#also wHO THE FUCK HAS A WIFI CURFEW

[acid-ixx]

i’m kinda curious on whether or not the reader would continue going to college after they go back to the wayne manor. furthermore, i also remember the resder mentioning a small group of friend they had, will they stay in contact with them? how do the family react to them being so close with others? dudhjew i love this series you write so well.

— masterlist !

a/n: phew i finally get to answer asks !! yesterday was insane, me and my family swam on around 5 different beaches so i was outside for more than 12 hours with no wifi and the power keeps turning off in the house due to the weather so that's that. i love writing so this is a bit longer than i expected hehe. oh yeah i forgot to tell yall that in the timeline, the mc may be bruce's third child but they're actually younger than tim as he was adopted later on.

now, to answer. i don't think bruce, as your ever-so loving father, would agree to get you back to college once you're back (kidnapped) in the manor. he wouldn't directly say it, but with your current state of relationship towards your family, with just how much time they have lost not spending it with you, it's a given that bruce, your dad, and your siblings who are feral for any ounce of attention from you, would insist that you take... a very long vacation with just them.

after all, desire is one of the stronger emotions they feel towards you, and they grapple at anything you offer towards them. but they still want you to be happy, no?

so at first, they'll let you go to your classes (though you'd be heavily monitored everywhere. who knows what bad influences scurry the area, right? barbara and tim take turns watching through the live feed of your college) but that's only if, and only if the uni's timetable allows for a flexible schedule with your family after. that means, if you're stubborn enough (which bruce understands, because "bruce! you allow damian to go to school so why can't i?!" and he's willing to give his baby the world after he finally hears them say his name) and still wish to continue the course you're working so hard for, one you had attained a full scholarship for, then go ahead!

though they can't help it when the hours they're supposed to get to know you better are taken away from them. for now, you'll have a taste of freedom before it's ultimately taken away from you.

but until then, you'll have to learn how to balance school life with family life. because even if there would be no more crappy apartment to go home to, even if you actually get a full meal instead of cheap, microwavable oven meals and dollar priced ramen, even if you still get to pursue your dream course— it's undeniable that the moment you leave your uni's doors, you'd be picked up by dick, tim, and even your youngest brother damian fucking wayne driving the car, to be escorted back to the manor strictly after classes. during the night, should you ever overstay for projects, it would be jason who'll greet you and allow you to ride his motorcycle; though that's only permissible if you have updated them a day before that you wouldn't be home before the curfew bruce has set up for you.

sometimes, it's your father who makes an untimely appearance with his well-known persona, brucie wayne. he'll greet all the people who pass by with a teethy smile, his big hand holding your stiff shoulders after he kisses your cheeks as a greeting. if you're out the door with your friends - friends who knew of your history of neglect, who told you they would always take your side - then he'll shake their hand, introduce himself with a charm that makes them question if what you've told them is true.

he presents himself with such an aura that's harmless, as if him and your other siblings who are spying by a bush aren't incapable of taking all friends down with just a punch to their face shall one of them speak up or dare tease you in front of them.

unfortunately for you, even some of your friends would be truly convinced that your father wasn't the same man you've told your lifelong stories about neglect. not when he makes a show of running his hand through his baby's head to comfort them whilst he talks to them, not when he cloaks your shoulders in his own work suit to make sure his child wouldn't feel the chilly weather, not when he takes all the time in his busy day to pick you up from school as he should've done all those years ago.

but who would believe you when it's obviously known by the public eye that bruce loves his child, (name) wayne?

you know it's all fake, and it's scary for you, that he simply was able to make a cover up story to the journalists that his child's lack of presence to the public is him merely wishing to shield them from the disgusting media, no?

now that you're older, he says, he would want to make a show of his undying grip over you, that his gleeming eyes that hold multiple threats towards the people in your campus is simply his overprotectiveness as your father, that if they ever harm you or dare question your family's overprotective nature towards you; they'd be gone by the very hands that sworn to protect gotham.

it's all fake, you tell yourself.

but what isn't false are his intentions to make you feel like you're part of the family now, no matter how much you kick, or fight, or scream; they'll always remind you that you're loved and always will be. it's both an apology and display of affection towards you.

it doesn't matter if your uni is on the other side of gotham, you're always coming home to them and that's final. at least you know they still have an ounce of empathy for you to continue having friends (and a boyfriend that they've no knowledge of, yet), as long as they heavily monitor you...

... what you don't know, though, is that the moment you've fallen into the hands of danger— your father wouldn't hesitate pulling you out of college and instead settling for homeschooling. you have brilliant siblings, after all, and a father who had trained all over the world.

that's why hangouts with friends are unpermitted, you soon discover that only trying to beg bruce to at least be more flexible with your friends would only lead to even lesser chance of trying to find escape in your already stuffy life.

and don't even dare throw a tantrum about preferring your friends over them. if you even go as far as calling one of your friend's parents as an even better parent than bruce could be, that your friends are people you consider actual siblings, then you've guaranteed yourself a one way ticket to being locked up in the manor, permanently; with your father and your siblings, especially damian, trying to prove themselves that, no, you didn't just fucking say that, take it back.

you're going to witness a personal breakdown from damian. because no way do you prefer those scum over him! he's supposed to be your favorite, who are they to take his place?! you love him, you love them, you wanted attention from the family, didn't you?! you wouldn't be able to comfort him because he'd already wear his robin suit, ready to eliminate any of your friends who are younger than you because they don't deserve to be seen as your younger sibling, no matter if you had just blurted that out as retaliation for an argument.

what you had just said is serious, and bruce and dick wouldn't even try to stop that kid from slashing someone in broad daylight; dick choosing to cry and refusing to let you go from his arms as he babbles on about his delusional baby bird, trying his damn best to not let his temper get to him, trying so hard to not choke the ever living shit out of any of your older friends once you confess calling anyone of them your older brother— because him, jason, and tim are supposed to be the only ones you consider your older brothers, babybird!

hell, even tim and babs are already on the monitors ready to give damian each and every one of your friend's individual locations.

bruce especially, would be heartbroken that his child called someone else their father. that's his title. you calling him father, or dad, or papa, or any language that describes him to be your parental figure is the only thing keeping him sane. he hates it when his child only calls him bruce as if to describe a mere stranger, to which he knows he is to you— but it sounds wrong and it furthers the ache in his heart— and it's even worse if you chose to call someone else a father, chose anyone else than him as your dad.

batman is even more cruel in his patrol after your argument, punching the living hell out of any male criminals, picturing your voice playing over and over again calling them your father instead of him— it only makes him perceptive of jason's moral code. because what if you have fallen into the hands of anyone but him before he had come to take you back? he knows he isn't the best, was never there for you until now, but fuck, he needs to make it up to his child, and getting angry at you only worsens your already severed bond with him.

so you may expect a punishment, but it's already punishment towards you when you're now isolated inside the manor with only the presence of your siblings to comfort you throughout the nights where it gets too lonely during patrol time. bruce would have more than an hour long talk with you in his study, forcing you to confess every single thought you have about him and your siblings. he tells you it's all unrecorded, that there's no cameras to watch over your one-on-one confrontation— he just wants his baby's opinion on everything so they could adjust to your every whim, but really, it's all just a matter of them wanting to dive deep into your very thoughts like the invasive creatures they are.

the worst part of it all, is that nobody even dare mentions the names of your friends and their respective family. they listen to anything you say, because you already barely talk, but the moment you mutter about missing them, the topic would be shunned down by something, anything else. whether that'd be damian deciding that his older sibling should paint with him, or dick inviting you to watch him perform his acrobatic stunts.

it's a distraction you know you're susceptible to, because they all wish to take your thoughts away from those scum, as damian calls them, and instead have you focus on them, your actual family. those people are nothing to you, now that they're out of the picture.

... you should've chosen to be homeschooled instead of unintentionally getting your friends killed.

[incorrecttwoset]

Lesson time with Dani:

The lesson here is that... there will always be someone better than you. (Cries in corner. LOL jokes)

But seriously thoooooo, they all sound so gooooood. Literally right after rewatching the vid (because wifi curfews a bitch) i felt like composing a piece! Even tho i didnt know how to! The inspire...

Also gOD that intro. So cute, so adorbs. Oh yeah, is it just me or does Bretts shirt a little loose? I swear, he looks like a block when he raised out his arms.

The first piece (the sacrilegious piece, if you can screw it slowly you can screw it quickly), after a couple rewatches because they all sounded fucking aMAZING, was actually inspired by the little jazz thingy the sacrilegious boi did. Like, damn. This guy even made that sound good. Also, our perfect pizz boi has rETURNED! We must rejoice. (And they really did show us that if you can screw it slowly, you can screw it quickly. Oh god that phrase sounds WRONG AHAHAHA)

The second piece (the one dedicated to Ling Ling, our Lord and Savior) I feel like, really represents the path and way to Ling Ling. Aka, a small series of screw ups leading up to a big screw up, and then learning from the screw ups to play perfectly. Also, the lil chants- aUGH MY HEART JUST GOT SHOT 40 TIMES. And the last part reminded me of like either pag or tchiak because of all the string crossings and that last note. Really nice!

The third piece... Alex, can I use your piece for my wedding someday because hOLY SHIT THAT SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING A PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER WITH YEARS OF EXPERIENCE WOULD MAKE LIKE WHAT THE FUCK HOW. The first part made me think of like, of course, the country side and just frolicking through the mountains like in the first scene of the Sound Of Music but jollier. Little faeries and pixies weaving through the air, toadstools littering the forest floor. Yeah, those vibes.

The second part of Alex's country side piece... damn. That part made me think of walking down the aisle, and saying vows at the altar while a soft breeze flows in the wind, white and pink petals dancing through the air. Which then transitions into the couples first dance together as man and wife, while family and friends cheer and throw rice grains. (Please tell me this is a regular wedding thing) Man, twoset would be so proud of us.

This SONG (check your grammar there jake) is about memes, but I was a little too bAMBOOZLED by the fact that this guy is 15. And wrote this fucking masterpiece. I... I couldnt find the memes, it was too amazing. I only got two, which was the first part (b flat) and the last part (15 notes a second). Please tell me all the memes I missed. This SONG is too amazing.

The last piece had me sHOOKT. This was made when she was tHIRTEEN?! NANI THE FUCK (yes i say this unironcally shoosh) Like it might be a lil short bUT HOLY SHIT HOW. HOW DO I GET THIS TALENT.

Also, Twoset if youre reading this, (i lowkey hope not and i know that you wont since yall dont act like you have a tumblr) your "butchering" is insanely good. I dont really play an instrument but i do have a lot of reference (aka hilary hahn, these recordings can only capture a drop of your perfection. And ray chen, the emotion when you play? OH JESUS WOW) and let me tell you. That sounded like the best sight reading i have ever heard. You may have screwed up a little in some parts but they still sound amazing, even without practice. So keep believing in yourselves and gO PRACTICE.

Also alternate vid title: twoset proving that composers with unpronounceable last names are actual gods for 13 minutes and 53 seconds.

[athenadcvell]

Let’s make this a strict parent’s thread

Ok, everyone with strict parents. I’m boutta top y’all. And let’s all suffer together, so reblog with your own wild rules you have to follow

Fellin bored, so I’m boutta flex and just go ahead and hand my parents the most controlling and manipulative strictest parents of all time award

I have never been allowed to go to anyone’s house unless they were family

That literally means that growing up, if I was even invited to a birthday party, my parents would not let me go

Not one of my friends have ever been allowed to come over

Up until Sophomore year, I had never hung out after school with my friends

I maybe ever went to one birthday party, for, like, an hour

My dad gave me his old tablet when I was 12. He put restrictions so I could not access any web browser, the app store, or download games intended for children 12 and up

I was twelve 

We have an alarm on our door. Not a system generated alarm that notifies police if there is an intruder. Nope. An alarm. You open the door or window? Alarm

I’m not allowed to open my windows and have my door locked. And no, I have not been caught smoking before, or sneaking out. My room is on the third level

I am not allowed to have my phone or laptop in my room, ever

I am not allowed to wear leggings

I am not allowed to wear shorts

I am not allowed to wear tank tops

I can’t wear ripped jeans or crop tops

I can not wear short dresses or skirts without wearing leggings underneath them (which is why I stopped wearing them all together)

I can’t leave the house wearing a shirt that shows my shoulders

I have never been allowed to date, or even hang out with guys

My mom says she’s fine with my hanging out with boys, but one time, one of my guy friends dropped me off home after school (there were two other girls visible in the car) and my mom thought he looked like a ‘drug dealer’. I ended up getting grounded for a week

I was not allowed to wear makeup until I was 14

I literally do not have a curfew. Meaning, that I can be out of the house for maybe two or three hours before my mom drags my ass back in. God forbid I ask to stay out past 7

I can’t hang out two weeks in a row. I asked my mom once if I could hang out with my friends on Friday, and she said I was abusing her generosity because she had let me hang out with friends the Friday before

I literally can not even sit on our front porch because apparently I look like a ‘prostitute’

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN???

My mom makes me roll up my pads/tampons in toilet paper before throwing them in the trash bc the ‘men of the house’ don’t need to see that

the only one who cares is my misogynistic fuck of a father. I’ve asked my brother. He couldn’t give a shit

I can’t even say the word period out loud without getting yelled at

My phone and laptop both have internet restrictions on them, cause apparently, a fucking high schooler can’t be trusted on google

I literally have like 5 different VPN’s and Proxy’s downloaded on my computer

At 9, my WiFi cuts off. I’m the only one in the house who has to go through that

If I want an adrenaline rush, I go and ask my mom if I can hang out/ buy something. Get’s the heart beating real quick

Also works if I wanna be reminded of all the reasons why I’m such a failure and let down

I can’t spread my legs open wide while sitting down without my dad getting angry and yelling at me

On more than one occasion, my father has forced me to sit in the trunk of our car bc I did something to piss him off. The drive can range anywhere from 15 min to 3 hours. The first time he did this I was 9

Tbh this has started to become more of ‘reasons why my parents are such shitty people’ rather than ‘reasons why my parents are super strict’

There’s more, but Imma stop now. 

If you got strict parents, add yours! Even if your parents are stricter, or not as strict as mine, it actually rlly helps to know that you’re not the only one in a wildly unfair and controlling household

P.S: Yes. I have broken almost every single one of these rules more than once. And yes. I have gotten in trouble. Trust me, I got the scars to prove it.

[malumsmermaid]

Ok so I’ve had this thought for a few months and like, I'm just going for it.

So like it’s half-blood!ravenclaw!ash and half-blood!ravenclaw!reader and both of you had muggle parents that made you go to normal school before you got accepted to hogwarts. 

So while you’re both in primary school y’all get really interested in what little you learn about space while you’re there, so when you get to astronomy class you’re stoked, but then you find out that what they’re teaching in astronomy isn’t quite up to date with everything that muggles have discovered about space.

So around third or fourth year you and Ashton take to googling different things about space and astronomy news whenever you’re home and message each other about the latest news, especially when something exciting happens. By fifth year you’ve managed to come up with a charm that would protect tech from all the magic at Hogwarts so you can stay up to date on science stuff. There are a lot of late nights of you and Ashton sitting in the common room on your laptops, listening to music while you work on homework before moving on to keeping up with the muggle world.

So in seventh year you’re both up in the astronomy tower late one night working on studying for your NEWTs. You’ve both always had top marks in the subject due to your general interest in the subject, as well as the fact that you two have been working in your knowledge of what muggles knew about space. 

So you’re laying there on the blanket you both brought up, working on perfecting your star chart when Ashton goes, “Hogwarts is fucking archaic.”

And you just hum in agreement, because like, you’ve had similar conversations about different subjects and how you could potentially bring in muggle knowledge to supplement the magic and make both things better, because obviously, you’re not just looking at space updates, but other science news because...ravenclaw. 

Anyway, so Ashton rolls over to look at you and you can just tell he’s got one of his ideas going and just look up at him and he goes, “What if, after we graduate and everything, we ask Headmistress Granger if we can stay on and try to bring Hogwarts into the tech age?” (i fully stand behind the hc of McGonagall giving Hermione the Transfiguration position and grooming her to become headmistress...and also Hermione keeping her name after she marries Ron).

You nod and you both lay there brainstorming for hours because, yeah, sure it’s past curfew, but you’re two NEWT students in the astronomy tower studying (and Ash is head boy) so like...it’s cool.

So when graduation day comes, after all the festivities you both go up and find Headmistress Granger and tell her all of your plans, showing her notes you’ve taken on your laptops about it and she smiles and once she knows you have the whole thing planned perfectly, she gives you the go ahead.

So you both spend all Summer working on the upgrades. You switch out torches for day lights, but keep a few torches because, aesthetic. You put solar panels on the roof of the bridge and in a large open section of field, both sets of panels surrounded with protective enchantments, just in case some kids get rowdy one day. And then you go into the kitchens and get some state of the art appliances in there, because Hermione has set it up so that each day a different House or year (primarily the older students) is responsible for the meals because, house elf rights. You add computers to the library because, as you’ve discovered from your own researching, there is a magical section of the internet from other witches and wizards who have connected the two worlds. Then there’s central heating and air, and some irrigation, and setting up a wifi network as well so that students who have access to muggle tech can bring their own devices if they wish. 

So everything’s hooked up and Hermione comes in a week before school starts and she’s just in awe of everything you’ve both managed to do. You both promise to stop by whenever she calls if there’s any maintenance issues to be solved, but like, you’ve got even more plans to integrate muggle and magic, starting with the astronomy textbook, so once you’ve taught the charms professor your spell so that they can teach it to everyone on the first day of school, and then to every first year in the years following. 

And as you both walk off the grounds, ready to apparate away, Ashton takes your hand, because after all your years of studying together, both for school and your common interests, neither of you can imagine a life apart.

Enjoy @irwinkitten @astroashtonio

[acidcorrodes]

Update:

It’s been two weeks. Here’s what I see:

There’s still no electricity pretty much anywhere. Some hospitals have it, but very few of them, and most all in the east, in the metro area. Some areas of the west have it too, but by no means a significant portion of the population. People are dying because there’s no electricity to run medical machinery with. Most hospitals that are working are using diesel-powered generators that were never meant to be running 24/7 so some are starting to break down.

There’s very poor or no cellphone signal. I’m lucky I have some, but it’s slow to the point I can’t actually call anyone most of the time, and text messages take ages to send. People are coming from far away areas of the island to the few places that do have cell signal. People are stopping in the middle of the highways to catch some signal, in an attempt to be able to tell their loved ones that they are okay.*

They say half the people have running water now. I would like to know where the fuck. Most people I’ve asked, most people I’ve heard talking or seen posting habe no running water or- if, like me, they’re lucky- have it at unpredictable moments. We had water in my house last monday, then a couple days later for about 45min, then yesterday for 2 days. Always low pressure, to the point that to do anything with it, you need to wait for a bucket to fill. We have no water right now. Supposedly the interruptions would be scheduled for every 24 hours, but this has not been the case. Right now, I don’t know for how long we’ll have no water. There are entire towns that have not had water service back at all, especially mountain towns (most of our towns, actually) that only just now are beginning to be able to clear out roads leading into and out of town.

People are stealing fuel from cars, power generators… you name it. They don’t care about anything except cash money and fuel. If they find water and food, they’ll take that too. But I’m talking: people have legit left behind iPads in favor of taking with them $20 cash and a tankfull of fuel.

There’s no ice. That’s fine when it’s rainy like the past 2-3 days, but when it isn’t? People can die from heat too, particularly because there’s very little water to hydrate with. Even if there were ice, there’s no power to run a freezer with, so you can’t keep it cold for long.

The governor lifted the prohibition on the sale of alcohol and made it illegal for gas stations to limit how much fuel you buy at once (so that now people have to be allowed to fill their car’s gas tank all the way up if they wanna). This has helped reduce the lines to about 2hr long in some places, when it used to take the entire day. The sale of alcohol helps move the economy and helps people chill out for a bit- literally and metaphorically.

Some schools are opening again, but very few, and I don’t know that attendance will be particularly great nowadays.

The UPR (our public university system) hasn’t given a start date for resuming classes again. At this point, half the campuses have been incommunicated. The ones we do know of aren’t doing very well in terms of damage to property.

We’ve heard very little of the west of the island.

Very few local AM and FM stations work, only one local tv station works (channel 2) as far as I know.

Very few people have wifi. I don’t have wifi; I’m posting this with my phone’s mobile network- hoping it posts at all.

Curfew is 9pm-5am. Anyone outside past then can get arrested. Some exceptions are made, such as emergency personnel, people working in food and water distribution, telecomm, and similarly important tasks.

People are stuck at the airports. The international one that everyone normally leaves and arrives at is handling very few flights per day (dont know how many it is now, but it used to be 10 per day) and many flights are military or relief cargo. Last I heard, no international flights were scheduled. Don’t know if that has changed. Prices for tickets to Florida went up from $300 the round trip to $2000. Many flights are getting cancelled. People want to leave, but we’re pretty much stuck here.

As far as destruction goes: trees are leafless or torn down, to the point where I don’t recognize the landscape anymore. It looks like when trees shed their leaves for winter, coupled with how a fire makes them collapse or break. I don’t know how else to describe it. I can see things now that I have never seen before because trees blocked their view, and it feels so wrong. Many places flooded. The images on tv that I imagine y'all saw (because we’ve had very few pictures from around here, much less video, except on facebook for those who can login and what’s on tv, which isnt much) are of places that have poor construction or built in areas where it is forbidden due to the flood hazard. That’s why you see houses filled all the way with water. But everywhere else, places that have never been flooded did get flooded, and the water has caused giant mudslides in mountain towns, to the point where people have been unable to get out of their houses and help cannot get to them because everything’s blocked. In addition to that, most structures with zinc roof lost their roof in the storm, wooden structures collapsed, but concrete houses held up pretty good as far as I’ve been able to see. (I, thankfully, live in a concrete house.) El Yunque is destroyed. Most mountains are gray and leafless now, but the people near them, like me, are grateful that they blocked the winds some.

Distribution of stuff in the ports is beginning, I think. We’ve seem gas trucks driving around and delivering to gas stations. The aid you’re sending is in Puerto Rico, it’s just not being properly distributed or is hard to distribute due to the state of things.

You can mail stuff to people directly because some post offices are open, but there’s no delivery to houses so the person you mailed to has to go to the post office to pick up the package.

Trump is supposedly gonna come to the island today. Uh…. well then. Dude should know we need the cabotage laws lifted for more than just 10 days for it to be helpful at all, and he should send the help we need rather than send a minimal amount, late, and blaming us for everything. We’re not lazy, man. Everyone I’ve seen or heard of has helped to pick up from the disaster in one way or another. We also have no use for that golf trophy, so keep it.

Seriously, at this point, we don’t care who or where aid comes from. We just need it to come here. We also need help rebuilding the power grid, which is down completely. Like… I’m talking even concrete poles that carry big power lines fell to the ground and broke like they’re made of cookies or something. The 6 months without power estimate is believable. I can see it being longer than that in some places, even.

Editing this in: There's also been a rise in the suicide and murder rates. Additionally, it seems the death toll from the hurricane is being underreported by the government. People are saying hospital morgues are full. People are burying loved ones in their backyards due to lack of resources for proper burials.

We are US citizens. This is US territory. We matter, dammit, please hear us.

*Okay means not dead. For me, because I’m lucky, it means I also have a roof to sleep under and food and water for a couple of days, plus access to supplies when we start running out of them. For many people, it is not so.

[qqueenofhades]

i know you [i walked with you once upon a dream]: four

Post-1x16 canon divergence. When Lucy Preston, a history professor at Stanford University, is visited by a strange man who tells her that her entire world is a lie, she is drawn into a mystery more dangerous than she could have dreamed, and a hunt for a past she can’t remember. But who, or what, is she going to find – or lose – along the way?

chapter three/AO3

Lucy spends the rest of the afternoon searching up and down for Lorena. She supposes that the thing to do would be to find the local police precinct and file a missing person report, but she can’t help but wonder if that would make it worse. It doesn’t seem at all likely that Lorena was actually intending to just pop out to the shop and has somehow forgotten to come back, but. . . Lucy doesn’t speak Croatian, would already be identified by the barista as the stranger who came in looking for Lorena, is evidently also known as the woman Lorena’s estranged husband wouldn’t shut up about, Lorena assumed she was there to flaunt their new relationship in her face, and Garcia Flynn is clearly, to say the least, a man with a checkered history. Lucy’s not a cop, but she doesn’t need to be to see how bad it looks. Like she distracted Lorena so Flynn could arrive, put a bag over her head, throw her in a car boot, and otherwise make sure the divorce was final, or that Lucy herself killed her, slipped rat poison in her tea while her back was turned and then had to scramble to hide the body, or. . . she doesn’t know. None this is of course what happened, but Lucy has heard of the Amanda Knox case. She’s not about to take chances with being a young American woman accused of murder in a foreign country, where all the evidence already helpfully points in her direction.

Finally, though, she decides that however suspicious it might look to bring this to the police’s attention, it will be several orders of magnitude worse if she doesn’t, and she didn’t come all this way just to shrug and head back to Stanford when a woman is missing. A woman who has a young daughter, and who was, if anything in Flynn’s deranged version of events is true, was at least targeted, if not killed, by a shadowy crime syndicate of some kind that clearly has no problems playing dirty. The obvious difficulty, of course, is that they might then feel perfectly entitled to do the same to Lucy, but before she left Istanbul, she sent an email to Amy explaining that she had just made a big mistake, and done exactly what she shouldn’t have. If for any reason she hasn’t gotten back or made contact in three days, Amy should call the police, the papers, and otherwise make a stink. These bastards (because Lucy at least cannot deny that there is something going on here) are not going to get away with vanishing her without a trace.

It takes her a while, but she finally finds a station and a cop who speaks English, and makes her report. The basic details are simple enough, but they quickly run into trouble with anything more. “How exactly did you know the victim, Mrs. Preston?”

“It’s Ms., just Ms. Preston.” Lucy has spent a lot of time recently correcting people on her title. She isn’t so full of herself as to insist on being addressed as Dr. Preston outside an academic setting, and she does have on an engagement ring, so it’s a logical assumption about her marital status. She almost wonders if she’s made a mistake insisting so swiftly that she’s not, if perhaps she should have thought to take it off. Lorena already thought Flynn up and ran off to randomly marry her one day, and to judge from the look on the cop’s face, at least part of that idea has also occurred to him. “And I – I didn’t really know her. Her husband came to visit me  at Stanford – California, in the States, Stanford University, I’m a professor there. You can call and check if you want. Anyway, he – he wasn’t making much sense. I thought he might not be well. He mentioned Lorena’s name, so I tracked her down on Facebook and I flew, uh, I flew here.”

The cop raises an eyebrow. “That is quite a favor to do for a stranger, Mrs. Preston.”

“It’s – ” Lucy bites her tongue. The more she points that out, the more he’s going to think she’s hiding something, more than he clearly already does. This of course is the truth, but she can hear how utterly flimsy it sounds. “It was. . . it was an unusual encounter.”

The cop flips to a new page in his notepad. “Unusual how? Can you give me the details of what this man Flynn said or did to you?”

Lucy watches his face, to see if that name is any more familiar to him than he’s letting on, but she can’t tell. And there is, of course, no way to condense anything of what happened on an otherwise unremarkable Monday morning into something that won’t spawn a hundred more questions with progressively more impossible answers. “He. . . wanted my help. With a research project he was doing. He had a few dates in history, places where he had dug up some interesting stuff and wanted me to take a look.”

“And you don’t know why he chose you to approach, of all the history professors in America.”

“No.”

“Which dates were these?”

“1754, colonial America, something to do with the French-Indian War.” Where that comes from, Lucy doesn’t know. It startles her. “And Houston 1969, the Apollo 11 moon landing, and – and Washington 1972. The Watergate scandal.”

“Ah,” the cop says. “So he’s a conspiracy theorist, yes? To prove the moon landing did not happen, anti-government paranoia, this kind of thing?”

“I. . . I don’t know. It was a short meeting. I didn’t think I’d be able to help him.”

“But it left enough of an impression on you that you decided to go find his wife?”

Lucy doesn’t have any idea how to answer that. Not when this makes no sense even to her. “I wanted to help them,” she repeats, steadily as she can. If she talks about secret agents and dead drops and strange phone calls and everything else, she is definitely in for an unpleasantly close-range inspection of Croatia’s formerly-Soviet justice system, which isn’t likely to be a good time. “Their daughter, is she all right? She must be home from school or wherever by now. I don’t want her sitting alone, wondering where her mother is.”

“The girl is staying with a neighbor. They phoned to report Mrs. Flynn missing shortly before you arrived.” The cop considers her again. “Are you familiar with the daughter?”

“No, I’ve never met her.” Lucy twists her fingers in her lap. For the oddest and most inexplicable moment, she had some kind of – flashback, hallucination, memory, what? Reading a file. Something about Flynn’s family. Something related to something he did in 1969 – but how does that even make sense? He’s probably in his mid-forties if she had to guess, he would either not yet be born in 1969, or only a very small child. Even more bewildering and alarming is Lucy’s momentary conviction that she was there too. In 1969, when she definitely wasn’t born. The moon landing. She just mentioned that, not knowing why. Jesus, what is happening to her?

It must show on her face somehow, and this, obviously, is not the thing to convince the cop of her status as a reliable, sane, well-balanced, and definitely not-murdery individual, and he briefly looks as if he’s thinking about keeping her for more. But it seems he can’t do that without formally arraigning her or filing a charge of some kind, and there is nothing concrete to do so with. “Very well, Mrs. Preston. While this is going on, it is a good idea that you do not try to leave Croatia. We will have to find you if we have more questions.”

“I – I have a job, I need to be back by Monday – ”

The cop gives her a look that clearly says that if she didn’t want to fuck up her life, maybe she shouldn’t have jaunted off here and whacked the wife of the man she may or may not be illicitly involved with. But after Lucy signs an affidavit (all the alarm bells going off in her head about signing documents you don’t understand without a lawyer present, but not seeing any other way she’s going to be allowed to leave tonight) she is finally released, not feeling at all better about that decision than she did at the start. She could call Noah, especially if she might be about to need bail money, see what the dollar-to-euro exchange rate is going at these days, but. . . as much as she tries to wrestle away her inexplicable reluctance to do it, she can’t. She still can’t remember when exactly they got together, or how. These gaps and flashes in her memory, as if someone has taken a pair of scissors, cut out bits, and badly stitched in others, are terrifying.

Pulling up her hood against the chilly evening wind off the water, Lucy starts to walk. She has no idea where exactly she is going. There has to be a cheap and reasonably non-skeevy guesthouse around here somewhere, and considering her current circumstances, she really does not want to be alone on the streets after dark – especially as a young woman in a foreign country where she doesn’t speak the language. It’s hard to feel more vulnerable, and she reaches into her purse in search of the pepper spray she usually keeps in there, in case she needs it. Then she remembers, of course, that she had to throw it away going through security at SFO, and groans out loud. Bang-up job, TSA. Really keeping America and its citizens safe.

She should at least buy a cheap phone of some sort. Is anywhere still open? She doesn’t want to get socked with international roaming charges every time she turns on her own, even just to use the wifi, and besides, it would be detrimental to her aims of avoiding contact with her worried family. This is so unlike Lucy, the girl who always asked permission to go anywhere in high school and actually worried about breaking her curfew, that she has to wonder if she has somehow had a personality transplant. All these flitting, ghostlike half-memories, the inability to remember the most intimate details of her life or Noah’s. . . like she’s changed bodies with someone, like another version of herself. Or in other words, exactly what it sounded like Flynn was talking about, and she thought he was crazy, the first time they met. And according to him, the last. Of course he’s disappeared, right when she needs to actually talk to him, right when Lorena has too, when –

Just then, headlights fall over the street, a car rattles down the cobblestones, and slows next to Lucy. The window hums down. “Dr. Preston?”

It’s a woman’s voice, American. Yes, because this has not happened nearly enough in recent days, a random stranger wants to talk to her. At least this one has gotten the title right. In the low glow of the streetlight, Lucy can see that she’s older, silver-streaked black hair tidily cut to her shoulders, dark eyes, and a commanding manner. “Dr. Preston,” she says again. “Is that you?”

Lucy debates making a run for it, not that she can outstrip a car on foot, and this is not a wise thing to do when she is already the prime suspect in a missing-person case. But she somehow trusts this newcomer more than she did the other ones, and she isn’t exactly overflowing on options to start with. After a moment, she turns. “Yes?” she says warily.

“Agent Denise Christopher.” The woman holds out a hand. “I’m with Homeland Security. You can get into the car, Lucy, it’s all right. You’ve had an eventful few days, haven’t you?”

Lucy balks. “Have you been following me?”

“We had someone keep an eye on you when you left San Francisco, yes. Why don’t you get in, and we’ll talk.”

Never get into a car with someone you don’t know, the fourth-grade “Stranger Danger” VHS tape drones unhelpfully in Lucy’s head. But Agent Christopher doesn’t look like a hitman (or rather, hitwoman) – not that that means anything, as she probably wouldn’t. And Lucy is tired, sore, shaken, very confused, and very much in need of an answer or five.

She gets into the car.

Denise – Agent Christopher, why did she seem familiar, first-name, for a moment? – smiles and swings behind the wheel, evidently pleased that Lucy decided not to make this difficult. Lucy glances into the back seat, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone else there, just them. Agent Christopher shifts into gear, and they roll down the street to the main ring road, then out onto the motorway. They are clearly going somewhere, and Lucy bites back the inane impulse to object that she isn’t supposed to leave Croatia. She still somehow fears getting into more trouble, though that event horizon seems to have been passed a while ago, and all of this is so utterly, unrelentingly bizarre that she has finally given up fighting it, is just going to have to throw up her hands and go with it. Alice woke up eventually, and discovered that Wonderland was just a dream. Lucy only hopes she’ll get to do the same.

At last, when they have been driving for almost forty minutes and have left Dubrovnik well behind, Agent Christopher speaks. “Do you know Garcia Flynn?”

Lucy had a hunch that question might be coming, and she still has no idea how to answer it. She mulls her words carefully. Christopher wouldn’t be asking that unless she already knew that Lucy met and spoke to him, and denying it outright is clearly not going to work. At last she says neutrally, “He seems to think I did.”

Christopher glances at her swiftly sidelong. It’s difficult to say if this was the answer she expected or not. “Do you want to confirm that you saw him in the morning of Monday, February 20? On the Stanford University campus, I believe?”

“I. . .” Lucy is getting tired of law enforcement officers thinking she’s in cahoots with this nutjob. “Fine. Yes. He came to visit me. We spoke briefly. Then he left.”

“Did you know that Garcia Flynn is wanted by the United States government, on suspicion of unprecedented terrorist activities and connections?”

That catches Lucy like a bag of rocks across the midsection. She should have guessed, and indeed she had more than an inkling that something like this was the case, but maybe she really has had an unfathomably lucky escape. “Unprecedented?”

“Yes. This isn’t just a matter of blowing up a building or driving a truck through a crowd or gunning down some innocent people on a beach or anything like that. This man is a danger to our very existence.”

“What – what is he supposed to have done?”

“That,” says Agent Christopher, ���is the difficult part.”

“I work at Stanford. I’m pretty sure I can handle difficult.”

Again, that oblique sidelong glance. “So you don’t have any idea?”

“Would I be asking if I did?” Lucy’s frustration shows in her voice. She can’t help it.

“I suppose not.” Christopher overtakes a dawdler in the fast lane. “It’s complicated, because strictly speaking, we can’t prove any of it. But in the short version, he was responsible for destroying a unique, priceless, and irreplaceable machine made by a company called Mason Industries, in – you’ve heard of them?”

“I.” Lucy swallows. “I only saw the newspaper article. He – Flynn – asked me if I know someone named Rufus Carlin. I don’t.”

One of Christopher’s dark brows arches. “Rufus Carlin, in fact, shared some very disturbing data with Connor Mason, the CEO and founder of the company, and the inventor of the machine that Flynn destroyed. As a result, this data made its way to my colleagues and myself in Homeland Security, and believe me when I say that the apprehension of Garcia Flynn is now the highest-priority case on the entire federal counter-terrorism docket. If you have any idea or lead on his whereabouts, now would be the time to share it.”

“I don’t,” Lucy insists, with something close to panic. “I don’t know where he is.”

Christopher evaluates her a moment more, finally decides that she’s telling the truth. Then she says, “Well, as it happens, we might. It seems he has an older half-brother named Gabriel Thompkins –which is strange, we went through his files several times and there was never any mention of him before. It’s like he just appeared out of thin air. At any rate, he lives in Paris. Given Flynn’s recent pattern of trying to make contact with a list of personal or family targets, we think he might next attempt to check in on Gabriel. But this man is trained and dangerous, backed into a corner, and is certainly expecting to be tailed, as well as prepared for a fight. We need an incentive for him to show himself, draw him out of cover, and put him off his guard.”

“And?” Lucy doesn’t like where this is going. “What does this have to do with me?”

“Come now, Lucy.” Agent Christopher exits the motorway onto a country road, takes a few turns. It’s only as they pass through a jungle of barbed wire onto a dark airstrip, with a private jet sitting on the tarmac, that Lucy realizes they must be at some kind of hidden black site, and that that, right there, is their ride. “Do you really think he’s going to miss the opportunity to talk to you?”

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

Paris, France – City of Lights, home of poets and artists, legendary romantic destination, etc. etc. – is a fucking shithole.

To be fair, Garcia Flynn’s current low opinion of the place might directly and inversely correlate to his level of anxiety about why he’s here at all, and the unpleasant encounter he just had with so-called French customer service (he hates to stereotype, especially as someone from Eastern Europe who gets plenty of that himself, but sometimes it just fits). He has been trying for the last forty-five minutes to see if his brother is here or not, not even sure if he wants to find him, existing in a sort of terrified exhilaration and mind racing too fast to wrap around the consequences. This, he supposes, is what he gets for shooting scientists, instead of asking their advice on what destroying the Mothership might do to reality. But he remembers Anthony, at one point, describing the space-time continuum as similar to a piece of chewed gum. Pull on it from either end, and it first starts to split in the middle. That’s where reality is starting to tear back into what already happened, the changes that Flynn and the trio made, despite the attempt to reset it to the original template by saving his family. He’s been keeping an eye on history, and 1969 – that was about the middle of the expeditions that they went on, yes. That’s about where the hasty patch job would start to pull out its stitches. The official account of the moon landing has suddenly altered, explaining how there was a mysterious attack on NASA’s computers and Katherine Johnson helped save the day. And that means the other change Flynn made back then, saving his half-brother’s life, might have returned into history as well.

Flynn can’t help but think of the fact that if the rips are going to start cascading back into existence, like a chain of knocked-over dominoes, that means everyone who is alive and present right now who shouldn’t be – Lorena, Iris, Anthony, Lucy’s sister Amy, just to name a few – is going to start disappearing, depending on when the correction hits. If his half-brother is back, that means it’s happening. That means this time, there is no Mothership to fix it, and trying again might just make the temporal destabilization even worse, riddle it with holes and contradictions until the entire thing collapses, like a sand castle gutted by the waves. That means that he might lose his family again, right before his eyes, with absolutely no way to stop it.

Flynn swears, banging his fist against the wall of the telephone booth, as a few passersby give him a funny look and walk faster. It’s already bad enough that he has pissed off Rittenhouse to a degree unseen in the organization’s sordid history, that they’ve warned him to stay away from his family and Lucy and everyone else, and yet he needs to do something, he needs to warn them. He doesn’t dare go back to Dubrovnik, as the place is probably saturated with agents already, happy to shoot Lorena and Iris through a long-range sniper rifle if he so much as shows his face, but he thinks madly that if he could just kill those ones, the ones threatening them now, then they’d be safe, they’d be –

For another, oh, five minutes. Until Rittenhouse sends more. Sends their entire fucking private army.

Is he planning to shoot those too, and think there will be no retribution?

It never stops.

It never stops.

Fingers shaking, he dials the directory again, waiting. It takes a while, but this time he finally gets an address for a Gabriel Thompkins. It’s in a tony, upscale part of the city, second arrondissement, not far from the Louvre. He slams down the phone and pulls his jacket straight, checking that it covers his sidearm – he is really not in the mood to be dragged into the gendarmerie just now – and starts to move fast. What he’s going to say, if anything, he has no idea. I’m your half-brother, who technically you never met, because you died before I was born? Is it possible this is like a badly tuned radio, and Gabriel will flicker out of existence again before he gets there, reality caught between two competing parameters, battling to decide which one is going to take precedence? Jesus. What has he done.

Flynn makes it across the city in record time, turning into the narrow street, shoving past the inevitable brigade of Vespas, delivery vans, and sidewalk café chairs, up to the flat. He rings the bell, looks behind him shiftily, and then hammers on the door. Someone shouts something that sounds unflattering from the second-floor balcony (Flynn’s French isn’t quite as good as his Spanish, but more than sufficient in this case). “Come on,” he growls under his breath. “Don’t you need to go get your single espresso and smoke your cigarette and read Le Monde?”

His interesting ideas about what constitutes a typical Parisian’s life aside, this does in fact get a response. There are footsteps in the hall behind, and the door opens. “Oui? Puis-je vous aider?”

Flynn opens his mouth, then shuts it, because he’s momentarily spellbound. It’s looking at himself, about ten years older. Dark hair considerably shot through with silver, square glasses, smile lines, sweater and corduroys. Gabriel Thompkins looks like a retired college professor or a successful novelist, the kind of man who has spent his life creating things, not tearing them down. There is a wedding ring on his finger. He has a family. A good life. Flynn remembers jabbing a shot of epinephrine into a small boy’s arm, a muggy July day in 1969, looking into his younger mother’s face, telling her that he only ever remembered her being sad. That he wanted to fix it. It was good to see you again. He tries to answer, but he can’t. It sticks raw.

“Can I help you?” Thompkins repeats, this time in English, as if Flynn might not have understood the first time. His brow creases, as it’s not every day a shifty-eyed stranger who looks very much like you turns up in a fluster on your doorstep. “You look – sir, have we. . . have we met?”

“A long time ago,” Flynn says by reflex. He still feels punched. “I – I can’t really explain, I’m sorry. I just – I probably should not have come.” He wants to ask, wants to know what it was like to grow up with their mother, happy, but doesn’t know if Gabriel’s memory includes him or not. He doesn’t know how this works. Lorena and Iris only remembered three years of his absence. “I – I’m sorry for bothering you. If someone comes by, you – I was not here.”

With that, leaving Thompkins utterly baffled, Flynn whirls on his heel and retreats, thinking far too late that he’s likewise pointed out someone else for Rittenhouse to target, that if a team of commandos arrive tonight to drag Thompkins out of his tidy flat and shoot him in the head, there will be nobody to point the finger at but himself. He blunders down the Rue Bachaumont in complete distraction, half-seriously thinking of jumping into the Seine to put an end to this unqualified disaster, this burning dumpster fire, that is his life. They ordered him to disappear, and perhaps that is the only helpful thing left for him to do. Will that buy his family’s safety, once his corpse washes up in some river grate weeks from now and they have to identify him by his dental records? From Rittenhouse, perhaps. But if the timeline keeps buckling in under the weight of its contradictions, if people disappear and reappear, if –

Flynn turns the corner, and walks straight into Lucy Preston.

Shock is not a sufficient word for either of their reactions. They collide, start into the usual apologies for knocking heads with a stranger, then stagger backward, get a good look at each other, and blanch. Neither of them appear capable of thought or movement or speech. Then Flynn grabs her by both wrists, jerks her bodily off the sidewalk, swings her around under the cover of a low market awning, and hisses, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Belatedly, it occurs to him that if he wants to convince her of his noble intentions, this is a piss-poor way to start, and it would not be best for someone to see it and get the wrong impression (and, he supposes grimly, this isn’t the first time he’s kidnapped her). She pulls at his hands, trying to loosen his grip, and he lets her down. The two of them are still standing close together in the small space, and he feels an odd lurch in his stomach as their eyes lock. She takes a moment to catch her breath; if she was expecting to run into him here, clearly it was not nearly that dramatically. Then she says, “We need to talk.”

“Do we?” Flynn glances edgily over his shoulder again.

“Yes.” He has to give her credit, she doesn’t back down or flinch, staring him in the eye, which sometimes not even grown men have been able to manage. “And we don’t have much time. Is it true? Are you – ” She hesitates, but only briefly. “Are you a terrorist?”

That’s quite the icebreaker to go for, Flynn thinks. Though he does, by any objective metric, deserve it. He knows she doesn’t remember, but he has a brief moment of useless longing for when that meant she would touch his hand gently and tell him she was sorry for his loss, not revert to seeing him as the hulking monster determined to wreak havoc on her nice ordinary normal world. “Who have you been talking to, Lucy?”

“People.” She looks at him defiantly. “And they’re here. In Paris. Looking for you. They’re using me as bait to try to draw you out. They’ll be here soon.”

“Wh – ” Flynn’s hand goes by reflex to his gun. He grabs Lucy by the wrist again and pulls her backward into the crammed alley, her ending up almost against his chest. “Who’s looking for me?” he hisses at her. “Who?”

“Homeland Security.” She pushes herself off him and glares. “You know, I’m more than slightly tempted to let them catch you.”

“Homeland Security?” Flynn swears. “You mean Rittenhouse? They’ve infiltrated every level of that department, it’s a nightmare, it’s – ”

“What?” Lucy is exasperated. “Rittenhouse?”

“Yes, Lucy! Rittenhouse!” He almost yells it at her, the same conceit observed by someone trying to make someone else understand, as if saying it louder and louder will make a difference. Absolutely nothing about this new timeline is the way he wanted it to be, and he hates himself for almost wishing that he hadn’t done it. He can’t regret that Lorena and Iris are alive again, but otherwise, it is the very epitome of being careful what you wish for. “Do we have to go through this again? You didn’t believe me when I told you that they existed last time either!”

Lucy stares at him, lips white, and he belatedly thinks that if her interest in hearing him out, and buying them a little time, is the only thing stopping Homeland Security from moving in to nab him on the spot, it would possibly behoove him to have more tact about this than a Panzer brigade. “Rittenhouse,” he repeats, more levelly. “Ask your friends about that.”

“They’re not my friends.” Lucy is scurrying to keep up with him as he barges down the alley, hoping that this does not come to a shootout in the middle of a nice Paris neighborhood – the city has too much unfortunate recent experience with that kind of thing – but also not planning to be taken quietly. He doesn’t know why. Ten minutes ago he was prepared to drown himself in the Seine and put an end to it, but now he’s seen her again, she’s here, she doesn’t know the danger she’s in, what happened to all of them and might still, and somehow, something in him isn’t quite ready to give up the fight after all. He pushes open an unlocked back door, pulling her in after him. They appear to be in the stock room of a patisserie, which smells delicious if nothing else, and he briefly wonders that if he’s already a wanted criminal, if stealing a brioche or a pain du chocolat is really going to make that much of a difference. He reaches behind her ear, fingers brushing her hair, and finds the small crumple of a smart-foil GPS tracker, peeling it off her.

Lucy stares at him, clearly wanting to ask how he knew that was there. “How did you get to France?” she demands instead. “They have a warrant on you, they – ”

“I used to work for the NSA, do you really think I don’t know how to get out of a country with the authorities looking for me?” Flynn hisses, peering through the crates. Seems clear, but he hopes the baker does not come in unexpectedly; his trigger finger is a little itchy right now. He leads the way around, Lucy following him almost despite herself, drawn into his orbit like a star devoured by a black hole. “I don’t suppose you did anything useful, and read that file I gave you?”

“I’ve been a little busy!” Lucy remembers to keep her voice down, but that is one of the more scathing whispers Flynn has ever heard. “Your wife’s missing!”

That takes him like a skillet in the back of the head. “She – she what?”

“I went. To Dubrovnik.” Lucy’s eyes meet his, half guiltily, half defiantly. “I met your wife. She told me what you think happened. And then she. . . she vanished. I don’t know how or why.”

Garcia Flynn knows several languages. Quite a few, in fact. English, Croatian, Russian, Spanish, German, and some French and Italian. But there are not enough curses in all of them to adequately convey what flashes through his head just then. He wants to shake her, to demand what on earth made her do that, even as he is horribly aware that all of this, every bit of it, is his fault. He was the one who insisted on seeing her one last time, introducing that element of chaos and danger into what otherwise would have been her boring life with her boring fiancé and boring problems. And nor can he know if Lorena has been taken in strategically by Rittenhouse, to hold as hostage against him – which would be bad enough, but still allow for the possibility of rescuing her – or if she’s vanished more permanently, a casualty of the ripping space-time, the world remembering that she is supposed to be dead and adjusting matters accordingly. He presses a hand against the wall, struggling to control himself. He should not be surprised that by trying to save everyone, he’s losing them dramatically and spectacularly instead. And more. And worse. This is going to gain momentum. It’s not going to stop.

Just then, there’s a thump in the next room, and Flynn remembers that they’re still standing here like idiots, right next to Lucy’s tracker – even if he’s taken it off her, that does him no good unless they get away from it. He grabs her, practically tucking her under his arm like someone stealing a valuable vase from an antique bazaar, and pulls her back out the door into the alley. Just as it bursts open after them, and someone yells, “Come out with your hands up!”

Flynn responds to that by shooting, which is how Flynn tends to respond to most things in general. He doesn’t think he’s hit them, unfortunately, as there is the sound of shattering glass but no yells or cries of pain, and Lucy stares at him with her mouth open. He thinks blackly that she’s getting her answer as to whether or not he’s a terrorist, all right. Then he grabs her again, pushing her up the alley in front of him, and wheels to fire one more time from around the corner. Then he jumps onto the nearest of the ubiquitous Vespas, pulls Lucy down in front of him, and reaches around her to hotwire it, gunning it to life within thirty seconds (he might admire the efficiency, if there was time to do so). Kicks off, and races away down the street at top speed.

Lucy is too involved in clinging on for dear life to scream at him, though Flynn is sure she will get to that part soon enough. He more or less knows Paris, though it’s not the city he spent the most time in, and he also has a few tricks up his sleeve. He knows they won’t risk shooting at a moving target in the middle of boulevards and plazas packed with tourists and civilians (or hopes so, at least) and they’ll have to catch him first if they intend to take him down.

He does not intend to let them. He dodges and weaves and throttles still harder, earning more than a few French obscenities and succinct gestures thrown in his direction, but he doesn’t care. Half the other Vespas are driving at the same pace, anyway, and without the tracker, it will be difficult for their pursuers to get a bead on theirs particularly in a city packed with the stupid things. Lucy is probably sorely regretting the moment she ever thought this was a good idea, but likewise, Flynn will have to worry about that later. He wants to tell her that if she trusted him to take her home through time, this should be nothing, but – for the third time in his life – this Lucy Preston is not the Lucy he has known. You’d think he’d get used to it.

He isn’t used to it.

They zip and dart and zigzag across Paris like a demented bumblebee for God only knows how long. At last, when they have gotten far enough away that the sirens have faded, all seems more or less tranquil, and nobody appears to be looking at them, Flynn lets the stolen scooter coast to a halt in a side alley. Lucy is gasping, clinging to the handlebars, and there is an excruciatingly tense moment as they stare at each other. The silence becomes overwhelming. Then at last, eyes flat, lips set, Lucy wipes her brow with her forearm and throws her shoulders back.

“Right,” she says quietly, furiously. “Talk.”

[koohiss]

30 years since the last critically acclaimed movie, but only like, 50 or 10 since the last one, depending on how time works, skywalkers are fucking shit up in the galaxy once more...

Luke’s gone, Leia’s still a badass, the heavy metal empire has been replaced with the emo-lite first order, just as much nazi garbage and none of the impressive capes. Instead they have a giant toddler who stomps around and eats shit on a regular basis and jerks off to his grandpa’s dead face, probably. Fucking weeb. This pilot, Poe, who I honestly don’t feel much of a connection to, sorry, is trying to get this old man to give him a map to Luke so he can come kick ass. But the douchelord Kellog’s Frosted Fuckup shows up and shoots everyone, bc uncle issues or something. poe gets captured, but shoves the map into his magic 8 ball, which escapes and finds a random superhuman jedi lady of amazingly ironic ancestry in the middle of, you guessed it, a desert. She’s Rey, and to quote some ghost guy who once got gutted inside a palace’s weird power dungeon murder hole, she’s probably maybe might be the chosen one for real this time, I swear to the force it’s for real this time yoda. Then, this amazeballs stormtrooper, Finn, has morals and courage and heart and all the things they wanted in wizard of oz, and is like, fuck this nazi shit, I’m out, and helps poe escape. Sadly, they crash, and poe apparently dies but really leaves finn to die in a plothole of a scene that someone in the writers room should be really embarassed over. Finn meets rey, and it’s love at first “oh shit”. It’s all meet cute/meet thief for a second, and then shit starts blowing up sideways, there was hand holding and running and “follow me”s and then the girl in white and the guy with the leather jacket get on the falcon and leave the desert planet. Classic. Speaking of classic, being the collector’s machinery that she is, the falcon breaks down and they get caught in a tractor beam of a larger ship, which conveniently Han and Chewie are on. Two gangs show up, the giant squid-tribbles escape, scooby doo mayhem ensues. They get away in the falcon and nope the fuck out. Spooky the gollum wannabe teases Kyle about Han and he acts like a pissbaby, says it’s nothing. Oh, and I guess he surprises everyone because somehow this giant moronic imbecile incompetent failure came from the pure glorious happy love of han and leia. Fuck you jar jar abrams. Fuck you in the eye. With a lensflare. This bullshit. The gang checks the map and realize it’s borked, Han gives the lowdown on “it’s real” and also that some sick asswipe death-murdered the jedi like some moron trilby with anger management issues because his mom cancelled his xbox live account because he wasn’t getting good enough grades at jedi academy due to playing the sith campaign of some shitty remade SW game with a pretty decent plot that every teen boy over analyzes and gets the wrong take away from. Anyways, they go to Takodana and Maz’s epic castle that was never fully explained. For some reason they need her to find the resistance for them, which I’m like, just have Han wave at a holocam for like, 2 seconds and you will find literally almost everyone except luke because he’s pouting over history repeating itself. So naturally while they are all chilling at the castle, the party splits bc Finn is scared and Rey is gonna go home and Han is just like, eyes roll emoji. Who knows where chewie went, they act like he isn’t a character or something. But twist, the big ol space nazis find them. Rey finds a lightsaber (prolly just a family heirloom or smth, nbd) and bolts after having visions of all these epics ass movies and shit. My beloved young padawan super duper force sensitive jedi in training Finn is given the lightsaber, bc even Maz can tell that those two are always gonna watch out for each other and are obvs soulmates and he’s the best bet to get it to Rey, the inheriting granddaughter. (also, didn’t a bunch of little kids get murdered with that at least once, possibly twice???) As they leave, death star 3 and with a much lamer name but really cool lore blows the everloving shit out of coruscant 2.0, killing a few more characters that I was probably more interested in than Kyle’s boring weepy “my parents dont’ accept me for being an edgelord” lame ass backstory. Then the TIE fighters try to wreck my fave dudes with some weak sauce army, but then that same ace pilot who apparently left finn to fucking die, nbd, true love amirite? brings the party to them in an epic callback with improved graphics. Meanwhile, that boring infant Ronald mcdumbass over here shows up and after a let down of a fight (c’mon rey, shoot him!) kidnaps his cousin. Gets all creepy and makes teenagers with poor romance comprehension (not their fault, imo) think it’s love and come up with all this bullshit as to why they aren’t cousins. Sigh. But Rey, light of my life, is stronger than this woobie weeb, and she makes him have to run back to the safety of his darth vader body pillow, while she up and obi wans her way out of this bitch. The theme-swapped leto-joker looking vastly subpar offbrand trashcan may have padme’s hair, but rey has her climb up random shit abilities, which go a lot farther honestly. (they both have her hit and miss fashion taste so at least there’s that in common you goddamned r/los that’s all i will give you) Mr. Hotshot takes everyone back to Resistance HQ and conveniently brings the drama too, since he followed teeny!leias footsteps and lead a superweapon to the not-so-secret-anymore base. Everyone scrambles, finn kinda sorta maybe lies through his teeth a little so he can rescue rey, leia guilts han because apparently no (coughdudecough) director can write a conflicted and damaged woman who also happens to be strong without making her completely subsume to whichever half of the dichotomy is needed for the current scene… They go to death star 3 and prepare to fuck shit up. Specifically by doing things that have never been done before with no guarantee they will survive and sassing each other mercilessly. My babies. They find rey off being her badass self, and then right at the point where everything has to go to shit to make the third act interesting, some motherfucking emo up and kills my geriatric fave. Fuck you, marilyn manson. Fuck you. Chewie takes the logical next step and blows his fucking guts out with a laser crossbow bolt, AND blows the fucking guts out of his fanboy cosplay of the death star, because fuck you that’s why. So that’s how the dramatic “ur up past curfew” conversation goes, because I can never have nice things, no the precious goth boy has to live, apparently my needs aren’t important to multi-trillion dollar entertainment corporations, whatever. The absolute wrench fucker chases my beautiful darlings around the currently imploding fucking doom orb of stupid, and they waste his ass with amazing shows of jedi prowess. Finn fights him first and the bastard cheats with his fucking laser butterfly knife like an ass, and precious finn who has never trained a day in his life for this bullshit can only hold on so long before the cheating bastard takes him down. Then rey, pillar of light and all that is good, curbstomps his ass with the prowling predator walk of her father and grandfather before her. Suck it, ron. She’s the chosen one, bitch. Anyways, so I guess the bombs let fly boy (only) get inside and pew pew up the place enough that it rejoined it’s godforsaken stop-building-death-moons-they-don-t-work ancestors. Old ghastly jazzhands on the demon projector asks the weasley kid to go pick up kyle’s raggedy strung out ass, like I fucking care at this point. Everybody goes home (AKA chewie saves all of your asses because even if you ignore him he’s still a cool dude like that) and they totally gloss over the deaths of characters I care about to give us this arbitrary fucking scene of the golden cock block and ir3cutesty5u the soccerball annoying r2, who magically wakes up and magically doesn’t nuke their inferior asses and instead gives them the stupid fucking map, why do you even need a fucking map, all you need is coordinates, jesus christ it’s space, you can just plug the fucking three axis code into the computer and float ur ass over why is there a goddamn treasure map to safeway just use the damn gps good god. It’s space. With infinite wifi. Rey and chewie go to this bird shit covered island and find luke sulking, probably about getting bird shit on his suede jedi boots or losing his best friend and failing his nephew and sister and and the entire galaxy or something like that and then the movie ends

[ultradisplacement-blog]

Failed Dates Plunge Me Deeper Into Limerence—A World of Perpetual Fantasy That May Just Border on Psychosis

I mean it. I really do. I’d rather spend a lifetime of limerence over someone so unattainable that barely knows I exist than go on another date with a blockhead who didn’t know that mayo is made of egg yolks, has never heard of Lykke Li (or any decent indie artist, at that), mistakes gender equality for feminism, and jumps back into my Taxify after he got off ‘cause he remembers he had some groceries to do—at 1 am, mind you. The Taxify that I had ordered and paid for, by the way, because he had no mobile data on his phone to order an Uber, nor could he connect to the Koton wifi (the McDonald’s one had for some reason vanished into thin air that night) or walk three fucking blocks back to his place.

He calls himself a world traveler but would’ve rather taken the subway to the old town instead of walking with me thirty minutes by the city lights, doused in the intertwining smells of shawarma, molten asphalt, and summer heat. Funny, because my definition of ‘world traveler’ is based on my friend George—who quit his office job in the name of freedom, motorbiked his way through (and came down with malaria in) Africa, had to apply for a new passport because the old one, though not expired yet, was full of stamps, and is currently driving a 1984 Skoda that crashed and burned a million times already somewhere in the heaths of Russia, bound for Mongolia—and this fellow couldn’t be further from that level of  “world traveling.” He brags about doing the same thing every day— jumping on a subway train to bypass the unbridgeable half-mile walk between point x and point y. That was the very first red flag that came into view. ‘I’d rather spend those 30 minutes in the old town than... walk,’ he said.  ‘Why? Do you have a curfew or something? It’s only 8:20 pm.’ ‘Nah, I just like luxury.’ Weird statement, coming from someone who backpacks through southeastern Europe and has no Internet on his phone. Means that actually, he’s probably cheaper than a dollar store. I used to be broke AF back when I first started traveling—which didn’t stop me from traveling anyway— but at least I was foresightful enough to download some offline maps so I wouldn’t end up sleeping in a bush in case I lost my way back to the hostel at night. There was also a hint of paranoia which I didn’t fail to take into account when he seemed leery of my Google maps directions and asked some passersby how to get to the old town instead. I was floored, and knew the date was meant to be a failure to remember, but I went for it anyway (if anything, perhaps so I could amass some writing inspiration).

He wouldn’t tell me much about himself except he spent the whole day at Mcdonald's, working his ass off. ‘Are you working at...McDonald’s?’, I managed to ask, trying to hold on to my wig for dear life. ‘Not that I find that a bad thing at all. I used to scrub toilets in a hotel—which is way worse than flipping burgers, some would argue. But it just struck me that you smell quite… fresh. Not like stir-fry oil, mayo, and pickles.’ ‘Nah, I just work from there,’ he retorted. ‘On my laptop, that is. I like to work from different places, like restaurants and cafés. I taught myself Russian and I move from one country to another, doing my thing; translating articles and stuff for some guys.’ To which I asked him whether he was one of those digital nomads or freelancers or whatever, but he didn’t seem acquainted with these terms.

We kept walking side by side, but with a considerable gap between us, I trying to avoid his hand to the utmost of my strength. He said he wants to go back to the States and enroll in Law school next year. ‘Why? Why would anyone wanna do any of that? You have all that we European millennials crave, pray for, and dream of at night—a job that allows you to work even from a McDonald’s lounge in a shithole in Eastern Europe and a passport that gives you the freedom to go wherever the hell your nomadic instinct dictates. Why would you loan your way into Law school and cram the whole constitution of the United States into your head when you could have… this, what you’re having right now?’

‘For the power,’ he answered simply. ‘And because I’m into politics. I don’t like to talk about it, but I am.’ (I failed to mention that when he first called me, he asked me how much money I’ll make as a doctor—a lot less than American doctors do, that’s for sure, but that was none of his business—huge red flag again. I told him, half-jokingly, half-seriously, ‘If you’re a gold-digger, I’m the last person you’d wanna hang out with.’ But he still did want to hang out with me, which I found nice at the time; now, I’m no longer sure.)

‘Well, if you wanna pave your way into the Oval Office and the ridiculous Twitter account with unnecessary capitalization that comes with it, why don’t you just buy a hotel and screw a porn star in one of its luxurious suites? I bet it must be easier and way more satisfying than Law school on the long run.’ Clutch your pearls, I may have just dated (and mocked) the next president of the United States; I sure as hell kick ass.

I hadn’t answered his calls and texts for almost a week. I was still grieving over my missed flight to Milan and the Nick Murphy show I had been looking forward to for so long as though it were my wedding day. I had been vivisected by the pain and the absurdity of the whole situation: a ramshackle, diminutive aircraft which triggered in my mind’s eye the depiction of my being sliced in a zillion pieces following its potential crash as soon as I set  foot onto it; loss of cabin pressure twenty minutes after landing—which was real; and an  emergency landing back to the airport we’d just departed from—realer than Kanye West’s tweets, too—only one hour before the connecting flight. It was lost, so irretrievably lost, and so was I—semi-catatonic in the departures terminal of the airport for the better part of the day, sleep-deprived for thirty hours, looking for solutions where there were none. My hair was blue, and so were my shoulders, the tip of my ears,  the tears trickling down on my cheeks, and my whole doubtful state of rejected aliveness. So blue for nothing. Pathetic and outrageous. I went back home and ran myself a bath—the longest and the most revealing one as yet; it felt more like a rite of passage than a basic body hygiene ritual It took half a bottle of shampoo to take off all that dye, and my hair was so stiff that it looked more like a worn-out broom abandoned in a country backyard than a bundle of human keratin that was supposed to be somehow alive. It took half a bottle of shampoo, but in the end, the whole tubful of blue water went down the drain. As soon as there was no more blue left in me, I got out of the tub and crashed into the bed that I had left unmade, crying myself to sleep.

And for some reason, exactly a week later, I was rehashing my predicament in front of this not-too-tall, not-too-fit, average-looking-and-talking American, who didn’t seem to grasp that I was into writing and I had a special way with words, and took all of my Facebook and Medium posts for mere yacking. He didn’t even ask whose concert I was pining for so badly (not that the name Nick Murphy—or even Chet Faker, his former moniker—would’ve rung any bell; he hadn’t even heard of Lykke Li, for fuck’s sake, though he pretended he was somewhat familiar with Lana Del Rey; that’d better be true). He said that something like this had never happened to him, and he’d been on at least fifty-something flights (which is not a lot, by the way; I didn’t keep track of them, but I think I’ve been on fifty-something flights, too, and I’m not the one who calls herself a world traveler). ‘But I’m glad that at least you’re alive; God must have taught you this lesson so you could be more appreciative of life,’ he reckoned, after I explained to him that loss of cabin pressure basically meant a death sentence because of the hypoxia that ensued—lack of oxygen, in layman’s terms.

‘Oh, really? Exactly on that day, on that special occasion that was so important to me? Why then? Why not on any other fucking city break flight to Brussels or Berlin? Your God is a big-ass jerk sometimes, and his workings lack logic, reason, and mercy. I cannot decipher his hidden motivations, nor do I think that’s of any use to anyone,’ I blurted out without too much consideration or piosity, almost oblivious of the fact that I had spent most of my childhood’s Sunday mornings trying to find the most spine-friendly positions in the pews of my local church (which was quite a fool’s errand, to be honest, but perhaps that was exactly the point— to engage yourself in an act of self-flagellation at least once a week, for three hours, during the Mass).  He seemed quite triggered, because he didn’t believe in what I  believed—namely,  an unfathomable higher power, a spiritual force that had taken the wheel of the universe before it had even been created, whose whims and fancies could at times torpedo all your plans, hopes, and dreams; he believed in a specific celestial entity, in a Christian god who was always righteous and whose decisions we weren’t entitled to question or frown upon. And there I was, an obnoxious little European brat calling his supreme lodestar—the one  in whom each and every American dollar bill ever put into circulation expressed its unflinching belief—“a big-ass jerk.” Yet we somehow managed to dodge an endless religious argument—spoiler alert, for then—and kept walking towards the old town—or so I thought, for at some point, he took a sharp left turn, urging me to follow him: ‘I wanna show you a place.’

The street was impenetrably dark, and my mind should’ve probably started coming up with all sorts of scenarios involving rape, murder, and identity theft—but it didn’t; there was utterly nothing there, and you can’t be afraid of nothing — or can you?  ‘What the hell do you wanna show me? There’s nothing here; not even rats or stray dogs.’ ‘Wait  a little and you’ll see.’ Cool. This is how you roll in life, I told myself. You keep walking and you wait, although nothing might ever come your way. So we kept walking two or three more blocks and then, bam! there we were. Apparently. In front of an old building that reeked of fried fish and garlic sauce. ‘This is where I stayed for two weeks when I first arrived here,’ he enthused, big grin on his face—and due to the neon lights that had wondrously cropped up out of the blue, I was no longer in the dark, and could clearly make out that his dental arches were covered in a yellowish stratum of grim, indicating the fact that mouthwash was probably not at the top of his shopping list (or even at the bottom). That Christian god, or that unfathomable universal force making the world go round, or Satan’s offspring, or Ellen DeGeneres, or whoever rules this fucking world must be a great prankster, I thought to myself, while my musical memory was reproducing the first two lines of the sexiest song I’ve ever heard—Chet Faker’s Melt: ‘Help me breathe, you’re breaking up my speech/While you smile at me, you got the whitest teeth.’ That very same god could’ve been able to crash a plane and kill a hundred people in the process so I’d miss Nick’s concert; so I couldn’t bask in the endorphins milked from my brain by his balmy—yet rabid—voice and the dazzling white of his teeth that would light up the whole venue every time he opened his mouth to set free into the world the most otherworldly sounds I’ve ever got to hear; but he couldn’t, it seems, make me cross paths with a guy that gave a shit about his dental hygiene (and he didn’t even smoke, like Nick does). I had every reason to be pissed off with this god and his sick sense of humor, and I still am; I’ll probably be for a long, long time.

So he’d made such a tremendous (judging by his standards) detour only  to show me the building where he’d been a roomer for a fortnight—a plain, old, decaying house reeking of fried fish and garlic sauce, which would, for reasons known only to him, put that indecorous smile on his filmy teeth. Truth be told, there’s a lot of emotional baggage attached to a rental apartment one uses as a storage room for two weeks until one figures out where to go next. ‘Let’s get the fuck outta here,’ I said, ‘until a hobo doesn’t jump from a bush and screws us in the ass or steals or wallets; or both.’ I may be wrong, but I had an intimation that he meant to show me something else, something he couldn’t find—since he was no longer in the comfy subway that told him precisely when to get off and which exit to take.

‘Are you into museums?’ he asked, as we were making our way out of an underground pass, finally approaching the old town that seemed to have replaced the Sydney Opera House on the world map that evening.

‘Wow. Could you ask me something any vaguer?’ I replied, without trying to conceal my irritation. ‘I mean, I had the time of my life at the Museum of Chocolate in Bayonne, but I think the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart would bore me to death. Seriously now; but if I had a broader choice, between a bar and a museum—whatever museum—I’d probably choose the former.’

‘Right, right,’ he approved. ‘You’re totally right. I, for one, don’t really like art museums; I prefer archeology.’ Hm. So very interesting. I don’t know why, but the fact that someone is into archeology doesn’t tell me anything about them except that… they’re into archeology. If he had told me that broccoli triggers flashbacks of his childhood trauma, I think I would’ve been more impressed—at least that would’ve given me on a platter some food for thought, be it—as most likely would’ve been the case—watered-down pabulum. Maybe if he had elaborated on that a little bit, if he had explained his drive for archeology, why it was so important to him to bring it up on a first date, I would’ve cut him some slack; but no, he just randomly dropped the word ‘archeology’ into the conversation, perhaps to appear more cultured than he really was.  But wait—it can always get worse.

‘Oh, but what about music? What kind of music do you listen to?’

I wish I could’ve buried my face in my hands and cried a lifetime’s worth of frustration away.

‘That’s even vaguer than the museum thing, honestly. The music I listen to is genreless and so eclectic, and there are so many factors into play that prompt me to listen to a certain song at a specific moment in time. But if you want me to reel off a few descriptive words of my bar of choice, here’s my best shot: I listen to a lot of alternative, indie artists; I’m into electronica, downtempo, trip-hop, but also into soul, blues, and jazz; when I write, I’d rather listen to some ambient stuff, some lofi hip-hop, or even dream pop on rainy days. I’m into shoegaze and garage, swing and old R&B, grunge and funk. I like film scores and some Super Bowl halftime playlists. And I worship Lana Del Rey; have you heard of her?’

‘Yes, yes, I have,’ he rushed to reassure me.

‘Good. Or else I would’ve had to kill you.’

‘Why don’t you play me something on your phone? Like, the last song you listened to?’

‘What?! Do you want me to blast it right now, in the middle of the street, without headphones?!’

‘Yeah, why not? I wanna get to know you better.’

‘You must be off your rocker,’ I said, but I did open my Spotify app anyway and played the last song in my library, amid the clanks, whirrs, and honks of the hectic nightlife. What difference did it make? He had no more awareness of my music than I had of the intimate structure of that experimental particle collider at CERN in Switzerland. It was The Cactus Channel’s Wooden Boy, an admirable rendition of a neo-soul song by a much-underrated—yet hugely talented—group from Melbourne. He confesses he’s a metal fan—not a die-hard one, but still. I asked him what was the last live concert he attended and he couldn’t remember, though he said he wanted to go to a Korn show once, but it would’ve cost him about 400 bucks, which he couldn’t afford.

‘What the hell? Who asks that much for a C category ticket? Not even the VIP ones are that much! You must have been on some scalper’s website or something.’

‘No, it was a festival and you had to pay for the whole thing.’

‘You could’ve bought a day ticket, though. One hundred bucks or less. Or you could’ve gone to one of their headlining tours; you know, touring to promote an album all by yourself (plus maybe an opener) is one thing, whereas festivals are another. All you have to do is go to Facebook and type ‘korn’ in the search box, then you’re on their profile; once you’re there, check out the events and see when you can catch them in the closest town; easy as that.’

‘Yeah, you’re right; maybe next time.’

Right; I couldn’t say the same things about us, though. I knew for sure there wouldn’t be a next time.

I digress, but I have to say about this one thing about metalheads (though he obviously wasn’t one; he just feigned a mild interest in a metal band so he could have a musical conversation with me). In my scarce and sparse dating history, he’d be the third metal element, which is way over the top; it’s like thirty percent of all guys I’ve ever dated had something to do with metal one way or another. What is it about my hipsterish, indie, unpigeonholeable ways that seems to attract metalheads like bees to a honeypot? Why, for heaven’s sake; why? For all I know, I’m no more metal than Coldplay or helium; the only metal I transpire is the aluminum in my deodorant (and probably some iron, but I’m not sure; as far as I remember, most of it is eliminated through feces and urine). All three metalheads in my life were made from the same mold, one that I never had a particular affinity for: massive, but not exceedingly tall individuals, with puffy cheeks and some sort of ugly beard, a more or less overflowing beer belly, donned in capris and extra-large T-shirts, nice but insipid, with an average/average-to-high QI. He’d be, however, the first one to believe in a Christian god (the other two were, quite predictably, atheists; but then again, he wasn’t that much of a metalhead anyway). I’d like to believe that I look nothing like a metalhead, at least physically; I look more like a perpetual thirteen-year-old, searching frantically and fruitlessly for an extra-small size and ending up with some polka dot or floral pattern tank top from kid’s section instead, with thready arms, spidery fingers,  and strikingly bulky calves. My face screams that one could beat the crap out of me, so probably that’s why the metalheads may be drawn to me—to fulfill their protective instincts and to keep me safe inside their towering, hairy, fatty, tattoo-adorned arms.  Unfortunately, my helpless ass suffering from severe abandonment issues seeks protection in a different type of arms: more indie and rejective, less fatty and welcoming; I don’t mind the hair and the tattoos, though. What the metalheads and I had never resembled romance—or even dalliance—in a million years; whatever that thing was, it would smother by itself by the second or the third date (I let it go that far only once), and it was for the better. None of them had the guts or the occasion to kiss me, which means that I’d been spared a good deal of embarrassment and social awkwardness; I could only hope the history would repeat itself tonight as well.

He wanted us to go smoke some hookah, proposition which I kindly—but firmly—declined. I explained that I steer clear of any source of smoke whatsoever, because back when I was a three-year-old, my mother— a voracious chainsmoker—put a lighted cigarette in my mouth so I’d stop pestering her with my asking what it was like to smoke. ‘This is what it’s like to smoke!’ she said, transplanting the cigarette from her mouth to mine, and causing me to choke so badly that I swore never to touch such a damn thing again. And it worked, because my mother is the smartest person I know. She was all too aware that interdiction would’ve only whetted my curiosity, so she shot the vice into my lungs like a vaccine instead; as a result, I gained a—it would seem—lifelong immunity to the “disease.”  My sharp refusal lowered his spirits instantly, so he took an intellectual approach in his attempt to talk me into it:

‘But do you at least know what it is?’

‘Of course I do; I’m not an idiot. I clearly specified—any source of smoke whatsoever is a no-go for me. ’

‘I didn’t say you were an idiot; I was just hoping I’d deprive you of your better judgment.’

‘You wouldn’t be the first one to try; or to fail, at that.’

‘Oh, man. Then maybe a beer or two will do the trick.’

‘Bad news—lately I’ve been drinking only Coke zero; and tonight will be no exception.’

‘There’s no way out with you,’ he conceded, before asking me one more time if I was totally sure I didn’t wanna try the hookah. I was.

I wish there had been a way out of that date, though. Particularly so when he felt that I wouldn’t mind him holding my hand on the street.

‘My hand is okay without being held,’ I said, ‘with all this heat and everything. My sweat glands have always been hyperactive and it’s a bit disgusting.’

‘It’s okay, I don’t mind holding it.’

I did, which is why I liberated myself from his grip as best I could; to which he responded by grabbing me by the shoulders. That is when I knew that I hands down loathed him, and that was the long and the short of it.

We stopped for a drink at a street bar. I was quite taken aback when I saw that he ordered the exact same thing as I had—a Coke zero, that is. I looked at him in sheer perplexity.

‘I guess you were saying something about some beers?!’  

‘Yeah, but I’m not drinking on my own. Drinking is an experience that needs to be shared. If you’re not having alcohol, then I’m not having alcohol either.’

‘What the hell. If I feel like having a beer in my dorm room—alone, with Lana Del Rey singing in the background Pretty When You Cry—I’ll have a fucking beer, alone in my room; or with Lana Del Rey;  or in a restaurant at a table for one (is that even a thing?), or with the devil himself, or under any given circumstances I feel like having a beer. I don’t need anyone to hold it for me.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t do that; besides, I drink a lot of Coke zero anyway, so that’s why I had a Coke zero tonight instead of a beer.’

‘Weird; you didn’t mention a word about your love for Coke zero ten minutes ago, when I told you this is the only beverage I’ve been binging on lately.’

‘Why do you think I should’ve?’

‘I don’t know; maybe because I would’ve?! Maybe because it makes sense?!’

‘It makes sense only because you want it to.’

‘Right. So very pseudo-philosophical and Coelho-lite. Or -like. Or whatever.’

‘How often do you actually drink?’

‘Wait, what? Are you trying to assess whether I might use a stint of drying up in a rehab? Because I’m having a Coke zero and not a beer? Do you think I’m trying to conceal my forbidden cravings or something?’

‘No, it was just an innocent question; I totally understand if you don’t feel comfortable answering it.’

‘There’s nothing uncomfortable about my relationship with booze, except I don’t have any estimates in terms of consumption. I drink whenever I feel like it. I don’t need an occasion or company. I don’t drink every day, but I don’t drink once a year either. I don’t fucking know how much I drink. I can do with one pint of Guinness and stay highly functional and mentally aware, but I can also binge-drink, blackout, and puke in a plastic bucket, if you want to know the minutiae behind how alcohol gets in and out of my system.’

‘Wow. Cool. Okay. And how often do you read?’

‘That’s easy. I have an answer, and that is every day. But what does reading have to do with getting liquored up? Am I missing something? Or are you particularly fond of numbers and statistics?’

‘No, but I just figured that the more you read, the less you drink, and the other way around. That’s the way I see it, at least.’

‘’the hell?! So you think my brain must be so tiny that it can’t imbibe both booze and knowledge at once, right? You sure as hell haven’t heard of Bukowski, my friend.’

We had our Cokes zero anyway and he pretended to be examining my rings in order to hold my hand again. And again he feigned interest, inquiring me about their signification.

‘Well, I wear them because of the sense of unity they provide; and because I believe everything comes full circle sooner or later. And also because I need to have something to do with my fingers when I can’t sit still; otherwise, I’d have to run my fingers through my hair or do other weird stuff that would come off as inappropriate in public.’

‘I see,’ he said. Truth is, you do look like that kind of person who’s into astrology, crystals, bio-energy, spirituality, and the like,’ he said, pouring his Coke zero in a glass (I hadn’t asked for one, so I just sipped it intermittently straight from the can, in my usual, not very ladylike manner).

I almost choked on my Coke. It’s true I check my horoscope on Elle.com for fun every now and then, but that’s quite a far cry from incarnating all that plethora of esotericism and bullshit he had so casually churned out at my face.

‘And truth is, you do look like that kind of person who likes to make all the wrong assumptions about people they’ve known for a minute. You see me wearing a shirt that reads ‘Gender Equality’ and you automatically assume that I’m a feminist, which fills you with dread and disgust; you leaf through my Facebook posts and automatically assume that I’m a yacker, though you have no idea that I’ve been writing longer than I’ve been menstruating, that writing is my whole life and the only thing that I feel I can actually do—little does it matter that it’s writing, not talking; you say that the average female uses 7k words a day, whereas I do 147k; you hear me dropping some indie artists’ names and you automatically assume that I must be into celebrities and Gossip Girls, though those people are so famous that you’ve never even heard of them; you notice a bunch of rings on my fingers and you automatically assume that I’m some sort of transcendental mystic, brewing tadpoles alive in a cauldron in her bathroom and hoarding crystals for the sake of her chakras’ balance. You’re so wrong you can’t even imagine. Shall I go on, shall we call it a night, or would you rather tell me something factual about yourself, like, I don’t know, how was your life back in America?’

Oh, my, that escalated quickly; so quickly that it caught him off-guard, which means things could get even worse from that point of no return. Nevertheless, I must admit that it surprised me to hear that his life in America is not something he likes to discuss on a date; he’d rather change the topic or start making some more wrong assumptions—that, at least, he didn’t seem to mind.

‘I don’t want you to be that girl I’m discussing my life in America with; it’s just something I don’t do. Not with girls, not on a date.’

I can’t tell for sure, but I must have choked on my Coke again. Why wouldn’t he want to talk about his life back in America “with girls, on a date?” Had I been a boy, would that have changed things in any way? What was there to hide? Was he smuggling keys on a schooner in the Caribbean or shoplifting from Walmart and TJ Max? Did he have a criminal record for driving without a license? Did he attempt to cut his wrists in a friend’s beach house in San Diego because he couldn’t stifle his pedophilic urges? Mind you, I can make a bumper crop of wrong assumptions, too; just try me.

‘Why is America a taboo subject? I thought we weren’t talking about your foot fetish or the fact that you love the smell of your navel lint. I’m a European girl, and you’re an American out on a date with me. Do you think I’m here in the hope that I might wanna wheedle a green card out of you someday?’

‘Nope, it’s not that. I mean, I could help you with the green card anyway when I become a lawyer.’

‘How considerate. Thanks, but I don’t think it will ever be the case. I mean, my needing your legal assistance, not your becoming a lawyer.’

Then he suggested we get going, even though we hadn’t finished our drinks. We can walk with them, he said, but before paying the bill, he chugged his down in a gulp. I looked at him, baffled and reduced to silence. I got mine and took a few more sips, and we resumed our walking,  but then he insisted to hold the can for me, which made me realize that what he actually meant was that he wanted to drink the soda he had paid for, so I handed it straight away to its rightful owner. Quite predictably, he wasn’t late to do what I had anticipated he would, and then asked me whether I still wanted to drink that thing. Nosir, it’s all yours—do with it whatever the hell you want; I don’t want your saliva anywhere near my inexhaustible mouthpiece that spits out 147k words a day.

At some point, we found ourselves in front of a Christian-Orthodox church—a church that, goodness only knows why,  was open at 10 or 11 pm, and a priest was firing off a raucous sermon on why adultery and greed will drag us to hell. The doors were wide open because it was sweltering hot, so we could see and hear the whole thing from outside. A handful of people were listening meekly to the sermon, eyelids heavy with sleep and boredom, while others were moving about to and fro, lighting candles for the living and for the dead or groping for the best angle that would do justice best to their  Instastories. He wanted us to go in, which I found ridiculous.

‘An hour ago I called God a big-ass jerk, and now you want me to step inside his home as though nothing had happened?! Why would I do that? Why would I do that even if I hadn’t called God a big-ass jerk? I know by heart these chestnuts that are supposed to scare the shit out of our straying souls and guide us to the right path. I’ve made it through six years of med school; hell is the last thing that can frighten me. Besides, it’s ridiculous; I never imagined that I’d be taken to church on a first date. You must have taken Hozier literally, but that song is so 2013, though; it’s 2018 now.’

‘Why? We’ll just go in a couple minutes, take a peek, do that sign, and that’s it. The architecture is beautiful.’

‘Do that sign? You mean, the cross? You’re not even an Orthodox; that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. There are people out there, something is happening—something that is none of our business; this isn’t the right time to play tourist.’

‘Oh, come on, it’ll only take a minute!’

And, believe it or not, I consented. ‘At least I can write about it,’ I told myself after the smell of incense, burned wax, and human sweat kicked us out of God’s Home in thirty seconds, just like Adam and Eve had been banished from the Garden of Eden at the dawn of time (except we hadn’t thankfully spawned the whole of mankind in the process). Deep down into the bottomless pit of the old town nightlife, though, his appetite for hookah was suddenly revived, and he asked me once again whether I was sure I didn’t wanna sample a puff with him. For the third and last time, I was; I didn’t want to. If there’s one thing that I deserve credit for, it’s that I have a knack for holding my ground under the direst and the most overpowering of circumstances. Back in LA, perhaps the most handsome guy I’ve ever made out with poured gallons of Bourbon down my throat—and even though I was dead-drunk, I could still say no when he undid my bra and unzipped his fly. It was hard (the situation, that is), but I had to; I didn’t wanna sleep with him because I didn’t wanna sleep with him; I didn’t wanna sleep with him because I was drunk. I’d had some minor blackouts, and I wanted to avoid a huge one that could explain a potential HIV contraction or a cocaine overdose (I was also on my period, but that’s just a piddling detail; or is it?). So, yeah; I’d rather sleep with someone when I’m 100% aware that this is what is about to happen—so I can blame it solely on temptation and my poor decision-making skills when I end up emotionally attached and they sleep around like normal people do, without giving a fuck about me and my attachment issues.

He wanted us to sit on a bench in front of the church—one that was circled by bums resting their bodies on newspapers and asking for alms—which I found a rather uninspired idea, so we just kept walking until we found a bench that was slightly less parasitized by unwelcome human presence and the odors thereof—which the crisp night air would only enhance. Out of the blue, he started talking about evolution; he told me that some scientists keep some secret genes in the lab, and that someday, maybe in thirty years from now, dinosaurs may be brought back to life. Birds are the closest thing there is to them, he said scholastically, and they might find a way to suppress some of their genes so that their eggs would hatch baby dinosaurs instead of chickens. Right, I said. And that wasn’t all: some people are born with tails (which some of them can move) due to pretty much the same reason—those atavistic genes undergo some mutations and aren’t silenced properly. I’d never heard of people being born with tails, but that sounded more like spina bifida to me; but from that to being born as a dinosaur instead of a chicken (or a human?), there’s a long way to go. That was nothing new under the sun to me; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that’s one of the few things I remember from my embryology lectures. In utero, at the outset, the embryo looks more like a worm or a reptile before gaining human features. It takes time for that amorphous cellular slime to morph into a functional human body. Anyway, why the fuck was I having a conversation about evolution close to midnight, in front of a church, with an American guy that believed in a Christian god? What was he trying to prove to me? That deep down, he knew there was more to it than what the Genesis pretends there is? The Bible is a metaphor anyway, but I should’ve expected him to take it literally, as he did Hozier’s song.

‘I can see that you’re a skeptic, but you have to admit that believing in a Christian god helps you be of better use to your fellow human beings. That priest in the church in front of us didn’t preach theft or murder; he preached kindness and decency instead.’

‘Why would I need a priest to teach me kindness and decency? Why can’t I be kind and decent on my own? Look, for example, a lot of people I look up to, who’ve made tremendous contributions to the world—they’re doctors, writers, psychologists, musicians— don’t buy into that shit. They’re atheists or Jews. They didn’t need a Christian god or a Christian priest to be of use to their fellow humans in need.’

At that point, though the lights were dim,  I could see him turn green in the face.

‘Are YOU a Jew?’ he asked, with panic in his voice.

‘There we go again,  Mr. I-can-make-a-wrong-assumption-about-you-in-the-wink-of-an-eye. I am not a Jew; and even if I were, that was not the point. Do you want me to remind you what’s going on right now in the Catholic church in terms of pedophilia and sex abuse? You must be familiar with Pennsylvania. Do you want me to remind you that the Pope recommends psychiatric intervention for children with homosexual tendencies instead of love and acceptance? What’s next on their to-do list for the sinful, a lobotomy? Would you want to have your appendix removed by a surgeon who has homicidal propensities? I bet not, so let’s change the subject or get the hell out of here.’

‘Yeah, sure; getting jammed in a religious argument is not how I wanna spend my time with you,’ he agreed complacently. ‘Why don’t we go play some arcade games instead? Oh, man, I love arcade so much!’

‘I don’t. And it’s almost midnight. Where do you think we could play arcade games right now?’

‘Oh, come on, let’s look it up on Google maps. On your phone, I mean, ‘cuz mine, you know.’

Yeah. I knew. I also knew I’d be mad as a hatter if I played arcade games with him when all I wanted was a reason to put an end to that stupid date as soon as possible. But I was so sure that I’d come away empty-handed that I agreed to look up “arcade” on Google maps, only to find this place called Arcade Café, 1.6 miles away—which turned out to be just a regular café with a misleading name; no arcade or any other type of video games whatsoever. I shoved the phone in his face triumphantly, and then we got going—again.

‘Would you like us to go someplace else?’ he asked.

Yeah, at our place, I thought. I mean, me—at mine, you—at yours. I regret I didn’t verbalize that thought, and instead I heard myself saying, ‘No. I don’t care where we’re going. This is also how I roll in life by and large.’ (The second part of that statement is, however, true.)

When we were in front of an ancient building (it was the old town, so we basically were in front of an ancient building at all times), he asked me whether I’m interested in history. ‘I used to be,’ I replied, ‘back when I was in secondary school, because I had this huge crush on my history teacher. I’ve had it for years,’ to which he interrupted me, grabbing himself by the ears jestingly, bringing to my attention that I had pronounced the word “years” as if I’d failed to notice that it started with a “y.”

‘Great. Thanks for the correction. This is my flawed Eastern-European pronunciation. You see, when I was born, I wasn’t swaddled in an American flag. Also, I read and write more than I listen and speak, which is detrimental to face-to-face dates with native English speakers. We should’ve done this whole thing on Facebook instead.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, it was just a gentle correction. But carry on with your story, I wanna hear it.’

‘Yeah. A gentle correction and a huge turn-off. You know, like farting during sex. You can keep going, but it’s not gonna be the same.’

So we walked some more; until he said he needed to pee and wanted to go to McDonald’s to use the restroom. Must be a special bond between McDonald’s and him, I thought. Maybe he’s actually living in a McDonald’s, after all; maybe he doesn’t live in a rental apartment in the old town, as he had claimed. But now it was way past midnight—was it still open? Of course, only Google Maps and my phone had the answer, and like most answers that night, this one was negative, too. There was a park on our way to McDonald’s, so I just suggested he relieve himself behind a bush. ‘Not too classy,’ he said, ‘but if you have nothing against it...fine.’

‘Why would I have anything against it?! I’m not the one with a full bladder. Just go for it, release your problems, and be a happy man again.’ (And don’t dare touch me, my real self whispered in my mind’s ear; without a “y” this time around.)

‘Oh, look, problem solved!’ he jubilated, pointing towards a row of composting toilets—probably the most disgusting thing ever created by man, which filled the nightly atmosphere with their unmistakable whiff of ammonia and vagrancy until the memory of what must have been the scent of last morning’s freshly-cut grass was completely annihilated.

I sat down on a bench and waited for him to get out of that temple of piss and loafing, although deep down I wished a supermassive black hole would yawn out of that toilet bowl and swallow him out of my life. I could’ve walked out on him, but I knew he wouldn’t find his way back home if I did that. He depended on my phone to order an Uber and make it back to his place safe and sound. I was the man in this, not him; gender equality my ass. Or maybe that’s exactly what gender equality is about—a girl may just as well order a taxi for the guy who asked her out on a date and see to it that no one rapes him on his way home. Or not? He said he had a problem with feminists and was glad that I wasn’t one,  but what I did for him that night was the epitome of feminism—but more on that, later.  

At long last, there he was again, in front of me, with an empty bladder and a right—or left?—hand  brimming with bacteria from his groin, and probably from the groins of all the wastrels that had ever taken a whizz in that composting toilet. ‘What if we go to this other park,’ he suggested, and indicated the name of a park that was like a million miles away. We sure as hell couldn’t walk there, and I’d had enough of parks—at least when it comes to dating. I don’t wanna date in parks ever again. All the guys I’ve ever dated were so cheap that would rather take me to a park than a café or a restaurant, because it was open to the public for free; they didn’t risk having to pay a bill that would’ve probably caused an aneurysm to burst in their brains. I’d always offer to go Dutch, but better safe than sorry—in parks, you don’t have to go Dutch at all. In parks, you don’t risk spending your entire weekly allowance that mom and pop slipped into your pocket because you were a good boy who did well in school and didn’t come home with the clap. So we went to parks; a lot of ‘em, goddamit. Ugh! Those memories of making out on the benches and being made fun of by kids playing badminton or riding their bikes make me sick to my stomach. I had my first date ever in a park in my hometown, in late November. It was freezing cold and my poor, sickly beau subsequently came down with a cold that took weeks to heal. Nothing of the sort befell me, like,  ever. I also had my first kiss ever on a bench, in the same park, though with a different date. We broke up two months later because I loved dogs more than human beings, and he got married to the next girl he started dating after me, on the same day that the high tide wiped the hiking trail that would take me to the shore on an Irish island in the middle of the Atlantic. And once, I went to a park, determined to break up with this guy, but I ended up staying in that toxic relationship almost another year because of his cajoling and other dirty schemes. In a nutshell, I have no fond memories of parks; and the fact that someone takes me there in the middle of the night to pee (hoping to take a shot at romance after that) is not gonna make me change my mind; if anything, it’s only gonna make my nausea more difficult to internalize—which is a bad thing in itself, to begin with.

‘Do you like long walks?’ he asked me, when we were doing the exact same thing—walking for hours on end, heading to the middle of nowhere, because I didn’t care where I was going as long as it wasn’t home, and he was still hoping to get laid that night to let me slip through his fingers so easily.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to thwart again your attempt to pigeonhole me in any possible way. What are you gonna ask me next, if I like my fries with ketchup or mayo, what’s my favorite color, the subject I struggled the most with in school, or the name of my first pet? You sound like Gmail asking security questions when you forget your password.’

‘Yeah, I know it sounds stupid sometimes, but… I’m just trying to get to know you. I know people who’d easily do that—the long walks, that is—whereas others are simply couch potatoes. Only Netflix and chill for them. I was just wondering where you belong.’

‘Nowhere. I belong nowhere.  I walked thirty kilometers in two days in Nice and Monaco, plunged sixteen kilometers into the depths of a forest in the French countryside in full hunting season, but I also had a two-month spell when I didn’t get up from bed, lying there all day long, writing my book (he totally ignored the fact that I had brought up the words “my book” into the conversation; must have misheard it or blamed it on my Balkan pronunciation).  Nothing I do makes sense or is interconnected with another thing I do; it doesn’t even have to. It’s just who I am.’

‘I see. That’s why I wanna spend time with you. Given that there’s nothing much to do in town, I’d normally say we go to my place and watch a TV show or something, but…’

‘But you know that “at my place” are not the three words you wanna say on a first date; not with me, at least.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know; I didn’t suggest anything, I just thought it’d be nice.’

‘I didn’t say you suggested anything; it’s just something I don’t do on a first date. You have a self-imposed America-related omerta; I don’t drink alcohol and sleep around.’

‘Fair enough. Well, then, I’d like to hang around some more, but I have stuff to do, so maybe we should order a taxi and go back to our places.’

How very odd. A minute ago, he was inviting me at his place because he wanted to “spend time” with me, and now, after he realized he’s not gonna get what he wants, he says he’s gotta go back home because he has stuff to do. How the hell did that stuff materialize into his living room in his absence, in the span of one or two minutes? Hm. Maybe he’s the mystic in this story, not I. If anything, I am the man. The man who orders a taxi, drops him at his place, at which point he gets back into the car, claiming he had forgotten he had to go buy something from a convenience store on the main avenue. His paranoia kicked in again when he wasn’t sure that the driver had started the GPS—does this guy even know where we’re going? And do I have to pay him or you? It’s a Taxify, you idiot; all the fares are deducted from my bank account. He handed me a bill, which I obviously turned down, hugged me twice (because he didn’t like the pat on the back—I patted him anyway the second time, too), and off he went. Finally. Thank God. The Christian god, the Jewish, the Muslim, or the Buddhist one, or whatever god had effected the long-awaited demise of my worst date ever.

Two days later, he texted me, saying that he wants to hang out again soon, but unfortunately, he still has a lot of work to do. Nevermind, darling! I’m far from being a time-sucking vampire. I like garlic and solitude too much, that’s why.  ‘Sorry, but I’m not exactly vibing it, and I don’t wanna waste your time (or mine). We belong in different worlds (literally and non-literally), so we’d better leave it at that. Best of luck.’ And I pressed “send.” The reply came back instantly, and it was monosyllabic—‘Weird.’ And I’ve never heard from him again.  

Man. That text felt so liberating I could almost cry for joy. It felt ecstatic to be able to fantasize again with Nick Murphy, to plunge into the same old endless spiral of limerence in the peace and quiet of my room, smelling of coffee, dark chocolate, old books, and isolation. No more piss in the park and platitudes on Christianity and evolution; no more answering security questions and avoiding hands caked in groin bacteria and molecules of urine; no more getting back home late enough to shower with cold water and watch the cockroaches crawl all over the dishes in my kitchen. Dating is a pain in the ass unless you do it with someone you’re smitten with—and the modern society doesn’t quite give you permission to be smitten with someone you could actually date. Here’s the thing—I’d been late twenty minutes that evening because I’d gotten lost in a Youtube loop, crying and grieving over my missed flight and Nick’s show in Milan, and telling myself that I can’t do this. I don’t wanna do this. I can’t do this. I won’t do this. I’ll cancel last minute, although I’ll come across as a bitch. I don’t want the universe’s leftovers on my table; I’d rather starve myself to death. I know that never in a million years could I have my limerent object, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be happy with the dollar store version of it. Matter of fact, I won’t. I may be trying to punch above my weight, but then again—who isn’t? I don’t have perfect teeth; I’m far from having a Baywatch body; hell, my jokes aren’t even that good sometimes, and I can’t even pronounce “years” correctly in English—why wasn’t this guy good enough for me then? Because nothing and no one ever is; because we only want what we can’t have. Because that evening, I was hoping for a refreshing conversation on the duality of the self, on the body-mind conflict, on how art in general (and music in particular) is a lifeline for lost souls like me; but instead I got caught in the trammel of a religious argument, with baby dinosaurs lurking around the corner, threatening to hatch from the potentially fertilizable eggs in my pelvis under the auspices of the right genetic mutation. Because only average guys can be stubbornly interested in me, so much so that they keep texting me although I hadn’t answered their calls or their texts for a week; average guys who probably hadn’t gotten laid in a while; average guys to whom I seemed reachable, who didn’t have to punch above their weight to go on a date with me.  I’ll never be interesting, multihyphenate, mysterious, or good enough for the likes of Nick Murphy or any other unattainable person that could be limerence material for me, no matter how hard I try; I’d probably have a shot if I stopped trying altogether (but I can’t, because I’m me).

And it’s sad, but I know the drill all too well, ‘cause I’ve been there so many times—basically my whole life: “Limerence is a state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and have one's feelings reciprocated, ” says the Holy Wikipedia. We owe this concept to psychologist Dorothy Tennov, who coined it in her 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Look it up on Wikipedia; it expatiates on all its aspects amazingly well,  and it might just let you know that you have a new disease. In my case, reciprocity never came into question, and in spite of starvation and adversity,  I’ve always managed to stay limerent until I found another person to transfer my limerence to. The more impossible it is, the more drugged up it makes me feel; the more rejected I am, the needier I get. And I believe it’s essential that it stay that way; a healthy relationship pattern just wouldn’t do for me. I have yet to discover whether therapy would be of any help, though, but I’m not that willing to try, to be honest. I feed on my limerence, and my limerence feeds on me. We need limerence, at least in art; studies say that limerence is experienced by about 5% of the population; I bet that the bulk of it are artists (or at least artists at heart). I wonder how many of the great songs put out into the world would have been written had it not been for limerence; same goes for books, paintings, sculptures, and whatever involves a muse. Not all limerent objects are muses, but all muses are limerent objects, in a way or another. I know it, and you know it; everybody knows it, and in case you didn’t, now you do. While therapy —or even medication— may help limerence to some extent, the one thing that does not help are failed dates, with people you’re just not vibing that much (if at all). And of course, you can’t vibe somebody else when your whole being vibes that unattainable, volatile, celestial presence that will never be within reach like Tash Sultana’s mad guitar riffs.

And it’s okay; just don’t rush it. Don’t go for the leftovers. Don’t go for the dollar store hoops when you’ve been coveting the Gucci ones forever; otherwise, you’ll end up with a fallacy and a lifetime of bitterness and second-guessing your own worth.  Are you truly dollar store material, too? Are you willing to work till you’re dog-tired, day in and day out, to afford something that might be stolen from your purse on your bus ride back home? But what if it’s something money can’t buy? What if it’s something not even wits or looks can buy, because it’s not yours to keep in the first place?

Well, that sucks; but I won’t go for the dollar store version ever again. I wanna bathe in the glory of a life with no one else, as the song goes. I’d rather die surrounded by dogs and books without having procreated, have no one come to my funeral, and give away my whole fortune—whatever’s left of it after decades of concerts, festivals and trips to Melbourne, New York, and LA—to charity. But until I die, I’ll keep on falling back upon the same pattern of limerence, hoping for the best; after all, hope is an important part of the definition of this whole concept.  And I’ll make art out of it to stay alive—and because it’s fun, even when it makes me weep. If I were to believe Lana, at least I’m pretty when I cry.

[lazyturtleloss-blog]

3 stories one title 

I was chilling with my friends when this one girl comes up to me. Her name was Julianne or something. And she led me to a secluded area in the school that I didn't even know of. I felt awkward. I didn't know what to say. I was alone with this girl and she got something to say. Then I asked "what's up? Why'd you drag me here?". I haven't noticed, but this girl was banging like damn she got them good genetics! Body right, nice scent, pretty face it just didn't make sense. She came closer. So close her breasts started to hit my chest. THEY WERE SO SOFT DAMN IF I LAYED ON THEM I WOULD SLEEP. She got close and said "I'm going to make you mine." Knowing me, you can't get me on lockdown I will find a way to get out of the jail cell you call "lockdown". I was pretty upset saying "nah no way you can lock me down. You know how much girls I've dealt with? You're nothing special." She was shocked. But one of those hand to the chest shocked but she was still smiling. Shit that was hot. And that was one weakness of mine. Turning the tables on me. "You know you're real cute when you're trying to be all tough. You're really strange but I can get addictive by just your attitude. I'll have fun with you. But to this day, you're mine. okay?" Damn this girl is dangerous. Then Julianne left. But I'm trying to get at her. Okay. Let's play this game then shorty. 

After a week has passed I started to feel some type of way. I don't like these emotions I'm feeling. I'm overthinking. I never overthink. Especially for a girl. Not after what happened between my grade 10 crush. Damn was she beautiful. Eyes of fall. Body of a fit lioness. Her sweet scent of lust. Her intelligence of a professor. Damn was she dangerous. I shouldn't of fell for her. I was a mouse in her puzzle. I should've escaped. Because every time she moved the puzzle, she would watch me fail. I didn't like it and it made me feel like a puzzle piece I could be disposed of. I wouldn't say this if it wasn't for the truth. I was shown the truth one day when me and her were chilling with my friends. She was awkward with all of them. But all of them were laughing. It didn't make sense until my boys brought me to the side, leaving her alone. The words I could hear but I didn't believe in were "haha fam don't you know that girl fucked with all of us? I can't believe you brought her with us. Oh you have a crush on her? Oh shit. Don't worry fam we can save you if you need to be saved. Just holler." Damn I didn't believe it. It hurts the most knowing the most beautiful girl was like wifi; she connected with what's in our pockets. My friends, my very close friends told me all about how they got bare shit from her from donuts to money. I realized, she used me to give it to my friends. I'd rather give it to them than her to use me just to give it to them. Fuck this. Fuck this attempt with girls. I'm not being used. She used me. I'm not a person to use. Just fuck girls and leave. At least we got both something off our shoulders. I'm done. Girls aren't trustworthy. I came back to my senses and realized my boys got my back. I tell them "alright I'm dropping this girl. She used me just to give you guys gifts I can just do that. You guys in?" "Hah you know it let's do it!" We came back to her. I said we needed to go. She said alright and we left. We were at the train station. She had to go one train me and my friends on another. Then once we're waiting for the train and me and my "crush" both see our trains coming I hit her with "hey you know what's the difference between our trains?" She asked "what?" "One train's going home another is going to another mans house get trained on, you hoe." my boys hyped it up coming with "next stop nut hill!" "That's the only train you don't need to pay for!" And "the only way of stopping that train of yours is a condom!" And we left. Shit but on the inside, I wanted her. A lot. But she used me. You can't be with users and abusers. Because by the time it was grade 11, every guy knows her as being an easy A. Fuck it I need my emotions gone. But now, I’m just chilling in bed thinking about Julianne. Damn that girl is smart. She’s making me think. Making me feel wanted. Alright you know what I’m going to break curfew and I can’t leave home through the front and back door. I pulled up my window and I can land it. If I don’t miss the table. I started to change. I was wearing a Levi’s blue jeans, a belt, got my Nike borough mids hitting the ground as he walks, shit hopefully it wasn’t loud. I had a white shirt underneath my Levi’s sweater, and with a black adidas hat. I looked shady but whatever I gotta go meet her. I called my friend to ask where she was. He replied with “she’s hooking up with some guys up at the beach.” The beach? What is she doing there? “Why what’s up fam? Got some situation with her? She’s dangerous you know?” I answered with “I know. Respects fam. Link up with me at the beach?” He answered with “alright I got you. I’ll bring the car so I can go home quickly. I shouldn’t even be out right now.” “Yeah I know. Thanks let me ride with you after.” I hang up. I run to the bus. And the bus ride there made me think of what I’m doing there. Well I still have a feeling that she is needed. Whatever let’s go see. I link up with my friend and we walk to where she was last seen. What I’ve seen was heartbreaking. Damn just like last time. But this time, it wasn’t my friends telling me what they’ve done, she was showing what she’s done. She wasn’t banging my friends, no. She was banging men 5+ years older than I was. I was 18. And it was in public. My body didn’t move. I was too shocked to move. I waited 3 minutes until my boy brought me back by yelling “AYO JACE WAKE UP WTF ARE YOU DOING?!” I snapped out of it. I woke up. That loud sound also startled Julianne. She looked scared. “Jace…..” the guys that were banging her asked “yo you know this dude?” She stayed silent. I just looked at her, Ashamed. Why did I stay? Why did I think. “Fuck Jace I didn’t want you to see me like-” “so this is what you mean when you said you wanted to make me mine.” “No Jace that’s not-” “so you put me on the side so you can have someone there. But not think about me even once.” She started tearing up and trying to hide her naked body. The guys that were banging her started putting their pants back on. “Heh we’re leaving. Have fun with that boy toy of yours.” Julianne yelled “he isn’t my boy toy!” But those words didn’t hide the words “boy toy”. Was I just a boy toy? A game to a girl that almost made me feel emotions for a girl again? I couldn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand, it just hurts my heart. I just stared. Stared at a girl I wanted. A girl that was beautiful. A girl that made me think. It was a waste of my memory and thinking. I was mad. At her. At myself. At my emotions. The only words that could come out was “I shouldn’t have believed in you.” Those words hurt. To me, because those were the only words I can muster up. And to her, because I saw it made her body quiver. And she just got dressed. “Jace please don’t say that…” I turned around. “I shouldn’t have came. I shouldn’t have stayed. I already experienced this. After all, something like this happened to me.” Julianne grabbed my arm. “Who did this to you before?” I yelled “don’t worry about it! You’re going to be the second one who does it and you’re just going to be the past! Fuck it whatever. I shouldn’t have came. Have fun with your life. You heartless woman.” Then I dashed her arm away from me. My friend comes and says “should we get revenge?” I say quietly “nah just leave her alone. She’s not worth it like my grade 10 crush.” “Goodbye Julianne.” Me and my friend left her all alone at the beach. We drove off. I was the the front seat contemplating about life. My friend was acting like an asshole and played drake “marvins room”. “Imma kill you fam!” And he just laughed harder. 

A few years later I got off the bus. I was walking to work. As I walked past a former crush across an intersection I sensed a cry that made even a grown man would have felt hurt. I moved closer to the sounds. It was coming from a cemetery. The sleek grey of the skies, the tear felt cries from the clouds. I knew today someone lost a person important to them. The afternoon rush hour made the environment so noisy but I couldn’t hear them because my focus were the time and the cries. As I walked closer to the sound of the cries I was sacrificing my shoes to the dirt for the heart felt cries. But it didn’t matter. As I approached closer, it was an old man and a young woman who I guessed was his helper. That didn’t make sense. Because there was no burials today. As I walked closer to them, I got to see what he looked like. He was fragile, was getting a bald spot on his head, and was wearing a robe to keep him warm. Then, I was approached by his helper. She asked “do you know of Mr. Thompson sir?” “No I don’t but I heard his cries and it pained me.” “Ah I see. Well… the reason you might be feeling a lot of emotion is because Mr. Thompson has Alzheimer’s. He forgets about everything at one point. He doesn’t remember anyone. Except for his wife.” As I looked at the gravestone,there were a lot of roses. it read “Mary Beth Ashley Thompson 1952-2003” “she’s been dead for so long. But Mr. Thompson will always remember her touch and kisses like it was yesterday. He even remembers the day when she was buried. But Mr Thompson’s happiness lies with this woman. So everyday she brings her a rose. Because a rose to him symbolizes love. And a rose is beautiful isn’t it? She loved roses. So he appreciates every single thing about her. Too bad she didn’t live long enough for him to leave happily. I appreciate you coming here sir. He needs some time with people.” And with that, I walk away. And walked towards my home. I’ll take my day off today. Realizing every step I take couldn’t be worse than not having the one you love walk across the intersection into heaven, leaving you behind to deal with life all alone. But what do I know? My experiences with love ended with tragedy. But for that old man, it broke him. I hope I never feel that way. But that isn’t what life has to offer and I'll lose someone important. Just like those times I was close to love but fell into the ditch of relationship fails. This is how emotions are so dangerous, they make us do things we don’t expect even ourselves to do. To go against our words, to forgive someone we shouldn’t, in the end of the day, it was just like a gravestone. Left and forgotten. Unless the ones we love are able to show us they appreciate what we’ve done for them and offer us their time. At this time, the rain didn't feel cold, it felt warm. I felt glad, because the rain felt like an ending, like a new beginning, it covered my tears like sweat. I could finally see my life flash before my eyes. Like a beam of light coming towards me. 

Then it hit me

Blood filled my brain

Will someone remember me like the man’s wife?

I hope so

I really do.

Everything hurts

But the rain was cooling

Was I going to be missed?

The noises

They’re getting quiet

My sight

Fading to black 

My heart

losing rhythm

I guess this was what I wished for

Not to feel emotions

Not to feel anything

Was it worth it?

I don’t know.

I can’t say 

because I was feeling the light

the light of the end of the tunnel 

I was going to be left and forgotten,

[sending-the-message]

Opened 24 hours! by MixedupMaeson

This happened recently and I'm not sure what to make of it,

I need to give some background before going into it. My name's Booker, I work in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Everyone knows each other, everyone talks to each other, we don't get tourists often, we don't get reporters or military personnel coming through. We are small, we have a few bigger stores but mostly it's just mom and pop shops. I work for a knock off Denny's near the end of town, it's right near a freeway entrance that's not often used but it's close to bars and a few schools so we get business.

Normally we open at six and close at ten, except for the summer. During the summer we are opened twenty four hours on Friday and Saturday and every other day is the same. People in my town often get off work earlier in summer or go to bars, we get a lot of teenagers who will come in at all hours of the night getting high and eating our pancakes. We'll call this place Lenny's since I'd rather not have people snooping.

Across from Lenny's is a Carl's Jr that's running on the same or similar hours to us, we often trade food with one another.

Now, a little background on me, I'm twenty five and Im a writer. I also have a few mental disorders, I don't want to describe them in great detail as I don't want to bore you but what you need to know is that when I was a kid, before medicine, I would black out which hasn't happened for years! But when I do black out I normally act...off, I'm almost like a different person. Another thing that happens is I lose track of reality. It's not like suddenly I'm in space or something,

It's more...I forget where I am and people become almost blurry, especially faces. It's really scary but medicine tends to keep me afloat and keep these things from happening. Anyways, like I said I'm a writer and so is my dad.

When I was thirteen he gave me a voice recorder. Yaknow, like those ones in the old movies. They're like a little brick you talk into, he uses one for his own writing. He writes for those magazines that say stuff like...Johnny Depp is wearing a mask made of someone else's skin or aliens change your eye color when they abduct you or something. He was convinced since I was born that he was abducted and things went down hill for him there.

He was taken away and I'm not sure where he is now, but boy do I wish I had his input. Maybe that's why I'm writing this, maybe he'll see it and help me. I'd also like to point out that when I black out I don't ever use this recorder so I don't know what exactly happened.

On with the story,

So it was a Friday night at Lenny's, I don't remember exactly why it was slow all this is fuzzy but I was cleaning a few booths and my chef was watching a game on his phone. It was a boring night, just me and him my other coworker called out. It was rounding ten at night when I got an alert on my phone. --City wide curfew put in place. 10 pm till unknown time--

I was a little shocked, I looked up at my car outside and down at my phone's clock. It was five till ten, I debated on getting in my car and leaving but I wasn't sure if I'd make it. Sometimes, we get weird texts like this, no one ever knows why and they normally last for a half hour or maybe an hour. I decided to just stay put,

I tried to call my manager to see if I should lock the door but no answer. My chef and me just...decided to stay where we were. Now, everything's fuzzy after this. Around ten thirty I don't remember much, I woke up in bed on Sunday morning at eight am. I was groggy, starving and felt like I haven't had water in a week. That's when I rolled over and found my voice recorder, it was hidden under my pillow. I thought I just...blacked out for the first time in years but then I started listening. I made an entire voice diary of the night.

I got up, got some water and noticed my legs were torn up and bandaged, my arms were sore and my head had dried blood on it. One of my eyes was black and blue, and the whites were bright red. That's when I knew something weird happened.

Here's my voice recordings word for words,

"11 pm: Oh my God I'm so bored! Our WiFi went out, middle of a YouTube video too! I have 4g but I think I'll save it just in case. I guess the curfew isn't lifted. What a bad day for a curfew! Hardly have any customers. Whatever."

"11:15 pm: I thought I heard something, I was trying to get information from people on Facebook when I heard a few soft booming noises. Nothing out the windows, we have a million windows everywhere you'd assume I'd be able to see /something/! But I think I'm just being paranoid, normally the curfew is lifted by now. Usually just some idiot robbing a bank or something. I hope it gets lifted soon I'm bored"

"11:30 pm: No one on Facebook knows anything but they all said they got the same texts, my room mate told me she thinks there was a police chase or something since she saw some lights but nothing on the news apparently. Why don't we have TV's in here? I hate using my 4g to talk to people I have no clue why the WiFi went out. I heard those booms again but I also saw the Carl's Jr guy smoking outside so I think it was just them taking out the trash. They have those big bins and they're all stoners so they were probably just fucking around."

"Midnight: My chef is getting antsy, he says he wants to leave so he can see his family. It's only the first twenty four hour shift of the summer and at this point he thinks we won't have any customers. I mean, I agree but the curfew! Hopefully it gets lifted soon Ill probably ditch. I just bought a bunch of games and DVDs I'd love to crack opened. On the plus side, booming stopped and the WiFi is back. My chef and me have been snapchatting my room mate so I'm not on edge anymore. I'll probably stop recording I was hoping something cool would happen. Say hi! -sounds of movement as another voice perks up- hello everyone listening! -more movement sounds- that's my chef, Roger! He just had a baby!!"

"1 am: There's something weird going on down the street. Me and Roger we're playing some card game on his phone when we heard the booming again. We ran to the window but the Carl's Jr was dark! Like they left, in fact, everything was dark. You can't even see my car and it's only a few steps into the parking lot! There's a stop light by the restaurant and there are police cars all over the place! But...they don't have lights on, and...they're moving really slowly. I'm watching them right now, they're going down the street in perfect unison. What's going on?"

"1:15 am: I see a tank!! Like..a tank tank!! It's huge and moving really slowly, that's what those booming sounds where. But why is a tank here? We're all wilderness, tanks would have a shit time getting through the trees why come here? I tried to take a picture with my phone but I dropped it! Stupid idiot...when I grabbed it and looked back up the tank was stopped behind a bunch of trees I can't get a shot. Roger is freaking out, the second he saw the tank he ran back into the kitchen. I'm going to go see what he's doing"

"1:30 am: Roger left. I went back to see if he was okay and he was gathering his things. He told me tanks were a bad sign and he's lived here for thirty years and never once saw a tank! He told me I should leave too, but that tanks right where I need to go anyways... I don't get why he's freaking out, a military group is probably just coming through or something...right? Military people do that? Right??

On the plus side, I don't think I'm as alone as I thought I was...I watched Roger drive away and for a split second I saw someone standing on the sidewalk next to Carl's Jr. I think it was one of the workers, same height and build but their face was...a little...blurry, I'm anxious, did I take my meds? Oh Lord I hope I took them..."

"1:45 am: I'm locking everything, I saw two more people. The only light anywhere is inside my building and by the street lamp, I turned to look at my phone and looked back and there was someone there! I've seen enough horror movies. I went to the emergency door in the back and locked it, I looked outside and someone was out in the back. I couldn't make them out, it's dark...but I saw their shape. I'm hoping maybe I'm seeing things. I've seen things before. Yaknow...little things like spiders maybe.."

"2:30 am: Nothing happened, I turned off all the lights and locked everything. No one's here? Maybe I did imagine it...I'm eating a sandwich in a booth just looking over at the street and the tank it gone, the police are gone, there's nothing. WiFi is out again, Im-- What was that? -shuffling, the sound of recorder being set down- What the fuck...there's a guy outside.. he's...banging on the glass door, trying to open it...i-i can't make out his face...I'm gonna watch him. Maybe he's just some random customer who didn't hear about the curfew..."

"2:40 am: He went away, my phone has no signal out of nowhere. I'm not sure what's happening but have you ever felt like you were being watched? The lights in Carl's Jr flickered back on but no one's inside, I'm staring at my car. I have a baseball bat in the back..thank God my shitty nephew left all his sports crap in my trunk but should I risk going to get it? I don't know. I'm scared, I'm not sure if it's all in my head or it's outside. -a pause, the sounds of shuffling- I'm going to get that bat...what if that guy wanted to rob me? Or worse?? What if he's he reason for the curfew? What if he's some mass killer an-- no. I can't let my anxiety get the better of me. It's probably in my head I didn't take my meds it's in my head. -softly- it's in my head it's in my head...I need to get that bat or I'm dead..."

"2:45 am: -out of breath- I saw-- I saw the tank! The tank from earlier! I got my bat, the tank...police! Military! I ran to my car...I unlocked it and slide inside, it took me all of two seconds to find the clutter in the backseat. I thought it was in my trunk thank God it wasn't because the thought to open my fucking trunk didn't even--

Whoa!! Wh-- -static, cutting out before going dead-

"They shot the tank! No...wait no not..fuck the tank fired a gun a tank gun! And...fuck, they hit something /in the sky/ there was something up in the clouds -static- and it was huge!! I'm starting to calm down, okay okay, -taking in a few shaken breathes- there was this...the tank fired okay! The bullet hit something in the sky, it took up most of the sky! I...it looked like clouds but it wasn't, when it flashed I saw a bunch of military personnel everywhere. Where they the ones trying to get in? I don't know. I'm hiding under a table with my bat but I can't see what's happening through the window and I don't know if I'm making this up or not I've never experienced anything like this. It has to be real, right? It has to be..."

"3:15 am: More people, they're coming to the doors and pounding on the windows. Why? It can't be the military! But I can't see them I can only hear them, I'm still under this table I haven't moved. The tank hasn't fired again but a siren went off about five minutes after. I got another alert on my phone, it says to stay indoors that there's a tornado??? There's not a fucking tornado!! There a military fighting North Korea or something outside!! God okay I need to calm down, I'm not sure who Im screaming at...God the pounding is so so loud. I'm going to go into the back maybe I won't hear it. I need to get out of here I should have left with Roger. I hope Roger is alright...okay, wish me luck to..whoever finds this, I'm going to run to the back and hide in the dry storage."

"3:37 am: I'm here! I'm hiding...I'm freaking out a little, but I'm alright...I jumped up and ran to the back. I didn't even look out the windows, God I'm so afraid. I'm holed up in this tiny little closet thing but the door doesn't close all the way and it's so dark, I'm not even sure who I'm talking to anymore. I'm going to die I know I'm going to die, I'm --

A window just broke. They're coming for me. They're going to kill me. Why else would they pound on the windows? I can still hear the pounding -voice cracking in fear, static-"

"4am: -whispering- I'm terrified they're moving around, I'm not going to die. I refuse. I'm going to beat the living hell out of these fuckers with my bat and run to my car! I'm going to go out the back door, it's an easy lock! I just turn the little knob and it opens. It's ea-- They're getting closer, I hear them right out the door. I'm goin-- -soft creek of a door, distorted screaming-"

"4:12 am: I'm in my car! I beat the shit out of them! They got me a few times, my eye hurts like a bitch but I'm not stopping!!"

"4:50 am: -out of breath- my car stopped working! I'm running! It was fine, I was five minutes from my apartment. -takes in a few breathes- then I heard this loud humming and this light! It was so /bright/!! It was like the sky was on fire!! Then my car just stopped...it just STOPPED!! No reason it came to a stop and i ran but I just stopped so I can record this. I see my apartment complex, my legs are so sore an-- -humming, static- oh my, the LIGHT oh my GO-- -Loud humming, tape cutting out-

"Unknown time: -broken up, static- where am I? I'm so afraid...I can't open my eyes...-cutting out-"

That's the last of it, I woke up at 8am on Sunday. I'm not sure what's happening...After listening to all the tapes I tried to recall anything but just nothing. My neighbor brought my car back, he told me he found it down the road and it's got a huge dent into it. He said I ran into a tree...I guess that explains my bruised up arms and legs? I'm not sure. I drove to my work and my manager told me that we don't start the twenty four hours till next week? She told me I locked myself in the building, my chef wasn't there and left at ten and that these guys broke in to rob the place? And that I beat the hell out of them with a bat.

I don't know what to believe...I guess that makes sense? But I have...I have Snapchat of me and Roger that night with times on it and a recording of us. I called him but he also says he left at ten. My manager says the people pounding where probably customers or something but why would they show up when it wasn't twenty four hours??

There are so many holes but maybe I'm crazy, maybe I did black out, but...I never record when I black out...my therapist says I blacked out too, there are reports in the newspaper about the robbers stealing from the Carl's Jr as well and claimed that the guy who was smoking outside was /killed/ by these people. They found his body mangled and without any blood in the dumpster, who drains their victims blood? This isn't Lost boys!

I check my texts, the only one is one claiming a tornado had touched down where a build was that looks more like a bomb was dropped on it. I drove by it and it was...a mess but I guess a tornado can do that. Last I checked Facebook and texts between me and my room and there were none. I asked her...I asked her what happened,

She told me I came home around 8am when she was up getting ready for work and she helped me bandage up my legs. She said I was crying and shaking, my eyes were even bleeding and red, I wouldn't say anything to her and just went to bed. I don't remember. She said I slept through all of Saturday...the sheriff came in and tried to wake me but I guess he couldn't wake me up and I kept screaming all day. I'd wake up, scream and go back to sleep.

My therapist thinks I forgot to take my meds for a few days since I was so caught up with things and stress just..cause an incredible break down. I got my license taken away and my cars in the shop...my manager gave me a week off. I guess maybe all they're saying is right, it makes sense..I'm just a little out of it maybe. I probably did black out, my therapist is going to talk to me about it more. I'm going to show her the tapes maybe they'll help...but...

The only thing that really has me confused though...My eyes, they were brown. In all my selfies, they're brown. In everything, they're brown. I just looked at myself in the mirror.

They're green.