Quoted By:
<span class="mu-r">It is a burden to be anything but YOU. The last realized this.</span> You<span class="mu-r"> have realized also, have embraced—</span>
It is more of a burden to be <span class="mu-r">YOU</span> than any single other thing. After all this time you still stagger under the weight of it. The size, the vantage, the loneliness, the entire world on your back— a burden by definition. Better to be somebody unimportant. Also, ah, unobservant. Irrelevant. Safe. You know the one.
<span class="mu-r">-----</span>
>[GENERAL STORE]
>[A COUPLE DAYS LATER]
Your name is ROSCOE PRATER. It is afternoon. Nobody has come in since the double Madrigal/Lucky whammy...
...nobody until now, anyways. You've spent the last few hours diligently writing out REAL/NOT REAL/BUY AT OWN RISK/DAMNED IF I KNOW stickers, plus taking your lunch break— not that you've needed to eat in 15 years, or felt any biological urging to. On lousy days you just take a solid nap. On better ones, you force yourself to browse the comestibles, pick out something you haven't seen recently, and eat it for lunch anyways. You're not religious about it like the Wind Court is, but you do think they have the right idea— that keeping up the habit adds a little stability, or something. Staves off the crazy.
You always did wonder if it backfired a little, though, because from what you've heard and seen they eat terribly. Barely edible rations. Whatever they can scavenge. Raw meat, sometimes (apparently their fire refuses to cook anything). They don't ever seem to die from it, but it can't help the mood. You? You've eaten some dogshit, sure, but you don't see a point in only eating "real" food if it's all going to the same place. (Nowhere, is what you mean. Because it never comes out the other end. In any form. If it dissolved into seawater [leading theory], you'd think you'd be doing a lot of pissing, is what you mean.)
...You got off track. Uh, the point was, you get some clearly not-real comestibles in the shipments, and you will say— the texture is weird. You will cop to it. It's weird. It ranges from the papery to the crackly to the the insta-dissolving spun-sugary. The smell and the taste, though, is worth the...
No, that wasn't the point either. Shit. You're a little out of it. You were saying you agreed with the Wind Court about the anti-crazy of eating something regularly, because— okay, yeah. Because of the routine, but you think they're missing a trick: adding novelty. That's why it has to be something you haven't seen recently. Brand-new, even better. Even if it tastes like shit in the end, even if you're choking it down, that's still a memory, and memories are how you—
"'Scuze me!"
—how you separate one day from the next— you stifle a yawn. You didn't even eat anything today. After the fucking double trouble, you took a deep, deep nap, had a funny dream— you can't remember it anymore— woke up, realized it was way past your usual break, and limped out here groggily.
"'Scuze me? Hiya! Hello?"
(2/3)
