PixelVixen707

Last week didn’t go as planned.

No, that’s an understatement. Last week didn’t go like anything I’d ever planned.

I don’t like to get personal on this blog. It’s not why you came here. But this was a bad week. I was on a run here, writing my silly, snarky posts about the latest game I’d stolen from work. But real life got in the way. My boyfriend Zach Taylor – you remember, I wrote about him last week – got a case. He works as an art therapist at an asylum, and they threw him to the wolves on this one, and … well, many of the details are already in the news. Zach got the Martin Grace case, the biggest one of his career. I can’t talk about it here, both because of patient confidentiality and because, well, what happened this week is something I don’t know how to talk about. Some things happened right here in our neighborhood, in our home, that I can’t explain. And Zach – well, Zach violated my trust, is the only way I can put it. I’ve only dated him a year, but I don’t really “date” him. We’re together. I stand by my people and my love is real. And when someone pulls away from that? I don’t like it.

But I don’t want to blame Zach for everything. It’s my hang-up too. I believe in a rational world. Physics, chemistry, and biology. I don’t believe in a god, God or goddess. When I roll my eyes back in my head and take a drag and stare at the sunset in Central Park, surrounded by the races of the world in a celebration of pagan oneness, I don’t feel that tug of spirituality you all say you get. I am neither religious nor spiritual. If you can’t see, count, or weigh it, it ain’t there.

But I don’t have an answer for everything.

Here’s a story: I’m five or six years old. I’m visiting family who live out in the woods, in rural Oregon, and I’m in the driveway. I’m crouching, and I see a shelled bug, maybe a beetle, walking through the dirt. I take a stick and crack the shell.

Inside, I don’t see guts: I see more bugs – little bugs, like white worms, all alive and moving on their own. The beetle’s shell – the entire shell – is empty. Nothing in it but those worms, and set free – or left helpless – they scramble and crawl away.

I used to think about it a lot. I never doubted the memory, so I had to explain it: How can a bug be made of nothing but other bugs? Did the worms move the legs? Was it like an AT-AT, or a Trojan Horse? Were the worms maggots? Do maggots live in their mothers? The only thing I know is what I saw: that beetle was alive, but when it died, it was nothing but a shell. And science hasn’t helped. What do you do when you see something that could actually be impossible? Even something as small as an insect? I chose to let myself forget it.

I play video games, and I write about video games. I spend hours every week searing my eyeballs with made-up landscapes. But it’s not real, and I don’t pretend it’s real. It’s a challenge and a release, but it’s not an escape. I know who I am and where I am, and I know what I see in these games. It’s always something I understand - and something I control.

I choose to live in a rational world. But we saw things this week that were not rational. I’m not happy with Zach – I don’t think he knows how unhappy I am - but I’m not happy with myself either. Maybe later we’ll talk about it. For now, I need a couple days off.