To all of Julia that I can reach:

I love you, and I’m sorry. I know that you’re upset with me, which is why I wanted to address as much of you as I could in order to explain myself. Our communication was always something we prided ourselves on, and I don’t intend for these extenuating circumstances to change that.

When we met, I realized very quickly that you were one of a kind. You were nothing like the other no-talent creative writing majors at that school, myself included. Your work made mine look like English was my fourth language, when in reality it was your second. Your prose was so effortlessly beautiful, so eloquent without ever coming across as indulgent or long-winded. Moreover, you didn’t have any impulse to wallow in your own romanticized misery like I had convinced myself was necessary to be great. It’s not like it ever even worked. I was no Hemingway or Bukowski, no matter how much I tried to pretend I was when I was on one of my benders.

You, on the other hand, were something magical. You walked into every class like it was the most meaningful event in the world, yet you spoke with such an intoxicatingly off-the-cuff tone that felt more befitting of a coffee chat than a senior thesis workshop. You wore your zest for life on your face every single day, with your faint smile lines serving as proof that you had been this way for a very long time. I didn’t truly understand what the word “savant” actually entailed until I met you. It was like creating was a part of your very essence, like synthesizing and communicating the worlds inside your head was as intuitive a process as breathing. You were a genius with none of the baggage, someone with a gift who was endlessly excited to share it with the world.

To this day, I don’t understand what you saw in me. I always figured that people as special as you would naturally gravitate towards one another, that you all would go off and live your lives somewhere far away from wherever I would wind up. I think I was subconsciously hoping you’d reject me when I asked you for dinner to discuss our writing; it had been a few too many months since my last failed romantic encounter for me to squeeze any more melancholic vomit-inducing poetry out of it. But you accepted my offer, and before I knew it, we were moving into our new apartment with absolutely no plan for the future and absolutely no care as to how we would figure it out.

Loving you was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, being with you made it impossibly easy for me to clean up my act. One concerned look from your soft, hazel eyes provided more clarity on how to change than the twelve-step program could ever hope to. On the other hand, those first few years led to the crystallization of a truth that I had known deep down from the very first day you read your work aloud in class: You were the genuine article, and I was nothing but a pale imitation. You were one of the future greats, and I was a derivative amateur who wouldn’t know real nuance even if it moved in with him.

While this was a bitter truth to swallow, being with you was enough of a miracle that I was able to cope with the blow to my ego. My new purpose became nurturing your gift, making sure that you had the means to produce the art that I knew was going to change the world. I stowed away my own ambitions and got a job at a literary agency. It was meaningful enough work, but at its core, it was just a means to an end to secure a roof over your head so that you could work uninhibited. You protested, said it wasn’t fair, but I wouldn’t relent. I was finally being honest with myself. I knew that the most meaningful thing I could do in this world was to allow you to fully develop your craft.

That’s why I broke when you got sick. You had been my reason to persevere in a life that had otherwise been dull and ineffectual. I loved you. I needed you. Your decay might have been more visible and painful, but mine was nonetheless real, set in motion the moment the doctor read your diagnosis aloud. It seemed like every day was dragging me kicking and screaming towards the end of the world. The more energy you lost, the less coherent your sentences became, the more I lost the will to fight. I slid back into my drinking, sneaking off to bars on the rare occasions that you were able to get a full night’s sleep. I hated myself for it. I knew that this was when you needed me the most, but I lost every time I made any attempt to wrestle with my nature. I belonged in the gutter, and with you on your way out, I felt the pull towards it stronger than ever before.

On one particularly despondent night, I found myself in a rough part of town, drunk enough to start talking at a stranger about my situation. He was dressed uncharacteristically well for someone from that area. His features were sharp, almost too geometrically precise for a real human being. He was solemn as he listened to me, hesitant to interrupt or ask questions. He waited patiently as I sniffled and wailed about you, about how scared I was to lose you.

Most of all, I bemoaned just how great a tragedy it was for a genius like you to die before getting to share her gift with the world.

“She was… she was just starting to make some headway on her dreams. It’s just.. she really is something special. The world needs to know her.. I wish the world could know her…”

This caught the man’s attention. He looked right at me, almost through me, and spoke calmly.

“I can help you. Follow me.”

I followed him back to what I could only assume was his apartment. Not a wise decision, but it wasn’t like I had much to lose. It was a small studio with nothing but an ornate wooden desk placed in the center of the room. The man sat down in the accompanying chair as I continued to observe my surroundings. On the walls were dozens of strange-looking geometric diagrams drawn in thick black marker. They resembled the impossible shapes you would find in those optical illusion books, giving me a headache if I looked at them for more than a few seconds. It might just have been the alcohol, but they really did unnerve me. Interlocking grids of triangular prisms, attempts at 4 dimensional shapes, lines that seemed to somehow be parallel and perpendicular at the same time. They covered the walls completely, with some of them even stretching onto the ceiling.

Strewn across the desk were multiple maps, ranging in specificity from the neighborhood we were currently in to the entire globe. On the side closer to the man’s chair were vials of churning multicolored liquid organized in rows inside an elaborately engraved container. The man spun one of the vials through his fingers as he began to speak.

“I am in the business of dividing souls. If your wish is to both save this woman from annihilation and share her with the world, I can provide a solution.”

I looked him up and down. Through a combination of my blood alcohol concentration, the esoteric setting, and his matter of fact tone, I was uncharacteristically convinced by what would have otherwise been regarded as a nonsense string of words. Still, I needed to know more.

“Souls? How do you divide a soul?” I finally responded, trying and failing not to slur my words.

He looked the slightest bit annoyed at my question. He paused and began to inhale, as if preparing to give a well-rehearsed speech.

“Society would have you believe that there are things that escape the purview of mathematical operations. That certain aspects of reality cannot be conceived of in terms of fractions or percentages. That a memory cannot be cut in half. This is patently false. Everything in existence is quantifiable. Everything in the universe is divisible. No matter how complex or metaphysical the thing is, there are rules that can be applied to remove parts of it from the greater whole. Through my intimate knowledge of the sacred geometry undergirding reality, I am able to exploit this truth and engage in the art of soul division. The soul, the psychic amalgamation of every aspect of a person’s essence, is dissolved into the collective consciousness of the human race.”

The alcohol made me take even longer than I already would have to digest those words. I stood there for almost a minute trying to process what he had said. My response was only a single word.

“Dissolved?”

He put the vial he had been fiddling with down and directed his attention towards me more fully. His voice was still just as monotone, but he began to speak with his hands instead of resting them on his desk.

“Correct. Think of it this way. A soul is an enormously large coagulation of everything that distinguishes a person as an individual. It contains within it every thought, memory, feeling, and physical characteristic belonging to them. It is everything that makes them what they are as opposed to something else. It is an ocean of individuality. What I am able to do is divide that ocean into individual drops, adding one drop to each of the other eight billion oceans on this planet. Every human alive today will be endowed with an infinitesimally small portion of her soul, yourself included.”

I was finally starting to catch up with conversation. I had admittedly gotten a little distracted by his lengthy explanations, but as I started to synthesize what was being said, my reason for being there came back to the forefront of my mind. As the gears began to turn, I asked the only question that mattered.

“Will she be ok?”

Another annoyed look, like we were back to the old script.

“She will be lost to herself. All of the individual constituent components of who she is will still exist, but they will be scattered amongst her entire species. Does the ship of Theseus still exist if each piece of it is used to repair a different ship in Greece? It ‘exists’, but it is not a ship anymore.”

“Why the hell would I take you up on that?!” I snapped back. It sounded like he was just offering to kill you before the cancer could. I saw no reason why something like that was any better than a dignified, if not tragic, death.

“Because the alternative is obliteration,” he retorted. “Death is absolute. All of her will be destroyed. Soul division ensures that what is unique to her is not lost to the world. I was under the impression that this woman was special?”

I was taken aback by that response. I realized then what his offer actually was. This was how the world could know you. You would be given over to all of humanity, your genius preserved and able to be accessed. You could live on as a million sparks of inspiration in the minds of otherwise mediocre artists like me. The gift that you would be to the creative spirit of mankind…

“Let’s do it,” I suddenly barked.

I’m so sorry Julia. I said the words without fully comprehending what I was doing. There were dozens more questions I should have asked before even thinking about playing with your life like I did. I just so desperately wanted to keep you here in some form. I couldn’t lose you completely.

The man nodded and picked back up the vial he had been previously toying with. He began to mutter under his breath in a language I didn’t recognize as he emptied the vial onto his hands and rubbed them together. It was a viscous, shimmering liquid that became more and more prismatic as he continued lathering it between his fingers. After ten seconds, he began to wipe his hands across the largest map on his desk, the map of the world. The geometry strewn across the walls began to faintly glow as he covered every inch of the Earth with the now foaming liquid. The previously whispered chanting grew in volume, and I was now certain that this was no language I had ever heard. After maybe about twenty seconds, it was over. He opened a drawer and grabbed a towel to clean up.

“That’s.. That’s it? You don’t need anything from me?” I asked sheepishly.

“No. You gave me enough at the bar. The process will take approximately twenty-four hours. You are free to go.”

I stood there for a moment before finally turning to leave the apartment. When I was halfway out the door, a question I should have asked long before he performed whatever ritual that was came to my mind. I spun back around and asked it.

“What’s in this for you?”

The faintest smile made its way across his lips.

“Not to worry. I have already been compensated.”

I tried my absolute hardest in that moment to convince myself that this didn’t mean anything dangerous for you. But I think I knew better.

“Any other questions?” He asked, subtly implying that I was wasting his time.

I could only think of one.

“Who are you?”

His dispassionate demeanor gave way for the first time after I said those words. He looked somewhat surprised, like he wasn’t expecting to be asked that question.

He paused.

“Someone very far from home.”

I spent the next day at your side in the hospital. Even though you had said you were feeling better when you woke up, by midday you were becoming delirious. You kept talking about the shapes you would see every time you closed your eyes, and how every few minutes a flash of what seemed to be someone else’s point of view would fill your vision. It broke my heart to see your fear slowly rise as you tried to understand what was happening. You said it felt like you were being pulled apart. I tried to tell myself that this was normal, that everyone saw things like this before they passed on. But this was no light at the end of the tunnel. By the evening, the edges of your fingers started to appear blurry, like the boundary between your body and the room was starting to become unclear. I wanted to convince myself it was just my imagination, but I couldn’t. I knew that this was my doing.

You were gone the next day. Not dead. Gone. The hospital staff frantically searched the entire building for you, but you were nowhere to be found. None of their cameras caught you walking down any hallway or through any exit. A missing person’s report was filed, and I was eventually even taken in for police questioning. But they let me go. There was no reason I would do anything to you when you already had weeks to live at best.

I didn’t leave our apartment for almost a week after I got back from the station. The guilt, the grief, it kept me bedbound for many days. Even if what the man did had worked, you were still gone from my life. I would never get to hear your voice again. And your fear, the look in your eyes… I just didn’t want to face what I thought I might have done to you. I didn’t want to face the world that I had imposed you onto. In the end, my intuition was justified. I had every reason to be afraid.

I had to leave home eventually. My first outing was a visit to a nearby convenience store out of pure necessity. I was just going to grab enough food and drinks to let me stay at home for another few days. It was fairly crowded when I walked in, with maybe ten to fifteen people spread amongst the aisles.

I made my way to the back of the store to grab some drinks. As I was looking over my options, a man maybe four feet to my left turned to look at me. We made eye contact for maybe a fraction of a second. He twitched ever so subtly before whispering two words.

“Have to.”

Immediately after he did this, a woman walking behind him twitched in a similar fashion before whispering as well.

“Want to.”

I watched in horror as it spread throughout the whole store, the voices overlapping and growing louder.

“Have to.”

“Want to.”

“Cold.”

“Cold.”

“Want to.”

I knew it was you. I knew this was your pain. I sprinted towards the exit, but a frail old woman grabbed me by the arm with terrifying strength. She opened her mouth to speak.

Her voice… no, your voice, was filled with such venom that it made my heart sink further than I ever knew it could.

“I was going to make it.”

I haven’t left home since that incident. I don’t know if you were only able to speak because you saw me, or if the whole human race is experiencing what I witnessed. But I know that you’re still here, and I know that you’re angry. That man, or whatever he was, was either wrong or lying. I can only guess that the resonance between your soul fragments when they gather is producing a sort of proto-consciousness. You’re an incomplete ghost, aware of yourself to the extent that you know something is deeply wrong. More than that, you seem to know that it’s my fault.

I’ve had the same dream every night for the last week. In it, we’re face to face in a pitch black void. You’re in your hospital gown, staring daggers at me. Your eyes are a swirling blend of blue, green, and brown. There are patches of your skin that are the wrong color. There’s a prismatic hue emanating from the outline of your body. You’re angry, but even more than that, you’re scared. You tell me that I need to fix this, that something terrible is going to happen if I don’t. Before you can tell me what it is, your body begins to break down into abstract shapes. Your shoulders become spheres that turn inside out, your head a cube with impossible angles. This process continues until your whole body is a fractal that engulfs the entire void. The fractal begins to moan and writhe in agony, shaking the space around me. Before I wake up, I hear the voice of the man from the bar. He says the same thing every time.

“Subject is unstable.”

Julia, please hear me when I say this. I love you, and I’m sorry. I made a decision on your behalf that turned you into this, and now you’re suffering as a result. I’ve thought a lot about you and me since you’ve left. When I gave up my dreams to support yours, part of how I coped was to view you not only as my partner, but as my project. I convinced myself that if I could nurture your creative spirit, let it fully develop, I would in some way be able to take credit for the results. I think that’s why I did what I did. It was selfish, but I just couldn’t let my efforts go to waste. I needed to see it through, no matter what it meant for you.

But I was wrong. You never belonged to me then, and you don’t belong to humanity now. You are yours. I’m so sorry I took that away from you. Know that I will make this right. I will put you back together.

And to you, the complete soul reading this, please know that you now harbor within you a fragment of someone extraordinary. Perhaps you’re wondering what it means for you to have gained one eight-billionth of a human soul. It’s impossible to know for sure. Maybe there’s now a speck of hazel in your eyes that you’ve never noticed before. Maybe you know the word for chair in French and aren’t quite sure where you learned it. Or maybe, you had a shower thought this morning for a novel that you think would be worth exploring. If the latter is the case, I beg you, please don’t waste it. See it through. For her sake, not mine.