It'll be over and I'll still be asking when.

inspired by @casgirl’s tags on this post:

But one day, I think it was August 2021, I flipped a coin. Thinking back, I think it might have been the first time in my life I'd ever flipped a coin. But we were deciding where to eat, me and my friends.

And then it happened. The coin landed on the table, heads... and also on the floor, tails. I tracked the coin with my eyes, but suddenly realized I was looking at two things at the same time. It was like crossing your eyes, and seeing things kinda overlaid on top of eachother, kinda mixing and fading in and out, but with four eyes instead of two.

It was such a weird experience. At first I just stood there kinda motionless, trying to figure out what was going on. Then my friend bent down and picked up the coin off the floor, and said "Hah! Tails! Pizza!" and also she just stood there and said "Damnit. Heads. Guess we're gonna get burgers after all."

And I looked down at her and up at her at the same time.

That's really when the desynch started. I reached for the coin on the table and held a fuzzy, half-there, transparent coin in my hand.

I began to feel kinda sick. We got in the car and things got more and more confusing. Thank goodness I wasn't driving that day. My friends were having two increasingly different conversations and I just sat there kinda dissociating. By the time we got to the two different restaurants I was nauseated and I had a bad headache. I stayed in the car in the parking lot at the pizza place for a few minutes until the other car going to the burger place parked. One of my friends was worried and stayed with me, so that was nice. But when I tried getting out of the car, everything went wrong.

One of my bodies walked right into another car and fell down on the ground, while the other stopped and froze in place. The completely different sense of proprioception completely broke me.

I was basically bedridden for a week. Slowly I relearned how to move, and walk, and talk. I had two bodies, in two timelines, connected by a single consciousness. My brain(s?) had to learn how to control two bodies at the same time.

It's like, pretty weird, but I'm used to it these days. My two sets of eyes no longer overlay on top of one another, they're kinda separate. It's hard to describe. I think my brain got better at multitasking too, I can walk in one timeline and draw in the other, for example.

Things kept getting more and more different, as much as I tried to enforce keeping things the same. Finally I started seeing my therapist again.

I had to convince her that what I was experiencing was real. So I asked her to think of her favorite food and her favorite color. Then in the "Burger" timeline I asked her to tell me her favorite food, and in the "Pizza" timelines I asked her to tell me her favorite color. And I told her her favorite color in the burger timeline and her favorite food in the pizza timeline (Spaghetti and Red, btw.)

She quizzed me on a few other things and sometimes her answers differed between the two timelines which was pretty frustrating, and I don't think she really believed me at first, but she was nice enough to play along at least. And like, not have me committed.

I ended up scheduling my therapy so that I have meetings on pizza tuesday and burger friday, so they're kinda spaced out more evenly. It also just makes the meetings a little less confusing. Ironically doing the same thing in both timelines is actually more distracting than doing different things.

In late 2022 I transitioned. I decided to come out in the burger timeline and stay in the closet in the pizza timeline, so if everything fell apart I'd still have one normal timeline. And like, my parents did not support me. Most of my friends did, but some of them drifted away. And I found that just made me resentful of my parents and those friends in the pizza timeline. And the dysphoria of being a guy in the pizza timeline while living as a woman in the burger timeline was killing me. So when I got on HRT in early 2023 I decided I couldn't take it anymore, I had to transition in both timelines. So I did. Ironically things went a little smoother in the pizza timeline, probably because I was already more confident about presenting female.

I ended up making some transfem friends in the burger timeline, and I sought them out in the pizza timeline too.

It's kind of a mixed bag, this phenomenon. You know like, pain is a lot worse. One week I had a bad tummy ache in the pizza timeline and a bad toothache in the burger timeline. Or like, if I have back pain in one timeline, not having back pain in the other timeline doesn't relieve the feeling at all.

It's such a cool thing, like. When I first started out I had all these conflicting signals in my limbs and body and stuff. But now it's just like. Yeah I have a pizza arm and a burger arm, just like I have a left arm and a right arm. They're the same, but different.

When I make a drawing in one timeline, I don't have access to it in the other timeline, which is really annoying because I keep wanting to show people art I made in the other timeline. One day I'll figure out some kind of interdimensional data transfer protocol. I mean I guess I could like, convert the file into hexadecimal text, and then manually type it out and hope I don't make any mistakes. I'd have to compress the hell out of the file though. Maybe I'll try that one of these days when I don't have anything to do in either timeline.

But I get to spend more time with my friends, because I can schedule hanging out on different days of the same week. Does get kinda confusing when I confuse things that happened in one timeline for another.

Because like, ever since that coin flip, the timelines have been steadily moving further apart. You'd be surprised how little the weather has changed. Like, sometimes there's a little rain shower in one timeline a few minutes earlier than in the other, but all the big storms and hurricanes and stuff are basically the same. I guess it's harder to influence these continent-scale systems than the butterfly effect predicts.

I get to see almost twice as much meteors during meteor showers because I can look in two directions at once. Meteors hit the atmosphere in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.

But it does affect a lot of other little things. Even when you don't realize it, you affect the lives of everyone you come into contact with in little ways, and that spreads. I know people with different jobs in each timeline, people who have different relationships. Even people I don't know that well.

I wasn't quick enough in the pizza timeline to keep my friend from. Well. To save my friend's life. But I rushed over to her house in the burger timeline and talked her down. It's so weird, grieving a person you still talk to every week. Because it ended up being this kind of abstract pain. Everyone else is missing her and you're standing there like. Yeah. I have plans to see a movie with her on burger tuesday. I went to her funeral just to make sure that I saw the dead body so I could really internalize that she was gone. And I still didn't cry. It made me feel like a terrible person.

My friends never really take me all that seriously when I talk about being split like this. They kinda play along but I can tell they think it's a joke. It's whatever. But my friend's girlfriend came into my DMs one night sobbing and cry-typing and begging me to let her talk to her gf one last time. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. But I relented, and made plans to have a sort of interdimensional seance.

I could tell my friend--we'll call her Elsie, and we'll call her girlfriend Robin. I could tell Elsie was pretty awkward about it. I think she felt guilty on behalf of her other, dead self. Robin kept saying stuff like "how could you kill yourself, how could you do this to me," and I would have to say that, and Elsie was just like "I'm sorry." And it was really hard to get Robin to understand that we weren't talking to Elsie's dead spirit, we were talking to her in another timeline. I told her she didn't have to apologize, and I told Robin that guilt tripping the dead was kind of rude.

After that things went a little more smoothly, Robin asked about how Elsie's life had gone, how their relationship had progressed you know like if they were still together, things like that. Elsie said some stuff that I wouldn't have known, and Robin was like. Wow you really are talking to Elsie aren't you?

And I was just like :| yep.

Ever since then my friends keep trying to get my help with stuff. Like they'll ask me what their other self is doing, like, ok, for instance, my friend, we'll call her Jane, she wanted to ask out her crush, and she was like ok. Can you ask the burger version of my crush if she likes me back. Which kinda throws the burger version of her under the bus doesn't it!

And another of my friends wanted to know if she'd regret quitting her job, so she told me to ask the other her to quit her job, and then if it went well she'd do the same. I did ask, and she said no, obviously.

Someone to be brave for.

excerpt is from chapter 29 of the novel.

Rocky hums. “Close. Skip first note.”

“Why? You always include that.”

“This means… of Rocky, possessive. Of the speaker.”

“My.”

“Correct. But only for names.”

“So you’re calling me…?”

Rocky repeats the word: “My Grace. Yes.” 

so after the extremely important post observing Grace is wearing Ilyukhina's dress during his crash out, i feel it is my civic duty to catalog Grace's wardrobe shifts during this sequence. important science. gender science. as if there were not enough science on that with Grace already.

This sequence is non-linear, jumping back and forth, so I'll try to put them in order.

CRASHOUTFIT ONE:

PHM shirt, workout shorts, what seem to be PHM socks, and his horrible flat sole sneakers. This is all probably his own clothes or communal PHM clothes.

(I am 80% sure he's wearing fucking KEDS. So apparently Grace does not require arch support. Or comfort. Or any grip on the soles of his shoes. Maybe this is a factor in his clumsiness.)

CRASHOUTFIT TWO:

When he's going through everyone's effects, he's in longer drawstring sweatpants, his PHM polo, and what I've determined to be a hospital cloak. It's cut the same way as the medical garb and doesn't have the same pockets/fasteners you'd expect from normal clothes.

CRASHOUTFIT THREE:

Grace really likes Ilyukhina's clothes. Read into this what you will, I know I am. But he also has plastic sunglasses, and a beach hat for the WHAM! Big Tour, which. Is wild. Ilyukhina's silk robe is the clear focal point here.

I want to note that I believe Grace has another of her dresses on the floor of the lab when Rocky first shows up. Also, Grace seems to be very careful and conscientious of the silk robe; it looks like he's hand-washed it and has hung it up on his improvised airlock clothesline.

(Why is that a dress? It has a similar look and pattern repetition to the other dress Ilyukhina wore, and when Grace briefly picks it up to try cleaning the room, the weight of it is floaty like a dress would be.)

CRASHOUTFIT FOUR:

Grace loves oversized jackets and cardigans. He seems of the opinion outwear should hang down below the hips and above/around the knees. Love that. Here, as he tries to remember who tf he is, he's in a thick, warm-looking robe and the fox mask. The mask is interesting; Eva Stratt leaves him a lil fox figurine as a gift with his effects, and we know/can infer most of the things packed for Grace were from her and the team since he was drugged into oblivion. So maybe Stratt's order was "just find fox-themed stuff and bring it to me."

CRASHOUTFIT FIVE:

There it is! But oh man this makes my heart hurt. Grace seems to be dressed in as much as he can be. The dress but also two different hats, the sunglasses, his cardigan, and what looks like another jacket under the cardigan. It gives the impression he's wearing as much of the crew's clothes as he can, as if trying to hold onto them in the only way his drunk brain can.

BONUS HEARTBREAK OBSERVATION:

Grace locates the NASA jumpsuits then makes the conscious decision to dress the bodies of Yao and Ilyukhina in their own before eulogizing them. This is apparently a detail lifted from the book, where Grace does the same thing, takes the extra time.

I liked these tags but I had something to say about it

I already assumed that the dresses were a choice made by the female crew, mostly for my own sanity. They do show (very infrequently) women in tos wearing pants

And they show men wearing dresses in tng, but only ever in the background (unless you count the dress uniforms)

And obviously I like that these were included, but they were clearly a cop out decision.

“Yeah see men can wear dresses, women can wear pants. They just don’t choose to” reads as “of course I’m not sexist, women just like wearing tiny little dresses in the future”

And thinking about it from a late sixties perspective, many women did see more revealing clothes as an empowering choice to make. Men wanted women covered and modest, understated makeup, only exposed or done up for male enjoyment. Some women took that in the opposite direction and chose to wear more extravagant makeup, revealing clothing, and brighter colors. It was a progressive time, and some of the choices made in an attempt to highlight that in the show did not age well.

I think it's worth emphasizing that this very genuinely is the main reason for the "sexist" miniskirts. IRL, women were often not choosing between sexy miniskirts and non-objectifying pants, but long skirts (respectable) and short skirts (rebellious). Deliberately wearing short skirts as rebellion against patriarchal control that mandated long skirts or maaaaybe loose slacks on a good day is still hardly unknown among girls/women leaving conservative communities in the USA, and was only more commonly coded that way at the time.

Sally Kellerman, the actress for Elizabeth Dehner, found the close fit of the supposedly more feminist pants uncomfortable and is often given something to hold in front of her because she was so intensely self-conscious about them. Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand) loathed the more "proper" initial look and worked with the (gay) costume designer, William Ware Theiss, to design a different, more daring and cool-looking aesthetic for women of the future that appealed to her personally. That was what resulted in the miniskirt uniform design. No doubt it served the objectifying tastes of various straight men involved, but literally zero of them were responsible for the design of Whitney's and Nichols's uniforms.

Not only did Nichelle Nichols not consider herself suffering from the miniskirt, she admitted later to sometimes deliberately lifting the skirt even higher at Uhura's station to show off more of her legs because she hadn't worked so hard on her body to not show them off. Meanwhile, Jill Ireland, the actress for Leila Kalomi, was nervous that she might have to wear the kinds of revealing costumes so many other TOS actresses did, and Theiss instead designed her the comfortable overalls she wears as Leila in "This Side of Paradise."

The kneejerk backlash against short skirts (in decidedly more reactionary eras of both Star Trek and US culture) led to both the large-scale disappearance of the skirts and the snide commentary on them throughout later iterations of Trek, with zero consideration of the fact that they were designed by a gay man to suit the preferences of the leading actresses at a time when they commonly represented rebellion. The Berman-era Star Trek productions tut-tutting at the old costumes while actually putting actresses in uncomfortable, form-fitting uniforms they disliked is ... uh, something else.

I know. Christianity? In my Christian fanfic show? Groundbreaking.

Anyway.

It feels like the writer's intention was to show that Aziraphale and Crowley get rewarded for their suffering by bringing their souls / their lookalikes / their human reincarnations back as Asa and Anthony. That would be a nice thing, right? NO!

What that means is, Crowley and Aziraphale are taking over the role of Jesus. They suffer, they die for (the sins of) humanity, they get ressurected, or more like they came back wrong.

And that honestly feels so... preachy for a show that supposed to be a satire of Christianity. It sounds like the moral of the story is about the virtue of suffering. The new universe is free if God's whims now, yay, but it's fundamentally based on the same Christian morals as before. The mystic lore of this universe is that two supernatural beings loved each other very much but they sacrificed their love and their lifes to defy the old god for others. Sorry, but I'm so unimpressed by this shit. That sounds so much like the creation myth of any other religion. I'd very much prefer the starting point of my universe free of sacrifice and feeling guilty and dead queer love, thank you.

The cycle is not broken. This new universe isn't a complete fresh start, cut lose from the mythical laws of the universe before - Unfortunately Asa and Anthony are the proof of it. Apparently there is something like soulmates, like destiny, whatever you want to call it, that drives these two people together, and it doesn't matter if it's their old souls or if it's just the universe they created that rearranges matter to shape a copy based on the memory of them. In anyway, they and therefore their history and their sacrifice transcends somehow into that new universe and therefore this old religion is still a part of it.

And no, I don't see beauty in the sacrifice and I don't want to see it honestly. I'm so tired by this old chrisitan tale that there is beauty in suffering, that it's the highest moral principle to sacrifice your own happiness for others. That's not virtuous, it's oppressing. Suffer during your earthly life, then your soul gets rewarded in afterlife. That is basically the whole Christian doctrine used to suppress people for hundreds of years.

He's God, isn't he? Part of the "triune godhead." Then we could have gotten a completely different version of the scene in the bookshop, one where Jesus defends the world he knows and the people he's met and the things he learned (in his short time back on Earth) about love and generosity and helping people become better people. 

Maybe Aziraphale and Crowley ask him to create a world without angels and demons. Maybe he says, but aren't they people too? Can't they learn about love, and generosity, and helping people become better people? Of course they can. Look at the two of you.

And we could have gotten a beautiful mirror to the end of Season 1, where Christ does the same exact thing as the Antichrist, where he doesn't destroy the world but puts it back just the way it was. Even slightly better.