Month: April 2021

Looking out over the Bay, looking out east, the sky’s still light even though the sun has already set. Alcatraz straddles the horizon, rough rock washed gentle shades of mauve and blue. In my hands, I think there must be a kite, and it flutters in the wind, strains against its tethers, wants desperately to cause an airplane crash. I hold the nylon cord tightly in my hand and watch the beach goers, black silhouettes against the blue, pink and gray of oncoming evening, play. The seagulls call and children whine. Dogs run off leash, spraying up heavy wet sand as they gallop into the surf. Low tide begins to run, and the estuary will pull out, rushing , empty only after nightfall.

I can swear that I took a photograph of this moment, but when I flick back in my phone–nothing quite like it, no exact image exists. Are my feet planted in the sand, or are my shoes filled with the stuff? Does the moment exist , or is it an amalgamation of all the moments that I’ve known this place before? Are these seagulls crying the same call as the ones on the Long Island Sound? Is this beach trash the same trash that I used to pick up in Massachusetts? What else is there to scrounge from the surf? Coffee cans filled with pebbles and clam shells, handmade bricks and old porcelain plates, shattered by the undertow, now become cabochons washed smooth and clean.

The days run strangely, a collage of experiences that flow together to create who I am, ebbing away at night, leaving only detritus that tumbles in the wake of my dreaming. In the prologue to Ellison’s Invisible Man, the narrator smokes a little of that good old reefer, letting the sound of Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blue course through him, reveal him, waves of realness and recognition bringing him to being. And I lie back on a bamboo mat that’s made its way, two years and a trip around the world, through the hands of three or four friends, to somehow come here to be with me in Davis. And I lie back, toke a little of that good old Humboldt County stuff, and I fold my body and let the sound from the little speaker I’ve kept with me this whole time flow over me.

I’m listening to a set by California’s Flying Lotus, emphasis of the BBC, from 11/29/2008. That would’ve been the year before I graduated from high school, right before college. I can’t remember much of the year; I know that I must have been visiting and applying to colleges. Here and there are a few pieces that hold fast, the bright, sunny arboretum of Smith College, the way that the Amherst College tour guide left the only two families of color behind on the tour, stranding one black and one biracial family, two strangers with one small commonality, in the middle of a church that hadn’t seen a live service in half a century. Belief in a higher power is passe now that we have computers which can run calculations faster than an underpaid woman.

Flylo’s set opens with an Alice Coltrane track, the sound of his grandmother’s music slowly becoming subsumed to a pulsing beat and an text-to-speech reader with a bad British accent, a programmed voice that pronounces “BBC” as “bibby-see” and, skipping as if degenerating into repetition, pulls the listener into the next track. There’s something about the way that Flylo mixes a set that gives the listener a sense of endless progression; sound degenerates into noise which alternately recedes and bubbles over into the next track, forming an aural collage that carries you through as a listener. When he uses vocals, the voices are distorted to the point where the ear strains to make out even a full syllable; where that doesn’t even matter, lost in the reverb and the constant ebb and flow of the samples that make the set keep rolling on. After a point, it isn’t even about the voice any more; it’s about how much it can be stretched, and how the words can be worked in to a web of pattern and implication. In this set, Flylo pulls easy-listening fresh out of a stimulus progression Muzak track or a 1950’s advertisement and juxtaposes it with Thom Yorke and Bjork, with samples so far out of context that you almost lose track of what you are listening to in the first place. Was that a sample from Super Mario Bros?

Before you know it, your eyes are closing and you’re drifting away into the amnion distortion of a real, garage-style, k-hole-style dubstep track. The listening experience is immediate; I’m forgetting that it’s from 2008. I try to hold onto what remains in my memory,turning a wave-worn popsicle stick over and over in my hands. It’s been in the ocean so long that the bad joke seared into the wood is barely legible. It’s not even sticky anymore. I think that there’s a good chance that I was listening to Flylo in 2008. My friend from high school was a DJ at American University’s college radio station. He sent me a dropbox link to the college station’s music, and it was filled with weird, exciting, experimental stuff like Flylo and Merzbow. Not this set, exactly; but other great sets, sonic collages and samples.

In between two of the tracks, Flylo samples a lo-fi recoridng of Hindi singing, which in its repetition loses vboice to become uncertain if what is being sampled is vocal or flute or whatever. It puts in some plucked string instrument, maybe an oud, which in turn fades into a drum track and samples from a video game, the sound of an exuberant shout, hey! but muffled and low-fidelity. The low-fidelity doesn’t mean low-quality, it means less-of-an-adherence-to-whatever-is-real-here. It means fantasy. It means cobbled together, the way I hold all the beach glass in my hands, turning it over and over, wondering if there’s a way to pull together a bottle or jar out of the smooth pieces in my hands. There’s still a little bit of salt on them, and they leave my sweaty palms slightly sticky, as if they’d taken the opportunity to had a good cry.

I wonder if each of these little shards remembers what it used to be, what it’s like to be a bottle, a glass, a jar, a firecracker ice cream pop. I wonder if they remember what it’s like to be made, then to be re-made into something else through the grinding of the tides and the currents that snake t hrough the bay. I wonder what it is to be here. To make something from them. Sometimes, I used to stack stones up into cairns, build one on top of the other, build sculptures that would beforgotten as soon as the water rose high enough to knock them apart. I wonder if I remember what it used to be like to be me, how scared and small and tear-stained wet I used to be.

I can’t remember much from 2008; can’t remember my birthday, can’t remember prom (from the year above me, I was cool like that, even as a nerd) I can’t remember much, even though I went with a friend and got dressed up beautifully. I can’t remember what the dance was like, I can’t remember my friends or crush. The photos are there; and there must have been Thanksgivings and Christmases and Easters and all kinds of holidays, and there must have been video games and everything to play with and books to read and projects to write. I think that was the year when I got major depression, but I’m not really sure. I used to play the flute and the piano, but I’m not much of a musician; the memory of how to play has gone too. There’s no collage I can make of these things, and even visually collage isn’t one of the things that I work with as a medium either.

I could try writing about it, here; but what’s the point of trying to write nonfiction when you cant stitch the web of happenings that must be a part of your life together? What’s the point of nonfiction when so much has been unremembered, flushed from your being? I can only report, now, on what happens in the moment; I weave my lines back into books and music, into ideas that I can play and replay, into things said and documented–because for me, what has not been inscribed into some type of inhuman memory is not, and can not, be. A wise teacher of memoir once told me that this thinky writing might jeopardize my attempts at writing nonfiction that meets the requirements for a graduate degree, though a wiser anti-memoirist has since told me otherwise. When my memory is as loose and runny as my bowels after a bad day, how am I supposed to write cohesive nonfiction about it? And can it be compelling when the tragedy and gore of it has been hushed up, hidden away, or even purged? Because no one can say what happens to the memories that are lost to ptsd; they might come back in the beaks of owls for the dreamers or they might be gone entirely. And the attempt to remember is exhausting, met each time with a block that tells me not to progress, to go do my laundry or something else more important.

So I do the best thing that I can think of. I build a simple little bot to automate it.

I start by opening the copy I’ve made of Zach Wahlen’s SS Bot V. 4, a Twitter bot built using google sheets and a couple lines of python. An absolutely lovely misuse of google sheets, if I must say so myself. I go into the code, make sure that it’s updated so that my bot can tweet up to 280 characters, so that we’re not stuck at a mere 140. After all, I think this bot is going to have to say a lot. There’s been updates since the bot was first released, and some features don’t worked as planned anymore; but that’s okay.

I start by choosing the function that will allow the bot to compose text by selecting a few words from each column, filling in the desperate ruminations of the gaslighted like some kind of highly depressing mad libs. I’d like it to iterate and explore all of the memories that could have happened–those holidays and life milestones that movies portray as sunny, effervescent family affairs, but for which I know nothing more but a wash of confusion and which, in my memory, feel like a kind of nervousness that cuts like a knife.

A sample peels through the beat.

Shall we play a game? Oh, I’d love to. Let’s play Global Thermoneuclear War.

The track that’s playing is sampling from the movie about a computer game gone rogue, which coordinates to actually cause global thermonuclear war by gaming the situation out with a bunch of hapless teenagers. I wonder what would will happen if my family ever found this out and traced it back to me. Let’s play total thermo-nuclearfamily war! What would happen? How much do they remember? What pieces of that time do they hold onto dearly? What memories do they carry with them? Where do they feel it in their hearts? What scars marr their thoughts, tell them to stop right there? How much time can we hold on to in a lifetime, given the petabytes that we supposedly can store? Up to 200 years of HD video–how much do we hold dear?

Hours, and hours, and minutes, and seconds! Hours, and hours, and minutes, and seconds!

Is this a game, or is it real? ask the teenage boy. What’s the difference? replies the computer.

Is this a game, or is it real? Did this happen, or is the kind of fiction invented by a nuked-out mind?

What’s the difference?

The first column sets a time, introduces the event as one of many that have occurred. Hours, and hours, and minutes, and seconds! Hours, and hours, and minutes, and seconds! I try not to be too exact. The next columns get more specific, laying out timelines, rough events that definitely happened, events that had meaning. Christmas, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) each have their own meaning in the pattern of holiday suffering. Christmas Day was always spent with my paternal extended family; the day after was when we got to live with the fallout of whatever had transpired the day before.

That time when	right before	the holidays
I remember that time	right after	Thanksgiving
How about when	before	turkey day
That one time	after	Christmas
Once, when I was little	the day before	Christmas Eve
Once, when I was a teenager	the night before	Advent
Once, when I was in middle school	the night after	New Year’s
They said, “you probably don’t remember,” but	the day after	Boxing Day
	some time around	Ephiphany
	on	Halloween
	during	Christmas Day

The next few columns set up characters in the story; people who I remember, even if vaguely, participating in the events that went down on Christmas. If i try to get too specific, the wall rears itself again, blank and concrete and a mile high; it blots out the light from my computer screen like a migraine, more than a warning. I keep the actions vague; no need to get too close to that; no need to risk opening whatever cursed scrapbook there is there. Then, I complete the sentence with the aftermath, the most difficult part to think about–the part that I remember best. Because what’s gone is gone; but what’s there is the memory of how I felt in the aftermath of it all, that visceral, rotten, rooted feeling of what it was like to try to find safety or regulation in the face of abuse.

I	reacted	then calmed down.
	had a panic attack	a little bit.
	cried	for like forever.
	hid in a closet	for an hour.
	hid under the bed	for a long time
	was quiet	for a hot second.
	ran into the woods	in the car.
	played video games	next to the Christmas tree.
	lashed out	the whole way home.
	screamed	with my whole body.
	yelled	all over the place.
	got triggered	privately.
	vomited	until I passed out.
	felt unsafe	but stayed strong for mother.
	developed racial trauma	but stayed strong for my sibling.
	couldn’t handle it	and internalized racism.
		in front of everyone.

The shells and sea glass that I snatch from the tideline look different once dried and set aside. A well-worn piece of sea glass or porcelain like the ones I’ve pocketed takes about 20 years to become a smooth pebble, a neat little cabochon. Once dried, the salt that covers them reveals deeper textures, flaws, hints of a bottle that used to be; more of a memory, more of a thing. It wasn’t until 2020, when COVID-19 hit and Black Lives Matters protests forced me to reckon with what was going on in my own family. My white family was always conservative, but I shrugged it off as being part of America; some people will always have a different opinion, especially if they live in the suburbs. But what I came to recognize is that some of the fear that was baked into me didn’t come from just my family, but word came and was given to the idea of racial trauma, the trauma of racism.

My father never defended me or my sister from the racist comments of family. I remember some discussions where they tried to tell us that they saw us as white too, but I told them that it doesn’t matter and there’s nothing wrong with being asian. They’d say that being white was better, but I always felt closer to my asian aside and people keep on saying it. I mean, one of the things that was ritten in my shout it out graphic thtat i reference earlier in the collectionwas that i am half white and half asian, but i felt more asian. i never got to pass or found myself treated easily for being nice and white. i was law abiding and good and small and obliging. But yeah, i soon found out that people didn’t treat me right and that there was a lot worse stuff that went on and that we were very aware. And I remember when my mom brought the IQ test results to show the family and they were still saying mean things about us even though our IQ tests proved that her kids were smart and capable more so on paper than our half retarded white cousins, their children, their fat white sows of wives.

It didn’t feel good to realize that. It made me feel pretty bad. Bit I broke up with my therapist who kept on trying to bring ti back to family trauma when it wasn’t the trauma, it was that the family was doing violence against me and she was making excuses for it. And then I actually felt a lot better once that process was being automated…

What the fuck was going on when I was a teenager?

It’s the year 2021 and I’m sitting down and looking at the colorful keys on my keyboard flickering and shimmering and on the monitor in front of me is a relic of the mid-2000’s, a relic of a time and a place and a something that’s outside of my memory. I think it’s likely the last thing that I had left from that time–the last vestige of anything written down and worth hanging on to–the thing that I, for some reason, left up in my online gallery. Why keep it up? Why, out of all the things that I didn’t delete, did that one stay up? Maybe there’s some tiny mote of truth or realness in it. Or maybe it never struck me as significant.

But now that’s one of the few things I have left from that time. I have ancient Facebook photos–I was an alpha tester–but I never went and did a purge of my mainstream social media that went back that far, as there wasn’t anything edgy or honest enough that was worth deleting. But there’s still relics from those years, public for the world to see, on niche art/fandom websites. I think there was something about the art/fandom community that I was in that made it feel like I could be honest. We were so fucking weird, so idiosyncratic, tolerant to a fault and creative in all the wrong ways–maybe that was why it seemed like it was okay to leave up. Who would see it besides the weird art kids who were too eccentric and self-involved to pass their own judgment?

I think a lot of us who grew up on the internet have a track record of pure cringe; opinions and ideas that were so, so bad–so cliche, so weird, so nonsensical, so poorly informed–but which seemed fun, profound, or totally right at the moment of first posting. Take my cartoon self: a bright purple, sugar-fed fairy with a Lovecraftian mouth filled with fangs and Kinder Eggs. I think I must have loved becoming my character. She was good clean fun. And I mean it, clean: no butthole, no pussy, no sex. On the reference sheet that I have of her, I’ve written down that she’s 100% asexual: disinterested, physically incapable, and able to nope out of a scary situation by disappearing into a cloud of cotton candy. The collective fantasy that I held on to with the rest of my weird artistic friends was one in which I could leave all the dangers of the world behind; it was a place that was safe, easy, enticing.

I began to leave the fandom behind in my second year of college, the year when I began to forget. The fog stole into me gently at first: it was harder to learn, to place things. I wasn’t as sharp. I blamed the anti-depressants that I was taking for making my speech slur and my brain slow down. I blamed it for making me fatter, for making the despondence I was trying to deal with even worse. Sleeping, which had never come easily for me, became nearly impossible. Sleeping drugs were hard to cope with, hard to manage. Take too few, and I’d be up all night. Take too many and I’d sleep for most of the day, spending my evenings pacing back and forth, filled with restless energy and ennervated at the small-town quietude right outside my dormitory window. I’d never been somewhere so quiet at night before, and the silence–interrupted only by the odd sprinkler or the soft hooting of an owl–drove me mild with waves of anxiety. But this, too, I blamed on my diagnosis and all the fallout thereof–a secret which I kept close to my heart.

After my first year of college, I had been diagnosed with Biploar II disorder, despite never having anything that was like a real bout of mania or hypomania–just endless depression that seemed to suddenly lift when I was removed from my nuclear family. But like my cartoon self, it’s something that seems to have stuck with me–a label that isn’t accurate, but fits conveniently for life in a system where whatever is going on with you, the individual, is your own fucking problem. It’s more likely that my issues come from a bad case of complex post-traumatic stress disorder and a smidgeon of autism; not an internal flaw of any of my components, but the problems reflect what happens when you misuse a custom-build running linux; it’s not going to be a windows or mac no matter what you do, and though you can kludge together a ported driver to get things running, it is not going to run the same as if it were on a native system. And if you push a machine to the limit, mining bitcoin or subjecting it to intense human misery without a chance to escape–well, you’re going to see some drops in the framerate, kid.

At the time when I started to crash, I was pretty sure that whatever going on was my own fucking problem. The best way I can describe it is like when you’re trying to render and export video, but things aren’t working quite right. All of a sudden, frames start to drop out of the image: one or two at first, but then entire segments of the video are reduced to a handful of frames. Memories, even recent ones, started to look like a kid’s attempt at stop-motion animation, made wildly with little regard to the integrity of the picture. I can see, and hear, fragments of things that I know definitely happened–things that others were there for, that others remembered. But so much began to fall away. I tried to hide it, becoming more and more withdrawn.

And for a few weeks in the winter of 2011, my entire memory started to collapse. I began to live like an animal, moment-to-moment: assignments and classes and everything seemed to fall away from me, and no matter how hard I concentrated it seemed impossible to catch up. I’d spend my time listening to music, walking, trying to keep myself fed; but the fat I’d gotten from the antidepressants started to fall off, my hair started to fall out, and my sleeping hours became fragmented. I called for help one night, and went to see the college counselor the next; they weren’t able to help me get to see a psychiatrist, despite the fact that there was one sitting, biding her time and playing on her phone, in the office one floor beneath me. Because my parents had private health insurance that covered me, I wasn’t able to get help; and with no car or way of getting to the local hospital for treatment, I tried to hold on–crying, endlessly, about something related to my dad–but I couldn’t cope, go to class, maintain my grades. I had to go home on medical leave.

I remember trying to tell one of my instructors, a Chinese professor who was affiliated with a governmental outreach program, what had happened to me. “I couldn’t remember who I was. I don’t know what happened in my life.” She tried to comfort me by saying that she’d had a similar experience, but I knew from the look of deep concern in her face that she had no idea what had happened to me. I knew that she was worried, but I also knew that whatever had been happening was completely abnormal. I worried for myself: did this mean that my brain was gone? The one thing that I’d been really proud of–the literally genius level IQ that I’d tested at–was gone, now. I was just an empty husk of average and dropout. I’d come into college with so much energy and so much dynamism–and now all that was gone. I had to go to community college and pray to be re-admitted to my elite institution.

By the time that I had to go home, I couldn’t remember most of my childhood. I couldn’t remember anything from high school–no school trips, not much of what I’d read or learned, and even the names of most of my friends still escape me. Just as I was headed home, I broke off all my relationships with the people who I’d used to know. How could I face my gifted peers when I’d lost everything? How could I possibly face people who I’d completely forgotten? Even now, more than half a decade later, I can’t remember a single conversation with the people who I went to school with for six years. I can’t remember any of our milestones, though I can conjure up an inkling of what they might have been like. But I can’t know for sure. I don’t remember. I am here, now, and there must have been a chain of events that brought me here; but so much of it has vanished that I can’t be sure what happened. The memories that I do have of major events–events that were covered by journalists, historians, artists, everyone, etched into our national memory as Americans–are just as vague. I can remember the smell of human flesh pervading New York City on 9/12/2011, but I can’t remember much of the days before or after; or even of the day itself, except that the sky was such a beautiful shade of blue that it seemed completely impossible for something so bad to have happened—all fake until my mom wasn’t able to get home to us that night.

I only remember the broadest strokes of the time between 2011 and 2012. I remember a few faces, a few class projects, a few concerts–but those I remember from the stubs, the photos, old emails that still exist somewhere. But what I do know is this: it was a blessing, because I’d forgotten why I was so afraid to go back to my parents. I’d forgotten why every return home was an endless wash of panic. I curled up in the bed that I’d had since I outgrew my toddler-sized cot and cried myself to sleep at the sight of the mess I’d made for myself. I logged onto the art website and posted more hand-drawn pictures, watercolors, digital art. In all the turmoil, I fell out of playing Furcadia, but I kept in touch with my online friends; I had records, easy descriptions of all our conversations. There were reference sheets, visual aids, online journals and comments. There were forum posts and transcripts of our pretend-play sessions. I could remember all my friends, and they remembered me.

When the real world failed me–when my brain failed me, when my heart failed me– that digital numina was there for me to embrace. That normal world, that every day world that I’d been told I could own so easily–it was lost to me. But that digital world, that world of abstraction and farce and weird random inventiveness–that was real. I could hold onto it. I had a record. I had friends. I’d learned things. I was real there, and real to my friends there. They were real to me. So as all the rest of the world came down around me, as I conveniently forgot my backstory like the protagonist of a low-budget role playing game, I became a purple fairy with a mouth full of sweet teeth. My friends were a possum, a shiba inu dog, and a Pikachu. And things were, for the moment, okay.

In a conventional computer, memory is stored in binary code. That’s a long list of 0’s and 1’s, each one of them incredibly consequential. Computers have more than one type of memory, too. There’s RAM, which is sort of like the computer’s working memory; then there’s the information that gets stored on the hard drive. But either way, it works like this: you’ve got a bunch of chips in there. Each one has like, a zillion capacitors; each of those capacitors holds one bit of information. One 1 or 0. When you’ve got eight of those, you’ve got a byte. When you’ve thousand of those bytes, that’s a kilobyte. When you’ve got another thousand of those, you’ve got a megabyte. An average Mp3 song is two or three megabytes. A book filled with just text is about one megabyte. My dreams were about 10 megabytes. A thousand of those megabytes gets you 1 gigabtye, which is a movie in HD. According to science, my brain can handle somewhere around 621440 gigabytes. My hard drive, which feels like an extension of my person, only has 1,000 gigabytes of storage.

The first thing that a neuroscientist will remind you about is that our brains are not computers. We don’t stash and retrieve information in a binary state. Instead, we have memories and recollections and emotions and images and patterns that we can recognize that are stashed away in a vast net of neural connections. Each single neuron can connect with up to 1,000 others, maybe more. The memory stored in a computer, as long as it’s not corrupted, will retrieve the same thing each and every time that it’s called upon. But our human memories are not that precise. We can remember a lot, but only certain elements of a memory stick. Memories change, too; the emotions and associations that go along with each bit of memorable information color our memories. Some things are hazy. Some are vivid and clear and run through with fear.

But there is something that people and computers have in common. Sometimes, something happens and our memories become corrupted. For computers, this can happen if the memory is damaged–say, a coffee spill or something equally as frightful–or if there’s a short circuit that happens. After a year or two, corruption can start to occur on a drive. Now, drives are SMART: most modern drives have the ability to do a self-check, figure out which areas are corrupted or beginning to fail, and rope those sectors off so that it can keep recalling, keep calculating, keep doing whatever it’s supposed to do. Keep handling its daily business. Keep listening to, and responding to, its keeper. Sometimes, a single charged particle gets flung out of the sun with enough energy to make it to earth. Occasionally–as happened once in Belgium–one will hit a capacitor, causing a 1 to switch to an 0 and flipping the election results for an entire district.

For humans, a memory crash is a terrifying experience.

I’ve mentioned that there are a lot of things that I can’t remember as well as I wish I could. I can’t remember all the details of my story; can’t remember the nights when the house was noisy; can’t remember things people have reminded me of. Can’t remember my first kiss, can’t remember most of my birthdays, can’t remember summers or school trips, can’t remember…can’t remember. Only a few things cut through the haze for me, clarion clear and telling me that it’d probably be a bad idea to go back and retrieve whatever languishes there.

If I were a computer, I would be able to select the areas that I’d prefer to forget, separate them out from the things worth remembering, and quarantine the things that hurt. But that isn’t how the human mind works; some of the things that are most deeply, primally indelible? Etched into memory through justified fear. Here, even, my typing slows–like I’m hesitant that whatever words flow out here will have, hidden in their composition, something that I don’t want to recall. And some things are gone, not just because of an unconscious block or a memory dump–but because they weren’t relevant enough to treasure.

In the summer of 2020, I began to learn how to program, again. With a trusty electronic copy of Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities, I started programming in python. As I wrote out my first functions, something felt natural and easy. “I used to do something similar when I was a kid,” I told my husband, “but it was all for a game. This is kind of similar.” Pulling out one of my old hard drives, filled with storage, I started to look back and see if anything had been preserved. If any of the old patches were still there. Deep in my recovery drive, I found a file. I opened it, expecting to see something. Only a few characters had been preserved: the ones which initiate player placement at a default zone on the map. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said my husband. “I don’t even think it’s like any real code.”

From what I’ve come to remember, and from the coding that I’ve done more recently, I definitely can say that the scripts that ran my dream definitely were something like the code I’d write in python. Not nearly as powerful–very limited, in fact–but script enough to make lovely things happen in a tiny world only 10 megabytes big. But that code was just one thing that had gone forgotten in my mind, not important enough to keep current or to keep evolving. But I can feel, in my mind, the deadened ping of that neural pathway working, becoming stronger, the more things I create. The more commands I ask my computer to carry out very politely, the more I can feel myself reaching back, grasping for whatever memory might be maintained. But it’s treacherous. It feels dangerous. Sometimes, something will peek through, and it will be either completely fine or an utter nightmare.

Let’s reach back. Let’s see what we can find. What does it feel like? What does it smell like? Who’s there?

Who are you?

I can feel it in my bones. It’s a brilliant day, in late Spring. I take the subway home from school like I do every day. Something is hiding here, hiding in all these half-starts, in all the flawed and unripe exposition. When I enter the house, it smells musty, dank and dirty. It smells rank, the kind of rancidity that comes from a house that’s been soaked in a century’s worth of cat urine and cooking oil. The air is thick with dust. In the hallway, there’s a set of stairs that’s covered in coarse, blue nylon carpet. That carpet was placed when my parents bought the house in the 1980’s. The bottom step is partially shedded, ripped up by our cats. They’re somewhere in the house. Maybe upstairs.

By the fish stand that serves as our hallway console table, there’s no shoes. Nobody is home. That means it’s safe and quiet. There’s an absence to this place that is warming, comforting even. I go to the kettle, boil water, make a cup of tea. I sit down in front of the old, dark-gray Dell computer and boot it up. I hear the hidden fan start to whirr, throwing off its thick coat of dust and cat hair. I log into Furcadia. I navigate to the place I normally drop portal for my dream, and the world begins. I shoot a whisper to my friend. We begin to play together.

You do not know anything about the worlds that I have created. They bore you. You become aggressive when I do not greet you effusively upon arriving home. “I’m writing with my friends.” I say. You make some kind of horrible bleat and chide me, but you don’t stop me from going back to the world that I’m in. To me, it’s everything. It’s hope and friendship and a kind of easy love that I haven’t had anywhere else. When I am not playing through dreams with my friends, I’m posting on fandom websites like FA. I have four hundred followers, and whenever I feel like I need to, I bare my soul to that world. I feel like I can tell these people…things that I can’t tell anyone else.

I try to remember. I looks wherever I can to trace my steps back, to try to figure out what the past was like. Who was I? How bad was it really? There’s an old graphic, posted sometime during the middle of high school, with my cartoon self and walls and walls and walls of text. Looking back, it was actually a pretty sophisticated use of igraphical image processing software. I think I’d scanned a sketch from my schoolbook notes, colored it digitally, and then added all the text.

I’m suicidal but I hide it by dramatizing it.

I like bathroom jokes and internet jokes.

I only sleep four hours a night and I’m so tired.

I hate my father because he is manipulative and weak.

Filling this space.

I fart a lot.

Oh, shit.

What the fuck was happening?

I used to dream in pixels. I mean it.

I would When I was in middle school and high school, I’d sit and sketch in the margins of my notebook, filling up the empty spaces with layer after layer of graphite. I used a 0.5mm mechanical pencil which seemed unimaginably fine to my hands. I’d watch the graphite sloughing off layer by layer as I worked the margins into an even, shiny slick of dancing wolves and ornate designs of swirls and chains, woven knotwork and fanciful arabesques. Each dot, each stab, each shade was one hint of a pixel that I’d lay down later. After class let out, I’d meet up with my friends by our lockers or in the library. We’d walk up Park Avenue, six lanes of traffic rushing by as we waited for the stop lights. On sunny days, we’d lounge under the cherry blossoms planted on the avenue’s median, enjoying the islands of greenery that popped up between tracts of asphalt and concrete. And, in time, when the shadows got longer and the day started to wane, we descended into the 96th Street subway station and got on the 6 train. We got home in time for dinner. We were good kids. We studied hard, listened to our parents, and were ready to be successful in our world.

I had further to go than most of my classmates. In order to get to my neighborhood right on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, I’d have to take two trains to the second-to-last (or heck, even last) stop on the line. By the time the 6 train slid into Brooklyn Bridge or Canal Street, I was on my own and deep in thought. Clutching my backpack on my knees, I’d imagine carving a path up a grand isometric mountain made of agate boulders, the shimmering dapple of pixelated shadows moving at one frame per second. I’d imagine orchestrating an entire world from start to finish, from the quickening rays of the first gentle sunrise to the terminal plunge into stars and darkness that would occur at the very end of the world. Sometimes, the train would whisk me around to the uptown side of the platform–technically an easier stroll–and I’d walk up the dirty concrete stairs, half dreaming, half sleeping, excited to get home. I tried to step on the odd stairs, the ones which hadn’t been worn smooth and shiny by the endless passage of commuters, by so many shoes that had come before mine. Plus, sometimes you could slip on the smoother steps, slide and scrape your knee against the filthy pavement. Less convenient, but probably a safer bet to take the steps less traveled. The subway steps were crosshatched like steel emery boards, and each little diamond was itself like a pixel. I’d imagine them like that, each one a different color, a different value, put it in gray and yellow and a weird shade of blue in order to make it remappable. It felt fucking brilliant.

The walk from the subway station to my house was just three blocks, but it sometimes felt like forever. In the morning, I’d sprint the entire way, through sleep deprivation, to get to school consistently ten minutes late. At some point my teachers seemed to take pity on me and let the lateness slide. In the evening, I’d walk slowly back, dragging my feet, taking in the sights and sounds of the neighborhood. There was the deli, Mike and Maria’s, on the corner, the deli that’d been there longer than I’d been alive–it’s still there, as much as I can remember. There was the house with the container garden in the front yard, where the neighbors would smoke and drink cheep beer and watch as commuters streamed back home. The trash bin that someone left as a pseudo-public trash can after the city took away our trash cans. And there was the house with the albanian flag with the neighbor kid who loved to yell coca cola asshole at everyone. Then there was my house, covered in vines and fronted by a jungle of container plants that looked like something out of a children’s storybook. Do you remember Madeline, the little orphan who lived a life of adventure from her house all covered by tangling vines?

If it was early enough, I’d open the door to the relief of a quiet house. No one else was home. No one else’s shoes under the old fish stand that we kept by the door. And nobody sitting in front of the creaky old Dell computer that sat upstairs in our home office, crammed between a broken air cleaner, a stack of laundry, and a drying rack that was perpetually draped in my dad’s old sweaters and underwear. I’d sit in the creaky wooden dining chair in front of the computer and fire it up, pretending to work on my homework while meticulously constructing the wold I’d dreamed of all day long. My dreams did not come with sleeping: they were fully digital, mapped out in pixels and on an X, Y grid.

My dreams were written in Dragonspeak, the proprietary coding language used by the world’s oldest, longest-running massively multiplayer online role playing game: Furcadia. The premise of the game is pretty simple: you choose your species and write a verbose description of yourself, an anthropomorphic animal (or furre). Then you, like you did when you were a child, play pretend. Navigating around maps in isometric perspective, you jump feet-first into portals to individual dreams cooked up by your fellow players. Once inside, you get to have your own scripted or unscripted adventure–it all depends on what that dreamer had created for you. In one dream, you might be a wolf with wings; in another, a squirrel in fancy knee-high boots; or in yet another, you might find yourself transformed into a massive vermin or nightmarish Lovecraftian horror, replete with tentacles. You might stroll beneath sparkling mushrooms, drawn pixel-by-pixel, or in the depths of a lush rain forest. Anything could happen, and you could just as easily yes-and yourself into someone else’s design.

I remember more about the worlds of dreams than I do about the world that I lived in at the time. In my waking moments, I had already been folded–without my consent–into someone else’s fantasy of the world. I went to a rigorous public prep school, one of the most competitive in the entire US. I’d been told that if I studied hard and played my cards right, if I milked the right kind of connections and sucked up where I could, that I’d too become a Wall Street hustler, a good mind, a strong hand of empire. I was taught that capitalism was cool and not cruel and that I’d be able to win. That the world was more open to me than it ever would be. That I had the ability to choose my own dream and catch it. If I let myself get too distracted, I’d surely fail, and the whisper of possibility would slip out between my fingers.

But given all the bounty that the world of HCHS–the same world that spawned Lin-Manuel Miranda and Elena Kagan and Martin Shrekeli–I would rather take the endless night of the end of eternity and the possibility of a new horizon coalescing out of all the chaos than saunter down the easy path to success that we were told laid in front of us. There’s only one dream that I remember really well–there was a whole world where the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter moons were personified as celestial fox avatars, each desperately trying to realize their own idea of sense, of balance, in the world; an inherently unfair and conflict-ridden prospect. The two that were most powerful were the ones that personified times of change, the Spring and Autumn. Then, locked in a battle for the ages, something happened: a desperate attempt to regain control, manipulation and persuasion, until the world itself plunged into darkness.

I can’t remember enough of the story to provide more than a vague synopsis. My memory is hazy. Most keenly, I remember all the time that I spent carefully altering the edge tiles pixel-by-pixel, in order to create the sense that most of the world’s earth had dropped away, with formerly lush terrain transformed into dark, unwalkable abyssal paths. I wanted, so badly, for a character to stand at the very edge of eternity and look over–only to be grounded by an automated, gentle push back from the brink. From what I can recall, the entire story arc was a way of justifying a completely revamped map, one with new “patches” and designs, since the whole thing had come a long way from its very first iteration. I’d become better at coding and writing complex, multi-day story arcs, too, so I was able to orchestrate the change with masterful keyboard strokes and kludged-together triggering events. It was great fun; I remember the long trudge up a sacred mountain carved out of realistic-looking agate stones, the wind filled with gentle chimes and harmonic background music. When things had come to an end and returned to a start again, the formerly powerful creatures had been demoted down to a more simple existance, one in which their powers would have to be earned back.

Playing. Earning. Making something happen. That’s what I was convinced could happen if things were done in the right way. I’d be able to make things happen. On my own. For real. Not just imagined: there was hope. Hope for control. Control that I didn’t have yet. Hope for safety and rightness. Hope that there was a future from which the past could be banished, where what had happened in real life could fade into nothingness and memory.

When we’d go out to Long Island to visit family, or up to the mountains in New Hampshire, I’d tell my friends that I’d be offline and spend the rest of the time cooking up a new chapter for us to play through in our own little world. I remember the hours that I’d spend in the car, fighting back motion sickness on the long drive into the White Mountains. painstakingly re-shading, editing, coding, and testing my dreams out. I went away to the wild for a time, and came back to my stable internet connection with new dreams, new quests, and a circle of friends to share them with.

I stopped playing Furcadia after my first year of college. The world seemed bigger, the possibilities seemed more real and tangible. I began to find out that the rest of the world didn’t run under the same rules that I’d gotten used to. Things felt more vivid. I had new experiences. One night, in my first year, I went to watch a meteor shower with my friend Linnea. We sat out on the sports field by the college pond and a huge meteor streaked overhead, so huge and low that we could smell the electrifying scent of ozone in the air. But I can’t tell you much else, besides the fact that things were so radically different that each living moment was a pulse of constant revelation. I can tell you that the first night that I spent at my college’s dormitory, I cried myself to sleep. I cried for hours. I cried until it felt pure, and I drifted off gently into sleep.

I cried out of relief.