Each time I rose again there was no one there. This of course again redoubled in me the feeling of wanting to find someone inside the tape, even knowing I’d suffered some latent mirage of purpose. The longer I looked for others and could not find them, or was at least not allowed to feel I had really, the smaller the air seemed somehow, which worked backwards from how I would have expected. There was only me among them breathing, being precisely the thing they weren’t.
Throughout it all I felt that hovered presence in my head, beyond even just my thinking; it was more a kind of perverted area wanting something to attach to, a remainder of what life had been once, if only to provide context for its wired content, my memory; otherwise all that I had been just seemed a sprawl of ongoing minor wrecks, a mass of blackness like the dreamworlds where there wasn’t even the idea of something like our land.
And yet nothing new about the hours came forth on their own besides where sometimes the tape would hiss suddenly with static, interrupting the true lines of the supposed real. Glitches would appear or buzz out of the pixels. Whole big lightning-like strikes of wavering would lurch out through the horizontal beams of day. During these times I’d get down on both my knees and beg the buzzing not to stop but to move into me, too, to wrap me over, and it never would. Always the buzzing and razing only hit the land and fuzzed it out into a world less like myself. Sometimes it would obscure my skin a bit or pull my face apart but I could still feel me going on exactly the same, just in different temporary costume.
Anyway, there was no one to tell me what seemed new from the outside, how they couldn’t discern me now from what I’d been just before, or even where the land was and I wasn’t. And yet thereafter when I could see again and could stand again and began to walk among more space, I knew there was something lost about me I might remember sometime that there had been something there before at least, something rolled and wet about the homes and people missing from them and my body and my arms and mouth and face and hair, and even if I never remembered what it was, even in feeling nothing knowing nothing seeming nothing, there was still this little glimmer about the possibility of any instant coming apart from what it was. Where the replicating light inside the tape struck and stuck itself against me over and over I could feel inside the warming flesh there an alternating wish for light, a thing pulling or being pulled or wanting for wanting or knowing the want for want had once been there within the idea of me. Whether this made the hours that much harder or warmer going forward in the hours on hours I have no idea and do not wish to, so if you know please do not say. I wouldn’t hear you anyway, regardless, could I, but there is the shaking of the knowledge of the never-sent response, from which some nights there falls the language of the whole, to which every instant in every body has been appended, regardless of what luck.
FLOOD: Already more time has passed here between my ability to comment on myself than I remember having passed in prior iterations. My voice itself was bleeding. The whole thing was a trick. I was not really aware that I could count time in this manner but I could feel it. It reminds me more than any of this how it felt outside the tape to live inside the day: time leaping or erasing when I most wished it wouldn’t, and going by the longest when I wished it wouldn’t. It feels like how I’ve always imagined it would feel to die, though slowed down so slow it seems like living.
Another problem is is that there’s like seven hundred ways to talk here, to the no one.
Some of these ways of talking become deleted. Some things you say don’t get uttered.
Like one night I woke up remembering everything I’d ever done in life. Its transcription.
I tried to say everything about me at the same time aloud to anyone so I’d remember.
But when I tried to say it like that or say it at all inside that or speak at all I blacked out.
As if the tape got paused and rewound, or stopped and edited, by someone else. Not god.
Someone outside the machine fucking with the machine because I was learning about me.
I blacked out in the black and saw the black inside me and it was black inside and out.
In the second blackness there were people all around me, beating at me, laughing, knives.
I closed my eyes to hide from being beaten and behind my eyes I saw the world.
The world exactly as I wanted. Without death and beyond number. Held against another.
When I woke again it was like any other time. I remembered remembering but not what.
The years of anyone subtracted, hid forever. The contracting skin and lesions of the dead.
Here all surrounded by the absence of anyone I did not know, which is everyone but me.
I see their belongings and touch the surfaces and can imagine them being killed.
Can smell their blood without the smell there, in a necklace or a doorknob, a bit of land.
I can tell the dying had to hurt. That it must have, though who would really know.
I imagine I’m the one who killed them. I’m who was right there, laughing too.
In every instant every death revises itself to the instant dragging on without the rest.
I ate the skin off of your face. I remembered that just right now. I’m about to forget.
But when your skin came off there was this color like I’ve never seen in any body ever.
It was nothing different than the rest. It felt the same as every other. It wasn’t mine.
I saw the same color emit again when I killed someone else again the next day.
And the next day. The tape wound on. I wound the tape. I was the tape and I was you.
My flesh feels like it’s made of all the other flesh I can’t remember. It must be everybody.
You mean me too. You mean I am in you.
You are in me. It hurts.
But if everybody is also in you, then so what. That’s nothing special about me. All those bodies, all of them in death shaped just the same.
I don’t even remember who you are.
I can’t help it.
And that is worse than having died.
No it isn’t.
How would you know, you didn’t die.
How do you know I didn’t? I can’t feel me breathing. I can’t seem to do anything I want. I can’t seem to get where I am going, no matter where that is. How is that any different any day from dying?
You are alive.
Prove it.
There’s only one way to prove it, and then it would no longer then be true.
Go ahead.