I am preoccupied by death recently. My own and others, stranger or not. An inevitable that's somehow always going to manage to be subjective.

I reasoned to myself, as I panicked over the overturning of the Chevron doctrine days ago, that I could strut about ten feet from my room and right into my father's, reach into his closet, and brandish the shotgun he has hidden. Butt to floor, toe to trigger, chin to nozzle. Whether it's imagery I've drooled over or held with shame, I have carried it all the same for a large portion of my life. Please note this is not a cry for help. I know I won't kill myself, and I am going to be fine, actually.

I can't help but wonder if these thoughts are as abnormal as others, and my initial self, would label them, though. Is it the fault of man if he wishes for a quick, basal escape from the breaking wheel his limbs are tied, or is it the fault of the breaking wheel's inventor? Humans are not made for this. We will never be made for this, no matter how we try. We were meant to eat fruit, to get fat, to suck and mount each other, to nip, to nurse, to create. Whatever we are doing now spits globby phlegm in the angelic face of Humanity.

I'm listening now to Sunshine by Sparklehorse. I'm thinking of my mom, again. "She covered me with wings and held my head, and said: "poor thing."" I miss her. I don't know why so suddenly now. Perhaps it is because I've been thinking so much about children and babies, of raising them despite the fact I will never do so. Yet these past couple of days I've daydreamed not of romance or sex but of parenthood: clutching a cherub to my chest, feeling little fingers in mine, weeping over its chubby, tiny face. I think somewhere deep in my psyche, I want to fill what role my mother filled for me for someone else. I don't want a new mother; I want to become my mother. But not really... I don't know. I am feeling very emotional, different thoughts bouncing off every crook of my skull, colliding together occasionally, agitatedly, like the antlers of horny bucks. I suppose all of this is to say I am desperate for things that are out of my reach.

The first thought that stuck with me today while eating a grapefruit section-by-section with a steak knife was about my mother. How I see her in eating grapefruits, in having a spoonful of peanut butter late at night, in the frogs my friend Ivy takes pictures of. I know I'll think about my mother every time I have a grapefruit for the rest of my life, and that's comforting.

Other than that, I can't really put how I feel right now any better than this:

I suddenly remembered my old html files and the logs they held. One stood out to me-- the only one I had made for a long-abandoned site layout. Here it is, dated March 4th, 2023 at 4:44 PM: "I can go maybe a few hours at most without thinking about it or getting upset about it at all, but I always end up ruminating and crying. It makes me feel pretty weak if I'm honest, I'm not used to crying this much and this easily. Sometimes it just happens with no trigger. It's annoying, but I try to let myself do it for health's sake. Last night I sobbed just about as hard as I could at ~3 AM. I remember my Google searches were things like "can my abuser change?", "did my abuser ever love me?", "does my abuser miss me?". I read the resulting posts on forums and the outstanding number of "no"'s just broke me. This is one of the hardest things I've ever had to experience. I just want it all to go away."

It touched me. Made me feel incredible emotion in its simple sadness. I imagained reaching out to last year's person, wrapping her up in my arms and kissing her cheek as she hiccups into my shoulder, a hand cupping the back of her shorter hair. "You have no idea just how you survive, how you heal in your suffering. Please, please, trust me. You make it. You did the right thing."

I suppose in retrospect it is even more bittersweet when accounting for the fact I did return to my abuser for a short time after this, like a dog that fears its master but thinks it has nowhere else to go; no other way to be. But I've since learned-- through running away-- that frolicking with a limp amidst the greenery and its butterflies, whenever my aching paws allow me to, is a better life than lapping desperately at an empty food bowl and having bottles chucked at me.

But even in my omnipresence over the past now, that sort of despaired longing persists. I'm coming to accept that it always will because I'm also coming to accept that, in loving, you subject yourself to creating something undying. It may change shape, but it will always unapologetically pervade. I hold on to all the love I felt with old friends, acquaintances, and even strangers like receipts lying at the bottom of a grocery bag. I told my abuser that I hated him, but to use that word truthfully is a lie and I think I knew even when I said it. My love for him has twisted itself under the influence of my righteous rage, deep confusion, and the pain of his countless betrayals. No matter how much it warps, though, I have to resign myself to knowing it is still love. "I love you. Never ever come near me or my loved ones again. Suffer until you are better," I would call out to him from a long, long distance away, defensively clutching a scythe, "Exunt."

Happy pride month. This morning I woke up thinking about an experience I had at a baptism I attended last month for my brother's child.

While I am not religious (or, at least not in a Christian way), I remember enough about my Catholic experience to function well at mass. It also helps that, you know, they give you a guide detailing each and every thing that will happen that day. If I'm honest, I have a great appreciation for prayer, and so I bowed my head, uttered "amen", and kneeled when instructed out of basic respect. But this isn't what I'm really thinking about.

Instead, I'm mulling over an interaction that happened without my knowledge while I was dutifully participating in religion for a morning, which was only revealed to me much later in the car by my father. While I defeatedly weeped to him about how my brother refused to look at me the entire time I was at his house (an entirely unrelated, but in retrospect, potentially symbolically similiar event), he abruptly mentions how I was stared at by a random mother seated in a different pew, her expression disapproving and disgusted. He tells me how he then intimidated her with his own stare until she averted her eyes. From the way he spoke about it, he sounded... indignant on my behalf; protective. It was so jarring I nearly forgot my tears-- not just for the fact that I had been clocked, but for the fact I had not known at all.

I suppose it was somewhat eye-opening because I had spent the entire mass being so attentive, so interested in the sermons; in the architecture; in the singing. And still that did not keep me safe from being eyed like a freak.

But while this was pretty inherently shocking to hear, I surprisingly wasn't saddened. I found myself more curious and appreciative than anything. Curious what had given me away, appreciative that my father, who has struggled the most with understanding who I am, was the one to put an end to the brief hatred that had tried to reach me. As we talk of our family and my "blacksheep-edness", he adds on that I cannot give a fuck what people think of me. That if someone doesn't like me, that's their problem. "Just be yourself." It's an almost juvenile concept, and yet hearing it from my dad, someone I've always had an incredibly complex relationship with, felt like a form of love I lack the words to properly describe. It is like managing to only merely graze the sun with your fingers, feeling just a portion of its warmth yet not despairing that you could not have its full heat.

I think what the experience taught me was that I, like my father so eloquently put, should absolutely not give a fuck about what others think of me. If I was absorbed in prayer, a non-religious, while a religious was absorbed in her disdain for my existence, doesn't that say something? And, too, when I focused my attentions on my brother, giving him a portion of my brain to occupy as he resigned his own to purposefully skip right over my presence, doesn't that also mean something?

The love you give to others must be reciprocated for it to be selflessness and not self-sacrifice. A library will crumble without the return of its materials.

I just got done feeding Bunny. I had a panic attack.

The feeding is unrelated, but it was a unique thing to do: to be sick to my stomach, rising to my feet and wobbling to the bathroom to fetch a thawed and warmed feeder rat, one of its little clawed arms loosely dangling from its socket. I chalked it up to a bump during packaging. At least there wasn't any blood. My fingers are still trembling. The musky stench of rodent emitting from within a wet plastic bag is one that could double as my aura in the moment I retrieved it.

I am thinking of rape, to be frank. Of violence, of a new cruelty being done to me to fill the gap left between now and my last run-in with it. It never fails to make me feel hopelessly dirty when I remember my life has been one fattened by experiences of being taken advantage of. I've built quite a palate of unsavory flavors in my short 21 years, starting from mere runthood. My brain is constantly in a state of awaitance for the day it happens some more. It is a horrible thing to think and to expect, but I cannot blame myself. Throughout my life I've been convinced by others that my discomfort, my fear, my vulnerability, and my pain were all desirable. Thus, it has forever skewed the relationship I have with my sexuality. Once somebody who took obnoxious pride in being a 'masochist', I now recoil at the word-- because I realized I was not one... not in the proper sense of the word. I've simply been conditioned to believe that my suffering is inherently erotic, and so to escape that reality, I latched onto BDSM-esque labels to mimic a sense of control over what scares me the most.

Tonight, I sat in my room and shook. And shook. And shook. I clutched my middle and then my head. I closed my eyes and pulled imaginary guts from my body, tossing them over the ravine of my bedside. Yet still the thoughts plagued me, the thoughts of being subject to more of what I already unwillingly own. I think to myself: "Perhaps I should go back to presenting as masculine," and, "Perhaps I should stay inside forever," and, "Perhaps I should kill myself." I am sorry to you, reader, for making you read these words. They are bad, I am aware. But they have to escape somewhere for them to not make themselves true. I hope you don't feel the need to hold onto them for me. Just let them scramble over themselves to drop off the island of their HTML page; losing themselves between divs and other tags; burying into obscurity once I inevitably update to say "Everything is fine, actually."

Things I love: my friends Ivy and Cloud, Bunny, music, the relief in my muscles when I let myself cry, my hair.

I always feel like I jinx myself when I say things...

In the entry before this one earlier today, I complained about my schedule being messed up and how I missed spending my mornings doing things I deemed as productive. Guess what happened? I managed to stay awake and at around 6:30-ish I got up and started on breakfast. I even made coffee over ice cream and a side dessert of chilled chocolate hazelnut strawberries (that I am now struggling to eat because my stomach is already pretty full).

It is the aforementioned items with the main meal being guacamole toast topped with cooked buffalo chicken, ricotta and honey, and cilantro. It is very good. I've made it before and really liked it but adding the cilantro ties it together even better. Makes me wonder if I'll ever try making a recipe page, but that's too much on my plate for now (badum bsssh).

I might play Splatoon 3. I've long since fallen off of playing it a ton but I've been wanting to try and get back into it. I have been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons after a year or so of not touching it at all, mostly due to the fact I remembered you can catch bugs, and that's been pretty nice. Then there's also Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring, the latter's DLC release date coming next month... and Deus Ex that I got when it was on sale for a dollar... Terraria that Cloud got me... too many options.

I've been working so much on my site and yet it feels like only a dent in a great, big, wide wall. I almost spelled great as 'grate'... I worry a lot for my brain these days, wondering if, among all my other problems, I may have some sort of dyslexia. I've been mistyping words I've always known, replacing words with similar ones in my head, and forgetting how to start words entirely on the common occassion and it is humiliatingly scary to me. I've always had a junkyard memory, but I feel it's getting worse. I feel like if something isn't routine or right in front of me, I will forget, like an infant. That one little mistake sent me right into a spiel, didn't it?

Back on the site... I think the rework is coming along well, though I'm growing restless to finish and put it out into the world already. I'm a bit anxious I'm potentially downgrading everything instead of upgrading. I hope I'm not. It's not like the old design was very complex, anyways.

My sleep is all messed up again. I mourn the schedule I was maintaining for a good chunk of time (good in the book of a chronic insomniac, at least); waking in the early morning, feeling rested enough to make a proper breakfast, sitting out on the balcony. Now I wake up mid-to-late afternoon and remain in bed for the majority of the day, my most active activity being repeated onanism. Not even for hedonistic desires; I'm hypersexual. I joke often to myself, with bitterness, that the act nowadays feels more like a chore than anything enjoyable.

I guess I am talking of this openly because it feels like self-reassurance to type the thoughts in my brain out into something tangible, even if I am always nervous of coming off as some sort of deviant to strangers. It reiterates to me when I proofread my typings that I'm not a grossly ape driven by carnal pleasures-- I am traumatized. This is one of many things that can happen when you are traumatized, especially consistently, sexually, and as a child. I've seen Nagata Kabi, the author of the manga My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, get called a "sex pest" for having the guts to delve into her own complicated trauma and how it manifested in her attachment issues to her mother in said book. A sex pest. It turns my stomach. Not just from the lack of empathy in that statement alone, but because that could've very well been directed me, too. I sincerely worry for those that struggle to grasp the idea that living as a traumatized human being is unimaginably strange and ugly sometimes. Trauma has to have an outlet, you know? You don't just get hurt and then nothing happens. Your brain has to try and find a way to survive despite the damage. I wish more understood that.

I pray to God I am not coming off as one of those people that defends and salivates over genuine debauchery in the name of "healing", though. I can't believe I have to say that but I will. Also, it came as no surprise later on when I discovered that the person who insulted Nagata's work ended up being a TERF. Finding that out made the comment make a lot more sense in retrospect.

My one wrist kills me whenever I put pressure on it palm-down. Bunny pictures from yesterday unrelated, I was just cleaning too hard I suppose. Ow.

Leftover Japanese curry and rice with edamame beans on top... mmmh...

After working out, I showered and cooked myself breakfast. Today it was toast with ricotta cheese and honey buffalo chicken, alongside coffee pressed over vanilla ice cream (a treat... I usually am not that huge on coffee). Am I becoming a toast person? Also, why is it so hard to cook with ADHD... I mean, I know why, but my 'why' here is more of a 'ugh, whyy'. I actually cook pretty well, but I always struggle with multitasking, not just in the kitchen but everywhere. Not something I can do. So often I'll be telling myself, "No, Saf, leave it. Do X first before you do Y. Leave it!" while I am doing Y. Hah~... If I was alive in medieval times, they would make up a folktale curse about me... or maybe I'd just get crushed by a wagon wheel before they could.

When I went out to my balcony with breakfast, my paper wasp friend was not atop her little nest. I was instantly saddened and a little concerned. I did go out about an hour later than usual, so I'm hoping I just missed her and she's out hunting or collecting materials. It is entirely possible that she did not feel safe enough at this spot and chose to move-- or, more nihilistically, she got snatched by a bird-- but I am hoping she will return. I'll be keeping an eye out.

While sitting out there, I saw a large blue heron flying around. Birds are incredible things. I always argue that they have the best designs in the animal kingdom. I also caught myself staring at the grass, the sun falling on my knees, and wishing to pick around for bugs like a child. But I am not at that level of self-security just yet, sadly.

I keep replaying More Yellow Birds... I suppose this specific track is keen on touching my heart with its ghostly fingers today. Hearing Mark's backing vocals entwining and detwining with his main ones is a detail that sits heavy with me. It is like the same person is singing to me but from another place, another time, with another feeling. His voice strikes me as one perfect for lullabies, especially apparent in songs like Most Beautiful Widow In Town and Gasoline Horseys. I'll save my full thoughts for future reviews I want to eventually write and publish, though.

"I'll never find my pony along the roiling swells. A muddy river or a lake could do me well."

I had the same breakfast I had yesterday (avocado toast with chili scrambled eggs AND added ricotta, topped with sriracha and kewpie mayo) and spent it the same way; outside on the balcony with my paper wasp friend. Again, she was chill, simply in her dormant state as I munched away on my food. She did give me a little antenna twitch when I first stepped out which was very cute. After eating, I took the garbage out and then went to release a wolf spider I had caught at 3 AM. Gorgeous little thing. You can see pictures of her over on my bug page, if you want. The weather has been very nice here so I am trying to get sunshine, even if it's only for a brief moment. Wear your sunscreen!!

Still listening to a lot of Sparklehorse... I think it is becoming one of my favorite bands. Which is a shame, considering there will never be any new tracks (rest easy, Mark), but I think I'm content it exists for me to appreciate at all. I finished Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain earlier and enjoyed every single track, which is rare for me to do with albums. Will take my time going through the unlistened ones, as well.

I'm going to play more Red Dead Redemption 2.

This morning I made myself some-- ... hang on. Typing this made me realize I have swapped the 'N' and 'M' keys on my keyboard... Bless my ingrained typing skills, I only noticed because I glanced down. Let me fix that.

Better. Anyways, this morning I made myself some avocado toast with chili scrambled eggs, sriracha, and kewpie mayo on top. It was very good, but the taste was heightened by being outside. I've been wanting to desensitize myself to being outdoors by myself as, regardless of my previous rant last year about supposedly killing my agoraphobia in a day (think I was manic, honestly...), I am still agoraphobic. A big part of my illness is being perceived; if I simply existed outside, all humankind suddenly gone, I would be fine. Jovial, even. Not that I hate humans. Ask any of my friends and they will likely tell you about my abundant forgiveness and love for our kind. But being around ones I do not know? Horrifying. Violating. I'm not sure when it started, but this isn't the point of what I was trying to write.

I sat outside on the balcony, notably in a pair of shorts, a bra, and an opened flowery blouse I slipped on (very pretty thing, shame she's only hanging on my body so I feel more modest). As simple as this act is, it is hard for someone like me. The first moments I was out there felt awkward, like I did not belong; like every living thing was sending a telepathic message of unwelcome to me. But I sat through it and ate my food, because that is what you have to do, unfortunately. I gradually relaxed, partially thanks to Mark Linous rasping his beautiful songs into my ears. Looking to my left, I quickly spotted a solitary paper wasp chilling atop a small nest she had built beneath the railing. This only relaxed me further. Food, good tunes, and now a bug to quietly study! Three things guaranteed to make a Fona happy. I sat with her even after my food was done, confirming her species and admiring alongside watching the birds play and hunt down below.

Overall, a nice blip in a day. I hope I can have more. I hope I can extend the range of 'blips' I can have by gently peeling away the walls of my illness, to eventually coax the skittish animal inside out into the arms of the world.