I walk out of a shop and into the problem of being known.
They know me there. They like me. That part feels easy, almost sweet. Then the other part arrives, the part that sits in the corner of the room like a tool left out on purpose. The payment that declined last time. The tools I carried away anyway, with my hands full and my mind elsewhere, with a promise that lived in the air but never landed in the register.
They had been waiting for me to come back.
I feel their waiting like a hand on my shoulder. Friendly, familiar, firm.
They want me to stay and chat. I want to, in the way a person wants warmth, wants recognition, wants to be received without conditions. I also want to leave, because my mind has already started running ahead to the work that needs me. I say I am an artist. People call me an introvert. I say, if that means I am busy practicing, then yes, I am that too.
Practice is how I pay my life forward. It is also how I disappear.
I bought tools for my hands, and somehow I keep living as if practice is the only payment that counts. As if devotion is a receipt. As if effort can settle every balance.
Outside, the world resumes its speed.
An intersection. A wide street. A tall, bus-like tractor thing rolling toward me like it owns the road. A trailer. The word shows up late, like a name I should have remembered sooner. It moves fast enough to make people behave, fast enough to teach obedience without saying a word.
I see it and somehow I feel calm.
Cool, I think. Cool like a person who learned long ago to keep her face smooth when something large approaches. Cool like a person who has survived by looking unbothered.
I step toward the street and my eyesight vanishes. It happens like a countdown. Three, two, one, gone. I know the feeling. I recognize the shape of it. Vision becomes a door that shuts, and I stand on the wrong side, still holding the intention to cross.
A question rises with it, familiar and tired: why does this keep happening?
This time, I move anyway.
I decide I will cross using other senses and memory. I feel the edge of the curb with my foot. I listen for the shift in engine sound. I hold the map of this intersection inside my head like a small internal room I can walk through. I take steps based on what I already know. I let my body do what it has done before.
Is memory a sense?
I ask it the way I ask myself everything important, as if the answer matters less than the permission to keep moving.
Memory gives me more than images. Memory gives me distance. Timing. The weight of a familiar street. The angle of the crosswalk. The rhythm of when cars surge forward and when they pause. Memory gives me a private kind of sight. A sight made of repetition.
I cross.
Safely.
Thank goodness.
And then, as soon as relief touches me, my mind does what it always does. It reaches for the story that will make this survivable in someone else’s language.
Because cameras exist.
Because the world watches.
Because the road holds records.
I know about the cameras. I know there are eyes mounted high, patient and unblinking, collecting the small evidence of who I am when I think I am alone. I also forget them, often, because my attention lives inside my own current. My mind tends to run toward practice. Toward making. Toward trying. Toward the thing I am building that nobody can see yet.
I think of the times the cameras have caught me crossing wrong.
Not wrong in the moral sense, more like wrong in the rule sense. Wrong in the permitted-body sense. Wrong in the way society prefers people to move: low to the ground, predictable, obedient to lights and lanes.
I imagine the footage. The intersection. My body rising. Twenty feet. Thirty feet. Gliding across, as if gravity is a suggestion. As if waiting is optional. As if there is a second sidewalk above the first one.
Sometimes, I do it on the sidewalk too, when there are too many pedestrians, when the density of people turns into a pressure I cannot translate fast enough. I lift and glide, because my system wants space, wants silence, wants a clear line. It happens before I can explain it.
Now fear arrives.
It arrives as a social fear first. The fear of being named. The fear of being filed under a category that carries punishment. The fear of being misunderstood with certainty.
I think, they will call me a witch.
I think of what people do to witches in the stories that get repeated as warnings. I think of fire. I think of the pleasure the crowd takes in making a stranger into an example. My mind runs ahead to the tribunal of ordinary life, the kind with forms and procedures and polite voices that still lead to a cage.
So I start composing.
I start rehearsing a statement as I walk, as if a clean explanation can protect me, as if language can function as an ID badge. I imagine myself speaking to an authority who has never practiced anything in private long enough for it to turn uncanny in public.
I picture their eyebrows lifting, the skeptical lean of their attention. I hear the weight of the question they will ask, the one that pretends to be simple.
How did you do that?
And my answer wants to be honest, and also safe.
It is skill, I want to say. I practiced. I tried things. I tried them again. I tried them until the body learned a shortcut. Until the nervous system took over. Until the result looked impossible to anyone who only sees the final motion.
That is one of the hardest parts of practice. Practice is invisible until it becomes undeniable.
People look at the final form and call it magic. They call it talent. They call it an accident. They call it a threat. They skip the years of repetition, the private experiments, the quiet failures, the hours that never became a story because they happened in solitude.
I think again about the word introvert.
Introvert is a word people use when they want to explain my absence without asking what I am doing in that absence. Sometimes I accept it because it creates space. Sometimes I resist it because it makes my inner life sound like a deficiency.
I call myself an artist instead, because an artist has a reason to leave the room. An artist has permission to be devoted. An artist can disappear into practice and return carrying something.
Still, the fear remains. If the world sees the result without the process, it assigns meaning that protects the world’s rules.
The cameras do not record my hours. They record my glide.
They record the moment the body breaks expectation.
That is why memory matters here. Memory holds the process. Memory holds the training data of my life. Memory holds all the repetitions that shaped my instincts.
If memory is a sense, then it is the sense that keeps me honest. It is the sense that reminds me, I did not become strange by accident. I became capable through attention. I became efficient through need. I became airborne because the ground kept getting crowded.
Maybe that is what practice does. It builds a second way through reality.
You practice long enough and your body starts carrying a hidden vocabulary. You develop moves you cannot fully explain. You solve problems before your conscious mind arrives. You cross streets in the dark. You glide above the crowd. You improvise survival.
Then you wake up, and vision returns, and the world looks normal again, and you feel grateful.
Thank goodness.
And still, a question stays with me, quiet and persistent.
If memory is a sense, then what else have I been sensing all along, without realizing it?
If practice is a form of flight, then what am I preparing to cross next?
I’ll leave it here for now. What do you think?
— Makari
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