I know you're at home working on your fancy garden and waterfalls and shit but come play on tumblr with me. Write me a 3-sentence (or 3000-sentence) something.
Son of a bitch, Ismat. I know you’re doing a rewatch, so Scully’s water feature can make a cameo for you as well.
She bought the house after her mother died, a fortress against sentimentality. Pictures on her phone and in albums if she wants them, but gone are the framed wedding pictures and favorite snapshots. Gone are the knick-knacks, the souvenirs, the mementos that kept her tethered to a space. She wants only a port.
A Pisces, she likes the water that tumbles beneath her walkway, eroding tiny nibbles from the ground as she stands on it. She likes the burbling entropy of it, reminding her that this all too shall pass.
The TV guy came, forcing her into brittle small talk, and she ended up with a full home integration system. There is a monotonous peace in the setup, the self-contained sterility of her environment. It contains no surprises. She gave the dog to a neighbor, hoping it would be enough distance to keep him safe.
Mulder says it looks like Bill Gates’s guest house.
Mulder, Mulder, with his precarious heaps of organic matter all about. Books with thick creamy pages, pictures and posters and t-shirts and afghans. His fireplace takes logs, his freezer takes ice cube trays. He and his house thrum together in a symbiosis Scully can no longer tolerate. She hates the weight of obligations, of being needed at all. Her house is sufficient without her, a synthetic organism with no need for her messy human biology.
Her son is a quiet specter, appearing in distant corners and late hours. He requires nothing as well, not even her acknowledgement. She gazes at his face (Charlie’s adolescent face, mostly), blinks, looks away. Though he wouldn’t know her anyhow.
Three dead sisters - they don’t come to call and she believes this means William is alive and well because they watch him instead. She likes to think of Missy and Samantha guiding him with auntly pride, wispy Emily both older and younger than her baby brother.
Nights at Mulder’s when she wants them, cozy with pots in the sink and cheap wine and sweaty skin and panting breath, all tangled up in his mismatched sheets. Her car parked in the dirt, wind chimes clanging on the porch. Mulder is a fully immersive material experience.
She never stays longer than a couple of days, afraid of all the gravity his possessions have. They could draw her back into their odd orbit, out of her own trajectory. She could crash on the surface of his strange planet and be marooned there again. Organic molecules need warmth and water to spark into life, and she refuses to risk nurturing anything that might die.
Scully clicks the fireplace on, taps out a grocery order. Loneliness is a choice.
