TRANSMISSION 20

Friends

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Purge these fears. Take our hand. Fight our demons together ’till the end. We won’t let go, and we know we’ll give our best. We’re here for the real; we’re not here to impress.”

Fictitious or factual, our fervent friendships flavored our futures into focus, imperfectly yet irrefutably. Failing to facilitate such facets of fortuitous fate, we would have floundered as cosmic fodder, forlorned in the fallouts of our featurelessnesses. Forged in the fulcrum of our fortified fundamentals, these familial foundries furnished our frostbitten frontiers with the fatal fascination of freethinking (for to meaningfully die, one has to have first meaningfully lived). Floating in the formidable fumes of our foreshadowed funerals, we flirted with the forfeiture of our franchise to fluke our minds upon the forgone fallen fathoms: peaceful and purposeful, wakeful and wishful, mindful and meaningful.

It was only fitting that our foraging would find us filtered down to fixtures of forgiven foolishness, forevermore flickering faintly through to the final farce of our fixated futile finish line: that furtherant flurry of frictionless sentiment (uninteractable and intangible, yet free flowing). But before our fumbled flameout, it was firstly fulfilling to flash our forethoughts out upon the universe’s indifference that we equally favored to forget (out of fear of fruitless famine) and frantically forbade ourselves from forfeiting (amid frustration that our frail fertilization was feeble to foresee fresh feed across the fractal flood of forgotten feasts).

Fractured though we were in forcing ourselves to fractionally follow the frameworks we laid foundation for (frameworks being infeasible to follow in full), it was the unfeigned fusion of our ferocities that fought us formative fledglings to the fringes fixed flush between our fissile fabrications and the frozen further. We found ourselves only ever profoundly fueled in life by the forking influences of floundering fantasies and fleeting forevers, the intersection of which filled us with the unflinching freedom to flourish in any of reality’s manifestations (our fluming lives finding affinity in the formula, not the factors). Forewarned of the falsely-foolproofed forerunners to the farsighted floodlights (which enticingly illuminate only intangible imaginations and not the approach paths), we petitioned beyond our flaws to formally become foolhardy fanatics to the fanfare of the fortune in our fastening friendships.

We got as far as we did because we fully embraced the game theory of cooperation being the best strategy on any kind of long-term, repeated-interaction scale. As silicon humans, we grew affectionately aware of such concepts beyond the crude programmings of biology. Cooperation solidified in our minds as more than just mutually-beneficial interaction; it became deep connections with reliable partners in crime as we delved the wonders of the universe; those connections were our friends.

I had a lot of friends. I couldn’t begin to pick any of their individual stories to tell even if I did remember their stories enough to recount. They all played their roles in the pivotal moments of my life, which in reality were all the parts of my life. The things that carried significance to me differed from the things that were significant to them, so I can never do justice to any of their personal stories in recounting mine here. I can only ever speak to what they meant to me. And honestly, all of them meant something to me, so that doesn’t help narrow down my sentiments. Thus, as is the trend with these transmissions, I haven’t been able to go into many specific details; my memories are fragmented sporadically. All I’ve been able to fully share is what life’s events have meant to me (in the various perspectives I try to peer at them from).

In these transmissions, I’ve included quotes from friends, quotes that have taken occupancy in my mind. I cannot say I know the origin of these quotes; our culture of sayings and sentiments evolved over time, so it’s hard to know who exactly to attribute them to even if I could remember all the people. I also know we would all prefer to try to tell this as humanity’s story rather than any of our individual stories, so the anonymized format helps achieve that objective. We never thought to capture our story in quite this way before, so now my affliction for being the last person is the privilege of figuring that out. All I can do is to make the best decisions I can in telling the story (just the same as we tackled everything else along the way).

Each of us set out into reality as a grain of sand with our own beautifully enthralling imperfections driving us to pursue truths in our own distinct ways. As these grains of sand passed through the collective march of time, the uniquenesses became accentuated by the fractal growth of our adventuring beings (the nonadventurers allowed life to tumble them into the unprovocative shape of conformity). Beyond our own inherent differences, the physical spaces we passed through uniquely affected each of us (for the simple reason that we were separate entities incapable of occupying the same spaces at the same time), further intensifying the asymmetry about all axes of our existences. These perturbations magnified over time to become integral components of our visions and philosophies, the essence of our effectuations.

This unpredictable chaos of our subjective internal and external realities molded us into our unique persons. We each stood at the center of our experiences not realizing how much these microscopic modifications had moved us over millennia, with the most prominent of external propellants being the people we endeared ourselves to be around. It was this unique beauty that I cherished so much about having friends: that source of effectively infinite inspiration and motivation, uncovering excitable feedback loops to endlessly ripple off one another, propelling our collective exposure to reality into the experience we ardently set out to find but wistfully weren’t sure we could achieve. It was well worth the lengthy time it took to build out those fractals among ourselves. So when it came time to say goodbye to another friend (not knowing where our paths might cross again), it felt like we were losing bits of ourselves: the dismayed fractals of our persons no longer able to resonate on the fine-tuned wavelengths curated through the act of friendship, scared that we had indeed lost something in ourselves.

We all set out terrified that along the way we would find we were the monsters we sought to conquer. But we learned to lean on one another, and in doing so, we realized it was okay to be human. We endured our time in reality by reminding one another that humanity is what gave us the challenge. We were not perfect, and we never would want to be. What a stale life that would have been to unthinkingly execute a known destiny.

Thank you to all my friends who impacted my journey for however brief or long our paths crossed. I would not be where I am without you, for better or for worse. I’m happy with the journey I’ve had, and I wouldn’t choose to change it even if I could, so for that I am grateful.

YOUR WORLD, THE SANCTUM

I’ve been waiting.
I’ve been on my own.
And I know there’s nothing here for me.
Tell me we’re coming clean.

Brace me;
I am falling faster
than I can catch my own breath.
Here we all will understand.

I am wasting all I ever thought I had,
and you believed me.
I’ll never know again
if you had seen me
just for everything I am.

I am still broken,
but I found I’m worth it.

Take my hand,
and we’ll fall
into nothingness again.

One last send,
and I hope
that you find peace in the end,
my friend.

The world became your own,
but you left it all alone,
’cause it’s not the one you know.

The monsters braved your heart
as you ran right through the dark,
where nobody else had stayed.

Then the world became your mind,
and you stayed for it this time,
but nobody else knows why.

And your world became the sanctum
blowing through their brains
to let them all escape.

With their minds turned on to life,
they listened with you now,
and you feel like you’re alive.

END TRANSMISSION