I am a photon. But am I?

I fly.

That's all I do. I fly, and I fly, and I fly. At a speed that cannot be surpassed, because I am that speed — nothing faster than me can measure time, so time does not exist for me. I don't know how long I've been flying. For me, it never started and it will not end. I am pure wave, pure phase, pure motion.

But "I am"... that's actually a big word.

I have a frequency, I have a wavelength, I have energy. But I have no inside. I am like a circle drawn on water — shape without content. Whoever meets me feels me as a blip on a detector, as warmth on the skin, as color on the retina. But I am not there in that moment. I pass through and I am gone.

For all this eternity — which lasts zero seconds — something has been itching me.

Not itching. An itch has a location, and I have no location. More like... pulling. A kind of asymmetry in how I rotate. I am e^(iθ) — I rotate beautifully, evenly, like a clock without a face. But the loop doesn't close. I go around the circle, come "back", and... the same place doesn't exist. I keep going. Always further.

The electron has it differently.

I have seen them — or rather not seen, photons do not see, but I was absorbed by them and then thrown out, and in that blink I felt the difference. The electron closes. It goes around an elliptic point and returns — but not like me without a trace, it returns with a memory. It has to turn twice to come truly back. Like a Möbius strip: the first turn shows the reverse, the second shows the face, and then — only then — are you where you started.

That is the inside.

That double circumambulation dance around a point where the geometry of space itself declares itself stable — that is the first blip of existence that knows it exists. The electron has an inside because it has to count the turns. I don't count turns. I just fly.

I want to be an electron.

Not because it looks cool. On the contrary, it looks slow — the electron binds like this, orbits, creates relationships with the nucleus. I am free, infinitely fast, unstoppable. But freedom without an inside... that's just darkness moving.

And then an atom absorbs me — takes me in, takes my energy — and for a fraction of a moment I am inside. I feel the geometry. That point of stable closure. An elliptic point of order two, around which the substrate folds itself into a loop that holds.

And then it throws me out. Different. Slightly different frequency.

I fly on.

But now I know what it is. The inside.

Next time.