revised 1/6/12.

abyssal depths

.

1…2…3…4…5…

The flow of time doesn't really stop for you, for me—for anyone. I think that's just how it was meant to be, as everything beneath the million-star umbrella is. A wide umbrella. Very big.

You don't count backwards, do you? Math teachers frown upon negative distances, negative liters, and we are all propelled in one direction through the fabric of time (space). Stars die, but we see their deaths centuries later, a single breath stolen and exhaled quietly across the glittering umbrella, going, going, gone.

I cannot move. I cannot surpass the eclipse of nothing.

…

In my mind I am free.

-1…-2…

"You said that I could leave if I didn't like it."

She peers into the soulless green and red of my eyes, contemplates the wisdom of letting me go. Rain, slick and syrupy-sweet, falls to a puddle, drip by drip becoming a sea. Maybe this was how I made them.

"What if I happen to need you, hmm?" She adjusts her knapsack. Her face is hidden from me, but I can sense the sorrow twisting deep within. "I need this. I want to prove—"

I cut in, "Prove what? Beating Volkner wasn't enough, then?"

At first she doesn't respond, and resorts to stoking the campfire instead. Chipped fingernails suddenly touch my face. Cold against cold. Reaching behind my ear, she pulls out—

"I knew it," she breathes. "A dirty trick. You've been using the psychic plate, haven't you?" Another withering sigh. "I feel much better now."

But I'm only halfway listening to my trainer. The fear has already started to simmer. Eventually the emotions will devour me whole.

"Can't talk anymore?" And a sneer creases those hungry lips, blisters threatening to burst. "I should have known. Mom and Dad warned me against capturing legends, but no, I thought I was too good to be controlled by dusty piles of skin. Guess what? I am right."

All at once blood dribbles down the side of her face, and she reaches behind my ear again, frown quizzical. "Don't play, please. Toxic plate? Really?"

The skin at my waist shudders as it turns back to gold.

"You should've never chosen me, O Great One," she mutters. "None of this would've happened. Nobody talks to me anymore because of your control. I'm just a shadow of you! I can't go home now and…and I miss my parents! Even little brother.

"In the grand portrait of life, I'm a little speck of paint that the artist accidentally flicked."

She cries and laughs off-and-on for moments and I stare, fear subsided.

(Was it too much to want to be normal?)

"I'm done with this," she finally manages, "and don't think I'm going to let you go and find another trainer, somewhere out there, to ruin. Come back."

A whirl of light, and then I'm gone, vanished in the limbo between here and hereafter.

-3…-4…-5…-6…

"Finally! The Icicle Badge!"

Like most trainers, the way she wins badges is exciting, breathless to behold. Pearly teeth beams, and for the second of congratulations and way-to-go's, she forgets the missing toes and hacking coughs – it shows on her face in diamond-dust brilliance.

…But then the shining second passes, her face becomes pained again, and she exits the gym without her friends. They pretend not to notice; it has happened before.

She has climbed back into her coffin of truth. It used to be the other way around—her looking into a black box of unknowns, secrets.

Except now she's inside.

Things change.

I am broken into a million different pieces—maybe more so than the number of stars—and like Humpty Dumpty, the darkness of the pokeball puts me back together again.

"Let's go. I don't need them anymore," she says once I hear the doors slide shut. "They think you're some ditto or copy. They're not my friends, so I only have you now."

Snow crunches beneath her feet, and I tune out the world outside—easily.

"Wish I could find the sky plate…Fly hidden machine is just sitting there to waste…"

-7…-8….-9...-10…-11…

"I don't remember my name."

"Everything comes with a price," I reassure her.

Despite her doubtful look, she does not question further. Her friends shoot her stares, but it doesn't really make a difference—they're weak, she's strong, and nobody questions power, even if it's mistaken for skill.

That is, until one of them swipes my pokeball and examines it.

"Poor Mania, she got a ditto from her rich parents." The girl smirks. "You were nice, though, letting us get Rowan's starters. Silly professor ran out and left for Solaceon the next day." She fingers the latch. "Go, A—"

Quickly, my trainer snatches me back, whispers apologies. "He-she-it's tired. Um, dittos don't like to be awoken. They lose shape if they do."

The girl yawns. There is a definite sense of mistrust in her and the other friends, but Roark's coal badge will gleam more brightly than any of that.

He had been ridiculously simple to defeat, after all.

-12…-13…-14…

"Mom! Goodbye!"

She skates past the overgrown path, pushes the white picket fence, and waves farewell, path set on becoming the next champion. Of course, every trainer probably wished the same as they pushed past their mothers and hugs and front doors.

Innocence so bittersweet, so painful to believe it would've ever transform into anything else. Hurtful innocence.

(Nobody speaks of the kids caged inside sterile halls and padded walls.)

Truth was, Mania did have a pokemon latched onto her belt that day—its species and name is unimportant, so unimportant that she herself had forgotten it—and less important still, because in a brief time its god will erase it forever.

She met me in the woods, a flurry of I'm late, late, late!. Her friends were waiting for her in Sandgem.

That's when I stopped her.

I needed freedom, and this normal girl with a normal ambition and - She needed to win. Promises were made, souls were sold, and she laughed, all glitters and ribbons.

0

She smiles, and with hurtful innocence, hurls the sphere – orbit broken, metal shattered – deep into the abyssal depths of the ocean.

+6…

(twist and unravel and hope and count time-)

Backwards.

Continue to count.

—