A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

I hesitated coming back after Christmas. Lila would no doubt tell Kara about my slip up. Knowing what happened could only expose the gunshot underneath the band-aid. I had worked too hard to change their minds, to have them forget. First of all, there was nothing to know. The person Tarne was had nothing to do with what the soul was before. Granted he regained his memories once before, but Fyntn fixed that with his sacrifice. Having delayed going into the library until the last few minutes before work, I needed to face what became of Kara. I had to know that the memory of knowing was erased. I stepped into the library to find it empty, but rather than call out, I sent out a telepathic field to only connect to Kara. She was nowhere to be found, possibly no longer in the untethered space. She had the Keir after all, and I worried what that might mean, having revealed the plan to erase her memories to James AI. The setting was wrong. I would have to stop by again another time. I was disap...

Weeks passed before I returned to this. I wanted to abandon it, leave the three of them sleeping in bliss. I would go on to write children’s stories where drama did not rule over everything. The characters would be bright-eyed fools, and nothing too bad happened to them. I wanted to protect that innocence JJ championed. For that, I would need to fix what I broke inside Kara, what I fractured by trying to be something I always wished I was in secret. Maybe a part of life is meant to be disappointment, so that we sought completion through reproduction, channeling hopes and dreams into the children when they are but sponges. No. I would never let that happen to someone created by me. I would never… It already happened with Rebecca. She split her mind because she saw mine. In her mind, that was the only thing she could do to connect to me, to try to help me. And for that, I spat in her face and shunned her. Not literally. I shook the thoughts away. This was not about Rebecca anymore. This ...

I came back, incidentally, not a day later, but two days after. Kara and Lila were still in the cube, but sat back to back in the center instead of being split into the corners of the container. They were not at odds with each other so the orbs did not activate to separate them. Tarne was not around, possibly learning ways to make silence feel even better. I walked into the cube with a smile, but found myself slowing down as I got closer to the two women housed in a room to settle their differences. They were both hitting the ground beside them, hands sore and bruised. I stopped, but it was too late, they stood up and lunged at me. With both of them pushing, they forced me to the wall of the cube and used me as the key to exit as well. It was a well-orchestrated plan, for a bunch of rubes. “Sorry,” I said, then put one hand each on their respective sides to send them flying back into the cube. “I came here to get you guys out, but that wasn’t very nice.” “Let us out,” Lila said, then t...

“Hey,” I said, appearing weeks later past the fumbling of the device update and a mishap of a keyboard messing up quotations. The first part took an hour, while the keyboard took just ten minutes. I had been avoiding coming back, but did not prepare an excuse for being away. Lila sat in the corner of the room, eyes closed. For a moment, I thought she was sleeping, but when I came up to her, she leapt into the air and pushed off my back as I turned in recoil to land gracefully on the table of the room. “You’re late,” she said. “I’ve been doing some mental exercises. Without new stories to entertain me, the sentence feels like a real downer.” “Isn’t it supposed to feel like that?” I asked. “And that’s the first time you used the word 'sentence' to describe it. Anything you want to fess up to?” I studied her child form as it aged to a woman. She bunched up her shirt to reveal the triangle opening positioned perfectly over her lower back where the branched spine opened up. Her type...