It’s the two-year anniversary of moving to the city. (Wow.) Time really flies, and a lot has happened here.

It seems that there’s always a $WAGGOT song for every single period of my life, for better or for worse. Yesterday, I found one for the period I’m living through right now. It actually made me feel really sad. I got over it pretty fast, though; I went off on a magical tangent inside my head, but then I remembered that I have magical powers and God is on my side, so who cares? I’ll spend my time worrying about problems when they actually happen instead of months before they might happen.

Anyway, all this reminded me that I really wanted to dedicate a section of my site to $WAGGOT & KOKYANA, my favorite and most intimately treasured of underground music artists. I’ve been listening to them for a really long time now. As somewhat of a faggot myself (lol), the music connects with me, and I connect with it. I think the thing I value most about it is not its relatability, though—it’s its honesty. I’ll save all that for the right part of my site rather than going on about it all here, but I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about their music (some of which I probably won’t share). I think that’ll be my next project after I finish the doujinshi library and the framework for my various diaries. I will admit that a lot of their songs hold a mirror up to my own personal background, which is something important to me for sure. I won’t claim to know what drives either of them to make what they make, because we don’t do parasocial relationships here, but I do know how it makes me feel.

Which leads me to… If someone makes you believe that something happened even though it actually didn’t, can it then be said that it really did happen to you? The line between reality and fiction is one thing, but with smoke and mirrors, fiction can (and often does) become reality. In some ways, it can be “more real than reality,” as I always say. Even if part of you knows to question the narrative, if another part of you doesn’t, then that part is still living in a world where that false reality is the only real reality that exists. What are you supposed to do then?

Either way, torture is torture.

Other than all that, I don’t have that much to talk about right now. I’ve been spending almost all of my time and energy on working on my website (sad when you consider how unimpressive it is, but whatever), which has been great for my mental health. I was reflecting on things while I was scanning my doujinshi collection and realized that I just… wasn’t suicidal. I know it won’t last, but it was such a relief to know that, for at least a small window of my time, I felt stable. A lot of the time my life doesn’t feel like it’s in my hands, but for that moment, it really felt like my life was fully my own, and the fact that I had the privilege of choosing to spend it digitizing yaoi just… really hit me. It’s hitting me again now. I really appreciate how fortunate I am; even if stressful or bad things happen, I know it could always be worse, and I hope and pray it never goes back to what it was before. I’m tired of everything feeling like that, of it all feeling like it still is that. I just want to be free and at peace. The alternative is intolerable and exhausting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Final Fantasy recently. I’ve been replaying and writing about some of the older games. I’m having absolutely DERANGED thoughts about classic FF characters (and I use “classic” here to refer to anything pre-VII, so all the games that are sprite-based). It’s kind of lonely, honestly, because I don’t have anyone I can talk to about what I’m thinking and feeling. I keep coming up with these really elaborate fantasies, some of them even turning into these weird evil crossovers, but I don’t know anyone who’s into the games I’m specifically fixating on right now. I’m slowly trying to get Sephi more into FFVI, but the stars are not really lining up for us to be able to have autistic conversations about it (and the games I’m really obsessing over right now are ones she has never played). I also spent a lot of today dissociating in such a manner that my brain really believed it was somewhere between 2010 and 2013, so for a while I couldn’t even feel myself or remember who I was because I was reliving how it felt to be the person (people?) I was 10+ years ago. It made me feel really weird and cross-eyed and above all it was just really lonely. I feel like the rug could be pulled out from under me at any moment, and it sucks.

That’s all for now. I can never be sure how much journaling is too much. I know no one wants to hear any of this stuff anyway, but I’m doing it just to do it. I find that designing the individual pages for these journal entries helps me mentally and gives me a way to justify being allowed to write down how I feel. Weird mental gymnastics, hooray!

Happiness is really fleeting. Whenever you read this, please hug the people you love.