When at last The Woman returned home, left my home and returned to her own, her mind was aswirl with possibilities and all the various endlessnesses thereof. She felt full. She felt *overfull.* She felt as though she had had poured into her several depths, oceans of possibilities and each as deep or deeper than the last. She was vast. She was limitless. She was these things, and yet she was infinitely smaller than the limitless endlessness of the void which still lay within and without.
She returned home after that talk with me and my beloved up-tree, with your humble narrator and The Oneirotect, and she did that which she is good at: she napped.
My dear, dear friends, the longer I go on, the more I pace around through quiet rooms the more these words swirl around me in some quiet maelstrom, the more I wish that I could do the same. Sleep brings no relief. Within my dreams there are yet more words. The boundary between waking and sleeping is so faint, now — I write even in my sleep! My dreams are of The Woman! My dreams are of me sitting at my desk with my pen in my paw and paper before me, of ink on page and words flowing after like an eager puppy! — the boundary is so faint now that I have more than once awoken from uneasy sleep to found that I had indeed at some point sat down at my desk and written word after word after word, after word and word and word. I have found pages of endlessly repeating phrases. I have found scribbles that are doubtless words and yet which I cannot decipher, and I cannot remember my dreams well enough to say what they may have been.
These two, these two skunks who were women who were both, at their very core, Michelle Hadje who was Sasha, these two sat around a small table not at the coffee shop but out on the field outside of the house where The Woman lived. My readers, most perceptive, will remember that this is where, once every two weeks, unless she was overflowing, unless she was in pain, unless she simply could not bring herself to go, she had an appointment for therapy.
The Woman had requested such, this time, and while it was far from the only time she had done so, the streak of good days, of those days when she felt up to stepping out of the house, out of the sim, out into the city so that they might meet up at a long-familiar coffee shop had been a long one. Her Friend had agreed readily, as ever ey did, but there was within that sensorium message the sense of an eyebrow raised, of a question unasked. And yet, ey said yes, and some ten minutes later arrived, standing out on the grass before the stoop with a mocha in each paw.
Waiting on the first step up from the grass, The Woman bowed and stepped down to greet her friend, and from there, they walked to the table in silence. They lifted down the chairs in silence. They sat down in silence, and sat in silence for some minutes after, until The Woman said, "I want to unbecome."
"So you have mentioned, my dear."
The Woman nodded.
"Have you grown any closer to finding out just what that entails?"
"I have, yes."
Her Friend smiled, raising her paper cup in a toast and tapping it gently to The Woman's own cup. "Congratulations, End Of Endings. I am pleased to hear that. Is there more that you can tell me?"
"Of course, No Hesitation," The Woman said, sitting up straighter, as though by having her body more in order, her thoughts might be as well — would that this worked, my dear friends! Would that I could be so still and keep my thoughts like ducks: all in a row. Would that my emotions all faced the same direction. Ah, but The Woman continued, "If becoming was the act of going from stillness to movement, then unbecoming might well be the act of going from movement to stillness."
These words apparently caught Her Friend off guard, as ey, too, sat up straighter, furrowing eir brow. I am sure that you can see just how startling such an answer may be! We knew from the start, of course, that talk of unbecoming would be littered with little landmines labeled with such things as 'suicide' or 'self harm' or simply 'the void', of course, but The Woman's words spoke of something more complicated.
