alongkayakingtrip | Flowers for Cynthia [available memories]

September mini event memories! Any and all are endlessly available for the Moon Presence heart planting dreams

[You are 10 years old, with your parents at Dunkirk, your little brother laughing and shrieking into the wind. The sun is bright and the sea breeze is cold and you feel like you can fly. You join your little brother in shrieking into the wind. People turn and stare, but your parents only smile.]

[Trinity College is a long way from home, and you are seventeen but will be eighteen soon. Your brother is sixteen and taller than you. He traveled by himself to come and visit you, grinning proudly. You think he might have nicked the money out of an auntie's wallet, but you don't blame him.

There are introductions to friends, a tour of the campus, liquor at the flat because neither of you can go to the pub. You miss him like a limb to be so far away from home.]

[The other people in your summer internship seem to be treating this like a mission, but you are invested in actually learning, in taking down every note you can about every person you encounter, in listening to every single person and hearing what they have to say. You're tired of listening to old white men talk about how anthropology and ethnographies are done. You're tired of being told about the failings of the former colonies, the poverty following their freedoms from rule.

Radicalism in the middle of a blistering Guyanese summer might be a little unexpected for some people, but it feels natural to you.

You come back from your summer abroad ready to fight everything yourself, if you have to. You're nineteen and you manage to publish five articles before you get your first rebuttal.]

[You've compeleted everything you need to to graduate but it's a month or two until exams, so you sold some things and packed others and went to the continent.

Except for visiting family back in Asia, you haven't left the UK your entire life, but you're good with languages and willing to work to get a bed or a meal or a ride from one two to the next. Not that you're broke, but you don't want to burn through your resources, if you can help it.

You stand in the Alps and breathe in Austria and Italy at the same time; you stand on a beach and think of all the history that happened there before you arrived; you swim in the Mediterranean. Two weeks before exams, you return to Trinity.]

[She has long, straight red hair and a round face and a gap between her front teeth. You can't stop smiling as she talks about what she does - nothing special, just boutique work, but she clearly enjoys it, and that's important. When she blushes and apologizes for talking to much, you shake your head.

"Take up as much space as you need, love." She gives you a sly look. You grin.]

[You're a little nervous because this is a date, and he's made no qualms about that.

"You know I'm bisexual, right?" And he nods and it feels like a huge weight off your shoulders.]

[There's something rosy and hazy to the old apartment your grandparents live in, that glow of nostalgia but also of smoke and incense and cooking oil. You're five, or maybe you're fifteen, or maybe this isn't a real memory at all, just the forms of every dream you've ever had of returning to that place. A quieter, gentler time.]

cw: family death, post-traumatic stress, depression and isolation, uncanny valley (physical aspects), uncanny valley (perceptions of reality)

cw: family death, physical uncanny valley, blood/gore
[You're not-quite-23, coming up on it, when Danny comes to visit for the Covent Garden Theatre trip. Urban exploring is the flavor of the year. Summer, dreadful summer, creeping in at the edges. He's alone, smiling as he leaves, but all you know is its gray early morning, that hazy stillness of not-quite-dawn and overhot night pressing in on the edges as you stare across your living room at him sitting in that arm chair like a statue, covered in dirt.

Like a mannequin.

And when you get him to sleep on the couch, his cheeks still wet, when you crawl into bed, you think that's it. That's the end. But you wake up to no brother and only dirt and those smudgey pictures he's left on any loose leaf he could find to scribble them on, those sketchy repitions of a harlequin fact peering from every piece of paper on your coffee table and the floor. Dark eyes, dark hair, white face, red mouth, red diamonds, staring, staring, watching you. Watching you no matter what, and nothing of your little brother. Like he was never there at all.

What drags you to the Covent Garden Theatre? What calls you there? What brings you down below the Royal Opera House and into Robert Smirke's designs, into the bowels of that place, the place that ought to have been crushed and built upon, to look at your brother knelt on that stage like a penetant?

And the clown. Contorting, twisting, too long, too many joints. Like a sketching mannequin, able to articulate in ways that no human ought to be able to, able to extend in ways that no human ought to, as it reaches across the stage, crawls, scrapes toward your brother as you watch.

Like a mannequin.]

cw: physical uncanny valley, reality uncanny valley, depression and isolation
[It's like not being able to look at the sun.

You're always aware of her, always still present and familiar and conscious. Nothing changed, did it? You came back from quarantine, scars and all, and there she is.

When did you have to get rid of the pictures because you didn't recognize the woman in them? Did you? Or did you brain just train you that that face and the unfamiliar one, the one you could never quite entirely look at - that they were the same one? Some lapse in the understanding, because brains are imprecise things.

It's like not remembering the words to a song.

At some point, you make a joke and she takes a second too long to laugh about it. But it's you, isn't it? It's the rend of what's happened, and anyway you're poxed with scars and she's not looking at you either, so of course she isn't going to laugh like she used to.

Did you ever notice how she ducked out of photos? How she avoided the tapes or sounded not quite right on them? Did you ever notice any of it, until it was too late? Until after it was too late? How many times do you dream of her without knowing because your mind can't reconcile which is which - her or the thing that came after, after, after and beyond, like none of you would know the difference.

Like some cheap replica.]

cw: family death, depression and isolation, post-traumatic stress
[You don't know how to tell anyone what happened, and there's no body to recover.

You put an empty urn in the family plot.

In the fall, near your birthday, someone is whistling in the office - you don't know the tune but it sounds like some jaunty carousel bullshit to you - and you can't, you can't--

The next thing you know, you're sitting at the security desk, shaking. Your knuckles are bruised. The police - the police are here.

"Listen. It's all just a misunderstanding. Deadlines, stress, you know."

But you broke his nose and were inconsolable for a moment, and your boss and coworker are willing to forego pressing charges if you take a leave of absence. Nobody knows about your brother. You didn't tell anyone. Nobody knows. You leave the office and his face stares at you from a billboard, like it has every day for years, boasting about gym membership, and you haven't felt sick like this since you watched it happen.

Your knuckles ache. You hate him.

You need a new job.]

cw: insects/worms, blood/gore, trypophobia
["Do you hear their song?"

The worms. There are hundreds of them - thousands. You can feel them. You can feel them.

There's so much blood, and the pain--

"Do you hear their song?"]

cw: reality uncanny valley, suicide
[This is not the clown - the black hair and black eyes and red mouth and red diamonds and red, red, red - this is not the ball-jointed, contorting mannequin that ripped your bother's skin off.

Nothing in this place is what it seems.

You can hear Sasha's voice, but it isn't Sasha's voice. Basira's and Daisy's, Jon's. Your brother's, parents. Everyone you have ever known and loved - and nothing that you love is here. Everything is trying to rip you apart and drag you into this swirling madness.

"What do you see?"

The Knowing, the feeling of clarity cutting through the wild, swirling miasma. You can See, for a moment. This is not the clown - is it? You can See, for a moment, and you Know.

"What's in your hand?"

The clown watches you, jeers, mocks. Knows everything you fear, everything you've seen, that you watched. In your hand is the detonator for the plastique. It almost makes it worth it, in the end - almost makes it worth it to grin like a fiend and be torn apart as that damn clown tries to reach before the end.]

cw: reality uncanny valley, time distortion, post-traumatic stress
[All the bones are in his hands.

All the bones are in his hands.

The hallway goes on forever, feels like it's shifting, moving, too long and too short, too short and too tall. Where is Martin? Where is the door? There are mirrors, but they reflect nothing - and everything. The hallway goes on forever, and so does that laugh, that laugh, that terrible, bubbling laugh.

Where is Martin?

It twists and turns around you for a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a hundred years. How long? How long?

All the bones are in his hands. He laughs.

The hallway - where is the door?]

cw: blood/gore
[Drip. Drip. Drip.

"I told you he was going to do something like this."

Face smashed in. Blood everywhere. Drip. Drip. Drip.

"I told you."]

cw: mild mental manipulation, gaslighting
[You can feel it.

It's a slow building from the first time.

No, not the first time. The first time was when you sat in that office after your brother died for that interview. What good is a degree in Anthropology to a place that specializes in researching paranormal relations and parapsychology? It doesn't matter. But that wasn't really the first time. You sat at that desk, did that interview, and it's all been downhill since then.

You can feel it, that slow building from the time he came down to the Archives. But it's not only that.

There is that watching. There is always that feeling of watching. And it's only getting worse.

You can feel it.

"If you want me to ignore everything that's going on, forget my brother and everything that's happened over the last two years, how about you kill me?"

And you watch those eyes, the eyes that watch, the eyes that Know, that See you, that were listening to a truth that they know now - have known for almost four years? Still no clarity there, not really - you watch as he contemplates the worth of that endeavor. You watch the consideration coming along. Is it worth it?

Is he worth it?

You can feel it.

"I'll come back when you're feeling more reasonable."]