05 november 2021
so i have arrived today. fresh faced and new to the world.
just for the record, I'm editing this in vim, somehow it's less intimidating than the row of commands all at once at the bottom of nano? I do have to manually put in linebreaks or else the line will just keep going. I'm doing this in plaintext cause the feels engine said I could, dunno if this will have repercussions later. maybe it will, maybe it won't. hope nothing gets too unsightly. i'm sure i'm messing up something or another, or something will be Ugly once it renders somewhere... am learning. will learn better eventually.
anyway. i showed up and walked my way into the IRC. i was immediately taught about tmux (which... is not an abbreviation for tex mex, as i thought at first) but yeah it's suuuuper useful, it's like having multiple tabs open. also got to watch a heated opinion debate about which text editors are best/best to intro to newbies! wish i had made popcorn.
just learned a neat trick in vim to highlight when 80 columns are reached so I know when to linebreak, ayo. but as i was saying, or not quite saying yet.
i don't know if tonight is the night to do the Big Introduction? or if i even need to do a Big Introduction? I'm in college, and my brain is laggy. I should be painting right now, but I have plans to watch V for Vendetta tonight with a friend and whoever she invites. i'm in a good mood right now, especially with the start of being in the town, and starting to discover everything - this place is so much cooler when you can actually interact within it instead of just watching from the outside like I've been doing before today - and also I got some clothes from a thrift event at my college. is nice.
so. i am herbe. i use they/them. i am a sturdy little leaf, and i like all kinds of oddities. i'm easily entertained. i'm in a period of my life, an Era, if you will. i'm in a weird parallel right now. i'm hungry and should eat dinner, it's 7 pm. i should, again, be painting right now, i have a master copy of a Rubens painting (the satyrs) due next wednesday but alas. looks like that will not be happening this evening. i would have to settle in for a couple hours, or one hour at least, and i would prefer to just relax, type in here, bump around town, and chill until i go watch that movie (probably after eating... something.)
i am in an Era of my life, and i will describe it using terms and ideas that don't quite make sense without context, but will hopefully be entertaining in some way? informative? maybe i just want to be able to look back on this later myself.
it has been: 74 days since August 23rd. Because of course it has. I look myself in the eyes in the future from here, and we share a -_- together.
It is 13 days until the next full moon. Marking Phase 0, Phase 1, Phase 2, and now I'm within the third moon phase. Not that they particularly change Much, it's just how they line up.
My half-birthday marker was October 22, so I'm over halfway through my year of being 19 years old. In about a week I'll be three months post-dependency on a certain substance.
It's 43 days until December 18th, so I think I'll definitely be back at a home then, not college, so I'll see so many people that I miss dearly. But I haven't seen them yet. It's been - it will have been - about a year and a half since I last saw them. A year and a half, again, again.
So many things in my life make parallels. So much of timing makes parallels, I make connections, build and use connections, learn and falter and create and am created. Ah. I've gotten pretentious already. Thought I would maybe last longer.
I'll gradually open myself up to the town, I think. Give more context and such. Tell more about myself. But this little space is gotta be for me before it's for performance for others. I think that's the best way to be authentic anyway.
I'm not okay. I want to make it clear, I'm not okay in any sense of the word. I have not reached the threshold of being okay. I haven't been anywhere near okay, and I barely got there back in... 2019. Yeah, 2019. That was the one okay year I really got in my life. That's literally the singular year where I can say that I was okay. So much of what I've been doing lately has been in attempt to get me back there. But, a lot more of what I'm doing, and what I did during Phase 0, is trying to pull back to 2013, 2014, 2015, years where I was certainly alive and yet not quite connected to anything current, and reconnect with those years, reconnect with what existence was like for me and what I truly hoped to get out of existing, what I wanted to pursue, what I was interested in, my hopes that I lost along the way. Ugh. 19 and I'm talking like I'm going to die in 5 years. I self-deprecate, and I remember that I can't talk any other way and call it authentic. This is what my authenticity is.
Anyway. The last time I was happy, safe, and feeling okay, I was 17 years old in a new high school. (I'm going to see how much I can write before I run out of time and space and have to go watch the movie with my friend. And eat, eating is important to make time for as well.) The last time I had any grip on my original existence, I was in the second semester of my sophomore year. I lost everything about myself -- intentionally, but still... it changed so quick once I moved. It took a year of adjustment to feel stable and happy. And I needed a change from how things were pre-sophomore year. I was miserable. I wished every day that I would be able to move. But I left so much behind, and the things I held on to to survive in that span of my life, I dearly missed, I acutely felt the absence of, once they were truly absent.
Wonder if this thing has a word counter? I know I can be verbose.
A year and a half before I was able to revisit my original home, and even that was a fluke. One weekend. An evening, a morning, a hug I gave too tight, a drive to the airport, a photo, a fixation. Friends and friends and a fixation.
I like to think that we were still friends back then. That we were still friends when they linked me to the playlist.
I don't know if I like to think much else. I know I will. I know I need to.
And my internal situation is such... such a situation. And god, I have love for them, us inside, but... I've never openly talked or processed enough about this. Not really. Something about this being public makes it different. I certainly haven't talked about it enough, processed anything nearly enough.
I don't know if I'll dump it all in Feels? I would like it if feels was a daily sort of thing. Actual storytelling I could put elsewhere. I have ideas for my tilde page, absolutely I do. Absolute storytelling. A vague autobiography? Documents and documents I already have.
Anyway.
A year and a half, again, again. I so acutely felt that things had moved on without me when I returned. I was welcomed, I was missed, dearly missed... but it didn't stay static like it did in my mind. My mental image, my placement of that place in the past, that was just a perception thing. The place itself, the people, they were not beholden to it. Of course they weren't. It was still jarring. I was 17, and it was 2019, and it was something I dearly wished for, and it is something that made 2019 the good year. I'm scared. I am scared, I admit. I'm scared to return to the second home, the place I left the original place for, the place that became such a strong home, the place I'm choosing to return to. I'm scared of the same things. I'll be staying longer, 4 weeks for a break. I'll be staying longer, staying with my best friend. Couch hopping if I need to. The old house is gone and sold, and it was a guest room anyway, and there's no space in the new house for me to return to.
I feel so alienated. Even when I am missed, I feel alienated. I feel alone, self-contained and membraned, and I don't even know all of myself.
I truly wonder if there's anybody I know in real life (or would know me from the other places I'm Herbe on the internet) here in the town. I highly, highly doubt it. But something about the possibility... the risk? Something about it interests me, I guess. Scares me, maybe. Makes me wonder how much I miss communication with a couple - really, just a couple people - that could potentially see this, recognize me, and never tell me. Or there's the converse: that I am putting data into the world that will never, ever be picked up or observed by people I know and engage in life with. Unless I happen to go to a meetup event specifically town-centered. You know what I mean. Something about the creation of potential really gets to me, and knowing that it's so likely that the potential outcome of them seeing this won't happen. It's just a way to miss someone. Some people. It's a way to feel guilty for missing someone. It's a way to wish communication, it's a way to avoid letting go, it's a way to imagine countless possibilities instead of listening to what surely happens whether they ever see communication from me again or not. Or, you know, maybe the countless other people that I'm on good terms with might see this, and we might have a laugh, and then I'll continue typing and realise that that's statistically just as unlikely to happen.
Anyway. I'm not okay, I'm still not okay, I'm before the threshold of okay, it's 8:10 pm, I have a movie to watch at 8:30, I'm hungry, I'm going to go eat.
Might write in here more afterwards, might not. Certainly will tomorrow or some other day. Certainly enough here to engage with to hold my interest for a long time. I'm very glad to be in town.