Worm

[exercise in rewriting stuff I read]

     You're there, again, and here I am down the same, down the wrong trying to be there again too.  It started like this, too, a dark run through bright lights--our streets always lit and our city always endless--and maybe it's wrong for me to remind you like this but God it was good before it was a memory, before it got marked and sealed by all the shit that came after.  Can you forget the shit that came after?  Or just..find a way to extract this instance from all the others?  The city is flooded with light and I've searched so long I'm nearly blind. Maybe it's your ghost in the old caches we put down; or have you been returning all along?
     Because when we came out you went back in and this time to places where I couldn't follow.  I watched the old skin of you but it was a dead thing.  Data husk.  But how could I know you wouldn't come back?  We left because I couldn't take the lights but you needed them didn't you? You move between dark places and exist in filled spaces.  Maybe I'm right to seek your ghost because you're as much what you leave behind as what you become--it's all you are, really.  And it's beautiful.  And I thought it wasn't real because it wasn't real and like some snot-nosed kid I wanted you real and in anticipation, in eagerness, in almost-relief I let go--
     And you were gone.  Because I had chased you there, you were gone.
     What I see now is another sort of data husk--this one I can't approach.  If I did, where would you go?  If I did, what would happen to all the others?  It's not fragility that makes me hesitate, but the opposite--a bulwark, a trip-wire system; and behind it, a network of escape routes.  An army of rogues, indefinitely regrouping, each rendezvous without hierarchy.  No home base. No home.
     I think we could do this forever; I think you have prepared to, though I can't figure out why.  Maybe it doesn't matter.  Maybe because it doesn't matter.  If you moved with anything but a purpose divided and dependent on each part and path that expanded it, exploded it, you'd have something that could be traced, lost, or destroyed. Which isn't important--but it's so unimportant, so trivially boring in its prevalence that, ever the benefactor, you've deemed it worthy of avoidance--a kingpin so small it's more void than object.
     Every night I enter the city and search until I am blinded by it; until your ghost is indistinguishable from the walls and I think you are nowhere--or decidedly everywhere.  The expanding limits of the city; do I only grow the hunting grounds by seeking you?  But I will, still, and I check the old skins for signs of return, even as I drift from them, out of the city and out of the lights.  There are bodies that carry the city like you can't--like I thought you could.  I am tired and blind and when I leave the city there is a warmth; there is a home.  It is not a bad thing, Ellie.  It is not so bad a thing at all.