totem u24 Somebody once said they were in love with me, on blather, and I rather coldly replied that they didn’t, they loved the idea of me. But I have fallen in love the ideas of you all 260926 ... raze one of my very first red blathes had me fielding a playful marriage proposal from stupidpunkgirl. in the beginning, when i didn't really know who i was or what i wanted to say here, the idea of anyone seeing something of value in my words was difficult to wrap my head around. i was pretty skittish for a very long time. i came to regret that later on when there weren't so many people around anymore. there were things i wanted to tell them that they too far away to hear. i tried to say them anyway. i think my idea of love has evolved and deepened along with my relationship to this place. there are 'skites i never interacted with in any way, and still they came to mean as much to me as anyone i've known. i've said this before somewhere, but in a place where all we are is words, it's always felt to me like many of us have found the courage to be our truest selves. there's a part of me that misses the days before social_media, when i had no idea what anyone looked like and had to paint my own pictures of them with nothing to guide me but the pieces of their lives they chose to share. meeting a 'skite in the flesh for the first time when we'd only exchanged a fistful of emails and didn't really know what to expect was a surreal experience. in a good way, though. it's impossible to imagine who i might have been if i hadn't stumbled into these blue and red worlds of words as a confused, lonely teenager. to say blather has helped to shape me would be a profound understatement. some of the most important people in my life have been (and still are) 'skites. these_days, love doesn't feel like a big enough word to hold all i feel for these_red_pages and everyone who's stained their skin with the ink of their hearts. 260926 ... ovenbird I hope my own definition of love and my capacity to experience it continues to expand forever outward. I think I fall in love with the idea of people all the time and there’s a beauty in that, especially when it’s tied to creative endeavours. I can know and love someone through their writing, through their art, through their music. And it’s not exactly the same as knowing someone as a whole person but the love, I think, is real. I hope we are all brave enough to love the humanity in each other this way. It beats the hell out of falling in love with an AI agent. We have been sold so many stories about what counts as love and what doesn’t and I want, so badly, to tell a different story. I want to be free to love in ways that blast apart the narrow categories we apply to our affection. I love the word “totem” and its connection to ideas of kinship. While Blather does not have a physical being, I still see it as emblematic. It represents a shared orientation towards reality built with language. We build representations of ourselves with words inside this space. We make our bodies into poems. And maybe it’s possible to love each other’s word-hearts. And maybe that is real love, even though it has no concrete shape or expression. What are we but ideas anyway? We are the stories we tell about ourselves. So perhaps we are always loving the idea of someone, no matter what form love takes. 260926 what's it to you? who go blather from