I hung up the phone. I really did love him. He made me feel understood- he was my person. After the first time he beat me and the cops came, he promised to go to therapy. He didn’t. After the second time, he promised again…but he didn’t. Soon he was beating me nearly to death every day, and my heart screamed, trying to reach him.

How could I still love a person who hurt me so badly in every way? How could I still want to be with him? While he was in jail, I realized I was willing to die for his love. I knew if I stayed, it really would kill me. But when he got out, I could help but smile when I saw him.

All he wanted was crack. He didn’t kiss me anymore, or tell me how beautiful I was. He didn’t tell me how much he missed me. He accused me of hogging the crack. And then he said it was all I cared about. Even in the depths of addiction, I really would have given it up on the spot if it could make everything better. If it could make him love me the way he did in my head. I wanted the man I loved back. I wanted the happy ever after. I wanted to grow old and be happy and have children.

I dodged a bullet. Every time he left a bruise on my body, he was giving me a gift. Those bruises allowed me to eventually pick a different path. Those bruises allowed me to free myself.

But first I had to go deeper. I couldn’t go deeper into him and I couldn’t bear the loss of the life we’d planned. So I went deeper into using. I went months straight without ever once sobering up for even a moment. When I did finally run out, I’d start crying uncontrollably. My whole body hurt, and my heart hurt more. I didn’t want to live, but I didn’t want to die. I wanted to want to live. So I just kept existing, kept rolling the dice with my life.

It was all a gift. It brought me here.

As I walked into my Nana’s catcholic church, I noted that it was too warm. I run cold, but it was so sticky I wanted to crawl out of my skin. We walked through a corridor that felt haunted for no particular reason, and into the room where they had mass. It was all so alien.

Even as a child, I remember being invited to the Christian after school club by my friends, and immediately thinking to myself, “ew. No.” I was old enough to know better than to say that though, and always politely declined. I wasn’t sure what it was that made me feel uncomfortable back then. It’s not that I particularly felt like a sinner or a bad person, and the times I had been to church, people had always been nice and welcoming.

When I was a freshman in high school, my best friend dated a guy who was really into Taoism. I didn’t know what that was, but what he told me sounded so mystical, and it made sense. I learned about mindfulness and meditation and looking within for answers. I realized that I was looking for eternal truths, not for a ticket into heaven. I wanted answers, not security. I didn’t want the fuzzy and warm ignorance that was organized religion.

My Nana and I sat down on a hard wooden pew close to the middle of the room. I never did understand why religions seemed so preoccupied with uncomfortable things. Why was it more holy to sit on wood than to sit on a couch? Why weren’t there rainbow churches filled with beautiful things that remind you how awesome life is? Like I get it, religious art is in churches, but why don’t churches have like rooms full of nature paintings, or elaborate gardens? Why did they all have to look the same?

I realized a long time ago that a lot of people find comfort in fitting into the “norm.” Conformity was a security blankie for them, but for me is was too constructive. It made me feel claustrophobic. Why limit my ability to connect with the divine to a silly book written by a bunch of very mortal and imperfect dead white guys? I liked the idea of learning about what lots of different people believed, without judgement, and then taking a look at the patterns and similarities.

I didn’t get why my Nana would ask me to come here and then tell me not to participate in communion. Who is it for if not for those that need saving? Not that I needed saving, but I’m pretty sure she thought I did. The whole experience made me uncomfortable, and frankly, a bit bitter towards the church. Why wasn’t this wonderful god more loving? Why was he so cruel to his creations? I refused communion like she told me to. I never belonged here anyway.

All day today, all I could think about was her. She’s my person. When I hear something funny or see something beautiful, she’s the one I want to tell. One day, I’m going to marry her. I texted her when I was still at work, but she didn’t answer. I know that she doesn’t check her phone much when she’s out and about, and maybe that’s exactly what worries me. The more time that passes, the more anxious I get. What the fuck is she doing? Isn’t she thinking of me too? If I wasn’t working I’d text HER back. I know she’s seen my text. I bet she went to meet someone. I don’t trust her. She lied to me last week. She said she’d been home all day but when I got home she was dressed with makeup on. Why would she do all that just to stay at home? What the fuck is she hiding?

Tonight is warm. I sat around in bed all day and when it finally started cooling off, I just had to get out of the house for a bit. He’s been really jealous lately and a lot of the time, I don’t go out because I don’t want to hear what he has to say about it. Not that staying home helps, either. He never believes me when I tell him I’ve just been home all day. I know he has low self esteem- I care about him more than I can put into words. I want to help him, but sometimes it’s hard. He said he’d start going to therapy. He promised. Maybe I’ll find some good conversation downtown. I could use a bit of human interaction. I don’t even know if I’ve spoken out loud today even once.

Three more stops until mine. Almost home. I need to smoke a bowl. This girl stresses me out. I know it’s just because I love her so much, but damn! Sometimes it makes me mad. I feel like she has all of the control. Wait- is that her walking towards downtown? What is she doing? I knew she was up to something! Now that I’ve caught her, she can’t lie! I’m going to find out why she’s such a BITCH.

The rain was coming down hard now, bouncing off the tin roof. The air was sticky and thick. One spot in the corner leaked. It had ever since I could remember. We’d always just emptied the metal bucket and put it back before the next rain. Maybe I should get that fixed. Just because my father didn’t, doesn’t mean I can’t. I could be proactive. But what was the point? This house had to already be saturated with mildew and black mold. I’m sure that’s not healthy. Maybe I should move. It’s just me here anyway. Not far, but to somewhere less moldy. Disgusting. This place is so disgusting.

But change takes energy, and I don’t have any these days. I used to garden, but even that had been taken from me in my old age when my fingers began to become too stiff and clumsy to work the garden and my knees too wobbly and bony to kneel on. I thought I’d be older when I felt this old, but here we are.

Outside, a street light flickers on and off. It’s been doing that lately. That’s one thing that’s new. It never used to flicker. I hated how it glared through my bedroom window at night, but now I hated the flickering even more. It wasn’t even a regular flickering. Sometimes it would flash, sometimes it would flicker. How annoying.

I sat and stared out of the foggy window through the rain at the flickering light. On and off and on and flicker and off and flicker flicker…as annoying as it was, it was also calming. Like a love note from the universe reminding me that I’m still alive and things are still changing around me. I just haven’t changed in awhile. That doesn’t mean everything else has stopped.

I watched the light turn on and off randomly for awhile. I began to lose track of time, and for a moment I even started to think I could see a pattern to the madness. On and off and flicker flicker. It reminded me of Morse code. I learned Morse code when I was little; I wanted to be a spy when I grew up. My father told me that Morse code was an important tool for spies. If I wanted to be a spy I’d have to learn all sorts of codes.

But I didn’t become a spy. And I didn’t learn very many codes. Really just Morse code. I decided to decode the flashes as if they were a code, just for fun. “Fun,” ha! What a miserable human I was to find staring at a light fun.

A-r-e-y-o-u-t-h-e-r-e

Wait, what the fuck? Is the street light talking to me? Have I finally lost my mind? I must have imagined it. I don’t have any loving family, and I don’t have any friends, as sad as that is to say. Who would want to talk to me, let alone send me messages via streetlight?

I must be going crazy. I must have imagined it, or subconsciously made the flashes spell out a phrase so I’d feel less alone. I forced myself to divert my attention from the flashing light for a moment, and turned my head to look at the clock. Illuminated, and then in darkness, and then lit again. It was getting late. How did I kill this much time? What have I been doing? How did I even spend my day?

If you’re reading this now, it means that from the moment you find it, the universe is intrinsically changed. I’ve gone back and forth with myself- what would someone 100 years ago benefit from knowing? How much of what I have to say would not even make sense to you without temporal context?

You live in a time driven by fear and anger. A time with a glaring sense of doom, the knowledge that without a widespread change in how everything is done, the earth itself will die, and everything on it along with it. I can’t say that humans woke up and changed their behavior. But there’s an old saying- “Only when the pain of remaining the same becomes greater than the pain of changing will we change.” And eventually, we did. We had to.

As above, so below. The old World Wide Web was a reflection of the workings of the all. Everything connected, all the time, in infinite ways. Paradoxically, the further we ventured from nature, the more we began to unconsciously mirror it, down to the quantum level. As we became more connected technologically, so did our ideas- “trends” and information became so widespread so incredibly quickly and were almost instantaneously universally accepted that we had created a sort of artificial hive mind.

As this unity transpired, although our opinions became more polar, our feelings became universal: fear, longing, anger were all encompassing. This pushed the people of that time to reject what they saw as traditional. Suddenly, the new cool thing to do was to turn their backs on technology and the world their parents had built. Revolution is never easy, nor without fatalities. Much of the technology of those times was lost to us, as some of the more ancient knowledge of the all was unearthed and revived.

The richest of the rich quickly moved into separate societies. Those that didn’t move far enough quickly enough were torn to shreds. Violently rejected from society, stripped of their belongings, stripped of their power, and often stripped of their lives. The reason you are reading this now is that it has all begun. On December 4, 2024, the CEO of a major insurance agency responsible for many deaths of innocents in the pursuit of endless riches was gunned down in what was then the United States of America. Suddenly, people began to imagine the possibilities if this same course of action was directed towards what we only call “the rest of them.”