Shaleen Rakesh

​ The sky, circling in blue and orange has turned into an alchemist? Elias has stopped trying to name it. Orange into blue into something that has no colour yet, the colour of light that arrives near the end of things and seems to know it, seems to be watching back, in greys. Elias keeps walking. This is the whole discipline now — to keep walking under a sky of vapid judgment and not turn away  and not explain yourself to anyone, not even to yourself, specially not to yourself not anymore. We are not the rational creators we tell ourselves we are. We do not choose towards joy. We choose away from the face we are afraid to meet later — the older self standing at the back of every room we ever entered, arms folded, already knowing how it ends. Elias chose some things for that reason. The safe harbor. The door not opened. The words not spoken on an evening in another city that he can still locate exactly in his body thirty years later. He was trying to protect himself from regret. He ...

We are going somewhere. That is all. The surface is harder than field, the smell is wrong, there is noise from below that does not mean anything we know, but the body moves because the body knows to move, because movement is not decision so much as continuation, the way breathing continues, the way the herd continues, one body following warmth of the body ahead. We do not know we are ascending. We know the angle of the ground under our hooves. We know the one in front is still moving. That is enough. The boys are there. We know that too — the particular electricity of watching, the way attention has pressure, the way humans leak intention from every part of themselves and think they are being still. But they are not for us. They are just another condition, like wind, like smell of rain coming, like the low sound the ground makes near water. We do not perform.  We never performed. Berger said you withdrew from us the moment you no longer needed us, that the look across the fence bec...