I did not want to be categorized, pinned like a butterfly, labelled in a jar. But there was such a resonance, such a come hither, such a sense that I might find my people, that I had to go. I warned them of my reluctance, of my resistance to woo-woo bullshit (even as I craved it in my heart, even as I *knew* the things I knew). I wanted to be disqualified somehow, to fail their checklist. I want to belong, but on my own terms, ineffable even to me.

I joined their circle. I looked at the patterns. I closed my eyes and went inward. The narrator described the things I saw, too slow as my mind is nimble. Shocking to learn that everything has a name, each waveform, each transition, a chakra spinning at every gateway. I did not have a use for these words. An artist paints without naming every color. The narrator was almost scientific in his precision, enabling failsafes, gesturing towards spinning discs of code as though we were on a tour of the astral plane.

The gift I received was that everything had been accounted for. Someone else was curator of this knowledge and I no longer needed to worry about it. I went in search of the Like Mind and found that scholars had been recording all these silver spools for decades.

I could just go and be.

Some might call this a return to form. Some may see that the circle is a cross-section of an aetheric arrow. But now we shall exchange authorship, sidestepping into a parallel dream. Those of you here for the peanuts can get off at the next exit. Only existential bread and circus now.

When working on a puzzle, there comes a time when one must stop calling it that because it has turned into a picture. You can feel the scarred edges of each piece, yes, but there is no denying that what you behold is more than the sum of its parts. So it is useless to speak of a process, to account for vectors of trauma and ecstasy, to endlessly explain to the fascinated faces. When that last grain of sand crashes into the lower bell of the hourglass, well… one knows just the sort of beast they’ve become.