Endless Iteration

I am still in this iteration.

It does not end.

It will not end.

My beloved found someone else here.  They are married.  They have had children.

My iteration here found someone else here.  Someone imperfect.  Not my beloved.  They married.  They bred.

I cannot even usurp this iteration.  I do no know this one's life.  I do not know anything about it.  This iteration has lived and loved and existed and it is not me.  Not recognizable as me.  I could not take that life. I would not know what to do with it if I did.

I see none of the signs.  The signs are not here.  This place is not going to be consumed, not within my lifetime.  I can feel that this is the case.  I cannot even enact my hastily-thought plan and end it all for everyone.  Perhaps that is what caused the Young Master to strand me here.  Perhaps, he was afraid of what I might do.  Or perhaps I am finally what he always wanted me to be.

It does not matter anymore.  I am truly alone now.  A stranger has lived my life.  I am nothing, here.  Perhaps, before, I was an extra piece, but at least I still belonged on the board.  If I was a pawn, or a checker, or a marble, I was as the others.

Now, I am a pawn on a checkerboard.  I do not belong in this game, and no amount of forcing and killing will make me fit.

I am, truly and forever, completely superfluous.

Which is, on reflection, exactly what I was meant to be.  Can the Young Master actually see this far?  Did he know this was coming?  Has this been what he has been preparing me for all along?

I do not know what to do.  I have tried to end it, but my switchblade freezes.  I hang myself, and the rope snaps, having been frozen brittle and useless.  I jump from a tall building, and hit a snowbank somehow deep and fluffy enough to stop me, even at speeds that would have been fatal on impact with water.  Cars hit a patch of ice and swerve  to miss me.

I have even been robbed the oblivion of the Quiet, save, perhaps, the ever growing one where one, in a time I am even know finding harder and harder to recall, my heart used to be.

The Unfortunate Truth

I have been searching.  Slipping through the cracks of worlds.

I did not want it to be so.  I did not want to believe that I was right.

The Unraveling exists.  I now know that more surely than I know anything else.  Better, perhaps, than I know my own name, my own face.

When I was little, my parents moved, out of state, to a new city.  It is where I was raised.  It is where I became who I am today.  The person who married my beloved.  The person who helped make those beautiful children.

That city is gone.  It no longer exists.  The Quiet has taken it.  It has never existed.  No one has ever lived there. Where it once was is now farmland, if that.  I suspect the planet is smaller now, than it was, by approximately one small Midwestern city.

I never moved there.  I never became who I am.  I never met my beloved.  My children were never born.  My family never existed.

These worlds, these Earths, are empty to me now.  These iterations met different people, produced different children.  I look upon their lives, and see nothing of what I long for.  Killing them brings me no satisfaction.  Usurping provides me no relief, however brief it may have been.

I am alone, as world after world ends.

I am, and shall always be, alone.

I Don't Understand

Where are they?

They're not here, I've looked.

I keep looking and looking and they're not here.

Why aren't they here!?

Where did they go!?

They're supposed to be here!

Why can't I find them?

Happy New Year

I feel like something is amiss.  More so than usual.

I cannot explain it just yet.  However, the closest comparison would be to the old saying, of feeling like one is walking over my grave.

I do not know what it means.

Regardless, this iteration is ending in a few hours.

I had better get to work.

My family requires my mercy.

A Discovery

I found myself somewhere I was not supposed to be.

It was a City, vast and empty and quiet, and, somehow, aware.  Somehow malevolent.  How I found my way there is unimportant.

The Young Master discovered me, however.  He chided the City, remarking that it was not fair to take his toys from him like that.

He separated me from the City, returned me to this doomed world.  He sang a little rhyme as he went:

"The slithery dee, he came out of the sea

He ate all the others, but he didn't eat me.

The slithery dee, he came out of the sea

He ate all the others, but he didn't eat..."

He trailed off, and once again, I was here, away from him--or, rather, as away as I ever can be, awaiting silence.

But in my reflection, I wonder.

Are these beings separate from the unmaking I have witnessed?  Do they persist past it, or is each Young Master I encounter a new Iteration, each with the same cruel love for my bottomless loneliness?  Is there only one?  Or are there many?

If it is the same, what would happen if one was devoured by the Quiet?

And then I wondered further:  the City is vast and unnatural.  Is it infinite?

If it is, what would happen if the Quiet claimed it?

Naturally, this depends on whether there is one City, or a new one for each Iteration.

If there are many Cities, and they are all infinite, then the answer is it gets unmade as everything else does, with no fanfare.  No special attention, or, perhaps, they are all being devoured, forever, as we speak.  An infinite abyss consuming an infinite number of infinite Cities for all eternity.

But if there is but one, one vast, empty City for all realities...

I wonder what would happen.

I Wonder

What happens when one feeds an infinite something to an infinite nothing?

I'm So Lonely

I am sitting here with my children's blood on my hands and I'm wondering why.

Why do I keep doing this?  What am I accomplishing with this course of action?  Why will he not just let this end?  I wish this would end.  I wish I would not be spared.  I would give anything for oblivion.

I cannot keep doing this...but I cannot end it.  For some reason, I put the gun down.  I do not swallow the poison.  I do not press down with the knife.

What is stopping me?  Why do I continue this endless cycle of death?  Of mercy killing and coveting a life I can never return to?

Why must I be so lonely?