The frequency of the man I've been calling in

Or is this all bullshit?

I haven’t talked about this in a long time. Consider this a Dump since it’s 1:58 am as I tippy tap away, and my brain has decided it’s time to get to work.

Okay.

Here I am.

My mind circles through thoughts, experiences, and feelings in the more-silent hours of my day, when I don’t have to do anything but think and listen to my daughter snore softly, while Alexa plays rain sounds that loop every 6.5 seconds. Torrential downpour that would absolutely flood my apartment is more like it— the sound. Yet somehow my brain doesn’t find it disturbing.

It can separate “faux” rain from real, easily enough. Maybe because I’ve listened to this recording for almost 3 years non-stop.

My daughter very rarely slept in her own bed. We co-slept for 4 months and tried sleep training, in my exhaustion, but it was easier to feed her and have a broken back than it was to get out of bed every night, every 3-4 hours, to feed her. So I went back to cosleeping.

And then when she was two, I built her a unicorn bed, and she slept in there until my mother-in-law died suddenly, and my ex wanted her close. So, since 2024, she’s slept with us. She has a bed; she would sleep in her own bed now, I think. I can’t afford a second bed for her. So for now, we sleep together and listen to rain sounds every night that we’re together.

On the nights she isn’t here, I choose silence. Or, close enough, if the man upstairs isn’t doing a jig above my head. He was up a few minutes ago. I have no idea what he’s possibly doing. I’m not choosing to be awake right now, and I assume he isn’t either, but I’m also not loudly awake.

Maybe I should turn my keyboard sounds on?

No. That’s an asshole move, if not funny.

So, I sit here and think about the nights when I am alone, and the people who come into my head, and this idea I’ve felt in my chest for as long as I can remember about feeling the frequencies of people. I didn’t have the language for it at twelve, when I started building my internal world. The one I paint over our current reality, even to this day. The one I layered over my life, to help soften the way I felt, unable to speak. “Shout out to the selective mutes,” I saw someone post the other day, here on Substack. And the irony that my mom was a speech pathologist and no one said, “This isn’t normal,” is baffling.

I have 4%, and I won’t ramble.

So, in the forest behind my house, I would disappear myself from the house that called my mute presence a burden, and created characters who knew who I was.

At first, they were guardians. Beings who could keep me safe. And me, and kids in general, held secret powers in their chests. Hidden.

And as I grew, those guardians took shape into other feelings. Real friendship, camaraderie and also, as a teenager, I wondered softly, what about love? I dared it. Even then, I dared it to be. In secret.

Even when my mom would give me that head tipped down, hand outstretched to my sketchbook, the diary I couldn’t write because my sister would violate my sanctity, write in them, and laugh with my mom. I stopped writing in a diary at age seven. I still have it. I still have the notes she wrote. Somewhere.

3%. Here we go.

So, my mom would ask me about my characters. If I didn’t give her my sketchbook, she’d just look at it if I didn’t keep it guarded. She’d go through loose papers I left out and bring anything she didn’t understand to my dad, “out of concern”.

My images were dark. People dragged around, screaming, black, twisting spirals, black ink, and sometimes, if I gave myself a paper cut or got a nosebleed, I’d hide blood in them. Just because. I figured, if no one saw me, I’d leave a trace behind. Maybe aliens would reincarnate me in a thousand years and hug me.

Ha.

And now, here, at 2:14 am, Tippy Tappy Sr., and I write in the dark. About frequencies and loneliness.

Because I am not lonely now.

Not in the way I was.

I feel like I have friends who hold me now. Who can handle who I am, and don’t flinch. Who will read this and get a piece of the puzzle and not mock it?

Who would have been my friends, had life been different? And they’re the frequencies I knew existed without proof, and painted in the forest.

All of them.

Even the love. I think.

That one is still so hard for me to trust.

2%.

But I’m really, really trying.

---

Thank goodness for the copy + paste function on Apple products. Since Substack wants me to choose a section for this, it doesn’t allow you to do it on your phone. So with 1% left, I braved my kitchen monster (a god damn daddy of a silverfish who lives in my house and roams freely at night) and grabbed my laptop.

I risked my life for this.

Sincerely,

Melissa V. Guckerbungin.

PS, I’ll talk about the frequencies more. I must take to the dreamworld before the tempers return and render me unfit for polite society tomorrow (or today).