A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

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 after work, later than I intended. I wanted SOME entertainment after working all day, but it snowballed to ten at night, leaving me very little time to check in on Lila and Kara. When I entered the space, Tarne was already by my side, seemingly in the same exact spot where she was before. I wondered if she stood there silently watching as her two moms worked it out. I inspected the cube beyond the library space without saying anything. The walls were still intact, but the bubbles inside were gone. They had special rules to only exist in conflict to distance the two women in a brawl. I had not seen Fyntn around, and I was glad he was not taking Kara’s side in the fight like before. “Oh, hey,” Tarne said, and walked after me into the cube. It only kept Lila and Kara from passing through. They were sitting in the corners of the cube, apart. “What did you do to them, anyway? They seem so calm all of a sudden. Kara is usually very high-strung. She only unwinds when they’re in be...

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...