Chapter 2: Elegy of Crescencia and Inquisitor
I am not sure why you were always doomed to an early death.
Someone told me at one point that the beautiful, noble, and talented perish young because God does not wish to see them grow old: grow ugly, selfish, and incapable.
Were you the one who told me that?
Crescencia, I have not yet renounced the idea of God.
In my search for fate, I remember a vision of a dark incubating nucleus curdling in low and vibrant colors. Its scent and composition seemed toxic and uninhabitable. I conjured that this was the fermenting basin of acidic hypothesis and rebuttal, in which cultures of sociological metaphor emerge. This was not a place to be freely ventured by a mere man. Yet among me were forms that shifted and fluctuated in the void, that space between matter. I was only an outsider, a bystander with a temporary privilege of observation. A familiar quantum theory demonstrates that observation affects reality. In this phenomenon, there was, observed, someone with the roots of his hair black, but the rest changed with its background. He did not notice me (lest I'd failed as an observer) but he flickered as if some universal field was affecting and pulling on his corporeal form, like I was witnessing a rare glimpse of superposition in its most vivid depiction. Then, someone laughed something to him near his ear. He rematerialized and he smiled in response.
I believe that he was God.
God exists in every continuum, God is perpetually aware of every probability.
Yet, a god is never obsessed with any one thing.
Perhaps I was a god until I met you.
I am not sure why I expect you to remember me.
Though. it seems sometimes as though the vestiges of the life I had lived before pervade into the next like a gaseous haze, torturing me with their familiarity.
Why you were a writer in the life after I was a journalist?
Wasn't that the Ford I took you around in as you told things to the wind?
And that song you hummed, didn't you once sing it on the stage?
There was one time I could've sworn I saw a gleam of recognition in your eyes, but you blinked it away so carelessly.
Did you know, on multiple occasions, I gave in to my emotions and told you everything?
I pride myself on being a stable person. Only seldomly do words and tears simmer and overflow from the fissures in my heart.
One particularly vivid memory still haunts me in my waking hours.
The bridge in Russia, your trembling hands and trembling lips. The snowflakes settled on your eyelashes and melted in your tears.
I told you everything.
I told you that each of my nights is another life, another destiny in another age. Years are as endless as the span of space, and fated encounters are as commonplace as the frost fallen in your hair.
I wake beyond my years every morning, crushed and forced into a body I'd long abandoned. I'm haunted by your ghosts. I know it's most possible, perhaps certain, that this is all in my head, for it is indeed all in my head. This and my real world run parallel, never touching, never grazing, never feeling the warmth of one another. When I wake, there is no evidence that I'd lived a lifetime in my sleep -- not even tears to commemorate you. In the mirror, there is a face both foreign and familiar.
My waking hours are hell on earth. I spend days and nights on end drinking and drugging myself to stay awake for fear of seeing you again, for fear of seeing you again. I am never wake when I am awake. I am weary and the world is empty. You are not there, and I do not want to believe that I am deceiving myself that I see you every night, that you are not a figment of my dreams.
Yet, sleep inevitably returns, and you with it, and with you the deepest belief in my heart that you exist, and that you have existed. No matter how much I struggle and damage myself, as soon as the blackened haze seizes my consciousness, I am back there. I can feel you once more. You see, no matter how many new names and faces, I cannot escape you. You are my eternity.
After you listened, you laughed in a way you hadn't for a long time.
You shook your head, and let go of the railing.
Of course, no matter who you had become, you could never become someone who believes in nonsense.
And that's the curse of it all.
Perhaps you are wondering why I call you Crescencia. Perhaps you do not remember that it's a name you gave yourself.
You were a poet that year, the type to study Latin, well versed in the art of perversion, pretension, and wit. I'll put aside my pride and admit I'd envied you for it.
You called me Inquisitor. I asked if it was because I was inquisitive, and you replied that it was because I was an annoying fucking nosy piece of shit.
You were drunk that day, see, you weren't usually that straightforward.
I saw you in winter. It is too late to apologize, but I was late from debating whether or not to go. It was in the negligent breadth of a blind and rather impulsive decision that I had grabbed my coat and left my home to hail a cab to the station.
I saw him there just as the bell was starting to ring. He looked unfamiliar in the bright light, but the flush on his cheeks from the cold and the glaze on his eyes at least brought me solace. Upon noticing me, he smiled at me and told me I was just in time, and then leaned in and whispered something that must've been clear from his lips, but became lost in the fog in the air and in my mind. Then he stepped from the platform and became a cold wind that grew faster and faster before eventually turning into a slight breeze on my face that was lost and dissolved into the air.
As for what he'd whispered, I realized that what he said to me in the years wasn't, in fact, a cute zinger about those silly infatuations we must've at some point had for one another in that life, an apology for what we had done, or a sly remark meant to aggravate me, or even a hopelessly romantic, wistful "remember me" that he would use to emphasize the severity of his departure after all his pandering on the alcoholic scent of death, his last plot to remain in my mind like a blight, even after his body had long vanished and the corporeal memories of him had begun to decompose in all minds but mine.
At some point I'd inevitably become obsolete and he'd file me back into the reaches of his mind. For a long while I would exist as a dormant specter with only enough agency to feebly encourage his bad habits – like an addiction to the impossible, rooted in some horrible deal he had made to exchange his life to preserve my freedom.
One day he may be lonely. He may extract me from where he had meticulously stored the memory of my face and voice, and he would greet that illusion. But it was not a perfect illusion. This spectre of me would not stray from his grasp when he holds it nor falter its smile when he confesses his sins. And then I would fade as he sobered, as the light would trickle away with the last traces of alcohol. Then he would be alone once more.
Like this, like that persistent dirge and ancient procession of knowledge and the black-robed figure that would announce the semesters to monitor the passage of time, he and I would live on, and long live forever; vivat, crescat, floreat, Crescere, Inquisitor.
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