Fire of Ennui

by Ivana Skye

  “I don’t need your help,” they said.

  “I am not trying to pity you,” I said. “But if I were to offer anything—what would it be? Encouragement? Promises to punch this mountain in the face soon as possible? Distraction and storytelling? Statements of solidarity, telling you that I in fact totally know this is really hard?”

  Their tongue moved against their front teeth, making a sound.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know this either.”

  “I thought I made it clear I was a really fucking repressed kid,” Maràh said. “Forgive me if my self-statement skills are a little lacking.”

  “Well,” I said. “In that case, let’s continue. We’re almost to the top, let’s stop and have lunch there.”

  “Sounds cold,” Maràh said.

  Despite Maràh’s obvious displeasure, my eyes almost certainly sparkled. “Yup,” I said. “Cold, and filled with what seems like all the wind in the world. And with a view of desert as far as the eye can see.” I adored the harsh clarity of this pass; even now, it made me feel bright and alive.

  “You’re really selling it,” Maràh said.

  “You do know that I have a quick-burner and hot chocolate powder, right? If you let me stop long enough, I’ll make you plenty.”

  Maràh rolled their eyes but said, “Well. That’s a better sell.”

  “Hot chocolate’s the way to just about everyone’s heart,” I said.

  I tried not to scamper up the boulders too quick just after that. I didn’t want to discourage Maràh if I could help it, not after we’d had one of the best and most effective conversations we had in days.

  Hot chocolate was the first thing Maràh had so much as implied that they liked.

  I was just thinking this and smiling to myself when all at once in a slight widening on the path, Maràh walked right past me on the side, right on the snow. Their head was held high, their back was straight. Their posture looked confident. Determined. I didn’t know whether they were trying to prove something, but if nothing else, it amused me to see.

  So I followed their pack-laden figure up to the top.

  The snow was as bright as a second sun at the top of the pass and Maràh quite nearly collapsed onto it. I began preparing hot chocolate with somewhat more grace, taking off my pack and step by step getting out everything I needed from it.

  By the time I’d lit the burner, Maràh was upright again. They sighed and bit into a sandwich they’d made that morning. Preparation was something they knew how to do; perhaps that came along with their agricultural background.

  “What’re you thinking about?” I asked as I put a small pot of water on the burner.

  “Who said I was thinking about anything?” They bit back, harshness in their voice. There was very often harshness in their voice, but I’d firmly made up my mind not to care.

  “Well,” I said. “It’s very common that minds come up with thoughts. It’s a process that often goes on twenty-four seven, at least in my experience. So, really, it’s just a very strong educated guess.”

  Maràh sighed. “I owe you nothing.”

  “I know.”

  I let my gaze fall on the horizon, on the miles of reddish ground beyond the foothills. Though it was far flatter than the mountains, it wasn’t featureless: even from here I could see a few canyons, and one prominent mesa.

  Fuck, though, Maràh was difficult to have a conversation with.

  “So what is the longest trip you’ve taken?” I asked.

  They coughed with something like a snarl. “Guess.”

  “Other than this one, I mean.”

  “That’s what I was asking you to guess,” they said. I’d read them wrong again.

  “Maybe to a nearby town?” But as soon as the words left my mouth, I realized what Maràh had actually been implying.

  “Ta Ralis,” they said, confirming my new suspicion.

  “Ah.”

  “Did you know this isn’t even my native language?” They asked.

  “Wait,” I said. “It’s not? But you speak it so well.”

  A wisp of wind brought a small snowdrift swirling around Maràh, who sneezed, somewhat breaking the tension of the moment. The sun remained as bright as ever, though my eyes were getting used to it. I was also, perhaps, getting used to saying the wrong thing to Maràh.

  “Ezh ri sar,” they muttered under their breath, proving their point—it sounded like a curse, but not in my language. The syllables were similar, sharp and distinct just like my native High South. Yet, I couldn’t recognize any of the words. They were related languages, but they weren’t the same.

  “So why do you sp-“

  “It’s funny,” Maràh said, mouth moving into almost a snarl as they cut me off. “Our cultures are so alike. Did you know that we too, in Immasa, keep detailed family records, draw ancestries on our walls, even regularly visit your city to learn history?”

  Well, of course I didn’t know that. Until a few days ago, I didn’t even know that Immasa existed. “I actually hadn’t thought those traditions extended much north at all of Ta Ralis,” I said.

  “Not much north, no,” Maràh said. “Only, oh, say, a few days’ travel.”

  This time I had the sense not to ask the first thing that came to mind: why Immasa had its own language. I had enough knowledge of inter-regional dynamics to know that someone from a cultural powerhouse implying that they expected their language to be spoken everywhere was a bad move.

  “But you don’t even like your town,” I said, remembering all the things Maràh’d grumbled about before. “Why speak on behalf of it so much?”

  They glanced down at the deserts and canyons, and shrugged. “It’s shorthand. And irritation.”

  “Even not liking where you’re from, it being forgotten feels kind of like you being forgotten,” I guessed.

  “Yes,” Maràh said, and looked me directly in the eyes, something about them so sharp and clear that I considered taking off my glasses so as to not see their eyes quite so well.

  “Well, shit,” I said, and poured now-hot water into the two cups with the chocolate powder inside. “Hot chocolate?” I asked, holding a cup out to Maràh.

  “Sure,” they said, and took it, sipping it with what looked like pleasure.

  “I don’t think you ever did say how old you are,” I said.

  “Twenty-three.”

  Huh, I thought. That felt both older than me and not really that much older; I wasn’t sure how to explain it. They had five years on me, and that was both a lot, and not a lot at all. I considered those thoughts, but I didn’t have much to say about them, at least nothing that was particularly helpful. At least I had hot chocolate to drink. I took a nice long sip, letting the fingers of my other hand trace patterns in the snow, even though that numbed my skin.

  Oddly, it was Maràh who eventually spoke up, their voice as low and harsh as I’d have expected some sort of battle-worn person to be: “I’m not going back.”

  “Not even for family?” I asked, as if I hadn’t just left most of mine behind for no particularly good reason myself.

  “Not even,” Maràh said quickly, then seemed to take a moment to consider. “Least not if I can help it. They’re fine folks, but … they’re not good for me.”

  “Maybe you should stop conflating your town and yourself then, when you talk about it,” I suggested. “If you’re trying to cut off ties with it anyway.”

  “You don’t fucking get to should me,” Maràh said, and sipped their cup. “But I’ll think about it.”

  “Maybe the road is your town now,” I said.

  “You seem to like the sound of those types of sentiments.”

  “Do you?”

  They breathed in, and the wind played with their puff of hair. They almost smiled, and for a second I thought they were going to say yes, but they didn’t. “That’s for me to decide,” they said instead, and maybe that was their own kind of agreement.

  5

  Cijaya
<
br />   compartments of time

  You know, school didn’t bother me any less for having moved mostly outdoors now the weather was warmer. Vitalities, if anything, it made it worse. Here we were, mixed age, sitting in a circle under dappled light—fucking dappled light—with math notebooks out on our laps, working on some derivatives. They were pretty easy ones; if my brain had actually been working, I would have asked for harder problems.

  But my brain wasn’t even sure what year it was. One classmate whispered to another—I didn’t catch which two it was, and it didn’t matter. Whoever it was, the sound made me jump.

  Sometimes I wonder if you actually like anything but math.

  I didn’t hear those words, not really. And yet they reverberated more in my ears than the actually-present wind did. Words over a year old, and—

  I could almost feel her touch my hand. Without permission. It wasn’t happening, of course. Sā wasn’t here. She and her sudden touches and her constant slight degradations of anything I was interested in were gone.

  Yet, I couldn’t actually get my mind to believe that.

  “Are you okay?”

  I blinked, looked up from my slightly shaking hands, the way my pen had drawn an odd line across my paper. It was an instructor who asked. Matli. I liked lir—but of course I couldn’t trust lir anymore. Li was here when everything happened, after all. Li watched as Sā mocked the concept of complex theorems ever being used in ‘real life,’ heard it when I, who had always loved math, laughed along with her.

  How the fuck did Matli never figure out something was wrong? How did no one figure out something was wrong?

  “Orange?”

  It wasn’t my name; it couldn’t bring me back to myself. I was hyperventilating. Why the fuck was I hyperventilating? I needed to get myself under control, Sā wasn’t here, she wasn’t. But I couldn’t find the words to even contact Zel, who did know my name, nor would I dare speak it aloud, not where other people could hear.

  It took all my strength to write on my paper, with just enough conviction, my own name. Cijaya.

  Looking down, I could see the name, but more than that, I felt it written, the shapes and curves of it hooking into my mind, tethering me to something. Myself.

  And through those same tethers, as parts of that same connection, I wrote: It’s okay. She’s not here.

  The letters touched my heart, ran through my blood like ink and light and self. I closed my eyes and knew what had been written as if it was glowing, visibly, behind my eyelids.

  I breathed, for once at a normal rate. Opening my mouth didn’t sound quite as intimidating anymore, but that didn’t mean I could stay here, underneath trees and leaves. “I-“ I started.

  And Matli, fuck lir, interrupted. My breath caught. “Do you want to walk a little with me?”

  Privacy. Li meant privacy. But all I could think of was vulnerability, how no one has to know what’s said in the shadows, how without a witness it’s so easy to make yourself believe that everything’s alright even if it isn’t.

  “I need to leave!” I yelled, shocking myself. The sentence had started through gritted teeth, but the volume ended up rising without my control.

  Vitalities, I missed having control over myself.

  Speaking of, I knew I was about to start sobbing. I could tell. And Zel must have been off distracted by something else, maybe watching one of those frogs that hangs out inside them, because they didn’t contact me. And I couldn’t bring myself to contact them first. I couldn’t. Fuck, there was so much I couldn’t do. For instance: remain calm.

  “It’s okay if you do,” Matli said quietly, and it took me a full moment to realize that li meant it was okay if I left.

  Part of me wondered: does li want me to leave? Am I a burden? An annoyance?

  And the rest of me responded: fuck those questions, I can work through them when I’m out of here.

  So I stood up, only barely remembering to pick up my book, and left, not even really having the strength to run.

  I got far enough to not hear their voices. I got far enough not to be under trees. I was in a field of pointy grass, and despite that it hurt my skin, I collapsed there.

  Sure enough, I started sobbing. I may not have been able to control myself, but at least I could often predict myself. I clenched at the grass, felt how sharp it was against my hand. I was almost certain I heard something skitter next to my ear, but it’s not like bugs scared me. This environment could do nothing to hurt me. Unlike other places.

  Cijaya, I heard, but didn’t hear. Listen to me. It’s April, 12581. Not ’80, ’81. You are seventeen years old. And your name is Cijaya.

  I gave out a different kind of sob, the kind that was somehow relieved and happy while also very much being a mid-breakdown sob. “Zel,” I managed to say. “Hi.”

  Hi yourself, my best friend said. It was enough to make me smile, somehow.

  But of course smiles couldn’t actually cover up my pain much, and they certainly couldn’t channel it. So I bit my lip as a memory happened to me without my control.

  Her, walking past me. My room. Us pacing around each other. I thought I was having fun, and I thought, I thought—I thought that there was intimacy. Like, the good kind. The image of that room was a feeling and the brown of those walls was more real than the blue of the actual sky around me and fuck her, fuck her-

  “Fuck her,” I said aloud, not even meaning to.

  Indeed.

  “Did you know, I never got a chance to tell her my name? Did you know she never let me?”

  Yeah. Of course Zel knew that. I’d said it before. But now I both said and felt it, remembered pacing in circles around a room as she talked animatedly about poetry, how I looked for an opening to tell her, I had really important news, it was so important—

  How she only stopped talking for maybe two seconds, and that was the best opening I got, and timidly I said, “Hey, I have something to tell you” and she said—

  “Can it wait? I’m not really in a state to process new information right now.”

  And I’d accepted it, of course. It was a reasonable request; I’d been in states like that before, myself.

  It was just, every single time I asked, she had an excuse like that.

  Unable to process new information. Having a bad day. Really needing to get something off her chest first. Not up for talking.

  And yet, I can remember so clearly the way I sat at a picnic table under a tree with broad leaves, the height of summer, dappled light, dappled light—

  She said, “hey, can I talk to you about something?”

  And, Vitalities fuck it, this assignment was due tomorrow and I hadn’t had any fucking alone time all day, and even though I’d almost always say yes if she needed to talk, almost always, this one time I said, “Um, I’m actually really busy today.”

  And she said, “You’re just trying to put me off.”

  “I have this assignment,” I said, quiet and timid.

  Something hardened in her face. “Well, fine,” she said, and maybe her voice was filled with sarcasm, I didn’t know, I didn’t know, and maybe she stormed off, footsteps heavy on the ground, and maybe she was angry with me, and maybe she was right, maybe I was just trying to put her off, maybe I didn’t make enough time for her—

  —and she’d never done anything bad to me, you see—

  —never done anything I could definitively point to.

  And yet my heart clenched to think of her, my breaths came fast, and I felt weak, I felt inadequate. I must have failed her, I found myself thinking, despite all that I never wanted to see her again.

  Cijaya, Zel’s voice came to me again, not in the past but in the year 12581.

  I whimpered. Words were hard. Really hard.

  She’s not here. She can’t hurt you.

  Well, the first statement was true, but not the second. Sā was more than capable of hurting me even when I hadn’t seen her for almost a full year.

  I held onto the gro
und. I grabbed clumps of dirt. And though I couldn’t say what was directly on my mind, I managed to say, “Hey, um, so, what do you need to pack for cross-country travel?

  Hm, Zel said. Maybe clothes?

  If I was in a better mood, I would have laughed at their sheer unhelpfulness. “I did kind of figure that,” I muttered.

  Hey, Zel said, I’m a lake, I don’t exactly do cross-country travel.

  I sat up, figuring that would make my throat and voice work a little more clearly. “Well, yes,” I said, “but-“

  Come on, Zel said, you can’t expect one little lake to—

  “You can literally witness anything that happens anywhere in the fucking world,” I said, not actually angry despite my cursing. “You could check out a supply store—”

  Yeah, but why would I want to—

  “I dunno, but you could—”

  But I wouldn’t—

  “But—”

  But—

  Despite myself, I found that I was starting to laugh. This conversation was ridiculous, and so fucking far from my past, and I could almost feel the sun warming my skin, almost feel the dirt under my knees.

  In the year 12581.

  6

  Maràh & Nena

  over a fire

  In the beginning—well, in my beginning—I was utterly convinced Nena hated me.

  The conviction flickered on and off the way anxious convictions do. It was there, though, when I was walking down from that pass. It was there.

  Thing is, so was I.

  And so I did as I’d learned—as I’d taught myself. I held my head high and I straightened my back. I fixed a smile on my face, one of those confident ones. The person I was traveling with hated me, probably cursed how far I always fell behind, probably wish she’d never invited me along so that she could go faster—but I didn’t care. I chose not to care.