#also sometimes I sit there with an Italian origin text that I first have to edit and it's like do I not understand what this says because

[linguenuvolose]

I do a lot of translation in my job and I've started enjoying it so much more since I started letting myself be a bit more free in my translations. Communicating the message and the vibe is more important than the phrase structure or wording being exactly the same.

[queer-triple-a]

A Catholic Transition

Introduction

Hello!

Before I say anything else, I need to tell you that today’s story deals so so much with religion. Specifically, it deals with Catholicism. 

I found this story mostly by accident. I didn’t realize the writer was actually living in a convent when she started this journal until I had already read the first translated entry. I could see that it was a very religious person and was already writing it off as something I didn’t even need to finish. 

Then it got Queer. 

So I’m sharing this story with the major asterisk that this character is Catholic and talks A LOT about Catholicism. This includes many direct bible quotes. 

(See endnotes for information about King James, of the King James Bible)

(And a link to information about lesbian nuns and gay priests)

My publishing of this story is not an endorsement of the Catholic Church. It is meant to show another way a queer person has existed in history. This person's religious journey is entangled with their queer journey. 

If reading something with multiple bible quotes by a person who belongs to the Catholic church is not for you, then please take care of yourself and skip this one. No judgment from me. 

That being said, if you do choose to read this, I hope you find something meaningful in these journals.

(Oh, also, this journal is from sometime in the mid 1400s and was translated from Italian. The bible verses were in Latin. They used the New International Version translation of the bible. And because the numbers on the psalms didn’t match up and I got confused, It turns out psalm numbers shifted by one at one point. So the translated psalms use modern numbers, but the original text does not.)

Content Warnings: 

Catholicism

Direct Bible Quotes

Authors Note link

Link to this story on my site 

Journal

Psalm 139 1 You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. 2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. 3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. 4 Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely. 5 You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

Oh gracious and everloving God My every thought is subject to your knowledge You know the struggles which I hold my heart You hear the prayers I say in privacy Desires which pass from my lips are known by you before I take breath

What I know of my heart, you must also know. I pray for respite from this powerful wisdom I long to unknow my soul For it is not that of a brother, but a sister

I have said my prayers Yet, my knowledge remains steadfast and firm Are my prayers to be unanswered? The Son says what we ask shall be received? I ask for this knowledge to be taken from me I pray my soul becomes as my brothers Again and again I lift my voice in words you hear. I hurt, and you know my pain.

As the persistent widow of the Gospel of Luke, I shall persist I pray again for relief from pain or clarity of your path and your divine design Amen

[The first page of this image is included below. The second page is translated in the next section. This was done in order to distinguish different entries in the journal]

Psalm 13913 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

In a new day, I feel your love Your answer to my prayers and my turmoil

Oh Lord, you who made me as I am You knew me before my first breath As I was created in her womb Crafted carefully by your hands My mother knew not if I was son or daughter

But you knew even then Oh all knowing and ever loving God, If my self was not hidden from your sight as my mother carried me Then you, who made my body and knew my soul, Made me as I am.

The poor match of body and soul May therefore be by your design. For I am made in your image I am made by your hands You formed this path before me

You are the God of Hope If my path is that of a Brother I feel no hope

I recall Psalm 16 11 You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

If my path is that of a brother There is no fullness of Joy

I trust your word, Oh Lord Through prayer and meditation I begin to see my path

A Sister in Christ. A life devoted to God the Father. My prayers from the lips of a woman. I shall be myself to others As you have always known me.

Oh gracious, all-knowing God Who formed me and knows me I ask of you the fortitude to see myself fully You are the way and the truth, oh God I pray that you might guide me along this path I have been lost in myself Let this new sight not blind me to your will In Jesus name, I pray Amen

[The translation below only includes the second page of the above image.]

[ The first page of this image is included below. The second page is translated in the next section. This was done in order to distinguish different entries in the journal.]

Psalm 28 6 “Praise be to the Lord, for he has heard my cry for mercy. 7 The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy and with my song I praise him.”

My Lord, I pray I understand the way you’ve set before me. It is by your will and in accordance with my prayers that I shall move to the Monastery of Saint Marinos. You have opened a path for a brother of my monastery to join their religious community. Though it is expected that a brother lost will be a brother gained, I know the rumors The records there are not well kept. I now see it may have been your plan that I should hear stories of Brothers who ran unnoticed of Sisters who appeared unannounced. Surely this is the path I must take if I want to serve my Lord as a woman. Surely this is the path I must take if I want to serve my Lord as myself. If it is not the way you’d have me take, please guide Brother Edwy to choose another for this movement. I have pledged you my obedience. No matter the personal cost or reward, I shall obey thy will. As your one and only Son said on the eve of his death, “Let not my will, but Yours be done” In his name I pray, Amen

[The translation below only includes the second page of the above image.]

[The first page of this image is included below. The second page is translated in the next section. This was done in order to distinguish different entries in the journal.]

Psalm 66 1 Shout for joy to God, all the earth! 2 Sing the glory of his name; make his praise glorious.

19 But surely God has listened to and has heard my prayer. 20 Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!

My Lord, I praise you and thank you. My mind is filled with the bountiful answer to my prayers I have found it a spiritual challenge to kneel in prayer for anything but gratitude to you my Lord I sing Thanks Be To God! For I was welcomed into this new convent with grace and kindness. There is no doubt in who I am. I give you thanks that those who believe in your truth believe in mine as well. My truth, as Sister Agnus, is now aligned with your path - your truth for me I exalt your guidance, which brought me here.

It is through trust in you that I complete my days. I was not trained in a convent - but a monastery. There are rituals which overlap, but there are differences as well. In these moments, I turn to you, and you answer me.

You guide me through the dark and into the brilliant sunlight. I thank you Lord, with all that I am, I thank You Amen

[The translation below only includes the second page of the above image.]

[The first page of this image is included below. The second page is translated in the next section. This was done in order to distinguish different entries in the journal.]

I have begun to study the stories of your daughters Oh Lord In my research, I find sisterhood I see beyond my desire to be as they are - A want which I only now know how to name - I see myself and my story in these women

1 Samuel 1 26 and she said to him, “Pardon me, my lord. As surely as you live, I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the Lord. 27 I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. 28 So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.” And he worshiped the Lord there.”

As Hannah before me, I prayed We prayed to you through doubt A private mantra - a conversation between ourselves and our God Hannah Prayed for a child In her dedicated piety she promised the bounty of her prayer to you I, too, offer what I received from prayer Myself - as I am - has been dedicated to you

As your ancestor Ruth I left my home With uncertain future I set my sights on a relationship with god Ruth received in you a family, I received the same: a Sisterhood

As the women of the bible, I give you my all In your name I pray Amen

[The translation below only includes the second page of the above image.]

God bless me with strength and peace Brother Edwy shall visit tomorrow I pray for your grace and guidance if he should recognize me. Please grant my brother in Christ your sight and your wisdom. If it happens that he sees me Let him see my faith and joy as Sister Agnus Let him have the wisdom to recognize Sister Agnus as the servant of God he has known before. Let him see me and know me as you do In Jesus name I pray Amen

My memory of the blessing said over me by Brother Edwy

I bless you in the name of The Father The Son The Holy Ghost The Blessed Trinity of Identity God in Three Persons

Lord I did not know the plans you held for Brother Linus when he left the monastery Nor do I know now what the future holds for Sister Aguns I put my faith in you to guide her forward

Our shared vocation is built upon a shared personal relationship with the Lord And supported by a community of God’s children united in one faith, one purpose I shall neither question the strength of my sisters devotion nor the community she has made her home For she is your child and is made righteous in her service unto you

Sister Agnus is a vessel for your good works, Oh God. Bring her your peace as she walks the path you have laid before her In your name, I bless her, May your peace and love be with her always, Amen

Psalm 62 1 Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from him. 2 Truly he is my rock and my salvation’ he is my fortress, I will never be shaken.

My soul is filled with the peace and love of God

Outroduction

As promised, here are some tangents about the queer history of Catholicism.

information about King James

Podcast episode about Lesbian Nuns and Gay Priests

To those who skipped to the end notes, your choices are valid, and so are you. I hope to see you next time. I promise it won’t be more religion. 

To those who didn’t skip, thank you for reading this story. Despite its messy context, I think it’s still valuable that this story is shared. I hope you agree. 

Queer people are everywhere, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Chrys

[grinoir]

Religious Medievalism: “Stregheria”, Wicca and History - part 1

[TN: This article will break the Introduction to Stregoneria series for a second, but I believe it’s important to set things into perspective about both Witchcraft and this blog. My goal is to put out content, translated or redacted by me, in order to give people the correct historical information. I see a lot people on TikTok messing with things they don’t know, appropriating and distorting practices and cultures and profiting off of it. The only focus of this blog is the practice and the history behind it, I don’t want to “put people down”, I want to make the information available so you won’t hurt yourselves.

Also, I do not support fa***sm, na**sm or any other movement/ideology that oppresses and discriminates people. I’m specifiying this because I’ve received an anonymous ask about it and it kind of hurt just reading it. I hope this will clarify things and make whoever asked me that more confortable with my blog and my content. I’m a history nerd Strega, nothing more.

This article will be a translation, synthesis and re-elaboration of the following articles

https://tradizioneitaliana.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/medievalismo-religioso-stregheria-wicca-e-storia/

https://medievaleggiando.it/la-legittimazione-storica-della-wicca-margaret-murray-e-la-manipolazione-delle-fonti/

https://medievaleggiando.it/il-vangelo-delle-streghe-e-linizio-della-wicca-il-fascino-di-un-falso-storico/

The first being a rectification of the two that follow.

This article will be divided in two parts because it’s way too long to read and to translate, i’m drained af]

THE DEBUNKING OF MURRAY

Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963) was a British Anthropologist and Egyptologist, well known in the academic environment for her contributions in the studies of folklore. Even if she was very criticized and her reputation as an historian was poor, her work became popular bestsellers from 1940 onward.

The most well-known and controversial one is “The Witch-Cult in the Western Europe” published in 1921. In this book, Murray alleges that there was some sort of secret model of pagan resistance to Christianity spreaded all across Europe, and that the witches’ hunt and the proof presented to the trials were an attempt to eliminate a rival cult.

This book was clearly influenced by “Satanism and Witchcraft” by Jules Michelet, that alleged that Medieval Witchcraft was an act of popular rebellion against the oppression of feudalism and the Roman Catholic church, that took the form of a secret religion inspired by paganism and organized mainly by women.

To support her narrative, Murray chooses to analyze some of the trials that took place during the great hunt and employs 15 primary sources, mostly British or Scottish (not paneuropean, or sources from the european continent), that describe famous trials. Murray’s analysis of the Somerset Trials in 1664 offer a good example of her work ethics; quoting the testimony of Elizabeth Styles:

“At their meeting they have usually Wine or good Beer, Cakes, Meat or the like. They eat and drink really when they meet in their bodies, dance also and have Musick. The Man in black sits at the higher end, and Anne Bishop usually next him. He useth some words before meat, and none after, his voice is audible, but very low.”

Murray conveniently seems to “forget” to quote the immediately preceding phrase:

”That at every meeting before the Spirit vanisheth away, he appoints the next meeting place and time, and at his departure there is a foul smell.”

Other details offered by Styles are omitted, like when she alleges that the Devil presented to her in the shape of a dog or a cat or a fly, that the Devil offered her followers an oinment to use on their heads and wrists that made it possible to move them from a place to another. Or that sometimes the reunion involved only the spirits of the witches, while their bodies stayed at home.

Murray was fully aware of the fantasy element in the testimonies she included in her books, but she was able, by deliberately manipulating historical sources, to make people believe the fake narrative that a Medieval religion of witches with covens, rites and their own beliefs that relentlessy opposed Christianity really existed.

In her “The God of the Witches”, published in 1933 and clearly written for a commercial audience, she further broadened the scope of her claims on the witches’ cult. In this book, she alleges that until the C17th BCE the there was a religion, older than Christianity, that kept existing in all of Western Europe. Said religion, was focused on the worship of a two-faced horned god, known to the Romans ad Diano; this god presided the witches’ gathering and was mistaken by the Inquisition of the Devil, conclusion that made them associate witchcraft with a satanic cult.

Murray claims the existence of a *specific* non-christian organized cult spread all across Europe that worshipped Diano and relentlessly opposed the Roman Catholic church, but the sources she quotes are late and recount the flattening of the various “pagan” cults to the assimilation with the christian Devil, operated by the Church.

In fact, the Devil that the trials report on, depending on the religion, overlapped with different figures: in British and Scottish traditions the Devil was the result of the demonization of the King of Elphame. In the Basque country, the Devil substituted Mari. In Northern Italy it overlapped with the Donna del Buon Gioco. This means that the “Northern Italian Devil” is different from the “British Devil” and the “Basque Devil”.

This “Devil” is a figure that flattens everything and overlapped and substituted so many different figures, depending on the religion and the figure it ended up overlapping with.

Therefore, Murray’s narrative of a paneuropean cult of the Horned God stems from the analysis of late sources and to the false equivalence of the Devil that presided the Ludus (Sabba) in Scotland (where he masks the King of Elphame) and the Devil of other countries (where he masks other entities).

Since the Devil isn’t the same entity in all of Europe, the narrative of a counter-christianity organized paneuropean cult of prehistoric origin falls too. Instead, what we’re dealing with are Medieval, non-christian rielaborations of different remainders of the Religions of the Gentiles that survived in the Christian age and were absorbed in the legend of the Faery Procession/Procession of the Dominae Nocturnae first, and the legend of the Ludus (Sabba) later.

The following quote by Ronald Hutton, English historian who specialises in Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and Contemporary Paganism and professor at the University of Bristol, confirms this:

“Over a quarter of a century ago, I adopted the expression “Pagan survivals” to describe elements of ancient Pagan culture that had persisted in later Christian societies. In doing so, I was drawing a distinction between such survivals, of which there seemed to be many, and “surviving Paganism”; that is the continued self-conscious practice of the older religions, of which there seemed to be none. This point was worth making because even in the 1980s, there was a persisting belief, based on outdated academic texts, that Paganism had survived as a living force among the common people in much of medieval Europe: it was widespread in other scholarly disciplines than history, let alone among the general public. My formula and approach was adopted by other authors in the 1990s. During that decade, however, a reaction set in against it among historians who preferred to stress the comprehensive Christianization of medieval European societies and to relegate elements that had hither to been identifed as of pagan origin to categories of religiously neutral folklore or of lay Christianity. Some emphasized that the undoubted tendency of some Christians at the time to condemn such beliefs and practices as pagan was a hallmark of a highly atypical, reforming, intolerant and evangelical strain of churchman. Michael’s system of classification, in this volume, may be said to take its place in this, apparently now dominant, set of scholarly attitudes. Revisiting the issue myself, I am inclined to meet it halfway. I am startingto agree that to speak of aspects of medieval culture as “Pagan” might indeed be misleading and inadequate. Moreover, it would be especially inappropriate to characterize fgures such as the lady of the night rides, the fairy queen or the Cailleach as “Pagan survivals” when they seem like medieval or post-medieval creations. However, I have equal diffculty in describing them simply and straightforwardly as “Christian” because of their total lack of reference to any aspect of Christianity, including theology, cosmology, scripture and liturgy; all of them would indeed fit far more comfortably into a Pagan world-picture. […] It may be that the old polarized labels are becoming inadequate to describe a medieval and early modern religious and quasi-religious world that is coming to seem even more complex, exciting and interesting than it had seemed to be before.”

Also Michael Ostling, religious studies scholar focusing on the history, historiography, and representation of witches and witchcraft, confirms this in Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: “Small Gods” at the Margin of Christendom, published in 2018.

“Christians encompass aspects of their prior paganism both by inversion and revaluation. But where traditional spirits remain salient to a Christianized culture in encompassed or inverted form, their ongoing reality ought not to be counted by scholars as a pagan survival—though it is likely to be so construed by Christians themselves. Such “surviving” spirits are not just marginalized or diabolized pagan remnants, they are continually re-performed, recreated through Christian ritual and Christian discourse. We find such re-creation of the small gods throughout Christian history, and throughout this volume: when the Urapmin drive out the motobil by the power of the Holy Spirit, when Andean people frame their propitiation of the yawlu with devotion to the Christian God, when Mami Water appears primarily as a trope of Pentecostal deliverance ministry, when thirteenth-century Frenchwomen see, in an unoffcial Christian saint, their best hope of negotiating the return of their stolen babies from the follets, when the brownie and Robin Goodfellow appear in prayers of protection against them, in assertions of their diabolical status, or in tolerant mention of superstitious old wives who stillbelieve in such “harmless devils,” when cunningwomen insist that they only use “good devils” or that the fairies who facilitate their divination have no fear of the cross, this is because the beings involved have succeeded in taking up a niche within Christian discourse. The “good people” have not departed, have not been driven out by the sound of church-bells or the smell of gasoline. There are no pagan survivals: small gods are Christian creations with which to think the limits of Christianity.”

In essence, Murray’s version of events that describes Paganism as an anti-church, anti-society isn’t backed by any historical evidence.

Sources:

https://tradizioneitaliana.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/medievalismo-religioso-stregheria-wicca-e-storia/

https://medievaleggiando.it/la-legittimazione-storica-della-wicca-margaret-murray-e-la-manipolazione-delle-fonti/

https://medievaleggiando.it/il-vangelo-delle-streghe-e-linizio-della-wicca-il-fascino-di-un-falso-storico/

Michael Ostling. Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

[beewolfwrites]

An Iron Box - Of Mermaids and Ragged Claws

@cheshiya @tenseoyong @szallejhscorner @something-more-original-please @ofsunsetsandpoetries @nek0dzuken @allozaur

Hello again! Just got another chapter of this here for you. 

Unfortunately it’s not as long as the others, partially because the next chapter will be a big one! That’s right, the wound-dressing scene. But it’s also because life has been getting in the way of writing. Things should be back to normal soon though :) 

Here’s the AO3 link as always.

Enjoy!!

----------------------------------------------

It was a mixture of curiosity and boredom that brought me to the second-hand bookshop submerged within Tokyo’s backstreets. I had visited a number of times in the real world to find used textbooks at cheaper prices, not because I couldn’t afford to buy new versions, but because the old books were often filled with annotations and small drawings from previous students. It was fascinating to me, the secrets they spilled within the anonymity of the pages. 

In this other world, the Borderlands, it looked exactly the same. Except the sunlight couldn’t reach this small alley, leaving the store cold and dark. And this time, I wasn’t here for textbooks. 

I pushed open the door, sliding along the narrow gaps between the stacks of old books. There was a dampness in the air that hadn’t been present in the real world, but that wasn’t unusual. In this place, time seemed to pass in a way that I couldn’t fathom, and the books were now sitting, unloved and unthumbed on their mildewed shelves. Locating the world literature section was simple enough, but finding the exact text I was looking for was another matter. All I had was a few measly lines. 

‘I have known the eyes already, known them all – the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, and when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin.’ 

She had never mentioned the title, nor the poet. But even now, the lines stuck out to me. As did her reason for reciting them. 

‘The way you look at me sometimes… it makes me feel like a bug, like I’m a specimen and you’re studying me. I hate it when you look at me like that.’ 

I had been studying her. I still was. However, something had shifted. I no longer cared for uncovering her weaknesses, and I no longer had any interest in exploiting them. I was here for a different purpose entirely. 

I squinted at the strange fonts on cracked spines until I found the foreign poetry collections. And since I had no means of knowing where to start, I began at the ‘A’ section. It was an arduous task, and part of me wondered why I even cared enough to draw out every book one by one, flipping through the endless pages, absentmindedly scanning poem after poem, only to find nothing. 

I pulled out what felt like the hundredth book. The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot. it wasn’t a name that was familiar to me, but none of these names were. Poetry was of no significance to me. The first one was particularly long, reeling on and on, and I almost skipped to the next when the end of a stanza caught my eye. 

‘I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room. 

So how should I presume?’

There was something about the style of it that echoed the lines I was looking for, and slowing down, I carefully read the next stanza. 

There they were. Her lines. The ones she had said reminded her of me. 

This was the poem. 

Returning to the beginning, I decided to read it properly rather than simply casting my eyes over it. 

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, hm? 

It was a strange title, and even stranger, there was a whole stanza at the beginning that was in Latin? No, Italian. Considering the rest had been translated into Japanese, I could only assume this particular stanza had been written in Italian in the original. 

What’s the point in having a section only certain people can read? 

This man, T.S. Eliot, probably considered himself a member of high-society. Instinctively, I wanted to toss it away. A writer who assumed himself to be better than his readers was only good for one thing - as a human shield in a game. However, I persisted, forcing myself to read on. 

The poem jumped around absurdly. One moment, he was talking about women coming and going, the next he was describing a strange, moving yellow fog as if it were a cat. As it proceeded, it grew more and more anxious, the poet rambling off course in a series of paranoid remarks, and I must’ve reached half-way through when I decided it needed to be read out loud. 

I must’ve been an idiot, sitting on the floor of a bookstore, reading a poem out loud to myself. But for some peculiar reason, I couldn’t stop. 

‘Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.’

That night, during the Tag game, if I hadn’t extended a hand over the balcony… if I hadn’t pulled her out of the apartment before the tagger opened fire, I would never have had to deal with these curious emotions. It would have been far easier. 

‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’ 

Ch… he isn’t wrong. 

For someone like me, an empty shell of an existence, why was I even here at all? Someone like me could die without being remembered. I would be nothing more than a brief, insignificant flash of life on a tiny planet, living only for myself, and dying alone for it. That was humanity, after all. 

Was it? Not quite. There were exceptions. 

‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.’

She certainly wouldn’t. Although we’d addressed that temper tantrum of hers and come to a truce, someone like her, so driven by emotion and care, wouldn’t return these feelings, whatever they meant. We were too different. She would risk her life to save a boy she had never met, whereas I’d happily sacrifice a pawn of two for the sake of survival. 

That’s why, when I finally realised what this poem was about, I felt my mood begin to darken. It was about a proposal. This man, Prufrock, was gearing himself up to propose. I thought back to the ring I had taken after the Eight of Diamonds, hidden away in my drawer. 

She’ll never find it. 

I would make sure she wouldn’t find it. She could never know. 

The afternoon sun was sinking as I got to my feet, leaving the book of T.S. Eliot’s poems on the dusty carpet. I almost left right then and there, when another idea hit me. I slipped through the tables towards the fiction section. 

‘Have you read much by Haruki Murakami?’

She was a silly girl, referring to Murakami Haruki by his first name. But that was how they spoke over there. I ran my finger along the shelf until I found one of his short story collections, and pulling it out, opened up the chapter page. 

‘Concerning the Sound of a Train Whistle in the Night or On the Efficacy of Fiction.’

That had to be it. 

When I flicked to the right page I found that the story itself was no more than three pages, yet the words burned like fire.

‘I felt like I’d been jammed into a heavy, iron box which had been sunk to the very bottom of the ocean.’

This emptiness was all-consuming. I’d become aware of it even as a small child, that there was something integral missing. Purpose? Perhaps. Affection? My parents had seen me as… what did they actually think of me? 

I had never known.

Even now, this void persisted, and reading each careful word, I had never been more disturbed by a story. Nor had I ever been more certain of what these obtrusive thoughts and feelings really were.

She would never sing to me. I knew that, and yet, as I stepped out of that dark, musty bookstore and into the afternoon sunlight, it was as if something was tugging me back to the Beach, back to where she was. 

And what else could I do but follow? 

[hopetofantasy]

Actress Nora Dari (wtFOCK): “I hope I don't go crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if that happens”

Two years ago she was allowed to bump into Matteo Simoni in ‘Patser’, now your fifteen-year-old knows her as Yasmina from ‘wtFOCK’ and she ended up in Cannes because of the new film by Bas Devos. Where it ends for Nora Dari remains to be seen, but you don't want to get in her way. “You’ve been looking so long for a Moroccan girl who wants to act and then you get me.”

“So I always try to be a bit low key...” She hesitates. "Eumh, do you know what 'low key' means?" "How much of antique do you think I am exactly?" “Gosh. You have a flip cover for your smartphone, I saw.” “Point for Dari. But what are you trying to be a bit low key...” “Huh? Sorry, I have no idea anymore. I was completely distracted by that pigeon over there.” It’s easy to forget - especially when she starts talking in her Genk dialect about her sky-high ambitions or her tough childhood in Winterslag - that Nora Dari is barely seventeen. After all, she’s already accumulated a nice record of achievements in two years. From the Belgian-Finnish crime series ‘Bullets’ (shown on Telenet) and a leading role in ‘wtFOCK’, the online series of SBS and Telenet, to her supporting role in ‘Ghost Tropic’, the most recent full-length movie by Bas Devos, who made the selection of Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes in May. The day after our conversation at an Antwerp terrace, she  leaves for London, for a fourth and final audition for a lead role in an international film project. “It looks good, but I can't tell you anything about it yet. That’s a tough assignment for me: my whole body really wants to scream. Seriously, I'm pretty much the Moroccan Tom Holland (Spider-Man, and the spoiler king of Marvel's Cinematic Universe). But I'll remain silent!”

How does a large, international production house ends up at your door? Nora Dari: “I started knocking on their door. I'm really not going to sit around and wait for someone to discover me miraculously, so if someone gives me a tip about an interesting movie, I'll go after it myself. I always want more and everything I set my mind to, seems to be working. An international series, ‘wtFOCK’, Cannes with my first film role and now this latest project is also within reach. Can you blame me for believing? In my head, I'm already in Hollywood. First become a Shooting Star at the Berlinale.” Just in between everything? Dari: “You can dream, right? Acknowledgement is not for me - I don't even know who decide such things - but rather, it’s a means to an end. If you end up in the same list of acting prodigies (those Shooting Stars) as Marwan Kenzari, Matteo Simoni and Matthias Schoenaerts, every director knows who you are.” You can also quietly build an acting career in Belgium. Or is that really not an option? Dari: “Why should I linger on a few square meters? My world was so small in Winterslag and now that it’s gradually getting bigger, I really don't know why I should stop at Flanders. Even if ambition is a very dirty word where I come from.”

How? Dari: “Winterslag is a neighborhood where many young people are going into the wrong direction. Big dreams are taboo, apparently. I was bullied, mainly because I wanted to start something with my life. Even if I said that I would one day want to go to New York, I would be laughed at: “Just sit down, Nora! Who do you think you are?”

Keep your head down, keep your nose clean and make sure that you can start working at the age of eighteen: something like that? Dari: *nods* “Graduating and going to work at the age of eighteen seems like quite an achievement in Winterslag. If you hadn't gotten into the wrong shit by then, you would’ve done well. At my school, we had two pupils without an immigration background and otherwise exclusively Turks, Moroccans and Italians from families who were really poor. Our parents worked very hard, you spend a lot of time on the street and bad things sometimes happened. *thinks* There’s a reason why I almost exclusively watch gangstershit movies. I come from a neighborhood where a lot of gangstershit happens. I’ve seen and experienced so many bad things, but at the same time Winterslag is such a big part of who I am and I get very angry when someone else talks about it like I do now. *small laugh* 

I’ll buy a house there one day. It’s still my home, all the beautiful things and all the rotten things in one pile. To be clear: I don't want to romanticize my childhood. Winterslag is hard, but nothing to be sad about. There are so many people who have gone through the same thing. Only, it sucks to be called a whore, because you want to do something that is apparently 'not normal'.”

It dawns on me why you once said that Algerian-Canadian Zaho's song Kif'n'dir summed you up quite nicely. Especially the text 'Je fais la morte pour ne pas mourir'. Dari: “That's what I've been doing for a long time. Keeping myself deathly still and don’t stand out too much. In the long run, you also start to believe what others are telling you, that acting is not for you.”

When did you finally stopping ‘being death’? Dari: “When I was fifteen, when I heard that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah were looking for extras for ‘Patser’. That didn't mean much more than just bumping into Matteo Simoni, but I was sold immediately. In between shots, I approached Adil: “Mr. El Arbi, thank you for opening my eyes. From now on, I’ll go all out for this.” *laughs* We clicked and in the meantime we’ve become friends. I hope he thinks of me when they start recording ‘Patsers’, so that I can show how much I've grown in those two years.”

Not much later, through their casting agency Hakuna, you ended up as a suicide bomber in the Finnish-Belgian Crime series ‘Bullets’. What have I missed? How did you go from a sixteen-year-old extra to such an intense role in a few months? Dari: “I think - if I may say that - they were shocked after my casting. I’ve never thrown myself into a project as hard in my life. Whining. Shouting. Tantrums. All fucking emotions, one after the other. You’ve been looking so long for a Moroccan girl who wants to act and then you get me. *laughs* I've never loved anything as much as acting, so I’m giving everything during a casting. I know that I’m not the best and still have to learn, but I suspect my energy is making up for it. That, and I consider myself a very pleasant colleague. *laughs* I greet everyone in a Genk dialect, always walk around smiling and even bring cookies.

I've always had the feeling that I have to work harder than the rest, because people expect less of me. That's what my father taught my brothers and me. At the Liège boarding school where he studied, he was the only Moroccan in Latin studies: his classmates thought he was weird, because of his origins and the other Moroccans looked at him weirdly, because he aimed higher. "Ah, Mr. pope is back there." In the end it became so unbearable that he enrolled in the TSO (technical school), which was socially accepted.”

How does a 16-year-old feel like a suicide bomber? Dari: “They gave me a background, but I added a few things myself to make it easier. And music helps me really hard too: ‘Qui suis-je’ from Scylla on repeat and then a little method acting in that character. My mother was there on set and apparently got terrified. *laughs* I asked them not to accompany me anymore. When I see them, I come back to myself, while I try very hard to forget myself in front of the camera. I need to be able to get into a role on set. Although it remains very strange to hype yourself up for hours with the mantra 'I'm dying and I'm taking all these people with me'. Fortunately, I can also easily let go. I had to, I had exams the next day. *laughs* Suicide bomber by day, studying economy by night.”

In May you hopped around on the Croisette for the world premiere of ‘Ghost Tropic’. You play the daughter of Khadija, a woman who walks home through Brussels after falling asleep on the metro. Devos makes quiet, poetic arthouse films: it’s a huge leap from teenage series and thrillers. Dari: “It was an adjustment, yes. Before I played in ‘Bullets’, I had never even seen a Flemish film. Not a single one. Or wait: one at school. What was it called? I have to give a speech soon, with its protagonist.”

‘Daens’? With Jan Decleir? Dari: “That one! Everything I had already learned about acting was from Hollywood movies. That enlarged playing style also worked in ‘Bullets’, but when I tried that in ‘Ghost Tropic’, Bas blocked it very quickly. *laughs* "The less you do the better, Nora!" I thought about it all too hard. "Nora, just go." “Yes, but Bas, who am I? What have I been through up to this point?” I have a hard time playing without a backstory in my head.”

Did you learn something from Devos? Dari: “Bas and Maaike Neuville told me in Cannes that I shouldn’t forget to live. I was only busy with what should be my next big step, but I also have to learn to enjoy. Surrendering is nothing dirty, but if I put everything aside for this job, I’ll never be able to put content in my characters. Then they’ll give me a heavy role and I’ll get stuck.”

Sensible advice. Alarm bells already went off when I read in ‘Het Belang van Limburg’ that you certainly wanted to remain celibate until you were 27 and wouldn’t continue your studies, just focussing on your career. Dari: “In the end, I’ll study cross-media management and I’ve come back to that other one as well. *laughs* What?! I’m seventeen, I change my mind completely every month. When I am 40, I don't just want to have a nice IMDb profile to look back on.”

'9000 followers? That is more people than have seen my last film', Devos thought humbly in your Instagram Stories. Dari: “I hope ‘Ghost Tropic’ gets more visitors than I have followers, but I'm not going to bitch if only fifty people come to watch the film in the end. I just like to act and have hardly seen anything from ‘Bullets’ or ‘wtFOCK’ myself. When I'm not on set, I just feel bad. As if I'm not getting the most out of my life. 

At the very least, ‘Ghost Tropic’ gave me another experience and I was able to take my father with me, when we went to the Dominican Republic. My grandfather had passed away just before the shoot and we kind of processed that together there, while we were watching the sunrise at five in the morning. A very tender moment. Very cinematic, too. *thinks* I’m a very passionate person. Everything I experience is immediately very big. It’s all hard, good or bad. So hard that I can't always process all the feelings. *dryly* I hope I don't go crazy. I really wouldn't be surprised if that happens.”

You seem to be especially prone to obsessions. Whether it’s making music, painting or acting: if you decide to do something, everything has to make way for it. Dari: “When I got a keyboard, I was immediately very invested in my music. Making beats to accompany my slam poetry, tinkering at night, searching and keeping my parents awake until they went crazy. And then I suddenly got tired of it and started painting. Swimming. Dancing. I also played soccer for a while, mainly to get my dad's attention. During the 'consultation hour' around the tajine I could never have a chat with my brothers and father, because it was only about football and anime.”

Anime? Dari: “The men in my family are all next-level anime fans. They even speak Japanese to each other. *thinks* And I also plunged into my religion for a while, in between football and slam poetry.”

How? Dari: “When the community center closed its doors around the age of 13 and I saw a whole circle of friends go away in one go, I started clinging to something else. So, faith. At that time I also wore a hijab, because I was convinced that you could only be such a good Muslim. I was really pretty strict and took everything way too literally. Today I understand that you mainly have to look for your own interpretation.”

In the meantime, the average 15-year-old is also going through a storm for the second season of wtFOCK, which can be followed daily on Instagram and wtfock.be, good for about 400,000 visitors a week and more than 8 million watched - or at least started - episodes. Significantly more than the first season, although that also had good numbers. Especially for a series that was deliberately launched in silence. “You’re already bombarded with advertising on Instagram, subtle and less subtle,” says Dari, while she tries so intensely to make eye contact with a waiter that he almost bumps into a glass door. “I don't have any big theories about the future of television, but ‘wtFOCK’ really was a relief. It’s on the internet and you mainly do what you want with it. "Ah, I don't have to look?" That unforced approach works. The worst thing that could have happened to us, was that the press started writing about it en masse: it had to remain a bit mysterious and above all belong to the young people themselves. Normally we don't give interviews either: ‘wtFOCK’ is one big bubble that you shouldn't talk too much about.”

Without any illusions about the appeal of Knack Focus to fifteen-year-olds: is this conversation a good idea? Dari: “Sounds okay to me. I’m more now than just Yasmina? And I think fifteen-year-olds do know Knack.” 

For real? Dari: “That's the book we get in History as source material in class. *laughs* I think I'll stop giving interviews again after this. A little mystery can't hurt.”

SKAM, the Norwegian series of which ‘wtFOCK’ is a remake, became a hit in its own country. That’s not always the case with foreign remakes, except for the Flemish one. It continues to gain popularity. Do you have an explanation for that? Dari: “No idea why things were less successful in other countries, but ‘wtFOCK’ is so good because it is real. We don't disguise anything, don't pour Hollywood sauce on it and talk like I talk to my friends. Apparently, a lot of teachers also follow the series to get a better understanding of their students. Smart, because we tackle all issues a teenager has in a very realistic way.”

The makers of SKAM were prepared with a tour through its country and a survey of Norwegian teenagers. Their biggest conclusion was: no generation suffers as much from performance pressure and comparison anxiety as yours. Dari: “Social media. Instagram is a very beautiful, but at the same time very scary place. A lot of girls now ask me, for example, how they can also enter this profession. But if you ask them why, it turns out that there’s no passion, they just see it as a fast road to fame. Then join ‘Temptation Island’? They see  people like Millie Bobby Brown (from Stranger Things), who is barely fifteen and has a crazy career and they let themselves be hyped about it. I should actually say 'we'. I said it already: I ​​hope I don't go crazy.” *giggles hysterically* 

About 1200 teenagers showed up for the casting of wtFOCK, but the makers did not find their Yasmina there. Dari: *nods* “In the end they also had to call Adil, who gave me the tip.”

Why do you think that is? Dari: “I get angry when someone says they want more diversity, but can't find anyone. *throws arms up dramatically* "They aren't there!" They are there. In my neighborhood alone, so much talent is packed together. You may have to do your best to find them, because if you come from a neighborhood where ambition is laughed at, you’ll not find your way to a casting. Because the TV and film world seem so closed off from the outside - and it is. I also didn't know how to do that, I was just lucky that Adil, Nora Gharib and Ikram Aoulad wanted to help me. They helped me avoid a lot of rookie mistakes. And that I won't sign myself up for Temptation Island or something tomorrow.” *laughs*

Gharib also predicted that as a Moroccan woman she would have problems with ‘Patser’. From the moment you do not portray a classic religious Muslim woman, it seems to already lead to commentary. Dari: “I've had my part too. Women who send to me that I brought shame on the entire Moroccan community, for example, because Yasmina doesn't always wear her hijab. Usually these are women who’ve seen two minutes of the series and then get angry without seeing the context. *blows* You know, I don’t care. If my parents and I are okay with it, then no one has anything to say to me. Criticism slips away from me. It really takes more than an angry DM to get me off my path, I come from Winterslag breeding.”

*** Bas Devos, director ‘Ghost Tropic’:

“I had never seen Nora at work, but her audition video immediately made me curious. At the final casting, where she had to improvise a bit, it was already clear to me after a few minutes. She did a beautiful job. Nora is not trained as an actress, but I often work with a combination of non-professional and professional actors. That really doesn't matter to me. It's all about how naturally someone relates to the camera and how relaxed you are while being filmed. Then very beautiful things can happen. And I think she also liked not having to make her character bigger in an understated film like ‘Ghost Tropic’, as that’s sometimes the case for TV. To hear that you are still playing without doing anything. 

It's cool how she dares to go for something so outspokenly at such a young age, but I did point out to her that working alone isn’t the perfect solution. She’s very fond of that international career, but it is also easy to walk into a wall there. Seventeen-year-olds have to live, right? Well, she's sensible enough, I'm not worried. She'll eventually find the right balance. At the end of the shooting period, she said she hoped we could work together again. I told her that I hope she still likes it by then. *laughs*  Who knows which films will she be in then.”

[fedtothenight]

this competition asked to write a short story in the dystopian genre and my entry's below - don't rb!

the sweetest fruit

The boy gasped, straining against the padded frame of the jeep just as the vehicle slowly came to a halt. ‘Look!’ he shouted, pointing at a spot about a hundred feet from the group. ‘Look, Mum! That’s so cool!’

Half-instinctively, his mother had already grabbed a fistful of his tank-top, ready to yank him back. She had spent the entirety of the trip sitting as still as possible, facing forward, eyes stubbornly fixed on the self-cooling top of the car in a pointless effort to fight her motion sickness: her patience was already wearing very thin without her eight-year-old personal safety hazard trying to get himself killed.

‘Ethan, for the love of God,’ she snapped. ‘I already told you to stop leaning over the frame! Do you realise how dangerous that is?’

‘No, Mum, you’ve got to look!’

‘Emma, darling,’ her husband whispered, a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘You should really look at this. It’s magnificent.’

Whatever it was, even her fifteen-year-old daughter - who had spent the last thirty minutes texting her friends back home without so much as a glance at the scenery - was jaw-slacked, so she slowly got up on her wobbly knees and peered over her shoulders.

In the shadow of a tree, protected from the sweltering heat, two lions were feasting on a zebra. Perhaps belatedly, as it’d taken her a second to drink the sight in, she realised that the poor thing was still alive: writhing as blood, red and hot and pulsing, gushed out from where the bigger lion - the male - had bitten into its back.

The smaller one, the female, soundlessly sank its teeth into the dying animal’s neck, and the latter gave one last weak kick, finally falling limp. When the lioness stood again, it was almost impossible, from this distance, to see her eyes amidst the bloodied mess on her face.

‘Oh, my God, Matt,’ Emma said. ‘This is beautiful. Nature truly is beautiful.’

‘You don’t really get to see this kind of show anywhere else today,’ their guide said from the driver’s seat. He sounded proud, as if he’d hunted and fed the zebra to the lions himself.

Alberto wasn’t wrong, Emma reasoned. Given that they were parked in the middle of the privately-owned biggest North American savanna, he - or rather, his employer - was the one effectively feeding the lions. Like feeding mice to cats. She glanced at her children, glad they could have a window on a reality that was long gone. To think it would have taken a trip around the world to watch this spectacle - imagine the motion sickness then! If only, she considered wistfully, there could be a way of replicating glaciers just as accurately.

‘Honestly, it seems a bit unfair that they get to eat real meat,’ Ethan said at the dinner table a few hours later. He was picking at his plate, moving the fried grasshoppers they’d been served for dinner around, but not really eating any. ‘While we are stuck with insects and microprotein or whatever.’

Emma pinched the bridge of her nose. She was tired and sunburnt, her sensitive pale skin suffering under the blistering sun of the region, so different from the temperate weather back home North. She had a splitting headache, too. She was, yet again, at the so-called end of her tether. ‘Ethan…’

‘You should be glad you get to eat at all,’ her daughter said at the same time. ‘There’s a reason it’s illegal to eat meat. These animals are here for show, anyway. They were originally from Africa.’

‘Shut up, Becca,’ Ethan mumbled. ‘Everybody knows there are no animals in Africa. There’s nothing there.’

Becca’s cheeks were tinted pink, eyebrows furrowed. ‘Of course there were animals. There were animals everywhere before the Climate Crunch.’

‘Both of you, stop it,’ Matt interjected. ‘Ethan, your sister is right. You should be grateful that we are here in the first place. That said…’ He leant forward, voice down to a whisper: ‘I have a surprise for you. Or, well, Richard has a surprise for us. When he arrives tomorrow, he’ll bring us real meat. Bovine meat.’

‘But it’s illegal,’ said Becca.

‘It’s technically illegal,’ Matt acknowledged. ‘It’s not if you know how to get some and no one from Animal Conservation finds out. Do you think our president only eats insects? Please, Becca. Use that big brain of yours.’

‘Yes,’ Ethan snickered. ‘Use your brain, Becca.’

‘That is too generous,’ Emma said. ‘Inviting us here in the first place was, when even he hasn’t gotten here yet. Now this. I wouldn’t know how to repay him.’

Truly, all she felt was jealousy. Her guts twisted with the sheer force of it. Yes, she had known that Richard was comfortable. The gated, heavily guarded estate spanned for thousands of acres, comprised the 5000sqt villa they were staying at (five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a cinema, marble floors and solar panels on the rooftop), an indoor swimming pool inspired by vintage photos of Amalfi, two indoor tennis courts, and the savanna they’d explored earlier in the day. ‘The biggest conservation area in North America since they repurposed the Midwest,’ he’d bragged in a video call, two weeks before. ‘You will love it. The holiday you deserve. Make yourselves at home.’

But meat? He could get meat?

Matt’s family had designed DeNuketify, which was basically the only effective way of purifying ocean water from whatever nuclear waste Japan kept spewing so that it could be used and, most importantly, drunk. They had managed to flee the continent with the last handful of greencards about the time her family did, too, taking their precious Queen’s accent with them to found Nova London. She was the governor of Nova London now, for God’s sake. The bloody queen herself was long dead but she was alive, and yet, yet - they had never had meat.

‘We don’t have to, Emma,’ Matt said. ‘We just need to remember how lucky we are to enjoy this meal, this house, this holiday. Look at that,’ and he nodded towards the TV screen again. ‘Actually, Alexa!, volume up!, I think the Italians have finally surrendered.’

The war correspondent’s voice grew louder. She - they, Emma reminded herself: Becca always told her not to assume anyone’s gender - was wearing a dust mask and reading from a bundle of documents. ‘The last military hospital in the island of Palermo was destroyed four days ago by a Canadian airstrike,’ they were saying. ‘The rebels surrendered soon after, followed by the group of extremists in the Nebrodi island. Etna had already surrendered last year.’

‘It’s important to remember that these actions were necessary to finally put a rest on the instability of the region,’ they added. ‘Canada will fund a complete restoration of the Southern archipelago. The remaining civilians will be provided with a shelter and then, when the time comes, a suitable job. Nova Italia will be the sixteenth Canadian state, the fourth offshore. There are also hopes to extract petroleum from the seabed of the sunken city of Gela.’

‘Watch them make it into a holiday hotspot,’ Matt commented. ‘The weather is still nice there.’

‘Ooh, I heard about this.’ Becca picked her phone back up and started furiously typing away. ‘There’s this journal entry soldiers found over there, under the rubble, that’s gone viral. It was translated into English. Wait, I’ll pull it up. Alexa, volume down.’

‘I’m not sure I want to hear it,’ Emma said, uneasy. ‘We’re on holiday. Should we not watch a movie? Something funny?’

Becca waved her away, as if she was an annoying fly. ‘It’ll be good practice for my drama class.’

Matt didn’t help—he simply shrugged, half-apologetic, as if to say: Let her do her thing.

Becca made a show of clearing her throat, too, before she started reading from her phone—her high voice now grave, studied, as if she were speaking to a larger audience: ‘I wonder what peas taste like.’

Right then, the scene on screen changed to footage of what looked like a destroyed village, something out of an apocalyptic movie. Emma found herself unable to look away.

‘Nonna used to say that her own great-grandmother grew them in her garden. Figs, too,’ Becca read. ‘They say they were the sweetest fruit.’

Emma wondered if this journal was actually written by a child or a teenager. It didn’t sound like an adult at all. She couldn’t help but picture a girl, a brunette, not much older than Becca, perhaps a rebel, or a trainee nurse on the sweet cusp of adulthood, holding this journal of hers, or perhaps a gun. It violently reminded her that her own daughter, too, would have to serve her time in the Forces in three years.

On screen, the Canadian soldiers walked among the ruins, zigzagging between torn up clothes and discarded weapons, surely looking for surviving rebels under the rubbles.

‘Isn’t it silly that we can hear the fighters overhead and that all I can do is think about food?’ said Becca. ‘I wish we could also eat figs and be happy.’

On screen, the camera zoomed in on a long-forgotten man's shoe, some crumpled photographs, on a pile of bodies in black bin bags.

‘Grandma - I miss her - left me a poetry book, too, from T.S. Eliot. I hope the book is with me when I die, so I can give it back to her when we meet again, afterwards. So I can tell her that T.S. Eliot was wrong.’

On screen, one of the soldiers approached and showed a little trinket to the camera: a bloody, heart-shaped locket that must’ve once been golden, hiding the miniature pictures of two brunette children that would never have a name.

‘That’s enough,’ Emma said. She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. ‘Stop reading.’

‘The world may have not ended with a bang, but it didn’t end with a whimper, either: the world didn’t end at all. Sometimes,’ Becca finished reading, ‘I wish it had.’

‘What a load of rubbish,’ Matt scoffed. ‘Everyone should feel lucky to be alive. I bet this journal is a fake. Alexa, turn the TV off.’

As the screen faded to black, Ethan finally popped a grasshopper in his mouth. ‘I can’t wait to have meat tomorrow.’

[dragons-bones]

Writing Process Meme!

Rules: Bold/color the things that you relate to and then tag some people to play.

Tagged by: @autumnslance and @frostmantle! Thank you both!

I write: daily | most days | a few times a week | a few times a month | random

I’m not great at keep to a consistent writing schedule, and sometimes it’s just difficult to get words out even with inspiration, so my schedule is best described as “sporadic.” I’d ideally like to work on this.

I write most often: when I first get up | later in the morning | afternoon | evening | the wee hours of the night | whenever

This is absolutely the result of my shitty, shitty commute, which meant I had only a handful of hours properly to myself in the evening, so evenings are when I did most of everything. (Taking part in FFXIV Write really compounded it. XD) For whatever reason, I now find it incredibly difficult to focus on writing in the morning or early afternoon; this is probably also related to my old night owl tendencies.

In one sitting I tend to write: a few sentences at a time | a few hundred words | a few thousand words | a complete chapter/section no matter how long | An outline | whatever comes

When in the moon is in the right phase and the gods are pleased, I can sometimes push out a couple thousand words; “The Bluebird of Ishgard” from FFXIV Write 2020 comes to mind. Most of the time, however, it’s a words, a few sentences, perhaps a paragraph or two. Sometimes it’s not even that, and I just edit what I’ve previously written.

I tend to write scenes: in chronological order with no skipping | mostly in order but with some filler/skipping | whatever scene I feel like | who knows what’s gonna come out????

Once upon a time, I used to only write in the story’s chronological order with no skipping. I don’t bother sticking with that anymore, elsewise nothing would get written now. Instead, I’ll write whatever comes to mind; sometimes that’s something in the story’s beginning, sometimes it’s somewhere in the middle, sometimes it’s the end. I can’t complain overmuch, as writing out of order seems to make it easier to connect the Part A’s and Part B’s I typically have a firmer idea on.

The things that comes easiest to me are: dialogue | description of senses | description of action | description of characters | exposition | other

I really, deeply enjoy character interactions, and dialogue is one of the best ways for me to do that, so I really enjoy letting my characters just talk. I also love to worldbuild, but I have to be careful with the exposition; sometimes I can stop myself, sometimes I can’t. In cases of the later, I’ll edit back (but save a copy of the original word vomit elsewhere for easy reference). I also really like describing how characters are moving or emoting; I actually really enjoy trying to describe hand gestures! (My mom’s off-the-boat Italian and live the joke that if you tied our hands we wouldn’t be able to talk properly.)

I do want to get better about describing senses or setting the scene or characters; with fanfiction, I can get sloppy because there’s the assumption that the audience is already familiar with most of the locations and the characters, and it bleeds over to both original things in my fanfic plus my original writing. Things to work on.

I tend to write: on a phone | on a laptop | in a notebook | on whatever paper I can find | with speech to text | in the blood of my enemies | it doesn’t really matter to me | on paper first and then typed up | old school typewriter | on a computer

My laptop’s my only computer, soooo yeah. I type much faster than I write, so it’s easier to just type out my thoughts; it’s also much easier to refine a sentence or phrase with typing, so I can very quickly and neatly edit. I absolutely fucking despise writing on my phone; the most I will use it is to quickly record in either the notepad or my diary server a one off bit of dialogue or narration if I’m not close to my laptop.

There’s something really fun and elegant in handwriting in notebooks, but ultimately they now feel super limited to me because I can’t go back and edit or embellish as I like.

When I take a break from writing, it usually: lasts a few days | a few weeks | a few months | it’s kind of random

This pretty much ties into question one. It’d hard to say when I’ll write, so I don’t plan breaks.

My favorite thing to do when I’m on a writing break is: recharge with other creative hobbies | read/ consume other media | do something physical | catch up with old friends | work on my WIP in other ways like with playlists or art | other | play video games | get lost in work

I like to knit, and listen to horror podcasts, read books, and occasionally watch movies, and also I actually like to play the video game upon which all of my fic is based. XD And also play other games: Hades is my favorite go-to mindless slaughter game, but I’m also very fond of messing around with Stellaris and Frostpunk.

In general, I think my writing habits are: pretty much what I need them to be | okay, but I’m working on making them better | non-existent | not great :/ | i’m excited to develop them further | totally random | perfect for me

I could stand to work on my writing habits, honestly, even if it’s just make the effort to write a couple of words a day. I would like to be more prolific, but therein lies the issues of having a traditional nine to five job; making time is a lot more difficult than it initially appears, especially with all that needs to be done in the day. Still, I think I’ve gotten better at it over the years; last year I did a couple more projects than usual outside FFXIV Write, and the same for this year, so let’s see if I can continue the momentum!

I’m not sure who’s been tagged yet/answered this... @gunbun, @punchelf, @to-the-voiceless, @efrmellifer, @scrollsfromarebornrealm, @msviolacea, and YOU. (Yes, you.)

[justforbooks]

The Italian publisher, editor and collector Franco Maria Ricci has died at the age of 82.

In sumptuously produced art books, and as editor of the bi-monthly art magazine FMR, Ricci published writing by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and many others over the course of his long and distinguished career. In 2019, Susan Moore visited his estate at Fontanellato, near Parma, where in recent years Ricci had constructed the largest labyrinth in the world out of bamboo; they discussed Ricci’s notable collection of largely 18th- and 19th-century sculpture and paintings, as well as his library of books published by the great typographer Giambattista Bodoni, whose works Ricci had reprinted in his first foray into publishing. The interview is published in full below.

Collecting may be read as a form of autobiography written with works of art rather than words. In the case of Franco Maria Ricci, his is a life composed of both words and pictures. He has not only published the most lavishly produced art magazine – FMR – and art books in the world, but also spent the last 50 years amassing a peerless collection of volumes produced by the great Italian typographer, compositor and publisher Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) and a rich, eclectic collection of some 500 largely neoclassical and baroque paintings and sculptures. Both collections are at the heart of his most recent and extraordinary venture, the creation of the immense, star-shaped Labirinto della Masone, near Parma, the largest labyrinth in the world – and surely one of the few planted with bamboo.

There is something surreal, and slightly disturbing, about turning off the autostrada and suddenly encountering this majestic bamboo structure rising 10m or more above the plains of the Po valley. For all its elegant calligraphic stems and angular leaves, this is not the sparse specimen bamboo of Chinese ink-painting, but a forest. Here, more than 200,000 of these fast-growing bamboos arch upward in their quest for light. Once I turn into the drive of what was originally Ricci’s grandfather’s estate at Fontanellato, the brilliant azure June sky all but disappears. By the end of my two-day visit, it seems that the contrasts of light and dark are an apt metaphor for the book and art collections – and for the entire complex of maze, museum, archive and chapel, the latter built in the form of a pyramid. Ricci has always been part rationalist, part visionary.

Ricci’s story begins with the book. ‘I grew up surrounded by my father’s books. Reading Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce and Dante saved me from bad taste,’ he once said. ‘It made beauty simple, familiar and immediate in my eyes.’ It was a book, too, that transformed his life and launched a long and successful career: Bodoni’s Manuale tipografico, first published in 1818. Before his discovery of Bodoni’s works in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma in the 1960s, a career in publishing seemed unlikely. The stylish Ricci, a racing driver and a dandy with dark cherubic curls, was best known for patterning the snow in the piazza around Parma Cathedral with the wheels of his E-type Jaguar. Even Bernardo Bertolucci remembered that car.

As a young man, Ricci had wanted to study archaeology, but an uncle in the oil world persuaded him to sign up for geology instead. After three months in Turkey spent looking for oil that was not there, he realised the oil business was not for him. Yet his education proved critical in unlikely ways. He spent weekends exploring the mysterious, labyrinthine underground tunnels and caves that are a feature of the Romagna region of Italy. He also designed posters for Parma University’s theatre festival that caught the attention of an American curator preparing a show of Italian design in New York. He became, inadvertently, a graphic artist, and went on to create striking graphics for everything from Poste Italiane to Alitalia.

Ricci has long insisted that ‘Bodoni was not only a typographer. He achieved modernity and elegance through graphic art. He was, like Canova, a champion of neoclassicism but in two dimensions. I immediately fell in love with the proportions, the concept of beauty.’ Bodoni’s genius was not simply the freshness, rigour and precision of the typefaces, with their dramatic contrasts between thick and thin line, but also his sense of how to lay out a page. Texts are set with extravagantly wide margins and with little or no decoration.

Ricci decided to reproduce the master’s Manuale tipografico, although everyone told him he was mad to do it. He bought two early offset typography machines which, he noted, were ‘as expensive as a Ferrari, which I wanted to buy but never did’, and had the highest-quality paper made exclusively for the project by Fabriano. It took a year to publish the three volumes in 900 numbered copies (1964–65). ‘So I became a publisher. It became a bestseller.’

Much to his mother’s horror, Ricci decided to continue to publish very expensive books – art books printed in Bodonian style – and later, literary editions, several series of which were edited by Jorge Luis Borges, whose presence looms large in library and labyrinth. At a time when Arte Povera dominated the Italian avant-garde, Ricci chose opulent black silk covers embossed with gold, and printed on costly pale blue Fabriano paper with handmade plates. He wanted his books to be rare – printing small editions – but also surprising. He gave Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Borges free rein to write accompanying texts.

His wife Laura Casalis remembers having been struck by the originality of Ricci’s 1970 book on the then little-appreciated Erté – text by Barthes – before she met the publisher himself in 1975, and soon found herself working on a book on red paper-cut portraits of Mao, accompanied by 39 of the Chairman’s own poems printed in Chinese characters. ‘Little by little I slipped into publishing with him – Franco was a workaholic and I realised that was the only way I would see him. Those Mao paper-cuts were typical of the practically unknown subjects that he would seek out all his life, and we sometimes show them between loan exhibitions in the museum. Franco has l’occhio lungo – he can see beauty in something which may take others a long time to recognise.’

It is in the library I find Ricci and, indeed, where he is to be found most mornings and afternoons. It is part of a cluster of picturesque 19th-century stone buildings surrounded by lush and increasingly exotic gardens. He had begun renovating the dilapidated stables behind his grandfather’s long-abandoned villa as a summerhouse and library in the 1970s, and its enormous hayloft still serves as an idyllic open-air dining room and entertaining space, even though the couple have now moved into the main house. Inside this romantic half-ruined folly, Ricci created the unexpected: two neoclassical library rooms lined with bookshelves and marble busts, their domed and coffered ceilings reminiscent of those in the Biblioteca Palatina.

As soon as we arrive in the inner sanctum, the Bodoni library with its more than 1,200 volumes – missing a tantalising three or four tomes but otherwise complete – Ricci is immediately up on his feet and pulling down and opening cherished volumes, eyes blazing. Despite the heat, he wears an elegant embroidered linen waistcoat but not its jacket, which hangs nearby, bearing the synthetic red flower that became in effect his iconographical device. (Tai Missoni gave him a cardigan as a present: Ricci declined the gift – he does not wear cardigans – but declared that he would always wear the red flower from its packaging thereafter, which he did. Once, when he had forgotten the flower, an officer at the Alitalia desk at Milan airport said: ‘I see you are travelling incognito today Mr Ricci.’)

Now Ricci deftly presents Bodoni’s Essai de caractères russes… of 1782, and his 1789 edition of Torquato Tasso’s pastoral play Aminta, exquisitely illuminated for the Prince of Essling. These are dear friends and the joy as he handles these pages is self-evident. This is the only significant part of the collection not to have been moved down to the museum and archive complex, a short bamboo-lined drive away. It is clear that he could never bear to live apart from these books.

The impetus to create the long-imagined labyrinth, and a museum and library to house his collections and publishing archive, was a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. The couple sold the publishing house in 1982, and their house in Milan, and moved to Fontanellato. There is a fierce pride in Laura Casalis’s voice as she explains: ‘Franco wanted to do it, he imagined it, and he found the right team of people to help him realise it.’ We are sitting over coffee in the Labirinto courtyard surveying the sharp-edged geometries of its rose-pink brick buildings, a place that already has the air of a lost ancient city discovered in a jungle. Laura describes the evolution of the museum collections within, and recalls the words of the late Italian publisher Valentino Bompiani, who described Ricci as a man of courage and fantasy.

‘Whenever he fell for some subject or artist, Franco would try to buy.’ Laura continues. ‘He was never concerned with what was or was not fashionable, and never bought to decorate a house. He collected pieces that he liked that were strange or unconventional.’ He began with Art Deco, first buying inexpensive little bronze and chryselephantine dancers by the likes of Demétre Chiparus (1886–1947), as well as Guiraud-Rivière’s dramatic figure of Isadora Duncan with two bears, which dominates the central space of the 20th-century gallery in the museum.

Here, too, are three paintings by the outsider artist Antonio Ligabue (1899–1965), a tormented soul who had led a tragic life, painting and wandering around the Po valley when he was not confined to a psychiatric hospital. Ricci published the first monograph on the artist in 1967, two years after his death, a work that helped catapult the artist from provincial to national and then international fame. Two years later, he bought two of the artist’s bold, visceral close-up heads of roaring tigers, painted in the 1950s, including the key work that had been selected for the book cover. A no less bright and richly impasted self-portrait in the guise of Vincent Van Gogh followed a year later.

Ricci also championed – and collected – the work of the third dominant presence in this space, Adolfo Wildt (1868–1931), often described as the last Symbolist but one whose reputation was, as Laura puts it, ‘tarnished by Fascist association’. Ricci published a monograph in 1988, the same year that he acquired the strange masterpiece that is Vir temporis acti of 1913, a virtuoso marble bust of a Greek or Roman soldier reimagined through the combined lenses of Michelangelo and the Secessionists. The expressive anguish of this head may be seen as a symbol of the nobility and redemption of sacrifice, but it is the refined and gleaming silken surface that led to Brancusi.

Ricci has a penchant not only for sculpture but also portraits, and portrait busts in particular. ‘I have hunted portraits all my life. I never get tired of looking at them,’ he confesses, ‘and in turn, I feel observed by them.’ In the 1990s, he began following the art market and collecting in earnest. Ricci had an office, bookshop and apartment in Paris and there and in Monaco he was to acquire many of his largely French 18th-century terracottas, some of the most compelling by less familiar names. A superb example is the bust of an intense, low-browed individual, signed by one A. Riffard and given the Revolutionary date of ‘9. Fructidor an 3e’, from 1794–95.

Another naturalistic tour de force is one of very few known terracottas by Francesco Orso, also known as François Orsy, a Piedmontese sculptor also active in Paris. Orso is responsible for the rarest sculptures here: the disconcerting life-size polychrome wax portrait busts of Vittorio Amadeo III of Savoy and his wife Maria Antonia Ferdinanda di Borbone, complete with painted papier-mâché clothes. The revolution destroyed the sculptor’s courtly patronage in Paris, and he diversified into the more overtly commercial world of the waxwork with a show featuring an effigy of the aristocratic revolutionary leader the Comte de Mirabeau and popular tableaux on themes such as Marat’s assassination by Charlotte Corday.

Unsurprisingly, given Ricci’s passion for Bodoni, the neoclassical looms large. At the centre of the Napoleonic gallery, lined with marble busts – Italian, English and Danish – is a model of Canova’s ideal head of Dante’s muse Beatrice, first conceived as an idealised portrait of Mme Récamier. The display offers a witty face-off between Wellington and Napoleon on opposing pedestals, but the emperor prevails with a sequence of classicising family portraits. Above hangs the second version of Francesco Hayez’s The Penitent Magdalene (1825). Here the Romantic artist has transposed the chilly perfection of Canova’s marble surfaces into pigment.

An unusual and endearing mid 18th-century Italian group portrait presents the family of Antonio Ghidini, a cloth merchant to the Bourbon court in Parma, painted by his friend, the court artist Pietro Melchiorre Ferrari (1734/5–87). In this Zoffany-style conversation piece there is no doubting Ghidini’s business, as he points to documents mentioning his association with his trading partners in Manchester and his wife sits stiffly under her salmon-pink stomacher in sprigged and striped silk finery.

Yet it would be misleading to suggest that Ricci’s ever-curious eye never ranged beyond the 18th and 19th centuries. He owns a number of 17th-century marbles, including that of the all-powerful prelate Cardinal Paluzzo Paluzzi Altieri degli Albertoni, who effectively ran the papacy under Clement X – irresistible in profile. In the 2000s Ricci also added, for example, Ludovico Carracci’s handsome three-quarter length Portrait of Lucrezia Bentivoglio Leoni (1589), executed two years before the sitter’s death. Flanking the same door is Philippe de Champaigne’s Portrait of the Duchesse d’Aiguillon (c. 1650), and viewed beyond is an unusual sensual and erotically charged work by Luca Cambiaso (1527–85), Venus Blindfolding Cupid.

Yet Ricci has also always been attracted to what he describes as the art of visionary madness, by the surreal, and by what is prosaic and popular. The museum’s cabinet of curiosities includes a narwhal horn, once thought to have belonged to the unicorn. Its walls are lined with particularly gruesome vanitas paintings and sculptures. Centre stage among the skulls is a decomposing head by Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627), its flesh and rotten teeth seething with maggots and flies.

Only superficially more benign are the drawings of the Codex Seraphinianus, first published in two volumes in 1981 – Ricci’s most extraordinary publication. These meticulously detailed explications of the bizarre and the fantastical illustrate an encyclopaedia of an imaginary world conceived by the artist Luigi Serafini in the 1970s and written in a language still understood only by its creator. Certainly its pages are at home in the Labirinto della Masone complex – another visionary creation, in effect a Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-embracing art work expressing the life and taste of one man.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[xenolithium]

Americano? ☕️

America/Romano

Who hogs the duvet?

Lovino does, pretty much all the time. Whether for petty reasons like after just getting into an argument with Alfred about one thing or another, to get back at him; or simply because he rolls around a lot in his sleep. Although Alfred usually doesn't mind, he knows Lovino gets cold a lot faster. Though he usually finds himself waking up without a single thing covering him and an Italian boyfriend wrapped in five layers of blankets.

Who texts/rings to check how their day is going?

Usually Alfred, it's become something subconscious by a certain point in the relationship. He'll usually send Lovino a good morning text, despite their time differences when they're apart. Lovino will occasionally take initiative if he doesn't hear from Alfred all day. But usually that's only done sparingly.

Who’s the most creative when it comes to gifts?

Lovino is, he sort of over thinks about it to a point where he actually becomes depressed. "Nothing I think of is good, this is stupid!" While Alfred sort of just gives on a whim or because he thought it'd be funny.

Who gets up first in the morning?

Alfred, 100%. Don't even think of waking up Lovino before he feels like doing so himself, or expect a swift punch to the gut. Alfred found this out the hard way trying to mess with him one morning. He just needs a cup of coffee...or maybe two...three...four.

Who suggests new things in bed?

Alfred, Lovino is pretty adverse to change. By that I mean he hates it with a burning passion. Usually Alfred's ideas are shot down outright by a frightened and unsure Italian, but eventually he might warm up to a few ideas. Only very vanilla ones.

Who cries at movies?

Alfred, he has no shame in showing his abundance of emotions. Lovino, on the other hand, usually rolls his eyes at his over the top boyfriend. "It's not even sad, stronzo!" But he secretly loves how open Al can be, sometimes he's more fun to watch than the movie.

Who gives unprompted massages?

Alfred, he sort of just knows when Lovino is tense. He does it to calm him down or just because Lovino happened to be standing in front of him. It will usually be gentle rubbing around his shoulders and neck with his impromptu massages but in bed he'll have no problem rubbing other places. He just loves how relaxed and at ease his boyfriend looks.

Who fusses over the other when they’re sick?

Alfred, he can't help it. He's worried, he's scared, he wants to help in every way he can. Sometimes he's smothering or way too overprotective during this time. Anyone approaches a sick Lovino wrong, prepare to meet your doom. Well, not literally but you'll definitely be dealing with something not pretty. It usually annoys Lovino who doesn't like to be treated like glass just because he has a cough, but well...what can you do?

Lovino also gets worried, just not to the same degree. He's a little more closeted about his feelings and usually shows them through anger. By scolding Alfred or yelling at anyone who happens to pass him by, to try and get these pent up emotions somewhere else. He usually cooks a lot for him though, practically forcing him to eat.

Who gets jealous easiest?

Oh, this one's hard. They're both equally jealous people, don't touch what's mine! Kinda deal, probably Lovino though. By the smallest of margins.

Who has the most embarrassing taste in music?

Lovino: "That stupid American of course!"

Alfred: "Hey!"

They both have pretty stupid tastes in music.

Who collects something unusual?

Lovino tends to hoard and keep relics and junk of his past around in his room. He's also usually pretty bad at throwing things away. Alfred suffers from the same problem but usually he has places designated to store it so no one can see his garbage.

Who takes the longest to get ready?

Lovino. Alfred kind of just throws on whatever he has laying around, while his boyfriend is just a little more suave. Caring about his hair and whether or not he actually washed his clothes.

Alfred: "What? It smelt fine."

Who is the most tidy and organised?

Alfred, but only by a small margin. They're both pretty big slobs, just in different ways.

Who gets most excited about the holidays?

Alfred, "dude! I'm going to be throwing the most kickass party at my place!" Though he drags Lovino's ass into whatever he's excited about, 99% of the time.

Who is the big spoon/little spoon?

Despite being the shorter of the two, Lovino is. He's also usually the most dominant, if you know what I mean. Usually Alfred likes to curl up into a small ball and just press his back to Lovi. But they have no problem switching things up if his Italian boyfriend is comfortable with it.

Who gets most competitive when playing games and/or sports?

They're both fiercely competitive people, but usually Lovino just has more to prove. While Al? He's just being Al.

Who starts the most arguments?

Lovino, 100%. It's not so much that he likes to argue, but that he has a hard time dealing with his emotions. Usually they just end up coming up as anger by accident, which occasionally hits the wrong nerve with Alfred. It's usually resolved fairly quickly, but sometimes it can last a day or so.

Who suggests that they buy a pet?

Alfred does, he kind of already has a zoo of weird pets, while Lovi, well..."I'm not getting another animal! I already have to take care of Feliciano's stupid cat. That damn bastard, scoop the shit yourself!"

What couple traditions they have?

Alfred started going to church with Lovino every other Sunday. Lovino is heavily religious and finds peace in these moments. It's just a nice quiet time for them to sit and reflect, even if Alfred himself isn't super into the whole church going thing.

Who is the best cook?

Lovino, he has spent literal centuries perfecting his craft. He's a snob when it comes to food and everyone else will know about it, because theirs is "crappy". Poor Alfred isn't excluded from this blanket statement. He's not really a fan of trying new foods and when he does, he always has something to say about it.

----

I sort of left a few questions I didn't want to answer out but otherwise, everything is here! Hope ya like it~

Original if you want to ask more!

[theyellowcurtains]

Hej. In the third chapter of love today you wrote in the notes that you had gone off your original plan for this fic. Now I am curious: what was your original plan? If you feel comfortable sharing it. Anyway I love this fic and the characters and their story and your writing very much. I hope you are well and wish you all the best!

i actually have my outline plan that i’m gonna post in this answer just under the cut because it’s just the longest thing ever but it’s got all my chapter points and stuff and it’s fairly different i think but also i think i changed what it said in some parts to say other things and don’t have the like og og plan but yes :) i ALSO have a bit of a sequel planned but i don’t think anyone would want to read that it was messy

Outline plan

Chapter One - Blue Eyes (your heart is broken)

Matteo introduction, talk about his dedication to school being pre med

Matteo’s determination to ignore boys for his studies after his bf of two years left him because different schools

friends drag him to a party of Carlos’s friend David

meets David thinks he’s drop dead gorgeous, blue blue blue

Jonas ruining their flirting and says ‘sorry you’re babysitting me instead of getting your dick sucked’

David gives his number

Chapter Two - Lollipop (love’s gonna get you down)

Matteo goes over to help David clean up the mess, makes the mistake of leaving Jonas at his place.

cleaning is cleaning until David offers a joint, Matteo accepts and it gets fun, ft David throwing old beer down Matteo’s shirt and Matteo being adorable about not knowing a film

David promising Matteo they’ll watch it together sometime

almost kiss in the kitchen like in s3, however is interrupted by Carlos coming in because he had plans with David that day

Carlos telling the boys what he saw and Matteo dying because ‘i don’t like David jesus, no i’m not going to hook up with David fuck off’

filler weeks of David sitting with them at lunches

movie night happens and it’s hard to Matteo to not kiss David when he’s so close and so adorable

Matteo falls asleep on David’s couch/chest and wakes up to good coffee and eggs.

Matteo kisses David that day because he knows that he’s already liking him despite knowing him a couple weeks and it’s dumb, he runs away after and doesn’t reply to texts.

Chapter Three - Stuck in the Middle (i know what i’ve started)

Matteo runs into David at a party his boys dragged him to, it’s awkward and Matteo hurts. He’s mad at himself for kissing David, David more for cutting him out after that.

The boys don’t pick up on the problem and Matteo drinks a lot.

David ends up taking Matteo home and Matteo tries to kiss him again. ft the line from David “i don’t want to kiss you ever if you’re going to run away again.” because David  believes in love at first sight and loves Matteo. Matteo tells him that he got at text from David’s sister and he’s sorry he ran he just wanted to listen to her.

Matteo doesn’t kiss him but they both sleep in Matteo’s bed, David takes care of hung over Matteo and is nothing but perfect. he feeds him and kisses his forehead when he says it hurts. Matteo accidentally imagines what it’d be like being David’s boyfriend and it hurts

they smoke together again and Matteo wants to shotgun, so they do.  it makes Matteo feel weak in the knees David though they’re laying down.

Matteo falls asleep in David’s arms that night, when he wakes up he’s alone but there’s a drawing

[drawing of Matteo in bed alone in one frame, Matteo and David together in the other. caption: i’m not running from you, i’m just waiting]

Chapter Four - No Place in Heaven (been cast away, i felt the cold)

Matteo’s fails a test and he spirals. He sees Karl that week and he crumbles again. It’s been five months since they broke up but it still hurts seeing him.

Matteo’s now at every party and he’s drinking a lot, he’s broken and falling behind where he wants to be. he doesn’t care and his friends don’t know how to help.

Matteo being sad, Matteo skipping classes, Matteo needing someone to be next to him and make him do things

he runs into David.

Chapter Five - Love You When I’m Drunk

Chapter title isn’t for lyrics like the rest just for the name

David takes care of Matteo and it at his place more often than not. Makes him food and makes sure he showers and goes to at least one class on the days he has them.

Matteo goes out to get completely smashed and he calls david crying which leads to David having to help him get in the shower and Matteo kisses him again. tells David he loves him and he’s sorry he’s such a mess.

crying ft David being a rock and everything Matteo needs.

Matteo slowly getting back on his feet and it’s good, he’s stabilising himself with David by his side when he needs him but not always.

Matteo doesn’t remember telling David he loves him. David is hurt and doesn’t mention it until one day when Matteo’s sad and asks why David helps him. David says ‘because you once told me you love me and i need to be here for when you’re ready to say it again.

Matteo says it

Chapter Six - We Are Golden (staring at emotion)

Matteo and David talk. David explains that his sister found the letter he wrote Matteo and thought that he’d reacted poorly. He didn’t know until recently and didn’t know how to talk about it with Matteo because they’d spent so long not talking.

Matteo and David are together and happy. it’s cute and they’re in love. the boys find out one day when they burst into Matteo’s place right when Matteo and David are going to do some stuff ;0

they haven’t done anything but kiss a little and it’s fine e Matteo’s going to explode, he tells jonas and jonas is a great bro who tells him ‘man i don’t care just suck his dick and shut up about it’ (parallel to him being sad about Matteo not getting his dick sucked.)

it happens and Matteo almost cries. it’s not soft and lovey dovey but it’s perfect, ft a broken bed slat and Matteo being rimmed in the shower next morning.

Matteo gets teased about having a hickey because ‘you’re not in high school anymore wtf’

David is grossly proud of Matteo for everything and they’re in love, Matteo meets David’s mum who adores him.

beer fight was all a ploy to get matteo to take his shirt off

Chapter Seven - Happy Ending

Maybe epilogue but also don’t do it if you don’t wanna 

Extra notes

David and Jonas work on the newspaper together, they’re buddies and get along really really well. Jonas finds a drawing of Matteo in David’s mess and gives him so much shit for it.

Matteo is taking italian to be an italian teacher because he knows it’s easy, his friends always give him shit for it

[lovemesomesurveys]

What is the wallpaper on your computer screen? Why did you choose it? A gorgeous b&w photo from a photoshoot Alexander Skarsgard did. I chose it because it’s him and he’s gorgeous, duh.  Is there a pattern on the pants you’re currently wearing? Which one? Nope, they’re just plain black leggings. Do you like going to baby showers? Do you go only for the cake? I didn’t mind the few I’ve been to. I liked playing the games. Who is the person you text the most in your life? What relation are you? My mom or brother. Mexican food, Chinese food, Italian food, French food or American food? I like some foods from each of those.

Has there ever been a time in your life, you felt sexually undecided? No. Does your mother annoy you when the holidays come along in the year? No. What is the color scheme of your absolute favorite fast-food restaurant? I don’t have a favorite fast food anymore, honestly. I’m not big on it like I used to be. Do you think tattoos and piercings are sexy on the opposite sex? I don’t mind some tattoos or a couple piercings, but I’m not super into them. Do people ever ask you to do things they’re too short to accomplish? No, I’m the short one who needs to ask others for help. Do your siblings bring people around that your parents don’t approve of? No. Is there carpet or hardwood floor in your bedroom? Carpet. Do you check the texture of things first or the smell of them? Depends on what it is. Certain things I might do both. Have you ever broken the arm or head off of a trophy? How did you do this? No. Do you believe in superstitious things such as breaking a mirror? Nah.  Do you get sick of people who call themselves bi polar all the time? I don’t like when people just throw that and OCD around. Ever have an ultra-sound performed on you? What was it for? I’ve had several done in my life. I used to get my kidneys checked once a year. Do you like those ‘end of the world,’ ‘Armageddon’ movies? No. What color are the headphones you have at this moment in time? Black. Ever been choked severely on something during lunch at your school? This is worded weird, but yes actually. It happened in elementary school, but I still remember it quite vividly. I got a chip stuck in my throat. Do you remember who you sat next to in Kindergarten? Who was it? No. Has anyone ever compared you to an animal? Which one(s)? A monkey because of my long arms. Has anyone, including yourself, forgot it was your own birthday? Not anyone close to me, no.  Chocolate or strawberry birthday cake? Choose one. Strawberry, hands down.  Do you eat more vegetables or fruits? What’s your favorite fruit/veggie? Out of the two, veggies because I do eat spinach oftenish. And potatoes. I haven’t had any fruit in quite a long time. :X Do you abbreviate things way too often? Do you get called out on it? No. I only do “lol”, “lmao”, “wtf”, and “wth.” Ever been in one of those church Christmas plays before? Why/why not? No. What is the funniest conjunction you use throughout your day? I don’t think any of them are funny. Have you ever thrown a roll of toilet paper at someone before? No. Does the dentist calm you or does it tend to stress you out? I have never found the dentist to be calming. I get very bad anxiety when it comes to the dentist. It’s a real fear. If you had to choose, which is the worst movie you’ve ever seen? Hmm. I’ve seen a few shitty movies, hard to choose the worst one. Have you ever found yourself talking to an inanimate object? When they’re not working properly haha. Do you like movies that are originally based on children’s books? Sure. Is your hair more thick or thin? Is it more curly or straight? Thin and wavy. I really wish I could get extensions.  Something on the human body that grosses you out the most: Feet. Do you like meeting new people? What’s your most common greeting? I’m not very outgoing or social.  Ever think of what it would be like to be a mermaid or merman? Nah. If you had to choose, which celebrity would you date out of all of them? Alexander Skarsgard. ;) Do people feel sorry for you for no reason? Have they ever? I’m sure I look quite pitiful. What is something that bothers you about most surveys in general? The repetition of questions. Especially ones about marriage and children. Who would you take with you on a stranded/deserted island? Someone who could help get me off. Do you have your own personal boom box in your bedroom? A boom box, wow. No, I don’t. Haven’t had or used one in several years. Would you survive if zombies were to take over the world? Why or why not? Nope. What would you say is the worst part of high school period? The teenage years are a rough, pivotal time. What is your favorite color of apple? Red, green or yellow? I don’t care for apples. Ever want to be a doctor? Is it because of all the hospital shows? Noooo. What do you think of all these reality shows that try to alter personality? I’m not sure what kind you’re talking about. Where are your favorite pair of shoes in the whole world right now? My black Adidas with the white stripes. Do you live anywhere near a mall? Yeah, pretty close. Do you like drawing smiley faces or do you think they’re overrated? If I’m randomly doodling, that’s one of the few things I’ll draw. If you were dying who would you say goodbye to first out of everyone? I’d have my loved near me and talk to them. Are you someone who actually likes to babysit children? No. Do you ever have those ‘ah ha!’ moments? Do those annoy you? Yeah. I don’t think they’re annoying. It’s usually a good thing. Do you hardly ever remember where you put things at? No, I’m good about that. What’s your favorite lunch meat, if you even like any in the first place? Turkey, salami, and bologna.  When is the next time you’ll eat a cupcake, if you know when? I have no idea.  Where did you last buy socks from? What do those socks look like? I forget what the last pair I bought myself was, but I just received a few pairs for Christmas. Do you ever lay in the grass and look up at the sky, just because? Nope. I don’t want to lay or sit on the grass at all. It makes me itchy and there’s bugs. When do you normally go to sleep on the weekends? My sleep schedule is the same regardless of the day. I tend to go to bed around 5AM and wake up around noon. Have you ever met someone with the same ‘biggest fear’ as you? Yes, a few. Do you ever have movie nights with your significant other? I’m single. Would you rather write with a pen or a pencil? Why is this? Pen. Do you like candy bars? Are you trying to slack off of them? Yeah. I haven’t had candy in quite awhile, though. I’m not trying to “slack off of them”, I just haven’t had any.  What is your favorite number? Is it significant with your life? 8. It’s been my favorite since I was a kid. Are you afraid of being kidnapped if you go outside at nighttime? I’d be afraid of being attacked or killed. Has your mother ever called your school because of your grades? No. I always got good grades. In the next twenty minutes, what will you be doing and where will you be? I need to go to bed. It’s after 5AM now. Do you like showers or baths better? Why did you choose your choice? I only take showers. I haven’t taken a bath since I was a kid. Are you a controversial person? Do your views oppose others? No. I keep a lot of my opinions to myself. I mean, yeah I have opposing views. We’re not all going to agree on everything. Have you ever thrown a surprise party for someone? Who for? Nope. What would you say your average word per minute time is on the keyboard? I have no idea. I’m a very fast typer, though.  What is your least favorite class in school? Why is this? It was always math. I was horrible. Do you bite your fingernails or tap them on desks? I always picked at my nails in class. Have you ever wanted to be in a band? What position exactly? No. Who is your role model or hero in life if you have one? My mom. Do you ever call your cousins just to talk to them randomly? No. I used to text with them or Snapchat or something, but not anymore except for here and there. I’m not close with any of my cousins anymore like I used to be. :( Do you find any of your friends’ parents creepy or really mean? I never found any of my friends’ parents creepy or mean. Do you ever have to wash your clothes at someone else’s house? No. When is the next time you’ll go to the library? Why is this? I have no idea. I have no reason to. Do you like fiction or non-fiction books more? What’s your favorite? Non-fiction.  Do you constantly have to be told to shut up? By who? No. I’m not a  chatty person, generally. I do have my chatty moods sometimes where I want to tell myself to shut up, though. ha. Do you know how to play pool? Are you any good at it? Nope. Do you treat others as you’d like to be treated? Have you always? I try to. These past few years I haven’t been the most pleasant to around. I get moody, irritable, snippy, pissy, and short with my family and that’s not at all how I want to be. They don’t deserve it. I know I don’t like when people are that way to me. Were you a really mean kid or a sweet and quiet kid? Sweet and quiet. I was the “pleasure to have in class”! Are you someone who likes to get in arguments or fights a lot? Nooo. I avoid it like the plague. How do you make sure people know you don’t like them at all? I don’t have to make a big spectacle about it if I don’t like someone for whatever reason. I can still be polite and civil if I have to interact with them. Would you say you’re someone who likes to cuss a lot? Nope.  Do you keep secrets from your parents that you don’t keep from your friends? I mean, my parents don’t know everything. I tell them a lot, especially my mom, but I also keep a lot to myself. Not just from them, but from everyone.  What is your father’s best friend’s name? Do you know them personally? Donny. Yes, I know him personally. They’ve been friends all my life. If you had to, where would you get a tattoo at? Why? I’ve always thought my inner wrist, but I don’t know now.  How much was the cell phone you have at this moment in time? However much the iPhone XR is. Would you say you hang out with people the majority of your life? I spend quite a lot of my time alone, but I spend a lot of time with my family as well. What would you do if you woke up randomly with purple hair? Uhh that would be quite shocking. I also dye my hair red, so if I woke up and it was purple one day I’d be pretty concerned. Do you ever look in the mirror and name all of your flaws for no reason? I avoid looking in the mirror as much as possible, and when I do I keep it short. If I spend too long that’s exactly what would happen. All my flaws become magnified and intensified and they’re all I see. Are you getting sick of the reality show Survivor? Why? I never watched it, but I’m surprised it’s still on. Do you usually explain to people why you do the things you do? Not usually, no, but with some things I guess. Or at least try to. I don’t even understand why I do what I do. Ever submit a video to America’s Funniest Home Videos? No. I wanted to as a kid. What color is the closest desk to your body? What all is on it? I don’t have a desk in my room. The most painful medical procedure you’ve ever had? Any of the surgeries I’ve had. Are you someone who likes to eat Poptarts? What’s your favorite flavor? The strawberry frosted and the brown sugar frosted ones. Ever have a dream you’re being abducted by aliens? Was it scary? No. What would you say is the color of your favorite bra? I only like to wear black ones. Do you like people who are loud or people who are quiet? Quiet, generally. I mean, if they get animated and excited about something and get a little loud that’s fine, but not loud in general. That would give me a headache haha. It’s like, “why are you shouting???” Does personality weigh out the sense of ‘good looks?’ What. When is the next time you’ll see someone who is pregnant? I have no idea. Do you hate it when people copy the things you do? No one copies anything I do, nor should they. Where is your favorite piece of electronic equipment? I’m using it right now while sitting on my bed. Where is the person who ‘owns your heart’ at this moment in time? I’m right here. Has anyone ever told you that you’re good at cooking? Ha, no. I’m not a cook. Would you say you’re a fast texter, or are you pretty slow? I’m a very fast typer on a computer, but not as fast on my phone. What is your favorite flavor of Doritos? What do you drink with them? Nacho or Cool Ranch. I’d drink whatever I had at the time, which would likely be a Starbucks Doubleshot and/or water. I haven’t had Doritos or any kind of chip in a long time, though. Do you have any enemies who you think are dangerous? I don’t have any enemies. Do you ever try to squeeze information out of people? Uhh I might from my mom or brother about certain things cause I can be nosey with them lol, but no not generally. Does it freak you out when the police drive by your house? No. Are you someone who tends to take a whole lot of naps? I don’t take a lot of naps even though I’m always tired. Naps make me groggy and more tired, but sometimes sleep just wins and I give in to a nap. What is your favorite nickname you like to be called? Why do you like it? Sis. Do you already have your outfit for tomorrow planned out? No. I don’t plan my outfits unless I’m going certain places or packing for a vacation. What is the color of your favorite pair of pants? What brand are they? I like my numerous pairs of black leggings, ha. Has your favorite song ever been featured on a commercial? Yeah, a few have. Do you ever promise pc4pc on Myspace then never return the favor? Wow, I remember those days. I was good about keeping my end of the deal. What is one song right now that really gets on your nerves? Hmm. I can’t think of one in particular at the moment.  What would you say was the best year of your life? Why? My childhood. Do those annoying infomercials ever draw you in to buy things? I’ve seen things that were of interest, but nah I’ve never ordered anything from an informercial. I’m always skeptical about anything they try to sell. Have you ever been pulled over by the cops for speeding? I don’t drive. I can’t tell you how many speeding jokes I’ve received as someone in a wheelchair throughout my life, though. -____- Is anyone in your family a firefighter? Who is it anyway? Nope.

[nightingale63]

When I get you alone, babe!

A/N Enjoy! This will be a multi-chapter story: steamy like the midsummer night air, sweet as an Italian ice bought on the fairway, with twists and turns like an antique wooden rollercoaster, complete with side trips to the fun house, where illusion reigns supreme (and romance can sometimes get even steamier).This is of course somewhat AU, but McKinley is basically the same, as is Dalton. Rated T for language, and situations.I don't own Glee, or any name brands or songs that crop up here!

Yes, Rachel, I'm here now! See you in the choir room. Kurt snapped his phone shut . I'd actually get there faster if you didn't keep hounding me! he grumbled to himself. Yes, he was (checking the time) three whole minutes late, but what the hell! First day of junior year, and yes, he was impressed by her enthusiasm, but why did it also have to involve waking him up extra early?His phone vibrated again in his pocket as he strode down the halls of William McKinley High. I have coffee for you! He smiled at the text message, and decided he could forgive Rachel for this summons to a meeting.

He was almost there when he was violently shaken out of his reverie by a brutal body slam into the wall of lockers

"Hummel! Gay much? What the hell are you wearing, your granny's cologne?" Not waiting for an answer, Karofsky sauntered away with a sneer as Kurt slumped to a sitting position on the floor.

Damn! Kurt thought he'd remembered what those slams felt like, but the memory didn't compare at all to the painful original. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and looked up in surprise when he felt his shoulder being lightly tapped

"Hey! You OK?"

Kurt shook his head, took the hand extended to him, and stood up to greet… a stranger. "Uh, thanks. I'll be all right." He looked, and was pretty sure he'd never seen this guy before. He wasn't someone he would have expected help from, for sure: whoever this was, in his black skinny jeans with a black rock band shirt (who the hell were Freelance Whales?), motorcycle boots, heavy silver chains dangling from his jeans and jacket in odd places, with slicked black hair, looked scarier than Puckerman.

"Good. Later!" The stranger flashed a gorgeous smile at Kurt, and then turned to go the other way down the long hallway.

"Yeah. Later." Kurt whispered. He smiled at the retreating form of the mystery boy. He'd barely seen his face at all. Kurt wished he'd looked at his face instead of his clothes

"Kurt! Come on! Your coffee will get cold!" Rachel scurried down the hall, looking for Kurt, her patience wearing thin as she waited to get their glee strategy meeting started. "Artie, Mike, and Tina are already there!" Rachel stopped to look at Kurt, noticing he looked a little stunned. Seeing no evidence of a slushie attack, her brows furrowed as she tried to figure out what was up with her friend. "Where's Finn?"

Kurt went along down the hall with her, as Rachel had gripped his arm, leading him to the choir room. 

"Rachel." She looked at him, opening the door. "I know my way, you know. You don't have to lead me around like some kind of frantic seeing eye dog!" He was about to launch into a snarky remark about Finn not living in his back pocket when Rachel handed him a cup from the Lima Bean. He took his first sip, pure heaven, and looked down at Rachel, whose eyes suddenly brightened: Finn had slipped in just behind them. "Sorry, Rach, you didn't deserve that. And thank you so much for getting me this."

-----------------------------------------------------------

Kurt was glad Mike was in his honors English class. It was right before lunch, and they both had the same lunch period, which meant he wouldn't have to go alone to the caf to find the glee club table. They'd chatted about the heavy reading list, gotten out their lunches (neither one of them liked the school food) and settled in to wait for more friends to join them at a table outside.

"I said get away from my stuff!" 

Their heads snapped at the very angry,very loud voice a few tables away, on the outside rim of the enclosed courtyard. Kurt recognized the boy who was yelling: the stranger from this morning..

"Hey! it was an honest mistake, all right? My bag looks just like yours. Sorry!"

 Mike recognized the boy who was backing away fast, Justin Mara, from his AP Bio class.

"Maybe we need to make them look a little more different, asshole!" Justin watched fearfully as the boy reached to throw something at him, and Kurt and Mike were horrified to hear the thunk of a knife thrown with great force at the bag, right in front of Justin's chest.Kurt looked on, terrified. 

Slushies and getting slammed were routine occurrences at McKinley, as was the occasional trip into a dumpster. But knives? He hadn't seen anyone with one at this school, let alone witnessed one being thrown like that. The jocks clustered at the table near where Justin had been standing just sat there, mouths opened wide, as Justin fled without another word. They moved away a bit as the boy sat at the table next to them that Justin had just vacated.Finn and Brittany sat down next to Kurt, as Mike leaned over, saying, "I'm going to go check on Justin. Catch you later, Kurt."

"Everything OK, Kurt? You, um, don't look too good right now." Finn frowned at Mike's retreating form

."Fine. I'm fine. You didn't see anything, did you?" Kurt glanced over to where the new boy was calmly eating his lunch. He really wanted to get a better look, but brought his gaze back to Finn.

"No! What? Did I miss something?

----------------------------------------------------------

"Porcelain!"

Kurt turned, sighing, ready to see what Coach Sue Sylvester wanted this time. The first glee meeting had gone about like he'd thought it would; Mr. Schue had weird ideas to increase their numbers, Rachel wanted to start planning right away for Sectionals (and of course had songs picked out); not much singing this first day. He was tired; ready to go home, thirsty, hot

."Yes?"

"I'm hoping you've reconsidered your ill-advised decision from last year. You know you want back in."

Kurt could only shake his head. "Ah, Coach Sylvester, by the way, the name is Kurt, and I think I'm going to say no to what I can only assume is your invitation to re-join the Cheerios."

Sue's eyes narrowed as she considered the teen in front of her. 

"You're making a mistake, Porcelain, but I'm sure you'll come around. I've got some numbers planned out for you, and you know you loved it." She smirked at Kurt. 

"See Becky to get your measurements re-done; looks like you've grown some since last year."

Kurt rolled his eyes. He knew his measurements in detail; how else to create his own fashions? As if he'd let Sue's minion put a tape measure anywhere on his body! He had, in fact, enjoyed some aspects of his time in the Cheerios quite a lot, but he really didn't have time for this. He smiled at Sue sweetly. "Bye Coach." 

He was almost giddy at the Coach's look of frustration as he walked away from her. 

Glee let out almost as late as the sports practices today, and he headed towards his beloved Navigator in the nearly deserted student parking lot. Kurt's mind was preoccupied with anticipating getting home, getting rehydrated, and maybe vegging out with reruns of Project Runway.

"Nice ride." 

Kurt blanched as the new kid from earlier today suddenly came up behind him.

"Thanks." 

He had no idea what to say, and this throat was instantly dry, noting that he was completely alone with this guy – who'd been nice, friendly even, this morning, and then revealed himself to be a scary, knife-throwing nut at lunch.

"You all right?" 

The guy was looking at him with concern. Kurt relaxed a little. He certainly didn't look like a threat, for now.

"Yes! Fine!" 

Why was he here? Kurt decided to try talking to him as he were any other new student. He was glad for an excuse to look at the boy's face. "My name's Kurt."

"Blaine. Blaine Anderson." 

Kurt saw his face light up with a smile. And those eyes – he had hazel eyes framed by long lashes, topped with black triangular eyebrows. Why, Kurt wondered, did he look so damned amused? Had he done anything funny? How did someone dressed like such a fashion disaster manage to look so amazingly hot?"You're new here, aren't you?" he managed to say, congratulating himself on not slipping into his highest register.

"Yup," Blaine said. "Moved here this summer. I'm a junior."

Well, Kurt thought, this conversation was going surprisingly normally. If you can call normal having a conversation with a guy in goth-meets-biker gear who throws knives when he gets pissed normal. Somehow he didn't feel like he was in any danger, and part of his mind wondered why that should be so. 

"Junior. Me too." Brilliant, Kurt, he thought to himself. He must have paused too long, as he noticed Blaine started to speak again.

"Well, Kurt. Nice to know the name that goes with the face. See you around!" With that, Blaine nodded in a friendly way in Kurt's direction as he started towards his motorcycle parked further out.

"Right! See you tomorrow. I guess." Kurt watched him walk away for a moment before getting his keys out. Damn! Maybe those pants at least weren't a fashion disaster. Not on him anyway. OK! he thought, enough! I don't even want to know what would happen if he caught me staring at him in those skin tight jeans!

---------------------------------------------------------

Blaine pulled into the driveway of the little house he and his mom had moved into a couple of weeks ago. Her family in the area had all offered to take them in, but she'd gently turned them all down, preferring instead to move into their own place a couple of weeks before the semester started. It was smaller than he was used to, but he liked it more: his parents' fights, which alternated with periods of uncomfortable chilliness, had been hard to be around. Much as he'd hated the idea of them divorcing, he couldn't help but see that his mom actually seemed more relaxed now.

Letting himself in, he dumped his bag into his room and shed his outfit in what his mom would describe as the messiest way possible: jacket, shirt, socks, chains, exploding all over the room. He did use care however, with his knives and holsters, laying them out on the top of his dresser. He didn't regret losing the one he'd thrown at lunchtime: he grimaced for a moment, musing that it was a worthy investment. The table full of jocks? They hadn't said a word, including the Neanderthal who'd pushed that boy into the locker first thing this morning.

Blaine peeled off his sweaty socks, leaving them unceremoniously on the floor, as he loped over to the shower. He'd waited after school, so long he thought maybe he'd missed him, but had been glad to find that he hadn't: he'd wanted to stay to make sure the beautiful boy from the morning made it to his car without getting bullied again. Kurt. He'd seemed nervous, but when he'd finally smiled – wow. Blaine made a mental note to ask Justin about him later tonight

.A/N: So, badboy!Blaine ... consider yourselves introduced, dear readers. I will update again soon, and would welcome any feedback, comments, speculation 

This is the first chapter, written so long ago, in a fic I wrote that is now on Chapter 117. Check it out if you’re in the mood for a long fic...

…https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8315415/1/When-I-get-you-alone-babe

[sunkissedpages]

Just Another Thursday Night || Tom Holland x Reader

For my valentine @technicolor-lightning​!! this is probably the cheesiest thing I’ve ever written so buckle up lol. it’s been so great getting to know you over the past few weeks, love!! and now I can finally follow you ah!! happy valentine’s day, I hope you like it!!

also!! thank you so much @dtftomholland and @thazypangolin for hosting and putting so much hard work into this I had an absolute blast with it!!

Warnings: swearing

Word Count: 1.6k

As far as commercial holidays went, Valentine’s Day was your least favorite. Corporate America always goes batshit crazy when it comes to profiting off of people’s affection, but they took Valentine’s day to a whole different level and it made your skin crawl. Of course, maybe your bitterness was tied to the fact that you’d only ever had one nice Valentine’s Day in your entire life, but that was only a theory.

You and your roommate Tom planned to spend Valentine’s Day exactly as you always did. You’d order from three different takeout restaurants: Cuban, Italian, and Chinese and spend the entire night watching bad game shows. It’s what you had done for the past three years, save the year Tom had a girlfriend (whom you despised) and had taken her out to dinner instead. You still gave him shit for dating a pathological liar, even a year and half later.

Work had dragged on, but at least you were able to lock up early since patrons had stopped coming in over an hour ago. No one needed to be in a bookstore on the evening of Valentine’s Day, they all had better things to do- or better people to do.

It was raining, of course, and you’d left your umbrella at home. Tom had texted you a picture of it sitting by the door where you’d left it and offered to bring it to you at work, but you knew he was busy so you said you’d be fine without it. You regretted not taking him up on his offer now that you were pushing your way through the rush hour crowd holding your bag over your head trying to stay somewhat dry without much success.

You must’ve made your way around ten couples who were kissing out on the sidewalk. It was hard not to roll your eyes at them. To them the rain was romantic. Apparently they weren’t worried about catching bronchitis.

You were thankful for the blast of warm air that hit you the second you stepped inside your apartment building. It was already an old building when you’d moved in with Tom, but over the years it had really started to fall apart. There were more leaks in the ceilings, which made rainy days like today all the more difficult, the wood floors creaked, and the hot water only worked sometimes, but the rent was fantastic for the location and you couldn’t dream of living anywhere else. The elevator had been out of order for months, but you still weren’t used to taking the stairs all the way up to the sixth floor. You felt like you were dying every time.

“How was work?” Tom asked as soon as he heard you come through the door, completely soaked head to toe. He looked up from his laptop and pressed his lips together in an attempt to suppress his laughter upon seeing your appearance.

You narrowed your eyes at him. “We sold thirteen copies of Romeo & Juliet today.” Tom cringed. “All these boys think they’re so original by getting their lit major girlfriends fucking Romeo & Juliet for Valentine’s Day.” You went on and Tom closed his laptop to show he was listening. “I mean at first I felt kind of bad for them because they don’t know any better so I’d suggest Pride and Prejudice if they wanted something that was still well-known, but also romantic to be a little more original or Mansfield Park if they wanted to seem like they did research or put some actual fucking thought into it, but they always took the easy way out.” You hadn’t realized you felt so passionately about this until now.

“Anyone buy Alex, Approximately?” he asked and you immediately smiled. You always did when he brought up your favorite book.

You still remembered the first time you read it. It’d been a rainy night, much like tonight and you’d brought it home from work. It’d been on your to-read list for a while and you were finally able to get to it.

You’d had plans to go out with Tom and friends, but the weather had turned the five minute walk to the bar into a nightmare so the two of you bailed and spent a night in instead. Tom was curled up on the couch with his script and you with your book. Every time you laughed or smiled at a part Tom would stop working and ask you about it. You’d read the part out loud to him and he’d listen intently, urging you to go on when you’d finished, but you just laughed and told him to get back to work, unaware of his gaze that lingered on you as you got lost in the words you were reading.

“No,” you sighed, kicking your shoes off at the door where they could dry. “No one has good taste apparently.”

He smiled softly. “You still wanna watch game shows tonight?”

“Of course! It’s valentine’s day isn’t it?”

“You shower, I’ll order the food?” he suggested.

“Perfect.”

By some miracle the water warmed almost instantly and you were able to take a scalding shower. You let the water nearly burn your skin as the chill slowly eased from your bones. After your shower you changed into some sweats. Even though it was valentine’s day it wasn’t like you were trying to impress anyone.

Tom was set up on the floor of the living room with one out of three orders of food already on the coffee table. Family Feud was playing in the background. You couldn’t wait to spend the night lounging around and stuffing your face with your favorite person.

You and Tom both waited around until the rest of the food showed up, shouting answers out at the tv and yelling at the contestants when they got the question wrong.

The rest of the food arrived in under and hour and Tom set everything up while you were tasked with grabbing drinks from the fridge.

“There are some raspberries in there too,” Tom called from the living room.

“What?” you shouted back, not completely sure if you’d heard him right.

“I picked up some raspberries from the store, they’re your favorite, right?”

“Yeah, they are,” you replied softly, warmth filling your chest as you looked at the rosy berries in front of you. “You didn’t have to do that, Tom,” you sighed as you brought everything back to the living room.

“I know, but it’s valentine’s day, I wanted to do something nice.”

“But I didn’t get anything for you,” you whined.

He chuckled. “They’re just raspberries, y/n.”

You watched countless episodes of Family Feud, Jeopardy, and Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader until the sound of a buzzer made you both cringe, your brains hurt from all the trivia, and the raspberries in the container dwindled to almost none.

“I think I won,” Tom said at the end of the night with a yawn, stretching dramatically.

You shook your head. “No way, I got seventy points and you only got sixty three.”

“We said we weren’t keeping count this year!” he protested.

“Technically we didn’t. It wasn’t official!” He gave you a look. “You know I can’t help myself!”

“Uh huh, whatever,” he pouted. “I get you raspberries and this is how you treat me?”

“Come on, Tom, don’t be a sore loser!” He stuck his tongue out at you in defiance. “Real mature,” you laughed, stifling a yawn. “Hey, but thanks for spending valentine’s day with me,” you said genuinely. “It doesn’t feel so lonely when I’m with you.”

“Of course, it’s tradition,” he shrugged as he started putting pillows back on the couch.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I would,” Tom said and you froze, heart sinking. Of course Tom would want to spend valentine’s day with a romantic interest, who wouldn’t? But you and Tom had a good thing going, or so you’d thought.

“Oh,” was all you said as you helped him straighten up.

“Wait, no that’s not what I meant- shit.”

“It’s okay, Tom, you don’t have to explain-”

“No hold on,” he said and disappeared into another room returning only seconds later with something behind his back. “So I might have gotten you something else.”

“Tom! Why didn’t you tell me we were doing gifts?” you asked when he handed you a small wrapped package.

“Just open it.” You tore into the paper to reveal a copy of We Were Liars. It was a book you already owned and had read several times. It was one of your favorites. You looked up at Tom in confusion. “Open it.”

You flipped it open to reveal scribbles on the inside cover. “It’s signed?” you asked in disbelief, already smiling.

“That’s not all, read it,” he urged.

Y/n, Tom is too much of a bitch to tell you himself, so he asked me to send this message along to you: He’s completely head over heels for you, girl. Has been for a while. Be his valentine? - E. Lockhart

You looked back up at him, beaming. He was biting his thumbnail nervously, waiting for your response.

“Are those good tears or bad tears?” he asked.

You hadn’t even realized you were crying. “This is the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“So...is that a yes?”

“Yes, it’s a yes!” you cried, flinging your arms around him to embrace him.

He hugged you tightly, then leaned back to kiss you tenderly, taking your face in his hands and wiping the remaining tears away with his thumbs.

“Happy valentine’s day, love,” he whispered.

“Happy valentine’s day, Tom.”

“Same time next year?”

Forever Tags: @mischiefmanaged49 @bookingbee @cloverrover @perhaps-he-schnapped @awkwardfangirl2014 @the-queen-procrastinator @tastingthestarz @sleepybesson @everythingbooknerd @sunshine96love @bitchymathematician @livingincompletesilence @melbookstrash @swim-deep-or-die (some of you guys I couldn’t tell if you wanted to be on my permanent taglist or the woko taglist so if you want me to switch you over lmk)

Send me an ask to be added/dropped from a taglist

[chillermal]

The stories behind Ermal’s songs.

Here’s a summary of what some of Ermal’s songs are about or how were they born. (I didn’t include any song from Non abbiamo armi since there’s a whole interview that he talks about all songs of it,or neither famous songs like Vietato Morire, Lettera a mio padre or Storia di una favole, since  I guess everyone knows everything about them.)

Odio le favole

“Odio le favole is a song born in the end of August, after a phone call with a friend of mine.He told me about a common friend of ours, who had tried to hurt herself, a lot. And it made me feel so bad. I experienced a very strong sensation. In my mind, the first thing that I thought, because I couldn’t communicate with her, was that I wanted to tell her…to remember. To remember how everything was. I didn’t wanted to be too didascalic while writing this song. So I just let it flow, in a stream of consciousness.”[I:but does she know it’s about her?] “I never have told her, because I know what kind of person she is,so she wouldn’t like it. That’s because she’s going through a very particular moment in her life,but she’s better now.” *///after singing the line “ma ogni tanto una stronza ci tocca” he said that originally it was supposed to be ‘uno stronzo’ instead of 'una stronza’.” (Interview @ Red Ronnie,2016) 

Schegge

“One night I saw a dream. I dreamed that I was standing in front of a window, which exploded in front of me, in a thousand pieces. In the dream, I ran in front of a mirror to look at myself, but I didn’t have even one scratch, and I thought, 'Wow! I’m miraculously safe 'but no, I started to feel something inside. I immediately connected this dream to what I think of music. Music is like 'a memory without origin’, it is something that at some point comes into your life, it explodes inside or in front of you or somewhere near you; you have no memory of it but it is as if it had always been there. And so I wrote this song. In fact, the title should have been initially “Un ricordo senza origine” (A memory without origin) but it seemed too much at that time.”  (Interview @ Red Ronnie,2016)

since it got pretty long: the rest under the cut!

Volevo dirti

“This song represents the need to move forward. Despite all unpleasant things we’re surrounded by and whatever may happen in the world, the sky above is always blue; it never changes. And we all should try to keep that flame burning. We’re not the first beings that have dwelt on this planet: it’s very selfish of us to think that, and humans are generally selfish by nature. We are all just passers-by, and time flows even when we stop; we should learn to keep marching on so as to not waste any of it.”( translated from @cordeoblique ,posted on her old blog @/gentlepluck)

“Volevo dirti is an invitation, an encouragement to live life lightly. In a world that goes the other way round how it should go, you have to keep high the desire to live, taking things as they come, because we live once, and despite everything we are the only ones who can choose for our lives.” ( Interview @ All Music Italia,2016)

A parte te

“More than a person, I think of a place, because for me love is a place, not a physical one, but a safe space. It’s a blanket on your shoulders, it’s a smile, it’s where you scraped your knees for the first time, where you first learned to ride a bike. This song was written after I took a trip to Albania a few years ago, when I passed by my old school, in my old neighbourhood, and I got very emotional seeing the same things that hadn’t met my sight in so many years.” ( translated from @cordeoblique​ ,posted on her old blog @/gentlepluck)

Umano

“It was written in a moment of  discouragement and anger. Sometimes it happens, to feel like you’re just a caretaker of your own soul; as if you were a house whose resident delays rent payment, and the financials don’t add up. It was all born from the thought “What’s wrong with this soul of mine, that takes everything without asking, and never asks me about myself?”. This song is somehow liberating. Scars are like seals; when you seal something, you lock it up forever. So, with this song I locked up some of the bitterness I had inside, and I made peace with my soul.” 

“It’s not that I can record the songs I have written in every moment. I need to feel when it’s the right moment to do it- and that’s usually during the night. For example, while trying to record the track ‘Umano’, someone told me my voice sounded weird. I knew I could never record that song in the daytime; it was meant to be at night, and I had to be tired too. So I waited, until occasionally, I found myself not having slept for more than 40 hours and there I realized, that was exactly the right moment. I ended up recording it at 6 am. I was totally exhausted, but it finally came out exactly how I wanted.” ( translated from @cordeoblique​ ,posted on her old blog @/gentlepluck)

Pezzi di paradiso

“Everything comes at a price in life. This song is tied to the concept of ‘being human’, main pattern of the album. By those lines “sembra quasi un incantesimo il nome che abbiamo” I mean that the name of a person influences the course of their life. People identify you by the sound it makes, and you learn to identify with it too. If my name hadn’t been Ermal, my life probably wouldn’t have been the same. I deeply identify with the sound of my name.” // Also Pezzi di paradiso is written during the time he also wrote Viteato Morrire. ( translated from @cordeoblique​ ,posted on her old blog @/gentlepluck)

Piccola Anima

“I like to have my guitar in my hands and see the passengers go by and imagine their story. That’s how Piccola Anima was born. I once saw a girl passing by, and I thought 'something is not going well for her’ so I wrote this song.”(Radio Italia Live, 2018)

La Vita Migliore

The whole song is inspired from this photo of La Fame Di Camilla . Also  the lyrics "È stato bello sognare,sognare insieme” are pretty much the same as the words he used in the post in which he announced the split up of the band: “È stato bello suonare per voi,È stato bello sognare fra noi.”(From Ermal’s live stream on fb & Ermal’s Twitter) 

Crescere

“I wrote this song the day I left the house in which I grew up. I saw my sister crying and I felt very bad and guilty. So I locked myself in to the room, in which the only thing left was my piano and wrote this song.”(Live in concert in Milano,2016) 

Buio e Luce

“Sometimes it is not understood that the darkness does not exist…It is only the absence of light, a light that can also be born inside the human heart. The only secret to dream big and to not forget to be reasonable.. not even for a little while!” ( Squeezer Mag, 2010)

28-03-97

It’s a song that talks about the Tragedy of Otranto. It took place on 28 March 1997 when the Albanian ship Kateri i Radës sank in a collision with the Italian naval vessel Sibilla in the Strait of Otranto and at least 81 Albanians, aged 3 months to 69 years, lost their lives.

“I felt like I had to write something about that story, not because I was forced to do it, but because I wanted to bring out the pain I had inside of me. And the only way I know to do that is music. Someone makes a painting, another a sculpture, I make music. I shaped my feelings. I’m very attached to Albania, it’s part of me. It is a source of inspiration.”(Albania News,2010)

L’amore perfetto

“It was inspired from the movie ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’. I was watching that movie and in one of its most moving scenes I felt I was about to “throw up”! I paused it and took the guitar in my hand … the rest I don’t remember…” // He also once tweeted it was one of the songs he enjoined the most writing.(Lost High Ways,2008)

20 cigarettes ,for Marco Mengoni

“20 cigarettes was first written in English, it was called “Long Way Home”. We wrote the Italian text at Marco’s house, me and him sitting facing each other. It was magical, I watched him carefully while smoking and looking at his drawings, that he did not want to show me. In my mind those drawings have become photos and so was born the verse ‘and I smoke 20 cigarettes looking at you on photos that I will not forget.’”(Sorrisi e Canzoni,2016)

Natale senza regali, for Marco Mengoni

“Even this song was first written in English, the title was "Christmas Homeless”, talks about Christmas from the point of view of a homeless person. When I made Marco hear it, he liked it right away, also because he was born at Christmas.   (Sorrisi e Canzoni,2016)

Big Boy, for Sergio Sylvestre

“It was him who contacted me first, because he had heard that I write in english too. When Pico Cibelli of Sony send me his video, i got very emotional and the first thought was “This guy is too far from home” (Sorrisi e Canzoni,2016)

Un uomo: is dedicated to Dino and is written the day his daughter was born.

New York: Is written with Marco and is dedicated to Marco’s girlfriend.

Voodoo Love: Was inspired by the book called “L'alchimia del desiderio”.

[vitaminxiu]

Run Into You | Chanyeol

Hey guys! So this is the first thing I’ve written in like 6 years, and certainly the first thing I’ve written for EXO, so don’t be too hard on it. 😅

Member: Chanyeol

Genre: Straight up angst, based on a song?

Word Count: 1,500+

Rating: rated E for everyone lol

Summary: No real plot, basically it’s after a breakup with Chanyeol. Inspired by the song “Into You” by Julia Micheals

     Haven’t been to my favorite restaurant in months. I just can’t stand the thought of all those memories flooding back to me. Memories that I once held as precious. The sound of his laughter as I watch him double over at the dumb joke I just told. The way his eyes light up like the stars when he talked about all of the new projects he’s working on.

     “Oh, you’ll never believe what Junmyeon did the other day.” The way that he speaks slightly too fast when he gets excited.

      It’s these things that I’m worried I’ll be reminded of if I step into that little Italian place at the end of the block. It’s these things that keep me cooped up in my third-floor apartment, ordering takeout for dinner yet another day.

           I thought about moving to a different state, a different country. Maybe that would be better. Then the possibility of seeing him wouldn’t exist, and maybe if it did happen, just maybe, it would be fate.

           Last week I was out buying groceries, and I thought I saw him. I didn’t know whether to hide or try and follow. All I saw was little wisps of brown hair on top of long arms and legs, but it didn’t stop me from thinking of him. Somehow, I managed to drag myself through the remaining aisles of the store and past the checkout before I realized I’d forgotten to pick up bread and the latest Nicholas Sparks movie. If I couldn’t have love in real life, I was damn well going to enjoy imagining myself as Rachel McAdams.

           I wish we didn’t have so many friends in common. But I guess that’s not fair to say given that so many of them belonged to him first. Minseok, Junmyeon, Kyungsoo, and Jongin had met him when they were all kids. Back when we were together, he had shown me pictures of the “five amigos,” as they had called themselves. Although he was the oldest, it didn’t take long for the other boys to outgrow Minseok. The younger boys looked up to Minseok so much, even if he was the shortest. When they hit age thirteen, they all started to even out, but not him, not the ex-love of my life. He continued to grow until he was a whole head taller than all of them. According to him, he was the tallest boy in all his classes, and I believed him. That boy could say anything in that smooth, deep voice of his and I’d believe him. It’s one of the reasons that I fell for him in the first place. Yeah, he was hot… okay, still is hot, but his voice… it has this certain quality that makes me feel all giddy inside, like I’ve become 12-year-old me again and I’m at a Jonas Brothers concert. I hate that I miss it.

           On the first day of our second year of college, the first thing he told me was about these two guys he had met in class: Baekhyun and Jongdae. They were just alike, all three of them had the same personality. (Later Minseok and I would refer to them as puppies). They are as equally loving and cute as they are raucous and loud. (Just like puppies). On any given day you could find them all in the library being too loud, or in Baekhyun’s apartment having a “jam sesh.” Jongdae and Baekhyun loved to sing while he would play the guitar, or piano, or whatever instrument he had with him that day. How I miss them so much. I still have a class with Jongdae, and occasionally I’ll see Baekhyun in the hallways or he’ll send a funny meme through text, but things just aren’t the same anymore. They’re practically always with him, and though I know they would still treat me as they always have, it’s still too much for me. Even the mere mention of his name makes my skin prickle and long to feel his warm touch.

           Yixing and Sehun were originally my friends. Both of them I had tutored before we began to truly know each other. They complemented each other well, Yixing the sweet, innocent boy, and Sehun the clever, sassy one.

     When they first met him, we weren’t dating yet. It wasn’t even something that had crossed our minds. It was simply me introducing two of my best friends, to my other best friend. Both of them grew to love him and love seeing us together. Yixing said it was like the sun came out from behind the clouds when the two of us were near each other. When I told him about our breakup, I think he was almost more devastated than me. Almost.

     Sehun and I have become very close recently. He went through a rough time last year and seems to understand how I feel better than anyone else. Sehun has taught me a lot about myself. That I don’t need someone to be happy. That I am my own person. That even though things didn’t work out, things will turn out okay in the end. I know the words that he says to me are true, but it doesn’t make me hurt any less.

           I wish we didn’t have to walk around our problems. I still don’t know how we got to where we are now. We used to be so happy. Another thing that I loved about him was his passion. His name literally means passion. He showed this trait in many ways, competitive to a fault – I can’t count how many times I had to cheer him up after he lost a game with his friends – but also passionate in the best of ways. He has so many things that he’s talented at, and his passion only amplifies those talents.

     Unfortunately, sometimes his thirst for life came out in a different form. When we would argue, it didn’t take long before voices were raised and we were both yelling. My insecurities definitely didn’t help the situation either. I always questioned if he really loved me like he said he did. He was my first real relationship, and I couldn’t find the right balance between wanting all his attention and needing my own space.

           So many birthdays that I missed, and I feel terrible about it. Jongin, who is literally the sweetest boy ever, turned 25 last week. He had a small party at the bar downtown, and I know he wanted me to be there for him, but I just couldn’t force myself to go. I knew that he would be there. My wounds are still too fresh, and it would kill me to see him and his lopsided smile having the time of his life while I’m sitting in the corner, downing my drink like it’s water. There was always the possibility that he would be a no-show, but he never misses the chance to spend a night with his best friends, especially not on someone’s birthday.

     My best girlfriend tried so hard to convince me to go. She told me that I was never going to get over him if I just kept avoiding him and that this would be a good way to ease back into normalcy. “It’s not like it’s just you and him. There will be plenty of people there and you won’t even have to look at him if you don’t want to.” She was very persistent, but so was I.

           I don’t want to give him all this power. I’ve even changed my daily routine because of him. After the almost run-in at the grocery store, I make sure to go when I know that he’ll be in class or busy with his other schedules. Everybody knows when we’re in the same vicinity I die too. It’s not a secret from anyone. Thankfully, they don’t mention it too often. Sehun did bring it up once, but after he saw my face, changed the subject instantly.

           It’s been weeks since I’ve had the free time or the will to go out and do something fun, but finally, the opportunity came. Jongdae’s parents own a little plot of land at a lake that’s only about a 2-hour drive away. Jongdae has been saying for a solid year that we all need to go and see it, and the weather is just now in that perfect spot where it’s not too cold or too hot and the plants are starting to come back to life, so we all figured there is no time like the present. I’m actually really excited to go see the place.

     Yesterday, Yixing and I met up with Minseok and his girlfriend to go shopping for tents and sleeping bags. We got a little carried away and bought a bunch of extras, but I’m convinced that it’s not really a camping trip unless smores are involved.

           “Baekhyun just texted me. I’m so sorry, Chanyeol’s coming.”

Every time that a friend gets a text saying he’s gonna be there I just don’t go. So I don’t run right into him. Even though that’s what I want.

[skamamoroma]

Vediamo/We’ll See - Thoughts (or, as I like to call it, Megan rambles about giraffes for far too long)

As requested (by you lovely lot), my rambles on this clip. And what a clip it is!

This one made me sob. Full on tears down my face, need a tissue sob. It was equal parts heartbreaking and soothing which is Skam allover isn’t it?!

I think this one is one of my absolute favourites so far. I’ve been dying to see more of Mamma Rametta (when will we learn her name?!) and I have a feeling we’ll see more but this was some of what we needed after the other evening.

Her’s a long winded way of saying that everything about this clip was ever so special, the acting was stunning, the symoblism was completely perfect and in equal parts, brutal but beautiful.

So, first off, Ludo and the god damn synthy atmospheric music that has plagued me for weeks. I LOVE this kind of music and god has he used it to his advantage so much. This one is so sad but kind of helps us feel how Marti’s head is spinning. He’s a couple of days post Milan but his mind is still confused and full of hurt and sadness. He has internalised Maddalena’s words and yet is still researching. But as we all know, the internet is not always the best place to be when you’re researching a complex illness or medical issue. We can see him looking at elements of ‘suicide’ and this is a boy who we know has had a lot of exposure to mental illness but doesn’t have a lot of understanding so, to him, this must be very difficult to comprehend and so he will take things at face value. 

I love seeing Marti in his room. It’s SO BLUE but so cosy still. I also love seeing him in his sweatshirt bottoms because he always looks like the cuddliest bean. Bless him. 

We know he hasn’t heard from Nico but when we see that text it’s the first interaction they’d had post-Milan and poor Marti is still so confused and hurt and in the belief that he’s just another ‘someone’ to Nico, just a temporary thing. It KILLS me because we know, even when Nico was at his worst, it was still ALL about Marti. It’s where his heart is. 

AND THEN THE TEXT MESSAGE. Oh god. I am so VERY pleased that I was actually having a nap when this came out because I watched the translated version and not the website version first and when I read the translation of that text it made me cry instantly.

We’ve seen/heard of giraffes 4 times so far:  - The drawing on Nico’s wall - The beer glasses at the Halloween party that Nico loved - Nico’s discussion as to what he’d do as the Last Man - The flip book/horse riding lessons

There had to be a reason why Nico had this love of this animal and brought it up so many times. There had to be something about the giraffe that he loved and finding out what it is absolutely broke me because its SO BEAUTIFUL and SO perfect for his character I am still a little speechless as to how they did this. I didn’t for one moment think that any remake (and I was never down with remakes of the original in the first place until I realised there’d be an Italian one and saw the stunning trailer) would ever be able to match OR supercede the original in terms of layers of metaphor and nuanced symbolism but then THIS SEASON.... good lord. 

First of all, Nico had to make that giraffe. ON AN OLD MOBILE PHONE. To me, that’s almost impossible. Nico, the sweetheart, went to the effort of making that adorable kind of sad looking punctuation giraffe just to send to Marti. 

Then the words - “The giraffe’s heart is far from its thoughts. She fell in love yesterday and she doesn’t know yet”.

I swear, I didn’t think they’d do this. I didn’t think they’d make it THIS meaningful. Nico’s love for giraffes suddenly makes a ridiculous amount of sense. He actually IDENTIFIES with them to explain himself in terms of his illness. What a heartrendingly beautiful and gut wrenching sentiment. AH. I’m so in love with it.

The idea that head and heart are distanced and that love can exist in the heart that the brain may not realise yet just honestly makes me want to cry. 

I’m a sucker for this stuff. I am legitimately ALL ABOUT this kind of thing, the metaphorical and symbolic nature of things that people cling to or use to help them through life and Nico broke me with this. We understand him so much more. I wish Marti would have perhaps spent more time READING that to understand it because Nico is effectively telling him he loves him, that his heart is separate to his brain, that he can feel things but sometimes his brain isn’t on the same page and that his love for Marti is what is real. 

He kissed Marti’s heart. He drew a coffee heart. He puts so much stock in the HEART because he’s literally saying that his brain betrays him and doesn’t necessarily reflect what’s in his heart. But we STILL saw him in his episode and Marti was everything to him. He’s so full of love and it’s terribly sad that he has such a tough time because of his illness.

I don’t blame Marti for blocking his number. It’s really sad that he did but Marti doesn’t understand anything, he thinks he’s being played or used and that his time with Nico is meaningless. Looking at their history and the whole situation where Nico ‘went back’ to Maddalena, his doubts almost have foundation in reality and then Maddalena just confirmed them. I don’t know what will happen with Friday’s clip and the phone but we shall have to wait and see with that. 

And then the focus is all on Marti and his mamma. Oh my. This scene. This beautiful beautiful scene. First off, Mamma Rametta has the most insanely gorgeous hair. It’s just CUTE that we know where Marti gets his hint of red from in his curls. It’s that instant familiarity and closeness you feel when you see them both. ALSO SHE ALWAYS WEARS BLUE. Like mother, like son <3

The way he shouted is something I think many people can understand. He’s not able to share. He doesn’t feel able to be open with her for many reasons but the main two, I think, are that he doesn’t want her to be burdened with this stuff as he doesn’t think she can cope with it and also because he can’t be truthful without explaining his sexuality.

The way Fede plays this though is so pitch perfect. He’s stressed, tearful, frustrated and heartbroken. It’s a heady mix and I adore Fede’s performance. He’s wonderful. 

But I ALSO adore Mamma Rametta’s persistence. She won’t leave. I got a true sense of her as a mother here and a little of Martino’s fierceness. She was not going to let her son make her leave because she KNOWS he isn’t ok. 

That door slam, the door handle hitting the floor and Marti pressing his head to the other side of the door hurt like hell but it was so well done. 

AGAIN WITH THE SYMBOLISM LUDO. Just as Nico stood on the other side of bars, Marti is on the other side of a door to his Mama and she CAN’T GET TO HIM. She can’t open the door herself. Marti has to open the door for them. He has to take the first step to find their connection again and I loved how that was all shown in the way the clip was shot. YET AGAIN, this show stuns me with the way it uses cinematography to convey a message. UGH, so great.

I felt Fede’s acting in this moment. I’ve been in this moment. I’ve felt as he felt and he. was. wonderful. You could feel his frustration and sadness and instant regret and his little voice “are you sitting there”?

But then you see Mamma Rametta and she’s sitting alongside a quote written on Marti’s wall:  :Joy lies in the fight, in the attempt, in the suffering involved, not in the victory itself”

Oh Marti. I don’t know when he wrote that but the fact he did tells me he’ll be ok. To have his Mamma sitting next to THOSE WORDS is so meaningful and is a summary of this entire season. God, has Marti suffered and fought and been brave... It’s a summary of his bravery. He’ll TRY. SO GOD DAMN BEAUTIFUL. I keep using that word. Damnit. Haha. It’s so true though. 

“We’re so happy in this house, huh?” - and isn’t that just the thing you say to a loved one or someone close? That self aware, self deprecating thing you can say even in difficult moments? He recognizes for them both that they’re both sad and it’s a little moment of connection even if they can bond over the sadness, at least they can bond. 

The tears. I was a little emotional by this point what with the GIRAFFE of it all but those tears. Marti looks so exhausted and forlorn and just worn down. I miss his smile every single time it goes away. 

His almost bitter laugh and eye roll at the knowledge that his father has betrayed his trust was perfectly played by Fede because COME ON. His dad did that? That’s not ok. He asked him not to, specifically. There was nothing there in his chat with his dad to suggest that Marti was in trouble or upset that may have prompted his father to tell his mother so it seems pretty awful to me that his father did this and still hasn’t contacted Marti about it, hasn’t responded with any words of comfort or love. I don’t know where that’s going but it’s really sad for Marti. 

And then the bit that breaks me ever single time. God there are tears as I’m writing this. When Marti says he doesn’t know if his sexuality matters to his Mamma... MY GOD, the way she says his name. Her broken voice through tears is just gut wrenching. 

“You’re the most important thing in my life”. The words Marti needs to hear and, by the sound of it, the words his mamma needed to say. She can hardly get them out. Marti’s reaction kills me because it’s full of relief. He SMILES. Her words get through to him and the way, from this point onwards, he SMILES is like a plaster to the heart, it’s so soothing and comforting to see that kind of relief. It’s so comforting to also see a mother who is struggling but trying HARD (like the quote says) and who still is taking the opportunity to tell her son that no matter what, he is what’s important to her. For any person who struggles with their sexuality or who has to perhaps face a moment of honesty with a loved one like this..... well, for me, it’s really damn emotional and full of hope. 

Mamma Rametta needs all of the cuddles and love. I’ve adored her since we first saw her but GOD, look at her trying so hard. I love that her first idea is to spend time with her son, to talk. She’s offering him that and effectively telling him that she’s there for him and that she WANTS them to reconnect. He looks grateful.

And that’s when you truly believe they’re family and see their mother/son bond because there’s this banter between them even in the midst of all of this sadness and heartbreak and confusion.... 

Vediamo. 

Ah god, it’s simply so cute. She knows her son. Her little joke makes him smile and even laugh because he knows it’s true... and just like that’s there’s so much WARMTH. They’ve made a connection and I love that Marti looks up at the handle because of course he’s going to let her out of the room and HE is going to be the one to remove that barrier between them. 

It’s the first step to repairing their relationship and it’s simple but such a truly meaningful moment and absolutely one of my favourites of the entire season. I KNOW we will get to see more of Marti and his Mamma and I can’t wait. 

Now, I need a tissue <3