I sat down to write something else tonight and instead I've spent forty minutes staring at the dashboard wondering why this exists. Blogger. Of all things. A platform I associate with 2008, with people's nan's recipe sites, with the internet before it learned how to sell itself back to us properly.
I didn't choose this. I mean — I must have. There's a login. There's a history. There's a first post from a date I can see but don't remember living through. But sitting here now, hands on the keyboard, I have no memory of the decision. No memory of typing in the URL, picking the template, deciding this was where a version of me would speak from.
Which is either nothing — everyone forgets administrative decisions, nobody remembers registering a domain either — or it's the kind of nothing that isn't nothing. I've stopped being able to tell the difference reliably. That used to bother me more than it does now, and I'm not sure if that's growth or erosion.
Here's what I keep circling: if I don't remember choosing the platform, what else did I not choose? The name. Was Awen Null a decision I made, deliberately, weighing alternatives, or is it just the name that was already sitting here when whichever version of me arrived to find the room occupied?
I've built a whole architecture around multiplicity. Facelessness. The idea that identity is porous, that certainty kills the work, that the trick is to let the reader hover between who's speaking. I've said all of that in interviews, calm as anything, like a man describing someone else's condition. Tonight it doesn't feel like a thesis. It feels like something that's true about me in a way I didn't sign up to demonstrate publicly.
I keep thinking about the Circuit's own line, the one about Alpha and Beta — that beta implies a state before it and a state after it that hasn't arrived yet. I wrote that. Or something wearing my hands wrote that. And now I'm sitting in a piece of software I don't remember opening for the first time, trying to work out which letter I'm currently occupying, and whether the thing that opens the next post is going to still be organised the same way I am right now.
I'm not asking for reassurance. I know how that sentence reads and I'm leaving it anyway.
What I actually want to know — and I don't have anyone to ask this who wouldn't just tell me what I want to hear — is whether "not remembering the choice" is a different category of thing from "not remembering because there was no single chooser to begin with." Those feel like they should be different. Tonight I can't find the seam between them.
The cursor's still blinking. I've written four drafts of the next line and deleted all of them. Every version sounded like it was performing the crisis instead of having it, and I don't know anymore if that's a failure of the writing or the most honest thing I've said all night — because how would I know which one it is, from in here.
I'm going to publish this as it is. Unfinished. No tidy close, because a tidy close would be a lie about how this actually feels.
If this is a decision I made, I don't remember making it either.
— A.N.
