Nivelle’s 28 Circles

(a sound spiral of crumbs, resonance, and cookie-consciousness)

No one knows how many cookies one must eat to be happy,
yet twenty-eight are not enough — and yet perhaps they are.
Nivelle knew early on that happiness does not arrive, but flows,
does not remain, but trembles,
does not rest, but rolls like a sugar crumb across the tongue of the moment.

One cookie was a crack, was a sound, was a kiss made of crumb.
One cookie clicked itself into the heart,
a second laid itself over it like a soft sentence made of dough.
Three were too conscious, four too much, five too early 
so they became twenty-eight.

Twenty-eight numbers tongues compasses sugar-tongues sugar-circles.
She ate and she let be and she read, in the crumbs of her hands,
the future of her teeth.
In every bite, a morsel of knowledge in the essence of desire.
She did not nibble out of hunger,
she nibbled out of longing for longing,
she did not bite down, she listened
to the cracking of language in the palate of thought.

She was a twenty-eight
an eight that had doubled itself,
a loop in the infinite,
a circle in the cookie in the circle.
She could fill rooms with warmth, ideas, and sugar,
yet she stood at the edge of her own tenderness,
as if waiting for permission to be.

At night she did not count the cookies she ate, but those she did not eat.
She counted the non-bites, the gaps in life, the air between must and may.

Perhaps happiness did not lie in the gulp, but in the stop,
not in taking, but in not-taking,
not in the cookie, but in the crumb of the non-bite.

She asked herself: When does desire begin to know that it is desire?
Perhaps at the edge of the twenty-eighth cookie,
where the teeth hesitate and the tongue listens.

She was not made for stillness, oh no,
she was a whirl, a stirring, a rondo.
She wanted to feel, not feel, feel how not-feeling sounds.
She wanted more of less, less of more,
the moment of not-yet, the glow before the grasp,
desire before the sound.

One day she stood before the mirror of the sugar wall,
saw her hands 
hands that gave, took, took and gave,
hands that could hold and yet would not let go.
She asked the hands whether they knew their own power,
and the hands did not answer; they trembled slightly,
like cookies in the oven.

She suddenly understood the twenty-eight as a seesaw, not a scale.
It does not teach measure; it shows oscillation.
It whispers:

You know abundance only in overflowing,
stillness only in rushing,
measurelessness only in the moment of recognition.

At some point the cookies softened.
They did not disappear; they surrendered.
What once cracked now yielded,
what once resisted now received.

The circles were still there,
but they no longer counted.
They floated.
They absorbed.

Marshmallow replaced the crumb.
Milk replaced the bite.
There was nothing left to break,
only surfaces willing to be covered.

Then she thought: pour something over it
to cover the traces of your mind and of your thought.
And so she poured milk over the objects—
not fresh, not innocent, but already turning,
already leaning toward sourness.

She discovered that sour milk does not explain.
It settles.
It dulls edges, thickens time,
rests on things without asking their meaning.

She did not eat.
She immersed.
She did not take;
she let herself be surrounded.

The twenty-eight became a temperature,
a degree of closeness,
a measure of how much the body can bear
before thought dissolves into touch.

Milk ran along the marshmallow’s skin,
slow, hesitant, intimate.
It covered the small scars left by thinking,
the sharp outlines of intention.

Desire no longer asked how much.
It asked how long.

She stood inside the white overflow,
counting nothing,
waiting for nothing,
satisfied not by fullness,
but by saturation.

Here, happiness did not arrive.
It coated.
It lingered.
It spoiled gently.

And in that spoilage,
she recognized pleasure
not as consumption,
but as a voluptuous suspension,
where the mind leaves its marks
and the milk, patiently,
covers them.