Story of Your Life, and Another

Link to article: Story of Your Life, and Another.
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text=Once we lay together, you and us, tangled under a spreading oak in some lazy summer.]]

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**Author:** [[*user whenwerewe]]
[*https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/whenwerewe Here's my page!]
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Before we met you, in all the worlds, we were adrift, in a sea of ourselves, living all our possibilities. None of us knew anyone like ourselves, who could remember other places, other earths, other selves showing us what we stood to gain and lose. Long did the multiplicity of our experience leave us lost.

We found you, and thus ourselves, along the outward roads. Though others warned incessantly against it, we refused to cling to our parochial homeworld, and let ourselves come unmoored, until our bodies followed our dreaming souls along the way down from their stultifying paradise.

It is hard to remember, but all of us first saw the sun when we were born. Then they dragged us blinking blearily down into great glass towers, overflowing with squirming life. We grew up among green cascades of life. They fell blooming from the eaves and bedazzled us, so fecund as to sicken, profligate with a beauty that strangled our own spirit. We could not move for fear of upturning their sterile tranquility. It was unbearable, but we forgot that we hated it, too caught up in the slow rooting, the grafting, the pruning, our holy rites. Though we varied across the worlds, all of us felt some part cry out against our miserable condition, living under the dim and choking canopies -- and fall silent. In time, we tried to forget that we ever knew daylight. But it was not to be.

Teenaged and stripped of our certainty, we slipped out of the city’s bonds. There in the outskirts we found carrion-pecked concrete carcasses, longlimbed beggars whose eyes were not even plaintive, glyphs scrawled on every available surface. We feared, in every timeline, that the metropolis had atrophied our spirit until we could not care. And even as our frame quivered under the stark light of a clear sky, and we looked longingly back at the lost shade of our city, we found our way out.

Sometimes we fled on a humming steel leviathan borne along roaring razor-sharp rails. Others of us slumbered in quilts in a wagon out of the //kurultai//, stumbled through smoky rooms on a rising zeppelin, were carried on long stratospheric arcs beyond the face of the waters. But we could not go home again, and were swept along lamplit paths to worlds beyond dreaming.

In the high halls of Lampeter we found our selves. It was a terrible thing. In our desperate attempts to stand apart, we polished our quirks and passions so fiercely they became a uniform, until every face -- tattooed or scarred or copperskinned -- seemed a mirror held in a stranger's hand. All virtue was diminished by multiplication, staled until our beauty hung bare and spiderwebbed, and our flaws waxed so terribly we retched to see our own form. How could we ever have made such mistakes, dealt so cruelly, been so puerile, so cowardly, so pathetic? We understood at last why we had not been able to conform to the logic of our homes. We were all of us dense with sin, we thought, and fell away from each other into the abyssal silence of the worldways. We might have wandered forever, myopic with despair, if not for you.

When we die, it is in slivers. Years slip through our fingers until we fall stonejointed and lay down at last. Our legs do not ache, though we have walked under numberless skies. And still and slow our tissues calcify until we cannot emerge from our corporeal sarcophagus. But trapped at the bottom of that pit we hope to hear your call one final time. Sometimes you are far and we only have a few kisses, slow whispers, a last dance. Sometimes you are there with us every moment as we fail. Too often we are alone.

Through rheumy eyes we look back at the life we had, remember your brash grin, and how your curls fell across your eyes, and the icy laughter you gave when you were afraid, terrified, begging us not to leave you behind. You mastered your dread by will alone, and it animated every inch of your frame, broad shoulders tensed with spite, brows knit as you tried to hold on to us. The stars shone in your eyes, and reaching out of them, binding you to us, blazed the fire of your admiration.

We met you first in a hundred places. In a baroque lounge lousy with loafing aristocrats in powdered wigs you lay sprawled and curled in on yourself, speaking thoughtlessly to your peers while our eyes met across the tables. Elsewhere you rode sidesaddle in a daring evening gown and we felt a thrill in our blood at the boldness of it, at how it opened at the back and we turned away from the obscenely corded muscle, and you glanced at us so coyly we flushed. You were an android, a bird, a dragonet, a river that begged an aria of us before we plunged into your waters. We met you, and you, and you, in so many bodies and worlds, and you us. We thought it a singular pleasure, and sorrowed to leave you behind, for the joys of another Creation.

And then you were there. Again. The only constant across the Earths, our fated anchor.

It was not the same face, the same body, but your soul called to ours, and we knew each other already, as ships passing in the night, and you tried to remind us how to root ourselves in one Earth, and let the winds of a single sky sustain us. Out of the lampways we lay in repose with you, and even in old age we can say this: that we remember the taste of honeysuckle, and salt, the sharp chemical tang at the back of our throats, and the thousand other things you were. It was not enough.

Though we met half a hundred of you through our evil youth, we could never let ourselves love only one. Instead we flitted across the worlds, delighting in your universality even as you despaired at our inconstancy. Sometimes the luckiest of us hoarded you (what delight, to sample you across a dozen possibilities!). In your embraces we healed our old wounds, and the shadow of the city fell from us. For a time we saw who we were meant to be. Your perfect man. We ran from it, back onto the far roads.

At the end of our lives all of us (all of me) are paper-skinned. Our minds grow gnarled with disuse and we remember impossible things. The moment of our births, our loves for you, the decrepit garden-cities; all of them at once, every journey any version of us ever took across the high rails. Is this what it is to die? To have all our lives collapse inward so that all the textures of our alien births, our diverging existencess, are flattened until only a dull line remains? Our uncounted selves that looked up at every heaven implode until we are all just this: a body, perhaps in a bed or a chair or cryostasis (we cannot even remember our deaths). Everything is lost to us, but these sights:

Once we lay together, you and us, tangled under a spreading oak in some lazy summer. The setting sun doubled in the reddened sea which strained as if to meet the vault of heaven above. And we felt your arms about us, and let ourselves soften from a stiffness we’d clung to all our lives. Beneath us Sol plunged unwarily down. Somewhere the sky bent to brush against our cheek and as the dark ran over us we (I, me, can I not assert this?) did not feel anything at all: the sun would rise again tomorrow.

A final moment: Us, //me//, on the train again. Shuddering between the worlds. Nothing remarkable about it. The same dull metallic walls I’d seen a thousand times. The lingering smell of old beer, something organic under it, antiseptic and must and mud. Strips of light flickering by again, the spoor of unseen civilisations. I was dully bruised, wriggling upset in my stomach, lump in my throat as I called to mind involuntarily your despair when I pulled away from you for the platform, to a world you would not follow. I knew that the pain was transient; I’d see another you soon enough, fall into his arms and let heavy kisses and firm hands paper over my heartache.

How could we have known it? Any of us? Sometimes we see you at the end, but not me, I think, though all memory betrays me. The dust builds too thick in this mouldering manor for you to be here. Or is that you by my side, in that shadow, pressing out those creaks from the boards?

That train was all my trains; nothing marks it especial. These things are only important in hindsight, and as I sped onward toward another you’s embrace, hungry for your touch again, it felt so humdrum. I thought I knew that I might know your lips, your mouth, the sweep of your back a hundred times more, until the wonder grew too familiar to love. I wish there had been time for familiarity. We grow used to things so easily, and as they repeat we feel them part of the rhythm of our days, and let ourselves forget: there will be a last time.

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Story of Your Life, and Another

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