Happy 50th @flashfictionfridayofficial! Thank you for running this great event and for your wonderful prompts. Here is my offering. I honestly didn’t think I’d get one in on time. I’ve been trying desperately to catch up on some video editing (thanks to the source material being late) and my eyes itch from sleepiness. But! you can’t ignore the call the write no matter what time of day it is. So here it is, kind of inspired by Mouth to Mouth but I’ll let you have fun figuring out how it applies to what I came up with! And I’m sorry in advance; I think I needed to get some things out!
Pod #49 Personal Log
—Day 72—
***Journal start***
Alarm 8am; water, dental, ablutions, cardiovascular and pulmonary stimulation, standard uniform.
Bio-cycle check; hydro levels good, luminaire 6000K, healthy growth exhibited on all species.
Personal: I saw 24 other pods today. It’s a shame the solar shield layer of the view ports don’t allow you to see the others inside their pods. I waved anyway. I like to think they waved back. I can’t believe it’s been that long. I can’t believe it’s only been 72 days. The daily reports still don’t offer any clue as to when we can return to the surface. I hope it’s soon, but at the same time I’ve gotten accustomed to my space and my little routine. I’m good at it and there is no pressure but to remain as l am. It was nice to see the pack at games night today. I miss them. I’ve put in a request, the minimum period is over soon. Hopefully I’ll be approved.
Bio-cycle check; hydro levels below optimal - possible indication of issue with grey water reclamation, luminaire 6500K, healthy growth exhibited generally, yellow tinge to leaves of Nasturtium microphyllum - possibly caused by hydro issues.
Morning meal.
4 hours couch; 4 gigabytes of vid-media consumed, 5 issues of physical comic books consumed, 900ml of caffeine imbibed, longer morning than expected.
Afternoon meal; eaten while setting up work station.
2 hours work station; 2 terabytes of information parsed, communications link interrupted, inbox clearance postponed for 24 hours, work suspended until link restored.
3 hours creation station; 1,000 words.
Evening meal; high in carbohydrates, eaten late.
1 hour repair work: grey water reclamation system diagnostics, issue isolated and rectified.
0.5 hours cleansing; utensils postponed for 24 hours, stations sanctified, bio-cycle in hibernation mode.
Core level; low.
Personal: Things seemed okay yesterday, but it’s funny how a few small things can throw things out of sync. I write down everything in the pod’s log but it doesn’t record all the details, it doesn’t record how I feel and it doesn’t record how hard this is sometimes. This morning was okay and normally I can deal with little issues not problem but I wasn’t expecting to be so upset by the wilting flowers. Those little plants were put in my pod to keep me alive and in return it is my responsibility to keep them alive. I thought I was doing well, but those yellow leaves made me feel like I was letting them down. Normally this would be fine! A bit of water and patience and everything would be healthy again. I keep forgetting this isn’t normal. This whole situation isn’t normal. We weren’t meant to live in isolation. I miss seeing other people in the flesh, hearing their breath, smelling their unique scents, feeling the gentle buzz of their energy in a space. I never thought I’d say that. I didn’t surround myself with others when I was on the planet surface, but I guess this is enough to strain even the most introverted of us. Today turned into an exercise in survival; ice cream for dinner, I read my comic books one after the other, an extra cup of coffee, tried to write but managed nothing more than a stream of consciousness exercise. I tried not to get too frustrated when the net went down. After I finished my chores I stared out of my view port at the planet for an hour or so. I didn’t bother logging it. I ended up going to bed later than I should have but I just had to watch the surface for a bit. Spinning slowly, passing its time, looking like nothing had happened over the past two and a half months. If anything the colours have gotten more vivid since I’ve been up here. It’s so beautiful.
Personal: Sleeping is restorative. I mean, obviously. That’s what it is there for, but I think people don’t appreciate the importance of and benefits of frequent napping. They are like little resets during the day. Small opportunities to defrag your brain, let it sort itself out while you conserve your energy. There is no shame in just getting through the day.
****Urgent Communication Incoming***
I’ve been approved! It just came through! I’ve been approved, she’s been approved, we’ve been approved! I can’t wait, I cannot wait! We can meet up whenever we want. I just got off the commlink to her and we’ve arranged to dock tomorrow evening. There’s so much to do. I’ll have to spruce up my stations, make sure to brush up on my docking procedures. I can’t settle now, my fingers are itching. I need to do something. I think I’ll make her something. What do you make for your partner after nearly three months apart. If she hadn’t been on tour when this all started we would have been sharing a pod. What shall I make her? I can’t think! I’m too excited to see her face-to-face!
Coming here to write again and continue the streak. I’m seeing if writing with earbuds in while Hearthsnail is watching shows I’m not interested in is close enough to the right surroundings to write the way I need to. Inconclusive, so far - only have two data points - so it’s a work in progress.
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Summary: More details on January-to-be, I suppose, for sake of a summary/processing my ongoing life to get it out of the way of the rest of the writing. Like I said, the first more-than-half of my month was booked with sub jobs already by a month ago. Right now I’m two days into a week-long stint for one teacher; which is nice in its own way. It’s nice to be able to actually get to know the kids, put names to faces, and build a rapport of some sort with them (and it pays dividends down the line when they see me in their other classes, too). It’s also nice having the opportunity to actually teach for once rather than essentially babysit a study hall. Classroom management is worlds easier, and it’s also more fun for me. Granted, biology is somewhat less of my background in science than you’d think - but I get by. Mostly it’s the cells and genetics parts that I’m missing. Otherwise - there’s a single day for one of the other science teachers, and then three days total for the physics teacher, and then my single job so far outside the science department. I’m sure there’ll be plenty to pick from later in the month, too; but we’ll see when we get there. My run of jobs ends just about when my classes start, so there’s some fortunate timing in that; we’ll see how that feels once we’re there.
So what to write about tonight, then? I suppose I could write about writing. In that, I had a sort of come-to moment across the empty recent; which is the reason that I’m making more an effort to try to write here more often. Yes, let’s do that.
In a sentence, I realized recently just how much and to what degree writing lets me process life as a whole. I’m not even talking about my own life or experiences; I’m also talking absorbing knowledge, forming memories, developing opinions, and expressing my own spoken thoughts clearly. More than two decades being a Writer in nature, and I never realized just how essential it is for me. The reason why, of course, being that I never went without it - I always wrote, constantly, like breathing - so I never got the opportunity to see what happens when I don’t have it. I haven’t had that writing-as-breathing for years now, of course; but I’ve also had too much emotional fog to engage in much of what it was for anyway (which is also part of why it took so long for that emotional fog to process). As of recently, though, the fog has lifted enough that I can actually see the impact - which, in a word, oof.
The sort-of sparking incident was the most recent video call with ArtKestral. I walked away afterwards feeling... discontent. Not with the conversation - it was wonderful talking to her - but with my own processing. I felt like I had so little to say, and that what I had to say was shallow in my usual interconnectedness; and that even those things were expressed badly if at all. Not for lack of things, either - there were plenty of things, or ought to have been - but it was like they sort of massed into one big block of foam in my head. I spent a few days being discontented, and then a week or two down the line considered when the last time was that I actually had a thought that felt like my usual depth and interconnectedness. And you know what it was?
It was that ramble about Growth and Person and Life. It was one of the last things that I’d written most recently, and that was the only recent thing I could think of that actually felt like myself. With that data point, it was easy to look at other examples and establish the pattern from there. That is indeed the pattern: this sort of half-journaling writing, even when it feels like it’s about nothing in particular, is apparently the crux upon which I process the entire world. Which makes it kind of important to be doing on a regular basis. Which means finding a way to make that happen.
One of the major barriers is that writing is still hard. More than that, the mindset that I need for this particular kind of writing - that sort of deeper-touching, feelings-based journaling - has to some degree always been but has especially the last few years been very specific. Which is to say, late at night when everyone else around me is asleep. Turns out that if there’s anyone active in my environment, there’s a not-insignificant amount of brainpower that goes into a background process of keeping tabs on them at all times - and it gets very much in the way of that sort of thoughtful or emotional writing and checking in with myself. Even if Hearthsnail is in another room entirely, that process is still going and it doesn’t work.
So therein are posed two problems. One, Hearthsnail has a hard time going to bed early; I’m no early bird, and even I’m usually ready for bed sooner than him. Two, I can’t afford to stay up that late anyway - not when I have to be up at or before dawn on the regular. So that’s the current challenge, is seeing if I can replicate those needs effectively without them actually being met.
Hence what I’m trying now. With Hearthsnail watching things, at the very least he’s not up and moving around and doing things - which helps. Earbuds in means I can immerse myself in music more, which helps bring me closer to touching that place that’s so hard to reach; and music is another component of the whole process that has proved vital before, so it seemed like a good place to start. Otherwise, I turn off or dim all the lights so that there’s at least that vibe of late-night darkness. So far, it seems like a pretty good shot - I’m writing this, after all, and that’s how I wrote last night’s post too. More data needed, though.
So that’s sort-of where I'm at. I’m hoping that whatever sorting-through-things role this plays will at least help me know where I stand on things - and ideally, all the rest too. It may be that I just still have a certain amount of emotional fog in the way of doing all those things I haven’t been able to do; but if so, journaling will help anyway. Steps, and more steps; ever-onwards.
I’m done with this one, but I would like to write a bit more. So I suppose I’ll start a new one and just do a basic update on what’s been going on the last few months, and process that, and make the connection between where I left off and where I am now. Steps, and more steps again; and again, ever-onwards.
