If you turned this cloud of collisions over and over until you found the thumping little clump of me, and you held this clump right up to your eye, you'd look down along a slender ribbon almost forever.
It's you all the way — all the way! — to a cell or not even a cell. Tracing back you'd see that the ribbon is stitched from two threads, both of them you, twining into each other, in so many chance meetings, in so many ways you have certainly met. But were they by chance? Could they have gone another way? When you held his hand, when you played her that record, when your father found it agreeable, when she was your pretty cousin, when he was the only cousin left? In love, in duty, in the pursuit of desire, bored out of your mind, in fear of your life?
It's not only those encounters, but also their negations: the one who let go of your hand to don holy robes, the tic in her eye you thought you couldn't live with, your two left feet at the dance, the drums of war that marched him out the door, the shower of rain that meant you stayed home, when you were too drunk to get it up, do you remember the maggot-wound in the apple you spat when you thought no-one was looking, do you think about the sly wink you weren't brave enough to answer, that as she came up the road you turned down a side street, as a crow cawed and you looked away, that you were bested in an arm wrestle, for the sandstorm held the caravan, for the bough you thought would hold did not, for the current that brought cold waters from the north, no, even when it all aligned but it was not her time, to think that in the gloopy jostle of a trillion billion wriggling homunculi, a trillion billion have missed their targets (less only some thousands along this ribbon, as little as a black star in the night, or one leaf among all the trees in all the worlds) — that in countless configurations of atoms, at any moment, over every moment ever, a countless number did not occur. Your whim is infinite, and your whim was me.
This is a way we've never met. It joins other ways, like ineluctably, by adverbs, and in the park, by star fields.