It's surprisingly loud when the brush hits the paper now. My first few months were much more reserved. I wasn't aware of it, but I was afraid of doing it wrong. I'm not sure why, I'm the only one here. A holdover from the last world, I guess. I can't even consider something like doing "art" as a career, because there's no one to give me money for it. Nor is there anything I could spend the money on. I'm just doing it to do it. It isn't like I'm over here making masterpieces, though. I'm just scribbling. It's natural—something to do. The time will pass by itself, but being in one place for months at a time, it doesn't really feel like it.
As I mentioned before, the characters I'm writing aren't real. They don't have any meaning except for whatever I decide the mean in the moment, and probably won't remember by the time I've finished. That also means there's less of a standardization to it than *actual* calligraphy. When you're writing actual words, you have a duty to make them legible, or at least understandable. Many generations of people came before you, spreading those forms, and imbuing them with meaning. Letters, by themselves, aren't artistic. They're functional. You can write them all wibbly and fancifully, but if the reader can't recognize them, they lose their ability to enact a change within them. That's what they're for, after all—to implant a thought into those who look at them, and possibly change some aspect of their world, even if it's small.
I remember when advertisements used to be a part of my daily life. "Buy this product," "watch this show," "listen to this song." In addition to flashy colors and distracting designs, they were armed with weaponized statements to try and influence my behavior. It seems a bit nefarious, really. But I find it hard to cast judgement on them. They're just trying to survive, like everything else. The people who make the ads, yeah, but also the ads themselves, in a way. Attention is their food. When people engage with it, they are rewarded. More money gets put into them, and they propagate. If they're starved of attention, they'll stop paying for them, and let them die.
When thinking this way, it's easy to see nearly everything as a strange kind of living organism. Maybe cities are alive, in a way where each person is like a cell of its body. It has to provide for them, just like a human body has to provide for its own cells. If it doesn't, they'll either die or have to go find somewhere else to live. The legislators, city planners, and other big decision-makers would be like the organism's neurons. They make conscious attempts to support the life of the greater being, and their motivation is because they also benefit when that happens. Of course, corruption is typical, even expected. I think the mind is corrupt too. Not in the sense that it's evil, or rotting—it's just self-serving. It'll scroll social media instead of working out. It'll demand ice cream, even if you really just need some vegetables. Those decisions please the mind at the cost of reducing resources for the rest of the body. How do you get better? I don't know. Not in politics, or the mind. All I know to do is wait for the inevitable uprising, when the people rebel against their rulers, and the body rebels against its mind.
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While I was thinking about this, I filled about five sheets of paper with one hundred characters each—precisely wording my thoughts and feelings in my own made-up language. Not that I have the ability to decode it back into English.
Not yet, anyways.
While lying on my back, taking one of my many breaks from the subtly pungent scent of ink, I remembered how Rose and I used to talk. Or how we used to message, rather. It was painful. I didn’t like my mind being host to her little brain-parasite infohazards. I’ve forgotten most of the details, but bits and pieces of her are still lodged in my memories. Probably forever. It’s scary to think that embedded somewhere in my physical brain are her horrific stories I never wanted to be a part of. I guess it isn’t just her, though—we probably all have a lot in there we don’t want. Regardless, they’re my responsibility to take care of now. Rose may have written the words, but they live inside me now. I can’t just cut them out of my brain and label them “give back to Rose.” If I think of trauma as an “other,” and never fully accept it as being 100% a part of me, it’ll never get better. I don’t know if my random scribbles are really “getting better,” but with each stroke I write, I feel like I’m taking away one of hers.
Not that I’m really trying to fix anything. I’m just doing whatever. I’m not even sure why I was thinking of Rose in the first place. As I would soon find out, it was probably because she was thinking of me.
