On my back and shot through a thin screen of white, explosively landing at the foot of the vast monolith and at its towering peak it reconfigures itself in flurries of de/re-constructing boxes, cubes, and rects to spell the message: “ANTI-SUPER-NORMAL” in order to elicit some form of understanding from me. Texts indecipherable are written and re-written in iterations so rapid that any attempt at comprehension is laughable. Blood-red runes/sigils/digits spit out calculations at speeds that make light seem lazy. I’m grazed by clouds, hazy and cyclonic, washing past me faster and faster then slower and faster again when suddenly I realise that you have been crying all this time and are holding my hand so tightly that your knuckles have turned to ash.

The monolith is bright and welcoming and despite its oppressive blotting of the sky a brilliant halo blooms around its edges, not fully blocking my view of the powder cerulean behind. Y2K angles full of soaring soft curves and bleached stone steps lead nowhere and everywhere. Ladders and gantries to heaven. Every ratio is golden. There’s a catharsis in simply being here, despite not having achieved a single tangible thing. The final moment in this timeline has already come and gone and I have been favoured by the saviours who have chosen who remains. The fountains are beautiful.

Your sobs are mildly grounding; a weak attractive force that brings my feet to touch the cushions we have laid out on the carpet and my eyes are functioning again. She calls our names, but I cannot respond. Her voice is a thousand parched ghosts speaking from a light-year’s distance away and all communication must surely be temporally irrelevant by an exponentially-increasing order of magnitude by the time I have even begun to think about what I would say in response.

My view is split radially: segments of perception are sorted based on broken algorithms so that the objects in my gaze are stitched-up corpses of who they used to be. Everything I see is a car crash frozen in the most violent moment of impact. Shards of glass hang in a static snowstorm – floating in the air as if suspended from a gossamer so fine as to be translucent – and bodies are reconfigured into lethal shapes which conform to the impossible angles of their surroundings.

I gather my limbs and sit up in movements glacial. Your breathing has returned to normal, exhalations no longer requiring epochs to resolve. I attempt to take note of my body, or rather the loose collection of shapes and ideas that once was a body, all now having regressed from artifacts to concepts in a twisted form of embodiment in reverse. My “hips” have become dislocated and my legs are rolled and stretched into thin strands of compressed bone. “Kneecaps” are a parallax of one second away from the fragile veneer of once-flesh that wraps my thighs. My “arms” are unwieldy and untrustworthy, relaying information at bitrates shattered so completely that there is no possible hope of reconstructing the original message. I oscillate rapidly between many states, each one existing for both a microfraction of a nanosecond and for as long as the penultimate and infinite dilation of time in the final heath death of entropy.

Objects I interact with are dissolute, their essence hazy and becoming more uncertain with every consideration. All experience is undoubtedly unreliable and as I observe “myself” I note that my familiar mirrored distinctions of mind and body have, at the exact same time, both fragmented and coalesced into a multiplicative array of infinite states while also into a dense monist singularity which offers not the unification and spiritual congruence of non-dualism but instead an ink stain of tunnel vision, at the end of which light has simply ceased to exist.

Across the room, you and her sit face-to-face-to-face-to-face. Betrayed by your meaningless and confusing expressions, offers of empathy are exposed as cloaked daggers. As truth begins to regain its foothold in objectivity numberless forked tongues hammer into my skull, but I rip veils away from your every poisoned word. Vitriol. A ridicule of care. Acid. I bite back with cracked teeth and you recoil in horror which might have once seemed genuine but now, with the smoke clearing, I see through it, straight to the rotten core. I see the sky behind the monolith. My former blindness staggers me. How could I have let this happen? But even as I question myself, I know why. I have always known why.

A lover took my sight. A lover held me closely, pressing coals into my eyes until they blackened. A lover touched my body, tracing contours across me, mapping weak tendons and loose teeth and gaps in my being. Layers were flayed away with every delicate graze, leaving me bared to all this endless winter’s elements before those final caresses whispered across my peeled body with all the trauma of a hundred thousand natural disasters.

In a mockery of my torture, you both begin to casually remove the flesh from each other’s skulls, playing with the strips of skin that you peel away and laughing as the loose shreds dangle from your nails. There is no regard for each other in this internicine game; it only exists as a cruel experiment to extract some humour from my suffering. My horror is absolute, and despite my abjection I cannot scream for you to stop. I am frozen. Interally I beg and I plead, but on the outside I am a carving - a sculpture more torn up than your faces - and so I cannot express my need for you to stop. Your shining skulls simply stare at me, and within that single look the monolith is complete. In some ways, I think you could call this a success. The snow is settling. I think I miss her less.