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# 1

Once upon a time there was–

"A king?" my little readers will immediately say.

No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time, there was a woman. She was not a fine woman, not a prize to adorn your arm or to set beside you at the head of a grand table, but a simple woman — the kind we pass on the street and imagine some plain home life for. She has a house, one might think. There are floors and walls and windows, there are tables and chairs and sofas and beds. There is a shower and a claw-footed bathtub. There is a creaky step — the eighth — that she always swears she will fix.

We must imagine such a woman happy. We must imagine that she has friends and that she goes and drinks okay wine or maybe strange cocktails with them at the most absurd bars. We must imagine that she comes home, wobbling slightly with each step, with some other simple woman on her arm. We must imagine sharing their kisses, being happy together.

We must imagine these things because they are not true.

I do not know how it happened, but one cloudy day, she was asking after her friend most pure and then her mind was turned all in on itself, was wrapped and folded three times, turned, and then wrapped and folded thrice more. Some malicious baker kneaded and kneaded and kneaded, and when next she woke up, sixteen hours and twenty three minutes later, her mind remained in some unknown, integral way tied up into knots.

But that was three hundred years ago.

-----

The Woman wanders the world some few times a month, stepping out into unknown nowheres and known somewheres to be seen, to be perceived as still existing. I do not know why she does this, but it is important to her that someone witness her existing. It is a ritual she follows around like a little puppy: she will not know what will happen when she first does it properly, but she hopes it will be something wonderful.

The Woman has many rituals. 

She has rituals for eating food, for feeding the vessel in which she makes her home. There is no order in which she properly consumes food, she may consume it in any order, but there is an order in which she must appreciate food. You must understand: she must do this for everything she takes into her body. She must look at it before she touches it, must touch it before she smells it, must smell it before she eats it, and before all of these she must say a prayer.

She has rituals for getting dressed, for clothing the form with which the world sees her. She must choose a garment that fits her body and one that fits her mood. You must understand: every time she gets dressed, there is a moment of scrying into her deepest self and estimating how it is that she feels that day. And should her mood change, should those feelings shift, she will find her clothing itchy and uncomfortable, and if her form becomes not what it once was, her clothing will become uncomfortably tight or perhaps she will disappear down into the folds of fabric.

She has rituals for entering a room, for passing through a door. She must touch the door frame beside her shoulder, must brush her fingers against the wood or stone or metal or some more abstract substance. You must understand: she has to do this for every door she walks through, and for this reason, there is a door in the house where she lives that was built by a friend of Her Friend that leads directly out into a city. She opens the closest door and steps out onto a concrete sidewalk lined with trees and passers by, where the sun shines bright and the air burns cold in her nostrils and the dry leaves skitter anxiously about her feet. As she steps out, she can brush her hand to the door frame.

I do not know where these rituals come from, and perhaps some of my readers will immediately say, "OCD? Does The Woman have obsessive compulsive disorder?"

Perhaps she does, perhaps she does not. I do not know, friend. I *do* know that there are obsessions within her, yes, and I am sure that these rituals feel compulsory, but there is something different about The Woman. She is too present. She is too much herself, too human, too embodied within her vessel as it spirals out of control, too stuck in her mind as it twists in on itself. She is less struck by a disorder than she is struck by a constant overwhelm, a constant overflowing.

The Woman uploaded when she was overflowing. She lived within that overflow for years, for seven years she was overflowing, she was trapped within her mind and within the vessel of her body, and she lived as best she can as her body spiraled out of control. 

Readers, you must understand that she was in so many ways whole still! 

She campaigned for herself and for the others as damaged as her, but I think this was borne out of trauma and desperation as much as it was care for her loved ones lost and found.

She campaigned after uploading for individual rights for uploaded minds, before they were even cladists, before forking and sensorium messages and all of the other benefits that the System has to offer.

She was whole because she maintained — even while overflowing, I think! — so many deeply held convictions that those around her need not suffer, even if she herself did. Especially, she would say, because she herself did.

I think that she would say, however, that she was *too* whole. I think she would say that she was *too* full, too much, too alive. I think she would say that almost three hundred years of a life that was lived as hers was, with her mind turned in on itself, was too much life. I think she would laugh that hoarse, dry laugh that always sounded like tears were on the way, and say that thirty years was probably too much for her.

-----

"I wish," The Woman said some decades after Michelle Hadje/Sasha uploaded, after she became End Of Endings of the Ode clade, of the tenth stanza, "I wish I could unbecome."

Her Friend frowned and replied, "Do you mean you wish you could die?"

"No, I specifically do not mean that."

"What do you mean by 'unbecome', then?"

"I mean that I wish I could go through the process of becoming backwards."

"I am guessing you do not mean that you wish you could come apart."

The Woman laughed and shook her head. "No, though if I had to line them all up on a scale, I would prefer coming apart to dying. I would just prefer to unbecome more than that."

Her Friend was a good person who always treated The Woman well. Ey knew just how to talk to her, just which questions to ask, just when it was okay to offer a hug and when to hold back. Ey was a therapist of sorts, or at least someone dedicated to understanding the vagaries of the mind, someone who sought ever to reclaim different aspects of a less-than-ideal life, a less-than-ideal past.

"Do you know what that looks like?" Her Friend asked.

"Not yet," The Woman said. "Not yet."

"Is there a time when you will, then?"

"I think so, just not quite yet."

-----

Every few years, there would be a gathering on her birthday — their birthday, for Her Friend was also of the Ode clade, also of Michelle Hadje/Sasha — and they would sit somewhere, whether it was out on the porch of the home The Woman shared with the rest of the tenth stanza, or out on the dandelion-speckled lawn, or, once the door had been built into the house, on rickety chairs outside a cafe over identical coffees.

Every time they would meet up thus, The Woman and Her Friend would take a few minutes to themselves to have the same conversation:

Her Friend would ask, "Have you figured out what unbecoming looks like yet, my dear?"

"Not yet," The Woman would say. "Not yet."

"And have you any idea on when you might?"

"Not yet, no."

And then Her Friend would ask The Woman if ey could hug her, and she would usually say yes, for she saved up her energy for these parties, and ey would hug her and lean down to whisper gently beside her ear, "When you do, be sure that you tell me, End Of Endings. I want that you feel good above all things."

"Yes, No Hesitation," she would say. "I want you to be there with me, if ever I figure out just what I mean."

And after that, they would go to the rest of the party.

I think you would like to see these parties, friends. I think that they would not be quite as you would expect, of course. They are not the kinds of birthday parties that you or I might have. Where we might have cakes and singing and the blowing out of candles, they would gather together over simple foods — so many from the tenth stanza had such sensitive tastes, and it was so easy to make sure that everyone could eat everything! — and often they would simply sit silent. They would sit there, quiet, but present in each other's company.

They would not seem to be parties like you and I have because this was not all that different from what might happen once or twice a month at the house in which the tenth stanza all lived. While each lived their own lives, occasionally, their schedules would coincide and they would all sit down together at the giant oak table together and eat, mostly in silence.

Some of them shared rooms, you see, but mostly, they kept to themselves. They lived together in that big Gothic house plopped right down in the middle of a prairie of green grass and yellow dandelions, out where the stoop stepped down directly into the grass, but I say 'lived together' in a very mechanical sense. They never shared meals intentionally, nor even spoke all that often to each other. It is just that, sometimes, they would all find themselves at table at the same time!

So the only difference between parties and those days when they all found themselves eating together was mostly that this time, they actually *meant* to, and these were the days when, most often, more than one of them would invite over a friend or a guest.

The Woman invites Her Friend over more than any of the other members of the tenth stanza invite others over, except perhaps back when Should We Forget was alive, and Warmth In Fire would come by to give her little gifts and toys, little trinkets and special snacks that she would divvy up and share with the rest of the stanza in little unlabeled envelopes.

But Should We Forget was no longer alive, not since the world had turned in on itself and had eaten so many of those who lived within, and now that meant that The Woman, out of all of those who lived together, there on the field, brought over company most often.

-----

When Michelle/Sasha had quit, there on a field so similar to the one that she lived on, The Woman breathed out a sigh of relief, because she knew — though I do not think she know how — that Michelle/Sasha had found her own relief in those last moments. She had looked up to the sky, up to the Poet, up to the Dreamer who dreamed the world in which they lived, and in those moments she knew relief. She knew relief and she knew joy and she knew so, so much peace.

Peace! That was one of the things that The Woman craved. She wanted nothing more than to know a little bit of peace.

No rituals.

No overflowing.

None of this shifting of form that would strike unawares, for there she would be, sitting as pretty as could be, just this woman, just this short, round woman with a round, pale face and curly, black hair, and then with a cry or with a whimper or with a sigh of defeat, her very form would shift from beneath her. Her conception of herself would slip from her grasp and she would cease to be The Woman and instead be The Skunk or The Panther. It was always one of those three, for some days, she would be happily The Panther, and then a bee would land on her nose and tickle her whiskers and she would sneeze herself into a skunk.

I think it was cute sometimes, and I think she would say the same. I think she would say, "Oh! Oh! Look at that!" and then she would set to work brushing her tail. After all, what else is one to do if they found themselves to be in possession of such caudal beauty as is a skunk?

This is why The Woman had so much trouble with clothing, you see. She would try to look deep within herself at her moods to see what it is that she felt and how it was that the day might go and she might come up with a pretty skirt that felt good on her legs and a lovely shirt she liked the look of, but then, some time later, the shirt would be puffy with fur and the skirt would not sit right with her tail.

No rituals. No overflowing. Just peace. It is hard to experience peace when one is too human, is it not?
