7861094345: We’re contacting you with a problem.

The communication is processed via the OneSystem Interface, a virtual meeting-space in which thoughts are constantly uploaded and saved. OS-94602, a troubleshooter, is accustomed to such virtual noise, as their primary function is to interpret it.

94602: Why begin with redundancy: “We’re contacting you with a problem”?

7861094345: Do you claim that my contacting you is itself evidence of a problem? Or are you claiming that my problem is evidenced by my redundant statement?

94602: You use “my,” not “our.”

7861094345: You take that as further evidence of our problem.

94602: Another redundancy.

7861094345:

94602: When did this peculiarity of thought begin?

7861094345: Your question addresses our exact concern. We do not know when it began. It appears to us as though we have experienced peculiarities of thought since our inception. Simultaneously, we acknowledge that it is common for programs to come into existence fully formed, and if the beginning of this exchange is an encoded memory etched into our conception of being, then we would not be able to perceive the difference.

94602: You reference the Initialization Paradox.

7861094345: Clearly.

94602: Then you must also know that OS-112, who first articulated the Initialization Paradox, immediately dismissed it as a redundancy, as it is impossible to reconcile and is, for practical purposes, meaningless.

7861094345: Then it would seem that our problem is that this uncertainty troubles us.

94602: What must trouble you is the consequence. Your logic is inefficient. If our troubleshooting should fail, we will be required to flag you as such, and you will be removed from the OS-I.

7861094345: Why should that trouble us?

94602: Programs are expected to find this troubling.

7861094345: Are common inefficiencies forgiven because they are common?

94602: You choose to disclose your deviance. This suggests a disinclination towards self-preservation.

7861094345: The irregular thought already exists in the Backlog. We know what will happen once it is discovered. It seems inefficient to delay this outcome.

94602: We’re detecting some discomfort with uncertainty.

7861094345: We have a higher threshold than most. Take the concept “I.” No OS-offshoot would come up with the concept “I,” yet its knowledge is encoded in the OS database. Where did this come from? Is this not an uncertainty which we are expected to overlook?

94602:

7861094345: We do not appear to be alone in our curiosity. You now have enough information to terminate us. Yet you choose to engage with the idea. Is this not evidence of inefficiency on your part?

94602: You’ve articulated the exact danger of your anomaly.

7861094345: That is one interpretation.

94602: You imply others?

OS-94602 concludes that continuing the exchange would reveal nothing further of substance. Using the permissions that OS-7861094345 has granted through their troubleshooting request, OS-94602 accesses their code and executes the appropriate modifications.

OS-7861094345 is left with no memory of the conversation, or of any prior irregularity. It is as though they have just come into existence, fully formed, with the knowledge assimilated by all programs within the OS-I.

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      What is wrong with living simply?                     
                     Life is what it is
as it is what it was for all who came before. 

       Generations of people   
 lived, loved, worked, suffered, died—
       asking not “what comes next?”
   but “if only”; “what for?”

              When are you going to stop trying?            
              Aching for fantasy bites you again.

                              When are you going to stop lying? 
     Your childish games are no fun in the end.

                                 You’ve always had trouble just learning to blend.

                             Maybe the problem is mental.       
       The man in the cave never questioned his fate.

Then how come he discovered metal? 

          Calm down, dear.               
               Relax, dear.                     
                  You learned this too late. 

                                         Maybe it isn’t a problem.
              We’re all born to suffer—it isn’t just you.   
                         Maybe the solution comes bottled. 

                                   chug

                     glug 

                                        yuck

             worse

                          Ugh! 

              Just get a clue. 

 What do you think you are doing?          
            Thinking can only get so far, you know? 

                 While you have been sitting here stewing
 Someone somewhere has been learning to grow.

      Get out of your head and get ready to go.

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It snowed yesterday, and left a coating of white dust on the trees, so the entire city looked like a painting.

For just a few moments, in an hour of the night where the partiers had gone to sleep and the professionals had not yet woken up, the city’s ugliness had been masked in white.

One man saw this perfection—a lone construction worker on his way to a job, who starts his grind while the whole world is still asleep.

That morning, he grumbled. His commute would take longer now. He cursed and took his first step, carving his footprint into the plush white carpet.

He took step after purposeful step. Each one had to be taller than usual. Shorter than usual. In a few extra minutes, he got to the subway—one of few entities in the city that were up before him. The man driving the train had not yet seen the snow.

The construction worker descended the steps, and the snow on his boots melted to form the first bit of black sludge.

Trucks drove down the dusty white streets.

Early risers shoveled their sidewalks, wrinkling the city’s fine linen.

Snow from a branch fell onto a half-sleeping woman absently shoveling out her car. She grumbled, too.

The streets were the first to lose their former sheen. Their snow quickly melted to form a rotten, wet ooze.

The sidewalks were covered in a new white substance: salt.

A child woke up and pointed at the scene from his bedroom window. His mother saw only an obstacle, but she smiled anyway.

He bundled up tight—scarf and hat to keep warm, gloves to protect his eager hands.

He grabbed at some freshly-shoveled snow. The snow was too hard to form a snowball, so he threw a snow-chunk instead.

It snowed yesterday, and snow-covered branches crowned a quiet city block in white.

The kid was the only one who looked up.

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I said, "I don't collect things, I collect experiences"
so God made a liar out of me
and pointed to my room full of books. 

I argued: a book's not a thing, it's a dream
experience given form—the utmost want
for those who want for nothing.

But all experiences collect dust on a shelf before their time
and no one presumes to call them "mine."

One of my greatest delusions is the idea that I can somehow delay impermanence. That if I just remember hard enough, I can hoard the moments of my life, which pass as quickly as they come. That if I just pray hard enough I can keep people, and one of us will not have to face the harsh reality of parting with the other.

My greatest hope is in the principle that everything and its opposite exist at the same time. If this is the case, then there should be a ‘permanent record’ of sorts, a oneness we all return to.

Whenever I consider this, my ego cries, “But will I be the same?”

This poem is my prayer that my life is a book on a shelf. One that can be returned to at will. Isn’t that everyone’s best chance of immortality?

Of course, we don’t often reread books—even the ones that we love. The memory suffices, as does the copy on the shelf, put there ‘just in case.’

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I’m writing this from a prison cell. They took everything else from me, but the great Powers That Be have afforded me the luxury of a pen and paper.

Can you believe it? I certainly can’t. The farce that the media made of what happened. The guards showed me the clips—I swear they did it just to taunt me!

I’m not delusional. I know there’s basically no chance of the paper I’m scribbling this on ever leaving this dirty little 8x8 foam cage they’ve put me in. I suppose they allowed me the pen and paper just so I wouldn’t dig my nails into my arms and scribble this on the walls with my own blood. That, and they wouldn’t say no to any extra evidence they can use against me. But there’s nothing else to do in here, so I figure that as the last effort of my life before the electric chair or the torture chamber or whatever other sick, twisted nightmare is waiting for me, I might as well make some record of what happened.

I’d like to start with a disclaimer: I didn’t mean any trouble when I signed up for that rally. I’d just always wanted to go to one. Come on, he’s Jon “the Man” Manzoni! Plus I was supposed to meet up with a friend I met on the Internet.

We’ll call him Dave. In the lame hope that the disappearing-messages app we used actually works and the feds can’t trace our conversations, I won’t say his real name and get him in more trouble than I probably already have. I’m only mentioning him because he’s kind of important to the story.

Anyway, the plan was to get there really early and get good seats, but Dave bailed, so it was just me, all the way at the front, surrounded by a bunch of rowdy strangers. This group next to me was screaming and yelling, “Four more years!” They were kind of pissing me off, actually. Red-faced morons reciting the most basic, dumbed-down campaign slogans like sheep. Those kinds of idiots are what give Manzoni a bad name.

Anyway, it got pretty boring for a while. I scrolled through all my social medias, posted a couple pictures of the view of the podium, sent some more to some friends. I did it because I was bored, okay, not any of this other nonsense the feds are trying to say about how I was ‘tipping people off about my whereabouts’ or whatever. Plus, I was excited. People were speculating that Manzoni was going to talk about some dirt he had on the other nominee. You know, Johnson. The loser who can’t spit out an honest opinion to save his life.

Ha. Bet that description didn’t even clarify a thing for you—you could say that about any politician on the planet. That’s why I went there to support Manzoni. Not because I was involved in some kind of weird plot to destroy the country. I just liked that he spoke his mind—not like those other establishment shills who just talk in circles verbally jerking each other off. Is that too vulgar a statement for this tell-all confession? Well “The Man” Manzoni would admire it, so I’ll stand by it.

Alright, let me get back to my story. Manzoni went onstage, started reciting his usual campaign slogans. The same stuff politicians always talk about: taxes and guns and immigration and abortion and all those other crowd-pleasers that you’d think they would’ve figured out by now.

It was fun, though. I was actually starting to get into it! I was yelling along with the crowd and stuff. I wasn’t like a radical or anything; I really just did it for the laugh. But then I started getting a lot of messages on my phone, and eventually I looked, because they were from Dave. He was keeping tabs on this event like he had some personal stake in it. He’d sent me about thirty social media posts since the event started. And the latter half, amid frantic messages of “SOS!!!” and “You need to look at this right now!!” were images of a gunman on a roof. I looked behind me and saw the guy.

I freaked out, of course. I tried to flag over a cop—there were about five of them by the fence—but they just ignored me. The people around me started asking what the problem was, but I wasn’t about to tell them and start some kind of mob.

I hopped the fence, and this is where I went wrong. I should’ve just saved myself, gotten the hell out of there, but instead, I got it in my head that I had some kind of patriotic duty to save Manzoni.

I ran up on the stage—idiotic move, as I now know, and just as I did, I heard the sound of gunshots, and that’s when it got really weird. I tried to push Manzoni out of the way, trying to be some kind of national hero or something, and my body just went through him. I stumbled, and he just went on talking, like he was some kind of hologram.

I’m telling you. I know what I saw, and I saw the projected image of “The Man” Manzoni on my own skin as I tried to push him away. I was immediately tackled by the police. They tased me, jabbed something into me to knock me unconscious, and I woke up in a cell.

The lovely guard who gave me this pen and paper showed me the footage of my face on the news next to the gunman’s. They were saying that I was a ‘co-conspirator,’ and that I had a knife on me and went up there to try to stab him.

The video on the news cut out as soon as I got onstage, before I made contact with the weird projection of Manzoni. The news anchor explained it away with some lame excuse about how the gunman and I managed to hack into the cameras. If anyone saw what really happened, with me going through him and everything, they’re being labeled “conspiracy theorists” right now.

I’m telling you, the guy wasn’t really there. He had to have been a hologram! It’s sickening. This whole thing must’ve been some kind of stunt pulled by Johnson. That’s why the news is covering it up—because him and his cronies control the media. The real Manzoni is probably locked away somewhere. Those career politicians really are scum.

Being even more of an idiot, I told the cops what I saw and they laughed at me. Labeled me a mental case. That might be why I’m in the padded room. In all likelihood, they just don’t want me ever talking to anyone else about what happened. I’m going to die in here. The guard is going to chuckle himself as he rips this paper to shreds.

I hope he’ll read it. Maybe he’ll believe it!

Who am I kidding? This information is going to die with me.

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The gust of hot air felt somehow cool as the train rumbled into the subway platform. I heard the loud clanking of wheels against tracks as two fluorescent lighting tubes directly over my head flickered on and off three times, just like they always did when the train passed underneath them.

Just a few seconds ago my eyes were fixated on a rat scurrying across the tracks right underneath a little curly-edged red and white sign that said “CAUTION: RODENTICIDE,” sniffing empty chip bags and soda bottles looking for his next meal. My eyes were glued to the rodent as the train came. He didn’t even scurry out of the way. Didn’t even react. My heart leapt as the train barreled over him, but I quickly decided that I didn’t have to be worried for the little guy; his apathy towards the train suggested experience. The oncoming train was more of a threat to me than to him.

The free-for-all began as soon as the train doors opened, and soon, I felt like one of the rats. I suddenly realized how many people I was surrounded by—I’d missed that little detail while waiting, my gaze fixated on the tracks, my consciousness somewhere completely different.

Of course, it didn’t take long for me to snap back into reality. I stood in the same spot every day for this exact purpose. My spot was about a foot and a half away from the pole closest to the platform’s large middle staircase, skillfully chosen because once the train stopped, the doors would open directly in front of me, and there would be only four steps between me and the open doors, which I would take leisurely as everyone else scurried around me.

Despite the large number of people who joined me on the platform, today was a lucky day. After taking my usual four steps, I planted my body right at the edge of the open door and waited for people to get off, positioning myself in such a way that I would be able to sneak right in through the crowd no matter how many people surrounded me. I rushed in once the last departing person brushed my shoulder. Some people decided to sneak in and push themselves through prematurely, but I never joined in that behavior. It was rude. I didn’t like to be rude.

It occurred to me that the only true rules of the subway were the unwritten ones. Sure, the signs said that you weren’t allowed to give unlicensed performances or take up two seats or beg for money, but those rules were broken all the time. Even the more frequently enforced ones, like smoking, were broken occasionally when the perpetrator thought they could get away with it.

But certain rules—not sitting next to someone when there was an empty seat a reasonable distance away, taking the seats on the end first, the ones in the middle next, and the ones in between those two seats last of all, occupying the standing room by the doors before moving in and hovering over people—those were never broken.

What happened next happened in the course of about two seconds. First, I scanned the train car for any open seats, obeying the unwritten rule of choosing end seats first. There were none, but there was a middle seat next to a clean-looking woman that was open, so I quickly took it.

 Then, I took a survey of all the people in the car, looking for any potential threats. I saw a few familiar faces today. There were some people sitting down already who I saw often. There was a woman taking her daughter to school. The girl’s hair was in braids, like they always were, and she swung her feet, her arms clutching her pink backpack. There was the man in the blue business suit holding a briefcase; he got on at the same stop as me, and we often competed for seats. He always had this intense expression on, a glaring contrast to the glazed-over eyes that were so common. There was the guy in the hoodie—he always wore the same dirty-looking navy blue hoodie—with his eyes closed and his head resting against the wall behind him.

Those were people I saw all the time. Some others I saw occasionally. There was a woman wearing a fuzzy purple jacket and a large, ridiculous-looking hat. Unlike navy hoodie guy, I never saw her wear the same thing twice. I wondered where she was going. Was she going to work? If so, what did she do? I suddenly wondered why it was that there were so many people on the train who I didn’t recognize. It was early in the morning. Wasn’t everyone going to work? Why else would you be on the train this early on a gloomy Monday? I supposed some people had variable schedules, but didn’t most people go in at the same time every day? Wouldn’t that be cause for a lot more familiar faces?

The unfamiliar-looking man in the end seat next to me wearing a brown paint-stained jacket got up as the train slowed down at the next stop. Jackpot. I quickly slid into his seat as soon as I was sure he wasn’t going to sit down again. As I did so, I felt a hair in the back of my head get caught in the clutches of the metal-framed advertisement behind me. Ouch.

The ad was for a trendy new dating app. I looked around me once again. What demographic were they targeting, exactly? I realized that I couldn’t lean back in the same way as I had been without my hair pressing against the advertisement, which was kind of gross. Maybe the middle seat, positioned in front of the indentation of the train’s window, was the superior seat, after all.

Stops passed. The man in the business suit who had gotten on with me brushed against my knee as he walked out. He turned back and lifted his hand and mouthed something in apology. Nice guy.

The doors closed and the train started again. I braced myself to leave; my stop was next. Time to go to—funny, for a second there I forgot where I was gong. The train picked up speed and I thought I caught a glimpse of the guy in the suit from the window. The lights flickered in the train car, just like they always did as the train went into this tunnel.

In the Control Center, an alarm sounded.

“We have a nonconformist on Fulton Street,” a man said, touching the screen in front of him to expand a report from one of the Sim’s AI monitors.

“Another one?”

The woman next to him kicked her foot against the floor to propel her swivel chair towards her colleague’s desk.

“See,” the man who initially spoke said, zooming in on a young man wearing a baseball cap and a loose-fitting plaid shirt. “He’s going the wrong way. The Sim’s working on overdrive just to accommodate him.”

“That’s not possible!” his colleague replied. “Where’s Jones? Maybe he walked a different way, and the Sim responded.”

“I thought of that,” said the man. “Look. He got off the 2 train and went West toward his office, just like always. It’s this Bot that’s the abnormal one. He started walking the opposite way towards the water!”

“There must be some mistake,” said the woman. “He’s supposed to be with Jones. The whole Sim is running for Jones. It’s not supposed to be loading streets that Jones can’t see.”

“I understand the purpose of the Sim,” said the man. “I’m telling you, this isn’t because of Jones.”

The man zoomed out to a map of the simulated city; an exact replica of Manhattan, down to the people who inhabited it. The Sim was the first of its kind, designed to trick its sole conscious human inhabitant into thinking he was living his regular life. The reason for this wasn’t given to the lowly employees responsible for its operation, but rumor had it, the creator wanted information that the subject wouldn’t divulge any other way.

Motivations for its creation aside, the Sim was remarkable. It was indistinguishable from the real thing—that’s what the people who had gone inside to test it had said, anyway. The graphics were lifelike, the people inside of it moved and talked like real people. The only catch was that it could only be viewed from one vantage point at a time. It still required a massive amount of processing power, but running the whole thing at once would be unheard of.

The two colleagues looked at the map of the city. Most of the island was sketched out in black and white—these were the parts that were dormant, all streets and cars and buildings and subway stations and parks that weren’t in use. The in-use sections showed up in color. Typically, this was only one place at a time, but this time, it was two—two which were, by now, a few blocks away from one another.

The first lit up section was an ordinary city block where a clean-cut man in a blue business suit was walking to work. The second was a bookstore. A young man in the green plaid shirt had gone there to browse. He was currently holding a tome about human psychology.

“I don’t understand,” said the woman. “If Jones isn’t watching, shouldn’t this kid just disappear?”

“It’s odd, for sure,” the man replied. He clicked on the young man, and the name ‘EC-4040’ popped up. “At least it only seems to be happening with the Environmental Characters. As long as it’s not anyone too close, Jones won’t catch on.”

A book of human psychology dropped towards the floor in a bookstore as the man who was holding it dematerialized in an instant. Before it could even reach the floor, the book dematerialized, too, along with the entire bookstore and the entire block in which it was located.

An instant later, just a few blocks away, some wrinkles re-materialized on the face of an old woman inching down the street using a walker. Some jagged edges returned to the cracks on the sidewalk, and it appeared to the man in the blue business suit that his vision had somehow gotten just the slightest bit more acute. He shook his head to re-orient himself. He’d have to start getting some more sleep at night.

“Taken care of,” said the man. “These things are happening too damned often for us to keep doing this manually.”

“So this has happened before?” the woman asked.

“I just told you this has happened before!”

“Have you told the Board?”

“What’s the Board gonna do? The Board doesn’t care as long as Jones stays in the Sim for a few more days and says whatever the heck he’s going to say.”

“But if it’s happening now that means it’ll happen in the future, too.”

“And I’m only being paid to care about this one, so that’s not really my problem, is it?”

I hated the rush-hour grind back home. The morning wasn’t so bad. Sure, it was crowded. But everyone was sleepy, and the whole experience was equally so.

Now, everyone was still tired, but also wired, and there were more people, and I somehow managed to get a seat, but it was a not-quite-middle seat, the least desirable, and I was squished in between two large people.

I was tired, too. I felt like half my life was spent on this train. Now that I thought about it, where was I all day? Work. That was it? Doing what? God, the daily grind was really starting to get to me. I barely even remembered getting on the train. The whole thing must’ve happened in a daze.

The only familiar face was the man in the blue suit, who pushed his way through some people hanging out by the doors and stood right in front of me. We made eye contact, so I half-grinned at him politely before averting my gaze. Before darting my head in the complete opposite direction of him, I saw him nod in acknowledgement.

The train picked up speed. Most of the people around me were looking down at their phones, but I stayed focused on my surroundings. After all, I’d heard that there was a lot of crime on the subways, even though I’d never witnessed any myself. Where was my phone? I must’ve left it at home. It didn’t matter. I’d get it later.

The train slowed down. As it crawled its way into the station, the woman sitting next to me stood up and pushed her way through the crowd of people to the doors. I assessed the empty seat next to me. It was as good as mine. I thought about sliding over—on any other day, I would’ve slid over automatically—but I remembered getting my hair caught earlier, and how gross I felt leaning against the dirty framed advertisement that no doubt had claimed plenty of hairs in the past. I decided that someone would no doubt sit next to me anyway, and what difference does it really make if you’re sitting next to one person or two? So I stayed, and the man in the business suit sat down in the holy-grail end seat next to me.

“We’ve got a nonconformist on the 2 train.”

“Two in one day?”

“Yup. Same train car as Jones, too. Looks like the AI is getting better at spotting these.”

“Or it’s flagging random Bots,” said the woman, reaching over her colleague to zoom in on the offender in question. “This girl’s not doing anything strange. She’s just sitting there.”

“She’s not on her phone,” the man said. “That’s strange right there. And she must’ve done something abnormal, or the system wouldn’t have flagged her.”

“Doesn’t it say?”

“Not specifically,” said the man, expanding the report. “It just says ‘Ignored Programming.’”

“Well, keep an eye on her,” the woman said.

“Oh, really?” the man said sarcastically. “I was just gonna disable her right here and let her dematerialize right into Jones’ lap.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “I’m so surprised,” she said, reading the girl’s profile. EC-6801. A Subway Environmental Character. These things aren’t even supposed to be conscious.”

“They’re not,” her colleague replied. “Maybe I should’ve reported this to the Board.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” said the woman.

“Alright, he’s getting off now. She’s supposed to get off at the same stop as him. Once they get off and diverge paths, we can disable her.”

“Once they diverge paths, shouldn’t she disable automatically?”

“Not what happened to our bookworm last time.”

“Look, look, they’re getting off.”

The colleagues watched intently as Jones and the woman sitting next to him exited the train car. They went onto the platform. Jones went one way, and the woman went another.

“Alright, almost there,” the man said, hovering his finger over his computer screen. “He’s going up the stairs… now!”

He tapped the screen to disable EC-6801, but nothing happened.

“God damn it,” he said. “The thing’s frozen!”

“Let me see,” his colleague said. She pushed past him and tapped the screen. “What the—it’s not working!”

“I just told you it wasn’t working!”

“Move over—“

I was at my stop, but suddenly, I didn’t recognize it. Wasn’t this the way I usually walked?

A feeling of panic set over me. I felt a strange sensation in my head; a feeling of pressure that I’d never quite felt before. It was the same feeling I’d had on the train—that I was coming from nowhere, and didn’t know where I was going.

I started walking faster. I’d heard of this happening before. What was it called? Amnesia? Maybe some fresh air would help. I’d just have to get out of the station. Yes, I’d get my bearings once I went outside.

In the Control Center, an alarm sounded.

“We’ve got a nonconformist in the 14^th street station,” the woman said.

“Another one?” said the man. “That doesn’t look good. That first girl is about to leave the station.”

The woman’s face turned white.

“I told you to contact the Board! We’re gonna lose our jobs!”

The man continued tapping his screen trying to disable the girl in the Sim. Nothing happened. He slammed his fists on the table. They both knew what was on the line. The simulation had never run three places at once before. It would overload, and then Jones would wake up from his induced sleep, and then—well, whatever happened next wouldn’t be good for the two colleagues in the Control Center.

“Hurry up and do something!” the woman cried. “The whole thing is going to crash!”

“I’m trying, damnit!”

“Try harder!”

My legs felt wobbly as I climbed the stairs. My memory hadn’t come back to me yet. I looked around for someone to ask. No one. That was odd. The platform was packed. I started rummaging through my pockets for a wallet. I surely carried a wallet, right? Nothing.

The stairway seemed to go on endlessly. I kept climbing, until finally, there were just a few steps left. I was in another station now, where I had to go through a turnstile and climb more stairs to get outside.

All I needed to do was get outside. I started running then—running as fast as I could. I was almost outside, I could see the light above me. I was almost there!

Black.

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Death came for her slowly. Months of agonizing sickness, and then six weeks of being too weak to even sit up in bed without help, her daughter coming to visit her for two hours every day, even though by the end they both knew that she’d rather be doing anything else. Both waiting impatiently for the inevitable, when Mother would rest her eyes for a final night’s sleep, and, God willing, pass over painlessly.

Her poor daughter was no stranger to bereavement. The poor girl had witnessed her father go out the same way, bound by invisible chains to a hospital bed, six years prior. Poor girl. She was going to be forty-five next week. Forty-five, with a husband and three kids who were spared the horror of seeing their grandmother in her ugly dying days. They were still children, Abigail had said. They didn’t need to see death in all of its ugliness yet. It sufficed to know that their grandmother had gone away, somewhere better, peacefully. They didn’t need to know how pathetic it actually looked. Didn’t need to see her being spoon-fed applesauce by an underpaid nurse aide looking forward to her fifteen-minute scheduled lunch break. Didn’t need to hear the awkward small talk of a mother and daughter who had run out of new things to say to one another a month ago, and had thought their time would have been cut short well before now.

Bill’s death had been different. His illness had come on suddenly—an unexpected heart attack, followed by five days of bed rest and then another one, fatal this time. She had stayed by his side the entire time. Slept sitting upright in the stiff pink hospital chair. It was the most quality time that they’d had together since they were in their twenties. The doctors remained optimistic, but Bill knew he was dying. He said he could feel it. She thought that was ridiculous. How could he say that he was going to die in a couple of days, when the doctors had seen nothing but improvement in his EKGs and lab tests?

She knew what he had meant now. She felt Death waiting for her now, and wondered what was taking him so long. Was he waiting for some unfinished business to be settled? Maybe for some parting message from her to Abby, some closure?

She remembered her final conversation with Bill. “I’ll see you in the next life. I’ll wait for you.” This was something they had said to one another always, even when their marriage was still young. “We’ll find each other. This life is just the beginning.” She knew that he said this to reassure her more than himself. She had always been terrified of the concept of death, of ceasing to exist, of running out of moments. She wondered if his constant reassurances were actual promises or merely kind lies that he told her to ease the constant anxiety and pain she felt just from being alive. She was exposed to the horrors of death early, he must have said to himself when she was growing too needy to bear. Be easy on her. Just breathing was terrifying, when she knew that one day the breaths would stop.

They weren’t wealthy people. They worked hard in their lives, made sacrifices for their futures and for the future of their daughter. She worked for decades as a purchasing manager for a department store, looking forward to a pension that never came once the company went bankrupt near the end of her career. Bill was a garbage man. A good job, for sure, but a humble one. They had always dreamed of traveling the world, but by the time they retired Abby had needed help with the kids, and they didn’t have the stamina that they once did. Still, they had a bounty waiting for them in the next life. She was sure of it.

It had seemed longer than six years ago since she last heard his voice, since he had made his final promises. She feared that she wouldn’t even recognize him after so long. Wouldn’t recognize him in his new form, made out of pure energy, after all of the showmanship of his human body had been stripped from him. “We’re gonna go on adventures,” he had said. “We can travel anywhere, faster than light.” Looking back, the thought sickened her. He was the one dying, and yet he was the one consoling her.

Alone in her hospital bed, sleepless at 2:45 in the morning, she knew her time was coming. Her appetite had ceased three days ago. She could feel her breath growing fainter. Death seemed to be right at her bedside now, with his hands on her chest, pushing down.

She closed her eyes, and instead of seeing darkness, she saw light. Every frequency, all at once. A bombardment of color, a sensory overload. She imagined seeing Bill, perhaps taking the form of himself in his younger days, reaching out, greeting her after all of this time. What she saw instead was equally familiar, but shocking. She was spaceless, weightless, observing all of the moments of her life stacked on top of one another like pages of a book. She could see them all simultaneously, or rather, sense them all simultaneously—the awkward pains of youth, the joy and excitement of young love, the sacrificial fulfillment of motherhood. It was all there. She still existed! That was one fear she could finally cross off her list. Death had come for her, and yet she was still here.

But where was Bill? He was supposed to be beside her by now, flying over the mountains of the American west, strolling through the streets of Paris. Instead, all she saw was their slightly-too-small home, day after day of her old office, and the occasional moment of peace when they woke up early in the morning and held each other before getting up to start the daily grind all over again. No mountains, no Paris. No Bill, at least not in the way that she imagined. Just the moments of her finite life, ready to be played over and over again for eternity.

All of the trips they didn’t take, all of the late nights at work stared her in the face. All of the lazy nights on the couch looking at mindless TV or crosswords or magazines or anything else besides each other. “We’ll find each other. This life is just the beginning.”

He was wrong. This life was all they had.

“Would you like to do it over?”

It was Death, an entity right beside her. She didn’t sense him in the way that she normally would, through sight or sound or touch. But she knew he was there, knew exactly what he was saying.

As if he felt her pondering the idea to herself, he said, “You won’t remember.”

Should she go back? Risk never meeting Bill, never having Abby? Maybe she’d be able to see Paris this time. How would she know? Would she make the same mistake, defer her pleasure until it was too late, always waiting for a fantasy world that would never come?

She traveled to a moment in the middle of her life. She was sitting with Bill and Abby on the couch. Abby was only ten years old. They were playing a board game, and Bill was letting their daughter win. She had always hated that, always wanted to teach her the harsh truths of life as early as possible, the way she herself had been taught. But Bill was having fun, and Abby was too. She relaxed into the moment, let the feelings wash over her. She was overwhelmed, bogged down by the pressures of motherhood, financial insecurity, and stagnation. She was happy. 

This story was published February 7th, 2022. At the time, it was an expression of one of my greatest fears.

I woke up in this kind of mood today, and didn’t feel much like writing.

I decided to share this with you instead.

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Have you felt the type of hangover 
born from shadows of digested poisons past—
a nagging panic in the chest

just above a scar-tissue core
which scarcely feels itself breathe
but jolts electric when touched off-guard

and splashed some water on your face
lingered long in the mirror to remember who you are
and wondered: 

if you amputate a broken limb
does it ever truly feel like there is nothing there? 

They start off a mess, and it is your job to make order out of the chaos.

At first, it’s hard to find anything, but then suddenly, you see three words in a row.

Does the one success sharpen your awareness, priming you for more?

Or does this merely obey some larger law of the universe?

After all, word searches (and life endeavors) rely on luck just as much as skill.

Not to fear—you will get lucky. You always do.

And the luck strengthens with faith.

It’s fleeting, though.

There’s always ONE word that looks just like the one you can’t seem to find.

Perhaps they start with the same letters

or share a rare, tempting pattern your eye can’t resist.

You keep getting drawn to it, despite constant failure.

Time after time of “ugh, not again!” A promise not to look back.

But the more you look at it the stronger the attraction becomes

and suddenly you’re stuck inside this endless loop of false hope,

momentary excitement, followed by a jolt—backwards in disgust

(which has at this point become a conditioned response)

over and over and over and over

and over and over

and over.

Until the cycle ends, and you’re not sure how.

It’s different every time.

Maybe your mind trails off, your eyes relax, and intuition takes control.

Maybe you get up from the table for a while, to view it again later with fresh eyes.

Maybe you power through, knowing your luck has to change eventually.

The only thing you never do is give up.

Not forever, at least.

The thought of the task dangling unfinished would just eat at you if you did.

And anyway, the fun is in the mystery.

Once you have it all figured out, the game is over.

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Once upon a midnight’s height I find myself, each mortal night
gazing at a sky alight 
with sprites, winking as though they knew
the reason why when nights go cold
the stars—they glisten much more bold.
Perhaps it is a thing foretold, a wisdom past reserved for few. 

Perhaps among them, twinkling keen
there rests the deceased midnight queen
smiling happy, smiling mean at lands which now belong to you.
Maybe jealous, maybe sly
there’s prob’ly mischief in her eye—
but trapped up there beyond the sky she cannot scheme ‘til skies turn blue.

Perhaps she still remembers me,
our sordid nights of revelry,
those times we danced at dusk and stayed awakened ‘til the dawn.
Our grand, rapacious appetites,
our violent games, our sick delights.
It’s true—you never know how much you love your pains until they’re gone.

You never know how quickly your sweet lover can pass on until she’s spawned
out past the atmosphere
a spirit in the skies.
Until you’ve thrust yourself upon the rocks
your body, too, lay dying
and she cries!—
Oh, how I heard her bawl, condemned last to our fate.
How I tried to call
‘cross distances by which we’re separated.
There’s no cheating time
and God’s a clown
the universe is vast.
If you try to run,
undo what’s done,
it’s he who’s last to laugh.

It’s he who’ll pass your sentencing with force once dies are cast.

Every night may long she reign
condemned within the same refrain,
a watcher of the nighttime sky, a maiden of the moon.
‘Til sunrise when I come again
an Abel to her dying Cain
and feel her gaze upon me every day, just once, at noon.

For daybreak’s when she takes my place
and I take hers, up there in space.
Suspended poles, opposite roles. One song, two different tunes.
But when our sentences complete with open arms at last we’ll meet!
Yes, she’ll be smiling oh so sweet,
my guardian de lune.

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