#how am i feeling homesick for a 2009 video game

[perilegs]

no video game will ever feel as much like home as dao does. i saw an alistair clip and got mildly emotional over how much i miss him.

[nihilnovisubsole]

i feel like we say this every year now, but wow, 2019 sure was a ride, wasn’t it?

sometimes i worry so much about coming off as negative that i’m not emotionally honest about my personal life. so, as much as i wish i could tell you otherwise, i’m not really ending 2019 on a high note. for several months, i’ve been working on something that’s been a shambling slog of rejection, false hope, and a lot of wasted energy. i’ll survive - i always do - but it’s still been frustrating, and it’s definitely affected my ability to work on my other projects. in fact, i’m not even going to tally up a word count for 2019. i know it’s less than 2018. nothing i can do but do better next time. many of my friends have hit huge, happy personal milestones this year - engagements, big moves, dream jobs, graduate degrees. i’m proud of every one of them, and because i’m so proud of them, i wish i had something of that magnitude to share with them, too.

[again, i say this as a joke, not to be depressing, but you know i’m in a rut because i’ve been drawing more again. when i’m happy, i write. when i write, i’m happy. when i push through my forearm injury to draw, you know there’s something i’m trying to escape from. probably the writing.]

on the other hand, i don’t want to let the gloomy second half of the year cloud the fact that i really, actually, finally, for real put a novel out. i’d built it up in my head for so long, it feels strangely ordinary to have done the one thing i’ve wanted to do since i was eight years old. because i’m... well, me, i have to remind myself that it’s a real achievement, not just the bare minimum to be an accomplished human being. i did it. i wrote it, i designed the cover, i formatted the ebook, i tweeted about it, i saw it through from start to finish and made it real. even if it hasn’t made me an overnight millionaire. even if i didn’t publish it in the way i dreamed of being published in elementary school.

it’s also a sign of how far i’ve come that i see me taking a summer break to dash off a 38,000-word fanfic as a trivial footnote. [and a very well-received one, thank you!] i remember all the afternoons i hunched over my college desk and grit my teeth about only being able to write 200 words a day. i remember how hard i worked to drag myself over the 13,000-word finish line of the fallout big bang. lord knows i remember playing repetitive video games until 4 AM, stewing in the fear that i’d never make it in the only field i want to pursue. nowadays i don’t think, apart from a chosen few, any writer “makes it” the way we think of “making it.” you never get to rest on your laurels. you always have to keep working. it’s why you have to enjoy it. even if i’m not a bestseller, i’m lucky i do.

because it’s 2019, everyone is doing retrospectives on 2009, and it’s weird for me to contemplate even existing in 2009 and 2010. for years, i’ve thought about writing a nonfiction piece about what happened back then, and something always stops me before i get it off the ground. either i cringe at my memories, or i cringe at my nonfiction writing style, or i want to wait until i’ve become some kind of outrageous success so i have something more narratively satisfying to end it with. mostly, i recoil in horror at the idea that, to really write it, i’d have to be completely open about a wretched time in my life. after a decade of facing outward on social media, i’ve become one of those stiff-upper-lip people who is intensely private about the things that actually bother me. you kill a bad thing by acting in public like it never existed. if you write a navel-gazing essay about it, you’ve made it immortal. so maybe i will. maybe i won’t.

in the meantime, i wonder if i can meet myself halfway and learn to talk about my younger self with more neutrality. i’ve spent the decade brutalizing past-me with a spiked baseball bat over my questionable grooming, or my edgy, cynical attitudes, or things i said out of jealousy or ignorant, arrogant meanness that irreversibly damaged friendships with people who didn’t deserve it. bashing your old self’s brain in doesn’t change the choices you made. it just leaves you exhausted and covered in gore and feeling gross. i always said that if i let myself forget how much it hurt, i’d slip up and make the same mistake again. but that’s not true, is it? i think now the real victory would be to let it stay in the past and not feel the obsessive urge to keep scourging myself. to paraphrase a dear friend who i don’t get to talk to enough, “everyone is already cruel to teenage girls. you don’t have to be, too.���

around the time i graduated from college, i had a premonition that it would take about a decade after 2010 to get back on my feet. i couldn’t explain why then, and i can’t now either. it’s just a feeling. by some people’s standards, i may have already done it. by other people’s - like my own - i still have a long, long way to go. which is silly, because i couldn’t even tell you what “getting back on my feet” looks like. i just know that it has been almost ten years, and i have a sense that i’m standing on one of those precipices of change where you've become sick of yourself. i’ve started feeling homesick for places i’ve never been. i’m fidgety about my writing projects. i’m not sure what i want to throw myself into next. i’d love to move to another country, which is surreal and bewildering, since i’ve spent the whole last decade wanting to move back to the home i lost. what can i do with that? i don’t know. i want things so badly, i wear myself out. i’ve always struggled to accept that sometimes you just have to wait and see.

i thought about setting new year’s goals, like “talk more about dangerous crowns,” or “publish a twine game,” or “finish another novel,” or something like that. but to be honest, i already hold myself to such ridiculous standards that pressing the boot on my back even harder feels like a bad idea. maybe 2020 is the year to work harder without trying to prescribe what should come of it. i may not know where i’m going or whether i’m on my way, but at least i know next year, i’ll have something new to report.

[sonoflucis-archive]

I couldn’t sleep for hours because your eyes were burned into me. Seafoam, just enough green to not quite be blue and the whole ocean contained within. Enough to drown me.

Funny how something wet can burn, like too much salt dried on your skin. 

I wish I wasn’t this confused container stuffed too full of too many memories and too much else that will never even matter here, its only purpose is to make me as disjointed as the memories themselves, and if my own pieces will never line up then how will they fit with anyone else?

I know people think I’m fixated but it’s the first thing that’s been ‘home’ since I’ve been born, like I was familiar with every stone and shitty ramshackle rest stop. 

Everything in my head, in my memory was “It can’t be, but it is” and I guess I don’t know how to live in this world when memories of somewhere else are more real and right. 

It’s a lot. I’m too much. I’m too much even for me. I don’t even want to believe mySELF half of the time.  

I’ve gone by Nox since 2009 at least, and used the moniker of ‘the vermin prince’ even longer. I feared fire more than anything else when I was a child, and upon seeing a documentary about Mt. Kilauea I crawled sobbing and shrieking into my mother’s arms when I was only four or five. Video games were the first thing I cared about aside from magic in shitty 80′s movies, and I’ve been good at them since I could hold a controller. My aunt dabbled in Eastern mysticism despite being obnoxiously christian and told me that all things repeated... maybe “or something” etc. At six or seven, we visited the grotto of the redemption, and while my grubby little child hands ran along the walls, a chunk of rose quartz the size of my fist fell off into my hand. I hid it and kept it. Later on, my family joked about how the “crystal chose me.” I started to panic and cry at the suggestion. No one knew why, not even me. I think they decided I was afraid I might get in trouble.

When my dad explained to me  that his work was dangerous, I wasn’t worried, and I explained that his magic would protect him “like always.” They thought I was utterly hopeless and blamed my aunt for filling my head with ‘fantasy garbage’ when really, she only ever showed me movies and books  that she thought would quell my constant homesickness. 

It’s like. I’ve lived with this constant truth my entire life with a certainty that even the most faithful believers can’t really mimic. I never expect anyone to be able to level with me, and I believe that my truth is not your truth and vice versa. I never... think I’m going to find that home because it’s probably. Another planet or another universe altogether. I do fixate bc I guess I’m trying to fill holes and man this world always has and probably always will feel foreign to me. When I was studying in Yamanashi and the short time I spent in Tokyo were the closest I EVER felt to home. 

Sometimes I get violent flashbacks of things that have ‘never happened’ and sometimes it lines up so closely that I don’t know where I am. This is my existence and I have had to live with it my entire life. It’s not the only place and time and thing I remember vividly. It’s just the one I’m closest to. Someday maybe I’ll write down every snippet I can isolate. Maybe someday I’ll line up the pieces and they’ll make sense, but I doubt it.