i. Yuuko

She does not recall a time in which she did not exist, or even a place (the situation with Loki and Singe was, she thinks with a curled lip, truly tasteless).

This is a tiresome and lonesome business, although she never says so, and at least that necessary organ of her heart cannot be really broken (though it will remain, forevermore, just a shade past repairing).

Yuuko starts drinking a few months into the seventh century and, after that, never quite finds the time in which to stop.

ii. The naming of names

She accumulates names the way that men collect slaves and twenty-first century women buy shoes: trying each successive one out for a while and discarding, or forgetting the reason for which it was acquired.

'Yuuko' works as well or better than most of the others (although she is secretly fond of the way an enraged poet once called her a 'saucy pedantic wretch'), at it is not an unfamiliar name for her current continent (she's lived here, in one dimension as well, for some time now)—but above all things, she never utters and rarely thinks of what happened to her true name.

iii. If I am quiet, it will pass me by

What is it, Clow asks her lazily. He is lying across her bed, where he has devoted the past several hours to his own bizarre school of metaphysical philosophy (and more than casual flirtations). Now he is kissing, with absent and courtly tenderness, the descending line of her jaw.

Nothing much, she answers, her words slightly muffled by a dreamy lungful of opium. –This is astonishingly true, though: in Clow's company (and when she is smoking her sweetly delirious opium pellets) she has fewer visions, does not feel compelled to catalogue numerous timelines by species of fruit.

She's still aware of his future, though, the potentiality of it looming like a clockwork that's bound to stop.