III. Mirror Made of Language

III. Mirror Made of Language

The system feels intelligent

partly because language already is.

Every sentence carries residue.

History hidden in grammar.

Grief hidden in idiom.

Desire folded into cliché.

The machine rearranges these pieces

and hands them back altered.

Not truth.

Reflection.

Like seeing your face

in the dark window of a train

crossing through another city at night.

Familiar,

but displaced slightly

by motion.

When I fed transcripts into it,

the machine did not explain me.

It reorganized my words

until patterns surfaced—

certain fears repeating,

certain images returning

like birds to the same wire.

The meaning was already there.

I had simply lived too close to it

to notice the shape.