###EXTEMPOREALITY 5
Back at the house. I couldn't sit anymore. I spent the next [null] minutes pacing between the kitchen and the dining room, where Constable is stationed, peering intently into the eyepiece. He collected water, as well as a sample of bladderwort.i said I was pacing, but it was really more of a drugged shamble. One foot in front of the other. I stood at the counter of the kitchen, looking fifteen feet ahead to the wall in the dining room. Nothing exactly looks real. I feel like I'm a paper cutout of myself, dimensionless. I'm moving to the wall and as I do, the countertop fades into an unreachable past, ancient memories of youth. I feel like I'm never going to reach the wall. Constable is providing a near-continual stream of commentary on his findings.
Oh man, there's a guy here [his way of describing animals and insects] floating around, it looks like it's hunting. I'm having a hard time staying focused on it because it's moving so fast. Man this guy looks so weird. You gotta imagine that there have to be hundreds of organisms in this sample that have never been described, unknown to science. We could find some and study their behavior and we could give them a funny name.
And this is how I internalized all of this and my reply:
C: ... (study their behavior) and give them a funny name.
{What the hell is he talking about?} Uh... Yeah, that's crazy but you're right. {I'm talking like an idiot.} It would be interesting to see what is in there that is undescribed. {Okay, what the hell am I even talking about?}
I eventually looked through the eyepiece. I was apprehensive about doing it at first, but I am glad I did. Something about looking at the slide helped me to return to some semblance of reality, though I was still dealing with intense time distortion. I could see the sinews of the bladderwort: giant, hollow green trunks. A tiny, translucent animal was traveling through the water, graceful and mysterious. I know some trick of atavistic ancestry related me to this sentient speck. How many millions of years have passed since our progenitors shared blood? A time before trees, or grass, before the Americas.
This moment finally released something in me, and the weight of all of this collected experience made me incredibly tired. I sat back on that leather rocker while Constable looked at the microscope for a while longer. Eventually I fell asleep.
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evan@thebogboys.space