life, almost, you owe it to yourself, almost, and yes, perhaps I should try doing something new. For example, stop stalking you on Facebook.
*
I stop for the red light, place my right foot down on the sidewalk. A delivery truck pulls up beside me, white with blue lettering. CLEANING ALL TYPES, it reads. Cleaning, all types. For me too, then? I cycle on toward the lecture hall, think of the limp algae eater the morning after the aquarium exploded, I was ten. Mom and Dad rescued the other fish in a plastic bowl, they swam here and there on the kitchen table. The algae eater was brown and preferred the bottom, which is why they didn’t spot it in the dark. If my heart was an aquarium, would the algae fish be visible? Would it eat up all the old love and all the accumulated panic attacks, all the calls ending in silence, all the times I got up in the morning before the other person, knowing that we wouldn’t see each other again, not in the same way. And if the algae eater could just eat all of this up and one could be perfectly . . . clean. And if one could try something new. And if one could only be new.
*
Fishmoths on the bathroom floor when I return home drunk and have to pee. I try talking with them. Fishmoths under the sink when I get up nights and am parched. Fishmoths, once, folded up in the shower curtain after I’d undressed. Fishmoths eat all kinds of starch and sugary things, but are otherwise harmless. They molt between seventeen and sixty-six times throughout their lives, more often than other insects. Besides that, they can go a whole year without eating. Fishmoths live to be two to eight years old, and thus the largest of them has lived in this apartment longer than I have. Should I ask their advice. About cleaning the shower head, maybe defrosting the freezer. Is it really necessary to change the light bulb in the hall. How to deal with the neighbors. Should I tidy my room before you visit. Will you visit me if I ask you to.
*
The universe is, in general, an appallingly cold place (circa 2.7 ºC above absolute zero) broken by spots of unbearable heat. There are very few places with a temperature in between, and we inhabit one of these. The sun, for example, has a core temperature of 15.7 million Kelvin, and is not one of these places. The surface is cooler, the corona—warmer. I tend to have a core temperature that is 310 ºC higher than absolute zero, my surface cooler, my clothing—warms me. But my hands are always cold, no matter how many layers I’m wearing. You say it is bad blood circulation, that you usually had that yourself, that you were usually the one in a relationship with the coldest hands. We are not in a relationship, I say. A non-relationship, you say. The universe’s two coldest places have an address: one of them is the Boomerang Nebula, which somehow manages to be colder than the rest of its surrounding space. The other is 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 26-243, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Where they were able to create an artificial zero, to within a billionth of one degree, because after all absolute zero cannot be reached, though it is an important theoretical and experimental limit. I stick my hand up under your jumper to warm it, and instead of removing it, you take my other hand and place it next to the first one. Place your hands on top. Your hands are a theoretical and experimental starting point. I say that I might consider a relationship after all.
*
The squid’s forefathers veered off from ours more than 550 million years ago. What do we know about the squid? That it changes color and squirts ink? That it is prodigiously intelligent? That it has a brain the size of a walnut? That the walnut itself resembles a brain is only a peculiar coincidence. We used to believe that a large brain indicated great intelligence, but those who research artificial intelligence are growing more and more uncertain about what intelligence actually is. It was believed, for example, that the ability for abstract thought was a prerequisite for playing chess, however the computer Deep Blue won against the chess world master, Garry Kasparov, in 1997. Most people would agree that Deep Blue cannot think abstractly and is not intelligent. Deep Blue did not originate beneath the water the way we did, but rather upon land. Its name is only a peculiar coincidence. The squid’s forefathers remained in the sea, while ours crawled out, and yet we have each developed nearly identical eyes, the largest difference is that theirs are logically constructed, while ours are turned inside out.
*
Something has happened, something spreading outward. A fog in things. A nausea in the hands. A reverberation in the cranium (the sea roaring). Will I become a snail shell when I die.
*
I don’t want you to see the cracks in my face. I want you to see all the smoothnesses in me, that I am a whole entity, a pitcher of glazed ceramic, pliant and sleek as snake skin, I want you to glimpse the reptile in my face, slipping in and out of sight, beneath the expanse of a cracked pitcher for example, sunken halfway into the earth. The grass that grows up around it.
*
I have tried straightening my back lately, on public transport vehicles such as the subway, the bus, I’ve stood with head lifted, shoulder blades pulled back toward my midsection, as I’ve been taught, in the produce section of the Kiwi supermarket, in the lingerie department at Lindex. I’ve tried “taking my place in the world” in front of the railway timetables at Oslo Central Station. I saw a cloud that resembled a spine, it hung above Torshov borough. I wondered whether it was mine, seeing as I’m missing one.
*
“Why is the giraffe’s neck so long? So that it can reach up to the leaves on trees. No, so that it can reach down to the water to drink.” A joke from my elementary biology teacher. He wanted to show us that the most obvious causes are not always the right ones, I consider now, in retrospect. The correct answer is possibly: so that it can butt heads. Giraffes, as everyone else, duel to find a partner, life’s most important battle perhaps, at least according to some, at least according to our genes, and the longer the neck, the more strength one possesses. But not everyone can bear all this loving, in the case of the giraffe’s neck, sexual selection has won out over natural selection, and because of the great distance between its heart and its brain, the giraffe has the highest blood pressure of all the mammals. Oh, the things we do for love. The giraffe’s heart can therefore weigh upwards of eleven kilos.
*
We cannot see the dark, but we can see in the dark. Black does not exist, it is merely the absence of something else. The eye perceives rays, we don’t see objects, we don’t see other people, we don’t see the world, we see only the light that they reflect. I don’t see you, only the light that collides with your body in the morning and ricochets back, to me. I catch it, all of it. We are born into light, and throughout our entire lives this is what we see, we pry open our eyes, and all we can see is light.
