Don’t give up on me

EUGENIE: Your stories do come true, sometimes, then, that’s what you’re saying.

RYDER: I don’t have stories, I have just that one story, that I have been writing for ages. And in the case of Barry, I’ve written him for so long and I’ve known him so well that he did come to me, but I let him go.

EUGENIE: If you need him so much, why let him go?

RYDER: You are intrigued by this.

EUGENIE: To say the least.

RYDER: You’ve never heard that phrase: ‘Everything changes once we identify with being the witness of the story, instead of the actor in it’?

EUGENIE: It’s from Ram Dass. Is that what you are doing with your stories— story?

RYDER: I haven’t accessed the enlightenment of Ram Dass no, hey, don’t ridicule me! I’m trying to be open with you.

EUGENIE: I was not mocking you. I was laughing about the fact that you’re asking me if I have ever heard about Ram Dass while, according to you, any knowledge I possess comes from you making me up.

RYDER: You are catching on. But to be candid with you, I don’t need Barry to be real and to love me. I need him to love you.

EUGENIE: Does Barry love me?

RYDER: I’m not supposed to say anything to you, otherwise we will lose the… tension between you two but—

EUGENIE: Oh come on. We are on the deserted slope of a volcano right now, in an alternate dimension.

RYDER: … Buut it’s fine. You’ll forget everything afterwards anyway.

EUGENIE: After what?

RYDER: Focus, Eugenie. I do need Barry to love you. From day one.

EUGENIE: How did you manage that, seeing our different.. styles, birth years, I don’t know. The major differences between me and Barry?

RYDER: I made you extremely beautiful. It fixes all the problems. You don’t dress very well, but you are strikingly beautiful.

EUGENIE: Did you make me beautiful because you are ugly?

RYDER: Ah crap, I forget that you cannot see me. Yes, that’s the reason I made you beautiful. I am an ugly woman.

EUGENIE: It must not be easy to write a character who is beautiful when you are not, I mean, how are you able to adopt the perspective of a beautiful person so easily?

RYDER: Seriously? How about, writing from the point of view of a super hero? It’s called creative writing.

EUGENIE: Or writing teenagers with such confidence when you have never been a high school teacher before.

RYDER: Your memories might be scrambled, but my own, about being an adolescent, are still fresh. And as I have said before, fortune has blessed me. Some people made me feel beautiful enough, more beautiful than when I see myself with my own eyes.

EUGENIE: You have been loved.

RYDER: I am loved, right now.

EUGENIE: And yet you are bored and lonely.

RYDER: I am loved by the wrong people I think.

EUGENIE: What a mean thing to say! And an ungrateful one too.

RYDER: Forgive me! Maybe that’s not it, maybe it’s not the wrong people who love me, but people who love me the wrong way. It’s not important. What is important is that maybe Barry just showed up in my life to tell me that writing magic and sigil magic exist. That magic exists in general. That’s a possibility.

EUGENIE: It reminds me of that one time when I found an earring on the ground, outside, and it was so pretty, very minimalist, just a hoop, just the kind I like. I looked at it and kept it in my pocket because I didn’t have enough pierced holes in my ears to wear it. All my earring holes were already taken by other earrings.

RYDER: How many earring holes do you have on each ear?

EUGENIE: You don’t know that?

RYDER: I don’t know i… might have written it at some point a long time ago but… this information must not have made it to my most recent drafts.

EUGENIE: Well I thought I didn’t have enough free spots anyway, to wear that lovely earring I picked up from the ground.

RYDER: What an episode of your life it must have been.

EUGENIE: Let me tell it! Anyway, at some point I looked in the mirror and found out that the earring I thought that I had found, I had actually lost from an existing hole. It had been mine the whole time, misplaced, outside of my attention.

RYDER: Look at you coming up with a real memory.

EUGENIE: Was that a real memory?

RYDER: Who the fuck knows, Eugenie. Soo, whatever is meant for you will find you, right?

EUGENIE: Or you already have it. You already have everything.

RYDER: Or if you act like you do, already have it, it will find you. Like a magnet.

EUGENIE: OR!! You don’t really want to be in space, you just want to sit in the spaceship satisfied that you made it there and delight there, with your ass on the seat of the rocket, so you don’t risk being disappointed when you do arrive to real space and it’s not as mind-blowing as you thought.

RYDER: Who doesn’t crystallize their dreams?

EUGENIE: I don’t crystallize my dreams.

RYDER: that’s true, but if I crystallize my dreams, it’s because they are likely to become true like, decades after I dreamed them.

EUGENIE: You are saying you fed your dream-bag enough that it burst, eventually.

RYDER: There are many ways to picture what’s called writing magic.

EUGENIE: And sigil magic?

RYDER: Look, I met an exorcist once, a medium, a seer. She channeled a spirit for me into a stone carved as a skull.

EUGENIE: Excuse me, she did what?

RYDER: Excuse ME, I didn’t interrupt you during your absurd tale of the black skinny monster visiting you in the night!

EUGENIE: But I’m not sure that you believed me.

RYDER: We’re just going to have to want to believe, Eugenie. But yes, that clairvoyant lady described to me that the spirit inside the skull was a deceased person named Lily, who had been alive in the world and who had never found a romantic partner during her lifetime. Lily had, however, been an artist, she had drawn the same man for many years with pencils and charcoals on paper and, after her death, she found that man.

EUGENIE: Jesus Christ. Lily is the name of my LED ghost at home!

RYDER: Yes, a late addition.

EUGENIE: Is Lily a Black woman?

RYDER: Why are you asking that?

EUGENIE: I don’t know, I always had a feeling.

RYDER: I’m not gonna lie, when I’m high as fuck, I have the feeling that Lily is a Black woman too.

EUGENIE: Do you think Lily knew that she would meet that man she drew over and over?

RYDER: Eventually?

EUGENIE: Yes.

RYDER: I’m not the psychic here.

EUGENIE: Not a teacher, not a cosmonaut, not a nurse, not a psychic.

RYDER: I’m a writer.

EUGENIE: And you are saying that writing makes magic happen. That drawing makes magic happen.

RYDER: Images, giving outside shape to what’s inside, does. Writing and dreaming, yes. Or, from your last question about Lily and her repetitive portraits: the future has already happened and it’s communicating with us, that’s another likelihood.

EUGENIE: Is that why everyone makes fun of me and my vision of time, because you created me this way? Like, you and your bizarre notion of time?

RYDER: Sleeping, for example, is like embarking on a machine to travel through time, to breakfast.

EUGENIE: So sleeping is a way to avoid going through your feelings and fast forward to later, to a better future. Something for cowards who don’t want to face the day.

RYDER: I can’t deny it. If you could feel the void I feel sometimes, you’d be less quick to judge.

EUGENIE: Have you ever seen the future?

RYDER: Yes, of course! After Barry, I understood that the future speaks to me all the time. It’s hard to discern from normal life noise and sights, though, because the future doesn’t always speak with the aim to say some important things. Sometimes the future just wants to say, ‘I’m here, you can hear me, Listen’ People tend to be spiritual and think that the invisible only drops bombs, while the truth is, most of all, invisible things just want you to trust.

EUGENIE: God almighty, you know it all, don’t you?

RYDER: No, stop that. I don’t know anything. All I’m doing is speculate.

EUGENIE: But I see you gave me your weird vision of time.

RYDER: I don’t control the way you come out of my mind. Eugenie, have you ever killed a spider?

EUGENIE: What?

RYDER: Next time you kill a spider, think about that spider. She was born, from an egg. Maybe transported on her mother’s back. She ended up in your bath tub, and you killed her, because you were too lazy to remove her inside a cup with a sheet of paper for the manoeuvre, and too lazy to release her into the wild. You just wanted to take a shower and go about your day. So now you hold in your mind her birth, through imagination, and in your hands her trespass, from your lack of oneness.

EUGENIE: It takes some skills and some time, to capture a spider for release.

RYDER: It does, I mean, it takes some motivation.

EUGENIE: Why are you telling me this?

RYDER: I want you to think about that spider. Life can stop at anytime, any literal time. I want you to think that when you take a life, you take your own.

EUGENIE: Is that from Dune? Not the book… the movie adaptation of it.

RYDER: The last occasion on which I killed a spider because I just wanted her removed from my sight, it was surely my last. I paid dear price for it. Death hunted me later on before the sun went down, told me, ‘are you inflicting death around here, little lady? Because that’s my job’

EUGENIE: Death actually called you little lady?

RYDER: I don’t know. It was powerful, though.

EUGENIE: Why are you telling me this? What does that spider have to do with anything?

RYDER: Nothing, I’m sorry. It doesn’t have to do with anything. I just can’t help it. I was only thinking, perhaps, I should try to instill some extra values to you while you are in that state, like, rewiring your brain. I care a lot about animals.

EUGENIE: And I don’t give a crap about that vegan Buddhist bullshit, I will continue to kill as many spiders as I want.

RYDER: Of course. Don’t worry about it.

EUGENIE: Very well then.

RYDER: …

EUGENIE: Ryder with a Y?

RYDER: Yes?

EUGENIE: When you are quiet, I’m picturing you jotting something down for your next idea, in your book of ideas, in your notebook of brainstorming.

RYDER: I’m scribbling.

EUGENIE: When you say writing and sigil magic, do you mean manifestation.

RYDER: Yes I mean manifestation, by all means. Projection, The Secret, intention, power, life itself. Whatever we call it, it is a very dangerous magic to manipulate.

EUGENIE: Because things come true, as in the old adage, ‘be careful what you wish for’

RYDER: GIRL.

EUGENIE: You sound like—

RYDER: Girl, that’s the story of my life right there.

EUGENIE: I was going to say, you sound like my cunty inner voice, or my dead grandma.

RYDER: Listen to yourself.

EUGENIE: Alright, alright.

RYDER: Let me tell you something. The whale episode, it’s not just from that film, The Big Blue, it’s also because when I was a little girl, I had this strange tingle and impression, that I was lying motionless on a flat disk falling fast into a big cylinder, into darkness. My arms and legs were heavy and light at the same time like I was made of burning thread and ice cold iron at the same time, and the falling felt like it was going into water. That’s when I started thinking that I could wake up from a coma in a strange bed, one day, and that all would be an illusion. I was terrified of it at first but, then, after some time, I taught myself to enjoy it.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

EUGENIE: Like the bull thing, like, Tom, the bull

RYDER: Tim.

EUGENIE: Tim the bull.

RYDER: Or like your sleep paralysis monster-turned-friend.

EUGENIE: That’s right.

RYDER: I have never written anything about your sleep paralysis monster.

EUGENIE: But you have written about the bull…

RYDER: Perhaps at some point, but I don’t remember for sure.

EUGENIE: How is it possible that you don’t recall even what you wrote?

RYDER: Because I have written so goddamn much. Maybe you do exist, like Barry exists. But he’s gone now.

EUGENIE: Fine. But maybe I have taken a life of my own too.

RYDER: In a way you have, seeing how similar I have become to you, which still gives me the chills.

EUGENIE: It’s a bit harrowing.

RYDER: Maybe the same has happened to me and I’ve also taken a life of my own. Maybe from some other writer or cartoonist who made me up in my own drop of water.

EUGENIE: So if the universe doesn’t care if you’re scared to death or desperately wishing, as long as you glorify and throw your energy towards something enough, how come the universe hasn’t made anything bad occur to you, anything you worried about sufficiently?

RYDER; I am stronger than that.

EUGENIE: No, Ryder, you are not stronger than that. You are just what you said: fortunate, lucky, spoiled, with your army of good stars. Some people hold the belief that they don’t incarnate on Earth without having their life already planned and written, even discussed in details with a bunch of guardian angels and spirit guides like in a conference room.

RYDER: Here you go. It must be nice to have opinions.

EUGENIE: It must be nice to have real memories, too. That spider you regret so much killing, she had probably agreed about that death beforehand.

RYDER: That’s plausible.

EUGENIE: Which didn’t prevent the Grim Reaper from harassing you the next day.

RYDER: You mean the very day. Yes, I believe our contracts intertwined, the spider’s and mine.

EUGENIE: In order to come to life in this world, you have to sign like… a soul contract.

RYDER: Confer with your guides and angels and ghosts and sign it on a paper. Voilà.

EUGENIE: You are French.

RYDER: I’m certainly not from Indiana.

EUGENIE: But I don’t think I have signed any kind of soul contract regarding my existence.

RYDER: Not to my knowledge, no.

EUGENIE: And Barry did?

RYDER: Barry did what?

EUGENIE: Sign a soul contract, with you involved, as his creator?

RYDER: Don’t be silly, Barry wasn’t created by me. He must have existed this whole time doing his own thing, and I must have been aligned with him on my incarnation path.

EUGENIE: Listen to yourself. Barry and the spider, both part of your Earth contract.

RYDER: …

EUGENIE: Why are you giggling like a child?

RYDER: Because soon after I met Barry, the real one, he caught from my bathtub the biggest spider I had ever seen outside of an exotic zoo. I couldn’t even have showered her down the drain if I had wanted to or if I had been alone in front of that issue, because she was too large for the drain.

EUGENIE: Barry lived with you like he lived with me.

RYDER: By the way, zoos are—

EUGENIE: I’m sure, bad, bad, bad. Bad zoos. Save yourself the trouble of your argument against zoos.

RYDER: Fascinating, right?

EUGENIE: Barry’s name, the Barry who came to you, his name wasn’t Barry, wasn’t it?

RYDER: No.

EUGENIE: What was his name?

RYDER: I will not tell you that.

EUGENIE: And did you ever call him Barry by accident?

RYDER: One… one time. Don’t laugh!

EUGENIE: Come on! You have to laugh about this!

RYDER: Okay, maybe you’re right.

EUGENIE: Are you one of those people who ‘write drunk, edit sober’?

RYDER: Is that a quote from that shitbag Bukowski, or that childish wanker Jack Kerouac?

EUGENIE: Hemingway. I’ve never read him, but I heard that phrase before.

RYDER: In the past, i might have been writing drunk an editing less drunk, but not anymore.

EUGENIE: You are a sober writer.

RYDER: It doesn’t mean that I am raw-dogging the process nor this crazy life, and neither should you.

EUGENIE: Is Barry a superhero in… real life too?

RYDER: He saved me, so he is capable, for sure, but he’s not a superhero. There are no mutants and super powers in my world.

EUGENIE: In your drop of water.

RYDER: Now you see why I have been so bored.

EUGENIE: He saved you like, from despair but also from that spider. Like in Titanic, forgive me but—

RYDER: Of course, He saved me—

EUGENIE: … ‘He saved me in any way—

RYDER: … a person can be saved. I don’t even have a picture of him. He exists now only in my memory’

EUGENIE: … Only in my memory’ But you saw Barry, and you didn’t take a photo of him?

RYDER: No.

EUGENIE: So you don’t have proof of his actual materializing into your life?

RYDER: We don’t have proof of anything at all. Sometimes you see things, the truth, sometimes, you don’t.

EUGENIE: Wouldn’t you be obsessed with things that have a lot of… sea? By any chance?

RYDER: Yes, the whales, the turtle, the dolphins, the Pacific, the proteus—

EUGENIE: What’ s a proteus?

RYDER: A cave-dwelling salamander. That’s what people compare you to, because you like to live in the absence of light.

EUGENIE: That’s… charming. Hold on, what people, people who have read your story?

RYDER: No one has ever read my story.

EUGENIE: Nobody?

RYDER: Anyway, sorry for all those water creatures. A lot of my dreams need water to function, I apologize for that excess, Eugenie, I need water for things to flow from me through the invisible, to life. My main three astrological signs are all water signs. Solar, Lunar, Ascendant, all three of them.

EUGENIE: Yikes.

RYDER: I even have a stellium in one of those signs.

EUGENIE: Which one?

RYDER: … Scorpio.

EUGENIE: YIKES. Oh my God, yikes!

RYDER: There will be an albatross too, soon, you will see.

EUGENIE: You will write me more? Write Barry more?

RYDER: I will try my best, I swear. I want to, I long to, every second of the day. Initially I could only write at key moments of my schedule, like, after menstruating or if I was really sinking into hopelessness. I wrote in airports when I evacuated countries, I wrote when I fled, when I landed, all but one of my luggage missing, I wrote when I thought I would kill myself, I wrote when the ground dissolved under my feet.

EUGENIE: You wrote unhappy.

RYDER: I want to write happy, I know I can, Eugenie.

EUGENIE: So you barely even write.

RYDER: I’m not one of those people who can’t be happy or nitpick their happiness or second guess everything or are suspicious of merry moments, I soak happiness up when it comes to me, even if it lasts only half a day.

EUGENIE: So that’s how it’s taken you some twenty fucking years to figure out. Because you’re just… slow.

RYDER: Sometimes I write during retrogrades, conjunctions, moons, that used to be my routine, very sparse.

EUGENIE: I hate the moon.

RYDER: I hate the moon too.

EUGENIE: So you seldom write.

RYDER: One year ago, I started writing non-stop, it was so bananas. I guess I asked the universe to never stop writing, because I miss it when I don’t write. I asked and asked and asked. It’s the only mindful thing I can do, when I don’t operate in past or future, only present. I didn’t want to depend on celestial bodies or my hormones anymore. And the universe listened.

EUGENIE: Eywa had heard you.

RYDER: The Great Mother. Yes, all I asked was to become a real writer because writing is the only thing that makes me less bored and a little happier. Writing happens for me in the present, like vomiting.

EUGENIE: Like vomiting? Like, puking?

RYDER: Like throwing up, have you noticed? When you are throwing up, you are on a one-track-mind. In our overbooked modern days, it’s worth noting that being ill can trigger mindfulness.

EUGENIE: I’m sure that some people can throw up and multitask.

RYDER: I disagree with you. That’s why I think of writing as maïeutique.

EUGENIE: The Socratic word for midwifery of the Logos!

RYDER: Yeah, giving birth through discourse.

EUGENIE: My goodness, is writing painful to you?

RYDER: Writing is like the present, isolated from past and future but it’s cold, suffocating, lonesome. It’s lonely and painful. It can be a torture for me, the blank page, with my idea of what I want to write and the mission in my hands to give it life on the page, just like coexisting with the void.

EUGENIE: Do you have children?

RYDER: No.

EUGENIE: You only gave birth to… me and Barry. Siblings. The Great Mother.

RYDER: HEY I AM NOT YOUR MOTHER! Don’t make this awkward. I told you that you and Barry were never blood-related siblings.

EUGENIE: Blood related.

RYDER: I gave birth to this story, not to you and Barry.

EUGENIE: Do you wish for immortality?

RYDER: No I do not.

EUGENIE: Holy Molly, you are lying.

RYDER: Nevertheless, now, I write all the time, not just on moons or phases or ovulation. I have been heard. But it scares me, Eugenie.

EUGENIE: You’re saying this to me? I am in a coma, powerless, lying there like a vegetable, and some weird person is telling me that my entire life has been made up out of their sporadic writing activities, which could stop at any time, if you get sick of it, if a bird drops a heavy stone on you mid-flight and your head gets bashed, if you get murdered, if you are even just fed up and distracted—

RYDER: That’s the thing, though, I don’t get distracted anymore. First time I did write non-stop was on the big solar eclipse last year, it was a total eclipse, a ring of fire. But then, now, my wish has come true, just the way I asked for it to be, and writing has become what breathing is for me. It scares me because sometimes I feel like writing could swallow everything else around it, like the black hole on the face of your sleep paralysis visitor.

EUGENIE: Do you like your men submissive?

RYDER: What sort of a question is that?

EUGENIE: Do you or don’t you? We can talk like adults.

RYDER. Yes, and by yes I mean no. I like a bit of a foggy line

EUGENIE: A Threshold.

RYDER: A liminal space.

EUGENIE: How did I already know the answer to this? Oh wow, that’s why you have been bored and lonely! You don’t even recognize your own love language!

RYDER: You are more clever than I would have thought.

EUGENIE: I think what you are asking the universe is more than becoming a full-time writer.

RYDER: I know what you are implying and you are wrong, sorry. I don’t want anything else from my story to become true.

EUGENIE: But look, if you are praying to keep writing, to no longer be that lazy seldom writer, and you obtain it, writing will produce magic, and things might cross over again.

RYDER: Like what? Hobbes? Aliens?

EUGENIE: You don’t have aliens in your world?

RYDER: Sadly no.

EUGENIE: Mrai Moumous popping out of your story would make you less bored for sure.

RYDER: I will continue to write that story just because it cures my loneliness. Then I will see what happens. It has always been a life force, a life-juice, this thing coming out of me.

EUGENIE: I understand.

RYDER: All I want is to write and just trust the process. It must be something important in my soul contract.

EUGENIE: Yeah because I was going to ask you, why did you choose a love story?

RYDER: I didn’t choose. I’m serious, this thing is just trying to come out, to exist, and sometimes I feel like I am just a vessel for it.

EUGENIE: Possession.

RYDER: More like a haunting. It can happen that I match something I write with something personal in me, but at some other moments, I don’t know why I write what I write. I have learned to let go and accept it.

EUGENIE: Give me an example.

RYDER: Well, you and Barry, I should tell you, why things are so explosive between you. I am fascinated by loneliness, people who are eaten alive by it but would not move a finger to help themselves. I’m mesmerized by stories of people who have felt alone in the world for so long that they have given up and they forbid themselves to see the potential remedy for loneliness in others that they meet. And they fight it when it crosses their paths because they don’t want to regain hope, it’s too scary, the danger of having faith again is too risky, it could destroy them.

EUGENIE: It’s more frightening to hope than to dream in disillusion.

RYDER: For sure. But then when two people meet and they finally open up, and welcome the treasure of a real connection, then their hearts catch on fire and combust, their souls crack open and their want, their love become unstoppable.

EUGENIE: That example is weirdly specific and vague at the same time.

RYDER: It’s the plot of The Last of Us.

EUGENIE: I don’t know that movie either.

RYDER: It’s a video game.

EUGENIE: The last thing you said was rather making me think of that song from Pulp, Seductive… Seductive some name I can’t put my finger on at the moment.

RYDER: …

EUGENIE: Do you know it? I’m asking just because I want to be polite.

RYDER: Y… Yes, I like that song.

EUGENIE: I hate that band and that singer’s voice who sounds like he’s drooling all over his microphone, but I’m very much fond of that song, especially the line, ‘When the unmovable object / Meets the unstoppable force / There’s nothing you can do about it’

RYDER: …

EUGENIE: You sound perturbed. I mean your silence sounds pondering.

RYDER:…

EUGENIE: Ryder??

RYDER: I completely forgot about that song. Do you remember the title now?

EUGENIE: Oh, now you’re asking me about a memory that we don’t even share, that you don’t seem to have written into me?

RYDER: Do you know the title of the song, Eugenie?

EUGENIE: No, only the first half of it. Seductive something.

RYDER: That song is called Seductive Barry.

EUGENIE: Oh.

RYDER: It’s one of my favorite songs. Do you recall that other line, ‘How many others could handle it / If all their dreams came true’?

EUGENIE: Yes, and that other one, ‘And if this is a dream / Then I’m going to sleep—

RYDER: … I’m going to sleep / For the rest of my life’

EUGENIE: I heard that song on my way to here.

RYDER: You are full of shit.

EUGENIE: Why would I lie to you? I heard that song and also a swarm of bees, a very loud one, buzzing atrociously.

RYDER: Okay, I can see that happening. I heard that song for the first time on a very special occasion too.

EUGENIE: Why do you say that becoming a full-time writer scares you?

RYDER: Why?? I mean, do you see what’s already happening, everything overlapping, like our drops of water are sitting on a sheet of blotting paper?

EUGENIE: You are more a scaredy-cat than I am, Ryder.

RYDER: Definitely. All I’ve known all my life is fear.

EUGENIE: You can’t be serious.

RYDER: You should try to picture it, sometimes, constant fear. Everyone should, so they wouldn’t grab at any fixed superficial ideas in a rush. You know, last moon, I did a ritual, I burned a laurel leaf on which I wrote I am a fearless writer. I burned it on a new moon for intention with frankincense, copal and corn silk. Because I am so terrified of my writer dream coming true and the universe taking me so literally. And I don’t want it to become literally full-time.

EUGENIE: Like you want to continue having five minutes for a meal or to pee.

RYDER: You don’t understand, the danger of manifestation. If you say to the universe, ‘I want a new car’, the universe will crash your old one. If you say to the universe, ‘I want this completely different and more attractive face’, the universe will drop a bucket of acid on your head. I don’t want to lose my job, for instance.

EUGENIE: Your mysterious job?

RYDER: Yes. My job doesn’t make me happy, but I work with good people, and it makes me content and it makes me feel safe. It pays my bills, and more importantly, what the universe perhaps is unable to, or not meant to distinguish, it allows me to write with a roof over my head and no fear of becoming homeless and no worries to distract me out of writing.

EUGENIE: Seeing the use of the monetary component.

RYDER: Yes.

EUGENIE: You used to write in turmoil, now you wish to write in peace.

RYDER: Yeah.

EUGENIE: Perhaps writing costing you everything is a lesson from your soul contract.

RYDER: I’m not ready for it.

EUGENIE: Is that why we are here, discussing it?

RYDER: I will release you soon, I’m sorry I took so much of your time, Eugenie. I just needed someone to talk to.

EUGENIE: How much time have we been here?

RYDER: For me, an hour or so. For you… I can’t say. It could be any length of time.

EUGENIE: Jesus fucking Christ. Wait, Ryder, I have a question.

RYDER: Ask.

EUGENIE: I am… How can I put it? I am… immensely intrigued by why you keep shooting Barry.

RYDER: Oh my God.

EUGENIE: Yeah why?

RYDER: I…

EUGENIE: Don’t be shy.

RYDER: I’m not shy, I’m…

EUGENIE: Don’t be embarrassed.

RYDER: I’m not embarrassed, I’m… drafty about it.

EUGENIE: Don’t be heavy from your draft, it’s just between us girls.

RYDER: I don’t know why I made Barry this way. I have been asking myself the same question because it’s a bizarre thing in the story. I can’t alter it.

EUGENIE: And also a random thing.

RYDER: I will give you the same answer as before: I don’t always control the way you or Barry come out of my mind.

EUGENIE: Like I have this memory of Barry, when he first stayed in my bedroom. I was so exhausted by then, but I had got my medical certificate from my ex, you know, Chedli, at least, I wasn’t pressed by working anymore. I used to spend a lot of time in the corner of the bedroom, in the dark, listening to Barry breathing, because I was so scared shitless that he would die.

RYDER: Like a mother with a newborn.

EUGENIE: You see what I’m getting at?

RYDER: A little bit.

EUGENIE: One night, he managed to roll over on his side by himself.

RYDER: Hmfhf

EUGENIE: Stop laughing! I know what I sound like! You made that happen, not anyone else.

RYDER: I know, I know, continue.

EUGENIE: The reason why he pushed himself to change position and roll over is because he was in so much pain that lying on his back wasn’t possible anymore, and there was still like forty-five minutes before I could give him another sleeping pill. So he turned on his side and curled into a bean. I sat behind him, like, in a way, my sleep paralysis monster had done on our first encounter, and I just scratched his shoulder, for comfort. I didn’t know what to do, because I didn’t know if that was, maybe, like…

RYDER: … extremely inappropriate! Wild, intrusive, violating—

EUGENIE: Creepy, too.

RYDER: Deranged.

EUGENIE: I’m glad we can laugh about this together. I was so afraid all the time, during that period.

RYDER: Yes, go on.

EUGENIE: But in the end, that day, I was too tired to overthink it and I just listened to my gut and went for, you know, touching him, trying to accompany him. Good heavens, there is some truth in what you’re saying about realities overlapping and how nice it feels to be able to talk to you about this.

RYDER: Like a big weight lifted off your chest.

EUGENIE: I was thinking, you know, about the duties of a nurse, I tried to simplify the concept of what he needed of me. Like, okay, if Barry is hungry, I will feed him, if he is thirsty, I will give him a drink. If he is cold, I will add a blanket on the bed and crank up the radiators. If he is ill, I will take care of him. If he needs a sitter, I will be that sitter.

RYDER: Makes sense.

EUGENIE: And then, that one night, he turned his head and looked up at me. He had this messy hair on the pillow. My eyes had adjusted to the obscurity and I could see enough of his face. It was one of our first… our first—

RYDER: Eyelocks.

EUGENIE: Certainly. And I was astonished that… in a way, although I was going through a horrible time in the beginning, this moment was nice.

RYDER: Yes? Like Tim the bull. It could have been your end, now it’s your beginning.

EUGENIE: Who am I joking… You already know all this.

RYDER: No. Obviously there are some things in your heart that I don’t know.

EUGENIE: ‘The heart of a woman is an ocean of secrets’

RYDER: You sweet child of the 90’s.

EUGENIE: I thought that moment was a bit fucked up, afterwards, though. And now that you’re telling me you’re the writer of all this, I think it’s even more disturbing.

RYDER: I honestly can’t explain why I wrote Barry like this. There was never a moment, even at the very start, even twenty years ago, when he wasn’t like this.

EUGENIE: Like hurt all the time?

RYDER: Yes.

EUGENIE: So you don’t know why you make him suffer? Why you hurt him all the time?

RYDER: No.

EUGENIE: You should think about it, reflect on it. Maybe you don’t know your shadow. Maybe you are a stranger in the land of your own intimacy.

RYDER: I w—

EUGENIE: Maybe you don’t know your own love language.

RYDER: …

EUGENIE: Maybe you don’t know your own heart.

RYDER: I will think about it, Eugenie.