#this seems like simultaneously a very specific and probably somewhat relatable pair of feelings | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hyukmoon · 3 years

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moon. | l.sy x gn!reader

lee sangyeon x gn!reader

word count: about 4.01k

to put it short: congrats! Something you should actually say, right? Your best friend and crush is getting married in two days and you feel,... well, not very good about it. So, wait... he's returning the feelings? Damn.

content warning: ANGST in capital letters, I would add lots of exclamation points but im lazy. So yeah, hella angsty. Some good old making out, it's kind of heavy at some point but no smut at this point lol. I don't condone any of the done actions, so yeah, I would've personally handled everything differently, but you know, y/n is kinda wild. Very awkward sometimes, but that's more the situation in itself. ALSO, NOT PROOFREAD

taglist: @loki-in-hogwarts

note: the second thing i wrote and im somewhat excited!!! Yes! Exclamation points. So,... thanks for reading :)

It was a great day. Well, at least seemingly for everyone but you. Your best friend in this world Sangyeon was about to get married to the love of his life, who is notyou and now you just stand in the hotel lobby waiting for it to happen. Funnily enough, the crushing feeling of desperation and fear didn’t seem to set in yet.

The hotel lobby was filled to the brim with acquaintances and other guests possibly confused by the uproar of the wedding guests. So, who were you specifically waiting for? The rest of your friend group, the ones who will most likely clean up after the wedding whatever will be left of you.

A nervous smile swept up to your lips, casually just avoiding every sort of tension that could come across you. Just with the luck of this entire occurrence an older woman started to approach you, demon alike features spreading around her face almost like she knew you were apparently the only single person here. An aunty, that wasn’t even related to you but had all the business to judge.

“Are you here for the bride or the groom?”, her sweet voice rang a familiar feeling in your stomach. Almost too sweet, making you suspicious of her intent. “I’m here for my best friend, Sangyeon. So, yeah, for the groom.”, you hesitated a second, “What about you though? Do you know the bride?”

“She’s my youngest niece, the only one that still visits, her sisters don’t even care anymore…” You nodded politely, not wanting to anger her now and stepped towards a different direction.

“So, my dear, are you here with anybody?” You already feared that question, the same as always. The eyes of yours started with a panicked expression searching through the room a familiar pair. “No, I am here on my own. I kinda wanted to focus on getting Sangyeon through with it, being there for him.” As a friend.

Possibly this was the first part of feeling despair and fear. People at this wedding were really waiting for them to get married. They weren’t joking, this would change everything.

“Ah, I see. You know, get over him. Well, it is time for you at least, you’re not getting younger. There are quite few handsome men here. I remember the names Juyeon and ah yes! Kevin, get over here!” As far as you were concerned, your facial expression couldn’t possibly look more stunned than a moment ago, yet another one of your good friends appeared, seemingly just as confused.

This only held on for a good second, Kevin knew exactly what to do. “Oh hi, I’m so sorry to steal [Y/N] away from you, but I actually need to talk to them on my own over a gift we both prepared for the couple!”, he grinned at the lady, who was obviously smitten with him. “Yes, of course, hun. Take your time.” She finally hushed into a separate direction.

“So, how are we doing? You seem kinda… stressed.”

“You don’t say”, you sighed, “if I have to go through a conversation like this again today, believe me I’ll-. “

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I get the sentiment. Even though I meant more the other situation. Like in, Sangyeon getting married and you sitting here all grumpy because of it.”, Kevin was already aware of your “small” infatuation with your best friend, a man too far out of your reach also funnily enough, the man’s wedding you’re attending. However, your friend in front of you didn’t seem to mind talking about it out loud in a place like the hotel lobby. Your lips tightened up into a fine line.

“I’m not grumpy! I just…I don’t really know what to do. I mean, I know I’m going to be there for him but yeah, okay, I might feel a bit grumpy.” The lobby did clear up a lot now.

“Okay, oof. There’s this dinner with everyone in the evening today, do you think you can get through that?”, Kevin asked hesitantly just as stressed with this additional complication.

“I mean, I probably have to, don’t I? This makes me so sick, ugh. Not gonna lie, my stomach feels like a laundry machine.” You laughed quietly and drifted off again into a place where you didn’t need to think about this.

“What did you really expect though? You know I love you, respectfully, but like, this feels like an incredibly bad move to do.”

“Don’t you think it would be worse if I didn’t show up at all? I’ll just need to go through this weekend and I’m outta here. No one will know anything.” It might feel like a nightmare but at least a nightmare you can actually run away from and not actually have to face at some point.

“Well, I hope you’ll keep your confidence. Because imagine I saw the person, I love getting married to someone else. Oh my, believe me, you wouldn’t find me for the next three weeks.”

“Not very helpful, a good three out of ten. I guess, I’ll just stick to sulking around then.” A dead smile crept up your lips following a stern look from your side at your opposite.

“Seems like a good plan, just stick to me, maybe we will find someone to take your attention away from this, huh?” A sly grin was visible on Kev’s face.

“Ughhh, of course. Let’s do this. It can’t get much worse than that”, you cleared your throat, “thanks, though. You actually make this here somewhat bearable.”

“Awww, come on. We should pack out our suitcases.”

No one can really prepare someone for a moment like this. Most older folk turned into their hotel rooms which left you in a party like situation seeing your closest friends turning it up in a huge pavilion while the future groom sits comfortably on a velvety sofa hand in hand with his fiancée.

The air was quite warm even at this time of the evening, not humid, just warm enough for everyone to taste the end of this era with nostalgia and a slight feeling of energy to experience what’s to come afterwards.

You as well sat down, continuously processing your environment. With a cup of your favorite drink, you felt invincible, nothing able to shake you down.

Now while this wasn’t a preferred environment, this was manageable; you could look your best friend into his eyes and proudly congratulate him on his wedding. You would be able to get over this and continue to be a great friend. Black hair with an intense facial expression made its way into your viewpoint along with a somewhat tipsy Kevin. Simultaneously the lighter hair of your best friend fought his way through the crowd.

Lee Sangyeon, the man lighting up your mood with simple touch of his fingertips was now signalizing for you to head outside towards the veranda of the pavilion. He exuded patience, yet clearly waiting for a response of you. You nodded and brushed cautiously over your evening attire.

“Hii, [Y/N]! Can I introduce this someone to you? This is Juyeon, he might look a bit intense, but he’s really nice to talk to! So, I’m gone for a sec then!” Kevin started drifting off into a different direction where you stopped him in his tracks.

“Could this wait? Sangyeon needs to talk to me. I think it’s important, I’ll come back though in a bit!” You gifted both of them an apologetic face and made your way around the men towards the going to be groom.

Surely it wasn’t exactly clear why he wanted to speak to you, especially on his own. He was still waiting for you after all.

“[Y/N]! What has it been? Like three? Four months? I missed you so much.”, Sangyeon pulled you into his chest abruptly and sighed softly into your shoulder. Engulfed entirely in his figure you never wanted to wake up from this again. Was it now 10 seconds? 15 seconds? Neither he nor you really seemed to let go, taking in all the scents of his that were formerly familiar to you.

“Yeah, I think so. You were probably busy planning this all and I just had to work, I guess.” Trying to keep it short was your main goal, appearing distant maybe. He didn’t mind at all though. Not discouraged from continuing this conversation Sangyeon pointed at the veranda, showing the only speck of space with little to no crowd.

The veranda was close to closed off to the party. Non distinguishable palm trees in the far distance were playing right into your cards for not having to look into his eyes. Magnetically glowing, that’s how he appeared. All happy and smiley about the obvious luck he was experiencing. Now again, he sat down with you in the beach chairs without loosing a word.

“The palm trees are so pretty. You remember me wanting to buy some new plants?”, you tried to invite him to the conversation.

“You always want to buy new plants, which time do you mean?” Sangyeon grinned to himself. “You know what? It’s so weird. Everything feels still so unreal. This wedding, also you at my wedding… So weird.”

“I am literally your best friend, where else should I be? Your funeral? At home? Who else is going to charm the hotel staff for some free capri suns and new towels?” Your mouth crinkled up and you let out a soft laugh.

“[Y/N] … You know exactly what I mean!”

“Noo, not at all. I’m so confused right now, not gonna lie.” Your face finally moved towards his direction, seeing his gentle gaze resting on you.

“Do you remember when we were still in school, and we promised each other we would marry each other if we didn’t find anybody else?” His gaze got more intense with each sentence.

“Yeahh, kind of. I was probably tired and it’s like ten years ago. I’m not really sure what you’re trying to tell me.”

“I really thought I was going to marry you. For several years, actually.”, he laughed. “I had such a crush on you and then you met your s/o and all that. Ughh, it seemed so complicated back then. Kind of weird to think about what could have happened if I did ask you out or something.”

“True.”, you turned away again standing up and resting against the wooden railing of the pavilion. “But you didn’t so, let’s just drop it there.” The weather as well started rebelling a bit, the wind hugging your figure slightly too tight for your taste.

“Why are you so cold all of a sudden?”, he whispered closely behind you.

“Well, you’re getting married tomorrow. And you’re telling me about a crush you had on me?”, you croaked.

“I was just being nostalgic, I thought this would be fine with you.” Sangyeon appeared now next to you on the railing, waiting for you to face his concerned dark eyes.

“It isn’t for me. It just feels wrong.”

“What feels so wrong about it? It was a long time ago.”

It is here, the bitterness. Bitterness shouldn’t even be the correct term, the pain of your heart going into a slump didn’t feel like a fitting word. Being reminded again that you will never have a chance again.

“Wait or is it not a long time ago for you?”, The voice of his tried to word his next sentence very carefully.

“I went out with them because I thought you were joking. Then when I thought about you, it was always different. It was too late though, you met her.” Only the close ocean along with the wind were hearable, neither you nor he were able to form another thought put into a sentence.

“You could’ve told me. I would’ve-.”

“Broken up with her?”

“No, I-.”

“Then what could you have done?”, you interrupted Sangyeon’s rambling, trembling while speaking. Terribly spiteful with a bite that wasn’t too often dripping down your lips.

“This.” Sangyeon pressed a fluttery kiss against your lips. Slender fingers tapped onto the skin right under your chin, signalizing you to look at him.

The now much calmer atmosphere made you snake your arms around his torso. Heat rose towards your head, longing after a second out in the cold again just to see his lovely facial expression. Your lips broke off and touched once more in an almost hypnotic fashion.

His hot breath started sliding downwards your cheek to your neck, physically making you unable to resist his entrancing presence. Also his hands broached over from your face down to your waist, holding you with the lightest touch.

Sangyeon’s lips darted away from yours, catching you staring deeply into his eyes. The silence felt warm now as well, filled with the slow and recovering breath of the participants.

“[Y/N], I think I still feel that way.”, a rosy blush swept over the man’s face you wanted to hear say these things so many times and so long ago.

“No. No. No. You shouldn’t! I shouldn’t either! I have to go.” The reality of the situation caught up to you. This was bad. Incredibly bad. Still the disgusting feeling of hope within this made its way up to your head. Stinging alongside the feeling of remorse, you didn’t think clearly, especially now, next to him.

You darted in the fastest way possible from the pavilion up to the hotel to your room, leaving him there.

Today should be the final day. The hopes that already should have been buried a long time ago, crawled up again and clawed its way into your mind. What if he leaves her for you today? Like in those unrealistic rom coms. Yes, again, it was unrealistic.

Leaving her at the altar and running after you. While all those thoughts of hope and wishes came together you found yourself with a stomachache. His fiancée was an incredibly nice person, sweet and kind along with being a beauty. You shouldn’t even dare to think about Sangyeon that way anymore, she deserved a lot more. Quite honestly, you felt pathetic. Who were you to run into their possible future?

Just because of a simple brush over the lips, his eyes staring into yours like no one else existed but you and his soft hands delicately touching your waist. A tap on your shoulder put you out of your trance, “[Y/N]? Can you go up to Sangyeon’s room? He asked for you.” Kevin’s eyes glanced at you with uncertainty. Neither you nor he knew why he wanted to see you.

Even more importantly, why did he need to see you alone? This seemed like dangerous territory after, basically yesterday. Agony rose again, what if he really was going to leave her?

“Sure, I don’t know why he wants to see me again though.”, you said and left to see the groom’s room. You stumbled more and more over every step closer to the door of the man who’s going to rip your heart and air out of your lungs. The normally soft laid out carpet felt in this moment like you were stepping barefoot over glass. There was the door, brightly painted in eggshell paired with the digits of the hotel room.

Before you could reach the door to knock on it, light brown waves greeted your overtly surprised face.

“You clean up well.”, Sangyeon’s rang in your ears clearer than freshly hung-up laundry in your nose. His previously concerned face curled up into a faint smile.

“Same goes for you”, you tried your best to hide the very apparent frog in your throat, “So, why do you need me?”

“Just needed to see you before going out there, I guess.”, his voice got a lot quieter. It got silent.

Not sure if a said word was necessary, you plopped down on a small, velvety stool. Every whisper was to be heard. An otherness surrounded Sangyeon, like he wasn’t there anymore, and his thoughts took over his being. You scooted closer towards him, just wanting to see him up close for the last time like this, smelling his earthy cologne from this distance.

“Why are you doing this to me?”, your voice went close to hoarse after the question. He was just as silent as before. No sound, nothing. This torment of a weekend was supposed to end with no gratification, not feeling free from this feeling on your chest? Your hand slid over his, the most desperate attempt to get his attention while also experiencing his touch again. Sangyeon jerked his hand back and returned to his absent posture.

“Why do you want to hurt me like this? I am your best friend, and you use me like I’m nothing.” The lack of power you had now made you sink down to the beige teddy carpet. Small tears started swelling up in your nearly dry eyes, kind of contradictory, yet the more tear drops rolled down your cheeks the rottener and hollow you felt.

“You were my best friend until you-.”, he stopped midsentence, “made me feel things again I didn’t need, I didn’t want.” Also his face was wet, ridden with tears making his usually calm and cheerful persona look like a painful insult.

“You asked me here. It hurts, Sangyeon. I can’t make it stop hurting, I don’t know what to do”, you reached for him again, “Could I ever be enough for you?” He returned your former attempts to stroke your face. Cornering both of you, the air trapped you in the toxins of heartbreak and hopelessness.

Once again, Sangyeon’s hand glid over your soft skin and halted on your face. Glaringly staring into each other’s eyes, you were there again. The day before, yesterday. Close to baring the soul of each person present.

“[Y/N], it’s not about being enough. It never has been. I have made a commitment I already broke, I…I can’t do this”, he sighed, “you know I love her.”

“I thought you loved me as well.” Overwhelming nothingness overruled you, almost scaring you about this reaction. You weren’t crying, yelling nor having any physical reaction at all. It was convincingly numb; the resting hurt would come later. Sangyeon’s head dropped in the dip of your shoulder and neck.

This sort of closeness would never happen again. You feeling him breathing into you while having his comforting heartbeat close to yours.

“I do, but I can’t do this to her. I would never do this to her.”, he whispered into your shoulder. A sigh came from his side.

“Then, please. Kiss me, for the last time.” The last part of the sentence left a disgustingly bitter taste in your mouth. This was over, right? His head, which was formerly resting on your shoulder, drifted up and towards yours. Also his expression blank and hollow, like he didn’t know anything.

For the last time, his hands cupped your face in a comfortable manner. As always, he felt homely, but he surely wasn’t yours ever. Not even waiting a good second or two, the light brunette’s face came closer to yours. With no hesitation both of your lips touched tenderly, releasing every sort of affection that could be expressed at that second. You inhaled again his intoxicating scent, in the hopes of having him all over you. His now reddened lips moved closer towards your jawline making you gasp for air.

Also, you weren’t completely still, constantly shifting your hands up and down over his torso upwards his neck, desperately feeling everything, you can for the last time. Sangyeon’s locks tickled you softly while he suddenly latched his mouth onto your neck right below your ear.

“No. Please, I just want a kiss on my lips.”, you said lowly, closely resembling a whine afterwards. He complied pretty quickly, leaving you with no thought but him tickling your bottom lip with his warm tongue. With him being this fast, you didn’t want to keep him on his toes. Entirely engaged in this moment, hands surprised you again on your waist, wandering closer and closer under the blouse you were wearing. You moaned into the kiss, making him take the opportunity to maneuver his tongue into your mouth.

Similarly to you, he was also stunned for a short moment when you grabbed up onto some strands of hair. A sigh left his now plump lips, a need of fresh air arrived onto both of you. Yet this was short lived, his hands captured your chin and attached his lips again onto yours in a matter of mere seconds. A bell rang, close footsteps to be heard across the floor reminding you of the situation you were in.

“Why am doing this? I am so sorry.”, you broke off his lips and took a step backwards at the door.

“[Y/N], we both did this, and it won’t happen again. We just need some time without each other. I think it would be for the best if we don’t spend time together alone anymore.”

“Are you doing what I think you’re doing? I don’t know what to say. I-.”, His lips captured yours again fast with a lot more force behind his kiss.

A strong arm shut the about to be opened door again and hovered over your head. The other one caught grabbed your chin with an almost contradictory feeling to it, the lightest touch just to shove you into his direction. You sighed into his lips, waiting for him to commit with his tongue one more time. Buttery lips pressed against yours and clang inside your mouth. Fiercely did your tongues meet, ending with him sucking on yours. Wet cheeks batting against each other with no intent of separating, your movement still came to a halt.

“You know what? I hate this. I want you to be happy, then if it is with her, I will just y’know…go or uhm mind my business.”, you slurred the last part. It wasn’t really one of your most prideful moments. Still flushed with tears and embarrassment you dropped again against the room door.

“I ask for one condition though,” incredibly hearse was your voice after the crying and even more so because of your follow up, “I do not not want to see you for some time, I don’t want to have to see your face ever again.” Tears weren’t anymore swelling up in your eyes, they never seemed to stop running down with no chance of leaving this conversation with an ounce of self-respect and pride.

It wasn’t even really much of a problem to leave him behind for a bit, it most likely would be for the best anyway, yet while his words should only leave a small mark and feel like a ripped off band aid, you felt alone. A sense of loneliness crept stealthily into you leaving you with nothing but a severe feeling of dread.

“If that is what you want, I’ll respect that.” The room got quieter till you heard the last of his words: “Of course, I still want you in on my wedding though, you’re still my best friend.” Sangyeon’s usual soft and kind smile appeared on his face, seemingly reaching you an olive branch. The former assertiveness and confidence drained through the conversation; you were nothing but a wreck.

“Alright, I’ll be there.”

The ceremony was beautiful. Fairy like flowers were hung all across the beach space, making the place more surreal than it was to begin with. Everything light with a hint of light green and an even lighter lavender tone. The air seemed to have evaporated all the tension and sadness from your face. All across the seats were relatives and friends sitting with a nervously happy face. Ironically, he really thought it was going to be you someday.

“You’re [Y/N], right? Everyone always tried to introduce me to you. Now we’re sitting next to each other at Sangyeon’s wedding together! I’m Juyeon by the way.”

#lee sangyeon x reader #sangyeon x reader #lee sangyeon #sangyeon #tbz #tbz fic #tbz angst #the boyz fic #the boyz #the boyz au #the boyz scenarios #sangyeon x you #sangyeon x y/n #the boyz x reader #sangyeon tbz #the boyz kevin #the boyz juyeon #moon kevin #lee juyeon

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fatdisruptor-blog · 4 years

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Snack, noms, and nourishment

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th3h0unds0fl0v3 · 3 years

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II. The Janitor

This past July, I saw fireflies for the first time in as long as I could remember. I stood barefoot atop my mother’s wooden deck, marveling at the way the phosphorescent insects lit up the otherwise ordinary backyard of the house where I spent my adolescence. I explained to my mom how we didn’t have these up North, in New England, and how I almost forgot entirely of their existence.

Looking back at this now, I realize that the syntax of this observation explained how I had naturally sectioned off my life. “We didn’t have these up North,” I recalled, as if from a distant memory from a place that no longer exists. While, grammatically, it would have made more sense for me to say, “we don’t have these up North,” I had already resigned myself to that fact that I was referencing a place that I would never occupy as home again. The New-England-Where-Fireflies-Don’t-Exist phase of my life had ended; All of the addresses that I occupied, nine of them to be exact, had been temporary homes, placeholders, dreamy little cubicles, that allowed me to work my way through my shit before returning to the backyard in which I stand now.

Last July I had just turned 26, and I still held these two conflicting views of myself before I left home at 18. In one sense, I couldn’t wait to be older. I wanted to grow up as quickly as possible—I wanted to bypass all of that hard and confusing stuff associated with being a young queer person. During my high school years, when I worked as a camp counselor, I would look at these young parents with their young children with envy. They were filled with light and hope, their bodies still taut and strong, faces without wrinkles or spots, and their movements quick and without hesitation. They presumably had good jobs, owned their homes, and drove cars that they’d be able to fix should something go wrong. I assumed their lives were comfortable, but not lavish or out of my frame of reference. They had gone through the period of life that I was wading through and came out in-tact. When I was this age, I really had no interest in going through, or figuring out, any of what I’m going through now.

On the other hand, I didn’t want any of that. I didn’t want to have a family or own a home. I didn’t want to have a car or a job that would require childcare until 6 or 7 o’clock at night. I didn’t want to know what would come next, I just wanted to go out into the world and experience things and figure out what came next as the previous thing came to an end.

I wrote on Tumblr about how I loved the idea of working as a janitor at nights in some mundane place in the middle of nowhere, leading a life where I didn’t have to be responsible to anyone but myself where I had all the free time in the world to spend my time with books and my own words.

Clearly, I had given a little too much credence to the Catcher-in-the-Rye-I-Hate-Other-People-type-books that struck a chord with me at the time being a closeted, affected gay kid growing up in a place that felt way too small and homogenous for all of the energy that I fancied myself composed. I look back on this and laugh at what that would have actually looked like; it never would have worked out for I hate going to bed late (assuming this janitor had a late shift), I have always longed to live in a big city, and despite being relatively athletic in the most practical sense, I am not good at manual labor.

At the point in college when I had to decide on a major and a potential career path, I would, mostly subconsciously, compromise these two possibilities. “What’s practical is logical” paired with a little bit of the “What the hell, who cares?”, a lesson irreversibly burned into my brain after spending probably two years of my life listening to Britney Spears’ I’m a Slave 4 U.

But as I continued on towards my graduation, I realized (more and more) that so many people that I went to college with were actually there for the very utilitarian purpose of becoming a specific professional role in society. Here I was, trying to experience whatever I could, learn about as many things as I could, and maybe gain some marketable job skills in the process, while others had marked out their ten-year pathway towards a six-figure salary in corporate public relations. This sort of scared the shit out of me, and as my graduation date came closer, I began to slowly lose the spirit of inquiry and expression that I had ignited during sophomore year.

I was shocked and confused by the funnel that so many of my friends and classmates, who I figured to be more illustrious and unconventional in their imaginings of what a life could be, jumped directly into corporate-type jobs. I watched, with awe and confusion, as the gender and sexuality activist stopped dying his hair and moved to San Francisco to work for Google. Other friends that spent almost all of their free time acting or singing or working on films quickly shifted their energies and focused into getting a consulting (?) job (something I still do not fully understand). I felt somewhat stunned by this; it seemed almost like everyone had attended a meeting that this was what you were supposed to do and I totally forgot to go.

After witnessing this and graduating, I also decided that, at 21-years old, I should probably “get my shit together” a.k.a., stop going out and spending money on beer and burritos. I should spend all of my time being productive and taking good care of myself. In short, I fell right back into making no room for myself to have balance or nuance or to realistically enjoy my life. I was, once again, wound so tight during this time, that I doled out almost no kindness for myself, punishing myself with perfection, again.

Everything I did was for the purpose of optimizing my productivity, my health, absorbing knowledge from the in-vogue non-fiction book of the month to talk about at parties, and, once again, letting everyone know how much I had it together. I looked at some pictures of myself from college, dressed in face paint after an Of Montreal concert where I danced with my shirt off and thought about how much fun I used to have, how there was a point in my life where I was almost creative and “free-spirited”, but I had missed that opportunity, and going back to that fledgling person was impossible.

Of course, removing the neatly defined semesters and credit-hours and degree tracking software and adding in my revitalized perfectionism and competition and some new vague financial goals (building a retirement account? Getting out of debt! Fast! Grad school?), I began to try to ignore my truest desires and, instead, jump into that pipeline I saw towards the end of college.

This exercise led to a series of jobs and moves, ranging from dull to disastrous. First, I worked as a researcher at a cancer hospital under the supervision of a flaky and abusive-by-product-of-her-flakiness thoracic oncologist who told me I had trouble paying attention to details when she would make a mistake. Then, a fellowship working for a public health department in a conservative part of California during the lead up to the 2016 Presidential Election. When that didn’t work out due to a combination of loneliness and having absolutely no money, I moved back to the East Coast where I drove Lyft, watched dogs, and hosted at a restaurant known for their Jazz brunches, while I tried to get myself another “get your shit together job”. Through that circuitous path, I ended up getting a job working in housing advocacy, which I loved for so many reasons, but still felt outside of what I was looking for.

Monogamy also felt safe, during this time. First with my college boyfriend, who I met through friends and, despite being someone I definitely fell in love with, the first person I really had sex with, we couldn’t quite figure out how to integrate our lives without one of us sacrificing something essential. When that didn’t work, I almost immediately met my most-recent ex, who I would have a two-and-a-half year long, on-again off-again relationship with, as both of us traversed the country and planet doing internships and fellowships while trying to find our way.

When my first relationship didn’t work out, I was devastated. It felt like we obviously should have been able to make it work, and I genuinely thought we were going to move in together and eventually get married until we had that conversation and realized that all of our issues would probably get so much worse if we moved in together and that we would never get married.

When the second relationship ended, I was simultaneously juggling relief and heartbreak. I had been liberated from something that neither one of us could figure out how to end, but I hated how easily he seemed to walk away from everything. One of the last times I saw him, I went to a dinner party at his mother’s apartment where, over the course of the evening, it became very clear that all of his relatives knew we were breaking up as he planned to move to a new city, despite the fact that we hadn’t yet had an extensive conversation about ending our relationship.

That night I left the party and cried in the rain listening to Mitski’s Be the Cowboy on repeat, working through everything I had been through with that person, and all of the choices I had made since graduating college, all of which had exhausted me. I felt exhausted because I had been swimming upstream for almost five years, against the currents of my actual desires, my actual inclinations, my actual identity, while in service of ideas that I couldn’t fit in, relationships that did not suit me, all while feeling a sense of invented competition against my college classmates.

After this boyfriend and I split up, I felt a Sea Change starting in my life. It felt like I had been cracked open, that I could step out again, from the confines I had created, and allow the verve that I had imagined my life containing, back into my life, to a degree where it wasn’t just visible to people that I interact with, but within me in a way that I realized it.

This was September 2018, and outside of ending this relationship, a couple other things happened that accounted for this change. For one, in June of that year, I had turned 25, which is around the age that the human brain is pretty much set with development. Perhaps it was the result of ending a bad relationship, but I felt more confident and smart and interesting and generally more stable as the summer waxed on.

I had spent the last year working with a therapist who combined cognitive-behavioral therapy with techniques such as breath-work to help me understand that my present-day self reacts to my present-day life with wisdom and messages from every experience of my life, and all the people I was throughout those events. This process helped me to stop beating myself up for being nervous and anxious, and instead listen to these neuroses and listen to them earnestly.

Perhaps, one of the more significant factors came from the fact that two of my closest friends, one of which being my roommate, had moved away over the course of the summer, causing my social scene to shift. I was really sad to see my friends leave the city that we shared for the entirety of our friendships, but I was also really excited to explore new connections with those around me. It felt like a moment where I could say a big Thank You to my college years, and the messy and exhausting years after, and introduce myself as someone new, someone stepping outside of the snakeskin containing all the expectations and dreams and goals fed to me by other people, by bigger systems.

I knew that I needed to leave my little New England life eventually, but when I returned to Boston from a week-long trip to visit my family and friends in the Tri-State Area, I put my bag down in my bedroom and felt really sad at the prospect of leaving Boston, leaving this apartment.

I was almost relieved when the recruiter who was interviewing me for a job in New York suddenly stopped responding to my emails. My family and friends in New York and New Jersey expressed their frustration with the fact that I was literally ghosted from a job that I spent at least five hours, and a Megabus ticket, interviewing for, a job that would have given me a reason to move back home. I pantomimed being as upset as they were, but in actuality, I was excited. I felt so ambivalent about Boston; the city once felt boundless with possibility, but at this point in time it felt constricting and dully depressing. And yet, I had so many gorgeous memories associated with the city, I knew it so intimately, I loved my apartment and all of the green space that surrounded it. And from a 30,000 foot view, above this ambivalence, I felt like I still needed to get something out of my system while still living in Boston.

I told myself that I would spend the next year indulging whatever desires I had, in a quest to take care of myself in ways that transcended the drone of health and wellness propagated by Instagram culture and the boutique cycling studios that wouldn’t stop emailing me. And then, by the time this year was over, I would find a way to move to New York, refreshed and more fully formed, ready to lead a life that felt even better.

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comicteaparty · 5 years

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February 18th-February 24th, 2019 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from February 18th, 2019 to February 24th, 2019. The chat focused on Patchwork and Lace by Sooz.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Week Long Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on Patchwork and Lace by Sooz~! (http://www.patchworkandlace.com/)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Remember, though, that while we allow constructive criticism, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic. Below you will find four questions to get you started on the discussion. However, a new question will be posted and pinned everyday (between 12:01AM and 6AM PST), so keep checking back for more! You have until February 24th to tell us all your wonderful thoughts! With that established, let’s get going on the reading and the chatting!

QUESTION 1. What has been your favorite scene in the comic so far? What specifically did you like about it?

QUESTION 2. At the moment, who is your favorite character? What about that character earns them this favor?

QUESTION 3. What has been your favorite moment between Sheol and Lilika? What about their relationship dynamic stood out to you? Ultimately, do you believe the two will wind up together romantically, or will the past keep them apart?

QUESTION 4. In regards to Sheol’s PTSD, what moment most stood out to you? Do you believe Sheol will be able to heal, and if so, what will it take? How might Sheol’s continued suffering affect the story or her relationship with Lilika further?

Delphina

I really like the scene with both Sheol and Lilika's flashbacks happening simultaneously. Something like that could have been very confusing, but it was laid out really well with the chain going down the middle. http://www.patchworkandlace.com/?p=451

Lilika's probably my favorite of the two main characters. She's sort of like this adorable dark demon-summoning cultist Card Captor Sakura. Darray is pretty new, but he also cracks me up.

Delphina

Lilika and Sheol's dynamic is interesting and falls a lot on hurt/comfort patterns. The kiss (http://www.patchworkandlace.com/?p=533) was satisfying, both as shipper kerosene and also because it was one of the few times that Sheol expressed something she wanted instead of just protecting Lilika or doing her duties. Even if it's not romantic, I hope there's more situations like that in Sheol's future where she discovers who she is and what she wants in (un)life, but I suspect that there's still going to be a lot of secrets she'll keep from Lilika before she really gets to a place of balance and peace. I suspect Lilika and Sheol will end up together, but only once Sheol is able to let go of the pain in her past and stop protecting Lilika from her secrets.

€heshire777

Sheol looks a lot like Unity from skin horse.

Stefan G

1) There are so many beautiful scenes, but my favourite one so far was this one ... I think the interaction/dynamic between the characters works really well/naturally and the ending made me chuckle. I enjoy humor like that

RebelVampire

QUESTION 5. Who or what do you think Lilika is a vessel for? Why was Lilika specifically chosen for the role and why do you think they can’t just find a replacement?

RebelVampire

@Stefan G For future record, it's better to link the page by URL rather than post a screenshot. Many creators don't like screenshots of their work taken, and images also aren't included in the archive either. Thus, to readers to the archive, your comment would actually have no context.

Stefan G

Roger that

...this is so difficult

Delphina

It definitely seemed like Lilika was special and advanced in magic for her age. I'm just curious all around about the organization (cult?) she grew up in and what their motives are. It definitely appears that whatever they originally wanted for Lilika, she's a free agent now who's doing pretty much whatever she wants, so I would assume she got too powerful for them to control and ran away. So if they don't even have anybody on her power level because she's over 9000, it makes sense that they want to get her back.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 6. How exactly do you interpret Sheol’s past so far as it’s been shown? Who do you think her former master was? In the end, how do you think Sheol came to be on her own and will her former master come looking for her?

RebelVampire

1) i really liked the most recent scene where sheol is talking about leaving lilika while you can hear lilika just teaching the kiddo in the bg. before i felt their relationship was just kind of set in stone (romantic or not) in terms of them staying together. but this scene...this scene added doubt. now theyre not just star crossed lovers, but actually have to work at the relationship, whatever their relationship is meant to become. and i really like when stories add a complicated aspect like that, because relationships are work whether theyre friendships or something else. 2) Lilika. I just like this dynamic of Lilika being cutesy but summoning the most horrific looking creatures. Yet, even if the creatures are weird looking, she shows them a lot of kindness in a way. I also like shes more of a hiding her cards type of character. While I like Sheol, her emotional issues are pretty in your face so you can basically see her deck of cards. Lilika though? I don't know how she might be hurt or traumatized and I like that a bit more. Adds more mystery to solve. 3) I liked the scene where Lilika is offering understanding and comfort to Sheol being out of sorts. Just...it was such a positive interaction and really showed the depth of Lilika's care for Sheol beyond just having a bunch of shirts handy. I like in general how the two of them are somewhat opposite in personalities and yet have this subtle way of getting along and showing their care. As for the ship, I'm gonna be optimistic and say yes. And assume they won't go up in flames.

varethane

that answer to 2 is really interesting, because in that respect they're both kinda opposite to the usual tropes that tend to apply (the stoic/stern type vs the bubbly, upbeat type)

you'd expect that Lilika would wear her emotions and background on her sleeve while Sheol would keep everything close to the chest, but it's the reverse, haha

Delphina

Yeah, to get a bit meta about it, the webcomic title is a pretty obvious reference to the two main characters, so I think they gotta stay together.

varethane

I hadn't thought of it that way til I saw your reponse though

RebelVampire

4) The moment where Lilika asks if Sheol is good but Sheol was like, "no but ill manage." That was such a sad slap in the face but so true to trauma. Cause sadly life doesnt care if you are traumatized. Sometimes you have to go live life and just manage. And I liked seeing that in the story cause it made the trauma more relateable to me. As for healing? yes, but years and years and years and years from the current time. For now though, I think Sheol's trauma is actually gonna get in the way and stop her from helping Lilika when Lilika most needs her. Then drama and conflict ensues. 5) Probably this comic's version of cthulu. As for why specifically Lilika, like Delphina I assume magical talent. But I'm skeptical at the time cause if all it took was magical talent, they wouldnt need to chase her down. Just get a new student. So I feel there must be super special about Lilika's talent. Like she has some sort of connection even better students don't have. 6) I assume her master was some lord scientist who just felt like playing god. And that he was using Sheol to both prove his awesome and gather some sort of resource. Hence the whole targets thing. I personally think that Sheol just ran away cause she found some body part had murdered a shiz ton of people and could no longer live with herself of the selves she was made of. It sounded like he was alive, so I do think her former master is gonna come looking for her? Or someone close to him. I mean not everyday you hear about living flesh dolls, so someone is bound to be interested.

huh, you make a good point @varethane . actually had not considered that their types are different from the expected trope

Delphina

On the topic of Sheol's past, it looks like Zerymos assembled her. Nell and Lilika's cult seem to know of him from the recent pages, so I assume the dude is either a cult-adjacent individual practitioner or split off to do his own thing. From the flashbacks, Zerymos pretty much made Sheol go out and murder specific people on the regular. (From this scene http://www.patchworkandlace.com/?p=452 and the one that I can't find where the person recognized her mouth and wanted to "kiss their daughter" one last time - (Really wish this comic had an archive page...)) I first suspected Zerymos wanted corpses for more experiments, but in the first scene, she's not carrying the body back, so maybe he's a leader who just wanted to freak people out and flex his power over them? He certainly didn't seem to be worried about Sheol using discretion since she just walks into a crowded group of screaming people and chokes 'em. If she's been that overt and people have heard of her, then it definitely makes sense that she wants to cover up as many scars as she can, but I've also been curious why she's only covering the mouth because you can still see the stitchwork down the middle?

varethane

she's still gotta see lol

that's why the broad-brimmed hat I guess, it puts shade on the area she can't help but keep exposed (unless she invests in something like this )

Delphina

Maybe the big hat helps, but yeah, I'd get me a ski mask or veil or something if I'd been that murdery.

snuffysam

she could go all invisible man-style with bandages and a pair of sunglasses

and yeah if Zerymos wanted stealthy kills, he probably wouldn't have made her walk around naked

RebelVampire

QUESTION 7. Do you believe that Nell will succeed and capture Lilika? If so, what will happen to Lilika? What will Sheol do? If not, how will Lilika and Sheol manage to avoid capture? How will it affect their future plans?

RebelVampire

7) Nah. I honestly think Nell is going to vastly overestimate her skills and vastly underestimate Lilika. It's also 2 v 1 right now since her partner was sent off, so nell probably isnt gonna have a good time. Sheol, assuming she's present, will over course protect Lilika. Although this begs the question of how much of Lilika's past does Sheol know? I mean of course she knows of Lilika's demony magic stuff, but did Lilika mention anything else? cause if not, that's the point i feel Sheol is gonna go wtf and want answers. but yeah i think after all is said and done, theyre gonna skip town for a while together.

Delphina

Well, it seems like Nell is going to be forced into seducing Lilika away for reasons I don't quite understand (http://www.patchworkandlace.com/?p=589). So I suspect it's not going to be a physical fight (which I agree, Lilika and Sheol have the advantage with, especially if Lilika is irreplaceably powerful and Sheol has no visible physical weaknesses) but a love-triangly-psychological sort of approach. Drive doubts in both of their heads about whether they really love/trust each other so they're easier to manipulate.

varethane

I don't think Nell is likely to overestimate herself, lol. She admits right off the bat that she's not good at that sort of thing

RebelVampire

hey, someone can say theyre not good at something and still be far off the mark at how not good they are

RebelVampire

(the archive for the chat on Sombulus is up now! https://comicteaparty.com/post/182974467985/february-11th-february-17th-2019-ctp-archive @Delphina )

RebelVampire

QUESTION 8. What exactly do you think happened with the Way of the Bright Waters that has Sheol so interested? Is it something Sheol herself was involved in, or something from one of her memories that isn’t hers? Will she actually learn information about it?

RebelVampire

8) well we know there was a murder thing, but somehow the way sheol worded it makes me think she wasnt entirely responsible or something? which that to mean means two likely scenarios. either its the fault of one of her body parts or someone whose life force or whatever she stole and she feels she needs to take responsibility. or sheol might have like a detachment complex. kind of like how some media portrays assassins as guilt free cause they consider themselves like the sword or gun and it was the person who ordered them to kill's doing. so sheol might have some of that going on. not sure. what i am sure of is id hate to be in sheol's head cause if any of this is true it sounds like an identity hellscape

RebelVampire

QUESTION 9. Do you think Sheol will indeed leave Lilika to pursue her own goals? Is she right that Lilika doesn’t actually need her, or do you believe Lilika has her own trauma regarding her past history that Sheol helps with?

€heshire777

No, or at least not until endgame.

It's a possibility that she will leave and be pursued.

Delphina

Yeah, I think if they do get separated (either because Nell succeeds in finding away to get in Lilika's head or just flat out kidnap her), it won't be permanent because they'll want to be with each other. Lilika hasn't really given much indication that she's having trouble with stuff from her past IMO, but y'know, growing up in a cult has gotta do something to a person in general. I think they're both going to realize eventually that they're happiest together and do whatever they can to stick to each other and continue their life of adventuring together.

snuffysam

I think Sheol doesn't realize how much Lilika likes her. Like she considers herself to be a burden or something.

Delphina

True, I think it's safe to say that the part of Sheol that thinks people like and accept her is severely underutilized.

She also may be worried about snapping and going out of control and hurting Lilika

RebelVampire

QUESTION 10. What are you most looking forward to in the comic? Also, do you have any final thoughts to share overall?

RebelVampire

i second. i def think sheol just has a large disconnect with how much lilika likes her. evend espite the kiss. almost like she thinks its all just some game to lilika and that eventually lilika will get bored. 9) the above being said, i think sheol is going to try at some point or another. i kind of get this impression sheol just thinks lilika is the this strong, carefree person who would be completely fine on her own and doesnt really even think too hard about all the times sheol has had to save her. and i think sheol needs to make the attempt to break this image. but will it be permanent? nah. i believe in them to realize theyre happier together. or be practical and realize safety in numbers. 10) im looking forward to learning more about lilika's magic and seeing what else the full scope of her capabilities are. like, what other creepy monstrosities can she summon. XD mostly just cause thats my favorite aspect right now.

Delphina

I'm looking forward to learning more about Lilika's past and both of them growing as characters. It's hard to say what Lilika might be dealing with beyond conjecture, so I hope more is explained about why she's so cavalier if that's indeed a defense mechanism. Sheol is clearly dealing with a lot and I'd love to see her develop more healthy attitudes toward self-care and growing and healing from her pain. While I suspect a lot of that is going to involve Lilika's affection and that's okay, romantic relationships don't and can't heal everything, so I hope some of it is also just self-reflection.

snuffysam

Oh this is extremely last minute, but - more sappy romance! can't get enough of it!

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about Patchwork and Lace this week! Please also give a special thank you to Sooz for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked Patchwork and Lace, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: http://www.patchworkandlace.com/

Sooz’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/itsasooz

#ctparchive #webcomics #comics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #bookclub #book club #webcomic book club #webcomic bookclub #comic tea party #ctp #patchwork and lace #sooz

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how2to18 · 6 years

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DURING MY JUNIOR YEAR of high school, I took piano lessons from a woman named Frances Thompson, who lived in a well-kept but fading ranch house on Grand Avenue, alone with her dying father. My lessons took place at night. I don’t remember why that was — possibly I’d asked for a late hour, to keep from cutting into my all-important regimen of time-wasting after school — but I remember the slight feeling of eeriness it created, the oddness of being in a place long familiar in the daytime but subtly transformed in the dark. Mrs. Thompson sat beside the bench, in her spindle-backed chair, wearing the big hexagonal glasses with their slender, drooping chain, and I sat on the bench, trying to coax my fingers into decoding the music I had once again failed to practice, and the brass lamp shone under its green shade on the upright, and in the windows stood a darkness that seemed to cut us off from the rest of creation, as if the studio were a kind of spaceship in which we were traveling.

That fall we worked on Bach — the French Suites, because they would teach me to play gracefully, she said. Playing gracefully wasn’t my strong suit. What I liked was to improvise, preferably at ear-bursting volume, in a mode inspired by the exquisite but agonizing passions of the tragic lovers in Merchant-Ivory movies I’d seen, and also in Merchant-Ivory movies I hadn’t seen, Merchant-Ivory movies that existed only in my imagination, where trembling hands were forever pouring glasses of brandy from cut-crystal decanters in front of hotel windows looking out across Constantinople, while the curtains blew in, filmily. I thought of this mode as “romantic.” I was good at dreaming up melodies Helena Bonham Carter might freeze to death in Australia to, somewhat less good at scales. Certainly Mrs. Thompson deserved better. She herself had studied with famous musicians, had lived in Chicago, had known something of the world beyond our barren patch of north-central Oklahoma. Probably every dried-up oil town in the United States has one music teacher whose pedagogical lineage traces back to Liszt; she was ours. She was elderly now, but there were moments when she talked about music with an expression at once so hard and so far away that even I understood she was looking into a realm I had never conceived of, much less visited.

She had standards, in other words. She wasn’t someone you could impress with little virtuosic tricks. Yet with me she was patient. She frowned but never criticized. She’d raise a hand to stop my sight-reading, give me small lectures on fingerings and voicings. We slide the thumb under the palm to keep the slurred passage even. We bring out the dissonances — see? — to register a harmonic shift. In Mozart we play allegretto lightly, lightly; and there were her hands on the keyboard, knobbed and spotted as if they’d spent a century or so under the sea, playing allegretto with a lightness that seemed simple, seemed like nothing at all, except that I couldn’t mimic it.

I wasn’t too thrilled about the French Suites. Not because I had anything against Bach. In fact it had been while playing Bach that I realized I loved classical music, one day when our seventh-grade orchestra was rehearsing the Little Fugue in G minor and I suddenly felt (I think the trombones had just come in) as though my brain were a cloud of fine golden particles through which sunlight was streaming. It was just that the pieces were so measured. To play them well took poise I hadn’t begun to develop. You had to be able to sustain multiple ideas, multiple processes, and develop them simultaneously, in all their complexity. Which meant you had to be able to get above yourself, to listen not just in the emotional thrall of the moment but with a kind of cosmic detachment. That was what Mrs. Thompson meant by grace; she meant you had to be the astronomer, and not, or not only, the supernova. I was 17. My ideal of pianism was that when you finished playing, your hair should be sticking up, because of passion. I had no frame of reference for Bach’s superb contemplativeness. Mrs. Thompson might as well have asked me to learn a different instrument. In a way, that is what she was doing.

“I figured it out,” I announced. “It just has to sound logical. Everything builds toward this weird major chord at the end.”

“Well,” she said. “Yes, but also no. Remember that an allemande is a dance. This is a suite of dances. So we’re thinking, but the thinking is dancing — dan-cing, dan-cing, dan-cing. Dancing, not banging, please.”

It was confounding to think she had a living father. Students never saw him. We entered the studio through a separate door, around back, and were never invited beyond, into the mysterious interior, where he was understood to dwell. Mrs. Thompson herself rarely mentioned him. Yet in a way his very implicitness intensified the weirdness of his being there. Coming into the studio already felt like stepping out of time. You had the little bust of Brahms, the rounds of lace. The antique metronome, like something that might have fallen back to Earth after Sputnik launched. Mrs. Thompson and I were from the same small town, but I knew it only in its current form, with its miles of strip malls on 14th Street and its three Sonic drive-ins and the constant quiet stress over how many jobs the refinery would shed next year. When she was a girl, the oil mansions were still being built. Where did her experience open onto mine? I had heard stories about our great tycoon, the scion of an ancient English family from the village of Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester; he had built a vast oil empire in the early 20th century, when Oklahoma was practically the Wild West. Mrs. Thompson remembered him from life. To me, she was ancient.

So the idea that, invisibly near, there was someone so much older; and that he was on the threshold between life and death, frozen there, somehow, for the old man had lain dying for years … It struck a note not at all like a Mozart allegretto. Now, from a distance of time, I think of what the duty of caring for him must have meant for Mrs. Thompson — the challenge of it, at her age, the expense, the waiting, possibly the grief. How it must have reordered her life. None of that occurred to me then. Or it did, but as something not wholly real, like the weather in another city. What was real was the feeling of being in a ghost story. I thought of the word “macabre,” which made me think of Poe, and the word “eldritch,” which I knew from Lovecraft (“the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats”), and also from Dungeons & Dragons.

Once, only, I saw him. Mrs. Thompson collected sheet music. She’d been stockpiling it for decades. It overfilled her filing cabinets; stacks of it slouched on chairs and in the spaces under end tables. She needed this private library, she said, because she liked to consult alternate fingerings. In fact the impulse went deeper. I never had a music teacher who was more distrustful of memory. I, who memorized pieces faster than I could learn to play them, who couldn’t properly practice a measure until I knew it by heart, found this baffling. But to her way of thinking, it was dangerous to spend too much time away from the objective record of the printed page. Things slip. It was better to have a lot of music, even too much music, even an absurd amount of music, than too little. Too little and you risked becoming like Sviatoslav Richter, the great Russian pianist, who discovered near the end of his career that he’d spent 40 years playing a single wrong note in Bach’s Italian Concerto. He’d memorized the piece in his youth, but one tiny error had crept in, an f-sharp instead of an f-natural in the 47th measure of the second movement, the andante. And then, because his memory was prodigious, he’d replicated the mistake for decades, including on at least two recordings, without ever going back to check the score.

Mrs. Thompson wanted to look, that night, at a different edition of the French Suites, specifically the allemande that opens the second, in C minor. There was some question about what finger to use for the pivotal note in a run. I’d been playing it with my ring finger, as my yellow Schirmer’s Classics Library edition recommended, but she thought the pinkie might make more sense. We couldn’t find the book she wanted in the studio, and Mrs. Thompson didn’t quite feel like getting up from her chair, so she sent me into the house to continue the search.

I’d never been beyond the studio before. I walked down a dark hallway, toward what I supposed was the dining room, where the file cabinet she’d told me about was kept. The air was warm and had a stale-apricot, old-potpourri smell. Every so often thin lights would stretch along the wall and I’d hear the long sigh of a car sliding past on Grand; otherwise it was ticking-clock quiet.

Here was the file cabinet. I found the book, turned around to go back, and stopped, because the old man was in the room with me.

He was lying in a hospital bed. He’d been there all along; I hadn’t seen him because his bed was angled to face into the room, and so was partly hidden from the doorway. Now he was facing me. This was his sickroom, evidently. A metal stand with some sort of dangling clear sack stood beside the bed and was connected to it — to him — by tubes. The bed was raised so that he could partly sit up. A white sheet covered him to the chest. Over the foot of the bed someone had folded a patchwork quilt. His face was so thin it was as if it had been whittled down from a different person’s face.

I wondered if he was dead. I wasn’t sure how to tell. The summer before, I had gone with my father to the funeral of a distant relation, a huge man who lay in an open casket in a pair of dark blue farmer’s overalls, and I remembered how fragile he had looked, how strangely chastised, with his big hands folded over his work shirt, nose pointing up toward the lights. Maybe you can tell when someone is dead, I thought, because of the peculiar way in which they look alive.

After a hesitation, I said hello and gave him an awkward little wave. I heard him rustle in bed. He lifted his thin arm above his face, the elbow bent as if he were warding off a bright light. Then he straightened his elbow and I realized what he was doing. He was waving back at me. Arm raised above his head, he gave me a slow, exaggerated salute, as if he were hailing shore from a ship that was about to depart.

A few months ago, in a friend’s back garden in Los Angeles, I found myself paging through a book about the English Catholic poet Francis Thompson, who lived from 1859 to 1907. Thompson isn’t much talked about these days, but he wrote some of the most beloved religious poetry of the late Victorian era, work that for decades featured on Catholic-school reading lists, that was anthologized and memorized and admired by critics. (G. K. Chesterton called him “the greatest poetic energy since Browning.”) He also — this was the thesis of the book I was reading — might have been Jack the Ripper.

I know how that sounds, and you’re right to be skeptical. The case against Thompson is purely circumstantial. There’s no hard evidence. And at first glance Thompson is one of the least likely suspects imaginable. In photos, he looks like a fragile mystic. He stares out of a gaunt face with large, haunted eyes. He’s serious and celestial. At 47 he wasted away from tuberculosis. Before that he spent years semi-sequestered in monasteries, writing verses about God’s love. One of his poems, “The Kingdom of God,” contains the first use of the expression “a many-splendoured thing.” A person of strange intensities, clearly; an unsettling, even otherworldly person, but not someone you’d peg as a murderer.

Yet that very celestial quality, the sense, which Thompson strongly conveyed, that he could see into the world beyond our own, concealed a darkness — perhaps better to say it was a darkness, transmuted in his poems only through a keen effort of spirit. There’s a line Chesterton singles out in his essay on Thompson. Thompson is talking about the gulf between our world and what’s beyond it, and he says this gulf — he calls it a “crevasse” — is spanned by “Pontifical Death.” In two words, Thompson imagines death both as a bridge (a pont is a bridge, a pontifex is a bridge-builder) and as a high priest supervising the crossing over it. Which is a beautiful notion, until you look at it from a certain angle, at which point it becomes completely terrifying.

I didn’t know much about Thompson’s life, and I had to admit, as I slowly turned the pages, that some strange synchronicities emerged when you laid his biography over the timeline of the Ripper murders. Nothing definitive; just uncanny parallels, in a Dark Side of the Moon-played-over-The Wizard of Oz sort of way. Not that I believed everything in the book, exactly. The author, an Australian schoolteacher named Richard Patterson, was an amateur sleuth who was pretty clearly excited by the thought of solving one of history’s greatest mysteries, and he was willing to indulge in a lot of irresponsible speculation to make his case. On the question of Thompson’s fire-starting and doll-mutilation, for example. Patterson had some evidence to suggest that during childhood, Thompson demonstrated a pattern of lighting fires and cutting open dolls, behavior that could be taken as an early indicator of psychopathic tendencies. However, most of this evidence was ambiguous — Thompson made a joke, say, about how cutting open a doll as a child had taught him never to look for a beautiful woman’s brains. Which is ugly and misogynistic, but not necessarily serial-killer talk. But instead of treating it as suggestive but ultimately uncertain, Patterson charged ahead with the intensity of a prosecuting attorney, brushing aside all doubt.

Before long I was reading the book on two levels. On the first level, I responded only to the facts about Thompson’s life. This had the effect of awakening in me an intense pity toward the poet, who suffered terribly in his time. On the second level, I responded to the alternate reality conjured up by Patterson, in which Thompson was in fact Jack the Ripper. This had the effect of completely freaking me out. Often this split consciousness meant that a single piece of information registered with me in two directly opposed ways. That was the case, for instance, with the issue of Thompson’s education. He grew up near Manchester, in the village of Ashton-under-Lyne, where he was known as a frail, taciturn, bookish boy, unpopular with other children. In his youth he trained to enter the priesthood. Then one day he returned home with a letter from the seminary college informing his father that it was God’s will that he should look for a different career. He entered a medical college and studied to be a surgeon, but he failed his exams repeatedly, again disappointing his family.

And here’s what I mean about my two levels of reading. On the first level, the level of fact, I found this story sad. It was clear that Thompson had been under extreme pressure to pursue a career for which he was temperamentally unsuited, and I could easily imagine the anxiety, the lying to his father, the rising panic as he realized he was again bound to come up short, would again be revealed as inadequate. (In fact he seems to have had a nervous breakdown at around the time he left medical school.) On the second level, though, the story helped build the case that Thompson was a murderer. Dr. Phillips, the police surgeon who attended three of the Ripper’s murder scenes and four of the subsequent autopsies, thought the killer must have had medical training, due to the precision with which the victims’ organs were removed. Thompson, who could be placed in the vicinity of the murders at the time of the murders, had had such training. He had spent hours in the college basement cutting up corpses. He had in fact, according to Patterson, begged his father for more money so he could afford more bodies to dissect. He was known to carry a surgical scalpel on his person. He said he used it to shave.

This weird doubling of response continued, in fact compounded, as I read, so that before I was halfway through the book I almost seemed to be reading two stories, two parallel but unconnected narratives, at the same time. The outward action was the same in each, but the meanings were different. You can guess, then, how disorienting it was to read about Thompson’s time in Whitechapel at the time of the five Ripper murders, in the late summer and fall of 1888.

Whitechapel, in London’s East End, was then one of the city’s poorest districts. Thompson was in his late 20s. He’d had little success as a poet. In medical school he’d gotten addicted to opium, and he was now living as a homeless vagrant in Whitechapel’s warren of narrow streets. He slept in shelters within walking distance of where the murders took place. Many nights he spent walking up and down Mile End Road, often in the grip of delirium. Some time before, he had fallen in love with a young prostitute, whom he credited with saving his life. She left him shortly before the Ripper began murdering prostitutes.

Thompson wrote poems on dirty scraps of paper and kept them in his pockets. Those that survive show a mind not exactly planted on firm rock. The hallucinatory violence and barely controlled mania of some of his drafts from this period are startling:

And its paunch was rent Like a brasten drum; And the blubbered fat From its belly doth come With a sickening ooze — Hell made it so! Two witch-babies, ho! ho! ho!

Even in the Christian masterworks, you find disturbing overtones. “The Hound of Heaven,” Thompson’s most celebrated poem, depicts a wayward sinner’s flight from, and eventual surrender to, God’s love. Read in a certain light, its monomaniacal focus on God’s relentless pursuit of the speaker might even seem to frame the relationship between deity and human as that between a murderer and his prey:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days, I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears […]

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

It was a sunny afternoon in Los Angeles. Clusters of red and purple flowers swayed in the breeze as I turned the pages of Patterson’s book, drinking endless cans of the lime-flavored seltzer that Holly brought out from her kitchen. Without quite knowing why, I’d been listening for days to Bach’s Italian Concerto, repeating again and again the slow second movement, with the dirge of its left-hand part and the clear, cold aria of the right hand. I’d become mildly obsessed with Sviatoslav Richter’s recordings, as many people do with Sviatoslav Richter’s recordings, finding in them an intensity of focus that sets them apart from other musicians’. You feel, when Richter is playing, as if this music will be heard once, and then dissolve forever. In the garden, I played through my headphones a file I’d dug up online. It was a recording from the 1950s that preserved the mistake Richter had made when he memorized the piece — that one wrong note, almost unnoticeable, a 20th of a second where he’d shown a rare fallibility.

He’d have hated me for it. Richter was a perfectionist, not inclined to self-forgiveness, and he believed that the purpose of his playing was to serve the composer’s intention absolutely. That self-annihilating quality, never quite at ease with the obvious immensity of his talent, is part of what makes his playing so riveting. When Richter realized what he’d done, he didn’t find it “humanizing”; he was devastated. The very littleness of the imperfection galled. It was nothing, but at the same time it was everything, and it was irreversible. He issued an apology in the liner notes of a CD he released on the Italian label Stradivarius in 1991 — an astonishing thing for a pianist of his stature to do, to flagellate himself publicly over a slip Bach himself might not have worried about. From then on he played the piece as it was written.

To me, though, there was something irresistible in that false note sustained over decades, the f-sharp played instead of f-natural, the tiny broken stitch between Bach’s unchanging reality and the fluid world of an artist’s mind in performance. “Perfect” recordings of the Italian Concerto existed by the dozens, I reasoned; only this one offered that strange, fleeting glimpse into Richter’s mental experience. Where else could you hear a literal act of forgetting? It was magical.

That afternoon, as I sat reading and listening in Holly’s backyard, the music and the images from the Thompson story seemed to blend together, so that in my mind’s theater, Richter’s playing became a soundtrack for the perverse costume drama of Patterson’s book. I saw Thompson as a boy, swinging from a golden chain the thurible he used (so Patterson said) to start a fire in the seminary. I saw him slicing into the pale abdomen of a corpse at the medical college. I saw his eyes go out of focus as the first dose of laudanum kicked in. I saw him praying till his hands shook. In London, where he fled after his mother died and he could no longer hide his failure at school, he read De Quincey and the encyclopedia. He took opium to sleep. Poverty ground him hard: soon he was sleeping on sidewalks. At the British Museum Library he was turned away for being unclean. Cold, dark London: fog and gas lamps, horses’ breath, shadows on stone. Verses beating in his head. He submitted a crushed and barely legible manuscript to a Catholic magazine, Merry England, edited by Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, but he had no return address; he asked the editors to send his rejection to the post office. They accepted his poems, came to Whitechapel to find him, tried to get him off the streets. He refused to go. On the night of August 30, 1888, a warehouse fire went up in the West India docks along the Thames. Massive buildings burned. Flames visible for miles. The horizon a red glow. In Whitechapel the atmosphere was festive. Such a spectacle! Look what a jolly new bonnet I’ve got, Mary Ann Nichols sang when she was kicked out of her lodging house. She didn’t have fourpence for the bed. Alright, but there were plenty of men around after the fire — she’d earn it on the street.

She went by Polly. She was 43 years old. She’d been married and had five children, but that had all fallen apart. She was an alcoholic, herself intermittently homeless; she’d lived in and out of workhouses. A few months earlier she’d found a job as a servant in Wandsworth, but she hated the work and fled to Spitalfields with a bundle of stolen clothing. It was after one o’clock when she left the boarding house. Thompson was somewhere in the area. It’s not known precisely where, though he surely would have seen the fire. At 32, Polly Nichols’s roommate, Ellen Holland, ran into her at the corner of Whitechapel Road and Osborne Street. Polly laughed that she’d earned the money she needed three times over but kept drinking it away. (And there it was, in the recording — the misplaced note, the false f.) That was the last time a witness saw her alive, though strangely, when her body was discovered an hour later, at 3:40 a.m., in the doorway of a stable, the carters who found her were unsure whether she was dead. I felt something move in her chest, one of them said. What happened during the previous hour no one knows, except that her throat was cut.

The threshold between life and death was a place Thompson visited again and again in his poems. “We unwinking see / Through the smoked glass of Death,” he wrote in one, and in another:

O world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

It’s when I think about this threshold that I’m most strongly reminded of a passage written about Thompson many years later. By then he’d long since been rescued from poverty. Wilfrid and Alice Meynell eventually succeeded in getting him out of Whitechapel. They sent him to a priory in Sussex to recover from his laudanum dependency. (It was at this time, Patterson notes, that the Ripper murders ceased.) Soon, with the Meynells’ help, he began to win fame as a poet. The editors’ son, Everard Meynell, wrote a book about him. It’s somewhere between a biography and a memoir. The passage I’m thinking of is one where Meynell describes the poet’s love of music, which expressed itself particularly in an adoration of the piano. Standing at the piano, Meynell says, “he would gaze at the performer, his body waving to and fro in tremulous pleasure.” As a young man, he had shirked his studies at the medical college to attend musical performances. He would tell his father that a professor had kept him back to offer him extra instruction when in fact he had gone to the home of a pianist to hear music. When he was supposed to be studying anatomy, he listened to piano music. He could not play himself, but he knew a sequence of chords, and “he struck them,” Meynell says, “with such earnestness that I, as a child, was impressed by his performance.” He held down the keys as the notes, briefly suspended, decayed, crossing as they did so the uncertain bridge between what exists and what is gone forever.

Brian Phillips is the author of the essay collection Impossible Owls, forthcoming in 2018 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He lives in Los Angeles.

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