A bright and sunny Seattle midday where just enough sweat gathers on the brow to make you feel it’s summer — real Summer — and the shade and the breeze reminding you why you live here. Flowers burst in color near colorful and tall weeds in front of your friends’ house down the street, you see a familiar face coming towards you. Older woman, grey hair in a ponytail with glasses, she’s always greeted you with a quiet sweet voice and a smile, but not this time. Her mouth is agape, her brow contorted, no sound uttered, and as she passed she gives wide berth — past you, the partner whose hand you were holding just moments before, your 12 year old daughter pushing a market cart, and you realize those neighbors on the other side of your house may not be as kind as you thought they were.

You probably shouldn’t have worn the Holy Mountain Brewing shirt that features a naked woman drawing a pentagram. Gay is one thing, but occult and gay is a bridge too far?

Purple is a color I keep returning to, and as of right now the major changes for bed and bathroom have been completed with purple hues the dominant feature. My bedroom immediately felt calmer, but a sleep or two later, with items still stashed away in unfamiliar places, it started to feel wrong, like the room was angry. After many tears, I have arrived to adore it. There’s some final improvements to be made, but already I feel more myself than before. When I didn’t feel an immediate release, improvement on my grief disposition, I was lost. It turns out that no one thing can fix it, paint can’t cover it and I’m too tired to run from it.

Sometimes I feel like a tired robot arm built for one thing, left on in the factory, stuck in a loop where dutifully I reach out to screw some bolt on a car that will never come down that assembly line again. And when a human says “hold me” my robot arms fail. If I am not made for assembly, to build, to action then why, why, why robot shaped brain?

Of course, I do not find love in safe places. I do not find it where comfort has always been known, where difficulty is a sneeze on a summer day. I put down the books of escapist fantasy and read the world instead, because the fiction is too believable, the characters in crisis still to comfortable because I know they have a cruel demiurge, the name adorning the shining dust jacket.

I have no such faith here, because the capriciousness of a deity provides more solace than evidence provides. There are no gods, no rulers here, just dreaming, singing meat with no reason to be, with extraordinary endurance and fragility. What does a human version of the airplane, bullet ridden but still able to land look like? Survivorship bias infects us all, and what I have learned from listening is that we accept in fiction what we cannot conceive in our lives, but let me be very clear that too many of us are willing to sacrifice joy because of the fear of discomfort.

I’m unbothered by the notion that we are living in a simulation, or of multiverses where I’m a mirror universe pirate queen or somehow never survived falling asleep at the wheel at age 17 somewhere on I-75 near Ft. Mitchell. Like the end of a movie where the protagonist wakes up and sees the grand play we just witnessed be represented in a book title on the night stand, an auntie who nursed them through their fever, the news on the radio echoing bits of the plot. I walk around these days in a subliminal de ja vu. Has my pattern matching and eidetic memory drawn me to those pieces I’ve collected in mind to the choices I make at present? Does the ‘odd coincidence’ of common features among friends and lovers new and old speak of evolutionary human attraction or of a machine done learning?

My eldest has decided to dive into watching epic films, with this week’s selections being Kagemusha, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, and Bridge Over the River Kwai. His interest is in longer, deeper storytelling, rich world building, and characters. Lawrence of Arabia was an early favorite of many years ago, so come to me with your recommendations - the more esoteric, non-Western, indie, the better. He has no patience for small talk, so give him a rich world to fall into.

These days, writing has me feeling like my reading of John the Baptist; some poor visionary who has some good stories to tell but keeps finding myself in the company of those whose stories are more compelling than my own. I’m still writing here, though, and will continue on. I’m just half way through my ‘Year of Whatever’ and just a few months from Jon’s death anniversary. “Return to normal” is becoming more clear as an impossibility, like regrowing a lost limb. So I walk forward towards a velvet curtain I’m not ready to open. I’ve just got to be here for a bit longer, in this room of becoming.