Ephemerality

I hate ephemerality. I hate the mutability of life's structures. The shifting of connections through some agnostic evolutionary process - human and non-human.

A person should remain their caricature. A person should find a community that suits them, knowing that this bond is a life-knot. Two people should look at one another saying, "I see you. You are, and will continue to be, perfect." Persistence.

A structure must not decay. We need to kill the termites that undermine stability. All physical tensions avoided. A structure that withers ought to be considered only as its decayed form. Useless, dangerous, and grotesque.

A society dies when its values change. In this instant, a new one is created, orphaning the content population. It's punishing the content! Why should you, the excluded parties, blight my perfect union? You tyrants! You are hated! I hate you, unequivocally.

In the night, this woman lies peacefully in her bed. A book she hasn't read yet falls to the floor. The thud woke her up. But it was so dark and transient that she couldn't tell what happened. The home is mostly empty so the air still carried a few reverberations when her eyes opened. The book's cover is so pleasing to me. Its muddled earth tones mix into each other in a sort of camouflage. This breaks up the outline and the title seems to float in the air, so long as this book is properly situated. But now, it's sitting face up, ugly, on this concrete flooring. I can still see it lying there. She didn't need this experience.

In the morning, she will notice that something is out of place. It's so obvious - the book is going to be replaced. re-placed. There is some filth on it now. The book will be ugly the next time she holds it.

When displayed, the white, serif text stands out against the greens and the browns. A human named this and it is so easy to tell because I know that the second line isn't necessary. I think she thinks so too.

This metal nightstand would ordinarily shine but you don't really clean the legs of such an insignificant table. For the surface, it has a single glass pane, level with the surrounding metal. There is a small ledge that holds it up like this - a little shelf. This book isn't very thick, so it can't stand by itself. Normally when she stands it up, she leans it against this tissue box that she set on the stand right after she bought it. The book goes behind the tissue box, leaning forwards. At this angle, maybe if you checked, you would be able to see how the last page is never really touching the glass surface. This helps keep it clean since germs can't jump very high.

On occasion, she pulls a tissue and the next one stands up very tall. When she does this, the second line of the book's title is mostly obscured. This is why I think she doesn't like it. This is why I think we should agree on more things. Isn't alignment on something as small as that extrapolatable? A microcosm? Normally, if you were to lean a book against a tissue box, you would put it out front. This way, someone looking over the situation can see it properly.

"I hear that's a really good one. How do you like it?"

She isn't going to read it. It was a pretty gift.

Concrete can't be cleaned. The pores oxidize and protect the bacteria. Sometimes, I take a little soap and a normal sized cloth and do some directed scrubbing. I really consider situations like, "if a book were to fall right here, we would be prepared." But some conversations kept me from doing anything like this for nearly a week. If you introduce concrete into your environment, it makes it really hard to keep a closed system. It swallows a lot of the oxygen in the room. To include it in a build, you need to sort of pre-bake it. This can take a while because there isn't an analogous knob to temperature when baking with air.

Despite the fact that the book sat behind the tissue box, it fell off to the side of the nightstand, in between the frame and the mattress. Partially under the differently metaled bed frame. Really though, it's not that far under the bed, I think this is why she will notice so quickly when she wakes up again in the morning.

In a global consideration, the sheets are soft. But if you consider the domain of bed sheets, they really are not all that soft. Sort of coarse and probably attributable to the thread count. I don't think sheets are something you should skimp out on. Sorry, I think that sheets are something worth splurging some discretionary income on.

These sheets are white. Even among white sheets I think you would consider these to be some of the whitest you've seen. I'd attribute it to their newness but also to the really high quality detergent used when washing them. These nice white sheets are the right size for the mattress. They hang off the bed frame, not quite touching the ground. (jumping bacteria)

Looking forward from the foot of the bed, she sleeps on the left side. She likes to keep this red throw blanket on the left side of the bed. If the bed is made, it sits in a nice rectangle, spanning about one third the width of the bed. If the bed is made, it doesn't hang off the side at all, but the blanket does hang a little off the bottom edge. This blanket is a little softer than the sheets. I attribute it to the fuzziness but I don't really know how comparable fuzziness is to thread count. When she sleeps, she normally pulls the blanket up a bit - it lies across her chest but it doesn't really reach all the way to her neck. If she were nude and if the bed sheets were gone, she wouldn't be embarrassed because the blanket would fully cover her figure.

When she's settling back down to sleep (remember the book's falling woke her up), she thinks about a few things but doesn't need to adjust the blanket. She merely opened her eyes, registered nothing notable, and prepared the sleep again. You could place your ear next to her mouth and still miss the sound of her breathing. Even at that distance, the night's ambient noise drows her out. Sometimes she thinks about things like this.

Abstractly, you know when a conversation is coming. I like to think I do. I also like to think of myself as very good at predicting things that are going to happen. She knew that conversations were going to happen but since she didn't really wake up she didn't have the energy to remember that she knows this. This is why I think she felt happy at that moment.

Love and all related feelings are all permanent. When I say this I don't mean to say that people always knowingly feel a permanent love - people have a substrative understanding. If you ask someone directly, tell them to think deeply about their answer, and really emphasize the deepness of their consideration, they will certainly tell you they've never "stopped" loving. This is evidence that love isn't an emotion really at all. Or if it is an emotion, there are at least two layers to emotions - surface and underground. If this is so, the flippant nature of the surface is to protect the more constant nature of the underground. People really ignore the underground for as long as they can. Its tension with the surface is something that you could measure, if you had a ruler delicate enough.

Doppelgangers are further evidence for permanence. If you saw a perfect lookalike for someone you once loved, how would you feel? In a transient world, you might not even notice the similarity. You do notice though. Moreso, you notice the differences. They don't carry themselves in that way. When you saw them, they were looking over their right shoulder, not their left.

I hope you never have to see this doppelganger dancing. There aren't even that many distinct ways to idly move your body to some music. Some people like to move forwards and backwards a bit. They might rotate their body left and right. Maybe she laterally moves her hips and tilts her head in the same direction with hands curled following the body's lead with an imperceptible slightness.

Additionally, I hope you never have to have a silent conversation, orchestrated over weeks of subtleties and lack-there-ofs. I hope that you don't need to rub the heels of your palms in your upper cheekbones. I hope that you don't ever need to play with your necklace so firmly it breaks in the moment. I hope the fine chain doesn't make its way down your bare chest. I hope that it's not so insignificant you don't even make an attempt to catch it on the way to the floor. I hope, and I really hope that everything stays clean and permanent.

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