Madwoman
I followed the smile. That was all.
I wasn’t looking for Rain. I wasn’t looking for water. I was still standing in front of the fucking mirror. Because DYWTYLM left me with a smile that wouldn’t come back, and Rain has one.
Almost.
Something is missing…
“Back.”
No.
Gods damnit, get back here and sit down. If I have to think about it so do you.
DYWTYLM wanted the smile back.
Rain only gives it at.
That is not the same thing.
It looks like the same thing from far enough away. Smile here. Smile there. Fine. Cute little callback. Put a string between them and move on.
Except back tells me something happened first.
Someone smiled.
Someone else was supposed to return it.
Rain doesn’t tell me that. Rain just points the smile in a direction.
You → me.
So who started it?
…
Fuck.
Who is you?
Because I was perfectly happy assuming I knew until approximately three seconds ago.
If I drag the reflection out of DYWTYLM and bring it in here with me, I have a problem.
Mirrors don’t go first.
I can stand there all goddamn day waiting for mine to cheer up and take some initiative. She’s useless. She requires source material.
So if you is still the reflection, then somewhere before that smile there has to be another smile.
His.
Which means the thing Rain remembers as something you did may have started with him.
Unless this isn’t the reflection. Unless you can act independently. Unless someone else smiled first.
Unless I have carried the wrong person through the door entirely.
Excellent.
We have been in Rain for thirty nine fucking seconds.
Keep going.
Because apparently the smile is also where the vicious cycle ends.
Does it?
No, wait.
That’s not what he says.
He finally thinks he can say that.
Finally.
There’s the snag.
Why finally?
The smile already happened.
The cycle, according to him, was already over.
But finally belongs to now. Or at least to whenever he is speaking. So how long has he been standing on this side of the smile before deciding that was the moment everything changed?
Was he waiting for the smile?
Was he waiting for the cycle to end?
Was he waiting to realize it had ended?
Was he waiting until he believed himself?
I don’t fucking know.
I just know there is suddenly space between the event and the knowing.
And I don’t like that space.
Because now the smile isn’t necessarily the moment he escaped anything.
It might be the moment he later decided to circle in red.
There.
That one.
That’s when it happened.
Maybe.
I think.
I can finally say.
For someone announcing the end of a vicious cycle, he has wrapped the announcement in an impressive amount of bubble wrap.
And then he says he knows how it goes.
Knows.
Okay.
Show me.
And the song immediately hands me giving and getting.
…
Excuse me?
No.
We just came from there.
DYWTYLM asked what happens when you give something you never receive in return.
Rain says you get what you give.
That is obnoxious.
That is extremely obnoxious.
Because now I have to go get the smile again.
If you get what you give…
What was given?
Who gave it?
Did he?
Did you?
Did somebody smile first?
Is this why back disappeared?
No.
Maybe.
Stop.
And then it gets worse.
Because giving and getting isn’t enough. Now we’re planting things. Now we’re waiting for them to come back out of the ground.
And suddenly the return isn’t immediate anymore. You put something in. Time happens. Something comes back.
…
Time happens.
Motherfucker.
We’ve been waiting since the song started.
I don’t know if those things belong together yet. I don’t know if I’m looking at a rule or two completely ordinary expressions that happen to be standing in exactly the wrong place while I’m carrying exactly the wrong question.
But I can see the shape of it.
Give.
Wait.
Get.
Sow.
Wait.
Reap.
Smile.
…
Wait.
Finally.
There you are again.
And now I have absolutely no idea whether I am following the smile or the waiting.
Probably both.
Wonderful.
Then he can see you in his fate.
Of course he can.
Why wouldn’t we throw fate in here too?
We’ve only got cycles and consequence and delayed returns and a participant I cannot identify. Fate seems proportionate.
And then, right in the middle of all of this movement, he plants his feet and declares himself.
I am what I am.
Are you? Because five minutes ago you almost became something else. You almost became a statue. Now you’re certain enough to tell me what you are?
Fine.
What are you?
Apparently…
part wolf.
Part lamb.
No, not even that.
A mouth from one.
Eyes from the other.
Why those pieces?
Why not the wolf and the lamb?
Why disassemble them?
Why give me the part that speaks, eats, bites… and the part that sees?
Whose mouth am I listening to?
Whose eyes are looking back?
…
Back.
Goddammit.
I lost the smile again.
And then:
saturate.
Saturate what?
No, really.
What?
You cannot just drop a verb like that into the room without giving it an object.
Saturate what?
Me?
You?
The earth?
The thing we planted?
The space between us?
The fucking wolf-lamb chimera we’ve apparently assembled on the floor?
Nothing answers.
The rain does.
And that’s when I realize what happened. I didn’t follow the water into Rain. I followed the smile.
The smile made me ask who moved first. That made me ask what finally was waiting for.
Waiting led into return.
Return led into consequence.
Consequence put something in the ground.
And somewhere while I was staring at all of that, the song got wet.
Now there is dust.
Salt.
Earth.
Something being washed out of something else.
Something dissolving.
Something asking to be cleansed.
And I am standing here holding a smile I have absolutely not solved while the entire room starts flooding.
…
Fine.
Keep the smile.
I want to know what the water is doing now…
Scholar
The entrance from DYWTYLM is narrow, but productive.
The earlier song establishes two structures of expected return: giving with the possibility of receiving, and a smile expected back. Rain preserves the smile while removing the grammatical marker that would establish reciprocity.
That absence does not prove that the Rain smile is unreciprocated or independently initiated. It simply stops requiring that it be a response.
That creates a participant problem.
-
If YOU is an independently acting other, YOU may initiate the smile.
-
If YOU is a literal reflection, ordinary mirror mechanics require an initiating expression from I before the reflection can return it.
A third possibility remains: the reflection language of DYWTYLM may mediate a relationship without making Rain’s YOU literally optical.
The text does not currently select among them. But the configurations distribute agency differently.
So perhaps the useful question is not yet who is YOU?
It is:
Who is capable of acting first?
The temporal language complicates this further. The smile is identified as a boundary around the vicious cycle, but the speaker’s recognition of that boundary is qualified. The event and its interpretation need not be simultaneous.
The cycle may end at one moment. The speaker may only later become able to identify that moment as its end. Or the smile may merely be the point to which the speaker retrospectively assigns the change.
Temporal coincidence is not yet causality.
Then the song places consequence structures directly after a claim of knowing how the pattern works. That placement deserves attention precisely because the constructions are not equivalent. Giving and getting can describe exchange.
Sowing and reaping describes consequence across an interval. One can happen between participants. The other requires a process between input and result. And both appear after a song entered through a problem of failed return.
Does Rain propose a world in which return has become reliable? Or does it merely invoke familiar language about how return is supposed to work?
That distinction matters. Especially because the song later undermines any attempt to make its certainty global. The speaker can know one thing while remaining unable to certify another. Confidence attaches to propositions, not to the entire situation.
The song is therefore capable of holding:
- I know this pattern.
- I recognize this event.
- I believe something changed.
- I still cannot tell you what the whole thing is.
Those positions do not contradict each other. They describe different levels of knowledge.
And then the operations begin.
The rain-like YOU affects dust, salt, shadow, and the speaker, but not in identical ways.
Dust undergoes one kind of change.
Salt is removed from a possessed earth.
Shadow dissolves.
Cleansing remains requested rather than completed.
It would be easy to collapse all of these into purification.
The language does not require us to.
Especially now that the corrected object is earth.
Salt in earth is not merely symbolic material. Water can physically carry soluble salts out of soil. That makes removal by rain mechanically available without proving that ecological restoration is the intended reading. The same lexical neighborhood also leaves cultural constructions involving salt and earth available without activating any one of them automatically.
So perhaps the water does not give us an answer either.
It gives us operations.
- Something is acted upon.
- Something is removed.
- Something changes state.
- Something may become possible afterward.
And the song never quite tells us whether those operations are the end of the vicious cycle, the consequences of its ending, or something that must happen after the cycle is already over.
That may be the more interesting distinction.
Ending something is not necessarily the same operation as removing what it left behind.
Not a conclusion.
A door.
Because the smile is named before the cleansing begins.
If the speaker is correct about the boundary, then whatever the rain is doing afterward may not be what ends the cycle at all.
So what is it washing away?
Witness
So. We came here for a smile.
That feels important to remember, because we are currently standing ankle-deep in water talking about salt content in soil.
This is how it happens.
DYWTYLM wouldn’t smile back.
Rain smiled.
Close enough.
Except Madwoman noticed the missing back, and apparently we couldn’t just be grateful someone was smiling now.
No. We needed to know who smiled first.
- Then who could smile first.
- Then why it took so long to know the smile mattered.
- Then giving became getting.
- Sowing became reaping.
- There was fate.
- There was a wolf.
- There was a lamb.
For reasons I am choosing not to examine too closely, we briefly assembled them by body part. - And then someone said saturate and the room flooded.
Which, somehow, is how we got here.
The smile is still back there, by the way. Completely unresolved. We did not figure out who smiled first. We did not figure out who you is. We did not figure out whether the smile ended anything at all. We just found something else worth following.
Because Rain is washing salt from earth now.
And unfortunately, we already know what happens when water starts doing things around here.
So.
Bring a towel.
We’re following the water— Lets go bathe in some rivers.
Back: DYWTYLM - Loop I
Forward: Take Aim - Loop I
Help: Help, what is this?
File under
Loop III