The Best Letter I Never Received: AJ Fitzwater
This letter was commissioned by Verb for Verb Festival’s showcase event on Friday 6 November 2020 at National Library of New Zealand.
To Be Read Upon the Uploading of Our Consciousness to the Stream
by
AJ Fitzwater
Dear My Selves,
Congratulations, we’re dead!
Socially acceptable sympathies for the leave-taking of our meat suit.
Now no one is looking ... You. Fortunate. Bench. We’ve finally got what we wanted: To go light-speed, dressed in facets of light. No more constantly oxidising carcass. No more living between the cracks with a body that is NOT a problem to be solved, yet despairing at the us-shaped hole we couldn’t quite burn through the world. We’re burning through the chaotic void, well equipped to understand transhumanism, because to be transgender or genderqueer is to already understand transcendence of the body and mind. It’s like the Stream was built for us and our queer kin.
I’m imagining us as ones and zeroes, circling the world unending...unless there’s a power cut, or micro-meteor strike, or some wiser alien civilization decides to yeet us into the sun. But, hang on. We spend an entire lifetime breaking binaries only to become another. Though, I’m sure once we get to this point we’ll have figured out how to arrange those ones and zeroes into an infinite variety of usses; we can be as big as the atmosphere, heavy and hot as the Earth’s core, or as small as a perfectly crafted sentence.
Maybe we’ll peel off a few of us to head out to the stars. Maybe send another to become the greatest library in history; we always wanted to live in a library, catch up on all those books we missed, chewing words, re-bodying with thoughts, becoming sleek on ponderance.
And maybe, at some far future point we can’t imagine right now, those pieces of us will come back together to share the glories of the universe, the feats humanity has achieved, discover what fallibilities we dragged along with us, and – or - the pure stupidity of it all.
Yeah, I’m writing to you from one of those Stupid Years, where it wouldn’t have surprised us at all if a giant space crab ate the Earth, left humanity milling around its digestive tract for a thousand years, then pooped us out the other end, hopefully having learned our lesson about mutualistic relationships and commensal structures. You’ll probably remember This Stupid Year better than I will, once the light of the Stream opens up all those pathways our brain-meats decided to shut down in order to survive it, and many other bad years. Good on us. Have fun with that.
Actually, I’m envious we’ll be able to pick off the scabs from those memories and emotions, make sense out of the raw wounds underneath that 12 year old and 36 year old us couldn’t.
I’ve often imagined writing letters to younger selves, but then I realize it would be pouring the wine of wisdom into a broken bottle. You know and I know the surety we clung to, the contortions we made, how sheer terror made us an excellent liar, especially to ourselves. Yet, without that ability to lie convincingly we wouldn’t have become the storyteller we are today and tomorrow and yesterday.
So the only time travel we have is the slowest of them all; one second per second. Sending all of our fragments from the now into the next, hoping to find the glue, the stitches, the right words, to hold us together until we reach you, the one who has found the light and entered the beauty of the Stream.
Sometimes I think about the many selves we birth and put away each day; the many usses we try on, tried on, will try on, like miniature alternate universes. We heard something somewhere, about how each cell of the body is replaced over and over during the course of our lifetimes; the body rewritten like the many times we’ve tried to write this letter. If the body has the ability to rewrite itself, why did it leave behind the scars, the pressure on the vagus nerve that made our heart feel too big for it’s bony cage. At least it left behind the tattoos, the laugh and frown and caution lines, our broken fingernails and bones. We couldn’t do without those reminders, those outward chameleon prey signs; we don’t taste good. We’re all gristle and salt.
We have a lot of work to do, a lot of usses to become, a lot of gaps to fill between now and when. We gotta make sure the planet survives late-stage capitalism so that open source Stream is a reality. We’re not uploading unless everyone can upload, and if they can’t we better put that thing back where it came from, or so help me.
Do regular back ups. Tell great lies about us. Admire our regrets and polish their facets. Become the multitudes we always wanted to be. Weave with other multitudes. Expand. Fail gloriously. Break apart. Rest. Leave those cracks unmended so those following behind can split the meaning of gender, or lack thereof, wide open.
And don’t forget: you not only matter, you light, baby.
Welcome to the star-stuff.
Yours in perpetuity,
AJ
