Tagged relationships

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I made some excellent progress today! My legal residency in Mexico was extended for a full three years, rather than merely two or one like I'd been warned might happen~

One big thing with Mexican residency cards is that you're not required to stay in the country for any minimum amount of time in order for it to remain valid. I could fly back out to the States tomorrow and not set foot on Mexican soil again until 2029, and it'd be like I never left, legally speaking.

And as it so happens, I have something similar on my mind now.

The isolation is a big factor. Being utterly alone in a new country, with only a faltering grasp at best on the native language, is an intense and intimidating prospect. Even with how independent I usually am, I'm not sure how well I'd be able to tolerate not having ANYONE I know nearby in the long term, not to mention how much of an uphill battle it'd be trying to find fellow freaks here.

And sure, I could hang out with some of the self-described "expats" living here, but the idea of doing that instead of integrating into the local culture leaves a vile, colonial taste in my mouth. I truly WOULD be an active part of the gentrification problem at that point, and I loathe even to consider it.

More than that, however, I've been confronted with a very positive personal reason to return to the States~

The Kyou System has historically been quite defensive when it comes to letting others into our personal lives. Too many bad experiences with people who'd sooner take out their bad moods on us than try to communicate healthily has made us wary; our consensus is that we'd sooner stay single than gamble on someone who shows nontrivial red flags or consistently rubs part of us the wrong way.

Indeed, this mentality has kept us single for a long time now, so much so that I'd almost written off altogether the possibility of us finding anyone worth keeping around. That assumption, unspoken, had been baked into the Operation Mexikyou plan from the beginning... and of course, no sooner than I put the plan into action, the assumption falls apart.

Things are serious enough between me and the person in question that I can't write it off as some purely online, long-distance mirage. Although we met online, having been part of the same larger "weirdo outsider artist" communities for years now (even before my game jams), I've since met up with them in person.

Not only are they very cute physically, but we've just as much mutual chemistry face-to-face as we do online, if not more so~

I've been speaking very plainly with them as of late, in fact, about taking the next step and trying to live near / with each other, even if I have to pull the plug on my current plans for it. By all accounts, they're very interested—but we also both agree it's a big commitment, and not a decision I should make lightly.

Mercifully, I have some time to think things over: It's not too late to cancel the reservation (and get a refund on my deposit) for the longest part of my stay.

The question I have to answer now is whether things truly are or will become dire enough in the States to justify staying here alone in Mexico, even WITH a very promising romantic opportunity waiting for me back above the border...

First things first:
When You're Happy Being Single

Even though I'm plural, the Kyou System is single, and despite Old Man Winter's best efforts to undermine my moods, I really don't mind living by myself~ I'll take freedom tinged with isolation over the emotional anguish that characterized too many of my past relationships, certainly, heh.

Indeed, I might not have gone out on any dates today, but I did finally finish assembling the new art gallery on here, as well as finding some of those Bandcamp-style music stream embedding frameworks I was looking for~ I've also fixed the broken favicon, and learned more about how this SSG template translates the directory structure of the input files into an actual website!

Though, on the subject of romance-type things, a good friend of mine made a point of telling me recently that at least one mutual friend of ours has (or previously had, perhaps) a secret crush on me—but my tendency to vanish from the internet for long stretches of time, combined with my general inscrutability, has made me very difficult to approach.

Perhaps so. Monoe is my favorite NPC from Yume Nikki for good reason, after all, heheheheh~

Sometimes the psychic damage from social media platforms is too much, and I need to mute everything for a while for the sake of my own sanity. I don't anticipate that changing anytime soon, especially with the way things are going with social media as of late.

At the same time, part of my hope with this new website is to have a much more consistently active and easily followed online presence. It's more for my own sake than anything else, granted, since I've been in need of an outlet and a non-cancerous platform for logging my gamedev updates for a while now.

If it also ends up helping me communicate to my cute friends, however, that I am, in fact, harmless—and by extension, both available for and interested in cuddling and biting—then that's all the better~