sᴜʀᴠɪᴠᴏʀ / ɢᴜɪʟᴛ

“It wasn’t nostalgia that made these memories so wrenching. It wasn’t some fear that I’d never experience love or appreciate beauty again. Instead, my distress felt like a kind of preemptive mourning for a lost instinct. Those bits were a stockpile of tiny things, emblematic shards of some bigger, blurrier mosaic, that my mind had extracted and retained, when it was still able to do so. They were proof of some tenderly curatorial sensibility, intuitive and helplessly porous, that I was in the process of losing. My brain was Teflon, and everything in this beautiful place, in this beautiful time, was flowing past me like it belonged to someone else. It felt like I wasn’t making memories anymore, but just slipping through some inconsequential morass of stimuli, down a path that was neither a means nor an end. If could no longer absorb the right things—those tiny precious things, however de-contextualized and random, that signified some larger and nobler truth—how could I make meaning out of anything? How would I know what anything meant? How would I know who and what I was, who or what anyone was? How would I make sense of the world?”

“He was a fighter. He really was. I’ve watched people tear him down, and then ask for his help. And he would help them. He would spend hours helping them. I’ve always admired that part of him.”

Yall the RPC is a mess and we have got to start getting better about interacting with people. This whole ‘oh i’ll wait until they approach me’ mentality that so many of us have fallen into is literally going to be the death of the community before any update that staff wants to push out ever will. I can’t count on both hands the number of people I personally know who have left the RPC as a whole because of what they percieve as a lack of interest in their muses. I’ve been here for a decade and thing didn’t used to be this way, people could easily slide into the RPC and feel welcome.