All this time I spend awake. It’s more than I can take. Leave all my stitches bleeding. Cut me while I’m awake. All this dust that I’m breathing… Eats away at me.
Jonathan Hadley – Dust | From the album Damages
the personification of rot
In my world, rot has a color… A dingy green that permeates everything like the sepia that yellows old photos. It has a smell… Acidic, warm and forgotten. Like a room that’s been closed for a decade and never allowed to breathe. It has the texture of bananas, solid, but well on it’s way to becoming a liquid sticky goo that just doesn’t wash off cleanly. In my world that’s enough to be more than a condition, it’s enough to be a presence… a personification… a monster that waits for you and never forgets. You never forget it either.
Rot isn’t something that starts happening when something ends. It’s something that happens when a condition lasts long enough to chip away at who you really are. For me, it’s encoded into every memory and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It waits, it lingers and it settles deep into the places where you used to be. You put the happy parts of you in boxes for safe keeping, but the rot will take those too. It always has… It always will.
About a year ago, a well meaning bird from one of my favorite indie shows said that I never smile… He wasn’t wrong, but he didn’t know how much that one simple, true statement would change for me. I felt this need to answer a question that wasn’t even asked. Why doesn’t he smile?
So… I went back to the place where I stopped. I wrote an EP called Color to capture the those parts of me and something interesting happened. For the first time, I saw the rot for what it was… and it was in everything. Every memory. In my memory I walked back into my old bedroom and there was a little boy there… Me. He was crying and I asked him why. “We broke a rule…” and then we recited them together as my world caught fire.
We live… in the quiet… but the rot just left me no quiet place to hide. This me, that was built and learned to breathe in it. To flex with it, to please and to disappear was burning and there was no stopping the mess once I saw my actual role in the sadness. My role was being a kid that had to translate himself for everything and everyone and if he didn’t learn to speak that alien language he was just going to be alone and he knew it in his bones that there was no future. Just this… this… rot. The world was always burning, that younger version of me had been sitting in the smoke and flames and I left had left him there. Meet Jonathan, the Origin. He’s five years old, and he’s been sitting locked in this time bubble since 1991, alone… It started how it ended… with a computer. This is when the rot got it’s texture, it’s color and smell.
In 1991, my dad had died and with him died any hope my mom had left that he might actually come home one day, and that broke something in her. It was also the year we got a computer, and the internet, as basic as it was then. She found a world of people in chat rooms that she could talk to and re-invent herself with and she disappeared into it. This is where Jonathan, smart, and coldly logical little Jonathan learned to disappear.
I wouldn’t learn for many years that I’m autistic, and really, really good at acting like I’m not. Remember how I defined rot earlier? Rot is something that lasts long enough to chip away at who you really are… This wasn’t the beginning, but it was the first major chip.
