The way you organise your desk, your outfit, gestures, expressions, word choices, grammar, car, house, even the way you tie your laces, it’s all a mirror to your mind, and I use that, I use it to learn your darkest secrets, but I don’t use them. I like to think of it as omniscience, I know everything about everyone I know, but I do use it for bad, or for good, I just have it, my own private display.

My own tells are as vague as anyone else’s, but you can read them just as precisely. The thousand and one rings burnt into the desk by my mugs display my need to burn the midnight oil, the slightly open drawers display my need to hurry, the precarious pile of books on mythology, religion, science, politics, law, martial arts, written in nine different languages displaying the inner need for recognition and a thirst for intellect.

The bundle of maps on the table I call my ‘dining table’, half of which are marked with past and present wars, show a need for an understanding of what’s happening in the world. The newspaper’s in my bedroom closet’s that are one for every day since 2014 display that same interest in the world around me.

The telescope angled at a distant sun, the fancy car that cost five years of salary, the comprehensive list of every time I’ve left the country pegged to my fridge, these all show the need to escape the life laid out for me.

The jeans and plaid shirts that are my wardrobe, the boots that are falling to pieces, the knife that is always in my pocket, the hay and straw that is in my boots, pockets, hats, bed, the chickens and ducks and geese and pigs and sheep that wander aimlessly through the kitchen, the curled barbed wire near the always open door, the axe next to it that is there to remind me incessantly of the tree I have to spare a day to fell, chop into logs, leave to dry, all of these showing the impossibility of and reluctance to leave.

The small, worn writing desk with books piled alongside, that’s my only escape, and I indulge it when I can.

The thousand scars across my back, they show my hardship, the two bullet scars, one in my shoulder, the other my gut, they show my mistakes, the missing two fingers prove my profession as a worker of the land, the way I move to hide my limp shows a need to me normal and a need to be treated so, the way I talk, the very words I use prove me to be free from the restraint of the rich and posh, the very choices I make, way I act, prove me to be of the land.

The most important thing to me is the way a person swears. It tells you there position in society, sometimes as much as their job, tells you their origin, how comfortable they are in that situation, what brand of person they are, if you should leave alone.

My weekly attendance of a Church service, saying of Grace, the way I cross myself and pray, these tell you of my faith and faithfulness to it, and something of my morals.

It also provides a contradiction. I have two scars from bullets, I’ve been shot at more often, I have a pistol by my bed, in my belt, and that’s what I love most. The contradictions of a person.

Well that was… Let’s leave this one to sink and disappear