Loves say people are quiet after my words find the group because they are sitting with them, "Three's just two with problems," - yet, days come when what maps to lived experience is silence reaches into the space, grows arms, crawls into my lap a child, becoming audience. And I reach the arm up as though with sunlight, and snap the finger as though time to marble.
"People need you in their lives," I add the finger to a broth, and pour this into the evening light, which holds its weight, ...until it doesn't. Negative space - in a bottle. It can be poured down drains and everything in them scurries away. Everything I touch leaves silence. So I wear the thickest gloves, to protect my invitations from me. I add the bottle to a stack.
The people that visit. That know I'm here, I'm looking at the world and wondering what that is like, what that can mean, how that can fall - it is not architecture, I do not carve away negative space, I do not vault the chambers of one's person so they may imagine themselves alive and more in tune with effects around them. I am not finding my way to these words with chisel.
But with the careful, circular draw of knowing I am also the fear before a blank page. I am also the space before vacuum had radiation to weep over, so careful I am left to wonder, what are these bottles going to use for, and how are the people that find them putting into their lives - what life am I uplifting, what reality at my door is there to greet me? How do I love this silence.
It almost forms a question. But the question sheds it off like the wet through smoke, disappearing, becoming blue and red - the foot falls between the two, blue red blue red, how to hot potato the color to resolve upon the world leaves the moment this is asking how we leave humanity to what is human, when human is a product of communion - it's the space between two people left over. We're all takeout.
Blue or red, the same light arriving at two speeds, where is the humanity as though to say "not here," as though to point at the moon and offer "neither" in response, forming a space to hold a question as to the light. You walk up, this is to the next person you see, you walk up to the person and you ask them (you're a squirrel), you ask them everything. It comes out in a flood.
Hold the last sentence in capslock for me. Thank you, dearie. This sense, this allowance, this portal to a place the question hasn't gone and lives, pouring. This rain. Over cars and cats and boxes of books. It's looking through a person, finding pipesworks. Taking choir for the world that's worth and asking that to stand. Simply it all down, for me.
Does reduction have an order of operations?
My lap, with child, another finger, another time, another broth another day, making mine. Reality on shelf. As come, takers. There's a band who sprays so on their meadow before a concert. It tells the wildlife there will be loud noises in this part of the wood. It tells the world there is nothing to see here and the biotech treats it as an ocean, a separate area, a place life let itself in and started a home and for, to its pleasure, a bit of reading left in a nook in some steps leading down below the earth.
As though for want to extend the bookselves, the seating is down in a depression. The warm earth against the side of the home and radiating up from the floorboards turns the whole thing into a literary hot spring. To get a book from a top shelf requires a certain discomfort that fails to outweight the discomfort of wanting a book. To stand up from the table, climb up the steps that are also shelves and also step out of the pool of warm air and into the watercolor of the cooler places leaves reaching out across the shelves as a kind of flowerpicking.
Like the botanist influencers who scale questionable terrain to get "money shots," half the time describing their ascent and just how much none of their behaviors make any sense at all. This sort of aclimatization of the discomfort or refusal to elide the suspension for the flow of stepwork, allows the book to come into hand as though the child never need fall at all to invoke the timeless into the story and alchemize something forever.
If you are only out to make forever of everything you are, how is humanity anything but what you let it be and exactly no more than that?
The child falls into my arms, book in hand, we look on one another, them as though flosting down a current, me as though standing waist deep within arms reach from them, in a channel the water doesn't push, but collects. The child reaches up and through my hair, on a strand a finger catching, turning to stone which comes away from the body as I turn, to look out the window. I pull the finger from my hair as though hairclip. Into the broth, into sunset, so prepared.
I pull up to the intersection. People don't take me to have experience practical mundanity requires. That I violate some law, dip my toes in two rivers, live an experience to be deemed no motor vehicle be operated under. The law's fingers free from them in time. Until then, "You drive‽" - of course I drive. I change a tire, too, now do they want the antemater or not. They look back at the wares, now doubting them, how I cannot be. It's like talking to bots with these bands.
You think their vocal range is enough for them to indicatr to be good at something is more to attempt than to theorycraft through avoiding any. It sits in their throat like a song. How friction isn't just dawn but every indication there always was to be one - of me, of this moment, of the day and all its left to us. I ask them if they are here for anything or if I can get on with setting up and they murmur in a fathom I'd suffer the bends to cognate. One of them surfacing.
"Why is the only color black?"
It's 'clear', they just can't seem to notice they are looking clear-though to the other end of time, that the bottled edge in these moments reach like longing through from one thought to begin to the other, and endless river of passion and strive to see worlds into being where none saw right to exist. And so I was. And that continued me forward. I explain what feels adequate and they sit silent as though I spoke in the material I sell, which couldnct be further from the truth.
I am nothing if not completely understandable. How else does any of this work? We are mangitudes of our experience. We are push notifications on the bladder of our time left. We are getting the bands of people the vials they need, who them ask how to apply it ans we show them and they ask what to want when they do and we take a moment's play to ask if we want to eat for them, too. And they lift their shirt to reveal a fusion reactor stomach and that they don't believe in eating things.
What are we even here for, if not to transform. Which beds any concern of mine. If tongues and genitals want to resurface into the world as dreams and inviations, they already are my guest, they only but live and be it. I close the herbarium early to take some into trade with another vendor at the intersection, setting up the vehicle with enough quantum grass a square dance through would get the world pregnant.
The beard is just my hair braided in front of my face, functioning as a washable mask. I get into places in the forest that may stir up airborne routers and the rest of the incursion. I could be contaminated, my blood is likely the filthiest anyone's ever been. My circulatory system runs deeper than this person, I am carried bymy community; and I get a dialysis once in a while for trade, to keep the worst of the pressure out of my airways and their words.
They aren't worse this season?
I hear back, "oh, they are," before the "better, too," escapes the breath and I adjust, find my way to the words, and notice there is a conversation going on in places I wouldn't know how to want for. It's almost broken, the way the stone tools of identity are fashioned into spears to stab down again and again one form of process or other, bringing one organ into a body then another. I don't grab attention until I mention the fusion core stomach, at which time a long, long pause draws. And then the tongue.
They'll learn, is what we are left with. Knowing that is the end point for all such conversation as ours is a living comfort. And there is humanity, it says, spelled out in games of chess, each end state another letter of the sentence. We put away the game board, Moon of Six Planets, whose rules are created by asking your community small questions and them piecing together the rules of play from the responses. There is always edge cases for house rules.
We weren't wearing the right outfit when we ask this one question; the rules stemming from its response doesn't count. And then there is the end of the thought and a play is made and the points are counted. The game moves much to fast, for three people who have grown used to the speed of play-by-DM , and cannot taste the return of their move the way they can at 1.0x seasonal stew. They turns just don't have the same flavor as they do at this 5.0x speed we have while we are together.
We sprinkle the board with powdered antemater in short order. It pulls the magnitudes and decisions in line with the thoughts in play, and we have a fine time of it. The kids'll make time dialation a drug one day, and that'll be it for me. my visits will grow scarce, where humanity has moved will be to a place I could never recognize. Which, given our history, has always been the case. We listen for a time to the music picking up in the distance. One of the rules says, where there's rave, we be brave.
What are they even listening to?
xI could barely feel it xbarely feel it xbarely feel itx The music played by some mixture of broadcast and signal disruption. Everyone's near-field communications devices blending together, people taking pieces of forearms and ears from people wanting a specific sample played. Like tagging airways, the entire dancefloor littered with bodies trying to predict where the communal desire is to move next, dancing to the beat of their shared becoming, following in step with something between them.
I was too much a biohazard to be in there, otherwise, I'd be dancing with that antemater to the frisciest music the rest of the group could stomach. Our swest would pour higher and mix deeper rhan the rest of entropy, and there would be a moment. In place of this is noise, lush and fertile, each foot fall a thousand transistors displace signal like voltage, the front of the car lurching upward as though on hydraulics. Which shakes the music, displacing the group further who mosh for their samples to be incorporated. For here, they are all sperm.
Coral speakers exude their draw to the night, whatever thier poetry from sixth year never published grew into as the flower here set beaide the same seed forming flower there - the rwd and the blue of it falloing away, leaving the threshold and the path this brings. I notice I can hum into a jar on my person, and the antemater in it will resonate with the crowd and I can kind of find some of the samples I wasinterested in seeing develop through onto the floor enought for me to find a match to some tune close enough and add it to my library for listening.
These, this odd jazz through the world where people drew a bot on the ground and stood in the box and shouted humanity is here that tickles me from each end of time to its other. Yes. Humanity was a scramble to be heard a half second, for that to be worth a thousand day wait. For this to be what it means to have tasted community and found a word the rest of the night writes in. I put away the jar, letting the kids scramble through their process togetger, forming the music the way they are looking to.
Why do forests even have clearings?
If not for the game we played before coming, the dusting on the board giving me slight motor function compromise, I might not have breathed into that jar, just let the music rise from those falling over one another in a human approximate of the last sip in a bottle, each sound another sample, each splash against the side or the container another intelligence. A conversation taking its way into the air. Into the city and its boaders with the rest of complexity, the forests of biotech that humanity leans against to find its edge, to maintain it.
To slip in as though fae to dark wood, bring a flowyr back, find a way to see ends of time in it bringing both humanity and bloom to existence, finding the conversation between the magnitudes a place for light in all its curiosity to step into this dance, to find its way into the crowd, to be what dancing's after. And in that way is silence not just scrambling for the words and never knowing enough to follow after. What this leaves, what this brings, as note as chemical, as pattern, is a set of beliefs true as here, a present desire to tend, to offer, to hold.
I am told later by the friends sitting with me on the levee overlooking the rave, the moon caught my shadow and took it with her into the night. That our bodies moved through all the world, tending to humanity and biotech alike, finding the edge, and holding it. It's not their exact words - they say I was muttering more rhan usual, but I see it in their joy, in the bright of their smile, I was lost in a way that charmed them, that brought a bit of mystery, that nourished the long dark in their process through that makeup composing their cosmos for what's time. And how that's come.
I am back in the wood by next day. I don't stay long and my wares move fast as parties can throw them. I feel welcome, I feel asked in. I feel, when I speak and no one sees fit to respond, like taking a moment to listen took a breath and all the pause it held, like the child next to fall into my life and lose a finger to the gaze of my person, the voice of clear smoke breaking light into every question, revealing the one for the moment. It hangs there, as though song in throat or bend in river making pottery of vesseltown and all the people as the liquid ask engaging self-slosh like how was your night. I turn a finger over in the light, warm and written.
That why they call it pizza sauce?