🛸 Arrived

We keep misunderstanding what words are.

They bubbled up out of nowhere. Loose vibrations, floating between mouths and ears, like air-things. Whoever spoke the loudest said it best. The rest evaporated.

First we dressed ourselves in hides. Then we dressed ourselves in words.

Names, reputations, myth-making, propaganda. A second skin. A self we could point to and say this is me.

The body stayed put. The story knew how to travel, how to tell itself again and again. How to elaborate and embellish and exaggerate.

Suddenly distance didn't matter as much, and time mattered a little less. Words stopped belonging to bodies and started belonging to routes, traditions, institutions, rituals.

When print arrived, we thought we'd finally caught them. Flattened them. Pinned them to paper. Two dimensions. Permanent. Trapped.

That was our mistake again.

Print didn't cage words — it multiplied them. It gave them range. It let them repeat themselves without fatigue. It taught us a new rule: whoever says something most frequently says it best. That may still be true today.

Electronic words finished the job. One dimension. Pure signal, no unwieldy bulk. Serial.

They slipped free of sound, free of paper, free of transport. They move at the speed of light now, across any distance, as fast as the universe allows. No lungs. No paperboys. No delays worth naming.

We call this progress, but it isn't ours.

Words completed their evolution. We didn't. We still move at walking speed, flying speed, escape-velocity speed — never relativistic. We are large, warm obstacles dragging history behind us.

Language already lives in the future.

It got there first. It left without us.