Escaping the Backrooms

And so I return. Hello denizens of my walled garden, my bit of internet earth. I missed you in July. I had not planned to miss a month of posting, and yet, here we are. I do hope to make that up to you before the end of the year.

In the little introduction on my blog’s homepage, I say I will share whatever happens to be turning over in my mind at the time. This is a good and honest thing for me to promise. The soil of my mind is constantly turning over as an incredible variety of things are planted, fed, harvested, and pruned. Moreover, there are two things in the world that help me think: movement and writing. Given that it would be fairly difficult (and awkward) to interpretive dance at you, and we cannot go on long walks together, writing to you is a wonderful way for me to turn the soil of my mind. But I ran into trouble in July. I started no fewer than four posts, all of which I think have legs and will certainly make their way into the ether someday, but none were quite right. I could not engage honestly with any of them. Because this is the thing, July and August were hard for me. I could have very easily seen this coming, and next year I may just take July and August off. We’ll see. The things turning over in my mind during these months were melancholy, spiky, painful, and much too personal for the clutches of the internet. So, what to do? I chose to wait and see if what was growing in my mind could be valuable to anyone but myself, and to see if I could talk about it in a way that was both honest and respectful of my own privacy.

I mention at the end of my post Bodies of Christmas Past, which deals with my coming to terms with injury, that my big sister is no longer with us. She passed away during August of 2021 from cancer. She was 37 years old. I turned 38 this past February. This August, on the fourth anniversary of her passing, I am older than my big sister ever got to be. This is not an experience I recommend. I am not going to get into the specifics of my sister’s illness or her passing, but I am hardly the only person to experience grief, or try to figure out how to live in its constant echoes and ripples. And the specific pain of sibling grief is not often talked about and should be talked about more. So in this overdue post, I am going to talk about one specific facet of my grief, and we’re going to do it with an unlikely and un-looked-for helper: An urban legend from the internet.

This past week, I did a free mini course with The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic called Main Character Magic. It was cute, it was fun, and if you have never heard of The Carterhaugh School and the good doctors Cleto and Warman, you should really go check them out. I signed up with the specific aim of using Main Character Magic as a focus to sort of reground myself after this season of spikiness and melancholy. Each day the good doctors presented a small challenge drawn from the ATU folklore motif index (this is so nerdy and I love it) and day three’s motif was about magical obstacles appearing in the hero/heroine’s path as they flee the villain. We were asked to think about obstacles in our lives that appeared as if by dark magic and how we might deal with them. We were specifically encouraged to locate a legend that chimed with the obstacle we were currently facing and use it as a lens for understanding and navigating our current predicament. A couple fairy tales came into my mind, but the thing that stuck and just would not leave was The Backrooms.

Have you heard of The Backrooms? Well, now you have! They’re kind of an urban legend/bit of internet folklore/communal fiction that I came across when I was doing some research around ritual-game-focused creepypasta back in my college days, I think early 2019. They’re pretty unsettling. The Backrooms (which have since been developed into a video game, a YouTube series, and a film, none of which I have played or seen) are a sprawling, possibly endless, somewhat dilapidated, windowless labyrinth of old carpet, flimsy partition walls, and florescent lighting. It’s the saddest office building you’ve ever been in, completely empty, and it goes on forever. Click on The Backrooms link at the end of the previous paragraph if you’d like a visual. Anyway, you enter the Backrooms by accident, by walking through a weak point in reality, like suddenly finding you’ve walked through a wall that should have been impenetrable (no-clipping in gamer parlance) and once you’re there, you’re stuck. You live in The Backrooms now. Enjoy your life of bad lighting, gentle neglect, and moldering drop ceiling tiles. But why The Backrooms? Why was this weird artifact from one of my college papers showing up now as my magical obstacle? There were a lot of other options more “on brand” for me, if you will. But I’ve learned from experience that when an image is this insistent, it’s usually right, even if I don’t understand it yet. So I dug in.

Now, college-Marisa had some preexisting thinking on The Backrooms. They are a perfect metaphor for finding that you’ve somehow meandered into a soul-sucking career path from which you have no escape, one that of course requires you to spend what feels like eternity in a cubicle that gives you zero indication of time of day, weather, season, or anything else that would reassure your sweet little creature brain that it does indeed still live in a body, on planet Earth, on a specific day. Or maybe it calls to mind the weirdness that is living in a badly planned suburb, dominated by a blandness that endlessly repeats but with jarring incongruity, like a badly aligned repeating pattern printed on cheap curtains (cheaply made, at least; precisely zero curtains are actually cheap to buy.) But neither of those things are what’s being called up right now, of course. Here’s what I wrote regarding The Backrooms as I tried to explore what they might be here to show me:

The Backrooms are more a setting than a story, as if the magical obstacle were taken out of the fairy tale and set aside as a creepy little world unto itself. And this is appropriate for me, I think. The Backrooms aren't just liminal in that they are an in-between place (specifically an unbounded in-between space, which is just so unsettling...) they are also a liminal narrative space, again, perversely unbounded. They are excised from story to stand on their own. Their liminality encompasses both space and time and has the specific threat of consuming both the before and the after that would provide context and meaning to the interminable present.

I hadn’t quite realized I was talking about grief yet, but I can think of no better description of losing a sibling than “has the specific threat of consuming both the before and the after that would provide context and meaning to the interminable present.” Grief, at least in one of its facets, at least for me, is like being trapped in The Backrooms. No direction, no before, no after. One wrong turn that changed everything, and there’s no going back. There’s a sense of floating, of being unmoored and decontextualized. The world is bland, dim, and decomposing, and wrong. What’s the point of even engaging with that world? I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have my big sister in it, and I’m a somewhat stubborn—even quietly rebellious—person, so if I don’t want to, I won’t. I just won’t.

I want to be clear here: I am not saying I want to die, not at all. That, mercifully, is not my burden. I’m saying that after the loss of my sister, my natural inclination is to let the world slide past me, like water around a bead of oil, rather than once again become a creature made of water, that swims in it, that breathes it. This is hard for me to look at straight, because this is not the person I thought I was. This is not how I want to react to grief. But it’s what is. I can think of several things that might underlie this impulse. I could feel betrayed by the world, I could be afraid of experiencing another loss in the future, I could simply feel separated by experience, there might be some cowardice there, or maybe I’m just that tired. It’s probably all of those things.

And you know what? None of those things are wrong. Certainly, I needed some rest, some time away from the world. That’s why I chose not to seek employment when we moved to Maryland. I needed what I call “hermit crab time.” All good there, no notes. After all, I had been very busy. I went back to teaching ballet a week after my sister’s funeral, I worked as a bookseller, I was a library assistant at a high school, I started sending my writing out on submission. From the outside—or if I’m being honest, even from the inside—it hadn’t been especially obvious that I was lost in this maze. But it wouldn’t have been. I know that there is nothing so narcotic to me as being overworked. If I’m busy enough, I won’t feel pain at all. It’s one of the reasons I chose not to work when we moved to Maryland. It was time to deal with the pain. But at some point, my cozy little shell turned into something else. It expanded, lost its spirals and curves, the soft and bottomless rainbow of its nacre. It unfurled and refolded itself along crumpled yet sharp creases and angles—like the saddest moldy legal pad origami—into The Backrooms. How long have I been here? How long was I here and didn’t realize it?

Because grief is a strange creature. I can be genuinely smiling and happily talking to you and still be holding a very important piece of myself in reserve. She floats, her feet all tucked up so as to not have to walk upon this new and terrible earth that is so devoid of big sisters. She’s afraid to put her feet down. She’s afraid they’ll pass right through the the blades of grass like a ghost’s. Because this is the thing about grief, you don’t just lose the other person, you lose who you were when you were with them. I didn’t just lose my sister, I lost the feeling of being in her presence. I lost the reality of me she reflected back. That last one sounds weird and myopic, I know, but it’s the only way I can think to express it. I looked up to my big sister so much, I trusted her judgements of me much more than my own, more than anyone’s. My husband likes to quote this anime, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. There’s a battle scene where the younger brother figure, Simon, doesn’t believe he can do a Very Important Thing, and the elder brother figure, Kamina, encourages him by saying “Listen Simon, don’t believe in yourself. Believe in me. Believe in the Kamina who believes in you!” It’s that. I believed in my sister who believed in me. My self-conception is fuzzy and unreliable, but I could trust my sister. She saw me clearly, and I knew I was real because she saw me. I knew I was okay. From her recognition I gained solidity, and my feet had traction on the road of living. Was this super healthy and well-adjusted? I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t care. It just was. And now, it just isn’t. Or at least, it isn’t how it was before, because I do believe my sister is still with me.

And that, my friends, is how I find myself wandering the disorienting, unbounded liminal space of The Backrooms. Sure, there were other complicating factors. I moved to a new place—which can be enough to give you an identity crisis all by itself—and I went from working two jobs to not holding formal employment at all. But the dominant factor is definitely grief. And this is the riddle I have to answer to get out: How do I know who I am now? And more immediately, what do I do?

I’m still working on that first one and probably will be forever, but here’s the answer I came up with to the second question:

How does one escape that which is not only spatially endless, but also that which has no before and no after? The first answer that comes to me is to write a story into that excised setting. Expand it, resolve it into fine detail so that it contains befores and afters within itself that can be used to build an escape. I might literally write a story to do just that. But my hunch is that that's not quite it. I think there's a better, if more challenging, way. Maybe the way to escape my own Backrooms is to do the opposite. Stop sifting through the past trying to read it like moldy tea leaves, stop worrying about the future, and instead just take in the bad lighting, the sad yellow wallpaper, the moldy carpet, and all they represent as they press in and spread out around me. Just sit with the place I'm in, see how it's all put together and what it's made of, and when I'm ready, just start dismantling a wall. Any wall. And when I think about it, the things in the recent past that have helped me exit this liminal space to small degrees are not thinking, or planning, or theorizing, they're small concrete actions that take place in the real physical world or otherwise go outside myself. They involve going places, interacting with new and newish people, offering physical assistance, accomplishing physical tasks, taking on responsibility, or opening myself up to the possibility of rejection. They're things that put chinks in the sad yellow walls, things that let in the air and sun.

Do you see yourself there, dear reader? You are helping me take down the walls. I appreciate it. Because a life in The Backrooms is not the life my big sister wanted for me. I know that. She said so. In fact, among other things, she explicitly said, “I don’t know, Rissy. Do you ever think you should just, like, write shit?” Well I’m doing it dude, I’m writing shit, and I’m even letting other people read it. I miss you, and I love you so much. I am the luckiest little sister in the world. Thank you. I love you. Thank you. I love you.

The image featured with today’s post is “The Emperor Meets the Three Sisters,” an illustration by the English artist, Henry Justice Ford, 1906. I chose it because it’s a near perfect representation of me and my sisters. The seated brunette and redhead are me and my twin sister, and the standing redhead is our big sister. The colors are almost perfect. My twin sister is dressed in blue, her archetypal color, but mine and my big sister’s dresses should be swapped, so she is in purple and I am in the pinkish red. So close!