(this is an invocation.) You're never really sure where to start with him. Part of that is personal, you know, but part of that is just the way things get when he's around. He's a candle flame and reality wavers a little at his edges and the time you spent near him is a little unreal. But you can neatly divide your life into before him and after him, most days. And even on the ones where the tea light of your memory flickers, turns to smoke and phases through, you can't avoid the aching burning feeling that you're missing something there. Something important. ... You're not as good with words as he was. (to the psychopomp. to the keeper of tombs. to the guide of souls. to the guardian of the scales. to he who presides over god's booth. to the foremost of the westerners. he who is upon his mountain. lord of the sacred land. dog of the desert sands.) Here are the things you know for sure: There was a boy. You met him once, when you were in metaphorical and somewhat literal limbo. There was a boy who was only in the inbetween, caught between location and destination. Cat hair in the lint of reality. Flickering on the edge of lamplight, only available in the off hours on the wrong side of town, in parking garages and waiting rooms. There was a boy, and when you were in your direst of straits, when you were caught in the inbetween, he led you back out. He guided you through your own personal unreality back to solid ground. He gave you confidence and purpose and space to process what you now recognize as trauma and he set you on the straight and narrow of linear time. There was a boy, and most days these days you are not allowed to remember him because you are on the straight and narrow, because time wavers in his presence, because you are now back in the lint and he is not quite enmeshed in this reality like he used to be and your memory is only as reliable as the unreliable thread of history itself, tangled and knotted and occasionally, abruptly snapped . (to the greek jnpw. to the coptic anoup. to the akkadian reanapa. to the wolf. to the dog. to the jackal.) A thing you know for sure: you spent exactly one year with him. New Year's Eve to New Year's Eve. You watched the seasons change with him. (to sirius above. to cerberus below. to the arbiter of truth. to the god of the inbetween.) A thing you know for sure: sometimes your realities would misalign. Sometimes he was gone for minutes or days and you were not given the privilege of his memory. That is the nature of the inbetween. You know that now, or you know that on the days where your past intertwines with his. There aren't many of those anymore, and you mourn the loss of him on the ones that you have. Quietly, of course, and with as little sadness as you can manage because you know he'd hate to make you ache. But there's sadness there, sometimes, and accepting that moves you further away from him. (kai me ton kuna. as uttered by socrates, as uttered by plato.) A thing you know for sure: you miss him. Even on the days when you can't remember, there is a hollow weight where he belongs. He holds you down, keeps you from drifting off and getting lost in the flux of it all. (to the weigher of hearts.) There was a boy and you-- (to Anubis.) There was a boy and you think that-- (please. from the very beginning this time.) There was a boy and you know his name, you call his name in the foggy place between dream and reality and he-- (i need to know what happened to him.) There was a boy and you're losing him but you-- (can you tell me?) ... His name was Fraiser.
welcome to your life: prologue
