On Tuesday they will make an electronic incision across the ridged contours of his upper gums. Above the roots of the teeth, but under the top lip. No scarring to the skin of his face. After shaving bones, correcting angles and padding joints, it's all placed back together in a new alignment. Against the glow of the x-ray light box, they ask if he would like one or two millimetres added to the white of his smile.

Yesterday I watched a YouTube video of a smiling woman describing the symmetries of jaw and hips and the important implications of this symmetry. Two cupped structures. Two horseshoe halves. Each at either end of the spine, bookending the body. Via the spine, hip and jaw send messages to each other like tin-can telephones. Stress in the jaw could manifest as stiffness in the hips. Sitting all day makes the jaw wind tight. 

I have been asked to write a text for an exhibition. Strolling along the slow grey dirge of the canal, Kurt is stopping himself from telling me too much about the work, about what he’d like to travel from his tin-can to mine. Not everything should be transmitted so freely – we nod happily in agreement. He would like to talk and talk and tell me everything he thinks so that nothing is lost, but if I collect all of his thoughts, will there be room left for mine? Now we become unsure. Is it a gap in understanding that makes room for thinking, or is a gap in opinion enough? Do we only have different opinions when we slightly misunderstand each other? 

I tell Kurt about an image I don’t know what to do with. Two readers sharing a book, reading side by side. The particular tension and rhythm of thought that reading is, experienced in tandem with someone else. It is about a desire to become the same person, I say, so that they no longer have to worry about misunderstanding each other. Each can forget that there is a part of the other they cannot access, and a part of themselves they cannot share. To focus their attention on each other would result in wildly different, inverted experiences. Minds pointing in opposite directions. But the book offers this third thing, a third place. To focus their attention, simultaneously, on this third thing external to themselves – this is where they can feel like a closed circuit. They can pretend that nothing is lost.  

Later, returning to my search for the origin of an undeniable yet barely-graspable visual memory, I encounter a number of tutorials demonstrating the DIY production of a drinking skeleton Halloween display. In one of the more ambitious iterations, three variously sized plastic skeletons are seated around a table in a suburban driveway, each compelled by a series of motors to pour coloured liquid between their wide-hinged, lipless jaws. Naturally, the liquid falls right through, splashing past their neck bones and ribs, and is collected by a transparent funnel hot-glued to their hips. The futility is what makes the spectacle entertaining – is what makes a spectacle. Or perhaps it is longing we like to feel. For limitless consumption without consequence. A closed circuit where supply is demand and nothing is lost or gained. From the plastic funnel, the liquid flows into some discreetly-placed tubes, and is pumped back up the spine, along the arms into the liquor bottles, maintaining a continuous cycle. 

Soup moves dutifully down my throat into my stomach. I picture its heat as an animated glow traversing a simplified schema of my body. Soft red spreads and travels, each organ visited in turn by this pulsing information. Channels of flow, pockets of storage. Tin cans and string. 

Diesel moves dutifully through the organs of a bus. As I cross the street my throat receives the oily airborne residue. I'm not sure if I've ever actually seen diesel in liquid form, just smelt it on the hot grey breath of a bus, or felt it purr into the silent car while a parent fills the tank, or rubbed its stain from a small pink fingertip after doodling faces in murky windscreens. The fingertip of a time when so much new language was entering my vocabulary. Words like exhaust – not as in fatigue, but output, expulsion, waste. Also Fumes. Thick at first with that fat F, sinking into itself, arriving at the padded fold of an M. The compulsion to trace a clean pink fingertip through dark grey filth. Not quite the sly, childish glee of getting something dirty, but a solemn pleasure. Something known but not yet understood. Complicity perhaps. This dark, viscous, substance – a toxic yet inevitable emission of the grown-up world – and my inevitable future part in it.