I/Tulpa: the Seven Year Girl

chapter 14

"Well of course they're real people."

There are those times in any person's life, magician or not, where you want the magic to happen, and nothing happens. It seems like, the more you try, the less magic happens, and the thing you're wanting to change or go away seems all the more real, all the more scary, and all the more constant. What usually marked the difference between a non-magician and a magician is that a magician knows the thing is an illusion and simply sits through the spell, because even the best spell doesn't last forever. It feels like fucking forever when you're in it. But all spells, like storms, pass. That's all life is, really; a continuum of storms in varying degrees of intensity. There are macro storms like the eye of Jupiter that last for thousands of years, and you have the breezes that pushed past you and is gone, and maybe you didn't even notice it, because the storm of you was greater than the storm outside of you. Jon, knew this on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level, he was still a kindergartener when it comes to magic. After wandering the sets for an hour, trying to use the props and the environment to trigger traveling so he could go home for real, he simply found himself stuck in the world of fake. There was a Star Trek story, a short story that didn't make it to film where the actual Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, exchanged places with the actors and had to pretend to be the people that played them on television until they could figure out how to beam back through whatever anomaly brought them there. Remembering this story was fun, but realizing it was about you, less fun.

Jon took a wrong turn due to inattention and found himself alone in a room with a prominent piano, and an assortment of instruments scattered and unattended. He approached the piano. The room was mostly dark, which made the instruments seem all that more grand, and magical. There were glints of lights and star burst off the hard and soft, polished edges as he moved deeper into the midst of potential. He hovered over the piano keys. He resisted the urge to touch the keys, failed, touched them, but his flirting was so anemic even the hammer failed to sound. He sat down at the bench, rested his head on the piano, staring at the keys.

"Loxy, I need you," Jon said.

Nothing seemed to happen. Had he been focused, he might have realized she was with him, translucent like a ghost. She was sitting with him on the bench, arm hugging him.

"Oh, Jon," Loxy said. "I am always with you. It can't be any other way."

A tear drop landed on the edge of two ivory keys and descended into the space as if sucked in by a vacuum.

"Is this the Starlight sequence, where you're Rusty and I am the Starlight?" Loxy asked. She was okay with that, but felt they had done that elsewhere. If he could have seen her hand touching his leg, he might have been struck by the bracelet she was wearing, which was similar to the one Ali was wearing when on set with him. "Touch the keys, Jon. Make a sound."

"I am such a fuck up," Jon said.

Loxy didn't try to change his thoughts about himself. One never changes another person's thought about themselves by contradicting their beliefs. To change a person's narrative, one had to go deeper. "Did you ever wonder if Lady Gaga's song 'telephone' was a call and response song playing off ELO's 'Telephone Line'?" Loxy asked, trying to engage a higher level of dialogue with him, while simultaneously diving into him. She was going for distraction to get past his defenses.

Jon's brow furrowed as if something had occurred to him, but it didn't come high enough to the surface. He had a particular song trying to push through him and he didn't know why it was suddenly stuck in his head, but he wasn't ready to give it voice, because sometimes singing it caused it to fully manifest and sometimes just a phrase would catch, repeating and repeating. The latter seemed imminent.