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...

All my touting of trust over Moredo, and I had not been back in months. I was afraid of what I would find. If I trusted Fyntn, I would have gone back the next day. Meanwhile, I entertained myself with a story of a girl in a world ruined by the past, dreaming. I came back the morning of a Wednesday, after being woken up at five in the morning by someone calling out my name. It had to be a dream, someone from the library I left behind. I could not foretell what to expect now, but I would most definitely not be in female form. I just hoped Tarne was back to her previous self. I stepped into the untethered space, or my tether of reality core to the library. It looked just like when I left it, except for the darkness beyond the windows again. I partially missed the gray. The library itself was empty, almost heartrendingly so. What if, in my time away, the Rahin actually came for Lila and Tarne? “Hello?” I called out, realizing my voice was male. I created a full body mirror right away and f...

I came back the next day without hesitation. Part of me forgot about the memory inside Tarne’s mind, but when I entered the library, it all came rolling back with an impact. I could not leave now that Lila saw me. She sat on the third to lowest stair alone. “Hey,” I said. She did not look up from her dejected pose. I half expected her to ash a stress copy right then and there. “How’s Tarne?” “Is she even Tarne anymore?” Lila murmured almost inaudible. If there had been any other sound around us right now, I would not have been able to discern the words. “Will she ever be the same person?” Lila’s eyes watered while looking up at me. “Of course she will be,” I consoled blindly. “I don’t know, Jack,” she said. “Akier seems to have a very strong reason to latch onto her. He can’t face what he did to his own daughter, so now pretends that Tarne is Gemmy. How do you even tear apart that delusion? Wouldn’t that just make him a billion times madder if we make him face the truth? Just try to im...

I came back a few days later to the same feeling of warm comfort I hoped it still was. Having become comfortable in another gathering of people, I just disconnected from them again. It had to happen. Both JJ and beast started bleeding through. While an imaginative kid could use some friends, beast was not someone that deserved to exist around others. Just like before, I would miss those few I grew fond of, but they were better off not knowing me. The warmth I felt around me was also wet. With that in mind, I could only assume I was in a womb. If this was Lila’s womb, I had no idea what the birth would look like as that part of her being’s life cycle was not known to me. I knew two things other than this: that I could not see, and that I had no way of editing my predicament. Whatever this was, I would have to let it play out. In a strange way, I did not want to leave this comfortable embrace of warm wetness. It was like a sensory deprivation chamber, only you did not float in water, but...

I came back a week later, during the day for the first time in months. I wanted to have time in case Lila decided to tell me more about herself. Though I arrived at the library countless times before, this time I appeared in the small room underneath it in the small room at the heart of the creationism infection. There was nothing extra added to the space, but all four doors were open onto the darkness with a ceiling of the library slightly lit from within. There was no reason for the open areas since the vines creeping out from the central invisible mass could go through solid objects. It only took a sweeping motion to close them all. I had to wonder what this space meant, and just how big it could be. I worried that my creationism may impact the Infinity Void sourcing, but the giant mess of vines could very well be a small blotch in a very big space. There was still a ladder up to the library, not the grand spiral staircase there once was. The idea was scuttled by none other than the...

I came back the next day, the evening hours of Sunday in the first week of April. Lila was in the library, setting up some sort of circle on the wooden floor that had something of an alchemy or sorcery feel to it by scratching it into the the floor. I had to wonder where she got the idea for it, as none of the stories I gave her had that sort of theme. At least the parts I gave her had nothing of it. No, it might have been Faelight . The old and forgotten magic that had not been used must have resurfaced later in the story. “Hey,” I said. Lila turned from the line she was carving, and jumped into the air like some fort of ninja or acrobat. “Oh, it’s just you, Jack,” she said, lowering the knife in her hand. “Thought it was him again.” “Again?” I asked. “Did the guy from the untethered space try to come in here or something?” “He WAS in here,” Lila said, standing up while tossing the knife spinning into the air. Her other hand caught the handle from the air gracefully. “The library is k...

I returned to the small wooden room in the untethered space on Tuesday of the saddest St. Patrick’s Day under the heel of a pandemic of a virus in the reality I occupied. Had it been a normal day, I would have been at work the day before, and thus had a moment to speak to Lila at the tea shop I frequented. In light of this seclusion imposed on me, I had been away for another two days. Writing, and even using the writing device strained me at home. I had to explain that to her. I once stepped into the box to find the spiral staircase from before there, but ended up deleting that brief visit from record. I started writing it in the middle of the night at a hotel in Limerick for difficulty falling asleep. The clickety keyboard I used created too much sound for a quiet visit to that untethered space in the middle of the night. “Lila?” I asked, wondering if I would have to use the locator on her already. The bigger the space around me, the harder it would be to find her. Much like with Rebe...