Trying To Hang On

We talk about privacy and security, of liberty and freedom. We speak of barriers as if they were walls, make this one thing. That another. Like finding out where a writer ends and the story begins, trusting the acting before the actor. The teller as more than the tale. No. This isn’t working. Too far upside its own arse to be a story, or anything at all. To write is nothing; the fact of finding a writing, everything. Same thing. Everything shifted pretentiously. Random latin phraseology. The desire to hide incohesiveness in word salad. We shall be uncohesive, undercohesed. It’s almost so easy that it feels like cheating.

Went for a walk. Didn’t help. Feeling off. Odd. Shifted sideways. Uncomfortable in my own skin after having worn it for so long. Do you wake up one day and realize your skin is clothing, that you are something taken off, lost, discarded in the search for a new home? Absurd. I can’t write like this. Not anything worth reading.

“Sorry.”

The skeleton seeking a new home. A not-horror story about identity bookended by now our body is ‘new’ every ten years or so so the quest has no meaning in the end. We are and are not. Same fluff.

“I said I was sorry!”

I turn. I stare. There are no words for a despair of madness. Not this one. “Jay.”

“Uh-huh!” He grins, and the grin is eleven and jaysome and somehow – somehow it doesn’t touch me. Not as it should in the stories. “Uhm!”

“Uhm.”

“You’re kinda feeling weirdy because! I realized you don’t have friends like I have Charlie and Honcho!”

“Real people tend not to have friends in the way fictional people do. That is true.”

I write Jay. But even I try sarcasm. I think it’s a defense. Maybe the last one I have left.

“So! I pulled a Honcho and found a god and put them inside you so you’d have a friend!”

I stare at Jay. I count to ten. I don’t bother telling him that’s not possible, that gods in the real world don’t work like they do in his stories. I’m not about to give him ideas.

“But but but I think maybe it kinda removes a muse? Or replaces it? Or just does pretty weirdy bindings.” He nods sagely, as if that explains everything. Unfortunately, it does.

“Would you please undo it?”

“Okay!”

I feel – relaxed. As if a tension I didn’t know was gone. The headache from the morning I’d have buried was gone as well. I almost want to ask what kind of god Jay put in me. Or where it is now. I don’t. I’d like to think I know Jay better than others do, or at least what to avoid.

“You’re being really quiet. Are you okay?!” he presses.

“I’m fine. Glad to be me again. You can go back now?”

Jay gapes at that. “Wow. You don’t want to have a single adventure?!”

“I – I have enough already. Honest.”

“You can have enough adventures?” Jay stares in astonishment.

“Yes,” I say quickly.

“That’s really weird! I bet that’s because you are weird,” he says happily.

“I – wait. Compared to you?”

“Huh?”

“Uh. Some might call you weird?”

Jay draws himself up. “I,” he informs me, “am jaysome.”

“Right Noted. And going home now?”

“I probably should! I bet Charlie and Honcho are really worried!”

He vanishes. Between one moment and the next. I almost breathe easily before he appears again.

“Does anyone care for you like Charlie and Honcho do for me?”

“I’m not eleven.” Somehow, it makes sense to say that.

“Oh.” And there is something sad and strange in Jay’s face, and he is gone again a moment later.

I begin to write a story.

This one works.

It is only when my computer decides to glow in the dark hours later that I realize where Jay put the god.