Ouroboros
The serpent doesn’t circle you. It circles all of it.
You get what you give. I am afraid to be seen. Look at this, look at that, look at this curation of facts and images and vibes and tones and scents and details and aesthetics about myself that is a thinly veiled attempt at expressing the innards of me on the outs. The way I do my makeup so it looks like there isn’t any on when there really isn’t any on because I don’t have the patience or time to learn or care, because to care about appearance is to be vain, and to have vanity is to have a platform, a way of making one’s way in the world, of putting your face on the line with your brain, of opening your mouth and standing behind it morning after morning, your opinions unfurling on the tongue and on the keys. The wanting-to-be-worthwhile sits under all of it, the desire we are never meant to admit, the seeds of envy and longing holding close the twisted ground roots near the heart.
The Year of the Snake is closing. The serpent circles and mouths its own tail, an ancient symbol whose origin scholars say is lost though it always returns to the same thing. A cycle. The earliest known ouroboros was painted in King Tutankhamun’s tomb, a loop of time set beside a boy king who lived more than a millennium before Christ. In Nordic myth, the serpent is Loki’s child whose body encircles the earth and when it releases its tail the twilight of the gods will begin. Some say the symbol traveled from China to Alexander the Great, stripped down from the Yin Yang and carried west. Every version shedding something. Every version keeping the circle.
And all the while I am tired of being lied to by institutions, corporations, systems, and processes. Tired of speaking aloud and seeing the ad appear days later, as though coincidence has the same handwriting as surveillance. Elaborate stories built to reassure us that the algorithms are only guessing, when what they are doing is listening, pattern-seeking in the same way the human mind does, probability dressed up as prophecy.
The circle is older than me. The serpent is older than me. It tightens and turns without asking for my belief, a creature forever in motion, forever returning, forever at the center of the world.
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