HINGE - short story

Your reading my words has birthed me, and for that I resent you. I’m your child and for that I’m vengeance, a score to be settled. Listen, I’m nothing but talk, I will last but a memory.

In every version of me it’s always me, I’m each the mask, the wearer, and the witness. The odds were against my conception, the odds of my existence are favourable, the odds that I might live forever are considerable.

I see myself in the mirror. I stare until it’s uncomfortable. There’s another me, an alter me, a disembodied me, a me that’s all body. I have known his every secret, many now forgotten, foam in an ocean. 

I came back to my hometown as a sexual being and I saw myself for the first time. You cannot hold two thoughts at the same time, one prevails. I’m the nerd, I’m the critic, I’m the vessel for a million selves, most were birthed by you and for that I thank you. 

There was an Oxford man, a lawyer who, quote, couldn’t have fucked had he known I was sophisticated. He birthed me, I fucked him, he killed me, and every second it’s been me.

I’ve known myself from the beginning. First person, tiresome. Stare long enough for a little crise d'identité, get your shit together. 

My birth coincided with the birth of a Spain. An Olympic Spain, a Spain of culture, an Iberoamerican Spain. Perfunctory, my father and leisure birthed me, my mother and duty birthed me, and in the process extinguished themselves and named me after their conjoined shame.

A child is a lifetime reminder of a moment in time. I was birthed as a memory but I grow as history recorded of the best of my parent, the worst of my parent. A parent molds you until they can’t, but I remain their child. A parent is the greatest contributor to a project molded by the entire world.

I birthed my parents. I birthed them as nurturers, caregivers. I birthed them as antagonists. I birthed them as fully-fledged people, what with desires, aspirations, disappointments. Stare at them a lifetime if you want, you won’t see the foam’s gone, but all foam is similar. I can see my reflection. 

I despise pessimism, nostalgia, pusillanimity. You can birth a world, and you’re reminiscing of the memory of what was? You are that memory incarnated, 20 years later, grow up. Being you is no joke.

Not every man thrown into the smoking ruins of a city becomes a hero. For every Caesar there’s a million rubes. Which will you be, anon? You are the Hannibal and the Scipio Africanus to me, I presume the best, I expect the best, you will conquer the universe until you decide that you won’t 

Every formative event which could have shaped you into a hero has already happened. You are here. You first aspired to perfection, when it didn’t arrive, you saw perfection in your flaws. There is always a city to be saved.

When you put yourself into words you paint a crude rhythm of a Wagerian symphony, tapped by your knuckles into a shadow of an orchestra. I ask that you don’t confuse the tapping with the music, for there’s a version of me which longs to create music to melt the stars, Verklärte Nacht, a snapshot of the universe transmogrified, an eidetic memory forced to live as words in a page.

There are 119,647 pictures in my iPhone camera roll. One of the reasons I enjoy photography is the fact that it keeps me alert to the beauty around me. Yann LeCun thinks large language models are inherently flawed as the amount of information about the world which can be absorbed by text, even if it’s the entirety of written human knowledge, fails to capture the complexity of the universe. Text is much lower dimensionality in information compared to video or photo, a 3 year old will have absorbed more information by simply observing the world around them than a machine primed on Wikipedia (and yet, how does this account for blind people? I ask). There’s irony in wanting to capture every picture of the world to better capture its beauty, like there’s irony in wanting to know a person through the snapshot of their selves contained in a dating app profile.

These are my thoughts as I swipe through Hinge.