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Your wedding had been a maelstrom. Quite literally technicolor in its madness. You gripped the bathroom sink, looked at the young woman in a tuxedo and hairband in the mirror, and, in that moment, you’d kill another couple gods for some meteor moonshine.
You were back home.
No, not that home, not the concrete Prairie School waterfall-straddling isolation chamber where you sat in the dark and played philosopher, absolutely fucking missing Socrates’s whole deal about knowing that you know nothing.
Not that home where you deliberated in circles about just how to talk to the girl on the island for so long that you only got up the nerve to send her a new treatise on the disturbing implications of the Squiddles universe’s extended lore.
Not that home where you spun two boys up in entertaining loops. Not that home where you played underqualified psychologist. Not that home where you played a much more dangerous game.
This home. An apartment. A coffee shop on the corner. Your alien lesbian vampire wife waiting, presumably impatiently, for you to return to her. Just like you dreamed it.
And yet, for a moment, the mirror wasn’t a mirror. It didn’t show you. It seemed to splinter and crack in your vision, each fragment cutting your mind like shards of glass just to perceive. A thousand screaming sine-wave voices, a million broken narratives, an infinity of knowledge so vast, so yawning, the laws of everything seared you like embers.
You fall to your knees and kneel over the toilet in a familiar ritual now done stone sober, hacking up acidic bile as auras bloom in your vision and your head aches.
Fuck Socrates, actually , you think, involuntarily tearing up. Your name is Rose Lalonde, and you know much more than nothing. That’s kind of your whole problem.
You didn’t celebrate your 21st birthday. Everyone understood why. They always understand, always accommodate. You’re not sure why that makes you mad.
Your friends have all drifted apart in this new world. Barely any of them have noticed your gradual withdrawal from public life after the release of your first book. You decided to spend the day like you’d spent most of the last few years: Lending a hand to Kanaya in the brooding caverns.
She was a woman possessed with purpose, your wife, it was a joy to see her filled with the fire of creation. Her determination to build a troll society better than the one that she left behind, the way her nimble, long-fingered tailors’ hands flipped through paperwork and cradled grubs, her impassioned speeches to the jadebloods who grew up idolizing the story of her passed down in legend – she may not have been a god, but Kanaya Maryam was something better. A leader .
In an instant, she turned to ash in front of you, as your head stung like it was cleaved in two. Bubbling lava surrounded you. You’d never told her you loved her.
Kanaya looked up from across the room. You don’t know how she had gotten so good at recognizing an episode coming on.
In an instant, a clock tower at the end of the universe spun out of control, levels of recursion improbably increasing, and the universe split in two, tipping your great airship as you fell, fell, fell into everything. Even with your Ben Stiller sunglasses, the light was blinding, piercing, painful.
In one careful motion, she proffered the grub she was holding to the troll standing next to her, who dropped her mop to take it in her hands. The mop fell with a clatter that sounded in your head like a gunshot and hurt just as much.
And, just like that, the door shut on the room in the green manor, conspicuously locking. The computer showed a comic you couldn’t quite wrap your head around. The light from the manor and the TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK of a thousand clocks rose to a cacophony in your head.
She took long strides across the floor of the cavern, managing to not quite look panicked.
You were the last of your kind at the end of all things, and you welcomed a visitor. Your needles stuck out of his eyes and he died in the cockpit of his plane. You welcomed a third to your winter home, one whose ghosts became yours. You are a million characters in a million stories, and most of them are seen by so few, stretching yourself thin across the narrative membrane. You are out of character in this scene. You are drawn and painted and animated a million different ways and you feel your very self buckle and creak under the weight of contradiction. You wake up locked in a deserted jail cell, completely alone. There is nothing at all in your cell, useful or otherwise.
Kanaya catches you as you fall. Then there are only dancing lights, and there is only pain, blossoming and blooming and stabbing.
You stare at the dregs in your mug as you sit inside again on a beautiful spring morning.
You have no fucking idea how to read tea leaves. This strikes you as completely hilarious. Some Seer you are.
Your name is Rose Lalonde, you’re twenty-three, and you’re cracking up at a mug of tea alone in your living room just after nine in the morning. You have sent forty-six text messages and not gotten a response. Some people are afraid to double text. You boldly sexquadragintuple text.
You finally decide to call the fucker. Just as you expected, he picks up.
ROSE: Since when are you known to operate your telephone?