I did a lot of digging into the idea of “closure” and how looking for closure can become detrimental. It doesn’t matter how smart or well-adjusted you are. Like a dog chasing a bird, you can chase closure right over the edge of a cliff. The narrator of “The Last Lucid Day” is someone who has done the homework: He’s likely been in years of therapy; he knows the language of complex trauma, parental neglect, attachment styles, and so on.

Sometimes when I am not doing anything serious I allow different thoughts to run freely in my head. One of those many thoughts was wondering how cool it would be for humans to be able to see into the future.

I play tabletop role playing games, though that leads to a lot more writing, hah! I currently run two concurrent campaigns—one Blades in the Dark, and one VtM, on alternate weekends, and guide my players through a play-by-post campaign set alongside the main campaign during the week.

The mechas in this story were extremely inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime which has also driven a lot of my past writing. The mechas in Evangelion (spoiler) must be implanted with a core containing the soul of the pilot’s mother in order to function properly.

This was the story I wrote … while quarantining after traveling back to my hometown in Kerala, India. I remember that I was trying to challenge myself to write a chaotic, peopled world full of sensations that were in direct opposition to the sterile confines of my room.