The insect screens across my windows catch light in a particular way. They're formed of gentle ripples. This lack of perfect flatness means that the sun falls on them unevenly, causing certain ridges of mesh to shine and others to stay invisible. Even the sections that glow dull white in the sun are not uniformly illuminated. Their undulations cause variations in shimmer as well as shape, and in the centre of every tiny mesh square is a vacancy, too small for mosquitoes to wriggle through, but too big for you not to notice when you look close.

Sometimes, I think I can see circular pathways through the interlocking boughs of deciduous trees before spring is fully underway. This is not a metaphor. I can see actual tunnels formed by the concentric bending of branches. The effect is most pronounced in winter and at night, when there are no leaves and the trees are backlit by street lamps. During the day, it is more difficult to spot these tunnels, leading indefinitely into the air, and when the trees are heavy with green you can't see anything at all.

Are night skies clearer during the coldest months? How common are stars in the fly-blown centre of summer? I remember noticing satellites for the first time. I had just turned thirty. I am fascinated by space the way everyone is, but I am unobservant when it comes to incredibly distant things. Satellites have appeared in the night sky without me knowing. I will never be an astronaut, unless it's an emergency, and we all have to leave at once.

People used to say that the earth is flat. Now, they say it's round. Neither of these statements is cosmically true. 'Flat' and 'round' signal towards ideal geometric states, but nothing in this world is perfectly shaped. There are always undulations in our being, knots and dips, bumps and curves in the surface of even the flattest seeming plane. Our globe is squeezed at the poles. It bulges faintly in the middle, the loosening of a belt after a large dinner. A ball is never a perfect ball. There's no such thing as an unblemished sphere, apart from in our minds. There is always unneveness at a molecular level.

This is a theory, of course, like everything else. I have never actually seen a molecule, or anything that makes up the fundamental structures of our world. I am told these things exist - atoms, quarks, particles of matter - in the same way that I'm told satellites and stars exist. I have never seen anything close enough to know with my own eyes. I have seen lights in the sky and other people tell me what they are. I have seen tunnels in the fly mesh and I imagine black holes. We agree upon definitions for celestial things, extra-terrestrial flares. Perhaps all shapes are like this? We see things, or think we see, and we discuss, agree, tell other people, and soon our eyes don't matter, it's what we're told that shapes the world. All shapes are a melding of light and thought. Speech is in there somewhere, too. We are fed. It's all a form of play, but it matters, deeply, like the weight of space above us, cold beyond dreams, containing things that could signal our collective ending, or new frontiers.

I struggle to manage shapes, to fix things when they're broken - the metal clasps on a mason jar, replacement bulbs for signal lights, fold-out camp-beds with interlocking springs, returning a malfunctioning printer to it's original packaging so that the box can be resealed, origami. Such tasks.

The other week, I saw a hamster in a pet store that looked like a perfect sphere. It was eating and didn't seem to mind being stared at through the glass, but who really knows? We're not even honest with ourselves about what we like and what we dislike, about what's good for us and what isn't, health and destruction, love and pain, war and peace, the intimate, big picture stuff. How can we possibly know what a hamster wants? All I can say is that it looked like a golf ball, but grey, and without the equidistant dimples. As it packed its cheeks with kibble, the hamster lost its footing on the edge of the food bowl and rolled forwards onto its face. It didn't even make an effort to prop itself back up. It kept on chewing, even with its whiskers pressed into the floor. I could no longer see its eyes. They were in the ground. I wanted to buy it, buy it a glass home, or a glass prison, depending on how you want to spin it. I'm not sure I'm allowed pets in my apartment. Some people say 'rodents don't count', but this feels like a deeply subjective statement, rife with misdirection. I decided to call the hamster Atlas, even though he wasn't mine to name. Like the earth, Atlas looks like a perfect sphere, but he isn't. He has his own imperfections. He loses his balance when he eats. He does the best he can with what he's been given. It is strange to think he might not have a conception of god. I didn't buy him, but I think about him most days. He is somewhere in the world, occupying space.

Last night, I was trying to read Hegel's ideas on art and aesthetics, and it put me in a bad mood because I couldn't understand what on earth he was saying. It made me question whether I care, or if I care about the same things all the time, and all the while I felt myself tipping towards sleep, as if I were standing on the edge of a slippery bowl, trying to fill my cheeks, a bowl full of night and stars. There's a hole in summer where the winter gets in. I dream heavy in July. I love the longest days. The rest of the year is frayed. I try to sustain myself with no one watching.

I turned the page and a single ant appeared, delicate and dark, probing white space. It roamed, quite literally, between the lines. You could argue that the only difference between a pet and a wild animal is a leash. Leashes come in many forms. They can be transparent. They can be walls. They can be glass firmament. This ant was born in a tunnel in the earth, an unseen tunnel, a cave nobody knows about. The cave will not be there forever. It may have collapsed already, resulting in a more compacted darkness. I spoke to the ant. I said, 'I'll let you live, on the condition that you don't tell your friends about this place. I don't want a whole colony of ants in here. I like my space the way it is, bug free.' The ant agreed. I meant to be gentle. I flicked him from the page. The force probably killed him, mid-air, and I feel bad about it, even now.