*OVERFLOW
*OVERFLOW
*OVERFLOW
26 Apr, 2026
(thematically relevant)tags: tmi (probably forever for every entry) + bodily fluids + weed + dissociation + major spoilers for Warframe if that matters to you
...
you wake up in the middle of the night. it's late and you're young. you fell asleep with the tv on, and it's actually beyond late: the channel has not only run out of their normal shows, but their late night vintage syndicated sitcoms that only old and lonely night owls take comfort in, too. honestly they've run out of money to pay people to program more programming beyond the famously regularly scheduled, to which the tv will return right before the sun comes up. no, you wake up to the test pattern, the sign-off signal. the color bars. the volume is low but not so low that you couldn't hear the low continuous beep before your eyes cracked open. you think maybe that sound intruded into your dream, just a little bit. when you go back to sleep, you dream in the colors of that rainbow that only exists after midnight, burned as it is into your eyelids. without the light, without the test tone, that channel has to compensate, and in a way the dreams that follow are your own personal channel, images washed clean and brightly rendered, uninfluenced by the murmur of infomercials floating on the waves of your REM stage. whatever dreams may come then, that's all you. that's the discovery channel.
in and of an uncertain age
it's just after my birthday. yours truly by screenlight is older and older still, and i FEEL like it.
i've been training a lot of new people at work isn't... fun exactly, but one of the fun parts of it is: no one has guessed my age right.
i don't think all the credit goes to hormone changes either, honestly? it's always something to do with my personality or my pop culture references or something, and it's been like this ever since i moved here and started meeting new people. not a single person has guessed within 5 years of my age, and no one has guessed that i'm older than i am. teenagers are infamously bad at guessing ages of course, so i take them with a grain of salt even when it's funny/flattering—when my coworker marcy first met me she thought i was two years older than her, and as a reminder she's SEVENTEEN????—but most people nevertheless guess in the age range of 25-28. i like to make people guess now, though only when it comes up organically.
i've been thinking about this a lot in the past year but especially lately because of all the new coworkers. a sixteen year old who can't believe i'm old enough to be her parent much less drink. a thirty two year old who thought i was too young to know more than him, a thirty three year old whose jaw liiiiiterally dropped when she found out i was older than her. the newest hire guessed i was a full decade younger than i am.
the other layer to this though is that mentally i do feel younger than what people guess (if not physically lol). not like a kid but like i'm still sixteen or seventeen, maybe a little older? i've grown and changed and learned but that post-high-school-pre-never-really-going-to-college era looms immortal in my heart, even as internally my body feels older than it should be.
(when i say that no one guesses my age correctly, i feel like i should admit to the other caveat: obviously a lot of strangers who don't know my age do correctly identify me as a full adult, still hit me with the sir/ma'am, still don't card me at bars but generally i pass as younger than i am more than i Pass iykwim?) (i have completely stopped caring about passing, it's been extremely freeing! i still have cosmetic shit i want to have done but it's for ME and comfort in my own body and not because i want anybody else to see me a certain way. most days men assume i'm a man, and women assume i'm a woman, and i don't really care how men see me in the meantime.)
HELLO KIDDO
hello diary. someone is reading you.
it's me, in the editing process, thinking about you, and the me inside you. that sounds like an innuendo, but like these words, which are and aren't me, it is and it isn't.
recently i've been dealing with some health issues that i haven't had for a few years. it's pushed me back toward feelings i haven't had since before i started taking meds for my anxiety: low threshold to being irritable, impatience, intense waves of apathy. i may be overly rational sometimes but training the rational part of me up to heavyweight strength is a help when i'm feeling like this, because i know the apathy is a symptom, i can ignore how loud it is. not a lot, but enough to disregard it. i can't focus on much but i keep myself distracted.
one of the ways that's worked lately is playing games more. my attention span ebbs and flows with the whims of my twisting gut, so i cycle from game to game, mainly different online games my lovely friends are into. lately, because of a girl i've been seeing, i've gotten back into Warframe. but before that, before the health issues flared up again, i played a game called BROKEN CORE: sister = doll, a girl story, a VN by Nadia Nova.
for my thousands of unaware readers, BROKEN CORE is a VN about a woman and her older sister—and, another version of her older sister, in the form of a dressed-up life-size doll. it's hard to tell in this story which brings the younger sister more comfort: the idea of her real sister, or the fake version she can safely transgress with. by the very end, she's made her choice, but it's a choice informed by the intrusion of reality upon fantasy. early in my reading of it i began to pick up on the trajectory, albeit subconsciously, because it reminded me of the song "fantasy" by sofi tukker.
in Warframe, you play as... well. that's complicated to nail down. the vast majority of the time, you control one of the eponymous 'frames' via which you wage your wars. in-universe, the "you" controlling the frame becomes a playable character in their own right, called the Operator. the Operator outwardly appears to be a child, one of an uncertain number of 'Tenno': formerly human children on a deep space colony ship that were trapped in the Void and exposed to forces that empowered them with the ability to shred reality and possess certain kinds of life. there's no hard timeline on how long the Operator has been, well, operating, but it's long enough that they should've aged by now. they haven't, but they still have to actively fight in cosmic wars by possessing warframes.
now, if you want an explanation of how that works, here you go! skip this paragraph if you want though. NOW, most warframes are replicas of originals, which were sapient individuals with free will. the replicas the operator controls are like if i 3D printed your entire body: that's you, but i can't 3D print your soul. as a result, tenno can possess them using an ability called transference, which unwinds their physical body from our layer of reality and places their consciousness into a warframe. if they cease transference, the warframe remains in the exact position it was left in. (original warframes, meaning those which retain their own will and sapience, can also be controlled in this way if they're implanted with a transference bolt, effectively locking the warframe inside their own mind.)
some players didn't really enjoy finding out that they were technically playing an ageless child i guess, because along comes the Duviri Paradox to give them an older version of their character. follow me here, i think it's worth it.
the event that created the Tenno—a void-jump gone wrong—was also an opportunity for a cosmic opportunist. when the colony ship gets lost in the Void, a doppelganger appears to your character, before they ever gain their powers and stop aging, and offers them a deal. it will save "all of them", and all your character has to do is shake their hand. in one timeline, you accept, and you and all the children, only the children, are granted powers that help them survive the strange beings of curling metal that have invaded their home. that version of you stops aging from the Void exposure, locked into the body of what looks like a fourteen year old, and eventually makes it back to normal space. eventually, that version of you is run through with a sword and dies alone.
there is another version of you, of course: the one who doesn't take the deal. the doppelganger saves no one, the colony ship is lost to the Void, and your character obsessively reads and re-reads a children's book to cope. the book takes place in a fantasy kingdom called Duviri, and because the Void reacts and warps when exposed to strong emotions, your character makes Duviri REAL. as a result, they get to grow up next to their favorite fairy tale characters... who don't grow, or change. neither does the kingdom. your character grows through adolescence and into what looks like their early to mid-twenties, trapped in an eternal rerun, drifting through every waking moment. eventually, a paradox occurs—it would take too much time to explain, but a paradox forms the connective tissue between the two separate timelines that allows the Operator to be saved from death by the actions of the Drifter, the version of you that didn't take the deal.
in fact, the two versions of yourself meet several times. they have lunch together, discuss the different trajectories of their shared lives, and show off their different personalities. the Operator is often more mature and level-headed, but more light-hearted and hopeful. the Drifter is frequently more impulsive and careless, but more weary and cynical too. an immortal teen who will never look as old as they truly are, and a doomed woman trapped in various interweaving time loops, growing up but never really acting like it.
neither gets to grow up. one has a body that literally physically can't, and the other was cosmically imprisoned in a child's fairy tale for her entire adolescence.
and between the two, the warframe. here is where these skewed mirror selves exist in superposition. if the Operator and the Drifter are two sides of the same coin, then the warframe they both happen to control is the hand holding the coin, except those mirror selves are also ghostly hands cupping the warframe's hand into the stable shape required to hold the coin at all. in my own version of the game's events, this blind parallel between their two lives is a kind of quantum entanglement, and the mechanism by which they first feel each other's presence before the plot requires they meet face to face. my versions of these characters share the same warframe, and in so doing touch each other's minds in a way that they otherwise never could.
i could keep going on about everything that these two (or three) (or one) characters mean to me who only live in my head and exist not at all otherwise though even in canon they feel so much like explorations of dissociation and C-PTSD and age regression—but the context is all laid out here. i had a point i was trying to make with all of this, one that i think can be vaguely seen but not really understood externally, because i don't fully understand the feelings internally so anyway now i'm upset about it. a lot of things can happen between the endeavor of writing and the completion of it i guess.
what should the reader believe i'm driving at here? some foundational dissociation of self i'm trying to work through? a desire to possess someone else body and soul? yearning for a sister?
i guess that last one is sort of relevant, because yeah. it is kind of yearning for a sister. there is an ache in me that might be in that shape.
SISTER STATIONS
i was going through old writing and artwork recently and got emotionally sideswiped by some collaborative writing i did with my first LDR girlfriend. it was more like archives of text RP, but in it we called each other brother and sister. i'd completely forgotten all about that facet of our relationship until then, but it all came flooding back. it became such a key part of our interactions that when she finally broke up with me—suddenly one day, in the form of just saying "i'm not in love with you anymore" what felt like out of nowhere—it was as if i lost a girlfriend AND a best friend AND a sister all at once.
(i've kept so many files jumping from one external HDD to the next for that exact reason though: i forget and i want to remember. i'm always growing but it's like a spiral: my growth runs parallel to my past and my future.)
when i was much younger, my mom used to ask me if i wanted a little brother or a little sister. like she could choose one or the other on purpose, right? she asked me that until i was well past being able to legally drink, even, like i might somehow want to be the big sibling to someone who wouldn't grow up alongside me. my answer when i was very young, though, was neither. she loves to recite the 'silly' answer i actually gave: "honestly i think i'd only want a big sister but since i don't have one i think that's that."
i always felt more comfortable around girls. when i was in elementary school, my two best friends were girls. one of them asked me out but i didn't understand what should happen after that, not yet, so by the time we got to middle school she had to ask me if i'd mind if we broke up, because i'd sort of forgotten that we were supposed to be dating. i have memories of sitting on a bed with three older girls listening to TLC's CrazySexyCool while they giggled and gossiped and painted their nails; they let me hang out because i was 5 or 6 and had long hair and knew a bunch of the words to Waterfalls already. in my memory they're all ten years older than me, maybe they weren't, but they painted my nails and my mom scrubbed the polish off later.
one of my coworkers is nineteen years old. she's come up before in my diary so i'll keep calling her Marcy. i'm decidedly not as young as Marcy but despite the age difference we have an almost unsettling amount of shit in common: music new and old, borderline abusive parents (and one of them dead in both our cases), similar senses of humor and aesthetics. we even have the same last name. it's made us great coworkers, sure, but over time it's become something really tender? i read too much into it, but it also doesn't feel like other irl friendships i've had before even though it looks similar on paper. she comes to me for advice sometimes and she checks in on me when she can tell i'm stressing out. i've brought her medicine before when she's needed some and she's given me a ride home before when i didn't have a car. we trade messages at work on the whiteboard sometimes—she'll write "hi [screenlit]! c:" on it when she knows i'm opening the next day, and if i forget to label my otherwise identical watercup she labels it for me with cute little symbols all over it. when we see each other scheduled for the same day we both look forward to it because it means we're gonna talk for hours straight.
Marcy is so young sometimes in how she acts and the way that she looks at me that it makes me feel painfully maternal. once i confided in her that if i'd been born a cis woman, i think i really would've liked being a mom. (it's easy to confide an enormous secret in someone if they have no stake in it themselves.) i remember the way her lips pulled into a thin line, like she was wrestling with a sudden sadness. i said it off the cuff, no real emotional weight given to it, but after a pause she told me: "shit, girl. i mean the economy would've been fucked either way probably, but i think you would've been a great mom." my heart was in my throat then, and i swallowed it back down so hard that i had hiccups for the next hour. once she was having a really hard time with her boyfriend treating her like shit verbally, and after work she was supposed to go out to his car and have a talk with him. she was scared and i felt so protective i didn't know what to do with it, except give her all the advice i would want in her situation. i told her though that if she was even remotely scared at any point, to run out of his car to the 7/11 next door, where i would be chilling out until she texted me to let me know she was for sure okay. hearing that was the only thing that made her visibly relax the entire day.
'maternal' is the only way i've ever known how to put it, but after a few weeks of feeling like this toward her i realized that wasn't quite it either, or if it was, it would be like moms who don't know how to be mothers to their kids, only friends. but the specific ways that we look out for each other and share space with each other feels almost like what i imagine sisterhood to feel like. it's something i can only try and imagine, being an only child. the feeling isn't everpresent—sometimes we're just coworkers, or temporarily friends at work.
i've sometimes daydreamed about a fictionalized version of my workplace, similar to Glopossum's coffee shop crew, because a lot of my interactions there do feel strangely charged? i talked in my prior entry about one example, but my assistant manager is the one who got me back into weed by pulling me into the walk-in one day and all but cornering me until i hit her dab pen. she's a super comfortable person to be around and it's fun to be a little high at work on a slow day, but reminiscing about it it's not hard to daydream a version of that where she has some kind of intoxication kink that she's exercising over me. i don't want that with her, but the scenario is hot? i'm getting off track, but it works as a clumsy segue:
FAMILIAR FACE IN THE HAZE
SHED MY SKIN, FRESH AND PINK
MORE FEARFUL STILL
LONG DARK BLUE
listen if i could go down on the ghost i would but i just pass right through