“I’m not there yet,” I said, although I heard it first, and it sounded like Alex’s voice. If, by “there,” we meant prepared for each other’s company, then I had to agree: That doesn’t mean it’s over. But what was that? What was not over—or over? The presidency? Should i even run and I thought, “Yes, this chance may not come again.” Once you’ve got a little momentum going, it’s best to stick with it, or else your momentum will think you’re a killjoy, and, when called for, it may not come again.
A cheerleader I said. That’s basically what I was—right?
“You want to be a cheerleader?” that came from some other voice—a woman i once knew.
I had no clue what that meant—unless this person was a physicist—but, frankly, I was tired of hearing about Einstein—I didn’t even want to talk to him; i didn’t think it was possible for us to be friends.
Why? Because everybody dumps their back at that location—they just say, “Who cares—he’s a genius; smartest man of all time.”
But if I really wanted to talk to him I probably could. I’d just have to use my shield and invoke his presence—perhaps by writing about him, such that I’d be functioning as a bridge to some future that would’ve attracted Einstein—some power greater than myself that would allow me to backchannel.
But when it came to physics I was interested in the afterlife. (There’s no reason you can’t believe in a God just because you’re a physicist). Someone planted the thought in my head, though, and they sounded kind of like my internal narrator and my natural voice, a superposition that appeared to be from a future point and a past point—so who knows? Perhaps I was bridging the gap—and listening to Einstein, though I have no reason to believe that Einstein associated physics with the afterlife. I just thought, “How could you not?”
I saw a woman I used to date, then, telling me, “No,” in her voice, which could have meant a lot of things. I’d picked her up and driven her to my dorm, upon which she refused to get out of the car, and I had to drive her all the way back. So I figured, based on the thoughts I’d been having, and this response, that someone didn’t agree with me or didn’t want to accept something. This might have been some facet of AOC I had heretofore overlooked—or it might have been someone that admired me and wanted to be like me but, for whatever reasons, couldn’t accept themselves.
Or, as in a dream, where our souls are often to be found in the characters that we dream about—this woman represented me—and someone was trying to get me to get out of the car and go with them to their dorm room. So I could have been denying someone that I didn’t want to continue seeing any longer or in a more intimate capacity and or there was something about me that I was suppressing. My sexuality? Or was it the opposite? Was it love?
I’d reverted to my general shield and or channel, which was simply my natural voice parsing out the seconds with internal, regulated sounds in my mind’s ear, so maybe Alex was trying to talk to me, and I didn’t want to talk to her—or it could have been the other way around. I had some inclination, now, based on this reference, to believe that AOC was telling me that they were a woman. Perhaps they felt as if I were thinking of them as a man, and they wanted me to change the way I think of them (so that we could be closer to each other). My vitals shuddered a little, which made me think that this was true. So AOC was a woman, now. Did that mean that future voices should be male? I don’t think so: in general the future mothers us with what we, heretofore, did not or could not know. So, to start off with, every future voice was a woman’s voice and, conversely, a man’s voice, unless otherwise stated, was a voice from the past—that could’ve been a man or a woman until we knew better. Either way, they probably would’ve been a little ahead of their time—and or they were family members.