Trying To Schism

“So. I’ve been patient like a Jay, but that’s not patient like a human and it’s time you went away.”

Heh. The sickness laughs like a shuddering cough. You invited me in. I am here.

“Charlie was getting sick like Honcho and I didn’t want that. So I took you into me and now you have to go. There’s you there, and me here, and that’ll be a schism.”

No. There is no laughter now, just a hunger that has taken away hunger.

“I did warn you. It’s important to warn, you know,” I say firmly.

You called me.

“Uh-huh. But I am huge like a Jay.”

Laughter, tinged with things that aren’t jaysome at all. That is the only reason why you are not dead.

I roll my eyes at that, and I can do it like a champ because I learned it from Charlie. “Nope.” And I reach, in a way that isn’t unbinding at all. “Hi!”

I stare at me. Me blinks. I’m twelve, staring at me at eleven, and somehow it’s a memory and not one as well. “A sickness. You break time for this.”

“I bend it. Jaysomely,” I inform myself.

Future-me flinches. The world goes funny. There are things I’m not allowed to know about the future, for all sorts of reasons, and future-me reaches and kills the sickness with a single snap of fingers and tricks I haven’t even learned to do yet.

“I called it into me. And destroyed it,” he says, and his – my smile – it’s not me at all.

I flinch back, making it a flinch-fest. I want to say he doesn’t have to be like this, to do a binding on myself, but this me is older and deeper and other things as well too.

“There is no schism between us,” I say to me. “I wish there was.”

I stare at him. At me. I have words, but somehow I know they can only make me hurt more. “Thank you,” I say.

The smile is almost an echo of jaysome, and then I’m gone back to the future.

I go back inside, and my tummy is growling for real food but I head into the living room instead and watch lots of TV and try not to remember how not-jaysome I become.