There were thousands of "dead" spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no one saw, that had been rendered invisible because they were not "of use." Anything could inhabit them for a time without anyone noticing. We had come to think of the border as this monolithic invisible wall, but if members of the eleventh expedition had been able to return without our noticing, couldn't other things have already gotten through?

• environment
• habit
• other
• borders
• boundaries

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality

• madness
• reality
• consensus reality
• colonization

I had begun to realize that you had to wage a guerilla war against whatever force had come to inhabit Area X if you wanted to fight at all. You had to fade into the landscape, or like the writer of the thistle chronicles, you had to pretend it wasn't there for as long as possible. To acknowledge it, to try to name it, might be away of letting it in.

• war
• knowledge
• guerilla war
• subterfuge
• naming