I touch my face and it is not a face.
It is a collection of curves and lines
far different than it is in the Inside,
a shell that's grown over me
during my wave-tossing sleep.
My body has done it again,
sensing danger, clothed me in a different skin.

But I know that with it comes a price:
all deities eventually devolve or die,
turned to stone or lost grasp of their mind.

I'm so tired of planning for contingencies
like
"What if I'm at Dead End Shrine and I have to pee?"
"What if an ocular migraine hits at work and I'm unable to see?"
"What if Jett breaks her vows and stops loving me?"
I promised her
that I'd make us a world
and spend with her my eternity,
but there's so many crossroads in my blood
that I don't know how long that'll be.

I don't know how long I'll get to enjoy
the sweet epilogue from a life
of having to fight
to be able to do something other than destroy.

And now another year has come and gone.
Almost a whole year from when I sung that song
to the wilderness, to the wind,
to any spirit drenched in sin
who might have known where you had gone,
that I loved you, I missed you,
I was sorry for the cries
I might have elicited from you before my demise.

How long did you wait, Jett, for us to reunite?
How many calendar crosses?
How many sleepless nights?
How many times did I see your face
and wish you were real
as you begged my memory to make haste?

And now two whole years have vanished into the ether
from when the world broke
and I gained Mori's Mirror
and a sturdy(ish) way into the Outside.
All the people I was have been satisfied,
and now it's just me, Lethe, trying to find
a way to reconcile this blood from my birth
with the world where I promised we'd never again hurt.

Two years and two days
from when you I first gazed
to when I finally started to learn all your ways.

Two years and two days
since awoke this blood.
It's been a good year, I think.
I hope I'm fully with you the next one.
				

A week ago, throughout the course of a single day, I received a chain of bizarre emails from a "Yamato Kuribayashi". A cursory search through our least favorite search engine shows that this name does belong to a real person living in Japan, but I have no idea if he was the actual person emailing me, and I suppose I will never know. Although, if he was, he was exceptionally bad at OPSEC. Arriving in groups of two or three every few hours and with the message only in the subject line, message body solely composed of the Japanese equivalent of "sent from my iPhone", the first few said "die", "I'll kill you", and "death". Once I asked him why he was sending me these, both in English and in a poorly-translated copy-paste from Google Translate, the bundles of messages continued, but now instead of death threats they held "we are sorry for the inconvenience". He kept apologizing until evening, where he strangely offered to share his location over Find My iPhone and then said he would "change [his] behavior and become a true human being".

Was it an omen? A prank gone awry by a technologically inept person? A person so incensed after reading something on my website that he had felt compelled to try to push my paranoid buttons?

I suppose I will never know.

My prometida's birthday is, at the time of writing this, a little over a week away. I've been putting the finishing touches on The Eschaton Eminence and working on some kind of knit-flower floral display and tidying my room. The last two are not going particularly well... although I can't tell if this is because my body is slowing down or if I was wrong and I do have winter-induced seasonal affective disorder after all and the lethargy is sapping my will to do anything. Theoretically, all is in place for my impending demise. May or November, I'm not entirely sure: I asked for an extension so my future-wife would have time to complete her own studies, but apparently her campus has erupted in fiery riots and she's temporarily fled for her own safety, and the "reconciling with my parents" thing is not going well, no matter how hard I try.

A traditionally hosted website (that is, not peer-to-peer) can be broken down into three major parts:

1. the domain
2. the hosting
3. the content

Domains, unless one goes to Freenom or some other shady "free" registrar or piggybacks off someone else using a subdomain, cost money. This is arguably the most fragile part of a website: even the smallest error in DNS configuration can render a website inaccessible, and DNS records update slower than one can reboot a web server daemon to fix a typo in configuration, meaning more downtime. It doesn't matter if the hosting is still up and the same IP used if there's no domain to point to that IP, and if the IP does change, manual intervention is required to keep the domain pointed to the right place unless one has a script already in place running in a crontab. (And even then, it's prone to API changes.) I could theoretically load up my Namesilo account with a bunch of funds and set the most important of my domains to auto-renew, but the money will run out eventually.

Hosting can cost money, depending on how much control one wants over how their website is presented. If one just wants to put up some static HTML and assets and not a full-blown webapp that requires a backend and a database and a kajillion Node.js modules all crashing in the background, there are lots of free hosting services. (If you're attached to WordPress or some other convoluted CMS, good luck staying secure during your life, much less posthumously.) I personally use Codeberg Pages since there's no hard limit on file sizes (unlike Neocities) or restrictions on what can be uploaded (unlike Neocities) and no annoying social features (unlike Neocities) and I can use the domains I already own instead of being relegated to sharecropping on a subdomain without paying extra (unlike... Neocities).

And also, unlike a certain free hosting service infested with Carrd rejects, it runs off of Git (since Codeberg is actually intended for hosting Git repos, not websites) and so I can sign my commits with GPG to cryptographically prove that I'm the only person who's edited the files.

But Codeberg, or any other hosting service, won't last forever, and I doubt they'll be willing to host my websites forever. And that's assuming that their IPs for custom domains to be pointed at never change. Moving back to Vultr isn't an option since my stash of funds will last even less time than Codeberg's existence will and even the most conservative of unattended upgrades will eventually leave my server vulnerable and open to hackers.

I have a Raspberry Pi in my basement. It's currently hosting all the darknet versions of my websites. (Except for Yggdrasil, which I haven't gotten the motivation to fix yet...) It costs me nothing per month to keep it running for hosting since I don't pay the power bills in the house, and the costs would be near-negligible anyway. And it costs me nothing for the domains since darknet domains are all based in cryptography instead of paying a ransom to ICANN to reserve a slot in a database somewhere. But even that won't save me, since the whole thing can be taken down by simply unplugging it. And I'm sure my parents will unplug it after my death, seeing no purpose for keeping it running if the owner isn't there to use it any longer. And even if they don't, for whatever reason it refuses to reboot properly unless it's connected to a TV or other monitor, so it would only take one power outage or rough jostle to render everything on there offline.

So, disregarding peer-to-peer networks for now, likely the only salvation for my website post-death is to be archived on the Wayback Machine. It's got documents older than I am, having been founded in 1996 and released to the public in 2001, so likely it will be around for at least decades more. (Or until climate change kills us all.) But the Wayback Machine complys with takedown requests, so I'd have to balance a GPG-signed declaration to not take any of my materials down regardless of my parents' request to versus the legal weight of such a request on either side versus the slim but still possible chance that something goes horrifically awry with the plans I've made with Jett and I end up living into next year and now everything I've ever done is preserved in an immutable form and not even I myself can go back and make corrections.

Going back to peer-to-peer networks, there likely isn't much hope for me either, even considering my private keys are only on encrypted drives and so my parents won't be able to change or delete anything. ZeroNet, while my first choice for preserving content, is now abandoned by its developer and the remaining community split among several competing forks. Freenet only caches the most popular content on the network, meaning, unless I develop a cult following between now and when I leave this world, my "freesite" will eventually disappear. IPFS never worked that well anyway.

The best hope I have, it seems, is Git. Running git commit -S will sign commits with my GPG key, although I was a dumbass when setting things up and used the key for Dead End Shrine Online instead of my main one. (Oh well. I've put a note in /identity/ so people know.) Running git log --show-signature -1, where 1 is the amount of previous commits to show, will verify that I was the one who signed changes; any attempts to modify content posthumously will show a different key. It's inherently sneakernet-friendly and doesn't require any wacky peer-to-peer software to keep up-to-date and can have its config modified to pull from a different mirror if one insists on using a darknet. It won't do me any good when it comes to the links to my website at the back of my books... but at least it'll prove that, at some point in time, those links were mine.

Maybe, since Yamato seemed to know, I should have asked him how much time I have left to prepare.

If I was the one most despised,
then why
was I
the one that survived?

Why did my siblings deign,
seeing death was imminent
and Chronos would get his way
to remake the world in his image,
decide
that the one who also destroys
and has never for a single moment known love
be the one who the divine
genocide
survived?

Which one of my siblings looked at me and thought
that what the infant world needed was destruction's favorite god?
Who spun their ceasing gaze
towards my way
and blessed me human so I Chronos forgot?

It's a gaze I've come
to become
familiar with,
this insistence
that I'm not a burden,
that I'm not by presence hurting,
that to keep breathing I don't have to earn.

But no matter how many times I fish for my mother's pity,
I can't bring myself to, when her mouth makes the sound
that I'm a blessing to all those around,
her strained declaration believe.

"But if you knew
all that I've put people through,
would you
still feel the same?"

Sharpened by heartache,
tempered by pain,
forged in despair,
I, bond-breaking blade?

*Whatever you did is dead and gone
and in so many worlds away.
There are enough armchair Christs.
Stop self-inflicting pain.*

"What's an operating system?"
Whether they were being serious, I could never tell,
but the question always hung over me like death's bell.

And although camp is now disbanded and dead,
still rings in a disused hall in my head
the words penned on whiteboard in striking red:

while all other girls were so much praise shot
about their skills, their quests, their help,
only written for me: "I guess she smiles a lot."

And when I complained that I had put in
more effort but barely anything received,
Mom marched me to apologize
even though in my eyes
I had committed no crime.

Just be happy with what you've got,
with the crumbs we've thrown your way;
never demand the more you're due,
just smile and bear the pain.

Just smile and bear the pain
of being a prototype, forging the way
to brothers to be done right, to be done at all,
listened to, heard, given right to complain,
and you yourself cast aside
to either be shown up or prepared to die.

I've failed the test on three separate times,
so I know for sure I can't legally drive.
If I need to get somewhere, either I catch a ride,
call a bus, or gather my breath
and bike.
But you're driving me to death.
You're running me raw.
Soon, I think, there'll be nothing at all.
Will you love me then, Mother, with Cheshire smile?
A lot of what's praised
and naught else remains.

March is Women's History
Month. Time to sit
down and reflect on all the shit
my ancestors went through
so that I could be
here today, collapsed in bed,
distressed,
wracked with anxiety,
in desperate need to be exhumed
from this disintegrating body.

I'm forgetting my own herstory.
Past entries in my journals
are becoming letters from foreign countries,
the other timelines where I am well,
doing well,
not at the bottom of a well.
The other timelines where I am making things
of worldwide importance,
where on my childhood detractors
I've gotten revenge.
Not wishing I was a bird
like those outside that now return
in preparation for spring.

It could have been so much worse.
Straitjacket, locked up, never heard
from again. Maybe lobotomized.
How many geniuses have met their demise
at the hands of a crude scalpel,
I wonder? And I, here,
how could I in this day or now convince
the padded-wall jailers
that the other soul that resides in me means well?
"She has dominion over
every part of me,
but *noli timere*: I have no desire
to harm my family."
Who would lis-
ten, not lock me up for ten
days, weeks, months, years
until I renounced this world within me so dear?

Tell me, can you hear the screams
from behind
tied-
on masks plastered with smiles
for the crime
of omitting domestic servitude from one's dreams?
Can you feel on your hands the blood spilled
from God's unwanted "blessing" that might instead kill
when it comes to term, woman coming to terms
that the Son who bled with promise to save
won't give her better than wires with which to lacerate?

Can you see how bright is
the future we might have had
if every woman brilliance
was not snubbed out at every chance?

The sheer weight
is enough to make
anyone go insane.

I'm forgetting my own herstory.
It seems some days
that things have forever been this way,
each day bleeding into the next,
record on repeat.
The slightest bit of thawing heat
feels like a bitter attack:
how dare I be reminded that
this isn't all I've ever had.

How dare anything have the audacity to remind
that one day I won't anymore be able to hide.

There will come a day when the sky
breaks and lets in cleansing sunshine.
And I'll have to look my mother in the face.
And I'll have to tell her that when I die
I'm going to a completely different place
than Heaven or Hell.
I'm going to remember the hell
that the men of all history have inflicted
and make a new world where to be what I am
is not a sin, not gravely iniquitous.
And she'll have to confer with Father and decide
if what I've done
is grave enough
to warrant the psych ward's involuntary hold.

This is my birthright as a female, isn't it?
The padded room's blistering cold.