#I’m grateful and thankful and love the friendships that are blooming from this weird awesome stuff we write

[redstainedsocks]

This blog is 1 years old today!

Oh how fast time flies. I made the blog on the 27th, but didn’t make my first post (or my initial greeting post) until the 28th, and here we are, a year later, still going. It’s been such an odd one, but a perfect time to be escaping into fiction and fantasy scenarios and thinking about anything other than real life. Thank you all for enabling my habit of distraction from everything out there.

I’d been reading a few stories for a few months, and sending the odd ask or request, and finally caved (thanks to @whumpthisway being terrible at talking me out of it 😜) and started my own blog so I could reblog and interact and collect all the things I like in one place. I didn’t really expect to get many followers but there’s a fair few of you now, and I promise if you like or reblog or comment on anything I post with any regularity I know your name and appreciate having a fellow fan of all the same things that bring me whumpy joy.

I also already had my own idea for an OC whump story last December and I let it grow and develop in my head for a long time, but I finally started posting it last month and I’m very excited that it has some incredibly enthusiastic readers. Before that got going of course, Kit stole my heart and attention and taught me a lot about writing for OCs and I hope to continue to have more good times writing more of his story too, I know he’s well loved and that in itself is amazing to me.

Anyway, it’s taken me all day to get round to writing this and I’m posting it with 7 minutes to spare, but mostly I just wanted to mark the occasion and say thanks for being here, and I hope to continue to see you around. I’d love to open up to taking prompt requests at some point in the next year, and engage with you all even more. And as ever, I shall do my best to keep reading and loving on the stories—old and new—that get me excited about whump every day!

[travelingfoxes]

Grace

I dropped my bag of shower shit on a low wooden table and dropped myself onto a couch next to it. My hair was drying in tacky waves against my cheeks and I was dusty already, of course, even though I'd just gotten out of a shower.

It was pushing seven o'clock in the evening, and I was tired. I'd come out to the showers in a staff van after a day of work, accompanied by two coworkers. I'd woken up a little hungover in a bed that wasn't mine, spent the day dealing with people's feelings in a heavily social job, and realized in the middle of the morning that my hair was getting a sticky plastic texture, like Barbie doll hair. The idea of a shower had gotten me through the day, and while a dust storm threatened to ruin everything for a minute, it had worked out. I was warm and clean and grateful, even after a day of too much extroversion and loose-boned fatigue.

There was a man sitting next to me, pulling on a pair of socks that released little puffs of taupe dust with every motion of his feet. I kept my eyes on the ground. There are naked people of all ages and sizes and genders in the staff showers at Burning Man, but it's perhaps the least sexual space on playa. The unspoken rules seem to be 'don't stare' and 'don't ask.' I've never had so many conversations with strange men who look exclusively at my face as I have at the showers.

The guy was about my age, tan and fit, with soft blue eyes. Back in the real world, he would be the kind of man I automatically distrusted because of how often men like him know how pretty they are. But I liked his voice.

"I dunno what to do with it, man," he was saying to another guy. "It's been really intense."

'Intense' was a word I was using to describe my experience on playa this year, too, so of course I started listening in.

"I don't know how to feel about it. She's like--I feel all these things for her, you know, but it's not--I don't want her to be my girlfriend."

Ah, the playa romance. Across the barren stretch of dust and stone, this might be the only thing that bloomed perennially. I smiled.

"I mean, she's from fucking Estonia. I just picked her up in Montana and we drove forever to get here, and now we're going to be here together for like six weeks, and--I thought it would be shitty, you know, but it's not. It's been really great."

His eyes were on a line of women getting dressed by the woman-only shower trailer. He could have been talking about any of them--the chunky blonde with the thigh tattoos, the older woman laughing as she laced up knee-high boots, the slender one with a cap of dark hair that made her look like a seal.

"How'd you pick up a girl from Estonia in fucking Montana?" I asked. "Sorry, I'm eavesdropping."

"No, it's cool." He smiled at me. "I met her on Craigslist. It's both of our first year, and I picked her up while I was driving from Maine. We just agreed to do Resto together."

Personally, I thought spending days in a car with a stranger and committing to spend six weeks on playa with them sounded fucking nuts, but maybe that's just me. "And you're getting along with her? That sounds like a good thing, yeah?"

"Yeah, I just--it's weird, okay. It's been really... easy. Like, it shouldn't be this easy. We get along great, even when stuff is going wrong it seems like we've just had each other's backs from the beginning. We're really good friends, and we haven't known each other that long, there was just this immediate sense of... I don't know."

"Camaraderie?"

"Yeah, camaraderie."

He didn't know it, but he was describing an experience that mirrored my own, minus the part about Craigslist. I had woken up that morning delighted to see someone I barely knew. I had rolled over and slid my cheek up against his chest and felt the long bones of his arms curl around me. In the last week, we had seduced each other, laughed at each other, shared meals and childhood stories, fallen asleep talking, cried over dead friends and exes, kissed each other goodbye in the morning and hello at dusk. I didn't know his birthday, or his favorite color, or his last name.

It wasn't a romance, exactly. I'd raised the idea of forming a romantic connection, maybe dating when we were back in the default world, and been gently rebuffed. He wouldn't ever want me to change, he said, but he was never going to stop being monogamous, and if we got serious he'd want me to be monogamous, too.

Ironically, my inclination toward polyamory is what made a two-week playa fling possible for me. If I think about it right, I can fall into and out of love like a rain shower.

"Sounds like you're having feels." I said.

"Feels?"

"You know!" I touched my chest. "Heart feels."

"Yeah, but--it's not though! It's not romantic. It's just--I've never felt a friendship like this before, okay? I don't know what to do with it."

I sat back against the cushions. The sun was going to set in thirty minutes or so; we were right on the edge of another endless playa twilight and the light was distilling into thin honey. A breeze blew from the southwest, another sign of incipient night, and it was warm and dry and spacious.

Earlier that day, I'd biked across the city to spend three hours catching up with someone with whom I'd once been in love. We'd drunk a beer and fallen into conversation like it hadn't been two years since we'd seen each other face to face. We talked about everything we normally do--polyamory and books and the tech industry and consciousness and traveling. He'd told me about rekindling a romance he'd thought was gone beyond recovery, and I'd hugged him with delight. He'd introduced me as "my good friend, Sarah" to the other folks in his camp, and we'd kissed on the cheek to say goodbye.

If I'd still been in love with him, I'd thought as I biked away, the interaction would have made me wistful. But loving him as a friend, the same friend he'd been to me for years, it was simply joyful, and easy, and sweet.

"Maybe you need to look up the different kinds of love," I said. "It's a Greek thing. There's five of them? I think? Or seven? But it's a way of categorizing all the different types of love you can feel for someone."

He looked astounded. "Like, there's eros," I continued. "That's sexual love. Pants love. The kind of love that makes you fall in love with someone and get stupid about them. But there's also agape, unconditional love, the kind of love from a long-term relationship or friendship. Seeing someone completely and accepting them for who they are."

"Whoa. That's awesome. I've never heard of that."

"Yeah, well I'm glad you think it's awesome, because that's all I can remember about it, so that's all you're getting."

We both laughed. A thread of thought spooled around me, and I tried to grab it; something about connection, and friendship, and seeing what was, rather than what could be. Loving immediately, I thought, and immediately forgot.

Across the shower yard, my playa fling let himself out of one of the shower trailers, took a reflexive look at the naked people, caught himself, and dropped his eyes to the ground.

"Yeah, so--maybe you love this person, right, just not in a way you're used to. Maybe you're experiencing a different kind of love."

"Yeah." He sat back against the cushions, cradling the weight of a realization in his lap. "Thanks, you've given me a lot to think about."

"Totally! Hi, by the way. I'm Foxes."

"I'm Grace."

"Of course you are," I said, and we hugged.