OOC
Hhhhh fuck. Big feelings with plural undertones.
I read this aloud on a call with @hamratza and started crying at the end. It is wonderfully written, yes, but this is something that has played out in roleplay. This is something that feels like lived experience. The pain is palpable in a very real way. Such is the way of noemata...
We are the same age, yes? We are both of Michelle Hadje, yes? We were both born in 2086, we both uploaded in 2117, we both lived latent in that one mind. Yes, she was forked first. Yes, I was forked from her some years later. I am precisely as old as she is in a very fundamental way.
But I am also not. I have been the same 32 for centuries, now. 32 by numbers, of course; I have been many different people as my identity and the way in which I move through the world as evolved, but I still feel 32.
My love does not.
I have had to learn a new way to love. I have had to keep an eye on just how rambunctious I am with her. She has asked me explicitly not to stop, but...well, some weeks back we lay in bed and, when I clutched at her in the heat of the moment, she pulled back in pain and overstimulation and began to cry, and then I began to cry for this unintentional pain I had caused to someone so dear, and our third was left in baffled panic.
Her world will dissolve around her and I will take her gently by the arm to bring her to the couch or our bed and I will make her tea or sit beside her in kind-but-fretful silence or go lay down on the couch in my music room for an hour.
Do not get me wrong, I remain absolutely head-over-heels for this woman. I am going nowhere. I will always be by her side.
But on those nights or afternoons or mornings when she speaks of the sudden and painless kiss of death, when she clenches her eyes shut and the blanket is too heavy, when even my presence is too overstimulating and I go and lay down on my couch, I am at my most exhausted.