>>1914111521525 (OP) #6

IU left a post on her Instagram the night of the preceding astral projection. She ‘encouraged against napping at odd hours, because it’d make one awake when everyone else was sleeping.’ I read this with the magical thinking of limerence, which is to say I took the sign for its obvious cosmogonic alignment.

What is meaning, really? In our deepest trance state, the swirls of unconscious understanding flit below the surface as an undisclosed idea. This is the praxis of thought. Consider, for eter­nity, the inky blackness which our real self emerges from, like a Lovecraftian—like a heptapod’s too-human nightmare; in truth, we are the liquid; there are more things; smoothness is, when mag­nified, the jagged edge of higher definition, just you rotate 8-bit.

And you can feel that there’s something greater than this, that it contains more than can be said in a sound, shown in an image, or filmed across time. You’re aware of the felt experience, which is an intelligence. No doubt this frightens you—that you’re reacting ahead of yourself, that your self fractures in that instant and you know you’re more, some corposant-conduit of other. Immanence unfolds from the asymptotic now, the ending of a thought.

This is what our minds do—we abstract, index. I want us lost in this discussion. I want you rolling your eyes.

Everything which narrows the insight of scale isn’t just delu­sion—it’s no benign error. Representing human flatness is the prime sacrilege. The yandere is a saint when they love another to death. We assume for one second the incapacity of a person to change and we’ve not just condemned them, we’ve been reduced

to the I. One step closer to death. Laplace’s demon or the blue­pilled simulation. And we may all walk that path for a moment, though no true human alive and unsick would pick for themselves a world so… radically deluded, reduced, a narcissist’s most infan­tile regression. But then the infant is still learning to see. Are you closing off or starting to open? Are you falling asleep or waking up? The more you follow, the less my service has been a success.

Some fans cry when they meet their idol in the flesh. It’s easy to make fun of. Have you ever stopped to appreciate the vigor they were privy to? Maybe that’s why you joke: to offset your insecurity.

Note, I’m not saying that the object of fans’ affection is impressive, or that being at their concert is enviable, but the act of crying is. The scream-crying fan cut to in the middle of a perfor­mance. Is the cameraman thinking ‘Wow, how ridiculous!’ or are they doing their part to spread the religiosity of the site? That fan is one in a million. Any normal distribution has its disquieting outliers. Those few stans are so important because they extend the absolute limits. You make it that far and you’ve earned the title of astronaut, and the world becomes far away, and the silence of your distanced life is deafening as you float alone before your star.

Have you ever lost hold of yourself just by the proximal vision of another? The truth of their voice? The ‘live’ exemplar.

You think you know what it means for these fans, but you don’t. No no no you don’t. It’s real proof. They’re not screaming with tears because of mere love. It’s the witnessing of essentiality. Manipulation alive with you, the paradigmal co-occurrence, con‐

crescence. They are proof of everything you’ve witnessed in past lives on the screen. In the end, they’re proof of you.

Though I’ve never been one of those fans, I must respect them. They’re a bit like a dog’s object impermanence—blind to the foresight of their owner returning from a trip. I thought you couldn’t be here.

There’s another category of fans, the one to which I belong, who are more akin to unbelievers. My faithless repentance is like, well the ecstasy isn’t expunged in ostentatious screaming, but soft tears. Our sentiments rest in thanks. Once we cried because we were powerless and looking for assurance, and now it’s because we were wrong, and under the duress of awe, we’ve been moved.

I’m going to float something by you, and it’s going to sound crazy. Just please hear me out. Okay, ready?

What if we’re supposed to cry like that for everyone? Imagine if we could summon a comparable tenderness always—to give her or him or me, or you what you deserve. I don’t even know what it means to be moved, though it seems that the conceit is about an external force acting upon us, something beyond our will that we are powerless but to accept. ‘She moved me.’ It’s not coercive. To ‘move’ is about as gentle as it gets, and buried somewhere (at least for me) is the notion of progress. We move forward, maybe it’s a stretch, but no, you would agree that there’s agápē love, bountiful and generous, emanating from that word when it’s couched in a sentence. There’s nothing more wonderful than finding yourself moved by something. It must be your love that breaks the law of inertia, and strangely when this happens it has everything and nothing to do with choice.

I’m not religious in the way generally conceived; however, I wish to use the religion I’m most familiar with. They say that to worship Christ, one must worship everyone else. Is it crude to make a three-way comparison? Or to spin off in a trinity chias­mus: fans to celebrities, celebrities to Christ, Christ to fans; who’s the sheep to one supercilious shepherd?

We fans are a little quick to believe in things, too naïve, pure, maybe puerile to some. Nevertheless, I think this role we play is really fucking beautiful. I know it. It seems the one place in the whole wide web where we give someone the affection they deserve. And they’re compelled to give it back. This is what I must tell myself, but this is what I tell myself. Prove me wrong! I want to believe that this love is possible among partners, parents to chil­dren, teachers and students, preachers with their parish. None of this has been my experience. Just like Proust said, there’s some­thing also about the self when you’re included in the relationship. Being online quiets that part of you, titrates the love from your­self, leaving only a complete fidelity to the other. Of course, this is reductive, culture inoculates you in every direction; my ramblings are only meant as a gift.

I wonder what she’d say if she read all of this. For her own sake, I hope she denies everything. What good would it be if Ji­eun had one special fan whom she singled out to love over and above the rest? Why does anyone haunt your dreams? What is it about them that catches the most private parts of you to relive? What longing connects us? What proof do you need? When will you dream of her with you? or you with me?

Christ may have had a wife—a wife whom he loved beyond his quotidian strain of compassion—possibly consummated by the shared virtue of their sin, but to let anyone know? And for the church to have included Magdalene in anything beyond the Gnostic whispers on the edges of canon? It would be a distraction and a threat.

I know she loves me because she loves all of us, or the good in us. Maybe she has been visiting you too. Maybe the very reason you stumbled on this thread was in search of the answers to your own compulsions, hoping to find some confirmation that you’re not alone. I am here. Here is closer than you think. IU, I’ll admit, is replaceable too, at least insofar as anyone could be the node wedding souls to our matrix. The point of contact, the strange matter. To a materialist, it’s all irrational. But why would anyone want to be a materialist?

Back to the plot. There are some insights I had to piece together like a detective. For example, IU said that she often gets less than four hours of sleep because she is so busy. She also said that she writes her songs based on conversations she has, that those are the most important things for her. Is it reasonable then to conjecture that she’s choosing to have late night conversations with friends, in what little time of the day she has left, over sleep­ing? both to inform her life and to feel less alone, because she needs friendship more than sleep to survive? That somehow her performances are a reified preference for connection over the body’s selfish need for functioning. Wow. I wonder how she justi­fies her magic. She must be very tired. I wonder if she knows.

And I’m not saying that IU knows exactly what’s been going on regarding me and the dreams. You could ask her. I’m not say­ing that if you DM’d her that she’d answer, let alone remember. It would be a cute joint effort, but you don’t need to all band together and organize it right here in this thread. What I can say for sure is that these visits between me and IU were teaching me. Was it Kierkegaard who said, ‘Sleeping is the height of genius?’ Oh who am I kidding.

A double-headed signpost stood before me, diverging into two knotted trails that mounted a knoll, a loose forest on the right, a drying swamp to the left. Ahead I could see how both options led to the same place, a great modern house. Unlike that crossroads meme, the decision was a false promise.

The house stood atop a hill and was sleeker than a mansion, with wide clear glass windows rendered like an aching hole in the darkness; it resembled in heart, if not in appearance, a half-open grand piano. The structure seemed to resonate with itself under a slanted roof, further revealing the back-reaching spinal curvature of the frame and was crowned in the middle by a hooded terrace. Think aesthetically the house from Parasite, except with a dark academia tinge in classical synergy to this musical chord. The grounds were castled trim with gartered walls, rife sometimes­stone crenellations giving a haunted church. When not stone it was dirt, mud, warped wood, and caping moss. This all gave the impression of a hierarchy of care which diminished into bony hedges and unfruiting trees. Clouds pulled down the low sky, and standing on the terrace was a figure whose posture marked the whole place with a gothic technostalgia. I’m not making this up.

Well. And this strange creature—my impression was that they held power. Their silhouette rippled from the wind of a cape or scarf or dress, something all black and of the night. Their posture was firm and unaffected. They haunted the structure like a gar­goyle would, only there was thin movement and so also a pressure, given clearly that they were aware of me. There’s a phrase I remember from some legendary in Pokémon: ‘<name> is exerting its pressure!’ In the game it makes you use up your PP. In my dream, it placed me on the margins of the story.

The figure either permitted my stay or found it amusing. Either way, I made my way up the steps with the labyrinthian sen­sation that some terrible truth was closing in on me, and to find it would require my being lost to its power. That I was to deliver something: a message, a gift—I didn’t know what and must’ve forgotten, just as I’d forgotten which choice I made—only com­pounded the problem. And I’m not sure how to express this, but I think I heard notes trembling from the house. This wasn’t a nor­mal sound. It was like the resonances were shifted up before an accordion lilted to bass. The song had a violent, computer-gener­ated precision.

Do you ever wake up from a vividness and have the inexplica­ble feeling the following day that you’d only recently gone to sleep, and that these waking moments were the illusion? That some­thing more complete was stalking you? Dread is really about some powerless lack of understanding. We dread the truth outstripping us and our inability to fully comprehend it. The house was dark, and the time was night, and I dreaded what I was after.

Beyond everything sweet and resonant in her voice, its clarity and angelic highness or control, beyond her sound’s timeless familiarity, and just past how she seemed to look at you, there was sadness. And sadness is the holy emotion. Sadness promises every­thing—it recapitulates hope; it’s the guarantee. If you’ve known sadness, then you understand. So please know that I entered that place with one thing on my mind: a completely unplaceable loss. I had lost the grail. I was chasing the sorrow of eternity in each moment.

The first steps in that place ushered forth a realm of sugges­tion. Heavy curtains were reworked out of quilts. My steps folded dead grass through the floorboards, and I saw visions of jungles as hot waves, alive and quickened by human abandonment. I watched as vines were already in the late stages of urban reclama­tion. This materiality slipped through my grasp. The foyer was skipped in time, upturned with a clockworked patina. It reminded me of those sci-fi horrors where you’ve rocketed your­self too far ahead of the future, gazing out the window with impo­tence until you land, and the future is a wasteland not unlike the distant past. Entropic visions of Zen desiccation, all-and-nothing, yes, the whole thing is peaceful once you’ve accepted it.

Not that these visions lasted for long. I’m not sure ‘lasted’ is apt. It was like those flip-book animations with a school pack of sticky-notes. There may be the illusion of chronicity, but when you hold and flip through it yourself, it always gets stuck the moment before your thumb has recalibrated to let the right time go. I’m writing of just that moment of accidental stuckness, or when you seem to look up at the second-hand and your brain has

filled the gap to reduce the blur. This is a tested perceptual bias, and however miniscule the error may seem, it provides crucial evi­dence. When we are awake, everything changes to accommodate the lie of constancy. I shudder to think what it could mean if this lie continues in our sleep.

The first door to my left had an empty room behind it.

The second door opened to a hallway, and the ceiling was too low and sinking lower. My family was waiting down there in the kitchen. They wanted to talk. I didn’t see any of this, yet it was a given. They were waiting past the shadows to guilt me to stay.

The third room to my left was a cornered gallery. A conch shell called me. The room was vital and bright like a child’s rain boots, or sun rays seeping through a hazy sky. Warmth abounded, as did the sweetness of chlorine, and the rug swam in a tropical turquoise. Two chairs hid a dormant fireplace by the far wall.

In the center of the room, just floating there, gyrating, collect­ing and threading and passing itself, was the ocean. I could hear the susurrus of waves and feel the cool air. The water not only comprehended itself, but also its distortions interpreted space. You’ll never see the same wave again. A rainbow formed in the twisting image, compromising its simplicity. The liquid rested while awake; it was unblemished and translucently revealed the underside of its shape, its lack of container, and projected itself across the walls to appear even more unbounded and absorbing. It floated with a logic that taught me things about the world. It sprayed lightly onto my skin. I knew that if I were to touch the mass I’d be caught in this logic, maybe with no way to escape.

I spent a long time there before I was able to leave. The after­glow threatens my core memories. It’s strange to know that place, maybe forever, and to still fail at offering it to you—it was sublime by its very domesticity. I was very sad to see it go. My ocean in my room.

I returned to the foyer. The ceiling was loftier than I’d remem­bered, though the pristine nature of the marble—like it had been laid out only the night before—was familiar. It had changed since the start of the dream, but I forgot this. Charcoal gray walls con­tributed to the feeling that it was less a home than maybe a place of ceremonial posturing. Everything was far too clean. However, there was a single wound: a leak. A stream formed across the ground. The floor was completely level, so I followed the strip of water down a corridor and through the heart of the house, passing doors like lotteries unscratched and trusting the slice of water to divine my path. Finally, I came upon a spiral staircase and saw water frozen in time, having once traveled the whole length of steps.

Well, okay. I thought the same thing you’re thinking, that is, ‘The leak must be coming from upstairs.’ Only I had an impulse to place my right foot at the base of the ice and found that it was actually a laminar current. When I broke the flow, the water retreated up the stairs as if time were reversing. However, time still beat forward. The water couldn’t have been magnetically attracted, because what pooled around my foot wasn’t rerouting up the stairs. I had severed a connection that, without a chain, could not find its way home.

Blocking the current was a perversity. I lifted my foot. The water performed the strangest swirling motion, like it was con­templating a full thought before righting itself and creeping up the stairs. From there it locked back into its laminar flow. If I’m describing this strangely—the water didn’t have any character, it was more that by observing it, I was granted insight into the higher consciousness that I seem to be continually alluding to; it was a law of nature being expressed. I climbed the spiral.

She was waiting there at the top of the stairs, standing in a pool that twisted with her figure, swirling around and around her head, and her eyes were closed.

I hadn’t been happier to see her in who knows how long. I felt that with her before me, I’d be okay. We’d escape together. We’d help one another, and I’d truly be of use.

“Ji-eun,” I said. Nothing. “IU.”

She opened her eyes. “IU.” I smiled as the water, awakened by that word, crashed down from the heavens.

She returned the smile before speaking my name. I would like to say that we hugged, but, dear reader, some things are more romantic with the wait.

“We have to get out of here,” I said.

Her eyes were a web, coy to catch the light in them. She said, “No. Not yet. I was looking for something,” I wanted to know her memories. “What was it—“

She traced a triangle in the air. Another inverted, larger, behind it. And then a third upright again. All one fluid motion. And the word as blessing danced on her lips. She looked skyward, or towards the ceiling, and then the ceiling vibrated, and dust

rained in conversation. (Btw, I googled for the symbol she drew; my best guess is that it’s the Merkabah? Merkava? I couldn’t ask her this during the dream because I’d never seen or heard of the symbol before.)

“We can’t leave just yet,” she said, walking deeper. She stopped and glanced back at me. I was waiting to test things, though we all knew I was destined to follow her.

We made our way by groping through the hallway. It was anciently dark: Cimmerian, Stygian, Acheronian, or like the period those words come from. The ceiling shook again, and now the walls were groaning with it.

Then there were these sounds—like the cries of animals threaded in metal. They spattered the corners of darkness, slowly growing, reinforced in orebody echoes.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, undisturbed.

The screeching and creaking of living minerals were fungi of contradiction. From all directions they came to threaten us, oppressed our sense of space, confounded reality. I pressed beside her and could feel her warmth.

“You’re so important here,” she continued. “You’re the light.”

“What?”

“You reveal what I can’t otherwise see. I’ll prove it.” Over the last minute, there’d been a steady though virtually imperceptible improvement in my vision. She took a step back, and the illumina­tion remained. She grabbed my arm and pulled me with her— causing shadows to recede. I looked at my torso but couldn’t see any glow.

We walked on until we found a fork in the hall. The ground, might I add, was unmistakably traced with the yellow lines of an endless highway, and this was perfectly natural; we were headed forward in the right lane. I turned to discuss what to do when a clopping came regularly from the darkness ahead. A bearded gray goat materialized, with a single horn centered upon its head. Its horn was goldened and curved and crusted with blue lichen. The goat waited on us; it recognized our needs before turning back into the darkness for us to follow.

We walked for longer than dreams should last.

The nightmare spaces we visit in dreams are the worst when they seem familiar. Once I was dreaming that I’d been living in a house much like my own, only it was partially outside or blended the in and out in some Wonkafied greenhouse—if Wonka’s obses­sion was entomology and stomach churning. Adorning each wall of the dream were the most ornate, detailed, predacious webs. They stuck and coated everything, their egg sacks hung sticky and voluptuous; dust and fatty putrid yellows and rotting carcasses coalescing, and this had been where I was living; this was home, where I had to breathe. It was the feeling of taking a bite of bread only to turn it over and see deep gray-blue spores sinewing the loaf. There is, with one’s gag, the doom of being knowingly infected, or being sick any action you are to take. Our present moment was not like those dreams—I had no idea yet the invisible nature of my vulnerability. But the encroaching doom was some­thing of the same.

We walked on through that corridor, walked in the direction of the sound of the one-horned goat, moved until the architecture

of reality was threatened. The unigoat had a screeching sort of bleat which mimicked a baby in the middle of being mauled. It was communicating. The screams were pointed and affirming. My spirit guide would be a goat: a trash-eating omniscience. It’s bone­antenna like a sextant; it was the only thing we could make out of the creature in the poorness of light. More than once the goat bumped into a wall with its horn before righting itself. I fancied the groans doubled as echolocation, horn as cat whisker, the weapon only an excuse for a tool. The goat had been created, evolved maybe, for the very purpose of guidance in the dark. Those plastic-predator noises (which hadn’t stopped since we entered the hallway) didn’t seem to scare this goat; they were, in all honesty, less abrasive than the goat’s communication.

I wanted to protect the goat. I don’t know. It’s hard to write about him, because I think the goat was made from me, at least that’s how I feel now. The goat represented temerity in wander­lust. He was felicitous yet prone to melancholy. He explored but also submitted to the unknown, and I loved him—in that fearful moment I did. Thinking back now, the dumb brute, my goat, that sorry creature… He was nothing more than a lighthouse with a burnt-out beacon.

It should be noted, while there’s still time, that our goat was to be the least strange thing that happened that night.

And how to explain the creatures that lay ahead and behind us? There’s was a world less of suffering than informational bed­lam. They weren’t courting evil but rather embodying a sensory overload that made morality the stuff of noise. They were entities

whose modality of thought might resemble a panic attack, and they laughed the way we shudder.

Just when it was past unbearable, the hallway cleaved wide like a gator’s wind-drawn maw. And a mirrored shadow approached. This image petrified the goat as it let out its last wail—oh that sor­rowful wail—before turning around, desperately charging past us towards whence it came, deep into the memory of things. All was silent. I could hear my skin prickle as the shiver shocked through my body.

The new shadow in the hallway innervated into the most familiar form. That THING before me. Fuck. It had her rounded eyes. It had her face, her figure. I couldn’t bear to look at IU, though I felt her skin heat viciously against mine.

“What is that?” She said.

“What do you mean?” The thing was already moving. “That’s you.” At the time, this made sense.

“No.” She gripped my hand tightly, backing away. “That’s not me.”

The sounds from the walls encroached pandemonium. Everything was bursting. Before us was the splitting image of her—recursive parallel, a refraction of a reflection, all to be symmetry, mirrorrim.

She, IU’s double, smiled with perfectly normal teeth, and what would’ve been so tender upon her face twisted with the uncanny straightness of a line. A phrase kept repeating in my mind: ‘We don’t belong. We don’t belong.’ We had traveled too far to fit the narrow confines of this house—the act of treading organized our home.

“아이유,” The double said. “어디로 데려가려는 거야?”

I looked at IU, hoping she could oblige. The other was inflect­ing conversationally. Given the situation, this was more than we could expect. Then she stopped and pointed at IU—her hand shook—and stepped closer, only this seemed to agitate IU the way magnets repel identical poles. Each word spoken without any response exasperated her double.

“We have no time,” I said.

The walls were transmogrifying, shifting and semi-porous; they were awake and magmatic, and through liquidation the sources of those sounds did not reveal themselves entirely, but were sentient amalgams of trash, plastic, and animal gore.

I sensed a trailing of these daemonic jestering entities in the alternate and simultaneous directions of IU and her double, just as they became aware of our predicament. In order to save my loves, I stood between them, reaching to bring them together.

It was us and the entities—a nightmare I feared to have birthed. The entities represented everything I’d seen or overheard, the inverse and/or gatekeepers of post-postmodern tradition. Gen-Z malingering, tricking the collision box, glitching and clip­ping out-of-bounds. They were laughing, not at us, with a psy­chobabble-glossolalia-doublespeak tumbling into wordsalad-pun­portmanteau. Stranger still, I understood it. Read this poetically: everything allowed for everything and nothing. What allows for everything?

They understood me better than I understood myself. IU didn’t wait to process, she pulled my hand past her second image, whom I grabbed to make a chain. Our steps glowed wet with

light, and the light made the entities shriek and recede. It was translating the dark into a psychedelic color-wheel, all corona, barely perceptible, novel, strange, and I saw past dreams wound up and skewered in fractal otherness, until the light began reveal­ing another’s dreams, still others, and then something in-between, like infinity was a game created to astound us; what’s inside a black hole? Shut up! Shut up! Shut up. You don’t understand.

I lost the double’s grasp, and she called after us desperately, chased after us, and I ran merely because IU was running. Maybe I was sobbing. I couldn’t breathe. I found my footfalls tapering existence as reality buffered, skipped, and rhymed.

Beyond being lost, I continued to feel that just maybe we didn’t belong there. This is a theme I seem to be working through.

The current zone—like a hole out of my mind—was likely haunted, possibly an alternate dimension, nether realm, ethereal place, liminal space, though these are all reductive. I think it can be distilled to this: we had left culture. Meaning hadn’t been decentered, no, it was in the midst of eradication, regressed to sub­atomic proportions, and THAT is horror. IU’s double was the most tangible thing we found there, and yet she made no fucking sense. What lay past her promised something positively alien. In Sci-fi there are again rules for this. If you come across yourself after a time jump, one of the two you’s is erased to resolve the paradox. Reality’s code had caught its snag, and no debugging could solve the input error. The double merely signified our jour­ney past the event horizon.

Venture too far and encounter true madness as it materializes: the Skinwalker (alien), Rakshasa (demon), Kitsune (beast), Chaneques (doll), or Impundulu (vampire). The Wendigo and the wilds. It’s a parable too threatening to customs, forbidden to children and restricted in adults. Get lost. Go too far, and once you’re there and starving, go further until you transcend the abil­ity to recognize yourself, nagualism is not a choice but a forbidden knowledge, until you look down at the lake, and instead of recog­nizing the creature, it considers anthropophagy. Howling is heard for generations, yet we don’t question the sound. Do not forget yourself when you return. Too much is made of this in the wilder­ness, not enough in the wired.

She screamed my name in the darkness—was screaming, end­lessly, bringing me back with an unendurable fervor that grew to from my increasing attention. It mangled our reality to complete blackness. “Lee Ji-eun!” I called helplessly then, just as now. “I’m with you!”

Unfortunately, here’s where I must pull back. I went there, but I can’t take you. Not from this thread. I’m sorry. What fol­lowed is quite literally unspeakable, so that I shall only gesture at the abscission. The images and sounds torment me alone.

At one point, I woke up gasping and willed myself back to bed —feeling the weight of the covers and the dull back-eyed threat of light. Using the momentum of my pandiculation, I closed the blanket around my skull. I was swaddling my consciousness against the threshold of day, willing it to remain where my soul staked immaterial claim. I woke up, again, in the deepest,

strangest, most impossible dream I’d yet experienced. My eyes throbbed with nystagmus as time preened with achronality.

Our portal eventually led to what was once the center of the house, which was somehow structured like my YouTube recom­mendations. The tone had jittered now to something more man­ageable. I’m aware of how stupid all of this sounds. Doom­scrolling infinity, uncannily familiar, a labyrinth knotted in a pretty bow. Don’t think about it—feel its vapidity.

IU said, “I think that all music is extending the conversation.”

“What?”

“Artistic, musical references, the things shared with me by my friends and family. So when I write lyrics, I don’t know if you could even call them my words.” She shot her neck towards the stairs. She was talking over my concern. Even calling her name made no impact.

Her head twitched. “Oh, my ideal type.” She smiled with a blush. “Everyone always asks me that, you’d think I’d be prepared. I guess it’s a secret.” I pulled her arm. Was she caught in a record­ing, or perhaps hypnotized? Maybe radio-waves trapped her in TV dead zones.

I knew she could see me in the corner of her eyes, insofar as her eyes were real. If she believed I was there, then she would understand.

“Sometimes you must take a leap of faith, but most of all I’m lucky to be here. Talent only gets you so far, then you defer to fate.”

I muttered her words to myself compulsively. I looked at the stairs and remembered our stint in the hallway before the

unspeakable happened… Yes, she’d been running from herself. Now the space was empty of her double, so why did it feel like she was speaking to some third party? She behaved like she was caught in a compilation of interviews, her presence splitting. Meanwhile, I was demoted to a mere fan—how could I not take it personally?

“Please, can I help?” I asked, knowing she wouldn’t hear me.

“I’m not sure that I sing for myself. The job of an artist maybe is to forget about yourself, or to become yourself so deeply that you’ve channeled everyone you’ve ever met, or to express the things everyone already knows.

The older I get—well I’m not so sure about the meaning of art, but I think it has something to do with communication, of finding a common language that we can’t reach otherwise. When singing, I’m allowed to say what no one can utter aloud. Maybe it’s because they’re embarrassed.” She laughed shyly. “It’s a cross I’m willing to bear, to hide behind. Honestly, it’s the easiest thing —it’s a gift you’ve given me—I can be sentimental when times are hard, when you’ve spent the day sacrificing for your family or community… Oh, the truth is, even words like ‘fan’ and ‘celebrity’ leave a sour taste in my mouth. It’s difficult not to sound ungrate­ful. You understand that that’s not my intention. We’re different, yet in every way that matters, we’re the same.”

Her closed eyes were lost in a REM ecstasy. As I gazed upon them, I was overcome with a strange vision: a few dozen screens were circling us in entirety, accelerating so that the screens ani­mated into one world that bathed us in blue light. The reality of the vision was a reversion of absolute data, the truth hidden in the habits of the awake. I was at once the center of every monitor,

every lens and pair of eyes, pulling myself in a mise en abyme. What was I here for? The Grail! And if she was—and if this was what some part of her soul always faced—

Then the worst ghastly shriek gutted the air. Whirling sonic violence pierced and held me back in that black hole of a house. The sound woke me to my displacement, like air rushes to fill a seal. Stupefied, I walked towards the noise of the scream which was so familiar, and away from my IU. Still, I heard her speak. The shrieks fought her voice, and soon the sound of steps became audible.

“My fans are the most important part of my life. I mean it. They somehow understand exactly what I need without being asked.”

I crept up the stairs, regularly glancing back as IU channeled her history from the room’s center, as a statue argues for space, for time. I felt to be at the heart of a collapsing moment, as if I was the dead-eye intersection of ballistic missiles, as IU’s sounds grew fainter, the hidden screams more hysteric, desperate; as above, so below.

And there was a choice to make. It wasn’t just inevitable; the woman standing before me, once more, the woman screaming on the stairs in her naked terror was perfectly identical to the woman I left and still loved. There before me was the woman I’d forgot­ten. Had I been lucid at any moment during this dream or night­mare or prophetic vision, or if she’d imparted to me some mantic truth as a sibyl imposing from the upper baileys, it would’ve been that IU and the woman before me were entirely different, no mat­ter how much they argued that they were the same.

“Dowa—dowajuseyo!” she, the double, screamed with inflec­tion, the sound ringing in my foreign ears. I let out an unexpected sob and could feel my body shivering with real sweat (recall the blanket over my real eyes). I stormed the last few steps as she came bolting past, scraping skin on mine, headed towards what was once the center foray, and I followed where she came as if expect­ing—as if hell was awake and closing in on her—that was the— there was a fear not unlike a life-threatening collision—just think­ing about the fear now is letting in death, it was as if I—see now I feel disloyal to myself, but unfair to you and what I owe, tempted to delete this all but fuck could I even do any better? Do you want to know what it was like? You don’t.

I thought I could be brave, only the moment humbles all belief in the ability to believe. There is a fear that makes breathing voluntary control. The fear doesn’t end when you wake up but rather goes off living, having somehow escaped—having been a fact you were keen never to admit to yourself except here when there’s no way to collapse the truth, when you are the truth. When the dread, examined, is the core prism of your identity.

She shrieked again, this time so loud it shook the world, and not to underplay my absolute impotence to help in this (or let’s face it, any) situation. And there was a dominant gust of wind that chilled everything selfless in me, and a door slammed shut, isolating her from whence she came, echoing from far, far, further away, and the digits of millions flashed before my retinas, holo­graphic and trophic, vitrified on the screen as from a nuclear blast. I realized then that the horror IU and her double were dealing with was blindingly, shit-in-your-pants unfathomable, which

caused my sob to spasm and consume my breath for the threat was already there with me, and yes you’re again ahead of me: there she was shrieking at herself. And IU was carrying on her business while Ji-eun appeared slaughterous, knowing one must succumb under the synechdotal death drive.

According to Google, psychosis signifies a ‘disconnect from reality.’ Based on this definition, dreaming is a form of psychosis, Q.E.D. One interesting study from Mota and colleagues (2016) found that psychotic lucid dreamers reported control of their dreams approximately three times the rate of non-psychotic lucid dreamers (~70% compared to 23%). They give the explanation that psychosis enhances the experience of internal reality to the detriment of the external, and through convolution they further argue that lucid dreaming is particularly dangerous for those already at risk for psychosis. I need not point out the succulent irony of this.

We have extensively explored the growing paradox by which celebrity steers the ship of cultural meaning through their sublimation/subjugation to us viewers, and I don’t intend to feed repetition. Reality made and done in again, our love story is one mysteriously of identification yet novel otherness; nor is it for nothing that she and I are two who, under normal circumstances due to location, class, language, age, talent, beauty, etc., would never have met. Well then, to tie everything into a pretty bow, my point is merely that it has *always* been the psychotic who gener­ate new reality. We are autopoietic—the divine intelligence neces­sary to escape before extending the real. Have you ever tried imag­ining someone who doesn’t exist? Or are you senile, tethered to

the creations of others? You’re telling me you feel depressed when a show ends? How do you think it feels to be the loving architect? The actor whose life was your mere model.

IU and Ji-eun were intertwined, and I was the link binding them to this reality. Maybe fans are the multiverse, and elsewhere they were saved. Regardless, I knew what I must do. She has a live rendition of an English ballad that I quite like. Actually, this song may as well be the theme song for our story. It comes to me some­times in her melancholic voice:

‘Oh, I built a world around you

Oh, you had me in a dream,

I lived in every word you said—

The stars had aligned, I thought that I’d found you

And I don’t wanna love somebody else’

For ease of googling, see the titular line just above. The song’s beauty is extraordinary when you consider the all-Korean crowds she performed it to in English. I fancy that the sentiment couldn’t be expressed in a known language. In my world of the final verse, the first line was a hope, the second line would become a mantra, the final is a prayer:

‘Oh, I thought that I could change you

Oh, I thought that you would be the greatest story that I tell

I know that it’s time to tell you it’s over

But I don’t wanna love somebody else.’

I remembered that I was dreaming. I had control. I could put a stop to this madness. Merely run the code, a simple invocation. First I would visualize. The world before me, the hallways with yellow road lines, the doors upon doors, the ocean in my room, the family past my vision, the unigoat, the woman duplicating her umbration. Second, I would manipulate. God-willing. Flutter my self-powered wings, flight as pure Ghibli metaphor for freedom, freedom undoing my reality-tether, howling like a wendigo. What could I do except find the latent disappointment in me, all the repressed hopes and calls unanswered? Three, I needed to admit it. I turned to IU. I gently pressed my forehead against hers. Oh, it was warmer, her skin softer than I will ever feel in this world of the awake. She rested hers on mine. Her eyelids fluttered open, her gaze sinking into my skin. She couldn’t have known why I was crying, or maybe she knew exactly why and for that reason never betrayed the thought. I wanted to caress her face. I wanted to kiss her. IU. And maybe I would’ve if only Ji-eun wasn’t there to see it.

Finally, I had to relinquish my everything.

I loved our time together. There was time for such a love. Past, and past, and past, holds in this pretty face from moment to moment, to the last breath of recorded life; and all our futures have darkened fools the way to torrid time. Out, out brief candle! She’s but a ringing mirror, a real person, that struts and frets her second upon the screen, and then is heard forevermore. This is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying everything.

I closed my eyes to her sclera reflecting the truth of me. The last thing I saw of her was her vision that I would go right

on existing.

“Love is letting go, because letting go means you’ve finally understood you never should’ve had them to begin with,” IU, no, Ji-eun said to the audience. At least that’s what I imagine happened.

In the darkness, I felt the absence of breath on my skin. Ji­eun’s screams had stopped. There was only one again.