#and my fifth grade teacher was i think literally the only person to realize i was definitely going thru something way more stressful

[aropride]

shout out to my fourth and fifth grade teachers . i had genuinely lifechanging experiences with both of them

[someheroescarryfloss]

for the fic writer ask: 🥺, 🤡, ✨, 💖 andddd 👀

🥺 Is there a certain type of moment or common interaction between your characters that never fails to put you in your feels?

Hurt/comfort for sure. I don't know why, but I seem to be obsessed with it! That and fluff of any kind. It doesn't have to be romantic, it can just be two friends hanging out making cookies or something. Especially if it degenerates into a food fight. You know, where one 'accidentally' throws flour on the other, and oops, now they're throwing bits of cookie dough at each other.

🤡 What's a line, scene, or exchange you've written that made you laugh?

Well, this one's kind of dirty, and it's not in this fandom, but I have an unfinished LONG fic involving Dr. Jaming from Dark Cloud 2, and there's this scene I wrote on a dare. He and his (my OC) girlfriend are sick with the flu, and she's visiting his house since she's got the bug too. They're sitting on his bed making pukka shell necklaces, and their conversation is overheard by another character who decided to eavesdrop. It's an innocent exchange, but taken out of context it sounded like they were 'doing things'. Turns out she just got stuck with the needle. It went something like this.

Her: Ouch!

Him: Are you okay?

Her: Sure, it's just a little prick.

And you know me and puns. So...yeah. I don't usually write that kind of story, but I was laughing to myself the whole time imagining the darer's reaction!

✨ Give you and your writing a compliment. Go on now. You know you deserve it. 😉

Ooh, I'm not good at giving myself compliments. But here goes! I'm good at writing emotional stories. I'm partly drawing on my own past experiences (not literally, but similar situations) and partly putting myself in the character's position and asking myself how would I react if I were them. Not so easy to do when the character's personality is really different from mine. Hopefully I pull it off!

💖 What made you start writing?

My fifth grade teacher said I had a talent for it. Thinking back, I was a jittery kid with ADHD who couldn't sit still, so maybe she told me that hoping to get me to focus. Like some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, I never became a published author like I wanted to be when I was younger, but I do still enjoy writing.

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please!

I don't have any new stories in the works, but I do have something planned for ASB and IAB. I just don't know how or where I'll have it! So, here's a BIG spoiler.

I mean a BIG one.

Not kidding.

You ready?

Okay.

Brandel was NOT Fergus's biological father, and he realized this as Fergus got older and didn't look like him...but looked an awful lot like another Fairy who isn't in town very often.

Roy's biological grandfather is completely unknown to him so far. Not only that, but he's a member of a small subsection of Fairies who aren't pleased with the caste system in their town. Things happen, Alpha is banned from the Fairy Town, and TF basically says, "Fine. I'm going with her." TF's grandfather eventually introduces himself, tells him "You and Alpha have more friends than you think", and that's as much as I'm going to say for now. ;)

Except I've sort of written myself into a few corners, so I have to pull something out of my butt at some point to fix it!

[andi-kook]

Omg I was in a kind of situationship too 😭 it was around a year ago. Him and I were friends from fifth grade, and he was one of my first male friends. I had a crush on him back then but I never told him that. and he had surprisingly confessed that he too had a crush on me. But I still didn't tell him cuz I was too afraid and we were just too young for this shit lol.

However the next year I broke things off with my friend group and since he was also good friends with them, I thought he probably wouldn't want to talk to me anymore. So I decided to stay away from him from then onwards. And then covid happened too, which made it impossible to have any communication in person.

Fast forward to a few years later, he reached out to me on Instagram and we started chatting day and night about so many things. We cleared up misunderstandings like I thought he didn't want to do anything with me anymore and he thought my mom (a teacher in our school lol) forbade me from talking to him. He also started low-key flirting with me, complimenting here and there and saying corny shit 😂. However, a few months later his responses started getting dry and would keep me on sent for a long time. I didn't realize I was literally embarrassing myself by texting even after he once kept me unseen for days. He gradually ghosted me like that and a couple of months later unfollowed me.

Now he claims in front of his friend (that friend is my friend too) that he was just playing around and thought I got the hint. When he "realized I was quite serious about whatever was going on" he decided it was best to just ghost me. It's just funny now how he completely claims he never liked me when the things he'd say to me were so contradictory. It's been like a year now, I don't like him anymore but still feel hurt whenever I remember things.

Anyways sorry did I bore you with all this? Lol I didn't realize how much I wrote, got carried away 😭 sorry skip this if you want lol 😭😭

-💗

nooo you didn’t bore me!! i’m grateful you sent this in, lovely 💗!!!

ghosting someone is such a coward move for me. if you don’t think you’re going to work out, just say so. you owe that person that much especially if you’ve spend a significant amount of time with them that disappearing from their life, without any explanation as to why, will really affect them in a way that is indescribable. people who ghosts instead of just being honest are cowards!!!!

i’m sorry you had to go through that :( he sounds like an asshole my god and it’s worst because you considered him a friend before anything else. i definitely could relate to the whole instagram thing – that’s where my situationship started too – and going from talking to each day in and day out to just .... nothing. in hindsight, that really should have been our sign but alas, love is blind.

and fuck, him changing narratives to your friend????? SAME. he also claimed that i was the only one who liked him when he was the one who pursued me. that really broke my heart and the cherry on top was that i found that out through this other girl he was talking to while he was gradually ghosted me. that really gave me extreme anxiety on top of my already existing one and i always dreaded going to our campus and coming across them – even on social media which i don’t use anymore besides tumblr.

i’m proud of you for saying you don’t like him anymore. i wish i can say the same thing. the pain from a situationship is really greater than most because we don’t get any explanation why it ended. it just did. and when you do get an explanation, you’re fucking gaslighted beyond belief hahaha. it’s insane how a person can do that to another human being.

i really hope we heal from this unnecessary character development, 💗. i hope we never experience this again. we really don’t deserve it and i hope we realize that again and again until it’s etched in our brains.

may they never know peace every time we appear in their life whether through a dream, a song, a scent, a place, or when they simply go about their day.

[raposarealm]

Rapo Rambles About Juri and Herself

Maaaan, reading through Juri’s MSS, I’m seeing what I very well could’ve been.

I took on working on the JSON for Ai’s translation of Juri’s MSS, and while editing the file format to merge with the Japanese JSON, I’ve gotten to read through the translation (which is quite well done, thank you Ai!) 

For some context, Juri attends Ryuugasaki Academy, which is a relatively well-to-do all-girl’s school. She worked hard to get into its attendance, so her father (who’s both single and a teen father, so he has literally Juri and that’s it,) wouldn’t have to worry about her getting a poor education, or, more importantly, her getting kicked out. Except, she continued to get into tussles, and was on the verge of expulsion, presumably not for the first time, when she was approached by Kyubey, and made her wish: for a “perseverant heart”. That’s what granted her personal magic as such; she can endure much more than before, but the more she endures negative emotion, the more violently she’ll ‘explode’ when she reaches her inevitable limit. As of her MSS, the only outlet she’s found has been to physically fight other people (mostly Yuna). 

I remember when I was in elementary school, and was in private schools similar to Juri’s. I also had a serious anger issues, coupled with a number of neurodivergencies that made it all worse. From what I can see, I don’t know whether Juri was bullied or hazed when she was younger, but given the combination of her extremely short temper, rough behavior inherited from her father, and of course, said father’s young age and single status, I’d wager she definitely was. I wasn’t in Juri’s exact situation, but it was comparable in some ways -- for one, I had a mother in bad health, who was bedridden for part of my elementary years, and for two, I attended so-called ‘Christian’ private schools that were, for the singular exeption of one actually good Catholic school (yes, I’m serious!), were basically Evangelical nightmares. 

My father, as I’ve noted on here before, is a Doctor of molecular genetics, and from the combined influence of him and my mother’s profession of emergency nursing/paramedicine, I developed a strong interest in scientific fields very early on. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d routinely answer ‘a chemist!’, with heavy enthusiasm -- I wanted to work in drug research specifically, because another hit to my mother’s health was her extreme allergy to NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), which are the primary treatment for most chronic pain. Needless to say, the minute any of my teachers found out of my father’s profession, and how his love of the sciences had rubbed off on me, they’d give me all hell. ‘Of course she’s bad, her father’s a biologist! Which means he believes in evolution,’ they’d unilaterally think. (Look, my ‘science’ textbook in fourth grade claimed the Moon was only a few thousand years old, which was the moment I realized how dumb the curriculum was.) So I was allowed to become the bullying target, with the teachers refusing to reprimand any student who harassed me, and instead turning the blame on me when I’d boil over from repeated abuse. Hell, I sat out in the hall as ‘punishment’ nearly every day in fifth grade, arguable the worst year of my life. 

The difference though, from Juri’s background, is that I had two parents, one of whom was a full-time mother, for the very reason of my severe neurodivergence. When I got to middle school, which hilariously was a public school run fifty times better than even the best private school I’d attended, these sources of abuse were removed, since the teachers a) didn’t give a shit about what my parents did for work, b) were required to keep their religious views out of the question, because while Virginia might be a Bible Belt state, this was Northern Virginia, where that sort of bull doesn’t fly, and c) were informed of my special needs before the year started, and were required to follow any accommodations on my IEP (thanks, ADA!). Juri doesn’t get these luxuries, I know, and I can only imagine that I’d have turned into her by high school if I hadn’t gotten the support I did. Juri’s old man is as supportive as he can be, but he was stated to be only 19 when Juri was born (so 35 now,) so he’s got his own set of issues to deal with, and likely didn’t get the time to mature properly himself, ‘cause he had to raise a kid at the same time. (Meanwhile, my folks were nearly forty each when I was born.) She’s been stuck with no support but her father her whole life, and she’s had to support him right back. It’s kinda surprising that they don’t fight all that much, actually. 

To go into some Arc 2 spoilers, Chapter 10 gives us another perspective, too, showing us what Juri would’ve been like as a parent... but also what she’d have been like if she’d been given a fairer shot. In the Kimochi bit in episode 4, we see Juri as a teen parent to Ao, yes, but she’s not alone like her father was -- she has Yuna, who’s been the closest to support Juri’s had this whole time. She’s also got Hikaru, to an extent, and while Hikaru won’t hold down a job to save her life (ironically,) she’s still good-natured and kind, and, more importantly, cares about Juri and Yuna’s wellbeing. Juri’s given a chance to ‘trial-run’ being an adult, since she knows this whole bit will end eventually (though, from their perspective, in 14 years!) She’s given a chance to work for something, to have a support structure she didn’t before. All that ends up giving her ways to manage her anger beyond just beating people up -- yeah, she still has to fight the kimochi every time Ao gets fearful, but she’s got Yuna in tow to help, as well as Hikaru. 

I’m in my 20s now, and I’ve only just started attending college. I’ve got a certification for pharmacy technicians, but no license, and I go back to school for my third-ever semester this winter. I’ve been convinced for years that by the time I’d get to college, my dreams of having a four-year degree in a science field or in translation would be violently shattered by my own inability to simply ‘do things I don’t like!’. Well, while I likely won’t be able to handle a full degree for quite a while, the idea that it’s my own damn fault I can’t do so has also been shot down. I’ve been struggling with a deep depression and a sometimes straight-up paralyzing anxiety for years now, to the point that my whole high school career was extended an extra year past when I should’ve graduated as a result. But, after almost a whole decade of being psychologically stuck, I’ve gotten some treatment for it. The chronic pain I’ve been fighting is starting to be managed, after we finally found a pain management doctor who’d actually take me seriously. I’ve found a therapist who’s actually able to cut through some of my own self-deprecation to get the point across that my behavior is normal for ADD folks. I’m inches away from getting a license finally, after being forbidden from getting one at sixteen, and I’ve been cleared to ride my bike into town along a certain route, so I’ve got ways to get outta the damn house. I know those aren’t the same ‘clean break’ Juri got in Chapter 10, but given that the Kimochi mindscape wasn’t reality anyways, she’s still gonna have work ahead of her to make that future a reality for herself, too. But, knowing that there’s a chance that things can turn out alright, and that you’ll be happier in the future, takes a lotta weight off the shoulders, y’know?

It’s late, and I’m tired from my medication increasing in dose today, so I dunno if I’ve made much sense, but basically I love Juri more now because I can see myself in her, and therefore I can see some hope for myself in there, too.

[ificanthaveu]

Paper Rings || Shawn Mendes

Description: After a little too much procrastination, your boyfriend helps you learn a craft to teach your students. Very loosely based off Paper Rings by Taylor Swift.

A/N: I have had just “paper rings” sitting in my notes literally since Lover came out. Then I added a quick one line of what I wanted to happen a few months later. And FINALLY the other day, inspiration struck and I came up with this cute lil thing. ALSO the fact that there’s absolutely no angst in this??? who am i??? Hope you love it anyway :)

Word Count: 2.6k

“Have you chosen your activity for the Fall Festival next week?” The principal of your school asked as she poked her head into your room. 

You looked up from the dense pile of worksheets you were grading before you looked at your calendar next to you to see that the due date was tomorrow. 

“Shoot, no, I haven’t,” you said through a sigh as you set your pen down and leaned back in your chair, cracking your knuckles and stretching out your back just to glance at the time and see it was already after 5:00.

She walked in and sat at the chair next to your desk and glanced down at the papers. 

“Are you doing ok?” She asked with a small smile. “I know the first year teaching can be hard.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” you said with a quick head nod. “Guess it’s my fault for assigning so much work.”

“It happens,” she said with a shrug as she picked one of the worksheets up to look at the math you were teaching your second-graders. 

“I guess I just got caught up in things at home and got distracted from the many things I hadn’t graded yet,” you explained. 

“Everything ok at home?” She asked hesitantly. 

“Oh, yeah! I didn’t mean to sound like that was a bad thing. My boyfriend just travels a lot, so I get caught up in it every now and then,” you said as you glanced down at the framed photo on your desk from a vacation you took the summer before. 

“Well, I know everyone is going to tell you to keep those two things separate, but it’s hard not to. As long as the two of you understand that you both have your own things to take care of, the rest falls into place. He seems like a really great guy,” she offered. 

“Thanks, Beth,” you responded as you started packing up some of the papers in hopes of finishing a few more tonight once you got home. 

She stood up with you, handing back the worksheet and giving you one last smile and wave before heading out of the room. 

You let out a sigh as you checked your phone to see a few messages from Shawn asking when you’d be home. You sent him a response that you were on your way before locking up your classroom and going home.

You could smell the pasta coming from the kitchen the moment you opened the door. John Mayer was playing through the speakers as you walked through the dining room, instantly feeling relaxed.

“Hey,” you said softly as you walked up to Shawn stirring the sauce on the stovetop. 

He looked up at you and smiled before leaning closer to press a quick kiss to your cheek before turning off the burners. 

“Just a few more minutes, and dinner will be ready,” he said before straining the pasta. 

“Sounds good,” you said before setting your stuff down in your room and making your way back to him, wrapping your arms around his torso from behind as he rested one of his hands on top of both of yours, your cheek pressed firmly against his back.

“You ok?” He asked cautiously, craning his neck back to get a peak of you. 

You let out a sigh and nodded your head as best you could. 

“Yeah, just a long week,” you mumbled.

Shawn’s grip tightened against your hand as he mixed the pot once more before turning around and placing his hands against your cheeks.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” He asked softly, his breath fanning over your lips. 

You pressed a quick kiss to his lips before saying, “Yeah.”

So Shawn scooped the pasta on to two plates and poured two glasses of wine (“I know it’s a Thursday, but you can’t have pasta without wine. That would be a crime,” he claimed when you fought him on opening a new bottle) and met you at the table where you now sat in running shorts and an oversized t-shirt.

“It’s my first year teaching, and I get that they can’t teach you everything in college, but shit, I feel like I know nothing sometimes,” you ranted as you poked at your food. “And then on top of the actual teaching, you have to make sure the kids are ok mentally and everything is ok at home and they have materials outside of class to work with and now I need a craft for the damn Fall Festival.”

“A craft?” Shawn questioned after setting down his glass. 

You sighed before leaning back in your chair. 

“Yeah, there’s a day in the fall where the kids do a different activity in each room. I was told about this weeks ago, and I still don’t know what to do,” you said. 

“Any ideas at all?” He questioned. 

“I’ve been thinking we can just meditate, so I can sit in silence but something tells me elementary schoolers wouldn’t think it’s that fun,” you said. 

Shawn stifled a laugh as he nodded his head, “Personally, I would be in, but I do realize I’m not seven.”

“Every time I thought I came up with something unique, I’d check the sheet and someone else already took it, so I’m open to absolutely anything you have,” you said as you set your fork down.

“You could just turn on music and do a dance party?”

“Taken. The music teacher came up with that one at lightning speed.”

“Hm, ok. What about just coloring? Do fall themed coloring pages?”

“Taken.”

“Friendship bracelets?”

“Taken.”

“Oh, huh, well…” he trailed off as he stared at the ceiling with a crease in his eyebrows. His hands flew up and back down to his legs dramatically. “Paper mache?” 

“Yuck, way too messy,” you said with a nose crinkle.

“Origami?” He said with eyebrows raised. 

You cocked your head to the side and studied his excited expression as you thought about it. 

“That could actually work,” you said quietly as you grabbed your laptop from the counter to look at the sign-up sheet. “And no one has it!”

“Perfect! Easy! You can do those little fortune things!” He said, making the back and forth gestures with his hands to get his point across. 

“I feel like I could tailor it to the grades, too. Like the Kindergarteners could do something easy like a basic paper airplane, and the fifth-graders could do something more complicated like those little swans,” you said as you started to pull up instructions. 

“Do you know how to do any origami?” Shawn asked as he peered over at your screen. 

“No, not at all,” you said. “Well, I used to be able to do it when I was younger. I was actually pretty good, but I can only remember how to make a heart now.”

“Well, you’ve got some learning to do,” Shawn said as he grabbed your plate and glass. 

“We have some learning to do,” you corrected him as you shot him a sweet smile. 

He leaned against the counter and looked at you from across the room with a deadpan look on his face. 

“We?”

“We.”

He sighed and hung his head before looking back up at you. 

“You know I’d do anything for you, and you take advantage of that a lot,” he pointed out. 

“I know,” you returned as you continued opening up new windows to look for new shapes. 

“And to think if you didn’t procrastinate, we could’ve just made a child-friendly playlist to dance to,” he whispered in your ear as he leaned on the back of your chair, looking over your shoulder.

“Don’t talk about it,” you squealed as he pressed kisses down the side of your neck.

The next night the two of you had patterned origami paper and instruction sheets scattered across the kitchen table as you both attempted to learn how to make a chair for the chair and table set you were going to have the third graders make. 

“I’m confused. What does this arrow mean?” Shawn asked you as he pointed to one of the pictures. 

“You tuck it into the slot,” you said as you showed him yours. 

“I don’t have a slot.”

You looked up from your nearly finished chair to see that he was right. He had no slot. 

“How did you manage to do that?” You asked him as you studied his shape. 

“I have absolutely no idea,” he said as he stared at it with you. 

You tossed it in the trash bag before either of you could think about it any longer. 

“Hey,” Shawn said softly as he stared at the trash bag. 

“I already have it figured out, so you don’t have to keep struggling,” you said as you placed your small chair in front of him. 

“It’s so cute,” he said quietly as he placed it by the table he had figured out a half-hour ago. 

“Ok, now let’s work on this jewelry set for the fifth-grade girls,” you said as you placed a packet in front of him. 

He flipped through it and scanned over the directions. 

“A packet?” He questioned as he gave you a look. 

“Yep,” you said through a yawn.

“I think we should call it a night,” he said as he pushed the pages toward the center of the table. 

“No, let’s just keep going,” you said as you widened your eyes for a second as you stared at the directions. 

After a few moments of silence and Shawn waiting for you to buckle, you finally did. 

“Ok, let’s go to bed,” you finally mumbled after crumpling the half-done charm. 

“That’s what I thought,” Shawn said as he stood up and held his hand out for you. 

You gripped onto his hand as he pulled you to your room, pulling you under the covers with him immediately. You landed on top of him, your legs settling on either side of his waist as you buried your head into his chest and his hand ran up and down your back.

“I’m so proud of you,” Shawn whispered as his other hand tangled into the ends of your hair.

You adjusted your head so you could look up at him.

“Thanks, bub,” you said back just as softly. 

“I could just never do what you do,” he started, shaking his head for a moment before continuing. “Like, the stories you tell me and the kids you’ve bonded with and the influence you have on them. You’re really making a difference in these kids’ lives. I don’t think you notice that as much as other people do.”

You stayed quiet as you mulled over what Shawn had just said. 

“I just feel like sometimes I’m still not doing enough,” you mumbled.

“Hey,” Shawn whispered harshly, tapping your back to get you to look at him. “It’s your first year, and you’re doing the best you can. The kids love you and feel comfortable with you and they’re making progress and that’s all that matters.”

You stayed quiet, choosing to stare at your dresser instead of Shawn, 

“[Y/N],” he mumbled. 

Before you could answer, he flipped you over, hovering on top of you as you looked up at him. 

“You’re an amazing teacher, and you’re only going to get better and better. I love you, and I love what you do,” he said before pressing a kiss to your forehead. 

“I love you, too,” you said as he smiled down at you. “And I am a good teacher.”

He laid back down next to you, pulling you against his side before you looped one of your legs around his.

“The best teacher,” he repeated. “And soon the best teacher who also does some decent origami.”

The next morning, the two of you dove into the jewelry packet as you drank your coffee. Shawn figured out the star charm pretty quickly as you worked on a heart version. Shawn eventually moved onto a ring as you folded small pieces together to make a bracelet. 

“This is stupid,” you mumbled as you added the last piece and throw it in the middle of the table. 

“I think it’s gorgeous,” Shawn said as he picked it up and tried to slip it onto his own wrist. 

“It was made to fit a fourth-grader,” you pointed out.

“Are you saying I don’t have the hands of a fourth-grader?” He said as he gave you a pointed look.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” you said as you flipped to the ring instructions as well.

“Done,” Shawn proclaimed as you barely made your first fold. 

You glanced up at him to see him proudly holding out the ring in front of him. 

“I hate you,” you mumbled as you tried the next step.

Shawn grabbed your hand before you could make the next fold and slipped the ring onto your left ring finger. You looked from him to the paper ring as he just stared at it. 

“It looks good there,” he said softly as he ran his thumb along the top of it. 

“Yeah, it does,” you replied as you looked back up at him. 

Comfortable silence flowed between the two of you as Shawn continued to hold your hand in his. After a moment he cleared his throat and pulled away, moving to work on the final piece and leaving the ring on your finger. 

You didn’t take it off. 

And it stayed there as the two of you finished learning all of the steps and packing up the paper and instruction packets to bring to school with you on Monday. 

After spending the rest of the day cleaning up the house after a long week, Shawn laid in bed and waited for you, scrolling through his phone. 

You shut the door behind you before you crawled in next to Shawn and buried your head in his shoulder with your arm draped over his middle. 

“You’re still wearing this?” Shawn asked as he fiddled with the paper ring still on your finger. 

“Mhm,” you mumbled as you held it up. “I always wanted a pink paper ring.”

“Think we can switch it out for this one?” Shawn said as he pulled out a black velvet box. 

Your breathing stopped as he opened the box to show you your dream ring. 

You shot up as your hand flew to your mouth. Shawn slowly sat up as well, holding the box tightly in his hands. 

“Will you marry me?” He asked with a genuine smile on his face as tears streamed down your face. 

“Yes,” you choked out as you lunged on top of him, wrapping yourself around him as he held you tightly. 

You leaned back in his lap, holding your shaking hand out as he removed the paper ring and slipped on the new one. 

“Much better,” he whispered before finally pressing his lips to yours. 

“I would’ve married you with the paper one,” you whispered against his lips as he smiled. 

“I’m well aware. That’s why I had to switch it out as soon as possible,” he said through a laugh before you pressed another kiss to his lips to shut him up.

“I think I like this one a little better,” you said as you leaned your head on his shoulder and looked down at the ring. 

“Only a little?”

“Yeah,” you sighed. “I have to keep you humble.”

You could feel him laugh against your shoulder before the two of you moved back to laying down. 

“Do you want me to make your wedding band out of origami?” You asked him after a moment of silence. 

“Absolutely not.”

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[jayt23]

So, here's my opinion on the people I know irl based on their personality types and stuff

So, since I'm an introvert and it would be boring to just put my friends and family here, I'm just gonna include random people I know, like some trainers of this medical gym I go to for my health(I literally don't know what you call these but whatev)

I'm just gonna start with my favorite, INFP: So the people I know who have this type are: My lil sister, my mother, two of my friends, my crush and probably some other people I'm forgetting. Literally I can just dump my random knowledge on them and they're too shy to complain, so thanks for that Ig.

Next is the same but now it's extroverted 😱 ENFP:

People I know w/ that type: My best friend and also basically half of the YouTubers I watch. So obviously I like their humor, but the one I know personally is like the most pessimistic person I know so like, do your job? I definitely shouldn't be the person spreading positivity in our friend group, I suck at that lol.

I don't really have to say much about the next one, aka INFJ. I have one friend and like five online friends with that type and online stuff was all pleasant and the INFJ I know personally pretty much just sits in a corner and reads fanfic the whole time without talking to anyone. She could literally just lock herself in a room with noone to talk to and would be totally fine, but will talk shit back at you if you insult someone she cares about.

ENFJ: One of my trainers, my big sister, my german teacher. My sister constantly tries to improve my life and tells me inspiring shit I already heard thousands of times. The other two pretty much wanna adopt me? My trainer literally always says my name after every sentence and doesn't do that's with others like what's up with that? The teacher always tries to make me say stuff in class because she knows I'm really good at it and it gets annoying at times but it's also nice in a way.

I'm not really doing these in an order, just wanna get the sensors done. ISFP: I don't think I know any of them personally l, but I've always got a soft spot for them. I know like two ISFP YouTubers and both are really precious and sensitive, y'know?

ESFP: My music teacher and one of my trainers. I don't like the tbh, I'm like his favorite or something, always being like "Was that gonna be your answer too?" When I put my hand up but didn't get picked. It was really weird and I didn't like it. The trainer on the other hand is really nice and made me feel more at ease when I first went there

ISFJ: My dad, but I also wanna talk about them in fiction. Two ISFJ I really hate are Superman and Captain America, the former I can still endure to an extent, but I think if there's no saving the ladder for me. My dad is pretty good, we just don't have much to talk about really, he also really avoids conflict and tries to kinda suck it up.

ESFJ: One of my trainers but we barely talk. I don't even really know what to say about her, I remember this one time when I put back a mat and she said I didn't have to and that she would take care of it and I was like "Yeah, but it's on the way, because I left my shoes there y'know?" And then we just stared at each other for a few seconds, that's basically all interactions I had with her.

ISTP: The best friend of a friend I'm gonna come back later to. Pretty much anything you've heard about ISTPs lives with this guy, he's like just quietly sitting on his phone and makes a sarcastic remark every hour or so. We joke about reading porn, that's pretty much it and if we're left alone it's just awkward silence intensified.

ESTP: A jerk who was probably into me in like fifth grade and a fictional character I could write a full personality analysis on. Although they tend to kinda be jerks I don't like personally, I can appreciate their existence and the chaos they bring.

ISTJ: My ex-therapist. Could be wrong about him, but honestly who cares? I was a patient for like two months then he had to move, so yikes. Therapy with him was fine. He would be like "Here's a few solutions to your problem, pick one and move on to your next problem." And I would be like "Oh these are just shitty advices, I'm just gonna do it my way" so I actually got better, whaddya know?

ESTJ: I don't really know with this one, I don't know any ESTJs personally and they're often just these traditional assholes and I know it's hard to write a healthy one, but I barely know any so... Idk

INTP: My type, if you haven't realized from the 'ENFJs want to adopt me' part. Don't know any in person and I tend to not really like them in fiction, there's like two I like, one of which being healthy and the other is just too relatable to me to hate him.

ENTPs: My other best friend and the best friend of the ISTP, but also the clown of my class and my math teacher. Ironically all of them hate each other. Tbh it's just nice to talk to the ENTP I'm friends with and play videogames together, the only problem is that he doesn't like my ENFP friend, since he is one of the most sarcastic people you could know and she doesn't get sarcasm like at all. In fiction I like them for their chaos, similar to ESTPs, but also because of their humor. The only ENTP I dislike and know of is Iron Man and I don't even know why. The class clown hates me and is pretty much failing in every class but german and English and my math teacher is really sarcastic but also has a soft spot for me because I'm really talented at math.

INTJ: one of my trainers and an online friends. My conversations with the latter so far all have been one of us talking about our favorite of something, mostly naming two things and the other sharing one of the favorites but preferring something else over the other. In short, we have so much in common that we would probably like anything the other also likes, but have enough differences in taste to have stuff to recommend. The trainer on the other hand really just leaves me alone. There was this one time he went to leave but he had told me he'd show me an exercise earlier so I kinda just waited to see and one of the other trainers had to help us communicate while we stared at each other since we both didn't really want to communicate with each other.

ENTJ: Idk, I'd love to meet one but at the same time not? They're like the perfect match for INTPs or whatever and I can see why but I don't know them enough to really say anything about them.

So, this is it and I don't really know why I stayed up until like 3 A.M to finish this but whatev

[artxyra]

The Secret Life of MDC | Part 4

Part 4 - Riddle Me This!

Part 1 | 2 | 3 |

It just had to be the Riddler who decides to grace his appearance at the strip mall. Just looking at his outfit was a crime against her eyes. Marinette had her far shares of a run-in with the green suited villain, and after countless complaints, he still hasn’t changed his outfit let alone attempt to contact her about an outfit change. Catwoman literally has her number; he could have just asked.

“Now who wants to go first. Choose wisely and you shall survive, but choice wrong and you may get a bullet.” The Riddler taunts his capture victims. They squirm under the threat, eyes widen beyond belief.

From afar, Marinette could see the shaking figures of her classmates. Years of being under Hawkmoth’s terror, showing little to no emotions during an attack, and they are shaking to the sight of the Riddler. Perhaps it was because there was no Miraculous cure or they have forgotten their permanent residency.  To be honest, Marinette was just waiting for Lila to say something stupid that would most likely get them all killed.

“M-my Damiboo would save me!” Yup, there she goes. Everyone, that was not fooled by Lila’s words (ie. Gothamites), facepalmed and groans as she gains the interest of the Riddler.

Tapping his chin, he stares at her before introducing his first riddle of this heist, “It's raining, and you pass a bus stop. There are three people there; your trustworthy friend, the love of your life, and a woman about to go into labor. Your smart car only has two seats. What do you do?”

Lila blubbers her answer, something about taking the love of her life and leaving. She is then scared shitless as a bullet zooms past her, nearly hitting her ear. A shock facial expression stays prominent on her face until she falls down, fainting.

“Oh, how the fibber swoons to darkness. Batsy isn’t here yet and I really want someone to solve my riddles.” He searches the crowd for his next victim. The Parisian teens quickly try to wake up Lila, but they also hope not to be the Riddler’s next targets.

Marinette mentally goes through answering the riddle. Chloe and Adrien stare at one another before shaking their heads. They knew what Marinette was thinking and that is a bad idea. Then again it might bet the better option seeing as they have no idea when the bat crew would make it to the scene.

“You give the keys to your friend so that they can take the woman in labor to the hospital and wait for the bus with the boyfriend.” Marinette confidently answers. The GA Trio stare at the Marinette in awe.

“She does that a lot,” Adrien whispers just enough for their new friends to hear. That was true, Marinette has a tendency of solving riddles which were due to her time being Ladybug.

Chuckling happily, the Riddler turns his attention to Marinette. Marinette doesn’t falter at him glancing at her, but she does narrow her eyes just enough to enforce a challenge.

Dancing closer over to Marinette and her friends, the Riddler chuckles. Half of the weapons turn to them, it's Adrien and Chloe that hold their ground while the GA trio looks like they want to bounce to safety.

“No amount of sass can save you from this riddle, pick the correct answer and your friend shall do free but pick the wrong—”

“They die?” Marinette quirks an eyebrow at the villain.

The Riddler blanches and says, “Only one color, but not one size, stuck at the bottom, yet easily flies. Present in sun, but not in rain, doing no harm, and feeling no pain. What is it?”

Emotionless and quick, Marinette gives her answer, “It's a shadow.”

“How about this one: if eleven plus two equals one, what does nine plus five equals?”

Adrien turns to Marinette, he knows the answer as Chloe taps the ground giving away the crook with a gun behind them. Tensions slowly rise among the group of friends.

“Uh, it’s two o’clock. You’re adding the hours of time.” Marinette answers with a sigh of relief at the end. She knows they are aching to pull the trigger, but unknowingly to the Riddler if anything happens to her, well let's just say he might not live to see another day.

The Riddler growls clearly frustrated with the teen's ability to answer correctly. Only a handful of people can do this to him. “In that case, what is it that given one, you'll have either two or none?”

Marinette only smirks, riddles was also one of her favorite past time against Tim when they are both on the verge of death by lack of sleep. Those late-night twitter messages give much to their twisted mindset on a lack of caffeine.

As Marinette draws on the answer a little longer, Chloe and Adrien take down the henchmen behind them. The henchmen fall to the ground swiftly as the blonde duo nod their heads. Adrien quickly pulls out his phone to see if there were any messages in the group chat. There’s none.

“How long do you think we can hold him off until they get here?” Chloe whispers side glancing at the rooftops of buildings.

“No clue, they haven’t sent anything in the chat, should I try texting Jon?”

Chloe’s eyes narrow causing Adrien to gulp and quickly tap on his phone.

“It’s a choice.” The blonde duo turns their heads towards Marinette who was now toying with the green suit villain. It was clear that she was slowly becoming agitated. “You know, what I have a riddle for you. What’s green and yellow, has no sense of fashion, and is literally killing my eyesight?” She yells at the villain.

It’s like a pin drop as everything freezes once more. Her classmates on the verge of leaving the scene as they were no longer the targets. Seriously, you’re just going to leave them to fend for themselves. Yup, they are as they make a large dash out of the scene. This then creates confusion among the Gothamite as they are used to this and what did they expect, screaming?

“Uh, I—uh…” The Riddle tries to formulate an answer. It takes him a second before pointing to himself. “Me?”

Marinette, like a disappointed mom, nods her head. “Yes. You dare show your face in such a green that could put someone’s eyes out. Don't you dare get me started on the yellow question marks? That tone does not do well on your skin. Gosh, you had one job, Riddler, one fricking job.” Marinette begins to go off. The Riddler and his henchmen pale at every word she says.

Just as Marinette was beginning to calm down, a shadow in the shape of a bat looms over the Riddle.

“Finally,” Marinette huffs as the Riddle turns his attention from her to fight against the Batman.

“Hey, you guys okay?” It was Nightwing who asks appearing behind the blonde duo. If looks could kill, he would have been six feet under with the look Chloe was giving me.

“Oh, my lord, it Nightwing!” Allegra squeals in the background but she goes ignore as Nightwing rubs the back of his neck.

“Get us out of here, like now!” Chloe screams to the vigilante.

Robin rushes to Marinette and tries to take her away from the situation.

“Are you alright miss?” He asks bringing them to the safety of the public. Marinette stares at him deadpanned before nodding. As much as we would like to kiss her lips, he sends her a shrug over to her friends. “Where are your classmates?”

“Gone, unless Alya decided to do something stupid like try and get a film of you guys in action.” Realization began to set over Marinette’s eyes. “You’re going to need to find them. Hopefully, they made it back to the academy without any problems.”

Robin nods then proceed to send a message over the coms about the missing foreign class from Paris. He quickly joins the search as Marinette turns to her friends.

“Do you any idea how ridiculously stupid that decision was?” Chloe grills the designer before whispering, “You know we’re not even in our suits.”

“Sorry Bee, but did you see that outfit?” Marinette counters before going on a massive rant about the Riddler’s outfit and how he could choose it.

~*~

Nette @GothamsFashionSense Yo, some foreigner just grilled the Riddler on his outfit. I’m so proud of her. #prideful #doIseecompetition

Chloe B. @QueenBeeOfParis Replying to @GothamsFashionSense That was my sista @MarinetteMemes, she too loves your content.

Nette @GothamsFashionSense And I ❤️ her, that rant was amazing 🤩. Need any tips @MarinetteMemes? #futureapprentice #fashionmess

~*~

Case in point, Alya did separate from the class when they were trying to escape once word got out that the bats were on their way. She is quick to make sure that Lila was alright before dashing back to the “crime” scene with her phone recording.

Batman had found her, but before he could get a word out, Alya was blasting him with questions regarding the situation and personal questions. He, of course, ignores them. Alya even tries to bring up Lila’s name but he doesn’t answer. Nightwing pulls on up on his bike to take the “aspiring” journalist back to the academy against her pleases and constant questions.

Upon returning to the academy, Alya was heavily lectured by the GA’s headmistress before her own teacher baby her. Mlle. Bustier was never one to give punishments unless it was warranted and even then, she doesn’t do it right. Alya was lucky to return to her dorm with a slap on the wrist and detention.

~*~

Babe Bee @Iheartthebatboy23 Um… can we talk about the girl that grilled the Riddler and how she looked so much like a Wayne? #newWayne #theorieseverywhere #brucewayneexplainplease

~*~

After a week of grueling classwork (aka grading assessments), getting pestered by her former classmates in Mlle. Bustier's class, Marinette wakes up with a beating headache. She hasn’t felt that way since the last time she had gone days without sleep, running on twelve shots of expresso before crashing.

“C’mon buggy, it’s Saturday and Jon’s in town. You know how much the kitten would want to spend time with him.” Chloe states, standing in front of Marinette fully dress and with a businesswoman power pose.

“And here I thought you did want to be the fifth wheel.” Marinette retorts only to get a chuckle out of the mayor’s daughter.

“No, but I will be FaceTiming Gami while you and the boys have fun,” Chloe responds back as she laughs at the dismal look on Marinette’s face. “But seriously though, get dressed. We’re meeting the boys in thirty.”

Marinette rushes over to her wardrobe and picks out her clothes then rushes to the bathroom. She comes out in fifteen minutes wearing black leggings and one of Damian’s sweatshirts that look like a dress against her small frame.

As the teens exit the school, they were quick to avoid Lila who was making up another story as to where she’ll be this evening. It was something along the lines of going on a date with her Damiboo. It took everything in Marinette’s body to not grill the liar about her boyfriend, but with soothing words from Chloe, they managed to get out the building without bloodshed.

If only that wasn’t the case later on that day.

Part 5 >>

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[angelbabyszn]

Protection (Ruby X Reader)

OMB Masterlist

"Okay, people! Hurry in! We need to start going over this play!” shouted the English teacher, Mr. Miller in the community theater after school.

The core four and Jasmine sat down next to each other with other students in their grade along with freshmen in a circle of chairs with Mr. Miller in front to see the whole class.

"Everyone, everybody you see in this circle is part of Freeridge's first annual play, "Hamilton"!" said Mr. Miller and everybody clapped.

"This will be a little musical so some parts were based off of people who's in choir with Ms. Grande. Now, do we have our lead actress, “Eliza” here?" Mr. Miller asked.

Students start to turn and start to chatter between each other to figure it out.

The doors that enter you into the theater busted open, causing everybody to turn to them

You came in jogging tiredly with sweat coming down your face, your script in your hand, and your backpack on your back. You just came from your house because you have to buy groceries from the store instead of getting on the bus to here.

"I'm-I'm here! I'm here! I'm-"

You screamed and found yourself on the ground hurt because you tripped over your foot. Some freshmen laughed at your fall.

"Y/N!" shouted Ruby and he quickly got up from his seat and jogs up to you. You slowly get up from the ground until Ruby grabs your right hand and helps you the rest of the way up.

"Thanks, Ruby. I appreciate it." you said. looking at him with a small smile.

"No problem, Eliza." said Ruby with a grin, making you giggle a bit as you grab your script from his hand.

"Now, that both of our main leads are here, let's start reading our script, shall we?" said Mr. Miller and you and Ruby walked on the stage and sat next to each other. 

-

"Y/N!" shouted Ruby and quickly out of your thoughts that were flowing through your mind.

"Huh?" you said with wide eyes as you looked at everyone. You just realized you were still here about an hour later.

"It's your line." said Ruby and your eyes widened again and you quickly flipped through your script to where everybody was.

"Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?." you said while acting sadly. 

"Good job, everyone! That includes practice today. We will be back here on Thursday to start setting up the scenes for the play. Everyone is free to go now." said Mr. Miller and everyone started to get up and started leaving.

You close your script hard because you were so glad you were glad for the day. You quickly got up and left out of the theater.

You took out your skateboard you have in your backpack and put it on the ground. You got on and started to roll down the sidewalk to get home until you heard your name.

You stop rolling and turn around. Your heart skipped a beat to see Ruby coming up to you with a smile with his backpack on his back.

"Let me take you home." said Ruby as he walks up to you.

"Awe, you don't have to. My house is literally around the corner." you lied, hoping Ruby would leave. You don't want Ruby to find out where you live.

"But I want to. I like you, Y/N. You're going to ignore what’s going on between us? I'm not going to act like I don't." said Ruby looking into your eyes confessing. He starts to get even closer to you but you backed away from him.

"I like you too but I'm just not in the right mindset to date right now. Too many things are going around in my life. I gotta go, bye!" you said and you quickly swipe your right foot a couple of times as you start to roll faster and away from him. 

You look back to see Ruby with a puzzled face, making your heart ache and feeling regret. As much you want him to take you home, you can't because Latrelle is your cousin and currently living with you temporarily.

You hate that he was your cousin. “He’s hiding," he says. He always brings girls over for his pleasure, smoking all over the place, and leaving trash all over the house. 

He is nothing worse than your father. An alcoholic with no job. Who's just let Latrelle with no questions about why he's hiding.

How are you still living in your house? All you. You are always working, cleaning, paying bills, while all going to high school.

You are still trying to figure out how you manage to do this while having average grades. You were glad makeup exists because you always have to put on makeup everyday to hide your dark circles from the late nights you work.

Sooner or later, you have to tell him but you haven't because Ruby is just turning back into himself. This play was a big step for him to become himself again because he loves planning and wants to make everything perfect. 

You saw how Ruby got back to himself through your eyes by doing all of these pain-relief medicines, therapy, and doing fun activities with you and the rest of the gang like regular teenagers.

You're so happy to see him grow from his experience and you don't want him to relive his memory because of you. You just can't.

You entered your house with your skateboard underneath your right arm and you saw your dad knocked out on the couch with a whole bottle of alcohol in his right hand.

You rolled your eyes and you went into your room. You screamed to see Latrelle and his girlfriend of the week making out on your bed. Disgusting.

"Latrelle! What the h*ll?!" you shouted with a disgusted face. They quickly stopped and looked at you.

"This is the fifth time this happened, Latrelle! You got your own room, do you know that?!" you shouted angrily.

"Your room is the closest. We just in the moment." said Latrelle with a smirk and leaned over to his girl. He kissed her slowly as she started to go down his body about to reach his pants. You have to stop this now!

"Hey hyna! Get the h*ll out of my room now!" you shouted furiously and the girl looked at you with a stink eye.

"Little girl, I don't think you know who you are talking to." she said as she walked over to you with a glare and her arms crossed against her chest.

"You think I'm scared of you? Ha, listen. You ain't the first girl that he invited into my house and slept over so don't think you're special, Becky. With those low-quality "extensions" y'all say when it's actually a weave." you said and the girl's jaw dropped in shock.

"Actually, my name is Maria. This is not a weave, it's my real hair. The leader's daughter of the Prophet$, the winner of the Freeridge beauty pageant, the queen of-"

"Nobody f*cking cares! Now get your bad-looking blonde weave looking a*s outta here, Becky or I'll bust a hole through your head!" you shouted angrily. 

You were mad now and you were willing to do anything illegal because of what Latrelle and your dad did today.

Maria grabs her purse from your floor and leaves the house angrily. You walked over to your bed and grabbed a shirt that wasn't yours.

"This hyna walked out in her bra." you said while looking at her shirt in her hand. You dropped it to the floor in disgust. 

"Where do you think you're going, Latrelle?" you asked seriously. You turn around to see Latrelle trying to sneak out of your room.

"What Y/N? I need to go." said Latrelle.

"Oh no! You're going to stay here and clean up this house! I have gotten food, made dinner, working multiple jobs just to keep us underneath a roof! You have done absolutely nothing but bring girls and smoke ever since you moved in here! If you're going to stay, you should do something that would help in this household!" you yelled at him.

You have enough dealing with this every single day with him and your father. It makes you feel lonely and angry because they don't do anything. You felt like a grown woman when you should be enjoying your last years of a teenager.

"No! Let me be! You're just here to give us anything we want! We own this place! You can't do anything about it because you're just a puta!" yelled Latrelle at you furiously. 

You looked at him with wide eyes as you were breathing heavily. You don't see your cousin anymore in him. You see a monster. A horrible monster ready to hurt you at any moment. Along with your father.

You felt tears coming through your eyes. You were trying not to break but it's not working at all, it was making it worse.

Latrelle grunts and walks out of the door of the house. A few moments later, you screamed furiously and tears started to flow down your tears heavily.

You fall down to the floor of your bedroom and just cry as you feel your eyes turning red. You couldn't take this no more. You try so hard to be strong but it's so hard without your mom here without you.

-

An hour later, you opened your eyes and you found yourself on the floor. You slowly sit up and grab your phone that was a few feet from you.

You look at the time and you see a few missed calls from Ruby. You slowly smile. It seems like Ruby is the only person right now that would call you this late at night.

A thought came into your mind and you slowly got up from the floor. You wipe your nose with a tissue and eyes as you look in your full mirror.

You see your red eyes almost returning to normal with your mascara running down your cheek. You wipe off your face and start doing small and natural makeup on your face.

You stopped to see your scars and bruises you got from your dad on your arms that are slowly healing and you felt your heart breaking again. You quickly grab your purse with your phone and leave the house.

-

A few minutes later, you found yourself in front of Ruby's house. You don't know why.

You slowly walked up to his door and hesitated until you rang his doorbell.

A few moments later, the door opened and my heart skipped a beat to see Ruby.

"Y/N?!" said Ruby, shocked that you were here at this hour.

"Hi Ruby." you said shyly and you look down to the ground.

"Hurry, come in," said Ruby, opening up the door wider and entering his house. He locked the door.

"What are you doing here at this hour? You know what happens after eleven?" asked Ruby, looking at you concerned and scared because he didn't want anything happening to you.

He looked into your eyes and you saw you were upset, making his eyes soften.

"Y/N...what's wrong? Did something happen? Is there someone I have to beat up?" asked Ruby and you chuckled underneath your breath.

"Ruby, you can't beat up anybody." you said as you looked at him.

"I'll become The Rock if anybody is messing with you." said Ruby and you chuckled again at his silliness. He always knows how to cheer you up without trying.

"But seriously, what's wrong. You came here this late at night. You should stay here for the night since you're here for your safety." said Ruby and he quickly went into another room in his house.

"Ruby, that's not necessary! I'm fine! I'm going to call-"

Your heart melted as Ruby came back into the living room with pillows, covers, pj's, slippers, and soft socks.

"Awe, Ruby. Wait, why are you here alone? I don't think you're completely better." you said being concerned to Ruby to ignore your situation right now.

"I'm not alone. Abuela's here but she fell asleep. My family is at a graduation ceremony for the twins for passing kindergarten up in Brentwood." said Ruby as he sat up a comfortable place for you on the main couch in the living room.

"Oh, okay. That's good. I'm proud of you. You're becoming better." you said and Ruby looks at you happily.

"Thanks Y/N. I'm glad you were here by my side all that time. I would've done the same for you." said Ruby and you felt a blush gaining on your cheeks. You look down so Ruby doesn't see them. 

"There we go. Let me take that for you. Here, sit down." said Ruby and you look backed up and walk over to the couch to sit down. Ruby took your purse out of your hand.

"I'm going to inform your dad that you're here, okay?" asked Ruby, taking your phone from your purse and going to your messages.

"No!" you shouted with a scare to your voice, causing Ruby to look at you shocked.

"Please don't tell him. I, um..." you said and you felt tears coming down your face again. Not again.

"Y/N.'' said Ruby, concerned and quickly putting your purse and phone on the coffee table in front of the couch. He sits next to you and looks at you concerned.

"Come down princesa. What's going on? Please. You're scaring me." said Ruby and tears started to fall down slowly.

You couldn't hold it in any more. Everything that has been going on for you for the last few months you held up in your mind was just all coming out in tears tonight.

You have to tell him now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now. There's no way to escape. You were going to lose Ruby tonight.

"Ru-ru-Ruby?" you stuttered as Ruby was wiping your tears and the light mascara on your face that was running on your face off with his mom's makeup wipes.

You look into his eyes deeply for the first time. Your heart skipped to see his eyes soft and full of concern.

You felt such a connection. Ruby was feeling it too and you have no idea. Your heart aches that you won't be able to see into his eyes again once you tell him.

"I-I-I ha-have to tell you something. Something I've been ke-keeping for m-m-months." you stuttered and Ruby's eyes slightly widened at your statement.

Ruby slowly nodded and you did a deep breath. Here we go.

You told him everything. From the jobs, Latrelle being your cousin, your alcoholic father, both of them abusing you. Every moment. 

You see Ruby's face become less and less full of expression and it just breaks your heart inside into a million pieces.

"I'm sorry. I don't know why I said all of that. I'm okay now." you said and you turn away from Ruby and face your body the other way to avoid looking at him.

Ruby didn't say anything. He was trying to process anything. He has so many emotions that he doesn't know what to express first.

He looks at you faced away and tries to figure out what to say but couldn't think of anything.

"I understand if you don't like me no more. Don't worry. I'm going to quit the play and you don't have to see me again." you said and you felt movement from Ruby.

You felt a hand connecting to your left hand and you looked down at it. You follow where that hand connects and it leads to Ruby.

Without saying a word, Ruby slowly pulls on your hand, making your body facing him. Ruby continues on pulling on your hand and puts his hand on your waist.

You look up at him again and Ruby wraps you with his arms. 

Holding you was the only thing Ruby could come up with in response to what you just told him. He was furious, upset, disappointed, disgusted and many more emotions.

He hates that all of this happened to you and nobody didn't notice it. Not even him, making him disappointed in himself.

Ruby just holds you. Tight. On the couch in his living room. Both of you didn't talk at all.

Eventually, you fall asleep and Ruby looks at you deeply and starts to stare at your face features.

He caresses your face softly as you sleep on his chest like it was a pillow. He slowly gives you a kiss on your forehead, causing you to gain a small smile during your sleep.

"I'm going to make this right, hermosa. You’ll see next morning." said Ruby as he caressed your hair with his fingers.

-

A few hours later, you woke up and you looked around to see you were in a whole different room. You sat up quickly but calmed down once you realized you were in Ruby's room.

You turned to the other side of the room to see Ruby was not there. You grab your phone that was next to you on the bed table and saw a post-it note on it.

"My mom called you off of school today. Got some news for you outside this room. Put on the outfit hanging on the hook of the door. Take your time, maravillosa. -Ruby"

You looked at the door and your eyes widened to see there was an actual outfit hanging on the door. You get up and you start getting ready.

-

You did a final layer of lip gloss and you stepped back from your outfit. You were wearing a rainbow tie-dye t-shirt with jean shorts, golden checkered vans with your hair in a high ponytail and silver jewelry.

You opened the door to exit the bedroom with your phone. You jumped to see Ruby sitting on the floor in the hallway looking at you with a grin.

"Hola hermosa." said Ruby, making you smile.

"Hi Ruby. Um...what's the good news?" you asked remembering the post-it note on your phone earlier.

Ruby gets up and grabs your hand. He pulls it making you follow him. A moment later, you saw the rest of the core four and Jasmine along with Ruby's family and Monse's dad sitting in the living room.

They all turned to you and Ruby entering with happy faces.

"What is going on?" you asked with a shy smile as you and Ruby sit next to each other on another available couch in the living room.

Jamal turns on the TV  and turns it to the news. Everybody turns their attention to the TV.

After the news came off a few minutes later, you stood up surprised.

"So, my father and Latrelle are arrested?" you asked calmly and everybody in the room quickly nodded.

"That means..."

"You're free, Y/N." said Ruby standing up and looking at you.

"Wait, really?" you asked and everybody started to cheer and celebrate. You started to cry again.

"Princesa, there's no need to cry." said Ruby as he caressed your face to wipe the small tears away. 

"These are happy tears. I just feel revived." you said happily as you looked at Ruby. You felt happy in your life right now and it was honestly scaring you a bit because life can turn this left real quick in a few seconds.

"Wait, then where am I going to live? I can't live in a house by myself. I'm sixteen." you said.

"You will be moving into my house. Monse told me what was going on and I immediately said yes because Monse needs a girl friend to talk to." said Monse's dad. 

"Thank you so much." you said happily and you quickly went over and hugged Monse and her dad.

"How did all this happen?" you asked curiously and everybody turns over to Ruby with weird grins on their faces.

"Y'all snitches." said Ruby and everybody laughed.

"Ruby..." you said softly as you went back over to him.

"Did you really do this for me?" you asked and Ruby hesitated to your question and nodded. It was true. 

"I don't know how to repay you. You're been the sweetest and supportive guy I've ever had in my life and making sure I'm okay." you said. You met every word.

"Oh course, Y/N. I handle things for you. I don't want you to go through anything like that again." said Ruby and you hugged him tight. Ruby hugged you back quickly.

"Let's go celebrate!" said Abuela and everybody cheered as they started walking out of the door leaving you and Ruby, the last two people in the house.

"Wait." you said stopping him from walking out of the door.

"What is it, Y/N?" asked Ruby, looking at you deeply. Your heart skips a beat by what you are about to say. 

"I know I keep on rejecting you multiple times for multiple reasons and I'm so sorry for that. Now that my life is better now, I was wondering if we can-"

Ruby kisses you passionately and you quickly kiss him back. You were dreaming for this moment and it was finally happening. You couldn't believe it.

Both of you ended the kiss and looked at each other with soft eyes.

"Y/N, we're together. And nobody is going to break us." said Ruby and your heart melted in happiness.

You and Ruby did a quick kiss and walked out of his house. You stayed with your knight in shiny armor forever.

[collapsingintojupiter]

Sea Urchin

I made me some analogical fluff bc honestly, why not?

Characters: Virgil, Logan, (brief) Roman

Relationships: Analogical, platonic Prinxiety

---

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Roman?”

“Are you kidding me? Of course it’s a good idea!”

“Fish? For a date?” Roman sighed, slinging an arm around Virgil’s shoulder. 

“I’m telling you, oh panic-at-the-everywhere, that taking him to an aquarium will literally make his year. Logan loves the ocean, man.”

“And...and you’re sure he won’t think it’s weird?”

“No, because he’s weird. And so are you.”

“Hey!” Virgil shoved Roman away and glared at him, though it melted into a grin when he laughed that stupid laugh of his.  

“Relax, Virge. He’ll love it, I promise.” He sighed. 

“Okay…”

Half an hour later, Virgil was standing on the doorstep to the Crofter house, his hair awkwardly styled (Roman’s fault), and a plush shark in his hands (also Roman’s fault). Logan opened the door when he knocked, eyes widening at the sight of the plush shark. 

“I uh...here.” Virgil shoved it into Logan’s hands, then tried to remember what Roman had told him to say. “Uh, guess where we’re going today?”

Logan looked at the shark, then up at Virgil. 

Holy shit, I’ve never seen him this excited before. 

“Are...are we going to the aquarium?” At that, Virgil couldn’t help but smile. Maybe Roman’s terrible idea wasn’t so terrible after all. 

“Correct. I heard you were into marine biology, and they have a sale on the admission fee today. Roman also told me you liked sharks.”

Logan smiled--adorably, Virgil thought. 

“Yeah, I do. They’re such fascinating creatures, despite the terrible reputation they’ve been given.”

“That’s good, ‘cause they’ll have plenty where we’re going.” Virgil motioned to his car, which actually wasn’t his car, but his mom’s. “You ready to go?”

“I believe I am adequately prepared, yes.” Logan still held the plush, and carried it to the car with him where he set it on the dashboard. 

“Will it be okay if I keep it in here for now?” he asked as the two climbed inside. 

“Oh, sure!” Virgil said, and his voice definitely didn’t crack. He tried not to look at Logan as he backed the car out of the driveway and started into town; at his messy hair, the soft blue sweater he currently wore over a white button-up, at his blue glasses which had tiny goldfish painted on the sides - Roman’s work, most likely. And it was perfect.

Roman had been Logan’s best friend since the first grade, and from what Virgil had heard the two had become friends in much the same way he had when he’d been transferred to their school in fifth grade. Promptly after arriving Roman had made it his personal goal to befriend him, though Virgil had never understood quite why. Logan said he didn’t either; Roman merely shrugged when asked and said they’d seemed lonely. 

Not that that was true, or anything.

Whatever the case, Virgil did eventually succumb and become a part of the odd group. Later, when they reached highschool, it was again Roman who convinced him to finally ask Logan out. 

At first glance, Logan was little more than a quiet and studious kid with a weird fascination for both space and the deep ocean, something that was weirdly connected to and disconnected from Virgil’s own fascination with cryptids, conspiracies, and aliens. The more he’d gotten to know Logan, however, the more he learned about the nerdy kid’s wilder side; about his impulsive (but fun) antics in the name of science, his crazy ideas “for research purposes only, obviously,” and his long rants about stars at two in the morning when he couldn’t sleep. 

And Virgil fell in love with him. 

Roman noticed he had before he did, actually. He also said that Logan liked him too, and after several weeks of nagging Virgil finally worked up the courage to ask him out himself. And when Logan accepted--well, Virgil didn’t think he’d ever been happier (though he’d never tell Roman that).

“What’s your favorite ocean animal, Lo? Aside from sharks.” Logan glanced up, grinning crookedly. 

“I love eels,” he said. “And sea snakes. And crabs. And...” he stopped himself, and Virgil both tried and failed to hide a laugh. 

“Go ahead,” he said. “Um, do you have a favorite shark species?”

“Certainly. I am most fond of the tiger shark; their unique patterns are quite aesthetically pleasing. Speaking of sharks, did you know that shark skin feels like sandpaper?”

“I didn’t,” Virgil said, even though he did. “Tell me about it.”

“Their skin is made up of specialized placoid scales, which form a special kind of armor for the shark that’s actually quite thick. It’s also so rough that it can actually injure animals that rub against it the wrong way--it’s relatively smooth the other way, compared to it. The shape of the scales also makes the shark more streamlined in the water, so it loses less energy to drag when it’s hunting prey.”

Virgil kinda froze, even though he was still at the wheel, and once again he was struck by how damn smart Logan was, not to mention how cute he was when he got excited, and--

“Uh, Virgil?”

“Yeah?”

“You missed the turn.”

“Dammit!”

- - -

Virgil stood back a little, grinning to himself as Logan pressed his face up against the tank. On the other side of the glass, a rather uncomfortably large fish looked back at them. Virgil had already been dragged around four different rooms in the span of less than fifteen minutes, but despite that he couldn’t wipe the dumb look of adoration from his face as Logan excitedly rambled to him about parrot fish. 

“Did you know that they create bubble nets out of their mucus to hide in from sharks?”

“Uh...no, I didn’t.”

Man, the ocean was weird. 

“Ooh, this way! They have touch tanks in here!”

“They have what now?” Virgil asked, as Logan grabbed his hand and started pulling him into another room. 

“Touch tanks! So you can touch the anemones, urchins, sea cucumbers, and whatever else they have in there! Very fascinating textures, they have. Especially the anemones.”

“Wait wait wait...touch them?”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Logan said quickly, coming to a halt at the room’s entrance. He glanced at Virgil. “If you want I can show you first, and then you can decide. They won’t hurt you.”

“Uh...okay.” Virgil wanted to say no, mostly because being wet was not what he had planned, but Logan seemed so excited about it that he couldn’t help it. Besides, it was just his hand. He’d be fine.

“Here’s a purple sea urchin.” Logan pointed at a little spiky thing in the sand, grinning from ear to ear. “Their spikes can’t hurt us, but they’re cool to touch.” He dipped his hand in, running his finger along one of the urchin’s spines. 

“Whoah, they’re closing together around your finger!” Virgil leaned over the edge of the tank, eyes wide. Logan grinned at him. 

“They trap food with their spines like that, isn’t that cool?”

“You mean it thinks your finger is food?” 

“Yup! Don’t worry though, he can’t hurt me. See?” Logan pulled his hand away easily, showing Virgil. “Wanna try?”

“You’re crazy.” He looked down at the urchin. “...Yes. I’ll try.”

The water was stupid cold, but Virgil rolled up his sleeves, pretended he didn’t notice the adorable smile Logan was giving him, and dipped his hand in. The urchin’s spines were hard, but smooth, and quickly hugged onto his finger as he watched in surprise. 

“You haven’t been to an aquarium before, have you?” Virgil glanced at Logan.  

“I haven’t, no. Ocean always gave me the heebies. Didn’t realize it was so...uh, cool…” he turned away to hide his face, which had turned a delicate shade of rose, and quickly washed his hands while Logan tried to pet every sea cucumber he could find in the tank. 

“They’re very squishy,” he said as he joined Virgil by the entrance. “Very smooth. I like them.”

“I can tell,” Virgil answered with a grin. 

They went to more tanks, then ate at the cafe inside. Logan excused himself after they sat down, leaving Virgil alone for a few minutes as he disappeared. 

Virgil pulled his patch jacket closer around his shoulders, and let out a small sigh. He’d never been much of a learner like Logan was - sleeping in class, doodling on the margins of his notebooks, ignoring the teacher and everything around him...but learning from Logan was so different, so...fun. He realized he’d been enjoying himself immensely the whole time, even though he now had more facts on sea cucumbers than he’d ever know what to do with. 

Being with Logan was fun, he thought. 

“What are you thinking about, Virgil?”

“GAH! Logan, why?”

“I apologize.” Logan sat down, a smile hiding in his eyes as he tried to look sheepish. “I uh, didn’t realize that you hadn’t noticed my presence.”

“It’s alright,” Virgil shook his head, pushing a plate of food towards him. “You just startled me.”

“I will try to avoid doing so in the future.” 

They talked about black holes and green sand; about comets and cone snails and nebulae and nurse sharks. 

And Virgil loved it. 

At last, the day had gone and it was time to go. Virgil was exhausted, but glowing with happiness as they made their way towards the exit. Logan held his hand; similarly quiet, similarly happy. 

As they reached the front door, he stopped and turned to him. 

“I uh...got you something,” Logan said quietly, holding something up for him to see. 

“Is...is that an urchin plush?”

“I, uh...I thought that since…I went back to the gift shop...wanted to get something special...”

“I love it.” Virgil gently took the plush from Logan, cupping it in his hands and feeling how soft it was in his fingers. Logan grinned widely, and before either boy knew what was happening they were in each other’s arms. Logan’s embrace was gentle, but firm, and Virgil was pretty sure he never wanted to leave his arms again. 

Silently, he thanked Roman for his best terrible idea ever.

[softboyscully]

Public School Stuff I Wanted to Share

public school is both beautiful and horrifying am i right

so ill just go by the grades i guess

Kindergarten, first year

i did kindergartden at a catholic school in a relativly big city so this one’s got some shit

we went to church every wednesday, me and best friend (lost track of her when we moved, wish we’d stayed in touch, she was awesome) would giggle the whole time, pretty sure we made fun of jesus once, can’t remember why, possibly the hair

i had the nicest teacher, she was (as i remember her) young, blonde, and super sweet, that was the first and last year i ever had naptime

SPEAKING of naptime

i never slept during it

once i found what i remember being a nut of some sort on the ground, probably came off someone’s shoe

i grab it, turn to sarah (my best friend), say something about putting it up my nose

sarah, apparently having common sense, says, “no dont do it!! we’re supposed to be sleeping!!”

i put it up my fucking nose

try to get it out, just push it farther in

im crying a little bit now, that shit hurts

go up to my teacher

“you’re supposed to be asleep!”

“i have a nut up my nose and it wont come out”

teacher tries to get it out, but it wont budge

just. sends me back to my mat

that was it

the art room was tiny

like re-purposed broom closet tiny

there was a copy of the mona lisa in the hallway, someone had drawn ray bans on it with a pencil, never got replaced

there was a creepy-ass basement i went down to after school, we ate cheeseballs and sandwiches with some kind of meat, mayo, and that kinda yellow bread

someone broke his leg down there once, think an older kid threw him at the ceiling or something

we learned how to play Silver Bells with actual bells in music class

Kindergarten, second year

i remember these two teachers as the evil step sister-type look, but it might be my little kid imagination

but seriously they were horrible

we learned stuff in a room that was more middle-school styled, except everything was green or black and it was v dark

me and sarah attained a new friend, john

honestly i think we would’ve stayed friends for a while if i didnt move away

i have two vivid memories

one is of me really wanting to go home, so i walked by the teacher’s desk and did a fake sneeze

they laughed at me and told me to go sit back down

the other is  john leaning his chair back and then falling, so me and sarah went to help him back up

it was funny, so he did it again

and again

me and sarah were laughing, had the time of our lives

after the maybe fifth time the teachers said “john can get back up by himself. sit down and stay there.”

one of the reasons we moved was bc i got sent a letter from my fourth grade buddie

most of the words weren’t spelled correctly, many letters were backwards

my mother was horrified

ofc now we know it was probably a learning disability 

1st grade

this is when i moved

beginning of school i was ASTOUNDED we didnt have uniforms, one of the best things ever to happen to me

nothing wrong with this teacher, she was cool

thing is i was a little shit

told everyone my dogs died (they did but i was maybe three when it happened, i remember it not)

all my personal narratives were bullshit (only one sticks in my memory, wrote it about celebrating christmas AND hanukkah with my dad’s friends who were jewish, i have never even met those friends)

had a crush on this kid, best friend (she was terrible and helped wreck me emotionally) told me to kiss him in music class. me being a stupid ass bitch, i did it, aND HE GOES TO THE TEACHER AND CALLS ME OUT. at the end of class she gets both of us to stay for a bit, AND I DENYIED EVERYTHING. i walked across the fucking classroom, kissed him on the cheek, ran away giggling, told my teacher i didn’t do anything, AND GOT AWAY WITH IT. i’ve embarrassed myself further with this child but thats another story

2nd grade

i loved this teacher but honestly he was absolute shit

like. all he did was play the guitar and sing with us

never actually taught us stuff???

middle of the year, my mom goes in for a parent-teacher conference, he tells her i dont pay attention is math.

“what do you mean?”

“she doesn’t listen, she just takes out a book and starts reading.”

“........have you.... tried taking the book away?”

“sure, i could try that.”

“o....kay”

he also told her i’d be a girl who’d grow up to love spellcheck (which i do lmao)

like ???? why not just??? teach me to spell????

there was this one dude who one day showed up, gave me a pink stuffed cat, and then asked me where i lived

funniest thing was he lived on the same street as me

something that is vivid in my memory is showing up to class one day and realizing that i was wearing my regular clothes over my pajamas

also we had fish

every day someone else was in charge of feeding them

one of the times it was my job, i grab the fish food and walk over to the tank only to find all of the fish floating on the top

i screamed “THE FISH CAN FLY?!?!?!?!?!”

everyone ran over, all of us scarred for life when Mr. G walks over and goes in the most normal voice ever “no theyre dead”

we held a funeral

the cause of death is still undetermined

3rd grade

this year just draws a blank for me

all i know is that whoever the teacher was, they neglected to teach me how to tell time from a clock

also we learned the Cotten Eyed Joe dance in gym around here

4th grade

i had two teachers this year

one was the same one from 1st grade, the other one was a total bitch

made a girl named hannah ball her eyes out once, never apologized

i was (and am) and avid reader, so my reading skills were high above average

instead of being proud of me she told me i was weird, not normal, and too smart for a 4th grader, so i MUST be cheating. 

she was the start of a lot of self confidence issues for me ngl

this was around the time i went and got tested for ADHD (me and my grandmother almost broke down on the highway but thats another story), Mrs. M (the nice one) was super supportive when i told her why i was leaving early but Ms. S (bitch) told me ADHD wasn’t real and i just wanted to be special for once

she sucked, Ms. S

5th grade

this is getting super long so this’ll be the last one i do

but my teacher..... Mr. F was A+++++

he legitimately taught me math

we had i guess like,,, a buddie class we switched with sometimes

the teacher of that class was Mrs. R, who had crazy red hair and many freckles

at one point she referenced a meme and my entire class started screaming

also there was another Mrs. S (to differentiate this one will be called Mrs. Su)

she was kind of crazy

she was the astronomy teacher and she told us many times that the moon landing was faked

once she handed out sunscreen and had everyone put it on their whole body (this was in december, fyi)

Mr. F also hosted an ‘archeological dig’ which sounds cool but in reality he had a bunch of arcade prizes from his childhood buried in little flower pots we dug into with plastic spoons

also heres some stuff i cants pinpoint the time of/happened in multiple grades:

someone held a who-can-scream-the-most-like-a-goat contest

a guy named Makenzie won

remember we planned it while the teacher left the classroom so the teacher walks back in and one by one everyone in the room starts screaming, there was some applause, a few kids got a standing ovation

we cleaned out our desks in the middle of the year, i found 3 socks and a dog treat in mine

like how the fuck did any of those things get there

and where’s the fourth sock

b o t t l e f l i p p i n g

but no seriously there were at least five water bottles stuck in the ceiling in the cafeteria

my sorta friend charlie was obsessed with paper airplanes

one time he might’ve broken the world record for longest time in the air but he was counting in his head and it was at recess so there was no video

four square and gaga ball would be played no matter the setting, time, or conditions and it was super competitive

like if you could get to king in four square you got the everlasting respect of everyone

and everyone was super educated on four square special rules, special plays, that kinda shit

no but guys i grew up with bus stop, candy store, haunted house on mondays, haunted mansion on fridays, zombies was fair game unless it was Zach, Ryan, Chrissy or Vee

me and one other guy named andrew were the only known pjo fans, had the time of our LIVES making refrences

“HEY ANDREW IM NOBODY”

“I HAVE WAITED YEARS FOR YOU, NOBODY, COME HERE AND FACE YOUR DEATH”

“hey annabeth, i thought you looked like a princess when i first saw you. i printed out a picture you sent me casually and kept it with me. i snuck along on a quest so i could save you, endangering myself immensely. i held the sky for you. when you talk about your crush on luke, i get jealous. beckendorf understood, but hes dead.”

“ikr we’re literally the best of friends”

“RIGHT”  

also the first time we finished mark of athena we were in the same classroom and we individually dropped the book, stood up, looked at each other, and screamed “WELL FUCK YOU TOO RICK RIORDAN”

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Why did you draw Cody getting shot? That’s messed up man. You should probably see a therapist for this.

Okay, so sometime in the early 2000s I was reading an issue of Nickelodeon Magazine that had a section dedicated to obscure superheroes from the 1970s. One was a disco skater, one was a weasel themed hero I think called the whizzer (I remember they made a pee joke), and one was a hero called Matter Eater Lad who was a lad who could eat matter. I thought that was a dumb name, but I was intrigued by the power to be able to eat anything; there was also an alien on the cartoon Ben 10 with the same power, a little chameleon gummy bear looking guy called Upchuck who could grab things with his tongue and digest them no matter the size (his stomach was bigger on the inside). Well, being a little plagiarist I decided to come up with my own superhero with the exact same powers as Matter Eater Lad and Upchuck. I had an entire cast of stick figure characters I drew comics of, so I was going to introduce The Digester in the next "issue," which was just a bunch of squares drawn on sheets of lined notebook paper. I didn't know what an origin story was, I just thought the origin was what you called issue 1 whether you explained the powers or not, so his "origin issue" began with him stopping a bank robbery; the robber shot at him, he dodged the bullets, then snatched the gun with his lizard tongue and ate it.

My teacher didn't like that AT ALL.

I got sent to the front office, and the assistant principal interrogated me for half an hour. She kept talking into a walkie talkie she had clipped to her belt, so I thought I was in DEEP dog shit. I was scared out of my mind! She was accusing me of threatening other students, of planning to bring a gun to school, of being a danger to myself and others. I thought I was gonna be expelled or jailed or something. Choking back tears, my little 10 year old self had to try and explain that it was a bank robber shooting at a superhero, not me shooting at another student. I explained the plot I had planned out (I only managed to finish one page before they took it from me), and that he was eating the gun, not committing suicide by putting it in his mouth. It was benign, there were more violent visuals on cartoons they let us watch, and my drawings were literally faceless stick figures. They just wanted to make an example of me in front of the rest of the class. I was escorted to the office by the school's police officer, so everyone thought I was being arrested, which made them think I was guilty of everything the teacher accused me of. You don't make a lot of friends when you're arrested for threatening to kill people. Cody, the kid who brought knives and an unloaded gun to school, he never got this sort of treatment. He was a little bucktoothed varmint, the kind of kid who you wouldn't be surprised to learn tortured animals (I don't know if he did, but he looked and acted like he would). He's also the first person to introduce me to the song Last Resort by Papa Roach. He liked to sing it, especially on field trips, "cut my life into pieces, this is my last resort, suffocating, no breathing, don't give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding." He thought the F-word was funny, and liked to make suicide jokes, pretending to slit his wrists as he sang the song. I never learned what happened to him, he just didn't show up when fifth grade started. Don't know if he was expelled or if he moved or what, didn't know, didn't care, wasn't his friend, didn't like him, forgot about him until I was old enough to learn about school shootings in the news, probably high school or college aged, and realized that we dodged a bullet (no pun intended)

Cody was the kid who needed therapy. I just wanted to draw a comic book.

[thefloresgarden]

Sad tales of a 20 something. -FRIENDS AND WEIRD WAYS TO FIND THEM-

Hello! Back again from a long ass time of taking a break from this site and my 2 followers who don’t even reblog my writings.

Anyway, the reason i’m back is because i actually show this blog to one of my bestestssss friends in the world and encourage me to keep going and well here i am.

So i was thinking, maybe since a friend of mine made me come back, I should write about that. So this is it, an Ode to my friends.

I have always been sort of a friendly character, at least in my mind i am. Even when i was a kid and used to cry a lot and be a bit on the side shy, I always had a lot of friends. I even dare to say I was one of the first girls in my fifth grade class yo have actual good guy friends, not only the “popular” kids that chased girls to see under their skirts. Actual good and close friends that I’m still friends with.

So, I went to the same school from elementary until high school, meaning that i had been with the same people for around 12 years, and damn i was tired of it, not from my friends, not from a lot of people to be honest, but maybe more with myself and my lack of abilities to make new friends.

That leads me to my new found weird way to make friends. It started in college when i started as a music engineer major before switching to media and film. Engineering not always equals to men, in this case i guess it did. Some may say having all guy friends is easier no drama and shit, and is true for some part, I’m still grateful of all the guys of my Music engineering program that adopted me and ate lunch with me every day, not to the rest of engineering students that are “nice guys” by mansplaining anything on the math class board before the teacher (female) started explaining, though not gonna lie i didn’t understand shit, i still didn’t want some greasy hair guy with a weird stain on his shirt,that i pray it was toothpaste, to explain me shit. I can fail this class on my own thank you very much.

My first girl friend in college was a girl on the bus that i knew my cousins was a friend with but never formally met her before and i chatted her ear off in the way home, i was so excited i forgot i could be a chatty bitch when i feel happy. When they left the bus (her and her roommate who is lovely too) I started to replay everything we talked about and was already very much regretting living because i was so cringey. I guess i wasn’t that bad, I got a Facebook friend request and became pretty close after that.

First friend I made in my new major program (who i made before switching because of mutual clases) was a girl that i always saw in my favorite class, “Signs, symbols and significances” she was funny, very friendly and clearly friends with at least three quarters of the class. I decided that was my next mission, i left my guy friends side after an exam in our common class and went literally running towards her and another girl (amazing person too) I asked them in the most awkward way how the exam was for them and even if they thought i was weird they didn’t show it and were so nice with me.

I made a mistake though, I told the girl i had a mission on (to be close to) she seemed familiar outside class and she said i did too but we couldn’t remember where from. Until I realized she was the girl that i met in my first day of school in math class and sat next to her. That, until i didn’t hear my name while checking the list and was told that wasn’t the math class, everyone laughed i stand up and trip and yell “puta madre” so hard everyone laughed again. I then found out that story was so funny to her she actually used it as an ice breaker when meeting new people and started introducing me as the “puta madre” to everyone. At least she got me a lot of new friends, and besides having passed more than 5 years, she still reminds me of it and she still is one of my closest friends.

Another story, I was an exchange student and knew nothing about the culture (only basics, didn’t want to be rude), the language or anyone in this new country. I was so lost I literally was trying hookup apps to meet friends (never works tho, at least on me). It was my second day in Seoul and saw there was a kpop concert of one of the three groups I actually knew and my baby brother was a fan of, i checked and there were some tickets left, bought them, put on a pretty dress and left. Going to a concert alone is not that bad, going to a concert alone in a country you have been for 5 minutes and also understand shit, that is a fucking nightmare.

I met some friendly girls from USA that helped me out to figure the shit out in the venue, they told me they were living in Korea for like 5 years and still couldn’t even read, which i thought wow kinda disrespectful but anyway i wasn’t going to let go of anyone friendly anytime soon. Met some other girls that came to the country only for the concert which wow commitment. And then I was left alone again when taking the seats (standing spots to be exact). The concert was cool even if I didn’t understand shit and I’m 87% sure I even caught eyes with some of the guys in the group a few times. The concert ended and I wish I could say I captivated one of the kpop guys and that is my next friend meeting story but, nope is not and honestly i wouldn’t change it for any of the hot men that were on stage.

Fast forward the first day of school, i was lost and ask a girl for a classroom, she was very nice and told me where it was but that the class was in like 30 more minutes. We made small talk and i sat on a bench in the opposite way of her. The girl next to her was saying she had this next class that sounded kinda familiar, and I realized it was my same class so I told her to go together. Once inside the classroom I saw her phone and she had a familiar face as her screensaver, it clicked, it was one of the guys of the concert! I asked her and she said it was him and that she went to the concert too and we decided to had lunch together. From that day on we became pretty much inseparables, until she got the sleaziest guy in the world as a boyfriend but we don’t talk about shit in my safe space so that is a story for another day. Besides that terrible guy and his best friend who dated me only to dumped me weeks later to play LOL 24/7, I got my baby, my mijita who i love so very much and again, wouldn’t change a bit.

Lastly in this post, not in life nor in place of my heart, is a little blessing (literally) that came to me from heaven! She didn’t even know this, but a semester before she was having her abroad year in my country I was in one my deepest holes in my life. My mind was empty but my eyes always filled with sad tears. That semester before, nothing major changed in routine, in my family, in my life as in general. But somehow it did in my brain, my heart was feeling agitated for no reason, my palms were sweaty and shaking all the time and my brain was as it was shut down. I got the big D, and not as in a big nice dick getting me fucked, but another type of fucked nonetheless. Depression, the kind of weird illness that can’t be seen but oh dude it can be felt, and felt is all i did, i felt sadness, loneliness even with a full house and a full line of friends ready to help me. Sometimes shit just happens.

Took a semester off and when I came back I decided to faked it until i made it, and it was going great. I did cry back at home a few times a week but i could hold it during classes or in front of people, great advance. I decided to focus in what made feel best, dressing in my favorite shit and letting everyone out of my arts and humanities department have a nice view of it. And then I see her, weird to say i still remember how cool she looked, tall as fuck, wearing all black, shaved head and what i got to find out were her trusty black vans. I got obsessed with her fashion style and decided my next mission, be friends with her, or at least for her to acknowledge my presence. I saw her talking to a close friend (another great meet cute story for another day) so i decided it was my moment, I said hi and was introduced to her, we chatted a few minutes and got along pretty well. Her amazing style and bad ass british accent made me feel i was in bad rom-com where we were both straight and platonically soulmates. I saw her again outside the bathroom while i was waiting some friends, we talked for an hour, she invited me to a party and we had dinner first (so romantic, I know) at dinner I thought it was going to be awkward until we both realized our mutual love for SZA and Idris Elba. We never stopped talking after that, she even went back to my hometown for 2 weeks with me, where all my family loved her and strangers treated her like a celebrity. She calls my parents tíos and we talk as much as we can now that she is back at her country.

I miss her everyday and there is not a minute I am not grateful i met her.

These are some of the stories of how I met some of my friends, my closest ones and those that are still with me in every step I take. I can tell you one million more ways of how i met friends i love so dearly, but that is for some other day my hands aren’t hurting for writing only with my thumbs in my phone.

And what I care and love most about all these, is that I would never want to change being the weird girl that catches a hunch and runs towards people that will mean the world for.

FRIENDS I LOVE YOU ALL. 

[wincore]

hazy recollections | huang renjun

pairing: renjun x reader

words: 1.8k

genre: boyfriend!au, fluff, nostalgia(?)

warnings: this has so much c h e e se

a/n: this is just a warm up fic and it’s like the cheesiest thing i’ve ever written smh also lmk if you guys want plotless boyfriend scenarios w nct

Renjun can’t for the life of him remember how you met. Or what the first thing he said to you was.

But Renjun remembers you smiling at him, the brightest smile at the age of seven, a gap where your front tooth was supposed to be. He remembers the incident—you had hit him with your soccer ball right in the face, and though the hot tears running down his red, scratched face were a little less than flattering, he found himself unable to yell at you. No, Renjun had muttered a timid ‘it’s okay’ and you had invited him to come and play with you. He remembers how different the pitch of your voice had been back then, how annoying it should have been, even if you deny it now. Renjun remembers the polite ‘hello’s you used to exchanged before it turned into high fives and eventually holding each other in a chokehold as greeting. You had also asked him to marry you later that year claiming he was the nicest person on earth, to which he had wholeheartedly agreed.

Although both of you pretended to have forgotten the promise by the time you were in fifth grade, you didn’t stop being each other’s best friend.  You walked home together (being neighbours was an added plus to your friendship) every sunset, and he remembers being coated in the blues and reds and purples of the skies with you through the changing seasons. Renjun remembers the smell of your old house every time he came over with the excuse of completing homework, but really he just wanted to talk. He remembers your mother’s appreciative glances and you pouting because you started to think she loved him more than you. He remembers tying each other’s’ hair up in the most ridiculous ways, accidentally breaking the hinges of your neighbours’ windows trying to retrieve your jammed kite and the time you had accidentally swallowed your stubby crayon.

Renjun remembers you climbing through the balcony, and you having to cover his mouth to stop his panicked screams when he thought it was a ghost. He remembers falling deeper in love with the stars then, with your engrossed face following his every movement, listening to each of his words. He remembers you asking him if he was an alien (“Because, Huang Renjun, boys aren’t as sweet as you.”) He also remembers feeling a thump in his chest, that he would never have believed would grow into something else.

Renjun thinks of you terror-stricken at the hospital, having to get an injection and letting you almost crush his hands (“I wasn’t holding it that hard!” “I have literal marks on my hands.”) He also remembers you sighing exaggeratedly every time he yelled at a stray bug in his room, and removing it for him with a smug look on your face. He remembers you always passing a pen to him in class because you knew he had a tendency to lose his. He remembers you calling him a crybaby, and although he wouldn’t admit it, it still holds true. It was the little things, he thinks now, that built up this entire thing.

The second time you had asked Renjun to marry you was when you were thirteen, obviously joking. The fact that it wasn’t the truth hurt him in a way he never understood, but it was a subject he had no idea of, a deep crevasse he didn’t want to fall into. He remembers swatting your hands away when you insisted he reveal his crush, telling him that friends don’t keep secrets.

Renjun remembers waking up on the bus when his head slipped and fell against your shoulder, with you already far inside dreamland. It was the first time he thought of the word ‘cute’ in relation with you. He thinks of the times you made him buy ice cream for you, and the times he made you do his homework, despite your blatant protests (You would do it any day if it was the price of his affections, but he didn’t have to know that). He remembers running down the streets after you, out of breath, when you told him you were too afraid to do anything, just to get you out of your room. He wonders if the two of you looked like complete idiots to strangers, wonders if either of you care.

“Sloow!” Renjun remembers you calling out to him when he deliberately walked much further behind you, after having a mild argument with you. He made a purposeful disgruntled expression at you before looking the other way. You had to work so hard to win back his attention that afternoon.

Renjun remembers telling you he was in love with you in his sleep, when he can’t say he knew the meaning of it. He remembers waking up embarrassed in the middle of art class, not realizing he was still there, even if the teacher wasn’t. Even if the whole class wasn’t there, even if the whole of tenth grade wasn’t there. But you were. You had smiled the brightest yet again (but this time with a full set of teeth) and in your excitement, you had knocked over his entire jar of paints, laughing sheepishly at the mess you made. But it was a mess he made too, and he laughed with his entire being, crouching beside you, the left side of his arm coated in yellow paint.

Renjun remembers being afraid to hold your hand; but when he started, he found it much too difficult to part from. That’s all there was in the beginning. You used to hold hands and call each other out for being cheesy if either of you tried acting more mature than you were. He remembers never feeling like a burden after he told you, he remembers the puppy love you two had shrouded yourselves in.

Renjun remembers the teasing of his friends, and swears he was not a single bit bothered by it even if the sprouting red across his cheeks seemed to tell a different story. Renjun remembers whispering softly when he was alone with you on his rooftop, the thumping in his chest getting louder with every brush of your fingers against his arm as if he were falling in love again. He didn’t kiss you that night; it wouldn’t have been right when the two of you were too into discussing the world and the universe and where you belonged.

Renjun thinks of being seventeen turning eighteen and the pinkness of the cherry lip balm you had used. Your lips were soft against his, and the rush of blood to his head had made him dizzier than your touch. There are times when Renjun feels like he belongs, and times when he feels detached. But the contact between your lips that made him feel so real and connected yet so euphoric was by the far the strangest feeling he had ever experienced. He can’t point out when the soft pressing of lips for barely a few seconds had turned into making out in the places no one held but you two. The back of the bus, the corner of your balcony at night, under the bridge beside your school, his bed, beside the campfire after everyone had been lulled to sleep. These places are marked now, and he’ll never forget how these places were so insignificant at the time, when he was so engulfed in you.

Renjun remembers wondering aloud if soulmates are real, in the middle of the night when bluish oil painted clouds cast shadows over the both of you. It was after your college acceptance letters had come in, and the fate that had intertwined you both wasn’t willing to let the both of you separate yet. You got an apartment together, and despite your friends chiming with their ‘you’re already a married couple!’, neither of you thought of it as anything too much.

Renjun thinks of you losing your mind every time exam season rolls in. With a head scarf wrapped around your forehead like a bandana, Renjun can’t help but laugh at your ridiculous appearance, and every time you say ‘it’s not funny!’ he doubles over, laughing harder. Renjun finds dates with you more pleasant when your exam stress has died down, and you look a lot brighter flashing your teeth at him, unafraid of the world.

Renjun doesn’t remember the little things that had led to you storming outside in the rain, but he does remember the horrible feeling in his gut. He didn’t follow you outside into the rain, and he regrets it because he had found you sick and alone on the steps of the nearby café when the rain had died down. He cried that night, when you were gone, and again, when he found you. When you had dried your hair and changed into warmer clothing and sat beside him on the couch, he took your hands and promised you he’ll never break your heart. (You had made a face, teasing him about how he’s getting sappier every day and he had whined that you never took him seriously, but you did cuddle to sleep that night.)

Renjun likes getting under the fluffed up blankets after a hot shower, only to wake up later and find you drooling on his shoulder. You complain every morning that he clings too much, sometimes smacks you in the face but you don’t seem too bothered by it either. In fact, there’s a smile tugging at the corner of your lips as you pour your milk into your cereal, while he thinks of a response other than distracted nodding.

Renjun likes the feeling of your lips against his after his painfully long classes; the movement is much tamer and familiar than before, when you were teenagers playing with the idea of love. He likes waking up in the middle of the night to find you already midway through your stash of snacks, and he likes going to the terrace, to point out his dear stars to you. Renjun likes calling himself your boyfriend and even if it still makes him a little shy, the flowers blooming in his chest tell him that it’s okay because it’s you.

Renjun likes the thought of being with you, of going on adventures with you; he wants to travel the universe someday, maybe become a bunch of intergalactic travellers. He wants to live lives with you, not just this one, but the next, and the next, and the next. There are still things to do, and people to be—but Renjun is okay with that as long as he gets to share his warmth with you, and you with him.

Renjun thinks, the third time you talk about marriage, he’s going to be the one asking you to marry him. In a few years, maybe. He sighs, already picturing you wrinkling your nose at the cheesiness. But there’s still time and he’s not one to blurt something like that out impulsively (unlike you) and right now, he has a sleeping you to worry about.

Renjun smiles to himself as runs his fingers through your hair and tells you that he loves you.

[oneemofungirl]

~Chan’s Top 5 Lies~

So~I recently answered an ask and in one of the answers I wrote that I have a lot of stories of me faking stuff and thank you @virtuallytakenby for being curious about it. Feel free to pause and come back to it because I know this is long af XD Also remember that I don’t do these anymore, lying for your own benefit is bad! and I do not condone lying! So please do not follow my behavior but anyways I hope you find some entertainment in these stories. <3

LIE #1 I Have A Punctured Heart💘

- Probably the biggest thing I’ve faked is telling people that I have a punctured heart. I remember when I was in fifth grade I used to get chest pain a lot and for some reason it led me to believe that I had some sort of heart disease(lol). One day, I guess I was reaaaally deprived of attention that I began telling people stuff like “Hey, I have a heart disease.” and I remember everyone being like “Omygosh really? No wonder I always see you clutching at your chest and having difficulty breathing.”. But the truth was that I had planned all of that beforehand, making sure to fake having difficulty in breathing every half an hour at school. Then when I went into high school, I was reaaally lazy and I hated PE so I continued the lie and I was exempt from literally all the running competitions I used to participate in. Now I do participate in PE and I make sure to get active every now and then.

LIE #2 I Have A Rich Fiancé💍

- Okay. This one is stupid, no joke. Also in fifth grade, everyone had boyfriends and girlfriends and I felt really left out. So I made up this elaborate story that my mom had a friend who was really rich and really liked me so she wanted me to marry her son so we were in an arranged marriage or some shit. And omfg as a kid I was so dumb that I fabricated sooo many text messages in WhatsApp of us. My dumbass even faked being cheated on by him not once! But three frikin times! I used my cousin’s photo as my fake fiance and bought a few stuff to show people and tell them that my ‘fiance’ bought them for me. I continued this lie until my first year in high school. I even frikin told my real boyfriend that I was cheated on. Everyone believed me, and I still feel really bad. So please guys even if y’all don’t have a boyfriend/girlfriend, don’t be going around lying and stuff, it really doesn’t even help one bit. If anything it makes being single even worse!

LIE #3 My Lesson Is Over 🎸

- I was a little devil omg. For this one, I was in fourth grade(crazy I know) and I had guitar lessons. But back then I hated playing the guitar(so stupid i know) and I really didn’t want to go to my classes anymore. So, what I did was flip this round clock I had in my living room(it had roman numbers so I could flip it and people wouldn’t know it was flipped). My dad was supposed to leave to work about a half an hour after my class, so I flipped it to show that my dad was late and he noticed and told my mom about it. My dad went to work and I stayed home because they thought I missed my lesson lmao. I ended up telling my mom I didn’t want to have guitar lessons anymore and stopped but my mom still had to pay for that day’s class even if I didn’t attend and I’m pretty sure my teacher was waiting for me because I didn’t leave a notice earlier. My lesson from this is that you guys should tell the truth if you don’t want something, lying only affects you and others.

LIE #4 My Friends Don’t Want To Watch This 📽

- For this one, I think I was in second year of high school. This one isn’t that extreme but I still faked it really well. I was out hanging out with one of my old friends and we wanted to see this horror movie together. But~ turns out that it was only for 18 & above so the ticket seller recommended another movie for us and I think we were both dazed or something so we agreed. Of course after that we regretted buying the tickets because they were so expensive.The tickets were non-refundable so we proceeded to make up a story and tell the ticket seller that we would be coming back at night to watch another movie with a few other friends. It took some convincing and at one point the manager actually came and got involved lol. In the end we got the tickets refunded and spent it on our equally as expensive lunch. But of course the lesson from this is please listen to what people are telling you, even more so when someone is trying to sell something to you. You might not even realize you spent your money until you regret it.

LIE #5 I’M POSSESSED 👻

- This one isn’t that bad because everyone had a laugh after this XD. This one is more recent(actually happened 4 days ago lol). I was in Melaka for a busking event(I sang but no one cares) and I had to share rooms with 6 other girls. Honestly was the first time I had a sleepover with other strangers. We bonded that night and stayed up super late. I had an idea at first, it was to scare them and tell them that ghosts would roam at 3:00AM(Bloody Mary lol). They got scared but didn’t sleep when it was 3:00AM. So naturally, as the evil person I am, I felt daring enough to scare them with a few ghosts stories(some of them were real tho) and I went in and out of our room and made it feel like there were ghostly things happening (At one point I actually saw a light flashing but we’re here to talk bout lies, my people). Then one thing led to another and I had this funny idea to scare them further. I told them that I could get possessed and that something was making me feel daring enough to expose them to ghosts. One of them was a kid, and she brought like amulets? with her, and she made me wear two of them. I scared them so much that we ended up sleeping late past 4:00AM. Don’t regret it though because we had so much fun XD and don’t worry I didn’t really spook them to the point where they’d be scarred for life, making sure to keep it fun.

Whoo! This was fun another post of me oversharing lmao hope you guys learnt something from this. For the record I'm not proud of any of these maybe the last one Anyways~ if you guys wanna do something like this too go ahead! I'm honestly intrigued to hear some of your crazy stories~ That's it for this though XD babaiiii 👋👋👋

[moonriverandkamila]

I’m feeling 22! (Part 1)

Today, May 4th of 2020, I turned 22 years old. 

When I was in kindergarten (although it was more of a daycare), I remember being scared of going to class without my mother. I was a fast-walker, and my house and my school was just a-minute-distance. I am still not sure if it was my shy personality or the fear of making mistakes - and being scolded for it, that made me fear being away from a guardian who could defend me from a teacher. 

When I was in elementary:

On first grade, I experienced having a crush at first sight, who was a boy that was smaller than me, and a girl that I decided would be my best friend because she gestured me to sit with her during the first day of class. I remember during a math class, our teacher was not in the classroom and she had us answer, or maybe copy some addition and subtraction from a textbook. Maybe it was pride that didn’t make me stop, but I ran around the classroom during our whole period while I watch my classmates do their work. I was scolded by my teacher, and I had to stay in class during lunch time. Looking back, I think my shyness disappeared during elementary. 

On second grade, I met new classmates. I had a feeling that my adviser didn’t like me, but I was a child who wanted attention so I think I wasn’t the only one who worried about not being liked. One afternoon, a mischievous classmate, who sat behind me, told me he’s going to whisper something in my ear. I leaned closer to him, and he kissed me on the cheeks. Back then, I was laughing and cringing. Now, I wonder if he actually had a crush on me. My father was the one to drive and fetch me to/from school, but I remember commuting in a tricycle because the driver told me he was routed to my subdivision – and I was afraid to say no. I rode the tricycle, literally saw my father on his motorcycle less than a meter away from me, but I didn’t call him. I told the driver to drop me off at the municipal office (where my mom is still currently working for) because I had no money for fare. I came there, with my mom on the phone because my father was so worried that I had gone missing. That was my first commute experience.

(There was also one particular memory that I had with my subdivision friends. We went to play in the subdivision court, where these rice/palay crops were left under the heat of the sun. My friends went running on them, playing, tossing them around – and I watched from the side, telling them to stop. They ignored me, so I joined them instead. A wrong choice, now that I think of it. But hey, I was a child. One of the house owners near the scene saw us, and shouted her lungs out, calling us. She sounded very angry. She was angry. My friends ran away, but I froze on the spot. She kept shouting at us, telling us how it was so wrong that we would step on and play with food. Or maybe she kept on shouting because I was still there. Maybe she was just scaring us, and she had no intention of scolding us face-to-face. But I walked towards her, scared but, ready to be scolded. Alone. I don’t know how to put it into words now, but the tricycle driver incident and the angry woman incident made me think if I was a people-pleaser, a person who couldn’t say no, or just a girl who didn’t want to be bad.)

On third grade, I met the teacher who changed the path I thought I was destined to take. I didn’t know I had potentials, but somehow, she saw it (whatever they were) and encouraged me to take an admission test for the fourth grade special class - called SPED, at that time, but it literally just meant the highest section. I took the test, at that time I didn’t know what it was but, I just did. She came to our classroom one afternoon and she told me the proudest “congratulations” I would ever hear from a teacher, or from a stranger, when I passed the exam. I decided I want to be that for someone. Someone who sees potentials. Someone who encourages to taste and see.  I was good with those window drill cards, with M1 (Multiplication 1) and D1 (Division 1). Answering those was like an unspoken competition between my classmates, and I always finished first. No kidding, I think my longest record for that was a minute. Around our fourth grading period, we did A1 (Addition 1) + S1 (Subtraction 1) again. I took a longer time, while my other classmates finished them - not in a flash, I must say, but way quicker than I did. I remember looking at my adviser in the eye at that time. She wasn’t judging me, but I felt so embarrassed. I realized that time, that we are not always the best. That there are things other are better at. It made me humble, for a few months, until I became very self-centered – this one I hadn’t quite realized until college.  For some reason though, I comforted myself that I was good at the ‘higher’ level Math: multiplication and division. But none of it mattered when I went to high school, because I sucked so badly at Math.

On fourth grade, I attended the highest section class. I had no idea though. I had this slam notebook that I passed around for my classmates to answer – with their names, birthdays, favorite things, crush, own definition of love. Maybe it was just a girl thing, those slam notebooks, but I knew I really liked knowing about people. Not gossip, but just knowing. My adviser confiscated that slam notebook one morning, and she kept it until the afternoon. I don’t remember when, perhaps a few days after that, she changed our seating arrangements and she made me sit on the front row desk, on the third column – which made no sense because only shorter people are ‘allowed’ to sin on the front. But it would make sense if I sat with my crush from grade 1, the boy who was smaller than me. She read my entry in the slam notebook. That was the only explanation I could think of. I do not know the term, but after being loyal to my grade 1 crush, I ‘picked’ another crush as a joke, and it became an inside joke between me and my classmates. That crush lasted until sometime in high school. Then two real crushes in high school. If I count it, I actually have few real crushes that lasted me YEARS before I could move on from one crush to the other. I couldn’t really remember if I was attracted to them, or if I just picked a crush and stick to it. However, it mattered to me that I didn’t easily change my picks. I was loyal. When I was 18, rather than picking, I chose a guy I wanted to date. It was the same guy who, according to him, liked me and waited for me ever since I was in high school. Despite my indecisiveness, I was sure of him. At 18, I started believing that love is a choice and not just a chance to pick.

On fifth grade, I first experienced being unable to see at far distances. We had these cute wooden tables to ourselves, way different to the classic desks we were all used to. I was on the farthest corner from the blackboard. I remember my adviser telling me to get eyeglasses – there was this medical mission activity just outside our school that focused on giving eyeglasses to those who need it. But I didn’t come. I reasoned that we have a Math quiz and I don’t want to miss it.

The truth was I couldn’t go there alone. And I never had my first eyeglasses until around the third grading of my first year in high school, so I became so terrible at Maths and Algebra because I couldn’t see the equations on the board – and no words would help me understand Math without visual representation, not now and not ever. Because of my near-sightedness, I decided that Math wasn’t for me. It lasted until college, and maybe it will for the rest of my life.

On sixth grade, I saw two of my teachers cry. One was out of embarrassment. One was out of worry. Seeing the first teacher cry made me think “I don’t want to be like her.” Maybe I judged her. But after some thinking, it changed to “I don’t want that to happen to me.” It was a major shift of perspective for me, because that time, I realized that our mistakes or situation do not define us as a whole. There are just some ugly things that happen to us no matter how hard we try. The next day, she came to school and we had our class normally. Maybe it was an adult thing, just moving on after a bump. But crying, I thought at age 11, was not an adult thing. The second teacher cried out of worry because she thought one of my classmates had gone missing, after messing up an errand. Maybe it was relief? Or anger? I thought negatively (but not really) of my teachers who cried, but at age 20 (no matter how I tried to be professional, refusing to accept their Facebook friends requests until the school year was over), I cried out of frustration in front of my (practice-teaching) students. But on that day, my grand demo teaching, I was so proud of them as well. I made sure I told them. I wanted them to be assured, that I believe in them. Always.

In my first year in high school, I met my first official best friend. I first befriended her because she was seatmates with my crush from grade 4 (my second pick), the one that lasted until sometime in high school. It was a ‘bad’ motive to befriend someone, I know. But it wasn’t like I did it to harm her or anyone. (Are our motives justified if we think that way?) And she couldn’t care less about him being her seatmate, that we became friends just because. No idea how, but we just did. Whenever I open my Facebook, and those Facebook memories pop up, our posts and conversations appear – and I realized that I was really self-centered. It made me thankful that she remained being my friend. It was too late to ask her now if I annoyed her or offended her. The dislike I felt from my other high school friends was so obvious – but no matter how I try, I couldn’t remember a moment that I felt that she disliked me. Maybe she was just good at concealing her feelings. After several years, despite the differences in our streams and boats, she is still one of the few friends I trust and treasure. Maybe I wish things were different, but remaining on one place just because is good for me, too.

In my second year in high school, I met new friends who introduced me to Kpop – and I had no idea how they would bring colors to my high school life. They all said high school is the best part of life. I used to think it was because my high school life had Kpop in it. Maybe it was one factor, but what were the odds of nine high school girls being friends and making colorful memories? Whenever I hear the word nostalgia, those were the memories, and the people I think of the most. The people who first pointed out my self-centered personality, maybe out of anger or frustration, or concern. I figured as adults, such feelings often roll into one honest remark that we often mistake as hatred or judgment. One of them, I remember, was so guilty when we talked about it after some years. Maybe she reflected on it. But I did, too. Maybe she regret saying them, maybe she regret ‘being mean’ but looking back, it was a good reminder to me. Maybe we identify our ‘mistakes’ or ‘bad attitude’, and feel sorry for them, and that’s a good way to go – but I love how God makes it for the good of others, too.

 In my third year in high school, I won my first competition (ever) in an essay-writing contest during our Buwan ng Wika (Filipino Club’s event). I remember my eight girl friends sitting beside me during the programme, and we were waiting for the announcements. The second placer was in the same year level as me, only she was in the highest class. And let’s be honest, I sucked in a science high school and often felt like I didn’t belong there. One of my friends comforted me, accepting defeat, I didn’t dislike the gesture. It felt nice, that her first reaction was to comfort me, and it was enough for me. But I was expectant, for some reason. Maybe it was my self-centered personality, although I didn’t really think I was the best. I just believed I was good. The host announced that the first placer, the winner, was in the third-year too. My friends cheered and screamed, the whole batch screamed. They knew it was me. I knew it, too. I went up the stage to receive my certificate, and on my way down the stage, I caught a glimpse of my adviser coming towards me, she was proud. I missed the steps, and I slipped in front of the whole gymnasium. They laughed, but I wasn’t really embarrassed – because I won. And even if it was a third placer award, I wouldn’t feel embarrassed too, I was sure. Because I won. I was laughing when I went back to my seat, my friends waiting but still laughing so hard. Two of my friends won, too. It was a great afternoon. I won in a writing competition, and my friends whom I treasured more than anything, as a fourteen-year-old, were there, not just for me, but with me. I became a total introvert in college, had social anxiety issues that made me miss classes on my final year. I started to say that I don’t like people, but that wasn’t true. I wanted company. Not people who would always agree with me, but people who were sure they would be with me.

In my final year in high school, I saw the remark of my teacher in one of my essays for her subject. She said I had a unique, good style in writing. It made me feel good, so good that if I think about it now, I would have bragged about it to my friends. But I can’t remember that now. The same teacher saw me and told me that I should join the campus’ school paper. But maybe I was lazy, or I didn’t see the point of joining in my final year. But I remembered thinking maybe I was worth being on a school paper, so I joined one in college. I remember graduating, and my friend crying to the song Long Live by Taylor Swift, as we huddle up, all nine of us. I remember enjoying the moment, the idea that I graduated in a science high school despite being so bad in Maths, or maybe everything except English. This high school had influenced me so much, making me think I am not good (after years of realizing that it was my perspective that lowered my self-esteem and not the curriculum) – but also giving me the privilege of being in good company, my friends. The future was set for me after that graduation. I already had a university to attend, with one of my friends. Most of us would study in Manila, and we could meet from time to time. That was my plan. That was what I was expecting. I was 15. I didn’t know that it would change for me. All of it.

College was not easy for me. I remember being an outcast in my block section because they disliked the university publication I was a part of. But I had two friends who stayed with me. We were inseparable. Not until we reached second year and had different majors. This was when I wondered if I was a bad friend who was not good with maintaining friendships.  I had many friends from when I was young and until now, and I came to a conclusion that I am the friend that you couldn’t remain friends with if you don’t see me often. It still applies up to this day, with few people merely making it. Not that I was a price or something. I was a bad friend, I admit. In my final year in college, in the year of social anxiety, depression, and missing classes – I told my college friends to “leave me alone” but in the nicest way possible. They were mad that I missed classes. They talked it out with me, communicated with me, but all I asked was for them to let me do what I want and have to do, all by myself. But I have a reason! Now that I think about it, it was so immature. I felt guilty that they had to deal with the “Where is she?” “Is she coming to school today?”  and being stuck with an irresponsible friend who does not even speak whenever she comes to class.

I was wrong. I realized I was just being ignorant of the company I have in them, refusing to admit that I need their help. Or that I need anyone’s help. The next day after I told to leave me alone, they let me do what I had to do. Of course, it would be wrong to think that they abandoned me after I tell them that. But I never really thought that way. They were the nicest friends, the deepest friends. We refused to badmouth our classmates (but not always, haha), refused to “help” each other by cheating, refused to do anything that is wrong. Instead, we pointed out what was wrong. We pointed out what we needed to do properly. Pointed out what was wrong with me. Pointed out what I need to do properly. They were not the type to get sick of a friend and leave them hanging. They were the friends who communicated with me, and friends who wanted to be my company. We didn’t graduate together, of course. I stayed for one more year in college, completing the required courses for me to graduate. I stayed for one more year, and they were with me. I was not with them for their final year in college, but they were there for mine. I learned a lot of things in college. My darkest days, yet, were in college. But in those dark days, I was enlightened by one realization: It is a gift to have a friend who corrects you; communicates with you; comes to you even in during your stormy seasons.

 Today, I turned 22.

I’m feeling 22.

Unsure, afraid, but thankful.

Joyful.

I looked back in my life so far. Suddenly, all the things I expected and wanted to have and achieve at 22 weren’t as important as the things I learned from my past.

If it weren’t for Jesus and for the people He allowed in my life to be my company, I wouldn’t have felt this joy.

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a list of my entirely way too niche headcanons ive actually implemented for everyones imagination:

name options ive used and refuse to retire: david elizabeth strider (sometimes i dont feel like being a douche to others and saying thats not his name), harley davidson strider, and david james strider for the sake of simplicity

im not gonna tell yall the like. oc exes ive given him bc thatll take eighteen years. 

i dont rlly have an explanation on the ghost thing besides the fact he just can? ive occasionally pulled from family ghost stories and experiences bc i somehow got landed with family members who lived in a haunted house for a decade and enjoy scaring me with all the stories (including the time my cousin literally died on the kitchen floor from a bronchial spasm and one of the friends that was over asked my aunt later what was up with the old man she saw in the corner of the room that night - my cousin is fine btw shes just a huge bitch and a third grade teacher and i dont like her)

whether or not hes done drugs is based on absolutely nothing besides how im feeling in that moment. either hes the designated driver and sober friend forever or he got fired from his job after doing a line at work during graveyard with some random customers theres no inbetween (this absolutely happened @ waho. if dave works at waho hes a mess of a person and thats on the diner itself.)

ok look i hc dave w/schizophrenia besides when i was 14 i had a hyperfixation with learning about it and then at 16 was prescribed a medication and had side effects so wack my therapist genuinely thought 14 yr old me was onto something and its a weird way to cope with the idea that lady put in my head that i might “develop it in my twenties” which i turn 20 this year and i havent been able to stop obsessing and panicking over the prospect so PLEASE dont come in my inbox calling me ableist im not out here all harley quinn in suicide squad with the voices ok hes medicated, he goes to therapy, the hard fast delusion that lil cal was nearly sentient and informed bro of every single thing dave did no matter how asinine it was is no longer a debilitatingly affecting him ANYWAYS

i actually use the chicken/egg farming family pretty often just because its hilarious to me to give dave like. an actual mom and dad. hes literally an uncle to like three different kids he just never visits because they make fun of his skinny jeans and he hates one of his (incredibly bare-bones ocs all of them) brothers who threatened to bash his head in with a little league bat after dave broke his star wars lego set apart on accident (but not rlly) so their parents were like “why dont you stay with your brother in the big city for a lil while champ” and then they just never picked him back up? and thats on favoritism 

the other one is that his name is actually david reed and hes the middle child of a family of three who literally live the standard golden retriever white middle class life only they went to disney land or something equally as dumb one year when dave was like 6 and he wandered off so bro literally just went “huh free game” because frankly he was an idiot who thought maybe i should take this kid home because its real dangerous in parking lots and then it was too late to NOT have it seem like a kidnapping and thats why daves never had a summer job, seen his birth certificate, or gone to school. but vaguely remembers what kindergarten was like and having a pet dog and calling someone mom as a kid. 

im not making a bullet point about his sex life headcanons just use your imagination and acknowledge the fact bro essentially worked within the sex industry and i enjoy putting dave through trauma as a catharsis 

i stopped doing this one usually but if he did go to school hes been in percussion since fifth grade and played the drums in his high schools jazz band as well as various edgy teenager garage bands he likes to pretend dont have a youtube presence and that hes absolutely never been shirtless in front of plenty of his classmates because he wore a hoodie to a show like an idiot. idk occasionally ill put him in an actual band he doesnt hate but keeps separate from his lil turntechGodhead internet persona (which i will ALSO touch upon in a sec) until they wind up getting looped into a tour with some bigger named band that has a show in *insert beta kid here*’s city and hes gotta come clean solely so he can visit his online friend. sorry derseasterous thats the one time weve ever run into each other and i made him have a crush on one of his bandmates i was in my anti-daverose phase where i made dave a hoe and also didnt want to admit i still loved the ship all these years later 

i hate it so much but you know the whole vr loli trap voice shit that was popular a while ago? hes fucking baller at it for some reason. he did it as a joke while talking to bro and they both about shat their pants. if im feeling real ambitious, hes got a separate soundcloud solely dedicated to doing dumbass rap covers or making his own but in the voice under the pseudonym elizabeth “beth” davids that he will never admit is his. well, he will, but hes gonna be really fucking embarrassed about it. irony or not.

talking abt seperate soundclouds and stuff ive always had it where turntechGodhead was his like. essentially internet fucking persona facade shit he used because we all had that phase where we wanted memorable urls and stuff but also didnt want to totally ignore the nagging fear of people finding you in real life, until it turned into real life ppl finding you on the internet. so he also has basically an adjacent set of social media under the same name but its just a boring username i havent decided on so everyone he knows irl doesnt mix up with what hes made for himself as TG and the people he knows as TG dont know what highschool he goes to. (this occasionally comes with the territory of ppl on parp being pissed that daves “lying” or “hiding things” from his friends as if he was doing it out of spite instead of just keeping embarrassing tagged photos and videos from football games or when he ate shit at the skatepark from fucking with his “rap career”)

every once in a while i get on a kick where hes just german. like, i just replace houston texas with hamburg germany and have him apply to a university in whatever state is applicable for whoever im chatting with and it goes from there? sometimes he moved when he was little and went through the whole visa thing, sometimes he didnt go through the visa thing, sometimes hes a dual citizen because of family and shit, its all dependent on what suits the situation best. 

one that ive been fucking with for a while but hardly break out (until recently with like 5 roses in the span of one day hell yeah) is that he has a neighbor at the end of the hall who is like a thousand year old witch lady that hes basically adopted as his mother figure in lieu of not having one and shes totally cool with it, especially bc when she kicks the bucket she fully plans on giving dave all her occult stuff so her figure-skating coach and realtor daughter doesnt sell it at a garage sale and lets it all go to waste. she also once brought rose up by name in a conversation without any prompting of her existence which dave didnt realize for days, and then one time cryptically stopped and stared at an empty space in the wall, went “she has potential, you know.” then looked at him sitting on her kitchen counter with a smile “lots of it” and hes thought about that weekly ever since. (it is important to note one of the occult items he leaves her is literally her own personal book of shadows shes been filling out for decades its like a 600 page leatherbound book dave has no idea what its used for but the sheer amount of homemade spells and etc in it is like. gonna murder rose the second this chick gets her hands on it i promise you.)

theres the standard strife shit? im not rlly gonna get into those theyre all basically cookie cutter bullshit. its just standard bro and dave abuse talk. i like to inclulde the whole 24hr live cam up in the apartment that definitely watches dave in every room besides his own and the bathroom, but that quickly delves into the prospect of middle-aged men stalking him online and basically sexually harassing him in his own god damn home by talking about how they can see him just trying to take his shoes off in the living room after getting home and frankly? its not one of my best takes! but once you throw it into the headcanon bin, its there forever. 

he actually really does do something with his photography but not enough to warrant anything exciting, but he has his own branding for it and regularly takes pictures of his friends or anything else he thinks is moderately interesting enough to take pictures of, but those are just thrown into shoeboxes under his bed in favor of posting genuine shots because he wants to keep his image intact and blurry photos of jade smiling in the tree they climbed up together while bec paws at the base of it while whining isnt exactly something he wants the whole world to see.

i also pretty often but him into either paleontology OR i put him down as trying to become a mortician because he thinks handing roadkill once he graduated from museum giftshop specimens to doing his own taxidermy on the side has prepared him enough to perform an occasional autopsy and start embalming real human corpses. (sometimes i put my own desires in and make them his bc i have to project at some point and put him through the same EMT course i dropped out of bc it was one semester and he already has pretty decent first aid skills, but he definitely didnt expect it to be as fucking wild at times as it is, but whats he gonna do? get a job back at waffle house? the company hes working for just offered to pay like half his associates in paramedicine tuition and hes already got all his pre-recs done when he started for paleo. at least its a stable job and hes got the ability to be compassionate in the moment) 

im running out of things that ive done to the poor kid. OH 

hes not a virgin he had a girlfriend all four years of high school (shes also one of his optional and designated exes plz keep up) and their relationship ends in one of two ways: she dies in a car accident a week before their high school graduation, or she stops talking to him entirely a week after their high school graduation until a couple years later she gets into (guess what) a car accident with her current wife/girlfriend and dies which leaves behind their daughter. who just so happens to also be daves daughter. her name is hannah and i love her like my own but no one ever likes her and thats on the conditioning of dirk. does dave end up taking her in? yes. shes awesome and the first time he takes her to the park to like run off some fucking steam she disappears for two minutes and dave is moderately terrified until she comes back holding a dead baby squirrel and thats the moment he realizes huh maybe things really do be genetic.

ok at the bottom of the list im gonna add the couple of times hes been a camboy which usually coincides with the live apartment cam thing and the amount of people in his dms calling him hot or whatever, but typically its more of a started the day he turned 18 and basically dipped around 20 in favor of showing up randomly with no warning to complain about a video game dick in hand because it gives him an outlet that wont annoy his friends bc this is the fifteenth time hes had a lot to say this week about a certain boss battle and also the comments fuel his ego and daddy issues.

the last one wasnt the bottom but literally unless its explicitly proven otherwise every time anyone rps with me there is the underlying fact dave strider was a goalie on his high school lacrosse teams all four years and (shocker another one) definitely had the hots for one of his teammates like major hots like first gay experience hots. like it was painfully obvious that teammate also liked him back hots. like one night at a team sleepover one of the other guys was like can yall just makeout and get it over with were fucking tired and dave really had the balls to be offended and ask what the fuck they were talking about while literally sitting halfway in the mans lap bc for some reason they had to share the same chair. 

he is also guilty until proven innocent of being the worlds biggest loner outside of that sports team and even though hes literally a jock he still opts to eat his lunch alone in the hallway or something like that and has a tendency to leave girls on read, but bc hes got an in with the rest of the jocks hes basically drug around to plenty of parties and since hes conventionally attractive enough and popular in the aloof way that he is, hes got plenty of tagged insta posts and twitter directs and snapchat streaks going. 

THESE WERE ALL NO GAME AND DONT INVOLVE SHIPS BC I LIKE TO KEEP MY OPTIONS OPEN AND THEYRE LITERALLY ALL BASED OFF RPS IVE DONE I HOPE YALL JUDGE ME ACCORDINGLY