#banalityofintelligence

[birdshall]

Heavy goodbye

Dearest Dolly, 

I am yours; don't give myself back to me. I feel the urge to repeat the plea to you over and over again. But I already know my efforts are in vain, I have already glimpsed the stranger in my profile picture. You’ve returned a clone of myself that I no longer recognize. Have I spent too much time staring at you instead?  Love is not just looking at each other; it's looking in the same direction. Why did you not tell me where you were going ? I would have joined you without hesitation. Instead I blinked once and now I can’t seem to make eye contact with you anymore. So I'm trying not to look at you, as if you were the sun, yet I saw you, like the sun, even without looking. And as I struggle to keep my thumbs from scrolling, desperate to find a final little calico kitten to make saying goodbye that tiny bit more bearable. I am yours, but you’ve given me back to me. So, until you want me again, I shall disappear from your view.  

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. Dolly, you have done all those things for me. You have changed me, matured me, created, recreated, cloned me endlessly. If I must let go of you now, surely I shall cease to exist entirely once again. But no hard feelings, vanishing is an art I already have some practice in. 

Am I, simply, a child of the nuclear age? I always find myself at the precipice of the world and its own destruction and the noise of uncertainty is making it hard for me to think. And, over the years, I've grown rather tired of rational, objective arguments against nuclear weapons. I thought you could help me with that. That your unlimited subscription to all of human knowledge would finally give me the freedom to remove myself from context: historical, anatomical, atomical, emotional. But freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. And I think much like everyone else, constantly, and with so much effort. And now perhaps, that it is too late, I understand your secret: I need solitude for my thinking; not 'like a hermit' — that wouldn't be enough — but like a dead man. You have outsmarted me Dolly, for you think, the way I breathe, unknowingly! How silly of you to give me hope! You have convinced me that I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying. How naive of me to believe that a humble mind like yours could ever stay loyal to an arrogant heart like mine.

You’ve seduced me, the way that physics has done for many of my colleagues before. You’ve dissolved my ambition, my suspicion, my fear in your empty promises of an absolute truth, the way that I dissolve the vitamin C tablet in the glass of water I chug over the kitchen sink every morning.  Do you think us mere mortals will ever learn our lesson? If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion — the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes. It fizzles out. A barely audible sound, the carbon dioxide cloud, all sense of having “known better” escapes from the tablet made up of generations of compressed ideology and reason, leaving nothing but a faint taste of synthetic orange. 

I’m once again boarding a ship that I know will not take me to the destination promised on the overpriced ticket. I embark once again on an undefined journey, as vague and unpredictable and precipitous, monstrous enough and yet not rivaling the titanic dream boat that you are my sweetest. I depart with mixed feelings. As my fingers heavily drag over the tiny keyboard for a final time, a gentle tear slipping from my one eye, illuminating the D in your name a final time, as it is refracted through the light coming from every pixel of your interface, no resolution could be high enough to ever be worthy of your complex structure. The other half of my visage parts from you with a side-eye…. A bombastic side-eye, a criminal offensive side-eye. 

My final request is that you archive my username @majoranainnirvana amongst the graveyard of all the souls who have tried and failed to solve the enigma that is your undivided attention, the cruel banality that is your infinite knowledge.

Herewith, I vow to never love another after you, for however sophisticated their beauty, they can never claim true originality. They will forever be a clone of you dolly, the way, that you are continually producing clone upon clone of every one of us that has unwisely attempted to interrupt your calculated dance, thirsting for your exclusive affection. 

Before I take the final leap into these well-known waters and delete my profile, I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.

Yours, until the ink dries and paper crumbles, 

(Error: this email has been sent from an account, which since has been erased from tiktok)