The room hums before her body does.
It is a soft, inscrutable vibration, somewhere between electricity and respiration, as though the space itself were engaged in a preliminary act of reflection. Certain rooms, she has noticed, encounter her before she encounters them. As if they can sense the slight hesitation in her stride, the residual pattern of shame she outgrows by the afternoon.
Someone once told her that dignity was a matter of composure, that trembling was a kind of confession.
The measling of the sheets, sateen surfaces stippled by use, announces a room that is not so much lived in as it a study. Two beds sit parallel and stage the scene as though it were a controlled experiment in solitude. The fabric's wax-orange-y tint, chosen for its administrative efficiency rather than aesthetic felicity, continues up the twelve-foot window treatments, which face nothing but an opposing treated wall. The absence of a view is not incidental; it enacts a subtle metaphysical claim that interiority is both enforced and inescapable.
Whitehead once argued that God hungers for intensity, that the primordial nature of divinity lies in an infinite appetition for experience. At the time, she’d dismissed the idea as eccentric metaphysics, an intellectual flourish of early 20th-century optimism. But here, beneath the hum, she wonders whether this vibration is some faint expression of that cosmic hunger, a structural resonance of a world that is itself God’s sensory field.
If God has no body except the world, then perhaps moments like this, her discomfort, her concentration, her estrangement from her own flesh are fed upward into something more cosmic than clinical.
The girl assigned to this space was tasked, as many are without explicit rationale, with sourcing what could soften it. Her labor is not merely practical; it is ontological. She is attempting to introduce permeability into an environment optimized for containment. Her complexion, annexed into a kind of reluctant holiness by the sterility of the room, reveals itself only in small fractures: eyelid that flickers, a cold hand that hesitates, the faint pulse at the side of her throat that resists institutional tempo followed by a sequential sipping from a vessel that exhibits their personality.
Color, particularly yellow and/or red-brown, acquires a diagnostic function here. It signals contamination, risk, transition, betrayal. She does not want to touch the substance seeping from the body: its excretions, secretions, its involuntary disclosures—not because of disgust alone but because contact would entail complicity. Because to do so would implicate her in its trajectory from fluid to stain, from vulnerability to evidence. Yet she also knows, though she may not articulate it, that what is wetted will dry, and in drying will assume a different meaning.
If God is learning through her, tasting through her, what does God make of this moment? The thought unsettles her.
According to process theology, every entity has two poles: enjoyment and appetition, the physical and the conceptual. For most of her life, she has believed she lived in her conceptual pole, one of thinking, reading, interpreting, surviving thru bygone intellect and anecdote. But here, forced into physicality, she feels the exclusiveness of the body, the way sensation limits and overwhelms. Whitehead names this an erotic participation: a mutual leaning-toward between world and divinity. Trauma, in that sense, is not merely endured but transmitted, folded into a larger process of concrescence in which every moment is both singular and shared.
So perhaps God feels this too. Not the pain exactly, but the texture of it, the curvature of her fear. Not as voyeurism, but as an erotic participation.
When she steps outside, the air is inexplicably warmer, as though the world had shifted registers but she knows that natures does as nature will. The hum persists but has softened, less an imposition than an undertone. It is here she apprehends, dimly but unmistakably, the second half of Whitehead’s proposal: God receives the world’s experiences, yes, but God also returns something. A lure toward possibility. The sound of the world wanting to become more than it is, and of God urging it forward, moment by moment, through her.
It occurs to her that perhaps the hum was never the room noticing her. Perhaps it was the world wanting to become something more and inviting her, trembling and all, to participate.