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From the diary of Monica Tsai, backed up on three servers spanning two continents

November 24, 2018 (2018-11-24T17:24:29.

420083)

loc: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

United States of America (42.

3721865,71.

1117091)

There’s a state of calm I can sometimes enter.

Yesterday the calm was nowhere to be found because there were too many unknowns.

But when everything is laid out, the panic subsides, replaced by logic.

For me it’s the same feeling as coding once all the

specifications are in place.

The problem is clear.

All that is left is to address it.

After we left the hospital, Louise drove me home.

She had not driven all the way here out of any sense of love for me.

She

came to get grandmother’s story.

Otherwise, she feared it would be lost forever.

She cared more about collecting stories than

for the people at the heart of them.

In this calm state, I didn’t even feel that bad for myself.

I felt worse knowing grandmother’s

hopes must have deflated.

We were silent the whole ride, her hands tight on the steering wheel.

The cramped brick houses of Cambridge lurched past.

We remained silent even after her fourth attempt at parallel parking, when she finally managed it, the car sticking out only

a little bit.

She turned the engine off, and our silence was amplified.

“Listen,” she said as I continued to stare out the window.

“I know I’ve messed up somewhere. And I probably owe both you and your grandmother an apology.”

I told her she didn’t.

“I do. I think.” She shook her head.

“But I’m so tired. I’m not thinking properly. I didn’t sleep at all last night. So I’m

going to find a hotel or something and get out of your hair.”

I sighed and told her to sleep in the guest room.

“No, that doesn’t feel right—”

“No matter how much you insulted grandmother, she would find it even more insulting if you paid for a hotel.”

I opened the car door to show I was done arguing.

For a moment, as I walked toward our home, I thought she would drive away.

She finally climbed out of the car.

“You know where the room is,” I said as we took off our shoes.

I headed to my room.

I heard her follow me up the stairs.

“Monica.”

I had avoided looking at her since the hospital.

Her shaking voice forced me to face her now.

She stood in my doorway.

I could

hear grandfather’s snores from the room next door.

“Yes?”

When she did not say anything, only continued to stare at me, opening her mouth, then closing it again, I turned away from

her.

I opened the top drawer of my desk and pulled out the pencil that had started it all.

I had almost all the facts.

How Louise truly felt.

Why grandmother felt so guilty over Meng.

There was just one part of this

story I had not heard yet, one point of view whose lens was the last one I needed to make a rational decision.

I pressed Meng’s heart into my wrist.

All I could see was white, my room gone, replaced by a lack of vision and a spiking pain.

The other pencil heart had not felt remotely like this.

Grandmother had warned they could be painful.

Even so, I had not expected this much.

There was something piercing in my head, as if a high-pitched scream, and my fingers were in my hair, clenching, grabbing.

The scream contained words, I eventually sensed, too high and garbled for me to comprehend, for me to do any more than to catch a few here and there when the ache did not overwhelm.

Gradually, as the pain subsided, I could see my room again, registered the pink carpet rubbing against my cheek, recognized

Louise kneeling beside me, her hand on my back, as I regained control of my breathing.

The words were clearer now.

It was something about Shanghai, something about—could it be?

—my father, and finally, in a flash

of light, Louise, so clear that I could not tell if the Reforging had ended right as I saw the real Louise in front of me.

“Was I screaming?” I asked.

“More like whimpering,” she said.

“I closed your door so your grandfather wouldn’t wake up.”

“Thank you. I’m fine. You can go to sleep now.”

“Don’t you need to Reforge?”

“I can do it while you’re sleeping.”

“I... could help you though.”

I sat up.

The room became clearer still.

Our eyes met, and I could see each red vein in hers, the dark circles around them.

The calm fled at this point.

She was confusing everything I thought I knew.

Perhaps she did care for me, after all?

Then she

glanced at my arm, at the darkened phoenix, ready for its rebirth, and everything clicked.

“You just want to help me so you can get Meng’s story.”

Her eyes widened.

“No, no, that’s not—”

My whole body trembled, leaning away from her.

“You’ve only ever tried to get close to me so you could learn about their magic—”

“Monica, please, I would—”

“You would, you would what? Get me off if it meant you might be able to claim an old woman’s story for your collection? What

kind of person are you?”

“Meng already told me her story!” Louise nearly yelled.

“And even if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t do that to you. I offered

because I wanted to, alright? I’ve wanted to for so long now, and oh god, none of this is going how I wanted it to—”

The world quieted and slowed.

Her bloodshot eyes filled my field of view, though she was still an arm’s length away.

I wanted

her closer, I wanted her farther.

I jerked my head away and locked my eyes on the doorknob.

That was safe, dull, and mundane and promised an exit.

“How could you think that of me?” she whispered.

“I heard what you said to my grandmother. How is that any different?” I ran my thumb over the phoenix’s head.

The way she

had dragged me along—it was a dull imitation of the pain that poured out of Meng’s heart.

“You tried to force grandmother’s

story out of her while she was in a hospital bed, when she already told you she didn’t want to share it with you.”

“I didn’t handle it well,” she conceded.

“But I would not have tried to take advantage of you—”

“Haven’t you already?” The doorknob began to blur, tears forming.

“As soon as we met, all you wanted was to meet my grandmother.

And you must have figured out how I felt about you because I couldn’t hide it. You knew I would have done anything for you.”

I brought my knees to my chest.

“Anything except hurt grandmother.”

“I wasn’t trying to hurt her.” Her voice was hard now, urgent.

“I was trying to help her.”

“You can’t force people to share things with you that they don’t want to—”

And then she knocked the wind out of me.

“Oh?” The change in her voice made me flinch.

“Is that true, scraper of the internet? I don’t think someone who makes money from gathering data on users without them even realizing can have anything to say about that.”

I couldn’t speak.

She picked at my guilt, the vulnerability I had revealed to her, twisted it.

I closed my eyes.

Not even

the doorknob was safe anymore.

“That’s different,” I stumbled.

“That’s to connect people. To connect people like grandmother and Meng—”

“And that’s what I’m trying to do too.” There was a desperation to her voice I had never heard before.

She needed me to understand,

and I needed her to understand, but we were too far past each other.

“I’m sorry,” I said even though I really was not.

She exhaled.

“I am too,” she said eventually.

“I’ll see myself out.”

“Get some sleep first.” I somehow could not stop caring for her, even now.

The floor creaked as she stood.

My door opened then closed, gently.

I kept my eyes shut, listening to her footsteps, wondering

if she would go to the guest room, collapse on the bed, and wail into the pillow the way I wanted to.

Instead, the front door

clicked open and closed.

Her long stride tapped down the sidewalk.

I convinced myself I heard her car door wrenched open and

the ancient engine stuttering alive.

I opened my eyes and stared at my phoenix.

It was the pencil that had begun our relationship, the pencil she had slid over

to me at the frozen yogurt shop with a smile, the pencil that had built the relationship between the four of us—her, grandmother,

Meng, and me—the pencil that I still can’t understand, even though its heart is aligned with my own.

I don’t even know why I’m bothering to write all this down, why I’m reliving these awful conversations when every keystroke hurts.

After all, what has this journal done for me?

I thought it’d help me work through the trauma of grandmother’s illness.

I thought it’d help me figure out Louise’s cryptic signals.

There’s no way I’ll share this with EMbrS or anything or anyone.

Yet I can’t stop writing, trying to make my life make some sort of sense.

But maybe there isn’t any sense to be made and this is just how life goes, and any endeavor to turn it into a coherent story is futile, an attempt to make a path out of nothing.

I can hardly even type anymore because my arm hurts.

The phoenix is pulsing.

My wrist is on fire.