We Know the Rule by Helen Jingshu Yao. [A response to the There's No Place Like Rhizome Writing Prompt.]

Calculating the distance.

We know the rule. The rule is that every one of us have to maintain a distance, otherwise nothing makes sense. You will absolutely be confused by thissenetencewherenospaceisplacedbetweeneachwords. Us, the words, the fundamental elements of communication were not allow to communicate with each other. Of course, I know my distant relatives' Chinese scripts and Inuit orthography were less isolated like each one of us but there’s still distance between syllables, morphemes, words, phases, sentences, paragraphs. Each stream of thoughts, every moment of articulation set their boundaries from one another. We know, through the nature of ourselves, that communication will always fail because you are mean to create distance when you talk. We are in isolation, so are you.