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A sim child has to go to school by Maxime Garcia Diaz

‘A sim child has to go to school’ is an excerpt from Maxime Garcia Diaz‘s debut poetry bundle ‘Het is warm in de hivemind‘, released by De Bezige Bij, last summer. In the bundle, Maxime ask what happens to our psychical selfs gazing at screens. She wanders through the ruins on the 21st century, evoking the fragmented yet intoxicating image of the internet in the early 2000s. If you’re interested in Maxime’s work, please follow her poetry newsletter here. That’s enough talking from our side. Maxime, take it away:

the rules of an infinite game have a different status from those of a finite game they are like the grammar of a living language where those of a finite game are like the rules of debate

there was the deadspace at the edge of the desktop
there was an echo chamber in the other room and
in the echo i saw something a half-clinical thing

(when the screen goes black i do not see myself or at least i do not see a girl i do not see the thing i drag outside each morning)

in-game every morning a yellow bus came
waited outside the house, honked twice
disappeared into nothingness
at the edge of the screen

infinite players cannot say when their game began nor do they care they do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time

i wanted to disappear into deadspace but found none in any of the corporeal worlds only alive spaces there teeming with things that crawl on the skin i wanted to not be in the alivespace where the lungs were asked to be so human the bones asked to be so structure the sweetpink intestine asked to be so organ

neopets never die
but a body is still a body

is blue light bad for you
it would be like canceling your physical body
when i booted up my game it took 30 min to load,
swollen with gigabytes and slowly unfolding its
mammoth limbs like something ancient when
in fact it was something newborn the great white
hope of a civilization and it had only just opened
its eyes, sclera as blue as the iris

with old age i’ve grown bloated & pock-marked. i’ve grown interesting behind the desktop computer. i was busy growing up behind a desktop computer and i forgot to be a nymphet – now i forget to be a hot girl –
and so the fandom that ate fandom
ate the mundane world instead

it is also impossible to say in which world an infinite game is played though there can be any number of worlds within an infinite game

i did not drag the thing outside each morning i did not drag the thing outside i left the thing inside to pray 8 hours a day to a desktop computer i left the thing inside to rot & to grow interesting with its own pockmarks and its bloat
like a work of installation art

it is an invariable principle of all play finite and infinite that whoever plays plays freely

in the other room was a shadow and
she looked like me and she was screaming
i was a screen that day and i crashed
stuttered, my pixels a primordial soup
a wealth of cold stars i could not straighten my spine
and i lifted the dirty white monitor to the skies
i was a screen that day and i turned blue

when i leave the echo chamber
i take the dead thing with me
her flayed hands curled around my neck
in my hand there are sweetpink pixels there
are nonplayablecharacters walking the streets
girls talk to me through the screen
i eat their image they have plastic inside of them
there was a time before the comfort of a
desktop background its flattening its deadspace
the undead world it could bloom into

i am not a digital thing so onetime
after many months spring had come
and i rode my bike to school and my eyes hurt
at the green green bodies of the trees

Purchase ‘Het is warm in de hivemind‘ here and subscribe to Maxime’s newsletter here