The Illustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe

She’s a clattering girl, all of her cacophonies shrill. Her uncrafted noise was omnidirectional and unavoidable. She begged for no ears, no: she stole them instead, kept them arrested with her every word and strike of laughter. She was once a marvelous thing, all dimensions in ridiculous cataract, violently embracing life for all of its worth, squeezing out from it all of the wonder it had available. But now her tongue has been rewired for self-deception and a grim internal dishonesty that could never properly dovetail with the disobedient world around her. She had become instead a crystal delicacy always on the verge of destruction, each unwelcomed moment that did not fit precisely within her personal design increasing the pressure on her structure, every imperfection in life that she faced finding its way into her majestic errors; and the cracks which grew across her escalating alarm pushed her ever closer toward explosion.

Where once she was truly strong, she was now weak. Any strength she perceived in herself was actually an illusion manufactured through her own careful orchestration. Instead of embracing life’s occasional coarseness and opposition, she actively censored it. All disturbances she chucked into darkness. She performed a kind of social book burning, a PhD-inspired witch hunt for sedition and for all who did not or were unwilling to recast themselves in the roles she designed for them. These processes left her with an aching sense of sanity. But it was always on the balance, always burdened with a woeful potential for upset; and when that happened, and surely it happened, she would merely run away and, once she reached a safe distance for her sterile articulations, she would perform a grand denouncement and then marvel at her newfound strengths.

He still loved her previous edition, the one lacking these fitful and unfortunate updates. He would always find in his nostalgia that girl that seemed so invicible and unstoppable. Now she seemed to be nothing more than a sum of maladies, an untrustworthy process prone to endless error, and her clinical self-righteousness seemed to be no more effective in engendering compliance in those around her than an ATM’s display claiming that there weren’t enough funds for a transaction would make someone feel ecstatic. In a sense, their relationship, which had always steered a wary course from one disaster and the next, had been running short on funds for some time and neither of them have been doing much to maintain it. She cared enough, however, to go ahead and fully close it out. He would never have predicted it, or at least he never would have admitted it (even to himself), but he was grateful. Maybe there is some strength in censorship now that it was clear that he had been censored.

So, he left his card stuck in the ATM like a paralyzed tongue and smiled as the sun lifted the weight of her from his mind. He walked away pleased and, as he turned the corner, he could still hear the ATM beeping maniacally, desperately, as if it hoped that someone, anyone would hear it and pay the attention it demanded as long as that attention obeyed its parameters.