Words

 Words, like people
Can be stressed.
About what, I do not know.
But we all worry about something. 

Color

 Color
Dancing brightly
On a lovely painting
Joy to every one of my senses
Painter

The Daily Life of a Human

    I'm not entirely sure what Lady Greaves does with her time. She's always off "making deals", whatever that's supposed to mean. As far as I can tell, my job consists of telling people to wait for her, getting them water and other drinks, then watching as they leave in frustration. 

    I'm glad I'm not a nightmare, but sometimes I wish that I wasn't a human either. 

    Fortunately I'm extremely lucky, for a human that is. Back when I was living with my parents, we'd get books every time the book store was open, and it was always open if we were walking past that way. A nightmare was supposed to test me to see if I could make it as a nightmare myself, but thankfully they never showed up. I'm supposed to be on watch for customers, but they never show up when I need a nap, so I sleep in the waiting area. 

   When I'm not asleep and there are no customers around, I'm supposed to be filing papers. Business has been so slow lately that I don't have many papers to file. To pass the time I've been reading the books that Milady keeps in the back room. They're all business, but it's better than being bored. Recently I ran out of books to read, but I found a trick to stop from being bored all the time.

   It goes something like this; if I wait an hour and a customer doesn't show up, I go for a walk in the city. When I find a store I want to shop at, I stop and buy something for myself. When I return, a customer shows up shortly afterwards, and they usually have a request that I can manage, like making an appointment to be seen by Milady. 

   Unfortunately, even the luckiest humans run out of luck eventually, and after three months of working at a job I can't seem to get the hang off, Milady fires me and starts looking for another assistant. 

Musings:

- I wish I knew how to find another job

- I wish I knew how to find the temple when I'm awake

        - I wish I had somebody who loved me. 

Life is a Package of Top Ramen

    I was in fifth grade when I first learned the trick of breaking up uncooked packages of Top Ramen, putting them in a Ziploc bag, mixing in the seasoning packet, shaking it up, and eating it like a bag of chips. I fell in love with that method, and did it countless times over the years. Over time, my taste in ramen packets went from "any package works" to "only the spicy flavors" until I eventually came to the conclusion that the only flavor of ramen I was willing to eat this way was Picante Beef.

     This decision was partly influenced by the fact that it was the only spicy flavor I could find at local grocery stores. Over the years spicy flavors of ramen went away and only the bland flavors remained. Eventually, I couldn't even find Picante Beef anywhere.

    I was devastated. Not because I loved Picante Beef, most of the time I thought it was too salty or too spicy or too overly soy sauce tasting. I was sad because about one out of every twenty ramen packages I got tasted Perfect. Just spicy enough to be interesting, not overly salty, with enough soy sauce flavor to set everything off perfectly. Basically, I didn't like eating Top ramen, what I liked was playing the Top Ramen lottery in hopes of a slightly less mediocre experience. 

    I've said before that I don't think we should go back to "normal", meaning I don't think we should aim to go back to the world before the pandemic. I know the present sucks, but I think most of us have forgotten that for ninety percent of the worlds population (at least) before really sucked too. The only reason we want to go back so badly is that there are a lot experiences you can't have anymore, or at least not easily. Flash games are gone, social media's worse, it's impossible to escape from work, the earth will soon be uninhabitable due to climate change, I can't blame people who want to go back.

    But I think that most of what we view as "good" about the past is like the packages of Picante Beef Top Ramen I used to eat dry like a bag of chips. Not great most of the time, not even objectively good, but sometimes you got to have a truly wonderful experience and you would hold onto that forever. Over time, the successes would outweigh the failures even if you failed more often then you succeeded. In the end, the experience wasn't all that good. That's why, even though I badly miss flash games, I don't think you could pay me to spend all day playing them the way I used to. And even if you can technically buy bulk packages of Picante Beef Top Ramen off of Amazon, I don't think I'll ever eat it again.  

The Shadow Leader

     I come from a proud tradition of lawyers. When my family isn't creating order, we're deciding what the old order means. That's what my father told me when I was a boy. He taught me everything I know about handing out justice. He was so good at his job that every human hated him. Someday I hope I can say the same. 

    I have no interesting history to share. My family is quite proud of being the most boring people in Estellia. I wouldn't have become the god of Shadows otherwise. 

Fears and worries

     I hurt.

     I always knew there would be a moment when I would have to face the truth; the old world is gone and we're not going to get it back. That moment hit yesterday. I can't stop crying and I don't know how to talk to anyone about what I'm feeling. 

    I've had this suspicion for a while that we're seeing the truth, specifically the truth that I see. I'll be honest, I didn't want it to be true. I can handle the thought of being a con artist, being despised by history as a worthless scammer, but when I picture a world that sees the Infinite for what it is, I don't see any happy endings. 

    The Infinite is why I believe we should fight global warming. I don't think we'll win, but whatever we learn in our failure will be valuable knowledge should we need to build a strong Dreamworld. My feelings on environmentalism are a little mixed honestly, but if it keeps people fighting for a better world, then I'm all for it. 

   Lately, however, I keep asking myself the same question, a question I can't possibly answer.

   What if we're too late? What if our world is doomed? How much longer do we really have? 

Souls of the Infinite

 Words.
Stories.
Meaningless and empty.
Time that seemed to stand still
Now rushing towards oblivion.

How?
Why?
What should I do?
What can we do in the face of the end?

In the darkness I hear them screaming.
The ones the Infinite has consumed.
I can't save them.
No one can.

Everything is ending.
A world that was mine
Falling apart
Into dust.

Ashes to ashes.
Dust to dust.
Who'd have thought we'd live to see it?

In the darkness I plead 
For someone to hear me,
For moonlight to guide me,
For a god to save me.

In the darkness I see people banging on the walls
Of the glass house their trapped in,
Begging for those still living in the world
To help them before it's too late.

In the darkness
All I can do is dream 
Of a world that might survive.
A world where all of us are safe
From the sins that consumed us. 

In the darkness 
I seek the laws of physics,
The lines pushing and pulling us apart,
Looking for the moment we fell into nothingness.
Looking for the moment where it all went wrong.

The hardest part about all this isn't that it's over,
It's that knowing that if they could hear you
Maybe you wouldn't have to die. 

    I never wanted things to got back to "normal". Not the normal of pre-pandemic life. I wanted things to change, to get better. But I always thought that I would be able to picture what our future would look like, who would be there, what I would see. 

    Now I don't know anymore. 

   You ever think about the evil empires in science fiction. Those guys had to build infrastructure to transport goods and services across thousands of lightyears, deal with climate crises in multiple planets, and fend off multiple rebels. But they kept going for hundreds of years.

   It's probably a bad sign that I've started to view the villains in Star Wars as a source of hope.

The Magic Necklace

    To humans, so long as something means a lot to you, it's considered to be valuable. Most of us have to little that we cherish everything, even if a nightmare wouldn't think it was worth anything. 

   I was five when I went to my first and only fair. It wasn't in the Fairy lands, so there weren't an rides, but there were two games if I can remember correctly, and everyone in town tried to put on a show. Work was rare, money was rarer, but we had a good time. There was music, which I loved, and people shouting, which I didn't. There was also a strange women selling knickknacks on a blanket. She didn't have much, only about twelve things in total, but it was still more stuff than I'd ever seen in one place. I stared for a long time, then asked to purchase the one piece of jewelry she had.

   "This thing?" She asked, "It's not valuable at all."

    "I want it." Was all I said to her. I begged my mother to buy it for me. She was a weaver who got commissions from nightmares from time to time, so unlike most of the people I knew, we had the money to buy special things. She refused to buy it until the seller said that she would trade it for a penny. My mother told me when we got home that I'd need to work extra hard to make up for the money she spent getting it for me.  

 I know it's nothing special. It's not even made of diamond or rubies, or even glass. Over time, though, it started to become magical. At first, I just used it as a weapon against Nightmares when I was asleep. Nightmares have a lot of resistances, but humans take damage from anything. Fortunately, beneath their power, all nightmares are human. So long as I remembered that, I was able to hurt them with my necklace. 

   I used it on every nightmare I could, even before I'd figured that out. I'd learned that if a Nightmare caught you, you'd get trapped in one of their illusions, and I was terrified of them. It took me longer than it should have to notice that most of them were very similar. 

  I got better and better at using my necklace, so I worried less about being trapped by Nightmares. Then I figured out that even inside of an illusion, I could use my necklace to attack Nightmares. That made things much easier for me.

    Then one evening my mother told me she wanted me to buy me something at the general store. I didn't want to, since it was late and I was tired, but she was insistent. The man who owned the general store never slept, since he was human, but he didn't keep regular store hours. So few people bought anything from him that there wasn't much point to it. This late, he was almost never open, and I knew that you had to wait until he showed up. 

     To my surprise, he was at his shop. I don't remember what he told me exactly, but I know he'd planned on being somewhere and it fell through, so he decided to man the shop on a whim, even though nobody came by at night. I bought what I needed (I honestly don't remember what it was) and left. When I got home, I said to my necklace, "The seller was wrong about you, you really are a magic necklace."

Cinquain

 Two words
Half of them stressed
How do I tell which ones?
Do I practice speaking out loud?
Silence. 

The Fairy Princess

      Ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed I'd be a princess. Now I have it, and it's everything I could ever want, but nothing like what I hoped it would be. 

 

    I was walking through the fairy's Dreamworld with my parents. Aside from humans begging for money and drugs, it's a wonderful place. Being a fairy myself, I didn't buy anything. I didn't have to. All the owners knew my parents, so I could ride as many rides and eat as much food as I wanted to. My parents warned me to be careful. Dreamworld food tastes just like the real thing, but it does nothing for the symptoms of weakness. If I wanted to keep functioning, I'd have to keep eating real food. 

   I was having a blast when I was walking into the house of mirrors. It's one of the lamer attractions, it only has mirrors that make you look large or small. I was getting bored and asked my reflection, "Can't any of these mirrors show me as a princess?" And I swear to my fellow gods, my reflection answered back.

    "You can't be a princess. You're too ugly."

     I know now that it was probably just a trap set by a weaker nightmare trying to gain enough power to become a fairy. It was meant to horrify me so much that I would wake up in a sweat. Instead I turned and screamed, "What do you mean I'm too ugly to be a princess?! My parents say I'm the prettiest little girl in all of Faytree! Someday, I'm going to be the prettiest princess in all of the Fairylands."

   When I met up with my parents to go home, I told them, "Mother, Father, I've decided that I want to be a princess when I grow up."

   "Darling," Mother said, "Princess aren't like the rest of us. They have very strong magic and can hold a crowd with just their voice."

    "I can learn magic. And someday I'll have the strongest voice in all of Estellia."

  

     The very next day I checked out every book on magic I could find at our local library and read them cover to cover. I begged my parents to send me to the best school in Estellia. It was in the sorcerer lands, but I was determined to have the best magic education that one could get in Estellia. In my spare time I practiced singing, dancing, and public speaking. All things the princesses specialized in, or so I was told. 

   I attended every event a princess was a part of.  I read every book a princess was a character in. I became friends with people who worked for or were friends of friends of the princesses. I did everything I could to get close to them.  

    Except for meeting them. I was smart enough to know how that would likely turn out. 

    When I was fifteen, my parents took me in for the exam. The one they said would determine what kind of fairy I was likely to be. They were very careful to warn me that the likelihood of me being set on the path to being a princess was slim. You needed to be truly exceptional. I didn't let that stop me. I studied hard. I practiced every day. And I passed the exam with flying colors. I received word that I would start training to be a princess within a week.

 

    When you hear that you're training to be a princess, what do you expect? Do you think of living in glamour, with dresses covered in diamonds and glittering tiaras? Or do you imagine vicious women trying to tear you down to give themselves the best chance at the life they dream of? I imagined both. I knew that the dresses were boring, my parents had friends in the academy after all. I also knew that there were scandals caused by people doing heinous things in an effort to rise in the academy. As lawless as the Fairylands are, we do care about murder. In spite of this, the academy seemed quite drab to me. 

   I fully expected to find myself on someone's bad side within the first week. I'd been studious my entire life, and I always answered every question the professors asked of me. Strangely, nobody noticed me much. I realize I should be grateful for that, and I was, but I was also really bored. I was learning a lot, making a lot of friends, and while a lot of my classmates seemed to be jealous of me, nobody seemed to have much of a grudge against me. At one point, I even told my mother, "I thought training to be a princess would be much more interesting than this."

    "Aren't you enjoying your studies?" She asked.

     "Oh, I'm learning a lot. But aren't you supposed to be despised by everybody if you're going to become a princess? At this rate, I'm certain I'll get to meet with the council and they'll tell me I never had a chance. How can I tell them it's not my fault I couldn't make any enemies in school?"

   "Where did you hear that people make enemies in the academy?" My mother asked.

    "In books, mostly." I admitted sheepishly. 

    "Darling, most of those stories are written for the benefit of humans. Humans don't need to know the truth about what goes on at the top. If they found out, they might stop believing in those they were meant to serve."

  

   I was at the academy for five years. I graduated at the top of my class. I got a job as an assistant. 

   Then, on my twenty-first birthday, the God of Shadows showed up at my apartment. 

    "Is this the home of Emily Elaine Maris?" He asked,

    "Yes it is, your Godliness." I said. I made sure to curtsy.

    "You're aware that on this day, twenty-one years ago, the Fairylands High princess died?"

    "I don't think there's anyone in the Fairylands who doesn’t know that." I said.

    "We've been keeping tabs on all the children born on that day, to see who has the potential to become the next God of the Fairylands. Some show potential, but only you, Emily Elaine Maris, show true promise."

   I suppose I should have been shocked, or at least a little bit surprised, but at the time I only had one thought.

  "If I become god of the Fairylands, how can I become a princess? It's been my goal all this time. I don't want to throw it all away."

   Fortunately, he laughed. He said, "I know this comes as a shock, but I assure you that you would be an excellent goddess. If you wish to help your people out as a princess, as your predecessor did, you can do that."

    "I suppose it's alright then." I said. "When should I start?"

    "As soon as you are ready." He told me. 

   I sometimes wonder if I blog for the right reasons. I'm not blogging to get famous (or at least I keep telling myself that I'm not) and I don't really blog because I feel like I have a lot to say. I'm just blogging because I want to blog, and I write about whatever my brain is thinking about that day. I don't really have any deep insights, I just have opinions that I feel strongly about and nobody in my life who wants to listen to them. I guess what I really want is to matter in some way. 

An Imaginary World

This isn't real.

That's what I keep telling myself.
That's what I have to remember
To keep from being consumed 
By despair.

This isn't real.
Our world 
Only appears real
To us
Because we have no reason 
To believe that it isn't.

But it isn't real.
It never was.
It never will be. 

Our world 
Is nothing more 
Than a dream.
A way of coping with the fact
That our world will end
And take all of us with it. 
Our world
Is  nothing more
Than an act of rebellion
Against the infinite.

Our lives are a rebellion
Against that 
Which we can never know about.
Against that
Which we can never see.
Our lives are a rebellion
Against the fact
That someday 
We will have to wake up.

And that time is coming soon. 

Our time of belief
In a world that would stay real
Without our help
Is ending. 
I can't ignore it,
No matter how hard I try.

This isn't real.

I try to remember 
That the Infinite
Is outside of reality.
I try to remember
That our world
Will keep us safe.

But everywhere I look
I see people struggling 
With the feelings flowing through my 
Heart 
Like magma.
Everywhere I look
I see reminders
That this isn't
And never will be
Real. 

Frog Lamp

 A couple dancing
On a small circular stage
Stuck spinning in time

Exhaustion

 How can I be so tired
Yet sleep so much?
Is it the weight of the world on my shoulders?
Or is it because I ate too much before bed?

The Daily Life of a Human

    I'm not entirely sure what Lady Greaves does with her time. She's always off "making deals", whatever that's supposed to mean. As far as I can tell, my job consists of telling people to wait for her, getting them water and other drinks, then watching as they leave in frustration. 

    I'm glad I'm not a nightmare, but sometimes I wish that I wasn't a human either. 

    Fortunately I'm extremely lucky, for a human that is. Back when I was living with my parents, we'd get books every time the book store was open, and it was always open if we were walking past that way. A nightmare was supposed to test me to see if I could make it as a nightmare myself, but thankfully they never showed up. I'm supposed to be on watch for customers, but they never show up when I need a nap, so I sleep in the waiting area. 

   When I'm not asleep and there are no customers around, I'm supposed to be filing papers. Business has been so slow lately that I don't have many papers to file. To pass the time I've been reading the books that Milady keeps in the back room. They're all business, but it's better than being bored. Recently I ran out of books to read, but I found a trick to stop from being bored all the time.

   It goes something like this; if I wait an hour and a customer doesn't show up, I go for a walk in the city. When I find a store I want to shop at, I stop and buy something for myself. When I return, a customer shows up shortly afterwards, and they usually have a request that I can manage, like making an appointment to be seen by Milady. 

   Unfortunately, even the luckiest humans run out of luck eventually, and after three months of working at a job I can't seem to get the hang off, Milady fires me and starts looking for another assistant. 

     Summer's finally arrived in western Washington. 

The Gods

 My mother always told me I'd serve the Gods someday. She'd pick me up and say "Alex, you and I are part of a long line of avatars. The power that holds Estellia together flows through your veins the same way it does mine. Someday you will wield a bit of power from the gods, if not become an avatar of the gods yourself." 

     There are four gods in Estellia, one for each race, except for humans of course. All of the gods gain power from their respective bloodline. I'm proud of my bloodline, but I don't think it's proud of me. 

  We do our best to respect the gods where I live. Disrespecting a human may bring you power, disrespecting a Nightmare will bring you pain, and disrespecting a god will mean the end of your days after all. Ever since I was little my parents have drilled into me that you absolutely, positively, can't screw up around a god. Because unless you're a god yourself, you won't live to see the next day. 

   

    My mother always told me to attack humans if I needed more power for whatever reason. She'd tell me, "Humans are always weak, and most of them are little more than cowards. If you attack them, they can't do anything to you. I can't say the same about any Nightmares you'll wind up facing. I don't care how weak they appear to be, they might be a Midnight Nightmare hiding their true strength for all you know. Don't risk it, and never anger another Nightmare."

   It's true that most, if not all, of the humans in the valley are weak. Most of the one's I've talked to say they've moved here for opportunity, then got trapped by labor laws. They all hate me. I don't have to worry about homelessness and loneliness the way they do. 

   Attacking humans makes me nervous though. Not only is there always the risk that they could be a Midnight Nightmare in disguise, there's always the possibility that they could go lucid. 

   I didn't know lucidity was a thing until Cassie showed me. It was just after Halloween, when nightmares are at their most powerful. My mother had heard about the strange human child who was entering our dreamlands borders, and told me to get rid of her, "Even someone like you should be able to do that." she said. 

   I didn't want to, of course. Cassie's the only person in all of Estellia who thinks I'm a nightmare of any sort of worth, though I don't know why she thinks that I'm one of the gods. I assume it's because she hasn't seen any of them up close the way I have. 

  I saw her enter the dreamland and moved to her spot the way my mother taught me. I'm not the strongest nightmare in the heartland, much less Estellia, but I know all of the standard tricks. I let off an attack, but she blocked it effortlessly. I wouldn't have found it strange, except she started glowing when she did it. 

   "What the heck was that?!" I said.

   "I went lucid to counter your attack." She said. She seemed to think I should already know that.

   "What do you mean you went lucid?" I asked.

   "It's when you remember that everything within the Infinite isn't real, so as long as you're in the Infinite or one of the dreamworlds." 

   "So you just change dreamworld willy-nilly. That's against the rules. You could be put in prison, or killed." I said.

    She looked at me like I was being stupid, "Alex, those rules only apply to Nightmares. They don't apply to humans. If I never become a Nightmare, the ones in charge can't do anything to me, so I can do whatever I want."

   I was about to say that wasn't true, but then I remember mother saying that one of the only things humans have over us was that they don't have to live under the laws, "Not that that's much of a blessing." 

   "What are you doing here?" I asked.

   "The same thing you're doing. I'm trying to pass the time until I wake up tomorrow."

    "Why are you sleeping to pass the time? Shouldn't you be at work or something?"

    Cassie looked panicked. "I should be. You won't tell anyone will you?"

    "Why aren't you working now?"

    "Because I have this issue where I need to sleep. If I don't sleep for more than three days, I collapse. If I collapse, then I might not wake up again for a week, and when I do wake up I stop being able to stay awake for more than about ten hours in a row."

    I'd heard this story a lot. Humans in the heartland often fake weakness to try and gain more power than they deserve. "Have you been tested for weakness?" I said, knowing I'd catch her.

   "No. I don't think it's weakness. With weakness you get really hungry and thirsty. I just get really sleepy. I know it looks at lot like it, but it's not the same thing. I wish I could explain that to my parents." 

   "No offense, but it doesn't sound like it's not weakness. I didn't get all that hungry until my mother started having me eat dinner with the rest of the family. Actually, it's not that I wasn't hungry, I just didn't realize how much I wanted food until I ate it, then I couldn't seem to stop."

   "Don't you eventually lose control of yourself if you deprive yourself of your weakness for too long? I don't fight for food when I don't eat. I don't think I've ever eaten a thing in my entire life, though I did have some coffee once. I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. It did help me stay awake, but I didn't like going to the bathroom afterwards. There's only one bathroom in the entire village, and nobody uses it so it never gets clean."

    I shuddered. My family and I all have weakness, so we all eat regularly. We have two bathrooms in the house and my mother and father insist on them being cleaned every day. 

   "Hey Alex," Cassie said, sounding like she was scared. "Don't get mad, but I think my parents are going to want to wake me up soon. I'll be back at some point." 

  "Okay." I said. "See you in a bit."

   I was walking back to village, the fake one my parents made for the locals to gather in the dreamworld, when one of my father's colleagues walked up to me. "Did you scare her off?" He asked.

   I realized that I'd been so focused on talking to Cassie that I'd forgotten to do that. "No." I said.

   He got big all of a sudden. Most monsters transform into their nightmare forms, but my father and his gang just get bigger to scare weak humans. "Why not?" He said.

   I could have told him the truth, but at that moment I suddenly realized that I didn't need to scare Cassie away. She was a human, but she'd just demonstrated that she wasn't weak. She was, after all, the only human I'd met who didn't play by the rules she wasn't required to follow any way. So I said, "I didn't want to."

   I think he tried to attack me. I don't really remember. What I do remember is pain, followed by red hot anger, ending with me standing over an unconscious man. I woke up, terrified, knowing that mother and father would see to it that I was punished, and dreading it.

  Miraculously though, I was spared. I found that out the next morning at breakfast, when my mother told me, "Your fathers work friend had a run in with our god. Alex, I know you like wandering around the valley, but I don’t want you going out there without permission anymore. It wouldn't be good if you angered the gods yourself."  

Society's Doom

    The problem with having a personal philosophy  is that you start seeing everything through the lens of that philosophy. So when you see half your country working towards a fascist dictatorship and the other half refusing to do anything about it, you see it based on what you feel about the world. The way I see it is that our world is dying, nobody knows what to do, and we very specifically didn't prepare for this situation.

   One thing the United States is exceptional at is crowing on about how exceptional we are. True, we had the stats to back that up at one point, but eventually it morphed into, "We're the greatest country in the world, because we are." This is not to say that the United States is the worst country in the world. There's a lot of competition for that title. It's to say that we aren't nearly as good as we pretend we are. 

   At some point, people started to figure that out. Maybe it was the moment they realized how expensive college was going to be. Maybe it was the moment they got out of college and realized they couldn't get a job. Maybe it was when they lost their job due to chronic illness and then lost the insurance they were using to pay for medical expenses. Maybe it was when their children were diagnosed with a learning disability and they got firsthand experience with how little the school system is willing to help those who need it the most. Maybe they or somebody they knew got shot by police and they had to watch the cop walk away scot free. Maybe they got denied a job for their sexuality, race, gender, or disability status. Maybe they escaped all of that, but kept seeing stories of how people can be screwed just for being who they are, and they realized that was wrong. One way or another, they learned the truth about America; it's only beautiful to those who are allowed to live freely, and that's the smallest minority in the entire country. 

   Here's the thing about society; it only exists as long as those who participate believe that it's real and meaningful. This means that everyone who's a member of any given society needs to believe that society is perfect, or that it has only minor flaws, or that any major, glaring flaws will be fixed soon. You can't have a society filled with people who feel they'd be better off if they didn't play by the rules. The issue is that society doesn't belong to those who live in it, not most of them anyways. It belongs to the rich. They're the people who make the laws, enforce the laws, and decide if somebody was punished unfairly. Now, the rich aren't all powerful. They appear that way, because they make the rules of the world we have to live in, but they only have power because we the people say they're allowed to have power and do whatever they want with it. If they misuse it, or don't use it enough, then it can be taken. Ideally those in charge are aware of this fact. They know that even in a system where people don't elect their leaders, their reign only lasts as long as the people are willing to let them keep power (or until they die). But leaders aren't kept separate from the false reality of society. They're at the center of it, so they're often the last to realize things aren't going well. After all, they aren't safe from the need we all have to avoid knowledge of the Infinite. They may know it exists, but their minds don't dare acknowledge it. 

    Sometimes we get lucky, and a leader strong enough to acknowledge society's flaws comes along. But such a leader hasn't come along in the United States, and I think that it's mostly our fault. See, the more we learn about science, the more we push away the idea that the unreal, the imagined, the falsified, could have meaning and purpose for people. I know that not everybody thinks this, but I've heard it said more then a few times the art and music were just a byproduct of our advanced senses. I don't believe that. Stories and art are the backbone of culture. Just as society belongs to the rich, culture belongs to the poor, and culture is how those without power make their will known and their influence palpable. It bothers me that so many people seem to think that if you want to change the world, you have to change society. I've heard people say that, as they got older, they were expected to stop imagining fantastical worlds. Is it really that important to have everyone living in the same reality?

    I know the big issue is that those at the top think that the rules don't apply to them. But as somebody who's needed accommodations her entire academic career, I'm keenly aware that forcing everybody to live by the same rules can be just as exclusionary as saying that some people get to live by easier rules then everybody else. Double standards aren't the issue. It's standards that everyone knows are wrong and cruel. 

The Dreamworld

 The space between our hearts
Is filling.
Our souls are growing
To fill the void
In our world
Out in the silence
A dream world is being born.
A world we can live in.
A world we can share. 
A world where we don't have to worry
About being forgotten.
About being alone.
About our names being erased
From the book
Of history. 
Close your eyes,
Open your heart,
You will see what I see.
A world where anything
Is possible. 

The Common Goal

     The Roe v. Wade reversal is ripping the Democratic party apart. At least, that's the overall impression I'm getting on the internet. I don't have anything to say that could fix this. All I have are feelings. Rage, sadness, despair. A voice that says it doesn't matter if the Republicans lose, no one is coming out of this a victor. 

   I don't think we should put aside our differences and get along. That's not what seeing the Infinite is about. My goal for us isn't world peace, it's a world we're all willing and able to live in. Not a world free of conflict, but a world free of the evil, poisonous hate that's killing us slowly. 

   If we want a world where we're happy, than that's the world I'll aim to help create. But I think most of us want more than just a world where we're happy all the time. We want a world where our experiences have meaning, where what we say matters, where our voices are heard. We don't have that world, and our leaders are unwilling and incapable of creating that world for us. It's not that they don't have a template for that world. Most of them believe in at least one god after all. All they are willing to focus on is this idea that if we all work together, the perfect world will build itself. How can we possibly collaborate when we don't know what our common goal is? 

    I never thought I'd wish that history would stop happening. There's so much going on it's hard to really understand it all. 

In the Beginning

     I can't remember the day Estellia was born, any more than I can remember the day I was born, but I've pictured it so many times that I feel as though I remember both. 

   Long ago, there was nothing. Just darkness and light, separate and mutually antagonistic. Then, out of the abyss, a soul was born in the place where light and dark come together. It was small, but overtime it grew, and eventually it became our homeland, where humans, monsters, fairies, shadows and sorcerers all live together. 

   I don't remember being told the details. Humans are only ever told the things they need to know in the moment. They aren't told anything that might be useful to them. 

   

      I was born in a human village on the edges of Estellia, close to the border no one goes to. I don't remember much about my time there, I was only there until my tenth birthday. I remember it as a large village, relative to the surrounding towns. It must have been, because how could there have ever been a fair large enough to have vendors selling necklaces? 

   I lived with my mother and father. Our house, from what I recall, only had a single room with a couch and a television. My parents, like ninety-nine percent of the human population, didn't need to sleep or eat. I remember the house being very sparse, my parents made very little money, and almost all of it went to taxes. We were humans, we didn't need food, water, or sleep the way high nightmares did, so why should we have any money? 

    If that were true, I would have been okay. See, I'm the only person I know, human or nightmare, who sleeps on a regular basis. I don't know if it's a weakness exactly, I've never read a book that describes it that way, I only know that if I go for more than three days without sleep I start hallucinating. After day four I collapse, and usually don't wake up again for at least a day. This has made living a normal human life impossible for me. If you sleep more than once a month in most jobs, you'll be fired. But I can't help it. I've tried, but I can't seem to overcome my weakness that's not actually a weakness. 

    I was ten when my parents sold me to Lady Greaves. She wanted someone to look after one of her offices and protect it from theft. My mother said that it was a simple job and if I needed to sleep, I could do so without disturbing anyone. I suspect that she was just glad to get rid of me. No human wants a child who can't protect themselves, and a child who goes unconscious for anywhere from three to eight hours a day is a disgrace. 

    I knew I was going to be found out. All night shifts are expected in human jobs, but staying is something I can't get the hang of. But what choice did I have? I couldn't become a nightmare, I'd already been tested and it was determined that I couldn't attract any power to me at all. I needed to be able to work as a human, and that meant that I had to learn to live without sleep. 

     But I didn't want to learn to live without sleep. Because only in sleep could I visit the Temple of Humanity, the only I had, or will ever have. The temple was where my true power lay, for using it I could see all that could harm humanity, and stop it before it would ever hurt any of us. 

    As of yesterday, I'm one year older. Naturally, I celebrated by posting what I hope will be a long series of short stories about the first character I can remember creating. Hope you liked it.

The Dreamworld

    There's a saying in Estellia; in sleep, all of us are equal. It's a shame, then, that I'm the only person in Estellia who sleeps on a daily basis. 

     Not that I'm complaining. Much. If I didn't sleep, then how would I be able to enter the Infinite, home of all dreams and dreamlands. The place where anyone, even a human like me, has the power to change reality. 

   True, humans aren't supposed to be able to alter reality. Going lucid isn't forbidden, exactly, but it's deeply discouraged by the High Nightmares. Not only are you putting the world in danger by changing it in ways the gods haven't sanctioned, but you're putting yourself in danger as well. Go too lucid, it's said, and you'll undo your existence. 

   I don't believe them.

   Ever since I was about five, I've gone lucid every night when I sleep. It's the only weapon a human has against nightmares, and I intend to use it for the good of human kind. I have to, since so few people are willing to defend us. 

   I don't just use it for combat purposes of course. The real use of lucidity is in creating dreamlands. Only those who've been sanctioned by the gods are supposed to make them, but anyone can, if they're willing to risk death of course. I don't have much of a life, so I don't see how that's supposed to hold me back. 

   So I built the temple. I don't remember how old I was when I first made it. It was shortly after my mother told me the story of the strongest shadow. She told that once, a very long time ago, humans were just as powerful as the other races, because we could use the temple of humanity to grant us the power needed to keep other races at bay. Then Dalton, a Shadow of unfathomable power, destroyed the temple, leaving us powerless. Not long afterwards, the other races enslaved us. Now we only exist to provide power to nightmares and slaves to the wealthy. 

    As I was sleeping later that day, I tried to picture what the temple humanity, the source of human power, would have been like. I imagined it as a simple stone arch, on a stone platform in the middle of a large field. Anything, I felt, would have been destroyed on sight for being too dangerous. When a human walked through the arch, they would find themselves in a large hallway full of mirrors. Not normal mirrors of course, these are magic mirrors. Looking into them, a person sees alternate versions of themselves, both the successes and the failures. At the end of the hallway is a door to the center of the temple, where the realm of all souls is. 

   The realm of all souls is the most powerful scrying device in all of Estellia. Using it, one can see the actions the holder of a particular soul, human or nightmare, will take if certain conditions are met. It's murky, but then so was reality to me at the time that I made it. 

   From the center of the temple one will find five doors. There's the hallway of mirrors, of course, but going right one will find the door to the library, where every book ever written is located. To the right of that door one finds the hall of artifacts, where all of the most important artifacts in Estellia are stored. I didn't have any artifacts when I made it, so I mostly used it to store my old toys and journals. To the right of that is the study, where one can record dreams and turn them into reality. The final door leads to my house, with however many rooms I need and all the stuff I could ever want.

  Hey, I made the temple, so I did what I wanted with it. 

  I built up the temple over time. I'd grab books from library shelves and book stores, copy them using lucidity, and stick them in the library. I'd come up with powers for the artifacts in the artifact room. I'd used the realm of souls to find out when I needed to be wary of a boss showing up or a watcher trying to arrest me. 

    I always hoped that, someday, I'd be able to take my parents to the temple and show them the one thing I'd done that I was truly proud of. But I couldn't. While I had to sleep constantly, my parents never slept at all. They weren't nightmares, so they didn't see any point. "We enter the Infinite, the nightmares will be on us instantly. Then where would you be." They'd often say. I don't think they remembered that I entered the Infinite every night, and I always woke up the next morning. 

   I didn't spend all my time in the temple of course. I went all over the infinite, looking for the Dreamworld. The Dreamworld in the oldest legend in Estellia. It's said to be the place where the dreamer, the maker of Estellia lives. Find them, and they'll give you anything you want so long as you never reveal where the Dreamworld is or who they are. Most people said it was just a story, but find the right person and they'd tell you about the ones who'd found the dreamer and gained power beyond their wildest dreams. Dalton, the most powerful Shadow in history. Celeste, Sorceress supreme. Alexander, the monster who every monster lived in fear of. Lindsey, the only fairy queen in existence. Those are the ones they tell humans about. They say there were many, many others they don't let humans know about, for fear they would break down in fear. Or so they say. Personally I think they just don't want us getting ideas, but I'm all for getting ideas. 

    So I'd go from dream land to dream land, old family estates to small cottages kept by one person. I saw how both the high and low live when they think that nobody's looking. You would think that, having seen them up close, I'd be able to tell you that one is good and one is evil, but all I ended up learning is that all of us have something horrible we need to hide. 

   Maybe because I've seen so much of what most want kept away, both from others and from themselves, my favorite place in the Infinite is what's considered by most to be the evilest place in the Infinite. Sinister Valley, the heart of Monster country. The place where everyone is evil, and everybody inside and out knows that. It's also the home of the Heartland, a charming town of about five thousand people, where my best friend in the world, within and without Estellia, lives. 

    Her name is Alex Loreden, daughter of Aubrey and Marcus Loreden. She says she's just a daughter of one of the towns many gorgons, but I know better than that. She glows like a high nightmare, that's how I'd put it. For reasons that make absolutely no sense to me, she thinks she's the weakest of Estellia's nightmares. She's thought that ever since I first met her.

  I couldn't forget that day, not even if I wanted to. I was flying around the Infinite using the power of my necklace (I think it was just after I got it actually) and I spotted the valley. I remember thinking that a large meadow surrounded by lush forest sounded like the perfect place for a dreamer to hide. I entered it, and it became clear immediately that I was wrong, as the place was infested with darkness.

   A lot of people say that miasma doesn't exist, that what some humans call miasma is just what happens when you go lucid enough times to see where darkness and light separate. I don't know if I think that's true, I just think that miasma is a better term than darkness. Darkness has no consciousness, no desire to cling to anything. Miasma does. And most Dreamworlds run by nightmares are infested with it. I can handle nightmares without issue, all nightmares are humans deep down after all, but I can't handle miasma. So I ran, until I found a place that was free of it. 

   That's when I saw her. She was curled up in a ball and crying, looking like she'd just been attacked by someone. Part of me wanted to rush up to help her, but I knew better. Even if I can't see nightmare forms, I knew a nightmare when I saw one, and she was the strongest one I'd ever seen. Nightmare or not, you could see that she needed help, and unlike in the real world, in a dreamland I have power. So I walked up to her and asked, "What's wrong?"

   She didn't answer at first, so I repeated the question. That's when she looked at me and wailed, "I can't scare anyone."

   I didn't know what she meant. Judging by the way the miasma was circling her, I figured her nightmare form, when she got one, would be horrifying. Heck, without even seeing her nightmare form, I was a little nervous by how bright her soul was. "Sure you can. I should know, I'm a human and we're scared of absolutely everything that isn't us or our Mommies and Daddies." 

    She looked at me and muttered, "How come you aren't scared of me, then?"

    I was baffled. "Of course I'm scared of you. Who wouldn't be? But I can't show my fear. Humans can't fight back against nightmares, so the only thing we can do is try to bluff our way out of trouble." 

    What I didn't tell her was that I knew that wasn't even remotely true, and that I would fight her if she tried to fight me. I had a feeling that she didn't want to fight right now though, she just needed somebody to talk to. 

   "What do you mean by bluffing?" She asked.

   I thought for a bit. "I don't know what it means exactly, it's just something Mommy tells me I need to do when I go to sleep. My daddy says it means I should lie, but I don't know how that would help. Nightmares lie, humans always tell the truth. Right?"

   "If you're lying." She said, "Then you're much better at it than most humans I've met." 

    "You've met humans?" I asked.

    "Of course I have," She said "Humans live everywhere in Estellia."

     "I bet they aren't proud humans." I said.

    "What do you mean?" she asked.

    "I asked Mommy once why a human would live in a city if Nightmares were so awful to them. She said, 'Cassie, some humans are weak, so they beg for power and privilege from nightmares. Not us. We may be Humans, but we're proud, for we can live our own lives.' Those humans must not have a lot of pride if they're willing to live in a place like this." I said, gesturing at the clouds of Miasma.

   She looked at me and asked. "You're name's Cassie?"

   "Yeah," I said, "What's yours?"

    "Alex."

    We talked a bit more that day, though I don't remember what about. I saw her as often as I could, which wasn't as often as I wanted to, because she often spent time in the center of the dreamland, where a replica of the village was, or in one of the Miasma pools. 

    It didn't help that her mother was against our friendship from the start. She said that the only reason I was there was to try and gain power for myself. I thought she was being ridiculous, but Alex kept taking her words to heart. The only thing that kept our friend ship together was me praying to her dreamland that she'd see sense, and remember that if I wanted power, all I had to do was go to dream tower, at the center of the infinite, and display my worth. I wouldn't do that of course, because I was such a coward that it was obvious that I had no worth at all. No amount of praying could dispel Alex's doubts about me. I didn't feel that was such a bad thing. I'd heard that if a nightmare liked you enough, you would become a nightmare yourself, and I didn't want to be a nightmare, so I kept every nightmare I met at arm's length. 

    My goal in searching the infinite wasn't friendship or power. I wanted to find a way to be a human, the kind of human that doesn’t need to sleep all the time and can do most things easily. I figured that if I found the dreamer, I could become one and then all my problems would be over.

   One thought kept niggling at the back of my mind though. They say that, past a certain level of power, souls develop weaknesses so that no human or nightmare is truly stronger than any other. Weaknesses are pretty rare, only found in the Gods and midnight nightmares, or so I've been told. Of those with weaknesses, needing to eat and drink is by far the most common weakness. I'd never heard of anyone, even a midnight nightmare, needing to sleep, but other than that it sounded pretty similar to my sleep issue. If you go without you're weakness for a little bit you're alright, but the longer you go, the worse the effect is, until you succumb to your weakness or you die. 

   I was worried about that because the Gods said that not even the dreamer could eliminate a weakness. I tried not to think about it, but in the back of my mind I kept asking, "What if I find them, and it turns out that this was all for nothing?" 

The Importance of Belief

     I don't believe in God. It's not that I don't think he/she/it could exist, it's that judging by what's in the bible, they aren't someone I want to believe in. My feelings are, if you believe in a deity, then they should be willing to protect you from the world you have to live in. 

    I don't believe that our world is a simulation. A simulation keeps going no matter how many, or how few, of those who live in it believe that it's real. That's not the world I see. I see a world that only exists because everything in it, from the stars to atoms, believes in it and follows the rules. 

   I don't believe our world is doomed, no matter how hard we try to destroy it. Our world is much larger then us, much more complex then we could ever imagine. Even if we make our planet uninhabitable, we won't be able to take our Universe with us. Someday, somewhere, someone will pick up where we left off. 

   I want you to remember, when you're angry at others for not fighting to save our world that, deep down, we're all trying to keep our world going. We're trying to our best to believe in a world that we know, no matter how hard we try to hide it, doesn't really exist. Everyone, on earth and elsewhere, is doing everything they can do to keep our Universe together. All of us are telling, and playing out, a story that lets us keep control of a world that doesn't know our names, where no matter how loudly we yell, it will never hear our cries. 

    Remember, everyone is trying to avoid looking down into the Infinite. Don't do anything to make it any harder than it already is for them. 

The Death of a Nation

 Our nation
Was a nation born
From a desire for freedom,
Or so I was told long ago.
Our nation was born
So that we could be 
Whoever we wanted to be.

So long as you're white,
And only like women, 
And can walk and talk easily,
And were born a man. 

Our nation
Is a nation celebrated 
Every year,
On the day Thomas Jefferson
Wrote "All men are created equal."
Not women.
Not people in general.
Only men.
And he owned slaves,
So not all men were included 
In his statement.

We talk like our past
Doesn’t indict us.
Yes, we were evil,
But we didn’t know better.
All our mistakes
Were a hundred years ago,
Just the foibles of a young nation
Still learning to walk
On its own. 

According to legend
Our nation was born
Out of the worst racism
And cruelty 
Imaginable. 
So is it true that our nation
Will only be equal
On the day it dies? 

For more patriotic poetry written by yours truly, check out So Stands She, my poem on the statue of liberty and what it means to the United States. 

 There are times when I wish that I was a famous blogger, or at least that people actually read what I write. Then there are times where I'm glad I'm not, so I can say what I want and not be scared. Don't get me wrong, I meant what I said yesterday. There's no redeeming the Republican party. But if I was as famous as I sometime pretend I am, I might not have said it at all. 

I Hate Republicans

    Everything that’s gone wrong in this country can be blamed on a single party. Let’s not pretend that that isn’t true. I know the Republican party didn’t introduce covid, but they bungled the handling of it so badly that we had the highest covid mortality while they were in charge. Yes, they didn’t cause the great recession themselves, but they put policies in place that allowed it to happen. Let’s not forget that three of the judges that overturned Roe v. Wade were picked by Donald Trump, the most infamous of the republican presidents.

    I can’t claim that all republicans are evil to their core, but I won’t say that I feel the party is worth saving. I feel that, in order for the country I want to live in to exist, that party needs to die. Not the people in it, the ideas, and views that they hold. None of the values of the republican party are popular. No one outside the party likes them anymore. I’m fine with America having a conservative party, but not a party consumed by cruelty and malice.

Post For July first

 I just realized I never posted anything for July first. Oops. Well, if you're in the future, here's the post that I put in as a placeholder.