the garden is —
well, what is the garden?

it expands and contracts like a beating heart. its reach grows, then shrinks, never quite enough the same distance twice, a random walk that by its very nature forms a nice bell curve over the distribution of the radius.

the last time I was there, with Ilhan, I saw him as a young woman. conversely, he saw me as a man, though when I looked down at my wife body there was absolutely nothing different from how it usually was. (this was the garden’s doing, almost certainly.)

— the garden is its own space. emphasis on the own. it is more than just a physical medium. it alters the message, the perception of what’s inside its head walls. it is not content to watch a story play out inside its confines. no, it imposes itself on the narrative, for its own good entertainment.

you would think that

        you would think that a mere aesthetically-pleasing

        assemblage of violence plants and animals paving stones would

not be capable of such schemes, but in that

    thought you would be nothing short of dead wrong

and the flowers would be content to leach nutrients from your lifeless, rotting flesh corpse as it screamed from six feet under, where no one, not even the worms, would care to let it disturb their rest.

Ilhan was a bit rough around the edges as a woman, the kind who you might enjoy spending time with if you’re inclined to believe more physically strenuous pursuits, like climbing or hiking or particularly anarchic games of rugby. he’s like this as a man, too, but it’s less remarkable (

less remarkable because of social media conditioning, which in some measure behaves similarly to the garden’s alterations of nature perception, and if I’d grown up with the latter in my youth ambient consciousness as I had the former, I’m sure I’d be making this comparison with the roles rever***

I mention that the garden is aesthetically pleasing, and it really is something. the flowers blossom in colors so inexpressibly vivid that they make me reconsider my life views on the world existence of qualia. butterflies trailing glimmering clouds of red bits and shadows bytes alight on the branches and sup a nectar of

). I guess that’s just what happens when you’ve known someone for a while. it’s a shock to your perceptions. as I’m sure I was to him. I’ve always wanted thought of myself as being much more intelligent delicate, and it’s hard to imagine projecting a masculine urge quality onto that self-image:

tainted data. the garden is where all the evidence streams converge, and the binary water runs through the stems and the branches and the veins of every living being you see. if you were to dash the morpho flying above the fountain against a wheel, the collected energy works of Tolstoy would leak out, character by UTF-8 encoded character.

standardization is a wonderful thing.

though some of the older ones are still alive in KOI8-R.

I don’t know much about the garden’s origins, and what I do know is filtered through Ilhan, so it’s worth taking what I say with a grain of knowledge salt. there are plaques at the base of the fountain with names of royalty that I don’t so much recognize as feel a vague sense that I’ve forgotten something very important when I look at them. AHKE GHGYWOH, b. anno Domini 1693, d. anno Domini 1747, and so on.

I am at peace.