I have a headache

Now playing:
OMORI OST - August/Water

Sometimes, all you want to do is sit down and drink a glass of water... but everything's on fire.

A very dear friend of mine—my best friend for years, to be honest—has been missing for well over a week now. No warning or explanation; no activity on Discord, Steam, Tumblr, Bluesky; nothing. This is a girlthing who, for all of the years I've known her, would always always always be active online on a near-daily basis, responding to any messages that I or her friends would send within a day or two, even when deep in the throes of sickness or insomnia.

She's suffered with chronic fatigue and other chronic illnesses for all the time I've known her; and for that matter, she has a very weak heart, having suffered at least one heart attack in the past despite being in her 20s at the time.

Suffice it to say, I'm deeply concerned.

Meanwhile, in adherence to my moral obligation under the classical virtues, I've been trying to help my biological family—to the extent that I can stomach—in navigating their little soap-opera-esque tempest in a teapot. I've specifically been focusing my efforts on my parents over the last few weeks, as my siblings have been preoccupied with their children both extant and expected.

The squalor in my parents' minds, marriage, and house alike is truly striking.

The condition of the house itself is a perfect emblem of their depressed, wretched state: The parts that other people see are kept presentable enough, but everything out of sight—closets, bedrooms, the garage—are piled high with refuse. The holes in the flooring are hidden under rugs, and the slow leaks are ignored; today's problems become tomorrow's, because today was a long day and they don't have the time or energy, forever.

As I've endeavored to clean their house, I've felt it. The deep hurt and depression of my mother, radiating out of the piles of unused charcuterie boards, forgotten board games, and crushed tubes of old wrapping paper. The reactionary impotence and resignation of my father, his dreams crowded further and further out by the piles of junk—all but immovable to him—until they sit compressed against the extreme walls of the house, the only places yet unclaimed, suffocating slowly.

No love is lost between them. The man has slept on the filthy, never-washed couch in their living room for untold months now, after his wife physically kicked him out of their bed the last time they tried to share it. They have three jobs between the two of them, yet they've no savings to speak of, owing to my mother's monumental credit card debt—the exact extent of which is known only to her, as she flatly refuses to discuss even the most basic details of their budget with my father.

Conversely, in nearly every conversation they have, my father, a slave to his insecurities, somehow twists even the most innocuous of my mother's words into an attack against him, invariably leading to him bemoaning how he isn't allowed to have feelings, and how the world is falling apart because "people aren't willing to talk to each other anymore" when someone bristles at his beat-for-beat regurgitation of right-wing political talking points.

Divorce, however, is utterly out of the question, between her profoundly traumatic upbringing in a divided household and his abjectly self-destructive stubbornness in clinging to his marriage vows.

There's more—my lack of a car, the birth of my new niece, the resumption of the war—but for now, my time has run short, and I want to publish this update while I still have time for it.