Today I’m made of clay. I look just like myself in the office bathroom mirror, or the reflection of a bus stop pane as I pedal and gasp through the street. I am a very convincing clay model of me. You can only tell when I catch the right light. Sloppy eyelids and a posture that doesn’t quite hold its shape. As I start to sink in the heat, the carefully sculpted ridges across my brain sweat and slide into each other. Synapses recline into easier shapes, coming wetly unstuck from the slouching muddy mass of melting grey matter. To make the thoughts work I have to reach in and mush the neural pathways back together with dripping hands. The excess squelches through, between my clammy fingers and under earthy nails. I can’t stop adjusting my nose. It will soon fall off of my face with a messy slap, simultaneously puncturing its shape and ruining the functional office carpet. It’s been fed too much liquid from the seeping murk drip behind my caked eyeballs, and now the base is flooded. It will droop and then the bonds will go stringy and break. The snap will recoil through my malleable putty skull, and both molded eyes will likely slip from their sagging, lubricated sockets to embed their dull grey stain forcefully into the carpet’s fiber. I am now so workable that my attempts to repair my progressing deformities just meld into the goop. I must be sent to the kiln. A deteriorating sculpture should not have an office job. But even if I were to be fired immediately, what monstrous form would I take? A deflated moaning tar man. A viscous soft-serve toothpaste body. A freeze frame of a spilling shape. A statue of something unrecognisable.
I must not be sent to the oven, but back into the ground.
Quit Vision 