#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.