Lake Lewisia #537

Their love was a story they told each other daily: not the kind written down but spoken, bits gathered in the daylight and woven together in the dark. Like all good folk tales and fairy stories, it changed over time, picking up stray themes and side characters and shedding them again. Sometimes the tale went in directions neither of them wanted, but that was the beauty of a story told aloud–what was there to stop you reshaping it the next night, picking up the oracle bones and shadow puppets of the past and recasting them to your liking?

---

LL#537

plague journaling

The thing I find strange is how fast the rise and fall comes these days. Yesterday, we weren't sure if it would be safe to move through town or if we would be able to get to work the next day. Today, nothing in particular*. Yesterday, the sight of some sort of military plane within spitting distance was cause for alarm and confusion. Today, it's here still/again, and it has become just part of the (deeply weird, disturbing) wallpaper of my workday.

Rise and fall. Panic and desensitization. Urgency and resignation.

There is too much happening too quickly to process. I know I keep saying variations on that refrain, but it's one of the biggest takeaways I've had from the last several months. It's so difficult to figure out how you feel, let alone what concrete things you can do in response to anything, because the next thing has just come up and whacked you across the nose before you even finished registering the one before it.

It is, I suppose, a rather oversized version of freezing, as in "fight, flight, freeze, fawn." (I never remember how many of those there are, but those are the ones I could recall off the top of my head.) Trauma response options. I'm more of a flight, most of the time. But right now, I find myself freezing a lot. Just shutting down in the face of too much stimulus and no clear sense of how to make anything better. I'm not ignoring things, but my reaction is basically wide eyes and a helpless shrug.

Breathe in and breathe out. Rise and fall. The next thing is already here. I still haven't moved.

*I will point out, some of this is merely my perception. (Well, ALL of it is my perception, frankly, but then, that's what this journal is for.) Elsewhere, things have not settled down in the slightest. I have the luxury of not immediately seeing/knowing about those things, though. This sense of rising and falling action is entirely subjective. I'm aware.