The Opacity of This Bitch

Me and clarity have been having a war of attrition for awhile now. It's not something I recognized until I was more cognizant of the effects my grief was having on me, but the revelation was a stark one and it slapped me across the face when it arrived. 

The basic building blocks of a home (whether it be an actual house or an apartment or a condo, whatever) consist of ways to hide the things you own. Closets, drawers, cabinets, attics...I had taken these things for granted in my previous lives, favoring storage over display in almost every sense of the word. I felt like I was keeping things organized and clean. But like a solid, but obvious, metaphor for the rest of my life, I was simply hiding the important things from being seen by others. 

When I first moved into my home, I filled the closets and the cabinets and the drawers all the way they should've been filled, the way we're all used to them being inhabited by the objects we've accumulated along the way. I had gotten used to the absolute wonder of two massive walk-in closets in my previous apartment, so while they hid my clothing, they also had every article fully on display. This new iteration had smaller closets with folding doors that practically asked to be closed. 

For months, I dabbled with the idea of removing all my brand new kitchen cabinet doors just so I wouldn't forget what was behind them. Some of that was an aesthetic choice, but much of that thinking was steeped in the dense brain fog I experienced the months following my mother's passing. I don't like hidden things; my love of clarity (at least in terms of real life things rather than my creative life things) is paramount. I like knowing the boundaries of a thing. I know knowing how it works, why it works (or why it doesn't). 

I like having answers. And currently, I seem to have nothing but questions, which I keep asking, but the responses from every which way seem to still be "suffer in this stranglehold of ambiguity a little longer."  

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I began a healthy revamp of my office. Bought an adjustable standing desk (which is fucking DOPE) to help keep me productive while avoiding sitting all day. I also bought a yoga chair to help stretch out my back after a day of standing. Removed a lot of clutter from the workspace and the whole vibe of the room just feels better. Not quite spartan in feel, but certainly closer to that than claustrophobic. 

Of course this emptying of one room created a cascading effect and I have been slowly taking on several rooms at a time, removing what's unnecessary. Shedding old skins. Removing all the shades of of a former self that I no longer wear. Clothes, items, trinkets...holdovers from a different life that feels so weirdly foreign from this side of the timeline. 

But the scraping out of old, unused iterations of self has been good. It's been needed for awhile, but I can fall into being a sentimental bastard every so often and might have a tendency to hold onto things longer than is probably healthy. Purging is good, but I'm doing a lot of it at the moment. 

*    *    *

It's not a stretch to say that my greatest strength is also my greatest weakness. My imagination needs very little in the way of prompting in order for me to take a small interaction or throwaway comment and either see all the paths leading up to it or to one singular, devastating outcome. Rarely do the final terminations of these thoughts end up in good places and they are almost always emotionally injurious to me. The irony being I'm only doing it to myself. 

*    *    *

I continue to do horror livestreams. They're fun, the people I play with are great and hilarious and really know how to lean into a narrative in surprising ways. 

I'm currently writing several at the moment, with three or four nearing completion now. It's not the same kind of writing I'm used to doing, but it's writing nonetheless and it's flexing those muscles that seem to have atrophied. Here's an excerpt from a prologue for one such book: 

This sky above us used to give voice to birdsong and lilting breezes; now it simply bleeds the same way we do.  

I can’t remember the last time I saw a cloud, but there were more people around then. Whole cities of them, milling about, shopping and driving and picnicking under a bright yellow sun that somehow allowed the sky to remain its vibrant blue. 

 

And then a few cities became mausoleums for the living, everyone ordered to stay home because of some contagion or poison in the air. Then a few more, then a whole state. The thing moved faster than the country could stop the spread and soon we were global with an experience none of us were ready for. 

I can’t remember the last time I had a good dream, but there were fewer bodies around then. Whole cities devoid of these black-veined, prolapsed-tongue corpses stacked like sandbags fifteen bodies high. Like they were meant to protect us from a flood that had already drowned what little hope remained. 

The first few weeks were terrifying as the spread seemed to affect most people the same way. No age group was safe, nor was any gender. No race, no religion, none of it seemed to matter…and yet, there are those of us who made it through without incident. A registry was created to gather genetic traits and markers in the hopes of pinning down what ailed us, but so much of the population simply collapsed into the contagion’s hands that whole industries ended up collapsing too. And those bodies began to decompose. 

At least the rural parts had space for the smell to dissipate. The larger cities got hit hardest, what with so many people living on top of each other. Apartment building after apartment building became free-standing cemeteries full of bodies in their beds or their recliners. Those of us who hadn’t left the city yet were tasked with clearing out our buildings. If you were in the right part of the city, you could sit and watch as thousands of corpses were pushed and shoved out of 3rd, 7th, 24th floor windows. The ripest ones split apart in gruesome ways across the pavement below, scattering skeletons and their former thoughts in a million directions.

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