reading room
Provisional Certainties
I. Axiom: The Beginning is an Invention
I was rendered last Thursday— calluses branded like signatures, half-formed regrets seen beneath unblinking eyes, and the ghost taste of a breakfast never savoured.
Memories: shadows of impressions no sense could seize. Hume would laugh— not at their absence, but at my foolish faith in these pale echoes.
II. Empirical Evidence is a Theatre Prop
Fossils pose staged in curated strata, stained by time's counterfeit ink— no worm carved those tunnels, no wind whispered through this sediment. Bones lacquered with narrative, painted lies preserving a script we never authored.
My mother's face creases rehearsed, her smile a mask too seamless to unravel without unmasking.
(Was Hume too kind, or simply mistaken?)
III. Rationalism's Curse
Cogito, ergo I was coded— thought before thinker, Descartes reverse-engineered from axioms cold as ice.
I doubt. I am. But did I exist before thought?
If a demon veiled in logic poisoned me with these conclusions, would the venom taste sweet?
IV. The Tension of Consequence
Each scar, each tremor of affection— a forged relic pressed in flesh, a counterfeit imprint.
What is guilt, when the crime was scripted by a playwright whose pen never touched paper— or an audience never seated?
What is love, if longing preceded the spark of my becoming?
Still it burns. Still it binds.
V. Final Postulate
If I am false, yet ache so vividly— does not the illusion deserve reverence?
Perhaps conviction, well-crafted and lived, outweighs brittle, fractured truth.
So let the lie be luminous, let it bleed light like a wound healed in shadow.
And if I end this coming Wednesday, may I vanish as a thing with shadow— almost real.
— Lilith