Writing Again
It’s been a while. Months and months, to be precise. I moved to Japan. I moved home from Japan. I got married. I got a PhD. I got a new job, quit that, got another new job. Every day is a struggle to speak, act, and conform in the right way to make sure I’m employable and accepted. At least at work. At home, I always have a place.
We now have two cats as well.
I’m trying to get back into writing as I seem to not be able to balance the two parts of my brain. There seems to be an organic, creative portion that comes alive when I write, and a brutal analytical part that consumes information with a hunger that seems almost pathological. The nonfiction portion of my brain has been dominating for years now and I can feel my organic bits screaming to be let out.
I think about the ocean a lot. The combination of terror, depth, and majesty. It’s at once overwhelmingly powerful and profoundly shallow. Beautiful, terrible, peaceful, and dangerous all wrapped up in one. I feel like I’m trapped in my own mind, like drowning in a moment that lasted decades.
Archivist of Forgotten Futures
Centuries from now, humanity discovers a strange phenomenon—every time a person abandons a dream (writing a book, learning an instrument, building a machine) that dream doesn’t disappear. It condenses into a physical artifact somewhere in the universe.
Once upon a time, there lived an archivist: part explorer, part academic, part scientist. A being that lived in many different realities at one time, moving in and out of the fabric of space-time according to the ebbs and flows of the akashic field, searching for these artifacts. Each one reverberating with a particular vibration, unique in the cosmos, but not unknowable. Most are harmless. Most are forgotten pieces of souls from many different times and places, but others shake the field and cause echoes, ripples, and sinkholes, influencing the stars themselves.
Today, the archivist has materialized in an unremarkably empty corner of space. Unremarkable except for the powerful string vibrations materializing light in the beginnings of a nebula. It’s a bottle. A simple bottle with what could be something written on it or maybe in it. The archivist plucks it from the pulsing blackness, holding it in a hand made of light—only an echo of whatever body used to belong to this being. Strong enough to hold this collection of vibrating strings though. The archivist delicately opens the top and draws out the thinnest of paper. It’s rice paper, the being notes to itself. How curious. An ancient technology that should not exist in this timeline, but it shrugs. Time was relative anyway. It could be the beginning or the end of all things and it would likely look the same. Long light fingers unrolled what remained of the scroll as it revealed handwriting. Even more curious, the being thought. What lifeform wrote in this dead language on these dead trees? Part of the writing rubbed off on it’s non-existent fingertips. Pencil? The being was even more surprised. It hadn’t thought about pencils since…it looked closer at the writing. Is this my writing? Back when the being had a body and existed on a single plane. Back when it had a single life and existed for itself, not as part of hive of service. A life of desires I never remembered giving up, it thought as it read the first paragraph.
The storm was wild. The darkness, encompassing. All I could feel was cold, wet water everywhere. Divisions between my skin, the waves, and the rain all dissolved into my clothes as the air and water howled around me. I couldn’t tell up from down—my sight was locked into a kaleidescope of chaos confusing me and driving my brain into a primitive scramble for anything familiar or safe, but there wasn’t anything. No boat, no land, just the angry, violent hurricane doing its best to drown me——————so I let it. I stopped swimming, stopped trying to survive, just curled into a ball to float with the fury. Occasionally, I could feel the bump of my back on air and I’d quickly uncurl for a gasp of oxygen and then roll up again like a pill bug.
The waves were still violent, but without fighting them, the water turned strangely peaceful. My lungs hurt, crackling with desperate need to breathe, but the rest of me was much more comfortable. I might actually survive this, I thought. Only to be followed by, Do I want to?
The archivist stopped reading. The paper was blurred, like a water drop was dissolving it. The being let it go, watching it hang in space motionless. This one seemed infinitely more precious and more dangerous than just another aborted project. It rubbed its nonexistent chest, feeling as if something had scooped out its spine, right where the brain used to connect. It craved more contact, but was afraid to touch the delicate paper, hanging unassumingly in the nothingness. It reached out, wanting to push the little paper into its soul, embed it back into the memories that never were, but it’s fingers were too greedy. This time, the light flared and the paper dissolved back into the field, flicks of moisture where it had been. The memory gone, the light absent.
The archivist dimmed, frustrated and empty again as the vibrations disappeared into nothingness. It released its grip and drifted back into the place between planes, waiting for the next ripple to call it to the next location, intuitively knowing that it would never see that part of itself again.