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rainbowfic2015-07-10 07:06 am
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2015-07-10 07:06 am
Dragon Scale Green, Skyblue Pink with Striped Polka Dots 6
Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Dragon Scale Green, Summer Carnival), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/touching-floor), Saturation
Characters: Martin (POV), Corwin, Spenser for a little bit.
Colors: Dragon Scale Green, Skyblue Pink with Striped Polka Dots 6 ("You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.")
Word Count: 2,945
Rating: Low R or higher PG-13?
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Martin’s thoughts on life, death, and undeath.
Note: …I couldn’t leave well enough alone. XD Especially when I asked SWL and she informed me there wasn’t a precedent for someone doing it both ways. In the timeline, I’d place this around the same time as Rest In Pieces, and maybe a little bit after.
Watch Downhill Speed
"Old dragons, like old thorns, can still prick. And I am a very old dragon." ― Jane Yolen
Sometimes, I think I act like such an asshole just so I can prove it to myself that I still have the kind of power I’ve always had, that it's just locked up in a casing that's starting to fall apart. Really, I'm every bit of what I always was. I just need to take it easy is all.
I don't know when, exactly, I stopped believing that, but it's probably for the best. It was all bullshit. And one thing that hasn’t changed, is that I can’t abide bullshit. Not even my own, at least once I see it for what it is. (I was never very good at that.)
Otherwise, I'm not even close to what I used to be.
All my life, I was a powerhouse. I could do almost anything I put my mind to. No one dared to fuck with me, and since I started high school when I was twelve, that's actually kind of a miracle. I was a sore loser and a braggart and a showoff. And as high and mighty as I was, I knew in my heart that I'd earned it. That the whole world was at my feet.
Now, I'm just some pissy ninety-eight pound zombie fuckhead who insults people constantly and can hardly stand.
Even so, no one dares to fuck with me.
I have to hold onto that one thing, lest I admit that I‘ve finally lost it all.
"Better to sit all night than to go to bed with a dragon." ― Proverb
If I go to sleep, I'll probably die. If I call someone to sit next to me in case I do, I'll end up having some bullshit conversation with them.
Neither of those would leave me with enough time.
I need to get used to not being around. I close my eyes and try not to think. See? Like that. I wonder if I could make myself blank out, but not remember it this time. See? That's closer.
And I need to get ready for what happens next. I imagine the warm rocks under me, the wind on my face, blowing through my dry hair. I try to feel the vultures tearing me to shreds, the talons slitting me down the middle, my intestines unraveling. The mallet splintering my bones.
Then I imagine that I'm not feeling any of it at all. Because I wouldn't be.
Not only would I be good and dead, but I don't even know if it's going to actually happen. It's a nice idea, but it seems like one of those ostentatious things that people say when they're not really sure what they want. Like when I used to talk my head off about how I might as well take advantage of my head start and go through grad school twice.
Well, I never got to finish my BA, so odds are, I'm not even going to make it halfway up the hill.
"Let me tell you: the only way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own." ― Eugene Shvarts
I'm leaning into the flimsy old toilet in Hal's dismal upstairs bathroom. The joints in my arms and shoulders are snapping in and out of place. It feels like someone grabbed my spine and twisted it. Spenser is sitting on the edge of the tub with his hand on my back. And I can't make myself stop throwing up. It's pretty mortifying, actually. Even more so would be telling him he has to stay right where he is. That I need to know he's still there and won't let me fly apart or turn inside-out. He’s chattering behind me like a set of wind-up teeth. If it was anyone else, I’d think he was trying to distract me, but he‘s just doing the same thing he always does. He’ll never know how much I respect him for this. That it’s why I let him in here with me in the first place.
We have a division of labor set up:
Corwin sorts pills and injects me with things, wasting half of both our days. If I wake up in the middle of the night, he hands me a bucket so I can catch whatever's trying to get out of me.
Spenser drags me to and from the bathroom.
This just makes sense. For one thing, Corwin couldn't lift me if his life depended on it, even now, when I'm barely over eighty percent of what I was. And Spenser never gets that gutted look that makes me want to either break down and apologize for everything or punch him right in the face. He didn't know me back when I was okay, so I can do just about anything in front of him without wanting to go out back and shoot myself in the head. Can't get out of the bathtub of my own volition? Whatever. He holds out his arm and hands me a towel. Emptying out the quart of blood that leaks into my gut every day? He sits and waits it out, even though he's probably really bored and wants to be somewhere running around breaking things and making an ass out of himself.
He waits. I'm dizzy and seeing stars. I heave and nothing happens. I'm finally done. I sit back on the tiles. He puts both hands on my shoulders. Unlike some people, he doesn't get swatted.
"You, like, all emptied-out?"
I don't say anything. I don't even nod. If I did, it would knock what's left of my blood clean out of my head. My throat feels like something ripped it wide open.
"Alright! You ready for bed?"
"Always speak politely to an enraged dragon." ― Steven Brust
Corwin always does his best to say things that would make me feel better.
That's why I end up snapping at him and generally treating him like shit. I'm sick of him being so fucking appeasing all the time. It drives me up the walls and makes me want to kick him in square in the teeth. Makes me want to scream at him to get his act together. And my god, it's like he's a born go-alonger who doesn't even know how to go along. How did someone like that even survive to adulthood?
Really, I worry about him. Because I'm not always going to be around to make sure he's alright. I want to drive it into his head, over and over, that I'm going to be gone. That I'm passing him on from my hands to his own. That I can't carry him anymore. That I’d never planned to in the first place and wasn’t exactly thrilled to have been given the job.
I want him to be who I've always known he was. My first impression was watching him stand up in the middle of class, tell off that blowhard of a philosophy professor, and storm out of the room. I waited for class to end, then went to see if I could find him. He was smoking under a tree. I sat down next to him and congratulated him on a job well done. Finally, my kind of person!
He wasn't the kind of person I thought he was. Just something that looks similar in certain contexts. But everything I saw that day is still in him. I want him to realize this, internalize it, live it.
And I know I'm not helping.
"I'm not so much a dragon slayer, more a dragon annoyer... I'm a dragon irritater." ― Craig Ferguson
If I started taking things seriously, I probably could have changed the world.
But, I didn't want to take things seriously. And I didn't really want to change the world, either.
I wanted to play its game and win.
Really, playing and winning were the bulk of my interests. That, and fucking things up.
The world was a thought experiment, and life was all for sport. If I couldn't puzzle it out or win, I'd lose interest. It's not that I was incurious, or cynical, except in certain other senses of the word. It's just that learning something felt like winning, and winning felt good, so learning felt good. I lined up skills and facts on a trophy shelf, and god, I was so proud.
Sometimes, I think that maybe, if I'd put gaining a sense of understanding before gaining a sense of mastery, I would have handled all this a lot better than I did.
Corwin, would you have known what to do?
"Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive." ― Terry Pratchett
He was my best friend. I should have wanted to talk to him. I should have made him feel like going to see me every day was worth the effort.
But, thing is, I didn't think it was. That anything was. I only had one foot in the world I'd known. The rest of me was in the world as it really was. It had such a hold on me that there was barely an "I" at all.
I would have explained, but I was drifting in and out, my being so dilute that I couldn't get enough of myself in one place to talk. Or do much of anything. They had a tube down my nose, because I wouldn't eat. I wouldn't eat, because I wasn't even there.
After a while, Corwin wasn't there, either. He went out for a cigarette break and never came back. I wasn‘t sure if I was coming back, but I did. On a part-time basis, at least.
When I got most of me back in my skull, the first thing I felt was betrayed. The next thing I felt was a terrible guilt. The next thing after that was, fuck him anyway.
I drove a rift between us that never quite went away. It was my fault, so I should have been the one to fix it. And the sad part is, I wanted to. But, I never got around to it.
Now I‘m all out of time.
"But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them." ― Ursula K. Le Guin
He was leaning over the tank when the mass reached criticality. It was the kind of mistake that anyone could make, just trying to get the job done. And the blue light filtered through him, and he fell down, and he stood up, and he didn't know he was dead.
His body fell apart the way all our bodies fall apart, bit by invisible bit, every second of every day. But it didn't remember how to put itself back together. So the doctors tried. They didn’t know how, either. He asked them to stop.
They didn't stop.
The cameras surrounding him captured everything.
He came unglued.
Then they strung him up from the bed so nothing was touching anything else, his skin slipped off, and his membranes slowly dissolved. And even then, they still kept trying to put him back together.
He still kept falling apart.
So they plugged him into every machine they had. He was losing blood and water faster than they could replace it. But they kept on pumping it in. He kept on drying out. And this went on for almost an entire quarter of a year, until everything short of his heart had disintegrated and he was finally gone. Nobody wanted to admit that, by then, he'd already been gone for a good, long time.
I read this story once, when I was seventeen. Then six times when I was twenty-one and could finally understand. A re-read here or there when I can’t understand anything else.
And lately, I think about it almost every day.
"With money you are a dragon; with no money, a worm." ― Proverb
I don't know what I was trying to accomplish when I moved into that hotel room. If it was just to escape the way people were looking at me, like I thought it was, or if I was trying to commit suicide without, well, actually trying.
All I know is that I went there to die.
Of course, I brought all my medications, so I was doing a pretty shit job at dying. I was doing an even worse job when I started going to shady websites and buying the things that eventually ran out. There were empty amber bottles and mutilated blister packs scattered all over the floor; glass vials in the mini-fridge, needles in the trash.
When I got low on money and had to pick and choose what I reordered, I started doing a better job. Middling at worst. Half-assing death, phoning it in, putting it off to tomorrow.
When I started losing lung function that I'd never fully regain, I almost had it nailed.
I was spending all my time bent over the sink or sitting up in bed, curled around the plastic wastecan. I'd cough so hard I was making myself vomit and pass out on the regular. I couldn't help it. My pipes were choked with gallons of unrecognizable crap. Most of it was dark, almost black; blood that was already old before the vessels burst. Towards the end, I started hacking up this thick yellow stuff that would rattle so loudly inside me that I sometimes woke myself up just breathing. And then I'd spend the next hour spitting black-and-yellow sludge in the white sink. The colors made me think about hazard signs.
Divided road. Be prepared to stop. Watch downhill speed.
Dead end. Dead end. Dead end.
No exit.
"You haven't been bit till a dragon does it." ― Tamora Pierce
On one of my last days alive, I twisted a few arms to get the university take me on that space tourism trip, even though I wasn't a grad student. Which was easy enough, because half the mathematics department had known me since I was ten.
I was excited, for most of the usual reasons. Liftoff was like nothing I'd ever felt. The world looked so small from out there. Floating against my seatbelt was interesting. I drove Corwin nuts all the way to the space station, because he was there, and that was just what I did, no matter where I was.
It was the first night of the three-night trip, and I was still excited. Much too excited to sleep. I drifted out of my bunk and into the main corridor. I kicked the walls and sent myself flying.
I didn't know they'd been keeping an eye on that particular hatch.
I didn't know I could break an airlock just by kicking it.
But they were, and I did, and the pressure shifted too much, and some things came apart, a huge metal something flew at me and ran me through, and someone grabbed my hand to keep me from flying off, and then they sealed off that wing of the station.
And I was already dead.
They worked as fast as they could to siphon out my blood and fill me back up with ice water, leaving the broken metal stuck in my chest like a cork. Then they shoved me in a coldbox from one of the labs and quietly sent Corwin and I home. Later, I was told that they didn't know what else to do.
But, I don't remember much of that. I remember seeing globs of blood, red blood, floating in front of my face.
Then I remember waking up, almost two months later, with tubes running in and out of me, and bandages covering wounds that were still wet and open after all that time. They'd reconnected and rewired me. I had a metal pump doing most of my heart's work for it, and parts of me ran on batteries. I wasn't quite alive, but I'd survived. Later, I was told that they didn't know what else to do.
Between those moments, I remember being dead. And while I was dead, I didn't remember being alive. There wasn’t a me to remember anything I was just one drop in a huge solution, like I'd been for billions of years before I was born, and would soon be again for many billions more.
The time I spent alive was just a statistical error.
That, I’ve never forgotten.
"So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings." ― JRR Tolkien
These past few years, there's been so much I had to face down, or figure out, or learn to live with. And so much I had to memorize and stay on top of, just to stay alive, for some value of alive.
And I did it all alone.
This took some getting used to. I grew up with people urging me along and telling me I was doing great, moving obstacles so I could coast along to whatever great thing was waiting for me. Keep going, that’s right, you’re so smart, you have this, you’re a natural, A+, First Place, so talented, such a hard worker, I’m so proud of you.
Helping me along would mean acknowledging where I’m going.
Sure, I had friends who tried to work out what to say. I had doctors who drew out and analyzed every substance and tissue in my decaying body, so they could give some vague instructions and never have to admit that they really had no idea what to do with me.
But, nothing any of them did or said could save me, in any sense of the word.
I was going to die.
I was going to die, and I was going to be the second person to die like this. Ever. And the only one who made it so far. That was a big part of the problem. No one knew what to do about someone who just kept on living. The procedure they performed on me wasn’t even designed as a long-term solution.
I only fell apart so spectacularly because I got so much time to do it in. It got so much time to do me in. None of us could guess what was next, because I was always the first one to even have a "next."
Except now, I finally don’t. And this, too, is something I have to figure out on my own.
My only consolation is: well, I've done it before.
It can't be that hard.
Can it?
starphotographsStory: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Dragon Scale Green, Summer Carnival), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/touching-floor), Saturation
Characters: Martin (POV), Corwin, Spenser for a little bit.
Colors: Dragon Scale Green, Skyblue Pink with Striped Polka Dots 6 ("You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.")
Word Count: 2,945
Rating: Low R or higher PG-13?
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Martin’s thoughts on life, death, and undeath.
Note: …I couldn’t leave well enough alone. XD Especially when I asked SWL and she informed me there wasn’t a precedent for someone doing it both ways. In the timeline, I’d place this around the same time as Rest In Pieces, and maybe a little bit after.
Sometimes, I think I act like such an asshole just so I can prove it to myself that I still have the kind of power I’ve always had, that it's just locked up in a casing that's starting to fall apart. Really, I'm every bit of what I always was. I just need to take it easy is all.
I don't know when, exactly, I stopped believing that, but it's probably for the best. It was all bullshit. And one thing that hasn’t changed, is that I can’t abide bullshit. Not even my own, at least once I see it for what it is. (I was never very good at that.)
Otherwise, I'm not even close to what I used to be.
All my life, I was a powerhouse. I could do almost anything I put my mind to. No one dared to fuck with me, and since I started high school when I was twelve, that's actually kind of a miracle. I was a sore loser and a braggart and a showoff. And as high and mighty as I was, I knew in my heart that I'd earned it. That the whole world was at my feet.
Now, I'm just some pissy ninety-eight pound zombie fuckhead who insults people constantly and can hardly stand.
Even so, no one dares to fuck with me.
I have to hold onto that one thing, lest I admit that I‘ve finally lost it all.
If I go to sleep, I'll probably die. If I call someone to sit next to me in case I do, I'll end up having some bullshit conversation with them.
Neither of those would leave me with enough time.
I need to get used to not being around. I close my eyes and try not to think. See? Like that. I wonder if I could make myself blank out, but not remember it this time. See? That's closer.
And I need to get ready for what happens next. I imagine the warm rocks under me, the wind on my face, blowing through my dry hair. I try to feel the vultures tearing me to shreds, the talons slitting me down the middle, my intestines unraveling. The mallet splintering my bones.
Then I imagine that I'm not feeling any of it at all. Because I wouldn't be.
Not only would I be good and dead, but I don't even know if it's going to actually happen. It's a nice idea, but it seems like one of those ostentatious things that people say when they're not really sure what they want. Like when I used to talk my head off about how I might as well take advantage of my head start and go through grad school twice.
Well, I never got to finish my BA, so odds are, I'm not even going to make it halfway up the hill.
I'm leaning into the flimsy old toilet in Hal's dismal upstairs bathroom. The joints in my arms and shoulders are snapping in and out of place. It feels like someone grabbed my spine and twisted it. Spenser is sitting on the edge of the tub with his hand on my back. And I can't make myself stop throwing up. It's pretty mortifying, actually. Even more so would be telling him he has to stay right where he is. That I need to know he's still there and won't let me fly apart or turn inside-out. He’s chattering behind me like a set of wind-up teeth. If it was anyone else, I’d think he was trying to distract me, but he‘s just doing the same thing he always does. He’ll never know how much I respect him for this. That it’s why I let him in here with me in the first place.
We have a division of labor set up:
Corwin sorts pills and injects me with things, wasting half of both our days. If I wake up in the middle of the night, he hands me a bucket so I can catch whatever's trying to get out of me.
Spenser drags me to and from the bathroom.
This just makes sense. For one thing, Corwin couldn't lift me if his life depended on it, even now, when I'm barely over eighty percent of what I was. And Spenser never gets that gutted look that makes me want to either break down and apologize for everything or punch him right in the face. He didn't know me back when I was okay, so I can do just about anything in front of him without wanting to go out back and shoot myself in the head. Can't get out of the bathtub of my own volition? Whatever. He holds out his arm and hands me a towel. Emptying out the quart of blood that leaks into my gut every day? He sits and waits it out, even though he's probably really bored and wants to be somewhere running around breaking things and making an ass out of himself.
He waits. I'm dizzy and seeing stars. I heave and nothing happens. I'm finally done. I sit back on the tiles. He puts both hands on my shoulders. Unlike some people, he doesn't get swatted.
"You, like, all emptied-out?"
I don't say anything. I don't even nod. If I did, it would knock what's left of my blood clean out of my head. My throat feels like something ripped it wide open.
"Alright! You ready for bed?"
Corwin always does his best to say things that would make me feel better.
That's why I end up snapping at him and generally treating him like shit. I'm sick of him being so fucking appeasing all the time. It drives me up the walls and makes me want to kick him in square in the teeth. Makes me want to scream at him to get his act together. And my god, it's like he's a born go-alonger who doesn't even know how to go along. How did someone like that even survive to adulthood?
Really, I worry about him. Because I'm not always going to be around to make sure he's alright. I want to drive it into his head, over and over, that I'm going to be gone. That I'm passing him on from my hands to his own. That I can't carry him anymore. That I’d never planned to in the first place and wasn’t exactly thrilled to have been given the job.
I want him to be who I've always known he was. My first impression was watching him stand up in the middle of class, tell off that blowhard of a philosophy professor, and storm out of the room. I waited for class to end, then went to see if I could find him. He was smoking under a tree. I sat down next to him and congratulated him on a job well done. Finally, my kind of person!
He wasn't the kind of person I thought he was. Just something that looks similar in certain contexts. But everything I saw that day is still in him. I want him to realize this, internalize it, live it.
And I know I'm not helping.
If I started taking things seriously, I probably could have changed the world.
But, I didn't want to take things seriously. And I didn't really want to change the world, either.
I wanted to play its game and win.
Really, playing and winning were the bulk of my interests. That, and fucking things up.
The world was a thought experiment, and life was all for sport. If I couldn't puzzle it out or win, I'd lose interest. It's not that I was incurious, or cynical, except in certain other senses of the word. It's just that learning something felt like winning, and winning felt good, so learning felt good. I lined up skills and facts on a trophy shelf, and god, I was so proud.
Sometimes, I think that maybe, if I'd put gaining a sense of understanding before gaining a sense of mastery, I would have handled all this a lot better than I did.
Corwin, would you have known what to do?
He was my best friend. I should have wanted to talk to him. I should have made him feel like going to see me every day was worth the effort.
But, thing is, I didn't think it was. That anything was. I only had one foot in the world I'd known. The rest of me was in the world as it really was. It had such a hold on me that there was barely an "I" at all.
I would have explained, but I was drifting in and out, my being so dilute that I couldn't get enough of myself in one place to talk. Or do much of anything. They had a tube down my nose, because I wouldn't eat. I wouldn't eat, because I wasn't even there.
After a while, Corwin wasn't there, either. He went out for a cigarette break and never came back. I wasn‘t sure if I was coming back, but I did. On a part-time basis, at least.
When I got most of me back in my skull, the first thing I felt was betrayed. The next thing I felt was a terrible guilt. The next thing after that was, fuck him anyway.
I drove a rift between us that never quite went away. It was my fault, so I should have been the one to fix it. And the sad part is, I wanted to. But, I never got around to it.
Now I‘m all out of time.
He was leaning over the tank when the mass reached criticality. It was the kind of mistake that anyone could make, just trying to get the job done. And the blue light filtered through him, and he fell down, and he stood up, and he didn't know he was dead.
His body fell apart the way all our bodies fall apart, bit by invisible bit, every second of every day. But it didn't remember how to put itself back together. So the doctors tried. They didn’t know how, either. He asked them to stop.
They didn't stop.
The cameras surrounding him captured everything.
He came unglued.
Then they strung him up from the bed so nothing was touching anything else, his skin slipped off, and his membranes slowly dissolved. And even then, they still kept trying to put him back together.
He still kept falling apart.
So they plugged him into every machine they had. He was losing blood and water faster than they could replace it. But they kept on pumping it in. He kept on drying out. And this went on for almost an entire quarter of a year, until everything short of his heart had disintegrated and he was finally gone. Nobody wanted to admit that, by then, he'd already been gone for a good, long time.
I read this story once, when I was seventeen. Then six times when I was twenty-one and could finally understand. A re-read here or there when I can’t understand anything else.
And lately, I think about it almost every day.
I don't know what I was trying to accomplish when I moved into that hotel room. If it was just to escape the way people were looking at me, like I thought it was, or if I was trying to commit suicide without, well, actually trying.
All I know is that I went there to die.
Of course, I brought all my medications, so I was doing a pretty shit job at dying. I was doing an even worse job when I started going to shady websites and buying the things that eventually ran out. There were empty amber bottles and mutilated blister packs scattered all over the floor; glass vials in the mini-fridge, needles in the trash.
When I got low on money and had to pick and choose what I reordered, I started doing a better job. Middling at worst. Half-assing death, phoning it in, putting it off to tomorrow.
When I started losing lung function that I'd never fully regain, I almost had it nailed.
I was spending all my time bent over the sink or sitting up in bed, curled around the plastic wastecan. I'd cough so hard I was making myself vomit and pass out on the regular. I couldn't help it. My pipes were choked with gallons of unrecognizable crap. Most of it was dark, almost black; blood that was already old before the vessels burst. Towards the end, I started hacking up this thick yellow stuff that would rattle so loudly inside me that I sometimes woke myself up just breathing. And then I'd spend the next hour spitting black-and-yellow sludge in the white sink. The colors made me think about hazard signs.
Divided road. Be prepared to stop. Watch downhill speed.
Dead end. Dead end. Dead end.
No exit.
On one of my last days alive, I twisted a few arms to get the university take me on that space tourism trip, even though I wasn't a grad student. Which was easy enough, because half the mathematics department had known me since I was ten.
I was excited, for most of the usual reasons. Liftoff was like nothing I'd ever felt. The world looked so small from out there. Floating against my seatbelt was interesting. I drove Corwin nuts all the way to the space station, because he was there, and that was just what I did, no matter where I was.
It was the first night of the three-night trip, and I was still excited. Much too excited to sleep. I drifted out of my bunk and into the main corridor. I kicked the walls and sent myself flying.
I didn't know they'd been keeping an eye on that particular hatch.
I didn't know I could break an airlock just by kicking it.
But they were, and I did, and the pressure shifted too much, and some things came apart, a huge metal something flew at me and ran me through, and someone grabbed my hand to keep me from flying off, and then they sealed off that wing of the station.
And I was already dead.
They worked as fast as they could to siphon out my blood and fill me back up with ice water, leaving the broken metal stuck in my chest like a cork. Then they shoved me in a coldbox from one of the labs and quietly sent Corwin and I home. Later, I was told that they didn't know what else to do.
But, I don't remember much of that. I remember seeing globs of blood, red blood, floating in front of my face.
Then I remember waking up, almost two months later, with tubes running in and out of me, and bandages covering wounds that were still wet and open after all that time. They'd reconnected and rewired me. I had a metal pump doing most of my heart's work for it, and parts of me ran on batteries. I wasn't quite alive, but I'd survived. Later, I was told that they didn't know what else to do.
Between those moments, I remember being dead. And while I was dead, I didn't remember being alive. There wasn’t a me to remember anything I was just one drop in a huge solution, like I'd been for billions of years before I was born, and would soon be again for many billions more.
The time I spent alive was just a statistical error.
That, I’ve never forgotten.
These past few years, there's been so much I had to face down, or figure out, or learn to live with. And so much I had to memorize and stay on top of, just to stay alive, for some value of alive.
And I did it all alone.
This took some getting used to. I grew up with people urging me along and telling me I was doing great, moving obstacles so I could coast along to whatever great thing was waiting for me. Keep going, that’s right, you’re so smart, you have this, you’re a natural, A+, First Place, so talented, such a hard worker, I’m so proud of you.
Helping me along would mean acknowledging where I’m going.
Sure, I had friends who tried to work out what to say. I had doctors who drew out and analyzed every substance and tissue in my decaying body, so they could give some vague instructions and never have to admit that they really had no idea what to do with me.
But, nothing any of them did or said could save me, in any sense of the word.
I was going to die.
I was going to die, and I was going to be the second person to die like this. Ever. And the only one who made it so far. That was a big part of the problem. No one knew what to do about someone who just kept on living. The procedure they performed on me wasn’t even designed as a long-term solution.
I only fell apart so spectacularly because I got so much time to do it in. It got so much time to do me in. None of us could guess what was next, because I was always the first one to even have a "next."
Except now, I finally don’t. And this, too, is something I have to figure out on my own.
My only consolation is: well, I've done it before.
It can't be that hard.
Can it?
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Thank you!
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