HERE, REMEMBERED
A Requiem for the Nine-year Pretending
"The weight in your left shoulder—
it was never yours."
What This Is
This is a requiem for everyone who survived organizational drowning by learning to walk on the ocean floor. Written from October 2032, looking back at the "nine-year pretending" (2020-2029), it documents both the drowning and the walking out—the mass exodus from systems that revealed themselves as death machines during the pandemic and never stopped consuming.
The book weaves between multiple voices and timelines: The Walking One who makes tea at 5:45 AM, The Executive Learning Dirt who grows tomatoes from seeds that remember, The One Who Stayed and transformed from within, River who calls from Portland, the children who ask the hardest questions. It moves between the drowning times when we optimized our dying, the walking out when some finally left, and the after/during/now where new patterns slowly emerge. It's simultaneously eulogy for what died, witness to what survived, and birth announcement for what's becoming.
The text itself breathes with grief and liberation. Some sections read like fever dreams, others like documentary evidence, still others like love letters to everyone still trapped. This isn't triumphant escape narrative—it's the messy, guilty, glorious documentation of badly-done survival becoming conscious choice.
Who This Serves
This book serves those who walked out and those still drowning. The ones who left everything at 3 PM on a Tuesday because their body simply stood up and walked. The ones still inside, swimming through another day, knowing but not yet moving. Both the escaped and the entrapped need this requiem—the first to understand what they survived, the second to know survival is possible.
It's NOT for those who want clean narratives of transformation. The walking documented here is messy, costly, incomplete. If you need heroes and villains rather than humans doing their best in impossible systems, if you want solutions rather than witness, this requiem will frustrate. But if you need your survival—however compromised—honored as holy, this book holds you.
What You'll Encounter
The Tuesday knowing - Why organizational death always reveals itself at 3 PM on Tuesday, when exhaustion becomes intelligence
Badly-done survival as revolution - How continuing despite impossible conditions is its own form of resistance
The impossible math - One paycheck, four lives, the algebra of drowning and why walking out requires miracles
October 2032 perspective - What becomes visible three years after the pretending stops
Both/and redemption - Why those who left and those who stayed are both right, both wrong, both holy
How This Connects
Read this before:
We Gather But Do Not Meet - The diagnosis of what you're escaping
Testimony - Individual voices from inside the drowning
Read this after:
The Field Manual - Practical protocols for the walking
Organizational Metaphysics - Understanding the cosmology of what happened
Or start here if:
You've walked out and need witness
You're still inside and need permission
You understand that requiems are for the living
Related Koans
"Already gone.
Still typing."
"What ended
that you're still attending?"
"Stop."
Get This Book
Available on Amazon
Published: 2025
Publisher: Fractal Praxis Press
Format: Paperback, Kindle
Practice This Work
Self-guided
Read as validation for your walking (or preparation for it)
Share with others who are swimming/walking/drowning
Use as permission slip for whatever comes next
Facilitated
Strategic Witnessing with Performance Rising
Group rhythm assessment and restoration