T    e    s         t

Test i    n    g

A B C                                    The letters are still.  

Hello.  Can you read me?

My name is Michael Perdita (the label of my jacket says so), and I’m trapped in space.

Perdita is not my surname. It was given to me; I lost mine… somewhere. I want you to know so you don’t waste time looking for a Michael Perdita.

I lost my surname… somewhere in Tuesday… a Tuesday…

Perdita: You can look that up; it means something in that way only words can. Ever changing. The weight of their meaning carves visible channels in space. I forget what it means; maybe I haven’t been told yet.  I needed it though, need it though. A name is important when you are writing. The words are important, and the name is important.

It’s important to get these words down out of all the words that surround me.

To fill a space. So, they can be found. I was given this name to help. I was given this name by the Tailor.

A name to mark my place in space.

Words to mark a space. Me.  Here for you to       find

Sorry

To be clear… by space, I don’t mean the black void, stars and satellites; I’m not an astronaut… I’m trapped in regular, everyday space. The kind of space you find under your floorboards, at the back of a cupboard, inside the inside of things.  Inside that.

Does that      help?    

Sorry                     be patient

This is harder than it looks. Hard to get things in the right… order.  

Hard to move words in space.            A start             I need to begin.

A beginning. There are many, but this one follows my heart, not my head. I don’t know why that matters, but the Tailor told me it does.

“Have to stay connected to the heart!” he said, will say, I’m not sure.

“Don’t lose yourself in your head,”                     less          space in the heart. That’s important.

Sorry…  Start           

now

London, Tuesday 17th December.

Stories should never start on a Tuesday, but don’t let that put you off – it’s just Tuesday, not the end of the world.

Except, of course…it is… was…                      for me.

It was a bright, clear Tuesday morning, fresh and crisp. The new air snapped in my lungs like Christmas crackers.  That first cold breath of a new winter. The one you take when you step out of your door. The one that tells you Christmas is coming. Air to tell the time. Temperature to tell the time. I never realised everything told the time… before.

Before, when there was a before and an after.

Weird how little space Christmas took up in my head. Weirder how much space it takes up now.

     Trees, Turkeys, people and presents…so many presents.

Sorry. It’s hard to stay focused. You must learn, retrain, retain, and reprogram to survive in space.

Hard to stay focused          on        one present.

Imagine a street with infinite houses in all directions. I mean, all of them, even the directions inside the directions. Inside, inside, and inside again, forever. Clocks and compasses fold in on themselves endlessly. Time is fractal.  Is it?

No! Time is the exhaust fumes of a car called space, which runs on gravity.

Its Tuesday              sorry!

This Tuesday morning, I stepped out of the tube station—it was my regular one -Piccadilly, the one with black statues above and gold trim below. There are tiles and tiles of white, blue, and red. The space inside is round, round like a… merry-go-round filled with people, not horses—everyone leaps into the whirlpool, gets spun around, and spat out onto the street under the black statues. The regular wash of routine and human traffic leaves a stain in space.

The statues above are black. I like them. They’re solid. Around them, the stains of people stretch thin. There is a hum here… I’m told that’s music—a deep resonating wave, unchanging yet constantly modulating. I can’t listen for long; my brain mourns what it’s lost. Music is hard to lose.

I like the tube stations. The round tunnels and tubes. They have permanence.

Built into the deepest foundations of London. They are spaces I recognise. The walls flicker and fade, tiles dissolving and reforming. The posters jitter, giving strange life to the people trapped selling toothpaste for all space.  But the tunnels are solid. I can pass through them. It keeps me grounded in the bad spaces between the good ones.

Sorry. I’m Michael.

I’m Michael. I’m good at IT. Actually, that’s not true. To be good at something, you have to have passion, and by default, passion is something I was not programmed for; ironically, this probably saved my life. Passion drives emotions, which fill the heart, which lacks the space of the head and breaks easily.

I read science magazines for fun. Again, this was probably at the root of my survival. I hate sports except for an irrational love of Manchester United, which I have frequently tried to give up, but when I was small, I needed something to care about, and that sufficed. It's amazing what we fill the spaces in our minds with without even knowing.

Now I know.

There is so much space in there filled with so much junk. We are all hoarders. People can’t stand the echoes from the space in our heads. That’s what drives us. Cats, dogs, and dolphins all luxuriate with the space inside their heads. They float around in it, celebrating the joy of empty shelves.  They aren’t driven to fill them with…. things.

I work, worked… in a Private Equity Firm in London. I do, did statistical analysis. That’s not true; nobody does statistical analysis. I make computers do statistical analysis.  I force numbers down their throats until they spew out the right information, like numerical Fois Gras. If people understood what information really is, they would be as outraged by the sight of a bloated hard drive as they are at a goose’s liver.

Sorry          it feels important to say          be gentle with information.

I’m Michael Perdita; I force-feed computers information, then get paid to keep them alive. I used to.

In my office, I’m the guy who tells everyone to switch it off and then back on again. Not because it’s my job, that’s Ian, but nobody likes Ian. He’s cultivated an air of such disdain and disregard around himself that someone scratched out most of the word support from his office door, so it reads Ian FSuckson IT …….t .

They may have focused harder to get the spelling right if they only knew how permanent that was.

Maybe I’ll fix it when I’m in that space.

Maybe I already have.

If my last name was Suckson, I would have become a teen suicide statistic… Ian is, was, hard.  I lost my surname… it wasn’t Suckson. I wouldn’t have survived that.

I was on my way to the office. I had just got off the train, the underground train. Piccadilly with the tiles…up the escalators, to the black statues, in the street.

Outside in the street, the people were bustling and charging along their paths towards their destination. Briefcases and bags, shopping… who shops at 08:42 am? The clock on the massive screen tells me it’s 08:42 am - I remember thinking, “Who shops at 08:42 am?” She was laden down with bags from a shop with a blue logo, a cold blue on brown - colours stay, words do too, but only in books because books sit for a while in one space. Bags travel then disappear- I could find out which shop, but then I would have to retrace my movements and follow hers. Her with the bags, remember, who shops at 08:42 am?

I don’t know who she is, was, or will be, but she is the last face I saw, so she’s burnt into my mind - our paths crossed. Our paths collided. It’s all of a blur. Her bags with the blue logo blur as they flew, fly, flown upwards and sideways, backwards and forwards all at the same… time. As I tried to sidestep, I accidentally passed through her leg, which was trailing behind her. I could see it turn a corner; it went for miles. A spaghetti leg that, if I followed it would take me all the way to her      breakfast.  

Too fast, slow down; you need to understand the        moment.

This moment, my last, or first or just another of the many that I was pre-destined to experience, happened at 08:42 am in London on December 17th… Tuesday. F****n Tuesday.

Nothing good ever happens on a Tuesday.

She was, is, and always will be middle-aged. Blonde, attractive, in a busy way, a way I always liked. There was something pleasantly angular about her; if we had met under normal temporal conditions, it’s safe to say I would have fancied her. Or it's safe to say, as she is the last woman I have ever seen, I have grown to fancy her. She has grown in my mind; she has a special place in my heart. It’s safe to say she would have ignored me.

I am bland in a new house magnolia, choose from one of these three options for your unique kitchen experience kind of way. I am part of the masses, the great unnoticed. The invisible millions who make up the non-player-characters of the world. We blend in and spread out, staining the world off-white with our vanilla snail trails of apathetic banality. That’s why she didn’t see me.

That’s why we collided.

I apologised in the way Englishmen do—some Englishmen did—without thinking, like the apology was in front of the thought; it left the mouth long before the rational understanding or conception of the incident formed in my brain. I read in a magazine that your brain can 3D scan a space before your eyes have registered the objects within it. In the same way, an Englishman will issue an apology before the incident has finished. It’s a scientific fact.

It’s called an autonomic reaction. It’s more autonomic to an Englishman than breathin