Cerebral-tongued cartography

by Salma Galal

I spend my days now sitting in a room with very dull lights that sometimes remind me of the home I’ve left to come to this sunnier place but sometimes it’s all rendered null and void because I spend my most of my time not all but most of it sitting in a dull room staring at a microscope looking at slices of gray matter I catalogue the soma the axon the dendrites and their fragile needle-pointed spines and I have grown adept in this language of cells arteries and membranes it’s only with this syntax I can carry out my conversations between the slice of this person who once dreamed and hoped and wondered in front of me it’s the only option because they are dead and the only way to reach someone in death is to make a map of their remains and so I am a cartographer for the past I can sketch the images of the future-turned present and see how the world before me now is constructed I have not used my tongue save for its attachment to Broca’s area for conversation real conversation not the kind that I engage in with this dead matter and my living hand and its green river veins the kind that I have been just having now with who’s sitting across from me it’s been a long long time and the last time we spoke I was a cartographer of the language tongues with Broca’s area but not only Broca’s area with what real tongues use and flesh with thrumming pulses use I used to write so much and I wondered why I wrote what I did and why the best thing I wrote I wrote in a little train with lighting as dull as the place that I spend most of my time in and why in this sunny lovely golden place I can think of nothing and none of the light seems to pour into me and why am I just a shadow what am I missing so I dove from my fingers up my arm past my clavicle in the stretch of my neck tendons to the place between my ears and I wanted to see why I couldn’t lose myself in what was around me and I supposed if I really rooted myself into my body if I became an expert of my internal landscape if I could know every corner and divot of my gyri and sulci if I could become a learned cartographer and know my mind so intimately I would find which places precisely to tweak and scrape the rust of lethargy from and where I could massage my potential from in an electric ooze but instead I’ve gotten lost and I really don’t write much anymore and I know it’s the cerebellum that lets me know how to swim and the sea-horse of the hippocampus that lets me remember everything else like how I used to love writing but this notebook in my hand from the other hands of the person that wrote in it but they’re my words looking back at me and he says he wrote them down because he wants to always remember and I know that I remember I used to love writing and this notebook in my hands is glossy and flexible as a fish and this person in front of me the owner of this fish is also why I dove back into the hidden valleys of my brain because I didn’t understand why my synapses fired the way they did why I felt the squirm of snakes and thrash of waterbugs simultaneously when I thought of him and why seeing him here today I feel the same thing because despite my years all I know is everything works in random and when one is lesioned the other one takes up the mantel because every area is dynamic enough to adapt and that’s what I’ve done I adapted to the flow of ions and neurotransmitters and let words slip through my pupils out to the exterior of the room which doesn’t have much light that I’m sitting in almost all the time but not all of it because I’m here right now across from the boy now the man the boy that made me mistrust myself all those years ago even though it’s not a moment it’s an accumulation of synaptic connections and congealment of receptors to thicken the dendritic spines as I thicken my spine and sit up in a gesture of indignation because it isn’t an epiphany it isn’t only he that punctuated this fork in my life’s road that I wanted to understand my mind before he even touched the contours of my existence and I love what I do in that room with so much shade and that matter that speaks to me without a tongue only through the dormant nets of Broca’s area but I sit here holding this fish notebook across from someone I have tried so hard to forget holding the words I have written in a drab place with a whirring mind that was still foreign territory and I have lost myself in the minutiae and I have zoomed so acutely into the cell of a neuron I have not pulled back to see the connection of the region to the tongue and cradle the shape of the words in my ear canals until I sit here holding my words and this is an accumulation of all the forming fibers and reaching synapses all coalescing to this needle eye and I am sitting here in my private sea of consciousness bubbling up into the dome of my mouth and sloshing in my ears and I unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth and let the synapses draw tighter between my keen gaze on the brain and long-veiled shape of the written word and I murmur that which I have in my hand outloud to the man in front of me who has done so much but really not much at all in the grand scheme of things I will wiggle the fish in my mouth and swim in waves of paper and I will add words to pin the catalogues of my brain and let them reach beyond the recesses like the matter of our skulls are the creators of what we see and instruments that push us to move beyond their boundaries which really are limitless all these borderless edges this dissolution and the gray hunk of my head expanding to fill the infinite curve of the world with a thousand little sparks into a forking path of fire that will dissect to travel down my hand to make infinity plus one and I say: “That’s lovely.”