August 20th - "Opus, Part 2"

Lucille’s stomach lurched and then she and HSL were somewhere else entirely. They landed on the top of a big truck barreling down a sixteen lane highway that covered a hundred layers of sparkling, neon cityscape below it. As Lucille rubbed her eyes, the bright lights of distant skyscrapers shone down on her, the biggest one of all stretching into the clouds and atmosphere above. The starscraper, the tallest building in the city known as the Corridor, gazed down upon the highway, the light from its artificial moon casting a rotating beam across much of the megalopolis. It was night, of course, because daylight doesn’t truly exist in a cyberpunk setting.

“Ah, A Dream and Mist,” Lucille recalled. She stood up on the truck and gazed upon her work proudly. “This didn’t even make it past Fictionpress.” She then gazed back at HSL, who remained sitting. “What do you think of this? I wrote this in college. No self-insert or working my problems out here or nothing. Just some good old-fashioned cyberpunk.”

Artificial moonlight shifted across HSL’s impassive face. “You literally wrote this when the pandemic broke out.”

Lucille raised her hands defensively. “Because I was bored, not anxious.” She pointed down at the highway. “See, look at these beauties.”

The main characters drove past the truck on a stolen motorcycle. The thing about A Dream and Mist was that it was never finished, never fully fleshed-out, just someone trying to write something. The world was never completed, the plot never fully planned-out, the characters having few traits, let alone full-on arcs; they merely existed in a single dimension, moving flatly against the highway like a sidescroller. Jacuzzi, the MC, was a good proper and cyberpunk protagonist, just gruff and sarcastic, just trying to make a quick buck. The heroine, Mary, was a swordswoman in a miko outfit armed with a MAC-10 on the run from her past.

“How nostalgic,” Lucille said, watching them go by until they disappeared down the dark highway. As to where they were off to, she had no idea, because their entire existence ends with this last chapter on the sixteen lane highway. Lucille sometimes wondered if they were upset about that.

“This is escapism, through and through,” HSL pointed out. “You were locked inside your house all day, so you created a fantastic setting to make yourself feel better. Your writing is just escapism and a waifu factory.”

“What?!” Lucille grabbed the collars of HSL and hoisted her to her feet. “My writing is not just a waifu factory!”

HSL tilted her head. “Think about it. How many characters have you written about that either smoke cigarettes, vape, or have some other substance abuse sort of deal?” HSL shrugged. “It’s the author’s poorly disguised fetish.”

Lucille shook HSL senselessly. “It’s not a fetish! Christ, I forgot about how much pornography I used to watch. Warped my mind and all. Not everything is sexual! Sometimes I just want to write about a cute girl with a vaping addiction, nothing more than that!”

The artificial moon flickered. The highway rapidly approached its end - sixteen lanes into the bright white of a blank word doc. There wasn’t much left to this world since there wasn’t much to start with.

“Alright, I’ll take you somewhere else,” Lucille decided. She snapped her fingers again.

When her stomach finished roiling, Lucille found herself on a big truck in the middle of the night once more. But this wasn’t a highway - this was the scene of a battle. Outside of Vyse Academy, the country’s top educational facility for those with psychic powers, two armies battled for control of the school. Time was of the essence - the principal with his vaguely suicidal motifs would be activating his plan to ensnare humanity in an endless dream for all eternity. The protagonist and her allies had just charged across the no man’s land and defenses outside the Academy and were now battling their way inside.

“Boundary Scramble,” Lucille recalled with a goofy smile. “Another early college classic. This one’s just fun stupidity. I mean, the enemy army consists of gorilla-ninjas!” From her view on the battle truck that just crossed no man’s land, Lucille watched a platoon of them get blown away through the windows of the school. Smoke and fire rose into the night, giving the sky a scarlet glow. “No fetishes here.”

HSL put a hand on her shoulder. “Your main protagonist’s power involves emitting German World War I chemical weapons. If that’s not a fetish, I don’t know what it is.”

Before Lucille could counterattack, HSL spoke truthfully and with the aura of an old mentor.

“You also make all these characters to cover up your loneliness.”

HSL said the words so matter-of-factly that Lucille didn’t have an answer, so she continued.

“Your only friends are Jackie and Regina. You’ve burned countless bridges in high school and didn’t build any in college either. You spend so much time alone that you make up these characters in response.”

Still no answer. The battlefield drifted away; the night sky gave way to daylight; Lucille and HSL sat on a grassy field on a calm day in late spring. Ahead of them, a gravel trail snaked through a thin clearing cut through the woodland, the trail stretching onwards, dotted with utility pylons connected by power lines until it reached blue sky and horizon. White clouds like whipped cream on a cake drifted overhead.

Long before she developed her chemical weapon psychic power, young Sarika lay asleep on the grass next to them. Her older sister Haruka read a book with a sad smile on her face; she set the book down when she saw Sarika awake with tears in her eyes.

Haruka looked more closely at Sarika. “Are you alright?”

Sarika realized she was crying. She rubbed away the tears. “I don’t know. I feel like I just had the longest dream…”

Lucille watched the scene with an even greater sense of nostalgia. “This was the first thing I ever wrote for a contest,” she said quietly. “I wouldn’t say I was lonely in the moment.” 

But then she hugged her knees like Sarika did, because Sarika was never able to say goodbye to her sister, not physically because Haruka would die in an accident soon, nor emotionally because Sarika couldn’t move on.

“But maybe I’m just lonely in general,” Lucille supposed.

“It’s what fills your heart,” HSL said softly. “You are that sorrow.”

A spring breeze sent ripples through the woodlands. In this land of make-believe, Lucille leaned her head back and gazed at the clouds. “So, this is what you’re telling me? That I write because I got nobody to talk to, so I invent worlds that I can talk through? And the things I talk about are things that scare me, like the state of the world, anxieties about the future, and I got nobody to talk to about them so I work them out through writing?”

HSL shrugged. “I’m you. You’re telling yourself this. I just present the subconscious facts. You interpret them.”

“I guess that’s it then,” Lucille supposed. “Writing as some sort of therapy. I thought I wanted to write because I wanted something I could look back on and be proud of as I lay dying. But maybe there’s more to writing than just that. It’s more like…it’s more like…”

Lucille used her wrists to rub her eyes. “I’ve come to accept that I won’t ever be destined for greatness. But I might not even be destined to be average. I’m not good enough for anything, am I? Not good enough to have more friends. Not good enough to have a job I can be proud of. Not good enough to get closer to someone. Not good enough to be normal! Life’s passing me by, and I just can’t keep up, and then I’m gonna die. Life’s instantaneous like that. People think you have so much time, but you really don’t, because all of a sudden you wake up one morning and you’re forty or sixty or on your deathbed wondering where all the time went. I’m just not good enough for life. I can never catch up…”

“Life’s not about reaching the horizon,” Haruka began. Lucille jolted upright, only to remember that this was a scene simply playing out in front of her.

“It’s about standing up and moving towards it,” Sarika answered. Sarika did just that, standing up, understanding her place in this crazy existence for the first time.

Lucille watched her rise. And then she understood something too.

“Hey, writing’s all about talking my problems through, right?” She gazed at the sisters saying farewell to one another. “Maybe some of the solutions I find, even if it's found through writing, can be useful. Therapy isn't a bad thing, after all. And even if my life's not good enough, at least it’s better than a blank page. I can’t think of anything more sorry than a blank page.”

As Sarika took those first steps down the gravel trail, having moved on from her sister’s death, Lucille rose in turn. Small stones crunched beneath her sneakers as she wearily took up the path, pylons humming in the distance. The trail wouldn’t go on forever - the scene had ended with Sarika taking those first steps, after all - so Lucille stopped and enjoyed the spring breeze whistling past her. It felt young, full of promise, and that's the thing about a spring breeze - you can feel it every year, no matter your age.

Lucille closed her eyes and raised a hand. This vision quest would have one more stop - the pinnacle of her college years, perhaps the last thing she wrote that she was genuinely proud of before crashing and burning and limping to the finish of her senior year - so she snapped her fingers for the final time.

Her stomach was getting used to all the jumps. No dingy bar bathroom, no cyberpunk highway, no gravel trail this time. Lucille stood on asphalt, completely smooth and without a single crack, at the edge of an apartment complex, next to the bike rack. Beneath the night sky, buildings rose above the complex, flooding the city of Miyazawa with lights.

Lucille and HSL were the same person after all, so both of them had cheeky smiles on their faces as they returned to an old setting. “Sure, maybe I’m lonely,” Lucille admitted. “Maybe I’m inadequate. I might just never be good enough for anything. Writing definitely helps me deal with all that stuff. But you know what? Sometimes I’m write not just because I’m a mental headcase looking for answers. Sometimes I write because writing is fucking kickass.”

The door to a particular apartment opened up, and there she was, the girl with brown hair and a nervous disposition. She rounded the spiral staircase to the parking lot, keeping her head up even as she spiraled. The city swirled around her, bright lights like constellations, and then Natsuki leapt down the last few stairs, off to save the Web Novel Club.

Lucille laughed into the night as she watched Natsuki unlock her sister's bike and wheel it toward the street. Natsuki’s hands trembled, because Lucille hated riding bikes and never learned how to, either. But there comes a time where you need to do what needs to be done, so Natsuki hoisted herself onto the seat, loafers on each pedal. As she did so, Lucille slipped onto the little tray thing over the back wheel of the bike where a delivery boy could put a crate on or something (again, she’s not a bike expert). HSL remained standing in the parking lot, smiling, as Natsuki caught her breath and kicked off, Lucille holding on behind her.

They wheeled into the midnight streets, taking it slow, Natsuki finding her groove in one great big metaphor for life. A warm breeze of a summer night gently slipped past both their faces; streetlights shone down on them. Natsuki basked in the green glow of a traffic light and tapped her fingers along the handlebar. 

April Natsuki didn’t exist anymore - she had transitioned into August Natsuki, who knew much more both to her benefit and sorrow. But that’s how growing up worked.

I wonder if I’ll miss the August me some day.

Lucille nodded with a small smile. You really will. But there’ll be plenty more August you’s. There’ll be an August you each year, in fact.

As for the fact that there would eventually be no more Augusts, no more years, Natsuki glanced back at Lucille and smiled.

“Seize the days as they come, right?”

Lucille smiled in turn.

“Always.”

Natuski pedaled toward the edge of the city, then found a slope she felt comfortable biking down. Just before she headed downward, Lucille kept her head held high, and she saw it all. There was the city of Miyazawa stretching into the bay, but on the other side of the water, she saw the subway stations and Chinatown of Letter From Yokohama, bright neon and dark engines and the starscaper with its artificial moon of A Dream and Mist, the brick towers of Vyse Academy from Boundary Scramble, the factories and smokestacks of Destiny Marine, and behind all of it, far in the distance, there was her sleepy hometown of East Eden with its patchwork suburban lights that formed the genesis for all her stories, and above it rose crystal towers and floating grassy islands and planetoids and Shizuku Tskushima herself in her red dress, since without that quiet summer afternoon where Lucille watched the film called Whisper of the Heart, she wouldn’t have been inspired to write anything in the first place. Shizuku drifted off to the sound of trumpets, and there was High School Lucille with her, sailing upwards along the updraft, as Lucille held onto Natsuki and rushed down the slope.

They arrived at the midnight bridge. While Natsuki stood under the streetlight with her troubled senior Masako, looking out into the bay, Lucille took up on a spot on the other side of the bridge, resting her back against the railing. HSL materialized next to her, and the two watched the quiet scene unfold in front of them.

“You know,” Lucille said. “This won’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t read my stuff.”

“Ah, but it’s your vision quest, right?” HSL answered. “It only needs to make sense to you.”

Lucille nodded. “Yeah, it’s not like my life is a web novel.”

Masako took a long drag from a cigarette. 

"Don't think that you convinced me," Masako said, a tiny grin in the corner of her mouth. A real one. "But maybe I feel a little better now."

Natsuki smiled. "Only 90% lousy now?"

"Something like that."

The two girls, having settled their differences, grabbed their bikes and wheeled them off the bridge, making the long trek back up the slope. Lucille and HSL took their spots on the midnight bridge underneath the streetlight, embers from Masako’s cigarettes still burning softly next to Lucille’s sneakers. She gazed out across the bay, across all her stories, across the various characters moving here and there, across ideas turned tangible.

“Alright,” Lucille declared. “This is like the third time I’ve written about figuring out why I write, so let's put a cap on it. I don’t think I can pin it down to just one thing.” But then she glanced down at HSL and smiled. “But I understand myself a little better after this. Enough that I know what I want to do now.”

“And what’s that?” HSL asked.

Lucille relaxed on the railing. “Keep writing. Not just to create something I can be proud of before I die. It’s for all the reasons I've found during this vision quest, and because I want to make something I can be proud of while I’m alive.” The artificial moon flickered; autumn leaves swirled around Sarika; fireworks went off as the Miyazawa Sparrows won the national championship. “And you know what? I think I already have. I might not be remembered in the grand scheme of things. But fuck it, I love writing, I love these stories, and I’ll keep writing them.”

The tide lapped at the shore below the bridge. HSL turned to face Lucille. “Well, that’s it for me. The job of the subconscious isn’t easy, but sometimes I just have to give the consciousness a good old kick in the pants.”

“So that’s what this vision quest was?” Lucille asked with a wry smile. “Thanks, me. Sometimes I love myself too much, but sometimes that’s just to cover up hating myself. But, after all this…I think I’m alright. And that's all I can ask for.”

“One more thing before the quest ends,” HSL said with an appreciative smile. “You’ve always wanted to have a discussion with your high school self, right? I’m your current subconscious taking on the appearance of your high school self, but I can make it happen.”

Lucille nodded her approval. "Thanks again, me."

"Any time."

HSL closed her eyes, and then smoke drifted from her, a dark cloud of smog mixed in with good memories, foreign wars with 21st birthdays, worldwide diseases with power line treasure hunts, until the years of 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 were completely gone. HSL was genuinely High School Lucille now, the bags below her eyes gone, her face brighter, her body shining with idealistic radiance.

“Young Me?” Lucille asked.

Young Lucille beamed. “It’s me! And you’re Future Me! I’ve always wanted to talk with Future Me!”

Lucille couldn’t help but smile. “You go first. Ask away.”

Young Lucille balled her hands into excited little fists. “Do we have a lot of sex? Was it hot?”

“...stupid porn addiction,” Lucille muttered. Then she smiled again. “Well…some and somewhat.”

Young Lucille waved her arms and grinned. But then she slowly lowered them, took on a sheepish look, and twiddled her thumbs. “Is any of it, you know…sensual? Intimate? With someone we really care about?”

The smile never left Lucille’s face, but it took on a weary quality.

“No.”

“Oh…was college at least fun?”

“No.”

“Oh…did we write the Great American Novel yet?”

“No.”

“Has anything of ours gotten published yet?”

“No.”

Young Lucille kept twiddling her thumbs, her hands slightly trembling. 

“Have any Boston sports teams won a championship recently?”

“No.”

“Oh…well, is the world doing okay?”

“No.”

“Is the world at peace, at least?”

“No.”

“Oh…is America doing alright?”

“No.”

Young Lucille let out an awkward cough. 

“Do we…do we get a K-On Season 3?”

“No.”

“Did we stop the ice caps from melting?”

“No.”

“Have I been living a healthy life?”

“No.”

Young Lucille waved her arms above her head. “Then do I have any conceivable reason for getting out of bed in the morning?!”

Lucille shrugged. “Well, when you wake up needing to pee, it’s not like you can just piss the bed.” Then she looked toward the bay again. “We’ve spent the past four years trying to get the hang of being alive. And we’re slowly starting to understand, at least.” 

Planetoids floated overhead, crystals shining down on her. “And I think we’re in a good spot to start understanding a lot more. That's what gets me out of bed, at least."

Young Lucille joined her in looking off into the distance. The colors rising and glowing from either side of the bay created a kaleidoscope on her face; she strummed her fingers along the railing. "That's good enough for me, too."

Lucille rubbed the back of her own neck. “Alright, my turn. I got just one question for you.”

Young Lucille waited with an expecting, gentle smile. It took Lucille a moment to find the right words. “None of our dreams ended up working out. We had all these grand plans when we were younger, and we’ve achieved none of them four years later.” Lucille scratched her temple. “You’re not disappointed in me, are you? That I couldn’t accomplish anything I wanted to do?”

Her young doppelganger patted her on the shoulder. “Ah, you’re alright, Lucille. You try.”

==========

Lucille awoke with a start. She breathed heavily, sweated heavily, and pushed damp hair off her face. Her keyboard clacked as she raised her head - she had fallen asleep at her desk the night before. As she wiped her face with a sleeve, her phone told her it was 1 PM in the afternoon.

“Maybe it was the NyQuil I drank after taking the melatonin,” she supposed. Then she rose, stretched, and let out a long exhale. With her arms stretched toward the ceiling, with her back slowly bent, she caught her own smiling reflection on the dark screen of her computer. A hip check to the desk jiggled the mouse and turned it back on - the date revealed itself as August 20th. Roughly one week of summer left.

One week of summer, huh…

Lucille grinned.

Let’s go seize the day.