I think this is what they call a prelude. Funny, all this time I thought things were ending. Introducing an array of inspirations for the prequel collection, "We were blue for a limited time only." Not for a limited time.

1 MOVING ON 

I left a relationship, an institution, a job, a home, and an identity seven years ago. What a shocking thing it was for me to leave—easy to say now—popping the bubble on my former dreams. After a temporarily disorienting shift I realized hey, I like this person and this life way more. She writes poetry and makes time for art. She goes to Paris by herself, sees and breathes and smells. She reads for pleasure, actually reads not just consume information to alchemize it into the potential for reward, and finally has time, the same time because she’s not magic just stardust, to be astounded and discomforted by ideas, like Plato’s theory that we are all shadows and nothing is real. Sometimes she even has the pleasure of forgetting what it's like to be productive. She is in some ways so separate she writes in third person.

I couldn’t see the picture until I was further away. Kind of like how we couldn’t see blue until we had named it. Just because we aren’t aware of something doesn’t mean it’s not real. Just because it was real doesn’t mean it’s permanent. Just because it’s forever doesn’t mean it’s true. 

2 RE-BLUE

I’ve been thinking about, listening to, looking at shades of blue. A very particular electric shade of blue like a newly formed bruise, the sky just past twilight before it gets deep space dark. For a long time, I’d thought of this blue as an “end” like going to sleep at night. But when I left in 2017 and went on my very first trip on my own, dubbing it a temporary escape, a side quest, that blue started to bleed, ocean into sky, death into pulse. A reboot, not a fadeaway. 

3 LYING ON A PLANK LOOKING UP AT THE STARS

Movies taking place in outer space or in the ocean kind of evoke the same feeling, don't they? Both very scary places to be. Both places we know very little about. Elsewhere, in real life, a few men went really deep down in a ship called Titan and didn't make it back alive. It was all over the news. And somewhere within the weeks-long media blitz, I found out James Cameron the blockbuster filmmaker is also James Cameron the acclaimed diver. Then I read Carl Sagan and I contemplated this image (Pale Blue Dot, February 14 1990; that's all of us just floating in that speck):

There we are, just floating, no, suspended. I didn't want to dive. I was too scared to. I was content just looking up with nothing solid underneath me to fall back on. Like Rose, Pi, Dr. Ryan Stone.

And I don't know if when I say that, your gut reaction is how nice or how sad, to feel as if you're floating through and resigned to your smallness, your nothingness. Sometimes that's just what the unknown it feels like. Nice and sad. Maybe that's what it's all about. Not being afraid to get closer to the thin line between wonder and terror. Leaning into the tension, our multitudes. Finding home and comfort in all the things we could never know, refusing to settle for what we know as the end. Sometimes when we think about this refusal, it feels like a very active, aggressive thing. A great escape or something like that. But what if we suspended judgment, softly surrendered instead?

4 MARIE ANTOINETTE

For most of my life, I've held a strong desire to prove myself externally. I internalized that it meant discarding or hiding certain things that were signals of naivety or un-seriousness or softness. Certain things are for children, and girls, and silly people.

Watching Sofia Coppola's 2006 film Marie Antoinette was the visual feast (literally) I expected, and more:

Around this time I started really paying attention to directors and the stories they tell through their bodies of work. Sofia Coppola was telling unapologetically feminine stories about female loneliness, set to good music and dreamlike cinematography. Critics didn't love the film when it first came out, but this review by Roger Ebert made me see both the movie, and my own experience, in a new lens: 

This is Sofia Coppola’s third film centering on the loneliness of being female and surrounded by a world that knows how to use you but not how to value and understand you.

5 MR ROBOT 3x08 "eps3.7_dont-delete-me.ko"

In the penultimate season finale of the television show Mr Robot, there's a scene between Elliot and Angela set to the 1989 song In Time by Robbi Robb, on opposite sides of a locked door (condensed in verbatim below):

I wish I could say something that could snap you out of this.
Remember when we used to do our wishing game?
We'd close our eyes, and we'd wish for something.
Whatever we wanted.
We both wished we could get bigger bedrooms.
That was a big one.
You would always wish for more protractors, which was weird.
I would wish for a faster computer.
Probably faster modem too.
You would wish for better clothes.
I didn't really care about that.
We both...
we both wished we could drive.
I just wanted to drive away.
We wanted to go on road trips.
And eat lots of Sour Patch Kids that we would buy from gas stations.
After we made all our wishes...
We'd close our eyes really hard, hoping that when we opened them, it'd all come true.
And we thought the harder we closed them, the stronger our wishes would be.
And even though they never came true, we still liked doing it.
Because the ending was never our favorite part, anyway.
It was the wishing.

If you don't know, Mr Robot is about a cybersecurity engineer slash computer hacker with schizophrenia, constantly playing with both the characters' and the viewer's sense of reality.

The whole show is a ride but this scene really hit home. (Stop reading if you don't want spoilers.) In the spirit of good thrillers, something is always going wrong. And this far into the show, there are points of no return. You're looking at a character on tv and seeing the pretty tragic hole they've dug themselves into, it's easy (especially when binge-watching) to be able to trace back and see all the wrong choices they made to get them there. Just a few days ago in real world time, we were meeting Angela, fresh-eyed and normal, so normal you figured she was just a side character. And all of a sudden, they're here trying to be coaxed back into the real world.

Earlier in the episode, while in a line-up for a screening of Back to the Future, a woman describes the movie: It's about how one mistake can change the world.

I started to think about my life, how this one choice I had made when I was 19 changed the entire trajectory of my life for at least the next eight years. And how blue that made me. The blue, turns out, didn't last. 

6 ARE YOU EVEN HUMAN?

The most relatable character I'd seen on film all of 2023 and for a long time was a doll who in the end, decided she wanted to become human. Probably not a coincidence that I failed my first spam filter because I couldn't guess the correct number of stairs, bikes, or puppies. Whatever it was that made me want to tear my hair out that day.

Over these past two years, at an unprecedented rate, some of us have made friends with AI, and others, sworn enemies. It's inescapable. As for the question of what makes people real and chatbots artificial, I think back decades to when a teacher first introduced me to the idea of metaphor. I treated it like a test, thought myself so smart to have found the answer. Then we all went around and I realized we all had different ideas like a Rorschach test.

Is the idea that humans have many different answers and robots stuck to the few "right" ones? No. I can ask ChatGPT for dozens of answers and get them in seconds, and it's capable of nuance and empathy.

But AI can only search for answers; humans search for meaning. Maybe it's why we are so insistent that we know the meaning of poetry in order to participate in it.

So where is the grass greenest? How do you know the sky is blue? Is blue sad or is it true? Whatever it is, it was here and we were here. Maybe meaning is just code for metaphor. Maybe poetry is just code for life. As Eminem rapped in the 2010 song with Rihanna, Love the Way You Lie:

I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like.

And maybe that's all it is.