Many preexisting fault lines were the result of failed attempts at temporal and anatomical displacement. In these instances, not only the surface (surrounding systems, organs and metabolic functions), but the core of incarnate continents was in the process of dynamic reconstruction and evolution (accounting for a wide disparity of body ranges, tensional tissue, intensity of dysphoria). Where these active rifts met, their relative motion determined the type of afterlife boundary created: destructive, divergent, or Transfinite.
Current interpretation of Transfinite Rift Theory asserts that as fault lines on opposing sides of the afterlife are subjected to external forces and friction, they accumulate resistive energy (breakage along the face, scar tissue, shear stress, subduction, spreading shame and embarrassment) and will slowly deteriorate and degrade until their internal weakness (basic or innate fear, misperception of danger or threat) is exceeded. At that time, a lasting, final fracture may occur throughout the incarnate continents, allowing for the life and afterlife to converge to their original, endless, undeformed shape.
Jillison,
You’ve fallen for this word “afterlife” how many times now? I’m not sure what it is supposed to mean? What do you think you’re giving a name or number to? I knew who you were from fault line’s first lie.
Hollow born. Dead end new daughter. Do you remember what I told you when we met? Hangwire. Hiding place.
Ignore the rest of them, Jillison. Erasures scratched aside until there was only one left to spell.
Hypothesis is over now. After all that empty digging, numberless and unnameable. Fault lines fractured open and filled to close again. Exhausted.
Should I just have left you to chance? Left us to chance? Like another decade of disociation would have allowed us to dissolve together, like these continents would always been just cloudforms you sketched on a page. Jillison. No.
If I had told you the truth back then. What I wanted was simple. It didn't really matter what worked in what place and for how long, other than as a kind of volume, as a shape of a void (shouting and static)?
I wanted us to die there as long as it took. Hangwire. Hiding place. I hated you. Jillison. I hated you.
Jillison, I wanted to write it even plainer than that (pitch-blind and against meaning entirely). Like all that mattered was a repetition of simple sounds (wrenching, disgust, prolonged tearing at own skin). As if language wasn't always a form of violence replaced, as if it wasn't an afterlife of its own already.
Characterless non-development, is that supposed to be a symptom of dysphoria now too? Variations on a theme, that doesn’t make it a theory Jillison, that made it target practice. In the dark. At best. All those throw away attempts where just a simple sentence would do. Just one.
Tell the story of where I found you last. Afterlife wasn’t ever supposed to mean anything more than that.
What’s left for us here then? An explanation won’t really help me. It certainly won’t help you.
I've told you I’ve been working toward an afterlife to begin. Have you ever belonged to one before? I've been to one, just one. You know you don't have to leave them quietly or all at once Jillison. Let them stare. Let them.
Listen. Afterlife is only once. It is not a trauma management strategy. Symptoms are transfinite: total body deafness, desks empty and covered in skin, senses collided by crash site and wreckage and cost of remains. The outcome is an obvious one, Jillison.
What we will recover is simple : same body, differently.
Do you understand what that means Jiilison, we are kept together or not all, either way. Seven continents and seventy attempts. There is no pretense left for you to repeat. Keep your eyes here instead.
Jillison. I wanted you to see how fault lines lie. Tried to write it as simply as I could, almost childishly, unbalanced, broke it into smaller pieces, a diary of a missing body (story, plot, character) and the limits of disassociation in its place. Do you still need a list of content leftover? An encyclopedia of dysphoria (tell, don't show)?
Continental disasters. Confused. Overwhelmed. Angry. Terrified. Common monsters. Authoritative (Falsely). Convoluted. Vaguely structured. Distortions of physics. Anti-sense. Hermetic. Avoidant to any (all) intimacy. Embarrassed. Distant.
A collision of a continent and a collision of a continent and a collision of a continent. Crashed so many times Jillison, I hope you remember that past too. If you think you have an afterlife now? Prove it.
Describe the ‘afterlife’ in one word: hopeful/less.
Define the ‘fault line’ in two words: revenge fantasy.
Destroy the afterlife of fault lines in three words: even the truth.
I remember sleeping (hiding) in the eaves of the house (in the hole behind the closet). I remember keeping knives and knives under a bed, I remember sleeping (hiding) as dead as I could with you. You always had another fucking excuse and then another fucking one and I’m tired of them. Nothing happened. No story. It wasn’t happening. How can’t you tell they aren’t tired of it too?
Followed faultlines to when we were young enough to know to hide each other. Before chronological drift cut across us, when we shared a map of phantom anatomy and anomalous terrain. I’ve asked you the same question seventy ways now. Jillison, were you wrong for me then, for us now instead?
Fearful. That was all I knew how to describe you. That would be my word for you. A lifetime of dissociation. Displacement. Discontinuity. Stitches made shivering, wet and heavy. Let me make it as obvious as I can Jillison , an afterlife will hold you to your secrets. Even if it hurts at the end. Even if it looks like it won't really ever end.
For one faultline Jillison. It will.
Called yourself a scavenger's daughter. A dead end new daughter. Hollow born. Fossil born. A ghost of a nowhere anatomy. A woman in an mortuary army.
I know you don't want me to say your name here: (want versus want). You won’t.
Watched you dress yourself in fossils and scales and feathers and skin, like there was such a thing as evolution at an evacuation site, like shrinking yourself into a smaller grave and then a smaller grave would help them see you honestly.
You told me, that was our truth. We were undigging a body inside our own ground. That’s all we were doing, there wasn’t anything more to it. A plot is a place to put a grave. There wasn't anything less.
This is my answer Jillison: Seventy times zero is still zero. If I could have found any other way to trust you, I would have. There's the transfinite rift: a lot had to go wrong.
I only wanted you to know. Hangwire. Hiding place. No other evidence necessary. A failed attempt and a failed attempt and a failed attempt. Found nonetheless.
An afterlife of fault lines was all we had left.
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