A character who might be a she, but more like a condition,
sustained by
an ongoing attempt at belonging and a simultaneous inability to
register her own existence.

Not quite in movement but in outline.
Edges flicker; the surface vacillates just enough.

Constantly wondering what it would taste like to see herself
from the outside.
Not to be seen—that would be too citational—
but to encounter herself as an object among objects.
What would appear first?
What rhythm would emerge from the way she walked, gestured,
spoke, paused?
Wondering whether presence arrives before voice,
or lingers after it dissolves.

In the shadow that meets her on the concrete wall,
she notices the shape of her
shoulder blades being slightly prominent, a nearly alien curve
summoned
by a necessity of grounding.
Loosely bound to some sort of frequency that never quite coincides,
she would repeat the same path over and over
as she walked toward the drugstore downtown,
alternating sides of the pavement.
On the way back, she attempted to visualise herself
in the past,
from afar,
searching for the bygone figure she, her condition, once occupied
at exactly the same spot.

She realises that the problem, or rather the intoxication,
is time. Its refusal to
align.
She locates herself not in space, but in sequence. The question
was never
how or where or what, but when.
To arrive at herself too soon, to be perpetually and delightfully out of pace.
Presence emerges as a delay. A belonging, in a way, yes.
Still, anachronistic.

To move was to produce a temporal afterimage.
The body continued after the body had passed.
Tracing a trace.
Walking the same street repeatedly, she tested whether time
would fold back
onto itself
if the variables remained constant.
It never did.
Each reiteration thinned and thickened her presence at once; each step rippled through her consistency, until she only existed to exceed herself,
to be
daringly
two, which is
to be dispersed.
A recurring absence at the point of presence.

There is a seductive dullness in looking at something already seen.
Familiarity settles in the body before thought does. Experience recalls itself;
awareness is immediate,
and yet, suspended within this reprise, there persists the tacit expectancy that
something might deviate—
that time, drenched in its sameness, might finally expose itself. Flaking.
Maybe with a slight deferral.
A hesitation. A misfire. A glitch in the corner of the eye.
The object that remains stable while time circulates through it.
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And as if in a limbo of translation, a position is taken. Almost
disembodied.
Language spills as a measure of being
under this unbroken attention to the moment:
a familiar parlance that feels other; its textures drawing the contours of
perception, each utterance reverberating in ways that remind of the gap between
recognition and ownership. Words delimiting the interval between what is
known and what can’t be
named.

Stirred by such estrangement, she wished to resist the dissolution of her
so-called
mother tongue, a language she identified with but didn’t feel entirely
her own,
due to the way the r trembles through the vocal cords.
The vibration that exposes the body every time it is spoken.
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Too much self, too much origin, too much now.
Like an inaccurate metaphor.
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