Chapter 23 - Ungodly Whispers
I had been trying really hard to have something else going on during my nights, to avoid coming back there again. I had no control over my body, no freedom of creationism I often escaped into. I was no longer a god of a tiny universe left behind following Rebecca’s escape. Whenever I came back now, I would be a passenger to the child named Tarne, a girl that I wanted to be deep down. Maybe that kept me coming back, the possibility to feel that I was born correctly.
In reality, I bought female yoga underwear, and whenever I felt I deserved to, I would clean my body with perfumed soap and wear the pink softness. They were a prize I have not felt worthy of lately. I kept them sealed in an airtight plastic bag to keep brand new and fresh. I knew if they somehow got dirty, I could not possibly bring them to the laundry. They lived one life for a person hidden away within a fake world inside his head.
I arrived as Tarne again to a sight I did not expect. Lila was entirely naked, legs spread apart and facing me. My eyes wandered to the spot missing the human vulva, then centered at her breasts. Her smile faded, something I missed seeing since before I knew too much. I felt water all around me, warm and bubbles at my midsection. Lila sat on the edge of the bathtub, reaching forward to hold my fragile body up above the water.
“Hey, Jack,” she said. “I was just bathing Tarne after a very poopy incident in her diaper. You kinda ruined the mood.” I wanted to talk to her, reach her somehow. Would I have to wait years of outside time in my reality for Tarne to learn speech before I could actually say something? It was my own fault, for trying to retreat within myself in untethered space. I was the product of my own choices, in here and in my reality. I just wanted to be more in here.
“I wonder how long it’ll be before you can talk to me,” she said. “Maybe then I’ll find out what happens to the person who is here when you are not. Are you knocking the REAL Tarne out of the way to suckle at my teet when wearing her skin as a cloak, or are you really Tarne, and the person here after you leave is the one to worry about? Who could it be? Is it a specter of a child who died too soon? That’s a morbid thought.”
I wanted to talk to her, and closed my eyes again to try to reach her without talking. I imagined a tendril extend from the lightly haired baby head into the empty space between us. It was wriggling in the air without a real direction in mind, until it neared Lila. She dodged a swipe of it as if she could see it. I felt my eyes swim in sadness, bursting out with tears welling big at my vision. What else could I do? The alcohol I ingested to psyche myself up to come back here was taking me down bit by bit.
“Don’t do that, Jack,” Lila said. “I just want Tarne by my side now. You will have to wait your turn. It shouldn’t take years. After all, don’t you remember? Years are seconds to me, right?” I grimaced uncomfortably at the memory. She was just a child herself back then, punished with five billion years of this darkness. Something I alleviated for selfish reasons of seeing yet another person to help me. I had too much hope for my own brain, or the worlds beyond my life.
I was nodding off at the device. It was my time, though I was sure if I stayed around Lila, she would mention something about a plan of attack on my own reality, or her world… No, her world was gone. Did she mean to do the same to mine? Maybe it was time. I decided to leave the place where I was unwanted, and try to get some rest again.
break
I came back nearly a week later, at 4am on a Monday in the second week of November. No matter how, I needed to find a way to communicate with Lila in the new predicament. An idea of creating a board to show thoughts crossed my mind, for those times when I visited Rebecca without the ability to record what she said. I had hoped it would be possible to have something like that created. It was only too bad that I thought to stop by at 4am, when my brain just wanted to rest. I could not hold my eyelids open. The idea would have to wait, but much like most, I recorded it.
break
This time arriving at 3am, worried over what comes next in my life while the pandemic raged, I only had 12% of power left on the device, but this would not take long. I only wanted to create a way to communicate with Lila while I was unable to talk as Tarne. When I opened my eyes, I was in bed with her, held close to her chest. When I stirred, so did she, but one look changed her from the caring mother to that strange indifferent woman that was put in darkness for what I had to assume was a long time.
“Hey, Jack,” she said. “You better not wake up Tarne with this shit. It took a lot of effort to put her down. Can’t sleep? Ah, that’s right. You can’t talk to me. Oh well, guess you’ll have to stop coming by until Tarne learns to talk.” I grabbed hold of Lila’s finger and looked her right in the eyes. Then I closed them, closed eyes in my reality, and pushed an idea at the pain of death. When I opened my eyes, there was a display in the room with us, floating in the air with lights inside of a frame.
#I will have to talk to you this way then,# I thought. The lights intensified and intersected to create a sort of hologram of my thoughts in the room. Lila stood up and tried to destroy the creation, but her body went right through it. With a grimace, she picked me up and walked out of the room, but the screen followed close behind. #You can’t run away from this forever.# She paused and glanced at the words on the screen floating up from behind us.
“I’m not running away,” she replied. “I just want to be a mother. I want to have a child that depends on me, someone I will never let down. WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE YOU?” I felt the words hit me harder than normal. My baby ears must have been sensitive to screaming as they had never heard it before. I felt tears in my eyes at the loud tone. Her face melted to concern for a moment, then faded to indifference again.
#I’m sorry,# I thought. #I was erasing myself from this place, but you saved me from that. You took me into yourself. You gave birth to me. I didn’t want to stay here, expanding my domain of creationism in the end of something that came before, in a space before anything ever existed. If I could, I would split myself from this baby and let you live your life, but I can’t muster the creationism to do it. It took my everything, in here and out in reality to just conjure this.# I motioned my hand at the floating screen where she read my thoughts.
“Maybe it’s like a muscle,” Lila said. “Because babies have no muscles, your creationism is just as unevolved. Maybe you need to push yourself every time you stop by, always create something new here. It could take months, years of trying so that you could finally separate out of Tarne. If you work at it diligently, maybe you could leave her be while she’s still a baby.”
#Maybe,# I thought. #I’ve never been that devoted to anything, but if it means that you can stop being upset with me, I’ll do it. Let’s say this board was enough for tonight. I should try to sleep.# Lila leaned over and kissed my forehead.
“Hurry back,” she said. I closed my eyes and faded back out of there. The limitation of only seeing the world through a baby’s eyes was a humbling experience. I used to be a god there once. I used to have fond memories of that library. In reality. In Tiarto’s story. With Rebecca. There had to be an end to this. I was counting down the years, but did that mean anything? A whisper in the dark of night said it would not matter at all. I listened to it, because it felt like someone I knew. It felt like they were telling me about my future, or lack thereof. Or was I just that gullible to trust my own depression and claim it was someone as distant as god?
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