This is a version of a post I’ve wanted to put out much sooner, but haven’t been able to properly express. It feels weird to write it, but nothing has felt normal for four weeks now. Might as well embrace the weirdness.
Last month, my mom passed away in her sleep. She was just 58. The suddenness of it all, the way it just sort of fucking happened and then the next day came and so on, has left me feeling unmoored. For the first three weeks my dad and I just sort of kept ourselves busy. My brother would come over and we’d clean the house. We went out to dinner at a Tex-Mex restaurant after meeting with the reverend my mom would’ve wanted to deliver her memorial service and chatted about politics and life shit like nothing was fundamentally Incorrect about things. Just doing shit to keep our minds occupied.
This week has been harder. Stranger. There’s less shit to do to keep completely busy. Everyone has returned to the pattern of their lives, sans my mom’s presence. We replaced a router. I watched The Game Awards with friends in the No Escape Discord server. I’ve returned to video games. None of this feels right. It feels like there should be more sadness, more devastation at the loss. I am angry with myself for not feeling the way I’m supposed to, even though everyone has said “there’s no right way to grieve and you’re going to feel emotions randomly.” There are logistical issues to worry about – like my rent just went up $200 – but I don’t even care about all that right this second. I am simply plagued by the idea that nothing about this whole situation has felt real despite its rapid normalization.
It probably won’t surprise you that I haven’t been sleeping well through it all. It’s not dreams or nightmares that are causing my insomnia, but rather the fact that I can’t get my own fucking brain to shut up long enough to sleep. So I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos. Early on it was a whole let’s play of Pacific Drive done by Alex Steacy for LoadingReadyRun‘s Twitch channel, despite my having finished Pacific Drive myself just a week or so prior to [gestures wildly]. Then, when that ran out, it was whatever longform video about scary ARGs I could let occupy my thoughts. For the last week or so, it’s been videos about the “Backrooms.”
If you’ve never been to the Backrooms, you didn’t work as a trainer on the night shift for a call center at the Xerox plant in Yukon, OK between 2015 and 2019. Its original concept is that of a “liminal space,” a place in between places, and it’s usually a series of empty rooms with aging wallpaper, moodily lit by bad fluorescent or tungsten lighting. If you want to “increase the feeling of liminality” in a space, introduce elements to the room/hallways that definitely should not be there, like one dingy office chair (or a hundred [there is no middle range here]). Since breaking out of discussions around the “liminal aesthetic,” the Backrooms has become a supernatural site, full of false walls and floors, strange anomalies and, in some renditions of its mythos, hostile entities. It’s not uncommon to come across Backrooms media that either directly references shit like the SCP Foundation or modern urban legends like Slenderman, or is clearly influenced by them.
There are so many videos about the Backrooms on YouTube, all varying in quality, and they all have millions of views. There are apparently just as many video games that aim to reproduce the Backrooms, either directly or through vibes, and of course they do so to varying degrees of success. People clearly eat this shit up. There’s something resonant about a place that Feels Incorrect being identified as such. The Imaginary Engine Review‘s Phoenix Simms, writing for Paste, speculates that part of the reason we’re so attracted to the Backrooms is because it calls attention to our struggle to make meaning out of meaninglessness: “Who are we without the rhythm of commuting to and from work? In quarantine and sheltering in place for months on end, are we leading meaningless lives? Did work even give us any meaning in the first place, or were we projecting meaning onto the experience whilst distracting ourselves from the fact that just being is enough? Were our everyday routines a lie sold to us by those in power?” Katie Wickens at PC Gamer wonders whether it has anything to do with our fascination with the eldritch and unknowable, making direct comparisons to the megastructures in BLAME! by Tsutomu Nihei and the fictional city of Rl’yeh in Lovecraft’s mythology. The power of the Backrooms is so evident that it has even inspired mainstream creatives, like Severance showrunner Dan Erickson, to go all-out on the disconnected weirdness in their own projects.
I think most people are unnerved by the Backrooms. It’s easy to see why. They create monsters to fill up the negative space, anomalies to break up the monotony, quirks in geometry and geography to attempt to anchor what is by necessity unanchorable to the real world, or to video game logic, or to the rules and mores of horror and folklore. But the Backrooms draws me in because it resists easy interpretation. An empty series of rooms is just as uncanny without jumpscares as with them. It makes me feel less bad about finding my current reality to be incorrect, skewed, a little bit off. I feel a little more at home there.
Thank you all for your patience, kind words and well-wishes as I’ve been dealing with this loss.
I’m not letting go of No Escape.
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