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.

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

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.

I experienced my first end-of-history illusion when I was eight years old. Everything that I could think of had been said.