ally

September 23, 2019

Apophenia

What?

Apophenia. Connections. Imaginary lines traced from topic to topic in cheap butcher’s twine.

And the topics?

Imaginary. Or real, but only half remembered. I’m spinning a web.

Are you catching something?

You?

Are you answering with a question?

I’m unsure.

You’re not catching me in that.

You sound so final.

Not my department.

Right. Is that a fact, then? I’m not catching you in this web. Are you the web?

Not my department.

The spaces between, then. The negative spaces outlined by twine wrapped around pins. There are connections–

Or not.

–or not, and there are topics, imaginary or not, and then there’s you, there, in the place between. You, the liminal creature. You, defined by absence.

Presence and absence are not my department, either.

Are you some cousin to apophenia, then? Some relative to that unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness? Are you that numinous, abnormal meaningfulness?

I am easier to define in negatives. I am not presence and absence, but between them. Beyond them. Your ally, but not your friend. Real enough to impinge on your reality, but totally imaginary. Not here. Not doing. Not thinking, feeling, acting.

So, are you?

Anything else is just pareidolia.