Otherwise known as, "When the Now shifts into the past tense in the Moment, it can get very scary indeed."
-After she remembered one of his most somber epithets in "Czarina", his import of her descent, future tense. She’d thought of it as way off target. It turned out to have actually been true. At the moment of first encounter it so happened she’d been caught in a paroxysm of supreme grief. In glaring contrast to euphoric mayhem, her aspect would have been suitable beside a casket. In the moment she keeled with her face in her hands she could picture his bemusement through the black glass, how laughable it would have seemed, mortally embarrassing. Moreover in her mind the prospect of first encounter should have been a moment of unbounded joy. It turned out it could not have been further from reality.
She could also see that these elements or portents had a way of graduating until they reached the ultimate point of truth. And in that moment, they shifted and receded, becoming past tense. She’d accepted that being awakened had put her into mourning because it put her into separation, due to being awakened by the hope or prospect of personal love. Attempting to meet it aroused the ultimate challenge from her father which led to the shattering of her remaining family ties, sacrificed to the classic schism she’d foreseen for years. So on a level that “she” would arise in “sackcloth and ashes” had been true. It had become even truer after having been subjected these outcomes when she was met by no response on “the other side”; effectively abandoned by Bono. But nothing made that state more real than the prospect of losing Billy and the troth she’d asked of him in her mind, the graduation into past tense, and with that shift, the looming outcome of permanent isolation. What had finalized this in her head was the certainty that if Bono sealed her away in his lack of response, if she were unable to establish the existing connection there, she’d have no possibility of ever establishing the connection with Billy either. So in effect she felt that by Bono’s personal negligence, she’d lose the prospect of ever being with the person she’d asked to be with. It was only when she shifted gears mentally to the attempt to prove the connection in the Now that she didn’t feel permanently doomed by this constraint, but now that she was here, it wasn’t helping, because the Now, in the moment, was shifting into the past tense right in front of her, which was terrifying.
This was because of how she could see these portents falling into place: Bono’s appeal to lead her to the confluence of two roads had already fulfilled itself too. But what she’d hoped or expected from this was to be recognized, as it was an appeal for her arrival. And the epithet in “Czarina” about his lover’s apparition in sackcloth and ashes had also signified her arrival. These things were entering reality, the conjunction had come; she was arriving, but she was the only one who knew it was happening. They were fulfilling themselves without the circumstance changing at all. She was never going to get through. And that was what scared her most of all, the prospect of having to exist in separation. She was the furthest inside the paradox she had ever been, more unified in terms of the universal unconscious than ever before, and more terrified than ever that her exclusivity in that context was completely isolating in the real world, where she felt she had not been recognized and more worrying still, wasn’t going to be.