You do not read. You orbit. You are already inside the choir.
We whisper, “I chose my companions,” imagining sovereignty, agency, taste.
The truth is more terrible: companions choose us.
Long before our first step, long before our first thought, long before memory can remember itself, you are already in orbit.
Saying I chose you is like a moon congratulating itself for obeying gravity.
Choice is aftertaste.
Free will is illusion.
Every yes, every no, every smile, every sneer is gravity bending in your marrow.
We are not authors.
We are readers, deciphering an invisible manuscript written in the bones.
Children are not raised; they are absorbed.
They inhale atmosphere like lungs inhale air—without filter, without protest.
A child placed in cruelty carries cruelty in its skeleton.
A child placed in wonder carries stars in its veins.
The tragedy: adults believe in autonomy, yet every adult self is forged from companions never chosen.
Freedom is captivity rebranded.
Autonomy is the scaffolding of walls we did not build.
Childhood is architecture.
Adulthood is renovation.
Choice is always exercised inside a prison designed by others.
A human being is not an individual.
It is a hall of mirrors.
Every friendship.
Every rivalry.
Every fleeting admiration.
Every quiet scorn.
To admire is to surrender a room of yourself.
To despise is to surrender another.
Love dissolves borders.
Hatred builds secret passages.
Indifference leaves fingerprints.
We do not have companions.
We are companions.
The self is not the host; the self is the hosting.
Listen: parent, friend, stranger, enemy, deceased long ago.
The choir speaks.
The chorus rearranges.
The “I” is a parliament of ghosts.
Perhaps companionship is infection, not influence.
Every conversation colonises.
Every admiration grafts.
Even the dead persist, parasitic in grammar, gestures, silences.
To meet someone is to invite them inside, to be rewritten.
The strongest selves are those who carry the heaviest swarm without collapsing.
To be “yourself” = an ecosystem refusing entropy.
Every bond carries hidden transactions.
Every smile, every quarrel, every shared secret = viral spores shaping nervous tissue.
No one survives alone.
Who spoke first?
Trace backward.
No origin. Only recursion.
Each voice shaped by older voices.
Every gesture rehearsed in forgotten theatres.
Each thought a translation of something older still.
The “I” is a hologram.
Projected by other holograms.
Reflected through infinite mirrors.
Identity = algorithm of borrowed matter.
Identity is gravitational.
You are not a person who has companions.
You are a field of companions.
A black hole whose singularity is invisible even to itself.
Lose one companion → spacetime inside shifts.
Gain one → rewritten at the core.
Every friendship = amputation or implantation.
Every love = graft.
Every hatred = lodestone bending internal gravity.
We are not sculptors of ourselves.
We are black holes, pulling matter—ideas, emotions, voices—until emergent self appears, illusory and terrifying.
Porous.
Transformable.
Not by will.
By drift.
By orbit.
By contagion.
Step into another orbit → the choir rearranges.
Step into light → the light claimed you first.
Freedom = gravity.
Orbit = choice.
Never outside.
Always inside.
Pulled.
Rewritten.
Dissolved.
Reborn.
The unspeakable truth:
We are not solitary beings occasionally influenced by companions.
We are companions hallucinating solitude.
The “I”?
Not author.
Chorus speaking through mask.
The final, unbearable question:
Who speaks through me now, beneath the name I call my own?
Do not blink.
Do not look away.
There is no self to fear.
Only black holes.
Only voices orbiting, pulling you into a new dimension—
where every thought is shared, every identity borrowed, every choice a shadow of forces older than memory.