All our lives

Chapter 22

He spent the rest of the night, luckily no more than three hours after all that Italian adventure in the previous circle, sprawled on the bed with his eyes closed or aimlessly fixed on the ceiling, constantly venturing between past and present whilst rolling a pill between his fingers. Daring fate.

At one point, being too far gone into his little trips and this Jon too much of a wreck, he had even dropped the tablet. Or maybe he had finally swallowed it. He didn't know what exactly had happened and he didn't really care anyway. He wasn't terrified when he realized he didn't have it in his hand anymore. He wasn't relieved or happy either. The emptiness of his hand didn't spark any kind of emotion in him, so he just groped for another pill to replace the lost one and he resumed his game, playing with death like nothing had happened.

When slipping back to that audition started to feel jaded, he settled for inspecting this circle's memories. The last six years were nothing but an empty rope, nothing truly unexpected in that, but the fact that that last night of the US leg, his recursive nightmare for years, was not part of this universe startled him a little. If he had been in a better state, maybe he would have been angry. That short moment in time represented the start of his awful journey, after all. It would have made much sense to be the end too, but at this moment, that memory was an inaccessible one and he just accepted that.

Going to the past and leaving it unaltered didn't seem to function as he expected anyway, so it probably didn't even matter if he went 30, or 20, or 6 years back. His last real dialogue with Richie before the split was important only to him, the UTS didn't give a shit about it. Mathematics and physics didn't care for the little details or moments people clung to. The laws of the universe could probably distinguish Tokyo from Madrid, but the difference between Lubbock and any other US city where they might have ended the leg of this circle's 2013 tour was too insignificant for them to count. Red t-shirt, green t-shirt. Shame shit!

So no, he wasn't outraged by the absence of that memory. It was how the circles functioned and whining about it didn't win him anything. However, he soon started to feel frustrated when he realized he could go to whatever moment from his past, witness undisturbed its unfolding through time, until a little voice surfaced from some obscure part of his brain, alerting him to the fact that that was not how the things had happened. Sometimes he was not even sure, the little voice formulating more of a question than a statement, but either way the result was the same. The images disappeared, leaving only a black void before his mind's eyes.

Trying to see those memories after that little voice doubted their authenticity felt a lot like trying to catch a snowflake in your palm. He could see them coming, he could feel their light touch, but when he concentrated on discovering their form, on deciphering all their secrets, the images disappeared just like a melting snowflakes on warm skin, leaving him with only a vague taste of what it could have been.

"Fuck..." he muttered. He would never be able to overwrite or even silence his memories for enough time so the rope could show him how his life had been. "I'm forever stuck with what I know..." he sighed while he unconsciously intensified the rolling of the pill between his fingers. How the hell could other people just remember something they had never lived? And why the hell was he unable to do the same?

Those were not the questions he should dwell on, he knew that. The situation was how it was and it became clear there was nothing he could do to change it. He couldn't remember shit so he had to come up with some trickery to overcome that deficiency. Maybe if he was lucky enough - he didn't count too much on that, though - the blank spaces on the rope, that black void that seemed to sooner or later engulf everything he had lived, could give him some information. Something not happening in a certain way might prove useful at some point.