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I dug my fingers into the squishy material, searching for the small buttons embedded underneath. I pressed down on them and the chair shrunk away from me, letting me go. I didn’t get up. I lifted my wrist bracelet up and tapped on it. A holographic screen projected in the air above my arm about the size of a 15 inch screen. There were a couple of symbols I didn’t recognize and hadn’t seen before but they were familiar in design. There was one that looked like a miniature picture of my phone itself.
I tapped on it and the screen changed to look exactly like my previous phone screen. I swiped through it, found the bird app, and opened it up. There were thousands upon thousands of notifications; people had tagged me and commented on all of my previous posts. There were direct messages from people on my allowed list and I pulled them up.
That initial gut clenching feeling I felt when I saw how many notifications I had melted when I looked at direct messages. There are a couple I can tell from the first sentence I didn’t want to read so I ignored those, but there were several that made it sound like people were genuinely worried about me.
It was then I realized I hadn’t posted anything since the disastrous live stream.
I’d recorded the wedding, but it wasn’t live. I hadn’t even posted a single sentence letting people know that I was OK. It hadn’t occurred to me. The initial reactions to the live stream were so negative that I didn’t think to say anything else.
I tapped the live stream button.
My face was at an odd angle, and I lifted my wrist to find a better shot. Viewers immediately streamed in and the chat began to fill with questions and exclamations and emojis.
I beamed a smile.
“Hey, Soul Fam!” I crooned. “So glad to see you all! This is just a quick update to let you guys know what’s going on and all that. I’m in space. Everything’s good. I'm OK. It was all just one big cultural faux pas. I’ll give you guys a more in-depth update later so make sure to like and follow, so you can be the first to see the new content I post.” I leaned in closer to the camera and dropped my voice down to a fake whisper. “I’m going to give you guys the inside scoop, so stay tuned!”
I ended the stream.
I leaned back in the chair with a sigh. That was about all I could handle for right now. I knew I should be pushing it, releasing new videos left and right and using this temporary fame for its fullest potential, but I just couldn’t even. Catching glimpses of the nastier comments was too much.
How was I gonna handle any of this?
I felt like I was running in place on a log that was floating in the water and at any moment I would miss my step and come crashing down. All I needed to do was to be perfect and innocent and sweet and seductive and experienced and completely in control of my every movement and choice that happened to and around me.
What if I was just making everything worse?
I buried my face in my hands.
Even through the numbness that came from the drug, it wasn’t able to keep those thoughts away.
Aeson dropped from the ceiling, and I lifted my head from my hands to look up at him.
“We are here.” He held out his hand to me. “Please, let me take care of you.”
Something cracked inside of me, a small sliver of a fissure, the slight tremor of my heart’s warning shake before the quake that could break the infrastructure my self image had been built upon.
I couldn’t let go.
I plastered over the cracks with a perfect habit of falseness. I fixed that smile I had practiced in the mirror for hours firmly across my face, making sure the corners of my eyes wrinkled in just enough to display warmth.
“Oh, I’m just fine.” I pushed off from the chair. “I’ll have a chat with the alien doctor, but you don’t need to worry about me. I’m good as gold.”
“Gold is an extremely malleable and conductive element.” He shifted, moving his body around the circular room to reveal an open door on one side. “You are saying you are highly susceptible to being changed and reformed by your environment?”
I looked at him for a moment. Talking with aliens was a really strange experience.
“I mean, no.” I moved towards the door. “I was saying you don’t have to worry about me. You don’t need to take care of me, I’m a tough cookie. I can just tell this doctor I’m fine, do some quick checks, and we can be on our way.”
“It is my privilege as your first and only male to take care of you,” he said, moving with me at my pace so he was beside me when we reached the opening. “You experienced a severe distress when we went into space. Whether you are an overbaked dessert or a malleable element, I ask that you please tell the doctor the full truth of what happened. We are not in a rush. We can take as much time as you need. Please.”
The last word he said with such a heavy tone, I stopped to look at him again.
Why did he care so much?
He just met me.
At the same time, his words soaked into my outer layers, softening them just a little bit.
