Continuity Meets the Skip Intro Button

“Snowing. Of course. It had to snow, didn’t it? This is your doing, Broderick, yours. You know so long as it snows I’m trapped here, which means you’ll never be alone, which lets you not give up for one more day. Tomorrow will come, honey, believe me, tomorrow will come for us all, and there’ll be no snow to save us then.”

“God forbid you try to sympathize, Henrietta.”

“God forbid you face reality, Broderick.”

“Face reality? How can I? We’ve been saved the melancholy of suffering through transitions and can be in a continual state of everythingness—some of us just need a cabinet full of pills to survive it. Why bother to face anything? There’s no time to anyway.”

“Well, nothing’s real either, is it, so what’s it matter? You act as if someone should give a damn that you choose to choke down those pills. The dream is as real as waking, which becomes the dream, the waking, the dream again. Each as real as the last but none any more real than being spared intros and credits, ad infinitum. The rest rolls past us on a tangible, credible plane, but one that is no more real than mistaking a mannequin for a human. Perhaps you fall in love with it, perhaps you make a movie about it, which exists on that same credible plane—at least for one and a half hours. Well, slightly less now without those pesky intros and outros.

“Say whatever you like, Henrietta, but it’s still snowing out there, and you know exactly what that means for both of us. Perhaps you’re right—nothing’s allowed to end, but that means nothing can ever begin. A continuum is truth, yes, but one the human mind struggles with at the best of times, regardless of how we chose to perceive it. So we sit and refuse—reject—silence. Up to alarms, down to white noise. Fill the long march to death so that the inevitable moment is the ultimate in self-fulfilling prophecies. I know what I am and yes, I’d rather go through it beside you.”

“Broderick, you rattle off empty words without feeling one of them. Words are parasitic, burning into the dark, sleepless hours, while action reiterates the myth of our power to act, pushing from mind our inability—your inability—to do anything more than pathetically re-act. Still, if the goose is golden and the day bright, what worth is caring for a fig, or in any belief at all? For humanity is the dying of the kingdom, beyond the glory, praised for stimulation and revered for the miracle of pharmaceuticals. If there were another way surely we would’ve found it years before, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier to put the search to rest.”

“None of which has done anything to stop it from snowing.”

“No, but would you really have it any other way?”

END