Auberon: Introduction

“Remind me,” I said, tears filling my eyes, “remind me to write a story about us…”

I lie in this big sleigh bed, phone grasped in one hand (the one where my liquor bottle once resided). A few minutes tick past and I sit up, head whirling from bipolar philosophies that spin in my head on an almost regular orbit. I take a few moments to notice how my underwear matches: white bra and regular bikini panties. Moonlight dances with candle flame reflections across a pale stomach, no longer flat and belonging to a child. I swing my woman’s thighs over the side of the bed. My hands are curled and limp in my lap. I think, They belong to someone dead.

They belong to me.

I let that fact settle into place in my brain, followed logically by just who I am. A few dozen names scatter across the recesses of my mind, but I can only understand a handful of them, mostly the ones spoken by familiar voices.

Morgaine’s worry will grow. She’s shouting for me as I sit here, her crow’s wings flapping in accompaniment to her shrill cries of Helena! I can see her. But I stay hidden.

I look at the vanity. I see only a paper cut-out girl, with cheap shiny buttons for eyes. But if I stand just right, I see a goddess too great for the world of man. And if I slouch in that position, I look human. The names continue to run through my head.

Shit, I am lost in my own world of thought again. Nostalgia is the name of the sea broiling in greeting in front of me.

The deep ocean surges up before me, and I am taken, unresisting, to its depths. I don’t struggle or writhe as life lets out of me. I let the light come in and obliterate my vision. My brain allows my lungs the luxury of not having to breathe anymore. My heart, it says, can stop hoping.

I can remember the conversation. It had such loops and twists. I hold together all my theories with twisty ties and Elmer’s glue. They’re not meant to be permanent.

But I didn’t lie.

I do remember.