dira | early semicoherent ramblings.

One of the weirder side effects of reading the Outlander books, if you are me, is that if you wake up at, say, three in the morning, get a drink of water, go back to bed, and then lie awake for half an hour feeling like you're going to puke before it occurs to you to go make and eat some toast, you will find yourself half-awake thinking something like, "My wame is curdled." Be warned.

Being awake from three to three-thirty is sort of nice, in that you get the lovely experience of crawling into bed three times in one night, but less nice in that you only get two and a half continuous hours of sleep afterward, culminating in fantabulous and complex dreams. I--I! Somebody said my name, and I was startled to realize that I was me--was the embodiment of Life, or maybe Victory, and I was running with a girl--possibly Emily from Wilby Wonderful--who had become the embodiment of Beauty, or Life--as these incarnations, we had powers, but we had never manifested them before, and so the enemy were confused--why had we never healed, or raised the dead or--whatever we were supposed to be doing? We didn't know what we were supposed to be doing, only that it was deadly dangerous to be what we were, running through crowds of people, past fantastic and beautiful beasts in the park. We found two other incarnations, men--I think the embodiment of Chance was portrayed by Robert Sean Leonard, I got one good look at his face before we turned to fight the mob, the four of us back to back. The man with him was Victory, maybe. Not sure. I thought we weren't going to make it, and then I realized that we'd be all right--Emily/Beauty/Life and I--if we broke off from the guys again and fled alone. I looked back and saw Chance's face as the mob descended, but he knew it was the only way, and then too, he must be lucky, so perhaps it would be all right.

Time looped. Beauty had been trying to divest herself of her nature, and as we ran she fumbled off a ring and pressed it upon a Chinese girl in a striped shirt, crying "It was never me, I was never supposed to be, take it!" We ran on, and I knew she was only mortal now, and she knew it too; she thought I wouldn't want her by me anymore, but she was the only companion I had, and I knew escape was at hand. I also knew that, being what I was, I would have to take one life. I had been told so, and that I would know it when I came to it. This was the third loop in time; the first time I had come upon her--pretty, dark curly hair, mouth open to scream and give the whole thing away--and known that this was the life I had to take, and here was the dagger in my hand. I had been forewarned in the second loop, and now, in the third--Emily ran off for a moment, crying that she had to fetch something; I thought it had been me who ran off, leaving Emily standing in the corridor, so that I could fetch the dagger, but as I stood there waiting for her to return to me, I checked, and the blade was already in my pocket, and I knew that when she came back we would turn, run up the stairs, and there would be the dark-haired girl, mouth open to cry out, the life I had to take, and then I woke up, having slept through five snoozes.

Four inches of snow on the ground and on my car; my socks are wet. The roads were awful, but I somehow made it to work precisely on time, caught my usual bus. The bus driver warned us that there was only one patch clear of snow as we disembarked, so we all went out through the front door, and I remembered to say "Thank you," for once--why do we thank bus drivers? does this happen everywhere?--as I stepped off. I walked along, picking my way along the sidewalk, and kept inhaling snow and coughing. I abruptly realized why the school's snow-cancellation policy was a moot point and said, "Motherfucking spring break, fuck," out loud. The snow under the South Building was like dunes, and I picked my way to a clear path between. And now I'm at my desk, and everything is completely normal, and a little surreal, and I'd like to write, if I could settle to it.