a lil jigsaw puzzle of recurring nightmares before work ;)

I want to preface this one by saying it’s kind of a downer. I’m having a bit of a haunted time. A lot of incredible things have happened in the past few years. The past few days. I had some sweet time with a 3-month-old this week, drafted a couple of new designs, played a sick show in Anchorage and caught up with some good friends. I am almost done editing photos from the show. I started my first no-pattern-no-masters crochet project. It’s just the nighttime, when there’s nothing left to do but grieve, when the heaviness of existence pours in, and I haven’t been able to rest easily in so very long. Trying to process the last few years is a real whirlwind. I have tried several times to write out a timeline, figure out how to untangle the mess, but it’s a real mess I’ll tell ya, and it runs circular back into itself in waves. It gets easier every time I really sit with it. At this point I think sharing what I have been able to put together is part of the process of letting it go. I don’t expect y’all to read this one. It’s long, and it’s still grasping for a thread. I know the past few years have been a lot for so many people, because they’ve told me. This isn’t even breaking into our complicated life experiences prior to 2020. If hearing a kind of personal shape-of-griefs from another person’s perspective is therapeutic for you/facing your own griefs, get yourself a glass of water and dig in. If you are here for the fun project updates and don’t have space for feeling that Existential Rub right now, I suggest you skip it. I’m working on a write-up on the show from last weekend that will be far more thrilling to follow.

I shift tenses a lot throughout because I’m working through moments messily and presently, and commenting on them with hindsight.

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It’s March 1st2020. I’ve just moved into a new apartment after one of my closest friends, my artistic collaborator and roommate, had completely unraveled. The destructive behavior and inability to function had become untenable. We started the conversation about finding new places to live 3 months before, after we hit the agreed upon limit of $500 worth of bills I was floating him, made an action plan. I helped him look for affordable options and resources. Checked in on him. Made sure he had enough food and smokes during the hard times. Of course I was still the villain when the time came. I made it out of there, but I’d lost a friend. I was drawing a tarot card every morning back then and there was a 2 week period where I drew an Ace every day. It seemed like I had a lot of new beginnings ahead of me.

A couple of weeks later, the office where I work with traumatized kids closes. COVID shut-downs are officially rolling out. Nobody can work, the kids are stuck in their complicated homes. I push the business to purchase a HIPAA compliant zoom account so the kids can have a shred of consistency. They do it. I pick up all of the outpatient clients who are not in foster care while the rest of the department remains willfully ignorant of the technology. In a ploy to get people back to work, they pull a few kids out of inpatient for an “experimental foster transition program” and offer positions to me and the other two people who worked directly with the kids to staff it in 24-hour cycles. It’s a madhouse. The computer doesn’t work. We have to homeschool the kids. There are no laptops left to loan out because they were all checked out to billing specialists. They tell us to download the software to do the billing on our personal computers. It’s very illegal. Everyone does it anyway, except for me. They fire me in May.

My childhood friend moved to town that year. We’d been chatting about it for a couple of years before that. They had come to visit several times over the past decade. Made friends. Said they enjoyed it. Told me they were looking for community and purpose. I told them it was as good of a place as any for that. They asked me to look at a couple of cabins and vet them. They moved up once their affairs were in order. By May we are starting to have our first serious breakdowns in communication and boundaries. It’s not terrible yet. They are so unrelentingly aggressive, they push me to the point of telling them to leave my home during a beautiful summer day. A friend drops in while they’re packing up with flowers and a card game. They decide not to leave. They increasingly refuse to seek help that isn’t me. They tell me I’m crazy and unreasonable for even suggesting it. It goes on like this for some time. They are unraveling and instead of treasuring our friendship and support, they are resenting me for refusing to follow them into unrelenting despair. Doing everything they can to take my joy from me.

My mother is supposed to visit. She misses her flight. She is very upset. I try to find her a new flight that doesn’t layover in Seattle. I can’t find anything affordable. I suggest we wait out the chaos and check in again in August. She doesn’t like that. I tell her not to worry. I tell her there is time. She gets angry. I get a little angry too. I tell her I need 2 weeks of space from her and promise to talk to her after that. I do, but she never responds. She died during those 2 weeks.

The officer who responds to the wellness check is a friend from high school. She moved there to be close to her long-term long-distance boyfriend she met playing WoW, who dumped her a few weeks after she arrived. We spent a lot of time together after that. Later that summer we get drinks and catch up. The same morning we call the troopers, my family’s house catches fire. Everyone is ok, but they had been up since 4am gutting the garage where the fire happened. I went home for a couple of months, maybe. That childhood friend is with me when the trooper comes to my door to hold his hat over his belt and say he’s very sorry. He had never had to do that before. I tell him I am sorry and that he did a good job. He tells me he went to academy with my officer friend.

That childhood friend watches my apartment while I’m away. Back home we stayed in an airbnb while the fire department ran ozone machines at the house. My brother has a friend in town. I make everyone play games with me and watch the documentary Gaza Fights For Freedom. Nobody can touch. That period of time is the foggiest. While I’m there packing away my mother’s things, I get a call from the unemployment office. The job that fired me 2 months ago is fighting my claim. They ask me to provide evidence that I was fired unjustly. I reach out to old coworkers. They say they are sorry but won’t help. They’re too close to having their retirement vested. My email has been scrubbed from the system already. There is nothing. My ex-employer wins the case and I wait 6 more weeks to receive unemployment.

I eventually go back north. I start a job at a place a bunch of my friends had worked for a few years. I had sworn to every one of them that I would never work there at some point during those years. We took lunch breaks together smoking spliffs around the skull pit, and the drama sounded somehow more dreadful than working with teenagers. The offer came at a time I needed it though. Something mindless, trimming weed, around people I trust.

My first day I get tapped to help in the garden. It’s a mess. I was looking forward to having no responsibilities, but it’s nice to have a serious project. I agree. I spend 3 years of my life keeping the life systems afloat, pivoting with the frequent sudden changes and uncontrolled experiments, creating venues for communication and having them intentionally sabotaged or entirely ignored, being scapegoated, reprimanding the boss for taking advantage of the employees, who are also long-time friends, demanding that everybody is afforded a weekend, time off, adequate pay, fighting tooth and nail to not be taken advantage of while picking up the slack left by the inevitable burnout of my peers, asking for help that never arrives. It was 13 months before I got a step stool. Eventually being at-will demoted for a $9 pay-cut with a shrug and the phrase “It’s just business.”

Winter of 2022, my best friend who comes over for dinner and to talk about the world once or twice a week, uses a cryptic puzzle to tell me how he “feels.” It’s very intense. I ask for some clarification. I don’t receive it. I’m planning a trip to Arizona with my estranged cousin to see where our maternal grandmother grew up. I tell my partner of 6 years I’m going through a lot and feeling a lot of things and can’t be much more than a leaf on the wind. He says “That’s fine because I’ve been thinking about breaking up with you since before your mom died.” I feel shocked and betrayed, and I am too exhausted to keep fighting. I let him go. I eventually learn to feel grateful that he could be honest with me, even if it took a year and a half, and even though it had to be in that moment. I continue to wish he hadn’t let me feel like our relationship was more secure than it was as I learned to trust the process of our partnership. I wondered if we were going to grow old together. I never thought that way before. But it wasn’t real, and it hadn’t been real for a long time before I found out.

A day later my best friend tells me he loves me, forever and ever, no matter what. I’m raw af and I fight the urge to tell him that’s bullshit and I just surrender to it. He kisses my cheek. He tells me not to worry. He tells me there is time. He is like family to me. It’s all very confusing.

A month later, a good friend dies of an overdose the same day a friend I’ve known since we were infants’ mother dies. I spend a long time on the phone. Hours. Back-to-back. Most of a day and part of the next morning.

A couple of weeks later, I fly to Sacramento to catch a train to Yuma with my cousin. My cell phone is stolen on the train. That trip is enchanting, intense, healing. I manage to keep a serenity with me throughout the whole endeavor. I write postcards a letters as we drift through the desert. The aforementioned childhood friend happens to have a car there that they let us borrow. We pick it up from their dad at one of those fancy gated retirement trailer parks. I post about that trip on Patreon. We find out my biological father lives in Bisbee and my cousin convinces me to take a significant detour across the state. We spend several days there and have a great time. I return home feeling somehow more significant.

My childhood friend has started threatening to kill themself when I wont let them come over. I tell them I’m running a DnD game in an hour and cannot hang out. They come over anyway to pick up their gun. I cancel DnD and ask my best friend for help. He drops everything and makes time for it right away. We spend a weird evening at a compound he’s caretaking. Everybody is having a strange winter. At the end of the night I ask him again what he meant. He begins having the response “not that” when I ask. I start responding with “what is that and what is that not?” He asks me to be patient with him. I try.

My childhood friend video calls me in the middle of the night after I tell them I’m not available until the weekend. I answer. They berate me until I yell. I lose it and they soften and start to laugh. I hang up. A few days later they ask to talk to me about something important. We go for a drive and they reveal they wanted to have a romantic relationship with me. I remind them that we already did that and they already betrayed me and that was 16 years ago when we were literal children and we’ve had an entire lifetime of friendship since then. I feel shocked and betrayed, again, but I remain somehow more composed than during the 2am video call. I tell them they need to leave town if they can’t respect my humanity and clear requests for space. The last thing they say to me is “I think I’m just now realizing that you don’t have super powers.” We never speak again.

My ex-partner of 6 years’ best friend dies. I want to be there for him, but I can’t. I’m trying to give him space. I’m still hurting. From the cold, nonchalant end to what felt like a lifetime of growth and coexistence, and because that friend was my friend too. I don’t know what to do. My adoptive dad’s dad is dying, and then dies. I try to be there for him, but the distance is alienating. My DnD buddy and my neighbor-friend’s best man dies in a freak accident weeks before his own wedding. My adoptive mom’s nephew dies. The empathy I feel is bottomless, but the powerlessness of grief all stacks and tangles into a weight that gets heavier as the people who help to hold it drop off one-by-one. The people who are still around have rallied harder to carry more together. I do my best to process through things so we can put them down and hold other things. Some things are impossible to do by yourself, but even with help, there is a limit to everyone’s strength.

I wait for 2 years for my best friend to figure out how he feels. He never decides. He writes me a letter before I get on a plane saying it’s “cosmic” and “forever” and I break. I say fuck you that doesn’t mean anything & forever and never are two sides of the same nebulous nothing coin. I demand his help understanding what I’m supposed to do with that. He stops showing up at my house for dinner. He stops showing up to game nights. I tell him it’s not ok to leave us hanging week-after-week with no heads-up. He doesn’t think it’s a problem. I tell him I’m afraid he’s going to disappear. He holds me while I cry and promises he never will. He says he wants to spend Christmas with my family, play chess with my father, see my brother perform. He insists he wants that for months before deciding that he won’t do it though. He stops showing up to make jokes and talk about the world. He stops showing up at all. I get scared. I get mean. He comes to my house one last time in June of 2023 and says he’d like to work together to come up with a strategy to communicate better, but he doesn’t have time to do it now. We agree to work up some bullet points and meet again after the weekend. The last thing he says to me is “I’ll see you on Monday.” He never comes back. I point it out. He ignores me for a few weeks. He tells me he’ll only speak to me if I come to his house, but doesn’t say when I should do that. I don’t have a car, and his house is 12 hilly miles out of my way by bike. He drives by my house twice a day, and never stops by. He doesn’t see the problem. I see him 3 more times over the next year. All unavoidably work-related. The first time he tries to buy me coffee. I already have coffee. The second time he tries to buy me dinner. I let him, and then I tell him I am not interested in pretending nothing is wrong. He ignores me. The third time we drive a mutual friend to the airport and part ways. I continue to reach out via text, email, phone, discord. Sometimes it’s normal. Sometimes unhinged. Sometimes I don’t even have words, I am just drunk and crying. He never asks me to stop. He never says anything at all. He never responds again.

I continue to work hard to support myself, and the people around me. I work hard on the things that bring me joy, and I work even harder to make sure those things are accessible and to share those joys with others. I’m getting so tired of being reminded by people I hold closely that it’s not enough. I assure the people around me that I am doing my best. I am doing my best and a lot of the time it kicks ass. I shouldn’t have to say so. To me it is obvious that everyone is doing their best. I so rarely feel like a failure, and so often seem to be punished for that. For being unafraid and forgiving. Why is that? What is it that I’m missing? I wish I understood. Alienation is one of the most pervasive and insidious acts of violence. Ostricization. Exile. Alienation is a slow killer. When people have nobody, they don’t want to persist. Why do people go out of their way to make people feel like they are not acceptable? Why do people withdraw when what they need to feel whole is the opposite?