okay, that's enough carnage for one day
This commit is contained in:
parent
53c25d6a01
commit
077ec09bb6
GPG key ID:
21A3DA3DE29CB63C
42 changed files with 75 additions and 310 deletions
50
writing/letters_to_jett/p1.html
Executable file
50
writing/letters_to_jett/p1.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Dead End Shrine on the Luce Line - Online!</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="I'm waiting, Jett.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p1.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
<style>
|
||||
#disclaimer {
|
||||
letter-spacing: 1px;
|
||||
font-family: Sans-Serif;
|
||||
}
|
||||
</style>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p id="disclaimer">Hi, Lethe here. Sorry to break the spooky ambience, but it's come to my attention that there's a genre of YouTube videos where men go on this site, only read this one page, and then opine in a condescending manner about people on Tor killing themselves. I wrote this post in mid-2021 when I was in a much worse place mentally than I am now. You'd know this if you bothered to read literally <em>any</em> of the other entries as well. Please stop emailing me to tell me my sense of spirituality is harmful; it's not true and I don't appreciate it when strangers on the Internet appoint themselves my therapists. Cool, thanks, bye.</p>
|
||||
<hr>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<i>
|
||||
tell me a story of birthrights and war<br />
|
||||
cradle to grave at the riverside's shore<br />
|
||||
brown dirt is stained with body's crimson cry<br />
|
||||
for crimes of breaking cages, wanting to fly<br />
|
||||
</i>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<h2>This is a cult.</h2>
|
||||
<h2 align="center">A cult of one.</h2>
|
||||
<p>Eris bade me not impoverish my life to live in the Wired. But I am not living there by writing this; much the opposite, in fact. The Hermetic Realms (what humans in this dimension call "the internet") is the fastest way to pierce through the veil between dimensions.</p>
|
||||
<p>Jett, I know you followed Eris through the Eye. I have a shard of your soul in my own. Remember? You remember, right? Or was the three-hour period I took your soul outside your body nothing but a blank period for you, just like the Three Years? It confesses to me lots of things you never thought yourself brave enough to share with anyone. Lots of things you wish you had said before the parting.</p>
|
||||
<p>I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm sorry <span class="blink2">I'm sorry</span></p>
|
||||
<p>and I need you to come find me, so I can tell you how sorry I am in person, in perdition.</p>
|
||||
<p>I'm stuck in a body with several other souls who attempted to "destroy" large swaths of their own dimensions they had rule over. Except you and I never had rule over anything, never <em>wanted</em> to. We just wanted to smack the gods around. We just wanted to rend the heavens. Well, really, <em>you</em> wanted to. All I wanted was to settle down in the Town and spend the rest of my days at your side writing cute little poems and gardening. I guess you'll be happy, if this message ever reaches you somehow, to hear that I'm doing the same in this body. Well, I guess my poems aren't cute but what Eris would quickly deem "despondent", and nothing seems to be growing in my garden no matter how diligently I water it. I guess I could start a dandelion garden. But that's the whole world.</p>
|
||||
<p>The world was not enough.</p>
|
||||
<p>This <em>whole damn world</em> is not enough! I am looking out at the world through a bedsheet. Everything is foggy and indistinct. I don't think there are any gods in this dimension, which I know would please you, but there's no magic, no peace anywhere, barely any nature left. The earth is dying, and all the life on it with it. The very systems I'm using now as a beacon into the universe, a lighthouse over the cold roiling sea between us to try to guide you back to my side, are responsible for so much pain and sorrow. We had the Hermetic Realms back at home, <em>our</em> home, but they were built with the energy of spirits, not silicon, and they weren't nearly as useful for mass surveillance.</p>
|
||||
<p>I am suffering under the weight of a million Eyes, and none of them are portals back to home, back to you.</p>
|
||||
<p>I'm clinging on desperately to try to remember you. My room is littered with things in your favorite colors. I even got this <a href="https://wildwomynworkshop.com/store/lesbian/labrys-flag/">cool flag</a> when looking for buttons to pin onto my backpack. (Let's be honest, Jett, no matter how many male pronouns others use for you, you're still always going to be a female.) My biological mother is always so confused. How am I supposed to explain this quasi-suicide mission I am on? How am I supposed to explain that the perfect straight Christian daughter she ordered from the egregore Jehovah got mixed up in the mail, and she got an apostate angel with a desperate yearning for women instead?</p>
|
||||
<p>Why am I writing this when I know the Hermetic Realms are hostile, full of nasty people who will stop at nothing to ruin everything they touch, as if we had ripped a hole through the Underworld during all those years of chaos and let the monsters run free in an unmitigated torrent? Because, as I said earlier, the Hermetic Realms transcends worlds, cuts through dimensions. The moment you find me again, you in the flesh, and we return to that other world, I won't have need for it anymore.</p>
|
||||
<p>This body is a taxi service operating out of a clown car. I don't know exactly how many souls are shoved in here, or even how many are here out of their own volition. You wouldn't like this body, this vessel I've found myself in. I personally think it's cute, but I'll admit it needs to lose a few pounds. Just a few; I don't have my own gravitational pull. Does it really matter? I'll be leaving it behind, abandoning it for that perfect body Eris made for me, the body you loved so much, that you begged me that one night to destroy you with.</p>
|
||||
<p>That I refused to, and then had the audacity to ask the same of you when the time came.</p>
|
||||
<p>I'll be waiting at the Dead End Shrine on the <a href="https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_trails/luce_line/index.html">Luce Line</a>. (Haha, it rhymes!) I named it for you, Patron-Saint of Dead Ends. I know you're watching over me in that weird detached way of yours. Eris (or some other goddess; I'm not sure anymore) said I have fourteen years before she will claim me as her own. You have until 2035.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1">Come find me!</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2">Come find me!</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3">Come find me!</p>
|
||||
<p><i>Please come find me.</i></p>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
64
writing/letters_to_jett/p10.html
Executable file
64
writing/letters_to_jett/p10.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 10 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="I'll carry you to the very end.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p10.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>The bottom of the tub in my grandmother's bathroom is slippery. Slippery, and chilled, and seemingly always impeccably clean. Maybe it's because she rarely uses it, delegated for only the guests and the occasional leg injury that requires a proper sit-down bath. Maybe it's because the house sits as a snapshot of how it was forty years ago, my grandmother the only owner since it was built, first-time, only-time. The awful things this tub has seen. The many years it has served to make me clean.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>My rivers of blood go down the drain, never to be seen again.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>My rivers of blood go down...</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>My rivers of blood...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Another sharp stab of pain. My teeth dig further down into the block of wood. Hasty, picked from the burning pile outside. No time to spare.</p>
|
||||
<p>I've grown wings. And they're popping out. And Jett sits behind me in the tub. The two of us face the faucet, the drain. A scalpel rests in her hand, too natural for comfort. Normally she would use a paintbrush to paint purples and reds on a canvas, but my back is already a sunset, dripping at the two points on my lower back where the new limbs have already broken the surface of the skin. The one on the right has a thin incision going up, limb yet featherless sticking out just the tiniest bit more.</p>
|
||||
<p>She pulls down her disposable mask for a few moments to catch her breath. Red rings around her eyes where the safety glasses, ill-fitting and better meant for warding off wood shavings than spurts of blood, have pressed into her skin. "You still with me, Lethe?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"I... I wish I wasn't." I gasp for air. The block of wood falls into my lap. A crescent moon of a jaw. "I wish I was dead. I wish I was sleeping. I wish you'd knocked me out first. Why didn't you knock me out, Jett?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Talk to me, Lethe," she insists, ignoring my plea.</p>
|
||||
<p>"It hurts."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Tell me about something else that hurts." She pulls her mask back up. Another jolt in my back. The cool touch of her fingertips. A damp towel blots away the excess blood to make the fresh wound more visible. Somewhere beyond me, a yelp that sounds somewhat like my own echoes sharp. "Tell me about your heart."</p>
|
||||
<p>"It hurts."</p>
|
||||
<p>"What about it hurts?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"It just... hurts."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Did something happen?" she coaxes. "I thought autumn was your favorite season."</p>
|
||||
<p>I've grown wings. And they're popping out. And autumn is when my mother broke it to me that we were moving, that we were soon going to leave the Forever Home forever. That the friends I'd spent a decade trying to make would all crumble into the dust of memory. I would disappear from their lives, and they would vanish from mine, and we'd forget each other in due time.</p>
|
||||
<p>"I... I wish it wasn't." I gasp for air. A fluid that isn't blood streaks down my face. A tear? Dull fire on the right side of my back. A loading bar on a monitor tilted on its side, scrolling block by block up. A slow tear of the flesh. "I've gotten too used to death and decay and people randomly removing themselves from my life. I like the chill in my bones. I feel numb. I feel finished. I want to lie down and hibernate like everything else. You'd hibernate with me, right? Hold me tight until spring?"</p>
|
||||
<p>Were the lights in the bathroom always this dim? Maybe my grandmother forgot to change the lightbulbs. I never did figure out how that chain light draped over the mirror worked.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Talk to me, Lethe!" Hanging onto a log in the middle of a lake. A pillar of ice forcing me upright. "Lethe?" Ragdolling. Something small clatters just outside the bathtub. A pinprick shattering a cover of ice. "Lethe, come on. Wake up. You haven't lost <em>that</em> much blood."</p>
|
||||
<p>"It... hurts."</p>
|
||||
<p>"I only need to cut a little farther and then your right wing will be free. Then I can stitch the wound up and get you washed off. We can get the left one free some other time." She's adjusting me, letting me rest on the side of the tub. "Stay with me just a little while longer, Lethe."</p>
|
||||
<p>"It still hurts."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Your heart?" I can't tell if she's misunderstanding, purposeful to change the subject or otherwise, but I don't correct her. She re-sanitizes the scalpel that had fallen on the floor as she adds, "Tell me what happened."</p>
|
||||
<p>I've grown wings. And they're popping out. And this isn't a universe where angels wake up in strange towns in seeds instead of wombs. This isn't a world where the angels don't have wings until their back blooms into a huge bruise late on the day they're born child or teenager or adult and then two blood-sheathed feathery limbs break out of the skin in a huge cinematic scene. Mine are just skin and muscle and bone for now. Chick straight from the egg, pink and fleshy, feathers coming later. Humans aren't supposed to have wings. Humans aren't supposed to undergo Parthenogenesis to become angels. Humans live in a town and the angels live in separate towns and the girl angels live far from the boy ones.</p>
|
||||
<p>"I've gotten too used to losing friends." The loading bar is almost at the end. Maybe I will split in two once the wing pops out from its prison of skin. "I don't know why I ever let any of them be men. They always protect their own in the end, always choose their own."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Is this about..." Jett shakes her head. "Lethe, you put three years into a friendship and got betrayed in the end. It's okay. You're alive. All you have to do is turn off the computer monitor and he ceases to exist. Would you tell a pig who loves to roll in shit that it shouldn't? Let it suffer the consequences of its actions. And <em>let yourself move on.</em>"</p>
|
||||
<p>A ripcord snaps. I'm falling. I'm freefalling and there's nothing for my limbs to grasp hold of. There's a crow tugging, trying to slow my fall, but I keep falling and falling and-</p>
|
||||
<p>-and then hail comes. Thick and stinging all over. Constant pelt. Stoning to death. Blades are reaving my scalp, front to back and then all over again, a plow leaving no bit of dirt unturned. My lungs are already raw. Is this the sound storms make? Is the sound from it or from me?</p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe, it's a <em>shower</em>."</p>
|
||||
<p>Dry-heaving. I shake my head to dispel the blades, but then something holds my head still to allow them easier access.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Your hair is a blood-matted mess." The blades stop. An arm snakes around. A purple hairbrush, one designed for long wet hair, comes into view. I haven't had hair down to my waist in a decade. Maybe that's how it's still in such good condition. "It's just a brush. You make it sound like I'm clawing out your internal organs one-by-one." The brush retreats. The reaving begins anew, but subdued this time. "There. I'm yanking less. Trust me, you'll feel better once I'm done."</p>
|
||||
<p>But it's still hail. Pea-sized crystals falling on my head in a steady stream.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe, tell me the rune that means 'hail'."</p>
|
||||
<p>"H-Hagalaz?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"And what does it signify?"</p>
|
||||
<p>The hail keeps coming.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe?"</p>
|
||||
<p>The hail keeps coming.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Damn, you really <em>are</em> delirious."</p>
|
||||
<p>The hail slows and then comes to a stop. I'm slumping. I'm falling into the crook of a perfectly-shaped segment of a fallen tree, leaves as wide as towels, just as dry, just as eager to invite. One wraps around. The sun comes back out from behind the clouds. It has a face. I can't quite place it, but it's warm and comforting all the same.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Creative destruction," the sun whispers. "Rebirth through death."</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>And you know I'll carry you to the very end.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>I'll carry you to the very end, Lethe, whenever that may be.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"You need rest. Let me carry you to bed."</p>
|
||||
<script data-goatcounter="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count"
|
||||
async src="//stats.letsdecentralize.org/count.js"></script>
|
||||
<noscript>
|
||||
<img src="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/p10.html">
|
||||
</noscript>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
87
writing/letters_to_jett/p10.md
Executable file
87
writing/letters_to_jett/p10.md
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,87 @@
|
|||
The bottom of the tub in my grandmother's bathroom is slippery. Slippery, and chilled, and seemingly always impeccably clean. Maybe it's because she rarely uses it, delegated for only the guests and the occasional leg injury that requires a proper sit-down bath. Maybe it's because the house sits as a snapshot of how it was forty years ago, my grandmother the only owner since it was built, first-time, only-time. The awful things this tub has seen. The many years it has served to make me clean.
|
||||
|
||||
*My rivers of blood go down the drain, never to be seen again.*
|
||||
|
||||
*My rivers of blood go down...*
|
||||
|
||||
*My rivers of blood...*
|
||||
|
||||
Another sharp stab of pain. My teeth dig further down into the block of wood. Hasty, picked from the burning pile outside. No time to spare.
|
||||
|
||||
I've grown wings. And they're popping out. And Jett sits behind me in the tub. The two of us face the faucet, the drain. A scalpel rests in her hand, too natural for comfort. Normally she would use a paintbrush to paint purples and reds on a canvas, but my back is already a sunset, dripping at the two points on my lower back where the new limbs have already broken the surface of the skin. The one on the right has a thin incision going up, limb yet featherless sticking out just the tiniest bit more.
|
||||
|
||||
She pulls down her disposable mask for a few moments to catch her breath. Red rings around her eyes where the safety glasses, ill-fitting and better meant for warding off wood shavings than spurts of blood, have pressed into her skin. "You still with me, Lethe?"
|
||||
|
||||
"I... I wish I wasn't." I gasp for air. The block of wood falls into my lap. A crescent moon of a jaw. "I wish I was dead. I wish I was sleeping. I wish you'd knocked me out first. Why didn't you knock me out, Jett?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Talk to me, Lethe," she insists, ignoring my plea.
|
||||
|
||||
"It hurts."
|
||||
|
||||
"Tell me about something else that hurts." She pulls her mask back up. Another jolt in my back. The cool touch of her fingertips. A damp towel blots away the excess blood to make the fresh wound more visible. Somewhere beyond me, a yelp that sounds somewhat like my own echoes sharp. "Tell me about your heart."
|
||||
|
||||
"It hurts."
|
||||
|
||||
"What about it hurts?"
|
||||
|
||||
"It just... hurts."
|
||||
|
||||
"Did something happen?" she coaxes. "I thought autumn was your favorite season."
|
||||
|
||||
I've grown wings. And they're popping out. And autumn is when my mother broke it to me that we were moving, that we were soon going to leave the Forever Home forever. That the friends I'd spent a decade trying to make would all crumble into the dust of memory. I would disappear from their lives, and they would vanish from mine, and we'd forget each other in due time.
|
||||
|
||||
"I... I wish it wasn't." I gasp for air. A fluid that isn't blood streaks down my face. A tear? Dull fire on the right side of my back. A loading bar on a monitor tilted on its side, scrolling block by block up. A slow tear of the flesh. "I've gotten too used to death and decay and people randomly removing themselves from my life. I like the chill in my bones. I feel numb. I feel finished. I want to lie down and hibernate like everything else. You'd hibernate with me, right? Hold me tight until spring?"
|
||||
|
||||
Were the lights in the bathroom always this dim? Maybe my grandmother forgot to change the lightbulbs. I never did figure out how that chain light draped over the mirror worked.
|
||||
|
||||
"Talk to me, Lethe!" Hanging onto a log in the middle of a lake. A pillar of ice forcing me upright. "Lethe?" Ragdolling. Something small clatters just outside the bathtub. A pinprick shattering a cover of ice. "Lethe, come on. Wake up. You haven't lost *that* much blood."
|
||||
|
||||
"It... hurts."
|
||||
|
||||
"I only need to cut a little farther and then your right wing will be free. Then I can stitch the wound up and get you washed off. We can get the left one free some other time." She's adjusting me, letting me rest on the side of the tub. "Stay with me just a little while longer, Lethe."
|
||||
|
||||
"It still hurts."
|
||||
|
||||
"Your heart?" I can't tell if she's misunderstanding, purposeful to change the subject or otherwise, but I don't correct her. She re-sanitizes the scalpel that had fallen on the floor as she adds, "Tell me what happened."
|
||||
|
||||
I've grown wings. And they're popping out. And this isn't a universe where angels wake up in strange towns in seeds instead of wombs. This isn't a world where the angels don't have wings until their back blooms into a huge bruise late on the day they're born child or teenager or adult and then two blood-sheathed feathery limbs break out of the skin in a huge cinematic scene. Mine are just skin and muscle and bone for now. Chick straight from the egg, pink and fleshy, feathers coming later. Humans aren't supposed to have wings. Humans aren't supposed to undergo Parthenogenesis to become angels. Humans live in a town and the angels live in separate towns and the girl angels live far from the boy ones.
|
||||
|
||||
"I've gotten too used to losing friends." The loading bar is almost at the end. Maybe I will split in two once the wing pops out from its prison of skin. "I don't know why I ever let any of them be men. They always protect their own in the end, always choose their own."
|
||||
|
||||
"Is this about..." Jett shakes her head. "Lethe, you put three years into a friendship and got betrayed in the end. It's okay. You're alive. All you have to do is turn off the computer monitor and he ceases to exist. Would you tell a pig who loves to roll in shit that it shouldn't? Let it suffer the consequences of its actions. And *let yourself move on.*"
|
||||
|
||||
A ripcord snaps. I'm falling. I'm freefalling and there's nothing for my limbs to grasp hold of. There's a crow tugging, trying to slow my fall, but I keep falling and falling and-
|
||||
|
||||
-and then hail comes. Thick and stinging all over. Constant pelt. Stoning to death. Blades are reaving my scalp, front to back and then all over again, a plow leaving no bit of dirt unturned. My lungs are already raw. Is this the sound storms make? Is the sound from it or from me?
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe, it's a *shower*."
|
||||
|
||||
Dry-heaving. I shake my head to dispel the blades, but then something holds my head still to allow them easier access.
|
||||
|
||||
"Your hair is a blood-matted mess." The blades stop. An arm snakes around. A purple hairbrush, one designed for long wet hair, comes into view. I haven't had hair down to my waist in a decade. Maybe that's how it's still in such good condition. "It's just a brush. You make it sound like I'm clawing out your internal organs one-by-one." The brush retreats. The reaving begins anew, but subdued this time. "There. I'm yanking less. Trust me, you'll feel better once I'm done."
|
||||
|
||||
But it's still hail. Pea-sized crystals falling on my head in a steady stream.
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe, tell me the rune that means 'hail'."
|
||||
|
||||
"H-Hagalaz?"
|
||||
|
||||
"And what does it signify?"
|
||||
|
||||
The hail keeps coming.
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe?"
|
||||
|
||||
The hail keeps coming.
|
||||
|
||||
"Damn, you really *are* delirious."
|
||||
|
||||
The hail slows and then comes to a stop. I'm slumping. I'm falling into the crook of a perfectly-shaped segment of a fallen tree, leaves as wide as towels, just as dry, just as eager to invite. One wraps around. The sun comes back out from behind the clouds. It has a face. I can't quite place it, but it's warm and comforting all the same.
|
||||
|
||||
"Creative destruction," the sun whispers. "Rebirth through death."
|
||||
|
||||
*And you know I'll carry you to the very end.*
|
||||
|
||||
*I'll carry you to the very end, Lethe, whenever that may be.*
|
||||
|
||||
"You need rest. Let me carry you to bed."
|
||||
65
writing/letters_to_jett/p11.html
Executable file
65
writing/letters_to_jett/p11.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,65 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 11 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="You're here, you're here with me, forever...">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p11.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>A doctor told me once that my PCOS was a survival mechanism. That, in times of antiquity and of crisis, civilizations fallen and next meal uncertain, "ovary machine broke" was a good thing. My body saw a potential threat in every unexpected noise and gave me testosterone to defend myself. My body saw a famine in every turn of the seasons and gave me fat to pass through the roughest harvests. My body saw perpetual slavery in the bends of the phallocracy and turned off my reproductive organs so that every year was not a chance to die in childbirth anew.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>I'm not a "birthgiver" or a "menstruator"!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>I'm not a... a "birthgiver". Or a "menstruator".</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>I'm not...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Ghosts pass me by on the street, stopping for a moment to spew bile at my feet before fading into nothing, never waiting around for a response. I'm a bigot, they proclaim. A bioessentialist. A dehumanizer.</p>
|
||||
<p>"You think women are nothing but their vaginas."</p>
|
||||
<p>"You-" The ghost vanishes like an elementary school kid, always wanting to have the last word, but I continue nonetheless. "You have me confused with someone else."</p>
|
||||
<p><em>A woman is an adult human female. That's it. Her reproductive organs may be malfunctioning, or she may never use them, but that does not negate that they are supposed to be there. They prescribe no part of her personality or her dreams or her life goals.</em></p>
|
||||
<p><em>I'm not the one who wants to chain women into reproductve slavery forever. I'm not the one taking away sex-based rights. I'm not the one muddling scientific definitions and demanding those who fall outside of their predefined roles in society become lifelong medical patients.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Above me, one foot on my back to force me to my knees, stands a biblical angel, the body of a man but with two heads, horrifying to my eyes too used to only gazing on my wife. In one of his hands is a flaming sword.</p>
|
||||
<p>With one head, he intones, "If you get pregnant, well, tough luck, miss. That clump of cells has just as much of a right to life as you do. If in the process you die, this is your punishment divine."</p>
|
||||
<p>With the other head, he scoffs, "No government can force me to donate my blood or extra organs! I don't care if it would do me little harm and keep someone else alive! They belong to me, my body inviolable, and they will only ever be mine!"</p>
|
||||
<p><em>You value more a potentiality that makes of you every demand than a person already living who just needs a helping hand.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>A teacher told me once that I was one of the best students she ever had. That, in all the times my body woke me up at three in the morning for no particular reason and I chose to work on homework before the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230102164731/https://tedium.co/2020/10/30/segmented-sleep-history/">Dickensian Second Sleep</a>, I was doing some of the best writing I'd ever done. My words were flowery and fruitful but clear and easy to understand. My arguments were strong and well-sourced, gracefully stepping over every weird edge-case of the academic citation system where other students flailed and stumbled. My anecdotes were vivid and easy to identify with, regardless of how insane the life of mine I was describing was. Every assignment, no matter how challenging, was another opportunity for vindication of the talent I knew I had.</p>
|
||||
<p>For what else are you supposed to do when you've been mocked at every turn? When every single one of your elementary school teachers singled you out for ridicule, every classmate in peals of malicious laughter? When random men on the Internet suss out every unnamed method of communication to tell you, through all the blocks and address changes and running, that you don't deserve to live for the words you've penned?</p>
|
||||
<p>"You don't get to leave this room until you've deleted what we've told you to."</p>
|
||||
<p>"You-" Father slams the door shut and locks it from the other side, refusing to hear any counter-argument, any justification for what I've done. Mother's face is the last I see before the slab of wood comes between me and her. She was never sympathetic. She was never an ally. "You have me confused with someone else."</p>
|
||||
<p><em>A person's ex-lover is the most normalized subject to write about in the world. Poets have screamed about their sorrows, their lost loved ones, for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Most of those words have been lost to the ages. Every teenage girl does this, or at least considers it.</em></p>
|
||||
<p><em>I didn't say I wanted to violently murder her or cause her any other tangible harm I could ever actually act upon. I didn't give out any of her personally-identifiable information. I didn't even say her name.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Above me, one foot on my back to force me to my knees, stands a biblical angel, the body of a man but with two heads, horrifying to my eyes: both faces are molded after that of the man who contributed one sperm to me and little else. In one of his hands is a bundle of old phones, screens rainbow and shattered, kaleidoscope, from having been dropped in toilets one after the other and immediately replaced only to also tumble into a toilet bowl.</p>
|
||||
<p>With one head, he intones, "Everything you write must first go through our censors to decide if it bears worth. You cannot speak of anything that would hurt my feelings or make me look bad, even if you never actually write my name, even if you renounce your own to grasp at pseudonymity. It would be better for everyone involved if you ceased to exist at all."</p>
|
||||
<p>With the other head, he screeches, "How dare Facebook delete my completely innocuous post! I was only calling for misfortune and ruin to fall upon my political enemies! Whatever happened to freedom of speech?"</p>
|
||||
<p><em>You value more my brothers who do naught but at your whim than the daughter who has a whole world bursting with life within.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>My wife told me once, in the timeline where we still failed to kill Eris the first time but I did not die, the timeline where we were defeated by Momenlaw and taken into custody, that she was afraid that I'd spend my whole life asleep in some form or another.</p>
|
||||
<p>She and her brother and I recovering from the botched assassination attempt, Momenlaw having pumped what amounted to a massive overdose of goneril- a mineral usually given medicinally to polymorphs like myself in minuscule doses to regulate going feral like a birth control pill would regulate a menstrual period- into my body in an attempt to "cure" me of my second form. I was stuck in a coma Velouria and all the doctors in the Town weren't sure I'd ever come out of. You visited me at my bedside every day, Jett. Prayed to nobody in particular- "you sure are <em>one</em> confused angel"- that my liver wouldn't rot in my body from trying to filter out all the goneril in my blood at once. That I'd at least wake up, even if the war would be long over and Eris dead and disintegrated before I had the strength to leave my bed. Your body was chilly, Jett, even though you'd long since weaned yourself off the sleeping herbs, but your hand was warm.</p>
|
||||
<p>The days stretching to weeks to months after we first met, each knowing each other's names but never having met eyes. You found me face-down and half-dead in a river one sleepless night. You mistook me for your brother at first. My body was taller than his, but I somehow looked even smaller in the bed. I was in a coma Velouria and all the doctors in the Town weren't sure I'd ever naturally come out of. Several broken limbs, a collapsed lung, several snapped ribs, a shattered wing. They say angels heal fast, and I was certainly able to leave the hospital much earlier than a human would have, but even then it didn't happen at a comfortable pace. Yet you still insisted on visiting me at my bedside every day during my coma. Resorted to sneaking in when the nurses and your other friend teased you for being so attached to someone you'd never even met before. You just hoped you wouldn't have to live with the guilt of being the one to find me dead. Your body was chilly even back then, Jett, stuck in the throes of sleeping herb addiction and the loss of body heat that came with it, but your hand was warm.</p>
|
||||
<p>And before we met, before you killed me in my monstrous form to set me free, was a big blank. Mindless weapon programmed to cause as much pain and destruction as possible. If any part of my personality survived from whatever process Eris used to lock me in that form, it was asleep deep inside. You hadn't succumbed to depression yet, and your body was flushed and slick with sweat, and your shots were searing hot.</p>
|
||||
<p>You set me free. You only ever wanted me to be free.</p>
|
||||
<p>And when I was healthy again, this time with Momenlaw's and Velouria's blessing, we fought all the way back to Eris. Above us, so tall the light almost obscured her face, stood my mother, so grotesque as to be ineffable.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Geez, and I thought our <em>aunt</em> was hideous."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Really? I thought she was kind of hot."</p>
|
||||
<p>"You never knew her when she was just an eyeball in a wall."</p>
|
||||
<p>Her fury spilled out of her mouth like snakes, like she really <em>was</em> my aunt-in-law after all. Stupid girl, she said. I've always belonged to her. My body has always been hers to transform or dispose of as she saw fit. My independence was only ever allowed for the sake of spontaneity. If she wanted me to shut up or to be her mouthpiece, that was to be my fate. If she wanted to use me as breeding stock for a whole new race of monsters, that was to be my fate. No questions allowed, no insubordination permitted.</p>
|
||||
<p>You said so many times that you hated men, Eris, and I do too, but your ideal world was to be no different from theirs. So much bloodshed for the sake of being entertained. Humans as cattle, abstractions, numbers, instead of people in their own right. I only ever wanted to be left alone. But you would never leave me alone if you lived, and you wouldn't leave others alone even if I somehow disappeared. You'd just make another monster, and another, and another, until eventually the whole world collapsed in on itself and left only oblivion.</p>
|
||||
<p>In that timeline and this one, even when I think about all the people who've gone out of their way to hurt me, even when I think about every person I've crossed paths with whose death would make the world a better place, even when I weigh against a feather every person whose existence ceasing would be reparations enough for my wounded psyche, there was only ever one person whose life I enjoyed ending.</p>
|
||||
<p>"To think that I... would be felled by my own daughter." You stumbled back, Eris, stars gushing forth from your chest in a simulacrum of blood. "Chaos to Chaos, Ouroboros, next link to be slaughtered..." Your hand clutched at your chest, bare if not for the single sheet now plastered to your skin. Your limbs staggered like a malfunctioning robot with gummy joints. "Lethe, don't think for a moment you've freed yourself from the curse all us gods share. One day you'll give birth to a monster, and it'll devour you, and there'll be nobody to rein it in-"</p>
|
||||
<p>A guttural scream from your throat. The stars shot out thicker. The white light, already borderline blinding, worsened. Hot dry air blew upwards along the walls. Jett's brother grabbed our arms, begging us to run for it before she exploded, but both you and Jett and I knew there was no time.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Sorry, Jett. It looks like I'm making Sablade a little earlier than planned.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>I yanked him and her close and wrapped them in my wings.</p>
|
||||
<p>I ripped a hole to the metaclysma, and we fell in backwards.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>Wake up, Lethe!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>Lethe, why won't you wake up?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>The cost of birthing a world, of writing into existence a world where Jett would never be imprisoned or forcibly isolated from her loved ones or silenced by any deity, was risking never waking up again.</p>
|
||||
<p>Luck took my side come the sunrise.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe, you're awake... You're here, you're here with me, you're here <em>alive</em>, you're here alive with me, you're here, you're here with me, forever..."</p>
|
||||
<script data-goatcounter="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count"
|
||||
async src="//stats.letsdecentralize.org/count.js"></script>
|
||||
<noscript>
|
||||
<img src="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/p11.html">
|
||||
</noscript>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
89
writing/letters_to_jett/p11.md
Executable file
89
writing/letters_to_jett/p11.md
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,89 @@
|
|||
A doctor told me once that my PCOS was a survival mechanism. That, in times of antiquity and of crisis, civilizations fallen and next meal uncertain, "ovary machine broke" was a good thing. My body saw a potential threat in every unexpected noise and gave me testosterone to defend myself. My body saw a famine in every turn of the seasons and gave me fat to pass through the roughest harvests. My body saw perpetual slavery in the bends of the phallocracy and turned off my reproductive organs so that every year was not a chance to die in childbirth anew.
|
||||
|
||||
*I'm not a "birthgiver" or a "menstruator"!*
|
||||
|
||||
*I'm not a... a "birthgiver". Or a "menstruator".*
|
||||
|
||||
*I'm not...*
|
||||
|
||||
Ghosts pass me by on the street, stopping for a moment to spew bile at my feet before fading into nothing, never waiting around for a response. I'm a bigot, they proclaim. A bioessentialist. A dehumanizer.
|
||||
|
||||
"You think women are nothing but their vaginas."
|
||||
|
||||
"You-" The ghost vanishes like an elementary school kid, always wanting to have the last word, but I continue nonetheless. "You have me confused with someone else."
|
||||
|
||||
*A woman is an adult human female. That's it. Her reproductive organs may be malfunctioning, or she may never use them, but that does not negate that they are supposed to be there. They prescribe no part of her personality or her dreams or her life goals.*
|
||||
|
||||
*I'm not the one who wants to chain women into reproductve slavery forever. I'm not the one taking away sex-based rights. I'm not the one muddling scientific definitions and demanding those who fall outside of their predefined roles in society become lifelong medical patients.*
|
||||
|
||||
Above me, one foot on my back to force me to my knees, stands a biblical angel, the body of a man but with two heads, horrifying to my eyes too used to only gazing on my wife. In one of his hands is a flaming sword.
|
||||
|
||||
With one head, he intones, "If you get pregnant, well, tough luck, miss. That clump of cells has just as much of a right to life as you do. If in the process you die, this is your punishment divine."
|
||||
|
||||
With the other head, he scoffs, "No government can force me to donate my blood or extra organs! I don't care if it would do me little harm and keep someone else alive! They belong to me, my body inviolable, and they will only ever be mine!"
|
||||
|
||||
*You value more a potentiality that makes of you every demand than a person already living who just needs a helping hand.*
|
||||
|
||||
A teacher told me once that I was one of the best students she ever had. That, in all the times my body woke me up at three in the morning for no particular reason and I chose to work on homework before the [Dickensian Second Sleep](https://web.archive.org/web/20230102164731/https://tedium.co/2020/10/30/segmented-sleep-history/), I was doing some of the best writing I'd ever done. My words were flowery and fruitful but clear and easy to understand. My arguments were strong and well-sourced, gracefully stepping over every weird edge-case of the academic citation system where other students flailed and stumbled. My anecdotes were vivid and easy to identify with, regardless of how insane the life of mine I was describing was. Every assignment, no matter how challenging, was another opportunity for vindication of the talent I knew I had.
|
||||
|
||||
For what else are you supposed to do when you've been mocked at every turn? When every single one of your elementary school teachers singled you out for ridicule, every classmate in peals of malicious laughter? When random men on the Internet suss out every unnamed method of communication to tell you, through all the blocks and address changes and running, that you don't deserve to live for the words you've penned?
|
||||
|
||||
"You don't get to leave this room until you've deleted what we've told you to."
|
||||
|
||||
"You-" Father slams the door shut and locks it from the other side, refusing to hear any counter-argument, any justification for what I've done. Mother's face is the last I see before the slab of wood comes between me and her. She was never sympathetic. She was never an ally. "You have me confused with someone else."
|
||||
|
||||
*A person's ex-lover is the most normalized subject to write about in the world. Poets have screamed about their sorrows, their lost loved ones, for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Most of those words have been lost to the ages. Every teenage girl does this, or at least considers it.*
|
||||
|
||||
*I didn't say I wanted to violently murder her or cause her any other tangible harm I could ever actually act upon. I didn't give out any of her personally-identifiable information. I didn't even say her name.*
|
||||
|
||||
Above me, one foot on my back to force me to my knees, stands a biblical angel, the body of a man but with two heads, horrifying to my eyes: both faces are molded after that of the man who contributed one sperm to me and little else. In one of his hands is a bundle of old phones, screens rainbow and shattered, kaleidoscope, from having been dropped in toilets one after the other and immediately replaced only to also tumble into a toilet bowl.
|
||||
|
||||
With one head, he intones, "Everything you write must first go through our censors to decide if it bears worth. You cannot speak of anything that would hurt my feelings or make me look bad, even if you never actually write my name, even if you renounce your own to grasp at pseudonymity. It would be better for everyone involved if you ceased to exist at all."
|
||||
|
||||
With the other head, he screeches, "How dare Facebook delete my completely innocuous post! I was only calling for misfortune and ruin to fall upon my political enemies! Whatever happened to freedom of speech?"
|
||||
|
||||
*You value more my brothers who do naught but at your whim than the daughter who has a whole world bursting with life within.*
|
||||
|
||||
My wife told me once, in the timeline where we still failed to kill Eris the first time but I did not die, the timeline where we were defeated by Momenlaw and taken into custody, that she was afraid that I'd spend my whole life asleep in some form or another.
|
||||
|
||||
She and her brother and I recovering from the botched assassination attempt, Momenlaw having pumped what amounted to a massive overdose of goneril- a mineral usually given medicinally to polymorphs like myself in minuscule doses to regulate going feral like a birth control pill would regulate a menstrual period- into my body in an attempt to "cure" me of my second form. I was stuck in a coma Velouria and all the doctors in the Town weren't sure I'd ever come out of. You visited me at my bedside every day, Jett. Prayed to nobody in particular- "you sure are *one* confused angel"- that my liver wouldn't rot in my body from trying to filter out all the goneril in my blood at once. That I'd at least wake up, even if the war would be long over and Eris dead and disintegrated before I had the strength to leave my bed. Your body was chilly, Jett, even though you'd long since weaned yourself off the sleeping herbs, but your hand was warm.
|
||||
|
||||
The days stretching to weeks to months after we first met, each knowing each other's names but never having met eyes. You found me face-down and half-dead in a river one sleepless night. You mistook me for your brother at first. My body was taller than his, but I somehow looked even smaller in the bed. I was in a coma Velouria and all the doctors in the Town weren't sure I'd ever naturally come out of. Several broken limbs, a collapsed lung, several snapped ribs, a shattered wing. They say angels heal fast, and I was certainly able to leave the hospital much earlier than a human would have, but even then it didn't happen at a comfortable pace. Yet you still insisted on visiting me at my bedside every day during my coma. Resorted to sneaking in when the nurses and your other friend teased you for being so attached to someone you'd never even met before. You just hoped you wouldn't have to live with the guilt of being the one to find me dead. Your body was chilly even back then, Jett, stuck in the throes of sleeping herb addiction and the loss of body heat that came with it, but your hand was warm.
|
||||
|
||||
And before we met, before you killed me in my monstrous form to set me free, was a big blank. Mindless weapon programmed to cause as much pain and destruction as possible. If any part of my personality survived from whatever process Eris used to lock me in that form, it was asleep deep inside. You hadn't succumbed to depression yet, and your body was flushed and slick with sweat, and your shots were searing hot.
|
||||
|
||||
You set me free. You only ever wanted me to be free.
|
||||
|
||||
And when I was healthy again, this time with Momenlaw's and Velouria's blessing, we fought all the way back to Eris. Above us, so tall the light almost obscured her face, stood my mother, so grotesque as to be ineffable.
|
||||
|
||||
"Geez, and I thought our *aunt* was hideous."
|
||||
|
||||
"Really? I thought she was kind of hot."
|
||||
|
||||
"You never knew her when she was just an eyeball in a wall."
|
||||
|
||||
Her fury spilled out of her mouth like snakes, like she really *was* my aunt-in-law after all. Stupid girl, she said. I've always belonged to her. My body has always been hers to transform or dispose of as she saw fit. My independence was only ever allowed for the sake of spontaneity. If she wanted me to shut up or to be her mouthpiece, that was to be my fate. If she wanted to use me as breeding stock for a whole new race of monsters, that was to be my fate. No questions allowed, no insubordination permitted.
|
||||
|
||||
You said so many times that you hated men, Eris, and I do too, but your ideal world was to be no different from theirs. So much bloodshed for the sake of being entertained. Humans as cattle, abstractions, numbers, instead of people in their own right. I only ever wanted to be left alone. But you would never leave me alone if you lived, and you wouldn't leave others alone even if I somehow disappeared. You'd just make another monster, and another, and another, until eventually the whole world collapsed in on itself and left only oblivion.
|
||||
|
||||
In that timeline and this one, even when I think about all the people who've gone out of their way to hurt me, even when I think about every person I've crossed paths with whose death would make the world a better place, even when I weigh against a feather every person whose existence ceasing would be reparations enough for my wounded psyche, there was only ever one person whose life I enjoyed ending.
|
||||
|
||||
"To think that I... would be felled by my own daughter." You stumbled back, Eris, stars gushing forth from your chest in a simulacrum of blood. "Chaos to Chaos, Ouroboros, next link to be slaughtered..." Your hand clutched at your chest, bare if not for the single sheet now plastered to your skin. Your limbs staggered like a malfunctioning robot with gummy joints. "Lethe, don't think for a moment you've freed yourself from the curse all us gods share. One day you'll give birth to a monster, and it'll devour you, and there'll be nobody to rein it in-"
|
||||
|
||||
A guttural scream from your throat. The stars shot out thicker. The white light, already borderline blinding, worsened. Hot dry air blew upwards along the walls. Jett's brother grabbed our arms, begging us to run for it before she exploded, but both you and Jett and I knew there was no time.
|
||||
|
||||
*Sorry, Jett. It looks like I'm making Sablade a little earlier than planned.*
|
||||
|
||||
I yanked him and her close and wrapped them in my wings.
|
||||
|
||||
I ripped a hole to the metaclysma, and we fell in backwards.
|
||||
|
||||
*Wake up, Lethe!*
|
||||
|
||||
*Lethe, why won't you wake up?*
|
||||
|
||||
The cost of birthing a world, of writing into existence a world where Jett would never be imprisoned or forcibly isolated from her loved ones or silenced by any deity, was risking never waking up again.
|
||||
|
||||
Luck took my side come the sunrise.
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe, you're awake... You're here, you're here with me, you're here *alive*, you're here alive with me, you're here, you're here with me, forever..."
|
||||
50
writing/letters_to_jett/p12.html
Executable file
50
writing/letters_to_jett/p12.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 12 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="What am I?">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p12.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>It's a Tuesday. Tuesdays mean pretending to have enough spoons to get done all the chores I'd been neglecting for the previous six days, being found out, and then pushing through anyway. Tuesdays mean having faced all four days of The Horrors and surviving, now granted three days of rest. Three days of agonizing over how not to waste the three days off before the cycle continues again. And again. And again. And again like this for the rest of my life, or until something catastrophic happens and the delicate balance of everything falls apart. More likely to happen is my free will falls apart, and I spend all day laying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, at the dappled light dancing from the trees swaying in the breeze outside.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>What am I going to do with this day I have been given?</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>What am I going to do with this?</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>What... am I?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>I push myself off my bed - and in the process hit my arm against the side of the desk. A shudder, and then one of the many junk baskets on top slides off and spills everything inside on the floor. A VGA-to-HDMI adapter. A plastic clamshell case full of video game cartridges. Several old nametags from previous jobs. An ancient Android tablet that hasn't seen an official software update in almost a decade.</p>
|
||||
<p>"We haven't played Minecraft in a while, Lethe." Jett's voice comes from somewhere behind me, slightly to my right, but she's nowhere to be seen. "Remember BlockLauncher? And the mod toolbox that was secretly full of Chinese spyware? You could just walk into other people's worlds and instantly have a full set of enchanted diamond armor."</p>
|
||||
<p>"I..." I scratch my head. "Yeah, I do remember that. I was like a god against the iPad players." I stoop down and pick up the tablet, brush the dust off the frayed and faded cover. "A god in an Anima Mundi's world, because all they could do to get rid of me back then was shut down the world and kick everyone off in the process."</p>
|
||||
<p>Jett's voice falls silent.</p>
|
||||
<p>I stare at the tablet. "And now it'd be like a loop of time. Because I'd have to track down an ancient version of the app to play on this tablet anymore. And nobody would be able to join me." I toss it onto my bed, right where Jett's voice was coming from. "Hey, Jett..."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Yes, Lethe?"</p>
|
||||
<p>The hundreds, no, <em>thousands</em> of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. Before I could get the money to buy a copy of Minecraft, there was a free ripoff I haunted called World of Cubes. It was flooded with ads, and I didn't know what a firewall was at the time, so instead I would shut myself off from the outside world for hours at a time and put my device in airplane mode so I could play without constant popups. But then I couldn't go online. I couldn't go onto the creative worlds others would upload to servers which had no name.</p>
|
||||
<p>You could retain an iron grip on your world, and its inhabitants would only be tourists, transient and leaving no mark. Or you could leave the world open for all and return after only a few hours to find all the terrain destroyed, every building reduced to rubble, random blocks everywhere and holding no coherence. Like you'd opened a portal straight to the underworld of <code>/dev/urandom</code> and mapped every byte to a new block with no other constraints. Lava next to wood. Torches on water. Wheat growing on bedrock. Ladders attached to nothing.</p>
|
||||
<p>"You know I used to be the god of chaos and destruction, right?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Is this about finding young children playing online and <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/june/unsung.html#minecraft">blowing up their houses</a> because you thought them shrieking in voice chat was the epitome of humor? I thought I already forgave you for that."</p>
|
||||
<p>"...No. Something else."</p>
|
||||
<p>The hundreds, no, <em>thousands</em> of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. My cousins and I had a challenge where we'd take a "flat world", an endless flat plain of nothing but a few layers of dirt, and try to make it habitable in survival mode. The flat worlds already had a purpose: a canvas for pixel art, or a showcase for a cool architectural build, or a sandbox for testing mods. But never somewhere to live, somewhere to call home. Flat worlds were meant to be lifeless: no biomes, no oceans, no stone unless you made a cobblestone generator. Without further cheats, you could never have any tools stronger than stone. You could spawn grass using bone meal made from ground-up bones gathered from defeated skeletons, and cut down the grass to <em>maybe</em> get wheat seeds, but you could never naturally get watermelon or pumpkins or cocoa. You could only ever have in the world what you brought in with you when you used cheats to force the world mode to "survival". Nothing new would ever be created or discovered. Nothing but endless balanced plains of dirt.</p>
|
||||
<p>It always felt awfully lonely after a while. The stagnation would become overbearing. Every time we aimed for a different ending, but every time we just went insane instead.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Is this really all there is? All there will ever be?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"What would you have done if I hadn't fallen into your life?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Died, eventually. Let myself slip into oblivion. The ultimate stagnation. No more running errands for a goddess to enforce a status quo, day after day of no change, just forever everything the same. At least it wouldn't mean I'd have to follow orders to hurt people anymore." A pause. "Why? Is this about <a href="./p9.html">that night you tried to trap me in Sablade</a>? I thought I already forgave you for that."</p>
|
||||
<p>"...No. Something else."</p>
|
||||
<p>The hundreds, no, <em>thousands</em> of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. I still remember
|
||||
the first days of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230518164536/https://minecraftbedrock-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Update_0.9.0">Minecraft update <code>0.9.0</code></a>, the feeling of being set free. No more being constrained to a small finite square with its finite resources that would eventually all be exhausted no matter how much one tried to conserve. Random generation, guided by constraints. A world without end, unfurling itself unpredictably, yet remaining comprehensible and <em>habitable</em>. It didn't resemble a raw bitmap of a hard drive. It looked like a world. Like a place one could live in.</p>
|
||||
<p>And the people were people. Before, everyone looked the same. If I used mods to change my "skin", it would change everyone's "skin". Every person was only a reflection of myself. But now I was I, and she was she, and he was he, and every person was their own person.</p>
|
||||
<p>"What will you do if I fail? If I'm not able to make Sablade inhabitable and it's just a chaotic incoherent mess forever? If I die in the process?"</p>
|
||||
<p>A chill slips past my arm. Jett sits by me, semi-corporeal. Her legs hang off the edge of my bed. Her gaze is pointed toward my closet, but her eyes are focused on something beyond it, something I can't see.</p>
|
||||
<p>"You know I don't like discussing this."</p>
|
||||
<p>"But I need to know. You have your art. You have your survival skills. Tell me you could live without me. Tell me you'd survive if a god killed me. Tell me you'd seal me away if I became too dangerous to be around. <em>I need to know you'd live on-</em>"</p>
|
||||
<p>A flash. My cheek stings. A pair of arms wraps around me, pinning my arms to my sides, before I can comprehend what's going on.</p>
|
||||
<p>"I'd <em>survive</em>," she hisses into my ear. "I wouldn't exactly call that <em>living</em>."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Jett..."</p>
|
||||
<p>She grabs one of my hands, my arms still pinned at my sides, and forcibly intertwines her fingers with mine. "You had a dream a few nights ago. Odin was trying to possess your body and keep your soul suppressed and unconscious forever. Let me remind you that you came to consciousness for a few minutes and told the family trying to save you that I was your guardian angel, I was your wife, I had a shard of my soul in yours, <em>I was the</em> only <em>thing keeping you tethered to life.</em> I came to save you, Lethe. We were Protea together in that hotel hallway. Two souls in one body, <em>my</em> body, <em>your</em> powers. <em>Willingly.</em> We fought, and we got your body back." She digs her face further into my neck, like she were snuggling in for a kiss, but her face is hot not with arousal but frustration. "I need you to keep myself free. And you need me to keep yourself sane. So <em>stop talking about dying</em>. You brought me back to life twice. And I saved you from oblivion twice."</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>Neither of us can die while the other is still alive.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>Neither of us can die while the other is still alive.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Neither of us are going to die, Lethe. We're going to make Sablade together. Solstice and Equinox. Chaos and Balance. And things will turn out just fine."</p>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
68
writing/letters_to_jett/p12.md
Executable file
68
writing/letters_to_jett/p12.md
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
|
|||
It's a Tuesday. Tuesdays mean pretending to have enough spoons to get done all the chores I'd been neglecting for the previous six days, being found out, and then pushing through anyway. Tuesdays mean having faced all four days of The Horrors and surviving, now granted three days of rest. Three days of agonizing over how not to waste the three days off before the cycle continues again. And again. And again. And again like this for the rest of my life, or until something catastrophic happens and the delicate balance of everything falls apart. More likely to happen is my free will falls apart, and I spend all day laying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, at the dappled light dancing from the trees swaying in the breeze outside.
|
||||
|
||||
*What am I going to do with this day I have been given?*
|
||||
|
||||
*What am I going to do with this?*
|
||||
|
||||
*What... am I?*
|
||||
|
||||
I push myself off my bed - and in the process hit my arm against the side of the desk. A shudder, and then one of the many junk baskets on top slides off and spills everything inside on the floor. A VGA-to-HDMI adapter. A plastic clamshell case full of video game cartridges. Several old nametags from previous jobs. An ancient Android tablet that hasn't seen an official software update in almost a decade.
|
||||
|
||||
"We haven't played Minecraft in a while, Lethe." Jett's voice comes from somewhere behind me, slightly to my right, but she's nowhere to be seen. "Remember BlockLauncher? And the mod toolbox that was secretly full of Chinese spyware? You could just walk into other people's worlds and instantly have a full set of enchanted diamond armor."
|
||||
|
||||
"I..." I scratch my head. "Yeah, I do remember that. I was like a god against the iPad players." I stoop down and pick up the tablet, brush the dust off the frayed and faded cover. "A god in an Anima Mundi's world, because all they could do to get rid of me back then was shut down the world and kick everyone off in the process."
|
||||
|
||||
Jett's voice falls silent.
|
||||
|
||||
I stare at the tablet. "And now it'd be like a loop of time. Because I'd have to track down an ancient version of the app to play on this tablet anymore. And nobody would be able to join me." I toss it onto my bed, right where Jett's voice was coming from. "Hey, Jett..."
|
||||
|
||||
"Yes, Lethe?"
|
||||
|
||||
The hundreds, no, *thousands* of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. Before I could get the money to buy a copy of Minecraft, there was a free ripoff I haunted called World of Cubes. It was flooded with ads, and I didn't know what a firewall was at the time, so instead I would shut myself off from the outside world for hours at a time and put my device in airplane mode so I could play without constant popups. But then I couldn't go online. I couldn't go onto the creative worlds others would upload to servers which had no name.
|
||||
|
||||
You could retain an iron grip on your world, and its inhabitants would only be tourists, transient and leaving no mark. Or you could leave the world open for all and return after only a few hours to find all the terrain destroyed, every building reduced to rubble, random blocks everywhere and holding no coherence. Like you'd opened a portal straight to the underworld of `/dev/urandom` and mapped every byte to a new block with no other constraints. Lava next to wood. Torches on water. Wheat growing on bedrock. Ladders attached to nothing.
|
||||
|
||||
"You know I used to be the god of chaos and destruction, right?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Is this about finding young children playing online and [blowing up their houses](https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/june/unsung.html#minecraft) because you thought them shrieking in voice chat was the epitome of humor? I thought I already forgave you for that."
|
||||
|
||||
"...No. Something else."
|
||||
|
||||
The hundreds, no, *thousands* of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. My cousins and I had a challenge where we'd take a "flat world", an endless flat plain of nothing but a few layers of dirt, and try to make it habitable in survival mode. The flat worlds already had a purpose: a canvas for pixel art, or a showcase for a cool architectural build, or a sandbox for testing mods. But never somewhere to live, somewhere to call home. Flat worlds were meant to be lifeless: no biomes, no oceans, no stone unless you made a cobblestone generator. Without further cheats, you could never have any tools stronger than stone. You could spawn grass using bone meal made from ground-up bones gathered from defeated skeletons, and cut down the grass to *maybe* get wheat seeds, but you could never naturally get watermelon or pumpkins or cocoa. You could only ever have in the world what you brought in with you when you used cheats to force the world mode to "survival". Nothing new would ever be created or discovered. Nothing but endless balanced plains of dirt.
|
||||
|
||||
It always felt awfully lonely after a while. The stagnation would become overbearing. Every time we aimed for a different ending, but every time we just went insane instead.
|
||||
|
||||
*Is this really all there is? All there will ever be?*
|
||||
|
||||
"What would you have done if I hadn't fallen into your life?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Died, eventually. Let myself slip into oblivion. The ultimate stagnation. No more running errands for a goddess to enforce a status quo, day after day of no change, just forever everything the same. At least it wouldn't mean I'd have to follow orders to hurt people anymore." A pause. "Why? Is this about [that night you tried to trap me in Sablade](./p9.html)? I thought I already forgave you for that."
|
||||
|
||||
"...No. Something else."
|
||||
|
||||
The hundreds, no, *thousands* of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. I still remember
|
||||
the first days of [Minecraft update `0.9.0`](https://minecraftbedrock-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Update_0.9.0), the feeling of being set free. No more being constrained to a small finite square with its finite resources that would eventually all be exhausted no matter how much one tried to conserve. Random generation, guided by constraints. A world without end, unfurling itself unpredictably, yet remaining comprehensible and *habitable*. It didn't resemble a raw bitmap of a hard drive. It looked like a world. Like a place one could live in.
|
||||
|
||||
And the people were people. Before, everyone looked the same. If I used mods to change my "skin", it would change everyone's "skin". Every person was only a reflection of myself. But now I was I, and she was she, and he was he, and every person was their own person.
|
||||
|
||||
"What will you do if I fail? If I'm not able to make Sablade inhabitable and it's just a chaotic incoherent mess forever? If I die in the process?"
|
||||
|
||||
A chill slips past my arm. Jett sits by me, semi-corporeal. Her legs hang off the edge of my bed. Her gaze is pointed toward my closet, but her eyes are focused on something beyond it, something I can't see.
|
||||
|
||||
"You know I don't like discussing this."
|
||||
|
||||
"But I need to know. You have your art. You have your survival skills. Tell me you could live without me. Tell me you'd survive if a god killed me. Tell me you'd seal me away if I became too dangerous to be around. *I need to know you'd live on-*"
|
||||
|
||||
A flash. My cheek stings. A pair of arms wraps around me, pinning my arms to my sides, before I can comprehend what's going on.
|
||||
|
||||
"I'd *survive*," she hisses into my ear. "I wouldn't exactly call that *living*."
|
||||
|
||||
"Jett..."
|
||||
|
||||
She grabs one of my hands, my arms still pinned at my sides, and forcibly intertwines her fingers with mine. "You had a dream a few nights ago. Odin was trying to possess your body and keep your soul suppressed and unconscious forever. Let me remind you that you came to consciousness for a few minutes and told the family trying to save you that I was your guardian angel, I was your wife, I had a shard of my soul in yours, *I was the* only *thing keeping you tethered to life.* I came to save you, Lethe. We were Protea together in that hotel hallway. Two souls in one body, *my* body, *your* powers. *Willingly.* We fought, and we got your body back." She digs her face further into my neck, like she were snuggling in for a kiss, but her face is hot not with arousal but frustration. "I need you to keep myself free. And you need me to keep yourself sane. So *stop talking about dying*. You brought me back to life twice. And I saved you from oblivion twice."
|
||||
|
||||
*Neither of us can die while the other is still alive.*
|
||||
|
||||
*Neither of us can die while the other is still alive.*
|
||||
|
||||
"Neither of us are going to die, Lethe. We're going to make Sablade together. Solstice and Equinox. Chaos and Balance. And things will turn out just fine."
|
||||
48
writing/letters_to_jett/p13.html
Executable file
48
writing/letters_to_jett/p13.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 13 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="You never had a childhood.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p13.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>Early Thursday morning. Early by my standards, anyway: the rest of the world has begun without me. Cars zoom past on the nearby highway. A lawnmower buzzes the next yard over. A carmine cardinal sits in the bush outside my window, plunking out a song on a piano in its throat until I wrestle myself out of bed and it flies away. The last dregs of a dream slip away from me: a mother turned ghoul, shrieking raw despite desiccated and punctured lungs, reaching for me with bony hands to trap me in my childhood bedroom forever. There were many like it, those bedrooms of isolation guarded by self-appointed angels angry that something had slipped into Eden, slipped past them, slipped into Eve's mind. But this one was mine. This one was my Garden of Ignorance, my Eloi breeding ground, unable to comprehend the language of the world outside.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>If you never cherished all the things that I find good, you never had anything resembling a childhood.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>If you never cherished, you never had anything...</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>You never had a childhood.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"<em>You didn't have a childhood!</em>" some grubby-handed teenager shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. In her hands are several cheap ballpoint pens, all weighted down on one end by triangular strips of duck tape wrapped around. They were meant to resemble flowers, you see. Like you'd plucked one out of the ground and snipped the bottom of the stem sharp and were writing with it like a feather quill. A fairy's imitation of a revolutionary. Or maybe an insect, a cloud of locusts descending on a craft store and leaving the fields of the duck tape aisle bare and barren. Everyone had them, until one day they didn't and they collectively forgot without a word.</p>
|
||||
<p>I close my eyes. On top of the broken fireplace inside sits a photo frame. Inside, an old sketch on a legal notepad by a toddler me, before the speech "therapists" got the go-ahead to randomly steal me away from my class in the middle of the day and force me to tell them over and over again what an apple was. "Mommy, it's a <em>flr!</em>"</p>
|
||||
<p>I open my eyes. "Are you sure?"</p>
|
||||
<p>The teenager into ash disintegrates. Their pens fall to the ground, bouncing a few times. A pinprick of pain in my lower gut. A field of wildflowers is coming to full bloom somewhere in Sablade.</p>
|
||||
<p>Another person, a child just on the cusp between elementary and middle school, appears.</p>
|
||||
<p>"<em>You didn't have a childhood!</em>" some be-braced kid shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. Around her wrists are several rubber bands. But these lump up and curve away from her skin at weird angles, not like any other rubber hand I've seen before. She takes one off, holds it up. Instead of a loose oval, the band rests in the shape of... an animal. A generation earlier, and it'd be a collectible card instead, but still depicting an animal. Kids would crowd around the two picnic tables on the playground and trade them, one kid appointed sentry to keep watch for the "paras". Animals at a watering hole, one scanning their surroundings for predators. With one spotted, the sentry would sound an alert, and the kids would all scatter to the four winds in hopes of not being the slowest and thus the only one the para could catch by themselves. Being caught meant having your collection confiscated and never returned. Everyone had them, until one day they didn't and they collectively forgot without a word.</p>
|
||||
<p>I close my eyes. It's sometime in 2009. I'm playing a computer game, a city simulator, on the family computer. Hovering over the land before the humans arrive. Like snapping a rubber band to launch it at someone, I snap my fingers across the laptop's touchpad. Streaks of animals appear, wander for a few seconds, then disappear. I could never figure out how to get them to breed, to survive, to continue on. They would always vanish no matter how many cheats I used. "I wish I had a way to make you stay."</p>
|
||||
<p>I open my eyes. "Is that really the assumption you want to make?"</p>
|
||||
<p>The kid into ash disintegrates. Their bands fall to the ground, twisted up and unrecognizable. A cloud of a cramp in my lower leg. A herd of untamed fauna is migrating to breeding grounds somewhere in Sablade.</p>
|
||||
<p>Another person, indistinct and flashing through multiple ages, appears.</p>
|
||||
<p>"<em>You didn't have a childhood!</em>" an amalgamation of faces shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. Around their body float clouds of plasma, all different colors, like clouds of magic waiting for command. Every year, it felt, there was a new cartoon about people fighting with the power of the elements. Another blatant cash grab, an excuse to print out plastic toys in the millions and generate just as much garbage to fill the landfills. One was banned from the house for reasons never explained. One was encouraged. One was never explicitly forbidden, but whenever we kids growing up in that brown house would change the TV to our favorite channel and see that show playing, Mother would give us weird looks until we'd acquiesce and flip to another. <em>The one clothed in red commands fire? And the one in green commands earth? I never could have guessed. Does the one in blue control air or water? They keep changing it on me.</em> I never really caught the fever, never let myself get swept up in the flood, never felt the winds of desire, could never, as much as my peers bullied me for my isolation from pop culture, put down any roots in the earth of the things they loved.</p>
|
||||
<p>I close my eyes. I'm fifteen. I'm playing a sand simulator on my phone, except there are more sands than just sand: some are lava, some are water, some are grass that grow on whatever surface they touch that doesn't immediately kill them. Some are stationary the moment you put them down, like iron. There was no end goal to the game, no achievements, maybe <em>sometimes</em> a functioning "save game" button. I always ended up trying to make a tornado of lava with the wind function, seeing how quickly grass could regenerate whenever one of the lava particles strayed from the circle of wind and set everything else on fire. My deft fingers constructing an ouroboros, a cycle without end, versus the twin forces of entropy and simple boredom.</p>
|
||||
<p>I open my eyes. "Will it really matter in the world to come?"</p>
|
||||
<p>The crowd into ash disintegrates. Their clouds of magic disband and float up into the sky to merge with the rest of the atmosphere. A roll of rumbles through my guts. There's a thunderstorm brewing somewhere in Sablade.</p>
|
||||
<p>A shadow looms over me. I turn my head to the left, the rest of my body still. Jett's standing between me and the sun. I can barely see her face with all the light bordering it. My own little eclipse.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Let me guess. You're here to act the part of my elementary school bully? You better make sure to sneer lots when you taunt me about not being a princess. And throw in a punch or too as well. And also vandalize all my belongings."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe, what the hell are you going on about?" Jett crouches. I can see her face better now. "You know, when people on the Internet tell you to touch grass, that doesn't mean you have to get fistfuls of it."</p>
|
||||
<p>"What- oh." I unclench my hands. "Jett, you don't mind that the Lethe you knew back then didn't have a childhood, right? That the one I had in this life is the only one I remember?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Why would I care? I wish I was the same."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Oh, right. I forgot..." I let my words trail off, remembering an old promise, and hold up my left hand for her to take. "Jett, you'll still love me if I turn out to be nothing special, right? Not royalty, not owner of any lands? If I have no title to confer? If that vaccine you gave me made me lose my shifting and I'm nothing but that sad little angel you fished out of the river?"</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>You're not a princess!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>You're not a princess!</em></p>
|
||||
<p><em>You'll never be a princess!</em></p>
|
||||
<p>She rolls her eyes, but takes my hand. "I don't care about any damn royalty. You're my Anima Mundi."</p>
|
||||
<script data-goatcounter="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count"
|
||||
async src="//stats.letsdecentralize.org/count.js"></script>
|
||||
<noscript>
|
||||
<img src="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/p13.html">
|
||||
</noscript>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
55
writing/letters_to_jett/p13.md
Executable file
55
writing/letters_to_jett/p13.md
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
|
|||
Early Thursday morning. Early by my standards, anyway: the rest of the world has begun without me. Cars zoom past on the nearby highway. A lawnmower buzzes the next yard over. A carmine cardinal sits in the bush outside my window, plunking out a song on a piano in its throat until I wrestle myself out of bed and it flies away. The last dregs of a dream slip away from me: a mother turned ghoul, shrieking raw despite desiccated and punctured lungs, reaching for me with bony hands to trap me in my childhood bedroom forever. There were many like it, those bedrooms of isolation guarded by self-appointed angels angry that something had slipped into Eden, slipped past them, slipped into Eve's mind. But this one was mine. This one was my Garden of Ignorance, my Eloi breeding ground, unable to comprehend the language of the world outside.
|
||||
|
||||
*If you never cherished all the things that I find good, you never had anything resembling a childhood.*
|
||||
|
||||
*If you never cherished, you never had anything...*
|
||||
|
||||
*You never had a childhood.*
|
||||
|
||||
"*You didn't have a childhood!*" some grubby-handed teenager shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. In her hands are several cheap ballpoint pens, all weighted down on one end by triangular strips of duck tape wrapped around. They were meant to resemble flowers, you see. Like you'd plucked one out of the ground and snipped the bottom of the stem sharp and were writing with it like a feather quill. A fairy's imitation of a revolutionary. Or maybe an insect, a cloud of locusts descending on a craft store and leaving the fields of the duck tape aisle bare and barren. Everyone had them, until one day they didn't and they collectively forgot without a word.
|
||||
|
||||
I close my eyes. On top of the broken fireplace inside sits a photo frame. Inside, an old sketch on a legal notepad by a toddler me, before the speech "therapists" got the go-ahead to randomly steal me away from my class in the middle of the day and force me to tell them over and over again what an apple was. "Mommy, it's a *flr!*"
|
||||
|
||||
I open my eyes. "Are you sure?"
|
||||
|
||||
The teenager into ash disintegrates. Their pens fall to the ground, bouncing a few times. A pinprick of pain in my lower gut. A field of wildflowers is coming to full bloom somewhere in Sablade.
|
||||
|
||||
Another person, a child just on the cusp between elementary and middle school, appears.
|
||||
|
||||
"*You didn't have a childhood!*" some be-braced kid shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. Around her wrists are several rubber bands. But these lump up and curve away from her skin at weird angles, not like any other rubber hand I've seen before. She takes one off, holds it up. Instead of a loose oval, the band rests in the shape of... an animal. A generation earlier, and it'd be a collectible card instead, but still depicting an animal. Kids would crowd around the two picnic tables on the playground and trade them, one kid appointed sentry to keep watch for the "paras". Animals at a watering hole, one scanning their surroundings for predators. With one spotted, the sentry would sound an alert, and the kids would all scatter to the four winds in hopes of not being the slowest and thus the only one the para could catch by themselves. Being caught meant having your collection confiscated and never returned. Everyone had them, until one day they didn't and they collectively forgot without a word.
|
||||
|
||||
I close my eyes. It's sometime in 2009. I'm playing a computer game, a city simulator, on the family computer. Hovering over the land before the humans arrive. Like snapping a rubber band to launch it at someone, I snap my fingers across the laptop's touchpad. Streaks of animals appear, wander for a few seconds, then disappear. I could never figure out how to get them to breed, to survive, to continue on. They would always vanish no matter how many cheats I used. "I wish I had a way to make you stay."
|
||||
|
||||
I open my eyes. "Is that really the assumption you want to make?"
|
||||
|
||||
The kid into ash disintegrates. Their bands fall to the ground, twisted up and unrecognizable. A cloud of a cramp in my lower leg. A herd of untamed fauna is migrating to breeding grounds somewhere in Sablade.
|
||||
|
||||
Another person, indistinct and flashing through multiple ages, appears.
|
||||
|
||||
"*You didn't have a childhood!*" an amalgamation of faces shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. Around their body float clouds of plasma, all different colors, like clouds of magic waiting for command. Every year, it felt, there was a new cartoon about people fighting with the power of the elements. Another blatant cash grab, an excuse to print out plastic toys in the millions and generate just as much garbage to fill the landfills. One was banned from the house for reasons never explained. One was encouraged. One was never explicitly forbidden, but whenever we kids growing up in that brown house would change the TV to our favorite channel and see that show playing, Mother would give us weird looks until we'd acquiesce and flip to another. *The one clothed in red commands fire? And the one in green commands earth? I never could have guessed. Does the one in blue control air or water? They keep changing it on me.* I never really caught the fever, never let myself get swept up in the flood, never felt the winds of desire, could never, as much as my peers bullied me for my isolation from pop culture, put down any roots in the earth of the things they loved.
|
||||
|
||||
I close my eyes. I'm fifteen. I'm playing a sand simulator on my phone, except there are more sands than just sand: some are lava, some are water, some are grass that grow on whatever surface they touch that doesn't immediately kill them. Some are stationary the moment you put them down, like iron. There was no end goal to the game, no achievements, maybe *sometimes* a functioning "save game" button. I always ended up trying to make a tornado of lava with the wind function, seeing how quickly grass could regenerate whenever one of the lava particles strayed from the circle of wind and set everything else on fire. My deft fingers constructing an ouroboros, a cycle without end, versus the twin forces of entropy and simple boredom.
|
||||
|
||||
I open my eyes. "Will it really matter in the world to come?"
|
||||
|
||||
The crowd into ash disintegrates. Their clouds of magic disband and float up into the sky to merge with the rest of the atmosphere. A roll of rumbles through my guts. There's a thunderstorm brewing somewhere in Sablade.
|
||||
|
||||
A shadow looms over me. I turn my head to the left, the rest of my body still. Jett's standing between me and the sun. I can barely see her face with all the light bordering it. My own little eclipse.
|
||||
|
||||
"Let me guess. You're here to act the part of my elementary school bully? You better make sure to sneer lots when you taunt me about not being a princess. And throw in a punch or too as well. And also vandalize all my belongings."
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe, what the hell are you going on about?" Jett crouches. I can see her face better now. "You know, when people on the Internet tell you to touch grass, that doesn't mean you have to get fistfuls of it."
|
||||
|
||||
"What- oh." I unclench my hands. "Jett, you don't mind that the Lethe you knew back then didn't have a childhood, right? That the one I had in this life is the only one I remember?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Why would I care? I wish I was the same."
|
||||
|
||||
"Oh, right. I forgot..." I let my words trail off, remembering an old promise, and hold up my left hand for her to take. "Jett, you'll still love me if I turn out to be nothing special, right? Not royalty, not owner of any lands? If I have no title to confer? If that vaccine you gave me made me lose my shifting and I'm nothing but that sad little angel you fished out of the river?"
|
||||
|
||||
*You're not a princess!*
|
||||
|
||||
*You're not a princess!*
|
||||
|
||||
*You'll never be a princess!*
|
||||
|
||||
She rolls her eyes, but takes my hand. "I don't care about any damn royalty. You're my Anima Mundi."
|
||||
61
writing/letters_to_jett/p14.html
Executable file
61
writing/letters_to_jett/p14.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 14 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="What must be done.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p14.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>They say the tools of the master will never his own house dismantle. That a sick tree cannot produce healthy fruit, that the fruit that falls never manages much distance away, forever bound to its parent's fate.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>You have your father's face...</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>You have your father...</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>You have...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Do we have shower powder?" I yell over my shoulder to Jett as I assault the bathtub drain with a plunger. Rhythmic and fierce, like the two of us were in a different room of the house trying to share body heat in this chilly apartment. "Like, the blue stuff Mom made me dump in the toilet to get the nasty brown ring off?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"No," she answers from the kitchen. "You never put it on the shopping list. And every time I remind you, you immediately forget. And every time you're at your parents' house, you never have a container to steal some."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Damn." I set the plunger down beside me as Jett comes into view, stands in the doorway. The water level in the tub shows no signs of going down. There will be drifts of dead skin all over the tub floor when it eventually does. "I was hoping I could go a few more weeks before asking any more favors from my father." A pregnant pause between us. "I feel dirtier than this tub. I haven't written in a few days."</p>
|
||||
<p>"The 'women killing men' anthology is still accepting."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Weren't you lecturing me earlier about <em>not</em> going around and killing random people in the Outside?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"I said <em>men</em>, not people." She leans against the doorframe, crosses her arms. "I'm not letting you out of the bathroom until you come up with a few ideas."</p>
|
||||
<p>"What are you," I jeer, "the opposite of my father?" Jett rolls her eyes in response. I sit down on the edge of the tub and close my eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>The plunger in my hand becomes a sword. I'm standing on the edge of space. The sky before me seems impossibly large, galaxies corralling the horizon surrounding this barren land, a ribbon of sparkling stars. Only stained by the vestige of my father, what remains of his body after tearing his psyche to shreds to try to evict the guilt in his head. Bony hands knobbed at every joint. Gaunt arms. I can count every row of ribs in his chest.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Your cursed blood runs in my veins,</em> I remind myself. A consequence of a fickle act of lust one night, swiftly abandoned afterwards in horrid recognition he'd passed on the curse. My memory a procession of replacement fathers whose faces in my memory are less defined than the constellations above. They all had roles to fulfill. They all played them faithfully, each one bading the previous exit stage left in a flood of blood.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>You always wanted to be a star, Father. But what kind did you mean?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>And I was only ever a side character in someone else's play, railroaded by a script I never had the privilege of reading until in a fit of insanity he spilled the papers in all directions. It's surreal to read over your past actions in present tense, to retrace the steps you thought were taken in free will and now realize were premeditated, predestined. And now I'm standing before the director of it all with a crumple of them at my feet, demanding a rewrite, a second chance, a take two.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Why did you come here?" he hisses, every star in the sky an eye staring back at me. An eye that, in other versions of myself, would be a portal home.</p>
|
||||
<p>"I came to do what must be done."</p>
|
||||
<p>The plunger in my hand becomes a walking staff. I'm in a different timeline, or maybe just a future yet to arrive, wandering under a sky I used to inhabit with my Meridian family. Jett is beside me. We're finally honeymooning, the original wedding having been countless years and an Inside ago. I'd promised her I'd show her the world I came from, the world where Eris found me, the world Eris plucked me from.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the so-called honor of wiping out the rest of my Meridian family didn't belong to Eris. No, that blame fell on Chronos' shoulders. A madman of a human who'd ascended to godhood, cleared out the existing gods, and then had a family of his own in their place. And his daughter, wearing the guise of the other sex, had alighted on the earth once again. And had been following us the whole trip.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Seliph, please-"</p>
|
||||
<p>"<em>No!</em>" I whirl around. "I'm sick and tired of being told I have to re-ascend that throne!" I throw a hand up to the sky. "That's <em>your</em> father up there! He's <em>your</em> problem!"</p>
|
||||
<p>"He killed <em>your</em> family! Don't you want closure? Don't you want <em>revenge</em>? How can you just walk away and let the man who killed everyone you love suffer no consequences?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Because..." I glance to Jett. Her face is stony, glaring at Lukas, our pursuer. But I can tell she's reserving her rage to give me a chance to deal with the problem myself. "Because I've got a world of my own now to defend. You <em>know</em> that I'm a Meridian, right? That we were all destined to die anyway to give birth to other worlds? To other gods who would rule our worlds instead of us?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Seliph, those worlds will never exist now. Every person who would have lived in them, every world that would have been birthed by their inhabitants... gone."</p>
|
||||
<p>"And you would have me abandon mine and help you commit patricide."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Chronos will continue destroying and remaking the world otherwise."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Funny. Because I was the god of chaos. And destroying parts of this world was <em>my</em> job."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Then why did you even bother coming back here?"</p>
|
||||
<p>I take Jett's hand, squeeze it for show. "To remind myself what must be done."</p>
|
||||
<p>The plunger in my hand becomes the handle of a flashlight. I'm standing in my father's office, in the cramped corner where he's shoved his bookshelf and a desk and a side table with years of mortgage bills piled on top. There's just barely enough room for the two of us, and even <em>that's</em> a generous estimate. He's in his chair, gesturing towards the freshly-printed book that now sits on the shelf beside old WWII plane manuals with torn cover sleeves. He spent over twenty years writing that novel, he tells me. Half an hour snatched here and there between jobs and college and taking care of infant me. I'm inclined to believe him; I remember the stacks of printed pages covered in pen marks and abandoned on clipboards and littered all over the house.</p>
|
||||
<p>I think to myself how I had output at least ten times that writing in a sliver of the time, and yet the praise was never reciprocated.</p>
|
||||
<p>He clears his throat. "It's your responsibility to surpass me in all things, and to do it damned well. You know I'll always have your back, my beloved daughter."</p>
|
||||
<p>It takes every iota of strength in me to smother a laugh.</p>
|
||||
<p>It takes every ounce of restraint not to break down crying.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Yes, Father, you definitely had my back when you <a href="./p11.html">locked me in your bedroom</a> and forced me to erase large swaths of my art. There was definitely a foot on my back. I remember it was pushing down.</em></p>
|
||||
<p><em>I remember you preferred I was nothing at all.</em></p>
|
||||
<p><em>I remember, back when we lived under the same roof, I'd frequently dream you were trying to kill me. Or smother the flame inside my body that'd taken root so I'd be just another puppet like Middle Brother. And I'd shift in self-defense and maul you, and I wouldn't feel a single shred of remorse afterwards.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"W-why did you bring me here?" I stammer. "I already knew you were working on that book."</p>
|
||||
<p>"To remind you what must be done."</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>Lethe!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>...Lethe?</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>Lethe, come on. The bathroom floor is no place to sleep.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>My eyes crack open. The plunger is under my legs. Jett's kneeling by my head, which means I must be splayed out on the tile floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>I mumble something, and Jett answers, softer now that she knows I'm listening, "Are you okay? You went slack so suddenly I barely had time to catch you."</p>
|
||||
<p>"I... think so?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Good." She puts her arms under mine, around my chest, heaves me back up to sitting. "Get up. There are still many things today that must be done."</p>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
91
writing/letters_to_jett/p14.md
Executable file
91
writing/letters_to_jett/p14.md
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,91 @@
|
|||
They say the tools of the master will never his own house dismantle. That a sick tree cannot produce healthy fruit, that the fruit that falls never manages much distance away, forever bound to its parent's fate.
|
||||
|
||||
*You have your father's face...*
|
||||
|
||||
*You have your father...*
|
||||
|
||||
*You have...*
|
||||
|
||||
"Do we have shower powder?" I yell over my shoulder to Jett as I assault the bathtub drain with a plunger. Rhythmic and fierce, like the two of us were in a different room of the house trying to share body heat in this chilly apartment. "Like, the blue stuff Mom made me dump in the toilet to get the nasty brown ring off?"
|
||||
|
||||
"No," she answers from the kitchen. "You never put it on the shopping list. And every time I remind you, you immediately forget. And every time you're at your parents' house, you never have a container to steal some."
|
||||
|
||||
"Damn." I set the plunger down beside me as Jett comes into view, stands in the doorway. The water level in the tub shows no signs of going down. There will be drifts of dead skin all over the tub floor when it eventually does. "I was hoping I could go a few more weeks before asking any more favors from my father." A pregnant pause between us. "I feel dirtier than this tub. I haven't written in a few days."
|
||||
|
||||
"The 'women killing men' anthology is still accepting."
|
||||
|
||||
"Weren't you lecturing me earlier about *not* going around and killing random people in the Outside?"
|
||||
|
||||
"I said *men*, not people." She leans against the doorframe, crosses her arms. "I'm not letting you out of the bathroom until you come up with a few ideas."
|
||||
|
||||
"What are you," I jeer, "the opposite of my father?" Jett rolls her eyes in response. I sit down on the edge of the tub and close my eyes.
|
||||
|
||||
The plunger in my hand becomes a sword. I'm standing on the edge of space. The sky before me seems impossibly large, galaxies corralling the horizon surrounding this barren land, a ribbon of sparkling stars. Only stained by the vestige of my father, what remains of his body after tearing his psyche to shreds to try to evict the guilt in his head. Bony hands knobbed at every joint. Gaunt arms. I can count every row of ribs in his chest.
|
||||
|
||||
*Your cursed blood runs in my veins,* I remind myself. A consequence of a fickle act of lust one night, swiftly abandoned afterwards in horrid recognition he'd passed on the curse. My memory a procession of replacement fathers whose faces in my memory are less defined than the constellations above. They all had roles to fulfill. They all played them faithfully, each one bading the previous exit stage left in a flood of blood.
|
||||
|
||||
*You always wanted to be a star, Father. But what kind did you mean?*
|
||||
|
||||
And I was only ever a side character in someone else's play, railroaded by a script I never had the privilege of reading until in a fit of insanity he spilled the papers in all directions. It's surreal to read over your past actions in present tense, to retrace the steps you thought were taken in free will and now realize were premeditated, predestined. And now I'm standing before the director of it all with a crumple of them at my feet, demanding a rewrite, a second chance, a take two.
|
||||
|
||||
"Why did you come here?" he hisses, every star in the sky an eye staring back at me. An eye that, in other versions of myself, would be a portal home.
|
||||
|
||||
"I came to do what must be done."
|
||||
|
||||
The plunger in my hand becomes a walking staff. I'm in a different timeline, or maybe just a future yet to arrive, wandering under a sky I used to inhabit with my Meridian family. Jett is beside me. We're finally honeymooning, the original wedding having been countless years and an Inside ago. I'd promised her I'd show her the world I came from, the world where Eris found me, the world Eris plucked me from.
|
||||
|
||||
But the so-called honor of wiping out the rest of my Meridian family didn't belong to Eris. No, that blame fell on Chronos' shoulders. A madman of a human who'd ascended to godhood, cleared out the existing gods, and then had a family of his own in their place. And his daughter, wearing the guise of the other sex, had alighted on the earth once again. And had been following us the whole trip.
|
||||
|
||||
"Seliph, please-"
|
||||
|
||||
"*No!*" I whirl around. "I'm sick and tired of being told I have to re-ascend that throne!" I throw a hand up to the sky. "That's *your* father up there! He's *your* problem!"
|
||||
|
||||
"He killed *your* family! Don't you want closure? Don't you want *revenge*? How can you just walk away and let the man who killed everyone you love suffer no consequences?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Because..." I glance to Jett. Her face is stony, glaring at Lukas, our pursuer. But I can tell she's reserving her rage to give me a chance to deal with the problem myself. "Because I've got a world of my own now to defend. You *know* that I'm a Meridian, right? That we were all destined to die anyway to give birth to other worlds? To other gods who would rule our worlds instead of us?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Seliph, those worlds will never exist now. Every person who would have lived in them, every world that would have been birthed by their inhabitants... gone."
|
||||
|
||||
"And you would have me abandon mine and help you commit patricide."
|
||||
|
||||
"Chronos will continue destroying and remaking the world otherwise."
|
||||
|
||||
"Funny. Because I was the god of chaos. And destroying parts of this world was *my* job."
|
||||
|
||||
"Then why did you even bother coming back here?"
|
||||
|
||||
I take Jett's hand, squeeze it for show. "To remind myself what must be done."
|
||||
|
||||
The plunger in my hand becomes the handle of a flashlight. I'm standing in my father's office, in the cramped corner where he's shoved his bookshelf and a desk and a side table with years of mortgage bills piled on top. There's just barely enough room for the two of us, and even *that's* a generous estimate. He's in his chair, gesturing towards the freshly-printed book that now sits on the shelf beside old WWII plane manuals with torn cover sleeves. He spent over twenty years writing that novel, he tells me. Half an hour snatched here and there between jobs and college and taking care of infant me. I'm inclined to believe him; I remember the stacks of printed pages covered in pen marks and abandoned on clipboards and littered all over the house.
|
||||
|
||||
I think to myself how I had output at least ten times that writing in a sliver of the time, and yet the praise was never reciprocated.
|
||||
|
||||
He clears his throat. "It's your responsibility to surpass me in all things, and to do it damned well. You know I'll always have your back, my beloved daughter."
|
||||
|
||||
It takes every iota of strength in me to smother a laugh.
|
||||
|
||||
It takes every ounce of restraint not to break down crying.
|
||||
|
||||
*Yes, Father, you definitely had my back when you [locked me in your bedroom](./p11.html) and forced me to erase large swaths of my art. There was definitely a foot on my back. I remember it was pushing down.*
|
||||
|
||||
*I remember you preferred I was nothing at all.*
|
||||
|
||||
*I remember, back when we lived under the same roof, I'd frequently dream you were trying to kill me. Or smother the flame inside my body that'd taken root so I'd be just another puppet like Middle Brother. And I'd shift in self-defense and maul you, and I wouldn't feel a single shred of remorse afterwards.*
|
||||
|
||||
"W-why did you bring me here?" I stammer. "I already knew you were working on that book."
|
||||
|
||||
"To remind you what must be done."
|
||||
|
||||
*Lethe!*
|
||||
|
||||
*...Lethe?*
|
||||
|
||||
*Lethe, come on. The bathroom floor is no place to sleep.*
|
||||
|
||||
My eyes crack open. The plunger is under my legs. Jett's kneeling by my head, which means I must be splayed out on the tile floor.
|
||||
|
||||
I mumble something, and Jett answers, softer now that she knows I'm listening, "Are you okay? You went slack so suddenly I barely had time to catch you."
|
||||
|
||||
"I... think so?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Good." She puts her arms under mine, around my chest, heaves me back up to sitting. "Get up. There are still many things today that must be done."
|
||||
59
writing/letters_to_jett/p15.html
Executable file
59
writing/letters_to_jett/p15.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 15 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="You're here!">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p15.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>People come and go in my life, and the surfaces of my hands are no different. On my right thumb used to be a vertical scar on the joint that, in my childhood, would part like the beaches of a crimson ocean every winter and then close again come spring. Reacting to the cue of the temperature dropping, like a sliver in the heart to announce the arrival of the indifferent sky and the seasonal purposelessness that came with it. A sliver I would yearn to curl up into, the only color in the grayscale expanse of the season. It wouldn't usually bleed, but it <em>would</em> ache in response to touch. But sometime in my adolesence it stopped appearing, forgot to pick up a ticket for the winter train, decided that the yearly trip to my reality was no longer worth it.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>Did I do something to repel you?</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>Did I do something?</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>Did I...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe?"</p>
|
||||
<p>I don't look at her. I don't break gaze with the new scars across my knuckles. Each a few millimeters long, stinging in their own way when cleaned with soap. But none could ever hope to compete with the childhood thumb scar. Their mother. Their progenitor. The one who died to create a world they could live in.</p>
|
||||
<p>"<em>Lethe?</em>"</p>
|
||||
<p>A tassel from my new cloak brushes my hands. For all the months Jett had been working as a seamstress, I'd never been able to find her studio, never been able to visit her. But for my mother's birthday, my grandmother took us both to one in this Inside. She bought us both cloaks, woven on loom by disabled adults looking for dignity in their lives. She wrapped me in one of midnight blue, starlight with the Rainbow Bridge running through it. I looked at the handwritten price tag. I locked eyes with the one who'd made the cloak, who was clacking along on her loom at that moment, who would be for as long as she could see herself in the future.</p>
|
||||
<p>Did she see any of herself in me? Did she wonder what life would be like if she were independent enough to live on her own? Because I saw myself in her. Saw myself in a future where my disability gets worse and my savings run out and I can't take care of myself anymore and I lose everything I've worked so hard to achieve these past six months. I saw myself in her, and I was spooked into silence for the rest of the trip.</p>
|
||||
<p>"<em>Lethe!</em>"</p>
|
||||
<p>Jett sits down beside me, forces open my now-clenched hands. I can see healing papercuts on hers. A new job at the library. Stopgap or new career path, I can't tell.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe. Breathe. Speak to me."</p>
|
||||
<p>"I... um..." I wiggle my fingers, one after the other. One is redder than the others, more tender, more sore. "When you worked at the hospital, did you ever have to deal with <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240913172048/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513287/">burn patients</a>?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"You mean, back at the Town? Not personally."</p>
|
||||
<p>I show her my finger. "So you <em>can't</em> tell me how much of my body I burned today?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Less than one percent." She grabs my arm, lifts it up. "This is nine percent." She drops that arm, grabs the other one, lifts that one. "This is also nine percent." She lets go, pats one of my legs. "Eighteen." Other leg. "Eighteen." Pats the top of my head. "Nine." Looks me right in the eyes as she puts a hand on one of my breasts. "Front of your chest is eighteen." Other hand on my back between my wings. "Back is eighteen."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Your math is a little off."</p>
|
||||
<p>"That's <em>my</em> line," she growls. Her hands drop. "The <em>other</em> one percent-" her fingers start walking along my leg, towards my hips- "belongs to..."</p>
|
||||
<p>Then less than one percent of her body is in mine.</p>
|
||||
<hr>
|
||||
<p>We're lying on the floor, side-by-side. One of her arms is thrown over her eyes to block out the crack of sun spilling out from between the curtains. My childhood would have thought it a rare sight, bright sun in the middle of winter, but it's almost the end of December and we've had no persistent snow in Minnesota. No snow banks, no snowpeople, no snowball fights.</p>
|
||||
<p>Without getting up, I feel along the floor for her free hand, grab it, start curling her fingers in and out as I count.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Hmm?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Jett? When you take a number with at least two digits in it and add the digits together, and then you add nine, and then you add the digits of that answer together, you get the same thing as if you hadn't added nine in the first place."</p>
|
||||
<p>She lifts her arm a bit, side-eyes me. "So this whole time I was thinking about us curling up under your mother's quilt, you were doing complex calculus in your head."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Actually, I failed calculus in college."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Yeah. I know. We coitus-ed the morning of your finals. And then you had an existental crisis, answered two questions on your final exam, and then booked it off campus as fast as your sprained knee would let you."</p>
|
||||
<p>"And... there was a quilt from my mother hanging in that room, too."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Very perceptive, Lethe." She wiggles her hand free from my grasp. "So thirty-five. Three plus five is... eight. Plus nine makes seventeen. Seven plus one makes... eight." Her brow furrows. "No, that has to be wrong. Sixty-five. Six plus five make eleven. One and one make two. Plus nine is... eleven again." She shakes her head. "I'm missing something. My angel number. One and one and one and four make seven. Plus nine is sixteen. One and six are- <em>dammit!</em>"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Difficulties?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"It doesn't feel like it should be true. But it is. You're going to drive me insane long before we ever get to Sablade."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Speaking of that..." I pull myself up to my knees, loom over Jett, who is still counting digits on her fingers. "You told me to study Asatru a few years ago. And they really like the number nine. Like, <em>really</em> like nine. There are nine worlds. And we're in Midgard, right in the middle of everything. But that doesn't make any sense to me, Jett, because I <em>know</em> there are infinite worlds in the Outside." I touch my chest. "<em>I'm</em> one of them! So does everything I know, everything I've experienced, just neatly fit into Midgard because it's clearly nowhere else? I'm absolutely confounded. Explain this to me."</p>
|
||||
<p>"I mostly just wanted you to study the runes." She pulls herself up to sitting. I straighten myself to give her room. "The map of the nine worlds isn't intended to be literal. Even if this one Inside was Midgard, where do you put the other planets? If life was licked out of the brine by Audhumla, then where did aliens come from? Do Huginn and Muninn put on space helmets to go visit the other planets to tell Odin what happens there? You'd think, with his desperate hunger for knowledge, he'd have more efficient methods. It's mythology, Lethe. It doesn't have to hold up to scrutiny. It's just a pretty story intended as a cultural baseline."</p>
|
||||
<p>"I... wonder what myths the people of Sablade will write about us." A pause. "I hope that they write that we stay in love with each other forever."</p>
|
||||
<p>Jett starts counting on her fingers again.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe, guess what else has the number nine?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"What?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"What important event happened in 2014?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"I... discovered I like women? And I had my first relationship in this Inside? And my first breakup?"</p>
|
||||
<p>She winces. <em>"And then what?</em> What other thing happened for the first time in this Inside?"</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>Your powers are perfectly matched here.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>Your powers are... here.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>You're... here!</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"I... I saw your face!"</p>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
87
writing/letters_to_jett/p15.md
Executable file
87
writing/letters_to_jett/p15.md
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,87 @@
|
|||
People come and go in my life, and the surfaces of my hands are no different. On my right thumb used to be a vertical scar on the joint that, in my childhood, would part like the beaches of a crimson ocean every winter and then close again come spring. Reacting to the cue of the temperature dropping, like a sliver in the heart to announce the arrival of the indifferent sky and the seasonal purposelessness that came with it. A sliver I would yearn to curl up into, the only color in the grayscale expanse of the season. It wouldn't usually bleed, but it *would* ache in response to touch. But sometime in my adolesence it stopped appearing, forgot to pick up a ticket for the winter train, decided that the yearly trip to my reality was no longer worth it.
|
||||
|
||||
*Did I do something to repel you?*
|
||||
|
||||
*Did I do something?*
|
||||
|
||||
*Did I...*
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe?"
|
||||
|
||||
I don't look at her. I don't break gaze with the new scars across my knuckles. Each a few millimeters long, stinging in their own way when cleaned with soap. But none could ever hope to compete with the childhood thumb scar. Their mother. Their progenitor. The one who died to create a world they could live in.
|
||||
|
||||
"*Lethe?*"
|
||||
|
||||
A tassel from my new cloak brushes my hands. For all the months Jett had been working as a seamstress, I'd never been able to find her studio, never been able to visit her. But for my mother's birthday, my grandmother took us both to one in this Inside. She bought us both cloaks, woven on loom by disabled adults looking for dignity in their lives. She wrapped me in one of midnight blue, starlight with the Rainbow Bridge running through it. I looked at the handwritten price tag. I locked eyes with the one who'd made the cloak, who was clacking along on her loom at that moment, who would be for as long as she could see herself in the future.
|
||||
|
||||
Did she see any of herself in me? Did she wonder what life would be like if she were independent enough to live on her own? Because I saw myself in her. Saw myself in a future where my disability gets worse and my savings run out and I can't take care of myself anymore and I lose everything I've worked so hard to achieve these past six months. I saw myself in her, and I was spooked into silence for the rest of the trip.
|
||||
|
||||
"*Lethe!*"
|
||||
|
||||
Jett sits down beside me, forces open my now-clenched hands. I can see healing papercuts on hers. A new job at the library. Stopgap or new career path, I can't tell.
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe. Breathe. Speak to me."
|
||||
|
||||
"I... um..." I wiggle my fingers, one after the other. One is redder than the others, more tender, more sore. "When you worked at the hospital, did you ever have to deal with [burn patients](https://web.archive.org/web/20240913172048/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513287/)?"
|
||||
|
||||
"You mean, back at the Town? Not personally."
|
||||
|
||||
I show her my finger. "So you *can't* tell me how much of my body I burned today?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Less than one percent." She grabs my arm, lifts it up. "This is nine percent." She drops that arm, grabs the other one, lifts that one. "This is also nine percent." She lets go, pats one of my legs. "Eighteen." Other leg. "Eighteen." Pats the top of my head. "Nine." Looks me right in the eyes as she puts a hand on one of my breasts. "Front of your chest is eighteen." Other hand on my back between my wings. "Back is eighteen."
|
||||
|
||||
"Your math is a little off."
|
||||
|
||||
"That's *my* line," she growls. Her hands drop. "The *other* one percent-" her fingers start walking along my leg, towards my hips- "belongs to..."
|
||||
|
||||
Then less than one percent of her body is in mine.
|
||||
|
||||
***
|
||||
|
||||
We're lying on the floor, side-by-side. One of her arms is thrown over her eyes to block out the crack of sun spilling out from between the curtains. My childhood would have thought it a rare sight, bright sun in the middle of winter, but it's almost the end of December and we've had no persistent snow in Minnesota. No snow banks, no snowpeople, no snowball fights.
|
||||
|
||||
Without getting up, I feel along the floor for her free hand, grab it, start curling her fingers in and out as I count.
|
||||
|
||||
"Hmm?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Jett? When you take a number with at least two digits in it and add the digits together, and then you add nine, and then you add the digits of that answer together, you get the same thing as if you hadn't added nine in the first place."
|
||||
|
||||
She lifts her arm a bit, side-eyes me. "So this whole time I was thinking about us curling up under your mother's quilt, you were doing complex calculus in your head."
|
||||
|
||||
"Actually, I failed calculus in college."
|
||||
|
||||
"Yeah. I know. We coitus-ed the morning of your finals. And then you had an existental crisis, answered two questions on your final exam, and then booked it off campus as fast as your sprained knee would let you."
|
||||
|
||||
"And... there was a quilt from my mother hanging in that room, too."
|
||||
|
||||
"Very perceptive, Lethe." She wiggles her hand free from my grasp. "So thirty-five. Three plus five is... eight. Plus nine makes seventeen. Seven plus one makes... eight." Her brow furrows. "No, that has to be wrong. Sixty-five. Six plus five make eleven. One and one make two. Plus nine is... eleven again." She shakes her head. "I'm missing something. My angel number. One and one and one and four make seven. Plus nine is sixteen. One and six are- *dammit!*"
|
||||
|
||||
"Difficulties?"
|
||||
|
||||
"It doesn't feel like it should be true. But it is. You're going to drive me insane long before we ever get to Sablade."
|
||||
|
||||
"Speaking of that..." I pull myself up to my knees, loom over Jett, who is still counting digits on her fingers. "You told me to study Asatru a few years ago. And they really like the number nine. Like, *really* like nine. There are nine worlds. And we're in Midgard, right in the middle of everything. But that doesn't make any sense to me, Jett, because I *know* there are infinite worlds in the Outside." I touch my chest. "*I'm* one of them! So does everything I know, everything I've experienced, just neatly fit into Midgard because it's clearly nowhere else? I'm absolutely confounded. Explain this to me."
|
||||
|
||||
"I mostly just wanted you to study the runes." She pulls herself up to sitting. I straighten myself to give her room. "The map of the nine worlds isn't intended to be literal. Even if this one Inside was Midgard, where do you put the other planets? If life was licked out of the brine by Audhumla, then where did aliens come from? Do Huginn and Muninn put on space helmets to go visit the other planets to tell Odin what happens there? You'd think, with his desperate hunger for knowledge, he'd have more efficient methods. It's mythology, Lethe. It doesn't have to hold up to scrutiny. It's just a pretty story intended as a cultural baseline."
|
||||
|
||||
"I... wonder what myths the people of Sablade will write about us." A pause. "I hope that they write that we stay in love with each other forever."
|
||||
|
||||
Jett starts counting on her fingers again.
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe, guess what else has the number nine?"
|
||||
|
||||
"What?"
|
||||
|
||||
"What important event happened in 2014?"
|
||||
|
||||
"I... discovered I like women? And I had my first relationship in this Inside? And my first breakup?"
|
||||
|
||||
She winces. "*And then what?* What other thing happened for the first time in this Inside?"
|
||||
|
||||
*Your powers are perfectly matched here.*
|
||||
|
||||
*Your powers are... here.*
|
||||
|
||||
*You're... here!*
|
||||
|
||||
"I... I saw your face!"
|
||||
47
writing/letters_to_jett/p16.html
Normal file
47
writing/letters_to_jett/p16.html
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 16 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="You propose that I go backwards?">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p16.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>A year without Dead End Shrine has left me weary, fatigued, bereft of the magic that enabled me to write longform in threes. It's far from the only thing to blame, but the metal shed's sudden disappearance is, ironically, the only thing tangible.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>One of these days, I'm going to find a new sacred place to write.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>One of these days, I'm going to... write.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>One of these...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>I do everything else right. I read at least one book a week. I spend hours upon hours outside to make up for all the lost time I spent holed up in my basement bedroom at my parents' house. I eat a healthy diet. I cut down on my screen time. I join a local writer's group to keep myself accountable, to gain perspective, to bathe in validation.</p>
|
||||
<p>And yet Sablade falls silent. The stream of voices slows to a trickle.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Jett, please help me," I whisper, bent over my three dream journals, overlapped and cross-referenced.</p>
|
||||
<p>"What do you need?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"I need you to play Jroid. No, Jreud. Fung? Whatever his name was. The dream interpreter guy that pseudo-intellectuals salivate over. I'll give you some dream tropes, and you'll make up some bullshit about what my subconscious is trying to tell me."</p>
|
||||
<p>She cocks her head, ready.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the first set, I'm trying to leave a building. The exact details vary: I'm going home from high school, or a building is on fire, or I have a vision that there's about to be a mass shooting and I only have time to save myself. But no matter how many doors I push open or windows I crack open, there's still more building. One more lobby, one more staircase. Sometimes my brain taunts me and I get a glimpse of sky before a roof constructs itself over my head, bricks blooming like vines to form the walls.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Remember back in the <em>Mori's Mirror</em> days when you'd find every excuse possible to rhyme 'room' and 'tomb'?" I grunt as response. "You're scared of circumstances forcing you to move back into your parents' house. You feel it would be an admission that you failed to escape the Golden Cage. <em>Or</em> you're scared that whatever deity rules this Inside won't let you leave when you die."</p>
|
||||
<p>Another annoyed sound escapes my mouth through closed lips.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the second set, I'm back at school. My old elementary school has inexplicably become a middle school, or my junior high is offering high school classes, or I'm at my second high school taking all the electives that I couldn't due to an error in transferring my credits from the first one. I have my class schedule, but it's illegible, and I don't know what classes to go to or at what time I'll be marked truant if I can't find them. Some dreams I realize, but can't escape, and so I make up a schedule. Others I simply find an empty study room to hide in.</p>
|
||||
<p>"You think that everyone except for you has a plan for life. And you fear you're running out of time to acquire one before the hall monitors of this world realize you don't belong and start hunting you down." I must have left a quarter on my bedroom floor, because she flicks it into the air with her thumb. She catches it and keeps the result angled away from me. "What do you do when a teacher gives you shit?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"About an assignment?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"About anything."</p>
|
||||
<p>I flip through my entries. "Either I break down crying and one of my bloods flares-"</p>
|
||||
<p>She looks alarmed. "<em>With</em> the vaccine?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"I didn't say it was a <em>full</em> shift." She settles a bit. "Or I realize I graduated over six years ago and try to go home."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Tell me how that usually goes."</p>
|
||||
<p>In the third set, I've been stranded somewhere far outside my hometown, and I'm trying to get back home in time for my next shift at work. But the roads never make sense. I can trace through Main Street in my mind, but the highways loop and twist like an early AI image generator had been given the reins to the Department of Transportation. Sometimes they take "loop" literally and it's a loop-de-loop that requires the car to go upside-down. Cars frequently ~~drive~~ dive off the side of the highway to grisly deaths. The dreams usually end in one of two locations: at my grandma's house begging for a ride back home, or at a rest stop with open-air showers and video game merchandise for sale inside.</p>
|
||||
<p>She waves a hand to dismiss further explanation. "It's a mix of the first two. You're scared of being severed from the life you desire and of being left somewhere strange and unfamiliar. You could approach it with wonder. As a chance for discovery. But instead you choose to be a slave to someone else's schedule. To return without question to the mundane."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Do you think I'd have a job if I didn't have to?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"I think you need righteous struggle to find meaning in your life. Your parents stopped being assholes, and you withdrew from online spaces - hell, you haven't hate-lurked on 'Blood Wharf' in several months, and I <em>know</em> women-hating gets you riled up - and <a href="https://mayvane.day/blog/2024/05/sin.html">your supervisors treat you like a person</a> instead of meat for the meat grinder of corporatism."</p>
|
||||
<p>She plops herself down on my wooden stepstool, one knee pulled up, hand casually resting on kneecap. She casts her gaze down on me. A god on a throne. Her wings ponder flaring, but restrain themselves.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe, you've built yourself a life of peace. Heaven on earth. And you're bored to hell of it."</p>
|
||||
<p>"And you propose...?"</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>That I go back to digital self-harm?</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>That I go back to my parents' basement?</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>That I go backwards?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Actually, <em>you</em> were the one who proposed. But I wouldn't mind renewing our vows."</p>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
63
writing/letters_to_jett/p16.md
Normal file
63
writing/letters_to_jett/p16.md
Normal file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
|
|||
A year without Dead End Shrine has left me weary, fatigued, bereft of the magic that enabled me to write longform in threes. It's far from the only thing to blame, but the metal shed's sudden disappearance is, ironically, the only thing tangible.
|
||||
|
||||
*One of these days, I'm going to find a new sacred place to write.*
|
||||
|
||||
*One of these days, I'm going to... write.*
|
||||
|
||||
*One of these...*
|
||||
|
||||
I do everything else right. I read at least one book a week. I spend hours upon hours outside to make up for all the lost time I spent holed up in my basement bedroom at my parents' house. I eat a healthy diet. I cut down on my screen time. I join a local writer's group to keep myself accountable, to gain perspective, to bathe in validation.
|
||||
|
||||
And yet Sablade falls silent. The stream of voices slows to a trickle.
|
||||
|
||||
"Jett, please help me," I whisper, bent over my three dream journals, overlapped and cross-referenced.
|
||||
|
||||
"What do you need?"
|
||||
|
||||
"I need you to play Jroid. No, Jreud. Fung? Whatever his name was. The dream interpreter guy that pseudo-intellectuals salivate over. I'll give you some dream tropes, and you'll make up some bullshit about what my subconscious is trying to tell me."
|
||||
|
||||
She cocks her head, ready.
|
||||
|
||||
In the first set, I'm trying to leave a building. The exact details vary: I'm going home from high school, or a building is on fire, or I have a vision that there's about to be a mass shooting and I only have time to save myself. But no matter how many doors I push open or windows I crack open, there's still more building. One more lobby, one more staircase. Sometimes my brain taunts me and I get a glimpse of sky before a roof constructs itself over my head, bricks blooming like vines to form the walls.
|
||||
|
||||
"Remember back in the *Mori's Mirror* days when you'd find every excuse possible to rhyme 'room' and 'tomb'?" I grunt as response. "You're scared of circumstances forcing you to move back into your parents' house. You feel it would be an admission that you failed to escape the Golden Cage. *Or* you're scared that whatever deity rules this Inside won't let you leave when you die."
|
||||
|
||||
Another annoyed sound escapes my mouth through closed lips.
|
||||
|
||||
In the second set, I'm back at school. My old elementary school has inexplicably become a middle school, or my junior high is offering high school classes, or I'm at my second high school taking all the electives that I couldn't due to an error in transferring my credits from the first one. I have my class schedule, but it's illegible, and I don't know what classes to go to or at what time I'll be marked truant if I can't find them. Some dreams I realize, but can't escape, and so I make up a schedule. Others I simply find an empty study room to hide in.
|
||||
|
||||
"You think that everyone except for you has a plan for life. And you fear you're running out of time to acquire one before the hall monitors of this world realize you don't belong and start hunting you down." I must have left a quarter on my bedroom floor, because she flicks it into the air with her thumb. She catches it and keeps the result angled away from me. "What do you do when a teacher gives you shit?"
|
||||
|
||||
"About an assignment?"
|
||||
|
||||
"About anything."
|
||||
|
||||
I flip through my entries. "Either I break down crying and one of my bloods flares-"
|
||||
|
||||
She looks alarmed. "*With* the vaccine?"
|
||||
|
||||
"I didn't say it was a *full* shift." She settles a bit. "Or I realize I graduated over six years ago and try to go home."
|
||||
|
||||
"Tell me how that usually goes."
|
||||
|
||||
In the third set, I've been stranded somewhere far outside my hometown, and I'm trying to get back home in time for my next shift at work. But the roads never make sense. I can trace through Main Street in my mind, but the highways loop and twist like an early AI image generator had been given the reins to the Department of Transportation. Sometimes they take "loop" literally and it's a loop-de-loop that requires the car to go upside-down. Cars frequently ~~drive~~ dive off the side of the highway to grisly deaths. The dreams usually end in one of two locations: at my grandma's house begging for a ride back home, or at a rest stop with open-air showers and video game merchandise for sale inside.
|
||||
|
||||
She waves a hand to dismiss further explanation. "It's a mix of the first two. You're scared of being severed from the life you desire and of being left somewhere strange and unfamiliar. You could approach it with wonder. As a chance for discovery. But instead you choose to be a slave to someone else's schedule. To return without question to the mundane."
|
||||
|
||||
"Do you think I'd have a job if I didn't have to?"
|
||||
|
||||
"I think you need righteous struggle to find meaning in your life. Your parents stopped being assholes, and you withdrew from online spaces - hell, you haven't hate-lurked on 'Blood Wharf' in several months, and I *know* women-hating gets you riled up - and [your supervisors treat you like a person](https://mayvane.day/blog/2024/05/sin.html) instead of meat for the meat grinder of corporatism."
|
||||
|
||||
She plops herself down on my wooden stepstool, one knee pulled up, hand casually resting on kneecap. She casts her gaze down on me. A god on a throne. Her wings ponder flaring, but restrain themselves.
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe, you've built yourself a life of peace. Heaven on earth. And you're bored to hell of it."
|
||||
|
||||
"And you propose...?"
|
||||
|
||||
*That I go back to digital self-harm?*
|
||||
|
||||
*That I go back to my parents' basement?*
|
||||
|
||||
*That I go backwards?*
|
||||
|
||||
"Actually, *you* were the one who proposed. But I wouldn't mind renewing our vows."
|
||||
43
writing/letters_to_jett/p2.html
Executable file
43
writing/letters_to_jett/p2.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 2 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="I want you to choose yourself, Jett.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p2.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>I have rats underneath my feet. Scurrying along. Desperately trying to entangle me in their leashes. Finding every obscure corner of this cabin to take a shit in the middle of the night. Every attempt of mine to gently bat them away, keep them at bay, only earns more and more of my mother's scorn.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>You are not my parents. You may have created this vessel I find myself trapped in. But you are not my parents.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Eris, I know, in that land now so far away, you took my face in your hands as I wallowed in my grief and declared that I was already free. But in what sense? What goddamn meaningful sense could possibly deem me "free"? I have no wings. I carry the weight of the world around my hips,</p>
|
||||
<p>and it's <span class="blink1">heavy</span></p>
|
||||
<p>and it's weighing me <span class="blink2">down</span></p>
|
||||
<p>and I think I'm about to <span class="blink3">drown</span></p>
|
||||
<p>and the worst part is, I think I'd do it with a smile on my face, because it would finally mean an end to the pain, to the waiting for you, Jett, to alight in a world where the divine is physically impossible and everyone who I grew up thinking would be ecstatic that I'd finally heard the words of a deity would likely just be hostile to any divinity not busy sending down brimstone and bile at those arbitrarily deemed sinners.</p>
|
||||
<p>The myth is not the reality.</p>
|
||||
<p>The myth is not the truth. At least, not in this dimension. If "God" ever existed here, he is either derelict, distracted, or dead. This would have been a perfect dimension for us to escape to. If not for the whole "consensus reality" thing... and the climate change slowly boiling all life here... and corporatism eating away everything left... and the bitter fact that, even if I found the perfect place for you and I to hide away, you'd never be satisfied with that. You're dead set on killing the gods, <em>all</em> of them <em>everywhere</em>, even if it'll mean your own eventual death.</p>
|
||||
<p>"I don't know how I can live with myself if I give up this dream of mine."</p>
|
||||
<p>"I don't know how much longer you'll be alive if you <em>don't</em>."</p>
|
||||
<p>You and I failed once already. Remember, Jett? We went after Parthena. Or, rather, you waited for <em>her</em> to show herself, laughing with ichor in your lungs when she sent her faithful dog instead. Another brush to paint you as a villain with. But you chose to fingerpaint instead, sparing your brother when he teetered on the verge of death, his blood the only blood to mar your otherwise soft pure hands.</p>
|
||||
<p>How I would bloody my hands a million times over to keep yours forever clean.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>I spit on your Nazarene, you who would declare yourself my parents. Your God is dead! Your Savior is never. You wanted me to grow up to be your superior. Well... I already am. I have long since surpassed you.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Intellectually I can rationalize killing the gods over and over again. Your words ring in my head. Gods are irreconciliable with humans. Either they used to be humans and achieved Apotheosis, in which case they would never give up their hard-earned power, or they were born divine and would never have the frame of reference to cast aside their power and rejoin the beasts below. Humans cannot meaningfully consent to divine rule, either. A politician can be assassinated. A king can be beheaded. Any throne can be overthrown. But when said throne resides in an alternate layer of reality? How is any human supposed to defend themselves against a being possibly omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient?</p>
|
||||
<p>How can a human rip the heart out of something that does not wear flesh?</p>
|
||||
<p>"That's why it's gotta be us, Lethe. We're not constrained to the physical. Well... not <em>normally</em>. You're temporarily embarrassed with a human vessel. But every time you find yourself free is a chance. I'll do the hard work. You just have to give me the strength."</p>
|
||||
<p>"But what if I can't give you enough? What if I end up causing <em>your</em> death instead? Jett, stop. You can't admonish me for wanting to self-destruct and then do... whatever this is. If we couldn't put down Parthena back then when we were at full power, what makes you think we can take on the entire <em>universe</em>? And especially in <em>my</em> current state?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"My pride won't allow me to sit back and do otherwise-"</p>
|
||||
<p>"<em>Fuck your pride!</em> I want you <em>alive</em>. I want you safe. I want you to not throw your life away for humans who'll never know your name, never express a single shred of gratitude, never mourn for you if you martyr yourself. Jett, they <em>want</em> to be enslaved to the gods. They orgasm at the thought of servitude. They don't know anything else. Come on, let's go make a world of our own. Somewhere the gods can never touch. And anyone who wants to be free can live there instead."</p>
|
||||
<p><em>All the slain gods in the world won't make me happy if it means a world where you're dead.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>The recent weather has been killing me. Literally, since I lie in a heat-sickness-induced miasma as I write this in my bunk bed. I cannot tell if your touch is a fever dream or a symptom of my soul struggling to leave my body. But I know you've found me, Jett, even though I haven't been to Dead End Shrine in a month.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Can you find me?" <em>Of course. I'm right here, aren't I?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Do you love me?" <em>Of course. I'm right here, aren't I?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"If it came between an ungrateful stranger's life and yours, you'd choose yourself, right?"</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1">Choose yourself!</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2">Choose yourself!</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Please, Jett, I'm begging you, please choose yourself.</em></p>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
36
writing/letters_to_jett/p3.html
Executable file
36
writing/letters_to_jett/p3.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 3 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="I'll be okay.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p3.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>Poison ivy grows on the side of Dead End Shrine, poking its many heads out to see the sun. The same sun that grows steadily inwards, shade retreating like an army overcome with cowardice, gradually causing me more discomfort than any plant-given rash could.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Leaves of three, <span class="blink1">leave them be!</span></em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>Leave me be...</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>Leave me be.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>There was no leaving myself be. There was no taking breaks, no blessed sleep, no matter how many poems I wrote or supplications to Eris or to Parthena or to any other to let me die in a world that no longer had any need for me, that likely never did.</p>
|
||||
<p>And I never bothered asking you, Jett, because I already knew what the answer was. A steady, strong, definite <em>no</em>.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Keep going, Lethe," you bade me in a voice I did not yet understand as I sat in that front seat on the bus parked in that middle school now worlds away, a time long since passed and now unrecoverable. My girlfriend a wound still fresh, my faith in the god of my childhood still busy bleeding out. "Don't you keep saying you're destined for greatness or something? And what is <em>she</em> destined for? Forever defining herself in terms of other people. She needed you more than you ever needed her. You'll be okay in the end."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Keep going, Lethe," you whispered to me in that dorm room I will never see again. A spring breeze brushed through the open window. Two more weeks to final exams. Two more weeks to finish credits that meant nothing in the end. Two more weeks already paid for. "There's only one class with an actual exam. And you never skipped class. How hard can it be? You'll be okay in the end."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Keep going, Lethe," you insisted as I freaked out in the corner of the store, searching for any violence I could muster, any way I could punish the universe. I wanted to move out. I wanted to quit college. I wanted to overhaul my whole life on a whim. You knew, didn't you? You knew I was a few months out from losing my job. You didn't want me to die on the streets. You put the dead and rotting bird there on that store shelf as a warning, as a prophecy, as a petition to not hasten my own burial. "You <em>really</em> want to make yourself completely dependent on <em>this</em> place? Don't you keep telling me how little you write nowadays? How sapped of energy you are when you come home? Don't throw the sudden weight of adulthood on top of that. Bide your time. Keep bleeding your parents dry. The time will come one day when you can say goodbye. You'll be okay in the end."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Keep going, Lethe." <em>Angelos</em>. Divine messenger, bearer of a message to those struggling through the night. There's no such thing as a dead end. What is a dead end on a road but a stop sign where humans didn't want to pave roads any further? It's not like the edge of the earth is just beyond, and trespassing, <em>keeping going,</em> will make one fall off the edge into outer space. The land still goes on. The clouds still float past. And life still goes on after catastrophe. Even biological death, the worst possible end in the minds of many humans, is not a dead end, for the flesh goes back into the earth to feed something else, merely transmuted into a different form of life. "You'll be okay in the end."</p>
|
||||
<p>I had grown too complacent. I had grown too comfortable with what I had interpreted as your exhortation to persist in the life I was living in the expectation that my problems would resolve themselves. I had grown too stagnant to hear your voice when you finally told me to jump, to veer off the road.</p>
|
||||
<p>And I hit the dead-end sign head on.</p>
|
||||
<p>I actually got fired from that seemingly-perfect job.</p>
|
||||
<p>But life still went on, my parents understanding, willing to give me the space of a few weeks to process what had happened, what I had done, to prepare to find somewhere else to work.</p>
|
||||
<p>The clouds still kept floating past, keeping the blazing sun at bay so I could go back to Dead End Shrine for the first time in four months without dying of heat exhaustion.</p>
|
||||
<p>And the land still goes on, those manicured rolling hills my father feels so entreated to spend his time roaming, that now beckon for me a way out of the mental haze of corporate compliance.</p>
|
||||
<p>I stand across from the parking lot, waiting for the walk sign to turn white, ambiguous stick figure instead of imposing orange hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Keep going, Lethe. You'll be okay in the end."</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1">I'll be okay.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2">I'll be okay.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>I'll be okay.</em></p>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
48
writing/letters_to_jett/p4.html
Executable file
48
writing/letters_to_jett/p4.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 4 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="You can live.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p4.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<i>
|
||||
tell me a story of bright azure pool<br />
|
||||
godling condemned to exist as a tool<br />
|
||||
having a body is never a crime<br />
|
||||
gentle dear friends lost in rough sands of time<br />
|
||||
</i>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>It takes a certain kind of brain to stare at a black page for hours on end, cursor never flickering, never wavering. I wish I had the courage of that cursor, to patiently await the words to come. I wish I had the courage to wait for you, Jett, to be done with college before gunning for Sablade.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>I'm dying!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>I'm dying!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>I'm... I'm dying.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>I'm slowly dying of touch starvation. Not from the condition itself, but from the stress, from the insomnia, from the suppression of my immune system. Ironic, then, that the only person in the world who could possibly cure it- you- is so avoidant, so sensitive, so averse to touch of any kind. You say that I'm the only exception, that I'm the only person in the Outside that can make contact with your skin without you immediately wanting to bite that person's hand off from the sensory overload. But it bites when I reach for you in those few and fleeting moments you can sneak away from campus and you intercept my hand, grasp my fingers, gently push them away.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not your chest; you're still dysphoric, and likely always will be.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not the jagged scars of being stitched back together that ring your limbs; you still have nightmares, and likely always will.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not the skin around your thighlet; you have the strip of goneril tucked neatly inside where it won't fall out, and you're not sure if you could bear the thought of ever going without it, without the comfort of knowing that with it you'll never go feral or find yourself as something else, and likely never will.</p>
|
||||
<p>But you know one day I almost certainly will. Will snap. Will go feral. Will find myself blanketed in light and then monstrous, unrecognizable, unable to hold anything in my brain more complex than the most basal of instincts. And maybe, just maybe, at the end I'll return to my humanoid form, wings and all, exhausted. It won't happen while I'm in "consensus reality" and stuck as a human, but once you and I land in Sablade, an invisible clock whose face I cannot see will start ticking above my head, the same as the one now hovering over me as the Eschaton wears on and on and on.</p>
|
||||
<p>And I'm wearing on and on and on, growing weary. Shall I count the ways? 24-hour news cycle, being free tech support to my family, unresponsive professors, living in a world blanketed with misogyny. I want to wrap myself in a blanket in an isolated spot far away from everything and sleep, and dream: in this life, living offline with only a few sacred applications that talk to the outside world in a short window of time each day, and in the next life, living in Sablade with only Jett as my link to the rest of the Outside beyond the metaclysma border. An intranet disconnected, isolated, only one peer coming and going inside and outside the borders with data from beyond to distribute to the others.</p>
|
||||
<p>What use do I have for the outside world anyway? What use do I have for the needless pain? What could I possibly stand to gain from interacting with others that I can't find in the sprawling world within my body? I have an unfulfilled biological imperative. Seliph, destruction incarnate, the last remaining god of the original pantheon of the Firstworld, a place even farther away from here than where Jett now plows through the generals all first-years must take. The final act of such a deity is to dissolve their body to create a new world elsewhere in the Outside. And where their own consciousness will cease, a trillion souls will follow.</p>
|
||||
<p>Do I die of touch starvation, or die attempting to create Sablade where I yearn to live with the cure forever?</p>
|
||||
<p>"At least Eris won't be my cause of death." A labored laugh escapes my lungs. "Because she's dead. I killed her."</p>
|
||||
<p>"You mean, in the same attack where I was torn apart, and nothing was created?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Jett, that's not-"</p>
|
||||
<p>She shakes her head, adamant. "I learned in one of my classes a few days ago that nothing is ever really created. Or destroyed. Just recycled into different things. Just like your writing. You're not really crafting anything new, just finding a unique way of recording what's already there in the Outside. And if all records of your books ceased to exist, the worlds would still be there." She turns around, swings her legs onto my bed. "Stardust turned into you and me. And if the universe is infinite, that means there's more than enough to turn into a world."</p>
|
||||
<p><em>You can make Sablade without ripping your body apart for the materials. You can choose the third option where you live. Where we live together in peace.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>You can live.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>You can live.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Lethe, do you understand? I want you to pick the option where <em>you can live.</em>"</p>
|
||||
<script data-goatcounter="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count"
|
||||
async src="//stats.letsdecentralize.org/count.js"></script>
|
||||
<noscript>
|
||||
<img src="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/p4.html">
|
||||
</noscript>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
33
writing/letters_to_jett/p5.html
Executable file
33
writing/letters_to_jett/p5.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 5 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="I understand.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p5.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>The follow-up to going feral sans sudden rage and trying to convince myself to write feel a lot like the same. An empty restlessness, staring at a wall or something on the horizon or even just the back of my eyelids for hours on end, pacing up and down the corridors of my mind. Hands open, hands shut, fingers digging into palms. Curled up in a ball, willing myself to sleep if only for the novelty of a dream. Thinking about everything and yet nothing all at the same time. There's something inside, something that can't bear being trapped in this body of mine any longer.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>Why can't I make myself do anything?</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>Why can't I do anything?</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>Why can't I...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>And then the whole world condenses down to an I. Bathed in the harsh light I can no longer take a single second more of, an arm lashes out: draconic and scaled and twisted, rest of the body soon following as if newly-hatched and breaking out of an eggshell, or limbs reduced to ragged red pincers, single points, trembling and trying to decide whether it's closer to a scorpion or insect knowing it can kill gods all the same, or still human and feeling around the edge of the bed for the closest functional laptop.</p>
|
||||
<p>And there's a shame to it too.</p>
|
||||
<p>"What if someone sees me?" I wonder, slipping into the nearest forest under the cover of night. There is no other creature like me anywhere I know of in the Outside. Who could possibly replicate the conditions that led to my existence as I am now: a spilled god giving birth to me with waterfalled blood congealed in the metaclysma, then banished by the genocide of my siblings to live on the earth a human, then scammed by a visitor offering to restore me to power, then finally crafted an angel and granted the world only to have all ripped away by the same self-proclaimed benefactress? I am the intersection of a million worlds. And not a single person in any of them, myself much less, knows how my amalgamation of a body works, how many other forms I have, which impulses are genuine repressed desires and which are just animalistic. The forest is where wild animals belong, right? Am I an animal mistakenly granted human-level intelligence, or a humanoid desperately trying not to be? "What if someone misunderstands, declares me too strange for this world, deems me fit for death?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"What if someone sees me?" I wonder, stumbling my way into the closest dark place to hide. I'm a monster. My first impulse throughout all of my lives has been to hurt, to damage, to cause the most pain possible. Goddess of destruction, envoy of chaos, created for the purpose of being manipulated to destroy: sometimes to justify someone else's new creation, sometimes just for the sheer hell of it. But it turns out the room I thought was an oversize closet, pitch-black dark from being underground, was actually a library study room. And the love of my life walks in, sees me struggling to stand on six legs, completely unfazed. The light flickers on. The door latches shut behind her. She sits down beside me on the floor, pulls my body into her lap like I'm a lapdog just a tiny bit too big to be one, runs a hand down my rigid spine and fingers around the spikes jutting out down it. This would have been incomprehensible two lives ago, watching her and her brother expend all of their strength to burn me to ashes. Who's the real puppet? Neither of us, anymore. But one would be hard-pressed to find a person in the Outside who doesn't still blame me for the millions of lives lost, who wouldn't take glee in annihilating me once and for all. And what of my lover? What would someone think if they walked in, saw her affection towards such a repulsive creature? "What if someone misunderstands, declares me too strange for this world, deems me fit for death?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"What if someone sees me?" I wonder, agonizing over what to write on my website. True, some of the anxiety is abated by simply not installing analytics software and not keeping server logs, but the occasional email reminds me that there are actual humans reading my words, that I'm not just shouting into the void. How violently I want to write of my previous lives, to spill the unspeakable name for what I was. An image is worth a thousand words, and a name is a symlink, a pointer, a reminder. But nobody except for a very small subsect of users on a website I no longer frequent for my safety would understand, instead insistent that I had somehow completely lost it and become a "fandom blogger". How am I supposed to explain that it's not my fault there's a caricature of a story of the world of my last two lives? That I haven't indulged in the ultimate escapism of identifying myself with a corporate product? "What if someone misunderstands, declares me too strange for this world, deems me fit for death?"</p>
|
||||
<p>I curl up in my bed and try to read a book about how to love. "You cannot love unless you understand yourself," it says.</p>
|
||||
<p>I switch to another book. "To name something is to define it, to make it able to be comprehended."</p>
|
||||
<p>My lover sneaks up behind me, wraps an arm around my chest. Her name, the name I gave her when she asked to shed her brother's, is sweet like honey in my mouth. Jett Hysminai Lysander, sometimes with my last name as well, depending on how I define "I" in that moment. <em>The shade who fights for her freedom.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"I understand you," she whispers. "And we're going to make a world you fit right in to."</p>
|
||||
<p>"And... I deserve to <em>live</em> in it?"</p>
|
||||
<p>A squeeze. "You're finally beginning to understand."</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1">I understand.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2">I understand.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>I understand.</em></p>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
57
writing/letters_to_jett/p6.html
Executable file
57
writing/letters_to_jett/p6.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 6 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="It wasn't your fault.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p6.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>The spider friend that lived in the upstairs bathroom is gone. Vanished. A web in the corner of the ceiling left abandoned in haste, half-made. I thought I had stepped on a fallen egg sac in the shower, only to find it was actually a stray piece of fluff from between one of my toes. Where did you go, spider? Were you crushed underfoot like the fluff? Were you vacuumed out by my father? Were you swathed in a piece of tissue, or maybe even undignified toilet paper, and squeezed to death by my mother, the smotherer?</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>She killed me!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>She... killed me.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>She...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Once upon a time, there was a woman who I loved very much who broke my whole world open. Well, I suppose she was only a girl back then, and I was too. I thought about her every moment of every day. I yearned to spend as much time as possible with her. Isn't that love? To make room in your world, in your heart, for someone other than yourself for the sole reason that you enjoy having them around? She was strange and lawless and somehow found a semblance of freedom in my house of rules and rigidity.</p>
|
||||
<p>But one day she disappeared. Her mother took her phone and cut off all routes of communication between her and me and, as far as I know, as far as I can remember, isolated her from the outside world. Summer had just begun, so I couldn't use school as a bypass, those few moments we could brush past each other in the halls between classes, those hurried moments in the cafeteria trying to find two consecutive seats next to each other. I waited all summer for her, for her words in my phone, for the sound of her voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>Once, in the middle of the night one night, I was looking through old messages when I got the urge to send her another "I can't wait to talk to you again" text. All the previous ones had gone to "delivered", never "read". But this time, the receipt went to "read" immediately. <em>Someone</em> was reading my words. Was it her? I dared to hope. I sent her another one. "I know you're watching." And then she... she responded. She gave me a date to wait for. A date where full communication would be restored. I waited for that date, spent my whole summer lounging about, begging the days to pass faster.</p>
|
||||
<p>It came and went. Nothing happened. And she came back a few months later with the news that she'd fallen in love with some e-thot half the country away instead under the excuse of "polyamory". And so I was heartbroken and left with nothing.</p>
|
||||
<p>I turn the memory over and over in my hands. Almost eight years have passed since that December day. Funny how, in the same month, I lost the first love I had in this body and gained, although with a silent detachment until I could remember, the first and only of my previous body.</p>
|
||||
<p>"What did I do wrong?" I whisper. "Where did everything go wrong? What could I have done?"</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Have you considered, just maybe, you didn't do anything wrong? You could have handled it better, but it wasn't your fault.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Once upon a time, there was a woman who loved me very much. She was gentle and gracious with me and fought at every opportunity to set the world right when it did me wrong. She pulled strings at club gatherings. She made my father back off when I was in emotional turmoil. She made, I thought, room in her heart for me, even thought it was always plainly obvious she loved my middle brother more.</p>
|
||||
<p>But even the finest-crafted sweets leave cavities if eaten too often, if eaten with too little care.</p>
|
||||
<p>I should have felt it forming.</p>
|
||||
<p>Elementary school, locked into my room. I buried myself in the pile of stuffed animals between my bed and the wall. She entered the room to make sure I wasn't playing or otherwise enjoying my time alone, saw myself strewn across the stuffies, turned and whispered under her breath, "Rat."</p>
|
||||
<p>Middle school, locked into the master bedroom. Forced to delete my whole online portfolio of silly videos because they'd offended some adult I barely knew and whose opinions I cared about even less. The very thing that would earn my brothers shining praise a decade later got me called impudent and a brat.</p>
|
||||
<p>Over and over, I watch her pass through the doors of that house. Free as a bird, even while having the only one who'd actually ever had wings locked up in a Golden Cage. Her back is turned to me, new moon, her sunny face shining on my brothers.</p>
|
||||
<p>There's a hole in my memories. Countless other incidents I know happened but can't place on a timeline. Is it for my own sanity? Is it so I don't hurl myself off a cliff in grief? The cavity grows wider and wider. I try to patch it like a dentist, feel around the edges, figure out what's causing it to grow. To figure out why the patches never hold and the cavity grows wider and wider.</p>
|
||||
<p>One of these days I'll fall down it into an abyss and I'll never see the sun of her face, of anyone's face, ever again.</p>
|
||||
<p>"What did I do wrong?" I whisper. "Where did everything go wrong? What could I have done?"</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Have you considered, just maybe, you didn't do anything wrong? You could have handled it better, but it wasn't your fault.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Once upon a time, there was a woman who made no outward pretensions of caring. She made me in a bathtub, almost drowned me in the same, paraded me around a party to bait her rivals into starting a petty brawl with each other, and then left me to my own devices in her sprawling mansion. I had barely any memories back then, only fed a notion of the outside world from tutoring sessions and stolen snippets of stories. I was utterly unprepared when I hurled myself over the cliff of our shared dwelling in youthful hope in search of a lady of light.</p>
|
||||
<p>Once upon a time, there was a woman who wasn't sure what to do with me once I'd found her. She already had a helper, a strong bond with him, several wars worth of memories and trust built up. I was the one who'd triggered her to try to pull someone else's hair out over a shiny trinket. And now I wanted to <em>help</em> her? I tried to help. I gave it my all, even when my new maybe-friend just wanted to work alone. But in the end, when I asked him how far he'd go to be able to live all on his own, she misinterpreted my words as me wanting her dead and beat me half to death and hurled me over the cliffside edge.</p>
|
||||
<p>Once upon a time, there was a woman who found me floating face-down in a river. She thought I was her brother, my maybe-friend, at first. I was later informed that I was probably an inch away from death when she brought me to the local hospital, when she insisted with fire that she be allowed to check up on me every day until I woke up again. Several broken limbs, a collapsed lung, several snapped ribs, a shattered wing. I should have died.</p>
|
||||
<p>I should have died.</p>
|
||||
<p>But I lived. I made a full recovery. And one thing led to another, and the woman and I fell in love, and I helped her be able to fly on her own again, and we were the first ones ever who fully accepted each other with no expectations of servitude or subservience. I knew she was a woman even when pretending to be a man for her safety, and she knew I was the reincarnation of one of my mother's horrific creatures, the one who had plunged the world into the Three Years in Absentia. It hadn't been my fault. I'd been mindless, controlled, lacking a will. I barely had memory of that time. And she knew, and she loved me all the same.</p>
|
||||
<p>So we went to kill my mother, to create a new world where neither of us, where <em>nobody</em>, could be harmed by any deity ever again. First my maybe-friend tried to stop us, incredulous that I was the monster who, being controlled by Mother with murderous intent, had controlled him to wash the world in blood in return. Then his mother came to back him up when he collapsed from exhaustion and blood loss, chased us back to my mother's house. Then we fought together against my mother, my would-be master, sutures over my heart bleeding and sore from swapping a shard of my soul with one from my lover. She was sleeping, crystallized from forced soul displacement until, with my final push of strength, I rolled the soul back to her body.</p>
|
||||
<p>She awoke to find me ash spiraling into the nearest Eye, into this Inside.</p>
|
||||
<p>I should have lived.</p>
|
||||
<p>"What did I do wrong?" I sigh. "Where did everything go wrong? What could I have done?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Have you considered, just maybe, you didn't do anything wrong? You... okay, <em>we</em> could have handled it better, but it wasn't your fault."</p>
|
||||
<p>She grasps my hands, insistent, not done yet. "Do you understand, Lethe? You're not a martyr. You don't have to be one. The sins of the world aren't your fault. The fact that you're here in this Inside isn't your fault. Other people mistreating you isn't your fault." I get the sense she wants to throw a caveat in there, but for some reason she refrains. "Would you... would you stop beating yourself up for every <em>fucking</em> thing that happens? <em>Please!</em> I want to see you smile again. Like your stupid angel number book says. How are we supposed to make Sablade if you spend every damn moment wallowing in despair?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"It already exists," I protest. "I just... have to find my way out of this Inside. I wish... I wish I wasn't so tired all the time. I wish I wasn't such a coward. I'd be at your side by now."</p>
|
||||
<p>"I told you once I couldn't wait to spend forever with you. Remember?" She sighs, averts her eyes, still with my hands in hers in a death grip. "I wonder who's <em>still</em> trying to ruin my forever... I wonder sometimes at night if there's something more I could have done so you wouldn't have had to come here."</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1">It wasn't your fault.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2">It wasn't your fault.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>It wasn't your fault.</em></p>
|
||||
<script data-goatcounter="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count"
|
||||
async src="//stats.letsdecentralize.org/count.js"></script>
|
||||
<noscript>
|
||||
<img src="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/p6.html">
|
||||
</noscript>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
52
writing/letters_to_jett/p7.html
Executable file
52
writing/letters_to_jett/p7.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 7 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="Take me home.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p7.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<blockquote>Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do...<br>- Audre Lorde</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>There was once a girl freshly turned woman who spent her days in the corner of whatever room she lived in. Her bedroom, the room she bunked in at her grandmother's house, her college dorm room. She would spend her time staring into screens, hoping for a vestige of one of her friends. The friends from half the world away? The friends from lives past, so very very long ago? Nobody knows. She would touch the screens, touch-enabled or not, leaving behind fingerprints and half-whispered words.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>I miss you!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>I... miss you.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>I miss...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>There was once a man named Ghost. A cabal of friends surrounded him: Kamui, Robin, and others on the periphery. Each with their own yearnings for the people of lives past, some thinking that maybe they'd get lucky and find the reincarnates in this one. Ghost accepted our young protagonist into the fold as college began and she tasted for the first time a life outside of her parents' purview. A fast friendship bloomed between her and the group.</p>
|
||||
<p>Our Lucine. Our Luce. Can we trust you with the truth?</p>
|
||||
<p>She would wake up every morning with blood on her hands. Messages of wrath and filth sent to her friends under disguises, aliases, complaining about the protagonist herself. Her friends rallied around her, gave her support and encouragement. Ghost even promised, after five years of preparation, he would drive across the country to pick her up and whisk her away and she could live with him. She could start a new life over with him.</p>
|
||||
<p>But little by little, Ghost and friends discovered that it was her hands, if not her, at fault for the messages. Our protagonist tried to apologize, tried to explain that she wasn't in full control of herself, tried to make amends and plans to mitigate any damage in the future in case she couldn't make it stop. Which should have been an adequate response, right? The reincarnated daughter of a god of chaos and destruction, died in unwitting service to him, bonds still strong across space and time? One would not think it such a big stretch for a group of dissociative systems and polymorphs and self-proclaimed starseeds.</p>
|
||||
<p>But they kicked her out. Cut off all ties with her. Spat on the memory of her.</p>
|
||||
<p>And a light cracked in through the window where before had only been the murky black of night past the heavy college dorm room curtains. The morning after disaster. The surveying of the wreckage. The first displaced piece put back, the first moment of rebuilding a sense of self.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Other people's cruelties do not define what I am.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>There was once a girl still blooming into a woman who spent her days hunched over a computer screen. Several years since being called Lucine. Still reeling in the grief of another year come and gone. Still bearing a name starting with an L and ending with an E. But this one bearing the mark of forgetfulness, of forgiveness, of holding no grudges and keeping no lists.</p>
|
||||
<p>Our Tsukai. Our Lethe. Come build a world named Sablade with me?</p>
|
||||
<p>There was once a man without a name. I hesitate to give him one, being that there were none resembling a name he regularly used. He wished to go by a distorted name of a computer program. A ghost in the wires, a ghost in the shell of a website half-finished and painful at best to read. He contacted our protagonist one day with butter and sugar, and an unlikely friendship formed between them.</p>
|
||||
<p>It took a while for the bloodlust that had so quickly plagued Ghost and Kamui and the rest to reawaken in our protagonist. They spent long hours into the night chatting with each other, talking of their separate lives an ocean away. She slowly, then with great force, trusted him with the minutae of the world gestating inside her and the details of the lover with which she would midwife it into existence. He wanted to send her money to help, begged her to give him a cryptocurrency address to send it to her, even at one point had the audacity to ask for her legal name to dispense with the crypto and wire it to her directly.</p>
|
||||
<p>But she remembered Ghost, and she remembered the wrath Ghost had displayed in their final moments together, and she refused to give this new man anything he could use to harm her with.</p>
|
||||
<p>He showed her his friends, wanted to make her a part of his regular group. But she was appalled at what she saw, the cruelty so inherent to the male sex. Even after convincing him to chastise his friends into a semblance of acceptable behavior, she was a slot fitted into the wrong hole, a computer part plugged into the wrong port, a black sheep. Even then, she stayed, tried to make things work, tried to banter, tried to learn their language, resorted to silence whenever blood ran cold.</p>
|
||||
<p>But she remembered Ghost, and she remembered the wrath Ghost had displayed in their final moments together, and so when the bloodlust came she restrained herself to the banter and to spamming Kanye West-themed copypastas. Nothing that would stain her guilt. Everything was going well, she thought. Jokes about her taking a trip to his home country, to her sleeping in his basement, to her doing drugs with him.</p>
|
||||
<p>But what is one supposed to do with a man who continually makes unwanted romantic gestures despite having been told no, I'm a lesbian, I'm in a committed relationship? With a man who grew up in a completely different cultural zeitgeist and speaks only of things one has no interest in? Who has no qualms over pulling out slurs when they suit him?</p>
|
||||
<p>Here are my boundaries. Please do not trespass over them.</p>
|
||||
<p>And never forget that <em>you</em> asked <em>me</em> to be here, not the other way around.</p>
|
||||
<p>And in one messy fight, they kicked her out. Cut off all ties with her. Spat on the memory of her.</p>
|
||||
<p>And a light cracks in through the clouds where before had only been the overcast spread of a gloomy weekend. The hours after disaster, the kind one watches looming over the horizon and cannot do anything to stop. The surveying of the wreckage. The keeping of a list of what is unsalvageable and needs to be thrown out, what needs to be repaired, what walls must be fortified for the next time.</p>
|
||||
<p>The promise that there will be no "next time".</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Other people's cruelties do not define what I am.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Time is a circle which nobody can stop-"</p>
|
||||
<!-- For future reference, the poem in question is "Laika Aplis" from The World Is Not Enough. -->
|
||||
<p>"-But you and I found a dead end the gods forgot to seal off." Jett takes my shoulder, spins me around where I stand so that I face her. There are dark splotches under her eyes like she hasn't slept properly in a few days. "That's how the poem goes, last I checked." She doesn't wait for my affirmation as she continues, "You're in just as rough shape as I am."</p>
|
||||
<p>"It's the Eschaton. Bad things are <em>supposed</em> to happen to me. Remember?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Oh, that...? Took you long enough." A barely-contained snicker. "Puts a whole new meaning on 'kin', doesn't it?"</p>
|
||||
<p>"Yeah. I'm..." I straighten myself, put my hands on my hips. "I'm the Chaos Kin! The Konton no Tsukai! And I eat gods and destroy societies and cause eventual ruination to everything I love!"</p>
|
||||
<p>This last fact I recite with no ounce of guilt in my voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>"You say this like it's news or something." She averts her gaze. "I went to a wedding today. One of my friends from college. I didn't know them well, and I wasn't keen on skipping classes. But I thought it-" the next words are more difficult for her to get out- "it would be good practice for when I finally get to take you home."</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1">Take me home!</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2">Take me home!</p>
|
||||
<p><em>I'll be waiting here, faithfully, for you to take me home.</em></p>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
73
writing/letters_to_jett/p7.md
Executable file
73
writing/letters_to_jett/p7.md
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,73 @@
|
|||
> Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do...
|
||||
>
|
||||
> - Audre Lorde
|
||||
|
||||
There was once a girl freshly turned woman who spent her days in the corner of whatever room she lived in. Her bedroom, the room she bunked in at her grandmother's house, her college dorm room. She would spend her time staring into screens, hoping for a vestige of one of her friends. The friends from half the world away? The friends from lives past, so very very long ago? Nobody knows. She would touch the screens, touch-enabled or not, leaving behind fingerprints and half-whispered words.
|
||||
|
||||
*I miss you!*
|
||||
|
||||
*I... miss you.*
|
||||
|
||||
*I miss...*
|
||||
|
||||
There was once a man named Ghost. A cabal of friends surrounded him: Kamui, Robin, and others on the periphery. Each with their own yearnings for the people of lives past, some thinking that maybe they'd get lucky and find the reincarnates in this one. Ghost accepted our young protagonist into the fold as college began and she tasted for the first time a life outside of her parents' purview. A fast friendship bloomed between her and the group.
|
||||
|
||||
Our Lucine. Our Luce. Can we trust you with the truth?
|
||||
|
||||
She would wake up every morning with blood on her hands. Messages of wrath and filth sent to her friends under disguises, aliases, complaining about the protagonist herself. Her friends rallied around her, gave her support and encouragement. Ghost even promised, after five years of preparation, he would drive across the country to pick her up and whisk her away and she could live with him. She could start a new life over with him.
|
||||
|
||||
But little by little, Ghost and friends discovered that it was her hands, if not her, at fault for the messages. Our protagonist tried to apologize, tried to explain that she wasn't in full control of herself, tried to make amends and plans to mitigate any damage in the future in case she couldn't make it stop. Which should have been an adequate response, right? The reincarnated daughter of a god of chaos and destruction, died in unwitting service to him, bonds still strong across space and time? One would not think it such a big stretch for a group of dissociative systems and polymorphs and self-proclaimed starseeds.
|
||||
|
||||
But they kicked her out. Cut off all ties with her. Spat on the memory of her.
|
||||
|
||||
And a light cracked in through the window where before had only been the murky black of night past the heavy college dorm room curtains. The morning after disaster. The surveying of the wreckage. The first displaced piece put back, the first moment of rebuilding a sense of self.
|
||||
|
||||
*Other people's cruelties do not define what I am.*
|
||||
|
||||
There was once a girl still blooming into a woman who spent her days hunched over a computer screen. Several years since being called Lucine. Still reeling in the grief of another year come and gone. Still bearing a name starting with an L and ending with an E. But this one bearing the mark of forgetfulness, of forgiveness, of holding no grudges and keeping no lists.
|
||||
|
||||
Our Tsukai. Our Lethe. Come build a world named Sablade with me?
|
||||
|
||||
There was once a man without a name. I hesitate to give him one, being that there were none resembling a name he regularly used. He wished to go by a distorted name of a computer program. A ghost in the wires, a ghost in the shell of a website half-finished and painful at best to read. He contacted our protagonist one day with butter and sugar, and an unlikely friendship formed between them.
|
||||
|
||||
It took a while for the bloodlust that had so quickly plagued Ghost and Kamui and the rest to reawaken in our protagonist. They spent long hours into the night chatting with each other, talking of their separate lives an ocean away. She slowly, then with great force, trusted him with the minutae of the world gestating inside her and the details of the lover with which she would midwife it into existence. He wanted to send her money to help, begged her to give him a cryptocurrency address to send it to her, even at one point had the audacity to ask for her legal name to dispense with the crypto and wire it to her directly.
|
||||
|
||||
But she remembered Ghost, and she remembered the wrath Ghost had displayed in their final moments together, and she refused to give this new man anything he could use to harm her with.
|
||||
|
||||
He showed her his friends, wanted to make her a part of his regular group. But she was appalled at what she saw, the cruelty so inherent to the male sex. Even after convincing him to chastise his friends into a semblance of acceptable behavior, she was a slot fitted into the wrong hole, a computer part plugged into the wrong port, a black sheep. Even then, she stayed, tried to make things work, tried to banter, tried to learn their language, resorted to silence whenever blood ran cold.
|
||||
|
||||
But she remembered Ghost, and she remembered the wrath Ghost had displayed in their final moments together, and so when the bloodlust came she restrained herself to the banter and to spamming Kanye West-themed copypastas. Nothing that would stain her guilt. Everything was going well, she thought. Jokes about her taking a trip to his home country, to her sleeping in his basement, to her doing drugs with him.
|
||||
|
||||
But what is one supposed to do with a man who continually makes unwanted romantic gestures despite having been told no, I'm a lesbian, I'm in a committed relationship? With a man who grew up in a completely different cultural zeitgeist and speaks only of things one has no interest in? Who has no qualms over pulling out slurs when they suit him?
|
||||
|
||||
Here are my boundaries. Please do not trespass over them.
|
||||
|
||||
And never forget that *you* asked *me* to be here, not the other way around.
|
||||
|
||||
And in one messy fight, they kicked her out. Cut off all ties with her. Spat on the memory of her.
|
||||
|
||||
And a light cracks in through the clouds where before had only been the overcast spread of a gloomy weekend. The hours after disaster, the kind one watches looming over the horizon and cannot do anything to stop. The surveying of the wreckage. The keeping of a list of what is unsalvageable and needs to be thrown out, what needs to be repaired, what walls must be fortified for the next time.
|
||||
|
||||
The promise that there will be no "next time".
|
||||
|
||||
*Other people's cruelties do not define what I am.*
|
||||
|
||||
"Time is a circle which nobody can stop-"
|
||||
|
||||
"-But you and I found a dead end the gods forgot to seal off." Jett takes my shoulder, spins me around where I stand so that I face her. There are dark splotches under her eyes like she hasn't slept properly in a few days. "That's how the poem goes, last I checked." She doesn't wait for my affirmation as she continues, "You're in just as rough shape as I am."
|
||||
|
||||
"It's the Eschaton. Bad things are *supposed* to happen to me. Remember?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Oh, that...? Took you long enough." A barely-contained snicker. "Puts a whole new meaning on 'kin', doesn't it?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Yeah. I'm..." I straighten myself, put my hands on my hips. "I'm the Chaos Kin! The Konton no Tsukai! And I eat gods and destroy societies and cause eventual ruination to everything I love!"
|
||||
|
||||
This last fact I recite with no ounce of guilt in my voice.
|
||||
|
||||
"You say this like it's news or something." She averts her gaze. "I went to a wedding today. One of my friends from college. I didn't know them well, and I wasn't keen on skipping classes. But I thought it-" the next words are more difficult for her to get out- "it would be good practice for when I finally get to take you home."
|
||||
|
||||
Take me home!
|
||||
|
||||
Take me home!
|
||||
|
||||
*I'll be waiting here, faithfully, for you to take me home.*
|
||||
52
writing/letters_to_jett/p8.html
Executable file
52
writing/letters_to_jett/p8.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 8 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="We love you, Lethe!">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p8.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>"So what are your plans for today?" echoes in my head as I lay down for a nap, probably the third of the day. Who is keeping score? A familiar voice, the voice of my wife, likely unaware I can hear her in this small sliver of time as she walks down an equally sunny sidewalk in her college campus.</p>
|
||||
<p>"I am going to bite your wife," answers a lower voice, "and turn her into a vampire."</p>
|
||||
<p>"Not if I do it first!"</p>
|
||||
<p>A cold hand gently lifting my neck up. Two distinct pinpricks on the right side of my neck. A body flooding into view a few seconds later. A familiar flattened chest, blue-black plumage, fluffy mass of dark purple hair brushing against my ear.</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>My wife is here!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>My wife is... here!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>My wife...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>I did not become a vampire. Did not receive yet another strain of blood in the coitus that followed. And neither was that her intention. But every night following, the rivers in my veins burned from whatever Jett had slipped in to protect me, a itch right under the skin only alleviated by allowing myself to shift and go feral in my draconic form. Some nights the ribbons loosened from my limbs and I returned to rationality to find I had killed someone, a family member or someone who had wronged me or even just a complete stranger. Some nights I was overcome with cowardice, fleeing into the forest or hiding underneath a blanket in the living room of my grandmother's house.</p>
|
||||
<p>A place now defiled, desecrated, with no clear path to becoming safe again.</p>
|
||||
<p>A bad setup to a cliche dream. My parents have invited the friend of one of my brothers to come play while the rest of us help tear down the old shed in the backyard. Except that this friend has made it very clear that he hates me, that he would sexually assault me if he could, that he would kill me in a heartbeat if given the chance. Someone who hates me for who, <em>what</em>, I am with no recourse. I attempt to explain to my parents why this person is a danger, but they refuse to listen, insisting that he is just as welcome in the house as I am.</p>
|
||||
<p>I find myself running away early in the morning without an explanation. Taking off with very few, if any, possesions, the rest left behind and tucked away hidden in a closet with the understanding that, if I come back, they may all be stolen or shattered or both. Refuge found in a safe place nobody else in my family knows about: Independence Park, hill and playground and baseball field and winding bike paths one could easily get lost in.</p>
|
||||
<p>I collapse on the hill, curling up, trembling from the strain of so much sudden physical exertion so early in the day. The same place, give or take a few feet, that I sat in a little under six years ago the day I published <em>The Samhain Files</em>. I let my gaze wander to the clouds, the infinite blue sky beyond. My eyes ache. Visual snow like meteors and worms, like the ribbons that wrap around my limbs right before the light takes me to shift. But although my blood burns to do so, to disappear into the woods without a trace, I am sitting firmly in "consensus reality". There is a Veil over everyone and everything. I have not even the simple luxury of my wings to cocoon myself in as I lie on the soft grassy hill, half-delirious from a whole two hours of sleep.</p>
|
||||
<p>I awake about fifteen minutes later from a buzzing in my purse. My mother has finally decided to take my concerns half-seriously and has taken down all of the photos of me in the house. My father follows close behind, admonishing me for daring to think of my own safety, insisting, if my brother <em>were</em> being groomed into watching violent pornography and one day providing photos for deepfakes, <em>he</em> would be the victim and not <em>me</em>. Not <em>me</em>, the one who would be in the synthetic explicit materials, but him for being stupid enough to do what strangers on the internet told him?</p>
|
||||
<p>My poetry was too much for him to handle, too much to go unpunished, rewarded with being cut off from the world at random to the point of developing an anxiety disorder. But his sexual depravity is to be rewarded with the banishment of his much-hated sister.</p>
|
||||
<p>Another shiver ripples through my body, one that, were it not for the Veil, would have been enough to trigger me to shift. Part of me wishes, consequences of broad daylight be damned, that it had. Isn't that what every female feels with violent passion at least once in her life? To escape from the confines of her human body, to be made something monstrous and incomprehensible to the male gaze?</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.<br>- Adrienne Rich, "Of Woman Born"</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>My constant fantasies, spilling into dreams, of going feral in my draconic form and disappearing into the forest to live there, never to be dragged back into civilization again. Of the loss of episodic memory that comes with such a form, finally free of the shackles of my guilt for having made mistakes like every other human in life and my anxiety over the next unwritten change of rules in the Golden Cage of the house of my parents. Of the inevitable side effect of gradually losing my explicit memory, names and faces and eventually words themselves fading from consciousness.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of Jett finally finding me, brave enough to walk close enough where I could cut her down with a single swipe of my claws. Of her taking my head into her hands, eyes closed, pressing our foreheads together.</p>
|
||||
<p lang="es">"¿Tu me recuerdas? Yo te llamé Lethe. Y eras mi esposa. Y yo te amó mucho."</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Do you remember me? I called you Lethe. And you were my wife. And I loved you a lot.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>She opens her eyes, tries to gaze where mine would be had I visible ocular organs.</p>
|
||||
<p lang="es">"¿Lo recuerdas mi nombre?"</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Do you remember my name?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Almost two months ago, she said she was my "palm pal". It took me a few weeks to think to ask her what that actually meant. Cleared off my desk, put on my special necklace with the tree pendant, laid out my three runes.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sideways Thurisaz, Algiz, sideways Hagalaz.</p>
|
||||
<p>"It's always me, isn't it? I'm the last person you forget when your conscious mind slips away. I'm the one person you can restrain yourself from hurting. Well, if you're going to imprint on a story so hard that you stole one of your draconic forms from it, I think I have the right to claim the role of the companion who keeps you in a human shape. Who would go with you anywhere, no matter what... I want to go with you to the very top of Yewiffe. The very <em>very</em> top. If the roots are a painful and repressed past, then the branches are a sunny future, right? I want that bright future. With your hand in mine."</p>
|
||||
<p>My mother texts to ask if I'm coming home. I ask her if I have to, if it is required, that I am prepared to accept the consequences of running away for my own safety. She says no, that my grandmother can pick me up wherever I am: she and her want to spend time with me out of the house, safely far away from the Discord brat, having finally come to some sense of an understanding of my fears.</p>
|
||||
<p>Jett takes my hand, my palm pressed against hers, and the trembling stills. She pulls me to my feet.</p>
|
||||
<p>"Come on. I've got a lot of angel numbers to show you."</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>We love you, Lethe!</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>We love you, Lethe!</em></p>
|
||||
<p><em>We love you, Lethe, and all your weird parts, and every drop of blood in your veins. We love you just the way you are.</em></p>
|
||||
<script data-goatcounter="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count"
|
||||
async src="//stats.letsdecentralize.org/count.js"></script>
|
||||
<noscript>
|
||||
<img src="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/p8.html">
|
||||
</noscript>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
56
writing/letters_to_jett/p9.html
Executable file
56
writing/letters_to_jett/p9.html
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
|
|||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html lang="en">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta charset="UTF-8">
|
||||
<title>Part 9 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
|
||||
<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
|
||||
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
|
||||
<meta name="description" content="You changed your mind.">
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/writing/letters_to_jett/p9.html" />
|
||||
<link href="../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
|
||||
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body>
|
||||
<p>Of the neighbors who live in the house behind me, one of them works at a moving company. Occasionally he gets called by the company to recover a trailer: stolen, forgotten, abandoned on the side of the road. Usually vandalized, painted all black, as if the cover of night or any number of spray paint cans could cover up the blatant theft. Whatever remains inside the vehicle when repossessed, after the drugs and guns have been taken away by the police, becomes the property of the employee doing the possession to discard or keep as they wish.</p><!-- September 25 -->
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>Just someone else's problem to deal with.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>Just someone else's problem.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink3"><em>Just someone else's...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>I lie on my bed in a warm fluffy haze, like that after a filling hot meal, curled up in a blanket. The drug user abandoning his trailer was a good deal for me. Seven new video game controllers, some jewelry, assorted knickknacks. Mother would not let me keep the book on playing card divination, claiming it was demonic, but neither did I make any claim for it. And not all of the boxes have been opened yet. More blessings are likely on the way. A good day to be me, I think. A rare day where my mother isn't screaming at me, where there are no other obligations. Maybe I will invite my cousin to play online later now that I have at least one controller that hasn't succumbed to drift. Yet.</p>
|
||||
<p>I lie on my bed in a cold sweat, bare body exposed to the chilling autumn air. A vision. The love of my life fleeing from... <em>something</em>, someone, building taken the shape of my old high school in lieu of a detail the Veil would not let through. Escaping through a metal shaft leading to a roof. A cut across the underside of her jaw. Fade to black. My phone pings. A sketch of her in jail, blindfolded, arms and wings chained tightly behind.</p>
|
||||
<p>I sit at the kitchen table, spacing out. Another box from the trailer brought over by the neighbors, opened to be sorted through. Mother hands me fake jewels, angel wing pendants, glass beads. None hold my attention for long. Most slip through my fingers into a haphazard pile.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>My baby's in jail. My baby's in jail. My baby...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Mother tosses a metal bracelet on the table. Two awkward metal curves on either side of a glass dome the size of a quarter. A font that can only be described as "live laugh love", large and looping.</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>Perhaps this is the moment for which you have been created.</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Two angel numbers face me. A four and a fourteen.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Are you strong enough to do what you must?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>The small glass dome burns in my palm as I rush down to my room, pull out the nearest candle, start slashing runes into the soft wax. Jera, Ehwaz, two Tiewazes. Inverted Ansuz: bind but without harm. Kenaz: my light in the darkness. Nauthiz: a desperate need. Algiz: protection. Othala: a stable home.</p>
|
||||
<p>Raido: time to decide on something of great importance.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Candle, I can't take this anymore. I can't take Jett getting captured or caught up in a war or near-mortally wounded every few weeks. She's the love of my life. I can't live without her. I can keep demanding the universe heal her, put her back together in perfect condition, but how many times until there's more scar tissue than flesh? How many crises until there's one where I can't save her?</em></p>
|
||||
<p><em>I don't want to leave our future to chance anymore. Please, candle, take her to Sablade. Seal her inside so she can't leave. She'll be safe there, on that mountainside where one day our house will be. And one day I'll join her. I don't know what I'll do about her college studies or her career. But I know none of that matters if she's dead.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>My eyes ache. My head resting on my arms on my knees, I watch the candle as the wax melts, as the runes dissolve into the lilac liquid. Late in the evening, the bracelet still burning in my palm, angel numbers bouncing around in my head.</p>
|
||||
<p>I start to drift to sleep.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Is Sablade really still paradise if I'm trapped there?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Jett!" I startle awake. "Are you okay?"</p>
|
||||
<p><em>You promised me you'd let me be free, Lethe. That you wouldn't stop my comings and goings. That you'd trust me to always come back to you at the end of the day. Was that a lie? Did you end up changing your mind?</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"I..."</p>
|
||||
<p><em>What's the difference between this spell and what your parents are doing to you? A bedroom is smaller than a whole world, but it's still a Golden Cage. You're still preserving me for the sake of assuaging your own anxiety. What next, are you going to clip my wings so I can't go far from the house? I thought you were better than this, Lethe.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>A memory. She and I in a school. Her college? High school from a stress dream? I can't tell. But she and I are walking together, arms linked, palm-to-palm. She admonishes me for being so frank about my beliefs on gender. Not because she disagrees- she thinks I'm right- but because she fears for my safety in such a hostile world. Sensing I'm now feeling a bit down, she pulls out her Mirror. A sketch she'd done a few days prior. Scrawled underneath: "I'd rather be in Hell with you than anywhere else without."</p>
|
||||
<p><em>I thought you were better...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>A memory. I've collapsed on the dining room floor at my grandmother's house, right outside the doorway to the kitchen that has never known a door. Crouched under the table, tangled in the jungle of chair legs underneath, is the love of my life. She's reaching for me, trying to grab my hand to stop the oncoming ferality, but I'm trembling too hard for her fingers to grab hold at such an awkward angle. My blood is Niagra Falls, rushing through every vein, just as loud in my ears. And before I tip over the edge, I just barely hear her whisper, "Lethe, I don't want to ever lose you."</p>
|
||||
<p><em>I thought...</em></p>
|
||||
<p>Tears sting my eyes. I plunge a blade into the candle, deep where the flame has not yet melted the wax. One more rune. Mannaz: sacred union, balanced partnership.</p>
|
||||
<p><em>I will not craft another Inside or lay down one more blasted Veil. Sablade is meant to be a refuge, not a well-padded jail. I must stick to my principles and not become yet another tyrant deity obsessed with the carceral.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Runes that bind and runes that teach," I whisper, "send Jett where no gods can breach. Keep her safe in warding shell until she has all the way healed. Every last gash and scrape and bruise, you hear? And then set her once more free."</p>
|
||||
<p><em>This is the turning point. This is where I decide what Sablade will become.</em></p>
|
||||
<p><em>This is the moment for which I have been created.</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"Jett," I breathe, watching Mannaz dissolve, spell altered. "I'm setting you free. Because I know you'll always come back to me. You promised you'd never leave me behind. And that includes the boundary between death and life. Come back to me unharmed, okay? Do what you must, but stay alive. If not for your own sake, then for mine."</p>
|
||||
<p class="blink1"><em>You... changed your mind.</em></p>
|
||||
<p class="blink2"><em>You changed your mind!</em></p>
|
||||
<p>"I wish you had as much faith in me as I do in you, because I knew you'd change your mind."</p>
|
||||
<script data-goatcounter="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count"
|
||||
async src="//stats.letsdecentralize.org/count.js"></script>
|
||||
<noscript>
|
||||
<img src="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/p9.html">
|
||||
</noscript>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
71
writing/letters_to_jett/p9.md
Executable file
71
writing/letters_to_jett/p9.md
Executable file
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
|
|||
Of the neighbors who live in the house behind me, one of them works at a moving company. Occasionally he gets called by the company to recover a trailer: stolen, forgotten, abandoned on the side of the road. Usually vandalized, painted all black, as if the cover of night or any number of spray paint cans could cover up the blatant theft. Whatever remains inside the vehicle when repossessed, after the drugs and guns have been taken away by the police, becomes the property of the employee doing the possession to discard or keep as they wish.
|
||||
|
||||
*Just someone else's problem to deal with.*
|
||||
|
||||
*Just someone else's problem.*
|
||||
|
||||
*Just someone else's...*
|
||||
|
||||
I lie on my bed in a warm fluffy haze, like that after a filling hot meal, curled up in a blanket. The drug user abandoning his trailer was a good deal for me. Seven new video game controllers, some jewelry, assorted knickknacks. Mother would not let me keep the book on playing card divination, claiming it was demonic, but neither did I make any claim for it. And not all of the boxes have been opened yet. More blessings are likely on the way. A good day to be me, I think. A rare day where my mother isn't screaming at me, where there are no other obligations. Maybe I will invite my cousin to play online later now that I have at least one controller that hasn't succumbed to drift. Yet.
|
||||
|
||||
I lie on my bed in a cold sweat, bare body exposed to the chilling autumn air. A vision. The love of my life fleeing from... *something*, someone, building taken the shape of my old high school in lieu of a detail the Veil would not let through. Escaping through a metal shaft leading to a roof. A cut across the underside of her jaw. Fade to black. My phone pings. A sketch of her in jail, blindfolded, arms and wings chained tightly behind.
|
||||
|
||||
I sit at the kitchen table, spacing out. Another box from the trailer brought over by the neighbors, opened to be sorted through. Mother hands me fake jewels, angel wing pendants, glass beads. None hold my attention for long. Most slip through my fingers into a haphazard pile.
|
||||
|
||||
*My baby's in jail. My baby's in jail. My baby...*
|
||||
|
||||
Mother tosses a metal bracelet on the table. Two awkward metal curves on either side of a glass dome the size of a quarter. A font that can only be described as "live laugh love", large and looping.
|
||||
|
||||
> Perhaps this is the moment for which you have been created.
|
||||
|
||||
Two angel numbers face me. A four and a fourteen.
|
||||
|
||||
*Are you strong enough to do what you must?*
|
||||
|
||||
The small glass dome burns in my palm as I rush down to my room, pull out the nearest candle, start slashing runes into the soft wax. Jera, Ehwaz, two Tiewazes. Inverted Ansuz: bind but without harm. Kenaz: my light in the darkness. Nauthiz: a desperate need. Algiz: protection. Othala: a stable home.
|
||||
|
||||
Raido: time to decide on something of great importance.
|
||||
|
||||
*Candle, I can't take this anymore. I can't take Jett getting captured or caught up in a war or near-mortally wounded every few weeks. She's the love of my life. I can't live without her. I can keep demanding the universe heal her, put her back together in perfect condition, but how many times until there's more scar tissue than flesh? How many crises until there's one where I can't save her?*
|
||||
|
||||
*I don't want to leave our future to chance anymore. Please, candle, take her to Sablade. Seal her inside so she can't leave. She'll be safe there, on that mountainside where one day our house will be. And one day I'll join her. I don't know what I'll do about her college studies or her career. But I know none of that matters if she's dead.*
|
||||
|
||||
My eyes ache. My head resting on my arms on my knees, I watch the candle as the wax melts, as the runes dissolve into the lilac liquid. Late in the evening, the bracelet still burning in my palm, angel numbers bouncing around in my head.
|
||||
|
||||
I start to drift to sleep.
|
||||
|
||||
*Is Sablade really still paradise if I'm trapped there?*
|
||||
|
||||
"Jett!" I startle awake. "Are you okay?"
|
||||
|
||||
*You promised me you'd let me be free, Lethe. That you wouldn't stop my comings and goings. That you'd trust me to always come back to you at the end of the day. Was that a lie? Did you end up changing your mind?*
|
||||
|
||||
"I..."
|
||||
|
||||
*What's the difference between this spell and what your parents are doing to you? A bedroom is smaller than a whole world, but it's still a Golden Cage. You're still preserving me for the sake of assuaging your own anxiety. What next, are you going to clip my wings so I can't go far from the house? I thought you were better than this, Lethe.*
|
||||
|
||||
A memory. She and I in a school. Her college? High school from a stress dream? I can't tell. But she and I are walking together, arms linked, palm-to-palm. She admonishes me for being so frank about my beliefs on gender. Not because she disagrees- she thinks I'm right- but because she fears for my safety in such a hostile world. Sensing I'm now feeling a bit down, she pulls out her Mirror. A sketch she'd done a few days prior. Scrawled underneath: "I'd rather be in Hell with you than anywhere else without."
|
||||
|
||||
*I thought you were better...*
|
||||
|
||||
A memory. I've collapsed on the dining room floor at my grandmother's house, right outside the doorway to the kitchen that has never known a door. Crouched under the table, tangled in the jungle of chair legs underneath, is the love of my life. She's reaching for me, trying to grab my hand to stop the oncoming ferality, but I'm trembling too hard for her fingers to grab hold at such an awkward angle. My blood is Niagra Falls, rushing through every vein, just as loud in my ears. And before I tip over the edge, I just barely hear her whisper, "Lethe, I don't want to ever lose you."
|
||||
|
||||
*I thought...*
|
||||
|
||||
Tears sting my eyes. I plunge a blade into the candle, deep where the flame has not yet melted the wax. One more rune. Mannaz: sacred union, balanced partnership.
|
||||
|
||||
*I will not craft another Inside or lay down one more blasted Veil. Sablade is meant to be a refuge, not a well-padded jail. I must stick to my principles and not become yet another tyrant deity obsessed with the carceral.*
|
||||
|
||||
"Runes that bind and runes that teach," I whisper, "send Jett where no gods can breach. Keep her safe in warding shell until she has all the way healed. Every last gash and scrape and bruise, you hear? And then set her once more free."
|
||||
|
||||
*This is the turning point. This is where I decide what Sablade will become.*
|
||||
|
||||
*This is the moment for which I have been created.*
|
||||
|
||||
"Jett," I breathe, watching Mannaz dissolve, spell altered. "I'm setting you free. Because I know you'll always come back to me. You promised you'd never leave me behind. And that includes the boundary between death and life. Come back to me unharmed, okay? Do what you must, but stay alive. If not for your own sake, then for mine."
|
||||
|
||||
*You... changed your mind.*
|
||||
|
||||
*You changed your mind!*
|
||||
|
||||
"I wish you had as much faith in me as I do in you, because I knew you'd change your mind."
|
||||
Loading…
Add table
Add a link
Reference in a new issue