System pop & whiplash switches.
It felt like chiropractic manoeuvres sound. A pop, shift and the immediate whiplash after. Our presets clicked like a joint finding its socket. We could move. In and out, we were able to flow in and out of that forward space, a whirlpool forming closer to the outside. Some sucked in against their will, many happy to feel our common body, like checking in on a generally absent friend. Our réservoir pathways didn't split; there was no empty space left between. Our constellation of alters rushed in to fill it. The freefall forward felt like a current.
It was fun. It felt open, clear, breathable. Those who settled for the following hours felt clean, free. "I've always loved this world the way I've always loved the one we made for ourselves."
"Ours is a bit better though. It's further."
There is so much I can't sit with. My attempts to find a reason to doubt myself, my memory, are desperate.
"I wish I was cool. I wish I'd made up these stories to sound cool." "We fixated." "We learned not to care whether it was real or not. Whether we were real or not." "It never mattered to us. Because we'd lived it. It's too real to ignore."
I don't want to lose my composure. I don't want to ignore the spread of doubt that looms over my way of perceiving myself. My body is awkward, my demeanor is off. I view myself with suspicion. My memory is something I never want to solve.
"You don't have to."
All those nights. I feel vengeful. I feel like I've been lit on fire. It's not compressing me tonight, it's giving me permission to be full of life. Part of my healing is acknowledging that there will never be justice, at least not in the binary way people might expect. I don't want punishment. I want to be free. My mind is tailored by pain and violence, but it would be nothing without the creativity that is inseparable from its making. I will live with an altered, patched up mind if it means I can life a full life.
I will know love like few people do. I will know it as salvation in a perfectly agnostic way. I will know it as the anchor I finally found after bruinsing my lungs screaming for a buoy.
"I don't want it though."
Maybe love is sinking. Maybe it's the thing you don't have to try for. It's up to each of us when we let go of the fear of finally understanding the devastation fo what we've missed.
"Maybe this text is also the patchiest shit I've ever witnessed."
Yep. Editing? Noh. Later? I don't know. Let's just be messy.