There’s a riddle I’m told one gets asked during job interviews at Google to test your problem-solving wits. The riddle:

You have a dollar, pinned under a heavy, immovable stone. The stone prevents the dollar from moving, but is only touching it at a pinpoint. How do you extract the dollar in usable condition?

And the answer is to let the stone cut through the dollar as you pull it out. The tear does not invalidate the tender.

I have inadvertently found myself in another vortex of metaphors, negotiating with myself to use a bottle that is occupied by a ship I have painstakingly built with the most valuable materials I could find. Small but meaningful. At first I just liked the shape of the bottle and was content to fill it with stems, but with time, the pieces of my life came together inside like an organism. Perhaps I would use the container and my skills to grow a poire williams. Or could I use it to contain a letter. Would the ship be an accurate representation of my desire and ability to traverse oceans.

I fear that now, having to destroy the contents to use the bottle again, that no one will want what I created if it is disassembled. Could someone rebuild it with me? Must I keep the container empty, or couldn’t I keep building inside of it? Perhaps there’s a dioramic eden worth committing myself to. Perhaps I can tear along the shortest radius of my body and fit myself into the vacuum instead. I want to live under the pinpoint of the rock and let you decide how to break me up for use. I want to live in the menagerie of impossible bottles forever.