#WOAH OKAY I DIDNT EXPECT TO DROP THIS ON YOU GWEN

[forabeatofadrum]

@cerriddwenluna replied to your post “got some news from home which my mind immediately...”:

Mostly dead or all dead?

​OKAY SO, y'all know my grandma died around a year ago. My grandma was a hoarder (affectionate). During her life, she collected glass perfume bottles. Now she's gone, and the family is left with thousands of perfume bottles. Thousands. I am not kidding. A lot of (wat de fuck is "nabestaanden" in het Engels?) nabestaanden have gotten some as a memory of her. I have four on my windowsill. We've sold some, cause throwing them away feels kind of wrong. As in, yeah, gran dead, let's kick out her life's work! So we sold some, because we'd rather make other collectors who can appreciate it happy. But, as my family has noticed after a year, daar is geen beginnen aan. Basically, throwing them away is really the easiest, but again, that feels bad. We have no use for them, but it really was her life's work, some of her most prized possessions.

(I have a fic-related point. Bear with me.)

Today I got the news that apparently a castle wants the perfume bottles. I do not know the details, so I don't know if my family is selling or donating, or if the castle wants all of them, or only a couple of hundred, but basically a castle wants them for a museum. They will display her name and present it in an exhibition and I may or may not have almost cried. The idea of having a woman's life work portrayed like that. She is dead, gone, deceased, and yet her work lives on. It is so insignificant on a large scale, yet still significant in its own way. Ever since my uncle died in 2020 and my grandma died in 2022 I have been thinking about legacy and what not, and how we have all these things, but how in a couple of years times, personal belongings of deceased people will be of value because they teach something about ordinary life. For example, I also inherited a book from my grandma. It was written in, I think, the 1860s and it is a dissertation on the first constitution of the Netherlands and I don't give a shit about law, but the fact that this man's dissertation ended up in my grandma's house and that I was able to find him online (geboorteakte, overlijdingsakte, you know) is spectacular. And that I was moved. That I was sad to see he died relatively young. And you may have heard that there's a exhibition on class photo's somewhere. I saw it on het Jeugdjournaal. You know, that kind of stuff? That really moves me. That I can go to an exhibition that displays stranger's belongings and that I can be moved by the thought that they were there, and that they mattered, and the fact that it's happening to my grandma... oh BOy.

And because I am me, and because I still use Klaine fanfiction as the way to express myself (I mean, I didn't write River fic for nothing), I came up with a fic idea of Kurt anno 2023 going to a fashion exhibition and there he finds a massive, massive bow tie collection from the (recently?) deceased B.D. Anderson and he is so moved in the way that I am moved that he is compelled to find out more about this B.D. Anderson. As in, the fic will express what I feel now, and how legacy is being held up, or how useless things can become meaningful as time passes. Basically how Kurt learns about Blaine's life. It starts by thinking: "Damn, who is this B.D. Anderson who collected a shit ton of bowties during his long life?" and how he becomes invested in this story, the same way I can get invested in learning about ordinary people who have died, in the same way someone might get invested in my grandma's life.

But, uh, yeah, Blaine is dead, totally fucking dead-dead, in this idea and if he weren't, then he'd still be way too fucking old for Kurt. Maybe this is going nowhere. Maybe I will find a way. Who knows. But that's what was on my mind.