surprise vs. inevitability

REPTILY: It's great how you keep going and coming back to life, but it's not the same as reincarnation because it's all in one breath; I know because I am still your blood mistress, and you've only been gone a week, a month. You were just here. Hey, the pink carnation, literally, in your lapel has not finished drying. It's the original carne, horseman.

ILLYN: But uglier, a taking to task of symmetry. Once I tried to retrieve some dry cleaning I'd dropped off in a previous expression. Lou looked up at me and said he was sorry, not that I died but that I had to insult the community and its grief that way, over and over again. These arncho raiments, he said: Might as well stick with the wormeaten pinstripe on yr back. ...It stung.

REPTILY: N' I know how they say that a Craw dive is the only noble way to treat yrself out, that the Mthyuh is hungry and the patriotic gesture is to beg her to eat you first, but how much of a sacrifice, bro...? How much, when you know that it's just a matter of planets moving through space without you, while an uncomfortable recital, dreaded meet-and-greet might be avoided, before you are back in action with yr credit rating through the sea floor and one ear a little lower than the other?

ILLYN: Like a warrior must fight, a dyer must dye, a narcissist must write, I sacrifice my will to live a full single life. As my flesh is torn and burned away by soft-molten and sharp-cool gravel, I accept each day as either vital repair or road to terrble destiny in randomly uneven ration.

REPTILY: Like the fall-and-recover dance aesthetic of early-80's Highchank.

ILLYN: No, not really like that. Unless your critical fulcrum is core theory. Right. Wherein the human body is reduced to a rag doll on a whip handle.

REPTILY: Hot.

ILLYN: Yes.