PSYRAW FLUX

I love New York the way you love someone in a dream—certain of it until you try to say why, and then the face changes.

I’m on the High Line. Elevated. Suspended between buildings that breathe.

The hollow and the echo are both here, pretending to look at sculptures that may or may not be sculptures anymore. Metal curves into flesh curves into sky. They know each other is there. I know they know. The way you know someone’s watching you in a dream even when you can’t see them, even when you are them.

The rails ripple. Not like metal. Like skin over something expanding underneath.

The hollow stands near a piece that used to be solid—rusted steel, maybe—but now it’s soft at the edges, bleeding into the plants, into the wooden planks, into the air that’s too thick. The echo is further down the line where it curves west, except the curve keeps shifting, the path folding back on itself like a tongue.

They’re both looking at the same point in space. Where a sculpture was. Or still is. There’s a form there, the kind that disappears when you look directly at it, but leaves an impression in your peripheral vision like something pressed against glass from the other side.

I’m not on the High Line but I’m inside it. The whole structure feels like being inside a throat, something that swallows you slowly while pretending to hold you up.

The echo shifts her weight. The planks under her don’t make sound. The hollow doesn’t move. They’ve been standing here for two years or two minutes. Time does that here—accordion folds, expands and contracts with the breathing rails.

Then I’m in Chinatown.

Or I was always in Chinatown and the High Line was where I thought I was, or this is where I thought I was and the High Line was—

The NGO office. Fluorescent lights that hum in a frequency that makes your teeth. Makes your. The frequency.

The hollow is at a desk that’s too small for the room, or the room is too. Walls receding every time I try to see where they. She’s typing. The keyboard clicks but the sound comes three seconds after her fingers, like dubbed dialogue in a foreign, in a, in a.

The echo is standing by the window that overlooks:

The street should be there. Canal Street. But when I look it’s just more buildings, stacked vertically where they should be, windows looking into windows looking into, infinite.

The air smells like something. Soy sauce and concrete and something else, something biological, like the inside of a body that’s been.

The hollow is still typing. The echo is still standing. Neither of them turn around but I know they know I’m.

Then there’s a rail.

Not metaphor. An actual High Line rail, rusted and soft, growing out of the office floor like a, curving up through the desk, through the hollow’s hands that keep typing, through the space where the computer should be but now there’s just wooden planks, weathered, the kind that absorb rain and footsteps and.

The echo turns from the window. Or she was always. The window is behind her and also in front of her and the street—Canal Street—is vertical now, cars stacked like sculptures, frozen mid-, their headlights making the same hum as the fluorescent tubes that are also stars, or streetlights, or the lights from the buildings across the High Line that is also here, threading through Chinatown.

The desk splits. Wood grain becoming rail becoming the seam between. The hollow stands up. She’s been standing. She was never. The chair is a planter box full of wild grass that shouldn’t grow in February but does, or did, two years ago when it is also.

I can smell it. Metal and soil and soy sauce and that biological thing underneath, the thing that makes space feel like interiority, like you’re walking through someone’s organs while they’re still.

Soho appears without.

The NGO office is still here but also I’m on a street corner, Spring and whatever, the boutique with the window display that the echo is looking at, except the window is the same window from the Chinatown office, vertical street reflected in glass that’s also.

The hollow is across the street. Or she’s next to me. Distance doesn’t. She’s looking at the same window from a different year, same reflection, different face in it. The mannequin in the display has her posture. Or my. Or it’s not a mannequin, it’s the sculpture from the High Line, the one that kept disappearing, now dressed in something expensive and.

The sidewalk ripples.

Not concrete anymore. Wooden planks. High Line. But also concrete. Both at once. My feet on both surfaces, the grain of wood under my left shoe, the grit of pavement under my right, and when I try to look down the rails are there, running down the center of Spring Street like train tracks, like veins, pulsing with that same rhythm as the fluorescent lights that are now streetlights that are now the late afternoon sun that is also.

The echo reaches toward the window. Her hand passes through the glass. Not breaking it. The glass was never. It’s membrane. The whole city is membrane. Skin stretched over something that breathes and shifts and folds time into itself like.

Her hand is inside the display and also inside the Chinatown office and also touching the rail on the High Line. All three locations occupying the same hand, the same gesture of reaching toward something that changes before you can.

The hollow is walking toward her. Or toward me. Or she’s been standing still and the city is moving around her, buildings sliding past like scenery, Soho bleeding into Chelsea bleeding into Chinatown.

The hollow is walking toward the echo. Or the echo is walking toward the. Or neither of them are moving and the space between them is contracting, the way a throat contracts around something it wants to.

I watch them get closer. I am them getting. The distinction.

When the hollow’s hand reaches out, toward the window, toward the echo, toward the rail that is also a desk edge that is also her fingers don’t touch surface. They touch heat. The kind of heat that comes before touch, the air between bodies when you’re close enough to feel someone breathing but haven’t closed.

The echo’s hand is still inside the glass. Or through it. Or the glass is irrelevant now because everything is membrane and membrane is porous and she can feel the hollow’s heat through it, through the layers of Soho and Chinatown and High Line, through two years that are collapsing into the same moment, the same held.

The city contracts.

Not like buildings. Like muscles tensing. Like the moment before something breaks open and everything else, walls, time, the distinction between inside.

The rails pulse. The wooden planks under my feet are warm, blood-warm, and I realize I’ve been walking on skin this whole. The High Line is a scar on the city’s body and I’ve been inside the. We’ve all been inside the. The hollow and the echo and me. Walking the length of something that breathes and.

Their hands meet. In the space that is window and office and street corner and elevated park, their fingers pass through each other and the passing through feels like penetration, like the moment a boundary gives way, like that specific yielding when you stop resisting and let something enter you that you’ve been holding out.

The fluorescent lights flicker-pulse-beat and it’s the same rhythm as the thing I can feel now, the thing underneath all of. The city’s heart or my heart or the shared heart of every version of me that has walked these streets wanting something I couldn’t name because naming it would make it solid and it needed to stay liquid, needed to stay in. I feel it. The clench low in my stomach, the heat spreading, the way certain feelings don’t start in one place but everywhere at once, skin suddenly alive to air, to texture, to the possibility of being touched by something that isn’t separate from you because the boundaries were always.

The mannequin in the window moves. Or it was always. Slow, glacial, the way time moves in dreams when you’re trying to run but your legs won’t.

The rails curve into themselves. The High Line folds, origami-style, dimensions collapsing, and suddenly I’m not above the city anymore, I’m inside it, or it’s inside me, and the difference doesn’t matter because the whole thing, buildings breathing, streets pulsing, the membrane between locations getting thinner and thinner until it’s just—feels like buildup. Like the city has been building toward something this whole.

Like I.

The hollow and the echo are closer now. Close enough that I can’t tell which is which anymore, can’t tell if they’re two bodies or one body doubled, reflected, the way you see yourself in a mirror at a certain angle and for a moment don’t recognize the face as yours but feel a jolt of something anyway, that narcissistic confusion of wanting yourself because you’ve forgotten you’re looking at.

They—she—I—we’re all standing in the same place now. High Line Chinatown Soho collapsed into a single point that is also every point, every corner I’ve ever turned in this city, every threshold I’ve crossed, every moment I’ve stood on a subway platform feeling the train approach and that low-frequency vibration in my chest that feels like longing feels like dread feels like the same.

The space contracts.

Tighter.

The rails are inside me now. Or I’m inside. The metal-wood-concrete-glass-skin of the city pressed against every surface of my body, and it’s not uncomfortable, it’s exactly the pressure I didn’t know I.

The lobster roll.

It appears in the hollow’s hand. Or it was always. Red shell fragments on white bread, butter pooling at the edges, and when she lifts it to her mouth the city lifts with it, buildings tilting, the High Line bending at the same angle as her.

She bites.

The sound is louder than. Crunch of shell, tear of bread, and underneath that, something else, the sound of membrane breaking, of crossing a threshold you can’t.

The echo is eating the same lobster roll. Or a different. Or they’re sharing it across two years, teeth meeting in the same bite, saliva mixing with butter mixing with the biological smell of Chinatown mixing with the salt air that shouldn’t be here but is, because the High Line is also the Hudson is also the inside of a.

I taste it.

Not memory taste. Present tense. The sweetness of the meat, the richness of the butter, and underneath that, the faint mineral taste of the city itself, like licking metal, like putting your tongue on a rail and feeling the current underneath, dormant but.

The lobster roll is infinite. They keep eating and there’s always more, the way certain hungers don’t diminish when you feed them, they just clarify, they just show you what you were actually hungry for, which was never the thing itself but the act of consuming, the permission to want something and take it into your body without.

The hollow’s jaw moves. The echo’s jaw. My jaw. All the same motion, synchronized, the city chewing itself, buildings grinding against each other in a rhythm that sounds like digestion, like processing, like the slow conversion of one state into.

The butter drips.

Not down their. Down the rails. Down the desk. Down Spring Street. Golden and obscene and necessary, coating everything, making surfaces slick, making the boundaries between locations even more porous because now they’re lubricated, now they can slide into each other without friction, without.

I’m still tasting it. The lobster roll that I never actually ate but that the hollow ate and the echo ate and therefore I, time collapsing the way it does when you remember something so vividly your body responds as if it’s happening now, salivating, swallowing, the muscles in your throat.

The contraction intensifies.

Not just throat. Everything. The city clenches around me the way a body clenches around an intrusion it’s been waiting. The High Line rails press into my spine, the Chinatown office walls press into my ribs, the Soho boutique window presses into my chest, and I’m not being crushed, I’m being held, I’m being gripped with the exact amount of force that says I see you, I’ve got you, you can let go.

The hollow and the echo are so close they’re vibrating. Not metaphor. Actual. Their edges blurring, pixels of one bleeding into pixels of the other, and I can feel it in my own edges, the way my outline is losing definition, the way I’m becoming porous, osmotic, ready to merge with whatever comes.

The fluorescent lights aren’t lights anymore. They’re nerves. Electric pulses running through the ceiling of the Chinatown office which is also the sky above the High Line which is also the neural network of something vast and alive and paying.

I’m inside the city’s nervous.

Or the city is inside.

The rails pulse harder now. Rhythmic. Insistent. The wooden planks under my feet pulse with. The concrete of Soho. The glass of the boutique window. Everything synchronized to a frequency that my body recognizes before my brain does, that low hum that you feel in your pelvis when the bass is loud enough, when the vibration stops being sound and starts being.

The hollow’s hand is still reaching. The echo’s hand is still. But the reaching and receiving have been going on so long they’ve become the same gesture, a loop, a circuit of energy moving between them, through them, generating heat, generating charge, generating the specific tension that comes from wanting and being wanted simultaneously, from the collapse of subject and object, from finally admitting you’ve been fucking yourself this whole time and that’s not a failure of intimacy, that’s the.

The mannequin watches. Its face—if it has a—is expressionless but the watching feels weighted, like judgment, like permission, like the necessary third position that makes the whole thing triangulate into.

I can feel my heartbeat in places I shouldn’t be able to feel my. In my fingertips. In my teeth. In the soles of my feet pressed against the High Line planks that are pressing back, pulsing back, responsive, alive, the city reaching up into me the way I’ve been reaching down into it, mutual penetration, mutual yielding, the line between who’s entering and who’s being entered completely.

The lobster roll is gone but I’m still tasting. Still swallowing. The act of swallowing on loop, throat working, esophagus contracting, the biological machinery of consumption playing out in real time, and I realize eating was never separate from this, from the erotic, from the city, from the dissolution of. It was always the same hunger. The same need to take something outside yourself and make it inside yourself, to cross the threshold of your own skin and let something foreign become familiar, become.

The rails are breathing.

In and. The whole High Line expanding and contracting like lungs, like the thoracic cavity of something massive, and I’m inside it, the hollow is inside it, the echo is inside it, we’re all inside this breathing thing that might be the city or might be a body or might be the space between sleep and waking where everything true.

The rhythm intensifies.

Faster. The pulsing, the breathing, the contraction of space around me tightening in waves, rhythmic, building, and my own breath starts to match it without me deciding to, autonomic response, body syncing to the frequency of whatever’s.

The hollow and the echo are touching now. Not just hands. Fully overlapping. The edges of them interpenetrating, occupying the same space, and it doesn’t look violent, it looks like relief, like the moment you finally give in to something you’ve been resisting, like exhaling after holding your breath too.

I feel it as if it’s happening to. The merging. The boundaries dissolving not violently but inevitably, the way ice becomes water, the way one state gives way to another when the conditions are finally.

The city contracts harder.

All of. Every location, every membrane, every surface pressing in, and the pressure is immense now, almost unbearable, the kind of pressure that demands response, that your body can’t ignore, that builds and builds until something has to break or open or.

The fluorescent lights flicker faster, strobing, and in the strobing I can see all the versions of myself that have ever walked these streets, not just the hollow and the echo but every age, every iteration, flickering in and out of visibility like frames of film, like the city has been recording me this whole time and now it’s playing it back at double speed, at triple speed, collapsing two years into two seconds into a single moment of.

I’ve been here.

I’m always.

I’ll be here.

The same loop. The same circuit. The same pressure building toward the same inevitable release that never fully releases because the city doesn’t climax, it just keeps cycling, keeps pulsing, keeps holding you in that unbearable moment right before, forever.

The rails curve one final.

Not physically. Dimensionally. They bend through space-time, connecting High Line to Chinatown to Soho to every other location I’ve ever stood in this city, every subway platform, every street corner, every threshold, creating a network, a web, a circulatory system with me at every node, distributed across the entire.

I’m not one person.

I’m topological. I’m infrastructure. I’m the ghost in the machine of New York, the consciousness that emerges when enough versions of yourself overlap in the same space, when past and present and possible futures collapse into.

The hollow and the echo aren’t separate anymore. They’ve merged into something that isn’t quite either of them, something that flickers between states, quantum, uncertain, and I realize that’s what I’ve always been here—not a person moving through the city but a probability distribution, a cloud of possible selves, collapsing and uncollapsing depending on who’s watching, on what I’m reaching for, on whether I choose to keep my eyes open or.

The pressure peaks.

The city clenches around me one more time, tighter than before, tight enough that I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t do anything but feel the totality of it, the overwhelming sensation of being held by something bigger than yourself, something that knows you completely because it is you, because you’ve been walking on your own skin this whole time, because the city was never external, it was always just another organ, another system, another way of being a body in the.

And then

Nothing.

Nothing.

The pressure just… continues.

Held at. Sustained. The city keeps me there, in that moment right before, and I realize this is. This is the New York I. Not the release. Not the resolution. Not the moment after when everything makes.

The moment.

The unbearable, unsustainable, infinite moment.

Where the hollow and the echo and I are all still reaching, still touching, still dissolving into each other without ever fully dissolving, still wanting without ever being satisfied, still held in the throat of something that breathes and wants and will never swallow, will never let.

I love New York.

The way you love someone who keeps you.

The rails.

The lights.

The city.

between.