🍂: On Brumerot || decay, creativity, fae, inconstancy, scribes, self-doubt, weirdly personal and probably not relatable
Everything about my home was perfect once.
I suppose I should have noticed even then.
I suppose I did know, even then.
But it was such a little thing, so easy to pretend to overlook.
Everything about my home was perfect once, because it had to be. I'd written it that way, after all. Every single word exactly what and where it should be, every sentence perfect, every detail exact and impeccable.
And every bit of it was, except the cabinets.
Oh, they'd been perfect once as well, along with all the rest. Every knot and whorl in the wood where it was meant to be, every bit of the cope-and-stick construction meant to evoke exactly the sense of simplicity and elegance I wanted, restraint and dignity without hauteur.
I was happy with them. Well, content with them, at least. The truth of it is that I never noticed them, because they were just the way they were supposed to be. Who pays mind to what is correct and in its place?
Until the day I noticed the corner.
But it was flawed, smashed, finish chipped, wood splintered.
Only slightly, as if in a moment's carelessness, an unfortunate impact with chair or broom or who knows what.
But that wasn't possible. It couldn't be other than I'd created it. Other than I'd left it.
I drew my pen, the dull steel drinking in the light that fell upon it, nib stained and corroded no matter how oft I cleaned it. Creation took its toll on creator, regardless of how careful one was.
I stooped over for a closer look, peering closely at the imperfection.
Wood gave way to words upon inspection, the edge of the cabinet revealing its true form, unfolding and unraveling into script so dense it fooled the senses of all but the one who'd written it, letters etched not in ink but in absence, as if Void itself had been writ into unbeing.
Something rose in my throat, fear and disgust and confusion and sickly bitter bile. I couldn't remember writing those last few words. Why would I have wanted to? This was my havenworld; it would not change but for my will. It simply could not.
And yet...there they stood, those words that seemed to corrode the space around them, the feathered and bleeding letters eating away at their surroundings like rust and moth.
As one depraved, I plunged nib into ink, that abyssal mix that held power of creation and destruction alike, its repice simple, unchanging, a sumi inkstick made from the ashes of every page of words I'd ever burned, dissolved in liquid Shadow.
The offending words struck through.
The values I thought I held. The mirror of my fears.
And it worked. For a day.
The next day, the kitchen was all wrong, beautiful, vivacious wood replaced by cold, uncaring industrial steel, all right-angles and welds.
I hadn't asked for this, hadn't written this.
And yet...when I looked, the writ was in my hand, signed in the ink only I used, sealed in hopelessness.
Well, perhaps I'd written it, but it wasn't what I'd wanted. I wasn't the me who'd written it, any more than yesterday I'd been the me who'd finished the kitchen in delicate wood.
So I rewrote them as stone, something more natural, if still durable.
It only worsened from there.
Day by day, year by year, words shifted, little by little, drifted in meaning to me. Stone chipped. Paint peeled. Wood warped. I read, wrote, reread, rewrote; nothing ever stayed the same. Each time, new flaws, new things to fix, unintended implications, unforeseen shortcomings.
Who could say what changed.
Bit by bit, everything ended. No matter how much I tried to hold steady this asylum, moment by moment it all changed.
One day, I looked back and realized that everything had died and rotted.
One day, I looked back and realized that everything was gone.
One day, I looked back and realized that whoever had made this world was gone as well.
I too had died and rotted away. But not to nothing, no, much worse than that. I'd rotted away to something.
That was the day I burned every last page of it.
At least whatever I wrote next, it would be with a clean slate.
