#Luckily by now I'm safely in a mental state where I kind of find it funny how inconceivable it seems to be for others that I now look ...

[birdylion]

I can't stress enough that when you meet a trans person presenting as their gender, what you should not do is stare at them as if they're an animal in the zoo. Not even a fascinating animal. Even if a lot of time has passed and they look very different now, or if you knew them well back when they weren't out. Especially then. At best, they're secure in their identity and your staring leaves them bewildered and a bit weirded out. At worst ... well, imagine being considered like a fascinating animal, when all you struggle with is just existing as yourself. It's kind of dehumanising.

If you need to process the change, try to do as much of it as possible out of their view. They have other things to do than help you through your hangups about their existence.

[tragedy-for-sale]

Sooo I'm kinda in the mood for angst (I don't know why) and ever since I saw a post about how Fox and the other Coruscant Guard flinch when Anakin goes to see Ahsoka I have been thinking about how the senators and Palpatine treat them behind closed doors. With Palpatine, I have always thought that he is the worst to them behind closed doors and that is why Fox does not dare disobey orders (like hunting down Fives) and that he has been trying to think of a way to tell somebody (anybody) about it.

Oh-

Me too

I really do think about the shit they put up with. Especially Fox. Uh- this is an edited snippet from a chapter on one of my Wattpad stories- I just changed the context.

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When Commander Fox got the news he was going on another mission, he'd plungered into stress. He hated leaving his men unattended, even though they were capable of running the place efficiently, he still worried. For if anything terrible happened while he was gone, it would be his fault, regardless of the fact he wasn't there. There was also the stress of if anything happened on his mission, that would rightfully be his fault. He'd face the consequences, not only the verbal abuse from outsiders, from people he didn't even know. He'd also face the disappointing glare of people he did know, people that were above him in command and power. Those were the people that scared Fox, for they could hurt him, they have hurt him, and they always got away with it too.

The Commander stood frozen at attention, looking to the Chancellor under his helmet. The older man's gaze always had upset Fox, for as kind as the Chancellor was, there was something off about the man. Something evil and corrupt. But everytime Fox had that thought, the Chancellor seemingly... knew. As if he could sense the storm in Fox's head. Then the Commander would get in trouble, but he never could remember what happened after the Chancellor's face goes dark. His mind went blank as the smile of Sheev Palpatine drained to the scowl of the future Emperor Palpatine. Unbeknownst to the clone, who was now in a state where he wouldn't remember what was going on, just the pain.

Fox always remembered the feeling of his throat tightening and him gasping desperately for air and sometimes, the high voltage of electricity surging through his body. His arms would drop as he screamed and cried in pain. Shaking and shaking as he wished for death. But he was never granted that mercy. Then for a moment, everything is black. He comes to, shaking on the floor, he's struggling to pull himself up, arms and legs weak, and when he finally makes his way to his feet, the meeting is immediately dismissed. He's leaving the Chancellor's office with new wounds. Fox's entire torso covered with purple veins shocked from the lightening directly surged through him. Those freshly fried veins seeped from his chest to his arms and legs.

Sensitive to the touch, the wounds from the electrocution led up to his neck. However he acquired these wounds, he knew not to mention it, or else he'd have more. So his entire body was covered except his head and hands, luckily the veins hadn't seeped that far. He had stared at his bare chest when he had taken off his blacks to change into a new set of blacks. His entire body ached as he moved, he didn't want to move, but he forced himself to. He got dressed and walked out at the same pace he always walked at. He was shaking the entire time. Though Fox shouldn't have been moving at all, he'd gotten used to the strain on his body, and how to deal with the extra pain that came with continuing his duty.

As he walked around the facility, his chest started to hurt, he looked away, pretending to be studying his holopad as he took quiet, deep breaths. He could barely breath, so, until he was addressed, Fox focused on breathing. When he was asked a question of clarity, he shoved everything down, putting on his mask and hiding his pain. Overtime, a clone gets good at hiding their emotions, at smiling and pretending everything is okay. Because no one cares when it isn't. Especially for this Commander.

He'd been tortured, manipulated and harmed inhumanly. He'd been treated as a slave, which wasn't new, for all clones were slaves, chained to the Republic. They all had a duty and the embedded loyalty helped the Republic's slaves stay in their place. Fox hadn't expected this mission to be any different. He had prepared to be glared at, shoved and yelled at. The rude comments of people who disapproved of him and his brothers. Even in the senate when he stood next to the Chancellor, he could see senators glaring at him, for a clone didn't belong next to the Chancellor.

The man had grown used to the abuse that when it happened, Fox was never surprised. He put up with the physical and mental abuse everyday, he didn't even realize when it happened, or that he had willingly taken that abuse. Overtime, Fox lost all hope his life would get better, lost the hope he and his men would be accepted. It would never happen. Everyday, he'd face the hardships that came with being a clone. The Commander had thought of telling someone, anyone... But who? No one cared enough about clones.

Even the Jedi he worked with showed no kindness. So Fox gave up, he wished to tell someone, not for him, but for his boys. He'd take his boys on a mission and watch them face the abuse he'd grown numb to. His boys had the best training in the galaxy, but nothing could prepare them for this. For this abuse. Fox wanted to spare his boys from this pain, so eventually, Fox got smarter, protecting his boys and taking all the hits. Though most times, it went unnoticed and unappreciated, Fox had put his life on the line. He'd become a shield for his boys and no one noticed.

None of his boys knew their Commander had put up with a lot more abuse than they ever had. He'd find his boys crying in supply closets and wishing that life was different, and Fox would sit next to them and hold them while they cried. Fox never thought about himself, he didn't matter after all. Only his brothers. Fox never let his boys see him gasping for breath, his hands shaking from his fried nerves, and he never, never, let his boys see him cry. The Commander was simply that, a Commander meant to die. For his entire life, the impression that he wasn't worth to feel loved was embedded in his head. He'd begun to believe he wasn't worthy of being loved or feeling safe and cared for. He truly believed he wasn't human enough.

But he knew his boys were

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|| Tag List ||

@ct7567329 @a-lil-perspective @mageofcole @advcntura @crying-at-ikea @stuckyjacos @lena-ravenhart @crahsystor @obiorbenkenobi

[ephemerlskies]

emerald dreams: REDACTED | kth

⇢ pairing: taehyung x reader

⇢ genre: series, blackmirror!au, angst, fluff, artist!taehyung, strangers to lovers, set sometime in a dystopian era of technology, taehyung is s o f t

⇢ word count: 4.5k

⇢ warnings: explicit language, memory loss, mentions of death, themes of grief/depression

⇢ summary: in a technologically advanced utopia where a memory can be stored as a data file in a chip inserted in your head, it was entirely impossible to forget anything. when you met taehyung, a young at heart yet talented artist, he garnished an odd familiarity, raising suspicion that some of your memories had been lost in the digital cloud, or worse, erased from your memory chip.

♪ playlist: IDK you yet - alexander 23 • 4 o' clock - v & rm • jamais vu - bts • the story - brandi carlile •  moonlight - ariana grande ♪

╰ episode index: 01 | 02 (coming soon)

a/n: if you don't watch black mirror then just imagine that everything is technology based, even the inner mechanisms of your thoughts/mind/memories and social culture has centered around the automation of the human body. also the government is sleazy and controls literally everyone in this au >:) also, i'm going to try and update this weekly!!

Scenario No. 2: Re-test

You didn’t expect to be spending your weekly visit at your favorite coffee shop gasping for air in the single occupancy commode. An unsettling familiarity had reached into your chest and compromised the body of your lungs, now savagely hyperventilating for air, and seized control on the reins of every sensory neuron in your body.

First, it was the sensation of sound. That voice, that unusually specific coffee order, the soft lilt of politeness riding through his etiquettes of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ struck right in your chest with a shockwave of deja vu, like you’ve heard that order before, a million times before perhaps. No part of you would let go of the fact that for some reason, this stranger was someone you knew very well.

And yet you had no idea who he was.

“Hi, how are you?” He smiled to ease the nerves of the overworked barista on this Sunday afternoon. Your ears picked up his husky, sweet tone through the scuttle of customers walking in and out of the shop and a commotion of side conversations that filled the room. It was quite noisy, enough so that it muffled any specific utterances, but the bass of his voice had met your ears with a strong posture of familiarity.

You looked over to the sweater draped over his frame that fit snugly against his broad shoulders. That was when your visual senses were overrun with the muted forest green of the knitted jumper. You’ve seen this color green. To be fair, green was always secured in your life abundantly through your own will. You had always loved this color and demonstrated this through small displays such as picking the green straw from a bundle of multicolored ones, or scanning over a set of shirts to find which one had the most green in it.

You surrounded yourself with a life full of green, but when this green sweater was paired with the voice there was a strange jolt of reminiscence.

It was not just a sweater, it was a sweater that you have touched, even worn before. And when he wore it, it wasn’t just any green. It was his green.

His figure drew closer to you as he waited at the side bar for his drink to be called, sending a waft of his scent to nullify those of fresh brewed coffee and pastries. Along with your eyes and ears, your nose now fell to the magnetism of this stranger.

He smelled of fresh evergreen with a bit of pinewood, mixing into an overwhelming oaky aroma. As the smells that resembled a tranquil forest ruminated through your lungs and your bloodstream, it weakened your body to a state of paralysis. Your motor skills were numbed to endow a series of mental backflips to figure out where this estranged attraction was coming from, and why it was him who provoked it.

Standing comatose in the middle of a populated coffee shop meant the clash of your body into another's was bound to occur. And of course, it was his body that bumped you out of the trance of obscured memories. It was his arms that held your shoulders steady so you wouldn’t topple over and spill your latte over yourself.

“Oh, sorry! Didn’t see you there. Are-” His eyes studied your aghast expression, “Hey, are you okay?”

This marked the compromise of your visual sensory. You looked right into his eyes, kind and concerned, and your surroundings had melted away into a whirl of unidentifiable colors. Your body was transported to a purgatory that rested between reality and a dream-like setting, which eventually molded itself into actuality before your eyes.

Redacted File No. 6

Suddenly you turned your head side to side and the territory that was once a café was no more, and had alchemized into a zone of unparalleled comfort. To your left, you were warmed by a wood-burning fireplace with stones crested along the frame of the pit. Your body was covered in a blurred canvas of forest green, and there were two hands holding your body gently and lovingly. It was a vision so incredibly clear and intricate it couldn’t be conjured through imagination or illusion, but a very real and vivid memory.

“Excuse me? I’m sorry… You’re okay right?” His jostling hands fainted the memory that swept you from the cafe. You blinked a few times before your eyes could refocus and land you to your present circumstances.

The man’s firm grip hadn’t abandoned your shoulders even though you regrounded your balance, which quickened the pace of your heart. They you earnestly, that even though you were certainly not going to fall over, he wouldn’t have let go. Without more than an array of unintelligible stutters to confirm you were okay, because you weren’t okay, you hobbled backward quite ungracefully to the privacy of the bathroom. After your rushed retreat, you tried to analyze the string of memories that pervaded your mind.

How do you know this man? Were these your memories? Or perhaps your memory chip glitched and downloaded files that didn’t belong to you?

The blunder of confusion racked your head with a slight tension headache. What was once a temporary occupancy of the restroom turned into a marathoned hideout until you could safely assume the stranger’s drink was made and he would leave the vicinity.

You checked your phone to count the duration of time spent. It had been about ten minutes since you pathetically holed yourself up, and it would be about five more minutes until you felt you could confidently emerge and escape.

You knew him, and for some reason it sent you into a fearful sequester.

Luckily, just last week you downloaded an upgraded storage plan which gave you access to all your past memories.

You activated the chip residing in your temple to trace every single unit in the archives, even the ones from as early as your birth, to see if anyone, including the likes of a passing stranger, a waiter that took your order three weeks ago, even a student from your high school class, resembled the man in the café. There were no records in your memory files of someone who echoed the same unsettling familiarity that this man had.

If the advanced technology that contained each capsule of every moment in time that you have ever experienced couldn’t give you the data on this man, then perhaps it was just an unusual coincidence.

One of those Twilight Zone-esque occurrences that isn’t deployed through factual evidence. Though you weren't entirely met with closure for this reasoning, it was enough to cope through the rest of your lengthened stay in the restroom.

What battered your precisely timed and nearly successful plan to avoid further interactions with this man was the light knock against the door. And it was the feeling of guilt that there must be other customers who planned on using the bathroom for its intended purpose that hoisted you up and had you reluctantly vacating the protected area.

Though, it was punishingly ironic that the one who had torn you from your sanctuary was the same person who put you there in the first place.

“Sorry,” He apologized about three times within the small window of time he’d been confronted by you and you already caught on to his habit of perpetual remorse, “Um, I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. I bumped into you and you kinda… freaked then ran and hid in the bathroom.”

If he weren’t so considerate to a stranger that was acting oddly evasive, this would have been easy. But he was considerate, and this was unbelievably difficult.

“Yeah um,” Your eyes sank down to rest on the comforting hue of his sweater, “I’m, uh, I'm okay. Thank you.”

He cleared his throat, dislodging the nervous laugh blocking his words.

“Okay well, I was just wondering if you were all good. You seemed a little shaken up back there.” Frankly, he still sensed something about him was off-putting to you, but he tried to deny it for the moment.

Your assurances fell gravely short of convincing since you couldn’t even bring your eyes to level with his. The soft-spoken gesture of kindness made you feel like a helpless animal that would surrender at the slightest sign of danger. It was a fair assessment for you acted as though his accidental collision into you through a crowded space was the end of the world.

“Yeah, sorry. Thank you!” You chirped to imitate a normal reaction despite this tremendously abnormal situation. “I was just um… It's just one of those days, ya know?”

Then, it was his smile that cluttered your sensation of touch. He was standing a respectable distance from you, however, his smile touched you. It cornered you into blurting out something even more peculiar than the overwhelming deja vu that had been commencing the moment you noticed him.

“Do I-” You paused to lower your voice that could have outsourced to the collection of ruckus in the café. Now in a whisper, you continued, “Do I know you?”

He didn’t offer a voiced response, but an equally bewildered expression. You couldn't quite read what this implied so you assumed he thought you were crazy, maybe even a bit creepy.

“Sorry! Fuck, that’s so creepy. I’m just gonna go.” Before you had the chance to push past him and the billowing clouds of regret, he obstructed your path to the doorway with his body.

“No! I think I know you too. Like, I’ve never seen you but I remember you. Like… Like a dream.” He scaled the length of your body with his eyes, which only manufactured his intuition into an undoubtable certainty. “I know you. How do I know you?”

“Hell if I know. I’m just as confused as you.” You felt your body slumping into itself under his gaze. He was attentive to every detail of you, from the length of your hair to the twitch of your fingertips, making you feel over exposed to this stranger that wasn’t a stranger.

“Well, do you wanna maybe sit? Have a coffee with me?” He propagated his interest like there was no reason to be afraid which only intimidated you further. There wasn’t a real threat in his invitation, however accepting it felt like you were walking on thin ice.

The government agent standing guard with a perfect earshot of every conversation wiring through the small café didn’t help ease your nerves either.

“I really should be heading home soon.” Guilt worked quickly to try and compensate for the discouraged expression on his face, “But… if you give me your number I’ll call you and maybe we can go out for lunch or something?”

He traded his grim with excitement while pulling a pen from his pocket and walking over to the condiments bar to write his number on a napkin. You had no clue as to why, but the fact that he had a pen on hand was strikingly nostalgic, much so as every other detail you had acquired from him.

Although entirely unheard of, you felt like this new knowledge of him was not adding to the collection, but rather dusting old artifacts that had simply been forgotten. You weren’t learning things about him, but instead remembering them; the more you stood watching him scribble his name and number on the napkin, the deeper you entrenched yourself in this theory.

Not to mention, you couldn’t recall the last time someone favored using a pen over a keyboard and a paper napkin over a digital contact entered on your phone.

What kind of person carries around a pen in the age of modern technology?

“Thank you. I’m ___, by the way.” Your hand wavered a bit before holding out to greet him, and when his hand made contact, you could have sworn on your own life that this wasn’t the first time it happened.

This was no introduction. It was a reunion.

The fix of his gaze had suggested he too felt reminiscent with the feeling of your hand.

A shared inability to let go held your hands together, trying to harness a bit of recognition or recall a social function where you two might have met in passing. Neither one of you had shown any intention to pull away, which dragged the formality of shaking hands into a gesture of mutual wonder; now you were not so much exchanging a handshake but rather holding each other. Holding tightly, as if you were rediscovering a mass of feelings that would give you an answer.

However, the answer was not generous enough to make itself available to either of you.

It could have been hours until you were able to unriddle this strange sensation, so you made the preventative move of pulling away before the warmth concocting between your hands would produce a light sweat on your palm.

He too seemed to retract upon regaining his sensibilities, but there was a glint in his eyes that suggested he would have held on for longer, maybe even forever if necessary. If it would regroup the unattainable and partially inexistent memories into cognizance.

“Taehyung. Kim Taehyung.”

Redacted File No. 12

You clung with desperate persistence onto the flaccid hand. Trailing up the arm was an indiscernible figure that had no features, no notable detailing, not even a vague outline of facial structure; just an ethereal glow that projected throughout the entire room. The nebulous haze terminated any identifiable aspect of the room except the hand you were holding, so you focused on the scant detail your eyes offered.

There was no specified context, no real evidence that you had to hold on, but something deep within you was urging for it. Some omnipotent instinct which prophesied that if you let go of the hand, you would in turn be letting go of the world.

You had to hold on.

However your hands wouldn’t obey you. Each time you tried to tighten your fingers, it felt as if the hand would continue slipping from your grasp. Or maybe, your hands weren't gripping at all.

They were numb, or paralyzed, and unable to execute your urgencies. The more force you exerted into your dire intentions, the easier it was for the hand to grow limp and melt through your fingers like liquid. It was frustrating, your willful attempts to hold on seemed to elicit the opposite effect as the hand, unowned by a certain being, resigned from yours.

“I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to let go.” You chanted through the tears, feeling as though that would somehow ignite a stronghold on the lifeless hand falling away.

But even so, it did fall away.

Perhaps the pain of it was that it wasn’t you who was letting go, but the hand that was being taken away from you. That you had been fighting a losing battle far beyond the prospects of your own decisions or control.

You begged for mercy, but were bestowed with your hands clean of what it was trying so desperately to hold onto. The hand slipped and when you peaked through the glaze of tears, your knuckles and fingers were gripping airy, cold emptiness.

“I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to let go.”

Soon you were captured in a perpetual aria of pleas to the ears of a God that would not listen. Unsettling despair had mutilated the illuminating glow of the room to bleak darkness. The world of colors had fallen absent akin to the cold hand vaporizing alongside the dispersal of light.

Then, everything was black.

Your eyes shot open with deep distraught.

The full moon flashed against your dampened face; half of the moisture sourced from a cold sweat and half from the heavy tears pouring from your eyes.

You knew the only explanation for this dream, which resonated more closely to a memory than a figment of sleepful imagination, was curated by the peculiar events that took place earlier today.

Soon, the dream drifted from your mind as consciousness took its place. Your tardy response to write the sparse remnants of it had left you with nothing but a distorted plot of what transpired during your slumber.

Widening your awakening through long sips of water had forced you into an obsessive rewinding of your memory files. It was a shame there wasn’t technology yet to store memories of your dream, or you’d have been replaying the one you just dreamt about a hundred times.

You scanned through a collection of moments in the afternoon when you first met Taehyung. The clear, digital picture of him glassed over your eyes, taking the place once inhabited by the moon, as you pressed the play button on the handlebar of functions.

“Taehyung. Kim Taehyung.”

You rewound no later than a second after he introduced himself back to the beginning.

“Taehyung. Kim Taehyung.”

Rewind. 0.5 x speed.

“Taehyung. Kim Taehyung.” Said in a distorted voice from the ‘reduce speed’ function you equipped.

“Kim Taehyung.” You muttered to the empty room and the bright moon.

Sleeping was abstracted to an impossibility, and for the sake of your sanity, you walked over fish out the napkin in your coat pocket. It took you a while to move on from meticulously inspecting Taehyung’s handwriting.

The aimless effort to recall if it was the penmanship of some classmate had slackened to yet another unmet hope. Taehyung didn’t reside in your memories, but claimed quite an existence in your intuition. However, that wasn’t satisfying enough. You settled with the unsolved familiarity, though not before a lengthy wrestle between your eyes and the seven numbers scribbled into the napkin.

After dancing with the idea of it, you resolved some courage to finally dial. Each ping of the phone had you dreading for the automated message to inform you the recipient was not available at the moment, that you would have to hang up or wait for the tone to leave a message. Little by little your spirited nerve had depleted as you were now practicing what message you would leave Taehyung in his voicemail box, praying that it wasn’t full.

“Hello?” The sound of his voice interrupted the seventh or eighth ring, along with your rehearsal of the voicemail you assumed you’d have to leave being that the moon had been aging the sky into midnight.

“Oh! Oh, sorry I didn’t expect you to pick up.” After the chaotic pounding in your chest settled, you realized how nonsensical you sounded. Everything you methodically planned to say had been scattered by his unprecedented answer.

Instead of asking why you would call if you expected him not to pick up, he asked with a kind curiosity:

“Who is this?” He didn’t sound tired, in fact it sounded as if he had been hard at work preceding this call.

“Oh yeah! It’s ___, from the coffee shop. You remember me right?” Though you powered through, the worry was quite deafening. Taehyung seemed to pick up on it and diffused it with a gentle chuckle.

“Of course I remember.” On the other end of the line, he had been penciling a sketch on a blank page in his notebook.

The serenity of the stars and moon pinned on the navy blue sky never failed to spark inspiration. Taehyung was the type to refuse passing up a surge of an artistic muse, even if that meant he would shed a few hours of sleep from his routine. No matter the time or place, he always had a pen on hand to honor his heart’s unremitting passion.

He loved the moon and stars. He loved it so much as one would love a dear friend. He wished to be a part of the scenes of lights that hovered just out of reach, but could only settle on capturing a piece of the starry heavens on paper with his trusty pencil, sketchbook, and emerald-tinted muse.

“It’s late to be calling, but you’re lucky I was awake.” He said to hide how ecstatic he was you had actually called.

For someone you had just met, or at least you thought you just met, he threaded a flirtatious coyness in his response. It difficult to hush the winged eruption in your stomach because of that.

“Lucky, huh.” You repeated through a mumbled laugh, “I was just… I was thinking.”

“About what?” He had placed his phone on speaker mode and laid it next to his sketchbook.

There was a new inspiration that bore a louder siren than that of the moon and the stars. He sifted through the memory files throughout his day to the minute he first bumped into you, and though your face had been ingrained quite clearly behind his eyelids with each blink, he relied on the accuracy of a reference to perfect his drawing of you; not to mention he projected the image of your face to delight his undeniable attraction and to moderate the wildly romanticized version of you in his head.

Perhaps if he hadn't, he wouldn't be able to discern your face from the arena of glimmering stars scattered along the shaded skies.

“Just about how I think I was too quick to pass your offer.”

“Really?” That endearing lilt hope in his voice, the excitement expressed, acted as some puppeteer that manipulated the corner of your lips to lift into a smile.

No muscle in your body could ever be moved with the same conviction as it did when he was the reason for it. It bewildered you, almost to the point of frustration, as to why he had this power over you.

I just met him. I'm already getting this worked up? You thought how absurd it was you'd fallen this quickly, hoping it would ground you to the reality that he was still a stranger you hadn’t exchanged more than two conversations with.

Though, reality and memories and data files had all been obscured ever since you met Taehyung which was fascinating more than it was disorienting.

“Would you want to, maybe, grab coffee? Say next Thursday?” Your hand was subconsciously gripping the bed sheets, just like the way you gripped the disembodied hand in your dream, and awaited his response with full-blown suspense.

“I’ll see you next Thursday, ___.” Taehyung's confirmation put all your anxiety to rest, as well as your tightly clamped hand around the cotton fabric.

“I’ll see you.” You mimicked as if that would make the idea of seeing Taehyung again any less surreal. He laughed at this and brushed up a few finishing touches on his drawing.

“So just to clarify.” His pause gave entry for curiosity to wire through your head.

“Yes?”

“When you said you were thinking… you were thinking of me?” You wanted the upper hand to be reinstated with you, but your shy chuckle was no match to the smirk adopted on his lips that you couldn’t see, but you knew was there. You knew he was prideful when he swept the rug right out from under your feet, and you were right.

“Perhaps. And what if I was?” You framed your question to render your intimidation as flattery. Though, you had no idea how convincing this facade actually was and that it came off more suggestive than you had expected. There was a part of you that had fraternized with the romantic idea of Taehyung which might have registered your motive to reciprocate an undertone beyond platonic.

“Then that would be one thing we have in common.” He sounded responsive to your flirting and raised the bar significantly.

Your eyes and smile were directed towards the scenery displayed by your window, but they were not dedicated to the moonlit beauty of the diamond encrested sky. Though the midnight glades of stars were the ones to witness your smile, it was, without a shadow of a doubt, dedicated to Taehyung.

He was staring at the same moon, the same plot of stars, so perhaps you were looking into each other. When the moon twinkled, it looked awfully similar to a smile. Your smile.

For the moment, there was a radio silence that splintered through the two speakers of your and Taehyung’s phones. Even if the use of his hands weren’t engaged by his needful recreation of your face through his art, if his hands were left unused, he wouldn’t have mustered the discipline to end the call. Your unoccupied hands were trying to find any employment so you could have some excuse for not hanging up as well, not that there was anything else to be discussed.

Again, it felt familiar. The feeling of hesitance to be the first one to hang up despite the conversation’s recoil.

The cohesive idleness of you and Taehyung was unprovoked and ran out for about a minute. Neither of you had the intention to sever the virtual communion quite yet. The awkwardness of sitting in silence on the phone with a newly acquainted stranger was a delicacy compared to preemptively ending the call.

At one point, you were about to question if he had hung up; but the rhythmic and light breathing told you otherwise. And because of that mutual need to stay on the line, it seemed to be unreasonable to hang up, save for the yawn that eventually trimmed the call to an end.

“You’re tired.” He stated, now prompted with a yawn of his own upon hearing yours. “Goodnight, ___.”

“Goodnight, Taehyung.” Saying his name out loud sent you into that same blend of reminiscence and nostalgia.

His name was not unexplored by your tongue, that much was certain, and the thought of putting your entire life on hold to discover why it felt that way was a tempting venture. Why when he said your name, it felt like sitting in front of a wood-burning fireplace under the security of a green sweater and wrapped in safe arms.

More than that, you wanted to know if he felt all these things too.

“I’ll see you?” You asked instead of saying that dreadful word 'goodbye'.

“I’ll see you.” He repeated before reluctantly hanging up.

“___.” He whispered your name, hoping the inky sky would design it in the stars for the world to remember forever.

Hoping that the next hours, which would surely be spent on multiple sketched renditions of your face, would amount in some revelation of the mystifying familiarity. He believed shedding a few graphite imitations onto the surface of his sketchbook, soaked by the glow of moonlight, would somehow make him remember everything hidden in the dark compartments of his heart.

However, if it didn’t, he would be okay with it. Because at least he knew he would see you again.

“Meeting place: Silver Lining Café.”

“Thank you, Agent Park. Heighten surveillance on the two subjects.”

[balancingthewind]

returning

Why do I practice yoga?

Because, as much as my triggers would have me do otherwise, I need to spend time listening to my body. Because, when I don’t, I experience pain physically and mentally. Pain that is avoidable through Yoga.

Yoga is not just a blending of fanciful movements that make you acrobatically strong and flexible. Sure, those can be outcomes if they are your aims, but the heart of the practice is learning how to do the most simple of movements - sitting, standing, walking - with stability and fluidity, a fully embodied person. The Yoga poses you see are only the most superficial layer of the asana practice; what is happening in the unseen, felt sense, is the most profound gift of Yoga.

Not only does the intelligent use of our bodies bring physical alignment and grace, but longevity and health also lie in our abilities to focus our minds acutely on any subject, to quieten the chaos noise of the world and the narrating mind to see any one thing clearly. As we narrow our focus to the subtle workings of our inner bodies, we also strengthen our ability to concentrate without distraction to achieve any goal.

As a person who deals with complex trauma and its companions, dissociation and anxiety, this level of embodiment has clarified my path to mental health. Symptoms like depression and shame tug at my frays, looking for a hole through which to pull me from my body, soothing terror with waking sleep. With one-pointed focus I can feel my feet, check in with my senses, and make my way back to presence. Post-traumatic stress can bring about an overload of stress hormones, throwing my body and mind into a fight/flight/freeze response… to which, I breathe, hush the mental chatter, address the trauma on a physical level, and diffuse it. When looking at everyday, practical self-regulating tools, Yoga provides some that can directly combat both numbing and panic.

Yoga has given me the tools to cope with the past year, too - although at first glance that may be hard to see. To be perfectly honest, I was not one of the lucky ones who remained buoyant, giddily occupied in their homes. The year prior had held some pretty huge losses for me and I was dealing with insecurity on several levels when the pandemic hit, and so I fell back into my familiar coping mechanisms - checking out, smoking cigarettes, and generally not holding myself accountable for how I was treating myself and the ones I loved. On a day-to-day basis, checking in to the senses can prevent absolute neurosis, but once I built a sensitivity to my body’s need to communicate, I felt and now am paying for the long duration of silence.

I also sustained a few injuries in 2019 and 2020, altering my practice as far as removing any pose involving weight-bearing in the hands, and causing mild-to-severe constant pain in my neck and shoulder, so my relationship to my body has changed drastically, and approaching a flow (my typical mode of personal practice) isn’t really possible anymore in the way my mind isn’t able to sink completely into movement and has to stay thinking about how I need to modify the next pose, which made practicing altogether less enjoyable.

I quit teaching when studios shut down right at the beginning, and today, I am teaching my first one back (so long as anyone signs up). I have some nervousness about this, but I’m using some methods I learned in an Alexander Technique workshop to deal with this in the sense of being able to follow through with showing up.

Because that’s really been the issue. Showing up. For the past year, every time I tried to get back to health, it started with a morning Yoga asana practice, and the message at the end of the practice from inside was always, “I can do this.” Eat a good breakfast, great. But then, the day would pass, the inevitable fatigue would set in, and I would end my day with mind numbing activities until I was too tired to keep my eyes open so that I could avoid the real responsibility of acknowledging my day on a physical level, diffusing it, and getting myself to a place where I could sleep. Because I’ll be damned if I’ll ever get up for a 5am Yoga practice if I’ve been up until 1am playing Sims or watching the Great British Bake-Off. Just isn’t happening.

Even being in a yoga teacher training that started the same month as the pandemic hit Kentucky hasn’t stopped me from falling from the path for a little while. Luckily I can still use what I’ve been taught now, but there’s a little shame and remorse in letting yet another opportunity go under-fulfilled.

So yeah. In all honesty, this year has been straining and traumatizing for everyone. From some perspectives, the outlook is pretty fucking dark too. My partner and I are sinking deeper into the Great American Pit of Medical Debt as we speak, and it’s hard not to get angsty just thinking about the fact that so much of the suffering the world endures could be avoided in an alternate but feasible reality.

However, despite this apparent loss of hope, Yoga was still there for me. As someone who will probably always deal with the darkest corners of depression for life, I need a light to counter the darkness, lest it becomes too much to handle. Yoga - not in the sense of poses or breathing, but in the experience of unadulterated union between mind, body, and spirit - is that light. Whether distant, in memory, or present, Yoga is one of those things you “can’t unsee”. To remain in that state requires practice, but if you can’t practice, you at least can know that Yoga is there for you when you’re ready to return.

So, here I am, returning. Letting go of the shame of thinking I need to have had it all together, allowing ME to be good enough while honoring the responsibility of being a teacher. I’ve been practicing Yoga asana (poses), pranayama (breathwork), nidra (resting yoga) and meditation of various sorts multiple times a day for a couple weeks now. I’ve quit smoking cigarettes (again) and am working with a doctor to find medication to help stabilize my depression until the Yoga has done its work.

These are things I require of myself to be able to show up to teach: to be doing everything I can to get myself healthy, making decisions that contribute to my health, remaining diligent to my tendencies and looking for places I can implement what I’ve learned kinesthetically and philosophically to my life. In this way, I can come to the mat with a clear mind and hold space for anyone who may need Yoga in the same way I do.

So, I guess this all begs the question, why do I teach yoga?

Because I want people like me to feel safe in a Yoga class. Because I know I'm different from many in that my gauge of excellence is metered by stability and comfort, rather than physical exceptionalism, as the absence of suffering in myself and others is my highest goal. And I think I could access people who really need that, given my understanding of complex trauma and experience with and love for so many kinds of people. I want badly to create culture in my city and even farther, focused around health and community, sharing and creation. I know we can do this. It's hard work, but it can be made easier when your environment reflects positive ideals, and that is something almost everyone has control over to some extent.

If you’re interested in a trauma-informed, research-based, gentle Yoga practice for physical and mental longevity, please join me. Literally everyone is welcome, and I can modify almost all poses to be done from a chair. I’m teaching virtually on Tuesdays at 6pm and in person at Centered Holistic Health on Saturdays at 11am.

Be humble and blessed <3

[kittyit]

hey you're really level headed and I admire your thinking very much so I just wanted to ask you about this situation I'm in. I was groomed by men when I was n high school in online sugaring and it luckily never got physical. but now im going back to those sites and respiring connections and I'm really scared I feel like I can't stop myself and I don't know why. I feel like I have this obsession with being hurt again and again and permanently staining myself but this situation I am putting (cont)

myself into is really dangerous for a multitude of reasons- I’m not attracted to men and have been injured during sex with a man when I was a teenager so the psychological impact would shatter me + all the given dangers that come with sex work. I’m so philosophically anti prostitution and I think men who buy and sell women should be executed but somehow this doesn’t extend to me in my mind. I have these intrusive thoughts about being destroyed and hurt and they’re not fantasies they’re genuinely horrifying for me to think about but its like a compulsion. it makes me cry and scream sometimes. basically I’m worried I’m not safe for myself and I’m going to put myself in these risky situations specifically to damage myself because I feel this overwhelming compulsion to and I have no idea what to do about it and I’m too scared to talk to my therapist because I’m so embarrassed about having such a horrible compulsion. sorry for oversharing—first of all, i want to apologize because i know you sent this quite a while ago but my head hasn’t been on straight enough to answer it. the good news is that compulsive retraumatization is something you are absolutely not alone in experiencing. it’s been pretty hard for me to find academic works on it and the ones i have aren’t really that useful to read and are extremely dense, but this is how a friend explained it to me and how i think of it:think of your trauma like a deep, open wound. i don’t know if you’ve ever had a really bad wound, but when wounds start to heal, they itch. and not just a little, a lot, a deep itch. sometimes that itch can be pretty unbearable. so what do you do? you rip off the scab. you’re bleeding again, the wound is open, but at least that itch is gone.retraumatization is ripping the wound open over again to get back into that state of numbness. i have the most intense retraumatization urge when trauma begins to surface and starts demanding to be dealt with. if you don’t have any alternative to just doing the same thing over (which it sounds like you don’t), retraumatization seems like almost a rational thing - the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.the reason i explain this isn’t to say it’s inevitable, because it absolutely isn’t, but i know it can feel so awful and confusing when you’re like, why the hell do i want to do this thing that’s the worst thing for me and something i know has fucked me up for life - and this is why. not because you’re destined for it or somehow broken beyond what can be healed - it’s a maladaptive behavior to survive a messed up word when you haven’t been shown alternatives.but! there absolutely are alternatives! i hear you when you talk about how your empathy doesn’t extend to yourself. that’s super common for victims of abuse as well. learning how to practice self-empathy is one of the hardest things i’ve ever done but is so rewarding.i usually advise women to approach self-empathy through a really simple thought exercise: if what was happening to you was happening to a woman who wasn’t you but who you love dearly (say, a little sister) - what would you tell her to do? for example, in your situation (which has been similar to my own in the past), i would say, you need to delete those accounts immediately, block anybody you’re talking to, you need to seek out friends you can reach out to if you feel like starting them up again, and definitely tell whatever mental health professional you’re seeing about what’s going on (and if they don’t react well, find a therapist who does understand.)i say practice self empathy and not feel self empathy because you have to use your intellectual reasoning and not your emotions. you don’t have to try to control the feelings and thoughts you have about yourself (that you’re not worth it), but you can control your actions, even if it feels really hard and scary. naming your agency even when it feels like you have none is incredibly important. sometimes this concept gets presented as “fake it til you make it” but i think that doesn’t really cover what’s going on - taking material, real steps towards making a better life for yourself is not fake. in my experience, the more you take these healthy and practically loving actions for yourself, the easier it becomes. you can absolutely combine this with refusing to engage with spiraling thoughts of self-hatred. you don’t have to argue yourself out of those feelings, just go distract yourself or do something else as often as you can while experiencing them. and above all: claim your agency and do not act on what those thoughts tell you to do.sometimes i feel really bad answering these kinds of questions because i wish there was some quick fix i could tell you, and i wish i could tell you it’s going to get better in a linear incline, easier and easier. but that’s not how it’s worked for me. this is a cycle you’re going to have to work really hard to break. the cycles get farther apart, but bad thoughts and feelings are still going to happen. you just have to remember, even if you end up in a place similar to where you started, it doesn’t mean you haven’t been working hard and put the time and effort in. i’d say one of the biggest thing is making sure there are other people that know. you can’t carry all this alone and you shouldn’t have to. it’s not something to hate yourself for or be ashamed of, it’s a common trauma response that deserves to be treated with empathy, kindness and understanding.

my most highly recommended reading for women experiencing retraumatization compulsion is loving to survive by dee graham