Eventualities Collapsed

I know why I haven't posted in well over a year.

The foremost reason is that I had wanted to post more of what I had written for Eventualities Cordon. At first, I wasn't getting around to it. And then, the place where those writings were stored was deleted, and I irrevocably lost them.

While I don't think any of the lost fragments rivaled the introduction for poetic artistry, I was nevertheless very proud of them and for a long time... Perhaps I was hoping to eventually rewrite them, but didn't find the energy.

As to the year and a half or so it has been...

Glancing back at the 'Blessings' I was appreciating before the big silence... My mood is wry. The relationship I was giving up on then, I'm far from finished being angry and heartbroken about. The household of people who were doing a good job of not taking it out on me when we were in conflict? Well, first one and then another wound up blaming me in pretty awful terms for the way that I push for concrete answers a body is willing to admit to, that clear and steady "No" that I abhor to have to infer from cowardly implication. And I was asked to leave.

Eventualities Cordon's premise offered me an entire nutritious diet for thought. Exploring the question of what I would do, from where I was then in the real world, given the sudden power of particular types to exploit, gave me a powerful way to explore and examine what I want. Although I do not have the power that Something has, when I think of what that the transcendent and untouchable self would do with a real-world situation, it does tend at least to suggest a direction in which my own impression of justice and closure lies. It is not usually too difficult to think of lesser moves in a similar direction which might have some fruitful results. It makes it easier to forgive myself when I feel helpless, knowing what I wish I could do, but either cannot or dare not.

I startled myself to tears, seeing what directions my thoughts took, given the premise of power, without changing the context of my life otherwise. What problems I wished I could solve. I wished to heal my mother's cancer, and her mind. This was more apt than I realized at first. Seeing that desire for resolution, seeing by it that I was still able to find a compassion for her underneath the pain and bitterness, I found my way to visiting her in hospital. The trip taught me a lot, and one of the things it taught me was that although I had not properly realized it growing up, she was, and knew she was, cognitively impaired from brain damage, acquired in a car accident as a child. The effects were subtle. She was capable of being charming enough to get by in most social situations. But the solidity of a well-reasoned logical conclusion was often not within her grasp.

I wished to heal her mind, and learned that I had not realized how right I was about it being damaged.

Even just this changed the context of a lot for me. I heard some stories from her sister about what had really happened, those many years before I was even born - those things which were really far more of the cause of what I have suffered in my mother's treatment of me, rather than any sort of justice, or even any actual conclusion on her part that I deserved the way she treated me. Weakness, not malice. Although weakness of a kind that can look a lot like malice, when you don't know what you're seeing, being too young and inexperienced of the world to know what to look for.

While I was traveling to see my mother, I stopped in to see my father as well. It had been fifteen years, did I mention that? Perhaps more than fifteen years since I had seen either of them. They were so old now, heads growing threadbare and skeletal. Shrunken and warped, but unmistakably recognizable. A sort of diminished caricature of the faces I had known. It can be like that, when one does not see someone for years. If you age together with them, the changes come slow and subtle, but when it has been a long time, you see all of them aggregated together at once and the contrast jars.

My father, too, developed cancer. It took a turn for the terminal at about the same time I was asked to leave my rooming house approximately a year after my short visit, so I asked to go to him and live in the unfinished cabin he'd mostly built in the back woods, to be near him while there was still any time to spend. And so I did live there for four months or so. We played cards frequently. We were on better terms by the end of those few months than at the beginning, there's that much to credit at least. I injured my knees walking across the uneven ground. They are not recovered yet, but struck by weakness and the occasional twinge.

My father is dead now. He died while I was away to help my American friends with a move of house. I got on the phone to be in some vague sense virtually "present" at his dying-day. I could hear little, but I hope it was a comfort to have me there in this minimal sense, and to have had me there more substantially in the few months we had.

My father would semi-regularly have friends over to listen to playlists composed by a certain artist he enjoyed, and dance. I also assemble playlists. I take significant pride in them. He never listened to mine. They are not such easy listening, and I wanted to see him hearing them, see what impact they might have. We didn't find the time.

The month is August, but in another sense, it is a season of winter for me now. A time of endings and of barren places, of long and difficult cold. A time of numbing wounds and numbing distractions. A time of grim endurance. Of waiting to see what comes with the new wind. Of needing time for the seeds of potential to germinate under the soil of my subconscious before they dare put up shoots of new hopes, new paths, and show me what there is to want next.

Eventualities Cordon Index

Eventualities Cordon is was a work of collaborative fiction in which a set of people discover one day in February 2023, that they have suddenly developed incredible magic powers. What will they choose to do with these powers? How will they relate to world events? Their previous lives? Each other? These are themes the story will sought to explore.

I intend intended to post various excerpts of my own part of the story to my blog under its own tag.

edit, Nov 2023: However, while I was procrastinating on retrieving the pieces I had already written from the Discord server where they were composed and polishing them up for this blog... That channel was deleted. My compositions were lost. This is part of the reason that my blog has been deserted for such a long time after this post. The things I had really wanted to post next where these things, the names of which are listed below in sections 2-5. First I was distracted and procrastinating because it was a big task... And then they were gone.

If you have canon or fan fiction about the Eventualities Cordon story-line and universe you would like to share, you are welcome to write or link to it in comments to this or other Eventualities Cordon blog posts to which your fiction relates.

edit, Nov 2023: Ah, such beautiful optimism...

Readers are encouraged to comment about how they might interact with the story as people without magic powers; if you do, your participation may at the discretion of the authors (including myself) be incorporated as canonical details.

To Never Forget

(Part of 'Eventualities Cordon', a collaborative work of fiction) 

It woke on a generally unremarkable day without a splitting headache for once, and that was a welcome relief.

It lay in bed for a long while without opening its eyes, considering the lingering impression of an oddly transformative and vibrant seeming dream. One of those dreams which is so beautiful in some difficult to define way that it is painful to wake up from it and find that reality remains the same. The same as it was yesterday that is, and very different than the dream.

Once upon a time, those dreams were of love, of adventure, of fun fantastical places, of finding a potential sexual partner whose interest was mutual and fun and safe.

Today, it was a dream of the occasional directional glow of mysteriously confident psychic relevance and things it ought not to have had any way to know and yet thought it did, seeming to ignite in a slow, bleeding eruption, out into a web of context and comprehension and nuance that reached out without an end to its light. Subtle, yes, but at once vibrant and clear.

Ah, those dreams, those longing, beautiful dreams. For as long as it kept its eyelids closed, it seemed that perhaps it could keep the thought coherent a little longer, hold the memory a little longer before it would begin to decay into meaningless confusion and be forgotten.

The something considered this, watching itself watching itself, and reflected passively that this level of meta-awareness was uncharacteristic of still being asleep. It could feel its bed and its eyelids. It was conscious. How then was it remembering so well as to not only picture and retain the sense of the vague shape of its dream, but to still see the web, in that sight which was not sight but could still be "light"...

Once upon a time, long ago, it had blinked its open eyes and in a moment destroyed or banished the welcome image of a spirit whose eyes shone a compassion it had never known from its human kin. It had regretted that moment for years even after it had reluctantly conformed to the insistence of the society around it that no such thing could be anything other than an illusion, and must have been a dream. It did not forget that now, and kept its eyes closed, lest opening them now do the same. And why not? Keeping eyes closed was easier than keeping them open.

It found that it was calm. Also a welcome change, but not altogether surprising. The medications had really been helping. It thought that on another day, this thought in this context would have made it cry. It seemed not to be doing so now. Was its determination to hold its eyes steady so great as to forbid them from watering? An amusing thought.

It followed its idle curiosity along the threads of intuition it had in this strangely persistent dream, into its own mind. Strands upon strands, lattice upon lattice.

`I don't think I can imagine in this much detail.`

Confusion. A bit of emotional nuance where it seemed like perhaps there should have been a sense of alarm, but there was not. It noticed both.

`Follow them.`

It dove into the representational shifting lattice of its own mind.

`Meta upon meta! Talk about going beyond the layers dream usually permits...`

A mental chuckle. The confusion and not-alarm growing and becoming rather insistent about something.

The something sought out the parts of the web which conveyed a vivid representation of the parts of its own brain capable of sensing and imagining, processing vision and visualizing.

It was not certain until it saw certainty in the structure of its brain. No. It couldn't imagine in this much detail. Nor did it have the medical background to generate this kind of a detailed model of how its own brain worked.

The cutting edge of medical science probably didn't have the capacity yet to generate this kind of a detailed model of how its own brain worked.

Something opened its eyes. The lattice receded slightly from prominence in its sensorium, competing in a moment with the more familiar illusions of visible light, but it did not disappear. It never would.

The something had long since lost the ability to have that kind of certitude about anything, much less anything in the future. Yet it had it now. This sense was a part of it. It was being processed as a sense taking in information from the outside world, not iterating imaginatively on models.

This was sensorium, not imagination.

I wondered if I could still cry, and willed myself to do so. My eyes watered.

I willed myself to commit this experience to memory, to remember and hope always to be able to remember what it was like waking up from this dream and finding that the world was the same - the same as the dream, that is, and very different from the way it was yesterday.