Warning; Scales is a body-horror and, at times, terrible terrain for the mind.
Bleu sat across from me as we stared into the ethers by the dim light of our remaining candles. It was a quiet winter’s day aside from the usual creaking of the building. The scuttles of leaves and the scraping soundscapes from branches along a window with outstretched talons. We would read. We would talk. We would giggle. Some days we didn’t talk at all. Enjoying a series of understood, silent cues that we had come to choreograph in our time together. Our brains just felt similar. Stressed, but capable. Daunted, but present.
The understanding that we didn’t have a choice but to be stressed or daunted. The world that was made was not for us, and the world remaining was now unmaking us.
By happenstance, we met. Holed in my ceiling among a hoard of uncovered mushrooms along the rotted wooden beams, they wedged themselves into a sort of safety above my head.
I don’t think I ever asked how long they were there.
Our conversations were never linear. They shot off like fireworks in the night, tangential lines of thought to follow as we collected timelines like little gems along the way. Attempting to scavenge for meaning in a world that finally had done what we always assumed it would do. What we were taught it would do.
Consume.
Somehow surviving against, not odds, but a sort of fated response from the cosmos as if to say ‘watch this.’
‘You won’t believe your eyes!’ it says. As we all entered that big top tent and received our revelations. Sealing every outcome with each dismissal of reality. Structures crumbling before our eyes as we were told to ‘look away’ and that ‘it’s not what it seems.’
It was and it is. But, we did look away. Maybe not all of us, but the collective majority turned their heads without shame. While the few of us looked on and waited.
We watched it all burn.
And someone I never met, who sat in front of me pouring over sci-fi novels and wacky conspiracy theories, witnessed it too. Never looking for answers, but always finding room for questions about human behavior in the wake of endless disaster. Always sustaining the belief in a reason ‘why.’
Why did this happen?
Why are we still here?
Why am I one of the only ones left?
They never gave into the cynicism that I so clung to like a badge of honor. They never stopped asking ‘why.’ And maybe neither had I, not in my head at least. I simply lacked the courage to explore it any further. To put it into any breath that would be taken on the wind as an affront. Wrestling with the universe’s patterns comes with its fair share of warning labels. Generally, I did not hope.
Bleu did.
Relentless were they in their pursuit for meaning.
I had forgotten what that felt like. Until their life began to take shape and form in the stories they would tell. I began to see again. The point of ‘life’ became clearer, but both remarkable and unremarkable.
“Can I share something with you?” Bleu asked.
“You know I love a good story.” I said.
“I’ve only ever, in my life, told two other people this…”
“Then I am but your humble witness.” I replied with a flourish of a dramatized hand.
The weighted dread would lift. And for a moment, it felt like I was evolving from the calcified grief.
Making room for other people can do that, I found. Lost time spent in curiosity that can only be fulfilled by the sweetest of bedtime stories. Campfire tales, secrets shared. Magic, it seems, needs little other evidence of its existence in my mind—real monsters aside.
Getting to know them was enough.