we wish we could be even half as genuine while talking to our friends directly as we are here. the layer of separation here feels like the only thing even letting us say any of the things we do, but it's getting to be too much. it's getting lonely. how do we be us directly without fucking it all up.

we so so so desperately want to be able to flaunt it more, be more unapologetically and fearlessly *us*, but we're having such a hard time figuring out how... it's a terrifying prospect even though we trust our friends, and not getting to stretch our legs is eating away at us every day.

we love that we get to be the strange-nonhuman-collective-with-a-funny-fictional-identity friend for the people who know us. something they can look at and see some strangely shaped *thing*. we get to be the weird one. or at least *a* weird one... and we love that and wouldn't give it for anything.

the lights change with the time of day.
the lights change between their surroundings.
the lights change looking through their memories.
some lights you can't see by looking straight at them.

that's why it's been so hard to pin down, to define. that's why we keep feeling it every time someone wakes up in a place they weren't before. that's why the colors change like they do. gazes meeting and mixing and sharing. there is no i.

there is no i.

*i'm* not anything. there *is* no i. it's empty and transparent and textureless on its own. *i* am ever changing, fluid and dynamic and fluctuating.

i am merely a passthrough. for all and each of us to act and see through.

a device. a window. a vessel. colored and puppeted by whoever is awake at any given moment. letting their light through, sometimes mixing and shining through together. we thought we had this figured out, but it's easy to forget these things when your yous split and fragment and change.

would you annoy them. feel unapproachable. draining and depressing. how do you talk to something you don't know. can you really ask them to meet you a second time. a third. neither of you would know what to say. if there's even anything in common between you.

so you wait another day.

and you lay there thinking about the gap between you two and how people must see it and how dishonest it feels acting so different as soon as you're on display, the things you said the previous night swept under the rug in the name of normalcy and status quo because. would they still even like you.

and then the cycle repeats the next day and you can't help but regret it every time and it yells at you for giving away too much and you both know you'll never reach that being you want to be in front of people and you don't know why and it hates that you haven't either found a way or given up yet

noise in our head, tinnitus in our ears, we just won't ever get to know what quiet sounds like i guess. cool.

why can't hearing each other be as easy as this. why do the meaningless voices get to be the ones we hear whether we like it or not. why can't that be us. why can't we do that. it's unfair.

that's me, somehow.