Broken Metaphors

Posted on 15 Jul 2021 @ 9:34pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Crewman Recruit Zuzal
Edited on on 15 Jul 2021 @ 9:38pm

Mission: M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Quinn & Zahn Quarters
Timeline: MD04 Mid Morning
1800 words - 3.6 OF Standard Post Measure

Zuzal looked around the senior living quarters. They featured high ceilings and everything was very newly furnished. She paused at Commander Quinn’s display case and Calliope waited for her to absorb it. Zuzal was in awe. “These are all your husband’s?”

“They're all his, yes, although they’re not all of his awards. Just the highlights.”

“He must be very intelligent.”

Calliope smiled with a blend of humor and pride. “Intellect is his burden, yes." She agreed before continuing for the reason they'd come. " Right, so. You can log into your lessons from here.” Calliope motioned to the general office area at the rear of the main living space. She had Zuzal as an assistant for the day, but there was a caveat that she be able to attend one of her virtual lessons. Calliope decided to bring her to the senior quarters, as it was far less cramped and would give Calliope the opportunity to unpack her crates. “When you’re through, we can resume the robot investigation on the Marine decks.”

“Yes ma’am.” Zuzal moved around to the desk area and logged in. Her access took her to her own menus and she was relieved she could reach all her courses just the same as in her own quarters.

“Go ahead and use the privacy wall.” Calliope suggested. She didn’t want Zuzal to be self conscious about her course work and neither was she especially interested in reviewing differential equations herself.

The holographic separator sprang up and formed as though it were a glass block wall between them. They could both vaguely see one another’s form through it, but it felt significantly enough as though they were in separate rooms.

Calliope turned back to look at Lance's achievement case and felt reflective. For as smart as he was, sometimes it felt like they couldn’t communicate. Like he couldn’t really grasp her meaning. Or maybe it was her. She couldn’t say what needed said. Which was what exactly? Calliope leaned into her cane as she crossed the room back to the counter. Her boxes were to one side of it, still packed and sealed from the Paracelsus. Strangely enough, her boxes were waiting in the last place she had sorted and packed up the boxes of the former occupant of these quarters, one Lt. Commander John Morrison.

She pressed a palm on the top of one of her crates. It still had the impression of the Paracelsus name printed in the casing, and pasted over it was the shipping label information for delivery to Obsidian Command. As she peeled back the shipping sticker, she remembered hastily throwing these boxes together while on the comms, making the flight arrangements to get to the station post-haste.

Calliope opened the sealed flaps and folded them back. Everything inside was something she loved. Clothing and trinkets and books from special trips or beloved people. Calliope had innumerable hobbies over the years but she’d learned that almost anything she needed could be replicated as required. It was the mementos that she retained. Things with emotional attachment. These she began to lift out and decide if it belonged somewhere in these quarters.

She set out a vase from her mother. It was a handmade thing they had made together in a night class, and Calliope had given her mother the fruit of her own effort, to which her mother had reciprocated. They were equally “homely”. As Calliope’s mother in law had once said over a holo-conversation during wedding preparations, having seen the vase over Calliope’s shoulder and been unpleasantly distracted by it’s visage. She wouldn’t continue the call until Calliope had “arranged its whereabouts elsewhere.” Calliope hugged the amateur stoneware now, brushing the cool surface with her fingers. It wasn’t that bad. The glazes had a kind of imperfect authenticity that didn’t come from replicated material. Calliope found it a place of honor on the counter, only wishing she had a few flowers to add to it.

Maybe the next time she came by she would move the sunflowers from her room in sick bay up to their quarters. They had recovered slightly, after all, just as Lance said they would. He was right, even if he’d entirely missed her point about having giving him a “broken Flower.” Lance hadn’t understood the metaphor, not really. That was one thing Calliope had always found simultaneously endearing and a little challenging. There were so many things in life that metaphors made it simpler to understand or talk about. It wasn’t that Lance never used metaphor at all, or that it always went over his head. In fact, it was almost as if he were just too intelligent for them altogether. Like he’d grasp onto one and overthink it, take it to the point at which it made no sense at all, and therefore completely lose the unity in the metaphor in the first place.

So she figured that was where she would start. By explaining her metaphor. Just, maybe not in person. Maybe it would be easier for both of them, she thought, if she tried in writing, this time.

Digging through her things with more purpose now, she came up with a stained and well used calligraphy set. It had been another hobby she’d picked up over the years, this one spurred on by the gift set that Captain Winters had sent for her to commemorate her fifth year aboard the Paracelsus. Calliope had to replicate fresh stationary, but then sat and smoothed it out on the counter, thinking. When it felt as if her head was so full that it finally spilled over into her heart, she began to let the ink flow through the fountain pen.


Dear Lance,
Fifteen years ago, when we married, I gave you a broken flower.

It’s not fair to you that I’ve waited fifteen years to tell you how broken I was. Every way in which my body is physically broken now, it feels as if it’s a debt I owed that I took out a loan against and I’m just now paying all of the compounded interest.



Calliope stopped writing for a moment. It was another metaphor. She was trying to explain a metaphor with a metaphor.... But she’d started in ink and there it was. She continued.



I’ve been trying to think of an anniversary gift, but I can’t think of anything that doesn’t feel trite or incidental. So I’ve decided it’s time I give you what I’ve always tried to keep from you. I told myself it was so you wouldn’t have to hurt, but really, I was afraid you wouldn’t want me. I’m still afraid. Afraid you might see me as untrustworthy, or that it might make me seem too fragile to touch. It’s ironic that by not telling you I’ve finally become both of those things, anyway.

I’m writing it down here— everything I felt would go away if I just stopped reliving it. I hid it from myself with medication and I wanted to believe that meant it wasn’t there anymore. And in a very real sense, I have lived without it. I managed to think of myself as a new person, and I’ve been okay. You always knew I used the medication as a prescription to manage the pheromones starting when I was young, and now you know that I purposely ignored all of the warnings that came with continued use later. I don’t want you to think any of this is your fault. It was wrong for me to think I was doing this to protect you, because behind that feeling was just me, afraid that if I told you about it, I’d have to look at that damaged and twisted girl again.

So, for our fifteenth anniversary, I give you all the ugliest parts of me. Everything you should have known before you married me. This is the Broken Flower.



In pages and pages of heartfelt handwritten script, writing as though she were under a spell driving her pen, Calliope began to tell the rest of the story of the worst chapter in her adolescence. About how she’d manipulated people around her and elicited reactions from others intentionally. About the repeated physical abuses it attracted and the trap she’d made for herself and accepted in a twisted way. About the beatings that made it ultimately impossible to hide from her mother anymore. About the police and lawyers and courts and therapists and medication.

When she came to the end of the story, it sickened her so much that she didn’t even want to reread what she’d just put to the page.

She stared a long time at the end of the final page, unsure how to close off the letter or how to say anything else at all. Instead the page became tear stained. At long last, she wrote over top of the wet spots, making the ink spread.



I love you, and you deserve a perfect flower, but this is the only one I have to give you. It’s yours, but I understand if you don’t want it. I understand if you feel I tricked you by never showing you the truth. You deserved to know from the beginning.


She struggled with how to close it. Sincerely yours? It wasn’t that kind of a love letter. She left that off.

Since she had first come through the other side of it as a girl, she had used the idea that those events were the story of “Not Calliope” as a way to create a healthy distance from them and to move on.

But now she simply signed:


Calliope


She dated it then sat long enough to allow for the ink to dry. At last, she carefully folded together the pages and addressed it “to Lance” across the outside.

While strangely cleansed by the exercise, she was nonetheless incredibly drained emotionally as she held the leaves of paper in her hand. They seemed so much heavier than paper. She discovered she wasn’t certain how to give it to him, or if she should yet. Unable to decide, Calliope tucked it inside the back cover of one of her travel scrap books and slid the book with the letter inside onto an otherwise empty shelf.

Calliope rubbed a hand over her cleanly shaven head and got up to wash her face. Zuzal would finish with her lesson soon.