trout

An Infinite Loop: 2

to Vrej Baghoomian

Margarita Meklina

But her dream had nothing to do with the drums. There weren't flashbacks from her accident or black holes in it, but there was the Sun and the Moon and a perfectly square raft on a pond: they recently moved there and she remembered their slow preparations for the move, and how they got a notification from his brother (she even measured with her memory the weight of a letter), and there was a neighbors' German shepherd and some boys making friends with them and the fish. V. was accurate with words—strict, introverted, but fair—exactly what she expected and liked. They kissed (A COINCIDENCE, tyche: lips coincided with lips?), and not a fullness or a fresh proximity of the kiss was unsettling, but a surrealistic detail: his mouth was full of something she thought was pine tree needles, but then she realized it could be tobacco. They kissed softly and his mouth was full of tobacco, or pine trees needles, but she remembered that she was filled with an outcome of a pleasant sensation (AN OUTCOME: telos, telo, which in Russian means a body). She didn't have to write—just had to expect him to be on the same page.

She drew a circle, and within it—another circle, and then she put another logo on the same invisible horizontal line where his was: hers was an ellipse with a check mark or a bird within it. "How come I'm always looking for a solution, thought she, as though I'm in a gambit of game; why do I try to predict a telos of Russian or Reno's roulette, or to draw a life line strictly across a checkered board of random events? Is there a way to express a word with its own shadow, so that a story starts with it and, going a full circle, comes back never stepping astray?"

The logos on "Mazdas" expressed her confusion much better: a circle enclosed in a circle, an ellipse, the drums. A check mark or a contour of a bird (let's say: a bird that they noticed while sitting together really close watching the sea). To her, cars, kisses, and birds created nothing more than a commercial wisdom: she knew that parallel lines crossed if they wanted, and there were no barriers for an airborne dream. But it was handy to finish the story by sea, because his favorite author, Kahlil Gibran, started the Prophet by describing one's wait for a ship: