Winter screen-printing // cro-chet-e // board gamin' // sunsets & grief (Patreon)

Hey y'all, it's been a minute since I've stepped into this space. I've been plugging along on projects, just been a bit quiet. I've been processing through a lot of grief this winter and most of my writing has been a bit scattered and personal. For outies, not for innies, so-to-say.

I want to share a few things I've been working on since November now that I have a little more space to review. My friend Remy came by the art studio a while back and helped me print about 40 of these patches from the screen I made. They are made entirely out of garbage, and I feel pretty good about that.

The screen is a picture frame, old window screen, and leftover emulsion from a print I did with the Fairbanks Ladies of Wrestling in August. The design is sharpie on sheet protector. The ink was the ends-of-pots from projects I've done over the years. The fabric was an old torn bed sheet, a fabric remnant, and pieces of an old ripped up stage curtain from my college theater.

When I get back to town, I'd like to send some of these out to you. I'm still behind on mailing posters, but the tubes have been packed for a long time. Constantly catching up with myself.

---

I have been crocheting lot this winter. I made a couple of mesh bags and hats when my power was out during the first big snow dump of the season. Then I made myself a sweater from a mosaic crochet raglan pattern from Nomad Stitches design. It's very colorful. I like the juxtaposition of chaos and order.

I started another one for my wee friend a little after Christmas. I'm visiting my family on the coast, so there has been a lot of time to just share space and read and work and talk and watch and play.

One of the first questions my brother asked me when I arrived was, "Did you bring any new games?" And I had, in fact, bought Dune: War for Arrakis from the Comic Shop and threw it in my suitcase the day before I left. It's a Counter-Insurgency game for the fate of a planet from 2024, which I was excited to try, and it's pretty great. We unboxed it together and played it 3 or 4 times. He kicked my ass every time. In our last game this Saturday, he beat me with an absolutely legendary sand-ride into my capital city after blowing his way through the mountains with a nuke in all of two turns, after I'd spent 2 entire rounds throwing all of my military might at the same legion he rode in with for the win.

We got in a game of Wingspan on New Years Eve with a couple of his friends, and we've played many many games of Dixit, and Euchre, with the whole family.

The most powerful game at the table though, was an 8 hour run of Talisman with 7 players. We all admitted, we had never actually been party to a live game that finished with somebody seizing the Crown of Command for an actual win. The last time we played together a couple of years ago, we decided to call it after 7 hours with no winner. It's how that game usually goes.

---

The last big project I did before leaving for the holidays, was my annual work on The Nutcracker. I call it church. It's such a huge show, and I do look forward to it every year. This year was hard, and different, with the long and painful disappearance of my closest friend over the past 3 years, & the finality of seeing him in person, having become so distant that I know he is not the person I remember. He's still in there, and I got to see glimpses of it, but the friendship we built and honored together is so far gone, I don't know that it will ever be repaired. I wept a lot during that process.

The last day, I said goodbye. We smoked a cigarette by his car as he was headed out from strike. I was so aware that it would probably be the last time we ever spoke. In the end, he told me "We'll talk soon," and that he's writing me a letter, but I haven't heard from him since then. I don't expect to. Not anymore. It's what he always says. I hadn't heard from him for 18 months before that, and he had been disappearing in so many ways long before that.

One day, I think he just decided to stop showing up in my life. Or maybe he didn't decide anything at all. Maybe it all just fell into one of those terrible patterns that sleep in our bones. The curious and tragic thing is, I can trace it to the day he promised he would be in my life forever, and he asked me to trust that. That was the day he began to stop showing up, for everything, while making more and more desperate promises that he would only break. To play a board game. To see a play. To watch a movie. To stop by for a beer and a chat. To help tend the garden, or the snow. To sit with me in my grief, and in his. Regular things, that he had never not-shown-up-for. He left me hanging again and again and again, wondering if he was still coming, never letting me know he wasn't. It's been so hard not to struggle against it. I know him. It's what he does. He disappears, and he starts over. I know that. I've been that person too. I've lived it in myself, and I've seen him do it before, in all of the ways he's shared the most painful and harrowing moments in the trajectory of his journey with me. I know him. He was my best friend. Until he wasn't.

Our friendship ended like many relationships do: with a process of slipping away. I think it's often mutual--a "we should get together soon!" from either side--a text message or call expressing a hope for reconnection, sometime, soon, hoping completely that the time will manifest itself, without having to make the conscious effort to make that time. And the time just slips away. Ropes of sand.

What was different about this, is that it began with an unexpected grand confession of feelings, and intentions, and a grand-illusion of commitments, born of empty hopes for a future not-yet-imagined--only believed-in--followed by an entirely one-sided process of slipping away, while I made the time, and made the time, and then bucked and pleaded for presence. Slowly, at first. An illusion, so delicately starved of presence and truth, takes time to bend into clarity. And then suddenly: you know that you will never again exist for them as anything but a memory, of somebody you used to be, becoming more distant every day.

Surely, artifacts of you will be kept. Keepsakes to mark the memory of you. But there are no new memories to be made. I don't know that he will ever admit that, until it becomes so obvious that it can no longer be ignored. He will tell me he'll be back soon, and pretend that nothing is wrong. But he won't be back, certainly not soon. And something is very wrong. There are stories about people like this. I already had a story like that about my father. I guess now I have two.

My father did eventually come back to the world he left, for a brief visit. A glimpse into a life he once had, long ago. But it wasn't until after my mom died, and it was a disturbing experience of time-having-passed, in a place and in the people he thought he knew. A radical arrival into a present he had chosen not to notice the becoming of. His own tightly-held illusions, bending violently into clarity.

It's not unfamiliar. It is, in fact, entirely familiar. It's what families and communities do to each other, when they don't know how to love. You cannot pause time to think. Thoughts and feelings are insufficient substitutes for action. In one of the songs I wrote when I was 20, What Happens Now, there is a line I return to often: "What happens now can't be put off 'til tomorrow. Even when you choose to look away, now happens anyway." That whole song is about the experience of struggling against losing onesself to dissociation and the illusion of forever.

---

I have made so much progress in the process of grieving my mother over the past couple of years. I made a very conscious decision when she died, to not let it consume me. To feel through it so I could let it go. I didn't want my grief to get trapped inside of me and become subsumed into the core of who I am. It was time to make the time to deal with it. And that meant dealing with all of it. I knew it wouldn't be easy. She was not an easy person to love, and those are the hardest people to lose. Her life, and the way that she died, were such incredible tragedies, and I am an inextricable part of that tragedy. Her story continues with me. I've been doing a lot of excavating my memories and letting myself have the emotions I wasn't allowed to feel in the darkest parts of my childhood. Hearing my own ancient unheard screams, letting them pass through me. Going back for the little girl inside of me who needed so desperately to be seen and held, who endured so much by herself, to carry her home. It's not easy. It makes you ugly, and difficult, long before it sets you free. Demons come crashing out of you as you peel away the protective layers to find the places, cracked and raw and bursting with heat, to break and re-set the bones of your soul. It's a process, and it isn't ever truly over. But in 2025, I feel like so much more a part of my self for it. I've carried so many pieces of that little girl home, where nobody can hurt her, because she is mine. And I will never let her go.

---

So much has been going on in the world. The past few years feel like such a time-dilated spiral in my memories. Partially from the active falling-through-grief, and partially because the external world has been moving just as fast as my internal world, and keeping up with it has had to become a daily habit to stay above water. We are in what feels indisputably more and more like an inflection point, between/among so many things. What are we willing to give up? What are we willing to say, and not-say? To let-go? What are we willing to take? What are we willing to give, and to share, and to ask for? What are we willing to know, or see, or feel? To wonder? What are we willing to make time for? What are we willing to do and be? What is allowed in our social contracts--agreements with others, and agreements with ourselves?

Because we live in a present that is inextricable from the past, it is easy to find excuses like "It's always been like this," that make you feel insignificant. But it is different. The world today both is and isn't the world it's always been, and we are, and always have been, the coauthors of our own existence. The story isn't over yet, and the narrative belongs to all of us. Don't ever give up your authorship. You get to write this thing too.

---

I'm still plagued with thoughts which are myriad and scattered, but they are coming into focus. Bending into clarity. I am excited for works-which-have-yet-to-be-made. Projects with artists who trust me and want my help. It's hard to find sense-making in art these days, in the ways it once seemed so easy and obvious. But, I am loving my growth as a musician, as I see tangible rewards for valuing the more rote aspects of learning to speak with an instrument. Especially in this moment where something rote feels meditative and productive and necessary. I hope to have something wonderful to share soon. For now, I'm still climbing my way out of some obfuscating muck, but I see the other side, and it looks like peace.

Happy New Year, my friends. Love ya~

amelia