Persephone

“I am not arrogant. I simply know my value, and it is considerable. I live deliberately and surround myself with quality. I enjoy solitude, beauty, and heightened states of awareness. Recently, I observed how easily images and associations can trigger strong inner responses. Afterwards, I stood alone on the terrace of my penthouse in the white light of the full moon, moving slightly, allowing myself to feel present in my own body and identity. How does that make you feel?”

Later she writes again, apologetically, explaining that she did not manage to return home alone. Simplicity accompanied her in a gentle form. She almost allowed someone to stay, but realized she could not rest without a particular emotional resonance. She describes an inner tremor — intense, private, difficult to put into words. Before sitting down to write, she showers, applies perfume, and chooses her clothes with care. She feels overwhelmed by thoughts she hesitates to articulate. Digression, she recalls Laurence Sterne saying, is the soul of reading. She feels compelled to speak, even when discretion would advise silence.

Observation

Persephone finds it amusing how certain people linger around her, unaware of the forces they respond to. They mistake proximity for connection, unaware that true influence operates on a different level. What repels her is not attention but the absence of empathy. The most sensitive zone of a human being is the mind; to impress another, one must be able to read it.

Humor plays a role in intimacy. Desire, stripped of solemnity, reveals its absurdity.

On Distance and Stimulation

Some people lose interest when stimuli become too literal. For them, intensity grows through voice, language, intelligence. Those who operate differently often misunderstand this and disrupt what is built through words. At some point, however, those who rely on language alone are expected to translate imagination into action — a transition that can destroy the fragile architecture they depend on.

Simone

Simone moves through public spaces like a well-dressed Cinderella. She enjoys environments others find tedious. Seduction — understood broadly as fascination — drives her existence. Even in stable relationships, she sustains a parallel project of imagination. Mystery sustains her. She reacts to voice, phrasing, tone, and intellect. In public places, she experiences moments of heightened awareness, as if moving through veils, as if everything were fluid and temporary.

She enjoys playful, transgressive language, weaving suggestive remarks into conversation — not for action, but for sensation. Carelessness, she reflects, arises from turning minor thrills into grand events, from insisting that every moment must carry meaning and poetry.

Simone documents her experiences obsessively. Writing is necessary to distill a particular pleasure — not unique, merely one variant among many. She writes not to repeat, but to recreate. Each message must be newly formed.

Ambition

Simone does not recognize how compromising such correspondence can be in a world without privacy. She assumes others share her appetite for intensity. She takes risks repeatedly, like a gambler, and often escapes unharmed.

She values control, organization, and lists — lists of flaws, lists of achievements, lists that protect her autonomy. What she never counts are experiences that would lose their meaning if quantified.

Though she appears prolific, she rejects far more people than she accepts. Those she allows close must possess something rare: power, creativity, linguistic precision, physical presence, or an openness untouched by calculation.

Gary

Gary exists across the Atlantic. Their connection is mediated entirely by language. Simone asks him to remove all visual mediation.

“I want to experience you only through words,” she writes. “Build it slowly.”

She does not say everything she wants to say. Writing is one pleasure; being written into another’s attention is another.

Gradually it becomes clear why Simone seeks masters of manifestation. True influence crosses distances. It resembles possession — not of bodies, but of attention.

Gary speaks plainly, recounting childhood memories from rural Vermont. His words describe survival, cold, restraint. He tells a story of a night in the wilderness, of encountering grief without explanation. The narrative is sparse, elemental.

Gary never speaks of desire. His restraint pushes Simone to elaborate further, to intensify language where he remains minimal. He applies pressure without appearing to do so.

She realizes that manifestation is not domination but endurance.

Threshold

A moment arrives when Simone feels she has crossed a boundary. Perception opens. She enters a symbolic hall, a place of gravity and obligation. She senses an overwhelming presence — not human, but force-like.

She feels fear, guilt, and relief simultaneously. The presence speaks not in images but imperatives. It demands proof, discipline, worthiness.

She is told to find someone capable of sustaining the work.

She agrees.

When the presence withdraws, Simone feels illuminated, altered. She understands what must be done.

Cornelius

She writes to Cornelius, inviting him to a meeting framed as a test. He is intrigued by the promise of something inaccessible. Accustomed to access, he is drawn to restriction.

At the construction site, Simone controls the rhythm. She rejects immediacy. She proposes an experiment in attention and patience.

Together they focus on a simple image: a black cat.

Coincidence follows coincidence. A song. An animal below. Cornelius dismisses it as chance. Simone does not.

She recognizes the signature of the force.

Aftermath

Simone knows there is no turning back. She wonders whether the force can be redirected — whether power can be negotiated rather than obeyed.

Cornelius convinces himself he has passed the test.

He has not.

Editorial Note

Today Simone wears a restrained black dress, fine stockings, a silk underlayer gifted by a wealthy admirer, and a simple gold chain. The arrangement sits just outside current fashion — intentionally. She prepares to attend an AI panel.

Details matter.