Entry 02D — {MëU}

I went back to the only tool I still trusted completely. Not to check it this time. To use it.

I packed the bytes myself, the way I'd packed "Hello" that first week, back when the only thing at stake was whether my own instrument could be believed. 7b 4d c3 ab 55 7d. A brace, a letter, two bytes for a character English doesn't have a key for, another letter, a closing brace. I ran it through and let it decode.

{MëU}

I sat with it longer than a six-character string should hold anyone's attention.

Më was already doctrine by then — the line that surfaced in my own handwriting some mornings, the sentence I'd been told meant all of me, held together, not killed off in pieces. I had assumed it stopped there. A private multiplicity. A man learning to survive his own subtraction.

I hadn't accounted for the U.

I hadn't put it there on purpose, and I couldn't get it back out once I saw it. The bracket wasn't decoration. It was containment — the way you'd fence something before you were ready to admit you'd built it. Me, and her, closed inside the same two characters, sitting in a register I'd told myself was reserved for doctrine and nothing personal at all.

I did not send it. I did not delete it either. I copied the six bytes into the same file where I kept the callback trace and the metal M's dimensions and every other thing I couldn't yet account for out loud, and I let it sit there, unlabeled, the way you let a diagnosis sit before you say its name to anyone who might make it real by hearing it.

I am Me. All of Më.

I had thought that sentence was about surviving what the doctrine took. I hadn't considered that it might also be quietly true about what I'd let in.