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i.
The night that Owen has the first dream, it is the day of the season finale, or perhaps the day before the Pink Opaque’s season premiere—it’s all so blurry even in the moment, all so blurry asleep, all so blurry awake. The dream is almost incomprehensible, every imperceptible color on the spectrum melting into some unholy amalgam of body. A body that Owen will never be able to have.
The only thing that Owen can parse from the dream is her. Maddy. Except Maddy is everything, and Maddy isn’t in the dream, and it isn’t Maddy in the dream, and Owen isn’t Owen at all anymore. Rewind, twirl it all back; in the center of the dream is a television screen, and this is the only thing that Owen can imagine. It is the only thing that she—
It is the only thing that Owen can see. In a literal sense. In Owen’s vision Owen sees Maddy’s face in the middle of the screen, smiling while she shivers—in Owen’s vision Owen sees Maddy typing on a keyboard screen as the letters flicker up on the screen of the TV—-in Owen’s vision Owen sees Maddy’s reflection in the screen of the dark set, but when Owen looks back Maddy is Tara and Maddy is unrecognizable and Maddy looks like the concept of home stumbling forward on two legs.
Owen looks at the television screen as the words light up.
Slowly Isabel began to realize—it had always been Tara. Tara is the one person she would always have. The connection between them could never be shattered. And as Isabel tapped into that connection, sat down with Tara near, she held a hand out, trembling! Isabel’s hand over Tara’s neck, Isabel’s lips over Tara’s lips. It was right. Mr. Melancholy couldn't bury this forever.
In the dream Owen looks down at Owen’s hands, touches Owen’s skin with Owen’s hands, touches the flesh of it as Isabel had touched Maddy’s neck, moments and years before in the dream and in the future. And Owen places her—-her—-her hand over her own lips, just for a moment, before the dream is over.
ii.
Oh, it’s the tape of the mid-season finale, when Owen has the first dream. It’s a little bit easier to remember when Owen is awake.
“What’d you think?” Maddy asks, one day. “Of the finale. I think it’s coming back with the new year.”
Owen sits, Owen’s fingers dancing over the lunch table, circling patterns into — wood, not Maddy’s skin, wood that would become Maddy’s skin if the world were kinder and Owen could exhale. Owen thinks about the dream from the night before, the little paragraph Owen’s Maddy had conjured up.
“What if,” Owen says, “I don’t know. What if Isabel and Tara…”
“Liked each other?” Maddy offers, eager to jump in.
“I… I didn’t exactly mean… I don’t know. Maybe.”
Maddy smiles a rare but radiant grin. “Can I show you something?” she asks, reaching for her bag. Trembling, trembling. As if she has a slight hesitation, as if she is worried. Does she not know? Does she not know that Maddy resembles it all to Owen—Maddy is the Pink Opaque, the opaqueness of it all fading transparent until it all becomes clear: Maddy is where Owen belongs. The insides shoveled out of Owen have been shoved down Maddy’s throat, swallowed, trembling.
Owen nods.
She retrieves a notebook from her bag. One of those silly diaries with a lock. She takes a key on a necklace hidden beneath her shirt and unlocks it.
“I’ve been writing some stuff about the show,” she tells Owen, shoving the notebook open and forward. “About Isabel and Tara.”
Owen takes the diary, gives an inhale that can be heard country-vast. It reads—
It reads—
Slowly Isabel began to realize—it had always been Tara. Tara is the one person she would always have. The connection between them could never be shattered.
“This… sounds… I’ve heard this before.”
“Shit, someone’s already written it?”
“No… how did you come up with this?”
Maddy shrugs. “It’s weird. I dreamed about it.”
iii.
This time Owen is not Owen, when Owen dreams; Owen is a soul animated in the body of Isabel, floating ghastly throughout the psychic plane until she finds her tether to the world. Tara, her tether, the parachute strap, the pull keeping her head in the shallow end, above water.
The shallow end, thinks Isabel, is a bit tiring. You can only spend so much time there, before it starts to get boring.
In the psychic plane she whispers outward. I realized something.
“What?” asks Tara’s mind. All four of them know the answer, but someone has to say it first.
iv.
The next time that Owen sees Maddy, Owen shovels a tattered book out of Owen’s backpack like shoveling realizations out of their graves, excavated. It’s an old paperback novel from when Owen was much younger, one no one else would miss; words about the Pink Opaque are scribbled between each printed sentence.
“So you’re doing it too, huh,” Maddy says. “Cool.”
Isabel could not comprehend what was blossoming within her. Isabel looked at Tara and reality seemed to melt away, the threat of Mr. Melancholy stripping itself of its melancholy and embracing joy.
Sometimes Isabel wondered if Mr. Melancholy was real, or if it was just another invention of Isabel’s mind, to keep the melancholy running. To keep her from finding out.
As Tara kissed her, she woke up.
“This is really… this is really good,” Maddy says. Owen notices that when Maddy talks, Maddy never refers to Owen by name, or by pronoun, or by anything. The connection runs deeper than that, blood-bound. “Hey, you wanna come over tomorrow? I think they’re airing reruns.”
v.
Owen has to prepare, before Owen knocks on Maddy’s door, this time. It feels different somehow. It feels like something is going to shift.
Maddy feels more real, more lucid and coherent and solid, than anything else the universe could create. Maddy is the universe—-Maddy crated Owen’s universe into something else. A familiar otherness. A welcomed difference.
vi.
“I want to show you some more,” Maddy tells Owen. “I’ve been up all night writing this stuff. It’s… whatever. Comforting. Like I can make my own, better universe, for u—for myself.”
In this version of Maddy’s story, Tara holds Isabel in her distress. Tara reaches out and grasps and doesn’t let go. Tara says I love you and I’m not going to let him win and he doesn’t win.
It’s not very realistic, Owen thinks, but - it’s nice to imagine.
“Sometimes,” Owen admits, “I think I like the show too much. I dream about it, every night. But it feels like that’s taking the place of another dream, like a band-aid. Like it’s just a cover for whatever I really want to dream about.” Owen pauses. “Or something.”
“I dream about it every night, too,” Maddy says back. “Sometimes you’re there. You always look like Isabel in those dreams. It’s weird. Not weird bad, but weird because even though it’s Isabel outside, I know it’s really you.”
“Huh,” is all that Owen replies with.
In the rerun of The Pink Opaque they watch tonight, Isabel and Tara hold hands, their faces just close enough to make Owen and Maddy giggle and swoon. The context is unavoidable, but neither of them can acknowledge the fact—-this wasn’t here, the last time they watched this episode. And they have seen the Pink Opaque so many times.
vii.
Maddy waits for two days after Owen puts on the dress, and three days after they kiss for real, in this universe, as Maddy-Owen-maybe-Isabel, to tell Owen that she is going to run away.
“It’s…”
Owen stares into the reflective glass of the mirror. She—-she—- she—- she!!! runs her fingers down the fabric of her dress, feels the velvet of it. It’s Maddy’s old dress, definitely not her style, but definitely Owen’s.
“Yeah?”
“...Thanks.”
Maddy kisses her again, passionate now. They’re adults now, fresh into their first lives.
All four of them pack a bag. Tara and Isabel pack a bag, and Owen—
Owen buries Owen down, rises upwards as something else. Four, divided. And Isabel packs a bag, and Isabel goes over to Maddy’s house. The story begins here.