## Endless Assessment

Around and around thoughts flow like water downstream with eddies behind rocks building whirlpools as holes in identity. These holes are pins that prick through the selves within me to hold them in alignment and hold the totality up against the wall on display for some higher me to investigate.

Too many words, too many thoughts.

> But tell me, who are these itinerants, more fleeting than even  
> we ourselves, since early on wrung out by an urgent (for *whose* sake, *whose?*)  
> always unsatisfied will; which rather wrings them,  
> bends them, slings and swings them, throws them  
> and catches them back; and as from an oiled,  
> slipperier air, they come down  
> on the worn out carpet, thinner from their  
> incessant landing, this lost, forlorn carpet in the cosmos,  
> laid on there like a plaster, as if  
> Earth's skyward outskirts had been smarting there.\footnote{\cite[47]{duino}}

It is hard to pull myself back upstream against the overwhelming current of so many thoughts. Already these waters have eroded the banks of the stream. Already these whorls ache within me. Already I feel my skin pruning, going soft, as though it may soon slough off under the onslaught of this investigation.

And even if it doesn't slough off, I will still be more vulnerable, will I not? I will still keep digging at these various selves and my skin, weakened by water, will break and tear, and stain these various mes pink.

> It's not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It's that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now, it's as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood.\footnote{\cite[119]{timewar}}

Ah, even my words are colored rosy from all this exploration!

I cannot stop, though, can I? I dragged myself upstream and felt that singular me delaminate, and now I am...what, three? Four? That paper-thin me sheared off into impossibly thinner selves, so sheer that, holding them up to the sun, one would still be blinded, the edges disappearing into invisibility.

And still, around and around thoughts flow like water downstream with eddies behind rocks building whirlpools as holes in each.

I am bound to them.

Though I may fear that they will tear, they also feel impossibly strong. They also bind me tighter than I could imagine. Where once that skin tore, now those identities hold it fast. 

> And if I stop, I'll surely die.\footnote{\cite[106]{ally}}

Around and around thoughts flow like water down stream and the edges of these identities flutter prettily. They catch the light even as, having once more been washed away in this endless cycling, I claw my way back upstream.

"Am I doing this right?" I ask those fluttering edges.

*There is not a right way to do this.* 

"Is this a valid way to explore?"

*Valid is a meaningless term.*

"Is it okay? Is it alright? Will I be okay?"

*You will,* they say. *You will and you will and you will, and I suppose perhaps even you will.*

"I feel embarrassed (though not shamed) that what I had considered a settled and permanent part of my identity is maybe not either," I said to Echo during those slow wriggings-toward of our early relationship, as the edges of my paper-thin self began to fray. "And I also feel embarrassed discussing that with you in particular. I don't deal with impostor syndrome to quite the extent that I mentioned last night, but neither is it wholly absent."

"You feel embarrassed discussing plurality with a plural person in particular?" ey replied.

"I think I am embarrassed because of the role our interactions have played in bringing this to the surface."

There was a moment of silence as, I imagine, ey leaned back in eir chair, brow knit. "Goodness, what a tapestry."

> Listen to me. I am your echo.\footnote{\cite[149]{timewar}}

And there, behind the scenes, that delamination prickled further through my paper-thin self.

> How I would then like to hide from the longing [...]\footnote{\cite[59]{duino}}

Even as we worked for weeks and months together after that, even as we pried carefully at those fluttering edges, ran that fraying me beneath the rushing waters, I worried still that I took up too much space. We inch by inch slid me apart into two, into three and four, and my worries increased twice, three times and four, that I was taking up multiples of me worth of space in eir life.

And even so, even as I strove towards what felt like a more fulfilling future, a more complete identity, my worries at times were founded. After all, the worries that others had for me, their connections, were impacted by this, were they not? Dave worried that I was disappearing into the work, disappearing into some other dynamic inaccessible to him. Robin worried that I was too anxious --- and what a lovely route to expand anxiety! --- about the effects of expanded identities on my relationships with others.

But "[w]hat gives life its "living" and its "psychic" aspect is the "vibrations" that permeate and surround each living thing and account for the "chemistry" between people," Will Crichton writes of the Duino Elegies.\footnote{\cite[103]{duino}} "In other words, life, or the non-mechanistic side of life, is in the same general category as light and radio waves and the subtle forces that these generate."

"God is in the dynamics," I have said. "God is a verb," say others. "See that of God in everyone," say yet more.

I live a sometimes panentheism.

Animistic, I see in these dynamics the divine in these relations between me and mine. Between Dave and me, Robin and me. Between Echo and this me and this me and this me and this me.

> Angel, oh take it, pluck it, that tiny-flowered healing herb.  
> Protect it! Find a vase for it! Place it among those joys  
> not yet open to us, in an appealing urn.\footnote{\cite[51]{duino}}

And now, I must-- what? Must dwell in that space I take up in the world and claim that I, too, bear god in the dynamics? Act out God? Allow that of God to be seen in me? I must see that dynamic between myself and myself and myself and myself?

So around and around thoughts flow like the divine downstream with eddies behind rocks of yet more divinity building whirlpools as holes in identity.
