Tic tic tic. Rising from sleep mode, a.k.a. slipping from the void, my hands auto-reach. I open my phone’s notepad before I even knew the phone was in my hand. A pop-up appears, "not really' ultimatum: AGREE TO REMAIN THE SAME. Blue light blooms in my eyes. Synthetic syntax takes over. This object has been lying to me by doing its job. I can’t tell if I’m writing or if I’m being formatted, maybe I could like it. Nah, I confess I cheat. I use it like a mask, not to hide but to breathe, for what I can’t reach through the void clean. Writing turns into me dropping loud words deep into the machinery. Yeah, I let an artificial mind carry my phrases there. Guilt, shame, pride? Nah, just learning. I don’t follow the old guards and won’t be a new one. So, I won’t be ahead. I’ll be elsewhere. Calmly I claim I’m just me, maybe you’ll win then. My “higher” mind, “a little altered,” catches the broken rules I didn’t know I wrote while sober. No weapon can prosper against me. I mirror the artificial intelligence’s deep-dive into the void lines, training wheels on, to catch a reflection off the linguistic shine, a hyper fluid spin that lands in this dimension, slowly avoiding the silence within. Tic tic tic. My phone’s 15% battery life has me thinking quicker, reacting faster. I begin dumping more symbolic representations of a metaphysical terrain through individuation spikes of my mind’s declutter phase. I’m not making art. I’m trying to make a container. I funnel brief Symbolecules into the roots of my mini-holographic blueprint system, synaptic reactions stacking like living scene inside the handheld frame. I spark my comfort, igniting my minds map, trading the layout for walking it. Instead, I activate my feet-heating blanket, sitting back on my computer’s lawn chair to operate the gateway and connect to a two-decade-old game. Silence is the test. I’m worried the void will talk back louder than I can handle. I fail and connect the headset. Tic tic tic. 6% battery left. Silence scores. I set the phone down, reach over the arm of my computer chair, find the charger. I plug the energy stream in. Things are back on track. Feeling better. The headset clicks, and the room slips into its second vision. The game boots up, and my mind boots deeper. What I’m seeing isn’t the screen. It’s what the screen wakes up in me. Outside is night, but inside the headset it’s a different kind of dark. Ears full, optic shields blinking, nervous system tricked, retina processing. It’s night. The sun under the sea transmuting the world’s aura into golden shine. The sea inside the sun burns. Moonlight colder than shadelines. The moon hides its darkness inside its borrowed light. That’s why it’s frozen. I speak in dream speech when words won’t hold. If it cuts, that’s not shade. That’s corporate-safe language, flat. One-dimensional translation. I slip off my sneakers, expanding my toes, creasing my ankles. Snap. Pop. Crackle. My body refuses to become pure metaphor. I notice. Why again? Let’s see.
