Post-Toasty

Post-Toasty by Batricia Steward (Me)
The sun was up but darkness weighed upon my spirit. I glanced at it. Blindness covered the darkness with one bright circle as my eyelids closed and retinas burned. My eyes opened while I did nothing. They looked away from it, but its empty, blank silhouette still covered everything, the large, white spot, refusing to disappear from influencing how one might view her surroundings. Then the old world reappeared—the one that prided herself because of her status with Man, the one that shared the same sun with Mars but thought narrowly of her relationship with him. To me, this world was not so different than the old old world that thought she was herself flat while those who dared to challenge her claims of herself would fall from her edges, not so unlike one man’s tale of an angel that had fallen from grace.
At one particular part of the Pacific Crest Trail, not that identifying it is really important, there’s a view I've discovered several times, though it has never really been the same view between visits. Sometimes I see something new added to the landscape or something else vanished, and sometimes what has always been there is simply there in a way that it had never been there before, altered, modified, changed—the clouds, for example. But I don’t find the shapes of animals or objects in clouds, at least not to the best of my recollection. I appreciate that they are themselves, always changing form, from thick to thin, to bunched up in one portion of the sky to scattered about from east to west or north to south and moving at various paces and directions with the breeze. On a good day, every one of my senses is consumed by this world—with the crisp, fresh smell of a smogless air and the unusually rhythmic sound of the various local birds, some chirping, others cackling, and still others even singing. On this day, however, there was no smell and no sound, and no breeze touched me; rather, the empty, blank silhouette disrupted my view.
I could see things that were not directly ahead. I used the perimeter of my sight to guide my steps to get there and to see what there was to be seen. At first it was quite an annoyance not being able to see the center of focus, but as I learned to focus on everything else, I grew much more, not exactly satisfied but perhaps, content with my new ability to see what I would not normally have seen. My other senses returned. The white, empty, blank spot became black, not literally this time, but I put it out of my mind and focus. In fact, the perimeter of my sight which could have remained active, if I so chose to allow it to be, also became the empty blank circle, shortly; and then it too turned to coal. I was left with nothing on which to focus in front of me, not even on my surroundings did I focus. Instead, I found another place, a view that had never before existed for me.
I found myself on a street with big businesses dominated by women. Women of color. Women of women. Women without money. Women without color, who insisted that they were not to be associated with men without color. My retinas burned again.
Another black emptiness appeared. It went black. Again a white circle encompassed it. And then it, the outer circle, all that was left, also turned to coal and blackness.
I found myself at a computer in a cyborg chat room, where no one had control over their names. All identifying usernames were randomly selected by an untouchable control system. All users had agreed to the cyborg code—that no identifying information could be stated. That is—not only could we not identify ourselves by name, but neither could we identify our age, sex/gender, religion, political affiliation, country of origin or citizenship, socioeconomic class, and so forth. But what a user did no explicitly type was arguably woven implicitly into conversations with queer diction, sentence structure, jargon, and so forth. Their identities were clear enough to anyone who bothered to guess. One cyborg who I chatted with, nearly broke the code. She felt she could identify me because of my empathetic tone among other things implied in my chatting with her. I expressed the same feelings as she and took to her as a sister when we discussed our Xs. She nailed me, or so she thought, as a new feminist, not because I am one but, because she sensed I understood her. She didn't actually call me one but asked if I was one. I felt violated, as if being asked if I was a “feminist” was a derogatory accusation. I can only guess that she would have liked to have said that she too was a feminist, but because that would have been a clear cyborg code violation, she could not. In truth I don’t really know if she was really a she. My retinas burned again.
I found myself on asphalt in the middle of a desert.