Once Around the Carousel

Chapter Twenty-One

With a sense of peace settled deep in her heart, Linda rolled out the yoga mat Robin had given her and sat spine-straight on the floor of her room. As was her meditation ritual, she began with her breaths. By consciously focusing her breathes into the chakras Robin had taught her about, she'd found something akin to an on-ramp into the energy streams. Her seven chakras were also where she anchored her tether. Without an anchor, Linda knew she might never find her way back. Even during her punishment travels, she'd carefully secured herself to the seven points of her breaths. It meant swimming with something akin to drag. However, it also acted as a line to pull herself out of the Sea when she needed to return. It felt similar to what the Water did when she stayed under too long, and pressure pulled her to the surface.

Entering the Sea of Souls, the beam of light Linda became darted amongst the Soul Strands. Swimming this way and that, she played like a baby dolphin in a psychedelic kelp forest. During her travels, she'd learned how to penetrate people's souls to varying depths. Usually, she would pick a specific strand and sweep along the outskirts of its glow, taking in the emotional reverberations as she moved from point to point through the person's history - scanning what amounted to a low-resolution chronicle of their life. Then, when she found a particularly intriguing event, she'd swim closer, embracing the singular point to live the moment's richness. After such a nice dinner with her father, Linda chose to search out the unbridled love people felt within families, particularly the reciprocating feelings derived from parental pride. Once saturated in the joy those feelings brought her, Linda went to find Sharon.

In nearly all her travels through the Sea, Linda mingled in the lives of strangers, often people who had died years and generations earlier. She'd observed the souls of Titus and Robin and, of course, her family, but other than her mother's, she rarely embraced their strands. Delving too deeply into the lives of people she knew felt intrusive.

Sharon was different. Linda knew Sharon would never mind her mingling with her soul. And the experience of being with Sharon was unique. When reliving the experiences encoded onto Sharon's soul, Linda felt the times they had shared far differently than she did when attaching herself to anyone else. It struck her as odd, but it came as close to touching her own strand as she had found.

Wiggling alongside Sharon's Soul Strand, Linda relived the moment they met, sitting making sand castles on the beach. She discovered a unique tautness at the point of their first connection, a glitch that felt like an oddly reminiscent marker. Descending further, Linda endured Sharon's panic from the wave sweeping her off the rock in front of Titus's house and Sharon's bursts of relief turning into silliness as they sat together in his bathroom. She avoided the times when Sharon had been abused at home, assuming they'd solved that problem by wishing the lm's away. Then, wondering if she could communicate with Sharon, she slid down toward the present.

Linda enjoyed watching the Soul Strands as they emerged from the predicted future. She thought of the barrier that held her from exploring the future as the floor sea's floor, knowing that what went on within the barrier itself was happening in the present. That within the thin plane of the present, the Sea wove its recording of humanity into place. Swimming along the sea's floor, Linda could watch the connections between souls freezing into place, and the multi-faceted blocks that recorded each person's actions, solidifying. There, she could watch as every action's associated feelings, and emotions hung like loosely draped fabric, then shrunk tightly over the polyhedron's uniquely shaped facets, becoming a permanent recording on each person's Soul Strand.

Sliding along Sharon's strand, closing in on the present, Linda became concerned. First, she felt Sharon's apprehension as she picked at her dinner in a fancy restaurant. And her sense of foreboding bordering on nausea as her father periodically touched her leg on their drive home. Watching Sharon's strand emerge from the predicted future, Linda identified intricate patterns forming - elaborately shaped blocks of 55, 89 and 144 sides. She knew configurations of this complexity only arose from people's most sensual connections.