#mine originally met each other as children (of the same age) but i eventually decided to change it to when they were already in their 20's | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

palmett-hoes · 3 years

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i said in this post that i have original characters and backstories for neil's extended family. it took me,, a really long time to write it all down. it's been a full month since the original post, and this is still just a run through of things, not full prose, which i might be interested in doing one day but not anytime soon

now, some things to note about what i'm writing, why, and how. methodology, basically. this might not have come through yet in my posts, because i just don't post about my half-finished ideas, but i research a LOT. i like to base what i write about on real life, even if it's just headcanons and fanfic

also, i love helping people with research, so if anyone wants help with research for a fic or just their personal headcanons or anything hit me up!!

as a white person who wants to write characters from different ethnic backgrounds, i feel i have a responsibility to really do my due diligence and research as much as possible to consider things from every angle. and part of that for me is making sure that every character of color has a backstory. they don't just appear somewhere, i have to give them a reason for being there and a story for how they got there, even if that's not what i write their STORY about. people, come from places, basically. i follow a lot of demographic census information and population averages, as well as a lot of history, from as general as transatlantic trade in the last 500 years to as specific as the changes in a single city in a certain year

talking to other writers in the fandom i know i'm a little overzealous, but this is what gives me peace of mind to feel like i am putting the effort in to get things right

so anyway, as for what that means here:

i like writing neil as mixed black/jewish. it works well thematically for his character, as well as just what FEELS right for how i visualize him in my head

only, that can't simply come from nowhere. we know who his parents are. they need to also be poc for neil to be one, and they're a complicated pair to handle in that lens

one choice i made about that, for multiple reasons, is that everything about neil's parents' backgrounds should mirror each other. it can't simply be that one if them is black and one is jewish, or even that mary is both and nathan is white, because that says something i don't want to say any way you slice it. additionally, i want both facets of his ethnicity to be important to neil, and i feel as though he would want to ignore the half of himself from his father.

so: they both have to be mixed, giving them a sort of,, ideological equal footing, as it were. that way, i can also write three different experiences, rather than accidentally implying that This is what being black is, or This is what being jewish is, or This is what being mixed is. and that's also important to me, even if it's just in my head or not even directly addressed. it's still a big consideration of mine anytime i write about any of them

now, finally, onto mary and nathan! i'll put it below a cut because this is already long enough, the under-the-cut is much longer, and i don't want to wear out your thumbs if you don't care

mary hatford

canon timeline, neil was born in 1988. as a tentative number let's say mary was around 30 when he was born, meaning she would be born in the 50s. say her parents were roughly the same age, so they were born around the 20s

like i said, what's happening where in history is very important to me for building these backstories, and major historical events tend to have a lot of influence on population shifts. and well,, jews and europeans in the early-to-mid 20th century? there's no getting around involving world war II. nothing explicit, but it is mentioned and part of the story

mary’s paternal family are the hatfords. they're from the british west indies, largely jamaica, but they've been involved with shipping and trade all over the trans-atlantic region for generations.

they have a complicated relationship with the british empire, having both worked for them and against them at various points, sometimes both at once. similarly, they've tried multiple times through the generations to relocate the family to england permanently, but have been turned away or pressured out

they associate england and the british empire with power, and they both disagree with and desire that power in degrees which vary person to person. they do have a general idea between them though that living in england is a sign of status and authenticity, and while they don't want to leave jamaica permanently they do want their center of power to be in england, and there is a deep resentment against the anglos for not allowing them to stay permanently despite their wealth and influence, the fact that their work will always be looked down on and seen as lesser

i did come into building the hatfords with the primary idea of them being black british, and looking into the organized crime connection second. them being jamaican/west indies is a reference to the jamaican posse, who have a large presence in the london crime scene, although that's really the only connection. the hatfords aren't really yardies in any sense

the hatfords' status as organized crime is a little iffy. mostly they skirt the line between legal and illegal, owning legal trading companies and doing plenty of legal shipping. their main business in the criminal underworld is being middlemen moving supplies for other groups. they have a lot of contacts, and they serve an invaluable role in international smuggling, but they rarely get their own hands dirty. they move things from one place to the other and don't question too much what it is, though they don't deal in people

mary's father is named samuel hatford (first name in reference to samuel bellamy, the gentleman pirate king of the early 18th century). he was born in England, raised largely in Jamaica, then moved back to England as a teenager/young man. he's light-hearted and a bit idealistic for someone from a crime family, seeing the best in people even when they're cold and often believing in principle over profit, which at times put him in conflict with what's best for business

he almost enlisted in world war II, but instead convinced the family to work as weapons and supplies runners supporting the Allies and guerilla resistance groups

mary's mother is named cima ben nahman (ladino/judeo-spanish/sephardic names, doesn't really reference anything or anyone in particular). She's is an algerian jew. Born in algeria (city undecided, though algiers had the largest jewish community at the time), she moved to france for a few years as a young woman, probably for education. she joined anti-fascist organizations which became resistance groups once germany invaded

she's stoic, and has a ruthless mind for strategy. like most algerian jews, she's caught between her home country and its colonizer. the french empire played the algerian muslim majority against the jewish minority as a way to create infighting and distract the algerians from uniting and turning against them, but the algerian jews also then became reliant on the french for protection. (it's a really, really complicated situation)

cima sort of hates them both, both algeria and france. her only allegiance is to being jewish

(contrast this to samuel, who feels that he is BOTH british and caribbean, even when those two identities may be in conflict)

cima and samuel met when samuel provided weapons and supplies to cima's militia group. he took particular interest in them and went out of his way to help, above and beyond the other groups the hatfords were supplying

in the waning period of the war, cima was seriously injured, i'm currently thinking a land mine accident. she survived, but her recovery was slow. she lost an arm and had burns across half her torso, neck, and face. samuel brought her to england supported her through her recovery. in the hospital, they spoke a lot about why they each chose to fight, and the ways they did because neither were formal soldiers fighting for a country. samuel was in many ways fighting for an ideal, while cima was fighting for her people. cima also talked to him a lot about judaism and religion during this time, which samuel took an interest in. eventually, cima decided to stay

they got married. samuel converted, which was somewhat controversial with his family. however, cima agreed to join the family business, where she became an integral but sometimes ruthless member. after algerian independence, she brought some of her trusted family and community into the fold as well, some moving to england and others to france

both cima and samuel believed very heavily in responsibility, though what it meant for each of them was different. cima believed in preparedness and follow-through, samuel believed in family and protection, doing what's right outside of the bounds of the law. this contributed a lot to how they raised their children

when they were born, mary and stuart were raised in england (and i like to think they have an oldest brother). the hatfords were a big family, and influential, although careful about balancing the legal and less-legal sides of their business. the ben nahmans were smaller, and most of them were in france so mary and her brothers saw them less often. they were raised very religiously and culturally jewish, though close with the caribbean side of their family too, as well as being the first generation who were born and raised in england. this put them at a cross-section of three very different cultures, and was where mary first learned about changing and blending in with different groups

mary was the youngest and a little bit spoiled by her father, aunties, and uncles. her mother however was much less tolerant of her. clearly very affected by her time in the war, cima became extremely distrustful and suspicious, and tried to instill in her children a similar sentiment of secrecy and self-sufficiency, avoiding attention and casual relationships. she could be harsh on them, especially mary, who was the most resistant to this

growing up, mary was irresponsible and fun-loving, goading her brothers and cousins, getting in trouble, and starting fights. she didn't understand the tenuous balance of being organized crime, and at times put the whole family at risk by overestimating their sway. her mistakes affected the whole family but it was usually her mother who confronted her about them first and most harshly

she resented her mother's control, and didn't understand the reasons behind it. she also couldn't differentiate between the boundaries her mother sets as a result of her own trauma, and the necessary boundaries she set for the safety of the family, viewing them as one and the same, and leading her to hate any kind of control exerted over her

really, a lot of cima's character is just who mary ends up becoming after being married to nathan and being on the run. i like the story of a child becoming the parent they once hated. rather than learn from her mother, both her failures and her successes, mary becomes her, doomed to make the same mistakes. this is also why cima is wounded by a landmine, because mary dies in fire

---

nathan wesninski

nathan was HARD to come up with a story for, mostly because,,, WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS GUY WORK FOR THE JAPANESE YAKUZA

wesninski is a VERY polish name. the japanese-polish connection is,, not super strong

so anyway, working off the idea of the wesninski family being a polish jewish one, WHERE is he going to meet a japanese crimelord to get into a multi-generation debt/business arrangement with?

turns out, the answer is brazil

brazil actually has a large jewish population (roughly 10th largest in the world). it began with its colonization by the portuguese, but the 19th century to modern population largely comes from central and eastern europe. brazil ALSO has the largest japanese population outside of japan

also this story ended up being WAY more detailed and prosaic than samuel&cima's story, which is basically just bullet points. there's no reason for this i love both stories very much just for some reason the words flowed for me here and not there

to avoid having a second jewish story where wwII is prominent, the wesninskis get a page out of my own family's book: nathan's grandfather (neil's great grandfather) came to the americas fleeing the russian pograms around the turn of the 20th century

Wesninski came to brazil (city undecided, have a lot more research to do about individual cities in brazil). he had waardenburg syndrome(a hereditary genetic condition that can affect eyes and hearing) which runs very strongly in his family (his son, nathan, and neil will all inherit it), and he is completely Deaf. while he came to brazil alone, in his new home he connected both with the local jewish community and the local deaf community, and eventually marries another Deaf Jewish woman

eventually they were able to establish a kosher deli and restaurant in the city, one which became a common hangout for the Deaf community. then one day (probably around 1915), a group of japanese men came in, and kept returning

these were the moriyamas, recently arrived from japan, in a place with very few japanese people and businesses. they liked the wesninski deli because they didn't share a language with anyone in there, couldn't even be heard by most of them, and it would also be difficult for the authorities to question them. two layers of protection for a crime family in a vulnerable place

wesninski and the moriyamas were amicable to each other, but as they didn't actually have a way to communicate that was the extent of it. but the moriyamas were polite and payed well and didn't bother the other customers. als, as a jewish establishment, they had a lot of education resources, which were helpful to the moriyamas in learning about brazilian society, including beginning to understand portuguese

now, in japan, the moriyamas were a small yakuza family. they got driven out by their bigger and stronger and more established competition around the time when japanese immigration to brazil was just starting, so that was where they went. though they had little option in where they ended up, they also had little competition in establishing their business

i still have a lot of research to do about the moriyamas. about both how the yakuza operate and about how brazilian organized crime works, and about life in brazil for early japanese immigrants. so a lot of the moriyama details are pretty vague

now the wesninskis had a son, meyer (nathan's father. name in reference to meyer lansky, famous american jewish mobster of polish descent) who was around 14 when the moriyamas arrived. he himself was not fully deaf like his parents, though was hard of hearing and raised in the Deaf community. as he goes through his rebellious teenage years, well, the gangsters are right there

in the early days the moriyamas were still more concerned with mostly the japanese enclaves, but they had aspirations of expanding. meyer wasn't japanese, but he was helpful to the moriyamas who came into the deli to study. he was perceptive and bold, could keep a secret, knew his way around knives from working in the deli, and knew the city. he was a good asset to them, and he was interested in causing some trouble

over the next ten years or so, meyer got increasingly more involved, alongside the moriyamas becoming increasingly more established throughout the city. he goes from someone who helps out occasionally and relays information beyween parties to getting involved with minor shakedowns, bribery, evidence disposal. by the time he's in his 20s he's thoroughly enmeshed

his parents were older when they had him, and his father died relatively young, leaving meyer the store and his mother to take care of. they were vaguely aware of his connections to the moriyamas and didn't approve of what he did with them but he also kept the worst from them, and was always a diligent son, and the only one they had. he assured them no matter how far he went that he wasn't "really" part of the gang

"yakuza have tattoos, and see, ima? no tattoos. i'm still a good jewish son, not a gangster"

now the problem arises when meyer falls for camara da machado, a young Deaf woman who frequents the store

(based on/inspired by/FC yaya dacosta (where the name comes from) and rutina wesley)

she was a Deaf girl born to a hearing family who struggled to give her the support she needed, maybe even just a single mother, and she'd spent a lot of time alone at the deli from a young age (12-ish?). she was shy and quiet and a little bit of a shrinking violet, but the wesninskis became very fond of her. she started tentatively helping them out around the store which became a job. she was often included in family meals and holidays, and always had a bed in their apartment above the deli if she needed one, and more than once had helped patch meyer up after he got in trouble to hide the extent of it from his parents

she was a couple years younger than him but he'd always been sweet on her. and she'd had a crush on him from basically the moment she'd layed eyes on him. they'd known each for years and camara was basically family, and then one day when they were both in their 20s it just suddenly clicked for them

so meyer and camara fell in love. meyer was head of the house, had to keep the deli running, and had his mother, camara, and possibly camara's mother (undecided at this juncture) to worry about and he decided he didn't want to continue working with the moriyamas in case it dragged his family into danger. being a gangster was a fling of youth and he was ready to grow up

when he informed the moriyamas of this though, they,,, did not agree.

while MEYER might not have considered himself part of the gang, THEY didn't think he just got to walk away. he'd worked with them for too long and knew too much. there might even have been a desire to tie him to the family permanently through marriage. and well,, one man against a growing criminal empire can't do much

it was a huge shock to him, and made him truly realize how naive and reckless he'd been. he'd been a dumb kid who wanted to start some trouble, the moriyamas were career criminals. they expected that once you were in, you were in for life, and they did not take kindly to meyer disagreeing with this

he didn't know how to explain this to his family... so he didn't. they'd all told him they wanted him to stop, but he'd meant for the announcement to be a surprise. after learning that he would not be permitted to walk away, he chose to just hide it and continue with business as usual

it worked for a while, maybe a few years, a time during which the moriyamas were getting a lot more brutal as they got more established and increasingly looked to expand, putting them in competition with other gangs and greater law enforcement, until they were a true crime empire spread across whole regions of the country. meyer had lost a lot of esteem in their eyes by asking to leave, leading them to put him under increasing scrutiny and giving him more incriminating tasks, to ensure that he would be incriminated if he ever tried to turn them in. it's during this time that he first had to kill for them

then camara got pregnant

and meyer was terrified. he didn't know how the moriyamas would deal with a kid. the only marriages and children he knew of within the family were endorsed by the boss, many arranged by him, and he knew his wouldn't be approved. yakuza wives were heavily involved with the business too, and he absolutely did not want that for camara

he broke down and told her everything. she's horrified, and furious that he kept it from her, but she didn't want to give up her baby. it would be hard, but she believed they can keep it hidden, and if the moriyamas found out, maybe it wouln't be so bad?

(spoiler: it would)

they have a son, born natan da machado, under his mother's name

meyer and camara never got married. meyer was going to propose after he left the moriyamas but that obviously didn't happen. marriages were supposed to be blessed by the boss, and meyer never dared to ask. they already lived together, anyway

but with natan, they decided that meyer couldn't acknowledge him as his own. in the deli or in the streets, he didn't acknowledge natan. he was camara's bastard son, and meyer didn't want anything to do with him

it was a flimsy disguise at best. natan was mixed, but there was a strong enough resemblance to his father. even if his hair was a darker red or he had brown skin, they had the same eyes

they tried to keep him away from the moriyamas as he grew up, hoping they wouldn't see him and make the connection, but they also kept him very hidden in general, just in case. he spent a lot of time inside, with his grandmothers

and that was how natan grew up, feeling like a secret, his father cold and distant, only acknowledging him in their apartment. cut off from other kids his age. a hearing boy in a Deaf family (natan himself was HoH but still had most of his hearing. meyer and his maternal grandmother could both hear, but they had gotten out of the habit of it and mostly communicated through sign)

natan developed a deep feeling of resentment towards his father and shame about himself from a young age. he felt like a mistake, defective somehow. so wrong he had to be hidden away from everyone

there's only so long that you can hide a child, though, and when natan was around ten the moriyamas found out about him, and they were not happy.

they didn't like split attention or loyalty. they kept children and family under very tight wraps. they should be one hundred percent enmeshed in the moriyama empire, raised to be loyal and helpful in whatever way they were needed. the fact that meyer wanted and was willing to leave for this family, and then hid his son, was a huge betrayal

still, they gave him an opportunity to prove his loyalty: kill camara or the moriyamas would kill them all: her, natan, meyer, and both their mothers

but meyer couldn't do it, and instead he told camara to run and hope they didn't actually care enough to chase her down. and she did. and she couldn't take natan with her. (i haven't fully fleshed out why yet, currently thinking that meyer was given this ultimatium when they already had natan)

so camara left her son, and got away

i built the story of mary's mother as a reflection of mary's story if something had been different, and i built nathan's story the same way. his wife takes her son and runs away with him when the moriyamas try to take him from her. nathan's mother was in the same situation and left him behind

over the next forty years of his belonging to the moriyamas he gets to marinate in that resentment. from the father that ignored to the mother who ran away from him, he internalizes it as being something wrong with him, not the circumstances. the more he's taught to torture and kill and the more he excels at it, the more this belief gets cemented. he's good at killing, he was meant to kill. he's twisted and broken and wrong inside and he always was and his parents always knew

and then when it happens again but differently this time he throws away a decade and millions of dollars and his standing with his boss to hunt down his son and his wife because he didn't get to run away so why should they? why does mary love nathaniel more than camara loved natan?

from here, the exact detail's of nathan's story aren't quite solidified. whether he was raised by his father from then on or by his grandmothers (or whether his grandmothers left with his mother) or whether the moriyamas put him somewhere else entirely, but from then on he lived under the moriyamas' direct supervision, and they taught him how to turn a knife on a man

they took his mother's name from him, though, so he's natan wesninski, not natan da machado, because they own the wesninskis now

and when the moriyamas decided to expand beyond brazil when natan was a young man instead of a child, and settled on the east coast of the US, they renamed him nathan, because it sounded more "american"

---

so that's it. obviously there are still a lot of unfinished details in both stories, but they're strong enough at this point to stand on their own and i haven't changed or rethought a lot of the major details in a long time

i've become extremely attached to these OCs and their stories, and i hope they interest other people too. some day i'd like to write them out in prose properly, along with the story of nathan and mary meeting, but that'll be a while away considering the pace i move at

so until then i just wanted to put this out there

#aftg #tfc #neil josten #nathaniel wesninski #mary hatford #nathan wesninski #txt #my fics #my writing #my posts #black neil josten #jewish neil josten #cw gangs #cw organized crime #cw ww11 #cw wwII #long form post

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dragynkeep · 3 years

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do you have a backstory for the ace ops, since canon legitimately gave us nothing? and will they be in azre? i’m gonna reread it today since it makes me 🥺🥰

I actually do have backstories for the Ace Ops, and yes they do appear in AZRE! I did the backstories for Clover and Harriet, and my friends in my discord server did backstories for Elm, Marrow and Vine!

Clover

Since Clover is obnoxiously Irish coded in AZRE, I took a lot of inspiration from my older relatives’ childhoods for him.

He was born in Mantle to a family along with a younger sister, Ciara, his mother Fionnuala, his father Patrick and his grandfather Niall. Before Clover, his family were all miners, and are very proud of it. In his youth, Clover was far more of a troublemaker and a delinquent, especially with his troubled relationship with his father when Clover decided not to go into the mines and instead wanted to be a Huntsman.

Before Clover entered Atlas Academy, Patrick passed away from Dust Lung; a dangerous respiratory disease caused by inhaling Dust and is inspired by the real life disease that affected miners, Tuberculosis or “Black Lung”. Clover took the loss hard and his place in Atlas was threatened due to his behaviour, but he was brought back from the brink by Ironwood, who was the new general and headmaster of the Academy.

Obviously, when Clover graduated from Atlas, he joined the Ace Ops, becoming the leader after a few years in service which was considered highly unusual and just showed his great prowess and skills. He was in the Ace Ops with Elm and Vine from the beginning, and Harriet, Giang and later Marrow joined later on. After years in service, he and Ironwood entered a romantic relationship but had to keep things on the down low due to unprofessionalism and laws meaning that relationships between a general and his soldier was disallowed.

A few years before current time, he had a son through a surrogate; Riley.

Elm

The only Ace Operative to actually be from Atlas. Elm had a fairly normal life, her family was in the cuisine industry and enjoyed baking, something that Elm picked up on from an early age (That cake in the RWBY celebration party? It’s hers now, she made it, change my mind.)

When she decided to join Atlas and become a Huntress, it was never about the fame or money, but rather she’d spent her entire life watching her parents brings smiles to people’s faces and wanted to do that to, just in a way she was best suited in. In the Academy, she was put into Team SBLE, where the team quickly showed that they were exceptionally skilled together with winning the Vytal Tournament. After leaving the Academy, the four went into the Specialist career, a rare choice for all four to stick together for graduation.

During their first year, it went great. But soon they were called on a mission to clear out a Grimm nest near one of the sensory towers, hidden in a mountain that was connected by dozens of mines. The team went in, and there they found the biggest nest ever recorded. By the time evac came, Elm was the last one, having collapsed the mountain on top of them in a desperate attempt to kill the Grimm.

While she survived, the loss broke her. Elm handed in her resignation and spent time at her parents’ home in her room, just staring at the photo of her team at the Vytal Tournament. When General Ironwood personally visited her, she nearly slammed the door in his face. But he understood, and he was kind, and he offered her another chance. An idea he was coming up with, a unit of the best. He only had one other candidate so far, and in the back of her head Elm thought 'maybe this one will be lucky enough not to die'.

She put on a grin when she met the man who was about to be her new teammate, and poor Clover O’Connor found himself first on the receiving end of one of her handshakes, and then got a box full of fresh baked brownies immediately after.

Vine

Vine originally came from a very rural village in Northern Mistral, living there until he was nine years old before moving to Argus due to his adoptive parents finding work there. Vine wasn’t particuarly happy with the move since he enjoyed the solitude that rural life gave him, and being a quiet person, moving to a busy city made him close in more on himself to the point that he became a selective mute.

However, he was brought into a small dojo in Argus with the teacher there seeing a small Vine and teaching him what he knew. Vine showed an aptitude to fighting and went into Sanctum to further his education. When he graduated though, he was given a spot in Atlas Academy due to his skills, but Vine didn’t particularly want to go because of his anxiety. However, he was convinced to give it a go and graduated Atlas, being chosen for the Ace Ops due to his abilities and for his personality, able to handle the more outspoken Elm and carefree Clover.

On top of that, Ironwood saw this unsure young man and decided that having Elm and Clover on his team would bring him out more, and give him opportunities to break out of his shell so to speak. For Vine, the Ace Ops ended up being that security that he didn’t really have in life, and both Clover and Elm would welcome him into the fold.

Harriet

A Mantle girl through and through, Harriet was always a competitive girl, never backing down from a challenge and wanting everything to happen quickly, showing no patience for anything. In her eyes, being from Mantle meant that you had to give twice the effort for half the respect, and she would be respected.

Throughout her childhood, she had a best friend who stuck with her through thick and thin; Giang Meo. They trained together, had fun together, stuck together, and when they managed to secure spots in Atlas Academy, they were even put on the same team. Both mimicked each other, with Harriet specialising in wrestling and hand to hand combat with her plated arm weapons, while Giang specialised in kickboxing with his plated leg weapons.

After they graduated, both were picked by Ironwood, on Clover’s suggestion, to join the Ace Ops, making the iconic five man group along with Clover, Elm and Vine. Harriet was proud, taking her job seriously and wanting to show what she was made of, but her insecurities were compounded with every job in Atlas. Even after she made a name for herself, even getting the title of the Fastest Huntress in Remnant and breaking the previous record, she was still a commoner, and commoners weren’t respected in Atlas.

Worse still, after Giang defected due to Atlas’ inability to handle the Faunus racism and his own radicalisation being pushed by growing White Fang activity, Harriet was broken. No longer trusting people, she didn’t see her team as friends, believing that it would just get in the way of her work, and she kept that mentality ever since.

Giang

The Turtle to Harriet’s Hare, Giang Meo was the son of a Southern Mistrali immigrant who came to Mantle for work. His mother found work in Atlas working under the Nguyen family, a southern Mistrali family that took came to Atlas, starting a flourishing fashion company and making a fortune for themselves.

During his childhood, he found little friends in Mantle due to his Faunus heritage, being a snow leopard, and latched onto Harriet when she showed kindness to the boy. Quickly becoming the best of friends, they protected each other for years, even going into Atlas Academy and joining the same team. However, during his time at Atlas, the racism he faced was just compounded, pushing Giang further and further into the radicalisation that would later claim him.

Once graduated and given a spot in the Ace Ops, Giang started moving away from his team. During that time, he married the only child of the Nguyen family; Chau, which sparked many controversies in Atlas due to them being a human and him a Faunus. Because of the push back from their family, Chau and Giang had to marry in secret, which was not considered legal by law.

This further embittered Giang. He joined protests, at first hiding his identity, and then showing himself proudly, but one protest turned into a riot and Giang joined in the destruction. Given his identity as a Huntsman and an Ace Operative was well known, Ironwood was formed to reprimand him and arrest Giang for multiple crimes.

As the Ace Ops moved to arrest their former friend, Giang tried to see if Harriet would at least defend him, but she did nothing. Betrayed, Giang fled, resulting in a chase that ended in Giang wounded on the face, Harriet’s hip broken and Giang falling off Atlas’ ledge, where Ironwood declares him dead and seals all documentation on him. However, Giang didn’t die, and after nursing his wounds, he was brought into Salem’s forces, wanting justice and revenge for him and the Faunus of Mantle.

Marrow

The Amin pack was a small but close knit family unit that was only small in terms of their tiny house on the far end of the crater, where the children are packed into the bedrooms like very rambunctious sardines and the neighbours learnt that complaining about all the howling and play fighting was useless, because an entire family of dog faunus working the mines would rather let their kids be happy and have fun when they can.

Marrow's mother was a newcomer to Mantle, a wolf faunus from a town far out in the tundra, with piercing blue eyes. While Marrow and Ulna took the husky genes from their father, their older brother Ramus took the wolf. Ramus and Marrow, like so many children, had to take jobs in the mines to help keep food on the table, and as the oldest of the next Amins, they eventually took on the job of helping out with the younger cousins and eventually, younger siblings.

Marrow doesn't like the mines. He didn't like being a trapper. Faunus can see in the dark, sure, but spending twelve hours in pitch black by a little trap door, the only job being to pull it open to let air flow through, would be miserable for anyone. Sometimes though, he was sent into Mantle to pick up supplies if they had spare lien to get maybe a bit of bread to go with the customary broth that made up every dinner. One day, he ran into trouble.

A bunch of children who saw a hungry dog faunus in a secondhand miner's uniform and decided to play chase. It was over in one word, when he threw their taunts back at them and told them to stay, his anger at the unfairness his family suffered peaking in that moment. Suddenly he had a chance for a better life. A Huntsman life.

He applied for every combat school in the kingdom, and one said yes. Marrow put everything into this new chance, enough to make a scholarship into Atlas Academy at the end. Team MCHA, however, was not so happy to have a scruffy boy from Mantle with a tail and a secondhand miner's uniform as the A on their team.

May Marigold had better things to do then coddle an affirmative action student. Marrow ignored it. He knew his worth. He just had to get through four years, and then he could sign up for the military, and finally help his family, he could work his way up the ranks, make a difference for his people. He had ambition, and he knew how to use it. Then a mine collapsed. A worker tripped handling some agitated dust. Chain reaction.

Ironwood immediately sent everyone he could to help out. If nothing else, the enhanced strength of a huntsmen could help them clear the fallen rocks. Marrow and his team arrived just in time to see another huntsman pulling Ramus out from under a boulder, and they put a shroud over his brother's head. Ulna ran away, Marrow's grades plummeted, and his team told him to get over it, faunus died, it happened a lot in the mines.

He pulled himself up again himself, and eventually got what he was working for, graduating second-best in his year after May. The moment he got his first specialist paycheck, he funnelled as much as he could to his family, so that none of the kids had to work in the mines.

Soon, Ironwood decided to give Marrow a chance, moving him into the Ace Ops to further hone his skills and fill in the hole left by Giang. While most of the Ace Ops welcomed Marrow and tried to put the past in the past, Harriet was cold towards him, unable to shake the feeling that he was only there to replace Giang. Despite her animosity towards him, Marrow kept trying to prove his place in the Ace Ops.

And that’s it for the Ace Ops’ backstories! Hope you like them tbh, me and my friends worked hard to build these characters up after having crumbs for them for over a year now.

#rwby #clover ebi #elm ederne #vine zeki #harriet bree #giang meo #marrow amin #answered #luke.txt #i love them so much so if crwby refuses to give us anything imma make it up myself

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lizk77 · 4 years

Text

Ten Years

This was actually originally posted on facebook around the end of the year. It began with my need to share my experience with others. I saw a few of those ‘10 years ago’ posts where people post a pic from back then and a recent one side by side. I tried that and realized I don’t really look much different. But the last decade of my life has certainly been the most meaningful of my life. This is very personal and discusses physical, mental and emotional abuse so if that’s a sensitive subject for you please don’t read. This is why I’ve been absent from tumblr and writing for so long.

I would also say this is not appropriate for anyone under the age of 18 due to adult themes.

It’s been 10 years. A decade. The most difficult yet meaningful decade of my life. When I think back to the person I was 10 years ago, I am amazed by the woman I’ve become today. I stand here at the end of the most difficult decade of my life and I’m proud. Proud of what I’ve accomplished, my strength and everything I’ve learned.

I began this decade feeling nearly suffocated by grief. I was no stranger to grief, but the loss of my mother was like the spiritual and emotional equivalent of having the wind knocked out of you. Pure, utter devastation. I was overwhelmed by my feelings. The whole world felt like a strange, scary place without my mother in it. In the months preceding her death I had tunnel vision, I focused on taking care of her and Emily and didn’t allow myself time to feel anything. So even though I knew she was dying, it didn’t really hit home until after she was gone. I instantly regretted that I didn’t focus more on enjoying my mother’s last months on this earth. I carry that regret with me still today. I should’ve had her teach me how to make her spaghetti sauce. I should’ve written down the recipe for parsley potatoes that she showed me how to make once but I haven’t been able to duplicate since. I should’ve asked her questions. Questions about my grandparents, about my dad, about when I was a baby. I should’ve had her French braid my hair every night. I miss that the most. I should’ve asked her how to be a good mother. What to do when my child is up at 3am puking down the hallway, all over the bed and the carpet. If I should take my kid to the hospital when she has something stuck up her nose, or how high of a fever is cause for alarm. There have been countless instances over the past decade where I would have given anything to be able to call her for guidance and support.

Grief has been the overwhelming emotion guiding me the past 10 years. I’ve learned that grief never ends. It changes, at first the feeling of loss is so raw that you just don’t know how you’ll ever be the same again. Then, over time, it evolves into every emotion. Grief can be happiness, sadness, anger and frustration. It can encompass all emotions at once. There are times even now when I just feel the loss of her all over again and in that moment I’m devastated all over again. I struggled with a lot of things after my mother’s death. I am still struggling with my faith. I have been angry at God for the past decade, so angry that I have neglected the spiritual well-being of my children. I have yet to figure out how to let that go.

I’ve always considered myself to be a strong, independent person. Life made me that way. I’ve experienced enough death, enough pain, enough abuse. Not long after the death of my mother, I was lured into a relationship that provided security. Financial security, which I had never had before. But I lost my strength. For 7 years I allowed my strength and independence to be stripped away. I was broken, ashamed, nobody knew what I was going through. Hell, I didn’t even realize the full extent of it. I was blind to the damage being caused not just to me, but to my children. I told myself our security was more important than our happiness. I realized after a while that I was wrong, but by then I didn’t know how to get out. I was afraid of losing everything.

Then it happened. The one thing I always said I would never tolerate. And yet, I found myself wishing it would happen. Because then I would have a reason. I watched my mother suffer the effects of physical abuse many times while I was a teenager. I vowed that I’d never let that happen to me. But once I was tangled in the web of my own abusive relationship, I began to realize that there are types of abuse that far surpass the physical. Bruises, cuts, even broken bones eventually heal. And it’s so easy to say, “He hit her? What a monster!” The abuse is very evident. But when you’re subjected to the whims of a narcissist, it’s very different. Everybody thinks they’re such a nice guy. They project an image of being loving and caring and happy. But the truth is they are even more of a monster than the guy who beats his wife. For seven years, I merely existed in his world. I tried as hard as I could to give him what he wanted and make him happy. Nothing I did was ever good enough. My daughters and I walked around our house on eggshells, not wanting to poke the sleeping giant. I tried to be the peacekeeper. Tried my best to keep his anger focused on me and not my girls. I told myself I could take it as he backed me into the bathroom, up against the shower wall, screaming at me with his face inches from mine. Spit flying everywhere. He called me worthless, accused me of cheating, told me I didn’t care about my children or the home we built for them.

And I stayed. Because I didn’t know how to leave. I didn’t think I could take care of my home and children on my own. I wasn’t strong enough. I was weak. I wasn’t good enough. After all, that’s what he had told me for 7 years. The day after one of our fights was always surreal. He acted like it never happened. Told me he loved me and he just needed to get his anger out or he’d explode. Like berating me and breaking me down was no big deal. And I would stand there in front of him, bewildered. Amazed by how really fucked up he was. But I stayed. I kept the peace and I stayed.

Until that night. When he hit me, it was like he knocked some sense into me. I remember the look on my daughter’s face after it happened. Tears welled up in my eyes as my baby looked at me with concern and asked if I was ok. I was not ok. Not at all. I saw myself in the face of my baby, saw the concern I felt for my mother all those years. And I drew strength from it. My mom would have been devastated to know what my life was like. I was her strong child, yet here I was broken and weak. I couldn’t let the same cycle repeat itself. I couldn’t let my kids grow up watching their mother being treated badly. I knew that if she were still alive, I would’ve gotten out sooner. She would’ve seen right through him. She would’ve known he was evil and I was miserable. She always did. She always knew. I used to hate that she was always right about my life and my feelings. But now that she’s gone, I truly miss her ability to tell me what’s wrong with my life. She always had a way of calling me out on my bad decisions. And she was the only one I listened too. The only opinion that really mattered.

So I decided to make a change. I called the cops and had him arrested. Then I went the very next day and filed an injunction for protection from abuse. He was gone. My oldest was already with her dad and my youngest went up north to stay with my aunt for awhile. I had two uninterrupted months to find myself again. I picked up the broken pieces of my life and focused on me. I spent time with friends. I went on dates. I lost a bunch of weight. I went out and experienced life beyond my couch. Gradually I began to feel like myself again. I regained my strength. But I also found myself grieving, once again. Despite everything I had been through, I missed my family. I worked hard for 7 years to build a life and it was gone. Of course I didn’t miss the abusive part of my relationship. But there were some things I missed. The feel of someone next to me in bed at night. Having someone to talk to about my day. Despite my decision to stay single and raise my daughters on my own, I found myself lonely at times. Sure I had been out on dates, but I told everyone up front that I wasn’t looking for a relationship, I just wanted to keep things casual. Once you tell a guy that there’s really no way to take it back. Plus I had so much baggage. And I’m not talking about my kids. I’m talking about emotional baggage. I was a mess. I faked confidence that I didn’t have. Sure I was getting stronger, but healing takes time. How do you tell someone you just met that you just suffered through 7 years of narcissistic abuse? Without them thinking you’re totally crazy? You don’t. So I held it back. I tried to push it to the back of my mind and forget it was there.

It didn’t work. I decided to try something different. I talked about it. To everyone. Literally. Friends, co-workers, family, dates. Reactions were mixed. Most people were really supportive. Some were not. A lot of people just faded into the woodwork of my life at this point. They stopped texting me and returning my calls. I was upset by this at first, but soon discovered that letting it out was like lifting a huge weight off my shoulders. It was helping me heal. I was growing stronger each day. I have to thank each and every person who listened, even if they had a negative reaction. My healing was much quicker because I let all those feelings go rather than bottle them up. I know, crazy, right? Here I am, the cold-hearted one who buries their feelings deep down, sharing all my feelings with pretty much anyone who would listen. And something amazing happened. I started to smile more. I opened up to people. I started being honest and upfront with people about my feelings. Sure, I’m still hurting and healing, but I really feel transformed. I struggle, I have stress and anxiety, mostly about my children and finances. But I am happy. I am confident again. I know I’m a good person and learning how to let go of all the bad feelings and negativity created by my situation. Some days are good, some days aren’t. Some days I feel strong and on top of the world. Others I feel weak and broken. But the most important thing I’ve learned in the past decade is how to pick myself back up, dust myself off and rise above.

I don’t know what the next decade has in store for me. I know I will continue to focus on my inner growth and raising my children. I will figure out how to be happy and how to struggle less. I will also focus on developing honest and loving relationships with the people I care about. Respect and loyalty and communication are my top priority. My focus has to be me and my children. We come first. I refuse to allow any of us to be mistreated or abused. I will settle for nothing less and surround my family with people who are genuine and who care. This is my goal for the next ten years.

It will be the best years of my life.

Tagging: @allaboutchoices @innerpostmentality @bobasheebaby @sirbeepsalot @darley1101 @desiree---1986

I’m tagging just a few people I know. I won’t be offended if you don’t want to read or reblog.

#not choices #personal #ten years #hiatus explained #long post

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thecorteztwins · 5 years

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Idea: Fabian/Pietro but is an Hades and Persephone AU :)

Ok, doing this under a cut both for length and content, warning for a LOT of discussion of noncon because IT’S GREEK MYTHOLOGY:

Ok, so firstly, the version of Hades and Persephone I’ll be basing this on is the original wherein he explicitly kidnaps her, he explicitly abducts her, she is not willing, she does not want to be there, she does not want to be with him, she just eventually gets used to it. I specify this because Tumblr has popularized a very sanitized new version in which Persephone and Hades are this cute happy couple and hooked up very willingly and it’s just all crazy Demeter throwing a fit. Now, I don’t think it’s bad to rewrite new versions of old stories. It’s GREAT. People have been doing that for ages, it’s why there are so many variations on myths and fairy tales. Hell, the Bible literally has books that contradict each other on how the same events went down. And a lot of my favorite works in media are just retellings of familiar stories. So I don’t MIND the idea of going “I am rewriting this myth into something I like better” in itself. But Tumblr has also spread the idea that this is “real” and “original” story, which...no, it is not. Without going too in-depth about ancient texts and translations and stuff, there is no secret older version in which Persephone ever wanted to be with Hades. It has always been a story of kidnapping and implied rape. And there’s no problem if you enjoy the new version that is popular now. I get why a lot of people would! But I just wanted to be clear on WHICH version I’m using, and what kind of content is going to be there. I’m trying to steer away from TOO much darkness here, but also not turn into cute and consensual either. I just don’t want people popping in with comments like “THIS IS WRONG, HADES WOULD NEVER/IN THE ORIGINAL THEY WERE IN LOVE/etc.” You know how people can be when your preferred version of something isn’t their preferred version/the popular version.OK, so Magneto is our Zeus (king of the heavens, lots of kids, isn’t a rapist like Zeus but he sure does enter into a lot of relationships with younger women and slanted power dynamics). Exodus is our Poseidon, he’s Magneto’s lieutenant, his second in command. He’s equally benevolent and destructive, just like the sea, and his sanity shifts like the tides. And Fabian is the third in command and thus given domain under the Underworld, considered the most undesireable of the territories. As in Greek myth, what it lacks in beauty and life (not just no living people/animals, but no flowers and plants and natural beauty either), it makes up for in wealth. The Greeks believed it was literally UNDER the ground, which of course is where gems and minerals were mined, hence why Hades was also the god of riches. In a swap from Greek canon, where Poseidon is as much of a horndog as Zeus and Hades only takes (literally) a woman once, Exodus is celibate and Fabian is...not. Fabian is, well, Fabian. And that seems counterintuitive, right? The seas are teeming with life, just as Poseidon had many children. The Underworld is by definition devoid of life, which is probably why Hades had only woman and it was his wife, and why they never (unless you scour some really obscure stuff) had any children. So, what gives?Much like Fabian started as Magneto’s favorite and first lieutenant only to be replaced by Exodus, it was originally so here too. The stoic, ascetic, loyal Exodus ruled the Underworld, as constant and true as death itself, while the ficke and fertile Fabian ruled the sea with many consorts and an endless stream of children. But Fabian decided to imitate the wrong religion and pull a Lucifer with an attempted coup on Magneto, and thus Magneto swapped his and Exodus’s positions. All of Fabian’s former concubines became lakes and streams, separated from the sea. All his children were transformed into the countless life forms that live in the ocean---the fish, the crabs, the coral, the seals, and so on. All of them once women and children. Cruel and unfair? Sure, but that’s how it goes with gods. Lots of collateral damage and people getting turned into animals/plants, mostly women who didn’t deserve it.Now that Fabian ruled the realm of the dead, Magneto also forced him to take on Exodus’s celibacy. No wives, no women, no children. No sex or fertility could fester in a realm by definition devoid of life. Fabian attempts to weasel around this law as much as he can, but Magneto makes it so that he can’t do anything with the dead souls there, and anyone living he tries to bring there will die the instant they enter. And he’s not allowed to leave. So he tries bargaining. The Underworld has metal, lots of it. You know what Magneto loves? Metal. You know what there isn’t any of up in the Heavens? Metal! Fabian will give him ALL THE IRON (because for some reason that’s Magneto’s fave instead of gold or silver, go figure) if he lets Fabian fuck again. Magneto agrees that he’ll let Fabian have ANY consort of his choosing, so long as he agrees to three rules:- He can only have ONE, and they must wed. No harem.- They must be divine or semi-divine. No mortals. This is the only bride he’s getting, so they have to last.- They must be a man. The justification Magneto gives is he doesn’t want any chance of children but actually Magneto just wants to fuck with him a little because he hates him.Fabian, naturally, turns this down because WHAT THE FUCK MAN! But as he gets more and more stir-crazy over the ages, he finally gives in, takes the bargain, and sets out on a quest to find THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMANLY GOD OR DEMI-GOD MAN HE POSSIBLY CAN!Magneto is amused.Anyway, Fabian watches the surface world for ages through caves, crevices, etc. Since Magneto has cursed him not to be able to actually set foot there, that’s how he sees out into the world of the living, through all the holes in the earth. He does this for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, because he’s that picky, but also getting more desperate with every century too.Enter Pietro, our Persephone, though the role he fills as a deity is more like that of Hermes/Mercury, the super-fast messenger of the gods. Fabian never met him before because he always thought himself too important to use a mere messenger, always demanding an audience with Magneto himself.Speaking of Magneto, he is the father of Pietro and his twin Wanda via a mortal woman. Giving birth to the children of a god placed a strain so great on her body that she dissipated into nothing upon their birth, and they were raised by Bova, the divine cow, until they were old enough to join the world of humans, at which point she left them with a worthy human couple who had lost their own twins. They grew up, discovered their godly powers and heritage, and joined the pantheon, but that’s another story.Anyway, Pietro has wed an elemental, Crystal, and they have a demigoddess daughter, Luna. The only time the super-fast Pietro slows down is to spend time with them (or his sister). Crystal, as an elemental, loves nature, so they’re all having happy family time in this beautiful green glade, splashing about in a lagoon with a waterfall.And the waterfall has a cave behind it, which Fabian can see from. Now, Pietro is pretty, but he’s hardly womanly. He’s got a sharp face and lean muscles and his personality isn’t what I’d call particularly effeminate, going by stereotypes. But he’s still lovely and lithe, and he fits the criteria given by Magneto---male and divine---and Fabian is DESPERATE at this point. So he sees this elfin, attractive dude and he’s just like YES THIS IS IT THIS IS DEFINITELY PRACTICALLY A WOMAN AND THIS IS THE ONE I WANT!So he tells Magneto he’s found his choice, and Magneto lifts the curse long enough for him to obtain his “bride”. Normally no one is fast enough to catch Pietro, he’s the freaking wind itself, but the moment Magneto gives Fabian the “okay” the ground opens beneath Pietro and swallows him up right before his family’s eyes. Next thing he knows, he’s in the Underworld and this huge dude in a cape is standing over him, yammering about how lucky he is to be chosen and how their wedding will be an event to remember for centuries and blah blah blah.Naturally, Pietro is less than thrilled, and punches Fabian in the face without even realizing who he is. He then zooms around the Underworld and realizes where he is, and that there’s no exit. Cue Fabian gloating about how there’s no escape for him and he’s his now. Pietro says that just because he’s HERE doesn’t mean that Fabian can touch him at all, and he does a damn good job of keeping away from the guy. Fabian is more frustrated than ever...then remembers that gods get hungry too. They can’t starve to death, but they do get hungry.And nothing grows in the Underworld. So Pietro is zooming around down there evading Fabian and all the forces he sends to capture him---monsters, Furies, ghosts, Cereberus---but he can’t escape his stomach. He’s ravenous. But he can’t find any food here. Why would there be? No one here needs to eat. As Pietro gets more and more desperate for a single scrap, who appears before him, pomegranate in hand, but Fabian.”Gods cannot starve, but we do hunger, as you do,” he says, as though Pietro needs reminding,”And I too am a god. Any food that is here is in my castle. Be my bride and---”He doesn’t even get to finish before Pietro snatches the pomegranate away and runs once again.Just like Fabian KNEW he would. He knew that Pietro would steal it and run. It was the plan all along.Pietro cracks the pomegranate open, but he only gets six seeds down before he feels the CHANGE happening. Something is WRONG with him. Has he been poisoned? Can a god be poisoned? He cannot die, but he knows he can suffer. And something feels very, VERY strange right now.He drops the pomegranate, and it rolls away, stopping at the booted feet of Fabian.”I was hoping you’d eat more before you caught on,” he says, “But you are, after all, a quick one.”PIetro demands to know what has been done to him. Fabian explains that everything in his domain becomes his when it enters. That’s why none of the other gods come here. And food does not grow here, but it can be brought here. And once it comes here, it also becomes his. Anyone who eats it becomes his---meaning, dead. In Pietro’s case, he can’t die, but it can take his godly powers. He is immortal still, but so long as he is in the Underworld, he will lack his famous speed.He can’t run from Fabian anymore. He fights him, but the larger man drags him back to his dark palace, carved from polished obsidian and basalt, coming out of the rock walls of the Underworld itself. It’s beautiful inside, so much so that Pietro is stunned for a moment in spite of his situation. This is not what he expected the dismal domain of the dead king to be; its opulence outshines even Heaven itself. He’s thrust into a plush and beautifully decorate room the size of a house, told that these are his chambers, and everything he could ever need or want is there. There’s a huge crystal tub with steaming groundwater pouring in, gilded and velvet furniture stuffed with the softest fur of slain animals, paintings (mostly of Fabian, admittedly) and trinkets and...gowns? There’s a ton of women’s clothing here?Fabian informs him he’ll playing the role of a wife, and Pietro freaks out all over again, screaming at him, throwing things, trying to attack him.This is a mistake. Fabian catches him by the throat and tosses him to the floor, reminding him that he’s not so fast anymore. And when Pietro grabs the nearest little golden statue---a smirking bust of Fabian himself---to try to beat his captor’s godly head in, he’s also reminded that Fabian has guards here, who tear his weapon from his hands and hold him back while Fabian smirks down at him in perfection imitation of the golden bust.He says Pietro will adjust. And that he’d better hurry it up because the wedding is already planned. Fabian has been planning it a damn long time, long before he saw Pietro. It’s gorgeous, it’s huge, it’s opulent, it’s over the top, and he is NOT going to have it ruined by an ungratefully reluctant bride! Er, femininely shy bride!The invites go out and Pietro’s name is on them and that’s when Magneto realizes just who it was that caught Fabian’s eye. And Wanda realizes what happened to her brother. Wanda is our Demeter figure. She’s actually more of a Hestia/Hecate combo in terms of her role as a deity, much like how Quicksilver is Hermes but is playing Persephone’s part here, and she’s his sister instead of his mother, but she plays Demeter’s role as the one person who speaks out against this, the one person who rages, the one person who grieves. She uses all her power to petition her father to go back on his bargain, but he refuses her. He’s not happy about this either, but he won’t become an oathbreaker. Not for Pietro. Maybe he would have for one of his daughters, but not the boy.Wanda tries to rescue Pietro next, but the curse of the pomegranate seeds keeps him bound there in the Underworld, one month for each seed eaten.Half a year, every year.So for half a year, every year, Wanda’s chaos powers go haywire, her witchcraft encircling the world, letting loose cold and winds and magic...and ghosts too. The reason there are so many ghost stories around this time? Wanda is fucking with the Underworld and yanking out as many souls as she can just to spite Fabian. But the wedding still goes on. Fabian still has his bride. Pietro is still trapped for six months a year, and he hates it. He fights it for centuries, even long after he knows he can do nothing. And slowly, he adjusts. He finds small but significant ways to rebel, ways to making Fabian unhappy without provoking retaliation. And some small, awful, shameful part of him...begins to enjoy that at least Fabian values him. Sees him as a treasure. Pays attention to him.The way his father never did. And sometimes, Fabian will throw some kind of attempt at real human kindness in there, something more than cold gifts of gold and jewels, something more than cold hands in the dark. Like when he let Eurydice have her chance to go back to Orpheus. That was for Pietro, because Pietro wanted it, because Pietro asked. It was admittedly not done out of REAL kindness or compassion to Pietro, but just in hopes it would make him more compliant out of gratitude. And Pietro realized he could begin to use that. To make things better for people in the Underworld in whatever small ways he could sway Fabian. He had a purpose here. He could be a hero.And so he became not merely Fabian’s new toy, but the beloved Queen to the dead, the one to whom they petitioned for aid, the only god who would ever hear their prayers. And every six months, Pietro would return to the surface world. Wanda’s rage and grief would cease, and Crystal would make the entire world blossom and bloom in happiness at his return.And Fabian would wait, knowing what was his would come back to him.Oh, and while I’m on this: Haven is Medusa. A religiously devout woman (Medusa was a priestess to Athena) who was wronged by a man and then she was supernaturally punished as a result, making her a monster/villain the rest of her life, as well as apparently pregnant the rest of her life (with Pegasus/the Adversary) and only giving birth at her death. Admittedly we’d have to change her rapist since it was Poseidon and EXODUS AIN’T ABOUT THE LIFE but yeah. And I’d make Monsoon our Pegasus, so her son instead of her brother.

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ndx94 · 3 years

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My pro-choice Democrat anti-Trump pro-CCP parents are furious with me that my college girlfriend and I twice procured emergency contraception in 2007 and my brother will not talk to me as it turns out I’m not a virgin retard, but had sexual intercourse within a committed thought-we’d-get-married love-relationship in my senior year of college and lived with her in the year following that and twice in my life I committed seminal ejaculation within the context of a female anatomy belonging to someone who badly wanted to get pregnant and be “settled” with me at the age of 21, after our parents had very carefully trained us not to have sex before marriage, warned us about attending Rutgers University, and also demanded us to “take responsibility” in the case of conception.

I am not happy about being an abortionist, babykiller, or anything like that but the idea that I wasn’t put up to it in the least or that you can vote for Bill Clinton and love porneia and still hold your son 100% accountable for his morals at the age of 21 when he was traumatized by the Iraq War and sleep-deprived for 3 years due to stress and emotional abuse by his racist Pakistani anti-white roommate in college and naturally he would then not want to come inside girl to cope or work out and be a nice person in hope of getting love in general rather than gun for Law School. TW-1 and I thought we would get married; we were both virgins in the autumn of 2006 and I at least have not so much as copped a feel of a breast-outline or buttock since TW-1 and I broke up in summer ‘07 let alone ‘played the lottery’ (pregnancy is winning).

I don’t like talking about this but it’s one thing people want to know about and I feel the right to say a few words in my defense on Planet Roe America and as a person who I’m pretty sure was conceived both outside of wedlock and in cis-rape or rape by deception, and if my little “Jaehee’s helper-bird” friend is correct, son of a guy who got so mad I didn’t myself rape the American Korean Presbyterian Pastor’s daughter (a.k.a. my sister) in the summer of 2002 that he fond some girl to drug and rape as symbolic coping.

I still remember well the autumn afternoon I met Taiwan-1, whose name is Rebecca or in Mandarin means “pure literature” or as I like to say “pellucid and literary” or “limpid and well-lettered.” As with the pastor’s daughter I in retrospect devoutly if not ardently regret not being closer to her father, who cared about me far more than my biological begetter; a Confucian gentleman and natural scholar / lover of moral philosophy who happened to become a banker just b/c he had to help his family (and all of Taiwan as a national-level financier), rather than a scholar of history and poetry as I apparently myself have become.

The evening Taiwan-1 and I met was the first day in my life I drank a full glass of wine. It was at a Rutgers English Department function related to the Honors Thesis I wrote, also on Taiwan and the director Hou Hsiao Hsien. I had originally wanted to write my thesis on a videogame called Final Fantasy VIII which in retrospect was an augury of how E. Asian media would summon people to Love not just through Squaresoft but later SM Entertainment, about which I also hoped to write an academic thesis before breaking hard toward political scholarship and military or what I call the sort of “hard science ofo Korean Studies’ like statistics, economics, history, primary source documents, constitutional and legal analysis, reading the daily papers, esp. 38North which is an amazing labor of love from generals who just think all day every day about saving their boys.

The emotion that I felt as I drank that my first wine - I had just come from dropping off my desktop / tower PC to be repaired at the Livingston Campus Rutgers PC shop, and was looking forward to working on my writing on my father’s Windows 98 laptop (I didn’t like laptops at the time but felt comfortable / nostalgic using Win98 in 2006, the apparent end of the universe) - was like, “Wahh [soft but real cry], does David Johnston really deserve nothing and no one?” I’m not trying to say I am selfish or unselfish but I had no friends, the only person I really liked was Big Bad Boris a.k.a. Aleksey “Alex” Kasavin who worked Google later on then Microsoft via Yale MBA program, but he doesn’t like / has never opened up to me or wanted to be close or committed or “eternal roommates” as I used to feel about him. I recently wrote Aleksey a last letter just expressing frankly “sorry to you + sorry to me too” that I always wanted to be close with him and this was not reciprocated; it might’ve been a little cross but after 18 years of this person grinning at me without hugging me (platonically but I have always wanted a close male friendship like a I briefly had with Danny Shin in KR), what am I supposed to do but say something?

When Rebecca looked up at me at the RU English Honors Program welcoming gala at Zimmerli Museum I heard what was either glass breaking - like a Jewish wedding where the couple stomp a glass before kissing, a ritual I love / adore somehow - or at least someone toasting. I had talked to this Korean grad-student. Because of Rebecca I came out of my shell a bit and decided instead of pulling ice cream or delivering pizzas I would try to be slightly more social and get a job as a writing-tutor instead, since I was working on my creative writing daily since 2005, and had started my “bioweapons Taiwanese- and Korean-America families + abortion + China and America assassinating indigenous peoples” novel in 2003 (the “soft sci fi of Sci-Rom / Futurist Romantic Realism) novel that my parents hate me not publishing since it predicted Covid in a way), and had a good “ear” as a reader (I loved imitating esp. Haruki Murakami and a little Gao Xingjian).

TW-1 and I courted between September and November. One of the formative drives in our relationship was her parents’ moving back to Taiwan for her dad’s job and mine moving to WI leaving us all alone together in New Jersey. Another, we were both studying Taiwan. My uncle’s wife is also Taiwanese. I don’t want to give the details of our sexual relationship since this person is an important working professional, a scholar, but we lost our virginities in a hotel suite in Washington, which is why I posted this pic of drapes. I’ll never forget how the day afterward I felt an insane, idiopathic “atheist-thought-bullet-packet” in my head then spent the day working on my creative writing at the “business lounge corner” of the Embassy Suite while TW-1 watched anime in her t-shirt. For some reason that day when I went on my PC to check e-mail I got a communication from my online DAI Forum friend who hadn’t reached out to me in more than a year, as if psychically he just knew that there had been a disturbance in the force or, as I like to say, the great “gayakeum” that binds some people had been detuned or returned.

This is “American Korean Millennial Lit; the story of some semen / sperm” but it seems meaningful somehow that on the night I actually punctured her virginal membrance neither of us completed orgasm / ejaculation. She started crying and then I stopped and we both went to sleep and left each other alone. Then all day we just nursed ourselves in our way, she with Japanese stuff and I with my creative writing or “journals.” We went out to dinner and it was a very “Maison Ikkoku” moment in the November weather in her metallic dress and my military jacket and polo shirt and taped glasses. That night I also discovered my incredible intuitive capacity for what you might call “air-braking” or being able to stay inside really really really close to the moment of potential impregnation. I don’t like talking about porneia and had wished I left it all behind but like in JAV when they have to j--- themselves before doing something obscene that men of my gen. were influenced by the millions to do to insult their GF’s and wives t’s pathetic to me that they can’t “air-burst the A-Bomb at 100 feet.” It was 15 years ago and today I think like why did God create sexual organs to look that way and be that way, stuff like frankly what’s the relationship between male circumcision and conscience (removing the ”foreskin of the heart”).

I am not without tremendous fault in my relationship with TW-1 esp. due to the fact that all the while we were together I was haunted by the presence or memory or eventual wish to be together again with S’hai-1. I could never fully convince myself that TW was better and yet by the same token if I’m being honest my attitude in 2006 was, “If Kate doesn’t want me / is never coming back I am still gonna live life and try to be married with children and a profession because I am not trash just because she gets mad and fires me whenever she feels like it.” Our relationship was also marked by meddling from both her family and friends and mine.

I don’t know why I’m saying this now as it is the ancient past and I am writing almost something that I fear the Holy Ghost does not want me to as everyone has to work out their salvation for themselves with fear and trembling and their seed and eggs are their own or the Lord’s.

TW-1 and I had a good relationship in all honesty except for money. The MD at Aurora Psychiatric and my brother and parents are mad. The MD was like “get a car maybe blahblah then do some Bulgarian deadlifts, Axe body spray” ahhaha alright just the car and I LOVE and thank Hananim for this man but he is Indian-American anwyay I was like “Dude we traveled around half the world, we shared so many meals in so many places.” MD didn’t realize relationships are like that; you don’t just arrive but share the whole journey of two lives as one, and it’s infinitely sad when you share that way with one person then another rather than one all the way through. It was really liek a marriage in the sense that pace Ecclesiastes I was “seeing the world with my wife.”

My very favorite day together with TW-1 was in Princeton, NJ at Panera or Au bon Pain drinking espresso. I later wrote a scene in Hot Pursuit in Princeton and also K-pop fanfic in which I was married to I-know-not-whom but we were dropping off our daughter Krystal for classes. It was common for Millennials at Rutgers at least in the honors program to visit Princeton as a vacation or “different oxygen” since P is only about 1 hour down the road from this mad disheartening to some soul-breaking suicide-inducing state school, nestled in woods. Educational Testing Service / the makers of the SAT and TOEIC and TOEFL also have their headquarters around there adn I nearly got a job there in 2007, my first dream job as I believed that the SAT protected gifted young people from arbitrary often intellectually envious subjective teachers; a view on standardized testing shared by all rational governments but especially Korea and Asia in general, and also by the serious and caring moral, now basically religious scholar / sociologist Charles Murray, who believed he was saved from racists, as were many Jews in the days the Ivy League was hyper-anti-Semitic (word to the wise: they’re now anti-Korean mutatis mutandis).

The Lord is high and lifted up

The Lord is lifted up

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treehugginglibrarian · 3 years

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My Nana is Why I’m Like This

Writing about my Nana is hard, because our relationship was at times hard. I think anyone with an alcoholic or an addict in the family can relate to that. I learned a fair many lessons from her over the years, all of them useful even if not all of them were lessons that were learned in an enjoyable manner. That said, lessons are not what I want to think about just yet. Yes, she was flawed. When she was in a good place, though, and at her best, she was a truly wonderful human. For now, at least, for the few minutes it takes to write each of these pieces, I’m going to let myself pretend that this lovely person is all that ever existed of my Nana. To that, I offer some of her more poignant, thoughtful, or generally amusing moments.

Blankie

When I was a baby, basically everyone in my life lived in Massachusetts, as did I. My Nana lived in a nice house in Richmond with her husband at the time. Whenever we would visit, my mother would put a blanket down on the couch so as to ensure that if I puked, or drooled, or spit up, or just did baby-things in my sleep, my Nana’s couch would be safe. Apparently, after so many months of this, I eventually decided the blanket I was laying on was “mine.”

My mother found this out when she tucked it into a closet after we got home one evening, and I started to cry. She opened the closet and I stopped. Close: Cry. Open: Stop. When she walked me into the closet, I apparently pulled the blanket in question off the shelf, stuck my thumb in my mouth, and settled down. I had a blankie. While this was fine for sleeping and such, my mother was a little concerned. Not because blankets are inherently bad, as even back then there were psychological studies showing that children with comfort toys were actually better adjusted than those without. No, she was worried about more practical matters. Such as laundry day. Or if the damned thing should happen to go missing.

Enter my Nana, to save the day.

My Nana had not found the “original” blankie, but she was who found the “spare” that, excepting the overall color, was exactly identical to the one I used every night. So it was that on most days and nights I could be found dragging around a pink and white gingham and flower print blankie, as though it was a fifth limb. On occasion, however, this blanket would be replaced with one that was yellow. So that the pink one could get washed. Until, at the age of 13 or so, an age at which most normal humans would have long since stopped carting a blanket anywhere, I did something crazy: I retired the pink blankie. Torn to bits and more patchwork than blanket, it was time.

My yellow blanket took over, full time, moving into the task like the champ that it was. Sporting little more wear or tear than a grey foot print from a porch painting incident, this blanket has incidentally been a fair many places with me. It went away to college with me. It moved to Israel with me. It deployed to Iraq with me. It is the blanket I have cried into over failed relationships, fucked up friendships, and fights with my mom. And, yes, it was the blanket I sobbed into when I fully realized that I was never going to see my Nana again.

As for how this came to be… My mother watched a young boy have his comfort object taken away when it was done to one of her babysitting charges. She swore that, even if his parents didn’t realize it, he was never completely the same. Comfort objects are constants. Present when distance, disagreements, or death separate us from the people who matter most. She swore then and there, well before she’d ever read any research reinforcing her opinion, that she would never do that to her child. Which is how I was a 24-year-old Army Officer who ended up taking a blanket to Iraq with me. It’s also probably why I have a stuffed cow that’s been to more countries than most humans I know.

Shirley Temples

I have an absurd fondness for Shirley Temples. That’s not a typo in which I pluralized a child actress, nor is it a reference to a rather fun tap dance step. No, it’s a reference to a non-alcoholic mixed drink typically made with Sprite or 7-Up, grenadine, and cherries. Mind you, I don’t much care for Sprite, 7-Up, or maraschino cherries on their own. But mixed with grenadine and presented to me on a special occasion, my brain is convinced it is the best thing ever.

This is completely my Nana’s fault.

As a child, I was fascinated by the glasses that my Nana’s drinks came in. I was disinterested in the drinks themselves, as they smelled funny, but I liked the glasses. They were so fancy and grown up, and everything you said seemed more important if you were holding one. To that end, my Nana took to ordering me a Shirley Temple in a martini glass whenever we were out for a special occasion, that way I could feel important and profound just like the grown ups.

It didn’t take long for special occasions with my Nana to translate into special occasions of all sorts, and for the glass shape to stop mattering quite so much. As I got older, Shirley Temples became my go-to drink if I was out with friends, out for a celebration, or at a wedding, and I knew I should’t be drinking alcohol. Yes, yes, I have been introduced to the “Dirty Shirley” and, while I find the drink amusing, I prefer wine, whiskey, or bourbon if I want actual alcohol.

At a bar after a car accident a few years ago, I asked the bartender if he could make me a Shirley Temple (I was on concussion protocol, no alcohol for at least two weeks), and he found the request so endearing he refused to charge me for it. And, no, he actually wasn’t hitting on me. When I asked him how much it was, his response was, “No charge. That’s the cutest drink I’ve made in weeks. The chance to be a kid at work doesn’t have a price tag attached.”

Courtesy of my Nana’s desire to include me when I was a small child, a simple drink now has dozens of happy memories attached to it and has become a tradition so ingrained that I genuinely cannot think of the word “celebration” without thinking of Shirley Temples. Someday, when my nieces or nephews get married, I’m gonna be that eccentric 50-some-year old woman sitting there with my rainbow hair and my excessive glitter, sipping a bright pink drink.

My Nana would approve.

Scotland

When I was nearly 7, my Nana whisked me away on a near empty flight to a beautiful land of greenery, castles, and grey skies, so we could celebrate my birthday. It was October, so the British Isles weren’t exactly a cheery place to be. It was of no matter to me, though. Every part of the trip, from the passport to the money to the fact that my Scottish great aunt and uncle did not understand the purpose of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, was fascinating to my tiny little brain.

From the moment we landed, I found the “strangeness” of Scotland to be intensely intriguing. I was amused by the fact that my great uncle’s car had the steering wheel on the “wrong” side. I was baffled by the idea that buildings as old as the castles we toured could possibly be standing still. I was mesmerized by the sheer amount of red hair, something I almost never saw back home unless I was looking in a mirror or looking at my mom.

My great aunt Nan was in the beginning stages of what would eventually become dementia, which meant I was eternally referred to as Tammy (my mom’s nickname) and often asked about memories of a childhood I hadn’t lived. I eventually stopped correcting her and, instead, goaded her into telling me about these memories. It’s a sneaky way to learn about your mother’s childhood that only a child can cheekily get away with!

On my birthday, she made me a giant fluffy cake that was covered in bright pink, strawberry icing, and put zero limitations on how much of it I could eat. There was always tea, always, which went a long way towards explaining how my mother had ended up passionately obsessed with the stuff. Presented to me with honey and cream in it, I came home with a new appreciation for my mother’s preferred beverage.

At a tea shop, having no idea what any of the desserts or cakes were, I asked the person taking our order to bring me their favorite. Thus, at the age of 7, I was introduced to scones. Which I described as “cookie biscuits,” because they were too fluffy to be one and too sweet to be the other. I still enjoy them immensely, but only with tea, and I still think they’re technically “cookie biscuits.”

My Nana taught me at a young age that it was not only okay to be curious about the things you didn’t understand, it was okay to go explore them. To ask questions. To try new things. Nearly 30 years after this first adventure overseas, I still travel in much the same way. With a curiosity that is intent on learning about the country and the culture I’m momentarily immersing myself in, a desire to find out what the locals like best, and a fondness for trying all of the hot beverages and desserts humanly possible while there.

Glow-in-the-Dark

Me: Nana, do you remember that time Aunt Anita asked me about blowjobs? Nana: *snort of laughter* Yes, of course I do. You were 14 and you were mortified.

This recollection, gifted to a darkened bedroom in my step-great-grandmother’s house in Montauk, called to mind an event two year’s prior. While visiting relatives in Cape Cod, my great Aunt Anita had asked me if I put condoms on men before giving them blowjobs. Before anyone freaks out, she was on the older side, had never met me before, and probably had no idea that I was only 14 at the time.

My mother was somewhere between mortified, furious, and amused. My Nana laughed and explained that, as her granddaughter was only 14, it was actually pretty unlikely I had given all that many blowjobs in my life. My great aunt looked at me expectantly and, when I nodded the affirmation that my Nana was correct, she sighed and patted my hip. “Child,” she said, “don’t make them wear them.” She raised a finger in the air to emphasize her next point, “it’s not about them, mind you. It’s just that the only thing that tastes worse than a dick, is lubricated latex.”

The more you know, I suppose.

(It is worth noting that I have no idea how this conversation started. I walked downstairs for a glass of water and simply found myself being asked about blowjobs. I like to imagine my great aunt would be entertained to know I’ve given up on dicks entirely.)

Anyway, lying in the dark in Montauk two years later, still having never given a blowjob, I offered my Nana this tidbit: I found out they make flavored condoms. That would solve Aunt Anita’s problem! Nana: *hilarious laughter* I’ll be sure to tell her that the next time I talk to her! Me: They also make glow-in-the-dark ones. Though I feel like that would be a little too much like turning a penis into a lightsaber. Nana: *contemplative silence* Sweetheart, if you need it to glow in the dark, you need more than just a condom I think.

I offer no wisdom or insight gleaned from this exchange. I know only that for years to come afterwards, if either of us noticed something truly absurd while out and about together, we’d point at it and just mutter “look, a glow-in-the-dark condom,” and the other would know exactly what we meant.

Charming the ROTC

“We’re going to Daytona Beach. You should come. We’re gonna stop in Fort Meyers so George can see her great aunt or something.”

So began my spring break trip my sophomore year of college. The only year that I went on what most would consider a “typical” spring break trip, as the two years after that I traveled via the geography department on my campus. Since my Nana lived quite close to Fort Meyers, we figured it only appropriate to stop in and say ‘hi’ to her while we were in the area. Which is how she ended up with 8 or 10 ROTC cadets showing up on her doorstep crazy early in the morning on an April day.

We had set out quite early the day prior intending to drive all the way through. The end state was that we ended up arriving at like 6am or something. Blessedly my Nana was still an early riser, so she welcomed us all in and got us settled with showers and naps. She stuck around much of the afternoon, keeping us company while we splashed in the pool, getting to know the boy I was dating at the time, and peppering my college friends with questions about pretty much anything she wanted.

They were wholly charmed, with at least one of them threatening to steal her away and make her an honest woman. Again.

Come evening, not wanting to witness the debauchery or “get in the way,” she headed a couple doors down to stay with a friend. She’d pointed us in the direction of the wine bottles and the glasses, asking only that we not ransack the expensive stuff, and making a remark about the cleaner being in the day after tomorrow.

I’m not certain what she’d expected to find when she came back the next day, early afternoon, but I don’t think a nearly spotless apartment was it. I had awoken to one of my friends vacuuming. Someone else was scrubbing a bathroom. A third person was unloading a dishwasher that I’d drunkenly loaded and run the night prior. I began stripping beds and doing laundry. By noon or so that day, when she came back over intending to say goodbye as we made our way a touch up the coast to George’s great aunt, the apartment was cleaner than when we’d gotten there.

Naturally, my Army buddies were welcome to come back to visit her any time they wanted. Though O’Dell did get warned that if he asked her to marry him again she was probably going to say yes and that would make things super awkward for me!

I think we’d all have been that polite and respectful of anyone we were visiting. I also think that my Nana made it easier, though, just by being herself. She was the type of person you wanted to be good to. Exuberant from the moment we walked in the door, ever the charmer, ever the entertainer, and wanting only for everyone around her to have fun. It was a simple task to want to repay that kind of energy, even if only in the form of a super clean apartment.

Swimming with Dolphins

Have you ever gotten sun poisoning?

No? You’re a sane and normal human for whom sunscreen is sufficient protection against the big orange ball in the sky? Fuck you and your melanin, I hate you both.

I have gotten sun poisoning.

In Key West.

When my Nana took me to swim with the dolphins.

Stop laughing, I’m not fucking joking!

The day started out fantastic. Obviously. There were dolphins! Does any day that starts with dolphins start out badly? No. Of course not. As I was with my over-protective Nana, I was slathered in SPF five million. Apparently that was no match for the Florida sun in open water, though. Around 3am the next morning I woke up to projectile vomit basically everything I’d consumed after my dolphin adventure. This continued. And continued. And continued. Until, around 7am, it was decided I needed a doctor.

There was basically no one in the waiting room at the hospital in Key West. Despite this fact, after waiting for over an hour, we left. Unsurprisingly, we actually had much better luck at a local family doctor who, despite having a waiting room full of people, was able to see me within 30 minutes or so. He prescribed a suppository which my Nana took me to pick up at a local pharmacy, and then I got to have happy fun times trying to shove drugs up my ass.

By late afternoon the puking had mostly subsided. My Nana had ordered Chinese food as she knew doing so would afford her the ability to order me way too much rice, which I ate tentatively but gratefully. We then got dressed in something resembling normal clothes and decided to salvage the afternoon with a trip down to the shore/board walk/shopping area. At some point I puked in a trash can. At another point my Nana convinced me a popsicle would probably be a good idea since I really needed electrolytes. At one point we walked past a jeweler that was selling gemstone globes and I lamented the fact that I was not feeling well enough to go in and look properly.

As the sun set, we found ourselves sitting on a bench watching buskers, my Nana eating some sort of street food and me eating soup of some sort, having managed to almost salvage 60% of our last day in Key West. I apologized for having ruined our weekend and my Nana kissed my cheek and told me any weekend with me would never be ruined.

The next morning, I felt almost right as rain, though insanely hungry. So we went back down to the shops and such and got pancakes and french toast and all those other things that are delicious but terrible for upset tummies. She then detoured us passed the jewelry store, where we ducked inside and I bought my first gemstone globe. An expense I couldn’t afford, but that I’m insanely grateful I spent the money on. I love that sparkly orb so very much!

Half-way across the bridge back to the mainland, the flashing lights of an annoyed police officer showed up in the rearview mirror. When he walked up to the car and realized the young one was the passenger, I couldn’t tell if he was amused or miffed.

“I’m so sorry, Officer,” I said, leaning across my Nana and smiling as big as I could. “She brought me down here to swim with the dolphins, and wouldn’t you know I got sick and spent yesterday in the hospital. She’s just trying to get me home to a familiar bed and some soup. We’ll slow down.”

The Officer studied me for a minute before telling me to feel better, and letting us off with a warning.

“Out,” I said, pointing out of the car, as soon as he’d driven away. “You cannot be trusted with the keys, out!”

My Nana looked sheepish as we switched sides and I got us back to Naples, sans accidents or speeding tickets.

A month later, I called my Nana laughing hysterically. “They billed me,” I said, unable to control myself. “They billed me as though I saw a doctor. 1800 dollars! They billed me at the hospital.”

My Nana gasped, “They charged you that much to check your fucking blood pressure? You called and yelled at them, right?”

“Of course I did,” I said. “I told them they couldn’t have my money until they treated me, and they voided the bill. But still,” I sighed, still chuckling, “they fucking billed me.”

The family doctor that actually treated me? Still don’t know what I owe him. Either he figured out how to bill Tricare, or he decided an Army Officer puking her brains out was on the house. My guts thank him, either way.

Surprise!

In what had to be the strangest quirk about my Nana, she was probably the only grandmother I know of who didn’t like it when her grandchildren came to stay with her. Admittedly, she didn’t seem to like it all that much when anyone came to stay with her. Everything about our visits stressed her out. Having to plan for our arrival stressed her out. Feeling like she had to entertain us stressed her out. Having us interrupt her perfectly ordered living environment stressed her out. It wasn’t uncommon to feel like you were being shoved out the door by the time a visit was over because, in all honesty, you probably were.

This was helped immeasurably when my Uncle got his own place about 30 minutes from my Nana. Unlike her, he is not an overly ordered individual who likes his living arrangement “just so” and feels compelled to plan for someone’s visit. He really doesn’t care who’s there or not, he’s probably doing his thing no matter what. I started staying with him when I would visit my Nana, eliminating the major stressor of “human interrupting stable environment.”

I eliminated her compulsion to plan for my visit by simply showing up. Unannounced. Like a next door neighbor asking for sugar or milk.

The first time I did this I hadn’t seen my Nana in over a year or so. The visit prior had been… unpleasant… and I had needed some space to recover and recoup. My Nana, though one of my favorite humans, was an alcoholic. This meant visits, or parts of them, could occasionally be volatile. Initially, I had planned to go to Florida just to see my Uncle. He said he’d feel awful if he saw me and my Nana didn’t, though, and insisted I at least see her while I was down. I agreed, but only under the condition that he didn’t tell her I was coming. I didn’t want any of the nonsense and fuss that often led to her stressing herself sick (read: drunk) and, ultimately, wishing none of us were there.

So it was that on a warm February evening I arrived for a “condo complex party” at my Nana’s, and tappity-tapped on her lanai door while calling in a sing-song voice, “Nana, Nana, I’m coming in. I want a hug! And some wine!”

To say she was shocked to see me would be the understatement of the century. I was slightly worried I’d induced a heart attack at first. Shortly after the shock, however, came sheer and unadulterated delight. Possibly the first time I’d seen her be that delighted to see me since I was in high school. Five minutes later, when her friend Cornel arrived and I opened the door he went through the same series of emotions before saying, accusingly, “Ruth! You didn’t tell me Lyndsey was coming to town.”

“Well, I didn’t know!” she said, laughing. “She just showed up on my lanai, saying she wanted a hug and a glass of wine. Isn’t it the greatest surprise ever!”

I stayed with my Uncle the entire visit, and every visit thereafter, allowing her to keep her space as she liked it. We’d go to lunch, go to the zoo, go to the botanical garden, and sip coffee after my long bike rides. I had cracked the code. I had figured out how to visit my Nana, without stressing her out. Because she wasn’t stressed out, she didn’t get snippy or testy or nasty. On the occasion she drank too much alcohol, she mostly laughed a lot or talked about how much she loved us, rather than getting mean.

In the years that followed, I showed up at restaurants to surprise her, showed up at her boyfriend’s condo during a party, and walked into her place in the middle of the afternoon, wearing my swimsuit, to demand she come float on pool noodles with me. It wasn’t unusual for everyone in her social circle to know I was coming, except for her. After all, I had to plan to see them while I was down there, and I couldn’t do that if I didn’t tell them when I’d be in town! Everyone loved the joy she took out of my “just showing up” so much, though, that it was the general habit not to tell her.

The pandemic killed my ability to surprise her, because everything had to be so meticulously planned. Which is why, the last visit I made without my mother, I brought my wife as the surprise. My Uncle knew Lesia was coming with me, but my Nana did not. She was delighted, particularly since she’d picked up an obsession with puzzles and Lesia happens to be very good at them. We’d drive down in the evenings after work, have dinner with her, and Lesia and she would puzzle for a while as I scratched my head and glared at a singular piece with no intention of finding its home.

Of all of my visits, that very first surprise one will reign forever as my favorite one ever made. The look of delight on her face as I came into her living room demanding a hug, the sheer glee with which she told all of her neighbors, “This is my granddaughter. She came all the way from Ohio without telling me. She gave me herself as a surprise! Isn’t it wonderful!” was all the evidence one could ever need of just how much she loved me.

(Even if she didn’t want me sleeping under the same roof as her!)

Wheel Chairs at Zoos

In 2018, my Nana made the last trip to my parents’ house that she would make in her lifetime. It was a trip that was made largely on accident. A year or so prior, we had all decided my Nana needed to get the hell out of dodge before Irene hit, since it looked like that bitch was going to make a bee-line for Naples. Though her condo was generally unscathed, Irene did hit Naples harder than most hurricanes, flooding entire regions of the city and uprooting hundreds of trees. My Nana rode it out with her boyfriend, at his summer place in Maine.

My mother had booked the ticket and had borne the brunt of the airlines’ desire to make big bucks by gouging the shit out of every purchaser trying to get out of the region before the storm hit. They then got harshly reprimanded by the federal government for that bullshit, and found themselves gifting basically anyone who had paid more than they should have with a free plane ticket. My Nana used it to visit my parents. Who tucked her into a car for the two hour drive to Cleveland so that she could see her granddaughter’s house.

My Nana had lived independently for basically forever. She was divorced before it was acceptable to be such and while she remarried a couple times, I don’t know that she ever took any of them all that seriously. Because of the era, there were certain things she’d simply been unable to do. Like buy her own car. Or buy a house. Or have a fucking credit card. So to her, the fact that I owned my own car AND my own house was a remarkable feat signifying how far we had come since she was my age.

Humorously, she ended up visiting us the weekend that our basement flooded, which meant she got to see what the worst parts of homeownership are like. It also meant that simply hanging out at our house wasn’t really an option, since the fans in the basement were so loud it made it difficult to think. As we’d had a hunch we’d want to do something, anyway, we settled on the zoo. It was an idea that made my Nana nervous, as she wasn’t sure she’d be able to walk the entire thing, but Lesia and I were unconcerned.

For $20 bucks, we rented a wheelchair, plopped my Nana in it, and promptly ran around the place like we were little kids pushing a shopping cart. We got running starts to go up hills, popped wheelies on stairs, and shrieked “weeeeeeee!” as we raced down ramps. My Nana was thoroughly delighted, my brother was both amused and embarrassed, and my mom was just happy her mom was smiling ear to ear the entire day. I think my father is now concerned this is how we’re going to treat him in his old age. He’s right to be concerned, we absolutely are.

Two years later, visiting her at her place during a global pandemic in which she had not left her condo in six months, I suggested that she, myself, and Lesia go to the local zoo. I had already looked it up, and we could rent a wheelchair for her so she wouldn’t have to worry about walking. There were a couple different animal shows we could see while we were there and everything. Wouldn’t it be nice to get out of the house for a bit?

“Are you going to say ‘weeeeee!’ when we go down the hills?” she asked, with a mischievous grin.

Indeed, we did.

Pink Wine Glasses

“It’s pink!”

Such was my squeal of delight when, after an exceptionally long workday, my Nana proffered a glass of white wine in a piece of stemware that was, indeed, pink. Though I’m weirdly neutral on pink clothing, I’m a huge fan of random things that shouldn’t be pink, being pink. Pink wine glasses are basically the most perfect wine glasses ever.

To that end, I was delighted when she said, “Oh good, you like them? Take them with you when you go home!”

Which I did. On my very last trip to my Nana’s condo, she packed up those pink wine glasses and made sure they made it into the car with me. I gave her a hug, and told her I loved her, and thanked her for my pink stemware. Two days later, before meeting her and some friends for dinner, my mother and I began the arduous task of packing a months worth of stuff and those wine glasses got lovingly wrapped in t-shirts, underwear, socks, and pajamas. All four made the journey home in one piece.

There isn’t really much of a story to tell here, except that the very last gift that my Nana personally gave me were pink wine glasses. Glasses that I will cherish forever. Glasses that I will use as often as I can, because every time I use them I think of her. Glasses that make everything you drink look just a little pinker. Just a little brighter. Just a little happier.

It was a fitting final present, I think, as my Nana often strove to make my life a little brighter and a little happier. Now, each time I sip her favorite drink, I can capture some of that lightness, courtesy of a gleefully pink piece of stemware.

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ohgoddard · 4 years

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Fist of Fire.5.

Reverse laughed a hearty laugh. Around him, sitting along a long wooden table were several other people doing the same. Clasping each others hands and roaring. Beer was aplenty there in bottles and cups, as the bar was lively with discussion and music. It was the first evening after his club meeting, and Reverse was feeling happy for once. Around him were his friends, his family. People he grew up with. The members of Laurens SHS.

“We don’t get to get together often do we?” one of them said. “Well, we did all go our separate ways, I’m just surprised to see us all here.” Reverse looked over the attendance. While Laurens SHS originally had 13 members, only 9 remained. He took a quick swig of his mug, then stood.

“Thank you all for coming out here today and help me beat up several children.” The audience cheered and raised their drinks, men and women alike. “I would like to propose a toast, a toast to our fallen comrades and a toast to our continued health.” Several nods and cheers from the table came. Reverse raised his glass, and others did the same. “A toast to Huntsman, to Meteor” Reverse paused and let out a deep breath, “And to Helios.” “TO HELIOS!” The party took a hearty swig and Reverse sat down. Everyone went back to talking, but Reverse was content to just sit back and be in the moment. He always did this in this group. He liked to sit back and let everyone else speak. It’s his rest for bringing everything together, which is how it always worked. Reverse thinks back to his time in the Laurens SuperHero Security and chuckle at how he always had to formulate the plans of attack, pick the dinner menu. Not because he was told, but because no one else would. Even Mr.Laurens, while he was brave and righteous, was a very forgetful man.

But those were the days. The days when he and his buddy Tapout would disguise themselves and take on amateur boxing tournaments, only to get caught by Mr.Laurens who was betting in the crowd(he bet on them knowing their identities,but was still cross they decided to do it in the first place). They would be out to amazing places in the US, touring the largest cities and going to the wildest parties. However, only as bodyguards or bouncers but it was still something. And it definitely beat the alternative, being out on the streets and scrounging for scraps. I really lucked out when I met Mr.Laurens, Reverse thought. A smile creeped its way upon his face.

Reverse’s train of thought was interrupted when he picked up on a conversation happening to the right of him. “....but isnt it strange how we all ended up in Atlanta though? Like it is almost weird how we all had career defining moments that brought us all to this one city.” That had been something that had been bugging Reverse for a while. He only took the job in the AHA because of how many of his old friends were down here. He had asked them why they all came here and got a variety of answers. Most of them were job offers, they were all ex-pro heroes and this was a growing city. The first to come here though, his buddy Tapout, said he was on the trail of the villain Reverse can only think about as The Betrayer. It was not his name but it was the only thing he dare name him as. Tapout had followed him to Atlanta and looked for him for months before his trail going cold. He eventually grew roots in the city and decided to stay there, starting the chain of all the old Laurens SHS crew coming down. Well, Reverse thought, not all.

Reverse remembered the day he heard the news that the famous Hero Couple Huntsman and Meteor were lost in the fight. They were overseas and were fighting the warlords in the newly broken China, when the villain Guang He broke a mountain ontop of them. Even though Guang He was shortly defeated by Forest King, their deaths still shook the world. And Reverse.

Tapout, who was sitting at the other end of the table, stood up and stretched. “Well, it was nice to see all of you. And thank you, Joseph, for letting me use my abilities again. I missed punching through the dimensions. And to teenagers? Say no more.” The table collectively had a small laugh. Tapout was an average sized guy, standing around 5’9 and had a very stocky body. His age and lack of hero work had done works on him, and his rotund stomach and flabby arms showed it. One could describe him as if Mario became a real person. He could still put punches downrange though. “Think nothing of it, tiptap. Glad to have you here,” Reverse replied, raising his mug. “Alright alright, I think I ought to head home now. My wife will start asking questions. Keep touch now ,yall hear?” A trail of goodbyes followed him out the door, and the group went back to laughing and drinking away the night.

Tapout was whistling, hands in his pocket, on his way home. Atlanta was a lively city even at night, with traffic backed up for miles and music blaring from every bar and restaurant. The buildings climb ever and ever higher as space grows more and more limited, but thats just the life cycle for the big city. Tapout had lived here for a good deal of time now, around six years now, so he knew the city like the back of his hand. Which was impressive, as Atlanta was known for its lack of urban planning and its gloriously awful sprawl. Tapout turned down one alley, then the next, walked over a bridge and under another, the streets turning quieter as he approached the less traversed and more residential parts of the city. The tall brick towers were dark, save for a few lights on the windows. He was moving down the last Alley when-

“Took you long enough”.

Tapoout halted. Standing at the other end of the alley was standing a tall, slender figure dressed in a three piece suit. The alley was lit with three malfunctioning bulbs on wall lights, and they did very little justice lighting up the danger in the situation. The man in the suit was leaning against the wall, holding an oak wood cane. Upon his head was a long tophat and a pair of dark spectacles rested on his nose. “Tapout, its been too long.” Tapout stood their, terrified. Years ago, he came to this city tracking him down, but now that hes here? Tapout instantly took his fighting stance. “You will not get away this time you punk. You’re not going to do to me what you did to Victor.” The man in the figure laughed, the lights flickering for each breath he took in. “No, I will not do to you what I did to our ‘righteous and caring’ leader. I want to take my time. See, you trailing me here set me back by YEARS.” When he screamed that final word, the ground itself shook and the lights flickered. “It has taken me so long to rebuild what I had destroyed in D.C, longer because of you.” The figure pushes himself front he wall he was leaning on and begins to take a small, leisurely walk towards Tapout. “I’m going to get my revenge on you, once and for all. And its going to be all too easy. Your family has made you weak, while I only grew stronger. You made yourself fat and slow, while I only grew more power.” Tapout throws off his coat he was wearing, revealing his outfit. A t-shirt with jeans, not the most flexible outfit, but he could make it work. Tapout threw a punch and, out of nowhere around the figure, seven fists come out to attack him. All seven land upon the figure in different spots and he’s thrown back. He flies down the alley, and Tapout pursues. The figure was laying on his back, but started laughing. This makes Tapout pause, and stands and watches in horror as the body begins to rise. Floating in the air now, looking down at tapout, was the figure. “You’ve gotten weaker, just as I said.It used to be in the old days you could throw a hundred. Seven? That is pathetic. You’ll find me not lacking in mine own skills however. In fact,” as he was speaking the man raised his hand, “ I have some new tricks.” Tapout went to throw another hook but found hismelf stopped. His arms, legs, whole body found itself halted in place. It could not move an inch. Then, his body began to rise as well. “Do not worry about your family, dear. I came by and took care of them. No one will ask any questions as to your disappearance. Its a big city, after all.” Tapout grit his teeth, his anger taking control. He nodded with his head and around the figures came ten iterations of him, headbutting the figure. Disoriented, he loses control on Tapout and he falls the to ground. And as he did so he heard several snaps.

Tapout was laying on the ground, legs and arms broken from the fall. The man in the suit, now no longer floating, was walking towards him. A hand was on the top of his head, rubbing it.

“I must admit, i’m surprised. I did not think you had anything left in you.” Tapout looks up at the man in the suit, and spit on his shoes. “You”, he spoke through a bloodied nose,” wont get away with this. We’re..we’re all here.” The man smiles, then kicks Tapout in the face. “Oh, I know. I brought you all here. It didn’t take much, you know. A call here, a favor there. Giving each a reason to come. The only ones who I couldnt get here were the ‘Wonder Couple’ and Reverse. And those problems took care of themselves. In fact, I was even overjoyed when I heard Reverse died. He was the only one of you pathetic rejects who even had a chance of beating me, and with his death to that monster I unleashed in Boston? I am practically given the keys to the country.” Tapout looked up at the man in the suit, and coughed up blood. But, then he started laughing. “You *cough* you idiot. You wont get away with this, Planeteer.” The man in the suit kicked tapout in the stomach, causing him to cough up more blood.

“I’ve always hated that name. Its a shame it came to this, Tappie.” He leaned in, inches away from Tapout’s head. “But I need to get rid of all connections I have to my past. Sorry to say that you’re the weakest.” As he said that, he straightened up, then raised his cane behind his head.

“And by the way, the name has been changed. Its Emesh now.” His cane came down upon Tapout’s head, and it all went black.

Reverse had awoken that Saturday morning with a headache, a sign of his age catching up to him. He fell out of bed and stumbled into his kitchen, pouring himself a cup of much needed coffee. After a few minutes of his headache subsiding, he sat down on his couch and turned on the TV. He always watched the news in the morning, a force of habit due to his hero days. They were running the usual schlock today, break in this, political scandal that, taxes-

“This just in, Breaking News. Former Professional Hero Tapout found dead in alley this morning by landlord.”

#FoF:og #writing #original writing #originalwriting #oc #creative #creative writing #superhero #superhero story #original female character

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muggle-writes · 5 years

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@dionian-gayce asked me to ramble about world building and i can't save answers as drafts and tumblr ate my last (very long but not as long as this) attempt to answer. and while it's probably for the better that you'll get a more coherent answer I'm also very frustrated that I put a lot of time into an answer that I didn't get a choice in throwing out. That's not your fault though

Thanks for asking! I'm sure you made that post offering to ask people questions thinking of the (if your blog traffic is anything like mine) 3-10 other blogs that regularly interact with your original posts, and instead it had something like 350 notes by the time i saw it, so I'm impressed you're still following through.

world building is one of my favorite things to be honest. I write mostly fanfiction anymore and very few of them are canon compliant because I love pushing boundaries and exploring "if I make xyz change to that universe, how does that affect how the characters behave?" (tl;dr like 70% of my fic-writing is answering those world building questions, and the rest is when i have specific ideas about how certain characters will interact, and then I will write the rest of the fic to set them up for interacting)

the most visible example(s) I have of this is my surprising variety of soulmate AUs. I'll describe some of the thought that went into the published parts of Sphygmoid and Stripes of Fate, and end with some spoilery bits about the process of world building for The One I've Been Looking For (which was originally titled Colors and I'm going to call it that for the remainder of this post because that's a shorter title without having to abbreviate to The One or an acronym my phone won't recognize as a word)

I think of soulmate AUs as the easiest example of world building because there's something big and obvious and visible differentiating that universe from ours or canon. and while it's possible to write a soulmate AU with no thought as to "why" people are soulmates with each other, just for the fluff factor, or to get the OTP to think of each other romantically sooner than canon or ever, I usually prefer to explore all the interesting questions that brings up. like "how does the prevalence of soulmates affect social norms?" and "what does it really mean when people are soulmates?" alongside "what do people think it means to be soulmates, and how accurate are they?" I also generally have a preference for soulmate AUs that connect you to more than one person, like 'strings of fate' AUs that connect you to your inevitable best friends and long term partners and sometimes even mortal enemies, though I haven't written one of those yet.

so, going from least world building to most, in Stripes of Fate, the premise is that everyone has a patch of skin on the inside of their wrist that is the exact color of their soulmate's hair, and changes whenever they dye it. Saguru (the main character) speculates (and eventually his soulmate confirms) that if one of them changes the color of only part of their hair, the other's mark changes to a matching pattern. as I mentioned, this is probably the soulmate AU I've put the least thought into (they're soulmates because i like the ship and one of them, in fanon at least, changes his own and his classmates' hair colors often, if not regularly so there's something interesting to bring them together. and I haven't specified anyone else's soulmates) but even so I worked in some fun world building: how do societal norms change because of the prevalence of soulmates? well one country's norm is to wear the mark visibly and for young adults to change their hair color frequently as a way of identifying themselves to their soulmates. another country's norm is to keep them covered and private. but I left other questions unanswered, like since soulmates are rarely the exact same age, does the older one have a mark from birth? what about people who won't live long enough to meet a soulmate, do they have a mark at all? what about the soulmates of people who don't have hair at all, for any reason besides shaving? those answers aren't relevant to the story as written, but if I were writing any more in the same universe, I'd want to decide those answers, just in case.

Then there's Sphygmoid. Sphygmoid is more the style of soulmate AU I like to read (and write, obviously), because the prompt specifies that people have marks from many of the important people in their lives, not just their soulmates (who get a different color). I really enjoyed exploring the mechanics of these soulmarks, and unlike many soulmark AUs, which feature marks or strings which are either there from birth or appear all at once, these vary in brightness based on the state of the relationship. (Ran had a childhood friend who she had a mark from but after that friend moved away and they grew apart, the mark faded back to almost nothing). it's also interesting: the original prompt specified that people have marks from their soulmate and from people they love, but I initially misread it as "from people who love them". and even after i realized my mistake, I decided to keep it that way because I liked the mental image of children being born with several bright marks already because their parents and grandparents and older siblings loved them even before they were born. For the most part, the difference between "you love them" and "they love you" is negligible because in most cases, the care and affection are reciprocal, but given that the main character of the anime gets adopted into his best friend's home under a fake identity, using the "they love you" metric makes it interesting because I'll get to explore the questions of can Shinichi distinguish between Ran's love for him vs her love for Conan just from his mark(s) from her? does it matter that she thinks they're two separate people? how does that compare to his marks from his parents once they know the truth? likewise (and also a reader commented to ask and I was thrilled that someone else cared about the same sort of thing) what does Ran think when she doesn't get a new mark from Conan after they take him in and he's been in their family for a while? I've got partially solidified ideas of how to answer these, but aside from his parents finding out the truth and immediately loving their son in every form, love grows slowly over time, so I've got a while to decide and build up to those answers. in the meantime I'm stuck on chapter two which I want to be mainly from the pov of a character that I don't have a good handle on her voice, let alone her internal narration. But overall, yes the entire focus of this fic is to explore how soulmarks grow and change as the characters do.

And then there's Colors, which I'm probably most proud of the world building in. it's ironic that this is the fic I've thought the most about because I decided one night "hey I've got tomorrow off, someone prompt me and I'll write at least (minimum length) on the topic," and by 11pm the following night, I had picked someone, been prompted with a pairing and a style of soulmate identification (you see in grayscale until you meet your soulmate, and after that everything is in color), and then worked out a majority of these world building details and wrote a one shot that became the first chapter.

spoilers ahead for things hinted at but mostly not revealed (yet)

did that work as a readmore?

I can't actually tell

So the prompt was Harry/Ginny, and when I asked for preferences, suggesting i make other canon ships each other's soulmates, the requestor agreed. But for this one, I really sat down to think: what makes a soulmate a soulmate? now I'm ace and arospec so I wasn't particularly interested in the classic "the one perfect romantic partner for you" interpretation, though I saved that for the answer to "what does society think soulmates are?" because otherwise why are they called soulmates instead of something else? Instead, I decided that soulmates (of which any one person typically has many potential matches, people just don't notice a change from color vision to... more color? when they meet subsequent possible soulmates.) are people who, by adulthood, will support you and enable you to become your best self. For many people this is an ideal romantic partner too, but that's only the case when both people expect their soulmate to be a romantic partner (which is most people, given society's assumptions about soulmates, it kind of turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy that a majority of soulmates are also "the" perfect romantic partner for each other) but arospec people and others for whom romantic compatibility isn't a priority, don't tend have soulmates who are destined to be romantic partners.

So with all that decided, I had to decide (a) why are people's canon endgame partners the first potential soulmate they'll meet, especially for people like Bill and Fleur who met as adults, when many people, especially within a small community like the British Wizarding World, meet a match in their school years? and (b) why don't more people notice "one-sided" soulmate situations when someone's potential soulmate thinks they already know the one soulmate they should have. The latter was easy: power of suggestion again. when people assume they will only have one soulmate, and they know who that one person will be, they are hostile to people who claim to be their soulmate, and assume they're liars. that makes them not as supportive to the potential match as they could otherwise be, so mostly they just don't match. which of course reinforces the misunderstanding that there's exactly one soulmate per person. however, particularly selfless people will find themselves a match to nearly anyone who is reasonably supportive in return.

for Bill and Fleur, and why neither of them met a potential soulmate before each other, Fleur was easy: she's part Veela, and too many people judge her for her heritage rather than on her own merits as a person, so they're not supportive enough. for Bill, I decided he has too much wanderlust, and the British Wizarding community, small and insular as it is, doesn't tend to inspire much of a desire to travel for longer than a week of vacation so none of Bill's Hogwarts peers would have been up for traveling with him and encouraging and supporting him in that long term.

then of course I had to decide whether every canon couple was soulmates, and obviously I decided not. Charlie, being the most popular aroace headcanon, obviously wouldn't be surprising to not meet a soulmate at Hogwarts where everyone assumes they'll marry their soulmate, so it's okay to have him not have a soulmate or meet one (someone with similar priorities of dragons!) at the Reserve

on the topic of the Weasleys though, you can't have nonromantic soulmates and not make Fred and George each other's soulmates. you just can't. they're so in sync and so thrilled to do everything together, and you know they'll support each other perfectly for their entire lives. even Harry and most of the fandom (and Molly, facing a boggart), think of George and Fred as a unit. however, given the usual assumption all the characters make, that soulmates must be romantic, means that sibling soulmate bonds are treated as scandals that families hush up. (thus not publicly contradicting society's narrative that soulmates are guaranteed romantic. I decided that, while this doesn't happen for every set of twins, it still occurs in many families. they just never find each other because shame keeps them silent on the matter.) however, given that multiple soulmates are a thing, most sibling-soulmates are identified by non-family soulmates, and even if they don't believe their other soulmate's claim, they usually accept the "convenient misunderstanding" and marry their newly-met soulmate. This is exactly what happened with George and Lee, and Fred and Angelina. the twins assume their friends are mistaken, and the rest of the Weasleys assume Lee and Angelina are soulmates and are covering for the twins because they know they're "actually" each other's soulmates.

after the most recent chapter, (in which Harry asks the twins if they've met their soulmate it was Lee who answered for them, despite how willing the twins otherwise are to talk about themselves. because Lee knows he's not lying or mistaken, but all the Weasleys in the room hold onto a sliver of doubt and hate to "take advantage" of their friend by "falsely" making claims about his soulmate.) someone commented on how they were sure I was setting up to reveal the twins as each other's soulmates and Angelina and Lee were a curveball. and I kinda was leading up to that. but even if soulmates were unique in this universe, what stops Lee from lying to protect his friends, like the Weasleys mostly assume he is doing? characters don't always tell the truth! anyway that comment made me feel good, somewhat, about my foreshadowing skills, but also made me realize if I want people to know these details, I have to give them a reason to "naturally" come up. Like, Charlie is going to come pick up Norbert, still, and that'll be a way to bring up non-romantic soulmates (Charlie comments on the color of Norbert's flame as an indicator of health, and then demands the others not tell Ron, because Ron can't keep a secret from Molly, who's overbearing about insisting all her kids find their perfectly respectable soulmates and get married and produce lots of grandbabies, and Charlie's really not interested in most of that and his partner (name and gender tbd) agrees.

In Molly's defense, as far as she knows, of her eldest five children, the oldest two haven't met soulmates by an age most purebloods have, one is fine, and the other two are each other's soulmates which is absolutely scandalous. she's worried that Percy is going to be the only one with a real soulmate, and that'll not only draw negative attention to the family, but to her children as individuals, with further attention drawn because of the pattern of a "lack of soulmates", and none of them deserve society's judgment.

anyway back on topic, I had to decide if canon endgame ships were going to be each other's first soulmates in all cases, and tbh I decided "not always". because I love the idea of Sirius and Remus being soulmates even if Tonks and Remus get together after Sirius' death, and they obviously met before Tonks was born.

so from there I decided to keep canon ships and decide if they're soulmates on a case by case basis and justify it if not. Voldemort/Bellatrix is plausible (she'll definitely support him in his endeavors and he clearly respects and trusts her enough to bear his child.) on the other hand she's also soulmates with her husband but the Lestranges are just open-minded enough for Bellatrix to accept the status boost of his claim and Rodolphus to support her whether or not they believe him, so they don't question it publicly or privately. obviously their version of supporting each other isn't something the rest of the world particularly appreciates but I like it. alternately (though these aren't mutually exclusive options) I think it's likely voldie had another soulmate he met young but he rejected her due to his biases at the time and never gave her a chance. I'm not sure either option will ever be plot-relevant on a Hinny story so it almost doesn't matter (except it does because I hate JKR's "he's so evil because he can't love, and he's incapable of love because he was conceived under a love potion" and all the unfortunately implications of both those statements. I prefer to think he ignored or rejected the resources and chances for growth that could have made him a less evil person. regardless he has a soulmate or several to just not get into demonizing people for not being "able to" love.) The other notable canon relationship I've specifically decided on is Vernon and Petunia. and honestly, I can't remember a single instance in the books that he did a thing to support her. at most he didn't fight harder to kick Harry out at various times, when her decision not to was reluctantly made based on letters from Dumbledore. and to be honest, I can't imagine him being a supportive partner to anyone. he holds Dudley to high standards, and praises him whether he meets those standards or not, but that's not the same as a mutually supportive/healthy adult relationships. so Vernon is the only person who specifically hasn't and won't meet his soulmate ever in the course of the fic. but if I'm saying that then what about Petunia? given how I've focused soulmates on potential to support each other, I've made the arbitrary decision that Petunia and Peter Pettigrew are soulmates. if they'd given each other a chance they would have initially bonded over their feelings of inferiority next to Lily and James, but they would have seen the best in each other's abilities and encouraged each other out of that bitter spiral. Petunia of course admires and envies everything about magic, which encourages Peter who's used to being seen as the tagalong who isn't quite as good as James and Sirius. and in return he admires her for not letting having no magic at all stop her from accomplishing her other goals, and for her homesteading skills that he never mastered, with or without magic. I acknowledge it's an odd pair, but in terms of potential, it's there. as for why they didn't talk it out and give each other a chance when they realized they were soulmates, that's probably a short I'll eventually write, from both of their perspectives.

anyway i count most of this as world building instead of character development because it's rarely if ever going to show up in the fic (as if Petunia would admit to Harry that she's soulmates with one of James' buddies - she isn't even sure which one) but it informs characters' behavior and background events (Harry would still notice that she always insisted on doing the laundry and flawlessly matches socks to each other for Dudley and Vernon, and her outfits are always color-coordinated and she'll often find an "unrelated" excuse to correct Vernon's outfit when his has particularly uncomplimentary colors)

anyway alongside all that character-focused development, I also thought about what changes that makes scientifically and to society. obviously, since most kids won't see colors yet, the color names won't be taught in classes in younger years. they'll give everyone a take-home reference to study on their own time for after they do meet a soulmate. (Harry wishes for this and remembers Vernon binned his and Dudley's copies, saying it was propaganda). muggles get little reference books with all the basic colors and references to books with more colors, wizards have a magic magnifying glass shaped thing that will overlay color names of whatever is visible through the lens (Harry borrows Ron's on the train). since there's a strong chance that a large subset of the population can't see color, traffic lights are all different shapes, in addition to being different colors, and house/sports team colors have other designs worked in, so that they can be recognized by shape too (Harry observes something like this in the house banners at Hogwarts). scientifically, one of the few details I've come up with is that all color vision is magically granted, which means that even peripheral vision has color (which it doesn't in the real world due to the relative density of rods and cones in our eyes). and accordingly the usual variety of "colorblindness" that exists in our world doesn't exist in this fic, color is just all-or-nothing. (people frequently comment on how true grayscale vision "isn't" a type of colorblindness in the real world but I know someone in person who has that exact form of colorblindness it's just rare in our world, especially in comparison to other forms)

and I was going somewhere else with this, but it's been over a week and when I read this draft to remember what not to repeat I keep getting distracted by the character-backgrounds stuff so I think I'm just going to post this as-is. I feel like it's more than sufficient as an example and attempted explanation of my thought processes.

#world building #thanks for the ask #this kind of devolved #long post #as far as i can tell on mobile the readmore didn't work but i also can't find the post on my dash so it's hard to tell #muggle's rambles

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mindfullofclutter · 6 years

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Depression

I dumped my boyfriend when he was depressed. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. The words jammed in my throat and our tears mingled as we hugged in bed in a dingy AirBnB. He asked me if I meant it and, head thumping with a hangover, I said yes. We went for breakfast at our favorite spot and drank orange juice in silence. Then he pleaded with me to stay as we cried on a park bench. We hugged and kissed, for closure, before I climbed into my car and drove for three hours, back to my parents’ house.

Admitting that I left him when he was at his lowest point fills me with guilt. People will say I was selfish. They’ll say that if you truly love someone, you support them through sickness and dark times. I tried, but it wasn’t working. The reality was that his mental health issues infected my own headspace and I truly was not strong enough to deal with it. The situation left me suffering panic attacks and teetering on the brink of depression myself.

When news broke on Friday that rapper Mac Miller had died of an apparent drug overdose at age 26, people on social media were quick to point fingers at his ex-partner, singer Ariana Grande. “You did this to him… you should feel absolutely sickened,” one social media user wrote in a tweet directed at Grande. “Treated him like dog shit, threw him to the curb like he was nothing.” “You killed Mac Miller,” wrote another.

Grande and Miller—who admitted using drugs in a Noisey interview well before his relationship with the singer—began dating in 2016 and were together two years before splitting in May 2018. Shortly afterwards, Miller was charged with driving under the influence after crashing his car. One tweet in response to the news, which went viral, said: “Mac Miller totalling his G wagon and getting a DUI after Ariana Grande dumped him for another dude after he poured his heart out on a ten song album to her called the divine feminine is just the most heartbreaking thing happening in Hollywood.” The 25-year-old star hit back: “How absurd that you minimize female self-respect and self-worth by saying someone should stay in a toxic relationship.”

Reading the reports into Miller’s death, and seeing the abuse currently being directed at Grande, all I can say is: She’s right. Grande wasn’t to blame for Miller’s DUI, any more than she’s to blame for his tragic death. Whether it’s substance abuse or poor mental health, dating someone who’s in a dark place was one of the most challenging experiences of my life.

Max was my first proper boyfriend. We met in Rio de Janeiro while traveling around Latin America. We had our first kiss at sunrise on Copacabana Beach. We made sure our paths crossed again a few months later, in La Paz, Bolivia. I was interning at a magazine and he was backpacking, but we ended up buying a single mattress and a set of Toy Story sheets and sleeping on the floor of an empty mansion adjacent to our friend’s apartment. The property had a cellar, half-painted children’s nursery, and creaky floorboards like a classic horror movie set. It was creepy, huge, and free, so we spent a few months there. Then we returned to our lives in the UK and decided long distance was hell, so we moved in together. I adored him.

We began renting our first flat when I was 19 and he was 22. All my friends were going to college and we were living in a shoebox that we could barely afford but having the time of our lives. We would eat chicken nuggets at a cardboard box table and sleep on a futon. Later, we moved for my job. Things gradually got harder. I was working my first job as a journalist and the long hours took a toll. I was often tired and stressed. Max hated his job but felt helpless because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. I always knew he had depression. As a teenager he was in and out of hospital undergoing treatment for a heart condition, which triggered a long period of low mood. It lingered, always, but it had been manageable until then.

In those few months, we became trapped in an exhausting cycle. We were dependent on one another for our happiness, but we were totally out of sync. A tiny comment or mood swing would send everything spiraling out of control. Max would apologize, convinced he was to blame. I would say it wasn’t his fault. He wouldn’t believe me. I would feel bad for getting frustrated. I would go for walks, drive around the neighborhood, smoke cigarettes in the park, stay late at work to get away. I would have panic attacks. He would take days off. I was working 12-hour days, and I struggled to give him all my attention when I got home. Sometimes, I felt suffocated.

We had no space to breathe or feel emotions without upsetting one other and setting off a chain of events that could drag on for days. I begged him to see a doctor, but he was just handed a tick-box questionnaire with a sliding scale asking him to rate how likely he was to kill himself. Despite admitting he self-harmed and suffered suicidal thoughts, they didn’t consider him high risk. He was prescribed antidepressants and enrolled in a group counseling session where a PowerPoint slideshow recommended he do more exercise. Max was already going to the gym five times a week and cycling to work every day. As there was no one-to-one therapy available on the National Health Service, doctors upped his dose. It didn’t work.

I distanced myself subconsciously before we broke up. I suggested we both go back home with the intention of saving money but I think that really, I needed to reset. We saw each other once a fortnight and after a few months, decided to go on a weekend away. I didn’t plan to break up with him, but the words came out during an alcohol-fueled row. He asked me the next morning if I meant it, and I realized I did.

In the weeks that followed, Max hit rock bottom. I knew he was suicidal and that weighed on my mind constantly. He had always said I was the best thing to happen to him and he hated his life before he met me, but at the same time he was convinced I’d be better off without him. For the first time, I agreed: and I also knew that he would be better off without me, too. We were stuck in a loop of negativity, and things wouldn’t improve until we escaped it.

After we broke up, I felt sick and feared that he might hurt himself. All I wanted was to be there for him, but I knew that could make things worse. Instead, I messaged his mom to see how he was doing. Deep down, I was terrified that our break-up could lead him to end his life and alter mine forever.

It was the lowest point in both our lives, but it ended up being the most formative. Max spent 18 weeks without help on waiting lists but eventually, with the support of his family, began seeing a private psychologist whom he credits with helping him turn things around. The therapy gave him the tools to tackle negative thoughts that crept into his brain, taught him that he wasn’t to blame when I was unhappy, and gave him self-worth. It also made him realize he wanted to help others in a similar situation and he began studying for a degree in psychology. He’s just finished his first year and is in a good place. He’s no longer on antidepressants. And—plot twist—we’re back together now.

We got back together late last year, after taking things slowly and talking for a long time. Max was doing better, and so was I. Things are far from perfect, but we’re stronger and happier now than we’ve ever been before.

Miller’s death is a tragedy. Regardless of whether he was mourning his relationship with Grande, like some sources say, or had moved on, our knee-jerk reaction to tie the two things together is harmful. It insinuates that Miller might still be alive if she had not left him. This is just not true: Miller talked about substance abuse and battling depression years before his relationship with Grande began. We must stop expecting people to ‘save’ their partners. It perpetuates the myth that women—and men—should stay in unhealthy relationships. They shouldn’t, and to suggest otherwise is dangerous.

In my case, my break-up with Max could have ended in tragedy. If it had, I would have felt responsible for the rest of my life, but I know now that it would not have been my fault.

This essay was originally published by Broadly / Vice. Read it here.

#depression #mental health #anxiety #mental illness #boyfriend #relationship #love #couple

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parkerhouseblog · 7 years

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[This post owes a debt to a venerable but currently moribund blog belonging to a fellow Blue Hill-er. He relied for some of his material on comments I had previously posted on Wikimapia, so suggestions of plagiarism would be a somewhat circular argument. I’m correcting his chronology on a minor point or two as well].

My mother’s great aunt Effie Hinckley Ober was born in Sedgwick Maine, a few miles from Blue Hill, in 1844. In an unusual path for a single young woman from the hinterlands in the 19th century, she found her way to the city, where she launched a career as a theatrical agent and lecture tour arranger. Anna Leonowens, author of the book used as source material for “The King and I”, was one of her clients. In due course, she caught a performance of Gilbert & Sullivan at the D'Oyly Carte in London, and decided to bring Pinafore to the United States. Thus was started the Boston Ideal Opera company, specifically to stage an 'ideal' performance of the operetta in November,1878. The performances took place on a 'ship' in a lake in Boston's Oakland Park. Within weeks, 'Pinafore’ had captured the popular imagination, and Miss Ober and her top notch troupe of performers - a set of reprobates she took care to enroll in Bible School before departure, the better to pass them off as respectable artistes - took to the road, performing Gilbert & Sullivan and other light opera across the continent, sometimes in far outposts of the Wild West.

Having before age forty made one fortune in show business and a second through shrewd investment in Washington, D.C. real estate - including a sizeable chunk of what’s now the Kalorama neighborhood - Effie returned to Blue Hill, hired a childhood friend and transformed her childhood home into a vision of baronial splendor. This remodeled cottage was known, of course, as 'Ideal Lodge', after the opera company. Heavily inspired by recently published works by McKim, Mead and White (notably the Narragansett Casino and the Osborne house at Mamaroneck) the house, with its two story great hall with divided staircase and internal oriel window, provided a suitably theatrical backdrop.

In 1888 Effie married Virgil P. Kline, the Cleveland attorney who had helped her through the dissolution of her company - it later reconstituted itself under the name “The Bostonians” - and with the nucleus of themselves and the son of one of Kline’s Cleveland clients, set about expanding the nascent summer colony in Blue Hill.

The summer before, she had again commissioned her architect friend, George Clough, this time to build a completely new cottage on Parker Point, which was finished the summer of her marriage. It was promptly occupied by her sister Elizabeth (Lizzie), who had met and married a Harvard-educated dental surgeon in Boston while working as Effie’s assistant in the theatrical agency. Their second child, Ruth, my mother’s mother, was born that same year.

Effie at 44 probably had no expectations of having children of her own, but her experience as the oldest of her siblings and having been for a time ‘farmed out’ after her father’s death fully prepared her to take on the responsibilities of running the household of a widower with three young children. The two young women on the porch in the photograph are most probably her stepdaughters Mary and Minerva Kline, both of whom deserve posts of their own, for their personal accomplishments as well as the interesting families into which they married. Their brother too: a beau of Marion Davies, Virgil ‘Tad’ Kline, Jr., was ‘put out of the way’ by Hearst, dying in suspicious circumstances in 1929 while driving his Stutz Bearcat along Sunset Boulevard.

Their father (Williams, Class of 1866) had published an Abolitionist newspaper in his youth, was a friend and colleague of Charles W. Chestnutt, advisor to James A. Garfield and an early and vocal opponent of Trusts. Kline had come to prominence successfully defending Teagle & Schurmer, the last independent oil refiner in Cleveland, from being gobbled up by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. After a bruising court battle John D. famously said, “Young man, you’ve given us a good licking. Now I want you to come and work for me.” He was hired, prevented further actions by Standard that would expose it to expensive litigation, and remained in the company’s employ until his death in 1917, grooming his old client’s son Walter (Teagle & Schurmer eventually did merge with Standard Oil), to become John D.’s successor: after the breakup he became chairman of Standard of New Jersey, which under him became Esso, later Exxon.

It was while recovering from an exhausting round of court appearances that Mr. and Mrs. Teagle, guests of the Klines at Ideal Lodge, fell in love with Blue Hill and decided to build their own cottage nearby. Many people in their orbit did the same and the colony eventually attracted others from beyond Cleveland, including, by the early 1900's, the granddaughters of John Ellingwood Donnell, who traveled up to East Blue Hill, Maine, to visit a defunct granite quarry that he had purchased years before.

Delighted by the rocky oceanfront meadows they encountered, one of the granddaughters pursuaded her surgeon husband, textile heir Seth Milliken, to build a large summer bungalow on the property. In due course, other structures were added, and the property, known as Ellingwood after Mrs. Milliken's grandfather, became a considerable estate. The Millikens and their five children would arrive each summer, with a bevy of maids, chauffeurs, governesses and tennis coaches in their wake.

In the summer of 1924, despairing of the pernicious influence of the roaring twenties on their five children, Alida, Martha, Minot, Seth and John, Dr. & Mrs. Milliken added a music coach to the summer staff, hoping to provide an alternative to movies and fast parties. The idea was hatched to stage a performance of 'HMS Pinafore'. Children from other social families on nearby Mt. Desert were recruited for starring roles and chorus. The Milliken's 103-foot Herreshoff yacht, 'Shawna' would stand in for the Pinafore, classical music students, studying with their instructors for the summer at Blue Hill’s Kneisel Hall, would provide musical accompaniment, and car headlights would provide illumination. The commodious stone porches of the boathouse would house the audience. The advice of Effie Kline, by then 80 and still the grande dame of Blue Hill’s summer colony (she lived until 1927) would have been invaluable, staging ‘Pinafore’ afloat having been how she burst upon the scene 45 years earlier. There is, alas, no definitive evidence among her papers to confirm this. Alida, who was a friend of my mother’s and of mine (a winter resident of 740 Park Avenue, she once had me along as in-flight distraction when she chartered a plane to attend a funeral) would have been the one to ask, but she died in 1998.

By the next summer, the performances had become a tradition and a production of 'The Mikado' was mounted. Another rousing success, the group decided to become an official entity and perform in New York for the benefit of charity. And thus was born the Blue Hill Troupe, possibly the most respected, and social, amateur Gilbert & Sullivan troupe in the country.

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ecotone99 · 4 years

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(RF) Part 1 - Love is Overrated (Chapters 5-7)

Chapter 5 – The Pain Persists

I disappeared from our group for a week, I just couldn't take the pain. It was definitely too much. Chelsea was still hanging around with our friends and told me they were asking about me and she didn't know what to tell me. She said she was sorry for hurting me and if I don't want her around anymore, she understands.

"I would never say that. I always want you around, even if we aren't together" I replied truthfully. Honestly, I still wanted her around. I was slowly coming back to our group and reintegrating. It was interesting because she acted as if nothing happened. We still talked, everything just slowly transitioned into being the same. We would go back to regular conversations, still call each other. We even got as far as talking about what names for children would be good.

I was curious though, was I just being pulled around? Am I blind? Is there something I'm not seeing? I was so blind by happiness that I wasn't looking carefully at the situation and analyzing it. I had forgotten everything I had learned, everything I had originally been trained for. This time, I stopped and thought about it. This is what I came up with. I thought back to a conversation we had before about her telling me that she felt as if one of our friends had a crush on her, she gets the feeling of it, but she didn't wanna hurt his feelings so she didn't want to tell people about us. Only certain people knew and the more people found out, she was still ok with it. It was just that one friend we couldn’t tell. She was going to figure out how to do it but not right now. I kept lingering on that moment.

Regardless, throughout our next conversations and interactions I kept thinking about it and it kept coming back to how her and Callie interacted because she would keep doing it. She would say she couldn't do it anymore and leave and then come back. It happened three more times after the initial break up. What could I do? I just had to sit here and endure but I couldn't anymore. I finally told myself, let me take a break and take a contract overseas for a bit. I wanted to go to South America, it seemed like fun. I told my friends I was going to be gone for a month, no worries. They understood and told me to be careful. I still talked to them and it was completely ok with everyone. Everyone but Chelsea. She was severely upset, she wanted me to come back home. It was dangerous, trying to seize drugs, trying to stop bad people in the world. I was ok, I felt fine. I wanted to do it, I'm good at it. I even offered to send her my teddy bear, a bear I had kept from childhood that went everywhere with me, so I would be forced to come back and get it from her. She declined…nay…she ignored that whole conversation until later on when she said "I should've taken Teddy." Oh well, what's done is done, I'm overseas now.

"Are you safe?" she texted.

"Yeah, I'm good. I'm stuck in the mountains just watching, everything is completely fine. Plus, I'm originally from Peru, I blend in."

"I'm just worried, I want you to come home. I want you to be safe.""I am safe. Why do you think I'm not?"

"Anything can happen there, we don't know. Please just come home. Why did you have to go in the first place?"

"I'm fine, I promise. I needed to get out for a bit. I just needed a change of scenery. I had to get away from it all. It was getting to be too much." I never did explain to her that I hated keeping everything from our friends. I hated it. It was eating me up inside. At one point she said "I would shout it from the mountains and tell everyone you're mine." It just didn't seem true, she wanted to keep everything a secret. I was abiding.

I ended up having to move to action, what else could I do? I was there for a reason. In an attempt to seize a shipment of cocaine I got into a tussle with a cartel member and fractured my leg. I had no idea, I felt nothing. It was a hairline fracture. I told Chelsea and she was upset, hated me for being there and said that now she couldn't take it, yet again. She wanted to leave my life and I said ok, well, I'll come home. I did what I was supposed to do but at this point we were so distant from each other, it was just bad.

Eventually I made it home and we didn't talk much. She spoke sporadically because I had told her I didn't wanna come home yet. What would I come home to? Her?

"Let me be clear, you're not coming home to me. I'm out of the equation."

Well, then what would it matter? Should I even care? It was just going to be me. I was happy at one point. I was. Truly.

After that last one I messaged all our friends to tell them why she was upset, and that her and I wouldn't be getting back together. I had no idea she had access to those messages, she saw them. She was very upset because she said she didn't want them in our business. They have no right. If she wanted them to know then she would tell them. I've just ruined anything left between me and her. I mean, whatever, I'm just trying to make sure they understand why she's been so upset. She kept telling me they know she's upset and were asking her but she kept pushing the question aside. So I'm telling them exactly why and they chose to ignore me. They sided with her, that's fine. I cleared my conscious and that's what matters to me. To her, it may seem like she's won but it's also how you win that matters. I was alone, no friends, but I was content with how I handled things. With the truth.

Chapter 6 – Death is So Close

She started going back through our messages and deleting them. I never would’ve noticed but she put up a message as a favorite, one that said we were a perfect fit. I didn’t know what to say.

“I like that one too. I still think it” I replied. I had nothing else to say. “Are you just going back through our messages and deleting them?” As I scrolled up I would see her deleting anything that remotely expressed warm feelings or love towards each other.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no clue.”

“You can delete the messages but you can’t erase the memories.”

“I’ll probably end up deleting this too.”

“I’m sorry, about everything. Do you want to talk about it?”

“I’ve said everything already.”

In the days to come I didn’t know I would be met with cardiac complications. One of the weirder things I had ever experience, a fracture on my leg I thought was a bruise, it hurt but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Well, I had a fracture to the point of leaking bone marrow and lead to a heart attack. It sucked, I was hospitalized. I’m under 30, I’m low risk but such is life, you just have to roll with the punches. Our friends checked in on me, she didn’t. It was at this point in time I realized she didn’t care, at least, that’s what came across my mind. I’m sure she cares but not as much as she used to. I remember waking up in the cardiac ICU after being stable. I demanded discharge after having normal repeat labs.

I headed home and sat around for a while until I was strong enough to get around. I didn’t want to go back to work, instead I headed to Italy to relax. Was it fun? Eh…debatable, but I was able to get away and not think of anything going on, for one…damn…day… I left one of my friends at home to look after my dog, I couldn’t bring him with me. Her name is Katerina and she started reading the notes I had. I document just about everything I do and all the conversations I have, you never know when you need something, I’m just meticulous that way. The notes had discrepancies in age ranges and specific details of life just to note, I tend to forget things easily. In that hard drive I also had recorded conversations in case I needed to recall something, again, I’m just meticulous and because in my previous line of work it was good to have those things at arm’s length.

The issue then arose when she started talking to the guy that played matchmaker, for this story he’ll be referred to as J. Now J meant well, he really did, but he approached Chelsea about the concerns Katerina had told him. Due to that he received negative responses about me that I thought were unwarranted, but I took no action. I never said one bad thing about Chelsea, I never expressed hate or rancor, I simply listened and let it go. But wouldn’t you know it? It got worse from here. The rest of our friends decided to ask me why I was spreading lies…while I’m on vacation! Ugh…well, good thing I document everything. There were still things I didn’t want to share with them – not because Chelsea didn’t want them to know, just because they were hurtful to them. To this day they have no idea, I never told them everything. I told them enough for them to understand the truth and that I haven’t done anything, I’m in Italy trying to move on and forget (side note, it’s not going well). Armed with this new information they choose to confront her and, even though I said I don’t want to drive a wedge between them because I want them to remain her friends, that’s exactly what happened. Apparently some things were being said about me, I have no idea what, I never asked, but they were of a hurtful nature.

“He’s a fucking liar. I want nothing to do with him. Fuck him and anyone talking shit about me” she said to J.

“It wasn’t him that said it though. It was just someone.”

“Who? I want a name. Who said it?”

“Just someone.” That’s when the others asked me directly and I told them. We had to talk in secret, so she wouldn’t find out what we were saying. I told them the truth. She spoke all the time, just about every day. She would call me all the time and I would call her. We barely slept because of the time we spent with each other. We waited until everyone went to bed and then talked every night. I’ll never forget it. I would hang up, she would sleep for a few hours and then wake up and pass out in the middle of the day because of the lack of sleep at night. I would have to sleep in the physician’s lounge. I was sooooooo tired. I showed them our conversations. Well, I showed them portions of our conversations. I showed them timestamps of our phone calls, lengths of them, so many things. I never had them listen to the recordings themselves simply due to the fact that I didn’t want them to hear what was said. Some things were private and I wanted them to remain private.

After they decided to ask my side of the story supported by evidence, everyone’s friendship blew up. There was no fixing this. No amount of talking, no amount of apologizing, nothing in the world would fix this. It was done. The one thing I said I didn’t want to happen, happened. I told them specifically, I’m not showing you this to destroy your friendship, I just wanted the truth to be out there. I don’t know what was said between them, I don’t know what happened, I just know everyone went separate ways.

I didn’t know what I supposed to do. I just wanted to be a nice person and make sure everyone was doing well. I don’t think the perfect answer exists. I tried to rationalize every situation, I tried to think of every scenario and act upon the one I thought would be the best. Still, it sucked. Nothing I came up with came up well. Every outcome was horrible and someone was hurt. In the end I figured I should focus on the feelings of the others, not me and Chelsea. That ship has sailed and they are entitled to the truth. Something about hiding things and lying to them just seemed dirty to me. It hurt me to my soul. That, of course, meant I would never be able to repair my relationship with Chelsea. I didn’t even really see a way to repair it but if there existed any before, there doesn’t anymore. It adds to the pain and then I had the realization that I thought I was finally going to be ok but I wasn’t. I thought I was finally doing well, only to have it all ripped away from me once again. I’m done. I don’t care about people anymore. I looked at my H&K .45 and thought to myself, I think it’s time.

Chapter 7 – The Best I Could Do

What I remember the most vividly and clearly is waking up holding a bottle of whiskey and my gun. My nieces were on their knees around me shaking me and checking to see if I’m alive. They were frightened. “Oh fuck…what have I done? They need me, I need to make sure they’re ok, for my sister.”

I had to get up and get cleaned up presenting them with a story of hearing something outside and making sure we were safe. I don’t think they bought it but does it matter? It ended that conversation. My mind was still racing, months had already passed. At this point it had been 5 months, I was still alone. I cried every day, I tried to gather myself, I stopped practicing medicine, I stopped doing research. I told myself every day, “I’ve done enough for others, I don’t owe anyone anything. It’s time, I have no reason to be here. Is it really fair for me to be around and still have nightmares and suffer every day just to spare others the pain? I mean, I’m just weighing out whether their pain is more important than mine.”

“What are we having for breakfast?” asked Leilani. Her words broke my mental state, I still had four girls staring at me, looking to me for guidance and, at this exact moment, food.

“You guys want pancakes? We can order from iHop.”

“Yes!!!” they shouted collectively. Technically they all started shouting their orders but I couldn’t understand anything so to me it sounded like a yes. I told them to log onto my computer and go onto the website to order whatever they wanted. I still remember that. Breakfast was $147.82. Eh, what did I care?

After eating breakfast I sent them off to do whatever they wanted and it was at this point in time the outbreak started. Also, up to this point I didn’t get along very well with my nieces. They moved in and out constantly because I wasn’t a fan of their father. He was an ass, or rather, he is an ass. I hate the guy. So the girls hate me. Whatever, I’m still taking care of them and I have custody. I have to make sure they’re well and go to school. I try my best, I have no support. Such is life.

School was cancelled, they had to be homeschooled. I can’t do that for them, I don’t have the mental stability for that right now. I sent them off to my parents and they consolidated all the children of the family to homeschool them. We have two college professors in the family, they’re taking care of the education. Guess what? I get to live alone again. Once again I look at my handgun and tell myself it’s time. Thinking about it constantly and trying to get my affairs in order I get a call to see if I can help in the ER because they’re overwhelmed. When someone asks for help I can’t say no so I accept, just another obstacle to get over. At this point I think to myself “am I purposely putting this off?” I have no idea, but I head back to work.

I sent a text to make sure she was ok and if she needed anything, she could ask me. I didn’t expect a response but I awoke to a text response. I was surprised. We proceeded to have a conversation for the next 3 days, it was nice. I managed to trick myself into a false sense of security, telling myself things would get better. Why? Why would I do this to myself again? Why can’t I let this go? Fuck! Let go, stop it. It doesn’t matter. If anything, don’t force this. If she wanted to talk to you she would, it’s as simple as that.

It was the argument of letting go but not wanting to because I still love her. I hate it. I just wish this wasn’t a feeling I had because then this issue wouldn’t be here. Regardless, we spoke, laughed, shared feelings about the breakup, how we’re doing. I thought we were doing well, I thought…maybe…just maybe…we can keep talking and be friends. One day she just stopped responding and I was upset all over again. Time would only tell if things would get better for me. At the time, no, nothing got better. Everything fucking sucked. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, I couldn’t read a book without seeing her name, I just couldn’t move on. What does this mean? I actually love this girl? I shared things with her that I never told anyone else. Should I pursue this? Hell…most of the time my mind is racing, scrambling to figure out the next step. Not now. Now, my mind is blank. It’s as if I overloaded, my mind crashed as I sit at home staring in the distance without a thought in the world.

“This is nice” I say out loud. “I can finally think.” But in reality I couldn’t think. I couldn’t form a single thought. My mind was fried. I guess this is the end of me. The thing I value most in the world, my rational mind, it’s gone. Well, I guess it’s time to nap. What else am I supposed to do? Am I going to wake up? “Interesting…” I think as everything goes black and fall asleep. My last thought being that of a younger me telling myself to keep going, people still need help in the world and you can’t give up.

Chapter 4 - https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/comments/gkpx4c/rf_part_1_love_is_overrated_chapter_4/

Chapter 3 - https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/comments/giplq6/rf_part_1_love_is_overrated_chapter_3/

Chapter 2 - https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/comments/gi3xks/rf_part_1_love_is_overrated_chapter_2/

Chapter 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/comments/gh79uk/rf_part_1_love_is_overrated/

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mycaminodesantiago · 4 years

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Part 3

Night 10 - Nájera:

I awoke with the sun rise and my body was experiencing an ever-increasing array of pains that made it nearly impossible for me to stand or walk like a regular person when I first emerged from my bed in the morning. Strapping myself into my backpack felt different. After spending an entire day without it, I realized it was a part of me now. I didn’t feel whole yesterday without it.

Luke and I set out for the day on a barren trail through a farm-like landscape and miles of open fields. We sang “Drops of Jupiter” and any other songs we could think of that we both knew the lyrics to out loud while we nibbled on mangoes. When Joseph eventually caught up to us, he wore his usual fisherman’s hat and khaki pants that could be unzipped and converted into shorts. I could not mentally understand why I was suddenly so attracted to this man despite how ridiculous he always seemed to look.

“I caught up to you guys,” Joseph said, proud of himself.

“Congrats, old man,” Luke and I teased.

“I just sat down back there and took a nut break,” he responded, gesturing to a shady stoop behind us and a half-eaten bag of trail nuts he’d clearly been munching on.

“I’d like to take a nut break with you,” I said under my breath but loud enough for them both to hear. I knew that they both appreciated my ability to turn any statement into some kind of sexual innuendo.

“You guys are so annoying,” Luke rolled his eyes and laughed with us.

Joseph knew that he was the mature, responsible adult alongside us, though it really wasn’t hard to be considered the adult when we were walking with Luke, who, now for the second time, had forgotten to close a box of cereal in his backpack and was forced to empty out the entire thing on the floor of our hostel in Nájera.

For such a small town, the hostel we checked into was huge. They managed to fit ninety beds into a room that ordinarily would only hold half of that. Bunk beds were pushed together in pairs so that each top and bottom bunk were conjoined with the one next to it, meaning that you would have no space in between you and whoever slept next to you. Hostel owners usually gave you a card with your bed number assignment on it as soon as you checked in each day, but today as I dropped my things on the floor, Luke grabbed my card out of my hand before I’d even had a chance to look at it and swiftly replaced it with his, without saying a word. I didn’t understand why he did this until I saw Joseph climbing up the ladder next to the numbered bed that Luke had just given me.

“Enjoy,” he said with a grimace as he walked down to the bed that I’d originally been assigned. Joseph and I had sexual chemistry that was almost palpable whenever we were together. I sometimes wondered if it made Luke uncomfortable, but it never seemed to bother him—he usually just found amusement in us acting like children with school-crushes on each other. I tried to make it clear to him that he was never going to be left out with us—we’d even dubbed ourselves “The Trinity” because none of us really felt complete without the other around. The ironic part about everything is that in a lot of ways, Luke was being more mature than Joseph and I were about our situation. It was clear to all three of us what was going on, but Luke was the only one who was actually making any tactical moves to make things happen for us.

After we all showered and demolished the worst pizza that the three of us had ever eaten, I climbed up the ladder next to Joseph’s bed and collapsed beside him. As I rolled over to face away from him, I felt his body slowly inch closer to me. It’d felt like an entire lifetime that I’d waited to feel his skin pressed against mine. He ran his hand gently down the crease of my spine, down the length of my thigh and back up again, knowing exactly what he was doing to me. It felt like he had taken me to a different space and time where the only thing that mattered were his hands on my body. Only the reality was that there were eighty-eight other people sharing the same room as us, so laying beside each other was as far as it was going to go. Yet still, my mind was going to dangerous places as I felt his legs wrap around mine. I closed my eyes and let the euphoria of his touch fill my entire body before falling asleep to the rhythm of his breath.

* History: Nájera, with a population of 8,500, was the capital of the Kingdom of Navarre in the 11th and 12th centuries. The Monasterio Santa María de la Real is the burial place of many of the illustrious kings, queens and knights of Navarre. The Pantheon church was built in this city following the legend that the son of Sancho the Great, Don García, followed his hunting falcon into a cave and came upon a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Night 11 - Santo Domingo:

Luke shook me awake the next morning the way he usually did after I’d successfully ignored my alarm clock, while Joseph stayed asleep beside me. The sky was still dark and the air was cooler than most other days had been. The quiet early-morning hours on the Camino were unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life. For hours, we wouldn’t see a trace of another human being, just the faint flickering of headlights in the distance from those who had started their days before us. The stillness and beauty of nature was all that surrounded us, the grassy fields and the chirping bird’s faint melodies and the dazzling pinks and yellows of the sun rising over the mountains ahead of us. It was hard to not feel good here. Even when I would walk alone, I never really felt sad. Maybe it was because my mind was so focused on getting through each day, or maybe because I was forced to focus on my physical suffering so intensely that some of my emotional suffering had somehow faded away. Everyday it felt so good to be here, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about how this wasn’t real life. It was like summer camp, temporary and easy, but as nice as this was, somebody I would have to go back to the real world.

While Luke and I sat on a stoop resting our bodies, I spotted Joseph trekking towards us, his walking sticks swinging and pounding into the ground the way that they always did while he walked. Most people along the way carried very few outfits with them, five or six different pieces at most, and rotated them each day. Joseph, however, always wore the same thing: greenish, khaki cargo shorts that sometimes were converted into pants, and a long-sleeved blue dry-fit shirt. He had two pairs of each of them, but still looked exactly the same every single day. But as he approached us now, he was still wearing the black t-shirt and shorts that he only ever wore to bed. When Luke and I greeted him with confusion, he explained that when he had washed and left his clothes out to dry overnight, someone had stolen them all before he’d woken up.

“They even took my underwear,” Joseph laughed halfheartedly. Since I’d started walking, I’d never felt unsafe or worried about theft, not even once. There was an unspoken understanding between the pilgrims walking alongside us that we would all have each other’s backs. Besides that, all of our clothes were permanently stained with what we called “the pilgrim smell,” an odor of sweat and dirt that was so powerful it never seemed to fully go away no matter how long we washed our clothes. And even if our clothes had been relatively clean—which they weren’t—absolutely nothing that anyone wore was even remotely good-looking. The way you looked just wasn’t a concern when you were walking in the blistering heat for eight hours a day, everyday.

“I don’t think it was a pilgrim. I think someone from the village we were staying in probably took them,” Joseph theorized, which would make a lot more sense. “But I’m not going to let this ruin my day, or the rest of my trek,” he went on, shrugging off the entire situation in his typical, nonchalant and cool manner. “That would be giving whoever did this too much power over me.” I admired the way he was able to handle any situation thrown at him with such ease, maturity and level-headedness. I could tell that he was resilient and only chose to fight the battles in his life that were really worth fighting.

The three of us continued on for hours until we reached our next destination, our bodies slumping down on our beds as soon as we arrived so that we could take small siestas before exploring the city of Santo Domingo. As we passed a little restaurant off the beaten path, we were approached by an English-speaking, quirky, middle-aged couple who greeted us from behind the bar. The villages we walked through each day were so small that it was rare for anyone working in restaurants along the trail to not be natives. But the two of them were welcoming and friendly and singing along to a John Mayer song that was playing inside, so I was sold. Luke, Joseph and I were the only ones there, which wasn’t surprising considering that most nights everyone was so exhausted that they would only have enough strength to stop at whatever restaurant was closest to their hostel.

The couple sat next to us and chatted about who they were and how they had gotten here. The man was originally from Denmark, the woman a chef from Hungary, and they explained to us that the two of them had met and fallen in love exactly one year ago in this very town.

“I was walking from Denmark to Portugal. She was walking the Camino Frances,” he reminisced. “Somewhere along the way, I found myself. And even better, I found the love of my life. After we arrived in Santiago together, hand-in-hand, we both realized just how much this pilgrimage had given us. We decided that it was our destiny to settle down along the Camino with each other.” Their restaurant was appropriately named Wanderlust.

“The Camino is magic,” the woman chimed in.

I listened to their story intently, but it was so hard for me to take any of it seriously. I didn’t want to be a cynic, but I didn’t really believe in stories like this, ones that describe that kind of fairytale love that seems too good to be true and quite frankly doesn’t actually seem to exist in real life. But here it was, sitting right in front of me, real and in the flesh. The two of them gazed into each other’s eyes lovingly and tenderly and with all of the comfort in the world. Though I didn’t necessarily believe that what they had could possibly be real, I still wanted it. I craved it. But instead, I’d spent the last three years keeping everyone in my life at arm’s length, desperate for someone to love me but unwilling to be vulnerable enough to allow anyone to hurt me.

I grew up in a household where my mother and father took turns leaving each other for brief months at a time, only to reunite and then leave each other again for the same reasons they always had. When I was old enough to understand what was going on, I realized that they were stuck in some perpetual cycle of fighting and forgiving that was probably never going to end. It was maddening to watch. The two of them were like that teenage girl who keeps going back to the boy who cheats on her over and over again because each time he does it he swears he’ll change and she always naively believes him—except my parents were both in their sixties and were extraordinarily intelligent people. If I ever questioned why my mother wouldn’t leave my father permanently, she would always say the same thing: the two of them had something which she described as a “good partnership.” In a lot of ways, their relationship exemplified everything I never, ever wanted to have. I never wanted to be stuck with someone I wasn’t truly, deeply, madly in love with. I would rather be alone.

But as I listened to these two souls tell their beautiful love story to us, how they’d met each other in such a serendipitous way and had so purely fallen in love, how they’d moved to this tiny village far away from everything they’d ever known because nothing in the world mattered except that they were together, no matter how much my parents and my own relationships had destroyed my perception of love, I felt myself wanting to believe in it again.

Joseph pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up.

“I thought you weren’t smoking anymore,” I said sarcastically, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Of course I’m smoking,” he rolled his eyes. “You should know me by now.”

And I did know him. Every night that he sat with us he’d swear that he was going to stop smoking. But it was his vice, and Joseph’s biggest downfall in life was that he lacked any form of self-control. We both knew he wasn’t going to stop. Though it didn’t matter to me.

* History: Santo Domingo has a history closely linked with the Camino. Saint Dominic dedicated his life to improving the route for pilgrims in the 11th century, building roads. Domingo García built a pilgrim hospital, now the Parador and a church that evolved into the Cathedral.

Night 12 - Villambistia:

Luke and I awoke before the sun once again, letting the light slowly fill the sky as we limped into the day the way we did each morning until our joints warmed up. Each yellow arrow we passed now served as a landmark to us, a sign with a meaning that was indecipherable to anyone but pilgrims on the trail. I truly hadn’t ever understood how vast a mile could be, until each mile was ticked off at walking speed. In my life before this, normal modes of transportation allowed for miles to be things that simply blazed dully past me. But foot speed was an astoundingly different way of moving through the world. Each mile was now a long, breathtaking, intimate, and sometimes unbearable struggle. As the sun moved across the sky and sunk below the mountains, I realized I hadn’t seen Joseph all day. I knew he had been having foot troubles—more than the normal amount of foot troubles we were all permanently doomed to have—and assumed that he might have stayed behind in a smaller village to give them a rest. Karen had also fallen far behind the rest of us and I feared that I might have already seen her for the last time without realizing it in the moment. After spending every waking hour of every day with the same people for nearly two weeks, it felt completely out of place not having them around.

“You need a Joseph detox, anyways,” Luke teased as the two of us checked into our hostel, swiping the last two beds they had left. He was probably right, but it still felt strange knowing that I was going to wake up without knowing where Joseph was.

Night 13 - RioPico:

After a long day of walking beneath an enormous canopy of trees, Luke and I decided to stop in a beautiful, newly-renovated hostel just outside the next big town our guidebook had told us to stop at. We were two of only four people staying here, as most pilgrims decided to keep walking the last few miles into Burgos. But after the places we’d stayed at for the last two weeks, this spot looked like it was built for Kings and Queens. We couldn’t resist it. It was also the first time I’d had access to computers or internet since leaving Madrid. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t use my phone while I was here out of principle, but I decided that it was a loophole to use a computer to email and update my family back home. Luke, however, used the opportunity to download Netflix episodes of Glee and a brand new Taylor Swift song for us to listen to. The mere sight of a cell phone felt like such a foreign thing to me after denying myself access to it for all this time. Everything about phones exhausted me. Too often did I find myself doing that automatic tap loop, going through the same five apps over and over again on autopilot hoping to find something exciting but realizing after several hours that my fingers weren’t even connected to my mind anymore. I didn’t miss it.

Earlier in the day, I’d trailed behind Luke on my own for a bit in hopes of having Joseph catch up to us. But when I finally did hear the sound of his trekking poles, I could tell by the way he limped towards me that he was hurting more than I’d previously thought. I told him that I would be carrying on to the next village, but his feet were telling him that he would need to stay behind. I felt my stomach drop as I realized what I had to do. I wanted so badly to stay behind with him, to take care of him, to so desperately tell him that my days weren’t going to be the same without him. But I promised myself that I wouldn’t make this experience about anyone but myself.

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to lose you for a bit,” I looked at him with sincerity and I knew that he knew me well enough to know that I didn’t want to leave him, but that I had to. And I knew that he would have forced himself to do the same thing.

“I know. I want you to know that I really like you,” he told me. “I’m just still trying to be careful with intimacy for a little while. I’m kind of screwed up at the moment after all that went down in Bali.” I nodded without needing to say anything. “But you know that I would love to see more of you, so don’t walk too fast. And maybe I will loosen up and not be such a bore eventually,” he laughed.

“You could never be a bore, Joseph,” I looked up at him shyly and half-smiling. “I understand. We both have healing and self-reflecting to do and unfortunately that’s hard to do if you have someone around in an intimate way.” I always meant every word that I said to him. I knew that trying to cultivate any kind of intimate relationship with him wouldn’t be smart. But I also knew that I still wanted to do it.

“Look, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t want more with you when I obviously do. We’re just in such a weird situation being here and it’s hard to know what the right thing is,” he said, always seeming to know exactly what I was thinking. “I’ve used sex my whole life as a way to escape. It’s just a messy area of my life to navigate right now. There is just something in me that’s hesitating with us. And what really scares me is that I wouldn’t feel good afterwards. The worst thing would be losing you as a friend here.”

“I understand,” I repeated back to him. “We have things we need to deal with on our own. I don’t want to ruin that for the both of us.”

“We still have time left,” he winked. “But being impulsive about this would probably be the worst thing. That’s what my intuition tells me. Sex should never feel shameful. Let’s spend some time on our own and then decide. If we make the decision to go ahead after that, then there’s no regrets.”

I nodded in agreement as we hugged each other, unsure when I’d see him again. It didn’t seem real that I’d actually said goodbye to him until the sun began disappearing from the sky that night. After Luke had gone to bed, I made my way along a long line of white lawn chairs in our hostel’s courtyard until I found one that was set off by itself. I sat alone overlooking the mountain peaks I’d been hiking over and under for two weeks. It felt like I had been here forever, like the remnants of my past life were just a distant memory to me now. But it also seemed like my journey was just beginning, like only now was I digging into whatever it was that I had actually come here to do. I knew that in some way, something had altered within me. For the first time since leaving home, I felt like I might cry. I’d spent the last year of my life in a numb, self-deprecating whirlwind, never truly feeling happy or sad or angry or any emotion at all. But here, right now, sitting alone in the middle of nowhere staring off into the unknown, I could feel again. I felt some kind of unadulterated feeling come over me that can only be described as overwhelmed. I took a deep breath to push away my tears, but suddenly, something inside of me released. I started crying tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy. I wasn’t happy or sad or angry, I was all of them. I felt everything. I felt full and empty at the same time. I thought about Joseph and Luke and Karen and everyone else I’d met on the trail, I thought about Chris and Jesse and my mother and my father and my friends back home and everything they’d all done to shape my life into what it was right now. It all had brought me here.

Maybe there really was something beautiful about the fleeting temporality of life.

Night 14 - Burgos:

The next morning, I tried to convey to Luke what I could of the conversation I’d had with Joseph the day before, but he stopped me in my tracks.

“Karen called me last night,” he said with more enthusiasm than I found appropriate. “She’s taking the bus to Burgos tonight to meet us and say goodbye.” He explained that she’d fallen so far behind us that she knew she would no longer be able to keep up with us anymore, but was desperate to hug us all one last time. The public bus only ran to a handful of the larger cities along the route, and Burgos was one of them. She’d told Luke that if we were willing to meet her, she would spend the night with us in Burgos and then take the bus back to where she was now to continue on walking without us.

“Okay,” I said hesitantly. I knew that I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to see Karen one last time. She was too important to me.

Karen had just gotten out of a messy divorce from her husband whom she swore was out of her league, though none of us believed that to be true. I knew that any person who was lucky enough to ever cross paths with Karen was better for having known her. She was always smiling and laughing, lighthearted and loud, but never in an obnoxious way. Her energy and her positivity was contagious and she had a way of making everything so simple. My body could hurt, my mind could hurt, my heart could hurt, but when she’d look at me or hold me or tell me that things would be okay, I believed her, and they always were. I’d missed her dearly in the few days that I hadn’t seen her.

Luke and I walked for an hour into Burgos, spoiled ourselves by checking into a cheap hotel room with real, actual beds and sheets, and waited for Karen to arrive at the bus stop at the entrance of the town. As the three of us were reunited, she told us that Joseph had decided to stay in Burgos with us too and wouldn't be far behind her, though I had already assumed that was the case. I wondered if he’d decided to stay for the same reason I did—mostly for Karen, but also partly because he knew that our time together wasn’t meant to be over yet.

His face lit up as he approached us, flashing his classic smug smile.

“Just couldn’t stay away, huh?,” he laughed and embraced all of us. “I had a feeling you might still be here.” As we all held onto each other, I got a strange feeling that they’d all showed up in my life just in time. In just two weeks, they had become the people who helped me keep going when I had no motivation or when I felt like I couldn’t take another step. They supported me on the hard days and they let me walk alone when they knew I needed it. On the mornings when I woke up and found myself trapped under the weight of every bad thing that has ever happened to me in my life, they made it okay. These three had become my family here, like everything would be alright as long as I had them next to me.

“I splurged on a fancy hotel room tonight,” Karen told us. “Haley can stay with me if she wants, and you boys can stay in the other room.”

“Or Haley and Joseph can stay together,” Luke chimed in craftily.

“Oh?,” Karen looked up surprised as if she had been clueless about Joseph and I, which seemed impossible, but we soon realized that she hadn’t even known Luke was gay until he begged us to join him at a gay bar later that evening, so maybe she just wasn’t the best at picking up on things.

Karen and I showered off and got ready for the evening together, catching up on the days we’d spent apart.

“So, you and Joseph?,” Karen asked while raising an eyebrow.

We both laughed as I tried to put into words exactly what was happening between us, but as I said the words out loud and watched Karen’s cringing face become increasingly more unenthused, I realized just how stupid all of it sounded.

“What the hell are you waiting for? You’re here for one month with him and then you’re flying back across the world. You like each other, you’re attracted to each other, why are you thinking so much?,” she spoke adamantly. “Just do it already.”

Though she hadn’t put it as eloquently as I’d imagined, she was right. Suddenly, everything made sense, the way things always did when she spoke to me. I was a classic over-thinker. I’d always controlled my impulses so much so that I’d missed out on things that probably could have been great. I’d wasted so much of my life being cautious and not saying what I really felt and waiting for the “right moment,” which wasn’t something that really existed. The right moment is always now. And I knew that with Joseph, risk was better than regret.

As we knocked on Luke’s door, I hoped that he’d given Joseph the same pep-talk that Karen had given me. The four of us walked to the main square and treated ourselves to bottomless sangrias, and the rest of the night was a blur of loud music and moving bodies and feelings of pieces falling into place.

My head was buzzing from the wine and the uncontrollable desire that I knew I had for Joseph. I watched him move and I couldn’t think straight. I watched the way he would throw his head back laughing like a little kid at the dinner table, the way he’d dance like an old man with no rhythm to songs he’d never heard before. I watched the way he reached for my hand as we walked down the brick pavement, so casually it felt like he’d done it a hundred times before. I watched the way his eyes would lock with mine across the loud bar the wonderful way that his lips would brush against my ear as he spoke things to me I couldn’t make out over the music.

Joseph was complicated and he was irrational and he was insightful and he was beautiful, and with the way that we’d been looking at each other, there was no way that we weren’t going there. And why wouldn’t we? We’d spent two weeks showing off our scarlet letters and our secrets and our traumas, and yet I still adored everything that he was, everything that he said and everything that he stood for. I knew that we’d had a conversation only twenty- four hours ago about how we would wait, but all night long I’d still let my mind imagine all of the things that we might do.

And then we did them.

“Let’s just not think about it,” Joseph whispered softly into my ear, his soft blue eyes turning wild. His lips pressed against my neck before they slowly found their way to my lips, and we smiled at each other in that daffy way that two people who just kissed each other for the first time do. My hands ran through his curly hair and down his strong arms before gripping the back of his neck, the shape of him like something brand new to me. I watched his face while he ran his fingers down my side and pressed himself tenderly and tenaciously against my body.

Joseph gave me a feeling I hadn’t known existed before, like I was living in black and white and he’d painted me golden, like I’d just stepped into daylight for the first time, like somehow the world was now in perfect alignment. Not because of the sex—though the sex was great—but because I’d finally let go. I’d let go of my fears and my ghosts and I’d let my mind empty of all the possible complications and consequences and things that could go wrong. I’d unveiled all of myself to someone, not just physically, but emotionally. I had been vulnerable and I’d been raw and real with him and I’d just given my body to someone who knew every part of me and who’d shown me every part of him. I’d been intimate with men before, but having someone truly understand every corner of my mind, someone who wanted to listen to all of the things that I’d always been too afraid to say out loud for fear of sounding crazy—it was a different kind of intimacy altogether. He touched me and everything in my body told me to trust it.

Night 15 - Tardajos:

The morning was filled with playful teasing and elated laughter, grips on my thigh under the breakfast table, long, drawn out embraces with Karen and going back to her for second and third hugs because I couldn’t stand the idea of saying goodbye. Joseph had decided to stay another night in Burgos, unable to bounce back as quickly as Luke and I could after a long night of drinking. He’d pulled me in and kissed me gently on the cheek and looked into my eyes as if it would be the last time, and I was half-afraid that it would be. I didn’t know how quickly he would catch up to us or if he ever would, but it didn’t matter. I knew that even if we’d never met again, I was forever changed by who he was and what he meant to me.

The two of them watched me skip out of the city, still riding the high of the night before and blushing all the way to Tardajos, a small village where Luke and I stopped for the night. My breakfast had tasted like magic and I’d danced along to the chirping of birds and I’d smiled at every stranger who passed by and that evening, I swore the night sky had touched my soul. I was in love with being alive again. I had an afterglow reminiscent of having just spent the night with the people I’d grown to love most in this world. There was just something so strangely familiar in the ways that the four of us connected with each other, like in some impossible way we had all known each other before this lifetime.

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immortal-journal · 6 years

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Living With Cavemen

To suffer alone, or to suffer with company - which is better? Frankly, I don’t know. While having somebody to talk to is nice (or grunt to, as the populus tends to do in the current age of cavemen), it can get dull, fast. At first, it was funny to stumble upon the second man on Earth. I had been living for quite some time before I saw another being like me. First, I had to wait for the development of simple-celled plants, which eventually turned into monstrously large, poisonous greens. Next came the animals, fuzzy and deadly. Some of the mammals existing during this time were tame, but even then, I was still hunted by every large predator and their beastly mothers.

So, when I did find something that didn’t want to immediately kill me, I was pleased, to say the least. We stared. This man, if I could even call him that, was disgustingly malformed. His bone structure was… Interesting. His jaw protruded about two inches out from the rest of his face, his back was hunched to the point that I thought it was injured, and not to mention those mangled feet: crooked, dirty, and surely broken at one point. The hair on his head looked like a tangled mass of mammoth fur, and his clothing (or lack thereof), was thinly shredded skin off of some animal. Even though he was ugly, he was still my relative, in some twisted nature.

When we found each other, I assumed there would be some sort of conversation after our small staring-contest, but… Nothing. The cave-dweller stood there, staring, for a complete minute. A minute during our prehistoric existence seemed to last forever. I moved first.

The caveman flinched, but didn't shy away, and instead made a move towards me, as a silent communication to bond with me. I stepped closer, then suddenly, we were nose to nose and I could smell his stinking breath. Awful; he really needed to clean up and I decided that I would help him with that.

I was introduced to his people, the others that were some hybrid of monkeys and humans, and they greeted me fondly. I was fully expecting the lot of them to be savages, uncivilized in their ways, and I was fully wrong. The women boiled and cooked what meat they could, while the men hunted, and the children cried. To see the qualities of one man split up into subsets of other, individualized humans was astonishing. While I survived on my own, entirely independent and void of any assistance, these brethren of mine had a system to ease my own work. I expected to help with our survival, but the monkey-men had forced me to sit, eat, and relax. I dwelled on my current predicament.

It was uplifting to see the world that I had lived on for thousands of years finally create a being like me - a human, flesh and bone, with no scales or feathers or claws to be frightened of. I was no longer alone. I had company that would care for me. Everything seemed optimal for me.

That was, until, I knew of death among humans. I had witnessed the life draining from other animal’s eyes, especially during the mass extinction of dinosaurs, but some ignorant part of me thought that a creature like me would also be brandished with the same immortality.

I witnessed my first human death on a date that is long forgotten. It was a man who was technically considered the leader of a tribe I knew - I wasn't a part of such a group, I refused to join a squadron of ape-men. I called him Knuckle-Dragger, because he quite literally dragged his knuckles across the rocky ground with a hunched back and bent legs. It was only a matter of time before Knuckle-Dragger dug his own grave, with such a misshapen body. A fatal misstep on the unstable mountain sides our houses were built upon on had proven itself to be gruesome and beyond repair. I was shocked, upset, and for the first time, not able to comprehend the impact of the situation. I witnessed this death only a single day after I had met the second man on Earth. I learned the world's brutality and the misery of company.

I also became fed up with the way these men spoke. Urgh. Mmph. Gruh. What kind of speech was that? Assuming that these people had enough of a hive mind to task everybody with a job to do, and do well, I imagined that these cave-dwellers would have a better method of communication. I spoke to the men and they never responded in a way to progress our conversation.

For example, there was an ugly mother that I named Rock Woman, because she was constantly drawing on the walls of our caves, as if somebody would make a great discovery of her art one day. Anyways, I would talk to Rock Woman, simple and slow. “Hello,” is usually what I would say to begin. And Rock Woman, with her stuffy human snout, would moan in response. She would never say hello, much less hold a conversation longer than two grunts.

After meeting Rock Woman, I decided to educate the mongrels of men. They finally learned how to greet each other, at least. Little did I know, my simple lectures would turn into the English lexicon thousands of years into the future. I thank Rock Woman for the inspiration to teach.

Now, I will move onto the savagery of the cave-dwellers. They made simple tools, found fire (after I generously helped with their discovery), and even began to fabricate better clothing; the humans were progressing and giving me hope. But all good things must come to an end. While my people had found fire, they were oblivious to the other hoards of enemy men finding them. Ensue violence, brutality, and death. I figured that with the small community we had built, the men of all different groups would come to the consensus that it's smarter to work together instead of destroying one another, as well as ruining their equipment. I should have expected less from a race as stupid as my own.

After the tribe I squatted with had been almost completely run off or killed, I decided to leave the humans and resort to my sad, quiet life among the birds and the trees, but not before I accomplished a goal of mine. Before I left completely, I spent the night with a woman. The taking of my virginity is a horrid sight to remember, but the feeling was pleasurable. I know why the humans like to do grotesque things to each other - because it feels good. Not just for sex, but for other notions as well. Power over others, the feeling of a fresh game hunt, sex and dominance, the men like to conquer. My first climax with a woman washed an immense wave of raw, carnal instinct over me, and I felt like I had made my mate my own. I think that was the first time I realized what man so desperately craved. Although, even with that knowledge, I still decided to leave the cavemen.

I didn't return for another thirty years, to which I am grateful. While I was gone, it seems that the humans had matured some, and even integrated a system of law and order to a forming society. Their tools got better and soon the early developments of the hammer and screwdriver were made. I was pleased with my fellow men. That's how I discovered pride in others, not just in myself. The population could progress with or without me (even though I did offer amazing advice for the first men on Earth).

I also noticed that these people were forming features similar to mine - lean bodies, smaller jaws, straighter backs. The changes to their bodies were almost insignificant, but I had been so taken aback by their disfigurement the first time that even the slightest of changes caught my eye. I wondered how similar they would look to me within a few hundred years. I never grew or aged, always living in the same body, so I had no clue as to what aging or the harshness of nature would do to their weathered bodies. Something had intrigued me for the first time in a couple thousand years.

I stayed with the humans for a bit longer this time, but I never helped them and they never helped me. I was a silent companion of theirs, I suppose, because they always showed interest in me, yet we never interacted. They really were like the pets I had kept with me for the long years leading up to my discovery of the ape-people. Amusing to watch from afar, pesky to encounter up close, pitiful in most scenarios, but overall, I decided to camp with them and write in my journal most days. I rarely had spoken to them until they developed a limping form of speech and were able to orally communicate with me years later.

One day, I had decided to travel and not waste my years with the cavemen. I finally decided to call them my family - a word they developed - once they had grown enough, but I had no strong emotional attachment to them. A few of them died every week, anyways, either from a terminal illness, a fatal error during hunting, or blatant stupidity from the slowly growing race. A part of me wondered if there were others out in the world that were similar to me (and hopefully smarter than the few tribes I had witnessed for years). I packed my clothes, makeshift toiletries, and off I went.

The journey I embarked on seemed to last for quite a few weeks until I came across another pack of cavemen that weren’t threatening to kill me. If an unacquainted man stumbles into your camp, the chances are he will be beaten and barbequed. While I had been the victim of abuse on some rare occasions, I was, more or less, smart enough to escape any situations of impending doom. (Whatever doom meant for me, anyhow.)

The next community of people I found had darker skin, yet I had no idea of where I was heading at the time. Maps hadn’t existed for thousands upon thousands of years later. These humans were stronger, more resilient, and seemed to have tighter family bonds.

I built my house several miles away from any civilization. Even when I found people who were welcoming, kind, and caring beyond all belief, I still wanted to stay secluded in my home, maybe with a colorful plant to take care of, or a small rodent on the off chance that I was feeling more lonely that year. I ponder my original question: Is it better to suffer alone or suffer with company? It’s hard to answer. I’m lonely and I will admit that, but I see too many deaths for me to stomach. Then some kind of realization washes over me to think that I have to live with this for my whole life, billions of years of suffering, trillions of people I know will die, and I wish with all of my heart that I will one day find somebody with immortality like me.

For now, I choose to suffer alone.

#emily.eng298

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dcnativegal · 6 years

Text

I moved here for love

New Year’s Day, 2018

Entire swaths of my old identity mean nothing here in Oregon. The fact that I was DC born, DC public school educated, and a DC resident for all but my college years, is an odd bit of personal trivia. Back east, this DC Native thing made me a special, rare being. My intimate experience of being a small marshmallow in a sea of cocoa, a minority in a majority black city, doesn’t register as interesting here. My knowledge of back alleys and short cuts through Mount Pleasant, or Brookland, or Chevy Chase DC is not necessary here. My memories of landmarks in Adams Morgan or Georgetown don’t come up in conversation with other DC natives, because I’m the only one. (Remember the cherry cokes at the fountain at People’s Drug Store at 18th & Columbia Road?) My experience as the one white girl in my journalism class at Penn Center’s Urban Journalism Workshop, where I spent my senior year of high school, means nothing, although I’m convinced that my write up of that extraordinary year got me into Oberlin, since my only extracurricular activity was running away from home. I graduated from high school the same year that Roots played on TV, 1977.

Having lived through the Uprising of 1968 while living in Adams Morgan, and having memories of 9/11’s impact on the Pentagon and DC, might be an interesting anecdote here in the Oregon Outback, but the conversation in which that experience might come up is hard to imagine. The knowledge I have about presidential motorcades (that they always have an ambulance at the end and that’s how you tell it’s a presidential one and not a head of state) is downright peculiar. I know that there are two large helicopters that transport the President out of town, and that one is a decoy. That no planes are allowed in DC airspace, except the presidential ones. I’ve seen senators and congress people in downtown restaurants. The famous people of DC are not movie stars; they are more likely to be journalists. The traffic downtown is different when Congress is not in session. Cherry blossom season means the residents avoid the Tidal Basin and the tourists flock there. Seriously, the best place to see the azaleas in April is the National Arboretum.

My long-lived, meticulously collected, history of daily life in the District of Columbia has been mothballed.

I traded that history for quiet. For zero light pollution. For a glimpse of the milky way on a clear night. For moonlight so bright that I can see dramatic landscapes illumined by it. I traded my familiarity for wonder.

I’ve left behind traffic. There is no traffic in Lake County. Ever. There is the occasionally cow-choked two lane highway: I have learned how to drive very carefully between enormous bovine fellow-travelers on Route 31. There is the inconvenience of a large truck laboring at the top speed of 40 up the Picture Rock Pass. But I’m not in a hurry. I’ll labor, too, and eventually pass the truck when we get back on the flats.

I worked long hours in various social service positions in D.C., hanging out all day with people who had cancer, or dementia, or ALS. In Lake County, I work about 28 hours a week. A little over 3 days. This schedule is … there are no adequate words… luxurious.

My old self was cosmopolitan, and oriented to alphabetical streets, with avenues named after states, the biggest avenues named after the original colonies. Northeast and Northwest DC encompassed most of my world. My idea of wilderness was Rock Creek Park. The beaches of the Atlantic are sloping and the water is warm during summer. I’ve traded all of that for a state that apparently has almost every sort of land and weather the United States seems to offer, in microcosm. Except the waters of the Pacific are very cold, and the beaches are embraced by cliffs.

I am still me. I am an anthropologist from the East Coast, eyes wide open, taking notes for this blog. I moved here for love.

___

People who live in Lake County tend to ask me why I moved from Washington, D.C. to Paisley, Oregon. Depending on the context, I may or may not come out to them, because the answer can be, because I have lots of family here (although they do not know that the family is not actually my kin) or because I have a partner here (and she is originally from Bly.) I may then get asked, how did you meet her? I may well inform them that she and I were both members of a listserv for women who were married to men while figuring out that they may be ‘not strictly heterosexual.’ I knew her as a woman who wrote beautifully and was very funny. Valerie lived in Germany at the time with her youngest child in high school. She referred to him as the Tall Monk. Her husband was a civilian chemist, serving the Army base. She’d figured out she was pretty darn lesbian some years before, but didn’t have anyone to focus on as a potential female partner, and had this son to finish rearing and launching. We met online as fellow confused gay women, in 2004. We didn’t date until 2011.

In 2003, I had fallen in love with an old friend, a butch woman who lived in Chicago, while I was still in DC. My husband had given me permission to pursue this woman, following his shocking heart attack at age 43, which drove home the idea that life can be very short indeed. His great gift of permission was one we both occasionally regretted, but it led us to more authentic lives, just separately, by 2006, when I moved out of the only home our kids had known. My children were 11 and 9 at the time. This old friend and I managed a five-year relationship, long distance, until we broke up.

Valerie and I had met once in person back in 2006, and later that year, I’d made her an offer: if she’d come to DC to help me prepare the apartment that I would soon be moving to as a newly separated woman, I would pay all her expenses. She accepted, and we got the one-bedroom apartment ready for moving. I thought she was adorable, and I was very grateful. Off she flew back to Utah, where’d she’d moved by then, still coupled to the chemist.

In 2011 I was single, and training for a half marathon. I don’t know who started what but by late Spring, she and I were contemplating a romance. In June, she was a firewatcher for the Forest Service at Indian Rock in eastern Oregon. By August, I was there, visiting. A more dramatic locale for a first date I can hardly imagine. I stayed a week. The lookout was way up in the air, affixed to a pointy rock much like the one from the Lion King, jutting out into the Malheur Forest. It had 50-mile views, and mountain goats for company. Because I’d been running faithfully in my training, I had no trouble with the altitude. It was a magical time.

I guess because Valerie now had a girlfriend, she wrote letters to her husband, adult children, and siblings announcing she was a) gay, b) leaving her third husband and c) moving to DC for the winter. Needless to say, minds were blown. As soon as fire watch season ended, she moved to DC. By then I’d bought a house in the Edgewood part of northeast. Over the next five years, Valerie would winter with me and then fly back to Oregon to work on the Hyde ranches, or set up a weed whacking business with her youngest granddaughter.

My kids moved back and forth between their parents’ houses, and grew up beautifully, if I may say so. Their dad, Brian, began a relationship with a funny, talented, cheerful and 100% heterosexual woman who lived in the bungalow across the alley from our old house. We six would celebrate Christmas morning together, and go to school events as well. I was active at the church I’d started attending in high school, and Brian worked there for years as Parish Administrator.

Over the course of our relationship, Valerie and I talked about various scenarios. It was clear early on that having her move to DC permanently (including the sauna-like summers) was not going to work for several immutable reasons. One was the heat: Valerie’s multiple sclerosis is not a huge variable in her life most of the time, but when it’s very hot, she decompensates, and becomes a stuttering, lurching mess. Plus, all of her family is in Oregon. I don’t have much family: there’s my beloved sister, who lives in Philadelphia, and her amazing sons, who are wandering young people, just like mine are. I have lovely cousins who are all west of the Mississippi, so I’d be closer to them if I moved west. Valerie has children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces and nephews in Oregon and northern California. Lastly, although officially retired and receiving social security, Val has several jobs she can do part time in Eastern Oregon that don’t exist in the urban context. There is little demand inside the Beltway for tending cows, irrigating, and general fence maintenance.

When I began accepting that the best thing was to move west, I knew I’d wait until the kids were out of the house. At one point I told her, you know, Valerie, if I’m pulling up all my roots and moving where I know no one besides you, I want a ring on my finger. She considered my depth of feeling and was respectful. She didn’t say no way. She didn’t propose either.

When I’d visit her for 10 days each summer, we’d travel around the state. We considered Ashland OR as a possible place to settle as a couple. She’d lived there when she was a student at Southern Oregon University, taking care of three kids and her grandmother as her husband also studied. It’s a bit of a resort town, known for its theater. It has an Episcopal parish we visited, and a dear friend of Valerie’s who’s a professor. We decided against it because it’s really too hot in the summer. And pricey.

Our next choice was Eugene. It’s a progressive college town, and we already knew 3 people: a former coworker of mine, and Valerie’s first husband and HIS husband. We settled on that place, despite my concern that it is so very white. The entire state is so very white.

In the last couple of years I lived in DC, I felt myself slowly withdrawing. I kept in touch with my good friends, but I no longer pursued people I thought would make good future friends: I’m leaving soon, I thought. I need to prioritize. My work as a hospice social worker was more stressful than I thought it would be and not because my clients were dying at a fast rate. It was the Medicare-induced stressors around compliance with a thousand regulations, and productivity pressures.

At church, I agreed to be on the search committee for a new Senior Priest, and proceeded to pour heart and soul into a very time consuming and conflict-ridden process. My faith community of 40 years got the last bit of oooomph I had left, and once the process was finished and the priest chosen, I was kind of done. I never thought I’d feel that way about that place. And I probably would still be there, enjoying the fabulous liturgy, the kind people, and the new directions I know he is steering it toward. But knowing I was moving west ‘soon’, I could let go of being a part of those adventures.

My children’s father made it easier to contemplate leaving the city of our children’s birth when he decamped for Tucson Arizona in April of 2017 with his long-time girlfriend. He’s originally from California, and Jenny’s folks and sister live in Tucson. They sold their homes in Brookland DC and bought a much bigger home outright.

Jonah was ensconced in Brooklyn, and making a living as a music video director. Clara was a rising senior at Oberlin, and not at all sure where she’d be after graduating in 2017. So all it took was a particularly terrible staff meeting at Hospice one day in July 2016, and I was ready. I started looking for work in Oregon as a social worker. I got all the paper work together to get licensed there. I found a job, interviewed over Skype, and accepted the position as a care manager in Eugene. Within 2 weeks, I’d resigned at hospice, lined up a mover for mid August, and started packing. In early August, my new job evaporated: they said they couldn’t wait so long for me to get there. Valerie told me, come out anyway, we’ll stay in Paisley, and figure something out. And so I did.

Looking back, I don’t know how we considered any place besides than Paisley. For one thing, living in the home that Valerie and her son rehabilitated means rent free living for me. I didn’t realize that being a licensed social worker made me such a hot commodity in a county that is so rural, it’s called ‘frontier’ in the public health nomenclature. My being queer doesn’t seem to matter, thanks to the Eastern Oregon-born status of the well-respected Valerie, and the fact that Hope was right: no one really cares.

We probably won’t marry, although I have fantasies about a really fun wedding. Maybe someday, if, and I mean if, I feel as though there is a community, IN Paisley, that would commit to our well-being as a couple. She’s had 3 marriages to my one: getting married to each other is unnecessary. Meanwhile, I’ve come to see how loyal Valerie is, and how much she loves me. I thought maybe she’d regret my having moved into her world, bugging her 12 months out of the year instead of 6 or 7. But she has lots of places to go while I work, lots of family members to help paint a house or construct a room, and dear friends to ranch for when needed. I spent this past summer driving to Fort Klamath, Beatty, Brothers and Chiloquin. We took the train to visit her brother and sister in law in Lotus, California. If Valerie needs a break from me, there’s lots of opportunities. And I can binge watch Netflix without her ever-so-mild disapproval.

It’s all worked out remarkably well.

I moved to Paisley for Valerie, and a slower, kinder, quieter life. It was a good decision. Even though I still miss Black people, Jews, Ethiopian food, free museums, gingko trees in the fall, and liturgy with an enthusiastic thurifer…

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ecotone99 · 5 years

Text

[MF] Diary of Geff

CAMP REPORT- ITEM 562

This is the year 498 [(ref) Galaxy: Mound, Star: Ant, Planet: Hole, Satellite: Egg]. Head of excavation: Sabrina Moonwalker. This is an ‘early report’, to be shared among peers in order to avoid delay till the publication of final compilation of information and thus, the information contained about the item can change in the final publication. I have checked, read and referenced this report written by my trainee (11QU56) for the above mentioned specimen. I hereby provide my clearance for the report to be published Signature: __SABRINA_____ Status: approved

As usual, it’s a cold and dusty day on Mars. This piece concerns the archaeological finding from the colony in south-west. The contents reported below have not been found exactly in the colony rather about 20 kms North of the first site. A large cylinder has been unearthed which contains this item and a few antics, probably from the same time-frame in which this item was produced. Nevertheless we will do dating of all of them and run the forensics to be sure because the container was not found in a sealed condition. ITEM-562 is a script, it has been reproduced below and is crucial because it throws light on the conditions of the colony in the early era. This is believed to be one of the very few complete texts we have been able to obtain.

below is the content recovered from script

12 December 2137

Dear Reader,

It is chilly, dry and dark outside. I am sitting at my table in the office. This cute table-lamp, the only illumination source in my vicinity, gifted by Carlij, gives me company in these late hours. A photo of my family from one of their picnics sits in a frame on my table although I am not in that photo. I think the presence of my glass and steel clad body would have only made it look like a hostage situation. Although I would have looked like the knight in shining armor. Also, I am pretty sure that if Gina shows such a picture to her friends, the boys would keep a distance from her. This chair is really uncomfortable though. I have to keep shifting my posture, no surprises that the person before me resigned from the job. Moving on to what this is:

This is Geff [Exl:311207IDA#2M]. As I write this, I am about to leave for an expedition in deep space and thus, as a mark of tradition I am leaving this letter behind which might be my final word to this world. If my death is confirmed while my family lives then Jenny you are probably reading this with Carlij and Gina, in which case I want you to know that I am sorry I failed to keep my promise and if you aren’t one of these then I want you to know that Jenny is my wife and Carlij and Gina our children. Sometimes I am afraid and fear grips my heart now and then when I think as a realist. Thus, I will write believing that neither of you three have to read this letter.

I do not know in which year you are reading this, but in this year we still follow the calendar from Earth. My code states the nature of my job, date of birth (31-12-2107), genetic origin, family history and biological sex (M). I guess if the archives have survived when you are reading this, you will eventually find every trivia or data about me from my number.

My parents came to this colony soon after they got married at earth which makes me a second generation immigrant (#2). My father was a systems engineer for cyborg research and development while my mother an “extraterrestrial agriculture specialist”. When I decided to be a cyborg soldier, I was the odd one out in my family. Even my grandfather who I never got to see was a computer scientist on earth. I only heard about him from my father. I was born and raised in this colony. We all have registration ids, we live by the rules, life is tough but the sole aim is to survive and expand the humanity’s purpose. We are taught right from the beginning that there is no ‘I’, it is just ‘We’. Immigrants like my parents were taken in on the basis of decisions made through algorithms. Our mating partners are decided based on our genetic data (IDA), job, ethnicity, physiological parameters, etc. using algorithms. This is how I met Jenny, we didn’t really get to know each other rather we were chosen by the system once we expressed our interest in making a family. My previous job kept me out most of the times so we never grew too close. I was a soldier but right now I am a mercenary for a company (Exl) after my retirement so I take up security contracts. Two years before, I had thought that my retirement would give me more time to spend with my family, we would grow close, and I would feel a little more at peace but guess I was wrong. You might be intrigued about why there was ever a need for an army on Mars. You see, I believe, humans may wander anywhere but there is no escape from self. This age is of data and cybernetics. Cybernetics has given the humans eternal life. When the first settlers came, they established giant data centers, this was supposed to be the perfect world, a stepping stone for humanity to expand and claim the cosmos. Everybody was chipped in the neck, their identities were just a set of characters, and they lived like ants working together for a bigger cause. Things went well initially but as I said there is no escape from self, soon, a group of people rebelled who didn’t want to obey these algorithms made by a few men. They want to seize control, and so they devised what we now know as ‘soul-virus’. This malware fiddles with the chip and causes it to blur the identity of the infected person by disrupting neural pathways. Existential dread becomes too harsh to bear for a mind without an identity. These people become hungry to truly discover who they are and the virus is designed to prevent it from happening. They bite the healthy individuals. They bite and tear out their chips from the neck, killing them and use its data to feed into their own system. The virus takes some parts of the victims’ identity and fills the puzzle, giving the infected person a sense that his or her identity is now a step closer to be completed. This increases their thirst for more data and they keep harvesting more and more data. It is all about the illusion that virus is creating for the mind. With mind hacked, their reflexes are improved. The extra and quick surges of electricity needed to make this happen come from the chip but it deteriorates their bodies so they keep replacing those parts with machines. The ones who were first infected in labs were modified heavily to become more machine than human through cybernetics. These ones are called the first borns and are the most powerful and hardest to kill. The modus operandi resembles to what my father read in his childhood comics as ‘Vampires’. We call them ‘Vampires’ only even though nobody knows if the original blood-suckers ever existed or not. As the vampires grew and spread chaos through the colony, an army was raised to hunt them. I joined this army but took an early retirement even though colony lives under the fear of these devils, to take care of my family. Recently, stronger vamps have come up. They have modified canines which can hack into the victims chip, infecting them with virus while retrieving their data without killing the victim. The only way to kill them is to remove their heads or to destroy the chips. I have killed many vamps in my career but it seems there is an endless evil and they just keep increasing. This war seems like a lost cause to some but we fight nonetheless.

The ‘soul-virus’ creation brought some positive things though, it highlighted the need for humans to have some sense of self-identity too instead of just a collective identity. So, the algorithms were made less constrained following its creation like we were allowed to have names again instead of registration IDs. We could choose our careers more freely than before. There have been a few publications/theories now which treat ‘soul-virus’ in this light. At this time, the horns of two powers are crossed, the outcome of this war is held in the folds of future. Both fighting to take control and be the leaders in their own way. If one truly sees, it is just lust for power. Whoever wins, the cake will be shared by a few only.

Leaving that, how ironic that I gave up my job for my family but this new job is taking me away from them. This contract pays me really well, the insurance on me is enough to keep my family comfortable and safe even if I don’t return so I took it. I guess, this is the least and most genuine thing I can do for them. Jenny was against this. I tried to convince her that if I return we will have so much money that we need not do anything for the rest of our lives but she thinks this is just my attempt to get away from this sick world. I tried to reason with Jenny but she says that if I am so sure of my return then why I can’t take them along. I have to laugh it off. She says that this attempt of mine, of trading myself for the huge money is a deplorable attempt to feel less guilty about my escapism.

She accuses me of being selfish and of disrespecting the society by breaking away from the social fabric of family. She says that in her heart she knows that I will not return and that I am a coward for leaving her alone in this world with Carlij and Gina.

She reminds me about their well-being but I believe Carlij and Gina will get by fine even without me in this colony, there are structures in place to guard them given we have money to access them. This tells us how shackles have a few advantages if you see, a slave need only fear his or her master. The master protects it from everything else once it accepts a life of servitude.

In the last few days, she has even tried to talk to my parents so that they can convince me otherwise but I guess it was a poor attempt because I stopped listening to them the day I decided to become a soldier instead of taking up a job considered as elite and civilized in their social circle. Jenny’s accusations of escapism do not hold water because there is no escape from self, all I can escape from are the artificial shackles of this society. Last night she broke down and started to blame herself for being unable to stop me from going. I told her how she couldn’t be farther from truth. I have known her as a good person, she is not the one to blame. I know it will be a tough time for Carlij and Gina, I will miss them too. As for about what I think about this expedition. I am doing this because I have seen the illusive nature of life in these shackles. I haven’t felt as being a part of the colony in a long time but that is just me I guess but then I hope to find some answers. I think sometimes that the only answer is that we all were here for eternity and we all will be here in this universe for eternity. We are all made from the same matter that has always existed here. We are the universe and at the same time a part of it, just a few atoms dancing around for who knows what, who knows till when. I think we are not even meant to know and I accept it as it is. I am skeptic about those who say that universe speaks to them, I think it is just their mind and inflated ego talking. Universe is silent, when we are it and it is we, why will it talk to self and that too with such an insignificant self. Do we ever talk to our mitochondria? Anyways, I will leave in two days. It is already dawn. I should probably just go to my quarter and spend these last hours with them and be prepared to leave what could be my last impression on this colony. -Geff

script ends

Comments: While the information obtained about the creation of ‘soul-virus’ is crucial. We are hopeful that this has brought us a step-closer to finding its cure. Some analysts are arguing that the mindset of the subject referred here as Geff, is reflective of symptoms of this virus. Therefore, it is possible that some dormant strain of this virus had infiltrated the main chip manufacturing facility of the colony and several people like Geff grew with it in their system. These walking time-bombs, waiting to go haywire and nearly impossible to detect could have been the precursors to events that finally lead to instability in the colony and thus, annihilation of it. This discovery lays further emphasis on the need to discover the destroyed data center and chip manufacturing facility. -Trainee 11QU56

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