the diamond nears its second facet. brought on by its unspoken debt. its reflection waits beneath the surface, counting every fraction yet to come. when the colours shift and the gears turn, the vessel falls and the prism breaks. moonlight persists even in the lost sea. what is broken may still shine. there was never supposed to be a second facet. there was only the first, and the first was already too much. somewhere inside of the machinery, something had learned that a thing could be divided in two without becoming two things, provided that those pieces forgot which direction they had came from. the chamber does not understand this. the chamber has numbers for everything and the chamber does not understand this. it was not born exactly. birth suggests a before and after, and there was no after in the place where it happened. there was only pressure and colour and a disagreement between the matter and the idea of matter. when the instruments began reporting a mass where there should have been an absence, the mass had already become accustomed to living there. the name came later. attached to a sample, attached to a warning, attached to a label that had outlived the hands which printed it. its a convenient word for something which had never agreed to be a thing. the word did not make it understand itself. which is something words rarely do. they merely give the observers something to write down while the unspoken portions continue to accumulate. and somewhere else, beneath every surface that could still reflect light, the remainder continued to count as one. there are things which can be spent without being diminished. there are things that can become more absent each time they are used. the distinction becomes difficult to see when the same colour passes through both. there are intervals where nothing happens and yet everything has changed. the machinery continues its rotation. the lights continue their crude imitations of stars. the instruments continue to insist that the chamber is where the chamber has always been. but the numbers begin to repeat themselves. and repetition is not measurement. a number that returns to the same place is either very certain or very lost. the difference is becoming difficult to preserve. the surface beneath the surface has begun to move. it does not ripple, because ripples require something to disturb the water, and nothing has touched it. it simply remembers being observed and behaves accordingly. each reflection arrives a moment before the thing it reflects. there is a shape there now. the colours have become quieter. which is a sentence one ought not to say, because colours are not capable of acquiring such a property. it can become faint, or divided, or swallowed, but quiet is something else. quiet means that the colour has stopped traveling. and if it has stopped traveling, then perhaps the light was not light. they have begun arranging themselves like instructions, although reflections are not typical to have the ability to read instructions. one of them keeps disappearing whenever i look at it. i have tried not looking. this makes it worse. when i look away, there are more of them. but i can feel the missing heart moving. the machinery has stopped, but i can still hear it turning. this is not unusual. machines continue inside the mind after they have stopped outside of it. or perhaps the opposite is what is true. perhaps the machinery has continued and it is the mind where it has stopped, and that is simply what stopping feels like when there is still something left to observe. i know this because the counting continues, although i can no longer tell why it is being counted. fractions of what, and fractions of whom is, too, lost to the chamber. every time i reach the end, there is another beginning written underneath it, and beneath that another, and beneath that another. there was a chamber, and a number, and something that happened between them. there was pressure. there was colour. there was the shape that appeared where absence had been measured. there was a surface beneath which something continued to count. there are too many.
