Madison Rye Progress

is it yuri to merge with your friend and deal bonus damage

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End Of Endings — 2403
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Rye — 2409

When at last The Woman returned home, she performed a new ritual. She performed a ritual of mourning.

This, you see, was the start of her final task. Her set of five tasks, of food, of physical pleasure, of entertainment, of creation, of spirituality was not quite complete, and had within it one more step, and she felt most a connection to the spiritual in the act of mourning.

My friends, I think it may well have been our conversation, that of The Woman and The Oneirotect and I, that set her mind thus in motion, for was it not then that we spoke so freely of my beloved up-tree and the way it mourned over Should We Forget? Did not the pair of long lost tenth stanza lines come up as well? Death Itself and I Do Not Know? They, too, perhaps felt some of this too-full-ness that The Woman struggles with, for back and back and back and back, six decades back, they lay still and thought and, before long, before the week is out, quit. They bowed out. They dipped. Committed suicide. Quit the big one. They push now up some perhaps daisies in the mind of The Dreamer who dreams us all.

There is loss in our lives and in our hearts and in our minds.

But the tenth stanza knows these losses with a particular keenness. They leave empty seats and full plates at the table for these three who are gone. They speak the names of the dead on at least their Yahrzeit when they light the candle, and, for some of them, far more often, for The Woman's Cocladist was very fond of Death Itself, as the two loved each other fiercely, and it was perhaps this loss that drove Her Cocladist's bitterness and aught-elses.

Friends, you must understand that we love us. Even those of us who bore hatred for the others, the hatred of much of the sixth and seventh stanzas for others within the clade, even they love us. Some of us just bear a particular love for others of us. I have my beloved up-tree, yes? And ey has eir trickster partner, yes? And My Friend has The Musician, yes?

We love us, and The Woman's Cocladist loved Death Itself.

And so The Woman walked quietly up the stairs and knocked on Her Cocladist's door.

"Come in," came the quiet reply.

The Woman pushed the door open and bowed. "Rejoice."

"Ah, End Of Endings," Her Cocladist said from the amorphous chair she had claimed as her own, a perch over by the window where she read. Beside her: a stack of books. Behind her: several more. Lining the walls of the room: shelf after shelf after shelf after shelf of books. Shelf after shelf after– ah, the words fit so poorly, and so I try again and again and again to write them again and again.

"May I join you for a few moments?"

"Of course. What brings you to the end of the hall?"

"I would like to sit by Death Itself's bed for a few minutes."

Her Cocladist, halfway through setting her book aside, froze, and a wash of skunk spiraled up along her form, only to be replaced yet again by humanity, black fur sprouting, wilting, fading only to be replaced by skin. "Why?"

The Woman stood still in the doorway. "Because I am sad, and because I miss her."

"Alright," Her Cocladist said and finished the act of setting her book down, tented over the open page — no, do not get angry at her; sys-side, there are no broken bindings. "Do not sit on her bed."

The Woman bowed once more and stepped at last over the threshold, shutting the door behind her.

Along the other wall — that wall that had been hidden to the woman — was a simple bed, a single bed, a single-size mattress, and a wall painted in a feathery ombré from golden orange to purple-black. The covers were rumpled, clearly slept in. Clearly slept in and also clearly frozen in time, for the bed had not been touched since Death Itself had quit fifty seven years before. The Woman would not sit on it, even had Her Cocladist not warned her, for such was simply the way of things. The same was true of I Do Not Know's bed, and the only person who had laid in Should We Forget's bed was The Oneirotect who deserved such an expression of grief.

The Woman had her own ritual of grief to perform, though, and this did not call for touching the bed.

Instead, she sat down near the end of it, across the room from Her Cocladist, for both beds had at their feet matching beanbags — when you have a tail that flickers into being at moments not under your control, you are limited in your seating, you see, to the types of seats that can accommodate such caudal majesty that skunks sport — where once Her Cocladist and Should We Forget would sit at times and talk and share in kindnesses such as touch when their forms permitted.

There, The Woman remained still.

She had within her an idea that there was mourning to be had in proximity.

She had within her an idea that there was stillness to be had in mourning.

She had within her an idea that there was joy to be had in stillness.

The Woman wondered whether or not there was stillness in prayer. While Michelle who was Sasha inherited the faith of her parents and grandparents before them of Judaism, she herself did not inherit much of such from Michelle who was Sasha — this was the realm of the third stanza, of Oh But To Whom and Rav From Whence and What Right Have I — and yet the kernel of such lives within us all for such is the nature of an inherited faith.

And yet regardless of her faith, there are, I am told, four kinds of prayer: words of thanksgiving, words of supplication, words of wonder, and the silence of meditation. I think, though, and perhaps you may think as well, that there are words of woe, of distress, of pain and fear and of the yearning for something — anything — when our HaShem does not feel near.

I think The Woman, as she sat across from Her Cocladist and watched how she looked now out the window, unseeing, silent tears coursing down her cheeks and leaving tracks on cheeks or marks in fur, leaned hardest on the last. One might think that she would in her seeking of stillness lean harder on the silence of meditation but I also think that it hurts too much to witness some pains. The Woman was kind. She was empathetic. She could sit there in pain with Her Cocladist and pray: how long, Adonai, will You forget me always? How long hide Your face from me? How long shall I cast about for counsel, sorrow in my heart all day? Regard, answer me, HaShem, my God. Light up my eyes, lest I sleep with death. My heart exults in Your rescue my heart exults in You my heart exults in You my heart exults in You my heart exults in You my heart.

Perhaps this is how she prayed, perhaps this is how I pray. Perhaps I cast about for something — anything — to anchor me to this world, to this reality, to this life and call out: why am I forgotten? Perhaps I do my best to trust. Perhaps I do my best to cause my heart to exult in some god in whom I am not sure I believe that I may be regarded, that I may be answered.

Perhaps that is not how she prayed. Perhaps she rested her cheek on her fist and looked as well out the window and cried, or perhaps not, but still she sat in silence. Perhaps she leaned not on psalms of anguish but on the silence of meditation

Perhaps she did not pray at all. I do not rightly know, and can only surmise.

Perhaps she, like me, like Job, struggles with maintaining a faith disinterested in reward or punishment or relief from sorrow. Perhaps she, like me, wishes she could in the hope that such disinterested faith might still provide a soothing balm against pain. Perhaps she, like me, struggles not to fall into the cynicism of Qohelet, the gather of the assembled who mused aloud: I set my heart to know wisdom and to know revelry and folly, for this, too, is herding the wind. Who mused aloud: what gain is there for man in all his toil that he toils under the sun? Who mused aloud: everything was from the dust, and everything goes back to the dust.

Perhaps she spoke to The Dreamer who dreams us all, perhaps not, but either way, she did not find joy in the keenness of sorrow, nor spirituality in the stillness of mourning, nor aught else but pain the stasis of Her Cocladist, looking now out the window, unseeing, silent tears coursing down her cheeks and leaving tracks on cheeks or marks in fur.

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End Of Endings — 2403
×
Rye — 2409

The longer we live — and, my dear readers, I will remind you that I am now 323 years old! — the more evident it becomes to us that there is fractally cyclical nature to life: the years spiral up and the months spiral around and the days spiral forward — weeks are a construct borne out of our inherited faith — and so we live within a fractally cyclical tangle of time.

I know this. You know this, I am sure, on however instinctual a level, for you are clever and bright and you see the world with fresher eyes than I have. You are cleverer and brighter and fresher than your humble narrator who paces the empty rooms of her house and fills them with the quiet muttering of the mad.

The Woman knew this as well. When she woke from her nap — for my astute readers remember that that is how this rambling chapter began! — she could now — in a way she could not before — feel and perhaps even see these spirals. She could see the way that her 317 years had spiraled up around her. She could see the way that time bound her, tied her up in coils and coils and coils and coils and coils. She could see these coils — however metaphorically — as they twine around her legs and torso. She could feel these coils — however metaphorically — slowing her down, holding her arms to her side and limiting her reach. They — these coils and coils and coils — obscure her.

Ah, my friends, I am struggling. I can feel and see these coils and coils and coils and coils and coils, yes, and am obscured.

I am going to lay down, and perhaps I will dream.

I have slept now. I took a cue from The Woman and took a nap, and while it did not come quite so easily to me as it ever did to her, it still offered some respite.

I dreamed, though! I dreamed of words like leaves and sentences like branches and stories like trunks, standing solid, with premises like roots dug into logic like earth and drinking of emotions like water. There was the tree, yes, for there was the green of the words and the brown of the story and the deep darkness of logic and emotion.

And above was the sun which was also The Dreamer who dreams us all.

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End Of Endings — 2403
×
Rye — 2409

When at last The Woman returned home, left my home and returned to her own, walked out into the field for a day and then lay down, her mind was aswirl with possibilities and all the various endlessnesses thereof. She felt full. She felt overfull. She felt as though she had had poured into her several depths, oceans of possibilities and each as deep or deeper than the last. She was vast. She was limitless. She was these things, and yet she was infinitely smaller than the limitless endlessness of the void which still lay within and without.

She returned home after that talk with me and my beloved up-tree, with your humble narrator and The Oneirotect, and she went for a walk and she did that which she is good at: she napped. There, out on the grass, there, she napped.

My dear, dear friends, the longer I go on, the more I pace around through quiet rooms the more these words swirl around me in some quiet maelstrom, the more I wish that I could do the same. Sleep brings no relief. Within my dreams there are yet more words. The boundary between waking and sleeping is so faint, now — I write even in my sleep! My dreams are of The Woman! My dreams are of me sitting at my desk with my pen in my paw and paper before me, of ink on page and words flowing after like an eager puppy! — the boundary is so faint now that I have more than once awoken from uneasy sleep to found that I had indeed at some point sat down at my desk and written word after word after word, after word and word and word. I have found pages of endlessly repeating phrases. I have found scribbles that are doubtless words and yet which I cannot decipher, and I cannot remember my dreams well enough to say what they may have been.

Did The Woman dream, we may wonder? Did she lay down and sleep after that conversation and look up to the constellations in the texture of the ceiling, close her eyes, and then let play within her head some scene, some dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, some stream of meaning that the subconscious mind as dreamed by the dreamer of the world?

I do not know.

Let us suppose she had, though! Let us take a look at what has made up The Woman so far and extrapolate some perhaps dream.

When first we began, when first some saner me set pen to paper or claws to keyboard, The Woman was set within her ways. She was set, as with her cocladists within her stanza, as one of those who suffers. She had hopes for moving forward with her life, yes, and dreams, but there was some part of her that fell in alignment with Her Cocladist's assessment that it was her lot in life as a member of the tenth stanza to provide a client for the seventh, those therapists among us. That was the moment when I began this story, telling of who she was, of expressing her as she might express herself, as did Collodi with Pinocchio: once upon a time there was not-a-king.

For she is our Pinocchio, is she not? She is our Pinocchio in reverse. She is the one who was born into this world too real and yet yearned for some of the stillness of so-called-inanimate wood.

The Woman then had her inciting incident, did she not? She had that moment when she met with Her Friend and felt after some form of joy that she could not quite put into words, and with that joy, against that joy, she felt the loss of joy over time, the way it was secreted within the treats that she delivered quietly to her cocladists and the way it seemed to trickle out of her life. And the second part of this incitation was the way that this fading of joy was cast against the stasis of her stanza, the suffering supposedly bestowed upon them. It showed to her plainly the impermanence of such joys, and thus, by omission, the possibility of a permanent pleasure.

She is and we are of a neurodivergent type, and so her approach to hunting for such joy as she imagined was of such a type as that: thorough and curious, methodical and whimsical. She set before herself by rule of fives five investigations: food, sex, entertainment, creation, and spirituality. The first four of these brought joy, and even superlative joy, but not the joy she sought, and before her lay the prospect of spirituality, and yet such a prospect was exhausting before she had even begun.

And so now we may only guess at the dreams of one such as her, one who lives within our consensual dream, one who is dreamed by the dreamer who was at one point our superlative friend.

Here is my supposition:

The Woman went walking. In her dream, she went walking, though it was not out on her field, the one we have seen so often. No, instead she went walking out her bedroom and through her secret door, out through the door and onto the street of the city that had become so familiar to her over the years, that city with the brick pavers and the fallen leaves which skittered so anxiously around her feet. She went walking in her dream and made her way through the unnervingly empty city streets, walking and walking and walking. She passed the trolley stops. She passed the coffee shops. She passed, perhaps, the setting sun.

And at some final point — final! — she came across a square set within the cement of the sidewalk perhaps two meters on a side where the concrete gave way to a metal grate in the form of a sunburst, and in the middle there was a circle of soil, good and clean.

There, within her dream within a dream within a dream, she smiled. She smiled and she sank slowly to her knees in that ritual circle described in steel and dug her fingers down into the soil. Down and down and down she pushed, and as she did, she felt her fingers lengthen, stretching and twisting, seeking nutrients and water, seeking final — final! — purchase. They twisted and stretched down as roots and spiraling up her arms was a texture like bark and the bones of her neck and back elongated and her eyes sought HaShem or The Dreamer or some greater void and her hair greened to that of leaves and drank thirstily of the sunlight.

Finally — finally! — with one orgasmic flush of joy, The Woman became The Tree, and there was a joy everlasting in such stillness.

This is my supposition because this is my dream. This is a world I have seen and a world I have dreamed and it is a world that I have found a way still to love, even after it turned in on itself and ate so many of its own, even as The Dreamer who dreams us all stumbled skinned eir palms and elbows on the brick pavers of this land. Since I have become myself, since your humble narrator was first called Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars, that has been my dream. I have dreamed hundreds of times over the centuries that I have lived that I, too, fell to my knees and dug my fingers into the soil and became, in some pleasure-bound process, something still and sky-reaching, something earth-eating and water-drinking.

This is my supposition for The Woman and her dream after she came home from my house, because I think within her all along was that stillness, that sky-reachingness and earth-eatingness and water-drinkingness.