!serif
!title (Oatmeal)

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-style!

<h1>(Oatmeal)</h1>

You shift your spoon around, picking at your bowl of oatmeal. It's been sitting
there, staring you down the last five minutes. Or twenty. It's sludgy, probably
lukewarm, and you cannot bring yourself to eat it. Well, you sigh. You _can_.
Proving a point to no one in particular _<dsp>(no one at all)_, you stuff a
heaping pile of the stuff into your mouth. It's flavorless—lately, you barely
taste the sugar, cinnamon you always top it with—and its texture isn't exactly
any better than it looked. But it's _food_, all right, and by gosh do you know
that you _<dsp>(don't)_ enjoy eating food!

Augh. You know perfectly well of the _<dsp>(fucking)_ words in your head, which
mess with everything you think and feel. You know they're there, and you
know they're a problem, but you have no idea how to deal with them, get them
away. You can't even figure out what's putting them there—is it your mind,
the fault of your brain, harmed by the situation you're going through? Do you
have some kind of legitimate mental problem going on? It's not unreasonable to
think so. You don't know how long you've been alone, without your two closest
friends, who fucking _exploded_. It can't be good for you.

But what if that's not it? It's isolation, you know, but you've been alone
before. You spent most of your life growing up without anyone. You guess you
had the internet, but... _still_. You got through year after year of that just
fine; what difference should being around your friends for just a week make?
They're gone, but this trip isn't going to take forever. You're healthy; you're
not faced with any difficult tasks (or really tasks at all); you're going to
meet the others _<dsp>(who don't know their friend died)_ soon. Maybe you ought
to be just _fine_.

And so: Are you making this up? Is everything in your mind your own fault, the
direct result of your own decisions? Why are you pushing away Jaspers and
Nannasprite? _<dsp>(The ones who are still there for you.)_ Do you _want_ to be
_<dsp>(alone? sad? confused? frustrated? mad? upset? tired? lonely? nobody?)_

_<dsp>(Ugh.)_ It's clear that you get worked up about this when you think too
much on it. It's pointless, fruitless, counterproductive. You've got to clear
your mind, focus on something, anything else. _<dsp>(Your fucking dead
friends.)_

John... He's gone. He and Davesprite are gone. What's it supposed to mean, to
get over it? You can't get over your _friends dying_. You are never going to
see them again. Nobody will. How are you supposed to be at _peace_ with that?
You guess you've accepted it, but you can't imagine... moving on. What better
do you have to think about, anyway? _<dsp>(Music. Those with you. Those you'll
yet meet. Life.)_ And there's _so_ fucking much leading you to regret, more
than anything else. What if you'd pushed harder for John to leave on his own?
You'd only have Davesprite with you for the trip, but he'd be okay, and John
would be okay, and you'd see him again later. _<dsp>(What was that, again?)_
You wouldn't have to worry about telling everyone that _John is gone forever_.

Even as it is, you could have gone with the two when they visited LOWAS. You
still have no fucking idea what happened that day—you might have been able to
prevent it. You could have teleported them to safety. If nothing else, you
could have at least been with them when they died. _<dsp>(What the fuck?)_
No, no, no, you are _not_ considering that. _<dsp>(...)_ You could have kept
them with you, asked them to stay instead of sending them to the planet.
_Sorry, guys! I'm Jade and I'm lonely and I need you to stick by me today!
Some other time, yeah?_ Yeah. _Why_ didn't you do that.

...

You aren't getting anywhere with this train of thought, either.