These are observations based on loneliness in a new place, where others were obviously grounded and I felt split in two. I’ve never been good at casual, though eventually I learned how. All names have been changed to initials and they are in no particular order.

No, you can’t know who they are. Don’t be ridiculous!

_{photo: Pinterest}

D.

It was the dry wit behind your responses that called me to you first. You didn’t want to be important to me, but you tried. I know you tried. You made me sad for the first time in years. It reminded me that I’m human in an unbroken way, so thank you.

Missing someone you don’t know boils down to an idea. But was it the idea of you? Or was it never getting close, because you wouldn’t let me even when you opened? For what it’s worth, I want to know you even after you pushed me away.

N.

You were the second one. I’ve never been one to insert myself, but I don’t mind occupying the space between metal and skin, tungsten and stone. Because who says you can’t have it all? Who says you can’t have me?

I only wonder how you handle unweaving your strings from my thighs and the tender spot on my neck. How it feels laying next to her after me. In a sense, she chose me too. I wonder how crowded your pillow is while mine swims with ghosts.

R.

There is only one other man who has made me feel as secure as you have; though your roll in my life is one of a nomad. It had been a long time since I’d felt silly, laying in bed with our legs tangled together, as we laughed about something completely ridiculous that I couldn’t begin to recall. The only thing I remember is feeling light and safe.

J.

I like you even though you don’t know how to handle me. To be fair, I don’t think you can handle anyone but yourself right now. You’re just in the beginning throws of your grief, and from what you told me the wave hasn’t hit yet. I admire your optimism that it never will.

It makes things easier though. You can’t hurt me, J. And that’s good, because you would if I let you. Repeating the same spoken and unfulfilled promises feels trite, because it is, so we’ll keep this short and honest: I’m here if you need me.*

_{*No longer applicable as of 2026}

B.

You reminded me that the greener the flags, the more clearly to watch out. It makes me grateful that I met you in a solid state over a separated one, which made losing you not much of a loss. But how could it be?

You didn’t make yourself known after the last time, which was our first. It should make me feel used. It doesn’t. If anything I feel nothing but the absence of feeling. I’m glad you never called me back. I think you felt that space yawning between us too.

M.

So much promise in the attention you gave. While I know old habits die hard and that those in your profession don’t typically ever allow a habit to fizzle, you showed me that I should have trusted my experience. You overstepped my boundaries continuously, and while I’m not mad, I’m disappointed. You weren’t supposed to be like this.

O.

You became mad at answers you didn’t like to questions you shouldn’t have asked. I think we were just speaking two different languages. I hope you forgive me. Know I’ve been watching from afar and I couldn’t be more proud of you.

C.

A good reminder that the more handsome the face, the more shallow the depths. Typically. Hot people are so incredibly boring. Never tell someone the next time you kiss you’ll ‘use tongue.’

L.

I fear I let my curiosity and confidence get the better of me when pursuing something casual with you. Retrospectively it’s obvious that this would have been difficult for you maintain. You were a moth to the flame, and I had to turn off the light. I was becoming weary at how sad it was to watch you bump up against a lightbulb.

I do miss our budding friendship, but I’m not confident that you’d stay at the proximity I’d want. Which means we’re not really friends, are we?

A.

There were a lot of behaviors you had that I was unsure about, but in the spirit of giving dating an actual try, I allowed the time needed for truth to show itself. From being warm and excited you became cold and weird. That was enough for me.

D.2

It should make me more angry that you took off the condom without my knowledge, but it just makes me numb. I’m not surprised, and even more unsurprised that you never rescheduled the date I cancelled. Besides, you talk during films.

E.

It hurts my own feelings that I nearly didn’t include you here, because you were perfectly kind. You liked to read stuff I’d never even heard of before. You did standup, which I found interesting. But if you don’t drink caffeine, or alcohol, or like cheese, we’ll never be able to have pasta and wine with an after dinner espresso. I didn’t realize how essential that was to me.

B.2

Who let you in? Get out!

Tomie. Junji Ito.

Photo: ukposters

Junji Ito is fucking cool. If you like horror and manga, you should definitely look at his work; the storytelling within captures a type of malevolence that I find difficult to resist being completely and utterly despaired by. He’s also ridiculously adorable despite his insane content.

Tomie is a regular teenage girl, except that she’s not. An immortal being, she uses manipulation to bring people (mostly men) past the brink of obsession with her, driving them into a rage. It’s twisted and weird and beautiful, the lines both capturing a femineity and a gruesome edge to the physical violence women are forced to experience in their lifetimes that becomes part of their fabric of being. My favorite part about this illustration of Tomie is her soft, violent beauty; there’s something poisonous and deadly seeping out, but the surface is delicate.

How They Met Themselves. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Photo: The Fitzwilliam Museum

Studying the the doppelganger has made this painting unavoidable. But why would I avoid it? It’s so beautiful that I’m trying to hitch a train to Cambridge just to see it in person. Running into your doppelganger is supposed to give you the creeps, and this painting is no different in asserting that. While one faints, the other draws his sword, and their doppelgangers assessing them with a curious studiousness.

If I was a doppelganger, or ran into mine, I fear I’d be like the couple on the left. Though whose to say which couple is original, anyway.

Theatre Du Grand Guignol Poster.

Photo: eBay

Grand Guignol was a Parisian theatre in the late 1800’s that specialized in horror shows. The productions were known for being particularly graphic, and like most weird and amazing things, the theatre was previously a chapel. The actions on stage were said to be so graphic that they caused fainting, vomiting, or sexual arousal. The boxes underneath the balcony were available to rent for those who wanted some private space (wink-wink).

Anyway, I think this poster is excessively macabre and oddly whimsical, and it makes me wish I lived in a time when someone would actually hand paint this kind of thing. It makes it all the more special, the details all the more pertinent.

The Green Ribbon. Northernblots.

Photo: northernblots

There once was a girl named Jenny. She wore a green ribbon around her neck and traumatized all of us when it untied itself and her freakin’ head fell off. The story was originally told in a children’s book called In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories. And while I remember reading it, I also don’t, and there are many people in my life who have a similar tale re: Miss Jenny.

The print itself is beautiful. The artist really captured the tension between outer appearances and inner emotions. You can see their other work on instagram and even order it.

Saturn Devouring His Son, but Backrooms. Unknown.

Photo: x

Obviously I loved the Backrooms so much I wrote a post on it relating to consumerism and AI, and this picture tickles me. The original Francisco Goya painting always made me feeling like Saturn was appalled at his actions, and this updated painting captures that well. A pastiche? Perhaps. I can’t imagine it being more affective in any other form.

Isle of the Dead. Arnold Böcklin.

Photo: Wikipedia

There are six versions of Isle of the Dead, but my favorite is the third one (1883). It seems to be situated on the cusp of day, the dusk settling in before evening is upon the island. The darkness in its center is vortex-like and appears to go on forever, perhaps even into another dimension. One thing is clear, it’s somewhere we’re not supposed to go as living things.

Guess we’ll never know, but that’s part of the charm; the mystery.

I’m familiar with the backrooms conceptually, but it’s not something I know a ton about. It’s part of creepypasta-ilk, shown to be large, indefinable, deserted spaces that usually manifest as a yellow-toned, empty office. Indoor pools and abandoned malls are all fair game, too. It has to be liminal, deserted, and most importantly, off. The concept itself is fucking creepy, and though most of us probably couldn’t describe the definition of liminality, the place does capture and own the term to a point where we get it without having to reach for a dictionary^[1].

Photo: Pinterest

I’ve been particularly excited about this movie because I’m studying the uncanny and its manifestations in horror stories as part of my PhD research. Why things that look normal but simply aren’t give us the ick and why we like to look. Why we can’t stop looking. We’re compelled to. I’ve roped grief and postmodernism into this too, so I don’t have much brain space these days.

With all that in mind, Backrooms had a big task ahead of it. How do you make a movie about freaking nothing?

Photo: Pinterest

It’s so meta. And really, how do you capture the feelings that are dredged up in liminal spaces? That not wanting to move forward and not wanting to look behind you that accompanies such a concept of fear?

Video games already do this super well, but it’s different when you’re the one venturing forth with your mouse or joystick versus being the voyeur. Movies remove that agency. Which is why we’re able to criticize the protagonist’s choices and scoff at what we most certainly wouldn’t do.

The plot of Backrooms is pretty straightforward; it opens with someone in a hazmat suit running from a malevolent being in what we understand as the liminal space of the backrooms. They’re attacked and killed, and the tape cuts to the reflection of a group of scientists coldly watching what we just witnessed. We then jump to the main storyline, which follows Clark, an alcoholic, failing furniture store owner who’s going through a divorce, and Mary, his therapist. Clark eventually finds one of the walls in his store leads to the backrooms. I won’t go through all the plot here. My point is that there was a plot and it was necessary for such a loose concept.

Spoilers past this point, you’ve been warned!

It wasn’t the plot I found titillating; what I found the most provoking about the entire film was the imagery and the reflection glaring back at me.

Boringly enough, my first thought was consumerism, because it always is. It’s where my thoughts intersect these days over the suffocating pressure to be the most optimized version of our selves. I could drive myself crazy over the presence of wellness items like the Oura ring that assign sleep scores. It’s not just that we can optimize ourselves with machine assigned scores (which imply competition off phrasing alone), whether that be caloric intake or sleep or exercise, it’s that this information is typically only available to those who have the economic means to get it. And beyond that, is it even true? What version of ourself are we left with at the end, and is it really that much better?

My Apple watch has a similar function, which is why it sits in my nightstand, dead as fuck. Maybe I’m just worried I won’t score high!

As Clark explores the backrooms, the spaces get increasingly distorted, as if being copied over and over and over again. Stacked chairs are glued together, pairs of shoes sink into a solid but sand-like floor. There’s another scene where Mary finds herself on the edge of a room that is a cross section of a multi-storied building that’s had a big chunk taken from its center. It honestly looks like something you’d see in a dreamscape. In a comically horrible moment of bravery, she has to climb a set of stairs extending over the bottomless space to a door positioned in the ceiling. Naturally, it opens inwards, challenging her balance. It’s like an even more bizarre Alice in Wonderland. Everything is massively off, and not made for actual people to exist within it.

In the Western world, we don’t have a choice when it comes to existing within a consumerist society; consumerism’s relationship with technology has allowed us to create a culture where we can whimsically order nearly anything we want and have it delivered within the day. We’re encouraged to do so, both socially and through advertisement. Which can be good for people that are immobile or need extra help, but altogether has spawned other issues amongst the growing presence of AI.

It’s hard to know what products these days are even real, and if we need them. They’ve become pastiche, and often times, total bullshit. Warped and warped by the constant duplication and filtering process of production in the name of improvement.

Like really, how tall is this fucking fake ass cat?

Photo: Amazon.co.uk

The movie is set in the 90’s, and yet it felt more like a mockery of the actual period even though the furniture and clothing were some of the most realistic representations of what I remember. Memory is a fickle thing. I can’t even put my finger on why Mary’s therapy office gave me the ick, but it did in a way only uncanny things can. Not everything needs explanation, and sometimes that’s what makes it so terrifying. The inexplainable robs us of our ability to reckon and reason with fate.

I also love the idea of being scared by a couch.

As I sat in the theatre watching Clark getting eaten by his distorted, pirate-self (I promise this makes sense), technological singularity kept bumping up against my consciousness. Technological singularity is a concept that describes the unavoidable moment when technology moves faster than we’re capable of understanding, making us less intelligent than the tools we’ve created.

Personally, I think we’re well past that. I still don’t know what the ‘cloud’ is, and I’m doubtful I could describe how the internet works. I can barely describe what AI really is besides a supped-up search engine, and it’s fucking everywhere. Nearly every copy writing job I find is less about writing and more about feeding information into AI.

More and more companies are switching priorities to developing methods of shaping AI in ways that will maintain our consumerist world. At what point does the use of AI and its ability to replace and redistribute the way we function in society become a reality? That’s not to mention the resources required to run something like AI. Being ethical has never felt so difficult. Backrooms captures these fears in me. And while I don’t think everyone will like it and it won’t be my comfort film, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since the lights went up. We were literally the last people to leave the theatre.

Everything feels like a moral question these days. The amount of information that we’re fed each day has created a need in us to shut off, and I’m not the first person to do a social media cleanse.

But then again, you can’t make people feel anything. Horror is in a unique position of demanding the viewer place aside logic for feeling, since so often the feelings it aims to encapsulate are emotions we shove aside. Besides, trauma compounds when undealt with, multiplying over time as it warps through generations and the experiences we’re filtered through. The monsters created from it are always there to be reckoned with.

Kinda sounds like the backrooms, doesn’t it?

[1] If you’re curious, Merriam-Webster defines liminal as so: 1: of, relating to, or situated at a sensory threshold : barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response; 2: of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition : in-between, transitional