Reading Between the Lines

I would call the way that I am living right now a waking nightmare, if it were only more interesting. Instead, it feels like I’m in the world–watching it move around me in speed-of-light-streaks–while I’m standing perfectly still, not able to step through the glass box walls back into normal time. Time feels like ripped velvet right now. I feel like I reach toward it with detached curiosity, running my fingers across its texture only to find these huge holes where something important used to live. If I screamed for help through one of those holes, would it be so slow that the outside world would only hear a squeak? My time is different than their time, now. Except for Kaylan. Sometimes I’m able to lift my head and look over to see her, blue colors fighting black, moving at my pace while everyone else is at hyperspeed.
 
I guess my last journal was not a decade ago. It was only a few days. Maybe a few days is too many to go without writing, and the madness has taken me. I’ll let you decide, journal, with a faithful recording of what has happened. Per usual.
 
I think we left off in the wagon. The wagon, right? Yes, the wagon.
 
As Bo and Zy drove us ever further from the Lemish disaster, we didn’t waste a lot of our remaining dregs of energy in communication. I stared at nothing while layer after layer of cold apathy wrapped around my heart, protection from the driving spikes of pain that were trying to rip it to bitter shreds. When my hands needed something to do, I flipped through the book in my lap.
In no time at all and also in a million years, Bo and Zy were yelling that there was a fight up ahead. Madlyn stirred to life immediately, peering out of the window and muttering something about “one versus 6, just the kind of place I’m needed to save the day.” She’s probably right, I would want her on my side in a fight like that.
 
I next dragged my slow gaze to Kaylan. What I had thought was a blue shroud was actually a beautiful chartreuse one for Thersha; she is so thoughtful. Idly, disconnectedly, I wondered for the hundredth time how someone plagued by being raised in a cult could have turned out so compassionate. She’s just got that x-factor strength, I guess. Maybe that’s why it was so alarming to see the mention of the fight turn her blue vibe straight into black. Pain and loss must do different things to different people; I made a sluggish mental reminder to make sure I checked in with her, if we all lived through this next catastrophe.
 
I felt the small ripple in time of Bo turning into that hard, red presence; Zy driving us ever closer to the skirmish; Madlyn starting to prepare for battle; Kaylan and her dark power creating a massive construct looking oddly like a feral, muscular Thestral. I half-heartedly shook my precious book partially out of my sleeve and cast armor on myself–no more pain, or I’ll go to pieces.
 
The battle was a blur with only a few highlights swimming through my dense, foggy memory. Time makes a mockery of the grieving, causing what normally would have been starkly detailed to be only trickles running quickly through the cracks in my cupped hands. The short woman Madlyn saved was a fearsome fighter in her own rights with a mushroom companion; someday soon, I’ll be very interested to investigate him–Mot–more. He went on a rampage, so to speak, and caused poison clouds to envelop the enemies while she–her name is Laina–wreaked havoc with her fighting skills. Bo made fantastic attempts at leaping into the air from the cart to make some more of her characteristically lethal swings, but maybe the travel has gotten to her because she seemed to spend a lot of time on the ground. Zy pulled her bow and arrow out to do some serious damage as per usual, hunting style, but seemed worried about Bo. Madlyn was her usual disciplined self in the fight, except that she finally tapped into her strange tattoo and used it to make one of the soldiers get down on their knees, primed for my catapulted artillery banana. She also used it to light up some of those warriors. Kaylan seemed to pour her energy into sustaining the MegaThestral, and to good effect as it ripped the throat out of a soldier without blinking a beady little eye. I continued to pull on the folds of time, reaching into its drawers for the false base. My relish of the use of time is so conflicted now. On the one hand, I’m so angry with time; it feels like a thief. Is this what a toxic relationship is like? Because on the other hand, I can’t stop coming back for more, more, more. Maybe, if I can master time, I’ll never have to deal with its dark side again.
 
Anyway, I settled back into the wagon by Chartreuse Thersha again while the crew figured out that Laina was helping to resettle 50 refugees she had found. They emerged from close by with large, fearful eyes. Maybe, just maybe? They also had some downright awe for the battle they had just witnessed. I guess if you think about it, my friends are pretty impressive. So was Thersha, though–it didn’t save her.
 
I heard them agree to accompany Laina to the next town to help them get the refugees settled in; Madlyn really took charge, and I’m grateful that she could. I think maybe some people cope with loss by doing something, anything, to stave it off. I wish I were that way. Instead, I just sat in the bottom of the wagon as it bumped along down the road, sitting an unbroken vigil for my friend.
 
We made camp that night. Everyone left the wagons by the road and went a little deeper into the woods; I could not leave Thersha behind. Who was to say how long I would have been willing to spend time even with just her shell? It was horrifying to look at her, the shade of a person with a grimacing, dried-out death mask. Yet…Kaylan had done incredible work, making her look almost peaceful and full of a light she could never have shown in life. When the sounds of the camp grew quiet and distant, I began to speak to her.
 
My voice began as a rasp in the dark and sounded absolutely stupid. It felt like the words left my mouth and fell straight into a tangled heap at my feet, ineffective and lame. But I kept working patiently at it, allowing time to weave a balm between the pauses while I thought of the next thing to say to her. I started by talking about inconsequential things, like people who have nothing but heaps of time ahead of them and are ignorant of the luxury that it is to talk like that. Like there’s no pressure to say the important things, because you have the rest of your lives to say those things; living now means living with the arrogance of unreality. Maybe I imagined it, but I think her chartreuse shroud pulsed a little when I repeated a filthy joke I’d overheard from someone on the road.
 
Then, when the sound of my unimportant words had laid a soft, downy blanket for us–I moved on to the things my heart had been keening with since the light left her eyes. I asked her questions she would never answer and I answered questions I thought she might have had for me. I told her the story of her death and how it made me feel. I got mad at her for the people she had left behind, the people she had made love her. I told her how empty and hopeless her absence made me feel, how raw. And mostly, I told her about the future I had imagined with her in it; a future where she never had to feel like an orphan again because she fully understood the depth of our love for her, a future of sunny days and cleansing stormy nights. The birthdays we would celebrate and the bananas we would eat and the chairs she should have always filled, the cup she should always have been holding. I told her how it felt that those imagined futures were now forever warped on the edges, jaggedly discordant in a way that only time’s relentless march could blunt/blur the edges of. I let salty tears drip off the edge of my nose onto her shroud. I closed my eyes and tried to freeze time over the scent of her, the feel of her, the sound of her as she had been and not as she now was. I blinked to reverse time, to no avail.
 
At some point, Bo poked her head in and awkwardly offered me some chocolate because that’s what she gives Zylah when she is in her “moods.” I accepted and slipped some into Thersha’s pocket too, for the afterlife. I’ll need to thank Bo for the warmth that seeped into my bones at her kindness and yes–with the chocolate.
 
When I awoke, Thersha’s body was gone!!
 
I was frantic until I saw Kaylan and her beatific smile. Something good, something right had fallen into place for her overnight…I made a mental note to erase my former mental note to check in on her, she seems to be doing as fine as she can be right now. I know she is still sad because the time around her still matches mine, but she is starting to hum with life again and she said she had an experience with her not-so-imaginary friend, whose name is (apparently) Mishikal. Kaylan wordlessly led me to one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen…and I knew that Thersha was finally at peace.
 
“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, tears from the depths of some divine despair rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, in looking on the happy autumn fields, and thinking of the days that are no more. Dear as remembered kisses after death, and sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others; deep as love, deep as first love, and wild with all regret; o death in life, the days that are no more.” –Grandpa Mary
 
Madlyn said some beautiful words over Thersha, but I had said everything to her the previous night and the words were only slowly refilling in my heart. I had no more to say. Quietly as everyone began to drift away and onward in our journey, I knelt in the dirt and pressed my hand over where I imagined her still heart to be and froze the time memory for myself. “Goodbye,” I whispered one more time. I looked up to Kaylan and found her sharing this, coping in her own lovely ways. I feel so strongly connected to my other sister. My heart finally twitched with something other than howling pain–a sliver of the remembrance of the love we were still able to share between ourselves…and perhaps more lost sisters of this world.
 
I feel as though I am sitting atop a long, pillared pedestal. With a loud “tick,” the pedestal dips in one direction that is full of nothing but red, roiling, teeming darkness and what I can only assume is hate. If I were but to let go, I could fall into that powerful pit promising to satiate the darkness I feel, but change me forever. Then, the pedestal swings back to the other side with another loud “tick” and I’m careening into blues and greens and yellows; maybe a more familiar setting, but somehow dissatisfying in some ways now. As with the darkness, I have only to let go and I’ll slide safely to the known ground beneath my feet, into “innocent Manon” again. It feels like a trap. Back and forth, back and forth my thoughts sway and tick until I know the madness will take me before I can choose a side. Maybe if I wait long enough, a side will be chosen for me. Or I will find a new dimension to slide through. Despite everything, I am still pursuing mastery of time; may it guide me to a medium place.
 
We took the refugees to a small town called Fangoth and basically tripled their population, it seems. Their leader seemed clueless and terrified of the idea of a green dragon; I didn’t have the heart to warn her that the green dragon actually doesn’t seem to be the worst of the threat. I’m spending all of my spare time feverishly pursuing as much knowledge about dragons as I can; I’m giving my time obsession a little break so the ache in my heart can get smaller (ignore it, ignore it) and focusing all my research power on information that could save us, information that Grandpa Mary (a pang in my heart even to write his very name) obviously thought was important. I followed Kaylan to a church, and while she determinedly started something that is very important to her, I continued to sit in the pew and doggedly pursue more knowledge about what is coming. I’m finding that I don’t want to miss a moment of time with her, if I can help it. Each of those moments is precious and irretrievable. I’m making my crew armbands to have quick knowledge at our fingertips if we need it suddenly; I know I’ve found the information I stash in my sleeves to be quite useful.
 
The consensus of our crew after some resting and talking was to head to Solanthus. I’m very pleased that this is our group’s decision, as the scroll I got the night before we lost Grandpa Mary (ouch) needs to be brought to someone there. I’ll muster up the energy to think about that another day; for now, I will caress the words on the page and imagine my grandfather’s hand writing them out for my eyes, trying to save us all with something I just seem to keep missing. Help us, Grandpa Mary. What am I missing?
 
Word of the day: memorialization