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May 11th, 28XX. Night. Megan’s Apartment, Bedroom.
Megan had been lying in bed trying to think of a response to Eve’s text when she heard the hollow metal sound of a can clattering to the ground. She sat up, curious, to see an empty can of Supernova slowly roll to a stop beneath her desk. It was inexplicable not because she kept her room clean, but rather because she did the opposite. The floors were so covered in unwashed clothes that something falling off of the front of her desk wouldn’t make a sound. The can couldn’t have fallen behind the desk either because of how little space there was between the desk and the poster-covered walls—that was part of why she just threw her empty cans behind her CRT monitor. If the can had fallen in a way that was physically possible, it wouldn’t have made a sound. But it had made a sound, and thus it must have fallen in a way that clearly wasn’t possible. The apparent paradox was enough to distract Megan from that text for the better part of an hour. In the end, she told Eve that she wouldn’t be sad about their date getting canceled; Eve being too busy would give Megan more time to work on the next video she’d been hired to edit. Megan crawled back into bed and burrowed into her mound of blankets as the light coming through her blinds dimmed, the first of three suns setting outside.
May 30th, 28XX. Midday. Apartment of Lance and Savannah Echo.
Megan’s father had called her saying he’d gathered another box of her stuff together for her to pick up, and that it would probably be the last one. She made sure that she arrived at her parents’ apartment at a time when only Lance was around. He greeted Megan happily at the door and ushered her into the small, simple space where she had grown up and where her father was just finishing up some grilled cheese sandwiches for them to eat together. They caught each other up on their lives as they ate. Lance mentioned that Orion would be coming down from orbit soon to visit and invited Megan to spend a few days with them while her brother was there, though Megan turned him down, not wanting to be around her mother’s judgemental gaze anymore. Her father offered her words of comfort that sounded nice but didn’t mean much coming from someone who wouldn’t confront Savannah about anything. Megan was getting antsy after about an hour, so she hugged her father, grabbed the box of her things, and left as Lance called after her to visit him again soon. She took the train to the station closest to her apartment and walked the rest of the way home, though she had to pause frequently to pick up things that repeatedly fell out of the box she was carrying.
June 14th, 28XX. Evening. University of Kaladin.
It was easy for Megan to fall back into the familiar dynamic of the friend group she had in high school, though most of them she’d only seen once or twice since barely graduating back in early March. They met up in front of the towering Physical Sciences building with no goal in mind other than spending time together. Megan gave Eve a hug while the other three mock- complained about the two of them being too cute together for their own good. Someone remarked on how strange it was for Megan to show up in a hoodie and jeans after they’d all seen her outgrow that sort of outfit over the course of her transition. She tried to laugh it off. The group wandered the empty paths of the planet Kaladin’s largest university, gradually moving from talking about nothing in particular to discussing life and where it was going. Eve and the others spoke excitedly about starting classes later that month and Megan spoke of her freelance video editing and how her mom was still disappointed that she hadn’t gotten accepted into any universities. They gossipped about their future roommates, eagerly planning how to befriend or avoid them, and Megan said she was getting used to living alone and it was nice not having her parents barging into her room all the time. She laughed as she talked about her life so as not to worry them and ruin their time together that had become so rare. One of them decided it would be fun to break into one of the buildings that was closed in between trimesters, so they picked the lock on a window and slipped into the Historical Studies building. The group meandered through the large, empty halls of the tower, talking loudly so their voices echoed all around them. Eve stole Megan a can of Supernova from a vending machine that they passed. The five eventually made their way into a massive lecture hall and one of them found the controls for the holoprojectors, pulling up shimmering blue maps of the seven star systems settled by humanity—the entire inhabited universe. Eve scooped Megan up in a princess carry and walked her around the holographic map, pointing at celestial bodies and telling her interesting facts about their composition or history. Megan held tightly to Eve as she spoke, clinging desperately to the fleeting joy of this moment as she pushed down a sadness she didn’t understand. It felt like no time at all had passed when one of their friends said they heard footsteps in the hallway outside and the five of them made their escape, running out of the building and splitting up once they reached the edge of campus. It wasn’t until she was alone in the empty silence of her apartment that she noticed the choker she’d been wearing was missing. It was a gift from Eve, one of her favorites.
July 9th, 28XX. Afternoon. Megan’s Apartment, Kitchen.
Cooking was a skill Megan only developed recently following her move out of her parents’ house, but it was one she didn’t put to use very often as she usually didn’t have the energy. On one of the rare occasions that she did cook, she was struggling to peel a potato for the first time, her cuts into the vegetable she held being jagged and imprecise. During one particular cut, the knife felt no resistance as it went straight through the potato and into Megan’s hand. She dropped the knife and the potato to the floor, both covered in blood, as she stumbled backwards towards the sink. Her hand stung from the tap water flowing through her cut as she scoured the cabinets for the first aid kit she had yet to use in her two months in this apartment. Two minutes later her hand was poorly bandaged, the cloth turning red as she went to pick up what she had dropped. The knife she put in the sink to wash later and the potato she just stared at for a while, because it sat in her hand completely unscathed, Megan’s blood the only blemish on it. She decided she’d just have ramen again.
August 5th, 28XX. Evening. Allport Café.
This was the quietest date that Megan had ever been on. The short distance across the table that separated her and Eve seemed insurmountable, yet it was the closest they’d been in weeks with how busy Eve was with university. Megan couldn’t recall if they had even made eye contact since arriving. Eve’s eyes were glued to her flip phone, texting with one hand and resting her chin on the other. Megan was alternating between staring down at her food and gazing out the window at the crystal-clear waters of the Atreidus Atlantean Spaceport. She tried to distract herself from her nerves by watching the water cascade off of a variety of starships as they slowly rose from below the surface, glistening in the light of two separate setting suns. She would have much rather been looking at Eve—she was beautiful in her frilly black and purple outfit, much more than Megan was in her safe pick of an oversized hoodie and leggings—but something in the distance between the two of them made her avert her gaze, even during the few brief exchanges they had over their dinner. When the waiter brought the check, Megan reached to pay but couldn’t manage to grab the bill. Each attempt to grab it made her nerves worsen, making it harder and harder to tell why exactly it slipped out of her hand each time she tried to slide it towards her. Eve eventually sighed and paid for the meal herself, telling Megan that if she didn’t want to pay she should have just said so. Megan didn’t say another word that night or the two days following it.
August 26th, 28XX. Early Morning. Megan’s Apartment, Bedroom.
The polaroid picture Megan kept on her nightstand and hadn’t moved in over a year had somehow ended up on her cluttered floor. As she went to retrieve it, the image of herself and Eve smiled up at her, arms around each other’s shoulders, holding up peace signs mid-laugh. That was back when Eve dyed her hair blue and Megan still wore skirts. She was never able to separate that photo from the first time she’d seen it. Eve’s mother had wanted a picture of the two of them together for a scrapbook, but Megan had cried once she saw it and wouldn’t let it go. She hadn’t needed to convince herself of anything when she saw herself in that photo. She hadn’t felt the need to remind herself that progress was slow, that everyone’s appearance took effort, or that one day she’d get there. It had been exactly what she needed back then. The view of the two women in the photograph became blurry as Megan gingerly set it down where it belonged.
October 7th, 28XX. Midday. Confluence of History, Intrigue, and Greater Understanding.
Megan was sitting on a metal bench under a tall oak tree in the park surrounding the tallest building on the planet, and had been for the past few hours. In between the gargantuan library’s towering form and the dim orange star that Kaladin orbited, she could see faint pinpricks of light piercing through the dull blue sky, coming from distant stars from beyond Alpha Centauri and the reflective surfaces of the countless space stations in orbit. It was only under this specific set of circumstances, when the other two suns had set and only Alpha Centauri B was in the sky, that the people of Kaladin ever got to see the stars; at any other time either the city of Atreidus or the sky above it was too bright to make them out. Megan had heard that the Terran sky was such a deep blue that they never got to see the stars during the day. She knew most people pitied them for not being able to see the beauty of the universe, but seeing those distant stars made her feel small and alone. Kaladin was so far away from the rest of humanity, and Megan felt distant from even her home planet despite sitting on its surface. When she escaped these thoughts, she checked her flip phone for a text from Eve and saw another cancellation sent twenty minutes ago. She sighed and put her phone in her hoodie’s pocket before standing up. Her phone fell to the soft grass on the ground as she did, and it did so each time she tried to put it in any of her pockets. She didn’t have the energy to figure out why it kept falling out of pockets without holes in them, so she just held it in her hands for the entire walk home.
October 24th, 28XX. Night. Outside Megan’s Apartment.
Megan was reaching to unlock her door, yawning, when she felt her fingers collide with a flat surface and her key fall out of her hand, in that order. She opened her eyes just as she heard something metal fall to the floor just within her apartment. It was too dark in there to see anything under the door, but she didn’t think there was any way for her key to have actually gone through the door. She assumed she was hallucinating after forty sleepless hours and checked everything on her person in a panic. Megan scoured her pockets, her hood, the reusable bag with her groceries in it, her hair. She sat on the floor and unlaced her knee-high boots, patted down every inch of her body, walked up and down the hall scouring the floor for somewhere else she might have dropped it. She almost had me help her. It was an hour of panicking before she flipped open her phone and stared at her text messages with Eve, contemplating how she would ask for help getting into her own apartment. Thirty minutes later she mustered up the willpower. There was a response by the time morning came. She’d been outside her apartment petrified for almost ten hours when Eve arrived and let the shaking Megan in. The key was sitting just inside the door. Eve was busy, but could tell that Megan was barely functional. She fixed Megan up a small meal to take with her hormone pills and held her until she stopped shaking before rushing off to get back to campus. Megan ended up needing to throw away all the food that had gone bad after a night without refrigeration before collapsing on the couch.
November 1st, 28XX. Afternoon. Megan’s Apartment, Bedroom.
This was the first time Megan had the blinds on her bedroom window open since she moved in. She thought about wiping the layer of dust coating the cracked glass but ended up just staring through it. Her mom had always said you’re supposed to keep your windows open during Depression Month to squeeze all the vitamin D you could out of the three hours of bright daylight. Megan hardly got any sunlight anyway, so I don’t really think it mattered, especially with how her side of the building never really got direct sunlight. She caught a glimpse of three women walking hand-in-hand down the street far below her building, lightly obscured by the trees that lined the sidewalk. They each had large boots and more belts than they needed, just how Megan dressed back when Eve was around and she had the confidence to go outside looking like a girl. She was so lost in thought looking at them that she only noticed the window had fallen out of the wall when it shattered on a lamppost and sent shards of glass showering all around those women. They screamed and ran as Megan stumbled back from the now-glassless window, knocking over the figure of that idol she liked. She thought about calling her landlord, but eventually just shut her blinds, put her Cassian Cazo figure back in its place, and pretended she didn’t know what had happened.
November 9th, 28XX. Evening. Megan’s Apartment, Kitchen.
Megan was holding the prescription bottle with the fresh refill of her pills when she suddenly couldn’t feel the plastic container in her hands anymore. It and its contents fell like confetti around her and she was surrounded by a thousand rattling clicks against the floor as the pills scattered to all corners of the kitchen. She could barely see where they ended up through the accumulated detritus all over the floor and the tears in her eyes as she crawled around the room on her hands and knees, gathering up the bits of her womanhood piece by piece. She gave up on the ones under the fridge after her hands started aching from being repeatedly squeezed underneath it. No matter how many times she tried putting them back in the bottle, the pills would somehow fall out—or through, she still couldn’t see clearly. Neither of us had enough control over our ability to make it stop happening. Megan eventually gave up and put them in a glass cup next to the sink, trying not to think about how much of the kitchen floor’s filth was sticking to them and that she’d eventually ingest as a result. The thought of calling the pharmacy not even an hour after getting her refill gave her so much dread that she didn’t even consider it.
November 12th, 28XX. Midnight. Streets of Atreidus.
Ever since the incident with the key, Megan wouldn’t lock her door when she left the apartment despite the fact that she always went out to buy groceries at night in order to avoid the crowds of pedestrians around during the day. The fear of repeating the events of that day far outweighed the fear of someone slipping into her apartment and taking her things. She still walked fast though, almost running down the empty city streets. Her eyes were glued to the ground as usual, but a glimpse of a strange reflection in a puddle prompted her to look up. Through the canopy of leaves above her and past the towering buildings to either side, Megan could see what looked like jellyfish of light swimming through the starless city sky. Their forms seemed to ebb and flow with every breath we took, and they swam southward towards the direction the sun had set. It was a phenomenon that hadn’t been able to be explained in the half millennium that Kaladin had been inhabited, and one Megan and I hadn’t ever anticipated we’d see. We were so entranced that she didn’t notice the biker yelling at her to get out of his way. She didn’t even have time to move, but she felt no impact as one instant the motorcycle’s headlights were blinding her and the next instant she was hearing the motorist zip away behind her. It took her a while to force herself to move again, and she didn’t manage to get her breathing under control until she was back home with the groceries she’d bought with the last of her money. The jellyfish undulated in the heavens far above her for the whole walk, but she didn’t dare look up.
November 20th, 28XX. Midday. Megan’s Apartment, Hallway.
Megan was arguing with herself. Eyes wide, teeth clenched, she didn’t even notice as everything in the apartment fell apart around her. The noise in her head was too loud. She paced up and down the small length of our apartment, from the front door to her bedroom to the front door to her bedroom to the front door again. So little space for her entire life to fit in. I tried telling her it was plenty, that she had everything she needed in here, that the outside didn’t give her anything she couldn’t get on her own. She’d done this to herself. She’s the one who decided to live alone; she and I both knew it was best for her. I don’t think she could hear me. She kept thinking about Eve. She kept thinking about how she wanted to see Eve, how she missed when Eve wanted to see her, how she longed for Eve to drag her out of the house again, how she needed Eve to give her the strength to be herself again, how she didn’t understand what had happened. She texted Eve that she didn’t understand even when I told her nothing would come of it. She beat her head repeatedly against the loneliness of Eve’s absence and the even deeper loneliness of Eve’s presence. I couldn’t tell her why she felt even worse on the rare occasions when Eve was around. Megan froze up in the hallway, hands trembling at the sides of her head as her jumbled mess of thoughts condensed into a raging ball of anxiety that demanded it be set free. I managed to step in just as her head surged toward the nearest wall. She fell through it onto the cluttered floor of the living room, landing in a sprawling tangle of malnourished limbs. She didn’t even bother standing up again. She just curled up against the side of the couch and trembled.
November 20th, 28XX. Night. Megan’s Apartment, Living Room.
Megan couldn’t hear it, but someone came in through the front door. The lights must have been off because Eve called out into the room despite Megan being curled up on the floor in clear view of the door. Megan asked her if she was real. Eve didn’t know how to respond to that. Megan didn’t know how to explain why Eve had never felt farther away than she was right then, standing in the same room as Megan for the first time in weeks. Eve turned on the lights. I don’t think she knew how to process the sight of everything in the room phasing through each other, falling through the floor only to shoot up to the ceiling, rolling through furniture and walls. She started screaming, asking Megan what the hell was happening as if she had an answer. Megan managed to stumble to her feet, but collapsed again after she took a single shaky step towards Eve as her foot fell through her boot. She begged Eve for help, pleaded with her to explain what was happening, why everything was wrong and her life was falling apart. Eve was trying in vain to open a door whose handle she couldn’t touch. Megan was kneeling on the ground, sobbing, too weak to stand up again. Neither of them said a coherent word as Eve managed to grab the doorknob through the fabric of her flannel overshirt and throw open the door to escape the room tearing itself apart. Megan couldn’t move. She still didn’t understand. She didn’t understand why Eve didn’t help, why she didn’t explain what was happening, why nothing made sense around her. She couldn’t wrap her head around it. She couldn’t take it.
November 21st, 28XX. Early Morning. Megan’s Apartment, Living Room.
So she handed the reins to me instead. I picked myself up from the ground and shut the door as the chaos in the room started to die down along with the noise in our head. I salvaged what dishes I could from the kitchen, though I ended up throwing most of them out on the account of their shattering. I gathered up all the clutter on the floor, putting the clothes in the laundry basket Megan hadn’t touched for months and returning all of her trinkets to their shelves. I put what hadn’t survived the chaos, and the dozens of Supernova cans in the bedroom, in a trash bag by the door to take out later. I even called the landlord about the window, texted the pharmacy about the pills that were lost in the events of the previous day, and gathered together a list of freelance work Megan could do—she hadn’t taken a job in weeks. By the time I got around to setting Megan’s gaming setup back in its place, nothing in the apartment was falling through solid objects. I sighed and took a step onto the balcony that I don’t think Megan used a single time since moving in. I didn’t blame her; the view of a brick wall across the street wasn’t particularly interesting. It had apparently taken all day to fix up the place because it was pitch dark outside. I looked up to see those ethereal blue-green jellyfish in the sky again, swimming serenely through the starless city night. I couldn’t help but feel like they were there for me, witnessing my creation and the development of this ability Megan and I share.
It’s so quiet without Megan constantly freaking out. I know she’s still there—I feel her in the way my body refuses to completely relax, as if it’s always clinging to everything she’s afraid to lose. She can’t stop worrying about all these things that don’t matter. People that aren’t here, experiences she hasn’t lived, emotions she can’t control. I think about those things too, obviously. What she cares about, I care about; you can’t separate us. She just feels too much. Way too much, all of the time. She needs someone that can handle the world as it is and not cry about what it isn’t. I’ve been asleep long enough.