“So you’re here to stay?” and “i don’t know what you think you can do to me.” i think i was here to stay, but i couldn’t be sure—since, as it happens, i’d only been running full steam ahead for a couple years. Before that I couldn’t do much of anything. i got way behind my peers and i was wondering, what do you think about the electric chair—and, frankly, i thought it was barbaric. this is a disaster and i was not pierced
“I was minding my own business,” (walking along the streets of Manhattan—or was it DC? the two can get blended together). i wondered for a moment if Alex thought I called her a bitch (in so many words) but she and or AOC said, “that’s not how I saw it.” Yay! now lets go to the parade! “I mean the one where we torture you” i said. “the one where we prepare you for the worst.” ok: but you don’t have to like it so much. “I was angry—I wanted my Dr. Pepper,” and I would have it (in no uncertain terms) but i had to ask who was calling for the Dr. Pepper? Me or AOC?
It occurred to me, then, that if I was having a conversation with AOC—meaning AOC was talking to me, then shouldn’t I be talking to someone from the past, too? It occurred to me, then, that my man from the past was interested in the future—he was a man (i supposed they could’ve been a woman, but, in my mind i’m dealing with a man on this instance) of secret knowledge, and he used this secret knowledge to enchant people by dressing his secrets up in different garments. I called him Craig. His voice was modelled on what i could remember of an uncle’s voice. But it occurred to me that he wanted the info that i was getting from AOC and so i figured that when i talked to AOC i was, often enough, relaying the relevant information back to Craig.
That was a little bit of a downer, because that might’ve meant that what I was really after was the information AOC was getting from Eula, and so AOC was really talking to Eula more than me and just relaying the relevant part to me. I didn’t like that idea. The idea is to make friends. And so I concluded that AOC and I were talking to each other, from time to time, because we cared explicitly about each other. I considered, then, that I should talk to Craig a little more—he might’ve been lonely, even if he was privy to many of my conversations and experiences.
“I don’t think anything about it,” Craig said. (I’d asked him what he thought of my relationship with AOC). “it is what it is.” i think Alex probably felt the same way—meaning she was a realist. But I think Craig was also saying you should do what you want—he might’ve mentioned something about being in my head and talking to me throughout the day without me realizing it was him.
He was already there, so to speak. we don’t do that (Craig) I’d been blending Craig’s voice and AOC’s voice—and he’d basically confirmed what I suspected: I couldn’t talk to Eula without AOC knowing about it—since AOC was my equal, and, as such, the pinnacle of this my future. But what if I found a contemporary of AOC—someone that, over the course of mine and AOC’s relationship, had revealed themselves to be equally talented? Couldn’t i go through them to talk to Eula? In the end there’s only one future—and Eula (for the time being) was the ultimate future for everybody, so yes, I could bypass AOC if i found someone that was also in contact with Eula—but that person would be privy to what was going on between us unless, for whatever reasons, I tried to block them out with a shield—perhaps I wanted to surprise them or see them in another light—i don’t know. It was also possible that AOC, as a friend, talked, from time to time, with others that were different from me. Ironically, then, the more friends you had the more options you had when it came to befriending Eula. But the fact remained that I needed what, for me, was the closest possible connection to Eula, and I had to get AOC to teach me how to talk to her, since Eula, in fact, was on another level—it would’ve been, for her, like trying to communicate with a caveman. (Although the possibility that i’d catch up a little was there—since, the more you evolve, the smaller the change you feel going forward, because those changes are approaching zero).