#61: Kendra

04/26/19

FTP: So I'm settling in here nicely. I've decided how to format things going forward. Up here I will recount the events between the dream and now as I write up chunks of the narrative set during my sleep. I think that will be most effective; it worked last time. This entry all concerns the 27th of March, this first part starting after the dreaming ended.

After waking up, Ali was immediately besieged by messages and calls from Rob. She's since blocked his number and I think entirely cut contact with him. Whatever excuse she used about him causing too much drama was nothing but a pretense. I was the one she always wanted by her side anyway.

I hung out with her all morning as we wandered Wellington and she begged her parents for help. Spoiler alert: no luck on that part. I had no idea how much worse things were going to get.

I seem to remember us hatching different ideas for how to proceed. Jae would take Ali in to train her with the job. Maybe I could try and get the same job? She shot it down,
saying Jae could only recommend one person and Ali had the IT knowledge to manage a computer job. I'd find something. I knew I'd find something. Until then Ali would vouch foe me and keep Jae okay with her sudden bonus roommate. Where did we go until Jae could pick us up? She said she couldn't make the trip until the next Saturday. Since Ali's parents had left her out on the streets, we had to give her some kind of shelter. It took a lot of convincing but I think we agreed on trying to talk to my parents.

When we got back my mom screamed at me. She told me to pack my shit and get out right then. Obviously, I didn't just calmly go about this business but my arguments were utterly futile. It was as if she were an NPC set on a track of ignorance to my plight.

“Fine. Fuck you, then!” I heard myself say, but now I wasn't speaking. I was just the spectator on the side observing. “You're full of shit and I'm done with you anyway!” I followed my body to my room, not sure what to expect as I opened the door.

I guess Ali and I left behind a stinking mess in my room, paraphernalia and alcohol containers. I didn't remember doing more with her than smoking a bowl and, well, what we did, but true to my mother's word(amidst a sea of put downs and passive aggressive disappointment), the room was a disaster area the likes of which Ben's party days would envy. Normally my instincts said blame it on Darek, especially in that moment as he puppeted my body,  but recent events reveal that reality itself is an unreliable narrator. I have no room to assume anything.

I didn't even resist the move after that. I just kind of grabbed a backpack of essentials and met Ali down the road from my former home. Her presence was a welcome light in a dark unknown around me.


03/27/19

The dream imposed itself upon reality immediately. I felt as though I had been traversing the thick miasmatic fog all day, as if my spiritual self had been here the whole time I was with Ali. I can't be sure how soon after sleeping I saw the figure in the distance. I might have noticed her as soon as I slept. It felt like hours, days elapsed before I spotted her.

“Alice?” I called out, half-delirious.

A small smile illuminated her features. I saw full, red lips, thick glasses, and a distinct cheek dimple framed by royal purple hair. Memory did not betray me this time.

“Kendra!” I raced to her and threw my arms around her. She returned the embrace with a whimsical ease to her posture that lessened the weight I had been dragging around for these past weeks.

“What are you still doing here, you silly boy?” She asked me with a knowing smirk.

“I'm… I… I don't know…” I said. That weight suddenly crushed heavier down on me.

“Every time you get swept up in the darkness you always need me to come save you.” She pressed a finger to my chest and poked me, sending a slight warmth spreading through my torso. “You never realize until it's too late that you can do it yourself.”

As her finger pressed into my chest, a light radiated out from me, around me, piercing the dark fog.

“You've been so close to putting it all together in every post I have read on your new blog.” Kendra mused. “But you've got false angels in your ears misdirecting your mental processes, so I'm just going to have to spell it out for you plainly.”

We began walking, her own body generating the same warm glow as mine. “This dark cloud is not a location; it's a portal to the underbelly of the mind. It leads to the deep recesses of the subconscious where Chameleon lives. All those doorways you've been seeing are parts of that dark labyrinth the dark cloud leads you to. But that's because you're not looking where you're going. You're letting yourself get turned around.”

With each step we took the darkness seemed to be eaten away by the light, and i saw that we were in fact in the same familiar woods that I had known from my last trip to the Outer Layer. It appeared to be night time, though the inability to see the sky or anything more than a few feet ahead prevented me from confirming that. We continued walking together.

“You were right about Gwen being linked to the cloud. But you need to know she lied when she said she represented your relationship with Alica. I know that for a fact. I've been here a long time, longer than I can clarify right now, and I've seen her birth and who she is. She isn't an external event you experienced. She's an answer to an age-old question. Was Alice one of the users or one of the used?”

I paused in stride and felt the warm glow shrivel slightly. Without breaking stride, Kendra clasped her hand around mine and propelled me forward. “See? You know exactly what I'm talking about. It's this question that put the first crack in your soul. That has been there as long as I've known you. You turned it over and over in your head, even without conscious awareness. What were Alice's true intentions? Why did she behave the way she did regarding you, and what did she see you as?”

“Gwen,” Kendra continues as we began to be able to make out farther and farther ahead, “is the scenario where Alice never existed. Gwen, the real one, Alice's sister, pitied you and wanted to manipulate you so she created the fake account, invented a sister, and played with your emotions. The whole story from the relationship to the cancer was a big lie.”

I could now see the reflected moonlight off of the tree leaves and a couple stars twinkling in a clear night sky. I dare not try to find the dark cloud. Searching for it might trigger a reaction.

“Anna, inversely, is your more realistic vision of Alice, a troubled girl just like you who used the internet to escape reality, who fell for you and agonized over the fact that the happiness you shared could not last, who may even have deceived you about her sickness but out of a desire to protect your image of her. She died as an angel in your world so she could watch over your spirit.”

“Fat lot of good it did…” I mumbled.

“It has made all the difference." Kendra assured me. “Her influence over you echoes across every fraction of this Outer Layer, from Anna to Zanark.” She smiled over her shoulder at me. “In a way, bot Gwen and Anna are your interpretations of who Alice could have been.”

“So…” I mumbled. “Was there ever really an Alice here?”

Kendra stopped walking unceremoniously. She gazed up at the luminous round moon, now fully visible, and carefully formed her answer. “To exist in the same form as you or I would have been a bastardization of what she was to you, Mat. No, she never walked among Anna and Gwen; all of Anna's memories were the result of Gwen's manipulation. But she is among us; her spirit lives with you. Everything she was and is lives in your memory.”

“Memory…” I whispered. The word lingered on my lips. How much memory had been taken from me over the years? How much of who I was did Darek and Chameleon and Zanark delete and fabricate and obscure? Despite all of that, Alice still remained a constant focus of my shattered soul, never wavering, never dimming, a beacon for me to follow through the darkness.

Kendra pointed forward, toward a thinning of trees which indicated a clearing ahead. “Go this way. The girl at the lake waits for you. I must attend to some other matters.” She smiled and kissed my cheek as she strode in the opposite direction. “It was good to be with you again. I've missed you this past two years.”

“So you do remember the missing time.” I said after a moment of contemplation, but Kendra was gone when I turned.

#60: Exodus

04/19/19 FTP: It's my… twenty third birthday? I can't really remember anymore. I think Ben's the one turning twenty three. I'm two years younger than him so I'm turning twenty. Or wasn't I twenty twenty-four in the original timeline? Should that count toward my age even here in this weird timespace? I don't know. For those of you who care (there are some things lying around online from 2016 that suggest people were following me), let me tell you what the last few weeks have been like for me: a brief brief homelessness that almost felt like a reprieve; quasi-comedic events that play as if somebody shoehorned a plot point into a bad script; Darek's sticky prints all over the damn place; and a frantic salvaging move into position for the endgame. I briefly touched upon the feelings in the last entries on the other blog, but the behaviors of people around me give me a strong sense of my role as a playing piece for Chameleon and Zanark. All the moves that have been made over the last couple weeks are all familiar, forced positions. It's deeply unsettling to consider that my life might just be a game for powers higher than even Darek. Anyway let me put to rest the concerns about my well-being. I'm safe with Ali at her cousin Jae's house. She picked us up about a week into my homelessness. I made a joke about “Jae-us ex machina” and Ali laughed for the first time in the whole week. It felt good. Anyway here I am. Now that my eyes are open to the nature of my reality, I see the invisible hands guiding the pieces around. Yet again, yet again I sense the haunting nearness to the climax of this chaos. Kendra's hand in this is the only assistance I have. She's probably helping Darek, but, as far as I'm concerned, her direction is far more than I've had otherwise. So in terms of reality and supporting myself, Ali talked Jae into letting me crash on the couch while I get my shit together. I'm gonna start looking for a job soon. I already know I'll get the one I had before. I'm not too worried about income. Honestly what does all of it matter when the fabric of reality is stitched together by frayed threads? Enough from the present though. Here's part one of the events. 03/27/19 What follow is the events that occurred on March 27th 2019 starting at 2:13 AM. I'm not going to censor any of it for the sake of illuminating every echo between this iteration of my life and those recorded on the Tumblr blog. I didn't actually realize it was Alice's birthday until after the fact. Ali texted me saying she was outside around two in the morning. It wasn't actually exactly 2:13 AM when I read the text; I had been too engrossed in watching Ben's latest YouTube video to realize she had messaged me until a couple minutes later when I checked my phone. As to the contents of that video, well, I guess Chameleon has had his claws in more than just me. Despite the anomalies recorded in the video, Ben maintains a stubborn unawareness that anything supernatural has occurred. However, he is beginning to grow frustrated with the lack of answers his narrow viewpoint is revealing. This could be a promising hastening of his personal path to awareness. He has to accept he has the same disease as all of us before he can confront any of the deeper truths. Anyway, I had to sneak Ali in through the back door. Our family cat, Lucky(that doesn't sound right; check back with other logs for the cat name), slipped out while the door was open so I got to spend an extra five minutes coaxing the little guy out of his hiding place under the bushes. We made our way up to my room and I just confessed everything to her, from my blog to the dreams to Ben's YouTube account. She took it all in with a remarkable complacency. When she was done thinking it all over, she looked deep into my eyes. “I believe you.” She finally said. Something inside me released all of my tension into the world with those words. In many ways I felt about Ali the same way I did about Mammoth; she seemed just a mask being worn by Kendra to separate from the dreaming self. That admission of belief felt like something genuine, coming from the girl I'd come to know beneath and beyond all this split-personality chaos. “You do?” I managed to ask. “Yeah.” She said. “I keep getting these… feelings, like deja vu. They're so intense and so vivid and, if you really have lived this whole thing before, maybe I have, too. Like you said, maybe being on the other side helped you...remember how to not forget like me and Ben.” She looked wistfully out the window into the night sky. “Besides…” she said. “You're my best friend. Why wouldn't I trust you when you come to me with something crazy?” I embraced her, held her close to me, as I let the relief of finally making a connection in this post-apocalyptic disjointed nightmare overtake me. It felt so good just knowing someone accepted me, someone understood, and I lost myself in the pleasure of the moment. Before I knew it I was kissing her. Before I knew it she was kissing me back. Our hands were all over each other. Flashes of the intimacy we shared back in entry #46(though I couldn't have told you whether it was entry #40 or entry #4 at the time) rippled against the surface of my mind. This dance was all too familiar. I honestly don't know what my logical train of thought was while taking her clothes off. I highly doubt one existed. My brain asserted that in order to ensure Kendra would be able to help me I needed to be as physically close to her as possible. When she pulled the condom from the back pocket of the pants draped over the side of my bed, I realized that this was the closest I could physically be to her. How physical proximity to the host impacted Kendra's ability to travel the spiritual barriers of my mental dreamscape really does not compute in hindsight. Maybe that wasn't the motivation at all. Maybe it was just an excuse. Maybe I wanted to have the feeling of intimacy that had long since drained from all my social interactions. I will give one more relevant piece of info before I do the cliche pan up to the moon and fade to black. As I was throwing her onto the bed, I noticed a MegaBlok on my bookshelf. It was not red. I considered briefly that the blue one must have been with her all along, that surely the influence of Zanark within the block would save me, before she kissed me again deeply and made every thought and theory melt into oblivion. The haze of uncertainty afterward was numbing. I lay awake next to her and stared up at the starlight. Was this real? Would I turn over to find a black doorway greeting me, beckoning me back to the asylum? For the first time answers didn't matter so much as just experiencing the moment for what it was. I didn't try to fall asleep for once; it just came naturally as the next breath.