One Word Kill

“We might live in a multiverse of infin

“We might live in a multiverse of infinite wonder, but we are what we are, and can only care about what falls into our own orbit.”

“Basically, we’re all infinite.”

All of us have a shell, a skin between us and the world that we have to break each time we speak to it. Sometimes I wished mine were thinner.

“Of all the worlds, in all the universes, he walks into mine.”

“That sounds a lot like cheating...like cheating the universe!”

“Right, so you’re going to go all James Bond, and steal the microchip from a high security Tokyo laboratory?” I laughed out loud. It was almost less feasible than time travel.

What else was there to do? I’d been presented with a mystery. I could focus on that, or I could worry about leukaemia chewing its way through the marrow of my bones. No contest really.

“Time is just a variable. We make now. Consciousness makes now. We live it and we can, with sufficient energy, move it about.”

“If it’s true...what he says...”
“It makes you wonder what you can be sure of anymore. If anything is certain. What really matters.”

A creature made of failures, of old cruelties, of stillborn children, missed chances, soured wounds. It spoke a language of pain, sewn from torture chamber screams and widows’ weeping for lost lovers.

“I mean, it’s not awful or anything. I guess I just expected more from tobacco than it had to give... There’s a lesson somewhere in there for you.”

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that cancer is a noun and advises on pronunciation before declaring it a disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells within the body. Put like that it doesn’t sound too scary. Then it spoils the effect by noting the Greek root, karkinos, crab, said to have arisen from the swollen veins radiating from tumours that gave the impression of the many limbs of a crab.
At least they didn’t name it after spiders. If I was going to be eaten alive, and I in no way wished to be, let it be by a crab rather than a spider.

In general, I found other people to be a far greater mystery than, say, integral calculus, which my friends at school assured me was supposed to be difficult.

“So far, we’ve just been trespassing. Now we’re breaking and entering. That’s what the charge will be. And if we come out with something that’s not ours, that’s burglary. Just so we’re clear.”

The last call came when he was half an hour late.
“I’m leaving! I’m leaving!”
“You’re back at your house?”
“No, I’m leaving. Pay attention.”
“Leaving your house?”
“I'm heading for the door. The phone cord won’t stretch much further! Cover your ears. When it pings back it’s going to make a hell of a—”

“Fuck me sideways!”
“Mum!” Simon’s protest went unheeded.
“It’s like a stately home. In Richmond.” Simon’s mum gawped without shame. “Go on then. And Simon, if there’s even the slightest chance he’s gay, make sure you marry him!”

She made me feel like I was part of something, part of the world, not just skating around the edges, too tied up in myself to join in.

“That’s it?” I frowned. I had hoped for some deeper wisdom that might help me unravel the conundrums of infinitely many universes and man’s relationship with time and memory.

A decade seemed like forever, and it would take three of them just to reach the age my mother was right now. Cancer had closed that down. Like the big C, curling in on itself, my view of the future had narrowed to tunnel vision, aimed squarely at the next week, next month … would I have a next year? I was carrying not only the burden of my sickness but the pressure of making something worthwhile of each day now that my towering stack of them had fallen into ruin and left me clutching at each hour as it slipped between my fingers.

"In hospital they ask you to rate your discomfort on a scale of ten. I guess it's the best they can come up with, but it fails to capture the nature of the beast. Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm's length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye, and it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery."

"The equations that govern the universe don't care about 'now'. You can ask them questions about this time or that time, but nowhere in the elegance of their mathematics is there any such thing as 'now'. The idea of one specific moment, one universal 'now' racing along at sixty minutes an hour, slicing through the seconds, spitting the past out behind it and throwing itself into the future... that's just an artefact of consciousness, something entirely of our own making that the cosmos has no use for."

“The magical power of D&D to draw together people who knew things. Who cared about questions that didn’t seem to matter.”

“They say it’s good to share, but in the end, whatever anyone says, we face the real shit alone. We die alone and on the way we shed our attachments.”

"But as it turned out, I would die even before February got into its stride."

"But as it turned out, I would die even before February got into its stride."

In hospital they ask you to rate your discomfort on a scale of ten. I guess it’s the best they can come up with, but it fails to capture the nature of the beast. Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery.

Truth may often be the first casualty of war, but dignity is definitely the first casualty of disease.

We were all of us consumed by our own imagination, victims of it, haunted by impossibles, set alight by our own visions, and by other people’s. We weren’t the flamboyant artsy creatives, the darlings who would walk the boards beneath the hot eye of the spotlight, or dance, or paint, or even write novels. We were a tribe who had always felt as if we were locked into a box that we couldn’t see. And when D&D came along, suddenly we saw both the box and the key.

We might live in a multiverse of infinite wonder, but we are what we are, and can only care about what falls into our own orbit.