how did you get so far away

[prismaticbleed]

I have exactly ten minutes before I need to sleep but I cannot be ignoring headspace anymore.

Infi died last night.

...

On Friday morning-- I think? it happened so fast-- we had a traumatic dream hack, but it didn't target me... it used Infi.
Ze couldn't cope. Ze hasn't gotten over CNC and honestly at this point I was thinking ze never would, with how Black's terrible softness holds everything forever, and wounds don't heal in that space; a gash in that velvet dark bleeds eternally.

There was some sort of headspace event, as we got ready for church (the first 40m or so after we wake up, it is virtually impossible to front; the mind is so dissociated and blurry that we don't have a solid sense of self, let alone the ability to have a conscious person grab the nebulous steering wheel)-- we were IN the bodyspace, in what looked like the same "ribspace" we had been in years ago, when Infi fell to the bottom of the lavatubes with all the beetles, and I had to carry hir out. Ze was in my arms again, now. I forget why, God I forget why--

The next thing I remember was being in blackspace, holding a lightblade, and cutting the whitewomb out of Infi as I wept. It felt so wrong-- not the action, but that part of hir. It felt like an infestation-- like EXACTLY how our traumatized psyche defines such a thing in meatspace, no exceptions.
It felt so wrong. I'm shivering in disgusted horror just remembering the fragments. Infinitii insisted I remove it, remember. I refused at least two times. Ze said I must, if I don't get it out ze will try to rip it out hirself, or die rather than have that in hir anymore.
This was all a response to the hack. Ze could not live with the reality of it. The worst part is I didn't blame hir.

When I first plunged the blade in the sphere turned almost opaque, like it cracked wrong, it lost its translucent bubble look and became something diseased, something plasticine and pliable instead of glassy crystal. I was trying to cut it out and Infi TURNED OFF ALL HIR MOUTHS because otherwise ze would be screaming in pain. I knew. But ze would rather endure this than the alternative.

I remember the sphere splitting open at the top all of a sudden and I wanted to vomit from the kneejerk horror of it. I jabbed the blade in behind it and tried to gore it out immediately but suddenly the sphere moved on its own??? like it was an ENTITY. slithered out like hexxus, same horrible sticky-tar movement, but white. it was PLAGUED. it had that same stupid awful mouth and no eyes and those vestigial arms, trying to run away from me, but i was furious for some reason and I can't recall what i did. i just lost it. i think i set it on fire, or stabbed it to death, or burned it with light energy, or all three. i don't know. all i know is that i felt actual hatred seeing that thing crawl out of infi's abdomen and i wanted to kill it.

something very brief happened here, with me praying about this??? realizing that fighting corruption with vicious emotion will only exacerbate it ultimately. ended up praying? some vague vision of jesus just calmly grabbing the plague-worm and disintegrating it into powder with a touch. no violence, just that terrifyingly subtle omnipotence.

everything is a morning-blur from a week ago so please forgive me.
i know around here the body started to "wake up" so social girls started thinking "what's this headspace crap, i don't need to pay attention to this or remember it, it's wasting my attention and memory and i don't care. i'll just decide it didn't happen."

i quote. they literally thought that. "this is all in my imagination, it's just a made-up stupid thought, so IF I DECIDE IT'S NOT REAL, THEN IT ISN'T."
those freaking social girls LITERALLY think that THEY have the power and authority to ignore us out of existence if we're an inconvenience to them.
it is the most hypocritical, cold-blooded, stone-hearted thing in the world. i want to sob.

that's why nothing is written down and why i'm now desperately trying to write something out at midnight while chronically sleep-deprived because I keep reaching into that space in my heart where ze should be and has been for ten freaking years and suddenly ze's not.

...

those cursed girls couldn't erase the truth though.
they tried, tried to unravel things while they were still happening. i FOUGHT. i would NOT let them pretend this wasn't happening because it annoyed them.
infi was... melting. something. with that whitewomb gone hir form just started to literally decay from the plexus down, going all soft like kinetic sand or molten glass or the end of the world. hir "flesh" became intensely glitterdense too, in those spaces-- that rainbow shimmer that pure Black energy always carries was so sharply visible it looked as if the very atoms were sparkling as they slid apart.

i wanted to heal hir. i wondered if i should take hir to azurai, in the dreamworld leagueworld, like we did for xenophon when she was dying a decade ago. but ze said no. "don't you dare," almost. already hir eyes glassing over, still lying there with hir lower half liquefying. hir upper half catching rigor mortis. disintegrating statuesque. a nightmare.
desperate to do something and fighting time and socials, afraid of picking hir up lest ze fall apart in my arms, i warped the entire mindscape to whatever level matched the frantic weeping in my heart. we ended up somewhere small and floating, an isolated pocket of space, something green and white with an aura of peaceful quiet. it felt like time was moving very slowly there, if at all.
i placed hir on some dreamvague facsimile of a hospital bed, surrounded by that emerald green, and that's all i remember.

i... it's been so strange. so terrible.

the past week, whenever I feel something that matches hir vibe, or when i expect hir to speak up, when something would ping hir, or catch hir attention... there's nothing. there's that empty, hollow bubblespace, that is now fractured like a shattered snowglobe and slowly fading into nothingness. it's not even black or white anymore, it's greying out. it's like an actual bubble right before it pops. it's falling to pieces.
infi's not there.
infi's in some unmappable crumb of reality that no one else can find, a fragment of place, something i could hold in my palm. god i wish i could hold hir but i
i can't, i can't move hir, ze's losing the capacity to even be interacted with, everything is bleeding back into that colorsink void--

laurie knew. i forget how. was she there on friday? did i tell her? i don't remember.
she's the only one who knew. we were in some sort of mindscape together at some point, something scary like an arctic tundra at midnight. dusty bleach below, shineless nothing above. an inexplicable wind, the manifestation of fear even in the waking world, that brutal whip of unseen violence threatening to take itself weaponized out of your burnt-raw lungs.

today. oh lord today. what even happened.
i woke up and everything was wrong


last night, tuesday, i don't even remember,
i... was i talking to hir? what happened? when?
so much in the physical realm has been getting in the way, devouring our schedule, i didn't have time to even sleep, i couldn't front, i wasn't there, we're all just trying to survive, but you were dying,
and the worst part is you wanted to.

last week ze said ze didn't. ze wanted to live, to love, with me, to try again, to try better, to do better, something... but then there was that hack. it made the trauma of past regrets real in the present, unbearable, unignorable. you can't live with that in your line of sight, i know. and infi didn't want to.

something happened, god please what happened,
all i remember is weeping and kneeling next to hir as everything around us turned black as a moonless night and slowly melted into oblivion. like the very fabric of reality was rotting. god it was terrifying, there was no sound, no depth, it was all just dead,

laurie was with me then. i remember us standing in an endless blankwhite field with huge shards of broken glass around us for miles.
we couldn't get out of there. i couldn't warp it, we were in shock and scared, it felt like someone had just cut out my heart,
we ended up shouting for leon with all our strength and he DID show up. thank God oh thank God, you do realize that boy has an "EXCEPTION" tagged to his soul, like in moralimon he has the ability to jump anywhere. nothing can stop him.
he brought us to his cathedral and laurie and i were sobbing, still in so much shock, we didn't know what to say or do

i really couldn't front for the rest of the day. laurie stayed in the background too.

i kept reaching into my chest and feeling the missing rib and the space where there should be someone

this is all wrong

but.

remember why infi wanted to die. why ze let this happen. why i cannot forget that last glance, that look from hir eyes wide and bleary, like they were seeing the death of the universe. little did ze know,
please
remember why. why. the same reason you did, you cupid cephalophore, whenever the hacks got so bad the system itself stopped running right. you hit the bloody reset button. you took a knife to the optical disc. you took a magnet to the tape. you desperately tried to delete time itself, you tried to backspace the story of your life, you tried to erase this and start over, please, go back to a time before THAT happened.

you always used to dream of dying and coming back different. like this hell was just a bad dream.
that's exactly what infi did
soft reset, melt reset, world reset, hope god puts us back together better

infi's original timeline was hell, you remember that. the daemon era was the most traumatic one we had, all things considered.
yes, everything hit a dead stop with the fugue in 2019, but no one literally RESET the timeline. THE ERA DIDN'T HARDSHIFT.
yes, mostly everyone died and headspace collapsed, but no one tried to load a new game, so to speak. it was just left in shambles. we STILL haven't rebuilt.
those who have come back DID come back different, but so unstable, and shaky, and mutable even now. there's nothing new and solid FOR them to anchor into. there's no clear cut space to stand in. there's no new world, no sunrise yet, no "let there be light," not yet...

infi dying is going to require a hard reset

you too.
ze's your heart, you idiot, you know the whiteslot is just as corrupted and sick, what do you think you cut out of hir??
what happened to your blackblood? have you looked at it lately? who are you really, nameless echo of a boy? are you even alive enough to die?

we've been in the tomb for almost FIVE YEARS, do we even know what life is anymore??

god help us.

i don't want anyone else to die
i couldn't bear it
the thought of seeing anyone else lying in blood would destroy me completely

but so does the thought of living this haunted halflife, unable to move on because we don't know where we're moving from or towards
you can't kill a beast if you can't see where to set the crosshairs.
we need to man up, face whatever we're running from,
and then bury a bullet between its eyes

if we don't do something sharp and conscious and real, we're all going to die anyway

we've died before and thank God we're still here, there's still a reason for us to exist,

i think we can bank on that. i know. there's too much love here, please, i know there is, i can feel it tonight, inbetween the tears, filling up that void in my chest with weeping red ache

infi said that if ze came back ze wanted to be something completely new.
new name, new face, new life. death to the old. death to the hacks and the corruption. start over soul.

how long will it take? will the daengels survive here? will they move to heartspace instead, enter the league, leave our loop?

what will happen to me, still splinter-frayed to the past white-haired ghosts, those doomed men, gutted pink with veins running black? if infi is dead, what goes for them? will their bloodline stop completely? what will happen to me?

who am i, without hir?
what sort of new era is this? what new life will this become?

god knows i've been praying for this though
i need to pray more about it

lord keep us safe from the hollow girls
keep us safe from the barren chatterboxes
from the numb and eyeless automatons
from the manic shrieking drivers
keep us safe, please, you know they have no hearts,
you know they can't pray or love at all,

please keep us safe

please.

reset us.
reset us, lord.
hit the reset button for us all. whatever that means.
whatever started to break in cnc, snap it clean in half
give us a hard end, a final page, a closing of this book,
please,
give us the cross to die on,
give us the empty tomb in the lily-gilded morning.

give us a new era
give us a new life
give us new hearts for you and for each other
scrub out the tar
wash out the plague
saturate us with light and fire and hope
give us a rainbow after the storm.


i'm too scraped-out to talk any more
i'm falling into automated speech and that would be blasphemous here

i cannot see tomorrow, i never could, it's all in God's hands

right now all i have is five hours of sleep and this fiercely inexorable hope in my heart
bright red and weeping still
but there will be a sunrise
there will be a sunrise
and it will light up the moon


death is only a door

please,
let me find you waiting on the other side.