I feel connected. Again I see the number 22, everywhere, much like I once saw combinations of B and 13. Sometimes I still do. I finally took the time to look it up – connotations of Revelation and a conjunction of the mundane and the fantastical. Sounds like me in a nutshell – living in my own little world as I trudge through the bigger one – bigger things always seem bare and uninteresting because there’s more space to fill, but at the same time have more corners to lose things in and find. It’s often seen as something similar to the first major card of the 22 in Tarot. Other’s even say it’s the stuff of the very Word of God.

I marked up a candidate’s exam paper today when one mark wasn’t clear. Perhaps it was Question 22. I don’t remember. As soon as I did it I had a vivid fantasy about a life-saving operation I will undergo in about 30 years at the hands of a surgeon who once almost failed a critical exam if it wasn’t for one mark. It wouldn’t surprise me if it came to be. Impossible things lie in each and every corner these days.

The room where the exams take place is one of the college’s museums – a collection of internal organs, limbs and body parts forever preserved for trainee surgeons, visitors and temps such as myself to gawp at and possibly consider the nature of dignity of one made immortal in a plastic casket; a tide of formaldehyde sweeping back time to keep them forever close to their moment of death. An old lady – an actress playing a patient in one of the assessments and still in her red and white dressing gown – moves from exhibit to exhibit, regarding them and commenting as she does, either half to me or entirely to herself. “They are grotesque,” she says, “but I also find them comforting. The capillaries in our body look no different from those in a leaf or the roots from a tree. It reminds me that everything in the universe is connected. And I think that’s beautiful.”

I’ve started hearing music – a cacophony of clashing, incompatible noises and sounds that have only now started to slow or speed up, occasionally intertwining to become a melody or a beat. A simple sound that is beautiful by its very simplicity. Life plays on in endless Variations. I see these Variations every morning I leave the house, these beautiful things inconspicuous by their plain sight: traffic slowing to let an ambulance pass; two people who once had the improbability to meet and are now holding hands; sunlight within huge mountains and cities made of cloud reflected in a tall glass building, manmade. What is my chord? What key is my brain thinking in? What door does it want to unlock? What is behind door 22?

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