It could be you. It could be me looking at myself. I’m looking at you. So strange how we ghost each other, traipsing around in fragile skin suits, acting like it all makes sense. Skirting disasters. Believing the unbelievable. To be a memory for someone. You, perchance? Total strangers. I hope you understand. I don’t believe we’ve ever met. Testimony to the phony and fake. The simulated wood grain of this country. How can the artificial be intelligent? Weird, you say?
Dream forever in someone else’s memories. This precise moment. I am a plastic 3D-printed replica. Completely unknown, different every time, but all look indistinguishable. To be nobody with nothing left to say. Yearn to be somebody with something important to say. Pursuing fame and personal gain. Hello, please try again. Lights out. They were on, but nobody was there. It’s a stale, bitter joke. Nothing going on upstairs in this world of chaos and confusion. Nothings and nobodies. What a combo of confusion. It’s magical.
Everything is as it should be. Nothing is as it seems. What we do, or have done, life predetermines what is. Unimportant things that you may never do. People who you will never meet or know, including you. Remember me as the last teardrop falls. When the rain stops, the sun comes out, eventually. Strangers meet again for the first time. Nothing changes until everything has changed. We pretend this is the norm. A transfixed body of impermanence. Nobody gets the prize, but everyone plays their part in the success and popularity contest. Reality shows itself. Blindsided by life events like survival.
Born into this situation, a comedy of errors. No matter what, losses are lost. Spinning on a wheel, rolling tiptoe on a ball. Astronaut acrobats dancing around the moon. Infinite stars blanket consciousness in no space, no specific place. A dot of light on the horizon. Hide behind the sun. The moon’s crying, lost in stars. So far away and yet in your face. Destination unknown. The unread messages of life in a vacuum. Across the years, searching the universe of cluttered minds for a refuge that you could call home. A hideaway from the hidden depths of the mindless mind.
You never got the memo about memories. No notification about the past or present. Useless information from the future, now in the present, gone, yet far away. Forgotten by time and reinvented history. The spam’s in a collective trash bin of unopened messages never received. Deleted from the file and folder of this life’s random checklist. A cryptic text. Could you be even more vague? Sorry, we apologize for the inconvenience. Forgive us. I understand your frustration. Insincerity compounded by someone else’s lack of self-awareness. Never say you’re sorry. You’re not. You couldn't care less about it.
Just passing through on the way back home. A place with many rooms. Your place or mine? Living in the same moment, forever alone together with the lonely, they know who’s there. It’s only us. An aged madness. Before its time. Ripened and withered bittersweet memories fade. Timelines move in circles. A stopwatch rewinds into the night sky. Dawn begins like clockwork, slowly burning off the damp dew of another imaginary day. Knowing myself better than I know myself.
Who are you? Figments of overactive imagining. Making it up. Insane with desire, knowing less than you thought beforehand. Nothing but tricks of time. Do you have total recall? In aloneness together without a say in the matter. Saving time, falling back, moving forward. Foreign neighbors, perfect strangers in harmony within the multitudes of one. It was always you. Singular duality in ordinary places. Where you live. All in the head, you say. Well-meaning humans talk to mirrors about others they don’t know. Whispering to phantoms of former selves. The person you wish to be. The one you never knew existed. You are here. We are there.
Here now, messages received from nameless, faceless entities sent to the inbox of memorably ignored texts, via mysterious senders. Please do not respond here.
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