The exact point where the firm certainty about the lack of any and all supernatural elements in our life ends is the extreme condition of loneliness. No matter how well she knew that her life is just one of the many lives that are unfolding around, no matter how persuaded she was by the run of the mill modernist propaganda in the absence of God and any kind of magical force that would link all the living beings together, right now, alone and on the couch in her apartment, the scientific consensus was not very successful in persuading her that her desperate pleas have been in vain.
The scientific consensus stops being a factor in the decision making process once one gets to a certain point of intensity, and she has already reached this point. In fact, this was approximately the sixth occurrence in the span of the week when the threshold has been breached.
Her hands were punching the fabric of the couch in the living room of her family’s house. Surprisingly, (mostly to herself, as she every time felt like there should not be anymore water left in her body) she was still able to cry.
There wasn’t a single person there, in her home, and this of course was the problem. There should have been a single person in her home. The person. But he was not there, he was not going to come, he was not going to come ever again, he was not going to talk to her, he was not.
She was twenty one at the moment, and for the last couple of years she was dating a promising Starcraft 2 semi-pro, who was trying his hardest to break into the real professional tier while at the same time attempting at finishing the local college that was not great but was not desperately terrible either, and, after all, he needed a back up plan.
In the meanwhile, she was studying English Composition abroad, coming back for the summers. The summers have been full of mosquitos, very timid sex without blankets (for the temperatures far exceeded the ones comfortable for such activities), and clicks of the mechanical keyboard.
Every single unit of memory was now unbearable.
She once again was alone in her house - parents left for the whole weekend, a medium-sized apartment, her room decorated in the exact way that she preferred, everything that felt now as if designed specifically to cause the maximum amount of pure, unmediated pain. The pain that she previously could experience only when considering the prospect of her personal death, not even the death of anyone dear to her. The pain that was not about anything, that didn’t have any conduits for itself, but which was primal.
When your tooth aches, or when your friend struck your eye with a baseball, this is one kind of unbearable pain. But when you feel like you are dying at this very moment, when the vision breaks down, when the separation between the conscious mind and the body that mostly acts on its own becomes so apparent, that’s a very different sort of unbearable pain. The sleep paralysis type situation. The one where you are certain that something is wrong and it is not going away, no matter which actions you decide to take.
Which cannot be accepted, so she was trying to mentally scream, connect to him through some imaginary messenger, make him realise just how bad it was. Knowing full well it was in vain, she just didn’t have anything else left.
It was as if she was living everywhere at the same time. Some time ago, in the previous life, she read a story by Borges: about one paralysed Ireneous Funes who could remember and recreate in his mind all the events in his memory, full days, detail by detail. And she felt like him at the moment. The smell of the bedsheets or how they folded on his body, the playful fiddling with the voice assistant on his phone, or several hours worth of lectures on the intricacies of competitive starcraft, which instead of ignoring she was firmly committed to internalise and compare against all of the other things that she learned across the adjacent fields of study. It was all so recreateable, so close, and in fact it was not even objectively further now that he was gone. His present didn’t determine the physical impossibility of repeating these moments. But his absence made this impossibility acute.
In some sense, she was happy with this thought - that he could not influence the past and take the memories away. But at the same time, she knew that he could. As the memories are constructed again and again and not just stored somewhere, you can easily morph them by changing the present attitude of the rememberer. There was not a single part of her that was not vulnerable. There was not a single part of her with the protective film left intact.