#I could meditate on those two words for decades and still not grasp the full Truth ♡

[nevertheless-moving]

Suicidal Misunderstanding XIV

Part I - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  Part XI - - - - Part XII - - - - Part XIII

Star Wars Time Travel AU #27

Plo Koon woke to find himself chained in a dark room.

Somewhere behind him he could hear steady dripping; it was uncertain if that was deliberate or not.

He strained to discern anything in the dim light, but the walls of his prison refused to form into anything recognizable.

Cautiously, the trapped Master cast his senses out, only to find them reflected back at odd angles. He decided to wait before attempting to push any further past what his captor wished him to see.

Time passed strangely, but sooner than expected there was the sound of a pressurized airlock opening and, distantly, a raging ocean.

The airlock cycled through its rotation and Obi-Wan Kenobi stepped out of the amorphous shadows looking...decidedly worse for the wear. 

Plo ached at the sight. His normally carefully maintained beard was a scraggly mess. His robes hung tattered and bloodied. Of particular concern was how dry he looked, skin cracked and bleeding for want of water. The figure standing before him with a dead-eyed glare resembled less an accomplished Jedi Master and more the wretched husk of one. 

“Who are you?”  Obi-Wan's shade hissed. The chains around the Kel Dooran tightened. 

Well, however he might view himself and others...at least he’s willing to fight to defend what remains? At the bare minimum he’s not acting intentionally self destructive...

“Good Morning, Obi-Wan. I am a Jedi Master and your friend. I have been attempting to reach you through your rather impressive shielding. I must say, you’ve done a remarkable job confining me in this mental construct, its been sometime since anyone has managed to get the best of me in this arena.”

Obi-Wan snorted. “Don’t try and flatter me, you barely fought back. You could easily have forced your way anywhere, but for some reason you let me corral you, presumably to try and gain my trust. Now answer my question. Your presence is very much light so I doubt you’re Sidious or...Vader. I could be wrong obviously, but i can’t see either of themselves putting this much effort into that sort of mask...just tell me who you are, and why you’re with them.”

“I am Master Plo Koon, a High Council Member, and I am not unknown to you” he elaborated without hesitation. “I am glad that you can identify that I am a light force user. Can you not sense familiarity within my force presence, even so far within your domain?”

Obi-Wan reared back and the dripping noise in the corner stopped.

“It’s a trick. We might be in my head but that doesn’t mean I’m surrendering any of my thoughts to you,” Obi-Wan snarled. “I felt Plo Koon’s death, he was one of the first...and even if he somehow survived he would never work with the Sith to invade my mind. Never.”

“Obi-Wan. Listen to me. Please. I am not dead. I am not working with the Sith. I was brought in to reach you because no other method was working. You are in the healing halls at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.” Plo spoke calmly, but implacably, “We believe you have either experienced a uniquely detailed vision, or a run in with a dark-sider. Whatever has happened, I can feel the lingering impression of unsafety. But here and now, you are not in any immediate physical danger. There must be something I can do to convince you of your present physical location.”

“A uniquely detailed vision, huh? ha!” Obi-Wan replied, gesturing wildly. “Ha! You expect me to believe that what, the last four years of my life were a detailed prophecy? Why?”

“You...believe you have lived years beyond the rest of us. I take it the- what you remember has been dangerous enough to warrant maintaining abnormally tight control over your mental walls, precluding simply reaching out to ascertain the truth yourself.”

“Clearly my control wasn’t enough if you’re in here.” Obi-Wan muttered.

“I do apologize for the intrusion, but we’ve already used every other tool at our disposal to reach you. I repeat, is there anything that can be done to convince you that you are, from your perspective, ‘in the past’. You are a High Council member with a grandpadawan. It’s been two years since the start of the clone wars. You recently finished an extended clean up of the Mon Cala sector after your victory.”

Obi-Wan stared at him curiously. “If I set a test and you fail, will you agree to dispense with the pretenses?”

Plo-Koon hesitated. “Perhaps I’m making this deal in bad faith, as I am know I am Plo-Koon, and that everything I have said is the truth... but I swear that if you somehow prove that neither of those things are true and I am secretly working for a sith lord, I will...reveal that.”

Obi-Wan sighed. “Best I’m going to get, I suppose.”

The chains holding Plo-Koon loosened. Before he could respond, there was a hurtling rising sensation that he struggled not to fight against. After a disorienting moment, he found himself in his own body, feeling vaguely seasick. Obi-Wan blinked awake, apparently unfazed by the precautionary bonds holding him in place. Master Aerdo’s gaze flicked between them intensely. Plo-Koon held up a clawed hand to forestall any interruption while the two gained their bearings.

Obi-Wan spoke first:

“Cihynglo’s Fourth Meditation”

“...What?” Koon replied, honestly confused.

“Cihynglo was a renowned Kashykian Jedi, her mediations are, well i suppose were considered a quintessential example of High Republic cosmic poetry.”

“I’m familiar with Cihynglo- my master used to speak of her fondly.” Plo Koon said slowly. “Though I can’t say I’m familiar with her Fourth Mediation.”

“Hmm. Yes, well her poetry in the last few decades of her life got increasingly, well, esoteric. While most of her work was widely translated and distributed, she requested that those who wished to read her fourth Meditations do so in person, so as to experience without dilution the full calligraphy and artwork that accompanied her words. She only ever produced two copies. Any guesses where they were kept?”

Obi-Wan’s voice started out in the steady tones of a born lecturer, only to grow bitter towards the end.

“Is one in the temple?” Master Koon asked.

“Yes, one was held in the Master’s wing of the temple archives. The other was housed in a place of honor in The White Forest’s Great Tree of Knowledge. Considering both libraries were reduced to ash in the first month of the Empire, it is quite impossible, even for the Emperor, to find a copy.” 

His vague attempt at a smirk quickly fell flat. 

“I was privileged enough to be granted time to begin reading it once, but, alas, an emergency situation in the intergalactic war you created meant that I had to run off mid-sonnet. Bring me that book, let me hold it, read it, and I will believe that I somehow unlocked the secret of time-travel while overdosing on Spice.” 

Obi-Wan paused, catching his breath. “In the next fifteen minutes, please. Any more than that and you might try tracking down the few surviving Wookie scholars.” Koon flipped open his comm. “Master Nu, I have an urgent request.”

“Nu here, go on,” came the response.

“This may sound strange, but it is crucial that Cihynglo’s Fourth Meditation be brought to the healing halls, room seven. Within the next 15 minutes.”

“You do understand you’re talking about a physical book, not a flimsi-stack or a holocron. It’s not meant to leave a climate-controlled room.”

“I promise you, I would not ask if it weren’t life or death. Please Jocasta, I’ll explain later.”

“I’ll be there in 10. It had better be one durned good explanation.”

Obi-Wan looked bemused. ”You’re setting yourself up for failure.”

“I am glad you were able to come up with a test you found meaningful. Remember, you have friends here, regardless of whether you experienced subjective time travel or an incredibly detailed vision.”

They waited a little longer. Obi-Wan critically examined Master Aerdo.

“I’m a Senior Soul Healer” they offered at the non-verbal prompting.

“How interesting.” Obi-Wan remarked dryly.

They sat in awkward silence for another minute. 

They were all equally trained in suppressing fidgets, coughs, or other nervous tics, which made the wait that slightest bit more unbearable, each second nearly imperceptible from the one before.

Eventually the sound of heavy boots moving at speed approached.

Master Nu strode in, gently cradling a great burden. The book gleamed large and vital in the light of its stasis wrap. Her eyes widened at they took in Obi-Wan, still cuffed to the bed. 

“Cihynglo’s Fourth Meditation, as asked for. I trust you have an excellent explanation for how a book of poetry is a matter of life or death.”

“I’m hoping that it will convince our friend Master Kenobi that I am who I claim to be and we are where I claim we are.” Koon gently pulled the book from her grasp and reverently placed it on Obi-Wan’s lap. Obi-Wan stared at it uncomprehendingly.

“Obi-Wan, I’m going to uncuff you now. I trust that you will use your freedom to examine our ‘proof.’ We will physically intercede if you make any attempts at self harm.”

Master Nu gasped. “Then the temple rumors...I don’t understand.”

Obi Wan picked up the book as if he was afraid it might bite him. With an irritated snort, he opened brusquely to the middle, and began carelessly flipping ahead.

Master Nu started forward, offended, but Plo Koon held her back. “Please Master Nu, patience-”

Finally Obi-Wan seemed to reach the page he was looking for and stopped. “..And still the rain fell like blood of the womb” he murmured. “That...I tried to think of how the line ended but I...”

Everyone watched as the book shook in Obi-Wan's grasp. He turned the page, gasping slightly and murmuring as he read. “This is...a little gross, but oddly touching. I certainly would not have come up with it myself...but its so clearly...” They watched his react, eyes darting wildly and brow furrowing in confusion.

Several pages later he dropped the book abruptly.

“This is impossible,” he gasped.

Nu darted forward, carefully snatching it from his lap, "I am endeavoring to practice tolerance, but how is destroying an irreplaceable piece of literature supposed to help anyone?!” she snapped

“I admit I wondered that myself, but when I imagined what harm the Sith could do with some of the archive’s more practical works, I understood your decision to torch the collection” Obi-Wan responded dreamily. “I suppose the more beautific works would likely have been destroyed anyway...”

“Torch the archives? I would never.”

“But you did,” Obi-Wan insisted feverishly. “I found your message when we searching for survivors. There were so many bodies piled at the archive door that I was almost hopeful that they had managed to...but I suppose they held out just long enough for you to complete your task.”

Nu backed away slowly. “That sounds like quite the disturbing vision, Master Kenobi.”

“It wasn’t just a vision, it was my life. It-visions don’t last years!” he said, finally growing hysterical. “I remember everything! That gods-awful mission to Cato Nemodia! Getting takeout food with Anakin! The smell of burning flesh in the creche! Singing to Luke! The last year of the war! All of you! You crying after Dooku’s death,” he added gesturing wildly at the archivist. “It was so awkward! You were embarrassed! You told me that for some stupid reason you had ‘held out hope’ it was all an insane uncover mission, that he wasn’t really- Three years alone in the desert! I remember three years of living on fucking Tatooine, how could that possibly be a vision!”

“I...hadn’t told anyone that,” Nu whispered with a hint of alarm. She glanced at Plo Koon, daring him to comment. “I know its very much unlikely at this point, and by any measure, he’s taken things too far, but he’s gone on such long shadow missions in the past...” she looked away.

“Oh, Jocasta...” Plo sighed.

“Master Kenobi. I cannot explain how you came to have such detailed knowledge of the future,” Aerdo said, drawing focus back to the bewildered Obi-Wan, who had shifted into a defensive crouch on the bed. “But I do know one reasonably sure fire way to establish that this, us, is the present. Open yourself up to the force, please, just let yourself listen to what it has to say.

“I...want to, of course I want to believe- but the idea that I’m here- it’s, if you’re real than you can’t possibly understand, its too good to be true.” Obi-Wan responded brokenly.

“I know things have been clouded of late, but, if nothing else trust in the force to not lie to you.” Plo-Koon urged. “If you keep closing yourself off like this, how can you possibly learn if things are better than you think”

Obi-Wan collapsed from his crouch, knees folding underneath.

“If I am...even if I am in the past... Sideous might be watching...i didn’t- i don’t know the extent of his gaze- even if...” he trailed off.

“If it makes you feel safer, you are of course free to again raise your shields to whatever extent you feel necessary once you have verified your reality.” Aerdo replied smoothly.

Obi-Wan looked warily at the three Jedi in the room.“I...” he started, trying to articulate the swelling hope and fear only to find himself at a loss for words.

Aerdo shot him a reassuring smile, “If you don’t feel ready right now, that’s perfectly understandable. We’re very happy you’re willing to reach out as much as you have already. Would you like to pause this discussion for now so we can find you something to eat? I believe a simple broth is a customary first post-bacta meal, but if you have any special requests I’ll do what I can.”

Obi-Wan let out a deep breath, dropping his head into his hands. “I- I need to know, don’t I?” he mumbled. “Force help me...you win.” He took one last, searching look at the faces of his fellow Jedi before closing his eyes and surrendering himself to the force.

He opened a small hole in his mental barricades and tentatively allowed his thoughts to drip out. Tentatively, he trickled over the bank of Plo Koon’s being (expecting a frigid burn) only to find a warm and heartbreakingly familiar pool of tempered kindness. 

He ran, slightly faster now, over the other Jedi presences in the room. Having finished his course without encountering any dark undertow, he ebbed back. There was an indistinct impression of something heavy giving way.

Obi-Wan’s Shields Fell Like A Dam Beneath a Tidal Wave -

[vanithesquidwrites]

Waiting for Water (1/8)

First fanfiction. Criticism is welcome, but try not to eat me alive! I'm here to play in the sandbox, not to become a writer. ;-)

Apologies for the somewhat reader-unfriendly Second Person PoV. It was chosen for a reason; hopefully I manage to pull it off. The first chapter is spent in a very bad mental space, by virtue of directly following the cliff, and refers to suicide rather bluntly.

The fic follows Tharaêl as PoV. The one and only relationship of the story does not involve him, and happens entirely offscreen.

Crosspost to AO3 for those who prefer to read there. Warning: 10k words post.

Maybe it's worth a try.

Maybe it's even worth thousands.

1 - TO NOWHERE

You don't remember the first day.

There has to have been one, like every other time. You know that, intellectually. And yet like every other time, it simply isn't there. Only the sound of wind, the cold of ice and snow, then waking up under a tent with your head pounding like a drum.

It makes sense, you suppose. You had other things on your mind than the company or landscape. Two decades' worth of other things. And even without them, it is a fact of life that you are shit at beginnings. Endings, you can manage. Especially bad ones. But fresh starts and rebirths? New leaves turning over? Those happen to other people. The Undercity knows no spring, and neither do its denizens.

Maybe that's why the memories never manage to stay. Or maybe the ghost of your past steals them away from you, like the mercenary said it did back in the Refuge. You suppose that makes sense as well. If the soul is long dead and the body not even yours, why should the mind be otherwise?

The second day goes by as most days do, its memories clear enough — but that day does not feature much. Mainly dark skies, the discomfort of too-small clothes you cannot recall acquiring, and a slow trek down frozen slopes, trailing the mercenary's back. Precious little words, if any, after you think to ask why you are walking in the first place.

"Because if we were to find ourselves among the merry citizens of Ark right now," the mercenary answers you, "I trust neither of us to not tear out the throat of the first prissy Sublime who walks by."

You don't believe you could. You feel too numb for that. Too numb, and much, much too tired.

You close your eyes an instant and Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders. Your eyes fly back open, and you shudder, shaking your head to help clear the image away.

You hadn't believed you could ever tear out Letho's throat either. And yet you did, didn't you? You did. No amount of clumsy attempts to put his corpse back together is ever going to change that. Nor will any amount of dwelling within the Upper City. What will you even do, once there? You have no Path. You know no trade. How long until you fall right back into stabbing and cutting throats?

Two moons?

Three?

Perhaps it is better to walk. Perhaps the bears and wolves will solve the problem on the road. A painful solution, perhaps, but a fair one by all accounts. You feel more kin to them than to the city, anyway.

If all else fails, the fall remains, you tell yourself as a comfort. The slope is not quite as high up as the old temple was, but the cliffs remain steep, and the ground more than far enough. All you have to do is turn right, walk a little, and close your eyes — and then there will be no more questions, no more pain, no more remembering the absence behind Brother Sorrow's eyes.

But you said that you would try, and so try you do. The fall can wait. There will always be time later, unless you are dead already.

That second day is cold and unmemorable, but its evening stands out, with an improvised bonfire in the shelter of an old tomb. Your bread is long since hard, and even the mercenary’s Dal'Sark mead feels like liquid ice, but a pair of freshly-killed wolves promises good meat for the next few days. The mercenary skins and cuts with the ease born of long practice, while you prowl the area looking for dead wood, fishing twig and branch from the snow like you once did scraps from sewage. Wet wood, most of it, but still much better than the risk of running out of firewood in the night.

When you think to ask about watch, the mercenary shrugs, and answers your question by recalling the apparition she fought the Father with. You spend the rest of the evening haunted not by the ghost, but by the questions it leaves you too terrified to ask.

What is it that remains, behind the undead eyes of the lost Rhalâim?

If you were to find and dig up the corpse that once used to be yours, if you brought it to life as some Entropists do, who would be looking through its eyes?

Tharaêl Narys?

What is Tharaêl, anyway?

More questions dance across the back of your mind and eyelids, fleeting, formless, and all the more terrifying for their lack of definition. You try to grasp for words with which to give them a shape, but the sounds all die in your throat.

You end up lying back to back with the mercenary, in a half-tent half-bed assembled from her bundle of cured pelts and a pile of coffins. The corpse of the second wolf, wrapped in some old linen, serves as your common pillow. The aptness goes uncommented, but it does not go unnoticed; neither of you sleeps all that much, instead trading quiet childhood stories throughout the night.

For all the awkwardness and lack of proper sleep, and for all that the apparition nags at the back of your mind, that one night proves to be your most comfortable in years. Restful in some vague, abstract form. Perhaps because of the fire, or your freedom from the Temple.

You wake up to what the mercenary tells you is a blizzard.

The weather sees you spend third and fourth days alike walking from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn again, making use of any little bit of calm in the storm. This rock, that outcropping, those trees — all are made into shelter from the northern winds for a while. All are quickly left behind, never quite sufficient. The days run into each other, a jumbled mess of blinding snow, aching legs, and cold meat. The exhaustion builds on along with your migraine, until a cloud of hollowness settles over your mind at the sight of the ghost hacking at wolves and bears.

You know you knew the man before. You recognize his silhouette, the line of his shoulders and the shape of his brow. You remember that your first glimpse of the ghost had surprised you, five days ago — just as you remember that you proceeded not to care. You had been more... amused... by the mercenary turning the Father's own lamb against him than scandalized by the fate of your so-called brother.

You knew him then. You know you did. And yet his name escapes you now, no matter how deep you try to dig into your mind. So do his duties and his age, his reputation in the ranks, or even simply how far his bedroll had been from yours. Remains only a gaping hole and a vague sense of dread, as if some unseen hand had reached into your head and torn out the memories.

They'd been there just five days ago.

The inevitable question slips out on that fourth night, as migraine steals your sight and leaves you scrambling for context within a blinding void.

"How dead is he?"

You believe you are attempting to fetch wood when it happens, but you're not completely certain — your mind proves just as prompt to lose all track of itself when migraine blinds you as when meditation did. Still, fetching wood makes the most sense. You can do little in the wild but help to keep the fire fed, and you have been pondering firewood for the past days. The steps between green limb, wet limb, dead limb, and rotten limb. Wondering about the edges, about the point at which torn limbs can still sprout new roots into soil.

You hear the mercenary turn, the stop to her shuffling and the sound of her cloak brushing the ground. You hear that particular brand of silence that is usually accompanied by a perplexed frown.

Then she swears. Much, and angrily. In several languages.

"...That is one mess of a question," she replies in a tired voice once the swearing finally ends. You presume you must have sat down, because her words are clear, undisturbed by movement or distance. "Shit, I'm sorry. It might take a bit to lay down context for what you're really asking, and I'm self-taught, so I'd have to make up corny analogies instead of—"

"How dead am I," you ask on, ignoring her babbling. "Am I dead? Undead? I don't feel dead, but all the reasons why I don't are things that your... thing clearly does as well. I don't feel alive either. I don't feel anything. What's the difference? Is there a difference?"

There is silence, for a long while, and you almost regret interrupting. But you know the mercenary enough by now to be sure that if you hadn't, the blathering would never stop. Yet for all that she falls silent, she does not provide an answer, and so you blunder on, trying to put the void that caught onto you into words.

"There wasn't a difference for — for Letho," you explain, and a shiver runs through your bones at the sound of your own voice. "His body was there, but... no, it wasn't even his body, was it," you mumble in realization. "Just the... substitute. Why was it so — what's the turning point? Is there some—"

"You're alive, Letho's dead, and it's undead," the mercenary cuts across your words, and though sight does not register, you can hear her walking over and feel her sit down next to you. "The short answer is that you're nothing like my apparition, and that I am very fucking sorry I didn't rethink its presence. I just — you were fine with it before, and — shit!"

You hear her slap her own face with both hands a few times, as you saw her do after Qalian, after the mercenary, after Brother Hatred. You hear her take in a long breath, as if fighting to calm herself.

"The full answer is complicated," she lets out in a sigh, "and it is guesswork, not research. Are you sure that you want guesswork? It's done you enough harm as it is."

As if that could matter in any shape or form. Your entire life is guesswork. The past decade has been nothing but harm. More of either can hardly make a difference by this point. You care for the answer less than for a stop to the hollowness. You want the doubts, the shapeless questions, to be over. Dead and buried.

"I need this to be done," you say, hoping that the mercenary will read your intent in the word.

"...Okay," she finally answers, and you sigh in relief at having gotten through without five minutes' worth of digression this time. But then she stands back up, and her steps move away.

Before you can let out a word of complaint, however, the mercenary returns on your other side, and you can feel the weight of her cloak settle on your back. She wraps it around your shoulders, pulls the fur-lined cowl over your bare head, and sits back down next to you, sighing all the while.

"I'm not cold," you say, though you suppose the weather makes it by nature half a lie.

"That's not what it's for," she replies, but before you can ask what she means by that, she starts to explain at long last. "I don't know how the Rhalâs speaks of death, but if you're like most people here, you see it as either a place like the 'Eternal Paths' or as a... permanent state, of sorts. It isn't. The place doesn't exist, and the state is entropy. Death is different, although entropy can lead to it. Death is... more or less a cardinal direction in the Sea of Eventualities."

You feel yourself blink at the words as you attempt to conjure some sort of mental image. Then you feel yourself frown at the words, as sight refuses to comply even within the confines of your mind. Your rub your hands against your eyes, but the pressure does little save for making the migraine flare.

"Here," says the mercenary's voice, and after a few crackling sounds, you feel the cold wetness of snow slide across your forehead. "Rub it on a little. It helps a bit, or it does for me at least."

You feel your way into grabbing the compacted snow from her hand, and press it over your eyelids for a few seconds at a time. It's not a healer's cure nor an apothecary's balm, but it does numb some of the pain, if only a little. It's all you're getting, in any case. If the mercenary had a spell or potion to cure headaches, you figure she would have proposed it by now.

It's almost amusing, in its own dark, depressing way. Throwing fire at passersby? Any Arcanist can do that. Crushing minds with a thought? A Psionicist's bread and salt. Tearing out souls, raising the dead, building untold abominations out of rotting blood and bone? There always seems to be some Entropist working on it.

But curing a migraine? Good fucking luck with that.

"I'm fine," you tell the mercenary, once the throbbing has subsided enough for you to cast the snow aside. "Keep going."

It's only once the demand is out of your mouth that you realize it should have been preceded by 'thank you.'

"Sure," the mercenary agrees, probably long since used to your curtness. "So then, if it helps: imagine that the Sea of Eventualities is a big room filled with tables. Now take any of these tables, and imagine that it's a facet of time, with our reality as a map spread on top of it. The map covers the whole table, north east west and south, and we can go anywhere on it, provided we have the means that fit the terrain."

Simple enough, so far.

"But even though we don't see them on the map as such, there's actually two more directions we can go," the mercenary says, and you imagine from the sound of her chainmail that she is gesturing to illustrate her words. "Up above the map, which escapes our facet of time into the rest of the Sea of Eventualities, and down below the map, which collides with our facet of time and goes absolutely nowhere. That's what death is: running into the table and getting stuck in time. Still with me?"

You must have nodded, because she resumes once again.

"Alright. Now, undeath. Imagine that people are like boats sailing across the map, with their bodies as the hulls — sorry," she gives your shoulder a tap at the unfortunately familiar word, "and their souls as the sails. The hull by itself drifts, and the sail by itself sinks, so they have to be tethered to each other to go anywhere. Those tethers are usually a strong mast — senses — and well-tied ropes — memories. But if there's, say, a big storm in the Sea of Eventualities while the ropes or mast are damaged, the sails — the soul — can be torn off by the wind and make that move up or down. It still exists," she hurriedly insists. "It's just... off the map. Over the clouds or, more commonly, under the water."

You suppose this is why you feel like you are drowning on air so often. The less time you spend thinking of the body, the better — but if the hole your past made of your memories are its ropes, your soul has to be in a sorry state indeed.

"Now, the soul is just like actual sails," the mercenary presses on. "Whether the storm carried it up or down, it can't move back onto the map by itself, let alone bind memory-ropes to a sensory-mast. It doesn't have limbs to tie knots with. So unless someone catches it, or some magical wind moves it again, it's just... stuck. That's how undeath happens. The soul untethers, there's a big wave in the Sea of Eventualities, and the sails get thrown back onto the hull, rather than on the mast and ropes."

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, and you let yours fall in your hands. A shaky breath escapes your chest.

Don't. Don't think about Letho. Not now. There's nothing to do there anymore. Letho is done, Letho is gone. Just as he always was. His corpse — not even his, not truly — just happened to keep walking for a few years.

...What had become of his body? The real one? You looked everywhere. The pit, the sewers, the waterways, even all the way through the crypts once you knew how to wield a blade. What had the Father done with him? Did you find him and simply push him out of your mind, like you did the screams and silence the mercenary told you of?

And what of that damn temple? Did you bury him then? You'd wanted to. You still do. You'd asked the mercenary to leave, and she had, and then...

...Then you'd woken up in the tent, and she was right there.

You can't remember. You fucking can't remember.

"That's not what happened to you," the mercenary hurries to say once again, though she fails to catch up with your careening mind. "You're not undead. I know that, because my spells don't harm you and I can't see your soul. Which means that it's tethered in place. Not mismatched, not damaged, not free to take."

'Not damaged'? It doesn't feel 'not damaged'. And what does 'not free to take' even mean? So what if it wasn't? It hadn't been before, and that hadn't so much as slowed down the Father, now had it? Let alone stopped him. Clearly, anyone who knew how to undo the ties could do so at will, just as he did.

Just like the mercenary might. Where would her knowledge come from — where would her ghosts and skeletons come from — if not keen interest and practice? You are not so blind as to believe her ever fully truthful with you, not after seeing her so freely take part in your lies. Not after noticing the long silences between your questions and her answers.

If you were to fall on these slopes, would you, too, wake up as an empty ghost, or as a shambling corpse?

How would you even know, before it was too late?

You clench your eyes tight and press hard against your temples, trying to force your mind into killing the suspicion. You cannot afford to let it take over the emptiness anger left in its wake. The woman can be daft, yes. Naïve even for a Sunchild, and much less mindful of consequences than she fancies herself to be. But as she is all that, she is also steadfast. Even at her most inane, as you disagreed on every last thing under the Sun, she was never anything but loyal to you.

You cling to that loyalty, even as naivety burns. Your past is gone. Your cause is gone. Your rage is gone. Letho is gone all over again. Your life is gone, twelve years gone at that. Even your swords and bow are gone, presumably still on that cliff, though you can't recall leaving them. Your hideout still remains, but you cannot go there, and the mercenary knows of its location anyway. The woman's loyalty is the only thing you have left. You cannot let your doubts pry it away from you.

You blindly scrape the ground for another handful of snow, and press it against your forehead. It does little more for the migraine, but it does serve to distract the mind. The mercenary has begun to rub your back in what you assume she means as sympathy, but you tune the sensation out to concentrate on your hands. You focus on the cold, on letting suspicion seep out of your skull like the heat; imagine doubt running down your gloves with the melting ice.

It doesn't work, of course. You never were good at meditating, and the few things you were good at are too tainted by circumstance to be of any use right now.

"So, to answer the things you really meant to ask," the mercenary continues, oblivious to your inner thoughts. "Did somebody 'create' you? No. Nobody can create souls, only dissipate them or move them. That's why we're all still stuck using Pyrean crystals. So what the," she pauses, "what he did was halfway between casting a spell on you and giving you a wooden leg. He altered you, yes, but he didn't create you, only a 'hull you must transcend’, to use his own parlance. That shit he said was just his arrogance speaking. The only person with any right to call you their masterpiece is yourself."

"I know," you reply. And you do. Still, hearing the woman say it manages to be almost... comforting, somehow. Even if the thought of this being the best that you could achieve only serves to drive needles in the wound.

"And are you dead? Well, you're not off the map, are you? You're not above the clouds, you're not underwater. You're here," she says, and she pulls your gloved hands away from your face to hold them in her own. "I'm still with you. We're walking south towards Frostcliff Tavern, it's snowing, it's cold, and it's bloody fucking miserable, so we're definitely alive."

"Hurray," you mutter with all the sarcasm you can still work into your voice, and the mercenary grips your hands tighter in response.

At least you still have this, you tell yourself, focusing on her grasp and the melted snow on your brow. You have the cold to numb the pain, and a pair of hands willing to hold onto you rather than cast you away. An acquaintance, even, if one with a strong propensity for utterly failing to understand your point. You clench your jaw and grit your teeth, attempting to summon the determination you'd still possessed a week ago. So what if you have little left to your name? You've managed with much less, and done it twice at that. You can handle a third time.

The thought feels as hollow and empty as the mercenary's hands.

"Now for the... messy parts," she keeps going, more hesitant this time. "Does that make you a different person than before the experiments?"

Your false heart skips a beat.

You call yourself Tharaêl Narys. You feel like Tharaêl Narys. You even remember being Tharaêl Narys — or at the very least remember some of it. But does that hold any meaning, if Tharaêl Narys was a corpse left to rot on the Father’s workbench? If his memories are halfway gone? Are they truly his memories, or merely a copy of them? A set of old ropes wrapped around another's soul?

If you were to go find his corpse and have it brought to life again, who would look out of its eyes?

Tharaêl Narys?

What is Tharaêl, anyway?

"...Unless this body is a perfect copy of the previous one," the mercenary blunders on, "I'd say that yes, you are different. Very. But not in some fundamental sense of not being yourself," she interrupts your thoughts before they can spiral further. "You're still who you were yesterday, still who you were ten years ago. Rather, you're like... someone with permanent lycanthropy, or a piece of music meant for a lyre being instead played on a flute. Undergoing a change of form by itself induces a change of content, because the information is no longer processed in the same fashion. Some inevitably gets lost or otherwise displaced. Still you," she insists, "but different."

Okay. You but different. It sounds... trite. Almost nonsensical, really. But it's good enough. It will do. It's not like anyone is there to tell the difference anyway; anyone who remains only ever knew Brother Wrath. Nobody left alive knows Tharaêl Narys. Not even you, some days.

"And were you dead," she continues, "as in did your sails get thrown into the water and remain there for a while? If what he said is true, yes. And you're probably," she hesitates again, "...confused, or at least partly so, because you still have that sense of up above the map and down under the map existing even though you can't see them anymore. On top of that, your ropes, your memories, aren't tied to your new senses in quite the same place as before, which eight years of being taught to filter out your body can't possibly have helped. So you feel... poorly connected. Like you're detached from things, when you are attached — just not where you expect to be."

Because it just figures. The Rhalâs simply has to be poison to you all the way down to the marrow. Of fucking course.

First the gutter, then the sewers, then an orphanage that sold you, then the Dust Pit, then a cult that tore out your soul in the most literal of ways. What next? Maybe you should tell the mercenary to double-check her ceiling. With your luck, it may just cave in the moment you get there.

You raise an arm to wipe your face with the back of your glove, and the mercenary's hand is dragged along with yours, her freezing steel gauntlet colliding with your nose.

"So sometimes," she goes on once again, waiting for you to be done to pull your hand back to your lap, "when things get very stormy, you... flicker. A big wave crops up, and since the ropes that tether your soul aren't in the same place as before, your soul gets pulled by the wind a very little bit, for a very little while, in a way that you're not used to. Then the wave passes, and you come right back into place. And that's what you are," she concludes, bringing your two hands together and clasping them between her own. "Not dead, not undead, just... very out at sea, and needing to tighten a few bonds here and there."

You take a long breath in. You let it out, slowly, attempting to discipline yourself into relaxing your jaw.

You take in another.

A third.

"What happens if the ropes break down," you manage to ask on the fourth, finally able to form words.

"They will not break down," she answers, adamant. "And if somehow they still do," she forestalls your remark, raising her voice even as you were opening your mouth to protest her optimism, "I can catch souls, and I have a friend who can bind them. I'm not going to let you drift, I'm not going to let you drown, and we're going to do our best to make you stormworthy again. Alright?"

It's stupid. It's optimism without thought, words without actions, good intentions without the slightest speck of actual planning to back them up. Hopes upon hopes upon hopes, resting on the shoulders of an outlander daft enough to still believe in fairytales such as friendship and fairness in the Undercity.

...Still, whatever it is, it's there. There and willingly shared with you. Not with Brother Wrath, or some masterpiece, or with some other mental construct only extant in their beholder's mind. With you. Tharaêl. Not Tharaêl Narys, perhaps, but Tharaêl who smirks and screams and stabs and keeps calling the woman the fucking idiot she is.

It's a hope and a prayer, but it's what you have, and it's clearly all you're getting. Maybe you can both make it through this stupid plan as well, like you somehow did the last one.

Your shoulders feel as if they are mere moments from turning to stone, and so you let your head fall back, hoping to relax the muscles of your neck a little. That plan finds itself thwarted by a dull thud, however, and a smattering of snow falls on top of your upturned face. It takes a few blinks for you to notice that you are staring at the underside of snow-laden branches. You must have had your back to a tree. You hadn't even noticed anything was there.

You have barely realized that you could see the branches by the time the migraine throbs, robbing you of sight once again.

You sigh.

"It all sounds so simple when put in your daft metaphors," you tell the mercenary, blinking out the melt of the snow that just dusted your cheeks.

"I did warn you I would be forced to make corny analogies," she says, sounding somewhat... amused, somehow. "It is mostly accurate, though. If heavily, er... stylized."

"That's not the point," you snap, bringing your head back upright to look at — or rather blindly stare at — the direction her voice comes from. "Metaphors don't mend souls. They don't stop arrows. They don't fill the stomach or shelter from the mud. It doesn't matter how I feel or what pretty little thoughts you decide to have about it — it matters what I can do."

"...That would be why I offered my roof, yes," the mercenary replies, uncomprehending. "So you can figure out what you want to do."

"But I don't know what can be done. For food, for money, for — for anything, fuck it all. Not in the Upper City. As things are, I'm just going to end in the Pit all over again."

Or on another cliff, you do not say. The mercenary can likely deduce that one on her own.

She lets go of your hands, leaving you once again stranded in the white void. Mercifully enough, the silence does not last; you can hear her shuffle in place, creaking leather and crackling snow against the backdrop of the wind. Then you can feel the heavy hood settle against your scalp once more, its fur lining tickling the tips of your ears and eyebrows. It must have slid of when you let your head fall.

"You'll manage," she tells you as you hear her sit back down. "You need time to wind down, yes, but you have it. I have enough money to last us both a good long while. We'll be fine. Both of us."

That's a stopgap, at best. Not a true solution. You're unarmed, you're unskilled, you're Pathless, and it seems that to any competent Arcanist looking at you, you're also dead besides. Not the most auspicious of ways to start a new life anywhere, let alone in the damn city. But there's no point in telling her that, now is there? Having bought a house within Ark does not make the mercenary any less of an Outlander. She would hear the words if you spoke, but she wouldn't understand them. Just like she doesn't get them now.

You let your head fall back into your hands, but the mercenary soon pushes them away, grabbing you by the shoulders to pull you back to your feet. You let yourself follow the pull, stumbling a few steps once the difference in heights makes her hold more hindrance than assistance.

"You're tired and having an unbelievably bad week," the mercenary says, in a tone of voice that you take to mean the words are a conclusion. "Come on. I'll make you some windbreak, and you can rest as long as you want. Don't worry about the fire, food, or watch. Just lie down until you feel like getting up again. Take all the time you need. If it's an hour, it's an hour. If it's a week, I'll find us food and build us a tent."

You try to look at her, turning your head in the direction of her voice — and find out to your own surprise that you can see her, if poorly. The white of all the moonlit snow still shoots fire into your brain, but the spots of black about her — her hair, her eyes, her clothes — are dull and dark enough for you to grasp the contours of. You gaze into that shapelessness, into those blobs of blackness dancing across the white void, and the shapeless question finally takes form as well, tumbling from your lips like so many stones on your back.

"If I hadn't killed him," you ask, and you despise the way your voice quakes as it forms the words. "If I hadn't killed Letho — could you have brought him back?"

The blobs of black flicker, and you wipe at your eyes, attempting to fend off the migraine and the light. But you feel melted snow run down to your chin at the gesture, and so you wipe harder, harsher. Willing the drops to fade away.

You don't cry. You can't afford to. Every tear is a chink daggers can use to reach your bones. You are exposed enough as is. No need to make your weakness worse.

"...There was no soul left there," the mercenary says, her voice almost lost in the wind. "I looked as hard as I could, but he was gone long before your swords ever touched his neck. I'm sorry."

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders. The mercenary's fingers dig into the wool and the leather stretched along your arms, uncomfortable in their hold and in their simple existence. You let go of your face, bat both her hands away.

She lets you.

"Try to sleep, Tharaêl," she says, blobs of black bobbing with her voice. "If things get in any way truly dangerous, I'll teleport us home right away."

"Home," you echo the mercenary's silhouette, in a fruitless attempt to wring meaning out of the word.

"Yes," she insists, her voice still quiet and yet firm. "Home."

You stare at the shadow of her, at the uncertain shape of snowy trees against the bright night sky. You wonder what it is that determines the gap, that defines the difference between "Sister Pride, to be killed", "Brother Hatred, to step over", and "Brother Wrath, to be brought home."

You wish you knew what Letho saw, when he picked you to share his hay rather than any other child.

"...Okay," you tell the mercenary, resigned to finding no answers.

Of the fifth day and night, you recall only dreams. Nightmares, really. A rough push at your back. Masks in the night. Your swords cutting through bone. Sha'Gun in the temple. Your arms covered in blood. The old man begging for his son. Letho asking the Father whether or not to kill you. Reaching for his face only for it to melt and rot in your hands. The mercenary stabbing you and leaving you to die. Letho's body falling to pieces, combusting into unrecognizable charred meat. A head rolling across the tiles. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. And all the screams. So many screams. Then silence, and then nothingness, and beyond that a deep, dark void.

You are almost grateful for the glare of the snow when you wake up.

The mercenary says that you were more comatose than asleep, curled under the small tent of furs nailed to an old table that she had assembled for you. Says that she tried to shake you awake, slap you awake even, once you began tossing. Says that she could never manage.

You suppose there is luck in that. You could have done without the dreams, but thanks to that day's worth of sleep, the migraine becomes bearable.

That sixth day is... good enough. Your memories still flee you, but sight and sound are clear, the snow is less blinding, and the cold of the air feels crisp and clean on your face. You devour a breakfast of bear atop the bare wooden guard post you seem to have been sleeping on, then the mercenary and you set out for the Crystal Forest, infinitely grateful for its shelter from the wind. An idle argument on the nature of wisps springs up along the way, meant less for relevance than to busy the mind and fill the silence. You segue into theory upon theory, only rarely interrupted by spirits and elementals — which the mercenary in turn interrupts with her own.

The mercenary's ghosts are notably absent.

You feel somewhat... useless, standing there watching her. Almost enough to make you wish you'd kept your swords, wherever you left them. Or at least thought to keep your bow. What are you even doing, strolling unarmed and unarmored through the Northwind Mountains? Depriving your hired sword of her strongest weapon just to assuage your own fears? What the fuck is wrong with you?

Your arrow pierces through the mercenary's neck, your swords through Brother Hatred's throat, Letho's head rolls across the tiles as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders, and the diffuse pink glow of the Crystal Forest returns to your awareness in a gasp.

That, the memories say, in their infinite wisdom. That is what is wrong with you. That is what you are doing, what you are striving to avoid, strolling unarmed and unarmored.

You try to push the thoughts out of your mind's eye as you walk, but you never truly succeed.

You ask the mercenary about weapons themselves, eventually, in an attempt to redirect your focus from their use to their abandonment. She seems rather unconcerned by their absence, however. She can handle elementals and many more besides, she says, cheeks flushed with anger, or perhaps disapproval. She can do it with or without your assistance, thank you, and with or without ghosts. You put your swords to good use anyway, she adds, and it felt wrong to take them back. Better to leave them to the mountains, serving to mark Letho's grave.

You did bury him, then. That's... good. A net improvement on the dreams. You still cannot recall one bit of it, but the knowledge that you did go through with your plan makes the memories less pressing to recover. All that matters it that it was done. That whatever remained of Letho's soul was laid to rest, and that you were there. The details are irrelevant.

Gods, you buried Letho.

You buried Letho and it only took you an entire fucking decade spent failing to recognize anything from his stature to his voice. You lived with him, for fuck's sake. You saw him almost every day! How did you manage to be so fucking blind?! And how many bodies did it even take you to get there? The old man and his family, the 'handful' for the Rhalâta, the handful you didn't quite kill but drove to their deaths anyway, the other Rhalâim, the other mercenary... Would you have killed the mercenary walking by your side right now, if you'd had no other sacrifice to give before the door of the Room of Paintings? And how many dozens did you kill in the Pit? You don't even remember.

Some fucking brother you are. Some fucking friend.

You shake the thought out of your head, willing doubt and regret away, and resume your slow trek southwards in the mercenary’s wake.

When you reach sight of the tavern at last, on the evening of that sixth day, the last light of the sun is fading from the peaks. The mercenary's pace progressively slows down, before coming to a dead stop right in the middle of the road. You are the one who needs to prod at her, for once, for her to admit to her issue.

Which happens to be the Rhalâs sitting for all to see right in-between your eyes.

You would be angry at yourself for the gross oversight, but you mostly just feel disturbed. You've been dodging your own reflection for years because of the damn brand, donned hoods and headbands whenever needing to slip out of sight. It's barely been a week; how did you manage to forget it was there already? If your mind is wandering that much, there may in fact be merit to the mercenary's delaying. Frostcliff's denizens may not have thought much of one stray Rhalâim, but Ark's city guard would likely not have been quite so kind.

The mercenary observes the brand, pokes at it with a steel-gauntleted hand, then claims that there may be a rather simple solution. Scars don't take to magic too well, but this one is rather shallow by virtue of its location; a simple pass of skinning knife should expose fresh tissue, raw and recent enough to cure. She could heal that cleanly, she thinks, like she did all your other wounds.

She'd been wary of offering without Ambrosia close at hand, she says, but with a good bed to rest in — and a 'colleague' to barter with in Frostcliff — the issue is as good as gone. Why spend time and effort hiding something she can simply remove?

You've seen her wield her skinning knife enough to trust her skill with it, and maybe getting a good look at a piece of your artificial flesh will... help things sink in, somehow. You've worn the Rhalâs across your face and shoulders more than enough. Those years are gone; so should it be. You hesitate only for an instant, before taking up the offer as wholeheartedly as you can.

You lie back onto a nearby rock, tilting your head upwards as far as it will go. It feels alien and familiar all at once, movement and position well known, but the starry skies overhead as foreign as a brand new land. You find yourself looking up at the mercenary too, for once. A strange experience in itself, after so many days spent striving to recall to look below your shoulder level when trying to catch her eyes. She tests your forehead with a thumb, pinches and twists the skin, determining depth and angle — and you find yourself wishing she would simply get things over and done with.

The mercenary leans over you, eyes and blade-bearing hand focused on your forehead, framed by the dark night sky and the light of the moon.

The mercenary cowers at your feet, lip and nose broken and bleeding, framed by the blue light of a spell cast in your direction.

Your hands dive to your hips, but they grasp only air; you try to step away, and back into hard rock. You open your mouth to bark a question, yet find yourself winded, breath coming in short bursts and ears filled with nothing but the drum of your racing pulse. Cornered, you blink, once, twice — but still the change of scene refuses to make sense, leaving you to cast your gaze about in a vain quest for answers.

It strikes you, as you look around, how unfamiliar the sight is. The lines of the peaks, the texture of the snow and rocks, all of it is alien to you. The Temple had held its own grandeur, especially in torchlight, but even it had been held between the cave's walls, had stooped under its ceiling. There had always been rock, wherever your eyes went. Not so here. Here there is sky, there is distance — and there is horizon. The Temple had never had one. Nor had the Undercity. Not even the Upper City, the handful of times you'd been there.

The world had been aborted. Stopped in its tracks by rock walls. And yet now that you're freed from them, you keep feeling that if you stumble you will fall into the sky.

Your thoughts come to a brutal stop, as you find yourself riveted by the sight of droplets of blood splattering across the blue glow. You raise a hand to your face, and it comes away slick and red, as a sharp burning pain flares to life in its wake.

"Fawhaêl?"

Your follow the voice by instinct, and your gaze returns to the mercenary, still bracing herself on the ground. You'd forgotten she was there. Her eyes meet yours, wide and dull black, from behind the blue shimmer of her spell—

—and the details do not add up. It is her off hand that faces you, not the one she casts fire with, and all her spells drain, burn, or freeze. They do not lacerate, do not cause wounds that bleed. She does not seem to be angry, let alone attacking you. Her posture isn't aggressive. It's defensive, if anything. Worried, even, judging from the line of her brow. The spell is a shielding one. You've seen her cast it many times. You've seen her act like this before, back in—

You blink.

Back in the orphanage.

Shit. Did you have a... a 'seizure' again?

"...Yeah," you answer both her call of your name and your own mind, letting your gaze flutter about for more hints of context. "Yeah, I'm — what happened?"

The mercenary's head rolls back in visible relief, and her shielding spell winks out.

"Sh'fhine," she slurs, reaching out with one hand to brace herself on rock. She drags herself to her knees with a groan, starts to fish around the belt bags where she keeps her potion stock. "Yuhr ohhay, I'm ohhay. You fhunch like a fugghin fhroll, ut I'm ohhay."

Your vision starts to spin as you eyes flick from blood to rock to snow, and suddenly your head feels like it's set adrift, unable to fully focus on the mercenary's words. You let the rock at your back bear your weight, and turn your face up to the sky, using the stars as reference by which to gauge the accuracy of your sight.

The trembling lines take a moment to fully resolve into dots.

"What did I do," you ask, once you feel sure enough of your own senses to resume your question. "I don't — this didn't happen when I got the brand done."

"Sh'fhine," the mercenary reiterates between snorts, spitting what you suppose is the blood running down her throat. "You had an ehhisode. Shudda sheen iss gommin. Whir gud. Khenna heal fhad?"

It takes you a confused moment to parse her words, caught as you are by the remnants of the sensation of slipping from your own grasp. It takes more moments still for your eyes to return to her in response, and for her extended hand to reach through the fog of confusion that is blanketing you. But it does reach, eventually, and you give the mercenary a silent nod in response.

You tune out her ministrations as you focus inward, slowly reining your breath and pulse back under your control.

A few potions and spells later, the mercenary's nose and lip are in one piece again, and your forehead no longer bleeds. Your garments, however, can hardly say the same, and you are left to clean what looks like a pint of blood off yourselves with nothing but handfuls of snow. A lost cause if there ever was one.

"Sorry," you tell the mercenary.

You don't know what else to say.

"I've set you on fire twice," she replies, shrugging. "I kind of deserve it for being so bloody stupid, honestly. Yes, let's take a knife to Tharaêl's head and make light of it! What could possibly go wrong?"

"What did you say?"

The mercenary's eyes raise from their inventory of her ever-shortening stock of medical supplies to throw an exasperated glare in your direction.

"I am not daft enough to repeat it, thank you very much."

...Fair. Grating, but fair. You recall broken noses to be a rather annoying experience. You let the mercenary proceed with her sorting of her stocks in silence, allowing your eyes to wander across the ground and rocks — and the blood staining them.

"...The brand," you finally remember, and you run a hand across your forehead by rote, finding it eerily smooth and tender. "Did it work?"

"Yes," the mercenary says, her frown turning into a smile as she packs the last of the potions and salves back into her bags. "Well, we look like we butchered our way down the road and you really need a shave, but your face is as smooth as it ever gets and I've got hides to salt and hang, so we can blame the bears, and — whoah."

Your eyes whip back to the mercenary, only to find hers open wide, their uniform blackness staring as if through you.

"What?"

"I'm fine, don't worry," she answers, but the way she lengthens each sound would tend to say the opposite. "I'm contemplating the extent of our luck, I think. Shit. It hasn't been this bad in a long time. The visions, not our luck. Our luck is great."

"Great," you echo in pure disbelief.

Visions? What the fuck is the bloody idiot going on about, this time?

"Well, this version of you is sporting a rather distinct lack of being dead," she says, "and I am not dragging your corpse. So I think yes, we're doing great. Sucks to be alternate us, though."

"Arcanist's fever," you deduce.

You've never experienced the sensation yourself, but you've been there as others did, in the Pit and the Temple both. Messy moments, those were, some of them with messier endings still. None ever outright saw into other realities as the fever hit, however. That, or they never mentioned it.

"Yeah," the mercenary confirms your guess. "Ambrosia and some rest, and I'll be good as new. The shady guy near the back tables always has some. Don't worry. I can trade him some books for it."

Which means that both of you are unable to defend yourselves, and fully dependent on the assistance of a 'shady guy' who may or may not be present. Fantastic. Utterly grand.

You open your mouth to tell the mercenary of the flaw in her plan, only to let it close again. You look at her face, her flushed face, and it dawns upon you that its red never came from anger. She had been crimson-cheeked this morning already. Yesterday, you had slept; the days before, you hadn't been able to see — and the day before that, you hadn't been able to care.

How long has her fever been 'this bad', exactly? Since the blizzard? Since the Father? The bloody fucking idiot. You wonder if her alternate selves are as daft and red-cheeked as she is.

You wonder why they drag your corpse.

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, and you try and you try again to put it back where it belongs, to erase the image of the headless thing on the ground, of your swords going through its neck, of its eyes turning to the Father as if you'd never existed. But the blood is too slippery, gravity too unforgiving. Time too immutable. The corpse remains a corpse, no matter what you do.

The woman's eyes keep flicking to your left, running along the lines of something she alone can see. You pick up her backpack with one hand, grab her shoulder with the other, and half-push, half-guide her from the bloody rocks back onto the snowy trail.

"Let's get ourselves indoors," you say.

The woman nods, and you set down the road to cross the final few yards to the inn; her opening the way at an unsteady pace, you standing at her back, making sure she does not stumble.

The place is a simple enough structure from the outside. Old wood, stones older still, a handful of dirty windows. If not for the snow and the sky, you could imagine it fitting in the Undercity. Along Glimmerdust Lane, perhaps. Next to the orphanage, even. But as soon as you pass the stray drunkards to walk through the door, the impression vanishes like the illusion it was. The game tables are there, as are the exhausted patrons and bards singing their tired songs, but the room has a warmth to it, a sense of hospitality to its air, that even the Refuge on its very best days had never so much as approached.

It's an inn like any other, and yet it's too vivid. Too loud. Too everything at once. You feel your shoulders tense at the lack of dark corners, your hands twitch at the lack of weapons to grab if need be. You know nobody here.

You are nobody here, for better and for worse.

The mercenary points to a table close to the hearth, where an old, cowled man pores over a stack of books. Following the unspoken request, you half-push half-carry her across the sunken area that serves as the inn's entrance, help her over the few steps leading to the dining room proper. She greets the old man much like you would greet your own contacts, and a mere few minutes of bartering later, both she and the man are smiling — him over an old tome you gather must have been priceless, and her at an armful of familiar vials.

"Dinner," she proclaims with a smile.

"You better have some pennies left to buy me a real one," you retort with a frown.

The woman breaks into laughter as she uncorks her Ambrosia, and you follow her to the counter in the middle of the room, finding yourself chuckling as well. Maybe from the absurdity of it all. Maybe from sheer raw nerves.

The innkeeper is as warm as her hearth and tavern, and just as cloying to your mind. She grates against your skin and bones, leaving you wanting nothing so much as running back into the snow. The mercenary, for her part, seems unaffected by it all. She smiles at the woman, looks through her purse, and looks at you — then she books a 'small room for two' until 'the start of the new week'.

"This night and three more days," she tells you on the stairs, still relying on you to walk in a straight line. "Board included if reasonable — some meat and vegetables are okay, but start pawing at the desserts and you'll be paying extra fees. You can go down for some rabbit once we're done settling in."

It would likely not do to start an argument right on the stairs, within sight and hearing of all. So you wait until you make it across stairs and second floor both, the door of the small room closed securely behind your back.

"I thought we were going to Ark," you say once the mercenary is seated safely on the bed.

"We are," she confirms, taking a pause in her drinking of her second vial. "But I want this to work out, so I'm maximizing your chances first, and step one of that is drinking all of this Ambrosia and sleeping an entire day. Then there's letters I need to ask the Myrad Keeper to deliver, and — well, let's just say dumping you onto the marketplace right now doesn't strike me as a good idea."

"I managed just fine by myself for twenty years," you retort, the mercenary's condescension serving to destroy your patience. "You don't need to baby me, damn it. I'm not a fucking child."

The mercenary's brow furrows, and she cocks her head to the side.

"I don't doubt that you can deal, Tharaêl. I've seen you deal with much, much worse. But can you deal in a way that doesn't leave bruises or draw blood? This," she says, pointing to her slightly bruised nose, "is what I'm wary of. Your reflexes are adjusted for surviving under Ark, not living within it, and they're honed to a fault. Hence, a few more days to process things, ask anything you want to ask, and practice coexisting with tired and drunk surfacers."

The rational part of your mind thinks of swords best left to a grave, of allies best not alienated, and of heads rolling across tiles. But the feeling part of your mind, the part that wields the swords and kills the friends and cuts off heads, breaks through your fraying nerves like water through a dam. You whirl on the mercenary, fists clenched over nothing, voice catching on thin air.

"Practice," you snarl, putting all the contempt you can in the word. "You think I need to practice spending time around tavern lowlives? Where do you think I spent my fucking days, these past ten years? Do you even listen to what you're saying, for fuck's sake?"

"I think the uniform you wore has handled the problem for you," the mercenary says — and though her eyes follow your hands, her own hands, she folds in her lap. "I think you relied on it much more than you realize. Are you going to hit me again?"

The question pierces through your heart as surely as any blade would, and drains the anger out of you faster than any weapon could.

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it were a ball that had fallen from his shoulders.

The mercenary cowers at your feet, lip and nose broken and bleeding.

You let the backpack fall to the ground and turn back without a word, through the small room's door, through the second floor, through the back entrance you'd spotted on your way up the stairs. But you have barely taken a few strides into the snow when the realization hits that you have nowhere else to go.

You stare at the shadow that you guess to be Northwind Peak, towering over the landscape, dark even against the night sky.

You should have let yourself fall.

You should have fucking jumped.

The fatigue of the week descends back onto your shoulders, and you let yourself sink to the ground in the middle of the road. You brace your elbows on your knees and let your head rest in your hands, as unwilling to walk further as you are to go back inside.

You've been sitting there for a while when you hear the snow crackle at your back a few times, and then a heavy weight fall on the ground right next to you. A steel-gauntleted hand puts a plate in your line of sight, its contents leaking steam like a small stream of clouds.

Roasted rabbit and potatoes.

The woman scoots closer, fidgets for an instant, and you find yourself wrapped in her cloak all over again. She pulls the edges together, enfolding the both of you in the warm wool and rabbit fur, then takes a swig from a bottle you assume to be Dal'Sark Mead before setting it down in front of you. She sets her own plate on her knees, picks apart a piece of ribs with her bare hands and teeth.

After a few minutes, you start to do the same, allowing the food and the drink to return their warmth to your limbs.

The mercenary sits with you in the snow until dawn, gazing first at the stars, then at the way the rising Sun chases them out of the heavens in a burst of crimson and blue.

Neither of you speaks a word.

[garywonghc]

Just When You Think You’re Enlightened

by Andrew Holecek

Sooner or later it’s going to happen — it might be the very first time you meditate or only after years of dedicated practice, but someday you’re going to have a spiritual experience. These experiences come in many forms, ranging from simple tranquillity to radiant ecstasy. In their fullest expression, they are spiritual earthquakes that can transform your life. The Tibetan sage Marpa shared one such experience:

I was overwhelmed with joy. The hairs on my body stood on end, and I was moved to tears… My body was intoxicated with undefiled bliss… There dawned an experience beyond words.

— from The Rain of Wisdom, translated by the Nalanda Translation Committee

At more modest levels, they can manifest as the total cessation of thought, an out-of-body experience, or sensations of bliss and clarity. You might have an experience of profound meditation, or of union with the entire cosmos, and say to yourself, “This is it! This is what I’ve been waiting for.” Like the endorphin released in a runner’s high, these experiences are the meditator’s high. And they are addicting.

These events are a time for celebration — and a time for concern. They’re cause for celebration because they can be genuine markers of progress. You’re getting a glimpse into the nature of mind and reality; you’re starting to see things the way they truly are. You’re waking up. But such experiences are also cause for concern precisely because they feel so good. Surprising as it may sound, the spiritual path is not about making you feel good. It’s about making you feel real.

Spiritual experiences can be the sweetest honey covering the sharpest hooks. Because they can be so transformative and blissful, it’s almost impossible not to grasp after them. You want more. That’s the hook. And anytime grasping is involved, even if it’s for a spiritual experience, you’re back in samsara, hooked into the conditioned world of endless dissatisfaction.

Spiritual experiences are by-products of meditation. The problem is that we think they’re the final product of meditation. Traleg Rinpoche said, “The main cause of misperceptions regarding meditation experience is that after the loss of the initial fervour, we may forget to focus on the essence of meditation and its purpose and instead place more and more emphasis on the underlying meditative experience itself.”

Spiritual experiences are called nyam in Tibetan, which means “temporary experience,” and every meditator needs to be aware of them. Nyam is set in contrast to tokpa, which means “realisation.” Nyam is like pleasant vapour. No matter how good it feels, it always evaporates. Tokpa is like a mountain. It stays. A nyam always has a beginning and an end. One day you soar into the most heavenly meditation, but eventually you drop back to Earth. There are no dropouts with authentic realisation.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche refers to nyams as “meditation moods” and says, “Nyam has thickness; tokpa is light and fine. The problem is we like thickness more; it’s more substantive and satisfying.” We like the substance of our moods.

Nyam and tokpa are themselves the last two phases of a three-phase process of complete assimilation or incorporation of dharma: understanding, experience, and realisation. This shows us that experience is indeed a good thing, a necessary but intermediate phase in absorbing the dharma. We start with understanding, which is traditionally referred to as a patch because eventually it falls off. With study and practice, understanding develops into experience, which is like the weather — it always changes. With sustained practice, experience matures into realisation, which like the sky never wavers. This is the three-stage process of full embodiment; it is how we ingest, digest, and metabolise the dharma until it almost literally becomes us.

If you relate to a nyam properly, it blossoms into realisation. If you don’t, it rots and becomes the most subtle and serious of all spiritual traps. Tai Situ Rinpoche said that you can get stuck in a nyam for an entire lifetime. More commonly, people waste precious years thinking that because they had a spiritual experience they’re enlightened, when in fact they’re merely shackled to a nyam. If you’re attached to your grand experience and start to identify with it, you have simply replaced a chain made of lead with one made of gold. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche said:

Meditators who run after experiences, like a child running after a beautiful rainbow, will be misled. When you practice intensely, you may have flashes of clairvoyance and various signs of accomplishment, but all they do is foster expectations and pride — they are just devilish tricks and the source of obstacles.

— from Journey to Enlightenment, by Matthieu Ricard

Attachment to anything, no matter how spectacular, is still attachment.

I have a special interest in nyams because I, too, have been hooked. The first nyam to get me was the experience of non thought. This caught me when I was introduced to Transcendental Meditation (TM) nearly forty years ago. As my TM instructor guided me into meditation, I slipped into profound meditative absorption. For the first time in my life, I felt fully awake without a single thought running through my mind. I had never thought such a blissful state was even possible.

What made the experience so striking was the contrast of having arrived for my instruction feeling speedy and anxious, and then within thirty minutes dropping into a state completely free of thought. It was like diving below choppy waves into tranquil deep water. Because the contrast was so dramatic, I thought I had attained some level of enlightenment. It took me years to realise that this is a common experience and that I was far from enlightened.

The good news was that I had tasted an aspect of the awakened mind and wanted more. The experience inspired me to pursue meditation with gusto. I began a daily practice that hasn’t waned in four decades. The bad news was that I tied myself in knots trying to reproduce that experience. I had set a bar that was ridiculously high and caused me all sorts of unnecessary anguish when I couldn’t measure up.

RELATING TO SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

Because these exalted states are so delicious, it’s hard not to cling to a nyam. On one level, they’re just spiritual candy; having some of these sweets is okay now and again, but feasting on them will make your meditation sick.

How do we properly relate to a nyam? Let’s say that you have an experience of bliss in your meditation. It’s okay to celebrate it. Give yourself a pat on your back. But then let it go. Reinstate the conditions that brought about the experience in the first place. In other words, most of these experiences arise when the mind is open, spacious, and relaxed. William Blake, in Songs of Innocence and Experience, wrote:

He who binds to himself a joy Doth the winged life destroy But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

If you grasp after the event and try to repeat it, that contraction around the experience ironically prevents it. In order to let realisation come, we first have to let experience go.

Another aspect of improper relationship is talking about the experience. It’s very tempting to share, proclaim, or even advertise your awakening, but it’s important to check your motivation. Ask yourself, why do you want to do this? Do you want others to know how realised you are? If so, let your actions speak louder than your words. Live your awakening. Don’t voice it.

Spiritual experiences often arise in the sanctuary of silence, and they should be kept in that sanctuary. There is a reason for secrecy in the traditions. If you remain silent, the experience tends to stabilise and mature. The nyam evolves into tokpa. If you talk about it, the experience trickles away. The nyam degenerates into a distant memory. Don’t be a leaky container and dribble onto others. Keep your experience hermetically sealed so it doesn’t spoil.

It may be okay to share your experience with intimate spiritual friends; after all, it could inspire them. But even here, always check your motivation first. When people talk about their experiences, they usually just want them to be confirmed. The one person you should talk to is your teacher or meditation instructor. An authentic teacher will keep you on track by telling you the experience is neither good nor bad, or by ignoring you, or encouraging you to let it go.

During one long retreat, I had another nyam. When I came out of retreat, I raced to share my “realisation” with my teacher, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. As I shared my enlightenment experience, he yawned and looked out the window. My so-called “awakening” was putting him to sleep! When I was done, he spoke about a topic that had nothing to do with my experience. I came in all puffed up with my nyam and left punctured and deflated. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was exactly what I needed.

When you talk about your experience inappropriately, you transform opportunity into obstacle. The blessed event flips into a cursed one. Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche said that talking about spiritual experiences is like being in a dark cave with a candle and then giving your candle away — you’re left in the dark. This is one way to tell the difference between a truly realised master and one stuck in a nyam. True masters never talk about their realisation; those infected with a nyam are happy to talk. As Taoism puts it, “He who speaks does not know. He who knows does not speak.”

The essence of a proper relationship to spiritual experience is silence and release. Keep your mouth closed and your heart open. Use the experience to inspire you to keep going, but go forward without the nyam holding you back. Relate to whatever arises — the good, the bad, and the ugly — with equanimity. That’s how experience matures into realisation.

Since spiritual experiences can be so ecstatic, and the grasping correspondingly extreme, sometimes our fingers need to be pried away from the nyam. Khenpo Rinpoche said that you nurture meditative experience by destroying it. Patrul Rinpoche echoed this advice:

The yogin’s meditation improves through destruction… When experiences of stillness, bliss, and clarity occur and feelings such as joy, delight, or pleasant sensations arise, you should blast this husk of attachment to experience into smithereens.

— from Lion’s Gaze: A Commentary on Tsig Sum Nedek, by Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche

What’s blasted is not the experience itself but our grasping onto it. Tsoknyi Rinpoche also points out, “Ordinary people don’t get enlightened because they don’t meditate. Yogis don’t get enlightened because they don’t stop meditating.” They can’t get enough of their high.

There is no tyranny as great as the tyranny of success — material or spiritual. Success leads to pride and attachment. Nyams are markers of success, but the tyranny of that triumph can boomerang. When nyams are solidified, they must be defeated. Honest meditators invite that defeat; charlatans shun it.

GURU VS. GURUISM

There’s another reason why it’s dangerous to talk about spiritual experiences. When you talk about your spiritual experience, you reify it and begin to identify with it and believe it. The more you talk, the more you convince yourself that something special really did happen. Worse still, others might start to believe it and feed the reification. Word of your awakening can spread like a virus, and before you know it, everybody may become infected with strains of your nyam.

When this happens, a subtle codependent relationship develops between “master” and disciple. The disciple unwittingly enables the “master” by revering their nyam (and projecting their psychological issues onto the “master”); the “master” then enables the disciple by showering them with attention (and similarly gets tangled in a swarm of their own projections and shadow elements). They think they’re lifting each other up, but they’re actually pulling each other down. Everybody buys into the experience of the “master,” and soon a cult is born. A “guru” has been forcefully delivered into the world.

This is not the beautiful birth of a realised guru but the deformed birth of guruism. Guruism is based on the spiritual experience of the “master,” and the cult is all about spreading that experience like a disease. Everybody catches the fever and wants to have the experience. These “gurus,” in an effort to protect the nyam and their exclusive role as its transmitter, often quarantine their disciples from outside influences. They claim they’re protecting their disciples, but in reality they’re just defending their own egos and empire. The Branch Davidians, Jonestown, and countless other cults have followed this classic formula. It’s another expression of grasping after elite experiences, a natural consequence of a nyam run wild.

The danger in confusing authentic gurus with guruism is that both involve surrender. Surrender has a powerful place in spirituality, if you surrender to the proper authority. When you intelligently surrender to a guru, their pure realisation can pour into your open heart. The result is awakening. If you ignorantly surrender to guruism, that tainted experience can also penetrate your heart, and the result is often catastrophic.

In my years on the spiritual path, I have seen many teachers cemented to their nyam. There’s no doubt that many had genuine spiritual experiences, but there’s also no doubt that they were super-glued to that experience. These “masters” tend to pop up in the West, where spirituality is ruled by convenience and instant gratification, and where the need for disciplined practice is too often supplanted by the desire for rapid results.

Because nyams are desirable, they are marketable and they sell. Who wouldn’t pay for an experience of bliss, clarity, or non-thought, the three most famous nyams? Teachers stuck in a nyam also sell, because they often exude an aura of the nyam itself. They usually extol the extraordinary and ecstatic aspects of meditation and easily snag others just as they’ve been snagged. Their experiences sound so delectable, so “spiritual,” that it’s tempting to follow their bliss. I saw one such “master” who glided toward her throne, draped in white silk and surrounded by her flock of adoring students. She spoke in a seductive voice about the euphoric nature of her awakening. To me, she was clearly stuck in the nyam of bliss.

Teachers stuck in a nyam tend to work alone, and while they may have studied with authentic masters, they either pay lip service to their lineage or jettison it altogether. I know Western “masters” who rejected their own teachers because they didn’t confirm their nyam or otherwise endorse their awakening. The one person who could have put them back on track by destroying their attachment to the experience is dismissed as not understanding their experience.

Once such a “master” gains traction and establishes a following, it’s almost impossible to extract them from their nyam. The enabling is too deep and the success too addictive. It would take tremendous honesty and courage to turn to their adoring students and admit that they’ve all — teacher and students — been seduced into a nyam. It’s much easier to remain stuck in spiritual co-dependence.

WAKING UP FROM NYAM

In the world of dreams, there’s an event called false awakening. This is when someone wakes up from a dream and discovers later that they were still asleep. In other words, they wake up from one level of dreaming into what they think is waking reality, only to then realise that what they’ve woken up to is yet another dream. It’s like in the movie Inception, where there are dreams within dreams, deceptions within deceptions.

As a student of dream yoga, I’ve experienced a number of these false awakenings. It can be shocking when the alarm clock rings and I’m jarred into waking consciousness when I thought I was already awake! It’s equally jolting when someone asleep in a nyam is finally roused from their false awakening. Most prefer to sleep. False awakening is a term that describes what happens when people mistake their nyam for genuine tokpa.

Those stuck in a nyam rarely submit to the discomfort of being jerked away from their heavenly trap. One way to detect if you’re stuck in a nyam, therefore, is to see how you react when your special experience is interrupted or challenged. If you get irritated, defensive, or angry, you’re probably infected with a nyam.

Are you becoming more kind, patient, and generous? Is your heart opening? Are you more understanding and compassionate? Are you learning how to love? That’s where you’ll find the signs of realisation.

There is a place for spiritual highs, but it’s the same place reserved for spiritual lows. Relate to both with equanimity and you will be liberated from them. Left alone, spiritual experiences are wonderful events. They can inspire you to practice more and really lift you up. But if you don’t relate to them properly, they can drag you down.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “Enlightenment is ego’s ultimate disappointment.” From ego’s perspective, enlightenment is a downer. It will let you down — from the heights of inflated spiritual experience to the plateau of ordinary life, which is where true realisation awaits.

[vagaries-and-caprices-blog]

Notes on the Hugh Dancy oeuvre: “The Big C” (TV Series, 2011)

Part 2 of 3

(Part 1)

(Part 3)

Season 2: Episode 7, Goldilocks and the Bears

WARNING: PROCEED WITH CAUTION Evidence of an unreliable reviewer: Lee Fallon (Hugh Dancy) lifts his shirt to show Cathy Jamison (Laura Linney) his hip-level, cancer-treatment surgical scar. This reviewer was genuinely surprised, then disappointed, that the scar was not the same “smile” scar Hannibal Lecter gave Will Graham.

Representative dialogue:

Cathy: I’m sorry, my family is blunt, tense, and can’t relax for shit. [Word]

Acupuncturist [treating Cathy]: Your pulse slowed down when your husband came in the room. Cathy: [Laughing] We’re not married. Lee: No, she’s missing the one thing I look for in a husband. Acupuncturist: Well, regardless, there is something special going on between you two. There’s medical term for it: “anastomosis.” It’s when two streams that previously branched out, like blood vessels, reconnect. Or in your case, two people. Sometimes one person can actually affect the other’s breathing or heart rate. Symbiosis, soulmates.

A digression on “anastomosis”

I stayed up way too late watching Hugh Dancy pretend to die of cancer on “The Big C.” I was stupid happy to watch him drink wine, jog, cruise hot guys, and feel up Laura Linney. What a beautifully exhausting frisson (full review of Lee Fallon’s death coming up in Part 3).

Given that the writers of “The Big C” shoot out all manner of literary references—pew! pew! pew-pew!—I knew that typing “anastomosis” and “poetry” into the Internet would return something good. Sure enough, out popped Kenneth Rexroth’s “August 22, 1939.” An excerpt:

What is it all for, this poetry, This bundle of accomplishment Put together with so much pain? Twenty years at hard labor, Lessons learned from Li Po and Dante, Indian chants and gestalt psychology; What words can it spell, This alphabet of one sensibility? The pure pattern of the stars in orderly progression, The thin air of fourteen-thousand-foot summits, Their Pisgah views into what secrets of the personality, The fire of poppies in eroded fields, The sleep of lynxes in the noonday forest, The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought, Life streaming ungovernably away, And the deep hope of man. The centuries have changed little in this art, The subjects are still the same. “For Christ’s sake take off your clothes and get into bed, We are not going to live forever.”

Yum. I munched on that for quite a while…

Let’s Go to the Bear Bar!

Setting: At the bar, the whole scene—the tone of the actors’ performances and the portrayal of “Bears”—made me cringe. Cathy and Paul (Cathy’s husband) giggle at the fauna. There is much explaining of “bear” terms and everyone in the bar is super friendly, amused by Paul and Cathy’s wonderment, and not-at-all put out that they are an immersive zoo exhibit for the Hets.

Then: Lee/Hugh hunts a “panda bear” (Bobby Pestka). Hugh’s body language is ravishing: his slim body in slouchy affect, hands in jeans pockets, smooth grin on his face. [Magnificent gif via existingcharactersdiehorribly] Unsurprisingly, Panda Bear goes for it. Lee firmly grasps Panda Bear’s shoulders with both hands, pushes him forward, and parts the bead curtain to the back room. And—

—the camera swings back to Paul and Cathy. Wait, what?

Paul and Cathy blather on about how awesome they are to be in the bar observing Bears. Their passionate kiss says, “Aren’t we cuckoo tonight? We’re so turned on by our transgressiveness.” Of course, it is plausible that those two characters would feel and act that way, but I can’t help but think that the show producers set the overall non-threatening tone to make sure Middle America would come along for the ride.

I huff at the screen.

When Lee and Panda Bear emerge from the back room, neither actor shows the slightest indication of carnal pleasure having been had: They look like they have been discussing iPhone options at an Apple Genius Bar. True, Lee makes a big show of throwing away Panda Bear’s phone number, so maybe it just wasn’t that good. But I find it an unforgivable lapse that Hugh Dancy returns from that back room without being in any way perspired, flushed, or ruddy. Allow me to present the evidence: HBO/Channel 4 gave us Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I roughing up and reddening Hugh Dancy’s babyface. NBC gave us Will and Hannibal’s iconic gaspy-stabby moments to ensure blood pumpage. Hulu gave us the Great Cal Roberts BJ of 2016. Ipso facto Showtime sucks.

…

Where were we?

Ah, then we get Cathy in the bathtub talking to Lee on the phone.

Many of Cathy/Laura’s lines in the series are funny and poignant. However, I’d like to introduce the shorthand [Things Cathy Says] to indicate Cathy lines that, cumulatively, as I watched episode-after-episode, stopped being funny and started to exasperate me.

Lee: A bath is my favorite place to meditate. [Awarded the double entendre of the decade]

[Things Cathy Says]

Lee: Close your eyes […] breathe with me, all right just follow my breath, you inhale, you exhale, inhale, exhale, in, out, just listen to the sound of your breath and mine, in, out, in, out.

Cathy masturbates to the sound of Lee’s voice, which should have been compelling, but Laura Linney performs a disappointingly modest orgasm. She could have done much more with the material she was given. For fuck’s sake, this is Showtime! Showtime, known for its sleaze. What is happening to our civilization? Make America Sleaze Again!

Worth watching level: Yes, dammit.

[zitavoros]

6 lessons i learned in the hospital

I know it's a bit cliché to make a lessons-learned-during-a-less-than-ideal-experience type of blog, but I honestly think it's important to do it anyways. Being in the hospital is not something I was thrilled about, but I think I need to set aside the stigma and shame that comes with it and write about some stuff I learned along the way to help me reflect on life. Mental health advocacy is important, and as someone who is normally pretty open anyways, I think it’s essential that I discuss it and give my takeaways for people that may not understand what it’s like to struggle with mental health. 

Here are some things I have learned along the way so far:

1: age is just a number

In the ER, the age range varied from a couple of 10-year-olds to individuals well into their 70s. I was not as surprised at the people on the older side of life, but was shocked to find the kids who were at- or had just barely passed through- the first decade of their lives, most of which they were infants for. A good number of them, both young and old, were struggling with mental health and suicidal ideations just as I was.

Looking at the children in the ER, I suddenly better understood the number of nurses, volunteers, and elders who have told me a countless number of times that I am young, and things do get better.

I never put it into perspective, and have, for the most part, dismissed these words as a "you don't get it" sort of thing, but this shifted my understanding of mental health as well as life. Age is just a number, there are kids- children out there struggling and wanting to die, and despite me wishing for the exact same thing, I can't help but think about the lives they could live out if they got help, and how they're just so young. This was, by far, the most important thing I have learned, as it put my own struggle on a timeline by comparison.

2: you never know someone's story

This is a lesson I truly wish I could share with the nurses and hospital volunteers that I talked to. Although I know they meant all the best with their words, often the times when one would come and "cheer me up" would be the sessions I followed up with equally long bouts of crying. I ultimately wish talking with people for 3 minutes about serious topics did not give that person the idea that they can solve my life problems. A person's story cannot be fully explained in a nutshell, and is obviously more intricate than an overview.

A few of my highlights, because it's easier to show this lesson through example rather than description:

"You know what I would do? Talk to my mom. Talking to my mother always makes things a million times better, and I think you should give it a try, especially since you said you two barely speak now!"

(I do not really feel comfortable speaking to my mom due to family problems)

"Have you tried taking on an unpaid internship? Those are the new startup jobs, you can basically go anywhere from an unpaid internship, cause it truly shows you care. I'd start there if I were you!"

(I have, unfortunately, not had the chance to take on an unpaid anything, as I've been working part-time during school, full-time during the summer, along with my siblings, in order to pay for some everyday expenses)

"You think you're fat? Honey, have you seen me?"

(This is just straight-up invalidating, and does not help. Anyone can have body image issues and struggles. Medically I am on the verge of being obese. Relative to others who weigh more than me, yes, I am obviously less heavy, but that does not discount my struggle with my weight my entire life, and my struggles with my body being one key contributing factor in my suicidality & a leading cause to my depression)

3: those who you see doing great may be struggling just as much as you

This one was a difficult one to understand. There were some people in the in-patient unit who were, by all means, better than me (from my perspective) in every single way. Young, gorgeous, thin, great students, seemingly good relationships with parents, friends who came to visit, significant others, the works. It wasn't until some heavier conversations that I found that they all  struggled with mental health just as much as me, and had self-esteems down in the pits. It was humbling to know that students who I would normally just pass off as neurotypical were in the same bus as I was, and we were all here for equally valid reasons.

4: the key is not about implementing all the coping mechanisms and stress-relievers, it's about finding the one that works for you

This is the main takeaway from my second round of hospitalization in the past month. When I got out, I tried to implement every last skill I had learned during my time here, and it quickly got out of hand. I was overwhelmed by my options. If I had an anxious moment, it would worsen by my list of choices of how to calm myself down. Do I cook? Do I read? Do I meditate? Take a walk? Practice deep breathing? Take a nap? Art therapy? Pet therapy? The options were so vast, I could not deal with them. 

The easiest way to deal with this is to pick one. The occupational therapist gave me the suggestion to schedule one or two into the day, or even the week. Doesn't have to be everyday. Could be alternating days. You can pick your favourites, the coping skills that work and help you genuinely, and mark them down for M / W / F, and put another one down for T / Th. This specific goal is what I think is helpful to follow for those times when anxiety strikes.

5: it's easy to discuss life plans and plans for change when separated from the thick of it- a lot harder to deal with it when thrust back into the real world

You know the feeling. Maybe it's winter or summer break, and you've got a lot of time to plan. If you're an adult / not in school, maybe you're on vacation for a week, separated from work. Maybe it's a long weekend, or about to be New Years' Eve. You think to yourself, "Wow, when I get back to work I'm going to be so productive. I'm going to start working out. I'll change myself for the better, I'll eat right, I'll get to sleep on time, I'll meditate, I'll love myself, I'll care about my body, I won't put myself down."

These things are so easy to say in theory, but so much harder to actually implement in life once you're back in the midst of the everyday. When I got out of the hospital the first time, my problem was not with using coping strategies often, it was with going back to the same stress-factors that had landed me there in the first place. I was hit with the same problems: school, work, financial matters, life goals, weight problems all came crashing back and I did not know how to properly deal with it all.

It is a lot easier to discuss change in theory, but actually going after what you want is going to take time, and not everything will change overnight. I had to learn that the hard way, and have to understand that it will take time to actually feel better from medication, to lead a better life, to reach my goals, and so forth.

6: you are not cured the moment you leave

This one should be obvious, but it's been difficult coming in contact with professors and fellow students who tell me I "look better" or I look a lot happier. This is probably the hardest lesson for me to grasp. I do look better, and I am “happier” in a sense, but I am still struggling a lot more than I wish to be. I thought that as soon as I left, I was supposed to be “back to normal,” and really had a difficult time adjusting because I simply was not. I still felt lost. 

I am a lot more hopeful for the future now, but will continue to speak up about mental health and be an advocate for discussing it, because the battle doesn't end the moment you step out of the constant supervision of health professionals. It's an everyday problem, not just for myself, but others as well. Although I do feel completely different than I did when I first entered, I still have a ways to go before I can say I am doing great, and mean it wholeheartedly. 

[cccto-semi-pro]

Week 26: Prophets in Pain, Part 2

1. RECAP & PREPARING FOR CG

Daily Reading for Week

Jeremiah 23-25, Psalm 19  

Jeremiah 26-29, Psalm 20  

Jeremiah 30-32, Psalm 21  

Jeremiah 33-36, Psalm 22  

Jeremiah 37-39, Psalm 23

Jeremiah 40-44, Psalm 24  

Jeremiah 45-48, Psalm 25  

Resources for Week

Read Scripture Video: Jeremiah and The Law (themed video)

2. FOCUS OF TIME TOGETHER

To try to really grasp the events and emotions of Israel’s exile in order to orient ourselves in the world of Jeremiah and the prophets.

3. GROUND RULE / GOAL / VALUE FOR THE WEEK

Value: Our values for this week are attentiveness and empathy. When others are sharing, be aware of your posture toward them. Don’t be on your phone or thinking about what you are going to say next. Practice giving the person speaking your undivided attention and try to empathize with what they are saying.

4. CONNECTION AND UNITY EXERCISE (MUTUAL INVITATION)

Is there anyone in the group who has ever been forced to flee from their home or witnessed their family or someone close to them forced to flee from the country or place they grew up?

If so, ask this person if they’d be comfortable sharing what that experience was like.

If there isn’t anyone with a story like this, have each person share in 1 minute what they imagine it would feel like if they had to flee home tonight to escape danger. If everyone shares, use mutual invitation.

5. OPENING PRAYER

Read Psalm 130 as your opening prayer.

6. INTRO TO DISCUSSION

Many of us have been disoriented and weary of the prophets, especially in Jeremiah. You’re not alone. In Interpreting the Prophets, scholar Aaron Chalmers says:

“Many Christians remain confused and frustrated by these works. They are full of dramatic imagery whose meaning is not always clear. Sometimes there appears to be little rhyme or reason in the flow of their thought. They include numerous references to events from Israel’s history and life, the significance of which we do not grasp. It is perhaps little wonder, therefore, that the prophets are so frequently misunderstood and misapplied by many within the Church.”

Specifically, to understand the prophets we need to understand Israel’s exile. Jeremiah in particular lives through and helps chronicle the many phases of exile. Before we begin, let’s take a few extra minutes to try to understand what the exile really entailed.

First, there was a severe drought which led to severe and large-scale famine. As an agrarian culture entirely dependent on each year’s harvest for food, a few years of drought meant absolute tragedy. The first several chapters of Jeremiah take place in the context of this drought. Though unrelated to any of the political or military strife that is yet to come, this drought was the first part of Judah’s divine punishment for their sin and idolatry. To get a feel for what it was like, compare it to the Dust Bowl in Depression-era America or the many African famines that still occur today.

In addition to this natural disaster, incredible social chaos had begun to unfold. Sandwiched between the mighty empires of Egypt and Babylon, tiny little Judah laid exposed and vulnerable to violent exploitation. During the next couple decades, which the book of Jeremiah chronicles, the country became a place of utter chaos and injustice. Jews who lived rurally on farms and in small villages had zero protection from military troops and armed villains. Violence spread throughout the countryside, and the people themselves devolved into a state of self-destructive chaos. There was no justice in the land. Someone could enter your home and murder your family and no government or police force was there to help. Many who could afford it fled to Jerusalem to live behind the protection of the city walls, but many others suffered and perished. Perhaps compare it to living in Syria or the ISIS-haunted Middle East — or, sadly, in Israel today.

Consequently, Babylon, the biggest bully of them all, resolved to overthrow Judah entirely by sacking Jerusalem, which was their capital and fortress. Ancient warfare was slow and painful. When Babylon set out to “attack” Jerusalem, this means that they dispatched an army of soldiers with loads of supplies to set up camp around the walls of the city. As the army approached, the Jews fled in retreat to Jerusalem, after which they shut the gate. But all of the food supply was outside in the fields. So Babylon simply waited while the people of Jerusalem slowly starved to death. Tragically, the terrible prediction that mothers would eat their own children (Jeremiah 19:8-9) began to come true (Lamentations 2:20). Anyone who tried to flee from the city was killed by the troops outside, and those who stayed faced the horror of famine (Lamentations 1:20).

After four months, many inhabitants of Jerusalem decided to make a break for it. They waited until nighttime and broke a hole in the wall and ran (Jeremiah 39:2, 52:6-9). Even the king fled! Some escaped, but many were captured. And while they ran, the Babylonian army came flooding into the city, setting buildings on fire, murdering many, and capturing Jewish survivors. The fatal blow came when the mighty and sacred Temple — Solomon’s great house for God — was pillaged and destroyed. Mighty Babylon leveled little Judah to the ground.

Finally, for those who weren’t executed on the spot, two forms of exile occurred: most were forcefully deported to Babylon while the poor were left in Judah to try to keep the vineyards and crops alive. Those who remained did so having lost their family, their homes, their government, and to the Jewish mind, even God’s presence since the Temple had been destroyed. Those who were deported would have struggled to survive as poor, marginalized foreigners in a land not their own. Much like the diaspora of Africans sold in the slave trade, this exile violently weakened the Jews’ sense of national and religious identity. The people of God were made nobodies. To try to picture this, consider the horrors of the Holocaust, American slavery, or the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears. Consider also the millions of undocumented immigrants currently living in America with the fear of deportation.

This was Israel’s experience that we summarize as exile. It was indeed a very dark period of history. And particularly, it was a dark lowpoint in the Bible’s story of God’s people. Much earlier in the story, after their rescue from Egypt, God warned Israel that if they broke their side of the Sinai Covenant, “I will scatter you among the nations and will draw my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid to waste, and your cities will lie in ruins” (Leviticus 26:33). Despite this early warning, Israel arrogantly believed that because God chose them as the nation to demonstrate His saving love to the nations, they would always be safe from destruction and exile. This belief continued into the time of Jeremiah despite continued warnings and corrections from different prophets. Exile seemed an impossible outcome, but it was actually forewarned from the beginning. In other words, we should read the book of Jeremiah and the rest of the prophetic books which take place in the context of exile in light of this overarching story.

7. LARGE GROUP DISCUSSION

Questions for Interacting with Scripture:

These questions are to help us slow down to taste and notice Scripture, savor its richness, and meditate on its complexity of meaning.

Aaron Chalmers, in Interpreting the Prophets, describes the experience of those that were led away as follows:

“We need to be careful of glossing over the significant suffering and trauma which would have been raised by the experience of exile. Recent anthropological research has shown that such forced migrations constitute a serious socio-psychological crisis which would have ‘forced the deportees into destabilizing re calibrations of their communal and theological understandings’ (Moore and Kelle, 2001: 364). The loss of their homeland, the destruction of the Temple, and the physical sufferings and psychological terror inflicted by enemy armies must have led to intense theological ferment among the exiles in Babylon as they sought to find meaning in the series of tragedies they had suffered and discern the future of their relationship with Yahweh.”

How does walking through the details of Israel’s exile and trying to wrap your mind around the felt experience help shine new light on what you’ve been reading?

Have someone read Psalm 137, a psalm written in exile, aloud. How does a sufficient understanding of the sheer agony of exile help you understand and even empathize with the brutally honest prayers of this psalm?

In the intro we recognized how difficult and disorienting the prophets can be. Because of this, we often read a book like Jeremiah and halfway through feel desperate to grab onto any verse that can be meaningful for us today, even if we aren’t quite sure of its context. It’s not a coincidence that one of the most popular verses from Jeremiah is 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you”, declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.”  

When you consider that this is written to someone who just experienced being captured by the enemy and led into exile, how does it change your understanding of this popular verse?

8. SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION

Remain in your small groups and finish with the closing prayer.

Consider the modern examples we referenced in the intro to try to contextualize the different phases of Israel’s exile: starving to death in the Dust Bowl, fleeing from the horrors of ISIS, being deported from your homeland and forced to assimilate into a foreign culture, or being made into a slave.

Which of these forms of suffering strike at your heart?

What would such an experience make you feel?

In that situation, what would you want to tell God?

What would give you hope?

What would you want God to do if you knew this was going to be your reality for 70 years? (cf. Jeremiah 29:10)

9. CLOSING

Often, it is incredibly difficult to look suffering in the face. We tend to want to distract, medicate, deny, shutdown, etc. Instead, the prophets model for us what it means to honestly face suffering and to bring our cares to God. Spend one minute in silence and then pray honestly to God what you feel about the suffering around you. Confess any resistance you have coming up and ask God for help.

[sarahburness]

How a 10-Day Silent Retreat Helped Heal My Grieving Heart

“In a retreat situation, you are forced to come face to face with yourself, to see yourself in depth, to meet yourself.” ~Lama Zopa Rinpoche

When I was at university, doing a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat was considered a hardcore rite of passage only the toughest among us attempted. Those who lasted the distance referred to it as a “mind-blowing” and “life-changing” experience.

“Think of how you feel after an orgasm,” a friend said when I considered finally doing a Vipassana mediation retreat to reconnect with myself after a decade in full time employment. “Imagine feeling for two months like you’ve just had the most powerful orgasm.”

I couldn’t. I really couldn’t imagine how ten days of enforced intimacy with my own messy mind would result in two months of post-coital bliss. Nor could I imagine sitting still and keeping silent for ten days. Nor was I prepared to sacrifice half of my annual leave to find out.

What finally got me to commit to the meditation cushion for a ten-day marathon of silence was a shattered heart. I needed a radical act of self-care.

I had just spent two long years caring for my terminally ill husband. His funeral was followed three weeks later by the largest cyclone in Australia’s living memory. It made landfall within meters of my veranda, destroying an entire community. In the confusion that followed, I found things out about my husband that would have been best buried with him.

I was shell-shocked, as if a bomb had detonated inside me and ripped my heart to shreds. A psychologist suggested happy pills. But I wasn’t interested in medicated happiness. I didn’t even want the post-coital bliss my friend had spoken of.

I just wanted to feel whole again. The psychologist advised against a ten-day silent meditation retreat. It was too dangerous, she said. There wouldn’t be anybody there to catch me should I crash hard.

But I knew that only I could pull myself up from the abyss. Avoiding my grief was not an option. I needed to confront my pain head on.

Two months after my bereavement, I took myself off to an austere meditation center in Sri Lanka to follow the teachings of S. N. Goenka.

Here is what I learned:

Impermanence is the foundation of everything.

When I showed up at my first ten-day silent meditation retreat, I had just witnessed the impermanence of everything, and it had left me devastated.

Sitting in meditation for ten hours a day, continuously scanning my body, becoming aware of the rising and falling of my physical discomfort, I learned to accept that everything in life is constantly changing.

In the afternoons, when the meditation hall turned into a sun-drenched hothouse, the physical discomfort of sitting still became almost unbearable. Resisting the urge to shift my legs or scratch my sweaty head taught me to become a detached observer.

Every day a cool evening breeze would follow the intense afternoon heat. The tickling of my scalp, the tingling in my legs, the stiffness in my hips, all of it fell away as day turned into night and I stretched out on my rock hard mattress.

By observing what was happening to my physical body, I learned to trust that emotional discomfort and pain rises and falls in the same way as physical pain does.

Meditation teaches you how to become a detached observer.

I learned to focus on my breath, to feel it rising and falling. I practiced watching my mind fill with dark clouds, like a lake with storm clouds reflected on it. I glimpsed brief moments of clarity as I allowed the clouds to drift by. I learned to label my emotions and set them free rather than stay attached to the pain.

I learned to train my mind to be in control of those dark storm clouds that kept on brewing. They didn’t magically disappear as I sat in meditation ten hours each day. But I learned not to chase after them and become swept up in every little tempest that flared up.

I learned to simply watch what was going on in my mind. It felt like watching a giant movie screen from the back row of a cinema.

Meditation teaches us that we can control our emotional pain. By focusing on the breath, we are able to step back, assume the position of a witness, so that it doesn’t overwhelm us.

It’s a lesson I’ve taken with me into everyday life. When a friend says something hurtful or when someone cuts me off in traffic, I know how not to be reactive.

Meditation gives you a new perspective on who you are.

As I sat and listened to the constant chatter in my head for ten days, I realized that our identities are a product of the stories we tell ourselves.

Old stories from the past showed up. The tortured narrative of my dysfunctional family suddenly made sense. My parents had remained attached to the narrative of their suffering as deprived war children. Unable to craft new stories for themselves, this victim narrative defined them in adulthood.

Sifting through the details of the aftermath of my husband’s death, trying to make sense of his unfaithfulness, I understood that I had been given the tools to rewrite that story.

I couldn’t undo what had happened. I’d never be able to have another conversation with him to set the record straight. I couldn’t give our story a happy ending. But I had the tools to use what I had learned to craft a new narrative for myself.

One stifling hot afternoon, focusing on the beads of sweat forming on my forehead, my focus became laser sharp.  I understood that if I didn’t want to live my life by the victim narrative, if I wanted to be in charge of myself again, if I didn’t want to turn into a bitter woman with a prematurely aged face, I needed to forgive those who had compounded my suffering.

Writing to the women whom I had considered my worst enemies was profoundly liberating, both for me and them. We were able to make peace with ourselves and with my philandering husband.

Suffering is an inevitable part of life.

All of life is suffering. It’s one of the key principles of Buddhism. Human nature is imperfect as is the world we live in. The Pali word Dukkha means suffering, discontent, unsatisfactoriness. We all experience varying degrees of suffering all the time.

Some of us had come to the retreat feeling stuck in life, stressed by our jobs, frustrated in our relationships, directionless and ready for some kind of transformation. I wasn’t the only who had brought a deep feeling of grief to the retreat.

I was the only one who had lost a loved one, but grief has many faces. Some of us were grieving collapsed marriages or failed relationships. It made me aware that we will all experience deep sadness in our lives, not once, but many times. It made sense to learn how to deal with it.

Life had just dealt me an overdose of suffering as if to hammer home this important point. Sitting with my physical and emotional pain for ten seemingly interminable days forced me to make friends with it.

I was able to put it into a new perspective. I hadn’t died, I hadn’t lost a limb, I had no permanent battle scars. My adopted hometown would recover, the ravaged landscape would heal, and so would I.

I realized that being able to hold my husband in death, to comfort him on the journey through his terminal illness, had been a chance for deep transformation. I understood that we are in charge of how we respond to suffering.

Suffering arises from attachment.

Burying my husband and sorting through the debris after a category five cyclone had shredded my hometown to bits, I had glimpsed how suffering is linked to attachment. Sitting on my meditation cushion for ten days, I grasped the core of the Second Noble Truth that all suffering arises from attachment.

We are all driven by our desires and cravings. Our unhappiness is a result of our tendency to cling to or grasp at what is unattainable. We become attached to material things; we want to hold onto happiness; we chase after pleasure and we are in denial about the impermanence of everything.

As expected, I didn’t explode in multiple orgasms, nor did I crash into the bottom of the abyss, both of which would have been a form of attachment.

On the last day of the retreat, when we were at last released from our vow of silence, everybody was experiencing some kind of high. Something fundamental had shifted for all of us.

Endless chatter quickly replaced our noble silence. Having sat side by side, experiencing the full rainbow of emotions, we were keen to share our experiences.

A small group gathered around a self-confessed retreat junkie, who glowed like a 3D postcard version of the Buddha, sitting in full lotus pose for most of the retreat. He had made it his life’s purpose, he explained, to go from retreat to retreat so that he could stay permanently within that blissed out sate.

I was tempted to quote one of our teachers that it’s just as dangerous to get attached to bliss as it is to get attached to pain and suffering. The aim of meditation is to let go of any form of attachment. But I bit my tongue, because I knew that he would need to find that out for himself.

Meditation is a personal self-care tool we all have access to.

Of course the ten-day meditation retreat didn’t magically cure my pain. It took many more weeks, months in fact, on the meditation cushion to heal my heart. But with every retreat I was inching a little further away from the abyss.

Six years on, I have found love again. My house has been repaired and my garden has grown back into a lush jungle. Life continues to ebb and flow, oscillating between moments of happiness and suffering.

You don’t have to be at your personal rock bottom to experience the life-changing benefits of a silent meditation retreat. What I learned has stayed with me. Meditation remains my personal self-care tool that allows me to negotiate the inevitable ups and downs of life, from the trivial to the tough stuff.

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About Kerstin Pilz

Kerstin Pilz Phd, is a former academic with twenty years University teaching experience, a 200 RYT accredited yoga teacher, writer, and enthusiastic photographer. She’s based in Vietnam and offers journeys of creative self-discovery, online & on retreat. Read here about her upcoming retreat in Bali, check out her blog at writeyourjourney.com, or connect with her on Facebook and Instagram.

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