Everyone has favorite everyday moments, or aesthetics that happen. I have been thinking a lot about the positive in each day, because I have been struggling to see it. Writing has lost it’s appeal, but so has reading and other types of creating I enjoy. Everything starts to feel like work.

This happens every once in awhile, but winter quarter at Evergreen definitely makes these moments more frequent. It is week nine now, and I know that the break is just around the corner. Just a few more days for me to get through, but there are moments that aren’t work.

This morning as I was thinking about the fact that I have to present this coming week, and that I need to write one last journal, and do one last eval, I just sat up and saw the rain beating against my window and frowned.

Now flash forward about two hours and I am sitting on a couch typing this and drinking coffee and there is sunshine at my back. I can feel the heat from the sun warming my tattoo, and see the dust particles floating in the air. The shadows across my arms of the tree branches behind me, and I remember this moment.

I remember watching speckles of shadow wave in a calm wind with bright sunlight streaming, and I feel calm. Everything I need to do stills in my mind. Even if just for a moment, my day has gotten better. I sit up and start writing again, and I know this is just for a moment, but sometimes I just need that one moment. The one spec of everyday to make each moment float like the dust in the light, like little creatures drifting in the air, peaceful.

For me this is it, writing one last sentence for one last journal, and knowing all I have to do is get through one more week of work.

And the dust settles.

Oscar falls in love the way I pretend that I don’t. He sees someone and their life together flashes before his eyes. When he falls in love it is always head first with his heart not far behind, and his penis even closer. I have always wanted to fall in love in an equally dramatic fashion, sans the penis. It feels that sex leads Oscar’s quest for love, and my own path has always had an aversion to that.

I like to make jokes that I don’t fall in love, because I cut my own heart out. In reality I’m just uncomfortable with my judgments on the people I have tried to love in the past. I won’t give a rundown of every person who has left their hand resting for a touch longer than normal on my arm or the times I have made elongated eye contact with someone who made my heartbeat rush to fill my face with a blush. These moments don’t define my own experience with love.

The love I have felt has often been surrounded with hesitation and too little too lates. I never want more unless they have already given me something I could rely on, something to wander off with in my mind. It has always been easier to create what ifs and could have beens in my mind, the way Oscar created heroic rescue missions. I have not wanted to put myself in a place for people to see the creature that lives inside me. It seems easier to create something that won’t ever be real, than to let myself be seen. Oscar is admirable in that way for me, he put himself into the world to be seen and sought out love, where I never could.

The last time I fell in love was with a girl who wanted to fall with me, but like me had a creature in her mind she didn’t want to define her. We built the what ifs together and circled the creatures we had shown each other, while still too afraid to let them go. To let them no longer define how we sought out affection. In the end our emotions became too much too fast. There was no too little, and it wasn’t too late. Just too soon. 

So for now, I will continue to joke about my self imposed heartlessness, and hope in secret that there will be no too little or too soon next time. 

And that there will be a next time.

After delving into a project all about myself,and writing scholarships, I’ve grown tired of my thoughts. My metaphorical inner voice is pissing me off. Why is anything I’m saying important? With how I’m feeling, that’s a trick question it isn’t.  

This self imposed angst will eventually ear off, but since I’m here why not let it roll over me. I will fall down this grassy hill of self doubt and pick myself up. Ignoring the fresh grass and dirt stains on my jeans and the little drops of red from my shoulder on my t-shirt. Where did the blood come from? You might be wondering. Well, at some point as I was tumbling down I hit the tree of apathy and had to detangle my body from its all encompassing limbs. Eventually I escaped but it tried to cling onto me. Its claw like branches dug into my shoulder as I freed myself, leaving a wound that throbs to remind me of the false comfort I left. 

It’s time. 

It’s time to stride forward down the cobbled path I’ve created in my mind. Forcing a falsely confident swagger as the hot air of anxiety continuously tries to drag me down in a sweaty panicked hunch. Each street block worth of steps brings me to a slightly cooler patch of air. An air filling with relief. I’m continuing down this path but another hill is always looming. This one of self loathing. 

Which looks to be a much wilder ride.

The first time I really thought about what actually happens after you die was on Halloween night when I was in sixth grade. There is this church event that they do in my hometown as an alternative to Halloween, called The Reality House. I went with my Mom, my brother Paul, and his girlfriend Shelly. The Reality House is a car crash simulator, where you die and live out all of the processes of dying and going to Hell, according to Christianity.

You wait in line and in groups get put into a van and the seat belts are all broken, so for eleven year old me this was already pretty stressful. The driver then slams on the breaks and before my eyes I see a crushed car with three teenagers all covered with blood, and EMTs trying to revive the obviously dead teenagers that my brother went to highschool with. I begged them to let me leave, but the tour guide wouldn’t let me. As we walk past the fire truck and ambulance from the community that volunteered to be a part of The Reality House, you see a gurney with a body bag and a mirror sticking out of where the face would be and they make you stare at the mirror. The dead body is you.

Next you go to the freezers. They make you lay down on the metal table with wheels that you see on tv shows where the doctors perform your autopsy, and push you through the freezer to the other side to where a demon takes you to your own funeral. At this point I am full on sobbing and separated from my family because they divided our group up, and begging them to not make me do it. The second tour guide starts to take pity on me, but I am still forced to lay on the cold steel table and as the darkness of the freezer coats my body I feel like I am actually going to die. My body is shaking and I get pulled out to the other side and the lady promises me that I’m okay, but I knew I wasn’t. Now I am in the room where they have my funeral with a prostrated woman crying and begging the world for this to be a lie, and I stare into the casket and see a mirror where the face would be. I’ve stopped crying at this point, but I am so filled with hate for this place I just want to join the woman on the floor.

As we inevitably move on one room closer to me being able to go home, I see my neighbor Peachie who was one of the dead kids from the car accident, being tortured by Satan. They turned the heat up to 100 degrees, and I am sweating and starting to panic as the teen volunteers are screaming at the tops of their lungs, I just want my Mom. Finally we reach the end, and god comes out and tells you if you are good little boys and girls you can be here with him, in heaven. Personally I never wanted to go back there again, hell or heaven was not worth all of that. But I stayed involved with the church for quite a while after that, because of how scared I was of this forced Hell.

It’s hard to even write this much about The Reality House, it truly haunted me for years. I remember it so vividly, but even trying to write about it I block some of it out so I don’t sink into the panic that rested with me for so many years. Just because of some horrid Christian scare tactic.

The definition of Arch Nemesis is someone who was once a friend and is similar to you, but has chosen an ideology opposite of yours. It can also be considered as your main enemy, in your story you view yourself as the protagonist and they are your antagonist. The final push towards your own journey in your story arch. A constant meeting as you revolve yourselves and your stories around one another.

Recently a close friend called one of my friends who I had lost touch with my arch nemesis. We lost touch due to, honestly, the both of us being angry at the idea of being abandoned by the other. I chose the often more traveled path and drifted away; discontent with the way things were ending up but feeling like I couldn’t do anything to change them due to several extenuating circumstances…

Our friendship was a relationship that when it was good we thrived to the point of constantly being by each other’s side. We would fall asleep at the other’s place, and do literally everything together, even registering for the same class. But when it got bad all I saw was her flaws and none of mine. She was crass or negative or judgemental, none of the issues were owned by me. And that is how the friendship seemed to end.

Then something happened.

I reached out and apologized I wanted my best friend back, and I didn’t care how that happened just so long as we could try and go back to the way things were. She seemed receptive and we made plans, and then we both backed out. I felt this nervousness in my ribs, a sharp pain hitting my lungs with every breath. What would happen if when we finally spent time together instead of bright aqua joy there was a grey muddled color; filled with so many reds and greens from everything we never said to each other, and it was too late.

Was it too late? Is it too late? Does aqua not exist for us anymore?

I don’t know. But I do know there were ugly words said about me and to me, and I covered pain with a laugh and a “like I care” roll of the eyes. But at night… At night there were tears and anger. Laying in my stuffy warm bed under too many blankets there was hot angry tears, but in the morning when I woke up with the sheets and blankets thrown off of me and the bed, I was cold. I was cold from a bitterness that I have found hard to rid myself of.

Is she really my arch nemesis, do I feel a great battle brewing?

No, I am no superhero, not even in my own story. I am the observer of bright energies I feel myself pulled towards, and sometimes those lights stay and make up my sky. But there are the supernovas too big for my world and too bright for me to look at. An arch nemesis if I ever had one would be down with me on earth, attracting the stars and moons to orbit it. An arch nemesis would feel my gravitational pull and stay constantly colliding into the world around me. But my gravitational pull was never strong enough for her, and I think that is why I feel so bitter; our battle never happened, just the war and our orbit ended.

I don’t have very many memories from when I was little, mainly because I’m horrible at recollecting them. Most of the time I can barely recall if I ate dinner the night before, let alone what it was.

There are a few things that stand out through the fog; I see an opaque murky white mist and what feels like thousands of legs wearing suit paints with knee caps at eye level. Its the first image that comes into focus, and then suddenly all at once a wall of voices slams into my eardrums. My heartbeat is a light pitter patter, but it feels as if my whole body shakes with each beat. In hindsight, this is probably because I was four years old and so small you could see my shoulder blades sticking out from the back of my dress.  The dress was black velvet, and the material felt awful against my sweaty palm. My brother who was not much older or taller than me was holding onto my other hand as hard as he could. His knuckles white from trying to not let me get swept away by the rush of suit pants; and his face was flushed in splotches of pink from trying not to cry. It was time to leave the viewing and go to the actual service. My brother and I didn’t go to the viewing, instead we were told to stay in the room with food until some pair of suit pants came to get us. 

I don’t remember much after the rushing wave of suit pants, but when I asked my Mom in a hushed whisper late one night when I was around twelve, if I knew what it meant when Dad died. She told me, “I don’t think you understood, but you started crying, and asked why your Daddy wouldn’t wake up?” Personally, I think I knew he was gone. I just didn’t understand where or why is body didn’t still contain him.