I have realistically felt worse before, I have succumbed to depression before and im not doing that now, but i feel mediocre sadness. It’s mediocre because it’s not consuming me entirely, but it’s just enough to cause me discomfort. That sadness and discomfort feels endless and it feels worse because it’s seemingly endless.
I can’t listen to my music because I shared it all with my ex boyfriend and he listened to everything i ever recommended. I find it oddly difficult to open my music app and listen to literally anything, i immediately just start to cry. Which is honestly really stupid (and very depressing because i used to listen to music 24/7) but it’s just how i feel.
It really just bothers me how things can change so quickly. Nothing ever stays the same and it’s not supposed to but it’s so difficult and frustrating, I almost wish everything would stay the same forever, I wish I could feel neutrality and happiness for the rest of my life.
Im scared because i graduated, because im moving homes, because I have to go to university, because i chose to end a relationship that was bad for me but was routine. I simply just carry a fear of the unknown that I don’t know how to cope with. Idk what comes after graduation, idk how i’ll adjust to my new home, idk what lies ahead at university, idk how to return to a new sense of normalcy after being anxiety ridden for 8 months because I couldn’t control how someone felt and thought of me.
I just need time to move on, but i want it to be quick, even though that’s not how it works. I just don’t wanna be scared and upset anymore
It is not yet done - not yet grown - hardly yet born. So many would strangle it in the womb for all it could be. So many have tried out of less than that fear - for nothing more than a few caps, a slave or two. It is a complicated place because it is not a place at all yet. It is a Rorschach blob: look at it and what you see will tell you more about who you are than about the place. Is it an anarchic den of drug-addled drifters, prostitutes and outcasts? Is it the birthplace of a new ideology for which you would sacrifice yourself freely? Both, god help you? Or is it a ghost of a dream that died three centuries ago, carried on only by some ineffable spectre that haunts humanity’s dreams of progress and rises, again and again, to scream at its betrayal?
Maybe it’s just old brick and steel buildings that reek of piss.
After a long enough time, everyone’s faces blur together in Goodneighbor.
They are neither good nor bad, fair nor foul, ill nor hale. They are. They very simply are. They are the people of this amorphous phantom of a town, and their boundaries sometimes, from the window of my apartment, seem to be as fluid and vaporous as those of the Goodneighbor itself. Even those figures who stand out as distinct - the jabberer who has his own fixations, his fears of the super mutants eating his liver; the comforting familiarity of Daisy and her slowly growing library, tucked into its corner of the Old State house; the mechanical purr of K-L-E0 and her murderous body - are blurred on the right day, when the breeze carries with it some emanation from the cold, dead waters of the Bay. The character seeps from them and into the old, worn setts of the road, through the cracks and down, down - deeper, down, deeper and deeper until it reaches a place that does not quite exist in any human sense. It pools into this hidden reservoir beneath the city, the one that has grown and grown over its time. The one made of the voice of thousands of singers; the blood of thousands of fighters; the hopes of thousands more dreamers and rogues and loners; to say nothing of my own, which must surely seep into it as easily as anyone else’s; more, perhaps, without any particular character of my own to defend my personality from the slow ingress of the contagious liberty-madness of this place of the outcast and the idealist.
It is easy to think this way on a cold October evening, with the fog rolling off the harbour and the noise of the city omnipresent. It is not quite oppressive, this background hum. I have been silent places and loud places, and prefer, on the balance, those with just enough of the right noise. Silence is a terrible thing compared to the soft creak of the windmills turning on the overpass, and the constant whisper of chatter from the open air market of Scolay Square; the mumble of drunks in the alleys; the throb of generators. These are sounds that tell you are not alone; that the world has not forgotten you so thoroughly that it has ceased to do you the courtesy of existing when you are not looking directly at it. This was often a fear of mine in childhood, in the long dark spaces between dozing and waking. I would wake with fright, convinced that in fact there was nothing beyond myself; that, in an unguarded moment, I would turn to look to something comforting and regular and find only an empty black void so devoid of any substance that it could not even be considered empty.
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There are only three things a man needs to be happy. He must have food, warmth, and pleasure. This is the common view of the people of the Wasteland - and as common views usually are, it is not quite right. To be happy, to be truly happy, a man requires more than these three simple things. They are necessary, but they are not sufficient. The human being requires more rarefied fare than that of beasts, and more’s the pity - no wolf ever yet destroyed the world, nor fish blackened the sky with the ashes of their cities. The mark of man is a sophistication at once beautiful and destructive - an infinite capacity for that stuttering, halting thing we call civilization, however loosely we may define It and however vast Its potential for bloodshed.
In Goodneighbour, this need bubbles to the surface more freely than it does in the rest of the Commonwealth. It’s not that we have more capacity for it. We have less - far, far, far less than either Diamond City or that new Jerusalem that sits on its little river island in the north. No. Here, among fire-blackened bricks and layers of graffiti so thick they could peel back like geological strata, those who cannot fool themselves into thinking they may settle for just those three things congregate. They do not know what they need, necessarily - many come for the chems, the free and easy access to cheap Jet and bathtub buffout and mushrooms grown in the old sewers that will either kill you stone dead or liberate you for a time from earthly concerns - but they come because they know they need it.
What other village is anchored on song and art?
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Magnolia is radiant on the stage. She always is - it’s her nature to swallow attention; a gamine vortex of emotion and desire and romantic fantasy, all centred on dark eyes that hide behind painted lashes the colour of soot and lips the deep red of spilled rich blood. She was thus when I first saw her, and has been thus every night she has performed since, and even many she hasn’t. I have never seen her any other way than as this smouldering fire, always seeming to wait for the right hands to ignite her to some fling of passion.
It’s an act, of course, but its a damn good one. For the half hour of her sets, she sells you this as a truth, not as a lie. A lie you can ignore and refuse. A true thing, though? Those ache to ignore. It hurts to refuse to answer, to look away, even if some small part of you knows she isn’t really looking at you - that she can see only shadowy figures beyond the lights, staring up at her on the mezzanine of the Rexford, trailing light and smoke from cigarettes. No doubt that is part of how she puts her soul into it. If she can’t see the audience, how is she to be sure the one true lover, the one who will finally sweep her off her feet and understand her without requiring her to concede a single inch of her inner self to them, isn’t seated there on an antique armchair? So - sing, sing with true hope and desire and that desperate girlish need to be loved that is so painfully clear that no one with a soul, much less a heart, could ever hope to ignore it.
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What to make of the new civilization creeping across Boston? The same as the last, of course - best to enjoy it while it lasts, for all the gifts it can give, and to look to find ways around its excesses. Safer roads are nothing to sneeze at in these troubled times. Bandits and terrors can lie around any bend, and we ought to be thankful for anyone who will drive them back into the shadows.
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The smell of books rises when it is damp. It’s not unpleasant, this distinct aroma - the musty vanilla of the pages slowly breaking down. It is an unexpected advantage of renting this tiny space above Daisy’s emporium and library. On particularly moist nights, when the wind is just right, it smells like riffling the papers of something on that precious old kind of paper - the terrible cheap kind that now disintegrates in the hand, its leaves so brittle and eaten by the acids of the ink that the fantasies of the old world within fall away from you in glassy fragments as soon as you open the cover. Imagine the luxury of cheap paper and ink, so cheap it could be disposable, read and hurled into a bin. What an age those long-dead men built for themselves.
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There is violence in the street again.
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Why green for their coats, I wonder? The Minutemen wore blue, and this new government is supposedly their inheritor. They don’t run out of Diamond City. So why green? Why this dark olive colour they insist on, with their new coats? What vanity is it that possesses them to spend such extravagant sums on new fabrics from Ronto?
The clothes make the man.
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It is a pleasant evening to wile away a few hours in the Rexford. The new Management have done wonders with the old place - out with the decades of neglect, in with a polished veneer that glows under the dim chandelier. You could almost forget all the bad years when Marowski ran the place as his personal flophouse and barracks, and cleaning the place was a very, very distant second to ‘keeping the riff-raff out’.
How strange that sounds now that those very same riff-raff line up in the alley out back for their free soup.
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There is a boy who has begun to show himself at the Rexford. He is skin and bones; a walking scarecrow in ragged old clothes, with hair the colour of a dusty sunset and a most unfortunate nose. None of us can work out where he comes from - out West, certainly, but he is not talkative. He nurses a single beer most of the night and reads, moving his lips, from his battered old book. He is predictably smitten when Magnolia sings. He excuses himself when the heavies come to drink at the bar.
He is perhaps fifteen.
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There are new books today in the library. I have helped Daisy move them up the tight stair in exchange for part of my weekly allowance of rent - neither of us want a repeat of the day her fingers fell off. It’s strange how such a simple idea took so long to come together.
You’d think the Minutemen at the Boston Library would send books - but no. Daisy is forced to buy them from scavengers. Fair prices, in caps or the new scrip from the new Jerusalem. Romance novels with cracked spines, Tolstoy in faded buckram, crudely restapled pamphlets on the history of that mythological beast the automobile. Daisy buys them all.
