Story 11 - Locks and Breaks

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Welcome. Cassandra’s Tales and Truths is an anthology series that utilizes the wisdom of the Delphic Maxims. In this episode, the eleventh episode, Cassandra presents a lesson normally outshined by the consequences of failure. Because yes, there are consequences in failing to honor this wisdom. But there are many who are conditioned or have conditioned themselves to overlook that. And I could go on and on about that, but I won’t. The fact remains that each person has a complex story with details and items that could serve any number of purposes or be understood in any number of ways. As a result of this complication, we cannot understand any story but our own and should learn to trust other people at their words, specifically the s-word: secret. If it is uttered, we should heed the warning and be flattered to be an exception. No matter how we feel. But then again, there are some things that should not be secret. There are times when we need to speak what we may want to keep hidden. It’s a delicate balance. 

So, dear celebrant, keep secret what should be secret. And nothing else.

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There was much to enjoy about the Vibrant Eye Club, though you wouldn’t realize it at first glance. The building’s out walls had not kept up, chipped paint fell away in clumps, and the pavement was littered with debris of different kinds, some of which would undoubtedly stain the concrete, a discovery that could only be made if the seemingly impossible was done and the area was cleaned. It didn’t help that much of the same could be said about the whole block. Assumptions were abound in that appearance. Many would make them, and they could not be faulted for doing so when it seemed that obvious. And yet, there were those still–those who had been inside–who knew better than to make such judgments. They knew there was magic to be found, where so few would think to look. And when it came to proselytizing, when friends or family were invited where so many would dare not go, they all had a speech, some would call it. There were lines and lists and talking points all well established, memorized, and shared like a scripture all its own.

Glyn knew those versions. She would recite them excitedly despite having never been told them directly. Most in her position had, once upon a time, been the skepetical. They had been invited into that space and took a chance, but Glyn had fallen into them, led by her impulses, curiosity, and sense of wonder. The club was a certain type of flame, and Glyn was the rare moth that was drawn to it. 

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That had been the sort of creature she was, but there was a delicacy to it that went unnoticed until a newspaper printing, an announced death buried deep into a section most people would start but never finish. It was paper that was not meant to be lucked. The image of her friend was not even printed along with the reporting of the crime that took her life, and perhaps, considering how many copies of that paper were being used as scrap paper for waste, there was something generous about that, but Glyn who had never been one for books or metaphors couldn’t say why. 

Words about the Vibrant Eye Club were the only sorts of words she had, and they had been taken away from her now. They were not taken by the death of her friend or that she found out through the newspaper. No, neither bit of expectation-defying coldness had taken this from her. Rather, it was the memory of a fleeting moment of joy. 

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It was not supposed to be that way, of course. And in the moment, Glyn would have hardly called it joyful, though it was meant to be and all things are relative in hindsight. Her recently acquired promotion was something to celebrate, surrounded by her friends. Theoretically, her family should have been or could have been included in that, but they were too far away, travel was too difficult, and this was not the sort of situation they bent their schedules around. And frankly she didn’t miss them all too much. Years working in the city had weakened those already delicate bonds and strengthened the new bonds with her friends. They were her new family. But as with the old, they did not know her so well. Though she would have described herself as guarded, deliberately walled off from everyone else, she presented a good illusion, and they took her at her word. 

Glyn had her reasons for what she did. So she feigned naivety well, to the point that even she sometimes forgot it was an act, but her heart had the scars to prove that she knew better. Those phantoms spoke to her through her fears and anxieties, and sometimes they were quite loud. They were the loudest on nights like that one, when the joy of the moment highlighted all that had been missing in her life and all that was still missing. It was just another reason to turn to her friends, not for support, mind you, but as a distraction. 

There is a distinction between the two. Although we may expect a supportive friend to offer a well-timed distraction when we need one, to offer support or to be supportive goes beyond that. It is more encompassing than that, and to do it well, one must know the nature of the weight. For that, Glyn would need to speak up. Words she clutched tightly would need to slip through her fingers, but no matter the need or wisdom in doing so, she could not bear to let go of the few things that had always been hers. For that’s what secrets had felt to her: the only property that had never been stripped away. But it was worse than that. All this loss created so much woe, which would always grow, and those losses would always compound for her. Or that was how she understood it. This pattern had started so early, and she did not know how to stop the figurative bleeding that would ensue if she gave up her secrets.

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It was a friendship that was never meant to happen, Glyn would say. Nora did not seem to understand the game Glyn played, and that made Glyn uneasy. But despite her reservations, Nora won her over. Nora was quiet and soft spoken, but she had a warmth about her that spoke volumes into the empty space. That was all Glyn remembered about those first few meetings, but with Nora’s death now the biggest wound she carried, some memory would undoubtedly come together. She would keep grasping at the faint straws in her brain until she pulled together a passable picture, though in her heart she would suspect it wasn’t accurate. 

It was a way of shaking off the guilt that she never really appreciated Nora for all that she was. Nora wasn’t just a good person. Nora wasn’t just loving. Nora was perhaps the only person Glyn could have trusted with everything she kept secret. And what difference would it have made if Glyn had simply told her the truth of it all? 

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Hypotheticals aside, the truth was what it was. Glyn had never relinquished her secrets, and so they grew. And Glyn grew to need Nora more and more, which only stoked more fear, and from that fear came the need for more fortifications, more reasons for secrecy, and more leveraged that her anxiety then had over her. It made for quite the storm, and as so many other storms do, eventually, (Music fades out) it burst. 

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Because Nora would do anything for Glyn, or rather, Nora would do anything that she knew Glyn needed her to do. She couldn’t see the storm that was brewing over Glyn. And because Nora couldn’t see it or really know it was there, she did not know how she fed into it. Though she would take the correction well, a correction never came. So that night, that celebration of a major step forward in Glyn’s career, Nora did not go. In some ways, this was no surprise; she had missed many like it, but although Glyn felt that absence acutely, she did not let on that she was in pain. Instead, she would try to explain the hurt away and called it being helpful. Glyn would remind herself that Nora was busy working on some grand technology, something that was going to change the world. For the better, of course. This was Nora, after all. 

It was at that latter part that Glyn’s conviction would waiver a bit. She didn’t  fully understand what she was saying. Nora had her secrets as well. The nature of this project was at the top of that list, or so she said. It was some sort of harddrive, Glyn knew that much, but little more. However, that list of additional information wasn’t completely barren. She knew, for example, that Nora’s laboratory wasn’t far from the Vibrant Eye Club. You couldn’t tell it was a lab, but it was there, in that neighborhood. It was yet another thing about the Vibrant Eye that Glyn loved, though she loved that fact trait silently. To know where Nora worked was to know too much, it turned out. But that act of disclosure had been a bridge of connection Glyn couldn’t see. Going there, bringing everyone else to that club despite their inhibitions, meant that there was a chance that Nora would show up, even for a moment. But she never did.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

On the night of her promotion, the last night in the Vibrant Eye Club, Glyn still had this bit of hope in her that even though she had changed nothing everything would somehow change and Nora would show up. But that was unlikely. Something was going to change, of course. Things always change, but it was not going to be the sort of change that one wants. For all that is acting in a moment is time, time will break down all things at its weakest points. This is simply how it works. And for this consistency, we would hesitate to call it malicious, though it leaves us stewing in our pains all the same. 

In this case, what matters is not so much what broke but what broke through. The feelings of hurt rose from Glyn’s core to the surface and pierced through the thin but diligently maintained facade. Not that Glyn wanted to let them seep through. Not that Glyn could have really accepted how inevitable it all was. But tears began to prick at her eyes. She bit on her tongue trying to assert her will, but it only started a battle of sorts. The stakes were not something she understood. Her anxiety tried to convince her that it was more serious than it was, that it was something akin to her very life on the line, and she did not know to push back. She did not know how or if she should. But the defensive line she had drawn would not hold firm for long. 

In which case, her anxiety offered, it would be best to pull away, draw back and hide yourself, your feelings, and everything else. That was doable. While everyone else was dancing, everyone who did not matter to her as much as Nora did, Glyn slipped off the dance floor.

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In the open space between the dancefloor and the bar, Glyn felt more constricted than she had in the sea of bodies. It was the exposure, frankly. She did not know how to deal with it. She could not cope. But what did it mean not to cope? Collapse on the floor and sob? Release everything that had built up inside her over the years? Or lose it, by some other name. She couldn’t bear that. But what choice did she have?

A pair of hands reached for her shoulders. “Come now,” an older woman said to Glyn. “Let’s get you some air outside.”

Glyn could only catch a glimpse of her from the corner of her eye. There was something familiar about the woman. Like she had seen her a thousand times before in passing. But it was a stupid thought to have. There are lives that cross paths and lives that simply share paths, and the latter is hardly noteworthy. It didn’t matter, so why couldn’t Glyn shake the feeling that it did?

It was probably just the nerves, she thought, and she was used to sitting with them. But the air would do her some good. Glyn knew better than to let a stranger sweep her off into some private and isolated space, like an alley out by a dumpster, but for a brief moment–led by her senses and impulses–she fell into the dangers for the promise of momentary relief. Because, as she would frankly have put it to herself, what was the worst that could happen to her? What could death do to her that she would actually feel? That wasn’t the right reaction, she knew, but she could hardly muster what she assumed was the proper one. It was in the way she had broken. Some things just slip through the cracks that life’s attacks leave with us. This desire, or this instinct, as it were, for Glyn was one of these losses. 

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And admitting that would be impossible even to herself. There were simply implications to it. And so instead, she thought about the night air, how crisp it felt despite the smell wafting off the dumpsters next to her. The quietness likely helped the atmosphere. It was easy to focus on the nothingness that could then become almost anything she wanted it to be. 

“Almost,” she thought again. It couldn’t be Nora. It couldn’t do what Nora could do. And she needed Nora. 

Instinctively, Glyn pulled out her phone. Maybe Nora had texted her or called her, anything to tell her that she would come after all. That a miracle would happen. Somehow. In some way. The details were frivolous. There was no need to care about them. Glyn certainly couldn’t. Anything was acceptable if it meant having her friend here with her, pulling Glyn out of the horrors of her own mind and back into the world of the living where she still felt some sense of joy, even if it wasn’t the full amount she was owed.

As she stood in the in between–straddling the line between her brain and the rest of the world–she drifted aimlessly in her own body. 

“Waiting for someone?” the woman said, jarring Glyn out of the air and forcing her to pick a side. She picked the side of the living. How could she not?

“A friend of mine,” Glyn muttered. “She couldn’t be here tonight.”

Saying it aloud brought an additional pang to her chest. It hurt in a way she did not understand. It hurt in line with so many other aches she dare not say aloud. For a momentary reprieve, Glyn could not help but turn to where Nora’s lab was and–yet again–forget the woman who was there. You could see the lab from that alley, it turned out. It peered out from just over the other buildings. Glyn thought she could see a flicker of light on one of the top floors. Was that Nora’s office, she wondered. She couldn’t be sure, of course, but she treasured that detail, that moment of closeness and an odd sense of comfort.

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“She’s working in a lab nearby,” Glyn found herself saying absentmindedly. 

“There’s a lab here?” the woman added curiously.

“Yeah, it’s not a public one. The work’s kind of secretive, you know?”

The woman took in a sudden breath. “I do.”

It was an odd reaction, Glyn realized half a moment too late. How could she know, which is what she was suggesting she did. How could anyone know? Nora had led her to believe that it was impossible to know. And yet, maybe, it wasn’t. A chill crept up Glyn’s spine, and her lungs clenched, barring any bit of air from entering into her body. She turned to the woman to ask, to clarify, to do anything, but the woman was gone and the door to the club was swinging shut. 

The night had changed. Glyn could feel it, but she could not explain how. 

She did not have it in her to think more of it. She was weak, and what energy she had was being pulled in many different directions. Unsure what else she could do, Glyn took the most pressing issue into her hands. The one that was literally in her hands. She looked down at her phone, still expecting some sort of message from Nora, anything. She pulled up the message thread thinking that maybe–just maybe–a notification had failed to go off, that technology had failed in some small, completely fixable way. 

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But no, again no.

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The last message Nora had sent her had come that morning: a sincere congratulations and an apology that she couldn’t attend the celebration herself. 

“But I need you here,” Glyn thought more intensely than she ever had before. “Please be here.” 

Be here in the club, not in the lab, not where the person I may have sent your way could do you harm for whatever it is you are working on. Be safe, here, because I am the one that wants you. The woman just wants the technology.

Or that’s the story Glyn would tell herself when Nora’s death was announced. Death for a piece of technology, the newspaper argued, a theft that came at far higher a price than what was required. The only clue was a muddy footprint from a woman’s high heel show. Was she wearing heels, Glyn would ask herself. The woman who brought her outside whose face she could not recall but that she had stopped seeing in her daily life. She couldn’t be sure, of course, but the alley had been muddy. She knew that much. And it was far too much to know.

(Beep. New music starts)

Cassandra’s Tales and Truths is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, edited, produced, and performed by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. Transcripts can be found at oracleofdusk.online. That’s one word. Oracleofdusk.online. Thanks!