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My room is a corridor of doorways. Not a space, not a shelter, but a network of half-thoughts and abandoned exits. The floors reek of piss, like some wild dog marked its territory and then left me to rot in it. The walls pulse with memory. Or maybe delusion. Either way, it’s loud in here. Thoughts swarm like ants — frantic, mindless, pathetic — all scrabbling for something to hold on to. Information. Meaning. But there’s nothing. Just famine. Starvation of sense. A thousand tiny legs searching for crumbs in a house that hasn’t been fed in years.
And every day the sky breaks open again. Not metaphorically. The rain here isn’t poetic. It hammers. It devours. It doesn’t cleanse; it drowns. The ants drown, but they don’t die. They keep moving, twitching, twitching, twitching. Not alive. Not dead. Just full of guts and nerves and the viscera that keep them twitching. That hard carapace we all grow when the storm doesn’t stop. That’s all they are. That’s all I am.
Sometimes I think I’ll dig my way in. Crawl through the iris of my own eye — molecular, meticulous — and enter the network of my brain like a savior. A surgeon. Maybe a god. Maybe I’ll find the ants and teach them how to be more than twitching muscle and damp despair. Maybe I’ll name them. Maybe I’ll give them something like hope.
But dry drowning is real. No matter what they say. And the terrifying thing is — there’s no evidence it isn’t.
May 27, 2025
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I’ve never felt this skin touch air before. It’s pink and raw like fresh meat, like something not meant to see the sun. And here I am—half-naked in a garden that pretends to be Eden, if Eden were lined with thorns and mountain lions instead of angels. The shrubs rustle. I hear it breathing. I know it’s there.
Maybe I made it up. Maybe the fear is its own beast.
Tonight, sleep will come with teeth. That I know. You can’t talk to nightmares the way you talk to people—there’s no bargaining, no clever arguments. Just blood and the echo of screams.
There's a cartouche on my wall, etched in gold and dust, staring back at me like a curse I forgot I summoned. I think it’s watching. I think it knows. And where the fuck is my shoe? I had it a second ago. It’s absurd, isn’t it? That I’m thinking about footwear while being hunted?
It moves. I move faster.
There’s a crunch. A scream—mine, maybe. Or maybe the thing’s.
I look down. Under my Converse, something’s twitching. Then it’s not. Just a smear, just a stain.
I’ve killed it. I think. I hope.
And I wonder, briefly, stupidly—would Mother Gaia forgive me for snuffing a life because it frightened me? Because it was inconvenient? Because it was there?
Probably not. But it’s dead all the same.
2d ago
I hang your jackets in my closet like trophies, or maybe like warnings. I don’t know which. I don’t wear them. It’s far too hot — sticky, oppressive heat that clings to the skin like regret — but I keep them there, row by row, like memory has a dress code. The scent is gone now. That clean, clove-sweet sharpness you always carried. Still, I walk past them every day. I make myself look.
It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go.
And yet. I don’t move.
My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve.
A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog.
Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean.
So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?
May 28, 2025
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She says there’s a tornado watch, and I shrug it off as I turn another page to my book. I just want to be reminded of what used to be real for a while before I join her to bed. I have 90 minutes before the dreams take me back for what I owe them.
In the meantime, I’m with Ultra and Andy. I’m back in a place where the shitty instant movies meant something, not because they inherently meant something, but because a soup can was empty enough for the public to carry. Carry it they would, with enough means to make Ultra regret her own full stomach. The cans she had Andy sign could’ve funded her retirement, but the Factory was hungry. I’ve yet to create my food art that gets people interested in my shit movies.
The wind starts growling against the windows in a way I haven’t heard in the decade I’ve lived here. The rain sounds sideways. I wake her from the bathroom as the wind has caught me on a break, and the living room is more window than wall. We’ve taken to sleeping on an air mattress in the living room floor by the windows. It was lovely under the tree in December, but now there’s no hiding why.
It feels too real for a moment. I ask her to double check the radar. She says it’s fine, and she goes back to sleep. She already has me put on rain sounds with another apartment view on the TV nightly, though I don’t think either of us would have heard a difference had I turned it off now. Andy believed we would prefer the simulation. I‘m afraid he may be right. I’m afraid because I can’t control the one with a remote. Yes, that’s usually true, but for the moment I’m more afraid of the one outside my actual window that has no remote. Pontificating about simulacra or not, I’m afraid.
As the storm starts to calm, the red light hitting my blinds from the LEDs is flashing. A fire truck is outside my window. Are these red lights more real, more meaningful? Do they make my fear more meaningful? The fire truck leaves (me).
My 90 minutes have become 3 hours. My debt is greater. I can’t hide, and I’m afraid. It’s time to pay. I’ll simulate another violent death, wake up, and feel a little less convinced I’m about to be killed again since we’re in the living room. The lights help me see less of what isn’t there. I can see the front door bar intact with my own eyes. I’m safe enough to die in my sleep again. Good morning.
Feb 16, 2025
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Last night, I dreamed—though I can’t tell you what of, not exactly. There were fragments. A lawn, half-mown, or cats—dozens of them, maybe. Their shapes flicker now at the edge of memory, insubstantial. That’s how it always goes. I dream every night, I know this, but each one slips through my fingers by morning, evaporating like steam before I can grasp it.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I kept a dream journal. Religious about it. Woke up, wrote it down. And something about that changed me. Sharpened the recall, made dreams more solid. Realer. And then, over time, something turned. Now they vanish even faster. Like the act of remembering too hard wore out the muscle.
I’ve thought about starting again. Journaling. Documenting. Not just the dreams, but the moments around them—the texture of waking, the taste of forgetting. Because vivid dreams begin with remembering, don’t they?
But I hate recollection. The way it drags old feelings back up, stale and bitter. The way it stains the present with shadows of things that never happened. There’s something foul in remembering too much.
Still. Maybe I’ll try.
Jun 7, 2025
I unblocked him today. Stupid, really. A gesture that meant nothing and everything at once—flick of a finger, avalanche of consequence. I don’t love him. I know this the way I know fire burns and poison kills. But there was a time I did. Or at least, I believed I did, which might be the same thing.
And now, in the pit of night, he comes back. Not in memory, which I could handle. In dreams. Those cursed, wretched dreams where love feels like a trick played on me by some malevolent god. We are soft together, whole together. It feels real. Worse: it feels good. I wake up gagging on it. That intimacy, that false safety. My brain taunts me with what could have been, and I can’t even scream back.
So I dissociate. That’s the clinical word for it. But really, I haunt myself. I float through the day like a ghost freshly exhumed, skin buzzing with sleep that clings to my body like mold. Am I still dreaming? Has waking up ever felt this fake?
I ask myself: Do I still love him?
Then a worse question: Did I ever?
And the worst of all: Did I make it up, the whole damn thing?
Because if I did—if I built it all out of nothing, like straw houses and paper people—then maybe I am what he always said I was. A liar. A little girl who makes up stories and calls it truth. My father’s daughter.
And that’s the most disgusting thing of all.
Jun 7, 2025
I hang your jackets in my closet like trophies, or maybe like warnings. I don’t know which. I don’t wear them. It’s far too hot — sticky, oppressive heat that clings to the skin like regret — but I keep them there, row by row, like memory has a dress code. The scent is gone now. That clean, clove-sweet sharpness you always carried. Still, I walk past them every day. I make myself look.
It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go.
And yet. I don’t move.
My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve.
A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog.
Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean.
So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?
May 28, 2025