To Be or Not to Be He inhabited the negative space—he found himself only able to be where something else was not. It may sound like a scary or lonely life but luckily for him, it wasn’t. He had plenty of friends, and to the spectating eyes of his peers and parents, he was thriving; but all that was a facade to protect his secret research. This is not to say that he didn’t at times enjoy playing the character he had created for himself, but he knew deep down that was not him. So he carried out tests and experiments with marbles to attempt to find a dueling space: somewhere where two things could exist in the same place congruently. But he didn’t insist on perfect congruence: he would happily settle getting the marbles to meld together even a little. Of course he couldn’t achieve his goal by using the scientific method of keeping meticulous data and testing things, because he knew that what he meant to achieve couldn’t be achieved by doing it the way that it was meant to be done—then someone would have already done it. So he took no data and tested things only as he felt they hadn’t yet been tested. He didn’t throw the marbles or squish the marbles or crack the marbles or smack the marbles, he talked to them. He read them stories of unity and togetherness, and of the oneness of the universe, and simply placed the marbles next to each other; giving them the agency to meld themselves. He tried this for countless days, and in many different ways. He played them speeches from the Dalai-Lama and sheltered their lives from any trauma. Read them rhymes with affection but nothing could grab their attention. The marbles just sat there, neither melding, nor moving at all. Clearly he hadn’t found the right approach, or it truly was impossible for two things to occupy the same space. He stopped caring for his facade at this point in his research; he allowed his friends to distance themselves and his parents to worry, but all the same he tended to his marbles. He didn’t particularly want to share his research with the world, because he didn’t particularly care about the thoughts and feelings of the rest of the world: because they were absolutely individual. They could never understand the marbles because the second they saw them, their minds would be clouded with their own opinions and criticisms. What he wanted was true sameness. Two marbles to not only be the same shape, size and color, but also to occupy the same space, to free themselves from the confines of individuality. Suddenly, he realized that the marbles could never unite, because they had already been too exposed to the propaganda of form. They had already thought of themselves as marbles; not as beings, but marbles. They were convinced that they were not the world around them, and that they were a marble and that everything else was, well, just everything else. So he searched the world for something to test that didn’t already have this preconception—this misinformed, form creating, freedom inhibiting—conception.
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