Seahorse by Janice Pariat

no higher than a finger. The layout was unelaborate. One door led to the kitchen, a tiny space of shelves and counters fitted like a Rubik’s cube, and another to a bathroom with the single most luxurious feature in the apartment—a deep, creamy tub.
    I hung up my coat and emptied my pockets. I placed the envelope on the table, and walked into the kitchen, turning on the electric kettle. There was wine in the fridge, but I would settle for tea. The air had cleared my head a little, but the evening’s drinks still ran deep and strong. My fingers smelled of the artist.
    I paced the room, slipping off my shoes, my jumper. I stood by the window and lifted the blinds—the shape of the church rose up before me, and behind that I imagined the city, carved from shadow and light, rising and falling, an endless tide.
    All the while, I tried to ignore it. The white rectangle, light and innocuous as a feather, but it kept pulling me back. An unstoppable ocean current. I glanced at it. Touched to see if it was real.
    I’d opened it earlier in the bookshop, while people milled around, drinking wine. Casually, I’d stepped out, and returned before anybody noticed, just in time to be called over by Santanu—“Nem, I’d like you to meet…”
    Outside, it was raining, drops slashing into the ground beyond the awning, in silver sideway streaks. The sky had darkened and vanished, and the air glimmered with hidden light. They say looking at a painting is like watching the artists’ immediate gestures.
    Nothing is more immediate than a handwritten note.
    Dear Nehemiah,
    My builder of new worlds.
    I hope you find your chariot of winged horses.
    NP
    And if that wasn’t cryptic enough, something else fluttered out of the envelope to the ground. A rectangular piece of paper, thicker than the note. I picked it up, wiped it clean—it was a ticket. To a musical performance in London, over a month away. I switched on the laptop on the table. It hummed into life, the screen filling with bright, sudden light. A window within a window. I could search for anything in the world, apart from what I was looking for. I typed the words carefully. “The Orpheus String Quartet”, then hit delete and entered “Lauderdale House London” instead. This is where Nicholas wished me to go. Perhaps that’s where we would finally meet again.

    If you visit the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, and walk into the hallway where David is displayed, it’s difficult to look at anything else. When you enter, he’s to the right. And you are suitably entranced. They’ve positioned him beneath a glorious dome, and he’s bathed in natural light. He is an angel. You circle him slowly, gazing up, casting your eyes over his limbs. Studying the shape of perfection carved out of a nineteen-foot block of marble. Your thoughts are sparse, limited by awe. Somehow, words and emotion seem inappropriate, inadequate, out of place.
    Yet if you enter and turn left, you encounter something else entirely.
    Michelangelo’s “Prisoners.” Placed in a dark corridor, rows of figures commissioned for the never-completed tomb of Pope Julius II. They are unfinished, perpetually wrestling with stone. Unlike most sculptors who built a model and then marked up their block of marble to know where to chip, Michelangelo always sculpted free hand, starting from the front and working his way back. These figures emerge from stone as though surfacing from a pool of water. They will not stun your mind into silence, rather they rouse it. You are moved by their frailty, their endurance. They are endless metaphor. And infinite possibility. Much the same as anything unfinished in our own existence.
    We treasure the incomplete, for it lends us many lives—the one we lead and the million others we could have led. We are creatures of inconsistency. Passionately partial. Unexecuted. Unperformed. Undone.