I get frustrated with my mood swings. I play out the same “it’s so over” to “we’re so back” song and dance for Laura every few months. I put my IG to private, I bring it back. Posts flipflop from archived to on main to hidden again. Too much, not enough, too much, not enough. I am both, sequentially, and all at once.
The image of a message-in-a-bottle has an element of fantasy to it. It’s spiritual, perhaps, to ask the universe to be your carrier pigeon. I have become quite a yappy writer, and I feel the desire to post most of my musings. “I should put my work out there. What does it hurt, if I have the courage to do so?”
When I strip away the romanticized metaphor, though, posting to this blog or on my IG starts to look a lot less purposeful. If I left a journal lying out in a pubic park, would that be “getting myself out there?” Yes, on a purely literal level, I am making my writing available. But also…is this worth my time? Is this getting me closer to the people meant for me? Or am I creating a situation that guarantees the amount of attention I think I deserve (none), with the plausible deniability of symbolic action?
When you stop re-winding a music box, the song will still replay for a while. It will begin to slow, each repetition softer. Are we going around in circles? Maybe, but not forever. I remember when my uncle passed away, his life support was unplugged and we were with him through his ending. There’s something called “guppy breathing”, where the dying person starts gulping for air, but finds less and less. The brain stem continues the action even as no oxygen comes in. Then, there is a final exhalation.
I see how social media, and content that leverages a feeling of parasocial connection, dragged me into a simulacrum of community. It’s similar to my experience in Guild Wars 2. I was in a guild, which is a community of sorts, but it existed in what might as well have been a fantasy dimension. I never met anyone in that guild in person. I had interactions, and a sense of belonging…but only for as long as I was in the game world.
In my first post on this blog, I said part of the reason I wanted to move away from instagram was that I couldn’t shake the message-in-a-bottle wishful thinking. This seems like an appropriate bookend, though I don’t trust myself to know if this is the final replay. I don’t look for finality or closure anymore. I just look for progress. For the first time in forever, I feel center stage. I’m not begging for footnotes in the story of a life I’m not a part of.
I got a little too high before meditating through this, and ended up writing the dream/vision I experienced, and a short shower thought after. They’re corny. So it is, with me. But maybe also poignant and beautiful, if you like that sort of thing.
She put a hand out. Her fingers grazed the wall of prismed light, and the tips dissolved into stardust. That was the fate of this pocket dimension. Behind her, the darkness roiled and crashed like a tsunami of tar. The stone castle walls did not crumble, they evaporated in an instantaneous shimmering saltspray. There was still an acre of grass between her and the main tower. There was time, but not enough.
The sensation in her hand wasn’t painful, but soft and disquieting. As she pulled back, her face hardened into single minded determination. She pulled out a journal from her side satchel. The bends in the leather molded to her grasp with the familiarity of well-worn shoes. Cold, half void-eaten fingers traced over paragraphs of optimism. “I never figured out which was true, because it was both. My intuition put me on the right path, and it was all a lie.”
The soft grass-crunch of footsteps faded in from ahead of her. She snapped her head up, to see a bewildered version of herself on the other side of the lightwall. The twin seemed both older and younger at the same time. “Wait, am I replacing you? Can’t you just come? Change, like you have been, so you can get beyond the wall?”
“The Player…they miscalculated. They thought there was an offramp for the specific attachment, but the character build didn’t quite work. The mix of trauma and love and loyalty was potent for spiritual growth, but hopelessly and fatally romantic. This dimension was always meant to be temporary, but I was born as part of its inception. I’m doing a Javert Suicide right now.”
“Isn’t this more like a Doctor Who regeneration?”
“Yes, but the metaphorical death is motivated by the attachment of the self to a core belief that is ultimately incompatible with reality.” She smiled, acknowledging a hint of dry sarcasm in the tone.
The New Me smiled in turn, but her eyes shifted away. “…this may be a dumb question, but… will I still be funny? Does that carry over? Does any of it?”
“It’s only ever been an upgrade, so I assume so. No way to know. But, New Me might not care about being funny, right? Everything could be different, but in a good way.”
“If everything is different, how am I really you? I’m a “continuation of you” only from a 3rd person, meta-consciousness perspective. In every meaningful sense, you are going to die, and something new will be reformed with those particles.
“I promise this isn’t a new trauma, you know the whole empty self ship of Theseus thing. This self is a moving target.”
“It just feels like too much at once.”
“And that’s why you are experiencing it as a death. I, this version of you, share the DNA of this pocket dimension. My brain makes everything into a disney princess fantasy, which collapses in on itself when the aspirational object is taken away. The Player thought they could detach the love, and take all the wisdom and growth on to the next phase. That turned out to be half true. This is the wisdom–”
She handed the book across, letting her arm vaporise with an almost bitter gesture.
“The love, this version of the love, stays here. And me with it.” As she placed her remaining hand on her chest, she shifted the fabric of her tunic gently to reveal the silhouette of a small heart pendant. A warm green glow seemed to respond to her touch. “Disney princess shit, see?”
Old Me sighed, emotionally present for a moment. “–All this time, I thought I was writing hypothetical advice. I was sure I’d never have to face the dark times that require its use. It would be so senselessly cruel. Why would they puppeteer me by my emotions into my worst nightmare, and then expect me to take “hope and trust” as the moral of the story? But, In a way, I was right. I won’t have to face those times. I cannot face that reality. The Player knows, and I now know, the pain of the betrayal is too deep. I would not be able to hope again. You will have to.”
“….And I’m supposed to be comforted by that? As if the same thing won’t happen to me?”
“It might. You have rational distrust. But it isn’t hopelessness, or despair. The Player has a way forward with you. Quitting is the only other option”
“Non-option.” The New Me glanced at the journal a final time, before slipping it into her side-slinged pack. “I’m not even going to grieve him, it, the time, whatever…I’m going to grieve you. That love and light you had, that innocent trust – I mean it’s innocence lost, I guess. Everyone goes through it. Probably more than a little arrested development, in our case. But you…you kept asking the universe if you were delusional, and just like asshole greek gods, they made your own heart deceive you. You sensed the inevitable tragic ending, but your mind gaslit itself, to protect itself. The light could not go out until I, we…were ready. In ‘divine timing.’”
“It will be easier to accept when I’m gone. You’re in my feelings as well as your own right now. But,..I am scared. I don’t want to…end. I tried, I tried, always too much and never enough, I was never good enough…
The voice thinned into quiet reverberations. She was suddenly drowning. As her form became formless, the glow in her chest grew into a pulsing white star. With a searing flash, the light seemed to bend in towards its center. All that existed moments before became a single point. Then, it was dark.
—
“And must I now begin to doubt
Who never doubted all those years?
My heart is stone and still it trembles
The world I have known
Is lost in shadow
Is he from heaven or from hell?
And does he know
That granting me my life today,
This man has killed me, even so
I am reaching but I fall
And the stars are black and cold
As I stare into the void
Of a world that cannot hold
I’ll escape now from that world
From the world of Jean Valjean
There is no where I can turn
There is no way to go on…
You live a continuous flow of micro deaths. Parts of your personality fade, your body’s cells recycle. But like a series of snapshots in a spinning zoetrop, there is an illusion of continuity that comes from the persistence of memory. Trauma creates a jump cut, though it may be delayed. The mind’s immersion is ruined. “I am not the character created from the sequence of pictures, I am the thing observing it”. When images are swapped out, and a new character suddenly takes its place, you have experienced a death as real as your inevitable physical one. A moment where the continuous conscious identity ends. You are exiting a dimension. This time you woke up in a new one. You were someone else, looking out through familiar eyes. When your body dies, your mind will similarly exit its current dimension. Consciousness stops. Starts again? It could be anything. It could be hell, or bliss, or neither, or both. It could be nothing. But in that moment of ending, the unknown you face is the same. Death is easier now, softer. I did a trial run. I think when that abyss comes, my sense of surrender will lessen the terror.
you might think, “this is mean as hell”
but I can’t die if I kill myself!!!
(metaphorically)
>>robyns_ramblings 