The time is now. It stretches and distorts, like trying to look through a jewel or a prism, taking one image and breaking it apart into a thousand of its components. The components are my memories.

Memories are all I have left. The future is gone, it will never come. There will never be a moment after the now, and even now itself doesn’t exist. All is frozen still, stopped in time. I can move, I can breathe and talk, so there must be some kind of time here… But how would one even measure it? What would it count, and where would it lead?

Time is meaningless. I have screamed and raved for years. I have attacked and thrown many things, some that used to be people. I attacked the two things responsible for this madness, so long ago. Or was it just now? Either is the same, honestly. It didn’t work. I can move things, but not break or hurt them in any way. I cannot even cut a blade of grass. It’s as if I was never here.

I cannot even kill myself. I tried, many times. I think. It gets hazy, after a while. The memories blending together into an amorphous, ever-present now. An eternal moment that is everything… And nothing. I suppose I wanted to die. Do I still want to? Hard to tell.

The time is now.

Yet, amidst it all the yellow truth remains, firm in my mind as if it had happened a few seconds ago, which it had.

“Turn your regrets into strength,” she said.

“You can’t change who you are,” said the man in the suit. Funny name, but I don’t remember it. Dagoth? Hastur? Narlythep? One of those funny names.

“I am many things,” she said. “What you call me is unimportant.”

But I remember her name, and I say it out loud “We must get ready for the King, my friends!” I say to the empty theater. “In the memory of Carcosa, we consecrate this stage for the King in Yellow!”

I can almost hear the applause. The attention focused on me. I am so close. So very close.

The time is now.

I am almost reaching the top of the ladder when the hammer hits my leg. An explosion of pain as my vision blurs and tilts. I was so young back then, so blissfully ignorant, until that blow taught me pain. It showed me that death comes in many forms, and at the hands of a band of brainwashed actors wielding vicious homemade weapons is not the most pleasant of ways to go. Not really how I thought I would die, not even in the top ten. It taught me what I would do to survive when facing death.

Anything.

Even kick down another person, sending her falling to meet the stage for one final performance. I remember the sickening crunch of the impact. The blood.

I remember fighting desperately, clawing kill after kill, from those that would take me. I remember the one cultist who took her mask off, pleading me to let her live. Do I regret killing her?

I regret letting her go, in that diner. After hearing her story, I let that sweet girl be talked into dying for the sake of a nothing cult. She was like me, lost and in pain, wanting something to die for. We shared stories, like kindred spirits. I shouldn’t have let her walk into her own death. An altar of flesh and fine dining bistro, with cocaine-covered pancakes for the sake of an alien god. I should have shouted at her to not do it. Kidnapped her, took her somewhere far away, where things would make sense again. Taken away from the Grandmaster and others that would eat her for their own lives and their own truths.

Instead I watched her die, the same way I watched as the audience of the play were dragged, one by one, to the stage and killed. I couldn’t do anything, charmed as I was by the play.

And such a wonderful play it is! A kernel of truth and beauty, frozen in the pages of an unassuming book with a shabby, yellow cover. Nothing but ink and paper, but within that book the truth is written.

And the book reads, “turn your regrets into strength, as the memory of Lost Carcosa, once gone, never retrieved, its beauty never glimpsed but in memories or dreams, and yet Carcosa still walks with me.”

Yes. Suzy is still here, but she waits. Hidden. Quiet. But I know she is here. I speak to her, but no one replies. The stage is empty.

The time is now.

So many died around me, in the theater and in my life. So much misery in my wake. When I look back I see only the bodies. I see only regrets, preserved like cheeseburgers in a fast-food store, in all their fatty, glistening glory. Oh yes, I regret the cheeseburgers.

But now the cheeseburger diner is destroyed, first by a murderous fledgeling god, then by me as I tried to destroy said god. There will be no more cheeseburgers from that place. So delicious, unique, in that small corner of the world. But never again. I have reached the end of the cheeseburgers.

The stagelight is on me, as I jump from the table. There is a noose on my neck, but even as I fall short of breath, life won't leave me. Time and time I take that jump, that mad and suicidal plunge. But when the rope is around my neck I can't help but kick and fight, drawing for air that was never there. It is frozen in time, much like everything else. I refuse death, or death refuses me. I do not die.

The time is now.

How am I still alive, after all this?

Alive, but with no future. Tomorrow will never come for me. I will never see the end of the world that I fought so fruitlessly to avoid. I will never speak to my mother and hear her disappointment and anger in me. Never again will I talk with Marcus, my lonely, loyal friend. I will never talk to someone, or hug someone, or fuck someone, or talk about stupid things at 3 am, or...

I will never raise - or even see - my child. The seed of a random after-party hookup with the sweetest monster one could ever hope to meet with sharp teeth and a soul that was too good for me. In a moment of weakness, I considered killing them all… She responded by offering me kindness. Human warmth, from an inhuman being. She held me when I need it most, and I repaid her with a visit from Hastur, with its malignancy beyond the stars.

The half-monster child still grows in her mother's belly, and the monster half is also the better half, by far. Far better than me, kinder and more alive. I hope the child takes after her mother, and she teaches it the way of those who worship beneath the waves. Don’t walk my path, my child! There is nothing there but sorrow and corpses, pregnant with regret. Once I feared monsters, but now as I look back, they are part of my best memories. I don’t regret meeting Maria, in that last, wild party at the End of the World.

But I regret leaving the child behind, and the mother alone. May she forgive me for my sins, for I have no god to confess to and cannot hope for any pardon.

The Goddess I have met is a fickle trickster and an alien monster, laughing and manipulating and comforting and guiding me. Why does she follow me, in my dreams? Why does she hound me so?

"For the memory of Carcosa," I whisper. Yes, that’s the right answer! There is no reply.

Do I remind her of something? Do slumbering gods dream of frozen worlds? Why does she follow me, with every moment? Why is she watching me, without saying a word?

I have walked through the cosmos with a god, and it imparted me with its yellow wisdom until I stand awash with revelation. What do we call those who walk with a god and learn its wisdom? Prophets perhaps. Or messiahs.

I am the prophet of the Holy Church of the Cheeseburger. I have read its holy book, and the wisdom contained within. "Turn your regret into strength" it said. And I have learned. So I plead – no, I command! – that all my followers accept the cheeseburgers as they’re given. By all that is most sacred and holy, do not refuse a cheeseburger if you are hungry. Do not refuse such a small happiness, freely given and so small. So very small. Don’t starve because you are proud. Or because you’re above such things. Ore because you believe you don’t deserve it. Everyone has a right to enjoy a simple cheeseburger, if it makes them happy. Such simple joys are what keep us going in life.

“I thought you would like it,” said my father, smiling a little sheepishly. “We come here all the time and you like it.”

“But for my birthday?” I protested, angry and embarrassment in my thirteen year old face, awkwardly going through puberty with all the grace of a zit-faced bull in a china shop. “Really, a McBirthday, dad?”

“But look, we even got balloons here and everything,” he smiled. He smiled all the time, back then, even when things were tough and when others got angry at him, he just smiled. “We even have a cake afterwards. It’s a shame none of your friends could come, but -”

“Nobody’s coming because I didn’t tell anyone in my school!” I blurted out. Regretted it immediately, when a pained expression flashed on my father’s face, before the smile came back, like always.

“Oh, is that so?” He asked mildly. My mother, who was watching our exchange with a frown, had a more pointed question of her own.

“Why didn’t you invite your friends like we asked?” She asked.

“Because I was embarrassed!” I replied. “A fast food birthday? With frickin’ balloons and a crappy cake? We couldn’t even get our own cake?”

“How DARE you!” Barked back my mother, glaring at me. "Your father works hard every day to put food on the table, to give you everything, including this birthday, and this is how you repay him? This is what you do?!"

"How about a cheeseburger?" Interjected my father, trying to defuse the situation. My brother, the only other child in the party room, stayed quiet and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. "You love these cheeseburgers whenever we come here. Try one!"

"No!" I replied, angry after my mother's scolding.

There was an awkward silence, where we all glared at each other except for my father, who only smiled. There was never a smile as sad as his, that moment.

"Oh well..." He shrugged and dropped the sad cheeseburger on the tray again.

I'm sorry father, I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry. I should never have refused the cheeseburger you offered me, I should have accepted it, eaten it all. I should have told you how nice it was of you to offer me that delicious, cheap cheeseburger. Asked for seconds and thirds. I should have said how much you meant to me. I should have told you more often how grateful I was to you, before you died in that car accident.

You're gone, and I can never repair that moment. It is broken forever, stained with putrefying guilt. If I could return to that moment and fix it, I would eat it all. I would eat that cheeseburger as if it was my last meal on earth. I would have thanked you for it. I would have left behind a happy, tasty memory, instead of such bitter regret.

Regrets echoed across time. I regret refusing my father the cheeseburger he so kindly offered on the last party we were together. I regret refusing the cheeseburger my girlfriend offered me, on the dark theater stage as I lay dying. I regret refusing the cheeseburger of the Mi-Go, in their alien kindness. At the time I thought I didn’t deserve cheeseburgers. I did not deserve to be happy.

"For the memory of Carcosa," she whispered, before plunging the knife into her own heart. I did not know the meaning of those words, then. I was blind, before the yellow truth.

Memories are everything. All things whither and die. But the memories of those things are what we carry with us, the after-effects and echoes of every action and every thing, no matter how small. Nothing truly dies, if it is still remembered. Even the brief and fragile can be made immortal. Put words in a play, and even a world can become immortal. All that pain, all those people dying, they were not in vain. All, for the memory of Carcosa.

Carcosa filled with beautiful lies, all screaming a final moment as they stare into the void. I see laughter. I see tears. I open my eyes and see a world, frozen in memories, just like mine is frozen in time. It is beautiful.

And Carcosa still lives, even today. So I turn to the empty theater and tell them all the story of Carcosa, a tale of its final days, so it may still be remembred.

The time is now.

If memories have such power, what of my regrets? Do they seal my fate, doom my existence? Memories of cheeseburgers, suicide and numbing despair?

"You can't escape your past," someone once told me. And it is true.

"Turn all your regret into strength," says another voice, in yellow tones. And it speaks the truth too, the yellow truth.

It is time for my monologue. They are all listening, a multitude beyond compare.

"I will not let my regrets devour me!" I shout into the empty theater. "I will devour my regrets instead! Should I let my memories hurt me? Should my regrets haunt me until I die? No! I refuse! My mistakes do not make me weaker! They make me stronger and wiser instead! I will learn! I will grow! Even if it hurts, I will grow stronger. Even if I am scarred, and wounded- full of pain- I will make it all into my strength! Every shameful moment, every failure and every miserable fuck-up! I will turn it all into gold, beautiful and yellow! I will trap my eternal sadness in amber, until even its pain will fade into nothing but a distant, beautiful memory. Even if I fail a thousand times! Even if all my life is nothing but regret, I will take this regret and make myself stronger! It is by my choice that I make it so! And if I fall, then I will get up again. Wounded. Hurt. Depressed. And stronger than before!

With a final grand gesture I pull off my mask, a cheap, rubber gorilla thing. "It is time to unmask! All, take off your masks!"

Everything is quiet, for a moment. The silence is unbearable. It only lasts a moment. It only lasts an eternity.

I turn to my companion. "You, sir, should unmask."

But Hastur gets up from its seat, with its eldritch yellow cowl covering all except for a mask covering the darkness inside. The mask has the face of Lucy. The mask smiles, its lips twitching upwards.

"I wear no mask," she said.

"No mask? No mask!" I whisper, terrified. Yes, I understand now. I am in awe of this being that stands before me in its unmasked glory. It was unmasked all the time, yes, only I could not see. It was there all along, deep inside me, waiting for the right cue. There is no mask, when your infinitely different faces are all true.

"Well, well! You read the play and managed to summon me," she said, walking across the stage towards me. She sounded impressed. "Good thing too. I missed you so much!"

The time is now.