Isaac/Ainsley: If you know what's right...

I was awake at about 2 AM the night we finally got thirteen people at the Inn. The change hadn't happened yet, and really, I don't understand how anyone who knows what's about to happen to them is capable of sleeping through it. I wasn't even looking at my phone. Something felt dirty about doomscrolling while waiting for something with this much significance. Instead I just sat there, cross-legged and staring at the wall in some kind of meditative pose as if meditation's something I actually know anything about. But when my phone buzzed, I picked it up anyway.

It was Heather, calling from the room next door. Physically visiting was out of the question for fear of ending up in the wrong bodies.

"Hey, hey Isaac, you're still up, right?" Sara's voice sounded like she'd been drinking. The last year's keyed me into a lot of the tells.

"Yeah? You okay?"

"Y-yeah. I'm fine. Totally." I think she sniffled. "I want you to give me one good reason I shouldn't run away right now."

"What?"

"Like. Like from the Inn. Away from here. Before... y'know."

"You're not actually going to--"

"Tell me."

"Well." I took a deep breath. "You'd ruin everything for Sara. You know that. And for Ainsley, and for me and everyone else at the Inn right now if we can't get get someone to take your body on short notice, and it, it's wrong, you know--"

"I know!" Heather sputtered. "I know I know I know I know I know!!! I'd be horrible, a-a monster, it fucks everything up forever, I know. I don't need you to tell me that. 'Cept for how I just did, I guess." She found it in herself to laugh a bit at her own joke.

"So why--"

"I wasn't planning on it when we came in here. To Maine. I mean, Marvin put you through all that crap and he still handed over your body, and I'm not gonna be worse than him, right? But it's- it's different when you know it's coming for real, the gun's aimed at your head and you know you're gonna wake up sick and it's all gonna hit you all at once and I. I can't stop thinking about it! It's a whole, fight-or-flight, thing. God. Does this happen to everyone here who knows they're about to get a couple decades older and they're all too ashamed to admit it or did I just screw up my life that bad!?"

"It's gonna be okay," I said, after a lengthy pause in which I failed to come up with anything besides a platitude. I didn't really believe it. I picked that one up from Ainsley's friends and I don't know if they believed it either.

"Pfft. Sure." She sniffled some more. "Y'know? This was the best year I've had since, since... I don't even wanna think about it. I got to be bright and fun and cool and risky and energetic and I stole it all from someone else!! And I feel terrible about it, but, I won the Inn, Isaac. So many people get completely ruined by this place but I won, and if I were more of a piece of shit than I am I just never would've come back here. I don't have anything to come back to, I was, I am this warped, bitter shell and my kids don't want anything to do with me 'cause I ruined that too and I'm on track to die sad. I see it coming. And now I'm in this body that wants to live but I'm going back, by choice, 'cause if I don't ignore everything in me screaming to run away I'll never be able to sleep at night again."

I didn't know what to say. I've never been any good at comforting someone who's just venting and doesn't need any actual advice I'm capable of giving. Especially over the phone, where I can't use my body language. This kind of thing happened to me a lot with Ainsley's friends and I always felt like I was doing something wrong, more so than usual. I think I kind of suck at being a girl. And what does anyone even say here? I wasn't about to get thirty years older, I couldn't go "that's just how life is" or something worse. I can't understand where she's coming from, not really. Or should I have congratulated her for not doing one of the worst things anyone can possibly do to a person?

"It'll be okay," I sighed. Was that really the best I could think of? "Just... Just stay here. We can keep talking. If that helps."

"Wow, really? You oughta be a therapist." Heather started snickering before she abruptly cut herself off. "Actually, no, no, that was cruel. I dumped all that on you and I-- You can tell I'm a cruel person since that's the first thing I thought to say. Like, wow, what a bitch! I-I'm sorry. Really."

"Heather, I said this when I first met you, and I'll say it again-- I've had worse roommates."

"Heh." Her laugh didn't sound conflicted that time. I imagined Sara smiling to herself. Heather didn't hang up, but the line stayed quiet long enough for me to slip back into my own thoughts (and maybe even emotional exhaustion-induced sleep) before she broke the silence again.

"Am I really the only one who thought about what it'd be like if we didn't go back?"

Not this again. "Huh?"

"I mean. You've never seemed like you got much going on in your life, I guess? You complained about Ainsley's life a lot but I never really heard you say much about stuff you miss, besides the lower expectations. And your plants."

"So because I'm kind of pathetic, you think spending the rest of my life pretending to be a sorority girl would be an improvement?"

"If it was permanent, you wouldn't have to. That's the thing. You could ditch her friends and do whatever you want. Hang out with me and Sara's friends, maybe. I could tell you're kinda jealous."

"Are you kidding? You saw exactly what happened that time you dragged me to a concert and-- no." I'm never telling her she's vaguely right about that last part, but everything else about that spiel was out of line. "No. Back up. Did I think about what I'd do if I were stuck and had to like, cope with it? A little. But it was never a-- I can do whatever I want and not have to put up with someone else's friends in my own body! And as a bonus, I get to see my parents again. And, y'know, for someone who's spent the last year talking about how I don't appreciate my life enough, you're being incredibly cavalier about the idea of me throwing away five years of my twenties. You remember I'm really 21, right?"

That got her quiet again for a little while.

"Yeah. Okay, I-I shouldn't have-- I guess it was just, part of the fantasy I made for myself which I hate that I have about getting to stay but-- Sorry." Heather sighed. "I'd just miss having you around if it was only me who stayed."

"You really think that?"

"Yeah. You're on my mind, kiddo. You know, during that whole thing where you just threw yourself into being Ainsley, I just, I was really worried about you. I don't know if I ever properly told you that. And that's the other reason I asked about if you'd thought about what it'd be like to stay. I just... the way you tried so hard to be someone else, I don't know if someone who thinks they're leaving a lot behind would've been able to do that. So, I... I worry. That's all."

"...I care about you, too," I said after a while. "After all that, it'd be weird not to. You've helped me a lot. So, yeah. Though I'm not about to pretend you do were always the best roommate."

"Oh honey, you don't gotta, I know." Heather laughed again, full and genuine. "You know, sometimes you remind me so much of my Violet, before she-- oh shit I think I see--"

She hung up. I felt it, too.

I don't know if it happens the same way for everyone, but in my case the first sign was the hair, thickening, darkening, everywhere. I'd always had a lot of body hair, and after a year without it it felt only more so, great black vines breaking through my skin as it went subtly paler. Even on my face, which was a surprise-- I always kept myself clean-shaven, and Marvin didn't have a beard when I saw him two months ago. I barely even registered my head hair slowly retreating into my skull despite that being a far more blatant violation of the laws of physics. For a little while, I had the odd sensation of full breasts entirely covered in coarse chest hair (God, did I always have that much?) before the rest of my body began to catch up. Every second I inflated a little more, grew more rigid, and I hate that this is the least uncomfortably phallic terminology I could come up with to describe a masculinizing torso. My hands doubled in size. To my surprise a regrowing penis was far overshadowed by how I felt just above it, the entire abdomen churning inside or less frequently descending. My breath quickened until well after the changes subsided.

It's not me, in the selfie camera. It's not Isaac Strauss, not anything like the way I left him. This man has a full beard and a tight haircut and actual muscle and is missing a year's worth of babyface. He looks like he belongs somewhere. I kept staring, kept looking at every angle to find the old me in there, as if I could tear the Marvin off of me if I found the right seam. All I got was ephemeral flashes of what I wanted to see. Is my self-conception so awful that I'm just not myself if I don't look pathetic? At least Ainsley's body was supposed to be different.

I heard a knock on the door. I stood up, steadied myself, feeling like a lumbering giant although I only had a few inches on Ainsley and weigh about the same as her. I opened the door to see Heather Flynn, just like the in the old photos she used to show me of her with her kids, except she's gently crying. She reached out for a much-needed hug, and I embraced her with a hollow strength no body I've occupied ever had. I wanted to cry, too, but it's not as easy as it used to be.

Isaac/Ainsley: Karma?

Is it common for Inn people to start slacking a bit in their current body's life when they know they're about to return to the Inn? Like, the Old Orchard Beach version of senioritis? You end up in a strange body, freak out about it, come up with as many excuses as you can to avoid their commitments, eventually have no choice but to throw yourself in, you slowly and painfully adapt, and then when the light at the end of the tunnel appears you start to give yourself permission to let go a little?

Well, I've been trying to not do that. This isn't really because I feel like I owe it to Ainsley to be perfect; I think I've done an okay enough job keeping her life together under the circumstances (whatever that's worth) and her friends can handle a few no-shows if they're about to get the real her back. She's doing the same thing right now herself. No, I'm not cutting myself any slack because I've read enough of the blog's archives to know just how many opportunities there are for things to go wrong at this part of the process. I've got this basically superstitious instinct which tells me that if I act like I'm about to leave this life, I'll get hit by some kind of karmic whiplash which keeps me from returning to Isaac Strauss. And I know it doesn't work like that-- the Inn is anything but fair-- but the idea of letting myself relax just makes me feel deficient right now.

I don't even need the archives or my instincts to know that right now. The situation going on with Penny is absolutely horrible, and I considered not even posting this and holding off on any updates until after my Inn block is over. And yeah, this kind of thing has happened plenty of times in the past, but talking about the possibility of getting my own body back from a difficult-to-trust youth-seeking man with a chip on his shoulder just feels wrong.

But Marvin kept his word. I didn't give myself the luxury of fully believing him, but he's been communicative about his trip to the Inn, and even sent me an unsolicited video of himself mid-transformation while reciting a lengthy disclaimer about he's returning my body to me and how I shouldn't waste it. There was a lot more to it, but I think we've all had enough of me transcribing that guy. He's made his point very thoroughly by now.

So, entirely justified paranoia aside, I'm all set to arrive at the Inn next week. Everything looks good with Heather's plans as well. Speaking of Heather, I actually haven't seen much of her lately. She's usually gone whenever I get back to the apartment and doesn't come back until well after I've gone to bed, if not the next afternoon. As far as I can tell from when she does talk to me, it's the same kind of youthful hedonism she's been doing this whole time, just more of it. I don't really like to pry besides the occasional snide comment, and I'm not gonna stop her. The more things change...

I get jealous of her, sometimes. I kind of hate admitting it, but it's true. But then I remind myself that I've been clubbing as Ainsley, and went to a concert, and other stuff I never would've come close to a year ago. And, well. Look at how those went! I think I'm just not capable of being that type of person, and I say that as someone with experience in semi-successfully forcing myself to be a different type of person, so I at least kind of know what I'm talking about here.

Heather and I have done one interesting thing together since the last time I posted; not long after the Marvin incident we made an impromptu trip to the Grand Canyon since we were both feeling particularly bad about ourselves. It seemed like simply the thing one does if you find yourself in Arizona, despite being several hours away from Phoenix by car. Honestly, it kind of sucked? Neither of us wanted to spend Ainsley and Sara's PTO on anything not Maine-related, so we left very early Saturday morning and returned after midnight the next day. The view really is as beautiful as people say it is, but it was brutally hot the entire time and we spent most of the weekend in at least one of sleep deprivation or heat exhaustion. Neither of us felt up to doing any hiking, and between that and the horrible motel we slept at the trip felt more or less like a wash. I suppose that's the cost of doing something mostly so you can tell yourself you've done it. Of course, that's the same motivation that brought me to the Inn in the first place...

So I'm alive. Things have gone okay for me thus far after looking questionable for a while, especially when I last had anything to say. But the work isn't done. I hope it won't be much longer, and I'm not going to let myself upgrade past hope until it's no longer needed.

Isaac/Ainsley: What Once Was

10:05 at the Lounge and that creature still hadn't shown itself. I was left with only Heather for company-- Heather, who I'd ignored since the previous night's events to take a couple of sleeping pills, vanish from consciousness, and then stay holed up in my room until absolutely necessary.

"Seriously, Isaac, I had no idea-- I let that fucking maniac into my bed, I'm so--"

"It's not your fault," I sighed. "I never showed you what my body looks like. Not that any of my old pictures would've had a strong resemblance to that."

"Still. I feel-- on Tinder it said his name was Kurt!"

"Oh my God. Kurt?! Really? You fell for that!?"

"What, don't look at me like that-- he told me his parents named him after Kurt Cobain! Lots of people did that! I was gonna name my oldest Kurt but my ex wasn't having any-- Oh, so you do know who Nirvana is?"

"Okay, I--" We were interrupted by Heather's phone going off on the table in front of her. Incoming call from: "Kurt". Heather made a face and picked it up, putting it on speaker.

"Hey ladies. You at the booth I mentioned?" asked Marvin's voice. (It sounds nothing like mine, at least, not how I remember it.)

"Think so. Where are you?" I was perfectly fine to let Heather do the talking.

"Oh, nah, I'm not coming in. This is more of a pit stop, I just want to make sure you two see something. Set the stage a bit." I rolled my eyes. "But yeah, if you look at the wall opposite to the bar counter, about head height, you'll see a band pic that's just two guys. Got it?"

I didn't get it. Heather and I, already frustrated not even sixty seconds into the ordeal of interacting with Marvin, looked around at any of the band photos in the vicinity. "You mean the one where they're both wearing these colorful... bodysuit things?"

"What? No. It's somebody else."

"Somebody Else played out here? I saw them in Albany when they were active like ten, fifteen years ago. I thought they only stuck to Canada and the Northeast--"

"Heather, what are you talking about?" I muttered.

"Whoever that is, it's not them. It's just two guys. In normal clothes. Really skinny guy in overalls and a bigger guy with facial hair. It's not that hard."

I noticed a photo with two men matching Marvin's description, posed together onstage, closer to my side of the booth. They appeared fairly young, and happy, though the bigger one looked like he was having the time of his life and the skinny one seemed a lot calmer about it.

I pointed the photo out to Heather. "Green overalls?" She asked her phone.

"Yeah." Marvin rather uncharacteristically paused for a few moments. "Okay, we're good here. Meet me outside and we'll talk." Marvin hung up, and Heather and I glanced at each other as we headed for the exit.

We found him in the parking lot, leaning against his oversized rental SUV like he's gonna wake up in somebody else's seventies again if he spends a single second not trying to convince himself he's cool. He wasn't any easier for me to look at than the night before.

"You guys get a good look? Cool. I got one more place to show you, and then I'll actually get to the point and talk about why I'm doing all this shit, I swear."

Heather crossed her arms. "Uh huh, and what is this place?"

"It's a while away but it's just off the highway. It'll make more sense when--"

I tried looking at him, almost. "You're expecting us to just trust that we can blindly follow you? You're not even gonna tell us where this is?"

"*You're* not the one in position to demand things from *me* right now, okay? But, I get it, it's pretty sketch. That's why I'm asking you to follow me in your own car instead of doing the whole 'get in the car now, no time to explain' bit. If I'm lying and I end up driving you up to an abandoned warehouse or something you're free to fuck right off. And I'm not gonna hurt you. You outnumber me, I bet Heather's got mace on her or something, and besides. I don't have anything against Ainsley."

We got in the car and followed him.

"A while away" turned out to be over an hour down I-10, west of the city, well into the pitch-black desert. The highway narrowed to two lanes in either direction. Heather drove-- she told me this wasn't her first car chase and I'm inclined to believe her. I confirmed with her that Marvin's intuition was right and she had, in fact, brought pepper spray.

"I don't like this one bit," Heather said once we'd crossed the point where the only sign of civilization's existence became the highway itself. "This is some true crime BS. 'Two young women follow a jilted man obsessed with their bodies out into the desert for some reason'? Really? Do we want to be that stupid? Mace isn't gonna do us any good if he's got a gun."

"Even if he actually wanted to kill us," I replied, staring into the darkness, "I don't get how he'd do it without ruining things for himself. He keeps talking about stealing my body, you think he'd want to make that body a wanted criminal? And he's not gonna run back to the Inn and make it someone else's problem, he keeps talking about how much he hated most of the bodies he's had."

"There's your problem; you're assuming whatever he's doing has to make sense. If anything he did made sense, and he still wanted to steal your body, he would've just gone no-contact with you. And he definitely wouldn't have shown up here. Maybe he's just crazy. You sure you don't wanna bail?"

I looked at my lap. "Not following him is a risk, too. He's holding me hostage. I don't blame you for not wanting any part of this, it's not... It's not your fight, really." I felt bad that I never even suggested that Heather go home and let me follow Marvin himself. Everything is all lined up with the woman in her body, and they're communicating regularly. She could go to Maine without me, if it came to that.

Heather said nothing. But once Marvin slowly decelerated in front of us, she followed in turn, and she didn't leave him behind when he pulled over on the highway's left shoulder.

Marvin exited the SUV, hands up and pockets inside-out. We watched without leaving the car. "Evening, officers, is there anything I can do for you?" He joked. "But seriously. I know what this looks like, and I'm saying again, it's not. So get out the car and let's talk."

Despite what I'd said, leaving the car felt like an insane idea. But Heather and I glanced at each other, and I think the tipping point was being too curious for our own good at why on Earth he'd take us to this specific place. She left the car, and I climbed out through the driver's side rather than open the passenger door any closer to the highway.

Marvin walked us down the highway, around fifty feet from our cars. All of us had our phone flashlights on. The entire time since I first arrived in Phoenix I'd never left its massive sprawl before now. The world became void, its only features the stars far greater than any I'd seen in Phoenix or Charlottesville or the NoVA suburbs, and the occasional shrub I had to avoid tripping over. Every so often the void was disturbed by the roar and blinding lights of a car speeding through the darkness, breaking the illusion of nothingness for just long enough to remind me of my own fragility.

Finally we came upon a spot about ten feet off the highway with an angled pole sticking out of the ground, and Marvin stopped. There were objects scattered around the pole-- album covers, cards held down with rocks, figurines, a handpainted tile, a couple framed photos of the same two guys from the Lounge, covered in dust. The highway next to us bore a large, unsettled scar in the pavement, clearly old but obvious nonetheless. There was a moment of silence.

"This is the spot where they died," Marvin spoke. "They and their tour manager, about seven years ago. They'd just left the Lounge and were driving off for their next gig. Drunk driver going full speed the wrong way on the highway. It was instant, you see that shit on the road?"

"What does that have to do with--"

"They were your-- they were Ainsley and Sara's ages, just about. But they did something with their lives, in that short time-- way more than you, or Ainsley or Sara. Or me at that age. It's the kind of thing that when you hear about it you go, man, I haven't done shit with my life. I thought I was kind of a fuck-up when I went to the Inn. My girlfriend dumped me. Said I was 'behaving toxically'. Okay. Fine. We'd just moved in together a few months before and she bailed and stiffed me with the rent. But I was doing pretty good besides that, y'know? I went to the gym and thru-hiked when I could get the time off and had friends I'd get drunk with and go to Vegas with and they'd invite me to their bachelor parties and... Yeah, a lot of them dropped off when they had kids, but I had a pretty good thing going."

"Then I found a nice vacation deal in Old Orchard Beach and it all got taken away from me over and over and over again. The thing with waking up four decades older and some dickbag stealing your body is you start obsessing over how good you used to have it and how much you'd do with it if you somehow got it back, and you feel like you wasted your life now that you're stuck and everything's just over, and you can't live up to the potential you knew you had. It's contradictory, but that's what it's like. You two are the lucky ones! Especially you," he pointed at Heather. "But at least you know it. But you?" Marvin looked me in the eye, a gesture just barely visible past the glow of the flashlights. "You only think you know it."

"God, man, I was so happy to wake up a college kid instead of yet another retiree. And I felt kinda guilty about it-- yeah, hard to believe, I get it. I was gonna do it the right way. Adjust to your life, try not to fuck it up, enjoy it while it lasts, go back to Maine and pray I land somewhere long-term with an expiration date that's not in the next couple of decades. But when I got into it, there's hardly anything about your life to adjust to. Besides being able to actually walk and move and see and hear without hurting anything after five seconds, that's all great, but that's not you. Other than that it's just the accounting classes. Bro, you don't do anything! Your letter was tiny! The only obligation you even have outside of classes is watering a couple of plants. Like, was I missing something the whole time? Do you just take your parents' money, sit in that dorm room all day, and rot? I kept thinking there had to be some weirdness, something I'd missed, but there wasn't shit! I looked at you in the mirror every day and I, I started to hate you. You have every advantage in the world and you choose to just exist. What's wrong with you?"

I don't know if Marvin expected a response from me, but Heather gave him one. "Do not," she said, making herself as big as Sara could, "talk to my friend that way. You don't fucking get to take out your personal issues with getting your life stolen on him. I signed up to listen bullshit from adults who still don't know any better when I took a job at a high school, he didn't. You got unlucky. But there's guys your age who get cancer and I never hear about them going around telling 20-year-old kids they're wasting the gift of life. So tough shit."

"Oh really? You're going to say that?" Marvin sneered. "That's rich. I should just accept it. Tell me, all year, you really never once thought about some way you'd get to keep that body? Not stealing it, no, never, you're too kind for that. But that's not the only way it could happen, can it?"

Heather flinched.

"Why, there's so many ways! You don't even have to hope the real Sara dies in a convenient freak accident. She could just... have something come up, and then she asks you to bodysit for another year since it's better than risking anyone worse. But, nah, even that's gonna make you too guilty, right? So you think about what if she wants to stay! It happens all the time on that blog! Some kid gets knocked up and wants to keep the baby? Congratulations, give up that rusty old retiree body of yours and start all over at eighteen! Girl you're in falls in love with her new body's previous owner? Throw away a lifetime of scholarship and slut your way into being a homewrecker no matter how many times you tell yourself it's just temporary! A beautiful, single twenty-something fresh out of college in the big city gets a life that's apparently better, refuses to elaborate, and leaves? It's all yours!! We like to think we're just too good to steal a body, but you imagine it just... ending up that way and it not being your fault, don't you. For it to just kinda happen that way, so you have to reluctantly accept the burden of getting to be young and hot again. And it doesn't matter that all that youth comes from somewhere else, it fell into your lap anyway, right? For everyone who won the lottery there's just as many people who got permanently fucked into an old one-- at least the ones who die suddenly while they still think they get to go back don't have to live with it! And people like that, they seem to be a lot less talkative on the blog, huh. Maybe they just don't have the energy for it anymore, not at their age. That's what it's like for the rest of us, either we give up and die or we turn into that GIF of those old people at a casino hitting the slot machines all day. That's terrible, you feel bad for them, sure. But why go back to the Inn? There's no need to donate a decade or two to the beggars, right? There's so much that can go wrong. You might as well donate a kidney to a stranger, or sell your house to buy malaria nets. The people who do it are saints, but you're not gonna do it. There's no need. You're free to imagine getting what you've always wanted, but without asking for it, so you don't have to take responsibility for wanting it. To be young, and free from your mistakes, and wild again, going to concerts and being hot and getting high and having one-night stands with whatever hot college boy from out of state catches your eye. Or am I wrong, Heather, and you're too good to even catch yourself dreaming?"

No response from Heather besides a clenched fist and a silence which spoke for itself. Marvin turned back to me. "But anyway. I was gonna say... The more I got to know you, the more it felt like you were living life already dead. Like I could do better. You were barely occupying your own body, after all, and every day it got harder to look at. The potential you're just not using. So why shouldn't I change things? And I did. Isaac Strauss has a life now. He takes care of himself. He's getting jacked. He gets laid. He has actual friends who like having him around and do cool shit with him. Your 21st birthday was wild, by the way. His parents look more and more relieved every time they see all the progress he's made. But dammit man, no matter what I do with your body there's no escaping the old you, is there. Nothing's ever enough. I keep building and building and I still have to look at your face every day in the mirror and it, I just hate it. It's like it's mocking me, somehow. It's disgusting. I wanna pull a Nic Cage and just... take it off."

With every word Marvin spoke his breath grew heavier and Isaac Strauss' voice raspier. He stared, manically, at somewhere between me and the ground. It was the most utterly alien I'd seen that body yet, sweating and pushed to the limits and in a terrible passion. Or, that's the impression I had, even if my eyes hadn't been blurry the darkness made it so difficult to tell aside from the occasional passing headlights, so I had to fill in the blanks myself.

He'd paused long enough that it felt like he finally expected me to say something. "I hate it... I hate it too. Seeing my body look like this," I said, barely audible over even the distant cars, let alone the closer ones. Trying to reason with him over the whole scope of his rant felt pointless. "So if you really agree... You know where to go in July."

"Dealing with seeing your face in in the mirror beats seeing an eighty-year-old's. Look, I'm gonna be honest. Keeping your body was never the plan, and it still isn't. I really don't wanna be responsible for someone else getting hit with what I've been through. But that doesn't mean I don't think about doing it every waking moment. Trying to do the math in my head to get something that means I get to live again. You wanna know the real reason I came out to Phoenix, besides showing you what your life and body are capable of with someone who knows how to use them? I wanted win an argument with myself. I let all this shit I've been thinking out at you without getting you so mad that you throw your own body onto the highway and add to the death count at this exact spot. And now I want you to tell me. Man to man. How do I know I'm not gonna hand this perfectly good body over to the walking dead?"

I don't want to know how long it took for me to say anything to that.

"It's... It's not fair. It's not fair! You come in here with this... this whole speech, you hold my body hostage so you can shit all over me for all this time almost uninterrupted... And you expect me to--" I almost said thank you but got scared. "--to just. Defend myself? Write a cover letter for my own life? It's not..."

I sat down on the ground, balling myself up, totally uncaring of all the sand and dust and car exhaust that'd get on my jeans. "I-I can't take it anymore," I spoke quietly, through tears. "Everyone keeps telling me they can live life better than me... that I'm wrong... whether they think I'm Isaac or Ainsley. I've always been... behind other people, but I... Yeah. I don't know how to live my life. But that doesn't mean anyone's got the right to make me do it their way!!"

I tried to look Marvin in the eye. "I want to grow vines on the window of my dorm... I want to hug my parents again... and I want everyone to stop looking at me. That's all I'm good for. And if you think I need to be like those guys in that band, or Kurt Cobain, or Tupac or whoever, or a thousandth of that to not waste my life, then... that's all I can tell you. I'm sorry." After that I put my head in my arms and never looked back at him.

"Well, I hope you're happy," I heard Heather say, with a gentle but firm tug on my arm. "I hope your little vent session was worth it, I really do. But if you really think we're the same, Marvin, you need to realize that no matter what I'm tempted by, I would never do that to Sara. Torture her just because I feel that awful about doing the right goddamn thing and I want an award for it. C'mon Isaac, get up. We're leaving. He said he's giving it back. You don't owe him another second to indulge himself."

"Oh, I don't need you for that." Marvin snapped. "I've got another few weeks left in this, before I have to go. I'm not gonna waste it, I know how to enjoy myself. Maybe the original owner should try it sometime."

I didn't give him the dignity of a response. Heather and I returned to the car, she helped me into the passenger seat from the driver's side and drove us off, able to make it up to speed from the left shoulder without any problems. We were silent the way back through the desert, I stared blankly up at the windshield, leaning back in the chair, trying to fade from existence. It almost worked, but whenever we passed someone going the opposite direction the headlights would catch my eye, and I'd flinch just slightly, holding on to every tether, and imagine how I'd have felt about my life up to now if it'd been me on this stretch of highway west of Phoenix seven years ago.

Isaac/Ainsley: THING

Eleven at night and they were still going at it in the other bedroom, just early enough that I couldn't bring myself to sleep through it out of pure exhaustion. Heather tries to convince her various hookups to host, and it usually works out that way, but she's never let my sanity get in the way of her getting laid if it comes down to it. Eventually, the noise died down for long enough without me overhearing any talking or anyone exiting the apartment that I felt safe enough to assume they'd both gone asleep and go get myself a drink of water.

It was on the couch when I opened the bedroom door. Not looking at a phone or trying to leave or anything. Just sitting there, eyes already peeled to my door before I even opened it. I averted my eyes and speedwalked as non-conspicuously I could manage to the kitchen. As I filled a cup I involuntarily dropped the glass into the sink when I heard it speak.

"Well? Aren't you going to look?"

My breathing stopped. Without thinking I bolted around and did as instructed. It sat casually stretched out like it owned the place, a toothy grin I'd never seen before on its face. It had an immaculately maintained side-shaved haircut, clear, lean muscle visible alongside a muscle top and well-fitting jeans. Its voice, buried under a deeper affectation and genuine confidence, just hauntingly familiar enough to invoke nightmares. It was Isaac Strauss' body.

"What's up? Can't look yourself in the eye?" It laughed-- an actual laugh, not the disgusting choke-snort I long believed was the only thing it's capable of. "I kinda thought you'd react that way. You're so predictable, really-- both of you." I continued silently looking at the floor, not wanting to confront or provoke or comprehend the problem before me in any way possible.

A disheveled, half-naked Heather emerged from her bedroom, giving the intruder and I something else to look at. She yawned, looking over the both of us. "Ainsley, he was just leaving," she said, as if she'd be nudging him with her elbow if she were close enough. She looked at him. "I told you not to bother my roommate, she's kinda--"

"Heather that's my own fucking body!" I let out in a far more pathetic whimper than I'd hoped for.

She froze and looked around again. "Huh? I, I-- That's not how I would've--"

The body seemed to consider this the funniest thing in the world. "I still can't believe you never even showed her what you look like, this whole time. Like, I made some changes, but damn. She could've figured it out the second she saw me on Tinder, y'know? Do you just hate yourself that much?"

I had no response for that. It's true. I'd never shown Heather what I used to look like. It never came up and I didn't feel like volunteering it.

Heather, fists clenched, answered for me. "I am not. Going to tolerate you treating me, or my friend, like that ever again. If you say one more fucking word to him I swear I'm gonna make sure you won't even dream about showing your face again."

"Oh, really? Never show my face again-- is that permission to cancel my Inn reservation?" Heather flinched. "Yeah. I thought so. And I've been hitting the gym, so, y'know, I think I can handle a one-v-one fight with a stick like you-- since we all know you're--" Its face looked right at me again "--gonna be too busy hiding in a corner to help out. But, you look pretty pissed, I'm not gonna risk it. So maybe I should just--"

"--Just say whatever the hell you're gonna say and get on with it!" I cried.

"Thank you," it grinned. "For asking, 'why'd you come all this way, Marv?' Well, I'll tell you. The semester wrapped up, and all the cool, new friends I made over the last year skipped town for the summer. So I thought, hey, I'm young and got nothing better to do, why not visit two very special acquaintances of mine in Phoenix before I head up to Maine? It'd be a waste to just rot in a dorm all summer. I mean, can you imagine?"

"So I'm here for two reasons. One, I want to give you a demonstration of what you're capable of-- one way," it pointed at itself, "or another." It made double finger-guns at Heather, who I was almost about to join in nearly being driven to violence. "I can't believe I got away with that one, by the way. Crazy. But, yeah. And two, I want to give you an invitation, for tomorrow night. An event I'm putting on, just the three of us, where we can talk... Old Orchard Beach? And a couple other things."

Heather and I both waited for it to get to the point, unwilling to give it the satisfaction of a reaction.

"So yeah, meet me at ten tomorrow night. Little place called The Lounge, at least by someone in this room." Sometimes I wonder why anyone ever risks putting anything on the blog. "Sit at that booth in the back corner, by all those pictures of acts that've played there. Should be a good time. Better than this-- for you two, at least, I know *I'm* having fun." It started making its way towards the door, apparently, this was as far as it'd gotten with his clearly rehearsed speech. "We try to have some fun around here, huh? So, 'til tomorrow. Marv out."

The thing that was me left the apartment before either Heather or I could collect ourselves enough to do anything, for all it would've been worth if we had.

Isaac/Ainsley: Ungrateful

Incredibly, by the time Thanksgiving came around and I couldn't put off meeting Ainsley's family any longer, I wasn't all that terrified. I don't know whether that's growth or just numbness, or if the two can be considered the same thing at times. It helps that, as Ainsley's family lives nearby and "I" blew all my PTO in Maine over the summer, I had an excuse to only show up for a few hours on the day of.

It was basically a vacation compared to the wedding, and nothing really noteworthy happened why didn't have a worse equivalent at the wedding. I fielded Ainsley's parents' questions about how the job is going, if I'm back into dating yet, and why I stopped showing up to watch the Cardinals with them this year with disappointingly flat answers. Her family does the big extended family gathering type of Thanksgiving (it was at an aunt's house), which normally isn't my speed but it helped keep me from getting put on the spot too much by the people who know Ainsley best, again.

Christmas went much the same way, after changing out the food and decorations. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As predicted the holidays made it difficult for Ainsley's friends to coordinate any more big meetups for several weeks, not helped by how Ainsley is usually the one doing the coordinating. I got talked into a holiday party where about two-thirds of them showed up, it went okay. The wedding gave me enough experience with these girls to settle into an uncomfortable but stable equilibrium where they're clearly baffled by Ainsley's lack of being in sync, so to speak, but I'm present enough that they've learned not to pry too hard. I eat and drink and wait for a conversation topic which gives me opportunities to speak in ways that won't humiliate me and count down until I get to leave.

Melissa is the exception. I kept my promise to see her again and we've gotten lunch a couple times. Whenever I interact with her it feels as if she's trying to figure me out (though with less openly stated desperation than at the bachelorette party), as if she believes if she cracks the code, she'll be able to tease the real Ainsley back out. More than awkwardness, I just feel terrible for her. She's genuinely charismatic and engaging to be around, even if we don't have much in common, and all she wants and deserves is something I don't know how to give. But I can tell, she'd rather have the illusion of Ainsley in her life than to have her vanish again. So it goes.

That all being said I drew the line at going clubbing with the group on New Year's Eve. I already tried doing the courageous thing and taking a big step out of my comfort zone at the bachelorette party, and you remember how that went. Heather also made plans so I had the apartment to myself for the night. It went pretty well, all things considered. I broke into Ainsley's wine stash and watched The Truman Show. I'd had worse NYEs.

The next day I got a text from Isaac Strauss.

Also known as Marvin Harrell. I've kind of avoided talking about the man in my body, and I didn't like thinking much about him, either. Once it became clear that my life requires relatively little micromanagement it just became, too uncomfortable to imagine someone else in my place. Easier to avoid it altogether, despite how irrational a fear I thought it was.

Hey man,

I've been wanting to tell you. I mentioned I'm a 35-year-old guy, but that wasn't the whole truth. I'm SUPPOSED to be 35. But I was in this woman's seventies before I ended up in your body.

I've been in a few seventies, actually. An eighties, once. Life starts to look different when you keep taking peeks at the end. Fucker steals my body 'cause some girl smiled at him at the gym and he thinks he's got some kind of soulmate, and every summer since then that place finds another way to take everything from me again. Eyesight. Strength. Independence. The future. Lust, and not just that kind but. The lust for life. One time the guy in my at-the-time-body's husband's life got a heart attack, and he barely lived, but man, he got to go back in the end. And the fucked up part is you get used to it. You start to forget what you've lost, 'cause there's no other way to cope.

And then I finally got a good roll and woke up in your body and, man. You're a scrawny young guy, maybe that chick you're in's stronger than you used to be even. But you're a young guy. Could've been made of toothpicks and you'd still have one thing I hadn't had in years. Potential. You've got problems, but with the time to solve them. When a guy your age rots there's either something wrong with him or it's by choice. And I'm watching you do the same thing to Ainsley's life, too.

I just wanna know, what's up man? If you asked me in the first couple days I would've been relieved at how little you've got going on but it's just. Sad. The more I thought about it every joint pain-free day, the more I looked at you in the mirror, the less it sat right with me. And when I couldn't take it anymore I started making some changes. It's not that hard, you've got free time out the ass. Getting a real haircut was one of the first things I did. Been hitting the gym for a while now. Tried figuring out how to take care of your plants but some of them keep trying to die on me, I'm working on it though. Started chatting with some people at the dining hall, been going on hikes with them every now and then. Not a bad time. I tried out for the improv club but ate shit at the audition. You'd think all this Inn stuff'd make us better actors. Oh, and I cut off that girl you're always texting. She's too nice to say it, but she's for sure tired of you dude. Being the only person you have. You've been holding yourself back, it's for the best. Trust me, I've been there.

So yeah, I'll let you know about Inn reservation stuff once that opens up but I just felt like I had to tell you all that. You've gotta appreciate what you've got before it's gone. I mean, can I keep your life? It's not like you were using it. Lol

-Marv

I had to replace Ainsley's phone after that.