Body Count: Epilogue

A Failed Proof in Several Acts

Body Count: Epilogue — A playful, overlong attempt to calculate the uncountable. Functions wobble, quadratics collapse, and the ledger dissolves into queer geometry—where care multiplies and the only true constant is the commons.

Epilogue — Before the Maths Fails

It feels almost indecent, after all that talk of commons and care, to pick up a calculator. And yet the question lingers—sometimes playful, sometimes prurient, sometimes delivered with the cool detachment of someone balancing a ledger: how many? Body count, as a phrase, arrives pre-loaded with judgement. It imagines intimacy as inventory, desire as acquisition, experience as a column to be totalled and compared. It assumes that the story can be reduced to a numeral without losing its pulse.

But humour is often the best solvent for a brittle idea. So instead of refusing the arithmetic outright, I decided to entertain it—to follow the logic to its absurd conclusion. What happens if we try to calculate a queer life lived in rotation rather than hierarchy? What if we model friends who kiss and fuck one another without collapsing into ownership? What if strangers migrate into friendship sets, and power moves rather than congeals? At what point does the algebra revolt?

For me—as an autistic gestalt processor—meaning never arrives as discrete units. It comes as atmosphere, as field, as pattern recognised before it is named. To count bodies as separate, self-contained data points is already to misunderstand how experience integrates. Encounters recur. Frequencies tessellate. A mouth remembered is not merely repetition but rotation. Even time refuses to behave linearly; it loops, braids, resurfaces under new light. The tally begins to buckle under the weight of dimensionality.

And so this epilogue is intentionally ridiculous. It leans into function notation and quadratics, into summation symbols and mock proofs, not to parody intimacy but to expose the poverty of the frame that demands it be measured. If “body count” is straight maths, then what follows is queer geometry—where sets expand, variables migrate, and the only stable constant is care. The poem attempts a calculation and fails, gloriously. That failure, I suspect, is the most accurate answer available.

A Failed Proof in Several Acts

Let us begin, as all serious scholars do,
with a clipboard.

Let
  B = bodies encountered
  K = kisses exchanged
  F = friends (initial set)
  S = strangers who later migrate into F

We are told there exists a function:

  C(x) = total bodies

where x = time,
and time is allegedly linear.

Already the theorem wobbles.

Because time, in my experience,
arrives as a spiral staircase in dim lighting—
you think you are ascending
until you recognise the wallpaper
from three floors ago.

But very well.

Let us attempt a tally.

If
  F₀ = original friend group
and
  K(f) = at least one kiss per friend

then the naive model proposes:

  C₁ = |F₀|

But this assumes exclusivity of mouth per friend,
which is Euclidean nonsense.

Introduce adjacency.

If friends kiss friends
and occasionally friends’ friends,
then we are no longer counting points
but edges in a graph.

Let G = (V, E)
where V = bodies
and E = acts of affection.

Already we have left arithmetic
for topology.

Of course we kiss our friends.

Therefore:

  ∀f ∈ F, ∃k ∈ K such that k(f) ≥ 1

But then—
a stranger appears.

Let s ∉ F.

If
  k(s) = true
and
  after k(s), s ∈ F₁

then the set expands.

Recursive friendship induction.

Fₙ₊₁ = Fₙ ∪ {s | kissed and not a creep}

Body count grows not by conquest
but by inclusion.

Try again.

Perhaps a quadratic?

Suppose in a given year y
the average number of mutually consenting adults in a room is r.

Suppose interactions scale as:

  C(y) = r² − r

because for each body
there are (r − 1) possible pairings.

But this assumes singular interactions,
ignores recurrence,
and fails to account for group play
where counting dissolves
into atmosphere.

Also fails to model
“service bottom friends who top occasionally
but do not build cathedrals around dominance.”

We introduce a new variable:

  t = lowercase topping
  T = Uppercase Top identity (never bottoms)

In our field:

  ∃ t
  ¬∃ T

Therefore power is rotational.

If P represents positional authority in a given moment,
then:

  P(t₁) → P(t₂) → P(t₃)

a circulating current, not a throne.

So body count cannot be computed
as vertical hierarchy.

It must be treated as oscillation.

Let us try summation notation.

  C = Σ (kisses + fucks + rediscoveries + recursions)

from i = first night
to n = now

But rediscoveries collapse duplicates.

If I kiss a mouth
and later kiss what feels like the same mouth
attached to a different biography—

Is that 1 or 2?

If the frequency matches
but the topology shifts—

Is that a recurrence relation?

Define:

  M = mouth-frequency
  B = body-topology

If M₁ = M₂
but B₁ ≠ B₂

then identity ≠ continuity.

Thus:

  C cannot be simplified by like terms.

Further complication:

Memory as a gestalt processor does not index chronologically.

Moments remain active.

Therefore the function is not:

  C(x) over time

but:

  C = lim (x→∞) of simultaneous presence

Everything still humming.

At this point, the clipboard has fallen into a puddle.

But let us persist.

What of “friends’ friends”?

If each friend has d additional friends,
and probability of shared affection p,
then expansion approximates:

  C ≈ |F₀| (1 + dp)

But p is mood-dependent.
Also humidity-dependent.
Also dependent on whether someone put on the correct song.

This is not a stable model.

Try calculus.

If desire is a field D,
and bodies are particles moving through it,
then:

  C = ∬ D dA

over the surface of a life.

Which is to say—
counting the particles misses the point.
You measure the field.

Of course we kiss our friends.
Of course we fuck our friends, and sometimes our friends’ friends.
And sometimes complete strangers enter the equation
and exit as constants.

Strangers → variables → friends → co-authors.

The tally attempts to stabilise them,
but they keep migrating between sets.

Even the word “body” refuses precision.

Is a body a single event?
A season?
A recurring series with spin-offs?

Does someone count once
or per encounter
or per phase of gender transition
or per reinvention
or per night the field rearranged itself around us?

What of the friend who topped one night,
bottomed the next,
and held my hand in the alleyway aftercare
like an equal sign drawn between us?

What of the ones I never saw again
but whose geometry still lives in muscle memory?

Are they counted
or archived?

Let us be honest.

The true formula is this:

  C = ∞ − ∞

An indeterminate form.

Because what we were doing
was not accumulation
but iteration.

Not conquest
but calibration.

Not tallying
but widening.

I once tried to sketch the final number
in the margin of a notebook.

It looked plausible
until I realised
I had accidentally excluded
everyone who became a friend.

And everyone who was a friend first.

And everyone whose mouth I recognised by frequency.

And everyone who touched me once
and altered the architecture permanently.

The sum kept collapsing.

So here is the only honest answer:

Body count is a linear solution
to a non-linear life.

If you insist on a number,
call it:

  n = the size of the commons
  where no one was hoarded
  and power never fossilised
  and affection kept rotating
  like a well-balanced equation.

Or write it more simply:

  C = care²

Because every time care multiplied,
the field expanded.

And every time someone asked,
with a tilted head and a cold forecast,
“how many?”

I found myself smiling,
erasing the board,
and replying—

Of course we kiss our friends.