Recollection of my Undergraduate Exhibition: free-writing 11/9/25

On November 7th, 2025, SAIC's Undergraduate Exhibition opened, in which I am a participant of. I recall imagining what sort of work I would make for it. I used to run off of a vision I saw in a previous SAIC show, which I now realize was mostly likely a Graduate exhibition, of a large, wide, long roll of paper beautifully running along some sort of contraption-like structure. It was a print, perhaps. Or at least could look like one. Or maybe I imagined mine being a print. I originally fantasized over this when I used to make ink paintings and pretend to be an abstract expressionist: black and white on paper, large, taking over. I fantasized about it again when I made a lithograph from one of our larger stones, printed on folded paper, chine-collé'd to itself: black and white on paper, large, taking over. I thought I had struck a new turn to follow on my 'art making practice,' one that visually expressed who I thought I was at the time, who I thought I was expressing at the time. I had my first non-positive, ambivalent critique over the print: "it wasn't large enough."

I went into the gallery on the 7th to take some iPhone photos of my work.

On November 8th, 2025, SAIC's Undergraduate Exhibition had its opening reception, which I went to. I figured it would be a lot of standing awkwardly and glancing around, recognizing faces that never quite form certainly in my memory, and not doing anything about this half-recognition. I recently had gone to my parent's house to bring my bicycle over after a decently hefty iMessage debate over whether or not I should be allowed to bring the bicycle over. I had felt myself form solidly once again in the cool November air that was approaching, and my all black-and-white Canondale gifted bicycle looked at me as a being somewhere between an extension of myself and a pet. I left with my backpack full, containing my Macbook, a spool of thick black thread, and any all-black gothic ouji lolita clothing I happened to own. It was encapsulated on the 4 mile bike ride to the commuter rail station, in which I rushed due to underestimating the effect of suburban infrastructure and a minor uphill course: I was my bike and I also was on my bike, and as much as I wanted to stop rushing, it made no difference if I did, because once I'd stop rushing, my bike would stop, and so I'd stop. I was threatened by something of an external force, but I was also able to recognize and identify my own self and the very extent into how far I exist. I needed those costume-like clothes as suits of armour.

When I came back from the gallery on the 7th, I spotted a black cat by the church and played with it until I realized it could be lost. I took a photo of its collar that had 2 phone numbers attached to it, a 773, and an area code I didn't recognize. I thought about calling it but got too nervous, but then I got nervous about getting nervous about not doing anything regarding the cat. So I texted them when I got home, and it seems that the cat had just escaped and the two owners lived nearby. I was thanked and that was that. I existed as an 847, how strange.

During the reception, everyone was holding flower bouquets and placing down flower bouquets, and I was very confused by this sight until I recalled watching my Godmother who isn't actually my Godmother's youngest daughter act in her high school play, and how at the end, everyone would deliver flower bouquets to the actors. I didn't think much of it, because to be a stage actor had this traditional 'fuck you it's old but it's real' revolutionary aspect to it, and I figured flowers were old and revolutionary or something, at least outside of Valentine's day when the bouquet's at the grocery store would dwindle in stock.

I walked around with my hands in my pockets looking at the work, focusing on ones I hadn't focused on prior. I was constantly moving back and forth, two-stepping out of the way for people to walk past, or walking around people who decided to be more stationary. There was a moment where I about to walk through a people-hole opening, almost in a queue of gallery-lookers, when someone from a less relevant angle stepped forward and looked at me with a face slightly crinkled, a face I recognize. Actually, this happened multiple times. I don't recall a single time I nodded with a silent smile or motioned with my hand like one does when letting those older than you board the train first, or like one does when those older than you let you board the train first. It happens in the art museum cafe I frequent by the power of a family membership. Never more am I so misaligned with someone's thought process, yet so grossly attached to the societal operations of a scene. No one is like-minded, at least between me and the other members. I cannot describe what happens in a way that properly ropes in its own context, but I can make an analogy: that morning, on the 8th, the L train passengers had formed an interior queue to exit upon approaching a station, myself included, as always, when a lady around my mother's age with a large luggage suitcase grabbed my arm almost intimately. She squeezed it and leaned forward into me. Although this could have been because of the train's movement, the extent of her movement seemed unnecessary. She looked at me in the face, face crinkled, and excused herself, and in the clear disparage between our thought processes, she declared that she was getting off at this station, alluding to an annoyance over me blocking her way. The train was stopping now and all I wanted to do was just face forward again to prepare for a 0 millisecond reaction of my feet taking a step forward and exiting. I told her that I too was exiting, but her disposition didn't change much.

I walked around swiftly and felt very short compared to the gallery walls and attendees. I wondered what it would feel like sensation-wise to see my work after walking through and familiarizing myself with the images of everyone else's stranger-work. I lowered my expectations and expected a similar operation to waking up and viewing a painting you had worked on at night, wondering why it seemed so fresh, why the tides you once swam in have now shifted into a picture of a beach. When I turned the corner to walk into my work, nothing happened.

I was dressed in one of the shirts I had taken from the house, ordinary slacks, and my black trench coat with leather gloves in its pockets which I had thought I lost but instead found them the morning of. Its pockets were perfectly positioned for putting your hands inside of. My visual memory was of my coat, as well as flashing instances of students' parents whom I had just finished describing as 'formal; like they raised their children on a diet of nuts and tofu; but work as lawyers.' There was a lot of celebratory moaning and joke-making all said in a finalizing tone. I suppose it was a tone of graduation, although plenty of them were not graduating this semester, myself included, and it was still only November.

I just now attempted to remember what a graduating tone felt like. I can force out a picture of me leaving my high school graduation in a hurry so that my parents and I were not stuck in the traffic of SUV's maneuvering out of the parking lot. But nothing in this memory scene is significant enough to repeat, I don't even want to share that this scene was something I had repeated in a hand-me-down fashion. I witnessed my own scene 3 years prior, watching my brother do the same. What I had actually recalled was a scene from my middle school graduation, as our class walked out from one area to the next, from the ceremony to some classroom-like space akin to an after party. Held in one of the high school's one-of-many gymnasiums, I recall the bright orange wooden floors and blue walls of its corridor, I recall walking down in a queue and I recall recalling the times I queued up as an elementary school student, and how my last name always placed me alphabetically in the 4th position, which I considered to be an ugly number compared to something like the beautiful, red colored '5'. Overtime, I started to understand the number as an extension of myself. As we turned one corner, the queue bunched up and stopped, and I recall the blue walls very vividly here, because a group of my classmates were in the corner crying with each other. I was confused why it was happening, and the circle of hugging students had expressed that these were joyful tears. That didn't help. I gazed out with a fuzzy vision at familiar faces doing unfamiliar things. I had taken what was left in a bottle of Tylenol, and I was thinking about a student I never knew who had a seizure during a school dance.

I'm not sure what I expected when I kept circling around my work, peeking at it while trying to hide the fact that I was peeking. Consciously, I went to peek to see if my book was okay, if it wasn't slanted or fallen over, but this quickly turned into a neurotic need to see if others were looking at my work. Each time I peeked, a large group would be socializing in the section so that no one had space to see the work on the walls. I walked past for a final time with intent to leave and saw someone taking photos of my work, and then saw a member of the large group step backwards and bump into her, in which she huddled into herself and briskly exited the scene.

That morning, on the 8th, when I started to participate in the operation of the train queue, someone sitting down who had been looking at me prior looked at me again. I recognized the look, located somewhere in the quivering of the eyes and the shaky, slow movements of the body. He motioned a tapping motion and I took out my earbud and bent down to hear him. I looked raw as fuck.

How to Make Use of Time: free-writing 12/15/2025

I have not been submitting applications to art shows because I didn't have the money and now that I do have some money I don't have the energy nor the care. I have come to terms with the slowness of life and the 'falling into place' that occurs. It seems that's how it all goes, for everyone. I do not want to force things; I say, I have always said, to myself.

I have not submitted to many shows in my lifetime because I eliminate unrealistic possibilities before there is a chance of exerting my time and energy towards unnecessary things: unrealistic possibilities are impossible, impossibility is the end sentence, the end punctuation. It is inherently unnecessary to chase after impossible things. I have declared impossibility and in doing so I have killed "it". What is "it"? Is it myself?

Is what you would like to hear. I am trying to describe something logical, I can picture it in my mind, it has a structure to it. It tastes good, and smells like a refrigerator. It's always tilted diagonally because I'm always staring at it with my head tilted curiously, and the closer I get to understanding the structure, the more it sucks me in. My neck twists and turns a bit more, my eyes are drawn in from my magnet pupils. It hurts but it feels so good. I think it's euphoria. I could get addicted to this, I say with my hand clamped over my mouth and my eyes darted to the side. I'm looking at you, blank computer monitor screen, my lovely. And as you look back at me, I appear like a demented being. I'm somewhere else. I mean, I literally am. I am in the fridge. My mind enters the structure and I interact with it directly: to interact with logic would be to interact in the mind. Holy fucking shit I am onto something crazy here that no one understands. Drooling a bit, probably, I stare out in a rare moment of absentmindedness. You don't see me on a phone call, talking to "the other end", eyes blank, distant, talking to someone who isn't there: dementia. But you see me in the fridge. That is the difference. That is why I do not submit to art shows.

I sit on the train and shake a bit every few seconds with my eyes staring out, open wide, bloodshot, and my hands cramped and closed-in on themselves, my knuckles protruding. I am worried because... I am... I am in the structure and I cannot bring you in. I can try to reconstruct the structure in words but that only works with certain individuals. If I exit the structure and attempt to retell my experience in it, my words fail me, and I construct false walls and angles that had not previously existed. Suddenly, I contradict myself, I realize faults, I realize flaws, but I know that these were never there in the first place, it is just that I have lost the original structure. It's agonizing. It's the only time I've ever grieved.

It goes around and around; the thoughts, I mean. I don't overthink, I'm not an "over-thinker." I don't ruminate. I don't have a "voice in the back of my head" telling me bad things about myself. I'm running marathons, motherfucker, and I am each and every voice out there. I'm every single one of them. Yours, hers, his. I'm running laps around you as you tinker with your marathon-signs and wonder which constructed phrase fits best with the sentiment you are attempting to express. I'm running laps away from something, and I don't know what, but the fact that the route is circular makes me question everything. The only thing we have in common is time.

Sit up, grab a drink, take a break. Relax. Relax time. There is relaxing time and there is working time. Is there thinking time? What happens to time when I talk to someone; stupid fucking question, it isn't real. I'm running laps and I hate running and I hate 'laps', I hate repetition, I hate unnecessary repetition, I've been clarifying that since I was twelve years old. I've been drilling into the same things for so long and nothing has come out of it, but I continue to do so because I believe in it. Woah, what? Never mind, it won't make sense. It won't make sense most of all because everyone is a believer with a phone-call tied to the side of their head, eyes glazed over during every conversation held, every conversation during held every second of every day, nonstop lap-running around and around. I can't keep up with my eyes. All we care about is the movement and the amount of times one's foot slaps against the ground, we are hysterical.

It's called making use of your time. You should submit each application with a foot slap and a punch to the face. You should do this before it's too late because we never know when it will be too late, that's the entire point. It's called university and working towards a career and then having a career. What entails having a career? Is it not surrounding yourself with people who understand what you do and therefore have constructed it into a job-action-object with enough false verification to pass under any lie detector? For instance, it's not easy to find someone who truly doesn't believe in medicine, to any extent. Or maybe lawyers are a better example... the paranoid are always afraid of lawyers.

The point is that when you tell me you are a curator I don't really have a clear idea in my head of what you do and how you do it because. My head just jerked around. Oh God, they're coming... I can't keep my eyes fixated on a certain point. I'm denying a false reality, which isn't triumphant in itself because a false reality is still a reality. And we still live it.

You should be making use of your time because we are united by time and all we have is time and, OK, sure, you in the corner, I will entertain the idea of non-linear time, but I will do so begrudgingly because it does not matter to my point in the slightest and I do not have enough energy to help you enter my logic-refrigerator, so you will just have to believe me on that reasoning. Grasp reality, grasp the air, grasp 'grounded-ness', grasp presence, grasp consciousness, grasp focus, grasp attention, grasp knowing, grasp confidence. It takes a quick motion but you really can grab at them and catch them in your little hands. And remember nothingness, remember nothing, remember loss, remember regret, remember worry, remember forgetting. Think about humanity in a selfish, humanistic manner, and get all sentimental about it. Think about humanity in awe, think about our cognitive capabilities. Then, get hit by a car: time. It's time to get hit by a car.

Time is things 'going on' or 'moving on' or maybe just 'moving,' you can cut the phrase off there and it still works. Moving does not mean that the things inside of the movement change or become this or that in any direction at all. Moving means moving. This time, we do not have the controls to it. We can measure it and understand it and use our own language for it, but there is something beyond that. The reason that 'beyond' thing is really there is because it permeates everything around us, in us, outside of us. I die, you live on. But I'm not so certain of that. I live, you die. Do you even know who I am?

Perhaps: to be successful is to make use of your time so that you may advance into a career that allows you to some day reach a point of finality, a point of rest. To make use of your time is to start—possibly even to have—a career while you are a student. To begin a career while already having one is to plunge into a deep, deep coma, a career-oriented stupor consisting of many smiles and slaps on the back. To win is to end, to kill is to make final. To be successful is to be not a student at all. And then: never consider this, ever.

Untitled free-writing 11/8/25

It was so quiet outside that the loudest noise was from my soft boot soles hitting the ground. It was so quiet that I'm now thinking. It's 4:16pm and I'm sitting at my kitchen table for the first time in weeks. When I look out, I can see a streetlamp light up the bottom of a tree, its leaves glowing a bright yellow. There is a darker yellow elsewhere, in the sky, on the ground, because the sun sets earlier now. It is November. And on this Saturday, I thought about an opinion I frequently hear from my schoolmates: that they do not like Chicago---No, more so that, actually, well, they like Chicago but they can't live here, they can't, because, like, momentary pause, eyes glance to the side, a laugh of a kind I never heard until I attended a private arts college, giggle, heheh,  they need their nature. 'I need my nature, my trees.' A catchphrase at this point. A time-marker. Sometimes they moan when they say it. I hear it less frequently as time goes on due to the increased interpersonal separation necessarily experienced when you work your way through those four private years, but I still hear it at least once a semester. That pause... my stomach always churns because I can tell it'll happen, and I hate predicting things non-intuitively. I could throw up.

To this day, I still cannot tell whether an emphasis should be placed on 'nature' or 'my nature'. They would say the former, I would say the latter. A suburban Californian town that I only say is in California because I have a lot of classmates from California but really has the vibe of a highly-educated Connecticut town (which cannot be the case because so rarely do I have classmates from the Northeast, oh là là!). I mean, really, do I really believe there are more trees there (wherever 'there' is)? Tall trees line my streets up and down, so rarely am I ever out in the sun unless I'm waiting for the bus on one of those bus-waiting roads: if the wait time is long enough to write home about, it's a particular kind of road, pavement à la Devon. Sometimes the grass is shit but sometimes it's not and sometimes people grow butterfly gardens and sunflowers in their front yard, even in front of apartment buildings. Do my schoolmates all coincidentally live by a forest preserve? As in, these people cannot be rural mountaineers because they're graduating from a high school class of over 200 students. I graduated in a class of over 500, but I didn't live by a forest preserve, I lived by a prairie preserve that was nothing to write home about because the whole area was a wetland and so the difference didn't feel particularly strong. Well, my part of town at least. Or, because any undeveloped land was a natural prairie anyways, just without the designation of being 'protected.' FOR SALE! Call 847 something something. No trees though, get that. More pavement than Chicago all the way 30 miles out. All the way 30 miles out where you still find undeveloped land that has yet to be twisted and thrown up on by suburban developers. But I stop myself short here, because the architectural style I was about to criticize stopped existing in the 90's, and so I guess no one would be throwing up on the land because it was 2020 something and developers had their bad-architecture eyes elsewhere. More than 30 miles out now, beyond the prairie, enter the farm, here's the vision: mega town homes with front doors and garages so far apart they have nothing to do with each other, all so that you can forget your neighbor exists. Not like I like my neighbor, I've started stomping on the floor when he laughs too loudly. I say mega because they're huge looking and take up a lot of space, but the amount of square footage leaves a sour taste in your mouth. You realize it's not so large after all, it's just box-like, it just looks large. It's kind of fat with a swollen head, and it's kind of ugly when you think about it, when you see the aesthetic clash between the U2-listening generation's window placements and the plastic-baby box design. Goo goo ga ga. I can fit your family in a bungalow, motherfucker.

I grew up by a forest preserve, there's pictures of me there to prove it. I have memories too. I was too scared to walk across a log to cross a stream. My defense at the time was that I was 4. My real defense is that I'm not a mountaineer, what do you people expect from me? I was so over it, I just wanted someone to take me to the Broadview Public Library. I mention that one because it was so small and therefore it's funny. I really did like it, though. The one time I became a mountaineer, at Starved Rock, because of course I went to Starved Rock, I watched my brother get stung by a wasp, which seemed like it hurt, and I thought about when I watched my brother have his first allergic reaction to tree nuts, but instead of throwing a side-eye and simply wishing to move on and get tucked into bed, I felt a bit of fear because I knew it could happen to me too, and I knew that someone was allergic to bees in the family, or maybe my mom was the one, just mildly allergic, I don't know, there was a beekeeper somewhere in the family. I've never been stung yet so I currently hate bees because I cannot be certain one won't kill me and god I never go to the doctor so I'd probably just lay down and die right there on the pavement: train station platform pavement, there are still trees around us, do not worry. The photos feature me standing and my brother striking some sort of pose. In another, my dad is carrying me over a stream. Bingo. That's the memory. Not that it matters, I mix up the photos from Starved Rock and the ones from the forest preserve because in every photo of me outside, I'm wearing some baseball hat with some red t-shirt and shorts and slip-on hand-me-down shoes, and I remember each and every one of these garments because they were all my favorite, but I can't differentiate them temporally because all I ever wore was a red t-shirt and a baseball hat and slip-on shoes. I was always concerned about how worn down the slip-on shoes got, because the sole of those sorts of shoes would separate easily, and you know, Razor scooters, as well as the fact that I would stop on my bike using my feet because I guess kid bikes don't have the same brakes as adult ones. Or maybe I just did that. I can't remember. Kill all nostalgia. Kill all nostalgia. End my suffering. Until 2022, Starved Rock was the farthest west I had ever gone. In 2022 I went to Minneapolis to visit a college. I learned that I became particularly overwhelmed at events, I was learning what events were, and so I was already entering a layer of hell after the college-tour and the whatever else admissions event that was going on. I remember almost everyone was from Minnesota. It was cute to be from Chicago. The school was too small, so I didn't end up attending. If I did, they would have given me a free Macbook. Maybe I'm scared of getting doted on.

I will not talk about the Mall of America because I don't think anyone wants me to talk about the Mall of America and I only spent 10 minutes inside of there. Our hotel was by the Mall of America because it was the cheapest, and we drove anyways. I only say that to explain... What, the IHOP? That was a good IHOP. I don't remember any other IHOP, though. Never again will I sit in a car on the way to Minneapolis. I'll explain: I went to the art museum the day after the college event, but I slept with my mind buzzing and my stomach full of really good thai food from a place that was actually really modern so it was kind of fancy in a claiming-something-is-posh way but also in a Minneapolis way so it was fine and it tasted good. Actually I don't know when I went to the museum. The point is that I was very tired and hadn't yet recovered from the event being an event, and at a certain point I still had very much to see inside of the museum. I felt my legs crumbling, each step as if digging through mud. I had never felt that before. It's like going out without breakfast, refusing to eat lunch, and you're going out to some place like Wicker Park without even buying anything (and I allude towards Wicker Park negatively because it's so popular and I'm so insufferable so I can't enjoy it but, god, sometimes you just enter a store there and immediately remember why it's so popular in the first place: we are all a part of a mass human framework), but you have to walk fast to the train because the next one is in 20 minutes for some reason. Genuinely some reason. I will not criticize the CTA. I am talking about a time after they fixed the blue line tracks. Oh, there it is, the sound of crying. You don't understand who was at fault. It was IDOT. IT WAS IDOT. I'm crazy, and everyone else has their ears stuffed with cotton. And as you turn the corner and decide 'I will start jogging' you suddenly can't. And you get that realization of, oh, yes, perhaps we do need to eat. Have you ever tried running into Union Station from Clinton? You cannot. You also haven't. Blue line this and that. Fuck, those Clinton stairs are brutal. Am, I, right? Ha, ha. Airline food. I kind of loved the airline food I ate. The second time it was kind of shit but they had problems heating them up so maybe that's why. Both times it was the United Airlines beef lasagna. I actually don't like meat in lasagna. No, not kind of, I really loved it.

Turn the plane around, we are facing the wrong direction, we must get back to Minneapolis. Well, not on the plane, or, I guess you can fly to Minneapolis, but why would you? Land in the museum, exit, legs are jelly, you must continue on, for the sake of art, for the sake of art. A suffering falls upon you in a manner your 18 year old self hasn't yet felt because you are 18 years old. A throat that is kind of sore... hmmmnn... Hours later, sick in the car, sick in an overwhelmed way not in a nausea car-sick way: the flu if it wasn't a virus but instead was a piece of existentialist literature. Now I remembered: the museum was after the college event, then I ate the thai food, then I woke up and headed out onto the highway. That's why I slept so badly. Knew what was ahead: Wisconsin. I am shivering just thinking about the billboards and Culver's signs flashing before my feverish, non-fever-having eyes. I'd get sent home sick as a child even without a fever because I was a truth-teller and the nurse remembered me as a sick child who wouldn't have a fever until many days later. Hmm... I shall not think about it... 

Analysis of a small example in my writing

There is something I often do when I write (and I rarely ever write), and that is repeat a word. Truthfully, this is because of my poor vocabulary. My lack of knowledge in higher quality words, as well as my extremely small closet of words (more accurately, my vision in finding words is just extremely far-sighted), causes me to latch onto one for longer than I should.

I start off a paragraph with this sentence:

I gaze at myself often now as I have never seen a more unfamiliar figure. I am trying to figure it out.

I repeat 'figure' which adds a particular rhythm to the text, and I do enjoy the rhythm of texts (I have learned that I mainly focus on movement or rhythm in things, such as music, visual art, etc.) so this isn't entirely accidental. What really happens as I wrote this is that my mental picture was of me looking in the mirror at myself, but specifically viewing myself as some form of a human: a form of a human is a figure. I write the word figure because it matches the concept I was aiming for and affirms a sense or tone I was meaning to construe. Then I must describe why I will look in the mirror at myself, which is to understand what I'm looking at. My poor vocabulary and tendency towards casual language closes down all walls, leaving only the phrase 'figure it out' left to choose. I cannot see past any of these walls because I had just chosen the word 'figure' for the previous sentence and it is now stuck in my head.

I allow this repetition to occur because there is a sharp difference between the two sentences. 'Figure' was chosen in the 1st due to its representative connection for the object of 'myself as a human thing', so it is already slightly abstracted, slightly metaphorical, and in a way formal: the word 'figure' elicits thoughts of figure painting, the "nice" formal word for body. 

I have always felt an unreasonable disgust at the word body, similar to looking at raw meat in a deli. This disgust was at such a level to where my mother would allow me to run off to a different section of the grocery store. I now have fond memories of this moment for it was the rare chance for me to be alone in a public setting, without any responsibility for watching the shopping cart or hunting down an item. And so body becomes the deli meat which stands in the way from my peaceful solitude.

The 1st sentence is also lengthy in its route of description. I often write sentences like these, especially when I'm desperately trying to describe something, both ignoring any enjoyable rhythm of text, while also keeping my attention on not using too many words: the result is a choppy, weirdly accurate, 'I can't cut this down or rearrange this anymore' type of sentence.

I gaze at myself often: a striking-down motion, grounding with the descriptor of 'often'... as I have never seen a more unfamiliar figure: a rocky upwards motion, the steps of 'as I', 'have', 'never' acting as mini strike-downs (thus they became the flat steps of a stairway)...

A choppier sentence usually will have a lot of "that" words in it, as if the sentence throws a handful of words at you and points at each one, like a child reciting reading a book, not yet away of how a sentence should flow. This is a mixture of the two, a stairway.

The 2nd sentence is informal, short, and straightforward not by way of a striking-down motion, but a toss. It tosses itself at you, and says 'there.' That's all there is to it. It uses the phrase 'figure it out' and elicits a casual tone, and so the toss motion is more so represented by a shrug. A friendly toss from a stranger, but he wears no expression on his face.

By opposing the two in succession, especially when the 1st sentence starts the paragraph, makes the reader (and me as the writer) jump from one world to the next: dualisms of formal/casual, choppy/smooth, descriptive/expressionless. And so the repetition of one word, especially when it occurs at the end of the first sentence, makes an ostensive connection between the two worlds. It doesn't connect them actively, it actually separates them further. The word 'figure' makes an appearance in a formal and luxurious manner, it bows and leaves, but then we see 'figure' again, this time as a stranger. 'Well I'm not the first figure because just look at me...' it shrugs. But as a reader of words, the repetition of a word is so loud and obnoxious that it seems wild two figures managed to appear before us as two different identities: a revolving door of words and their refusal of identity theft.

There are more examples of this, but I am not going to go search for them. From my memory, I am thinking of times the repetition of a word occurs starting at the last sentence of a paragraph, and then again at the first sentence of the next paragraph. This should take on a different motion from a revolving door, something like jumping out of a window and landing on the grass, where we as the reader become confused about if we were watching someone through a window from our 2nd floor apartment and suddenly ended up on the grass with them, or if we never left our location at all.

Note: I have always hated the first sentence in my example! Even in my analysis I became under the influence of my writer-self and did not look closely enough at the words. I often read it as if it is 'I gaze at myself as never seeing a more unfamiliar figure', a usage of as to mean doing something simultaneously. Then I correct myself and reread it as "I gaze at myself often as I have never seen a more unfamiliar figure", and picture myself in awe of my own image, as this sentence is similar in wording to the phrase 'I have never seen a more beautiful...' But both are wrong! The 'now' always escapes! I must read it slowly, climb the stairs much slower: I have been looking at myself a lot, recently, because I look unfamiliar, so much so to where I haven't seen a more unfamiliar figure than myself. This is what I am trying to say. But I refuse to say it in such a manner, it's too casual. I must act proper and run away from the meat deli, only to chop my fleeing in half with the butcher's knife out of nowhere.

I also enjoy creating a metaphor, and then turning that metaphor into a world to continuously revisit.