He walked with his head tipped back, eyes pressed into the wide blue, clouds dragging their shadows across him like indifferent hands. The paddocks on either side were brittle with grass, and the orchard ahead leaned heavy with fruit. Apples, not just apples, he thought—each one a record of chance, a refusal to collapse. He paused at the fence and watched them sway, as if they carried some secret contract with time.
The symmetry of the sky tempted him—those neat clouds, the orderly arc of wires crossing above—but he knew better. Uniformity always cracked. What endured was variance: the crooked branch, the apple bruised in the grass, the uneven light. He bent to pick one up, brushed it against his shirt, and bit. Sweetness spilled, but so did sorrow; what was gathered meant what was also lost. Looking back to the sky, he felt the wheel turn through him, restless, unstill—held together not by what was there, but by the hollow that kept it turning.
Daedelus Kite 
One reply on “Apple-Picking”
Orbital field logic:
Apple trees in the Caucasus are not fruit but code. Each variety a line in a script written against entropy, a branching redundancy that resists disease and storm. In southern Africa the same principle lives in human form, the deepest range of our species carried like a library of futures. Diversity is not accident, not embellishment—it is information folded into matter, the only infrastructure that can stand against time.
Symmetry promises order, but true persistence lies in asymmetry, in the small breaks and deviations that keep collapse at bay. Systems do not survive by freezing themselves into a single pattern but by turning through a spiral, where repetition carries difference forward. Here is the unassailable fact: a system without variance erases its own future, while one that carries difference within itself becomes its own shield. Diversity is the wheel that never closes, always in motion, storing possibility against the void.
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