The Forms

In the end, like everyone else, they decided to step inside the forms. The forms stood up, and opened for them, and looked at them with their own faces, the empty eye sockets waiting to be filled. They decided to fill them, and to make those other faces their own. They went inside, and their naked bodies vanished, and the forms hardened, and, without looking at me, they walked away.
The forms walk around day after day, and they always move the same, and they love that moving—they move along with everything else that's been placed above the ground. They love the moving because it does not make them feel stagnant, or dull. They do not stop to think that they are just running along a circuit, never moving too far in certain directions. It feels natural to them to never deviate from the motions already laid out. I guess I envy them, sometimes. I walked about, naked and cold, and can't remember feeling any other way since I left the forms. Yes, I began inside them. Most of us do. There are a few, the lucky ones, who were born outside them, but it is strange—they are often the ones who are the most eager to enter them when the chance arrives, and who usually end up following the forms' instructions the most eagerly and effectively. They do not realize that they were born into what everyone inside the forms secretly desire. I know. I started out inside them. I started out as one piece inside a set of forms, and I believed that I would find the contentment that eluded me if I could only learn to more perfectly organize myself based upon the forms' dictates—to move my naked flesh in the way the forms told me. But what I never realized was that the forms were at my own mercy as much as I was at theirs. I could see how they were connected to the ground, were the unliving ground standing up and covering my true shape. At the time, when my movements began to be contrary to what the forms desired, I thought I was failing, failing again and again to move in the way the forms dictated. I thought I couldn't move the way they wanted me to, and I told myself I was a failure. The others in my set told me I could move the way they said if I really wanted to, but all I felt when the forms nudged me was complete lack of comprehension. Looking back, I can see now that I was purposely not moving in the way they told me, and therefore refusing to be a part of the one massive body of which they were just one undulating muscle. But at the time I felt I was a failure, and was widely seen as a failure by most everybody, including myself. Those were bad days, but no worse than these. I can feel the sadness they contained every time I remember them. That at least means I am living. The others in my set—my set of four—spoke through the forms, except their mouths only moved in the way the covering over their face told them to, and their voices only filled the space with sound. But at the time, I had believed I was hearing their true voices, and that the disparaging things they told me were in fact what they believed. I was left wondering why I could not follow the forms' instructions. It took a long time, and many failures, before I began to isolate a difference between my naked flesh and the outer covering of the forms, and began to realize how I was being acted upon. This realization was not a relief. At the time, from in the forms, I believed that this meant my problem was not that I had failed, but that I was inherently defective. This did not give me much to work with. Being inherently defective was not a comfort. I became focused on doing all I could to “overcome”—or, better, eliminate—the inner part in the hopes that the forms would take their place, and that I could somehow become them. I thought everything would be solved then. But it was fruitless. The inner part—the naked flesh—would not vanish. Instead it would assert itself in ways that I did not expect—in things breaking, in people making angry sounds through the forms, and the forms twisting their faces into ugly positions, and those putrid sounds spilling out. I was born in a set of four, two males and two females. We were connected to a building, which was connected to more clusters of houses, which all led to even larger buildings that created enormous bulges in the forms, with tiny bits of them moving in and out constantly, yet being steadily replaced, so that those bulges maintained their general shape regardless of what made them up. The forms are like that—they are malleable yet strict and ruthless. They accept many different types of agreement, but no type of disagreement. The closest I have seen them get to tolerating disagreement is to isolate the disagreeing aspect, the movement that is not in concert, and to surround it with the most alluring forms of agreement, and to find a way to force the not-in-concert movement to agree. If necessary, it may involve the forms changing their overall movement. As long as the movement continues. Those agreements they arrange around the disagreement can oftentimes find a way to absorb the pressure of the disagreement, and to change that pressure into a form of agreement. The disagreement therefore becomes an agreement. By struggling as loudly as it can, by attempting to disrupt the forms by moving against it, it guarantees that it will become a part of the forms. It will go on, making just as much noise as before, believing it is disrupting the forms when in reality it has become an integral part of them, by forcing other fledging disagreements into taking its form, a form already agreed upon. Its angry bliss becomes one with the forms. I know this because I followed one disagreement quite closely. It had a name. Sachi. She was one of the first genuine disagreements I ever saw. She spoke loudly and resolutely from outside the forms. I followed her on many occaissions. My hand—my naked hand—even reached out to her once. It was the first time I had ever seen it—my hand, that is. She moved too quickly for it, but once it reached, I stopped, and looked at it, and realized that it was different than the hand I had always watched acting as my own hand. It reached out to her a few times. It never touched her, though. It would be many years before I ever touched anyone, and Sachi would not be one of them. She got brought back in. She was glorious, though! I watched her in her dynamic, expressive nakedness many times, I saw the jiggles and the bouncings of her different parts, and I could feel my own flesh bear against my form. Sometimes it held, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes I even managed to get it to move in a way that it didn't want to, and made sounds it didn't like come out of its mouth-shaped hole. My own mouth still could not move on its own—all it could do was push against the forcible closure of the form-mouth, and cause squawks and twitters to come out, nothing close to what I wished for, but all I could manage, and my body would make spastic, unclear movements that neither I nor my form liked. Oftentimes, the form would send a quivering shame-pulse into my naked flesh—I could feel the needles—all the tiny needles, all at once—dig into my skin as the drug was injected from the forms and into my naked flesh that did not understand shame or self-consciousness, and I would lose the ability to move as the shame-fit kicked in, and all I could do was quiver and shake, just as it wished, as the form used my paralysis to reconstitute my movement, and Sachi continued to dance before me, lithe and graceful. How, I would often wonder, how in hell had she managed to drop the forms completely? How had she found a way to sneak out? How had she allowed her naked flesh to show itself like that? How could she do it, when I could not? They seemed like worthless questions, but I could not help asking them. And, when I was deeply in the throes of the shame-drug, I would sometimes believe that they were bad questions, that they were negative questions, and I sometimes even believed that Sachi was bad, even though she smiled. I allowed my voice to fill out the movements of the form-mouths, sometimes, and they were epithets or taunts directed towards her. She always danced, though, and paid no attention, which made the forms even more unbearable, because it became clear how much more free she was than I.
Except that changed. It all changed. I believe it always does. Perhaps I will change. I almost hope I will. But I am uncertain. But I watched it happen with Sachi. (It became clearer, as I shook off more and more of the forms, of my form. For that was what it took for me—a gradual process. I was not capable of the instantaneous freedom that others were. I can't even remember what the process was, because at each step in the process I'd believed the process was over, because each step felt like the final, expansive liberation I'd been waiting for. I never stopped to think that maybe I was witnessing only one step in a longer process. My fault, I suppose. I wish I had more to impart, I truly do. I feel like maybe it could help someone, but another part of me says it would be in danger of becoming another Form. That the agreements would surround it, and eventually assimilate it. Assimilate me. So I will remain silent about that aspect of my experience. You will have to have your own).
When the forms came for Sachi, I was in the process of emerging, eager to join her, finally, as I had so many times in my thoughts. I had watched her, and followed her lead the whole time. I had started by moving as closely to the way she did as I could. Needless to say, this was intially unsuccessful. I felt like a greater failure than I ever had before. But after some time, I discovered I was gaining more and more facility, directing the forms more and more. I was wrong in this belief. I was not moving the forms. I was stepping outside them. I was moving so rapidly that they did not have time to keep up. I began feeling the breeze against my skin, could feel the hair on my arm moving in the breeze, and was intoxicated. These moments became more and more frequent. I had traveled far away from Sachi by this point, because I had realized that I would never move against the forms if all I did was follow her, and when I was around her, that was all I could do. I admit it—I flailed. I thrust myself in directions that, looking back, were ridiculous and illogical. At the time, I was merely seeking the unknown, in the belief that the unknown would save me. The first few places I went, the forms caught up to me quickly because I left them a trail. I was when I refused to move in any direction that would make sense to me that I stepped outside the forms, and the breeze would come, and I would understand what living was. Once I realized I had managed to step completely outside the forms, I traveled back to Sachi, eager to see her, and to have her see me, outside the forms, and to dance with her, and to watch her parts wobble, and to touch them. But when I got back to where she was, I realized she had been recuperated by the forms. She still danced, but she was no longer naked, no longer vulnerable. Her movements were bland and predictable. I could see the forms acting on her, nudging her into certain positions. I have never felt as much sadness as then. Everything I had worked for was gone. Something had happened since I'd left. She had given up, and stepped back in. I wondered if I were to blame—if, maybe, I'd been able to escape the forms earlier, somehow, I could have helped her to fight against them, provided her with the support she needed to elude them forever. But as I watched she became more and more immersed in them. I saw her make the same crinkly faces I used to make, and say the same crinkly things. I did not watch her for long until I had to go away. I cried and shivered as I ran. I had never realized before how merciless the forms were. The face I had cast away the forms for was now immersed in them. There seemed to be nothing else to go on for, no reason to exist. I ran far away, to a distant place, where I lived for a time, watching all the people inside the forms move around and pretend to disagree. I found a dirty little burrow, as well as a porch, where I could sit and watch them without them watching me. I huddled there, cold but pleased to be so, and watched all the people around me. I would watch them speak, and remember having all those same conversations myself, and making all those same faces. I admit, I wished I could re-enter the forms, and just take part. Sachi meant that much to me. I thought that even if we were both inside the forms, maybe we could at least huddle close together, beneath the forms, and perhaps our naked bodies could touch. That would at least be something. At least a moment. Perhaps our bodies could touch within the forms, and subvert them from below. I thought it was worth a try. I thought this for a while. But, soon, I remembered my inept attempts to conform, my inability to move in the way they wanted. Because it had taken me so long to escape the forms, I had come to know what trapped me too well to ever go back. I knew it was hopeless. But I began to meet other people who had stepped outside the forms. I began seeing naked bodies here and there, people who moved without instruction, who spoke without mannerisms, and who stared you in the eye. I was drawn to these people, and they were drawn to me, although not in the same way as Sachi. I never felt the desire to meld with them the way I felt it with Sachi. It was more a feeling of sharing a unified purpose. We felt we were meant to watch all of the people inside the forms together. We thought this would lead to us destroying the forms, also together. This person led me to many others living outside the forms. They lived in sloppy structures, just like my burrow, and barely covered their naked bodies with torn cloths and bits of string. They lived in carefully disorganized enclaves. They held between themselves the vision of a world without the forms, in which everyone was naked and grew into their own shape, and that shape would be by nature free and expressive. There was no other way for it to work out. I realized I was at a place beyond Sachi, that Sachi would never have understood. I felt vindicated, in a strange way, as if I were proving something to her, proving that I had always been destined to move farther outside the forms than her. But I still got sad sometimes. I still cried sometimes. I would wake up in the middle of the night and cry, and see Sachi's eyes. As they had been, before the forms covered them. But those were isolated occurences. Mostly, I learned to better understand my new friends. Some of them knew how to move better than me, but some could not move as well. I was in the middle. I had made much progress, since Sachi, since I first began attempting to move contrary to the forms. But my victory felt hollow, felt lonely, yet still felt right.
We would move around, around the forms, laughing at their shape, amused at everyone inside the forms, laughing at them. Except we discovered something disturbing, something we had never considered: the forms began, occaissionally, offering themselves to us. Someone within the forms would speak through them to us, and we would see the forms crawl up to us, and look at us with out own faces, and open for us. And within the conversation we had with the ones inside the forms, we could hear and see the place we could take, if we wished it. We were unsure of how to respond to this. Instead of attempting to chase us down and overcome us, they opened for us, and if we refused, they accepted, and closed up, yet would always open up again later. And what was more, sometimes people would even emerge from the forms, and plead with us to enter them, trying to tell us that it was for our own good to enter the forms, that the forms were as natural as our naked bodies, and that our naked bodies were not meant to be exposed in this way, and that if everyone's naked bodies were exposed in this same way, the world would not function. And as they spoke, the ground would ripple, and grow up, and cover them, and part of it would open for us.
At first, we were all resolute. The forms would never dominate us. We felt closer because we were all fighting against the forms, and had agreed, together, not to accept their offers, despite how alluring they were. But we all felt a sense of self-worth that we had not felt before, knowing that we could enter the forms if we wished to, if we made that choice. It was either pride or vanity, which pride can be easily transformed into. We were frightened by this, and decided that it was our job to destroy the forms, and we began discussing how to do so. We did not want to destroy our form, or any particular set of forms, no—we wanted to destroy all the forms, all at once. We imagined a massive event, in which the forms would be swept away, one that would feel similar to each gradual step we all took a bit farther outside the forms, and the intoxication they brought, except a thousand times stronger in magnitude. Everyone would be forced from the forms, all at once, and then everything we wanted—everything we missed—would be there, and in the way we'd dreamed. Sachi would be there, in the way she used to be. When they were gone, we would not be lonely anymore. The temptation that would come each each time the forms opened for us would go away. That temptation was the worst—those times when we were forced to consider whether or not we truly believed what we all told ourselves and one another that we believed.
I think they knew that they could not resist. That was why they began railing against them so loudly, screaming epithets at the forms every chance they got. I was frightened by this behavior. I was afraid to go so close to the forms, and to draw their attention to me. I did not understand the tactics they chose, and I stepped away when they began using them, and watched. What their actions told me was that they were not, in reality, frightened by the forms at all. They were not afraid to be taken in by them. Not one bit. They knew they either had to destroy them, or accept them, and that no in between existed for them.
I watched as they railed against the forms for quite some time. I watched as their voices became quieter and quieter. I watched as they began pleading with the people who stepped outside, as they began speaking to them in low tones, tones that I could not decipher. I saw them speak to them, and I saw them begin to touch them.
And I saw, finally, when the first one of them stepped inside. It was not a shock. It seemed inevitable. At first, I told myself that that person was just the weakest of us. As his face crinkled in the way mine used to, I just watched, and felt superior.
But I watched as each naked body, in turn, stepped inside them. Some took a long time, some were easy. I couldn't believe I was watching it, but watch I did.
In the end, they all decided to step inside the forms. One after the other.
Some believed they were going to subvert them from within, that somehow they would cause them to become their own opposite. Other disavowed ever disliking the forms, and looked at me with disgust whenever they saw me. I hid from them, most of the time. Some had maintained enough of themselves that I could still speak to them, though. I would speak to them, but be careful to maintain distance at the same time, feeling the quivering of disgust everywhere in my naked body, and feeling how vulnerable to attack I was, and hating myself for it. I didn't bother with them that often, really. They had nothing to tell me, and could barely remember me, anyhow.
I understand now that the event we wanted will not come. I accept that I may wander around naked for eternity. But I feel there may be useful work in that. A part of me would like to believe that Sachi will emerge from them again, and that we will find each other. It is lovely to believe such a thing. That would be enough. I would not require the forms to vanish if I could at least feel complete outside them, if I could live naked with her outside them. I have the notion, sometimes, of pulling someone else outside the forms. Or perhaps coaxing them, slowly. But somethin always stops me. I know it is impossible. I know that such an action would be just stepping closer to the forms, and in effect asking to be overtaken. My only hope is to find a spot, and to exist there as long as I can, and to wait. A sad fate, many will say, but, for me, the only one.
I stay in my place, whichever one it is at that time, and I watch the forms. I watch the forms, and then I go to sleep, and I dream about a universe without them. I wake up in the night, sometimes, and I see Sachi, I see her as she used to appear, and I cry, and watch the forms ripple, oblivious to me and my tears. Those are the best times.