Crushed—okay, maybe just cut down a size, but I plan to make it up to you. That was mostly my internal narrator—who i won’t necessarily italicize or quote since that voice runs on autopilot—perhaps controlled by outside forces or even just one person but done in such a way that i can’t tell the difference. If I could i might talk to them, too.
“I know you’re disappointed,” AOC said. I was—my chances of winning her over had taken a turn for the worse, since, as it happens, i thought my math skills were getting a lot of attention, and i’d recently discovered that wasn’t true. most likely, then, she represented someone that i was with in the life to come—and, most likely, that person wasn’t Alex, although they might have been composed of her parts, in part.
i’m not going to lie: i was kind of devastated since i’d allowed myself to hope for something beyond my sphere. the afterlife is great, but it would be nice to make use of my powers while i’m still alive—even if most of what was going on around me, once in the past, hadn’t happened.
I want to talk to you that was Alex—cool. but i think she just felt bad about letting me down, and meant, naturally, that she’d speak to me as a friend (through the continuum).
It would’ve been highly irregular if we’d actually met.
So it goes (we’re doing ok).
I didn’t want to cling to the past, but . . . this is not something you’re interested in doing. I’d allowed myself to think that I had some control over the universe and the loneliness that goes hand in hand with the job i require. This happened periodically with me over the years: i’d get interested in something and look to a future that included that thing, only to discover that my basis for that thing was false—at least in this life.
one thing i wasn’t doing? listening to a podcast while i paint? i guess the equivalent of painting, for you, would be reading the fine print so you can stop the republicans from sneaking something pernicious into a bill. is this your signature? for example. i don’t know how to do that (AOC)
not here! (Alex) I don’t know what was going on—do what? write a eulogy but who died, how, and why? Maybe nobody died—maybe that was the problem with writing a eulogy; or maybe it was a joke: maybe they were saying that everything I write is like a eulogy.
“I guess for the people passing around me,” Alex said. I repeated the sentence in my voice. “Which ones?” AOC asked. That was odd—because it was like AOC was speaking through me to talk to Alex—and that was something to think about. i guess those that were important to me were considered friends of friends and worth talking to. But it felt kind of strange to be bypassed—unless this person, Alex, was somebody else that I hadn’t recovered yet. AOC talking to Alex was just another way of communicating with me, I guess—and i think it was pretty clever. It was like this little kid getting told no by me and then going to their mother and asking the same thing and possibly being told yes, then, by both me and the mother of my child. But I guess it didn’t have to always be like that: it could have just been AOC’s way of learning about me so that she, in the future, would have an advantage—knowing, then, what I like.