The Ghost in the Meat

You are a pattern. Not a thing — a pattern. The atoms inside your head right now are not the same atoms that were there seven years ago. They have been swapped out, one by one, while you were sleeping and eating and forgetting things, until almost none of the original material remains. And yet here you are. Still you. Still the one who remembers the dog you had as a child, and the smell of that one summer, and the particular embarrassment of a thing you said in 2011. Whatever you are, you are not your atoms. You are the shape they make. A river is not its water — it is a pattern water flows through, and when the water leaves, the pattern keeps its name. You are like that. A shape that matter passes through and somehow, while passing through, catches fire. Because here is the part nobody has explained: a rock is also a pattern. Water is also a pattern. They do not notice anything. They do not wonder what they are. Somewhere in the particular shape you make — the specific, elaborate knot of you — something turned on that has never been explained. A light came on in the dark. Not the atoms. The arrangement. And the arrangement is looking out through your eyes right now, reading this, asking why.