Rolan didn’t realize he loved the other two until it was too late. Until it had been years since they’d spoken, even longer since they’d seen each other. And when he realized, he didn’t know what to do. How to deal with the fact that he loved two people he could barely even say he knew anymore. He didn’t understand how he could love concepts, memories filled with laughter and affection and the always somewhat present smell of smoke.

But he did. He loved them. Felt his heart skip a beat when a girlfriend’s dyed blonde hair momentarily made him mistake her for Kian. His body warmed up when she spoke of a fantasy story she’d read, explaining all the little details that Rolan would remember for the rest of his life in the same exact way that Rand would. When he heard a song on the radio, and his first thought was still “Kian would like this”. When the smell of smoke and alcohol and weed that always clung to Rand’s attic bedroom never quite left him.

Kian knew he loved the other too far too early, before anything could be done about it. When their biggest worries were still exams rather than missing sisters or corpses that nobody else could see. And he hated himself for it, hated how quickly and easily his love turned from something acceptable into something they’d hate him for. Hated how no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get rid of the love he felt for them, how each time he hugged or just sat near them it would feel forbidden, like a secret they all had to keep but only he knew about.

But he couldn’t stop the way he felt. How his heart hammered in his chest when Rand rested his head on his shoulder because it was still normal to him. How his body burned when Rolan helped him bleach his hair during the early hours of the morning, talking about everything and anything to pass the time while they waited. How he mourned the friendship he still had with Rand, now tainted with lies because that was the only way Rand could still care for him. How he still felt such a desperate need and pain when yet another call to Rolan went unanswered, his words and pleas falling to nothing as he knew the other would never hear them anyways.

Rand only understood that he loved them when they were gone. He realized with fear and pain and yerning that the betrayal and loneliness he felt when they left wasn’t born just from his best friends leaving him behind. And he didn’t know how to feel, how to deal with it. Just like he didn’t years later, when he was left behind again, both of them gone somewhere he couldn’t bring himself to follow, only remembering how he felt when Rolan Deep and Kian Stone were both nothing but memories a few people held and empty graves he left flowers to.

He loved them for the rest of his life. His heart still skipped a beat whenever he passed by Rolan’s home, like he was still expecting the other to sneak out of the back door and join him in whatever he was doing. His body always felt cold and hollow, like something was missing, whenever someone touched him with the same care and gentleness that Kian always had. He locked up in terror whenever he heard the clicking and buzzing of ordinary bugs that had seemingly overtaken Galloway since the hive died. He screamed when the phantom flesh and blood that forever coated his barely living body wrapped around him tighter in a mockery of an embrace.

Rand loved the other two for the rest of his life. And he hated it more than anything.

Whenever I am critically ill (as happens increasingly frequently these days) I lapse into a sort of delirious dreamstate as my body & brain start shutting down and I stop being able to process information normally

Roommates & caregivers who have watched it happen say that it just looks like I've died, I go glassy-eyed and limp and unresponsive, and turn pale blue as my vital signs tank. But internally I have intensely vivid hallucination-visions the whole time, and when I wake up in the hospital or wherever after being revived I remember them very clearly even while having no memory of what was actually physically happening to me while I was having death-visions

It's hard to describe the experience because it's so unlike anything else ("Jessica has a forehead scar from the bottom of the pool / I ask her what drowning feels like / she says not everything feels like something else"). I meet God and God is a flock of vultures with their beaks in my intestines and I know with more certainty than I've ever known anything that everything is going to be okay when they finish eating my organs. I walk through a field of bones and white trees and the sky is fractured into a thousand different shards of light and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I exist in every moment of my whole life simultaneously, re-experiencing it in vivid sensory detail, and I am wholly present and aware and undistracted in all of them, and each moment carries on in perpetuity. Will happen & happening & already happened. Time and space are no longer relevant concepts. Often there's singing, not like a heavenly choir but like a group of friends drunk and raucous belting out karaoke together, and sometimes distant marching band cadences I can feel vibrating through my sternum. I doze at a cozy house party in a room full of people who love me and I know that when I fall asleep someone will carry me down the hall to bed. I open a rusty farm gate and walk into an empty fallow field and feel calm like I've never felt before. I bleed and bleed and bleed. I look up and the night sky is white with stars. I know how everyone I love is going to die and I know I will be there when they do. I open my mouth to speak but the only thing I ever say is "I don't understand, but I can learn if you will teach me", and I still don't really know why. And then eventually I stabilize medically and wake back into normal perception and just have to keep living my mundane daily life making small talk with the Walmart cashier like I didn't just touch the other side of death.

I don't know if I actually believe that I am seeing something cosmic and true or if it's just random noise my brain generates when sufficiently deprived of oxygen. But the sense of total peace and happiness I always feel is reassuring to me. Up until the point I fall into unconscious dreamstate, illness is miserable and excruciatingly painful and panic-inducing. Whether you are afraid to die or not there's no way to stop that raw animal terror when you feel your heart stutter and your lungs seize. But it's nice to know that at the end of the final terror there will be good dreams. It's nice to feel certain that I am not going to die afraid

MEDICATE MEDITATE SAVE YOUR SOUL FOR JESUS THROW A PUNCH FALL IN LOVE GIVE YOURSELF A REASON DONT WANNA DRIVE ANOTHER MILE WONDERING IF YOU’RE BREATHING SO WON’T YOU STAY WON’T YOU STAY WON’T YOU STAY WITH ME!! DON’T LET THIS DARKNESS FOOL YOU ALL LIGHTS TURNED OFF CAN BE TURNED ON I’LL DRIVE I’LL DRIVE ALL NIGHT!!! I’LL CALL YOUR MOM!!’

Colin Hanton played for the last time with the Quarrymen at Finch Lane bus depot. This gig had been arranged for them by the father of George Harrison who was a bus driver himself. It was in January 1959. According to Colin they had been asked to play two sessions and the manager from the Pavilion Theatre in Lodge Lane was in the audience to audition the Quarrymen for a spot in his theatre. The first session went down quite well with the audience but after this word got around that there were free pints of beer available for the group at the bar. The whole of the group were therefore pretty drunk by the time it came to doing the second set. John and Paul who were "under the influence" began to take the mick out of George Harrison, which did not go down very well with George's parents who were sitting in the audience. Afterwards the manager of the Pavilion spoke to the group back stage and started to criticize their performance, saying that if they wanted a resident spot in his club then their behaviour and attitude would have to improve one hundred percent. John did not take very kindly to being told what to do and told the manager to "get lost". According to Colin, on the bus home afterwards Pete Shotton and Colin had a row with Paul. After that fiasco Colin never continued with the group and apparently he was never asked to return.

John, Paul & Me Before the Beatles: The True Story of the Very Early Days, Len Garry (2014)

»I sincerely hope the lines drafting out your future are stable lines, ascending upwards.«

you know what? I am just tipsy enough right now to be super earnest on the internet, and I have to say, I love the Dreamling fandom so much. the kindness and creativity and diversity and joy I have found over the last couple of months has been genuinely lifegiving. for a lot of boring personal reasons I've been spending extra time online recently and I'm so glad that I found you bunch of weirdos as a result. y'all have fed a creative urge I didn't realize I was missing. and I fucking love you all for it.

I went to a bar with a lot of dancing (I danced a little bit mostly sat) and found a $20 on the floor so my second drink there was free :)

only a few hours off my phone got me into: hugging and being hugged by more people; taking more time to exchange a few words with whoever runs into me; appreciate literally too little and apparently insignificant things; realizing my life can't be taylor swift centered and it's okay if it's not; realizing there are small businesses, little activities, small owners, small producers, small creative surroundings that are not a part of the capitalism we live in but are still very very worth it and that it's okay to enjoy what no one knows, just because it's not widely known, just because it's not famous, it doesn't mean it's lame... It can mean the opposite sometimes !!!

I still can’t believe Allu went to Oulu 🤧 and how he wanted everyone to know he’s been there (with Olli) for 3 days already 😭😭💞

Yessss and for Olli's birthday too?! It's too soft 🥺💕 I hope Aleksi is still in Oulu with him and that they had a nice day 💞

I'm also really curious as to what they're actually on to 👀 Aleksi tagged the band account in his story yesterday so it seems it is something for BC after all, but clearly it doesn't involve the whole band... 🤨 so the conclusion we can draw from this is that they really just wanted to come up with something as an excuse to spend more time together after the tour, because they couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing each other until maybe after the holidays 😭💗

I need Aleksi to do a stream asap to answer all the questions I've had since he last did (like how come he has apparently taken up smoking all of a sudden 🤨) and I just want to know what's up in general 😩

There are two wolves inside you. One wants to write the bitb boys having cute fluffy romance time together because god damn it they deserve it. The other wants to cause them all horrific pain and make everyone who reads your work cry for “character development”. You are me.

the past two nights i've a recurring/continuation dream. sometimes i get recurring themes or settings (i feel like it's happening more the older i get) but this one is a new specific thing and suddenly i have it two nights in a row.

for a while i've been having the recurring theme of being in an airport/being late for a flight/having a layover, etc. i actually remember specifically that this started just about 2 years ago. but the last two nights have been about where i've landed but my suitcase has gotten lost and it had like all my clothes in it since i went on a long trip, including sentimental pieces. it's definitely specifically just clothes though, for some reason all my other stuff (including for some reason a bunch of my stuffed animals?) were separate and I still had those bags. but i'm just continuously sobbing from being sad and being stressed out about losing my suitcase; so much of the dream is just focused on how i cannot. stop. sobbing.

and then the next day (this is where my dream picked up last night) was about trying to get back to the airport to go to the lost and found (or whatever the area is that you go when your bags are lost), but it's one of those stress dreams where you're late and you can't get yourself to leave; things keep coming up and you can't finish all you need to do and you're just soooo late and it's so frustrating but you just can't seem to get out the door. that was happening when i was trying to leave for the airport partially because i was still crying so much that it was incapacitating, plus i was also still needing to pack again for some reason? but fuck i just felt the sadness so much and it was all so frustrating.

i'd rather have the stress dreams of my teeth falling out... those just make me instantly lucid now since i've had them so often that i just know it's a cue i'm dreaming lol. god forbid all my teeth ever actually do fall out lmao... i think there'd be more pain though. i've had pain in dreams but actually haven't had pain with the teeth-loss dreams.

all my other recurring themes/settings are either sad or dystopian or apocalyptic too. so it's just, ya know, so fun.

So I’ve been calling Ficino a wee magician and I’ve got it wrong—he was what we would now probably call a witch

back at my insane boy friendships <3

you yourself suggested that people defaulted to the wilburys because they “don’t understand wings”. where does that mindset come from? why is someone preferring an entirely different band to you a default because of their members, not a genuine enjoyment of their music and collaboration? don’t people listen to wings because they were brought there by their love for Paul? I like wings too and I got there because of Paul. why isn’t it similarly valid for people to be brought to the wilburys because of their love for George, or Roy or Bob or Tom or Jeff? why is it automatically assumed it’s because of hate for one of the other members instead of love for the one? it’s a sad suggestion honestly. can’t George fans be driven by love for him the same as Paul’s fans are by love for him?

i hear you but it's simply not that serious lmao </////3 i also love traveling wilburys, i was joking in my tags (but wings is better IMO)

why is it automatically assumed it’s because of hate for one of the other members instead of love for the one?...can’t George fans be driven by love for him the same as Paul’s fans are by love for him? - this is referencing the last anon that messaged me. yes, of course they can be. i wasn't 100% agreeing with that anon, i said i could be the case. and it probably is the case for some fans, but YMMV, of course

I am. Take care.

Also you have no clue how happy this made me it was so stupid but very nice

Ok but previous joking aside how did last night go in the creeper house go? Hoping the vibes seriously improve. And quickly.

honestly my social life is booming because i'm trying to never be at home