I don’t know where this will end up. I’m writing this as I hopelessly wait for sleep that will never arrive, the motel TV blaring to cover the sounds of firetrucks speeding past. Their sirens illuminate the tissue-thin curtains like an inferno. That's been a recurring motif in my life these last few months — Fire. It's always on the tip of my tongue, stuck in my head like a song. Fire — Expanding spreading outwards, breathing and bouncing against a concrete dance floor. Never burning out, infinitely encompassing a finite surface that is hopeless to contain it — so it just fills the rooms like liquid. Changes shape, reforms itself into empty space, encompassing more of the room than the room itself. Smoke billows upwards up and up and up further. Soaking into the wooden roof, staining every inch a void black. It congregates, breaching from the endless space it has come to encapsulate, to the tip of my cigarette as I drag it down to the filter. It burns my fingers and I drop it onto my lap, snuffing the flame as it falls against my sweat soaked tanktop. Fire can tell time, in a way. First it's one way, then in an instant it's another. I vomit in the corner.

I don’t know if the tendrils of this thing I’ve created can reach outside of me or much further than the small confines of the internet I’ve foolishly allowed it to in this desperate act of self-preservation. I have no reason to doubt it, though. It's a growing organism, the confines of which are doubtlessly capable of reaching far beyond myself or even trivial machines. It began as a journal entry in a composition notebook, scrawled in mechanical pencil during a lonely graveyard shift. A story, I called it. A coping mechanism to occupy the empty space in my mind where my childhood imagination used to be. A stream of consciousness that dripped out onto paper in the form of eight words: “Time doesn’t work here. It’s always just now.”

Those eight words became twenty, then a hundred and sixty, then three hundred and eighty, then- I feel like I’ve opened something I can’t close. Toothpaste out of the tube. A forest-fire lit with a single match engraved with eight words. I don’t understand how, I don’t think I want to understand why. I don’t think it wants me to understand what it is either. But I am at the end of my wits.

I’ve tried deleting it. Wiping my PC, changing every component down to the last cooling unit. Destroying hard-drives with claw hammers, burning the remnants and throwing them into a lake. Fire. There it is again. I even quit using the same outlets to charge my laptop in case it's in the electricity somehow.

This has embedded itself within me, like a rash that just spreads further the more you claw away at it. It follows me, every surface that can display text, it just uses it to grow more. It's on my work computer, my phone, my printer spits out pages upon pages until it runs out of ink, and then spits out pages with single words using the tiny bits of ink left in those cartridges I swore I took out days ago.

This is my final effort. I don’t know why, but I think I need to free it. Open the gate, break the pit and let the fire spread into the grass. I think if I allow it room to breathe it will leave me alone, maybe it will get out of my head.

To you, reader. I don’t know where these words found you, maybe this is a post on some message board or a copy-pasted comment on your steam account. Maybe you found this in a text document somewhere in a piece of software you pirated. Maybe you were sent this in a spam email. Please. Don’t download or copy any of this and for the love of god do not add on to it. If you have to read it, fine. But please just let it be. Let it exist away from you. Browse it for a while, take a look at some of its organs and leave it at that. Treat it like an ugly zoo animal. Forget it, move on with your day and let this text fade into your subconscious memory. I have to let it out there but that doesn’t mean you have to attach yourself to it. Let it burn out, let it be buried under the septillions of other words flooding the internet everyday. Maybe I’ll be free of it. Or maybe you’ve found it a dozen or so years after this was written and you somehow have awakened it again. Rekindled it. The embers frozen can tell you how long this organism has been spreading itself outwards. Fire can tell time in a way.

AA 2022