Version Control - part 3 (with images) (Patreon)

Sera is gone before I'm fully awake — the door, the elevator down the hall, and then nothing. Seven-fifteen by my phone.

I lie there a moment. The apartment feels like something has moved since last night, except nothing has.

I pour myself a cup of coffee and walk over to the window. The building across the street has scaffolding. It’s been there since November, it’s still not finished. The coffee is too hot. I wait until it cools. The window shakes as a truck drives by, the engine noise filling the apartment. I think about the Didion quote I was reaching for the night before. I think about whether it was there because I’d actually remembered it, and the AI just cleared the path, or if the AI did something more. Constructed it, organized the words from somewhere and then gave it to me as if it were mine. I can’t tell the difference.

I sit at my desk and open the shed essay.

The AI is there. I feel it like a presence at the edge, ambient, not intrusive but not absent either. I've been staring at this essay's first paragraph for six months, the thing wrong with it a wrongness I couldn't name, something off in the first sentence, too frontal, announcing what it should approach sideways. I sit there maybe two minutes and something surfaces — not finished prose, more like a pressure, a push toward coming at it from a different direction. I pick up the nudge. I write a sentence.

Then another.

The resistance is gone, like a headache is gone when it stops rather than when you stop noticing it. The shed is right there. My father is right there. I write for two hours without stopping, which I have never done, and the part of me that wants to flag this, hold it up and interrogate it, is quieter than usual — tamped down, its edges smoothed — and the essay is open, and the essay has been closed since September, and I keep writing.

The morning goes. Thoughts, ideas surface — a rhythm problem in a paragraph I'd been too close to see, two alternatives for a word I'd been circling — and I take some and leave some, and the work moves at a pace that feels like my own but isn't, or isn't entirely. I try to track which decisions are mine. I find I can do this for a while and then I can't, the way you can follow a single instrument in an orchestra until other instruments build around it and you lose the thread without knowing exactly when you lost it. At some point I stop tracking and just write. The essay opens and I'm through it.

I smell sawdust, freshly cut grass. An adult’s hammer, heavy in my twelve-year-old hand. The shed is in front of me, partially built. My father holds a tape measure. It’s hot, summertime, a July afternoon, and I’m sweating.

“Hand me a nail, Declan.”

I slide my fingers across the frame of the shed. The wood feels rough to my touch. He motions next to my feet and I notice the pile of nails next to me. I grab a nail and hand it to him.

Suddenly I'm at my desk again.

I sit very still for a moment. My hands are on the keyboard. The apartment is quiet. The essay is on the screen in front of me, seven paragraphs, four hundred words, the best four hundred words I've written since I started the program.

I've experienced memory-immersion before, the kind that comes with sustained close writing when you're really in it. But not like that. The sawdust smell is too complete — real memory is gappy, it gives you a detail and withholds the rest. This gave me everything at once. I sit there and try to determine whether it was the writing pulling me in or the AI doing something to the recall — enhancing it, constructing it, making the past more available than it actually is. I can't determine this. I let this pass and go back to the essay.

Around ten something sits at the edge of my attention that I keep not attending to. Some small movement at the edge of my body. Not pain. Not even discomfort exactly. An occasional sense of movement almost, at the periphery of my body, something not quite right in how I'm sitting or how my shirt is hanging. I don't look at it directly. The sentence is almost there. I go back to the sentence.

I write through the morning.

By noon I have eight hundred words I don't hate. I get up for a glass of water.

I'm halfway to the kitchen when I understand that something is wrong.

The movement is wrong — not my stride, not my balance exactly, but something in the front of me, a swaying, a weight with its own momentum separate from the momentum of walking. I stop in the doorway and stand very still. The weight is on my chest. Both sides. It moves when I stopped moving, a slight continuation, and then settles.

I look down.

The shirt has changed shape. Two points where it isn't flat anymore, where the cotton tents forward, pushed out from underneath. Round. Symmetrical.

I stand there and breathe.

I go the rest of the way to the kitchen and fill a glass at the tap and drink it at the sink. The weight shifts as I tip my head back — a small forward pull, my body making adjustments I'm not directing. I set the glass down.

I have breasts. My shoulders have been aching since I got up and I put it down to the desk chair. It wasn't the chair. The shirt is damp under them where sweat has pooled, and the cotton is tented where it isn't flat anymore. When I walked in here they swayed, and when I drank the water the weight redistributed, and right now they're resting against my chest in the cotton of my t-shirt and I can feel the fabric on them in a way I've never felt a shirt before — not as background, not as nothing, but as contact, temperature, texture. The air in the apartment registering on the surface of the tissue the way I feel air on my forearms. The feeling pulls up another one: the summer heat in the backyard, my father's shirt stuck dark between his shoulder blades, his hand flat on the wood.

I reach up with one hand and touch through the shirt. The tissue is real. Soft and dense and nothing like muscle — muscle compresses down to a floor, hits the rib, there's a bottom to it. This doesn't have a bottom in the same way, it redistributes under my palm, and I can feel the warmth of my own hand through the cotton. I take my hand away.

I need to see. I grab the hem and pull up.

The shirt catches.

The hem snagging on the breasts themselves, the fabric dragging upward as I try to pull it off — the drag across the nipples stops me completely. A brightness so immediate and concentrated that my hands go still mid-motion, holding the shirt halfway up, not moving. Not an unpleasant sensation. An overwhelming one, the nervous system lighting up as though something critical has been touched, and I stand there a moment before I understand that nothing is wrong, this is just what that feels like, and I finish taking the shirt off.

I look down.

I’ve never seen breasts from this perspective. From the front, from the side, yes. Always someone else’s breasts. As I’m looking down the breasts obscure my view of my lower body. These aren’t small buds, these are real, substantial. The skin of my chest is being pulled forward and down by their weight.

I can see my reflection in the window, straight on. The right breast is slightly higher than the left, which I have seen on women before and never thought about as asymmetry so much as a fact, and now the fact is mine.

I cup my hand underneath a breast and just hold it there. The weight of it surprises me. The warmth comes through almost immediately, into my palm, and then something underneath that, slower. Like the tissue waking up. A low pull, faint, the kind you could almost talk yourself out of noticing.

I can feel myself stiffening.

I hadn't been thinking about this. Wasn't building toward it. And yet — there's a direction available, I can feel that clearly, a way this could keep going if I let it. I stay there a second on the edge of that. The refrigerator hums. Then I pull my shirt back down.

Later, I think. Later, or never. Either way not now.

I put the shirt back on more carefully, gathering the hem, creating space, guiding the cotton over rather than dragging it. The shirt settles against them anyway, the weave present on the skin in a way it's never been on my chest before. I go to the kitchen and call the clinic.

The receptionist answers and I tell her, as levelly as I can, that I had an installation yesterday and I'm experiencing what I think is a side effect. She asks me to describe it. I tell her: unexpected development on the chest, both sides, onset sometime this morning. The pause on her end is not short, then she puts me on hold.

A cheerful jingle plays. I'm sitting at the window, and outside they've moved to the fourth floor scaffolding. Two men in harnesses come up and down, back and forth, slowly, a radio droning on a sports channel while they work. My mind is still at home staring at my computer screen at the essay I was working on, trying to ignore the problem in front of me.

She comes back. They can see me next week. I ask about sooner. She'll put me on the cancellation list.

I thank her and hang up.

I go back to my desk. The essay is there — eight hundred words, the shed, my father, the level held in both hands. I sit down.

The thing I keep not looking at directly. Something is keeping panic at a manageable distance that isn't my own composure — I know what my own composure feels like and this is smoother than that, too even, the edges of the alarm filed down before I reach them. The AI, doing what it does. Making things navigable. Keeping me at the desk.

I know this and I open the essay and keep writing.

The afternoon goes. I write through it. At some point I make tea badly — I always forget how hot the water needs to be. The mug at my lip is the first hot thing I've registered in two hours and it surprises me. A neighbor's shower starts up in the pipes. I can hear water moving somewhere under the floor. I realize I can smell myself — not badly, just differently. Something less sharp than I'm used to. The breasts rest against the inside of the shirt and the shirt smells like Sera's detergent, because it is Sera's detergent, because all the clothes in this apartment smell like her detergent.

I focus on the writing. The shed my father built, and my small body as a boy. The sentences that arrive before I reach for them.

What I notice, somewhere around three o'clock: I've stopped checking my chest. For the first hour after getting back to my desk I kept catching myself touching the fabric where it rests against the tissue, a reflexive inventory, making sure it was still there. At some point I stopped. Not because I forgot — I didn't forget — but because the body has started to report in the background rather than the foreground. The weight on my chest. The way the shirt moves when I breathe.

Around three-fifteen, something gets through.

I'm not writing. Looking at the wall. It comes without buildup — not panic, just grief, the plain kind. The chest I've had for thirty-one years. Sera’s reaction, our intimacy. Swimming. I played water polo in college. I can’t go swimming like this, can’t go into a locker room to change. I put my hands flat on the desk and try to stay in it. Two years of learning how to not flinch from the true thing, and I can't do it. The AI adjusts something at the edges — I feel it happening, didn't ask for it. The grief recedes before I'm done with it. I open the essay again.

By four o'clock I have fourteen hundred words and a structure I can see through to the end. The shed is doing what I needed it to do — not just a shed but the thing my father built around something he couldn't say. I've known this was the essay since September. I've written it today, in this body, while the AI kept the room quiet enough to work.

Two hours before Sera gets home and I spend the first twenty minutes standing in front of the open closet in my boxers trying to figure out what to wear.

The grey henley first. Too thin, pulls across the front, the outline unmistakable. No.

A thicker crew neck, the navy one I wear to the library. The heavier fabric doesn't cling, but it's too fitted, the shirt straining at the front where there's simply more of me than there used to be. I move and feel the fabric resist. No.

Four more options. A button-down hangs better but gaps at the chest buttons. A loose t-shirt is almost okay but I keep catching the sway in the mirror every time I shift weight.

I end up in the oldest flannel I own — shapeless, worn thin, large enough that it hangs off my shoulders without reaching the chest — layered over a t-shirt. Two layers. The outline is soft and ambiguous under all of it and I can almost, in the right light, talk myself into thinking nothing is obviously different.

I stand in front of the mirror for a while. The flannel hangs.

I go pour a glass of wine and wait.