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Her words, written and spoken:
all her words that I’ve read and heard;
Her pictures, still and moving,
still moving and moving still;
The information that describes her
and everyone around her and her relations to them;
The knowledge of what she’s done and where she’s been
and thoughts of what she may do and where she may be someday;
Her possessions, current and past (and maybe future),
such as I know and such as I imagine;
What I can imagine of how she experiences the world
and how and what she feels and thinks -
and how she might feel
and what she might do
and how she might act
and what she might say
in various imagined situations:
This is everything she can be to me.
And sometimes I feel as if this everything that is her to me
Is like a pool of water
And I’m a sponge
thoroughly immersed in that pool:
Only the sponge has completely disintegrated;
Every fiber of it has been replaced by water,
And it has only a sort of virtual existence:
A memory of where it was,
Where it is, only now it’s completely made of water;
Or else it’s just a point within the water,
Zero in every dimension;
Or dissolved in the water,
dispersed throughout the water
and indistinguishable from the water itself.
Sometimes I feel that
And sometimes I don’t feel that.