again
i was talking to my mom earlier today about how i need to get out of the house and i'm looking for jobs, and she offered a bunch of excuses for why it's okay that i'm in bed all day, like that even though i'm physically recovering it is normal to be on a "healing curve" regarding psychological and emotional recovery. and i mean some of that is true, i'm still nervous as shit on freeways and when crossing the street i can almost feel the piss running down my fucking leg i'm so fucking scared, it terrifies me to cross the street and i never realize how much it does until i actually have to do it, but those things momentarily are not the biggest reasons why i cannot find a job.
but i did tell her about how surreal it was for me, how long it's still taking to adjust to everything. a week after the semi hit us i was stuck in bed AGAIN (after being stuck there for nearly five months straight) to make sure i didnt exacerbate anything before my flight out to ventcon. and i told her about how, i think it was either the second or third day, i woke up in david's bed and started crying because i was so scared that i had actually died.
it was surreal enough being on the other side of the country in a state i'd never been in and a town i would never in a million years think i'd visit, but it was even more surreal because the reason i was there was to meet friends i had known only through the internet for over eight years. and what made it tenfold was that a week prior i almost certainly could have been paralyzed, amputated, decapitated (the nature of the accident actually made this a very strong possibility), or just plain squashed to death, and now i was in the immediate space of people whose tangible existence seemed so remote that i felt almost like i woke up in a storybook. it would be like waking up in a hogwarts dormitory or a hobbit hole; places that we can only dream of. there i was with ventrilius, people who occupied my life mostly as voices represented by virtual characters. but they're flesh and blood people, and here i am, waking up in one of their bedrooms. i was so scared. i looked outside and it was overcast and raining. it was so beautiful. everything seemed so beautiful that i was scared i had actually died.
"tomhet" means emptiness/void in swedish, and although i take it primarily from the finntroll hidden track tomhet och tystnad harska (emptiness and silence reign), i reblog pictures of misty overcast forests and tag it as tomhet when I feel it reflects that in-between space of life and death that i felt. it is the void in my heart that yearns to be filled. ventcon was so literally unbelievable to me that i almost felt a relief when my rave family called me up one day wondering when i was coming home. as a los angeles native, being in a place so lush and green and overgrown is a rare and nostalgic opportunity tied into a lot of buried memories of family summer vacations in the sierras. and as a desert, los angeles never gets rain. so being in a place like that—finally getting to meet these people i had known for so long as only pictures and voices in a beautiful rainy forested town—felt like a purgatorial oasis. i wasn't fully dead but i wasn't sure if i managed to survive. it felt like the angels took me there on a retreat to wipe me off and send me back to city to try again. the city of angels. hmm.
