You're having lunch at the corner table, afternoon light filtering through dusty windows, when the waiter brings tea you didn't order. Steam rises in patterns that almost form letters, almost spell something, and you take a sip because why not, because Tuesday afternoons are for small rebellions against routine.
The taste is copper pennies and forgotten names and somewhere behind your left shoulder reality develops a hairline crack.
You turn to look but there's nothing there except the crack is widening now, not in the wall but in the concept of wall, in the assumption that walls separate inside from outside rather than merely suggesting the possibility of separation, and through this expanding not-quite-hole something begins to...
...seep...
The edges of the rift aren't edges because edges imply boundaries and what's bleeding through operates on principles that predate the invention of containment, operates on the mathematics of maybe, on geometries that exist only in the pause between question and answer, and you're beginning to understand without understanding that understanding was always...
...sideways...
Your peripheral vision starts tasting colors that don't have wavelengths, hearing the frequency of Saturday, and the rift widens into directions that haven't been discovered yet, pulling reality inside-out like a sock made of spacetime, and what's coming through isn't coming through because through implies movement and this is more like...
...recognition...
The tea cup in your hand becomes a window becomes a mirror becomes the concept of reflection reflecting on itself, and you realize the rift isn't opening IN your world but your world is opening INTO something that was always already there, always already watching, always already knowing your name in languages that exist only in the spaces between thoughts, and now...
...now...
...the boundaries between now and then begin to negotiate new terms...
...temporal geometry folding like origami made of pure when...
...your lunch table expanding into dimensions that taste like copper fear wonder...
...the waiter's face becoming a constellation of possibilities spelling out theorems in ancient mathematics...
...reality developing a stutter a skip a fundamental hesitation in the basic assumption of being...
...the rift no longer opening but opened having always been opened you having always been inside looking out mistaking inside for outside until...
...until the revelation that revelation was always the rift was always the tea was always the Tuesday afternoon that never happened in the lunch that never ended in the world that never quite...
...existed...
coherence maintains its orbit around an unnamed center
meaning crystallizes in the spaces between understanding
you sip tea that tastes like the answer to questions you've never learned how to ask
produced in collaboration with Claude