Some years ago there was a different Zenia. There was a house where she more or less lived, and a man who lived there too. And all the things that went with it. And the good and bad and mediocre times flowed through her fingers. Nothing was especially good or bad, and she didn't think about whether it should be different because before this house and this man there had been war in many nations, and like many people all over the planet that they lived on during this time, Zenia and the man in the nice enough house felt grateful to  be alive.

When she stopped to wonder if she was meant to stay where she was, in the nice enough house, with the loving man and the kind people who lived near them, Zenia only knew that she was 1. grateful to be alive 2. happy that the bombs had stopped falling after many years of many bombs falling 3. hopeful at last for a future that might include both number 1 and number 2 for quite some time into the future. The moment that she caught herself thinking the above thoughts, she would curl up, in a corner or in a bed, or in the bathtub, and sob. Because the hubris of daring to think such thoughts was frightening, and yet she wanted to have hubris. She was a daring person by nature, and she wanted to be herself again.

~^~
After some years in the nice enough world, crouched down, trying not to invoke the wrath of the Gods in whom she absolutely believed, Zenia snapped.

~V~

Thus begins the tale in which we now find ourselves.

~V~

This World is not the one in which we live now, but a reverse circular inside out imploded mistake. It doesn't matter right now how it came about, you wouldn't understand it, and probably don't care. What matters is how it started. If you can see that part clearly, it might make everything else fit together. It's a vast puzzle. A vast puzzle of misintent spinning backwards on a lunatic's turntable at what could be called, perhaps, as a sick joke, warp speed, like a flip book, that is a kind of cartoon. So bear with me as I try to explain what I don't understand to you, so long after the ultimate destruction and rebirth that it is probably not possible for mere mortal minds to comprehend.

All we can do is try.

~V~

Zenia Argos is tired. Tired to her ventricles, but still curious. She might possibly have told the right person on a certain type of night in the right kind of bar that she defined herself by her curiosity. Now she felt that her strange mind and her odd ways probably overwhelmed her and had thereby come to define her.

~^~
Zenia not only felt undefined, she felt amorphous.
Like a ghost in a black silk raincoat and black patent leather stiletto  heels, she stalked through airports and the gutters of various cities. She forgot to ask herself meaningful questions. She forgot to ask herself any questions at all.

~^~
One day in some unbelievably high-numbered floor of a high-rise hotel in a city whose name she had forgotten she woke up in a luxurious enough bed with a body on the other side of it, face turned away from her. Her brain tossed up only this inane phrase, which repelled and fascinated her at the same time.
"Age has it's privileges"

First thought after that was a silly image of an actual ledge, outside of a high rise building such as the one she found herself in at the moment. With a cartoon cat and a cartoon Zenia fighting to stay on the edge, and comically slipping, hilariously falling, and hanging on, in fast forward and then reverse, and she lay there with her eyes closed and watched the vaudeville show for as long as it took to run through it's loop several times.
~^~
Then she wondered why she was thinking in perfume ad cliches, especially ones from decades, perhaps many decades ago?

This prompted her to jump, catlike, from prone, to alert, and holding her gun from beneath pillow, scanning the room.

Nope.

Not a perfume ad.