#Lynch Street

[whitesinhistory]

Eleven days after National Guard troops fired into a crowd of unarmed anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, local and state police in Mississippi opened fire on a group of students at Jackson State College in Jackson. In a 30-second barrage of gunfire, police fired 150 rounds into the crowd, killing two Black students and injuring dozens more.

On the evening of May 14, students were gathered on Lynch Street, a road connecting the predominately Black college campus to the more affluent white neighborhood in Jackson. Police reports allege that the students had been throwing rocks and bottles at passing white motorists; students and white motorists had a tense relationship because the white motorists would yell racial slurs and taunt the students as they passed. Later that evening, a person not believed to be a student set fire to a dump truck. Firemen arriving to respond to the blaze called police, claiming to need protection from the gathering students.

When one glass bottle was allegedly thrown into the crowd of police shortly after midnight, officers responded by indiscriminately opening fire on the crowd of students and riddling a women’s dorm with bullets. Phillip Gibbs, 21, and James Green, 17, were killed. Officers later claimed a sniper in the women's dorm had shot at them first. The President's Commission on Campus Unrest later called the shootings an “unreasonable, unjustified overreaction,” but ultimately no one was charged. A local grand jury blamed the students, arguing that people who engage in civil disobedience must accept the risk of injury or death by law enforcement.

In 1974, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the officers had overreacted but they could not be held liable for the two deaths that resulted. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

[baldnt]

holy hell i found him y’all. he is indeed in rural Virginia.

[alm0sthere]

mommy’s little monster - babies in horror movies

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

𝔉𝔯𝔢𝔡𝔡𝔶 𝔎𝔯𝔲𝔢𝔤𝔢𝔯 𝔴/ 𝔊𝔢𝔬𝔯𝔤𝔢 𝔏𝔶𝔫𝔠𝔥 𝔖𝔨𝔲𝔩𝔩 𝔑’ 𝔅𝔬𝔫𝔢𝔰 𝔊𝔲𝔦𝔱𝔞𝔯

[accidentally-in-fictional-love]

Maybe I’m Not Scared of What You’re Thinking Of - Simon Lynch/Reader

Prompt: Don't you know what you mean to me?

Warnings: Gender-neutral reader, no use of Y/N, friends to lovers, slow burn, growing friendship, angst, hurt/comfort, brief canon-related mention of violence, kissing, fully clothed grinding, kindness and praise makes Simon cry ;w;

Wordcount: 14270

Summary: It's a complete coincidence that you meet him, and even though he's a little weird and there's an anger in him fueled by pain, you know that you might be all he needs to be defused.

Notes: It's Simon's turn! I have a lot of feelings about Simon!! As soon as I saw his episode my heart went out to him a lot, he's so me-coded (aside from y'know the homicide lmao) and he really only needed someone to believe in him, so here's a whole ton of words about you doing just that QwQ I've also decided that this will be his own continued world like I did with Joshua, so any future stuff will take place during or after this~

You really regret accepting this blind date after the 30th straight minute comes and goes, your date still talking about himself on his side of the table.

He came highly recommended from your mother, the son of a friend of a friend of a co-worker, and it’s clear she did no actual research on him since you have nothing in common. You just keep smiling and sipping at your drink of choice, his words falling on deathly bored ears as he keeps trying to pitch his business to you, something about a private server for paying customers to get his advice or some dumb shit you haven’t seen a million times before. Sometimes you wished you’d been born in the past when things were simpler, because any idiot with a podcast and access to the internet always came to the same conclusion that they could be the Next Great Thing, and this guy definitely does not have what it takes.

He’s about to write down his contact info so you can check out his server right now, right in the middle of your date, his food cold in front of him as he just keeps choosing to talk instead of eat, and you just stare at him tearing off the paper to hand to you as you pray your souring expression isn’t giving you away too much. ‘Uh, sorry, I don’t have Facsimile,’ you lie as he holds it out to you, but it doesn’t dissuade him as he then says it’s super easy to sign up, he’ll help you. ‘No, I mean I’m not one for all these chatting apps, I prefer some good, old fashioned talking,’ you continue, another lie although not quite as much, for while you do prefer talking face to face, hence the date, you had so many chat apps on your phone to keep in contact with everyone that they had their own page on your home screen.

‘It’ll be worth it, trust me, I already have a bunch of guys giving their own presentations on my server, I’ll even give you a free week’s trial to check everything out, whattaya say?’ he asks, clearly more interested in expanding his brand than making any sort of actual connection with you, and this time you let your face scrunch up in pained awkwardness.

‘Yeah, it’s gunna have to be a no, sorry,’ you cringe, and his smile slowly falls as he crumples up the paper and stuffs it inside his expensive name brand jacket, obviously bought to show off to everyone how ‘successful’ he was.

‘Fine, no it’s fine, I just thought you were smarter than that,’ he grumbles just on the border of passive aggressively, your eyebrows rising as your opinion of him somehow manages to drop even lower. ‘You figure you give someone a chance to get in on the ground floor of something because you think you’re vibing, but I guess it was just me.’

‘Uh…’

‘How is everything?’ The small voice draws your attention from him as you look up to your savior, your eyes just going higher as the person towers over you, even when he’s hunched over a bit to take up as little space as possible as his co-workers pass by him to get to the other tables. Your mouth falls open a little bit as your eyes meet, long bangs just barely swept to the side to reveal dark brown irises that almost appear black focusing only on you as he ignores your date, and you forget to answer as the man across from you answers for you.

‘We’re doing great, just fantastic, thanks buddy,’ he growls, now eating his food as quickly as he can so he can get away from you. ‘If you could hurry up and grab the checks though that would be even better.’

‘Is there anything else you’d like? More water, or a refill?’ He completely ignores the other man as he focuses on you, which pisses him off even more, and you join in on that as you smile politely up at him.

‘Everything’s perfect, although I could go for a refill, thank you,’ you tell him, and he gives you a nod without once acknowledging your date, who’s already gotten out his wallet and is looking up the prices of the bar on his phone; he pulls out enough to cover the meal but passes over his beer and the tax, because that’s too much work to calculate it even with his phone in hand, and he gets up and sarcastically wishes you a nice life as he bails, the silence a nice change as you continue eating alone. Your server returns a short while later with a new glass and the checks, and when he sees the money left behind he puts two and two together.

‘I take it I’m not getting a tip from him,’ he figures, and you laugh into your glass, almost spilling the liquid all over the table as you try not to choke.

‘I doubt you would’ve anyway, he was a prick,’ you admit, which makes him smile, and you decide his smile is actually quite nice as he starts clearing the other half of the table. ‘Hey, uh, would you wanna sit with me? Just for a little, it’s kinda embarrassing to eat alone after that disaster.’

He glances at the freshly vacant seat before looking around, and he leans over to lower his voice, his eyes on the table as he speaks. ‘I should really get back to work,’ he whispers, but you gesture in front of you in a welcoming manner, and he follows your hands before sitting and hiding his apron behind his arms, the nametag of Simon just barely peeking out before it’s covered up.

You flash him another smile before getting back to your lunch, it’s amazing how listening to someone that incredibly annoying can really kill the appetite in the moment, and he tries not to watch you as he makes sure he’s not about to get in trouble. You finish off your first glass and start on the second since you did ask him for it, even if it was an excuse to ignore your date initially, and you catch the way his eyes watch your exposed throat as you tilt your head back; unlike the other person sitting there previously you don’t feel objectified, or like you were a piece of meat to devour after the sell was over. It’s refreshing, and you offer him your plate in case he might want something to eat before his break, but he refuses, of course he would.

He keeps his eye on his watch but never gets up, and as you pop a fry into your mouth you can’t help but want to talk to him as he meets your eye and looks away immediately after for the third time in a row. ‘You work here long?’ you ask to start, and it’s a lame start, but just the fact that you wanna hear about him has him leaning forward in his seat before he controls himself, sits back again.

‘Just a few years, this is actually my second job, I mainly work with Data Waste,’ he tells you, his voice getting away from him for a moment before he lowers it again; it’s obvious that no one asks about him often, just this small amount of attention enough to make his face light up in a way you don't see often anymore, at least not when you talk about work related things.

‘So, you waste all the data?’ you joke, and he leans in again, the plate pushed aside as he fights to keep his voice under control.

‘No, it’s really interesting actually, I get access to all the trashed data in the city, sift through it to find anything incriminating or important, things that were lost or gotten rid of, delete anything useless; my co-workers think it’s pretty boring, but you can’t imagine the things I’ve seen on some people.’ He stops, realizing he’s about to violate his NDA, and you chuckle as he looks around again like he expects his boss from his other job to suddenly appear and fire him.

‘Sounds exciting, you ever see anything on me?’ you can’t help but ask as you lean in as well, and there’s a slight dusting of pink on his cheeks as he sits back again.

‘I dunno, I’d need to look up your name,’ he answers honestly, and you smirk at his reply.

‘Pretty smooth way to ask for it,’ you tell him, and when he stutters out that he wasn’t you just laugh and grab the check so you can see your total. You pull out your card so you can pay, and you’re in the middle of reaching for your ex-date’s check as well so you can cover the rest when he stops you.

‘I’ve got it, you don’t have to deal with trash like him, that’s my job,’ he jokes back, and when he hands you his card reader you make sure to leave a large tip from the both of you. You hand it back and his eyes go wide, he can’t accept this, but you just flash him your most charming smile and hand him one of your business cards from your wallet, something you printed up years ago but rarely got to hand out since most people used electronic cards nowadays.

‘It’s for making me laugh, today would’ve been pretty shitty otherwise,’ you admit as you stand, and when he stands with you you can see that he really is tall. 

‘Okay, well… if I find anything I’ll give you a call, then? Just so you know what people are deleting about you on the internet,’ he offers, and you hold out your hand to shake his as your expressions softens.

‘I’d like that.’

It’s been a week and a half since your lunch date gone wrong but also surprisingly gone right again, and you’re at home working on a project when an unknown number lights up your phone. You frown at it before clicking into the chat and seeing a bunch of strange messages before the stranger clears things up.

ur sqky clean no trash on u sry it took so long was busy this is simon sry from the bar from last week sry

You smile fondly as you type in a quick reply, your phone lighting up again as he answers fast, he must’ve been waiting with baited breath on the other side. You add his number to your phone and answer back, another quick reply getting you to decide to take a snack break as you bring your phone to the kitchen. The more you chat the more he sees that he doesn’t have to use shorthand, his words lengthening and becoming more proper until you’re wondering if maybe he’s trying to find the perfect mix that won’t annoy you. Eventually he settles on a mix like you do, and you get comfy on the couch with your snack as you turn on the TV and find something to watch.

It’s hard to find things sometimes, you’ve had this older model for years and it isn’t compatible with every streaming platform’s updates anymore, which you think is dumb, but the thing works and you don’t wanna shell out money just to be able to watch whatever new reality show everyone’s talking about as it airs. You stick to your playlist of favourite movies and shows again, settling on one you’ve already seen a million times so you can chat without needing to pay attention.

After a half hour you add each other to Facsimile so you can chat more openly without wasting data, his username of 4LM0ST-HUM4N making you snicker as you check out his profile, but it’s bare apart from his age, which is around yours, and his full name, his last name being Lynch. You can’t help but look him up since you already knew he’d done the same to you, and all you can find is a dating profile on a site you’d heard about but never used.

‘“Shy and looking,”’ you say out loud to yourself as you read his info, and you sink a little further into the cushions as his unfortunately off-putting but also undeniable cute profile picture stares you directly in the eye; you can tell he took it alone, he’s all washed out in the glow of his computer instead of from the room’s overhead or any natural light, and you almost want to call him out on it and help him try again, maybe he might get some matches that way.

You don’t mention the profile as you keep chatting, and before you know it the next movie is autoplaying, your battery low with how long you’ve been on your phone. You figure it’s about time you get back to work as you tell him about the situation, and he agrees, he’s also been putting off work, and you wish him a good night, adding in, ‘That data’s not gunna waste itself.’ He sends you a bunch of laughing emojis before changing his mind and editing the message so there’s only one, to which you give him one back, and he starts typing something else but stops. You wait but he never starts up again so you leave it be, your phone charging out of reach as you get back to work.

Now that you’ve been reminded that he exists and you find his company quite pleasant, you take a ride to the bar on your lunch break the next day, keeping your eye out as casually as you can until you see him clearing a table nearby. You wait until he’s done before waving at him to get his attention, and his smile is so big that it makes him self-conscious as a group of people pass him by, it faltering as he gets out of their way. He takes his dishes to the kitchen and quickly returns to take your order, and even though you’re sitting at a table and a menu is in your hands, you surprise him when you ask him when his break is instead of telling him what you want to eat.

‘My break?’ he repeats back to you, like he doesn’t understand the question.

‘I just figured you might want to eat somewhere you don’t work,’ you simply say, and he glances at his watch to check the time.

‘I get off in 15, but we can eat here, I don’t wanna take up your break by traveling,’ he offers, but you just shake your head and set the menu down.

‘I work from home, I can take as long as I want,’ you tell him, and it’s not exactly a lie since you do have some things to for sure finish today, but losing an extra hour to hang out with your new friend seems like a pretty good tradeoff honestly. He accepts your answer and goes back to work with a shy grin, and you patiently wait at your table until he returns, a brown hoodie slung over his arm and his apron left behind. 

You get up and follow him out to the street where he gets ready to hail a cab, and thanks to your convo from last night you already knew he didn’t drive, but you don’t want him to waste any money when your car was in the parking lot. You direct him to it, and in your head you can hear your mother warning you about letting strangers into your vehicle, but apart from being a little weird he has yet to give you any red flags or warning signs, so you unlock the door and hop in.

‘There’s this place downtown that’s pretty good,’ he says as soon as he sits down, and you try not to giggle when you see how his long legs don’t really fit in the space as he tries to find the seat adjust nonchalantly. ‘They mostly do burgers, but their menu is loaded with stuff, you just need to know what to ask for.’

‘I take it you know?’

He glances at you, his hand stilling momentarily as it's wedged between the door and his seat, and when he does find the button he lets out a noise of surprise as his chair suddenly shifts backwards. ‘Yeah, yeah I go there a bunch, I think I’ve tried almost everything so far.’

‘Why not get a job there instead of here if you like it so much?’ you ask as you start the engine, and he looks down at his lap in response.

‘Cause I- I actually didn’t apply to be a waiter,’ he mumbles, your head turning towards him as you pull out onto the road.

‘Did you wanna work in the kitchen or something?’

‘I wanted to be a bartender, actually, but they needed a server, so that’s what I landed on,’ he explains, and when you go to ask for the name of the place he just directs you down the street, ignoring the GPS entirely. ‘It’s actually been a little dream of mine to open my own place, but starting a business is expensive, and saving up is a little hard even with two jobs, city living isn’t cheap.’

‘You could try for a loan?’ you suggest, but he just shakes his head.

‘I dunno… going that far would make it real, y’know? I don’t think I’m ready for it yet.’ He points to the left as he speaks so you hit your blinker and turn, this is a part of town you’ve never been to before.

‘You could always try, and if it doesn’t work out then I’ll keep cheering you on until it does.’ He’s looking at you like your words are about to make him cry, and he’s so preoccupied with you that he nearly misses the restaurant, your brakes screeching down the thankfully empty road as you back up and turn into the parking lot. You’ve never even heard of this place but the lot is almost full, and you manage to find a spot before he’s getting out and waiting for you, the chill of the fresh, spring air making you both shiver and hurry inside.

The place is warm and cozy, the smell of food instantly making you hungry even though you were feeling pretty okay just moments ago, and he smiles at you before you seat yourself and wait to be served. A large menu is placed in front of you and he was right, it is mostly burgers first and foremost, but as you turn the pages and see everything else available you feel your mouth water. You look up to ask what he recommends just in time to see his eyes disappear over the top of his own menu, and you grin and decide you can’t beat the house special, which is a double bacon burger with everything on it. He orders the same as soon as you tell the waitress, a big plate of loaded fries to split as well as onion rings added as well, and when you’re left alone again you rest your elbows on the table and get his attention.

‘How long have you been coming here? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about it before,’ you admit, and again his eyes shine when you ask about him.

‘Most of my life, I used to live around here when I was younger so this was our go-to place when we wanted to eat out,’ he explains lively, and he looks around and gestures towards the decor. ‘It was different back then, they did a rebranding back in the early 2030s, changed the name and everything, but I still call it by its old name whenever I recommend it.’

‘What was the old name?’

‘The Hotel.’

You laugh, your hand covering your mouth as you try to keep it down. ‘I bet that might’ve caused some confusion,’ you chuckle, and he nods.

‘Oh yeah, I always have to correct myself,’ he agrees with his own laugh, the two of you still going even as your drinks are dropped off. You sip at yours, taking in everything and wondering what the place looked like back then when he stretches out and accidentally bumps your knee with his own; he quickly says sorry as he tries to retreat back to his side of the table, but you tell him it’s okay, and your reassurance makes him balk, like he’s been told off too many times for similar occurrences.

‘So, tell me, why do you wanna open your own bar?’ you quickly ask before he can shut himself off from you, his shyness returning and looking more like anxiety as he clearly gets in his own head about something so small.

‘Well, it’s just something I’ve always wanted to do, like I love the atmosphere, everyone coming together for a little while to share the space and a few drinks, it’s a good place to forget about your troubles for a bit.’ His eyes are on the table as he fiddles with the brown paper covering, your glasses creating dark rings where they’re set down on it.

‘You can say that about a lot of places,’ you add, and he agrees, but his eyes meet yours as he tries to get you to understand.

‘I know but there’s just something special about it, if your customers come there enough it can become familial, you can make bonds with people, offer them an ear when they’re sad, share in their laughter when they’re happy… I guess I’ve just always wanted to be a part of something like that.’ He looks back down again, the paper tearing and making him stop, now picking at his nails instead.

‘It sounds like you wanna connect with people, you don’t need a bar to do that,’ you say softly, carefully in case he might take offense to it, but he doesn’t, just shrugs.

‘I know, but… I still think it would be fun.’ His eyes meet yours again, and there’s something behind them as you look between them, something lonely that you haven’t seen in them before. You wonder then how long it’s been since he’s been here with someone, if his family still met up with him here, but based on his eyes you think you know the answer.

‘Well, if you do ever open that bar, then I expect free drinks for life as your first customer,’ you tease as you hold up your glass for a promising toast, and your faith in him makes his eyes look a little less lonely as he raises his own and taps the rims together. You drink as your waitress comes back with your food then, and it looks even better than the picture as you grab on tight and take a big bite. It’s the biggest burger you’ve ever eaten but it might also be the tastiest, the toppings sliding against your palms as you try to hold it all together, and you can see him having just as much trouble with his own. You laugh again and take another bite, your conversation moving onto more cheerful things as you eat, from family stories to complaints about work, bad dates to how your week was going, your overbearing but well-meaning mother to his absent father, but he isn’t as upset about it as he used to be as you sit with him and listen, he confesses. 

You douse your half of the fries in ketchup as he dips his own in ranch, and he has more onion rings than you do before you realize it, and when your plates are empty and your glasses hold nothing but melting ice you finally look at your phone and realize you’ve been there for over an hour. ‘Shit, I need to get back,’ he panics as he stands, and you wave over your waitress as you both get out your wallets.

‘Hey, I got you covered, can you go start my car?’ you tell him as he searches for the card he wants to use, but he can’t accept that, even more so than the tip from last week. ‘I insist, this was a much better date than my last one,’ you say with a wink, and he fumbles his next words as you toss him your keys. He rushes out with flushed cheeks, and you instantly let your emotions show on your face as you mentally ask yourself why the hell you actually said that as you pay.

You run out as soon as you’re done and speed off back to the bar, the car quiet until you say your goodbyes, and you watch him go until he disappears through the double doors with a small wave.

It becomes a bit of a thing for you two as you meet up for lunch every Friday after that, with you trying something new at his recommendation each time, and after around 7 weeks of this he flashes you the biggest smile as you sit down at your usual table, Simon already seated and waiting. ‘What?’ you ask, his smile spreading to you, and he holds out his phone to show that he had an appointment with the bank on Monday. ‘Oh my god, are you-?’

‘I’m doing it.’ He’s practically bouncing in his seat, only stopping when he bangs his knee off the metal support and makes the table shake, his excitement so strong that you could probably start bouncing as well if you were to be completely honest with yourself.

‘That’s amazing! Do you need a ride? We can go together, it’s after your shift is done, right? Or should I pick you up at your place?’

‘I-’ His smile falters a bit but he pushes it aside, and it feels a little forced as it returns. ‘I’ve got a ride covered, but thank you. Maybe we can meet up at the bank when it’s over? I can text you, if you’d like.’

‘I’d love that, I’ll be sure to work extra hard so we can celebrate the night away.’

Everything goes quiet as you realize what you’ve said, since while you have been texting almost daily you still have yet to hang out outside of your lunch dates; you’re not even really sure if they could even be called that seeing as, apart from you calling the first time that as a joke, neither of you actually confirmed there was anything more than friendship going on between you. Still, you both take it seriously as your usual waitress approaches to take your orders, and neither of you bring it back up again after she leaves.

‘I’m really proud of you, Simon, this is a big step you’re taking,’ you do say to break the silence, and when he looks at you you can swear he’s about to cry again; it actually hurts in a physical way whenever you see that, and you curse whoever beat him down enough to have this be his default reaction whenever you give him any kind of compliment or praise.

‘I don’t think I could’ve done it if you hadn’t cheered me on, might’ve found more excuses to put it off.’ He looks so vulnerable in this moment, his hands clasped on the table in front of him, and you glance down at them and nearly reach out to grab one when he continues. ‘Actually, because of you, I kinda started paying attention to my old LoveMatch account, turns out I got some messages when I was offline.’

Your smile freezes on your face as you unexpectedly go cold, your reaction to his words catching you off guard as talking becomes hard. ‘That’s… that’s wonderful news, anyone catch your eye?’ you finally ask, and he goes pink as he shakes his head.

‘Not yet, I didn’t get many but I still wanna check them all out, see if maybe my soulmate is one of them. Wait, that’s kinda desperate, isn’t it? I don’t actually think my soulmate is on some random dating site but… it’s nice to imagine, right? It’s like you said, I- I just wanna connect with someone.’ He’s looking only at his phone as he talks, scrolling through the unopened messages still waiting for him, and it feels like you’re watching the conversation from afar as your ears start ringing, your hands shaking as you try to figure out why you’re feeling this way.

He’s cute, you can’t deny that, and you enjoy his company a lot, but you haven’t thought about an actual relationship with him until this moment, when it was made apparent to you that that wasn’t what he wanted. And now that he was considering someone else, picturing a life with someone else, you know that you wanted to be with him, not in a casual, Friday lunch date and daily chats kind of way, but in the way where you’d visit him on his off hours or you’d bring him to your place, where you could have a nice dinner, watch movies together, no more table between you as you curl up against him or have him lean against you. You could hold his hand, and he could tell you about how his day at the bar, his bar, went and about all the new people he met, and when he was done you could cup that enticingly strong jaw of his and angle his face up to yours.

‘Are you okay?’

You blink and your vision blurs, and you quickly sniff and search your pockets for your travel-sized bottle of emergency ibuprofen. ‘Yeah, yeah I’m good, allergies are just acting up again, gunna go blow my nose and take my meds real quick before this gets gross,’ you lie with a fake smile, making sure he can’t see the label before you run off, and he buys it completely before going back to his messages. You don’t let your facade crack until you’re safe in the bathroom, the weight of how much you had fallen for him without realizing making your knees buckle, and you lock yourself in one of the stalls as you desperately try to push down the fact that he would never feel the same.

You’d managed to keep it together as you finished your lunch get together - not date, never date - but you spend the rest of the weekend moping around your apartment after that, your eyes on your phone as you lay on the couch and watch some old favourites to cheer yourself up, but each time he leaves you a message you feel your heart ache and it always takes a while before you can answer back. You give him the excuse of being a bit behind on work so you can’t chat much, and he was fine with that because he was gathering up the courage to message a couple people back, see if there were any sparks, and you have to ignore your phone entirely as you bury your head in the couch pillow and yell.

Before you know it you’re waking up where you’d fallen asleep, the TV going through the night and the sunlight streaming through the wall of windows to the right of your couch, the brightness rousing you from your restless dreams. You reach limply for your phone but the battery died during the night, and you groan and stumble over to your desk so you can charge it. As soon as it comes back to life you see that it’s much later than you thought thanks to your alarm never going off, and you find a bunch of messages waiting for you.

‘Shit! Shitshitshit!’ you swear when you see that Simon had asked you to wish him luck before his meeting, and you’re already a half hour late to reply but you do anyway as you fully push aside all your feelings to wish him all the luck you possibly can. He doesn’t answer back, because he’s obviously in the meeting, and you end up too nervous about it to eat as you let your phone charge. Instead you skip straight to getting ready for the day, having a quick but much needed shower after your weekend-long mope session. As you dry your hair you then find something nice to wear that you secretly hope he might like, some part of you overcoming the misery to hope that if he’s ready enough for a relationship to use LoveMatch again then maybe you could have a chance, and that hope fuels you as you race back to your phone to see if he’s done yet.

you dont need to pick me up taking a cab home see you friday

Your hand reaches up to cover your mouth as dread fills you then, and you quickly call him, unplugging your phone so you can sit down. ‘Simon, where are you?’ you ask the moment he picks up, and all you hear is the sound of traffic before a small sniff is picked up by his phone’s mic.

‘Don’t come, I just wanna get home right now,’ he tries to tell you, but your body is moving when you hear his small voice, how broken he sounds, your keys in your hand and a pair of flipflops that definitely aren’t weather appropriate yet on your feet so you can be out the door faster.

‘Are you still at the bank? Which one is it, I’m heading out right now.’

‘Please…’

‘I’m already in my car, where am I going?’

The resulting silence to your insistence stretches on for so long that you’re about to just try every bank in town until you find him when he gives you the address, and you know the one exactly as you speed off towards it. You arrive about ten minutes later, and you’re scanning the area when you see him huddling from the wind in the alley, his hood up and people giving him cautious glances as they pass. You roll down your window and call out to him, and when he finds you through the gap you can’t help but let out a noise of pain when you see his face; he’s been crying, you hadn’t been able to see because of his hood, but now you can see that his cheeks are damp and his eyes are red, and you hurriedly unlock the passenger door and motion for him to come over.

He hesitates a moment before wiping his cheeks and jogging over, people bumping into him with how busy the street is, but he doesn’t do or say anything even as he gets a couple insults along the way. He opens the door, sits down, and as soon as you ask where he wants to go he hides his face in his hand and starts crying again. You reach out to touch his shoulder but he pulls away, he needs space, and you don’t try again as you drive back to your place.

‘I don’t know why I thought I could do this…’ he mutters to himself as you drive, and the lump in your own throat is so thick that it hurts as you try to swallow it down. You pull back into your parking lot and he finally notices that he doesn’t know this place, and you don’t shut off the engine as you turn back towards him.

‘You don’t have to tell me about it, but I’d like it if you came up with me, please,’ is all you say, and another tear rolls down his cheek before he’s nodding, following you to the front doors. Your place is pretty high up but the elevator ride isn’t awkward as he stuffs himself into the corner opposite of you, where you can’t see him as easily. You reach your floor before you know it so you lead the way to your apartment, and when the door opens and you set your keys back down on the small shelf nearby he takes everything in with an even sadder expression, which isn’t the way you were hoping it would go at all.

‘You- you have a nice home,’ he just says, and before you can thank him he’s already turning back for the door. ‘I shouldn’t have come up, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t talk to me anymore, I’ll leave you alone now-’

‘Whoa, wait, where did this come from?’ you need to know as you stand in front of the door, and he goes to move you aside before pulling back, he doesn’t even want to touch you. ‘Simon, I know I said you didn’t have to talk about it but- what happened in there? Why can’t I talk to you anymore?’

‘Because I’m-’ He flinches away from you as his voice rises, frustration apparent among the sadness, and he leans against the wall with a dull thud. ‘I was accepted into the police academy a few years back, before I got my job at the bar; I was training to be on the bomb squad, I thought my knack for technology could help save lives, and I practiced really hard, learned to disarm nonlethal devices I built myself to show them I could do it, that I could be useful to them.

‘But when they learned I’d been building things they thought I was doing it for the wrong reasons even though there was no danger to them, like I was going to learn how to build actual bombs next using the training I received; I was just learning how to cut the power without setting anything off, I was using fucking coloured lights to do it, there were no explosives on my devices at all! But it was enough to make them think I was a danger to everyone, and they forced me to take a psych exam which I then failed by their standards. I was kicked out of the academy, lost my job when the psych eval was sent to them the following week, even lost my apartment when my landlord got word of everything, this one mistake got me evicted in the middle of winter-!

‘And the guy I talked to today heard about it too, read about all of it when they researched me to see if I was deserving of it, do you know what I heard him say to his supervisor when he thought I was out of earshot? He- he called me “unstable,” and fucking “unqualified” when I told him how much I make a year, like he didn’t trust me to pay it back, like I was a failure before the bar even opened, and maybe he’s right, maybe I am a failure, I shouldn’t have tried, I shouldn’t have fucking tried-!’

He spins and punches the wall he was just leaning against and you tense up, your eyes shutting on instinct at the crash of his knuckles through the drywall; it’s the first time you’ve seen him angry like this and it scares you, but as he pulls his hand back and looks at his bloodied knuckles you feel no fear, just sadness.

‘I’m sorry, shit, I’m so sorry,’ he apologizes under his breath, hissing as he flexes his fingers, his hand shaking from the pain, and it would be so easy to end it all right there, kick him out too and never see him again after what he’s just told you, just done, but you can’t as you take him gently by the arm and lead him to your couch. You sit him down and go off to find your first aid kit, some big and overly full thing your mother made you buy when you first moved to the city, and you’re thankful for it now as you pull out the unsealed bottle of healing spray and spritz it against his torn skin a couple times.

For once you love the future as he heals, and while he’s fine now you can’t help but take out the gauze and wrap the area next just to make sure, your fingers resting over the fabric and the back of his hand as you hold him in place. ‘You’re not a failure,’ you murmur, and he tries to pull away again but you don’t let him. ‘What happened to you… it really, really fucking sucks, and none of it was fair, but… it doesn’t make you a failure, we can just try again until we find someone who can help you get that loan.’

‘I don’t even want it, not after today.’ There’s not a single trace of a lie in his words, he’s giving up, and you want so badly to hold him but you can’t. ‘It’ll just happen again, this black mark on my life will just keep following me, why even try?’

‘Because it’s your dream, remember? You told me you wanted to connect with people, no one should be able to take that from you.’ You’re moving closer to him, slotting yourself between his legs as your knees hit the bottom of the couch, he can’t run from you like this, but it’s like you’re invisible to him in his misery.

‘But they already did.’

You let go of his hand and get up, throwing your arms around his neck in a tight hug, and he lets out a sound somewhere between surprise and relief as he’s pressed into the couch; you’re practically in his lap like this, and you try to shift until you’re beside him instead, but your arms never leave him as you back up, your frown so deep it’s starting to make your head hurt. ‘They only will when you stop fighting for it, you haven’t lost it yet,’ you tell him in a hushed whisper, and something in him breaks as he crumbles into your hug, his head on your shoulder as he grips the back of your shirt as hard as he can, like he’s drowning at sea and you’re the only thing keeping him afloat.

You pet his hair comfortingly as he keeps talking into your shoulder about how it went, how he felt so worthless when he was rejected, how he tried to explain himself but it was all shut down, the man hadn’t even wanted to hear it because he’d heard enough, how he was so upset and hurt and angry that he was afraid of himself and what he’d do, and you just comfort him as he lets it all out. It takes a while but you never rush him, or interrupt him as he vents, you just keep holding him until he’s ready to let you go. You separate, and his eyes are so red as they avoid looking at you, but you just brush his bangs to the side before getting up and grabbing the tissues.

You hand him the box, and the smile he gives you isn’t as sad as he grabs a few, the lump in your throat easing up a bit at the sight. ‘I know you probably aren’t in the mood to celebrate, but if you just wanna grab some food and watch a movie anyway I could order something, or make something here? I think the Hotel might deliver this far, lemme see if it’s on Dumbwaiter.’ You’re already on your phone to check but he’s standing, his used tissues bunched in his hand as he looks for your garbage bin, his eyes on the ground again.

‘I’m not very hungry, thank you but I think I just wanna head home,’ he says after throwing them away, and your hand lowers as you take a step towards him, standing between him and the door again.

‘Please.’ You don’t mean for it to come out but it does, this is about him, not you, you have no right to ask him to stay when he needs space, but you can’t leave him like this, not now. Finally he meets your eye, and you can see that he wants to stay as badly as you want him to, and he opens his mouth to say something before he closes the gap, stands next to you and looks down at your phone. He taps your screen back to life and scrolls before he finds the Hotel’s real name in the list of places on Dumbwaiter’s delivery partnership, and he gives the name another tap before giving you the smallest smile, and it’s genuine and even less sad as his shoulder presses into yours.

‘Order the pasta today, all of their sauces are rich and they always serve too much, and get us the goat cheese spinach dip, it’s to die for,’ he says, his voice still wavering a bit after all his crying, and you just nod before adding it all to your cart, Simon taking off his shoes so he can get comfy on your couch properly this time. You pay for the meal and join him, offering him the remote but he has nothing he wants to watch, so you go to your favourites and pick the stupidest, funniest comedy you can find, needing something silly to lift the mood, and as the food is delivered and you both laugh with full mouths that almost get you to choke you end up wishing you could have this forever, that you could move to his side and hold him again.

You don’t, your phones on the coffee table along with your plates, the space between you feeling so much wider than it actually was as he stays with you until the sun sets.

Now that he’s been to your place your friendship only grows, your meetups changing from Friday lunches to properly hanging out, and it isn’t often he gets free time between his two jobs, but most nights of his are free and you’re always ready to drop whatever you can to see him when he asks. Because of your eagerness you’re slowly becoming a pro at keeping up with your own work, the need to procrastinate fading away like never before since being caught up meant you could go to him wherever he waited. You met him at both jobs, at the Hotel - which he got you to start saying as well since he never called it by its real name - and at the park, sometimes at the mall if there was something he needed to get and he wanted some company, but you’ve still never seen his place, and you’re starting to wonder where he lived.

You know it’s in town, since he got to and from work via Brougham and being outside of town would be hell on his paychecks, but you have no idea which part other than the fact that he used to live near the Hotel when he was a kid. You’ve tried asking before, but each time you do he just brushes it off, makes some excuse to why you couldn’t pick him up or drop him off there, and you’re starting to get a bit suspicious if you were entirely honest. You know he’s not homeless, he’s told you before how it took him a bit but he did manage to find someplace permanent and all his after his eviction, but this is getting ridiculous you think when he comes up with yet another excuse as to why you can drop him off on this random street you’re driving down, he lives nearby, he can walk the rest of the way.

‘Simon, you’ve got six bags of groceries in the back seat, it is literally impossible for you to walk home with them all,’ you say firmly as he just keeps looking out the window, and his lips purse as he tries something else.

‘It isn’t far and they’re not that heavy, I can do three per hand,’ he insists, and you step on the brakes in the middle of the road, no one coming or going as he jerks forwards in his seat at the inertia.

‘Why don’t you want me to see your place?’ you ask bluntly, no longer holding back, and he gets defensive, he’s more open with his anger around you now, but he hasn’t gotten as upset since that day, and you know it’s because he doesn’t want to lose control again, doesn’t want to scare you or himself like that again.

‘I never said I didn’t.’

‘You don’t need to; is it bad neighbours, or a bad neighbourhood? I don’t care where you live, or what your place looks like, I swear I don’t, so you don’t have to keep me away,’ you tell him honestly, and for a moment you think he might tell you when he unlocks his door and heads to the back. You just sigh as he gathers everything up in both hands and thanks you for the ride, but it really is close, you don’t have to waste gas going the rest of the day, he’ll see you Friday.

‘And… you don’t wanna know where I live,’ he mutters mostly to himself before the door closes, and he’s clearly weighed down by everything but he sticks with it, and you watch him just keep going further and further down the street until you have no choice but to take a U-turn and head home, and he’s still in your rearview as you hit a right and he’s forced to disappear around the corner behind you.

It’s a little awkward for you both after that, so you don’t bring it up again to make sure things even out, and it seems to help as you keep meeting up everywhere but his place, wherever the hell it is. He’s been to yours enough times now that you almost consider giving him a spare key so he can invite himself over, but it feels too personal for friends, and when you joke about it to test the waters he nearly spits out his drink in surprise. You clarify that it’s a joke as he sputters out that he’s never had someone’s spare key before, he’s never known anyone long enough for that.

‘You’ve known me for quite a few months now, maybe it might come in handle to have a spare out there in case of emergencies,’ you say next, instantly backtracking on the joke aspect of it with a little hope, and despite you initially calling it so he also looks a little hopeful at the possibility before his phone pings loudly. The moment is ruined as he stops your post-lunch walk through the park to see who’s messaging him, and his eyes widen as his smile grows and his face flushes. ‘LoveMatch, I assume?’ you ask, your teeth clenching in jealousy behind your smile.

‘Yeah, I’ve been messaging this one girl, Jeannie, a few days now,’ he tells you as he clicks in to see what she said, and his smile is so bright at her reply that you feel your stomach drop, your jealousy transforming into something that feels so much worse. ‘I think I’m gunna ask her on a date soon, when I can get an afternoon off so we don’t meet up too late, what do you think? Or should we talk a bit more first?’

The urge to tell him he should definitely talk more first arises because it’s true, you know what meeting too soon can do to a relationship before you can get a better feel for someone, but you also want them to meet before they’re ready; you want her to go in blind because you already know how to talk to him, know that there’s no way she’ll be able to get him out of his shell enough to consider a second date. You know he’ll be nervous, so he might say something weird like he did that first time you chatted over Facsimile, and if he does then there’s a good chance she might leave the date not wanting more.

You can’t do that though, you don’t want to see him rejected like that ever again after the loan, so you ball up your fist and give him a playful tap to the shoulder as he waits for your response. ‘Give it a little more time, get to know each other better, the perfect time for a date will show itself eventually, and if it doesn’t then maybe it’s just not meant to be,’ you suggest, and he nods before one-handedly typing out a reply back to her and putting his phone away. 

‘You’re so good with this kinda stuff, I haven’t been on a real date before, it’s why I signed up for LoveMatch to begin with, so I never know where to start whenever I get a match,’ he confesses as you go back to walking, your fist still balled painfully as you hide it in your jacket pocket. 

‘I’ve been on way too many bad dates by now, I’d like to think I’m a bit of an expert on it.’ Your laugh is strained but he doesn’t seem to notice as he looks straight ahead, his cheeks still pink now that she’s on his mind.

‘I can’t wait to meet her, she works at a flower shop nearby but I haven’t been in yet, I don’t wanna creep her out or anything,’ he says as his shyness crops up again, his expression cute until you remember this isn’t for you, it’s for her.

‘Just keep talking to her and it’ll happen, and who knows? Maybe she’ll like you as mu-’ You stop yourself from saying, ‘as much as I do,’ the words unable to come out as he turns to face you with a curious expression. ‘As much as I know she will,’ you finish, and he grins at the ground before taking another drink, your shoulders bumping for just a moment before he steps to the left to give you a bit more space, and you have to grip the inside of your pocket to keep from pulling him back to you.

About a week later he messages you as you’re working, your phone lighting up and buzzing energetically near your hand, and when you open the chat he tells you that she asked him on a date. Your face falls as you force a smile he can’t see, your thumbs typing him a congrats you don’t mean, not entirely, and when he says that he’s going to take her to the park you feel almost betrayed; you know it’s not your park, it’s just someplace you visit sometimes, it wasn’t like he was bringing her to the Hotel for lunch, that would hurt so much worse.

He then says he’s been thinking about packing a picnic since it felt more romantic, and that he was going to bring roses in her favourite colours since she told him she couldn’t decide between red or orange when they were talking about it, and you almost put down your phone as your chest aches. You want it to be you, you want him to ask you to the park for a picnic, you want to be able to pack your own favourites to share with him there now that the weather is nice again, you want him to bring you roses in your favourite colours even though you’re not even that much of a flower person just because they’re from him and he’s thinking of you.

You want to be her.

You tell him that that sounds like a great idea, she’ll love it, he should tell you how it goes afterwards if he wants to, which he does, since you’re his friend.

You’re his friend.

You send him a bunch of fingers crossed emojis and get back to work so he can start planning, the date is this weekend after all and he has things he has to do now, and when you go to bed that night your thumb hovers over the Sign Up button on LoveMatch’s mobile app until you fall asleep.

Three days later you find yourself lurking outside of the park even though you fought all morning not to, not knowing the exact time they were going to meet up and spending every second continuing that fight as you tell yourself to leave before you got hurt even more. You parked a block away so he wouldn’t recognize your car, and you’re wearing one of your thicker hoodies that you prefer to save for colder weather even though it’s making you sweat like crazy, the hood up as you walk around and see if you can find him. You’ve been there for hours now when you finally decide to go, this was stupid and petty and way too jealous to be acceptable no matter how you felt for him, and just as you’re about to leave you hear his voice echo faintly across the open area.

You look over and see him approach an unfamiliar woman, Jeannie, a big bouquet of roses in his hand and his Brougham waiting for him with an open door by the curb where he was dropped off at. He waves nervously at her, and she flashes him a big smile as he hands her the roses, she seems happy about them, and they chat for a little bit as you get a good vantage point behind a nearby tree. There’s people looking at you as they pass but you don’t care, you can’t leave now, and your jealousy turns to shocked offense as you watch her expression slowly fall.

She’s uncomfortable, he’s said something that she didn’t like just like you’d feared, and he picks up on it and motions for her to wait before he jogs back to the car, he’s still going to try and fix it with the picnic. The moment he’s away from her she puts the roses down on the bench they’re standing by and bails, her footsteps fast as she puts as much distance between them before his return, and your body moves on its own as you want to chase her down, demand to know why she did that. You lose her as you hear him come back to the bench, his voice calling out to her again but she’s long gone, and you freeze with your back to him as you hear him set down the basket, his car already driving off and stranding him there.

The lump is already forming in your throat again when you hear your phone go off, and when you pick up and turn to face him he’s already looking at you, having heard the ringtone you’d assigned to him from your short distance away. He looks hurt at your presence at first, then upset, then angry, and he leaves both the roses and the basket behind as he starts to walk away.

‘Simon, wait,’ you call out to him as you race after him, his long legs carrying him farther and faster as you quickly catch up, but you being there is just insult to injury and he does not want you to be there for him today.

‘You saw it all, didn’t you?’ he demands as he just keeps walking with no destination, needing to get away from you and his heartbreak as fast as he can, and you try to walk backwards in front of him but you can’t keep the pace, not when he keeps changing directions every time you catch up.

‘I’m sorry, I wanted to make sure it went okay,’ you confess before you can come up with yet another lie, and he scoffs at it bitterly.

‘Wanted to make sure I didn’t fuck it up like the loan, right? Well, sorry to break it to you, but I fucked it up again, I’m just one big fuckup!’ He takes another sharp turn to try and lose you in a dense crowd but you grab onto him, use him like an anchor as he tries to jerk away enough to make you let go, but your grip is strong and true as not even that works. 

‘You aren’t a fuckup!’ you insist desperately in a too loud voice for being in public, a group of mothers with strollers giving you the dirtiest look at your language, but you just give them a ‘give me a break’ look back before turning your attention back to him. ‘She just doesn’t know you yet, what did you say? Maybe you can still fix it? Or you could try one of your other matches? She isn’t the only one out there, you don’t need her!’

‘I told her that I wanted to meet her at work,’ he says, and that’s not so bad until he explains why it upset her. ‘I told her that I saw her place of work in the trashed data and I wanted to surprise her by ordering the roses from her, and she didn’t like it.’

Yeah, that’ll do it.

‘She- she didn’t get that you weren’t looking her up to doxx her or stalk her or anything?’ you hurriedly ask, and he just shakes his head, his pace slowing as you exit the main road and head down a less busy street, somewhere more private, probably unintentionally on his part.

‘No, I tried to explain that but her expression said it all, and when I got back…’ He slows even more, you both know how it ended and his lip is quivering. ‘She didn’t even have to guts to say goodbye, she just wanted to leave me there like I could be thrown out like the roses, like trash, that fucking bitch!’ He kicks the trashcan you’re about to pass and it crashes hard to the ground, the contents spilling all over the sidewalk as he loses control of his anger again. ‘I’m a person, goddamnit, why does this keep…’

You step around the trash as the wind blows it into your path, creating a river between the two of you that you cross to get to him, and this time when you try to hug him he steps back, puts a hand up to keep you away.

‘Don’t, just- don’t, I can’t be touched by you right now,’ he says softly, and he isn’t crying but he looks about to as you obediently back up, the trash spreading around you and making the river swell. ‘I’m going home, I’m sorry you keep having to deal with me.’

You try to tell him otherwise but he isn’t listening as he pulls up his hood and heads back to the main road, a cab hailed before he gets in and drives away, leaves you there alone. You lower your own hood and unzip your hoodie so your body can cool a little as you walk back to your car, and when you reach the bench you see that there’s a small group of concerned people gathering around the basket, all of them clearly thinking that it might be something dangerous.

‘That’s mine, sorry, it’s just a picnic,’ you say as you approach it, and everyone can’t help but peer inside as you prove it to them. In that quick glimpse you can see that he worked hard on the contents within, he made a whole bunch and even grabbed a few different drinks as well as a bottle of wine to split, and you swallow as you relatch the lid and grab the handle. The roses are still there too and you pick them up, they’re the synthetic kind you can tell as their scent is muted compared to the real thing, he wanted her to keep them for a while without them dying, and you hold them close to your chest as you finish the trek to your car.

You don’t look at the items in your passenger seat until you get home, and when you reach your apartment you put the flowers in a waterless vase and spread out the picnic on your coffee table. You choose your favourite drink, of course he would’ve brought it out of all the possible options, and open up the wine as well as you enjoy the picnic by yourself, not wanting to let it go to waste as you try not to notice how large your couch was without him there to enjoy it with you.

He ignores your messages for a while after that, so you stop texting him to give him some space, but that doesn’t stop you from at least typing everything out and deleting it before the temptation to press send overtakes you. You look him up on LoveMatch and see that he’s offline, and after looking up Jeannie’s name you discover a recent post she made in the site’s forums section; you click in and see that she completely tried to ruin his reputation on the site, warning others to stay away from him, calling him creepy and a stalker and claiming that he would doxx any matches. Your heart races as the comments join in, insulting his picture and saying he looked like a creep, how some said they had messaged him but now they were going to block, thanking her for the warning and telling her how sorry they were for having to deal with that.

You nearly come to his rescue but there’s no point, they’ve already made up their minds, and you instead flag the post as harassment and pray that it got taken down before he saw it.

He’s seen it.

He sends you the link without another word, your request to remove it denied, and when you look for his profile you find it gone.

He misses your next Friday lunch, and you figure enough is enough as you decide that if he wasn’t going to talk to you then you were going to talk to him. You wait until he gets off work before parking across from the bar, and you keep your distance as he hails a ride and heads home for the night. Your hands are gripping the wheel way too hard the entire way there, and when the car turns into a large, mostly empty lot sans a bunch of trailers parked inside as well as a few storage containers and miscellaneous vehicles and construction things for the building across the street you just keep going and pretend like you weren’t just following him. You wait until his ride leaves as you park nearby, and you casually walk up to the one you saw him heading for and hope that he won’t kick you out immediately as you knock on the door.

There’s the sound of stumbling from inside until the door opens and you step out of its way, Simon just looking at you before a cacophony of emotions plays across his face. ‘Hey,’ you say when he doesn’t shut the door right away, ‘you stopped answering my messages, I wanted to make sure you were okay.’

‘So you followed me?’ He’s more surprised than angry, which is good, but you don’t know how long it’ll last so you talk fast, needing to get it out while you have the chance.

‘You never told me where you lived, I improvised, I’m not the one with access to trashed data here,’ you try to joke, but neither of you laugh as you just stand there on his makeshift porch, which is just big enough to hold a single lawn chair and nothing else, another sign of his isolation.

‘I never wanted you to come here,’ he mutters just quietly enough that you almost miss it, and when you lean in to listen his expression hardens. ‘Your place is so nice, you’ve got a nice view, everything is so open, you do so well for yourself. But me, even with two jobs this is all I can afford, I can’t save up for my bar when I have bills to pay, can’t get a loan because I can’t pay it off if it fails, you’ve got everything so put together and I’m-’ He stops, he’s been looking at the ground the entire time but when he falls silent he makes a point to purposefully not look at you, and you can see the shine in his eyes as he shifts from foot to foot, resists slamming the door in your face. ‘I’m a fucking loser.’

‘You’re not-’

‘I got kicked out of the academy, I got evicted, I got denied for my loan, I got dumped before my date even started and now every other match I made has me blocked, I live in a fucking trailer because I can’t afford rent in the city anymore and it’s cheap to live out this far, how am I not a loser?’ He quiets down when he starts yelling out all the reasons why he was worthless, his voice echoing over the lot, and he tries to shut the door when your hand shoots out and holds it open the second you see it move. ‘I just- I don’t understand why you keep talking to me after all that, why do you keep coming back? Why haven’t you left like everyone else? Why won’t you just- leave me alone…?’

You swallow and walk up the two-step stairs, Simon backing up until you let yourself in, the door shutting behind you and trapping your voices inside so they can’t carry anymore. ‘Because none of that defines you, it happened to you but that isn’t who you are,’ you tell him, and he’s hunched over now that he’s inside, the ceiling not high enough to accommodate him in his own home.

‘And who am I?’ he asked pathetically, but you don’t see him as pathetic, not even now as you see his home and how bare it is, the nicest thing he owns his computer over by the far window, the setup grand and expensive looking, and you fondly think to yourself that he probably built it all himself.

‘You’re smart, you’re so fucking smart, and you’re easy to talk to, and you’re a bit weird sometimes, and you word things kinda badly at the worst of times but you’re not a creep, and you’re passionate about what you want and it’s so unfair that no one’s given you a proper chance, or gotten to know the real you, not just what they’ve heard and assumed about you. You’re not a bad guy, you’re more than your black marks, you’re Simon.’

He blinks and a tear falls from his eye to the floor thanks to the angle his neck is forced to be, but he never sits even though it must be hurting him, and you wonder if maybe you’ve gotten through to him when he catches you completely off guard with what he says next: ‘Would you still think that if you knew the real me?’

‘What do you mean?’ You’ve known him for half a year now, there wasn’t any side of him you hadn’t seen yet, but apparently there was as another tear falls.

‘I killed someone, about five years ago now.’

You stagger back into the door, the wind knocked out of you at this revelation, and he shuts his eyes and looks away from your expression as one of pain takes over his own face. ‘What are you talking about?’ you ask quietly, your voice failing you the first time you try, and he flinches at your words like you’d just screamed them in his face.

‘Back when I was evicted I was looking for people to room with, just temporarily until I could get back on my feet, and this guy had answered my ad, invited me over to check out his place. I should’ve been more cautious but it was so cold I couldn’t wait, and when I got there he tried to mug me, take whatever I had left. I fought back in self-defense, but when I almost got away he started attacking me, wanted to keep me there until his actual roommate got home so he had help, and I-’ He sits down then, his hands shaking as he goes back to that time, and your back leaves the door as he looks up at you with such sadness that your chest feels hollow. ‘He tried to kill me, I was only trying to defend myself, I didn’t mean to hurt him so bad, I just wanted to find somewhere to stay, it was so cold outside…’

‘What happened after that?’ You think you might’ve just mouthed the words with how much your voice breaks, but he understands you anyways.

‘The roommate came home while I- while it was happening, called the cops, and when they saw me standing there covered in blood, holding the knife still, they instantly ruled it as a homicide and arrested me. I was able to plead not guilty but they took one look at my bad psych eval and thought I’d snapped, killed him outta malice or something, it was only by a miracle that the evidence was in my favour.’

‘And the roommate?’

‘They searched the place and found evidence of all the others before me that’d fallen for the con, he was charged and arrested and I made bail, but after that my mother never talked to me again, even though I was acquitted.’ It looks like a weight’s been lifted now that he’s said it, but he also looks so fucking tired, most of him taking up his small loveseat couch. You want to go to him but you can’t move, your body refusing to shift even an inch in case he didn’t want you to, and he looks you over before something in his eyes begs you please; you let out a small noise as you fall to the ground between his knees, your hand holding his just like you had when you’d wrapped him up.

‘Why are you still here? Why haven’t you thrown me out yet?’ he weakly asks you, and you can’t lie to him any longer as you hold his hand up to your cheek.

‘Don’t you know what you mean to me?’ you need to know, your voice so small that again you’re not even sure if any of it even comes out, and he lets out a breath that sounds so desperate and broken it makes you wonder just how long he’s been holding it: days, weeks, months, since the moment you met?

‘I didn’t want to hope- you… you’re my only friend, I didn’t want to ruin everything and lose you too,’ he whispers as he properly holds you, his palm so warm against your skin, and you lean into his touch as you let out the breath you were holding in return.

‘You almost broke my heart when you said you went back to LoveMatch, I wanted to tell you so badly,’ you’re finally able to confess, and when you do his other hand finds your arm, holds you with just enough pressure that you know he wants you there.

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t want to ruin everything either.’

He leans forward until his forehead rests against yours, and when you open your eyes and look into his you can see everything you ever wanted again, all of it feeling so real and within reach as you brush his bangs aside, rest your hand on the back of his neck. His other hand comes up to cup your other cheek, and he’s shaking slightly like he’s afraid to touch you even though he already is because this time it’d be his decision to, his lips parting as he stares down at your own, and when he touches you you lean up and close the space between you.

He sighs against your mouth as you kiss him, it so full of relief and contentment and joy, and you wrap your arms around his neck again as you successfully sit in his lap this time. His lack of experience is apparent but you have no complaints as you deepen the kiss, needing more now that you could have it, and he lets you have everything you ever wanted as he leans back against the cushions until his head hits the metal wall behind him. He mutters an ow as he lets go of you to rub his head, and you laugh before catching his mouth again, which he eagerly allows you to do; he eats up all your attention, starving for it as he gets more into it, needing whatever you can give after so many rejections, and you’re happy to give it all back as you kiss his neck.

‘I was so proud of you when you told me you were trying for the loan, I really wanted to celebrate with you,’ you whisper into his skin, and you can feel him shiver as he lets out a soft moan and tilts his head to the side so you have easier access. ‘You’ve been trying so hard, please let me reward you, I want to be the first to…’

He moans your name as his hips start to move, try to find friction against you, and you shift until he does, his jaw going slack as he holds you by your thighs, perfects the angle even more.

‘When I saw you with her I wanted it to be me, I hated myself for wanting her to go, but she didn’t deserve you, I’ll never leave, and I want the next time we meet to be a real date, whether it’s at the Hotel or the park or my place or here, I want to be with you.’

He makes a noise of pure want, his Adam's apple bobbing as he tries to swallow back the sob that follows, he was always weak to your compliments but you need him to know how worth it he is to you, how much he deserves this after everything he’s been through.

‘You’re wonderful, I love spending time with you, you’re everything I want.’

A tear escapes between his tightly shut eyelids and you kiss it away before going to his jaw, pressing your lips along it before you find his mouth again.

‘I really like you, Simon, you mean so much to me, I’m so glad I got to meet you.’

He’s practically whimpering in your lap as he cries harder, his hips never stopping, he needs this so much but so do you, and you let him use you as the growing pressure wrenches a moan from your lips.

‘I love-’

You don’t get to finish as he comes apart underneath you, his body shuddering as he grips you tight and gasps out a series of choked out moans, your eyes fluttering shut as you feel it all travel from the top of your head down to the tips of your toes. You feel the heat between your thighs as he slowly catches his breath, his cheeks turning red under streams of tears in embarrassment for coming from just this much, but you just kiss the tip of his nose and rest your chest against his, let him feel how hard your heart was beating.

‘I love you,’ you whisper now that you can, and he looks at you like you’ve just given him the sun and the moon on a golden platter.

‘I’m so glad I texted you back then,’ he confesses against your cheek, his hands leaving your thighs to rest on your back, keeping you close, ‘I think I started to love you the moment you wanted to actually talk to me.’

‘Lucky for me your standards are so low,’ you joke, but it falls flat in the best of ways as he nuzzles into your neck.

‘It was all I needed, I just wanted someone to believe in me.’ He presses a single kiss to the space where your neck meets your shoulder, and your nails scrape lightly against his scalp as you let out a sigh at the feeling.

‘I told you, I’ll keep cheering you on until it works,’ you remind him, and he sits up straight so he can hold you even closer in his hug, your bodies fitting together perfectly as you hold him back and don’t let go.

The snow is falling lightly outside as you stretch in your chair, your back cracking as you raise your arms high above your head. You’re all done for the day, everything on your list checked off as you glance at the time and see that it’s almost 8PM, he’ll be there soon. You stand and bring the feeling back to your legs before grabbing the remote and turning on the TV, queuing up the next episode of the show you’re marathoning only one at a time each night. You let the recap and intro play and then press pause, it’s nearly time now, and you’re in the middle of grabbing the plates and utensils when you hear a knock at the door. You unlock it and open up to reveal Simon on the other side, all bound up in a large winter jacket, his scarf pulled up high enough to cover his nose and mouth from the cold.

‘You forget your key at work again?’ you tease as he walks in, trailing snow over to the mat where he can take his boots off.

‘Kinda hard to unlock the door with both hands full,’ he points out with a smirk as he then sets the food brought from said work on the table. ‘It’s busy tonight despite the snow, lots of people coming in to escape the chill, had to order these early to make sure they were done on time.’

‘You know I can always make something before you get back, you don’t have to keep bothering Elison over it,’ you remind him, but he won’t hear of it, he loves being able to bring you back something so you don’t have to stop working until you’re ready and you know it.

‘I convinced him to leave the Hotel to come work for me, might as well use him,’ is what he has to say to that, and you can’t argue with it as you both transfer your dinners onto the plates you set out. ‘Besides, it’s the only way I can get my favourites without having to drive across town, that’s a good enough reason to keep bothering him.’

You hum in agreement as you sit down together, the episode playing as soon as you’re settled, and when you’re done eating he curls up next to you, rests his head against your shoulder even though it hurts his neck. You take pity on him and adjust so he can lay more properly, his face still red from the winter chill, and you find yourself paying more attention to him until he feels your eyes on him.

‘You think we can do two episodes tonight before you go back? We’re so close to the season finale,’ you plead in that tone of voice that always gets him, and he looks like he really wants to say yes but he can’t, he doesn’t like leaving the place for so long as is even though his staff is more than capable of watching over things for an hour without him; outside of the weekend it’s the only time you can be together until he gets home at 2AM, when you’re already asleep most nights, and before he leaves again by 9AM, at least until the new year where he plans on hiring more staff if things keep getting better.

‘Not tonight, maybe tomorrow if it’ll calm down when the storm hits, I’ll call it early if it’s bad enough,’ he promises, and you smile and hold his hand as you rewind the episode back to before you stopped watching.

‘Should I be so jealous of a bar?’ you ask rhetorically, and he answers you yes before you playfully hit him and press play again. ‘Maybe I should start working for you part-time, I miss our Friday lunches, you’re too busy for me now.’

‘I’m never too busy for you,’ he reassures you so gently and genuinely before kissing you, the scene you just rewound to getting ignored again as you don’t let him go after just one. ‘I wouldn’t mind having you there, though, even if I think we might not get a lot done whenever you’re there.’

‘I’m just trying to make some C0NN3CT10N$,’ you say as slowly and as slyly as you can, drawing out the word as he just stares at you, ‘y’know like the bar’s na-’

He silences you with another kiss, this one a little more chaste as he laughs against your lips. ‘Yeah, yeah I know,’ he chuckles, and once again the episode is rewound so you can watch it, your arms around him for the rest of the hour he sets aside just for you each night, and in your head you make a mental note to thank your mother for recommending that son of a friend of a friend of a co-worker 10 months too late as he lovingly holds you right back.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

This is what ticker tape really looked like, March 26, 1942. The stuff pouring out of the machine for a clerk at Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Beane is like something out of a cartoon—I can see it going and going until it fills up the room.

Photo: Robert Wands for the AP via Money Review

[gaywarenn]

throwing out the idea that ronan isn’t a chronic speeder, small towns are just insane about how fast they’ll let you go

[fuckyessarahlancashire]

Bet and Raquel Get Drunk

[rawsmackdownnxtdivas]

Happy Valentine's Day!!! 💝

[braindead-virtually-tv]

Reblog if you vote !

[watchmorecinema]

I was re-watching the Folding Ideas video about Nostalgia Critic's The Wall, and it got me thinking about something. I'm perfectly ok with people hating my favorite movies, so long as they at least understand them. The Wall is a dark and depressing movie and maybe you just don't want to deal with that. But if you think the main theme is "high school sucks" then you didn't really try to engage with it at all.

A lot of this I think is due to advertising. The Exorcist isn't the scariest film ever made, it's a family drama. It's very compelling but if you're looking for a lot of scares then you'll walk away thinking it's boring. Rambo isn't really an action film since it's more about the character of Rambo and how he has been dehumanized by the very machine that sent him to kill in Vietnam (the sequels dropped all of that). A lot of people went into Fight Club expecting it to be a straightforward fighting movie but actually it's a twisty thriller about the horrors of capitalism.

But outside of that I think it happens when the movie is abstract in some way. The Wall is very abstract, but it's easy to understand what it all means. An animated scene about inhuman monsters destroying London isn't The Wall trying to be a Kaiju movie for a minute, it's a metaphor for the horror and destruction of the blitz.

David Lynch and Tarkovsky get hit pretty hard by this too; people don't understand what the plot literally means so they get hung up on that instead of coming up with their own interpretation. What Stalker means to me is completely different to what it means to someone else. Any Twin Peaks theory is valid so long as its yours. Good art is a mirror that lets you engage with it and reflect about your own thoughts and feelings. If you unironically think that Whiplash or Wolf of Wall Street was about supporting hustle culture then that says more about you than about the film.

If you don't regularly engage with art in this way, well you should! Watch movies you wouldn't normally consider and see how it makes you feel. Even bad movies can help you feel a certain sort of way and that's valid. Maybe you find something that means something to you in a way that was never envisioned by the creator. Videodrome has a lot to say about parasocial relationships with online content creators, but it came out more than a decade before the Internet came into being. Starship Troopers was panned on release but now it's understood to be a pretty clear satire of right wing militarism. Every time I rewatch Akira I get something different from it, especially if I'm in a different stage of my life.

There's a lot out there to explore. And sometimes that means you walk away from a film where you might think it was well made but that it did nothing for you. It's happened to me too; I can understand that The Wolf Man did a lot for werewolves in fiction (literally creating most of the lore you recognize), but it's also mostly about a guy being really creepy towards women with pretty bad special effects. I can appreciate its influence, but I just don't think it's a good movie.

I'm sure most people reading this will have similar thoughts about Stalker. It's very slow, philosophical, a bit nihilistic and while the plot is pretty easy to understand it leaves so much open ended that you need to decide for yourself what it all means. It's a lot of work to watch. I love it for that reason; very few movies actually give the viewer homework to mull about and chew on and this one gives so much to consider. But it's perfectly reasonable for someone to decide that it's hard to relate to the movie about Russians being depressed about abstract concepts for nearly 3 hours.

[heavymetal]

This week in 1987, Dokken released the single for DREAM WARRIORS, which was used as the theme song for A Nightmare On Elm Street 3. Shortly after the film's release, the track peaked at #22 on the Billboard singles chart, and became an obvious choice to be featured on Back For The Attack later that year.

[adelacreations]

"I wouldn't trust Billy fans/harringrove fans around my drink" Dawg you are in the same circles of people who have sent the following and this is a GENERALISATION OF A LIST:

1. Death threats

2. Harassment

3. Harassment and racism towards BIPOC especially Black Billy fans.

4. Doxxing

5. Sending gore to Billy fans

6. Sending LYNCHING photos to black Billy fans (thanks for that one BTW, got a few myself on twitter)

7. Talked explicitly and IN DETAIL about black fans getting hate crimed by billy

[silverwolfdesign]

🡒 ✨ 𝐀𝐥𝐞𝐤𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐚 & 𝐇𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 • 𝘚𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘦 𝘚𝘪𝘯𝘬 & 𝘙𝘰𝘴𝘴 𝘓𝘺𝘯𝘤𝘩

[notmuchtoconceal]

Verily, verily I say unto you! Laura Palmer is the image of the Feminine Messiah, for she is what we consume at our daily meal, wrapped section-by-section, genre-by-genre, a full-course luncheon in a box served up by an early-adopter auteur slumming it up in TV Land, for he believed in the good of public works and the joys of episodic narrative!

Look back now to the Image of Tina in A Nightmare on Elm Street, not only clawing bloodied and bitten-of-nail on the inside of her bodybag translucent as the mists of a high school shower. See her not only dragged down the halls by an unseen malevolence leaving a slime-trail of blood as she goes -- See her also in the Dreamland which was her prison and tomb standing shrouded as the Holy Virgin in Plastic, Deflowered though she was by her Hunky Tighty Whitey wearing Latino Greaser Boyfriend who too was to be found alone, strangled of his own volition.

See the continuity in these images, not only for how one may influence another, but how in each is a reflection of the time and place from which they arose. See the dead girls on the news in placid suburban 80's homes. See them now always for what they always were -- offerings to the Moloch of the Mainland, Our Homeland Hungering for the Blood of the Pure. See how the boogeyman was always a necessity of the loving patriarchs which your grief-stricken mother, intoxicated in isolation, barred the windows of your home to keep your father out. See your father the lawman hiding the crimes to which he knew he was entitled for the law was his and the courts always shows for the public. The letter of the law could not reflect the will of the people, for the people hunger for blood and the annals of our court are not a butcher's trough, though we may permit each tree within our garden a gallows!

The blonde girl. The Radiant Madonna. Who is she? In her name we see the laurel crown, the hands which reach and touch. As the heart is what mediates the two, and she is the heart of the town, the daughter of a respected lawyer for the local last tycoon, she was the most fecund portal through which to inject corruption. She is the Feminine Messiah for She is the Paradoxical Image of God in The Flesh.

In Laura's embrace of Stoic Wisdom, her acceptance of struggle, decision to withstand hardship and rejection of witchcraft, we see the font of her status as a glamor goddess is a masculinized mind which compromises neither its feminine allure nor immersion. From a young age, she is bombarded not only by repeated sexual and emotional abuse from a loved one, but continuous assault by the irrational and yet inarguable presence of supernatural forces. As with the first scene of Ash's sister Cheryl's possession in The Evil Dead, the unseen forces of darkness lurking always out of sight seize her hand against her will and use her own body as an instrument to intrude upon the pages of a meditative space where she may be alone with her thoughts.

The treasury of Missing Pieces from Fire Walk With Me are a particular boon to this subject, as the additional scenes featuring Laura and her mother shed warm rays of luminance on a relationship foundational to not only the heart, but the core tension of the series.

In a brief scene where Sarah, Laura's mother, is coming inside carrying groceries, three developments occur in rapid succession, which key the viewer in to the intimacy of these women's dynamic. Laura is harried, for she has just found pages ripped from the Secret Diary she had hidden, tipping her off that her secrets can no longer be safely kept in her own home. She is smoking a cigarette, as she was only moments before (in the main body of the text) living out an impromptu early-90's alterative hip-hop video as she comes home from school (as one does), which we soon find out is despite her mother's protests. (The smoking, not living in a improvisational music video. No matter what timeline you're in, you can't take the 90's out of a 90's girl even if it's still the 80's.) Yet also despite her protests, her mother will hold her cigarette for her as Laura in turn takes the groceries. Laura needs to ask her mother to borrow the car (fortuitous, I'm only now realizing, as she had just gotten home) for she is still only a high school girl, but first -- she must withstand another bout of lecturing from her mother where she insists she will never be a smoker if she never starts smoking. We can see in this briefly that Sarah is instilling in Laura a purity ethic where a corrupted-identity is based on an initiation ("being a smoker", "starting smoking") -- the definitive feature of idol worship, which Sarah is sadly living out half-consciously, as her own husband is drugging her with milk. The milk which she seems inevitably to accept, making her go into the white dissociative horsey dreams. As a final comic touch, once Sarah agrees, Laura runs out the door, leaving her cigarette in her mother's hands, which she needs to then run back in and grab to eye-rolling maternal exasperation.

This connects to a later scene which elaborates upon a vital point of ambiguity in the main body of the film -- an ambiguity which reads as such for it is not immediately parsible, for it is irrational.

Laura ascends to the local Roadhouse to once more prostitute her underaged body for the coke money she so desperately needs to fuel her lifestyle of endless social charity and drug-fueled bisexual intrigues. Her childhood best friend, Donna Hayward, played by a different actress in the film than in the series (perhaps embodying Laura's projections of her own naivety onto the cuter, smaller, mousier new girl) follows her. She is not only curious about her best friend's distance, her twoness, but she is aware of how Laura sees her. Donna is dating one of the two Local Mikes, the Earthly Dumb Jock, who proudly boasts from his convertible in his letterman jacket with her drug-dealer leather bro by his side that HE. IS. THE. MAN. This Donna will, in the same breath, wonder aloud if her football player boyfriend could ever write her a poem, then scandalously whisper to Laura about ... the mere possibility ... of having sex. Holy shit. This bitch was having threesomes in public when she was twelve. Girl, you know not what little you know. Oh my god. You are not yet ready to steal this woman's second boyfriend and develop main character syndrome as you shout on her grave in the dead of night. Right now, you are gonna do some weird needy insecure shit and it's gonna be fun.

(My little brother is a hardcore Donna stan and I know not ever why.)

As we have said, Donna follows Laura to her nightside prostitution meetup, which prompts Laura to react with barely-disguised dismay equal parts shock contempt and expectance. This Donna ... is gonna get fucking good at playing Laura's games. This Donna ... is gonna slut it up. This Donna ain't no fuckin prude. This Donna has cute lil perky tits and she's gonna whip em out! You ever see that other Donna's tits? Nuh-uh, bitch. TV standards. No full-frontal female. See em on the big screen, motherfucker. Bathed in hot pink electro-grunge hate-fucking your ears! I am a Goddess! I am the Concubine! I am the Queen of Whores! Ow. Don't cry from that one shot you took. That was real spicy. I'm such a good girl this is hard for me. I'm not gonna let it show, though. Do I have to be at church in the morning? Am I out whoring on a schoolday? What happened to my lesbian sister who writes poetry? How can Laura be best girl and biggest slut, how is that possible, what am I missing?

Once more you may see as it is revealed -- as Donna approaches the table at which Laura is seated with her two bucks, one asks if she is included in "the deal" -- to which Laura objects, which Donna insists on including herself, sealing it with the shot she takes from her mark.

Donna is self-initiating into the cult of ritual prostitution by means of libation that she may enter into sympathetic resonance with Laura. Laura, though she may seem to dismay it, is protective of Donna's innocence, and doesn't wish to see her corrupted. Though Laura may appear beautiful and bright and alive, inside she is consumed by darkness and fears being close to anyone, fears that her influence on anyone might be corrosive, and yet -- she's missing Meals on Wheels deliveries and unable to give excuses, although -- nobody wonders why despite the fact there's nobody there. There's nobody there, but maybe the two of us can sneak off later and snuggle in my truck while we listen to non-diegetic music over the radio and reflect on the beauty and tragedy of the night.

Furthermore, the Missing Pieces make clear the crossing of an additional boundary -- namely that the girls literally cross northward into the territory of Canada to engage in their Pink Room Prostitution Cube. The abrupt cut in the feature film, on first impression -- may lead one to believe the Pink Room is an extension spatially, literally ... (a backroom) as well as metaphysically and thematically ... of the Roadhouse, rather than another place, called The Power and the Glory some many miles away.

It is in this scene where Donna loses herself to her latent passions, caressing herself as a boa in the sweater which Laura had discarded as she disrobed, she sees then her old coworker, Ronette Pulaski (named for the park by my house, by which I mean not the French Jesuit Missionary, but the street not named for him) emerge from the pink fog of time, the mirror image of what Donna might become: the two reflect upon their past experiences in the brothel where they worked, recruited through the perfume counter at Laura's dad's lifetime friend and business partner's department store high school grooming and sex trafficking ring.

It is important to understand that consensual sex work performed voluntarily by an adult woman (or man or anyone else for that matter) who understands the risks they're accepting, as they would accept with any choice of occupation, is quite different from a situation where a girl is coerced, both overtly and subtly, into acting against her own self-interest by playing into what seems inevitable pre-scripted scenes by invisibly abusive authorities with loving faces. Laura may enjoy sex, and sex is empowering, but this is occurring from a place of deep hurt. Laura has been repeatedly humiliated, repeatedly disempowered, repeatedly had her body turned into a source of shame, that her ability to connect and be vulnerable with other men has been compromised. Truthfully, Laura enjoys humiliating men through sex. Laura loves the power she has over them. Laura enjoys that she can coerce, bully and intimidate adult men who know they're raping her, because at least these fuckers aren't her own father. Remember when Bobby breaks down crying with Laura in his arms, realizing she's only using him for cocaine, and he just gives it to her anyway cause he wants her to be happy? He just knows that she's in pain and he can't really help and he needs her, and it's fine. She needs these drugs. Maybe she needs these drugs. You can't get her off drugs. What can you do for her? What can anyone do for her? Nobody appreciated how Bobby was a good man all along but his own dad and nobody can understand that because nobody has a time-traveling airforce superdad who can hypnotize you in a diner with the best possible version of yourself he glimpsed in his Project Bluebook heaven research because an actual Good Christian Man might as well be sci-fi!

Oh my god, bro.

It just now occurs to me that I am literally recapping a soap opera to explain the gospel. The cute Polish pup with the muscly veins and roid acne was right, you are obnoxiously American! Well, it's important to remember that if cute little German boys didn't love American melodrama, we wouldn't have the great works of RW Fassbinder.

I win and this is an effective hybridization of film criticism and spirituality which rightfully makes actual Christians look like aesthetically and intellectually stunted-dweebs formaldehyded into guppies by doctrine!

My page is so much fun, you will not see this shit elsewhere. Never forget how special you are to me for appreciating my words, brothers.

Laura, you see, understands the nature of discreet energetic resonance.

Laura knows that the essentialized state which underlies fetishism is not simply sympathetic psychological association, nor strictly a consequence of molecular chemistry. While Laura would agree that, yes (for Laura is keen-eyed and scientifically-minded, yet nevertheless -- is not blind to subtler forces at work in the world around her) that if your cute lil queer boy ass wanted to lick an alpha man's armpits cause it tastes real woody and salty almost like a saltwater toffee, but a bit more mulchy and mushroomy, like -- yeah, there'd deffo be a molecular component, for you would be inhaling his pheromones direct and they would be seeping into your tongue creating fast-acting pathways straight to your brain, and yeah -- your direct proximity to a hunky alpha man's muscular triceps and biceps and big meaty pecs would cement the paraphilic association, acting as both a trigger and deepening a visual impression around which your mind would naturally mold itself, allowing your body to follow -- all of that is true. She would probably agree in 2023 Twin Peaks reboot timeline where she's watching gay tumblr porn prolly cause she finds it lolzy and how gay are Mike and Bobby, actually? At least as gay as Donna is for me, right? Am I ready to speak publicly about how gay I suspect Donna is for me? She's basically a little sister. I can't believe she grows up to be the bad guy in Men in Black 2 before fully morphing into Pete Burns. Holy shit. Maybe I am a mean bitch. Why the fuck do I wanna come for Donna so bad? I just feel she brings it on herself?

All that aside, Laura understands the essentialized state transferred by a fetishistic object is primarily energetic. That is, as everything is vibrational, one might say that a shirt worn by a person, or their underwear, vibrates at the same frequency as that person, coming to -- in time -- carry subtle traces of that person, for the very fibers of the garment could be said to have been energetically infused via the pitch or the sound at which the individual's spirit resonates or sings, and things such as smell, while real -- are themselves closer to self-induced inductions where we recall distant days and so surrender ourselves -- making ourselves blank to receive the song we'll never hear.

Laura wears her mother's clothes. In another deleted scene, Sarah chastises Laura for taking one of her sweaters, then not only not returning it, but leaving it balled up on the floor of her closet. Later, Sarah wonders if Laura took her sweater again, for she'd spent all afternoon looking for it, only for Laura to then say rather pointedly "Mom. What are you wearing?" Prompting Sarah to glance down, and slip into a fount of weeping, to which Laura slowly and tenderly approaches.

We understand. Sarah has some demons in her. Sarah sees the visions of the white horse. That wasn't explained for a long time, and even now that it has been, it's still not something which is readily sensible to the casual majority of viewers. The explanation is given, but the intellect refuses it, for it confounds the intellect's neat and tidy categorical schematizations. The white horse is frustrating for it is both obscure and obvious. The readily material explanation is drugs, slang, things one step removed from immediate reality. You can have Abe Lincoln descend from the Sky in Blackface and Crush People's Brains Open before Reciting In Slant Rhyme the Answer All Along to Mock to Your Face Your Conscious, Logical, Route Memorization Sensibilities, but in truth, the image is less paradoxical than a depiction of a current and emerging unity.

Sarah's memory maybe isn't all there. Sarah's had her mind played with. Sarah's been on some shit. How much has Sarah been playing along all along? How much does it only look that way, for she doesn't see?

How much does she always allow?

Mom. What are you wearing?

Mom, are you wearing Sarah?

Laura takes off her face.

Laura is filled with Light.

Saraha takes off her face.

Sarah is filled with Darkness.

Sarah has Laura's smile.

Sarah has a swollen spirit finger.

What would it mean for her -- to know the man she loved, wasn't only cheating on her, not only abusing her daughter, but both in a single act which violated the very underpinnings of both their marriage and their family; to feel she had brought this on herself, by selecting this man, by... not being enough ... by breeding a whore ... why would this happen?

Did you sit there after the reveal of Laura's killer and see this woman standing upright, eyes-alert at her husband's funeral, vowing to be awake, vowing to be present, vowing to remember and to live?

Do you remember how she was then written out of the show forever? How nobody cared? Nobody wanted to look at her? Nobody wanted to think about what happened? Everybody wanted to immediately forget. Nobody wanted to admit that it was happening. Bobby cried out at Laura's funeral that they collectively killer her by ignoring what was obvious and nobody said anything. Bobby was right all along. Bobby was never the real asshole. Bobby was maybe one of the only people who really loved her almost selflessly despite being an infantile douchebag who got secondhand raped by his shrink, who -- oh yeah. Was a jealous older man pining away listlessly and leeringly for underage Laura's hot and heavy secret trauma, who wanted to fuck with Bobby for being a badboy hot jock with powerful latent telepathic abilities, the likes of which his false-gold Mercurial debt-scheme which miraculously works only on cyclopean state champ wresler kooks with amazing pussy control could never hope to dream, let alone conceptualize in false 3D.

Mike the Man grew up to be an insurance agent because of course he did.

Remember how Sarah only came back in at the last minute to deliver a message from the realm of chthonian spiritual trial, reduced and elevated to a cameo, being both chorus and iteral messenger of a hidden devil?

Fuckin sucks for her, am I right? Prolly made her a lil loopy while it was happening, then -- once everyone she thought was a friend or family ignores her cause now she's nothing but a walking reminder, invisibly reduced to a pariah in her own life, it's like she does nothing but sits and festers in a wound of her own making which will never heal.

Damn.

She sat in that house. Where it happened. For 25 years.

In front of the television.

While nobody talked about it.

You know, I've always just really liked Grace Zabriskie. I was sad when she was murdered in Child's Play 2. This is the only thing by David Lynch she's in where she's not already alarming and insidious. Wild at Heart. Disabled Vampyre Ritual Mexican Sex Assassin. Inland Empire. Your 6th grade history teacher harboring an omen of immanent death before using her witch powers to rearrange time. The Return. Literally Queen of Darkness. There she is, folks. The Mother of Evil.

Here in the pilot, she is simply a primal wail of despair which induces some to laughter simply for its intensity disturbs their peace of mind and they must laugh to hold their fragile rational framework together.

(You may attempt to prove me wrong if it would please you.)

Therefore we understand. Whatever is in Sarah is in Laura and whatever is in Laura is in Sarah. They're, now you sense, energetically tethered -- not only cut from the same cloth, for her flesh was stitched of her loom, but if their strings were plucked, they would produce pleasing sounds of a similar timber, and none could confirm this better than Leland Palmer, father, husband and brother, who has readily plucked them both!

You understand now fully -- why, for Laura, at the Pink Room called The Power and the Glory, to see Donna as the image of Ronette, a prostitute saved only at the last moment by providence, that she may open the door to beckon Laura's protective spirit -- why to see Donna wearing Laura's sweater would incense her as to leap to Donna's rescue and cease all further consumption of libation and ritual sex. Laura remembers who she is, and what she values. She doesn't want Donna to be like her. She doesn't want Donna to do what she inevitably does -- investigate her double, triple, quintuple life, adopt her manner and her attitudes, seduce naive doofy biker idiots and cute agoraphobic nerds who are so sheltered and fragile they will suicide at the first sign of betrayal.

She doesn't want her stable family life to fall apart when she discovers that she-bitch Audrey Horne is her sister, holy shit. It was so obvious. If Donna had any charisma she'd be Audrey, who is too feisty and independent which is why her own father never tried to rape her!

Why would her own father try to rape her? Her father has a healthy and trusting creative-personal-business relationship with his brother. Her father lacks the core loneliness to make him that kind of monster. Neither Donna nor Audrey understand men, which is why they're not Laura. Laura understanding men makes her Best Girl. The fact that her own father never tried to rape her made Audrey feel so weirdly inadequate -- much like Donna -- that she has to do mentally ill things like hide naked in Hunky FBI men's bedrooms before dishing out her daddy issues.

God. Thank God our old pal Coop's semi-autonomous AI demon-half shot a corruption load in her so she had a raise a hellspawn, marry her accountant, then go insane wishing she was still young and pretty!

Joshy Fuck Me. That's what I say instead of Jesus fuck now!

I was gonna keep this G-rated for language, but holy shit!

This shit's got as much rape and incest as an actual bible story, I'm just gonna assume you're all adults and have the psychological resilience to handle a dirty word or two, ooooh. What if I post a middle-finger pic? Like and reblog telling me if you would swoon or drenche yer knickers.

Rather tellingly, all Leland can see as he arrives up to pick up Laura for breakfast -- is this same fear of Laura herself. He sees Laura seated beside Donna on the couch, and remembers the day he was almost the John to his own underage prostitute daughter, arranged via their mutual connection, Theresa Banks, his earlier kill in Deer Meadow one year prior.

God, imagine how that must feel for the poor guy!

Ya fuck your own daughter's brains out in a drug-induced demonic trance, thinkin she'll have the common sense to be trauma bonded ta ya for life, but nooooooo. She wants to be out here like that totally scary and unfuckable little Audrey bitch threatening to cut off daddy's tiny peepee with her intimidating precocious little scientific intellect. Girls are scary! If they're not dumb, they're gonna notice how dumb we are first! We need to destroy their capacity to think and feel with our dicks! This is the right way of the land, for it is the right of the conqueror, the female being fecund and plenty as the soil and just as fit to trod upon.

I love America! It's real fun to pollute and rape!

I mean I absolutely believe Dolores seduced Humbert, let's not kid ourselves. Humbert Humbert may have had a silver tongue, but he was not leading man material, folks. Humbert Humbert wishes he was James Mason, but Kubrick's film of Lolita is a perverse Wonderland full-immersion in the psychopathic ideations of a pedophile verging on a pederast for Humbert is so fucking hipster and selective of his vintage, he will only rape little girls in these precise specific age ranges, holy shit.

You are the most autistic and socially inept sex monster! I really believe all the women you meet are throwing themselves at you and Peter Sellers is the neurotic spazz radio man of a thousand voices. Kubrick's film is an irony which requires a level of psychological detachment which verges on psychopathic. It's more-than-less a feature-length 4chan joke, and I understand nobody will understand or appreciate it as a sterling treatise on irony as insurmountable as I do and I accept and appreciate this. Dolly can absolutely be aware of the sexual power she can wield over an infantile adult male, and it can still be illegal, immoral and that man's fault when he succumbs to his emotional weakness and rapes a child.

Joshy fuck me. Uncomfortable people leap to stupid fucking conclusions cause they're basically animals! People who are uncomfortable talking about raping children prolly wanna rape children, there I said it. I have only ever wanted to rape powerful and virile athletic men of an appropriate age and ferment, for I am a conqueror, a king, an alpha.

Well, you see -- Laura couldn't protect Donna, same as nobody could save Laura. In the end, Laura was the only one who could save herself.

Laura gave her body, to protect her Soul. When she places the Jade ring around her finger and weds herself to the Spiritual Mike, the Shoe Salesman and One-Armed Man Whose severed Autonomous Limb became First a Dwarf, then an Axxonal Bubblegum Tree, she was Free of Bob's Influence, and so ... Bob no longer able to farm her, was compelled by obligation to his former master to reap and immediately harvest her.

To put this in an economical sense more readily graspable for earthly carnivores, when Laura put on the ring, she allowed herself to be claimed by Mike, thus becoming His Property. BOB -- the spirit inside Leland -- once being Mike's familiar, now a runaway, was compelled by his very nature to kill this girl who had given herself to his master. As BOB had sought her out, slow-cooked her, flavored her, BOB saw Laura as his and wanted to enjoy her for a long, long time. When Laura gave herself to Mike, BOB was himself forced to sell now, and trade a good long steady drip for an immediate short-term gorging, most of which he then needed to immediately discharge submissively at the feet of his master.

For Laura had wedded herself to a demon, her soul was placed in the Black Lodge. Yet, Laura did not wed herself to a demon for any desire for earthly power or authority, but for it was a way to minimize malign influence. Laura's spiritual wedding was simple, practical harm-reduction. If BOB had corrupted Laura and entered her body, BOB could use her connections to every artery of the town to spread this influence everywhere. Laura "chose to let herself be killed" because this was in line with her dominant value of protecting the innocence she lost.

Look at Deer Meadow, the setting of the prologue to the film. See how little life means there. See how its evident nature as a stained and distorted reflection of the eponymous town was clear even before the doppelganger motif took stage as primary thematic preoccupation. Remember how nobody knew Theresa. Nobody came forward to claim the body. She was a drifter, a statistic, no family. Totally forgotten.

See how it was the love of real people who tried, who stepped forward, who had a desire to connect, and to care, and serve, despite the fears, the follies, the secrets and entanglements of other people in a vanishing tribal structure and way of life we do not and may not ever understand.

See how anyway, they never spoke.

For a time, they did.

Then all was inevitably forgotten.

See how it was through the laws of cause and effect; the accumulation and deterioration of karma as a debt, that Laura self-actualizes by taking control of her life by taking control of her death, that she breaks the cycle of violence and is so uplifted into Grace and Reverence.

See how the angel which came as she sat splendid and curled in the velvets of the Red Room was of her own making, as the one which appeared to open the door of the car for Ronette was of her own making, the lights splendid and alive as if hung ourselves on our own tree!

Tell yourself, brothers, as our sisters our able. That we deserve to be forgiven. That others will forgive us when we forgive ourselves. Any crime which may be mended may be done as such when we approach one another with a firm grasp of truth in an open heart. We were not born to be corrupted. We are not lowly and bestial. We are not the pawns of the powers that be, nor fated to sell ourselves half-willingly into slavery. If it is in a market that we must we live, we may set our value with those of so little they would design to ever think to put one on a human life.

Of this now, and at this time, I have said enough.

On another day, I will return to the ways in which our leading man and hero, chipper and chivalrous knight of the FBI -- boyscout in black tie --- who is easily able to clear the low bar of taking a high school girl crush out for ice cream and a pep talk instead of feeling her up, he already being telepathic enough to know a girl'd be murdered here a year ago, instead of, like ... y'know... fondling her prone naked body -- I will return to the ways in which he complements and contrasts the enigmas of our heroine, he being, by means of his multiplicity, quite an enigma himself.