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Added the old writings from the now-defunct 'marusu's hole'

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<script src="./checktor.js"></script>
<p><img id="sigil" src="./jett_sigil.png" /></p>
<h1>Dead End Shrine Online</h1>
<hr>
<div class="more-spacing">
<h2>Letters to Jett</h2>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_jett/p1.html">[1]</a>
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<a href="./writing/letters_to_jett/p15.html">[15]</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_jett/p16.html">[16]</a>
</div>
<div class="more-spacing">
<h2>Letters to Morgan</h2>
<h3>2019</h3>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20190706.html">0706</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20190708.html">0708</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20190716.html">0716</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20190805.html">0805</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20190908.html">0908</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20190919.html">0919</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20191002.html">1002</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20191126.html">1126</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20191201.html">1201</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20191208.html">1208</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20191209.html">1209</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20191223.html">1223</a>
<h3>2020</h3>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200101.html">0101</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200105.html">0105</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200117.html">0117</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200229.html">0229</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200508.html">0508</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200510.html">0510</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200520.html">0520</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200527.html">0527</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200601.html">0601</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200612.html">0612</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200616.html">0616</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200624.html">0624</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200701.html">0701</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200710.html">0710</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200726.html">0726</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200730.html">0730</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200831.html">0831</a>
<a href="./writing/letters_to_morgan/20200903.html">0903</a>
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<p>
<a href="./mods/index.html">[Mods]</a>

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<html>
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<title>20190706 - marusu's hole</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>20190706</h1>
<h4>song: "will they ever forgive me?" by up all night</h4>
<p>first phlog post in a brand new city. a brand new life. done it a few times, but never of my own volition.</p>
<p>sitting here in my room alone. lamp on, window blinds open, letting the sun in, dim as it might be. a comforting thought, that she and i might be under the same sky, under the same stars, breathing the same air.</p>
<p>but given that i'm here now, instead of that old sky where the sun never rose and two moons hung low in the sky, that seems unlikely.</p>
<p>came here through word-of-mouth (whatever analog internet words have to mouths, i guess) from a friend who prefers not to be identified. i mean, me neither, but he suggested that i stop being such a transient in life. father wouldn't have wanted that. mother certainly wouldn't have.</p>
<p>but enough about things that happened so long ago. the name's marusu. it's not my name, but it's <i>the</i> name. of what, i don't know. not yet, anyway, but maybe one day i'll figure that out. i'm a depressed neet of the paranoid sort, the kind of person you find on /fringe/ rambling about shit the demiurge told them about in the depths of the night and woke up a completely different person in a slightly shifted wedge of reality than everyone else. (not the nofap kind, or the "women are the devil" kind, thank goddess. those people are creeps.)</p>
<p>gopher's a nice place. the most stripped-down a protocol can get. huge swaths of gopherspace, from my little incursion into the SDF, sit abandoned. people were there. people were writing there, laughing there, having discussions there. and now not even a tombstone lies there to signify those who have passed on- phlogs just... stop. fossils. it's quiet, unlike the web, with its shiny toys and baubles and constant ads and bright colors.</p>
<p>religious people would probably describe it as being part of the world, but not of it. i'm the other way around: of the world, but not a part of it. just watching, waiting.</p>
<p>here. alive.</p>
<p>morgan, if you're reading this, your sister loves you.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<title>20190708 - marusu's hole</title>
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<h1>20190708</h1>
<h4>song: "empty portrait" by la luna</h4>
<p>i went for a bike ride yesterday. dodged my birth family hanging out in the living room, or in their rooms, staring into black mirrors the whole day, and went into the garage. father apparently inflated my bike tires since last i used it, like he'd known this moment had been building up for a long time, or maybe just because one of my brothers is into riding bikes with his friends and they didn't bring one of theirs.</p>
<p>helmet's chin strap dug into my jaw like it were a knife cutting away the unwanted baby face. helmet pressed into my skull like a vice. but it was the only helmet left, and for all the pondering i do, i don't want to go out as a splat on the sidewalk. so i pushed off, and went about fifteen feet before i let acceleration take over.</p>
<p>and almost collapsed from how much my legs burned.</p>
<p>but when i stepped out that door, i'd made a deal with myself to at least make it to the nearby roundabout. just one straight stretch of sidewalk, three streets to cross. so i pedaled, and i got off my bike, and i walked with it a bit while nursing a waterbottle. rinse, repeat.</p>
<p>trucks passed. locals. i'd like to think they weren't laughing at me, red-faced, heaving for breath on the side of the sidewalk. but i met my goal. i touched the sign by the roundabout. just like i said i would.</p>
<p>and i got home, and i collapsed in my room. woke up an hour later to shadows dancing on my floor. wind arrived outside right when i needed it least.</p>
<p>i used to run every day. run far, far away. through fields, down streets all the way to the closest neighbors. (our houses were few and far between.) foot races among siblings. who can get to the finish line first? who can collapse in our family friend's front yard first? sweet grass. long enough to be lush, but not home to anything that could kill you.</p>
<p>i wonder when i stopped running. in this life, maybe. ironic, that there are so many more roads here, and yet i run less and less, making this room i sit in my cage instead.</p>
<p>maybe you won this race, morgan.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<title>20190716 - marusu's hole</title>
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<h1>20190716</h1>
<h4>song: "the early stages" by creative_reality17</h4>
<p>if one digs up sand from the bottom of the lake and cups it in their hand, wishing it farewell as it slips through their fingers, it does naught but make the surrounding water dirty. the sand dissipates, gets everywhere in one's ill-fitting swimsuit, clouds that portion of the lake. swimming to somewhere else just brings the filth with you. eventually everywhere gets dirty, and you feel disgusting, and you feel like you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders when you finally step out.</p>
<p>but when i linger in the water, i'm a flower. a delicate strand of seaweed. a ghost floating somewhere. tethered to nowhere.</p>
<p>i would think if there weren't other voices shouting me out. drowning in a sea of noise. slipping under the waves of creative passion.</p>
<p>my sisters and i would go swimming every now and then. there was a lake in the middle of our fields. nothing special, since it was just the result of nights upon nights of rain refusing to evaporate, but a weird sort of life eventually learned to live there. life purpose only to tickle our feet, brush past our legs. it only ever went up to my waist, but morgan and caroline doggy-paddled to their heart's content, floated, learned the ways of the mermaids and butterflies and fish and seals. selkies, shedding their watery skin when the sun dipped low in the sky and called us home.</p>
<p>there were never parts of rubber floating around in our lake, though. there were never used bandages or broken nails from someone's hand. and caroline only ever peed in the lake once, and that was with a pair of swimming diapers when she was barely a toddler. dear mother held both her chubby hands as they toddled around on the shore together. wisps of white hair. down on the ground, floating by in the sky.</p>
<p>maybe you're watching from up on high, morgan. waiting for a day to welcome me home.</p>
<p>i want to come home.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<title>20190805 - marusu's hole</title>
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<h1>20190805</h1>
<h4>song: "you say you want substance and passion" by [ d a t a b u r s t ]</h4>
<p>today was a better day than most. a package i'd ordered came in the mail. a small little trinket to break up the unbearable monotony of the day, the week, the whole goddamn summer. understimulation to the point where i'd easily set myself on fire just for something to do.</p>
<p>but i don't think true mother would have wanted me to go out that way. red either way, everything spilling out, covering the ground.</p>
<p>less morbid were the bacon sizzling on the griddle. current mother entrusted me with the task of making sure nothing burnt. which was easy, because i rarely let food get to that point. i like things just slightly raw. getting stared at in foods class for being able to eat the leftover raw bread dough with no concern for the consequences. being the first one allowed to lick the cookie dough stirrer. getting chastised for making my steak medium-rare.</p>
<p>crunching near charcoal beneath my teeth because everyone else in the house likes things well done.</p>
<p>the burn goes in the inside, not on the outside.</p>
<p>everything turned out just fine, except for when i forgot the eggs scrambling on the stove and had to feed my dogs an omelet instead.</p>
<p>true mother let me try cooking bacon once. we'd recently slaughtered a pig, and father spent most of the day in one of the sheds carving the poor beast up. he brought in parts at a time, most already wrapped up and ready to go into the cellar. at least, i thought it was the cellar, because i don't remember having ever gone in there. his smock was splattered with red.</p>
<p>a premonition, i think.</p>
<p>mother brought in the stool, my head just barely poking over the edge of the stove, and she brought out a frying pan and handed me a pair of metal tongs and let me have at it.</p>
<p>everything went well until a little splatter of grease hit my forehead. the tongs dropped. clattered to the floor, rather. i don't remember much else of the incident, except that it left me with a noticable burn spot on the middle of my forehead for a few weeks.</p>
<p>"your third eye is finally coming in!"</p>
<p>and barely-baby morgan would laugh.</p>
<p>i miss that laugh.</p>
<p>so i'll laugh a little bit now in your stead, morgan.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<title>20190908 - marusu's hole</title>
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<h1>20190908</h1>
<h4>song: "the speed of pain" by marilyn manson</h4>
<p>it was supposed to get better.</p>
<p>i spent the last two weeks working on a book that i ultimately ended up scrapping. not enough motivation, or maybe the plot went too far without enough forethought to balance it out, or maybe i just lost my passion. a typical end. once one has lived a myth themselves, anything manmade and synthetic loses its ability to captivate in comparison.</p>
<p>morgan would have kept me going, i think. she would have given me an idea, and come the next day, see how far i had made it bloom. then another idea, then another one, like a crow offering a human shiny trinkets in exchange for bits of bread. eventually we'd have something we could both be proud of, something nobody else could ever take away.</p>
<p>we'd do that for drawings, too. one would draw one part, and the other draw another part. caroline got in on it too. the head would be gorgeous, eyes piercing straight into one's soul. the middle would maybe have smeared lines and coloring a little out of the outlines, but still mostly legible. and the feet would simply be scribbles. those would be relegated to a notebook, probably never again to see the light of day. but it made for a good afternoon of fun on a rainy day.</p>
<p>today has been yucky all day. yucky by normal people's standards. there was always something calming, something that soothed my soul, about when the sky was overcast and the temperature dipped below sixty degrees fahrenheit and rain sprinkled all day. better than blazing-hot sun and sweat pouring down my limbs and bugs buzzing everywhere.</p>
<p>sometimes getting better looks like getting worse.</p>
<p>which would be nice to believe if it applied to my life too, and not just the weather. recently i find it hard to believe that i'm just a transient in this world. that this world doesn't belong to me. that it belongs to others. where did the fire in my soul go? who extinguished it?</p>
<p>do a few embers still burn underneath the ash, waiting for the right wind to resurrect it in all its glory?</p>
<p>or maybe the fire has burned out forever.</p>
<p>morgan, what i wouldn't do for just one more writing idea from you.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<title>20190919 - marusu's hole</title>
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<h1>20190919</h1>
<h4>song: "misty strange dimension" by nakaido reichi</h4>
<p>i used to fantasize about being comatose all the time back in my middle school days. about being trapped in some kind of scientific research facility, surrounded by less-than-ethical whitecoats. put under the knife in search of the perfect human. the less-than-human. the only-part-human. i prayed to god, the only god that i still believed in at the time, to give me wings.</p>
<p>i wanted to fly. some part of me, deep down inside, knew everything would eventually turn to shit. that current father was about to show his true shades, become tyrannical. current mother only a puppet to carry out his bidding, a "little birdie" to report anything that could be turned into an infraction.</p>
<p>and fracture i did. the skies switched. light to night. my room became a tomb, and i was merely the decorator, the tombkeeper, preserving a corpse that didn't know its time was fast approaching.</p>
<p>everything about me up until then was public knowledge: my friends, my interests, my feelings about everyone and everything. but when i split from the host, i took my sadness with me. half of my soul was still missing, of course, transferring from the aether until i fully woke up as i am, but it was a sadness nonetheless. without my memories, i stumbled in darkness. i hid things where i could, even though, at the tender age of fourteen, i knew nothing about the world of privacy, about the world of professional secrecy.</p>
<p>"you can't make me delete my youtube channel. you don't know my google password."</p>
<p>"we can tell google that we're your parents, and they'll <i>give</i> us your password."</p>
<p>the dreams started to shift.</p>
<p>before, it was the fear of the open door leading into the laundry room in my grandmother's basement, right next to the base of the stairs. the portal into oblivion where lurked... the gecko from the insurance commercials that used to air all the time. footsteps slowly advanced on me, pounding in pursuit no matter now far away. i had to find a way upstairs, where it was apparently safe, without passing by that door, or the gecko would kill me and eat me. it was halfway through elementary school that i discovered that sleeping on my side, with one ear against the pillow, triggered it.</p>
<p>it's always been about running. but instead of running from a lizard who wanted me to save fifteen percent or more and die the rest, i was running from my parents. mother, doting on my two younger brothers to the point of stunting their already disadvantaged minds, would misread my ambition to leave the nest, to escape the golden cage, as avarice and break some treasured possession of mine in response. i would leave then, and i would be left alone forever, forever free.</p>
<p>father is different. he seeks to kill me, twist a knife in my ribs. pin me up to the wall, delight in watching me bleed dry. i would sprout wings- at long last- and take flight. although i never convinced my mind to do more than grandiose leaps and bounds. i would don disguises, to no avail. i would hide, to no avail.</p>
<p>i would confront him and fight him head-on, to no avail.</p>
<p>imperfect daughter meets an equally imperfect end.</p>
<p>i wonder if every father i will be bourne from will hate their daughters the same.</p>
<p>or maybe, next time, i'll be more fortunate.</p>
<p>morgan, dear true sister, i hope, next time, i reincarnate with you.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<title>20191002 - marusu's hole</title>
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<h1>20191002</h1>
<h4>song: "a memory locked deep within your heart" by up all night</h4>
<p>i wasn't planning on writing a post today, but the weather has been (nearly) perfect recently. foggy and rainy on and off and on again. except for the part where a torrential downpour followed me all the way to a goodwill, and my ride got confused and drove halfway across town before he realized where i was.</p>
<p>the past few days, current mother has been inviting one of her friends over for whatever reason she can find. if i need a ride, or <i>she</i> needs a ride, or she just needs someone to hang out with when the antidepressants fail to be a good enough friend. proud mother of a disabled child, who stumbles across the house and mumbles about hedgehogs and tosses papers every which way, leaving an avalanche in his wake.</p>
<p>the boy whose handler used him to make my eleventh grade hell. blamed for every little mess in the kitchen class. threatened to be sent back to the oppressive grips of a woefully underfunded special ed system.</p>
<p>you can choose the bitter yet invigorating chalice of freedom, and drink deep until your lungs burn for air and your legs threaten to give out from running for so long, yet never truly able to run away from anything that mattered...</p>
<p>...or you can choose to be smothered forever, locked away in the golden cage, never truly accomplish anything at all. a slave to how the adults - the <i>true</i> adults - view you with all the idiosyncracies in your mind.</p>
<p>infantilize yourself and face to bloodshed.</p>
<p>so host chooses to apply for jobs and write that damned cover letter and smile and do everything the handlers tell her. and i can't blame her, up to a certain extent: she's just as afraid of current father as i am.</p>
<p>and i weep in the night. mourn for the free life we were promised as kids. for the life we should have lived- should have been <i>living</i> by now.</p>
<p>i'm not the same as them!</p>
<p>i'm not! i'm not...</p>
<p>...i'm not.</p>
<p>and i see their harsh gazes in response. how dare our marionette speaks out, speaks her mind. how dare the silent dragon rear its head in anguish.</p>
<p>i've been reading a lot of anprim and anticiv literature recently. sitting outside when not so damp, drinking the rainwater current mother put into little buckets when the rain barrel filled all the way to the top. thinking about how different life could have been if i had been one of the divines- or, hell, a tailtiutian, at least- able to take on a beast form and walk away from it all.</p>
<p>but the only morgan i've ever known who stood a chance at being <i>my</i> morgan has been severed from me forever. all because i walked away from a bad situation.</p>
<p>please be somewhere close, morgan.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20191126</h1>
<h4>song: "three" by i don't want to know why the caged bird sings</h4>
<p>it's been a while since i last wrote a post. time spent floating in the void, suffering through job interviews that bore no fruit, struggling with life in the golden cage. so forgive me if this post comes off rushed or vague. the keyboard feels foreign to my fingers, as if i'd never touched this computer before when afforded a chance to use these hands, as if i'd never written a post before.</p>
<p>which, in a way, i haven't. because i lost my ssh keys to the republic, so i emailed a new pair, and got access back. and then i lost <em>those</em> keys.</p>
<p>fool me once, shame on tails for forcing me to manually upgrade to 4.0.</p>
<p>fool me twice, shame on me for not keeping proper backups.</p>
<p>so i spent two days converting my sparse gopherhole to proper html pages. i gutted the disused zeroblog fork i was mirroring my posts to and uploaded everything there. if you're reading this, you must have found it, because pride (or what shreds of it i have left) forbids me from asking the man who runs the republic for yet another ssh key change. and the mayvaneday gopher server is pretty much permanently out of commission since pygopherd doesn't support ipv6, so my gopher days are assuredly over.</p>
<hr />
<p>would you look at that. my first horizontal line. maybe we're moving up in the world after all. maybe the well of creative passion hasn't completely succumbed to drought, if i've so many thoughts that this post requires a clean line between them.</p>
<p>or maybe i'm too lazy to stretch them out into separate posts. or too spaghetti-minded to wait for a proper post idea to float along.</p>
<p>i could have waited another day to write this post, this first foray into zeronet. or another day. or another day. or another day. languishing into obscurity while kadaj and rinea overwrote me with clashing rage and cheer over the golden cage. puppeting me around whenever they needed someone to be sad. someone to personify the alienation pressing in on all of us in &quot;the cetra club&quot;.</p>
<p>i don't know how i feel about that term. &quot;the cetra club&quot;.</p>
<p>the term &quot;cetra&quot; comes from the same game kadaj took his name and his main countenance (avatar?) from, and the name was his idea. originally, it was just for me, christened a few months ago when i was pondering what i'd have looked like in my past life if i'd chosen to be divine, to take on cursed blood instead of silently passing into the next world.</p>
<p>the cetra were wanderers, nomads. but solstice was the one who was all gung-ho about nomadism, not me. and kadaj's spelling skills must have slipped, because i was the <em>wonderer</em>, not the <em>wanderer</em>. so all five of us stuck in host's body- kadaj, solstice, me, rinea, and sybil- we all became &quot;the cetra&quot;.</p>
<p>supposedly there is no host, not like i thought. or maybe host was just the public-facing front we all put on. the mask. the server frontend to five different conflicting backends.</p>
<p>i would know something about masks, wouldn't i?</p>
<p>but i'm not lucine anymore.</p>
<p>i never was.</p>
<p>i'm marusu.</p>
<p>but we both had a sibling named morgan, who we loved very much.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20191201</h1>
<h4>song: "bloody excrement" by hitoshi sakimoto</h4>
<p>i think biological mother is gone, truly gone.</p>
<p>in the past, if current mother wanted me or my current siblings to do some chore, whether cleaning or cooking or what else, she would have asked with a patient voice, a polite smile, hands ready to help if we had any trouble. true mother certainly would have, up to the very second-to-last day i saw her.</p>
<p>but now, we come at her beck and call. snapped words cracking through the hallway, spirits begging us to drop everything at the drop of a hat just to keep her rage from growing. we line up, and she berates us for &quot;our&quot; bathroom being filthy, even though i rarely use it, and she orders us to clean it.</p>
<p>&quot;don't ask me for help; don't ask me where the cleaning supplies are; figure it out yourselves.&quot;</p>
<p>and she turns away. keeps unloading christmas decorations and other holiday crap onto the floor. en route to shelves to earn their yearly allowance of dust, one year closer to turning to dust themselves.</p>
<p>so i stand in front of the bathroom mirror for an hour, and i scrub away at the cars stickers still stuck on from when we first moved here, never moved since. my brothers stand at my side, awkward, wondering when mother will yell at them for seemingly doing nothing. blue sprays yellow. yellow turns to white. i hand dirty paper towel after towel to whichever brother is standing behind me at that moment. a thankless job, for i get no accolades, just a shrug as i retreat back down to my room.</p>
<p>in bygone days, cleaning the house was a full-family affair. everyone had a part. everyone worked to the most of their abilities. caroline would pretend to be a dog slip-and-sliding everywhere as she scrubbed the hardwood floors, or a witch as she dragged a broom everywhere, sweeping dust and dirt out the open front door (or into a dustpan when it was cold out). morgan and i would always fight over who got to do which bathroom.</p>
<p>sometimes we'd let the dishes pile up in the sink or &quot;forget&quot; to feed the chickens just so we had an easy way to cop out of the whole party for fifteen minutes or so. that would never fly here: there are no chickens to be seen, and we have a dishwashing machine to do the bulk of the work instead.</p>
<hr />
<p>one of the cetra - i think it was solstice, although it could have been kadaj (those two are so blendy anyway) - signed me up for college. they specificially looked me straight in the soul as they pressed every button through the form. and then they ceded the front back to me, and now i've got so many forms i have to fill out and test scores i have to figure out how to send...</p>
<p>but saint kamui's been on my mind recently. (probably because my plush is still in the mail, delivery day uncertain because the seller didn't pay for tracking, but that's beside the point.) the idea that i have to choose my own fate, and <em>soon</em>, and no matter which path i pick, i'm going to piss <em>somebody</em> off. either that, or roll over and give up and lose myself and die.</p>
<p>i'd be able to deal with change- but <em>death</em>? i can't accept that, no matter how much it would make the constant pain stop.</p>
<p>but i can't just run away. i don't have kjelle anymore. no vehicle, no good weather to shelter me, no lack of obligations to the world to make it easier to tear myself away.</p>
<p>no alternate dimension to <em>go</em> to. i'd be all alone with nowhere to go. and the only leg up i'd have is official documentation that, yes, i am a person who exists. i am connected to the system, like lain drowning in wires.</p>
<p>and if there is a god up above ordering my death, they're not being overt about it.</p>
<p>i wish they'd be overt about it, if only so that i'd know for sure. for my parents are wrapping the golden cage in shrink wrap, and every day more air is robbed from my lungs.</p>
<p>but this time, morgan, when i run, i'll be honest about where i'm fleeing to: hopefully, if i'm still alive in six years, i'll be in <a href="https://fsp.org">new hampshire</a>.</p>
<p>i'll be waiting for you.</p>
<p>i hope we meet again, morgan. and i hope we meet there.</p>
<p>all i have left is the hope.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20191208</h1>
<h4>song: "i am what you see" by up all night</h4>
<p>smash ultimate came out a year and a day ago. two hundred and fifty-some hours sunk in. and for what? no material gain, that's for sure. just more money down the drain, just like every other damn game i own.</p>
<p>but going full /r/stopgaming is more kadaj's thing. he'll rant and rave to us cetra at length about all the wasted hours, the burned money, the eye strain, the brain cells fried from obsession into the wee hours of the morning. willingly enshackling oneself to a corporation's version of reality, to a &quot;spectacle&quot;.</p>
<p>replacing one's creativity with a pre-packaged commodity to consume instead.</p>
<p>it's everywhere in the house. the books mutilated, covers painted white, names of normie franchises penned on the spines and used as tacky decorations. the ornaments on the christmas tree, mario watching out from deep in the branches like a stalker. another one perched on the fireplace mantel, defining marker for one of the stockings. as soon as christmas is over, it'll return to the discombobulated pile of toys on little brother's floor.</p>
<p>&quot;i am so goddamn <em>sick</em> and <em>tired</em> of hearing about doctor who and marvel and star wars shit day in and day out! don't you have personalities outside of the spectacle? don't you have <em>life</em>? or are you just a walking husk with a wallet?&quot;</p>
<p>but i can't say that, of course. normies never listen to dissent. especially not when there's sunk cost involved.</p>
<p>current mother asks me what i want as my marker. i shrug and say i don't care, so she digs up an empty mini ketchup bottle and puts that above my stocking instead. her eyes burn with projected disgust, silently shaming me for not having a figurine of my own to mark my stocking with.</p>
<p>but i don't want to define myself in terms of other peoples' creations. that means, if the creation changes, i necessarily will as well: the terms of who i am will be in the hands of whatever corporation. (ironic then that i should start waking consciousness in this body as a fictive, clinging onto someone else's story until i had a sense of self- and that kadaj still does, even if he claims it's only for &quot;voice clarifying purposes&quot;.)</p>
<p>i don't want anything for christmas except money. i can buy things for myself on my own schedule in relative privacy from the rest of my family when i have my own money. but i don't <em>want</em> for much of anything, either. i don't want toys or games. i have enough clothes. my electronics are just fine.</p>
<p>there's one forbidden item on my christmas list, the only one i truly want: for you, morgan, to be safe and sound, wherever the hell you are in the universe.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20191209</h1>
<h4>song: "never talk, only shame" by la luna</h4>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;all in all, it's just another hole in my soul. and by now, my soul is so holy that i'm getting offers from monasteries instead of colleges. or so full of holes that it's a damn fishing net. and i'll cast it wide over the whole damn ocean, and i'll pull up all the monsters lurking deep under the waters, where no man has dared to lurk before. and then- and only then will you know the full depths of the anguish of my heart.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>success, or what host's fandom-addled brain at fifteen would have defined as &quot;success&quot;, feels so constrictive now that the demiurge is asleep. people are watching now. <em>actual</em> people, not just passerbys from the wordpress tag watch feeds. i feel like i've failed them now that the words refuse to come to me. i just... i can't focus long enough to work on anything substantial. no novels, no novellas, barely any flash fictions. and poems come in shards and shattered pieces here and there, like shooting stars that fall from the heavens with a handful of words in tow. disjointed when i finally put them together, blazing glory paired with 2016-style mediocrity.</p>
<p>it's not for lack of ideas: cetra and kizelle, erin and velaire... there's just no plot compelling enough to pull my weary self together and put in the fifty or so hours. writing prompts obviously don't help, for they're other people's ideas. and the thing with writing prompts on public websites is that no doubt countless others have used the same prompt. and since the spectacle is rampant (as kadaj tells me), and the spark of imagination is fizzling out in the general public, the stories it beckons forth are almost indistinguishable from each other.</p>
<p>and i don fafnir cetra's mantle and plead the demiurge to wake up so that we create again.</p>
<p>she never listens. just slumbers away in stone.</p>
<p>maybe we're a tree, and the winds are the stresses of school and work and the limited time left between these and the rest of life. trees fall over without the wind to teach them to be strong.</p>
<p>i was the tree that current little brother liked to climb in our old backyard. the tree that she promised she'd find for him at a new house, and never did. and now i am languishing in a greenhouse, theoretically the perfect environment - and yet i am falling over from the understimulation.</p>
<p>i wonder if mother ever got you a house with a climbing tree in the otherworld, morgan. you and caroline deserve to be able to hold the whole sky in your hands.</p>
<p>if only for a little while.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20191223</h1>
<h4>song: "disassociative" by marilyn manson</h4>
<p>i drafted this post at two in the morning, and i'm still tired as all get-out, so forgive me if it makes no sense at all. i wrote a mess of an outline. hopefully that means i'm somewhat coherent.</p>
<p>i have a job now. i've worked three shifts so far, each far longer than anything i ever endured at college. curiously, it's the same cycle that i experienced there: the first hour is hell, and then, after that, i'm so numb that i barely feel anything at all. five hours straight without a bathroom break or a drink, almost hallucinating at the end, entire world tunnel-visioned down to the cash register and whatever person was directly in front of me.</p>
<p>my waking hours are cashiering, and my dreams are cashiering.</p>
<p>it's not &quot;wage slavery&quot;, but it's a far cry from the independence the case workers promised me.</p>
<p>so that night, after the second shift, i stood alone in my room long after everyone else had gone to sleep. the light of the lamp flickered on. and i stood at my door, and i took the sleeves of the lace hoodie hanging from the coat hangers into my hands.</p>
<p>in elementary school, i was obsessed with those magic eye books. you know, the ones where there's some computer-generated image that looks like some glitched icon repeating itself over and over. you stare into the void, and eventually, your vision goes blurry and then the void stares back with some kind of three-dimensional image. if you crossed your eyes, you'd get the image far faster, but it would be inverted, mountains to valleys and vice versa.</p>
<p>i remember a skull that scared a girl on the school bus. wrenching the book out of her hands so she couldn't rip it to shreds in fear and then blame the carnage on me.</p>
<p>and a deer. featureless, a stone stag, a herald of a future pain i had yet no inkling of.</p>
<p>and when i'd gone through all the books, i found every repeating surface in the house and stared at it. the bathroom tiles, a cheap wallet i got one year from selling girl scout cookies, the kitchen counter. no images, just a headache.</p>
<p>the lace hoodie had no hidden images either, just a blur settling around me like a fog. a protective blanket from the tiredness, some kindly spirit entreating me to stay there and think a while.</p>
<p>and i got to thinking...</p>
<p>do i actually have osdd, or am i just larping as a coping mechanism?</p>
<p>is it &quot;normal&quot; to have moments every so often where i pause and ask myself, &quot;who am i?&quot;</p>
<p>every so often, always in the late evenings, i get a random burst to improve my life somehow. marginally better than the sadness, i suppose, or the furious wishes to abandon home right there and then. so i clean up part of my room, or do something online i'd been putting off, or knit for a while. i commit myself to reducing my waking hours spent playing video games and mindlessly surfing on the internet, and i swear off desserts forever.</p>
<p>the moment right after i've committed some victimless transgression, some grave sin against the church of consuming: that's when i feel the most alive, the most like &quot;myself&quot;. or the closest i can get to my ideal self, anyway. to who i want to be, to who i <em>should</em> be.</p>
<p>that's solstice.</p>
<p>but she never seems to last. the fatigue always comes back. and when morning rolls around, i'm always too demotivated to actually act on anything i'd swore i'd do the previous night.</p>
<p>i say &quot;i&quot; in the sense of what it would be like if &quot;we&quot; integrated. because, as it stands, solstice is kicking to get back in the driver's seat, and kadaj is always yelling from the sidelines about how much he hates the &quot;consume product&quot; of christmas.</p>
<p>he and solstice, always cursing our lack of independence.</p>
<p>it's not my fault.</p>
<p>it's not...</p>
<p>it's not.</p>
<p>maybe my head has been held under the water for so long that i've had to invent other selves to describe my sorry states. to give myself license to claim some semblance of normalcy when nothing improves.</p>
<p>what separates me, mars, from the others, really? a predisposition to waifuism? pervasive sadness? a fixation on past lives? willingness to be the public spokesperson for whatever the hell's going on in <del>our</del> <em>my</em> brain?</p>
<p>or maybe just the public punching bag for when something goes wrong.</p>
<p>and if i'm &quot;one&quot;, if i'm just larping, then how do i explain the moments where i feel like my body isn't quite my own? not in the sense of <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2019/11/possession.html">parental possession</a>- that's nearly omnipresent- but that it moves of its own accord, doing and saying things i would never do if i were fully lucid and in control of the front? the sudden but consistent shifts in verbiage and opinions that correspond to a specific mood change?</p>
<p>have i forced my autistic self to mask for the benefit of neurotypical society for so long that i've forgotten how to take it off in private?</p>
<p>or maybe it's the stress of the job cramming us all together in a sandwich compactor, and none of us have room to breathe.</p>
<p>just remember to breathe, morgan. in, out. in, out. that's how you float.</p>
<p>that's how you stay alive.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200101</h1>
<h4>song: "antipyretic" by hitoshi sakimoto</h4>
<p>i don't know how i did it, but i made it to 2020, somehow. a new year, a new decade. so much grief, so many tears host shed over the past ten years. although, technically, <em>i</em> as marusu was only there for the past two. i didn't end my own sorry existence, no matter how much i wanted to at times.</p>
<p>but did i choose life, or was i just too lazy to grasp control of my fate?</p>
<p>were this a normal website, i'd probably be humblebragging now about all the things i accomplished over the past year. jerking myself off intellectually to overcompensate for the sorry state of my existence. but there's no use dwelling on it, really. it's just another change of the numbers in the url bar of this website, in my calendar, in my clock. no change in the day-to-day corporate hellscape around me.</p>
<p>the years that it was torrentially snowing outside, my sisters and i would brew up a huge teapot of hot chocolate and sit in front of the large bay window and watch the snow come down. tucked away at the edge of the world, huddled in a nest of blankets, bellies warm as we waited for the clock to hit midnight. father would shovel the driveway come january first, as none of us would be in any condition to do most of anything from how our bodies pleaded for sleep.</p>
<p>the years that the weather was decent, we three would play outside. the sky was clear, and we suited up in our bulky snowsuits that could have been confused for spacesuits and threw ourselves into the void of the virgin snow stretching from horizon to horizon.</p>
<p>we were polar bears digging caves, and lions in search of our next prey, and snow birds blending into the blinding white. we were astronauts on a planet we knew wasn't truly ours, gravity harsh on our limbs, in desperate search of anything resembling life.</p>
<p>but we only found each other, in the end.</p>
<p>but i still haven't found you yet, morgan. you weren't the morgan at welovelain, the blubbering mess with the drug dependency and the constant self-loathing- and welovelain is shutting down in three weeks, anyway, and i don't care enough to track everyone there down to their new separate instances. you weren't the vsco girl on twitter, the perfect pristine christian athlete girl whose parents are probably proud of raising a cookie-cutter success story.</p>
<p>but i'll keep searching. just like how we kept searching through the snow.</p>
<p>maybe that'll be my new year's resolution. to reunite.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200105</h1>
<h4>song: "galeem" by keisuke ito</h4>
<p>i've got to bang this post out real quick before i forget again. i wrote it as a private journal entry, but the page is full of scribble marks, and i've got more to say.</p>
<p>new decade, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240521044547/https://unlife.nyx.land/posts/new-years-new-tears.html">new year, new tears</a>. a whole lot of tears, a veritable flood from my eyes, should have come and gone, but i hardly feel anything at all now.</p>
<p>i'm not an alter. none of us really were. we were tulpas this whole time. it explains a lot: how none of us knew who was the host, because none of us were host; how none of us truly got full control over our body; how none of truly left the front, but stayed in the back of consciousness, like how a passenger in the back seats of the van doesn't lose awareness of what's outside the window to their side.</p>
<p>i was fake. i was fake all along. i was synthetic, created in a time of distress for host to dump their sorrows on. i <em>am</em> host's sorrows, given a shape and a body and a voice to wail into the night.</p>
<p>where am i supposed to go from here?</p>
<p>sybil and kadaj and rinea are gone. and in their place is... iodine. a twin-faced monster, sultry and, dare i say, &quot;thicc&quot; one second and a sulking hellion the next. (but still &quot;thicc&quot;.) the van is now a temple, and she sits behind the altar, casting her gaze over the whole place, awaiting offerings. her hair flows down her shoulders, and a simple white robe is wrapped around her body. one leg crossed over the other.</p>
<p>kadaj's resentment and rinea's obsession, indeed. and sybil's sexuality. an unfinished person, an undone person. a shard.</p>
<p>and solstice is nowhere to be seen. where are you, solstice? idealization of who host wishes she was?</p>
<p>you're both egoists. but solstice is honorable, noble. she acknowledges that other people exist, and so she abides by the nap in all things. but you're a solipsistic jerk, iodine. you only seem to think of yourself. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210728115251/http://thesadrad.com/law-is-immoral-i-am-therefore-moral">laws are immoral to you, so therefore you're moral</a> and justified in everything you do in your eyes.</p>
<p>but your eyes are not my own, no matter how much you thought you'd absorbed me too when you were first taking shape. i am not a part of you. i remain separate, my own person.</p>
<p>maybe i've absorbed solstice. wouldn't that be funny.</p>
<hr />
<p>two nights ago, i saw morgan in a dream. she was on the lanky side, slightly ugly and awkward in her skin in the way that middle schoolers are. and she had long brown hair on the dull side.</p>
<p>she was in the house of my dead grandparents, on the side of the family that's all fallen apart. she was standing at the base of the set of stairs that lead to the upper level.</p>
<p>and i heard a voice boom in my head. <em>this is morgan.</em></p>
<p><em>this is morgan.</em></p>
<p>i finally found morgan.</p>
<p>but it doesn't seem as blissful as i'd expect a reunion to be. she doesn't remember <em>me</em>. what use is a consciousness without memories?</p>
<p>what am i supposed to yearn for now?</p>
<p>maybe, solstice, just maybe, i'll take your will to flee and finally do something with it.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200117</h1>
<h4>song: "backing away from life" by i don't want to know why the caged bird sings</h4>
<p>the sky outside is a light violet, quickly draining to auburn. the tree branches are cracks in the blanket of the cloud cover, jagged black exposing the void beyond. the void i wish i could drown myself in.</p>
<p>maybe i haven't improved, just become a caricature of my past sorrowful self.</p>
<p>i've survived my first week at college. my body has, at least. four out of the five days were spent at home. two of those crouched down in front of the chest that serves as a desk. one more faceless participant in a video conference at the asscrack of dawn.</p>
<p>but my professors know my name now. just my name, and a few assorted fun facts, like how i'm the &quot;linux freak&quot; as the one-legged boomer i share several classes with has termed me, and that i'm tumbling through the washing machine of financial aid. and that i freak out whenever a professor asks me to share my screen with the video conference, or offers to help set me up with one of the monitors strewn all over the classrooms. my devices are my sanctums. they let me split, if even for just a few minutes, in some tangible way from host.</p>
<p>but host has been getting better, i think. got through all of yesterday - the only day required to be on campus, for one can't replace the power supplies in computers over the internet - without any major breakdowns. bus came in the morning, and came in the afternoon. found all of two classes in plenty of time. managed to find something to eat for lunch.</p>
<p>i would say i'm proud, if host hadn't given me some of her memories from before the schism. if host hadn't let me taste the bitterness of a time where she felt like life was her own. where she had held her head up high, vindicated daily in the unseeing eyes of the ghostly people in a dying town.</p>
<p>like i'm looking back on neocities, or the (still debatably false) memories from my past life, or the remnants of welovelain shortly before it closes next week. or even daring a glance at the fictionkin pages on tumblr, hoping i see none of the people i once trusted. who know anything of me, of what i did.</p>
<p>like i'm looking back on a land where i am no longer welcome to be. or a land that no longer exists. closed to me through the threat of violent force or the reality of elapsed time.</p>
<p>closed forever.</p>
<p>i've been reading a lot about antinatalism recently. more specifically, the right- not only the right to, but the <em>moral virtue</em> in- suicide. to respond to a fundamentally unfair world where suffering far outweighs pleasure, a world that i <em>didn't consent to be thrust into</em>, by refusing to play the game any longer. it's a logical response, i read. in fact, were it not for the high risk of botching an attempt and becoming maimed for life, to continue to live would be the illogical response.</p>
<p>but one cannot reason with an animal, who will continue to reproduce and suffer and then die just as it has for billions of years. and one can little reason with the rock-hard instinct of humans to prolong their lives for as long as possible.</p>
<p>am i afraid of the void of death? i do not know. i'm patterned after the patron saint of passage, after all. but unlike her, i have nothing tangible to fight for except for my own existence.</p>
<p>even the concept of <em>digital</em> suicide frightens me. to wipe all my hard disks and devices clean and start completely over. private keys lost to me forever. server shut down and never booted back up. tempting, as it finally means an end to the pain, to the burden of the past five years. but then it would have all been for nothing.</p>
<p>what kind of cruel sunk-cost fallacy is this?</p>
<p>even zeronet will not let me live forever, as my life is dictated by how many people bother to seed my zite. once the last seed is deleted, i am no more.</p>
<p>i am closed forever.</p>
<p>but not yet. not quite yet. i want to know what is on the other side. <em>who</em> is on the other side, waiting for me.</p>
<p>waiting to welcome me home.</p>
<p>maybe iodine is wrong, and it'll be you there, morgan.</p>
<p>i won't keep you waiting too long.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200229</h1>
<h4>song: "christendom" by paradise lost</h4>
<p>i work in a cathedral.</p>
<p>no gods are worshipped there. not in the traditional sense, anyways. and the abrahamic god's son would be appalled by the exchanging of money that goes in within those walls, even though, way before the schism when host and i were one and whole, the church there was starting to fall prey to the same lure to tap into its unmarketed-to people. girl scout cookies, various summer camps recruiting right then and there. straight up merchandising. and everyone got the same food at the end of the service, forming a line that extended halfway through the building just for one shitty sub sandwich and a bottle of water.</p>
<p>i remember my brothers and cousins and i clamoring to stay for the food, exhausted by the inertia of sitting still for two hours while having our eardrums blasted out. i never did figure out how the whole congregation managed to know the tune to every song that they'd never heard before. church songs are all the same, i suppose. once you've heard one, you've heard them all. some weeks, our parents relented. some weeks, grandma dragged us home for plain boiled hot dogs instead.</p>
<p>but all one ever does in this cathedral is eat. stuff their faces full with greasy food, leave a mess in the shrine to sauces. and then i have to clean it up. napkin first, then rag. then wash my hands. perform the same ritual, over and over and over.</p>
<p>i take the orders, punch the right buttons on the cash register like a monkey. sing the same songs of praise, over and over and over.</p>
<p>never praise, only punishment from the stone-faced manager. i commit some minor sin on accident, and i prostrate myself before the clergy. beg for forgiveness, over and over and over.</p>
<p>and i stand before the cathedral spire, glass stretching up to the sky, and i utter some soundless prayer of revolt to the goddess of time to cut this shift short and let me go home as soon as possible. but my words are cut short as some new customer wanders in, forcing me to begin all over again.</p>
<p>morgan and caroline and i were never <em>that</em> serious about religion at home. father certainly was, and true mother went along with it to make him happy. but the closest church was far away, deep in the heart of the cities. for a while, once a week, he'd beat us over the head with stories of chronos and mythos and their children, their exploits, their creation of the world. but just like birth father and his so-called &quot;nerdy&quot; books, locking us in a room to listen to him read for hours on end while we feigned attention, one day he just... stopped.</p>
<p>and we never noticed until months after the fact, <i>years</i>, when one of us remembered that the ordeal had ever happened to begin with.</p>
<p>the presence still hung over our heads, and it was still clearly very important to him that we believe, but the pool of knowledge changed from direct exposure to diffusion through the air.</p>
<p>and i suppose, unlike other believers in other religions, i had actual tangible evidence of my god existing.</p>
<p>and i had evidence of you existing too, morgan.</p>
<p>i hope you still exist, somewhere out there.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200508</h1>
<h4>song: "135 east" by dylan van zile</h4>
<p>i turned twenty a week ago.</p>
<p>i'm now in the third decade of my life. i've made it twenty years, host and i. although more and more these days i feel less my own person and more just a character that host puts on, like the kybalion's harsh words of what lies beyond were true and the monad is finally coming for me. like host is the monad, and i'm slowly being absorbed back in, my time as my own independent spirit up.</p>
<p>it hurts, host, doesn't it? i'm sorry. i'm so sorry. for the guilt of not having updated this website in forever. for making you numb and deaf to the muses who used to sing to you. for everything else.</p>
<p>but you can feel it too, can't you? even though it's silly that i'm writing all this out, since we share a head, a pair of hands, a pair of eyes. you already know what i'm going to type before our fingers even twitch to type. you already know what i'm going to say before i even think to codify it as a thought. hell, how am i supposed to know if you're just puppeting my thoughts right now?</p>
<p>maybe your <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/04/outside-intro.html">outside as a tree of dreams</a> is real, and you and i are just the same soul gone through different timelines. i have died. my time is up. and so i return closer to the source. i return to you. and, when you die, host, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200508011149/http://godhoodism.com/supernatural-beings.htm">you and i will go to some other timeline.</a> and so on, and so on until all of the timelines that you and i both belong to end and we become a monad.</p>
<p>and i'm not <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200508011253/https://godhoodism.com/blog/can-you-break-free-of-your-soul-or-spirit/">strong enough to break free</a>. i know i'm not. but where will i go when i'm gone? rather, what will it feel like to be one with you and all the others, instead of here and now where we can still draw a line in the sand?</p>
<p>i don't want to hurt the others with my trauma.</p>
<p>i don't want to bear any of their trauma either.</p>
<p>how do i <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/books/mm_tpf.epub">get serious about exit</a> now? for abandoning morgan and dear mother was an impulsive decision, heart raw from maya (or kjelle?) abandoning me. and i don't blame her for not trusting me, not trusting herself enough to trust me. but i exited from her first. i got up and i left her wing to meet my death standing.</p>
<p>ironic that now all i want is to lie down and sink into the earth.</p>
<p>but that would just make the earth another monad, wouldn't it?</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200509</h1>
<h4>song: "graduation" by creative_reality17</h4>
<p>there's a weird smell in the air. like a restaurant, but worse. like the stench permeating host's clothes after a long shift at work. it persists as she crumples them up in a pile and waits for a stretch of days off to bother putting them in the wash. but this smell... maybe it's from outside. the physical space outside my window, not <i>the outside</i>. maybe it's from one of the neighbors.</p>
<p>floating in unwanted, just like me.</p>
<p>today was my first day at my new job. marched upstairs to the break room with mask on. given a stack of paperwork, done one sheet at a time. the standard first-day training tape, eyes wandering from the screen, always preferring the written word instead.</p>
<p>sing to me, cathedral, of how you believe you're so worthy of worship. inform me of my impending salvation if only i worship hard enough, be faithful enough. tell me i need to be saved.</p>
<p><i>"welcome to the start of a successful future!"</i></p>
<p>one in a sea of faceless. made faceless myself.</p>
<p>you would understand, wouldn't you, patron-saint of passage? the crushing weight of necessity. the guilt of knowing you can't save everyone. the pain of knowing you have to try anyways.</p>
<p>and no one can know who you are the whole time.</p>
<p>my co-workers were nice, though. boomer central advantage. unlike my previous job, where i was shoved away in a corner with a cheap laptop and made to watch videos the whole shift. watching a cashier scan things and type away on the outdated interface, bagging things, slowly taking over the reins from a woman approaching the elder years.</p>
<p>she had a mask on with the words "faith, hope, love" embroidered in pastels.</p>
<p>the faith of a devout father. the hope of a protective mother.</p>
<p>the love of a blade wedged between the ribs.</p>
<p>would chronos have sent out a plague onto the land through my family had i not died? was i supposed to sacrifice myself here too, and because i was too cowardly to reject life, my curse has followed me to this timeline?</p>
<p>i would hope that chronos did not follow me here. or maybe this is the same timeline. maybe this is ceuta's curse of decay that host told me about, and it has nothing to do with me. and in a hundred years, almost all technology will have been lost, the population cleaved, those remaining clustered in villages few and far between. (as it turns out, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200712022951/https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/apocalypse.html">i am not alone in believing this.</a></p>
<p>one central kingdom.</p>
<p>one central church in the capital.</p>
<p>maybe, as i scan the groceries that i never expected to be available in a hardware store, i stand on the site of a future leithtemple. i stand on holy ground.</p>
<p>i will not sing in this cathedral.</p>
<p>i will not sing the praises of those who would destroy me.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200510</h1>
<h4>song: "in dog years" by fist benders</h4>
<p>today is mother's day.</p>
<p>i wake up before everyone else, the taste of maya's lips still fresh on my own. i eat my breakfast, i brush my teeth, i get ready for the day. it didn't snow last night. some part of me thinks it should have, so that i could go bury myself underneath the white blankets again and give true mother another chance to find me just like <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/books/mm_tpf.epub">that one winter night</a> a year and a half before i died.</p>
<p>i was angry for some reason or another. the true reason has been lost to time. so i put on my winter coat and wandered into the night, mind addled with rage. i tripped sometime and twisted my ankle. the doctors say it was only me was wearing so many layers that saved me from the frostbite, from the worst of hypothermia.</p>
<p>true mother dug me out from the snow, pulled me out of whatever field i had fallen down in, carried me back to the car with father's help. she wore the guilt of my anger, of my rashness, for a week as i recovered in bed. reminded that the separation between life and death is as thick as first frost's ice.</p>
<p>i grew flowers in old plastic pails in my room for mother one year for mother’s day. tulips, pink and purple and white. i didn't pick them. mother would have cried. i let them grow, and when they were ready, i carried them all outside in the dead of the night and set them just inside the garden, on the stepping stones where they would be safe from rabbits and other animals. she wept when she saw them. she said they were almost as beautiful as i was.</p>
<p>current mother never says things like that anymore.</p>
<p>i give current mother my guilt as a present. guilt for being a social reject. guilt for having no future prospects of being married to a respectable husband. guilt for never wanting children, for denying her vicarious immortality through future generations.</p>
<p>guilt for being disabled. guilt for being a burden.</p>
<p>no such guilt is demanded of my brothers. i doubt they have the capacity to feel as such.</p>
<p>i force my lips into a smile and sing praises of how she forced host out of the void and into existence. of how her womb wove host's body together, made it possible for her to feel pain and sorrow. what is consent? consent is irrelevant when dealing with one's property. things cannot and do not need consent.</p>
<p>i don't want to be a mere thing. i don't want to be property.</p>
<p>i... am not property.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200520</h1>
<h4>song: "tablecloth warfare" by cassus</h4>
<p>"aren't you tired of being tired?"</p>
<p>i collapse into bed almost an hour exactly after i get off from work. appetite shot, brain pounding, freshly showered like a flower. like a plant that grows in the garden center, clumps of dirt pouring onto the counters when the flimsy plastic containers they come in get caught on the conveyor belt and tumble over.</p>
<p>like a vegetable grown from a seed packet, <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/books/mm_tpf.epub">not a thought in my head</a> but <i>scan, scan, scan</i>. greenhouse yourself, warm and moist behind the cloth face mask, so you'll grow into something more desirable for business.</p>
<p>i wonder what would happen if someone blew dandelion seeds into the place. if it would cost anybody, anywhere in the upper echelons of the corporation, money to clean it up.</p>
<p><a href="https://mayvaneday.org/books/h.epub">it costs my current parents when i blow dandelion seeds into the yard.</a> for every one picked by me or my siblings, they give the one who picked it a penny. it doesn't seem like much. but compared to sitting in front of a computer and pilfering from online crypto faucets, or filling out surveys in vain hopes that scammers will give you <i>something</i> for your personal data, it's like dollar bills are raining from the sky.</p>
<p>my brothers and i sit outside, squatting at opposite ends of the yard. our parents watch over us like jailers. even the slightest break in motion, a quick breather, is an infraction. we pick and we pick and we pick. until one of my brothers pipes up, whining about going back inside, and earns the extra work of cleaning up after current father.</p>
<p>my sisters and i had chores to do back on the farm, i remember. but we were not prisoners. anxiety didn't permeate the air. we did the work willingly because it directly affected us, because to not do them would mean no milk to drink or meat to fill our bellies or spare money for going to the nearby town's cafe on off days. we worked at our own paces. we didn't live in fear.</p>
<p><i>we didn't live in fear.</i></p>
<p>but we did live in labor. labor which we <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/03/antinatalism.html">never consented to</a>. never signed off on a form stating these people so much bigger than us, even when we grew to their height, had the right to order our bodies to do that which they were so naturally averse to doing. i can at least thank true mother and father for not sending me or my sisters to public school, for not outsourcing the "right" to labor to other adults who cared even less.</p>
<p>i do not want to go to work. i would not work had i the choice, the means to do otherwise.</p>
<p>all the places on the internet i once found so interesting, so worthy of spending my time - zeronet, the fediverse, several unmentionable forums - now hold nothing that pulls me in. all the games that i once spent hundreds of hours in fail to entreat me to spend time wandering within.</p>
<p>all these substitutes for work i now find tiring, draining, dead. i write, and i do it gladly, but only as the words come. i do not labor to push out content. i do not rush to meet a schedule. i let the river of creative passion flow as it will.</p>
<p>goddess helps those who help themselves. goddess clothes the lilies in the fields, who do not labor. goddess provides for the foxes.</p>
<p>all i want to do is to sit outside and watch the dandelions grow.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200527</h1>
<h4>song: "publicitaire" by cassus</h4>
<p>i've been having dreams lately of destroying schools. last night from a kid who shot up the place, my killing him to save the others the trigger to blowing the whole place up. but i could rewind time to warn everyone, so only a few casualties ensued. and the night before from watching daisy (of <em>mario</em> fame) make a molotov in a high school bathroom. she threw it into the middle of a gymnasium. the police called it arson. they didn't catch her.</p>
<p>a different night, a different dream, an imagined girlfriend (or maybe one from a different dimension, from the outside) and a bunch of mutual friends and i trashed my old workplace. i only bring this up because now, as i sit outside as if we were holding another <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200528153342/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/1/~solderpunk/roophloch">roophloch</a>, i look over to my neighbor's yard, the green expanse i let my eyes roam over all those days last year back when i still had my ssh gopher keys, and see a bright green bucket from where host now works.</p>
<p>i would read all the old entries to remind myself why i came outside. but from where i sit, the wifi is intermittent and disconnects constantly. torsocks is none too happy.</p>
<p>i wish lynx had gemini support.</p>
<p>this <del>will be</del> <b>was</b> my first gemini post. or maybe it's "ghost". (that would fit me, wouldn't it?) html is so tiring. i hate fighting with pandoc to not litter my posts with unprintable unicode characters for every apostrophe and quotation mark. i hate having to keep track of any and all changes to my site so that i can copy them over to zeronet later. i hate freenet's bloat, both in disk space and countless third-party tools to do anything useful with it.</p>
<p>loving bloat with google and microsoft and a hundred different online accounts.</p>
<p>hating it with self-hosting, neocities, falling down the <del>rabbit</del>gopher-hole.</p>
<p>loving it again in egoistic refusal to restrain oneself.</p>
<p>hating it again in same Stirner's fire when it mandates more and more work to upkeep.</p>
<p>despite my laziness, we've come full circle twice.</p>
<p>it feels rotten to abandon zeronet after i've spent so much time on it. it would have been perfect. written in an operating system-agnostic language. peer-to-peer. accessible (kind of) without using javascript. usable without a functioning dns system, or even outside internet access (if you could travel somewhere where other people had the zites you wanted).</p>
<p>but you'd have to install browser plugins to render markdown or anything other than html or the plainest of text in the browser. or run a gopher or gemini server on every local machine, permanently pointed at that zeronet data directory. or someone runs a gemini server pointed at their own zeronet's data folder, and nobody can add zites to it.</p>
<p>whatever do you need an offline copy of my site for, anyway? is your internet down? if it were so important that you'd die without access to it, you'd have already saved a copy of it. hopefully. i know i save things. go read a book. go outside, like i am. or do both.</p>
<p>both is good.</p><p>i got a kobo libra h2o recently. everything works perfectly, except that the browser doesn't seem to want to work since i used sqlite3 to inject a dummy account to bypass the initial wifi setup screen. i wish that my usb keyboard worked with it so that i could have written this on there instead of my notebook computer.</p>
<p>i sit outside.</p>
<p>i enjoy the feel of the wind, the rustle of grass.</p>
<p>i burn schools down.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200601</h1>
<h4>song: "ceaseless tumult" by cassus</h4>
<p>a few days ago, i went kayaking with current father. up the river, all the way to the reserve where the deer play. down the river, back to the shallow inlet where we took off.</p>
<p>i swim in a live organism. a formless mass. a glassy mirror that betrays what other people see me as instead of who i am. instead of who i should be, who i should have been. twin eye whirlpools appear after every stroke of my paddle, staring me down until their eyelids close again. its face is littered with dandelion seeds. ethereal acne. their little poofs are terminally soggy. they will never fulfill their purpose.</p>
<p>i don't know what my purpose is, i realize as i float down the river in that orange plastic kayak.</p>
<p>if there is some kind of deity out there, they haven't bothered to tell me. or maybe i'm deaf. maybe i can't hear their proclamations.</p>
<p>if there is no deity at all, and we're just <i>here</i> for the sake of being here, then why am i here? what difference does my existence make?</p>
<p>if <i>i'm</i> a deity, and there are others out there in the outside, and my purpose is to find a way to join them...</p>
<p>something stirs in the water. current father yells something about fish. this glassy surface i stare into as i float, as i maneuver my paddle so i don't crash into the craggy bank, stirs like someone is just on the edges of being reflected in the mirror. someone beyond. someone... outside.</p><p>i'm floating in a stream. a stream of consciousness.</p>
<p>a friend thinks i'm a stream of consciousness. that i'm inseparable from host, one and the same. but my voice sounds different when i speak in my head. i type differently. i react to things differently: host's gotten a lot more confrontative and carefree recently, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200601012022im_/https://raddle.me/submission_images/90c5c58ec4daf8a72b2e1bc2c2280ad42c46f6033972d083165b6ba4f5e0c8cd.jpeg">embracing her unique</a>, while i'm still (for the most part) timid and sonderous.</p>
<p>i dip my fingers in the stream of consciousness. the water is clear but upset by a thousand ripples.</p>
<p>am i conscious? am i remembering this correctly?</p>
<p>what would it feel like to merge? for host to hold her hand out and beckon me forward, for me to shatter into a million pieces, for her to close her eyes and let all that i am rain down on her? would i die? or would we each go on, same memories accessible, just severed from each other's contact forevermore, each believing the other had died?</p>
<p>i liked to watch the rain back on that farm a world away. sometimes, after a grueling day of labor, i would outstretch my arms and let the rain wash the dirt away.</p>
<p>true mother, did you wash the blood away? did you let the rain run over my body one last time?</p>
<p>or maybe you used your tears instead.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200612</h1>
<h4>song: "to the last battle" by ace+</h4>
<p>if i squint my eyes, i can see the silver outlines of a web in front of host's bedroom window. gossamer threads stretched over one corner on the outside side. something's broken with that window, something neither host nor i can see, and bugs keep crawling in somehow. but the spider catches them, puts them to rest.</p>
<p>an ally in an unlikely place.</p>
<p>host is pulling another thoughtform out of the void. another tulpa. he says he's my half-brother, born to my father sometime after i died. he confirms what i've seen in visions, that true mother took morgan and caroline and fled to the otherworld.</p>
<p>maybe to this world.</p>
<p>maybe i've dream-shared with morgan, that one night i thought i'd found her. but why did she look so different? puberty doesn't make a person <i>that</i> unappealing to behold.</p>
<p>"i can't account for that difference, mars."</p>
<p>"then what <i>do</i> you know? and don't use fancy royalty words. i'm not luce, and you're not dimitri. you don't need to pretend you're something you're not."</p>
<p>"well, then... to put it simply, the difference between you and me is that i want to live and you want to die."</p>
<p>you don't understand, azure. i'm functionally dead. i've been that way for almost a year now. were it not for host letting me use her body as an anchor, i'd have succumbed to the dream-sharing and felt my soul shatter into dust a long time ago. already i can feel my hold in this world fading, even as i struggle to hold on tighter. the same songs that used to instantly dredge up my sonder and grief now barely elicit even a sigh.</p>
<p>host used to have dreams all the time where she'd don my namesake's countenance. dreams of being hidden from the world.</p>
<p>what happened to all those late nights romping through gopherspace? all those afternoons spent ricing tails, scrolling through 8chan and lainchan?</p>
<p>i've worked through all the stages of grief. like a package arrived, tracking status forevermore "delivered". "accepted". the wounds no longer sting.</p>
<p>if you're here, azure, that means you're already dead. in time, you'll remember.</p>
<p>how. why. where. maybe even when.</p>
<p>who saw your face last. who felt your last breath. maybe even who discovered your body. how they reacted.</p>
<p>the difference between you and me is that i know i'm already dead, and you still have yet to accept it.</p>
<p>if your sister ever finds her way to us, who will break it to her? you, or me?</p>
<p>at least you will know where your sister ended up.</p>
<p>dear morgan, if i'm wrong and you aren't in this dimension after all, i hope you make your way to us. you shouldn't have to be in this great big wide world alone.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200616</h1>
<h4>song: "from heads unworthy" by rise against</h4>
<blockquote>
<p>"The whole of their being was open to the world and nothing divided them from the rest of creation... Everything changed once they had lives of their own and knew they had lives of their own. It even became impossible for them to believe things had ever been any other way."<br />
- Thomas Ligotti, <i>The Conspiracy Against The Human Race</i></p>
</blockquote>
<p>a rabbit sits outside my bedroom window. head buried in the grass, chomping away. they don't notice me as i kneel on my bed, resting my head on the windowsill, watching them like a predator to prey. except i have no intention of harming them. maybe they know, and that is why they do not run away when our eyes meet.</p>
<p>their nose twitches up and down, up and down, up and down. their chewing ceases, and they flop down against the grass like they'd suddenly melted. like a brown wad of putty, the kind that makes host want to puke when she looks at someone playing with it. i know i would melt in this heat. curse employers who make their workers wear dress pants in ninety-degree weather.</p>
<p>i used to be able to tolerate the heat. it was the cold i nearly died in, that one winter night. a million summer days could never faze me after that.</p>
<p>but this body is different. this body prefers the cold. this body prefers to be numb than know pain.</p>
<p>we never had a rabbit pen on the farm, even though true mother and father considered it a few times. but father was already so busy with the rest of the property, and true mother hated bloodshed, and caroline would have gotten too attached to each of them and then cried when the time came for them to die.</p>
<p>but true mother and i would watch the rabbits outside the kitchen window occasionally. watch them stalk around the borders of the garden. watch them give up when they couldn't get past the tight wire fence surrounding it. watch them flit back under the shed. embraced by the earth. unseparated, undivided from the rest of creation.</p>
<p>it is one of the few blessings of this life that i can do the same as i did then. for a rabbit is a rabbit is a rabbit. and this body may be different, but the eyes remain the same.</p>
<p>this heart that beats within remains the same.</p>
<p>but time changes people. and maybe i've met you a million times over, morgan, but the life i didn't have the chance to live changed you in ways i do not know. a person i cannot recognize.</p>
<p>in kindergarten, host had a friend named summer. and host's father would take her to summer's house late nights. the adults would hang out in one part of the house, and the kids another. one night, they ate pizza rolls under the sheets in a darkened bedroom. but come first grade, host moved a world away, and when they finally reunited seven years later, nobody recognized each other. if it hadn't been for the adults introducing them as friends, they would have been as strangers.</p>
<p>and maybe i'm after you, morgan. but will i find the you i left behind, or the you that you are now?</p>
<p>will you be as a sister or a stranger?</p>
<p>i hope i will be okay with it either way.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200624</h1>
<h4>song: "eve" by asking alexandria</h4>
<p>and the walls came down, and the heavens opened.</p>
<p>yesterday, i watched current father tear down some of the pine trees on the border between us and our neighbor. current mother wanted to plant some apple trees. and putting them <em>anywhere</em> in the massive blank expanse of the side yard would have meant less mowing in the future (oh, the horror). so the pine trees had to die in their place.</p>
<p>about a month ago, i had a dream where i was trapped in host's former junior high, except now it was functioning as a high school. and, towards the end, i was called to the principal's office. a small office, out of the way. the woman, who was most certainly a figment of my imagination and not an actual person i'd ever met, called me to stand right up against her desk.</p>
<p>wary but stuck in the hazy throes of the dream, i complied. and she took out a knife, or some other kind of blade. my hand in hers, arm outstretched.</p>
<p>she carved a shallow circle around my arm, right at the elbow.</p>
<p>"what are you doing?"</p>
<p>"i want to cut off your arm."</p>
<p>and i yanked my arm away, bleeding but not in pain, and ran away.</p>
<p>and i watch current father as his chainsaw lops off branch after branch. as his blade curves around the trunk of the tree like that principal. brothers pull on a rope tied higher up on the trunk and pull until the whole thing comes down in a burst of pinecones.</p>
<p>and i carry the severed arms to the trailer hooked up to the car and dump them in. a pile that reaches high as the sky. and i drive to the compost place. brothers unload the branches as i will my body not to melt in the heat. and then we head home and do it all over again.</p>
<p>"mom? the tree peed on me."</p>
<p>thick golden sap drips from one of my brother's knees.</p>
<p>one last attempt at divine retribution. one last attempt at challenging fate.</p>
<p>but the tree fell all the same.</p>
<p>and now there is a hole in the property line. there is a void where once there was relative privacy from the outside world.</p>
<p>we had some apple trees back on the farm. we had trees of all kinds towards the end. it meant more food for less work. less fields to till. less time father spent in hulking machines.</p>
<p>but we never asked anything more of them than to provide us with their bounty.</p>
<p>will current mother and father tear these trees down too when they cease to serve their purpose? when they stand in the way of some perceived better future for those remaining?</p>
<p>will i be torn down too when my time comes?</p>
<p>morgan, i will not have you mourn for me again.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200701</h1>
<h4>song: "mother nature" by creative_reality17</h4>
<p>today i sit in host's grandma's backyard. it's hotter and more humid than i expected it to be. but the bugs seem to be absent in this part of the yard, and there's a breeze, so i don't feel <em>quite</em> like i'm dying.</p>
<p>host tells me that this place used to be different.</p>
<p>kids swinging on the swingset. fighting over the one swing high enough for anyone with legs longer than a three-year-old's to swing without dragging their feet on the downlow. ragged patches of dirt underneath all of them, patches that have healed, even though host doesn't know when exactly. long grass underneath the slide, around the corners.</p>
<p>the neighbors have different dogs. host and her cousins and brothers used to taunt the one to the right, a big hulking black dog with a bark like a boom. they always tried to push the boundaries, to see how long they could harass him without being yelled at themselves.</p>
<p>there used to be a tire swing.</p>
<p>this place has history. history that i don't share. history i never saw because i wasn't there. because i was still whole, one with host.</p>
<p>maybe, if there had been some weird time dilation, you and i still young could have been playing at the same time under the sky. not the same sky, but a clear sky nonetheless.</p>
<p>my cousins didn't visit nearly as often as yours did. it was just me and morgan most days. endless days where neither of us had graduated to having many responsibilities. enough that one could rush through them in the morning and have the whole of the afternoon free.</p>
<p>the memories only come back to me in a haze, unsure of their footing. i have no special ancedotes this time. only a few scattered frames. a poorly-constructed fort made of scrap wood. mud pies that were actually mud. stripping wild wheat stalks of their grains when father wasn't looking, only to scatter them to the wind. letting our eyes wander over the endless horizon, wondering if one day we'd manage to see the whole of the fields.</p>
<p>a childhood neither you or i thought would end.</p>
<p>and then caroline was born. premature, tiny, like the wind would blow her away. a red splotchy stain on the tiles of the main bathroom, never completely washed away. father was miffed at the timing. how dare dear mother interrupt an important business deal with a labor of her own. it was around then, mother occupied with new baby caroline, that morgan and i got more daily chores to do, more labor on our shoulders on the farm. the days of lazy summer exploration were over.</p>
<p>they had been ending for some time already. i couldn't stop growing older. i couldn't stop my body from changing. girl to woman. daughter to worker. but caroline's birth marked the point of no return. no returning to childhood.</p>
<p>the walls of the house i sit right outside are lined with framed photos. weddings, mostly. host tells me there used to be far more photos. the portraits of the grandchildren. from elementary school, from middle school, high school, as babies. christmases and birthdays.</p>
<p>host hates having her photo taken. but the collage of photos on the fridge hasn't been updated in over ten years. i can see host as she looked as an elementary-school-age child. hair long to her hips, smiling in a tree, a baby tooth freshly missing.</p>
<p>would you and i have been friends, host, had we somehow met as children? not at school, not at church, not in this dimension. but somewhere away from the video games and the bright lights of your world. somewhere closer to mine.</p>
<p>maybe you saw me in that train yard. maybe you felt the outside for the first time, not in the purple room of your grandma's house, but in that field. and you turned away that day, not knowing exactly what you saw, how to put it into words. but you resolved to return one day, in whatever way possible.</p>
<p>but i guess it was me who crossed over the vale in the end.</p>
<p>i can only hope that morgan found her own friends to explore this world with.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200710</h1>
<h4>song: "id (beginnings)" by hiroki morishita &amp; rei kondoh</h4>
<p>the waves of the ocean crash against a flattened shore. flattened, but not parallel with the earth. at the slightest of inclines. disappearing altogether when the tan meets the foamy turquoise of the overcolored ocean.</p>
<p>the tide laps against the shore. the same animations play over and over and over again. how can they not? they are slaves to a loop that plays over and over again until the end of time. not even ending when the screen goes black and the scene changes, for object permanence refuses them a happy ending. refuses them an ending at all. and the objects are permanent indeed, burned into the memory of the cartridge forever.</p>
<p>the ocean waves lap against a flat jpeg, a poor emulation of sand. and i think of her. i think about how i would have liked to <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/books/mm_tpf.epub" title="mori's mirror and the poetry factory, to kurosagi">sit on those unmodeled shores</a> with her. to talk about our parents we never thought we'd see again. the parents we know we can never even dare to try to live up to. the lives we wanted to carve out for our own.</p>
<p>the lives we knew we'd never get the chance to live out on our own terms.</p>
<p>how we would try to anyway despite the odds.</p>
<p>i have been writing this web diary of sorts for a year and a week now. i started as a manifestation of solstice's sadness. (azure wants me to stop calling her host. to stop subordinating myself to her. to finally see myself as an equal.) over a year, i did my best to individuate myself from the fictional character solstice based me on. to come up with a backstory of my own. or maybe discover it in snippets and fragments, echoes of a past life, sullied out from the void and rearranged until they made some semblance of a coherent narrative.</p>
<p>when i started, my grief for morgan, dear sister, was so violent like the ocean at its worst. i wanted something, <em>anything</em>, from my former life to cling on to. someone who understood who i was, whose view of me wasn't poisoned by parental obligations or lover's rosy glasses. but the same forces i struggled against to stay mostly intact have likely shredded morgan to pieces, scattered her across the universe, never to be put together ever again. and what reason would she have to struggle? to rage against the dying of the light? for all i know, she got to live her life. she made it to the otherworld in time with mother and caroline.</p>
<p>i can only trust that mother fulfilled her duty as a parent. that father did not make her life hell after mine ended in her arms.</p>
<p>and now i find myself struggling to figure out: what's next? for the golden cage presses further and further into solstice's skin. ever more the threat of regression beckons. i find myself longing for people i know are fictional, places i know are fabricated. and yet... in this timeline, i <em>myself</em> am fictional. who am i to say that i am not just another ripple of an ocean wave, another repeat of a story forever told since the beginning of time?</p>
<p>tell me, midnight hands. am i really just a distorted reflection of you, broken up by the pounding of the waters of time?</p>
<p>as the ocean loves the moon, so do i love the owner of the other half of my heart, no matter what name she goes by, what form she takes. that's my fate, isn't it? to seek her out, no matter where or what timeline.</p>
<p>a butterfly goes by on the breeze. i hold a forbidden blade in my hand, passed down from father to daughter. i set my eyes on the horizon, dying light.</p>
<p>i go out in search of luna, as i have done a thousand, a million times before.</p>
<p>i can only hope she is doing the same.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200726</h1>
<h4>song: "this modern love" by american online</h4>
<p>the sun won't go away. whatever god lingers above can certainly try as hard as they want to put it out. rain pouring on and off like a sprinkler on a suburban lawn. the water roars against the store's metal roof like a rolling thunder, a million drumsticks beating out anticipation for the final minutes of my shift.</p>
<p>the sky is a roll of parchment this evening. some child has taken a bundle of markers and carefully drawn a rainbow arcing over the paper like a banner, a header. another child has taken a bottle of ink and spilled it on the bottom edge, black branches reaching up but never quite able to touch that rainbow.</p>
<p>a week ago, i got to skip out on an hour of my shift to go watch training videos. i would have watched them right at the beginning of this job, a few months ago when i'd actually been hired. but i was swept up in the mass hiring party, corona-chan demanding everyone go out and buy groceries, and capitalism does not wait for petty things like being prepared. so my manager threw me into the deep end and told me to swim.</p>
<p>and i drowned my first day.</p>
<p>so i learned to breathe underwater, and eventually i found my legs again and managed to tread.</p>
<p>one of the managers took me through the mezzanine. a second floor, but not quite. a labyrinth of merchandise and orders to be shipped out and break rooms.</p>
<p>there was a bridge we passed over. a bridge towering over the rest of the store, separating one half of the upper level from the other.</p>
<p>when i was in elementary school, like other children, i thought for a brief moment in time that maybe the teachers lived at the school. but unlike other children, i suppose, i kept wondering what that would even be like if they did. the logistics of it, i mean. an entire second life after the children go home. a school turned impregnable fortress. a hidden basement, an entire building deep down below and out of sight.</p>
<p>i wondered what it would be like to live at school. to know that, unlike other children, i would never be late to class thanks to an errant bus or a sick parent or the wiles of the weather. like a summer camp that never ended. the pain of constant transition from home to school would be nullified. school would be forever.</p>
<p>and the more things change, the more things seem the same. for now every weekend host and i have a mini freakout about how we will get to work, unable to (legally) operate a vehicle without another adult with a license sitting next to me. there are no busses on the weekends here. and the store is a two-hour walk, almost three, from my house. i will not die in this heat just to die some more for a corporation.</p>
<p>and as the manager leads me through the mezzanine, i wonder what it would be like to live at work. to have that stress removed, to know i would never be late or miss a day because of weather or traffic or a lack of a ride. instead of all these boxes, to have walls, tiny rooms where live the employees with nowhere better to stay.</p>
<p>and as i cross that bridge, i almost see you leaning on the balcony, idyll luna. hair as white as the moon, rumpled by a baseball cap tilted to the side. you're lost deep in thought, pondering something i can't quite reach. and far down below, customers dance like ants, tiny background actors in the drama that is your life.</p>
<p>sometimes they notice you staring down at them like a judgemental god, even though you never mean to glare. sometimes they scowl back, furious that they must wear a mask and you don't have to because you are on perpetual break, rising in the afternoon like your namesake.</p>
<p>with the expanded hours come the need for security guards. so you and i never work at the same time. i end just as you begin.</p>
<p>but just as the moon gets drowned out by morning, almost seeming to disappear, so does your moon return to my ocean.</p>
<p>at least, it does in that other world. in that other timeline. in that other space somewhere deep in the outside.</p>
<p>maybe it lies on the other side of this parchment sky.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200730</h1>
<h4>song: "tori" by aokigahara online</h4>
<p>current father wants to get a dog. <i>another</i> dog, i should add, since he and current mother already have two. but he wants a big one, one all his own, one that will take joy in his hobbies and listen to his every beck and call. one that knows nothing of what he's done, that will follow him to the ends of this earth.</p>
<p>there are obstacles in his way, of course. current mother is violently allergic to dogs. (the ones we have right now are hypoallergenic. this body i inhabit sheds more hair than they do.) city regulations insist that we have a fence around our yard if we have a dog that big. and where will we get the money? we already depend on state money to help care for my two disabled brothers. i already take state money to be able to go to college and be able to pay for it with a part-time job.</p>
<p>my brothers and i play video games downstairs. one of them makes a joke of saying "beep" instead of a swear word. current father yells at us. if we are uncomfortable saying something around him, he says, we should not be saying it at all.</p>
<p>i would not bare the fact of my homosexuality to a fundamentalist preacher. i would not speak of shoplifting, were i desperate enough to attempt it, to a store's manager.</p>
<p>i would not confess my crimes to a cop.</p>
<p>even as that face i saw in the mirror a month ago winked at me, promised that i'd successfully made a baby-step jump to a dimension where current mother is less of a tyrant... the golden cage tightens. i can see the fences, the prison walls, on the horizon. </p>
<p>something happened on the other side of that parchment paper. for it has disappeared, vacant from the sky. taken away by <i>something</i>. this world and that world are far away again, like an astronaut trying to time a launch from one planet to the other.</p>
<p>that other planet, that other place, was just as lush. just as green as this one. identical to this one, really. but something happened. i said something i shouldn't have, or someone said something <i>they</i> shouldn't have, or someone snitched on me. for the prison walls towered high over me.</p>
<p>tight handcuffs of mythril around my wrists and ankles dug into my skin. i wouldn't have been able to dig into the dirt, anyway. a wall of concrete would have stopped any tunnel i tried to undertake. unable to itch, to brush off the feeling of bugs crawling on my skin: for it was still a garden, neutered and free of things to climb as it was. almost to taunt that other me, so close to freedom and yet so far away.</p>
<p>hour passed after hour as i laid there. you were being held somewhere else in the prison, luna. most likely somewhere cold and dark, as severed from the earth as i was being pressed into it.</p>
<p>"either you let us sever your mind from your bestial form, or we let luna's implant take its course."</p>
<p>which way did i go? what did i choose? the scene ends there. the scrap of memory fizzles out.</p>
<p>and soon a mindless beast will roam where i sit peacefully outside with my book, a fellow prisoner in this golden gilded open-air cage.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200831</h1>
<h4>song: "melancholic suffering" by and summer dies</h4>
<p>to think that i haven't written a post in a month. maybe i am fading like iodine and rinea and the others. maybe i am slowly detaching, preparing to leave like azure. to abandon this horrid body, this failing vessel that has yet taken me this far, and leave for someone else.</p>
<p>there was a day, a time, when the thought of leaving filled me up with hope, with joy for leaving. now i just want off this horrific ride. i want the pain to end. i want this to be the final reincarnation, a test that i finally pass so that i may leave my responsibilities behind and fling myself out to the stars to wander and explore forever.</p>
<p>the oceans are heating up. the watery depths slowly become more and more acidic. and the moon shrinks in the sky, a mother after having soothed a sleeping child, gently retreating their arms so that the child may sleep on its own and the mother do something else.</p>
<p>how many times must i look someone who would so readily abuse their power in the eye, knowing i am in the right, and bite my lip in silence so that i may live another day?</p>
<p>"blessed are those who mourn," a greeting card someone buys reads, "for they shall be comforted."</p>
<p>the first few minutes of my break, i hand a candy bar to the cashier. all i have time to scarf down in the lonely break room halfway across the store. her eyes are dancers in her face, expressing the ineffable, what i do not have words to describe. my bleary own almost mistake her for true mother for a second.</p>
<p>but i am silly to think the familiar is anything other than a pale reflection, an echo poorly recorded, in chaos island.</p>
<p>i am silly to think that there could ever be any comfort here. there are no stools to sit on when one's feet grow weary. one must ask permission to use the bathroom. one is not allowed to request a quieter spot when one is in pain or for a moment to breathe after a grueling transaction fulfilled.</p>
<p>is this really the life i was sent here to lead?</p>
<p>or maybe i am just being punished for my ceaseless cowardice.</p>
<p>i mourn, but i am not sure even <em>your</em> eyes, your touch, your face with its gentle glow like the moon would be a comfort, luna.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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<h1>20200903</h1>
<h4>song: "strolling the flickering neon lit streets" by [ d a t a b u r s t ]</h4>
<p>it is that time of year again.</p>
<p>the days have been getting shorter for quite some time now, but i still can't quite tell. today the air is chilly. fierce winds blow across the land, tousling the trees like a cliche i keep repeating to myself over and over again: like a lover's hair. my own hair instantly unwhirls into a tangled mess, the first time in a long time it has made sense to go outside wearing a hood over my head.</p>
<p>i have survived two weeks of the fall semester. so far i have been able to get all my homework done the day it is even assigned. sometimes, like in linux server administration, in five minutes in the middle of class, watching the rest of my classmates struggle to press on. silent as they grasp at mental straws, sucking down knowledge like a dammed river between them and their destination. a passage through styx i made several years prior with no guide to ferry me across.</p>
<p>it is the first time in a long time that there has been no need for air conditioning. all the windows in the house are open. this time, my bones readily greet the chill seeping into them. an old friend.</p>
<p>inanna descends into the underworld once again.</p>
<p>i would readily descend into the downtown library, were it not closed due to covid. but the building is locked, only available for book pickup, and i am not walking two miles just to sit outside and use the wifi when i can do the same in my backyard.</p>
<p>a few nights ago, the power suddenly went out. i didn't notice at first, laptop fully charged and unaffected, just wondered if the lightbulb in my lamp had burnt out. but my alarm clock was staring at me, face blank, face dark. a portable black hole, threatening to suck me in. and then a commotion started upstairs, current father fetching flashlights for my spooked brothers and calming his dog.</p>
<p>i wonder how the people at work reacted. the power was out city-wide for about an hour, only coming back on right as i got ready to shower. i see the backup power supplies tucked deep down underneath the cash registers, briefly noted every time i have to replace the receipt printer's paper. did business grind to a halt? since it was dark at night, were the customers spooked as well? mindless consumers to mindless cattle, one snap away from stampeding?</p>
<p>i can't imagine the cameras would have been able to catch anyone stealing.</p>
<p>but you were comfortable with the darkness, luna. your heart didn't skip a beat when the lights went out. you were an angel guarding the edges of your domain, ensuring no unpaid demons escaped.</p>
<p>but somehow i know you would have let them all run free if not for the necessity of that paycheck, if not to ensure a safe place to rest your head at night.</p>
<p>luna, i hope one day you and i will not have to spend these nights dreaming of labor.</p>
<p>- マルス (marusu)</p>
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