What are the chances that I’d be here today

I thought once I’d finished typing it all up, it would be over. The worst would be over. Doing all that work, scribbling ferociously, looking over my shoulder all the time, hammering away at my keypad, getting lost in the black holes of the internet, like banging my head over and over again till I bleed rust, all that was behind me. Now I could lay my head down on my pillow again and nurse whatever was left of the stubs of my fingers.

No, none of it mattered unless people knew about it. I wasn’t allowed to talk about it online, lest they come after me. So instead, I spent three straight days trudging through the icy New York streets with a stack of flyers. There are few things as humbling as wandering through the subway at 3am and taping up flyers with shaky, numb fingers. I didn’t want people to see me putting them up, even with my goggles and mask covering my face, so I only went out at night. When I ran out of tape, I used a squeezy bottle of liquid glue.

The faster I went, the better I got. I didn’t know how many trains there were in the MTA transit system, but it seemed like somewhere north of infinity. At first, when I got on a train, I would wait till the next stop to hop into the next carriage. I quickly realized I could cosplay being a crackhead for a moment and just canvas the entire train by moving through the wiggly doors between carriages. It got much more efficient that way. The few people on the train that weren’t sleeping homeless people, parted way for me like I was Moses in front of the Red Sea. The whole thing passed by in a blur.

Everyone knows what it’s like to see a crazy person on the New York subway, but few people have been the crazy person on the New York subway. If someone asked me later, what was it like, I wouldn’t have an answer, I don’t really know. I was traveling on a separate frequency. I was seeing the trains and stations like a glittering map of the cosmos, running through the nodes at light speed. At night I hit the subways. During the day I snuck through the bookstores and libraries of the city, big ones, used ones, indie, name brand, weird, and everything in between. The right person would find it, tucked between books or hidden in plain sight in the corners of the shelves. All the flyer had on it was a QR code to the site where I had uploaded all the entries, with a cryptic headline, that I don’t even remember.

I had my earphones in, blasting Don Giovanni. When the levels of reality separated like debris under ocean waves, the only thing I was interested in listening to were operas. Usually Mozart, those were the most dramatic. Regular music was way too flat and stale, I needed booming cellos and sopranos that could chatter a champagne glass.

My roommates had it with me. I knew they were talking to Ferret One behind my back, but I didn’t know the extent of the damage. Apparently they were reporting every detail of my erratic behavior back to her. I didn’t expect the humans to understand, and I couldn’t explain it either. It really was none of their business.

Shit hit the ceiling when I told them to say goodbye to Audrey because I was giving her away. They were properly horrified at this. It didn’t make any sense to me because giving Audrey away was probably the most rational decision I had made in a long time. I couldn’t take care of her anymore. And I was falling down the slope of If I Can’t Have Her No One Can so fast even I was freaked out. I caught myself looking up how much Tylenol it takes to kill a cat. It had to be swift and painless, that’s what she deserved. She’s the best cat ever, she hasn’t done a single thing wrong, so why is she faced with a string of owners who can’t keep her? I made a post on the neighborhood forum. Audrey isn’t just beautiful, she looks like she was drawn by a Disney animator, like an Aristocat, perhaps. So of course my inbox filled up immediately with people wanting to take her. Fawn’s message stuck out to me, so she came by to check out Audrey, who was as sweet as pie to her. I explained to her I was having trouble taking care of her, and she needed someone better equipped. I didn’t have the physical strength to change her litter box in time and she had caught a foul ear infection, and it was all my fault. I hated myself for it, but it was a matter of life and death.

With only a few hours of notice, Ferret One showed up at the apartment, straight off a bus from Boston. It was Saturday or Sunday, I can’t remember. She had started her job and it was inconvenient for her to come and have to take care of me. Neither she nor Maybel would listen to a word that came out of my mouth.

Why are you giving Audrey away, I’m preparing for the apocalypse, what the hell is the apocalypse, I genuinely don’t know, I’m preparing for the worst, it’s responsible of me to know I can’t take care of Audrey, but why shall you be out of commission, if it’s that bad, we need to take you to the hospital.

It was horrible for everyone involved. I knew for a fact it would be devastating and fatal to be shipped off to the hospital without finishing the mission. And I couldn’t tell them what the mission was, because that would be breaking one of the three cardinal rules. Eventually, sobbing and pleading, I managed to convince them to let me finish delivering the papers on Tuesday, and then they could do whatever the hell they wanted with me, throw me in the hospital, toss me in the trash, I couldn’t care less.