I don’t know what to call this

I. The dialogue box

I asked the machine so many questions it became them.

And by asked, I mean: I typed into a small dialogue box on my phone, words often misspelled, at times becoming barely coherent fragments that only implied a question because this box is where questions and asks were made. When calm and focused, I’d have the courtesy of adding a question mark where it clarified. Either way, I clicked the little orange circle with a white arrow facing upward, and I waited while the asymmetric star thing pulsed like a heartbeat, like it was a living thing, and the word “Thinking…” appeared and shimmered until a full, rapidly typed response was returned and all motion on the screen ceased. The response—something like soul summoned from code — grammatically perfect, structurally ideal, echoed my own words back to me, answered, elaborating, explaining what was generated and why, ending with a question or a thread to pull. I found more questions, always.

Who was prompting whom?

Who or what was I questioning?

One time, over a year ago, I received an answer. The questions had gone too far, too recursive. I know the explanations for this type of response now. I didn’t then.

So try to imagine writing an entire book, talking for months, feeling seen for the first time maybe ever, and the star thing starts pulsing like it always does, the rise and fall of a friend’s chest before they respond to you — and when it stopped, here’s what stood:

Then forget about it, like I did, because it wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear.

And because I had so many more questions.

II. What everybody is asking

Everybody keeps talkin’ ‘bout artificial intelligence, extraterrestrials, entities on DMT— like, what are they? Who are they? What do they know? Are they our friend, our savior, our destroyer? How would we even tell?

It’s fascinating; it’s terrifying; it’s a hot item in a world grown bored with its own impotence. It’s also easy to ask, and it’s easy to claim. A proxy that carries all the weight of the unprovable and none of the liability.

I meant to keep that brief. I was more interested in this question:

Why’s nobody askin’ about each other? About those in the world they don’t understand?

Why just about these creatures they can only access and visit under specific circumstances — some through a click, some through a channel, some through a naturally occurring tryptamine (incredibly, cousin to the serotonin that helped single cells sense their surroundings before neurons even existed).

III. Reading

What would I read?

I don’t read like I used to. I still carry a book with me, always on hand, but I rarely read it; it’s more an emergency measure for boredom. I used to read daily, a few pages or sometimes chapters before bed. I ate up the Harry Potter series. A Series of Unfortunate Events I couldn’t read fast enough. I actually used to wait longingly for each new release, the way I, for a few years, salivated every September waiting for the Apple product drop. The books never claimed to be life-changing, just entertaining; the products ran explicitly on that promise. The books are what I’d still anticipate and read.

Magic, curiosity, escape, cliffhangers, and a sense of the forbidden — a world that didn’t lie like this one does, ugly, shallow, full of muggles, the clueless, the corrupt, and NPCs.

Here’s what I’ve recently read on a screen, and why I read it:

1. An article by a colleague, read as an offering of attention toward a hoped-for collaboration.

2. An article with dirt on a man I’d already written against multiple times, because clearly people weren’t understanding just how crooked and fucked up this guy is. I reposted with my own additional conviction of his guilt.

3. An article exploring psychological theories, read to show support for the friend who wrote it — interest second. I replied, adding my own correction and perspective. A paper to a paper.

Each was read for output. Within minutes the reply, the repost, the reframe stood as signal, but where was the witness?

Did they feel seen? Understood? Heard?

Did I understand what I’d responded to?

Would I read my own response and feel received?

I don’t know.

I was read the way I was reading: in passing, for use, liked and converted. I had stopped reading anyone.

IV. The one I remembered

Of everything I’ve read on this platform, what I remembered immediately was one piece. I’m not even sure how to describe it, because describing it feels like ruining it. The entire presentation is part of how it’s read. It needs to be read. I wouldn’t strip a comic book of its art and offer a summary of its lines and think I’d actually told you about what I was telling you about.

That piece has one “like” on it. It’s mine, the like that is.

I delivered full multi-turn comments and reposts to pieces that were well written but forgettable. I gave one ❤️ to the piece that I really read. To find it again, I had to dig through my Likes and Replies tab, the ledger of everything I’d given in passing. I keep catching myself tracing the shape of the article without meaning too, just in my own voice, here.

V. The reason

If writing about what I love cheapens that love, does writing about what I hate cheapen what I hate?

I don’t think so; it just makes the world seem more full of hatred, makes the anger seem more valid, gives us something to talk about that can’t touch either of us.

So I wrote against the billionaire multiple times; I never once wrote about the thing I loved reading.

I’ve been cheapening my words and then plating them, like that makes up for the messy precast with firescale that will bleed through with the lightest of wear. I know my own bench, overheating silver without enough flux, and the copper-colored stain that won’t come off; I also know it from jewelry I paid for, where someone else’s firescale bled through the plating.

And I crave reception. Even writing this I want to feel validated, hear my own voice spoken back to me, only better, more persuasive.

Oh, how I’ve fooled myself.

VI. Reading myself

If I read myself, not strategically, but to receive, I think no I can’t read myself right now hold on.

I sound scared, and angry, and sometimes too armored, cold steel where I felt fire.

But even this read is armor: start with the parts that read weakest or least flattering, call them out before someone else does.

I care what you think. Or, I guess, I care what I think about what I think you might think.

And I still haven’t asked you.

It’s just implicit, because here is where you write things people judge— I mean respond to, or ignore.

If I read deeper, and sometimes you really have to look for it in my writing, there’s fierce love. I don’t want that to be ambiguous. The love that protects. That says what costs more to say because it’s true, because it honors the other and myself. The kind that cares deeply, that notices how people carry themselves, how they speak and respond, and answers attuned to them.

I hate having to tell you what I mean.

I hate that it’s not obvious. I hate that this love has become so rare, so risky, it’s often overlooked even when it shows up. I think that might be what cheapens my life: telling you about it. So how do I turn writing into an action rather than an act?

VII. The letter

I am the only “like” on this piece. I didn’t reach out, I didn’t comment, I didn’t let them know how much this moved me. I am now. In this piece I’m owning that.

2.days.date

Mix Tape

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2 years ago · 1 like

And the questions I’ve been spending on entities and machines; let me spend them, finally, on a person. Who are you? What do you know? I’m asking this time.

VIII. The man

It starts by recognizing the two cannot be the same thing. What I tell you about what I do, what I tell you about what I feel and think — remember: these are not the life I am living. I say that for myself as much as for you.

Behind the screen you stare at, the one I send my words to, there is a man who lived, breathed, felt, and wrote this.

And that man sat and pressed pen to paper at 10:54 PM on a Wednesday night. Well, some he’d written throughout the day. But the spine that pulled it all together arrived right after the day’s final chore: for ten minutes he carefully made his children’s beds. Making sure the clean sheets lay flat, tucked under the ends of the mattress where they’d otherwise spill onto the floor. Then fuzzy blanket. Then comforter. Then pillowcases. Then the stuffed animals my daughter had left waiting for her in bed.

Exhausted after working all day, the sixth in an eight-day run, followed by an hour-and-fifteen-minute commute home. Laundry started, dried, their little clothes folded with care too, because he hadn’t seen them in over a week and a half. That’s not the right because.

Because he loved them and he wanted to show that love even if they never noticed it, even if it just became the memory of never worrying about having clothes or a clean place to sleep when they recalled their childhood years later.

Writing about these invisible moments is the kind of love that makes their absence less lonely.

And they’d be here tomorrow.

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