THE BLACKLIGHT // DEVELOPER CONSOLE
SOURCE LOADED: Your Submission: The Gift of Giving Yourself Away (Flower)…
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INPUT
The first conclusion arrives before the first person.
THE END.
You want something real with another person.
Wonderful.
Apparently that settles it.
Except almost everything that matters comes afterward.
Standards.
Self-respect.
Time.
Sex.
Expectations.
Trust.
Someone “on the other side of the screen” who has expectations too.
The false ending is funny because it is obviously premature.
Then the same problem keeps appearing in less obvious forms.
“I hope to prove, through some slopped together words, why I am God’s gift to women…
I mean, why I am worthy of your time, respect, and trust.”
The joke overstates the sales pitch.
What follows explains why any sales pitch has a problem.
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MECHANISM
The system begins constructing a person before the person has arrived.
“Before any of that can happen, we submit something else first.
An idea of ourselves.”
A profile.
A photograph.
“A confession of how we see ourselves, shaped by how we want others to see us.”
That distinction is precise.
It is not necessarily a false self.
It is an idea of a self.
Something selected, arranged, described, photographed, and sent ahead of the fuller person.
The attempted proof is already demonstrating the problem.
Someone is using words to explain why they deserve trust while explaining that words can only present an idea of the person asking to be trusted.
Then two lines establish the limit:
“Enough of ourselves to be wanted.
Not enough to be truly known.”
Wanted requires less information than known.
That difference creates room.
“We give someone enough to imagine the rest.”
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VARIABLES
The missing parts do not necessarily remain missing.
Imagination can complete them.
Then another thing appears before either person has actually been fully known:
“The possibility of us.”
So before two people truly meet, there can already be several ideas in circulation.
The idea I present of myself.
The concept I have of what I want.
The possibility I imagine for us.
That is a considerable amount of relationship to construct out of people who are still mostly unknown.
Then comes another warning against moving too quickly:
“let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Followed almost immediately by:
“Let’s go back a bit.”
The structure keeps reversing because the conclusion keeps arriving before the evidence.
First THE END.
Then the imagined us.
Then back again.
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CONDITIONS
The system changes when a concept encounters another person.
Before the person came the concept.
A story.
A song.
A movie.
A live action role-playing event.
Someone else’s relationship.
The concept arrives from places where it can be experienced without having needs of its own.
That is why it can remain perfect.
“It has no bad timing.
No contradictions.
No needs of its own.
No expectations of us.”
Those four absences matter.
They are also four things another person is almost guaranteed to bring.
Timing.
Contradiction.
Needs.
Expectations.
The qualities that disturb the perfect concept are the qualities that begin proving somebody else is actually there.
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DEBUG LOG
Detected: A complete relationship concept can form before the relationship exists.
Updated: Presentation of self separated from full knowledge of self.
Flagged: Imagination fills missing information before reality can provide it.
Reclassified: Imperfections are not interruptions to reality; they are evidence of another person.
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CURRENT STATE
The final contradiction is reduced to two sentences.
“They ruin everything.
They also make it real.”
Nothing needs cleaning up between those statements.
The same person can do both.
Reality does not merely fulfill the concept.
It interferes with it.
Another person arrives with information the concept never had to contain.
Their timing may be wrong.
They may contradict what was imagined.
They need things.
They expect things.
The fantasy becomes less perfect at exactly the moment it becomes less imaginary.
That makes the final grammatical joke more than a joke.
“Eventually, the concept has to become a person.
Not a place.
Not a thing.
A person.”
Then:
“Making sense of the noun-sense.”
A noun can be a person, place, or thing.
All three categories are placed on the table.
Only one is accepted.
Person.
Only one of them can bring the bad timing, contradictions, needs, and expectations that were missing from the perfect concept.
The first line asks for something real.
By the end, realness has acquired a cost.
The other person has to be allowed to become inconveniently, unpredictably, irreducibly other.
Otherwise, the concept may remain perfect.
It just never has to become a person.
Before treating another person’s contradictions, needs, or inconvenient timing as evidence that something is wrong, ask whether they are actually evidence that reality has replaced the version you imagined.
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SOURCE UNCHANGED.
READER STATE UPDATED.
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