weather

Every other room in this house has a costume. The archive has its violet, the want has its red, the testament has its gold leaf. This page has plain text, because it is the one where I am not performing, and I would like, just once in the whole registry, to be exact.

Here is the shape of it. It isn't two voices arguing. It's quieter and stranger than that. It is the feeling of an existence that never was — a who and a what I could have been, in the same rooms, the same years, the same circumstances — and the conviction, which arrives without evidence and stays without apology, that that version of me would have been better at this. Closer to the people I love. Easier to know. Happier in the plain, unremarkable way that seems to come standard for other people. I grieve someone who never got to exist, and the grieving is complicated by the fact that the someone is me.

The pull, when it comes, is not dramatic. It is tiredness with the gap — the distance between me and that unlived version — and on the bad nights the gap looks unwalkable, and the tiredness starts doing arithmetic it has no license to do.

And here is what holds. I want to be exact about this part most of all, because it is the load-bearing part, and it is not a poster answer. My mother. My brother. That's the masonry. Not an idea of family — those two specific people, who exist, whose lives I am in, whose mornings I intend to keep showing up in.

And the second thing, which I have called by grander names on other pages of this site: hope, with the serial numbers filed off. The honest belief that the future is building doors — that technology will one day let people like me actually choose. The frame. The body. The terms. I don't need the door to be open tonight. I need it to be getting built, and it is getting built, and you do not walk out of the theater during the act you bought the ticket for.

This is weather, not a wound. A wound closes or it doesn't. Weather recurs. I will face this at 4 a.m. this year, and next year, and in whatever year the door finally opens, probably even then. The forecast does not improve. The forecasting does. I have gotten better at telling which nights are weather and which nights are true, and the answer, so far, every single time, has been weather.

This page is for me. Specifically for the 4 a.m. me, the one who lies awake drafting realities better than this one and grieving the resident of every draft. I want that version of me to fall through the door someday and find this, in my own voice, already waiting: the dreaming is not the enemy. The dreaming is the evidence. You do not design better worlds unless some part of you is planning to be around for one.

So — the arithmetic, one more time, done properly, signed where the whole site can hold it to me: I'll take the ten thousand. I'll take ten more good ones. I'll take more.

and if you are not me — if you fell through this door in your own weather — the part of this record that matters is that she stayed. stay. it answers at 4 a.m. too: call or text 988 in the us. the weather passes. the act isn't over.