Epigraph

content/read/034.md

@@ -1,67 +1,35 @@
-# RJ Brewster --- 2112
+# Qoheleth --- 2305
 
-If AwDae had been expecting to find some fresh clue, some exciting conclusion to eir adventure at the clinic, ey was disappointed. The office was an office, nothing more. Cold. Hollow. Impersonal, despite countless touches cleverly engineered to add personality.
+It has been long enough that I am thinking of myself as Qoheleth now. All that slow washing-away of given names to replace with chosen ones. Something worth being methodical with. I have even begun introducing myself as Qoheleth whenever I go out, just to try it on for size.
 
-If ey had expected perhaps some comfort from familiar surroundings, ey was also disappointed. Walking into the clinic, memories fell upon em like ticks from branches. Latching on, leaching substance. Consult, surgery, treatments, training, follow-up, training, training, training. Getting to know the doctor and his team. Getting to know the trainers. Learning to loathe them. Learning to love what they had to offer.
+That I have never actually done so is of little concern. It is ancillary to the problem at hand. Something I can tackle later, or at least tackle in thought. I can daydream about the name change. Just plan and plan and plan, like I have planned everything else.
 
-There was nothing there.
+I like the sound of it. I like the way it feels in my mouth when I say it out loud. I like the connotations of 'teacher' and 'gatherer' and 'director of the assembled'. I want to feel the way that it feels to be someone different, and I have found at least a part of that in this name, the name that *I* chose for *myself*. Not some line of a poem I wish we would all forget. *Could* all forget. I may not have yet taught or gathered yet, but I am working constantly to earn the moniker.
 
-There were the couches in the lobby, of course. There had to be. That is what belonged in lobbies. There was the desk where ey checked in, the receptionist's chair behind it. Such desks belonged, and thus followed chairs. There was the hallway. There were the locked and unlocked doors --- ey now suspected that the locked doors hid rooms that ey had never seen, eir memory refusing to consider things never remembered.
+And 'Hebel'. Hebel was another name I picked up. Vain, futile, mere breath.
 
-There was the dimly lit surgery suite.
+Qoheleth's words, in the book written so very, very long ago, were all about hebel. "This, too, is meaningless," Qoheleth had written after that long walk through life. Try pleasure. Try work. Try prayer. This, too, is meaningless.
 
-There was the row of paired mirror rigs. Instructor, student.
+That is not how I envision the name, though.
 
-There was the whole affair laid out before em, and no solutions. No explanations.
+I think of the two names as signifiers rather than simple names. I think of the two moods that they bring. And I think most often of the two *sources* of names. Not the book, not the time at which it was written. My two sources. Now.
 
-Ey paced the halls. Sat on the lobby's couches. Sat at the rigs, dumb and silent. Lay on the operating table, face down as ey remembered. Laughed at the way eir snout poked so perfectly through the slot meant for an oxygen mask. Rifled through notes, their swimming text a mocking jeer.
+Qoheleth was the name I gave myself out of hope. It is a name of goals and aspirations. It embodies the things that I want to do. It takes all of my plans and me, maker of plans, and binds them up neatly into a word. Ties a pretty bow to the top. A single word. A name and also a rejection of *the* Name.
 
-Ey threw eir weight against a locked door, far more solid than it had any right to be. No rocking in the frame evident. It may as well have been a wall.
+Hebel was the name I gave myself out of despair. It is a name of self deprecation and a way of reminding myself that, lofty as my goals may be, they are all vanity. Mere breath. Meaningless in the end.
 
-Tears stung at eir eyes. School, home, this place. Everything was dreamlike, unsettled, waffling between mind-numbing and nightmarish. 
+Together, the names remind me that I am doing this for a reason. All of these resources, all of *my* resources, those found objects and hand-me-downs accrued over the years, are being built up and strung together into a cohesive goal. A net. Less trap than source of safety. Something to catch. Something to rescue.
 
-Not dreamlike, no, but a dream. If, as ey now suspected, all of this was simply taking place in a combination of eir mind and eir implants, why would there be these tantalizing clues dangled in front of em? Why would eir mind think to invent a mode of transit that simply skipped em along in jagged, stomach-churning jumps?
+They, the resources, are all nothing. The reasons are all nothing. Vapor. Mere breath.
 
-Tears flowed freely now, and ey hunched down against the unknown, unknowable door, first crouching, then sitting with the skirt pooled around eir waist as tears stained the fur of eir cheeks.
+The whole plan is nothing except for the truth underlying it. Not to fear God, but to...to something. To *do* something. To *be* something. To get the whole clade to see. My clade.
 
-Nightmares.
+No, my *old* clade. I am not of the Ode any longer.
 
-Dreams.
+I am Hebel Qoheleth now.
 
-Ey needed something to anchor emself to. Ey needed something to hold onto that wasn't dependent on clues and tidbits of information that were...were what? Stored in eir implants? In some core in eir exocortex, dumped when ey was pulled back?
+Hebel Qoheleth.
 
-Ey needed to make sense of something in this pale semblance of a world. Make understanding. Make knowing. Make lucidity.
+The old name is dead. I have followed it to the letter: I chose death as I must. As we all must.
 
-Dreams and lucidity. What mattered a lucid dream if there was nothing to wake up from?
-
-And yet was it not lucid? Did ey not have some semblance of control over this place? Ey had been trusting that it was some sort of locked down sim. One in which ey had no ACLs. Some sort of semi-scripted film from which ey could not deviate.
-
-But if it was a dream, if it was all within eir head and implants, was it not completely eirs? Did ACLs matter in a dream?
-
-The fog of war. The importance of the sound board. The very setting of eir school and childhood home. All of these were from within. The ancient strategy games ey had played growing up. The thing that had captured eir imagination in school. The places all stained with memory. Places which ey still dreamed of, even with home now in London. All things and places and memories where ey had spent uncounted hours honing and honing and honing.
-
-Were these limits of the technological system operating in tandem with eir nervous system? Or were they simply limitations of a panicked mind?
-
-Both?
-
-Neither?
-
-A test, then: something within said limits to begin with. Ey knew eir home. Ey knew eir room. Ey knew the feeling of the duvet beneath em. Ey knew the feeling of sitting on that bed, reading far past eir bedtime. Flashlight and book, listening for footsteps, feigning sleep at the slightest noise.
-
-Ey *knew* it.
-
-Ey closed eir eyes on the dim hall of the clinic.
-
-Ey dreamed it, dreamed of home.
-
-Ey felt it, breathed in the rich scent of the memory of it.
-
-Ey knew every detail of it.
-
-Ey dreamed it.
-
-Ey felt it.
-
-Ey reached out and, in one paw, clutched.
-
-And eir fist was full of duvet.
+I am Hebel Qoheleth.