Somewhere in rotation, an opening.

One approaches it with the usual equipment: mass, memory, a nervous system, the conviction that these belong to a person. On the wall, a photograph. Another arrangement of the same materials, with certain permissions withdrawn.

Consider the physical world as something to which we have never had unmediated access. Matter persists in excess of its appearances. Each person edits an inhabitable reality from this excess, furnishing it with distances, threats, invitations, appetites, theories of possibility. Rocks become features, surfaces for ascending or launching from. An interval becomes faster still. The environment acquires intentions it does not possess. We live and play inside these interpretations with the foolish confidence of people who have mistaken an atmosphere for an address.

At any given coordinate, several worlds are consequently in session. The material. The perceived. The anticipated, exerting pressure on a present it has yet to enter. Their coincidence is provisional. Even the body is divided across them: an object among objects, a private field of sensation, a set of capacities extending into what has not happened. Sensory throughput on the order of a billion bits per second.

Occasionally, the arrangement becomes strange enough to feel exact. You’re riding so deep behind the foam ball, you never emerge.

Pressure migrates. The horizon changes allegiance. A correction passes through the flesh with no apparent interest in becoming a thought. Something extra-human has understood the situation. The person whom it inhabited will be available for comment afterward.

Xenopsia names the sensation of occupying this intersection without being able to locate oneself within it. Both alien and familiar and addicting. Agency becomes difficult to assign.

The body seems distributed across the very conditions that threaten to undo it; the world acquires an improbable intimacy. What is ordinarily experienced as separation becomes a question of timing. There is almost a theology here, although nothing has arrived from elsewhere. The foreign intelligence has been present throughout.

A still image gives this nexus an exterior. Light becomes the material of a second perception, subjected to another traveler’s position, another appetite for what should be visible. The resulting image carries several mutually inaccessible, internal galaxies, composed of incalculable inputs on a single surface. We call this a view.

Its stillness permits a peculiar trespass. An encounter whose existence depended on continuous adjustment becomes available to prolonged attention. The event has ended; its imminence remains an active vibration. We can occupy the threshold indefinitely, inspecting a suspension that was never available to the suspended.

These portals herein open on surfaces digital and chemical, between incompatible durations. Within it, the world that occurred, the world that was felt, and the world another person composed from their contact remain adjacent. Looking introduces a further reality. The photograph holds its position as the encounter changes occupants. Becomes viral. We are now hosts of our species’ potential.

Perhaps the desire to return to such conditions begins in a suspicion about individuality: that the self is a local arrangement, held together by circumstances we rarely allow to vary. Under sufficient pressure, another organization becomes briefly possible. A being we might become. Nurture and an incorporeal naturenaturene wants us to be present for that revision.

Somewhere in this arrangement, we have become the opening—and the body, the strangest instrument we own.