Acolyte
2018: Mom gets diagnosed with cancer
2019: Dad dies.
2020: Global fucking pandemic; grandmother's health begins taking serious downturns (though it's already been bad for awhile).
2021: Mom dies.
2022/2023: My grandmother's dementia is so progressed, she no longer knows who I am. My entire existence is a fiction to her. And I could spend a full day recounting every single moment of my last 44 years to her and in the minute following my last word, I would become a fucking stranger to her. I have been wiped from her memories.
I remember watching my mom, deep into her chemo sessions, have her weekly Sunday calls with my grandmother. Each conversation got worse as my mom repeatedly tried to explain her health conditions to her own mother, who she was very close with...but who now couldn't remember much, if anything, about her daughter's situation. My mother lost her emotional tether due to dementia and I'm now understanding what she must've been feeling in those moments, to not have that elder, that pillar of your own, to lean on in your hardest times when you feel like you're way out of your fucking element, and in way over your fucking head, and just need that one true thing to keep you sane and grounded.
This isn't a cry for help so much as it is simply a mental exhalation, a gutteral utterance of a revelation as to why I have felt the way I do for so long now.
This deficiency is really fucking serious now.
Not that it wasn't before, but I'm understanding what this gap in feelings is tethered to. I am without consistency, without reliability. There is, thankfully, no shortage of good people to lean on...but. I am without someone who I can be absolutely and deeply emotionally vulnerable with, and that is no small thing.
Not that I've been overfuckingflowing with consistency or reliability before, only that I understand these things to be more immediate, and more paramount now.
Fuck the need for romance; I need an equal I can lean on for a little bit. I need a softness I've not had in a while. I need something I can count on. Something I can trust, which has also been mostly absent. You go so long without it that, when you finally really need it, you find those particular muscles have atrophied and you are an island in search of a mainland to cling to or risk sinking into the depths.
Though it oftens feels lonely as fuck, I absolutely have an abundance of support in my corner, don't get me wrong. But, I am badly missing the kind of vocal and physical affirmations that I'm in serious need of at the moment. I have no idea how to go about getting them, or finding someone interested in providing them, but I could truly and legitimately use them.
This is definitely crazy unfair to put on someone else, however. I have no other solutions at the moment other than my default, which is to just work...and I hate it.
* * *
I am nostalgic for Things That Will Never Be. The shoulda/coulda/woulda situations that never manifested. I am addicted to the potential of a thing, even when that particular starlight has long burned out. This might explain a great deal.
It's not helpful, this nostalgia. How much time have you wasted this week ruminating on the potential of a thing that's already come and gone and is absolutely never going to be a thing ever again? How much time do you spend looking backward at a horizon with no more possibilities scattered along its length? Because I do it a fucking lot, apparently. And I am all the dumber for it.
I'm not talking about "if you can dream it, you can do it" levels of bullshit optimism here. Always shoot for the moon when it comes to your personal goals. Just figure out how not to dwell on the shit in your past you can't change.
And when you figure out how to do that, come find me and teach me. I am in dire need of learning the lesson.
* * *
Under a Black Rainbow is very nearly ready to publish. Two more stories to edit and the full cover to complete before uploading it all to Amazon. Really would've rather had Featherproof want to publish it, but...not at the risk of waiting until 2025 or 2026. I have too much to do before then and getting this out the door now affords me the opportunity to really flesh out An Atlas of Bone & Sorrow, which I put a ton of admin/formatting work into this evening while sitting at a local wine bar.
The former is done, and has been for quite some time. The irony of finishing most of it before everything went to shit is...not lost on me. That so much of it still rings true? Also not lost on me. I'll be sure to post up pre-order details once they become available. Probably end of the month/start of January.
An Atlas of Bone & Sorrow, however, is a fun hybrid project that I've had at the forefront of my mind (when it's not distracted by other life things). I think I cracked the code of the format of the book tonight. Though I'm providing a lot of extra "behind the scenes" reasoning for many of the stories in UaBR, I feel like there will be a LOT more context in AAoB&S. We're really gonna have to scrape the gray matter to make this book matter.
I'd be lying if I said I was stoked to relive the last several years of shit all over again. It certainly didn't get me anywhere the first time around. I don't feel a single stitch closer to having any answers about anything.
So that's fun.
* * *
I've spent the last two years at home alone on New Years Eve and, while I'll be home again this year, I've decided to have people over. No more starting the years on the lowest "boo-hoo" setting. And since I did absolutely nothing for my birthday last year, I'm also actively doing something for it this year by DJing in Omaha all weekend. The first half of 2023 was not awesome, so it's time to rejigger that and start things off in better ways. Not that I usually believe in that kind of stuff, but a change is needed in at least these minor ways.
Here's hoping you figure out how to find and keep a little (a LOT of) happiness in the coming year.
And when you figure out how to do that, come find me and teach me. I am in dire need of learning that lesson too.
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