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fusion-ego · 1 year

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7, 18 & 19 for the writer ask meme?

Tossing my answers under the cut because I got a little long-winded.... whoops..........

7. What is your deepest joy about writing?

Honestly, I'd have to say my deepest joy is in creating things in general! When writing, what I take the most happiness from is the simple act of doing it at all, and of just... Making something that, yeah, maybe somebody else has made, but this one is mine, you know?

18. Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end. Spicy addition: Questioner provides the passage.

So this is one no one will have seen yet (aside from a couple of close friends who may have come across an early draft in a writing channel on discord), and I'm really happy to share this silly thing.

"Well hello Emperor Saggy Tits!" Sang the prince's best friend as he burst into his bed chambers like the untamed cretin he was.

The prince gave an overexaggerated, afronted gasp, sweeping his hair off his forehead in mock offense, "Such disrespect! I should have you executed for speaking to me in such a manner!"

His best friend flopped onto his bed, snorting as he bounced a bit on the plush surface, "You wish death would get rid of me."

The prince snorted as well, flopping next to him, "But no," He joked, "You'd just haunt me."

The backstory of this moment is simple as can be - an Imperial prince from an (at the time) unnamed empire and his common-born best friend are just... Being silly together. It's a peek into what their relationship is like - the sass, the levity, the trust.

Despite being the Crown Prince, the prince seeks no deference, or even the usual expected level of respect, from his friend, and they are on equal footing.

I don't recall exactly how this scene came to be, but I do know that originally it was going to take place within the main narrative of the story it's from, before later becoming a very brief flashback sequence that serves to, ah... Let's say "drive home how much things have changed".

19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?

So I probably say something similar every single time someone asks me when I started writing, but that's because it's the truth: I genuinely do not remember when I started, because I've been telling myself stories for as long as I can remember, and the only thing that changed was that one day I started writing them down instead of speaking them. I can't remember a time when I didn't write!

I'd say I probably started because, I'll be honest, I wasn't exactly well--liked among my peers. I was ahead of the curve in intelligence and missed out on a lot of social learning opportunities because I scored too high in basic education tests to go into preschool or pre-k in my city, so I was weird and not well-socialized and didn't have many friends. Telling myself stories was just what I did to keep myself entertained, I guess, and writing them down was just how I kept them around to tell myself again later.

Have there been bumps along the way? Oh, for sure. I'm in a bit of a rut right now, as it happens, but the thing about hitting bumps in the road is that sometimes they're potholes and sometimes they're speed bumps - sometimes I stumble for no reason, but sometimes it's my brain (and my writing ability) telling me to slow my roll and take a chill pill. And bumps aren't a bad thing! Every bump I've hit has ultimately been to my benefit, in the end.

Where I am right now is... Well, a rut, but I'm trying some new things out and trying not to be so hard on myself, so it might be slow-going but I am steadily finding my way out. As for where I'm going... Well, if all goes well, 'forward' will be good enough for me. As long as I'm still writing, and still enjoying it, then that's all that matters.

#dont mind the unanswered version #technical difficulties with the new web textpost editor #i loathe it so deeply i do not have words #anyways #asks #answered #kisstheashes #weird writer asks #fusionego.txt #matt rambles

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prurientpuddlejumper · 4 years

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A Lipless Face That I Want to Marry, Ch. 7

<- Chapter 6 | Chapter 8 ->

Summary: I gave myself a stomach ache writing this one 🙃

2,961 words

Thirty-two days. Nine surgeries. Twenty blood transfusions.

Sometimes it seemed like just yesterday when everything was going right—you and Frederick were so happy together, his books were selling, your career was flourishing, and he had just asked you to marry him. Sometimes, it felt like a lifetime ago. A state of being so foreign, you wondered if it had even been real, or if you were remembering someone else’s life.

Seasons turned. Cherry blossoms were starting to bloom in the parks around Maryland, and each gust of cool wind carried with it their sweet pink fragrance. The spring air vibrated and sang with life renewed. But where you were headed, the air was stagnant, beige, and sterile.

As the automatic sliding glass doors drew you into the hospital, away from the sun, a piece of your heart withered like a flower. It sank deeper when you considered how the unhappy hours you whiled away in those sterile halls were nothing compared to what Frederick had to endure. He didn’t have the luxury of being able to leave.

Physically, he was beginning to show signs of real improvement. The pneumonia had completely cleared up, and he was starting to receive permanent transplants from the cutting-edge, lab-grown skin created from his own cells. Most of his body was still wrapped up in gauze, but a few places had only received second-degree burns, and those patches were almost back to normal. For the first time since the attack, his odds of not dying were higher than his odds of dying.

Mentally was a different story. His moods grew progressively more sour. With none of his true nemeses at hand to take out his bitterness on, that burden fell upon his nurses, doctors, and upon you—and it was beginning to weigh heavily. At first you didn’t want to see the rift that was forming, even as he cut your visiting hours short in an angry huff, and had fewer and fewer kind words for you. You shoved every fear and frustration into a box at the back of your mind so you could keep smiling. He was just in pain, you kept telling yourself. He just needed time.

You held onto the hope that as he got better, your relationship would return to what it had been before. But he was getting better, and the rift grew wider.

“We’ll still want to wait at least six months to do the procedure, until your infection risk has dropped to baseline levels for a healthy adult, but we’re putting you on the transplant waiting list now,” the doctor explained. She was one of his regular surgeons who had been with him since day one. She wore a white lab coat over blue scrubs, and hid behind a clipboard as she spoke. You liked the that she needed to use the file as a shield—it made her relatable. Always friendly, and clearly a skilled surgeon, but uncomfortable with the heavy emotional talking to patients, especially to Dr. Frederick Chilton, who was always in a bad mood, and always ready with a scathing remark.

But today he had nothing to say. No critique on the hospital’s competence. No casual observations with hidden barbs. Just a silent nod of acknowledgment before turning his head to gaze out the window at the fresh spring flowers, framed by the sea of fake ones you had bought.

Francis Dolarhyde, the Red Dragon, had bitten Frederick’s mouth with such extreme ferocity there was not enough connective muscle left to reconstruct new lips from Frederick’s own tissue. The only option for him to look normal again would be a face transplant—donated facial muscle, skin, and hair from a cadaver—although the doctor explained that the procedure was risky. After taking the transplant, Frederick would be put on immunosurpressant drugs for the rest of his life to prevent rejection, which meant every flu season, or even a coworker with a cold, could turn deadly without careful precaution. But to Frederick, it was worth the risk. He couldn’t bear spending his life being stared at. He couldn’t even stand you looking at the black hole that was his face.

Yet what the doctor explained about the procedure added weight after weight to Frederick’s chest until he felt crushed by despair.

The donated tissue had to be a very close match, or his antibodies would reject the new lips. Unlike receiving a heart or a kidney, his new skin had to be an aesthetic match as well. It could not be from too old a donor, or the skin would lack the proper elasticity. And, unfortunately, most organ donors were not comfortable donating external organs—it ruins the open-casket wake.

So, he could be waiting on a match for a very long time.

You thanked the clipboard-wielding doctor when Frederick remained sulking, not bothering to look up as she left. He adjusted himself slightly to follow a flash of movement—a bird—out the window, and winced as it tugged his unyielding scar tissue. Something tore under his armpit, but he didn’t yelp in pain—he was used to this level of it by now—but his eyes watered.

“At least you can sit up a little bit now. That’s great, isn’t it?” you said in an attempt to cheer him up.

He scoffed, and made no immediate reply.

Years, was all he kept thinking. It could take up to three years to find a match, possibly longer, the doctor said.

“Up to three years or longer,” he growled sarcastically. “She does realize that means nothing? It means any time, or never.”

“I know...”

“But thank god at least I can sit,” he spat bitterly. “A little.”

You were taken aback by his sharp rebuke and fell silent, a cavernous gulf between you though you sat right beside his bed. As you recovered from the sting, however, his words made you smile. He had always been churlish, but recently all of the spirit had been eroded away from his petty attitudes, leaving him defeated and mean. It was nice to hear his churlishness take on a spark of sarcastic sass.

“Don’t lose hope, darling,” you said in an overly-sweet patronizing cadence. “One day you’ll have enough movement back to flip her off.”

He paused, eyes flicking over to you curiously. You had been downtrodden for weeks, too, and he hadn’t expected a joke. He chuckled appreciatively. You wished the good moments lasted longer these days.

It wasn’t as though his life had ended, even if his full cosmetic recovery would take a little longer than he hoped, and even if he was bedridden for several more months. It was that sharp mind and wit that made you fall in love with him, and he still had that. He could keep you entertained for hours discussing some arcane piece of trivia or sharing lurid gossip. Since he was cut off from his normal sources of scuttlebutt, you kept him updated on all the latest rumors you’d learned over dinner with Jack Crawford—about the shitstorm he’d brought down on himself at the FBI when Will Graham went rogue, how Alana and her wife fled the country (but you heard they might be in Cuba), Freddie Lounds being sued again. He always enjoyed hearing about other people’s misfortunes, but today it just made him jealous that you’d been spending time with Jack.

“You have both recently lost a spouse. What comfort you must take in each other,” he insinuated.

“I haven’t lost you, Frederick.”

You went into that sentence thinking you were convincing him that you loved him, but as it closed, you realized you were desperate to convince yourself he wasn’t gone. The more you tried to hold him close, the more you felt him pulling away, and felt a creeping dread that even if he got better, you would lose him. Everything you tried to say to reassure him only made him feel worse, and you wondered if it was your fault. Someone more capable, more empathetic, would know the right things to say. You were a failure. He deserved more.

His professional life, too, hadn’t ended. His injury would barely be a bump in the road to his writing career if he wasn’t so stubborn and prideful. The publisher offered to send a ghostwriter to finish The Dragon Slayer, for which they greedily anticipated a significant boost in sales, considering the author’s headline-making personal involvement in the Red Dragon’s end. Frederick, however, refused to be interviewed by “some insipid amateur.” He claimed they would not understand the nuances of psychology required, and stood firm on the grounds of “artistic integrity,” but the truth was, he did not want anybody else to see him.

His face had not made it into the papers, despite several attempts by Freddie Lounds to sneak into the hospital with a hidden camera, and he did not want any more of the world than absolutely necessary to know the extent of what the Dragon had done to him. He did not want to see the shock in the writer’s eyes at seeing his disgusting lipless teeth. He did not want a stranger to see him inevitably start drooling the longer he spoke—and he hated repeating himself to people who could not understand his impaired diction.

No. Publishing The Dragon Slayer would have to wait, though the possibility of another author beating him to the punch bothered him nearly as much as his missing lips. After an entire month recuperating, he thought he would at least be able to type again, but he could barely move his gauze-mittened fingers.

The world had not forgotten him, evidenced by the occasional fan-mail the publisher forwarded to him. You would bring them in and read them—a lot of get-well-soons, and entreaties to hear his side of the Francis Dolarhyde story. A lot of them were from professionals and students in the psychiatric field, pointing out errors or suggesting contradictory theories. Those were the most fun to read, because Frederick would come alive with indignation, debating with the letter as if its sender could hear him, sometimes making you send a response, seething with superiority as he dictated.

In those brief moments, it was like having the old Frederick back. Then a nurse would come in and need to run a test, or feed him, or something else that embarrassed him back into his shell of anger. Or he would grow too animated and rip one of his grafts, and his zeal for argument would end precipitously with a scream, and a surgeon.

As you shuffled a handful of addressed envelopes and started reading through the latest batch of strangers wishing him a healthy recovery, you were struck by a thought.

“Why haven’t I met your family?”

The wind caught in his throat. His scabbed-over nostrils flared before he answered, “I doubt that is what the letter reads.”

“They never visit, even when… even when you could have died. My parents even flew in that first week, when they heard. They helped me with the flowers. Why do your fans send more condolences than your family?”

Gritting ones teeth does not come easily when ones teeth are constantly bared by default, but Frederick grit his teeth. “My mother is old. She can hardly be expected to travel.”

A plausible answer, but not the full story. His discomfort with the subject only spurred your curiosity. All the time you’d been together, you had simply accepted Frederick as an individual, with no need for a childhood backstory or a group of others sharing his features and last name to complete him. You’d gathered, in snippets, that their relationship was not the best, and were satisfied to leave it alone. But he nearly died. The nurse who asked you about his next of kin looked so confused when you had no one you could contact, and it made you feel foolish for never having asked.

“It’s just, we’re going to be married.”

“So?” he said, a hard, mocking edge to his voice.

“So, if I’m going to be part of your family, isn’t it weird that I’ve never met them?”

Instead of answering directly, he snarled, “Look somewhere else.”

“I wasn’t staring!”

“Look. Somewhere. Else.”

You huffed, and sat back in your uncomfortable plastic chair whose unpadded seat bruised your butt after countless hours, crossing your arms. The box full of anger was overstuffed. You shoved its contents down like clothing in a suitcase to squeeze one more sting of hurt inside, but it began to overflow. “I swear I don’t stare at your face any more than I used to,” you muttered aloud what was supposed to remain a thought, “but now every interaction needs to be a carefully calculated balance between not looking at you enough to feel gawked at, and not not-looking enough to make you feel like I’m averting my eyes from your horrible face.” At the word “horrible,” you wiggled your fingers and wavered your voice the way the vampire running a children’s haunted house would say the word “spooky.”

“I am sorry my suffering is so inconvenient for you,” he said in clipped, cold syllables, and you knew you’d pushed him too far.

“I’m just saying, you know I don’t care about your face. You’re acting the same way as when you got shot, and you got over that. You know I still think you’re beautiful. Can’t you give me some credit and just stop freaking out?”

Being stuck in a hospital bed with limited range of motion, he had few resources with which to express anger, but his chest rose and fell and his breath hissed like steam through his nose. “You...” he seethed. “You never care about the pain I suffer, do you? You, in your fantasy world where you accept my injuries and make it all better—you have no idea what it is like to be violated. To have your body ripped apart! It is not a thing one ‘gets over.’ Beautiful? That is rich coming from one who would not know how to tuck in a shirt without my guidance. It must be lovely in whatever quaint children’s storybook your mind inhabits, but in the real world, appearance matters. It matters to me. Your fetish does not stop every sane individual from seeing ugliness. You believe I should be delighted to have a partner who calls ugliness beauty and trivializes my grief? I should have had you analyzed years ago—my judgment was compromised by my relationship with you. I could not see. Your attachment increases with my physical deterioration. You prefer me broken.”

“That… that isn’t true! How dare—”

“You could barely tolerate me before Abel Gideon took my kidney. I was shot in the face and suddenly you professed your love. What shall it be this time? Ah, yes—marriage. You must be elated.” He rolled the words over his tongue in that distinctively upper-class way that was almost musical, yet bone-cuttingly brutal.

“Stop. This had nothing to do with it—you proposed to me!”

His eyes had been flashing with energy behind the bandages as you argued, but all the anger in them vanished like a message written in steam on a bathroom mirror. They took on a dull, blank glaze.

“Then I take it back,” he said. You wished you believed he meant the accusation. His head shifted toward you, but his dull stare seemed to look right through you to the door. “The engagement is over.”

Your throat dried up. “You don’t mean that,” you said, voice barely above a whisper.

“I will not be with one who gains pleasure from my mutilation. Get out of my room. There are some amputees over in the rehabilitation ward; go explore your fetishes elsewhere.”

He couldn’t be serious, and yet there was no hint of sarcasm or hyperbole in his flat tone. He meant it. You were surprised to find that you weren’t sad. Your hands began trembling uncontrollably, the tiny convulsions working their way from your extremities to your shoulders, tightly clenching in your gut, but it wasn’t sadness. The overfilled box tore open at the seams, exploding its pressurized contents, and weeks of frustration shattered against the walls and cascaded out over the floor.

“Fine!” you stood up from the hated plastic chair so sharply it scraped across the laminate floor and tipped over backward. “I can’t put up with a second more of this, anyway! I can’t keep walking on eggshells waiting for you to snap—if this is the way it’s going to be from now on, then marrying you would be a nightmare.”

If you had seen him flinch as if your words had physically wounded him, then you might have stopped shouting. A surge of pity might have overwhelmed you, and you might have broken down sobbing. He might not have been able to go through with it, then. Seeing you blubbering with heavy, hot tears rolling down your face, he might have said he was sorry, like he wished he could have said if only he were not so much like his father.

But you were too angry to look at him, and you didn’t see him flinch.

So a moment later when your back was in the doorway, instead of I’m sorry, he said, “Keep the ring. Sell it, and get a new apartment. Do not come back.”

“Fuck you!”

#Frederick Chilton x reader #frederick chilton #Raúl Esparza #hannibal #angst #my writing #and now as a reward I finally get to read beccabarba's Chilton fic :D

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wild-aloof-rebel · 4 years

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By no means do I want to invite discourse onto your blog, so please do not feel at all obligated to answer, but I was wondering what you thought of the titular happy ending. Obviously, it's sparked a lot of debate, and your takes are always so compassionate and articulate and insightful. Have a lovely evening regardless, and thank you for everything you've contributed to this fandom!

a few things to start… first of all, thank you for asking this in such a non-confrontational way. i haven’t seen much of whatever debates are happening as most of it has managed to stay out of my inbox this time thankfully (i hope i’m not jinxing myself by responding to this lol), though i feel like i can assume the shape of some of the broad strokes of it. i say that just to mean that this shouldn’t be taken in any way as a response to any particular posts/people but just as my general thoughts on the ep. and of course, as i always try to remind everyone, my opinion certainly isn’t the only one that matters, and everyone is entitled to feel however they feel about this (or any other) plot line on the show. i’m certainly not the be-all, end-all of schitt’s creek opinions, nor do i want to be.

anyway, let’s talk about the happy ending…

the first thing i do any time that there’s something on the show that seems to throw people off in some way is to take a step back and try to think about what that particular scene/plot was trying to accomplish. and honestly, the first goal of the show is always that it wants to make you laugh. it’s a comedy. while it means a lot to those of us who love it so deeply and have watched it so carefully, and while there are certainly moments–more and more frequently throughout the years–of great depth and heart and drama, it is still at its core a comedy, and some scenes are really just meant to be a laugh and not hold some kind of earth-shatteringly deep revelation, and i honestly think this is one of them.

i mentioned in some of my speculation earlier this season that i thought we (def including myself there) were in danger of trying to connect too many plots in a way that the show historically hasn’t really done, and i think that some of the negative reactions to this may be the same kind of thing, that we sometimes take things too seriously on a show where historically most of the plots of most of the eps aren’t really meant to be that serious. think about “love letters” for instance. so many people were (and still are) upset about how patrick reacts to the robbery, and sure, i get that he could have been nicer and considered that david and stevie didn’t know the robber didn’t actually have a weapon and that they were frightened, etc etc etc. but also, it’s a comedy. it wasn’t supposed to be some kind of treatise on the right and wrong ways to respond to traumatic situations; it was supposed to be funny and that’s that. the characters clearly have moved on by the next time we see them–david doesn’t seem to be harboring some kind of resentment for the way that patrick responded–and we shouldn’t take it any more seriously than they do.

the show is actually really good at telling us what’s serious and what isn’t, if we just listen to it, and it’s definitely telling us this particular plot isn’t meant to be That Serious. patrick, despite having his understandable initial wtf kind of moment about it, has already by the end of the scene accepted that it was a miscommunication (and one of his own making at that–i mean he does leave the cash and the note, plus he tells david specifically before he leaves that “it’s all taken care of and i’ve told them we need you calm today, so just let them do their job,” so he recognizes once he starts thinking about it just how david could have thought this was what he intended to happen), and he’s already thinking about how some day down the road it’s just going to be yet another story that’s part of their history. he’s clearly still excited and happy when we get to the wedding. he obviously still chooses to marry david that day. so while any of us personally may have reacted differently in this situation, the show is telling us that patrick ultimately isn’t particularly bothered by what happened, that this isn’t supposed to be taken as some kind of serious, make-or-break moment in their relationship. it’s really just supposed to be funny–something to help break up the heavier emotions of the episode. now we may personally disagree on whether or not we actually find it funny, but that seems to be most of the intent either way.

if you do want to take it somewhat more seriously though (because i mean that’s what we do in fandom right? lolol), i think you have to look at it in the context of what this season has been trying to accomplish with their relationship. season 4 is all about those tentative first steps of falling in love. season 5 builds on that to give us all these hallmark relationship moments. season 6 then lets us see what life looks like when the romance isn’t quite as new, when you’ve found enough safety in each other to allow yourself to be seen at less than your best, to make mistakes, to disagree, to explore, to fight when you need to, to know that you can get it wrong sometimes because your partner will always be there to catch you if you fall, because you’ll fall together and pick each other back up, again and again. that’s what love looks like long-term. that’s what marriage looks like. and that’s what this season has given us a taste of.

for example, david, though he’s embarrassed by The Incident, still comes back to patrick’s apartment at the end of the day, allowing himself to be more fully seen (and thus more fully loved) in the light of patrick’s understanding. patrick, who we know has struggled with always trying to make himself be the person other people want him to be–the perfect boyfriend, the perfect son–lets himself crack open a bit, allowing those truer, messier emotions to spill out, letting david actually see his frustration about the spray tan because he knows by now that it won’t scare him away. in these ways and more, season 6 is about how love goes beyond romance, how it builds a space where we can be our true selves, how there’s a stability in that which takes time for you to build together. if something like this had happened earlier on in their relationship, i could see it being A Big Obstacle for them, but at this point, it’s barely even a bump in the road, already well on its way to being a funny anecdote they’ll trot out years on down the road, when they’ve both had a bit too much wine at one of their monthly dinner parties with their friends, the two of them talking over each other as they compete to tell it better. they’re solid enough that a miscommunication like this isn’t going to derail them.

like dan said to entertainment weekly, their relationship is “founded on something much deeper, much more substantial, much more respectful… their sex life [is not] something that is always what’s defining loyalty in their lives.” and while that may not be how some of us feel about our own sex lives and the role of sex as it relates to loyalty or intimacy within our own relationships, it is pretty clear at this point that for david and patrick, sex can just be sex sometimes. they were obviously interested in entertaining the possibility of a threesome with jake earlier this season, and as david points out in that episode, jake is the perfect candidate for something like that because there will be no emotional intimacy tied to it with him. the same thing goes here. there is no threat to the intimacy and stability of david and patrick’s relationship because of this mishap, so ultimately it’s something that’s easy for both of them to just wave away.

and that’s really what i feel like a lot of the disagreement probably comes down to at the end of the day, too–for a lot of us, this wouldn’t be so easy to wave away. we all have our own lenses through which we view the world, which means that when we see other people’s relationships, fictional or not, we tend to judge them based on our own standards. and while that certainly might mean that whatever is happening may not be something we want in our own relationships, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily wrong for whomever is actually in them. it’s tempting to put our own views of sexuality, loyalty, monogamy, happiness, whatever onto david and patrick’s relationship, but at the end of the day, what actually matters is how they view their own relationship, and the show is telling us that they’re both happy with exactly where they are. so many of us see something of ourselves in one or both of them, and so seeing them make a choice that we ourselves might not make can be a hard thing to reconcile, but it still doesn’t make it the wrong choice for them.

ultimately if david and patrick both are clearly happy in their relationship and don’t view this as a big deal, who am i to say otherwise?

#anon #replies #s6 #happy ending #and thank you for your very kind words <3 #show discussion

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agentsofsupernaturalmarvel · 4 years

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Waves On A Beach // Joshua Bassett

IN WHICH: Josh listens to the story of a woman healing from a deep loss and beautiful love story unaware of how his listening would affect his life. It all started on a beach taking a chance on a forlorn girl holding a guitar.

Characters: Joshua Bassett x Reader, OMC!Peter Everett, HSMTMTS Cast (mentioned)

Words: 2.3k

Warnings: Swearing, cancer, death, love, angst and fluff. (it’s a doozy)

A/N: I watched I Still Believe and all I could think about was writing a fic about it but I couldn’t decide between Josh or Tom Holland. I decided to write without thinking and Josh was picked subconsciously. But there are tiny easter eggs to Tom Holland, two infact if you can name them.

YOU CAN REQUEST FROM ME AS WELL!

Masterlist

Every year without fail, you managed to find yourself on the beach staring out into the vast unknown looking for something. Something that would confirm that somewhere Peter Everett was okay and not in pain anymore. Life had a way of ripping something sweet and perfect from people’s hands at the very moment they need it most. Often you found yourself in a pew in a church struggling to understand how you had the honour of meeting Peter and then losing him within two years.

A foot behind you was an unopened guitar case that had been hidden in a closet for months now. Untouched from hands that had once itched to pluck the strings. Fingers that had learned chords to countless songs for Peter’s entertainment since you worked up the courage to approach him after working as a stagehand for an infamous local band.

For the first time in two years, you had dragged the guitar to the beach trying to build up the courage to play. Without a second thought, your hands found the familiar vegan leather guitar case holding something so beautiful. Breath taken away from the beautifully designed acoustic guitar with a quote by Peter inscribed on the back. He knew rage would claim the previous guitar that ended in pieces mere days after your parents had to come to Peter’s hospital room to remove you.

Sitting cross-legged on the cold sand just out of the ocean’s reach you strummed a familiar song that Peter had adored since he first heard it.

THEN

The local park the university built was often filled with students trying to relax, but you often found inspiration on lyrics. Your eyes were closed as you sang under your breath to a tune you had discovered early this morning over your cereal.

“You’re really good.”

The deep voice spoke from above to the side of you. Your eyes snapped open to see a male with a kind smile and blue eyes staring down. Your lips opened in a gasp at the newcomer you had made eye contact with and briefly spoken to at that concert.

“Uh, thank you.” You smiled feeling nerves build-up, but you shouldn’t take your eyes off of him, “I’m not overly good.”

“No, you are really good.” He spoke, “I’m Peter.”

“Y/N.” You replied, clenching the neck of the light brown guitar tight. It wasn’t every day some guy you embarrassed yourself in front of willingly starts a conversation.

“Are you busy tonight?” Peter asked, glancing over his shoulder to wear his best friend was scanning his phone.

“No.”

“Meet at the side of the pier. Bring the guitar.” Peter was gone as quick as he had appeared in your sight. A tiny smile tugged at your lips, leaving you to know that this had to be a date.

Oh, how wrong you were. At the pier it was a small group collected around a small fire, at Peter’s side was a brunette girl. Little inquiry brought you that Peter had a problem disappointing people and included the girl hanging onto his every word.

NOW

So, wrapped up in the memories of your love, you had no clue that someone had sat beside you with a friendly smile.

“Hi.” The voice made you jump in surprise, bringing your attention to the side where a curly-haired brunette was sitting. His eyes went to the guitar with a broad smile, “You play?”

“Yeah.” You kept quiet surprised at the zing of attraction you felt at the newcomer. Your solemn expression bringing the boys attention.

“Am I intruding?”

“No. Just stuck in some memories.” You replied, continuing to strum returning your gaze to the horizon, “I keep looking at the beautiful sky and wonder how someone can create something so otherworldly but cause suffering as well.”

“Nothing would be beautiful if there wasn’t anything ugly. Vice versa.” The stranger spoke, “I’m Joshua Bassett.”

“Y/N Everett.” Your smile dipped at the last name before your eyes fell to the simple band encircling your finger.

Josh’s eyes followed, feeling a ping of disappointment, seeing that this subtle beauty was taken.

“Married?”

“Was.” You sighed, stopping your fingers from delicately moving on the strings, “A sad story belonging in a novel.”

Josh’s brown eyes blinked at the sad words bumping his shoulder against yours with words sending you back into a memory, “Would it be too forward to ask what happened?”

THEN

So maybe kissing Peter after singing an impromptu song simply stating you loved him was too much especially when Paige saw it. The girl from the bonfire Peter struggled to let down. That led to whatever between you and Peter shattering. Fall turned into winter and with winter came the holidays where you retreated to.

Your dreams were indescribable, and it didn’t matter when your father, Gary, roused you from sleep in your childhood bed. Bleary eyes grasped at the phone mumbling a greeting of some kind at 2am.

“Y/N? It’s Jacob.” The unmistakable voice of Peter’s best friend was confusing to hear, “Peter’s in the hospital. His sister called me, and it’s bad.”

Time didn’t matter as you scooped up every item into the duffle bag and half-assed brushing your teeth or hair. Gary handed over his station wagon keys to his eldest child receiving shock while his partner was demanding a text when you arrived back in the city.

“Drive safe. It’s a long drive.”

You nodded before you spent the night number of hours on the road only stopping to refuel and use the bathroom. Empty snack bags on the passenger held you over as you arrived at the hospital address sent from Jacob.

A power nap in the waiting room before visiting hours was spent restlessly just before a hand nudged you awake.

“Hey Y/N.” Standing in the flesh was Peter’s sister Heather who you had briefly met on Skype in the early ages of the relationship.

“Hi, Heather.” You sighed blinking, “How is he?”

Heather hesitated debating if it was her place to answer the specifics on why the Everett family was at the hospital. In a moment of clarity, Heather decided to bring you to her brother’s room where their parents had congregated. Sitting up against the pillows in a gown was the handsome honey blonde man.

“Y/N.” Peter breathed surprised to see someone he had hurt with simple words on not wanting to hurt Paige. Now facing the unthinkable Peter wanted to hold your hand forever and proudly declare his love.

“Hey, Pete.” You half-smiled sitting on the edge of his bed while the room emptied, “You gave me a scare.”

“You were at your parents? Isn’t that hours away?” Peter questioned taking in the pale blue bruises under your eyes. You nodded in response, but it sent a warmth brought Peter’s body. His fingers grasped yours tightly.

“You’re worth the drive.” You simply replied, squeezing his fingers.

“Jacob was crashing at my dorm. He called for an ambulance when I was wrenching myself around my bed. Indescribable pain that ended with the surgeons removing a tumour the size of a plum from my stomach. The docs found it spread to my liver. Odds aren’t in my favour.” Peter revealed still holding that smile that drew you in initially.

“You aren’t getting rid of me.” You breathed.

NOW

“So, he has cancer?” Josh asked, turning to give you his full attention as you delved into the story that you had spoken about since that first appointment with the therapist.

“It was first in his stomach and then the liver. The last masses were found in a testicle.” You spoke tapping your fingers reliving the proposal in the hospital chapel and response from your parents, “He did chemo, radiation and finally the last resort was surgery. It was upsetting because Peter wouldn’t be able to have children.”

“It was only one right?”

“The chemo and radiation would deplete the chances of conception.” You medically recounted the words from the doctor, “Peter grew up active in church, and everyone prayed for him. From the people at the gigs I did to the listeners to the radio shows I appeared on.”

“Famous?” Josh questioned, but he only received a shrug in response. He kept quiet as you continued on with your story.

THEN

Heather and you held steadfast in Peter’s hospital room, you had walked holding his hand to the point where you couldn’t continue. He went into the operation room, and you returned to his empty bedside. Heather was your confidant and vice versa. Sleep was pulling when the screams of Mrs. Everett broke the silence.

“Heather! Y/N!”

The two girls scrambled to where a shaking couple stood blinking shocked at having heard the news. Right in the OR despite scans showing a mass when the surgeon opened up their son, there was not a speck of anything not meant to be there.

“It’s gone. There’s no cancer.” Mrs. Everett had no clue, but at that moment, all the hopes and dreams of Peter and you rebuilt themselves, “A miracle.”

A miracle that ended with Peter standing firm at the end of the aisle on the beach you swore you fell in love with him. Your dress was as simple as the wedding where you left to spend your honeymoon at the Everett’s family cabin for the weekend.

“I love you.” Peter breathed, pressing his nose against the edge of where your hairline started. The words flooded your system with love so deep you knew you had a lifetime to feel.

You chuckled seeing a mirage of the wedding party just up the beach from where you were sitting.

“We had a good weekend, but Monday came and so did seeing the oncologist. Peter refused to tell me if he had felt off at the wedding or the honeymoon. He was re-diagnosed, and we spent the week learning how to inject medications, the dosages and the times to do it. It was fine until the end.

You stared out the window of the full hospital room where Peter slept soundly with the IV of pain medication. A slight grimace moved over his face every once in a while, but you couldn’t sleep. Not with the news that Peter’s cancer had returned with a vengeance not even a few weeks after your wedding. Your dress still hung up in your apartment closet next to his tux that you hadn’t been able to return after renting.

“Hey. Mrs. Everett.” The groggy voice brought your attention to the dimly lit hall. Standing in the entry was Dr. Johnson with a solemn expression. You left Peter with a napping Heather as you slipped out of the room.

“Dr. Johnson.” You replied, clasping your hands on your arms, “How is he?”

“Peter’s scans gave me insight. The cancer spread throughout his body.”

“Okay, so are we starting chemo?” The doctor’s expression brought you to the answer is that it wasn’t an option, “Radiation?”

“No.”

“Surgery?” You got more frantic unaware that Peter had woken to see you struggling to take the news. The slight shake of Dr. Johnson’s head, “There has to be something!”

“We can make him as comfortable as we can, but I’m sorry to say we’ve done everything we can.” Dr. Johnson wasn’t surprised as you hugged him out of Peter’s view. This often happened when Dr. Johnson broke the news to people.

NOW

“The rest of Peter’s life was spent at our home until he was rushed to the ER vomiting blood. It was short. Maybe a week at most before he passed away without pain, but I believe his pain was shifted to me.” You finished deciding not to go into the grief that almost drowned you. The apartment had sold after a month as you fled to your childhood home.

“I’m sorry that happened.”

“I’m not.” You replied, smiling, “I got the honour of loving a wonderful man for two years of my life. I married him and lived with him. Do I wish he was still here? Sometimes but he was in too much pain. He always told me that the pain was worth it, he was able to touch the lives of people. He made his mark on the world.”

Josh was quiet as you strummed the guitar into the song that Peter had adored and asked to be played countlessly. The song was created by a Christian musician after losing his wife to cancer at an early age. Their story and your story had been so similar that the man was happy to help you move passed the loss into music.

The beach hadn’t changed in the time you had been away, but something sure did. Behind you was the sound of a small group, you had become close with overtime. The breeze was combated when a blanket was wrapped around you.

“You looked cold.”

The corners of your mouth curved at the concern in words coming from Josh. His arms wrapped around you next taking in the beautiful view. A view you only saw on the same day every year, but instead of being alone, Josh was always there.

Another change was your name. At age twenty-three you had had three last names, first the one you were born with Y/L/N, then Everett and now Bassett. Peter and Josh were physically the opposite of each other but both gentle souls.

“Did you think this would happen? That we would meet and fall in love?” Josh asked, pressing a lingering kiss above your ear as he took in the sunset.

“No, but I have a feeling someone knew I needed you.” You softly replied, “Didn’t think it would be an actor, though.”

“Are you coming? We want to hear you sing!” Heather called from the bonfire where your family, the Bassett family, the High School Musical: The Musical: The Series cast and even the Everett clan were stationed.

Was it weird your first husband’s family was spending time with your current husband’s family? Maybe, but cancer and loss created a bond indestructible. Besides, it was the Everett’s that pushed you into a date with Josh, and it ended perfectly. How beautiful was it to have the joyful ability to fall in love twice?

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imagineclaireandjamie · 5 years

Note

I love HRH. During the last chapter I found myself wanting to skip time and read about Jamie being the Queen Consort already for all his dreams have come true ...

Many thanks to @notevenjokingfic for telling me where I can do better, and to @smashing-teacups and @desperationandgin for always cheering me on with this story. xx.

Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.)Part XXIV: Balmoral & London

The cabin’s spare key was cloistered in the musty sanctuary existing beneath a loose board on the front patio. It was a trusting thing for the Fraser family to leave it hidden there, she thought, but the road to the cabin was hardly what one would consider to be “well traveled,” and the cabin was the type of dwelling that was not particularly easy to find unless someone was looking for it.

Despite a generally abhorrent sense of direction, Claire had driven herself to the Highlands, her hands somehow possessed with the memory of clutching Fraser’s jacket, leaning her weight into him and into each turn on the back of the motorcycle. After tucking the vehicle into the shed alongside the pickup, she turned herself sideways to slip between the vehicles. Facing down the short walk to the empty cabin, she suddenly felt rather foolish for having brought an overnight bag.

Inside, the cabin was quiet, its stillness almost eerie. Entering the room where they had lost themselves in one another again and again, her breath caught as she set the bag at the end of the bed. Their bed, as her mind had come to think of it. The duvet was rumpled just a bit on Fraser’s side of the hastily-made bed (before leaving for their impromptu camping trip, he had laid her out, kissed lies into her lips about an easy forever). She tucked the fluffy corner down, smoothed it with her hand, and left the room. She closed the room off, her fingertips lingering on the doorknob for a moment too long.

After opening a number of windows, she ran a single finger along the countertop and marveled and how readily dust had collected in the absence of occupants. As the thought of the domestic help she had around her own homes caused her guilt, she plucked a thick-plumed duster from beneath the kitchen sink and carefully ran it over the various surfaces of the cabin. Counters, the mantle, coffee and end tables, window ledges, the bookshelf, the top of the refrigerator, the tanks of the toilets and shower curtain rod. She straightened her shoes at the front door, making sure the toes did not scuff the oak moulding, and took her summer jacket from the back of the couch to hang it among those in the front closet. When her small amount of housekeeping was finished, she found herself adrift and waiting, checking her wristwatch periodically.

Two hours passed.

She wondered if he got the message.

She wondered if he had decided not to come.

She had no idea how far away his childhood home was, the trivia he’d shared about the distance from the cabin and location lost somewhere in her lizard brain.

She opened the refrigerator and stared inside, rearranging its contents and tossing out some of the items that had gone off since their journey to the market.

She wondered how it felt as though an entire lifetime had passed since they had last been there. Wrenching her eyes closed, she realized it had only been a few days.

Gravel crunched underneath tires, and she snapped to the front door like a magnet, pulling it open and looking out. All that remained was a plume of dust from a passing motorist. It was chilly, the air biting and the sky grey. Autumn would come early this year.

Another hour passed.

She settled herself onto the couch with a book plucked at random from the bookcase. Camus. The Stranger. Reading, but not retaining, her mind wandered. Perhaps Fraser was angry with her; maybe his sister advised him not to come. Claire chewed a thumbnail, excoriating herself for even wearing the bloody ring to the cabin in the first place and then for just leaving it like some useless, nondescript bauble.

This was her fault.

Well into her fourth hour, Claire had resigned herself to the fact that she would perhaps sleep alone in the cabin. She could give Fraser until the following day to come – a night of restless tossing and turning in their room, nose pressed to his pillow. For the first time, she seriously entertained the possibility that Colonel James Fraser had heard her speech, that it was not enough, and that he would not be coming.

‘What then?’ she pondered.

Perhaps she would be left to send notes to him periodically, to beckon him to the cabin. Days would be spent – dusting each surface, straightening shoes and magazines. Maybe she would do that for a time, until the moss-covered board was nailed down and the key relocated from its damp home to a hiding place less obvious as a message to her. A signal to just stop, and then she would know for sure.

With The Stranger long abandoned on the coffee table, Claire poured and drained a glass of whisky, then another. She let down her hair from its loose twist, and stood at the back window, watching a cardinal. The prospect of drinking until she was drunk enough to sleep soundly seemed welcome to her in the moment.

The door opened.

For some reason, she was resigned to Jamie not coming to the cabin. In the moment, it did not occur to her that he had received her message or that he had come to her.

“Mrs. Fitz, is that you?” she called out.

A pause.

“Did you drive to London to deliver that note?”

The door clicked closed.

Claire looked into the bottom of her glass and drained the third dram without the wincing shiver that had accompanied the first and second drinks. The liquor didn’t taste like smoke or peet anymore; it didn’t taste like anything anymore.

“It isna Mrs. Fitz.”

Claire swallowed, her breath catching on the hazy burn of the spirit in her throat. She set the glass down on the window ledge, willing her hands not to tremble.

“It’s me.”

Lungs. Her lungs weren’t working. Brain and heart and guts. They were all betraying her – nausea and lack of oxygen and an ever-ratcheting tightness behind her ribs, beneath her breastbone.

“Jamie.”

Claire turned, her knees rapidly going through an evolutionary backslide to reconstitute themselves into a mass of gelatin and floppy, pale flesh. She wound her fingers into the curtain. With the fabric in hand, she willed herself to remain upright. Her voice was hardly a whisper as she said, “You came, Fraser.”

“Aye.” The long line of his throat dipped as he swallowed. “Of course I came for ye.”

At once, they started across the room towards each other – long legs carrying him past the halfway point and bringing the fronts of their bodies crashing into one another. His arms gathered her close, then pulled her somehow closer to hold her with an almost-bruising ferocity. For a few moments, she stood stunned against him, her hold loose at his waist. But then she started to cry. She hadn’t meant to, but the tears would not stop once they started. As she wept, Jamie smoothed her hair and began to weep himself, the unseen origins of a sob building with a tympanic vibration in his chest and eventually cracking free.

“I thought I lost ye,” he mumbled. “I thought that I had to lose ye.”

Claire tucked her face closer to him, balled fistfuls of his shirt into her hands. She was not sure she had a single, solitary word left that day. She had spoken them all on that camera. Everything else, she hoped she could communicate as a shell of herself with only her eyes and gestures.

“I thought that I’d no’ ever see ye again. That the last words I spoke to ye were no’ the ones ye deserved, that I said them to yer back, that I didna say that I loved ye until ye had already gone and I was alone. That I’d no’ ever touch ye again, a nighean.”

“You can touch me now,” she whispered plainly, the sound of her own voice surprising her. His acknowledgment was snuffled and ineloquent as his hand cupped her cheek.

When he kissed her, it felt real. Breathless, she pulled back and mashed her cheek to his.

Part of her wanted to rage. To call him what he was – a bloody stubborn Scot, an idiot, and a know-it-all. The other wanted to hold him, to kiss him, to implore him to make love to her; to wash the taste of that moment when she had turned her back to him out of her mouth, to cleanse her mind of the things they’d said to one another.

His hands were in her hair, tilting her face back towards his. “We need to talk.”

Nodding, she hitched herself somehow closer to him. “I need you to just hold me right now.”

The underside of his chin bumped against her head. She wished desperately that he had more hands, that he was broad enough to fold around her entirely, to swallow her whole. He wasn’t, so they stood in the center of that living room – Claire in her stocking feet and television appearance clothes, Jamie in work clothes – for what felt like an eternity.

She was the first to pull back, to run her fingers along his cheekbones, to try to speak. Words failed her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, rose to the tips of her toes and kissed him. His cheeks, his jaw, his mouth as he ran his hands over her hair and back and shoulders again and again. It was not a romantic kiss and it was not a touch meant to arouse, but instead the intentions of two relieved lovers.

They made their way to the bedroom silently, undressed one another wordlessly, took their time with each button and clasp, every zipper, the delicate film of her stockings, and the clip-on earrings and bracelet.

They slipped beneath the covers naked. It was only once the duvet was overhead that they whispered things – gratitude, love, hope. “I meant it… what I said in that interview. I want to stay here with you for a time.” Claire slid her foot up the back of her love’s leg, the one who she had declared to the world was hers and hers alone. “Come to Balmoral with me. Not as an employee. Come as…”

Her voice faded away, and she shifted up on the bed to look at him, to make sure that she could read him as she said it.

“As the man I love. Not as the Crown Equerry.”

He raised his eyebrows. “So ye’re sayin’ that I’ve been terminated?”

The corner of her mouth lifted in a smirk to match his as she delicately rose above him, hands on either side of his head and one knee moving over his belly. She lowered herself to sit on his thighs. “I’m saying that we have the rest of the summer, and however many days we have left on this earth, if you’ll have me.”

As he pulled himself up and leaned back against the headboard, he tucked her hair behind her ears, traced his hand down her shoulder to push the sheet away from her breasts. Taking her legs and bringing her fully into his lap, he sighed, “Of course.”

“So you will you come to Balmoral? And then back to London?”

“Ye ken there’s nowhere else I’d be, Sorcha.” Her fingers charted a course south between them, and he arched up enough that his neck was corded, taut. “I want to make a life wi’ ye, mo nighean donn. Whatever life that God and the universe have in store for us. I want ye. Desperately. Unendingly.”

Her eyes clouded, she nodded. For a moment she indulged in the thought of him as prince consort (night rides and meeting her under too-sweet magnolia bushes, not out of obligation for secrecy, but for want alone), of his hand in hers as they introduced the world to the next in the Beauchamp line to the throne (an auburn-curled lad with translucent eyelashes or a peach-skinned lass with the rosiest bow-shaped mouth).

“Will ye grow tired of me, do ye think?” he asked.

Her brows knit together, and she huffed a small breath, the diaphanous image of a family they had never discussed having dissolved with his question. “Surely you are joking, Fraser. Do you think you will tire of me?”

“No,” he said firmly, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “That I willna, Sassenach.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“I haven’t,” he pointed out. “It hasna been long, but I want ye as much today as I did those few months ago. More, maybe.”

She leaned down and kissed him. He tasted clean and fresh. Familiar. “I do, too.”

“Then dinna trouble yourself about it, Sassenach, and neither will I.”

He smoothed the curtain of curls that had fallen forward away from her forehead, let loose a little sigh as she rose over him and sank down, her face twisting with the pleasure of having him back with her, back inside of her. Leaning into her, he took his time, lapping at the base of her throat, apologizing with the soft skin of her earlobe absorbing his breath, moving with her only when she whispered, “Please, Jamie.”

She rolled against him, rocked, took his hand, reared back with the bedding tented over her shoulders. He touched her right breast, whimpered, and said that he loved her, that he knew she loved him. Their fingers intertwined, she fell forward to take his mouth, to bite his lower lip.

“Stay here with me for awhile, Fraser,” she groaned, moving faster, pressing closer.

“I will.” His eyes were open, his mouth slack, but he managed, “Always.”

Later, sated and aching between her thighs, Claire was not sure if Jamie was awake. Night had long since fallen, and the quietness of the cabin was disrupted only by the soft click of the radiator and the even cadence of his breathing. “Jamie?” she asked softly, her fingertips running up the centerline of his chest and along the stubble of his throat. “Are you awake?”

He made a decidedly awake, chesty noise of sentience, and she found herself smiling.

She needed him then, not in a desperate away, just in an ancient way. He turned towards her, a hand coming to rest against her hip as if she were gravity itself. Quiet, as though he had not already divined her purpose in rousing him, she asked, “Make love to me again?”

“Yer wee cheeks. They’re pink.”

Defiantly, she muttered, “I have been exercised quite thoroughly, Fraser.”

His fingers traced the apple of her cheek, the bottom swell of her lip. “Ye’re blushing.”

To shut him up, she kissed him and refrained from saying that he was blushing just as furiously with her hand between his legs doing the careful work of bringing him to full readiness for a second round. As he carefully situated his knees on either side of her hips, they somehow knew – both of them – that they could know one another for an entire lifetime and still surprise one another, still love with a mad intensity.

And then all conscious thought was lost between them.

#Anonymous #; mod kate #HRH #Her Royal Highness AU #Part XXIV #jamie x claire

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spotlessvast · 3 years

Text

jetsam and flowers

the boundary between winter and summer is ever so thin on a march day, but time moves like molasses on naked trees in lukewarm air. april teases you with hope and snatches it with rain of its final day, instead of giving rain to steptember to quench the dry grass previously scorched by flames. november and december feels more wintery than the real middle of winter, but it only ever snows in february anymore. life is delayed, and holiday shopping is no exception. i'm a stranger among sisters, and i haven't told them what i want yet. an adult among children, a child among adults. out of place everywhere i go.

frigid december air eats at my already dry face and the only moisture left is the mist underneath my eyelashes. i pull my turtleneck over my nose and hesitate behind them. brick wall buildings are intimidating if they're just the right shade of red, with only steel and no wood. the bricks are a staple rather than an accent, and they clash with the cobalt all too well. inside the store is much warmer, and a little crowded. everyone runs off in different directions, but i stay in place while the whole store morphs around me.

i don't want to be here, i thought. i don't like being here. i don't belong here. i already made a mistake showing myself to these girls and offering even the slightest of my obligations; now i can't escape. with eyes of an artist i observe every small detail in the faceless mannequins and faceless advertisements. consumerism is a soul-sucking disease. apparently, the younger you're exposed to it, the more it affects you.

holiday shopping season is when i miss the summer the most. after the new year, all i see in front of me are days of pre-summer. i wait, and i watch, and i wait again. hoping that this next spring, this next summer, will happen the same with the same old people, except nothing bad happens this time. it's almost pathetic, but there's nothing else to do except wander and wait. summer comes around, and i'll end up hating the heat. it gets hotter and hotter each year, colder and colder each year, and earth's denizens continue to worry themselves. why is consumerism the only medicine they can find? don't they know it's temporary? don't they know it's—

"excuse me sir, no loitering in the entrance."

right, i'm still by the entrance.

i'm outta this joint.

hey, i don't like automatic spinning doors! i don't like self-playing pianos either! automatic spinning doors are less scary than self-playing pianos, but i see more automatic spinning doors in my life. and this store inside the mall had one. it must have been a really fancy one before undergoing renovation, because why else would it have an automatic spinning door? sidestep to the sway of glass walls, don't get crushed by bricks. avoid the consumerist death trap. i'm rewarded with warm april air and a pencil sunset.

unconventionally. sunsets don't usually happen at this time of day during this time of year. it got dark before we even got to the store. however, this was unmistakably the same air as late april despite it being december when we walked in. i exhaust myself trying to figure out what the hell just happened, when i'm snapped back to the present by short haired guy bumping into my shoulder pretty damn hard. and first of all, ow. second of all, upon closer look it appears that i know this guy.

he gathered himself and spoke; "long time no see."

"haha, yeah."

he didn't bump into me, he was knocked flying in my direction, and i realize that now upon hearing a voice as equally enraged as it was collected.

the fancy-looking guy connected to the voice sighed, put his hands in his pockets, and sighed as a trail of smoke followed his footsteps. "well, this isn't the best place to continue a fight. we should move elsewhere." he paused, then made eye contact with me. "oh, hello there."

i stare for a few seconds and then wave. "what the fuck are you two doing here?" i turn my head back to the entrance. it's no longer a mall, but a warehouse. who knows what could be inside it. either way, it does look like a good place to continue a fight, so why would he give it up now...?

"what does it look like?" the short-haired guy said.

"fighting."

"precisely. also, he started it." the fancy-looking guy pointed at the short-haired guy.

"haha, man. you must've done a number on him to get him all the way out here." i gave the short-haired guy a nudge to the side.

"we have unfinished business," he said, matter-of-factly.

i let them bicker it out for another two minutes while i shove my face against the window to the warehouse. it doesn't look like anyone's inside, but there's some lights on the ceiling and a bunch of junk scattered around. i go inside anyway, just to see if it'll take me back to the mall.

it doesn't.

funky.

maybe i forgot the twists i went through on my way out. it'd make sense, though. i ended up in a different parking lot than i started in. malls are fucking huge. sometimes they have storage warehouses, but usually they're not so out in the open like that.

what's weirder than the situation of my current whereabouts is the fact that i know these guys, but never learned their names. oh well, it's fair that they never learned mine, either. i just know them as "this guy" and "that guy," and they probably know me as "that motherfucker."

�� "hey, so," i start. i wait for a response, but there is none. "y-"

and then there's the response from the fancy-looking guy. "hm?"

i pause. "a mall warehouse is a pretty damn good place for a fight, though."

"but you shouldn't be in the middle of this fight," says the short-haired guy, slugging behind me.

"so what? if one of you gets knocked into me, i could probably take it."

there was silence.

"if i may ask, what brings you here in the first place?" asks the short-haired guy.

i shrug. "dunno." and i was telling the truth. i would've told him about holiday shopping, my family, but with every step i take i feel myself growing more and more distant from that. i never really liked spending winter with them, anyway. a liar among sisters. and it's not december anymore, anyway.

a soft april breeze courses through the vast emptiness of the storage warehouse. that's how i can tell the most.

time passes.

time always passes.

time passes, and we end up talking about things i don't care for talking about any longer. my throat is stuffed by ghosts of the past and wrung out with the presence of more friends who tagged along. i was told of a secret hiding spot near the outskirts of the city. an abandoned spot reincarnated to an underground mall with super fucking good pizza. or at least, that's what the guy with the fur collar said.

he stumbled onto the conversation between myself and the short-haired guy and the fancy-looking guy and immediately caught them silent. he always dominated conversations, but had a knack for keeping the listener interested in what he had to say. or maybe i'm the only listener who cares, and i'm an exception who's easily entertained. either way, it's easy to get lost in his stories. i want that pizza.

i tell him i wanna go there, and he leads me out of the warehouse. for a moment, we're the only two people in the world. in the next moment, we're surrounded by hurried shoppers exiting the store i walked into first. and i hate the atmosphere here, but he makes it bearable.

...but where did the others run off to?

probably to finish their fight, or be petty.

"where...are we?" asks the guy with the fur collar.

"i dunno," i say, and i'm telling the truth. i don't remember the name of this place, or how i got here, i just know that i was here to pick up some things for some people that i don't give a shit about.

i try to say more, but my breath runs out before my sentences can end. it's horrible. and suddenly, i'm alone again in a crowd of faceless consumerists running in and out. they get too close, and they'll infect me with their consumerist germs. i put my hands over my face to protect myself, but my hands are bare too. i cover my face like i'm about to cough into my arm, and run.

i trip over a speed bump and land face first into a junk pile outside the ruins of a five-story parking lot.

somehow, every scratch and bruise on my face, arms, and legs were more bearable than going home that night. am i even going home? home is a snare trap on my spinal cord.

the fancy-looking guy grabs me by the shirt collar and pulls me up to eye contact. he narrows his gaze and stares needles through me. "you look like hell. what happened to you?"

"a lot." i can speak now, but i'll have to limit my words. can't waste my breath. "friend's gone."

he just sighs. "shouldn't you go home?"

i flinch. i don't want to go home, so i shake my head side to side.

his grip softens with his gaze, and i fall softly to the ground. my wounds hurt, though i can still walk. it's not like i'm going limp anytime soon, it's just a bit of blood. my top lip tastes like iron...

following my instincts, i walk slow behind him. thinking about it now, he wanted to get away from me or just be left alone in general. those who want to go somewhere always look for directions, and i'll ask him for directions. i dunno what it is about him, but i can't leave him alone.

beneath every step i take, the ground changes shape. what was once a tar road became a narrow dirt path with flowers tangling down and mossy rocks peeking out. the dirt turns into mud, and suddenly i'm walking through a lake while seasonless night sky reflects on the water's surface. i'm watching his footsteps. his shoes are getting wet, his socks are getting wet, and they look expensive. i feel sorry for him, almost.

oh well, he could afford new socks and shoes. wouldn't even have to go through all the trouble of washing them.

a wood fence turns into a brick wall and we walk out of the alleyway. no longer choked up, i try to speak again. i breathe in, and before i can say anything, he turns his head to face me and says; "what?"

we sit down on the curb outside the mall.

"did your parents hate you, too." a ghost spoke through my mouth.

crestfallen, he said nothing. i caught a glimpse of a cut on his neck, just the size of a fingernail.

who am i trying to escape? where am i trying to escape to? i don't need words from you. he's not saying anything. i want to go home to my friends. this world isn't real, and this unreal world is happening in all the right places at all the wrong times. april is the real beginning of the year, and september is the real end. everything in between is suspension between beginnings and ends, and i'm unsure what to do. did my parents hate me? did your parents hate you, too? are they even mine? i am a chameleon among the norm, and my faces aren't dictated by my own will.

are you a social chameleon too? is it my choice to pile on images to fit a role?

"we don't have parents."

a pair of empty hands carry murky pond water in their palms as they ache to be touched by something real. who those hands belong to, is unknown.

and somehow, i know.

i don't have to go back inside to buy flowers.

why couldn't it have been you, instead?

and if i may see you once more in the past can i say "if you are to die soon or quickly can you die pretty" like a famous movie so i can rest against your shoulders, guiltless, and spill all my bottled up muddy secrets.

the guy with the fur collar catches up to me with the rest of his ensemble. it's about time to go home. out of the corner of my eye i see three strangers pushing a full shopping cart.

#spilled ink #short stories #writers on tumblr #surrealism

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ranger-report · 4 years

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Review: THE WITCHER (2007)

With the recent popularity of The Witcher across mass media thanks to the Netflix series starring Henry Cavill and his arms, I finally began what I consider an epic quest to play through all three of the Witcher games and their DLC. This is, by no means, a small task, but you know I might as well sacrifice myself in the name of entertainment. So I began to play The Witcher: Enhanced Edition, a PC game released in 2007 based on the books of the same name written by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Now that I’ve beaten it I have quite a few things to say about it. But, first thing’s first, and that is easily the most obvious aspect of this game:

It has not aged well. Not at all.

To begin with, the graphics of the game are very 2007. A product of seventh generation graphical technology to be sure, it doesn’t help that it’s running on BioWare’s Aurora engine, which was notoriously difficult to use outside BioWare’s own house. There’s all kinds of graphical glitches, people pass through objects, character models and textures are fuzzy and sometimes plasticine, facial animations are sometimes downright frightening. There’s also the fact that the game reuses the same character model for multiple characters, both important and unimportant, leading me to confusion sometimes as I swore I just saw that goddamn priest I just killed wandering around the city. Except now there’s two of him. And all the merchants look the same, too! This being the enhanced edition there’s a number of upgrades and clarity that’s been added in to the experience, but it’s still dated for better or worse. What has aged well is the use of impressionistic paintings for the purpose of certain cutscenes, adding an extra dose of epic quality to some of the goings-ons. This also includes more “intimate endeavors” Geralt can engage in. Long story short, there’s a lot of women in this game who are willing to throw themselves at Geralt, and if you play the cards right you can get down to business pretty quickly. Sometimes too quickly; one time I brought a woman a loaf of bread and she had sex with Geralt. It was confusing and out of left field. But each encounter comes with a brief piece of tasteful nude artwork of the lady in question as blurred models bump and grind in the background. And, to be completely honest, the artwork is really well done. Although it is very jarring to play a game where sex workers are clearly labeled “whores” and “hookers,” most of the women have a good amount of agency in the proceedings, particularly the two primary romance options, Triss and Shani. Geralt can actually romance these two women to the point of committed relationship, which is refreshing to see that sex is not just a reward for “romancing” a character in a game, but something the characters enjoy, while the romance comes from genuinely caring about someone.

Despite the graphical despondency, main characters fare slightly better, as anyone who needs to be easily recognizable is, and are crafted with much more detail and fine tuning than regular NPCs. While this is fine, sometimes finding these characters is a chore and a half. The Witcher has a day/night cycle, and characters follow this, but when my map is telling me I need to be in one place to meet up with someone, I can’t count that they will actually be there depending on the time of day. And I can’t artificially move the time of day forward unless I have a campfire to meditate at. Meditation is an interesting mechanic, btw, as it basically acts as Geralt “sleeping” and also functions as your chance to level up and distribute talents. On paper, I’m okay with that. In reality, campfires and places to sleep are few and far between, unless you’re close to an inn or someone who doesn’t mind you crashing at their place. And oftentimes you’re running back and forth in linear paths across deceptively open areas, back and forth and back and forth in what can only best be described as tedium when you’ll approach the quest marker on your map, only to find no one there, and need to hoof it back to a fireplace to change the time again. This can also lead to extra consternation if the game crashes, which it did a handful of times during my fifty hours of gametime. Save often.

And, finally, there’s the combat. For better or worse, it’s an exercise in clicking on people to attack them, then clicking again at the right time when your icon changes in order to string together combos. That’s fine. Combat is also divided into three styles between two swords: strong, fast, and group style, with steel blade and silver blade. Strong and fast styles speak for themselves; group style is for when you’re surrounded and need to attack everyone around you. Steel blade is for humans, silver blade for monsters. Sounds simple right? It is -- too simple. Clicking on people is as easy as that, with little interaction otherwise. Sure, you have to figure out which style to use on which enemies, and you can couple in Signs (magic spells) to make your life easier, but repeatedly clicking on people to whack away is bland at best, frustrating at worst. Later on when you can level up your sword styles to include more powerful/deadly moves it becomes more challenging, but even then it remains a strange exercise in an odd hybrid of real time/tactical combat. Finding oneself surrounded can lead to death quickly, so if you’re not paying attention, you can go from overpowered madman to witcher meat in seconds. Literally seconds: enemies I would have no problem with one-on-one, or even two-on-one, suddenly escalate to an unstoppable force the moment that three or more come in for an attack. The game has a way of forcing Geralt into combat situations without warning as well, making it easy to be thoroughly unprepared for a deadly gangbang around a corner and a cutscene. The game also doesn’t have much of an autosave system, meaning that if you haven’t been hitting that quicksave button very often, there’s a deep chance you could get your ass handed to you and reload a ways back from where you were. Easily the biggest frustration for me in terms of playing the game. Enemies will stack status effects to clobber you; Geralt will attack and get hit; sometimes you can stagger enemies and one-hit kill them, but enemies can still attack while Geralt goes through the slow kill animation. I don’t know how many times I cursed the game in anguish as I was forced to reload yet again after a fourth monster swept in out of nowhere, or the one monster I was fighting decided to get in a Stun attack, then proceed to own my ass. Pausing the game at any time using the space bar can help to get bearings, but you can’t execute commands while paused. Saving in combat isn’t allowed either, so if a big fight starts and you realize you haven’t saved in a while, you’re screwed. Couple this frustration with the intensely boring act of clicking on monsters over and over again to fight them, and here we have the biggest weakness of the whole product.

That being said -- is the game worth playing in 2020? Despite being 13 years of age and regarded as the least accessible game in the franchise, what it brings to the table is a surprisingly effective storyline that involves subject matter which is shockingly relevant. Racial tension. Class war. Plague. Quarantine. Riots. Gray morals. Strange creatures. Frustration. Difficulty spikes. Blurred lines between human and monster. If that sounds hauntingly familiar, it’s probably because that sums up the first half of the year 2020. To say that I was expecting a 13-year-old game to reflect the state of current events would be a massive lie; in fact, at the outset of the game, I was struggling to maintain interest at all. However, as time goes, the story and the choices made are what end up being the game’s biggest strength, and ultimately its salvation.

The story opens up simply enough: Geralt of Rivia, our titular witcher, has been found in a near-death state and nursed back to health by his fellow witchers and former lover, the sorceress Triss Merigold. Coming back from the dead has cost him his memories, however, and the amnesiac Geralt is quickly plunged into conflict as a group of mercenaries called Salamandra attack the witchers’s base to steal the secrets of their mutations. Swords clash, magic flies back and forth, and Geralt is tasked with giving chase in order to retrieve the mutagenic formulae so they can’t be used for harm.

A great conceit in this is that Geralt having no memory of his past allows anyone unfamiliar with the world to gently ease in and learn about the world as he does. The game is set after the events of the books, so this gives an added bonus to readers already knowledgable of events. And as the player learns more about Geralt and his world, a variety of choices come into play. Most RPGs have this option to allow player freedom in telling a story, but unforseen consequences follow every decision; whether they come into play immediately or further down the road remains to be seen, but there’s a ripple effect that goes above and beyond the usual Choose Your Own Adventure details which essentially craft your character into a good guy or a bad guy. What’s brilliant about this is that the game never hints at this; it isn’t until the game breaks away into a cutscene with monologue does Geralt realize how his choices crafted this specific moment. For example, in the Salamandra attack, Geralt can choose to fight off a horrific monster or help Triss defend the witcher laboratory. Depending on that choice, some characters may live or die, and the game will let you know that when it wants to....usually to hammer home a point.

What works to this being the strength of the game even further is the deep narrative, which is often times complex to the point of frustration. But the story develops at a natural pace, and never presents any choice as being right or wrong, black or white, good or bad. The main gist is that the human city of Vizima is under quarantine, fighting off a vicious plague, but also defending itself from the rise of nonhuman freedom fighters comprised of elves and dwarves. The city is divided on this, particularly in class division, with any nonhuman residents living in the slum quarter, while the affluent humans live exclusively in the market quarter. There are humans in the slums too, make no mistake, but it’s very apparent who is allowed to live where. However, the game makes no stance on this whatsoever; Geralt is presented with a series of choices based on the information at hand, and as the game goes on, comes closer and closer to choosing a side between the freedom fighters or the humans as tensions comes to a head with violence. Every action has a consequence, positive or negative, but also depending on who the consequences affect. Questions of moral arise; what truly defines a monster? Is it appearance, or is it action? It’s difficult to really spell it out further without diving into spoilers, as the story should be experienced first hand without any warning. That being said, it’s refreshing to play through a game in which the character is clearly defined as being the hero, but then forces the player to ask if their actions are truly heroic or actually damaging in the quest to destroy the greater evil.

In closing, The Witcher is a mixed bag. Narratively, it’s a stellar effort that swings for the fences and sticks the landing. From a gameplay perspective, it’s a dated game that’s sometimes a chore to play through, even to the point of dire frustration. But it’s one that I can cautiously recommend. While it certainly took me six or so hours to finally believe that I had the hang of it -- I didn’t -- struggling through the first quarter of the game can yield beautiful results, especially once it rolls into the final, jaw-dropping conclusion. What I will say is that it really beats you over the head with your choices, even the ones you didn’t know you were making, and holds up a mirror to ask if your decisions were really for the greater good or not. Outstanding work in that regard. I’m looking forward to playing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings now that I’ve beaten this, and someday I’ll even come back to see the paths I could have taken. Just with tempered expectations this time around.

Final score: 7/10

#the witcher #the witcher enhanced edition #cd projekt red #geralt of rivia #pc game #andrzej sapkowski #henry cavill #netflix #bioware #review #ckburch #rubyranger #ranger report

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morallydraconequus · 5 years

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Gordon in Wonderland, Ch 4: Percy Sends Phillip to Gordon in the Middle.

After his trial in kangaroo court - even though there weren’t any kangaroos - and a caucus race, Gordon puffed down the dirt path in peace. He thought that when he grew big, he would require rails again. Gordon did feel more secure on rails, but he did not deny that it would be troublesome to need them when he’s somewhere that didn’t have tracks.

“As long as I don’t knock over, I think I’ll be fine.” Gordon mumbled to himself. Or was he talking to himself? Gordon had a feeling that someone was watching him shrink bit by bit as he travelled. His first instinct was to chuff as quickly as possible to lose them but that would be a waste of water. Instead, Gordon went slowly and listened carefully for anyone. He heard faint rustles in the flora and soon, voices that spoke in a familiar, Scottish dialect.

“Tis yer fault ye scared th' rabbit away.” “Na! Tis yer fault! Cause of ye, we have nae company!”

“Donald and Douglas?” whispered Gordon. “They’ve seen the rabbit? Perhaps they could direct me to him.”

Gordon passed through the bushes and saw the Scottish twins arguing. They were in engine form, to Gordon’s relief. What was different about them was that, despite being like Gordon, they were well versed in moving about in this way.

“Excuse me, do you know which way the rabbit went?” Gordon asked.

Surprised but somewhat pleased, the twins stopped their argument with innocent looks on their faces.

“What rabbit? Na rabbit here,” The twins replied in perfect synchronisation, “Who are you?”

At last, Gordon had found residents who referred to him as ‘Who’, not ‘What’.

“My name is Gordon. You two were talking about the rabbit that passed by. You were just arguing about it seconds ago.”

“Why ye ask?” The twins pondered.

“Well, I’m chasing after the rabbit because I have to talk to him about something. He rushed by while I needed a nap and woke me up, so I have to find him in order to complain for an apology.”

“Ah’m Tweedle-Donald.” “An’ Ah’m Tweedle-Douglas. An’ na, we have nae seen the wee rabbit.” “Or was it a big one Douglas?” “Aye, we dinnae know.”

Their answer left Gordon puzzled and annoyed. For certain, they knew about the rabbit who went by in a hurry.

“Fine then,” Gordon huffed, “I’ll try to find him myself. Sorry for bothering you two.”

“Wait! We know where it went. We know about it.” confessed Tweedle-Donald. “If ye stay for a little while, we’ll tell ye which path it went along.” added Tweedle-Douglas.

“I guess I could stay,” agreed Gordon, “But I’m not the kind of engine who gets obsessed with a tree the moment I see it. I prefer sophisticated entertainment.” ‘Unlike Henry.’ He mentally added.

“Well then, how aboot a brawl?” “A fight!” The twins were bashing against each other and Gordon questioned how in the world does that did not hurt. Gordon was a strong engine, but due to his situation he decided to preserve his energy for whatever was awaiting him in the near future.

“Why don’t we just talk about serious things to pass the time? Like gentlemen.”

The twins were interested in being ‘gentlemen’, as if it was some plaything.

“How aboot a poem?” Tweedle-Douglas suggested. “ ‘The Toad and the Olive tree’. An interesting tale.” said Tweedle-Donald.

“Alright then.” agreed Gordon.

The twins took turns with each verse.

“The stars all sparkled and twinkled,

Their light upon the moor,

Puck and friends would enjoy,

To dance and sing but what for?

They cheered and sang the tale of,

The characters of the lore,

The sun and moon, day and night,

Though the sun never learned,

Once the sun asked the moon,

‘Why should we have turns?’

So the moon simply said,

‘So creatures won’t wither or burn.’

The lake in the moor barely waved

The moor wearily wuthered,

There was an olive tree,

Because there were no others,

There was a toad,

And it was never bothered,

The Toad and the Olive Tree,

Were very close indeed,

Ever since the Toad was ‘Tadpole’,

And the Olive tree was ‘Olive seed’.

And companions, no matter what,

Was what they both agreed,

The Olive tree obligated to bore,

Poor Toad with tales of bravery,

‘I came through storms and thunder,

I’m a very brave tree, see?’

‘Yes, Mr Olive Tree, I see.’

Toad responds politely,

Then one day, a creature,

Alligator came to the moor,

“Name’s Gator, it’s nice to meet you,

Olive Tree’s stories always left me in awe,

Toad, would you like to visit me in the lake,

I too have tales galore,”

Toad, was interested,

In Gator but Toad does mind,

Even though Olive tree’s quite boastful,

Toad shouldn’t leave him behind,

‘Cause if he did, the promise,

Would be broken, were he not kind,

Now when you hear the ‘wuthering’,

It’s the Olive Tree of the moor,

‘If only I was humble.’ he moaned,

Olive Tree withered with grief but what for?

For the Toad visited the Gator,

And didn’t come back anymore!”

“The end!” Announced the twins.

“That was quite an interesting poem,” Gordon admitted.

“Which character did ye like the best?” asked Tweedle-Donald.

“I think I like the Toad the best. Even though he left the Olive tree, he did feel sorry about it.”

“But he still left the Olive tree all sad an’ lonely.” Tweedle-Douglas interrupted, making Gordon changing his mind.

“In that case, I like the Olive tree the best,” Gordon hastily claimed, “He did learn his lesson to be humble at the end, and he did care about the Toad.”

“But tis was his own pride that got him into the mess.” added Tweedle-Donald.

“Alright, I like the Gator the best then. He was friendly after all.”

“But he’s the reason why the Toad left the Olive tree.” Both twins contradicted.

Gordon was left puzzled.

“Fine then! I like them all equally. No more, no less. You two make them sound so contrary!”

“Contrary?” “Yes. Like in the nursery rhyme, ‘Mistress Mary Quite Contrary’.”

The two twin engines were interested in one blink.

“Missus Mary? Never heard that poem.” “Aye Tweedle-Donald. Could ye care to tell us that poem?”

“Mistress Mary,” corrected Gordon, “And sure, it’s a short poem.”

The blue engine drew in a breath before reciting the nursery rhyme which he has heard from the little children at the stations for years

‘Mistress Mary, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells and cockle shells,

And pretty maids all in a row.’

“The word ‘contrary’ makes Miss Mary sound like lovely lady.”

“Common mistake,” Gordon explained, “‘Contrary’ means that the person is very disagreeable or stubborn. So the true context is, Mistress Mary is very stubborn of how she grows her garden and doesn’t like it when people tell her advice on how she should grow it.”

The twins were in awe of this piece of new knowledge. Not that Gordon minded.

“So, which way did the rabbit go?” Tweedle-Donald and Tweedle-Douglas both stopped talking of the word ‘Contrary’.

“We can say that the wee rabbit went down this path with the marigolds.” The two Scottish engines directed to said path, bound with bright, yellow flora.

“Thank you-” The twins had disappeared, leaving Gordon no choice but to follow the yellow flowered road.

…

“What an odd pair.” Gordon mumbled. “What’s more odd that I’m roughly Thomas’ size! Oh the indignity…”

Soon enough, the path of marigolds stopped in front of what seemed to be a massive cottage, if it wasn’t called a mansion.

“It has a height of one Cranky and a half!” Gordon exclaimed, still proud of his makeshift measuring unit. This had brought the attention of a certain rushed rabbit.

“Oh dear! Oh my! I’m so behind on time!” Gordon had finally found Percy, bunny ears and all.

“Well, well, well. Here’s the engine I want to speak to-” “No time to talk! I need to find my parchment!”

Percy rushed into what Gordon believed was his cottage. All sorts of fabrics and little bits and bobs were flung out of the door. One ridiculously large sheet of green silk trapped Gordon, taking away his sight. When Percy had puffed out of the cottage, he took the sheet off Gordon. Gordon was more than confused since Percy was an engine like himself, having only buffers to pull the silk off.

“Oh dear, I don’t have time to put this away! Could you do it please?” “What? But I-” “Thank you so much! Put it back in the highest room and in the cupboard!”

Percy shunted Gordon into the cottage before rushing out again. To Gordon’s disdain, he would have to pull the door to get out; he only knew how to push.

“I might as well put this away, since I’m stuck in this one and a half Cranky tall ‘cottage’.” Gordon planned. The not-so-big-but-not-tiny blue engine chuffed onwards for what seemed like hours - even though it was about fifteen minutes, for Gordon exaggerated again - until he came upon the last room.

“How am I meant to reach the stairs?” Gordon pondered. There were two glass doors ajar and they lead to what seemed like a balcony in between two windows, decorated with curtains that had a floral pattern of roses and thorns. He came onto the balcony and was stunned by his current height above the ground. A Cranky and a half, to be exact.

“I didn’t even come across any stairs or even a ramp!” Gordon exclaimed, “This is such a bizarre place indeed! I’ve been shrinking and growing, rained on a bird, thrown to win a race and made another bird dive head-first into the ground and now this!” Gordon did not find the poem exchange with the twins strange enough to fit on his list.

“I suppose I’ll just leave this here.” Gordon fumbled with the silk that was dragged along on his tender. He bumped into a dresser which had a jug of water on top of it, and the pitcher conveniently fell on top of his boiler. It filled it up completely with water.

Gordon felt his body shrinking and growing in an abnormal way, but he wasn't too big yet.

“Oh no, not again…” He groaned. Gordon burst inside the cottage, breaking on what was supposed to be the second floor. His tender crushed the back garden - if there was one - but fortunately, his face did not pop out of the wall, unlike his buffers. Two windows allowed Gordon to see the commotion outside.

Strangely, Percy was nowhere to be seen considering the destruction of his cottage. However, he did see human figures gaping at him or rather at what abomination that caused this sight before them. Seven of them, to be exact. Gordon squinted his eyes and recognised them by colour and the way they interacted.

The men were dressed in lower-class outfits - by Gordon’s definition of lower-class - and wore respective colours and tags displaying their names.

“Would you look at that?” said the carpenter with the tag ‘Rheneas’, “There’s something hiding in that cottage!”

“Ye 'n' yer silly imagination.” grumbled the one labelled ‘Duncan’.

“He’s right, it’s staring at us through those two windows!” argued Rheneas’ companion, ‘Rusty’. “You always have to complain, don't you Duncan?” “Why, I ought to-” “Gentlemen, let’s not fight. We can all agree there’s something in that cottage. The real question is if it’s safe or not.” ‘Skarloey’ interrupted.

“Agreed.” ‘Sir Handel’ remarked in a nonchalant manner.

“It could be friendly,” muttered ‘Peter Sam’, “Anyways, has anyone seen Luke?”

As if on cue, their fellow carpenter (whom Gordon presumed to be Luke) rushed onto the scene, out of breath.

“Sorry guys, I got caught up with something,” puffed Luke, “I ran into this little guy getting stuck in a tree.”

Gordon was not intimidated or amused by them. “What is this? ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’?”

“We’ll never be able to do one rehearsal of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ at this rate!” Duncan complained.

“Correction, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.” Gordon stated. “Might as well be as confusing as ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.”

Gordon’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s works came partially from conversations he would overhear at stations. There were a few productions, but obviously Gordon was not able to see them. A Shakespearean actor had often explained the plots of the plays to his mother, who did not understand them. Specifically, the playwright’s wording. That was imprinted into Gordon’s mind instead of the old lady’s.

What Luke ran into appeared to be a small Diesel engine no higher than the fence in front.

“Phillip?” Gordon whispered. Phillip seemed to be more energetic than usual, and that was saying something. Like the Scottish twins Gordon met previously, Phillip was more experienced of movement without tracks.

“Ooh! Is that smoke from that weird chimney?”

Gordon had no idea how Phillip would mistake his funnel for a chimney and the steam clouds for smoke. Then again, this is Phillip.

The group of carpenters had decided to start rehearsing anyway, without supervising the hyperactive Phillip. As Gordon had predicted, there was a carpenter playing ‘Pyramus’, ‘Thisbe’, ‘Wall’, ‘Moonshine’, ‘Lion’ and so on. Everytime they mispronounced ‘Ninus’ tomb’ for ‘Ninny’s tomb’, Gordon kept muttering to correct them and groaned at their poor use of iambic pentameter.

Unaware to the Skarloey carpenters and Gordon, Phillip had somehow got onto the roof with debris above the hole Gordon’s funnel created. The funnel did not peek through the hole, but Gordon’s sudden transformation had been enough to break part of the roof.

“I wonder what will happen if I push all the broken tiles and dust into there?” pondered Phillip. He had pushed all the debris into Gordon’s funnel with a naive smile.

The gigantic blue engine spluttered at the invasive feeling of the debris in his pipes and smokebox. The curious diesel above moved closer to observe through the hole in the roof. Poor Gordon felt the need to sneeze, and worried that the whole cottage would collapse on him.

After numerous attempts to contain it, Gordon sneezed. Stronger than Henry had when he taught those mischievous boys a lesson by sneezing soot on them, the sneeze carried the debris and Phillip up into the air.

“Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” screeched Phillip. By Gordon’s logic, Phillip should’ve fallen down... but it seemed that Gordon had blasted him out of the atmosphere! This had caught the attention of the Skarloey carpenters, shocked faces plastered on each of them.

“Poor Phillip.” Gordon whispered as if it were an apology. He doubted that the poor thing had even thought about writing a will, unlike Gordon, who had hastily created his during his flight in the caucus race. Gordon made a mental note to develop on the will at a later date.

“Well, that does it! The creature in that house is evil! It blew that innocent young’un into the bloody sky!” Duncan cried.

“By the looks of it, we’ll have to make a sensible plan.” Skarloey decided. ‘At least one of them is reasonable.’ Gordon thought. “We’ll smoke the beast out!”

‘What?!?’ Gordon mentally screeched.

The Skarloey Carpenters all agreed on covering the hole with some of the useable debris and using Gordon’s ‘smoke’ against him. The gigantic ‘beast’ engine didn’t even notice the hole being completed in such a short time frame: they had it done in under a minute.

Plumes of polluted steam poured out of any cracks in the cottage, as well as the windows that were Gordon’s only vision. The dust particles that were carried around by the steam made Gordon splutter and wheeze once more. The Carpenters were far away from the cottage in a safe distance to take cover.

This time when Gordon sneezed, the cottage walls and the roof flew away like the frightened critters fleeing nearby, leaving the engine back to his smaller-than-a-toy-engine size.

He saw the frame of the entrance door, with said door missing due to his sneeze and grumpily ignored the Skarloey carpenters celebrating his ‘defeat’. With slight satisfaction but discomfort - Gordon absolutely loathed the feeling of dust and debris in his system, which should be well cleared - chuffed out the door and into the long grass.

“Oh the indignity. Now Henry can actually justify why he feels so horrible when he was a sickly engine, since the whistles and taking my express wasn’t enough for karma.” Gordon moaned.

Author’s Note:

Again, thanks to @mystarsignisno for editing and proofreading and I would also like to give thanks to @butterfrogmantis for checking the dialogue for the Scottish twins.

You can clearly see that I slowly gave up on the accent and I rushed the poem (The original was really long).

#Gordon in Wonderland #ttte gordon #ttte #gordon the big engine #alice in wonderland parody

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70slovergirl · 5 years

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Jimmy Page Fanfic

Hello, thank you for sticking with me down this road! I have all sorts of plans for this story, so I hope to keep you entertained.

I also wanted to give special thanks to the lovely @ritacaroline. I know my grammar is not great and she was so so nice to offer me help correcting some of my monstrous mistakes. She’s also a really great person overall so thank you for that Rita. I recommend checking out her Jimmy Page Fanfic, it’s called ‘In the Light’ and I’m personally hooked on the story.

P.S. The next chapter involves the concert and I know we all love a good Zep gig!

Chapter 5

There was a ringing that threatened to split my head in two. I’m never drinking again, I thought, cracking my eyes open to find the source of the incessant sound. The room was still heavily disorganized but splendidly bathed in a golden light that suggested it was still early in the day. The noise suddenly ceased, and I slumped back to bed, defeated. Those damn sequins on my dress had dug deeply into my skin, making me itchy and suddenly so uncomfortable that I couldn’t get back to sleep.

And then the strident ring began again.

“For Christ’s sake.” I muttered against the pillow, searching for the cherry-colored telephone on top of the bedside table. “Yes?” My annoyance was clear in my voice when I answered.

“Ms. Rayne, this is the hotel receptionist. You had a call, and the caller said you should get back as soon as possible. The number is here in the lobby, in case you would like to drop by.”

“Yeah, I’ll get back to them after lunch.” I yawned, my eyes already closed from the effort it took to reach for the phone.

“It’s four in the afternoon, Ms. Rayne.” Her stylized, almost robotic voice echoed back at me, and her words ran down my spine like a bucket of icy water.

Shiiiiit.

I literally ran to the bathroom in an effort to speed the process of making myself presentable. As the tap released a shower of warm, therapeutic water, I tried to count in my head the number of shots I had taken last night along with John Bonham, but just couldn’t come up with a plausible one. After that encounter with the aloof Page, I had gone back to the table full of the Zeppelin personnel joining the three remaning members. Whatever happened after that is not exactly clear.

Racing back to my luggage, I rummaged through for something that didn’t require too much thinking. I was supposed to spend Saturday creating a profile on the band members, not sleeping off my colossal hangover. Man, I should be named Employee of the Month. I finally came across a pine colored maxi dress that sported a thin halter neck. I paired it along with some round, orange-tinted glasses to try to hide my bloodshot, hungover eyes, and I was out the door.

My feet followed firstly the trail to the lobby, and I finally placed a face on to the lady whose call had awoken me. She was already busy answering the phone, but happily handed me a piece of paper with a scribbled number. I didn’t recognize the digits, and there was no name nor address whatsoever. Nevertheless, I walked towards the telephone for guest calls and dialed it.

“Hi, this is Venus Rayne, you were trying to reach me?” I greeted as soon as the repeated tone ceased.

“Yes, Ms. Rayne, this is Ben Fong from Rolling Stone Magazine.” I burst out laughing, doubling over and holding my stomach.

“Yeah right, that’s a good one.” Giggling, I tried muffling the sound as I had gotten dirty looks from some guests hanging around. “Listen dude, I have a massive hangover, and this is certainly not helping.”

“Mr. Callaghan must’ve given me the wrong number. Are you not a journalist for Muse?”

Oh fuck.

“Uhhh, yeah. Yes, I mean.” I facepalmed myself, begging the earth to swallow me whole.

“…Great. Listen, you’re with Led Zeppelin for the weekend, right?”

“Yes.”

“We’re doing this Concerts You Can’t Miss this Summer piece and would really like to include Zep on it. And, you know, since today is their very first, we thought we might get your perspective on the matter. 150 words. What do you say?”

I was at loss for words. Being included on this particular magazine has been a goal of mine, and even if it was only an insignificant part, it would surely look good on my resume.

“Yes.” I finally let out with absolute confidence.

“Good. Just one more thing, this is due tomorrow six am sharp. It needs to go through the editor’s table before being published. I understand you have another deadline for Sunday. Are you sure you can handle it?”

“Fuck yes.” Ben Long chuckled on the other side of the line as I fist bumped the air. The opportunities were lining themselves up for me, and I was not going to be afraid to take them. I sent my regards to the magazine’s team and hung up, feeling victorious.

“Oi, girlie.” I knew by the brusque voice that it belonged to none other than Mr. Grant, and I turned around to greet his sleepless face. “Breakfast.” He said, pointing towards the direction he was walking. The large manager didn’t stop to chat, and I trailed behind him, hoping to get on his good side.

“Tough night?” I asked, perhaps too chirpily.

“Fun night, Miss Rayne. I am surprised you’re up this early, considering the events that occurred.” My cheeks burned at his comment, but he seemed pleased, as though I had somehow earned his approval by drinking half the bar. “Hey chap, did you manage to wake them up?”

He was speaking to a roadie who rushed by with a distressed look painted on his face, hands deep in his pockets. “Bonham threw a pair of drumsticks at me, but they’re up.” With that remark the boy was gone, and I glanced at Mr. Grant to find him nodding.

“That sounds like him.” He muttered almost to himself and I contributed a chuckle.

We finally entered a deserted room, probably destined for reunions, and especially closed for the band. The table was filled edge to edge with all sorts of foods: fried bacon, scrambled and poached eggs, trails among trails of diverse breads, grilled veggies and fresh fruit. There was also champagne and orange juice for mimosas, along with bottles of heavier alcohol. Despite the fact there was literally no one, the grumpy manager asked me to take a seat and left without a beat.

I was buzzing, first as a result of the recent news and second, because it didn’t really matter I had overslept. Apparently a four pm breakfast was only natural for bands, and I took a mental note for future events. The possibilities of accompanying other rock groups on tour seemed suddenly reachable, and I found myself on cloud nine.

As I was reaching for some champagne to celebrate, two scantily dressed girls with long chestnut-colored hair entered the room, and I immediately identified them as groupies. Robert’s, I thought, deciding the best would be to simply ignore them.

“So, who did you come in with?” One of them asked me, and I only glared back. It was then that I noticed both of the girls shared my same hairstyle: wavy dark hair with a middle parting. It was certainly a strange coincidence, but I didn’t put too much thought into it, downing my mimosa.

A freshly showered Robert Plant then strutted in, his wet blond tresses stuck to his neck. His characteristic jolly smile was shining through despite the hangover I knew he too had to be sporting. The singer walked directly for me, obvious to the excited groupies that fought to get his attention.

“Really, Robert? You spent all night with those chicks and you can’t manage a hello?” I asked him, discreetly pointing their way with my slim, champagne flute. This produced a confused expression on the rock star’s face.

“Oh, they do not belong to me.” He shrugged bewildered, and without a care reached for my glass, drinking the leftover. There was a sudden blow, and in came the boisterous John Bonham, his face obviously tired but enthusiastic. As soon as he caught sight of me, the drummer came sprinting towards my seat.

“Bloody hell, Venus. That’s what I call getting hammered.” I high fived my new drinking buddy, and we ended cracking up over the ridiculous conversations we had last night while totally inebriated. “I don’t even know how this wanker could perform.” Bonham howled, referring to Robert and his league of unclaimed groupies.

“Actually, Planty here claims they aren’t his.” I responded while both band members devoured plates of traditional English breakfast. The drummer looked up at my statement, slightly puzzled.

“Well, they’re certainly not Jonesy’s, and Page goes for blondes.” Some peculiar ideas began popping up in my mind after Bonham’s remark, but I waved them away as pure speculation. “Now that I think about it, where was Jimmy last night?”

Like summoned by the mere sound of his name, the elusive player burst through the door and the entirety of the table fell silent. Try as I might, I couldn’t resist stealing a curious look at him and at the way his hair released tiny drops of water that slid well into his open shirt. I was suddenly thirsty and knew no amount of alcohol could satisfy it.

Jimmy Page took a quick look at the members of the makeshift breakfast, until his eyes finally settled on me. I shifted nervously at the intensity of his glare, as his fellow partners followed the trail of their guitarist’s gaze to my seat. A beat later and he was gone without uttering a single word, both groupies following quickly behind him. Well, that answers that.

“What did you do?” Robert and John questioned in unison, shocked at our exchange but very much amused. I shrugged and sank deeper into my chair, still dazed by the brief appearance of the British God. Or Devil, that suits him so much better.

“I’ll investigate.” The singer stated and rushed out of his seat laughing. Bonham quickly followed, not before congratulating me on managing to piss off the reclusive Jimmy. It didn’t seem like an accomplishment to me.

#jimmy page #jimmy page fanfic #jimmy page fanfiction #led zeppelin #led zeppelin fanfiction #rock #70s

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fayepratas · 3 years

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Block , block, delete.

Forgiveness is such a difficult topic for me to talk about. When you’ve been through trauma, whether from childhood abuse, or a destructive relationship, or a ‘friend’ who turned out not to be who you thought, the thought of giving the person/people who wronged you just a second of your brain energy is an impossible one. Just thinking about the person/people and the event/events brings all these ugly dark and oppressive emotions rushing up from deep in your subconscious. The anger, the hurt, the grief, the pain. Even when you think you’ve put it in its box. Its spring loaded, and when you think about that trauma BAM! It’s like you’re right back there, and you haven't escaped it at all. Weak, vulnerable, defenceless. Just a taste of the emotions you feel when something not many could every truly relate to, has happened. And who would want to feel this way? especially when you’ve worked so damn hard to be happy. Is it not bad enough that a part of your true self has been torn from you, kicked around and thrown away like some cheap plastic football? Why, then, would you ever entertain the idea of showing any empathy or compassion towards them? They don’t deserve your compassion. People like that don’t give a shit about you or your feelings, clearly. You are the victim, it's your story, and while they had their fifteen minutes of fame, they’ll be pretty low down on the list of the end credits (if there at all). So why on earth would you allow them back into your life? and on top of that, attempt to reconcile or even forgive them? Forgive them... Even typing that was a challenge. Like I said, this is a difficult topic.

No, bad people deserved no opportunities prove themselves to me. And, as I grew up and entered adulthood, I treated everyone as a potential threat. Waiting for them to show their true colours before promptly and abruptly ending our friendship/relationship. And there was nothing to be done. My mind had decided that before I had even pressed the ‘Block’ button. They had ‘proven’ themselves already. That was my reckoning, anyway. Sometimes they hadn't even actually done anything. But I felt fear, threat, an uncomfortableness that I just couldn’t sit with. And each time I blocked, deleted and ghosted those from my life that I felt had crossed a line, I felt better, like the ‘problem’ had been solved, and I had gotten rid. Rid of all of the drama, and those uncomfortable feelings that I didn’t want to... have to... deal with. I was the victim. But while I hoped my life would get better, it got worse. I drank, I partied, I entered into a relationship that was not good for me. And I had absolutely no awareness that I was heading down a road that would take me to some very dark places. Life was just happening, and I was going along for the ride. In its highs I loved it. Getting drunk, connecting with people at a superficial level. I felt invincible. I lived for it. But at its lows I was constantly anxious, I felt incredibly disconnected, and walked around with the viewpoint that nobody was to be trusted, that every person I came across was another opportunity to be let down. I kept everyone at arm's length and unsurprisingly had very few people in my life. I convinced myself for years that I was happy alone, and that I didn’t need anybody. I concentrated on my work and my children, and that, I thought, was all I needed.

But I was so wrong about so many things. Childhood trauma does that to you. It instils beliefs deep into your unconscious mind about who you are, what you deserve, and how to view the world and everyone in it. My children were on pedestals, and I did everything I could to be the best mother I could be. But there was so much in me underneath that I had not dealt with; finding peace from difficult events, being able to maintain friendships, etc. In fact, the main take away from my counselling sessions over the years have always been centred around my connectedness (or lack of) with others. I let people in. They let me down. I erased them. But far from making me happier it drove me further into depression, and not feeling like I have a place in the world. And while my aim was to rid these people from my thoughts, they took much more of my brain space than I could have ever wanted. The anger and hatred I kept burning so brightly for them spilled into other areas of my life, and I was just an all-round bitter person. My outlook was pretty bleak, despite having overcome depression, and being disconnected from society was still a massive issue for me. In finally recognising this I came to the realisation that I couldn’t just erase and repeat, but instead must learn the art of repairing, reconciling and fixing what was broken. I'd never consider throwing a laptop with a damaged charger, so how could I consider being so detached when dealing with other human beings? And why would I want to repair? Because my inner peace was not just at risk, but constantly being violated by my negative thinking. After my least serious period of depression I learned that if I was to really move forward and grow in my life I needed to let go of the past and mend some of those bridges that I had so carelessly burned down. And so it started with my mother. After all this is where it all started. I had a lot to be angry and resentful about, but I taught myself to relook at all the events of my childhood and consider them from her perspective. It was hard, at first. But eventually while a lot of her actions could not be justified, I understood that she was acting from a place of vulnerability. Mothers aren't addicted to Heroin for the hell of it. She was in a very dark place. And the second I understood this I understood her. And i forgave her. Once this metamorphosis of my ability to empathise had occurred, I was able to look at others in my life and apply the same practices. I unblocked almost everyone on my social media accounts. I messaged most (some were random strangers I'd probably argued with one time on some BLM post) and I apologised. Not just 'I'm sorry', either. I really opened my heart and explained why I had acted the way I did, and offered sincere apologies for the things I had done wrong. I expected nothing back each and every time, which was very difficult with some who I had always thought owed me an apology. I accepted that nobody had any obligation to reply or accept my apology, no matter how sincere. And some didn't. To this day I have had no reply. Some replied and were less than impressed. Reading words that express anger at you are hard to hear when you're trying to do better, but you made the bed that you lie in. I used my ability to empathy to understand and accept their responses.

But all was not lost. Some of the responses were from people who were very happy to hear from me, who readily accepted my apology, and furthermore had actually missed me. I felt genuine shock about this, and struggled more with it than I had with the rejection of others I had contacted. Not ever had I considered that I had had a positive impact on people. I clearly did not think highly of myself as a friend, or maybe I thought that once I had cut people out of my life, they had just done the same with me. But there they were, with open arms, accepting me, and filling me with a love for myself that I'd only caught moments with before. I'm not fully there, with the forgiveness, there are still a couple of people on that block list who I haven’t taken the steps to approach. Partly because I still hold a lot of resentment, but also because I know that they most likely will be equally resentful. That fear of opening the can of worms and upsetting my inner self holds me back. But I know it must be done. And it will be done. Because I know how freeing it is to let go of all the things that keep you imprisoned. All the energy I expended on thinking about them, or worrying that I'd bump into them, has transformed into a more positive energy that I'm using to grow beautiful friendships. I'm happier. And I can't imagine a better way to live life.

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thecaffeinebookwarrior · 7 years

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How I Overcame Reader’s Block (And So Can You!)

As a kid, I adored reading. Okay, more specifically, I enjoyed reading about dragons, but that’s not the issue here.

It frequently coincided with my equally as intense love of climbing trees, and some of my fondest memories involve being perched in a small tree and reading some hopelessly goofy, dragon-related literature while my mom and toddler siblings used the playground equipment. If no climbable trees were available, I’d settle for reading under one and drinking a thermos of chocolate milk while they ran around in the park.

As I got older, my tastes got a little more eclectic as I encountered Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Anne Shirley, the residents of Narnia and Middle Earth, respectively, and much to my mother’s horror, Stephen King, but my passion remained more or less the same.

Bottom line is, I loved reading. It was my paramount joy, my primary source of entertainment, and I didn’t think that would ever change.

So imagine my shock when, around my sophomore year of college at the age of seventeen, it occurred to me that I hadn’t really read for pleasure since I discovered the Hunger Games a year or two prior. Moreover, and equally as horrifically, when I tried to read I found I couldn’t focus; regardless of the quality of the story and how much I wanted to read it, the investment was gone.

Whether this was due to my first stint with organized education (prior to college, I was homeschooled) or the fact that I’d grown accustomed to the bite-sized chunks of candy-flavored, insubstantial information served up by the internet, the sad and simple fact was that I had fallen out of love with reading, and it looked like it was going to stay that way forever.

Well, flash forward two-point-five years to Present-Day Brooksie, and since school got out in early May, I’ve read Chuck Palahniuk’s Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, Emma Straub’s The Vacationers, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. Despite the disappointing lack of dragons, I loved all of them.

I drink books like nectar again, if you’ll pardon the floral language, and everything from the quality of my writing to the quality of my life has improved as a result of it.

So how did I fall back in love with reading? Well, I’ve spent a lot of time pontificating on this, and as far as I can tell, it can be narrowed down to three factors:

1. Reading every day.

It started with lunch. Every day, when I’d sit down at my university cafe, I used to get out my laptop and watch YouTube or whatnot while I ate my sandwich -- a cool idea in theory, but really sort of gross whenever I rubbed my greasy fingers on the mouse and keyboard.

When I made a conscious decision to read more, I began taking out my book and reading during the lunch period instead. It didn’t come naturally at first -- I was easily distracted and kept zoning out -- but I ultimately found it very pleasant, especially when I listened to some classical music in the background as well (nice for atmosphere, and for drowning out noise and distractions.)

I kept doing it.

When that summer rolled around, I rediscovered an amazing little outdoor cafe by the harbor. It had no wifi, which for my purposes, was absolutely perfect.

I went there to read Good Omens and eat home baked lemon squares, pie, and banana bread, listening to international tourists speak in other languages, and watch the boats go by. It was a beautiful environment, and that (coupled with the fact that Good Omens is just really fucking awesome) made it easier than ever for me to want to stay longer and become more engrossed in what I was reading.

Afterwards, I’d take out my notebook and work on my own stories and journal. Overall, I’d say that summer was one of the most intellectually productive I’ve had.

Once school started again, it got a little harder to read every day, but by then my love of reading had pretty much caught: it had become an intellectual drug for me again, a source of comfort, pleasure, and inspiration. Also, it was another viable excuse to procrastinate on my academic responsibilities, which was always welcome. So I kept reading. It was still a relatively slow process, as I had to work around my already busy schedule, but the more I read the more adept I became at drinking in the information in hungry, satisfying gulps (a bit more suggestive than I’d initially intended that metaphor to be, but I’m going to go with it.)

But this isn’t to say that there were no bumps in the road back to bibliophilia. There was another factor that I had to grasp before I reached the point where I could unabashedly adore reading once again.

Which is:

2. Reading what excites me.

No, I’m not speaking sexually, you pervert. I’m talking about books I actually want to read.

When I first started trying to get back into literature, I started trying to read the classics exclusively, like Around the World in Eighty Days and Little Women. Let me be clear, these books are amazing (excluding the jarring amounts of racism and endorsements of British colonialism in the former) but after semesters of reading similar works for my literature seminars, they just felt a little like...academia.

In fact, the only reason I was insistent on reading classics exclusively, I now realize, was because I was a pretentious, pseudo intellectual little shit back in those days with a horrible case of impostor syndrome. What I needed to re-learn was what dragon-loving, Ten-Year-Old Brooksie long since already knew: the best way to enjoy reading is to read what you actually enjoy.

It was a lesson I slowly but surely remastered, and it took me a while to realize that modern literature is teaming with smart, enriching reads, like Life of Pi, American Gods, Where’d You Go Bernadette, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Help, Everything I Never Told You, and countless others.

Moreover, these were books I didn’t have to force myself to read; they were books I found myself reading at four AM because I didn’t want to stop.

I’ve also discovered classics that I can eat up in a matter of days, like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Which absolutely everyone should read, by the way: Francie Nolan is a feminist icon, and way, way ahead of her time, not to mention it’s fucking hilarious and will make you cry like a little bitch), Jane Eyre, and basically anything written by Jane Austen. I love these books for their sharp wit, applicable and timeless life observations, and striking lack of the pretentiousness that I’d come to associate with a lot of classic literature.

This summer, I my reading list includes Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Louis Sachar’s Holes, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, and Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. I’m looking forward to reading each and every one of them.

Ultimately, the point I’m trying to make here is that there’s no joy to be found in pretentiousness: don’t read to prove yourself as an intellectual. Read to enrich your soul, read what you legitimately enjoy, and read what inspires you.

Which brings me to my next and final point...

3. Reading what inspires me.

This one might be true specifically for my fellow authors, but since I know a large portion of my followers are fellow authors, I think it’s applicable here.

Ever since I was an infinitesimally small child, I’ve wanted to write stories. When I was fourteen I wrote a hopelessly angsty YA novel about a half-dragon girl named Freedom and her misadventures with an ambiguously lesbian vampire and werewolf duo, a seductive and ambiguously bisexual elf (it was a time of self discovery for me), and a talking lion. When I was eleven, I wrote a middle grade novel about a little boy who befriends a dragon. When I was four, I wrote *ahem!* drew wordless stories about a winged wolf-creature named Starlight and his (in retrospect, overtly gory) battles with monsters.

It was bizarre, cringey, and I’m not gonna lie, pretty fucking awesome.

Around the time I started college at around sixteen, I’d just decided I wanted to start writing again. I had lots of ideas, and I remember in detail getting yelled at by my manager for scribbling in my notebook behind the counter instead of dutifully smiling at customers the way I was supposed to.

But my writing was...well, to put it bluntly, it was really, really bad. It only began to improve when I resolved to write every day. It noticeably and drastically began to improve when I began to read works that I found creatively inspiring.

While I was revising my manuscript, I read a lot of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, both masters of the kind of urban fantasy I was attempting to write, and spent a lot of time figuring out what I loved most about their writing and how to best apply it. This was also around the time I began reading Douglas Adams, which was, let me tell you, a magical experience. It involved a lot of delighted gasping on my end and thinking you’re allowed to do that?

It really showed me what the barriers were for creative writing, or in this case, total lack thereof.

I think I owe these writers a lot for helping me to create several novel-length manuscripts I’m incredibly proud of, and one that I’m currently preparing to get published.

So in closing, for anyone suffering from reader’s block, feel free to try my approach: read every day, read what you love and not to stoke your ego, and for my writer peeps, read what inspires you.

Either way, my books and I are enjoying a passionate long-term relationship, and every day I find myself loving them more.

#story time #the author speaks #reading #writing #books

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casualarsonist · 6 years

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story review

When Rogue One was released around this time last year, I wasn’t going to be caught dead watching it at a midnight premiere as I had for The Force Awakens. A deep disdain for TFA had settled in during the previous year, and news of reshoots and studio meddling during Rogue One’s production sent the message loud and clear that Disney had finally collated their data following Episode VII’s release and were now using its formula as a template for all further releases; aiming for what I believe to be a lowest common denominator approach had been a massive financial success, so why, as a business, would they want to change that approach? I know that in releasing a stand-alone film, Disney were indeed doing something out-of-the-box, so I can’t reasonably shit on them for EVERY decision they made, but it seemed that even then, my greatest fear was coming to bear - not that they would make shitty Star Wars films, but that they would make middling Star Wars films. And sure enough, the reviews largely bore out my premonitions, describing Rogue One positively but calling it disjointed, unnecessary, and lacking in significance in the same way that Episode VII did (although I would argue that the only thing of significance in TFA’s plot was when it disposed of a pivotal character).

But remember in the last review when I mentioned that hope? That terrible hope drew me back in. For no matter how simpering or weak a live-action Star Wars may be and no matter how hard I resist the pull, my curiosity always gets the better of me in the end. I wasn’t excited for Rogue One - Disney had managed to kill that for me - but I decided to see it none-the-less. And as I walked into the cinema I had this weird sinking feeling in my stomach (Christ I really am a fanboy, aren’t I?) as visions of half-finished plotlines, inconsequential Macguffin superweapons, and so. many. fucking. gags swam in my head. I mean really, the idea for Rogue One is about as safe as one could get given the supposed new ground that was being tread - it’s essentially a recreation/retconning of a backstory that has already been long established, and of which the entirety of the audience knows the end result (my treatise on why prequels are a universally garbage idea is for another article). And as I said, I wasn’t afraid that it would be shit, only that it would be boring and predictable, for again I find myself playing a role I never thought I would play in siding with the George Lucas prequels by asking the question ‘who could have known what any of them were going to be like before they were actually released?’ No-one.

Who could possibly have seen this coming?

So I sucked it up and went to see Rogue One in a cheap cinema that only charged me six pounds for the pleasure. And after all the build-up and the let down and stupid melodrama regarding an intellectual property that hadn’t released a good film in forty years...I was surprised. A bit.

I was a bit surprised.

I was surprised by Riz Ahmed’s genuinely affecting character arc. I was surprised by Darth Vader’s really actually terrifying display of power in a penultimate scene. I was surprised by the narrative stakes established in the latter half of the film. I was surprised by the risk the filmmakers took in deciding the fates of the central characters. And of course it had a lot of problems, and some of the things I liked may be just as easily disliked by others, but when I left the cinema having actually felt real feelings because of the things I’d seen on screen - more than once - I was surprised that Rogue One had actually managed to exceed my expectations. I’ll expand more on this in a second, but first, a snarky plot synopsis:

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (ugh) is the immediate prequel to A New Hope. It opens on an isolated planet on which engineer Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) lives with his wife, and daughter Jyn. Galen is a reknowned polymath and committed pacifist, although you will learn almost nothing of this unless you read the wiki: Rogue One is a Disney Star Wars film, so of course large chunks of important character-building are omitted (because who needs to understand the people in the movie when there’s a blind guy hitting stormtroopers with a stick). Ben Mendelsohn phones in the beta-villain character of Orson Krennic, and kills Jyn’s mother in order to coerce Galen into working on what will be the Empire’s greatest weapon - the Death Star (ugh). Cut to a decade later and Jyn (Felicity Jones) is a stroppy young woman with all the charisma of moist denim. She is reluctantly required to care about the fate of the galaxy, but apparently this is a big problem for her because IGN says she ‘put up walls’. She’s freed from an Imperial labour camp by the dashing and committed rebel Cassian Andor, and brought to Saw Gerrera - a veteran of the clone wars, a close friend of her father’s, and the man who raised her after her Galen was taken. Saw is a character from the Clone Wars animated television series, which every person the audience of this film will definitely have seen, so therefore his backstory is all but omitted as well. Saw is holding captive an Imperial defector who brings word that Galen has left a weakness in the design of the Death Star. The rapidly expanding group of misfits are then tasked with venturing deep into the better half of the film to procure the plans to this superweapon.

Now to be clear, Rogue One is not at all consistent - certainly less consistent than The Force Awakens. But it does quite a few things that TFA failed to do: be a complete film that managed to successfully close its own story whilst remaining a worthy stepping stone to a larger narrative, for example, or have tangible stakes and a final battle that feels like a genuine struggle against insurmountable odds. It also succeeds in taking a different approach to its tone than Episode VII, not in terms of 'darkness’, but in terms of emotional realism. The characters still have their one-liners and moments of charm, but Diego Luna’s Cassian is a life-long member of the rebel alliance and has a wonderful scene in which he attacks Erso’s flippant attitude towards the work they’re doing, and it feels real. He isn’t gurning like a cartoon character, or trying to be another cooler-than-cool Han Solo - he understands the weight of their mission and that its importance stands above their own individual concerns, and when he convinces Jyn of its importance, he convinces us as well. So too does Riz Ahmed’s defecting Imperial cargo pilot exhibit the characteristic signs of being a real human, and while his background is passed by faster than it ought to be, over the course of the film he undergoes a clear transformation from someone doubting his choice to turn against the Empire out of fear for his own life, to someone who comes to embrace his convictions and find strength in the act of doing what he knows is right.

Bruh.

Not every character is as well-realised, though. As mentioned, the film’s focal point - Jyn Erso - is as likeable as a cracked plastic toilet seat. Her endless cynical brooding is exhausting, and Jones fails to encapsulate the complex emotional broth that is supposed to be feeding her sanguine emotional state. She is joined in this limbo by Saw Gerrera whose motivations are hidden almost entirely in the animated series. I still can’t figure out why the hell Disney would waste time in reshoots fiddling with the tone of the film instead of fleshing out the characters upon which the entire first half hinges on? In any case, his words and choices carry little weight because we don’t know who the fuck he is or why he makes the decisions he makes.

‘Save the Rebellion! Save yourself!’

The rest of the motley crew also lack the collective core strength of The Force Awakens’ central characters, but that isn’t to say that they are entirely redundant. The second half is widely recognised to be superior, and I believe that’s because it successfully manages to establish a set of compelling stakes, and makes us care about at least some of the characters that are putting themselves at risk. Either that, or it’s because there’s more shooty-bang-bang.

I found I could forgive a lot of this though, because, despite the odd bump in the road, the film ends on a high, and you can’t forget what Rogue One is required to do in its run-time either:

Introduce an ensemble cast and make the audience care about their individual and collective fates,

Simultaneously re-establish certain older characters for a new generation of viewers,

Introduce and acclimate both older and newer audiences to the backstory of this film,

Introduce and acclimate newer audiences to the backstory of the older films,

Provide a self-contained and entertaining narrative that is cohesive with the established canon and appeals to people who wish to enjoy the film on its own merits,

...all in the space of two hours.

Now let’s look at what The Force Awakens had to achieve:

Don’t be shit.

Have mass appeal.

Be a self-contained story that can be enjoyed on its own merits.

Be a meaningful continuation of the classic character’s stories.

I’m sure there are many that would disagree with me, but I’d argue that while Rogue One is probably a less cohesive film overall, it achieves more complex goals with greater success than The Force Awakens.

But look, let’s be honest - obviously it’s not Citizen Kane - Rogue One is a film with many faults: the first half, for instance. And while I’d say that even the first half isn’t without merit, it needs to be understood just what you’re getting with this new breed of movies. At the end of the day, no matter how interesting a concept they may have, they’re always going to be tampered with by the studio; no matter the talent of the writer and/or director, they’re always going to fit a certain mandated mould. But the light in the darkness is that we will occasionally get big-budget, live-action films that fall outside the central narrative canon just like this one - films that Disney won’t obsess over quite as much because they don’t ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS IN THE FIRST EIGHT SECONDS OF THE OPENING WEEKEND - and maybe, just maybe, they’ll be alright. And Rogue One is alright. At certain points it’s really good. And it ends whilst riding a wave of energy and emotion that makes you feel like you just watched a decent fucking film, as opposed to The Force Awakens, which feels like a tv serial and you’re supposed to tune in next week to get to the good part of the story. And I think that’s something worth commending. You might disagree, but I think that makes it a good film.

The CGI Moff Tarkin is a fucking joke, tho.

7/10

Good

#rogue one #star wars #film #review #mads mikkelsen #felicity jones #forrest whitaker #riz ahmed #death star #rebel alliance #empire #darth vader

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malemblogs · 7 years

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A quick rewind to the summer

While my blog might have been inactive this summer, I certainly wasn’t. With ‘Festival Season’ in our sites this May, I started working with a company called PTL who have standing contracts with a number of festivals around the country supplying the toilets for both arenas and campsites, as well as providing luxury toilets and showers at certain festivals, I began working, alongside my sister Tamara, with the festival site crew as a supervisor for the crew, affectionately known as ‘the penguins’ on the festival grounds. While I didn’t spend a lot of time onsite around production or during build and breaks, I still had my eyes opened and my mind blown seeing how much has to happen for a festival to happen, I’d compare it to a town being built easily. The toilets are a small part of what goes on, but an essential part of it, everything from the water, to the power to the roads and walkways have to be added to the site before anything can happen.

The first two festivals I worked at were both no camping events, which were the easier of the two, we had between 100 and 300 toilets on each site and were over seeing seven crew only, which for the most part was relatively easy, the crew had been split into groups and assigned toilet blocks to cover, and it was our job to ensure they had everything they needed, ensuring they got lunch and most importantly making sure the job was being done. In that group of seven we had a group of three lads (for lack of a better word), who tested and tried our patience every day for these two festivals, trying to find three young men in a crowd of 10,000+ was not an easy thing to do, especially when they’d taken their high vis off, we made it to the end of day having tracked them down and sniffing out their hiding spot, and got the job done. I learned really quickly that some people don’t care if they have toilet roll or not towards the end of the night, I mean some people don’t even care if they have a toilet or not! Towards the end of the night at Field Day, we were severely understaffed, so it was one of those days I had to get stuck in and deal with the toilets myself, I have found condoms, knickers, used tampons, a portaloo where they’d managed to shit on the floor, a toilet that was wall to wall covered in shit, let me say, those units aren’t big, there’s about enough room to go in, sort yourself out, and leave again, you have to go a long way out of your way before you can poop on the floor. Field Day opened my eyes to just how disgusting people can be, and over the rest of the summer they didn’t let me down.

The first real festival I ever saw through from start to finish was Download festival at Donnington Park, while I have worked at festivals in the past, it was always as part of a backline crew and a matter of in that morning, set up, do the show, pack down and get back on the bus. This was a new kind of monster. From the get go I knew that this wasn’t going to be anything like Common People or Field Day, we would be here for 8 nights, camping in tents, if it wasn’t for the fact the company also provided luxury showers and toilets for this festival alongside the portaloos, I’d have been a wreck by day 3.

This time round, we probably had the hardest crew to deal with out of all of the festivals but definitely also one of the most fun, jumping from seven to twenty-one, among them, the most difficult man I’ve ever known to work with, Rusty, a 32 year old kleptomaniac, ADHD suffering, manic depressive with tendencies to lie, who can’t be left on his own by recommendation of a doctor, who refuses to do what he’s told or asked unless he is watched and followed like a hawk all day, above and beyond everything he put us through that weekend, was the hour he vanished and when I did finally find him, he’d spent the hour helping a random punter get a large amount of drugs out of his body, I can’t fathom any reason a grown man would want to help anyone do that, never mind a stranger. Between Rusty and the rest of his friends, managing the staff at Download was one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever had, but the rest of the summer felt like a breeze in comparison. After Download, my boss said to myself and my sister, ‘If you can manage Rusty, as effectively as Rusty can be managed, you can manage anybody.’ I haven’t yet found that to be untrue.

While I thought that Download was a new kind of beast when I got there, being blessed with luxury showers and only having to cover campsite toilets, honestly was a gentle introduction to the big beasty a festival site really is, the following festivals we worked at required our company to look after toilets in the Main Arena, Camp Bestival saw us covering the entire festival site, including staff toilets, and had us managing up to 30 staff at one time, most of which were between 17 and 21, surprisingly enough, while the younger crew did tend to sneak off more for a cheeky wee song here and there, I had the most trouble at one of these festivals with a middle aged couple called John and Theresa. They started off by sneaking their dog onto the festival site, and continued to be late very morning and then refuse to wear shoes while working in and around the toilets and who tried at every opportunity to tell you stories of their glory days. You go to any festival site and you look at the punters, you see festivals and the people there operate on a different set of rules, it’s almost like all normal social constructs go out the window, people really just do whatever they want, people like John and Theresa live their life by festival rules all the time I reckon.

Latitude was one of the most beautiful festivals I had the pleasure of working at this year, the woodland entertainment areas, the pink sheep and just the general atmosphere was lovely, however professionally Latitude was a bit of head melt for us, the toilets were just eating stock and on one occasion an hour passed before we were able to get stock to the blocks that required it, also because it’s such a big site, even on a buggy, getting from where our stock was to the blocks that needed them could take between 10 and 20 minutes depending on traffic. Speaking of traffic, on a stock run toward the end of the first working night here, going over a bump in the road, my phone fell out of my hands and proceeded get run over by one of the big gulpers, you know the truck ith the septic tank on it, and it crushed it to bits, even apple couldn’t fix it. Despite the problems we faced, people seemed to think the toilets were well looked after and relatively clean, and two of the penguins ended up getting a £30 tip. It ended up being a fun festival and to top it off we also got a cheeky photo in with Dick from Dick and Dom.

It was also at latitude I gained a newfound respect for the portaloo, after a few drinks I thought it would be okay to brave the long drops, if you don’t know what these are, it is essentially a hole in the ground with, in this case, a long plank of wood with holes cut out, with a metal cage plonked on top like cubicles, I didn’t know there was no toilet roll provided, it was the last night of a 3 day festival and I wasn’t mentally prepared for it. If you’ve never used one, try and keep it that way.

Camp Bestival was one of the more interesting festivals I worked at production wise, it takes place just kind of in and around a village, and I often was on a main road on the buggy to get from A to B, not that I minded, because the festival was laid out like this, on the last night a friend of mine who lives fairly locally was able to make it onto our campsite and with the help of twenty-something penguins shrouding her from security, we smuggled her into the festival site itself, that night is a whole other story in itself.

At this point, it’s been a long summer, I’ve packed and unpacked my suitcase more times than I’d have liked to, and I was getting really sick of seeing it, it’s not the same as just living out of a suitcase, those little teasers of home and living like a regular person make it harder. And it’s feeling like this I leave for V Fest, the end of festival season is near and I can feel my bed. I didn’t like V Fest, it was a lot like Field Day, only younger, the number of children at this event was insane, I spoke with some of the security and drug dog handlers about the measures in place dealing with the punters and drugs, and all in all it was very lax, the general idea was they’re predominantly after dealers, but if they are alerted to a punter with a small amount of drugs, of any age, they confiscate it and it goes no further than that. After possession, it’s out of their hands. V Fest also cut the number of staff they wanted from us by 50, but didn’t cut out the corresponding number of toilets, so we were all stretched very thin, and didn’t have access to the buggy, meaning in a crowded site full of drunken teenagers, me and Tamara had to carry stock around, and also try to track down wandering staff. The women’s toilets at V Fest were beyond foul, women are a special kind of disgusting after spending a few days drunk in a field, I have been physically attacked by a grown woman over a roll of toilet paper, there was used sanitary items thrown around the cubicles, women opening the storage unit and throwing toilet roll around the main arena, I could go on but I feel as though the rest of the stories are too graphic for this kind of a blog, but I’ve seen more stranger bodily fluids at this festival than I ever wanted to, ever. The only thing I will say for working at the toilets on a festival like this, people feel sorry for you, we got free rides on the carnival rides, and as soon as people see the penguin logo, there’s discounts too.

Straight from V Fest we had 7 hours at home then onto Leeds, which was an absolute dream, as there were no portaloos involved, just the Seat of Luxury toilets, and the worst thing we had to face was the occasional chancer trying to get in without paying and the smell of the long drops next door. I got to see Eminem, who I spent my childhood listening to, we had the luxury toilets, got some free food, danced, sang, drank and generally was merry, of course though, as is my luck, after having such a great week, once it came to our journey home, we ended up stuck in Leeds for 4 more hours than we were meant to, at this point in the village all the food traders were gone, the water points had been disconnected, everything is dead and none of us had any food left, no more bottled water, not even any beer! It’s amazing how quickly a festival site managed to rip itself down, after weeks of building and work going into it, as soon as possible, it comes apart again.

Looking back on this summer, I notice now that because our bosses trusted us, we spent most of the summer left to our own devices for the most part, and personally the only other time I’ve been left to my own devices on a job is when I’m not responsible for anything else, being put in a management position without much previous experiences, especially as someone who struggles with anxiety, was one of the hardest things in the world I thought going into it, but it came so naturally once I was there and knew what I was going. Initially our boss said they were going to go with different candidates, people who’d worked for the company before and knew the festivals and what was expected, but just has a gut feeling about Tamara and I, and took a chance on us, and I think I can say it’s mutual that we’re glad they did. At each of these festivals, the head of the company and her son who acts as Sales Director as well as the Site Project Manager visited to ensure the job was being done up to standard, he ended up posting about myself and Tamara on his LinkedIn he was so impressed with how we were doing, especially as we were just students, myself without any experience of a festival beginning to end, and having never managed people before. Another thing I didn’t really think about before I starting doing this was how to go about motivating people, it’s a hard thing to do, motivating a group of tired people at the end of a festival to perk up and make sure they’re feeling good about it and making sure they’re coping well, especially those who’ve over indulged the night before, and being able to motivate them and help encourage them to work better is hard after they’ve spent several days in a field dealing with strangers shit all day, pun not intended. It wasn’t something I saw myself being good at but I ended up getting along really well with the penguins, while still managing to get them to respect me.

I know you’re not meant to pat yourself on the back, but I spent a summer completely out of my comfort zone, spent for the most part, in and around the waste of strangers, I can safely say if I never manage to smell another festival toilet block it will be too soon. Even after the many, many, many sleepless nights shivering, and being cold, and wet, and tired, and stressed out, I wouldn’t trade my shitty summer for anything, I learned a lot more about festivals than I thought I would doing this job, but even doing the toilets, if you use your eyes it’s crazy how much you notice going on at any one given time. While I might not have gotten to see and be a part of the same side of the festival as my colleagues got to, when I do actually get to I’ll at least have the satisfaction of knowing I started from the bottom, and I’ll always be nicer to the people working the toilets.

(You’ll be pleased to know there are no photos of the aforementioned toilets)

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vidaandthecity · 7 years

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From Breakups to Wake Ups.

“I kinda always knew I’d end up your ex-girlfriend”…

That was my jam. It’s the year 2000 and I’m laying in my room, old school stereo that lit up in neon blue lights this No Doubt hit was the sound track of my life. It was on repeat as I sang along with Gwen Stefani, rolos in my hair, smudged nail polish, trying to figure out what went wrong with this last guy, or the one before him. Was I cursed? Maybe. Or was it payback for the brujeria that I attempted on them.

What did I do wrong? Was I too demanding? Too soft? Did I say something out of pocket? Was I not pretty enough? Was I too sexy? Not sexual enough? Too smart? Too outspoken?

It’s a foolish and very dangerous line of questioning that all women expose themselves to at the end of a failed love affair. As of lately, my two younger sisters recently going through their own breakups; have gotten me thinking about my own past relationships and all the breakups that I experienced in my life especially in my 20’s.

If I told you that the post breakup me was always on some bad ass, fuck the world, dust myself off, whose next vibe; well that would just make me a bold faced liar. Some of these breakups, the ones involving men that had managed to love me or somehow had me convinced that I loved them, had broken me. Parts of me had eroded and dissolved with each break up. Parts of me that I thought could not be shattered were now drifting away in the Coney Island waters. This was my place of solace. These breakups made it impossible to trust, to fall in love with anyone other than the concept of love. Ask me today if I’ve ever been in love. The answer might surprise you.

Now much wiser and slightly older, I feel for my sisters. I sympathize for both the one who feels nothing and the ones who feels it all deeply. I especially worry for the one who feels nothing, for being numb stunts growth. Today I put myself in their shoes because I know what can come from these emotional waterfalls when you are young and inexperienced.

We never see how beautiful breakups are while we are knee deep in that shit crying into our pillows, deleting all his photos off our social media, or washing his scent out of our bed sheets. We see the beauty years later when we bump into that same miserable ex, still chasing the same miserable nothingness, looking like shit, and dating a younger bootleg version of us, because that’s all he feels worthy of.

The beauty of the breakup lies in the mending of self. Its attaining that aha moment; the quintessential “wake up” of the breakup. The wake up that becomes that internal realization when that little voice is finally heard screaming at the top of its lungs, “Fuck him! I deserve better than this!!” We as women evolve with each break up. We get closer and closer to Mr. or Mrs. Right as we peel these ex-lovers off our skin. We begin to finally put a face, a voice, a style, a placement of ethics, family values, artistic vision and a moral code onto the ideal lover that would best suit who we are and what kind of love we long for. We begin to lay down our expectations of how we should be treated and how we deserved to be loved. We slowly prioritize our self-esteem and guard our hearts with a dignified glory. And we finally demand that these needs be met as we deliver ourselves once again.

In my early 20’s I dated an aspiring rapper. Ahhh … the always desirable and never attainable musician, a weakness in the long list of men that quickly show us the harsh realities of dating and even harsher realities of uncoupling. Lets call him Josh. Josh was a very materialistic, egotistical, broken man, who struggled with his sense of self. Of course when you think you’re in love you do not see these things till way after the damage is done. In my eyes, he was a talented aspiring musician, with a romantic side and a nice smile.

I fell for Josh at a time when my personal life was chaotic. My father had been arrested, all the family truths had finally been exposed, we were in financial ruins, and my family was about to move to Florida. So of course I clung to Josh in all his cold, dry, and disconnected splendor. And his dream of being a famous rapper became my dream. I left Florida and came to NY to be with him, and the rest was dating disaster history.

As I plunged into helping him with his dream, burning cds, selling cds, going to his late night shows that always took place in seedy bars with bad music I began resenting him more and more. But as you know ladies, we try to glue things back together. So I held on in hopes that it could be fixed, in hopes that this was not broken.

One day Josh was getting all dapper for what had now become his weekly hometown trips to Connecticut (trips that I was never invited to.) Straight out of the shower I saw him do something I had never peeped before. He had taken his bottle of cologne and doused himself with the good smells. But one move in particular caught my eye. As I’m watching him spray himself, standing naked in front of the mirror, I see him take a final spray to his privates. And as if I was in a movie with a slow motion special effect, it finally hit me, “Oh my god this asshole is cheating on me.”

I said nothing. I let him go to Connecticut. I knew without knowing that there was someone else. At his return, tired from his trip he passed out in the middle of the day, as I was cleaning. An hour into his nap his cell phone began to buzz and buzz and buzz. In my naiveté I looked at his phone, (which I never did) because I really thought maybe there was an emergency, his mom was sick, or something terrible had happened.

And there were the text messages sprawled out before me. “I can’t wait to see you again.” “I had a great time with you last night.” “I’m starting to fall in love with you.”

Now what follows is exactly why I chose this break up to write about over any other one. And trust me there were many to choose from. But out of the men I dated, out of all the separations I had, this man Josh, was the meanest, the coldest, the most emotionally ruthless, careless, and callous man I had ever encountered. This might not sound surprising, but you just take into account that I dated all kinds of men. Criminals, drug dealers, ivy league scholars, business owners, wealthy, poor, artists, musicians, all nationalities, older men, younger men, even religious men. And out of all of these men, his approach to ending our shindig was the cruelest. And in that cruelty I reaped the greatest rewards.

When confronted, despite the hurt in my eyes and the tears that rolled down my face, Josh flew into me with a rage I had never seen. A rage because I had the audacity to go through his phone, rage for getting caught, rage for being confronted with who he really was, and a rage because whether or not he loved me, a part him knew that he would never find another woman as loyal as me. Word.

He quickly and boastfully owned it. Exclaiming with his arms in the air, “Yeah I’m cheatingI Yeah I fucked her! What are you gonna do about it? Oh and by the way, I don’t love you anymore!” I smile now remembering it because he wanted so bad to break me, yet all he managed to do was release me.

Unfortunately, because we were living together he needed about a week to find a place and leave. I had packed all his shit in boxes that laid piled up in the hall way. During that time he did everything in his power to sprinkle salt in my wound, like openly talking to this new girl in front of me making sure I heard everything that was said. Reminding me how he had been wanting to leave me and break things off, how he was never in love with me and so on.

On our last day together, after he had moved the last of his belongings, he wanted to have a final conversation with me. He sat me on the bed as he held a present wrapped in green foil. He starts, “Look, no hard feelings. Things just didn’t work out. Don’t hate me. I even got you a present.” I take the box with no intentions of opening it. He insists I open it in front of him. I open the box to find a dildo. I was shocked that he would stoop that low to get a rise out of me. He smiles and says, “ I got it similar to my shape and size, so you wont miss me as much, “ and marched out the door smiling ear to ear.

For a long time I was afraid to tell anyone that story. I thought it was a reflection of me somehow. Like for a dude to diss and disrespect me to that major galore level maybe there was something wrong with me. I know better now. I now tell that story proudly with my head held high. I wrote a poem about it and this article which I hope will remind all the ladies who are now going through a tough breakup just how lovely and amazing they are and how they deserve to be with someone who sees that beauty as well.

I know now that this was all about him and what an insecure and damaged man he was. I now know that I dodged a major bullet and from that moment on I instantly knew how to spot, identify and totally avoid people like him.

Years later he attempted multiple times to add me on social media, to befriend me and reconnect. A request I never entertained. Not because I haven’t forgiven him, I forgave him many years ago; but because toxic people do not deserve any space in my universe. A lesson he taught me well. Thanks, Josh. As you can imagine he never became a famous rapper. In his thirst for fame and money, he got as close to it as he could by managing video girls. How fitting.

Breakups are not easy. They can be downright ugly, vicious, and painful. If you’re fortunate enough to break up with your best friend consider yourself one of the lucky ones. If you break up with the devil, well it’s a much bumpier road. But both roads lead to self-discovery and the ultimate wake up! Both roads lead to a newfound freedom and womanhood. And sure enough, both roads lead to being that awesome, bad ass, fuck the world, dust myself off, whose next type of chick… And everybody wants to date her!!!

*** image courtesy of google

#personal essay #latina blogger #vidaandthecity.#breakups #Love

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