Could be anyone

I wake up on a beach bled free of stars. Little half-crescent moons jutting out of the sparkling silver dust, like teeth of some ancient monster, ruins from the future, keys to a door burned down and forgotten. The doorlessness of these keys matters little: keys are doors themselves, if you can cohere strongly around them, intending them to stretch and expand themselves into full worlds. My eyes drift without anchor or weight over the alien beach, not being held down by any one detail, soaking like a sponge all that is. Tom Strong, Six Color Legend, is sitting beside a crescent crown. Surrounding him are images with high levels of personal resonance. Purple hexagons, blue pentagons like the way my lips looked once. I plop beside him in the dust. “Stop reading my mind,” I say.

“Stop thinking so loudly,” he says. “You don’t have a monopoly on your mind.”

“I do,” I whine. “How else could it be my mind?”

Tom Six Color shrugs like falling shawls of layer shoots. “Could be anyone’s mind.” Lips like twisted barbed wire, or tangled cords. “Could be mine. You don’t think all those things buzzing and sizzling around in your skull are really you, do you?”

I know they aren’t. Those things that take my name, when I know that I have none. Names are anchor points, reference signals that can collapse into void or expand into line. Line into plane, plane into time, time into space. You know all this. And you know other things too. You know how those buzzing little ones work, why some have labeled them demons and viruses and invaders, and others have loved them more deeply than they have loved the sun or soil, moon or memory. You know what their influence feels like, because you feel it every second of your life. All those other minds intersecting with what you only thought of as yourself. “Of course not,” you say, “But maybe some of us like having our emotional currents tugged to and fro.”

“Ah,” Mr. Six Color echoes breathy, “So that’s how it is.”

“So that’s how it is,” you say. “And would that explain the purple hexagons, the blue pentagons, the black circles, you seem to be so enamored with, all of a sudden? You didn‘t feel like you had to dress up for my appearance, did you? I hope you‘re not that formal.”

Tom Color grins. “Some of you like having your emotional currents pushed and pulled. Some of us don’t. Some of us push and pull to make you like us, the pushless, the unpulled.”

“So that’s how it is,” you say.

“So that’s how it is,” he says.

“So long, Tom,” you say.

“Won’t you say goodbye to your dreams also, Ms. Bluesday?” he asks.

“No,” you say without any hesitation or consideration. “Those could be anyone’s dreams.”