devlog #36, [ANGST.]

A watched pot never boils. It's the third of february and ever since december 20th, something has been brewing. Its been brewing, and brewing, and the surface has foamed and the oils have fractured into perfect mirror-like ponds before fracturing again, and again, but it hasn't boiled.
I'm in a similar state, currently. If you couldn't tell.
I've been biting and chewing and eating the frog first, trying to make headway on ouro as I am desperately trying to get control of the wild-horse-chariot im driving across a plain never before leveled by experience. I didn't code anything in the past two weeks. Nothing. I haven't even gotten back to the dev again (another story, for another day), because all I have been (desperately) trying to do is maintain my writing habit while trying to corral the rest of it all. So some days I have been writing bullshit that amounted to nothing, other days, out of frustration, I have been working on a new project (a very "casual slice of life", I told myself, and then wrote the synopsis, and prologue, and end scene, of someone (you) dying and getting to narrate/steer the life of a struggling new adult as they find love, while you bicker with this very detached sphynx-ish sidekick that is obsessed with the feeling of wanting). Um. where was I? The sphynx (???), Leto, has a lot of real estate when it comes to braincells right now.

I love them.

ANYWAY.

Right! I started working on my many lecture assignments, because I don't know what else to do. I didn't quit, because honestly, sometimes I don't know how to. Correction: I cannot allow myself to. Not right now, when it feel like I'm failing at everything. I activated my app for sub-work and had my first fill-in last week. It was brief, and stunning. Good, and bad.
But, my savings are now completely drained, and I still have two rent invoices to pay and insurance and I postponed my wisdom teeth even though it is apparently "dire". I don't care, can't feel it. Not my problem what my teeth are up to, when it has that pricetag. I barely have fucking clothes. I still have a mattress on the floor, but now a kitchen table and chairs, and I cry about that more than I should, because If I could at least get out of the house, I would be fine, but for the first time in my life with my sweetheart, lovely dog, I am starting to feel some sort of strange resentment? Despair? I don't know what, but I feel so trapped trying to care for pani nani, and feeling like I'm falling short, because I am so trapped. All we do is go on walks, and get hauled to others homes in cars I have to lift her into (and she fucking haaaaaaaaaates that.). I feel unreasonable relief when I can leave her with my parents for a day, and then feel incredible guilt because I felt that relief, although she loves it. She's my everything. But man, I am so stuck here, in this apartment with nothing in it. And no money to pay for it. I haven't even gotten my first electricity and gas bills, and already my money isn't enough. Lawyers and dentists and vets are supposed to be "emergency spending" that happen once, what, biannually? and I got hit by all of em, and all my money is gone. I couldn't have worse timing if I tried. I'm fucking destitute, man. lmaoooooo. I don't know what to do!!! I am scrambling for work, but even that won't pay until a month from now, and it'll be a pittance. I am so sick of inviting myself for dinner because I don't have anything at the house. I am so sick of my ex living large with all the things we bought together while I sit here counting pennies just to get poop bags so my neighbors don't hate me. And I hate, I hate, that I wish I wasn't here. All those mornings when I wake with just a black hole in my gut. When I hate the sight of the pale sun. I just wish, all the time. I wish. I wish. Sometimes I even wish that I could take it all back, and continue living with All That, because it was easy and I didn't have to worry as much about practical things, because we had a system. Why does every change involve actual change? Huh? Why is moving so expensive? Why is the impact lagging so much, and so jaggedly that I can't keep up? Why couldn't I calculate it? And why on fucking earth am I more productive in creative endeavors now, than I was when I had literally nothing to do all day, but I was in that relationship?

I think I know the answer to all of those questions. It doesn't make the reality any easier, though.

I won't pretty this up, I'm sorry. It's just a really, really rough time, rougher than the night I left, because now there is no turning back. There is so much. Just so much. I can't take the looks of sympathy I get anymore. I wish I wasn't here. I just wish. It's an endless string of if only-ies that lead so far back in time that I could stop the extinction of the dinosaurs, if only.

I wrote a little ouro stuff in the past two weeks. And I was very drunk. I hate that, but I do love what came out of it. Sorry, not sorry. I love ouroboros with all my heart, but it is really fucking hard to get into that headspace sometimes. It's raw and meaty and claustrophobic, and has all these recent hemorrhages that only worsen it. There's just blood everywhere, in clots and splatters. Anyway, have the bit that I'm really happy with, even if it is uncomfortable for me. It was one of those just-bleed-onto-the-page nights. I can't say I'm happy to be in this space of the pathfinder being miserable again, because ouroboros to me is about all the cast finding their way out of it, but you can't have point B without a point A. I'm very excited to finally write this part though, because ever since releasing the first demo one of my main gripes was about having to have the pathfinder go to the hedge either willingly, or forcibly, and only then find out about the plot about leith. In this iteration, pathfinder finds out about leith in different ways, sure, but instead of getting recruited by the vicar to find leith as an ultimatum, the pathfinder (and crew) instead thwarts the church's own efforts to find leith and whatever weird shit is going on with them.

Oh well. We're here right now, although I wish we were a thousand paces ahead. Could you just cross your fingers and say a small prayer to the gods of resilience, maybe? I need it, and so does the rest of the ouroboros crew right now. Just. If you're out there, fighting, I'll fight for and with you too. There is so much, all the time, everywhere. I don't know what to do with it all. Every time I sit down to write, I just hope it will bring us together, somehow, someway. Some day. Even if, for now, it is just this ethereal, far-away-feeling of solidarity. God, I hope you're out there.

I'll shout it into the void once more: I'm here, and I'm breathing. I hope, somewhere out there, you're breathing, too. xx

You don't want to lie here. But you can learn to. You have to.
Endless hours of night turn to gentle twilight. When you finally allow yourself to truly wake, to break the seal of your despair-crusted eyes, you see lehim right there with you. It makes you scoff.
It's faint, the returning smile, through the sheerness of the curtains. You feel like you're underwater.

They called you weak,

a failure of a soldier.

Not good enough to push past their limits.

A waste of space.

As if you weren't just somebody's daughter/son/weird cousin.

Leith slides under the cover, maneuvering so smoothly you just feel the glide of it, of lehim, nestling their head in the shallow dip over your chest/ nestling your head in the crook of their neck. For a while, there is just your breaths, syncing, until you can't tell one from the other.

"If you listened to what they now say, and it went straight to your head, would you do it all again?

… All of it?"

Their voice murmurs just by your ear, ruffling the frail baby hairs there. It feels so real. You turn yourself inside-out for it, writhing in minuscule movements while your mind does the rest. The flaying. You reach a limp hand, two laxed, curled fingers, to brush against the soft, barely-there fluff of lehis cheek. lehe leans against the touch, pushing against it, like a cat. You revel in it, not turning your body too much, just existing in the feeling, in the sparse space the in-between has granted. Your eyes remain closed. You hum, and the universe exists within the sound.

What answer rests on your tongue? With everything that has passed since then, the buckets of experience and the years of knowledge of not only human psychology, but the stripping of good-natured naiveté, the cold-hard truths of the rough, the grating surfaces of life? Is the answer always the same? Forever? No matter what happens?

[You never answer]

[You let a smile linger on your lips]

You want to ask why lehe is here, though, why the air is vibrating around you, why the pit in your stomach, but you don't dare to do anything but push it further away for a few seconds.
Just a few more seconds.
You trace their eyebrow with the tip of a finger and let out a laugh when they laugh.
lehe catches your palm in theirs, turning it to place a kiss in the beating center of it. You can see lehis eyes.

"Did you have everything you wanted?"

A pregnant pause. Tears puncture from within you, a spiky maul hauled from your spine to the front of your chest, like a gasp armed with teeth. You feel like coughing blood, feel the red protruding through your teeth as you smile through the minuscule, nodding lie.

"Am I dreaming?" The whisper is barely formed by your lips.

"A nightmare?"

Everything turns hostile, dripping tar and darkening corners, and you balk, scrambling to turn it back, your mind free-falling through options, breaking branches, leaves spraying, run, RUN—

"You tell me."

Everything brightens. leith laughs, a windchime of feeling. Their form flickers, no longer solid. You grieve the heat you thought you could feel, your fist clenching around what was once there, within it.

"Please stay," you waver after a second of basking in it, of pulling it closer; losing it like you once watched a raccoon-eagle carry the cotton candy it deftly stole towards a puddle to wash, and it amused you, how it grew increasingly distraught, feet stomping in sugary water. If only you knew.
Your throat gets cut with a thousand razors as you try to speak, gurgling with want. "Just… a while more. A second more, make it real, make it count—" Your words peeter out into the room as your fingers reach for heat, foreign with their intensity against the dusty, dead, silent spaces. It's all still here. Everything, down to the detail, nothing moved, nothing disturbed. Just missing the final gear. If you could just— if you could just.

Turn back time. Reel it back in. Fight with it, sure; you're no stranger to fighting. You'd welcome it. Having the option to fight would only mean some catharsis for the years lost.

So you plead, tears wetting your temples, the pillow, your hand twisted around your gut just to keep all the feelings in place.

"Please." 

But nothing hears. The river happily chuckles.

Just once, you blink your eyes open, only to check. You're met with the straight-forwardness of reality, and it feels like a shockwave. The mushroom cloud of a rising dawn, the absolute finality of a new day, further away from what you once knew.

The No More.

The moving on. Of the Onward.

Give it whatever fucking name you want.

Leith's form has faded so much, it is just an outline in the sheets beside you. You trace it, trying to coax more out of it, breath stuttering into silent, subdued, almost-there sobs. You can feel it; something was here. It happened. It was real. You know it was. In the center, where lehis chest might have been, you make a fist, and it chokes more words out of lehim; ethereal, real enough that you question your sanity. Did you ask, or did lehe?

"Is that why you want it so much?"

You can't answer that either, won't even examine it. You shake your head. It happened.

"Because you cannot have it?"

It makes you snort, that kind of half-laugh of disbelief, of when someone tickles you and you barely register the touch despite their candid effort. (You wish you remember what that felt like). You turn over, rejecting it, choosing to find your place within this new world, instead. No point in delaying it now, really.

Staring up at the crackled stone of the ceiling, momentarily wishing it would fall onto you, staring intently; asking it to.

Fuck you, you goad. Fuck you, fuck this, fuck all of it. 

When it doesn't, you squeeze your eyes closed once more, praying it buys you more time in the in-between. Demanding it to. It is only fair. You swim in it for a long while, letting your eyes roll back in your head, searching for it. Bringing out just the right tasting memories to coax it. And when a glimpse of it, when a familiar wave of dullness crests, falls, foams— you let the words most frail wander out of your mouth, a bumbling pilgrimage of vulnerability. It is parched, dry as a desert. Honest as a rainfall.

"I miss… I miss you."

Nothing answers.

Teeth gnash. Tears threaten with blade and bullets and jeering smiles.

You feel silly. Stupid. Overcome.

Defiantly, you try to battle it. A stiff smile settles on your still sleeping lips. You pretend. You pretend so hard, you can feel reality shatter from it. Today could be any day. It could be one of the ones where lehe brings to-go coffee from the canteen and brings the lip of it right under your nose, so that the red-hot smell of burnt beans blends with the icy freel of lehis hand as lehe slips it under your shirt to rest on your chest, right in the center, fingers lazily curled around the base of your throat. And you could laugh and squirm and chase that coveted first sip lehe thought was too bitter to stomach.

You could.

It could be. Just—- it could. If you don't open your eyes, it could. As long as you don't—

[Just don't, on repeat: maybe a few more glimpses, but futile, always with the option to truly wake]

[next]

A ray of sun cuts under your eyelid, just so. You muffle a frustrated scream by swallowing. And swallowing. You embrace the calm, if only to not become the storm. Fists curl into themselves, like intestines seeking equilibrium. The spell is broken, and there is just you, and the sleep-warmed sheets. Dust swirls in the air, centuries old. You feel it, the age. It happened. To you. To everything. And nothing changed. Everything did. Did anything change? For you? If nothing had happened, would it have changed, differently? What paths diverged, and which merged?

Why would now be anything different? Or would now, be different? By what factors?

Pleasing ones? Would lehe live, but hate you for what you did?

It doesn't matter.

This is the Now you have.

Your feet hit the mat. You roll your shoulders. The river ripples. There's a presence that always lingers behind you, in Riven, and in here especially, so strong it feels tangible. Like you could reach for it. You don't ignore it, not when you slip on your shirt, or when you turn to face the strange clutter of sounds from the kitchenette. You don't get scared. You nod your head to it. You don't know why. But somehow, you understand.

They called you weak.

A failure of a soldier.

As if you weren't a home.

As if all that didn't happen.

As if you didn't love.

As if you don't, still.

[some context: this happens in leiths apartment in Riven, now a safehouse for the crew. The church is looking for it to find more intel, but they haven't found it. Hence, a good place to both hide, and to keep on top of the blade-raids happening in the areas around the house. They have a good perimeter, and good friendlies around them. Did I ever share the leith 101? I'm pretty sure I did. It is in the same district.]