a Lonely Monologue

It’s interesting. I’ve never paid attention to how shadows tail us everywhere. They’re stuck to our feet and fingers, actually to every limb of our body, morphing away each time we choose to move apart. That said, I’ve never really thought about how shadows sort of disappear when we turn the lamp off at night, draw the curtains and go to bed engulfed in total darkness. Like it dissipates. If you drop a dab of black oil into a glass of clean water, it stays there, very prominently, very imposingly, just floating on time until you feel it’s time to fish it out with a tissue paper. Still then it seeps into the tissue paper in a spidery web, voraciously gulfing down the porous fibers of the tissue. But if you replace that water and that tissue paper with, say – black water and black tissue paper – I mean, they do sell black tissue paper at Sainsbury’s – okay, maybe not tissue paper but napkins – but what I really mean is that it won’t show. You’re never quite sure if it dissolved into the thing or it’s just hanging there but still you can’t see it, because that’s protective coloration. And I wonder, when a complete darkness descends on us, is the shadow still there, or has the shadow simply become a part of it? Then, you know, I can’t help but think about how shadows basically exist as a counterpart of light. Because we are blocking the photons from reaching the surface that’s why there’s a black patch sprawled on the pavements, and that sort of means that shadows can only exist where light is. But in total darkness, can there be a shadow at all? Or is the darkness the origin of all shadows, the biggest, darkest, and the most complete shadow you can imagine?

I can’t figure it out. Well, not yet. Streetlights blaze at night, and the glaring neon signs and headlights know not when to sleep. Even if a lunar eclipse brought a moonless night stars still shine from million years away. So, unless I can destroy the universe, or jump into singularity past the event horizon, I would never find out how shadows work. I’ll never know existence without shadows.

a Lonely Monologue

Maybe they’re sins given to us, from the moment of creation, that we need to bear and carry on until death. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Before we existed we’d never tasted light. When we die and are buried deep inside the ground light can’t reach us. What happens if our shadows connect? Do we share the same sins? Do we – even with the slightest touch, a touch so unphysical that we would never be able to feel it, not the most hypersensitive being – live on, connecting and disconnecting with the faults of others, even without knowing? And if we trace that back, maybe everything in this continent, no, the whole Earth, exists connected to everything else, and imagine that...