What You Cannot See

You have many things in your apartment, but there is one you have yet to see. Now is the time to find it.

Try to steal a peek at it. Don’t be shy. You’ll need to use the corners of your vision. Look under things. Lift up your mattress. Pull all your books from your shelf. Take down each and every picture frame from all of your walls.

Pile the things you move while you look. Stack them, in no particular fashion. Let them sink into each other like a vat or let them grow until they tower and topple over. Don’t look at them, and don’t worry about them either. They are all the things you’ve seen, and none are the thing you are looking for now; just let them be. The shelves will refill themselves when the time is right. The walls will not stay barren forever.

Please, for your sake and mine, stop worrying about these things. Break them. They do not need you to be gentle.

While the pile of things you have seen grows larger, challenge yourself to keep adding to it. This will require effort. All the books are off the shelf? Well, then take the bookcase. The walls are empty? Strip the paint from them. Don’t just look under the mattress, use a knife to look inside the mattress. Get creative in your destruction.

The refrigerator contains some food, but it also contains shelves, drawers, components in its lining to regulate the temperature. The refrigerator is not one thing, it is many. Separate them, and add them all to the pile separately. Do not let them mix.

Once you understand this, there becomes a universe of things around you. There are shelves and dishes and globes and candles and magazines and matches and toiletries and mirrors and windows and everything else. There’s your phone and your computer and your favorite secret thing that nobody knows about except you. Don’t forget these things. Don’t forget that each of them belongs in the pile. Add them, one by one. Take your time, but don’t be afraid to get excited. And don’t worry if you forget that you are looking for something; this will happen to everyone. It is always too easy to lose yourself in the now.

Now there is a pile in the middle of your apartment and seemingly nothing else. You are standing at the foot of a tower or an ocean of your things, you see cracked mirrors and books with broken spines and an assortment of things normally hidden. The things you have put there first are at the bottom, and you can barely see them anymore. You are impressed, understandably, with how much stuff you had. You cannot imagine there is any more.

But now things get interesting. Now when you look around, you see the spaces that these things used to take up. The walls are not empty; they have been robbed. The space where the refrigerator was is still defined by the fact that the refrigerator has been there. You wonder how this could be, and then it hits you: dust. The dust leaves traces of what has been, the dust is reminding you. You must gather all of the dust and add it to the pile; it is, after all, a thing. Add it, one mite at a time, to your pile. Take your time.

Now you are standing around an enormous pile of things and surrounding by nothing but a stripped apartment. Yet this is not nothing; the walls are something, as are the floors and the ceiling. They are made of many things, in fact: drywall and studs and insulation. They are thick; they have spaces to be filled. Touch them before you take them apart, but don’t take too long. They are, after all, not one thing but many. The wall is not a wall; it is many things come together to make a wall. Separate it, and place each piece in the pile. See if they still resemble the wall in any way once they have been added to the eclectic collection of everything you own.

Look around after you have done this. Remember to breathe. Now there is truly nothing outside of the pile; you see no trace of the apartment that was there before. The pile before you is massive, it would have burst through your ceiling and floor had you not removed them yourself. You remember that you were looking for something, but you have no idea what. You become angry when you realize that you still do not see it, you have seen everything in this god damned apartment but haven’t yet found the one thing you are looking for.

You look through the pile in anger, but something slows you down. You realize that this towering, toppling, enormous heap of things contains nothing of your old apartment. There are wooden panels and beams, yet you cannot see the floor. There are scattered books and a busted cabinet, but you cannot see your bookshelf. Even the dust is not your apartment’s dust; it clumps together and stuffs you up, but it does not trace your frames, your drawers, the spaces beneath your bed.

You realize that you have seen all of these things before, but you cannot see them now. And you realize that you are looking at something you have never seen before, made up entirely of things you have seen too many times to count.

This takes your breath away. It sparks something in your mind, something that makes your eyes sharper. They start to see things that are not there, they start to piece together the amalgamated pieces in front of you and reconfigure your apartment. You see the walls rebuild themselves and the pictures jump up to meet them. You watch your dishes restack themselves and retreat to the reconstructed cabinet. You see your books snap their spines and organize themselves on repaired shelves. You see things that are not there; your eyes find your old apartment in a dusty, ruined pile.

Now you can see without even looking. Now you could see even without eyes.

Now you are ready to ask yourself: What is it exactly that I wish to see?

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What You Cannot See