nanowrimo madness

I can’t shake the sensation of being watched. When someone is standing just behind you there’s a definite feel to it. You know someone is there. It’s like that. I know someone is close by observing, looking over my shoulder. I can almost see them, but when I try to focus, like the Pleiades, they melt away.
Whether they intended it or not a rudimentary link has established between us. I can discern a vague discontent, restlessness and something else. Hunger. Aha! I’ve been starved all the time lately with no good reason. Gotcha! Or is it the other way around? We’ve gained a couple pounds but I’m so tired most of the day I don’t feel like walking.
Logic says I’m tired because someone else is awake at night. We’ve still no idea who swiped an entire day from us. All I can say is they must be good because Eyvonne never noticed. She’s usually on to a newbie before any of us inside.
The majority of new alters steal little blocks of time, pretending to be one of the Qs already known to Eyvonne. She catches them when they relax. They’re usually damned by some little quirk like being extremely ticklish.
Most of us barely react to a tickle threat. But just point a finger at one recent newbie and he flinches away. He doesn’t know his name so we dubbed him Flinch. When he’s con-conscious with anyone else they become ticklish too.
Sometimes alters know why they exist. Like Ian being a guardian to the sleeping babies. Others have no idea what their purpose was originally. Like Flinch, some show up without even a name. I know my first purpose was to guard and protect Baby, Lillie and later el. I knew it was important that I was male. I also knew it wasn’t wise to express that outside. el was ‘conceived’ to preserve our intellect. I can’t remember my first moment of consciousness. But el remembers his.
“One afternoon while our mother took her usual nap, Baby locked the bathroom door, a forbidden thing. She sat on the floor shears in hand, but I hacked away,” el said. “I cut her golden curls but saw my own straight, dark locks hit the floor.”
While we were in therapy Dr. Dwon warned us over and over that it was likely there were more than four of us. He was concerned that some of our alters might be filled with terrible rage.
I was terrified of even considering that others lurked beyond the known inside. I could barely breathe when I thought about it. How was I going to protect el, Baby and Lillie from some idiot on a rampage? My anxiety about emerging alters rivaled the anxiety level when secrets spilled out in flashbacks. I was so jumpy it was pathetic. I was totally unprepared the first time it happened.
Baby wandered into el’s library trailed by a tiny, naked waif. Thin and dirty, ragged dark hair long and unkempt, he stood before us sucking his thumb, eyes closed tight in fear. el gently embraced him. I wept. I’d been ready for almost anything but this.
“His name is Stonebaby,” baby said. “He’s been hiding wif me.”
This new l’ilone was patient, even stoic. He could stay motionless for hours turned totally inward. We surmised he was born of Baby’s need to escape the pain of sexual and physical abuse. Lillie managed to clean him up but he never learned to like clothes. The most we could get him to project wearing inside was a pair of jeans. Thankfully when he got the courage to be up outside he didn’t strip down, but he did take our glasses off and pitch them. He didn’t need them to see.
Stonebaby was drawn to Eyvonne who we chatted with daily online. As our friendship deepened she was friend to me and Lillie, mother to Baby and Stonebaby, and clearly el’s heart’s companion. We counted on her help as we faced the challenge of nurturing Stonebaby. He was comforted by motion. I loved rocking him nearly as much as I’d once enjoyed holding our outside children. They were too grown up now for such baby stuff but we missed it.
One summer evening Stonebaby relaxed against my shoulder as we swayed back and forth on the porch swing. Lillie’s husband sat nearby smoking a cigar. The smell reminded us of our Grandfather Burgess. Baby missed Grandpa intensely. When he lived at our house for a year his presence kept her safe. His dark skin, high cheekbones and familiar smile were safety, warmth and love.
Every afternoon she waited for him at the train station near our home. Her toes even with the yellow danger line on the platform she strained to see the approaching train. As soon as he stepped down she ran to him.
Baby threw herself into Grandpa’s arms. He swung her aloft into weightlessness pressing her smooth cheek to his stubbly, scritchy one. He was tired from a long day at the office and the train ride home but his eyes always lit up for her. He smoked a cigar as they walked home down the tree lined street his big hand enfolding hers.
That summer night Baby realized Grandpa was never coming back. She hadn’t understood his death or the passage of years. She fled upstairs to mourn. But as Baby ran up the stairs she was seeing the ones in the house where we grew up. Baby paused at the top looking back to where our mother stood below. Mom was crying and yelling. Her face twisted in anger.
“Don’t you dare cry!” Mom screamed. “He wasn’t your father. You don’t even know what death is!”
Baby froze at the top of the stairs, hot tears drying on her cheeks.
“You stop it right now or I’ll give you something to cry about,” Mom threatened.
Denied the right to mourn Baby simply refused to remember Grandpa was dead. Now Baby laid on our bed sobbing. Stonebaby cried too without really knowing why. Lillie scooped them up and rocked them repeating over and over, “That was then, this is now. We’re here and we love you.”
But it felt like ‘now’ to all of us. Time isn’t always linear for most us, it’s more like a series of vaguely connected ‘nows.’ To get a real handle on a series of events we check with el. He has the best grasp of events. In a pinch we poll everybody. That’s how I discovered the missing day.
After Stonebaby came into the system from whatever dreadful place he’d been hiding in I started to worry that there were others like him out there, frightened and alone when there was no longer any need to hide. I wavered between that and being terrified the next one in would be our own personal Jeffery Dahmer.
‘rion and Ian scared me the most. They tested my strength and my wits. They were also to date the worst first presentations of any Qs. Congratulations guys! At least we survived them. Looking back my bent for risk taking throughout our lifetime was a bigger threat to our survival than anything they did. So who am I kidding? I should worry about who’s watching us now? Hey, I’m cool. Really.
Did you hear something?


© 2004 M. S. Eliot

In case it isn’t really clear by now, we experience two separate but concurrent realities most of the time. There’s the world you live in, the one we call ‘outside.’ Then there’s ‘inside’ which is where we live. We experience inside and outside life simultaneously as forever and irrevocably separate worlds.
Imagine looking in a mirror but the mirror world is as complete as the one where you’re brushing your teeth. It isn’t just a reflection. Things happen there independently. You can always see inside this alternate reality and know it intimately. It has sunlight, forest, rivers, mountains, houses, animals, flowers, whatever you want, like instant virtual reality. If you walk to the horizon it expands before forever, every step takes you toward something familiar or new.
The only people who live here are Qs. There is no crime, but there is darkness. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother with outside. Inside is paradise where anything is available just by thinking of it. We can be alone or do things together. Sometimes Qs conflict as to what time of day it is, or the weather or the time of year, but all things are negotiable. Or we can always go off by ourselves to have it our own way.
Why we bother with outside reality is complex. Although inside can be addictive it’s also sort of muted. Tactile sensations are a little off. Beach sand isn’t as hot. Chocolate isn’t as chocolaty. But the real drawback is that Eyvonne isn’t inside, nor are our kids and friends. We just can’t manufacture the excitement of interacting with people in the real world. However if we’re ever in a coma don’t be in too much of a hurry to pull the plug. We might be perfectly content surfboarding inside.
If you’re wondering why we call ourselves “Q’s” watch Star Trek. There’s a character who is both autonomous and yet part of an intelligent continuum called The Q. Friends of ours noted we have a number of traits in common with Q. Unfortunately one of those traits in common is not omnipotence. We are not a deity, even a minor one. Oprah are you listening?
Since our friends had trouble discerning which of us was up at any given time it was easier to call us all Q. It stuck. When there was only the original four of us in the system (before our Q nickname was bestowed on us) we didn’t know any others lived outside our circle of light.
We did have some rather strange ‘imaginary friends’ according to our siblings. I remember distinctly playing with ‘rion in the chicken coop where we hid frequently at very young whiling away long hours until school was out and our big sister returned home.
Over the past decade many like ‘rion, Ian and Jamie Lee have come in from hiding. Some of these ‘newbies’ burst into Q consciousness with little or no warning, wild-eyed, angry, frightened, disoriented, shaking our system to the core. Others whispered hints and scattered esoteric clues for the rest of us to puzzle out. Some were hesitant to claim their rightful places in our system. Others gave ominous warnings of their impending emergence. A few were rescued from places where something had swallowed all the light.
I suspect some still hide beyond the fringe of our inner reality. Losing a whole day recently is a pretty big clue. A few years ago I would have freaked out. Now I know there’s no sense wasting energy worrying. Most of what I worry about never happens anyway.
Much of the time at least a bit of our attention is focused on what’s happening inside even when we have ops. Each of us looks different inside. Each of us has a sense of self, of completeness. Any one of us can have ops for a variety of reasons. We usually take control with the knowledge or consent of the rest of our system, but sometimes it doesn’t work that way.
Each Q lives a full and independent existence inside parallel to our life outside. We can and do sleep, read, swim, hike, play, paint or otherwise amuse ourselves inside. Most of the time what Qs do inside doesn’t affect the one with ops. In order to contact each other or share information we use a technique we call ‘mindtouch’. If you understand telepathy you understand mindtouch. Sometimes we use the same technique outside the system. Eyvonne and I play a game where she thinks of a random word to substitute for the word “screen” in the useless information flashed a TV screen every time you watch a rented movie. You know, it says, “This movie has been formatted to fit your TV screen.” So she thinks of a random word instead of ‘screen’. In nine years of watching movies together Qs guessed wrong three times.
We use it unconsciously outside with varying consequences. Yesterday I met a fellow for the first time. He asked what there was to do around here, a common question from city folk pondering moving to a county with one traffic light.
“If you want to get over being scared of reading your poetry in front of an audience, there’s a poetry open mike once a month,” I said.
He looked really confused, wondering how I even knew he wrote poetry. It made me sweat. I don’t mean to get inside people’s heads; sometimes it just happens, like the northern lights. But at least there’s a body of evidence explaining how that works.
We use the mindtouch to share ops. Any number of us can share ops and thus have immediate live feed access to what we’re doing in the outside world. Even though this is possible, therapists call it “co-conciousness", only one alter should have control of the body at any given time. We proved that when we first experimented with sharing ops. We fell flat on our face if one alter decided to walk in one direction and another decided to go the opposite way. It wasn’t pretty. It also gave us an idea that driving with that kind of shared ops is dangerous. So it’s a hard and fast rule: Only the Q with ops decides what we do and where we go. It’s fine when we’re all agreeable and cozy. But when there is dissention it can be hell.
Outside we are still very invested in camouflage and keeping a low profile. Some of us are better at it than others. Anyone can peg Ian's brogue or ‘rion who speaks with a southern accent. They rarely take ops unless they’re at home. Some of us spend a lot more time outside than others due to the idiotic need to make money. Time outside can get to be an issue in and of itself. Even the l’ilones want to spend time with Eyvonne, watch a kid movie or eat ice cream.
When she hasn’t seen someone in a while Eyvonne asks casually, “What’s Ian doing?” or “What’s Gwen up to?” Most of the time she’s just checking in to see how we are. But sometimes we know she’s scared someone has integrated without saying goodbye. Even though we try not to do that sometimes there are special circumstances like when Keeper got so unstable I needed to make it happen NOW so things didn’t fall apart.
Just as we need to adjust when our inner population shifts, so does Eyvonne. Imagine a child you’ve grown to know and love suddenly disappears, absorbed by someone else. You can catch glimpses of them in that person, but it’s not the same. I know Eyvonne privately mourns each integration while at the same time she accepts whatever we need to do to stay healthy. Living with a multiple is like existing in a kaleidoscope. Your life can change in a blink. She shares our triumphs, sadness and joys. Looking back over the decade we’ve been together it’s been chaotic but it’s also been the happiest ten years either of us ever imagined.
As we fall asleep Eyvonne likes to ask where each of us is, what we’re doing. Frequently as the one with ops nods off those still awake take ops for a moment. L’ilones like to cuddle up to Eyvonne before they fall asleep.
Eyvonne is familiar with our inner world. She loves to hear us describe it and what we’re doing. She knows ‘rion has a cabin in the woods on a lake. He and Ian like to sit on the dock and fish. Inside Ian smokes a lot. None of us smoke outside, we’re allergic to tobacco.
I live in a tipi. Quit laughing. I know it’s stereotypical. But I like the way it looks when I look up, like it’s a wheel curving up to become the whole world. I paint a lot including the sides of the tipi. el reads a lot. He lives in a house now, but for most of our lives it was just a library. It has a gazillion books, and even a kind of gallery with a railing. There’s a beat up leather couch where he sleeps, usually with his glasses askew and a book fallen on his chest.
el’s house is right next to Lillie’s cottage. It has flower and herb gardens all around it. It kinda looks like a hobbit house, all warm and cozy. She reads and quilts and bakes a lot. Her place is a gathering spot for our l’ilones. Lillie loves being a mom. She adores kids, a trait she shares with Gwen. Gwen has her own house but she alternates most of her time between ‘rion’s and Lillie’s. She’s nearly always keeping a watchful eye on our current batch of l’ilones.
Ian sleeps on the ground. He has a little cottage too, even more hobbit like than Lillie’s because it’s thatched. But he says he misses sleeping in the roots of the great tree where all the babies once slumbered. The tree is still there, but it’s not his home anymore. He and Jamie Lee integrated a few years ago. He inherited her gracefulness and sharp wit. He’s a little easier to understand too.
Inside is idyllic most of the time, but not always. It’s also the battleground where we fight the demons of our past.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot