Moth Beyond Time

A laugh lights her face as she spins off my arm and through the grass in a flurry of blooming flowers. She beckons. I consider, then yield / hold firm, bifuricated as one of me takes her hand with a laugh and another stands apart, arms folded, brows drawn, sternum heavy.

I'm warm in her arms, surrounded by magnolia and daffodils, sun bright and dancing in her eyes / I watch myself fall so easily to temptation and wonder why I persist in trying / I stand beside someone else who watches like a storm watches the hill it crests over, and she looks at me without ever looking away and asks,

"Why are you here? This is mine."

"This?"

Her head swoops a fraction of a centimeter towards the dance in the grass, features rearranging. "This."

I'm too distracted by the implications of her face reshuffling itself to process her answer, and I just stare at her while her face shifts in tiny swooping twitches in my periphery, never quite straight on, the impression of cloud-formed cheekbones bleeding off into nothing. The train of thought is gone.

I feel yin meeting yin while yang meets yang off to the right, in the land where there is no weight and water cheers along in fountains and streams and sprinklers in the summertime, and I feel the weight of a still pond of fog in my chest.

"I think it's theirs, not yours," I say, and I shrug. They are still dancing. There is no pain because the pain is somewhere else, somewhere away where the dirt and grit and itches live. Unimportant, inconvenient killjoys, they might say, these realities.

I get to my knees and I'm somewhere away in a creekbed, rocks and pebbles burrowed in the dirt beneath my legs, digging into my skin where my boots don't cover me, and I couldn't care less because I'm touching more tadpoles than I've ever seen in my life. They feel firm, like raw peas covered in mucus, and their bodies slip through my fingers by the dozens.

There must be hundreds here in this little creek, hundreds of tiny bodies in the mountains halfway through a road trip- it's always been my solace, that with every haul to somewhere unpleasant, I'd get to see something precious. One year it was tadpoles.

Another two years, we saw a cabin by a little mountain lake at Christmas, one of those rare places with the genuine sort of magic, somewhere I'd never find again if I tried. All away, somewhere else, on the way to or from having my arm pried open and skewered whether I wanted it or not. Some comfort.

But still, in this moment, there are my tadpoles, and she is back and crouching over my shoulder to look at their bodies in my hand.

"Whose is this?" she asks.

"I don't know," we say, bifuricated, waiting. "Both of us. All three. I don't know." They nod. It doesn't matter. We drop it and then I see bark chips in the woods, smell the pine needles, and suddenly I'm underneath the little tree in the front yard of the Last House our parents loved each other in, hiding.

I've hidden here before, a lot. It's a good hiding place for hide and seek, at least until the other kids learn that it exists. Yet again, I wonder in retrospect whether the other kids not finding us when we sat on a rock in plain sight was because they weren't looking for the obvious or because they just wanted an excuse to ignore us for an hour or two. My fingers clench around dirt.

I see people speculate about what a hivemind might be like, and as the tree's leaves shrouding my head begin to spin and peel and bleed color through me, I see someone looking back at me in a raincoat, plushie arm slack and bear body heavy in her hand.

A moment later, I am in the hallway of the Last House looking around a corner as my sister persuades my mom to do something that I convinced my sister she wanted. For the first time, I wonder if I am a bad person. I can't be older than ten years old, small and smooth with that awful bowl cut that we used to have. I've been thinking about growing it out again. It just gets in the way.

She leans out of the scene trailing globs of midnight, a lava lamp for the void. "Did you ever want to cease to exist?" she asks.

I blink. She laughs.

"I don't want to make any plans," she reassures me, "I'm not talking about that kind of death. Did you ever want to just... be someone else?" Another laugh. "Sorry, stupid question."

She's so close. I take a step back. She drips on me, and I try to flick it off without touching the droplet on my shirt. It's thick like oil. It stays. My spine crawls until she notices my discomfort and sucks it back.

"Who are you?" she asks. "Are you people, or not? I need an answer."

"I'm a person," I say.

"I know," she asks, "but what kind?"

"The kind who's not in the mood to be questioned by the drug woman," I snap / a wolf's maw snaps shut, narrowly missing her hand, a warning shot fired. Keep away, stay away, leave me alone. I don't want to hurt you but don't test your luck. She flinches. I back down, shrivel smaller, apologize for my physicality.

"You really don't have to do that for me," she says. An eyebrow raises. I'm not sure whose.

People wonder what a hivemind would be like, and I see them fear it or crave it, and I didn't understand the former until recently but we've always been the latter. Sometimes I'm less sure of that now that we've learned what existential terror feels like.

I'm standing at the kitchen sink, my fingers smoothly carving divots into the metal beneath them as the world wavers around me, my periphery drowned in psychedelic green and my central vision full of sweat and nausea. I retch once and nothing comes, and then the impulse is gone and I am repeating in my head, "I am at the kitchen sink" to carve this single moment back into reality and out of the hell that is everything and nothing all at once, blazing fractals stretched across the floor.

"Did you ever wish you could die?" she asks again. I pause. I nod, once, lick my lips, glance over my shoulder.

"Sometimes, I think it would be easier," I say slowly, "if we didn't bother with all the people business. And sometimes all I want is to vanish into myself and cease to exist. Implode into a naked singularity (physics)."

"Apparently we can say parentheses," laughs a third person, and in a flash I know who everyone is: the third, Echo; the goo, Gwen; myself, Red; with traces of Blue darting through the cracks and Hawthorne left home to answer the phone. But then the moment passes, and I am seated at two bars at once, and a pillar of goo serves me overlaid with the memory's bartender. Brass mug, Moscow Mule, sat on the corner of both counters to watch the room, never quite sure how a tab works but too exposed to ask.

I consider frowning in disapproval, and Echo actually does frown as I decide instead to shrug and chug my drink, not that it'll do much. It's placebo, every time.

"I can't believe you're still drinking in here," says Echo, looking down into its own swirling mug. Even then, it considers the offer before pushing the mug away, and it's left to sit on the tender's side of the bar in one place and further down our side of the bar in another. The memory-places bleed together, sometimes.

Two more bars edge in: a pizza place our mom went to as a child and a steakhouse where people threw peanut shells on the floor, the floor they left unswept all day. I don't envy whoever had to clean it to stop the shells from piling up past our ankles.

I wonder again why all our deepest memory-places involve liquid, and then I'm by the sea- not The Sea, but the Pacific ocean, Oregon coast, fingers in the sand. We found a crab, once. Large, glorious, alive. We watched and poked it for a while and then let it go in the way children sometimes do. Another time, we found jellyfish. We stayed well away.

In another moment, I am beside the river and lake near our campsite in the mountains, the one we visit most years in the summer until our parents divorce. Our mom can never afford it after that, and our dad stays busy traveling to Peru and rennovating his bathroom while our sister tries to find a second job to survive. Our mom calls him selfish. Sometimes we agree. The rest of the time, we remember how hard he worked to try to get us to be more independent, how he forced us to learn to drive, how it was always his way of trying to say he cared: he tried so hard to give the gift of success whether or not his kid actually wanted it. He won his kids both choosing to live with someone else.

I am by water, and my hands are in the ground, and water laps between my fingers as the night air cools my skin. I hear frogs, smell moss and river, remember the sound of the earth underfoot. We have never seen a firefly in person, but they flicker in the distance here, the idea of breathing lights.

People wonder what a hivemind would be like. Her hand is on my shoulder, and we look at the night. A lone car drives by in the dark.