A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

I came back to the library after a few days of stress about moving. I would have to move again soon enough, but the temporary respite was welcome. The first thing I saw inside was Tarne, sitting at the desk in the open space with a book in her hands. I scanned around before coming up to her, but Lila and Kara were not around. “Hey, Tea,” I said. She held up a finger for a moment of silence, then slipped a divider into the section of the book where she was, and closed it with a heavy slam. I wondered what she was reading, and questioned whether I put my stories back into the library, or if Lila did. She could probably recall them from memory after the library got shattered to pieces. I did still worry about those books and where they ended up. “Jack!” She said, and jumped across the desk with hands in a loop. The arms caught my neck like a ring tossed onto a hook. From there, her hands split apart for just a moment as she floated slowly down thanks to creationism into a hug. I smiled, a...

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...

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 reluctantly, at odds with myself. My mind wavered between a blissful ignorance of the world going to shit and the stark panic that tortured my sleep. Maybe it was something else that tortured my sleep. I wanted it to be Garavand, in the dark of the room shifting me awake in the middle of the night as a joke to keep me tired, but it was far more likely to be some mouse looking for food in the winter times. Otherwise, it was my stressed mind, wondering what I could do to make enough money to keep a roof over my head in the coming months. Here I was again, at the device for entertainment, for work, just writing of my own insanity Part 3. I wanted it to be the final part, but seeing as Lila would be with me for years of my life, I felt this final arbitration of me would not be wrapped up here. Not to mention that I was still a part of Tarne, Lila’s child. I had to figure out a way to exist apart from her, though I had a feeling that I would always somehow exist within the confi...

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...

That wasn’t just one story,” Lila said the second I formed up in the untethered space. “It was like five separate stories that intertwined.” “Well,” I said. “That’s what most stories are. What do you think of secondary characters otherwise? Do they just serve the purpose of the main? Don’t they have their own paths that led them to interact with the lead?” Lila rubbed her temples in thought. It was a lot to understand that each tethered story she put together had dozens cast off from the central one. Those were often left untold. “That’s crazy,” she said. “You mean each of the other ones had other stories in it, but never tethered because the thread stitched together the main’s story?” “If you want to think of it that way, yes,” I said. “But it’s ok, Lila. Those stories are often omitted. Like the drunk man in the samurai story. Didn’t he seem like a small character for Dokuto? All he did was ask whether he had a family. They talked for a brief moment, but what if the old man had a ful...