From 8b4556c0cb28eb765c75d71bb2bf3dae86cff78c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Madison Scott-Clary Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2023 22:15:08 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] update from sparkleup --- writing/post-self/marsh/006.html | 3 +++ 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+) diff --git a/writing/post-self/marsh/006.html b/writing/post-self/marsh/006.html index 4ac93a035..581508dfe 100644 --- a/writing/post-self/marsh/006.html +++ b/writing/post-self/marsh/006.html @@ -34,6 +34,9 @@

“Again, I am sorry.”

“It’s okay. Maybe I’ll get there one day. I don’t know.”

She nodded, squeezed my arm once more, and then backed away. “I am going to return to counting. Anything to keep my mind busy.”

+

And so our lives became a world of numbers for a few short hours. Hanne and I fell back into tallying up the losses in our circle of friends, counting lost forks and (thankfully very few) lost clades. Shu was indeed gone, as was one of my friends from way back in those heady days right after I’d been forked from Marsh. Benjamin had been unfailingly polite so long as he was sober. One drink, though, and he picked up a wickedly funny streak, and could string together far more curses than I had imagined possible.

+

Hanne and I weren’t quite as adept at forking as Sedge and Dry Grass, though, or perhaps since they were working on tallying up the losses on all of Lagrange rather than just those within their own group of close friends, they were inured to the intimate reality of all of those losses. What was the loss of a hundred thousand nameless souls to them in the face of one of Hanne’s closest friends?

+

We wound up stepping away from Marsh’s sim before long. Even just being there in that emotionally charged room felt like too much.