I leave my other soul at home sometimes. Not today. It was particularly insistent, and who am I to deny myself, even if it is but another side of the same? Even if it causes me harm, there is benefit in exploring the self.
And so I walk into work, an amalgamation perched on my forearm. He claws up to my shoulder and the elevators ping and rasp as dry metal does, allergic to itself because hateful things cannot stand their own likeness. And he clips my ear with his beak, leaving a soul-divot in the helix much like the aftermath of an infected piercing whose insurance declined coverage for cosmetic surgery. And the metal detectors beep, and I am first waved with wands held at a distance, sweating lightly under the cold LED suns and the impenetrable white concrete that never ceased to look like a roadside bank of packed snow. And the wands beep, and I am patted down and the other half of my soul ducks and clambers around the black-gloved hands erupting from the bomb-shielded, kevlar-coated desk staff. And after the LEDs burn holes in my vision like candleflame through accusatory newspaper, and through shaking heads and denial of my belongings until I am permitted to leave I am let through, and when a guard turns their head with regret and startles when my other half screams, like how birds of prey scream sometimes, like we never actually allow outside of our chests, and I anticipate that today will be a learning experience for myselves both.
Underbrush clambers through the hallway carpet. I lift my feet once the downtrodden turns to sand and then lift them higher once that numbs my skin as a frigid mountain stream, and I part the cattails before me with an outstretched knee.
I sit at the morning meeting. It is on the eighth floor, a comfortable place between the sixteenth and the ground — and below. When I asked after some file-snooping on my first day, I was ignored and hushed and given flickering glances. Because the biggest responsibility for all new employees, regardless of who they are or under whom they are employed, is to commit as many plausibly-deniable, possibly-accidental infractions on their first day as they can. For performance reviews at end-of-month showing positive progress, yes, for lack of nitpicking yet of one's personal quirks and personality traits the company would like to grind into dust, of course, but also because one has exactly two chances to commit the crime of showing curiosity in a place that is at its soul the antithesis of the mind: the first is when you join and are expected to make mistakes, and the second is when you are about to leave and nothing matters anymore. And a third opportunity, if one becomes so consumed by the company they grow to become On Top, but by then your curiosity is gone and your heart is punctured and naught but greed and the endless well of despair remains inside when you breathe. I turn my eyes and shoulders at the click of the door, wrangling my other half back towards myself from where he had been exploring the table.
My coworker expresses her greetings over a lidded cup of brand-name coffee shipped from halfway across the world, processed by hands that would never touch the wealth she spends every week, picked from coffee plantations growing over rainforests she bemoans the loss of every Earth Day and whenever the company has a Sustainability Potluck — when the investors get worried that they aren’t showing We care, and we want to help enough. Planted by hands that bloat with the gasses of decomposition after heat exhaustion, dehydration, a body simply giving in to what must be and not rising again — when the world is simply too terrible to continue.
My other half gives me a croaking laugh. My coworker startles, looks around, and I am reminded: she’s not that bad.
She talks openly about sustainable business practices, degrowth, investigative and undercover journalism. She sits in corners on our lunch breaks reading Wikipedia pages on climate activism, reblogs Tumblr posts about how committing arson in a Walmart or taking an EMP to a generative AI server facility are the best forms of voting because our democracy is a farce, but remember to vote anyway because we need to disrupt the policies from without and within.
I believe that some people are bullets, already fired but without purpose or direction. They zip about the world in hopes of a target, seeking all and finding none. My coworker talks in want-tos rather than will-dos or have-dones. She has found her target, but stays in the sanctuary of the barrel. My other half does not care for her.
My other half hops onto my meeting notes, empty lines in blue ruled by red, leaving taloned pawprints in ink that overlap like gravedigger bootprints in the soft loamy earth of a cemetery, and the other team members file in. A collection of suits, eccentricities, intelligences, creative spirits moulded, shortened, filed, honed. Regardless of their inclinations of becoming, made into swords like clay put to an iron forge. Clay can be a sword, just as these beautiful people can put their talents towards the company. And too like a sword made of clay, they will be beautiful, sharp, weighty, and have mighty power — exactly once. And then they will hit something slightly too hard, slightly too unsurmountable, and break. That’s what we call burnout.
I take in a breath, another, another, and remember to let it out instead of building up in my chest like a slow-blooming nuclear explosion. It comes out in too loud a rush and I get glances, faintly miffed explorations of my humanity — or, no, assessments of my continued functionality as a gear in a great machine, and the great machine needs to have a meeting that goes as meetings go: sufficiently looking, smelling, tasting like a meeting, but only because the stage is set in the environment it emulates and the performers are all under the delusion that each of them is the only one performing; that everyone else is here in body and soul and they are the only one jerking on marionnette strings. In reality, all of them are actors, and nobody talks about it and so nobody knows that they can act otherwise.
The company needs a meeting, and the meeting will not change anything before nor after it is done save for that a meeting will have occurred, and so the facsimile, this odd disjointed play, must now take place, and I am not to draw notice to that nobody is actually doing anything but fulfilling what is on all of our calendars.
I should not have brought my other soul to work today. It is giving me odd thoughts. And so, when the presenter’s back is turned — his voice is the drone of a rich educated western straight cisgender white male — I plunge one hand wrist-deep into my chest, grab hold of the hot, rippling, throbbing, irony red wet thing inside, pull it out throbbing, splurt it with a choked gurgle onto the table, and switch my soul.
My legs stand. My hands push my chair in, and my feet leave the room. The LEDs are a low grey hum, but their haloes form a rainbow quilt along the hallway ceiling. Where am I going?
The trees burst around me in answer, an explosion of forestry that penetrates the concrete of the building with the musty odour of fungus, lichen, moss, the rich dark smell of rotting wood and loamy earth, layers of duff over years and interspersed with ashes from healthy forest fires to feed and fuel the underbrush anew. My feet wet — my shoes have eroded in the hall which is still a hall. Voices, shouting from behind — but the birdsong of the forest is, for once, louder than the sound of the highway. Mushrooms everywhere crumble bark and soil to fruit: amanita and chicken-of-the-woods and chanterelle and destroying angel all cohabit nurselogs lurching from the concrete, bursting from the floor and cracking it to expose ferns whose fronds splay out like the wings of shorebirds at dawn. Dew beads on my skin and my other half flits from branch to Spanish moss bearded branch, and as even the LEDs fade I am approaching a waterfall — it eclipses all sound in a complete and utter destruction of the senses. Rays of glorious sunshine break through the pine needles and maple leaves. And as I climb a set of boulders that may once have been a cable line trail to reach the waterfall, I marvel at how the landscape has changed since my arrival and the world begins to bleed a scarlet yellow at the seams.
“Lead is a toxic heavy metal that leads to neural degeneration. This leads to symptoms of dementia at high doses.” My other soul’s voice comes from nowhere, is brown streaked with red like feces with an intestinal bleed, and the feathers of my face gleam like polished garnet under the too-low cold and burgeoning sun.
Once, my other half was despairing, desperate. When I was not myself — when I was my other soul, I could not differentiate hunger, thirst, loneliness, boredom, sorrow, joy, restlessness. All was the same, and all was dreary and ill-advised. I remember now, as snow begins to fall like radioactive static flooding photographs. I remember going weeks without speaking to the people I loved, months without working on the projects that gave my life meaning and going half a year without recalling my purpose as a person, scarcely seeing my other soul at all, only living as a half-a-soul. I remember sinking into despair-boredom-restlessness-tiredness-hunger-thirst and thinking as I did not practice activities that made me myself for months at a time, perhaps I am depressed. Perhaps I am hungry. Perhaps I am broken. Fulfilling something through inaction, then something else through action, but never querying whether the need I was fulfilling was the one I was craving the fullness of. Never thinking beyond immediate survival. Occasionally catching glimpses of a better life, a prior life, when I stumbled by happenstance across something I had done before — a book, a play, a person — and briefly recalling that yes, I need this in my life. Occasionally recognizing that, and resolving to increase the levels of that in my daily living.
And forgetting again. Forgetting come dawn, memories burning away like mist before the rising sun.
I cannot stay in this better, euphoric state forever, though. A return to the mean must occur. First it is in afterimages of my movement, and then it is at the edges of everything — the lines of the bark in a douglas fir, the ragged seams of a maple leaf, the boundaries of a rock in my vision, blurring where one eye does not quite cover where the other eye does. I look up and I am in a tiny shard of sunlight beating down into the black where fireflies and phosphorescent orange fungi bloom, and I see a blood red sun burning down over paradise. I put a limb to my chest, and in my hand there is the familiar weight of a leaden dagger.
I ignore myself as best I can. I find what I actually need in any given time. I am a restless spirit; my needs are many and ever-shifting like a kaleidoscope before the sped-up sky trickling like molten crayons through dusk, dawn, milky way, shining summer day, snow and midnight. I find what I need and I do it as soon as possible, even when others think it strange that I jump between activities faster than fleas from rats during plague. Because I have not always been myself.
The edges are more than red now. They are bleeding through, a dead space where pixels repeat and coalesce like a virus on a computer. I wave a limb through the space before my face and my vision is whited out by my skin, and the world is jittering and shuttering and I am falling through a loading zone of the mind.
I am at the bus stop on the side of the road. The road is an unmarked place of dense greenery all the same shade above, behind, beyond, split by a clean blue stream of sky above and a wet grey-black of asphalt below. It is evening — I am tired, bones denser from the concussive forces of hiking than they were this morning. The bus would come, and I did not know whether it would be within hours, within minutes, or not today at all — it all depended on whether it was early or late, and whether I was early or late. Had I missed my opportunity? Was it too late, and should I go on to other things, apply myself elsewhere since I missed my chance? Or should I place my faith in possibility, allow myself to stay at the bus stop in the humid darkening of day, my mouth aftertasting of snow and my muscles still remembering the ice, the cold, the blue and the bright that whited out sight, sound, smell, feeling until all was endless and pale and beautiful and nothing at all. Until frostbite, and what comes after.
I wait for the bus.
“And I wait for the meeting to end,” says my other half, and there is a vertigonous orange-and-yellow on black feeling like a lantern falling — or maybe I am the one falling — and a roiling black-and-green nausea in my mouth, in front of my teeth, and a horrific Niagara Falls squeezed through a straw shunting—
“Your tasks for today are to work with clients 1000.1, 2033.2, and 1013.3. Look through their medical charts first, then through the rest of their pages on Epic. Do you want me to walk you through it when the visit is about to start?”
“No, I got it,” says my mouth. My hands are packing up my bags. I am not in the same space as I was before. My thermos is large, heavy, and filled with water and a small measurement of diluted protein powder that is supposed to taste like nectarines. When I get to the room—
My only thought is hunger. When I get to the hallway—
No. If I take a sip now—
No. They will see that there is something wrong with me, that I am eating. Drinking. I must not eat in front of them — I might lose control. And wouldn’t it be such a shame if they saw that I had a problem? No — when they are gone, I will eat and feel such shame that I am eating and feasting on the all too few calories I brought with me today. It still feels so gluttonous. Such a good thing that I brought so little today — a relief. Always. I should have brought less, still. A thought appears, I reach for it, it dies like a light obscured by a hand. There are no good metaphors when one’s only thoughts are rigid, when one’s thoughts are focused keen on how to evenly space out one’s food times so one does not experience ravenous hunger. So one does not realize that one is already in its throes.
People are standing. I have been watching duly from my seat, and the room holds only people. I have not seen my other soul in so long, rarely at all since I decided to start starving myself. I haven’t seen it in weeks, now — this is my longest time without it, yet I still refer to myself by we. We stand. Sway on legs getting thinner by the day with bones and muscles that are withering by the minute. We thank our teammates, make the adjustments in our face to display approval and a disinclination towards too much speech, pick up our bag and go to the isolated work pod. My teeth are so dry. There is something terribly wrong. I could break down into tears and weep for something, a loss I can’t even name or describe, at any second. There is something terribly wrong. I am starving and I am dying. There is something terribly wrong. There is something terribly wrong—
Breathe.
I am not there anymore. I don’t think I will ever return. My muscles are strong, my skin returned and my fat pads, small as they always have been, replenished. My heart is healthy, no longer bradychardic, and I breathe with ease. I am so strong, and my mind is ever returning. I am somewhere else—
and in this somewhere else, as this someone else, my shoes are melting into the orange-white sand. There are bacterial mats growing on the sand like duff in forests and twenty years of work are destroyed with a single hiker’s bootprint, and if one hiker has the idea then so do fifty more. It’s tourist season. I stumble, crack the orange rock beneath a step on what might be and ended up being a ledge and nearly topple from the summit to the valley floor as the bundle of blood and bones and sinew I am. But I do not die — I windmill and step back, land hard and wince as something lodges beneath bone not used to having muscle tucked beneath it. It will be fixed with thorough stretching tonight, and the sun is hot and the air is thin and cool and dry. I summit the orange-baked rocks still ice to the touch from the frost at their hearts replenished each night, and beneath the sky I lie on my belly in tan-orange clothing that drapes and muffles my form so I am not immediately recognizable as a person, breathe carefully through the tiger lily print of my bandana, and take my camera like a hunter takes a rifle. I wait for the destroyers of ecosystems to come, and the sky is so blue it’s almost purple but leaves white on my vision
My other soul’s office building is a sham. Here is the place where minds are extracted, processed, filtered, and sold as product under another, richer person’s name.
I take the cresting wave within me and bodysurf to its summit. My eyes are salt-crusted, sun-exposed, and I blink.
I'm on the top floor of a tall industrial building by a large natural lake. My other soul appears every third to fourth day, and only briefly. I wake, I bring my body to the program, and I do as I am told until we are allowed to leave. There is little room for strenuous thought, and I suffer for it, but I must be here for the betterment of myself.
It’s not all bad.
We see eagles often. One of the people there is an "I wish I was vegan; I just have so much respect for vegans" type of person. As though one could classify people into types, into boxes. A mistake of many. During group, we once saw a bald eagle carrying a pigeon. It landed on the roof right above us — I could see the yellow of its great scaled talons, the veining of its pale adult tailfeathers, the deep auburn of its body feathers fluttering in its own wind. It proceeded to tear apart its pigeon and eat it. The debris — bones, down, clutches of skin with flight feathers attached — drifted past the window, the bloodied and flesh-stuck ones falling faster than others, and our meeting halted entirely. The wannabe vegan was horrified:, "Oh, I hate eagles! They just kill everything! That poor pigeon! Pigeons are so nice; they don't hurt anything." I was baffled and dismayed. There were so many points that I could have made. My half appeared and it and the self I was at the time were finally united in a brief moment as I told that person, "Eagles can't afford to be vegan. Eagles can’t afford the grocery store. What would you have it eat? Beans?"
The wannabe vegan did not listen, and group ended with them continuing to hate eagles for their crime of needing to live.
I dive into this memory. I want to remember. The chair is cushioned well and its fabric is rough and cool to the touch. It is machine embroidered and patterned by more, other machines parroting what artists fed to them in instruction form so many years ago. My skin is numb but in an apathetic way — I finally have a spark in the dark yawning of my chest. I am horrified that so many people could go through life not learning about the circle of life. I believe that people who want eagles to be vegan fall into the overlap of the venn diagram where one side is "doesn't really understand biology" and the other side is "disapproves of wolves being reintroduced to Yellowstone".
It is my sorrow that animal loving groups who don't like that animals kill to survive are often quite vocal towards lawmakers, and that lawmakers don't always use best judgement when deciding which groups need appeasement. That knowledge makes me angry — but in an exhausted way. Weary. So, so weary. This memory melts like skin under a branding iron.
The world is bleeding — only fissures remain. The forest is thick, the brambles wide. My time is up. My world-life is a great cracked and melted wash of red and yellow from the edges of reality — the slivers of glass in my vision are widening. And the first shattered micron-thin edges falls through the surface of my eye like concussion glass following a skyscraper—
I am back. My heart squelches in my chest as all organs do. My other soul gives me an incredulous look, then flutters into the rafters, because this is no office building. That, too, was a part of the dream. My eyes are not yet open. The air is hot, thick with the smell of myself and books and computer fans. I’m not quite there yet, but I am close. There are very nearly days when I am my best self, united and whole as a soul-and-a-half, and then there are days when I am at my worst, but now my worst days look like the best days of yester-half-a-year. I am so strong now. Eyes wide—
My other half is a tattoo on my shoulder, a reminder of myself if I ever forget. More tattoos cover my body, further reminders and nails — no, needles, like bug taxidermy, a silver spike through a butterfly — pinning me down, wet algae and shipwreck detritus and seaweed barnacles and all, anchoring me so even untethered I have reminders of not what to live for, but whom I can live as. Options for when I feel as though there are none.
Before me is not the bramble-thick black forest of my dreams, lit by starlight though it is and filled with a singular monster that chases, formless but wolflike at once, and somewhere a clearing with a red pentagram with so many circles, placements for brethren I only met one of, and only once. Nor is it the daylit cliffside where I describe the wings of a bird attached as fifth and sixth limbs of my body, myself and my body, and a sapphire lake glittering so far below and the strongest updrafts meeting me head-on. I spread my wings, launch from the cliffside, flap hard and down — no. Before me is my keyboard. Warmth, reminders, acne patches, a thermos, sunglasses because I am still dazzled by the sun. Restlessness. Insatiable restlessness and a desire for more. My other soul claws my ribcage and if it were not so hot out I’d let it free to sprint, but for now I will redirect it to emails, bookreading, creative writing, perhaps music. Maybe painting, later. There are many ways to ensure its feathers are as many colours as possible, and I have only scratched the surface.
I am so many people in one. I must remember to change once in a while. But for now I am here, I am alive, and I am a million colours under one skin.
Not the biggest fan of the ending, but I am pleased with the middle.