From where I am this is all I can see. And I may be right in believing I can read what I see. I am no longer sure. I seem to have left behind the ability to make sense of things; or shall I say that ability has left me, drip by drip, day after day. I can no longer be sure. I say “read” when actually there is nothing to read in what I see and you probably see too. There are no letters and no words. There isn’t a language. There’s nothing to read. But perhaps there is. I am confused. I can no longer make sense of one thing and another. Too many things that I thought were those things turned out not to be those things.

I mean I used to think a lie is a lie and then it turned out that a lie is actually the truth. When they lie they say it like the truth and it is received as the truth. It seems I have lost my definitions and understandings of things as I had grown up to learn them. Turns out I was fed the wrong definitions and the wrong understandings, and it can be a little unsettling that all this time has been spent living and perceiving in error and now it may be too late. I probably should not be saying “read” when there is nothing to read in what I see. But then, perhaps there is. Who knows?

I used to think, perhaps wrongly, that it is possible to read things by seeing things, they need not be letters or words or sentences, or longer things with many many sentences. They may just be what they are and it is possible to read them. Read a sign, for instance, or a situation, or a scene. Possible? I can no longer be certain. From where I am I can see very little and read very little. There are bars that tunnel the scope of my vision and there is nowhere else to look at anything from. All the time that I have been here, this is the only view I am allowed of what is outside. Or where you are and from where you can turn your gaze 360 degrees and up and down and see all there can be seen. You can probably guess where I am. It’s Independence Day, but it is not independence day. See I told you things mean different things, different from what you thought they mean. I might wish to read in what I see a tableau of freedom, and open sky, whatever little I can see of it, and birds in flight. But I may also read a menaced sky and birds of prey, watching over, in readiness to swoop rather than soar. I can’t tell what it is, I can no longer tell one thing from another.

All that flies

Isn’t all free

Those are lies

Of a high degree.