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waywardwrestlewritingwaif · 4 years ago

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The Guardian’s Oath, Part Six

Since this is a horror/ supernatural story, I’d hoped I’d have it finished before the end of October. In fact, I’d hoped to have it finished well before that because I had another horror-type thing that I was also supposed to get finished before the end of October. And now I have a few other ideas that aren’t horror-driven that I want to get done because... Yeah, you know. Life.

Anyway, if you’d like to get caught up on this story, you can find the previous sections here:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

Pairing: Feargal Devitt/ Finn Balor x OFC

Word count: 2,392

Content advisory: Graphic sexual content, dub-con, possibly disturbing moral/ religious themes

For several days, the dour mood in the house persisted, although the children did start to brighten up a bit. Things made a sudden shift, however, when the Reverend, who continued to stay at home, returned from a meeting. He was smiling and some of the color had returned to his face, and as he entered the house, he immediately called the children to him. I still felt that he was cross with me from the incident at dinner and so I stayed back, watching them from the drawing room.

“Did you get good news, Papa?” Sophia inquired.

“Very good news. At least, the best news I could hope for. And I want to apologize that I haven’t been myself with you lately. I hope you know that I always love you, even if my mood is low.”

I glanced in his direction, faintly hoping that he might indicate that I was included in his apology but his attention was entirely given to his children. He didn’t go into any detail about the nature of his news but he did tell them that they would finally be able to properly bury their mother and to “say their goodbyes”. Considering that he had been rather cold to me since that night in the dining room, I was a little surprised and perhaps a little hurt to hear him use my exact words as if they were now a good thing.

The children returned to me a few minutes later, seeming more content. I suspected that this was not so much because of the news but because their father seemed like himself again. I tried to reflect their good mood back at them as I continued our French lesson, even though I felt like I had been left out.

To my surprise, Reverend Devitt stayed in the doorway, watching us with a curious expression. Perhaps he wanted to see if I was doing an adequate job. I definitely felt as if he were judging my performance and I found myself quite nervous. Nevertheless, I worked my way through everything I had planned to cover before I released them for their afternoon tea. Their father hung by the door after they’d left, watching me speculatively.

“May I help you sir?” I asked meekly.

“Will you be taking tea with us?”

“I would be happy to.”

I had been mostly taking my meals by myself in the last several days, frightened I might anger him more or that my very presence would be aggravating. He had given no acknowledgment that he even noticed, so it was very gratifying to know that I was being invited back into the fold.

He stepped inside the room and offered me his hand, which I gladly took, blushing a little at the unexpected contact. He continued to hold it after I rose and he made no move to leave.

“After an investigation,” he began, “the authorities determined that there was no evidence to proceed with a full inquiry into my wife’s death. So there is no imminent disaster and no shame that will be visited on me or my family.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir. I have prayed for you.”

I shivered a little, remembering who else I had asked for help and how I had agreed to pay him.

The Reverend bent his head and lightly touched his lips to my fingers.

“I don’t know why, but I feel that somehow your presence and your prayers are somehow responsible. I shared the story of my most terrible memories with you and for the first time, some of the burden of carrying them has been lifted from me.”

“You’re too kind, sir.”

“Feargal, Helen,” he reminded me softly. “Call me Feargal.”

He turned my hand over and kissed my wrist and palm, lips as soft as dew, and I felt the sensation reverberate throughout my body. When he raised his head, the look in his blue eyes was like nothing I had ever seen before, slightly playful and at the same time a bit dangerous. I felt as though he were searching for something inside me, but I could not fathom what it was. Gradually, his expression changed to a gentle smile as he lowered and released my hand, leaving me to wonder what had just passed between us, or if I had been imagining things.

The funeral for the late Mrs. Devitt was organized for the following week. A lay minister was brought in from the city to conduct the service so that the Reverend would be able to sit with his children. The family asked that I attend and I agreed, although my secret feelings towards the head of the house made me feel awkward about it. I didn’t like to admit it, but in my heart I hoped that finally being able to say goodbye to his wife might open my employer to the possibility of someone new.

Many times, I replayed the moment his lips had touched my hand and the look in his eyes afterward. He was on the road during the intervening days and by the time he returned, I had worked myself into a state. I was barely able to look at him, afraid that my face would betray the entirely inappropriate thoughts I was having. At the same time, I longed to know if he was looking at me and, if so, in what way.

The day of the funeral was the first when autumn’s chill could be felt cutting through the warmth of the late summer. We walked to the church together- The Reverend, the children, Kate and me. I had been a little disappointed when I realized Kate was coming too since it diminished the pride I felt at being asked to join. Of course, she had known Mrs. Devitt and I certainly didn’t object to her pleasant company, but I felt less special as a result.

A few women from the town were in attendance, ones I assumed had tried to befriend Sarah Devitt when she first arrived. No one, not even the Reverend, knew how to contact her family and so they had no presence that day. The service was simple and warm, in keeping with what I had seen of the Reverend, if not what I had heard of the woman we were mourning.

I was a little surprised that neither of the children cried, but it seemed likely that their mother had been dead in their minds since the night she disappeared. Both of them looked forlorn and Sophia’s face was a mask of anxiety that seemed inappropriate to her tender age. My heart ached for her, knowing too well the pain of losing a mother, of feeling the need to behave like a young woman while still being very much a child.

We returned home and the visiting reverend joined us for an early supper. He and Reverend Devitt immediately fell deep into conversation and I allowed myself to look at him from under my eyelashes, marvelling at how very handsome he was and at the serenity of his clear eyes now that the shadow had passed from them. I had to force myself to take the children upstairs and put them to bed because I would have happily sat there all night, watching him in silence.

“Would you like me to read you anything in particular?” I asked the children as they settled in bed.

They glanced at each other and shook their heads simultaneously and yet I could tell there was something they wanted to say.

“You both did very well today,” I commended them. “I was inconsolable at my mother’s funeral.”

“Miss Miles,” Sophia began crisply, “my brother and I have something we want to know. Can you help us?”

“I will try my best.”

“Is it true that unbaptized babies go to Hell?”

I stared back, aghast at how her cool tone never wavered. It was like she had asked me why apples came in different colors.

“Well,” I stammered, not knowing what to say or why they wanted to know and remembering all too clearly what had happened the last time I had tried to give advice on a matter of death and religion, “that is what we are told. Baptism absolves us of Original Sin and therefore…” I struggled to come up with something that made things seem less bleak. “These matters are really in God’s hands. We know what He has taught us but ultimately all of these decisions are his to make.”

“But He has told us that unbaptized souls are always lost, no matter what the circumstances,” Sophia persisted.

“That is so,” I answered quietly.

“What if the baby hasn’t been born yet?” William chimed in.

Again, I was astounded at how easily these questions came from them. William sounded a little more emotional than his sister but not by much.

“I don’t know that there is anything in the Bible about that.”

“But aren’t there many babies who are stillborn?” Sophia, cooler and less affected than ever, took over the questioning again.

“There are. But the Bible says that man is born in a state of sin. So I think the child would have to be born and alive.”

I could tell that my argument was unconvincing and their expressions became worried.

“Wait! The Bible also tells us that life comes in breath, so in order to be considered fully alive, the baby would have to have taken at least one breath.”

The two of them immediately looked relieved and Sophia only gave a little smile.

“Why did you want to know about such things?”

“We were just thinking about all of the unborn children when we were at the funeral,” Sophia explained. “We didn’t like to imagine them all going to Hell.”

I smiled to know that I had relieved their minds on that score and yet I knew in my heart that she was lying. I felt hurt by the lack of trust and wondered what could be so shocking that they felt they could not share it with me but so pressing that they had been compelled to ask their unsettling questions.

Back in my room, I continued to ruminate over the meaning of what had just happened and wondered if I should tell their father as I dressed for bed. Within hours, I had found myself overwhelmed with sympathy for the vulnerability of my two charges and frightened by their almost inhuman coldness.

I knelt at the side of my bed and asked God for His guidance. As I prayed, however, I became distracted by an acrid scent, smoke and seawater, filling the room. I tried to tell myself that I had left the window open and that the smell was coming from outside but it was useless. I could feel the presence in the room with me. I sensed his dark form circling the room and felt the weight of his body on the bed before me before his talons ran down the side of my face. I desperately wanted to keep my eyes closed in the hopes that he would simply leave but finally I had to see for myself and confirm what I already knew.

Balor leaned his head down, continuing to cradle my face in his hand. He regarded me with an expression of perverse delight, his pale eyes almost luminous.

“You see how I protect what’s mine,” he hissed.

I nodded a little, frightened to find out what I had to bargain for now.

He pressed the knuckle of his thumb under my chin, forcing me to stare back at him.

“But that wasn’t all you wanted.” He gave a knowing smirk. “Say it.”

“I just…” I trembled at the voracious look on his face. “I only wish that he loved me.”

“Then pray,” he snarled.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He unfolded his crouched body, easing his legs off the bed on either side of me and pushing my head against his thigh, close to his erect member.

“Pray.”

He guided my mouth over the swollen head and down his shaft, rocking back and forth and giving quiet yet lascivious moans. I waited for that first painful thrust into the back of my throat but this time he pulled me off him and dragged me onto the bed by my hair. I landed on my stomach and felt him pounce on me, gripping my hips and lifting them from the bed, which caused my nightdress to fall forward.

Within a second, he pushed inside me, the shock and the burn of being stretched out almost making me faint. If he noticed this, he gave no sign, pounding away at a frantic pace, claws dug into my flesh to keep me somewhat steady. Gradually, he slid one hand around to the front, pressing his fingers against that point near the top of my opening, the one that had made me fall apart for him before. And, once again, the pleasure obliterated every other feeling I had in me. Wrong though it was, I wanted him to continue like this forever and at the same time, I wanted to rush towards the peak I knew was coming.

He seemed to prolong the act before finally pressing me over the edge, my body spasming around him until I felt the hot, thick liquid he released inside me. His arms wrapped tight around my chest and he used his weight and strength to press me flat against the bed. He continued to thrust slowly, bestial growls escaping him until he finally stilled. I felt his breath heavy on my neck, and the movement of his rippling muscles as he too began to relax.

When I came to, I was on my back, under the covers, as if nothing had happened. I could feel every scratch and welt he had left on my body but when I examined my skin, there were no external marks. I tried to sleep again but lay awake, terrified of what might be happening to me and trying to decide if it was worse that I had entered into some kind of pact with a demon or if I had gone mad and these fantasies were just the dark contents of my mind.

#wwe imagine #wwe fanfiction #nxt imagine #nxt fanfiction #finn balor imagine #finn balor fanfic #wrestling fanfic #wayward wrestle writing

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path-of-my-childhood · 5 years ago

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Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’

By: Laura Snapes for The Guardian Date: August 24th 2019

Taylor Swift’s Nashville apartment is an Etsy fever dream, a 365-days-a-year Christmas shop, pure teenage girl id. You enter through a vestibule clad in blue velvet and covered in gilt frames bursting with fake flowers. The ceiling is painted like the night sky. Above a koi pond in the living area, a narrow staircase spirals six feet up towards a giant, pillow-lagged birdcage that probably has the best view in the city. Later, Swift will tell me she needs metaphors “to understand anything that happens to me”, and the birdcage defies you not to interpret it as a pointed comment on the contradictions of stardom.

Swift, wearing pale jeans and dip-dyed shirt, her sandy hair tied in a blue scrunchie, leads the way up the staircase to show me the view. The decor hasn’t changed since she bought this place in 2009, when she was 19. “All of these high rises are new since then,” she says, gesturing at the squat glass structures and cranes. Meanwhile her oven is still covered in stickers, more teenage diary than adult appliance.

Now 29, she has spent much of the past three years living quietly in London with her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, making the penthouse a kind of time capsule, a monument to youthful naivety given an unlimited budget – the years when she sang about Romeo and Juliet and wore ballgowns to awards shows; before she moved to New York and honed her slick, self-mythologising pop.

It is mid-August. This is Swift’s first UK interview in more than three years, and she seems nervous: neither presidential nor goofy (her usual defaults), but quick with a tongue-out “ugh” of regret or frustration as she picks at her glittery purple nails. We climb down from the birdcage to sit by the pond, and when the conversation turns to 2016, the year the wheels came off for her, Swift stiffens as if driving over a mile of speed bumps. After a series of bruising public spats (with Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj) in 2015, there was a high-profile standoff with Kanye West. The news that she was in a relationship with actor Tom Hiddleston, which leaked soon after, was widely dismissed as a diversionary tactic. Meanwhile, Swift went to court to prosecute a sexual assault claim, and faced a furious backlash when she failed to endorse a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, allowing the alt-right to adopt her as their “Aryan princess”.

Her critics assumed she cared only about the bottom line. The reality, Swift says, is that she was totally broken. “Every domino fell,” she says bitterly. “It became really terrifying for anyone to even know where I was. And I felt completely incapable of doing or saying anything publicly, at all. Even about my music. I always said I wouldn’t talk about what was happening personally, because that was a personal time.” She won’t get into specifics. “I just need some things that are mine,” she despairs. “Just some things.”

A year later, in 2017, Swift released her album Reputation, half high-camp heel turn, drawing on hip-hop and vaudeville (the brilliantly hammy Look What You Made Me Do), half stunned appreciation that her nascent relationship with Alwyn had weathered the storm (the soft, sensual pop of songs Delicate and Dress).

Her new album, Lover, her seventh, was released yesterday. It’s much lighter than Reputation: Swift likens writing it to feeling like “I could take a full deep breath again”. Much of it is about Alwyn: the Galway Girl-ish track London Boy lists their favourite city haunts and her newfound appreciation of watching rugby in the pub with his uni mates; on the ruminative Afterglow, she asks him to forgive her anxious tendency to assume the worst.

While she has always written about relationships, they were either teenage fantasy or a postmortem on a high-profile breakup, with exes such as Jake Gyllenhaal and Harry Styles. But she and Alwyn have seldom been pictured together, and their relationship is the only other thing she won’t talk about. “I’ve learned that if I do, people think it’s up for discussion, and our relationship isn’t up for discussion,” she says, laughing after I attempt a stealthy angle. “If you and I were having a glass of wine right now, we’d be talking about it – but it’s just that it goes out into the world. That’s where the boundary is, and that’s where my life has become manageable. I really want to keep it feeling manageable.”

Instead, she has swapped personal disclosure for activism. Last August, Swift broke her political silence to endorse Democratic Tennessee candidate Phil Bredesen in the November 2018 senate race. Vote.org reported an unprecedented spike in voting registration after Swift’s Instagram post, while Donald Trump responded that he liked her music “about 25% less now”.

Meanwhile, her recent single You Need To Calm Down admonished homophobes and namechecked US LGBTQ rights organisation Glaad (which then saw increased donations). Swift filled her video with cameos from queer stars such as Ellen DeGeneres and Queen singer Adam Lambert, and capped it with a call to sign her petition in support of the Equality Act, which if passed would prohibit gender- and sexuality-based discrimination in the US. A video of Polish LGBTQ fans miming the track in defiance of their government’s homophobic agenda went viral. But Swift was accused of “queerbaiting” and bandwagon-jumping. You can see how she might find it hard to work out what, exactly, people want from her.

***

It was girlhood that made Swift a multimillionaire. When country music’s gatekeepers swore that housewives were the only women interested in the genre, she proved them wrong. Her self-titled debut marked the longest stay on the Billboard 200 by any album released in the decade. A potentially cloying image – corkscrew curls, lyrics thick on “daddy” and down-home values – were undercut by the fact she was evidently, endearingly, a bit of a freak, an unusual combination of intensity and artlessness. Also, she was really, really good at what she did, and not just for a teenager: her entirely self-written third album, 2010’s Speak Now, is unmatched in its devastatingly withering dismissals of awful men.

As a teenager, Swift was obsessed with VH1’s Behind The Music, the series devoted to the rise and fall of great musicians. She would forensically rewatch episodes, trying to pinpoint the moment a career went wrong. I ask her to imagine she’s watching the episode about herself and do the same thing: where was her misstep? “Oh my God,” she says, drawing a deep breath and letting her lips vibrate as she exhales. “I mean, that’s so depressing!” She thinks back and tries to deflect. “What I remember is that [the show] was always like, ‘Then we started fighting in the tour bus and then the drummer quit and the guitarist was like, “You’re not paying me enough.”’’’

But that’s not what she used to say. In interviews into her early 20s, Swift often observed that an artist fails when they lose their self-awareness, as if repeating the fact would work like an insurance against succumbing to the same fate. But did she make that mistake herself? She squeezes her nose and blows to clear a ringing in her ears before answering. “I definitely think that sometimes you don’t realise how you’re being perceived,” she says. “Pop music can feel like it’s The Hunger Games, and like we’re gladiators. And you can really lose focus of the fact that that’s how it feels because that’s how a lot of stan [fan] Twitter and tabloids and blogs make it seem – the overanalysing of everything makes it feel really intense.”

She describes the way she burned bridges in 2016 as a kind of obliviousness. “I didn’t realise it was like a classic overthrow of someone in power – where you didn’t realise the whispers behind your back, you didn’t realise the chain reaction of events that was going to make everything fall apart at the exact, perfect time for it to fall apart.”

Here’s that chain reaction in full. With her 2014 album 1989 (the year she was born), Swift transcended country stardom, becoming as ubiquitous as Beyoncé. For the first time she vocally embraced feminism, something she had rejected in her teens; but, after a while, it seemed to amount to not much more than a lot of pictures of her hanging out with her “squad”, a bevy of supermodels, musicians and Lena Dunham. The squad very much did not include her former friend Katy Perry, whom Swift targeted in her song Bad Blood, as part of what seemed like a painfully overblown dispute about some backing dancers. Then, when Nicki Minaj tweeted that MTV’s 2015 Video Music awards had rewarded white women at the expense of women of colour, multiple-nominee Swift took it personally, responding: “Maybe one of the men took your slot.” For someone prone to talking about the haters, she quickly became her own worst enemy.

Her old adversary Kanye West resurfaced in February 2016. In 2009, West had invaded Swift’s stage at the MTV VMAs to protest against her victory over Beyoncé in the female video of the year category. It remains the peak of interest in Swift on Google Trends, and the conflict between them has become such a cornerstone of celebrity journalism that it’s hard to remember it lay dormant for nearly seven years – until West released his song Famous. “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” he rapped. “Why? I made that bitch famous.” The video depicted a Swift mannequin naked in bed with men including Trump.

Swift loudly condemned both; although she had discussed the track with West, she said she had never agreed to the “bitch” lyric or the video. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, released a heavily edited clip that showed Swift at least agreeing to the “sex” line on the phone with West, if not the “bitch” part. Swift pleaded the technicality, but it made no difference: when Kardashian went on Twitter to describe her as a snake, the comparison stuck and the singer found herself very publicly “cancelled” – the incident taken as “proof” of Swift’s insincerity. So she went away.

Swift says she stopped trying to explain herself, even though she “definitely” could have. As she worked on Reputation, she was also writing “a think-piece a day that I knew I would never publish: the stuff I would say, and the different facets of the situation that nobody knew”. If she could exonerate herself, why didn’t she? She leans forward. “Here’s why,” she says conspiratorially. “Because when people are in a hate frenzy and they find something to mutually hate together, it bonds them. And anything you say is in an echo chamber of mockery.”

She compares that year to being hit by a tidal wave. “You can either stand there and let the wave crash into you, and you can try as hard as you can to fight something that’s more powerful and bigger than you,” she says. “Or you can dive under the water, hold your breath, wait for it to pass and while you’re down there, try to learn something. Why was I in that part of the ocean? There were clearly signs that said: Rip tide! Undertow! Don’t swim! There are no lifeguards!” She’s on a roll. “Why was I there? Why was I trusting people I trusted? Why was I letting people into my life the way I was letting them in? What was I doing that caused this?”

After the incident with Minaj, her critics started pointing out a narrative of “white victimhood” in Swift’s career. Speaking slowly and carefully, she says she came to understand “a lot about how my privilege allowed me to not have to learn about white privilege. I didn’t know about it as a kid, and that is privilege itself, you know? And that’s something that I’m still trying to educate myself on every day. How can I see where people are coming from, and understand the pain that comes with the history of our world?”

She also accepts some responsibility for her overexposure, and for some of the tabloid drama. If she didn’t wish a friend happy birthday on Instagram, there would be reports about severed friendships, even if they had celebrated together. “Because we didn’t post about it, it didn’t happen – and I realised I had done that,” she says. “I created an expectation that everything in my life that happened, people would see.”

But she also says she couldn’t win. “I’m kinda used to being gaslit by now,” she drawls wearily. “And I think it happens to women so often that, as we get older and see how the world works, we’re able to see through what is gaslighting. So I’m able to look at 1989 and go – KITTIES!” She breaks off as an assistant walks in with Swift’s three beloved cats, stars of her Instagram feed, back from the vet before they fly to England this week. Benjamin, Olivia and Meredith haughtily circle our feet (they are scared of the koi) as Swift resumes her train of thought, back to the release of 1989 and the subsequent fallout. “Oh my God, they were mad at me for smiling a lot and quote-unquote acting fake. And then they were mad at me that I was upset and bitter and kicking back.” The rules kept changing.

***

Swift’s new album comes with printed excerpts from her diaries. On 29 August 2016, she wrote in her girlish, bubble writing: “This summer is the apocalypse.” As the incident with West and Kardashian unfolded, she was preparing for her court case against radio DJ David Mueller, who was fired in 2013 after Swift reported him for putting his hand up her dress at a meet-and–greet event. He sued her for defamation; she countersued for sexual assault.

“Having dealt with a few of them, narcissists basically subscribe to a belief system that they should be able to do and say whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want to,” Swift says now, talking at full pelt. “And if we – as anyone else in the world, but specifically women – react to that, well, we’re not allowed to. We’re not allowed to have a reaction to their actions.”

In summer 2016 she was in legal depositions, practising her testimony. “You’re supposed to be really polite to everyone,” she says. But by the time she got to court in August 2017, “something snapped, I think”. She laughs. Her testimony was sharp and uncompromising. She refused to allow Mueller’s lawyers to blame her or her security guards; when asked if she could see the incident, Swift said no, because “my ass is in the back of my body”. It was a brilliant, rude defence.

“You’re supposed to behave yourself in court and say ‘rear end’,” she says with mock politesse. “The other lawyer was saying, ‘When did he touch your backside?’ And I was like, ‘ASS! Call it what it is!’” She claps between each word. But despite the acclaim for her testimony and eventual victory (she asked for one symbolic dollar), she still felt belittled. It was two months prior to the beginning of the #MeToo movement. “Even this case was literally twisted so hard that people were calling it the ‘butt-grab case’. They were saying I sued him because there’s this narrative that I want to sue everyone. That was one of the reasons why the summer was the apocalypse.”

She never wanted the assault to be made public. Have there been other instances she has dealt with privately? “Actually, no,” she says soberly. “I’m really lucky that it hadn’t happened to me before. But that was one of the reasons it was so traumatising. I just didn’t know that could happen. It was really brazen, in front of seven people.” She has since had security cameras installed at every meet-and-greet she does, deliberately pointed at her lower half. “If something happens again, we can prove it with video footage from every angle,” she says.

The allegations about Harvey Weinstein came out soon after she won her case. The film producer had asked her to write a song for the romantic comedy One Chance, which earned her second Golden Globe nomination. Weinstein also got her a supporting role in the 2014 sci-fi movie The Giver, and attended the launch party for 1989. But she says they were never alone together.

“He’d call my management and be like, ‘Does she have a song for this film?’ And I’d be like, ‘Here it is,’” she says dispassionately. “And then I’d be at the Golden Globes. I absolutely never hung out. And I would get a vibe – I would never vouch for him. I believe women who come forward, I believe victims who come forward, I believe men who come forward.” Swift inhales, flustered. She says Weinstein never propositioned her. “If you listen to the stories, he picked people who were vulnerable, in his opinion. It seemed like it was a power thing. So, to me, that doesn’t say anything – that I wasn’t in that situation.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was more than nine months into his presidency, and still Swift had not taken a position. But the idea that a pop star could ever have impeded his path to the White House seemed increasingly naive. In hindsight, the demand that Swift speak up looks less about politics and more about her identity (white, rich, powerful) and a moralistic need for her to redeem herself – as if nobody else had ever acted on a vindictive instinct, or blundered publicly.

But she resisted what might have been an easy return to public favour. Although Reputation contained softer love songs, it was better known for its brittle, vengeful side (see This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things). She describes that side of the album now as a “bit of a persona”, and its hip-hop-influenced production as “a complete defence mechanism”. Personally, I thought she had never been more relatable, trashing the contract of pious relatability that traps young women in the public eye.

***

It was the assault trial, and watching the rights of LGBTQ friends be eroded, that finally politicised her, Swift says. “The things that happen to you in your life are what develop your political opinions. I was living in this Obama eight-year paradise of, you go, you cast your vote, the person you vote for wins, everyone’s happy!” she says. “This whole thing, the last three, four years, it completely blindsided a lot of us, me included.”

She recently said she was “dismayed” when a friend pointed out that her position on gay rights wasn’t obvious (what if she had a gay son, he asked), hence this summer’s course correction with the single You Need To Calm Down (“You’re comin’ at my friends like a missile/Why are you mad?/When you could be GLAAD?”). Didn’t she feel equally dismayed that her politics weren’t clear? “I did,” she insists, “and I hate to admit this, but I felt that I wasn’t educated enough on it. Because I hadn’t actively tried to learn about politics in a way that I felt was necessary for me, making statements that go out to hundreds of millions of people.”

She explains her inner conflict. “I come from country music. The number one thing they absolutely drill into you as a country artist, and you can ask any other country artist this, is ‘Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks!’” In 2003, the Texan country trio denounced the Iraq war, saying they were “ashamed” to share a home state with George W Bush. There was a boycott, and an event where a bulldozer crushed their CDs. “I watched country music snuff that candle out. The most amazing group we had, just because they talked about politics. And they were getting death threats. They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what.’

“And then, you know, if there was a time for me to get involved…” Swift pauses. “The worst part of the timing of what happened in 2016 was I felt completely voiceless. I just felt like, oh God, who would want me? Honestly.” She would otherwise have endorsed Hillary Clinton? “Of course,” she says sincerely. “I just felt completely, ugh, just useless. And maybe even like a hindrance.”

I suggest that, thinking selfishly, her coming out for Clinton might have made people like her. “I wasn’t thinking like that,” she stresses. “I was just trying to protect my mental health – not read the news very much, go cast my vote, tell people to vote. I just knew what I could handle and I knew what I couldn’t. I was literally about to break. For a while.” Did she seek therapy? “That stuff I just really wanna keep personal, if that’s OK,” she says.

She resists blaming anyone else for her political silence. Her emergence as a Democrat came after she left Big Machine, the label she signed to at 15. (They are now at loggerheads after label head Scott Borchetta sold the company, and the rights to Swift’s first six albums, to Kanye West’s manager, Scooter Braun.) Had Borchetta ever advised her against speaking out? She exhales. “It was just me and my life, and also doing a lot of self-reflection about how I did feel really remorseful for not saying anything. I wanted to try and help in any way that I could, the next time I got a chance. I didn’t help, I didn’t feel capable of it – and as soon as I can, I’m going to.”

Swift was once known for throwing extravagant 4 July parties at her Rhode Island mansion. The Instagram posts from these star-studded events – at which guests wore matching stars-and-stripes bikinis and onesies – probably supported a significant chunk of the celebrity news industry GDP. But in 2017, they stopped. “The horror!” wrote Cosmopolitan, citing “reasons that remain a mystery” for their disappearance. It wasn’t “squad” strife or the unavailability of matching cozzies that brought the parties to an end, but Swift’s disillusionment with her country, she says.

There is a smart song about this on the new album – the track that should have been the first single, instead of the cartoonish ME!. Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince is a forlorn, gothic ballad in the vein of Lana Del Rey that uses high-school imagery to dismantle American nationalism: “The whole school is rolling fake dice/You play stupid games/You win stupid prizes,” she sings with disdain. “Boys will be boys then/Where are the wise men?”

As an ambitious 11-year-old, she worked out that singing the national anthem at sports games was the quickest way to get in front of a large audience. When did she start feeling conflicted about what America stands for? She gives another emphatic ugh. “It was the fact that all the dirtiest tricks in the book were used and it worked,” she says. “The thing I can’t get over right now is gaslighting the American public into being like” – she adopts a sanctimonious tone – “‘If you hate the president, you hate America.’ We’re a democracy – at least, we’re supposed to be – where you’re allowed to disagree, dissent, debate.” She doesn’t use Trump’s name. “I really think that he thinks this is an autocracy.”

As we speak, Tennessee lawmakers are trying to impose a near-total ban on abortion. Swift has staunchly defended her “Tennessee values” in recent months. What’s her position? “I mean, obviously, I’m pro-choice, and I just can’t believe this is happening,” she says. She looks close to tears. “I can’t believe we’re here. It’s really shocking and awful. And I just wanna do everything I can for 2020. I wanna figure out exactly how I can help, what are the most effective ways to help. ’Cause this is just…” She sighs again. “This is not it.”

***

It is easy to forget that the point of all this is that a teenage Taylor Swiftwanted to write love songs. Nemeses and negativity are now so entrenched in her public persona that it’s hard to know how she can get back to that, though she seems to want to. At the end of Daylight, the new album’s dreamy final song, there’s a spoken-word section: “I want to be defined by the things that I love,” she says as the music fades. “Not the things that I hate, not the things I’m afraid of, the things that haunt me in the middle of the night.” As well as the songs written for Alwyn, there is one for her mother, who recently experienced a cancer relapse: “You make the best of a bad deal/I just pretend it isn’t real,” Swift sings, backed by the Dixie Chicks.

How does writing about her personal life work if she’s setting clearer boundaries? “It actually made me feel more free,” she says. “I’ve always had this habit of never really going into detail about exactly what situation inspired what thing, but even more so now.” This is only half true: in the past, Swift wasn’t shy of a level of detail that invited fans to figure out specific truths about her relationships. And when I tell her that Lover feels a more emotionally guarded album, she bristles. “I know the difference between making art and living your life like a reality star,” she says. “And then even if it’s hard for other people to grasp, my definition is really clear.”

Even so, Swift begins Lover by addressing an adversary, opening with a song called I Forgot That You Existed (“it isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference”), presumably aimed at Kanye West, a track that slightly defeats its premise by existing. But it sweeps aside old dramas to confront Swift’s real nemesis, herself. “I never grew up/It’s getting so old,” she laments on The Archer.

She has had to learn not to pre-empt disaster, nor to run from it. Her life has been defined by relationships, friendships and business relationships that started and ended very publicly (though she and Perry are friends again). At the same time, the rules around celebrity engagement have evolved beyond recognition in her 15 years of fame. Rather than trying to adapt to them, she’s now asking herself: “How do you learn to maintain? How do you learn not to have these phantom disasters in your head that you play out, and how do you stop yourself from sabotage – because the panic mechanism in your brain is telling you that something must go wrong.” For her, this is what growing up is. “You can’t just make cut-and-dry decisions in life. A lot of things are a negotiation and a grey area and a dance of how to figure it out.”

And so this time, Swift is sticking around. In December she will turn 30, marking the point after which more than half her life will have been lived in public. She’ll start her new decade with a stronger self-preservationist streak, and a looser grip (as well as a cameo in Cats). “You can’t micromanage life, it turns out,” she says, drily.

When Swift finally answered my question about the moment she would choose in the VH1 Behind The Music episode about herself, the one where her career turned, she said she hoped it wouldn’t focus on her “apocalypse” summer of 2016. “Maybe this is wishful thinking,” she said, “but I’d like to think it would be in a couple of years.” It’s funny to hear her hope that the worst is still to come while sitting in her fairytale living room, the cats pacing: a pragmatist at odds with her romantic monument to teenage dreams. But it sounds something like perspective.

#taylor swift #interview #by taylor #the guardian #lover era #lover album #not sure how I feel about the interviewer's approach...there's a lot of irony in it #but a fun read for us nonetheless

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phroyd · 6 years ago

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We lost one of the Great Film Makers yesterday. Her soul will live on In Cinema! Rest In Peace, Agnes! - Phroyd

Agnès Varda, a groundbreaking French filmmaker who was closely associated with the New Wave — although her reimagining of filmmaking conventions actually predated the work of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and others identified with that movement — died on Friday morning at her home in Paris. She was 90.

Her death, from breast cancer, was confirmed by a spokeswoman for her production company, Ciné-Tamaris.

In recent years, Ms. Varda had focused her directorial skills on nonfiction work that used her life and career as a foundation for philosophical ruminations and visual playfulness. “The Gleaners and I,” a 2000 documentary in which she used the themes of collecting, harvesting and recycling to reflect on her own work, is considered by some to be her masterpiece.

But it was not her last film to receive widespread acclaim. In 2017, at the age of 89, Ms. Varda partnered with the French photographer and muralist known as JR on “Faces Places,” a road movie that featured the two of them roaming rural France, meeting the locals, celebrating them with enormous portraits and forming their own fast friendship. Among its many honors was an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature. (It did not win, but that year Ms. Varda was given an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement.)

It was her early dramatic films that helped establish Ms. Varda as both an emblematic feminist and a cinematic firebrand — among them “Cléo From 5 to 7” (1962), in which a pop singer spends a fretful two hours awaiting the result of a cancer examination, and “Le Bonheur” (1965), about a young husband’s blithely choreographed extramarital affair.

Ms. Varda established herself as a maverick cineaste well before such milestones of the New Wave as Mr. Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” (1959) and Mr. Godard’s “Breathless” (1960). Her “La Pointe Courte” (1955), which juxtaposed the strife of an unhappy couple with the struggles of a French fishing village, anticipated by several years the narrative and visual rule-breaking of directors like Mr. Truffaut, Mr. Godard and Alain Resnais, who edited “La Pointe Courte” and would introduce Ms. Varda to a number of the New Wave principals in Paris.

These included Mr. Truffaut, Mr. Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, all of whom had gotten their start at the critic André Bazin’s magazine Cahiers du Cinema, and who became known as the Right Bank group. The more politicized and liberal Left Bank group would come to include Mr. Resnais, Chris Marker and Ms. Varda herself.

Arlette Varda was born on May 30, 1928, in Ixelles, Belgium, the daughter of a Greek father and a French mother. She left Belgium with her family in 1940 for Sète, France, where she spent her teenage years. At 18, she changed her name to Agnès.

She studied art history at the École du Louvre and photography at the École des Beaux-Arts before working as a photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris.

“I just didn’t see films when I was young,” she said in a 2009 interview. “I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn’t have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me.

“I started totally free and crazy and innocent,” she continued. “Now I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials, I don’t do films pre-prepared by other people, I don’t do star system. So I do my own little thing.”

Her “thing” often involved straddling the line between what was commonly accepted as fiction and nonfiction, and defying the boundaries of gender.

“She was very clear about her feeling that the New Wave was a man’s club and that as a woman it was hard for producers to back her, even after she made ‘Cléo’ in 1962,” T. Jefferson Kline, a professor of French at Boston University and the editor of “Agnès Varda: Interviews” (2013), said in an interview for this obituary. “She obviously was not pleased that as a woman filmmaker she had so much trouble getting produced. She went to Los Angeles with her husband, and she said when she came back to France it was like she didn’t exist.”

Ms. Varda was married to the director Jacques Demy (“Lola,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”) from 1962 until his death in 1990. From 1968 to 1970 they lived in Hollywood, where Mr. Demy made “Model Shop” for Columbia Pictures and Ms. Varda made “Lions Love,” which married a meditative late-’60s Los Angeles aesthetic to the New York counterculture. (The cast included the Warhol “superstar” Viva; Gerome Ragni and James Rado, the writers of the book for the musical “Hair”; and the underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke.) During that same period, she shot the short documentary “Black Panthers” (1968), which included an interview with the incarcerated Panther leader Huey Newton; commissioned by French television, it was suppressed at the time.

It was also during that period that she befriended Jim Morrison, the frontman of the Doors, who visited her and Mr. Demy in France; according to Stephen Davis’s “Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend” (2004), she was one of only five mourners at Mr. Morrison’s funeral in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris in 1971. That same year she became one of the 343 women to sign the “Manifesto of the 343,” a French petition acknowledging that they had had abortions and thus making themselves vulnerable to prosecution.

In 1972, the birth of her son, Mathieu Demy, now an actor, prompted Ms. Varda to sideline her career. He survives her, as does the costume designer Rosalie Varda Demy, Ms. Varda’s daughter from a previous relationship, who was adopted by Jacques Demy.

“Despite my joy,” Ms. Varda told the actress Mireille Amiel in a 1975 interview, “I couldn’t help resenting the brakes put on my work and my travels.” So she had an electric line of about 300 feet for her camera and microphone run from her house, and with this “umbilical cord” she managed to interview the shopkeepers and her other neighbors on the Rue Daguerre. The result was “Daguerréotypes” (1976).

In 1977 she made what she called her “feminist musical,” and one of her better-known films, “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t,” which also seemed inspired by personal circumstance.

“It’s the story of two 15-year-old girls, their lives and their ideas,” she told Ms. Amiel. “They have to face this key problem: Do they want to have children or not? They each fall in love and encounter the contradictions — work/image, ideas/love, etc.”

One of Ms. Varda’s more controversial films, because of its casting, was “Kung-Fu Master!” (1988), a fictional work about an adult woman — played by the actress Jane Birkin, a friend of Ms. Varda’s — who falls in love with a teenage boy, played by Ms. Varda’s son. The title — it was changed in France to “Le Petit Amour” — referred to the young character’s favorite arcade game. The film was shot more or less simultaneously with “Jane B. par Agnes V.,” another of Ms. Varda’s border crossings between fact and fiction, which she called “an imaginary biopic.”

After Jacques Demy’s death, Ms. Varda made three films as a tribute: the biographical drama “Jacquot de Nantes” (1991) and the documentaries “Les Demoiselles Ont Eu 25 Ans” (1993), about the 25th anniversary of Mr. Demy’s “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” and “L’Univers de Jacques Demy” (1995).

Ms. Varda was then relatively inactive until 1999, when, armed for the first time with a digital camera, she set about making “Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse” (“The Gleaners and I”), which resurrected an artistic career now well accustomed to under appreciation and resuscitation.

“She was a person of immense talent, but also enormously thoughtful,” said Mr. Kline of Boston University. “When you look at some of the films you might think they were more spontaneous than thought out. A film like ‘Cléo,’ for instance, you might have said, ‘O.K., she just follows Cléo around Paris,’ but the film is extremely beautifully imagined and thought out beforehand.”

In “Vagabond,” an 1985 film in which Sandrine Bonnaire plays a woman who is found dead and whose life is recounted, often in documentary style, “the traveling shots in the film are always ending, and each subsequent shot beginning, on a common visual cue,” Mr. Kline said. “It makes you look at film in a completely different way.”

Alison Smith, author of the critical study “Agnès Varda” (1998), called Ms. Varda “a poet of objects and how we use them.” In an interview for this obituary, she added, “Varda as an artist intrigued, and intrigues, me by the constant freshness and curiosity which she brings to her inquiries into the everyday world and how we relate to it, particularly how she uses the detailed fabric of life.”

Richard Peña, who as director of the New York Film Festival helped introduce “Gleaners” to an American audience, praised that film and Ms. Varda’s “The Beaches of Agnès” (2008) as “touchstones for a new generation of nonfiction filmmakers.”

Ms. Varda is represented at the Museum of Modern Art by photographs, films, videos and a three-screen installation titled “The Triptych of Noirmoutier.” “A decision to change direction and move into installation art when over 80 is, by any standards, remarkable,” Ms. Smith said. “But her energy was awe-inspiring.”

Phroyd

#france #agnes varda #rip

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okimargarvez · 7 years ago

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HURT- open wounds

Original title: Hurt.

Prompt: Luke’s dark thought, destiny, contrasted love.

Warnings: sexual content, dark thoughts.

Genre: angst, drama, romantic, smut, dark, mistery, frienship.

Characters: Penelope Garcia, Luke Alvez, BAU team, O.C.

Pairing: Garvez.

Note: multichapter.

Legend: ��😘😈🔦🐶❗🎈👻.

Song mentioned: La tua vita intera, Tiziano Ferro.

Hurt- Masterlist

MY OTHER GARVEZ STORIES

Chapter 5-

Yet she insists on going to the Quantico headquarters alone. She doesn't want others to know. -Not yet-. For him it's indifferent. He doesn't care what others think. Although he quickly became attached to the team. Or so he believes. Because as soon as she leaves her home and gets on the subway, his head starts to spin at full speed. And the ghosts visit him. It had been too good. It had lasted too long, the fun's over.

It's tremendous not to be able to be himself. Not being able to touch her. Smile at her. I'm screwed. Completely fucked.

Then she arrives one morning with bags in hand. She stops in front of his desk. He must hold himself back so as not to stretch his hands towards her body.

-It's just a little something.- he smiles at her, confused. There is hardly anyone. It's still early. He chose to get there first, hoping that filling out some paper would help him divert his attention from his fixed point. From his obsession. But it hadn't been like that, as he could readily imagine.

-For me? - he asks, hoping for a positive result. She shakes her head.

-No! Not for you, it's for Roxy. But you have opposable thumbs, so you can open it for her.- his face widens into a smile as he peers into the smaller bag and discovers some... biscuits. Which turn out to be unfit for his dog's diet. And telling this to her is a titanic enterprise. How badly this gets him, seeing her so sad because she was wrong. Fortunately, there is a second gift: a sweater. Pink. He would see it much better on her. It would exalt her forms. Then her damned phone ring -We have a case.- he can't avoid turning his head towards her, following her until she disappears in the meeting room.

On the jet, he continues to rethink the information he has acquired on previous nights. The way she had stripped completely naked before his eyes, her sincerity. Totally exposed. Vulnerable at the highest level possible. If he had wanted, if he had been a sadist, a madman, a wicked person, he could have made her what he wanted. It was as if she had given him the opportunity to hold her palpitating heart in his hands, crystal, both for the transparency and the fragility of this material. The responsibility she had given him, unwanted and unexpected, had completely stunned him. She had left him numb.

Then some particular episodes come to his mind in random chronological order. She had told him that on public transport she never sat down. She always carried a book with her, because you never know, if the environment around her was dark, if the world tried to suck her down the drain, she would let herself be carried among the clouds on the balloon of fantasy; and then it was the only way to endure the noise of the crowd, the confusion, without really becoming estranged from the real context in which she found (and so it would not have been if she had listened to music with headphones). And at the same time, she had tried to explain to him how much in those moments, crushed between men in suits and ties, briefcase in hand, cheeky ruminant little girls, indifferent of their half-open backpacks, old women stubborn to not sit because "The next stop is mine", how often she lost herself to think how beautiful, varied, vast the world was. How many occasions, how many people we don't have the possibility to meet. She had felt a sense of loss towards something that had never been. And perhaps never would have been.

So, she had stared at him intently, making him understand that it could also have happened between them. Thanks to that criminal, only thanks to Daniel Cullen, to the escape organized by Mister Scratch, their paths had crossed. So, he owed his happiness to the bastard who had almost killed his best friend and had ruined his life. A beautiful paradox. And now this asshole was comfortable in a psychiatric hospital and there was even the risk of freeing him, because he was no longer the Crimson King, he was a rind of a man, the one who had left Lewis; he was any person he didn't know, he didn't feel he had committed any kind of crime. Always that he wasn't pretending.

Luke remembers the question Hotch had asked him. Do you want to kill Daniel Cullen?

And his answer: I took an oath to uphold the laws of this country. So... Yeah. Yeah, I want to kill him.

How much of these events had influenced in his first "approaches" with Penelope? He had not unloaded all his tensions on her? It wasn't just the shadows of his past or a desire to be "healed", as he had told himself until now. It was much more. He needed to throw, fling on someone else all that weight, which bent his back, prevented him from thinking rationally. And poor, little Penelope, she had found herself in the wrong place at the right time. And now that mistake had proved to be the greatest miracle that could ever happen to him. But he didn't stop feeling guilty, wrong, horrible, thinking about how he acted. How much he had used her, and yes, it cost him to admit it, even ill-treated. And to what he had received in return: love, tenderness, understanding, total availability.

The screen turning on interrupts his thoughts, more or less: it's the face of his woman, the one that occupies the visual rectangle entirely. -My crime fighters- she begins, as she usually likes to define them -I have some news for you: Amanda Berxtrom awaits you at the police station upon your arrival.- while providing important data, he is attentive and in "operational" mode. But as soon as the screen goes black, as if someone has pressed a button in his head, he re-starts from where he left off.

If only he could tell her. If at least he managed to get rid of this extra burden, this sword of Damocles, before it fell between them, definitively separating their lives. Because until he had said nothing to her, the "thing" would continue to grow, to incorporate him, drag him down with it. And there was the usual problem: there were other things that she should have known, before she could think, hypothesize a relationship with him.

And Luke realizes it while they're starting the landing maneuver. He wants that. He wants a serious relationship with her. And he can't have it. But he can't do without it. And so he's a hundred percent messed up.

She cares about everyone, each of the members of behavioral analysis unit. Just as she wanted a deep good to anyone who had been part of it, even in a very limited way, like Jordan Todd. But for the first time since Derek said goodbye to the Bureau, she rehearsed that feeling of amplified anguish, at the thought that there is someone who she loves in a special way, out there to fight against the contemporary dragons of our society.

Well, it's useless to make fun of herself. She's in love. Wretch world!

Worse than a teenager. She is in the phase of the Little Prince: "If, for example, you come at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to feel happy. As the time passes I shall feel happier and happier. At four o’clock, I shall become agitated and start worrying; I shall discover the price of happiness!". She does her job, she researches possible connections to identify the bad guy. But she does so with the knowledge that first they'll catch the unsub and first she'll see him again.

Oh my God, I'm so ruined.

And he, what does he feel? He didn't say anything to her, but the way he made her feel that night, the attention he gave her, the way he looked at her all the time, as if he were contemplating something precious, to be treated and protect with nails and teeth... it gives hope her. It's a while she doesn't see those shadows obscuring his already dark eyes. But she doesn't be fooled that they have disappeared forever. And she doesn't want that he censors anything in her presence. She wants him in integral format. Full package. Full price. Evil and good. In sickness and in health.

Till death do us part.

Amen.

Why the hell that phrase does come to his mind right now? What does that have to do with what Spencer has just said?

When I was five, no, maybe they were already six... Zorba, my kitten, my first pet, was hit. My parents tried to sell me the story that he was gone, and indeed it was true, in a "better place" or so-called. But I saw it. I saw his body deformed by the impact with the car. He was agonizing. He was still alive. Mom didn't want that I knew it. But I discovered that a neighbor had to go there to "stop making him suffer". I have done absolutely nothing. I know I couldn't, I was just a child. But this is one of the things that still haunts me today. And when I went to Alaska with the team, one of the few times I was in the field, it happened that the signal was gone, I was talking to my boyfriend... I went down to check and I heard a cry. Human, though hardly recognizable as such. I was afraid, I would say a lie if I asserted the opposite. But I couldn't stay there, doing nothing. Why I didn't go call someone who would be able to do a better job than mine? Because there was no time. I knew he could no longer be saved. But I didn't want the last thing he saw was the face of his killer. Whose had taken his life from him... how it could have happened to me.

She had continued, adding the details of her exit, the frightening noises amplified by the fear, the wind that hissed, freezing every limb, the ferrous smell of the gushing blood, of the life that abandons the body of that poor man, the grass that crunched beneath her feet. But he interrupted her, because he wanted an explanation. What do you mean with "it could have happened to me"?

Penelope had sighed. And then spat everything out, exactly as he would have done with her own saliva or her own phlegm.

About ten years ago I went out with a man. I don't want to make this too long. He was attractive, at least for me. I had repaired his computer and he asked me out. I found it strange. I'm not the girl men see across a smoky bar and write songs about, I told Derek at the time when I told him about it. And just because of his answer, don't get me wrong, I don't want to least to blame him, it was only my responsibility, my naivety and stupidity. However, almost as a consequence of his sentence, I decided to accept the invitation. Just... this man was a policeman with the killer hero syndrome and he was convinced that I was identifying him. As a result, he shot me, hitting me very close to my heart, on the stairs of my apartment. And he also bent down to make sure I was dead, that his plan was successful. I had to hold my breath. In those conditions. As my head thundered, the forces faded, I heard David Bowie calling me, I thought I saw Mom, Dad and even Zorba, who made me a sign of reaching them... and I managed to deceive him. I don't know how. I don't know what I was holding onto. But what I know, and that I knew even then, is that I never wanted my last look to be occupied by my killer. That his indelible image remains forever on the retinas. I don't know if you've ever seen See No Evil...

TAGS: @theshamelessmanatee @itsdawnashlie @talesoffairies @janiedreams88 @kiki-krakatoa @yessenia993 @teyamarra @c00lhandsluke @gcchic @arses21434 @orangesickle @entireoranges @jarmin @kathy5654 @martinab26 @thisonekid @thenibblets @perfectly-penelope @ambrosiaswhispers @maziikeen92 @lovelukealvez @reidskitty13 @jenf42 @gracieeelizabeth27 @silviajajaja @smalliemichelle99 @charchampagne14 @ichooseno @ megs2219 @rkt3357 @franklintrixie @thinitta @chewwy123 @skisun @maba84 @saisnarry @myhollyhanna23 @thenorthernlytes

#garvez #penelope garcia #luke alvez #penelope x luke #luke x penelope #garcia x alvez #alvez x garcia #criminal minds #cm

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emanresusi-blog · 8 years ago

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Musings of schizotypals Pt. 1

L.G. - I have a sucky sensation inside. Now that I might break up (for my own mental health) with my boyfriend, I have a sucky realization. I have no friends. I have pushed people for years, stablished unhealthy relationships for years. Now everyone is gone, and I cannot retake relationships that I pushed away years ago. I feel lonely. C.B. - Maybe my impulses to criticize others are a way to avoid criticizing myself. I find myself wanting to tell people that no one cares about their stupid lives but now I realize that's just one of the negative things I used to tell myself. I stopped the stream of negative thoughts about myself. But the thoughts are still there, just waiting to be applied to something. I need to channel this inner critic into something more productive. I know it is a facet of who I am, just one that I misuse a lot. It must be able to do some good somewhere. Constructive criticism about myself and my behavior perhaps. I should meditate on this. I'm feeling good but strangely devoid of emotion simultaneously. Like, my outlook on life is a generally optimistic one at the moment even though I'm not specifically happy about anything. I told my friend that I felt like something more was developing in my mind towards her and she wasn't scared off, so maybe that's why I feel optimistic. At the same time, I feel oddly suspicious and paranoid about her as well. Suspicious of her motives in continuing to talk to me after I told her how I felt, and paranoid for her safety at times (she's blind and also the tiniest little bit naïve, in my opinion). Extending my locus of emotional openness doesn't come easily to me. I really bond with other people to the point that I feel a bit like I'm losing myself. I don't like that feeling, but I love bonding with individuals at the same time. I suppose I'm just a bundle of contradictory neurons wrapped in a skull lol A.C. - So I'm sat in my porch locked out bags packed after another of my alcohol induced binge dissapearing acts I know "only Self to blame" I was only out drinking and chatting nothing bad, but I guess I am selfish, selfishly anaware and selfishly inconsiderate with what I don't think through or when I act rash. Slowly I've become more of a loner and made a habit of losing things family, friends umm jobs, it doesn't feel normal or nice that I might just be a procrastinative, selfish/absorbed individual who can't really get any sort of balance in personal life. I care about making amends and living a normal family life it's just... I don't know. Everyone blames me and punishes me, I don't want a scapegoat for my mistakes but it's very confusing I think if I didn't do what I did I'd damage my self by suppressing it all inside would be worse that's not a justification just a thought. Maybe leading a stable life, to work full time, three kids and relationship is too much. S.C - I suffer from depression and anxiety...I feel sometimes that im different of others because i think i have a few particularities(including that i have only two friends).I often try to explain to some that i can catch thoughts & feelings from people that i know...In fact,from complete stangers too ...I just thought if someone here could uderstand me? And I would like to add that is it okay not to fear of losing my few friends?I am 14 and feel like a misfit..I can't recognize what i am and don't remember who i used to be. R.R. - I have a weird feeling that I'm gonna die soon. Lol. Awkward. 2 near death experiences for me and 1 for my mom. Meh. Now I'm walking around every day with intense anxiety, waiting for an accident to happen. 😢 C.S. - I'm not doing well. I'm emotional... I cried for like half an hour today and I usually don't cry. But I've been sick over something I can't talk about. Very paranoid and scared. Such ugly ruminating thoughts. Barely slept last night and I have such a headache but my mind won't shut off. For the first time in years I feel like punching myself in the head. I've been taking my pills regularly. I see the shrink on Thursday. Which means I have to get through two days of work... I've been mildly sick with a cold for the last week. Oh help! I just want to feel better. A.M. - Today I keep seeing characters from TV shows as people in public spaces (anyone else experienced this?) and there was a shadow man in my lounge. It's odd and not making me paranoid which is also odd. Usually when freaky brain shit happens paranoia activates. Side note; Who the hell puts dried apricot in a hot cross bun!? C.B. - Sometimes I have this urge to be rude to people I don't like. Or that I decide are, as narcissistic as this sounds, beneath me morally or intellectually. It makes me very nervous to confront people but sometimes I do it out of impulse. Like I have this parallel line of thinking that just criticizes the hell out of everything I see. I let it build up and then let it out when I reach a certain level of resentment at the world. Afterwords I feel no better. But it's like I have this good side and this bad side to me. The bad side is the worst me I can imagine: lazy, thoughtless, critical, apathetic, and cruel. The good side is the best me I can imagine: empathetic, supportive, passive, thoughtful. I realize that I internalize these values from my primary caregivers growing up, my mother and first stepfather. I can't see the value in my stepfather very well. Jung had this idea of the Anima and the Animus. One male and the other female. I've always identified my values with the feminine due to the fact that the only support I ever got growing up was from women. I never understood men. I never understood women either for that matter. But they were the people I tried to emulate growing up. I couldn't stand the thought of being like my stepfather or boys my age until I became a teenager. Then I copied my stepfather and began to hate a lot. To be cruel a lot. Because that's all I saw in him. These impulses must be that old behavior rearing it's head. I've always wanted to be my own person but I've never quite known how. L. G. - Okay so I am going to lay one of my biggest problems right now and see if you can help me even if it's just a Little bit because I have no clue :( I finished university last year. Everything fine. My father came to my room and asked me, "what do you want to do next year? you have to think it NOW" and clearly wanted me, pushed me to do oposiciones (this is how we call the process of studying to get a job in the public system). I did the course for oposiciones. I HATED IT. God damn how boring, bland, deadly! I cannot even study for it or understand what they do. But my parents are 100% into it and they don't even contemplate me leaving them. I have to act like I study on days like those because they are so into this, specially my father, who sees working in the public system as my only chance in life because I am schizotypal. You can ask me questions, I will answer if it hasn't been understood. Thanks for the help :) L.G. - This is a bit of a hard to ask question but I will ask anyway...do you have problems maintaining your personal care, etc...? Sometimes I do and my family makes shame of me :( although i think really I'm not that much of a disaster. I mean, now I take care of myself, it's not like when I was really bad where I wouldn't take proper care of myself. L. G. - Do you ever feel like you've got too much contained in your chest and feel like telling anyone about it? Like you had an urge to tell what's ailing you? I've got Friends to talk with but I have too much in my chest and everyone looks like a friend to me now... S.S. - Two things I learnt about myself recently 1 - I will never be able to do a 9-5 job. Because I am too impatient and get angry when someone tells me what to do. Also overthink everything and get bored with routine. The only thing I can do is my own boss and work from home alone.I need to be in control. 2 - I can't ever picture myself in a relationship. I recently met a woman a bit older than myself but we share lots of interests and get on well. But I'm beginning to feel smothered and under pressure to behave a certain way. I just want to be a free individual with no responsibilities. I wasn't born to be a pack animal, but to give others as much freedom as possible and for them to not bug me in return. C.B. - Anyone else feel really anxious when they talk to other people about personal issues? It makes therapy very difficult for me. I'm too nervous around my therapist to open up to him, to really talk about the issues I have. I always just spend the time in my "therapy mode" (where I act pleasant and nice and talk about minor issues to avoid the larger ones). I don't feel like anybody can really help me with some things, and that I would just be making whoever I was talking to feel bad. I want to be able to talk about my motivations, my relationships, my feelings but they make me feel pathetic. Sometimes I feel like less than a person, like I'm really just wearing a mask when I behave as a normal human does. Trouble is I don't know for sure who or what is under that mask. D.S. - Had an irrational mental breakdown in public again one of those crying and screaming in equal parts of anger, frustration and sadness... why am I so easily overwhelmed sometimes.. plus I look kinda scary afterwards.. the neighbors already peg me for weird as it is... all emotionally shutdown and stuff only secs later.. I dont know its always like that.. overemotional first and a few seconds later back to the void.. im done. Im turning 23 tomorrow and I just wish I could skip to my funeral instead.. yeah.. one of those days.. A.M. - Does anybody else wander through life aimlessly? Never really finishing things they embark on, barely following their interests and feeling as though they're waiting for something to shake enough life into them to align them with the dimension that is reality... Being a drifting alien is really getting to me lately, I didn't realise how meaningless I find everything or how far I have drifted from society. I am not referring to deppression btw. P.A. - There’s something that’s killing me inside and I would really appreciate getting it out in a post. I really hope I don’t sound like a total bitch. It’s to do with abandonment, which I hope some people here will understand. I feel so abandoned by my counsellor. It’s the closest relationship I have. I sent her a text a few weeks ago saying I was sad and I never heard back. It has been my psych ward “anniversary” and I thought she’d message me to ask how I am but no nothing. Now she’s just become a grandmother... I know because I’m friends with her son. They are all super excited and spending lots of time together. He is sending me photos of the new baby but it’s just making me even more upset. Why can’t I just be happy for them? I feel so bad and self-centred for feeling this way. I know this little girl will be spoilt rotten with love and I’m jealous, there’s no other word for it. I suspect this is triggering an ancient wound in me, a hole that I’ve never managed to fill. My friend wants to see me tonight but I’m just too upset to see him and I can’t explain to him why *hides under table* C.B. - Sometimes I feel like I am more comfortable being depressed than I am being happy. Being sad feels, I don't know, solid, constant, whereas happiness is a fleeting and ephemeral feeling. Because of this, I got used to lying to myself to make myself more depressed. Don't know if that makes any sense, but I used to love laying in bed and thinking terrible things about myself until I cried my eyes out. I guess I craved that sense of catharsis. These days, I realize that this isn't a healthy way of coping, but I still crave the cathartic feeling I used to get by working myself into a terrible place. I think maybe I crave intense release of emotion because I have a hard time letting go of emotions in the moment and I kind of bottle them up. I still crave that. It's odd, I suppose I'm working to integrate the disparate parts of my personality into a functioning whole. It's like the emotional part of me exists kind of parallel to the rest, separate but connected in form if not function. A.C. - I guess if you can't do anything consistently but your capable of being extremely creative which many are here. Your purpose in life is to create a masterpiece not stand in line and fit the system. S.S. - Got told I'm too much of a negative person earlier and that I should keep all my thoughts secret. But the truth is I only say about 10% of what's actually on my mind. I'm too truthful about my flaws. The last thing I wanna be is a fake who brags. I can't help who I am.

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pussymagicuniverse · 5 years ago

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visualizing a new earth

disclaimer: i’ve been ruminating on these thoughts long before covid-19, although now i’ve incorporated current events into these thoughts. i am not advocating for rich and/or city people to leave the cities to move to rural areas and help destroy them by making them over-populated and/or bringing disease there.

for years i’ve been meaning to meditate more, connect more to source, etc. i have a connection but it was always up to me to foster, deepen, and trust that connection. i’ve done a lot of work in the realm of self-healing. to be more specific, this journey began when i was 16, but truly and consciously since 2013. i have never felt the call more than now to get serious with these abilities. many times, frazzled, i’ve declared, “i need to meditate more!” as i’ve continued a lifestyle that is not conducive to what i know is best for me. out of fear and the hope for ravaging success, i’ve continued to live in a fast-paced, capitalist-driven environment and work myself to the bone just to make rent. i was convinced that if i just buckled down and worked hard, it would come… that’s how people get what they want! right? but i’ve been at a crossroads for a few years now… hesitant of which direction to move in, so i’ve continued to remain in what seems to be what i want, even though i feel the calling for a life outside of all of what we are told to desire. i am trapped in the dichotomy of the two lives i want and can’t choose between. i’ve dabbled in too many different things, never sticking to just one.

but i wanted this, right? i’ve wanted to live in a “cool” city like NYC or LA (i’ve lived in both) and wanted to succeed in the industries that are mostly tied to these places whether that be publishing, film, marketing, and so on. no matter the rent amount, i wanted this. but for the last year, i’ve been contemplating a lot more about what my soul truly wants… because i think my desires might be evolving. maybe so have yours. maybe they align perfectly with the current events that are happening globally right now.

side note: i mentioned to my partner the other day that what i’ve wanted would have been easily feasible once upon a time, but that the world is changing and we must adapt, and maybe what i’ve always wanted might not even be possible in the near future. or maybe it’s simply not what i’m destined for in this lifetime. i simply don’t know yet, hence the call to meditate more. what i do know is that i’m being very much called to go inward, to continue the self-healing work i’ve been doing. but there is more to do. it truly is time to get disciplined.

i started writing my novel at the end of 2019, and without giving too much away (because it’s still a tiny seed), i think it’s going to be focused around two women who propel humanity forward. when i realized how much that might link to what’s happening now… things became a bit more clear.

when i visualize new earth, i see so much more green than i physically see now. maybe this will just be a new location for me, but i also think globally there will be a lot more green, and a lot less city. i do love cities, so much, but i know they can be restructured to be more eco-friendly and less industrial. it’s always been hard for me to decide where i want to live because i love cities, beaches, mountains… that’s why i love California so much. it has all of the above, even deserts! which are my least favorite, but don’t tell the succulents that… because i do love them.

something i’ve learned again recently is that humans are the keepers of Earth. we aren’t just here to enjoy it, we are meant to take care of it. this might sound obvious but hang with me here. we are meant to plant trees, foster plants… there is a reason caring for animals and plants feels so good for many of us. it’s tending to the earth. it’s what we are here for. we are spirits in human bodies. we are guests here. everything else is extra — whether it’s fun or not. most things are not necessity, which is not to shame what we enjoy, but to cherish it, and honor the earth for her gifts to us.

somewhere down the road, things changed… many of us have evolved into machines (just watch a conservative/conspiracy-washed news anchor… yikes). we have been so shamed into or falsely gassed up into the hustle and bustle that part of me still feels ‘bad’ for wanting to build a home and tend to it. for wanting a house with land so that i can tend to, plants and animals and children, and my own food. like it has to be one or the other. between the many obstacles i’ve faced and learning myself more and more, i know corporate life isn’t for me. i know i am meant to work in other ways, and i think many, if not all of us, are. we can still do what we love without those models… old models that don’t serve us individually or humanity as a whole.

my intention is not to dismiss the suffering that current events is causing. it’s heartbreaking to witness. i meditate in my gratitude every day now. despite my own challenges, i am aware of my privileges as well. this time is not always going to be easy, or simple, and many are hurting… my biggest hope is this propels us forward in real, tangibly changed ways. count your blessings as much as possible. connect to your heart space–which, by the way, is green.

it’s not wrong to crave a different way of living. to crave a more natural world in our tech-bombarded and rushed way of life. this capitalist world wasn’t made in our favor, even though it’s been sold to us that way. it’s not wrong to want to leave the city. maybe we just have to finally give ourselves permission to choose differently. maybe that’s step one to eroding what we know isn’t working for us collectively and in very big ways. some of us have kept ourselves so tied up to corporate and capitalist ways of living. some of us haven’t had a choice. this moment in time certainly feels like the beginning of the end of a collective tower moment. a collective releasing of that which does not serve us (hasn’t spiritual-internet been telling us to release that which does not serve us for years now? i have a theory it may have all been leading up to this), and i pray for our collective flourishing, and i pray for justice where it’s deserved, because i see what’s on the other side… and it is glorious.

The Creatrix and Editor in Chief of Pussy Magic, sam is a writer/editor originally from Northern California. Her work in and outside of writing revolves around the merging of spirituality and authentic well-being to foster community, raw self-expression, and holistic healing to honor our sacred selves: mind, body, and spirit.

sam is the author of L’ACQUA (2017), a poet, and the columnist of sacred wild exile at Pussy Magic. Her writing has been featured in ILY Mag, The IN Magazine, The Vagina Zine, Tiny Flames Press, Occulum, Rose Quartz Magazine, and more, with a poem forthcoming in Blood Orange.

sam offers Sacred Serpent Writing + Healing sessions to bring people more intimacy with themselves and their writing which you can find more info about on her website. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her partner and plant babies.

Find more about sam, her writing, and her offerings on her website and follow her #soulbits on Instagram.

#new earth #visualizing #meditation #reflection #essay #mystic #city living

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hollywoodjuliorivas · 5 years ago

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This contrast—of women raring to assert their agency in one context, then willing, even eager, to relinquish it another—captured my interest in part because of its familiarity. I’d seen it crop up recently in widely praised works both written by and featuring brazen, outspoken, and almost always middle-class white women. It’s in Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends,” when Frances tries unsuccessfully to get Nick—older, married, kind—to choke and hit her during sex. And in Rooney’s “Normal People,” when Marianne discloses to gentle, sensitive Connell, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, that another man has hit her with a belt, choked her—that she asked for it, enjoyed it. It’s also in the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series “Fleabag,” when Fleabag confesses—literally—to the priest she lusts after. All she truly wants is someone (by implication him, or maybe Him) to tell her “what to wear every morning,” to instruct her on “what to like, what to hate, what to rage about . . . what to believe in . . . how to live my life.”

These scenes both do and do not seem like ordinary kink. All sex, of course, is psychological, but the source of the charge here is more than just a dom-sub mind game. What vitalizes them is the friction of the characters’ incongruent desires: on the one hand, to embrace the simplicity of someone else’s authority; on the other, to assert their own authorship. Popkey’s narrator, though not a writer, has a literary sensibility—her dissertation is on “female pain in Jacobean revenge tragedies,” and her idea of a beach read is “The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962”—and it’s on masterly display in the scene with the single moms. Like a plotting author, she engineers a game: they will go around in a circle relaying their origin stories, the narrative that explains how they got to this place, “with the wine and the kid and the no partner, the moment when that became inevitable.” It’s a premise that grants her permission to deliver a personal monologue, to test-drive the story of her becoming. She tweaks some of the facts (instead of a student, she’s an intern; instead of a professor, he’s a peer), but she is emphatic in the authority of what she’s saying. She tells the single moms that “there’s a line” through her life, and “it runs straight from that hotel room.”

Does she believe all this? Is she trying to make herself believe it? Years earlier, listening to Artemisia, she envied the older woman’s narrative control: “I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives.” And yet, a part of her seems to hope authorial mastery will overcome personal folly: “of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but . . . to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that’s what narrative’s for.” Maybe if she tells the narrative well enough it will be true. And, if it is true, then maybe she can finally be coherent; the past decisions that perplex her most, those moments that reek of self-sabotage or that hurt people she loves, were all along foreordained, set in motion by that catalyzing moment. Even if she had tried to, she could never have done anything otherwise. The right narrative, she understands, can release her of responsibility.

Rooney’s Frances and Marianne and Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag share with Popkey’s narrator a literary proclivity, which can also manifest as an anxiety. They, too, want to assemble the type of story that is also a kind of proof. Frances gets her first story published in the course of the novel, Marianne is bookish and academically successful, and they are both so-called digital natives. For them, communicating through text and e-mail, Facebook and I.M.—which is to say through writing—is as instinctive as speech, sometimes preferable to it. “I had been so terribly noisy and theatrical all the way through,” Frances worries after sleeping with Nick the first time, “that it was impossible now to act indifferent like I did in e-mails.” To be online is to craft—and control—a persona, however deliberate, however fussed over, however much it resembles (or not) one’s I.R.L. self. Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag is likewise aware of her audience—not an online one, although all of us watching at home are, in a sense, her followers—and may in fact be the one who’s most invested in authorial control. When she turns to the camera, to us, with direct narration, her clever quips and wry asides annotate and editorialize the plot. We are not observers of a neutral story unfolding; we are observers of a story unfolding the way she wants it to.

These women behave in ways that are harmful to people they care about—Frances to Nick, Marianne to Connell, Fleabag to her best friend, Popkey’s narrator to her offenseless husband—sometimes with tragic consequences. Most of all, they do things to hurt themselves: drink too much, eat too little, carve wounds into their skin. What kind of person am I, they worry, to be so self-contemptuous, so bent on self-defeat? Their behavior mystifies them, and they discover that the selective work of authorship can relieve their confusion: if they choose some moments from their past and discard others, if they arrange these moments in just the right way, they might be able to understand themselves as logical and consistent, free of the messy task of figuring out what they want, and the even messier one of fully accepting these wants.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

New Words, Favorite Clues, and the Year in Crosswords

Is whatever these women want—and however they decide—O.K.? What if they want bad things? “Bad” because they have been deemed perverse, or illogical, or are likely to undermine longer-term goals; “bad” because they could be harmful. Such vexed questions spurred me to revisit “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?,” a vibrant, perspicacious essay by Amia Srinivasan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, and published in 2018, in the London Review of Books. The essay, among other things, resurrected a feminist debate that for years had been mostly dormant: Should feminism have anything to say about desire? Should feminism develop a political critique of sexuality? During the sex wars of the nineteen-eighties, anti-porn radical feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that heterosexual sex under patriarchy inevitably normalizes male violence and reinforces female inequality; women should, on account of this, consider repudiating their desires. Celibacy and political lesbianism were the theory put into practice.

Sex-positive feminists countered that the radical critique denied women the right to pleasurable sex. Women should instead be taken at their word: if a woman says that she enjoys submitting to a man—the activity that, at least superficially, seems most to reënact women’s subjugation by men outside of the bedroom—or if she says she finds it emancipatory, then feminists must believe her. For feminism to do otherwise risks slut-shaming, prudery, and charging others with false consciousness—creating yet more binds for the very people it means to liberate. Srinivasan reactivates the argument because, although she too is wary of these risks, she is equally distressed by the implication that a feminism without a critique of desire gives cover to wants that replicate more general patterns of oppression and exclusion. The “rape fantasy,” or the “unfuckability of black women and Asian men,” or the “sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies” passes for mere personal preference—nothing at all to be done about it.

Popkey is plainly conversant in these debates. In an early chapter, the narrator listens to a woman’s story about a date rape that took place on her college campus, at a party she attended: a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate, still a virgin and in her behavior more innocent than most, was assaulted by a thirtysomething male grad student, widely known to be something of a lech, a “sexual predator.” The friend wonders why no one tried to alert the unworldly undergrad, much less intervene. “We told ourselves she must have known what she was getting into. We told ourselves that she was an adult. . . . The porn wars were over and porn had won and we were porn-positive, we were sex-positive, we probably wouldn’t have even called ourselves feminist. Who were we to judge.” Walking home after hearing the story, the narrator ruminates on the woman’s account, tries to assess her own desires in light of it. “Could what the graduate student did be wrong,” the narrator asks, “and what I sometimes felt I wanted also be right.” Of course, what’s right for some may not be right for others. As Srinivasan notes, in a summary of intersectional feminism, sexual submission may have an altogether different valence for a woman of color, or a trans woman, than it does for a white woman—like Popkey’s narrator, who “by virtue of her whiteness, is already taken to be a paradigm of female beauty.”

If the feminist debates parse desire on a theoretical level, Popkey’s novel reveals where these analyses intersect with the more mundane, familiar kinds of self-analysis: Should I choose one direction or the other, act this way or that? She depicts what it feels like to exist, actually live, at that intersection, which can so often bring about paralysis. Always there is a “churning,” as the narrator calls it, that ongoing fusillade of impulses and counter-impulses reverberating through the closed system of the mind; we weigh facts and then counterfactuals, consider social or cultural conventions, weave a thick weft of reality and fantasy, deference and denial, then wish we could tear the tapestry apart. How can we ever know what it is that we want, rather than what we have been taught to want, or what we resist wanting because it, too, is what we have been taught?

Years after her ur-erotic hotel-room encounter, the narrator finds herself in another hotel room, this time with a man she has picked up in the bar downstairs. Her husband is at home and thinks she is away at a job interview or visiting friends; she can’t remember. Alone with the stranger, the narrator tells him that she wants to be dominated. This time she’s articulating her desire, rather than discovering it through someone else’s, and in the act of articulation she can’t help but come face to face with her own agency. But the fantasy itself is for the opposite: “I hate making choices,” she says. Desire inevitably leads to a paucity of control; we make decisions, take chances, but don’t always get what we want. Or we get what we thought we wanted, but it leaves us worse for the wear, exposes the way we didn’t know ourselves, or someone else, well enough. Giving up control to someone else can be a way of regaining control by relinquishing the stakes and, in turn, the possibility of being disappointed—of trying and failing, of feeling responsible for doing the wrong thing. If choice can be its own kind of prison, submission can be an escape plan.

At the end of the novel, we find the narrator facing entrapment and casting around for an alternate means of escape. She lives with her son in Fresno, where life is lonely and remote. The days of relaying stories with women seem to be in the past. Now, when others inquire about her life, she no longer holds forth: “Sometimes I say nothing. Silence: The great conversation killer.” Once more, she seeks an explanation for how she has arrived at her destination. She bought a house in this small town, she says, because of a short story she read. The short story is by a man, about a man. The author is an “exemplary jeans wearer”; the protagonist is a promiscuous husband who leaves his wife, driving off into the distance, from Maine all the way to California. En route he stops in various towns and calls up former mistresses, asking each one in turn to run away with him. All the women decline. When eventually he dials a number that is disconnected, the story ends. The town he’s in—it’s Fresno. The man must have stayed there, Popkey’s narrator concludes, because “he has run out of road.”

The narrator seems to fear that she, too, has reached the end of the story; the “line” that she traced for the single moms has turned into a dispersion of dots. And so, it seems, she has turned to other people’s “governing narratives,” just as she once turned to Artemisia’s. In the story, inspired by Sam Shepard’s short story “Coalinga 1/2 Way,” the man is “abhorrent,” and yet the story demands that the reader empathize with him. “Did I imagine myself as the lone driver, making a life for myself in a town full of strangers?” the narrator asks. “Yes, I did. Pay attention to enough men and you will begin to think of yourself as one. You will think of this as an improvement over fantasizing about being mistreated by one and you will, probably, be right.” On the one hand, this new independent life might be seen as an achievement, proof of her autonomy—the kind of life that women are judged for having and men are not. But it’s not just a man’s freedom she has borrowed; it’s literally a man’s narrative. The act of submission is replaced by the act of substitution. And if she’s merely borrowing, can we really say she’s gotten what she wants?

When a literary protagonist introduces the question of literary influence, we ought to wonder what all this means, at the meta-level, for the novelist herself. One clue comes in the novel’s end notes, in three and a half pages of “Works (Not) Cited,” an expansive list of titles including books by the authors Annie Ernaux, Norman Rush, Janet Malcolm, and Mary Gaitskill, films by Olivier Assayas and Paul Verhoeven, and episodes of “Frasier” and “Mad Men.” (It also includes Srinivasan’s essay.) These are works the author credits for giving shape to the novel, and, in some cases, she says, they are referred to only “elliptically.” This polyphonic model of influence—of many voices speaking and listening, avoiding and arguing—might be seen as an alternative to the narrator’s longing for a single origin story, her longing for total authorial control. In acknowledging that she is part of a wide-ranging conversation, rather than a singular narrative, Popkey, by contrast, suggests that she may be willing to cede some of this control. On the novel’s final page, the narrator finally admits: “Perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story’s protagonist.” She is referring to the “abhorrent” protagonist of the Shepard story, but, in a book that grapples explicitly with how and why we craft narratives, with the perils and gratifications of the stories we invent and inherit, the line invites another reading. Popkey may in fact be making an admission of her own, casting doubt on the narrative that she herself has constructed, acknowledging the ultimate impossibility of the authorial pursuit.

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