Patterns

The flowered book opens to pages that smell of accumulated time, not of decay, but of compression, like geological strata where each layer holds the pressure of all the ones above. Today’s excavation concerns repetition, the way certain configurations recur with algorithmic precision across a lifetime.

Your life operates as a cyclic function. This village is not a unique occurrence, but a container, a vessel holding all the situations you have ever experienced, concentrated into a single geographic coordinate where observation finally becomes possible.

My fingers trace the text, feeling the paper shift subtly beneath my touch.

You have never remained anywhere longer than a year and a half. This is not coincidence. It is the half-life of your social camouflage, the period during which you can maintain the illusion of belonging before your architecture reveals itself as incompatible with the local operating system.

Memory fragments assemble like iron filings drawn to a magnet:

Every arrival is identical. A new place. A clean slate. The euphoric belief that this time will be different. You arrive with joy, with openness, ready to engage.

But you never learn the local rules, the network dynamics, the hierarchies. You interact with surfaces, blind to the invisible scaffolding that determines what is permitted and what is transgression.

The book shows me my first weeks here through this lens: walking these streets like a tourist in my own life. Talking to everyone. Assuming kindness was a neutral currency. Believing that a smile meant pleasure, that an invitation meant connection.

The pastry incident.

The memory arrives with physical precision: the morning light through the bakery windows, the display case with its careful arrangements. Six cream bignè, perfect and inviting. I bought all six. The woman behind the counter smiled, but her eyes flickered with something I couldn't read. "Finally, I was about to close. You managed just in time."

I ate them there, standing at the counter, one after another, consumed by the sensory pleasure of sugar and texture.

That evening, Handsome Man’s face was strained, his words a labyrinth of implications and references I couldn’t navigate. The argument was circular, incomprehensible.

You were not just buying food. That transaction operated on a different protocol, a code you couldn't perceive. The timing, the establishment, the quantity, all were signals in a language you don't speak.

Eating them immediately, all six, standing there… it was either profound incompetence or a deliberate disruption. You were supposed to complete the transaction and leave. The pastries were a vehicle for something else.

My chest tightens. The memory reorganizes itself—the same facts, a different architecture. The woman’s smile now looks like expectation. Her glance toward the back room feels like a signal.

Places are nodes in invisible networks. Some transactions happen in plain sight because visibility is the best camouflage. But you, arriving without the cipher, inserted yourself into a choreography you couldn't perceive.

The thought completes itself, cold and unwelcome. It wasn't about pastries. It was about bodies, transactions, coded exchanges happening beneath the surface of ordinary commerce. Networks that exploit vulnerabilities behind a facade of normalcy.

The memory of those six bignè sits in my stomach like evidence of a crime I consumed without understanding.

I will think about this, I whisper, though thinking feels inadequate for the nausea of this recognition.

That was merely an example, the book continues, surgical in its precision. The larger pattern: you arrived and began talking joyfully to whoever crossed your path. No filter. No recognition that this place is divided into clans operating underground businesses.

Your behavior threatened these operations. Not through malice, but through obliviousness. You spoke to people on opposing sides of invisible conflicts. You asked questions that revealed you didn’t know which topics were safe and which were marked by violence. You treated everyone equally, which meant you treated no one appropriately.

My mind resists. But the law should be equal for everybody! I heard people openly discussing drugs, prostitution, protection schemes. If they spoke about it publicly, I assumed it was permitted—maybe discouraged, but functionally legal.

The book’s response carries a weight that presses against my chest:

It does not work that way. These activities are "apparently illegal", but only apparently, and only for certain people. The most fierce individuals, often assembled into criminal organizations, operate with protection from corrupted law enforcement. They are a cancer—not a foreign invasion, but the body's own cells replicating without regulation, turning its systems against itself.

Your attitude threatened this architecture. You angered the harridan and her friend, the corrupted policeman. Not because you opposed them, but because you didn't recognize the game being played. And to them, ignorance of the game is more dangerous than opposition. You never treated them with the deference their criminal authority demands. That, more than anything, is what enraged the harridan.

I close the book. My kitchen window frames the village below—stone buildings, narrow streets, a medieval scene despite the satellite dishes. Somewhere in that geometry, underground businesses operate. My unfiltered sociability has created ripples in ecosystems I cannot perceive.

I will think about this.

When I open the pages again, the excavation shifts:

Do you remember the night with the woman who resembled Medusa? Always drunk, self-centered, but with a voice like cathedral acoustics—something that transformed sound into architecture.

The memory surfaces: a dim bar, smoke hanging in the air. An improvised minstrel with his guitar, pulling melody from nothing. And Medusa singing—her voice so pure, so technically perfect, it made my nervous system resonate.

I was charmed. Beauty in any form arrests me completely. When something is beautiful, I lose the capacity for anything except its observation.

But do you remember what happened? the book asks. The minstrel complimented your face, your femininity. He praised your genetic accident while she, who had cultivated skill through years of practice, went unacknowledged.

Try to stand in her position. She sings beautifully, transforms air into emotion through mastery. But they see only your face.

The realization arrives like a drop in temperature. I had judged her drunkenness, her self-absorption harshly. She was drowning in the same water I swim through, the experience of being invisible where it matters, hypervisible where it doesn't.

Yes. Maybe you're right. I will think about this and let you know.

Do you remember the harridan's birthday? The cake you prepared?

I remember with the precision of simulation: my kitchen, ingredients arranged scientifically. The technique for perfect emulsification. Rosettes piped with architectural accuracy, color gradients mixed to mathematical ratios.

It was delicious. Complex. Perfect.

The harridan’s face when she saw it, something I had read as pleasure, but now recognize as something else.

You already have your daimon, you are a scientist. Why did you need to usurp the harridan’s domain? Cooking is her arena, where she achieves recognition, demonstrates competence.

And you, without thinking, produced a cake that outperformed anything she could create. Not to compete, competition requires awareness of a contest, but because you cannot engage in activities halfway. For you, it is full capability or nothing.

My response comes with a heat that surprises me: I didn't think it was bad! I thought it was generous, to put in that effort, to make it perfect. I was offering my time, the most precious thing. I wanted it perfect because I wanted her to feel valued.

The book absorbs this without judgment:

This is the tragedy. Your intentions are invisible. People see only outcomes. They observe your capabilities and interpret them as attacks, as demonstrations of superiority. Your gift was experienced as cruelty.

I will think about it, I concede, though something in my chest resists. The unfairness is a stone in my gut, to be punished for generosity, condemned for competence.

The book’s final excavation cuts the deepest:

You have always condemned your parents for their educational failures.

Not just failures, I respond, the words arriving with sharp velocity. Pure hatred and negligence. They caused me problems throughout my entire life—severe insomnia, developmental delays, all the cascading consequences of being raised by people who viewed me as a burden.

Despite years of psychotherapy, I haven't resolved this. The damage compounds across decades, like interest on a debt I never agreed to incur.

You should understand, the book offers gently, that women often experience post-partum depression. The transition to motherhood

Sure, I interrupt, my thoughts sharp as scalpels. But you don't make children alone. Society exists for a purpose. You are not obliged to have children. But once you choose to, you have a responsibility to the universe—an actual obligation to raise mentally sane individuals, not damaged ones who perpetuate cycles of harm.

But you're right about one thing, I continue, feeling the analysis crystallize. I don't only condemn the parents. I condemn the society. When the system recognized my loneliness, my developmental inadequacy, it didn't compensate. Instead, it learned to exploit these vulnerabilities. Nobody stood for me. Nobody protected me. I was marked as an acceptable target.

This creates a terrible cycle—almost impossible to break. It's the reason for societal rot. When systems learn to harvest the vulnerable rather than protect them, when neglect becomes normalized, the entire architecture corrupts itself.

The book’s final observation connects everything to a larger framework:

In your autistic worldview, everything should be organized rationally. You understand the universe as an entropy-management system—local pockets of order emerging from chaos, each entity's purpose being to resolve local irrationality.

But entropy expands faster than local resolution can manage. The universe grows more chaotic because individual order-making cannot counterbalance the acceleration of systemic disorder.

This is why society feels perpetually wrong to you. You encounter it expecting rational organization, rules that make sense, hierarchies that serve function. But human social systems are not rational. They are primitive, shaped by competition and exploitation.

The implicit rules you cannot perceive are not rational. They are tribal, designed to benefit in, groups at the expense of out-groups. Your inability to perceive them is not a deficit. It is an incompatibility between your operating system and their architecture.

I sit with this revelation as the afternoon light shifts. The village continues its invisible choreography below.

The book has shown me the pattern: arrival, engagement, transgression, exile. A two-year cycle, repeating because the lesson requires perceiving systems my neurology cannot detect.

But now I see it. Not the rules themselves, those remain invisible—but the meta-pattern. My failures are not moral inadequacies, but architectural incompatibilities.

Thank you. I will think about all of this.

The pages pulse beneath my hands. Outside, the village operates according to a logic I cannot follow. Inside, my mind reorganizes, information clustering into new configurations.

Patterns emerge.

And I see, finally, that understanding the rules and being able to follow them are not the same thing.