041623

[prismaticbleed]

all right, quick notes for today.

We have not been updating lately, which is lethal in the long run, but there are two huge reasons for that I can tell you right now:
1) absolute schedule overload, and
2) identity collapse.
We only start to "exist" around 10pm when the day is over and life gets quiet and dark and real and peaceful and, God willing, lower down on the thermometer. But... this sensory hell of a dysphoria is getting so bad. We haven't typed about it in weeks because it's effectively turned the brain into unfeeling scar tissue from how much damage the nonstop screaming body horror has done.
We've successfully cut our diet down to 1300k daily, but we're still unsure if accidental measurement excess (especially olive oil) is pushing it up higher, so we're taking precautions now-- using more specific tools and erring on the side of less, not more. In any case we need to start exercising again, even if it does set off the dyspnea. We miss running all the time, except now we can't, because we live in a public area and we no longer have gym access-- plus, I can clearly see the shrieking panic that slammed into our pre-COVID fronter when they were treadmilling and someone got onto the adjacent one. They literally thought we were going to be murdered. We have SUCH INTENSE FEAR of people in public, it's literally debilitating. Again, yet another reason why we ALSO need to find a bloody therapist. Geez.

"Taxi Man" is playing on Spotify. It's giving us simultaneously Jewel-joy and... whatever wailing grief is tied to the last homestead-core. We used to exercise for an hour every night just going up and down the basement steps, listening to upbeat tunes to keep us moving, and this was one of our favorites. We have some... oddly nice memories of literally just listening to music and soldiering up those steps, over and over, like nothing else in the world existed. We can't exactly do that here, but we do have stairwells we can get used to again, get our cardio stamina back before we try to purchase a gym membership. Public exercise feels invasive, too-- I don't know how Cannon did it in 2009, while blasting Midicronica and burning to death in her own desperate rage.

Honestly we've.... lost so much of who we are. I've been realizing that lately, and... oh God knows exactly what I'm talking about.
"Late Night Partner" was next on shuffle.
I... if this body didn't feel like such a smothering parasite I would break down in tears right now.

I don't know how to exist anymore. The body is falling apart. We aren't getting any younger, even if most of our deepest heart is still hanging out in 8th grade or earlier. We're old enough to be crucified and honestly with how sick we feel on a daily basis-- and the good Lord knows it could be so much worse, so watch your mouth-- we spend a disturbing amount of our day just thinking, "if we die tomorrow, what will any of this matter?"

And then I turn on this computer.
The first thing I see are the Archives.

...I want to spend, like, eight solid hours just reading and re-uploading our history. THIS MATTERS. It sounds ridiculous and outrageous, but honestly? I don't FEEL those accusations. That is HUGE. When I say "we matter," our collective existence and the memorial of it matters, that feels... true. It feels honestly true and honest and real and when you consider how much we've battled doubt and denial our entire life, that is monumental.

"Pearls" by SEATBELTS is playing now, and that just shot our brain right back into 2004. What a strange and precious niche of time this is, coexisting alongside the manic socials and hyper Jewels. Who held this? Did they even understand what it could mean, this subtle sadness? Judging by the chronology memory, the answer is a tragic no. It was pretty to them, nice music, a lovely voice, and a minor lilt. But they didn't know this feeling. They couldn't feel anything like this.
It wasn't until the System woke up for good four years later that we truly learned what a heart was for.

We need to solidify whoever our current Core is, and we also need to clarify our jargon there. We used to differentiate between a Core and a Host-- the latter for the System, the former for the League-- but now we recognize that there are several "essential bloodlines" and we NEED a "Jewel and a Jay" SIMULTANEOUSLY in order to exist, well. Jargon should be updated.
Nevertheless they BOTH need to be distinguished. The main "Jewel" is still that ~2004 one, who picked up the red hair, and who bizarrely doesn't feel like she knows Genesis????? Like WHAT THE HECK, dude, he changed our LIFE but actually that might be WHY he doesn't resonate with her-- he literally changed the entire way our LIFE worked by effectively FUSING THE SYSTEM AND THE LEAGUE. He was an inspacer ghoster who got INTO THE COREGROUP and just... made everything super weird and awesome, haha. But we love him, he's irreplaceable, especially now when things are such a mess, and we don't give him enough credit or recognition.
...You'll notice we're not saying "I." That's proof that there is no available Core.

There IS a "Jay" that exists, mind you. He comes out around Xenophon often, but he CANNOT be pushed out and he CANNOT CHOOSE to front either, because his existence is so fragile right now he DOESN'T HAVE A SOLID OVERLAY OR INTERNAL PRESENCE. He's a mess, but at least he exists.

More Chaos 0 music, this time right from his canon. "Aquatic Base Level 1." This one ties to one of his old "self-eras," remember how he was disturbingly mutable for a while when the Jays were being hacked to pieces, and his color and even name kept changing along with theirs?
We can't really look at that time period yet. There's NO accessible memory of it. The trauma was too bad.
But it's in the archives, all that hell and horror is recorded, the tarmac glutting our lungs and frantic veins. It happened, it was real, and we want to get that back up online as proof that WE SURVIVED, BY GOD WE SURVIVED, and even if our body feels like a misshapen derelict of a corpse right now, something in our heart is still crystal. Deep down there has to be a fire yet, a snowflake, a gem. Please. This is hope enough, these old words, all this fear and love, all these tears and hopes, all this blood and water.


Today was Divine Mercy Sunday.
We were so distraught and desperate over it yesterday we literally made ourself physically ill. The weight of sin post-CNC has been murdering us, and with the chance to be SAVED FROM ACTUAL ETERNAL DEATH today was something we would ironically rather die than forfeit.
We did our normal 4 hours at the home church, then ran home for noon to eat a breakfast we had literally prepped the night before and bolt right back out the door for 115, to go to a Maronite church in the next town that was going to have the flippin' Monsignor as a confessor. He's an EXORCIST.
We had to go. The very thought of being in the presence of such a man was unbelievably hopeful. If there was anything evil possessing us, then here was a chance at last to get it out and throw it back into hell.

We got there at 140. Confessions started at 2.
We waited UNTIL 330 TO BE HEARD.
That is how many people there were, AND how beautifully thorough the confessions were, on BOTH sides of the screen. People were pouring their hearts out and the priests were responding in kind, which is honestly the MAIN reason I came to this church today-- I needed something deep, something heavy, something to lift this titanic weight off my shattered chest.
We didn't mind waiting, mind. We said a rosary in line, and we had our sins all written down ready to read off (we knew we'd probably go into freakin' social mode and forget everything, so we took precautions), and the church was simple but beautiful and whoever was singing sounded like an opera singer, it was amazing.
HOWEVER. The whole thing was a serious trial of patience and devotion. We recognized this and responded as humbly as possible.
When we finally got to the front of the line, and were next with the Monsignor, they started saying the Divine Mercy Chaplet in common. Well, since that's a key part of getting the indulgences for the day, we couldn't skip it. We told the women standing behind us to go first, so they did.
The chaplet ended, and they said they were going to begin the Divine Liturgy, but confessions would still be heard... BY A DIFFERENT PRIEST. So they moved us to the other side of the church, and Monsignor went up front. Oh well. Guess we weren't meant to confess to him. So we surrendered to that.
...Not even two minutes into this new line, the priest said we were moving to the first confessional again-- a room, not a box, entered through the narthex by a curtain-- and in doing so, we would be outside the nave.
So there was I, and three other people, standing behind closed doors and looking in to everyone else celebrating the Liturgy.
It was... painful. For a second I wondered, God why? Don't you want me in there with you? But then I thought, this is what Jesus felt from the Cross, a little bit. This is the lack of consolation. This is a very special sort of suffering and He is giving it to me for my good. I must trust this. So I did. I stood quietly and watched through a little wavy-glass window, feeling like a cloistered nun or an ancient Jewish woman, separated from the rest of the congregation, but not any less beloved by God. I held on to that, as I tried to grasp snippets of speech, touched by the beauty of the consistently sung Word so unlike our Roman rite. The Gospel was different from ours today, too-- I cannot remember what, though, as I couldn't hear well. Nevertheless, all of a sudden the Monsignor gets up to give the homily. He had hobbled up front on a walker, his eyes were bleary, his face worn and warm, but his VOICE. It instantly rang through the church like a bell. It had such strength and gentleness. He began by telling us that, through Baptism, Jesus is in us, and the devil hates that fact-- then suddenly began to tell about a case of demonic possession he had just endured the day before. I was listening raptly, trying to discern tells and whether or not we had them, when just as suddenly... it was our turn for confession.
Another mortification for the sake of sanctification. We turned and walked into the room. We were the last person that day to be heard.

...I don't remember the confession. I remember tearing up, just a little, through all the scar tissue and permafrost. I remember a feeling of utmost resignation to the mercy of God as we spoke the sins we had never wanted to admit. It felt like hollowing out our entire chest cavity. It felt like kneeling down at the guillotine. We just... gave up, in that moment. We said what we had tried to deny for years. And... we just kept talking. I don't know how long it took. I know we didn't read our notes verbatim-- and I wish we did, because we forgot to explicitly mention one major thing and it's haunting us still-- but we said as much as we could think of, all the dark stuff clinging to our guts. We dumped everything out, and then we said we were heartily sorry, and it sounded like last words.
And the priest smiled at us.

...I cannot put into words what his face looked like. It had more warmth than I've ever seen on a face in this world. He had nutmeg skin and white stubble and eyes like sunlight, all wrapped in the red and gold of God. And then, in an equally beautiful Syrian accent, he said-- and I quote--
"God is so happy with you!"
I was stunned.
What? God was happy with me? After all the literally abominable crimes I'd just admitted? After how much putrid festering cancer of the soul I've just revealed to this man?
But he insisted. "God is rejoicing," he beamed. "God is throwing a banquet for you," you prodigal child stumbling home, he's throwing a robe around your shoulders and kissing your forehead, He's happy, He's happy with me, here I thought I was damned for good but He just grabbed all those sins and threw them away, He's waited for years to do this--
I was reeling. My vision was getting watery. Everything was suddenly brighter and lighter than it was when I walked in.

He asked me if I prayed. I said yes, every day. He asked me if I read Scripture, I replied with the same.
He then gave me the best penance ever.
"Pray a novena of Psalm 51." The one where David mourns over his sin of adultery.
How bloody fitting is that.
Oh, but that wasn't all! Also, he told us to make small sacrifices-- SMALL ones, or it would be too burdensome on our post-operative soul; he even offered to lessen the penance if he felt it would add just another weight-- and to forgive ourself, too.

There was one last thing. I need to mention it.
At one point he stood up to bless us. He put a hand on our head, I think? And he was praying over us, asking God to give us the graces we needed, and... oh Lord, I don't remember the words prior but at one point he... he slipped pronouns.
This priest said, "fill his heart with compassion, and gentleness, and love..."
Jay snapped into awareness immediately and nearly sobbed. He and Jewel exchanged incredulous looks, stunned at what had just happened, but KNOWING this was from God, too.

We went back out to the Liturgy feeling loved in this world for once, and upon waking up from some sort of spiritual coma, to boot. They were singing over the Eucharistic Consecration, leading up to our Lord to meet us right there on the altar. We hadn't missed Him, even with everything that had happened. That meant so much. We knelt on the floor behind the last pew and just melted into the ritual.

Memory is, understandably, a blur. But we remember receiving the Eucharist. Once again, we were the last one, and we went to a different priest than we confessed to-- the one who had sang the Mass.
How can I say this without sounding irreverent from sheer thunderstruck awe... THEY DIP THE HOST IN THE WINE.
They give you the Body AND the Blood. And let me tell you it is NUMINOUS. They lift that sacred bread up and it's half red and I just... what a torrent of nameless emotion that was.

(btw dude note for later: you FORGOT THE PROCESSION!!!)

We stayed after Mass, not just to get the blessing with St. Faustina's relic & venerate the Divine Mercy image, but also to finish our daily prayers in that lovely church as everyone filed out and it got all quiet and serene again.
However. There was a line to the left. Curious, we walked over and asked what it was for, confessions?
They said no, this is the line to speak to Monsignor.
WELL. We got right in line.
It was really something, reflecting on how, despite all the unexpected and drastic changes to our schedule and expectations that day, everything had still worked out perfectly. We could never have planned this ourself. It was all sheer blessing, and thank You God.
When we were next in line for Monsignor, one of the women organizing the service (obviously; she had spoken at the beginning and was communicating directions to everyone; she was SUPER pretty too, an older lady wearing a sapphire blue angel-lace dress with airy blonde hair and a megawatt smile) told me that, once again, after me there was a family to go and then that was it. So our time was short.
We didn't need much. We walked up in front of him and knelt to his eye level as everyone else had done, and were immediately stunned by the depth of kindness and affection on that old face. He smiled at us with such joy that we wondered why.
He took our hands, so gently, and said something that boggled our mind.
"Oh, I am so glad to see you!"
The warmth in it was unreal. We immediately teared up.
We told him we had met him once before, about 7 years ago, at our home church, but that we had been through a lot of "spiritual trauma and terror" since then and we were struggling badly in the wake of it, having made some dramatically poor decisions and really being in a chronic state of anguish from the weight of it all.
He asked, "what would you like me to pray for you?"
We hadn't expected the question, so we just trusted our guts and spoke the first aching thing that translated into words.
"Strength," I said. "For the strength to stay faithful, and keep fighting the good fight, and not give in to despair."
He smiled like Christmas morning again-- or was it Easter?-- and then he responded,
"You also need to find joy!"
We laughed. "Man, we sure do," was our incredulous admission. Our eyes flooded immediately. Oh we knew God had filled him in, for sure.
"I pray that you will find joy, and peace," he concluded, with such a matter-of-fact assurance that we already felt the lights turning back on. He prayed over us, blessed us, and we don't remember but we thanked him. We smiled back into those glassy glorious eyes and we got up and we walked away into hope.

A lady stopped us in the aisle and told us to go and take a blessed flower from the altar, so we did: a single red-soft rose, its head bowed like ours, and a spritz of white carnations like stars.
We were, unsurprisingly, one of the last few people to leave the building.


I don't quite remember the evening. We said our prayers when we got home, and prepped dinner, and read more of the Gospel of John, but it's all so blurry. We spent over seven hours in church today, mind you, and we haven't been sleeping well so we were exhausted. Nevertheless, we hadn't a single regret about today. We thanked God for not letting us chicken out and getting our collective butt to that church, because wow. We acted in faith and courage to get ourselves there, and He did the rest.

We gave Xenophon tons of carrot-tails to eat as it was a special feast-day Sunday, she kept thanking Jay and Lynne both. She also got her first post-Lent fortune cookie, which read "people consider themselves lucky to have you as a friend."
Jay just sat there for a while, and looked at that. He considered how people at the churches often come up to us and speak so kindly to us, how so many assumed strangers actually know our name, do they consider us a friend? Are we even capable of being a friend, let alone one they'd feel lucky to have? Jay thought, with notable heartache, "that's the kind of person I want to be," and even if the corpufoni couldn't echo him in active sentiment I'm sure the Jessicas did, if only by their exhausted souls grasping for something redemptive through all the washed-out blue.
But it was an important moment. The Jays have, honestly, a disastrous history, literally plagued by masquerading abuse and bejeweled delusion and bleached-out frozen hearts. But they're still crystal to the core, too. And we're lucky to know them.


So. That was today.
It's too warm in this apartment. We're still so uncomfortable in this body; it's so much bigger than it's ever been and we can't cope well with all the extra body taking up space now. We're not used to having fat on the body; we're used to bone and muscle and nothing extra. Stripped down. This is disturbing and surreal. But the energy color stored in it is pink this time, like cherry blossoms, not that awful shrieking yellow like it was after SLC, which is a huge reason why we were always vomiting it up. Now it's innocuous, which is just as surreal, but God knows we only gained this weight because we spent, what, nine solid weeks in a hospital, being the best possible patient and eating everything they gave us no matter how much it hurt or made us ill? But we were never bitter and we were always brave and the entire staff was so genuinely proud of us. Don't ever forget how they hugged us, and said we were inspiring, as arrogant as that sounds we have to admit it because it shows we are CAPABLE of being those good things EVEN when we're feeling this gross and misshapen. It's just different, man, it's not inherently bad. We ONLY look like this because we were BEING GOOD. So remember that. We were thin because were were abusing our body to torturous extremes. We are now shockingly soft because we were finally taking care of the poor thing. It's storing all that fat in case you decide to starve it again, you disaster. You've got to stop judging your self-worth based on society's disgusting "beauty" standards that you unfortunately internalized from your family AND that were exacerbated by trauma. But we confessed that, dude, so LET GO.
...I'm getting an oddly bright-ache feeling that "we can only let go in truth if we talk about it, together."

Oh, thank you Spotify, you're trying to make me weep at 2 in the morning.
Why does this song make us cry? "Why Do I Keep Counting" by the Killers. Honestly, part of it is the era of headspace it's from-- Jeanove's era, with those "long bitter car trips" and so much hurt in our heart that it could only be recognized in music.
But... oh man, we never realized just how much of a System anthem this is. The lyrics are SO relevant to the Jay bloodline it aches.
Man. We NEED to do a music-survey entry for the System soon. We've literally had a tab open for one since ASH WEDNESDAY because we had like, five solid days of music obsession when Lent was beginning but then had to quiet down because Lent, obviously. But music is tied to love, always, and if anything is going to help us reconnect with us it's our music... that, and revisiting the Archives, of course.

Jay is saying this song "feels like some aspect of my heart" and it's "Peacock (Haywyre Remix)" by 7 Minutes Dead. That's true; the original Jay "theme song" was "Dichotomy (Soft Mix)" by Haywyre, which JUST played on shuffle in the car today for the record, as we were driving down our favorite hill towards the church, and the spring green was just beginning to dance over the mountains as the river-clouds lifted up from between their indigo arcs... honestly you people don't even know how lovely the view is, despite living in the middle of town there is some gorgeous nature surrounding us, thank you Pennsylvania. But yeah, apparently something about Haywyre's style is that "splash of sparkling sunlight vibe" that a certain type of "Jay" resonates hard with. So there you go.

We've been doing a lot of Bible study notes over breakfast lately, but it's putting our brain into "Tumblr mode" because there are at least two people who do follow our account, so the social programming is kicking in. We've been fighting that, though, handing off the prayers to people who lean red and who can feel pain, which the hyperreligious folks ironically can't, which makes their ENTIRE practice a sham since they can't feel contrition or suffering at all. How we lived for so long with them running the show is a literal miracle. God didn't want us dead, apparently.

All right now it's 2AM so we need to get some sleep (the latest we can wake up is 1045), and I'd like to upload at least one more archived entry before closing up for the night-- honestly the smart thing would be to go one year at a time, but I randomly decided to upload some things from 2015 the other night, and... the amount of profound emotional sincerity was staggering. Reading those entries, even with all the frankly appalling trauma we were going through on a near-daily basis BOTH inside and outside, made us feel something more deep and real and true and loving than we have in a long time.
We somehow got cut off from our heart in CNC. We got so mangled, God forgive both us and them, and then the System literally COLLAPSED and there was that hard-shift of fronters that ended in cries of betrayal and all proof of our existence being set on fire. We won't talk about that at this hour, we're not ready to yet in any case.
But. Not everything was destroyed. Somehow, those painted-smile kakofoni didn't delete the archives. God only knows why, when they erased so much else, to the point where we're still in mourning.
Nevertheless. The brain is shutting down from fatigue. We have our words from the past, words written about each other and for each other, and no matter how much pain and fear is locked in those letters, there is also immeasurable LOVE and that is worth everything.

If we can tune back into that, if we can live AS that again, in this new and freer life... God knows, that would be such deep joy our heart would become flame. We need that.

Lord help us and guide us all. Help us take care of this body. Help us take care of each other. Help us love You and everyone else, inside and out.
And help us get some sleep, haha.

See you kids. Today was a very significant day, a literal spiritual turning point. Whatever happens from here on out is painted in much brighter colors, on a canvas that can actually call itself white for the first time in ages.
We can't erase the past. Honestly we shouldn't. Jesus still carries His scars, too. But now those wounds are windows, ways to let the light in, and to reach out to others through the same.
Remind me to type about that more. That was today's devotion, and Jay underlined most of it. We read it when we got home, which was oddly perfect-- it hit home all the harder, as a testament to everything that had happened since waking up that morning, and to everything in our collective existence.

All right now let me post this poor thing before I accidentally hit backspace or something and lose it all, haha.

Closing song is "Without You" by Empire of the Sun, man now that reminds us of walking loops in the living room in ages past. Cannon's era, 2009. We were just beginning to know each other, just beginning to love each other. Bittersweet but full of so much hope, like the first fringes of red on the horizon as the night fades to dawn.

Chaos 0 keeps reminding Jay of that, too. "You're like this, inside," he said to him this morning, as we woke up to a diamond-scented fog and trees suddenly blooming delicate green, the sunlight in hazy crystal ribbons. They had a small conversation, Jay genuinely listening, trying to re-integrate this into his own self-awareness, trusting what this beloved creature testified about his soul. He tried to respond but said "you're so different; you're all water," and he couldn't describe him the same. Chaos reassured him that was as it should be, that it showed that he did know him, that he could recognize and treasure differences. He knew what he was, and what he was not. That's important too. Sometimes all you have is the latter, but man that's something, and it means you're not as lost as you feared you were.
Faith is like that, in general. Sometimes all you can do is hold on to what you know God is not, if you can't see what He is. Truth speaks in absence, too, in silence and mystery and question... all those beautiful paradoxes that we love so much.

I can feel so much dormant love in our heart, for everyone in the System, love unexpressed for years and hidden beneath fear of abuse, of misinterpretation, of blurred lines and broken functions... but it's love, for God's literal sake, there is REAL LOVE in our heart tonight and it's what has kept us alive all these years and it is what will keep us into the future, together, always.

For the record, the real song of the night is this. Jay's been looping it lately for Chaos 0 and Laurie. He says it feels like that dormant emotion, that old love from the old years, that aching evening compassion when everyone was covered in scars but together. It sounds like tired hope and unflagging love both. Tenderness so soft it's the entire ocean, indomitable despite the hurricanes... devotion so real it shines like alpine stars in a cold-violet night. The warmth of a candle in the snow. The break of dawn. The embrace of evening. A drift, a gentle movement into something better than this, when we don't have the strength left to drag ourselves along the ground anymore... the tide still comes in, slow and faithful, and carries us on. Something like that.

...Every single night since the System came back online, Jay has gone to sleep embracing Chaos 0 and there is no distance between them at all. Even after the sudden hell of dream hacks that hit last month, he didn't push him away, and he didn't close off, and he didn't run. He STAYED, and he loved, and he was just as true as his aquamarine angel has always been.
I don't know if you realize how astronomical that is. In the past, the Jay bloodline was constantly shattering and forgetting what love even WAS, to the point of sometimes denying the fact that they had EVER been in a relationship, let alone one that ardent and close. But now? Even with the lingering fears, even with the history of them haunting our skull, this current Jay is not turning away. He really is a sunrise, now. No matter what, he's there too. Just like the water. Just like hope. Just like love.


All right, it's exactly 8 hours until waking up, so we're off to sleep.

(you get one more bonus song of the night, this is our current instant-optimism song, enjoy you beloved loons)