#and public transport to go back to my town is HORRIBLE especially at night and ESPECIALLY ON SUNDAY

[vriendenboekjes]

girlie you did noooot agree to a group meet up on sunday and then when i asked what's the plan say i have work until 5 so we can meet up at 6. i thought this was going to be an afternoon thing 😒

[rainydaydream-gal18]

(TFATWS) Bucky x Reader: Protective- Part 1

 (Author’s Note: I watched TFATWS and loved it.  So here we are).

 The tension had finally fizzled out an hour or so into the trip- at least for a little while.

   Your consulting criminal, Zemo, made himself comfortable as soon as he set foot on the jet.  He was leaning back in his seat across from you, looking very pleased as he read a book and took an occasional sip from his champagne glass.  His contented demeanor had visibly affected both of your friends, Sam and Bucky, causing their irritation with him to skyrocket earlier.  But after some of the confrontations concerning Bucky’s inherited notebook from Steve, Sam’s music, and Zemo’s observations of you, things had finally calmed down.

   He was a crafty one.  He knew how to push buttons, knew exactly what to say to trigger each individual’s weak points.  Things had begun to escalate especially when Zemo turned his attention to you.  His piercing gaze had you frozen in place as he made inquiries.  While he didn’t ask anything outwardly uncomfortable, the probing questions about your life were starting to make you uneasy.

   The other two males didn’t take too kindly to Zemo’s attempts at conversation with you.  Bucky stared out the window with his jaw clenched.  At one point, Sam let out an exasperated sigh, causing the criminal to halt mid-sentence. He leaned over to raise his brow at you diagonally across the aisle of the jet.   “_________, is he bothering you?”

   You didn’t have to speak: the look on your face said it all, and Sam shifted in his seat again to look over at Zemo.  “Alright, that’s enough.”  His tone was firm and leaving no room to question.

   Directly across the aisle from you to your right, Bucky’s shoulders relaxed when Zemo followed Sam’s command.  The jet had fallen silent except for the muffled whirring sounds of its mechanics.

   You pretended to skim through a magazine that you’d found laying on a tray.  With one hour down and twelve more to go on the flight, you felt the need to unwind a bit.  Everything had happened so fast from the moment you agreed to go with your friends to Berlin to see Zemo.  After Thanos’ horrible plan came to an end, things heated up when John Walker went public as “the new Captain America.”  He’d even offered you a place working with him since you were part of Team Cap back in the day.  You declined, of course, and found yourself even more determined to help Sam and Bucky.

   You were happy for Steve.  You were.  It was still hard to have him gone.  For years, ever since the Avengers broke apart over the Sokovia Accords and Bucky’s framing, you’d followed Steve.  Even before then, when it was discovered that Hydra had been infiltrating SHIELD, you’d left the broken agency to join him as he continued his fight against threats to the world

   You hadn’t imagined that you and the others would be left to keep fighting without him.

   “You in the market for a new grill?”

   You were drawn from your deep thought to a set of dark blue eyes that looked from you to the magazine page that you hadn’t turned in at least ten minutes.  You chuckled and closed the magazine, playing along.  “Yes, I figured with all this extra time, I’d do a little shopping.”

   The corner of Bucky’s mouth twitched up in a brief show of amusement.  You rose from the seat to go to his side, kneeling down beside his chair.

   “Why does he even have this?”  You lowered your voice as you glanced at the eccentric baron, setting the magazine back down onto the tray.  “You’d think there would be more European fashion magazines or something.”

   Bucky’s eyes flickered to the man in question before leaning in to speak in an equally quiet tone.  “I have to admit.  We lucked out with him.  Not only does he have a lead, but he’s got private transportation so we can stay under the radar.”

   “I think we made the the right choice going to him,” you replied.

   “We can only hope,” he muttered.  “Seriously though, what were you thinking about when you zoned out?”

   “Oh.”  You averted your gaze, playing with the hem of your jacket.  You didn’t want to delve into your train of thought.  It was plain as day that Bucky and Sam were both dealing with Steve’s departure in their own ways, and you didn’t want to add to it or open up any healing wounds.  So, you settled on being vague.  “Just...everything.”

   He seemed to know what you meant anyway.  The silence that followed made guilt gnaw in your chest, but before you could say anything, Bucky spoke.

   “Hey,” he nudged you with his shoulder, making you meet his gaze again.  His eyes had softened significantly and forehead smoothed in absence of the lines caused by furrowed brows.  It was a nice change from the scowl he had since the mission started.  “Sorry we dragged you into this.”

   You dismissed the apology with a casual wave of your hand.  “You guys didn’t drag me into anything.  I was along for the ride from the beginning.”

   A comfortable silence fell between you then.  He returned to gazing out the window while you stood up and headed back to your seat, sinking into it and letting your head tip forward.  You figured that a cat nap was in order since you hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before.  All that business with an internationally-known criminal breaking out of prison had you on edge.  With nothing but the sounds of occasional page-turning from Zemo’s book and Sam tapping his foot lightly to the beat of music he listened to on his phone with earbuds, sweet sleep claimed you in no time.

   You were pulled from your dreamless slumber by voices, but your body wasn’t ready to respond just yet.  The first thing you noticed was that you were leaning against something on your right side, your face resting on a soft material that held the scent of leather and cologne. Bucky’s scent.  It must’ve been his jacket balled up to serve as a pillow.  In fact, it was his voice rumbling closest to you.

   “Stop looking at her like that.”

   “Apologies, James, but I don’t know what you mean.”  Zemo’s accented voice was quieter, but there was a sprinkle of amusement in his tone.

   “You’re doing it right now.”

   “Bucky, come on,” Sam interjected.  “We managed to make it a few hours without killing the guy.  Don’t let him get to you now.”

   Zemo’s tone took on a new intensity, as if he was gripped by fascination.  “You seem very protective of __________.  The way you move around her is intriguing, as if prepared to defend her at a moment’s notice.”

   “Don’t engage,” Sam warned in a low voice.

   By now, you were almost fully awake.  Despite the potentially awkward situation that Zemo was creating with the analysis of your friend, you figured it would be best to intervene.  You shifted, blinking your eyes open.

   “What’s going on?” you muttered, voice still a little rough from sleep.  “It better be good because I haven’t slept that well in a while.”  You lifted your head from Bucky’s jacket, eyes darting up to see him staring out the window again.  “Sorry,” you muttered, brushing a bit of drool from his jacket before handing it back to him.  He stole a glance in your direction again, not seeming to mind.

   “No big deal.  You needed the sleep.”

   Bucky didn’t say another word, so you turned to Sam for answers.  He shrugged with the shake of his head.  “Zemo’s being... well, Zemo.”

   You nodded in understanding, as if that simple phrase was all the explanation you needed.  Zemo caught your gaze, the corners of his lips turning up a smile.

   “As I mentioned before, we will have to go undercover to meet with Selby in Madripoor.  I was merely thinking of disguises for you and Sam.”

   He seemed like was telling the truth, but you didn’t doubt that he relished the added bonus of getting under Bucky’s skin in the process.  While Bucky had been protective of you and those who chose to put themselves on the line to prove his innocence when it came to the UN bombing, you hadn’t expected him to be quite that defensive in this situation.  As flattering as it was in some ways, it made you worry.  Zemo knew what buttons to push.  Would he eventually push a button to make things go his way?  To forward some plan of his?

   You got up to stretch and use the refresher.  You took your time since there were still several hours left in the flight.  Zemo had informed the group that upon landing, there would be  limited window to get into costume and go over your characters before heading to Selby’s club.

   - - - - - - -  

   “Only an American would assume that a fashion-forward black man looks like a pimp,” Zemo complained.  You stole a glance at your friend who gave his outfit another displeased look.  “You look exactly like the man you’re supposed to be playing.  The sophisticated, charming African rake named Conrad Mack, aka the Smiling Tiger.”  He handed his phone over so Sam could get a look at his character’s picture.

   “He even has a bad nickname.  He does look like me, though.”

   “And who am I supposed to be?” you asked, pulling the jacket over your form tighter.  You wore a dark blue dress that went to your knees.  The material was soft and had a subtle glimmer in the light, and the outfit was complete with a pair of black heels that clacked on the pavement with each step, a shiny silver bracelet, and the black jacket that you were glad to have in the chilly air.  The group was walking to the halfway point of the bridge to be picked up.

   “You will be my date,” Zemo replied casually.

   You gave him an incredulous look.  “Really?  I’m just the date?”

   He released a sigh before launching into explanation.  “You don’t exactly resemble any crime bosses.  Besides, it’s not uncommon for dates to come and go in this town.  No one will be asking who you are.  No one will expect what’s coming to them if we need to fight.  You may have the greatest advantage out of all of us.”

   As much as you hated to admit it, he had a point.

   “Just remember to remain at my side at all times,” Zemo continued.  “Make it look convincing that we are together.”

   You refused to meet his amused look.  “Yeah, yeah.  Whatever.”

   A black car idled just ahead, and Zemo once more reiterated how important it was to stay in character. He told the group about High Town and Low Town, though you were a little distracted by the city lights reflecting off the water.

   You squeezed into the backseat between Bucky and Sam.  The ride was tense with only the sound of your breaths in the small space.  Bucky stared straight ahead through the windshield even as motorcycles surrounded the car and escorted it the rest of the way.  The car dropped you all off near the club, and Zemo held out his hand to help you out of the vehicle.  He put an arm around your waist at a respectful level, but Bucky took one look and halted.

   “Okay, this isn’t going to work,” Bucky snapped.  Everyone’s eyes were on him.

   Sincerity was written all over Zemo’s features as he responded.  “I assure you, it will.” Suddenly, his eyes flickered with realization, though you glanced between the two men in confusion.  “I know you don’t trust me, James, and I understand your discomfort.  However, you are playing the part of the Winter Soldier.  It is best if she remains inconspicuous as my date.”

   “Wait, that’s what this is about?” Sam asked in disbelief.  “Who ________ pretends to date?”  Your eyes fell to the pavement.  The situation was already unpleasant.  The last thing you wanted was to bring confusing feelings into the mix while in the middle of an important mission.

   Bucky began to protest.  “No, I-”

   “Relax,” Sam said, holding up his hands to show he meant no offense.  “________, you can stay by me.  Smiling Tiger can have a date, right?”  He looked to Zemo for confirmation.

   “Excellent idea.”  He nodded in approval.  “Just remember to stay in character.  All of you.”  

(Link to Part 2)

[chaoticallysapphic]

just the start chapter one

summary: It’s such a sweet beginning and such a horrible end. Before you die for someone, you have to love them with your very being. You have to see just how much this world needs them despite their doubts and you have to be happy up until the very end. If not for you then for them.

a/n: I give to thee part one of the just a scratch prequel. This is a series that I will most likely very slowly update because tgt has my full attention and this is all I have for it so far. Please tell me your thoughts on it and as always thank you @medeliadracon​

word count: 3k

Your kids are going to be the death of you. It was meant to be an easy, minimum stress day where you handed the kids a test you’d been helping them study for over two weeks. Afterward, it was a lesson on the creation of the Earth Kingdom and its early history,  but ten-year-olds never like to make things easy on you. You caught three of your students trying to cheat off of one another and two forgot to bring pencils to school. Someone tried to feign illness to get out of it, which led three others to try their luck as well.  

Another one of your students decided to continuously interrupt what was meant to be a painless fifteen-minute lesson into a thirty-minute lesson that had everyone groaning in their seats towards the ends. You did not get paid enough for this.

You may have been a bit harsh by assigning them more homework than normal and it would come back to bite you in the ass when it came time to grade them. The problem is that if you yell at them or call them assholes you’ll lose your job so instead you decide to punish them with more work and you finally leave the classroom with a tense demeanor and a need to see your favorite person. 

You usually don’t let work get to you like this, you're known as the sweet teacher that everyone adores so on the days when you snap or hand out extra work your students know they messed up big time. But last night you may have lost track of time as you read a new book you had purchased the day before. 

You couldn’t help how it sucked you in and locked you inside its pages until late into the evening, so you woke up late with the book lying flat against your chest and your head laid in a weird angle on the arm of your couch. You weren’t able to eat any breakfast as you ran to school with half of your shirt untucked and your hair messily pinned back.

It’s early evening now and you know she will most likely stay late at the office so you decide to bring her some of her favorite food from a fire nation food cart. By now the owner knows you by name and happily whips up the usual as you tighten your coat around you. Summer is slowly saying goodbye and in its wake autumn is bringing a chill as the sun goes down. Soon enough it’ll be the best kind of weather to cozy up inside with a mug of tea and a novel. 

You’re suddenly thankful for your outfit choice, a pair of dark brown loose slacks that button at your waist with a white long-sleeved blouse tucked into the waistband. You do regret the pair of burnt orange heels you paired with the outfit, school required women to wear them which you felt was incredibly wrong with being on your feet for the majority of the day. 

Usually, you’d pack a pair of flats to change into but this morning you forgot it along with your scarf. So as your feet ache you decide to strike up a conversation with one of your favorite people.

“How are you doing today?” Kaito, the food cart owner is a sweet old man who you’ve been coming to way before you met Lin. It’s only a block away from the school so when you first started working there you’d rush out during lunch to get something to eat in hopes that food would calm you down. 

“I’m doing okay, although I must say the local gossip has kept me entertained today,” he places the boxes of your food into a paper bag as you hand him the yuans for the meals. You quirk a brow with an amused smile and ask “and what is the gossip today?” 

“The Avatar has come to Republic City!” 

“Wow, are you sure about that?” You grab the bag of food from the cart and wait for his reply before leaving. 

“Well, my buddy told me, said he witnessed it himself and I believe him.” 

“I’m putting my trust in you Kaito. If that’s a lie I’ll be very sad,” you say teasingly before taking a step back to walk away. He calls after you, claiming he’d never lie and while you know he’s telling the truth you still decide to playfully stick your tongue out at him over your shoulder. “Have a nice night!”

Those around whom don’t know you, which is everyone except for Kaito, watch in bewilderment at the thirty-nine years old woman who acts like a child towards the elderly cart owner. 

That little encounter helped ease your nerves a bit as you walked towards the police station, cars zoomed past as the streetlights flickered on to illuminate the streets. Lin had been talking to you about needing a mode of transportation, she hated you walking everywhere for fear of getting mugged, but you enjoyed walking. It gave you time to look back on your day and think about what needs to be done before your head hits the pillow. 

Some overpriced car will slash that time in half and with it your moment of silence. That being said it would be nice on your feet and back. You jog up the long stone steps in front of the precinct, a few officers are filing out for the night, all of which have slowly pieced together who you are. 

They throw smiles your way as you hold the door open for them before walking inside. Ishi, the lady who runs the front desk smiles as she watches you walk past with the bag of food in hand. Everyone here likes you, which is no surprise, especially since anytime you visit Lin is left in a good mood for the rest of the day. 

Phones are ringing as you walk through the main office where desks are lined up, a couple of the detectives and rookies offer a hello in between flipping through pages of paperwork or dialing the phone. Without knocking, because at this point you know it’ll just result in Lin yelling, you open the door to her office. 

You find her hunched over her desk with her glasses resting at the tip of her nose. She’s got papers scattered across the desk with her chin resting in her hands. At the sound of the door opening, she glances up and lets out a sigh of relief at seeing you instead of some officer. 

“Thought I’d bring you an early dinner and hopefully rip you away from your work for at least a few minutes,” you say as you set the bag down on the desk. She pushes away from the desk and, taking off her glasses, collects the mess of papers to help prep the desk for the meal. 

“You know you didn’t have to do that, right?” She asks you this as she moves past you to put the stack of papers on the couch. You shrug and begin to pull out the containers of Komodo sausage and spicy fire noodles. “I wanted to, besides I know you probably skipped lunch.” 

At the site of the containers from Kaito’s Lin shakes her head with a smile. “You know, one of these days I’m going to make you eat something other than Kaito’s food.” 

“Hey!” You look up with a playful scowl, chopsticks in hand. “I eat my own food and that meal you made me.”  

She rolls her eyes and comes up to pull you into a brief kiss, you smile as her lips touch yours and lean closer to her. Any ounce of stress left from your workday vanishes just as it always does when it comes to Lin. 

“Fine,” she says, her lips gently brushing against yours, she’s smiling too. “I’m going to make you eat something other than our home-cooked meals and Kaito’s.” 

“Never,” you whisper before pecking her on the lips. You pull yourself away from her, truly you want to stay in her arms and kiss her until you're breathless but you know she needs to eat. Plus you don’t want this food to get cold. “Now c’mon, eat up and tell me about your day.” 

You hand Lin her chopsticks as you sit down on the leather chair opposite her desk, she rolls her desk chair to sit beside you and picks up her container of sausages and pours them over the noodles. With your legs crossed over one another your foot brushes against her leg as you do the same. This is a routine picked up long ago, just at the start of your relationship actually. 

Most days you’d come here for dinner or drag her out of the office to eat at your apartment. She was grateful for your care, to be honest at first she tried to push you away, to keep you at arm's length, but she couldn’t. Lin gave up within two days of knowing you and has ever since been enraptured by your mere presence. 

“It was…” Lin sighs, “the Avatar has come to town and destroyed public and private property along with interfering with Republic City Police business. I’ve been neck-deep in paperwork ever since Tenzin came to bail her out.” She stabs her chopsticks into her noodles with a scowl and swirls them around to gather a bunch of noodles around them. 

“I heard about her coming to town but I didn’t know she did all of that.” 

“Yeah, and she tried to tell me how to do my job!” Setting your container down you reach over to rub your hand up her arm in a soothing manner. You tend to let off steam by reading or spending time with others whilst Lin bottled it up and let it twist into something akin to resentment.

 Thankfully she recently started opening up to you and somehow she was surprised by the fact that you actually listened to her. “She’s some privileged teenager who knows nothing about this city or the law, and she tried to tell me how to do my job.” 

“Lin you have to think about what you were like as a teenager. What she did was wrong, but they tend to be a bit entitled at times. Once she finds out how much you really love this city she’ll take it back and respect you.” 

“Well, thankfully she won’t have to because Tenzin said he’d take her back to the South Pole.” 

You roll your eyes at the mention of Tenzin, not being able to help yourself. You are a nice person, really you are and you try not to let people get to you but fuck does that Airbender get on your nerves. When he found out Lin was dating someone, a woman on top of that, he freaked out and somehow tried to make it about him. 

When Lin said she happened to like men and women he stood with his mouth open in confusion. You know how hard that was for her to say. You were the second woman she had ever been with, the first some one-night stand she had met some years ago in a smoky bar. But you were the first woman she had ever dated and for her to finally admit it was a big step. You had stood there with her hand in yours as you tried to silently support her. 

He shut up when she said she loved you. She hadn’t told him until a month ago so your irritation was still warranted, but you knew it was probably time to get over it. It just upset you that he expected her to spend the rest of her days alone while he happily creates as many airbenders as he can with the woman he cheated on her with. Due to him, Lin still held back to some degree regarding your relationship, which you understood and didn’t hold it against her. But you did hold it against him.

“C’mon, I know you hate him and I definitely don’t like him but at least he’s getting rid of her.” Lin sets her container down to thread her fingers through yours. You nod and gently squeeze her hand twice, a little thing you came up with a month ago. She squeezes back twice and you smile, she smiles back. 

“You’re right, at least he’s doing one good thing.” Lin can’t help but laugh at that, she slowly lets go of your hand so you both can go back to eating. For a while, it’s comfortably silent as you both chow down. Lin didn’t realize how hungry she was until the delicious scent of Kaito’s cooking wafted through the air. 

You’ve been happily in a relationship for almost a year, with your anniversary just days away it makes Lin wonder what these kinds of days were like before you. She can’t seem to remember, all the memories of this office that she can conjure up involve you in some way. 

Lin already made sure to have time off for that day, she scheduled herself to leave early and has even been scoping out the best restaurants and jazz clubs in the area. She’s surprised herself with how much effort she’s putting into planning this. To be fair Lin Beifong never does something half-assed but even when she was with Tenzin their anniversaries were a bit simple, and she let him plan them. 

“By the way can you be ready by six on Saturday for me?” You bite your lip with furrowed brows as you try to think up what's happening Saturday. With your muddled brain, it takes a few seconds for you to remember your anniversary, which is surprising seeing as you wrote it down in your calendar two months into your relationship. You even found a present for her last month. 

“Hmm,” you tap your chin as you try to fight off a smile. “I don’t know, what’s Saturday?” You quirk a brow and Lin knows you’re teasing her by the look on your face. 

“You know what’s Saturday.” She stares you down with an exasperated expression and sets her empty container on the desk. Biting your lip you try to continue playing dumb “I don’t think I do, can you help jog my memory?” 

Your chair is close enough to hers that she can easily grab onto it and pull it until your knees are touching. In a swift motion that you could definitely never succeed at doing on your own, Lin grabs you by the hips and pulls you off your chair until you're straddling her lap. The last of your noodles go flying to the floor, not that either of you notices, as you let out a shriek of surprise. 

“What happened a year ago on Saturday?” 

“Y’know I think I rearranged my bookshelf that day, it was life-changing if I’m-” You begin to laugh as she scowls, “being honest.” 

“You’re impossible,” she huffs. You lean down to peck her lips, your free hand going to cradle her scarred cheek. She leans forward to kiss you back but you teasingly pull away and watch as she chases after your lips. 

“Hmm, did I go on a date with someone almost a year ago?” 

“Y’know what I am perfectly fine going back to being single.” Lies, she doesn’t know how she’d cope without you in her life. You’ve added color back into her world and reminded her what it feels like to be happy, to feel loved and secure. It terrifies her if she’s being honest. Everyone she’s ever loved has disappointed her, she doesn’t know what she’ll do if you end up leaving her too. 

“Okay, okay! Yes, I know what Saturday is.” You reach behind you to place your container on the desk, it falls onto its side due to the awkward angle but you’ll just clean it up later. Now with both hands-free, you gently cradle her face between them. Lin’s hands rest on the curve of your hips. “What kind of outfit should I wear? Something elegant or something you can easily take off?”

“Why not both?” She says with a smirk. Lin pulls you into another kiss, this one is slow and less innocent than the others. Her lips slant against yours as she pulls you closer by your hips. 

You kiss her back at the same, slow pace, neither of you pushes further than the kiss. For a few minutes, you both lazily kiss one another, you missed her. Yesterday was so hectic that all you could do was call her when you finally finished grading some papers. 

Reluctantly you pull away, you’re all for going further, but just not this second. You want to keep teasing her, you just can’t help it. Lin doesn’t hate your playful side, if anything she adores it which surprised quite a few people. You were this cheery woman with a bounce in your step who looked at Lin like she hung the moon. 

Grumpy, bitter Lin, or so she thought. In your eyes she was amazing, she had a dry sense of humor that caught many by surprise, and she was so incredibly gentle with you. Before you even started dating she let you hold her hand or pull her into a hug, even if she did grumble about it at first. 

She wouldn’t tell you then, but she secretly loved how you kept coming back despite her trying to pretend like she wasn’t totally head over heels for you. It made her feel desired and important.

“Now you’re just being greedy.” 

Lin shakes her head at your words, her eyes locking in with yours once more. “I can show you greedy.” 

You slowly move your hands from her cheeks to softly scratch her scalp, she lets out a relaxed sigh at your ministrations. You smile as you move them further back, her usual simple hairstyle is messed up in the process, but she doesn’t mind. It’s easy to fix. 

“I’d like to see that.” You know you’ve egged her on, challenged her, and she does not back down from a challenge. Perhaps you could help relieve some of her stress on the couch before dragging her out of the office for the night. 

The idea of teasing her and dragging this out flees from your mind as Lin pulls you into a heated kiss. You can’t help but think when she slips her tongue into your mouth, this woman will be the death of me.

[essie-essex]

anybody here remember night blogging??

You know thinking back on how I would do things differently, I would probably have gone to another school for college. I had assumed that you were required to write a thesis at every school to graduate, and at my school we had I.S. (Independent Study), which was kind of a final 100 page paper + project that we had to do our senior year, in addition to taking classes. But my school offered me the most money, and everyone I talked to said that it was a good school. I remember my English teacher being surprised that I got in. I wasn’t the best student, but during my senior year I started to be more engaged and pay attention in class. I think part of it was that my family (me and my mom lol) hosted a Japanese exchange student that year. She stayed for 10 months and I loved having someone at the house to do things with, and I think having her around really helped me out a lot with feeling less lonely. So, my grades improved (with the exception of math, I actually did a lot worse in math than usual despite studying every night for hours because my teacher was horrible, but that’s another story...) and for the most part I did a lot better academically. Also, I started running, lost weight, and felt generally better about myself (I thought that finally after all those years of depression, things were finally getting better, and I was stronger, and blah blah blah).

When I was accepted by a university, I was so excited, especially since my advisor told me I wouldn’t get into college (because of that awful math class--like honestly that year would have been so much better if I had had any of the other math teachers who could actually teach, and I came to my advisor meeting thinking that I was doing so much better with my grades than usual, like I literally had A’s in everything except for math, in which I had an F, and I thought she would ask me about what was happening in math and offer help, like seriously who sees a bunch of A’s and one F and thinks “this student clearly isn’t applying herself” and not “clearly this student needs some help with this one subject,” but no she said “I just don’t know what to do with you. At this rate, you’re not going to get into college.” And I just remember being so upset especially since I went in there without any emotional armor like I would have put up if I actually had really bad grades and was expecting to hear about it, but right that’s another story, so anyway... )

My problems started after I got back from Japan. Before that, while I did still have my moments of depression, especially when dealing with my boyfriend who had his own share of mood problems which tended to be a bit more high key than mine, it was a lot better than it was in high school. I loved my major, I had friends who actually appreciated my presence, and, for the first time in my life, I felt hopeful about the future. I remember when I was taking the bus back to my city after visiting my boyfriend and one of my friends, and I realized that for the first time I just felt like a normal person. I didn’t feel like some weird defective mistake that clearly didn’t belong in this world.

Then I went to Japan. And I fucking loved it, which is why I was so sad to leave. I’m usually a really quiet person, and in order to be outgoing I have to completely turn off my filter, which, I realize, can make me sort of obnoxious. It worked for me at first. I made several friends in different groups so I could have different options and be able to go out with friends more often.

My school only allowed us to study abroad for one semester. So, I had 4 months to do everything I wanted to do there. Like I’m not an energetic person at all, but basically I told myself “I’ll sleep when I’m back in the US, but right now I’m in fucking Japan and I need to do everything.” But basically everyone else was staying for the entire school year, so they weren’t in a rush to do and see things like I was. My no filter self helped me make friends, so I would have different groups to go out and do things with (like I changed my personality so much that when I told one of my dorm mates that I liked to play videogames, she said that I didn’t “seem like the type” who would do that. Like she was genuinely surprised.) Public transportation and the safety of Japan made it easier for me to be more independent than I was in the US. My college was in a small town, so while I was more independent there than at home (where if I so much as opened the front door, my mom would come rushing downstairs wondering where I was going/what I was doing/why was I going outside) I was still basically confined to one or two streets in the area. In Japan, I could just get on the train and go. Plus when you’re a foreigner you sometimes get random people talking to you on the streets and can even meet new people since you stand out. I went out to clubs at least once every weekend, and sometimes even twice (the advantage of having more than one group of friends). I didn’t sleep too much and always wanted to be out doing things since I just didn’t have a lot of time. I met guys, went out on dates and everything, had cultural experiences, and I mostly just didn’t care about any danger because I was in Japan and I basically had no plan after that and had done the one thing I really wanted to do (which was travel to Japan). The attitude was also brought on by me not giving much of shit about my studies because I was so angry and disappointed for not getting a placement in a program in which basically everyone who applied would get accepted. It was especially annoying because it allowed me to get experience in participant-observation while volunteering at a place that interested me, but most people who did the program were just doing it for fun, like there were a lot of various sciencey majors plus at least one math major, and I was just really disappointed. Luckily this attitude I adopted didn’t affect my grades too much, since most of the classes were pretty easy.

So, getting back to the point of all of this, I realize that the real problem was my shitty attitude, and I should have made the most out of my four months and then come back to “the real world,” as my mother put it, and be the same person I was before. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. I have never been popular before, and having so many people not see my weird defective self was so exhilarating to me. For once I wasn’t the weird quiet girl. For once I could be independent. But then I was back to the small college town, and I wanted to go out and do things, I wanted to go to parties on the weekends. But my friends would mostly stay in and watch movies on the weekends. Like we went to the occasional party or did the usual hang out together and drink thing, but it wasn’t the same. I couldn’t be the same person I had been for the previous four months, and I didn’t take it well.

I had never had the kind of depression where I had brain fog. While I was still depressed in middle and high school, I could still do things like read books or write song lyrics. But brain fog made it impossible for me to get anything done. Like I could read a page and not know anything about what I read. I’d be stuck reading the same sentences over and over. When I hung out with my friends, I could muster up some energy, since I would cling to anything that brought me even a bit of joy, but mostly I just did nothing. I had this tiny room at the back of the house (we were a volunteer house and went to the local animal shelter every week) and I never even unpacked my clothes. Everything was in bags or boxes or in a clothing pile somewhere. I would have dreams of being back in Japan and wake up so disappointed. It was especially upsetting to think about all the people I knew in Japan, since they still were there. I tried checking in on people to see how they were doing, but--as is usual--they didn’t miss me nearly as much as I missed them. And I felt the same way about my friends at college too. I was back to just being tolerated instead of wanted. I always let them have their way and yielded to their decisions and just tried to keep my group of friends but I think a good number of them stopped liking me.

ANYWAY, getting to the point. I got on meds over the summer and felt kind of better. I didn’t having nearly as much brain fog. I was ready to do my IS and graduate, and then things went downhill again. My friends used to automatically include me in things, but now I always had to check in with them to see if they were doing anything. I started my IS, joined a local Pagan group to do my research, and started reading books to use as sources. My IS advisor was my favorite professor, but when I told her that I was having trouble doing everything because of my depression, she said “but you took care of that, right?” Like the meds I was on were supposed to fix everything. I just straight up never went back to her office. I stopped going to classes. I purposely avoided meal times and went to get food at times when most people were in classes. I stopped everything.

I feel like if I had gone to a different school, I might have been able to power through the year and finish my classes. Maybe. Or maybe not. I don’t know. This school truly felt like it was the best option though. They offered me the most money, and I was able to visit and write an essay while I was there to get an even better scholarship. I remember when I was offered a merit scholarship for the first time (for one of the schools I didn’t choose to go to) and I called my dad and told him they were offering me some money. He just thought it would be a few hundred dollars maybe, but when I told him $11,000 he was so surprised and was speechless. Like there was just silence for a few seconds for him to process it. The school I went to offered me $14,000 a year, and the scholarship I applied for and went there to write the essay for, brought the amount up to $18,000 (Sadly, this didn’t even cover half of the yearly tuition). It seemed like the best choice, even if they didn’t offer Japanese, I figured I could still learn on my own, and I didn’t realize that their IS program was so unique. If I had gone to any of the other schools, especially one of the bigger ones, I wonder if I would have made more friends. There would have been much more to do there. And all I would have to do was take classes and not be horribly stressed out by IS. Even if I was depressed toward the end of it, all I had to do was pass. Like even though I got good grades for the first two years, I would just need to pass the classes in the last two years to graduate. I got really off topic here I know. This is mostly just a stream of consciousness thing to get my thoughts out. And putting it here has probably stopped me from going into the kind of depressive rant that I usually go into when I write about my life.

Anyways, I’m not editing this or anything. I meant to write this while letting the Sims 4 load since it takes a while with the 938347283333 mods I have, but I forgot to actually start it, whoops!

tl;dr started writing this post meaning to talk about my college and senior IS, ended up having one of those sitcom clip episodes but in writing.

Also fuck my senior year high school math teacher, holy shit she was horrible at teaching

[shadowhunterdownworlderhybrid]

•A Little Bit Of Everything•

Pairing: Isabelle Lightwood & My OC Jennifer Reaper

I got sidetracked so many times because this originally was supposed to be an AU so please bear with me thank you for your time. ❤️

______

It was simple, take the picture then boom Isabelle had an idea. But it wasn’t easy it was actually pretty difficult for the small women to find something or someone to be her muse, Jace volunteered but Isabelle declined, don’t get the women wrong she loved her brother but Jace was sometimes to much he loved taking pictures of himself Isabelle couldn’t really blame him she did the same.

But that wasn’t the point, Izzy was doing a fashion design at home, she had the clothing down but nothing came to mind when she got to the colors, so Isabelle decided to use an old hobby that she loved to do, photography. Isabelle has an eye for fashion but she also has an amazing eye for scenery, perfect lighting and timing.

Aside from fashion Isabelle adored taking photos of things that caught her interest.

But at the moment nothing caught her attention or interested her. Izzy huffed in defeat deciding to go home leaving the park she was originally at.

—-

As Soon as Isabelle entered her apartment the smell of freshly cooked pasta invaded her senses which only meant one thing.

Jennifer was cooking lunch.

Isabelle made a Beeline towards the kitchen settling on a chair by the bar placing her camera on the wooden platform resting her head in the palm of her hand letting out a deep sigh.

“Uh oh I know that sigh, that’s the ‘I give up’ sigh, who exactly are you and what have you done to my best friend?.” Jennifer asked clearly joking with a hint of seriousness. Isabelle groaned tilting her head back as Jennifer set a bowl of pasta in front of her, “But seriously Iz what’s up?” Jennifer continued to question placing a fork in front of the women swaying her hips a bit to the music that was quietly playing.

“I have no muse.” Iz mumbled picking up her fork stabbing the pasta, “Isabelle Lightwood, not having any muse?. No that’s not possible Isabelle, you made a design out of a garbage bag and it looked nice! And you got that from where? A dumpster by an ally?.”

Isabelle shook her head chuckling a bit eating the noodles she stabbed earlier.

“Why not use Jace for muse?.”

Isabelle snorted covering her mouth so she didn’t spit out her food.

“Izzy he’s not that bad he models for Clary all the time.”

“I know but Jace sometimes doesn’t act normal when a Camera is faced towards him.”

“Jace does love himself I don’t know what to tell you there. Hell pretty sure if there was a second him he’d date him.”

Isabelle glanced up at Jenny her eyes casted down on the newspaper placed in front of her, she didn’t miss the way the corners of her mouth curled up, Isabelle found herself smiling too.

“It’s true.” They said in sync.

Jennifer looked at Isabelle meeting her eyes, their smiles growing bigger both women laughing.

——-

Later in the evening Isabelle found herself in her fashion and photography studio, Izzy stared down at the unfinished drawing that she created nothing coming to mind.

Isabelle groans in defeat she’s been staring at the drawing for two hours now and nothing struck her creative side.

“Why not red? You know like the iconic rose.” Isabelle jumped a bit looking over her shoulder to see Jennifer leaning against the doorframe of the studio her amber hair dissolved hazel eyes dropping wearing a shirt that went past her waist hiding her underwear, holding a cup in her hands. Isabelle gave her a gentle smile “I have at least over a hundred styles that are full on red Jen.” Jennifer shrugged “just trying to help.” She mumbled walking over to where Izzy was sitting leaning over her shoulder to see what she did.

“It looks good.”

“Yeah but it would look better if it had color.”

“And a hat.”

Isabelle looked up towards Jennifer “what?.”

“It is the winter time Iz a beanie would go great with the Jacket and pants, beneath the ripped Jeans would be leggings the shoes would mostly brown army boots with one of the tags hanging off the side.”

Isabelle thought of it, trying to imagine what Jennifer told her and explained into some details.

“Or not, i’m not as good at fashion then you are aside from that you can do it Iz, your a lightwood you’ll find a way to finish this and make it come to life.” Jen said kindly placing a quick kiss on Isabelle cheek.

“Here I made this for you, don’t stay here too long or I might have to drag you to dinner and bed like last time.” the women warned in a playful tone placing the cup in Isabelle hand “Coffee?.”

“Coffee.” Jen answered messing with Izzy’s hair before finally leaving the short women alone.

Isabelle huffed in amusement she adored that women, Isabelle looked down at the liquid smiling, not to dark or to light it balanced out, but it was mostly the foam heart that made her smile. Jennifer understood her well.

“Perfect.” a small ‘Just like you!’ could be heard making Isabelle laugh.

“Thank You!.”

Like I said, she adores that woman.

_____

Hours after hours Isabelle found herself yawning, her black hair tied up into a messy bun held together by different pencils and pens, The cup from earlier empty on her table.

Isabelle drew 5 different styles using some pictures she took years ago to help her, but nothing they didn’t give her the passion she would usually get when she created a new design.

An exhausted sigh left her lips deciding to call it a night, it can’t be that late if Jennifer didn’t come to drag her to bed, right?.

Isabelle looked at her watch, it was 8:46 Pm.

“Shit…” Isabelle dropped her pencil onto the platform of her design table grabbing the cup beside her pushing the stool back walking out of the studio turning off the light on her way out, quickly walking down the hall going to the kitchen order to clean the cup placing it in the sink.

Isabelle sighed rubbing her eyes, “what am I supposed to do?. I can’t think with a tired mind.” She said to herself leaning against the counter after a minute of complete silence and debating on what she’s supposed to do, Isabelle noticed a dim light coming from the living room, raising a brow Isabelle circled around the island heading towards the source of the light, finding a sleeping Jennifer laying on the couch. Papers laid out on the coffee table, Isabelle glanced over at them to see one word in bold RENT.

She forgot all about the rent, Isabelle was out of town for a couple months on vacation with the Lightwood family and Magnus, Jennifer wasn’t allowed to come because in her mother’s words ‘I don’t have enough money for another ticket.’

They both knew it was a load of bullshit but Jenny being Jenny told Isabelle it was fine she’ll live.

‘It’s gonna take a couple of months to get rid of the Lightwood smell anyway you and that freaking perfume trying to kill me.’

Isabelle smiled at the memory, Jennifer always tries to find something to tease Isabelle about.

Isabelle scoffed rolling her eyes a soft smile forming on her face “now aren’t you a sweetheart?.”

“Who pays 150 dollars for a damn perfume!?.” She Shouted in a playful manner a smile on her face.

“Me!.”

“Obviously.” Jennifer scoffed shaking her head.

•

Isabelle closed her eyes shaking her head at the memory quietly laughing.

The revenant took a seat by the sleeping amber haired girl noticing money lined up by the rent and other things, there were labels on top of the different stacks, Rent, Light, Cable, Gas, Phone’s, AC bill, Water bill. Taxes.

Isabelle brows drew together, how the hell was Jennifer able to pay for all these things for the past 3 months? Isabelle never got the chance to ever send Jennifer money because of her mother.

“She’s a big girl, she’ll be able to handle it.”

Isabelle was so mad when her mother said that, Isabelle and Jennifer were roommates for a reason, they split the bills, food stamps and more and of course they’ve always planned on living with each other since they were kids.

Why was the Light bill so high?.

Crap the light room…

Isabelle forgot to shut that off, after looking over the bills she noticed how each was was high beside the phone and gas bill, AC was Isabelle fault So was the light.

Isabelle sighed “you better not be working twelve jobs again.” Izzy said to herself, Izzy left before for a whole year because of a design project she was doing in London she was needed to make and come up with ideas for the dresses the models were wearing thanks to Magnus help, he knew how bad Isabelle wanted to be a fashion designer so he tried to help everyone supported her especially Jennifer. Frankly her year trip was cut short because of a call she got that scared the hell out of her. Jennifer ended up in the hospital.

Isabelle can’t remember the last time she got on a public transport so fast, she remembered bouncing her leg up and down on her way back tears in her eyes fearing for a best friend as soon as she got off the plane she called an Uber going straight to the hospital she told the Uber to take her bags to her house saying her landlord would be at the door to help with them. Izzy opened the double doors seeing that her brother’s, Magnus, Clay and Simon were already there all looking equally worried but Isabelle knew she was worst that she looked worst she was the closest to Jennifer, Jennifer was her everything.

Later on Isabelle found out she didn’t have enough nutrients in her body, she didn’t eat a normal amount of food she didn’t drink enough water or anything else her anxiety levels were horrible, doctors said she either passed out from hunger, stress, anxiety or exhaustion. All of those reasons made Isabelle feel horrible, Isabelle remembered everyone arguing with the doctor but she was more focused on the unconscious Jennifer on the hospital bed, she didn’t even look alive she would’ve mistaken Jennifer for dead if the heart monitor didn’t tell her otherwise. She was pale Isabelle couldn’t see her freckles as much, the dark circles under her eyes made her sick to her stomach.

At one point she had to yell at everyone to shut the hell up. Them arguing was gonna give Jennifer more stress and make her state last longer she may be unconscious but Isabelle knew Jennifer could probably hear them.

Isabelle was pulled out of memory lane when a small sound came from beside her, she looked over to see Jennifer stirring in her sleep a bit, then there were the nightmares.

Isabelle sighed crawling over to her lightly stroking the side of Jennifer’s head humming a song, Jennifer relaxed under her touch a deep breath leaving her, Isabelle watched her friend for a while thinking of all the times Jen was there for her. “You do so much and you barely get recognition for any of it… I tell you everyday and I’ll keep telling you, I am thankful for you I appreciate you for being in my life for always putting me first even when I don’t deserve it. I want you to take better care of yourself, I should’ve asked Magnus to help you that year but I was to caught up in my own excitement that I forgot, that was selfish of me and I really wish you told me of all the things you were doing, I would’ve helped you pay for your classes if I knew that paper was coming early, even if I did ask for Magnus to help you, I know you would decline his help till the bitter end because you’ve never enjoyed asking people for anything.” She spoke quietly. Playing with a strand of her hair.

“When I got that call I felt as if my world crumbled around me… I was so scared for you I tried to not think the worst but I did… all I knew I wanted to do was hold you and not let you go or let you out of my sight, I don’t know if I want to do this fashion thing if it’s gonna end up taking me away from you for a period of time, period of time that causes you to run all around the place trying to keep a place for us. It’s not fair for you or me, I don’t want to go somewhere and find out months later you’re in the hospital again because you weren’t able to have time for yourself.” Tears overwhelmed her eyes, “I’ve always wanted the best for you, as you did for me… be selfish for once please… do something for you…”

“You think you don’t have a calling or a future, you think you’re nothing but you are something you’re not a delinquent you’re not a mistake. You’re not bad I don’t care what my mom says, you are a part of the family you’re my family…”

“I absolutely unconditionally adore you and love you with my heart and soul.”

_______

Shadowhunters: @my-archerboy

The only reason I got into this was because of them, thank you sweetheart for giving me the courage to actually write this even though I’m still nervous about this.

If nobody likes it or cares that’s alright too 🙂🙃.

[sithlordintraining]

Sugar IX

tagged:  @itamenher @mundane-cup-noodles @hoe-for-kylo  @rebeccamaximoff

Sugar Masterlist

Summary: You’re just a girl who wants to have fun(d$) and live life and not have to worry about the stupid galactic war. Even though you are a school teacher for the Resistance, it doesn’t hurt to be a little bad sometimes.

“ It's Your Birthday and I'll Cry If I Want To”

Leia asked to see me in her office to discuss something about Bunhead or whatever. I walked to the office and the door slid open. Tentatively, I walked into see a holovid playing on her desk. I know I shouldn’t be looking at something so personal but, curiosity got the best of me. Moving closer, I could make out a child, a little boy to be exact. I could hear the high pitch yells of the exuberant tike; moving closer I saw he had wild black curls and large ears and beautiful big eyes, and I realized, it was him. I could feel my heart swell at the sight of him so young, so innocent, so carefree, so… happy. A clearing of the throat caused me to jump and see the General. “General,” I nodded and so did she. She quickly turned off the video and put it away. Before Leia could speak, I asked “Is that him? Is that your son?” Silence filled the room as she looked at the draw that hid the holovid. “He’s really cute.” Didn’t matter if it was pr esent or past tense, because it was true. “Do you miss him?” I asked. I was entering dangerous territories; speaking about him was off limits. “I do.” Those brown eyes seemed to glaze over. “Is it his birthday?” She was taken aback by this. “I-I don’t mean to cross the line, it’s just, around this time you always get so closed off.” I told her. There was more silence before I spoke, definitely feeling like I was about to cross the line. “You shouldn’t feel ashamed for loving him.’’ I guess this was also me talking to myself. “He is your son and you know him better than all of us.” Her eyes seemed to light up at my words. “He was a very curious child, liked adventures, always getting into trouble.” She spoke with a smile and I couldn’t help but wear one as well. Soon the meeting was long forgotten as she continued to speak about him.

The more I heard of his childhood, the more I yearned for something more. “I think you and Ben would’ve gotten along very well.” With wide eyes I stared at her with a breath caught in my throat. “Oh, thank you.” I mumbled strangely. What could I say, we actually did get along well. “Of course, I’m pretty sure there would’ve been trouble; I could see him bothering you while you taught the kids, like his father; you making him break Jedi code and both of you running off to some planet somewhere.” No lie, I was offended that she thought I would be trouble. If she only knew it was him causing all of that. She chuckled lightly, “I wish that was the case, he’s just a few years older than you, he’ll be thirty-” “HE’S THIRTY!” I yelled. I cleared my throat. “Sorry,” It was just I knew he was older than me, but I didn’t think more than five years. But, I guess seven years wasn’t too terrible. I mean only when I think about awkward pre-teen me and a probably gorgeous teen like him; I cringed just thinking about it. “Well, do you do anything for his birthday?” I asked. “It’s too bittersweet to reminisce about someone that’s everyone’s enemy.” She gave me a small smile. “He’s not my enemy.” It was true, I was just a teacher, never went on the field or crossed Kylo, well in that way. “Maybe, I know that I’ve been overstepping the lines today, but maybe we could do something that represents the true Ben Solo, not Kylo Ren.” I said. Tears welled in her brown eyes and I could see the similarities in Kylo and Leia. “I’d like that very much, Y/N.” Leia said.

Thirty was a big deal and I know he wasn’t my boyfriend or anything like that, but I felt the need to do something. I just didn’t know what. I couldn’t ask his mother, it was too awkward and I still wasn’t really talking to Kat, which made our living arrangements very uneasy. Transportation wise, I sought out to the First Order spies. The good thing was that his birthday wasn’t until weeks later so it gave me enough time to think of an idea. And I did! I mean, I couldn’t afford much so it wasn’t as grand as the trips he took me on, but it was quaint and intimate. It was a dwarf planet in a little town called Stowe and it was said to be great for couples who wanted to get away. I paced back and forth in the suite; it had a kitchen and living area and a large bed with large windows and the bathroom was pretty nice as well. The theme was wood I’m guessing since it was a lodge, but it was beautiful and everyone was so nice. Looking at everyone here, they were older than the both of us, but closer to him. I chuckled, I should get the old jokes up before he arrived. I heard the door open to reveal the old geezer. “Geezer?” He asked with furrowed brows. A wide smile spread on my face as I ran engulfing him in a tight hug. His thick arms wrapped around my waist pulling me close to him. He pulled back and his brown eyes scanned my face. It was so hard to keep my composure together with everything I had planned. His eyes glistened as he held a steady lock with mine. He wanted to say something, I know he did because so did I. “Let’s take a walk!” I beamed up at him.

We walked hand in hand, swinging, down the main street. I looked up and bit back a smile. I remember how he never wanted to be out in public for the sake of identity, but he slowly began to warm up to it and now here he was holding my hand and pointing out things and suggesting what we should do. All I could do was smile and nod like the love sick puppy I am. We were standing on the corner of a street when thunder roared above us. We looked up as droplets began to fall heavily on our faces. I grabbed his hand to run back to the hotel, but it was like pulling at a brick wall. Kylo stood there with his raven hair stuck to his face, pulling me back towards him. “What are you doing?!” I exclaimed. His large hand fell to the small of my back while the other one found my hand. He began to move me in the middle of the street, moving back and forth. “A-Are you dancing? Are we dancing in the rain?” I asked feeling my clothes get heavier. Little hums left his lips; “And you’re singing too? You’re enjoying this too much!” I laughed and a hearty laugh erupted from his throat. His head fell back with a wide smile exposing his dimples. So, in the name of love and his birthday, I decided to indulge this.

Making it back to the lodge was basically like fighting against the rain. Once in the suite, we removed our wet clothes and traded them for the large white plush robes. “You look cute like that.” I pulled my knees closer to me as I looked to see Kylo in his robes and a towel wrapped around his head like me. “Thanks that means a lot from someone as stylish as you.” He sat on the bed beside me. I couldn’t help but just stare at him, internally bouncing off the walls. “What?” He asked me. I shook my head, before delving under the bed. When I returned he gave me a quizzical look before I was shoving the black box decorated with Vader stickers in his face with the craziest smile. His brows furrowed as he cautiously accepted. Slowly, he opened it, eyes scanning the item. “What is this for?” He asked. “Happy Birthday!” I smiled, I was too excited to even take in his confused state. “Is it real?” He asked. Is it real? I was taken aback. “Of course it is! Weren’t you the one who gave me that talk about fake jewelry.” I scooted closer to see the gold chain. An amused huff emitted from him. “What?” I asked. “It’s just funny that you used the money I gave you to buy me a gift on a day you assumed was my birthday.” He chuckled lightly. But there was nothing funny about that.

“Um...I didn’t, I used my money.” I said. “And you expect me to believe that?” Why the fuck he was being so rude. “Yes, because I’m trying to be nice for your birthday.” My voice started to rise. “No one said it was my birthday.” He shook his head. The palm of my hands flew to my eyes as I growled; he was being so horrible. “BECAUSE IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY, YOUR MOTHER TOLD ME HERSELF!” I walked away and I could see this newfound information had him caught in a daze. “SHE TOLD ME IT WAS YOUR FUCKING BIRTHDAY AND I DECIDED TO DO SOMETHING NICE AND GET YOU A NICE SUITE AND A NICE GIFT WITH MY FUCKING MONEY, WHICH NOW I’M PRETTY SURE THE BANK WILL CLOSE MY ACCOUNT NOW BECAUSE IT’S SO DAMN LOW, FOR SOMEONE AS UNGRATEFUL AS YOU BECAUSE I FUCKING L-” The word almost escaped my lips, but instead I muffled a screamed and went to slam the bedroom door only for it to not budge. I turned to look at Kylo who sat on the bed. “Let go!” I yelled at him. “No,” He said with no emotion which made me worse. I continued to tug at the door that wouldn’t budge. “That’s not fucking fair!” I whined feeling tears brim my eyes. This vacation was horrible and was giving me a reason to actually hate Kylo Ren. He seemed to have heard that thought because his hold on the door stopped as I swung it shut, stumbling back. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you! I thought loudly. I was too angry to pull out the couch or even get a blanket. With arms crossed and a scowl, I flopped down on the couch doing the one thing my father said never to do: go to sleep angry. Because that’s how you get sick.

I didn’t know how long I was out there, but not long enough to actually fall asleep. Especially since I’ve been grumbling the whole time about things I should’ve said and making up fake scenarios. I heard the door open and continued to keep my angry stare at the wall ahead of me. “Y/N,” His deep voice called out. “Y/N, I know you’re awake.” I still didn’t answer. “Y/N come to bed.” “No.” I said sternly. I heard him take a deep breath. “I’m not going to let you sleep out here all night, so you either go yourself or I’ll make you.” I rolled my eyes, did he think I was one of his little stormtroopers? I got up and walked inside, noticing the gold chain that adorned his neck. “You don’t have to wear it.” I rolled my eyes again; Kylo was on my heels as I walked to the far side of the bed. “I want to.” He spoke softly. I nestled under the covers ignoring him. He sighed before slipping under as well. “Did you really talk to her?” He asked. I looked over my shoulder to see him staring at the ceiling. I reached over for my datapad unlocking it. “Every year around this time, she acts so weird; she’s short with everyone and zones out and secludes herself. I caught her watching a holo of you and I tried to just be there for her and that’s how I found out about your birthday.” I told him honestly. “She told me how when you were younger you used to hang these gold dice on your neck so you can look like your Uncle Lando.” I bit back a laugh, focusing on finding what i wanted to show him. “And how much you loved calligraphy, which makes sense with your notes, and reading; so I thought that she could have something to remember you by.”

I handed him the datapad and his dark eyes studied the picture. “The Ben Organa-Skywalker Solo Literature Scholarship.’’ He read. “You should’ve seen how much I had to go through just to use the name, so we say BOSS.” I chuckled, remembering the almost physical altercation that almost unfolded. He began to swipe, seeing pictures of children ranging in ages, with bright, hopeful smiles. “The money that YOU gave me went to this. All these kids know is war and I don’t think it’s fair for them to not have a choice to do what they love or experience life. Granted I ended up being a teacher at the Resistance, I received a scholarship to college and I was able to meet amazing people and create so many experiences and learn so much. And I just thought it’s the least I could do to help them to think that there is more than just war for them.” I shrugged. Kylo didn’t speak as he continued to look at the pictures. He then stopped at a picture of Leia and I, which I forgot was there. The pads of his fingers brushed over his mother’s face. He had no expression as he continued to just look over at the picture. It was weird, him with such detachment as his mother looked up with a smile. He placed the datapad down and turn wrapping his arm around me. His lips grazed my forehead as he spoke, “You make everyone so happy.” I looked up at him; I wanted to ask him so bad if this included him, but his eyes were shut tightly, tears squished between his lashes. So I opted to press a kiss to his shoulder and placed my head under his chin.

I felt lips and hands press against my face. My name being called caused me to stir; I moved closer to Kylo only to feel him to push back. Then before I knew it I felt cold piercing stings against my body. I opened my eyes to see the shower pouring down on me and Kylo just watching. “WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?!” I tried to yell, but my voice couldn’t break above a whisper. “You have a fever.” He said over the water. In the mirror behind him, I could see myself looking like a wild loth-cat. I moved to turn off the water but my muscles felt weak, so Kylo did it instead and wrapped me in a large robe; scooping me up he placed me on the bed looking over me with worried eyes. A large hand smacked down on my forehead. “Ow,” I barely made out. My head was pounding and supposedly hot, but I was freezing. “You need medicine.” He quickly left the room leaving me to let sleep evade me once again. That was until he came back to wake me up again. “Does your throat hurt?” I nodded. “What else?” He asked. And I pointed to the various pained points. “The woman at the desk said this should be fine.” He poured the dark-colored medicine on the spoon. The smell hit my nose and had me rolling away from him. A firm grip was placed on my shoulder to stop me. “I don’t want too,” I whined, my voice not even breaking the sound barrier. But he didn’t listen and was shoving the nasty liquid in my mouth. My eyes widened as it hit my tongue, to make matters worse I couldn’t swallow. My throat refused to let anything go down, so I began to choke and coughed it out landing it all on the sheets and on him. With heavy lids, I slowly peered up at him to see him frozen with disgust. Tears burned down my fevered cheeks. Too embarrassed, tired, and in pain, I slid back down under the covers. Kylo sighed, cleaning himself up.

I floated in and out of consciousness throughout the night. There were a mumble of voices from people I didn’t know and then him. When I opened my eyes, I could make out the warm chocolate eyes looking at me filled with sadness and the gentle feeling on my left hand; patterns being brushed against my skin that would cause me to fall back into my relaxation state. I wasn’t fully aware to what was happening until I felt myself moving. I felt his grip loosen on my hand and grabbed harder. “No,” I cried out softly. All movement stopped as his lips pressed gently against my ear. “Y/N, you’re sick. You need a doctor, you need to go back home.” Kylo whispered. “No,” I felt the cooling tears slide down my cheeks. “Y/N please,” He begged. “No, I don’t want you to go. Don’t leave me.” My voice strained. His hand that was entangled with mine began to tremble. “I’m sorry, but I can’t go with you, you know that.” He said, finally removing his hand from mine. “I love you.” Was the last thing I heard, but I wasn’t sure if he said it or it was my imagination, but I said it back anyway even if I was the only person that could hear it.

Outside POV

When Poe heard you were being emitted to the medbay the first thing he did was call Kat back from her assignment. The next thing he did was rush off to get you a large bouquet of flowers. Making his way to the medbay he saw a fellow pilot nod and go on his way. This said pilot wasn’t really liked by Poe. Something about him just rubbed him the wrong way. But all those thoughts went out the door when he saw you lying in the bed hooked up to all those machines. A nurse passing by cooed at the sight of Poe; everyone knew of his infatuation for you and well you, everyone just thought you were just a headstrong girl who needed convincing that love wasn’t that bad. Poe placed the flowers on your bedside and looked down at you with a pout. He gently brushed the free strand behind your ear careful not to stir you. His hand moved to gently brush against yours only for him to see something strange. His brows furrowed as he plucked the white paper from underneath the cover. He shouldn’t be snooping around your stuff, but the Darth Vader sticker caught him by surprise. He remembered the uproar from everyone when they caught you handing out these stickers to their kids. He chuckled thinking about all the trouble you caused. Slowly he peeled the sticker back and read the neatly written letter:

Little One,

I hope all is well. Hopefully by the time you receive this, you’ll be awake. I forgot to pack your datapad so letters will be our only form of communication. I’ve asked one of them to let me know of your health status. I don’t know what happened, but you scared me and no matter what I did, you weren’t getting better. It truly hurt my heart to let you go and to see you cry when we had to separate, because I care for you more than I should. What I’m trying to say to you Y/N is that I love you. I love you so much, it wakes me up in the morning and lulls me to sleep at night. Your love carries me throughout battle to make sure of a safe return. I should’ve told you truthfully when you first came, but there was something about you that I just couldn’t let go. Y/N I’m so in love with you, I don’t know what to do, I was so scared of telling you, I don’t want to lose you.

It was signed ‘B.O.’ which caught Poe off-guard. At the moment he couldn’t recall anyone he knew with the initials pertaining such letters. All he could think about was Ben Solo and how hard you fought to use his name for the scholarship you started. But he shook his head; Kylo Ren, in love, with you? You, talking to Kylo Ren? Where would you even meet him? You were just a teacher! His thoughts were cut short from the whimpers that left your lips. Slipping the note in his back pocket, he sat on your bedside. “Hey Y/N, how are you feeling?” You looked at him with furrowed brows and then at the colorful flower arrangement to your left. “Those are for you.” Poe pointed out. “And I contacted Kat telling her to come back.” Both of his hands engulfed your left one and he watched your (y/e/c) eyes study him. “Thank you.” You croaked. “No problem. If you need anything just call me.” Poe pressed a kiss to your knuckles and watched your lips part with a mix of emotion in your eyes. This had hope filling up within him. He sent you one last smile before leaving to find out who was B.O.

[artificialqueens]

Gone Tonight (Trixya) - Pichitinha

A/N: back by unpopular demand, it’s me! This is a bit different from what I usually post but it’s still full of cliches! I hope you like it even if some parts might feel a little unrealistic (it’s fanfiction y'all). You can as usual find it on AO3 and I’m here on @pichitinha

When Trixie is faced with the facts, she does her best to ignore them. They aren’t pleasant, they are the very opposite of everything she wants to be aware of right now, and she really isn’t going to entertain her crappy reality becoming crappier.

She’s never seen so much chaos in the city before. She’d left work maybe an hour later than usual, the last song she was working on taking a little while longer than she expected, and the storm she was met with outside scared her to death. She knew things were bound to be bad, but not to the level she’s seeing now.

It’s been an hour and a half and the rain seems to only be getting worse. Traffic is a mess and public transportation is completely unreliable and she’d decided half an hour ago that waiting would only lead to waiting all night, so she might as well just try to leave and get anywhere else other than the studio she was crammed in with several of her coworkers.

No ubers or taxis or anything want to take her to where she wants to go. Her apartment isn’t that far away, but it’s on the other side of town and apparently the bridge was blocked.

She called all of her friends, asked all of them for shelter and having the ok from all, she said she’d try to go and would let them know where she was headed once she finally got a cab.

The bridge to the other side is also blocked.

Apparently she’s pretty much stuck in a very small radius of the city with no access to anywhere else and she doesn’t know what to do. She’s managed to get a taxi and she asks the driver to just take her to a hotel. He tells her he will if she really wants to, but that he can assure her they won’t have a vacancy - he’s been dropping people off all night.

She lets a bit of rain fall on her face as she talks to him through the car window and she uses that to let a couple of tears fall as she goes back under the roof and takes her phone with shaking hands. She only knows one person that lives in that area. On a normal day it’d be a ten minute drive, today it might be an hour, but it truly is the only place she could even consider going. She takes deep breaths, tries to calm her now fast-beating heart, and presses call. Part of her wishes she won’t answer.

“Trixie?”

Her voice is, as Trixie expected, confused. Surprised, even.

“Katya, hey. How are you?”

“Uh, good. I’m good. How are you?”

It’s awkward and formal and Trixie can feel her gut twisting already. She almost regrets doing this, but the she remembers she has no other option.

“I’m ok. I’m… I’m stuck at the studio and all the bridges are blocked. I can’t make it home.”

“Oh?”

Given her tone, Katya still doesn’t get what Trixie wants. She’ll have to say it.

She takes a deep breath and tries to fish some courage right from deep within.

“All the hotels in the area are booked. I… you’re literally my last option.”

“Oh. Okay.”

She leaves out this horrible laugh, clearly forced and not funny at all, and Trixie realizes how rude she was - especially when she’s asking for such a big favor.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”

“You did.“ Trixie’s sure there’s a smile on her face, but it’s definitely humorless. "But that’s okay, I get it. Do you wanna crash here?”

She doesn’t. But she also doesn’t have any other option.

“Unless you can’t. Or don’t want to. I’ll figure something out.”

“I thought I was literally your last option?”

Trixie is quiet, can’t find the words, thinks back of the old crappy chairs at the studio and thinks that maybe she could just sleep there.

“I-”

“I’m kidding. Of course you can stay here. I’ll text you the address and I’ll fix the couch for you while you’re on the way.”

“You’re a lifesaver.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

Trixie’s heart skips a beat. Before she can even think of responding, though, Katya is ending the call.

“See you in a few, I’ll order chinese.”

And then the tone is dead and Trixie feels like she is a bit dead too.

Katya texts her address like she promised, but Trixie doesn’t even glance at it. She hates herself, but she knows it by heart, has never been able to forget it. The taxi driver she was talking to earlier is still there, and he opens the door when he sees her exit the building. She’s extremely grateful.

She tells him where they’re going, knows all the references and places around and feels a bit sick at how nostalgic it all is to her.

It takes them half an hour, but soon she starts to recognize the neighborhood and knows they’re close. She closes her eyes and tries to calm herself down, feels her hands shaking a bit and her breathing uneven.

It’s just Katya, she tells herself. You’ve slept on her couch several times before. It’ll be fine.

Her phone vibrates with a message from Shea when they are just a couple of streets away.

Shea: you figure out what to do?

Trixie: … yeah

Shea: where are u staying?

Trixie sighs and looks up, sees the last corner before they reach Katya’s street fast approaching.

Shea: … ur staying at katya aren’t u?

Trixie: it’s the only place available

Shea: ok. i’m here if u need anything

Trixie: what could you possibly do all the way there in chicago?

Shea: call and interrupt if anything that shouldn’t happen, happens

Trixie sighs but before she can think of replying, the driver calls her up, “We’re here.”

She pays him and exits quickly, finds shelter at the reception where she tells which apartment she’s visiting. She waits as they call Katya to let her go in, and texts Shea.

Trixie: nothing’s gonna happen

Shea: that’s what you said last time

Trixie lets her fingers hover on the keyboard, types a few letters and then deletes them. She doesn’t know what to say. She really doesn’t want to to relive all of this now.

“You can go up, ma’am,” the receptionist informs her and she makes her way to the elevator, her heart beating out of her chest as she tries to pull herself together.

She hasn’t seen Katya in three months. Before that, she hadn’t seen her in six months.

It has been nine months and she isn’t over it yet.

The door to the elevator opens when she reaches the tenth floor and Trixie has to put on a normal face sooner than she expected, because Katya has the door open and is leaning on the frame, waiting for her.

Trixie doesn’t miss the way a deep breath leaves Katya’s body, as if she was not ready to see her.

Trixie isn’t either.

“Hey,” she says for lack of a better thing, doesn’t know what else she could possibly put into words right now that would be light and normal, and not deep and heavy like she feels.

“Hey,” Katya replies, nods weirdly before moving to the side and giving her passage. “Come in.”

Trixie thanks her quietly, makes her way past her and tries not to let her wet hair drip everywhere.

“I found a few clothes that might fit you, if you want to take a shower? I’ve left some towels in the bathroom.”

“Uh, yeah, a shower would be great, I’m kind of cold.”

Trixie smiles a bit at her offer and immediately feels like she overshared with the cold information. It’s not much - it’s isn’t anything, really, small talk she might do at a bus stop - but she feels like she didn’t have to - shouldn’t - share that. It’s odd.

“Oh, I’ll turn up the heater.” Katya starts moving immediately towards the little table besides the couch where she apparently still keeps all of the remote controls for the house.

“You don’t have to, it’s fine-”

“Trixie, go take your shower. I’ll warm up the house and wait for the food. I- I ordered the same as you always did, I hope that’s ok.”

Trixie can feel the pang in her chest like a knife. She remembers, of course she does, they’d eaten together so very many times before. And that’s what hurts the most, the weight of their history together, the ghost of the laughter and hushed conversations they shared in the past, the heavy silence that’s been sitting on Trixie’s head for the past nine months, an empty space where Katya’s voice used to be.

“Yeah, that’s ok.”

She nods and Katya nods back and they just stand there, quietly, looking at each other from opposites sides of the room without anything to say or do. It’s pathetic, but at least Trixie’s not pathetic alone. It fills her with some twisted guilt the fact that Katya’s discomfort gives her some satisfaction.

“Uh, I’ll go shower now,” she announces eventually, when the tension in the room is too much to bare and she knows Katya will end up breaking and talking about things, which she definitely doesn’t want. She turns around quickly, doesn’t give her time to react, and makes a beeline to the bathroom.

The scent of Katya’s shampoo hits her as soon as she’s inside, closing the door quickly behind her. She closes her eyes for a second, tries to find a breath inside of her so she won’t go insane.

She remembers the first time she slept over at Katya, back when Katya still lived in Boston and she was visiting. They’d been friends for a few months then, met through friends of friends, and she had booked a job in Boston and asked Katya to host her - or maybe she had booked a job in Boston because she wanted to ask Katya to let her stay there, but that doesn’t matter, not anymore. She remembers realizing she forgot her shampoo and using Katya’s every morning before the waffles filled breakfasts, and she remembers getting faint smells of it for a few weeks afterwards every time she’d wear an outfit she’d worn in Boston.

She opens her eyes, urges herself to ground herself in the present. It isn’t much more helpful, this bathroom is one she’s much more familiar with, and the thought makes her turn to the bathtub and search for the red dots that have been there since Katya accidentally dropped nail polish one day and never bothered to clean, always saying she’d do it “next week”. It’s still there.

She turns on the water and while she waits for the cold droplets to become hot, she removes her damp clothes. She avoids the mirror, is weary of how she looks right now - not in appearance, per se, like it or not Katya’s seen her in her worst days, but she fears for her expression. She doesn’t know what her face is telling Katya and she’s scared of finding out.

She stays under the water for longer than she should, urging it to wash away her worries and her heartache. She knew that coming to Katya would be a bad idea, but she didn’t think that she’d feel like that after mere minutes of interaction.

She takes her time drying her hair and body, looks at the loose shirts and shorts that Katya had put on the counter for her until she finds the one that looks to be more comfortable. They smell like the brand of fabric softener that Trixie had convinced her to start using and it’s with that feeling that Trixie realizes that nothing about this night will be easy, even if they eat in silence in separate rooms and pretend the other isn’t there. Memories linger on the walls of Katya’s place, and even if they didn’t, Trixie’s mind has that in check as well. She’ll just have to toughen up and go through this, however the night might unfold.

She exists the bathroom just as Katya is closing the door with the food in hand, and for a brief moment Katya smiles at her and it’s just like it was a year ago, when things were good and easy, not broken like they are now.

She clears her throat and sits down on the table and Katya follows her in silence. It’s weird and mechanic, they’d usually eat on the couch or the living room floor with the TV on on some movie or show that they’d only pay attention to for five minutes before getting distracted. She wants to say something, to cut the silence that seems to hurt her more and more at each passing second, even if she knows that talking will hurt just as much.

“So, how have you been?” Katya ends up asking, her face clearly as uncomfortable as her own. She tries to remind herself that no matter how much she resents what Katya did, she’s the one that put them in this situation tonight. She’s part to blame as well.

“Good. Busy.” She doesn’t really know what else to say, if she’s honest. She has been busy, has been focusing more and more at work every time her free time gives her time to think. And she has been good - well, ish. She’s been as good as she could, since Katya left. But she can’t say that.

Truth is that Trixie knows that what affects Katya about the situation is guilt. She’s not sad about what happened - she can’t be, she’s the one that did it - but she feels bad for Trixie. And Trixie hates that it affects her this much, hates that it’s been months and months and she can’t let it go. She hates that Katya pities her.

“That’s good.” Katya replies after a long silence, like she finally accepts that Trixie won’t say more. “I’m glad you got the job at the studio, I know how much you wanted it.”

She should, Trixie gushed about it to her several times in the past, told her how much she’d love to work there, how that was her dream job and she’d do practically anything to get it. She thinks back to those time and can now see that Katya was always supportive but never enthusiastic. She knows why, now.

“Yeah, I’m glad things started falling into place.”

Katya opens her mouth then, but closes it after a second. She looks back at her food and Trixie realizes that as long as they’re talking, as long as there are words leaving their mouths, she has less time to focus on Katya’s face and wonder how she feels. And that’s good, so she makes an effort.

“What about you?”

Katya considers her, takes her time in chewing her food and swallowing it down with her juice. It looks like she’s trying to decide on what to say, and Trixie worries for a moment about what she will hear.

“I’ve been… I don’t know. Not good. Not busy.”

Trixie nods, feels her mouth go dry. She’s being honest, she’s opening the floor for discussion and Trixie doesn’t want to enter that, she doesn’t want to allow for a scenario in which they could potentially talk things over. Trixie’s not ready to talks things over. She doesn’t know if she ever will be.

“Oh?” Is all she manages to sound out, can’t find it in herself to even be polite and ask her why. Katya responds anyway, though, always much less worried about societal conventions. And Katya probably does want to talk it over. She always does, and that’s one of the issues, isn’t it?

“You know I like to keep busy and all so I thought it’d be fine to take the reigns and be my own boss and book shootings whenever I want. But I’ve been slacking lately. I want to be busy, but- but I haven’t been feeling good and that doesn’t help.”

Trixie understands that. She only started overworking herself a few months ago, because at the beginning she was the complete opposite, calling in sick several times and just overall not giving all of herself.

She knows why she’s like that though, she knows why she was broken and needed time to heal. Maybe she doesn’t get why it hit her so hard, but she gets why she was heartbroken.

She can’t figure out why Katya’s like that though. Not after she went after everything she wanted.

“Do you miss Europe?” Trixie asks before she can stop herself, finds it to be only plausible reason. She’s never understood why Katya came back, if she’s honest.

Katya shrugs, acts much more nonchalant about it than Trixie would’ve expected. “I miss certain aspects of it. But not really, I’m much better here.”

Trixie bites her lips, doesn’t want to speak without thinking again. Why is she back? Why did she leave?

“Have you visited your parents since you came back?” Trixie decides to shift the focus a bit, knows it’ll be safer to talk about her family - and knows specially how important it is to Katya.

Katya smiles lightly at that. “They were actually here two weeks ago, they went back to Boston last saturday.” She stops, considers again, and averts her gaze. “They asked about you.”

Trixie swallows. “How are they?”

“Oh, you know them. Excited about life, worried about the future.”

“That’s you.”

“True.”

They laugh a little and for those small seconds it’s almost like they’re okay. But then the laughter dies down, way quicker than it would have in the good ol’ days, and silence is their only company again.

They’ve both finished eating so Katya gets up and starts clearing the table. Trixie gets up, unsure, starts moving to help.

“No, it’s fine. You can sit down, I’ll be back in a bit.”

Trixie doesn’t want to be rude and leave her to take care of the mess by herself, but at the same time she’d love a few more minutes to herself, to maybe try to pull herself together again. Looking at Katya she thinks that’s exactly what she wants as well.

She agrees and sits down, gets her phone for the first time since entering the house and the only new message she has is from Shea.

Shea: sorry trix, u know i worry. hope everything goes well, pls call me if u need ok?

She sighs and locks her phone again, sets it down on the little coffee table. She might be a proud person but right now, if there was any way Shea could help, she’d ask. Unfortunately, there isn’t.

She looks around the place with attention, tries to place the details she can notice are different. She has on different curtains now, but that’d been way overdue anyway so she’s proud of her for finally buying new ones - even if they are horrific.

Then her eyes fall on her shelves and her heart skips several beats when she sees herself. It’s in the back, sort of hidden by other pictures and paintings, but it’s definitely there, a picture of the two of them that someone - she thinks maybe Jinkx, but she isn’t sure - had snapped on the beach without them noticing. Katya looks happy in that picture - and so does she. She was happy, she remembers it vividly.

She diverts her look, tries to focus on the other pictures that are displayed. All of her friends are there, some of them repeated several times, and even though she knew that Katya hadn’t cut ties with anyone when she left, it stings to see it. She isn’t mad at them for talking to her and she isn’t bitter about it either, what truly gets to her is that for years no one knew Katya better than she did, and now she’s met with the knowledge that Katya’s life went on when they stopped talking and that probably several things happened that all of her friends know and she doesn’t. She feels clueless, excluded, doesn’t know what to do with all the space in her brain that’s still there waiting to be filled with every tiny detail about Katya.

And then she realizes that that probably goes both ways, that maybe her friends talk to Katya about her - she’s fairly certain Katya didn’t have a “no Trixie talk” rule like she did for Katya - but definitely not that much, not as much as she’d tell Katya otherwise. There’s no way Katya knows what she’s been up to, these are a few months of her life that Katya probably will never know about. She can’t pinpoint exactly how she feels about that, but it for sure isn’t a good feeling.

Katya comes back into the room right then when Trixie’s about to have a crisis and the jump scare that she causes is enough to ground Trixie again.

Until she realizes that they’re together again and that things are still - obviously - weird.

She sits down at the other end of the couch and they both look in the direction of the turned-off TV, shoulders straight, posture correct. It’s late enough that they could technically just go to sleep, but Trixie knows she hasn’t slept before midnight in at least five years and Katya is most definitely the same.

“Do you work tomorrow?” Katya asks eventually, probably tired of the quiet - or the noise in her head which is usually ten times louder when no one’s talking - but without looking at Trixie.

“No, I only work Saturdays if we’re running late on a project or something. Do you? Cause I’ll be out really early!”

“No, no, don’t worry.” She looks at her then, sighs audibly and forces herself to relax her back on the couch. “I had a yoga class but that’ll probably be cancelled because of the storm.”

Trixie nods, knows that she’ll for sure wake up to the sight of Katya doing yoga somewhere in the house, knows that she needs the movements to ease her morning anxieties, especially now that she quit smoking.

Unless she picked it up again. The thought leaves Trixie breathless and she doesn’t know why.

“Are you still… hm… an ex-smoker?” She tries to phrase it as best as she can.

Katya smiles a little, seems proud. “Yeah. My last cigarette is still the same one as it was last time.”

Trixie smiles for real for the first time that night, remembers how hard it had been for Katya to quit - remembers how hard Katya had tried for her. “I’m proud of you.”

And maybe those had been the wrong words because Katya averts her gaze immediately and Trixie’s sure they’re watering a bit.

“Thank you,” she manages to say and Trixie gets a bit choked up, too, maybe because of everything and not just how emotional Katya sounds.

“Katya…” she starts but closes her mouth before she can figure out what to say next. She regrets it immediately, knows that she just opened the gate for precisely what she didn’t want and can feel her heart speeding up and her breath getting irregular.

It’s too soon. It’s been nine months, but it’s too soon.

“I always thought that you knew why I did it,” Katya says, like Trixie knew she would. She didn’t know what she was gonna say, but she knew she was gonna say something. Knew she was going to dig into the wound with the alcohol soaked cotton that everyone tells Trixie is necessary but she’s been avoiding at all costs in fear of the pain. “But since I came back, I’m starting to think you don’t.”

Trixie doesn’t want to engage, wants to tell her that she’s tired and they should go to bed, wants to lie down and think about it while she tries not to cry because she is pathetic. And yet, a small part of her yearns to understand what happened, wants to hear Katya explain, wants to see if there’s anyway she has a patch that will fit perfectly into the void she’s left on her heart. And this part is really loud.

“I don’t. I really don’t.” The words leave her mouth choked up and she’s horrified when she realizes that tears are pooling in her eyes and dropping faster than she ever wants anyone to see it happening.

“Oh, Trix,” Katya says and starts moving closer, but Trixie raises her hand, stops her. She’s full of pity on her voice and this is the last thing Trixie wants right now. She feels sick to her stomach, can’t believe it all went downhill so fucking fast, can’t believe she’s crying out her heartbreak to the person who had broken it. “Sorry,” Katya apologizes for trying contact, goes back to the other end of the couch but keeps her figure turned to her side.

Katya gives her time and she takes it. She lets the tears fall, lets her breath get ragged and her chest feel impossibly tight as she tries not to focus on how stupid this is, on how Katya must think she’s ridiculous for acting like this. She buries her head on her hands until her sobs subdue to hiccups and only when her eyes are dry does she take a long breath and looks back at Katya.

Her face is stained with tears.

“God, Trix, you need to understand-”

“I do understand,” she cuts her, feels the weight of her emotional breakdown winning over her need to know. She’s so tired of feeling like this, she just wants to pretend nothing’s going on. “And it’s fine.” It isn’t, really, nothing about this is fine, it hasn’t been since the day she left. But Trixie can’t blame Katya for not loving Trixie like Trixie loved her. Trixie resents her leaving the way she did, but she doesn’t blame her for their fall-out. Trixie always knew that this was a possibility, that letting herself fall for someone she knew so well - and therefore knew how she was - would very likely end in heartbreak. So it isn’t fine, but Trixie doesn’t want Katya blaming herself for not loving her back. Not much could have been done about that, and Trixie knows it. “I get it, I really do, and I don’t blame you. You aren’t the first one on the list. But I need you to understand why for me it’s impossible to ‘be friends’ or whatever it is that you said on Violet’s birthday. I hate to think that our friendship is over but I can’t. Please understand that.”

Katya looks taken aback and Trixie looks away. She knew that eventually they’d talk it out, that they had to, and she also knew that for her that would only lead to reascending something in her chest that she had fought for a long time to diminish. All of their friends kept telling her she needed closure, that she really should talk to Katya, that it would be good for her. Oftentimes they’d act like they knew something she didn’t, but she’d made it clear that talking about Katya was not something she wanted so they respected it. Now she’s there, following their advice, and it’s like the hole in her chest is brand new. She fears the prospect of yet another nine months tirelessly working to close it. She doesn’t know if she has it in her.

“Trix…” Katya’s voice is quiet, earnest. She moves closer and this time doesn’t stop when Trixie flinches, even if she stills keeps a couple of inches in between them. She seems to not know what to say and Trixie can’t blame her. She’s in an awkward position, Trixie wouldn’t know what to do if she was her either. So she takes this opportunity, embraces the fact that she’s already cried and said more than she thought she would, and goes on. Maybe it’ll be easier if she gets everything out.

“You were my best friend.” It’s a quiet statement and it reverberates in the room, followed almost comically by a loud thunder. She doesn’t know exactly why she’s saying it, what she’s trying to convey here - because Katya knows that. She nods, even, looks at Trixie as if she’s waiting for her to say more. Trixie feels there’s more she needs to let her know, but she has no idea what. Has no idea how. “It’s been hard without you. As a friend, I mean. No one else in the world knew- knows me the way you do. Even after all these months, unless you suffered memory loss, no one else even comes closer. You know everything about me.”

“I do,” Katya states before Trixie has time to continue. “I haven’t forgotten anything, how could I? And the same goes to you.” She chuckles a bit, even if it doesn’t sound funny at all. “Who else would it be?”

“You knew me,” Trixie accuses, then, even if she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to be the bitter ex, she wants none of this to ever have happened at all. But it’s too late now, it did and the words are out. She’s constantly stuck between completely understanding Katya’s actions and feeling bitter and betrayed by them. That’s why she didn’t want to talk - she knew she’d fuck it, and she also doesn’t know what she feels.

But Katya is nothing if not understanding - and again, she knows Trixie. She doesn’t seem surprised at all at her words. “I did. And I fucked up.”

Trixie bites her lips, feels her eyes tearing up again. This is not what she wants. Katya’s back to the guilt and pity and that’s not what she wants. But what does she want? She doesn’t know either. She wants this dull pain in her chest to finally subside, she wants to feel free of this and start over, she wants to be herself again, but she has absolutely no idea of what to do to get there.

She wants to not have fallen in love with her best friend. She wants to never have acted upon her feelings. She wants to never have loved her so deeply.

But she can’t change that now, can she?

“I don’t want you to feel bad.” This much is true. Through all the pain and the hardships there are few things she wants more in life than for Katya to be happy. However that might come to be.

Katya snorts, shifts a little and her thigh scrapes very lightly against Trixie’s. She shivers, tries to push past that, but it’s the first physical contact they’ve had in nine months. When Katya had gotten back and they met at Violet’s party Trixie had simply nodded at her, too frozen on her spot to even shake hands. She feels the ghost of her skin lingering, wishes something so minor wouldn’t affect her so much. “How can I not, Trixie? I know I did it all wrong, I know I hurt you and I think about it everyday. I hope you know this already, but I truly am sorry.”

Trixie gets up then, needs air and knows she can’t go out in the balcony because it’s still raining heavily, she can hear it against the glass. She takes a deep breath, tries to remember the breathing techniques that Katya taught her all those years ago and then when she remembers Katya touching her back and stomach to guide her, she tries to forget it. “Uh, I need some water.”

“Of course.” Katya starts getting up, but Trixie denies quickly.

“I can get it. I-I’ll be right back.”

She moves quickly to the kitchen, feels like the walls are closing in on her and hopes against hope that she won’t have a panic attack. She’s never had one before but she knows the signs. She refuses to let it happen over a heartbreak. A heartbreak that happened nine months ago.

She finds the glass and fills it with water mechanically, barely thinks about what she’s doing and where she’s moving, and when the familiarity of it dawns on her she closes her eyes forcefully again. There really is nowhere safe in this place.

She leans against the sink, sips the water slowly, tries to even her breathing with each gulp of water she takes. She thinks about the time when the rain stops and she gets to leave, thinks about what will happen then. Will this be it? Will she never talk to Katya again? The thought is like a double-edged sword because she doesn’t know what answer to that is more frightening.

Trixie knows, of course, why this is harder than it’s ever been before. Why this time she can feel the pieces that her heart broke into, why it’s hurting and hurting and it never seems to heal. She’s thought about it endlessly over the course of these months, tried not to but found it impossible.

She’s never dated a friend before. She’s always met someone through someone or at a bar or online. She always met them with the intent of dating.

Katya had been her best friend for seven years when she first noticed how she felt. By that point, well, she already loved Katya more than almost everyone else in her life. Maybe platonically or maybe not, but she did. Katya was already someone she could never see herself without.

She should’ve listened to Shea, and Kim, and Pearl and pretty much everyone else when they told her that it was a bad idea. It really had been.

“Hey,” Katya’s voice scares her enough to get her to drop the glass on the floor, tiny pieces of glass flying around and one of them landing on her foot, making a tiny cut. “Shit, I’m sorry.”

“It’s nothing,” Trixie dismisses. She can barely feel it, leans down with Katya to try to get the bigger chunks. “Sorry for breaking your glass.”

“It was my fault.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was.”

Trixie feels they aren’t talking about the glass anymore.

They put all the pieces they managed to gather away and turn to the sink to wash their hands, side by side. It’s silent as the water runs and they take turns slowly.

Katya clears her throat. “You said… you said I wasn’t the first one on the list. What does that mean?”

Trixie dries her hands, can’t look at Katya as the words she feels pathetically weightning her down leave her mouth. “You weren’t the first girlfriend who didn’t love me back.”

Katya freezes so fast, so true-to-the-word full freeze, that Trixie glances back at her for a second, worried. She’s staring at Trixie, looks heartbroken and at a complete loss for words. She blinks rapidly, eyes searching through Trixie’s entire face for seconds on end.

“You’ve spent the last nine months thinking I left because I didn’t love you?”

Now it’s Trixie who feels at a loss, maybe more heartbroken than before. Katya asked that as if she was wrong. Her heart is beating at a mile per minute.

“I’ve seen you jump from relationship to relationship, three months each, for years. I’ve stood there as you said time and time again that you don’t believe in love and forever. I knew where that was going, Katya, I don’t blame you for that.”

Katya fully touches her then, envelops her upper arm with her hand. She isn’t gripping at it, it’s a light touch that Trixie could easily free herself of. But she doesn’t, stares at the hand and back at Katya’s face several times, alarmed by her sudden movement and her expression. “God, Trixie, I did everything wrong.”

“Kat-”

“Let me speak, please. You don’t have to, but I’d love if you’d listen. Just this once.”

Trixie nods then, Katya’s hand still on her arm, her bony fingers digging lightly into her flesh. Katya looks lost, a bit, uncertain of what to say, and Trixie’s worried that whatever it is will just break her further.

“I left for you. I wanted to travel and to photograph the world and to live freely and you wanted a nice job and a family. You were fast-tracking towards your dream job, you were house-hunting hand-in-hand with me. I wanted to love you in Rome, and Paris, and Lisbon and you wanted someone that wanted to settle down. I wasn’t ready.”

“I wanted you,” Trixie barks back, can’t stop herself. Katya’s words are buzzing in her ears, but she won’t let her throw that last sentence like that. Trixie didn’t want someone, Trixie wanted her. She’d made that perfectly clear.

“And I wanted you.” Katya’s eyes are honest and Trixie knows she isn’t lying because she knows her. There’s a lump in her throat and her skin burns where Katya’s touching her. But she still hurts.

“You left.”

“I left.”

They stand in silence, eyes interlocked, both clearly fighting back tears.

“I couldn’t give you what you wanted, Trixie. The easiest way was to go.”

“That’s exactly what you said back then, we want different things. You didn’t know what I wanted. We dated for five months, Katya, I never asked you for forever.”

Katya denies with her head, looks up when a tear forms up anyway. “That isn’t it, Trixie. I wanted forever with you, too, I just wanted it in a different way.”

“You never asked me. You never gave me the choice.”

“I know.”

Silence falls again, and this time it stretches. They don’t move, don’t look at each other, do nothing but take deep breaths and pretend - to the other, to themselves - that they aren’t crying.

“You didn’t have to leave. We didn’t have to break up, I would have understood that you wanted to travel, we could’ve been long-distance, I might even have gone with you for a few weeks or visited or- I don’t know.” She runs her hands through her hair, exhaustion screaming inside all of her limbs. “It’s like… it’s like you didn’t fight for me.”

“I was scared. You know me, you know I panic and let anxiety have the best of me. But you know me, so tell me you can’t see how much I regret it, how much I regret every week that passed that I didn’t try to make things right.”

Trixie looks her in the eye, and she can feel how Katya is urging every bone in her body to remain still and stare back, truthfully. It’s quiet and it’s heavy and the tension is clear.

And then there’s a thunder and the place goes dark.

“Shit.”

Katya squeezes her grip on Trixie’s arm, grounds them both together in the pitch dark of the place as it appears the whole neighborhood has powered out.

It’s in the quiet of the darkness that Katya finds the courage Trixie knows she’s been searching for.

“I don’t know if it changes anything. And I don’t know if it’s good or if it’s bad or how it’ll make you feel or even if I have a right to say it. But I still love you. I love you just as much, maybe even a bit more, than I did the day I left.”

Trixie doesn’t even try to hold the words in, knows she wouldn’t be able to. “I love you, too.”

She feels Katya getting closer, can feel her warm breath on her face and as her eyes are slowly adjusting to the darkness, she thinks she sees the contour of Katya’s face.

“I know what I did was wrong. I thought about coming back several times, but I thought you’d be better off without me. I shouldn’t have left the way I did, but I swear I thought that was the best for you. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about you, Trixie. That’s why I came back.” She pauses. One second, then two then three. “I thought I knew what I wanted, but in reality everything falls second to you.”

Trixie doesn’t say anything, doesn’t know if there’s anything she could say. This is so, so much for her brain to handle. She feels exhausted from the night already, feels like all the emotions she could’ve possibly had overloaded her. But she stays still, feels Katya’s warmth in front of her, her other hand now ghosting its fingertips on her arm. She loves her. Nothing’s gonna change that and she knows it. Her words echo in her brain.

“Can I kiss you?”

Katya asks softly, doesn’t move an inch as she waits for an answer. Trixie knows that if she said no Katya would immediately back off and give her space. More than anything, first and foremost, Katya is a genuinely good person. That’s one of the reasons Trixie loves her so much.

That’s also one of the reasons that instead of replying, she’s the one that closes the gap. Her hands find Katya’s face and pull her in slowly, their lips meeting tentatively, calmly. Trixie can feel warmth spreading through her entire body, like spring has just come and blossomed all of the flowers. The familiar feeling sets on her chest, the smoothness of Katya’s lips are like coming home. She feels all the cliches and the songs from romance movies circling inside her, she feels like this is what she’s been waiting for the past nine months.

In a way, it is.

They kiss slowly, innocently, neither moves their hands from where they are currently, but Trixie pulls her in a little more and puts her right foot back at that, trying to ground herself better.

And she manages to step on a remaining tiny shard of glass. “Ow.”

They break apart, breathing not heavy but uneven, and search for each other’s faces that they still can’t see in the dark.

“You ok?”

Trixie nods before she realizes she won’t see. “Yeah, it’s nothing.”

They stay there, locked in an embrace, until the sound of the rain on the window is louder than their breathing. The clock on the wall is ticking and Trixie revels at how in sync it is with her heart.

“We should go to bed,” Katya suggests, and Trixie gulps to herself. Maybe Katya hears her or maybe she just knows, but she adds, “We can both go to my bed and just sleep. Or I can go to the couch or you can to the couch. Whatever makes you comfortable. I just think we should rest.”

Trixie agrees and they start moving through the dark apartment, their hands clasped so they won’t lose each other and also so they won’t lose each other. Katya hits her knee on the bed and hisses, but then she sits down on it and pulls Trixie to sit besides her. They move in the dark, the moonlight filtering in through this window making it a little bit easier to see, and soon they’re settled on the pillows, Trixie on the same side she always slept whenever she and Katya shared a bed both before and after getting together.

Katya finds her hand again, squeezes it, and Trixie looks at her. She waits for a few seconds, hopes the moon will allow her to at least see Katy’s eyes, and it does. They’re shining.

“Give me another chance?” Katya whispers into the night, the words flowing over to Trixie’s already calm, sleepy brain.

“Yeah,” she replies softly, squeezes Katya’s hand back before closing her eyes. “We can talk more in the morning - if there are waffles.”

She falls asleep immediately, doesn’t know if Katya replied or not.

But in the morning she finds Katya doing yoga - and there are waffles.

[justalittlemango]

Putting things into perspective.

So.. obviously.. this feels like the worst I’ve felt in a long time or maybe ever. Or, I’m just dissociating like crazy and things feel really wack, but maybe I’ve been through wacker things? I’m not sure. I guess that’s the point of this post to put my thoughts into perspective and compare to past experiences. And with some hope it may make me feel a little more positive about what’s going on right now..

Well, I guess the present moment. Why do I feel wack? I mean, I feel lonely. Even though I’m not, I’m friends with and speaking to quite a few people. Probably the most I’ve ever actually spoken to at any point in my life. So not lonely in terms of friendships, I guess it’s the “love” type of loneliness. Because my boyfriend has gone. I don’t know where. He’s been gone for a while. And it’s affecting me like crazy. Most of this stress and anxiety is being triggered by the thought of him. It all happened quite quickly, a couple months ago he was so clingy and sweet and I’d be the same back. A month after, that all changed completely. It was like the boy I fell in love with had gone. I do blame the meds, but I also blame his lack of accountability. And unfortunately, there were a couple of fallouts, both of us ending up getting hurt. I apologised but got nothing. Nothing at all. Just...ghosted. He came back temporarily for a day or so, but left again. It’s quite wack when someone you felt a new level of love for just disappears.

So yeah.. that’s rough. I’m constantly thinking what he could be doing, how he feels about me and all that. Constantly those thoughts dominate my mind. To the point where it’s disrupted my sleep majorly. I keep stressing in my sleep. Insomnia became a nightly occurrence until I was able to retake control of it more recently. However I’m still waking up in the middle of the night, having distressing dreams, sleep paralysis and all that.. I’m going to assume that’s due to all the stress I’m experiencing. My body doesn’t feel too great either so it’s kind of triggering my health anxiety.

This may also be a part of my seasonal depression because I fucking hate the winter and early dark nights. Feels so depressing. I feel quite isolated. So yes, all those issues in one combination isn’t too great. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a house key here so I can’t really go out early in the day. So I’m stuck inside until it’s night. Oh well, not much I can do anyway.. it is a national lockdown again.. and this lockdown has been the roughest one yet. 10x worse than the one last year. Everything seems so bleak on that front but seems like there may be light at the end of the tunnel soon... I hope.

I think there are some similarities with major negative events I’ve had in the past, such as my first love, when I went to uni in 2016 and whatnot. I mean, the predominant feeling here is loneliness, overthinking and stress. Loneliness always has made me feel ultra shitty in comparison to other things. I hate that I feel lonely since I have so many people to speak to, a lot of friends now.. but it still feels lonely.

So. What’s positive right now? Well.. positive news is that this pandemic seems to be coming to an end (at least here) in a few months. I hope. Positive is that my parents are alive and healthy. I’m currently with my parents right now and I don’t have to worry about money, I don’t have to worry about going grocery shopping or anything like that. I myself, I think, am physically healthy too. My health anxiety tells me otherwise, but I’m trying to just believe it when I feel it yknow? I have friends too that are supporting me. I have a lot of stuff that I would’ve only dreamt of as a kid.. like.. all this technology and a big TV, the only important things to me when I was younger lol.

Money is usually a big stress causer for me, but now I am financially stable and should be good for a while as long as I don’t spend like an idiot. So there’s no need to stress over that at least.

So if I compare this moment to times in the past, maybe I can start being more happy and grateful for what I got right now.

Lets rewind to when I was working as a baker. Having to take a 30 minute train and then a 15 minute bus to the supermarket I worked at. Working those horrid weekend shifts. Having to pick up other people’s pieces because they wouldn’t work as hard as I did. I didn’t like the job mostly because colleagues were lazy and the distance I worked. In all fairness, I hated living in that town. There was nothing to do. It felt trashy and grimey. I hated living there when I decided to move there. I was in a relationship that didn’t feel like it was really working out, but held on anyway. It never did get better really. So.. things in reality weren’t better. It felt nice to get a paycheck. But I remember the stress of public transport, the mixed shifts, not knowing what I’m coming into.. et cetera. So things weren’t as good back then.

Fast forward to summer 2018. I mean, I won’t bother here, summer 2018 was one of the most fun time periods I had. Even winter 2018 was fun despite getting robbed. But it was fun going to Coventry a lot, all the bars/gay clubs around there. Going to Pride. Winning free tickets to Comic Con. Integrating with the Splat community on Twitter, feeling so welcomed and happy. It was the best I had felt for a long time.

Summer 2019. Things got dull! Surprise surprise. Health anxiety was still a new concept to me, so when I did have panic attacks, I would go to A&E. I remember those experiences and how awful it felt, especially just being told it was anxiety. That was a frequent worry for me back then. Another worry was my depression. I felt stuck. Still hated living in that town. Nothing to do. Bored. Working long hours. Not too great pay. Having to cover my colleague and doing that wack warehouse job. Having to deal with annoying customers. The stress of all that would be so bad. I remember being sad because I didn’t have enough time in the day to do my hobbies. Arguing with my ex-bf over who’s doing the dishes and cooking etc. I felt like a zombie in that job. Only thing keeping my head up high was my upcoming trip to Canada, quitting my job, moving out and starting university. I didn’t even really have friends at all back then.. I had my one friend, Drop. I didn’t have anybody else necessarily... imagine that now.. though that has happened at points in 2020 too. So yeah, summer 2019 was arguably worse. Mostly with the situation I was in. Dead end job. Stressed. No time. Hated that town. Lonely.

A bit further back.. September 2016 to Early 2017. This was shit. I hated uni. I didn’t get on with my flatmates. My anxiety held me back so much. I felt like such a mess. I was drinking almost everyday to cope. I blew so much of my money. I didn’t go to any lectures. I felt like a failure because I wasn’t attending. Not making friends either. Just in my room doing jack shit. Relationship didn’t feel great either. So I dropped out a couple months later, found a rather unpleasant message said about me in a group chat, and uh yeah, that made me feel wack XD though.. I can’t blame them, I was isolating myself for legit no reason. I also received lovely news that I had a debt needing to be paid off since I dropped out, and it was one I had to pay instantly. I had no choice but to sign on at the job centre and claim jobseeking welfare. It didn’t go well. I slept over some appointments and got penalised. I then left the jobcentre and extended my overdraft to help cover time for my debts. I then went to a different jobcentre. Took me a couple months but then I got my baker job. I just need to remember how horrible that was. I felt like such a mess. A no-hoper. I was partying and going out with my welfare money and a bit of my ex’s money lol (with him of course!) so yeah. That was an extemely difficult situation to escape. It felt impossible to find a job that wanted me. I was grateful for the job I got. Until it got shitty.

And now... fast forward to 2020. The last time I was at my parents house was summer 2020. It felt really strange coming back here for Christmas with all that happened over the summer. I broke up with my ex-bf. It felt like a relief weirdly. I fell in love with a lad that I felt so heavily for. It went well until we would fall out. He and I did break up around July 2020, and then I met somebody who comforted me and made me feel good. But that didn’t last, since I didn’t “love” him and he did for me. So I ended that around Sept 2020. And then, when I started uni for a couple months, that was also one of the worst times I had. I felt lonely. Lost a lot of the friends I made this year (almost all.) My ex-bf was bringing his lad over and having fun and that made me feel weird. Dealing with being single was stressful. I was drinking to cope once again. And yeahhhh...

How I feel right now is similar to Sept 2020 feels when I started uni. Just stressed. Overthinking. Lonely. Wanting to drink a lot. But I won’t let myself abuse alcohol like that. I think I’m coping well for how shitty I feel.. I mean not all the time I feel like this.. but a lot of days I do. But.. at least I am getting on with my work. I am attempting to do my workouts and my Spanish stuff, as well as my portfolio stuff too. Also keeping up contact with a lot of friends. Pushing myself outside my comfort zone. Not being scared to VC friends anymore. I have come quite a long way.

I just need to fix my sleep. And to do that, I need to stop thinking about him. My brain is just so confused about him. One time I will love and miss him, other time I won’t care and want to meet other people. And I’m not really sure how to maintain a dominant side, if that makes sense? The side I would like to stick to is just thinking he’s a time-waster, he’s ghosting me to try and remain distant and that I should just move on... I try my hardest to keep that in my head, but despite all that, whenever I see old messages or pictures, my soft sensitive side comes out again. I really don’t know how to tackle it. THe thing is, I need to tackle it otherwise I will continue to be stressed and not be able to sleep like a normal human again (and god knows I was a normal human before... smh)

I want to retain my view that he’s no good for me, that I deserve better etc.. but it’s like, the meds messed him up.. but why wasn’t he open about it with me? Why did he get so distant from him.. why did he react so bad to my concerns.. why can’t he communicate with me? And now why is he ghosting me rather than sorting it out? Does he want it sorting? Is he wanting to move on? So many questions and unfortunately I just don’t know. Maybe I need to just put my foot down here.

Easier said than done, but if I put my foot down and keep telling myself I deserve better. Listen to what Drop says, I do deserve better and that he is not well, and that the boy I fell in love with is no longer around. He’s gone. Instead, there is a dark shadow of his former self that is ghosting me. I gotta keep reminding myself that there will be better people out there for me. People who won’t treat me like this. And that, as much as I feel bad that the meds did this to him, I can’t respect how he treated me. He’s made me feel all this shit. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care to reply to me. He made a rude remark about my anxiety in a public forum. He’s manipulative. Think about it.. he’s there, he could easily message me, it takes 5 seconds, but it’s CLEAR as ICE that he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t care to do it. And that should be enough for me to put my foot down and remember that he is no sweetheart. He’s not the Dylan I fell in love with, period.

I think if I keep telling myself this, I can do it. I just need to remind myself that I deserve better. It’s not normal to be treated like this, and that honestly it’s a good thing this all happened before him and I met. On the plus side, I could do something with that £250 I was saving to go see him.. I gotta stop being sensitive. I am way better than this. I gotta remember what my mom said too. Mom always knows better. I was a fighter with all the problems I had when I was younger. I shouldn’t let this present shit bring me down. I’m way better than this!

I’m too good for that kind of treatment. I know my worth. I know my values. And now I know his. And yet here I am losing fucking sleep and stressing over him! Imagine!! Well, I want February to be different. Jan was shit. Feb I hope to be better. I will not think about him as much. I just got to remember that he has disrespected me and treated me like trash. I am no longer going to feel bad. He needs to grow up and take some responsibility. I don’t care if this sounds harsh, this is truly coming from the heart. I know for a fact I didn’t deserve the backlash I got from him. Yeah.. maybe I’ll try that. I should try to avoid the habits I tend to do.. like checking his Discord... or his twitter.. or his Switch activity and that. Avoid looking at my twitter cover also. I wish at this point I could just remove him from my bio and cover but I don’t want to fully break.. or do I? I mean.. how can I hold a relationship with someone who acts like this? So yeah. I need to treat this like a breakup.. an official breakup. And that he and I broke up a month or so ago when he decided to ditch me. I shouldn’t feel bad.

And remember the positives: my parents are alive and healthy, I’m with them right now! And that I don’t have to worry about money. No money problems! Not having to worry about groceries either. All I gotta do is my uni work. Pace myself. And I can try find time to do my workouts and Spanish at some point soon. We gonna have a good time Kurt. 

[worlduniversityrp-blog]

Posting my own form as an example for everyone joining! — Prof. Kota

OOC

Name: Dakota/Kota. Pronouns: she/her Contact URL: romanope

Character Wanted: South Italy / Romano Activity Level: 6-8 Timezone: PCT (Las Vegas) Password: accepted

Extra: My only big thing is I am uncomfortable rping the Italy Bros and will likely not be interacting with any N. Italy’s, I’m sorry!

IC

Full Name: Lorenzo Riccio

Age / Year: 20, 2nd year/sophomore. Gender / Pronouns: Male, he/him.

Appearance: Lorenzo is of short stature and small/medium framed body, his overall appearance being more gender-neutral than it is overly feminine or masculine. He has brown-olive skin littered with moles and sunspots, cappuccino brown curls that reach about ear-jaw length, and dark hazel green-brown, almond-shaped eyes that have a judging glare to them.

He stands at only 5’5 and weighs around average, with no defined muscles and slight pudge around his stomach area. His facial structure isn’t too sharp or defined, but not very soft or round either; he has an oval shaped face with a Roman nose, slightly plump lips, and high cheekbones. The most notable thing about his appearance is the unruly, curled strand of hair that sticks out.to the left, his right.

Personality: Lorenzo is, without a doubt, not the most approachable person out there; he tends to be anti-social, though when he wants to be can be rather charismatic and friendly. It’s not his strongest suit, however. He’s a bit abrasive and frequently rude and foul-mouthed with most people, especially those he does not like. Though it’s mostly a defense mechanism, and if you’re close enough to him, he’ll feel comfortable enough around you to be his passionate, loving, and even often silly side of himself. Though to no one does he show the side of him where he’s crying, or feels helpless.

He has a great deal of insecurities that have guarded his personality so intensely, that it causes him to lash out when angered, and push people away very often. He has an awful inferiority complex, and little to no sense of self-worth. He’s very pessimistic, and his depression makes it harder for him to show positive, happy emotions, as to how easy it makes it for him to spit out insults and being stubborn, rude, and overall grumpy and unimpressed with everything.

The person who makes him happiest is Antonio; he actually manages to give him a spot of optimism, make him smile and laugh and just be himself.

Skills: Painting & drawing, cooking, napping??? Complaining? Nothing else

Painting/drawing: A given, Lorenzo is very skilled with artistic media, namely painting and drawing being his best too. He is a specifically traditional artist, but has been considering learning digital media.

Cooking: Growing up in an Italian family, it’s hard to not know how to cook. He learned when he was younger since he’d always help his mother cook. It’s relaxing to him.

Napping: Worldwide champion napper. Any chance he can nap, he takes.

Complaining: Honestly.

Flaws: Pessimism, low self-worth, abrasiveness.

Pessimism: Naturally, given he has depression, Lorenzo tends to see things in the worst way, to expect the worst, and accept it. He doesn’t have a lot of hope for himself, and usually relies on others to give him some sort of sense of optimism. This also goes for his bad mood, he has trouble showing positive emotions as opposed to how easy it is for him to be negative.

Low self-worth: He thinks incredibly lowly of himself due to a multitude of things in his past, and even in his present. And yet he still manages to be a narcissist. He is the definition of “hates himself, but believes he’s better than everybody”.

Abrasiveness: A lot of bottled up emotions tend to manifest themselves in him in forms of aggression, making it easy for him to lash out, or they way he insults people and acts so rude to someone he doesn’t like so nonchalantly. Also, he’s ultimately petty, so.

Backstory: ( TW: Abuse / Depression / Self harm + Suicidal thoughts )

Lorenzo was born to his family as a first gen Italian-American, his parents having moved from Italy for better opportunities. He was always closer to his mother growing up, as his father wasn’t exactly an incredible one to begin with. As he got older, he got more and more abusive towards him, mostly verbal but even sometimes physical with him the older he was; and the older he got, the more his parents fought. He used to blame it on himself, since his dad seemed to make it look that way.

When he was 13, his mother and father divorced, and his father walked out on them. School was already awful for him as he wasn’t rather popular, only had a few ‘friends’ (they weren’t that close, since he usually shut everyone out), and had been bullied since he was young. It got worse with this, his grades fell back, and it was practically a miracle that he wasn’t held back.

Any friends he had in middle school, he lost once he was in high school. High school felt infinitely worse, he was much more stressed, ridiculed far more, and he didn’t know how to cope with it. His mother was often busy and never home, trying to provide for them both without their father there anymore. So he turned to harming himself; cutting, sometimes, just to let something out. When he was 16, he started to get ahold of cigarettes and starting smoking, to de-stress himself. He didn’t care if it harmed him, he had little to no sense of self-worth, and figured he wouldn’t live long at that point anyways.

The more he bottled up, the more he lashed out, the more he shut himself off thereafter; peers viewed more and more horribly, hated him more, made fun of him more. He’d contemplated much worse than self-harm at times. He got a job at a local fast food place to help his mother, and also to have more of an excuse to avoid people he knew, ever. Smoking became a bad habit. It didn’t help him one bit that, despite having a loving and supportive mother, a lot of himself went hidden thanks to family values and religion.

Graduating high school felt like a weight had been yanked right off his shoulders. Going off to college in NYC, away from the upstate town he was born in, was a fucking blessing. Every from high school was gone and he felt a little less outcast at World U. But he still bottles stuff up, and could really use a therapist, honestly.

Headcanons: 

Despite being 20, Lorenzo still hasn’t gotten his driver’s license, and if he can’t catch a ride from someone else, he takes public transport or walks most places. He’s not sure when he plans on getting it; he lives in NYC, after all.

While Lorenzo majors in Art, he’s often thought about opening his own restaurant in his future, and even works in the campus’s cafe (which isn’t that delightful, not that he thought it would be.)

While he has the ability to paint with a more modern style, he’s deeply inspired by barocco era paintings, and loves to paint to in such a style.

He still smokes sometimes, but he’s trying hard to quit. He’s been clean of any type of self-harming for a couple years now, but the urges still resurface.

Major(s): Visual / Studio Arts Major. Minors: Culinary Arts. Courses: Life Drawing II, Advanced Painting, Drawing II.

Ships:

OTP(s): Spamano ( I have others I like, but this is the one I’m gonna focus on ).

NOTP(s): Most of any other ships that spamano, but g/ermano + itace/st make me the most uncomfy.

Writing sample:

Every bone in his body ached, his limbs felt heavy, and his eyes were barely open; probably not the best conditions for him to be working on a stupid fucking charcoal piece on, but he had no choice. His movements were rushed, trying to piece together the painting as it came along. A man with his back to the viewer, messy, disheveled hair envisioned with dark and heavy strokes of charcoal on the canvas, an arm raised to the level of his head, and a hand cupping the back of his neck.

It wasn’t a mystery who it was meant to be a caricature of, but he’d do everything he could to deny it was anything other than just a random mystery man he’d come up with. No, he just wanted to finish it ― he needed to finish it, since it was due tomorrow, and he’d put off most chances to work on it over the past few days. A tired groan slipped from his lips, and he fumbled for his phone to turn on the screen. 1:16 am. Another groan; looks like this would be one of those days where he needed a smoke. Wishing he had weed right now, he smacked a cigarette out of the box and grabbed his lighter, too tired and frankly too lazy for something more than one of these right now, and dragged his ass outside. A brief break wouldn’t hurt.

Once he was outside, he let the cigarette hang from his lips and cupped his hand around it, shielding the flame in the lighter as he brought it to the tip. It felt comforting to take a long drag, breathing in the awful but somehow relaxing smoke, before letting it tumble from his lips and fill the air in front of him. He swatted his hand, clearing it away, but the stench would still linger. He frowned, looking around at the dark campus in the middle of the night, huffing.

After some time passed and he felt calmer, he made his way back inside and to his dorm, setting back on working on his piece, putting a little too much effort into the curve of his back, his backside, and the soft shading that emphasized his muscles. God, he was really gay. Eventually he figured – fuck it, that was good enough, he needed sleep, and dragged himself to his bed to do just that.

[scriptshrink]

If a character experienced a lot of trauma and has panic attacks and disassociation episodes triggered by being in enclosed spaces like cars and elevators, unexpected physical contact (particularly around their face), and unexpected loud noises, what would be some strategies they could try to not just deal with those triggers from day to day but to actually become more comfortable and less anxious about them in general?

nothowiplanned

So exposure is one (horrible) way of doing this. Taking cars as the example, and depending on at what point the panic kicks in, they could stand touching the car, then sitting in the car with the door open and their legs out of the car, then sitting in the car fully with the door still open, then sitting in the stationary car with the door closed, then sitting in the car for a very short journey, then gradually building up the length of time they stay in the car. This would be extremely emotionally demanding, the character should probably have someone they trust absolutely with them, and they will have panic attacks/dissociate while doing this. It might not progress in a straight line either - one day the character might be able to sit in the car with the door closed but the next day they might really struggle getting in to it.

rarmeowz

Exposure therapy is pretty much the only thing I know of to actually get rid of triggers like that, and depending on the level of fear/panic that the trigger causes it can take a pretty short time to get over it or it can take a very, very long time.

[[Post continued after the jump]]

Snail

Apart from exposure therapy, your character might work on grounding techniques to prevent from dissociating, or to help return them to their normal self. They may also do work to prepare for panic attacks and put safety mechanisms into place for when things go wrong (cure rather than prevention). This could help relieve some of their anxiety about having the panic attacks.It won’t be possible for your character to completely avoid panic attacks (although they may well attempt to do this as much as possible by avoiding possible triggers), so a good strategy is to start developing techniques for dealing with the aftermath of panic attacks. 

They may prepare an “in case of emergency” kit to help them recover from panic attacks. This could include sensory stimuli like strong mints, fidget rings, etc. that can be used for self-soothing; snacks to help with energy (panic attacks can really take it out of you); a mantra/affirmation (“then is then, this is now”); a playlist on their phone of songs that make them feel better; a recording of or letter from a loved one. This kit might be a real “kit” that the character carries around in a little box or bag, or they might keep the objects squirrelled about on their person (fidget ring on their finger, strong mints in their pocket, mantra at the front of their notebook, playlist on their phone, letter in their wallet). It might take a bit of trial-and-error to work out what contents are best for them. Maybe the playlist is no good because headphones in means they can’t hear their surroundings. Maybe the strong mints get replaced by essential oils.

There will likely be a lot of learning to do for your character as they find out what works for them. After having a panic attack + dissociation episode where I ended up wandering around central London with no money or phone and having lost the ability to recognize streets that I knew very well (I wandered around for hours, at night, trying to find my way back to the restaurant where my belongings were), I had to change my strategies:

After that I made sure that I always had a phone and money on my person - they could not be left in my bag or in my coat pocket, because if I became separated from them I would be stuck. 

I also began always carrying a scented rag in my pocket (contained in plastic bag) so that I had a sensory stimulus to help ground me (especially good during flashbacks). 

If I could avoid it, I didn’t put my bag down at all. If I did put my bag down, I made sure that it only contained things that I could abandon - valuables went into a second small bag that I kept on all the time, unless I was at home, or at a small number of specific locations.

You also eventually get better at predicting what situations will be triggering, and better at actually taking action to look after yourself - even if you know that going into an elevator will be triggering, it’s embarrassing to not be able to do something so commonplace, and I saw it as weakness on my part - that I should be able to take the elevator, and so I didn’t have a justifiable reason not to (this didn’t have great results for me). Even once I realised that I needed to take the stairs whenever possible, I then had to learn how to tell others I wouldn’t be going in the elevator with them. Usually I went for the “health” excuse (I got a pedometer so I could say that I was trying to make ten-thousand steps per day), but if time was an issue or there was what seemed an unreasonable number of levels to go up I would have to say “sorry, I really don’t like elevators - I’ll meet you up there?” 

If we take the example of elevators, I can now almost always take them - I will sometimes choose not to, but it is a real choice - if I do take the elevator I may feel uncomfortable while riding, but it doesn’t have an impact that continues afterwards.How did I get to this point? My problems with elevators were twofold - 1) I was scared of being trapped in the elevator; 2) I was scared of being attacked by whoever I was sharing the elevator with. When I first started trying to use the elevator again it was in a glass elevator that they had at college. This meant that I knew other people could see (so I was less likely to be attacked, and I would be able to get people’s attention if the elevator broke down and the alarm system wasn’t working). I also took the elevator for tiny journeys - *I am going to travel one floor. If I change my mind when it gets here, I’ll take the stairs instead*.Sometimes that meant I didn’t go in the elevator, but other times I did. And for quite a while I only used an elevator for going short distances and only if there weren’t any strangers in the elevator. I probably wouldn’t have gone through this learning process, but one of my coursemates couldn’t use stairs and I went in the elevator with her. 

The next push was when I got sick and began to tire very easily - I spent 18 months with very limited energy supplies. Now I had to use elevators that were not glass. It was difficult - I would sometimes still try to use the stairs, but I really suffered for it afterwards. By now I was working on the basement level of my place of work, so it was still a short journey, but the opaque walls and lack of choice made things much more difficult. One thing that really helped was having a colleague who understood trauma and accompanied me during elevator journeys. I trusted her and didn’t worry that she would attack me. When everyone left to go home and I would start walking towards the stairs she would ask “shall we take the elevator?” This was an agreed code for her to say “you are allowed to take the lift even though everyone else is going to the stairs and I will go with you to make sure you’re ok”.

I was still the one in control - sometimes I chose to take the stairs anyway - but she was reminding me that I had a choice and that she could help me follow-through whichever decision that was. The short journeys that I did with her several times a day were essentially training me - the more examples of safe, panic-free elevator journeys I had, the more comfortable I was with elevators in general, and the less likely I was to panic in the future.

(Sorry if that is too much about me, but I thought it might be relevant to your question) 

For cars- does your character drive? If they do, they may find it easier to drive than to be driven because they are in control of the vehicle and can stop and get out whenever they want (obviously this doesn’t work so well if they’re driving on the freeway, but they might choose to start trying short drives around a parking lot, and then around town, but make a conscious decision that they are not going to drive on the freeway and they are not going to drive to appointments or anywhere that there’s a time limit for arrival that means that they can’t get out and walk around for half an hour if they need to during their journey. They could use driving their own car (or just sitting in there for a bit) as a way to get accustomed to cars in general. They might try using larger enclosed spaces as a way of working up to using cars - maybe riding the bus for a short distance. OR they might just find ways of avoiding cars - obviously how feasible this is depends on where they live, but they might move to using public transport, or cycling, or getting a motorbike. 

They might avoid unexpected physical contact by avoiding crowds or places with lots of people. They may tell people that they know that they don’t want to be hugged - in my experience if people know you don’t like hugs they tend to be more cautious initiating physical contact (although thinking about it, this may have been partly due to my exaggerated startle response which also communicates “I don’t like being touched” very well). Knowing that people will ask before touching me helps reduce the anxiety I have around them. Another thing that the character may do is emotionally distance themself from other people - people are less likely to touch you if the relationship is professional than if you are friends. Of course, the social isolation this causes has its own impact.

Anon 217

Regarding physical contact/physical proximity, this is another situation where my service dog comes into play. One of his tasks is blocking – placing his body between me and anyone who gets too close. Having a giant mobile barrier goes a long way towards getting me out of the house. Before I had a service dog, if I left the house once a month, it was a busy month. Now, I can go out a few times a week, even to crowded or unfamiliar places, and it’s generally okay.

Disclaimer

[eftb]

México Y2K17 Livelooping Festival - Part 1

Alright, this is gonna be a lenghty post. But I feel like I have to go into detail about the festival I just came back from... it’s worth it. So go get yourself another coffee and sit down. Welcome to sharing one of the best experience of my life as a musician so far!

In fall 2015 I met Lizeth Ruvalcaba and Eliud Ernandes at the annual Livelooping Festival in Santa Cruz. These two form the musical duo CIAN, based in the Mexican city of Guadalajara, and told me about their plan to put up a similar festival in Mexico the coming year, casually inviting me to come and perform. For various reasons, 2016 didn’t end up being a good year for traveling, but I was even more excited when it crystallized that I would be able to attend the second edition in May 2017

To be frank, I had no idea what I was getting into. What scope the festival would have. How it would be to arrive in Mexico, a country about which I hardly knew anything about, other than that it’s the home of Aztecs, Mayas, Inkas and Tequila, and that the last VW Beetle left its Mexican factory in 2003. 

However, what Liz and Eliud have created out of their initial vision, went beyond all my keenest hopes and wishes. A well curated and highly professional music festival featuring 26 artists from 6 countries, traveling through 3 cities and playing at rather impressive stages. And besides that, also a unique hub for personal and artistic exchange, but I will get to that later…

ARRIVAL

Our journey started in Guadalajara, whose smog dome could be spotted miles away from the airplane. A traditional savoury breakfast with Chilaquiles and strong, more or less locally grown coffee fueled my weary body after 21 hours of travel and helped me stay awake until the evening, when whole bunch of people was assembled in a bar called Silvestre. There we were, ready to kick off the festival - not yet musically, but socializing and exchanging names and stories. A bunch of live loopers with the most diverse backgrounds and approaches to music, lots of us strangers, but not for long….

FESTIVAL START IN GUADALAJARA 

After a long night of getting to know each other over beers and multi-instrumental courtyard jams, the performances started on a Monday at the Universidad Panamericana, on a chilled indoor stage where most of us would give a first taste of their works. I was fairly impressed with the stage setup, even including lights and live visuals, unaware yet that it was modest compared to what my second and final performance in Guadalajara would hold: A newly built Culture Center in Zapopan offered us an amazing classical concert hall with a stage big enough so that six of us playing that day could all set up at the same time and then play one after the other without long transition times. The sound unfolded massively in the large theatre space. But these main concerts weren’t even the highlight of our week-long stay in the home-town of tequila...

During the week days, the local School of Rock hosted musical workshops where my old Californian friend Rick Walker would talk and teach us about rhythm and percussion and ambient jazz guitarist James Sidlo from Texas broke down his setup for us and explained the use of effects and tools to create drones and intricate layers of sound. The geeks among us also explored the shop section, browsing for new interesting pedals to add to their boards, and the nights always ended at our headquarter, soon to be called „Loopicasa“, where we drank and chatted and played music together until exhaustion made us stop.

CONNECTIONS

Also, a very special event was set up on Thursday night: four duo performances – each consisting of two randomly paired loopers – were to take place in the Laboratorio Sensoral, an experimental space for arts and sound in the city center. James Sidlo and I would play as the second team, between the groups of Faisal Khan from Pakistan with Oscar Galoz from Mexico, Liz Ruvalbaca from Guadalajara together with Spookstina from North Carolina and Rick Walker from Santa Cruz with the local musician Marks aka. Los Hijos de Doña Loope. 

Exciting – to get a chance to trigger one’s experimental side and jam along with another person you’ve barely met, especially as someone who is usually very tied to traditional pre-arranged song structures. I could dwell for hours on this particular event, but will keep it short: Each of our random multinational groups managed to create such an intense and unique sonic journey that by the end of the night we were all so blissfully charged with the magic we had just witnessed, that we exchanged baffled looks and kept nodding to each other:

This is it. This is music, this is why we do this.

As a side note, James and I were so struck by our improvisation that we are planning to collaborate in the future… but let’s not jinx that yet….

SAN MIGUEL ALLENDE

After one week in the brisk heat of Guadalajara, a long, but air-conditioned bus ride took half of the artists to the small traditional town of San Miguel Allende. Our stage there was the area around an inactive fountain in the lush and beautiful courtyard of Centro des Artes Ignazio Ramírez.

Despite missing our first bus and arriving horribly late at night, despite hearing from the hostel staff in the evening that there was no running water and we would have to fill and use buckets to even operate the toilets, despite being woken up at 6 in the morning by mysterious cannons saluting for an hour, and despite playing in the open sun at 30°C and struggling with overheating laptops, boiling hot gear surfaces and invisible LEDs on our pedals, it seemed like nothing could even scrape the enthusiasm and good spirit we had already built up over the last couple of days. We were hungry, hungover, exhausted – and happy!

CDMX METRO

I had no idea what to expect when I realized that a whole bunch of our performances were set up to be inside the metro stations of Mexico City. Would it be a busking setup? What is the acoustic space like? Would people even care?

But watching the first gig at the city’s actual Metro Museum, where Xandra Wong and Violoncheloops kicked off this little series of events, I was finally convinced and relieved. And finding my own stage (to be shared with ecnegrU) at Chabacano station the next day, located in a large hall between escalators, as well as watching my other friends play in a charming spot at Zapata station that was dark and enclosed like a small club space, and completely transformed by lights and projected visuals, I remained genuinely amazed.

With all in all 8 perfomances per day acros the city, always sets of two in two spaces simultaneously, we hijacked the public transport net and interrupted the hasty routines of many locals who actually came and stayed and allowed themselves to be carried away for a moment before continuing on there way. The events had been titled as Interventions, and that was indeed what they were, technically at highest level, officially presented by the Metro and resonating well with our mostly spontaneous audience. Later in fact, a good handful of people that attended the main concerts, admitted they had come because they had spotted us on the metro.

FILM CLUB CAFE

The next venue was a completely different story and much more similar to what I am normally used to – a  small room in the Satellite City, a bit further outside of CDMX. In stark contrast to the vast, open spaces of the metro halls, here we had a very cozy, intimate atmosphere and could watch and listen very closely to each other’s sets, drawing a small, probably local crowd of mostly young people. My personal highlight was watching the only performance of CIAN at this festivals, who otherwise were only with us as our omnipresent caring and guiding hosts, now finally showcasing what they normally do and what initially brought us together.

[mybodyliberation]

Touring Hacks Part II

Touring Hacks Part 2

 Greetings to my fellow performers and fellow travelers. It would seem they were are back with a second installment for hacks when you are on the road! I had no idea that part 1 would be the hit that it was and it was actually my most popular post of 2018 so I want to give a BIG SHOUT OUT and say a massive thank you to everyone that read it, shared it, commented on it and took the time to feedback to me about how helpful it was.

It warmed my little nomad heart and I have to say that it made me want jump straight back into things in this beautiful New Year with this the second part of how to hack your tour.

The truth for most performers at the moment is that our work is on the road. This isn’t to discount any of my other friends part of other industries in which they are required to work, but for us performers it is becoming more and more apparent that while shows don’t seem to be regularly changing and casts seem to be remaining the same, it means getting jobs in “town” is become that little bit harder.

However it would seem the UK’s national tours are absolutely thriving, 2019 being no exception as we see major musicals like The Book of Mormon, Motown, The Bodyguard and no exception of my own job *cough* Matilda the musical *cough* hitting all the biggest regional theatres. That of course doesn’t exclude all the fantastic new seasons at all Rep’s across the country.

Anyway I digress, the point is more and more of us on the road, so here are some tips to help, cause just because we’re not at home, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be comfortable.

 Be Alarmed

I mean it, be alarming, by making sure you are alarmed. Yes that means you. Get yourself an alarm. You see the thing is most of the time we head to these towns and cities we have never been in, we got out and socialize or we walk home late at night and we don’t know the nuance of the neighborhoods and what areas are okay and which ones are not. Sometimes we are close to the theatre but sometimes we are not and it’s important that if you are doing a lot alone, you have something to protect you. So get yourself a rape alarm. Make sure you have at on you at all times. Just in case! The hope is that we remain as safe as we can as often as we can, but there it isn’t overacting to make sure you have a way of getting help should you need it.

Don’t Panic

That being said, also have a bit of balance. Do not panic. Easier said than done of course, but try and be calm in as many variable situations as you can. We want things to run smoothly and to plan but life isn’t like that and that goes for double for life on the road. Yes we want to schedule and make sure our days our structured, but we also need to make sure we leave a bit of flexibility. So if things are going belly up, if you end up having to move digs between shows (this guy), if a window falls out in your room at your digs (its happened), you have random extra rehearsals, there’s no microwave or parking at the theatre, DO NOT PANIC! It will all work out. You cannot do it all at once. So take your time and stay as calm as possible.

 VavaVroom your VaVaVoom

If you are in the UK arts industry as of last year then you’ll remember the #VaVaVoom incident, in which case I won’t go into too much detail, but least we forget. A moment of silence for an every thriving industry full of Va Va Voom.

Now that said, because you know I had to say it, let’s get to the Va Va Vroom bit.

This hack is for any of you that drive. If you can? Do it. Honestly I am trying to get my act together so I am driving before this New Year is out, but it’s an asset when you are on the road. You end up clocking miles and hours yes, but the convenience of being able to move around whatever city you are in without worry of figuring out transport and more importantly, how you’re going to get all your many belongings from A to B, it ends up being a lot more cost effective than you think.

If you’re worried about your environmental impact then that’s okay. Opt out of driving altogether or at the very least keep your driving to a minimum, choosing to walk or get the bus with shorter journeys and using public transport when you can.

Try local restaurants instead of chains

A great perk of touring the country means you get to visit places you ordinarily wouldn’t have. So why not use the opportunity to feed into the local community economics and visit local cafés and restaurants. It’s a great way to find new food and drink and you’ll probably find you spend less money than you doing visiting the same old chain restaurants.

It’s also great if like me you have really specific dietary requirements, because what I am learning is that outside of chains, restaurants and café’s tend to be much more accommodating and willing to make sure you still have the best food and the best experience.

Ask the theatre digs list

Something other performers and probably even your agent has told you to do, but this is a very important one because though a lot of the accommodation seeking has moved online for convenience, you’ll find some real gems for some great prices on the digs list. So when you are looking to book your digs, don’t ditch the digs list. Just email the theatre’s you’ll be visiting to request a copy and they’ll email it straight to you.

Stay with friends

Now if you’re really looking to save some coin this would be your best bet. Always see if you can stay with friends or friends of friends or friends of your parents. It might not always be what you were looking for but again you could stumble onto some hidden gems and more importantly save some much needed money for something else like transport or maintenance.

Limit your luggage

This is something that we all learn the hard way. You see the number of months you’ll be on the road, you factor in the fact that you probably won’t be able to get home frequently and so you pack as much as humanly possible. You even pack that outfit you don’t need but you know, have, just in case there ends up being a royal visit. Honey if there ends up being a royal visit, order something from asos.

Just make sure that you pack with purpose. Keep in mind you won’t just travel clothes. You’ll need other important items that you use day to day and if there’s no room what are you going to do, because touring three big cases just isn’t an option when every venue move means getting on a train by yourself.

Be smart. I’ve evolved through the stages of hikers backpack, to suitcase, back to backpack, back to suitcase, to two suitcases, to two suitcases and a massive backpack and thankfully I’m down to one medium sized case and a big backpack. Even then it doesn’t seem like there’s ever enough room.

Remember, plan for the time of year, your environment, your work schedule and other things you might get up to, but keep it practical.

Theatre digs website

Now back to the subject of digs (accommodation), another great way to look out for a great place to live while you’re visiting a new place is to check via www.theatredigsbooker.com It’s a website  that I have both used as a host and as a guest and I have to say, it’s really handy way to do research and know what your options are because the likelihood is that even if you find your digs through the theatre list or somewhere else online, your host will also have a posting on TDB.

You can search digs based around the distance to the theatre and a varying degree of specified options that help narrow down the search. So whether you are looking for self-contained or sharing, non-smoking or smoking and parking space, house or flat, TBD offers you all of those options.

Now you are required to pay a deposit, but I am always happy to do this if it means securing my place in a great place, and knowing that the level of service I am going to get is of a higher standard.

Plus having experienced some seriously horrible digs in my 12 months of touring, there’s a real comfort in knowing that there is someone out their regulating accommodation right now. As prices soar for both hosts and guests, it’s great to have someone meditating how we communicate, book, interact and experience.  

Portable Hepa purifier and masks

Now this is something that I honestly didn’t even realise I needed until the very end of the year. Diffusers and purifiers and humidifiers have also been something that I have been aware of but I have never really entertained how it might play a part in my day to day, but it purifiers entered in from stage left and I’m ready for it to stay.

You see we have to really take care of ourselves and especially our voices, and sometimes as travel and stay in other people’s homes we can’t guarantee that things like, the air around us, will be adapted to what we might be used to at home.

I’m also an asthmatic so making sure that I protect myself from things like smoke, allergens, chemicals etc, is becoming more and more important, especially if I want to dodge being sick and even more so if I want my voice to be in working order.

So honestly looking out for a portable HEPA purifier that can just be working away in your digs room to ensure you are sleeping in the cleanest air you can. Do some real research here because there are a lot of different brands with a lot of different uses, so know what works for you and the result you are looking to get.

Leading into that, if you don’t want to travel anything like that but want to try and filter the kind of things entering into your atmosphere (cue John Mayer track) then look into the multitude of filtering masks that you can get.

There’s a reason that these are so popular in South East Asia. Pollution is a real thing you guys and it’s important to protect what’s going into your body as you spend a lot of time travelling and in other people’s spaces.

Be Mindful

It’s a brand New Year and even if it’s a New Year, but same you, it’s important to recognize that in this industry mental health is something we overlook, and if it’s not directly or actively effecting you right not in a tumultuous way, that’s no reason not to take care of it.

Something as simple as practicing mindfulness daily will affect not only your daily life but your working life. I promise you’ll find yourself being able to focus not only in your personal life but in your working life.

I like to find a few moments either before or after warm up to remove myself to a quiet space and centre myself and my thoughts. Sifting through the facts from the fiction in order to make sure I am in the space I need to be to give a great show.

There’s some great apps on the market, a lot of them free that can help assist you on a journey of mindfulness and it leads to gratitude which I promise you cannot have too much of.

[cosmosogler]

today i finished unpacking! i did not clean my room, but i did take all the empty boxes out and took out the trash. so i COULD vacuum, if i wanted.

eve’s surgery is tomorrow morning at 7:30. i won’t be able to get up to take her, so i’ll go with dad to pick her up when she’s done.

as a kind of preemptive apology i took eve out for a longer walk than usual. and it would have been longer, but we ran the last minute home. she’s still faster than me. then i took wiley out on our usual route. there were so many people outside around 6:30 pm though. the weather was nice. the bugs thought so too. and i was wearing shorts instead of pants so i had to stop and slap at my legs every now and then.

one of gramma’s friends observed yesterday that i had lost a lot of weight. i kind of noticed, when i look in the mirror? but all my pants fit way more loosely now and that kind of struck me as odd. at the doctors’ offices i always weigh in at just under 150. well, the scale reads over 150, but i have my shoes and stuff on. so i still weigh like... 20 or 30 pounds more than i did before i started taking medication. it’s kind of surprising i haven’t lost even more weight considering the size of my meals for the last three months especially.

i did eat three times today though, for once. about four hours after dinner i was pretty hungry again so i reheated some leftovers and burned my tongue. i also snuck some crust to eve and doge. just a bite.

i noticed that wiley’s favorite toy is the bright red one. it’s kind of silly. why even make red dog toys?

oh, i also talked to my aunt a little bit. her thyroid problems are continuing, but she seemed ok. i was too nervous to call and make an appointment with the doctor. i’ll try again tomorrow. and asher and i made plans to hang out on friday. hopefully eve will be feeling well enough by then to let us spoil her. the tumor cleanup isn’t as hard on her as that first time where uncle mike tried to scrape her bones and everything and spent hours cutting off every cancer cell. when it came back anyway we kind of figured another surgery wasn’t going to get rid of it for real this time and eve was hitting the end of middle age so being under for so long again would be even more dangerous. and she was way too old to just cut the leg off. you know how it is.

i’m trying to remember the rest of what i did today but it was mostly watch youtube and idly play pokemon. i think i bought all the unique items in the game by now... and i only have three more types of berry to collect. i need to somehow win 50 times in a row for each type of battle at the battle tree. that’s going to be a drag. i’d rather get all the pokemon that need hyper training to level 100 first. it’s kind of weird how many legendaries have 0 ivs in a stat.

and i found my gen 3 latios and latias both had 0 ivs in the same four stats. i took pictures and put them on snapchat.

i did do some busywork and organized my closet. now all the winter clothes are on a separate rack.

i hope things go ok for eve tomorrow... i’ll probably spend most of the day downstairs with her. 

i still have 27 perfect iv pokemon i haven’t given away yet. i should really just send them out on wonder trade, but i keep feeling like maybe one of my cousins will want one someday. i could very easily just get a perfect one in a few minutes if they asked using my competitive pokemon, but i dunno, i always want my best resources to go to people i know first. i can’t nickname them since most of them are from gen 6, so i’ll just send them out tomorrow. 

my dad judges me pretty hard for playing pokemon all day... but before i picked the game back up i was doing literally nothing. if i could just inch out a little farther and apply that, i don’t know, determination to some other project. even just a new game. or making an appointment with my doctor. 

i was thinking about playing mass effect again. not like, planning to play it, but just thinking about it. i don’t really want to play through it again. it was craig’s game. i mostly bought my own copies on steam to legitimize my time playing them. i don’t even want to play the third game, i’d rather make up my own ending. especially since my old files are either totally gone or on craig’s computer. 

last night i had a hellacious road trip dream. after what appeared to be a disagreement with my family (over... haircuts, maybe? i was not, and still am not, sure) i found myself stranded in a small town. you know the neighborhood from edward scissorhands? it was that sort of palette. i was looking for a bus out of there, but i don’t recall knowing where i was trying to go. perhaps i was planning on catching up to my family. but it was so irritating trying to get anyone to help me. there was one lady who would just scream any time i came anywhere near her. most everyone else spoke as if they were underwater. my stuff would get stolen or lost if i looked away for even a minute. i had no idea how i was going to pay for an interstate bus ticket if i ever did manage to navigate the public transportation system. eventually i found a place to try to eat, but i accidentally dropped all my food in a trash can. like it fell out of my hands. i was dumpster diving when i woke up.

don’t got much else to say tonight. the current plan is for me to go to mom’s office on thursday for five or six hours. i’ll charge my ipod tonight since the battery always lasts about a week.

i do... feel a little better with all that cardboard out of my room. i can see the floor again. there’s a nice open space for wiley to come lay down if he wants. and i moved the pile of crap that was blocking access to the closet. the room looks more like a place that someone lives instead of a depression hole. maybe since i won’t be able to do anything productive on thursday, i can trick myself into thinking i have a deadline and get some stuff done tomorrow, like setting appointments and sending emails and paying my bill from the school. barring any horrible brain malfunctions, i will at least think about doing those things tomorrow, hopefully before everything closes at 5.

[ablindrunner-blog]

Fell off the wagon

Well, I am finally off of overtime at work for at least this week, its only been going on since before november and trust me ww are all tired. Its nice to know that I don’t have to go in until 9 all week. I can actually catch up on my sleep. 

I hope everyone has a great easter with family and friends or both. We skipped mass to go with my in laws to church and honestly I felt a little bit out of place. Church should not be an hour and a half. I am sorry if you can’t say what you need to say in five minutes to 10 its not worth saying. 

I took my night time meds early in the morning and I slept most of my day away fro the exception I was partially awake for dinner at my in laws house. I ate and then preceded to sleep on the couch in the basement for an hour or two. I’ve slept six hours already through out the day so now I am just going to be awake I think all night. I definetly won’t be following the bottle insurctions again. It told me to take it in the morning but it makes me so sleepy I guess I need to take it at night. 

My diabetes has taken a back seat. I was really good at checking it but then I feel off the wagon. I guess i just need to get back on. I feel so much better when I have m sugars in check and knowing exactly what they do. I’ve been eating horribly the past few weeks but that’s going to change and I am going to start going back to ww. I think I’ve gained about five pounds back but I know I can easily loose it. 

As far as future plans we are starting to amke them I plan on transfering to an aramark plant in chicago and live in the suburbs of chicago and just cummute to work everyday. I know I will get a raise and the cost of living will be hire but it should work out prett well. Em’s ready for a move and a fresh start and I am ready to not be dependent on anyone. I was made to be an independent person and that is exactly what I need to be. I hate being reliant on people especially for rides when I know there are plenty of town with great public transportation.  Who knows I may even get a better job from moving. So sometime hopefully by the end of the year. 

As far as kids go none yet. We’ve been trying and we have also tried adopting ans we haven’thad any success on either front. I told my wife today that maybe we wheren’t supposed to have kids in Kansas. 

I am just chilling at home listening to WGN chicago. 

[super8richlandjacksonms-blog]

Travel Survival Guide to Staying in Hotels

Travel Survival Guide to Staying in Hotels

1.  What are tips for choosing your hotel?

•  Location, location, location.. stay in the city.

Like many travelers, I like to navigate the city quickly and easily. I don’t want to stay somewhere far outside of the city, where I have to take taxis to get into the city. Aside from convenience, I often stay out late filming and staying away from public transportation means costly dollars spent.  Instead, I like to be located in the city. I like to walk out on the street and the town is right there.

• Research hotel reviews.

I always check hotel reviews if I’m interested in booking a hotel. Most of my Asia travel, I book with Agoda and they’re great.  Most accommodation booking websites have a place for reviews and there’s also Tripadvisor.

• Convenience to public transportation and sightseeing landmarks.  

Having a metro station or bus stop located five minutes away is ideal to me. When I arrive after a long flight or bus ride, I just want to go straight to my hotel. The last thing I want is to be walking around the city for an hour, dragging my luggage around.

2. What is your security tip for entering and leaving a hotel?

Obviously, I would not book a hotel I don’t feel safe in. But let’s say I book  a hotel whose security is questionable. If my room has a chain lock on the door,  I’ll use that when I’m hanging out in my room or sleeping.

3. Do you use a doorstop ?

I  take a doorstop with me for guesthouses. For most of the hotels that I’ve stayed at, I’ve not  needed a doorstop.

4. Do you leave your stuff in your room?

Do you unpack your clothes, keep it away or toothbrush or other item so that it wouldn’t get stolen? Once the cleaners get an idea that you’re staying alone will they steal from you? Should I fake that someone else is staying with me by having an extra pair of shoes maybe men’s shoes. What if my suitcase gets stolen with all my clothes, what should I do?

• A thieving maid is probably the exception than the rule.

Having worked in the hospitality industry for a brief stint, I know that workers are very dedicated to the work that they do and they try their best to create a good experience for people. Nobody wants to lose their job. Nobody wants to be accused of stealing.

• Don’t leave your valuables out as temptation.

I do leave my stuff in my room. But I will pack all my stuff away. I will not leave any valuables out. Leaving money,  valuables like your computer or camera equipment out; those are things I would probably pack up  in my bag or at least, cover and hide a little.

• Take your valuables with you.

If I’m staying at guesthouses or hostels, where I feel like the doors feel a little  flimsy and easy to open or the hostel locker doesn’t feel stable… I will take all my valuables with me (that includes my laptop!). I will pack it in my daypack and take that around with me sightseeing.

• Put your  “Do not disturb” sign on my door, so your room won’t get cleaned.

When I used to work in television as camera crew, I was staying on one hotel room from days to a month. I  wanted my room untouched. I had a lot of expensive equipment in my room. I didn’t want anyone to tamper with anything, clean or organize. I also I didn’t want to pack everything up my belongings every day, before I left for a shoot. So I put out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.

• Always do a once over of your room before checking out.

I always go through all the closets, drawers and look under and on my bed to make sure I don’t leave any personal items behind.

How much of your stuff should you leave out when you leave your room?

5. Are hotel room safes safe?

I think hotel room safes are safe, but I’ve never used them.  It’s personal preference. I don’t like using hotel safes, because I like to keep my things organized and in very visible sight. I don’t like to put things in spaces where it can be concealed and I can forget them, like drawers!   As I said, it’s personal preference.

If I’m running late for my plane, but I forget that I’ve left stuff like my passport, in the safe… a passport is a pretty valuable thing. It means I’m definitely making a trip to go back.

6. What’s a good time to be off the streets?

Hard question.  Personally, I don’t come back to my hotel until it’s midnight, because I’m filming . I want to make the most of my trip.  I practice travel street smarts often. I don’t take anything for granted and I pay attention to my surroundings, especially if they’re foreign.

Read Important Safety Tips for Solo Travelers… it could save your life!

But if you feel like you know the place is sketchy or you don’t feel confident traveling at night,  a good time to be off the streets is 7pm-9pm. If you’re comfortable then maybe 10pm.  There are other travelers, who will suggest not going out at night.

But there’s so much stuff that goes on at night. To completely remove evening activities from your itinerary is removing a part of the culture and lifestyle of that city. When I was in India, I was in Darjeeling. At night it gets dark. Very dark. But the streets are lit up and people roam around as if there’s a street festival. Shops are open and tourists are buying souvenirs. Families are going out for dinner or they’re just walking around strolling. It’s really up to your comfort level.

7. Tipping Etiquette in Hotels

I feel tipping should be personal preference, based on budget and cultural etiquette.  It’s up to you how you want to set the tone of your trip.  In the U.S., tips are expected . Americans believe in tipping  in hotels, cafes, restaurants, deliveries, apartment doormen, a lot of places! Many of us think it’s due to the fact employers don’t pay their staff well enough and place the burden on the hotel guests to pay housecleaning their full share.  It’s a social etiquette and practice that turned grossly into an expectation  and horrible societal practice enforced by bad employment practices.

Generally, being American, I tip on a sliding scale depending upon the country’s dollar value. I know that house cleaning work is effort and it’s not fun to clean after piggy or dirty people.  In some cases, when maids see they’re being appreciated, they give a little extra effort or leave extra toiletries.  Some travelers like to leave a tip daily, whenever they request their room cleaned or some tip a lump sum at the end of their stay.

If I’m going to Las Vegas, I  tip about a dollar a day to the hotel maid; if it’s a nice hotel and there’s a lot of pampering or extras they bring, I might tip a little more.  But a hotel in Cambodia, I might leave a few cents or tip what’s considered a dollar in their currency.

True, there are no tipping countries where tipping is considered offensive or is already included in the final bill and is not expected.  Asians coming from Asia, will stay at American hotels and don’t tip. Australians might be taken aback by the idea, as companies pay a high minimum wage. In the end, it’s up to you as to how you enjoy the hospitality staff and how generous you feel.

8. What if you don’t have the budget to tip every single day, but you feel pressured.

I put out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on my door and I don’t let the cleaner clean my room. If you don’t have the budget, you don’t have the budget. It happens to us all.  I also believe in being eco-friendly and avoiding waste. I don’t need fresh towels, my bed to be fluffed or new toiletries and soap everyday.  That Do not disturb sign is the one fix for everything.  A safe room, no excessive waste and I don’t have to tip every day.

[rob-blog1234]

WEEKEND TV HOT FILM PICKS!

Check out my guide to the top films on TV this weekend and the best of the rest. Enjoy!

LATE FRIDAY 15th DECEMBER

HOT PICK!

Syfy @ 2300        Serenity (2005) ****

Serenity is Joss Whedon’s feature length debut. His previous work was the very successful TV series Buffy, Angel and Firefly. In more recent times we know him for the impressive Avengers Assemble and he also wrote the fantastic Horror The Cabin in the Woods. From the very start of his career - he was a success and this shines through in Serenity.

Serenity is a film set 6 months after the series Firefly ended. It’s a futuristic space adventure focusing on the crew of the space ship Serenity captained by the charismatic Mal, played brilliantly by Nathan Fillion. It is a great adaptation of a TV series to feature length film. Mal and his renegade crew of smugglers get by from job to job constantly steering clear of the totalitarian regime of the Alliance. When they agree to transport a Doctor and his sister who are on the run from the Alliance they really didn’t know what they were getting themselves in for.

This film has a great sense of humour and there is a vein of comedy running throughout. Fillion is in his element with this sort of material. It has some great effects and the whole film has an incredible richness to the settings and story that breathes life and realism into a very entertaining and interesting plot. It has some great characters and this “space western” focuses as much on the relationships as it does the main story. Whether you are a fan of the original series or not this is a great space romp accessible to anyone and everyone.

Best of the rest:

GOLD @ 2100     Gremlins 2: the New Batch (1990) ***

E4 @ 2100           The Impossible (2012) ****

 SATURDAY 16th DECEMBER

HOT PICKS!

Film4 @ 2100      Men in Black (1997) *****

There's no better way of celebrating the weekend than with an action packed Sci-Fi Comedy. Men in Black is exactly that. Unbeknownst to the general public a secret department of Men in Black police the goings on of aliens on earth. We are introduced to some great characters, particularly Tommy Lee Joneses Agents K who offers Will Smith a job in the agency as Agent J. The two agents get caught up in an intergalactic terrorist plot that could destroy the Earth. Its comic book beginnings show through the direction and camera work of Barry Sonnerfeld to great effect. It is full of some pretty good CGI and special effects that were state of the art in 1997 and still hold up really well today. The script is well put together, fast and snappy with some fabulous dialogue which further strengthens the relationships and chemistry between the two agents. It's short but sweet at around 90 mins, perfect for a film that's a bit of fun. It doesn't take itself too seriously and so shouldn't the audience. This is great action, comedy Sci-Fi escapism.

Horror @ 0045   Eden Lake (2008) ****

I was surprised how truly horrible this film was, I am surprised how uncomfortable it made me feel and I’m sure that’s exactly what the makers were hoping it to do. It is very unforgiving and deals with such difficult subject matter that I don’t think this film withstands any more than a single watch. It is a bleak, brutal, and more importantly, a very realistic horror that I truly never ever wanted to watch again after my first viewing. In fact all subsequent attempted re-watches have ended in only being able to half watch it as I know what horrible events are coming. The reason for its affectation is purely down to the realism and the ability of the viewer to relate to the characters - they are very realistic and believable. The situations that they find themselves in seem very close to home. If you have ever been witness to gangs of youths on buses or in town centres causing trouble - then this film will really strike a nerve.

A couple’s weekend in the woods turns into a living nightmare as a group of aggressive youths come on the scene. This Horror film contains no aliens, no fantastical beings, no CGI creatures lurking in the night - just pure evil… the evil of people… and we are far more evil than any made up beast that we see on screen. The pace picked up just when required and the story contains a few timely surprises. At the end of this film I was left sitting in stunned silence whilst the credits rolled. This film really isn’t very nice… but unfortunately it really is rather good.

Best of the rest:

ITV3 @ 0825       Ben-Hur (1959) *****

ITV1 @ 1830       The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) ***

5* @ 2100           Dirty Dancing (1987) ***

Skyarts @ 0045 Chocolat (2000) ****

Film4 @ 0100     A Dark Song (2016) ****

 SUNDAY 17th DECEMBER

HOT PICKS!

Gold @ 1530       It's a Wonderful Life (1946) *****

This is one of the greatest Christmas films ever made - it defines Christmas. It is a feel good film - plain and simple. A perfect Christmas film. No matter how you are feeling - It’s a Wonderful Life is sure to lift the spirits. Merry Christmas!

ITV2 @ 1915       Gravity (2013) *****

Back in 2013 our senses were overloaded with this new level of cinematic experience. It restored my faith in IMAX 3D proving it still had a place in cinemas and it also became one of my favourite films of the year. It felt like I had seen this many times but in fact all I have always done is watched the opening 20 mins over and again, showing its spectacle to friends and family as the destruction of Explorer booms through the surround sound. So surprisingly, this was my first full re-watch.

One thing is certain - this is still an amazing spectacle and the unbelievable amounts of tension remain very much alive on re-watch. I was still left holding my breath at many points during the film. I was still completely gripped throughout, I had actually forgotten how exciting some of the scenes were, my memory almost always just focuses on the opening scene. Admittedly this time I did roll my eyes at some of the script but instantly forgot and forgave them as the tension once again ratcheted up and the next explosive sequence battered my senses into submission.

I called this film a “cinematic success” and this still holds true. It still works wonders on a big & loud home cinema set ups but I doubt it would have the same impact on small screens and portable devices. This film needs to be accompanied by the large cinematic set ups it was obviously created for. A solid, visually ground-breaking film that still carries the tension and adrenalin on repeat viewing. Love it.

C4 @ 2200           Die Hard (1988) *****

John McClane comes home for Christmas but manages to bump into a load of terrorists lead by the amazing Alan Rickmann as the sinister Hans Gruber. Here begins John McClane’s bad luck stint getting mixed up with bad guys where ever he goes. Great story, classic 80’s Action. A must see Action Film. The greatest Christmas film.

C4 @ 0225           I Origins (2014) ****

I was really impressed with Mark Cahill's Another Earth so when I saw this pop up in the cinema I had to catch it before it's limited release pushed it into catch-it-late-on-Blu-ray territory. I'm so glad we caught the late showing on a Saturday night. The cinema was empty... Perfect.

Dealing with scepticism, spirituality, Science and Religion this film takes a few big leaps that you need to roll with but it is put together in such a beautiful way. A splendid cast with performances to be proud of, especially Michael Pitt's Dr. Ian Gray. He shines throughout and is almost always on screen. The beauty does not just end with the cast. Cahill is honing his skills and it looks absolutely stunning, each and every shot purposefully placed and combined with a soundtrack that is expectedly cool and quirky with great mood, it certainly is a lovely ride. The use of Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack" in the close is fantastic.

So much happens in the plot I'm not delving into it here as that will rush the detailed sequence of events that mould and manoeuvre our lead. The subject matter and the questions it raise are admittedly deep and I felt continually torn as certain events unfold. It touches on many issues and ideas, from reincarnation, belief systems, religion and spirituality all through a scientific platform of a desire and necessity to prove and disprove. It certainly throws up some chewy subject matter. I for one think it was handled well in the most part.

I'm sure this will be a bit chalk or cheese for some with some leaps too far, but I was won over by its overall feel. A great looking film. I am certainly impressed with Cahill's next step in film. I hope he can keep this momentum going.

Best of the rest:

Film4 @ 1100      The Book of Life (2014) ****

BBC1 @ 1450      Toy Story 2 (1999) *****

C4 @ 1505           Jingle all the Way (1996) ***

Syfy @ 1700        The Last Starfighter (1984) ****

ITV1 @ 2000        The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug (2013) ***

Comedy @ 2100 There's Something About Mary (1998) ****

TCM @ 2100       The Deer Hunter (1978) *****

ITV4 @ 2255        Gangs of New York (2002) ****

C5 @ 2300           Sleepy Hollow (2013) ****