The slightest disturbance can set me off; was that a confession? You don’t need me anymore; but I had to disagree. It was possible, anyhow, that she wasn’t just trying to brush me off; she might’ve been feeling (fingers crossed) that she couldn’t make me happy. Did she think, long term, that I would withdraw from the relationship? Perhaps after having children around? I always felt that my work was more important than anything, and, while that might be true if I was the only person around—I knew my work depended on the love I shared with others—and the ways that i expressed that love; communicating the love that we, as humans, feel for each other is how we not only get close to God—but it’s also how we communicate with him.
In short, she was important to me—she made it possible to enjoy life without working all the time—or when I was doing other things that normal people do. So, in that sense, she staved off intrusive thoughts, bad thoughts, just like my work did, and, therefore, she was important. I couldn’t say that she was more important, she never would be, and she knew that, but, at times, she was equally important because she both inspired my work and made me happy when I wasn’t working—which i do, sometimes, when I’m suffering. That’s what makes it ok. But everybody knows that that there’s more to life than working; we’re meant to love each other and share experiences together. So I told her, “I do need you—i would be distraught without you.” Then I told her (if that wasn’t enough), “You make me a better artist and, also, a better man.”
Anyhow, if i were not in my right mind I might think that the djinns had been down here (cosmic enforcers) but I know, now, that they are my real flesh and blood parents, so that makes a big difference. It just seemed like i was making telepathic progress and somebody from the future and or an extra dimension had said, “We can’t let him do that—if he does that, he’ll drain the energy out of all of us.” So they’d have some kind of eating marathon feast in which they partied hard and dumped their backs no matter how hungover they might’ve been, and all that negative energy was directed at me, so the djinns were riled up, and they came down here to stop me from telepathically communicating with Ursula. That’s the kind of thought I would be having, back then, and, well, if you pick up where you left off when you quit taking your medicine, that same sort of thinking might’ve started up again—andI would believe it.
But lurasidone was going to save me, wasn’t it? Or maybe even Abilify? it would be nice if i could eat a sandwich for lunch without gaining weight, or, even better, if I could lose the ten pounds that I so desperately want to lose (without starving myself or not being able to eat a little more when I’m especially hungry). I don’t know—I just wanted to talk to Ursula, but she wasn’t saying much—nobody was, really, or maybe they were, and this is exactly what they were saying and or asking about. Once you had them on the line, did you necessarily have to use their voice all the time, or was that voice, their voice, translated by our internal narrator? I’m here, she said, and i believed she was—so maybe that was at least partly the case. I could be reading through and responding to her messages right now, which would explain why I have her voice on the line to varying degrees, but I still have so much that I can say.
In that way, then, this book is our book—it’s about our lives together since I started using Ursula’s voice. You can see right through me. That was her—and I read between the lines, for better or worse, for, if, truly, I could see right through her, then she’d never known real unadulterated passion—she’s been happy, but, possibly, never addicted—never impressed by something greater than herself—in short, I’m sure she loved her fiancé, but had she ever been completely and totally in love? Or if it wasn’t love, since, as with every ex, how could it have been if it ended? then did she know what it was like to need someone so bad that you were in pain and, also, paralyzed without them—or at least the promise that, yes, you would see them soon, and yes, they felt as passionately about you as you did about them? Had she ever been slightly unstable? Had she ever known that? Perhaps she had when her and her fiancé split—hence the reconciliation.
But i don’t think that was the case; of course it’s practically offensive for me to say that she would or does feel that for me, but that was how, at some point, I was sure to feel about her—once our lives allowed for entertainment instead of increasing levels of concentration that felt a little too much like the answer to suffering as opposed to the answer to happiness. I was mirroring her, in a way. The things that came out of my mouth were things that she might’ve been thinking, that she might’ve said in my place. I’d just said them before she had the chance to say these things for herself. Who knows? But I felt her presence, and I was beginning to wonder: is the apparent disconnect between me and Ursula’s voice a function of disorder, or have we moved to another level, and her voice was mainly meant to address us, and, when I was typing, maybe she’d been absorbed by my internal narrator, who, for all I knew, was the extra-dimensional me, assisting me across the bulk.