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\begin{quote}
\itshape\Large
For Dear: Tell us about one or two of your less successful experiments in identity and instance art.
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\subsection*{Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled}
% Skunks

{\itshape
Speed dating.

I set up a series of events perhaps a century after I began this particular focus on instance art wherein I constructed a large circle of tables, twenty in all. Each of these tables was set up to seat two, and each was split in twain down the middle, for the chairs sitting along the inner side of the ring of tables sat upon a dais powered by subtle machinations.

You see, I had invited twenty individuals to come and join me for a round of speed dating—them sitting along the outside and my various mes sitting within—and that dais was a clock. Within, a second hand ticked time inevitably forwards, and every fifth time that pointer reached zero, the dais would click forward as well, skipping each of me forward one space every five minutes.

This was the mechanism of the speed dating: my ephemeral cocladists began all the same, and yet as we ate this lovely meal together, this hours-long evening, each was subtly changed by the conversations we had all the while. Every time we would come back to a person we had seen before, we had changed, just as they might have, by the ongoing conversations that we had had in the interim. We were aiming to build rapport over a series of ongoing periods, learning more about each other, while my various mes did their level best to keep information straight in our heads. We had begun to intuit, by this point, the endless depths of our memory, but I had yet to learn to control it with quite so much finesse. My experiments to date had been successful, yes, but accidentally so.

Now, I say `ephemeral' above, but that is not how it worked. Of course it is not how it worked. I am clever, am I not? I am very clever! But I am not smart. No one has ever accused me of being burdened with an overabundance of wisdom. Many of us couples—not all, no, or even most, but many—did wind up pairing off and spending more time with each other. I know that, at least as of about systime 175, some of them have even entered a long-running relationship and remain together.

An outstanding success, yes? Somehow, out of all of me, out of all of my cleverness, I succeeded admirably in my goal of toying with forking, toying with identity.

An outstanding failure.

There was me, standing primly as ever at the center of the dais atop the second hand, slowly turning around the middle of this circle once per minute, observing down along my haughtily lifted nose as the events proceeded. When it was done, when I had greeted all of the guests personally to learn their sentiments about this little dalliance of mine, I went home, feeling some hollow sense of pride.

An outstanding failure because I am myself, yes, but I am also Rye and Praiseworthy, and thus I am also Michelle Hadje. Michelle, with all of her own failed relationships, all of her loneliness, all of her desire for comfort and companionship, and no matter how hard I tried to cherish my own loneliness as a prize, I never quite managed to succeed at that particular experiment.
}
