This blog is a record of my existence, and a certain latent dread that has gnawed at me for decades. Here you will find documented my descent into an ever-increasing solitude and unspoken mania that lives inside us all. This blog discusses the parts of life that lurk in the shadows: the nagging emptiness of a vacant room, the abandoned childhood stores now a maze of decaying corridors, the color of dread and the feeling you get when the evening closes all around the city. This blog is the haunting melody that you can't seem to get out of your head; the eerie sense you can't shake that you've been here before, and the clues left behind when someone vanishes. This is what remains at the end of the world.
I started this blog as a way to chronicle my thoughts in the wake of a divorce and recovery from addiction; it also serves as a collection of some of my poetry and short stories, the bulk only existing on now-yellowing pages I have kept since I began writing in middle school. This blog has evolved over the years, however, into featuring a collection of scattered thoughts, of eerie experiences I can't get out of my head, and of the stories that haunt me. I have very little contact with the outside world, and keep very few friends. When I am gone, this will be the only thing of mine that remains. I have intentionally left no contact information or means of commenting as this is merely a place to keep my thoughts on a life lived alone on the periphery of society. You are welcome to stay and read; you alone are one of a few that know I exist at all.
I stated before in my blog entry on Sandra Ross that there are probably close to a dozen unsolved missing persons' and murder cases in my city off of and around Alston Avenue, the street I've taken to work for years. This is one of these cases. Long Meadow Park is just off of Alston Avenue and near where my father works on Gilbert Street. If Sandra Ross' case can be seen as an anomaly in quiet Apex, North Carolina, in neighboring Wake County, Tonita Michelle Brooks' case is unfortunately just the opposite. I don't feel at all good about the possibility of a happy ending for this case, as East Durham is a world away from the leafy Raleigh suburbs, and her transience makes it much more likely that she met with foul play. Brooks' case dates back to just 2019—and unlike Ross, who disappeared before I was born, I swear I have seen Brooks in downtown Durham before her disappearance, back when I lived in downtown Durham in the mid-2000s. Details on this case are slim, but I am relaying what I've researched here.