I Sit Myself in the Attic Room with Skylights
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CW: Adult content mentioned. Minors go away. In fact, minors should never read my blog entries ever, thank you, goodbye.
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It was not a routine exactly, but my friend Vic and I sometimes read each other's tarot in turns. So, that week, I asked them to read for me. I could picture it in my mind, the way they would shuffle the deck. Nothing fancy, just in this simple and relaxed way. They would pull three cards from the tarot deck, then one card from oracle deck—the Wild Unknown, both by the same artist—then, Vic would go ohh and hmm, fingers under their chin, curly hair falling onto their forehead. We have never met before, not in person, but we have known each other for more than a decade, and I have fantastic visualization skills. "Hmm," they started, "we have been visited by the Ace of Wands, the Strength, the Five of Swords, and The Empty Room oracle."
I stared at them, thinking. Then: "Oh, and what's The Empty Room oracle?"
Near the end of July 2026, the air was so hot and humid it made me want to shower 24/7 (which obviously I cannot do because one, I have to work full-time eight-to-six every weekdays, and two, imagine the water bills, and three, despite the popular belief, I am not a fish), curling in my bedroom with the AC on, I was thinking of an email notification I got from the other week while I was at work, that I saw for one minute then completely forgot because I'd sold my life to big corporation just to be severely underpaid.
The email was, surprisingly, not work-related. It was from Archive of Our Own, announcing that an author I was subscribing to had just posted a new fanfiction after months of being MIA—which was already a surprise. Even bigger surprise was that it was a fanfiction of the Among Us game. Then, as though the universe decided right then and there it wouldn't be enough to surprise me, because, come on, Vi rarely got surprised, it threw onto my face an even bigger surprise: the work was rated Explicit.
Now, what's the big deal? Everyone in AO3 writes Explicit-rated fanfictions. A lot of them vanilla, some others consist of kinks that I will not bother writing down in here lest it would reveal my true self. All true, very correct, one-hundred-percent. The big deal, at least to me personally, is the fact that the author wrote a graphic explicit scene and they have never, ever, not once, even written any pairings they loved doing anything beyond holding hands, hugging, and staring at each other with eyes full of yearning. Not even in private fanfiction works. Nada. And I would know. Because this author used to be a friend of mine until July last year.
I'd like to say that I forgot to unsubscribe to this ex-friend of mine, and it was the truth at first, until boredom got to the best of me and I was thinking, eh, why not? Why the need to unsubscribe? I could just stay there. I could just watch.
A couple of weeks later another surprise came into my email inbox. Another notification from AO3. Another update from the same author posting a new fanfiction. This one, and I noted this gleefully, was an explicit-rated work, too. I wondered if there would be one more work after that. Just one more sample, and it would be a real pattern. And if it was a pattern, I could start investigating on the why.
(Also yes, in case you're wondering, I did read both of the fanfictions. They were decent in the way someone usually so repressed attempting to write a graphic explicit scene, albeit a ridiculous one: well-worded, but clumsy while crossing their fingers nobody notices them stumbling. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I am not a nobody. But, yes, the writing was decent.)
This wouldn't be the first instance I let myself stay in an environment that no longer included me. I don't feel the need to moralize why I do the things I do. I enjoy observing situations. I enjoy dissecting other creators' works. I enjoy people-watching or observing as things unravel on the internet. In these moments, I was an outside person looking in. More importantly though, doing all of those, including making open speculations about celebrities or influencers, keeps me from being out-of-my-mind bored.
In another social media platform, also recently, as though yet again the whole universe conspired on not letting me get bored—out of concern I'd start a fire for the sake of it, perhaps—someone in my friendlist who prided herself as a tarot reader and an author—spiritually-awakened since 2020, or so she claimed, material needs beneath her—had suddenly posted a status asking for financial support. Preferably through her (indie) published poetry books. And nobody, not even one person, had interacted with the status.
It was difficult not to feel sorry for her, but I managed it well enough. Much harder, I suppose, for me to sympathize with her. Last week she posted a screenshot of someone talking about not letting go and taking things to the grave. She added a caption, I'm this petty. Again, nobody, not one person, interacted with the post. She might even think nobody noticed. Might even find relief in doing something bad and having nobody notice it.
I did, though. I keep tabs on her, like I keep tabs on the AO3 author, like I keep tabs on my other friends, and family members, and coworkers. I keep tabs because she used to be my friend for more than a decade, until her "spiritual awakening" in early 2020 led me to end our friendship by the end of 2020. It would be a hard feat not to, even though the bar of my self-worth at the time was in hell, since she had been mimicking me, copying my personality, appropriating my childhood stories that I had told her in confidence, then plagiarizing my writing as hers for years before I eventually found out.
Her response? Are you actually mad about this? she had asked me, eyebrows knitted together, so genuinely baffled that I had even taken offense to that. Of course, I had half-shouted, what do you think?
Babygirl, unfortunately, did not think.
The boredom, naturally, remained. It was always looming in my back, breathing down my neck. Climbing up my back sometimes. Whining at me. Dissatisfied. A few times before, when I'd told friends about the crashing and burning of my past friendships (and relationships) and the fact that I was still keeping tabs on all of them, also that after awhile I got bored again, they had stared at me and said, You do realize that you can actually write an autobiography with all that? I had shrugged. Sure, I could. You're not going to even consider it? they had asked again. Because your life is like, insane. I had thought about it for a moment. Then shrugged again.
It isn't that I don't think that I could write it since, obviously, I'm writing an essay right now. It is that I get bored so easily without anything to stimulate my mind. My favorite observation subject is, and always has been, people. People's psychology, people's mind, people's actions, people's motives. The gap between reality and people's understanding of that reality. The skewed interpretation of it. Then, eventually, the way all of us bridge that.
However, what I noticed in the last two years of my regular therapy sessions lessened, after my moods have stabilized and my bipolar announced remission, was that things around me had slowed down so much that nothing, I noted in bewilderment, was a blur anymore. For once, in my entire thirty years of being alive, everything was clear. I could see the wallpaper pattern. The smooth wooden floor with some dangerous nails on the side. The dust in the windowsill. The balding tree outside the window. The air.
But it wasn't that my environment had gone through significant changes. I realized later that it was me who had gone through significant changes. That it wasn't my surrounding going slower—it was me going faster. I became aware of the arguments in where my role was to emotionally manage the other person. I became aware of exhausting patterns where I had to put myself second, if at all. I became aware of the play of sleight hands and curled down lips and softer tone of voice that tried to slice into my worth. Relational bonds crushed one by one, like an old wood rotting from the inside, splintering. Like creaky old furnitures being pushed out of the attic room, making an empty space of the initially crowded storage room. Like The Empty Room with the sun beaming past the skylights and I am sitting myself near its window, watching the front yard filled with people below.
"The Empty Room oracle card is pretty interesting," Vic replied to me back during the tarot session that week with a smile to their words. "The whole spread reads as there is potential that surpasses its surroundings, new energy flowing, backed by newfound knowledge of the self.
"Real strength," they emphasized, "and maturity coming from peace rather than winning conflicts. How much are we willing to do? Is it it worth it to win every conflict? Is it not best to walk away?"
I studied the cards. The Empty Room oracle staring back at me. Vic couldn't see this, but I wrinkled my nose at it. I did not enjoy how smug it looked at me.
"Ah, and you know," Vic continued on, and I pictured them cleaning up the deck, putting the cards back into their box, "I never read oracle cards upright."
"Oh yeah?" I smiled, already suspecting where it would go, already knew because, of course. Of course.
"Yup. But your empty room card came completely, perfectly upright."
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