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barbarianprncess · 3 years

Text

of these rushing waves

(you’ll be the oxygen i breathe)

A week after the Titan War, Annabeth is drafting a temple to Hestia when the weight of being the only person in the world that knows Percy's weak spot hits her.

Like. Really hits her.

(or 2k words of annabeth discovering what she means to percy)

(the biggest of shout outs to @timelesslords for helping me make this coherent, and to @colorguardfreak97 for encouraging me every step of the way. enjoy <3)

read on ao3

A week after the Titan War, Annabeth is drafting a temple to Hestia when the weight of being the only person in the world that knows Percy's weak spot hits her.

Like. Really hits her.

And after about a day and a half freaking out about what it means and what she should do about it, she decides to go talk to him.

(Because not talking to him about what was bothering her led to the worst year of her life. Progress.)

They’re sitting on the beach, sharing Percy’s too small blanket- they both know he has bigger ones, but it’s an excuse to be almost on top of each other. She’s curled up resting on his chest, and he has one hand secured on her waist tracing patterns on her thigh, the other tangled in her curls. They watch the sunset and Annabeth is almost perfectly content.

Almost.

“How did you know?” The words tumble out of her without context.

He shifts to face her and raises an eyebrow. Annabeth finds it unfairly attractive.

“Know what?”

“When you told me your weak spot. How’d you know I could handle it?” The unspoken ‘because I don’t think I can handle it ’ must be apparent enough because Percy’s expression softens.

“Have you been worrying about this?”

Annabeth’s first impulse is to brush it off and change the subject. But then she hears Silena’s voice in her head: tell him how you feel. So she ducks her chin and forces the words out.

“Well yeah, I mean it kinda freaks me out that I just have this power over you. I don’t trust myself.”

Percy tilts her chin with featherlight fingers and an unadulterated fondness her seven year old self would kill to be on the receiving end of.

“I trust you enough for the both of us,” he said.

“How are you so sure about this?” ‘How are you so sure about me?’

He gives her a ‘duh’ look that she’s so used to giving him, it's a bit shocking to be on the opposite end of it. She decides immediately she doesn’t like it.

“You know why.”

“No, I don’t, hence me asking you why.”

She's watched Percy's face morph to pure amusement. He chuckles, and hesitates. “Well, because...”

He trails off clearly thinking about how to word his answer. As he thinks it over she allows herself to look at him properly.

He’s beautiful. Sharp jawline, defined cheekbones, devastatingly symmetrical features. His eyes are deep and content, looking out at the sea as if it has the answer he’s looking for. He can’t seem to find what he wants amongst the waves, but his eyes meet hers and the words seem to come to him.

“It’s you, Annabeth.”

He says it like it answers not only her question but thousands of others. It does neither.

“What’s me, Annabeth?” She attempts at light-hearted sarcasm despite her impatience.

He looks at her with a glint of mischief in his eyes and she knows that look. She hates that look. That look means she’s not getting an answer anytime soon.

“Oh my gods, you really don't know?”

She glares daggers.

He smiles winningly. “Oh, this is going to be fun.” She bites at his shoulder in retaliation.

“You’re the smartest person I know-” Percy starts.

“True, but flattery will get you nowhere-” Annabeth cut him off.

“So figure-’ He presses a kiss to her temple.

“It-’ A kiss to her left cheek.

“Out.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but he kisses her before she can get out the words. And His knuckles are gentle under her chin, and he smells like ocean breeze, and his lips are chapped yet achingly soft, and he tastes like home. Annabeth resigns herself to find out what he means later, and allows herself to get lost in him and saltwater and home.

...

She digs up every legend about the curse of Achilles she can find. She scours Daedales’s laptop until it runs out of battery. She didn’t even know that was possible.

She researches.

And researches.

And nothing.

She has no idea what he means. Annabeth famously hates not knowing.

And. Percy. Won’t. Budge.

She has tried every trick in the book. She tried baking blue cookies (she burned them), refusing to kiss him till he tells (she caves), and asking Grover to get it out of him (something about the bro-code).

Everytime she asks him he just looks at her with his dopey, baby-seal love eyes and says those same two words.

“It’s you.”

She hates him.

...

It’s three more days before she figures it out.

Nico is looking at her skeptically. His all black get-up makes it so he almost blends in with shadows of the Big House’s basement.

“You need my help?” He deadpans, leaning against the wall looking almost bored.

“Sort-of,” Annabeth shifts on her feet, “So, I know you were the one who took Percy to the River Styx, right?”

“Yeah?”

“Well he’s explained to me bits and pieces about how the curse works, and told me where his… you know… spot is.”

“Ok.”

“So my question is-” Annabeth stopped short. “Wait doesn’t that surprise you at all?”

He shrugs noncommittally, “Not really, no. You were saying?”

Annabeth clears her throat and soldiers on.

“Uh yeah. Right, well it sorta freaked me out how readily he told me about it and I asked how he knew I could handle it and he just said ‘it’s me’. And he refuses to elaborate, and it’s kind of killing me so, do you know what that means? And if you do, could you please explain?”

She’s been staring at her shoes while she rambles on and when she looks up she sees…

Is that humor in his eyes?

“So, I'm guessing you've done your research on the curse?” She nods. “So you know that when Achilles mother dipped him in the Styx, she held him up by his ankle, which then became his mortal point.”

“Like a sort of anchor.”

“Exactly. Now what the legends don’t mention is that the mortal point wasn’t just the ankle. When his mother pulled him out she became part of his mortal point. Still with me?”

“Not really.”

“Perfect. Going in on your own is no different. You still need someone to help you out of the river, just not physically. You need to picture someone pulling you out, someone to motivate you, someone to bring you back to earth.”

He looks up at her, silently asking permission to continue. Annabeth nods with urgence.

“It's not just someone who can keep you mortal, but the one person that makes you want to stay mortal. That person and your weak spot become intertwined.” He looks up at her and must still see traces of confusion.

“Your mortal point isn’t just the point of your body that’s unaffected by the River Styx, It’s the person in your life that you saw that gave you the strength to survive the Styx at all.”

Oh.

“So when he says ‘it’s...He literally means…” She trails off and looks up at Nico. His smirk is patronizing, but she can’t bring herself to care.

“It’s you.”

…

She vaguely recalls thanking Nico for his help, but how she ended up in her bunk staring at the wall is a mystery. Annabeth has never truly understood the word dumbfounded until now.

...

It’s her.

...

By the time she comes to, it's dark out. Annabeth is already grabbing her invisibility cap and pulling on her shoes. She should probably change out of her pajamas, but her urgency to get to Percy outweighs the little vanity she has left in her. Percy has seen her in far worse conditions than messy hair and sleep wear.

Normally she would climb in through his window, but tonight is strictly business. Percy is still up waiting for her like he has been every night since the war ended. His face brightens when his eyes land on her face then immediately scrunch in concern when he sees what must be a manic look in her eye.

“You ok?”

“It’s me.” A whisper- she says it like she can't fully comprehend the words.

“It’s me?” A question- not necessarily for him just unsure.

“It’s me!” An accusation- this time it’s directed at Percy, who smiles with unnecessary pride.

He tugs at her hand and pulls her to sit on the bunk.“You figured it out.”

She’s briefly tempted to explain the whole visit with Nico, but she has other things on her mind.

“That’s how I knew on the bridge. That feeling that you were in danger, even though you hadn’t told me where the spot was, I knew.”

He shrugs, “It would make sense, but to be honest, I actually have no idea.”

She entwines their fingers and he lifts her hand up to press kisses to her knuckles.

“You saved me.” Percy says it soft and reverent, like a prayer.

“On the bridge?”

“No. Well yeah you saved me on the bridge, but I’m talking about the Styx. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt. I was burning alive. It was like I was back at Mt. St. Helen’s all over again.”

She feels a swift wave of guilt that she quickly pushes down so she can pay attention to the rest of his words.

“Except instead of the lava being thrown at me, I was dunked in it. And it was ten times hotter. I was drowning.” He laughs mirthlessly, and she squeezes his hand. “I was in so much pain I couldn't remember who I was.”

She knocks her forehead against his, partly to bring him back to reality, partly to remind herself that he did in fact survive to tell her this story.

He looks up at her, green eyes wide with a wonder and reverence she doesn’t believe she deserves.

“Then I heard you. Your voice. I heard your voice and I saw your face and you held out your hand. You didn’t just pull me back. You put me back together. The thought of you put me back together. I took your hand and I survived because of you. You saved me Annabeth.”

Annabeth is stunned into silence.

She has no doubt in her mind that if it were her in the Styx, she would've seen Percy and he would’ve saved her in the same way she saved him. But, it's different hearing it from him. It’s a rare feeling to know that this full-bodied, utter devotion (the kind she feels for him), is mutual. To hear it spoken out loud is almost unheard of.

She doesn’t have the words to articulate the supernova of emotions exploding her chest, so she kisses him. She kisses him with everything she has. Percy kisses her back with the same intensity. Percy’s kisses are safety and contentment and light. He’s so good with words (better with them than she is), and she thinks it translated into the way he kissed. He kisses her like he’s trying to say something--typically some shy declaration of the love that they both know is between them but tiptoe around speaking into existence.

He kisses with his whole body. He clutches at her waist like he couldn’t bear to let go, and she arches her back because she doesn't think she could bear it either. He occupies all five of her senses, the only thing she knows is him. Her hands are buried in his hair. He’s the sun, and kissing him is sunshine personified.

When she finally pulls back, he removes one of the hands gripping at her waist to slip into the junction between her collarbone and her jaw to keep their foreheads together. He keeps pulling her in his orbit, freckles like constellations, breaths mingled like they could survive on kisses and shared oxygen alone.

She thinks she’d like that.

Percy ends up curled on top of her, his head resting in the crook of her neck. One of her hands in his hair, the other on the small of his back like she can protect him with force of will alone. They fall asleep the way they survive- anchored to each other.

...

#my first fic yall so pls be nice to me lol #rbs are appreciated!#ask box is open for prompts #percabeth #percabeth fic #missing scene #annabeth chase #percy jackson #the last olympian #nico di angelo #percy jackon and the olympians #grover underwood #my writing #omg i can use that tag now #fic rec

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years

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my life story - part 50

Since there wasn't going to be any help for me being able to lose weight like a normal person, I started popping diet pills constantly. I found some cheap stuff at Canned Grocery Outlet and I just kept pounding down those capsules, they were oddly powerful for a cheap brand. It seemed to help with me losing more weight. I remember the taste of those particular capsules. The gel they were made of had this slightly salty taste and they would stick to your tongue at first. I would swallow them down, and then about a half hour later I would begin to feel the effects of a pounding heart and a need to go out and do more exercise. It helped me drop a little bit of weight here and there for the remainder of the summer, and it was helpful to have them, since every time I felt hungry, discouraged or empty inside, I could just pop one of these pills and my outlook would get a bit brighter. I think it developed in me, a way of consciously finding external ways to keep things in check.

I wrote this poem near the end of that summer, I think I called it The Rose at Emily's Windowsill or something like that. It was basically about this girl who was never courted and so she instead dedicates her life to her garden, and she gets older and older and the only rose she ever gets is one that falls by her window. I don't have a copy of it, but I remember later learning that there was a song on the album Oracle and Odyssey by The Zombies written back in the late 60's that has a very similar theme, with a rose, a girl named Emily, and dying alone. The song is much better than my poem was – my poems were never decent. The thing was, I had never heard The Zombies 'Rose for Emily' nor did I know who The Zombies were, and wouldn't be discovering them for several years to come.

This, along with a few other lucid things that came upon me throughout my life always gave me this superstitious suspicion that ideas exist in some kind of cosmic soup and we can feel things and find things in that soup that others have left by others, this strange soup we all share is where all ideas exist before they are conscious, sometimes perhaps even that our ancient ancestors left behind ideas. It's like some kind of library that we all draw from. It's hard to explain, and it's just a theory. I am not saying things for sure work this way, or that I even believe in it myself wholeheartedly. But there are certain elements of art and story that keep coming up with all people throughout all ages, certain coincidences, certain symbols. It's somewhat mystifying to me. Creativity is very strange and mysterious.

I had started working on one of the best art projects I had up to that point ever embarked on. Basically, I had uniquely strange and cheaply made doll house that you could look into from above. There wasn't really a true upstairs or downstairs, it was all in one story. Their were bedrooms and a kitchen, a checked tiled bathroom, and even a garage. I don't know where Allison got this dollhouse, but she was never the type of girl who played with dolls, and she agreed to give it to me. I had all these plans for the dollhouse. Basically, I wanted to make it a loony bin murder house. Over the course of that summer, I would sometimes work on it. I ended up getting a lot of cheap dolls at the Good Will that were just magically perfect for what I had in mind. Each room in the house was set up as a stage for something gruesome or disturbing. I used a lot of paint and splatter to make it look like murders were being taken place. I gave the dolls knives, and of course, the kitchen sink had a hand in it, and the refrigerator had a human head. It was all too perfect, and I still don't know how I was able to get lucky enough to get all the props I wanted.

I was going to set up murder scenes, as well as many other disturbing scenes – some of them being more abstract and surreal like a David Lynch film. I intended on even repainting the faces of the dolls and giving them new looks. I was going to make this murderhouse something I focused on, maybe for a year or more until I got it just right. There was even a point where I cut my finger while cooking by accident. Yes, I ended up using that blood as a part of the murderhouse, as the stains on a wrapped up dead person. It was the first time I had felt inspired to do something of this scale. And then sadly, I came back to my mom's house one day, and it was gone from the place where I had it set up. I looked around, and eventually asked my mother. She had thrown it away because she thought it was disturbing and disgusting. Once again, I cried at the loss of my art project that I was incredibly dedicated to, but there was nothing I could do to bring it back, and it just went into the bag with so many other disappointments in the end. I have sometimes thought about trying to make another one, but the right kind of prototype for a dollhouse that would work, as well as the dolls to go with, simply haven't come my way ever since. I suppose someday, if I ever have a lot of time, I might try something like that again.

I had scoped out three records at Hastings that I really wanted at the time, but given that all my money was going to be tied up in getting gas money to go to and from school each day, I didn't have any money for anything I ever really wanted. I was low on clothes, I had a very small record collection. I was living off borrowed everything. I scavenged through my mother's old things just to find old half used lipsticks and a bunch of beauty supplies she had bought and half discarded back when she had first gotten her divorce money. I really wanted Live Through This, by Hole, London Calling by The Clash, and The Velvet Underground and Nico album. My mother had this big container shaped like a Budweiser Bottle, and after bartending each night she would empty all of her loose change into it. She saved it up, and then played darts with her boyfriend Danny with the money. I always felt that it was a tremendous waste of money, and I would often times wish that she would pay me for babysitting. Yes, the job wasn't the most difficult. But babysitting had caused me to miss out on many adventures back in the days when I had had friends. It seemed unfair that she gave no appreciation or compensation for what I was doing, that I was making it possible for her and my father to work as much as they did.

So, eventually, the impulse became too great for me to withstand. It was the day that I knew The White Stripes would be playing at the Gorge, and I decided to dip into her oversized piggy bank bottle. She had no idea how much money she had in that bottle, and it turned out being over 100$ of change. I took about 30$ of it, went out and bought myself those albums, which I never once regretted. All three of those albums became some of the most important albums I was able to get my hands on as a young person. She asked me about a week later if I wanted to count the money in the change jar for her. She trusted me as most people would since I wasn't a thief (my two older sisters had stolen thousands by the time they were my age), and I have always been known as the type of person that really does enjoy sorting out small parts, categorizing, filing, and organizing things in a specific way. She was happy to hear she had 70$, she had thought she had had less than that. So I got away with stealing in this instance.

This isn't to say I am go around stealing from others by any means, or that I have no respect for the human contract of not taking from one another. But it is to say that, when faced with a problem in life, I don't always rule out doing something a person is not supposed to do. I think this little situation proved as an example of how I see a lot of things. My parents code of conduct and their personal system of living with other people outside of work has always been an opportunistic one. In fact, even though my mother and father are very different, if you get to know them, they are both very similar in their bordering on criminal mindset of what they will do if they can get away with it. I am trying not to use the sensitive artist card here either, but they really and quite mindlessly took advantage of me for being trusting and easy to bruise, for years. Neither one of them cared about my future, regardless if it was one of a creative person or becoming the checker at the nearest gas station. They simply had no interest in anything about me that wasn't involved with them in some way. If it didn't involve them personally, than it basically did not exist. It's fair play to take what you need from a system that takes the same from you, as long as you don't get greedy about it or dumb in what you think you can get away with. You have to keep yourself in check to make sure you don't end up too much like them. But under some conditions, it's actually in my opinion a far greater stance of morals to know that what you take will have a greater impact in the long run.

Everything seemed to be going well at the Nyes, but my mom and her boyfriend Danny were getting more serious at the time, and I guess he had encouraged her and all of us – at least on weekends to come live in his cramped one room little house. This meant we would have to move out of the Nyes. She took him up on it – maybe perhaps hoping he would marry her or decide to be our new dad. I personally liked living at the Nyes and I was sorry to have to leave, but she was smitten with the opportunity to be with Danny and there was really no going back in her mind. Though she sometimes would take David along with her when she visited Danny, generally speaking we never really saw him too often. We were part of two separate worlds. I think it's one of those common things where a single guy doesn't like the idea that a women either has children – with some other man no less, but also that these kids taint the woman's sense of loyalty to him in someway, or devalue her as a person. It's incredibly unfair, but all too common. I've heard a lot of men talk down about women who are single and have children.

So, my mother packed up her life and we all moved out of the Nye's place and to Danny's small home. It was very small. Most of our stuff got put back into storage, and in some respects, it always felt more like indoor camping to me. Our food was always separate, and our sleeping areas always on the living room floor. Danny was absurdly proud of himself. He had a fairly nice computer compared to the one I was used to at home. At home at my father's we still had a Windows 98. And he had bought some kind of program for downloading music. He spent a ton of money on this program and it wasn't very good. In fact, I just didn't really grasp the concept of what an mp3 even was at the time, so I sort of silently dismissed it when he first told me about what he had. Danny was very much a man who cared about owning things. He had been a spoiled child, and had grown up to be very much a spoiled man. He had a strong obsession for owning things – even when he didn't need them. He was very proud of owning a 50,000$ pick up, and a high end expensive motorcycle. He would buy new game consoles just to own them. He never once used most of them. On his refrigerator he had pictures posted of Catherine Zeta Jones, he would often make rude remarks about how my mother was ugly compared to Catherine Zeta Jones. He would watch American Choppers all day, or some really bad short lived Comedy Central stuff.

So when I showed disinterest in downloading music from his music downloading program, or ungrateful that HE was allowing me to use his computer at all, he got kid of insulted. My mother and him made this big deal about how rude it was for me to dismiss his music downloading program, and so I had to apologize and get interested for their sake. Danny was one of those people who always needed his inflated ego stroked. Which turned out being a big thing for me, and something I spent much of my time doing at Danny's. This was how I eventually found a considerable number of bands that I had never heard of before, Screaming Trees, Blondie, Gary Numan, Pixies, The Kinks, Bjork, and quite a few others, though I will say that the search engine wasn't very good on this program and also there were quite a few things I tried to like, that were actually quite terrible and there was a lot of music I should have thought to look up and didn't. I also ended up downloading some GG Allin, and Charles Manson. Mostly, I did this because of the fascination I had with things that were so far into the messed up that I was curious about what they sounded like. GG Allin started off making childish punk music, and eventually started to express himself with more filth and vile disgusting behavior, forget lyrics later on in his short lived career. At the time, I wasn't fully aware of all his behavior – I didn't happen to know that he raped women and young girls constantly, or that he fowled himself on stage or anything like that. For reasons of his clear psychopathic tendencies, and because his music doesn't resonate with me, I have long cast aside his music, or his contribution as a whole, and he deserves to be forgotten rather than revered. I like weird things, but I will never go so far as to condone that kind of destructive mentality for the sake of itself.

As for Charles Manson. I probably wouldn't have had so much against his music in all honesty – as I like weird tiny folk music (I really enjoy the song Nothing, by the Fugs) if he wasn't who he was. I didn't mind his songs honestly, though I didn't think they had what it took to really be in the same level as most of the acts during the 60's. I don't feel badly for being honest on this regard, as many people have been quick to discredit his strange short lived musical career on account of the murders later on – Neil Young also thought he was very interesting musically when they met in the mid to late 60's. Ultimately though, Charles Manson's musical career – though it will never truly take off in any way I am sure now, should probably be forgotten as well. I am as guilty as anyone for focusing on serial killers and dictators and their deeds and legacy. I really am. I do feel like I am quite emotionally stable about it, as I am never for a single second glorifying what happened. I have a pretty level head when I read or look up documentaries and so forth. I look back at my own youth, and I think given the proper circumstances, I could have been one of those girls that lived with Charles Manson – had I been found at the age of thirteen. Zack, though by no means was he ever Charles Manson, was someone I mindlessly worshiped in much the same sort of way. But we should all try to not give these kinds of sick people that kind of thing attention. It gives into what they like, and it encourages the rare types of people who are on the brink to follow in the footsteps of these monsters.

Syd Barrett was also someone I started listening to a lot. And it was funny, because about three days after I had become really obsessed with his solo music, he died.

I ended up going to my first real concert that summer, quite late, about a week before I started at my new school. I know that I had gone and seen Metallica and Godsmack, but that in a sense had been a concert very easy to take myself out of, even when I was into that kind of music. It was an enormous stadium, and I hadn't really ever felt apart of that music. And I had seen a few live concerts, but I found that most of that wasn't all that much fun. More effort, understandably on the bands part, was to make families feel good on their few days off, something to take the kids to, like a BBQ. Most local bands didn't want to challenge or disturb their audience, else they would probably lose all their gigs. So I didn't feel all that involved with live music. But CKY was in Spokane, WA – just a two and a half hour drive up north. This was Sarah's favorite band, not mine – but I was eager to see them as well. I had listened to their albums a hundred times by that time, and it had forged a place in my conscious as being something I really got into. It wasn't something I would naturally have been into, as it was a bit heavy for me. CKY was a very melodic band however, and they were very far from having the same cliché sound as other bands. It was a bit like mixing a metal band with something melodic and ethereal like My Bloody Valentine. We were both quite eager to go. It felt like it might actually be one of the most important things that had ever happened to us. Sarah in particular was so obsessed with CKY that it was hard to imagine they were real people who existed.

So, Sarah convinced her mother and her grandma Tutu to take us to Spokane. It was to be a sort of shopping trip for the older two. When Sarah and I showed up a few hours early at the venue, it was almost too much, and I was a little frightened of actually seeing any of band members in person. What if I had to say hi?!. Their tour bus was right there. We both lingered fearfully around it. Then, the guitar player of the band, Chad I. Ginsberg came out, and he was incredibly friendly. I used to have this enormous crush on him, as he looked mildly like Kurt Cobain, if Kurt Cobain had black hair and a black beard, and walked around like a friendly little biker. Chad was so incredibly friendly that he almost seemed more eager to meet his fans than his fans were to meet him. He specifically liked Sarah and I. I guess it was because the other few people who were there were kind of difficult to talk to. I remember this one guy just kept saying 'Your CHAD! YOUR CHAD!' over and over.

Sarah did most of the talking I don't think I ever said anything to him. I think he may have asked us what we wanted to hear, and I think I recalled an obscure song on a rare album that most people hadn't heard, and he laughed and said 'we'll see'. Sarah brought a camera, and she ended up getting a picture taken with him. I was incredibly shy, and felt I needed to get away to process just meeting someone I was a fan of and the shock of it, but Sarah pushed me to take a picture with Chad as well. Someday I will post these pictures, as Sarah has them, and I do not.

I also noticed too that the band members didn't actually seem to like each other very much. You imagine sometimes that a group of traveling musicians are friends, but often times it's far more professional and distant, or very often, they used to like each other, but now they can't stand each other but are locked into this band. The singer was kind of a jerk. He walked around nearly constantly in a state of criticizing everything. He looked at his fans with a sort of arrogance. Which did not really bother me too much, since I had just met Chad, who I was in a daze at that moment and thought I might have been in love with. And honestly, CKY at heart was always Sarah's thing. Darren's opinions didn't really mean much to me.

We got into the front of the pit. I had never been in the very front of a standing concert and I was a little bit in shock at how close it was. The crowd was mostly all guys. The two opening acts were kind of a bore, just typical metal music. But I did admire that the bassist of the second opening act was this really lovely woman. When she walked out on stage, the entire crowd sneered at her. It was pretty pathetic. The entire time she played, they called out to her to show her tits, or women didn't belong on stage. It was incredibly disheartening. I made a point to smile up at her. Privately I didn't enjoy their band at all in any way, but I wanted her to know that she was at least doing this for someone. I realized pretty quickly that while I didn't hate CKY for it as a whole, I did and still do have a sort of distaste for the average CKY avid fan. The singer Darren was really negative and he put that out a lot on the internet, and the entire scene for some reason had a gravitational pull for sexist fucks who wanted to be just like him. When CKY came on stage, there were suddenly guys everywhere, and the pit was packed. You could feel these creeps using their proximity to Sarah and I to cope a feel, some of them having boners poking us in the back. I don't know what it is like to be a guy, but seriously, why? It was pretty disturbing actually, but there wasn't much you could do about it.

Chad ended up just looking at Sarah and I the whole time. We were both euphorically excited about it. I guess that was just something he does. He picks one or two people and just pretends to be playing to them exclusively. I think he also ended up playing the song that I suggested. Darren didn't like it, but Chad had him do it anyway. It was very clear on stage that the two of them hated one another. It was pretty silly looking back, but we really thought we were quite special. The fact that there were hundreds of people there, but both Sarah and I had been singled out made the two of us feel like we had something about us that other people didn't have and that people like Chad might be able to see that. Really, it was probably more circumstantial in the moment. Getting attention from famous people is no measure of anything really. After the concert Sarah and I were in a daze for quite some times. And it propelled us even further to starting a band, hopefully sooner rather than later.

My sixteenth birthday was upon me, and it was a year that I didn't end up getting much – at least anything concrete. My father gave me one hundred dollars, which I spent on school clothes. I decided I was never going to wear jeans again. I felt like jeans were very unimaginative, and they always seemed to rip. I switched all my pants to colored corduroy only – the tighter around my leg area, the better. I tried to have kind of a soft grunge look about me, long before I think soft grunge was ever a realized thing, though I didn't end up exemplifying that fashion all too well, as I didn't have the guts to wear a dress still, and I didn't have enough money to buy anything I actually wanted.

By this time, about a week before we were to start school, Sarah had been given the car to drive all we wanted. So about a week before school we drove around constantly just for the sake of doing so. Sarah almost got into a car accident one night. She wasn't driving terribly. Sarah was always a very responsible driver, but she had gone when she wasn't supposed to. It was probably the only time that I ever saw her make a driving error. I was in a ridiculous mood, and started singing Christmas songs, so Sarah quickly got a stereo to play so that I didn't resort to that anymore.

At around this same time, Sarah's mom decided to buy this old rundown building downtown on Main street and turn it into an antique – second hand shop. She didn't have very much money, but she was now in her fifties and it was becoming hard to live on manual labor. She liked antiques and had collected a lot of stuff that she kept packed in the spare rooms of their house. She barely had any money to buy the place, but she made do and took the loan out and made it happen. The building had been a popular gas station back in the fifties, but had been long neglected. The back part of the building was used as a car shop. It was right near where Sarah's stepdad had his shop, and Carol wanted to fix it up and sell antiques down there. Their hope was based on the fact that there were many rich older types who liked to drive out to these small towns during the weekend to go bargain hunting at the small local antique shops. And aside from that, Jim (Sarah's stepdad) would fix cars in the back part of it. So quite often, Carol would be found in the shop rather than anywhere else, though I think she also was fixing rich people's homes in the hills on occasion, as the money was too good to resist.

I was still playing guitar everyday, but I felt very stuck and disappointed. I didn't feel like I was truly getting any better after a time. I continued to practice what I had learned, but I needed something new. I needed some guidance or help, but when I asked people what I should be doing next, they just sort of shrugged. I felt like I needed some more technical understanding of music – something bigger to play off of. I needed some things to practice that would make playing better in general, and at the very least, less repetitive and more fun. I needed help playing in rhythm. I could play all the chords, but that was mainly all I could do. I might have also been struggling because I was a left handed person playing right handed guitar, and I my hands were the same size they had been when I was twelve and possibly younger. Most great guitarists have large hands. I have very small hands, and my reach was understandably limited. None the less, I really intended on finding a way to learn this instrument. I just lacked some guidance – guidance I wasn't going to get. My father didn't know how to play much better than I did – though he had a way of concealing that for the most part – and knew a few more tricks than me. So when I asked him, he would get kind of annoyed because he himself didn't know either. But rather than tell me that, he instead tried to make me feel small. And he wasn't about to let me know any more than what I did know. The idea that I would surpass him at guitar made him insecure.

So, one day I talked to him about it. I was hoping for some kind of support, even if it was just empty words of encouragement. I would get this panicked horrible feeling that I would never learn to play, and there would go my future. I know I was pegged as a loser by the teachers who knew me and such, but I've always been someone who has planned ahead, at least to an extent. The idea that the future would be vague and without purpose, that adulthood would be monotonous empty tasks done on repeat with the strong sense that life was being drained from you everyday, and you quietly and subtly forgot everything that had magic in it as a younger person. It was really too much to handle. I wanted life to be ready for me when I go to those points. And it seemed more important to me at least, that a person be in touch with themselves and who they were than it was that they have a college degree, or that I get married, have kids or even have a job. It was more important for me to be able to express myself and have a free mind. It wasn't as important as air, but it was close. And to me, learning to play guitar represented that somehow. It started off with me attempting to be cool, but it really became a symbol for me. Playing guitar was defying societal expectations, but not being so brought down by society that you couldn't dare to have goals.

So I asked my dad, and he gave me this cold weird look. He then basically told me that since I had not mastered guitar as of yet, than I never would be good at guitar. You either automatically get it or you don't. According to him, this was just something 'all guitarists knew'. It was too late for me, I was not a 'natural' – was how he explained it. He attacked what little I could play after that, commented on my poor plucking skills, my small hands. And he kind of made it out to seem that I might as well quit. I don't know why I drank the kool aid. I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach, and I was sort of stunned. I walked up the steps to my bedroom and I just sort of fell apart. I felt shaky and weak. I guess internally, he had confirmed the negative things I had already suspected of my capabilities. I continued to play, but it was never the same after that. Every time I picked up the guitar, I would think of myself as unfit and I would stop. I swear, my fingers felt like lead when I tried to play after that. It just wasn't happening. So I sort of stopped. I would pick up the guitar often on, but I didn't let my father see me, or anyone. I felt like he had done something to me psychologically that made it hard for me to want to play around other people.

So, the first day of school was upon me and I was waiting around in the late morning for Sarah to pick me up, in her new/old car so we could drive up to Moscow to go to school. I was pretty nervous, and didn't know what to expect. As I sat outside waiting, petting a neighbor cat, this yellow pick up with a back on it stopped by my house. I had seen this guy's vehicle around town. He had a veteran sticker on the back. He stopped the pick up and got out. I was a little confused. He walked right up to me and just started commenting on my appearance. He basically told me that I had 'gotten' attractive, and would be hot, if I didn't dress like a punk. What's absurd is that other than having red hair dye, I was just wearing a regular band t shirt and mint colored corduroy pants. I was sort of confused and lost as to what this guy was saying. He was half inviting me to hang out with him, and also cutting me down for not looking attractive enough, but saying I was at the same time. It was extremely unnecessary. It was a moment I wish my father had seen, as he would have surely come out and taken care of this.

I was more defensive than I was offensive. It was one of those moments that me screaming and throwing stuff at him would have been called for. I was passive aggressive, and he eventually drove away. Eventually Sarah came and picked me up and we headed off to school.

Part 49 - http://tinyurl.com/ydbpgkqw

PART 48 - http://tinyurl.com/ydcn5uuu

PART 47 - http://tinyurl.com/y8xyogl9

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PART 34 - http://tinyurl.com/yc6y4p69

PART 33 - http://tinyurl.com/y87449dz

PART 32 - http://tinyurl.com/ycetanep

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PART 30 - http://tinyurl.com/ybht9aul

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PART 28 - http://tinyurl.com/yagdlo47

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PART 24 - http://tinyurl.com/ycak5d8r

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PART 19 - http://tinyurl.com/rfhbms8

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PART 14 - http://tinyurl.com/yb4cfedq

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PART 12 - http://tinyurl.com/yc79mw94

PART 11 - http://tinyurl.com/yc9qhj84

PART 10 - http://tinyurl.com/yb734w24

PART 9 - http://tinyurl.com/yc2t6vfw

PART 8 - http://tinyurl.com/ybl37utq

PART 7 - http://tinyurl.com/ybvo283g

PART 6 - http://tinyurl.com/kbc9dwu

PART 5 - http://tinyurl.com/msnz4am

PART 4 - http://tinyurl.com/k9x8esg

PART 3 - http://tinyurl.com/mwp9atx

PART 2 - http://tinyurl.com/lbt6xq2

PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

#text

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