Originally published in anthology Origin, 2022. Format adapted for Tumblr.
Footnotes referencing earlier auto-writing.
Title: Archival Entry #476
[The following is a digitised annotated script of what appears to be a guided sleep meditation podcast. However, no supporting records of the podcast have been found to date. The archival staff theorise that the original document is an unpublished manuscript rather than a transcript as the implied existence of eleven prior episodes remain unsubstantiated save for rumours of a defunct website. The anonymously submitted script was typed and printed, with handwritten annotations in the margins. When digitising this script, the lengthy annotations were converted into footnotes.]
Sleep is healing. Sleep is rejuvenating. Sleep is the inevitable journey your consciousness makes to the bordering verge of oblivion.¹ Sleep well and wake up anew tomorrow, dear listeners… or don’t. Good evening listeners, and welcome back to REMnant, your nightly guided meditation exercise, where we practise visualisation to relax your body for deep, uninterrupted sleep.
As we begin this exercise, you will trust only my voice and my guidance. Before we begin, please find a private, comfortable resting area away from sources of light and noise. You are recommended to use headphones to minimise external interference.
June 15th, 2001. Episode 12: Rebirth.
Let us start with a breathing exercise.
Breathe in. Feel the cool air travelling through you. Feel your lungs expand slowly, feel the dust within rise and settle. Feel the breeze clearing the cavernous space inside your chest, light from a gap timidly illuminating its smooth walls. You know each grain of sand and earth beneath your feet and hum with the wind that whistles through each crack in the walls. You feel drawn to the entrance and nearly take a step...
Breathe out, slowly. Feel the warm air rush from the cavern and out through your mouth. Return to your body, where you have two lungs and a gently beating heart within the walls of your chest.
Inhale. Feel senses out of your reach sharpen. You are opening your eyes to the world I create.
Exhale. Let your involuntary existence secede. You are oblivious to your reality.
Continue to breathe and listen.
Imagine for a moment an unformed, flickering light, holding within it the unlimited creative potential of life. Residing within the cavern inside your chest, inside your ribcage, inside your heart, it is housed in the universe inside of you but you cannot interact with it. As you breathe in it brightens and as you breathe out it dims, its life tethered to your own.
You nurture it unwittingly, for the universe outside of you is reflected within. Everything you learn, every choice you make shapes the world within you.
Is this fragile life a child to one day be born and leave you behind? Perhaps, but you are deeply mistaken if you believe birth is finite. With each breath you take the nascent consciousness surfaces briefly, the cries of its birth echoing through your changing thoughts... its carrier dies and you are born and so you die for the next to live.² Your future lives intolerably within you waiting ceaselessly to become your present, each infinite option you may take extinguishing countless of its iterations without care.
But why should you care? Creation necessitates the singular elimination of all other possibilities.³ An artist finishes their painting by discarding all previous drafts - though unsatisfied, though in mourning.
How would you explain the continuity of your selfhood? Even a video fills in with imagination the gaps between each frame, mere snapshots of linear passage arranged in close succession. Each frame birthing the next faster than our eyes can perceive. It is in these gaps that fear arises - what losses do memory suffer, what changes go unrecognised?
We are defined by our continuity and we assume a singular source... Don't stop breathing now, listener. Clasp your hands together and rest, deathly still.
The gaps in our consciousness are as infinite as consciousness itself, but today we are only to speak of the fissure that is sleep. In the following visualisation exercise, escape for a moment your frail, inactive body and give in to my voice... Listen and envision yourself in my place.⁴
When I was a child I was afraid to sleep. Drowning in worn mattresses stacked atop one another, I breathed in and out. In, steadily, and out, the way you are right now. Your lungs expanding…
Do you see the rhythmic whirring of the fan, gentle as softly stirring curtains? They were blue and sheer against the dimly orange lights. The distant sounds of traffic were muffled through the bubble of height. Your room was so far above the cars and the trucks and the speeding motorcycles. Sunken into the warm sheets and curled around a pillow, you were the only child in your world.
But when you were a child you were afraid to sleep. You stayed up every night, straining your eyes open in the dark and fighting for consciousness. Still, you never would catch the exact moment you slip, slackened into that sirenic grip.
Eventually, all succumbs to sleep.
You never dream. It seems as though you are pulled directly from your body and replaced every morning with a fearful spirit. You wake up feeling utterly disgruntled and estranged from your body. How can you know for sure you are the same person as you were the day before?
It is a naive thought that sleep is the only break in continuity that plagues your fleeting life, but it is the only one you cannot ignore. Our memories of the past are distant and uncertain even though we know we are formed by nothing but the past, just as we will form entirely the future.
You complete your morning routine while gazing uneasily at the mirror, memorising each freckle and flaw that you are sure was missing the day before. Even the materiality of your existence is subject to change.
You've heard it disproved: the myth that cells in a human body are entirely renewed every seven years. Some cells like the ones in your heart can never be replaced, while others die and regenerate every day. Could you take reassurance in the cells that stay constant? Do you hinge your identity on some parts of your body more than you do the rest?
You know the body that is yours is not the one that stays the same, just as the shape of your consciousness cannot be quantified in frames. But you doubt.⁵
Every day, we die when we sleep, with each blinking lost, absent thought drifting without pulse in the natural rhythm of death and rebirth. Each night we dream enclosed in the dark, inside the body of a god that is neither holy nor kind, destined to die every moment we surface.
What was the origin - our origin? Our birth, the moment of conception, the origin of existence? or the spark of life, then awareness? Do we begin when we first learn of beginnings, or when we first know of death? Is every change a new beginning? At age 8 so sure of who we are only to tear it all apart at 10, 9, 8, 13, rebuild at 16, restart at 18— What continuity is there for children lost to memory?⁶ Who are we now? And where did that begin?
You're not here today to learn that you can reshape yourself. You're not here to learn how to change. Like everyone else you know, you are helpless against your nature. Change will happen whether or not you try. You will awake different - despite and regardless of your efforts.
Listen and accept, for all you can do is believe me. Change is random, change is predetermined. Is a child, weakly breathing, a result of fate or accident? Is birth freedom or damnation? You are born moment by moment despite yourself, and always will you seek to understand the origin that moments ago was yourself.
In that world inside you, your future sleeps uneasily, restless and shifting and flickering beneath your gaze. If you relax and breathe out, can you imagine emerging from yourself?
A neverending origin story where each change is a new birth, and time and time again we die to emerge and surface only to disappear. As for the past that bears our present, we cling to traces of their passage, evidence of our extinct existence. But our birth cleaved us from one another, and the past lay dead for us to devour.⁷
Your shoulders are still tense, listener, your brows are furrowed and every muscle down to your feet. You will never return to the cavern inside you, and you will never find the light that you seek. The past ejects you while the future eludes your grasp, so all you can do is devour.
You lay awake and cry.
Why can't you sleep? Why can you never sleep, pathetic listener, awake still and listening to me? Though I offer no words of comfort and you have made no amends? Until the desperate outpouring stops, you hide beneath the blankets, foetal and miserable, waiting for tomorrow to birth another you.
End of Episode 12.
———
¹ [Underlined by annotator.]
² All of us like gods with worlds of our own, harbouring a consciousness that inherits the fate of creation and responsibility of conception, again and again, each world nurturing a god that will create a world, within which the same creator will have been born, worlds within worlds, gods within gods, I know I know but how metaphorical can this be when my heart drums in my head with the truth of these words? I need to sleep I need to be asleep
³ [Highlighted by annotator.]
⁴ There was a sound here, some kind of interference or a slight change in sound quality. I don’t know. Maybe I imagined it? Memory is deceiving and right now the only sound is how I read their words aloud to myself and the sound of pencil against paper as I annotate. Whoever receives this - you won’t mind marginalia, would you?
⁵ [Both highlighted and crossed out by annotator.]
⁶ God help us but surely there is continuity! Are we not inextricably connected to our origins? What succession of cause and effect tracing back without end, turtles all the way down… and when I search, never to reach the centre of the eternally expanding gap, unending birth with no severance. as the origin of my originator, unfolding in paradox in search of the beginning like a god within a world of my creation fighting inescapably to emerge from myself
⁷ Our past selves must have borne the agony of our current existence with resentment, feeding and gouging until they could be rid of us, could become us, cursing our inevitable birth, dreading and anticipating the ultimate divorcement where the past become obsolete, the meaningless nature of their consciousness, the separation of a child from the body of its creator that marks us all abject all untethered, what happened to my memories? Not a single face remains nor a single word can be heard. I know only memory of memory, corruptible memory unascertained
This poem comes in three columns and three rows. The middle row is not divided into columns, and serves to divide the columned parts. The poem can be read both by columns and rows. I couldn't figure out how to transcribe this so I have done two possible readings of this poem, first by column (excluding the divider row "before the silence catches..."), then by row.
Research zine on heart transplantation. PDF to flipbook converted using heyzine.com
~40 pages of something between a digital zine and an annotated research scrapbook on the concept of heart transplantation and the cultural perceptions surrounding it, entitled Change of Heart.
Made this in 2022 for class but Heyzine deletes your zines if they are not viewed in a year so I'm posting it for more people to see!
Traveling across time to me,
a message lost unwittingly.
Ten days it says upon my screen,
yet I would rather destroy my spleen.
31st May
Tis the day she wrote to say
something important, something awaited
Yet only this app made it so unexpected.
Today is 10 June it says on my screen,
ten’s how long her message had went unseen.
I sigh,
I can’t deny.
A double quotation:
Tis the icon of my notification.
Suddenly, apparently, unabashedly,
The late alert flew fast to me
“Hangouts” I spit, with venom in tongue,
How I wished it a neck so I could have it wrung.
[Creative writing exercise, fiction, originally written 2021, edited for posting.]
"Rings and rings of flowers,
Circle ‘round and spun!
Quiet are the sun-sick,
Gazing at the sun.
Hush! In the dark,
Lest the light creeps in
And shimmer and spark,
Like needles through skin.
Children of the night,
Beware and shun
The golden of the sun,
As it'll take just once.
Rings and rings of flowers,
Though alive there are none.
For those who see in day-light
Are fore’er undone."
Sunlight, undated.
Excerpt from The Catalogue of Extant Children’s Rhymes.
𖤓
Standing on tiptoes, little Asra reached up with a little jump, fingers straining to flick the sticky string of beads dangling just beneath the pretty blue stars. The tips of his fingers grazed the drops, but even the slightest touch stirred that nearby cluster of glowworms to a bright burn in the dark. His face lit with wonder.
☼ Mama had warned him away from the edges of the western cavern, but following the curving slant of the ceiling rocks, he’d found the only downward jut where the winking glowworms were within his yet tiny reach.
☼ He wiped his fingers on his tattered shirt, head tilted up to admire the quietly thriving creatures, ensnaring moths and boy alike with their luminescence. Besides the cooking fires they so rarely could start, these glowworms were his only source of light, far beneath the earth. Besides his mother, they were his only companions.
☼ Unlike his mother, Asra couldn’t see very well in the dark, so the distant lustre of the glowworms enthralled him. He tried to imagine what colour the sun might’ve been when everyone had lived aboveground, but squirmed to remember the stories he'd been told: A fiery ball of light glaring down like a burning eye, watching, waiting, ensnaring all within reach.
☼ How unlike the gentle cavern stars!
☼ Shaking his head, Asra banished his unease, determined to explore further along the declines of the cavern before his mother returned from work. As Asra headed further from home, the glowworms above became sparser and more scattered, until only a sprinkle of starshine lit his unsteady path. He pressed on despite his disquiet, appraising by hand the widening gaps between footholds. With each surface he clambered down, he grew more determined to reach the end, his anticipation outgrowing even his fear of the dark.
☼ Finally, panting from exertion, his dusty hands found their way to thin tendrils furred with rootlets. When he looked up, his eyes widened. Swallowing the cavern walls were tangled trammels of vines and leaves, greener and brighter than anything he’d ever seen…
☼ Thin, peculiar columns of light pierced through the centre of the foliage. The light, though hindered, expanded and filled the hidden cavern space, imbuing everything it touched with life and vivid colour. Motes of dust in the distance glimmered with beckoning light. Ahead an upward climb, the thick, winding net of creepers stitched shut a narrow opening — a mouth to the outside.
☼ From the shadows, Asra held his breath in astonished awe, enthralled by his first glimpse of what must be the sun! He reached out to catch a ray, fascinated by the glistening sweat on his palm. His eyes first strained to keep open in the light, squinting to take everything in. Despite the spots in his vision he drew closer, stumbling at first from dazzlement, then frenetic with fervour.
☼ His urgency grew with each halting step, entranced by the shifting light. Faster, closer! His small body began the climb up uneven footholds, struggling to grasp the next fistful of vines. Though exhausted, the light restored him, taking root inside his chest, soothing old aches he’d never noticed. He breathed easier despite his exertion.
☼ As he approached, the mesh of leaves over the exit seemed to glow translucent, networks of thin veins backlit by sunglow. Asra wriggled his fingers into the barrier, crushing leaves in his grip, and pulled— How harsh its light!
☼ But he was unblinking, with tears that could not fall. He could see it now: an eye, opening red and heavy across the sky, fixating its gaze upon him.
☼ He lifted his head to meet the sun, eyes fluttering shut. Light glowed through his eyelids with orange glare as the sun seeped into his skin, warming and weaving strands of vitality that eradicated hunger and weariness. Embraced by light, energy radiating from that distant eye fizzed through flesh into his bones… and he cried, with dizzying relief.
𖤓
Darkness grew across the ceiling as the glowworms winked out, announcing his arrival far ahead of his path. Through the window, Aisha froze at the sight of that vibrant figure skipping through the pitch black, towards their home.
☼ He glided through the caverns untouched by shadow, an eerie collage of boy and cavern, bright on lightless earth. The child-shape housed a piece of the light, severed from his surroundings.
☼ Absently, she killed the flame running beneath their dinner, falling still as he approached. A numbness spread from her chest to her tingling fingertips, anticipating that echo of pain whose return she’d always expected. Her mother, her love, and now their son… It was her turn, she thought, with a perverse, guilty relief.
☼ There was no one else the sun could take.
☼ Drawing shallow breaths with shaking shoulders, she slid the door open as she has for countless years, and closed her arms around— Asra, who dived into her embrace so clumsily. Was this habitual for him, too? Muscle-memory engraved with love, though she knew she could never hold ‘Asra’ again?
☼ She held onto that empty body now - though it was lively in her arms. Could she have worked harder to move into the inner settlements, far from the forgotten edge? Worked faster perhaps, to spend more time home? Could her company have curbed his wandering, caged his curiosity till he grew old enough to fear the light?
☼ The creature struggled as her embrace grew taut, fierce in desperate bargaining. Couldn’t she keep him? She imagined growing to love this creature, keeping safe the pieces she had left of Asra. When she reached for its face, hands trembling in the shadow, she half-expected this jarring bright to fade, to dim, to- disappear, but it was solid, vivid, bright against her darkened palms- and it asked, sweet and pleading:
☼ “Mama?” it called, softly as always. “Come with us. Please?”
𖤓
Like everyone else, Aisha feared the light and tolerated the glowworms. There was nothing gentle or safe about their dependence on the larvae-lights. Her own mother had blinded herself, believing it would grant her immunity to light. But there could be no immunity to a lifelong craving for life in light.
☼ Sometimes, when they were both supposed to be asleep, holding onto her in sleepless cold, her mother would whisper a delirious fear and yearning: Light expands and inhabits, suffusing forms with vibrant lustre. Light subsumes, reducing reality to image. Its touch consumed, with unending joy, with undying beauty, infecting flesh with fervour for the sun. Oh, the Sun, that red Eye! There was no escaping its attention when it shaped their very perception, controlling what they saw, thus knew and felt. To see at all was to be seen. Light was the most invasive and intimate medium.
☼ As they crept forth on their limbs in ink-dark silence, she was tormented with visions of Asra and his father burning in the light. She should’ve kept him, held him back from leaving with the sunside expeditions, anything, but what other choice did they have? They had subsisted for so long on the rations allotted to expeditioners, staving off the deficiencies, that inevitable sickness of missing the sun. Guyan did everything he could for Asra to live through those weak, gasping years after his birth. Fish were otherwise so hoarded by the inner settlements, their rivers so guarded. After Guyan’s passing, she could barely afford to grieve, struggling already to find other ways to feed themselves. She fretted as Asra dwindled frailer, but now…
☼ Aisha rose to her feet as they approached the end. Behind her, the world seemed to darken and narrow, retreating from the light. Even a sliver of brightened rock strained her eyes to look, how it breached and invaded, pushing forth into their home, into her sight, forward into foreground at every expense. How light poured into their lives, into her son, how it filled them with another.
☼ Even a sliver of light... but this was a pouring of sun, straight through the torn vines. She felt her body seize against it, a rush of vitality rendering resistance unthinkable. It scorched her eyes open to its blinding magnitude. Light flattened the cave into stark colours, eradicating shadow and compromising form, reducing the chasmic depth of their world into a static photograph.
☼ She stumbled, thrown forward from disorientation. She grasped at failing memories of caution, struggling to comprehend the presence engulfing her own. The sun, the eye, the light pulled at her, devouring even sorrow and regret as her body pushed itself up.
☼ Light threaded through her skin, disguising scars of grief and ageing. ☼Light knitted back her bones, into seams and the hollow. She shuddered at the beginnings of the sun☼-sickness infecting her, rebuilding first her body then her mind☼. Dizzying visions overlapped her immediate environment; through the soil, in the air, by the waters, she was all at once the ☼sun and light☼, the rat, the fish, the butterfly, scuttling swimming seething singing choruses of breath blood bone calling ☼ calling ☼ choral corralling ☼ ; ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ her secrets and fears dissolved in a harmony of borderless thoughts. In their shared mind, they felt the others sing to them, outside and across valleys and fields, following the falling sun, ☼ she could hear them calling, ☼ calling... ☼ calling... ☼ rings and rings of themselves, sun-facing, still-waiting… ☼ ☼ ☼
☼ Escaping shadow and silence, they stepped through the mouth and called out in turn. ☼
It’s mother has most likely used the fake deer as cover for the fawn to sleep near. I’ve personally witnessed a doe direct a fawn to lay in a patch of tall weeds and go lay on a hill where she could see me and the tall patch of weeds. That’s what they do, find something bigger than the fawn to sleep near so they’re hidden while they sleep.
This isn’t a sad child looking for something mother-like, this is a kid getting put to bed.
two bros stranded by the rain, sharing one umbrella because they only have one (of course)
alternate ending
had this 2 second vision while opening an umbrella at the bus stop and it took over my life. what's this about? it's about plausible deniability. it's about (mostly) cooperating with an obvious excuse. it's about those colours I went overboard with
there's an image limit so I can't post every tiny detail AND the image compression is rly bad but....
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
jacobvanloon
germansingergirl
discoholicmusic
gummygunk
![For Now [column and row]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/e16b46342eba93aa507f320e6be9d9a4/393141034d528153-93/s540x810/4ecae8d7c89e3be79336a4953e5944863d352f53.jpg)
