i've left a lot of my friends over the summer. a more accurate retelling of events would be to say that i stayed and that i stayed *much* too hard. i folded in on myself and began to explore a strange cavernous meat space with really inconsistent color correction. i turn everything inside out again and i'm always shocked by how cold it is compared to the warm, red fleshy interior design philosophy i'd grown used to over the past several months. i'm writing this to reflect on a few things that i've been going through lately, as well as look back on this year and the ones following it that caused this one to proceed exactly how it did in denying me access to the outside world forever. i'll talk about a lot of my experience with an incredibly dehibilitating bout of depressive symptoms cropping up once again, as they would come around to do eventually. i don't think i'll share this publicly ever but if it ends up being found, then hi! sorry that you have to see me like this.
my spring of 2025 has rammed its horns through the first two months of the year, rendering them impossible to recall as winter months. those months are always supposed to be beautiful and innocent and sacred. but no, i spent the first third of the year constantly high, having formed a pitiful dependency on marijuana to combat symptoms of anxiety and depression, leaving me to feel nothing but dulled versions of all those feelings. things hadn't been going to plan so to speak, i dropped my band classes and prior to my second semester of senior year those were the only reasons that i didn't drop out of high school to begin with. that and the fact my parents would be disappointed in me. my peers would be disappointed in me. all the people who weren't fortunate enough to have an education would be disappointed in me. all the people who died before they got to their senior year would eb disappointed in me. all of these innocent souls would extend their tongues and noses to taste and smell the failure i'd become. a distinct scent that follows me through all time periods, they would not find a single moment of respite where i had modeled a successful way to live.
anyway, i barely went to school even though i only had 1 important class to attend each day, the other 2 periods existing just to pad out my schedule, and the remaining 4 were off periods afforded to me by my job as an elementary school janitor. there were maybe only one or two classes i showed up to where i wasn't 'under the influence' of weed. i was barely conscious in the remainder of the education i would recieve at no financial detriment to myself. i was a shitbag, i threw away every opportunity afforded to me by my serendipitous position as child of a man who makes over 100 thousand dollars a year. i am so mentally ill that i managed to fuck up that gigantic of a head-start. i should be killed for this.
a lot of my suicidal ideation was much more insidious than simply debating killing myself every day, as long as i can remember it manifested as me never thinking that i would even live long enough to turn 18, and i probably wouldn't even have enough time in my life to graduate high school. while not always a conscious thought, this idea infested my internal framework and i would wander through every day not seeing any need to plan too far into the future, because none of those plans would come to fruition anyway. it was nonsensical for me to do anything more than the bear minimum, because any knowledge i acquired would be wasted on a rotting corpse buried underneath a mislabeled headstone because i didn't have time to provide a better alternative.
this began as early as 6th grade, and honestly it's a bit horrifying to look back on because nobody in my life really did much of anything to stop it but put me in therapy, where i would lie about things being good because i didn't want to get locked up in a psych ward for in indeterminate amount of time. if any therapist i had in the past actually knew what i was thinking and feeling, my agency surely would've been revoked entirely and instead of going to school i would be eating the same bland food everyday in the same building everyday for years, with security cameras at every angle and no lock on the door to guarentee any privacy. the only reason i was put into therapy to begin with is because i couldn't help but (not at all subtely) allude to my yearning for death in any school project that allowed for it. i didn't understand why teachers showed any concern at all, i thought they were just normal jokes to make because i thought that everybody felt this way, i thought that everybody really wanted to die because they would wake up every morning and open their eyes and cry out that everything is too much and it hurts a lot and they would rather things not hurt forever.
all that to say, my last semester of high school was spent constantly smoking weed because i didn't need my body to last much longer anyway, it'd be passing on by the end of the summer at the latest, i'm free to go right after the vulfpeck concert on july 5th! i didn't apply to college the previous semester anyway, it hurt me too much to start filling out all those applications and seeing a name that wanted me to kill myself at the top of every one. why am i doing this. this letter isn't addressed to me. this is not my beautiful house. my room's walls are all white and i think i hear organs pulsing inside of them.
i became obsessed with the idea of hearing the organs inside my house because i truly believed that every house was a living organism that breathed and had its own wants and desires and fears and thing sthat it dreads. i wanted to get so much worse because i would die anyway, i can be a human experiment to see how mentally ill someone can become by willpower alone. the conclusion is that you can do a lot of damage, because if you have that desire to begin with then you're probably most of the way there anyway.
i'm losing focus here, mostly because all of my memories of this period of time are completely fuzzy, i can't really rememeber much of anything concretely. just a couple moments that i look back on wishing that i couldn't been present in with a more open heart that didn't want to die as soon as it did. still, i understand where i was then, because when you've got 5-6 months to live how are you supposed to give an honest fuck about anything but the things that gave you that many months to begin with. except for *the* one, let's just leave that in the past i guess.
i feel a lot of resentment towards the person i became at the start of the year, it was misguided completely. it didn't know anything. it was blind. they were just fumbling through things they were never human before it's their first time. i still feel that way now, but i'll get into that in another piece of writing. still, there are a couple moments here that i remember being especially impactful to me now which i feel are important to talk about here in as much detail as i can manage to glean from my sludged brain.
some day in march (i remember it was march because this moment became what i would name my playlist for the month), i finished playing a game on the perfect day for me to finish that game. 4 months left, and i decide to check out a little game on steam called Until Then, a weird visual novel type thing, somewhat like night in the woods in a lot of its presentation and, to a certain extent, setting. 17 hours into the game, i'm really invested in these characters and they hit me with the most heartbreaking line i could hear at this time: "the world hasn't ended yet." and i couldn't really take this as more than some cosmic intervention, everything in my life was railroading me to look at the message and take it seriously, to fix shit to the best of my ability before i'm out the door because the world hasn't ended yet. sure enough i didn't have the dopamine levels in my brain to make any actual, material changes to my life so i went up to my room, ripped several blinkers and cried for about 45 minutes before getting a text from my father. faux-pineapple scent staining the inside of my nostrils, i walk down to talk just as he requested, without fear in my heart because i already knew what it would be about. he announced to me that him and my mother were getting a divorce. it'd been a long time coming, my dad started sleeping in the basement a couple years ago, i knew they were going to get divorced in that exact moment but i never brought it up because my parents never showed any desire for emotional connection with me when i was younger so i learned to not approach them with anything resembling conflict if it can at all be avoided. i just kept to myself with this suspicion, and it was actually confirmed at my grandmother's funeral in february when my dad had to pretend to be married to her still in front of someone who had no idead that his kids didn't know he was divorced. my favorite part of my parents is how they never liked talking to me. they only like when i have nice and kind flowery things to say, because i think they really like my prose on a surface level and don't think about any further meanings too hard despite how deliberate i am with my style of writing whenever in conversation with them. it'd always been a weird ballet on my end, i'm putting up a performance and they're just heckling me nonstop they expect me to bounce back from a "fuck you" with grace that no human has ever been known to posses. they spew practiced transphobic rhetoric at me, and they don't stop because they don't actually want to see me dance they just like the idea that i can do that.
getting over the grudge i hold against my parents for not being moved to tears by the millions of words i've written for them, and even more millions i've intricately woven into conversation, the discussion of their divorce was met by me with a boundless joy that i did my best to hide, because i think that's the respectful thing to do when your mother is crying about this. though maybe i should've been more honest, i don't really know what human mothers like to hear from their children and i doubt i ever will because i stopped talking to her back in august because every time i hear her in the house i lock the door to my room and put in my headphones and play music really loudly and hug my shark plushie (you know the one) while crying out of nothing but fear. anyway, the conversation ends in like five minutes and i go back to smoking my brains out and sobbing for the remainder of the day.
while that day certainly was a punch to the stomach and a ripping out of all the vital organs, what really did me in was my second and last trip of psilocybin mushrooms. sometime in april i drank a little shot glass filled with lemon juice and 1.7g of shrooms that i cut into little pieces using my copy of Medea as the cutting board. an hour passes and i'm freaking the fuck out. i was going to give this half of the eighth to my friend originally, but she eventually decided to decline out of fear that it would be a bad trip, and ever since then it'd been in the back of my mind that this fate would instead fall upon me as punishment for my insatiable greed when it came to the limited number of drugs i had access to. this worry carried on into the trip naturally, and it of course served to make it a bad trip. i tried to calm myself down my looking at the tracklist for DAMN. by kendrick lamar. the uniformity of all the titles would surely soothe my brain and i could melt into my bed of warm feelings that brought me the last little bits of joy i'd feel for the rest of my life. my finger accidentally hit play and i didn't have it in me to stop it after hearing just how soothing the introduction to BLOOD. is. i never really gave the album a fair shot, then was the best time as any to finally see what it had to offer. the sad tracks left me with a very distinct feeling of guilt and dread and sorrow and rigid sadness that i can replicate now if i try hard enough, or if i just listen to ELEMENT. or YAH. or PRIDE. (especially that one) or XXX. or DUCKWORTH. i decided to text an online friend group that i lost contact with 3 years prior, apologizing for disappearing on them like that and talking about how much of a huge fuckup i am, sending a photo of myself high out of my mind on my roof with a spoon on my head. there were two messages to that group chat when i woke up. i never read those messages, i deleted them without letting my eyes glance my phone's screen. every single day i wonder what they said, but ultimately i don't think i want to know because how the fuck do you respond to someone saying all that i said in a way that they would recieve in a way that would make them feel better?
it wasn't long after that when i quit smoking alltogether. there were only two times afterward where i smoked weed, both in september and november and both because friends of mine offered their own weed. in the future i swear to never smoke at all, i really do not need any more of that in my life, it never feels good, it's another incarnation of that wicked elixer. anyway, if not for the "Time I Took Shrooms and Listened to DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar" i'd probably be dead right now. very dead. though interestingly, that wasn't the main component of that thing, it just lead to me making a decision to hang out with a friend of mine when i don't think i otherwise would have, because i surely would've continued taking all the people in my life for granted and continued my shitty patterns of behavior, constantly distracted and never fully engaged in any conversation. though to fully explain what happend i have to go back to even before 6th grade to some time between 2015-2016, there are no landmarks with a definitive time to them when the obsession started.
I found out about this little indie game made by a little man in somebody's basement, and it became everything I ever was instantaneously. I had a therapist at the time, probably because i was way more socially inept than most of my peers. i only had one friend at the time, and this wouldn't change until my freshman year of high school, but actually most of the change came in my sophomore year. I told her about a weird dude that was sort of in the game, but happened to be hidden incredibly well and not really have many details surrounding him, even leaving his physical appearance ambiguous. I cared about this stupid fucking game so much that i told my first therapist about it, and that's the only thing i remember talking to her about, alongside her saying that it doesn't really seem like i had autism, which is a weird thing to say about someone who cares this much about a damn video game. What brought me a lot of grief though is that i couldn't actually play the game, so my perception of it was kind of just whatever the fandom was going along with at any given moment. It left me to not really engage with the art object itself, just people's weird perceptions of it and weird porn when i accidentally typed in the second half of the game's name differently because i thought it'd just be a fun little AU of some sort, like the one where the skeleton has the sick shades.
the game came out on the nintendo switch in 2018, and i played it. i played it a lot. i fought the second major boss inside of a diner while waiting for the food to arrive at the table, nothing could separate me from the world and these characters and the *music* by god the music was like nothing i'd ever heard before, it was so intensely beautiful. and the story! i couldn't wrap my head around it because i was a really stupid kid outside of math classes. still, come 6th grade this game was the only thing that brought me joy somehow. i was in a claymation class, and i made so many of those projects as fan stop-motion animations for this game, and they sucked oh my god they were so bad, but i wish they weren't lost to time because there's something so earnest and pure about that effort.
anyway, 2020 rolls around and i start to reinvent myself. i drop a lot of the bigotry ingrained in me by my peers, parents and the church (weird it took that long given the content of that game i was really into), but more relevant to the topic at hand i stopped being a stupid fucking undertale fan. it's cringe shit for babies and the story sucks and is lame and the meta shit isn't smart it's stupid.
i'd like to reiterate that i was a stupid kid, and nothing i thought about this game and its successor from the years 2020-2024 were legitimate, it was all me trying to defend my own ego, sheltering it from being percieved as cringe and lame and gay.
actually, it never really had much heart behind it, i just kind of pretended to hate it because i liked it when i was really young, and i thought that to grow up you had to kill all the things you used to hold close to you, so that's what i did, but after a year or so of that i just got tired of it, and forgot why i was beating it to death anyway, and despite that doubt i just kind of continued pummeling it anyway. i dropped the act eventually, to the point where i was really happy for the fans of the game when the release date was announced, they sure were waiting a long time for that, i guess i'm lucky to not be as into the game as them cause the 4 year wait wasn't super agonizing, in fact i could probably make it a couple days longer and check out the new two chapters if they seem interesting-
May 28th, 2025
I'm hanging out with a friend of mine, and I'm thinking that this will be the last time I see them in person, because I had about a month and a half to go. I never told anybody about how quickly the date was approaching, i only really intended to see the vulfpeck concert and then take my leave, even though two car seat headrest concerts were sitting in my wallet since the spring. I couldn't possibly make it to that show, but it'd been my dream for years to see vulf perform live, i thought myself lucky when my suicide attempt a couple days after graduation failed. with all the fear of my impending demise circling around my head, i try my best to focus my eyes and my ears on the road as i drive us to the park with our recently acquired jimmy john's sandwiches in tow. we sit underneath a tree, and before we start to eat they play some music from their phone. and i won't waste time with the bullshit i pulled a couple paragraphs ago by thinly veiling the artist of said music, it was Toby Fox. it hit me like a freight train in that moment, and i couldn't possibly let it show because it'd be really weird to care about that game all the sudden after pretending to hate it for five years. still i had to let something slip, i comment on how i forgot how good the music was, which naturally prompts them to talk about the game and which pieces of the plot they were looking forward to seeing picked up again after four years of being set in stone. when i'm alone in my car later i plan to play chapters 1 and 2 on june 2nd and 3rd respectively, leaving the 4th open for me to play the new content the second it launched.
i fell back in love with the world and the writing and the characters and the music, and that one song that i always loved no matter what i thought about the game, and as that song played and i heard ralsei say that it was a place i can go no matter what was happening outside i started sobbing uncontrollably. i was going to die in a month, my mom was moving out any second now, i can't talk to my sister about it because nobody in my family knows how to fucking talk to each other, and this in the exact moment i needed it to this game swooped in and told me that not only am i still alive, i have a place to hide from all the bad feelings and stressful things that i couldn't possibly hope to escape any other way. and it's perfect, everything lines up too well. i fit into this game too perfectly. i saw myself in the game, not through the point of connection which is the SOUL, but in its host. Kris Dreemurr, who i believe to be the best written character in all of fiction made me reconsider my entire perception of myself, and struck me with a yearning so deep in my heart to be a little more like them. we're so similar already anyway.
my parents are divorced too. i play piano too. i barely talk to people too. i walk weird too. i have a weird delusion that an entity on a higher plane of reality is controlling my every action too, only you're actually correct about this and im not. my dad doesn't remember if i like huge like that too. i wander off to play the piano at my friend's house too. i create a fictionalized version of myself modeled after other people too. i idolize every one of my friends too. i wish i was a dog too. i can't communicate my feelings with anyone too. i'm visibily depressed too. my perception of the world is composed of short utilitarian descriptions too. i only give the love of poetry to the people i love too.
i wish i had a mom that loved me as much as yours does.
i wish i was able to let myself be a kid like you did.
i wish i had the friends that you did
now, i understand that this isn't a normal or healthy way to view a fictional character, i shouldn't feel this much envy and it shouldn't hurt me as much as it does and i shouldn't care about the characters in this fictional world as much as i do, and i know that i really shouldn't have starved myself during june so that i could be thinner because that's something kris probably did, and i probably shouldn't have cut myself after 3 years free of self-harm because it's something that they surely do. and i know it's weird how much i started playing the piano after only really focusing on bass for the past while. and i know that it's really weird to think to myself every day how that when i die i'm going to end up in this world one way or another, i am going to brute force my way to heaven and heaven is *here* in my monitor. given all the prior context though it isn't particularly surprising. i was in a way predisposed to having this reaction to the game, having it reach around across time and space to rip my heart out a thousand times over in a way that convinced me *single-handedly* to live a few more years to see the game fully release. the UNDERTALE worm was already in my head, the reintroduction of deltarune made it take up more place in my skull than my actual brain, that's only a natural reaction.
as for the more specific relatability i found in kris, i saw this character as a better understanding of myself than ANYBODY in my life afforded to me in my entire life. my parents never saw me for who i was; even when i was breaking down into tears countless times over being seen as their son, they thought my grief to be temporary and illegitimate. this character, with zero lines of spoken dialogue, mostly being explored by how others act around them, how others percieve them, how others talk about them, even how their characterization is brought through the screen is parallel to how i move about life, i only exist in the way i do in the context of others, i hardly feel like anything when i'm deprived of social interaction, i *know* they feel the same. they have to. as good as i saw the tv glow was, as well-written as the testimonials regarding the transfeminine experience are, nobody understood me like this queer kid in a fictional town full of monsters where they're the only fucked up one without horns or weird ears, they have normal ears and normal skin and no horns. when i replayed deltarune this year was when i finally felt seen by anybody in the world for the first time in my life. i didn't know what it was like, it was poking at skin that had never felt any force in 17 and a half years. it tore me apart, and i loved it for it because it told me that i would live because of it. i want to reiterate, i had talked to 6 therapists and 3 psychiatrists by that point, not including school mental health conselors, and the first time i felt like my experience in the world was being truly seen was in the video game DELTARUNE released in 2018 and 2021 and 2025 and 2026. even though i have the logical understanding that everything these characters say was determined by some guy probably living in japan right now, who knows nothing about me and will never know anything about me, i can't shake the feeling that they're real to me. these characters are people to me, how do i stop this feeling from happening? no! don't answer that don't you dare answer that! they're all i have i need them. i cling to them every day, they're all i think about from the moment that i wake up to the moment that i go to sleep, and they don't bother to stop then, i think about them in my sleep, i've had so many dreams about this game. nothing unique happens, it's just reliving what i already know to have happened in the game. it's an impossible level of sanity but it's the main thread keeping me alive now so just let me have this for the rest of my life please.
i lost 20 pounds in two weeks in june because i only ate about 500 calories a day max. i always drank tea instead.
i barely hung out with my friends to make music because i would be withdrawn in part due to my severe back pain, but mostly because i was still in a state of utter shock from understanding what it is for a character to be "literally me" in the most frightening way possible.
i found comfort in the summer months by purchasing a playstation 5 to play death stranding 2 and nothing else. i played a lot of death stranding 2 while watching andrew cunningham and mollystars.
i never really got how people found comfort in watching a particular streamer, but something about watching andrew cunningham vods while delivering packages through the snowy mountains of australia was so soothing to my mind, i'm still working through the hundreds of hours of streams from andrew cunningham, just because they're incredibly nice to listen to and do provide me more comfort than they probably should.
the strangest thing happened during these months too, i made a lot more new friends because someone who i'd been an acquaintence with since preschool invited me to a voice call with them, and i was lucky enough to be able to talk to them beyond that singular call. i won't really get into it, because it's 6 in the morning and i want to finish this thing so i can go to sleep, but they're really lovely people and helped me through the hardest time in my life without necessarily realizing it. so if you're reading this sometime in the future, thank you all so much i love you guys more than i can put words to, truly.
I wish it could snow
Whenever I wanted.
This winter is going complete shit for me. it's the worst one i've been through. i've been crying every day because it's not snowing at all, there's no snow on the ground there should be snow on the ground why is there no snow on the ground it's not even the answer that's making me sad, i've been knowing about anthropogenic climate change for as long as i've been politically conscious, that's the first shit they teach you when you start to become a leftist for fuck's sake why is there no snow on the ground. WHY IS THERE NO SNOW IN DECEMEBER.
in a text-only format i cannot possibly describe the anguish the lack of snow is bringing me. i love the winter, it's my favorite season and it isn't close at all, i love the snow and how cold it is and how much of a pain in the ass it is to drive on all the slick roads and having the excuse to drink hot chocolate instead of eating breakfast and spending time with my family where we're near each other long enough for the veil of happiness to drop, but instead of revealing unending terror we see each other being truly happy on both sides of the physical space we occupy. why is there no snow on the ground. i want to see it fall and then have it melt off so i can go on a walk in the weird sunny snow melting cold as a bit of water drips onto my head from the trees above me while i think back to how i used to do just this in my freshman year of high school when i only had friends online for a little while and things were going really bad for me and i wanted to die but had to stick it out to senior year in case things got any better, and i want to go on those walks and smile because i made it through all that shit because of the walks i took while listening to that stupid fucking alpharad podcast and that zombie running app i listened to a couple times, and i want to listen to spirit phone just like i used to
i never had the sister of my childhood friend disappear under the circumstances of cosmic horror, no, my childhood friend is an only child actually. and it's a fucked up wish but i wish that happened, and my childhood friend was a reindeer and-
i'm walking in a world that isn't meant for me to experience it any more. the seasons aren't bothering to change how i know they should, people aren't talking how people talk, nobody talking to me could possibly be seeing me as i am because surely they would start sobbing because who would look at this sobbing child and scream at them the question of "who put this shit in your head"?
i think i'm dealing with a lot of unresolved issues that will remain unresolved and the longer they fester the more they will worsen, until i eventually die and nothing is resolved postmortum.
maybe i'm already dead.
a couple weeks ago i listened to i didn't mean to haunt you by quadeca, after seeing the full album movie for it pop up in my youtube home page. this album struck a particular nerve that few things have to the extent that it did. i listened to nothing but that album on loop for the next week, until i wore it down completely and can't really listen to it any more, but that's okay. it describes what i feel right now so perfectly, i'm a ghost right now and i'm haunting everybody i come across, simple as that. i feel like i died and the world was supposed to move on without me but it's humoring me a little by giving me conscious experiences that are almost the same as the sort of things that i felt when i was in the real world, you know, when things felt real before the start of june and DELTARUNE ruined my life. speaking of, i think i've come full circle on that game after six months
it died down a bit, but i think i'm just as insane about that game as i once was, i knew it to be true when my body piloted itself to walmart to buy supplies to crochet a green and yellow sweater than i have yet to bring into existence but i know i will one day when i have a burst of motivation that gives me all the same sorts of feelings that lead to me crafting a semi-public meltdown on a neocities page that i don't link anywhere, and a page that won't allow writings like this to be easily accessible until enough time has passed and i've built up enough of a back catalogue so this can be percieved as just my 'thing' you know like how people journal but i've done too much journaling in too many notebooks and i always delete the google documents anyway and it just feels more meaningful to type all this out in html cause i have to be intentional with my line breaks with the ps and /ps and the spans and the hrefs and the style and the h1s and h2s and all that bullshit that makes me semi-interested in web development.
i hope it snows more in janurary and february.
DELTARUNE is giving me all that i need, and i'm so excited to see new content. i dread the full release every day.
_
i have this really fucked up thought sometimes of what if someone calls me kris instead of dani. i have this fucked up thought that it would feel right.
i hope that LOVE is possible in the next world, for the same people
i'm sorry this was so gruesome to read, i'll do better next time. i'm just really sad right now.