masks, pt. ii

I always thought the conceit of a masquerade, that we are in some way disguising who we are, was absurd. Most people who know me could identify me from the shape of my chin, the color of my eyes, the way I smile or don't smile, my voice, the way I carry myself; at best, it protects us from being identified by strangers. It grants the illusion of anonymity, not anonymity itself. Or perhaps that's the point. Perhaps, so long as the masquerade continues, we have ensured that strangers will remain strangers, that when we stand unmasked in the cold light of morning no one will be look at us and ask "isn't that" or "didn't she". But when the moon is bright and the stars are out the dawn is a distant threat, a phantom to haunt our morning selves. Plenty of time to dance.

Without the benefit of masks, I can always tell you from your sister by the way you carry yourselves: she cannot hide her confidence, her defiance, no matter how she tries. Even when you're pretending that you are her, there's a tentativeness there, like you are afraid that your passing will disturb the tranquility of the world. You are, I have always felt, a creature of silence.

When I saw you, I was certain you were her. You thought it was the mask, I think, that my powers of perceiving you were diminished by your disguise--the way you smirked at me when I called you by her name, playfully chided me for paying so little attention. I wanted to protest, to tell you that I had paid attention to little else this evening, that your dress and your hair and the roses and the mask were so elegant, so beautiful, I could scarcely think about anything else. But I tripped over my tongue and you just laughed and I fell in love all over again.

You asked me to dance. I would have thought that was unthinkable, before, but here you had become someone else entirely. For my entire life until this moment I had been in perfect control of my life, but here you led and I followed, lost and dazed and happier than I had been in countless years. And as the festival wound down and we sat on the roof, we talked, or rather, you talked, and I did my best to listen when all I could think about is the way your lips moved, the way your voice sounded.

I think you were talking about masks. You said something like, "I'm so glad that we sometimes have this chance, to take off the masks and be who we really are." I was too enthralled and had had too much wine for the words to really take root then and there, but the seed was planted. And when dawn finally did come (I didn't realize I had even fallen asleep, but you were still there, your arms around me, watching the sun rise) you seemed different. I could no longer think of you as a tremulous creature hiding in the wake of your sister, and you could finally see through the air I projected of perfect calm and perfect control.

It seemed so wonderful at the time, to be privileged to this secret world. I had forgotten, momentarily, how dangerous the truth can be.

masks, pt. i

One summer when I was a kid, the wildfires drove everyone out of our hometown. It felt so sudden: one day everything was fine, I was out playing in the fields of sagebrush and tumbleweeds with my friends, and then I came home and my father made me put on a mask and my mother thrust a bag of my things into my arms. "We have to leave," she told me, and we did. We drove for what seemed an eternity (all trips last forever when you're a child), stopping at the occasional rest area on the way out.

My memory of the trip, as childhood memories often are, is hazy, a series of images and feelings: everyone wearing masks at the rest area; the sky filled with smoke; a sickly sun shining through the haze; my eyes burning; my parents chastising me when I fidgeted with the mask. We stayed at a motel in a town I don't remember, somewhere that was supposed to be safe from the fires for the time being--I remember that very clearly, my father on the phone with someone, saying in hushed tones, "We're safe here for the time being."

That night when they had both gone to sleep, I stole the room key and went outside without the mask on and just walked around--some foolish gesture of defiance, I suppose, or maybe just restlessness and a longing to still be spending my summer under the sky. I could feel the smoke in the air almost immediately, making my lungs hurt and my breathing shallow.

We drove on from there, further from the smoke, until we stopped seeing people in masks and the sun shone bright and clear, and the confusion and uncertainty faded into a dull tedium. But that sensation of not being able to trust the air stuck with me long after the smoke had cleared.

a prelude for april (scenes from a pandemic pt. iv)

I'm pretty sure I had plans for April's theme, but like so many things this past month, it's gone now. It's cold out there--cold like a normal Seattle winter, which isn't that cold, and is still warm enough that the leaves are starting to come in on the trees and the flowers are in bloom. There are even tulips at the courthouse. Spring is a time of vibrant colors, of life, and that's no less true when there is no one there to witness it. Those tulips still exist even if there aren't many people left at the courthouse, even if the usual spread of office workers eating their lunch on the steps, admiring the fountains and the flower arrangements. The color isn't there for us. So many people will miss the spring, sealed away in their homes--it's a small tragedy in the grand scheme of things, but it is one worth marking.

It's interesting how quickly the city is finding a sense of normal in all of this. In some ways we're still struggling, of course, but in others . . . this is how life is now. It won't last forever, but it could very well last for a very long time, and damned if we aren't determined to find a way to get by, to make it easy, or at least smooth. Within the past week, the data in Washington state has been promising. The growth of the disease seems to no longer be exponential; it's far from over, but it is comforting, at least, to think that all of this is working.

This month's theme is masks. Unlike the indifferent beauty of spring, masks, literal and figurative, are something which exist for us. There are masks which protect, masks which conceal, masks which keep us warm. And on some of them you can doodle a little angry face with a sharpie if you want. I am trying very hard to retain a sense of a schedule right now, but it is proving to be something of a challenge.

returning, pt. iii

I missed last week because, as you may imagine, I had other things on my mind.

We were separated when the empire began to tear itself apart. She spent her days in the empire's heart, I'm told; every now and then I'd hear a story with her name in it. They loved her, there, as she tried her best to maintain the fragile peace, to give voice to the downtrodden. She was a champion of the people, a symbol of hope for people who otherwise would long have given into despair--at least, that's what the stories said. Sometimes I wondered if there weren't stories where she was the villain, confounding the peace, poisoning the minds of the populace with false hope and empty promises. But if those stories existed, they never found me out in the hinterlands. And just hearing her name made me smile.

Some days, I'll admit, I resented that she made pretty speeches while I lived by the sword--out this far from the heartlands, what peace and stability the empire had once offered had long since faded away. So the people of the hinterlands made their own peace, and when that was threatened, they turned to vagabonds and mercenaries like myself to make things right. It's possible some of them thought of me as a hero later, and I know many of those I crossed swords with were certain I was a villain. Some of them probably even told stories about me, but none of those stories seemed to travel.

It was years later when we reunited. She had, impossibly, won. At first I hoped that we could carry on as if neither of us carried those years with us, that we could be just as inseparable as before, be just as wonderful and impossible together as we had been. But neither of us could pretend the years hadn't happened. Neither of us could return to the people we were before.

We tried. Somehow it was worse that there was no hostility, not even any real friction, just this distance that neither of us knew how to bridge, growing wider with every passing day. In the end I packed up my things and slipped away in the night, for good this time. And I hope that someday she hears stories about me and finds it in her to smile.

scenes from a pandemic, pt. iii

Today was my first day back to work and, coincidentally, the first day Governor Inslee's stay at home order was in effect. The streets felt like nighttime streets. There was still traffic, but not much--one or two cars at a time at most; much more frequently just stretches of empty road. People on streets behave differently at night. There is no longer the assumption that a car might be coming at any time because there probably isn't; instead they simply rely on the fact that they'll probably see one coming if there is one. It felt like that. Downtown was the worst. In the U District, there were still plenty of people milling about, but downtown felt deserted.

I was given a little sheet of paper to give to the cops in case they harass me for being out, which is surreal. It doesn't look particularly official but it says where I work and that my work is considered an essential business and that, as such, it's essential that I be out there. I don't think it will be a problem, though--cyclists and joggers are out in force, especially on the multi-use bike trail I take home. With the exception of the occasional mask, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it doesn't seem like anyone on the trail is aware that the city has been shut down.

Business, as you can imagine, is very slow. Slower than it was two weeks ago, the last time I went to work, and slower, I'm told, than it was even yesterday, when the stay-at-home order was not yet in effect. The usual expectation in service jobs of trying to find something to do even if there are no customers was gone. The handful of customers we encountered seemed grateful that we were open--there are not many places downtown that have elected to keep their doors open, as it trns out.

Residential concierge desks downtown seem to have set up a little system where they tape off an area several feet away from the desk and ask you to stand behind the line when interacting with them. Like all of this, it feels strange. Just another reminder that whatever you thought of as normal is gone, now. The rules have changed.

At my first residential delivery of the day, there was a wedding going on in the lobby. A small gathering of people--four or five at most, maybe less. It was sweet, and sad, and strange: while the concierge asked me questions from a list about whether I was currently feverish or had recently been to China, someone else started trying to talk to me, telling me to wait so that I didn't interfere with the wedding. I stood aside until the bride had walked down the lobby to where her betrothed and the officiant waited.

That image will stick with me, I think. In many ways it captures the feeling of every interaction I had with people today. There is a profound sense of loss, of uncertainty, but people are doing their best to get by, to find little moments of joy where they can, to be kind to one another.

scenes from a pandemic, pt. ii

Last night, Governor Inslee ordered bars and restaurants to close, except for delivery and take-out; when I called out from work this morning, my store was still open; it's never been primarily a dine-in place, so I suppose the order won't make much more of a difference than the pandemic already has. (As for me: the mild cough lingers, the malaise/fever/whatever seems to have subsided. It feels kind of like the last day or two of a cold now.)

When this first started happening, I don't think I anticipated that one of the side-effects would be that my comrades working at restaurants and bars would be suddenly trying to navigate the bureaucracy of unemployment. My housemate, who works (or worked, I guess) as a cook at a restarant/bar, said that as he was trying to fill out the application online last night, the server crashed, presumably as food service workers across the state all tried to fill it out at the same time so they could make sure they could still pay their bills this month.

We will spend the duration of this crisis wondering if the measures that have been taken were too much, or if they were too little too late. Is the economic suffering caused by this measure worth the lives it might save? On some level, of course, that suffering would have happened with or without the measure, but for many, this will never be enough.  What are they planning to do when the order expires at the end of the month? Do they hope the crisis will be over by then?

The most important question, though: will they actually take measures to protect society's most vulnerable from the economic fallout of all this? Will they take measures to protect those workers who are still forced to go to work and interact with the public because their services are considered too essential to be shut down? Or will the interests of the ownership class prevail, and the underclass ultimately be left, as America is so fond of leaving them, to live or die by the whims of fate, protected only by a woefully inadequate social safety net?

COVID-19 will lay bare, has laid bare, the inherent cruelty of our society. I will leave it as an academic exercise for the reader whether this revelation will lead to any meaningful change towards a kinder world.

scenes from a pandemic, pt. i

I live in Seattle, the city where COVID-19 first touched down in the US. I work downtown as a bike messenger, doing food delivery, mainly to office workers. There isn't a nonpretentious way to say that this means that while I'm at work I have a finger on the pulse of the city, but I do. It's far from perfect--things that happen outside of my delivery area are usually off my radar, for instance--but I see and hear a lot. And when something noteworthy happens, people occasionally talk to me about it. The news cycle is happening quickly and I'm not going to try to replicate it or keep up to date, but I want to chronicle what I've seen and what's happening.

I'd been following the news for a while, because it's 2020 and everything bad that can happen will happen. Still, it felt distant as Governor Inslee declared an emergency--I knew that at some point I would probably get sick, that there would be runs on supplies, but it didn't feel real. Then, on March 4th, two days before I was supposed to go out of town on vacation, Amazon, a corporation with a massive percentage of the office space downtown and therefore a primary source of business, asked their employees to start working from home until the end of the month.

The day after that, downtown felt subdued. It wasn't as desolate as I expected, but traffic was lighter than usual, business was quite slow despite multiple coworkers being home sick. There was a sense of something big coming, but overall people seemed to be fairly cheerful about the whole thing. The reality of our situation, I think, had not set in.

Allergies were also quite bad that day. Bad enough that, worrying that the symptoms might be the onset of the virus, I cancelled my trip plans and stayed home for the time I had scheduled to take off. I didn't know what to expect when I returned to work the following Wednesday (the 11th of March). I returned to find that the company was slashing hours for employees across the board; sales were down to something like twenty percent of usual. Many of the restaurants I passed were closed indefinitely. The city had come to the realization that this was going to hurt even those who are lucky enough to avoid infection, or who don't suffer major distress from it.

People in Seattle are famously polite but aloof; the so-called Seattle chill, or Seattle freeze, is legendary, even if it really does vary from person to person. But everyone I encounter at work I'll ask "how's it going?" by way of greeting, and on Thursday, instead of just saying "fine" or "it's going", people answered. "It's quiet out there." "My commute this morning was amazingly fast." "Business is dying." And so on.

I should note that most of the people I encountered at that point were self-selecting for people who were willing to go downtown during a pandemic, but people were worried about what this would mean for our futures, economically. And they're right to; many food service and hospitality workers live paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks have unexpectedly dried up for them.

The city and state governments have been trying to patch our social safety net to help workers who are affected by this. I'm worried it won't be enough.

***

It's 5:50 am right now and I'm still awake from yesterday. I spent most of Friday wondering if this malaise and mild cough were the virus or just a combination of stress and allergies and bad sleep, but by now I'm fairly certain I'm sick. I'm tired but I'm not tired. I can focus well enough to write. It's hard to say if it will get any worse; right now it feels like a flu that lost interest. It's probably time to start the process of telling people that I'm sick.

It feels weird doing more than just calling work and saying I'm not feeling well. All of this feels weird, which I suppose is why I'm writing it down. I already feel like I should have been doing this a while ago--the conversations and thoughts I was having in the lead-up to this are lost now.

I remember that people were concerned but not alarmed. I remember someone at my fencing class telling me that one of his coworkers was using 'Are you afraid of coronavirus?' as a conversation starter; that coworker, he said, didn't know what to do when he responded with 'No.' I remember feeling like it was strange that the buses weren't emptier.

I plan on writing more of these as time wears, but I don't know when there will be more; I don't expect a lot to happen while I'm home sick, but who knows?

returning, pt. ii

The last thing I expected, when we finally returned home, was for everything to somehow be the same. It shouldn't have been possible. But somehow (I suspect Charlotte was involved, but I'm afraid to ask what she did) the city felt just like it did before everything went wrong. Sure, a lot of the businesses had changed, and of course people had come and gone since we left, but when I walked into the corner bar the bartender just said "You're back? Been a while."

"Yeah," I told her. "I've been away."

"New arm looks good."

"Thanks."

And that was that. She poured me the same drink I always got and we chatted, as if none of the past year had happened. As if things really could just be normal again. And when I walked back home and Nora was curled up reading a book, she smiled the same way she always used to, like she didn't really want to but couldn't quite help it, and just like we had before we sat together in silence.

I know that the city will be different in a thousand little ways that neither of us noticed, just like we are. But sometimes it's nice to return to a superficial similarity, to allow ourselves to believe that nothing has changed.

returning, pt. i

When she returned from her exile, she had changed. It wasn't just her physical appearance, though there was that, too. The dark circles under her eyes, the sickly, wan complexion. She was gaunter than she had been, too; a better friend might have tried to find a moment alone, a moment when she didn't need to project strength and confidence to a world that had stolen everything from her, and asked if she was all right. Asked what had happened to her up at the edge of the world.

(Sometimes I like to imagine the conversation we should have had. Whatever she endured, she should not have had to endure it alone, as she did, and when she returned, all of us simply let her continue to endure. We all thought she could endure, I suppose. But I knew better.)

She had always been . . . composed, I suppose is the word. She bore the weight of the future on her shoulders, after all. She was always reticent, careful with her words, and carried herself with a gravity that could be overwhelming at times. But she also always had such energy, such conviction, that no carefully constructed demeanor could conceal. And when she came back, that energy was different. Darker.

At first I thought that it was just me; previously, when she held court, her presence was inspiring. Now I found myself feeling uneasy. We had built this army . . . not for her, exactly, but we had always known that if she returned, when she returned, it would be hers. Before she had always been so careful to listen, never allowing her thoughts to be known until she had heard every option and formed a final opinion. Now, she seemed to have lost her taste for guiding our discussions with any form of subtlety; she would swiftly silence those who seemed to be straying from the topic, or whose contribution to the conversation was not to her liking. It no longer felt, as it once had, like an open forum where she was the first among equals, the one who would voice the opinion that our discussion had constructed. Now, we were dancing to her tune.

A better friend might have wondered if something was wrong. She was always so careful not to make anyone feel as if she was trying to sway their thoughts or influence their opinion. Instead, I wondered: was it always like this? Perhaps, I thought, she had merely lost subtlety in her exile, or perhaps I had grown wiser, more perceptive. Perhaps she had always been manipulating us and it had only now become apparent.

She returned from exile to find a changed world. A broken world. And perhaps if I had made the effort to take her aside and remind her that I am her friend and I care about her, things could have been different. It doesn't matter now, but sometimes I still miss the way she would smile when we were alone, and I will always wonder if she brought that smile back with her.

time marches on, again

Another month is upon us. Though March is officially the first month of Spring, there's an argument to be made (one my allergies seem to agree with this past few years) that it really starts in February here in Seattle. The rain starts to let up, the sun starts to shine, the sunset starts happening at an hour approaching reasonable, but even on the nicest day you can still feel winter's grip. Some years it's hard to even imagine that spring might be just around the corner.

March, though. Sometimes in March old man winter is still fighting to survive, but you'd have a hard time finding someone who would say that it's winter--not really, anyway. It's a month of chaos and contradictions, where a sky that's cold and dark and grey can be suddenly illuminated by the perfect gold of an unexpected sunset. It's a hard month to really get excited about, but it has its moments. It's the moment when people start coming out of their shells for the winter.

This month's theme is "returning." This time I had a story I wanted to tell and I thought of a theme to fit it, but it works, right? The return of spring, the return of life, the return of . . . I don't know, St. Patrick's Day?

(Can you believe I used the title "time marches on" for my New Year's post instead of saving it for an excellent March pun?)

mo(u)rning, pt. v

I dreamt I was traveling along a familiar road, only to find the road impassable. So I did what you do when your way is barred, and searched for an alternate route. I knew there was a tunnel nearby, down a steep stair which was designed to appear functional at a glance, but as I descended I found that the rails which appeared to be there to aid lost travelers actually blocked the way forward. Despite the obstacles I reached the bottom, and quickly found the entrance to the tunnel. But something kept me from taking the safe, certain path. Something drove me to explore.

Not too far from the beaten path was the twisted entrance to a cavern, one I would need to contort myself in order to enter. My adventurous spirit from just moments before faded away, replaced with a sense of dread. I didn't know where this cavern might lead, but it was not anywhere good. Shaken to my core, I resolved to depart, only to be waylaid by two old women, who seemed impossibly tall despite not appearing any larger than an ordinary person. They chastised me for my cowardice, cautioned me that if I took the safe path the consequences could be dire, but at that point all I wanted was to find my way home. With their taunts and warnings echoing in my mind, I turned away, from the sinister entrance, from the wisdom of crones, from the dream itself, and awoke with the profound sense that by making that choice I had lost something vital, and that if I did not commit this revelation to dream the soft nepenthe of the morning would deny me even that.

mo(u)rning, pt. iv

When I went into exile, I went north past that line where there are parts of the winter where the sun never rises at all. It was a carefully orchestrated blind panic, terrified that my enemies would find me, or worse, that my friends would, that they'd see me lost and alone without a plan or a purpose and they would finally realize that behind the charm and the smiles and the perfect composure, there was nothing. That I didn't have an answer for everything, that I didn't always have a plan. I didn't even usually have one. That for so long I had trusted that everything would work out, and it did, right up until it didn't.

Without Iona it would have been impossible. I don't know what strings she pulled, what favors she had to call in, in order to even find a ship willing to sail north in the dead of winter, much less a village willing to shelter me. I spent most of the journey in the cabin, seeing no one, trying to study the various books and texts and maps I'd managed to salvage, as if there might be something in there that could turn any of this around.

After an arduous voyage, we made landfall in the frozen north, in a village that existed only by the grace of a monastery, channeling the energy of the earth into keeping the village . . . warm is not the correct term, but warm enough. Manageable. The empire--my empire, once--was built on these shrines and temples, spread through the continent. I had no idea they stretched even this far into the hinterlands; I couldn't begin to fathom why. But even up here, they looked after travelers and the lost.

In the endless dark of the polar winter, I lost track of time. I kept trying to study, to collect my thoughts, to make a plan, but I could never focus. I seldom left my room, often ignored the meals Iona brought me, and when I did sleep it was fitful, and I always awoke exhausted. When I fled I promised everyone that I would find a way to reclaim what was mine, but the enormity of what I had lost seemed inescapable.

I'm not sure what drove me to go wandering--even the most defeated mind can only handle so much time spent in one room, I suppose. The bitter cold of the polar air made me immediately regret my decision, but I carried on. It was something, at least. And then, when I looked at the horizon, I noticed it--just a little patch of dawn. I don't know if it was the first sunrise of the winter, but it was the first I'd seen. I sat there in the bitter cold, shivering, and watched as the sun very briefly crested over the ocean, illuminating the sky, before vanishing once more. And I would swear that in those brief moments I could feel its warmth washing over me.

mo(u)rning, pt. iii

We ended up about as far from civilization as you can get. Neither of us were as pissed about it as probably we should have been--it meant that he won, that we couldn't even escape him when he was fucking dead, but we'd been on the road for so long it felt less like losing and more like just finding a place to settle down. I don't know how much the locals knew, but they didn't ask questions and they weren't on the grid. Officially this place didn't exist. They let me wait tables at the village inn, which didn't pay much but they gave us one of the rooms and three hot meals a day. Morgan worked odd jobs around town. There wasn't much money to go around but we felt like part of something, you know?

I started waking up before dawn and going out for a long walk, just on my own, until I found a clearing where I could just sit and watch the sun rise over the lake and reflect. The lives we'd had before weren't easy, but they were gone now, and some mornings it took a minute to remember that we weren't still in the city. We weren't on the road, either. All of that, all the good and the bad, was gone. It seemed worth mourning, even if I wouldn't have traded the peace of this place to get it all back even if I could.

So, whatever the weather, I'd take my breakfast out to the lake, I'd sit under the tree I started thinking of mine, and I'd reflect on everything we'd lost. The constant buzz of activity of the city, the freedom to go wherever we wanted, do whatever we wanted, to just hit the open road and go without thinking of it. The friends we had at home, the companions we met along the way.

Some days, my little mourning ritual was accompanied by the brilliant pinks and golds and reds of the sunrise, when everything seems so unfathomably beautiful; sometimes it was dull and grey and wet, sometimes it was bitterly cold, sometimes I'd find myself covered in snow by the time I wandered back into town--beautiful and unpleasant all at once. It seemed right, somehow. The life we'd lost was all of these things: beautiful and bleak and painful and wonderful, all at once. If I was to mourn it properly, it was important to me to remember that.

mo(u)rning, pt. ii

We explored the ruins of the empire together, chasing its echoes down broken roads and through empty fields. She had a gift that I could never quite understand, where she could take an artifact and see into its past. There was something she was chasing, and I was there to keep her safe, to keep her company on the road. To make sure she knew she wasn't alone.

She never liked calling them visions; she said it was like having someone else's memory. Like her thoughts weren't her own anymore. It left her shaken and disoriented, and while she was experiencing whatever she experienced there wasn't much I could do except hold her hand while I kept watch. Even keeping watch wasn't that helpful out here. These lands had long since been abandoned.

Sometimes she would forget which memories were hers and which were echoes. It was worst in the mornings: I think the continuity of the day helped her keep track, and waking up in the morning, there was nothing there to anchor her. She'd sleep fitfully at night, dreaming dreams she would never share, and when morning finally came, I could always see that moment of panic on her face, as she tried to reorient herself. I don't know if it helped when she saw me there next to her, but she always said it did.

I would never understand what compelled her to do this to herself, just to piece together the story of the death of an empire from nothing but fragmented memories. "I'm the only one who can," she told me once. But I didn't need to understand to be there, to hold her hand, to make sure she has something familiar to wake up next to in the mornings. And despite everything, the wilderness was always so beautiful, and it always felt like we were inching closer to some kind of truth.

mo(u)rning, pt. i

I like to think of the people I watch over as friends, but most of them don't know I exist. Most of them probably don't even believe someone like me could exist: a ghost in the grid, following them through their day, helping them out in the quiet ways they think are just luck or coincidence. Making sure the traffic lights work in their favor, tricking point of sale systems into giving them free things. And some things they'd never even notice: distracting cops, blanking surveillance footage. My own hidden surveillance was the cost they paid to make sure they were as invisible as possible. I try to respect their privacy as much as I can. No spying on private moments, which mostly means I stay out of their homes unless I have good reason to be in there. It means that, very rarely, I miss something, and I lose them altogether.

It's not hard to imagine how it happens. They ditch all their devices, find a route with minimal surveillance, move out of town--most of them have good reason to suspect they're being followed, and most of them know someone who could help them disappear. And I should be glad, since it usually means they've finally escaped the hell that is modern society, but every time it's happened I can't help but feel like I've lost a friend.

After the first time, I resolved myself to have a little ritual for next time. I'd go down to the neighborhood bar, where they know me and seem to like me despite how rarely I left home these days, and I'd treat myself to a decent meal and some drinks, flirt with the bartender, pretend, until the evening was done, that I was just a normal person with a normal life. It helps create some distance, which makes it so much easier to mourn, and in some small way it celebrates their lives, the fact that they got away. Because I do come to care about them, after watching for so long. I wouldn't be watching if I didn't wish them well.

Inevitably in the morning I wake up with a headache and a backlog of work to catch up on. There are so many people who don't quite fit in the world we've created, and if it's in my power to help them, I will. That, combined with the hangover, instills me with a clarity of purpose, so I've come to think of those rough mornings and hangover breakfasts as a part of the ritual. There is always more to be done.

give us a smile, february

It's hard to believe a whole month has passed in 2020 and it's already a garbage year. (I'm just kidding, we all knew this was going to happen.) It's only just started being February where I am; the wind has picked up in the past few hours and it almost sounds like a storm out there. It's not, of course, but sometimes it's nice to pretend, isn't it?

I'm trying to write something on or around Saturday every week. Structure helps when you're trying to clear the cobwebs out of your brain, to find a cadence you can live with once again. So far the stories have been shifting wildly between genres and characters and settings, and this will probably continue, so, you know, be aware.

I never really liked February. At best it's the month where winter has really worn out its welcome and you spend the whole month dreaming of spring, imagining what it will be like when the sun is shining and the flowers are out and yet it's still so far away. Last year, after a particularly mild winter, it was easy to believe that February would just be more of the same. Then it snowed for two weeks straight. The city shut down. Winter does not like to go down without a fight.

When I wrote my weird themed stories back in 2013, February's theme was isolation. It's a cold and lonely month, after all. This year I'm going with "mo(u)rning", as suggested by effika. Maybe the parentheses weren't supposed to stay there, but I like the contrast there. It can be lively, it can be solemn.

Anyway, stay tuned for more of that sweet, sweet content. Feel free to throw more theme suggestions at me for next month, or for your favorite month down the road. (Guidelines: one word, maybe two. Thematic. Bonus points if it is seasonally appropriate, because I love me some seasons.)

beginnings, pt. iv

When the empire started collapsing around us, one of the first things I did was try to think of everything that had changed as the beginning of something new, rather than the death of the old. For instance: I had been a scholar in the employ of the principality; when there was nothing left of the principality to serve, it marked the beginning of my tenure as an itinerant scholar, one who served no master but the truth.  (It was a construct, of course, but then, so is royalty.)

It's hard to figure out where to draw the lines. When, for instance, did the scholar's robes I wore become so tattered and worn? They were once new and clean, a symbol of the status I enjoyed as a servant of an empire that had not yet realized it was dying. At what point, do you think, did it begin to die? At what point did it cease to be a living empire and begin its eternal existence as a dead one? At what point will people begin to see it not as an entity with a real effect on the world and begin to see it as lore and legend? I had often traveled far and wide in my efforts to uncover the secrets that too often are buried and lost by the sediment of empire, but at what point did my travels begin to feel so lonely? When did it begin to feel like I was not so much unearthing that which had been forgotten, but archiving that which we could not afford to forget? When did my curiosity begin to feel so important, so urgent?

As you can see, it became something of an obsession. Perhaps it was the only thing between my conscious self and the revelation that everything I had once known was gone, that the world was a colder, harsher place than I had believed, that I may have been the only living soul trying to make sure that, if it could not be saved, it could be remembered. Or perhaps my mind simply latched onto this new challenge because it seemed so insurmountable, because the very notion of a beginning is ultimately arbitrary. When does night become day? When does a kitten become a cat? When does a difficult task become a fool's errand?

When I first enrolled at the university, I believed that I would be finding answers, but of course it has always been the case that the deeper I delve, the more questions I find. The end of all things, though it has changed many things--my relationship with the wilderness, the way I dress, how my thoughts are formed--has not changed that.

But that's enough time on this little aside, I think. There is work to be done; time to begin.

beginnings, pt. iii

It was, I suppose, the snowstorm that ultimately sparked the beginning of our relationship. It was one of the winter festivals we would throw at the palace, something to keep the city's nobility entertained during the cold and the dark, complete with fencing and dancing and music and feasts. She was there to fence, and she defeated the city's best and brightest with such grace and such little apparent effort that of course I fell in love straightaway. It's hard to imagine someone who wouldn't have. I was too dedicated to being a good hostess to our guests to offer more than a perfunctory congratulations on her victory, but I couldn't stop myself from watching her as she navigated the crowds, so effortlessly confident, so carelessly charismatic, and every now and then she would catch me staring and just grin.

Her confidence cracked when my father announced that the storm had picked up, that lodging would be made available for those guests who could not make it home. I found her on the balcony, staring out into the blizzard, shivering against the cold. She was still there when I returned with tea. I don't think she realized who I was when I pressed a cup into her hand at first, until she turned back to look at me, a faint smirk on her lips. "A princess serving a mere commoner tea? What will your court think?"

"I just--you looked cold," I stammered, instead of something clever or even something passingly flirtatious like "I won't tell if you won't."

But she smiled, and turned back to the blizzard. "You don't have to be afraid of me, you know."

"I'm not afraid," I said, and hated how shrill, how unconvincing my voice sounded as I did. But I stood next to her on the balcony and gazed out into the storm with her, and if she found my presence as irritating as I knew she must have, she was too polite to say. Then, hating myself all the while, I said, "Are you all right?"

She looked thoughtful for a moment. "Someone brought me tea, so I'm going to say yes." A long pause followed. "Tell me your thoughts, princess. You must see something when you watch the snow bury your city."

I decided to take my time in answering. "It reminds me that everything can disappear in an instant, that everything I do will one day disappear. But it's beautiful. I could watch it for hours. And that makes me hopeful, even if it's a stupid reason to be hopeful."

She smiled at that. "Me, too, princess. Me, too."

beginnings, pt. ii

New York felt like a liminal space, too familiar to be foreign, too alien to be home. It was a place to disappear, to leave behind all the old trappings of our lives--one last "fuck you" from Sean after someone finally killed him. We shuffled into the city looking and feeling nothing like ourselves, after spending four hours on the bus, if you can imagine. I kept looking over to say something to Nora and thinking someone else was standing beside me. But nobody looked twice as we hauled our overstuffed luggage out of the terminal, and that was the idea. We could have been anyone. I thought that comfortable anonymity would have set my mind at ease, but instead I felt exposed. If something went wrong now, this far from everything, what could we do?

We met our contact--when I insisted she give me a real name she said, and I quote, "You can call me Charlotte, because I'm kind of a lot"--at a diner that was far too brightly lit, its colors too garish. I couldn't focus as she told us about the tech she'd added to the cheap, sensible car we would be taking west, or about the work she'd done on constructing identities for us in the event things went wrong. I didn't even have enough focus to be suspicious.

"Nothing's untraceable," she was saying, in response to something Nora said. "But anyone trying to trace you will have to get past me, and I'm fucking awesome."

The car she'd prepped for us was waiting in a nearby parking lot, where she assured us the parking fees had been taken care of. It was a far cry from what I imagined when I thought of Nora taking me on a road trip somewhere--this car was too cramped, too weak, too bland. There was no room to get comfortable, no room in the back to sleep.

It was supposed to be fun. We'd earned some quiet, Nora and I, after everything that had happened, but there was no peace to be found on the path we'd found ourselves on. Still, there was nowhere to go but forward.

beginnings, pt. i

There is something powerful about the fear of being alone that drives even the most resolutely introverted among us to make strange decisions. So I found myself at a party on new year's that, by virtue of being a party, I didn't particularly want to be at. At the time it sounded better than the alternative.

I must have been giving off some strong "not having fun" vibes; most of the people who talked to me started with "Are you okay?" and I had to force a smile and say something like "Yeah, just tired," and then we'd engage in awkward party talk until there was a pause long enough for one of us to make our excuses and wander off, or, occasionally, just quietly slip away. But, credit where it's due, the woman who had commandeered the bar made some pretty solid drinks and I did enjoy the excuse to dress up.

Shortly before midnight, when I'd ducked outside to get some air, I encountered someone else who seemed to be having as much fun as I was, and we just sat on the back porch and talked. The exact sort of quiet conversation I enjoyed, with someone who was interesting and who laughed at my jokes and didn't seem to find the sound of my voice annoying. At midnight she told me, "I think I'd like to kiss you," and I told her I'd be okay with that. And once it was no longer impolite to leave I walked her back to her house, which was not far, and then walked back to mine, which was.

There was a time in my life I really loved the idea of having a meet-cute, something spontaneous and romantic that drew me together with my partner. I even dated a few people where I tried to manufacture that moment, with limited success. Back then I would have scoffed at "We met at a party where we were both older than everyone else there and we just found that we liked talking to each other" as a story of the beginning of a relationship, but it feels comforting now, like drinking tea in the winter, wrapped up in blankets, watching a fire. And sometimes comforting is what you need.