Client [Undecided] - Session 2

(Beep. Music fades in.)

You listened to your last recording a few times, did you not? You aren’t even sure why you did. And neither am I, frankly. Even I find that surprising. Look, I understand why you have such high hopes and expectations for me. You actually believe in me, which is odd. Or not odd, per say. It’s just not something I’m used to. I’ve found that skepticism tends to be the default reaction to me and what I say, but I guess anything is possible. Or rather, I know anything is possible. But possibility means very little, I’ve found. Things have to be lined up just so, don’t they? Pieces of an incomprehensible puzzle have to first be found and then brought together. Some of it we can orchestrate. Most of it we can’t. 

But I know why you felt the way you did. I know the way some of the pieces in your mind had fallen together. I know the logic. The rationale. I see it. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

“She has a removed and–thus–more objective perspective on things,” you said to yourself. And that made sense. I am not you. I am not there. I am me. And I am in my bed some ways away from you. Typically, that’s a marker of objectivity, right? But that’s not the right sort of distance. It implies the right sort of distance. Generally these things go hand in hand. But that ignores something. 

Think about parallel lines. You remember that lesson in math class right? Two parallel lines lie in the same plane but never intersect. They are removed from each other. They travel in the same direction, never deviating and never touching. They will never meet. They are removed from each other, and yet, they move identically. They have to move in the same directions or else they would cross over. They are kept apart because of that which makes them alike. 

Physically distant but in some ways, not far away. I’m physically away. I’m physically removed. But also not.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

“I have had many sleepless nights,” you want to tell me. Because you feel the need to tell someone. You have to say it. It’s the beginning of a thought though. It is the start of a confession that you feel the need to get off of your chest. For whatever that will do for you. You aren’t sure what it will do. You aren’t sure what the point is or what it may offer you. But there’s a conversation line you want it to reach. There’s a confession somewhere down that train of thought that you just know the tracks will cross. You have crossed it yourself, but that never felt like enough. You needed someone else there to see it. You needed someone else to know.

And you didn’t think it would be me, at first. Or at all. You are surprised that I’m bringing it up, frankly. That’s what has made you stop and think that there might be a connection there. If I see one, you are willing to trust that there is one. You’ll trust me, after all. You’re willing to follow my lead. But I have to say that your skepticism is not unfounded. 

In and of itself, this restlessness hasn’t seemed all that relevant to what we had been talking about, and I get it. The connection wasn’t abundantly clear. But from where I am I can see it. Or, really, I feel it. 

I have those restless nights too. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

You’re speechless, I imagine. You are sitting in your bed, playing this podcast in the dark of your bedroom with your mouth slightly ajar. You are having one of those nights as well, aren’t eyou? And you turned on this recording to chase that feeling away. That feeling of profound loneliness. That feeling that there is supposed to be a body there beside you or somewhere in that living space you reluctantly call a home, but there is none. There is just the space where a body was meant to inhabit, and that definition has given the space extra power, extra dimensions for echoes to bounce around and grow. 

There’s a cry I can’t make out. In your chest. It’s a desperate yell for something, you know. You feel the tone even if you can’t make out the words. Or whatever the equivalent of words would be when it is the heart and not the mouth that cries out. Or when the thing being conveyed is not specific. When it’s ambiguous, or a concept, daresay. When it is asking for a need to be filled and not so much for a specific stimulus. 

When it asks for the sort of thing that a person provides, not quite the person themselves. 

When the crying stops, there’s a dull ache, isn’t there? It doesn’t go away. It is a scar, you want to think, but the wound is still open. It is still festering. It is still raw. 

But that first restless night was a week ago, wasn’t it?

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

“It’s just allergies,” I told myself when it was me. And it was me. Different details, perhaps, but it was a similar night. It was a similar night of restlessness, of a loneliness without clear cause and a lingering dull ache in the soul that kept me up at night. And to be fair to me, I was and still very much am having a very bad spell of it. So I told myself it was just allergies and the related difficulty breathing. My body feared death, and so it didn’t want to be alone, and so it was desperately looking out for a sentry who might keep watch over my sleeping form and thus keep me alive. 

I used to have that. I used to have someone who cared like that, so it was also grief, I guess. For me. And maybe it’s grief for you. For what you created through hope and faith. No, there was nothing wrong with you keeping the fantasy alive, with you dreaming for something you didn’t think could ever come to pass. There’s something inevitable about it. It’s the way our minds process what our hearts feel, and the challenge is not falling too deep into that fantasy. 

Imaging a brunch or two is not that deep. Imagining the flower arrangements you would buy is not that deep. Each step forward into the cloud is a bit of a risk, however. Eventually the clouds will fall away and you will fall into reality, right?

You assume that fall will hurt. That you’ve ensured that fall will hurt. You assume that the time you have spent in this cloud has cost you time building up the landing pad, time that you could have spent building up the world you will fall into and time that you could have spent turning it into something you can savor and take pride in. 
Because it didn't have to be this woman, did it? You could have let her go and given someone else this flame, you think. It would have been that simple, you think. And then the nights would not have hurt so much. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

You’re expecting me to agree, aren’t you? You’re expecting me to go along with what it is you are now proposing. Especially if I know it too. I know the dangers of love, I will admit, but that’s as far as I will go. I don’t agree with this solution, so deceptively simple and perfectly laid out. Because there are points missing. There are pieces hidden away. There are things you won’t tell her, sure, but many others that you will not tell yourself. 

In any event, no one else will entertain this illusion. No one else will deny what we see. It’s just you. Alone. In silence. The problem compounds.

(Music fades out. Beep.)

The Oracle of Dusk is a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. It was written, edited, produced, and performed by MJ Bailey. And if you like the show, tell friends about it or the quasi-friends that are still on your social media feeds because social norms evolved before words did, am I right?