<p>With May out of the house and True Name doing…well, whatever it was that she did in her room by herself, Ioan was left emotionally and intellectually stalled out, stuck by emself in an empty den. Ey sat for a while on the couch, staring out into the slowly melting snow on the deck and ruminating. Then, giving in to the urge to pace, ey slipped on the boots ey kept for just such situations and slowly tramped a ring around the outer edge of the yard, first reveling in the crunch of the icy top layer of the snow, then the sweat ey worked up when, on the third time around, the snow began to drag at eir feet, and then finally the solidity of the uneven path ey’d worn down into the snow, a marker of energy spent.</p>
<p>The pacing gave em time and space. It let eir emotions spool out into nothingness while eir thoughts were left crunched beneath the treads of eir boots. Ey didn’t know what ey thought about. Ey didn’t know what ey felt. Ey just walked.</p>
<p>Ey knew that, at one point, ey wondered if eir command to mirror the back yard for True Name’s room meant that it made a new back yard or whether it just mirrored the view out the window. If it were the latter, would she be watching em? Would she be wondering why ey walked? Would she scoff? Would she wish for a way to crush her own worries down into the ice?</p>
<p>And then the train of thought was gone, lost amid some whorl in the steam of eir breath.</p>
<p>An hour’s walking gained em sore hips, a sweat-soaked shirt, and a well-trod trail around the outside of the yard.</p>
<p>“Fucking cold,” ey grumbled, stomping the lingering snow off eir boots and the hems of eir slacks on the way up the stairs to the balcony. The boots were kicked off outside the door for the snow left on them while ey completed the journey inside. Ey could fork emself warm and dry, sure, but why do that when there was a perfectly good shower right there?</p>
<p>So, ey lingered under the hot water for fifteen minutes, and instead of whorls of breath, the crunch of ice, the nothingness of slate-gray skies, eir thoughts and emotions dribbled down eir face in rivulets of water, swirled once, twice, and disappeared down the drain.</p>
<p><em>Dissociating,</em> ey thought, laughed to no one.</p>
<p>Brushed eir hair, stared, unseeing, at emself in the mirror for a bit, dressed in clean clothes — sweater vest? Sweater vest — and wound up sitting on the couch again. </p>
<p>True Name peeked out of eir room and bowed to em from just outside her door. The sound of the door and the movement out of the corner of eir eye startled em awake. “Sorry, True Name. Everything okay?”</p>
<p>“Yes, thank you, Mx. Bălan.” She smiled apologetically, such a strange look on her. “I am not the greatest of cooks, but would you like me to make dinner tonight? I do not believe May Then My Name will be joining us, and it is getting dark.”</p>
<p>“Huh?” Ey whirled back around toward the picture windows and frowned. Sure enough, it was dimming into evening already. “Oh, well, sure, I guess. I’m sure whatever you make will be fine. Sorry I’m so spacey.”</p>
<p>The skunk padded into the kitchen and waved the apology away with a paw. “You are fine, my dear. You are allowed to space out. It has been a dramatic few days, so I do not blame you. Can you please grant me ACLs enough to create ingredients?”</p>
<p>After a pause to will it so, ey nodded. “Sure, should be good now.”</p>
<p>“Thank you.”</p>
<p>Ey felt strange staring out into the yard, the opposite direction of the kitchen, while True Name cooked, so ey grabbed a notebook moved to the dining table where, should ey be able to pull eir thoughts together, ey could write, and should ey not, ey could at least talk with True Name without twisting around in eir seat.</p>
<p>Ey could not, it turned out. Ey flopped the notebook shut again and rubbed at eir face. “What’re you cooking?”</p>
<p>“Chicken…rice…stuff. It is college food.”</p>
<p>Ey laughed. “Right, I’m familiar. Sounds good. Certainly cold enough out there for it.”</p>
<p>“Of course, yes. May Then My Name would have the same recipe, would she not?” The skunk clattered about for a moment, and then, apparently satisfied, leaned back on the counter behind the stove. “I do not understand your affection for the weather, but I am happy to make warm things while it is about.”</p>
<p>“Hopeless romanticism, I guess,” ey mumbled. “But whatever. Are you feeling better?”</p>
<p>True Name shrugged, eyes locked in a glassy stare out the windows. “I do not know if better is the correct word. I feel lighter, perhaps, having said what I did to May Then My Name. Conflicted, as well, that I feel lighter and yet she feel the burden of knowledge heavy enough to need to step away. For that, I apologize.”</p>
<p>Ey nodded. “She sent me a few brief pings. She’s with End Waking and Debarre at the moment. No clue when she’ll be back.”</p>
<p>“I am pleased to hear that she is safe.”</p>
<p>“Now that you’ve had some space from it, can you tell me any more about what you told her that set her off?”</p>
<p>“I am not ready to get deep into it, Ioan, I hope you understand.”</p>
<p>“Of course. I’m just worried. I guess. Did it have to do with her specifically.”</p>
<p>She didn’t respond. The skunk’s gaze never wavered. Her posture remained relaxed and comfortable. For that, ey felt all the more anxious.</p>
<p>“Well, maybe you can tell me what spurred the conversation?”</p>
<p>“Right, yes,” she said, deflating somewhat with a sigh. “What do you believe, Ioan?”</p>
<p>“Excuse me?”</p>
<p>“What do you believe? You strike me as irreligious, but surely you believe in something. The sanctity of life? Love? Art?”</p>
<p>Ey sat up straighter, frowning at the skunk. “That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer.”</p>
<p>“It is not at all surprising. It is easy to provide a noun and say that one believes in that. The irreversibility of time, perhaps? Your cocladist and Dear spoke to that.”</p>
<p>The conversation was taking a decidedly Odist turn. Coming at the topic sideways, grand statements that came tinged with a sense of awe. They all seemed prone to falling into the style of speaking, and ey fell for it every time. “Mmhm. Several times.”</p>
<p>“But what does it mean to believe in something like that? Or the sanctity of life or love or art? Or God, for that matter? ‘Belief’ as a word is a stand-in for a concept so broad as to be to be intimidating.” She finally broke her thousand-yard stare out the window and smiled faintly to em. “But I believe in what I did, Ioan. Really, <em>truly</em> believe. I felt called. I felt led. I am good at it. I wake up thinking about it, spend my day working with it, and fall asleep thinking about it. We have an existence which is fundamentally different from that of phys-side, and I cannot put into words how much I love that. It is more than a want, I have a need so integral to my being for it to continue that I would not be True Name without it, and I love being True Name.”</p>
<p>“But now…”</p>
<p>“Yes, ‘but now’. But now I am stuck in an impossible limbo built by Jonas. My entire existence these last two hundred years has been defined by by a belief that I thought Jonas and I shared, and in a few minutes, he tore it to the ground, burnt the pieces to ash, and then ground the ash beneath his heel.” She laughed and shook her head. “So melodramatic, is it not? But that is how it feels to have one’s belief turned hollow and stale.”</p>
<p>“Do you overflow?”</p>
<p>The skunk had lifted the lid of the pot of rice to stir. If it was anything at all how May cooked it, it was a stiff rice porridge made with chicken stock, cheese stirred in at the last minute —‘poor skunk’s risotto’, she called it. She seemed keen to use her time cooking to think, so ey waited in silence.</p>
<p>“I do. More frequently and in much shorter bursts,” she said, finally. “Every few days, I will walk sims and I will get lost. Well and truly lost. Dear loses control of its tightly directed energy, May Then My Name loses control of that wellspring of love within her, and I lose control of my sense of control.”</p>
<p>“Every few days? Is that because you’re stretched so thin with all your forks?”</p>
<p>She shook her head and, deeming the rice to be done, slid it off the heat. “I started walking in 2124, my dear. A few years before May Then My Name was forked, back when it cost too much to be so cavalier with forking.”</p>
<p>Ey nodded. “Were you overflowing earlier today?”</p>
<p>She chopped the sauteed chicken breasts she’d made into strips, focusing on the task, then on plating up the food, before responding. “Perhaps, Ioan. Perhaps.”</p>
