From Where I Operate

I write from the line between life and death. That is the depth from which I operate.

As a writer and as an empath, I move toward the fault lines of experience — the places where emotion, culture, grief, and meaning collide. I don’t skim surfaces. I descend.

This blog is the rope system that makes that descent survivable. These pages are the ropes used for controlled descent — not to avoid the depth, but to move through it with intention.

Writing here is how I translate intensity into structure. It is how I stabilize while working in terrain that would otherwise be overwhelming. This is not performance. It is equipment.

The reason I am staying is simple and not abstract.

I love my father. I love Monkey. Those are not philosophical arguments. They are living bonds. They are hands on my chest pulling me back into the room when grief tries to empty it.

Tonight the absence of my mother rose like a wall.

For a moment the mind tried to convince me that leaving would be relief. But love interrupted that thought. Love did not erase the pain. It did not make the world suddenly beautiful. It simply prevented the exit.

I am not staying out of optimism. I am staying out of ransom.

Love is the tether that keeps me here. It does not feel uplifting tonight. It feels like weight. It feels like a binding force tying me to a world I struggle to accept.

The world looks corrupt and structurally ugly. People are cruel with each other.

Even small situations — like what is happening at work — feel like proof of a larger sickness running through everything.

I don’t feel aligned with it. I don’t feel like I belong inside it. Much of what passes for normal life feels distorted and hostile.

Remaining here feels like standing in something broken and knowing it is broken.

But I am still staying.

Not because I agree with the structure. Not because I suddenly see beauty in it.

I am staying because my life is entangled with other living beings who matter to me.

I have other loved ones in my life who are important to me and whose presence I carry, even when they are not physically in the room.

But tonight the anchors closest to me are tangible and immediate.

My father exists here with me. Monkey exists here with me.

Those realities hold me in place when part of me wants distance from everything else.

In the middle of this wave, Monkey rushed to my aid without hesitation.

He climbed onto me, loving on me in the only way he knows how — nuzzling his head into my arm, pressing his paw against my chest, staying close.

There was no analysis in it, no philosophy. Just presence.

His warmth and weight anchored me in the room and interrupted the isolation that grief tries to build.

He did not solve the pain. He reminded me I am not alone in this. He's in it too. I won't leave him alone. 

I have been listening to “Mama” by B.J. Thomas today and into the night, along with other songs of his that my mother and I shared when I was little.

He was one of her favorites and one of mine.

The music carries memory in a way words cannot.

Hearing it brings her presence into the room for a moment — not as denial of her absence, but as proof that the bond continues in another form.

The songs do not erase grief. They make it audible.

They remind me that love existed in time and still echoes.

Sitting with that echo is part of stabilizing.

That song in particular carries the shape of my relationship with her.

Listening to it brings back memories of sitting with her and sharing those moments, thinking about all the ways she showed up for me throughout my life — the ways she was there, steady and present, just like the lyrics describe.

While she was alive, that song meant something to me because of who she was and who she was to me.

Now that she is gone, it still holds that meaning, but it carries an ache with it.

I feel like I am living on memories and echoes of her presence — fragments that remain, reminders of a person who shaped me and is no longer physically here.

Another song playing is “Whatever Happened to Old-Fashioned Love” by B.J. Thomas.

To me, it isn’t a hopeful question. It reads like a statement disguised as one. The world is not like that anymore. The kind of love it points to — steady, patient, human — does not define the culture I see around me now.

Listening to it sharpens that contrast. It doesn’t ask me to look for anything. It simply names a distance between what the song describes and reality.

This is exactly what this space is for.

I even wrestle with my spirituality. I’m human.

I hate death, but it exists and refuses to go away, like I mention in my blog entry “Death’s Witness.”

Sometimes I feel as if we are just rotting away like fruit before God. It feels cruel.

I strive to stay on the right side of God, but I also wonder if this is simply how we gaslight ourselves to remain.

I am human. I battle this in real time.

It is dark, yes. But I suppose I am my mother’s son.

I have both heard and read her thoughts and her struggles with her own darkness — the yin and yang, as she called it. She said everyone has one.

I heard her frustration with God, and I also witnessed her pull back and praise.

So I suppose she was a deep cave diver also. Spelunker.

This blog is a working ground — a place to vent without destruction, to analyze instead of collapse, to break down experience in a way that is productive rather than corrosive.

I write here to stabilize.

I write here to endure moments like this without letting them swallow me whole.

Putting language around chaos contains it.

It turns formless pressure into something I can stand beside instead of inside.

I am a work in progress.

Nothing written here is a final verdict on life or the world.

It is documentation of movement — of thoughts and emotions being processed in real time.

This space exists so I can keep working through what is unfinished inside me while I continue becoming.

There is tension in all of this.

Love is not lifting me above suffering tonight. It is holding me inside it.

It is the reason I remain present in a world I often reject.

I am not pretending this is noble. It is simply factual.

I am staying because leaving would abandon bonds that are real.

I remain inside a conflict between rejection of the world and attachment to the lives connected to mine.

Tonight there is no grand conclusion.

Only the decision to remain.