Episode 9 - Barriers

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Welcome back. Last week, you met the Queen. Or not THE Queen, though that feels like splitting hairs a bit. I told you about someone with the handle Queen Elizabeth who found a great way of justifying it, so great that it didn’t get her kicked off the Forum. Well not directly because I don’t know if anyone had the capacity to do something like that. I don’t know how websites do that, though. But we would just shun someone. It didn’t matter how often you posted or what clues you had, we would just ignore you. And eventually you would leave or conform to our demands if the Funhouse Hallway was that compelling of a mystery to you.

(softer) Was it… No I mean. We did-- We couldn’t… We… So who was running the website. (louder) I mean someone had to be, right?

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But that’s not the point. None of that is. In a podcast that was supposed to be about Aishi. They’ve hardly been in it. Or they’ve been noticeably absent as of late. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe I’m just a terrible person. Aishi was the greatest friend of my childhood, and yet, I keep ignoring them at seemingly every opportunity. The story I am trying to tell you has gone awry. Maybe because I didn’t care enough to pay attention to the details of their life. And now I don’t have much to present. And that probably is the truth. I mean, that would be true to form, I guess. That I wouldn’t care enough to keep them invested in this tale despite it supposedly being about them. And instead, I’m just being incredibly self-absorbed. I mean, that’s what happened before, right? It’s why they left me where I was because I just kept--

No. Stop. This is not an episode about me. I need to tell you different things I do remember about Aishi. There’s still some sort of picture here. I just need to paint it for you.

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Aishi and I started our friendship with that common clue, yes, but in the midst of all that theorizing, we gave each other glimpses of ourselves. It was initially accidental, on my part. I kept accidentally revealing things about me that I probably shouldn’t have put on the internet.. And for each revelation from me, Aishi offered one of their own. Or that’s what they claimed to be doing. Maybe they were lying. I don’t know, and I will never know. Maybe it was just easier to agree with me on some fronts. To play a part rather than to exist as they were. 

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I’ve been interacting more on Twitter, @OracleofDusk remember. Not just yelling into the digital void for once. But actually interacting with people. And I’ve been playing around on Reddit too. Not going to give you the username for that one. Because, well on Reddit I’m more… authentic in the worst possible way. It is the part of me that I deliberately hide from everyone else. It’s just cathartic to say things I would never stand behind. I’m not explicitly lying on that website, which I’m sure would be hard to believe, considering a bunch of other people lie on that website, but that’s the one place I’m not lying in the classic sense. I mean stringing together words that pain a narrative picture that isn’t accurate on the whole. Whether aspects of it are, and you are merely exaggerating to illustrate a point tangentially related to but still somewhat outside of the plan.

Rather than recreating, it’s a repositioning, you could say. Not an outright replacement of facts with fiction, but leading to certain conclusions by controlling what gaps gets filled and what lays vacant.

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On Reddit, I used a dummy email to make what was going to be a throwaway account, just to comment on some random topic that I know a lot about and you know, showing off everything you know does give you an endorphin rush that is pretty intoxicating. But that can only happen with things you want to reveal or can. And I don’t have too many things like that in my life. Hence the appeal of Reddit where they are subreddits about every topic imaginable, and it’s not hard to find a place devoted to whatever minutia you care about. Or can care about. 

But then everything else started coming out there too. And I could have stopped it, unlike that classic cliché. I know I could have stopped it, but I decided not to. I didn’t want to. For my own sake. Regardless of the anxiety that came with other aspects of that Reddit account, being able to say things I couldn’t otherwise say or tell the stories that lay beneath those remarks and make the related, dark and cutting humorless jabs that take the place of jokes has liberated my soul. I feel so free while I’m still trapped in this darkness I carry. 

That’s a paradox to be sure, but I don’t want to fight it. I don’t want to explain it. I just want to leave it be. 

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Twitter is somewhat different. On there, everything I do is light. It’s pure humor and joy. I tell happy stories and share cat pictures. I make witty remarks in the replies and retweet the various bots that say interesting and happy things. All under a different name. A name that I created. 

But Delphi was never meant to be that much different than I am. She is tired, burdened by something she can’t carry. A weight that she never wanted, forced upon her by her father--if the canon is to be believed at face value--or if her beliefs are worth anything. All the while telling stories that aren’t her to tell. 

She is a concept. The Reddit Account is the truth. And none of it is me. Or who I am to the world.

When I was a child, I was fascinated with mosaics, and I didn’t exactly know why. I thought it was because--when I was in middle school--we had to make this construction paper recreations of moscaics, and I was surprisingly good at it. I had the best one in the class, according to everyone in the class. And that’s a hard thing to accomplish in middle school. For once, egos didn’t get in the way, and I got to be good at a thing. For the first time, in a long time, I was praised by others, including my peers. But I guess maybe it was more complicated than that.

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Aishi and I gradually poured ourselves out. We found like we both liked stories. TV and books, specifically. Not so much movies. In my case, movies were asking too much of me all at once. I couldn’t devote hours to anything. Television shows have shorter episodes, and they’re designed to have some sense of closure at the end of each, so that if you’ve hit your limit or you can’t watch anymore, you can walk away and come back. And books move at whatever pace you want. You’re completely in control on that front. 

But movies are different. Every stopping point you may genuinely need feels like one you are not allowed to take. It’s not in the director’s vision after all, but maybe that’s not something you should be worried about. Death of the author or director or whatever. Maybe it’s the cinematographer you’re offending by pausing the movie mid-sweeping panorama shot. Whose to say? Or maybe it’s your own experience you’re ruining, but regardless of what it is, I’ve never been able to immerse myself into to something for so long. 

Aishi told me it was the same for them. Movies were quite a bit of a commitment. And honestly, the stories within them could be too drawn out, they said. Like the piece of art in question had a message, and that message was being drawn out more and more when a simple declaration of facts could do the trick. Which is not a generous thought in the least, but I can’t say I’ve never had it, usually it is about certain books, though.

Honestly, I love the act of reading. Genuinely. It’s just hard for me sometimes. Engaging with stuff, again. Focusing, you could say. It’s just not something I can do all the time. And not well enough. Well, I can focus, I should say. It’s just about focusing on certain things. 

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Aishi loves… Loved? Winter. It was their favorite season. And I’m guessing it’s because they lived in some place that had snow because so much of what they described to me had to do with snow. It was the whimsy of the world outside that both looked magical and beckoned everything, everything that was causing you fear and anxiety in particular, to stop, just for a moment. I always imagined it based on what I saw on the television or in the random pictures that littered the disorganized digital world. 

I don’t remember how this particular topic came up. Maybe because I told them that I liked autumn. But I wouldn’t have explained why. It would have just been a fact that existed to take up space in a conversation. Because I didn’t know what my favorite season would have been. Somew here just better than others for certain things. But I really didn’t like summer vacation. Maybe if I went to camp, but I was never allowed to do anything like that. It might have meant something different if I ever knew what fun was.

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Aishi was afraid of the dark. And that’s not an uncommon fear, is it? But Aishi was the first one to articulate, to me at least, that this fear was just the fear of the unknown recast in a different or absence of light. It was the not knowing what dangers were out there and by extension, not knowing how to protect yourself, if you ever can, that did you in. 

Personally, I would put emphasis on that last bit.

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Aishi showed me a television show once called Serial Experiments Lain once. Maybe it’s better if we don’t go into the how. I mean, how did people watch a television show that wasn’t playing on the television before streaming services you could pay for were really a thing. You can either fill in the blanks or get someone a little older to do it for you. Whatever works. 

Serial Experiments Lain came out in the late nineties,but it shows a relationship with the online world that holds true to today. The internet, particularly the social aspect of us, can suck us in, particularly through our loneliness, and then reality starts to twist and turn. Who you are starts to change. Or does it really? Are you just becoming more of who you have always been? 

It was a fascinating show. It drew me in, and it’s a shame that it only lasted for one season.

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I thought I could explain this friendship to you, as I remember it being, but that is so much more complicated than I first thought it would be. Because I just can’t make a narrative out of this. Aishi was just… They were always there. I can remember logging onto the Forum. I remember the introduction, that first connection, and the plan that came from it. But behind the scenes, beneath that obvious surface, Aishi and I grew closer. Just we grew closer. There’s nothing else to explain. And maybe I’m missing a critical part of it, but maybe the gap is inevitable when you consider all the things I cannot say. 

Well, you can’t really consider them, can you? I mean, I can’t say them. You don’t know about them, and you can’t, which is the problem. But when you’re making a friendship, it’s not just about the other person because you--you as you act or are--remain a critical part of the process. You are the foundation, some could say, as this whole thing is built around you.

But it is a shame that I was so authentic with Aishi, then. Because now it has taken so much out of the story.

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Sometimes I do wonder if I’m making a mistake with my creative choices, with the way I market my show The Oracle of Dusk or--and this is a big one--if the personally bleeding into what should be an in-character or professional Twitter account is wise. In part because I know where that character is going to go, and at some point, I am going to need to leave that account. But beyond that, it can’t stay a character driven account no matter who that character is. 

But it will probably still hurt and feel like a loss to switch accounts, no matter what necessity dictates, and that’s going to be true even if all the fans I had from my old account migrate over to my new one. You can never create a memory, I’ve heard someone say. But don’t ask me who. Okay, even if that’s never been said in any notable context. You can never truly recreate anything, and the pieces of yourself that have been lost along the way are going to stay gone. 

It’s almost like we’re constantly following apart. Despite our best efforts. I guess, in theory, new things should be coming in to fill those voids, but I don’t know. That has never been my experience.

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When the queen came onto the Forum and Aishi disconnected, my heart was absolutely broken. The irony of including that statement in an episode in which I am scrambling to collect any memories of Aishi is not lost on me. Aishi was just a part of my reality, and as a result, losing them was a complete and devastating loss. 

In trying to mitigate this loss or to bring Aishi back to me, I grew more distant from The Forum. My time was consumed not by the game or piecing together its clues, but by constantly pleading for Aishi to take me back, and that made the leadership transition between the queen and I difficult. Because clearly, I was the one stumbling into all of these revelations, and if I didn’t want to play anymore then it would only be fair to get me to tell them exactly how it was that I was doing this. But I didn’t know. So there had to be some interrogation involved, but I wasn’t even participating in that. I was a world away, maybe further. And there was nothing anyone could do to reach me.

It hadn’t been that long since the move, at time in which I felt such dismay at the idea of being disconnected from the Forum for even a few days. Even the idea of a few days without them filled me with a great sense of dread. But those days, when I was desperately reaching out to Aishi, trying to reestablish a connection that was really only just about me, about having someone who cared about me, about having someone who showed me what I thought was consistent care and affection. After all, it was really just my actions that would cause me to lose everything, right? I mean… Those days. I was desperately reaching out to Aishi, caring not for the Forum at all. And that didn’t bother me. Not having the Forum did not matter. It was losing Aishi that I couldn’t take. 

All of that is a very simple view. The reasons I valued Aishi in particular. I know there’s something very wrong with what I said. What I felt at the time, but that was my reality. Without Aishi, I felt like I was coming undone. Like everything was coming undone. And I couldn’t be reasoned with. 

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There’s one message from the queen that I still remember plain as day. It came to me, not on the main Forum thread but on a side one that she had started between us.

“I am here,” the queen would tell me. “I’m here to talk to you. To listen to you. What do you want to talk about? The game? Aishi? Something else? You can just talk to me. I’m listening. No matter what. I hear you.”

And there she was, offering me the same thing Aishi did, offering everything that I wanted. But I didn’t take it. And that was something I could not explain, at the time or now. I could not explain it without telling the queen the same things about my life that I’m keeping from you all. I did not want to do that. Those were things I wanted to keep close to my chest, and sure, I had told Aishi about them. But when I did that, they started to feel more like their secrets than mine, and I couldn’t tell someone else what they were. That did not feel fair.

And I think the queen knew that. I think she knew that at some point, the allure she offered with all that she was, couldn’t be added to. That everything she could give me were things I was not interested in. I liked knowing her. I liked seeing her. I liked admiring her, but I couldn’t do any more. So it was unfortunate that I hit my limit with her right then, right when she got so close, but not close enough. 

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There’s a new grocery store that opened up a few streets over from where I live. I was curious, so I made it a point to go. Okay, actually, and I know this is going to be weird, but like, I want to have a go-to grocery store: a place that has everything I could possible need from frozen food to fresh ingredients to beyond at good prices without the tiring signs and flashy salesmanship. I just wanted a place I could go when I was bored. There’s the weird part.

But I went there with my bags, my grocery list… And I swear, it was like being in that coffee shop again. Someone was watching me. 

But I think I know who it was now. Because I think I saw you there, and I know you’re listening to this podcast. And I think you got daring when you heard me mention you again. But why won’t you leave me alone?

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Aishi Online is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, produced, performed, and edited by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. If you like the show, please leave a review, tell a friend, or donate to the show’s Ko-Fi account.