There was no amount of justice I could earn on her behalf now that could bring her back to the world of the living and exonerate me of my guilt. And on top of that, to admit that it was time for me to move on was almost like giving up on life. The life I’d built with her. Passionless at times and imperfect always, yes, but a life.
It was weeks after I was removed from the Program that my brother Jay gave me the envelope. He’d been hesitant to tell me about it at first because of the way I’d been behaving, he said. Strange and dissociated. Of course, I was strange and dissociated. I had spent the past three years of my life in a simulated reality, for fuck’s sake. I didn’t know how to live anymore. Nothing made sense to me. Nothing. My grief was muted, but so were all my defining qualities. The pride I used to take in my work. The joy I was able to find in everyday things. The ease with which I navigated day-to-day matters.
I had become a stranger to the world, but mostly, I had become a stranger to myself.
The only thing that felt familiar anymore, the only thing that could strike a speck of emotion out of me, a sense of guilt, or even just plain self-awareness, was that mysterious ghost woman.
Every night she emerged from the dark of my mind, her soft tactility at my fingertips, her high breathing in my ear, her cool, low voice—a dream slowly entering the physical realm.I feel so safe with you, she would say,You can do anything you want to me.As if it were some kind of suppressed erotic fantasy of mine. To be needed like that. To make her surrender. To make her feel so safe, she would trust me with anything.Her. My tormentor. My nemesis. My captive. Dear hostage of my mind.
In the claustrophobic emptiness of the house, her visitations were the only thing that kept me breathing. I started thinking of religion, of messengers and disciples.Are you here to save me or condemn me?I would ask her in those dreams, on my knees, humbled before her. And she would rise above me, shrinking up to a pale blue light, incorporeal and resplendent, just the essence of a woman, commanding me to find her.Remember,she would chant.Remember me.
In the cold of dawn, I would wake up, gasping, sweat cooling on my skin, and with such a painful throb of desire in me, such yearning, such immediate physical need that I would have to make myself come to the mere idea of her: the outline of her hip, her rare voice, her soft hair at my fingertips.
I was someone else when I was with her. I was anything she wanted. And God help me, she should never learn the things she could make me do.
On the verge of a complete mental breakdown, Iwent back to Hive demanding answers. Was I losing my grasp on reality, or were all these near-hallucinations normal after being exposed to a simulated reality for as long as I’d had? And if so, why hadn’t I been warned about them?
After I returned to the real world and found myself without the feeling of newness I’d been promised, the specialists at Hive told me that I’d had quite the rocky experience, which had ultimately affected the results of the treatment—if one could call it that. During my last year alone, I had tried to disconnect myself from the Program fifteen times, although they’d been able to reconnect me after each attempt. Why had I been trying to disconnect myself? They wouldn’t divulge, and at first, I hadn’t cared to find out. I’d just wanted to go home.
But now I wanted answers. I needed,desperatelyneeded, for someone to tell me what on earth was going on with me. Only that Hive was not going to take responsibility for my dreams. Hell, I could have had a heart attack and died during the process, and they would still be left out of the blame. That was what I’d signed up for.
When I finally told Jay about these dreams that were not really dreams, he gave me the letter, and everything started to make sense again.
This is who you are to me, she’d written.This is who you are. Because the truth was, I hadn’t spent the past three years at a bizarre wellness retreat. I hadn’t been asleep. I’d been someone in there. Someone that had affected a real person’s life, at least enough for her to send me this letter. And that postcard: a furious autumn sky raging over a tempestuous ocean, blue blending into blue so vividly you could almost feel the brutal salt air through the paper. Jay said it was some kind of inside joke between us. Me and her.
Anya.
Her name alone was able to stir an obscene amount of emotion in me. Desire. Love. Nostalgia. Scenes I couldn’t quite remember. Places I couldn’t quite reach. And everything I’d once believed in crumbled.
My relentless chase for permanence, my ideas of right and wrong, my understanding of time and purpose all disintegrated. Because, unlike her, who was able to write so beautifully about gratitude and love, if the world ended tomorrow, in my final moments, Iwouldbe filled with regret.
I’d lived my whole life in fear of losing it. Of having no control over it. Of running out of time. And I could see now that if only I’d been a little less connected to the concept of time and more connected to myself, I would have done everything differently. I would have let myself love passionately, irrationally, maddeningly. I would have slowed down. I would have cried at my mother’s funeral. Because I had time to be weak. I had time to be strong. And when Kate died, I would have allowed myself to feel loss instead of guilt, because I would have been able to accept that I could not turn back time. I could not change the past by living in it forever, for to live in the past was to not live at all.
Yes, Anya’s words slit me open, but through this cut she carved on me, she filled me with hope. No one and nothing had ever touched me more than she had with her letter. Everything returned to me. Who I was. Who I wanted to be.To find a way to live, she wrote. Because, in the end, nothing was lost. Life was not a fixture but an experiment, and to fail at one way of living was not a failure to live but an opening into a different life.
And so four nights later, after yet another awkward dinner with Dad and Jay, I found myself asking the taxi driver to take me to her address instead of mine.
Just to lay eyes on her, I told myself.Just to breathe in each other’s air for a bit. To attribute all these imaginary feelings to reality.
I had refused to look her up online, although Jay said she had recently won a huge case for the Public Defender’s Office, and there were many articles out there with pictures of her.
Intelligent and persevering, my brother had described her, but I dreaded making her real almost as much as I longed for it.
Instead, I promised myself to email her first. Make sure that she still wanted to meet me. A whole year had gone by, and Jay had only met her twice during this time. Everything could have changed. She could have met someone. She could have gotten back with someone. Hell, she could have moved out of that place altogether. Downtown it was, in one of those high-security buildings where you needed a passcode just to be let into the lobby and a face scan every time you wanted to enter your own apartment.
So much she valued her safety, and yet, she had written down the code on the back of the postcard for me, along with her full name and address.
Yes, to make someone feel so safe, they’d trust you with anything. Wasn’t that a miracle? Wasn’t it a marvel that even after memory deletion my subconscious was still able to conjure the essence of her? Wasn’t this proof that I was capable of experiencing extraordinary love, not just fondness, but passion and desire and adoration?
So I went to her, blind and faithful, just like she had commanded me to do in those dreams of mine. And if it so happened that she did not want to see me, if life had taken her to a path I was not allowed to follow, I would still be content for having tried.
In the back of the taxi, as the drab grayness of the city slipped past me, I found myself thinking,Any price. Heartbreak, despair, insanity. I don’t care what comes after this. I will pay any price to know her, if only for a moment.
My every movement, my every decision after that became pure instinct, a habit I hadn’t yet developed. I punched the passcode into the keypad, took the elevator to the twenty-fifth floor, and strode with my heart striking in my temples down the long, floodlit hallway until I found apartment 045B and a bell to be rung with her name on it.
Anya Larsson.
I was panting, my hands shaking, so I grabbed each side of the doorframe to steady myself as I waited. I couldn’t hear her through the door, but I could feel her somehow, approaching. Near. Nearer. And then, as if by enchantment, she appeared right before me, not a dream, after all, but undoubtedly and excruciatingly real.
