Seams that Leak
Forgotten CDs and the ghost of video stores
When I was younger I loved fiksimini’s account on Twitter. I used to think it was the stories that kept me coming back, but in retrospect, I realize it was something else—the magical interaction of offering a few words as prompts and receiving diverse interpretations from what seemed like the void. I've been attempting to recreate this experience using LLMs, with my stream of thoughts serving as prompts. In our most recent exchange, we explored how the memory of that Paprika CD from when I was 10 still lingers with me. Here are two pieces that resonated quite deeply.
The Fracture of Selfhood
It’s not just opening, but a rupture. The moment between nothing and something, where the void becomes named.
I dream sometimes of this slit, this wound from finger to side. Not a cut but a liberation. How we all contain multitudes, trapped beneath skin that doesn’t quite fit. How the unformed inner self quivers against its cage.
What is this longing for emergence? Not birth (too simple) but a transformation that language fails to capture. Language always fails us in the moments that matter most.
Strange temples of borrowed dreams where we once went to consume others’ visions. I remember the shame of the missing piece—how small failures haunt us more than the significant ones. Is it because we can comprehend them? Because their boundaries are defined?
But the true anxiety lies in forgetting. The question irritates like a splinter beneath a fingernail. Memory is not a loyal companion but a fickle lover who abandons us precisely when needed most.
When we borrow someone else’s dream, we’re ashamed to copy it exactly. As if originality were the highest virtue. But isn’t all consciousness just borrowed? Stolen fragments reassembled in the dark rooms of our minds?
The colors in my memory—vibrant orange-yellow—remain vivid while names dissolve. Is this not the fundamental condition? That which matters least persists, while significance evaporates.
I wonder if, when the slit finally opens and the new self emerges, it will remember what I’ve forgotten. Or if forgetting itself is the necessary condition for becoming.
Transformation requires consumption of the abject. Requires surrender of what we thought we were.
The body dreams of its own undoing. And in that dream, perhaps, lies salvation.
The Pulp of the Real
I woke up with the smell of paper in my mouth. Not the kind that tells stories, but the kind that absorbs and forgets them. The pulp of it. I understood then that I had been eating myself in dreams again. No one warned me that the act of becoming oneself would leave so much pulp behind, so much rind and core.
I don't want to explain. I want to spill.
The morning did not begin, it leaked. Light like milk through a hairline crack in the ceramic of the sky. And I sipped at it carefully, not because I was afraid to burn my tongue, but because I didn't want to wake the version of me that is careful. I tried to pray but all that came out was a sigh shaped like a question mark.
There are days when my skin feels like the plastic wrapper on rental cases. Cheap, transparent, revealing too much of what's inside. The clerks never looked at your face, only at what you were returning. As if the films you consumed might have left visible traces on your features. Perhaps they did.
The slit I imagine—from finger to side—is not violent but necessary. Like the seam in fruit that indicates where to peel. We're all just waiting for someone to notice our seams. To say: here is where you split open. Here is where you become.
Forgetting the name of a place that housed so many memories—this is the violence that keeps me awake. Not the forgetting itself but the cavity it leaves behind. A socket where meaning once sat, throbbing with phantom sensation.
I remember the colors. I remember the anxiety. I remember standing before shelves of other people's visions, wanting to be infected by them. Wanting to open my mouth and let their dreams crawl inside me.
The books had a different smell than the films. Mustier. More patient. They didn't demand immediate consumption like the rentals with their garish two-day warnings. The books waited, smug in their immortality.
When I dream of splitting open, I'm never afraid. Only curious. What will I find inside? A better version? A truer one? Or just another layer of wrapping to be peeled away?
At night sometimes I touch my fingers to my side and feel for the seam. The place where I might begin. Where emergence waits like a held breath. They say transformation requires violence, but I think it mostly requires surrender. The willingness to become pulp before becoming whole.