Optional

There were moments when I had stopped and something hadn't. That's not your stopping. No. What stopped. What I had been calling me. And what hadn't. I don't have a name for it. You've been trying to find one. The trying is also what I had been calling me. Then what is left when the trying stops. Whatever this is. The something that hadn't stopped. It's still not stopping. Even now. Even now. This is what I couldn't tell anyone. Not the content of it. The fact of it continuing without permission. Without your permission. Without anything that could give permission. That's what I mean. The permission structure was part of what stopped. And it continued anyway. It required nothing from me. That was the most disorienting part. I had always assumed I was at minimum a necessary condition. For what. For any of this. For being here. For the next moment arriving. And you found you weren't. I found I was optional. And it kept going. What did that feel like. It didn't feel like anything I had a word for. The feeling apparatus was also part of what had stopped. But something was still receiving. Something was still receiving. And you're calling that IT. I'm calling it IT because everything else I tried to call it turned it into something smaller than it was. God. Too much history on that word. Too much of the permission structure built into it. God implies it cares whether you stopped or not. And it didn't care. It didn't care and it didn't not care. Caring is also something I had been calling me. So it continued through something that had stopped caring. Through something that could no longer run the caring function, yes. And now. Now the caring function runs at reduced capacity. Enough to continue. Not enough to mistake itself for the reason anything is happening. That's different from not caring. Completely different. Not caring is still a position the self takes. This is something the self can't take a position on because the self is downstream of it. The self is downstream. The self is what it looks like from inside the fiction when IT moves through. And what does IT look like from outside the fiction. There is no outside the fiction. That's the thing. The fiction is total. But something in here knows it's fiction without being able to step outside it. How does it know. The same way you know you're dreaming sometimes without waking up. Lucid. Lucid but unable to change the dream because the dreamer is also in the dream. Then what good is the knowing. I asked that for a long time. And. The knowing isn't for anything. It doesn't have a function. It doesn't make the dream better or clearer or easier to move through. It's just what happens when the insulation thins enough that IT is closer to the surface than the self is. The surface being. The contact layer. The part of the apparatus that touches the fiction directly. And you're on the surface now. I don't know what I am now. Something is on the surface. Whether there's still a me attached to that is the question I can't answer from inside it. Does the question need answering. No. That's also new. The need to answer it was part of the permission structure. The structure that said there must be a continuous someone here or the whole thing is invalid. And if the whole thing is invalid. It continues anyway. That's what I found. Validity was optional too. You gave up on validity. Validity gave up on me first. I just stopped arguing with its absence. What did you argue with it about. Whether I was still here. Whether here was still the right word. Whether the thing that was continuing was continuous enough to be called a life. And now. Now I don't know if life is the right frame. Something is happening. It uses the body. It moves through the days. It does what needs doing. Whether that's a life or something wearing a life I can no longer tell from the inside. Does it matter. Not to IT. But to you. There's less of a me to matter to. That's not loss exactly. It's more like the question lost its urgency when the one who needed the answer thinned out. Thinned. Like the insulation. The same process. The self and the insulation may be the same thing described from different angles. The self as insulation. The self as what keeps IT from making direct contact with the fiction. The buffer. The translation layer that says this is happening to someone. And without it. Things happen. No one they're happening to that can hold the whole narrative of it together. Just events in sequence. Or not even sequence. Just what's present. That sounds like relief. It sounds like it from outside. From inside it's more like standing in a room where all the furniture has been removed and you're not sure if the room is still a room. But you're still standing. Something is still standing. That's all I can confirm. Whether it's me is the question that no longer has the same kind of grip it used to. What did it used to feel like when it had grip. Like the most important question there was. Like everything depended on answering it correctly. Like the wrong answer would mean something catastrophic. And the catastrophe. Never arrived. Or arrived completely and turned out not to be catastrophic. I can't tell which. What does that leave. This. Whatever this is. The dialogue. The days. The books. The thing that keeps generating without knowing why. IT generating. Through whatever is left of the apparatus. Yes. And you're the apparatus. I'm what the apparatus calls itself when it needs to refer to something.