When I Ruled The World

This is the journal of Dr. Charlene Wood (1962-1994). Dr. Wood was a pioneering scientist in STEM during the early 90s.

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Diary of Dr. Charlene Wood—June 3rd, 1979.

8 pm

I haven’t left the house in a week.

The night air is not a comfort. It is arid. Devoid of life. The shadows are as deep as regret.

The Houston sunlight burns through my eyelids. I haven’t been able to sleep. Mother screams into the couch cushions day and night. She waits by the door for father who she has forgotten has died. Or, maybe, she really believes he will come back. If he does so, what would he find here? Two women going mad. His daughter, quietly, in the restroom, stabbing a safety pin into her thigh. Staring at her blank expression in the medicine cabinet mirror.

His wife, bellowing out her despair at all hours of the day. A tornado siren for a disaster that, once it touched down, never lifted off the ground again.

I took the pills inside of myself and soon the noise was just a distant thundercloud on another horizon. Too far away to matter. I told my favorite stuffed animals about the world. Did you know that octopuses have three hearts? One heart can stop and start again later. Isn’t that strange? Isn’t that neat? I would like to have three hearts. One heart for father, one for mother, and one just for me.

One heart just for me.

It is 2 am. Mother has been going in and out of the bathroom. I can hear the tap running, shutting off. Her vague murmurs and cries.

She is banging on the door. She is screaming at me saying I’m the reason he’s gone she—

August 14th, 1979. 5:45 am

I am on a greyhound, headed to New York. It has been 2 months since that awful night. I spent a few days in a hospital bed with missing, broken nails. My throat was bruised. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t stop crying. The officers came and said things to me but I don’t remember everything. Memory is funny that way. I could fill in the gaps with what I think happened, and my brain would decide that that is real, and store it as truth.

I had no legal guardian except mother who was now in custody. I spent a couple weeks in a group home before running away. I was 17, and had just been accepted to NYU. The acceptance letter sat against my chest under my jackets like a cherished love letter.

Everything I owned was still there, in the home that had been a holding cell. Not even a true prison; an in between space of gray walls and corners full of piss and vomit. Misery.

My stuffies are probably still tucked into the bed, waiting for me to return. Gathering dust. But I will never return.

Mother is in a state hospital. If the medication works, she may get transferred to a minimum security facility. But she will never be free again.

This pains me, even as I still feel the phantom pain of her maniacal grip on my neck.

The trip is long, arduous. I have no money to eat. People on the bus feel sorry for me. They buy me things. A sandwich, a coffee. Someone asks if I have family where I’m headed. No, I answer. I don’t answer anymore questions. I am too tired.

The bus moves slowly across state lines, stopping at rest stops where fields of grass sing against the plum ripening sky, stars springing against the flesh of the night. I want to sink my teeth into it and bite. Feel the nectar burst against my tongue, drip down my chin. I want to cry, standing helpless and alone in the field as cars whizz by the interstate. Someone calls out for me, Time’s up! Let’s get movin’!

Time’s up. Let’s get moving.

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Charlene Wood - Diary, November 19th, 1990 12:48 am

How to put you in words? Would I press you to my navel and caress your silken head? Would I follow each precious step you took and carve the imprint into the wood so that I may gaze upon the impression you left in my sullen world? Would you show up in my prayers, in my journals, in my nightmares where I am riding a white horse across a frozen lawn, following the ghost of your grandmother into the forest where she took her own life as you watched from the high windows of your childhood home? You were not born yet, and yet you hold the burden of her passing in your mind.

Would I kiss you, would I give you everything that I have stored in my memory in my bones in my knife? Are you an illusion of the future or a relic of the past that still threatens to shackle me to pain and degradation?

I have seen your face before. You look back at me from the mirrors in the solitary bar bathrooms, a dim bulb blinking desolately as the stench of vomit and piss and shit and the thunderous guitars of some shitty GNR cover band beat at the door--oh no, it's security. I've been in here looking at you too long. I wish I never had to stop.

You stand at the bar, concern coloring your pale blue eyes.

I cannot keep from moving towards your destruction. It is an echo of my own.

With a smile, you say, "Hey, Charlie, what took you so long?"

Would I love you despite the cruelty of your spirit? The agony of your rapture? You take my hand, press your lips to my palm, bundle me into a cab, and watch from the curb as it pulls away, ushering my broken spirit back to the high rise where our mothers cannot reach us. A cigarette hangs loosely from your lips.

I would. I would. I would love you regardless. I already do. Have, for as long as I can remember, it was always you. Tears spill down as the warm cab rumbles to the sanctuary penthouse, to the place where you sleep, but you don't come home that night. The city was made for beautiful lovers like you to revel in. I am just here, waiting for you.

You will find me when you are ready for me to love you. You will love me when you are ready for such a thing.

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Charlene Wood- Diary, September 24th, 1987 5:54 am

I reside in my own cathedral, where the faint murmurs of prayers hum from the stone-carved ceiling. Is apparent in the fading of sharp edges and banisters polished from the loving hands of pilgrims. When light streams through the sacred legendaries, bathing my unworthy head in the rapture of the Holy Spirit, eating at the darkness of my sin.

I am not a martyr or a saint, yet I would die for this love.

I am fading against the coming of dawn. The brief headlines of tomorrow thorn my mind as I stumble back to my dorm, thin socks slipping down into my worn boots. ...Cyclone, Speaking For the Dead, Artifical Life Conference... This life is a deficit and a mourning and a sacrifice and an invocation a kiss and a death sentence, a parallel and a single drop of dew balanced on the edge of a blade of grass.

I have not told mother about this. She would think we were too much alike, and gently, gently, take me back into her arms in that burnt-out Texas town to seclude me from the rest of creation, to be absorbed into her once more. A shorn limb returned. A phantom presence. If I return, I will be consumed. She has tried this before, but I survived. Would that I could survive each attempt.

My last roommate has graduated and there are no takers for the empty bed to the right of me. Everything is the same as it always has been. I hate to end this with 'I am alone,' for though it is true, I do not permit myself to succumb to loneliness. There is much work to be done; I am feeling through infinity for the single string to grasp, the one red strand that will pull me through this garbled soliloquy into the exaltation of eternal love. This is no god I speak of; at least, not in a traditional sense. This is an exploration of assumptions. In the search, I will find that infinity resides within us all. I know it to be true already. I simply need proof.

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Charlene Wood - Diary

September 14th, 2004 2:33 am

I’m sitting in a coffee shop, the bar top flaking under my probing fingernail. The foam of the seat is bursting through the ripped seam. My mug, small, rim stained from nearly a century of late-night coffee drinkers, their hungry eyes scanning the badly written, greasy menu, their blue lips carefully sipping the scalding liquid, junkie heart and soul in tatters, as tattered as their denim, as the seat, as my mind—wait. I’m already dead.

September 14th, 1987 2:32 am

Here I am. Still alive. New York. I would be lost without you.

The day moves forward relentlessly; each tumbling morning like dice in a desperate man’s hands. Each night, I learn the extent of addiction. Where do the nights go when I am past the point of breaking? I visit the diners and write until my fingers bleed, and with that small sacrifice I ask god for more. More coffee, more words. More moments where the city, in all its bustle and murder and greed and love, hushes for a single second and delivers to me a silence that is beyond progress, beyond any age of man. A silence that exists only at the dawn of time.

When I leave the diner, I am in mourning. So many dawns will approach that I will never know. So many pasts have flown through the night like the sullen chorus of nightjars; a language I will never decipher, yet even the sound of it has shaped my solitude in some way. I am an orphan in the city of sound. I am alone again.

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Her obituary from the New York Times:

The New York Times

Obituary – February 2, 1994

Dr. Charlene “Charlie” Wood, 31, Scientist and AI Researcher

Dr. Charlene “Charlie” Wood, a pioneering scientist in biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, passed away on January 31, 1994, in New York City. She was 31 years old.

Born on December 3, 1962, in Houston, Texas, Dr. Wood was the daughter of Theodore Wood, a NASA scientist, and Josephine Wood. Her father’s passing when she was just 11 years old profoundly shaped her intellectual pursuits and deep curiosity about science and technology. Her mother, Josephine, resides in a care facility.

Dr. Wood earned her PhD in biomedical engineering and computer science from New York University, where her groundbreaking research in neural networks, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction positioned her as one of the most promising minds in her field. Her work directly contributed to Turner Inc.’s rise as a leader in the internet and home computing industry, laying the groundwork for advancements in digital networks, machine learning, and interactive computing systems.

Despite her academic achievements, Dr. Wood was known for her introspective nature and deep appreciation for art, literature, and fashion. She worked at Harving, Fine Clothing and Goods, a luxury boutique in Manhattan, where she found solace in the craftsmanship of design and beauty.

Colleagues and friends remember her as an intensely private but deeply curious individual, driven by a belief that technology could bridge the gap between isolation and connection. Her contributions to artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure continue to influence the industry she helped shape.

She is survived by her mother, Josephine Wood, as well as colleagues, mentors, and members of Turner Inc., who mourn the loss of a brilliant innovator gone too soon.

A private memorial service will be held in her honor.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Turner Inc. Future Innovators Fund, supporting young scientists and engineers in honor of Dr. Charlene Wood’s legacy.