#but then I had a bit of an identity crisis for a week straight agonizing between relating to type 4s more or type 7s | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

setepenre-set · 5 years

Text

My Life Is A Fanfic As Written By Me

I’m sitting alone in the dark, in the passenger seat of the car, waiting for her to come back.

She offered to let me come with her when she went inside to check us into the hotel, but I said I’d be okay. She was only going to be gone for five minutes, right? And we’d been together all day in the car, and we spent the entire week together before that; I don’t generally spend that much time in someone’s company without needing some alone time.

Of course I’ll be okay.

It is about two seconds after she disappears behind the doors of the hotel lobby that I realize my mistake.

I don’t need alone time; why did I ever think I wanted alone time; alone time sucks. What I actually want is for her to come back right now, immediately, if not sooner. I want her to come back so she can talk to me some more, about anything, about everything. I love talking to her; I love hearing what she thinks about things; the way her mind works is fascinating and so much fun; I love making her laugh, seeing her smile. Her mouth is made for smiling—the edges of her lips draw to sharp little upturned curves, like the smile is already there, hidden and waiting.

She has romance novel heroine eyes—such a complex color, wide and framed with long dark lashes. Lovely and sweet, the sweetness contrasted by the wicked arch of her eyebrows. Her eyebrows arch even more when she’s saying something clever and her face is so expressive; I could look at it forever, the scars on her high cheekbones like constellations of stars, and this is the longest five minutes ever; this is the worst; it feels like an eternity since she left, feels like she’s never going to come back; maybe I should go in after her; no, that would be weird; maybe I should—

The door of the hotel lobby opens and she’s there, framed by the golden electric light that spills out into the darkness and the pulse of absolute joy that goes through me at the sight of her is so strong that it makes my heart leap and—

oh.

so that’s—

—ah—

—that’s definitely a—a thing, but it can’t be a thing, right; it can’t be, because—

(stop. wait. let’s go back just a bit.) Two days ago:

“Can we talk about this?”

We’re lying in bed together, having just woken up from a road-trip crash nap when she asks me that. The fact that I’m not sure what she’s talking about must show on my face, because she answers the question I didn’t ask.

“The us thing,” she says, watching my face. “I’m not crazy, right? You feel this, too?”

I nod—I’ve never felt this close to anyone; we only just met in person a week ago and I already feel like we’ve known each other forever. I feel more connected to her than I’ve ever felt to another person; she is by far my best and closest friend—

Again, she must read what I’m about to say in my expression, because she gives a slight little shake of her head, and, still without looking away from me, says—

“You know I’m in love with you, right?”

And I just

p a n i c

“Is that okay?” she asks, still looking at me so intently.

“Y-yeah,” I say, meaning oh god help

because

no I didn’t know and she can’t really love me, not the person that I actually am, the person who’s so weird and broken and unsatisfactory, and when she realizes who I really am she’s going to be disappointed, and she’s going to be disappointed in me anyway because I can’t feel the same way and I’m going to lose her oh god

I’ve identified as demisexual for a while now, but I’ve always had a suspicion that maybe I was aroace, or—I don’t know, broken, and using the aroace identity to hide that—because if I was aroace, that meant I wasn’t broken. If I had been aroace I would have felt differently about it. See—whenever I’ve questioned whether what I was feeling for a person was romantic and/or sexual attraction, the feeling I was examining always had something—

—unpleasant—

—at the bottom of it. A kind of awful twisting in the pit of my stomach, a heavy fluttering like stone wings, and I always assumed that was the ‘butterflies in your stomach’ feeling everyone talks about.

And I thought that if I was ever going to fall in love, I was going to have to learn to enjoy that feeling.

And now, lying in bed beside her, listening to her say she’s in love with me—

I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have it at all.

So I can’t be in love with her. And that’s—

Awful; it’s awful and it makes me feel awful and it makes me feel cheated and upset, because—

If I was ever going to fall in love with anyone, of course it would be her.

So I really must be broken—or completely aroace, which is the kinder, non-broken alternative.

I manage to tell her some of this, probably not very clearly because of the panic, which makes it hard to think straight.

“That’s okay,” she says gently when I’m through babbling, and I can tell she means it, which is baffling. This isn’t okay; how can she think this is okay? “It doesn’t change anything for me. I never expected you to feel the same way; I just wanted to tell you. I want however much of you that you want to give me. I’m always going to want more, but being your best friend like this is enough.”

And I can tell that she means this, too, which is the only thing that keeps me from dissolving entirely in my panic. She even still lets me sleep in the same bed with her that night, which helps, too.

So.

Back to me, having an existential crisis in the car two days later:

She comes out of the hotel doors and my heart just about explodes with joy, and then she walks towards the car.

She’s smiling when she gets in, an expression that changes to one of concern after she gets a look at my expression, which is fair, since I’m sure my face has to be doing something weird.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Y-yeah,” I say, meaning no I am absolutely NOT okay; I am having feelings of some kind and I do not know how to handle them help.

The existential crisis does not abate as she parks the car, nor does it abate as we carry our things upstairs and into the hotel room. She flops down on the bed, and after a moment of agonizing indecision, I lie down…kind of extremely on top of her, but it’s okay; she said stuff like this is okay; she said nothing had to change, and we’ve always been really physically affectionate, ever since the first time we met in person and she hugged me and I didn’t want to let go, and this is FINE. IT’S FINE. SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST VERY PHYSICALLY AFFECTIONATE WITH THEIR TOTALLY PLATONIC FRIENDS, OKAY.

Some people just want to lie on top of their totally platonic friends and stroke their face and tell them everything they like about them…which is what I end up doing.

I fell less panicked, now that we’re this close, but I also feel sort of like I’m drowning in her, and I close my eyes to try to steady myself, and when I open them, she’s pushed up on her forearms, leaning forward slightly, like she’s—

—as if she’s about to—

She settles into a different position, leaning back against the mattress again, and I feel a terrible pulse of disappointment and anger towards myself for not keeping my eyes closed just a moment longer, so that maybe she—

—maybe she would have—

“Were you going to kiss me just now?” I say abruptly, and I see from the look of shock that crosses her face at the question that the answer is no, and my heart drops.

“You don’t want things like that,” she says.

(except—except I’m really beginning to think that maybe I do)

“Can I brush my teeth first?” I blurt out, which is a terrible and awkward and utterly non-romantic response, but I’ve been in the car all day and I don’t exactly feel like I’m at my best, and I can’t do anything about the fact that my hair is a mess and my clothes are rumpled and I’ve got blue paint on my face still, and cheese bought from a gas station stuck to my leggings, but maybe brushing my teeth will help I don’t know

She gives me a look of amused, affectionate confusion as I quickly leap up.

“I mean…you can if you want,” she says. “But it’s…just going to taste like toothpaste, then.”

Which is kind of the point, really, the tasting-like-toothpaste instead of, well, me, but on second thought let’s go ahead and skip the teeth brushing, because I’ve only been standing up and away from her for five seconds and I’m already starting to panic again, and if I take the time to brush my teeth I know I’m going to end up really panicking and backing out of this, and I really don’t want to.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I say, hands somewhere between fluttering and flapping in distress. “I’ve never actually done this before.”

“It’s okay,” she says, and then adds, “come here. Sit down on the bed.”

I sit down on the bed in front of her, my heart beating so fast that it’s practically humming, my hands twisting together in my lap.

“I might not like this; what if I don’t like this,” I say, words rapid with nerves.

“It’s okay if you don’t like it,” she says soothingly. “And we don’t have to do this at all if you don’t want to.”

“I do want to,” I say quickly. “I want to try. But I don’t know if I’ll like it and I don’t know how to do this—”

“It’s all right,” she says, voice gentle. “Sometimes first kisses are weird anyway.”

“Are they?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Sometimes you have to learn how to kiss each other.”

She takes off her glasses, and then mine, and then she takes my face in her hands. I take a very shaky breath and close my eyes.

She kisses my forehead first, just above one of my eyebrows, kisses one of my cheeks, and then the other, the touch of her lips soft and light. When she kisses the tip of my nose, it startles me into a laugh. I’m still smiling when she kisses my lips.

And it’s—

really, really nice. It’s good, and not weird or scary at all, like I was worried it would be, and there’s no bad feeling in the pit of my stomach for me to force myself to enjoy—there’s nothing bad at all. There’s just her, and the soft way that she’s kissing me.

It feels good, and I feel safe and loved and happy, and when she starts to pull away, I make a sound of protest and lean forward without thinking, chasing her lips. She inhales sharply through her nose and slides one hand into my hair and the other arm around my waist, holding me tightly, kissing me harder, and that’s really wonderful, too.

“So—ah,” she says, when she finally breaks the kiss. “You enjoyed that…and that…wasn’t exactly friendship-type kissing.”

There’s a smile in her voice, which unfolds into a grin when she takes in my dazed expression. I reach up to touch my lips with the fingertips of one hand.

“Yes,” I say, and then she kisses me again.

It goes on longer this time, and when she starts kissing my neck, I somehow wind up in her lap, and by the time she bites the edge of my ear, I’ve dissolved into an incoherent mess.

She pulls away again, although not very far, because of the way I’m clinging to her.

“You’re in love with me,” she says, smiling so bright and happy, like a reflection of my own heart at that moment.

“I really am,” I say wonderingly.

This is... not actually a fic. This is something that really happened—and it’s about me and @displacerghost.

Ghost and I met in the March of 2017, when she sent me a series of—well, I guess they were technically love letters, although she didn’t realize that at first, and I didn’t realize that at all.

I was in a very bad mental place at that time. I had been doing badly since the summer of 2016—it seemed like everything I used to love doing—theatre, dance, writing—had turned into something that hurt instead. Rejection letter after rejection letter for original writing; nasty comments about my dancing and people leaving me in the lurch with my dance performances; and a production of one of my original plays, which I directed myself, and which was a great success with audiences, but socially and emotionally terrible for me.

For a while things seemed to get a little better—I joined fandom and started writing and posting fic for the first time, and the intensely positive reaction I had from the fandom went some ways towards making it possible for me to scrape together some semblance of self-confidence and joy.

The problem with that, though, was that there wasn’t any kind of stable foundation underneath it, and I couldn’t seem to actually heal. The cracks were still all there, and every kind of harshness or cruelty shattered me all over again, and sent me spiraling down into emotional flashbacks and long extended periods of self-hatred and despair. I came dangerously close to burning everything—original writing, fic, art—setting all of the physical copies on fire, deleting everything I’d posted, wiping my computer files. Erasing as much evidence of my existence as possible.

I’ve always been particularly susceptible to accusations of immorality—probably because the conviction that I’m intrinsically bad runs very deep for me.

all the things they say about me are things that I already know about myself and if the cumulative effect on the world of your continued existence is negative, do you not have a moral duty to remove yourself from it, and the way I write Megamind has never been anything but a reflection of me.

I had a plan, at one point, and a schedule—I knew exactly how I was going to do it, exactly how to make it look like an accident. I planned it like a murder and thought of it like an execution, and I came very close to going through with it.

But my cat had to be given her medication at certain times, so I postponed my plan to do that and ended up waiting long enough for self-preservation to kick in again.

It isn’t just Zero’s personality that’s based on my cat.

I tried to get help after that—several different doctors, therapists, a whole bunch of different psychiatric medications. But no one helped, and nothing helped, and the suspicion that nothing would ever help, that I didn’t deserve help, began to grow into a conviction.

I didn’t just need help. I needed hope.

I vividly remember the first time Ghost messaged me—it was in the midst of one of the very bad self-hatred periods. I had posted something talking about that a bit, but I hadn’t really explained how very very bad I was doing.

I was lying on my bed crying, thinking that I was a terrible person who would never be able to affect anything or anyone in any kind of positive way—

(if the cumulative effect on the world of your continued existence is negative)

—and then I heard the message sound come from my laptop, and, in a desperate attempt at distraction, I opened the message and read it.

And what was inside the message was so exactly what I needed that when I woke up the next day, I was convinced that I must have dreamed it, because things like that don’t happen.

It’s hard for me to get across how much of an effect that message had without quoting the entire thing, but here’s part of it:

I don’t really know how to tell you how much of an impact your writing has on me without telling you that my life has been really, really bad for a long time. I had an abusive childhood, then got out of that and largely saved myself via fandom obsession and writing. I went from a terrible life situation to a merely shitty one and if I had not had fanfic and writing in my life I would not be here typing this right now. I thought things were getting better for me -- But. That turned out to be an abusive situation, too. Fast forward through ten years of that? I have no friends, my family dumped me long ago (I'm pretty much an orphan, most days I can laugh about it). And the person I thought would be my life partner has done more to destroy my self-confidence, self-worth, and any and every joy or happiness than I could ever have imagined was possible.

I tried to reach out to people in my life -- great big pile of nope. I tried reaching out to a couple different therapists -- small help, but mostly it's just the same god damn thing I've heard all my life "there's nothing wrong with you, try harder, you know what you need to do, just do it" and I guess because I CAN do it alone I have to.

I tried to keep writing. It's THE THING that I KNOW I need in my life, I need it like air to breathe and I'd been suffocating and dying for a long, long time. I never gave up on trying even when the words were sawdust. Like a lot of writers, I struggle with perspective on my own work -- this wasn't that. This was utter empty bullshit. And I didn't even enjoy writing or having written or even thinking about the stories. I didn't care at all. I felt a little sad but it was like water vapor sadness, it was small and fleeting and THAT is the most horrifying aspect of all. That my soul was evaporating and I didn't even feel it.

Then a couple of months ago I re-watched Megamind. I'd seen it when it came out and I remembered liking it a lot. It hit me even deeper, this time. I got on AO3.

This was your hobbit birthday week, Set.

I can't even think about this without ugly-crying because I was DEAD. I can't explain it better than that. Even pain didn't really go deep anymore. And no one I reached out to saw it or cared. I was alone, always and again, and I was dying.

And then I found your writing. God this is so hard to talk about. Everything had been so empty for so long and I'd read books and I'd read fic and I'd watched movies and for TEN YEARS nothing had worked, nothing had reached me, and I had tried so hard to reach myself and I could. Not.

You did.

Your writing made me FEEL again, I was ALIVE! I don't have good words for how much it means to me. Your writing. Your stories. I've been alone in the dark for so long and reading your fanfic was blinding, bright sunrise bursting across my world when I'd thought the sun was dead and gone. Are there words for that? For rebirth of the soul? You brought me back to life. I'd been trying so hard for so long to scale this mountain, all alone while everyone pushed me aside, and then I found your stories and it was like a light from the heavens shining down on a path that had been there all along.

And when a week after that my partner had a full on emotionally abusive temper meltdown all over me...

That was it. NO, MOTHERFUCKER. I found my heart again.

It's going to take a while to leave him (I think two years) but I'm on that escape route with the pedal to the floor and I'm not looking back AND IT FEELS AMAZING. It feels like freedom. I really believed I'd never feel this good again, never live through writing again this way.

I tell you all that so you believe me when I say how much your writing means to me. Whenever my words start to feel like sawdust I re-read one of your fics and my heart beats blood again.

Your Megamind fanfiction saved my life.

There is a level of raw, emotion evocation that is simply without compare. That's the thing that resonates inside me, time and again, no matter which of your stories I'm reading and no matter what emotion it is you're conveying in the moment. When I'm broken inside because my partner had a bad day and took it out on me and I need to feel so I can write, I return to your stories. There is a level of raw, real truth in what you write that does not exist in 99.9% of anything published.

And your writing is so fucking brave! Holy shit! How do you do that, I study your works to try and figure it out when I'm having a tough time in that area. You are so fucking brave. Because this kind of writing only exists when someone bares their own wounded soul to the words.

I've always found my heroes in stories. You're the first one I've found writing the stories.

I know I talk about some dark stuff in my own life here but I'm actually doing really fucking fantastic. Now, anyway. I'm happy for the first time in YEARS.

I add this so you know I'm not reaching out to you because I need anything from you – just you keep being you, whether that means struggling or creating or ranting or posting those amazing blue-skin photo edits. I'm doing SO FUCKING FABULOUS AND ITS ALL BECAUSE YOU WROTE FIC AND POSTED IT OKAY. I've been stumbling around in darkness and you came in and flicked on the light switch and I'm standing here like, Oh. Okay. NOW I can see what I'm doing, I've got this!

I've always known that I can climb this mountain. I guess I was just needing a reminder, a reason, that I'm worth it to try. Your stories opened the way for me to find that within myself.

You made me feel again, Set. Your writing is priceless.

I just wanted to tell you your writing saved my life. I'm a real person out here in the random world and your fanfiction SAVED MY LIFE.

Thank you, forever thank you, Set.

Sometimes in a person's life a story comes along at just the right time to tip them towards what they need. Isn't that part of why we read stories? (I mean, also porn. But). To find heroes, to live through and triumph over difficulties, to feel the things we never do in real life – love, peace, acceptance. To find, through the characters, a reason to go on. To take that one more step.

Megamind was that, and YOU are that, for me. I love you forever. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for being who you are and being so BRAVE and inspiring me to claw my way back to my feet and try again.

I was drowning, and you were the lighthouse.

Can you see how much this message meant to me, especially coming right then? It came to me exactly when I needed it.

It was so utterly what I needed that, when I woke up the next day, I was convinced that I must have dreamed it, because it seemed too good to be true. I actually deliberately avoided looking at my messages, to put off the horrible and inevitable (or so I thought) disappointment of not finding it there. I avoided looking at them for a good long while, until finally I got a notification of a message from someone else and had to open it. I was on my phone, then, and when I scrolled down my messages and saw the message from Ghost, the one I had been convinced wasn’t real, I very nearly walked into a wall.

You may recognize that last line of the message as being something that Megamind says to Roxanne in my Code: Safeword fic—but Ghost isn’t quoting Code: Safeword there.

That part in Code: Safeword is quoting her.

That message from Ghost is the source of that line—the lighthouse in a storm theme of love and salvation that threads through all of my Megamind/Roxanne stories can be traced back to that moment, the moment that I first met Ghost.

Ghost says that it was the morning after she sent me that message that she woke up and realized she was in love with me.

In retrospect, my starting to fall in love with her can be traced back to that moment as well, though I wasn’t going to realize I was in love until a year and a half later, after we met in person—after she kissed me.

We fell in love words-first; Ghost with the me that she so perceptively saw in my stories, and me with the person she showed me in her messages.

It was only after I wrote the lighthouse quote into the fic, and wrote Megamind telling Roxanne that the poster of the lighthouse in his bedroom came to represent her to him, after they met, that Ghost told me in one of her messages that she actually had a lighthouse poster in her own bedroom, and that, even before I wrote that part, the lighthouse in it had come to represent me to her.

There is a certain point at which coincidence begins to look like fate.

Much as I love the tropes, I always sort of assumed that the whole long period of Obliviousness followed by the Sudden Realization of Love thing that so many fics are built around was a thing that only happened to fictional characters.

It is not.

Some of the...very obvious signs that I was in love with Ghost that I missed during my Long Period of Obliviousness:

I felt intensely jealous of her now-ex. Thinking of her with him felt so fucking awful, which might have passed as a non-romantic friend-concern feeling if it hadn’t also transferred over to an utterly irrational hatred of any future partner I imagined her with.

I looked forward to talking to her more than anything, and I enjoyed it so much—at one point, I was talking to her via the tumblr app on my phone and beaming absolutely giddily as I looked down at the screen, when one of my cousins asked, “Who are you talking to? Do you have a secret boyfriend?”

Another time when I was talking to Ghost on my phone, my grandmother asked who I was talking to, and when I explained who Ghost was, and what she was going through, my grandmother actually asked me when was I going to go get her.

There were so many times that I almost told her ‘I love you’ in our messages, but ...something always held me back. I didn’t know what it could be; I don’t have a problem with saying ‘I love you’ to friends—but. With her it was somehow…different.

When she started signing off from our message conversations with 💙💜💙, I immediately took it up, signing off with 💜💙💜. Blue is her favorite color, and purple is mine, so that series of emojis seemed to convey the sentiment of ‘I love you’ without actually saying the words. I wasn’t sure how she meant it, but that was how I meant it.

(spoiler: she meant it like that, too.)

I very frequently daydreamed about hugging her—and not just hugging, about climbing into her lap and her holding me, which is…not a thing that people really fantasize about with their totally platonic best friends. I was aware of that, too, but just sort of…pushed that aside and didn’t examine it.

She volunteered to beta read for me, and I instantly knew that I definitely wanted her to. I’ve never wanted someone to do that with my writing, have actually always sort of hated the thought of it. But I love the way her mind works, and I love the way her mind works with mine, and I wanted that, with Ghost.

She had to go to the ER on her birthday this year, and on mine, and I was so worried, and so wished I was there to take her to the hospital and stay with her. Even on my own birthday, that was what I wanted to be doing.

Speaking of birthdays—for her birthday, I kept giving her more and more presents, and didn’t really know how to stop, because no matter how many things I gave her, it never felt like enough.

On my birthday, too, I was very preoccupied with her—she’d told me that she’d found my fic/me during my hobbit birthday week, so that year’s online birthday celebration had to be even more elaborate! Because it wasn’t just a celebration of my birthday, but also a sort of…anniversary. Which is why I ended up posting a thing every day of my birthday month this year.

I panicked when I realized she was my best friend, because I was sort of under the impression that I wasn’t hers. Yes, I had been her gateway into the fandom, but then she’d met other people and clearly would have moved on, right?

This maybe went a ways towards explaining why I was so jealous of her tumblr conversation threads with other people, of her comments on other people’s fics, even of other people whose posts she liked. Although I’ve certainly never felt that way about any of my other friends. I’m always happy when people I’m friends with find more friends! But with Ghost, I felt like I needed all of her attention. When she would tag me in things, I would gloat over it to myself—see look she likes me best.

Every time I posted a thing, fic, art, or whatever, I would refresh the page obsessively and not feel satisfied until I got the notification that Ghost had liked it.

When my therapist asked me to write out a list of totally safe people, she was the first one on the list.

I was wildly excited when I heard that she was going to Mega Camp, too—wildly excited and wildly panicked, because I was sure that, after meeting me in person, she would like me less. My excitement and apprehension both increased e x p o n e n t i a l l y when she suggested that she and @vairasmythe drive up to my house before camp, so that we could have a few extra days together at my house.

I wanted it; I was terrified of it; I was certain that it had to be a bad idea because of how much I wanted it.

Months went by before I was finally able to fight off the panic long enough to actually say yes to that plan.

I really, really wanted to…kidnap her, I guess? Nicely! Benevolently! But also really desperately.

I wanted to show up at her house and take her away from her now-ex. I used to fantasize about it—more than…fantasize, really. I had actual plans.

When I found out she lived in Nevada, I was, at first, very disappointed—I’d been hoping she lived within driving distance of me. But then I perked up. My sister lives in Nevada! I could go out to visit her and just casually happen to drop by Ghost’s house! (And then work in the kidnapping.) But when I looked up the driving distances between their houses, though, I deflated.

Driving eight hours through the desert to see someone sort of ruins the whole casualness of the thing.

Still, it was the best plan I had, and I actually began taking real steps towards doing it. Then Mega Camp was announced, and Ghost told me she was going, and so I decided to put the kidnapping plan on hold.

When I talked to Ghost about writing the Megamind musical (which she very much helped with and influenced greatly, as well as beta read)—when we talked about how I wanted to perform it at camp, I told her that I was really nervous about it because of how socially and emotionally devastating the last play I put on was, and she convinced me to go for it in spite of my fear.

I was extremely excited when I found out that there would be time to perform the play at camp, and I was really extremely excited to get to play Megamind myself. I deeply wanted Ghost to play Roxanne to my Megamind, and she actually suggested it herself. I was so busy flailing to myself about this that I took too long to respond, which led to Ghost (unbeknownst to me) interpreting my silence as me trying to find a way to let her down gently. In order to give me a way out, she added ‘except, you know, stage fright’. Which then interpreted as her trying to tell me that she probably wouldn’t feel comfortable with playing Roxanne.

Aaaand so we both agonized about that until we met up before Mega Camp.

(A side note: I was very jealous that Ghost and Vaira were going to be driving up from Nevada to my house together, and more than once considered arranging things so that I could ‘just happen’ to be visiting my sister right before their road trip, so that I could conveniently ask them to pick me up on their way, so that I could ride up with them.)

The day they were set to arrive at my house, I was A MESS. I was in such a state of nervous excitement that I neglected to eat all day, resulting in my nearly fainting right before they got there.

I also dithered over what I should wear—it had to be something suitably impressive! It occurred to me that it was…a bit odd that I wanted so much to be attractive, but I put it down to me simply being even more vain than I’d previously thought.

I settled on leopard print leggings and a tight red shirt.

(bright colors! attention grabbing pattern!)

((mating dance plumage))

I even put on eyeliner, both as a way to increase my confidence, and also as a way to make my eyes look more interesting.

Ghost’s only comment about my appearance that night was “wow, do you always have that bad of dark circles under your eyes?”, after which I was a little crestfallen, but which made me even more determined than ever to impress her!

…still without me realizing why I wanted that so badly.

(Ghost would like to mention that the dark circles comment was related to her knowing that I was sick and wanting to talk to me about vitamins and that she blurted it out in concern…after which she saw my weird reaction and died internally.)

((it’s nice that I’m not the only awkward one))

Meeting her in person was…overwhelming; when I first saw her, I was hit by a wave of joyful recognition so strong that I very nearly said “I missed you”. (She’s said that she felt it, too, and that she almost said the exact same thing.)

She said, “We made it!” instead, intending me to interpret the ‘we’ as her and Vaira, and the fact that they’d made the drive, but actually meaning that she and I had made it to finally seeing each other in person.

She hugged me, and it felt like coming home.

I didn’t want to let her go.

My emotions were in such turmoil that I couldn’t really tell when an acceptable hug length might be, so I just sort of…made her handle that, and clung to her until she started to let go first.

So she and Vaira and I went inside, and got them settled.

And Ghost showed me her tattoos, which was A Thing, let me tell you. She has a Megamind logo on her right hip which is…exactly where I sometimes draw the logo on my own body in eyeliner, when I’m feeling in need of extra confidence. The unexpected parallel of that threw me for a bit of an emotional loop—and then she showed me her other tattoo.

She has a ghost with a kintsugi heart tattooed on the center of her chest.

And the reaction I had to seeing that was both intense and complicated, because she had to take off her outer shirt to show me that one, and skin oh god so much skin am I staring I feel like I’m staring—

—and also, the ghost tattoo…well, it looked a lot like she’d combined two of the drawings I’d made for her.

But...surely it couldn’t actually be that, couldn’t actually be about me; that was ridiculous and…also incredibly conceited and presumptuous!

(Side note: yes...it actually is that—a combination of those two drawings, and about me.)

((A more ridiculous side note: my odd, unreadable reaction to the ghost tattoo, coupled with the way I couldn’t keep my eyes off of it, gave Ghost the impression that she was making me uncomfortable by showing too much skin. Which led to her repeatedly changing into more modest clothing, to my p e r p e t u a l f r u s t r a t i o n.))

And yet I still didn’t get why I felt frustrated by that, or by her apparent lack of attraction to me.

When it came time to talk about the musical script, Vaira said she wanted to play Minion, and so I asked Ghost if she wanted to try playing Roxanne. She said she would like to try it, and the three of us read through some of the scenes in my living room to practice.

And since I’d been wanting to test out my Megamind costume anyway, I changed into it for the read through.

(skintight black leather and high black boots and long black leather gloves, and if this didn’t work on her, nothing would.)

Vaira, world’s best Minion, was enthusiastically complimentary about the outfit. (“disgustingly horrifying, Sir!”)

So my Minion approved of it.

But my Miss Ritchi was…evidently unimpressed. Still. She made a tepidly approving comment, but that was all.

(cue me internally screaming)

It was incredibly frustrating, but I wasn’t ready to give in. I was playing Megamind to her Roxanne, which gave me an excuse to be as deliberately attractive at her as possible.

I strutted. I pranced. I smoldered.

No.

Reaction.

My desperation bird mating dance yielded no results to satisfy what I still assumed to be merely my vanity.

(Ghost would like me to note that she was very affected, but holding back her reaction with an iron grip, for fear of giving herself away and making me uncomfortable. She also wishes to point out that any reaction she’d had, short of bending me over the couch and fucking me, would not have satisfied me.

Which is…fair, and…true, and also would have been extremely uncomfortable for poor Vaira, who would have had to awkwardly back out of the room, like Minion in Write Your Name In Fire On My Skin.)

In addition to all of the really obvious signs that I was in love with her which I missed, I also missed some extremely obvious signs that she was in love with me.

One notable example of this happened the night before our practice reading of the script. The two of us stayed up all night, talking on the couch, and I ended up first holding her hand and then ultimately lying in her lap while we both talked about how much we meant to each other, and ALL I CAN SAY IN MY DEFENSE is that I truly thought we were talking about friendship and am fanfiction-character-style oblivious.

During the drive to camp, Ghost talked a bit about her…upsettingly and necessarily long term plan to achieve financial independence and leave her abusive ex. During one of the times she was outside the car, I told Vaira about my kidnapping plan, and she pledged her help. (She really is the best Minion.)

At camp, it was incredibly hard to leave her side. We spent almost the whole time together. One of the times Ghost and I were talking about Megamind, I mentioned one of the dreams that I’d had of being him. I talked about the feeling I’d had when I saw Roxanne, and I said I’d never had that feeling in real life before. Which made poor Ghost actually cry, although she valiantly pretended to be crying over something else.

And. Well, I actually had felt that, but didn’t notice until later, when Ghost left me alone for the longest five minutes in the history of the universe and the feeling rose to a crescendo when she reappeared.

Since it was so hard for me to leave her alone at camp, I was very aware of what I interpreted as signals for me to give her space.

These signals, were, in actuality, the opposite.

One of the big misinterpretations on my part occurred when we were gathering in the main part of our cabin, which also served as Ghost and Vaira’s bedroom. Ghost sat down on her bed and started clearing away the things which had been sitting on her bed.

I interpreted this as her clearing the space for the things she had been carrying, and sadly and awkwardly moved to the other side of the room and (also sadly and awkwardly) perched on the couch.

In actuality, the clearing of the space was meant as an implied invitation for me to sit down on the bed with her.

o b v i o u s l y

It was shockingly (to me, at least) easy to ‘pretend’ to be in love with Ghost while we were performing the musical.

(Ghost would like me to add that she was dying the entire time from the vicious flirting and the intense eye contact.)

And the musical itself went so well! I am so, so glad I listened to Ghost, and was brave enough to try theatre again, even though it went so terribly the last time.

For the first time in so long, the thought of theatre doesn’t hurt anymore.

One of the nights at camp, Ghost had a really rough time emotionally, and said she wanted to snuggle with Vaira and I for comfort. Which caused me to

(you guessed it)

p a n i c

and confess that I didn’t know how to cuddle because I’d never really done it before.

(Ghost refers to the reaction/gesture that I had at this point as the ‘distressed octopus’ ⋛⋋( ‘__’)⋌⋚ )

I figured she’d be impatient at having to explain something so simple, and that she would probably get exasperated with me and want to stop, and I really did not want that to happen.

But she was so wonderful and patient, and calmed me down, and…we slept together like that, with her arms around me and my head on her chest.

(we woke up like that, too, with me having drooled on her shoulder in the night, and you know someone is serious about loving you when they find something like that endearing instead of disgusting.)

We held hands the entire next day, and since I was cold, she gave me her sweater to wear. And I still thought “oh, what good friends we are!”

We drove to Chicago on our way back from camp, since Vaira was flying out from there. On the way, the three of us stopped at what has to be the weirdest mall I have ever seen, all white and shaped like a long tunnel with helicopter blade sized fans all along the ceiling.

We ate McDonalds at a table in the food court of the weird mall, and part of the reason I remember it so well is because it was there that I had the first intensely vivid sexual fantasy about Ghost, which. You would think that would have clued me in, but NOPE.

huh, I thought, that’s a weird mental blip.

She gave me her fidget ring to keep me from biting my fingernails, which left me flustered and a bit panicked, although I still didn’t understand why.

I really don’t think anything would have actually gotten the point across to me, short of her flat-out telling me she was in love with me, and me having my Five Minute Parking Lot Revelation that not only was she in love with me, but I was in love with her, in a very extremely non-platonic genuine romantic way.

After the really wonderful first kiss, with me in the Highly Romantic Gas Station Cheese Pants, the two of us talked about what we wanted—to be together, as close as possible and as quickly as possible.

Ghost still had to go back to Nevada, to pack her things, and get a divorce (she had been separated for a year and a half, since before the first message, but was still financially dependent), and it was u n s p e a k a b l y miserable, being without her that long. She gave me several of her shirts to wear while I waited, which helped, and she also gave me her comfort blanket, which helped even more, but it was still an awful wait.

She finished it in a week.

Packing, divorce, everything. And then…

I GOT TO GO THROUGH WITH MY KIDNAPPING PLOT AFTER ALL.

(I made her a frequent kidnapping card and everything!)

I went to Nevada and got her after that week, and we have been living together ever since (hence the long absence from tumblr).

And it is fantastic.

For a long time it was a running joke between us that we hadn’t been on an actual date, but just sort of ran errands together like we were sixty-five, and spent every waking moment together. At one point, we accidentally went to three used bookstores…as an errand?

But! We finally went on a Real Date, a few days ago; we went to a farm with a pumpkin patch and orchard, and it was wonderful!

I am so happy.

I’m doing so much better physically—Ghost got to fix me up with vitamins like she wanted, so the dark circles are much better, and I eat regularly now, since she likes to cook. I went to a psychiatrist and Ghost came along as my much-needed moral support, and as a result I got a bipolar II diagnosis and some new antidepressants which are really helping.

There are…so many things I have now, that I’d given up on even hoping for.

I’m able to sleep, and to do it without sleeping pills, with her holding me.

She taught me how to play video games, something which I thought I was incapable of ever learning. I thought my hand-eye coordination was too bad, that I wasn’t smart enough to compensate for it, but she told me I could do it, and she was right.

We talk about fic and Megamind all the time, as well as my original writing, which I feel I might finally be able to look at again, with Ghost to help me through it.

The things I loved that hurt for so long—theatre, writing, dance—I have them back now, because of Ghost.

She played me a song that reminded her of me, and I got up and danced to it because I wanted to, and it didn’t hurt at all.

And—sex.

I thought that I was never going to have that—that I would never find anyone who I wanted and who also wanted me. I thought my ability to feel desire and pleasure just…wasn’t there. But being demi is a much bigger deal than I thought it was before. The difference between feeling sexual attraction for someone and not feeling sexual attraction for someone is staggeringly large.

Being in love makes an entire world of difference.

And I—

I don’t hate myself anymore.

I’ve hated myself for as long as I can remember; I’d always thought I was a bad person.

But I’m not.

Which is really earth-shattering for me, honestly.

I never thought I’d be able to fall in love, and I certainly never thought that anyone would ever fall in love with me. I wanted it; I wanted it so badly, but I didn’t think I’d ever get it.

Quite a while back, during one of the really bad times, someone sent me a message saying that I deserved to find my Roxanne—I am deliriously happy to report that she found me.

Having a romantic partner doesn’t fix your mental illness, it’s true, but having someone who loves you and supports you, someone who helps you through the dark times, someone to teach you how to be nice to yourself—god, it helps so much. Being with her has given me a safe place to get better.

My lighthouse in a storm.

#girlfriend ghost #mutually requited pining #misunderstandings #bed sharing #friends to lovers #sudden realization of love #awkwardness so much awkwardness #angst with a happy ending #personal #okay to reblog #long post

214 notes · View notes