>>1914111521525 (OP) #3

There’s a viral video out there with me in it. It was at school, and I was lurking in the background. Any more details would reveal me.

There are those who lurk and those who create. Sometimes we mature into creators or, by fate, fall back to lurking. Think about the word ‘lurk,’ the sound of ‘lurk.’ It leaves an iron taste in the mouth. It’s full of sneak and poise. We observe. We lurkers are the silent majority; we could fill stadiums in even the smallest virali­ties; our impressions become reality; we see from all sides, where everywhere is the center and the circumference is nowhere.

There’s a video of me out there. It floats and has me. Have you ever discovered your body on film? Mine apparently heats up. I lose capacity for anything except a vain, desperate fascination with my own image. There’s one’s agile self-concept that pirouettes within its head, yet turns to stone by another’s gaze. That’s the monkey’s paw of attention. It’s even worse if you see yourself when you aren’t supposed to, like spotting an animatronic in your likeness. There are only so many angles when examining from a mirror. Have you ever looked at the hidden lower rut of your jowl, the hollowed subcutaneous curves like the null of a spoon, asking to be trimmed by a knife? Have you ever seen the balance of your hair, but like straight from the back where it may split and relay the pink of your scalp? Many of you take selfies. What happens when the angle exceeds your visual repertoire? You’re shocked into deletion. You could make an argument that online is the first time we’ve had the freedom—the space and quantity—to fully develop as disembodied egos. We are glutted by feedback. The jel‐

lied bounds of self, the liquid digital, cultural markers having gooped us whole.

Case in point: you assume I’m a boy, but where is your proof? Could I have a reason for posturing? Would it have been more palatable to be a witchy thin snake fan-girl lesbian, is that more charming, identifiable, or unserious? IU implied that she didn’t do it for the money. I don’t believe her; if she said the opposite, I wouldn’t believe her then either. That is the game we play.

Lurking, you know, used to be a choice. The fractures between our worlds are accelerating.

I awoke consciously in a dream. Somewhere in the Midwest. Let’s call it Washington, though know that it may be a city, a dis­trict, a village, town, borough, an unincorporated community, a parish, a county, you get the idea. The rolling Midwest. The great big sleeping thing balanced just right of center. Some reflected heart’s image where most of the real unromantic American— what’s the opposite of a dream? takes place. I gather from online hearsay that there’s nothing much happening out here. Do we believe this? It seems to me that anywhere where there is human life, there is the infinite. Now, what really fulfills the constitution I don’t know. Surely commotion and cost, subways with rats, are not what grant life.

I remember at the start of that dream there were two large trees far ahead, and a powerline hung morose with a gothic sulk. The following anecdote may seem tangential, but what can I say? The order of my memories has flagged the dream with shrouded importance. I’m just as confused as you are. The sky was light enough, about an hour before dark, and the clouds were wide,

heavy, and distanced—not overcast, for there was structure to their bulk.

Flight can be a challenge even while lucid. There’s something uncertain about vertical ascension. You feel a cognitive flapping that’s slow-going and pressurized with time. The flight is tied to will, and your functional prowess and confidence fuel more than just direction. No two dreams bring with them the same control, rather, each attempt is new with only the memory of having once been capable of flight. I’m trying to say that it’s always a bit of a miracle when you’ve managed to climb and fall and climb again and against the inner wind of turbulence, up there above the powerlines, unclipped by the trees, with the scenery dragged to changing.

This specific brand of flights cropped up occasionally in my past. It was a thing I did before her, really a therapeutic form of acquiring bearings. Whenever my household moved, after we’d lived there for long enough to have driven around the neighboring streets, or when I missed an old place, inevitably the dreams would come. I’ve never encoded directions well while awake and cer­tainly not consciously. Back then I’d sit passenger in the car, meta­physically elsewhere with eyes tracing beyond the window. How much do we imbibe of the world even when we’re avoidant? I was destined to return at night (in rare gifts) to swoop across the dark­ness of local streets—I a ridiculous human with the stringed physics of a kite, unconfined mammalian hubris, still less suited than a bat. Some days I soared well. Others I’d go nowhere far and awake weary and self-hating.

Upon reflection, these flight dreams had stowed themselves with the arrival of IU, so this was like recalling a lost friend. I remember crossing late-summer grass, dusty green and torrid from drought. The ground crackled up from below, hell-wrought sorry earth, and this was a thing I couldn’t see yet still knew. The first great building was a barn met with sepia bleach around the walls, dust washing sore all verdure (think the sulfide-film warmth of preservation). There was a sort of fathomless affectation in the woodwork, or fathomless to me, a deep rich wrath-like maturity, an aged claim to the land about it which left me heavy with pre­tense, with my presumption, like the thing was both inhuman and alive and withered with dignity, and I was merely an itinerant in witness. This was a barn.

What are the odds that you know the video of those tornado sirens harmonizing in space? Google it; listen while you read, and goosebumps will overtake your flesh. The pleasing paresthesia of exultant frisson. That video is like angels calling for rapture.

The barn was bigger than it could’ve been, and I approached with marvel before it was gone. Flying past it revealed the sudden glory of setting skies, the lonely passing of spacetime. Graveyards and farmhouses, churches with points and stained-glass curves. Stone outcroppings cobbled as countless legions. Schools, high schools in the middle of nowhere, new and unused, elementaries flat and atavistic, teeter-totters and boxed metal slides that still shone with cold. Empty windows with open desks. Chairs and benches and dark hallways in the half-light. If it wasn’t clear yet: no people. Nowhere was there anyone. Trains following rivers and baseball fields. The brown diamond with rhomboid streaks and

nipple mound. Hillocks and hummocks and knolls to climb up and conquer and stare, or to sled in the winter. I passed things caught in long and slow transition. I was the first to see this world as it loaded, my mind’s procedural generation, everything unfa­miliar yet sub-archetypal. It was the type of truth that loses ground upon close examination, quantity capturing the forlorn quality of forgettance. Crisp stalwart evergreens and me looking. The words ‘ephemeral’ and ‘transience.’ Passing signposts with harsh caution-yellow and black scuffings. Dents and cracks and holes and so much space your eyes hurt, and maps are rendered out of use, ridiculous sublime. Then solar farms and wind tur­bines and animal farms now, horrors shrouded in tin, and rows of golden crops of wheat. Old buildings that barely stand and can no longer be identified. Water silos hanging in the sky like alien sacs. The sound of the wheat shimmering in the wind and visions of perennial harvest. Football fields and more parks, bleachers and pavilions respecting; those four poles holding a tent, an all-roof with cedar picnic tables and standing grills. The edgeless stretch of holes and curves, the sensuality of clean grass on a golf course. And homes. Hamlets circled at the end in culs-de-sac. How many sidewalks and mailboxes and street signs and road paint with bike lanes. Plastic sidings and outdoor patios and tree swings and free­grown cottage gardens.

Fleeting transcendental Midwest spatiality.

Memories of hot nights playing hide and seek behind the school on the shadowed blacktop. Time stopped. Hopping fences and kicking balls. Smelling the outline of cigarette smoke and tracing the rainbow iridescence of gasoline. Scary questing into

convenience stores for snack pouches of clear saran showing the impossible, that mouthwatering factory-smooth icing. Or the fin­ger-staining drip of popsicles. Gliding and seeing how the seasons change, the adolescence of autumn and the vague freedom of summer break. Asking questions that had no answers. The bleak becomings of reality, yet everything so wholly substantial.

Okay, I never said I hated my world. When you grow up, the places that once awed you become just places where the past hap­pened. Old games are like this. Pick up a copy of Pokémon and now it’s a thing to be speedrun, finished. There’s novelty, and we fall out of love, and then it’s history. You may think this mis­guided, but I’d rather be honest than complicit in moral lies. I wish I could change, only I don’t have the courage to oppose time’s ordinal flow.

It’s so hard to keep loving something. To everyday remember how to love something.

I wonder if I was looking for her down there, or her likeness hiding in the things that weren’t her. A figurative search and seizure, only I was going deep into myself where memories reign above actuality. We’re taught that childhood traumas are blocks that make us. How do I say—I didn’t exactly ask to fly around out there, though I found the trees humbling in their mass and age. These flights weren’t erotic. Nonetheless, there’s a sexual develop­ment in lack that I imagine you can recognize in my dream. If she’s not a mystery to me, I must not be seeing her clearly. So it had to do with her.

One could make a case that I was really after the gemmed glint of a peopled city, that I had to know what I was leaving, or with

IU, to find the equal opposite of all this tired space. These cultural forces may be coterminous. She is alive and exciting, adorned with hues, affects, passions, and the other stuff of life. However, there’s no opposite of a perfect thing, and getting older, I’m starting to accept that I need to have the need to surrender. Maybe that’s what I’m looking for.

I want you to understand, to feel, that all distance is illusion, and more importantly, that illusions are real. As real as anything.