I’m hoping my paranoia comes to naught, but since I can’t bring myself to watch the news - PTSD, say my doctors, as is the fatigue - I’m sitting here thinking about last year. Thinking about, early in the day, when I thought the situation was funny as zombies tried to climb the window and get at me. When I still had the man I loved. When I didn’t know the so-called secrets of the universe (Kung Fu Panda just about sums it up.)
One of the concepts I explored between my first and second degrees in witchcraft was the possibility of alternate realities, and I use that possibility to comfort myself now. In another scenario, the zombie never happened. Mike never got bit on the head because one of Honeywell’s security issues went wrong. Zombification is still nothing more than a ritual practice of inflicting neural damage that is absolutely non-contagious.
In that other dimension, Mike and I are still living happily together. He’s finally closing in on his PhD and I’m teasing him about his “deadline” to propose to me. I’ve had sufficient time to resolve any doubts about the relationship. Our apartment may be a nightmare, and my friends and I meet and drink and have our little dramas and laughs, but there is no mystical bullshit, just the steady comfort of my religious and creative practice. I do not have to deal with check-ins from a Vatican representative and I wasn’t tried and acquitted for killing a priest although the Vatican ruled he was not a zombie, despite the corpse attempting to sit up several times during the autopsy. None of my Etsy orders involved me opening an envelope to unload a human foot and middle finger. In this other place, my life is still one of quiet business-building, expanding on my writing career and one where I can usually sleep through the night.
But I’m not in that other place, right now, I’m here. And I’m sad. I’m not going to unload on Joel about this, I’m just going to sit at the computer, shotgun across my lap…
And wonder why the hell there’s a helicopter landing in our backyard.
