[Voice]
Tonight marks the eve of six months that I've lived here, in Siren's Port.
If you're not the sort to be interested in the abstractions of a night shift doctor who can't just nap on his break hours, then- Fellow Newcomers, by all means please disregard this message. If you aren't interested in hearing any reflections on the nature of the human condition, then you may as well take rest or go about your business.
I have no practical words like usual, spare to keep warm and sheltered on these chilly nights, as best you are able.
This is mostly...just a record, so that I can pause and take stock, for a moment.
I have trouble slowing down, these days. It's busy, and I don't like to leave any work hanging. I rarely feel like I have a true moment's peace, even when I have the day off. Six months, and I'm still not conditioned to handle the volume of people in this place, or their seeming inability to tame their surface emotions or restrain their destructive urges. I am still largely unprepared to encounter so many systemic problems and their symptoms daily; the issues of scarcity, of poverty, contamination, of corruption, the lack of security, the vice and misery...and I never thought I would stand in the shoes of an outsider, or become a part of an operational civilization under open skies- as an add-on cog, an immigrant, a newcomer.
These are things a Romdeau Citizen such as myself is never taught to dream, never expected to conceive, because we were so rarely encouraged a glimpse at any possibilities beyond the reality we had settled in. A stagnant world, under a fishbowl dome, perpetuated so elegantly that not too many things slid out of place until the time of its predestined end.
My passing contemplations, questions that slipped through the cracks then were mine, and perhaps one of the only things that were truly my own. To voice them now is a luxury, still a relatively new addiction of mine, to say aloud the things that I think. To have people connected on the network, who will dare to answer.
Siren's Port does not appreciate it's own wealth- a sustaining environment, a city of extraordinary people with fascinating talents, of freedoms unparalleled by any former standards I was accustomed to. Of it's chaotic lack of structure but seemingly limitless potential for the exchange of new ideas. The core, for all it's miseries, affords us so many new opportunities to learn and understand the things we'd thought impossible, or could have never even imagined.
A new reality- and I'm glad that I am not alone in it, or else I probably would have thought myself hallucinating. Isolation has not served me so well in the past. Here that's...almost never an issue. It's difficult to distance yourself from anything, in a city so vibrant with the immediacy of living.
I don't think I can claim that prior to my time in this place, in fact, that I have ever felt so alive, or so challenged, or so regularly troubled by the radical ways of this city. It is certainly no paradise, but I think...all things considered, that I'm satisfied with the constant, restless state of dissatisfaction, because despite the imbalances there is hope of life in the momentum of here and now.
Therefore, I exist. Daedalus Yumeno, the not-so-brilliant prince born from an artificial womb, in a world his careful blueprints never prepared him for. I struggle to understand why things are as they are, why we are as we are, why we should suffer and love. I am no closer to those answers than I was six months ago, but the world is wide, and I am wide awake in it. At least I will never lack in wonder, for better or worse.
[A brief pause- and then a quiet chuckle, a gentle surprise at himself]
Listen to me! I sound like such a poetic idealist! You'd never expect a practical person to carry on this way.
If you're not the sort to be interested in the abstractions of a night shift doctor who can't just nap on his break hours, then- Fellow Newcomers, by all means please disregard this message. If you aren't interested in hearing any reflections on the nature of the human condition, then you may as well take rest or go about your business.
I have no practical words like usual, spare to keep warm and sheltered on these chilly nights, as best you are able.
This is mostly...just a record, so that I can pause and take stock, for a moment.
I have trouble slowing down, these days. It's busy, and I don't like to leave any work hanging. I rarely feel like I have a true moment's peace, even when I have the day off. Six months, and I'm still not conditioned to handle the volume of people in this place, or their seeming inability to tame their surface emotions or restrain their destructive urges. I am still largely unprepared to encounter so many systemic problems and their symptoms daily; the issues of scarcity, of poverty, contamination, of corruption, the lack of security, the vice and misery...and I never thought I would stand in the shoes of an outsider, or become a part of an operational civilization under open skies- as an add-on cog, an immigrant, a newcomer.
These are things a Romdeau Citizen such as myself is never taught to dream, never expected to conceive, because we were so rarely encouraged a glimpse at any possibilities beyond the reality we had settled in. A stagnant world, under a fishbowl dome, perpetuated so elegantly that not too many things slid out of place until the time of its predestined end.
My passing contemplations, questions that slipped through the cracks then were mine, and perhaps one of the only things that were truly my own. To voice them now is a luxury, still a relatively new addiction of mine, to say aloud the things that I think. To have people connected on the network, who will dare to answer.
Siren's Port does not appreciate it's own wealth- a sustaining environment, a city of extraordinary people with fascinating talents, of freedoms unparalleled by any former standards I was accustomed to. Of it's chaotic lack of structure but seemingly limitless potential for the exchange of new ideas. The core, for all it's miseries, affords us so many new opportunities to learn and understand the things we'd thought impossible, or could have never even imagined.
A new reality- and I'm glad that I am not alone in it, or else I probably would have thought myself hallucinating. Isolation has not served me so well in the past. Here that's...almost never an issue. It's difficult to distance yourself from anything, in a city so vibrant with the immediacy of living.
I don't think I can claim that prior to my time in this place, in fact, that I have ever felt so alive, or so challenged, or so regularly troubled by the radical ways of this city. It is certainly no paradise, but I think...all things considered, that I'm satisfied with the constant, restless state of dissatisfaction, because despite the imbalances there is hope of life in the momentum of here and now.
Therefore, I exist. Daedalus Yumeno, the not-so-brilliant prince born from an artificial womb, in a world his careful blueprints never prepared him for. I struggle to understand why things are as they are, why we are as we are, why we should suffer and love. I am no closer to those answers than I was six months ago, but the world is wide, and I am wide awake in it. At least I will never lack in wonder, for better or worse.
[A brief pause- and then a quiet chuckle, a gentle surprise at himself]
Listen to me! I sound like such a poetic idealist! You'd never expect a practical person to carry on this way.