the distance of the moon from a memory

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Sep 1, 2018 · 5 min read

“[O]ccasionally Pythagoras draws on the theory of music, and designates the distance between the Earth and the moon as a whole tone, that between the moon and Mercury a semitone, between Mercury and Venus the same, between her and the sun a tone and a half, between the sun and Mars a tone (the same as the distance between the Earth and the moon), between Mars and Jupiter half a tone, between Jupiter and Saturn half a tone, between Saturn and the zodiac a tone and a half: the seven tones thus producing the so-called diapason, a universal harmony […]”
— Pliny the Elder, Natural History


Only the ordinary happens here. Despite how much minor differences dreams and reality have, I would always consider the distance between those two to be a leap, or a stretch of the will, if one might point to the recognition of the expansion of space. Despite my movements, I dwell. To be able to speak about my current state would require the mapping of the differences to arrive into a coherence towards one systematic whole. I design my dwelling and within its process, I dreamed I was with Dorothy.

It was quite a dream. I found both of us under a bridge, which was, as to how I recognized it, the bridge from the anime FLCL. There was no sign of life everywhere. It was a clear sky but the stars are nowhere to be seen. There was the moon hanging above, illuminating everything around us. I was myself, yet Naota at the same time. A boy in a bildungsroman plot: his initiation to erotic desires, trying to find his space around the entangled lives of other people around him, and figuring out how to manage the feelings of looming change behind every mundane thing. On the other hand, Dorothy took the form of Mamimi, who yearned for an absent ideal, always melancholic, and drunk with despondent desires. In that dream, I was with Dorothy and she was the female version of myself.

We hung around under the bridge, where the river spanned a half-kilometer width. We took shelter underneath the shadow of the bridge. We were there, solemnly seeking warmth from one another. Both of us yearning for wildfires. Both of us finding one another in this moment of synchronicity, this liminal zone, in silence, thinking how much would it cost if we cross the river without the obvious aid of the bridge above us. Yet, we stayed there for reasons that were only expressed during that moment. The bank is flattened by rocks. Weeds occasionally spurted from the soil underneath while old overlapping stains of graffiti cover the bank’s walls like a war of occupation. It was a depiction of who owns the place by who has recently tagged the walls. Names and symbols began to be illegible but they were there nonetheless as a symbol for a desire to assert existence. But Dorothy and I were too old for the game of colonizing each other.

“It amazes me how much we contribute to this world’s ugliness by thinking we can make things beautiful,” Dorothy said in a weary voice. The river whispered in a current at the speed of her heartbeat. She squatted near the river, enough to let her hand be carried by the flowing water. She was wearing black tights under her dark blue floral dress which outlined her skinny figure, unironically owning the cliche manic pixie dream girl get-up. Her highlighted blue hair accentuated her dress. She was the night in the absence of time. Her eyes, almost closing, emphasized the roundness of her cheeks.

“But isn’t that why you sing?” I asked, as I gently sat beside her.

We never left the ground but I can feel that we were riding the waves of the river. She sat facing the waters the way someone pokes the burning wood in a bonfire. She took her hand away from the water and placed her head on both of her knees. She looked at me. “Do you remember how I ended the song Spaces?”

I let a few seconds pass. However, I was caught by her magnificence until the myth of Narcissus crept inside my mind like the Trojan Horse.

“‘The water’s found me,’” I quoted from her song, “And then it abruptly ends.”

She turned her head back to the river. “Yeah. Just like a dream.”

I was not aware of the time but we were there under the black sky. It was as if the earth is an eyeball of a giant whose eyes remained closed throughout the duration of our encounter. Waking up can only mean the death of the moment.

We keep the same position for another minute as if trying to hold the moment away from time: without movement but the sound of the flowing river. I inched closer next to her until our shoulders touched. Our distance was reduced to a semitone. She reverted her gaze back to face me.

“What about you?” she asked.

This gave me a reason to stare into her eyes. Her eyelashes shadowed her irises and I can feel the world asking for an entrance inside my being. I wonder what she meant. It was an innocent question nonetheless. Her figure, sitting unassumingly amidst the silence.

I was thinking if she asked if I thought of the ending of a song to echo the experience of a dream. Or was she asking about how the things in my waking life had been going? It crossed my mind that she could be asking me anything, without borders, hoping an answer would come after such a vague succession of words.

I tried to hold her gaze delicately and I answered her question in a language that we can both understand. To say that it is beyond words is an understatement and a misinterpretation. But she smiled at me after a while. Nothing happened but for a moment, we had changed into something more than a dream.

“I met Fatima when we last played at Route. Her brothers asked me for a picture. She seems really nice.”

I let out a sigh. “It was your last gig for a while anyway. Sure, she has to be there.”

“And why weren’t you? Haven’t seen you at Minokaua either. Where have you been?”

It just occurred to me that the moon had dropped behind the other side of the bridge. Its shape had grown enormously large. From our vantage point, it seemed that the bridge was now connected to the moon. That the distance of the moon from this memory is a memory of a bridge that does not exist. But we were left unmoved from our places. The moon was slowly growing bigger with every minute. It was falling slower than gravity towards the earth.

“I am always here. I am glad we somehow found each other here.” I finally answered.

The water began to rise and our shoes were soaked within a couple of seconds. We did not see the urgency to change our posture. The rising of the water happened as if it were not affecting us. Less than half of our bodies were underwater but the water felt like air. The river was overflowing as the moon pulls the tide. With the earth submerged in water that was continuously rising and the moon hovering closely above us, semantic meaning has abandoned me and Dorothy.

“Will we find each other in the same time signature?” I asked.

She looked at me and smiled. “Five-four?”

I managed to return the gesture. “Yeah. Five-four.”

At that moment, I felt the moon kiss the earth.

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