Truth

At first glance, the young woman crossing the street seems to be wearing a joke. But the line on her shirt carries more than humor: “I always arrive a little late, like the truth.” 

That feels familiar. Clarity often comes after the moment has passed — after the argument, after the wound, after the chance to speak cleanly has gone. We laugh because the line is true in a way that stings.

But truth is closer to weather: shifting, gathering, breaking, clearing. What we call truth often changes as memory reshapes our experiences. A trauma revisited years later may not match the raw fact of what happened years ago— but that does not make it false. It only means we are now able to recognise what the event felt like from the inside.

That is where the old problem of perspective begins. In Rashomon, truth is not one thing sitting at the centre, waiting to be found. It breaks into pieces, each reflecting a different need, fear, or desperation. Nietzsche suspected as much: there is no view from nowhere. Every truth is seen from somewhere — through a body, a history, a particular set of losses. We are never outside the feeling we are trying to describe.

Contradictory truths, then, do not cancel each other out so much as coexist. One person stands in the rain and feels refreshed; another feels trapped. Neither is lying. 

They are merely living from different emotional climates. What changes over time is not truth itself, but our capacity to see more of it. We grow into new angles. We notice different edges of the same stone.

That is why the woman’s shirt works so well as a line for the street — and for life. It speaks to how late understanding often arrives, but also to how patient truth can be. It does not always come with certainty. It can come back in fragments, in revised memory, in a quieter and more honest conversation with ourselves.

Truth isn’t a final verdict. It’s a dialogue that keeps adjusting to the shape of our human lives. 

Overpass

We are going somewhere.

That is all.

The surface is harder than field,

the smell is wrong,

there is noise from below

that does not mean anything we know,

but the body moves

because the body knows

to move,

because movement is not decision

so much as continuation,

the way breathing continues,

the way the herd continues,

one body following warmth

of the body ahead.

We do not know we are ascending.

We know the angle of the ground

under our hooves.

We know the one in front

is still moving.

That is enough.

The boys are there.

We know that too —

the particular electricity of watching,

the way attention has pressure,

the way humans leak intention

from every part of themselves

and think they are being still.

But they are not for us.

They are just another condition,

like wind,

like smell of rain coming,

like the low sound the ground makes

near water.

We do not perform. 

We never performed.

Berger said you withdrew from us

the moment you no longer needed us,

that the look across the fence

became one-sided,

became yours,

became a mirror

you held up to yourselves

and called nature.

We did not withdraw.

We never withdrew.

We were always just here,

doing this,

going somewhere,

in the way that going somewhere

has always meant for us —

not arrival,

not spectacle,

not the clean narrative arc

your minds require,

just the next step,

and the one after,

and the warmth of the one ahead.

Morton would say

you cannot help it —

the mesh of things

is too large for the human eye

to hold without frame,

and so you make us theater,

make the swarm a wonder,

make the migration a story

with a beginning and an end

and a meaning

that was never ours to give.

We are not indifferent to you.

Indifference would require

that we first considered you central.

We are only

moving.

The overpass beneath our hooves

was not made for us.

We do not know that.

We know it holds.

The boys point.

One laughs.

One goes quiet in a way

that might, in twenty years,

become a thought.

We go over the top

and begin to descend

the other side

where they cannot see us anymore

and we continue

exactly as before

because we were never

performing.

We were never

for them.

We were going somewhere.

That is all.

That was always all.

Seen

I am the part of her that watches.

She does not know I am here —

she is busy with the bulb,

reaching up into the uncertain glow,

twisting, adjusting,

trying to get the light right.

She has always been trying

to get the light right.

Not vanity. 

Something closer to fear —

the suspicion, quietly learned,

that what cannot be seen clearly

cannot quite be trusted to exist.

Han would recognize her.

The transparent society

does not demand confession.

It only makes opacity

feel like failure,

like something to fix,

like a bulb that keeps flickering

when it should just stay on.

And so she reaches.

She is not posing.

That is the ironic part.

She has merely internalised the angle,

the quality of light,

the difference between shadow that flatters

and shadow that conceals too much.

The camera is not in her hand.

It is in her mind now.

It has been for years.

McLuhan knew:

the medium does not carry the message,

it becomes the nervous system.

She does not perform for the screen.

She has become

someone for whom

being seen well

is the same thing

as being well.

But I remember the dark.

I remember when this room

could hold ambiguity without apology,

when she could sit in half-light

and not reach for anything,

when the flicker was just a flicker

and not a problem,

when mystery was not

a failure of illumination

but a place she could go

and still be herself,

more herself,

without anyone watching.

Something was kept there.

Not a secret. Not a flaw.

Just the unmanaged interior —

the self that does not perform

because it does not know

it is being seen.

She has almost forgotten

how to go there.

The bulb steadies.

The room sharpens.

She looks around, satisfied,

everything legible,

everything in its proper light.

I flicker once

in the place she no longer looks.

I am still here.

I have always been here.

I am the darkness

she keeps trying to fix.