Sanctuary.exe Has Crashed Unexpectedly

Influences, Known & Suspected

  • Let Him In, a novel abandoned after its fourth inelegant metaphor in as many pages.

  • Poor Deer, whose first three chapters kept me up past my bedtime.

  • A misfired arrow in Oblivion; I was supposed to rescue him from a cave full of zombies, but I shot him in the arm instead. He tried to flee in endless panic, forcing a reload.

  • A late-night headline: a man in Virginia opens fire on three teenagers; one dies. The boys had been banging on his door at 3am, claiming a TikTok prank (but they were a little old to be that fucking stupid).

  • My mother on the phone with a woman she used to hate, laughing, her words a rapid-fire blur of Sicilian slang and affectionate incomprehensibility.

  • A string of true crime YouTube videos played over the squeak of my faulty treadmill (because I can’t read and run simultaneously). One man says, “I’m tired of hiding it.” They find the body in a shed, dead for years.

(a wound misremembered as refuge)

You are young again, rewound—a tape unspooling backwards through scraped knees and untroubled afternoons, jammed in the mouth of a machine that forgot how to play you. Ten, maybe. Ten was when you stopped spending the night at their house every weekend; ten was when her memory began to [ERROR: CHILDHOOD NOT FOUND]. You are young enough to build a fortress of pillows in the guest bedroom, old enough to know it won’t protect you from anything.

Your grandmother is still alive, still animate—no trace of the disease that contorted her cognition in increments for a decade before it finally took her life. She is exactly as she was, you think upon waking, but-but-but: you barely remember her; then again: this is the underworld and she is myth now, not flesh (so this version is as true as any). She helps you raise the fort: pillows and couch cushions like walls of soft defiance, a blanket draped like a canopy between the oversized dresser and the bedpost. This is, the adult-salted version of your mind realizes, a child’s attempt at sacred architecture; temple, sanctuary, bloodless battlement.

Night falls, the house is quiet. (A quiet house is already a falsehood because in dreams, the house is always the soul, and the soul is never silent, only suppressed.)

And then it wakes you: the crackle of a mechanical throat clearing itself. A voice emerges from the security intercom, warbled and insectile, half-chewed by static. The words are nonsense to your waking-mind, but they are anything-but to your dreaming-one—phrases you recall from half-glimpsed TikTok rituals, fragments of news-speak warning about the trickster gods infecting the wires. Mischief, chaos, sedition.

You see him on the video feed: a boy (a teenager, not a man) in a letter jacket (and why this detail? the high school alpha, the adolescent tribal marker of prowess, a symbol of sanctioned violence—sports, competition, masculinity) with a knife (that has never seen kitchen nor vegetable). Two girls like dobermans at his side.

He talks to you. (What does he say? That part’s missing. Maybe he spoke inside your skull.)

“You won’t get through,” you tell him. “It’s state of the art.” (The type of thing a kid says because the grown-ups said it first.)

He laughs. You hear it and you see it. “We already did,” he says. The sound is glitch-wrong (too many sound, not enough mouth). The door opens like a stage cue and you watch them enter.

Your grandmother is awake now and so is your sister (where was she before? was she here the whole time?). The intruders approach; your grandmother stands sentinel. Three adolescents in silhouette but wrong in the details, one old Sicilian woman staring them down. Their eyes are black, glistening absences. The one in the jacket (the pack-leader) smiles like he knows how this ends, but your grandmother doesn’t flinch (and she wouldn’t—she was stitched from the war stories of the old country, grease-burned and indignant).

“Vattene,” she growls (get lost). She says it to them, but you’re the only one who flees the showdown. Into the sanctuary of the guest bedroom, calculating the violence in your head.

9-1-1 on the rotary phone by the bed. “What’s your emergency?”

“There are kids in our house,” you say. “Kids who aren’t supposed to be here.”

“Did you let them in?” the operator asks.

“The security system failed,” you tell her.

There’s a hush on the other side of the line, a sound like someone else contemplating the equation you’ve already solved. “We can’t do anything about that,” the operator says. (Bureaucratic gaslighting, the system serves the system, the polis does not protect.)

“Why not?” you ask.

But the line goes dead without explanation. (“I hear the Call to Prayer / fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.” No help for the helpless / no mercy in the wires tonight.)

You return to the scene of the argument in time to see the blade write its final vowel into your grandmother’s body (this is not how she died—you feel this indignance like a canoe crossing the Lethe, a peek behind the curtain, not that it does any good). It’s not as dramatic as it should be—quiet, textbook. Like something choreographed. The two doberman-girls are chasing your sister, junkyard dogs in eyeliner.

The alpha-Chad turns to you, pins you still with his wells of nothing, but only for a moment. You take off down the hall and dive into the guest room’s closet, which swallows you into its mothball reek like a wad of gum (yes, that detail, yes—her house always smelled like mothballs and marinara).

This detail, too: the panel loose at the baseboard of the closet; a crawlspace—oh my god, you fucking hated that term as a child, the word with ten legs and and no eyes. But it offers itself to you now like a rabbit hole (you are rabbit; you are prey), and you consider it, but no, look again: the box of knives, your grandfather's relics, the ones he used to polish like prayers at the kitchen table (he wasn't a violent man, but he kept it near the way some men keep saints on the dash; she hated it, but she loved him).

You choose one, squeeze the haft; it weighs at least as much as your resolve.

There are sounds like footsteps. He’s coming. You wait.

(You wait. You wait. You wait, rabbit-heart sick with adrenaline going thump-thump-thump.)

The door creaks open and you strike—no sound, just blade, but it’s—

it’s your grandmother who—

no, here the dream fractures, a split yolk in a pan too hot, and the versions sizzle-flicker like an interdimensional grease fire.

In one world: the knife finds the god-boy’s chest. He curses in a dialect of red warning lights and vanishes, taking the others with him.
In another world: it’s your grandmother who falls, heart-blood like marinara oozing off a wooden spoon.
In yet another world: your sister dies.
In a world mid-apocalypse: you do.
[PROCESS: MULTI-TIMELINE COLLISION DETECTED]
[SYSTEM RESTART INITIATED]

Fast-forward (the machine coughs, a sound like a Mr. Handy spitting blood in the sink). You are on the phone with your mother, static like a fit of rain behind her voice. “If you hide it,” she says, grainy and exhausted, “you’ll ruin your life.”

“Are you saying I should confess?” you ask. (Recall that you are ten.)

“You should confess,” she says. (She’s smoking. You can’t see her, but you know she is. She quit twenty years ago, but everyone knows she only half-meant it.) “But look, we’ll get you a lawyer.” And the name she offers is familiar—he’s the one your grandfather used to call Faccia d’Angelo (Angel Face, but you haven’t heard that in years because your grandfather’s been dead a long time, too). “Hang tight,” she says.

The three of you meet at a dimly-lit cafe that smells like mustard and bagged lettuce (like a Subway without the toast). You never met Angel Face in the dayworld, so your mind renders him like a seraphic Brooklyn oil-slick in gold cufflinks and a three-piece white suit. You slide into a booth across from him and next to your mother, a green vinyl gash scratching the backs of your thighs. They’re both smoking.

“I don’t know what’s real,” you say.

He nods. “They do that,” he says—the trickster-gods. “They blur it on purpose. Dream logic is a legal loophole. If you can't prove intent, you can't prove crime. Mischief isn’t technically evil, it’s plausible deniability with a personality disorder.”

“Even when someone dies?” your mother asks. (The someone is her mother-in-law, but they always hated each other.)

“Especially then,” Angel Face replies. “If they make you carry the knife, they win.”

“What, then?” your mother asks.

Angel Face ashes his cigarette in a ceramic tray shaped like a crucifix; it lands on the Savior’s crotch. “She won’t survive county,” he says. “The ones in holding will erase her. She’s evidence. A threat to the system’s denial, we might say.” (Recall that you are ten.)

The logic here is wet-paint; your mother opens her mouth as if to reach for it and then withdraws, fingertips gooey. “What do we do?” she demands in her I’m-gonna-have-a-chat-with--your-boss voice.

Angel Face thinks. “The panel in the closet,” he says. “We’ll wall her in. Feed her through the vents. Keep her hidden. No one’s gonna look for her there. We’ll tell ‘em she Aliced.” (Trickster-gods on TikTok, children pulling an Alice and no-clipping into Wonderland.)

But this doesn’t amuse your dream-analogue. “For how long?” you ask, a tremor of panic seeping into your voice.

Your late grandfather’s lawyer shrugs, weary, and exhales verdict. “Until the world stops worshipping entropy?”

(lol… oh, okay… )

Silence, and then, “I don’t think I killed her. I don’t think that’s the true version.”

He meets your gaze. “Neither do I,” he says. “But dreamers can’t serve on juries, kid.”

And then you wake to contend with this Lynchian hellscape of Catholic guilt, half-tempted to scribble it in a love letter to the new Pope.

how Midnight Cowboy made me nostalgic for Geocities

John Voight as Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy (1969)

The list of words I use to summarize my vantage has not changed much over the years. Writer, dreamer, gamer, roleplayer — I have been each of these things for long enough to dissolve the need for revision; these are the inroads to a connection with me (if a connection with me is what you’re after), and they provide the context to understand almost everything I say, so when I have to biographize myself (in a profile, for instance), these are the words I use.

I was wearing my writer-roleplayer hat as I watched Midnight Cowboy’s opening salvo: a young fella in a cowboy hat, getting ready (for something – for what? that’s the hook). He polishes not just his image but his entire appearance – mannerisms, voice; the mirror makes him a spectator, and the camera situates us similarly: to watch/judge him watching/judging himself. It’s a visual representation of the feeling I get when I’m slipping into character, running through dialogue options in my head, picturing this character as an entity in space. I am not objectively the character I write or play, and yet they would not exist without me, so I am not entirely not-them either.

The initial curiosity sparked by this image, a question which will persist until the end of the film and will, in fact, outlast it: is this authenticity or performance? Has he crafted this image in an expression of self or is it a costume, symbolic of the validation he hopes to extract from others? It’s a question that haunts me, too — the writer, the roleplayer, the person navigating a world where identity and survival seem inextricably linked to the act of being seen.

I was raised in Texas, so the red thread of Joe’s fate linked us across the space of possibility that manifests between fiction and audience. He moves through a place that is familiar to him and feels familiar to me, announcing his intention to commodify himself in New York as a cowboy, an archetype organic to his environment, and earn his living as a prostitute.

I spent a portion of my childhood in a town like that, where everyone knew everyone else, and where any impulse to perform would be quickly eroded by the absurdity of such an action; when you stay in the same place all your life, among the same people, they know when you’re putting on a show. But the skepticism these people express doesn’t sway him — shortly after the film starts, he is on a bus heading north.

As Joe transitions from a familiar, local setting to the hostile and indifferent world of New York, the question of authenticity or performance muddies.

A native New Yorker once asked me if Texans really wore cowboy hats, and the answer is yes, sometimes — but always, if they’re performing Texan. The cowboy hat is to the template of Texan the way independence is to the template of Texas. In Texas, the persona Joe adopts might have reflected a degree of authenticity, but to a New York audience, it functions purely as a signal, a means to be seen. The city refuses to validate him; it’s too sharp-edged, too knowing. He flails and fumbles in his initial attempts to impress people with this caricature. The people who see through his act reject him outright; those who believe it’s authentic are put off once they realize it’s a performance. This is where Joe’s existential crisis begins: the cowboy doesn’t work in New York, but he clings to it anyway; costume becomes disguise.

Contrast this with Rico: a New Yorker who, ostensibly, performs – he lies, cheats, hustles to survive. But despite this obvious performative angle, there is no artifice here; he has not built a character for the purpose of external validation (he has not successfully built a character at all). Rico is both congruent and incongruous; he – like Joe – is an organic byproduct of a specific environment, and while he too expresses a far-fetched desire to leave, the fantasy he has constructed around it — to move from bleak, filthy New York to bright, sunny Florida — feels less like an escape from himself and more like a rejection of what New York symbolizes.

Rico never wants to be someone other than himself, he just wants to be himself somewhere else.

Before the homogenous world of the internet (by which I, like most people who talk about the internet, mostly mean social media), where almost every place you visit is crafted using the same stylistic standards, and the difference in one page’s appearance over another boils down to their choice of template, there was a place called Geocities. But Geocities wasn’t a place in itself; despite its name, it was not much like a city, not a location on the internet’s map, but something like an interstate — a path by which one might arrive at several other, actual places, each with their own zip code.

I had a Geocities page. It was a fansite to a game called Soul Reaver, where a jawless vampire betrayed by his kin awakens from a purgatorial sleep into a broken world and must traverse that hellish landscape on a quest for vengeance. The game was released in 1999. I became obsessed with it for two reasons (beyond the overarching single reason, which was that it was a compelling piece of fiction to my adolescent sensibilities, a dark and vaguely Lovecraftian horror-fantasy with interesting dialogue and an aesthetic more literary than Mario Brothers): 1) because it was forbidden – a borrowed thing that would have been unapproved-of in my house, a game I played in the middle of the night, looking over my shoulder, with the volume down low trying not to wake my mother; and 2) because my computer crashed and I never got to finish playing it.

The Geocities page was indicative of a neutral-to-bad habit I have never been able to break: the burning desire to immortalize, to pay homage to fictions that took root in me, that excavated my psyche and built strange houses there. When I love a story, I can never seem to leave it alone. As a child, this meant filling notebooks – bestiaries of fictional monsters from Dragon Quest and Super Mario Brothers; drawings of the tornadoes that tore through my dreams; a Dragonball Z story with violet dragon balls and an ouroboroic she-dragon that encircled a dying planet in search of its saviour. As an adolescent, it meant spending hours learning HTML and CSS so I could customize a little corner of the web – sites that were a lot like the notebooks I filled, but that were (at least in theory) visible to the world.

To a modern user of the internet, Geocities would look like a shantytown – unpolished and bright, garish and loud, ugly and absurd. We asked and answered all the same questions that the modern internet demands answers to – who are you, what is your quest? – but our answers were more abstract.

Rico might be Geocities – a simpler, scrappier version of connection-with-others; a character whose way of life works in the margins but can’t hold up under the demands of a modern world; authentic in a way that is simultaneously endearing and pathetic – threadbare and outdated, absurd in the way real life always is. In a commercialized world, Joe fails initially but not entirely; Rico fails entirely. Rico’s version of authenticity is a great idea until it hits the marketing department, where it dies the same quick death as everything else that just won’t sell.

I’d been considering my exit from social media for several years before I actually did it. Before the tech cleanse was a sanctioned thing, I languished over the same list of questions everyone inevitably does when they hover their cursor over the hard-to-locate delete function on any given platform – how will I keep track of the 5/500 people I actually care about? will I ever talk to [person] again? – and had deactivated for extended periods, but never pursued deletion.

What sealed it for me was when a person I rarely spoke to sent me a caustic DM demanding to know why I didn’t post about an outrageous thing that everyone was posting about. We were not friends; if we were, she would have known how I came and went from that space, often avoiding it for weeks or months at a time. I did not even realize that she read my posts often enough to care, but she cared enough to spot an inadequate performance, and that was enough.

I once worked at a job where we were all supposed to wear the same color to the office on any given day, but instead of formalizing this, the manager would just mention it to one person, assume it made the rounds, and then berate everyone who didn’t get the nonexistent memo. This felt a lot like that.

But it also took me further back: to the early days of Myspace, where — like most adolescents online in those years — my friends and I would engage in a sort of performance art with our Top 8 friends, rearranging the digital hierarchy in ways that amplified petty feuds, dramatized love triangles, destabilized friendships. Two decades later, I still remember laying awake in bed one night, anxious and hurt, after a recent crush moved me from the first slot to the second. But to disengage from this process at the time was nigh impossible; the thesis purported by these social spaces was one we had collectively chosen to accept wholesale: that validation is necessary, and it requires performance.

It’s painful to watch Joe confront this idea again and again, in various shapes and contexts: that external validation is both vital and inherently performative, but that the tension between performance and authenticity is jagged, difficult to hold without injury. To perform is a trap; to refuse to perform is also a trap. In almost every sense, the social contract of the modern internet reflects this same awful dichotomy — be yourself, but not too much; don’t be fake, but don’t tell the truth; use the right terms even if you don’t mean them; pick a side and fly its flag so everyone knows how best to insult you.

I should clarify, though: despite my disdain for social media, I am not handwaving the notion of performance-as-survival; if writers are salaried liars (and roleplayers do it for free), then I threw my lot in with the theater kids a long time ago. It was not really possible (to my knowledge) to make a living on the internet in the days of Geocities; most of our aspirations were so much smaller, the stakes so much lower. People need money to survive, and branding – the alchemy that transmutes authenticity to performance – is a valid way to make a living; the people who make their living this way defend it, the commodification of the self, because even if it is always more artificial than organic, we are all still just trying to survive.

In this metaphor, I suppose there are two ways to view the relationship between Joe and Rico.

One way — the way many people seem to view it — is that their partnership is a beautiful, if troubled, thing that emerges from a hopeless, hostile place. New York, a place steeped in commerce and artifice, nevertheless nurtures something real between these two men; Rico becomes the unlikely key to a locked door that empowers Joe to reject his own shallow brand and seek something richer and more real.

Alternatively: that Joe and Rico’s relationship was damned from the start; that Rico’s survival was illusory, a negative contrast that slants tragic to remind us that whatever passes for progress will swallow every authentic thing in the end, bones and all.

There is a void that opens up when you remove yourself from social media — like turning off a white noise machine and being plunged into silence, peaceful or terrifying or something in between.

The ambiguous question the film’s ending refuses to answer: is Joe discarding the cowboy persona because he’s found something real beneath it? Or is he — as alone in the end as he was in the beginning — just a man on a bus taking a one-way trip towards another person’s fantasy?

On one hand, they say we’re social creatures. That we’re supposed to want to perform, to be validated, to be accepted by others. But Rico didn’t seem to think so; he was a hustler because he had to be, but he was as real and as garish as a Legacy of Kain fanpage on Geocities in the year 2002.

It’s hard not to feel like a tragic character when the world around you becomes unrecognizable. People will caution you against nostalgia, call you old-fashioned, outdated; it will gnaw at you, this insecurity.

In what initially felt like an act of survival, I rejoined Twitter at the beginning of the year. But I’ve been gone too long, and that particular costume no longer fits.

Unnamed Roads

In 2018, I wrote a lot about winter. 

Before I moved to rural Pennsylvania, my conception of it was more fiction than fact, more archetypal than actual; winter the symbol, not the season. In my late 20s, I learned how to scrape ice off my windshield, how to buy (and properly wear) a good winter coat, how to drive safely on snowy back-roads — hard lessons for someone who grew up in Dallas, a city that shuts down when it snows.

But in the winter of 2017, I’d been in a car accident — the first one in over a decade of driving; I’d lost control on a icy curve and skidded into a tree.

Physically, I was lucky; my injuries were not serious. But the aftershocks of anxiety worked their way into everything I wrote for months afterwards, fiction and non.

It was not the closest I had ever come to death, but it was the most dramatic; unable to commit to therapy, I began to keep a journal in earnest for the first time in years, writing my way through the thicket of unfamiliar emotions and the not-insignificant existential crisis that followed.

When the car began to spin, I felt unmoored from both my body and reality; adrenaline and panic distilled, in my memory, to a single moment that I relived across page after page of my dollar-store spiral notebook, circling ever back to the probability of repeating the mistake (but perhaps fatally, next time). 

Once the early anxieties subsided, the theme that emerged starkly between those pages was guilt; a preoccupation with all the projects I’d left unfinished, a hyper-focus on the breadcrumb-trail of paper-scraps (digital and analog) that — had I succumbed to my injuries — would lead those who had survived me to my dragon’s-hoard of drafts and works-in-progress. “You worried yourself into a manic ache over this idea, once upon a time,” I wrote of a shittily-first-drafted novel that had been drying on the rack for the past three years. “What happened?” I underlined the question until the paper beneath it shredded. 

By 2019, I had relocated back to North Texas. That year, winter and death were not immediately relevant, but I wrote a lot about money and lost time. I’ve never been great at long-term plans, but two cross-country moves within five years had set me even further adrift. 

Stuck in a temporary but discouraging living situation, I passed the time in the sort of aimless haze that so commonly goes hand-in-hand with transition and upheaval, and once again, my journal became a steady platform in an otherwise shaky world. 

“There’s a thread you follow,” writes William Stafford. “It goes among / things that change. But it doesn’t change.” 

Like all writers, I became aware of this concept via hours of workshopping; all writing is rewriting came the familiar assurance each time a story didn’t quite strike the way I intended. 

The themes and insights that emerge in a given piece are not often something you arrive at by intention, we’re taught, but something you unearth via the process of drafting. It had become second nature to me: excavating and locating this thread between the scribbled lines of shitty first drafts. 

But when I think of thread, I think of fate, too. Not as predestination, but as the process by which we arrive anywhere as opposed to elsewhere. 

My partner and I have discussed buying a house twice in our relationship. 

The first time was desultory; we were in our 20s, in college and living paycheck to paycheck, playing a game of what-if? to alleviate stress in a routine that felt unsustainable on a daily basis. Daydreaming became an effective coping mechanism.

Several years later, after spending most of 2020 crammed into a sudden and necessary mutual work-from-home arrangement that had us desperate for personal space, we dusted the conversation off and had it for real. 

Sometimes the line between need and want is hard to see until misfortune ups the contrast and something tangible is suddenly on the line. In our case, sanity seemed to be the resource most at-risk; our apartment met our needs pre-COVID, but it was too small to accommodate two working adults who each required a desk and an office (and, luxuriously, an hour or two of real, actual silence). 

We agreed that sanity is a need and not a want, but the distinction didn’t make the conversation much easier; we are a frugal pair without children who have, historically, made the most of small spaces. Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needs a room of her own, but I earned one and a half degrees at the dining room table, and had grown somewhat accustomed to being productive in a communal setting.

A house is a significant investment. The past several years have been an exercise in risk — management, mitigation, the psychological effects of. What fresh hell will the news bring us tomorrow? We asked ourselves this again and again, from 2016 onward.

Also: where? Urban or rural? Here or elsewhere?

This question is the most annoying one to answer, especially right now. On the cusp of the past year, neither of us has the emotional energy to move cross-country again, but here is a place fraught with political drama; I have never felt kinship with this place, with these cities — not the way that often emerges when writers talk about home, about place.

In a list of pros and cons, I come up with a few half-hearted positives about staying in Texas. The long growing season (but I’m not a gardener); the fact that every performing artist on tour comes to either Dallas or Austin (but I hate concerts); it hardly ever snows (but when it does, it’s apocalyptic; people skid across highways and die). 

As a systems engineer, my partner’s list of pros is longer and more specific. Tech hubs. Interesting career opportunities. Important things that apply to us but not to me. He talks about the widespead availability of Google Fiber, and I think back to the summer in Pennsylvania when a family of deer — seven, at least — walked right up to the window while I was writing. Our internet was terrible, but we lived at the edge of the woods, far from the city and its noise and its unspoken demand to consume, indiscriminately, in every possible direction.

We circle back to needs versus wants; the relative brevity of my lists seems disproportionate to my level of anxiety about the question being asked.

In December 2019, I made a resolution to start taking my work seriously again.

This was less a change in faith than a renewal; I have been writing for as long as I can remember, with a devotion that is almost dogmatic. But several years prior, the soul-crushing process of evaluating every story-idea for commercial viability in a graduate-level writing course had left me feeling creatively gutted. I wrote things that year, but I wasn’t proud of them; I published things, but I didn’t love them. I had workshopped and workshopped, written and rewritten, refined my weak areas at the expense of creative authenticity, and afterwards, when I was alone with myself at the mercy of a blank page, the trade-off didn’t seem worth it.

The tyranny of the writing workshop left me in a half-hearted state of disinterest; I stopped writing.

At the end of 2019, life stabilized; I had taken a year off, read a lot of books, nursed a handful of other pursuits, and I felt ready to confront writing again.

But my resolve was only one of many casualties in the year that followed; to say that no one got anything done is an understatement. It was, at the time, a miniscule problem in the world’s grand scheme of things, a thing that was relevant only personally, and yet: when I’m not writing, life takes on a monochromatic cast; like Bruno Schulz wrote in a letter to Romana Halpern, “my nervous system has a delicacy and fastidiousness that are not up to the demands of a life not sanctioned by art.” I become categorically unwell. 

Later in the year, I’d met someone in a genre workshop; we liked each other’s stories, and she was starting an online critique group. I was overzealous; it sounded like what I needed, and I was tired of waiting for problems to solve themselves. 

A few weeks into our second month, nobody had posted anything. The critique channel stayed empty, the conversations stayed off-topic.

And then someone posted an Instagram-filtered style photo of their laptop and their aesthetically-appealing snack arrangement. “When you’re supposed to be working, but you write instead. Oops.” 

I stared at the oops, tacked onto the end of that post like a wink, an accident staged like a model home; I stared at it, feeling a rise of emotions I couldn’t name. This is what writing looks like the image implies, invoking both ritual and performance. 

This neatly-packaged, perfect thing; this make-believe accident in the midst of a real and present and semi-dystopian reality had all the disingenousness of a social media post. The way someone on Twitter posts a question like they actually want to know the answer, but they never respond to the replies, and this becomes shorthand for community, for engagement. They want you to look at them, but they don’t actually care to see you looking.

I felt struck by a feeling so profoundly discomforting I would rather not name it, and I left the group.

In an effort to solidify a position, I decide that the question is vaguely ethical.

When I met my partner’s family for the first time, native Ohioans, his mother exclaimed, “I love Texas!” 

Texas is a state with a definite aesthetic; when pressed, the things she claimed to love about it were more aesthetic than not, more mythos than fact. The allure of the Southwest, the ferocity of independence, the romanticized bigness of everything (egos included) — all of which are highly dependent on where you live. The weather in Texas is described by outsiders as both humid and dry; the summers are beautiful, they say, but the important question is whether you’ve ever seriously burned yourself on your seatbelt somewhere in the middle of a 100-day consecutive streak of 100-degree days, when getting into your car feels like climbing into an oven (and for a moment, yes, you do kind of want to die). 

His family reluctantly reversed their stance on gay marriage when two out of three children came out, but they still defended Trump until 2020, when his efforts to contain the pandemic were unsatisfactory for my immunocompromised mother-in-law, for whom the failure of conservative policy was finally personal. (This sort of self-centered opinion-reversal is something almost definitive of political conservatives. That her grandchildren were inheriting a world buckling under the weight of greenhouse emissions and plastic trash was not convincing enough to trigger it.)

Texas has had a Republican governer for my entire life. After the 2021 winter storm, Texas was on everyone’s mind as $10,000 electric bills scaffolded by Republican policies sent shockwaves through the rest of the country. I have been subjected to the political ideologies of oppressive conservatives. My queerness publicly disrespected, first by my family — Sicilian immigrants who, nonetheless, wore the mantle of the deep south well enough to pass — who told me that it was a sin to be in love with the girl from Georgia that I’d met online when I was 15, and then later, by the absence of state-wide legislation granting LGBTQ protection. 

The governer of this state makes headlines for doing things that I find incomprehensible, and the rest of the country watches in horror as Texas becomes a parable. 

My asthma gets worse, and so does my insomnia, and if setting is a character in life as it is in fiction, am I really okay with inviting this one to the family gathering? 

The year we moved back to DFW, an EF-3 tornado carved a path of destruction less than five miles from where we lived. 

Tornadoes are never personal in North Texas, but this one was; the National Weather Service had ranked our risk only slight, so we were watching TV on the couch that Sunday at 9pm when the #CMAS#EXTREME alert came screeching from our phones. “It’s coming right for us,” I remember saying; I was wearing Adventure Time pajamas and mismatched socks and staring, disbelieving, at a radar image that gave us less than ten minutes to get to safety.

 A few days later, my partner and I drove past downed trees and boarded up windows on our way to the coffee shop — back when casually going places was a thing — and we debated which was worse: tornado-season or bad winters. (We grew up on opposite sides of the country, and our answers are different.) The tornado had destroyed my favorite branch of the library. I thought about all the books that had been ruined, waterlogged or ripped to shreds, and considered changing my answer, but remembered sliding on the ice, the steering wheel spinning through my hands, and stood my ground.

In my well-worn copy of MFA in a Box by John Rember, someone has scribbled angry disagreements into the margins of every essay. This is the joy of buying books used; an ephemera that is more exciting than the markless, noteless digital copies of the same books; an alternative perspective on the text encountered without having to solicit it or go looking. A used book, like setting, is a character of its own. In “Writing Place”, he asks, “In the face of extinction, why get up in the mornings? Why choose between right and wrong, or assume there’s any basis for the choice? Why write?” 

“Because it probably won’t happen,” the previous owner scrawled afterwards, tiny in the margin.

This annotation is like a meteor. The use of the word probably, precarious. Is this climate change denial, or is it a fragile act of resistance – belief, in defiance of certainty? Could they be talking about writing? Because it probably won’t happen, I think, and I consider all possible meanings. Mass extinction; a career in a field as uncertain as writing; getting out of bed in the morning in the midst of a global pandemic. 

The which-is-worse? conversation came up again lately, only our concerns were slanted more towards the future than the present. The summers are getting hotter and hotter; this trend is expected to continue. We’re young enough that it makes sense to worry about the prospect of baking to death in a decade, in two decades, but it feels like a level of scrutiny more on par with science fiction than with reality. Our parents didn’t consider climate change when deciding where to put down roots, but scientists, the people who know better than anyone what we’re up against, are breaking down in tears when they talk about the future, so we talk about contingencies. Escape plans. Solar panels and water filters and what-ifs, until the language of survival becomes more fluent than the language of home.

It probably won’t happen; somebody, somewhere, is parading maskless through a grocery store, typing a similar sentiment onto Facebook. 

What are the chances that your house will be destroyed by a tornado? It’s an impossible question to answer, but the thing is: nobody ever thinks it’ll happen to them. Watch the news — sometimes it does.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the subtle intricacies of language, so I find it significant when I realize that my partner describes this process as home-buying.

“Home” implies a level of certainty that discomforts me; because it probably won’t happen, they write; probably denotes uncertainty, so why do they sound so sure?

I think of the homes I’ve lived in. Of the years I spent in early adulthood deciding whether to put something on the bare white walls of my tiny apartment or feed myself for the week. The way everywhere seemed unfinished; apartments where I wasn’t allowed to paint the walls. Kitchens that are never big enough to contain all the small appliances you need to make home-cooked meals. Small. Inadequate counter-space. Outdated appliances that don’t match and don’t work. Plain, aesthetically unappealing cabinets. 

The places I’ve lived have always felt liminal and transitional; one stop among many in a lifetime, casual and impermanent and deliberately half-finished. Those of us who can’t live up to the mythic ideal of home — because we can’t afford it; because we can’t commit to it; because we can’t relate to it — are forced to develop broader, more poetic conceptions. 

Rember speaks fondly of where he lives, but he reminds us, too, that the intersection of writing and place is something subjective, something hand-made. “Over time,” he writes, “your writing will become the place you live.”

Sometimes, when I’m up writing past midnight, I glance out the window. Darkness swallows everything; I could be anywhere in the world. I am, in fact, usually somewhere else: a speculative fiction writer, I spend most of my time in a world I’ve painstakingly crafted from the happenstance of a single thought; a chance firing of neurons that became a place I wanted to put down my anchor.

In my first-ever creative writing class — a freshman-level course at community college; the first of many ventures to validate myself and my art — the instructor asked if creative writing was whatever we wanted it to be. Practical considerations aside, I wonder the same thing about home. Place or mindset? Noun or verb?

House-hunting, home-buying, feels a lot like the process by which an emerging writer learns that the final draft isn’t a fixed point on a map, a predictable place at which you can arrive if you follow the named roads. 

I’ve survived my rounds in the ring of artistic self-doubt in the age of COVID-19 certain of one thing and one thing only: there are no named roads; not around here. These plots unfold in real-time; a collaboration with chance. 

“Tragedies happen,” Stafford writes, “people get hurt / or die; and you suffer and get old.” 

These days, I’m hanging onto that thread for dear life.