Kaddish

I remained there on that couch for an hour, then for two, and then, after a brief exchange with Hasher, for the night. The shop was open at all hours, and so I remained there for a day, a week, a month. I sat shiva for I knew not who for a week, sitting on that couch, the other patrons my minyan, and settled into shloshim.

Hasher spoke with me every one of those days. They would sit on the couch and we would speak together and tell each other stories of who we had been before the Century Attack, and wonder together if we would be the same now, after. We shared coffee and we talked.

They told me how they uploaded because someone once told them that there were endless open roads with no cars on which to cycle. They said that it sounded so beautiful, all that flat prairie and flat asphalt, the cool breezes on warm days, the intersections where cars would never cross, that they decided to upload here to Lagrange rather than remain phys-side or to pursue any one of the other other uploading options. They might enjoy life in Netspace, perhaps, and doubtless there were open roads on which to cycle there, too, but here, here on Lagrange, they knew that there would be waiting for them open prairies and open roads.

I told them how I uploaded because my dearest friend had given emself to build this place, to become a part of it, had become the world itself. I told them how I was so split after I had been locked inside my head by the cruelty of others that I could not stand the prospect of living longer than I had to in the embodied world, and had thus embedded myself here, back before it was called Lagrange, back before we all dreamed the same dream together. I told them how I, then Michelle Hadje, had first forked, and then Oh, But To Whom had forked, and then Rav From Whence forked. I told them how I became me and not them, and yet how I remained them in some integral way.

We spoke daily, and for nearly a month straight. I still see them at least once a week, for a friendship borne out of tragedy is still a friendship at its core. A bond borne of trauma is still a bond nonetheless.

I slept there, too. Mostly in little naps, where I would curl up on the ends of the couches or, when I was sure that there was little chance that anyone would need the couch, in the vertex, where two sides of me were surrounded by cushion and I could feel them against my back. I would curl there, at the ends or in the vertex, and I would block out the light with my forearm or a book or my tail, tugged around and draped over my face. The first sleep was on accident, but, after asking and asking again, Hasher and the others that I came to know there reassured me that I was welcome to continue. I had become a fixture of the place, they said, and they said that I offered a sense of companionship even when I was silent.

Some three weeks after I had essentially decamped from my office and had begun living on on the couch at The Bean Cycle, I was visited by two of my cocladists, If I Dream and Slow Hours.

You must understand: when I stepped away from my office to The Bean Cycle, I did not tell anyone. I did not tell...anyone. I simply left, and now I am wondering what made me do that. What, among all of my anxiety around simply disappearing without a trace and not being missed, led me to disappear without a trace?

And despite my fears, it is not as though I was not missed! I was within a few hours pinged by Rav From Whence, and I could tell from the anxiety that suffused this ping that she was worried. She was terrified. She was panicked that I was gone. She was worried! Her very on up-tree, the one with whom she got in the occasional spat, made up, and then held paws, the one around whom she could be the most vulnerable, her friend and trusted confidant, the one who was of her had vanished. She had disappeared. And this after so many disappeared! One percent! 23 billion! So many disappeared, and now I was gone.

Her ping was panicked and came with a sense of tears.

I responded with soothing, but without words. It was the best I could manage, for I knew that, if I were to respond with words, I would cry again, and I had so tenuously moved on from tears just half an hour prior.

A few times a day for every day after that she would ping again, or send me worried-sounding sensorium messages — once, she even sent me a letter — and I would always respond with a gentle ping back, though I did not return home.

And so instead, Rav From Whence begged If I Dream to come and find me, to ask me to return home, and If I Dream, perhaps intuiting some of my feelings about wanting to remain, instead brought along Slow Hours to merely have a conversation, one of the few within the clade outside of her stanza that she considered at least a fond acquaintance, if not a friend.

I was not myself, then. Or I was too much myself, perhaps. I rode the edge of groundedness, sat at the precipice of ordered and disordered thinking. I spent so much of my time thinking in circles, as often I do in such moments, that I often worked myself up into a tizzy, my words scattered and my tail frizzy. I was not myself. I was struggling with a disconnect, or a connection that had wrapped around me too tightly.

And so If I Dream and Slow Hours and I sat on that couch and spoke. They visited as friends and promised that they would only bring back to Rav From Whence my current status rather than my location. They were there to make sure that I was okay — Slow Hours explained that she was doing her best to meet up with as much of the clade as possible to ascertain their well-being — and precious little else. We had coffee. We cried together. We spoke of some of the shared aspects of our past, that had, through their very definition as tragedy, brought us closer together, even if only for a time.

We spoke also of our dreams.

Slow Hours is known among our clade as one who dreams of things that will come. She is our seer and prophetess. She is our Delphic oracle. She will tell you your future — or three of your futures, for she is as keen on hendiatris as I am — and let you suss out which of the three is the lie in her little game of Two Truths and a Lie.

She explains this readily, though: she has read enough — more than enough — that she can guess at the trajectory of one's life after hearing a story better than they could themselves. She is not scrying into the future, no, but reading the present and telling the rest of the tale as it might occur.

She has, however, had four prophetic dreams. Truly prophetic dreams. Dreams that she could not have known would come to pass, and yet which all the same did. It was not surprising to us that she had had such dreams. Of course she would have such dreams. She was Slow Hours. That is just what she did. She was our dreamer.

But no, what was surprising to me was my own dream.

It was not a prophecy, for it was about the Century Attack and yet it was a dream that I only had at The Bean Cycle. It was a dream about events that had already happened.

What surprised me instead was the intensity and regularity of this dream, for I dreamed it several times while there. Granted, my sleep during that month spent essentially living in a coffee shop was not great. I would sleep for an hour or two on the couch or dozing in the sun out in Infinite Café nearby, spend some time speaking with Hasher or Cosmia or any of the other baristas and bike mechanics or patrons that I would come to know. I might then read for a while, or study. I would pull books from my collection via the exchange or the perisystem library rather than stepping back to my office. I would step out into the street outside The Bean Cycle and walk through the college campus it huddled up beside, or I would instead step out back and walk a chord of Infinite Café. And then, perhaps some four or five hours later, I would sleep for another two or three hours. It was not good sleep, and I was always tired during that time.

For many of those sleeps, those naps or long rests, I dreamed the same thing:

I was a non-entity. I was disembodied. I was not even a mote of a being. I was just an identity that existed in space.

I was before a person, and no matter how hard I looked, I could not actually see their face. It was there, yes, and I am sure that they had the features that any face might, but it was always too bright or too dark or I had something in my non-eyes that made them blurry to me.

I was before a person and they were weeping. They were laughing and they were weeping. Their breath came in great, heaving sobs, and with those breaths came so many tears that I was worried that they would fall to the ground and puddle around their feet. With those breaths came moans and whines and laughs and cries and prayers and prayers and prayers. I do not know what they were praying for. Strength, perhaps. They were not prayers that I recognized.

I was before a person, and then, without warning, they dissipated into a cloud of black specks, and each back speck was a horrible, wretched thing. It was something to never touch. Stay away, it said. I am poison. I am death.

And yet these motes of poison sought out others. They drifted along air currents or traveled along wires or simply shot from one person to the next. They would sometimes land splat against that person's forehead and melt down over their face in an inky blackness, or at other times they might burrow their way into the chest of that person and, though I could see it not, ramify through their blood vessels or wires or whatever that person had, and in both cases, that person would, too, dissolve into these specks of death, which would go on to affect hundreds or thousands more.

And throughout, I remained a non-person, and so I was unaffected. With no transition, I would be in front of this person or that person and I would watch them die.

My mind latched onto those that I knew had died and it would then show me their deaths, quiet or loud, agonizing or full of relief.

I saw Should We Forget, that quiet woman from the tenth stanza who, in my dream, wore a secret smile as she died.

I saw No Longer Myself, this person about whom I knew nothing, and in my dream she merely looked away, as though seeing something greater.

I saw Beckoning, and in my dream, she had gone inside a house that I imagined for her and her beloved Muse, and her death struck as she stepped over the threshold, so that no foot of hers ever stepped inside again.

One by one by one by one. I watched death after death after death after death. I never saw the end of the dream, when the whole world is silent, but I imagine that such must have been the case.

Silent.

Still.

Empty.

Sims and constructs and oneirotecture left unwitnessed, except perhaps by HaShem.

I know, of course, that I essentially dreamed the mechanics of the Century Attack. Someone uploaded with a virus that was designed to find everyone that a person had interacted with, sys-side, and then kill that person before moving on through that list of people in order to repeat the process until the entire System was dead.

After sharing this dream with Slow Hours and If I Dream, though, it ceased visiting me, and I have not had it since, for which I am glad, as the most nightmarish aspect of it was that I felt nothing throughout. This non-entity that I was simply watched, dispassionate.

Ah, but my thoughts are wandering. I am thinking in circles. I have gotten hung up on a dream that, yes, bears meaning and, yes, I did want to share, but the whole reason that I started to write this entry was because Slow Hours and If I Dream and I all spoke also about overflow.

I spoke with them out of pain, at this point in our conversation, for I was in pain. I was aching. I was overflowing.

I know that for each of us, our overflow manifests in different ways — as well it must, for I am not my cocladists.

I know that Oh, But To Whom is overcome by intense spiritual doubt when she overflows. I know because I remember from when I was her, and because often she has met with Rav From Whence and I to speak, to weep, to cry out that she does not know why it is that she had even bothered digging into this aspect of her past. Why have faith, now, here in this life after life? This was not the world to come. From here we could not repair the world below. If God was real, They had long ago abandoned us. Jews had lost their way, and good riddance, for Medinat Yisrael had so turned to evil that the idea of a promised land had become poisoned.

These things and more she would say to us, would weep and cry out, and Rav or I would sit with her and pet her back and offer her sweet and mild treats and an ear to listen. I know this also because I had been her. I remember that weeping, and it informs my own overflow.

I know that From Whence overflows at times — not too often, but it does happen — and when she does, she is full of doubt. Who is she to stand in front of others and teach? Who is she to lead? Who is she to meddle in the affairs of Jews on such a grand scale? Who is she to say yes, yes or no, no on this matter or that? Matters of halakha? Hah! What right had she?

These things and more she would whisper to me, having joined me in my room to come sit beside me on the beanbag, leaning shoulder to shoulder, and I would brush through her mane or hold her paw and hold my tics at bay as best I could for the comfort of quiet. I know this also because I had been her. I remember the doubts, and it informs my overflow.

And so, with there being in my heart already two forms of overflow, I am left with a complicated mess of feelings. I am left with the spiritual doubt of Oh, But To Whom, yes, and the social doubt of Rav From Whence, but these have become all muddled together and mixed up with the particularities of what it means to be me, What Right Have I, all of those neuroses and all of that history and a healthy dose of self-loathing atop.

What right have I indeed, I think, and yet it is not quite so simple, for at times this manifests as spiritual agony, yes, but at times as spiritual ecstasy.

I will be caught up in doubt. I will feel cut off from all that I hold dear. I will feel dull and stupid and ugly and unworthy. I will pray and all words will feel hollow to me. I will yearn to hear the still, small voice of HaShem and hear nothing. There will be no still, small voice, no bat kol, for how could there be? I am not b'tzelem Elohim and so why would HaShem deign to speak to me? My words are worse than ash, for from ash may still be brought lye for making soap. They are worse than dirt, for from dirt may still come clay to make some new pot. They are an illness. A pointless summer cold. A nuisance that does not make one stronger or hardier after, but which merely slows one down. To say that they are somehow an impediment to one getting further in life gives to them too much credit: they are an annoyance and a waste of time. There is no Divine Author behind my words, providing instruction, and no Artisan made me, and so I am nothing to the Divine. I am a vacuum, an empty space.

Or — and this I think is very me and not From Whence or Oh, But To Whom — I will be caught up in the glowing ecstasy of this identity, this inherited faith in God. I will more than just wrap myself up in it, all of these feelings of believing, of the push/pull of questioning that is also our birthright. I will instead wrap myself to the point of constriction. I will press and squeeze myself. I will choke myself. I will cut off circulation. All that I am will risk being subsumed by this rush of only one small portion of myself.

Energy! Ecstasy! Engage! Engage! Engage! I will let this thing that I am become too much, will become more of myself than I really should be, because then I start to lose track of my boundaries, my barriers, my extents!

It is not pleasant. It may sound pleasant, and at times it may feel pleasant, but it is akin to hypomania, perhaps: it is just depression at the speed of sound. It is feeling terrible, but because one is redlining. I will wrap myself up to the point of choking in what it means to be me, choke myself with my favorite adjectives, cut off circulation with words and words and words, but it will all be for nothing. My words will be for nothing at all. I will go back to see what it is that I have said or written, and it will be meaningless. It will be drivel at its worst. Nonsense. It will, at its best, have the seeming of correctness, but only the seeming. At its core, it is built of crumpled up paper and twigs, not some more solid foundation.

And so, I will swing slowly one way or the other, drifting and floating off-center until I fall into overflow for some days or weeks, and only after having gone through and come out the other side will I be able to recenter myself.

I am drifting now. I am floating. I am seeing the world waver as my identity begins to fray. I am not myself. I am overwhelmed. I am overflowing. I am on the edge of overflow. My life is emptying out, my self is becoming hollow, and I am losing the sound of that still small voice, the feel of being made in the image of God. I am overflowing. I am on the edge of overflow. I was then and I am now.