The threads bend back on themselves, sweeping through time, dipping into tiny pockets of experience and breathing out again into the emptiness. The artist whose threads they are and whose speck of life has held them together asks the scientist ‘What is this?’ and ‘Where is it going?’ But the scientist keeps her counsel. Tugging on theoretical principle and marshalling empirical evidence, she is silent. It will come right, there will be an algorithm.

The threads gather pace, gather new threads; hundreds, thousands, billions, and weave themselves together around the hundreds, thousands, billions of dreamers and thinkers and existers and things barely alive at all and out of whose experiences they are extruded. The scientist ponders. Extrusion? How so? But the artist has lost interest, she is absorbing the tracks, following the threads, losing definition.

Her soul frees itself first from its identity as lover. The bonds fade, he fades, his image dissolving as she looks on, the smell of him in the morning – content as warm coffee – creeping away and leaving no trace. His touch, gentle and thoughtful, and their loving – sometimes courteously perfunctory, most times an exhilarating union of impassioned equals – nothing more than echoes as the essence of them drifts away. All those losses turn the threads cold as life gives up its ability to find comfort in another.

Soon after, she feels the unravelling of mother love. What was his name? She can no longer remember or fully comprehend what he was, what child was, but the ache of hollowed out nothingness where he had been, coils and uncoils, rails against its dissolution, then gives in and drifts, insensate, into the collective void.

The scientist contemplates what is left of meaning while coherence and logic, resolution and cognition detach themselves and become insubstantial. Her last notion – not quite thought but not quite nothing, is curiosity, an attempt to gain an understanding of this process. But it folds itself elegantly into the anonymous, sinuous, regressing threads and leaves her alone.

The artist watches it go. Could love exist without cognition? Identity? She imagines a thread the shape of love, holds it, nurtures it for a quantum moment, for millennia. She binds to it all the loves she has ever known and tries then to bind it to herself to protect it and keep it safe. Finally, with loneliness turning to communality, loss to inevitability, and both feathering away into the temporal tide, she sets it free.

(c) suzanne conboy-hill 2012