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Once upon time, there was a coffee shop (house, actually) where all kinds of impossible and improbable and weird things happened, especially late at night - a place where universes could cross over and no one really blinked at it because we all knew the sort of people who hung out there.
And there were scones, too!
At any given night, someone would be reading, and two kids would be playing chess, and someone would be asleep on the old, ratty blue couch - or balanced on the back of the couch - and we all knew someone was probably cooking up an interdimensional portal in the back room (or maybe just playing pool), or perhaps summoning Cthulhu again, because that was what happened on the weekends in my youth. At night. Always at night, when the Muggles were asleep.
But this isn't that coffee shop, because that place closed years ago. RIP... somehow, I loved you, even though I barely knew your secrets.
That's a different story.
No, this was another coffee shop, one open only during the day, one located on a busy street in the middle of an urban center, one filled with hipsters and kids who were "cool" in the ways I never could be, no matter how long I hung out there or how hard I tried. It was all industrial grunge + queer chic + overpriced drinks, and all the staff had tattoos and body mods, and let's face it, someone like me could never fit into that lifestyle. I couldn't even fit in with the people who were trying to fit into that lifestyle.
But I nonetheless tried, every week, because that's where the people I knew were hanging out.
The people there knew of me, even though they never knew me. One afternoon I showed up to find someone I knew standing at the door, and she just blurted out with a big smile on her face, PSI CORPS!!! even though I was in my street clothes, because, uh, I guess I have a reputation. I mean of course I do, but still.
This is the place where someone else (bless her heart) "helpfully" suggested I could better curb strangers' harassment by literally setting up a booth with a sign saying "Hi, I'm a telepath, ask me anything."
How about not?
And that's the setting - the coffee shop everyone ends up going to because they don't want to go to some big chain, or just because that's the place everyone goes, duh, even though every time I go there I feel like the guest in the back row at someone's wedding, pretending to be happy for the couple even though I barely know who they are, and knowing I was invited out of "why not".
So when she and I decide to meet up and have awkward conversation, we go that coffee shop, because "why not." Also because she probably lives nearby, even though I live super far away - everyone always picks that spot to meet up with me because they assume I live around the corner. Everyone else lives there, so of course I do too, right? What do you mean you had to drive an hour for a ten minute chat?
So she probably suggested this coffee shop, and I wasn't about to argue, so I said OK, and drove an hour to get there and never said a word about it.
Then, like the way these things usually go, we spend the next fifteen minutes speaking about nothing at all - stupid small talk I'm somehow going to remember verbatim anyway, yay for my memory! - as if there's some unspoken rule that you're not allowed to have Important Conversation until the food shows up, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me - but nonetheless everyone follows this rule, so I have to follow it as well.
I appreciate the people who get right to the point - screw context - and just say what they came there to say, but it's rare I find someone who talks like that. And I won't find one in a coffee shop like this - that coffee shop is long closed.
I probably order the same kind of sandwich I always order there - something with pesto - because I'm a picky eater I don't often try new foods, especially with unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places. There's one exception. One BIG exception. But she's not it.
The food comes, and we start eating, and I realize she's kinda waiting for the people around us to clear out a little, and wonder why she didn't pick a less crowded place to begin with. Then she starts telling me what she actually wanted to say, and it's a dozen flavors of awkward guilt. How she realized twenty-five or so years ago that she was Susan Ivanova in a past life - about the nightmares, about the flashbacks, about not talking about it, about wishing it would all go away - but of course it didn't - and then she show went off the air and she thought maybe she could get some reprieve, but so many things never ended, so many questions didn't have answers, and then she ran into me and started thinking about all this again, and knew I was writing this book, and wondered, uh, maybe I could help?
I swallow my food awkwardly.
"I'll try," I say, non-committedly.
She feels she owes me an apology - me? - because she recognizes that in canon she was uh, "a bit of a dick sometimes" and she knows the broader context of what happened to her mother in that world, and she knows her behavior was, uh, "not the best."
Yeah, OK. That's one way to put it. I keep eating my sandwich.
"So I wanted to start with an apology."
I tell her that I'm not one of the people she hurt, at least not directly - I mean, I did see the show, and that was bad enough - and she winces inside - but I'm not one of those people, so, uh.
And when it comes down to it, she just wants to get it off her chest and be forgiven, and she's been hoping I could somehow provide that closure for her, but there's a big problem here for me because one telepath is not interchangeable for another - I can't just be like "oh I forgive you for the shitty things you did to other people" just because I happen to also be a telepath or I happen to be in the Corps or I happen to be a member of [$GROUP].
This means I'm appreciating that she's feeling sorry for shit she said and did, but also still subtly calling her out still expecting me to represent a whole group, let alone the weird little dynamic of people expecting telepaths to forgive them for their sins (I'm not your confessional), or help them with their emotional problems (I'm not your therapist either), and so I can already feel that this is not going well.
We're still a good thirty minutes away from the end, though, so she's stuck with me for now.
I make the mistake of trying to explain the issue here by analogy to LGBT - it wouldn't really work to apologize to one bisexual person - someone you literally just met - for being shitty to other bisexual people, right? That's not how it works.
But she takes that personally and things only get more awkward. She tells me "that's different" because "the Corps is different" and now I'm getting 'splained to what it means to be in the Corps.
Lovely.
And then she decides to ask me about Talia. She wants to know what finally happened to Talia. This has been bothering her for twenty-five years.
Except I have no fucking idea what happened to Talia. That wasn't even supposed to happen - the author wrote in all these "trap doors" in the plot in case an actor or actress decided to leave the show - everyone had one - and since she decided to leave, that one got triggered. It wasn't supposed to happen (which is why Kosh has "downloaded" her mind in another episode). It was just a writing device to accommodate the possible quitting of an actor. She was supposed to come back. And at that point in the writing, they hadn't even figured out "why the Corps had implanted a shadow personality" - it was literally just a "trapdoor" facade with no actual back story.
That's not good enough for her - and honestly, I know it, too. What happened to Talia? Yes yes, that's all true about the writing, but you know things that happened that aren't in there. What happened to Talia?
But again, I'm a disappointment, because I don't know. I'm not omniscient.
Again, I'm one person.
I tell my companion that there's a million things about her life - Susan's life - that I don't know - about EarthForce, about the Earth-Minbari War, about who knows what else - and I would have no way of knowing those things because that's her life - I don't, can't, know everything - so I'm really sorry, I don't know the answer about these things that happened to Talia. I tell her I'd be more than willing to listen about those other things in her life - Susan's life - if she wants to tell me. It's interesting.
Or it should be, but the awkwardness levels have been steadily rising like water in a mine, and I know that we've got to get out of this, or someone's going to drown. She doesn't want to talk about all the painful things in her past... and again, how can I blame her? She's carried this secret in silence for twenty-five years, like she carried the secret of her mom's telepathy in that world... Talking to me just makes me think about her mother (I know) - and on top of that, I'm not even useful.
My role in the story is supposed to be clear - I'm supposed to be "useful."
It's back to small talk.
I think about the new Star Wars movies. Kylo Ren said, "let the past die... kill it if you have to."
And we try and try, all of us, but none of us really can.
We can bury it, we can scream about it, but it's always there.
My companion and I thank each other politely and leave the coffee shop. If we see each other again, I know, it will be around other people. We will smile politely at each other and make small talk, hiding the awkwardness, and no one around us will have the slightest idea this conversation ever happened. All they ever see is "fans" - the way these things usually go.
Do satisfying "endings" really exist? I wonder.
Nothing ever ends, even when you die.