#emo pistols

[medleymisty]

Forgotten Art: Jasper – Seth 1

Greetings and salutations, Seth Morrigan. I heard your words when I read your profile on the Pen Pal Project. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon t…

Of course Seth would never write anyone first, so Jasper reached out to Seth. Here’s his first letter, if you want to see what Seth will be replying to over the next bit. :)

[firewritten]

I don’t know what I am willing to do, now.

I still have the fireleaf. But I also still need a garden, and other seeds as well.

Do you think Sarah would like another trip to Granite Falls? I need to collect the tears of a rainbow firefly. It doesn’t hurt the firefly. It just makes them sad for a bit.

I was about to say that if I collected everything, if I found a garden and a door, it wouldn’t hurt Sarah. It would only make her sad for a bit. But I don’t know.

I am walking back to the apartment now. Looking at the people gathered in the plaza. Someone’s playing a guitar. It’s late, and the food stalls have closed.

Yes, I think the good that you have done for me and your other pen pal outweighs the unintentional killing of the house.

I also think that you and the Egyptian carver that you were once are both equally real. Or should that be were? Or I guess I could say that you are currently as real as he was then?

I am sorry. My mind is not as clear as it was.

I think we would all ask more questions if we had our lives to do over again.

Part of me would like to be where you are. I think I might enjoy a howling quiet. The sounds I hear here, the guitar and the people and the cars and the sirens in the distance, are loud and jangly and they make my skin feel like it’s rippling, and also they are not real. Not in the way that you and your carver were. Or are. Or am, even. I don’t know. Does it matter?

It is dark and the sounds aren’t real and I almost wish the sun would try to bite into my skin again, but soon I will be home. With Sarah. Who I think is very, very real. She’ll help.

I wish you would stop feeling so guilty over things you can’t help. You are a decent person, there in your garden of darkness with your mailbox filled with sea grass. I know you feel terribly alone, but you have my letters. Does that help?

I keep using the word help. I don’t know if I know what it means.

I am almost home. I hope I didn’t stay out too late. I don’t want to worry Sarah anymore.

[medleymisty]

Forgotten Art: Jasper’s Profile

The Pen Pal Project Online Application Please complete the following questions as accurately and honestly as possible. Your sincere responses will help us match you with the applicants most suited …

Jasper is one of Seth’s two penpals. Here is his pen pal profile if you want to get to know him a bit. :)

[medleymisty]

Did one of your childhood homes burn in one of your lives?

My childhood home did not burn. The paint factory where my father worked did.

The walls in his hospital room were an institutional green, like the walls of our apartment. His room reeked of the sort of flowers that people hang on stands at funerals. 

I should know precisely what sorts of flowers those are, but I can’t bring the names to mind right now. There’s just the smell of....I know it’s not actually the smell of decay, but that’s the word that comes to mind. Fresh dirt and decaying matter and a cloying perfume that attempts to cover up the rot.

Sarah says, “Oooh, a pufferfish? Did you keep it?” 

“Yes. It’s in the freezer now. Ready whenever you want it.”

She looks at me and smiles, and I remember her dinner tasted of the docks.

She says, “Thank you.”

I think she wants to say more than that, but she doesn’t. Not right now. She just smiles.

She’s glowing.

She will cook it and then she will maybe die or maybe not, and I will see the end of my own story maybe or maybe not.

I hope not. Perhaps you are right, and I will never see the ending of my own story.

I am listening, if your mushrooms aren’t. And I don’t think you could have done better. I think you did the best you could at the time with what you knew, and that’s all any of us can do.

Sarah is still looking at me. She is golden and light and she does not end.

I am sure that your house forgives you.

[medleymisty]

Sarah’s looking out the window at the billboards. I wonder what she sees in them. Probably she’s thinking about all the lonely people asleep in their beds while the light from the billboards shines on their walls, and how she wishes she could make them dinner.

I want to ask her why I tasted the docks in her tacos, but I haven’t told her about the things I taste in her food. I am tired of her looking at me with worry. Although I am trying to tell her things now, true.

How do you tell someone you’ve been tasting their emotions and experiences in their food? It’s so personal. How would she react if I said, “I know that you are lonely and worried and angry and sad and that you love me, because I taste it in your food?” 

Perhaps it is best if I do not tell her this one thing.

I am not sure that I want anything from you, other than your letters. I do want those, please.

I am the only person who can absolve me. There’s nothing you can do really about the other Seths and their fires, not in your void with your dead house. You have your own things to worry about.

I do not know anymore if I want to open a door beyond all things. And anyway, if I do manage to find or make such a door and I end up deciding to open it, I want to open it on my own. It doesn’t count if you open it for me, does it?

Do you really think Sarah would melt if I took her through a door with me? 

I don’t want to be alone either. Sometimes it feels like I do, but other times Sarah is here, and I know I don’t want to be alone and that I don’t want her to melt.

What do you want? If you could go through a door and arrive in your ideal life, what it would be like? Or is that too painful to think about? I understand if it is.

I don’t think the woman in the garden behind the roots was like you. I think she had always only been herself. I also think she had only been herself for a very long time.

Why do you think she was warning me about doors? I thought your doors dropped you off into a new life, not into the worst versions of the one you already had.

I am watching Sarah as she watches the city outside the bedroom window. She is soft and light and her pajamas are pink, and I think maybe I love her too. 

I tell her, “Hey, I caught a pufferfish down at the docks today.”

[medleymisty]

It’s after dinner now, and I’m typing this to you from my notes. Sarah is sitting on the bed. 

She’s curious about you. She had a lot of questions when I first told her about the pen pal project.

“Where is Anya from? How did she choose you? Do her letters help?” 

I told her that you lived in a smug yellow house in an endless void and that sometimes the house had gardens. I told her that I don’t know why you chose me. I told her that yes, your letters help.

She watches me type.

“Was Anya the friend you asked for a recipe for? Were those the ingredients she had in her voidhouse?”

“Yes. Her house is dead now, though.”

“Oh dear. Does she have anything to eat then?”

Sarah likes you. I can tell because she is very concerned about your food.

I think she believes you’re real. 

If there was a Seth who didn’t go behind the roots and who didn’t hear about the other Seths, the ones who set fire to their houses, I hope he’s happy. I hope he doesn’t set fire to his apartment.

Maybe he’s just walking in circles around the woods, looking for fireleaf and the tears of a rainbow firefly and a tomato and noxious elderberry. 

Have you ever smelled noxious elderberry? I don’t recommend it. It smells like someone slowly dying in a nursing home bed while blue light flickers over them from the infomercials on the TV.

Tomatoes smell nice, though.

I don’t know. I think I can bear the idea that one day everything will be gone, including me and Sarah and tomatoes. You too, probably. Or do you think a door will open up and you’ll drop into a life in the multiverse that comes after this one dies?

If so, and you remember me, tell the lifeforms there that I hope they do better than we did.

Do you think you’ll drop into a RNA molecule? What would that door be like? Very small, I imagine.

Have you really been everyone? Have you been me? Have you been Sarah? Have you been the people I saw in the plaza on my way home from the docks?

If so, it’s possible that you are....what is. Maybe you don’t enter into people who had too many cracks and they shattered. Maybe you enter into people who cracked themselves wide open on purpose to let the multiverse in.

I like that idea. Anya the What Is. Anya as Existence. Anya the Destroyer of Egos and Bringer of Enlightenment.

No, I’m not afraid that you exist. Why would I be?

I ask Sarah, “Are you afraid of Anya?”

She says, “No, what you’ve told me sounds interesting, and I can tell that her letters are good for you. You have seemed more...present, lately, is maybe how I would say it.”

There you go. Sarah isn’t afraid of you either. You’re not scary.

Of course I haven’t told her about the doors and the lives and all that, but she does know that you live in a house in a void with gardens that aren’t there sometimes, and she isn’t afraid.

She is afraid to bring up the subject of gardens with me, though. I can tell. I told her about yours, and she skated right over that to ask more questions about your house, like how can a house be smug, and was it the yellow that made it smug or something else?

I’m glad you don’t want me to disappear.

[medleymisty]

I am home now. Too late. Sarah went ahead and made dinner. Kept a plate warm. 

She’s not angry. I told her about you and Jasper, my other penpal, and she said that this is okay for now, that your letters seem to be helping. And she said that she understood why I didn’t tell her about not going to therapy, after she threatened to leave. Said she shouldn’t have said that.

She’s talking about work. She got promoted. She caters events for people now. I don’t think I told you. 

She likes to tell me horror stories about catering for weddings. There are a lot of them.

Did you ever have a wedding, in any of your lives? Did you scream at people and get very upset about things like the color of the bands around the napkins? 

Could you not still have your transcendence, even with the dead house? You’re not alone. I am here. 

I am not alone. Sarah is here. It’s a circle of not-aloneness. I think. Do you think Sarah is alone? I’ll ask her.

She finishes her story about a groom who fell on the ground and wept when the napkin bands were ecru instead of ivory. I swallow a bite of fish taco, which tastes like frustration and lack of sleep and also the docks, oddly, and I ask her, “Are you alone?”

She looks at me, and I think if she’d cooked something now it would taste like worry and confusion. And the docks, apparently. I’ll ask her about that too.

She says, slowly, “No. I’m not alone. You’re here.” 

She hugs me. It’s awkward, since I’m holding a plate, but it’s warm. 

I am the Seth Who Keeps Sarah Not Alone.

[medleymisty]

I don’t know what I am willing to do, now. 

I still have the fireleaf. But I also still need a garden, and other plants and seeds as well. 

Do you think Sarah would like another trip to Granite Falls? I need to collect the tears of a rainbow firefly. It doesn’t hurt the firefly. It just makes them sad for a bit.

I was about to say that  if I collected everything, if I found a garden and a door, it wouldn’t hurt Sarah. It would only make her sad for a bit. But I don’t know, anymore.

I am walking back to the apartment now. Looking at the people gathered in the plaza. Someone’s playing a guitar. It’s late, and the food stalls have closed.

Yes, I think the good that you have done for me and your other pen pal outweighs the unintentional killing of the house.

I also think that you and the Egyptian carver that you were once are both equally real. Or should that be were? Or I guess I could say that you are currently as real as he was then?

I am sorry. My mind is not as clear as it was. 

I think we would all ask more questions if we had our lives to do over again.

Part of me would like to be where you are. I think I might enjoy a howling quiet. The sounds I hear here, the guitar and the people and the cars and the sirens in the distance, are loud and jangly and they make my skin feel like it’s rippling. And also they are not real. Not in the way that you and your carver were. Or are. Or am, even. I don’t know. Does it matter? 

It is dark and the sounds aren’t real and I almost wish the sun would try to bite into my skin again, but soon I will be home. With Sarah. Who I think is very, very real. She’ll help.

I really wish you would stop feeling so guilty over things you can’t help. You are a decent person, there in your garden of darkness with your mailbox filled with sea grass. I know you feel terribly alone, but you have my letters. I hope that helps, some.

I keep using the word help. I don’t know if I know what it means.

I am almost home. I hope I didn’t stay out too late. I don’t want to worry Sarah anymore.