#halotics

I went to an arcade today. a "retrocade", filled with 30% beaten up machines and the rest innumerously similar to one another. it was interesting, modern yet not. i saw games i've only heard spoken of or seen in youtube videos, games that i forgot, games that had been desecrated and left as cardboard husks, no screen, empty gun slots, abandoned because the parts weren't worth the cost. the guy at the entrance, the owner i believe, wouldn't stop talking about how there were no modern games, no 2000's "junk" just the 90's 80's and 70's. wouldn't stop making cocaine jokes either. he was a chill guy, but his reality felt trapped- joyously transfixed in one time, one space, pulling others into his truth.

i almost threw up at the end. it felt like a hotbox of flesh and subsuming meatwarmth.

i called my girlfriend, speaking for the first time in almost a year. she asked "who are you" when i messaged, and i had to agonizingly explain the multiple ego deaths and almost-real deaths that led to such a change in existence and expression. i couldn't believe she still loves me, it was like talking to a portal through time. like i was looking through a rift, back into the pov of that scared girl exploring the rotting parts of toronto, loving every terrified second of it. and the rift only let me look at the girl who dragged me along through it all. i wouldn't have gotten here without her, for better or (and, really) for worse. she gave me our memories back, filled me with a past. like there was a bottle of lightning in my heart, carrying thousands of volts of lives that could've been, and a single crack let it seep out. my body didn't stop shaking for an hour. all i could think of was everything she went through, how i could've been there, how i could've held her into the stability she now has. but then again, she recognized the utter dissonance between the me now and the girl then, she spoke of us with the same fondness while her voice twinged with, either curiosity or confusion im not sure. she told me she never stopped missing me. i told her the same. i left that reality to crumble because i thought i was already dead once i left it, but now i am alive, and i know otherwise. pulling bits and pieces that i desire, leaving the rest where they should lie.

no matter what she said about the past about the new about how things have become, you can't reach your hand through the rift. if i go back to toronto, which i am considering more by the day, it will never be the same. and i'm glad for that. "the ___ you knew is not the same ___" i know, sister, neither are any of us. you will never be the exact same girl that taught me how to two-step, how to love fully, how to make a mark. but if i can i'll come back and i'll hold you as new, and we'll exist for what we are now, no melancholic hesitation, no dreamy life huddled together in that streetcar headed towards the end of the bay, the end of what may be everything. this life will be this life until we die and then there's another. if there's anything i've learned through rebirth, it's that you can't escape time, but time is not an antagonist. time coddles you, time begs you to understand, even though you can't. time is always there, leading you to something, anything. you can do anything inside of time, it's a comforting blanket when you can feel the veil. when you know that time will always be there, until the end, you know that you must respect it, and do what you can with time as your eternal company, until it shows itself, and sits with you until the moribund rot sets in.

if my girlfriend messages me tomorrow as we said, i'll be overjoyed. if she doesn't, i'll still be Halo, i'll still be Trance, and the memories of her and the girl she knew, fighting in the back of the Cruel Intent pit where only the merch guys and the band members could see us, will still be here. and the memories will never be lost, or take over, memories are time, showing us its face. it wants us to see, that it has been here, and still is, it wants us to look it in the eyes and make new memories with it. memories are the only true motivational tales.

5 years ago today, i was three lives separated from now. even the twinges of feminization had barely reached me. the memories then are desaturated and cold. time has decided to relieve me of them, until i need them to see that it won't leave.

2 years ago, i was closest to a self than ever before. i cut my hair for the first time since COVID, i lived on my own for the first time ever, i was medicated for the first time, and had estrogen for a few months. it felt like life. and it fell as quickly as it came. time followed along, it kept those memories so i'll always know the catalyst of all catalysts, and know that they keep coming. life is a never-ending crux point, a point of damnating decisions. many think they come and go, but events are put in amber as they happen, dragged along like a rock. but i don't have to be the one to carry that rock, to let it chain me. you can let time carry it, it wants to be your pack mule, so you can carry yourself without the need for assistance. though you will need assistance, even time misunderstands. it will warp your memories to suit your needs, but isn't that so much better than living in pocket realities of space and time. i enjoy travelling through the pockets i'm given, knowing more realities will show themselves to me, will fade into this one until the previous is gone like the wind, dissipated until it can only be felt in the changing air, the heat transferring into me, being held on by my pores. another to be carried by my forever confidant.

now, in the hardest place i've been in in my life, i know it simultaneously is not that. there is no point of rock bottom or a peak of all peaks. this pocket, like every, expands with each second, entropy will find its victim, and i will be shot into a new continuum. dead and yet alive.

so it goes.

by the time that things are noticeably different, they will be entirely familiar. dozens of generations of cockroaches have died since i was a scared 15 year old, in my second-to-last year of high school, asking the lesbian from my therapy group if i was "allowed" to be transgender. they have all experienced time in its entirety, is that not a wondrous release, even for a creature as miniscule as such? they live, they go from house to house, or food source to food source. do you think they see the change from feasting on a rotten apple under the fridge for a month into feasting on the remains of chinese food on a fetid living room table, as a change of utter truth, a life-changing dissonance of realities? we are all in our own, and yet we can fill each other's with air, increase the space, further the movement of entropy, further the cause into the effect, take and give until the bubble pops, and the next one comes to subsume us.

i feel like i should've used up my 90 minutes ive given myself to write this by now. i guess time still wants me to keep going. i could talk to you forever, black text background plastered over the neonic glitch-effected image of some random anime girl. this feels like a reality in its own. for tomorrow will be another drop, as always, leading into a rise. like a roller-coaster, we are at the pinnacle, the daily crux, the climactic orgasmic influx of thought into the idea of the heart that is held inside the mind, and we drop, into the reality of screaming fear. maybe it will lead into a slow plateau for a while, maybe it will rise, maybe it will loopdeeloop and we'll have the most fun we've had in our lives. maybe i can have it all. scratch that, i will have it all. and if time can't stop me—which i know it would never—then nothing can. even as the feelings of that teenage boy from that bubble of time tries to mix into mine, i will take it and i will feel it and will touch her growing hair and i will braid it for the first time and i will tell her it will be okay. things will get so much worse, and things will get so much better, and you will find a self through any of it, you will never be the nothing you think you are, you will not only become so much, you will become so many. you will experience the lives of a girl, a woman, the boy you never got to be, a bug, a dog, a specter and a willing participant both. you will cry and you will cum and you will scream and you will fight and you will die and you will punch and kick and live even when you die. time is here, i am here, that ‘boy’ is here alongside me, and i will never be her again, but maybe i will be a different her in a year, or a month, or even years, but no matter what, i will *be*.

in 2 years i hope to have novels out. i hope to have started a foray into much more than this, games, films, mixed media of all i've learned. but if i haven't, then that is simply another reality that will crawl alongside me, like lines ever-so-slightly unparalleled, waiting to meet and dissolve into each other’s being. anything can happen. everything will happen. even doing nothing but waiting is a deeply consequential decision, one of the most. doing nothing when you are at the crux is no more than another plateau on the roller coaster. you are going to fall, whether you cover your eyes or not. and then the rise will come again, and so will the loops. and don't you want to have your eyes open for that? you will experience a thousand drops, and a thousand climbs, and none will be less vital than the last. you need to keep your eyes open throughout the wind. don't you wanna look at all the faces you made on the camera at the end? at every differing face you wore? a collage of every death and every life and every half-hearted dissociative fugue and every piece you created while crying and screaming is waiting for you to see, you won't be able to be the creator forever. i have been given the power of a god. to create as much as i can until the light fizzles, and then to create even more in the dark, until my hands grow weary and my fingers give in, bursting with caustic fluid and and leaving my reality. and then, i can hold them all. i will have everything.

time is my right-hand man, my little eunuch advisor, whether scheming or telling truths, i love her. and i'm going to drag her around on a leash until we reach the volcano, then i'm gonna throw every twink i could've been inside it, then i'm gonna watch, and i'm gonna turn to time, and i'll say "pretty funny, right?" and we'll laugh. and we'll sit by the heat with no suits, letting it peel away every layer. the girls and boys in my head who have told every me many things, who have driven me to this point, will wither as i huff the caustic fluids seeping from time's wounds, and i'll feel every reality that once existed within and without me, with each of their deaths, and i'll say "pretty funny, right?" and i will take one last drop into the final, into the last face of my realities. and time won't be there to hold me anymore. i will.