Aya

One day Bunny met Artak. Artak was a unicorn — so much a unicorn that everyone looked like a type to him. “I like your type,” he said to Bunny. Anyone he met, he felt he had already seen.

To Bunny, this seeing-in-types felt strange, since counting carp, for Bunny, was an encounter. Sometimes Bunny did not even separate the carp from the dark moving water, thinking that the dark shadow moving in the water might be a carp she could not clearly see. Bunny counted a family of geese feeling like a mother goose, making sure all her babies were with her.

Bunny met people the way a river meets lakes, valleys, other streams. She encountered dreams as participants in her reality. Dreams and river had one name for Bunny: Aya. The name was the wind travelling in the landscape of her field. The wind was bringing the next weather.

Artak was always interrupting any speech — including the flow of his own. Bunny wanted to say that this is bad manners, and that they come from thinking in types and categories — but Bunny did not say it to Artak. Instead, Bunny said that Artak flowed like a chain of waterfalls that interrupt a life flow. Unicorn Artak said that it was simply in the name — Artak.

“Oh — he thinks in meaningful symbols, not in types or categories.”

The name matters.

Bunny saw a meaningful one for herself — Aya.

“The name can let me become visible to the unicorn Artak — not as a type, but as an encounter.

I wonder whether he knows what counting means when he says we can count on each other.