IRC-Galleria

"So tell me girl, do you believe in blinking; do you believe I just saw your future; do you believe I grasped the fist of what awaits you?" He said as he straightened his mantle and perfected his pose against the concrete wall. There was no knowing what the cane was for, but at least he wasn't placing any weight on it. "No, I don't believe. No such magic vision exists, nor would you of all people possess it. What you are trying to feed me is some form of manipulation. What do you want from telling me this?" This was just another day for her.

He'd never been too fond of the drama, even if the tendency was for such to emerge. Now it all was suddenly a battle, no longer just a piece of narration - story telling. If he wanted to carry out what he was after, it would demand an amount of working around. But today he'd just pull a long shot.

"So you're afraid." He spoke as if it were a logical continuation to where the conversation had dropped off, like there was no pause at all.
"Afraid of what? I'm afraid of a lot of things."
"Of course you are. You're afraid of most insects, loud noises, strangers in the night, your sister falling into a well. But they aren't as relevant."
"How did you-"
"Even that's not important. I've been here a long time, as you should acknowledge. I know things, I feel things, I see things you don't see."
"Then what do you know, and don't start me on that 'I can see your future' crap again?"
"I know hope burdens you."
"Then I guess it's easiest not to have hope at all, easy?"
"I know hope is what you most desperately have sought a long time, nevertheless."
"That's not very logical, is it?"
"Well who would have guessed you part roads with logics." [sic]
"But I'm not here for this."
"No, you're not. There's no far enough for you." His comment sounded indifferent, which sparked her rapid, intensely defensive reply.

"Absurd for you to be telling me this. I know you: you're the one who hasn't moved from this haze for the longest time. You must come out only when you're really bored. Playing tricks on people." He raised his brows in an expression of narrow empathetic worry, and replied with a calm voice:
"But you're the one who can't get far enough to forget that they need hope. Until you can bend to admitting that you actually need to believe in some absurd concept of hope, for yourself, you're stranded on this endless odyssey."

"Oh, and here comes the future again."
"What I see is that believing in a future seems repulsive to you."
"There exists no future, ergo you can't see one."
"Then what's your calendar for?"
"Knowing what to do on my todays."
"Then why do you have tomorrows?"
"Because my today doesn't stop when I want it to. It's dynamic, see?"

She looked into her calendar and saw every day scheduled full with the phrases "Dismiss yesterday, decline tomorrow" in her own handwriting.

"Now that was a nice trick. Why'd I need the hope in the first place?"
"Why do you think it burdens you so much?"
"I'd hate to believe in something good happening and be turned down."
"Now you're cruising. You can do better."
"Because I actually think I care. And that's something I might not be ready to admit to myself."
"So where would that leave us?"

Situations never ceased to emerge. Solutions were an episode by themselves, but usually they were manageable - in terms of either a clear right solution existing or comparatively better alternatives creating a show inside the situation. A process always happened sooner or later, and occasionally she had the rare opportunity to pull a double take, even triple, if she was lucky. This game was one she seldom lost, and she could remember none such a case.

So when she was finally facing a junction, where all considerable paths were positive, and of equal value, she was hesitantly puzzled. Unless she could pull the impossible and make the paths intersect, she would have to dismiss the other. Even though not covered - making a decision felt like giving up something: every decision that had led this far, distilled to the point where all the alternatives were the best. The paths were viciously unlikely to overlap, and trying to force them could mean a path of pure loss would follow. Making a selection at this point would inevitably render half of the previous ones fruitless. Making a selection would also mean giving up the alternative future. So all the while half of her past would die, so would half of her future. Inevitably. No double take this time.

And she was supposed to finally be happy, had her life led to the point she can no longer make bad decisions. A single honest compromise could hurt more than a life in a tube: knowing a larger life exists is more painful than living in the narrowest one.

His mind was suddenly in shambles, his thoughts falling into irrational and unrelated heaps. The crash entry she had made into his space, intentional or not, had passed through him entirely and in an unforeseen manner. He was still in utter confusion, reeling the moments in a random order and growing more and more insecure about himself. This never happens to him. He knew what many of the most granite people he knew looked like when they lost their ability to resolve a situation, and couldn't help but notice it was happening to him. All composition gone, an expression best defined by the spacing gaze and speech lacking all the eloquence it once had. He had been pierced, and the feeling came accordingly. So sudden. So uncalled, so honest.

Unique people weren't anything new to him. Ever so often he'd come across someone, who'd change him permanently in a matter of days or weeks - sometimes even hours. Such a feeling was usually a generally passive, somewhat disorienting, but positive one. This time it felt more like something had passed through his head at the velocity of an aimed projectile, coming at a speed that makes the impact moment irrelevant. He had metaphorically been caught in a pigstick, and couldn't figure what had hit him. There had been no prior warning, no signs of escalation, no sense of danger; just an unexpected slash and he was stripped to the very soul. This was just his vision, of course, in truth he had chiseled parts of himself as they had conversed, and left mere framework to stand. These people could only be a new promising path. And the funniest part was, everyone behind it was entirely clueless.

Bliss, that it would be. To sleep again. His eyes burned, the night died and the ambient screech of the metropolis awakened into yet another day. The only thing he really wanted was to lay down anywhere and let the world rest. Feel the pleasurable transition from this world and back. He couldn't figure out the enjoyment, though. There's nothing more rewarding than a two-day slumber, but what one remembers is less vivid, and thrilling, than repeatedly waking up, and falling back into, moments of light snooze. In the moment he felt like the best choice would be to be able to sleep for years, but it scared him. He could experience more in five minutes than he could in months, when it was drawn into comparison. Anxiety axed the moment of peace in the darkly breaking morning. He no longer wanted to sleep forever, and what his body naturally needed seemed more like a burden and biological conspiracy than an chance for mental pacification.

Strange, it seemed. Every day she spent wondering, would he ever come back. The room was now just a collection of walls, on which his voice had once breathed the spirit into. She didn't know which one of them had travelled further away, but obviously they would always both be at an equal distance from each other. They were inseparable, she knew, but it brought no relief to her. The bond between two bodies can't penetrate concrete on more than an imaginary level. The truth was, her mind was writhing, giving out.

He had wondered from star to star ever since time had ceased to exist. It never appeared to him that there could actually be something meaningful in the midst of all this, but the world was still endlessly interesting. Strange things are done, when infinite meets infinite. He could pass through anything and everything in this plane of existence, inspect everything from all possible perspectives. The world had no limits, as it continued forever in all directions, and the further he'd go, the more of it he could vision. This state of being was final, and he couldn't grow tired of it, he couldn't tire at all. The emptiness would never end, were he to drift anywhere.

He had nothing to compare this state to, as it had always appeared to him as nothing else. Yet he felt there was nothing for him in all of it. He wasn't even a part of the whole, merely a lone spectator to everything and nothing that happened around him. When time is lost, it no longer matters whether things move at all, or speed away at the greatest velocity possible. The world wasn't empty, it was full of everything. Regardless, he felt vacant; he could see everything possible, if he wanted to invest the time, but it would make no change. "An endless world is as good as an empty one," He thought as he forever inspected the stellar systems.

The Blanket

It was cold by the time they landed. This would be a moment to remember, she thought as she walked down the ramp. No one would be there expecting her, but she didn't mind. Actually she preferred it that way. Walking in with a fanfare had never been her thing. She had run this countless times over in her head. She had kept on running for years, first by changing location often enough to escape the postcards, later to elude the detectives her mother had sent to pursue her in her last act of desperation. Eventually her trail was lost for good, and she had grown quite sure the only chance of discovery was by mere luck. And that never happened. She had been to various parts of the world, first to lose her tail, but hence forth to evade the creeping shadow that would always seem catch her after she'd remained in one place for long enough. She was never too keen to leave, but felt the urge to keep moving forward. After the first episodes, it became a habit for her to suddenly disappear, change name and lose herself in the new surroundings. She had felt so lost for the past years, but didn't feel like she really belonged anywhere else any better. She had crossed the world with a mill stone around her neck, dragging the burden with her anywhere she went, and relocated once it started to become apparent.

Once she had sworn never to return to her mother, her vision of everything sinister and abusive. The years hadn't been any more tender on her either, she knew, but it didn't keep her from tarrying her return. Even on the very day she had finally taken the last step towards a conclusion, and stepped on the flight, she saw no more a resolution as on the day she left. She had prayed all these years that she would one day find the courage to return after she was no longer expected, or even expecting to return herself. Today was that day. She had finally come back, and was taking hesitant steps in through the terminal, using any stimuli she could to procrastinate even further. To give herself time to think it all through. But the truth was, no thought could make her any readier to face everything she had hoped to part for good. She had gone through it all these years over and over: nothing would change. She had led a life of elusion, of thoughts, of memories, of this very moment that was to come; there was nothing else that could define her. Nothing would change, she thought, so she wouldn't lead a life aiming to find a resolution that didn't exist. She walked past the sign that said "Departures," turned left and all her hesitation was gone - she had lost nothing.

It was ironic, really. There had been nothing permanent in his life so far. Nothing static, nothing reliable. Every day had been another of drifting, floating from season to season without a focal point. Months used to spin around another, people passed as they would and never really left an impression on him. His life could be reviewed as a mosaic of separate moments, short stories and situations, but journalling was rather irrelevant. Most of the events could have taken place in any order, short sequences before he changed course. He would barely remember years and countries, but it was seldom for them to be in the right order. With hindsight, the life would seem more like a collection of experiences assembled by happenstance. To a stranger it would always seem intriguing, even envy-inducing, but even with multiple, various, single achievements a life without a plot-line can appear very bleak. A mosaic of randomly placed colour tiles doesn't make out into much after a few steps back. It's hard to really attach to anything, when you're constantly on the move, he thought. He'd passed through all of it, enjoying the scratches he could get at everything new and different, but always implicitly wishing he'd stayed in the places he liked. After a while of such life you desensitize to it, his internal monologue continued, I don't know if I still could enjoy such a life had I been given a chance. Living as a vagrant, he had never really considered anything else. The life was in the moment, and he used to indulge himself in every moment given. Who would have guessed, he whispered, that after all it would leave such a feeling of void, as if his whole life was vacant. Maybe it was. The only record of him in this world was the riddle of episodes he'd played in people's lives. This was the most permanent impression he'd ever made. To most, he was a positive acquaintance, a chance encounter. He rarely stayed long enough to see anything go further; he unconsciously knew he could have never left again.

In that very moment everything had changed. He wanted to go back to any moment and stay there forever. The only difference this time was, that he couldn't.