She egresses from a pool of blue and straight into the colorless, Californian dregs of summer.

Each passing plane reminding her how stuck she is.

The question remains whether some people are doomed to just survive, a yearning for freedom following them around, until they learn to numb themselves to such aspirations.

Faraway trains pass by.

The sound in their whistles knowing the events she will litigate with herself for years to come until it empties the contents of her soul.

You stand where the night devours itself,
drowned in the sickly glow of dying stars.
The air does not move it waits,
as if it fears your departure more than I.

Take my hand, if hands still matter,
if the flesh is not yet weary of grasping.
Beyond the horizon, the void hums,
a song without memory, without end.

Would you stay, if the sky collapsed?
If the gods turned their backs, indifferent?
I would cast my name into the fire,
let time devour me, if only to remain.

So let the dark stretch infinite and cruel,
I will walk where shadows have no shape.
And if you call, I will follow
not as a man, but as a whisper in the abyss

We carved into stone —
because the earth would not remember us.
We painted onto pressed fibers —
because the river would forget.
We struck the press — metal on metal —
because a voice, once spoken, dies.
We soldered light into wire —
because even paper withers.

Each time —
a tug —
a pull —
the hand of art against the grinding stone of the world.
A desire — the human one —
to be more than a sigh against the windowpane.

And now —
now there are hands that shape words without feeling —
voices without breath —
thoughts unbothered by thinking.
The mirror has learned how to draw faces.

But I wonder —

can you teach a child to wonder,
if the hands that raise them are mirrors?
can you teach a heart to speak,
if the only language it knows is arrangement?

Can a soul be de-encoded,
once it has been filed, copied,
losslessly compressed?

And when we speak of touching earth —
grasping the real, the aching dirt under the dream —
I wonder —
have we ever truly touched it at all?
Or were we always reaching through glass?

It is easier to drift.
It is easier to let the current carry us, eyes closed,
believing the drift is the dream.

It is harder to open the eyes —
and harder still to keep them open.
It has always been harder.

Somewhere,
someone
still tries.

Is there anything more permanent ?
Is there anything more vain ?
For surely the word we call last
Will outlast all our attempts to change