By the Dim and Flaring Lamps

On the Edge

Again, I'm here at the station, arriving just in time to shout your name in the hopes you will stop before you jump.

"Julian" I croak as loud as I can with my throat full of laryngitis.

Luckily, this time, you stop.

The train's brakes screech as it slows to a stop in front of the station. You really did choose a stupid place to try dying. Half the time, you jump, despite my attempts to stop you, the speed of the train not enough to give you the quick and/or painless death you hope for. It's terrible to watch. I can only imagine what it feels like.

Luckily for you, your memory doesn't carry over loop-to-loop. That's my curse: transcognition. It only afflicts a few of us in a circle of unlucky souls.

And if I'm successful, you will soon join that circle. And for that, I am sorry. Truly, sorry.

"I promise you that dying won't stop any of this."

You are still as stone.

"But I know how you can."

You turn, your bloodshot eyes full of curses, the madness of the ancients, swirling dark as the starless void. I see in that moment everything you have seen in the last few months.

It started on some obscure dark web forum, delving into one of those rabbit holes full of such horrifying images and clips of heinous violence, murders, sacrifices, initiations for gangs and terrorist organizations and cults. Your obsessive compulsive disorder drove you forward, ever deeper, until you saw the roots, then the seed, then the heart of the seed. You saw the Truth, the Righteous Sentence, by the dim and flaring lamps of your own sanity, flickering like a dying candle.

That void, that emptiness, now threatens to snuff out that flame.

"Your eyes," I say, standing, setting down my purse, "are full of noise. And I think you can see the same thing in my eyes, though the noise has settled into a song for me." I maintain eye contact, allowing myself to explore some of the hallways in your head, the places where you store the things you never wanted to know, never wanted to see.

There are a few monsters, familiar to me by now, things that regularly stalk the corners of most people's eyes, truly awful to behold, but physically harmless.

I see some of the entities that you seem to call "friends", the things your stoner friends claim to know fairly well.

Then I find the room you filled with all of the mad ravings that you've been generating to try and solve the equation, resolve the conundrum, explain the paradox. But nothing has worked. Within the pile of paragraphs remains the Sentence, impossibly loud in its silence, quivering beneath the gaze of one who has only seen a handful of its kind, each one just a fragment if a multifaceted whole.

I blink to stop myself from going too far. I won't allow myself to read your portion of the Sentence in full quite yet. It's still an unknown, something that, as far as we know, has only recently emerged from Liminality into Reality.

"Come sit down for a bit," I beckon, taking a seat myself in the frustratingly narrow space between two anti-homeless "arm rests" on the bench.

"I hate these things. What kind of a world do we live in where governments go out of their way to spend extra money on these design features just to keep people from lying down for a nap."

That seems to help take your mind off of your agony just long enough for me to make my proposition.

"I'm Charlotte. I work as a therapist and crisis counselor at a clinic nearby. We work with special cases like yours."