Zerofoxgiven — Field Records
Distillation Log
A record of reductions. What rises when heat is applied.
Apparatus: Glass vessel, indirect heat, patience.
Solvent: Time (variable). Involuntary attention. The smell of something discontinued.
Method: Raw material is introduced. Heat is applied until the volatile separates from the fixed. The volatile rises, cools, condenses. Both fractions are collected. This log concerns itself with the volatile — what rises from things not ordinarily subjected to process.
Note: Precision is not the goal. The goal is to not lose what rises.
RUN 001
A childhood summer (year unspecified)
Input
Long days with no edges. The smell of cut grass and something chemical from a neighbor's pool. A screen door that stuck and then gave. The absolute certainty that something good was about to happen. The waiting, which was not unpleasant. The quality of light at 7pm in July — the same light, but different.
Process
Approximately twenty years of undisturbed storage. One involuntary retrieval triggered by: the smell of a specific sunscreen brand, discontinued 2011. Duration of retrieval: six seconds. Clarity: unexpected.
Distillate
Warmth, structureless, locatable in the chest. The screen door giving. The waiting — which, on extraction, turns out to have been the whole thing.
RUN 002
A conversation that ended wrong
Input
Two people. A table slightly too small for what was not being said. A lamp at slightly too high a brightness. Words deployed and received across a gap that became apparent only partway through. The particular quality of silence when one person checks their phone first.
Process
Approximately one week of rehearsing the better version. Several months of not doing that. A period of forgetting. Involuntary retrieval while driving a road that required no attention. Duration: the length of the road.
Distillate
The lamp. A slightly wrong reconstruction of the other person's face — wrong around the eyes. The gap, still open.
RUN 003
The moment before a decision
Input
All possible futures, still simultaneous. The feeling of holding them like cards. A faint wrongness in every option, including the correct one. The last second in which choosing otherwise remains possible.
Process
The decision itself. Duration in clock-time: less than one second. Duration as experienced: considerably longer, occurring in a timeframe not synchronized with clocks. The last-second feeling: not extracted by the decision — simply cut off from it, and preserved separately.
Distillate
The last second, now permanent, now unreachable. The cards, never played. A faint wrongness in the correct choice that does not resolve with time.
RUN 004
A year of waiting
Input
365 days organized around an absence. The habit of checking. Small adjustments made to accommodate a space that should have been filled. A room that had acquired the quality of expecting something. The angle of looking toward the door.
Process
The thing waited for either arrived or did not — the log was not maintained during this period. Outcome cannot be determined from available records. The waiting period ended by some mechanism.
Distillate
The habit of waiting, which did not end when the waiting period ended. The angle of looking toward the door: persists. A room that has not finished expecting.
RUN 005
A word kept almost saying
Input
A word or name held just behind the teeth. The number of times it was gathered and put back: high. What it cost to hold it. What it cost not to say it. The way other words came to stand in for it over time — approximations, worn thin at the center from overuse.
Process
At some point the word became unnecessary. Or the situation requiring it closed. Or the person who would have heard it was no longer present. The log does not specify. The word persisted regardless.
Distillate
The shape of the word in the mouth. Still present. Neither said nor unsaid. The substitute words, slightly hollow. The word itself: intact.
RUN 006
The night before a departure
Input
A room being reduced to its portable components. Objects dividing into what-you-are versus what-you-merely-had. A familiar space seen, for the first time, as temporary. A suitcase acquiring weight in stages. The 3am quality of a room you have lived in.
Process
Sleep that was probably not sleep. An alarm. The act of leaving, which happens in increments — each increment feeling like the actual departure until the next one reveals it wasn't. The door closing.
Distillate
The room, after. The objects not taken. A window at a specific angle, last seen at an hour the body does not usually see. The quality of being already elsewhere while still present — which is also, possibly, the quality of being still present while already elsewhere.