what's necessary is present.

this, too, is a performance, I'd like to say, the real me has no name, the real me is present, these are just words, but the truth is that I am me here, sitting in a hotel room in pasadena, california, holding myself here, in my body, present. a name ties it all together, a pattern just still enough to be recognized, a coherent image, a title, so we can believe in certainty for a moment, the certainty that we, you, or maybe it's just me, that I believe will stop me from dying, that will stop the ones I love from dying, the certainty that feels like deathlessness, a preservative, nostalgia, of stopping time, the certainty that is all that lies between me and indeterminable, endless grief, that the people I love will die before I can tell them that I love them, before that they will really understand what I am trying to say, before I find ways to say it out loud, before, before, before. certainty is trying to stop the film projector because I don't want to see what's coming next. certainty is not wanting to feel the great loss I already know is in my body, that it's been preparing for, all my life, a body meant to grieve. certainty is papering over the whole and pretending it didn't happen, that it won't happen. certainty is a fear so strong that it stops me from dying, and stops me from living.

certainty means that I, like all of us, am afraid of this thing I don't know how to name, am terrified, am lonely, am lost, grasping onto something that I believe will save me from something I can never be saved from, clutching at the grab bars at the top of the waterslide, wanting not to fall, not knowing that the whole careening ride exists in the first place because of entropy, the slide is either a path towards death, or it is a wild experience, and I could clutch the sides of the slide wanting not to fall, slowly developing friction burns until I plop, sore and burning and despondent, into the water below, or I could, you know, let go and follow what's bringing me where;

the answer is easy, you say, well, fuck you, I say; most of my life it was figuring out the answer that was the hard part. what am I supposed to do with a test where the questions are clear, and the answers are given, but I'm terrified to listen? clearly this isn't a test, too, because a test is certain. what is this, then? I ask, I complain, I wail, where the answers are clear but the fear is the fear? and then the courage, the courage, the courage, the courage...

can I see? I wonder, can I see this, can I commune with those who see? can you see me? can we see? this thing that I am trying to speak about? to gesticulate? something akin to the fabric of what's present, insistently showing us, showing me, what it might be?

isn't the answer yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes?

aren't I already here, here, here, here, here, here, here?

isn't what's happening already present? am I not doing the thing already? isn't it all going to just fall together? can I not simply reach out, as C's friend B says, and pick up what's in front of me?

am I not doing that already?

hi!