To Pass Beyond Revision, or, Time Is a Stupid Fucking Asshole, or, The Crocodile Layer (Patreon)

So I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately.

Like, a lot. More than the usual a lot, which is a lot anyway.

STRAP THE FUCK IN, COMPAÑEROS, IT’S GONNA BE A CHEERFUL ONE.

And also I just finished watching Bo Burnham’s Inside, thus I am so emotionally in ruins somebody should just put an explanatory plaque on me and start charging tourists admission.

Just @ me next time, Bo, fuck.

Well. So. And. This is the moonscape of my life.

Some of you may know how much of our family we’ve lost in the last year. And only one to COVID. It just…happened, over and over. From May or so onward, we lost seven family members between us. One a month, more or less. It just knocked our knees out from under us. And because of the world ending and all, not once could we be there, say goodbye, drink at a wake, sing a song at a memorial. It just kept happening, and we were stuck here helpless.

And I’ve just gotten news that another close family member, one I love very dearly, has a terminal diagnosis. Maybe we have six months. Maybe we don’t. Maybe we have a year. Maybe we don’t.

HA HA TIME TO PRODUCE SOME WHIMSICAL AND MEANINGFUL CONTENT!

That’s why I’ve been struggling to get the rewards done this month, kiddos. And struggling with everything else. Making stories that have words other than everything and every one dies and we’re just expected to go on like that isn’t true. Being a person. Doing something other than staring at walls. My heart was already pulling a full-ass haywagon of pain, and the axle just blew out.

So I’ve been thinking about death a lot.

It’s not like I didn’t think about death before. I went through a pretty fucking harrowing period in my 20s right before I started publishing in which I was very literally paralyzed by the idea of death, the knowledge I would die, my inability to do anything about the time left until my death insisting on passing like the stupid asshole it is.

And I remember the very first time I had a panic attack over that shit. I was in 5th grade, sitting on a school bus after class. The driver was late and I was very annoyed because my Grammy was going to take me to a doll museum that afternoon and I loved my Grammy so hard. And as I was sitting there on the green vinyl seat in the yellow bus in the sunshine, I thought: the driver will come and I’ll get home and I’ll go to the doll museum with Grammy. And afterwards, I will think back to now when I’m waiting for that to happen. Maybe I can try to remember this moment before the doll museum after the doll museum. Everything I think and feel right now, right here: myself, I am ten, I go to Bear Creek Elementary, I have three brothers but I don’t live with one of them, my parents are divorced, I hate my haircut it looks stupid, my dog is named Truffle and my cat is named Skittles, I wish I could sing prettier than I can, I don’t actually really like dolls I just love Grammy and I hardly ever get to do anything with her without my brothers. Try to hold onto this moment for later. It’s like time travel. If I can remember myself as I am before the doll museum.

And that moment is still fucking seared into my memory thirty-two years later. Every detail. Even though I don’t remember one single solitary thing about the doll museum itself.

But I sort of put off having a pervasive crisis about it all until college, the correct time for that particular genre of crisis.

Pretty typical solipsistic early 20s Millennial mortality freak-out, I guess. Not overly unique, except that it lasted a couple of years until my brain decided: typing words will fix it. If I type enough. Fast enough. Well enough. And people read them. I’m not saying my personal existential slow-motion crash test in which I was very much the dummy was anything special. Perish the thought! What has the internet taught us but that no one is special (except that one 5-year old kid who can play the drums like crazy) and everything we like and think and dislike and rage against is monetizable and linkable to everyone else who likes and thinks and dislikes and rages against those things to create a vertically integrated species for whom enthusiasm is currency, purchase is virtue, and sign is signified?

HA HA TIME TO PRODUCE SOME WHIMSICAL AND MEANINGFUL CONTENT!

I guess I was lucky in that I have sort of…missed the bus as far as familial death until now. That will happen when you’re not in touch with your biological family for a really long time in your formative years. And when you’re the oldest child of two oldest children who had you very young, so everyone else was pretty damn young when you were young, too. Young, young, young. That so-brief state of being whose relationship to the rest of your life is pretty much the religious relationship between your mortal existence and the heavenly and hellish spheres. The choices you make when you’re young determine the environment of the rest of your life. Clouds or fire. Fire or clouds. It’s desperately hard (though not impossible) to change the backdrop once you’ve passed over. And most of the literature in the world involves the few cases where it could be changed, but you know. That’s probably not gonna be you. Gonna be us. We’re stuck with the paths we chose before our brains were fully formed. The paths our parents chose before their brains were fully formed. The paths their parents chose. The roads go where they will go, and we reach our hands out, as though through the window of a car on a sunny highway, to graze the clouds or the fire with our fingertips.

I was four when my great-grandmother Pearl died. Truly and actually while I was sitting on her lap. At least, that’s when she had the stroke. She technically died at the hospital later. It’s the only memory I have of her. But is it a real memory? Or is it a story my mother told me so many times it feels like a real memory? The brain will do that. It will take a story it is told and turn it into an experience indistinguishable from lived reality.

Fuckin’ brain, what a douche.

But I think I really remember it. I remember the pattern of the crocheted afghan blanket on her lap under my legs as I curled up against her in her wheelchair. And that seems like a detail no one would have thought to feed me in their version of the story.

My beloved grandmother Carolyne, she of the doll museum, my Grammy, passed when I was 14. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t know. Not until much later. Which still, from time to time, crushes me to the ground like a sudden attack of gravity. My grandfather Tony passed a few years ago, but had had dementia for so long he thought I was my mother at my engagement party. To my first husband. So I hadn’t been home to visit in ages. Being called by her name is a lot.

I guess I’ve “not been there” a great deal, long before COVID.

And maybe I’ve got bad stars now or maybe I’m just 42 and this is the age where it starts happening, over and over, because time is finite and numbers are huge pieces of shit and the New Math of how old will I be when I lose everyone forever is just…something to be compartmentalized away in order to plainly function.

It sits in the compartment right next to how old will my child be when they lose me. And wow, that is a huge bummer of a room.

The thing is, writers write about death all the time. Seriously, all the fucking time. We use it to get out of a tough plot tangle, to evoke emotion in the reader, to up the stakes, to shock, to show what serious artists we actually are. And I don’t have the data, but I’m pretty sure science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery writers write about it a lot more than realist “literary” writers. In a literary novel, a single death may be the whole climax the book is working toward, or the axle around which it turns. Some genre works slaughter thousands indiscriminately, or a couple of dozen very vividly, or several in order to revolve a work around the afterlife, or a few just to fuck with the protagonist and the reader and show this isn’t kid stuff, we kill people here, so we are very edgy and cool and your vicarious pain was the goal and the reward.

HA HA TIME TO PRODUCE SOME WHIMSICAL AND MEANINGFUL CONTENT!

We write about death all the time. Death and love. Both topics subject to the absolute worst of cliches. Talked about in received language, memes people don’t really understand are memes, addressed in greeting card prose, because in shock, we fall back on what is familiar, even if it isn’t very good or effective. I’m sorry for your loss, my condolences, better to have loved and lost, you’ll get through this, you’re strong, blessings, rainbow bridges, in a better place, best wishes, let me know if you need anything, on and on and on. The same way you find yourself repeating to your children the things your parents said to you, the songs they sang—in extremis, those phrases come unbidden, whether you even want to say them or not, like you were coded to output those lines, given this input. Which, of course, you were. Not under my roof, what time do you call this, hush little baby don’t say a word mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird, life’s not fair, you can’t have ice cream until you finish your broccoli.

Words like blackbirds, startled off the power line by a current you weren’t prepared for.

Death and love. Death and love and children and art.

Death and love are the two things that force everyone you know to come together and deal with each other and share a meal and generate stories for the next era of family life. And death and children the only truly permanent, untakebackable twists of fate—and only one is, sometimes, a choice. Weddings and funerals and maybe, sometimes, christenings or the like. But definitely weddings and funerals. The only moments when everyone you love basically has to be together—and you won’t be there for one. Also the presents are less fun. Mostly just flowers and kleenex and reheatable meals. Do people still do that? Or do they just…gift a subscription to a meal service. Or nothing at all?

I don’t know. I haven’t been allowed to go to a funeral yet.

And that’s true—all this death and the only funeral I’ve ever attended as a sentient person was my ex-husband’s grandmother Yelena’s. The only dead body I’ve seen. Again, that I remember and was cognitively present for. I’m told I was at my great-grandmother’s funeral and it was open casket, but I don’t have one single memory of it.

Yelena looked like a wax sculpture. The room felt like one of the hotel rooms they hold panels in. Featureless, neutral colors, modular, adaptable for the next event. Flowers, a coffin, everyone sitting in folding chairs. And I suppose I’ll always remember that the end of her very long life had been so brutal on everyone that at the wake afterward, an uncle said “Five minutes to be sad. Then we drink and tell stories til the sun comes up.”

And it was a really beautiful night. Really beautiful stories. I liked that, that the stories were the thing that mattered.

But she’s still gone. If I hadn’t put Yelena in a book, only three or four people would still be around who even knew who she was. And that’s how it works, that’s how it’s always worked, and fuck, what a garbage way for anything to work.

We write about death all the time.

And I don’t think there’s anything I could say that hasn’t been said before. I felt that way about childbirth, too. And the first year. What could I say about making a human and bringing it up that hasn’t been said a million times because it’s just the most common thing in the world? And if I can’t say anything new or at least interesting, shutting the fuck up has always been an option right there next to me, despite how little I’ve ever taken it.

But it feels glib now. The writing I did about death before 2020. Any writing I could ever do about it. Anything I could ever unshut up about.

It hurts. It hurts all the time. It hurts different every time. It’s never the same twice. It’s fast and slow. You know it’s coming and you get a phone call out of the clear blue hell-sky. There’s bureaucracy to handle or you’re not in charge of that. There’s surgeries and horror or a slow decline full of very well-researched drugs. Over and over, but never the same.

When I was in second grade, there was a girl in my class named Rochelle Blackburn. She liked really light pink dresses, almost white. Whenever I think about her I remember the dresses. She didn’t have any hair and we all kind of knew why but no one talked about it because we were children and we understood it in the way that we understood Ancient Egypt. The signs and signifiers, but not the reality of it. The pyramids, hieroglyphs, mummies, gods with animal heads. Crocodiles in the Nile. But not that human beings really actually lived in that place and believed and built and wrote and painted such things. What they experienced. That it was no less real than our classroom in September with construction-paper leaves taped to the wall in orange, yellow, red, brown. Because it had no connection to us. Not really. It was just a story we’d have to take a test on eventually.

And one day Rochelle Blackburn didn’t come to class, because she had died. And we all understood that in the exact same way. People die. Sometimes kids, even. Hathor had a cow head. The sun used to be named Ra.

It had no connection to us. Not really. It was just a story.

I am so glad I remember her name. I don’t know why I do, except maybe that I’ve never met anyone else named Rochelle. I am so glad I remember her name, because now you know her name, a child in a small town in Washington who died thirty-four years ago, who liked pale pink, whose parents I never met. Whose life was, to me, no more knowable or familiar than that of Osiris, or the long, slow inundations of the Nile delta full of quiet crocodiles who hissed so hard while they ate that the air irritated their eyes and made them shed real tears. Egyptians used to think they were crying over their prey, mourning them, and the inherent violence of life and death. But they weren’t at all. They were just being crocodiles and hashafashasha-ing over their food. That’s where the phrase crocodile tears comes from.

It looked like grief, but it was just eating and breathing.

I tell you all this and Rochelle Blackburn lives a little longer.

Maybe.

But not really.

But in the only way anyone can.

Which is not a good or useful way.

What a stupid fucking year. They’re going to call it the Lost Year or some bullshit like that. And us old nerd whiners will be like actually it was 21 months or whatever it turns out to be and no one will care because the VH1 retrospective on aLl ThE aMaZiNg ArT that came out of the pandemic is on and the editing is so fast we can fall into its rhythm and forget that all that art is people screaming in pain and bewilderment and loneliness and a lack of any human connection unmediated by a screen and suddenly having time to be aware of time’s stupid asshole nature and this art is not fun art, it is pain, everywhere, all the time, and fear and need because Death is just sitting in our living rooms eating all our snacks and not using coasters so every deep, lusty drink Death takes leaves little wet circles on the table where it’s put up its muddy feet, expecting to be served. Expecting to be satisfied. Expecting to be stuffed.

Crocodiles do cry. Their tears have the same composition as human tears, except for the pain. The feeling. Probably. The fuck do I know about how crocodiles feel? They could be in real, profound existential distress and I would just be like ew their eyes are creepy let’s go see the giraffes instead.

We write about death all the time.

But in the face of real death I stare at a blank wall and say nothing. No quips or wise aphorisms. I don’t know how to write something other than my aunt is dying and it’s not fair. My father-in-law died and it’s not fair. My grandfather died and it’s not fair. I remember my family young and constant, gods walking the earth, gods with animal heads, even. My aunt moving in with my uncle, their collection of Garfield memorabilia a powerful draw to a child, and even though I haven’t seen one Garfield toy in their house for decade, I still associate them both with the orange cat who hates Mondays, child of Bast, entombed with lasagna and Jon’s love.

What do you say or do, ever, when you know you have so little time left? Gonna watch a fucking Netflix special? But we all know we have so little time left, and we tweet and binge and order and smile as though we do, so maybe it’s no different, I don’t know, I haven’t done this before. It was always so sudden until now.

When I was little I had a friend named Matthew Jibben. We were both obsessed with the Titanic, which is enough to be best friends forever when you’re small. Maybe enough when you’re big. This was long before the movie. We spent hours pouring over National Geographics in his bedroom while our parents visited downstairs. He was my only friend who was a boy, and sometimes my only friend, because childhood is trash that only looks like gold in the rear-view. Because my life is my life, I went to live with my mother in California when I was thirteen and lost everyone I knew, lost track at least, really lost at most.

And maybe a year or two after moving to Maine, my dad called out of nowhere while I was working on the book that would be Deathless. I was sitting at my computer and I saw my dad’s number and it sounds like I’m making this up but I swear to you the thought peeled out across my mind: Matthew is dead. I hadn’t heard from him in years and years. But I knew. The part of my soul still endlessly turning Nat Geo pages in that beige bedroom in the late 80s while the pleasant drone of grown-up voices pulsed outside the door knew.

I picked up the phone and my father told me that Matthew had been running a marathon, having just gotten married, with a beautiful Kodachrome life ahead of him, and when it was over jogged over to his car, realized he’d forgotten his keys, and on his way back was stung by a bee, to which he was fatally allergic.

And that was that. Matthew was gone. Blue and black and silver at the bottom of the sea. Like something out of My Girl, only we were adults and we weren’t fictional, we weren’t supposed to die, perfectly healthy and strong, because a bee saw our happiness and went lol watch this.

I shouldn’t be sitting here typing about Matthew Jibben in the past tense, you should be able to just follow him on Twitter being weird about politics and culture like the rest of us. But shouldn’t never matters and everything is stupid and only Anubis knows that his soul never weighed half so much as a feather. Mine sure does. But not his.

FUCK THIS PLACE.

I feel like the whole idea of “what is the meaning of life” as a useful and entertaining question used to be all over media, as a set-up, punchline, and/or serious thought experiment—and just isn’t anymore. Maybe it’s that Doomer vibe. We just decided there isn’t one, everything sucks, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, we broke the sky and the sun is going to have its revenge in ten or twenty years, have a kid or don’t, make art or hell, just react to it in front of others, or not, or both, fuck the man, but, you know, also if the man doesn’t bless you with his munificence you’re fucked, so all hail the man, no one retires, no one gets out, sitcom houses occupied by middle class fictional families are only affordable by millionaires in the real world, get therapy, buy Douchecoin, subscribe to my podcast, do a flip, your pain is valid but it better be fucking perfectly lit, stay inside, go outside, get woke, don’t look back in anger, don’t look forward at all, find love or something, I don’t fucking know, the McRib is back and that’s what passes for seasonal folkloric myth cycles involving the sacrifice of the king these days, oh, by the way, don’t go near another human being, we’re all poison and it’s invisible and it’s a gasping nightmare, six feet apart or six feet under, forever and ever amen.

HA HA TIME TO PRODUCE SOME WHIMSICAL AND MEANINGFUL CONTENT!

In my 20s my answer was just: typing more words will fix me. Will fix this. I’ll be gone someday but all my words will stay. Not forever, I’m a classicist, I know the effect of rain and mold on the staying power of literature. Just type more words, Cat, just type more words and you can out-type the void. For awhile.

And here I am still typing words. Still hoping the void got lost at the last intersection and I have some time yet.

Except having a kid fucks that all up. the very basic math of: How long can I live so that I can see as much of his living as possible? But it’s not like I can do anything about that much. My grandmother missed literally everything of her grandchildren’s lives, even the birth of one of them. At 14 I was the oldest of us. I had my child late, so only if he wants children and wants them earlier than I did will I see much of any grandchildren.

I tell myself they’ll have my books. They’ll have the Fairyland narrator. They’ll have Marya and Decibel and Tetley and the others, they’ll have this, these words, these essays, and my big face reading The Orphan’s Tales on Youtube for hours and hours, all this speaking in my voice, to them, forever. So much more than I will ever have of my parents or grandparents or anyone else. Is that enough? Nope. But it is. And the higher likelihood is they won’t really care and it doesn’t matter anyway, even if they exist. The McRib will be back and I will not and I will be no more than a chunk of DNA who could not, in the end, fool the void one bit.

I think about Jay Lake a lot.

A lot.

Before the current generation of prolific writers, he was the prolific SFF writer. He was so loved. He was one year older than I am now when they first found a very operable cancer. I remember three years later, things already not going at all well for him, being at Worldcon in Australia together. My first Hugo nomination, the day before I would meet someone who, extremely improbably, would become my husband. We both wanted to put our feet in the Indian Ocean, the open ocean, not just the big bay Melbourne sits so prettily upon. So Jay and I and a friend of his drove down the Great Ocean Road for a couple of hours until we could get to a bit of open sea. Jay and I stood there in the shockingly cold water, letting it run up and over our bare toes and retreat again, so huge, so deep, so full and empty, too. And I remember so clearly thinking: maybe this is the last time I see Jay. Not just a hello or goodbye but real quality time, an experience, an experience together. Maybe this is it. If it is, this will be how I remember him forever, barefoot in the Indian Ocean, in the Hawaiian shirt he always wears, still working on a book back at the hotel. The thick blonde hairs on his toes. The sunlight here. The sound of the water. The sound of his voice.

And in the end, it was.

I saw him at a few other cons, and then I didn’t, as his cancer progressed and made that too hard. And then Jay was gone, and the memory was left, a memory that I have rarely shared with anyone, because it is so strange and small and intimate. Feet in the water. Voices on the clouds.

And I know that Jay would give anything to be…just here, now, procrastinating on a novel that’s already late, only he probably wouldn’t procrastinate, because he was better than me, he always wrote like he was running out of time, long before he knew that he was. For awhile I told myself: write, because Jay would give anything to still be able to.

But the truth is it didn’t work and I still procrastinated, knowing I could have that bad doctor’s visit anytime. Because no one can just live with the absolute certainty of death for very long without just lurching to bury it in TV and the internet and air-fryer food and candy and conversation and even chores, anything, everything, and that’s what 2020 did, it removed way too many of the burying materials at once and way too many people’s response to that was to tell us we needed to be WORKING HARDER and DOING A SIDE HUSTLE and MAKING CONTENT and LEARNING NEW SKILLS so we could GET RICH and MANAGE OUR BRANDS when all this was over.

All this is never going to be over. And if working like a tornado on fire fixed death, Jay Lake would still be here.

Typing don’t fix too much.

I am extremely aware of how depressing all this has been. And disjointed! It is a window into what my brain has been doing to itself over the last month. A window with black, light-blocking curtains. Naturally.

I’m also aware that I’ve talked for a long time and not really about my aunt, who is not gone yet. And the reason I’ve been thinking about Matthew, and Rochelle and Jay and Carolyne and Pearl and Tony, but mainly Matthew, is that it happened again. I saw my uncle’s name on the phone and I knew. The only times he’s called me out of the blue were when my cousin had a cryptic pregnancy and thus a surprise baby and when they found the cancer in the first place. I knew.

And I was dressed head to toe as Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek, standing on Commerical Street in Portland looking ridiculous, clutching my phone and sobbing. It was the first night after vaccination I’d dared to go out and do something, an event, a silly Schitt’s Creek trivia and activity night, and the void went lol watch this.

The things you know you’ll remember forever. The Indian Ocean. The bee. The pale pink dress. The afghan blanket. Moira Rose’s clothes.

The doll museum.

And this is all I can think about. I’m supposed to be writing a lot of things, and copyediting, which always feels like a very good use of one’s finite time on earth let me tell you, but my mind just does this, does everything you’ve been reading for 4500 words, over and over, day in and day out. Time traveling. Trying to learn how to freeze what cannot be frozen. Life is always too hot and fast for that.

I am a crocodile, hissing and crying as I eat. It looks like grief, but it’s just breathing and eating. Because breathing and eating and lying very still as the river rises is grief, that basic, that intrinsic, every day, every moment, plain and unavoidable and common and boring unless you’re a crocodilologist. We’re all fucking sad, I’m not special.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want anyone to die. Why is it like this? This system sucks. I can see so much room for improvement. For updates, QOL patches, new features, some nerfing, a more streamlined UI. But it never happens. We just keep playing the old terrible version.

I know, sooner or later, I’ll get unstuck. I’ll write the new book. I’ll let my son ride on my shoulders. I’ll take him to a doll museum. I’ll be the mother he will remember. I’ll do readings and go to conventions and find a way to package this into something that almost passes as art. But right now, I am such a very specific 20s kind of mess.

I suppose I always did want to be a flapper. Drunk or dancing or both, on the grave of the old world.

What have we learned to do in the 20th century but exhibit our mess and hope that somehow magically disinfects it and makes it livable? Even profitable, damn us all, but me especially.

HA HA TIME TO PRODUCE SOME WHIMSICAL AND MEANINGFUL CONTENT!

I remember being in grad school, some critical theory course, and my professor, a man named Robert Inchausti, who had a remarkably outsized influence on my work for the short time I knew him, said something about how obsessed with revision T.S. Eliot was. That he was revising The Wasteland more or less up until his death. Then we listened to a cassette of Eliot reading from the poem. And as that dead voice filled the room I recall so distinctly feeling sorry for him, that he had passed beyond revision, the ability to revise or edit anything. I personally hated editing and tried to just be good enough on the first go not to have to do much of it, but he couldn’t stop until death stopped him, and I figured that was as good a definition of death itself as anything: to pass beyond revision, beyond being able to fix anything, repair it, make it better, sweeter, more powerful, more confrontational, more perfect, more kind. The text is set, the work done, the poem is, at last, what it would become, and will not change again.

But for now, you and me and everyone reading this, for now, we can still revise. We can still edit. We can still find the more correct word. We can’t change the ending, but we can alter how we get there.

We can fix things. Still. A little. Maybe. Maybe not. But the tools are available. The pen, the paper, the keyboard, the eraser. Track changes. Compile draft.

I am straight up not having a good time.

But good times will come again. Just like the McRib.

Here is a fact you may not know.

Lots of animals burrow in the ground. Some even sleep there, a kind of hibernation, safe from predators. Some lay their eggs, some escape the heat. Most of them still stay fairly close to the surface.

But the animal that burrows deepest of all is the Nile Crocodile. Because of the extreme inundations of the river, you see. They burrow forty feet down and deeper still, and stay there, sometimes for months, except to occasionally emerge to bask in the sun before returning to the shadows. They lie there, motionless, in a kind of suspended animation called aestivation. Their hearts beat twice a minute. Young crocodiles can spend an entire summer in aestivation. They’re all down there, hundreds of them, deeper than all but the biggest bore-holes humans make, safe and still and dark.

Like a museum of dolls.

Which means that all the diagrams of the Earth wee see in school are wrong. It doesn’t go: Inner Core, Outer Core, Mantle, Crust. It goes: Inner Core, Outer Core, Mantle, Lower Crust, Crocodile Layer, Everyone Who Ever Died and Got Buried, Upper Crust. It’s part of the word. A ribbon of sleeping crocodiles.

And that’s how I live right now. How maybe adults live all the time and I never knew because I thought it was just so cool how they had all that Garfield stuff. Knowing what’s down there. Knowing what you walk on. The great reptilian secret. Death and finality and grief and injustice lying tail to tooth, waiting to emerge and bask in the warmth of me being forced to look at it and experience it before returning to the deeps. Two heartbeats a second, far down below the soles of my bare feet while I walk around pretending I don’t know about the crocodile layer. Pretending loss isn’t just waiting for the summer to end.

Maybe none of this was worth saying, but I couldn’t say anything else. That should probably go on my tombstone, if anything does. Maybe right now I am the crocodile layer, in aestivation, conserving energy, barely beating, hiding until it’s safe again up there. Believing it can be, or ever was. Dreaming in the thickness of the dark. Remembering who I was before the doll museum. Remembering everyone. Waiting for the sun.

Thump.

Thump.

Time to produce some whimsical and meaningful content.