#i simply think meeting a version of your shitty mom that's largely the same but not shitty should make you feel. a lot of different ways

[omgericzimmermann]

Fist-bumps mean I love you

They meet on the Haus Tour freshman year. The tour is given by a guy with a glorious flow and the sickest moustache they’ve ever seen and he’s wearing a shirt of a Christmas tree smoking a joint. They independently decide that they will like it here.

They fistbump for the first time after their tour guide mentions the Haus parties that will be thrown, and introduce themselves after the tiniest freshman they’ve ever seen, who is somehow on the hockey team with them, has produced a pie from absolutely nowhere.

“I’m Ollie,” he says.

“Wicks,” he replies.

They start dating after the first kegster. What happens is, there is tub juice. They come across the sophomore d-men, Ransom and Holster, making out in a back room and witness Bitty doing a kegstand, and figure hey, what the hell. After all, it’s Samwell, might as well try it out. The trouble is – that “college experimentation” thing turns out to be bullshit because this is not an experiment, this is the only thing that counts now.

They don’t tell anyone on the team. They’re not shy about it, they’re not embarrassed, and they don’t think they’ll be ill-received for it. After all, their team includes Bitty, and Ransom and Holster who have definitely hooked up more than once, and when they meet their manager after she gets back from Kenya, Lardo has a girlfriend for the first four months they know her. For whatever reason, Ollie and Wicks’ relationship status simply…doesn’t come up. They don’t bring it up, and neither does anyone else.

Ollie brings Wicks back to Vermont with him over the summer. Wicks meets Ollie’s mom and his siblings and they get along great. At no point is it mentioned that they’re dating, and at no point do they feel the need to bring it up. Here, it’s a defence mechanism because if Ollie’s mom knew they were dating, they would not be allowed to stay in the same room.

When they don’t get dibs on the Haus for sophomore year, they sign up to be roommates and spend their first few days of preseason rearranging their dorm to turn their shitty dorm beds into one large bed. A few of the guys from the team are conscripted to help, including one of the frosh who is good with tools but unsure about the legality of dismantling a school bed. They don’t explain, and he doesn’t ask, and things continue.

At Christmas sophomore year, things get complex. Wicks figures its his turn to introduce his boyfriend to his parents, and takes Ollie with him back to Manitoba. Unlike everyone else they know, Wicks’ parents do ask and they are upset. Not that Wicks is gay, which is the label he’s decided to wear comfortably, but that he’s living out of wedlock. Wicks’ parents give them an ultimatum. Either they marry by that summer or they’re writing to the school administration to demand they not be allowed to live together and will never speak to Wicks again.

After a month’s harried debate over the subject back at Samwell, they figure what the hell.

“After all, we can always get divorced,” Wicks points out.

“Right, exactly,” Ollie says.

They both think, unquestioningly, that this is not going to happen.

Ollie’s parents are taken aback by the whole situation, but they explain the benefits outweigh the problems. They’ve got cross-border status now, and avenues for the future in both countries are open to them forever; tuition is different for “non-traditional” undergrads which includes those who are married; they were probably going to get married anyway, so this just moves up the timeline.

They do small, a courthouse thing. They’ll do the big version, a party version, after graduation. Perhaps their teammates will have even figured out that they’re dating by then.

They don’t get dibs junior year either, but they do get non-traditional housing at least so they’ve got a suite and their own kitchen, not that either of them can cook. On the bright side, they can always pop by the Haus and pick up whatever Bitty’s made.

Ransom and Holster are the first to catch them making out in public. It’s at a kegster, no surprise, and tub juice makes them both handsy, and when Ransom and Holster encounter them, it’s with a sly wink and a nod and an assurance they won’t tell anyone about their drunken kegster fling.

“We should probably tell them we’re married,” Ollie points out when they’ve staggered drunkenly away.

“Nah, this is to the point of just being fucking funny now,” Wicks replies, and Ollie agrees.

The only indication Ransom or Holster gives that they had seen Ollie and Wicks with their hands down each other pants is that they offer them the attic as dibs. They take it, unquestionably, and get Dex’s help to do an HGTV worthy renovation off the place. When Dex says, unnerved, “again with the one bed?” they just shrug at him. What they want to ask is why he and Nursey have bunkbeds still, since they’re pretty sure Dex and Nursey are at the same level of intimacy as Ransom and Holster, but they don’t ask and Dex doesn’t offer and so they let it drop.

Their attic sparkles when the three of them are done with it and it feels more like playing house than the non-traditional dorm of junior year because this time they have close roommates. Between Nursey, Dex, Bitty, and Chowder, they’re sure that at least one of them will figure out they’re together. Add in the constant visits from Shitty and Lardo and Jack and Alexei Mashkov, surely, they think, surely. Besides even them, Ford and Tango and Whiskey are around often enough, and so are the waffles. There are constantly people in the Haus and yet.

And yet, somehow, somehow, the first person to figure out they’re together – not just hooking up, but together together – is Alexei Mashkov. He gets turned around at the last kegster of the year and winds up in the attic stairwell looking for the bathroom and discovers instead Ollie and Wicks making out.

“Oh! Am sorry,” Mashkov says. They think it’s odd that they know how drunk a professional NHL player is – who is not their former teammate – by how closely his English grammar gets to the original Russian. “Am thinking is toilet. No?”

“No,” they say. They don’t bother to pull away from each other more than it takes to speak.

“Will leave you alone on your date,” Mashkov says. He laughs and slips down a stair. “Seems I am needing to go to Samwell if I want dates.”

He starts to wander off and then pauses.

“Hmm, no,” he decides. “You are like Zimmboni and B, yes? Is not date, is…more?”

“Yeah,” they agree. He smiles, nods, and staggers away, more successfully reaching the bathroom this time.

They shrug, and go back to kissing each other.

It is after. It is after they kiss the ice and pack up their attic and toss their caps in the air. They hand out the invitations to the other members of the Samwell Men’s Hockey Team and their affiliated persons and are halfway to the next group of invitees before the earliest group figures out what’s in them.

“What the fuck?” Nursey shouts, impassioned, upon reading the invitation.

“This is, like, some kinda prank or something, right?” Dex asks.

“Nope!” they call back and hand invites to Jack and Mashkov.

“But how can y’all be getting married?” Bitty asks, squinting from the invitation to Ollie and Wicks and back.

“Oh,” Ollie says. “We’re not getting married. We got married two years ago.”

“This is just the reception,” Wicks says. “Now that we don’t have school.”

They hold hands as they wander away, leaving shocked gasps of realisation in their wake. They think to themselves, independently but at the same time, that the dumbfounded disbelief in everyone’s eyes at the reception really is the cherry on top.

#I have been seized by madness #ollie/wicks #the ghost ship scribbles #jesus is that my writing tag #it's been 84 years #mine #idk what this is maybe y'all can figure it out

[mylovelifehasnicknames]

Meet Me

I just told a friend the other day my current love life dilemma, which involves 4 different people, some from my past, but who have all contributed to why I consider my love life all fucked up. To keep them all straight, I had decided to give them all nicknames to help my friends associate who they are to me. Throughout this blog, I hope to detail each one and name their defining characteristics and actions that led to me being who I am today. Maybe Ill find some common traits that I can flag. I also hope to relate to many of you, as the events of my love life are certainly no strangers to the rest of the world. I should tell you about me first though because I’m pretty cool.

I’m not from around here and I know you don’t know where around here is but it’s not important. What’s important to note is that my family and friends are my everything, leading to loyalty being my greatest asset and weakness, all in the same. My parents got divorced when I was 12. Shitty thing #1 to happen to me. But I must preface...my parents are two of the most amazing people I have met. My dad is the hardest working man I know with a heart of gold and that takes pride in telling people that I am “my father’s daughter”. My mom is the strongest woman I know, never needing anything or anyone and who taught me to be independent, but also gentle and forgiving. My older brother was away at college when this went down and my younger sister was too young to really understand the dynamics. Yes, I am the middle child and I’m not sure we’re as fucked up because of that as people like to blame, but it can present problems some don’t have to deal with. In hindsight, my parents should have sat us (at least my sister and I) down together, all 4 of us, and explained that “Mom and Dad wouldn’t be together anymore, but we we’re still a family”. Not at all how it went for me. I was laying on my couch in our basement watching TV and my mom came downstairs and sat on the edge of the couch. Didn’t ask me to sit up, mute the TV, etc...I can’t remember her exact words, but the message was that her and my dad didn’t love each other anymore and they were getting a divorce. In classic Younger Me fashion, I just said okay without making any eye contact and went back to watching TV and my mom went back upstairs. Knowing myself now, that’s how I deal with conflict until I can fully process it. It was sometime after that that my dad came downstairs and sat in the same spot as my mom and asked how I was doing. I shrugged my shoulders (I wasn’t one for words at this age, I often shrugged my shoulders when asked a question like I couldn’t be bothered) and my dad started crying. He’s always been an emotional guy, so I wasn’t surprised. I started crying too because I was starting to process what is happening and my dad reached down and hugged me. Again, I couldn’t be bothered to sit up and hug him, but I just laid there and cried. They seemed like happy, normal parents, but I’ve certainly learned as I’ve gotten older that things are not what they seem on the outside. So I trudge through junior high with this event lingering, while also dealing with being a young teen, being overweight, having mental health issues that my parents tried every answer in the book to heal, being made fun of consistently by people I still have not forgiven to this day (remember how loyal I am? That means I have a hard time forgiving) and not facing this event head on. Next thing I knew, my dad’s stuff was all gone and I found the divorce papers on the stove one day after school when no one was home. I’m nosy, so I obviously flipped through them and seeing my name accompanied by all those legal terms made me very uncomfortable. Balance that with having to be the middle man between your two parents because you’re the only child that can and God forbid they actually speak to each other, bouncing between apartments with my dad, and simply growing up. But life goes on...

I enter high school in the fall of 2003, still overweight, still struggling with mental health and my overall image, but learning to go my own way. I’m an above-average basketball player, but am not accepted as a “friend” to the older girls on the team. They made fun of me a lot which was shitty. I recognize that now as someone who worked in a high school for 4 years and who is now in Higher Education. I don’t know if they were jealous or didn’t think I belonged there or thought I was weird....but they were not accepting of me on their team. I learned to be reserved and quiet, but still grind and get the work done, but I didn’t want to cause any ruckus among anyone, ever.

I grew close with a young man I high school who I spent a lot of time with. I’ll introduce him in a later post (Thong Guy), but we made great memories and he eventually was my first kiss. Oh did I mention he had a girlfriend all throughout high school, but told me he wanted to be with me? Yes, I was a sucker.

I went to a local community college to play basketball and had a great experience there. I partied a lot, but met forever friends and won a shit ton of basketball games. That is also where I met the guy who will be referred to as Mush.

I then decide to go to a four year college to continue my basketball career and that’s where my love life spikes. I met who I thought was my forever. Her name will be The Ex. Yes, her name. We were head over heels, having the best time. Little did I realize that she was gong to grind me down to become my least-favorite version of Me I’ve ever been.

Fast forward about 3-4 years and The Ex is gone, but her remnants are not. I begin graduate school and become an assistant coach for the basketball team I played for. I eventually get a job and continue coaching, but want to live my life in a very different way. See, at this point, I was still a virgin at 25 years old and I was sick of it. I felt like I was missing out on such a fun part of my life waiting for “the one” that I couldn’t fully feel like I was thriving. So onto Tinder I go, I meet “The Condition” and I bang him after knowing and hooking up with him for 6 months. He became my “first”, which I swear he cares more about to this day than I do.

Then comes The Druggie, 5AM Tinder, lots more of “The Condition”, Micropenis, Bumble Dad, and Marshall Buttstuff III. My “number” isn’t large, but man, do I have good stories. Those posts will be forthcoming when I feel like diving into the depths of my soul again.

#divorcedparents #divorce #lovelife #lovedilemma #adulthood #childhood #love #mentalhealth #gif #basketball #Exes #shitshow #lit