Everyone You Have Ever Loved Has Died in Your Arms in Another Dimension

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Everyone You Have Ever Loved Has Died in Your Arms in Another Dimension
Short Stories by Michael Griffin

An excerpt:

WE ARE ALL OF US PART OF THE HUMAN PROBLEM

Sometimes I take off my meat monster suit, because I've grown tired of the bleed and the biting and the nounism and the verbing. I hang the old body up on about 20 or 30 hangers, I suppose. I don't weigh that much. But.

It gets heavy. Without me in it, that is. Anyways, here's where it gets weird. That first info dump, free of the brain and all its thinking.

NOUN: VERB VERB VERB VERB; NOUN: VERB;

NOUN: VERB VERB;

NOUN: VERB; NOUN: VERB;

When you're this distant from the analog meatiness of life, things get abstract. I have to process what I'm processing. Electricity, atoms, forms, things. That first one was my body falling and rolling and crashing. The second was the door opening (maybe from body falling? investigate later.). Third, a hanger swaying and detaching. Four, the other hanger swaying. Five, a cat running.

I flow outside. And it's hard to tell what anything is doing.

Waving, dancing, fucking, fighting. All looks that same from the perspective of a bruised protein chain. The smaller (the narrower) you get, the more the same things look. Don't even think of asking a quark or a lepton what it thinks of what we did. Do. Those guys are way out of it by being so far in.

I can see the sound, the vibrations on the air, coming from things made of all those things. Communication. Or maybe someone farting.

The meat-forms have it bad. All their information they have to send serially. Impossibly slow and difficult to understand.

Funny how they get so much done in their dreams, though. If only they could transmit feelings.

All they can say is one thing. When I'm like this, I can decode it like, “FORM ACTS. FORM ACTS.”

But when I go a bit further...yeah, that's when it gets scary. Then all it sounds like it, “AND. AND. AND. AND.”

I'd have nightmares about it, I'm sure. But it's only static to me like this.

I remember trying to duplicate it in the meat machine. Just let the senses take it in. It's good to be alive, sure. But it begs interpretation. When I'm like this, it's only understanding.

Analog, digital, binary. Anything but to the point. I am in a quantum state and it is delicious. The only time I see the whole of the matter is when I am a particle and a wave and a paradox. Maybe you nouns can't verb when I say I am a noun and a verb.

I wonder how I could ever express it in terms that don't include nonexpression.

But then I slip on the old meat suit again, just a normal meat machine lying on the floor next to the open door . And the feeling is gone.

(Copyright Michael Griffin)
(December 21, 2007)

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