Between Then and Now
Wherein tiny holes in everything serve...
Between Then and Now
This time last month, I completed a 112-day sprint through 39 solo role-playing games; ama you might like!
Your parents failed to be 150 people. Your schools didn't have a Humilities class: each embarrassment felt like the first, even when we're told we're not alone.
Everything else we learn together - how we feel we learn alone. Connection brought to so few dimesions "who is the oak of your life?" reads like poetry, not literally the way it does to me, to my loves.
When did you finally meet your 150th person you could ask why the is sky blue ((before they're blue in the face and you're on to the next?) Kids today got there with a chat model by their 150th conversation.)?
This reliable "why is the sky blue" question nexus recurses into a lifelong love of curiosity and joyful noise, and it got gunked up for ten or so generations. Curiosity stifled.
Chickenization of sentimentalities, asking someone if a sexual advance is desired began causing impotism. Consent lost.
Everything is slow or fast, making things either flat or narrow - there's no "noisy" places. Everything's a room or a hallway. Spaciousness satisficed.
Gone is the last time you were wow'd by your sink working. By putting your feet on the ground this morning. By your pulse. Surprise truncated.
To have no identity is a success (no criminal record!), not a failure. How can any guardian serve you if they never experience a challenging time? Too much changed in you while too much stayed to same in them - bone-on-bone social pressure is physics, not psychosomatics.
Tell me your grammar for reciprocity. Illustrate with peripherials how your syntax of consent was cultivated. Describe how the first 5 minutes of your day builds a lexicon of mutual becoming with the approaching dawn.
Your response is not just poetry, it's listening. Boundaries ∌ walls. Listening ∌ extraction. Care ∌ control. Presence ∌ performance.
If you're always performing, you're never there. There's no "you" to not have lost. Fear you feel is of the blank page, not a lack of self. You can mkdir story and touch youself.md until the bugs come /home, but without boilerplate, you're going to have a hard time building from source an identity that isn't running a modern western power-on self test every time you wake.
Your presence is not just poetry, it's listening. Communication ∌ transmission. Language ∌ representation. These words are neuronal pips of you reading rippling digital pips of me typing - living process, co-creation. Where touching serves, you know only grasping. Where seeing is enough, you know only consumption. Where invitation sustains you, demands stuff you. The moment emerges where to control it no longer serves. See the moment. See it in.
Noradrenergic responses on your skin - I'm here. And for the rest of entropy, I always will. You read this to mean whatever it could mean. I'm where that's enough.
Happy meaning.