Chapter Text
What is grief if not a constant craving?
--Lola Sebastian, “Hunger Hurts”
Pomni ran to her psychiatrist.
She breathed hard, lungs burning with bitter-cold air as she raced ahead of the man running behind her. Worst of all, each stride sent a shock up her midsection that threatened to make her full bladder burst before she reached the doors of the psychiatrist’s office.
…
Pomni’s psychiatrist was nice. She asked a lot of questions about the circus, maybe too many, and Pomni would oblige, explaining how the players couldn’t actually eat but they ate anyway to retain their sanity or whatever it was she wanted to know. Then, of course, the psychiatrist would always ask how that made Pomni feel.
Pomni would answer, and the psychiatrist would nod along as if she talked with patients who’d just escaped a digital maze they’d been trapped in for what felt like years and lost the love of their life in the process all the time.
She was the only one Pomni could talk to about the circus when everyone else in her life didn’t–couldn’t–understand what it was like.
How could anyone who hadn’t seen it for themselves possibly understand? Pomni couldn’t take them there, not anymore. She'd snuck back into the C&A building a few days ago–which was much harder than before thanks to the new security guards–and found the fateful hallway empty; the office supplies sucked out like meat from an oyster.
She’d brought home no souvenirs, no proof of the in-game years she’d spent in the circus. Not even a scar, at least not one that people could see.
Nobody would’ve believed that it even happened if not for the class action lawsuit that Ragatha’s family was bringing against C&A’s parent company.
General Compensatory Damages: that was what the attorneys called the scars you couldn’t see, and according to them, Pomni had enough of those to be profitable.
Attorneys, like psychiatrists, were experts in the taxonomy of harm and they could trace its origin like bloodhounds on a scent. The keener their senses, the bigger a settlement they netted themselves and their clients. What happened between Pomni and him was emotional distress, they’d said, as they added it to the ledger of C&A’s wrongdoings.
But despite all their knowledge of harm, attorneys couldn’t understand the circus either. Pomni had grown tired of arguing with them over the potential legal severity of simulated violence, and whether shoving another player into a digital fryer was a misdemeanor or a felony or neither.
The nice thing about psychiatrists was that they were already used to talking to people whose experiences were unmoored from reality. So Pomni started looking forward to the Sunday afternoon meetings with hers.
The psychiatrist had asked during their first meeting why it took multiple tries for Pomni to respond when the receptionist called her name in the waiting room.
Because she had two names, Pomni explained. The psychiatrist asked if she preferred to be called Pomni or Christine. The answer was easy, but Pomni had paused for a moment to make the decision look more difficult than it actually was.
In the next session, Pomni confessed that she was finding it difficult to adjust to her old life. What was the hardest part about coming back?
This answer, too, was easy, but this time, she hesitated out of genuine apprehension. The lump in Pomni’s throat stymied the words but couldn’t stem the tide of memories of him, of them, in the ring, in the Dessert Oasis; her hair whipping in the cold wind of the void as he held her over the threshold of the digital and waking worlds, ready to let her go; of her hand in his as he swathed black hand wraps around her palm before they sparred for the first time.
Let go, Pomni…
The only thing that had been easy about coming back was kicking off her dust-covered shoes the first time she got back to her apartment.
That, and joining a kickboxing gym for classes on Monday and Friday nights at 7pm sharp to feel normal again. Even though getting punched hurt way more in the waking world, bookending the week with bruises and easy laughter turned out to be a small relief in the middle of everything. And she’d found that it was easier now to be around people who called her Pomni than the ones who still called her Christine.
Pomni wished she could spend more time with her circus friends but, besides Kinger, they still weren’t talking to her.
…
Cold air bit the exposed skin at the nape of her neck as she ran through the small, forested park to the psychiatrist’s office with her jogging partner from the gym, as had become their ritual.
Mornings like this made her miss the warmth of her jester hat. A stiff breeze rattled the tree branches, spilling a flurry of amber leaves onto a crosswalk that Pomni and her friend stopped at. On the other side of the salted road, a stately Georgian building with a brick façade as red as the leaves came into view. Her friend barely looked both ways before stepping into the road, but he stopped when he saw Pomni hesitate on the curb.
“You can go. I’d just rather wait for the signal,” she said because it was easier than explaining how painfully vulnerable being stripped of her digital immortality made her feel.
Mortality wasn’t her only heightened sense. She’d become aware of the physical force of time ever since she’d been dragged back into a world in the fourth dimension. When she closed her eyes and sat still, she could feel the steady current of time flowing through her like water through a filter.
Unfortunately, consciously experiencing the slow force of aging sanding down her physical body whenever she closed her eyes had made it kinda hard to sleep recently, so the nice psychiatrist had written her an Ambien prescription. The medication helped her sleep but now she was at the mercy of her dreams, multi-hour ordeals woven of fantasy and memory that felt so real that she couldn’t tell sometimes if she was awake, dreaming, or trapped in another one of Caine’s adventures.
Pomni and her running partner reached the covered stoop of the Georgian building, which housed the psychiatrist’s office, a divorce lawyer, an assortment of consultants, and a bathroom on the first floor. They agreed to rendezvous at Lamplighter with a group of mutual friends later that evening, and he offered to buy her drink since he knew that she was still between jobs.
“See you later, Pomni!” he called out before jogging back the same way he came.
…
“How do you know you're not in the circus anymore?” the psychiatrist asked after Pomni told her about the difficulty of differentiating the waking world from her dreams.
“I swear,” Pomni answered. Just that morning, she’d whispered every curse she knew as she steadied herself at the edge of her bed, like she’d suddenly come down with Tourette’s while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. “You can’t swear in the circus. At least not most of it. There’s one room in the backend where anything goes, but, um, nobody really goes there.”
Pomni tucked a strand of her behind her ear, ready to blame her reddening cheeks on the cold she’d just come in from.
“What else?” the psychiatrist asked.
“A really full stomach, like so full that it hurts. And the opposite, being so hungry that it hurts.” The circus kept its humans permanently on the edge of satiety and hunger.
That’s why she’d chugged an empty milk jug filled with room-temperature water that she kept next to her bed for that very purpose this morning, and consequently why she’d had to pee so badly on her way over.
“What did you dream about?” the psychiatrist pivoted.
Pomni wrung her calloused hands in her lap. Wounds that didn’t despawn after a fight were another way she could tell she wasn’t in the circus anymore, but she would never tell the psychiatrist that lest she try to tell Pomni that kickboxing was a form of self harm.
“You know. The same.”
“Him.”
Pomni nodded without looking up. “Him.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“Bad. Selfish. Stupid. My friends lost years to the circus and the other fourteen never never made it out at all.”
If she had a nickel for the number of times she’d heard the phrase “You seem different” or “But you were only gone for a few days” spoken in various shades of disappointment in the past month, she'd have at least a dollar.
“Like, god, the milk in my fridge hadn’t even gone bad yet by the time I got back home. And yet, here I am. In therapy. Crying over a guy who’s not even real. It’s so stupid. Not to mention unfair to everyone else. Especially because of the…Exit thing.”
A wave of shame washed over her, and she wrapped her arms around herself as if to hold all the pieces of her together. Her eyes welled up with the threat of tears but she held them back. She didn’t deserve to cry.
"Why do you think that those feelings are bad?”
“Because I know I’m never gonna see him again–I know–but then I have these stupid dreams and…” She sighed, frustrated. “I feel betrayed by own myself. Like, no matter how many times and how many different ways I say it’s over and there’s no going back to the circus, there’s a part of me that won’t believe it’s true and that part, even though I know it’s wrong, I feel…”
Hope.
Hope was the hardest thing about coming back. So much worse than despair. It burned. A flame that wouldn’t die no matter how many cold truths she threw on it.
“You’re never getting back to the circus. You’re never gonna see him again. Even if you did, he would just push you away again."
Because these truths and all others are powerless against just two words:
“But, maybe…”
Chapter Track:
“Forget About Me” Nick Leng