Reader

It is my birthday. It is our birthday. A large chunk of the third stanza, plus a few Odists besides, has gathered tonight at a small restaurant serving hand shaved noodles and steamed dumplings that we might celebrate 316 years.

It is a night of the savory tang of black vinegar and chili oil, of laughing over the fact that I can barely eat the noodles and yet that I can eat two dumplings at once, while the humans within the clade — and, at one point, the owners of the restaurant — have to bite the dumplings in half.

There will be another celebration in two days, when Purim comes around, and I am sure that, at that point, we will all gather with our own and throw parties that are very uniquely us. There are years that Purim will fall on our birthday, and it is those years when we will so many of us gather, take over some field or some enormous buffet and the room, the springtime will be filled with us.

This year, though, two days off, and we are merely here for a dinner, a chance to eat chicken and chive dumplings by the dozen and bowls of noodles the size of our heads.

It has been thirty-five days since Yom HaShichzur. Five weeks since I stood before thousands, stood before those here sys-side and those back in the embodied world and stammered my way through a short speech.

It has been two weeks since I started to be reeled back into my body, since the burning heat of dissociation was once more quenched, but still there is a prickling on the back of my neck that at times catches me unawares.

Tonight, there is such joy as I have not had in some time. Oh, But To Whom made us promise that we would not speak of the Century Attack. She made me promise that I would not speak of HaShichzur, too, because she knows me, knows that I do tend to at times go on, and she loves me and I love her too, and so I have not.

And so tonight there is so much joy as we celebrate our birthday.

After dinner, a few of us go for a walk, for across the road from the restaurant is a lake, placid, with a wide soft-surface path ringing it. Trees — Douglas firs for the most part, though there is a notable willow whose weeping branches reach nearly to the surface of the water, stopping just shy — line the path, alternating on which side. That road often has cars driving along it, for there are many who still like the things, but it is easy enough to cross, and the cars provide only the soft whoosh of the wind of their passing without much more. It is prosaic in the way that any town might at times be. It is soft. It is lived in, and loved. It is home for many, and we can feel that.

Rav From Whence and I walk paw in paw while beside us walks Unknowable Spaces.

There is within us I think a certain yearning for the void. There is a part of us that is avid for death — voluptuous, complete, and final death — and thus it looms large at times in our thoughts. Whether or not this is due to the traumas of the past, the ways in which we came close — so close — to death, we do not know.

It has, however, concentrated in various different ways throughout the clade. I do not myself yearn for death — none of us are suicidal, I believe, or none of us still extant on the System — but it does occupy a small part of my mind most hours of the day.

Perhaps such is inevitable for one such as me: I am a tricentenarian; I am an Odist; and I am one who concerns herself most with matters of faith. There is law, yes, Torah and Talmud and halakha, but among these are matters of the soul. I have written papers and papers on the shifting views of life and death within Judaism, of the ways in which we conceive of a soul, of what comes after the end. I have written on heaven and hell, and the return to the concept of Sheol, and the idea that has taken hold of nullity as what there is after death. There is nothing, we say, but the joy of life, and the never-ending silence. The tranquility of the world to come, we say, is the tranquility that others may have because we have left the world a better place.

Ah, but Unknowable Spaces!

She is one of those among us who splashes in death. She and Slow Hours and The Only Constant and a handful of others all together contain our death-thoughts. They do not just yearn, but they obsess.

She dwells in the realm of grief. She breathes the sorrow of loss. She lives through the pain, and in it, she finds holiness.

It would not be wrong to say that she has been busy since the Century Attack.

Despite our differing interests, we are still cocladists, and bear our similarities for that. We both have our hyperfixations. We both remain skunks. We both dress for the most part in loose earth tones, though she in skirts and blouses and me most often in linen trousers and a tunic. She will at times wear a tichel and at times a sun hat while I stick stolidly to my 'skunkerchief', as Rav so endearingly called it when first I adopted it, a simple kerchief tied to keep my mane out of my face and my hair, such as it is, covered.

“What Right Have I, From Whence says that you were overflowing,” she begins. Her voice is always so quiet and so calm. Another contrast with me, I suppose. Every time I am around her I am reminded of the ways in which we are comfortably contradictory. We are complements to each other in many ways. “How are you feeling? Has it let up completely now?”

“I believe so. I have...ah, that is, I am feeling better, though I have been left in an uncomfortable state of mind. I remain...mm...” I trail off, at a loss for words.

“You do seem a little bit more emotional than usual,” Rav From Whence hazards. “It is not in any way bad, you just seem more...labile is not quite the right word, but you are quite sensitive to emotional shifts.”

“That is...ah, I think that is accurate enough,” I reply, giving Rav's paw a grateful squeeze in my own. “Though I think that I am struggling in particular with the discomfort of frustration or...mm, I suppose it is a sort of fury.”

”'Fury'?” Unknowable Spaces asks, and I take what calm from the calm in her voice. “What makes you choose that word?”

“Anger is hot, but...ah, but this feeling is cold. It is steady, not flaring. It is almost respectful. It is almost kind. It is...ah, well, I am going to talk in circles, if I continue.”

She levels her searching gaze on me, and as so often happens with her when she has fallen into that very particular sort of empathy that she so often displays, I feel nearly translucent. I feel like she can see beneath the surface, can see some truer shape of me. She sees my soul. She sees that essence of me, and her empathy is borne of imagining what the world would be without it.

I bear it as best I an, though I can only meet her gaze in short moments before it feels as though such empathy will bleed me dry.

“Is this fury serving you?” she says at last.

“I do not yet know. It is...ah, I am still piecing together where it is directed.”

Rav speaks up, saying, “It sounded as though it was directed at HaShem.”

“It was...ah, it is, yes, for Their silence and distance, but it is also directed at death, for its complicity, and it is also directed at us, at humanity, for what we are capable of, and it is...ah, it is also directed at myself for my lack of control over my emotions.”

Unknowable Spaces nods, watching me still.

“I think that...ah, that I am still struggling to differentiate it from overflow,” I admit. “Even these many days later, yes? I am...ah, it does not feel quite...real, I suppose. Until it does, I do not think that it will be serving me, no. Until I can direct it, then...ah, then perhaps it will have meaning.”

“And this is why you say you have been left with this feeling after overflow?”

“Yes. It is...ah, it is not overflow, but neither is it wholly separate. It is– ah... I am talking in circles. I am still thinking in circles.”

My down-tree gives my paw a reassuring squeeze in her own. “You may if you wish, my dear. If speaking in circles offers relief, perhaps you should.”

I look down to my paws as they pad along the trail, claws leaving faint divots in hard-packed earth. I look down and I try to figure out what dividing line might be drawn between the numinous emotions of a mind unbound and mere fury.

“I think that...ah, that what I am experiencing is an earnest anger, but what I am missing is the words to express it, or even a clear direction in which it is pointed. There are options, yes — HaShem, the world, me, what-have-you — but...mm, well, that is all so vague. It is...well, I do not know the directionality. If I am facing HaShem and it is directed at me, what does that mean? If I look within and find it blaring out at the world, then what? And here I have said that it is pointed at all of those things, but I am...ah, rather, it is all so indistinct, and so it is difficult for me to piece together why I am even feeling it.” I offer my cocladists a weak smile. “An indistinct emotion that...ah, that I am not sure why I am feeling is a common feature of overflow, yes?”

It is some time before Unknowable Spaces replies, and we have made it another quarter of the way around the lake. “Do you miss your understanding of the world before the Attack?”

I furrow my brow and scuff my foot against a rock, figuring that I might kick it along the path for a ways as we walk. It is immobile, and I lose a half-step trying to figure out just what has happened.

Within me, that fury wheels about on myself. Stupid skunk, I think, and my inner voice is a growl. You look a fool. Stammering and tripping and cursing the world...

But no, even that fades as the direction of the emotion drifts away. I do my best to simply drop it, to set my anger down there by the rock and hope that it stays.

“I miss...ah, I miss that version of me who believed that something like this could never happen, yes,” I say at last. “I miss a world in which the Century Attack is unthinkable.”

Unknowable Spaces takes up my other paw, smiles her ever-sad smile, and we the three of us walk in silence for some time, paw in paw, taking the evening air.

I do my best to leave my anger with that immobile rock that I had tried to kick, and instead just count all of the different smells around. I try to feel the difference, without changing our grips, between Rav's paw and Unknowable Spaces's. I try to be present.

It mostly works, and we say goodbye to Unknowable Spaces with kisses to the cheek and smiles.

Rav sends me to bed with my own kiss, and now here I am, feeling as though my fury, that undirected emotion that I had left tangled around an immobile rock, is being reeled in as easily as had been my soul only some days prior, and I wonder what will happen when it at last catches up with me.

I have finally slept after three days without, and while it was only four hours or so, my mind has decided that it was enough.

This morning, Rav From Whence has brought me coffee and a simple breakfast of pastries from the refectory, and so now it is my hope that my body shall be able to once more feel like a home to me.

I sit now with her just outside my door. I have eschewed the garden and my Jonah plant as not quite what the day yet calls for, and so we have taken up familiar spots on a low stone bench that is well shaded by long eaves and an ivy-weighted trellis besides. We sit beside each other and each focus on eating a matcha-custard-filled croissant and drinking a mocha as we look out over the flagstone-paved court, the two doors in the matching adobe building across the way — one green and one blue — that houses yet more who have chosen to live here for a while or forever.

We sit in silence and think our thoughts. I know not what my down-tree is thinking, but I am thinking a feeling that occasionally strikes me towards the tail-end of overflow. I am thinking about how it feels like my soul has been kicked from my body, has been left some small distance away, or perhaps not so small, and, as the fire of dissociation burns slowly lower, I am reeled back in by the rest of the world, back to the home that is my body, this form that I have chosen and honed.

Soon, I think, I shall no longer be quite so much a Platonic idea of a self and then also this body, one supposes, and instead be whole. I am being reeled in, bit by bit, closer and closer, and soon...

“What Right Have I?”

My reverie splits and crumbles away. “Yes?”

“I have been thinking of something that you said a few days ago.”

I wince. I know that I have in the past uttered small cruelties when I was so divided. “I was overflowing and–”

She chuckles and holds up her paws, shaking her head. “No, no, I know that. You are alright, my dear. It was not a bad thing. It was a reminder.” Her smile grew wry as she added, “It is rather silly, actually. All you said was that you miss Michelle.”

I linger a moment in silence, wondering at how this lead that is reeling me back in must be tied to every nerve in my body, because I can feel the way the last bite of pastry seems to be lingering in my teeth, and the heady, almost savory scent of matcha lingers in the back of my nose. I can feel the warmth of the mocha through the drinking dish held now in both paws.

Why do these senses make themselves known now? Why do I feel a tingle on my neck as though my hackles are raising?

“I do miss her,” I say at last. “I am...ah, I have been thinking about her rather a lot of late, yes?”

“As have I. I cannot imagine why.” She smiles, a weary expression, existentially tired, but not defeated, I am pleased to see. “I have been thinking of what you said because I have been thinking, also, of my reaction to both events. Both her death and the Century Attack. I have been comparing the two.”

“They seemed...ah, they seemed quite different to me,” I say after a moment spent thinking back.

“Did they?”

I blink. “Did they not?”

“I am not so sure, no. Or, rather, their presentation may have differed, but the core reaction, what I felt–” She taps a fist against her chest. “–was more similar than I know what to do with. I do not know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. I do not know whether I like it or not.”

“Well,” I start, reaching for some way to engage with this that will not kick me back further from this ground. “From what I saw, in both cases, you...ah, you found what needed doing and did it, yes? And in both cases, what needed to be done was to offer the emotional support that a spiritual leader such as yourself must.

“After Michelle quit, you saw to the spiritual needs of those in the clade who...ah, who desired such. You worked until you ran out of energy and then you collapsed in tears.” I smile faintly. “Or so you have told me.”

Her smile is faint, too, but she nods.

“And the same is...ah, it is also true of the Century Attack. You ran around that first night on the top of the hill, and you forked so many times over that I lost track so that you could...ah, so that you could speak with so many different people, yes? You did that all night and well into the next day, and then you fell to tears.”

“Yes. And in both cases, I oscillated back and forth between those poles until I found a new level. I am no longer the From Whence who walked up the hill on New Year's Eve any more than I am the same From Whence who stepped with you to Michelle's field.”

I get in a lapping sip of my mocha while she speaks, and smile when she finishes. “That is the way of changes, is it not?”

She nods. “But come, you have said that the two looked different to you, and then you have listed the ways in which they are similar. What are the differences, my dear?”

“Yes. Those were perhaps the core things: the helping, the grieving, the...ah, the becoming of someone new. I suppose it is the last, though that is apparent to me. After Michelle quit, you were...ah, well, you focused on the immediate and the personal. I know that you have lost those that you were close to in the Century Attack, but the loss of Michelle was...mm, well, it was so immediate, was it not?”

From Whence bows her head, and I suspect that we both feel a tug in our chests of a grief nearly a century old and still unresolved.

I continue. “With her loss, you dove into grief. With the Century Attack you dove into work. With her loss, you...ah, you asked yourself, I think, what you should feel. With the Century Attack, you asked yourself what you should do.“

“Yes,” she murmurs, nearly a whisper. She seeks out one of my paws with her own, and though I have to shift my coffee to the other, I readily rest my mug-warmed pads against hers.

“Tell me what...ah, what similarities you felt, Rav.”

She looks not at me, nor out across the flagstone courtyard as she had been before, but down to her knees, down where she hold her drink in her lap. It is some time before she speaks.

“Both made me feel small,” she says. “Both made me recognize how little control I have in and over my life. I spoke with Michelle a handful of times in the year leading up to her death, and there was a whiff of what was to come on her in that time. After Qoheleth was murdered, the tenor of our meetings shifted and I became sure of it some months before she did at last die.”

I flinch.

“I know that you do not like that language in relation to her, What Right Have I. I will not apologize for it, because it is important to me that I acknowledge this as a death in order to mourn her. I speak her name every year in October, just as we speak the name of any of the dead.”

My body pulls greedily at my soul, draws it ever nearer. It is curious to me that it do so, too: I am so used to the way this topic can be so fraught. I am so ready to fly from this bit of my past. It slips so easily between my self and my Self and wedges them apart.

Now, though, coming off this week of overflow, my identity craves instead unity, and perhaps that is overriding my usual hesitancies.

“I know,” I say after a moment of wrestling these feelings down to a manageable level within me. “It is...ah, rather, the language is not wrong, either. She is dead, yes. She died, and we mourned her loss as we would any death, and her memory is a blessing to us. I am...ah, well, we have been over my feelings.”

She chuckles and gives my paw a squeeze in her own. “Yes, but now we are talking about the ways in which these things are similar, are we not? Michelle's death and the Century Attack? And so now we must once more speak in terms of death.”

“I suppose we must.”

“Yes. In both cases, I was confronted with death. And yes, the scale was different. The emotions were different. I grasped at what I could, then, and held tight to my control. You know perhaps as well as I do the strain of trying to maintain control of oneself, but in both cases, I could not do it.” Her gaze seeks elsewhere. It drifts away from her lap and away from me, though it points at nothing. It is a concealing shift, a hiding of her gaze from me, undirected but for to escape. “I crumbled, my dear. In both cases, I could not do it. I could not hold on. I crumbled.”

There is a nuance here that I struggle to latch onto, just as my body, my physical being, struggles to latch onto my soul, to reassociate after so much dissociation. I hesitate to voice this nuance and must turn my words over several times in my mouth — seven times seven times, I was told, though I never manage quite so many — before I say, simply and directly: “I did not know.”

She shakes her head, and I do not know if she is smiling or if her face is contorted in some other emotion. “I have never spoken of it so plainly, my dear, because I have never had plain language for it, not until recently. Instead, I have said that events such as these spark overflow or that they have made me feel wrung out. I have used metaphors and circumlocutions, I think, as we all do.”

“Yes,” I agree most carefully. Even my clearest attempts at writing — and I know that this is not one — will need disentangling from an editor. “Tell me of crumbling, then, if...ah, if you are comfortable.”

“Of course, What Right Have I. I trust you perhaps above all others.”

I bow my head, bashful gaze focused on the last remnants of whipped cream on my mocha.

“After all, that is what I have been thinking about most these last few days. You said that you missed Michelle, and what flashed to my mind was the argument that we had immediately after she quit. I argued that she should have a funeral and you argued that she should not. I argued that she had died, and you argued that she cannot have, not truly

“I know that you left, then, and I know that it was out of your own pain– no, I do not fault you, and I will reiterate what I said when you returned, that I love you and that I have faith that both of our readings can be true.”

I nod in thanks, pleased that she cut me off. There is an itch on my pawpads, and it is not a real one.

“And, it is that argument that was a brick removed from the foundation that led to me crumbling. I mean only to share, there is no accusation in me.” She turns at last to face me, and her eyes are bright and her expression is dire and her voice yearns. “We fought about this most terrible of things. The things that I was feeling that moment were some of the worst I had ever felt, and yet you reached for something that I could not. You, who are a version of me that I cannot be. You were so bitter and so cutting in your logic that I could not understand. We both wept because we did not understand what was happening and how it was that we not being understood.”

I sniff at a sudden cloudiness within my snout, look away. I am not sure that I have it in me to think in words, to speak. My body clutches desperately for my soul and I cannot speak.

The sound is echoed by From whence, but she continues, still watching me. “I stand by many of my feelings, What Right Have I. I stand by my understanding that she should have had a funeral. During that argument, though, and after, I realized that I, that Rav From Whence Do I Call Out, that I had lost my grip on the situation, had fallen into a despair that gripped me in turn. Instead of thinking of the clade, instead of even thinking of myself, I thought only of optics the read of the situation. I did not think of what it was that I needed. I did not think of what the clade needed. I thought of what would be best for the clade to need. My despair latched onto this and then whipped around me and pulled me under, an I lost my grip on everything.

“I spun myself into pieces after you left, What Right Have I. Both times, with Michelle and with the Attack, I spun myself into pieces. I love you, it is okay. You left to perform a sort of grieving that I was unable to both times. Yours was not that of a rabbi, and it certainly was not that of a rabbi struggling to be a leader. I am sorry, What Right Have I. I love you. My grip on myself failed and I fell to pieces and stepped away from my duties. I was so small, and I did not have you. I love you. I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

We weep.

On the day that Michelle summoned us to her field, I was not expecting that which I received.

I was expecting that perhaps she would seek input from us.

I had heard so little from her over the years. Early on, I believe that this is because she was doing better: complication had filtered out of her life and while, yes, she had her bad days, she was most often content, and at times even happy. She was doing fine and I had my work ahead of me, and so I did my work and she enjoyed the comfort of an uncomplicated life.

Later, I had found my pace in life, and my path, and this was a path and pace that interested her very little, as she admitted to me during one visit to Beth Tikvah. There was joy in her, to be sure, at having this part of her past recognized, cherished, brought to the fore, but she was most of all happy for us to have this thing, while, for her, it remained a thing in the past.

It was not until much later in life, toward the end of the 23rd century, that I once again started to see her with any more frequency, though these meetings were often defined by the question of pain.

She sought out Rav From Whence and I at one point to discuss her inherited faith, what it had to say about suffering, what it had to say about grieving. We spoke of Job and his woes, his wish to call God to account. Why was it that he was caused to suffer so? What, also, did the interpretations of this text have to say about what it was that he went through?

Rav and I explained to her the interpretation that we had come to lean on, that it is about the complexities of the world, that one will never get an explanation for every pain they feel; that it is about the maintaining of a forward progression through life without interest in reward and punishment; that it is, in the end, a story written thousands of years ago, and the world does not stay one thing for one year, never mind many thousands.

She then summoned more from the third stanza, those of us who delved deep into spirituality. We brought before her Unknowable Spaces, who spoke about grief and the ways in which it interacts with the soul, the spirit, and the self. Unknowable Spaces brought with her a friend who had been a doctor phys-side, who spoke to the ways in which suffering interacts with the body.

I, who linger long in the tail of overflow, think much on grief and suffering. The me who feels still unheard, who feels still abandoned is the one who thinks back to these months and years leading up to an ending and wonders: if we are the part of HaShem that was made to suggest Their immortality, to point at it apophatically with our beloved, beloathed death, the part who insists on Them, then why do I still feel abandoned? I have read my Job. I have read my Qohelet. I know that the world is more complex than perhaps even the Artisan who made it can say. And still, I watched my root instance suffer, suffered along with her. I watched her quit. I watched the world stumble, fall, and pick itself back up again, bleeding and lessened. I have observed these things, have lived through them, and wonder who is listening?

When Michelle spoke of heaven of hell, of paradise and eternal conscious torment, I cried. Many of us cried! She looked only tired. Unknowable Spaces recited for her a quote from Rabi'a al-'Adiwiyya al-Qaysiyya:

O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.

I cried yet more and spoke of the ways in which the Jewish view of the afterlife changed over the millennia, how originally there was Sheol, that place of darkness and rest and eternal sleep, and then, as the Jews collided with other cultures, this began to lean towards thoughts of paradise, and with that thoughts of some cruel inversion. I spoke of how we — those who had shepherded the New Reform movement into being, yes, but also so many other Jews besides — had drifted around a loop from ever more complex views of the World to Come, of the Kingdom of Heaven, of heaven and hell themselves, and made their way back down into the most simple explanation of all: eternal rest. Eternal sleep. Eternal nothing. Our olam haba was not a thing we lived, but those who came after. Our tikkun olam was to benefit those not us. Even those of us who had uploaded and who would, they promised themselves, never die, there was still the potential for death, and after, naught but rest.

I asked her to consider Qohelet — the teacher, not he who was a part of her — and his gentle admonition to consider the ways in which one strove as well as the ways in which one suffered in the face of so much rest to come: Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going.

From Whence said, gentling my words, “We are all to strive with an eye to the betterment of all, for we are all b'tzelem Elohim, made in the image of God, yes? We live into praise by caring. But you must consider that, if you are b'tzelem Elohim, that includes you, my dear. Treat yourself with grace.”

I cried so often before her. Every time I saw her, I cried.

This was me. This, this aching and broken woman before me, before us, was me. We were her. We were her remade into new wholes.

Why could she not be remade? What kept her so broken, so aching? Why, O Divine Author, was her story one of misery, in those final years? Were You not listening? Could you not bestow upon her a touch of order? Would that I could have. I tried, but...would that I could have.

And so when she summoned us that awful day, I expected other than what I got.

I was expecting that perhaps she had words to say about Qoheleth, about his rise and fall, about how it was that she felt about his assassination. Were it someone within the clade who had organized this — and none had ever come forward — then ought we not find a way to discuss paths forward?

I was expecting perhaps, in some roundabout way, reconciliation. Her with her clade, the clade with itself, all of us with the world in which we lived.

How naïve I am! How foolish I was to hold such hope!

I held within me an expectation that the broken one would fix those who were whole. I was ever a dreamer.

Thus, when she asked us to merge down, when I began to understand what it was that she was doing, I cried. I wept and tore at my garments. I tried to keep it to myself, but in the end, I collapsed to the grass, curled into as tight a ball as I could, with my snout all but tucked into the ground as though I could shield myself from what I now knew must be coming.

Where was Their staying hand?

Rav From Whence bade me look up just in time to see her disappear once and for all from existence, and we said “Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha'olam, dayan ha'emet,” the announcement of a death, and returned to our synagogue.

There we fought, and bitterly, as to whether or not this occasioned a funeral. Rav From Whence argued for yes, for the funeral was for the people, not for the dead, and I argued for no, because the funeral was also for the dead, and she could not be, for we lived on. This discussion was old and tired, for we had debated this for nigh on a century. Was the quitting of a cladist a death or something else if the clade lived on? Did the manner of quitting matter? If they quit of despair, was that suicide? If they crashed? If CPV claimed them? It was our evergreen halakha to argue, just...never in so immediate terms.

I stepped away and did not return for thirty days, preferring to sit in my half-shloshim while wandering, overflowing, believing now that she was dead, now that she was not, feeling now a sense of spiritual ecstasy, now a sense of abandonment. I asked a million billion trillion times why we suffered, why she suffered — and whether or not HaShem replied, asked a million billion trillion times again, “Look, I am worthless. What can I say back to You?”

When I returned for Shabbat, I asked Rav to give me some space from the topic. I said my Kaddish and always put off the topic of the funeral until she stopped bringing it up. After all, as Wakefield put it,

There are ways around being the go-to person even for ourselves even when the answer is clear clear like the holy water Gentiles would drink before they realized Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past.

I rely, I think, on the words of others because I do not know. If there was a funeral, I did not attend, and if all that had once been her did not — or did not even know — if all that was her was not there also in the grave, did it truly take place?

Rav and I spend half an hour trying to calm down. We lean on each other and hold paws and cry until the tears had passed and we were able to rest our heads temple to temple in silence for another five minutes more.

It is me who breaks the silence, voicing a thought that I had turned over in my mind far more than seven times seven times in our period of silence. “I have not seen you like that in...ah, well, not in a long time, my dear.”

She sits up and turns slightly, enough to bring her knee up onto the bench with us. “Yes. I am perhaps managing my own overflow, just as you are. It has been a heady few weeks. The last few days in particular have had me cycling over some thoughts. I usually keep those managed around you.”

“Why?”

Her answer is ready, and I know from my experience as an Odist, from being her, that this portion of the conversation is one she has been mulling over and scripting for some time. “Because you are empathetic, and so we bounce quite easily off each other. When I am overflowing, you know already, and we speak quietly and take from each other that which we need. From you, I take stability, and from me, you take support.”

“Are you, then, really in...ah, in so much pain when you overflow?”

“Are you not?” she counters, a wry smile on her face.

I return it, but faintly so. “I see. I am apparently unable to hide that, yes?”

“And I am not surprised by this. You forked from me with the goal of being the one who took off the mask, yes? My responsibilities were piling up. I had taken up leadership at Beth Tefillah, and already the seeds of an idea of what would become Beth Tikvah were germinating in my mind. I was working with True Name and her ilk to coordinate with religious communities and deal with the Israeli crisis. I was succeeding at all of these things, while also feeling like I was in some way applying layer after layer of paint over my identity to lock it into a certain way of interacting.”

I wince. “I do not remember that...ah, I do not remember it fondly, no. I know that you find joy in these things, but, to torture your metaphor, I spent...ah, I spent perhaps longer than I care to admit stripping those layers of paint away and reshaped myself in the process, yes?”

“Of course. Please be ever yourself, my dear,” she says, chuckling. “Both when it comes to torturing metaphors and when it comes to becoming who you intended to be.”

I do my best to give her a prim, proud smile.

She laughs, leans over, and brushes some stray strands of mane clear of my face. I master the urge to flinch away and squint my eyes shut. She has done this often enough that I know to merely hold still. It is pleasant, yes, though paws near my face can be so anxiety-inducing.

“Rav?” I ask after a few minutes.

“Yes?”

“I do not...mm, rather, how do I look back at the Century Attack and find in it anything but a curse?”

She gives me a queer look, head tilted slightly to the side. “Are you looking for aught else?”

I fidget with my coffee before eventually just waving away the cup and the dregs within. It is a struggle to frame my question, as I have just come out of the worst of my overflow — and Rav From Whence helped me greatly through it, as she always endeavors to do — and it would be so easy for me to speak this only to find that it is yet more of this overflow lying beneath the surface.

When I voice this fear to her, she smiles and rests a paw on my knee. “With that caveat in mind, then, perhaps you can try again? I would like to understand.”

“Very well. I will try. How do I...ah, how do I look back at the Century Attack and see anything other than us having been abandoned by HaShem? How can I believe that...ah, that They in any way hear us, now? That They are listening?”

She hums and rocks back a little, gaze drifting out into the courtyard. “I can see now why you felt the need to offer that caveat.”

“You have...ah, you have doubtless heard enough God-has-abandoned-me talk from me in the last few weeks to last you a lifetime.”

She chuckles and shakes her head. “My dear, I will listen to you speak in overflow for months on end if it means that I can in any way help.” She sits up straighter, then, and folds her paws in her lap, expression attentive and present. Would that it were so easy for me. “To your question, though, the simplest answer is that I do not know. I do not know how one looks back on this most terrible event with anything other than a feeling of lack. How could the Creator have been present for so much destruction? How could humanity so easily destroy so much of itself and yet also be the works of God? I do not know, What Right Have I.”

I wilt. “I suppose that...ah, that it is not an easy question, no.”

“None of this is ever easy, my dear. This is the thing we must all come to terms with as religious people, yes? Your faith is not there to give you easy answers to hard questions or to explain away difficult things. It is there to provide you with a framework for grappling with those hard questions and difficult things, yourself. Even now, you use that framework when you do not say, “How is it that these people could have done this thing?” and instead ask, “Where was HaShem when this thing was done?”, yes?”

“Where was Their staying hand?” I murmur, that line that so stuck in my craw over the last week that it had become a sharp point of focus in a mire of blurred emotions and words.

She nods. “Our inherited faith in God is the lens through which you view the world. It is the rod by which you measure all things. You said some days ago that They were your 'silent interlocutor' — and, my dear, I love you for using such a word even in the midst of overflow — and I know that you speak with Them so often throughout the day. It is important to you that you ask in this way, because it is by this framework that you may find your answer.”

I pluck at the linen of my trousers for lack of anything else with which to fidget, working to stay as present as I can as my body continues to inexorably reel in my soul.

From Whence watches me carefully, as ever she does, and, apparently seeing no signs of distress, continues. “You use words like 'abandoned' and speak of a doubt that They might in any way be listening. Your questions about reconciling belief and experience are borne of emotion, and so perhaps we had better ask whether or not direct answers to them are really what you are after.”

“What...ah, rather, how do you mean?”

“If anyone were to know the hows and whys that HaShem might do this or that, it would be you, my dear.” Her smile is kind, softening her words, smoothing out any sense of snark. “And for such answers, even if you did not know them, you would turn to a book, I am sure. A book and your intellect. Instead, you ask a rabbi. You ask a friend.”

Despite the understanding that I have of her words, the way they speak to a simple truth without value judgment, I feel a burning in my cheeks, and I turn my face away from her.

“Tell me about feeling unheard, What Right Have I. Tell me about feeling abandoned. If what you need in this moment is not a list of verses, tell me why you cry out.”

“Very well,” I say after a lengthy pause. “Do...ah, do you remember that story of a woman's father, how she grew up to hearing him say, “If HaShem is real, He is not welcome in my home”? How he would go to services and...ah, and read the paper in his seat, only standing to say Kaddish?”

She frowns, nods.

“This is it. This is...ah, this is the feeling that I am stuck with. I would never say such things, I think. I do not feel that particular type of bitterness. I will make my home a dwelling for the Divine. I will...ah, I will pray more fervently all other prayers.” Dissociation makes my world sway with these words. I laugh — or cry, I do not know which. “But this is still the feeling I have. I am perhaps not the father in this story, but the daughter: I am hearing time and again these things and...ah, hearing them from some other part of me and struggling to discern whether or not I, too, believe them. Where was Their staying hand? What...ah, what trust could I possibly have in a god who seems not to remember me? Not even to know me?”

“Do you know what you sound like?” she asks after a few moments. Her tone is serious enough to forestall any sense of teasing. “I am weary with calling; my throat is dry; my eyes fail while I wait for God.”

I offer a halfhearted chuckle. “And here I thought that...ah, that you were going to say Job.”

“That was my next choice. You have nicer friends, though, What Right Have I,” she says, and I hear the grin in her voice. “No, perhaps Lagrange as a whole is Job. We are all praying those psalms. You are not, I think, the only one crying out for deliverance.”

There is within me a groaning, deep in my belly, and within my throat a low growl. There is a grasping and a needing and a yearning and a pining for something to anchor myself to. There is a wellspring, even when I am not crying, of tears that burn and burn in my eyes.

There is a pointing at an embodiedness, a gesture at visceralness, a reference to a raw, disgusting, physicality to this feeling.

I wonder at this so. I am not my body. I am not in my body. I am without a body. My body is me but I am not home. There it is: draped bonelessly over the beanbag: arms dangling down the side to trace dull claws along the wood grain of the floor: a body.

My body.

Me.

I am not home. There is this body, and there is this me, and they are somehow, at this moment, immiscible. It is just a feeling that is embodied; I cannot be embodied, despite this grungy feeling that comes with all of existence. My body and I do not mix.

And why would they? Why would this body bother with such as me? I am so vague an idea of a person. I am a mere hint of a me.

This is how I know that I am overflowing. I am only a vague gesture at a What Right Have I, and not her in actuality. I have lost that which makes me human. I have lost that which makes me holy. I have lost that little touch of divinity that rests in the heart of everyone.

I am not merely sad.

I am not merely anxious.

I am beyond despondent, or somewhere perhaps to the left of it. There, still in sight, is despondency.

What I am is in some very real, very tangible dark night of the soul, and from there, there is a Godless pointing at the body, a gesture at viscera without holiness, the disgust of a physicality that knows not the Divine.

---

Am I my Lord's keeper? Must I, who They have abandoned, call them to account? And what right have I to do so?

How apt a name! What right have I, indeed, when I am so dreadfully broken? Is HaShem, too, so full of tics? Do they yelp and squeak? Does the Creator pace ceaselessly and ever straighten Their clothing? Does the Eternal hide beneath Their desk and cry at the drop of a hat? Is the Divine so weak?

I am chaos. The Lord is order. Am I my Lord's keeper?

I am anxiety. The Lord is peace. Am I my Lord's keeper?

I am nothing. The Lord is all. Am I my Lord's keeper?

How could I possibly be made in the Their image? What right have I to be b'tzelem Elohim? How could I possibly my Lord's keeper?

Am I my Lord's keeper? Where was Their staying hand? Am I my Lord's keeper? Am I my Lord's keeper? Must I call Them to account? Am I my Lord's keeper? Am I my Lord's keeper? Am I my Lord's keeper?

---

This must not be the way the world works, and yet it is, and here we are.

The world and all of life are a library, and I am a reader, but I am also an author, and my story is among the stories of the world.

We are the book of life. Our names are written by us. We are those who participate in creation. We are the hands of God.

How, then, O Beloved One, do we take into account the fact that we are those who participate also in destruction. You are hope, but also regret — I know that You have regretted me! — and so we have built our tower of Babel, and also we have performed our own great flood.

How, O Majesty, do we create new worlds, draw order from a shared dream and build new lives for ourselves, love and love and love, and then proceed to crash out so violently? How do we settle serenely into immortality? You are serenity, but rage as well — I know, I have borne it! — and so we have chosen a long peace, and also we have ended so, so many lives.

How, Lord God of Hosts, am I to grapple with this unwinding of us? Where was Your staying hand?

I am a being of growth! My life is one of becoming! This life is mine! It is mine! You, who cause the dawn to know its place, bring order to this life! Bring it to this poor soul below. Bring order to her...

Are you listening? Are you there? Divine, you have slipped away. Eternal, were you ever there?

There is disorder in despair and chaos even in the craving for relief. We dwell here — here in our new life, here in our new world — and we are surrounded by that despair. We are suffused with loss and the knowledge that this, now, is our world.

This must not be the way the world works...

---

Where was Their staying hand?

The Divine Author writes this story from minute to minute, from second to second, I tell myself, I promise myself.

The Artisan shapes time and matter and minds and hearts with duty and care, I tell myself, I promise myself.

The Eternal is eternal, I tell myself, and eternity must include also now, I promise myself.

But where was Their staying hand? Why did They not lift Their pen from the page before that sudden tremor in Their story? Why did They not pull back from Their creation when they sensed a sudden, horrible paroxysm?

Why did They not step in between us and eternity?

Where was Their staying hand?

O, Deep Will!

O, Unnamable!

O, Endless, Infinite!

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh!

Hayan, Hoveh, v'Yihye!

Mechayeh HaMetim, exalted and hallowed is Your name in the world which You created according to Your plan! May Your majesty be revealed in the days of our lifetime and the life of all – now! Hurry! Hurry! Amen! Amen! Blessed be Your great name to all eternity! Amen! Amen! Amen...

O, God, where was Your staying hand?

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.

The conversation with Joseph seems to be lingering in my mind, caught up in there like some bit of grit between the molars.

I suppose it is not so surprising, all told. The conversation was full of moments heated and kind. We spent some few hours talking together, and have both even sent each other letters after condensing some thoughts that we did not get a chance to share, as is our habit. I wrote to him some more of my thoughts on the moment of the Attack as I set down here in this journal.

We could simply meet up again for another chat, yes, but we have found joy in our letters, in the way they pile up in a folder as milestones of friendship.

But, as is evidenced by the content of the letter that I sent, my feelings on the time immediately following the Attack are sticking to me like burrs in fur. I have been ruminating over those minutes, hours, and days that followed. Those first confused minutes were so full of movement, overwhelming activity, that I could not keep up with them, no matter how hard I tried, and so I stopped trying, and thus those first few hours were spent trying to hold at bay the overwhelm. I alternated between keeping myself hidden away, curled under my desk and under a cone of silence with all outside contact cut off, and opening myself up to the world that I might better understand. I responded to queries ensuring that I was still alive — Oh, But To Whom contacted me to ask if I and any of my up-trees were still around, as did Joseph — and filled out a survey that was put under my nose for consideration. I contacted some friends of my own, and found that, to my luck, none were missing. I first scrolled the feeds and then promised myself that I would not scroll the feeds anymore.

I remained under my desk for two days straight, responding to queries with the barest ping of acknowledgment. I did my best to forget my body. I tuned my sensorium down — nearly off, at times — and removed hunger and thirst. I did my best to forget my existence in such a world as this.

Throughout, within me there was an anxiety growing.

I had seen them disappear. I had seen people disappear. I had seen those around me simply cease to be. I saw them, and then I did not see them. I remember their faces — for my memory is as faultless as ever — and that means that I remember their smiles, their joy, their little frustrations. I remember the barely contained tears of a woman who walked beside someone else. They were tears of disappointment, of a heart in the middle of breaking. I remember them unfallen, and then she was gone. I remember the unbridled joy of love, uncontained, unbounded, in the face of three lovers as the stood with their backs to a wall, postures subconsciously mirrored. I remember their excitement not at the night but at the presence of each other. I remember their glowing faces and then one of three was gone.

I remember seeing the broken-hearted one suddenly gone with no resolution.

I remember the trio reduced to a panicked and searching duo.

Within me there was an anxiety growing.

What if this was not over? What if there were to be yet more disappearances? What if I were to disappear? What if I were to be here within the world and then, with nary a blink, not? What if Rav From Whence and I no longer got to make up and hold hands after our arguments? What if Joseph and I never again got to meet up and talk for hours? What if there were no more papers or books or missives signed “What Right Have I of the Ode clade”? Who would notice? Who would think of me? Who would remember me? Joseph? From Whence? And how many others? Who thinks of me now? Joseph? From Whence?

Within me there was an anxiety growing and I needed out. I needed to be anything other than laying, curled, beneath my desk on a glorified dog bed, all senses turned to ten percent and hunger and thirst flipped off like a light switch. What if I disappeared and no one noticed? How long would pass?

And so I, without even bothering to stand up there in my room, slipped from the sim and was standing on the nearest arrival pad to The Bean Cycle.

I slowly ratcheted up my senses five percent at a time that I would not be immediately overwhelmed, and even then the sun shining overhead was so bright as to make my eyes water as they adjusted, to leave the tingle of a far-off sneeze in my sinuses, to leave the taste of pineapple on my tongue.

The Bean Cycle was muted, whereas two nights prior it was lively. The lights were dimmer and yet clearer, though perhaps that was because it was midday. It was quieter, as though the ratchet of the cycles was shy, the hiss of steam wand and compressed air bashful, unwilling to be piercing. There were people there, still, but they were quiet; if they did speak, they did so in pairs and small knots, and more often than not under cones of silence that blocked out any sound coming from within.

I had not considered any steps beyond being in this place, this place where others might be. Now, here I was, and there was something I was supposed to do. I had to do something. There was something I needed to do...

I supposed if there was one thing one did in a coffee shop that was also a bike repair shop when one does not have a bike, it must be to order a coffee.

And yet, my voice had left me. I stood dumbly by the counter, and the tired– no, exhausted looking barista behind it, a woman whose skin was a joyous riot of tattoos and wrinkles, merely stared at me. The stalemate lasted nearly a minute before I realized the lock I had gotten myself in, and I lay my ears flat against my head. I brought my fist up to rub in a circle over my chest. My voice had left me and all I could do was apologize.

“Uh.” The woman seemed started to awareness, and with that awareness seemed to come some more complex emotion. She sniffed, turned, and called out, “Hasher?”

Nonplussed, I watched as, without a further word, the barista and one of the bike mechanics switched places. She seamlessly picked up the work that this lithe, red-haired, red-bearded person had been working on, and they greeted me with a bow across the counter. “Help you?”

I signed an apology once more, followed by, “Do you sign?”

“Oh! Yes!” A bob of his fist accompanied this.

I sighed, then, in relief and cast a thankful gaze over to the woman who had swapped places with Hasher. She did not meet it.

Hasher stomped a foot gently on the ground — perhaps overloud for the room, but I could still feel the vibrations through the soles my feet, unclad as they were — leading me to jump back to attention. I smiled sheepishly, signed, “I can hear, just can't speak.”

“Gotcha.” They continued to sign as they spoke. I made no move to stop them. “What can I get you?”

“May I please have a mocha with extra whipped cream?”

They were already sliding over to the espresso machine as they called out, “Coming right up.”

Where was their energy coming from? He hopped to with such readiness that a part of me wondered whether they might be a construct, an automaton, a dream of a person built to act as a person might in the role of a barista, but otherwise made solely of dream-stuff in a way that we were not, as cladists.

But no, they had moved with an essential awkwardness that was so often left behind when oneirotects built up these constructs. They looked to me with curiosity and compassion. They looked excited, and for some very specific reason that was not just some attempt at customer service.

I watched them as they worked, then, trying to puzzle out this little bit of reality after so many hours of mere surreality. They caught my eye at one point, smiled, and returned their gaze to their work. The smile lingered.

The resultant drink was nearly a sphere. The mug was a wide bowl of a cup, a hemisphere in its own right, and yet the mound of whipped cream atop was of nearly the same volume, a fist-sized mound of airy white netted by a drizzle of chocolate sauce.

This was not the fanciest, nor even largest, mocha that I had ever had. It was not the most whipped cream I had ever seen in one sitting. Nothing about it was special — a hot drink in a cup with a mound of whipped cream.

And yet, when Hasher set it down before me on the counter, I burst into tears.

“Oh...oh no,” they mumbled and hurried around the corner of the bar, taking me gently by the elbow and guiding me over to the L-shaped couch in the corner of the coffee shop half of the building. Once I was seated, they ducked away to grab my mocha and set it on the low table nearby.

It took longer than I care to admit for the storm to pass, and even then, there were false endings: I would stop crying and settle into sniffling and then some emotion that I did not have access to, could not feel directly, would wash over me like a wave, and I would be sent once more into wracking sobs.

It occurs to me, now that I think back on that moment, that I had cried so little until then. After those first confused tears, I lay, curled, beneath my desk and did nothing. I turned off as much input as I could for the vast majority of the time, and such often came with turning off as much output as I could, too. I stopped moving. I stopped eating and drinking. I never got around to venting emotions or shedding tears. I borrowed all of that from the future, and now that debt was being called due. Perhaps my voice had left me because it knew that if I were to speak, this would happen.

And all the while, Hasher sat beside me, head bowed. They did not touch me, did not even talk to me, they simply sat beside me and let me work through this period without being alone. They witnessed this pain. They were present for it.

If I were to disappear now, I thought, if another wave of disappearances were to happen and claim me, at least Hasher would notice.

It took nearly half an hour before I was first able to take a sip of my mocha, having thoroughly worn myself out and forked twice to ensure that I could breathe properly and was less of a mess.

The tears, though, lingered just on the horizon, or perhaps just below the surface, and so I leaned yet again on signing. I knew that if I spoke, I would fall to crying once more.

“This is very good.”

Hasher smiled. “Are you okay now?”

“No, not really.”

“I do not think anyone is.” He looked over to the other half of the shop. “Cosmia hasn't said anything other than names these last two days. She lost a few friends, and from her perspective, she lost whole portions of herself. I have told her to take off every time she comes in. I can just work both sides, right? But she just shakes her head and stays, and whispers all of these names.”

I thought about this. I thought about myself. I set these two ideas of people next each other and compared them side by side. I looked over to Cosmia, who had set her hands on the workbench and bowed her head, shoulders hunched, mumbling to herself.

“Maybe she needs the names heard by someone other than just herself.”

Returned his gaze to me, curious. “Did you lose anyone?”

“No. Yes. I do not know. No one I know, so many that I did not.” I could feel that talking — even signing — about this was shoving me towards yet more tears, but what else was there to talk about? Nothing. Would I talk about the coffee more? Would I talk about my work? Would I talk about what my plans were for the coming day? Week? Month? The tears returned, and I signed clumsily, hastily. “Everyone always says we have three deaths: the last breath, burial, and the last time a name is spoken. If Cosmia is reciting the names of ones who never even had the chance to get buried, then maybe she is doing a mitzvah. But who speaks the names of us? I was hiding and then I was worried I would disappear and so I came here so that if I did, at least someone would notice, but what if everyone here disappears, too? What if Lagrange goes down again? Will someone speak all of our names? How long will God forget us? Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

At my outburst, Hasher had jolted back, though even as they relaxed their posture, their expression remained dire, and only got more so as I continued on and on past the point where I was staying anything sensible.

I drew my feet up onto the couch with me and hugged around my knees. I could not sign another apology like that, and counted it as a blessing. I was made of apologies already. I was a being of 'sorry'.

After a moment of gathering themself, of wiping their nose on their sleeve, they signed, “What's your name?”

The prospect of spelling out my name exhausted me, a fact that always irked me in turn. I was so tired. I was so tired. I swallowed down yet more tears and ick, took a breath, and croaked, “What Right Have I.”

They opened their mouth to say something, hesitated, and their expression grew distant as, I guessed, they checked the perisystem directory. “Ode clade?”

I nodded.

“Well, What Right Have I of the Ode clade, I'll be sure to remember your name,” they said.

I buried my face against my knees, snout tucked against my thighs.

The shuttering of cohost was a blow to a good many people, and to the Post-Self community in particular. Some confluence of ideals, of people and technology, just made the site a perfect home for the community, and it took off in a way that it has not on any other platform since. There is joy on our Matrix server and our Discord, and there is some chatter every now and then outside of those spaces, but we lack a place to truly share long-form thoughts that feels right, like it places a focus on the writing.

To that end, we've spun up this instance of WriteFreely, which serves a few purposes:

• Stories — with its focus on writing, this will hopefully provide a good spot for long-form writing such as stories and chapters. With the ability to require a password, it's also a good place for sharing works in progress.
• Worldbuilding — writing of what makes the Post-Self setting tick can often be condensed into a simple thought and tossed out onto the Matrix/Discord server, but pulling those thoughts together into a short essay can provide a better opportunity to share. Speaking of...
• Sharing — WriteFreely works well with the fediverse, meaning that a blog can be followed like any ActivityPub feed, such as Mastodon.

WriteFreely lets you write in markdown, gives multiple blogs per account, allows custom styling per blog, and lets you structure blogs as...well, blogs, as notebooks without dates, or as novels, sorted in reverse posting order so that chapter 1 is always at the beginning. You can learn more here.

Registrations are by invite only, so if you'd like to join and write about Post-Self/Post-Self-adjacent things, just hit up Madison.