There is a kid in front of a game console I used primarily from 2005 to 2008. She is sitting still and dreaming of a world I killed. She was snobby about video games, entitled, self-absorbed, desperately obvious in her role. She was me, and she wasn’t. She is a dream of what I could be, a dream I do not want anymore. Everything I make is some part of me excised so I might turn it over in my hands, staring as intently as I can, before putting it back. I dream constantly of what I might be able to become, and I have since the day I became capable of a coherent inner monologue. I remember the moment I believe to have occurred. I referenced the death screen of Kingdom Hearts 2 the second I needed to understand what was going on with the new tools available to my brain. Floating in black, waiting for something to happen. I don’t think I ever stopped referencing things to give my life meaning. I want to live right now. I don’t think I have the capacity to.
The girl before the TV has sat, hidden inside my brain, since high school. One of many dreams of mine, writing about a world I was largely producing from the fabric of the next second, one of many books I thought I could write. It referenced Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil. I had played neither at the time. She sits, still, engulfed in the turmoil of a world I did not complete, forever coming of age in a brain that feels like it is reaching for a goal that will never come, because it alone sets its goals. I want to grow as long as I live, deadlined entropy. I need to know that I cannot, if I see everything everywhere as a goal to be met.
There was a couple. One was dead, Javier, the other alive. I do not remember his name. Javier died a paragon, a goal to be chased. They had three kids, one of whom died with Javier. She would come back, the best of them, to kill her father. They were superheroes, facing the realities of their world, as I was in my time. It referenced Superman: Secret Identity and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It referenced my familial fears at the time. Javier is still dead, though the image of him and his lover in bed still rests in the back of my brain, in costume, light pouring in through the billowing curtains above them. Javier’s husband’s protege and surrogate child is still driving a stolen police car down a backroad, away from a sketchy motel I modelled on one just outside my town. I failed him. He drives, still, whether or not I care to look at him.
I have a world I am trying to make. It is sad. It references Disco Elysium and Dorohedoro and Signalis and Alien and dating sims and my patchwork political education and my fascination with old technology and. And. And. It is behemoth, the biggest thing I have ever tried to make, but it has crystallized, formed of everything inside me, a pearl/kidney stone/coal-diamond/blood clot. I want it to live. I think it is may be the most important thing to me that I create art, and I think I have never made art before in my life that I was ever proud to put my name on, let alone share widely. I need to vomit up/give birth to/kill this thing. I want meaning. I want generativity.
I have felt a sense of dread my entire waking life. Scared of death since the day I learned we do that. I have sought meaning in my life, some great arc, I have tried to build it for myself. Four, Ten, Fourteen, Sixteen, Nineteen, Twenty-One.
There is no inherent meaning in this universe. You make your own, they say, so we might not kill ourselves wanting. Wanting a concrete world. It is a recursive thought process. My brain is so hole-filled, wholly entangled in itself, I think there is no coherence that I might form from it. I want to be wrong, but this is the only new path I have. Now, I have to try to live through it. Atonal and desperate is all I’ve known, and I think it needs to be enough for me. I think it can be enough for others, if they allowed themselves the reality of the meaninglessness of failure alongside all else.
Do not try to create meaning. Let it bubble up, as animal as smoke in your lungs or blood in your mouth or the feeling of air entering places you know it should not, and the fear that comes forth from those hidden structures. Nothing means anything. We only have eachother. Anyone that tells you different is selling you something. Pass art around like a blanket. Pass it around like booze around a barrel fire; good, bad, cheap, expensive, it comforts no matter the contents. Make art like you would a splint. Make art like you would a barricade. Make art like you would. Please. For me?
dead or alive,