Decoherence

The persistence of imperfect things.

Everything beautiful is broken. Everything broken still functions. We’re decoherent systems writing messages in steam.

A detail from Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (c.1904). Public Domain.

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I. 
I took notes, 
but many months have elapsed.
These scrawls, once coherent,
now encode a message scrambled. 
I bite my lip. Who cares!
Penmanship is for scribes, not those who cry in verse.

II.
She showed me a set of designer lipsticks.
Limited-edition, all-black, and lined with gold,
except for the pink one, with cherry blossoms all over. 
But it was all messed up. 
What will it be?
Oh, give me the pretty one – I can fix her. 

I inscribe a message on the bathroom mirror
with my cherry-blossom bullet. 
She's wonky and jagged,
but writes beautifully.
Emollient mahogany, silk-textured. 
Beeswax and lanolin,
mica and beetle skin.
Restructured biochemistry,
once perfect, now decoherent.
A shimmering bloodstain on my lips.

III.
I'm craving soup. 

Miso, akadashi, tonkotsu –
with noodles of all sizes.
More. More. 
Fill the bowl, use the paddle,
mix up the fatty broth. 
Throw in some protein and scallions.

Soup – bubbling aquarium. 
Cambrian to Homo Sapien,
being becoming.
Flesh inside shells. Flesh around bones.
Flesh in between incisors. 
Fins that glide, wings that fly, 
fingers wielding chopsticks. 
Gills, lungs. Blow the steam off incoherent speech. 
Compound sight and eagle eyes,
blinking through contact lenses.
Monsters in the deep. Monsters in the sky.
Monsters in peplum dresses.
Salt of the Earth, recycling,
in soup, and designer lipstick. 

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©Apra Gotla 2025.