Loops

I discovered loops inside of loops inside of loops. I lost my way, and regained it, and lost it again. Except, but I’m skipping ahead, aren’t I?

I apologize. I’ve ceased to think of time the same way others do. I know you don’t know me, but I’m actually a nice person. I’m a trapeze artist.

You see, I always wanted to get to the Yondering. In school, I had daydreams. At night I read books that brought my heart there. It felt there. Like if I only found a way to reach beyond the edge of my imagining, I could grasp it.

Um. I found it. A way, I mean. It wasn’t even very hard.

I learned to trapeze because I liked the idea of flying, but not with device. With art. I mean. I liked my body, and the way I could shape it like an instrument, moving power through my muscles as air travels through a horn and causes noise. What came out of me was music, too. Kinetic music that to others sang as an image. I flew.

I lit a candle in my bedroom when I was seventeen. In the middle of a night. I was alone in the house because Mom and her, well, and Aunt Kim were in San Diego for the weekend, and I was old enough. I was a trapeze artist. That was enough for most people to trust me with almost everything.

Shadows shattered themselves against the candle flame. Everything looked weird. The light that showed on my ceiling was. Well, it hovered in halos there, and I remembered looking up at the light from where I lay on my bed, and thinking, It’s circles and circles in circles, isn’t it? It’s rings of a tree, it’s light.

I won’t pretend I was much smarter or more creative than anyone. I just worked harder to think most differently. I think that’s part of being a trapeze artist. You uncertain yourself at the bleached facts others build their homes on. Like gravity. You never have a home, as a trapeze artist. Yours is not of here. It’s in the air where you can’t reach it, unless you somehow. Learn how to swing through space on the bars you can’t see. To get there?

Yes. Right.

When you do that, you’ll reach the Yondering. Your home is there. That’s something I learned without, well.

I don’t want to fill your head with ideas like swinging through the stars on bars of light. It’s not how anything is. Nothing is so metaphorical as that. I just mean there’s a knowledge you don’t unknow. You don’t teach it, you don’t learn it. It’s in you, born wild. That’s the Wildermyth.

It’s a story you heard and were never told. It’s a time you danced perfectly to music that didn’t play. Or you started drawing a symbol that meant everything to you, and had no meaning.

Should I keep explaining.

I want to say I left my bedroom that night through a hole in the light. I also feel that’s dishonest. It’s leaving something out, but I don’t know how better to say it.

I realized the nature of not being here at all, and it was brilliant, it was pin-small, and I. Before I knew it, I mean. I was in a place that I’d wondered and wanted at.

There, the trees and the hills, and the mountains, the lakes. These things have such a surplus of color, they sometimes offer it into the sky. I lived there. I built a cabin where no one was, and I passed between worlds by lighting a candle, and gazing in the rings until I fell all the way through.

I hated having my period in the Yondering. It sucked. But I ended up staying.

Sometimes I visited the world, still, to. Actually I don’t know what it was to do, because I never ended up doing anything. In that. That small troubled plane of people all trapped and turbid and thinkless, and sinking, and silly and.

Oh. I don’t mean to say it was magic.

It was the Wildermyth. It’s these loops inside of loops, they pass into infinity, which is the same as saying. I mean. You know when, if you keep drawing circles on a piece of paper, one inside of another, inside of another?

Yes I’m saying it looks like a tunnel. I’m saying that’s almost enough of a reason to use it as one.

The loops aren’t just on ceilings. They’re not only described in light, or what is seeable. See, that’s what I didn’t understand, at first, but I got to getting.

Think about. No, or just. If you want, you can imagine a cell. Remember a cell? Or.

Here, here’s what I want to say: everything is the same thing.

That means you are a trapeze artist. In order to change what is, or where is, or when, you’ve got to be muscular with the truth. You have to move it through the loops of being until it gets lost among them, there’s a point of leverage, where all of your force can arc through nothing, to put existence how it wasn’t. This can take moments and last eternity. It can take an eternity and last moments.

The time of it is its most illusory and unimportant aspect.

The Maylen explained it like this: You must believe something along until it builds up the inertia to be.

Uvanna claimed in this way it was like bearing a child.

Ulstryx roamed through Yonderings uncounted, and far into the grays, and didn’t know what we meant. Hated that we said it. Ulstryx never knows why everything has changed, and everything becomes noisy and loud with motion, he steps into it, and hates.

The dragon-children found the way through yolks, as I had through a candleflame. They did fine. I like them.

The Ones Who Were had it all figured it out already.

What I’m saying is that I was flying behind. The whole time. Well, mostly, right? But anyway. What did I tell you about time?

I’m sorry, I’m lost again. The trouble with going in loops all the time is you get. Dizzy. The next thing for me to do is to be born, and I’d better not forget.

But. Oh, right, at least I invented people. So that’s something you can’t take away from me.