cw: bad things involving me, my body, my thoughts and the ways people hurt us

Place was originally posted and developed under and came out of a place where i was recently reengaging in social media. Thanks in large part to itch’s heavy use of and links pointing to creatørs’ twitter accounts, it became a source of reading in downtime.

I over some months due to the thoughts there became daily more in touch with the way i was feeling inside the moment and became less in touch with the way i feel overall and after all good things are accounted for. Like, overall, i am safe. I am in the woods. I am able to save, to work, and to sleep without molestation or easy access to substances. But the Overall wasn’t what mattered when i wrote this. When i wrote this, what mattered was the parts of me that were relevant to what i was seeing. The childhood domestic abuse of me. The neighbor who made my adolescent body theirs. The driver taking advantage of my bike’s flat to lay hands on me. The domestic partner’s year of assault, shame, abuse. By the time the bullseye rash of syphilis’ tick-borne relative showed up on my body, it’s corkscrew presence and bodily debilitations felt like a joke.

Feelings came up. They were staggered. They went through me. What got made in Place was not anything anyone would benefit from. It was my ‘why are you here’ and ‘we’ve all felt like this’. And that’s not why we’re here. So i went back to Place. I reworked it and i gave it a proper loop. I tried to take out all the alienating stuff. I’m not sure how far i got. I still don’t know if Place is fixed or if it’s still a mess best left. When i came across a thread on a predatør and their history of abusing coworkers right before i had to leave for a shift, my experience got a fresh thought and realized, contextualized, and made its own feeling and that feeeling was eight hours of crying alone at work stocking frozen dinners and cream pies and listening to a downloaded recording of guy named ian talk to what i make in an hour like its the screw leftover at the end of someone else’s project.

And when i got home, i read over Place and i saw it for what it was. I sat down. I steeped the leaves of tea that this year replace last years leaves of tobacco and at this time feel more ill-equipped to do the job as ever. And I, just as ill-equipped for my work, opened Place, to make it something if not fine at least playable. This is it.