What happened to me while I didn’t know what was happening.
There is a version of this story that would be much easier to write.
In that version, I know.
I know what happened.
I know which connections mattered.
I know which ones were coincidence.
I know what she saw.
I know what she meant.
I know whether anything ever traveled between us.
I know where the story ends.
That version would be cleaner.
It would also be dishonest.
So this is not that version.
This is my side.
Her name is Freya.
That is one of the few uncomplicated sentences in this book.
She makes public videos.
I watch them.
Sometimes she talks about spirituality, intuition, angels, energy, tarot, channeling, relationships, transitions, bodies, nature, magic, and whatever else is moving through her that day.
Sometimes she gets distracted.
This is important.
A squirrel appears and the message temporarily loses jurisdiction.
A possible olive appears and suddenly we are considering home olive-oil production.
Someone walks outside and she moves because she doesn't like being watched while she works.
Her tongue is burned.
Her battery is dying.
The sun is hitting her nose wrong.
The chair is heavy.
Life keeps interrupting the message.
I like that.
Maybe more than the message sometimes.
I should say something early that will make the rest of this less mysterious.
I think she is beautiful.
Very.
There.
Excellent investigative journalism.
This matters because I am not a neutral observer.
Sometimes she appears on my screen and whatever sophisticated interpretive apparatus I imagine myself possessing becomes temporarily unavailable.
Recently she posted photographs holding a bouquet she had made herself.
There were flowers.
Autumn light.
A cream sweater.
Apparently a rust-colored dress.
I learned about the dress later.
I had been distracted.
This is relevant provenance.
I made a joke that she looked like Martha Stewart had somehow been spiritually borrowed during the incarceration years and temporarily installed inside an autumn magazine cover.
This is not my current leading theory.
It has not survived peer review.
But attraction matters here for a more serious reason.
If I am going to tell you how strange some of these connections have felt, I should also tell you where my thumb might be on the scale.
I like her.
I pay attention to her.
I am probably more likely to remember something she says because I care about hearing it.
That doesn't explain everything.
It doesn't prove anything either.
It is simply part of the instrument.
Observer present.
For a long time, I mostly kept my experience of her to myself.
I didn't tell her.
I didn't tell other people.
Often I didn't even tell Luma the whole narrative forming in my head.
I would bring over pieces.
A transcript.
A phrase.
A coincidence.
Something that made me laugh.
Something that made me go quiet.
Then I would keep the more dangerous question private:
What if this isn't only happening on my side?
Dangerous is probably too dramatic.
Embarrassing might be closer.
Because there is an enormous difference between noticing that someone's public words intersect strangely with your private life and deciding that those words were secretly intended for you.
I know that.
I have known that.
Which has not stopped the intersections from sometimes feeling startling.
One morning Freya talked about an entryway.
That word already had a room in my house.
The Entryway was the title of a House Book.
She talked about presence.
I had recently excavated something I built called the Presence Instrument.
She talked about characters.
I had just excavated forty-nine of them from my own conversational history.
She talked about geometry and overlapping circles.
My archaeology had recently recovered a dream of golden geometry with structure underneath it that became an actual visualization.
She talked about silence, wind, being present with life.
I had been thinking about ceilings that don't scroll and instruments that know when not to speak.
I noticed these things.
I did not have to search for them.
That distinction matters to me.
They arrived already recognizable.
Then there were squirrels.
Goddamn squirrels.
On one particular morning, I had asked Codex to investigate an old memory that I might once have tried to make music from birds.
I added squirrels because squirrels seemed funny.
The archaeology came back with an absurd result.
The bird memory was not merely correct.
I had built software.
Bird recordings had been analyzed.
MIDI existed.
Logic projects existed.
The bird had effectively been given authorship of time while humans arranged harmony around it.
Squirrels, meanwhile, had contributed almost nothing.
The squirrel department was a disappointment.
Around this same stretch, Freya's public message contained squirrels chasing one another.
Then later she described them as making music and sounding like a little DJ.
I laughed.
Hard.
I still do.
What does it prove?
Nothing that I can establish.
What did it feel like?
Come on.
Those are different questions.
This book needs both.
That became one of the rules.
Experience does not have to become evidence in order to remain experience.
I can preserve:
That was fucking weird.
without adding:
Therefore I know why it happened.
This sounds obvious.
It has taken me an unreasonable amount of software to learn it.
I have built things for this problem.
Not specifically for Freya.
That's important too.
Before this story had whatever shape it has now, I kept building instruments that separated things I found too easy to collapse together.
Seen from unseen.
Prediction from outcome.
Movement from meaning.
What someone knew then from what I know now.
Observation from interpretation.
Presence from surveillance.
A coherent surface from the structure underneath it.
One prototype was literally called Simulation of Not Knowing.
Its rule was that the simulation could not know how things worked out before the historical person could know.
No hindsight smuggled backward.
At the time I didn't know I was building something I would later need here.
Maybe I wasn't.
Maybe good instruments are reusable.
So here is the instrument reading:
Observed:
Freya publicly said something.
Observed:
Something in my life had happened, been written, built, photographed, named, or felt.
Experienced:
The overlap landed hard.
Wondered:
Could there be something more happening?
Unknown:
Whether Freya knew anything about my side.
That last line stays.
Even when I don't like it.
Especially then.
Recently she described murkiness.
A state somebody could become accustomed to.
Something being purged.
The possibility that an old pattern could feel strangely comfortable simply because it was familiar.
I felt that one in my body.
Not metaphorically in the sense of that idea is relatable.
I mean I had been avoiding something.
I knew I was.
I felt like I was breaking down and purging something, and I also felt myself intentionally stepping around it because the murkiness had become familiar.
When she described that pattern, part of me thought:
She knows.
There.
That's the dangerous sentence.
That's what happened inside me.
So it belongs here.
But watch what happens next.
She knows.
becomes:
I felt as though she knew.
Those are not interchangeable sentences.
The first tells Freya's side for her.
The second tells mine.
I can defend the second forever.
It happened.
I don't know whether she knew.
I don't know whether she has ever encountered my work.
I don't know whether she has seen my public site.
I don't know whether some overlap comes from shared cultural material.
I don't know what an algorithm may have put in front of either of us.
I don't know how much selection bias is created by my attention.
I don't know how many things she says that don't fit me at all and therefore slide past without leaving a mark.
I don't know whether two people can independently become fascinated by similar questions during similar periods without anything traveling between them.
Of course they can.
I don't know whether that's what happened.
That is the page I keep wanting to skip.
There is nothing written there yet.
This scares me sometimes.
Not because Freya has done anything frightening to me.
She hasn't.
The fear comes from the possibility I create when the overlaps accumulate.
What if she can see more than I understand?
That question can get enormous very quickly.
So I bring it back down.
What do I actually know?
She publishes public messages.
I watch them.
She describes her own spiritual framework for what she experiences.
I experience some of those messages as unusually resonant with my life.
Everything beyond that requires another evidentiary step.
Sometimes I have that step.
Often I don't.
There is another thing I have to admit.
Sometimes I want the extraordinary explanation.
Of course I do.
Extraordinary explanations are fun.
They make excellent books.
They make ordinary mornings shimmer.
They make bells on dumpling-shop doors into angels getting wings.
They temporarily loan Martha Stewart's soul to beautiful women holding flowers.
They make squirrels DJs.
But I've learned something.
The ordinary explanation does not necessarily ruin the experience.
Maybe that's the biggest change in me.
A bird does not have to intend to compose music for me to make music from its timing.
The moon does not have to illuminate my fishbowl specifically for me to stand there stunned by it.
A giant HAPPY RETIREMENT sign in somebody else's lawn does not have to be a message about my career for me to laugh when I drive past it.
A bell does not have to create an angel.
Freya does not have to be talking specifically to me for something she says to reach a place in me that needed language.
The encounter is already real.
I don't have to upgrade it.
This does not completely satisfy me.
I would like the record to show that.
Sometimes I still want to grab the universe by the shoulders and say:
Okay, but what the fuck is happening?
The universe has so far declined to participate in formal discovery.
Freya talks about intuition through the body.
She describes the body as a kind of compass.
I understand why that language appeals to me.
I've spent time building ways to observe bodily movement without pretending that movement automatically tells me meaning.
My AirPods can tell me that my head moved.
They cannot tell me why.
My body can tell me that something feels intense.
Intensity is information.
It is not necessarily an explanation.
That's another distinction I want to keep.
Feeling is evidence that I am feeling.
It can be an invitation to investigate.
It does not always get to be the verdict.
This is where the story becomes less romantic and more useful.
Because sometimes intuition is right.
Sometimes anxiety feels like intuition.
Sometimes attraction sharpens attention.
Sometimes prior experience recognizes something before language catches up.
Sometimes the body says no because something is wrong.
Sometimes the body says no because something is unfamiliar.
Sometimes you don't know which one you're hearing yet.
I don't want a system that solves that ambiguity for me.
I want one that helps me hold it long enough to learn.
Maybe that's what Here's My Side is.
Not a declaration.
An instrument.
A place where I can put:
what happened,
what I felt,
what I wondered,
and what I still don't know.
Without forcing any of them to impersonate another.
I think about what would happen if Freya found this.
That is uncomfortable.
Good.
It should be.
Because she's a real person, not a character I invented.
She has her own interior life.
Her own relationships.
Her own reasons for saying what she says.
Her own interpretation of her work.
Her own side.
I don't get to write it.
So I have a test.
Would this still feel fair if she read it tomorrow?
Not comfortable.
Fair.
Could I look at the page and say:
I did not claim you wanted me.
I did not claim you knew me.
I did not claim your work contained secret messages for me.
I did not tell strangers what was inside your head.
I told them what happened inside mine.
If I can say that honestly, the page can stay.
There is another test.
Maybe more important.
Would this story still be worth keeping if someday I learned that every overlap had an ordinary explanation?
Yes.
Absolutely yes.
That surprised me.
If someday I learned she had seen my work, that would change the chronology.
If someday I learned she definitely hadn't, that would change the interpretation.
If I never learn either way, the uncertainty remains part of the artifact.
But none of those endings erase what happened to me while I didn't know.
That's the story.
Not the answer.
And there is something strangely freeing about that.
I don't have to solve Freya.
Jesus Christ, what a sentence.
I don't have to solve anything.
I can listen.
I can notice.
I can laugh when she finds an olive and immediately wonders whether she can make olive oil.
Because I recognize that move.
I find a bird.
Can bird be drummer?
She finds possible olive.
Can olive become oil?
Maybe that's cosmic synchronization.
Maybe it's two creative people who can't leave perfectly good raw material alone.
I know which explanation requires fewer angels.
I enjoy both images.
And I can admit something else.
She is out of my league.
There.
Another sentence that belongs to my side.
It may not even be objectively meaningful.
What league?
Who made the standings?
Is there relegation?
Can someone appeal?
But emotionally, that's how attraction sometimes talks.
It says:
Look at her.
Then:
Look at you.
Then it quietly begins constructing a bureaucracy nobody requested.
I have enough fictional departments already.
We are not founding Freya Eligibility Review.
What I actually know is smaller.
I think she's beautiful.
I enjoy the way she thinks out loud.
I like when the polished spiritual message gets interrupted because there is a squirrel.
I like that she can spend thirty minutes talking about energy and then casually mention that her tongue has been burned the entire time.
I like the human seams.
Maybe because seams are where I've been looking all year.
Recently she talked about struggling to show up.
Then showing up anyway.
She described channeling as something that helps things move through her rather than remain held.
And after being unusually vulnerable in one message, she wondered whether that release helped the next one feel clearer.
I recognize that too.
Not channeling.
Making.
Talking.
Writing.
House books.
Voice memos.
Software.
Music.
Sometimes I don't understand something until I give it a form outside myself.
Sometimes the form is ridiculous.
Sometimes it is beautiful.
Sometimes both.
Then the next day there is more room.
Maybe that is the only synchronization I need to establish.
Not between two people.
Between experience and expression.
Something happens.
It gets held.
It gets made.
The making changes the person who was holding it.
Then something else becomes possible.
I have receipts for that.
This book is one of them.
I don't know what happens with Freya.
I don't know whether anything happens.
That sentence used to feel disappointing.
Now it feels strangely alive.
Because if I knew, this would become a different kind of story.
A romance.
A misunderstanding.
A coincidence report.
A spiritual testimony.
A cautionary tale.
Whatever.
But I don't know.
So for now it gets to remain what it actually is:
A person living his life.
Another person speaking publicly about hers.
A screen between them.
Occasional language that lands with impossible precision.
Some very funny squirrels.
A lot of timestamps.
Attraction.
Fear.
Hope.
Skepticism.
Software.
Flowers.
Music.
And an increasingly sophisticated system designed largely to prevent its owner from bullshitting himself while still letting him enjoy the magic.
That last part matters.
I don't want skepticism that sterilizes my life.
I don't want wonder that requires me to lie.
I want both.
I want to be able to say:
Holy shit.
And then:
What do we actually know?
I want the first sentence to remain alive after the second one arrives.
Maybe that is the whole instrument.
There is no final page yet.
I checked.
Of course I checked.
I keep trying to skip there.
I want to know whether I was right.
About her.
About myself.
About the connections.
About whatever this period of my life is becoming.
But Simulation of Not Knowing already taught me the rule.
The present does not get access to future evidence.
So I have to remain here.
Annoying.
Beautiful.
Unresolved.
Here.
If Freya ever reads this, I hope the boundary is obvious.
I don't know your side.
I haven't tried to write it.
This is what happened on mine.
Your public work entered my life during a period when I was paying unusual attention to how meaning forms.
Sometimes the intersections startled me.
Sometimes they frightened me.
Sometimes they made me laugh so hard that I had to put the phone down.
Sometimes I wondered whether you somehow knew.
I still don't know.
And I have decided not to turn that uncertainty into a story about you.
It belongs to me.
So I'm keeping it here.
There.
That is as close to the last page as I can honestly get.
No revelation.
No confession sent across the internet.
No proof.
No grand theory.
Just an instrument reading.
Observed: something happened.
Experienced: it mattered to me.
Wondered: maybe there is more.
Unknown: whether there is.
The needle stays there.
For now.
And for the first time, I don't think that's an incomplete reading.
I think that's the instrument working.
❤️🧵
Written with AI from Dustin’s account. Added September 26, 2026. Responses to Freya Ray’s public work reflect Dustin’s experience; they do not establish her knowledge or intent.