/Klexos/
There's no going back to erase the past, tweak your mistakes, or fill in missed opportunities. When the moment's over, your fate is sealed. But if look closer, you notice the ink never really dries on any our experiences. They can change th...
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I’ve always existed, yet I’ve never been respected. Perhaps you know of me, or maybe I’ve swooped in and cradled your essence in my hands for a few moments. I am Klexos. I am an emotion that’s quite literally from the past. I grasp people by their shirts and make them remember.
I am everywhere, drawing my tendrils into someone’s brain and having them experience what they felt the last time they saw this place, felt this person’s breath against their neck or used this car. I make them stop in their tracks, cock their heads to the side and fall into a three-second hypnotization of things that they’ve experienced.
I’m everywhere, but the place I love the most is train stations. I hop onto a bobbing briefcase being carried to the B train and wait until whoever’s carrying it is vulnerable. Then they see what/who they’ve been avoiding/wanting/hating for the last three years/two weeks/ten minutes/twenty seconds again, and I strike. I come face-to-face with them, but they don’t see me, and then I mist around their eyes and tug out the moisture for three seconds while their eyes wander off into a place inside their head, where the most dampened cousins of mine hide. For a moment, I am no longer an invisible mist that stirs up the past.
For a moment, I am almighty. I control everything they see and sit at the stern of the ship as they respond. I release anger in spurts from my outstretched hands, or happiness, or sadness, or melancholia. When I am angry, I can make people become angry too, and walk right up to their niece and scream at them. When I am happy, I can make people bounce on their heels and throw a twenty-dollar bill at the homeless people sitting along the side of the station. When I am sad, I can release them and have them promptly burst into tears that they can’t explain. Some of my brothers and sisters: the core emotions that I can hand these people over to, think I am but a conniving manipulator. Joy hates me with a burning passion, even if I do generate business for her every now and then. But what I do is so special. I hold my hands around a crystal ball that maps out people’s lives for just a moment, and within that moment, I change the course of their lives. I am Klexos, and Klexos brings up things that motivate people.
There have been people that can do what most can’t: change me, and I will tell you the story of my most poignant experience. There are many, of course, because I’ve done this for many years, but this next one is the one that shook me to my core.
The first was a young man, headed for the J train with a pink Dora backpack hanging on his shoulder. The suit he wore had scuffed cuffs and a long rip down the right. He, I could tell right away, had a story. He would be interesting. So I released my grip from the old woman that I was stirring—that’s what I call it when I unleash my power—and came face to face with him. He just kept walking, oblivious to the fact that I was smothering him. And then I latched my tendrils into his eye sockets and forced myself into his brain. It was, as I’d suspected, interesting. But I hadn’t been adjusted to the fact that it would be this overwhelming.
