We grew the earth, grew it around us and grew into it. We grew into pairs of shoes after pairs of shoes and we grew into our names. We learnt to tie the laces of our shoes and to tie our tongues around our names, and the names of other things, other people, and around other people's tongues. We planted our cultures, cultivated them, and they blossomed into traditions and stereotypes and generalisations and rituals. We broke in our shoes, broke the ice, broke our voices, broke promises. We broke glasses, hearts and bones. We built hierarchies, looked up, looked down, bowed down. We broke down into dictatorships and demonstration. We found solutions like democracy and diplomas and delegated. We fixed fountains and freight trains and falling trees in the forest and faucets that leaked. We formed partnerships, made promises, pledged to parties for both politics and both parents. We made marriage and then we annulled, we divorced. We fabricated the faiths that we fed on. We invented stopwatches, reality television, pedicures, lampshades, philosophy, greenhouses, dictionaries, exclusivity, feng shui, hand-holding, opiate medication, street art, martial arts, lawsuits, lingerie, car boot sales, snow days, psychics, boarding schools, toast, baseball, psychiatry, bird-watching, plaid, research, stag nights, salads, and interventions. We wanted and we wished and we waited and we wanted for more. We were growing faster than we invented. We were outgrowing ourselves and our earth and our shoes and our names. We forgot what we had found and fixed and formed. We broke down eventually and went broke. We are waiting to invent a new way we can fix ourselves.
