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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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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
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.
1d ago
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Are you still listening for it?
The incessant splashing against the glass on a dark afternoon
Whilst inside you bake bread and mend holes in old loved clothes,
Warm cat on your lap,
Later you meet your warm lover in your bed.
Do you still listen for the beginnings of the shower before you know for sure it's even in the air?
You check your weather app eight times a day
And never wear open toed shoes if there's ever a cloud above you.
Are you still packing an umbrella into your little bags?
You know it never rains when you have it. Why does it never rain when you have it?
You start to believe that maybe you are magic and so you always carry an umbrella and now it is shining.
But why are you still waiting for it to pour?
To make up for the burden of protection?
To make the effort all mean something?
Can you still smell the storm before it arrives?
Does your blood still run in tune with the currents of the air? Do the hairs on your arms stand up when it is coming?
Are you bracing yourself or do you still love it?
The excitement of the electricity and wetness and risk all around you with each loud flash.
Don't leave the house lest it strike you down
Because if it were to happen to anyone, it would be you.
Does your heart still sink when you open the curtains and see the gloom?
Even though the sun was shining on your worst days because the sun always shines on your worst days and pathetic fallacy isn't real.
You're not living on a flood plane.
All the trees are waving,
In that, all the trees sound like waves in the wind.
The rhythm of this water is in the leaves all shuddering their bodies against one another
And it is not raining.
There are so many weathers and it is not raining
Though it will come again and the shuddering trees will be thankful for it.
It will spill down their green palms and spiny fingers,
Caress their planted bodies on its way to the earth
And they will be filled with all of its life.
You remark that you are waterproof, fireproof, bombproofed like a spooky horse
You drink three litres of water a day lest your body shuts down
and you don't know how it feels to have your feet in the grass whilst the rain falls on your skin.
It flows around your house through the pipes and the gutters and you sit inside and listen with some degree of anticipation
Or confirmation or validation or something something that you knew this would happen,
That you knew it was to be expected to come again
But the house you have built channels the water away from you
And the bricks are still standing
And you're inside where you have all of your things
And all of your loves
And the anticipation of the downpour never made it stop.
Sep 21, 2024
Top Recs from @spasi
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Resistance to inevitable change is a common source of suffering. Making a conscious commitment to acceptance can help you to reduce the resistance you embody every day. It can also raise your awareness of how and when you resist change.
Accept not just the truth that a breakup has occurred. Accept how you felt about the relationship from beginning to end. Accept the people you both were and the people you are now. Accept how you’ve changed or failed to change. Accept the pain that comes with vulnerability and need to remain vulnerable to grow. Accept your mistakes and their consequences. Accept your loss.
Feelings are often like clouds. If you run away from them, they may follow you for longer. If you sit with them, they will pass. Accept your clouds. They are impermanent.
Feb 16, 2025
concise, upbeat indie folk. This particular track has a popular form and progression.
Mar 8, 2025