The commentariat in every age and epoch, with their eagerness to adjudicate and their need to dictate meaning, have in their various commissions formulated countless ways to capture the essence of liberation, as though it could be tapped and extracted like a syrup, or clad about with a definition both bespoke and interminable. The impulse to frame and fetter, to bind within some concrete distinction, may occur any time a person becomes narrativised, the story etching out a permanent record within which an existential death is often guaranteed. It is said that a person is not a person without a story, but in the end a story may after all serve as executioner rather than liberator, undermining the very personhood claimed to be inhered.

This being, for whom those that tried found impossible to articulate or apprehend, was neither individual nor horde, neither avatar nor void; this icon built from negative space; this blank dream whirling like a death mask in a feverish mind; this conception wretched throughout with the ultimate antithesis of all conceivability - had any known from which procession of misfits this impossible being had escaped, or to which procession of misfortunes it found itself destined, they may refuse to talk of it out of a fear of all disclosure - for those things set free by truth can never again be restored to silence, and truth, however one envisions its freedoms, may yet give way to the most hostile and witherward of liberations.

The saga of your brokenness remains incomprehensible to whomever it is told: fragments usually murmured from the corner of one mouth to the next, often shared hurriedly on thresholds, sometimes spat. You are only glimpsed on the periphery of life, a fog shifting under a dim and distant light, a shadow dissolving at the edges of vision.

How it was you came to be known as Kintsu, the one who knit calamities together not with gold but sprezzatura; the one who appeared as thoughtform whenever spoken of, who would evaporate when the utterance came uncoiled and incomplete to a breath's end in the idle air. How it was you came to be bound together by sangfroid and apocrypha - an indestructable and impossible being.