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bubonickitten · 4 years

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Summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr

Chapter 13 full text & content warnings below the cut.

CWs for Chapter 13: all the usual Buried-related warnings apply (claustrophobia, inability to breathe, etc.); panic/anxiety symptoms; just a smidgen of internalized aphobia; brief mention of past passive suicidal ideation; internalized victim blaming; canon-typical trauma (including discussion of victims targeted by the Fears as children).SPOILERS through S5.

Chapter 13: Center

The darkness and overwhelming pressure of the Buried make it nigh impossible to orient oneself. The only conceivable directions are forward, down, into, deeper. Jon’s only choice, when he has one at all, is to keep moving – and so he does, digging and clawing his way through the muck, making a transient pathway for himself as best he can.

“Daisy?” It comes out as a rasp. He tries to swallow, but succeeds only in upsetting his already-sore throat. It feels as though the dirt and debris have taken up permanent residence there, clogging his airway just enough to leave him chronically short of breath without cutting off his oxygen supply entirely. “Daisy, can you reach me?”

“Jon,” comes the weak reply, “I’m – I don’t know where – I c-can’t – can’t see –”

“I hear you,” Jon says. “I’m here, I’m coming to you. Just – keep talking, and –”

As he talks, he inhales a cloud of dust, dissolving into wracking coughs.

“Jon? Jon, are you still there?” For a long moment, Jon cannot speak. Daisy’s next words are steeped in panic. “Where are you? I can’t… p-please be there, please –”

“I’m still here,” Jon forces out hoarsely, stretching his arm forward as far as it will go. “I’m not going anywhere. Follow my voice, I – I think I’m almost –”

Chill fingertips brush against his, and he throws his weight forward as much as possible. He hooks her fingers in his and pulls, and with a burst of energy he manages to clasp her clammy hand in his.

“There you are,” he says, smiling weakly.

“You’re real,” Daisy says in disbelief, crushing his hand in a bruising grip. “You’re real.”

“I am.” He intertwines their fingers, as grateful as she is for a hand to hold. “I’m here, Daisy.”

“Daisy,” she says dreamily. “Yeah. Daisy. That’s me.” A pause. “Just – just me.”

Jon closes his eyes with a relieved sigh. There are no signs that the Hunt still has its claws in her. He had no reason to think that reaching her a couple weeks earlier than before would change anything, but there was still that nagging doubt.

“J-just me,” she says again, but this time there’s a waver in her voice. “Just – alone –”

“No,” Jon says hurriedly, squeezing her hand several times in quick succession, “not – not alone. Not anymore.”

“Yeah.” She grasps his hand even more tightly, as if to reassure herself.

“I’m here.”

“Yeah,” she says again, and this time it sounds like she’s starting to believe it.

“How – how are you?” Jon cringes. It’s as stupid a question now as it was the last time. Moreso, seeing as he’s already heard the answer. “S-sorry. That’s – probably obvious.”

Daisy answers anyway, likely glad of the chance to talk to someone else after so long in isolation.

“I – I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t…” She trails off, hesitating. “But it’s… it’s quiet here? I can’t…”

She seems to be struggling to find the words.

“You can’t feel the blood,” he supplies.

“Y-yeah. How did you…”

“I can’t feel the Eye, either. It’s… it’s just me. All me.”

“Where are we?”

“In the Coffin. The Buried. It’s… the powers don’t have much sway within one another’s domains. The Hunt, the Eye – they can’t reach us here.”

“The Hunt,” she echoes.

“Yes. You’re a Hunter.”

“I… I guess I was. But – not here.”

No, not here. But once they leave here…

Stop, he tells himself. One thing at a time. Escape the Buried, then worry about the Hunt.

“Come on.” He tugs on her hand. “Let’s get you out of here.”

“Can’t – can’t move, and – and even if I could, there’s no way out –”

“No, I – I can get us out. I have a plan.”

“Is this like all your other plans?”

Jon chuckles, but it comes out as a wheeze.

“Yes and no. But – but don’t worry, it’s – I can do this. I just – need to – to find it.”

But when he closes his eyes and concentrates, there’s… nothing there.

“Come on,” he says under his breath, keeping his voice deliberately calm. “Come on, where are you?”

There’s nothing there. Why is there nothing there?

“Just need to… need to focus. Just – focus, think of…”

Think of Martin. Martin is your anchor. Clever, brave, loyal, compassionate Martin.

He was kind to you even when you didn’t deserve it; he cared for you even though you did everything you could to push him away. He reached out to you through the Lonely when you were at your most monstrous to remind you of the humanity you’d thought you lost. He made you want to do better, to be the person that he saw when he looked at you.

You followed him into the Lonely because you love him and because he deserved to know it. You need to return to him now, because this version of him doesn’t yet know that he is loved. If you don’t get back to him, if you don’t reach out to him – he’ll get lost, and he –

Jon’s breath hitches. The fear is starting to move in as inexorably as the earth surrounding them, settling cold and heavy in his gut.

Stop that, he tells himself. Just think about Martin, not the worst case scenario.

Everyone underestimates him, because he spent his entire life striving for the perfect balance between useful and unobtrusive. But he’s not helpless; he’s not a pushover. He took master manipulator Jonah Magnus by surprise; he fooled Peter Lukas for months. Sometimes, you think that Martin Blackwood could outmaneuver the Web if he cared to. If anyone could, it would be him. You don’t think you’ll ever fully forgive yourself for taking so long to notice.

No, Jon tells himself once more, recognizing the warning signs of a guilt spiral. That won’t help. Redirect.

In those early days after the ritual, you briefly defaulted to your old habits, withdrawing and shutting him out. He stood up to your brooding, gave your self-loathing no refuge in which to thrive, because he saw right through your sharp tongue to the vulnerable parts of you that it was meant to hide.

He is intuitive, stubborn, and patient in the best of ways.

You have a tendency to stare. You always have; you typically don’t notice you’re doing it. After you became the Archivist, it went from being an awkward habit to evidence of your inhumanity: all eyes, always watching, always demanding more, more, more until every secret is exposed and any semblance of privacy has been demolished.

But it was never just the Eye urging you to record things. You know from experience that nothing lasts forever, that anyone and anything can disappear without a moment’s notice – sometimes leaving no trace, no memory that they ever existed. It only makes sense that you would develop a compulsion to document everything for posterity. The tape recorders were only the most recent manifestation of that preexisting obsession. Before that, you made lists, you took pictures, you wrote on your hands – and, of course, you stared.

During your first few days together at the safehouse, Martin called attention to the staring. You were mortified, launched into a rambling apology – but he shut it down, reassured you that he was only teasing, that he didn’t mind it, that it was… endearing, in a way. And once you were given permission, you began to consciously catalog every little detail.

He has thirty-six freckles on his face, seventeen on his hands, and constellations of them besides: on his back, on his shoulders, on his arms, on his belly. He blushes easily, and you love it, because you’ve never been good at reading body language, and you can always use a hint. His hair is soft, and the way he leans into it when you run your fingers through it – you think he would purr if he could. You were hesitant, at first, to spend too long looking at his eyes – but unlike most people, he showed no signs that he found eye contact with you unsettling.

You gave him permission to stare, too. And he did. He never shied away from your scars. He liked looking at you – and you knew he was genuine when he said so, even though you didn’t understand it.

Martin is self-conscious about his size, painfully aware of how others see him. He rarely stands to his full height, tending to curl his shoulders in, maintain a curve to his spine, keep his arms pulled tight to his body: anything to avoid towering over others, anything to take up as little space as possible. He saw his stretch marks as flaws to be tolerated; spent most of his life assuming that his weight and soft edges made him unattractive.

There are so many things he hates about himself. It broke your heart a little, to see how difficult it was for him to believe that you like looking at him, that your boundaries regarding physical intimacy weren’t a comment on his desirability. (Though he never voiced that last concern, never wanted his own insecurities to make you feel self-conscious about that part of you. Never made you feel guilty or lacking or… or broken.)

You regularly stole his jumpers; the first time you did it, he went speechless and flustered at the casual domesticity of it all. You took turns ambushing one another with affirmations and small acts of affection like that. It became something of a challenge, a game: springing a pet name on one another here, placing a soft kiss on a hand there, delighting in the reactions it got. It’s strange how easily you settled into that routine, how natural it felt to let down your guard.

At night, he would curl around you like he belonged there, like there was no place he’d rather be – and it made you feel like you belong, too. The first time he held you in his arms, you realized that you’d never truly known what it was to feel safe until that moment – and isn’t that its own special kind of vulnerability, isn’t it such a cliché? You still had nightmares, still jolted awake several times throughout the night frantic and disoriented – as did he – but it felt so much more endurable with someone to coax you back to reality.

When you first led him out of the Lonely, it was still clinging to him. He couldn’t understand what you saw in him, any more than you could understand what he saw in you. You made it your mission to make him understand. And eventually, he did. It wasn’t the first time you told him you loved him, but one morning when you said it, he looked at you and his lips parted ever so slightly, and you could practically see the epiphany dawn in his eyes, and he whispered that he believed you.

You still haven’t found a word that accurately describes what you felt then. You kissed him, and hoped that it would say what words could not.

You never gave up on each other, even when you’d given up on your own selves. He never stopped caring for you, even when you were at your most fearsome and fearful. Despite everything, you communicated, you compromised, you comforted one another. You never stopped loving one another.

You lost him once before. You cannot lose him again. You need to find him. Why – why can’t you find him? Why can’t you feel him?

Jon feels his breath quickening, terror needling at the edges of his mind. He jumps slightly when Daisy speaks.

“Jon?”

“It’s – it’s okay,” he says, his voice shaky. “I’ve – I’ve done this once before. I can do this.”

There’s no rule saying he can only have one anchor, right?

He thinks of Georgie.

She took you in when you had nowhere else to go, even though you hadn’t spoken in years, even though you hadn’t parted on the best of terms. Staying with her felt more like home than you’d experienced in… you don’t know how long. It made you realize how much you missed her – her humor, her ingenuity, her confidence, her tenacity, her generosity, and, yes, even her perceptiveness, daunting though it may be at times. She speaks her mind and you can take her at her word. You can appreciate that, as someone who has always had trouble parsing the implicit and unspoken aspects of social life.

You trust her judgment, and she believes in you, and it makes you want to believe in yourself. You want to be there for her in the same way that she’s chosen to be there for you.

He thinks of Melanie.

You disliked one another at first meeting, even though – or perhaps because – you have so much in common. Over the years, you saw more sides to her. She’s brave and resolute, not just when it comes to fighting back, but when it comes to making the conscious decision to heal. She’s capable of kindness to those who are receptive to it. You’ve seen how she is with Georgie, how her hard edges relax, how her devotion is as fierce as her anger can be – perhaps moreso.

You know that she never deserved to suffer like she has. You know she deserves a happy ending. You want to try to reconcile with her. In your future, she went so far as to suggest that you could be friends. You think you would like that.

He thinks of Basira.

She’s had no one but herself to rely on for months. She feels trapped and alone; she hasn’t had a moment to grieve; she’s forced herself to compartmentalize and detach because if she breaks down, she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to put herself back together again. She’s told herself that her own comfort and wellbeing don’t matter. She has a job to do and she’s the only one left who is willing and able to do it. The only solid thing left in her life, the only thing giving her purpose is the mission. The mission is her anchor, because she’s lost everything else.

When she found out that Daisy was alive, she was almost angry with you for making her dare to hope. You promised that you would bring Daisy home to her, and you mean to keep that promise.

And Jon has a job to do, too, doesn’t he?

You need to stop Jonah Magnus, you need to –

His stomach clenches as the dread grips him.

Okay, no. Don’t – don’t think of Jonah. Not helpful, not helpful, not –

He reaches further. He tries to think of Naomi, of the Admiral, of –

The faraway rumbling starts up again.

“Jon,” Daisy says again, urgently, perched on the edge of panic right along with him.

This is forever deep below creation, some self-sabotaging part of his brain reminds him. Where the weight of existence bears down. This is the Buried, and we are alive. There isn’t even an up –

“I just – I just – I just need to calm down,” he stammers. He can feel his pulse beating in his throat; would be hyperventilating if he could breathe at all. “I – I can’t think straight, and I just need to…”

He thinks back to the physical details of the world just outside the Coffin.

The arrangement of the tapes –

…CASE #0160919 sits 34.2 centimeters west of the Coffin, turned at a 45-degree angle. Approximately 20.6 centimeters south-southwest is CASE #0172904; the casing of its recorder is slightly cracked at the lower left corner. 2.4 centimeters to its right is CASE #0171302; the rewind button on the recorder housing it tends to stick…

– on the floor of his office –

…where fingernail scratches are still visible in the northwest corner of the room, left there by Enrique MacMillan on 4 November, 2003, after he gave his statement regarding his encounter with a Buried-touched Leitner…

– and the tape he left on his desk –

…on top of a softcover Moleskine notebook – black, 12.7 by 21 centimeters, ruled – belonging to Martin Blackwood; the Archivist knows every word written thus far on the 68 used out of 192 total pages within…

– and on that tape are pleas that went unanswered for far too long, laced with desperation and grief and rapidly dwindling hope –

…We really need you, Jon. We – I need you …

– but Jon cannot hear it anymore.

His mind wanders to the single folded sheet of paper tucked away in the top drawer of his desk. A second message for Martin, to be read only in the event that Jon doesn’t return. A transcript, to be precise.

On their way to the Panopticon, they had been separated when they traversed the Lonely’s domain. Jon had searched frantically, resisting the urge to simply Know because he had promised. As much as he wanted to, he didn’t feel right forcing Martin to See him the way he did before. It was Martin’s domain, and he had the right to decide for himself whether to leave it behind. Even if Jon had wanted to, though, he suspected that he wouldn’t have been able to actually find Martin this time unless he wanted to be found. And in the end, he did.

Just before Jon found him, he managed to catch the tail end of Martin’s statement. Naturally, the Archive memorized every word and dutifully filed it away without any conscious effort or consent on Jon’s part.

…I am Martin Blackwood, and I am not Lonely anymore; I am not Lonely anymore. I want to have friends. I – no, I have friends. I’m in love. I am in love, and I will not forget that; I will not forget…

Before he entered the Coffin, Jon copied it down and left it behind. Just in case. Just in case something goes wrong. If he goes missing in action for too long, he trusts that eventually someone will clear out his desk, find it, and hopefully pass it along to its intended recipient.

It was a last-ditch effort to impart the truth: that a future exists wherein Martin isn’t Lonely; that he can be and is and deserves to be cared for; that it isn’t just an unattainable fantasy. And, most importantly, Jon is not the only one who can provide that, nor is Jon alone enough to fulfill that need. In the end, Martin chose to turn his back on the Lonely. He can do it again.

There’s every chance that it was a meaningless gesture, but Jon doesn’t think he could live with himself if he didn’t at least try – and if he does get lost down here, he’ll be forced to live with himself for as long as the Buried itself exists.

But Jon doesn’t want to leave Martin alone with that inexplicable scrap of statement, hoping that it’s enough to get the point across. Jon has to get home. He has to; there’s no other choice –

“Jon?” Daisy says again. “You sound like you’re… what – what’s wrong?”

“Sorry, I’m – I’m just… I can’t – I can’t feel my anchor.”

“Anchor?”

“Y-yeah. Something to ground me, help me feel the way out. It’s – there’s a void where it should be, and…” His short exhale shudders on the way out. “I think – I think we might be here for awhile longer.”

“N-not alone, though,” Daisy says, almost questioningly.

“No. No, not alone. And – and I can still get us out, I think,” he adds hurriedly. “I just – I need to… I need to come down from the panic, and it’s hard to do that when I can’t – I can’t breathe –“

His breath catches and he closes his eyes. Stop, he tells himself, you’re – you’re spiraling, talking yourself into a panic. Just… listen – listen to the quiet.

“Jon?”

“Still – still here,” he says, squeezing her hand again. “I’m not going anywhere without you, I promise.”

“Do you – if you need a break from – from whatever you’re doing…” She falters for a moment before blurting out: “C-can we… can we talk? I haven’t – I just want someone to hear me.”

“Of course. I’m listening.” When Daisy doesn’t reply, he offers a gentle prompting. “Daisy?”

“I’m – it’s difficult. I can’t find the words.”

“Would it help if I… ask?” The last time, it did help her get her thoughts out.

“Y-yeah,” she says with only a slight delay. “Do your… thing.”

“Right,” he says. For a moment, he worries that he’ll have difficulty concentrating long enough to compel an answer, but his mind clears almost as soon as he opens his mouth. Of course. “How are you feeling?”

The question buzzes like static on his tongue on its way out.

“S-scared. I – I’m – I’m s-scared…”

Daisy’s words do not deviate from the last time he was here, but he does not interrupt her as she speaks. He latches onto her voice, focuses all of his attention on her story, and tries to ground himself in the present.

“Y-you know what I thought, when I woke up here? I thought this was hell. I – I was dead, and I was in hell. And I - I knew I deserved it.” Daisy stifles a sob as she nears the end of her statement. “I don’t want t-to b-be a s-sadistic predator again. I – I don’t want to hobble around like some – pathetic wounded prey here. I don’t know which would be worse. But I’m scared now – that I won’t ever get the choice.”

One thing I’ve learned, Daisy, is that we all get a choice, he told her last time. Even if it doesn’t feel like one.

Now, though, he’s not so sure. Or, rather, now he thinks it isn’t quite that simple.

“It’s… complicated,” Jon starts slowly. “Choice, I mean. We all have choices, but – but when all the alternatives are unendurable, or impossible to achieve, or – or even conceptualize, then… well, it’s not a fair choice, is it? Sometimes because that’s just – how it is, and sometimes by design. There – there are people, and – and things out there that will abuse their power to deceive you, keep you ignorant about things that would affect your decisions. Or – or convince you that you have no options, no autonomy – or even that you can’t trust your own judgment, your own senses. Some choices can hardly be called choices at all.”

He begins to grind his teeth as he considers his next words, but stops as soon as he feels the grit between his molars when he bites down. There are a lot of things to hate about the Buried, but its refusal to allow him to engage in any of his usual nervous habits definitely adds insult to injury.

“You say you deserve to be here, but – do you think you deserved to be marked by the Hunt in the first place? Because one thing I’ve learned is… most people who become Avatars – we don't necessarily do anything to deserve the attention of the things that take notice of us. To be put in these positions, to be given impossible choices about – about things we have no right to decide in the first place.”

“What do you mean?”

“It seems that a common thread is… well, um, I think Tim hit the nail on the head, actually? In his testament before the Unknowing, he – he said, ‘The only thing you need to have your life destroyed by this stuff is just bad luck. Talk to the wrong person, take the wrong train, open the wrong door, and that’s it.’”

“You remember that verbatim?”

“It’s – it’s an Archivist thing.” Well, technically. Jon can’t access the Archive right now, but some statements have looped so many times in his head that he has every word memorized by now. “But the point is that our transgressions, they… the punishment often doesn’t seem to fit the crime.”

Daisy is quiet, so Jon continues.

“Uh, Jane Prentiss, for instance – stumbled upon a wasps’ nest in her attic, and then the Corruption infested her. In her original statement, she was afraid of what was happening to her, she was asking for help, but it… it was slowly hollowing her out. Appealed to her insecurities, whispered to her that it was the only thing that could love her, that wouldn’t abandon her. Maybe eventually she embraced it on her own, but at that point, how much of her was left to make that choice?

“And – and Michael Crew. He was struck by lightning when he was eight. The Spiral never stopped stalking him after that. He spent his childhood in fear, obsessively sought out information about – lightning, and fractals, because understanding it felt like the only way to resist a thing that feeds on uncertainty.”

Jon can relate to that, can’t he? He was always curious, but his desire to know and understand things became more obsessive after he encountered his first monster – as if he could solve any problem if only he learned enough about it. But it was never enough, and that impulse never actually kept him safe. It only offered him a flimsy illusion of control, which was something he desperately needed after the Web showed him what it was like to have none. Still, an ineffective coping mechanism was better than not coping at all – or so he told himself then.

“When Mike realized that there was no escape from the supernatural once he’d been marked by it,” Jon continues, “he decided that the next best thing was choosing which Fear to submit to – to serve. Obsessively sought out Leitners until he found the Vast, and… it offered him safety. The most basic of human needs, something he hadn’t known since he was a child. The things he did to feed his patron were – indefensible, but I can’t help thinking about the person he might have been, if the Spiral hadn’t come into his life. He… he was only eight. How is a child supposed to process something that even an adult would have trouble coping with? I’m sure many children don’t even physically survive an encounter with one of the Fears, but even those that do… they never actually escape, do they?”

Daisy makes an indistinct little noise in her throat. Jon can’t Know for certain, but he imagines she’s thinking of her own first encounter with the Hunt. When enough time has passed that she doesn’t seem ready to say as much, Jon continues.

“And there’s – there’s Oliver Banks, he’s an Avatar of the End. He just started having dreams one day, became a death prophet. As far as I can tell, nothing provoked it. It just… happened. And early on, he tried to use that ability to help people, but… the powers granted us as Avatars, they aren’t for helping or saving anyone. When you realize that, after a long string of failures, you start to become… despondent – numb, even. Maybe some misstep along the way piqued the End’s interest in him, or maybe it was completely arbitrary. I don’t know. I don’t know that Oliver does, either.”

It’s difficult to speak at length here, and Jon’s speech is punctuated by frequent gasps and stops and starts, but he plows ahead. Granted, he’s always had a tendency toward intense, rapidfire speech whenever he gets invested in a topic of interest, but it’s also that he needs to cover as much ground as he can as quickly as possible. There’s no telling when the Buried will constrict again. Sometimes there are long intervals of relative peace; other times, the bouts of crushing pressure come one after the other in a barrage. The inconsistency makes the dread all the more potent: you can never predict when the walls will close in.

“And Helen,” he says, moving right along, “before she became the Distortion, she opened a door. That’s all. Most people would have probably done the same. A door that wasn’t there before, that can’t be there – of course the human mind wants to test its perceptions, make sense of the discrepancy. Which is exactly what the Distortion preys on. It let her escape its corridors, because it would make the fear that much more potent when it came for her again, when she realized that it had never actually let her go, that there was never any way to escape. It was… it was just playing with its food.”

Like with Benjamin Hatendi, Jon thinks. ‘The blanket never did anything.’

The Fears are never merciful. For an earthly predatory animal, the pain and fear of the prey are only relevant insofar as their utility in capturing it. Granted, the majority of animals may have no qualms about eating their prey alive so long as it’s incapacitated, no concept of putting their food out of its misery – but still, sustenance isn’t derived from the experience of the prey, only from its organic matter.

For the Powers, though… terror is the food source. If anything, the misery is deliberately drawn out. The suffering is primary to the meal.

“I still don’t know how much of Helen Richardson was left by the time she embraced her new existence and began feeding” – by the time she chose to stop feeling guilty, Jon notes privately – “but she never asked to be in that position to begin with. She just… opened a door.

“And you… all you did was trespass on a childhood dare, right? You and Calvin Benchley. I did hear the tape – of your interrogation with Elias. Maybe the Hunt chose the both of you, was deliberately waiting for you there. Or maybe you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Either way, you… you did something that most children do at one point or another, exploring out bounds – I did plenty of that myself. And – and you’d done the same thing many times in the past, there was no reason to think that things would go any differently. But that time, that time you stumbled into something that most children – most people never do.”

Jon debates whether or not to share his own initiation into this world. He never told Daisy about it last time, but he knows – and Knows – about her childhood encounter. It seems only fair to include his own.

“Actually, I… I had a similar experience, when I was eight,” he admits, pushing through his habitual reservations. “Unlike Michael Crew, though, I was an active participant in my own fate. There’s no dodging a lightning strike, but me – I… I opened a book I shouldn’t have, knocked on a door I shouldn’t have. I could’ve just… not.”

“That’s a funny double standard,” Daisy says flatly.

“P-pardon?”

“Couldn’t you just as easily say that Crew could have chosen to not stand outside during a lightning storm?”

“He – he actually wanted to go inside, but his friend pressured him to keep playing,” Jon says, almost defensively. “By the time they decided to go in, it was too late.”

“Like I pressured Calvin.”

“That’s –” Jon gives an agitated little exhale. “It’s still different.”

“How?”

“Did you have a bad feeling about the dare, or was it just like any other day? You had no reason to think that things would go wrong. I… I knew that book was wrong, and I opened it anyway.” Daisy scoffs. “What?”

“Has anyone ever pointed out to you that you’re capable of some truly infuriating mental gymnastics?”

Jon puffs out another exasperated breath before muttering, “Yes.”

In fact, she said almost the exact same thing to him the last time around. And Georgie – she used to say so all the time, especially when they were dating.

“You always do this,” she’d pointed out once during an argument, hands on her hips and a shrewd look in her eye. “Any time a conversation gets a little too uncomfortable for you, you just – throw your hands up, say it’s your fault and shut down, and nothing ever gets resolved. Why are you so eager to take the blame for things? Is it that it’s better than admitting there are some things you can’t control, or is it just easier than actually talking about your feelings?”

The answer was yes on both counts, and he had been angry with her for putting it into words. He’d already known on some level, but he studiously avoided that sort of introspection. Now that it had been verbalized, the knowledge would always be there, floating around in his mind – yet another thing to overanalyze, to obsess over, to ambush him in moments of doubt.

Since then he’s gotten better at communicating in healthy ways, but the self-blame thing… well, Martin still had to periodically call him out on it, right up until the end. It became a common refrain: “It’s still victim blaming even if you’re the victim, Jon.” The reminder did help – at least some of the time – but it wasn’t enough to undo a worldview that he’d spent his entire life internalizing.

“Y-yes,” he says again, less sullenly now, “I – I see your point.”

“Good. So – evil book?”

“A Leitner, yes. The Web.” Jon has no desire to go into all the gruesome details, not when he’s – when they’re both already being suffocated by fear. “And I only escaped through… I don’t know, some combination of mundane human cruelty and luck – or… or someone else’s misfortune, more like.” He gives a tired sigh. “Or it could have been deliberate interference by the Web, taking someone else in my place because it had other plans for me. I’ll never know the exact reason why. If there even is a reason.”

He pauses, expecting the Beholding’s characteristic objection to the idea that he should accept not knowing anything, before remembering with grim satisfaction that the Eye can’t reach him here. Nor can the Web, for that matter. A small mercy, but he’ll take it.

“But the experience led to an obsession with the supernatural. I suppose I thought that if – if I could just understand it, I could conquer the fear. It didn’t work, but an obsession like that – it persists regardless of whether it’s successful or productive or – or healthy. Eventually it led me to the Institute. Which led me… here, ultimately.” He bites his lower lip as he considers his next words. “I’m sure many of my choices along the way were mine alone, and – and I’m responsible for my actions regardless. But that first domino… it was just a restless child ignoring gut instinct, all because he needed to know.”

“Jon,” Daisy says, the hint of a warning growl underlying her tone.

“I – okay, yes, I know, I know. Double standards.” He takes a shallow breath before continuing. “My point is, most of us are just… unlucky isn’t the right word, but it’s as close as I can get. Sometimes the Fears seem to seek out victims who are already uniquely susceptible to them – people with phobias, or specific traumas. Other times it seems… arbitrary. And sometimes it seems like the difference between an average victim and those who eventually become Avatars is… compatibility, or – or in some cases, a sense of kinship, even.

“I’ve always been too curious for my own good, a natural fit for the Beholding. Jane talked about being seen as toxic, and it was the Corruption that found her. Annabelle Cane said she was well-versed in manipulation as a young child, the sort of gift that the Web favors. Jared Hopworth always had a sadistic streak, but the difference between him and any other bully is that he found The Boneturner's Tale. I… don’t really know what to make of Jude Perry. The way she told it, she always had the disposition for the Desolation. She would likely have been a nightmare with or without supernatural help, but there are plenty of people like that in the world. She just happened to be one of the few who caught the attention of the Lightless Flame.

“But – but I also don’t think preexisting compatibility is a requirement to be an Avatar. Some people really do just – stumble into it, probably. Grow into it, maybe, after enough exposure. Especially if the same Power keeps coming back.”

Jon can’t help thinking of the Distortion and its tendency to dog its victims for years. Helen said once that she couldn’t just force her victims into her corridors, that they had to open the door on their own. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? Marcus MacKenzie refused to open the door every single time it appeared throughout his childhood and young adulthood. It started to take increasingly drastic measures: disguising itself as other things, at one point even opening up in the ground in front of him, hoping he wouldn’t notice until he already stepped over the ledge and gravity did its work. When that didn’t work, it took his father. And then, even after evading it for decades, Helen eventually took Marcus anyway. Choice didn’t come into it. It didn't matter how many times he walked away – it followed him wherever he went.

“Either way,” Jon continues, “whether it’s part of some grand plan or just happenstance, the Avatars… we catch the attention of something predatory, and it sinks its hooks into the vulnerabilities it finds. There are plenty of other people in the world who may have the same… flaws, or inclinations, or experiences, but most are lucky enough not to be drawn into this world. I’m not sure exactly what determines who is, but I don’t think it comes down to fairness, or deservedness, or – or some sort of cosmic punishment. I – I don’t think the universe works that way.

“And – and after we’ve been marked, maybe we can make choices along the way. But as far as I can tell, none of those choices ever lead to complete freedom from the Powers that lay claim to us. We’re still accountable for our actions; we can fight back, we can resist – but we’ll always be struggling against our natures. Sometimes it seems like there’s… there’s really no choice we can make where things actually turn out okay. Doesn’t mean we stop trying, or give up hope, but…” He pauses to gnaw on the inside of his cheek for a few seconds. “It can be hard to ignore the fear when it’s become such an intrinsic part of you, is all. When it makes its hunger your own, and hollows you out if you don’t feed it. It can make the concept of choice seem… empty.”

When he trails off, Daisy blows out a forceful exhale.

“That was… a lot.”

“Surprised the Buried let me get it all out,” Jon says, a bit sheepishly. “Sorry, I’ve… had a lot of time alone to ruminate.”

“I think I can rela-”

Daisy’s words are cut short when all at once the earth crashes down around them with a vengeance, as if exacting payment for the courtesy of staying its hand for so long. An indeterminate amount of time passes, weight pressing down on them from all sides, leaving no room for breath or words or thought. Jon focuses on their hands, still linked tightly together, the only anchor to be found here in the dark.

Eventually, the walls begin to withdraw in tiny increments. The sinister, sibilant shifting of soil is a constant, unknown variable – it sounds the same whether the earth is compacting or moving away, and often there is no way to tell until it’s already too close and pressing down. Jon can feel his pulse hammering in his throat, can hear Daisy’s gasping breaths overlapping his own.

“I was gonna kill you,” she blurts out eventually, breathless and rushed. “You know that?”

“Yes.”

“I – I don’t just mean that day in the woods,” she clarifies. “Af-after the mission, I was planning on killing you.”

“I know. You – you realized I wasn’t human. That I needed to die.”

“H-how did you –”

“I’ve been here once before. And – and I should apologize for the dreams, I –”

“Jon –”

“I know it’s not an excuse, but I never meant to compel you that time – didn’t even realize at the time that that was something I could do, and –”

“Jon –”

“I didn’t realize then that the dreams were real, and – and when I finally did, I still didn’t have any control over them, but I –”

“Jon! Shut up a minute.”

His mouth snaps shut a little too quickly and he winces as he bites down on the tip of his tongue. The metallic taste of blood just barely registers on his tongue in the few seconds it takes for the cut to heal.

“Just – back up,” Daisy says, toning down the intensity this time. “That thing you said about… you’ve ‘been here once before’? What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s… a long story. And difficult to believe.”

“Well, it’s –” Daisy huffs. “It’s not like we don’t have the time?”

“I suppose,” Jon sighs. He’s already told this story to the tape recorder at length, but… the idea of telling it to another person, in his own words this time, feels both terrifying and cathartic at the same time. It’s just – difficult to talk about, no matter how many times he recaps it. “Where to begin… oh, I should probably preface this with ‘time travel is real.’”

Daisy sounds far too nonchalant when she says, “Okay.”

“O-okay? That’s… that’s it?”

“Sorry if it’s not the dramatic response you expected. Encounter enough – vampires, and people made of sawdust, and – and this, here, and… I don’t know that anything would surprise me anymore.”

“R-right,” Jon replies, still a bit incredulous. “Well, I’m – I’m from the future.” He pauses again, but she doesn’t interject. “And… and I came back to stop the apocalypse.”

His inflection pitches up into a near-question on the last word, certain that this will be the point at which Daisy calls bullshit. Instead, she just gives a dry chuckle.

“And how’s that going for you?”

“Well, uh, actually…” Jon’s laugh manages to sound slightly hysterical despite its brevity. “Being stuck here actually does – put it on hold indefinitely?”

“H-how’s that?”

“Because – because it can’t go forward without the Archivist.” He takes a shallow breath. “Just like the Stranger has the Unknowing, the Eye has its own Ritual. I was – I am a part of it. I – I didn’t want to, Elias – he orchestrated the whole thing, f-forced me to –” He nearly bites his tongue again when he cuts himself off. “But that – that doesn’t change anything,” he continues, almost viciously. “I’m the one who opened the door. It wouldn’t have happened if not for me, s-so it’s as good as my fault.”

“Don’t know about that,” Daisy says.

“What?”

“Don’t think I can see you making a choice to end the world, if you had any say. Doesn’t sound like you. You – Jon, you just went on about having choices taken away.” Jon is silent, teeth clenched; Daisy jostles his hand insistently. “So – so how’d it actually happen?”

“I, ah…” Why is this still so hard to talk about? “So you know how I – I… need the statements?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I – it – my appetite only got worse as time went on. Started craving live statements, and – and hunted for them. The others intervened eventually, and I stopped, but I still needed – need – statements, or else I’d… starve, for lack of a better word. So I made do with the old statements like before, but they were – less and less filling as time went on, and – and I needed more of them, and more frequently, even though I tried to – to spread them out, ration myself. And, uh, some things happened, and Martin and I went into hiding – used your safehouse, actually –”

“Which one?”

“Scotland.”

“Ah,” Daisy says softly. “I like that one.”

“So did we,” Jon says, smiling fondly. “I – we only had a couple weeks, before… b-but the time we did have, it was…”

He clears his throat.

“An-anyway, I went – hungry, for a bit, until a box of statements could be sent to us. And the first one I read, it was – a trap, by J- Elias.” He can explain about Jonah Magnus later. If he takes that detour now, he’ll never get through the rest of this. “The heading looked – just like any other statement. Statement giver’s name, date – but as soon as I started reading, it was Elias’ words. It was a, uh, statement about – about me. About what I am. I’m not just the Archivist, Daisy, I’m the Archive.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I – when I take or – or consume a statement, I, ah – experience it like I’m there, and it – it becomes a part of me. I’m like a – like a living record, a library of – of people’s worst fears, nightmares, moments that I have no right to witness, and – doesn’t matter. Elias needed a fully realized Archive for his ritual to work, so he – he created one, and he fed it a statement. And I – I tried to stop reading, but I couldn’t, even though I – I tried, I really did, I –” He laughs nervously. “Even tried to – to blind myself, but it just – healed. Then, at the end, there was an – an incantation. To open a door that could let all the Fears into the world. And when I read it… it did.”

“Wait – all of them?”

“Yes,” Jon says quietly. “Just before she died, Gertrude figured out that a ritual to bring one of the Fears into the world could never succeed on its own. The Powers can’t exist without minds to experience them, and our minds – they’re highly associative. The experience of fear is just… far more convoluted and subjective than any artificial taxonomy can capture. The Fears have overlap, and – and some of them are defined by their opposition to the others.

“A Vast ritual would collapse without the existence of the Buried, for instance. Or – the Stranger and the Spiral, they’re both tied to unreality, to not being able to trust your perceptions – which can feed into paranoia, which the Eye and the Web also thrive on. The Hunt and the Slaughter run together, and the Flesh can tag alongside. Both the Corruption and the Desolation are equally efficient and thorough in ravaging a home or a body or – or even the general concept of safety.

“Even here – we’re too far deep below creation for the Eye or the Hunt to reach us, but there’s still more than the Buried to fear. The Dark, for instance, or being Forsaken. Even the Vast can be found down here, if you start obsessing over your own insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe. The Powers are just – too interconnected, and their rituals never accounted for that.”

“So the Unknowing…”

“Would have failed even without our intervention,” Jon says bitterly. “Same goes for all of the rituals that Gertrude stopped, and all the others that have been sabotaged throughout the centuries. All of that sacrifice, and for nothing. Michael Shelley, and Jan Kilbride, and – and Tim, and you ending up here –”

“Tim?”

“He… he died during the mission,” Jon says quietly. He hears a sharp intake of breath from Daisy.

“And Basira?”

“Alive. She got out before the explosion.” He can just barely make out Daisy’s sigh of relief. “She… she told me to tell you that she’s waiting for you.”

“Oh,” Daisy says softly. “I’m s-”

Before she can say more, the Buried begins to writhe around them again, this time closing in molasses-slow. They both instinctively tighten their handhold on one another. As horrid as the crushing force is, this time it at least has the decency to press them closer together. Daisy’s free hand tentatively brushes against Jon’s free wrist. Understanding the unspoken request, Jon interlocks their fingers, and they wait.

“S-so,” Daisy wheezes when the earth finally relaxes and settles again, “about – about the rituals?”

“R-right.” Jon coughs lightly, still catching his breath. “Well, ah, Elias found out about Gertrude’s theory. Came up with a – ritual that would bring all the Powers through at once, but with the Eye ruling over the rest. It required an Archivist – Archive – directly marked by all the Powers. Elias – chose me. Made sure I’d encounter each of them, and… when I was ready, he laid one last trap and waited for me to wander in, because he knew from experience that I would.”

And it could happen again, Jon’s brain helpfully supplies.

“Huh.”

“Yeah. S-so it probably goes without saying, but if you thought I wasn’t human before, I, ah…” He gives an exhausted, humorless chuckle. “I’m definitely not now.”

Daisy is silent for a long moment before saying: “I take it you – you didn’t come here the first time.”

That wasn’t the comment that Jon had been expecting.

“No, I did.”

“Then… how –”

“I told you, there’s a way out. I just – I just have to find it. Last time I found you, and we escaped together. We can do it again.” She doesn’t respond to that, and he kneads the tops of her hands with his thumbs. “Daisy?”

“You’ve been here once before, and you escaped, and… and you came back?” She says it in such a small voice, it almost doesn’t even sound like her. “After – after seeing what it’s like, you still came back for me?”

“Yes…?”

“Why?” she whispers. “Why do that for me? I – I had a knife to your throat, I would’ve killed you if Basira hadn’t found us first, I saw the fear in your eyes and I enjoyed it – and you knew that I’d still planned on killing you the moment I got a chance, so – so why?”

“We’re –” Jon stops himself, rephrases. “In my future, we became friends.”

“What?”

“W-well, we – we were both Avatars trying to resist our darker natures. We went through this together. We just – we had a lot in common.”

Daisy offers no comment.

“I… don’t know what I would have done without you, honestly,” Jon continues, jiggling one foot nervously as best he can in the confined space. “You were… you were the only one I had, most days. The only one who knew what it was like, having the hunger consume you because you refuse to feed it. And – and you had Basira, but she… there were things she didn’t fully understand, couldn’t relate to. So you would come to me. We, uh… we helped each other. Trusted each other.” He adds, a bit timidly: “I… I’ve missed you.”

Still, Daisy says nothing. Jon is about to start rambling again – about what, he doesn’t know; he just needs to fill the awkward silence somehow – but Daisy speaks first.

“But – but what about before all that? Why did you come down here the first time around?”

“I was… in a bad place,” Jon admits. “Tim was dead, Sasha was dead, Melanie hated me, Basira saw me as a monster, Georgie wanted nothing to do with me, and Martin was… gone. I had no one, I wasn’t human anymore, I was afraid and ashamed and guilty and tired, and I… I was starting to doubt my decision to live. Not wanting to die had started to feel selfish, and I – I needed some way to justify living, some way to make myself useful.

“When we found out that you were alive, I – I just didn’t want to lose anyone else. If there was a chance of bringing you home, I had to try. And… there was nothing to lose. If I got stuck down here, it – it would be no great loss. The world would have even been safer for it – moreso than I even imagined at the time. I… honestly didn’t think that anyone would care if I didn’t come back.”

“That’s messed up,” Daisy says, a hint of wry amusement in her voice.

“Yeah,” Jon says with a self-deprecating laugh. “That’s what you said last time. Like I said, I was in a bad place. But – but in the end, we got out. I know I can get us out of here again. I promised Basira I would bring you home, and I – I – I will. I just… I need some time to find the way.”

“No pressure,” she deadpans.

Jon makes a strangled, exasperated noise in his throat.

“Seriously?”

If he could gesture at the tons of dirt pressing down on them, he would – but he can’t, because of the tons of dirt pressing down on them.

“Just trying to lighten the mood,” Daisy says, just the slightest hint of a self-satisfied smirk in her voice. Jon feels one corner of his mouth quirk in spite of himself.

God, he really had missed her.

The concept of time has no meaning within the Buried. Without any real way to observe or calculate its passing, things tend to feel stagnant. One long note of boredom and desperation and restriction. If not for the unpredictable tides of the soil around them, it might even feel as if time is at a standstill. In a way, it is: there is only one time here, and it is forever – or until the End of everything, at least. To make things worse, true sleep is impossible in the Buried. Sometimes, though, there is a lull in the movements of the earth, and within that liminal space, the mind may be allowed to drift.

Jon isn’t sure how long he’s been drifting when Daisy tugs on his hand.

“Jon.”

“Hm?”

“You’re muttering again.”

“Oh.” Jon clears his throat when he realizes how groggy he sounds. “Was I?”

“Care to share?”

“I’m just – I keep thinking about how Basira escaped the Unknowing,” he says, rousing himself. Out of habit, he tries to stretch, only to remember that he can barely move at all – which, of course, only intensifies the urge to fidget.

“Oh?” Daisy shakes both his hands in hers, prompting him to continue. Judging by the waver in her voice, the silence must be getting to her again. “How – how’s that?”

“She… thought her way out. Like a – an ‘I think therefore I am’ thought experiment.” Jon smiles to himself and shakes his head slightly. “She put Descartes to shame.”

“Not even a fair comparison,” Daisy scoffs.

“Agreed.”

“Were you thinking of trying that here?”

“I… don’t think it would work.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re not that level-headed.”

“That’s –” Jon’s indignation fizzles out just as quickly as it emerged. “That’s… okay, yes, that’s fair.”

Daisy snickers; Jon can’t help a small grin in return.

“But what I was actually trying to say is that it was a strategy uniquely tailored to the Stranger. The Unknowing was all about – unreality, about not being able to trust your senses, even your own identity. Basira figured out that the best way to anchor herself in that situation was to boil her entire reality down to simple logical premises: She existed. She existed in a place and time. The place was dangerous at that time, so she had to not exist in that place at that time. Places have ends, and if she kept moving, she could reach a different place.”

“Huh.”

“Straightforward. Elegant, even.”

“It’s Basira,” Daisy says, unmistakable fondness creeping into her tone. Jon snorts. “Shut up, Sims. You were saying?”

“The Buried doesn’t operate in the same way. Basira reasoned her way out of the Stranger’s domain by denying unreality. If we tried to do the same thing, we’d just be denying… well, reality. The earth, the pressure, the – the ‘too close I cannot breathe,’ it’s all real.”

“Good pep talk.”

“Sorry, that’s not what I –” Jon sighs. “I didn’t mean to sound… morose. I was just thinking about different kinds of anchors. Basira managed to center herself and use her own mind as an anchor, and I – I find that impressive, is all.”

“That’s one way to describe her,” Daisy says. “She’s… always been like that. Practical, reliable… centered.”

Wait, Jon thinks to himself, brow furrowed. What if…

“Daisy, tell me about Basira.”

“What?”

“I – she’s your anchor, right? And – and you’re hers.”

“I don’t know about –”

“She called you solid, a – a – a fixed point,” Jon says excitedly. “When you’re there, things make sense to her. You ground her. And now, without you, she’s… she has trouble knowing where she stands. She has no backup, no one to orient her. What she did during the Unknowing – it was impressive, but it isn’t sustainable over a long period of time. You can only go it alone for so long before you lose your bearings. She – she needs you. And you need her. Right?”

“She’s the fixed point,” Daisy murmurs, as if that explains everything – and maybe it does.

“Exactly, s-so – tell me about Basira. From your perspective.”

“Why?”

“Because this is the Buried, where we’re at the center and everything is weighing down on us,” Jon says, mind racing five steps ahead of him. “The dirt, the pressure, it’s all real, but – but the Fears are also about state of mind.”

Jon can feel his heart rate pick up, the way it does whenever he’s talking his way through a puzzle. If he could, he would be pacing right now, burning off that restless energy. Instead, he finds himself tapping his fingers rapidly against Daisy’s hands. She doesn’t stop him, though.

“I’m not saying that we can solve this with ‘mind over matter’ thinking, but it might – help, if we can both focus on an anchor – a different center point, that is, one outside of this place. Move from this center to that center. There’s a better chance of figuring out which way is up if we’re both feeling for the way out. We can orient each other. If we both feel a tug from the same direction, we know we’re going the right way.”

“I can’t feel anything, though,” Daisy says. “Or – I can, but it’s – it’s everywhere, pushing in one direction – pushing down –”

Jon grips her hands more tightly when he hears her breathing start to grow ragged.

“That’s why you need to tell me about Basira – until you do feel a pull. I could be way off, but it’s worth a try. And – and if nothing else, it might help clear my mind, so I can give finding the way out another shot.”

“A statement, then?” Daisy asks sardonically. “Recharge your battery?”

“I wish,” Jon says with a grim smile. “The Eye only likes horror stories. If any story would sate my appetite, I could just watch biopics any time I was feeling a bit peaky. Hell, imagine if a fictional story was enough. An episode of the Archers would be like an afternoon snack.”

“You like the Archers?” He doesn’t have to see her to know that her eyebrows are raised as high as they’ll go.

“You know, I said the exact same thing to you once. And no, I don’t, but you do, and you used to make me listen with you. We didn’t even make a dent in the back catalogue, but I’m an Avatar of terrible knowledge and the Beholding loves spoilers, so guess who Knows every episode now?” Daisy barks a laugh at that. “There are over nineteen thousand episodes, Daisy!”

“That sounds like a you problem.”

“Anyway,” Jon says, squeezing both of her hands in lieu of nudging her shoulder, “a story just… helps take me out of my own head sometimes. Always has. You’re humoring me, not the Eye. Besides, do you have anything better to do?”

“S’pose not.”

“I mean – you don’t have to, of course, if you’re uncomfortable. I don’t want to pressure you –” Jon cringes. “Bad choice of words. I –”

“Stop babbling, Sims.” He knows that tone of voice, knows that she’s rolling her eyes right now. “We only have so long before the walls close in again –”

Daisy cuts herself off with a strangled noise, which she tries to cover by clearing her throat. She was likely trying to lighten the mood again, but the inevitability of the Buried’s ebb and flow is still too real, too close.

“Do you, uh… do you want to hear a story or not?”

“Please.”

“Back again?”

Martin jolts at the sound of Georgie’s voice. He tosses a brief glare over his shoulder at her where she stands just outside the doorway to the office, a safe distance from the Coffin. Martin discovered quickly that the Coffin’s compulsion has no impact on him, likely muffled by his allegiance to the Lonely. Georgie, though, has no such protection.

Coincidentally, it also means that as long as Martin keeps close to the Coffin, Georgie has to keep her distance from him as well.

“It’s been a week,” Martin says in a quiet monotone, tearing his gaze away from her.

“Yeah.”

“He should have been back by now.”

“Well, he didn’t really give a timeframe –”

“But you said he implied that it wouldn’t take more than a week,” Martin says impatiently. “And knowing Jon, he exaggerated how long it would take, just so no one would worry if he was late.”

“I… yeah, I know,” Georgie sighs. “I was expecting him to be back by now, too.”

Martin nods in a clear ‘I told you so’ gesture – then immediately feels childish. Why is he acting vindicated by her admission?

“Does Peter know you’ve been coming down here?”

“Don’t care.”

“Oh?” Georgie says, her voice suspiciously bland – and only then does Martin register the significance of what he just said.

“I just meant – it’s –” Martin huffs. “It’s none of your business.”

“Of course.” Martin can hear the smirk in her tone.

“Why are you here?” he snaps, swiveling to look at her again.

“Same reason you are, I expect.”

Martin says nothing to that, simply turns his back on her. For a few minutes, the only sound is the low, indistinct chatter of the tape recorders, still spooling out their horror stories on a loop.

“Have you tried calling to him?” Georgie asks. Martin continues to ignore her, teeth clenched until they ache. “It could be worth a shot. He left all those tapes running – don’t know if he can hear them exactly, but they’re meant to call to him.”

Go away, Martin thinks, his hands curling into fists on his knees.

“Your voice might be better than a recording.”

Why is she so persistent?

“Just – think about it, okay?”

When Martin doesn’t respond, Georgie sighs, knocks twice on the door frame, and takes her leave. He doesn’t look back around until the sound of her footsteps fade away.

“Sure, just leave the door wide open,” he grumbles irritably, rising to his feet to remedy the issue.

He pulls the office door shut with more force than intended, practically slamming it. The lone tape recorder on Jon’s desk, previously standing on end, topples over with a light clatter. Martin exhales heavily and pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to suppress the static buzz of nervous energy simmering inside him.

“But we need you, Jon,” the tape recorder grinds out. “Jon, please, just – please.”

“Fuck,” Martin says, voice thick and strained. He takes several deep breaths – in through his nose, out through his mouth – trying to clear his thoughts. Eventually, his shoulders slump and he sighs. “Fine. You win.”

He settles himself on the floor in front of the Coffin again, closer this time.

“Jon,” he says, then falters, unsure of what to say. “I –” He lets out an agitated breath, then follows it up with a bitter chuckle. “This is stupid. You probably can’t even hear this, can you?”

There is an uncomfortable, stinging pressure in his eyes and he reflexively tries to swallow back the tears, only to realize how dry his mouth has become. He rubs his eyes instead, digging the heels of his palms into the sockets and applying pressure.

“I – if you – if you can hear me, I… I already lost you once. I can’t do this all over again, I just – I can’t. I’m – everyone is waiting for you, and I still…” Martin sniffles and clears his throat. “Just – come home, Jon. Please.”

“I think I’d forgotten what it was like to just be… present in the moment? A – a quiet moment, anyway.” Daisy sighs. “On a hunt, you always have to think a few steps ahead, anticipate the prey’s movements so you can get out in front of it. Even when you’re present-thinking, like during a fight, it’s – it’s instinct and reflex, quick movements and jagged edges. You can never just… be.”

“I think I understand,” Jon says. “Not the Hunt aspect, but – but the intolerance of stillness.”

“But in that moment – laying back in the grass, Basira going on about the stars – I was… I was just me. I was focused on her – she gets so excited, so animated whenever she has a chance to talk about something new she’s learned, and I – I let her go on for” – Daisy laughs – “going on forty minutes, probably, about – about the Wow! signal before she looked over and saw me staring. Got all embarrassed that I let her talk so long.”

Jon can feel himself grinning.

“In her defense, the Wow! signal is a fascinating topic.”

“I thought so,” Daisy says warmly. “I mean, I must’ve, right? The whole time she was talking, I never felt the blood calling to me. Afterwards, it felt wrong, somehow – unnatural – that I’d been ignoring it. Not even resisting it, just – tuning it out altogether. I didn’t notice until then how loud it was – like for my whole life there had been teeth at my throat and I just never noticed until that moment.” She pauses. “It’s strange, but I – I think I liked it. The quiet.”

“I don’t think it’s strange at all,” Jon says softly. “I think –”

Suddenly, there’s a distinct wrenching sensation within him – like having a hook yank upwards, painless but abrupt enough to make his breath catch in his throat.

“Jon?” Daisy says warily. “What’s wrong?”

There’s something there.

“Do – do you feel that?”

“No? What – what is it?”

“It’s – wait, just let me…”

Jon concentrates, holding his breath as he waits, and –

There. Another pull, like a fish tugging at a line. And another, gentler but just as insistent.

“Daisy, I –” Jon lets out a breathless little laugh. “I think I know the way. C-come on, follow me.”

End Notes:

tbh I was tempted to split this into two chapters but it felt like it wanted to be all one thing, and also I didn't want to end on an angsty cliffhanger because:

I know I was managing a loose every-7-to-10-days-ish update schedule for awhile there, but it miiiight start looking more like an every-two-weeks schedule going forward. I've been on split shifts at work but we're supposedly going back full time soon, so that might effect how much writing time I have each day. Just wanted to give a heads up in case it takes longer than usual before the next chapter is ready.

There are several snippets of dialogue borrowed/reworked from Jon & Daisy's conversation in the Buried in MAG 132 - they're scattered throughout the chapter. (The "This is forever deep below creation..." and "One thing I've learned..." internal dialogue bits are from 132 also.) Probably goes without saying, but Martin's Lonely statement is from MAG 170 and there's also a previously cited usage of his dialogue from the S4 trailer. The Tim quote is from MAG 117. "The blanket never did anything" (still one of the creepiest lines in the podcast i s2g) is from MAG 086.

#tma #tma fic #the magnus archives #tma spoilers #long post

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cptsdstudyblr · 3 years

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Cults & Religious Abuse PART 1: Q & A

If you don’t want to see this series, you can block #cptsdstudyblrreligion

tw// cults, religion, religious abuse, religious trauma, mentions of other types of abuse

Anonymous asked:

Ask for ur series - as someone who hasn’t been thru religious abuse, what can I do to support my friends who have been?

Answer:

I love this question and I’m so glad that you’re the type of friend who thinks to ask this type of question! This is a question that I’ll definitely be addressing in much more detail later in this series, but I’ll go into the basics of it here and try to answer your question thoroughly.

From my personal experience, religious abuse and religious trauma are difficult traumas to talk about for a couple of extra reasons beyond those that make trauma difficult to talk about in general. A lot of the time, these experiences can come across as farfetched and unbelievable to people who are unfamiliar with fundamentalist or extreme religions. Additionally, in a lot of situations, the person might worry that their negative experiences with religion will be received poorly by someone who is still religious. Of course, these are generalizations and are by no means the case for everyone, but I can only speak from my experience.

I don’t know if you’re a religious person, but if you are, I would encourage you to make every effort to put that perspective aside when supporting a friend who has experienced religious trauma. This doesn’t mean you should pretend you aren’t religious or anything along those lines, but it does mean that you’ll need to consciously acknowledge that something you hold dear has significantly harmed someone you care about and put aside any beliefs that might make you hesitate to believe them or that might cause you to push that religion on them once again.

As an example, I was a victim of extremely fundamentalist Christianity and my best friend of almost 10 years is a devout Catholic. Because I was afraid that she wouldn’t believe me or would try to convince me that I should still be a Christian, it took me until earlier this year to actually talk to her about my trauma. But the way she responded, while imperfect, put aside her religious beliefs to support me. She told me that she believed me, that she was sorry that I’d had that experience, and that she would never push me to be religious or participate in religious activities. And she has followed through with those statements, which is even more important than the initial statement. I would also recommend that you ask your friend how much they’re comfortable talking about religion in general as this will vary by person (and if you’re not comfortable asking, err on the side of caution). I know I’m okay talking about religion as long as it isn’t something that’s explicitly related to my experiences, but this won’t be the same for everyone.

I would also encourage you to be supportive and understanding of the way your friend was raised to see the world. It’s most likely vastly different to how you see the world, and these perspectives take a long time to overcome. I might even say that some may never be fully overcome. It’s absolutely okay (and probably recommended) to point out when they have a misconception, but it’s important to point this out kindly and acknowledge that it’s a product of their environment and doesn’t necessarily reflect on them. Give them a solid chance to reconstruct their view of the world rather than jumping to the assumption that they are a bad person because of something they were told as a child that they didn’t have any way to correct.

Other than these few specific answers, you should just be generally supportive as you would to anyone who has experienced trauma. And as always, the best thing you can do is to ask them how you can help.

Anonymous asked:

Is it part of religious abuse to use faith, religion and the threat of "curses" and damnation in order to stop us from responding/reporting/calling out other forms of abuse- like physical and verbal abuse? ie, "God will punish you if you're not grateful to us", "God will punish you if you complain", "God will take everything away if you don't attend this ritual even when you're not physically capable of it"?

Answer:

Yes, using faith, religion, and religious threats to prevent you from responding appropriately to other forms of abuse is absolutely religious abuse and I’m so sorry if that is something that you have experienced. If you’re currently experiencing abuse, I’d encourage you to visit any of these resources and make some sort of plan to ensure your safety:

US Domestic Violence Hotline or +1 (800) 799-7233

International Domestic Violence Hotlines

Domestic Violence Hotline’s Article on Spiritual Abuse

Wikipedia Article about Religious Abuse (very basic explanation)

I would also encourage you to report any abuse that’s occurring in your home, especially if any children are involved, but please make sure that you and everyone else involved are as safe as possible when doing so. If you have a trusted friend or family member, you could also reach out to them.

@thiswilldragon asked:

Do you have any tips on how people who weren’t raised in cults should interact with people who were, but have now left?

(A few years ago I ran into someone who used to be really awful to me at school - she was trying to be nice and I blanked her. I now realise her parents had convinced her that I literally worshipped Satan and she was probably terrified of me every time I was in the room.)

Answer:

First, I would encourage you to follow the advice given in my first answer about supporting a friend who has experienced trauma caused by religion. Of course, only you can know how much of this advice is applicable in specific situations, but in general it’s a good idea to be as supportive as possible in a respectful way.

Second, I would encourage you to let the other person set the boundaries for interaction. In this situation you described, this other person was likely pretty uncomfortable interacting with you. In situations like that, I would simply let them set the boundaries. If it seems like they’re interested in talking to you, you might feel confident enough to start up a casual conversation, but if they generally avoid you, you might prefer to avoid unnecessary interactions. In general though, you should interact in a nonthreatening, kind, open way. It might also be beneficial to avoid making jokes that could come across negatively until you’re certain that it won’t be a problem to do so because in my experience people can take those jokes pretty seriously.

PART 2: So you’re in a cult?

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natsunoomoi · 3 years

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Oh yeah, addendum to the other post from earlier because I went to bed after I found it, but yeah. I found the spot where it talks about it finally. But just annoyed because I think it was an issue with like textual clean up or my phone browser at the time screwing with me as I went back and forth to the translation notes that it probably wasn't as clearly input into my memory the first time around. I don't have ad blockers on my phone so when I was originally reading it I was having formatting issues that I think distracted my reading sometimes. I still managed to remember quite a lot of details in general for the plot, I think, but I remember it was frustrating to try to get to the end. Checking now on my desktop and the formatting issues are near nonexistent so it's easier to read and jog my memory that oh yeah I did read this part.

But also still annoyed that it's improperly cited on the wiki cuz ugh, that's not how you write a wiki. Proper chapter citations, yo. It is in 81 not 92. *facepalm* Still kind of wondering where that other part I read when I started this book was mentioned? Still haven't seen that at all.

I think also I remember I was a bit more concerned about the overall meaning of what the ending meant too than what Qinghua was saying. Like the way everything turned out in the book it was really sweet and all and I like Qingqiu and Binghe together, but I was and still am really concerned that they only really work as a couple in this book specifically because of the circumstances of the book. I can understand people IRL are repressed or don't think about their own sexuality and maybe discover it later or under the right circumstances, but at the same time the way things unfolded also gives me some concerns. It's more possible that someone who is straight might only think so because it's just the normal accepted type of relationship we see in our modern society so they don't question or explore it so they don't know, but at the same time, I'm also concerned because your sexuality doesn't just change because of one person either. IRL if someone is not into you, they're not into you. I'm a little worried as well that the relationship between the characters is also a little coercive. Like when we're talking about enthusiastic consent IRL it means for all partners and both people in a relationship should thoughtfully respect the other's boundaries and needs, and unfortunately, Binghe tends to not respect boundaries. It makes for good comedy and cuteness in a fictional work, but a lot of young people also read this book and it worries me a bit what some people might learn about relationships in that regard.

Like this maybe a separate thing, but like thinking about the consent in the relationship in this book reminds me of a Reddit post I saw where this one guy was asking for advice about a situation with his gf where his gf would only sleep with him if he put on Sasuke cosplay and she wore Naruto cosplay and basically they acted out her BL fantasy. And like he was very kind and onboard with her roleplay because he wanted her to be happy, but also like when he asked to maybe not do the cosplay, she would get upset and refuse to be intimate with him in any other way. And like, yeah, the situation is very funny, but because this is a real life couple you can see how when only one person bends to their partner's desires and needs, it can leave the other person feeling unheard and empty. As hilarious as it sounds, a lot of people were very sympathetic for the guy and feeling for him cuz like he was doing everything right and giving it a try for her and then also just approaching her maturely and trying to talk about his own comfort in that regard and she wasn't hearing him. So similar to how I feel bad and afraid for that guy, I actually feel kind of concerned and afraid for SY/Qingqiu a little. Like if both of them were my friend IRL, I would legit be worried that Binghe wasn't always listening to Qingqiu's needs. The relationship needs to be an equal give and take or at least balanced, but one side tends to take more and act more selfishly, and it's like, you only feel worried and want them to talk to each other more and grow because you want them to be able to last together.

Still kind of getting into the other books, but in comparison the other relationships in the other two books seem to be more positive and supportive. Like TGCF seems to be the most healthy and functional as an actual relationship.

Also a bit concerned that Airplane's original outline was a teacher x student relationship. Like we can argue it's okay for SY cuz he's not really Qingqiu, but that relationship being the original outline is also risque and that is NG at worst and a huge risk at best. Like it was viewed bad enough already that Qingqiu was written to eye Ning Yingying, it wouldn't be viewed any better if that part of the original outline was in it too. On the plus side the way SVSSS plays out Binghe is an adult already when the situation happens and it is at a more appropriate time, but the optics are pretty bad just because of like ideas of society that a master is like a parent and a disciple is like a child. It's also related to the titles and such that they call each other like shixiong, shidi, etc. They have family dynamics with each other so it's not great. It's not like there aren't some situations IRL where teacher and student become a couple, but in many circumstances it's highly inappropriate. The underage issue is the normal problem. But if they are grown and it is later when you are no longer their teacher I've seen some couples where it worked out, but it's a situation of consenting adults at least. Still a little concerned about the power imbalance dynamics. In IRL situations that's a big thing too. Other than age, one person being able to affect other parts of your life on a whim is a huge stressor on a relationship you don't need. I can kind of understand how it would have worked out in a positive if like Qingqiu had shown empathy for Binghe when they first met because their lives mirror each other's, but like a lot of the other things Qinghua added into the story like the extent of Qingqiu's traumas being played out as asshole behavior became huge barriers. Like I mentioned, with just his traumas it would be very difficult for him to be able to have even a deep friendship with other men, which is similar to how IRL people in real life don't have a chance to explore themselves because of various issues and stuff in society. But also Binghe being ultimately unhappy by just doing what the world thinks he should do and not what he wants on both an in-world level and a meta level. We don't get a whole lot on Shen Jiu, so I'm really curious how that would have actually worked on his end because he seemed really broken, but it's impossible to parse out what of the original plot we can imagine to remove to understand the original outline and how it would have happened. He was very alone and even though the pipa player called him a friend, it doesn't seem like he was able to have a close enough friend to talk with or confide in at all. But is that isolation part of the original outline or part of the PIDW plot?

Anyway, it's things like that that I think about all the time and that's why I end up going into dives into the wiki cuz I want to like think about something and want to check notes real quick to make sure I'm thinking about it right. But the wiki is unreliable. Like also there was one part where it says that the bad cultivation manual was only something the other disciples did to Binghe, but in SJ's POV chapter he literally says that he gave him the shitty one. The wiki also claimed that him pouring tea was also actually an application of medicine misunderstood, but I haven't found any evidence of that either and it's just stuff like that that send me into a rabbit hole that derail me from my original thoughts I'm trying to work out.

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swordstrider · 5 years

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Epilogue Thoughts

Well, throughout the clusterfuck of meme reblogs, it’s finally time for me to pull up a velvet cushioned chair and discuss the “tales of dubious authenticity”. As such, there will naturally be spoilers pertaining to both the meat and candy routes, although I’ll focus more on meat, since I actually read a hell of a lot more there than I did with candy. Continue under the cut if you wish.

Since it’s the shortest possible spiel I have to offer, I’ll get the candy route out of the way first. My read-through of the epilogues began with this one, although I only lasted through eight chapters before promptly giving up. The reason for this, is, well... The candy route is just a mess, as it is 100% likely supposed to be. What I had expected from it was what some in the fandom have naturally ascribed to Homestuck’s candy metaphor; Fluff, romance, friendship, happiness, low plot, and so on.

However, it’s clear to me that candy itself extends into something more... sour, if you will, and I suppose it should have been blatant from the get-go, what with trickster mode being apparent in the comic. I only have remnants of memories from those few chapters, as well as commentary from fans which I took into account, and it’s naturally fucking insane. I don’t think I necessarily have to prattle too long on the matter, but, wow. It really does seem like the next edition of trickster mode, and that’s just too far for me, for various reasons. Although I didn’t spend much time preoccupied with the candy route, I’m essentially summarizing it as maximum craziness to a very disturbing degree, and as such, I’m not going to involve myself any further with it. As far as I’m concerned, it never “really” happened from my own point of view, despite it being an option likely disposed to... some potentially canon element to it? I don’t even know anymore. All I can truly attribute to this particular route is a metaphorical, sugarcoated mess on my lawn that I never really wanted in the first place, let alone anticipated.

Moving on to the meat route, there’s naturally a fucking lot that I can talk about here. I suppose you could say... this one will be the real meat of this post. Haha, funny.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, I continued onward with this route a bit after clawing my way through barely eight chapters of the candy route. I did it this way since, if I remember correctly, this particular order was recommended by V, or someone else involved with the production of the epilogues. I think such an order was... an okay choice? I didn’t feel particularly affected by it in hindsight, but I feel as though the upgraded prose and general non-wackiness made me feel somewhat better after the sinister experience of the candy route.

I’ll progress by listing the things that I enjoyed or liked about the meat route first.

1) As I mentioned before, I’m quite sure the prose and convoluted narrative were toned up quite a lot here, along with being linear and not feeling like a mess beyond rectifying. It’s more comprehensible, in spite of about forty six chapters worth of content and so many details to catch on to. There seems to be some sort of purpose within this route, rather than the capricious nature of its complement, which is something I can respect. It still feels sort of unstable, since there’s just so much shit to grasp, but I guess I’ll let that one slide.

2) Just like Homestuck was about honesty when inspecting the struggles, conflicts, and inner workings of teenagers, I feel as though the meat route did nicely in continuing that pattern. The characters clearly still continue having conflict through their adult years, and this is especially shown throughout Terezi and John, as well as the drifting relationship of Rose and Roxy, and the isolated state that Rose and Kanaya were in with each other; Likely being so entangled with their relationship that they distanced from others slowly, yet surely. I have no experience in the range of my early twenties yet, but I have heard other people comment that this captures the particular stage well. I feel like it does, too, since individuals can naturally go through general conflicts such as distance/isolation, mental illnesses, physical or emotional ailments, and so on during any stage of their life, whether it be as a young child, a teenager, or an adult. The depictions of John’s depression felt very, very realistic, and, on a more personable level for me, relatable. The numbing of emotions, the isolation from others, his self loathing, all just... very much captured what depression is really like, in a sense. Not everyone’s experience with depression is the same, but this felt very... close to me. It feels like the first time I’ve ever seen a character depicted with such an authentic struggle with depression, and even a character with such a genuine, visible struggle as a whole. I can’t put into words how reality-based this felt. The sheer fact that even in the epilogues, the honesty that life is difficult and filled with conflict is an amazing expansion to Homestuck’s already in-depth examination of such a thing itself.

3) The relationships are yet another point I’d like to make here, particularly Dave/Karkat and John/Terezi. Dave and Karkat still have this romantic bond, even if they were cagey when admitting it for a bit. They still love each other just as much, joke around with each other, support each other, feel good with each other, understand each other, and are happy with each other. That’s a lot of fucking “each other”s, but I’ll be damned if I can’t get the point across. It’s made very clear cut that they’re still very much in love, even in spite of growing political tensions and other conflicts. As for John and Terezi, it’s shown that they have this very unique bond that no other characters quite have with each other. Sure, they joke around and poke fun at each other, but most of all, they have this deep, innate connection in sort of relating to each other, in a way. They both had experiences with numbness, sadness, depression, and their own forms of trauma, and they were able to discuss some of this with each other on a very vulnerable level during that time. They discussed things that were important to them. Their relationship is also another thing that feels very authentic; Two young adults emotionally supporting each other and just having hope that the other has their back, especially in such trying, traumatic times. This particular bond was so strong that it even went into a romantic area, which also feels realistic, because couples supporting each other, especially under such dismal circumstances, is really fucking important. Although their former forms of communication were essentially two people having fun with each other and just fucking around with each other, this showed us that John and Terezi can reach such a wonderfully vulnerable point, to the area that they just connect so much that they’re in love with each other, whether it be redrom or blackrom.

4) As for the closing positive note on the meat route, I loved alternate Calliope’s role in this. She takes on this role that is to be expected of a fully fledged Muse of Space, what with taking command over the story in lieu of Dirk, at some points. She’s become a true conductor yet again, and she’s putting one of her sole hobbies, storytelling, to work just like before, although in a more expansive way. I think it was quite creative, having her narrate many areas of the story and involving herself in efforts to protect others as much as she could.

And now, I come to the areas in the meat route that I didn’t particularly enjoy or like.

1) For starters, I do really dislike this whole “horny Jade” concept that’s enacted in this route. I realize this is because of her dog hormones, but I find it... very perturbing and disgusting that she’s forcing herself in the midst of Dave and Karkat’s relationship, likely just wanting it to deteriorate so they can provide her with... services, and such. It’s especially horrid when you consider how uncomfortable Dave and Karkat respectively seem to be when she brings such awkward topics up. They stutter, flee, and whatnot, yet she still continues, as if none of it is a blatant warning sign. I don’t really know how hormones or even dog hormones work, but... I’d appreciate a sense of social awareness for her if possible, at least down the road. It feels... off of Jade to be doing such a thing, when, even if not the most selfless of people, she is generally quite courteous and respectful of others and their boundaries. Perhaps the hormones are the cause of her seemingly nonexistent cognizance of their discomfort around her during these times, but it still... unsettles me. I suppose we’ll have to find out later, if they happen to expand upon the topic.

2) Then, there’s my... sort of antithesis to my second positive, if you will. While I did particularly enjoy the realism that this route had to offer, it feels a little too unhappy, dismal, hopeless, what have you with your dejected adjectives and the like. Certainly there are some good things, such as Dave/Karkat and John/Terezi bonds, but I feel as though, at this point, the negative state of the meat route’s narrative outweighs the positives greatly. Jane is likely a new threat to Earth C’s society, seeing as she’s this Condesce-inspired fascist and a xenophobe now in office with likely unwell schemes of her own, John is very likely dead for good and died on a very depressing note due to his mental state, Dirk is in his Ultimate Self mode and seems to have quite the advantage at the moment along with Rose as his hostage, Terezi is still depressed and conflicted, Dave and Karkat wallowed in losing the election by nearly consuming alcohol, but also by going back to their typical shut-in lives, nobody knows about John and never seemed to have supported him, aided him, or cared for him much at all in the beginning and the end, Davepetasprite^2 died, and... overall, everything is looking extremely grim. Not to say that I don’t invite conflicts, challenges, and the like to be apparent in media that I like, but it feels... empty. Hopeless. Like nothing is left, nothing is redeemable. It just felt... Too depressing, too poignant, and angsty for me. Naturally, nobody is going to resolve issues such as these overnight, and not everyone or everything in a story will necessarily be happy and perfect in the end, but this feels like such an overdrive to me. Especially since I’m going through a very troubling time in my life at the moment, it makes me feel bitter; Like none of this can be ameliorated whatsoever, and the story is doomed to be depressing and dismal forever. I simply hope it will end on a slightly better note than this in finality, even though not every single problem will be solved right away, and isn’t bound to be solved in the end. I just want some sort of hope for all of these characters.

3) I’m not sure I’d consider this a negative due to reformed views I’ve had from other posts, but... Man. Dirk, y’know? I’ll include my original thoughts and post-reform thoughts here anyway. Initially, I thought this particular Dirk was extremely OOC; Only inserted into the narrative just for last minute villain perks, or some shit like that. It felt like such a shell of Dirk’s former self in the sense that I thought this development came completely out of nowhere for no discernible reason. I thought that it was a complete oxymoron, since Dirk’s arc was supposed to detail a young man with self-loathing issues attempting to cope with his toxic alternates; To, perhaps, create a new slate for himself even in the wake of his flaws and the actions of his other iterations of himself. But I realize now that Dirk is likely undergoing a very advanced and more self-restrained form of this so called Ultimate Self. This means his original self is sort of merging consciousness with that of his alternate selves, such as Lil’ Hal, Bro Strider, ARquiusprite, and a potential sliver of Caliborn, since ARquiusprite was a part of that particular soul. These conditions considered, it very well would make for an actual villain of himself, an intimidatingly cognizant and even powerful one, too. I suppose that, as fan speculation detailed, Dirk’s Ultimate Self is not necessarily going to be the most courteous, amicable being ever. Quite the contrary, in fact. And his mannerisms begin to make sense when considering the Dave/Karkat segment Dirk had, along with his odd commentary on gender discussion. Seems very Caliborn-esque, although it may be a combination of others, too, since his consciousness is merged with multiple Dirk splinters.

4) And for my final negative, I’m going to discuss Roxy’s gender identity. A very welcome surprise, I’d say, because I also said trans rights. Anyway, my essential issue with this topic is how it’s treated within the narrative and within dialogue. It almost feels like this sort of joke from the producers of the epilogue, in a sense. Maybe the shitty “Check Your Privilege Dave” joke is still nagging at me, but I just have this odd... feeling that this isn’t being treated seriously, especially with how Terezi seems to instantaneously point the pronoun change out almost in this shitty method of humor, and how Roxy is experimenting with pronouns quite often and comes off as hesitant when they first come out as nonbinary. I’m going to take this judgement with a huge grain of salt for now, because it’s not outright offensive, and seems to have well intentions. I suppose I could easily be being a pedantic fuck, looking too hard into things and having too much apprehension. Although, if it is a joke, I’d be very disappointed to learn so, seeing as V affirmed that the crew consisted of LGBT+ people who intended to make the reading experience safe and open for the community. Still, I’m going to presume I’m being just a bit too skeptical for the moment.

That’s pretty much all of the points that stand out to me for now. I’m honestly unsure of how this epilogue will turn out or where it will go for the most part, but I’m certain there will be a continuation at some point, perhaps even with a third choice that may combine both meat and candy in a healthy way somehow, or maybe avoid both concepts altogether. Either way, I hope things turn out okay in the end, or at least that the epilogue will end on some sort of happy note, even if some conflicts and issues are still ongoing.

EDIT: Do I consider any of this to be canon, including the meat route, within my own head? No, I really don’t. It’s just... a little too far gone for my tastes, but power to ya if you like it and consider it canon. It’s also sad to see that Dirk stans are hurting from this new development within him, so honestly, I give y’all a collective pat on the back. You deserve it.

#epilogue spoilers #hs epilogue #homestuck

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babydoll1947 · 5 years

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Let’s Talk: Mental/Emotional Abuse, from a Survivor

If you read my recent post, you have seen that I am a true crime lover, and have been watching the ID channel as if it may disappear when I’m not looking (kind of like this post did the first time I wrote it, but we’ll get to that). However, I have found that my obsession sometimes comes at a cost to my mental health. You see, when I watch these shows and hear about these horrible people with horrible traits... well, sometimes it triggers recall of some of the equally horrible traits of the man who once abused me. Now, do I think one day he will escalate all the way to murdering someone? No, I think there is a fairly slim chance of that, just given the lack of physical violence I have seen him exhibit. But, I could be wrong, and I sincerely hope everyone he encounters stays on their guard with him. Do I, however, believe this man is a sadistic psychopath who derives pure please from controlling and harming other people (especially women)? Yes, yes I do, with every fiber of my being. No matter the type, abuse is a topic people cringe at the thought of having to talk about. Trust me, the first time I wrote this before tumblr threw it off into the cosmos somewhere, it turned out to be one of the most difficult and painful things I’ve ever had to write. And, I do not relish the thought of having to write this all over again. But, even though we don’t want to talk about this, I believe that we NEED to talk about this. And yes, I said “we”, because it takes small actions from a whole lot of people to make a change in the world around us, not to mention the fact that I think everyone can gain something from the takeaways of abuse survivors. So, here I am, about to write about one of the worst years of my life, hoping to help others gain more understanding. WARNING: I am about to share graphic, detailed accounts of abuse. If you do not feel you can emotionally cope, that’s okay, please just skip to the end of the post for the recap. If at any time you feel you need support, please send me a message and I will be happy to direct you to some amazing resources! I met Chris... and I am choosing to use his real first name, as I do not feel he deserves any anonymity at all... when I was 17 and a senior in high school. When I said earlier that this man is a psychopath, I do not use that term lightly. Like, “Oh, that girl is psycho, like, totally cray cray!” I mean it in the full sense and scope of the disorder. I met him through a close friend who was seeing him, and our first real encounter should have sent off warning bells in my head. To protect the privacy and dignity of myself and my friend, I am not going into details of that particular encounter here, but I will say that it was sexual in nature. False promises were made to my friend to convince her to do this, and it was not an overall a good experience. Even with that, though, there was something so charming and alluring about him that you just felt pulled in. Right away I started seeing him on my own. At first, it was almost like a secretly agreed “sister wives” situation... each of us knew about the other, and knew we were both seeing him, but also both adored him so much that we didn’t seem to care. Over time, as we both started to want more with him, he would lie or manipulate the situation to keep us placated. Often, he would tell me he was not dating her, but tell her that he was. He loved to lie. Like, genuinely loved it. He once told me that half the time he would lie even when he didn’t need to, just to see what he could get away with and how many people he could fool. Another red flag I missed, since that is one of the hallmark traits of a psychopath. He could also fake any emotion necessary to obtain his end goal, even though I doubt he really felt much of anything. Before long, I was practically living with Chris and his roommate in their apartment. Despite this closeness, and his supposed care for me, we never “officially” dated. This is where things started to go haywire. He frequently would list off things he desired in a potential girlfriend, and I would jump through hoops to make them happen. I grew my hair out because he preferred long hair (even though I hated maintaining long hair), got French manicures because he didn’t like bright colored nails (even though I did), changed my mannerisms and reactions to be the “cool girl”, literally anything I had to do to please him. Sadly, I never realized that nothing I did would ever please him or be good enough for him... he just wanted to see how far he could push me. Over that year I morphed into a person I didn’t even recognize in the mirror. Then came the “reminders”, as I like to call them. He would not only talk about girls he liked from work or school, but bring them home with him when he knew I was there, parading them in front of me to remind me that I still wasn’t good enough. Next were the subtle put downs. Then the more serious put downs. Then came the tough love. So tough, in fact, the he held me by my arm while I was sobbing and trying to go home, holding me there until he was done telling me everything that was wrong with me. That was the closest he ever came to physical abuse, his hand wrapped around my forearm, but hell... sometimes I wished he would just hit me, thinking it would hurt less than his words piercing my heart and self-esteem. Still, I fell in love with him. Still, I stayed. Things continued to spiral, and with that spiral came the sexual abuse. That was undoubtedly the worst. His idea of sexual fun was to make me give him oral sex until he was almost ready to orgasm, then push me onto my stomach so he could fuck me for a few seconds until he came on my body. It was no longer about my pleasure or desires, only his. He convinced me that I would like being submissive, that I enjoyed it. He made me call him master, and bend to his will. On more than one occasion he would put me on my knees to give him oral sex, then hold me by my hair and half-drag/half-make-me-crawl over to him like a disobedient dog. Like an animal. I didn’t like it, but I just figured as long as it pleased him it was okay. I had only one hard boundary which I had communicated to him several times: I would not do anal sex. So, to get around this boundary, he decided to just rape me instead... One night as he was fucking me from behind, he pulled out of my vagina and ruthlessly thrust himself into my anus. I buried my face in the mattress and screamed, the pain being indescribable. He did not stop when I screamed. He kept thrusting until he finished inside me, and gave the final demeaning blow as I followed him into the bathroom: “This is why I don’t do anal, it makes your dick smell bad.” I sat on the toilet for several minutes in disbelief, dripping blood and cum into the bowl. I had never felt more humiliated in my entire life, and I don’t know if I ever will. But, he apologized (though he did not mean it), I forgave him (as I always did) and life moved on. Any time I tried to pull away from him, he made sure that didn’t happen. He would talk bad of people I liked, talk bad of me to the people I liked, and sabotage any attempt to let him go. The final few months of hell came with his drug abuse. He became addicted to Xanax and Percocet, and I became his caregiver and guardian, ensuring that he ate, finished tasks, etc., and watching over him on many sleepless nights, making sure he didn’t start to overdose in his sleep. He never once thanked me for helping him, or saving his life until he finally went into rehab. The only good thing that ever came of our relationship happened during one of his attempts to be sober: he began going to church, so I went with him and ultimately rekindled/strengthened my relationship with God. That relationship is what lead me to eventually leave Chris behind. As more time passed we slowly parted ways, him going into rehab and then halfway homes, and me leaving home permanently. Still, it took a very long time to remove him from my life completely. He was like a cancer that I had to extract from my soul one piece at a time, and it took me a lot of time, distance, and perspective to come to the realizations I have about who he really is. Here are the reasons why I am telling you all of this (if you didn’t want to read the details, come back now). First of all, something that still haunts me to this day is how nobody did anything to help me. I mentioned that he lived with a roommate, and they regularly had another friend at the apartment with them, but neither of them tried to intervene on my behalf. I know how hard it can be to confront a friend for doing shitty things, believe me I do, but we MUST do this. Please. If you are friends with someone who shows signs of being a perpetrator, please talk to them, or help the person they are with. The next thing is, please be understanding and patient with people who have survived or are currently experiencing abuse. I already know that a lot of you were thinking while reading my story “Why didn’t she just leave?” The answer is a simple one: I really believed that I loved him. I couldn’t process what was happening to me while I was still wearing the rose-colored glasses, and it can be extremely difficult to discern how bad a situation is in while you are still in it. Give your loved ones time to process what is happening, but still support and protect them as much as you can. Nothing is as black-and-white as it seems. Also understand that just because the abuse isn’t physical, it doesn’t make it any less damaging. I still struggle with the trauma to this day, seven years later. The last few days I found myself dealing with flashbacks and bouts of intense anger. It happens sometimes, and will likely continue to happen here and there for the rest of my life. And lastly, I leave you with this: If you have experienced abuse of any kind, or if you still are, I promise you that you will be okay. You are strong, a fighter, and a survivor. You are a WARRIOR. Time may not heal all wounds (I still have plenty of scars) but it truly does make it easier and less painful. There will come a day when the pain is not a constant ache, and when you can breathe freely again. Never, ever, EVER give up! I love you all, and I am always here for you! Thanks for going on this journey with me.

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ontheedgeofrecovery · 5 years

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Social calibration

I have to recalibrate how I interact socially. Between the ages of 15 and 20 and then again between the ages of 25 and 31 I spent a good chunk of time in treatment centers. So, throughout all of high school and beginning of college and then the years that most people are settling down and having families. Granted, I did the getting married thing, but I missed most of the other typical social milestones. While my peers were out partying, drinking, and then later buying houses and having children I sat in an eating disorders ward in therapy - group, individual, meal, exposure, art, movement, equine, recreational (there are a lot of therapies in the treatment world) from the hours of 8:00am to 8:00pm every day. That is a lot of therapy.

Everything you do in treatment, even the "fun" things are introspective learning opportunities. In some ways, this is benefitting me now, because as I am struggling with certain things in my life I am really able to self-reflect and work out in my head what is going on and try to pragmatically approach it.

Most recently this has been my social experiences. In treatment, as I mentioned, there is a lot of group therapy, so you get to know people really deep and really quickly. You are encouraged to shed your social boundaries and bare all for everyone to know. You share your life story, your traumas, fears, perceived inadequacies and are in fact disparaged by your treatment team if you do not. Throw that in with the fact that your eat with the same people 6 times a day and all of you are facing your number one fear when you sit down at the table. It brings you close to people not only exponentially quicker than how relationships happen in the real world, but also in ways that you don't find outside of the treatment bubble.

I have been struggling with this lately on a number of fronts and I have had a few social faux pas because of it. I am a chronic oversharer. One, I am probably the most authentic person I know, so when someone ask me a question, I feel like I am lying if I don't answer honestly. Friendly office banter just constantly feels like lying to me. The response to, "how was your weekend?" in the office world is not, "Well, I really struggled through most of my meals and then went to the gym for 2 hours because I was stressed about my alcoholic father being in the hospital for liver failure". No, the answer is, "great, how was yours?". And it makes me uncomfortable. In treatment we had weekend AND meal process groups. The answer "fine" would be met with a raised eyebrow and the question/answer, "You do know what fine means, right? Fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional!"

The other thing I am working through is who to share what with. I am learning (although through an extremely uncomfortable process of trial and error) that not all friendships are deep friendships. Some relationships are very surface level. I tend to be more comfortable in relationships where you can share the good, the bad, and the ugly with the other person. Where you talk about your thought process, anxieties, and what makes you tick. Apparently not everyone wants those types of relationships. I have learned there will be some people who I am more casually friends with. They are there to go out for cocktails with, talk about what happened at work, and what is on the news. It is just really difficult for me to suss out who those people are and which relationships it is okay to get deep in and which ones to remain in shallow waters.

Further more, it is difficult to navigate when and if to share all my bullshit. Like, how long do you know someone before you say, "so, I am really fucked up about food and it almost killed me. I am healthy in body now, but still struggle a great deal, so please bear with me". Virtually everyone in my life at this point (with the exception of my family and a few close friends who have stuck with me) has only known me since I have been weight restored. These are mostly people I work with and if the relationships remained work relationships, there would be no need to tell them. But, many of these work relationships have blossomed into friendships outside of work, so at some point, it comes up. There is only so long you can avoid all things food and drink related before you need to let someone know what's up.

And that part loops back around to the shallow/deep relationship conundrum. How much do people want/need to know? How much of my story do I tell them? For me, I want to tell them everything because not to do so feels somewhat like lying. Although my therapist says it's not and to share based on the questions I receive, it still feels like lying. I feel as though I told Nick how bad things got, but maybe wasn't detailed enough. I was upfront with him from the very beginning. And after 8 years he couldn't deal with it anymore. Maybe he didn't understand what he was getting into? Maybe he thought he could handle it and couldn't? To be fair, I got a lot sicker in Chicago away from my family than I ever did before that. As a result, I feel like being really honest with people may spare me the pain of them leaving me when they realize just how frustrating the eating disorder and some of the rigid behaviors around it can be (there is a whole other blog post coming about addressing my rigidity).

It would be so much easier for me to calibrate how I interact with different people and how to handle different types of relationships if people were just up front. Like, I saw a mother of one of my oldest childhood friends. She is not what one would call and emotionally intuitive or sensitive person, but in a way that lets me know exactly where I stand. She asked how my dad and brother were as a social nicety and I responded letting her know they were both really struggling and unhappy and that I was worried about them. Her response, "you could have just said fine". So, now I know with her how to respond when she asks how I doing - surface level and keep the conversation light and breezy. While it was a really awkward moment for me, I appreciate her being forthright and honest about what she means when she asks, “How is your family”.

Usually though, it isn't this clear-cut. And as someone who struggles with black and white thinking, I feel very lost in this space. It's kind of an all or nothing with me. I don't know how to walk the line between casual friends and deep connections. I tend to gear toward the deep connection side and then I have very uncomfortable moments with people who are just looking for light and fluffy conversations. Social interactions are so confusing!

#recovery #anorexia #eating disorders #rigid #treatment #therapy #sociallyawkward #friendship

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v-le · 6 years

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Kdrama: 그냥 사랑하는 사이 Review

Foreword: The entire composition of this “rant” took me about 5 months to complete. This drama changed a part of me. That is all I have to say.

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It hasn’t been a full 24 hours since I finished the last episode of this drama, and I may have not completely collected my thoughts yet, but I just want to make one point clear: it was a beautiful masterpiece that was simply too poignant, real, haunting, and raw for the world of kdramas.

This probably sounds like a terrible diss at the rest of the kdrama world, but to call this drama a kdrama, in my opinion, undermines its value. This show went beyond the boundaries of “normal kdramas” and brought us stories that are unpopular or just rarely addressed in the realm of kdramas in general.

To start off, I have a simple disclaimer, and it is that this drama is not for everyone. For some, it is too heavy, for others it is too slow. 그 사이 requires an open mind that is willing to absorb not only all the light, but all the dark, too. Because the brightest things tend to come out of the darkness.

Especially, towards the latter half of 그 사이, I began to cry really easily for every interaction that Kang-doo and Moon-soo had, for every event that made them a little more miserable or a little happier, for anything small or big in their lives. For the first time ever while watching something, I genuinely felt the pain of their worlds reflect onto mine, not because I necessarily related with them, but because their stories felt so real and tangible, that they were beginning to coincide with the stories of my own. Even up until the very end, although I thought it would be excruciatingly difficult for me to bid farewell to these characters and everything else they came with, I ended up feeling genuinely satisfied. Because, something about it, I didn’t feel like their stories actually ended there. It really does feel like Kang-doo and Moon-soo, and everyone else including Seo Joo-won, Jung Yoo-jin, Jung Yoo-taek, Ma-ri, Moon-soo’s mother, and Sang-man, too, are still living their lives somewhere far away from me right now in this moment. And to me, that was magical. Because whenever I finish a drama, especially a good one, I always felt extremely empty after its end. The withdrawal symptoms from amazing dramas are one of the hardest withdrawals to cope with. But after 그 사이, I of course felt regretful that it was over so fast, but I didn’t necessarily long to keep watching more and more, which probably sounds very odd, and maybe even bad.

But, no. Simply put, the way 그 사이 chose to wrap up these intricate storylines made everything feel overwhelmingly realistic. It wasn’t the ending of a story, but more like the closing of the curtains, the turning off of the cameras, and the end of the audience’s privileged priviness to their lives thus far. But the characters themselves, it didn’t feel like their stories ended anywhere close to there. I firmly feel like they are continuing. Just continuing.

How this drama managed to pull off such a clean finale, is something I will save to think about later. I know I am hopping around all over the place right now, but I felt that my post-finale thoughts had to be recorded promptly, before they drifted from me. Now, I want to back it up all the way to the end, to even before 그 사이 began to air. Oh, how grateful and glad I am to have noticed its uniqueness even prior to its actual premier. Of course, I didn’t exactly expect it to nearly change a part of me, but I had the slightest, really, just oh-so slightest inclination that this drama might contain all the elements that my heart has been searching for for so long.

After years of watching kdramas, one’s standards begin to naturally rise, and by today, I am definitely very picky with what I consider a “good” drama. Granted, everyone’s preferences are subjective, and my very own may be more specific than others’, but if anything, that probably enabled 그 사이 to rise in ranks faster than I ever expected.

Just from its posters, 그 사이 exuded a sort of ethereal calamity that most dramas don’t really go for these days. Everyone associated 그 사이 with the word “melo”. I am not sure if I completely agree with that description, because like the word “kdrama”, labeling 그 사이 as “melo” seems to undermine its value in a negative way. Melos have a stigma for being slow paced, dragged out, over-dramatic, and tear-filled for more than half the series. The most “melo” part of 그 사이 is the fact that its pace is definitely calmer; it didn’t rush into events and plot twists. But that is, in no way, a bad part of it. I will get back to its elements later. But trust me, slow added a gorgeous feat to 그 사이.

Going back to what I mentioned about the posters, specifically the one above, it felt like a movie. I had mentioned this to my friend, but upon watching the teasers and scrolling through a few images, the biggest thing that piqued my interest was that “it seriously looks like a movie!!!!”. Now, what I mean by “a movie” might sound pretty lame. However, personally, I am not a frequent moviegoer. In fact, I am barely a moviegoer at all. This is because I always felt overwhelmed by the end of movies, regardless of the genre. Movies were always so concise, impactful, and had the ability to leave a really strong, lasting impression within a really short amount of time. That sort of stuff always threw me off; it was just always too much for my brain to handle. Dramas and shows on the other hand, are way more subtle. I get to wean myself into the emotions and storylines, and there is an added level of depth simply due to the fact that they are longer than just an hour and a half or so.

And so, with 그 사이 giving me movie vibes, meant that I felt like it had plenty of room to hit me like a truck and leave me with a few scars, while at the same time, playing itself out as a 16-episode series. The prominent usage of cool colors, mellowed-down instrumental tones, wistful voiceovers, and a cityscape that wasn’t your classic, bright uptown Seoul, but instead a somber yet colorful Busan, all left a very strong, but refreshing first impression on me. It really looked like a movie. Its feats and details looked grand from the get go. It meant that I had a gut feeling that this show was really, seriously, going to move me. And it truly did.

initialization & continuation--

The very first episode, like most first episodes, introduced us to the one thing that this entire series basically revolves around: the mall collapse accident. I don’t want to exactly recap what the first few episodes were about, but more of what stood out to me that made 그 사이 feel much more special than anything else out there so far.

Moon-soo is a hard worker, balancing a lowkey, blue-collared “job” for her family, as well as working as a designer. Aside from the maybe flawed balance of “work” she has going on, 그 사이 decides to show us the mundane parts, too. Clips of her scrubbing the walls, sweeping the floors, building paper models, simply going about the daily rounds in her life. The initial portrayal of Moon-soo accomplished something that many dramas cannot really pull off, and that is that Moon-soo is just like you and me. Maybe not in the same exact occupational way, but she wakes up in the morning, maybe restlessly, maybe a little bit miserably, she does the things she needs to do, she tends to her responsibilities, and she simply carries on her with life. Of course, not everyone can relate to her on an emotional level, but in a way, we can relate to carrying on with our days no matter how hard it gets. We can see that Moon-soo isn’t that happiest soul in the world, but she isn’t oversensitive and extra mopey, either. She reflects a part of us that we can empathize with, to varying degrees.

The most prominent thing that I initially noticed about Kang-doo was his sharp tongue and the fact that he was always getting beat up and walking around with scars and blood stains. At first glance, many would probably assume that he was your classic, reckless bad boy that doesn’t give two shits about the world. And to an extent, that is true. However, we are also fully aware of the kind of ordeals he has gone through, and we could, or at least I could, sort of feel this underlying pain that he carries around within himself. The eternal scars that Kang-doo carries within himself still haunt me to this day. I can’t even begin to fathom, how hard it must be, to carry so much trauma within one’s own mind. I can’t even imagine how hard it must be to have your father die in an accident, to have been buried beneath rubble for 7 days, to have been stuck with a dead body, to have watched him die, to have your mother die promptly afterwards, to legitimately have schizophrenia due to the all these ordeals combined. In short, Kang-doo is fucked up in ways unimaginable to a normal person, but he hides it all away behind his cold eyes in a heavy layer of bruteness and disregard. From the very beginning, I could feel that Kang-doo’s character has so much complexity, to a point where I couldn’t even comprehend how deep the series would choose to dig out from him. I was excited, but at the same time, apprehensive to watch his story unfold. I knew I had to prepare myself for some massive waterworks. This, in itself, was something a drama had never presented to me with before. 그 사이, I could tell, would not be your cliche kind of romance story.

Even the opening, since the very first episode when I saw it, it pulled at something deeper than anything else. It is comprised of still frames of tragic accidents or sites of rubble and such. It is haunting for an opening and it definitely left a huge impression on me. It established a heavy aura that rarely any dramas dare to take on.

Another random but poignant point that stuck with me was the scene in which Halmoni was smoking, and she passes the cigarette to Kang-doo, who also takes a puff. We only see the back of their figures as they sit on swings, but when they turn their faces to the side, we can clearly see that it is the actors themselves smoking, and not some sort of lookalikes. This left a lasting impression because it almost felt shocking, to watch Jun-ho of 2PM smoke so blatantly like that. Korean media always heavily censors these kinds of things, even if it’s ingrained into their culture like smoking sort of is. Watching him smoke felt kind of scary, in a good way. It felt real, that yes, even someone who is a top idol that sings and dances and has to maintain some sort of pretty image 24/7, can and will smoke. So fun fact: kpop idols are humans, too!

The other characters as well, Wan-jin and Sang-man and Moon-soo’s mom, and Seo Joo-won, Jung Yoo-jin, Ma-ri and Jung Yoo-taek, and Halmeoni played their own special, but very symbolic role as 그 사이 progressed.

Since our introduction to Sang-man, we can get the gist that he is “not normal”. Once again, at first glance, Sang-man looks like a guy who is mentally slower than everyone else. But with time, we get to learn how much more mature he actually is than the rest of our crew, in his own special kind of way. Some of his simplest lines hit the deepest, and although he wasn't exactly my all-time favorite character, I can safely say that he was a hidden gem amongst this web of characters. He is extremely precious, and he shows the audience a beautiful side to being mentally “different”.

Then, we have Wan-jin who contributes to 그 사이 as a figure of immense support for Moon-soo. They share a friendship through their hardships and that in itself resonated really well with me. Throughout this series, we get to see small snippets of how the disabled are disadvantaged and disrespected, too. There is one scene that stands out to me, which is when Wan-jin tells her assistant (idr his name) that she doesn’t want his pity, but she simply wants to be treated like human, like everyone else. Because she is no less a person than anyone else is.

Even Ma-ri, head of the karaoke place that essentially “sells” girls for their presence: at first glance, she is your classic, rich, and manipulative female figure. But underneath that layer of presumable impurity, she is actually the victim of sexual abuse who has worked her way to her place and owes her life to the bravery of Kang-doo himself.

Furthermore, Moon-soo’s mother is more than a lamenting mother who has lost a child, but she is in particular, an alcoholic. Her relationship with her husband has gone sour and she barely manages to hang onto her sanity with the help of soju and Moon-soo by her side. Her mother portrays the agony of a child’s death in such a surreal way, that it only felt right for her to not be okay, in every way possible. She was a complete mess, but rightfully so. Her battle with alcohol didn’t end as just an unsolved addiction, but we were even able to see her enter rehab and conquer herself from within at the end of the drama.

Halmeoni played such an immensely pivotal role in this story. Her words of wisdom sat with viewers even weeks after she said them on screen. One of my personal favorites is “Just because someone is yelling louder doesn’t mean that they are hurting more”. Halmeoni played a sort of role that was like a guardian angel, who was present to give all that she could, until her own time was up. Her sharp tongue and snarky attitude made her likable in the most unique of ways. Because in the end, she was always sort of right. One of the hardest hitting things that Halmeoni talked about was when she was scolding Kang-doo’s sister, saying that it isn’t cigarettes nor cancer nor car accidents nor drugs that kill people. It is poverty. Because a lot of the times, poverty pushes people into these situations. And especially so, it is those in poverty that don’t have the resources to help themselves, in which they are left helpless to die. Halmeoni preached to viewers that poverty is the number one killer of humans. Her departure from the lives of our characters, and particularly Kang-doo’s, left a void that was meant for filling. I will never get over this, but I absolutely love how the show decided to handle her death. We didn’t see any funeral procession or all-black attire or wreaths or a nicely framed portrait. We just saw the aftermath, the broken pieces of Kang-doo and others, and we get to see how they pick themselves back up from all of it. It was a work of art, and it hit much, much, much more deeper than showing us the explicit parts.

All these supporting characters surrounding Moon-soo and Kang-doo indirectly dealt with things like mental health, people with disabilities, sexual assault, poverty, and even alcohol abuse. Aside from the obvious central theme of post-traumatic stress and remembering the forgotten, 그 사이 decided to touch upon these seemingly subtle, but very sensitive topics as well. All these characters were messed up or struggling in some sort of very real way. And it was so, so well done.

The next thing that I absolutely loved about 그 사이 was the progression of Kang-doo and Moon-soo’s relationship. It was simply drawn out so gorgeously. Of course, their fate began in a cliche sort of way, through the accident in which they both lost a loved one. However, this fact was only apparent to Kang-doo for a significant part of their progression. Moon-soo’s inability to remember the bits and pieces of the accident are compensated for through Kang-doo’s haunting ability to recall every miniscule detail, to an extent where he is mentally unstable. Time and time again, Kang-doo asks Moon-soo, what is the point of both of them suffering when only one needs to? This question was raised more than once during 그 사이 and I came to appreciate a sort of two-sided beauty to it. The fact is that, Kang-doo didn’t want another loved one to suffer, but Moon-soo didn’t want Kang-doo to suffer alone. Is it better to suffer alone and hold all the pain in? Or should you share the burden because it may be too much for one to handle alone? This is a dilemma that I resonate with in terms of my very own friends and loved ones. It is a question that we have all asked ourselves at one point. And it is a question that was at the forefront of Kang-doo and Moon-soo’s relationship.

Another thing with these two is that they came to love each other flawlessly. Although this came up before during Joo-won and Kang-doo’s conversation, when Moon-soo asks why Kang-doo loves her, he says “그냥” (just because). And that my friend, was the end of me. The End.

Of course, this definitely was not the only scene in which I cried, but it sure did release a flood of some sort. When posed with this question, the leads of many dramas don’t always list out amazing features of their significant other or anything, and they even say the similar things along the lines of “Do I even need a reason?”. But a one word answer, spoken so genuinely, so lovingly from someone who has gone through so goddamn much, has so much more meaning than a paragraph or an essay or even a book about how much he loves Moon-soo. It hits deeper than mundanely loving someone because they are pretty or accomplished or an amazing person. It touches upon a sort of love that only them two can feel and possess. Only them two, and no one else, will ever understand. And the feeling that this one-word description gave me, was one of a sort of invasion. I felt like I was intruding on something so precious and dear, the fact that Kang-doo spoke “그냥” in itself already felt like much, much more than I already should be allowed to know. I felt like anything further said would just tarnish the beauty of it all. That is simply how real and stunning their affection for each other felt.

Another point that many others could probably agree with is how their physical interactions exuded overwhelming chemistry out of the simplest actions. All they did was hold hands for a really, long freaking time, but it felt a million times deeper than just hand holding. Even when the two finally kissed, there was nothing extravagant about it. The two just genuinely wanted to be with each other. And that was enough. In fact, it was more than enough. I probably sound like a broken record by now, but these two felt so natural and organic together that I almost felt like I didn’t deserve to watch them be so cute and coupley and just in love. The surrealism was overwhelming and it is something that could only come about from stellar writing, and of course, the performances of Lee Jun-ho and Won Jin-ah.

Jun-ho absolutely blew me away. Watching him progress through this drama made me fall for him, hard. Honestly, I sort of want to not even talk about the fact that he is also an idol, too, because the stigma of idol-actors has no place in this drama. Jun-ho literally made himself into this person. Usually, when actors play a significant role, and even when they pull it off really well, I still tend to associate the actor himself with that one character, not in a bad way, but as a form of infatuation (e.g. Ryu Jun-yeol as Kim Jung-hwan in ‘88). Not to say that seeing that actor only reminds me of that one character, but more like, I always tend to see flecks of the character that I can never fully shake off no matter how hard I try.

But for Jun-ho as Kang-doo, this is not the case. I can separate the two, very clearly, too. Of course, as a person, they have completely different personalities and such, but its the fact that I can see Kang-doo existing in this world as well as Jun-ho the actor, idol, and human, too. Because that’s just how well he played it. And don’t even get me started on how multi-talented Jun-ho is as a person in real life, too. The fact that he can dance and sing super fucking well (with countless solo songs and albums to call his own) further blows my mind and raises him up to the top ranks of my favorite actors. There is nothing this guy can’t do. And I just want to mention, he isn’t particularly handsome or anything. To me, it is endless charms and abilities that make Jun-ho such a likable guy. I am absolutely proud to have watched him grow thus far.

As for Won Jin-ah, it was already hyped from the beginning that she was chosen out of “120 auditions” which is indeed a big feat, but I think just further adds to her credibility as an outstanding actress. She has such natural features of expression, and of course, that pure, innocent kind of vibe that is commonly taken for granted among actresses. I am going to be honest here, I am not as good at dissecting female performances compared to male performances, mostly because I am a female myself, but Won Jin-ah fit Moon-soo so well that I truly can’t see her as anyone else. I know that that kind of saying is a bit overused for many characters played by certain actors, but I truly do mean it in the same way I talked about Jun-ho as Kang-doo. She made herself into Moon-soo, in which I can firmly believe there is a Ha Moon-soo somewhere out there working at her mother’s bathhouse and making models, while there is also the actress Won Jin-ah doing her job.

It is just stunning, how intricate and detailed these characters were, and how well they came to life on screen. I can’t get over it, I just really can’t. If I daresay, it was almost as if I was watching a documentary. These two were that real together. It was heartbreakingly beautiful.

Which takes me into the angst realm of 그 사이. Many, many commenters of this drama mentioned how heavy it was, and how it was difficult to watch during hard times and such. But for me, although I admit I am a total sucker for dark and depressing shows anyway, its heaviness weighed me down in all the right ways. It tugged at the right corners of my heart, to a point where for the first time ever, I literally bawled my eyes out because of something beautiful.

It is pretty hard to explain, how I felt as I watched their lives unfold. The most prominent feeling, of course, was sadness and pain for when the characters themselves were in pain. Sometimes, I could feel the pain physically in my chest, and I wished until the end of the world that everything could be okay. But at the same time, when things just seemed to happen at the right moments in time, when their fingers seemed to intertwine at all the perfect angles, I weeped like there was no tomorrow because have you ever seen a couple so beautiful before? I haven’t, I really haven’t.

Anything that heals must have been hurt before, too. And that is Kang-doo and Moon-soo. They provide each other with a sort of healing that only they can feel and understand. While one radiates pain and suffering, the other absorbs it all and folds it with love into the layers that is their relationship. I agree to an extent that their occasional back-and-forth-ness got a little bit out of hand, but I also see it is as a sort of apprehensiveness. That these two loved each other so much, that they wanted to avoid hurting the other in any way possible.

So as much as their agony from the unfortunate events in their lives caused, and as much as they cried themselves, I cried along with them, the entire way through. And when there were those small, gorgeous moments of the light shining through the cracks for just a little while, I still cried. Mundane moments reflected something so much deeper than any viewer can feel on their own accord. Crying a shit ton during a show probably sounds like a negative thing, but for me, it simply shows me how much 그 사이 moved me. It moved my soul to peer into places deeper than the deepest places of my imagination. Even when I was simply walking to class in the middle of the day, I got choked up just thinking about Kang-doo and Moon-soo and how everything might unfold before them, for better or for worse.

Everything that happened between Kang-doo and Moon-soo felt so raw with emotion. Each line spoken to each other was purposeful and wistful. There really never was a dull moment between the two. The way in which some of the scenes were shot, the camera would shake in the slightest. It made it all look so brutally realistic, as if we were really there, privy to their thoughts and secrets and feelings.

그 사이 literally took over my life for the weeks that it was airing, and although this obsessive enthusiasm wasn’t exactly new to me (Healer & Reply ‘88 both accomplished this), it pushed me to ask why this show had the ability to do so. I honestly don’t think words alone will ever fully be enough to explain all of the pure beauty in 그 사이, but words are all I have at my expense.

silhouettes & hands & ice cream & carrots--

These are the small things that made this drama all the more ethereal. The cinematography and the way the sunlight hit the camera at certain angles, it literally printed itself onto my brain. These frames were magnificent and nearly struck a tear in my eye each time. The usage of silhouettes as well, was so, extremely well done here. I have no words.

One of the biggest things that also stood out significantly to me, although maybe not that big of a deal, but definitely worth a mention, was how well her hand fit into his. I have never felt such a swell of emotions through people simply holding hands. I swear to god, it is as if their hands were made for each other. Her hands are perfectly smaller than his, which means his covered them effortlessly. “You were born to be loved by me, right?” asks Kang-doo. Some of his lines were honestly so cringey, but Jun-ho pulled them off so well, they seriously sounded really natural to me. 100% cute and 0% corny.

And of course, the iconic ice creams. The fact that by the end of the drama, Moon-soo herself actually likes ice cream, too, can it get any cuter. To add to the cuteness, in real life, Jun-ho is ice cream obsessed, always posing with it, talking about it, even writing a song about it, and of course, eating it. I feel like the symbol of ice cream was sort of like Jun-ho’s piece to take from Kang-doo. It is like a part of him that he gave to his character, to fully make it his, but not exactly him.

The carrot is iconic because of the one line we can never forget. The line that Moon-soo meant, but didn’t really mean at the same time. The line that sputtered out of her mouth in a funny, exasperating way, but also in a meaningful, deeper, heartfelt way. Me too, Moon-soo, me too. I like a man that eats carrots, too.

thank yous & i love yous & geu sa-i--

This motif was quite a prominent one, but after thinking about it more, I started to realize the sort of message the writer and director were possibly trying to get at. The “i love you”s were touching and cute and everything, but the line(s) that got to me the most were not those three stereotypically monumental words, but it was the “thank you”s that cut deeper than most. How many dramas have you watched where the couple consistently thanked each other? And what kind of meaning did those thank yous hold? In 그 사이, Moon-soo and Kang-doo exchanged genuine, heartfelt thank yous.

The thing with these thank yous though, is that they have a multitude of meanings. “Thank you for picking me up today.” “Thank you for calling me.” “Thank you for being there for me.” “Thank you for loving me.” “Thank you for being you.” “Thank you for staying by my side.” “Thank you for being alive.” I could go on and on, but you get the point. These thank yous meant the universe to them, they relayed a sort of gratitude and passion and sentiment that only these two could feel and share. It all just felt so organic.

Next, I want to discuss the “trope” that 그 사이 utilized in which Kang-doo was fighting for his life towards the end of it all. This part was excruciatingly painful to watch, mostly because I honestly couldn’t tell how they were going to end it all. Nor could I really understand what sort of meaning each kind of ending could have. If they ended it happily ever after, why? And if not, what else were they trying to say? I just couldn’t tell.

Kang-doo was suffering from a failing liver, and I think it only made sense. From day one, he is depicted as reckless, especially towards his own body. A comment somewhere on Dramabeans stated it nicely: “Grandma kept telling him to stop taking [the painkillers] and to let his pain out instead, and with no granny to give him placebos, he ended up taking real, strong painkillers.” I feel like 그 사이 toyed with Kang-doo’s life as a sort of reality check, that shit goes on, no matter how good or bad everything seems to be turning out, shit still goes on. But by saving him, of course, maybe they are telling us that miracles really do exist. Most importantly, they don’t forget to remind us that these miracles may come at the expense of others’ own misfortunes.

And if anything, the dragging out of Kang-doo’s potential death left room for the supporting to characters to come out and shower Kang-doo with love. I can’t remember the quote exactly, but it was when the doctor asked Jae-young what kind of person her brother was, that so many random people were coming forward to readily donate a part of their liver as if it was no big deal. But Ma-ri countered wonderfully, that it is a serious decision to make, which is all the reason why it matters so much more. It was super duper heartwarming to see everyone try their best, in any way, to help Kang-doo and just have him live. I feel like giving us the most plausible hope of Sang-man specifically, was symbolic in which he, of all people, literally the most profound, but possibly most childish person out of our entire bunch, would be the one to save Kang-doo. But it also felt brutally realistic when they suddenly took him away as a donor because life just doesn’t get to work out perfectly like that all the time. But also with last-minute miracles, life kinda does tend to work out at the perfect times. Life is luck? Maybe.

But the ending scene, that goddamn, fucking gorgeous ending scene. I don’t even care if people whine all they want about how ending with a kiss scene is cliche and overrated, just leave me be to pick this one apart. In fact, the part that got me the most choked up wasn’t even the kiss itself (I mean, it partly was), but it was the dialogue, the eyes, the expressions, and the voiceover that got me wailing like a drowning beluga whale in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Like smack dab in the middle. Wailing incessantly. That was me.

Because here is the thing. First off, we pan into a frame that overlooks the Busan cityscape as the sun is setting, the bright houses are subtly flashing their hues, the horizon is glowing all sorts of reds and blues and pinks and oranges and purples, and our couple’s silhouette is situated perfectly at the center of it all. Literally, just that still frame of that scene itself, took my breath away. Stunning cinematography at its finest. Moon-soo tells Kang-doo that she loves him, which we haven’t gotten a chance to hear after all the times he’s already told her the same. But here she says it and her eyes are literally glowing, and his eyes are peaceful yet joyous at the same time, the most comfortable, and just the most at-home I have ever seen them throughout the entire series. And then there is a really long pause with no dialogue, no sounds, no loud blowing, just a blank, subtle, empty noise, as he cradles her face which somehow just manages to fit perfectly into his hand, and then Kang-doo’s voice breaks through the ever-so-slightly prolonged silence, and he narrates “Moon-soo loves me”.

I will repeat that just in case you couldn’t read it above: “Moon-soo loves me”.

The impact that this one simple line had was massive, colossal, unimaginably poignant, and it hit me. Deep. This one line, I feel, gave validation to this entire show, to all our hours devoted to watching it, to the characters’ actions, and most importantly, to Kang-doo’s life. Throughout the entirety of 그 사이, he is literally battling for his life, not only physically at the end, but emotionally and mentally as well. He very much lacked that spark of purpose, the thing that made him live. Not to denounce his worth and say that now his life only boils down to Moon-soo’s love for him. It’s more like, she gives him another beginning. Kang-doo states this eloquently when talking with Seo Joo-won on the roof about why he loves her. “Just because”. He continues, “I was a man that could only live by the day. But after meeting her, I was curious about tomorrow”.

And so “Moon-soo loves me” is so pivotal in which Kang-doo has mostly, hopefully relieved himself of all the shit and guilt and trauma and struggles that he has been fighting from within, and all he needs in his life to keep going is Moon-soo’s love. This line is followed up with a “The fact that we are alive… it is a relief.” How fucking beautiful is that.

And now, this is where I can come full circle to the title of this drama, “그냥 사랑하는 사이”. The English of this has been commonly translated as “Just Between Lovers”, but as you can tell since the beginning of this composition, I do not prefer to use that title, for several reasons. The main one is that, well, sometimes there are things in other languages that you really just cannot translate. “그냥 사랑하는 사이” is one of them. The meaning that it has in Korean, the feelings and implications that it carries with it, simply cannot be translated into the English language. If I wanted to try, it would be something along the lines of “just your average, simple relationship between two people that love each other”. Which still sounds pretty stupid in English, but with those extra strands of meaning, and even more added depth, is what the Korean title holds. Also, for simplicity’s sake, Korean phrases tend to be condensed into acronym-like words. In this case though, “그냥 사랑하는 사이 (geu-nyang sa-rang-ha-neun sa-i)” as an acronym-ish kind of word is simply “그 사이 (geu sa-i)” in which the “냥 (nyang)” and “사랑하는” (meaning “loving”) are removed to now signify something along the lines of literally: “that relationship” or “a relationship”. “그” is used as sort of an article, I guess, meaning “that” or “a”, or basically anything not really specific like his or hers or yours. **I have never learned Korean formally, and everything I’m saying is legitimately self-taught, so please don’t quote me on any of this, but I am just trying to get my point across as best as I can LOL** This all boils down to how, to me, “그 사이” is so simple yet touching and moving and so full of meaning, that it has this sort of immense, hidden beauty to it. Not only is it, in this case, a shortened version of “그냥 사랑하는 사이”, but “그 사이” as a phrase in any context is seemingly mundane, but carries so much more than meets the eye.

Just like, you know, a relationship. But not actually. The love part sounds simple enough, and it is. They love. But how they came to love, what it means to them, contains a meaning so deep and intricate that, maybe, just to make things easier and to even preserve its profound beauty that we will never understand, we will leave it as... just a relationship.

And I find that incredibly moving. I am struggling right now, to type down my feelings, but I hope that it is working to an extent. For the first time ever, a drama’s title actually seemed to fit, in less of a relevancy sort of way, but in much more of a meaningful, heartfelt way. The title of this drama is so short, so plain, almost boring-sounding, but it encompassed so much more than that. It encompassed an entire, full relationship of two people that come to love, or even more than love, but live, through pain and deaths and guilt and hardships and tears and growth and interdependence, and just each other.

There is an infinite amount of complexity hidden within the seemingly thin and obvious layers of 그 사이, and I think this is what is at the center of its ethereal beauty as a show for viewers to absorb. The words behind the characters’ actions and the events that occur carry immaculate weight, that it makes you question things, maybe even about your own life. This is a sort of art that I have never, ever seen a show demonstrate, and it completely took my breath away. It left a million pieces of my heart shattered on the floor. I literally feel like my life has changed, even if just a little bit.

Which now brings me to the things that this show wanted to tell the audience. When commenting about 그 사이, many people tended to say something along the lines of “It had great messages, it was so deep, etc.” and yes, I agree with that, too. But nowhere did anyone actually say what those messages were. I feel like there is an infinite number of lessons 그 사이 wanted to teach us, but I’ll try to point out the more noticeable ones first.

think about this--

Remember the forgotten.

Awareness is one of the strongest forces, because knowledge is power. I feel that, amidst people’s ordinary lives, we sometimes forget to remember those who simply never had a chance to live. We all live so voraciously and fervently, but it is important to be aware of that fervor that couldn’t be. Some people questioned the intent of leaving out the final product of the memorial that our two leads were working so hard on throughout the entire show. One commentator wrote simply: "In a way, it gave cadence to the idea that the memorial wasn't for the public or even us as the viewers. It belongs to the victims and the survivors of the tragedy." Very well articulated. Nothing more is needed.

Poverty kills.

I touched upon this one a little bit in the above text, but here, I’m just going to lay down Halmeoni’s entire spiel because no could have said it better than her.

Mental trauma is in its own way, more painful than any physical sort of pain.

Jun-ho demonstrates this so hauntingly and beautifully through his acting as the broken Kang-doo. In an interview that Jun-ho had after wrapping up filming, he says, "I didn't know what these people thought. It's something you won't know if you haven't been through it. You have to experience pain to know what it feels like. So I didn't even dare to try to understand them. I just used my own method of shutting myself away”. So much personal heart and character lies within those words, making his performance even more credible and noteworthy. Here is a line from the wise ol’ Halmeoni that hits pretty deep.

Never take life for granted.

I feel like this sort of message has such redundancy and insensibility in common-day life, but it is a reality that 그 사이 brings to life gorgeously. These characters are struggling in the depths of their own despair on a daily basis. But in the end, we get to see them prevail in some sort of way, with the help of each other’s sheer existence. In the same interview, Jun-ho says, “You don't take things for granted. Every little thing from the sun and wind, is important.” It is so poignant, to see the actor himself connect so deeply with the plot and depth of the story itself. The ending scene of 그 사이 paints this message in the air and the wind, from Kang-doo’s very own voiceover. He says, “Because we survived… it’s a relief”. And that’s it. That concludes the entirety of 그 사이. What huge punch to the guts that line was. It was so bold, heart-rendering, and just true. It was true, that the simple fact that we are living our own lives, sad or happy, good or bad, pain or not, we are alive, and that is all that matters in the end.

words & frames--

In addition, I want to include a few more lines (that are conveniently included within the beautiful OST MVs produced by El Music Studio) that struck huge cracks into my soul as they were spoken aloud on screen. Honestly, these lines sound much better in Korean because there is a sort of depth that an English translation isn’t able to capture, but that is okay. English will just have to do.

“Misery is just... being miserable.”

“Looking down from such a high place like this, people don’t really look like people anymore, do they?”

“Just because they are crying more loudly doesn’t mean that they are hurting more.”

“Him distancing himself that much shows how much he actually cherishes you.”

“And so, more than anyone else... we must be happier.”

An extra note about the OSTs: none of them stood out enough for me to add to my music library, not even Jun-ho’s very own (as much I love his gorgeous voice). However, I can confidently say that they added a haunting effect to many of the scenes and portrayals throughout the show. All the voices and quiet, heart-tugging melodies that meadered its way between the dialogue and echoes, created some intense emotions that probably would’ve been empty otherwise.

noticeable hair-growth & flaws & final wrap up--

One of the things that I really came to notice by the end of this show was that the characters’ hair had grown significantly. I mean, this is a given. Hair grows over time. Duh. But aside from the fact that it’s an obvious naturality. I found to love how it added to the realism in 그 사이. The fact that by the last episode, Jung Yoo-jin’s hair was almost reaching her shoulders, Seo Joo-won’s was creeping towards his neck, Moon-soo grew out her bangs and swept it to the side, and Kang-doo’s covered his eyes a little more than usual, was just a touching sight to take in. Look how human they are! Their hair grew properly, following the time sequence of the series itself. How beautiful is that. It’s such a subtle, minor detail, but to me, it really stood out as an aesthetic touch to its already-brimming-with-reality depiction that 그 사이 establishes.

I could be biased here, but I want to say that 그 사이’s biggest fault was that it used supporting characters like Seo Joo-won and Jung Yoo-jin. Not to say that their roles were completely useless or detrimental to the plot, but more like, their roles were underdone amidst the medley of such a strong leading pair mixed with the other complex, unique supporting figures. Although Jung Yoo-jin thankfully did not play your classic, snooty second female lead vying for the main man, Seo Joo-won very much fell under this category, in his own male-ish sort of way. I honestly did not really appreciate some of his actions and words. I felt like his character was lacking the depth and charm that the rest of the cast hones in on so well. The writers really could have given more to work with, but with such bland lines and cliche intentions, I just couldn’t find myself warming up to him. Aside from parts of Joo-won’s incompleteness as a character, I guess another flaw could be the classic kdrama tropes 그 사이 utilized. As minimal as they were, some were there regardless. The wrist grab, the mid-fall waist catch, the eavesdropping behind a wall, and all of that cliche mush you could find in 1897957 other kdramas, were definitely present in 그 사이. But whatever. It was fucking beautiful anyway.

Finally, I want to address the last part of this clean finale that 그 사이 managed with ease. In particular, it was the montage of the familiar locations that we have gotten to see since the beginning. Externally, it looked plain and a little bit sad and empty. But I feel like these stills offered us so much, because these locations were more than places that our characters frequented, but they are perpetual within their spaces of time. These places, those sort of “places that you can always go back to no matter what happens”. Places of rest, of heart, of everything else that has and could happen. At this point I’m basically just rambling, but my point is that. It was breathtaking.

Also, let us just take some time to appreciate these real Busan visuals.

To anyone that has read this far by now… Wow. Just so you know, you have read through an entire 5-month journey with my thoughts LOL. It is almost May now and my life has been too much of a mess for me to be able to post this within one sitting.

Many days have passed since I last finished this drama and wiped my tears off my face and blew my nose into a soggy tissue and gazed awestruck into the beautiful skyline on my laptop screen. But my feelings remain the same, and this series has held such a special place in my heart. When talking about Korean dramas with friends or acquaintances I try to sound nonchalant about 그 사이. Because, you know, it was just that one show that lowkey changed my life. 그 사이 made me feel things and taught me things and provoked thoughts that no other show ever has in my life. I really could care less about what the general public had to say about 그 사이. I just know, I loved it with all my heart and soul. Thank you for everything, 그 사이.

#그냥 사랑하는 사이 #just between lovers #rain or shine #korean drama #kdrama #review #lee kang doo is my bb 5ever #can they just get married ok #this drama stole a piece of me #love times infinity #i have exhausted all my words #see yall in my next rant (":

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oiseaux-de-proie · 3 years

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It’s the end of the weekend. I go back to work tomorrow and I am up too late because daylight savings is messing with me- along with the fact I was just so exhausted today I slept a lot of the afternoon.

I did not sleep very well last night as I kept waking up in a panicked state. The previous day was not too good either in this regard. My anxiety is increasing and I am realizing due to recent things with my parents and other stuff that what I am going through right now, mentally, when I get like this is emotional trauma reactions. It feels like this part of me just switches on that is not me and I can’t control it- the scared animal reptilian side of my brain, horrible consuming childhood fear, and I feel small and alone and like I am just choking down my screams while I am huddling and hyperventilating because I cannot bring myself to do anything else. All I want when I get like that is just for somebody to be there with me, but I am too terrified to leave my room, and I feel this deep despair and sense of being alone because I feel like nobody is there or can be there and I have been forgotten. It makes me intensely defensive with Lost and Ishmael and often makes me want to lash out irrationally. I feel this immense sense of anger and fear and bitterness and I become blind to everything else. I’m just drowning in pain.

And then a hour or a few hours later I mostly snap out of it and feel like a completely different person. It is scary, like flipping a switch, and it happens more starkly lately. It has been hard to understand and identify things previously but I think space from my parents and the setting I was in during other past events has helped me to see more clearly that I have plain old abandonment and trust issues deeply engrained in me since childhood- and sometimes things trigger me that cause me to spiral into that young child “I need mommy and daddy but they won’t help me” sense of horror I felt strongly a long time ago.

Not being able to talk to Lost much lately has been something slightly triggering me I think, or rather when I get triggered I hyper focus on it- I am not sure. The abandonment and attachment issues are very clear because I just feel so anxious and paranoid in ways that do not make sense, and then I feel like I am lashing out at her even though I know it is just because our schedules are wildly different and she has as much going on as I do if not more. And then I feel extreme anger at Ishmael too, or despair for reasons I don’t understand. These intense emotions latch onto everyone I know and make associating with them painful and and difficult and I don’t know how to talk to them anymore- not even Lost.

I think this weekend the intensity of it is just more so due to seeing my younger sister on Friday. I had a therapist appointment and I took her to dinner afterwards since I was in town and I heard through her some things going on with my family. What I half expected but is still very painful is that my parents have basically rejected and painted me as a black sheep and really do not care about me at all. My dad will not listen to me anymore, even if I just want to talk things out. There are a good number of details but the moral of it all is that I clearly see how much my parents really really do not care about me and never really did. They will never acknowledge how they have hurt and tormented me over the years. They are just focused on what me and my siblings mean to them as symbols or placeholders for what kids are supposed to be to them. My dad vowed to me he would not let what happened to my older sister happen to me and that he would draw the line there, but no, he didn’t, it’s been done to me and he is doing the exact opposite- just letting it happen and even turning against me. I was very close to my dad previously, though our relationship is strange and complicated, and in spite of everything up until now I’ve been holding onto some sort of slight hope I could get through to him and at least reach our relationship being tenable so I would not lose him. Now I know that he has just betrayed me and I can never trust him. So I have to close the door- on them, my mom especially because she still singles out and seems to hate me for reasons i really don’t understand. There is nothing I can do. There is no way I can have a relationship with my parents. I did not really understand that with that much clarity until now and it is hard to express the sinking feeling I have.

I will also need to draw boundaries with my younger sister because driving by my old house and her mentioning my parents is very obviously triggering me. I was sort of blank on Friday but the past couple of days I have just been a mess. I know I need to move on but the pain of it all is more deeply engrained than I would have previously recognized. I had once convinced myself my parents don’t matter at all to me which is far from the truth.

Anyways I guess that is most of what I have to say right now. The one thing i think is good about recognizing how so much of my moods and behavior are trauma-processing influenced is the fact that it means it’s not just me and my normal state. It’s something I can work through, even if I’ve been in this state for years already. I really hope things can begin to really change.

#bleh #mar2021 #childhood trauma #parents #abandonment #blehelehehkjkhaa #AAAAAAAA

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barebonesblonde · 4 years

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Lust, Laughter, and the Land of Oz

Remember what things were like before COVID? Yeah? No? Because I do, just barrely. Here’s something i wrote just before it hit, in February, just three months before i got sick -- i was feeling pretty good mentally, too. Hadn’t had to take my anti-psychotic in about 4 months, and was still happily in my I’m-single-for-almost-four-years-and-don’t-want-to-change-it mode.

I know i’ve been bitching pretty incessantly for the past few posts about this ”relationship” that ended recently, but the fact is, things never got the chance to get physical (COVID, hello) so i suppose technically, i never broke that 4-year streak. ANYWAY. Here’s where my head was concerning sex, love, and all that nonsense before the shit hit the fan. Since we can’t backdate things on here, i’m just copying it from my Wordpress blog and throwing it up here with a long-winded explanation before i move on to other subjects, and close the book on All Things Romantic for awhile. I just wanted to post this to remind myself where i was coming from before things took a wrong turn, now that i’m feeling better;

Which is that sex is perfectly good and fine and healthy, but i suck at the whole relationship thing, and i need to remember that before getting involved with anyone (particularly since my ASPD -- not so much my SZA -- crap tends to impede my judgement in that regard, let’s be honest. I am often attracted to unhealthy types, and that’s not good for me, as i’m working hard on getting better, not feeding the Beast).

What this shows me -- and reminds me of, is that i’ve been attracted to happier, healthier types lately. And that’s really a good thing. While things may have ended on an unpleasant note with this last one, and he definitely wasn’t the healthiest guy in the world, he was FAR from abusive and horrible. He was just immature and flighty and a host of other things, but not the usual fare i tend to go for (i.e., somewhere in the neighborhood of my diagnosis, but the evil, ultra-narcissistic, super fucked-up, unmedicated/untreated version; either that, or just a completely useless, quasi-depressed child with substance abuse issues. Take your pick. Now that i think of it, He might have fit into that 2nd category...).

So, with no further ado...

Feb 5, 2020 -

Sexual ambivalence when you’re single is such a useless, silly, obsessive state. Once you’re there, it’s so impossibly difficult to get out. Like when you’re a kid, at the bottom of the slide, trying to climb up to the top when you’re wearing only socks and have a case of the giggles. You’re just going to keep sliding back down again. And the thing of it is, you really don’t mind…except for the fact that you never get a really good slide in, because you never quite make it all the way to the top.

Are my metaphors getting too convoluted?

Bear with me, here…

It’s been nearly four years, with the exception of one ill-advised and poorly executed fumble into one-night stand territory two summers ago, since I’ve had sex; and I almost don’t count that time, since I was inebriated, didn’t come, and the guy was so tedious and odd in his behavior – what with his bemoaning the “perfect” ex-girlfriend one minute while we’re in bed, then telling me he can’t believe someone as beautiful as me would sleep with him the next (not to mention the consequent bizarre stalker-like behavior that continues to this day) that I almost feel like I can erase it from the board because the universal system of checks and balances surely indicates that I get to start from scratch when it comes to that one. Right?

Anyway, the point is it’s been a long time. Previous to that, I was in an abusive relationship, and the last time he fucked me, it was so angry that I felt like he was trying to exact some kind of bizarre, bad porno film-esque revenge on me, so that barely counts in my book either. So I’d say I’m about due for a toe-curling orgasm, or a hundred. Like, on a regular basis, from whomever the fuck I please, whenever I want, for the rest of the year. Or, month? How many orgasms are a reasonable amount to expect in a month’s time? I’ll be damned if I know – it’s been far too long since I’ve had that sort of sex life. Which is stupid, since that used to be my modus operandi.

I’ve always known how bad I am at relationships. I’ve been broken in that regard from the word Go. There are any number of reasons I’ve stayed single for the past three and a half years – and indeed, plan on staying that way. I could go into detail, which I have in previous posts, but the heart of the matter is a woeful lack of judgment and boundaries on my part. My taste in men is so bad, it’s actually notorious amongst my circle of friends. When I haven’t seen someone in awhile, a common question is;

“So, you’re not…dating anybody…are you?”, accompanied by a worried expression.

I truly am that bad at choosing men to be in relationships with. The more violent the nature, the more obsessive, and the longer the prison term the better has been my motto (and yes, there have been one or two exceptions. But literally, just…one or two). And so, I prefer to keep a safe distance from the whole mess. Over the years, in fact, I’ve come to realize that I’m much better off when I’m single. This has always been the case, all the way back when I was in my twenties, and ostensibly not yet jaded.

I’m OK with this. Because I’m not the type that needs to be in a relationship to be “complete”. I don’t get lonely, in that sense. I have friends. I might have done occasionally when I was younger, and made more wholeheartedly pathetic attempts at being in “real, grown up relationships” that would last, but anyone who’s known me for long knows I’ve always been happier single.

Sex was never really a problem – I got that whole thing sorted out early on. After some childhood trauma and a teenage rape, I set out to fix myself of the abject terror, pain, disassociation, and ultimate inability to feel a thing. I did that with a series of handpicked lovers (several of them one night stands). Sort of an immersion therapy deal. I figured out how to ask for what I needed, and how to get out quick if it was obvious the guy wasn’t interested in getting me off (or turned out to be dangerous). And now I love sex. Which has the unfortunate effect of making some men think you love them. I’m not sure how that works, but there it is. And fuck, is it annoying. The way some people confuse lust and love has always been astounding to me. I tried explaining this problem to some hippies I knew years ago, and they looked at me like I was some kind of evil succubus. I guess that whole peace and love thing didn’t allow for the finer points of fucking…

Anyway, I spent so much time figuring out how to be good at sex, but I hadn’t the first clue about being good at relating to men in the context of a relationship. How to draw boundaries. How to stay safe emotionally, and even physically. And time and again, it’s been disastrous.

But, as for male friends, I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of guys. I picked a group of really stand-up men. And with the exception of a couple whom I’d fuck on occasion, on and off over the years (because they didn’t ask anything more of me, or get things twisted), they weren’t guys I was crossing that line with (well, except for the one time I did, and that just ended up as you’d expect – disastrously. And that was my fault, because I was grieving my son, and was a huge mess). My guy friends are all intelligent, fun, cool, creative people who genuinely care about me. They call me on my bullshit, and regularly tell me how intelligent, talented, and beautiful I am, when I feel anything but.

So…why do I make such terrible choices when it comes to romantic relationships? Well, if I knew that, we wouldn’t be here now would we? Actually, I do have a pretty good idea why – and of course it’s all down to being brought up in a house full of mental illness, abuse, and the resulting lack of boundaries and high tolerance for chaos/ideas of what’s “normal” that skew my perceptions in the relationships department. And that’s a Hell of a lot harder to fix than sex.

So, I stick to sex.

Or, at least I did. But, things have been off for a few years now. Even before the abusive relationship 3 1/2 years ago, it’s been like I’ve been dead inside since all of the death and loss I’ve endured, really. Ever since then, I really just haven’t had the life force it takes to have a healthy libido. Which sucks. Losing such a huge part of who you are because you’ve lost people you love is like walking around with a huge hole in the center of your chest. And it’s a long, slow climb back to being a whole person again.

Then the real surprise is finding out that, after you’ve worked through all that grief, you aren’t at all the same person you used to be.

Fast forward to two weekends ago.

So there I am, sitting at a local haunt, listening to my girlfriend M tell me that the bartender is flirting with me (for the 47 millionth time) and aren’t I going to do anything about it?

M is my opposite in so many ways – the brunette with the wild sex life and raging libido, the Lonely Hearts Club girl just looking for love, to my misanthropic, stoic, cold, Blonde lce Queen that I’ve become. We make a great pair. She’s always got some guy waiting in the wings, whilst I’m forever fending off her offers to hook me up with “this great guy she knows”.

I tell her she needs to be less dependent on men for her sense of self worth; that there is joy in being alone and getting to know oneself. And she tells me I need to stop being so damn untrusting – that I need to let a little bit of fun and risk into my life, that I’m too young to be so frigid. We’re both right, of course.

For months, she has been the voice of my deadened, dormant sex drive – like the insistent little breath of spring to my boring, snow-bound, sexless, Persephone alter-ego — stuck underground with my shitty husband Hades (that’s how I anthropomorphise my sex drive for the past few years), who just wants to hang out with the souls of the Dead, watch football and drink mead.

But, this time, for some reason, I listen. This time…instead of rolling my eyes at her and commenting that he’s too young, or too skinny, or too shaggy, or too cheerful, or whatever, I instead notice he’s actually pretty cute, and that he’s looking at me with what can only be described as unmistakable desire as he approaches me with liquid brown eyes and a drink, and sets it down in front of me. Then he knocks M’s glass, spilling some of her water onto the bar, then immediately cracks the snappiest joke, which makes me laugh so hard I actually snort. Then he turns to me and asks if there’s anything else I want.

And it’s then I realize – my entire body has that tingly feeling I used to get as a kid from when people would play with my long hair, when he looked at me just now; I am like a cat, internally all langorous, and purring…

And I think, Yes, yes there it is. I want him.

And it may not ever happen – because I can’t think that definitively yet. But, yes. I want. Maybe it will happen with him, or maybe with someone else. The possibilities are…pretty much wide open. The point is, I actually, really, truly feel Lust for someone for the first time in years.

Over the summer, I wrote about that jerk I knew from my old bartending gig who walked me home, then grabbed me and kissed me – I wrote how it was actually a pretty great kiss, but there was no liquid melting of my insides, and I was drunk (actually not how I usually go about these things), he wanted me to invite him in but I was like fuck no…and then the next time I saw him he was a little shit to me because I wouldn’t fuck him that night. Well, that all flashed in front of my eyes for a moment as I sat there with this cute, scruffy guy staring at me with his big, doe eyes and then I remembered;

“Yeah, but you didn’t want to fuck that guy in the slightest…so your instincts were spot on”.

And suddenly it’s like that moment when Dorothy steps out of her house in Oz, and everything is in Technicolor after a lifetime of boring Sepia. I notice the curl of hair falling into his eyes as he watches my fingers wrap around the glass. I notice how his breath hitches a bit as I lean towards him and bring the scotch to my lips. I notice that I feel every muscle in my stomach and thighs when I shift my weight on the chair, and the slight burn of the liquid as it moves down my throat. Little things. Mostly I feel that sensual self awareness that comes from knowing someone’s eyes are on me – eyes that I actually want to be watching me.

“I’ll let you know,” I tell him.

“I’ll be right here,” he says, a kind of goofy lilt to his voice.

Which is perfect, because I don’t want this to feel like a big, serious moment; this reawakening of my finally, finally feeling sexy again after so long. It should be a little silly, a little lighthearted! In fact, that’s part of what does it for me. The few, rare times I viscerally connect with someone, it’s because they’ve made me laugh first. And I realize that’s why I’m attracted to this guy…because he did something completely goofy yet sharply funny (a woefully rare combo) earlier and made me laugh – like, really laugh, from down in my belly. Had, in fact, done so several times throughout the evening. He has, actually, this kind of upbeat, silly but witty, whipsmart vibe about him that just positively reeks of happiness. It is utterly charming, and so, so very sexy. And a far cry from the usual, darkly depressive brooding but witty types I usually go for.

And that told me something even more important – that I’ve finally come back enough from the dark where I can appreciate a person like that, who emits so much joy, can exude such a sense of life, and who can make me really, really laugh. Laugh without irony.

From there, all the rest follows. And maybe, there’s hope for me yet.

#aspd #crazy love #covid crazy #brain cooties #take your meds

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