undeath of the author

it rained all weekend. this morning the sun finally broke through the clouds, which promptly made everything worse. now it is bright and hot out, while meanwhile the amount of water in the air barely seems to have diminished. if anything it may have increased. it is insultingly humid outside. it is that kind of humid that feels like you could just reach out and wring water out of the air like a washcloth. I stepped onto the porch for a moment this morning to check on the plants. they were fine, but in the thirty seconds or so that I was outside my head started swimming and every inch of my skin immediately felt sticky. I think you could use our yard as a sauna without any additional modifications needed.

I intend to spend the rest of the day inside. those thirty seconds were quite enough.

there are marigolds blooming. only three or four, and small yet, but there are more on the way. seeing one was something to feel good about in a few weeks of not feeling good about much of anything at all. the miniature rose seems to be enjoying the kitchen window and a bit of periodic misting because it has so far produced three beautiful little marbled red-and-white flowers. the cosmos have not put anything out yet, but most of them have shot up tall and leafy. the little seedlings that grew up from the pots that last year's celosia were in--which I have been growing with hope but not surety that they would indeed turn out to be celosia--now have little feathery orange and red buds that do look a great deal like celosia. this is entirely logical really, and yet at the same time it feels like something amazing.

lately it has been especially difficult to get out of bed in the mornings. often it feels like there is not much worth getting up for. the world feels too much, too big, too close, too terrible. often during the day there are times when the anxiety is so bad that it feels as though everything could break apart at any moment, like I am constantly watching numbers on a timer ticking down to some unknown and dreadful cataclysm. it is impossible to pinpoint the place where a reasonable reaction to everything going on in the world ends and some out of control chemical process in my brain begins, but I try to find the line anyway. at what point do the things I might usually do to distract and soothe and comfort myself become irresponsible and avoidant of things that should not be avoided? how long can I justify watching something pointless and funny before I check the news again? how can I talk myself down from the world is ending right now this moment without overshooting into everything is fine and nothing is wrong when that is clearly not the case?

in the end it is all inescapable anyway. there it is, in the morning, before I have checked the news, before I have even opened my eyes.

when I was a child, in the grips of anxiety I did not have words or explanation for, I thought often about the world ending. I fretted about science-textbook stories of stars going out and planets crumbling from entropy, worried about tornadoes, house fires, car accidents. how could we know that one day, without warning, a comet might not crash out of the void of space and put an end to us all? I spent long periods trapped under the weight of a fear so enormous that it felt as if everything might come undone in an instant.

sometimes these days I feel as though I am back there again, ten years old and laying awake at night waiting for the world to end.

better then to lie there in the quiet under the close weight of the blanket, and not bother with anything.

but--

my cat is very soft, and silly, and purrs very loudly, and when she sees I am awake she walks across the bed to say hello, and even if the world is ending she needs to be fed in the morning and to do that I need to get up.

there are flowers that would never have bloomed if I did not get out of bed to water them.

right now it feels as though there is nothing meaningful I can do to make the world any better. I don't know if I ever will be able to. but I know that I must first be in the world.

I didn’t do an entry for this last week and I don’t much feel like doing one this week either. I was and am too much overwhelmed by everything happening in my country right now, and talking about my own small life right now when so many more important things are going on doesn’t feel right anyway. nor do I hardly have any business holding forth on the subject at hand; there’s not much I can think to say that would be relevant or appropriate or hasn’t been said many times already or wouldn’t be better said by someone else.

but neither do I want to say nothing at all, so I will say:

--here is the Black Lives Matter website’s compilation of information, places to donate and actions to take

--here and here are two compilations of anti-racism resources for self-education

--here is a youtube video you can watch for free to generate ad revenue which will be donated to anti-racism organizations

and, because this is after all a writing blog that mainly deals in fantasy:

--65 LGBT Books By Black Authors

--Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy Books by Authors of Color

--8 recent sci-fi and fantasy novels by black authors for Black History Month 2020

--Black Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors You Need to Read

--Black-owned bookstores in the United States

--10 black-owned online bookstores

--Writing With Color

black lives matter.

in the morning you make tea

and take your meds

and go sit, quiet, easy at your desk

watching the sunlight on the trees outside

and wait for the feel of your heart

beginning to race in your chest

as your nervous system kicks into gear

and careens from one extreme to another.

it will follow you throughout the day

when you stand light-headed in the shower

when you catch your breath after walking up the stairs

sit sideways in your chair, at rest

put your hand to your chest

feel it running a marathon all on its own.

well, you can't say they didn't warn you.

side effects may include:

insomnia.

(lay on your back staring up at the ceiling as the dead of night ticks by second by second.

morning will come eventually.)

dry mouth. dehydration.

(like clockwork you go to fill a glass at the sink when it starts to kick in.

keep a bottle of water by your desk when you work.)

lack of appetite.

(stand in the kitchen caught between crashing blood sugar and not wanting to eat anything.

eventually you eat some peanut butter crackers. it helps, a little.)

when you push, something pushes back.

chemicals against chemicals

a fragile, delicate machine may creak, spark, shudder

in protest of repair

everything has consequences.

everything has side effects.

side effects may include:

trying over

and over

and over

and over

try until it goes from overwhelming

to bearable, to normal, to boring

try until all the unfamiliar things

are slowly stitched together into a routine

until the edge of fear is worn down dull

(though never, completely, gone.)

try it until you memorize:

the pre-recorded spiel when you call the pharmacy

(if you are calling to refill a prescription, press--)

the script stuttered out as you stand at the doctor's office

(hi, I've got an appointment with--)

the feel of the words in your mouth when you must ask, once again

(can you stop by the pharmacy and pick up--

can you give me a ride--

can you sit with me while I--

can you help me?)

side effects may include--

an ever-growing collection of empty pill bottles

and a story told in pamphlets from the pharmacy, stacked in a drawer

each one a cautionary tale:

call your doctor if you experience any of the following...

and you think sometimes that next to the warnings on the bottle

(this drug may cause drowsiness

this drug may cause dizziness

this drug has a risk of abuse--)

they should have put one that said

warning: this might not work.

you might take this one

and another and another

and another and another

and get no better.

warning: you will feel the seconds of your life tick by

in a hazy, sticky, colorless blur

watching the world pass by around you

and with every new pill you will wonder

how much longer will it take?

warning: you don't know if it will ever be better

it didn't come with a guarantee.

warning: this will not fix everything.

when you get up, if you get up

you will still be where you fell

smarting, bruised

out of breath.

and you will wonder if you can ever catch up

to where you should have been.

side effects may include:

being scared.

hard not to be scared

when something comes with so many warnings attached.

sometimes it almost seems better not to attempt it at all.

but in the end you find

that the uncertainty of trying

is still to be preferred

to the dead certainty

of never trying at all.

that, too, has its side effects.

everything does.

so you sit on the edge of your bed

bottle in one hand, pamphlet in the other

read the warnings that come with.

breathe out.

and then you get up, make your tea

take your meds.

and sit quiet in the morning sunlight

lately I've been thinking about video games.

I've played quite a bit of Animal Crossing since New Horizons came out. so, as you just might have noticed, have a lot of other people. by pure coincidence it happened to come out at a time when a great many people needed exactly the kind of escapism Animal Crossing offers. it's peaceful and soothing and soft, an imaginary getaway to a distant island where the neighbors are all friendly, the waves lap gently against clean bright sand, and there is never anything much to worry about it.

but New Horizons was eagerly anticipated long before anyone had any inkling what the circumstances around its release were going to be. it's the fifth game in a very successful series. Animal Crossing has had something appealing to offer for a long time. in the wake of the success of New Horizons I've seen a number of people wondering--many jokingly, some not--about why, exactly, the series is so appealing. is it really that much fun to pay off a home loan? to pull weeds and water flowers? are people really so invested in the thought of buying furniture or catching bugs to sell?

the usual sort of answer--again, often a joking one, sometimes not--is that the appeal is that you can pay off your home loan, without stress or fear, without interest accumulating, without any consequences if you don't. you can earn all the money you need by doing simple, easy tasks, and in the meantime your tanuki landlord will happily wait on you for years if he has to. well ain't that an impossible dream, amirite? we might as well enjoy doing it in a video game because we have no hope of doing it in real life.

and that answer is true, I think, but it only scratches the surface of something that extends well beyond Animal Crossing.

here are some little things. it is a gloomy sort of day in May. the chickadees are at the bird feeder outside my window. a squirrel has been digging in my lemon balm. there has been another frost, and the poplar tree looks even worse now. it would make me sad to see it die. I've enjoyed watching it bloom and flower outside my window the past few springs.

the cosmos seeds have been shooting up strong, and now the marigold seeds are pushing their way up as well. I was rather pessimistic about the amount of seeds that I actually expected to sprout, and now I have rather more seedlings crowding together than I was really anticipating. they'll have to be thinned out, I guess, but even then I think I might have to get creative to find pots for them all.

[ID: 1. A photo of four plastic plant pots in a plastic box, each with several seedlings a few inches tall in the middle of them. 2. A long, shallow plastic tub filled with soil with small green seedlings poking up in rows.]

the cats continue to be fine.

I am glad that I keep a journal, because if I didn’t have some day-to-day notes to look back on, however sparse they may sometimes be, I would be completely lost in time right now. I’ve always struggled somewhat with a poor sense of time and poor short term memory that often add up to difficulty recalling what happened when in the recent past. but right now. christ! only four days into May and April's already long gone. I know that things happened in April. I could even name some of them. I would struggle to tell you when any of them happened, or in what order. was that one near the beginning of the month or was it five days ago? who knows?

I feel like someone adrift at sea or wandering in a great flat plain or desert, so utterly lost that I'll eagerly grab onto anything--the tiniest bump on the horizon, a rock, a lone bush--that might be pressed into service as a landmark. I am plotting my makeshift map with anything I can find. that was the day it rained. that was the day I finished the jigsaw puzzle. that was the day we watched that Star Trek episode. that was the day a herd of cows broke loose from some nearby farm and wandered through our yard, which I suspect will go down as the definitive event of the whole month. whatever it takes. distances are measured in last times. this far since the last time I took a walk. this far since the last time I streamed something on Discord for friends. this far since the last time John Oliver was on.

the biggest last time of all right now is the last time I went to the grocery store. it was a damp, gray, utterly unremarkable Thursday that would never have been notable enough to linger long in my memory normally. now it is a monument, the biggest mark on the map. it was seven weeks ago. I remember the feel of my raincoat, humid-sticky, clinging to my skin. I remember how the store was: so normal until we got to the last aisle, where the toilet paper and cleaning supplies were, and found it almost empty. we took my grandfather with us, tried to help him stock up. I tried grabbing things off the shelf and putting them in his cart, but I couldn't think of what to get.

"here," I said. "raisins, for your oatmeal." it was all I could think of.

we went to Dollar General. he wanted to buy a coffee pot. I stood in an aisle staring at a rack of batteries, feeling lost. think! what do you need? what will you need? this could be the last time you're here for a long time. I couldn't tell if I was being too paranoid or not paranoid enough. I bought an extra box of kleenex, because it was March and we were all sneezing with spring pollen, and then wondered if that counted as hoarding. I saw earbuds at the endcap of the stationary aisle and threw a pair in because mine might lost or go through the wash or get chewed up by the cat again and then where would I be? then I threw in some AA batteries, because that seemed like the thing to do.

and then we went home.

the kleenex has certainly been good to have. my earbuds very nearly did go through the wash, but were rescued in time. I don't think we've used the batteries. well, I have never claimed to be at my best when put on the spot.

now it is May, and here I am, at sea.

what landmark can I find in today? what stones can I put down so that when I look back later I can see where I have walked?

it is Monday, May fourth. people are making Star Wars jokes on twitter. today is clear and sunny. yesterday evening there was a mild spring storm, rain splashed with a bit of thunder.

I am working puzzles, and playing Animal Crossing, and listening to The Mountain Goats, and writing. my family is currently engaged in a quest to watch all of Star Trek, or at least as much of it as we can get our hands on. we're about halfway through the original series; last night we watched Friday's Child and The Deadly Years.

the cats are fine. both are currently busily engaged with their afternoon naps. I have hung the miniature rose in the kitchen window, where it seems to be doing alright. the bonsai lost half its leaves over the winter and so far seems disinclined to grow them back, which concerns me, but it's not lost anymore and the remaining ones look okay. I think it didn't get enough light over the winter (none of us did), so hopefully it will revive with some good strong spring sun to bask in in the mornings.

last week I planted some marigold seeds in a box on the porch, and cosmos seeds inside. this morning I pulled back the plastic bag over the cosmos to find this:

[ID: A photo of four plastic pots filled with soil sitting together in a plastic box. Three of the cups have small seedlings sprouting in them.]

It was a bit of a surprise--I'm not sure I actually really expected anything to come up. they looked a bit sad, so I gave them a drink, and we'll see what happens. nothing from the marigolds yet, but it's only been a week.

I have been re-reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a book much beloved to me. the story concerns the crew of a spaceship that tunnels wormholes through space, a job that involves a lot of long trips through empty space. on the ship is a large garden underneath a dome that looks out into space, where the ship's cook grows food and the crew come to relax and look at the stars and enjoy being among green growing things.

I think about that garden a lot lately.

it is the last Monday in April, warm and sunny today after a cool, wet weekend. many of the trees in the back woods were hit badly by a late, hard frost, which has made the view outside my window look oddly like early hot autumn. there are so many young green leaves gone brown and dead. the poplar tree in particular is all over brown and I worry about it. but today there is a lot of green out there glowing soft in the sun, so I will take that as a good sign.

it seems like a good day to think about gardening.

for a lot of my life I have thought of myself as having a black thumb, unable to grow anything. I kept plants in my dorm rooms all throughout college, lined up on sunny windowsills and carefully packed back and forth at the end of every semester. some of them lasted longer than others, but they all died in the end. I still remember bemoaning the loss of a mint plant to a friend and getting the incredulous response how did you kill mint?

during my last semester I had a labor position at the college greenhouses. for reasons too lengthy and bothersome to go into here, I had to stay on an extra semester in the fall and graduated in December. also for entirely different reasons too lengthy and bothersome to go into here, I was determined to not spend that semester working in the same place I'd been in for the last several semesters. the greenhouses weren't my first choice, but it was the first one that was willing to accept someone coming in new for only one semester.

bit of a misnomer, that: the 'greenhouses' were one glass greenhouse, several plastic hoop houses, and a few assorted small fields, along with a processing and packing building; a small shed-like building with a bathroom, an office, a sink and a fridge where we kept water bottles and a pitcher of gatorade; and a clearing in the woods that was home to a truly enormous amount of compost-in-progress. they grew produce and herbs, which were either sold locally or used by the college cafeteria.

working there left an impression on me, I think.

it was hard work, and I'm not a very physically sturdy kind of person. I also have no tolerance for heat, and more of that semester was hot than it wasn't; it was worst at the beginning, in late August, where I often found myself out working in the mid-90s, a temperature range I can barely abide sitting still in. even when the hottest days were past, that tail-end of summer clung on tight for a long time afterward. days warm enough to need a cold wet bandanna tied around my head popped up well into November.

it brought out a fear in me that is rarely far away: of falling behind, being lazy, not being up to the task. I was sure that I would find myself getting told off for not working hard enough, or accused of shirking. but it didn't happen.

"it is pretty hot out here," my supervisor said when I started getting sick on one of my first days on the job, out picking tomatoes with her in one of the fields. "you better go sit in the truck for a bit and drink some water. don't pass out on me."

I sat in the truck and drank some water, and did not pass out. we finished picking the tomatoes, and went back and sat outside the office-shed and drank cold gatorade. never in my life had gatorade tasted so good.

the other thing I discovered was that I liked gardening.

it seems a bit of a cliche but I was surprised to find how much satisfaction I got from watching seeds that I had planted start to sprout, or helping harvest enough butternut squash to fill up the back of the pickup truck. I worked through podcasts and audio books while weeding plots in the hoop houses or washing and boxing sweet potatoes alone in the packing house on a cold Saturday morning. I helped plant things, and water things, and pick things. it was hard sometimes, but I was able to do it.

then I graduated, packed up the houseplants from my dorm room windowsill, and went home, and watched them die.

well, I suppose a part of it's this: when you're having a hard enough time looking after yourself, it's perhaps not surprising to find yourself struggling to look after anything else as well.

sometimes it's easier. sometimes you need to look after something else; sometimes watching something else grow gives you what you just don't get from the care and keeping of your own self. but sometimes it just becomes another task on a list that already feels too long to bear.

but there have been other obstacles, and it's only in looking back now that I'm starting to piece together what they were.

so let's talk about ADHD and houseplants.

it wasn't something I knew I was dealing with while I cried over homework and watched my plants die on the windowsill in college. depression and anxiety, sure. I figured that much out well before I was ever actually diagnosed with either one. but ADHD was not a consideration at the time. sometimes I would look at a list of symptoms and think could it be...? but then I would shake my head, close the tab, and admonish myself that surely having ADHD did not look like getting straight As and showing up to all your classes on time, no matter how many anxiety spirals you went down at one in the morning.

so if I didn't realize ADHD was a problem there, you can bet I didn't realize it might have anything to do with the plants. I just kept admonishing myself over and over: come on, just remember to water them. is that really so hard? surely you can do it if you try.

when I finally got my diagnosis I started thinking: well. hm. maybe that explains something.

memory is the most obvious thing that comes to mind. remember to water them, or remember that you did water them so don't do it again now or they'll drown. remember to put this one out in the sun, and take that one away. did you repot that one like you were going to? no, you didn't, and it's been a week. have you ever fertilized any of these? lord! I'll do it when I've finished this paper. it's half past midnight. I'm going to bed.

etc.

but--like most things that have to do with ADHD, as I've been perpetually discovering the past two years--it's a bit more complicated than that.

you get a plant. you saw it at Lowe's, or Wal-Mart, or Trader Joe's, or the nursery while your mom was buying tomatoes, and you knew you probably shouldn't have, but you couldn't resist. you want to try again. you always want to try again. so now you have a plant, and you don't know much about gardening but you at least know that the tight little plastic pot it came in is probably not optimal growing conditions for anything, so you'd better do something about that.

only, you don't know what this particular plant needs and you don't have anyone on hand to ask. so you have to look it up. you google it. (if you're lucky enough to know what it is--if not, you have to find out, setting you back even further.) you find several websites with information about this plant. you open one. you stare at it. you go back and look at another one. you stare at that one for a while too. the information is not entering your brain. all of these websites seem to have slightly different information. you try to coalesce this mix of information into a series of steps you can follow and fail utterly. at this point you probably close your laptop and, now too frustrated to think about this anymore, decide you'll get back to this later.

(you probably will not.)

ADHD makes it hard to do anything that requires a series of steps. on bad days, this includes things like making lunch or taking a shower. you sit there thinking about how many different things you have to do to make a sandwich (get the bread out, get the peanut butter out, get a knife, get a plate, put the peanut butter on the bread, god, it never ends) and each step feels like its own task entirely and it's just too damn much to even think about so you sit there and scroll tumblr endlessly while getting progressively hungrier and crankier.

that difficulty increases tenfold if the steps required aren't clear to you. if you have to actually work out what they are yourself? and then go do them?

forget it!

and then--and then!--you have to retain that information. you have to remember for each plant: this is what it needs, and this is what I need to do and this is when I need to do it. the plant is not much help in this regard. the plant will not shout at you in the morning like a hungry cat, nor will it pop up a handy notification telling you when it is too dry or too wet or has had too much sun or not enough. certainly there are some indications it will give you--but you have to know how to read those, too, which brings us back to the first problem.

the amount of information you need to be able to keep in your head about a plant may not seem like very much. certainly it apparently isn't to many people, or we wouldn't have gardens in the first place. but ADHD doesn't tend to give you a choice about what knowledge you're going to be able to hold onto well enough for any of it to be useful. sometimes you can read up on something and then the moment you look away from the page, it's gone. sometimes you can take in the information, but will only be able to recall it at erratic times, which will almost never be when you actually need to do so. and sometimes you will absorb an astounding amount of information, but this will almost always be about something like Pokemon which has fairly limited applications for everyday life. if I could remember and reliably access as much information about my plants as I can about the making of the Lord of the Rings movies, I'd never be in this mess in the first place.

suffice to say, while remembering to water the dang things was a significant problem, it certainly wasn't the only one.

and that, I eventually realized, was why I could garden just fine at the college greenhouses, but couldn't seem to do so on my own. it wasn't--as I'd started to suspect--that I had some foul curse on me that killed everything I touched. I didn't radiate something that killed off any plants in my radius. and I wasn't incapable of doing the tasks required, or of understanding what those tasks were and why they were important. it was figuring it all out for myself, and then remembering it, that was getting in my way. when I showed up to work at the greenhouses, I was told what I needed to do that day, and if I didn't know how to do it, I'd be told that. and, barring the occasional problem of heat sickness or sensory overload while dumping food waste in the compost piles, I could go do the job just fine.

when I look back at that semester, I realize it didn't only teach me that I could do gardening, and get enjoyment out of it. one thing I will tell you about why I left my previous labor position: part of why I was miserable there is that I often wasn't given clear instructions--sometimes not any instructions--and thus spent a lot of time feeling miserably incompetent and behind everyone else. I'd have to choose between asking for clarification on something I seemed to be expected to know how to do, or risk doing it wrong and getting told off for it.

god bless my supervisor at the greenhouse! before giving me any new task she'd check to make sure I knew and fully understood what to do. she made it clear that I could ask questions, and if I did misunderstand something she didn't take me to task for it, just explained what I'd done wrong and how to do it right. it has become a valuable experience to have had as I am still trying to work out what I need to do things without so much pain and anguish over it.

when it comes to gardening, I don't have much in the way of answers yet. I don't know the secret key to dealing with all of these problems well enough to keep my houseplants alive and healthy. I'm still working on that. I'm sure there is an answer. I suspect it may involve a lot of writing things down, and possibly a lot of sticky notes with "WATER ME" written on them.

but I think--for all that I have tried and failed at this many times by now--

I think I'd like to try again.

so maybe I will plant some flowers this week.

I’ve taken down some older posts as well as a few of the stories I did for Fictober a while ago. a lot of it was just old art posts from when I first made this blog and was using it as both an art and writing blog for a while, and I’ve since decided I really just want to use this space for writing only. as for the stories--they weren’t bad, I don’t dislike them or anything, but I used that Fictober to explore a number of different projects I had in my head, and while it was good writing exercise I’ve since realized that the time hasn’t come for a lot of those projects and having content up for them right now would just be confusing to read now and potentially muddle things down the road if I do want to pursue those projects later.

so, I am sorry about that, if you liked any of those stories particularly, but I thought about it for a long time and it felt like the right choice going forward. I haven’t actually deleted anything, I still have all those stories safe and sound, so they may be revisited someday.

I don’t entirely know what’s going to happen here going forward. everything is very uncertain right now, so I’m just trying to write when I can. I have enjoyed doing the Monday thing. that seems to have gone alright so far. I am going to finish the somewhere else? story but after that I think the Monday thing will probably mostly stick to nonfiction and just sort of weekly talking about life. not that I think my life is especially interesting, but y’know, that’s what makes it a good writing exercise, trying to turn nothing in particular into something.

anyway, as always, thanks for reading. I wish you well. here’s a cat. she also wishes you well.

It was the summer between my sophomore year and junior year in college when I went and got myself lost between worlds.

I was on a road trip when it happened, which I'm given to understand is when this sort of thing happens most often. Not always on road trips specifically, that is--but during travels. When you're in-between leaving and arriving, that's when the roads that go Somewhere Else are just visible enough even to normal sort of people like me that you might catch a glimpse of one, just long enough to turn onto it by accident. By the time you realize it's not the road you meant to be taking, it's usually too late to turn around.

That's how the barista explained it to me, anyway.

All I could think to say in return was, "Oh."

And then, after a moment, "That sounds...metaphysical."

I didn't yet know how lost I was when I first entered this place. I thought I was just the normal kind of lost that you get when you find yourself in the middle of rural fuck-all several states away from anything you recognize, on a road with more weird little turn-offs and side-jogs than anybody could reasonably be expected to keep track of, and no cell service. I was miles from the last road sign that had meant anything to me and Wayz had long since given up on me.  

That was all bad enough as it was, but as I stood with my car pulled over onto the grass and me leaning against the side, desperately hoping I could either pick up a shred of a signal or get someone to stop and give me directions, it started to rain.

It came on fast. I could have sworn it was a nice, clear afternoon not fifteen minutes ago, and then suddenly I could barely get back in the car in time to avoid getting soaked. For a few minutes the rain fell thunderously loud against the roof of the car, so hard you'd think it had a grudge against the ground. Then it began to let up just enough to become the kind of steady, rhythmic rain that can go on for hours.

That really tore it. A cloudburst I could have waited out, but I had an awful gloomy hunch that this rain wasn't moving on anytime soon. I didn't want to get any more lost than I already was, but I also didn't want to sit there until it got dark, either. I was hungry. I had to pee. And a lonesome country road at night is no place for anyone to be alone for too long.

Just as I was preparing to bang my head against the steering wheel in frustration, I saw the headlights of a truck coming up behind me.

I couldn't tell you exactly what the plan was as I started up the car--really, calling it a plan is much too generous. It was just some vague sort of thought that there was another person and maybe I could catch up to them and get some kind of useful information about where the hell I even was. At the very least they had to be going somewhere, so if I followed them long enough I'd get somewhere too.

Look. I never said it was a good idea.

But it was all I had, so I pulled back onto the road and followed the taillights like twin lighthouse beacons through the rain. And, looking back on it, that was probably when I got lost lost.

I kept a close eye on the truck as I drove, partly because I didn’t want to lose it but mostly because in all the rain it was really the only thing to look at. It was a big black thing, with a tarp tied over the bed. There was definitely a license plate, but even though I glanced at it more than once, I couldn’t tell you what the number was, or even what state it was from. I’d look at it and think “Oh, right—of course,” and then as soon as I looked away the knowledge slipped away again.

Probably I should have thought more about that at the time, but I was distracted, because after a few minutes the passenger side window rolled down and an enormous black dog stuck its head out. It lapped at the rain happily, then turned and looked back at me. Its eyes were so green I could see them even from over a truck-length away.

I caught myself shivering. I’m not scared of dogs. I like dogs. I’m the sort of person that will immediately be distracted from all else the moment a dog enters my vicinity—which accounts for the license plate thing somewhat. But something about this dog was...weird. Not frightening, exactly, or at least not outright so. But weird. If nothing else, I’d certainly never seen a dog with eyes like that.

The dog eventually shook itself and pulled its head back into the truck, but I kept an eye on the passenger window after that.

The rain poured on. An occasional glance at my phone, still laying in the passenger seat, told me it was moving on toward four o’clock when I saw lights in the distance. Not enough for a city, but surely enough for a town. My heart skipped. Was it possible this dumbass not-plan had worked out after all?

When the truck pulled off, I pulled off too, hoping it wouldn’t lead me astray. The road dipped and curved, then plunged through a lane of trees, branches tangling close together above us. I held my breath. And then, glory be, the trees fell away, and there were houses.

It was not much of a town. The houses were all quiet and still, with no sign of life. There were street signs, but I couldn’t make out what they said through the rain. But the truck led me on through one gray neighborhood after another until I suddenly, without being quite sure how it happened, found myself turning onto what looked like a main street. It was narrow and it felt like the buildings were leaning over me, but amid all the gray I saw lights pooling from windows.

That was where I found it. The coffee shop. Or at least, it looked like a coffee shop from the outside. Now, I’m not so sure.

Parking wasn’t a problem; there wasn’t a single other car on the street, aside from the black truck, which kept right on driving down the street, around a corner, and out of sight. I was relieved by that, since I’d been starting to worry whoever was driving it was going to stop and get out and demand to know what my problem was any time now.

Still, as I watched it drive off I said, “Thanks, man. Owe you one,” out loud. To nobody, and for no good reason. All I can say is it’d been a long day.

I found my jacket in the backseat and tugged it on awkwardly in the limited space, gathered up my satchel from the passenger seat, and splashed hurriedly through the rain toward the coffee shop. I figured I had enough money for coffee and a pastry or something, which I desperately needed right then, and if I could just get some wifi I could figure out where the heck I was, and how to get back to my actual route. For those few steps between the car and the door I was feeling more optimistic than I had all day.

But as soon as I stepped inside I felt my optimism curdle, because everybody inside immediately turned and stared at me.

I say everybody, but really, the place was pretty empty. There were two people behind the counter, one sitting at the counter, and one sitting at one of the tables. But even four people is a lot when they’re all looking at you like that. I was suddenly very aware that I was a stranger in this small rural town that I knew absolutely nothing about, and every one of those sets of eyes seemed to be saying you don’t belong here.

I thought about going back outside, but by then I really needed to pee. No one had actually done anything more than look so far, so I decided to take a chance that I could at least make it to the bathroom and back.

The eyes followed me as I rubbed my feet on the mat and slunk over to the counter.

“Um,” I said to the two baristas. “Bathroom?”

One of them was a middle-aged woman, tall and plump with strong-looking arms and silver threading through her brown hair. The other was a young man with several piercings, short platinum-blond hair, and a “he/him” pin on his apron. That put me more at ease. So did the kind smile the woman gave me as she gestured towards a doorway in the back wall and said, “Back there, second door on the left.”

I nodded at her gratefully and headed back. After the way the rest of the day had gone, I was a little concerned I’d manage to get lost on my way to the bathroom, but thankfully I was spared that last indignity. I came out feeling rather better, and settled awkwardly in one of the chairs in front of the counter and hung my satchel off the side.

“Can I get uh, just a black coffee,” I asked the woman, who was looking at me expectantly. “And...” I eyed the nearby glass case of pastries. “One of those chocolate chip muffins?”

She nodded to the other barista, who started making the coffee. The man sitting at the table had gone back to his laptop, but the man sitting down the counter from me was still looking at me. He was wearing a heavy coat—too heavy-looking for this weather, I would have said, even in the rain—and, I now realized, he appeared to be soaking wet. Water was slowly dripping into a puddle around his chair. I shifted uncomfortably.

“So um,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m lost.”

“You sure are,” the man down the counter said.

“Behave,” the older barista told him.

I watched her plate a muffin that I was now not entirely sure I wouldn’t be too nervous to eat. “Sorry but, could you tell me where I am?”

“You’re lost,” the man down the counter said, and grinned at me.

“Halfway to the afterlife,” the other barista said. “Might be dead yourself.”

“No,” the man sitting at the table said without looking away from his laptop. “Not one of mine.”

do you remember that day it snowed in April?

spring was coming in, cresting green on the trees

and your coat had moved from ever-present drying out on the back of a chair

to hanging in the closet where you had to dig it out

and walked to class with your fingers wrapped around a paper cup

hot with still-steeping tea.

and someone had left the windows in the classroom open overnight

to tempt a spring breeze in and usher out the winter air.

it was so damn cold in there that morning

everyone kept their coats on throughout class

and everyone laughed about it.

oh, lord! that was a bad time

you were miserable.

that was the semester your room flooded over break

and you caught a sinus infection that just wouldn't move along

and the family cat of eighteen-some years died in her sleep

and you were always caught somewhere between I can't do this

and I can do this but what will it take out of me?

they say the bad things linger more in the memory

and maybe that's true:

you have some sharp memories.

you remember the misery. you remember the peaks of it.

you remember the day you fled half-crying from class

and curled up tight in a ball on your bed like you could make yourself disappear.

but most of those days you remember as beads on a string

all tied up together

they're only a thing because they're a part of a thing

individually they could drop out of your hand and roll under the bed

and gather dust in the dark.

but! you remember the day you went to your first rehearsal of that play.

you came to that show late. everyone knew each other. you were nervous.

but that day you were early, came in ahead rushing through the rain

and you remember the feeling of sitting alone there in front of the stage

bare feet, socks drying

you remember the book you were reading

and the way something eased up in you as you opened it again and forgot:

--that you were waiting and nervous

--that you were new and uncertain

--that you were cold and damp--

and would have to go back out in that eventually.

everyone was cold and damp when they came in one by one

so just then you had something in common after all

and something to laugh at and complain about with the rest.

and you remember when you went back out in that

you'd never seen so much rain in your life! the sidewalks across the quad were like canals

your converse weren't made for it. your umbrella couldn't take it.

you all but had to swim back to your dorm

wet up past the knees and clutching your satchel under your jacket.

but it's not a bad memory

because nothing got wet that couldn't dry

and in the end you had to laugh.

what the hell, huh! what the hell was that.

oh, you remember the bits that hurt alright

but it always takes time to see where it all leads out to

what scrapes made you laugh

(check out this bruise I got falling in the art building! jesus those stairs are hard)

and what healed alright

(well it hurt like fuck when that jar fell out of the fridge

had a black spot on my nail for months! but it did work its way out eventually)

and what you were willing to take because it led out of something

(got a hell of a cold out of that snow day but I hadn't been sledding in ages!

we drank cocoa afterward, my hands were so cold, I'd do it all over again)

or led to something

(god, my throat! I think I swallowed a gallon of water--I was so scared--

--but damn if I didn't just pass my swim test)

something worthwhile.

and--

what didn't.

what didn't hurt so much at the time

but set in you like a crooked bone, and now aches in bad weather?

(the way those counselors talked to me--

--about me--to me--)

and what did hurt, so much

but looking back now it's all just part of a pattern

and you couldn't even pick the piece of it out?

(...)

and what wasn't worth it in the end

all the hurt you were willing to swallow

hoping it would come to mean something.

what hurt do you cough up even now sometimes

standing in the shower, lying awake, thinking

when could I have stopped?

they told me there was a point to all this!

well, it takes time and it takes time

and it's still taking time

and all you know is you don't know

how things will look when it's all behind you.

when this is all over

(is anything ever really over?)

what of it will stand out to you?

what will be the sharp parts?

what will you point to and say yes--that was worth it--

and what becomes nothing more than another bead on a string

another day lost in the calendar

another part of the background

the given circumstances

of this slice of your history?

and against that background, what things too small even to see at the time

will stand out later

with light shining through

it is nearly the end of March now. good god, what a March! I have never known a longer one. it has been a month of rain and bad news.

after nearly two weeks straight, the rain has finally lifted. not completely; it comes in for an afternoon after a sunny morning, and then breaks away again, or falls in the middle of the night and we wake up to clear cool air. in-between the cats have sunny patches to lay in and the front door is propped open to let the breeze in. this is very agreeable weather. I am trying to savor it. before too long it will just be hot.

would that the bad news would lift as easily as the rain but it seems we are in for the long haul. if March took a year to pass, April looks fit to take a decade. and where will we be at the end of it?

but here are some things: with every morning there is more green outside. the poplar tree that sticks its branches past my bedroom window has begun to bud. the wild blackberries growing where the gutter runs off have turned from a brown tangle to a green tangle. there are barred owls calling at each other from across the property, and cardinals and chickadees at the bird feeders. (at least, there are when I can keep the damn things filled, which is usually only for about ten minutes before the squirrels eat it all.)

I don't think most of my plants have survived the winter, sadly, but the lemon balm is doing fine. for a while I was worried about it, but from a few brown stems it sprang back into leaf just fine. the thing seems near unkillable.

none of this solves anything, but at least it gives a sense of time passing. of things changing from day to day in some way that is not simply a progression of worse to worse. I have not gone out for seventeen days. I live far out of town, so there are no neighbors to wave to from window to window, only trees and squirrels eating all the birdseed.

social media is even more of a treacherous tightrope than ever right now. it's a connection to other human beings, a reassurance I find myself sorely needing often throughout the day. but if I spend too long on it I always come away feeling worse.

I am doing pretty much the same things now as I have been doing for the past three years: I write, and play video games, and do the laundry and feed the cat, and make tea and listen to music and take pills two times a day and feel always like it is not enough. I am trying to draw more, after a long dry spell. it goes slowly, but it goes.

between depression and ADHD it's been hard for me to read at all for a long time now, and certainly now more than ever, but this weekend I finished the first book I've managed to read in quite a while. Howl's Moving Castle. no one does a happy ending quite like Diana Wynne Jones. there's always a wild rush at the end as all the characters suddenly converge in one place, and mysteries are unraveled and truth exposed, and justice is properly dispensed, and people who have been in love the whole time finally realize it and rejoice.

when I started up the new Animal Crossing game on Friday morning I reset the game to get an island with apple trees on it.

it felt important.

we went up to stay by the lake the last week of September.

the drive up to Michigan took most of a day. we had to leave the day before and stay in a motel overnight to make the ferry trip to the island the next day.

I remember sitting in the car, crammed between suitcases and pillows, staring groggily at the rain flecking the windshield. we'd gotten up a little early to make a grocery run before heading out to catch the ferry.

"I'm really glad you're feeling better this time," my dad said abruptly. "you didn't enjoy this trip very much last time."

"oh," I said. "yeah. so am I."

last time was two years ago. two years ago when we'd stopped for lunch before getting on the ferry I broke down crying at the table in front of the waitress and everybody for no reason at all.

this, undeniably, was better. but I spent a lot of time that week thinking, is this as better as it's going to get?

it started raining as we got closer to the island and kept on as we got off the ferry and scrambled across the parking lot into the car. we'd brought towels, since the house we were staying in didn't have any. I wrapped one around myself and shivered the whole time we drove out to the house. when we got there we draped the towels over our heads while we unpacked the car.

I hadn't thought to bring a rain jacket, or my muddy-weather boots. I felt silly for it, but it had been dry and hot hot hot at home for so long that it simply hadn't occurred to me. this was the first time I'd felt cold rain in a long while. after a month of watching the grass turn brown in ninety degree heat, here, suddenly, it really was late September.

the air was cool to breathe and the sound of the lake was always present.

there were apple trees everywhere.

two years ago I had been a few months into trying medication and one of the antidepressants had caused a bad reaction.

sad is better than having panic attacks, not sleeping, feeling constantly on edge and always a little like being about throw up. sad is better than feeling as bad as I ever had in my life. I would take sad, hands down.

still.

it was a different kind of sad, though, this. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

it was a very nice house. there was one big main room with huge windows that looked out over the lake.

I spent a lot of time thinking if I lived here--

but I could never go too far down that train of thought. it felt much to greedy. too ungrateful. alright, so you don't have a place of your own, but you've got a place. how dare you complain about your situation when you know it could be so much worse?

so instead I would think about my cat. it wasn't fair for me to ask for more, but I could want more for her. more space. more sunny places to lie in. not having to live with another cat she didn't get along with.

I'd put a window seat there, I thought. and a bird feeder out on the deck, so she could sit and look out and watch the birds. and a rug there where the sun hits, and her food there and her water there, and--

that was alright.

things felt different there.

on spotty wi-fi that my brother rigged up we followed the just-breaking news: Ukraine scandal, promises of impeachment. like something might be about to change. some days it rained and the waves tossed outside the windows. some days it was clear and cool. out for a drive around the island I borrowed a hoodie from my dad, having packed only t-shirts. all around us were trees turning red and gold, and overflowing with apples.

I sat out on the deck and listened to sea shanties and Stan Rogers. like you know anything about sailing anyway, the voice in my head would tease sometimes when I hummed along, but that was never the point anyway. there's more than one kind of stormy weather.

at home it felt as if nothing had changed. like time had stopped. seasons stretched into each other; the summers seemed longer and the winters warmer every year. I began to lose track of how many medications I'd tried, how many psychiatrist visits and phone conversations, how many times I thought maybe this will be the one, and I'll finally feel better, and I can work and live and feel things like a real person--

it did not all go away at the lake. but the week that we stayed there was a brief slice of something different.

the first Animal Crossing game I played was New Leaf, in college, on the 3DS my brother had given me as a birthday present.

college was hard. a few years away from getting any formal diagnosis of anything, I knew I was struggling but would be hard pressed to explain how. I would not have said I am autistic but I would have said everything is too loud and too much here. I desperately missed home, missed being in a place that felt safe and right and comfortable. in my little virtual town I could make everything just right, and have a place that was familiar no matter where I was.

after I graduated and returned home I visited the town less and less often. needs change.

in college I only wanted to go home. there at the lake, I was surprised to find I did not want to go home.

I am routine-bound. I like things a certain way. I am used to thinking I want to go home almost as soon as I spend any considerable amount of time somewhere else. at the lake I did miss my cats, and my own bed, and my kettle, but still I thought--no, I don't want to go back.

oh god, I thought, watching September rain fall. oh god, I need things to change. I need to be somewhere else.

read enough stories and you start to expect things to play out a certain way. properly. satisfyingly. in a good story, this would have been a turning point. in a good story, when we got back and I called my psychiatrist to say once again, "I don't think this one is working either. can we try something else?" that would have been the one that changed everything.

it was not. there have been more prescriptions since then. there will probably be more still.

it rained on the drive back. when we stopped for gas somewhere past nine o'clock at night, we got out of the car to warm and swampy humidity and I felt my heart sink.

things did not turn around. but sometimes still, on the very bad days, I would stand in the shower and sing

turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain

and like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again

a short, hot fall turned to a warm, gray, bad winter that has brought a much worse spring.

I don't know where things are going, or what will happen. every morning I check the news before getting out of bed, and every morning it's harder to get up at all. things have felt hopeless for a long time, but never more so than now.

but what can you do but carry on?

Friday was the latest gray morning in a row of eleven. rain keeps coming, in thunderstorms with hail and in slow afternoon drizzles. the creek is high and the front yard is a swamp of mud. here at the end of the road everything feels far away and unreal.

there is very little point in saying oh god I need to be somewhere else, but then, there never has been.

so instead I made an island with apple trees. I like to imagine it's on a lake and the air is cool there.

hello,

I am not sure which piece of writing specifically you’re referring to here, but it’s a very lovely thing to say and I am very touched to know that you felt that way about something that I wrote. thank you.

I know it has been a while since I’ve posted anything new on this blog. things have not been going well the past few years. after a few times of attempting to go back to regularly posting here because I thought that things were getting better only for that to not last long, it left me feeling fearful of making more attempts.

to tell the truth, I’ve wondered a few times if it wouldn’t be better to scrap everything and start over; if I’d just made too many mistakes with this blog to salvage it even if I ever did get to a place where I was able to write regularly. it’s been easy to feel like I must have ruined any interest anyone had in my writing to begin with by leaving everything sitting here absent and unfinished for so long.

but every time I’vethought about doing that I wind up looking back at some of thewonderful things people have said about these stories, and it makesme feel that there must be something here worth saving. I still getnotes on this blog. not a lot, but that I get any at all after thislong astounds me.

I have wanted to tryto get back to writing for a while now, but I’ve put off returningto this blog out of nervousness of making another promise I couldn’tkeep. I didn’t want to come here and say “hey, I’m going tostart posting again!” and then wind up not posting anything. again.

but it is a new yearand although it has not been a terribly encouraging one thus far,still I would like to keep going. I would like to start posting hereagain. I can’t make any promises as to how much, or how often. Ican’t even make any promises as to what. when I started hereoriginally I had specific ideas about the kind of the writing Iwanted to post, but at this point I figure I can’t afford to bepicky. so it might very well wind up being mostly bad poetry andrambling stories about my cats. so uh, consider yourself warned, Iguess.

I apologize fortaking your ask down this side-road that I doubt you wereanticipating, anon, but I wanted to thank you because this wassomething I wanted to say for a while and couldn’t quite work upthe courage to do so. this ask gave me an extra push that I needed.

so: thank you.

Oh, thanks! That’s very kind of you. 

Since I’ve been feeling better I want to start working on a longer project again, but after what happened with the last one I don’t want to do that until I’m very sure it’s something I can keep up, and have a significant buffer built up for. Also, I don’t really know what I’m doing. So I can’t say when that will happen. The future is uncertain and scary.

But in the meantime I do have a couple of blogs up now that I’m doing writing for that didn’t really fit on this one: Per Ineptia Ad Astra is for doing recaps of original Star Trek episodes, and Roll For World-building is for Dungeons and Dragons world-building ideas. If you like.