Tetrapharmakos (don’t fear)

Three things. Sound, sand, and a sharp object. The woman called Leonie Ania realizes consciousness in a subterranean, starchy hotel room. Low ceilings. Thick, hazy air that tastes like the hot burn of an overzealous teenager’s bitten-out words.

Her first thought: To exit. Irrational, she knows, yet as she feels sand uncomfortably rubbing up between each crevice down her body, she realizes that she does not know much of anything at all. 

Leonie sits up very straight in the slatted cot. Slowing her breathing, she can hear muffled voices outside the room. A singular voice, if separated from the mass, sounds ghastly and atoned. When combined, the voices compose desperate brays of a deathbed’s song. No, Leonie decides, those aren’t voices that I know.

Leonie tends to know a lot of things. But not right now.

There’s a mirror slightly to the left of her blurred vision. She glances at her disheveled self, giving her familiar body a heavy look. Leonie’s all dressed up in the last party dress she remembers putting on, her glittered features matching the style she had done for a friend’s special occasion, shoes gone, her hair up in an extravagant flair done once for a celebration years back. These are all her memories, but they don't align. She doesn’t even recognize the little room.

Leonie climbs out of the bed, not bothering with the sheets. Material permanence is something she’s always struggled with; she tends to believe things just disappear when they’re out of her sight. 

Maybe they do. She decides not to look at the stained mattress any longer. 

As her breathing quickens, the sheets not providing grounding contact any longer, Leonie buries her feet deep in the long fibers of the scratchy nylon rug. Promptly, the sand grains between the strands become intolerable. There’s a basement window settled in the top corner, crepuscular rays of pale ginger light burnishing the few reflective surfaces in the room. Situated on the floor is a clay vase with two wild roses wilting in it, dodged expertly by the light. Leonie directs her attention to the paint-stained walls instead of the ground beneath her, uncomfortably brushing up against her skin. Her shallow breaths slow, her deep-seated panic pushed back to the furthest ring of her consciousness once again, and she’s left alone.

Leonie can hear again, though she hadn’t noticed she was tuning anything out. The unhurried, indolent voices from the outside are still droning on. They’re not as haunting anymore — still unfamiliar — and they’re shaping up to be the company she longs for, despite her nescience on the question of if they’re people at all. Dragging her blurry body towards the door, the motion makes her hair blanket down her back. 

The choristers outside don’t change in volume as she nears her means of egress. In fact, Leonie doesn’t even think they’re on the outside anymore; the sounds seem to coat the room in an oily wrapper of essence, invading the consolidated air in a hostile manner. If this makes her demeanor hesitate, it doesn’t show in her actions. The unremarkable mahogany door cracks open, blending with the increasingly higher-pitched voices that part the room in two. Leonie gingerly steps through it, noncommittal, giving the outside a quick sweep. The doorstep below her is rough concrete, a discrete contrast from the tender wood of the interior. 

Looking around, Leonie sees nothing. Anticipating lightness, she lifts her hand out to the nothing, but reaching back to her is a heavy weight that doesn’t push her hand downwards, simply pressing on all sides. She becomes aware that the area is not merely the complete absence of space, rather a physical manifestation of the existence of a nothing. 

Frankly, she is unhappy with the events of her day so far. The small part of her unaffected mind throws repeated red lights: for one, the speaking — singing — of the shrill ensemble have reached a point of unfortunate enveloping, filling her psyche — they’re self-contained, she notices — with a distinct sense of insanity. 

Second, looking down, everything seems to just be a concrete plane before her. In every other direction is the unending fullness of dark. Two things —  weight and void. Intertwining and swirling in the definitely-not-air. She takes a step.

Time is an accident of motion, and motions never have a goal. In situations like this, Leonie tries to leave herself for the quiet of blissful dreams, yet it never seems to work. 

Almost immediately after her first footstep, the heaviness shoves Leonie’s body in every direction. She feels exactly like how a pile of pulverized bone feels while being dusted into an especially marvelous vase. Jauntily jabbed in different angles across the self-operating concrete plane, she resigns herself to this particular pressure-filled future. The sounds crescendo to a head-splitting volume.

She examines her fingernails, barely resisting the urge to drill her brain out. Her nails are a light taffy, slightly longer than the tips of her fingers, and sort of cracking off. Moving her left hand in an attempt to pinch her wrist, she finds complete restriction. The same hand is involuntarily thrown behind her back in the next motion.

“God, this is a bad hangover,” Leonie mumbles, the signs all there, wildly scanning the dimming plane for any sign of what had happened before. She can’t remember, can’t think, and for that matter, she doesn’t want to try anymore.

A dazzling blaze of colorful light takes Leonie by surprise, but she just as easily embraces it, angry brilliance washing over her eyes, raindrops clutching a glass surface, and she knows she is not real.

Enquiry into plants — intermission

Earlier, when she had been looking straight up the building, Leonie noticed that the bottoms of the balconies were traced with wild vines. 

“Do those just keep growing?” she asked her company, gesturing to the ivy creeping up the walls with her unoccupied hand. Smoke crowded the air between the circle, filling each crevice with a distinct blurry soot. They were standing out on a balcony, a small ashtray by the glass door.

“Sure. I haven’t ever cut them,” responds the girl who presumably owns the apartment. 

A tall man with a dark green cap nods, scanning the walls —

“English ivy, and there’s a passionflower over there,” he says, taking a drag. “Leonie, got vines back home?”

She had forgotten they all knew her, by name and by childhood. Details, names, faces occurring and unchanging in their minds. She blanched. “No.”

The man looked at her, a silent question in his eyes. “Not anymore?”

“No,” Leonie repeated.

Everyone was quiet for a while. 

A girl in a long red nightgown holding a glass of wine pushed the screen door open, clearly expecting to join in on a lively group of friends. The heaviness of the smoke cut into her immediately, and she spoke while rapidly blinking. “We’re cracking open a bottle, come in,” she said, her eyes closed, turning back around. “If you want.”

By that time, she was already inside, thorny silence dripping over the group like a raincloud.

As her companions filed through the door without another word, Leonie just watched them, putting out her cigarette.  The apartment owner’s long, straight black hair was adorned with miscellaneous dust particles. The brown shirt belonging to the tall man was in a permanent state of disarray, similar to the urgent man himself. The last girl - she was like the sunshine melting over a tiny green flower, grass growing on a volcano, pure obsidian cutting open an angry animal, and no one knew her even one bit. Rarely did Leonie share a table with a girl like that, who hadn’t turned out like herself. 

They were all eerily similar, she figured, to each their own labyrinth, and the mazes weren’t children’s puzzles with an answer key. She closed the door gently behind her, melting into the purple-and-red strobe lights. 

Sensationally: open-eyed hands, the brokenness of fast-glancing mouths, maps of Atlantis drawn across the floor with dirty white sneakers. 

Leonie loses everything, now, then, falling, without a sound, in the cacophony. Past shifts to present; you — I — she — comes down with dreamlike diagnoses.

How she knew — knowing and kneeling, the concepts bleeding into a lacerated mess.

Leonie woke up curled by a wall, looking dazedly at the mass of fused humanness as they swayed and rolled. Next to her, the last girl from outside sobbed as quietly as she could manage. Long had the days passed where she was equipped to deal with such a situation, and long had the days passed when she possessed the benevolence to feel bad about doing absolutely nothing. 

She got up and walked away on unsteady footing. Later, as her twisted body slept fitfully on a bench, her nightmares were consumed with the crying girl’s angry murmurs, vines and sticks of the sort grabbing at the edges of her subconscious, leaving her to topple forward in an overgrown midnight field. As her face hits the flowers, the screen shatters and so does the stretching band between all the karmic creations —

Tetrapharmakos (don’t worry about death)

I’m dead, Leonie Ania thinks urgently, it was on that bench, I knew it. 

She can tell herself this, but it doesn’t change the absolute fact that she is not. Leonie knows that she could be tossed by catapult to the furthest planet in the star system, and still be alive, far from the comfortable reaches of the afterlife.

She’s found herself in a library — 

“Why,” says Leonie disdainfully.

It’s just the library that Leonie spent her hungry young days in, reaching to the highest shelves and raiding the drawers for knowledge. From her spot nestled on the ground, she can see its octagonal shape, the dim green-tinted lights giving the room a rather sterile feel. It feels like a place lost to time, which she supposes it does classify as. She’s leaning on a sad little bench, melded with a dusty metal table. 

Standing, she notices a couple books lying open, dog-eared. Upsettingly, Leonie notices she recognizes each title with ease, quickly averting her eyes. Quickly, this year, month, day has become the worst one yet, or at least, as of now. She kicks the miserable bench, relating heavily to its desolation, its slightly splintering wood making a little crack. 

“Listen, everything I have ever done has been to get away from here!”

 — she says to no one in particular. Backing away from the offending table-and-seating set, she peers at the titles from a distance. It’s all Leonie’s moldy, ancient readings from a time that she can’t quite remember without a dusty haze; a stack starting at the Enchiridion of Epictetus and ending with a large book called the Praeparatio Evangelica Book XIV.

Such awful, dreary reading. Leonie can’t imagine having the attention span to even sit down and open up their dusty covers. But she knows that at some point, the girl who meticulously organized the tomes by letter was her. Or some semblance of her, an existing entity that took on the same name, fingerprints lightly dusting the pages as means of identification. As a claim —  these books as much hers as she belonged to those dreadful books, if their shared commonality was a lack of companionship, little Leonie must have made them her friends. 

Or, alternately:

Outside the building was a tree wrapped up in a strangler fig. The webs stained the timber with its spindling vines, hollowing out its base from the top. Every time she found the spot, a new branch had curled around it, taking it home — to who knows where.

It was almost protective.

Leonie Ania walked into the silo-shaped tower. The amount of times? She had lost count. She hadn’t really been keeping count.

An onlooker would notice that the young girl’s short-cropped blonde hair was curiously wrapped in a vine. Leonie liked to imagine that a viewer was present; studiously recording her actions, giving them significance.

It’s like the Panopticon, Leonie thought excitedly. She giggled a bit, and skipped the rest of the way through the deceptive double-doors.