transmuted ovenbird I have been placed in a virtual waiting room with all the other parents trying to buy tickets for our kids’ year end dance recital. Ticket sales open at 9 a.m. We’re hovering over our computers. Watching the countdown clock. Sweating (or maybe that’s just me). I am alone at the same time that I am connected, through my act of anxious waiting, to hundreds of other people. When the synchronized clocks that tell us the time turn over to 9 a.m. I move from a waiting room to a virtual queue. There are 115 people ahead of me in line. How? What powers say who gets to go first when we were all let in simultaneously? I wait while the screen notes my place in line. By the time it’s my turn I’m so stressed that I screw up the order, forget my father-in-law can’t come, and buy him a ticket, which is non-refundable, and only remember when the confirmation lands in my inbox. How strange, I think, to move through the virtual world, to be inside a “room” that is not a room but only an idea of a room, where a digital code that represents me stands in for my body and sits next to the codes representing other human beings. How strange to be in a line while sitting still. How strange to be transmuted from flesh and bone to strings of data. I am here in my bedroom bathing my face in the blue glow from my computer screen, while some version of me, some digital doll, holds my place in line. When it’s all over and my digital doppelganger is erased, or given back to me, and I am just one entity again I want to go outside. I want to feel sun burning straight through my closed eyelids. I want to lie on the ground and feel heat radiating from the soil. I settle for staring out the window while I work. The maple tree is heavy with winged seeds. The tree knows what it’s like to have thousands of copies of itself spinning through the air. It knows what it is to be a fragmented being, at once stationary and airborne. How many pieces of me have I sent out into the world only to lose them forever? If you find a shard of my fallen self, would you plant it? Would you tell me what springs from all that coiled potential? Because I can’t quite tell what I’m supposed to be and your eyes are so kind and keen and I think you might be able to see. 260521 what's it to you? who go blather from