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date: 2019-09-23
weight: 26
---

Apophenia

> What?

Apophenia. Connections. Imaginary lines traced from topic to topic in cheap butcher's twine.

> And the topics?

Imaginary. Or real, but only half remembered. I'm spinning a web.

> Are you catching something?

You?

> Are you answering with a question?

I'm unsure.

> You're not catching me in that.

You sound so final.

> Not my department.

Right. Is that a fact, then? I'm not catching you in this web. Are you the web?

> Not my department.

The spaces between, then. The negative spaces outlined by twine wrapped around pins. There are connections--

> Or not.

--or not, and there are topics, imaginary or not, and then there's you, there, in the place between. You, the liminal creature. You, defined by absence.

> Presence and absence are not my department, either.

Are you some cousin to apophenia, then? Some relative to that *unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness*? Are you that numinous, abnormal meaningfulness?

> I am easier to define in negatives. I am not presence and absence, but between them. Beyond them. Your ally, but not your friend. Real enough to impinge on your reality, but totally imaginary. **Not** here. **Not** doing. **Not** thinking, feeling, acting.

So, are you?

> Anything else is just pareidolia.
