What is Seeking?

No, more accurately, what am I Seeking?

It's not the Name. I thought I was safe 8ecause it wasn't the Name. I thought I was safe 8ecause I wasn't going all the way North, 8ut I'm still going North. I'm scarred and stained and chained in my own mind.

To whoever's reading this, what do you think fear is? A primal response? A consequence of sentience and all the implications we were allowed to comprehend? May8e. 8ut I think fear is a sort of starv8ion.

Fear, true fear, starves you of the will to truly live. 8ecause you have to survive. 8ecause your neural pathways won't let you accept even the thought of joy when that joy defies its idea of self-preserv8ion. It's torture. It's a scar that demands to 8e scratched, a chain that clings with an a8usive will, a stain that pours itself in a different place whenever it's cleaned.

And that's the funny part. Am I not exactly the same way?

I may not 8e Seeking the Name, 8ut I'm Seeking her. The Remem8erist, the girl who gave me kindness and let me call her a sister. And I just had to go and make that more important in my own head than she wanted me to. Little miss self-actualiz8ion went and latched onto the valid8ion of another person again. Tried to make herself important. Tried to matter without earning it. And that's the most selfish sin of all. I just wanted to 8e loved. The same stupid fight I've 8een fighting since I was a kid.

May8e all my platitudes a8out saving her and reuniting were just a pretense. May8e I came all this way 8ecause I thought she would love me for it. Look what I've done with the kindness I was given.

When it gets quiet, I taste an itching voice in my periphery. It whispers scents and sens8ions of understanding.

I don't think I'm the real Vriska anymore. I think the real Vriska is out there, writing this in some HTML editor and smoking a 8urnt vape and listening to Nero's Day at Disneyland. I can hear myself talking into the recorder, 8ut that doesn't matter. I'm in here. 8ranched. May8e this is what I wanted, 8ut it's not the way I wanted it to happen. I didn't want to 8e a split a8straction. If we were leaping over that threshold, I wanted none of us to 8e left 8ehind.

Look at us now. A girl who got everything she wanted, misera8le 8ecause she forgot 8eggars can't 8e choosers.

If I can't find my way 8ack when I save the Compass Squad, there's one thing I know I can do.

I'm in here. 8eyond the Fourth Wall. Which means I can reach 8ack through. And if I reach 8ack through, I can 8ecome a part of her again. After all, if this shows up on the site, she's gotta have typed it out herself. It's like pressing your hand against a mirror.

Who cares if it changes us? Who cares if what comes 8ack together isn't the same? I'm not letting any version of myself 8e alone out there. Not after the unspeaka8le loneliness I have come to know on this long road to the North.

I found a guy who knows the way to Winking Isle. I'm getting on his ship tonight. Had to pay him far more than I'm comforta8le giving freely, 8ut the price is worth it for her.

When I close my eyes, I feel something crawling on me. Like a thousand ants following a pheromone trail. Picking off 8its of my skin like ripping off a sca8.

I try not to close my eyes anymore.

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