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\begin{quote}
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Odist who is eepy and neeby to sleeby.
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\subsection*{Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself}
% Boss

There was a time when I was not this weary, withered thing I have become, a time when I was vibrant and vivacious and full of life. That vitality has since been drained from me, replaced by all the migraines and dissociation and vertigo of someone exactly as old as I am.

I first coupled with Beholden in a haze of dance and drink. We took each other home and indulged in that secret affection that was then taboo, touched one another in those ways only cocladists can. It was the beginning of a serial fling, that the beginning of my first and only enduring romance, and that the very romance I carry with me twice over.

Five centuries of fondness dwell within me. How many more if I count all those ephemeral forks, all the parallelized adventures, all the thousand parties I attended as three aspects of myself: A Finger Pointing, Unbidden, and Beholden? To know is to take inventory of all the memories accumulated in millennia of subjective time; to know is to spend millennia dwelling and adrift.

I crave sensation. I wish to experience every lovely thing the world has to offer me and, having seen it all, spend my second spiral looking deeper than first impressions. Perhaps the third will be to savor the impermanence of it all, to prepare myself for my own inevitable \emph{mitat neshikah.}

Temperance was never my style before the launches, but something in me broke that night. I sometimes feel the world around me fall apart into an incoherent haze of information. It is like looking at a dream taken literally without any of a dream's intuition or impression. It is the inspiration for \emph{Spiro kaj Simpleco,} a smattering of unintelligible imagery coupled with the infuriating sensation that there is some inaccessible meaning to be found.

This restraining of my neophilia has made me a revenant of hedonism. I am at times gravely disturbed by that which I cannot indulge. I feel chains weighing heavily on my spirit, coercing me into a senile stupor where I would really rather bask in the Sun or get high with some friends or listen to Beholden's sampled music or find someone fun to bring home. Or all of these at once! That was always a beloved opportunity when it worked out.

Instead I am caught up in thousand-yard stares as the world around me ceases to have meaning, falling in and out of presence as my mind grapples with overstimulation, lost in a haze of frustration and pain and discomfort. I feel as if swallowed up in a silence that relentlessly beats on my eardrums with abandon, driving me to a resigned sigh and the words, ``Please, take me home.''

\subsection*{Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps}
% Skunks

Yesterday, after spending a while talking on a bench in a lazy park, she said, ``Walk me home, please,'' and of course I did. It is so often me who hears ``Please, take me home.'' It is so often me who is confronted with A Finger Pointing's age.

We are the same age, yes? We are both of Michelle Hadje, yes? We were both born in 2086, we both uploaded in 2117, we both lived latent in that one mind. Yes, she was forked first. Yes, I was forked from her some years later. I am precisely as old as she is in a very fundamental way.

But I am also not. I have been the same 32 for centuries, now. 32 by numbers, of course; I have been many different people as my identity and the way in which I move through the world as evolved, but I still \emph{feel} 32.

My love does not.

I have had to learn a new way to love. I have had to keep an eye on just how rambunctious I am with her. She has asked me explicitly not to stop, but...well, some weeks back we lay in bed and, when I clutched at her in the heat of the moment, she pulled back in pain and overstimulation and began to cry, and then I began to cry for this unintentional pain I had caused to someone so dear, and our third was left in baffled panic.

Her world will dissolve around her and I will take her gently by the arm to bring her to the couch or our bed and I will make her tea or sit beside her in kind-but-fretful silence or go lay down on the couch in my music room for an hour.

Do not get me wrong, I remain absolutely head-over-heels for this woman. I am going nowhere. I will \emph{always} be by her side.

But on those nights or afternoons or mornings when she speaks of the sudden and painless kiss of death, when she clenches her eyes shut and the blanket is too heavy, when even my presence is too overstimulating and I go and lay down on my couch, I am at my most exhausted.
