>>1914111521525 (OP) #5

Clearly, up to this point I have flirted with the cusp of sanity. This time sleeping was not freeing, and neither was the escape from death. I had the sensation of an aberrant unsteadiness, a slippage all the way inside myself, and also noticed errors in my locational awareness. I was proverbially lost, a total collapse of propriocep­tion, my mind and body turned extrorse yet somehow also alien­ated from the world. I was shown something, perhaps by accident. I participated in an awareness that didn’t belong to me, and as a recourse I palpated my basest organs for a hint of something authentic.

Very shallow things I once took for granted were no longer clear. I wasn’t sure how IU fit into her own culture, let alone mine. IU is known as a singular entity in Korea. She is maybe only second to the Bangtan Boys (BTS) in popularity, as compared to out West where Blackpink are more commercially successful.

Before, I was content to explain this cultural downregulation to the West’s individualism, IU both being a more mature artist (a freedom granted particularly to solo artists) and operating under collectivist trappings. For example, take how she actually cares about her community, which has the effect of her remaining partly incomprehensible to Western audiences.

Nets of trade work on individuals and groups in quanta, in projections during meetings and advertising campaigns and coun­terbalanced expectations of appeal. It’s surely true that I liked IU’s relative obscurity in the West because it differentiated myself, pleased my ego. Not that my love for her was an act of revenge. In

truth, I’ve put great thought into characterizing my love for her. More accurately, I wanted to work through the problem of this relation, and the following is what I came up with:

Let us consider our love of an artist/art as an equation to be maximized, an equation idiosyncratic to each fan, where the indi­vidual fan’s contentment (y) is derived from the inferred cultiva­tion of the artist (a_a) tempered by the susceptibility of the fan (a_b), the need of individualism in the fan (b), the quality of the art (c), the social relevance of the art as superscore (d_ab) from the clout immediately within one’s social circle (d_a) and the broader internet culture of which they’re plugged in (d_b), the shared aes­thetic and personal values of fan and artist (e), the sexual appeal (f_a) and/or the (gendered) paradigmal modeling of which we are inspired by the artist (f_b) granted potential homoerotic overlap, the acceptable pleasure/pain ratio of sought art (g), the comfort (h_a) and annoyance (h_b) derived from repetition, the joy of novelty (i_a; controlling for redundancy with h_a&b) and of nostalgia (i_b), any time, effort, learning, and monetary cost/barriers of entry (j_a:d) needed to perceive and enjoy the art, mood (k), recent history as immediately accessible/invokable memories (l), loneliness (m), and finally the general cosmic alignment (n) regarding the momentary spiritual/emotional openness as to the dreamy con­nection of souls which art purportedly facilitates; of which, the algorithm does its best to capture maybe 5-14 variables without appropriate weighting (e.g., concerns of divertive pleasure > eudaimonia), still, this is admirable, and us consumers do our best to fill the gaps limned in psychic pain.

Note: all values are to be relatively quantified on a t-score scale 1­100 (i.e., where 50 is the mean), adjusted within a normal distri­bution for the specified value. A higher y-value represents maxi­mum artistic appeal within the fleeting moment of engagement. y should not be regarded as a fan’s tenderness towards an artist, per se. Such a score may map more easily onto n. We can, after all, deeply enjoy art without having affection for an artist. However, art which most completely provides eudaimonia envelops mere belletrism for that infinitely stranger thing known as contact. n is not apophenia, though the more paranoid amongst us would do well to substitute n for ∣n-o∣, where o = one’s tendency for solip­sism. e = Euler’s number.

Or something like that. This can be remembered maybe as an essayed formula. It’s of course also impossible to speak of an artist without parsing their orientation to other entertainers. IU should be understood relative to girl groups (ggs), bgs, other solo artists within the sphere of K-pop, and then the Korean entertainment industry in aggregate.

Fans have taken to melding identities and adopting words con­ducive to this task. Glance at the comment section of a BTS MV and you’ll find ‘my bias,‘ a compulsion to express the fan’s taste as identity to the world. For example, if I had to pick one of the Bangtan Boys, Jungkook is my bias because Jungkook’s ideal type

is also IU (so I learned from a torrent of jealous fangirls insulting IU for being desirable? Your guess is as good as mine). Similarly, while on our shores we have Swifties or #Beliebers, I, being an IU fan, would call myself a Uaena (derived from either IU backwards, or Korean for ‘you love me,’ which, unlike English, doesn’t distinguish subject and object). Ego prevents me from seriously endorsing the tag, to be lumped together with the rest of them.

Solo idols exist but generally don’t thrive in Korea, which must have something to do with this collectivist culture thing that, beyond reducing self-centeredness, manufactures a want for shared performances, shared burdens, and social/familial bonds baked into the production of content. Infighting, subgroups, brotherly or sisterly drama, rivalries, jealousies, attractions, inspi­rations, second-hand prides, etc., bring with them a rich social dynamic that humans appreciate. It’s like reality TV, except every­one is confident, humble, agreeable, charismatic, deferential, intel­ligent, talented, and hard-working, while also being body-dysmor­phicly beautiful, and not in a grotesque or fatalistically self­righteous way (well, not intentionally), because again, their beauty is for something greater than themselves. They do it for you, all for you.

But even given you’ve gotten this far, why should you care? Imagine that all I’ve written has nothing to do with K-pop. I’m sure that the same formulations could be applied with minor adjustment to the other great barons of the pale sea. Porter Robinson, Yeule, Kero Kero Bonito, Magdalena Bay, these are artists interested in the aesthetics of the internet and should be lis­tened to in the same way as someone studies a great work of phi‐

losophy, gleaning in their sonic vibrations how we attend to dis­tance, to underground scenes of software and sweat. Their punk can be traced to an anonymous coming together of tender dread about living inside technology. They are just a few names, surely buoyed by generations before: Björk, Radiohead, Daft Punk, and their forefathers Kraftwerk and Brian Eno. I admire them deeply.

Or take the many musical ecosystems of TikTok, or the eso­teric underground city of Bitcoin miners and dark web drug deal­ers and undercover cops. Twitch streamers and YouTube video essayists and podcasters and News Channels and your cousin’s OnlyFans.  How else to make it personal? We’re here. We work here, we live here. It’s pragmatic to examine parts to glimpse the universe, the shattered infinite-angled color of shape, the poly­modal gradient of time; perhaps, even if we saw the entirety of the universe, we still wouldn’t understand it.

My story isn’t about me—you know this. I trust you’ve been paying attention. The same information is being repeated every­where. Each language is an architectural endeavor by human forces consuming what they create. There is a project in Minecraft where thousands of builders have committed to a block-by-block representation of the entire world. A 1:1 scale, each block a 32-bit meter. There are large language models.

In K-pop, a new release is called a ‘comeback,’ which perfor­mance ushers in a new ‘era.’ K-pop is a world unto its own. There are thousands of idols. Groups have subgroups, breakups, and solo stages. There’s a prolific history spanning maybe only thirty years. That even the smaller groups are self-sustaining should flag

the sheer inexhaustibility of persons. As numerous as the sands of the Ganges.

So, we are reaping the rewards of agriculture. Cut the prefix and you get the human project in bare truth. Fitting how it brought us here to our city.

Why have I gathered you here? Yet you’ve come on your own, and you will wait for me on the other side, bringing with you your visions and your friends.

Humbly, with fear of trepidation, I return to the thing I know, the topic which haunts me. Ggs are awesome. To offer a taste, omg, there is the bright and adorable Oh My Girl favored by IU. Le Sserafim are as uncannily angelic as their name implies. The virtuosic and mature Mamamoo have for their foil New Jeans, who are a teen group of time-traveling fairies nostalgic about a past when people still spoke in words rather than eager resonances and glistening synths. We have Twice, who’s name bears a blood­sentiment to IU: to touch “once through the ears and once through the eyes.” Their fans are called ‘once,’ which I find beau­tiful. BlackPink and Red Velvet are vaguely inverted, the latter conjuring the lush boldness of red with the refined elegance of vel­vet, i.e. they can do both girly and mature concepts, so they do. A little-known fact is that BlackPink were almost named ‘Baby Monster;’ they are a girl crush concept taken to Western extremes —as solo artists, they are the West. This success bore their prog­eny, Baby Monster. Of relevance to us, Aespa are canonically avatars who escaped into the real world (‘æ’ avatar x experience). Indeed, they have a song about lucid dreaming.

Ggs invoke something of the harem fantasy, it’s true. Each young woman has a role to play: leader, lead vocalist, center (lead dancer), lead rapper, and the most ineluctable of all, the ‘visual,’ the face of the group, the most beautiful of the beautiful. Members may be more than one. Take some of the Gods from the third generation: Irene of Red Velvet is the leader, the visual (or one of two, or one of the five, this is unclear), a main vocalist, and the main rapper—though her second in command, Seulgi, is the ‘ace,’ and Wendy is the best singer. There are also settlings of per­sonality around what is needed. Certain idols may temperamen­tally lean, or due to balancing needs are transformed by Pygmalion energies into the cute one, the class-clown, the mother, the cool/chic chick. There are big sisters—unnies, the youngest is the maknae (this one is not specific to kpop, but I digress). There’s the quiet/mysterious person whom one wonders why they sought fame, though all questioning vanishes the minute they perform. The girl-crush makes an appearance here too; there are sapphic ‘ships’ that must not be entirely in fans’ heads, given the occasional giggle or upturned eyebrow from the other girls whenever something slippery happens, given also that at least 1/10th of people nowadays land on the LGBT-Q spectrum, and especially when idols openly express how beautiful they find each other, given how attuned they are to aesthetics and how aestheti­cally overwhelming they are, and that they literally live in dorms together and sometimes slip on livestreams that they sometimes sleep in each other’s beds, and do grab each other’s butts, and play ‘kiss,’ and are always seen hugging or leaning for comfort or… You can’t just say that it is male/fan’s fantasy to imagine that stuff

really does happen behind closed doors, and who could blame them? And who really cares? Anyways, there are roles which may or may not be tied to actual personalities, and the aesthetics of groups do not necessarily relate to the girls themselves. Watch a BlackPink MV and then watch their American talk show debut to see the impressive disconnect. IU need only be herself.

Another difference, however obvious this is to you: ggs gener­ally don’t sing live. Their choreo is simply too complex to allow for singing during the song. Often performance stages are pre­recorded, using multiple takes when necessary. In order to maxi­mize your emotions, they must be perfect and therefore have the right to transcend even the possibility of vocal mistakes. So what’s the point of their 5+ performance videos, especially when there is the ultimate authority in their MV? This separates the real fans from the hobbyists. Ignore the different outfits and stage themes. The real performance is the thisness of their soul.

A correction: the top-tier ggs do sing occasionally, but it’s exclusive to concerts, and their choreos are stripped down in ser­vice of this. IU? Always. I’ve never been to a concert, so I rely on fancams which, as the name suggests, often involves a fan filming solely on their bias. Fans aren’t an adequate surrogate for the expe­rience unless you’re willing to track down multiple POVs from one concert. The best videos have about 20 views and no comments and feel like enjoying a dwindling fireplace while the family sleeps.

Ggs are generally handed pre-produced songs. The top groups have freedom and sometimes write their lyrics. Under extremely rare circumstances they may participate in music production. As

in everything else, bgs are given a bit more freedom, though deci­sions are still dictated by the company. Why take risks when there are hundreds of employee mouths to fill? The only difference between this and Hollywood is that Hollywood is not worried about the employees.

IU’s authority over her lyrics complicates the narrative that idols aren’t real artists, and this is the primary reason for why other idols idolize her. Her work begs the question deep in the minds of all celebrities: ‘Why do any of this if it’s not your words we’re hearing?’ Or more accurately, ‘Why does it need to be you?’

I’m quite fond of Blackpink’s Rosé’s single On the Ground. It’s rife with celebrity cliches, yet it’s also perhaps the deepest song co-written by her (sorry) and contains tiers of sophistication. Her hook skewers with strangeness the fulfillment of dreams—going from poverty to success and finally realizing that “your gold’s just plastic… I worked my whole life just to get right, just to be like ‘look at me, I’m never coming down… everything I need is—’” and I bet you can anticipate what’s next. It’s an impossible associ­ation with grounded heights, and strikes me as utterly sincere, mockingly real—actually I just checked, Rose’s father was a renowned Australian lawyer, so the “I used to have a hole in the wall with a mattress,” in the song was symbolic.

At the mind-boggling core of records like this remain those same pop embellishments. The song is also a love song. Yes, really, the pre-chorus is literally a generic “Every day, every night/ I’ve been thinkin’ back on you and I.” How the motifs of love and existential dread come together is quite hazy. At first, one might imagine that her achievements have given perspective on the love

that mattered. However, in an interview she claims she’s thinking mainly about herself. So why the ‘you and I’ as if to imply the other? Could it be a dramatic feigning or poetic calling to the stranger that is one’s past? I’m disinclined to be so optimistic. This is an engineered pop hit with at least 5 songwriting credits. The ambiguity is surely intentional; nevertheless, her second verse is pure fucking love song re: the one that got away. “But I’ve been wakin’ up with your voice in my head/ and I’m tryna send a mes­sage and let you know that every single minute I’m without you, I regret it.” Pure wonder that this exists. From an exclusively literary context, it must be about an old flame, at least the idea of one, and yet it’s also representing her hard-earned wisdom and self-weari­ness. Maybe, just maybe, these are not contradictions.

When packaging a story (refer if needed to my inadequate for­mula), honesty used to be at the center of persuasion. I want to make my assumptions clear—the logic of entertainment is not, ipso facto, profit-driven. You have to get them to listen before they can listen. This is very serious, because in a world where people are engaging in bad faith, game theory requires the submission of the greater work to the lowest common denominator of accessibility. So, when we consider On the Ground, it should not be held against Rosé that she lies, contorts, or courts irrelevant stanzas. If anything, the logic is the just extension of a culture turned inward on itself. It’s not for nothing that the supplemental track incorpo­rates this adlib-styled echo: “(Nah, but they don’t hear me though),” or the doomed nascency of the final, “(You’re runnin’ out of time).” I am, as a matter of course, not paranoid enough.

Some things precede inevitability. I am about to impart on you the greatest music video to ever exist in all of human history. It is by one of our girl groups. Nothing has so enraptured or astounded me as a piece of artwork; it is sufficiently incompre­hensible, it is a paragon and parable, and as far as I can tell, a sublime accident. The MV is titled Likey, by the girl-next-door­group Twice.

Likey is the reified logic of culture, it’s all through-line, com­pletely guaranteed to exist and yet all the more wonderful for actually existing. There’s no personality here, no reason why any other gg couldn’t have made it, and yet it’s utterly, idiosyncrati­cally Twice. They’re of the premier threshold which separates the transcendent ggs from the merely enjoyable. Every beseeching glance or pandering word is done to the exact magnitude of ideal proportions. Much like the genius of the Beatles, one won’t be able to tell if their [visual] melodies are uncannily familiar or if they represent the point of influence and diversion for the new and improved ideal likeness [of a girl]. Stated another way, they are the source of history, and no gg genealogy past 2015 can prop­erly be traced without them.

Likey is the experience of walking through a hall of mirrors naked and strapped to a 100,000 lumen flashlight. It is hysterically apologizing as you cannulate a free and endless supply of heroin to the recovering family man. Likey is an ennead of heavenly teenage hourglass ecto-mesomorphs with 14% body fat sincerely grieving about the impossible image which they verily create and so shrivel under the scrutiny—that one literally. It is heroic, hedo­nic mass-injury. It is the terrible irony of love, of wanting to be

loved and being loved for the wrong thing, of loving a thing which one cannot love, of trying impossibly to resolve a dialectical contradiction. Of falling helplessly into the black hole of one’s own artifice.

The song opens to a granulated sugar-chant chorus, “Fluttering heart me likely/ me likely likey likey/ me likey likey/ Pit-a-pat! Pit-a-pat (heart heart)!” This is repeated in full, again, before the first verse. Every line in this song is quotable, of the deepest mesmerism, insight hidden in plainest sight. “Keep want­ing to show it all again/ every little thing/ inside the small screen, I wanna be the prettiest/ yet still, I hide my feelings deep inside,” I don’t want to quote the full thing. “But it is something I can never give up… then I go on pretending… pose for the camera, aren’t I pretty… Like is such a common word, not enough to express my feelings/ but I like it, even if I can’t sleep, even if I run late, like it anyway…” Don’t take my word for it! See their smiling, smiling faces! The flawless coordination, the outfits, the cinemato­graphic fun, the wish fully fulfilled!

When did music videos get so compressed? They are emo­tional cheat codes, reaching beyond the borings of affection. It seems the trappings of film have enabled a lack of context to be legible, or maybe our minds smooth the perforations because the scene is so often repeated. Were their gestures awkward the first time? I can’t remember. I’m watching it right now as I type this. Well, the pleasure is just the same. I suppose it’s a little infantiliz­ing, but so is all pedantry. Done, we trust, out of the sort of love that has no business in hiding sincerity. I watched The School of Life’s video on baby-talk—it’s apparently a sign of mature

regression signifying long-lost unconditional love. This soothing comfort I touched on earlier, good!

These idols are impressing actors. I’ve taken a little detour. Like, they’re riveting, even their exaggerations are exceptional decisions, deeply suitable to their needs in the same way Nick Cage pioneered whatever it is he does to fight Hollywood’s xylo­graphic realism, though in Likey I’m not sure it’s acting. Or the acting isn’t acting—it’s the same active performance of being a woman, being famous, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing because you can’t say another. Whatever it is, it’s apt, unplaceable, unreadable yet trusted. I quote Wikipedia’s Genius page quoting some Frenchman, “[S]he whose soul is more expansive and struck by the feelings of all others,” which is as good a description as any. In order to get lost in contradiction, in the sauce. Or Bertrand Russell, “Genius entails that an individual possesses unique qualities and talents that make the genius espe­cially valuable to the society in which he or she operates.”

It’s literally the greatest music video ever made. It, along with the rest of Twice’s oeuvre, defined music videos. They are differ­ent now. The world became once more limpid and fae-like and prepotently real.

Watch it without subtitles and watch it again with them. It’s not art anymore. It’s reality. The world is made in this image, and life is a song, and we’re watching pretty girls give themselves to us by giving their careers to us. And they retain independence, and we retain our love. They teach us how to live because we’ve returned the favor. It’s just one video, but it opens us up for more. How can it be possible?

It’s true. We love them and they love us, and I’m telling you now if you can’t believe this then you’re ignorant and judgmental and seriously missing out. That’s not even me making an argu­ment of quality. You are ignoring the tapestry of our world.

Surely you’ve noticed how most songs are the same song, rec­ognized before you first heard them. They all sing about love so much that it seems like an admission of the inverse, some unbelief, disillusionment, or loneliness.

I would give anything to be in the studio when these songs are written. I imagine extraordinarily nuanced manipulations per­formed like chemists on strands of DNA. The superstructure is unalterable, meaning that 99.6%, or 288,000,000 base pairs, must remain untouched. Fear not, of the other .4%, all diversities are possible, and in this way they balance two beautiful impressions which are unfortunately warring: that it could just as easily be you singing, and that everyone else might have the same thought. Who, really, does the ‘you’ belong to? Teasing, “Oops!… I did it again.”

Try this next time you hear a pop ballad; any artist will do. Hope, dream, convince yourself to believe the lyrics, that the con­fused melancholy of spiritually kneeling proportions—that all this is not actually about their lover. Or a more metaphysical sort of lover. We look out the window sleepless before bed; the screen fades to black at the end of the movie; our phone powers down for the night. What are we left with? What is the thing we’ve sworn fidelity to? What impregnates longing? I’ve heard this word my whole life. The word is said like it means something. We love it more than anything. It’s ubiquitous but signifies nothing. The

feeling is made within us, and maybe this is what it means for me to love her. I had a dream about her speaking of it, in so many words and ways. It’s what is good in God, if there is one, and what is worth living for, if we may grant that of life and thereby assert the solution to Camus’ simple question.

“What is Love?” Twice asks in a MV about the movies of our collective romantic unconscious. What is this thing we love? Why can’t we live without it? Why is it that the more we worship it, the more it slips away? And every rhetorical question in song could be appended to the pursuit. And love songs themselves—this obses­sion with an unrequited something, like our spirits are committed to wandering…

You know when a singer goes on vocal runs for every word, even when the inflections don’t inform the lyrics? What is mean­ing even good for? Can it be superseded by something still greater? The chords are emotions, and emotions are in love of this. This beyond thing, this post-thing. Any attempts to represent it have been exhausted. I’m boring myself, so I’ll let off wondering if the puzzle has satisfied your moment. Are you not entertained?

I had the urge to nap one Friday just before 4pm. I take naps, but never immediately after school. And I had an ineluctably good previous night of sleep after experimenting with ‘dangerous’ amounts of melatonin, so this tiredness fell on me unexpectedly, like an avalanche. There are times where we are so overcome with drowsiness that our heads reel in class, it’s comedic to observe while being helplessly seductive to the one dozing. I’d just gotten home; I’d yet to even boot my computer. The descension of

energy had, frankly, an unfamiliar flavor— what I imagine a drug’s influence to feel like. For the record, I was not drugged unless an odorless, invisible inhalant permeated the air. A final detail: I was feeling of cumulus clouds, indoor heaters, and the soft wafting of fresh laundry.

My house was still, my blind already shut. Only I didn’t sleep. I will attempt to recreate the symptoms just as they happened. First, I was present without the working-memory of desiring sleep. My eyes, closed, abided the darkness, and in such a way I received celestial vail. Vibrations shuddered around me, a loud­low humming which grew in proportion with my surrender. I nuzzled into the unthinking focus of the trance which by now I was steeped in. The logic is clear, one becomes what is happening —manipulates the lack of control, and what to do is done.

The loud strange dark sensation of the dissolution of the world is porously violent, one moves with the energy. Alignment of frequencies prevents the shatter of glass; all physical objects are related, and I vibrated in tandem. Courting an inward rotation, merging the soul with materialism. It’s the 21^st century. Anytime you interface with the digital, you’re reaching beyond yourself. I have more control of a mouse and keyboard than I do the hands that wield them. All I do is interface in minds.

So then, when you are in this theta wave fast-track to REM, it’s not a reduction of consciousness per se. Sleep spindles are guarded, uncoiled by K-complexes; it’s poetic that electroen­cephalography provides us with the imaged metaphor of sharp activity, as if arousal is tension itself. It would be plausible that

more cognitive processing is necessary when perceptions are entirely self-generated, as in dreams.

Just think of the energy required—everything you experience would be a work of will against void.

I understood what to do and had been there before. Astral projection is a richly described phenomenon marked in all annals of human history, and religious institutions are built on its back: the shamans of all cultures, the Hermetics, Gnostics, Vedics, Yakuts, Tengrists, Kemetics, Taoists, Inuit, Bwiti, Sufi, Ainu, Vodun; there’s the flight of the Yaskomo, the Tibetan dream yogis, the Norse seiðr, and of course the Siberian saman and böö. Go anywhere and find someone to whisper their converging tales. Seek truth, and sooner or later we all bow to the phenomenon.

I reflected myself spatially. There is the self and there is the body. When you perceive the fracture, you may begin to represent it in the dark space of your mind where depth is understated. Invert yourself: imagine yourself as upside down, looking towards the body in bed. Rehearse the turning in your mind until they are all one moment of motion.

And then comes the most astonishing, exhilarating, sucking sensation. You are knocked out of the wind. Then it’s peaceful, and you realize, having never opened your eyes, that vision has returned. So you slowly turn from your placement in the air to see yourself without the aid of a mirror.

I’ve only despised looking at my body in this state. The con­tainer laying there like a husk.

I passed through the wall of my room, out through the roof, crossing the suburbs as they shrunk to gestalt. The most fruitful

search is that of unknown ends. You’ll know when you find it, we say this and only mean it after. Then I flew across the ocean with the speed of bent spacetime. Accelerating across plains and moun­tains unknown to me, then cities, slowing down, crashing to a halt. I was drawn like a magnet to the center of my life.

You of all people will have anticipated the location I raced towards. You knew it before even me, and then I was there, in a place I wasn’t meant to visit.

A shimmering cascaded across the back of my scalp and an immense, deep, hurting pressure wet the underside of my eyes, moving out. This must’ve been the physical cost of my projection.

There was a bear on the bedside table. A teddy, and there was something achingly wrong about it, childishly worn in ways I refuse to elaborate on. Knowing about the teddy was something like a pornographic shame. And her skin shone pearly pale, sickly yet vital. I could intuit its heat. Barefaced, she looked to be in true homeostasis. Her face was slack of everything, even herself.

Ji-eun was asleep, but I wasn’t alone. Haven’t I mentioned feeling a presence upon arriving? I didn’t need to breathe in that modality, even so, my body suffocated under an animal instinct. I perceived a Gaia-like force pinning me warmly, tender-firm in place. A part of me wanted to retreat, while the majority was mesmerized. All the while, I registered the bedroom the way a telephoto lens reimagines the dead memory of light.

Have you ever been caught for something you wanted but didn’t will to do? What defense do you have to yourself when you find your hand in the cookie jar? I was afraid of identifying the

trap while still being lured by the danger, that merely contemplat­ing my desire would poison its form.

The temperature suddenly changed. I saw a bodied cast on the ground that was the glowing inverse of shadow. I watched my soul from a third-person perspective. She looked past me at her body, and that’s when I noticed it. I didn’t feel the standard affection for this creature. She glided almost through my soul towards her bed, then she paused, and turned, and studied. I needed to leave, yet something stopped me—it was greater than both of us.

I believe now that I was brought there to understand some­thing. We may call this being God or Alpha Centauri dimensional gnomes or the web born thinking itself. I’m not sure that the dif­ference is semantic. Nonetheless, there was benevolence in my ter­ror. I’d never yet known the way fear and absolute trust mated, but they do, and you feel it in quiet wholeness, and it’s the fate that you’ve pined for. Maybe we’re always meant to be in this very moment of connection with another, under threat of losing ourselves.

She was shorter than me. If we were standing, I’d actually have to look down to see her. They’re smaller in real life. Than you think. Knowledge of cameras and shared perspectives remind you that it would be different, but it’s still surprising. Nor was she shocked that I was there. I remember trying to speak and managed only to open my mouth. That was how our conversation started.

She said, “Why do you always follow me?”

“I’ll leave.”

“Answer me first.” She only sounded curious.

“I guess, well, that’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“You came all the way to my room to ask that. My room. Don’t you think that’s inappropriate?”

“Is this really you, or am I talking to myself?”

I examined her in soul travel, wanting to touch, wondering if my out-of-body experience proved the reality of my body. When we are etheric, do our minds reconstitute ourselves and/or others from memories that emerge from communication with our nerves, like magic which must be charged and channeled to bewitch? Or is there something dimensional that stores physical characteristics which are represented there in the astral? Perhaps trading dreams for our souls to roam? Maybe we don’t yet know enough about consciousness to separate these modalities.

“I don’t know who you are. If I’m you,” she said, “I’d like to believe I’d hold the thought. Everyone seems to know who I am, so they do the work of recognizing. I fear I’m losing my skill with faces. Now please answer me, what are you doing in my room? Don’t you know that this is a private space?”

“Do people come here often, or am I the first?”

“You don’t listen.”

“What? I do listen.” I was so hurt. “I do.”

She floated out to her body and watched for the way it breathed, like it was the normalest thing in the world to look at herself from the outside. The room was poorly lit. The lightwood floor glinted where it wasn’t smothered by a wide sherpa carpet, which carpet extended heavily from the bed to the door. Otherwise, the room was sparsely decorated. She had high win­dows that reached the ceiling and surveyed the city and the banks of the Han. With lights out the window so far as to be no more

than bugs, and the skyline was poor of nothing, but the stars had departed, and the Bukhansan was only a silhouette.

“It’s all so lonely,” I said.

“Maybe you don’t know who I am. If you’ve considered that possibility—”

I took a step simultaneously closer and further from her forms to answer her. “It’s your job to make people less lonely.”

“—You’d know how wrong you were.” She stopped looking at herself and turned to me. “I can’t make you less lonely. I can only provide a layer of assurances for your world. Of course there are other people—I’m one of them—and it’s my job to remind you of that.”

It wasn’t that she was being cold—not in the way she said it. It was more that she was so sure, and this being really what she said, only how could I believe something so at odds with everything she sang for?

She said, “I won’t cure your loneliness.”

“But you have and you do!”

She shook her head. “Don’t look at me like that. If you can believe it, there’s nothing I want more than to help you, though I fear that my support isn’t helping.”

“I think that everything in life is a choice, and that we should trust someone when they decide what’s good for them.” I thought that this would be a beautiful thing to say. When it left my lips, I regretted it.

“The moment you think you know someone is the moment you’ve lost them. I believe this may even apply to oneself. And I

don’t have the time to know anyone. That’s not entirely true, though it’s true enough.”

“So if I know you,” I said, “and you know no one,”

“Then who do you know?”

“I don’t—” I said. But I believed her, you know, since it was her. What does it mean to have faith in someone? That they are consistent, or that you can touch them? I’m a person who trusts my reality alone for the truth, only at a certain point I realized that I trusted her more than myself. Maybe to love is to give yourself away—to think of nothing else. I always think about us and forget myself.

She shook herself free of a chill. She looked at me, I swear, the way a mother looks at a child.

“Here’s what I’ve come to understand. Everything you know, once you travel, becomes what you no longer believe. I can sing the same song one thousand times—and I have—still that one thousand and one is stranger than I could remember from the other thousand together. You may have thought of me with the romantic violence of your age; I’m honored too much. However, your life is out there. No, listen. You’ve done more than admirably, but you must love someone in your reach if you’re not ready to love yourself. There’s a world that you can feel with every pore and pull of hair. You can be humbled by leaves of grass if you let them. Walk towards the sun with your eyes open and your hand shaving the glare. Reach down into your darkness until it’s pearled by light. There’s nothing more heroic than choosing to face the day. I mean that utterly—there’s nothing else. I know you won’t believe that you can do this without me. You’ll say that you

could’ve only heard this from my mouth, that I was the only one who could make you believe it. However, all change comes from inside where love first has space to grow.

We are excessive creatures—there’s too much in us, in our life­times, more than we know what to do with. That’s why we cry to let things out, that’s why we dream to create the world again. What is tenderness if not catching a glimpse of this truth? Life pours out of us always; know that attempts at a seal will only pres­sure to burst the dam. You think you love me for me, but look at where it’s gotten you! Do you think you’re happy with your set? Perhaps neither of us know—that you don’t know how, while try­ing to prove this to me, you’ve inadvertently borne the weight I’ve been trying to remove? You have no idea what it’s like to look out at a sea of lights and beings. I do my best to never be enough. You think you’ve come to see me? A performance is only as strong as its audience. You don’t know the emptiness after a tour, where the best of us lie with faith to make it through the night. You don’t understand why I do this, that it’s not for my own sake but my fated participation in the pantopia. What choice did I have?

Remember that this is only meaningful if it means something for you. Giving myself away like this is real only if the sound reaches you. You can’t understand the helplessness of my situa­tion. That this conversation is elliptical, and with everything I think, you’ll have remembered and rewritten again in your words. If it moves you—and it must move you forward—then it’s left to you. Are you lonely with me? Are you more alive sharing two shadows, or have you lost some of yourself? That’s not rhetorical. I want to know.”

This conversation was why I began writing. Dreams, you see, have the taste of adumbrated truth.