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.

A Troubling Development

I have witnessed something with, perhaps, far reaching consequences.

I have noticed certain inconsistencies between iterations.  At first, I merely considered them a quirk of the multiverse, that some iterations contain one thing and others do not.  However, as I go farther and farther, I have come to a single inescapable conclusion.

I believe the Quiet is eroding all realities, even those it has yet to claim.  I believe that it has the ability to claim specific objects, people, and concepts and remove them from every universe, ever.

I could be wrong, however.  Perhaps, as stated earlier, I am simply noticing a lack due to my unique mode of travel.

But, if I am right...

I hope I am not.  I deeply, sincerely hope I am not.

But, then again, what is hope to me?  Hope is very nearly as alien a concept to me as the Quiet is to any living, thinking being.  How does one conceptualize something more empty than empty?  How can someone quantify something deeper than a void?

At any rate, I shall dub this potential phenomena the Unraveling, and I shall watch future iterations to make certain whether or not it exists.