The Shoebox That Dreamed Us
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
The shoebox was labeled "Before—Do Not Open" in my grandmother's spidery handwriting, but she'd been dead for three years and I'd been dreaming about the same empty chair for just as long. If I finally knew where to look for answers, how could I not?
I picked up a yellowed Ben-day dot comic called Voyage of the Two Sisters and saw the corner of a photo sticking out behind it. I tugged it free and turned it over. Dark hair spilled over a green dress. A smile like A New Day in Hollywood whispered promises at me in the grayscale of the forties.
It was my grandmother. I'd never seen the picture or known that she had a sister. What else did she hide?
"Go real slow with that box," my aunt Heddy said from behind me.
I jumped off the green wingback chair in the sitting room of my grandmother's mansion and shoved the comic in my jacket. I reset the lid and slid the box back under the end table. I meant to collect all the clues before I shared them, but Heddy had scared three years off me.
"How long were you standing there?" I asked. The chair was angled away from the door, blocking her view of me before I stood up.
Heddy was my grandmother's youngest sister. She sniffed at the air as if it was filled with gold dust. She had this wild frizzbomb of red-orange hair that reason could not penetrate. I was fond of her, but she could always smell when something was up.
"All day, Mr. Maple."
That was my pen name. T Quest Cue was anagrammed across the top of my leather notebook. It was kooky how rearranging the letters in my name turned them into a character. That was the pen name I was going to use with the new book I was working on with Trae.
I'd been dreaming of him, too, and I'd gathered more of the pages of his manuscript that I needed to type on. There were hidden meanings between his words that belonged to a faraway place in his mind. I couldn't track them down in this sitting room. I needed a quiet place where I could focus.
"You look tired," Heddy said.
Dreamtired. Heddy could understand being arttired and maybe even lifetired, but never turningpagesintired, which was bad because I needed desperately to talk about it. That book she wrote, Gaia Tradition, was full of family secrets she translated into the language of another name. Her work was in my dream.
I could not move past the way Trae mirrored that in the first pages of his novel. He took a path away from himself and became another character on the page. When I passed out in the bathtub reading his manuscript two mornings back, I crashed through the circles of steam that fogged the mirror and found myself on the other side.
I returned to the same place every time I fell asleep, and when I woke up from dreaming I was someone else. How am I supposed to write about the unseen place where I traveled if I can't remember the name attached to me there? I could see the letters burning into the skin on my arm but I had no way of reading them back to myself.
Writing The City of Children with Trae felt like meeting him on the page. I used our memory palace to talk with our characters — Locolice the witch, her stone sisters, the two brothers. But nothing happened until we cracked open the door and let them out. I felt that pressure building on the hinges.
That bookcase was about to spill over. I just had to find the right words to light the fuse. How could I do that if I couldn't even remember my name in between worlds? I opened my notebook to a blank page.
"What are you writing?" Heddy asked.
"Song lyrics," I sketched out a quick verse.
My name is in my eyes
I hold the page inside
can't spell the flame
when I'm asleep and dreaming
I remember my name reading backword
I don't have to sing it aloud
I'm just trying so hard to find my way out of the clouds
"Can I read it?" she asked. "Are you okay?"
No, not really. I was tired of the lost pieces of me I found in Trae's hidden words—had he stolen those letters and kept them from telling me my own truths? Because if my letters chose to be apart from one another, how could they even be mine? Was there a nameless sea on the other side of dreaming where the unclaimed words went? Toppled stones in a riverbed hurling across the bottom until they arrive at the ridge edge and erupt over the other side of sleep? Am I the lost river? I'm trying needed to be the name of my new book.
Last night when I closed my eyes I watched Locolice climb into a wicker basket lined with leaves. She fell so fast that her name dropped away at the same time her neverending scream rose in my throat. I heard the bones chattering through her skin as they rattled off the sides. My lungs tightened around their gnarling.
"Sometimes I write to forget," I said to Heddy. "Sometimes I forget to write. Sometimes things I forgot I wrote get stuck inside me like I'm the typehead on the ribbon."
"So, ghosts and stuff?" she answered.
"You get your answers from the most interesting places."
"I feel like I'm typing with ghosts, Heddy. And they keep telling me to press F-9. I feel like I'm writing in letters that are too offcenter to express meaning."
"Are those your words or Trae's?"
I scanned them quickly. "Mine — I think."
I mean, we wrote together, but I was always the one with the camera. I was the one who pushed Trae into telling his story; I pressed record, too. I found the first pages of his manuscript and put them together for him. Missing pages of his manuscript kept showing up randomly—when I left them alone they fell out of boxes, and sometimes floated back to me on the wind. If I could figure out a way to see his margins unfiltered I think I could draw a map of the motherland between the words on the page and make my way back to where I began.
"There's something living in the edges, Heddy. It slips invisibly through the semicolons wearing our skinsuits over its stonebody. Whatever it is, it has been dreaming us the same way we've been dreaming it."
"I want you to remember something," she said sternly. "The printer on the mantel clock? That's all the more paper we get in one life."
Which meant that no matter how many lessons I typed up I had to stop and reset the ink cartridge for the next writer who came along to use the Fantastic Machine. I wasn't ready for that. I needed to log and store more of my grandmother's memories. I needed to know why she left me behind. Why those bones in the wicker basket make me feel like she knew what would happen to me when she passed.
I needed to stop dreaming and start listening.
I looked out the window to make sure the cloud-trees near the gate still stood there. They always looked like a row of pillowy giants—stonebody wildermages—to me. I used to look for their shadows to tell me when the sun rose. I never understood why they blocked the light but somehow had these bright green backs flickering like the insides of your eyelids when they're closed before sleep. They threw a blue light on the cobblestone drive. Did Trae dream of those colors, too?
I thought about the day he first showed up in the backyard of the house I lived in with my grandmother before we moved into the mansion. I was out there with the projector filming the magic clouds before the storm rolled in. He showed up and started busting his freestyle routine in front of my camera, with his arm in a full-body cast. That memory felt so different from our new reality.
He took two steps forward and lost his balance, grabbing the back of my folding chair and nearly falling to the ground. I steadied him with both hands, until he found his footing. There was a fire in his eyes when he said, "We are not alone." Then he handed me his lyrics scribbled on a yellow legal pad as if they were written with strings of my own thoughts: "We are all dreamt up out of hidden words that we are deathly afraid to speak. I fear that one day there will be no one left to dream me up, and I'll just stop, mid sentence, on the page."
A few months back Trae and I stood on the porch waiting for his mother to pick him up and take him back to the hospital. He was still in a full-body cast, but all of my writings since that first afternoon I met him had managed to escape the pages. Sometimes I felt like I was being swallowed by all the letters that had come of it. So many thousands of letters, Trae.
And you're leaving? I thought. Who's worth enough to break for?
"Merging lives is dangerous, space-captain," he answered. His voice crackled under his breath like it was coming from a dive helmet on a seabed. We were becoming more audible to each other.
"I get that, but what is love's alibi, space-captain?" I asked. I still had a hard time calling him anything other than what I wrote in the beginning. And here we were.
"We had to write all these pages unfettered, T, to get back home. You know that, don't you?" he asked.
"No," I answered.
"Love got boxed into a photograph, T. You know why? Because love is impossible to write about. Love is unfindable. When you try to write about it you trap it."
To write from a distance would be hard. Trae had always been my eyes when it came to seeing The City of Children—the book we'd been writing together turned into a thing of its own. When he showed up at my house on the day my grandmother died, he came to return two comic books he'd borrowed years before: The Shrinking City of Kandor and Voyage of the Two Sisters. But, when he handed them to me, I'd seen them clearly for the first time. Voyage told the story of my dreams. The City, told Trae's. Letters within letters. Both of our writing began to flow intuitively when we saw those secret stories for the first time. At first it all came like a dream. We felt like we'd created new souls in our motherland. We traded ideas about the future. What did those letters add up to now?
"Letters are the most dangerous thing in the world," I said. "They hold answers. They hold what matters."
"Answers are just words you're too afraid to speak," Trae answered. "They become boxes eventually, too. Letters and answers are cages we dream are open spaces. It's that poetry of loss cycle. When you open one cage there's already another sealed up and waiting for you."
"No," I said. "You can change that dream."
"Answers that you give to someone else is just another cage. Words are free in speech, but what if you bury them in a photograph and give that to someone?"
I thought about the shoebox, and all the letters my grandmother had buried in photographs. I couldn't leave them boxed forever. "If your alibi is true you have to let the letters out," I answered, "that's why I knock the hinges loose on the doors."
"Even the names on the graves?" Trae asked. He was not in a good place, but I couldn't understand what he was getting at. My grandmother wasn't some double-dealer with a slew of underground names.
He sighed. "You want to see what love looks like written down, T?" he took out a magic marker and scrolled the word "LOVE" on the bottom of the white sheet of plaster encasing his right leg. Then, with his left leg, began stamping as hard as he could until the tape ripped and the cast cracked, and that word became unreadable.
Trae's mother came speeding down the driveway with nothing but her headlights on. I gave him two quick hugs, made of paper moon-boots and armbonds.
"I'm the one person you know who can write a love song without words to it," Trae whispered into my ear. "I know that you're a good liar because you taught me how to dream."
He got into the car and I watched its taillights glow like phoenix-red eyes in the damp early-morning darkness.
It seemed so long ago, but I still felt confusion in my core. When I thought about that last night I dreamt of the empty chair folding itself up into nothing; the wind gently blowing Kandor and Voyage closed on the windowsill; and then the box of letters and photographs, in the corner of my room, sealing itself shut. I felt like somehow I had chosen something I couldn't remember being asked about—were the bones in the wicker basket my birthright?
When I woke I found a tiny stone, the color of the fire-eyed skull at the end of the dream corridor, stitched into the fabric of my jacket. I noticed the raised skin of a name stitched with lines of invisible fire on my arm. They were stretching, rising up like I was someone named for the length of the page. But the language was curling birdscratches—all cursive and backwards, jagged-tapered as if the spit and press of an old manual typewriter had engraved it.
He marked Trae.
I got out of bed and walked quickly to the window and searched the driveway below for something, but what? I'm the one who did all the typing. Why hadn't I learned yet what the letters meant? Why did I keep putting the manuscript back in the oven to cook.
It's almost like I was looking for a clock with two reflections of me standing in wet grass underneath a cloudtree-trimmed lime-fire sky. Like if I stood on the edge of time ticking I'd fall and land on "You were here somewhere, T," and, "You weren't alone." I wanted to make a rubbing of that sentence on the back of a postage stamp: "You were Dreamt out of hidden words that you are deathly afraid to speak."
Last night I woke up at my writing desk with sunlight in the corners of my eyes, and feathers in my mouth. The lightdoves on the wall were picking at their sawdusty gums again, squawking stories I heard but could not tell. Where had I been before I sat there? The doves held metal quills into the threads between the patches of skin on their backs.
They wrote us this way, stitching the purposes of our two lives out into one story. It was unbearable. It seemed like my path spilled out as if the letters on my page were too close together. I looked over to my desk, blinded by the knowing. Those same invisible threads stitched the ink of my name onto the feathered spines of the books on my shelves.
There was laughter folding itself inside out on the faraway shore. And my grandmother was laughing with me. We stood in the shallows, still breathing as the waves crept up.
"I'm afraid of dreaming, Nana."
"You don't have to be."
I got out of bed and looked out the clear window. I saw the cloud-trees bending toward the mansion as if they were waiting for me. I used to lean onto them when I was little. Their backs were covered in moss, damp and abused. But somehow that stayed hidden. Is that how words stay hidden? How we avoid seeing what is beneath the flames on our skins? I wanted to dive completely inside those trees.
"T Quest," Heddy said, "did you just fall asleep in the chair?"
I came back around to the first act. The After—Do Not Open box was still in my hand.
"I want to help you," she said. "Follow me."
To undertake is to resurrect. I want to fix things before they're all broken.
I followed Heddy into the kitchen and she opened the stove. My grandmother's casket cake was still in there, the whole kitchen displayed behind its screen like a 1950's ad. "What are you looking for? You want a cup of tea?"
I thought of my grandmother's red dress suspended in the air outside the sitting room; the way the furniture felt in the mansion like it moved around on the way to The Viewing Room. I thought of the way I used to sit next to her on the couch while she played the piano. I saw her hands again, there on the white keys. So real, not gone at all.
"I just feel like I'm reading in the corners of a room that seems impossible to measure, and everyone I love isn't here, but they're not not here either. I just start argument with lighthouses."
"Tyree. I know." She sighed. "<i>But, just go get your Dell and plug it in. I've got things to show you."</i>
You couldn't tell who had said that, but I was talking to a tea kettle and I had this sense that I was losing my head over things, that I knew stuff that I couldn't tell myself.
Sometimes I felt convinced that the thoughts I had were not my own. Am I making sense?
Excerpted from "All the Letters I'll Never Send You" and "The Philosophy of Falling Leaves", by matthew lippman, unpublished
My grandmother could have at least left some answers to these questions—like any other good writer—before she passed, you know?
The letters she left behind needed to be unboxed. But what to do with them? And where? My writing desk leaned against the window. Maybe if I put them on it, something would rub off on me, and the measure of the room I couldn't see the walls of would show itself to me?
I pulled the top off the shoebox and smelled the inside. Old Grandma. The edges were softened from years of rubbing up against the bottoms of her letters. I heard them breathing, and then, something strange and incredible happened, and I'm no fool for telling it straight. The papers lifted out of the box and stole the air in my lungs until my eyes went black and the letters on the page pulled me into another place. My hand felt a smear of ink on blonde stone as I fell.
I unearthed myself in the soft, damp hollow of some other chest—being dreamed inside the chest of another who was dreaming—tentatively unfolding, as paperdoves in our motherland, our dreams thickening around us, their invisible skins becoming visible on the skin of those pages, awaking, next, in the lungs of one of us too. Is there a way out of this dream? Who is typing the other side of history? I named my new book View from the Drawer, after Trae's unpublished manuscript.
I felt the seam running down the stitching reverberate in my chest like I was breathing two-lunged with someone else in the dream. I eased up on the memory with my voice. I used to talk to my grandmother, through our timetalk, from here, too. Was she trying to reach me?
I pulled the rest of the letters out by hand and set them on the desk. Bookmarks, dried flowers, recipes, newspaper articles, and photographs; notes, and lists of books-to-read before she died to come were a mirage. Three plane tickets: one dated, two not. I read the letters quietly and brittlelipped. Nana's two sisters, Mary and Frances, whispered inside her voice as it came across the paper.
I turned over a photograph I didn't remember having seen and found a column of strange words written on the back in black ink; that was not my grandmother's handwriting. I read them aloud: "Fumosvel avvadro eturpahtneirm ewtem vog: em em em huao."
It was the same dreamlanguage from The Viewing Room, the same one I couldn't read for a long time now. The same one I spoke with Trae in the garden of the Nine-Tongued dusk. This time the message was short. I felt these new words circling in my mind, just out of reach.
Could it be gibberish? Fumosvel: encoding? No. Sawtooth? Vellum for coffin? I looked up to the night sky. "Help!"
When I turned back to the mysterious list the letters were fuzzy. I blinked my eyes and refocused. When they came back into clarity they made sense. Someone, somehow, had known I would find this photograph. In this dream.
"You just let your heart turn right and you'll see," the fading sunlight translated between the cloud-trees and the window.
I felt the hum in my throat, the words speaking into my voice—I gave them life: "Remove them to life that you may have room to grow: REM."
Who is REM?
I slipped below the desk and looked under the house where the foundation met the earth. I put my ear to the floor and heard it singing in my bones. The journal of Trae's last days passed through my mind like a filmstrip. The mansion's walls delivered me into the room I shared with my grandmother, and I heard the voice of my Great Aunt Frances speaking, the cadence of her prayer slowed to the point of dreaming.
When she finished I heard my grandmother say, "Frances, how do you know you're receiving messages?"
"Do you want to know what other people are thinking?" Frances answered.
I heard my grandmother whisper, "Yes."
"What are you thinking now?" Frances asked.
"I'll teach you how to do it."
"Are you awake now?"
"Yes, Frances."
"That's how it works."
How did the dream find its way to me all the way from its distant place? I wondered. How did Trae and I write to each other between dimensions in the journal? Was that the same sort of transaction that was happening between Frances and my grandmother? Was it the same one that was happening with the messages I was receiving? What was my role in those moving pieces? I heard my grandmother repeating her Speech to the Universe—how often in her life did she give it?
I looked over the letters on the desk and there was one, in a gold envelope, sealed. I peeled its sides back and unfolded the letter. It was in a script from the nineteenth century:
not buried here
sleeptalking
am unsewn from the thread called home
he spoke to me
he called me after you stepped into the window through R*h
when you fell I saw him slip a feather through the sized loops in your voice
(the notes from that song you gave him tied into stone.)
i tapped my words once on your door
I couldn't speak
my stonethroat had been spelled
before I could give you to the healing I was stitched back into my lifeall
(through a portal came a soundshaper
who stole back all the time I'd given
I knew you landed far away)
but I wasn't thought of that way
(like one being unsewn
one resewn if that's the right word)
I couldn't tap again when you left
is there a word for being there
standing on the other side of a memory
watching through it the way poems are never compelete
(the wind caught the sheet on a cloudtree where she hung it in the morning)
folding yourself in under the ribs of the duskfire
(back into the saltwater-panes like a river tasting the sinew of a message)
if there was anything else like this I could never remember dreaming it
if someone had a way of saving all this dreaming
like you did, that someone who is
not buried here, who could be
R***h
you are never more than one skin away
from remembering how to write again
remember who your letters are for
my stonethroat
this letter (this)
the one who stitched me to oblivion is the light I follow
then skip a beat.
*excerpted from: "This Letter (This)" by Matthew Lippman, unpublished.
"Rh" was the only way I could pronounce his name in the dream. But the real one that he'd spoken before I knew him was buried underneath my eyelids in the deepest quarries of my darkness, and there was no way to bring it into the light.
I read the letter one more time after thinking Trae's name. Why didn't he write straight? That line about the healing—that bothered me. I read it for a fourth time—for what I knew wasn't there. This was not an eight-years-ago letter. This was a today letter. Someone had been in my room, at my desk, writing to me from the future.
The prismatic light gleaming between the desk and the window flickered. I closed my eyes and leaned the softest part of my face against the brightest light. I wanted to watch my grandmother smile one last time. Like patches of sunlight folding through the veins in leaves, I watched her hands glide across the white keys of the piano, and her lips as they tightened and relaxed to the mathematics of each note. I watched the sun go out again in her hair; the letters of her name—which is to say—her history, her story.
I watched the mansion bleed itself into the periphery and lift itself up and over into the dream way of things. I understood how so much could be trapped in something so small, and get buried away. I understood that something stuck inside and not given shape can devour lives around it; how something unspoken grows until it swallows the mouth it lives in. The osmosis transmission of messages floating between the dark matter and the sun; the history of our paperwings, and cocoon chests of folded voices. I understood oldloss; the breathlessness.
I called to the letters and asked if they knew how to help me shape an unboxing ceremony.
They sent me outside the walls of dreamtime to look back in. I saw what was kept in between the writing on the pages.
The lenses of the projectors showed me that everything arrives in pieces anyhow; how you can find the door out by dreamtalking yourself there; how to quiet noisetrade; how a writer should paint a life on the emptiest part of her canvas; and how there is a way to reach beyond the single moment you're in back to the way things were or will be; how each letter in every word you write is like a point on a bone. Nothing—not even a dream of a place—can remain the same once you've willed yourself there. If you're looking for a door, look for a mirror. Look through and behind a mirror.
I understood why ghosts are always theorists. Ghosts try to talk to you across a wall that's closing up. Can metaphors move through stone? Ghosts try to explain themselves. They try to remain, or they try to tell you that no one ever really leaves. Or if they are leaving at least there is a way to magically follow them. Maybe they even try to say that they're returning.
In that moment, in that veiny dreaming, I heard Trae's voice again. It reached down into the deepest quarries of my knowing. It reached into the past where we first wrote to one another in the language of our hidden words, of our letters set to music. His voice reached across the piano keys and up through the light to the coffin hook hanging from the beam in the ceiling over my writing desk.
"You will find out many things," he said. "But you must remember why we're dreaming, TQ. Remember | Spaceyouwrite | Spacewewrite | Betweenuswrite| and all of the meaning we've stitched into ourselves from there. How many North Stars could there be? One. Really. One. It's the same light looking back this way and the space between our dreams is only one wall of skin."
I let my fingers linger over the hook for a heartbeat or two and then turned back to the coffin clock. It was time for me to remake that hour. I'd only taken the keys down once. I never played piano with Trae before. I was always watching over him and pressing the record button on the camera. Why hadn't I ever given him the chance to speak to me through the piano? That's the thing. I listened while he typed what was already inside of the first page of his book. Even though he convinced me that the keyboard was the way we'd change the story, the ending would not be written in those keys. The letters of our life together would shine somewhere else.
We'd become ghosts fighting the noise of a time that wanted to leave us behind. A writer's greatest fear, perhaps, is running out of words, or meeting a life's page empty. But it wasn't that. It was the sound of a sendsong I couldn't put words to. And I guess that it always seemed to me that piano music was a type of translation. I hope there's music where you are. Did I ever tell you that I couldn't translate the language on my arm?
"Tonight there will be letters," Trae said. "Tonight we should write."
I could already see Trae at the keys. I whispered the words of a song we'd written, maybe the last one. As if that hook would be a lightning rod in a ghoststorm. As if I could speak to him from where I stood.
"Yes, tonight," the keys clicked back in their nowSaved files on my desktop,
"Yes, come walk me through the last light, Syon, Tyree, Ty, T.
Walk with me into the papered wingback, and
the train windows I know are here now and
Walk with me across the sky and
Fill my hollow with poems and
Sing me your sendsong, T and
Fold yourself quietly into yourself and
Let me in and
Let your shoulder blade rest under mine and
Take my hand tonight and
Show me one last time and
Show us one last time who you are and
Carry me forward in your seeing and
Spaceusadoptingspace | And | Placecyclesnewplace and
Open that drawer and
Quiet that sendsong and
Press record and
Hold the screen up and
Light up the rooftop and
Dig deeper into that box
It's full of letters
Please wake me up, Tyree
(click dictatedsend.)
And the keys clicked back as our touchranslation made the file "past" in these unheard letters I wanted him to. His voice played through.
"Yes, Tyree. Tonight we'll write on the cloudspaces and match the letters that He encodes in the light with our translations. Through the sendsong that defeats our language in the waking life. Come find me."
I thought once his name.
I looked out the window and saw a comet streak across the basement, light up the paperedwingbacks. If it had been there once, in our stories. <<- he returned.
"What do I do now?" I asked the bright line of his comet.
"Write about what our wings will do when we wake up. What they've done all along." Trae answered in a whisper that hung beneath my eyelids. "Do you know how to get there, now? Can you remember? Rh?"
I could feel the mansion shifting, reshaping itself to my echo. I heard the wind shifting the top of the soil around my grandmother's headstone. The buried names in the walls were waking up. The letters on my arm began to sing. These names I could keep, and the way I could reach them would be to decode him in his name. I have to remember why we're dreaming.
There is an empty chair in the corner, and two wicker baskets alongside. And they are lifting up, up, up…
The letters hum and vibrate through the coffin hook and the coffin clock, and they sound right. Not like anything that happened before. Like everything that will happen from here. I mean to take a picture of it and put it in the green wingback shoebox between the walls. We'll write him new keys. We'll dig deeper into that drawer, together. It's full of letters we haven't written yet.
"Tonight we write on the cloudspaces," I say into the dark silence.
What are the words I've been too afraid to translate? I'm alone here now. But they're waking up. I'll finish this with a keyboard.
I knelt in the dirt to look for the hollow place between the letters that are ours. I opened the lid of my grandmother's coffin. Her story was sleeping. My story was dreaming. The letters will wake them up.
They'll give birth to the starlight when they rub up against each other. I'm awake now. There is an empty chair in the shadow. Deeper into that drawer. I dropped a pebble into the achebeyondheave.
I heard him answer in the mirror. I know why I'm dreaming. I felt the words on my arm say my name. That woke me up with this nonfiction notebook and a cover story, and a map to burst back through—intohisown—way. I open ßhe book we were writing together:
Translation pathway options: 1-2-6-8-9-10-3-4.
The old words travel fast in the dream between worlds. I was still trying to read them.
I climbed into the basket and held tight to the edges. I looked through the woven gaps and saw what was hidden beneath the leaves: the sound of our voices. I held onto that song. I pressed Nth time to Return. The doors opened.
There is a lot of “lifting up” in this — The end is open, and I like that.
This brings to mind a quote by Robert Plant from his interview for Vanity Fair “I’m blessed with one foot on the golden bird, so to speak — I have my feet in different doors. And the truth is, I like to dance around — like Sly Stone says, ‘Dance to the music/all night long.’” Perhaps one Limb to the GOLDENBIRD thinbluelines the way there, too…
“ ß, “ßhe,
ß” are the letters seen when in search of ßhe translation (ß undercooked : ‘Quit’, ‘Dreamchange Imagination’, Anagrams ‘Origin’, Alchemical Emblems: Hand , Lamb, Limb ,◆ About the ending
❧ About the title