A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

I had not been back to the library in close to a month. Even before, I saw happiness and left them to it. I did not want to interrupt Kara’s happiness, nor that of Lila and Tarne. Yet I sat at the little device again, continuously broken by stresses of everyday life, living in a temporary location that I could not call a home, and working in a toxic environment. I needed a change, or a chance for something else. The strings that held my life together in the metal metropolis were tearing apart. I had to escape before I fell apart. I appeared within the library in silence, only looking up toward the golden arched ceiling. I did not look around or move for a while. The golden paintings of godlike figures shifted around to depict a miniature story. There was a woman clothed in a billowy golden dress running through a barren wood. On her heel, two lions pulled a cart with a mustached man holding a whip. She took refuge in a golden hut by a blue lake, in the small patch of forest green, whit...

I returned at lunch, a bit late by my own fault. Fyntn was right beside me this time as I entered the library on the second floor. The room was silent, except for the portal created in the air oscillating gently with the sound of continuous and slow tearing of paper. We walked through it together, the slightly red edge oscillating open to fit us as we passed through. It shrank as soon as we were through. Beyond was another portal that led to Kara’s mind, just like before, but this one’s edge was white-out green, and no sound was coming from it. “Here goes something,” I said. “Nothing,” Fyntn said. “That’s the expression, but I’m going to try something.” “Good.” I stepped through into darkness that lasted a few seconds before a bright light impacted my body, tearing at my plot armor. The green shreds tore into the fading light, as I reached for them. I clung to the last of the green shimmering cloth while floating naked in the darkness. I pushed my creationism to force the cloth back to...

I came back to the untethered space a few weeks later, though Tarne pleaded before that I take care of the issue quickly. I could only hope that distance from the hate for Akier was refuge enough, albeit lonely. When I entered the library, it was not so. The structure was a palace with great stone columns supporting a heavy stone ceiling painted with flowers. The windows out onto the dark beyond were gone, and so were the lights. Instead, a miniature sun was suspended near the ceiling, casting an intense white glow all over the open space. I looked for the staircase down to the wooden box in a panic, and found it much to my relief. It looked the same, but out of place on the now stone floor. The inside was still wood, outfitted with a couch, and four chairs around a table next to the bookshelf. I sighed in relief. Something wild happened here. The stairs to upstairs remained in the same area, and I followed them up to find the second floor with bedrooms just as stoned as the main libra...

I came back the next day, feeling horrible for promising a child that I could do something that was probably beyond my power. Part of this that I reread recently lit up in my head with Lila remarking that nothing was impossible in your mind, but this was a little bit beyond my mind now. I was only connected to somewhere I was not supposed to be. I wondered what the Rahin decided, or if that already occurred. It was hard to keep track of the events that happened since that first knock on the wooden box below the library. I stepped into the very box this time, instead of the library. It was just as I left it, minus the laptop with Rebecca’s record. Parts of her story didn’t even make it out to her story, and I was fine with that. A lot of that story already was not fit for standard human consumption. It would get edited to all hell, reduced to the gist of an idea, but that was likely to happen to this last installment of the mind, coming apart. I sat on the green couch for a moment and r...

I came back a week or so later. My time was spent writing other things, from Voltra to Anton and Moira . They were stories for a younger generation, each weaving problems of future strife they had to overcome without notice. I stepped into the library in physical form. It was nice to be here where heat was not. My reality was experiencing those last few days of summer heat before the burst into the fall season. Sleep in 100% humidity at 80 degrees Fahrenheit was a struggle, but it was all at an end. Before long, rains would proliferate the sky day and night. The library was empty, as it often was. The space was big, and the people who sometimes occupied it were few. When Rebecca divided herself into ten separate versions of herself, it felt lively in the library. Not to mention that the library was actually a flying vessel back then. I could still put the building into that mode, but I feared creating another world populated with the things I gathered from the ivy. That thinking almos...

It had been months since I had been back. There was no reason to bother them. I wished Kara, Tarne, and Lila all the best. Although on bad days, I had come to dislike the way things ended up. It was not to the point of screwing things up for them. It would not change anything. Kara would just whisk them away to some other world to live peacefully together. I was the big bad in the story. It was ridiculous. Lila was the AI of an abused little girl who went on to destroy her world and universe in the pursuit of all those offenders, and yet somehow I was the one who ended up seeking unreasonable things. When Finn was here… When Rebecca was here… I let those thoughts drift back to destruction of the laptop filled with memories of her, only realizing now that all the stories Lila wrote out were in there as well. I did not know how I could get back to that feeling, the happiness of letting go. My heart cried out for her to be here again, to the point of hanging out in the wooden box in the d...

Weeks later, away from Lila and the untethered space, I felt distant. It started with editing, hopeful of the brutal story of death thanks to a suffering writer, but that idea relied on the deaths of characters. Soon enough into writing, I started thinking just how much I did not want them to die, and while some could enjoy the struggle, many would not enjoy this endless killing of the main characters in various strange circumstances. It was an idea, like many which lived in the void, sourced exactly there for both the portraits and the stories Harry wrote. After that drive to edit and complete that dark story faded, I disappeared into work unrelated to writing. I was not sure how many days had passed since I left the three of them, but I missed their happiness. I wanted to recharge. I entered the untethered space through the little room below the library again, creating a spiral staircase near the windows connecting the two. While I could just float up and through the divide, I decide...

I came back on September 12th of the nightmare year 2020. I did not feel like thinking, only talking. I had put off seeing Lila for a long time, about two weeks. To her, in the darkest space no longer dark, it must have felt longer. “Hey,” I said, walking into the library I recreated in the network of creationism infected vines of the untethered space. The empty space welcomed me. I sat down on the brown suede couch, to the groan of wood under my frame. The quarantine had not been kind to me, or it was me who was not kind. Everything groaned out in annoyance of me in reality, but such realism did not have to exist here. With a flex of my fist, I not only slimmed out, but changed genders. Almost instantly, tears started escaping my eyes in reality. It took a minute or so, but I calmed down. It was so simple here, to be someone else. My reality was not so easy. Even if for a moment, I was not heavy, nor was I driven by any stray sexual thought. I had written Rebecca that way, or Crimmy a...