Oracle 2 - Message 4

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From what I’ve experienced, it can often feel like the human experience is simply a matter of questioning things. Like why do we have to constantly play mind games with ourselves? Why can’t we just… know certain things. We don’t need to have all the answers. It would be great if we could have all the answers, but we can’t have them. We only get a certain set of them, and they aren’t even allocated based on practicality. They aren’t what we want, exactly. And after enough time, we do know the ones we want, which makes the whole not having these specific answers fairly annoying, and then the ones you do have almost mock you with their uselessness as they tempt you to take them and cram them into the keyhole meant to unlock the solution to your problem. But they’ll never fit. And also, at some point, you have to wonder if those really are answers in the way you always thought they were. That was kind of the point of everything I’ve been saying, if you haven’t noticed.

Anyway, how have these past two weeks gone for you? Oh, no need to answer, I already know. First you were asking what my ‘problem’ was, which… Yeah, how much time do you have to spare? It’s a whole long list of contributing factors, my friend, but we do not have the time here and now. Nor do you entirely care. You were mostly asking in the rhetorical sense, which I knew, but I thought I was being clever and wanted to share that. Not that you would ever admit that I was ever clever, but I understand there is a limit to how friendly we could ever be each other. No matter what happens next.

But okay, that’s not entirely the point. It started by asking about me, but then--potentially when repetition broke the question down--you turned inward and asked about yourself. You started to realize that you needed to consider what your problem was in light of the mess you got yourself into when you decided to weave the lie you wove. Okay, that wasn’t as clever. I admit, they can’t all be winners. 

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However, if it makes you feel better, she already knew you were full of it. I already knew you were full of it. So the other listeners on this feed might have just found out the hard way, but you know, anonymity and all that. You have that going for you as a sort of pride-shield. 

Okay, look, I recognize that maybe it would have been better coming from her, alright? I recognize the virtue of honesty in a relationship, but she isn’t good at being direct, your charade wasn’t exactly sustainable, and there is no great reason for that band-aid pull. I know, but honestly, I’m not the sort of person to wait for great reasons. I wait for things to be somewhat practical and inevitable because at that point, it’s just cushioning the blow, as it were. Helping the descent to not be so blunt.

And to be blunt, that’s a better answer to the matter of ‘what your problem is’ than anything you’ve come up with thus far. You were so determined to prevent falls that you weren’t able fully recognize when one had already happened. You can’t bring yourself to look up from the blueprints you’re working on, out of fear of what could happen. Irony of that aside. That might be a completely reasonable reaction, given the stakes of the situation. In fact, I think is because you don’t have to tell me what the lack of sleep can do to somebody. I have experienced it first hand. 

It isn’t just uncomfortable, and that’s the part that no one seems to understand. It isn’t just discomfortable. You aren’t just disoriented. Eventually physical systems will start shutting down. And when there’s no end in sight to your peril, it doesn’t matter how far shut down point is: you’re still at risk of getting there. And, to be blunt again, she seems particularly close to that point. At first glance, anyway, I am eager to be wrong.

Of all the list of things I could criticize you for, being concerned for your partner will never be one of them. In fact, I’d be genuinely pissed off if you weren’t. She’s the sort of person who deserves to be protected and cherished, which is what you’re doing. Good for you on that.

But you get hyper fixated on what more you could be doing in some “grand gesture” sort of sense. That plan of yours had quickly become an obsession, almost like a distraction you have a tight emotional attachment to and it came in a moment when she needed you to be there with her. You continually chose to play with hypotheticals rather than to return to the moment with her. Yes, the hypotheticals can curb your anxiety a bit with their games, but it’s not the sort of grand production you want it to be. It can’t make anything, unless you count on a… well, a very different sort of ‘commodity’ in your schema. But we don’t want to think about that one.

To return to an earlier metaphor, you were so focused on your blueprints that you didn’t see the rocks had already given out beneath her feet. You may have known that her standing there wasn't the best thing for her and that it posed a certain danger, a danger that you were earnestly trying to prevent. But there was no way for you to be quick enough. There was no easy way to pull her back before the fall. Partially because I don’t know why she’s out there. I never figured that part out for me, even. I never figured out what put us in this mess, and the fact that we’re from two very different heritages, from two very different worlds, you could say, certainly doesn’t help my confusion.

I don’t know what got us here, so I don’t know if there was a way to prevent this. In fact, I am very inclined to think that there wasn’t, unless you could bend space and time or some set force in our universes. The bones that made up our worlds were faulty, I’m trying to stay. The mechanics that you had no way of seeing. 

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Face it, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen. For all your talk of philosophy the implications of this ability, of the things that potentially made it possible, cosmically, are lost on all of us. But you didn’t even know that. You didn’t even know that there were so many things you couldn’t know. Maybe if you had considered it, you would have seen the problem in your approach. You would have seen that you couldn’t have prevented this problem, that the blueprints were all in vain, and that all you could do and should have done was run out and grab her, stumble with her, maybe have a parachute ready. Or be that parachute for her.

The fall was going to happen. The landing was what you needed to worry about. But you didn’t. You were too caught up in something else.

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This step she’s going to take? I’m hesitant about the details, but in some way, this was always going to happen. In some way, shape, or form, because this isn’t so much a creation of the universe. But a creation of her: the result of her hitting her breaking point with the dreams. This is her feeling the impact and recreating herself from the dust that was left when she shattered. You know, sometimes when things are hard, it helps to go back to the beginning. Do you remember how you met her? Do you remember the old Greek myths she was so fascinated with. Like the one about the Fates: the three old women who are charged with the destinies of all living beings. And even those of heroes and heroines were simply strings which feels so trivial and yet so accurate all at once.

They wanted her to read the tapestry as it were. No matter how terrible the stories, but now she’s trying to reinvent the language and make new stories with better endings. She’s doing that. I just don’t… I honestly just don’t know what’s going to happen with it. And I feel like… I feel like you should be the one concerned about that. Not me.

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I… I know what you’re expecting me to say, but I won’t say it. We all have our limits. I can lament that we found yours this way, but this isn’t a story I can change. In fact, I don’t have much more to say. Anything else will have to come from you.

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The Oracle of Dusk is a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. It was written, edited, produced, and performed by MJ Bailey. And if you like the show, tell friends about it or the quasi-friends that are still on your social media feeds because social norms evolved before words did, am I right?