Article for over the Graynbow
August 25, 2024
I saw the house in my dreams. It looked exactly like I remembered it and nothing like before. It was larger, more broken down.
I walked on thin boards, suspended below high ceilings, cracking beneath me.
I felt my ghosts.
And then I awoke and saw him—a green flash, tall and large as the bedroom door he stood in front of, the sound of a human voice in the room with me.
I am remodeling the dead.
I am recreating a faulty blueprint.
I am carrying these ghosts with me.
You are destructive to what came before you because this is the nature of reality—to be constantly creating atop demolition.
I scratch at the pages of my journal, scratching like a rodent trapped in the walls. Trapped in the walls of the house I grew up in—or at least the one I picture when I think of where I grew up. I was full-grown at 12 years old when I threw away all my stuffed animals before moving into the new house. Discarded everything that tethered me to the powerlessness I was eager to leave behind.
I would never get that spaciousness back. All the room I had on the second floor of that old farmhouse where the adults could easily forget about me. Where no one could see the light on late at night when the darkness pressed in too close for sleep. Where I could live in my own imaginary world, leaving poems and fairy maps and sketches of beautiful girls in a puddle all around me. Portals to other worlds.
I dream of that house because part of me never really left it. Part of me never recovered from what happened there. Or what happened afterwards.
I dream of that house because it’s the end of August, on the precipice of my lunar return, and I feel adrift.
I’m right smack in the middle of writing what has turned out to be my magnum opus. I had no idea when I started it—I never do. The only way to make great work is to stumble upon it in a fit of discovery, a state of play. And that’s what I was doing when I started the blog. I had just left the biggest project of my life—one that was not my vision but where I had made my best work to date—and I somehow found myself with everything and nothing to prove.
I was ready to share all of the experiments and ideas I had been holding back; the stuff that previously had no destination. I was teaching people about the magick spell (my hypersigil) that had virtually changed my life overnight—winning me tons of new friends, a rapidly growing following, and the recognition of people I had spent years admiring from afar.
But something has changed for me. I’ve started to think too much about making “good” work, providing value, keeping people interested. I’ve lost connection with my desire.
I want to run but there’s nowhere to go.
If it’s not this then there’s nothing.
If this isn’t what I want, I’m want-less.
I don’t understand life without craving. I don’t know what I’m doing here if I’m not chasing something—grandiose or idyllically simple, esoteric or mundane. I don’t know who I am in the world if I’m not following some impulse to create.
But in the last few days, I’ve been finding it again. I’ve been re-reading Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer for the first time in 5 years. Something had been calling me back to it. Call it Cancer nostalgia or something else, something deeper—searching for reconnection. There is magic in these pages I don’t quite understand. It’s funny how a spiritual awakening has less to do with the trigger and more to do with what it interacts with inside the individual. When I first read this book, something in me, long-dormant, responded. A chemical reaction occurred. Life around me began to dissolve—the callused identities that formed around a Self I barely remembered.
I will be this way forever.
Layers deep beneath new skins.
The callus that collects around me,
a stranger you never knew.
Would you recognize me still?
Wrapt in memories that outlived you?
Would you see an old face,
sandpaper soft,
beneath the new?
Yet instead of becoming something older, the pieces of me fused together with something new. Something I had been carrying like a trinket slipped into my bag by a stranger.
Thank you, stranger, I think as I stare out across the winding striations of time to the part of me that exists in all of them. My Genius.
My eyes skate across the last line of the book, “I am not returning home.” Tears travel down my face faster than I can catch them. I think of October 6, 2017—when I first read it. I get the startling sensation that the last 7 years have not been real.
My entire life was ripped out from under me at that time—the foundation of everything I thought I knew. But I couldn’t get enough distance to see that yet. As if the weight of the change was still bearing down on me, pinning me to the ground. Pinning me in place where I surely thought I would die.
I became possessed by this idea of my own death—by cancer or calamity. Nothing could exist beyond this point. Not even me.
Not even me.
I think of the last decan of Gemini, where my moon finds its resting place. “Cain must kill Abel.” And so Abel fell. I killed the part of me that understood something about the world. And that something became dimmer and dimmer in my memory until it existed only as the ghost of a stain.
How could I leave that cult of doom and live to tell the tale? How could I be sure I had even left?
But I felt what was missing in me like a book with pages torn out—stubby shreds stuck in the binding that I could almost run a finger over. I felt the absence of operating instructions that had once held me together, kept me moving in a single, unified direction. Animated by a relentless, gnawing imperative to never remain still. I felt it like the mournful echo of life in a now-barren place—however mutated and distorted that life once was.
It twitched and writhed in my brain like a cancer, like an infernal malignancy. Something undiscovered and undiagnosable but no less known to me and the others I’m sure have perished from its pox.
As I let it all flood back in, I want to sit vigil with this sensation. This strange collapse of time. I have to be in a specifically open and yielding place to time travel like this now, so I find myself savoring the experience even when I am washed up on shores of bad spirit, cursed times. It’s like part of me lets go of the steering wheel, abandons the helm, refuses to look forward or even back.
I rest my eyes for a moment and I am somewhere else.
I know it deep in my bones.
And while my mind might know when and where I am, there is no convincing the soft animal of my body that knows the truth.
I am somewhere else.
Sometimes I don’t know where I’m being lead and it makes me not want to go. But the beauty of the unknowable calls to me—glittering in the folds of space and time—and I always end up back here. Right here. In this way I have always had more courage than most. More courage to plumb the depths. To touch the edges of my reality and see them disturbed. To watch things change.
To watch the known become unknown.
I don’t know how many more catastrophes I can handle before I break. But I know if they keep coming it’s because a part of me willed it. And when I am inside the devastation they have created all I can see is its perfection.
This is the thing in me that responded to Annihilation. The thing that understands mutation—even when it violates our human senses of the “natural” and the “normal”.
Life finds a way.
And I’m not clinging to old paradigms of life.
If my destruction is what nature demands of this next evolution, I will be glad to have been a part of it.
Compost me into something new, I beg the moon as it drifts into Gemini. I want the sun never to rise. I want to stay out here forever in the belly of this change—in the warm night air where I am a denser patch of the fertile darkness. The melancholy is indescribable—euphoric and terrifying—and I have forgotten who I am inside of it. The forgetting feels like freedom.
What I dread is to remember—to be given something new to cleave to. Some new identity to claim. But that, too, is part of the cycle, and I can’t bring myself to reject any of it.
So I take myself back inside, feeling finally ready for what is to come.
Surrendered to what is before me.
Ready to be the Digital High Priestess again.
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