A Stock Image of a Strawberry in Place of a Geyser That Spouts Every 109 Years – Caroline Cai

February 16, 2026

The pleasure I obtain from resting on your stoop is the same pleasure we obtain from music which is the same pleasure we obtain from counting, but counting unconsciously. Your final step through the threshold through which you appear, like letting out a sigh at the end of the alphabet, every separation between letters and doors a link to new meanings, meant to be like the ratio of tones in “Amazing Grace.” I wish that being where your feet go didn’t evoke the rightness of numbers, but if I squint at a page of sheet music, it starts to look like a serene sine wave, and if I squint at the space between your eyes, it starts to look like it’s pulsating a beat, one that I can step to.
 
You appear like lagging masses of land with every drag of the cursor on Google Earth, launched from a desktop inside a dank church basement, eternal pastures and dense jungles zapping into frame, not with a raw force of being, but with a world grasping, beauty grasping, scale grasping gesture that falters and compounds to reveal what is just beyond, and what is already sullied by its basic incarnation, anonymous as a pedestrian, crude as a map, dead as a surface – but a surface I can plunge into, the surface of Eden, before falling off the frame in stray pixels. I walk upstairs to empty pews and a silence that breathes.
 
I recognize you like a freshly sprung, adolescent and untrained neural network, scanning and sifting images to identify a picture of a STAIRCASE, but only binds to a brown flurry in the shape of a CAT, but one that purrs and languishes in my lap, and a blue smudge of a CYCLIST in motion, but one who’s pedaling in a beeline home to me. Inside the gummy, organ pink part of my heart’s left chamber is a computer in competition with myself to prove that we’re both human, and the competition has spiraled into an invisible arms race – a cold war where if I can win, just for once, then maybe I can win for always.
 
I remember you as in in place of a geyser that spouts every 109 years, which just to have witnessed is the heavenliness of being choiceless for a slice of a moment, is a paywalled stock image of a ripe strawberry, one that I seek to both liberate and shrink and wedge between my gums and blot up slowly like nicotine gum, but at last, it is a matted watermark. I remember you as in since the geyser’s main claim is potential, there is mostly nothing to labor over, no cause to organize around, and so I’ll compensate for the absence of a real event by producing a real effect in its place – the hallucination of mist.
 
I miss you as in in place of a historic eruption is an endlessly long, pristine needle siphoning energy from the very center of me, and still I’m made to feel like I’m the one consuming, gorging until I vomit foam – a risk deleting itself.