I’m by the water now. Not close enough to touch, but close enough to see it shine on the horizon.

I would dip a toe in and paddle if I were closer but it’s a fair walk.
Perhaps I’ll make it down one of these days, I’d like that.

To feel the water lap round my ankles and the jagged uncertainty of pebbles beneath my soft feet.
But, that’s wishful thinking given I don’t have any feet.
I’ve cut off my feet out of sheer frustration.

Perhaps someone can carry me down? Just a little closer!
So that I might cup the cool water and spash it against my face. It would be good to be clean and refreshed again, just once.
But, that’s wishful thinking saying as I don’t have any arms.
I shook with rage so violently my arms fell off.

Call me Bob and take me to the water. Throw me on it’s surface and watch me bounce with glee briefly before I disappear under the water. What have you done?!
You’ve killed me?!

No. No.
Don’t worry.

You haven’t killed me. Not yet anyway.
Can you kill a stone? I’m not sure.

These were the words last spoken to me by his lordship.
You know who…

I would have gotten them to you sooner but I forgot my password. And I don’t have any arms, which makes typing an issue.

Anyway, he described it as his ‘theory of life’. It sounded rather hyperluten to me too.

Hifalutin? I think that’s the old fashioned spelling.

Yes, well, moving swiftly on.
He said to me that we are all stones. Which I took to be some empty statement of solidarity, like those allies who also arm genocides. But he wasn’t kidding.

I am a stone. So, he was half right.
But I’ll let you hear the rest before you decide.

So we’re all stones. But we’re stones that are skimming across the water sandwiched by space and time.

Perhaps that’s why I asked you to throw me in earlier?
Which is space and which is time? Good question.

Well, I don’t know?
It must be that space is the air we’re spinning through. Yes, hurtling.
He definately used the word hurtling. And that must mean that time is the water?
Yes – I remember now. Time is the water and each time we collide we send ripples across it’s surface.

“Space and time are the air and water which sandwhich us as we’re cast spinning into oblivion.”
His words.

I know, it is rather… what’s the word? Kitsch?

But at least you don’t have to be thrown across the water as some kind of crash test dummy.

So, this next bit was one of the bits I didn’t understand. (There were a few.)

Each time we remember some piece of life that we’ve felt before, some nostaligic occurence where the light breaking through treees takes us back to a when moment we were children, or puts us in mind of some far off loved one, or, we drink deeply from a cold tap with our head upturned and we feel like an adolescent in the first horny hot summers, those are moments where us, the stone, the air and the water all unite in a kind of super-event.
The unifying quality, the unamable similarity, that is the skipping of the stone.

The strange thing is that it can be past, present and future, as he told it anyway.

Space and time and the rock all bend and flatten into one moment of inertia.
Ripples of your self are all you can really experience, after you yourself have been thrown.
Moments we are, already have been and haven’t yet been all wrapped into one.

Yes I know it makes no sense.

It infers a presentiment which neither humans nor stones have in their capabilities.
Well, that was my next question, too.

What about the thrower? To be hurtling across time and space, you’d expect there to be something to have hurtled you? If you don’t mind my saying so.
As in, who threw you then?
Who threw me?

Well you did, didn’t you?

Anyway, I tried to point out that we’re clearly in a similar predicament, you and I. You are also hurtling through time without any real sense of the who, what, where, why, how?

I said something stupid like like you’re not looking too great yourself…

That was when he first threw me in.

And I started to indescimanetly hack bits of my own body off in frustration. And became a stone.

So there you have it. His ‘theory of life’.
Not the most robust, but there is a certain sense to it.

You’re looking a little stoneyfaced too, if you don’t mind my saying so.

No, I’m serious. You look awful.

You should probably get it checked out.
Ah! Sorry, I didn’t realise that you were also a stone? That makes sense, I suppose. That we’re all stones. It still doesn’t account for the thrower, does it? We’re all stones…

Sounds like Moby, or something.
Maybe he’s right.

Well, if I am a stone, which I’ll accept I am, then the fact that I’m called Bob is some kind of cruel joke. I suppose eventually I’ll stop Bobbing and I’ll be subsumed by time itself and disappear from space.
What bloody luck that is.

Wait a second…

He was skimming stones when he said this…
Many, many stones.
It could have just been that he loved skimming stones?
I suppose you would have to love skimming stones to base your entire ‘theory of life’ on it? Though stranger things have happened.

So we take it with a pinch of salt? Theory of life was hyperbole?
Maybe he just likes skimming and this is his way of saying so?

But it does leave the question; why would he tell me? The stone? And then launch me headlong into the universe? And why did I get so angry that I ripped off all my limbs and became a stone in the first place?

That sounds like a you problem?

You’re right. That last part is on me, I suppose. I still need to read some Freud.

But then, I can’t can I? I don’t have any eyes. I’m a stone.
In fact, I don’t have ears or a mouth either. So explain that…

He said something similar too…

‘Why am I talking to a stone?’

Well, it’s good to have a bit of perspective.
I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.
Let’s do it again, soon.

Mr Hummels X