or a lazy tale

This lone arm, which I don’t know how it got here or if I got here. I don’t remember how it came or how I ended up here. But I call here “back home” when I go out and when I come back. I come back to the arm that waves to me and never demands food.

Until today, I haven’t had the courage to attempt any investigation into the arm. It’s just there and I’m here. Of the countless particles that were once loose in the universe and then decided to form this arm, none of them I wanted to move. Even though this quantity of colors looks like the skin of the arm, or a soft glove that wraps around this resembling human skin, I haven’t touched it. I haven’t made sure it’s enough of an arm for me to entwine my fingers between the fingers.

The nails are there and they hardly grow. Until today, I never stopped to think that if the arm had a mouth, maybe it would bite its nails. Does it expect my mouth to do it? Of the countless parts of calcium molecules that can form a nail, I can’t understand the material that makes up these.

The fingers of the arm sometimes crackle. They crackle, but I think they invented the crackle for themselves, without knowing that they were making a gesture that is already an imitation for us, the whole bodies. If we have an arm, we have a head, a thought and a word; an arm possesses someone, but it is a limb, an extremity, and it lacks a center. Here, am I a whole tree looking at a fallen branch? Or, as a large plant, do I not recognize the bushes?

If I try now to scrape the colors off the arm, mine will be dyed. Will my arm become like that arm? Will my arm, which has a head and thinks, take on colors so detachable from my body that it can act as if it had never inhabited me?

This afternoon, I hereby commit: I’ll offer the arm a cup of coffee. Just to see if it knows what to do with the cup. Just to see if it drinks with an invisible mouth and lets the liquid fall into itself and if, when it gets burnt, it’ll startle.

I go into the kitchen and try to chat while it waits for me like a friendly visitor (even though it’s been here for a while). I try to do something literary with it’s presence: I reflect, share a question or try to turn it into a comedy, to find a verb tense that becomes a joke. The water boils and I meditate on burns, the temperature of the skin or how a pigment would behave in the excessive heat.

I bring the coffee and the arm tilts, but I can’t detect any gesture of curiosity. I offer, it holds out the hand and, as if rehearsed, it places the fingers on the handle of the cup. I try to make conversation to create a distraction and see if I can come up with a theory. But when I asked it if it couldn’t walk around on fingers like the full-bodied people who do handstands do, it put the cup down on the coffee table and rested the wrist on it. Then fell into a deep sleep and time changed its verb, the afternoon fell into the depths. My hands spill coffee.