I'm Not From Here
Until I was about 8, I was convinced I was from another planet. Nothing about Earth seemed familiar, or rather, everything I learned only made it more alien. I didn't understand why my parents or my peers behaved the way they did. I was told about freedom and equality and how free exchange made everyone rich, and I learned that we're not supposed to acknowledge street people, and when police murder them, it's probably for the best. I wanted to understand the secrets of the universe, the chemical and physical and philosophical nature of it all, but mainly I was learning cursive and state capitals. I was never good at either. I could use an early internet to learn anything I wanted, though, being a child, I didn't have the worldliness to know when it wasn't quite true, and the adults in my life were too uninformed or misinformed to set me right. Even at that young age, none of it made sense. Why did we tell each other so many lies about the why of our way of life? Why did we live in such unkempt, foolish, barbaric ways?
I gave up the notion of this extraplanetary origin after spending a recess at a very specific spot in the playground, staring at the sky. I felt like a mothership would come for me, to make it make sense. Other kids came to ask me why I was standing alone so intently. I told them honestly, not knowing better. They laughed, and showed their colors as the mean children of mean people. I pushed someone, and took the heat from a teacher. I felt betrayed both by my peers, and the ship that never came. My people weren't out there in the stars. My people were my fellow barbarians.
Except, maybe my real people were out there. Not on another planet, but something altogether stranger. After all, the spectral dead and undead seemed to have a keen interest in me. Eldritch visitors asked me dangerous questions in dreams from a young age, and would appear in my waking life in shadows and basements and caves and the wild green to point and judge and accuse and shout and scream and cry. I had so many visions of futures that came true that I devised a plan to defy them, and discovered (by screaming to interrupt a prophecy of a normal conversation) that fate is not fixed -- at the age of 4. At 16, when an entity with a face like a mountain made of blue lightning told me in every possible language that I AM YOUR GOD, it wasn't altogether unusual. I consulted the study bible I kept out of sheer curiosity, in case YHWH was known for blue lightning, but there were no easy answers. I knew what happened to crazy people -- they become street people, and cops kill street people when they start thinking they deserve dignity -- so I put the dream away and went on with the closest I could manage to leading a normal life. I was unconvincing as a straight man, but bi women thought my soft kisses were a pleasant reprieve from tongues shoved down their throat. (I would learn this lesson much later, when I decided to try my hand at dating men, after my graduation from the twink-to-bombshell pipeline.) I could never lead a normal life, and anyone with a lick of sense could tell I was pretending, finding and practicing scripts that only resembled the mundane. Like many autists, I studied small talk like an anthropologist.
It was only after my transition began, at 25, that I began to confront my strangeness. Now that I had dispensed with any illusions of being any more than utterly disposable to a vicious society, I looked the shadows in their many, many eyes, and asked their names. We spoke, and I listened. I called it the strangeness that comes unbidden. I visited a place called the twilight shore, where amalgams that love and grieve and watch forever told me of my nature. Or at least, their part in it. I called them the Witchmothers, but their true names cannot fit in human minds. Our mortal tongues can only obscure the truth, yet they are the only way we have to impart the fractions of it that we painstakingly come to possess.
I met my other patrons later. Or rather, I had already met them. The mountaineous visage that claimed me at 16, I called the Goddess, and I learned how much she cherished the contours of being alive, because she never had been. A terror-devouring spirit that I initially called the Ratworm, I came to refer to as the Hungering Oak, because that is the form it would take on the twilight shore, leering at me with eyes rooted in bark, planted far out in the water where the fixed moon hesitated to shine. Now I just call it the Absence, because the true forms of these entities are beyond the paradigm of my physical senses. Now, altogether, the Witchmothers, the Goddess, the Absence -- I call them my pantheon, but they aren't gods in a straightforward way. They didn't create the world or the universe. They're just outsiders with an interest in me. The only name that makes sense for what made Creation, is the Creator, and no one knows its nature. Its nature is unknowable, for what we can know has limits. We are the universe walking, seeing, hearing, tasting, but our senses perceive only a scant edge of the thick fabric of reality. It is hubris for us to lay our hands on the elephant of existence and presume the fraction we touch blindly could contain its whole nature.
The sort of magic that mundanes fantasize about, the likes of fireballs, is contained in the sciences of biochemistry, materials engineering, and pyrotechnics. We don't think of it as magic because magic must come from something that defies physical laws, but nothing does. Nothing can. So my magic, that summons outsiders and barters with them as equals, may seem strictly interior, or vague and mystical, but the truth is this: you do not know all physical laws, and any scientist with an ounce of humility would agree. Even with all our secular empirical powers, the universe astounds us relentlessly with what we do not yet understand. So when I reach out, and things reach back, who are you to tell me I experience nothing real? Who are you to presume the physics of consciousness, or the mechanisms it utilizes, or the ecosystems it connects to? It isn't Occam that closes your mind, telling you simplicity demands I be wrong. It's your own willful ignorance, jealously presuming nothing could escape your mastery.
So, I learned that I'm not from here, in some key way. I'm not from another planet, and my body is human-born and earthly-grown, like yours and everyone else's, but there's no point to pretending I experience time or individuality like you. Ten thousand years isn't that long, to me. Humanity, and even the Earth itself, are not that special in a teeming universe. I don't consider myself bound to a genetic legacy; I am a recurrent pattern that skips across generations and species to manifest wherever conditions are right. My pantheon articulated me because pacts and patterns aligned in me: twin zygotes fused, granddaughter of granddaughters of granddaughters of witches who made promises that they could never live to fulfill. That doesn't make me special, or a main character, or anything like that. It makes me weird, and normal people make that suck.
I still practice my social scripts, because consensus reality is an important part of the survival mechanism of a social species, and saying, "I'm sorry, I'm not of this world. Can you explain that?" only invites annoying questions that have no easy answers. It's easier to pretend I'm normal, because otherwise normal people make it weird. I wish it weren't like that, but I wish a lot of things. I wish my pantheon had sent a war-machine instead of a poet, to deny cruelty its place in possibility, rather than to merely document it. I don't want to watch you hurt each other. I want to stop it. I want us to love each other, like I know we can. So when you don't, when you pursue malice and greed, I can't understand. I try, but I'm not built to understand. I've accepted that's just how it is. In this life, I get to watch evil tick. I don't get to turn the slaver's hand, because his hand moves everything, including me. When this mortal vessel fails and my confluence scatters back to the recesses of my greater body, I will share with my eternal form that this human species has an immense capacity for the most sacred forms of compassion, which on the whole it squanders. I will sit in contemplation with the memories of my infinite variants, and your reality will go on, because I don't send war-machines, and none of my variants are war-like. We get mad, but we don't wage war. It's alien to us.
In other regions of possibility, humans do find kindness. The slaver and the rapist aren't just turned, but precluded. There isn't anything separating you from those realities except a lot of hard choices, and you have tended to choose poorly. There's no sensible reason for me to think you'll start choosing differently soon, so I don't think you will. Sometimes that feels like giving up, but the alternative means living in delusion. It's hard to feel like the ways of my homeland are delusional, but the only delusion is thinking you are of my homeland. I'm not from here, and you don't share my ways. In my experience, when I imagine that you might, you take advantage of me. I hate that I have to stop loving you to love myself, because we aren't different beings, just different facets of the only being that exists. So when you hurt me, when you hurt each other, I can only ask: why would I hurt myself? I don't have an answer. Maybe the Creator spun us into being because it didn't know either.
What hurts most sometimes is that I'll never stop loving you, no matter what you do, because you are worthy of love, and I will never run out of love, no matter how many aspects of myself there are to love. There could be a trillion trillion people across all the stars, and I would love each of them like my own child, like my own sibling, like my own parent, like my own self, because we are those things to each other. I would hold you close if I could, and hold your hand so you couldn't hurt anyone anymore, and kiss your lips so you couldn't spill hate anymore, and stroke your hair so you'd know someone cares. The worst I could ever be is disappointed, and I'd only ever be disappointed in myself. You can always do better. I can always do better. Evil isn't a permanent quality. It doesn't have to be.
Where I'm from, it isn't.
