the last time i moved. [trigger #342]

It happened during my last fight with Jenny. It was the newest version of a fight we’d had over and over again before that. We were in my living room, able to get louder and more ferocious than normal because my roommates weren’t home. I wanted the fight to be over, to move on to the rest of our day. I was tired of the fight and didn’t have the energy to keep going.

She was standing, so I got up from the couch and moved to her. She let me put my arms around her, buried her head against my chest. She started crying, and I knew that meant she was getting mascara all over the front of my shirt. Mostly I didn’t care about the mascara.

When she first started speaking again, I didn’t catch what she said. She mumbled it into my chest. I’m not sure she wanted me to hear it that first time, like maybe she it was a test run and she was warming up to the real thing. When I asked her to repeat it, took a deep breath and she did, moving her face just enough so that her mouth was free from my shirt.

“I can’t be stuck with you anymore.”

“What?”

“You’re stuck, Ryan. You’ve stopped growing or changing or wanting anything more than where you are right now. I don’t know if it’s because you’re lazy, or because you’re afraid, or because of some other reason I can’t even guess. I just know you aren’t moving at all.

I had no idea what to say. Was she breaking up with me? Or was this just a particularly emphatic plea to get me to make a change? It wasn’t just what she’d said, but how she said it that made it clear to me that she’d been thinking about this for a long time. This wasn’t a knee-jerk attempt to make contact with a blow during the argument. This was real. How real, I didn’t know.

Then she pulled away. She kissed me, and in that moment I hoped that maybe she would feel bad and soften the edge on her words. We could figure this out together. But when she pulled away she looked me in the eyes, hers still full of tears.

“I love you,” she said. “But I can’t be stuck with you anymore.”

Then she walked out my front door.

I tried to follow, but my feet were rooted in place. I couldn’t move them at all. I don’t mean figuratively, I literally could not move my feet, and haven’t been able to since.

Immediately, I started panicking. It was like a terrible form of claustrophobia. I screamed and yelled, I pulled to try and unstick my feet from whatever strange suction held them in place. Finally I was able to calm myself down enough to stop hyperventilating.

I experimented, and found I had full range of motion of my other extremities. I can bend at the knees, which is tricky without being able to move my feet. Losing one’s balance is a painful proposition when both feet are locked in place.

That first day I stood alone the entire afternoon. Occasionally I yelled for hope, but no one ever heard me, or at least no one ever responded.

When my roommates finally came home, nothing they could come up with helped me. They pushed and pulled, carefully poured boiled water under the rubber of my sneakers, no dice.

I didn’t let them call anyone for help that first night. It was embarrassing, and who would believe it? Plus, I wasn’t feeling tired like I should from standing for so long.

The next day we called the fire department, who came and failed to get me free. Their saw could’t get through our floor, which was suddenly somehow extremely hard.

That’s when the news crews started showing up. Crowds of people outside to see the guy who was stuck to his living room floor, whom no expert could free.

This went on for a while, but eventually the world lost interest. Went on to whatever other impossible and mildly entertaining thing there was to grab their attention.

 

 

 

 

 

the house always wins. [trigger #341]

Tom used to think of the phrase, “The House Always Wins,” the way most of us do, relating to casinos. That is until he bought the house at 13 Delaware Rd.

Never one to be superstitious, the number 13 didn’t cause him even a momentary pause. However, now it is another thing he thinks about from time to time when trying to understand what reason there is, supernatural or otherwise, that his house seems to hate him so much.

At first, it was only evident when he was doing home improvement projects. When he was redoing the outside steps to the side door, the door fell off its hinges seemingly without reason. When he was replacing the tile in the guest bathroom the tank on the toilet tank spontaneously sprang a leak. The new refrigerator he bought stopped working within an hour, which is unremarkable except for the fact that this happened five times, with replacement fridges each time and two separate models after he thought maybe the first model was just a lemon entirely. The ceiling fan dropped on his head when he was sanding a cabinet drawer at the dining room table, resulting in a concussion and 18 stitches.

Now, things are going wrong whether he is working on the house or not. The wallpaper in the family room all came down at once, all of it, on its own, even though it had apparently been on the walls for 28 years without any sign of peeling. The doorknob on the inside of the door to the master bathroom fell off, leaving him locked there until his wife got home from work four hours later.

He’s tried to fight back. Every time something goes wrong or breaks, he replaces it or fixes it so that it is even better than it had been originally. Yet, no matter how well he repairs it the thing is broken again, worse than the first time, within a matter of days, if not hours.

Tom can’t explain it, or make any real scientific sense of it, but he knows that the house at 13 Delaware Rd. hates him, and apparently, the house always wins.

stepped in something wet. [trigger #340]

A crash had woken him to a dark house. Much darker than usual. After a few moments of panic, he realized that the power was out. It didn’t squelch the panic entirely, but it at least explained his immediate surroundings being unfamiliar. The ever-present glow of electronics was suddenly missing, and the contrast was eerie. As he swept his feet over the side of the bed he stepped in something wet and cold. He instinctively recoiled, his feet retreating back to his sheets and making them wet in turn. He switched positions and reached down to his carpet with his hand. It was drenched, but not submerged. He lifted his fingers to his nose but there was no odor, which he hoped meant it was merely water. A flooded house would be a major headache, but any other possibility seemed worse, he couldn’t even decide what another possibility could be. He surrendered to the reality that there was no way to avoid standing on his wet carpet and resolved to do it quickly instead of putting it off, like ripping off the proverbial bandaid.

The hallway wasn’t as dark as his bedroom, but the carpet there was just as wet. There was light from downstairs, most likely coming through the windows from outside. He padded his way down the hall and the steps, the moonlight was filtering through his window enough that he could see water trickling down the southern-facing wall of his house. He walked up and touched it, unable to discern the water’s source. The large photo framed on the wall caught his attention, and he stared at it as it warped and faded from the moisture. The photo was of himself, a much younger version, his fists raised in celebration, bent slightly at his waste as a teammate half lifted him off the ground. It’s strange, but it had never struck him before that moment how far away the past was, how inaccessible. He would never be that younger man again, never re-experience his physical peak. He tried to recall what that victory had felt like, knowing at the time that it had seemed complete and unending, total in its scope. Why is it that he suddenly realized this? What is making it all so clear in this strange moment in the small hours of the morning as his house inexplicably fills with water?

 

they slipped away, like pearls on broken string. [trigger #339]

Eva thought about the fact that loneliness felt so much darker when one holds it up beside a memory of a moment when we felt truly connected to someone else.

She thought now of her cousins, when they were all teenagers.

They’d all been so close then. A tightly knit band of allies. The eight of them against the world. Thinking of that moment now made her feel like she’d be swallowed up by her pain and isolation.

There was a time, at the end of her grandmother’s driveway, when her teenage heart was struck by how common it was for adults to slip away from one another. She saw her father interacting with cousins over the holidays, all of them telling stories their childhood. She knew it was only surface level, that once the holiday was over none of them would talk to each other for another year or two.

She couldn’t imagine that sort of distance from her own cousins. She’d had them all make a promise, in that moment, to never drift apart. “We’ll never hate each other and ignore each other like they do. We’ll make sure we are always close, like we are right now.”

Yet, here she was, removed from them all. They’d all slipped away, like pearls on a broken string.

She’d had that happen to her once, the string had broken and by the time her hand had reached her neck to catch it the pearls were all bouncing away across the floor, scattered, into dark and dusty corners and under cabinets and furniture.

Yet, she was the one who’d bounced away from her family. They were all still close. She was the one who hadn’t kept the promise, and here she was in a dark and dusty corner of her own. She had no idea how to even begin a return. There was too much distance, too much shame.

Some lost things just can’t be regained.

so help me god i’m going to eat. [trigger #338]

Dad never lets me do anything good. No video games, no movies or tv. Everything I eat is healthy and boring and gross. No Soda, or candy, or fat, or anything processed. It’s all banned.

I try to get as much of this stuff as possible when I’m out of the house, but he finds out so often. I’m not sure how, but he has some kind of… like… psychic power that tells him when I’m watching TV and eating Oreos at a friend’s house instead of playing soccer in their backyard like I told him I would. It’s creepy and weird.

But in just two years, I’ll finally be able to go away to college. Then, I don’t care what he says, I’m going to do whatever I want, eat whatever I want, whenever I want.

So help me God, I’m going to eat McDonald’s every day. I’m going to play video games until my eyes fall out of my head from exhaustion. And there is nothing he can do about it.

do you have kids? [trigger #337]

Children were mystifying to Jeanine. Well, people in general were mystifying to her, but children especially. The younger, the more they astounded her. These little conglomerations of matter that somehow held a consciousness. Cocktails of chemicals that somehow exceeded the sum of their parts and made up a self. She saw her sister’s 18 month old the other day, and just kept thinking, “This time three years ago, you didn’t exist. You were not a thing. And now, here you are, a fully formed person.” Existence itself was confounding to her, but in children that was honed to a fine point. The bizarre impossibility of it all was made so clear by these little humans. She couldn’t imagine having one of her own, in her house all the time, relying on her, their mind being partly shaped by her strengths and weaknesses, her successes and mistakes. It was all too much. Even a cat was stretching her capacity sometimes.

On the outside, people are small. They are petty and reactionary and mostly seem ruled by their desires and hungers and fears. Yet, Jeanine knew that on the inside they must all be like her, with vast interior worlds that are only hinted at by the activity and behavior on the surface, at times even contradicted by the surface appearance. Kids were simpler in their behaviors, but she knew that didn’t mean they were simpler on the inside. She remembers too much of what it was to be a child. Although she seems to lack so many of the memories most people seem to share, their nostalgia and anecdotes, she does remember that everyone around her treated her childhood self as simple and sweet, took her silence for acquiescence or inattention. Yet, there was so much at work under the surface all the time, a massive world she didn’t know how to translate into her outer world. She knows this is true of the little ones she sees around her. She wishes she knew how to tell them she knew, to help them. She doesn’t. She still doesn’t know how to do it for herself, how to bridge the chasm between her thoughts and what she says and does. She knows that people take the shadows she makes on the cave wall to be her actual self, and she has no idea how to show them otherwise.   

and then i had my first panic attack. [trigger #336]

I was standing outside in the backyard when the lights all went out. I’d been calling for my dog to come inside. She had been out for longer than normal and wasn’t coming when I called her, and so I had to throw on some sneakers and wander into the back looking for her. I hadn’t been in the yard for more than four seconds when all of the lights on the black shut off. Clouds blocked out the stars and moon and the darkness felt absolute, a strange feeling outside for someone who lives in a city and normally never experiences actual darkness outdoors.

My skin tingled. I raised my arm to scratch my nose and all along my arm static built up in my shirt, my finger shocked my nose when I reached it. The air itself was beginning to feel charged.

A bright light exploded above me, and I instinctively threw my arms up in front of my face and winced. Even through the closed lids the lights flooded into my eyes.

There was a loud pop and a sharp pain in my eardrums, like the pressure that builds up when your ears won’t adjust to a change in atmospheric pressure.

I opened my eyes slightly and lowered my arms, wondering if I’d see perhaps the fire from a transformer that had exploded. Instead, I saw that I was somehow no longer in my backyard. I was in a large white room. The walls appeared to be backlit, but the light was still too intense to allow me to see details. The room did appear to be empty, though, no furniture or people.

Then a voice came from a speaker I could not see. The sound was diluted by the fact that my ears were still ringing and in pain from the pop moments earlier. At first I couldn’t make anything out at all, but eventually I could discern that it was the same message repeated over and over: “Hello, welcomed guest. Please do not be alarmed. We do no with to hurt you. A representative will be with you momentarily. Make yourself comfortable until then.” Then a brief pause, before the message started all over again.

It was right about then that I had my first panic attack.

this is a fun roller coaster. [trigger #335]

“Well, this is a fun roller coaster.”

The moment the words left my mouth I knew I’d made a mistake.

Watching too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer over the course of my life has always made it likely that I let fly with a snarky comment in response to any given situation.In my head I always hear Xander’s voice delivering the line. Sometimes they’re funny, most times they’re not, but they’re always a matter of pure reflex.  It’s basically just muscle memory at this point.

Normally, this isn’t a problem. At worst it gets a little irritating to folks, even to myself.

However, when you are trying to calm your teenage daughter in the midst of an emotional crisis that has her bouncing from feeling to feeling at lightning speed, the quip, “This is a fun roller coaster,” is not a great ingredient into the mix.

As soon as I said it I internally kicked myself. Not just because it was going to make matters worse, but also because it conveys a lack of concern for her that isn’t accurate. It’s easy to forget how fucking terrible it is to be a teenager, to feel confused and out of control all the time, to have your emotions and hormones constantly shifting the ground beneath your feet.

Being a teenager is actually like a roller coaster, often a hellish and cruel one. The last thing she needed was her father making light of that fact with a Xanderism.

caesar is an honorable man. [trigger #334]

It is a rare thing for a man with unchecked power to be honorable, but the Caesar Tigre V, Emperor of the United City States of North America, enjoys nothing more than to do the opposite of what is expected of him. So far in his young reign what is expected of him is always brutality, betrayal, and abuse. He finds delight in showing mercy, honoring his word, and offering kindness and support to his subordinates. It was something his father didn’t understand before him, the potential in goodness. Not for goodnesses sake, that would bore Caesar Tigre V, but for the sake of power. With a precedent like the one set by his predecessors, showing just the smallest bit of tenderness or decency to a subject is a mindfuck. People are waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it doesn’t come, they either offer their heartfelt obedience in response to unnecessary mercy, or else they live in fear, waiting for the endgame of the charade they know must be in play. He wears the visage of being honorable and just, and no one knows what to do with it. The unchecked cruelty that people expect is just so boring, so commonplace. Eventually this too will grow boring, or someone will go too far in testing his patience. He isn’t sure what he will do then, but that is part of the joy of it all. It’s all such a delightful game he gets to play.

music in space. [trigger #333]

It’s been several decades now that Shanice has been traveling amongst the stars. It was an ordinary morning in Queens, and Shanice was on her way to work, when a collection of different species from multiple galaxies introduced themselves to her as the Peace. She had been chosen, they said, to travel with them amongst the stars. Every species eventually has one chosen like her, to one day return to earth and share her findings in the hope that it would shift the course of humanity and its place in the universe. It is always the first step. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but she said yes.

One thing that Shanice had learned, since being chosen, is that every planet has music.

It took her a while to realize this, because not all of it is packaged or performed in quite the same way it is on earth. It is not always created by the dominant species on the planet, not always created intentionally, not always enjoyed for pleasure. Yet, once you know how to hear it, you discover that every planet is a planet of song.

On some planets, it is similar to ours, with arts and creativity. These planets reveal the desire of a species to make sounds that convey meaning beyond the more direct and mundane forms of communication available. This was the easier form for Shanice to identify.

Early on, she thought that other planets, which lacked artistic creation for one reason or another, were simply devoid of music. Yet, in time she learned to hear that it was there, even in the darker places.

Once she learned to listen, she was able to identify on every planet the way certain audial phenomena came together, and from which there was an emergent quality that was greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes one needs to listen very closely, shift assumptions and expectations, but the music is always there, waiting for Shanice to come find it.