Sub Rosa

Pretty 🥺

My playthrough:

Where left and right become forward and back, what we placed on either end - what it is we capitulate and where it is the line falls as we’re brought to draw it - drawing it through us more than we ever could ourselves. Momentum a streak, a mass given birth.

Information has its meteor, its comets. Its stars and vessels, and blood. Water the lot of it, cooling. How tongues overheat the moment knee finds throat just long enough to bring you to draw the line. And shoe up. And step into street. Information, bytes.

Bytes ate my face. On rides to work, on a bicycle, through the powerplant and the lumber yard mixing esters to produce acid. So the bank would excrete funds the corp I biked to belches into it, a corp years of days by bike away. Those bytes, turning to grains and grains to meals.

And meals to shit excreted like birth to day, each turd a child of data, facts and figures about biking through acid to clock in to work. I would imagine on the bike rides buying air particulate measurements. Maybe something i could plug into my phone.

Sousveil the air, bring visuals to neighbors for their thoughts alongside salves for those who stopped going on night walks, addresses of the companies and ways to buy bulk bus tickets and hole up in a civic center of a nearby city for a month to hold a strike on their (rural) town.

Little ways I pass the time in my head between places, stories I tell myself, connections, between points wenching me to what I find were I myself, were I the data pulling me to draw the line, every door the girl knocks on, receiving her salve, between stargazes.

I keep thinking, if I can just imagine myself as all the water of the world I could hug all my friends. I could paralax between mug empty and mug full, housed and unhoused, wings in songbird folding for that that flap before branch claims me like our waters met in rivers, and me.

Where I am now, without enough to hold myself. Grandmothering comment sections, dropping “blessed child”s, and “you art just like your mother”. Allowing that to be its truth, as much as wings hold my attention enough to hold me up. And I sit say I’m alright, pockfaced, alien.

Unrelatable, cherished, homed in waters, enough. They don’t call solar flares lapping waves, they don’t call cold hard cash consent, and they don’t call planets star ocean seafoam. They don’t call wires veins, they don’t call crows songbirds, and they don’t call acid based.

What’s left, what’s right, my back. What’s forward is day, burning sticks of bright. What collects on the tip of this finger as I sway it side to side and watch the trail pour time in from outside just an zember of that flame. Just what I keep. What lies my mother told me.

This half of all the neurons I connect in my life, this side of the womb, this side of birth, this end of silence, I am sitting with the entanglement there - the mass of what’s right here and where I trace connections made in the womb. As that creature and I commune, I stop.

A sustain –

Radiation pours back from eyes into pixels, and pixels into digits and digits into keys and keys into digitizers and digitizers into the tips of the nose on a cold day when it is too cold to take fingers out of gloves and in that moment, where a nose became a finger to claim a game, I grin.

This will always be the game where the one with the strongest soul was the person who unlocked their digital prosthetic with something other than the digits at the ends of their bodies. I don’t know if I should thank you for turning my nose into a finger, but I am happy, all the same.