Dig It
On their way to the doctor, Chase bikes over the old border bridge. Binder tight. Arms burning. Sweat drying cold under their black shirt. Traffic nearly throws them into the river. They lean their whole weight forward to keep the bike straight. Piss, beer, hot metal. The city in summer. Familiar. Gross. Weirdly soothing.
He goes through endless tunnels. Underground now. The sky is a 360° dome of blurred pastel light. It clashes with the roads and the artificial city glow, fluorescent, dirty. Dust cuts digital god rays through the air. The fog makes it real, like a 3D render. Noise and voxels.
Chase dreams of owning back his non-binary body, and the pronoun that labels it. He needs to pass the test: a man asking the State to correct his body. He can’t do it without embodying it every day. Speaking the language of the ruling class to access health.
While driving, surviving traffic to arrive on time, he says to Ray:
"Record this. No time to write it down. Remind me to edit later. It goes like this: Digit means dig it. Dig a cave into the cave because nobody can escape it."
The bike shakes on the bumpy road. His hands slip.
“Dig deeper with your fingers. Digit means fingers, the way we measure the world.”
Chase tightens the grip.
“Digital doesn’t mean technological. It means one thing divided into two, two into three, and so on. Technology grows between you and what you touch, until you forget who’s holding whom.”
His chest hurts under the binder.
“So dig deeper with your fingers. Recycle the surplus into layers until the image stops making sense.”
Sweat runs down his ribs. Binder and testosterone make him wet.
“Use it to rub the excavated images while hesitating between inside and outside. Know the difference between extraction and excavation. Extraction recontextualizes nothing, it just drains. Excavation listens. It crawls in the abyss infinitely. You only approach the meaning of what you’re digging for by making a hole in it… Ray, record this before I crash.”
They both laugh. He arrives right on time.
AI-generated images, 2023.