About the text: While I’m still finishing a few texts, I was thinking that there were a few things that happened to me that I don’t have a place to put them. Small things. I decided to put them here.

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Birdy has gone away, as she often does after having her babies, but something very odd and unfortunate happened.

A wounded (or perhaps, very old) bird showed up in our terrace a few days ago. Poor thing was trembling so much, and he was very scared of us, as Birdy is. But he couldn’t move very well, and it looked like he was in pain.

I got so scared at first because I thought it was Birdy. I’m still not sure, since she still hasn’t returned. This bird seems smaller, though, so maybe it could be one of her offspring. Maybe he never met Birdy.

I wish we could’ve done something about it. My grandmother put a little lid filled with water next to him when she saw him. She seemed less worried, but equally intrigued. I only had time to go check him once; after a few hours he was already dead.

I hope you’re in a better place, love.

And I selfishly hope you’re not Birdy.

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“You’ll never know the hurt I suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you
Your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry

Idiot wind
Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind
Blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves”

Completely obsessed with Idiot Wind for the millionth time. Such an odd song from Dylan.

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Okay, so the funniest thing happened.

I was doing a sudoku on Sudoku dot com on extreme difficulty and I quickly ran into a wall. One of those moments where you know what most squares could be, but it doesn’t tell you anything; classic of the more difficult sudokus.

Well, when this happens and I’m on that site, I take two screenshots of the board and try to see where is the farthest place I can go if this 5/6 pair is a 5, for example, one screenshot being for each of their possibilities. I’ve seen the guys on Cracking the Cryptic doing kind of a version of this mentally with colors and all, but the site doesn’t have them, so I just go to Paint and draw the numbers like a moron.

And then you say: “Well, can’t this be kind of a long thing? Isn’t this like not the best way of trying to do what you want to do?”

Yeah. But you know the funniest fucking thing? This time, while I was doing this, just checking the farthest I could go, I accidentally finished the puzzle on Paint.

I laughed so hard when I noticed. I was like “For sure I must’ve missed something and this is wrong. I surely didn’t just solved a puzzle by not solving it.”

But it was correct. I thought it was the funniest thing, you can even check the screenshots for yourself.

I’m sorry if the explanation is confusing, in case you’re not familiar with sudokus. But what happened is equally confusing, so don’t worry.

And yeah, I will try and find a better, quicker way of solving hard sudokus in the future, ok? Go easy on me. But this was very fun, still.

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I am playing Earthbound now. It’s the second time I play this game; in the first time I went to what felt like the last few moments before the final boss, but never finished the game. Life got in the way; it was most likely around the year my mom passed away. Now, I’ll try going all the way.

It’s quite funny to see so many modern aspects of the genre while you’re playing it, but it makes sense since Earthbound-like is probably its own genre at this point.

One thing that got me is that the game stablishes a really sweet connection between the family of the kids and the kids. I’m so used with Pokémon, where the mother doesn’t care about you and you don’t have a father.

In here, to save you have you have to call your father; he handles your finances as well. But there’s this very sweet aspect they introduced that if you don’t call your mom for an extended period of time, Ness (the protagonist) will start missing turns because he is homesick, missing his mom. I find that so sweet.

I also get a bit emotional sometimes when I call her. I put the name of the dog as Maggie, the name of my dog who also passed away, so sometimes she will say something like “Maggie is taking a bath”. And she will be so happy and understanding of your task. She’s so supportive, so funny.

It’s so strange. The sensation of not having a mom anymore. She used to be this omnipresent person and now she is not in a single grain of dust around. I suppose for men my age this is the time where you’d be trying to replace her with a lady, while Sigmund Freud is probably watching from far away with odd curiosity. It’s what they call “mom issues”, and I also suppose everyone has to have one issue or the other.

But to me it always felt different. I always wanted to be more like the aspects of her that I appreciate so much, instead of looking for it in other people. I say to my friends that I want to have kids and be a mom, because I don’t even know how a dad acts or what he does.

I’ll try filling the space she left with myself. My lovers will have their spaces to be filled, and I will have to learn how to be an omnipresent person, like she was. To my future wife, to my kids. And to my nothings in the way. I would like to be a presence that creates life, but opposite to where my mother stopped; I would like for the people that loved me to be able to create life for themselves, beyond me. Forgetting me by a day undone.

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Listen to this month’s Nightporter playlist below.

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