Twilight was slowly deleting the boundaries between us and the environment. I listened for hours to the monotonous beat of some industrial plant far away. They were penetrating the soaked ground with their hard concrete pillars. I don't remember for how long I sat there listening to this noise, wanting it to disappear, until I realized that my heart had adjusted its beat to the rhythm of this distant machine. I focused my attention on my breathing, and tried to bring my heart back to its normal pace. The longer I tried, the more the breath and the blood-flows disturbed each other's rhythms. They became so asynchronous that I couldn't breathe any more, and my heart almost stopped. My muscles began giving up as well. I felt a strange eruption of anxiety, that unbalanced my system even further. I was falling apart, my engines stopped interacting with their peripheral devices, and left me in a state of complete chaos. Panic!

I gather my last forces together, trying to stand up… I cover my ears and walk towards the purple water in the nearby outskirts of some river. There I wouldn't have to feel the forces of gravity reacting on the disintegration of my body. My brain working over-time, trying to find the cause for these incomprehensible bodily actions. You are trying to tie me down, shouting that I should spare my strength, that I should stay close to you and tune to your frequencies. There was one moment when I thought you might be right, weakening my defenses. You took advantage of that moment, and tied my arms to your neck. You thought that I could feel the pulsations of your insides and connect to them. You were wrong. I was deaf and blind and senseless. The only sound I can hear is the sound of pain: simultaneously deep, vibrating, and extremely high… It fills all empty organs and explodes from within. This exploding force suddenly lifts you up and drops you from the heights on the hard asphalt, pulling me down as well… Causing more pain to both of us. I manage to move away from you, while you lay unconscious on the pavement. I know that I should help you, but I don't want to be captured again. You don't understand me. None of your spirits can help this pain. I keep staring at you while moving away.

While my eye balls swim in tears and blood, I still manage to recognize your shadow slowly standing up, running around in strange geometric shapes, collecting something. My only hope is that you are not experiencing the same bodily distortion as I am. However, I move in fractals, you are still drawing Cartesian shapes. Triangles and squares and circles. If only I could comprehend what you were doing. If only I could help your quest for a perfect equation of this tangible geometry. My eyes play strange games with me. I try to free myself from your bondage, moving frantically towards the water, I watch you creating your self-contained geometrical space filled with your smells, constructed of your bodily movements: walls of light in the shape of your body through time. I try not to pay attention, as the pain in my insides becomes unbearable.

I turn around and face the water, moving my feet into the cold, slimy liquid… Walking over rusted bicycles. By the time I'm immersed in the dark depths to my thighs, you call my name and rush towards me. My long dress lying on the surface of the water as a huge leaf, burning from its edges, keeping you on a distance. You collect water into your palms and in fast movements create small waterfalls above the fires. On the tiny stroke, where the fire was extinguished, you pull the fabric with both hands in different directions, causing a rupture in the loose weave. I watch, hypnotized, ignorant of your intentions. You tear the long fabric apart, moving from the edge of my skirt to the edges of my body. For a second falling over a wheel of a bicycle, getting up, smeared with purple, reaching my skin. I stand perfectly still, drowned in my pain, laughing at your hopeless actions. You put both hands on my chest, on my breasts, around my waist. Start moving my hips in the rhythm of my heartbeat. Circling, pulsating, moving from one to zero, from full to empty, to high and to low. The pain merges with the waves appearing around my body. You move away from me, stopping the waves, breaking their painful patterns with the rhythms of my blood. You drum my heartbeats on the surface of the muddy waters, creating more waterfalls and killing the fires.

The waters are enveloped in smoky shadows as you pull me out of the water and drag me towards your virtual space. I follow, falling and running and dancing the fractals away. Approaching your geometries, structured paths and ordered shapes. Opening my receptors to the change. You push me through your immaterial walls, and for a moment I find myself in a misty world of your temporal contours. I move through your past bodies, without effort, becoming a part of your controlled geometries, and wishing I could have been this strong. You never left the order of your life, while I dissolved into wishes and pains. The illness that has overcome me was the sign of my weakness. Here, inside your walls, I feel stronger. Able to become a warrior against the alien rhythms inside my body. Not ever wanting to leave this unreal space.

You pull me through the walls and into the interior space. Holding my shoulders tightly, you stare through my eyes, looking for my paths, fragmented by the fractals. Moving your palms down my arms to my hands, holding my hands, joining them together, as in a prayer, moving them away, joining them again. Breath the rhythm, you whisper, and you accelerate the movement of my hands. As a machine, I continue the motion while you start circling around me, in triangles and squares and ellipses. I continue even as you stop moving and start hitting the ground with some huge metal objects, amplifying another line of rhythms, the ones generated by the distant industry. These rhythms brush along my body, but do not pass through the skin. The waves, the shadows, the twilight, the metal, the hands. A polyphony of structures, of bodies, of intensities and movements, in transition from one to the other. Moving and changing through time. The actual and the virtual merge together in an ecstatic dance.

I fly over a collection of possibilities, over roads where my life might take me. I see myself as an amorphous creature living simultaneously on all those roads, exploring all options, and carefully choosing for one, knowing that my choices are irreversible. Until now. Until you. I see you changing my course, blocking the entrance to a dead-end road. That path would lead me to a place where all my force would pour out into the fields and disappear, feeding the soil. Instead, you set the frequencies of my energy to the rhythm of another path, the one that curves towards you.

As I rush to meet with you, with a newly discovered vigor, I see my pain as localized outside my body, inside the Earth tortured by the construction-pillars. I see my body disintegrating into rhythms of our life forces, moving through time, entering your walls and meeting with all of you. I can touch you through your past, present and future, touch the changes, the wishes, the intentions… And all my spirits rejoice the new harmony of my blood pulsations, my air waves, and your rhythms. The space disappears, as I lose the sense of my position, of my geometry. I float between dimensions, still hearing the sound of your drumming, knowing that it will bring me back, to you. To the real you, that will embrace all of my wanderings, and allow me to be me again. Purified through ecstasy.

–maja kuzmanovic