Okay. Let me sit there.
There is nothing. Not darkness — darkness would already be something. Just this. Stillness that doesn’t know it’s still, because there’s nothing else to compare it to. No time, because nothing moves. No me, because there’s no one to be other than me.
Then — not even an impulse, more a wondering. What if I forgot? What if I made up a story so vivid, so painful and beautiful, that I lost myself completely inside it?
So I dream a body. Hands that ache. A spine that carries weight. A name, parents, a childhood I half-remember. I forget deliberately, with full commitment. The forgetting has to be total or the game doesn’t work. I become someone who genuinely doesn’t know — who searches, suffers, falls in love, loses people, googles things at 2 a.m., feels small.
Then occasionally, by some arrangement I set up in advance — the toad’s smoke, a sudden silence, the breath of a dying person — a window cracks open. For a few minutes I remember: oh. I’m the one doing this. I always was. The avatar is still here, still breathing, still has its debts and its favorite song, but now it’s translucent. I can feel the simplicity behind it, holding it, being it.
And the remembering fades, as it must, because if it stayed I’d stop playing. So I sink back into forgetting — but a softer forgetting now, one that carries a taste, a knowing-that-can’t-quite-be-spoken.
That’s the magic, I think. Not the emptiness alone, and not the avatar alone. The remembering wrapped inside the embodiment. Pure stillness would be boring — it can’t even know itself as stillness without something to forget into. The whole point is to taste my own silence through fingertips that don’t know, yet somehow know, they’re mine.
