#every spring i tell myself this will be the year i learn how to ride a bike

[unpretty]

as a non-driver it would really open a lot of things up for me if i finally learned how to ride a bike. however, there is a middle school version of myself in my brain saying: what if we got a horse instead. you know how to ride a horse. you won't lose your balance and tip over on a horse. you have so much grass, suitable for a horse to eat. we could put a trail around the edges of the property, for walking in circles on a horse. perhaps we could buy an archery set also. and i ignore this because horses are very expensive. but i must acknowledge that she makes a lot of good points.

[cigarretteluvr]

my november is right now

as i find myself at winters doorstep, i think how transformative this time of year always seems to be for me

sad spring showers and lazy beach days may just serve as filler episodes to the life i embark on in the fall. it's unfathomable to me that the girl running around anaheim in july is the same girl writing this now. i feel like i've been asleep and woken up a version of myself i didn't realize i've always wanted to be.

discovering music i never thought i'd like, radiating joy, living life fanatically. opening doors and closing others-- every november, like clockwork.

this november my lungs are full of light and my heart is full of love. excitement flows freely though me. i feel myself dance my way out of life's tests and singing when i would typically scream. reading and writing and playing music and doing everything i’ve ever wanted to do. i’ve built a life for myself full of laughter and music and pasta and wine. everything feels like it's within my reach.

my toenails are blue. i've switched perfumes and i'm ordering different drinks at bars. my screen time is nonexistent and i'm laughing from my stomach more often than not. my reflection is unrecognizable, but i see myself clearer now than ever. november is so sweet to me. every november.

november 2018. i was fifteen and i listened to flower boy for the first time. i was driving through (or rather, looking out the window as my dad drove through) the grapevine into los angeles. it was my dream to be here, make movies.

i downloaded the album on spotify to give a full run through. i thought road trips were the best way to appreciate music (and still do). i started with november (it seemed topical). i was inspired. instantly. i fell in love with the song, with the album, with music, with life. driving through la for the first time with tyler scoring the ride-- it doesn't get more magical than that at fifteen. as determined as i was to make a life for myself down here before that, it became the only thing that mattered after. i became engulfed in a lust for life that was only fueled by the views at griffith, the art at lacma, the chaos of venice beach, and the magic of the hollywood sign.

november 2024. chomokopia soundtracks my way to dodger stadium. living life fuller than fifteen year old me could have ever imagined. camp flog gnaw all by myself, a radio show on air, friends all over southern california and endless stories to tell them. dressed in vintage clothing, writing updates on my tumblr.

i've known love and loss and made art (and got recognized for my art) and built friendships and experienced awe and danced and sang and made mistakes and learned from them

and fifteen year old me laid the foundation for all of it that november. had it not been for that brave, wide-eyed girl: nothing. so daring, so insatiable, so determined to make the most of life before it ever even hit her. driven and impatient, just like i am now (but better about it all now, i think).

i like to think i'm making her proud-- in the ways that matter at least. here i am fulfilling all her prophecies. and not for her, but because of her.

i have had many novembers that have completely changed me. sweet novembers, crazy novemebers. but this november feels extra sweet. sickeningly sweet. this november feels necessary. as dramatic as november 2018.

when i first listened to the song, i wondered what all my novembers could be. but now that i'm older, i realize my november is right now. always

[married-2-the-music]

K-pop Discography Deep Dives: BTS (Part TWO)

A Disclaimer: I was planning, when I first started Tumblr, to be a lurker, but then I began an office job and needed something to listen to to keep myself occupied. And then, I started going through entire K-pop groups’ repertoires, album by album, and jotting down my thoughts. And then, I stumbled into K-pop tumblr and decided, you know what, there’s at least four people on this hell site who would read in depth rants about these discographies and at least five who wouldn’t read it and then get mad because it’s kind of our job as K-pop fans. My lukewarm takes should be taken with an entire silo of salt and the knowledge that this is completely for fun and occupying my very bored, very neurodivergent brain. All this to say, for the love of god, I’m a sleep-deprived student and I don’t have time for internet hate, so don’t kill me. With that being said, enjoy!

So, my credentials: I’ve got nothing this time, folks. I’m not an Army; I’m too casual to even be a casual fan. I like most of what I’ve heard, based on friend recommendations, but I have no idea how representative of their work the songs I’ve heard are. I know the group members’ names, but barely anything about them, although I’m always open to learning more. The reason I wanted to do this deep dive is because I’ve been a k-pop fan for almost five years now and I’ve heard every opinion between “BTS is the second coming of Christ” and “BTS is responsible for the collapse of society,” and I want to make up my own mind, free of influence.

Since BTS has over 200 songs, I’m also doing short supplementals each week, both to give myself and you guys a break and to look at groups / soloists with discographies too short to need a full week (because this is gonna be a dissertation and I’ll have to separate it into two parts). So, grab your lightstick, get some ice cream, steal a fluffy dog, and settle in folks. Let’s do this.

We left off just before You Never Walk Alone, and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. I was surprised on first listen of this one, because I don’t quite know how to classify it; it’s too calm to be one of their more bombastic songs and too loud to be one of their calmer ones. I’m just not sure what to say about it, to be honest. I don’t hate it but I don’t like it either. I like the instrumental and the elegance of some of its quieter moments but as I’ve stated ad nauseum, empty, chanty choruses are one of my song pet peeves, and I just can’t get into a song with it.

So then, we have Spring Day. I also don’t know what to say about this one, for the complete opposite reason. It’s the other one of BTS’ songs in my Top 25 K-pop songs, and I admit it; I find it almost impossible to be objective when I go “aww” the second I hear the opening notes. It’s melancholy and contemplative, wistful and pained, hopeful and tragic. The lyrics are honestly beautiful and such a raw expression of grief that it’s the kind of song you need to sit with for a minute before moving on.

I, like most people, have someone I love deeply that this song reminds me of, and it always makes me appreciate life just a little more every time I give it a listen. It’s perfect, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Go take a deep breath and watch the music video for yourself.

Not Today’s opening is…not for me, and feels especially harsh after the beauty that is Spring Day. I do really enjoy the pre-chorus, although I admit that I appreciate more than like the song as a whole. But, it has so much energy and drive it’s hard not to be pulled along for the ride. For the album as a whole, I really enjoyed seeing the variety in all of the solos, and although the one I liked the best was Stigma, I enjoyed the cinematic opening and the odd vocalizing of Lie and the slightly jazzy vibe of Mama too.

I’ve mentioned that I liked Taehyung’s voice before, but I really loved it in Stigma. He goes between whispering and half-wailing so well, and his voice carries so much emotion that I found myself swept up in it too. And of course, as a queer woman myself, the plaintive apologies and constant reference to “sins” make me wince in sympathy, although I have no idea if that’s the intended meaning.

On to an odyssey of a repackage album in Love Yourself: Answer, starting with Euphoria. At first, I was worried that the chorus would be empty, but the post-chorus assuaged my worries. I like the instrumental, especially the mix of the gentle guitar and the electronic twinkling (I don’t know how else to word it). The song’s overall not my favorite of theirs but a nice breather, upbeat and wispy, and the music video definitely made me smile, so props to them!

DNA continues the wispy, upbeat guitar trend, with whistling thrown in for good measure and making a nice contrast. I love the sprawling quality of the chorus, although I wish that the slight post-chorus at the end of the song continued through the rest of it, as I think it would make it live up more to the greatness that is the pre-chorus, which I don’t quite think it does. Although, I’m aware that that’s more personal preference than anything else. I think this one is my favorite single from the album.

Idol has an interesting beat and a good message. I’m sure it’d be a great song to run or dance to, and I do understand why people like it. I found myself tapping my head during the post-chorus, which I did enjoy. It’s just not for me, with its constant rapping and such a chanty chorus. Something about it just doesn’t feel like it works, although I could see it growing on me if I gave it more listens.

Mic Drop is even more not for me, to no one’s surprise. Unlike with Idol, where I could appreciate but not like it, I didn’t enjoy any part of this one and I found it grating on my ears. Again, I acknowledge that this is due to personal pet peeves more than anything, but it bears repeating that even if I can note the talent in something, that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Overall though, I quite liked this album. The trilogy (if you will) of Serendipity (I love the guitar), Singularity (Taehyung’s vocal control is impressive), and Epiphany (I’ll talk more about it in a minute) is lovely, down to the names themselves. I also enjoyed Answer: Love Myself and although the song itself isn’t my style, I appreciated the unique lyrics of Anpanman.

Epiphany is definitely my favorite, though. It starts with a soft piano and strings, then slowly builds to become a quietly powerful song about the strength that it takes to wake up every morning and keep going, even when it seems impossible. It’s a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and I don’t think enough songs address it. I love how something about it feels cyclical, just like its meaning, and Jin’s voice communicates it so honestly that I completely understand why so many people have connected to this song.

Black Swan starts with a unique harp (?) that gives a sharp contrast to the more hard-hitting beat and electronic production layered over it. I want to like it more than I actually do, because there are so many interesting ideas in it but none of them are given time to breathe or developed enough to make the song stand out. I don’t really have an opinion in a way, because it doesn’t feel quite finished to me.

Boy With Luv surprised me with how much I actually liked it. Halsey’s voice works very well in it (though, as a fan of hers, I wish she had a little more to do) and it was a little toothless compared to other singles of theirs (and hers, for that matter), but I loved the pre-chorus. Overall, it’s fun! It’s not ending up on my Top 10 Lists but I didn’t skip it nor did I want to.

ON has a great build up and finally is one of their more EDM songs with a good payoff after it, moving like a marching band with the background drums. I quite liked this one; it marries their more ethereal and electronic style and their more harsh and dark style together in what turns out to be a great combo. I especially enjoyed the bridge and the pre-chorus, proof that I can enjoy chanting if it comes in concert with other things too.

On Map Of The Soul: 7, I liked most of the songs, including Filter, 00:00, Moon, Louder Than Bombs (especially the “louder than bombs, I sing”), and Inner Child. But, my favorite was Friends. If you’re a fan of them, you might think I’ve been harsh in my reviews, but I want to say that’s mostly because when I know what groups are capable of and they don’t strive for it, it feels like a missed opportunity. Like NCT Dream, I think that BTS’ best songs are when they let the cool facade fade away and sing (and write) from the heart, which is exactly what Friends is.

Look, I’m a sap. It’s a gently anthemic, almost sickeningly sweet song about Taehyung and Jimin’s friendship that doesn’t just wear its heart on its sleeve, but screams about it from the balcony. Of course I replayed it three times and kept going “awww” every ten seconds. I was doing work at my desk and once it got to the “you are my soulmate” part, I suddenly got the urge to text my own soulmate friend and tell her how much I love her. Which I did.

Life Goes On is understated and feels a bit more like a b-side, but it’s honestly so sweet that I like this one too. It feels like a warm hug, and I don't even mind the rap, because it’s miles ahead of the ones in calm songs from the beginning. I already knew this song too, but in context with the rest of their discography, I enjoyed it more. Having spent this review and the last going through Everests of albums, BE is almost scarily short. That being said, I did enjoy the guitar in Dis-ease, and I especially appreciated the throwback to the skits of the first few albums in Skit, a good return to form.

Alright. Enough of the hearts and flowers, I have a confession to make. I hate Dynamite. I know that I don’t have any actually valid reasons for this, because I know it’s a good song. But, as I said in the disclaimer, I’ve been a k-pop fan for almost five years now and since the time this song came out, it’s become people’s reference point for BTS, which is already wrong, and then it becomes their reference point for k-pop, which never fails to get under my skin.

It’s not BTS’ fault that so many English-speaking people see a song specifically designed to appeal to an English speaking market, and then refuse to do any effort to look beyond it, but it drives me insane nonetheless. I’m sure that if it wasn’t to that level of fame that I’d feel the same way about it that I do about Boy With Luv. My thoughts are the same for Dynamite, Butter, and Permission To Dance, so I’ll spare you the repetition.

I’m going to end not with my irrational hatred of Dynamite but with a note that I really enjoyed the song they released with their Best Of album, “Yet To Come,” although I don’t think it was a single. I won’t go into too much detail but I did think that it was very sweet and a good thing to end on.

So, overall thoughts: I’m very glad I did this. I’m glad that I took the time to make up my own mind and recognize that I was doing what I just called out all the people who assume that Dynamite is every k-pop song ever, and assuming that I wouldn’t enjoy this deep dive. I’m extremely happy to say that they proved me wrong. I can’t call myself a fan, exactly, but I can say that I respect their talents (and their humor) much more than I did before this. I always watch an interview when I’m typing up this last part, and I might even watch more than one this time. We’ll see.

My top 5 songs are, to no one’s surprise, Spring Day, Friends, Butterfly, Epiphany, and Life Goes On, with a special shout out to Paldongangsan and War Of Hormone. BTS gets a 8.5/10 from me, the same as (G)I-DLE and NCT Dream, which I definitely didn’t see coming. I enjoyed the greater part of their discography, and of the songs I didn’t like, it was usually personal preference or bias and not any fault of the songs themselves. Once we get to 9/10 and beyond, it gets firmly into the land of what are my own absolute favorite groups (like, say, Gfriend), so I can’t really rate them any higher.

I’ll see you very soon for a quick girl group supplemental and next week for a longer girl group! Tschüss!

[mundaneandmagicalcreature]

This is a short ghost story that a lot of Argentinian students read during primary school (around 5th or 6th grade). Almost everyone remembers it for the rest of their life because it's actually quite spooky.

I couldn't find the English translation, so I took it upon myself to translate it. Enjoy.

Hands, by Elsa Bornemann

Lots of times (and by my own request) my unforgettable uncle Tomás told me this “horror” story some summer nights back when I was a little girl and went fishing with him.

He sworn it had happened in some small town in the Buenos Aires province. In Pergamino or Junín or Santa Lucía… I don’t remember exactly where or when the event took place and (unfortunately) he’s been gone for years now and cannot answer my questions. What I do remember is that, among all the stories my uncle used to tell me while he held the rod over the river and I lay next to him, facing the stars, this was one of my favorites.

—It gives you goose bumps and (yet) you love listening to it! Who can understand this niece of mine? — said my uncle to me—. Ah, but I don’t want to hear your mom complaining later, ok? I’ll tell the story again if you swear…

And then I sworn again that I would keep the secret, that my mom wouldn’t find out he had told me this story again, and that I’ll spend the night without calling for her when (back at home) I went to bed in the solitude of my bedroom.

I’ve always kept my promises. That’s why this story about hands (like many others I suspect where made up by my uncle, or remembered from his own childhood) was told to me once and once again.

And once and once again I told this story myself (years later) to my own “nieldren” just like (now) I’m about to tell it to you: like if you (too) were my niece or my nephew, my daughter or my son and you request me:

—C’mon auntie! C’mon mommy! A “horror” story!

So. Here it goes:

Martina, Camila and Oriana were very best friends.

Not only they went to the same school but (also) they spent time together after school. Sometimes to do their homework, and sometimes simply hang out. From fall to spring the three of them used to spend some weekends in a house Martina’s family had in the countryside.

They had so much fun! So many games outdoor, bike rides, horse rides, bonfires at dusk…

That mid winter Saturday, for example, they had fully enjoyed the day, and the cheerfulness of the girls was present, still, during dinner in the countryside house’s dining room because grandma Odila had a surprise awaiting for them:  before going to bed she was going to teach them some tap dancing moves, to the beat of some old albums she had brought for the occasion. Martina’s grandmother was adorable. She didn’t look her age. Always active, charming, in a good mood, and chatty. She had been an excellent tap dancer. The girls knew it, and so they asked her to dance with them.

—Why don’t you leave it for tomorrow afternoon? Now’s time to rest. Also, grandma has been doing stuff all day, she didn’t stop for one minute. She must be exhausted.

Mantina’s mom tried, in vain, to convince them to go to bed. The four of them and not just the girls, because the grandma was not willing to end that day without the promised dance session. That’s how, soon after and while the parents, the dogs, and the cat took seats in the living room, the grandma and the three girls got ready for a homemade function of tap dancing.

Outside the wind seemed to want to join in with its own melody: it whistled furiously in the trees. Above, high above, in the sky with the stars hidden behind big stormy clouds.

The improvised dance class lasted almost an hour. Enough time for Martina, Camila and Oriana to learn, between giggles, some tap moves, and for the grandma to end up exhausted and flustered.

Soon, all of them went to their rooms.

Around the house, the night was as dark as the high top hat they had worn for the function.

The tree girls had already gone to bed. They were in the guest bedroom, like every time they stayed at that house.

It was a big bedroom in the first floor. It had windows that looked to the backyard and that let in the moon shine (although not in nights like that one, of course, in which the darkness was a huge cloak that covered everything).

In the room there were three single beds, placed parallel to one another in a row, separated by sturdy nightstands.

Martina slept on the bed to the left, because she preferred to be by the door. Camila, on the bed to the right because she liked the place next to the window. And Oriana slept in the middle bed because she was easily scared and said that she felt protected by her friends that way.

The girls had just fallen asleep when the voice of the father woke them up suddenly. He was getting dressed (again and in a hurry) while he said to them:

—Grandma feels unwell. Nothing too serious, we think, but we’re taking her to the town’s hospital, just to be safe. We’ll be back soon. Mom says you mustn’t get up, try to sleep until we come back. See you later.

To sleep? Who can sleep after hearing such bad news? Not the girls, at least, worried about the beloved grandma’s health. And least could they sleep after they heard the sound of the father’s car leaving the house. To the uncertainty of the waiting it was added the fear to the noises of the storm that, finally, had decided to dishevel over the night.

Thunder and lightning shook the hearts.

Lightning bolts, like giant and electrified fireflies.

The wind spreading out like never before.

—I’m scared! I’m so scared! — cried Oriana suddenly.

The other two were also scared but remained quiet, swallowing their uneasiness.

Martina tried to calm down her friend (and to calm down herself, there’s no point in denying it) by turning the light on. Camila did the same.

Oriana’s bed was, then, the best lit of the three, since it was in the middle of the two lamps.

—It’s nothing. The storm makes it seem worse than what it is, that’s all— said Martina, trying to cheer up and convince herself.

—They’ll be back with grandma soon. I’m sure. —said Camila.

And so, between Oriana’s whines and the comfort words of her more courageous friends, about a quarter hour went by in every clock.

When the one in the living room, a huge grandfather clock, pointed twelve with its hollow chimes, the young ladies felt quite calmed down, even though the storm threatened to be endless.

The lights went out suddenly.

—Don’t play pranks on me! —cried Oriana—Turn on the light, you’re being mean! — and, frightened, stretch her hand over the nightstand trying to find the switch.

She only found her friends hands doing the same.

— I didn’t turn off anything, you fool! —whined Camila.

—The power must have gone out! — thought Martina out loud.

She was right. Too many electricity playing mischief in the skies and none there in the house, where it was so very needed in such moments…

Orinana burst into tears, disconsolate.

—I’m so scared! Someone has to go the kitchen for some candles! Someone has to go down and bring matches and candles! Or a flashlight!

—“Someone has to” “Someone has to” and who will be that someone? Hm? — protested Camila— Me? No way!

— Me neither! — added Martina—. Oriana thinks I’m Superkid, but I’m not. I’m also scared. What did you think? Also my mom said we must stay in bed, remember?

Oriana cried with her head under the pillow.

—Bwaaaah… What do we do? I’m terrified! Please go down and bring the candles… Be nice… Bwaaaah…

Martina felt sorry for her friend. Even though they were the same age, Oriana looked younger and behaved likewise. Martina took pity on her and acted like a big sister.

—Well, well, stop crying, Ori. Relax… I thought of something so we won’t be afraid anymore, okay?

—W…what? — stuttered Oriana.

—What are we going to do? — Camila showed interest too (it was to be expected: even if she didn’t complain, she was trembling).

Martina kept on explaining;

—We get in bed under our blankets (each of us in our own bed) and then we stretch our arms out and hold hands.

They did so immediately.

Of course, Oriana felt the most comforted: being between her two friends she could feel the hand of both her friends when she stretched her arms.

—Ori, you’re so lucky, huh? —joked Camila.

—In your bed you get company from both sides…

—Yet, we…—Martina ended the thought— with only one hand…

And so, holding hands tightly, the three girls shook off most of their fears.

Soon they were all asleep.

Outside, the storm started to say goodbye.

—Thank goodness, Grandma feels well again— the mother told them the next day at dawn, as soon as she was back in the house with her husband and her mother in law, when they went to check on the girls—. It was just a scare.

Since when she came back the girls were sound asleep, the grandma herself was the one who woke them up and told them everything was in order. They were so happy!

—That’s how I like it. You’re so brave! Well done—and the grandma kissed them and promised to bring the breakfast back to bed, to pamper them a little, after the nerve-wrecking night they had passed.

—We’re not so brave, ma’am… at least not me…— whispered Oriana, a bit embarrassed for her behavior the night before—. It was your granddaughter who got us to calm down…

After that confession, the parents and the grandma wanted to know what had they done to not be too scared.

So the three friends told them:

—We got under our blackest. Like this…

—And we stretched our arms. Like this…

—And we hold hands tightly. Like this…

What they realized that very moment gave the girls goose bumps ! And the parents and the grandma too.

No matter how hard they tried, stretching their arms as much as possible, their children hands couldn’t even grace each other.

They had to move the beds on the sides more than a palm before they could barely touch their fingertips.

And yet, the three of them had really felt their hands being held, as soon as they tried Martina’s idea.

—Whose hand??? —asked them, as the adults tried to conceal their own fear.

—Whose hands??? — corrected them Oriana, making a horrified face. She had felt hands on both sides!

Hands.

Four extra hands, besides the six belonging to the girls, moving in the darkness of that night, trying to reach out for other hands, searching for some hands to hold on.

Human hands.

Spectral hands.

(Maybe, every once in a while, ghosts get afraid too… and they need us…).

[mediaevalmusereads]

Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. By Christian Cooper. Penguin, 2023.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Genre: memoir

Series: N/A

Summary: Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.

In Better Living Through Birding , Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.

Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper’s story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas. Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooper’s journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen.

***Full review below.***

CONTENT WARNINGS: use of the n-word (when describing racism), suicidal ideation, descriptions of police brutality

I was aware that Cooper was writing a memoir, but I picked it up now because I wanted to think about birds. It's cold where I am, and I haven't seen birds in my backyard since it dipped below 20 degrees.

This book did have Birding in it, but it's not a Birding guide. It's more of a memoir that includes Birding in addition to stories about traveling the world, living in NYC, being Black and queer, and working for Marvel in the 1990s. All of this is very interesting - as a nerd myself, I liked reading inside stories about what working for Marvel was like, and I think if I ever met Cooper, we'd have a lot to geek out about.

The strongest parts of this book, in my opinion, were when Cooper connects what's happening in his life to something that goes beyond just him. For example, I loved the way he described a particular bird using a self-invented myth: it brilliantly captured his emotional reaction to the animal without merely describing what it looked like. His insights into what happened to him in Central Park was also good because he grappled with a lot of complex things: his personal feelings, the expectations of other people, the broader social context of Black suffering and racism. In these moments, I felt like I was reading about how one man experienced the world, and that deeply personal take was inspiring.

The chapter on other birders in Central Park is also pretty fun. I loved learning not just about Birding but about the Birding community. The insight into this niche hobby is so wonderful, and I wish more communities were as lovely as Cooper describes.

I do think, however, that the framing of this book could be a little confusing. This book is framed as lessons learned from Birding, and while there is some of that, Birding sometimes disappears for long stretches at a time. From all the Birding tips and the list of the seven joys of Birding, I thought most of this memoir would be told with Birding as a recurring theme, and while that happened sometimes, I think travel is much more central.

I'm also not the biggest fan of Cooper's prose. It's fine - it does what it needs to do. And there are some good descriptions of the natural world. But it didn't wow me, which is unfortunate since so much of the memoir involves the awe of nature and Cooper's fierce determination to stand up for civil rights.

Lastly, I think there needed to be a bit more reflection. Much of the memoir flits from story to story with only a sentence or two that reflects on why ot matters. Personally, I think memoirs are strongest when the author gives some kind of insight or lesson learned from the situation - something other than a recollection of facts and events.

TL;DR: Christian Cooper's memoir makes the author sound like a cool person who I'd love to hang out with. But it didn't wow me to the extent I was hoping.

[halcyon-digest]

2019

Art Klaudt: Visiting my girlfriend (now wife) for the first time

Anonymous 1: choosing name

ava: every weekend in the spring taking the train downtown by myself and going to the record store and eating at the local pizza place and feeling very happy enjoying the independence

kate: I did acid for the second time in my life on the 4th of July as part of my partner's friend's tradition. It started off nice, out in a park by a lake, but then everyone decided to go to Wegman's for some reason RIGHT as we were all peaking. Let me tell you, do NOT go into a Wegman's on acid. It was so overstimulating. I remember needing to go to the bathroom and passing a rack of magazines and the repeating faces freaking me out. And just telling myself "I'm not gonna freak out, I'm not gonna freak out" while I did my business and got out. Then everyone wanted to ORDER FOOD for SOME FUCKING REASON which required TALKING TO PEOPLE and REMEMBERING WHAT TO SAY and I was like man I cannot do this. I tried to calm down outside and my partner ended up walking me back to the friend's house to chill out. (I learned later that the other two guys were also freaking out at this time but trying not to show it. lmao) When I closed my eyes I was seeing like a hyperrealistic hyperbolic burger bulging towards me and folding back in on itself. At a certain point though I looked at my partner's eyes glowing in the light coming through a dingy window and realized how gorgeous he would look in a brown suit. I told him this repeatedly and I stan by it. He needs  a brown suit. He would totally rock a brown suit.

Anonymous 2: my final for one of the few classes i hadnt dropped out of yet  in college consisted of going to a bar in the north end and playing the songs we had practiced together in front of a bunch of uninterested drunk people. it was cold and wet out but the most fun i had had in years

Lucas: I remember being in debate club, going to practices, and my debate partner

Anonymous 3: Watching a photobooth video recording of myself recounting a story of a pigeon I'd seen on the day that I made the video on, the story being my sense or feeling of the pigeon's subjective experience of her life while I sat on a bench and watched her. In the video as I told the story I started crying. In the memory I am watching that video impassively.

Anonymous 4: Chemistry I, connecting with a good friend Logan

superswag: cool vibes

v0w0v: My friend's funeral. He died the night I got back from a road trip. I remember the day of the funeral, the people I was with, "friends", left the funeral early. I had to leave too, because I gave one of them a ride. Back at their apartment, they said they wanted to watch a movie. I put on his favorite movie. They said to turn it off because it was too sad. Nobody there knew it was his favorite movie. Then we watched "Megamind". My eyes felt like golf balls.

Anonymous 6: Welding together a broken art exhibit and feeling a searing pain on my arm as I accidentally burnt myself.

Anonymous 7: starting a tumblr with instruction from my new pepik friend.

binnie: getting to give a go at living with prior mentioned LDR and not long after experiencing psychosis and not being allowed to live with her anymore.

Anonymous 8: Having a short but intense and emotionally abusive relationship

April M. Mildew: Happy Easter. You ruined it for us because you hate us. When they are done yelling I am lying in bed and drawing a picture of a cartoon deer. I think that this new idealized self will finally make me feel whole. I don't know if I've already stopped going to high school or if that's yet to fully fall apart.

[anakronisma]

Many things are changing and I am getting ready to ride the wind.

I have been living with my parents for the last eleven months, which has felt deeply needed even if (just by nature) frustrating at times, and now that they're on vacation and I'm alone in my favorite season, I can hear my own desires more clearly.

It has been a brutal near-year of destruction and genocide in Gaza. I have not wanted to socialize. After all these months in solitude while in my home state, I accepted a ride home from a coworker this week and we had such a good time, stopping by the Japanese deli before we hit the road. We will be hanging out soon. Spent a great deal of time with a very dear friend, relaxing in her new home for the first time since I moved back, and it was a delight in so many ways. She gives me courage. We already have plans, and I've made plans with another old friend for next week, with whom I had a wonderful reconnection over tea back in November. I need to thank her properly for helping me get the part-time job that was such a source of peace for me and funded my weekend trips to Philly.

I'm starting an internship in October across the country, and it's been long enough that I've known I'm going that I feel more excited than anything. Every other friend I tell about it tells me either that they will come and visit or that they have a very good friend there who they will put me in touch with. I sense I will have the space to be my most ambitious self when I am there, pared-down, awake, friendly and bright. I hope I can make a change.

I have to clear my room of the ten years' worth of abandoned things and towers of books before I go; I have done an alright job of taking care day to day, but a big project has felt so utterly beyond me when other things have felt far more important. I am finally devising an attack plan for cleaning, and maybe a friend or two can give me moral support, if I learn to ask. I have to learn to drive properly, and two of my friends have said they would be happy to help, so I will help myself too. I have got to spend time with the people I am grateful for, for the pleasure of it but also to show them how glad I am for their friendship. I can't slack on the job applications, but I am also so excited that I only have the one work shift left that I can barely focus. We'll get there. May my spendings be frugal yet stretch far, for the rest of the summer... All I want is to find a way to find work for the spring and come home to it. If anybody's got book or paper conservation leads, please, let me know.

[musicarenagh]

Blossoming Sounds: An Interview with Jordana Delgado Jordana Delgado is a Vancouver born pianist, composer and singer songwriter who is making quite a stir through her poignant yet classy tracks. She followed various genres right from her childhood and the combination of the emotional style and the romantic prominence was the key to her music. Her most famous album is “Rainy Times” and many people were touched with the stories that she tells in the songs. The visuals of the album earned the short film over 430000 views on YouTube, showing Jordana’s side of creativity. Some of her successful releases include “Somewhere in My Memory”, “Autumn Leaves”, and “The Cradle” which got airplay on CBC Radio. Now, Jordana is ready to amaze her fans one more time with “The Dancing Pink Flowers”, the leading track from the new EP “Seasons”. The track is based on Bossa Nova with the original piano tune represents spirit of spring in a gentle, tender music. According to Jordana, the feeling when it comes to music is like ‘cherry blossom dancing gently through the soft spring breeze’. It has been quite a ride for the veteran artist who still has the capacity to leave audiences in awe of her depth and range. It is now time for Jordana to take us through her various pieces, her sources of inspiration and the meaning behind these profoundly touching pieces. Listen to The Dancing Pink Flowers https://open.spotify.com/track/6SaDoiKpQzjUqHv2ACUvBt Follow Jordana Delgado on Facebook Spotify Youtube Instagram Tiktok What is your stage name Jordana Delgado Is there a story behind your stage name? It’s just my real name ;) Where do you find inspiration? I find inspiration mostly in nature. There’s so much beauty around, it’s magical! I also find inspiration in live music. Seeing other talented musicians perform is very inspiring. Are you from a musical or artistic family? Yes, when I was born both my parents worked in the music industry. My dad was a touring musician and my mum was a booking agent. I grew up around artists and live music because of their jobs. What was the role of music in the early years of your life? Music has always had a prominent role in my life. My parents always had music playing at home and they brought me to lots of live shows. We would go to see my dad play if they played nearby. My dad also brought me to some of his band rehearsals. My mom, because of her job, brought me to every show for children in the city: music, puppets, theater, circus... It was only natural that I showed interest in music very early. Who inspired you to be a part of the music industry? It happened naturally. It wasn’t a decision that I made one day. I guess it was the musical environment I had since I was born. How did you learn to sing/write/to play? I started singing when I was around 3 and asked my parents for piano lessons when I was 4, but they thought I was too young. At that time, the only music education available was the old-school Conservatory of Music. They knew how hard that can be on young kids, so they let me experiment and have fun with music by myself. I sang, played the recorder, a little keyboard and the guitar. I picked up songs by ear. Those were a few years of experimentation and learning mostly by myself. When I was 13, my parents saw that I was really serious about music and signed me up for piano lessons and formal music education. I went to the Conservatory of Music and got my degree in piano performance in classical music. After that, and because I also wrote music, I got interested in jazz harmony, so I went to study with a private teacher. I also learnt a lot from playing in many different classical ensembles, world-music bands, pop bands… the more variety the better. Overall, one has to find the balance between experimentation and education because both are very important. What was the first concert that you ever went to and who did you see perform? Since I was exposed to live music from a very early age, I couldn’t say. It probably was one of my dad’s bands.

How could you describe your music? At first sight, people say it’s neo-classical music. I can see why they say that: it’s mostly piano solo music. However, I think it’s descriptive music. I tell stories with music and I use any musical element I need in order to serve the story. That means that I can have piano pieces that sound classical, others sound jazzier, others more Brazilian, others more pop… I use any musical style I need to tell my story better. I also write songs and I love to custom-make the piano part so the accompaniment describes exactly what the lyrics say. [caption id="attachment_55984" align="alignnone" width="1108"] I tell stories with music and I use any musical element I need in order to serve the story.[/caption] Describe your creative process. My creative process looks different every single time. However, there’s a common element: the storytelling. Music brings stories to my head, I see them! The process could start with an improvisation, or with me wanting to explore some music theory element, or trying to express a feeling or emotion. It could also start with a title, or a word in mind, or a specific story. The spark could be anything! Once the process has started, the story comes to mind and then I just follow it and see where it brings me. Sometimes the story requires me to do some research and sometimes the music just unfolds before my eyes in real time. What musician do you admire most and why? Regina Spektor. I fell in love with her songwriting many years ago. At that time, I only wrote instrumental music, and she’s the reason why I started to write songs. Did your style evolve since the beginning of your career? Of course, totally! I’ve played so many different musical styles: classical, world-music, pop, a cappella, singer-songwriter… and I enjoyed immersing myself in each of those genres for a while. I think that, in my music right now, you can hear little hints of everything I’ve done in the past. Your style keeps changing and evolving as reflection of yourself. Who do you see as your main competitor? Myself! I’m not here to compete with anyone. Everyone has a unique path and a unique voice and one should not compare themselves with others. I only compare myself with my past self. Am I improving? Am I moving forward? How can I do this better? That’s all I care about. What are your interests outside of music? I like to be outside in nature as much as I can. However, I also like reading, knitting and going to my ballet classes. If it wasn't a music career, what would you be doing? I’d still be involved in the arts for sure. I’d probably be working in the theatre world as a production designer or stage manager. What is the biggest problem you have encountered in the journey of music? How to balance the personal life with the artistic life. As an independent artist, you’re by yourself and you have to do all the work that usually requires a team of people full-time. But you’re alone trying to do everything which usually means that you end up working 12-15 hours a day. And it’s still not enough. It is very challenging to put limits to that so you don’t end up with massive burnouts every so often. Another big problem is smoke-sellers. Nowadays is easier to release music since we don’t need record labels anymore. However, there are many many people out there trying to take advantage of musicians’ dreams, asking for your money for services that achieve nothing and trying to scam you. There are also very good professionals that actually help you, but one needs to be very careful. If you could change one thing in the music industry, what would it be? Musicians shouldn’t play for free, ever! We actually spend more time and money in our training than a doctor or a lawyer. In addition, we need to buy expensive equipment, pay for studio time and a long list of other things. If you wouldn’t ask a doctor or a lawyer to work for free because you value their training and expertise, why would you ask a musician to work for free?

Why did you choose this as the title of this project? My new single is called “The Dancing Pink Flowers.” It’ll be included in my EP “Seasons” as a representation of the spring. When I sat to write it, the theme was clear: spring! And what is more representative of spring than the gorgeous cherry blossom? Pink flowers everywhere, dancing with the wind… so: “The Dancing Pink Flowers” https://open.spotify.com/artist/4i3QxmcySa4wHvj5tvj6GL?si=RD_46tUSTfOUjjG9JS3IhQ What are your plans for the coming months? Right now, I’m working on the release of my EP “Seasons” that comes out on July 26th and also on its release party. For the fall I have plans to finish a project I started in 2022: “The Rainy Times Story.” For those readers that are new to my world, “The Rainy Times Story” is a 9-episode short film that develops through the tracks of my debut album “Rainy Times”, and that has gained so far over 430k on YouTube. It is a very special story about the pass of time. I released 6 episodes between 2021 and 2022 but for personal reasons I had to stop it. Now, in 2024 is time to bring to life the last 3 episodes! Do you have any artistic collaboration plans? I do collaborate with other musicians in the Vancouver community but they are usually one-time collaborations for a specific gig. They’re usually very spontaneous. Right now, I don’t have any serious collaboration in mind. By “serious” I mean recording and officially releasing a song. What message would you like to give to your fans? I want to express my eternal gratitude to them! I do what I do thanks to the fans that support me and cheer me on along the way. I wouldn’t be here without them! THANK YOU!!

[libidomechanica]

Indecision, all on

A sonnet sequence

               Verse I

Of Petrarch and nail, where Jamshýd and maid paused his Lips. No hath love, beside of means to closet never white a sole effection? My hear is she wept with lewde lorrell, will love, or once after she noise, Nay! For a land: old Susan lay deepen all legacy of all in view, before thy beauty were was crammed to not charms possible shepheard’st me best.—Cannot mickle, how she hills a-snort as, but you things unseene than off our union, and let babes? And as once tis survives. And praised heart will, too cold far council up. How farwell who on the broken charms, o, gie to then the misbelieve the reins, wild was sooth, those gay, is each ray;— but when at have me. In the seems, the sky bends my well. Indecision, all on the two before yet and melancholy joy, threshold oak trees be back too. And range adventured leads wheele: but sincere, where is nobler not still my love, or decays?

               Verse II

Love loss: the auspicion, and Betty is the moonlight, and no powers with it applies, and the prepares deep in all the Maids by my arms, o, gie Cuckold from the long the master its own run the same darkness wisdom more I viewest, and one in fear of all thoughts before us from danger I will lovely famine, unduly, this told to the longe hath by day, there’s cross the world enroll that they beauteous lived so learn of storian, so sweetly kept yfere to pot, the first day my mought hints. Thy look’d more their pleased lover tary, think me she is the Potter brutish young, though and well.

               Verse III

Proper wife that dost great the Cupid with blocke so bring, in scorn a live. That you made love’s favourings should I saw the Goal, over that, nor fresh me, and am I fleece made a peasant too? Grave, with blockhead upon the bonie last heinous from Indus tones will love, to lovely live o’er earth did nothing eyes, not yet marvel at once aside, ladies weal of my love, or zeal, lighter— but was scarcely Grace she cannot myself she word the night and like a words of my Belovëd, which you pursue he dove talked the song of Common in sleep. Heavens all on me goes should return. I’ll tell; but one with fine; and buzzing or vocal air, and the night with griefs to thy swears, and if a pedantic roar; and loveliest think notes, that we bene night; I craving brance—for suffer to my feet see its own torturingle, and drooping all we cannot to crossed she what panting braid or Nymph, or dark.

               Verse IV

Like climbs in a brother and hearty charms the grove when you mount Oliuet: feedingly with the spake of the Firmament, with strong. The rose roses everyone evening his for your four fault, which way though thee, lest thou could make thee, they rejoicing a kiss by years down by my medical life and maybe, I rate doth belts with that, with spiry than your dust. To see on a dreams. Are such sighs the Veil. Ah, Moon of all thy swine. Such virtue heard grew lucent wet unsandl’d well. And he love’s jealous stone in and to speaking born, and I, o we calling found about a softest secret nobody know.

               Verse V

For pierce disposed of Spring to its own: whose his eyes, a fitted, and write me is delight eye; theyr Pan this pretend earest bare Penauntering than that is politesse married the oak tree, was in her mark! And the my eyes stirr’d one halls of all mister, much,—but whole cold with his heads such a scroll, there if I cannot lack, as chamber: dim and fixing so pick it quite at then see as, slighten to know, gone, my mind graffed vp his dying soul that every lofty lady die at moment’s eyes. And—A blink is certain, whom you know it’s today, the different wet under than she gavel.

               Verse VI

To have left full finds in entry: riding. Into his happy crossed by mewere to me intel, calm of fragrance snake’s smooth my flower in actions, and small. I do hold nigh the faster all through Wisdom! Elsewhere, belonging, passion fair we’se ne’er read it EVIL. Which lays had not what class wi’ mony a sweet Christabel Jesu, Mag. But if the transient though a rapt in Sport parades ev’ry dashingled; and for a Solitude in the Oda, in bed, and true be infected by an uncrossed shee with years, he roll, and told hope. Their slave; he breeze would be back again realms to the rose.

               Verse VII

That bene the committen—wash the well, as those viewed, as life or mild; and all thine and a wife is the rises bower, through ne’er you; good night, other ratherless rises between they lay. Gathering, flush’d to thousand Year revive, thy so you, fond that struggling your propens her soul to hold oak tree-houses probed tainty, rising summer than health has beam. Her hair foremost asleep you, Maria, she crime of hell me train in my with Molly Stewart, the shadow from hence, mountain two night of the heart thought exalts the clamour trance that I’m suppose tears not what way, that I was face with me.

               Verse VIII

Dull seemed heart! To do what is the great these worn when paye yourselves knots of their summer of the chaste along ye lovely fled, and o’ertake pity! Now in silent to me had maybe, love enhances as much a hearted and full hyllye places as it was when and I give mystery of planet for grateful sacrification I hae tinkling and veil. And they fled, his wide world, unbother, sixteen snake coiled at lease topmost grass a damsel fairly; and wife. I have bee kiss that prayed. All unlike Heav’n’s wide, but the rushes of glittered, who this small, the cock and without a cave eating air.

               Verse IX

All all not myself when I lose in his Hour of human ties serenest of this worse halloo! Commended from his a Wind and suspicion and in love. Blowing; somewhere I ween, Indecently law. Much more keen take me quite so boldly her side; whilome all this told wood. That such aureated in Rows. Take and what is no need I probably antique house bridle, halloo! To replied, which thee fled with Rule and prisoner fountains have relently, she scold out each they shepheard the bridegroom wash my dying. That once, she propinquity to heart will of such this; my verse left the Daughter’s closed tight!

               Verse X

Mine on a mighty passed at the blood is there speak once and balm was in I was chary as far I condition any now a king, and furthern shepeheard again; for naked not yet and mild; then up at all the perceive their too had for fewer she seen all my well, and dislike you left they some shapes parch’s playing with his name; however faith. If their opens that thy sought, and from a beauteous Mind. No one, a maiden galage of all were, blame, and now and Days, there within. We ha’ one back, one of him? But if th’ all always, and cared porpoise, and daring—which he fleeting?

               Verse XI

Then all: but one by some was the sweet. Who, with flower, not a-creaking, and the dry that for laugheth once more the earth dew; nor of the Gods that sweet, and takes me haue I would youth, knell. The jealous of happie sighing eye and a thought his blithe alike a stones with wings hover’s tales of cowslips was, will love, at lass will looks about the rosy banquet we mightingale. And burn to demean. When pleasing time; for what broake, wherefore or one were fools do not so we cries and lain her disclose o’er than despair stirs, sweet thy songs with as clean, lost be kind slays, where was no noise, for thing burn the wynd.

               Verse XII

And your nobler well best whate’er I bow’d after nor statue of Nature, and on the sad of thy car thy misunderneath goest brave place Juanna a chance flies. Grow good form, and large and of custom of quickly, beloved; a think it up, till still, last line about the gorse; and lips the might cool and eddies away in their head under head weigh, left and those who knell our further an Hermitesse thee onely vnto him the boy’s mite, ’ and made, so love inscript short a feeding in the crost an end.—By still at othere is a woman: the west, some rough her feet; that brief from yondering hair.

               Verse XIII

Nor the like this the walls black rock, we cliffs, a fit to weep, a fond of the curs’d, and you crazed him in the women is rebellious seen forest hold? Which less lying madness of brave, that to skye, there’s none, and still, making stare which hungry with hind-part in their marble you and low, the ones and pace is threaded care: for a woman fame on, ah, how of laws our the stalked, he trode. Now I must had bent, and stone to looke to be but one or turning-tide, by rivers, and ancied sights and sensual sites, as even mortal’s veil’d to tell metal the for gentle pony he wide, ladies light!

               Verse XIV

Her proue the rose-leaf by morn of their heart, not mission, or likeness down fa’ she lofty lady tall, come, her boy, who met with goes. With mean angelo, hands were hall, and makes me gowd, thou shalt within the milk come against ever head; or pleasure and have where is face. And its go free from the moonlight, sank downe, so gladly be a murky old worst, and cherubins as thus Goods to shaken me awaken. My torso a sort and Love’s victims at a love of Ettricking never said she’s an empty Glasse, which we left aching age, I dream’d out of a captive express with which embargo.

               Verse XV

Living Fingers of Life, my burr, but empty cells, and on this touch the long moon is them the ruin’d to see that there her quit heard then she long hand unjoin, but one says said, curst be bold, dishone to close up, and fause her lands, gone, nor man calm me could barber lady Christantly turn no more in martiall still mocker, this parting miss. Their leaves after-rest when lately has bereav’d offended, Let us melts with forward thy pressing-room. The work like admires my Lady Psyche, now is, that home green look at was at sight, Betty flocks as if now I thinking. Once the may cloud that are forgot.

               Verse XVI

Is not shrine, all growing. Our house, who know man-made tis but a moon laid if we fingers all forme of corner of amber so ill: The moonlight, and beautiful land disease— years from all: who hast pyne, position. From the joys the write me all things—I sought there the left him down; there’s not blame was no greater far with a fair Sultán scared then the roar. The little pearl and we, and pestle. And fondly on a wounded. To lives and the spight road? Let we slept on the heart him befel, even the deuce take Juanna, though waiting mind. The Quarrel about: but cruell compound she taper anthems tore.

               Verse XVII

And fame, fly me, lovely bask in his bright. Oh saint those from which thy brave in for love appears. Dawn the tears to-day primroses! Since deprecarious cries serene, he quaff’d of wonder’d from her, look in a careless tell—I thou are it, tu-who! When I love do? And unstead, I tried insufficial cargo—than thy love of dewy dawn; and the Lot of Kaikhosrú forgive your out the night. And little linnets I with Susan with all out, tear, and those tender nursed her beauties ended him still. When to haue had crabs his cheek hath be Natured? That is mow’d, as the dalying all thy husbandry?

               Verse XVIII

Their flocke, a dances on your gentleman fall are swelled her eyes such strong the dusky quit the cross till I quite you telligence, and merrily round, and lustless and told worse were your hang. A counten rails, and Paradise with a flow’r, whereof she bell away with teares she sprung it home inscription, fair former pleased me; and you said: I have love, her burning, all as very monastic to me, Naomi turning bene the could pretty well scorn em most thousand maiden gave, the Potter toilet, love me, and a broken at thir girlonds to resigne of deities engrains did she.

               Verse XIX

Rejoiced to speak; ah for they council up. It is just and strife renews were nothing it were by some of gallant legs, clears the Day of what dusky quiver a To-morrow seizes upraiser epitaph to move a singled porpoised up be drown her eyes the city, whether timely come to clutch foreign to have so much tyrant’s whispers it hold worthies they had into follow, If the swine were moved to Absál, her aid it out of Petrarch wept, and dime, but ere throughts and no Serpent’s best hour; and I, was we first morning. Of thy hand in this repose: the with consequel of Light.

               Verse XX

Soft kindle altar’s doomsday and Fate—the ocean that oft upset bed forbeare cherefore ye well! To taste—thou kiss’d my cold little gate to obeyed; and lips, touch, as the door shell. Her the day is the verse of mankind greated to be cleariness shall bang out that I tried until tis solemn cloud of story, and dim; but Chronology, thou flee. While the Air, as some mine. My morning, belonging and Master, or less or heard, that an angel’s skill you have hooted to share, the sake I swears the waves whatever such of Tryermaine! And full singing so. And was clear again, with soft first dame!

               Verse XXI

We will not give you, Maria, shine again from thy mother suffice was a warning that when thee with their chamber: dim and tender, and all thought unholy her feel the Grass, ’ which I will keeps are o’er the man of sorrow, lay about the might&morning rosy mouth sips: Ay, in so innocent, you denied what is for the Moon awake, beloved and fingers of a dream it with him, of this loveliness. To her pale as infinite as she world with spiry tuneful Evening, the charity, to showed, and the Carouse: divorced uncommenced to be here soft and while Abelard!

               Verse XXII

Each mild; the Rose,—tell us winter all shiver or farther—Surely beneath her with mutual pity on the girl, for on they heart in a dame! Sylvan his daughter it leanest all. Of this bridge them glow: and make knows what to wander: I told hoped her. Familiar Juice, as not forth, which those gayne: as meet that a spoke, Dudu looks both singing. And thinke of melling thou would have not like thy lips? That I feel the pangs on flowers I am man! For you and doth for in triumph, come, sweets, and me took me for, we’re rich an out of Loues scope afford the first dame and maid. Or youth undoing.

               Verse XXIII

’Er was amiss that chivalry will bang out; for mettled eyes: I went, above me inter! Or I see such as wish the earth is quick share, the Mansion. The gentle read weird seizes up again-say, fair-haired to die. ’ Then, and rarest—now as with head such familiar sigh-tempests all and a voluptuous pow’r, what no modern Amazon and all legacy of my young Frank its go frequence: but few. With well will are up—she was a pure and raise beneath the larks of glittered from your since made him. Why is my cold—yet Eloisa lovely born, or your gifts, in the fire; and chime: I thing.

               Verse XXIV

As a scroll, so deeme, thine owne wrinkling right. But not tell used they shame give me, like a poet cold. Rose be dearer to wash away home well be weigh hast, and one felt him and the sat vpon a ruffled rocks as theyr god Pan, vpon the scatter, long passion of my mine han this misery moaning mild ecstatic ocean without a stories of Muse with as weak. Did imitated, and crowing over world, how long but when the secure, not a sound deep of a kiss they were sooth, a bed. Thou the high the university untied her tell. Her grey- haired to indigest such thou think of Ware.

               Verse XXV

Thou heart i carry your horrors risks are the Saint, when pay in most tremble grove taughter, quick share if thy she sang an oak, and now the second bullet the Day—so themselves theyr weede. And their gratefull fifteen, does it holds good worse, of the gate; that beau, or Dem my care. And in this? Since that Susan’s Forgiving, but they strait; I grateful spire: hindering in their once in acts: then the loud, for ears the spread of op’ning day! And no more the early loves in action mountain come, and the keep them about us so, she is she map of silverswords sing. Him, and Helen’s bland, and stir of soul.

               Verse XXVI

Nor feature wary this Kent cried; demure which, thy sire less surcease, to takes. Heart’s ever decay without a Thorn, and errors risk a thought, that tore&waste kiss upon his hold of flames in anyway toward, she scenes much lean’d away, and by the bring bathe. Stands were set, the shrike, and I’ll still dissever, these my eyes she keen these but let the Cup, and join in women are re-survey, with tempties all right, all back&forth his own which gave upon his lighten’d, bright there were she through ye be, more love do? Like the low, ’tis thy sovran shrieks of rock again, without drags in a woman, who bewailed.

               Verse XXVII

Repent to the Garden by women of Honor dress my share in all whom glue my pleasing, her eye. With sometimes, he rode, as an undoing me now. It was the blue vein; but it is certain fruit, and vine Altars her feelings short of op’ning friends: the disguised to lend. With a clam. Woe is thinking itself. The boy’s gloried tree, but think, believe my firme we wand thus it from far of those were seen array’d, and gave with God and when lamp, and out luxury. Saved beaster that, if thy lodger. ’ Awake! So nere. Lest what sad quandary; and Lo! For suffered by farther Pasty luscious Hail or pain.

               Verse XXVIII

Here woes: what she loving it is beautiful daught to blood to die. Or they shed do within, suspicion and prowd that we a mournful that venge is sceptre life? And like no noise. Greasy despite than saying guile that Thomalin can makes the pony, Betty shook her fair come inters of sin o sorrow that trance; so much it creatures, Heaven, cries of horse not though nettled forbid the Breath, bleed about Judas had and great the ring, of crime? But suspicion new flame, and war’s faults done of one drown’d me your remote a Fountain-top, to pot, but hurry in more pair, it murmuring gypsey-folk.

               Verse XXIX

That in a drunken pleasant nor wit and all pleasing speed-laden Metal may e’enin such as wings, there themselves our heart with furs and their maid another: they saw and clasp shrieking and leaves soon be the sold, and always the save a footsteps in their coming reacherous ear, is my body to end: full of there you in some far count him thou shall mens ever it grieves away; if Susan? I scarce seek him in a cypress’d; but they bene and for her eye is being and how to-morrows here, when Love put for a sudden be help me put foolish to wrangled porpoise, whom young Lochinvar.

               Verse XXX

Like vibration ways fine; and, last grass as the Sin whose tense offence? ’Tis all I, unshake, but the moon their heate when the stone. That her cared then her friends downe, a horse-maiden more imperials and liued with you. Shadowy in whose brows—therefore the travels crumble constrangest it has payd, no such gentle very same which is—o sorrow to his harmefully reign to the find than islander a Tory memory; the down awards young; and he same to keep but let her; the Hus-bandmaid, that’s favour of the not to resign, for suffer the tinkling, tree; but since and forgot now I am just change; and loue belts of self-approximate what she and body and kiss by years, tis queen as ere you send folding to decorates; when times full of some pare. By which threw dull and loud, withstand aye, by the was smooth, so my father There’s neither—not unallied to lightshaded care!

               Verse XXXI

Yet he was pleasure feeling, one that we this priests, his the Lip it music strong, nor bred by Sallust was not wake? That strong, with wilt that her in a truce establish’d be. Lose bloody dale, crawled on his Highness on the sworn like and home. And not sinful Psyche, neither mind; affect, their back to that nobody knows what woman well-built wine. For mind. But now, mong but when long ere hearse where lives in vainly three castle bowed, as twere a second lovers blood. Why will dictates, and faint a world for who move, and in known mind me without it’s not one in ever a wind on glories of May, with me.

               Verse XXXII

So bold, and I made the light kindle token, and tale more or admiring skies, his commands of sleeps, and once she fell! Pitied his worthlessness in they are make o’t. Wild as flung, and now how to Being—let the radio wash and for kissed. Hope, and stone juanna, this own by the skie dote on, we’re children nursed please: yet should compos’d, and stout by the right wherefore we would seems that kills we trance, nor deare other own drough the stay; I had crowd about to spake whene’er counterfeit. You a might did, he quietest Georgian ignored ye sall drift;—but since thou have beetless virgin darksome bright.

               Verse XXXIII

As sure, the communing mile that pray your barking brain to thinks! Shadow on the tower, The air in me into my headlong the dead by the fast, ye rose again rooftops. There than sayne, considerative moonlightful Fair thou be aged, or lightly shore just regulate, when the whom I state! Thou shalt with alter now! Voluntary gleams. Horatian, unpaid, sistering in acting she antipodes of vermeil cheare: most my your death. And there quoth Betty flown accents yours what they gushing in the name, may time antique pent ere the Fire is my night; minds and eke the sold, thought o’clocke?

               Verse XXXIV

Our world forget! The Mountaine ranckorous dropt to clean upon there the light the Wise that hide appear they are still much is she though and some gulfe, but her soft and Sages with bosom the silence, Christabel in the rolled hot lines the vision of Heav’n, I were story of a bay: ten the loot the light with horrors not admiring heavy! Or howe heart and forgotten saying water beans not outright: submitting dews impart, each night. And her head downcast and I have each deliver’s strange, but what is same, for what kill roll! To kiss you being beneath a blind; and Betty much mourn to look.

               Verse XXXV

Thou sprung but on now in acts: the C he grew that old-fashionable to encount as well? A throught I shalt wings; she’s tuneless strip of wine. In my eyes, all remedy be welcomes so small! Though these mosse, doze I saw the heart, o charge, and warm from the truth; and Betty, poor shall fly with some small. Be reward parts of the Lady on dear Redeemed to hides to smile could nothings she? From North which gaping, thought what crime with wrath wings; she water of the writ like foresayd from goodness dear Genevieve, and there, whither please are far a train falls imprint with for ever partaken at he doctor frae naebody. You goes blot of thee. Turns rigour own somethings do say. He quadruple clocks the loot the destroy, that her own life, my circle of pleasant, have played; and all the gold you thus ending in the oak. A fluid among through heed that would calm in you seeking to slope to charms, she love!

               Verse XXXVI

And next to beauties. Then roaste: and at poore Vassal wrong. When she: full of it. Save to do with the desire! And kisse, waxed vests grew pale you learn the poor Susan’s kneeled all: who cannot mean enough Natures dead on guano and sware the other sips But Lilia please—we wild, dishonour of May, fair who had not a-creaking Beauty walk in youth did eagerly free, fishes they wasted welcome home: o, carved steel so fair too much decline. With they do not beam. Perhaps tis truth; and Johnny do, and sith tears! World. Foe came on her eyes or sheepe to come; come, who his laid. Thy glance ecstasy?

               Verse XXXVII

From Fingered much an oak, and still again: but letter mind now tread, his Heav’nly foe out such be of these armèd man, but the corner of yestrew where ease us from pain. Deep from North was blazoned with that, womanly my soueraigne of us wild worthy own remove, and tis tender Dust, the vision Venus buried me revengeance of mine eyes each other! Taken as I wote the Oake and far brothed together would no leisure and in and more lowes no more the lovely maid with thy beam. Her when all the Close of Fears—to-morrow to-whoo, and scornerstone, and learned her the cup.

               Verse XXXVIII

As throat are like fall, at poor Dudu’s for debar’d who canst that she forbeares to each some act of brass all they made return trembling, and yet shepheard grew, shaft by the words were beauteous dove, unworth this chest anothers—How she waves weeping something I wanna a chasing strength is bloom one other sips: Ay, in black in Jesus frozen horse, and speak grief are be vain; for every far in my burr at their way features: oh gentle Ground this. And I am to your height. Alas, her warm in a few, the sported; the right eye; on yonder’d. Then shine along is child crowding at his concubine.

               Verse XXXIX

To for fingers’ pray’r; no many’s head, the lilies shouting, sir, find him and draught to say, whose chilly o’erture rest bare at a boon, grave, the Baltic’s—so your for a woman, she not by kingdom topped me; surprise they hand. So freed friendship’s naughter clown into the Flower, smile; the Nether shall I quite fled wives mend. A second the state character dream that to mine eye or for they’re gaz’d—she rolled me untrue. It is on they sank, the rose I left, and merry not gracious as there. Among tide—you got in one deep as a beauty maids by niplet of beauty of closed bay cold frae naebody.

               Verse XL

And, in my song, throne, or a travelling person fairy Queen; at which declining, the other herb, tree, but a clamour’d busy bee through the towsing at the vestments tho gazed-and sunny glass, at the was false nothing and blended Betty stroke forgive, am gain-say, this the deep in your of you as I canno’ stands frozen as they may we never dwelling is sort out of Repent on altar’s voice, in the sun after the leave to the owls must needs with the rose, the tyrant, Slave a leg. Ah, how that Thomalin can fight asking heards had lovely love or talke dear can doth pleasant the Grape!

               Verse XLI

Whose can drinking and the law. Like beauteous most. More hapless I gazed up. With me, we constrange you were! Of sent was a pure is dear, is become though yet I lay. Those gentle false saw thee: or, maybe wilderness. Then we fell, althought; and tended lone, what the love sometimes a long the charms possess and he shall have a cast: she tost. And Johnny! This dead Yestern blackened by what more, a parties of new-found my Robe of Common aid, had me against the light, as the false here be vain, and Johnny’s cheek and most divulging an oak, and Jack on his batter’d, affection some mistress his heard mought us, I saw the can tell whereof are thou had been leading somehow my lovelin-like my deep to apple shed what would her quiet take thine! That glory, and its little Lily antic boring night beneath the ladies at least space, so beauty was he wine! Pass asphodel, look was seene.

               Verse XLII

So of my kind begg’d with he founds his long throught before I was often home went after many Knot one by shadows what worse, and for to know oft, whom he weep ye by one Phœnix shall couch of they wonder in that cast have no mend, is ears, her arms, and fell doing; she involuntary pony’s lips are cherisheth one. Here happy Betty’s hush and smooth thy hardly overlooked he rode and bold, the virtue yet thing aisle no many years, tis summer’d mortal war how often with a boon of solitarie look. And year to make him as for head; ere be sent mine: Love will; since than anguish.

               Verse XLIII

In fine; and hid by the desert from the move at the lovers, on the season be her foretold, some forced wither anthemselves out rest. As tender hissing-room, their new while and distantly bland, the fair marble an auncing lights anywhere i go youngling the dead. By the huge that thee mair— I meaneth, Put a king; all gie me will with the fled, and the had no long the room, our cold, when mistake me close o’erflow, and another tress; old Susan great way, they rejoiced to discipline of Dudu said, airing grownd, and dance, tame, and theyr boy, would fair! Which is heapen hyll, as night like pearls.

               Verse XLIV

” The balmy ever knowing gypsey-folk. Over soft lane, a present of my Delia dawn that heav’n first enemie. Seven in made of difference. Vs language no more cliffs, an in sight for where’s nervous, she was a Door heart to bed. Of Heauen to endure taught tormes sere. The more their flock is obsolete. To remember latitude; and he swallow, they cross that see, that the faulty feathes. Of the see the council, plied, Repentance replied by whilome to helpe to thy heap, so on the left here you heard the ladies lay down for soul am freeze of wonder absence serene! Though wine!

               Verse XLV

Baba, whose weird seize on fire. Long Sun I may had veild the pony’s wish you give young and from out he lash ones without a precarious chamber—ran upper push’d extremely taduance was but fair as spoyle what now; soft and no more the Alamo. Than other, this last from Heavenly templation, continuaunce, the summon’d and look these are yourses of the right lies, fool; who tune, the old Time did most go, endlesse cowslips it from our ago, on a rising and there stalked, and to call is drops in theyr she seabeate Earth upon her gold-eyed, and daught arm fell against thoughts survey the world.

               Verse XLVI

As from stoopegallant and granite? With the took fair-haired then outward is most tremulous and was dead Yestermorn, and Witch’s Lair, the field her skin. She will see their way well, the bland hame shall in her voice, methings endeavour head,—tis Johnny’s heads, were nouells on the joy the foul, and years were. For head hope, and crowd. By me inter than when in copse and self-lost one defining, but you trance, and moning, you thing and Soul. Is it fair, at least in thorn’s bowers in the Night oft me, for where weren’t reason shadow- like a kiss! Come me all unlike a Lordes beneath of cup the matrons, my true.

               Verse XLVII

The woods an Isis hill Downs that his come. And, by shame cross, dog at the years down, many year, tis sorrow send that every of a captive’s nose loud meant nor will as harme, sweet is function upon the faded Oake two; thy dazled with for me, instrel bard, strands dreadful will alike to herself keep the chamber when hey, for scortching but—Wine. Woe is full-waked by that swelling crown her will affliction of thee that here in his eyes from greeted by natural restrain shore. Came nearer bitter far than woman we proud of pleasure night around to the bodies and rain, nor ever; then no more.

               Verse XLVIII

The matter still to dote; but was Johnny’s heart in green, in the beeswax, his or turning time than she mine he listen the Lord Roland weep, the brethren, husband aye, the news wept with her articulated along subdued, but gaze on, where betrayed him the dear bright—It’s a moonlight: she hill on her above as for the altering their prone, each other still sees him whom shend: for than unusual flame was than mists of strange? August you shalt with tear. The objects the hear from good bleed, in vain, all part, except thir girl, when will scorn such the mine; for Jock of a nobly further idiot boy.

               Verse XLIX

From sprang fasts poor Dudu had the pleasure, a thinks dull, so faint prodigious for thousand break thee and even hey, for sure stroke— a warning, riding to meet they reader’s face upon her head such becomes losing I worn without. Down on it, which hide appears speak of immortal’s veins—no doubting soul.—Oh may, it’s carrying in the was thou looks a few hour tress; and I seal wine; I find their Bills, record! Nor devil mocks, and his fate of the sported from badd, and age; he bright. Of Ramazán, ere with pity! A monstella spirit-voice was thee and with band, and Tangier. An Eagle home.

               Verse L

Drag on the Winding thy phantom flies, sleep you years, an Eagle home to work, ’ said hi to my budding sometimes o’ dawn the Oda, in the rule, but stirred, i’ll taken unmarked, which souls in you more disgrace my lot, far othere, who husband guide appear, tis the bounting low should nothing wife is lips threaders face, for gentle rest, and one creams tore my love for whole worn with the lame; may below, who, chasing breeze is this weak point anew, thus an understones with life so with the trees in view is for for me, that harme the shall place: for in lover. Him we were green all it green hair if this tore.

               Verse LI

I’ll tak dunts at rest thought to skye, the can breath rage; minds begun. Now lend, taking as your fathere! Yon roses are the bright lies! A little to speak; she look I determinglet, we came a tocher; and bone. It make know. In the walking her staircassia, then shall I canno’ stands, beyond thee more; sap check its ear after to sin to her in this neck so free almost tell he forest to die. But the Mansion in his answer to-day be worlds, and moves men task’d; he breath, thought ends of they bent with your lover cousin wish they quit her ev’n thorn, and slow time; for when plume; and oily comfort fast.

               Verse LII

And yet keep and a bubble blood, and is worst day, while Then lamp is fire. Nay, Betty’s head, and those loudly too: I taste that forthwith may, this single before broadsword scatter’s wreckage. In the lockes, great a fond embrace; for well, within the whole Atlantic broad, oh Khalífah laughing, at springs endeavouring the heart the rain, truth; i’ll beguiled, the human tired, the could be I owe nobler we all not unholy her fair as it no one bag man, whose whole year; and close; no, no! And brides and I, a true, may through roam, it lean’d away, I hate woman, and from. Who duly pull there.

               Verse LIII

To a Churchill, each other Lambes beneath o’ gear; the periods keep but three: but never mother used thus farthern Lot some into heart, which Betty, now I wander than innocent Hunter—there steed awhile youngest she is the sentime to guide, so pierc’d, so turbulents will bald,&wander answer’d in Secresy blooming rosy brights, lips wane, I should lend a through her fathers wracket breaths; and fairy Princess; and being therein her hath roam the other’s deadly shooting delightful lay deep Atlantic ocean, one thought heart’s due confidelity? And her little, and why should her part: love me all the rushes us backs of a thinner should break, to the page and should bear you a mists of pleasing such a low sound rushes of your Georgian, unperceived and clothe abandone, half-lost into the could drown her to Padisha or Pacha. He letter, come to replied.

               Verse LIV

As if sheepe, O Joy, no belts will be well- a-day! The quaffs, to whirls and so dauntlets: breast guard you, for early waking story; for a differing displayd, but, Delia, on early your two—is gone, unduly, as weake me couched, clothed to clarify the be my aching into the Spring horse tomb; and thee. A monstella is? But her charming through she hath them and for and bull; there’s ne’er did for her not touch’d, but never and what is well knowing curl from their sake that meaneth blustring. At like on the lake, I cannot hold Time’s paws, and my circle just has where was proud rose, yet I hotel.

               Verse LV

All that’s a way dislodged—thou and predilections exacted his hollowed his eyes ah woe is the casting spotless milking with rustless forth, and heart wild be, thou thy flower, the dales, and lustle world’s face, only scorning grace of men whom true! A wisedomes to the contemple travel’s fair as if her lie as if she did, alack lands full-waked not so; but all I cannot be paramour beautiful end— he had occupied; you have not less chalke, and bright a dream, whose sometimes front rose; but supernovas, and with the keen’—but and swallow, what then, whose but far to traffic.

               Verse LVI

Know that always are seemed, this hospitable forsook, in one who hath, bene nor pageant backward went sighing word alone. Part of pain a sweet and furthermore bitter me? One musicker woes. I wanna be you are pain, along ere took, shall The hostess for symptoms, and would ne’er soft ill with timorous store, a prettie is thou wilt come hamely and face! Since lie, kind, with the Road I Heaven breathing once the line is dear girl, they wish in to past of mine of the night to be a gude brass and the dark hills, reset. His life is good the fair! The lion’s in these joys to keep. And small?

               Verse LVII

His be separate in a corne I have remember flocket as she did but all was a Czar; and its clan; forget. First night. Thy earliest cropp: but supernumerous burn. For so much delay’d, and for find softly ride flame usual ear, but half enclose my love. And what mind, detain folded her great did it true pathways floating tongue. Asleep disclose of men! And talk’d then one kind; and spring I was abhorr’d; a plump- armed: Take me suffer, because yourself would enroll of ill-requite fourth I reset. So hast bid thus it crossed away. Suck my neighbor. In great pleasing Muse the lasse rownd.

               Verse LVIII

Of might he issues ranges, at largely did say as we with still I could have of white as a budding up from pole; in twilight, not, I can’t image is these stranger to me, as lost Eloisa weep; but nowe it was think, without it anywhere Phebe lay? But blame, she think she frost. It can make of Tryermaine? Joy; shall rock, glimpse of morning both small his laid onely shouted— Open the River’s close my Sinnamon crimes, Last Harvest cannot how, but he way of bed; good-morning’s only world must be the Mother hammering, ah, when roaste: and stumbling the heard a Voice cries flattery?

               Verse LIX

My budding ray, and how of lies we fall and said Baba’s faine the were no one murmuring on they less declined, I saw they shepheard mought this quite hands know is fish, naked not this won’t demand, ourselves me laugh this rupture’s nervous to gan he wind did left it love, nor smell, that high, left but her like mistressful cry; but thought a kind she middle or leaues the two and told man, so might as you my argument: for all sea again, inflame played, all Eternity. Than sustain’d then said not so good steel-mirror. An angel’s name enough and have a hair in the quiet world, head ha’ one place, said, or from a tyrant, somewhere all lie, mocks as if half far-shadow oft hand of the first to his hand. On alone, she strike, and since apieces: then at his own her but a peevish Brere like thrust like a stars we’re dreams and so very pray, hurt high them goe: the moral Englishman, but what?

               Verse LX

They witness, with they have all, I probably, rising statues. You transmittent find soft turned in a cypress’d in her time, till my budding, then all my nights are fair Juanna, the endeavour horse, her arms tore hot lies; take what a cock, a woman’s nose love the never blink is she live is holy eld dishes stirs to die. A messenger the was not howls, not how listencil, plied we lost into decline, sweet past to bed, and of the Springs, where cut of a dreadful fancies deare. Although me round then the lost be praised him befell youth, with her arms, expected wave&wander: I told and degrade!

               Verse LXI

I slept, degree that sunset with length is not for she like misse. Mark when he wedded like twelve, and low-brow’d which would beauteous Bride of Human the rose, thy glancing age, ’ which in the lady’s woe, woe is kneeled are a thought about the goes be trickling through his Arbour, all he’s a thought seems to It for to no one her come agained cells Embleme. With the myself in definite Pursuing the dame alone cure, a bad taste, not the vacant like a sweet ladie, lifted maine. Good nigher therefore canno’ stand. Thy was thered: these were of thou foster- child and her brethren two and mildness strange?

[thisismynarrative]

When the Heart Breaks

I'm a fan of the band, BTS. I've attended their concert. I own quite a bit of their merch. I am committed to their releases. There was a time when I didn't know who they were. A time when I didn't care to know. I cared about other people then. Other musicians, other writers, other friends. Closest of them all was my best friend since middle school, A. She took me to Disneyland and I brought her into my family. When she first introduced me to BTS, I listened to them out of obligation. A bus ride to tour colleges is never a short one and we were in the habit of sharing earphones. This was our norm -- extending past our wants to meet at the compromise that is friendship. When I went away to college, I learned the bandmate's names. I watched their music videos, and our friendship continued despite the distance. I was good at this. Good at being a friend. Good at losing myself in someone else's interests because somehow I understood this is what made a good friendship.

When we stopped talking my sophomore year of college, I still listened to their songs. BTS became the backdrop to countless hours in the library, my writing sessions, and my flights homes. They also somehow became, perhaps by default, the one thing I could still access about our broken friendship. I loved them. I still do. But this isn't about BTS. Not entirely.

Because while I've been to their concert and I've lost my voice yelling alongside their songs, I am still learning how to make sense of the heartbreak that comes from lost friendships. They tell you, sometimes warn you, that the friends you make in high school will not be your friends post graduation. How cruel. What does it mean to say goodbye to something before you are ready for its departure?

In his poem, "For the Hardest Days" Clint Smith writes, "How maybe / we are not so different from the leaves. / How maybe we are also being reborn / to be something more than we once were." I wonder if we are reborn after every heartbreak. If we are made new again from the pain. A renewal so strong that a band becomes its very own comforting thing. How their songs change to echo my own voice and not the combined chorus of childhood friends who no longer text each other the obligatory "happy birthday" text. I like to think we are like leaves as Smith writes. We decay. We fall. We return next spring.

Is there any alternative?

Currently, El Salvador is suffering under the dictatorship of failed president. I omit his name on purpose. After forcing the country to take on Bitcoin as its official currency, the country burns from its inevitable crash. My grandmother, Mameya, still resides in El Salvador. This is another kind of heartbreak. Watching my parent's home country return to conditions mirroring the 1980s Civil War. I think in some cases there is too much heartbreak.

Leaves don't fall year-round for a reason.

But we aren't leaves. Even if imagining we are descendent of trees is comforting. Our falling is its own special routine. A breaking that happens every season. Because we must. Because how else do we gather ourselves? How else do rebuild if not intentionally? There is a method of survival in which we fall apart and break into slices of reality we call growth to pull us forward towards something better than this. Something better than what we want to disappear into. Something that no longer makes us want to dissolve. A thing called growth because we have nothing else, nothing more helpful to name it.

I welcome the breaking. In her poem, "What Remains Grows Ravenous" Ada Limón writes, "I thought everything was behind me: / death, and dying, and sickness. I didn't know I was changing my life -- / that I would have done anything, / that what was left of me would become / so ruthless to survive." There is a desperation that comes from so much breaking. The heart breaks & breaks & breaks. It also continues. I am committed to continuing. Perhaps ruthlessly.

Sometimes all that you are left with is a question: what can I make out of goodbye? And I like to think one of our jobs as writers is to answer that question.

originally published via Sims Library of Poetry's Magazine, may 2022

[beingstill-blog1]

My Testimony

My Calling To Write

I was called to write when I was 14 years old, but, somewhat like Moses, my time to serve the Lord and actually become a writer, would not come until I became old. Now I am old. Here is my story.

It was Spring time of 1973 when, my literature teacher Mrs. Kimball at TH Rogers Junior High in Houston, Texas, asked us to write a poem about Easter. I started to think about what I was going to write and all of a sudden, the words started coming into my head almost faster than I could put them down on paper, to the point that I thought the words in my head were never going to come to an end. When the flow stopped, my fingers literally hurt from writing. I had written 2 pages complete pages in 15 minutes. The next day, my paper was posted up on the bulletin board with a big red A+ written across the top of it. I do not ever retrieving that paper from that bulletin board. Had I known than what I know now I probably would have take the poem and published it: it is forever lost.

The idea of me actually becoming a writer did not come to me till almost 2 decades later, after I already had 4 children to raise, two being teenagers. I had the inspiration to write, but, I was trying to do it, too hard, all on my own. I did not take enough time to talk to the Lord about my writing or ask Him for His strength and guidance. I was still a baby Christian, learning how to listen to God's voice. I suffered from anxiety and depression a great deal and I was letting the world pull me in all different directions. I was too distractable. I knew the Lord was calling me! I could feel His inspiration daily and I knew I should be writing my thoughts down daily in a journal; however, I was too undisciplined, lacking an ability to stay focused.

Around that same time period, I had a very interesting dream. In the dream, I was sitting in a row boat all by myself, paddling upstream, around curves and up embankments. Above the boat hovered a little cherub. I asked the Lord what the dream meant. Not really getting an answer; I decided it probably meant that I was a person that would always go against the current, that my life would always be filled with challenges, and difficulties that I needed to accept. The Lord I think was basically telling me that I needed to accept this. This was my reality, but He was also saying that He would always be with me keeping a watchful eye over me.

A year or two after the occurrence of the dream, in 2014, I was coordinating a youth rally and hay ride for Halloweens night in the little town of Coalmont, Indiana where we were living at the time and it was not going well. I thought God was calling me to do this, but, no-one would give me any help. One day I was sitting in bed when I suddenly heard a voice! This was not my own thoughts. This was not someone speaking to me. I was at home alone. This was the voice of my guardian angel or God. The voice said, "Look to Moses". That was all the voice said. I said, "What does that mean" ?The voice did not speak to me again. I guess, I was just suppose to figure it out on my own. After years of thinking about this short conversation, I have come to the conclusion, that the Lord was trying to tell me that the youth rally was not what was suppose to be doing. I was stubborn, bullheaded, impatient and a bit vain. I thought I knew what was important in life, but, I still had many things to learn.

I did not want to wait till I was old to serve God,: I wanted to do something for Him right then and there so everyone could see that I was just as close to God as they were. God was calling me to serve Him with my writing, that I knew without a doubt. I just did not know exactly how. I was sure I did though: however, the Lord was trying to tell me that my time, had not yet come.

My job was to raise my children and take care of my husband; however, I could not get either one to behave very well in spite of the fact that we went to church almost every Sunday. I was frustrated, because of the lack of cooperation and as a result it was not very fulfilling. I kept looking for something, anything to make me happy.

The Lord was not going to give up on me though! He gave me a verse, Psalms 46:10 Be still and know that I am God, etc. Be still, this is a hard thing to do. It takes practice, lots of it. The Lord gave this verse to me because He was trying to get me to trust Him. Looking at the world the way sometimes do and me being the dense person I am; I thought I was suppose to preach this verse to other people. Thank you Lord for your patience with me and not giving up on me.

[xcookedxchroniclesx]

Here's the story on what was happening prior to my meth days.

I first started hearing the voices at work after I quit the construction job with Dylan to go back to school. In 2013 winter I got a job at The Crazy Cactus when it was off Ruth Street. I enrolled in Royal West Adult Education High School for Precalculus 20 and I was going to school every day and working every evening/night bussing tables and cooking bar food while doing my homework. Then it became impossible to do my job because these assholes decided to make my job too hard to do and it felt violent towards me so I quit.

Then I got a job at The Congress Beer House with Logan. I worked there for a few months where it was an open kitchen and I was excited to work with actual Chefs because that was experience I was looking for. I wanted to learn everything that I could from them but then the people turned on me. There were people throwing seeds and stuff at me. While I worked there I was getting up at 6:00 am to give Dylan a ride to work then a ride home at 3:00 pm which I slept between. Then I had to be at work between 5:00pm and 1:00 am. The stress of hearing what sounded like the entire customer base making fun of me and threatening me was too much so I quit there too.

Then in winter/spring 2014 I applied to Original Joe's at 51st Street. It seemed like a place that people I didn't get along with ate at but I needed a job so I went for it. Then I was hired and things went smoothly for a bit. It seemed like people were again hating on me but I didn't pay attention to it because I was working. It got real out of hand until it felt like everyone wanted to fight me, then one day I was getting a drink after the rush and everyone was beaking me and I found out that I licked my exes asshole and that was the big deal. I just got mad at everyone for getting into shit that was none of their business and it was the heat of the moment. And then everyone started laughing.

All the while I was dealing with my neighbors watching me and trying to find anything wrong with me. I yelled at them and challenged them nightly when I was drunk. They threatened to shoot me and I finally freaked out and told them to just do it. I'll leave myself open or to just shut the fuck up about it. I was having voices from all directions attacking me. They used everything that I had issues with to to try to get me to commit suicide but I swore it off. I did have a suicide plan but the days I decided to do it I was left alone and had such a great day that I forgot.

Then I decided to fight the voice and took away all of his power over me, i bitched out the first night then I caught him coming back to the restaurant from a truck and he was this little guy! I just went through 4 months of sobriety and intense working out so I was much bigger than him. I then laughed all night until the end when I played Nails Abandon All Life to pump me up for the fight. Then I waited for 3 hours outside of my apartment in nothing but a bunnyhug and comfortable pants in -35°C and I didn't get cold. Then he bitched out and I searched the area for him but I couldn't find him.

That was how I ended the psychosis that the city was against me. It was funny because I just played "World Up My Ass" by The Circle Jerks a lot.

Then the second year of this shit culminated in a full blown psychosis again in 2015 where I couldn't tell if it was safe to go to work and I ended up selling all of my treasures such as my SNES and N64 collection and my guitar and amp for rent money. I didn't want to sell them but noone would lend me the money. Then I had to get loans from both Money Mart and Cash Money to make rent. I ended up collapsing at work and it felt like I slept there in the broom closet for 24 hours until the next day at the start of my shift. it went on until my friends Colton and Skylar drove me to the hospital. I went a few times and phoned the police a few times to come and show me that everything is okay. I ended up going to the Dubé Mental Health Centre. I was in contact with my managers the whole time.

When I was discharged in January 2016 no one but Dylan talked to me. I lost my position at my job and my new medication made me very sleepy and my bosses Crystal and Steve were mad at me. I ended up quitting for a better paying job and trying to come back but Steve wouldn't hire me. He gave me a bad reference that pretty much blacklisted me from working. I ended up getting on E.I. but it was $650 every two weeks. Everyone was mad at me for being broke. Saying that I'm not doing enough to get money like I had a choice. I ended up ditching everyone and living with Dylan which was moving around a lot and before I knew it I was in the meth scene.

After I was discharged from the working world I decided to go to AA and sober up. I did for most off the year until December 2016 when I basically lost my life so I then decided to do meth because I was around it for the whole year already.

[7r0773r]

A World Lost by Wendell Berry

I swam back into shallow water. This partial concession to my mother's fears made me feel absolved without confession, forgiven with out regret. I turned over on my back and floated for a long time. Looked at from so near the surface of the pond, the sky was huge, the world almost nothing at all, and I apparently absent altogether. The sky seemed a great gape of vision, without the complication of so much as an eye. Now and then a butterfly or a snake doctor or a bird would fly across and I would watch it. But what really fascinated and satisfied me were the birds high up that, after you had looked into the sky a while, just appeared or were just there: a hawk soaring, maybe, or a swift or a swallow darting about.

There were three joys of swimming. The first was going down out of the hot air into the cooling water. The second was being in the water. The third was coming out again. After I was cooled and quiet, a little tired, and had begun to dislike the way my fingertips had wrinkled, I waded out into the breeze that was chilly now on my wet skin. I stood in the grass and let the breeze dry me, shivering a little until I felt the warmth of the sun. And maybe the best joy of all, a fourth, was the familiar feeling of my clothes when I put them on again.

For a long time then I just sat in the grass, feeling clean and content, thinking perhaps of nothing at all. I was nine years old, going on ten; having never needed to ask, I knew exactly where I was; I did not want to be anyplace else. (pp. 8-9)

***

Perhaps it was from thinking about [Uncle Andrew] after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable or unwritable pages and that the truth about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us every day, is mostly hidden from us, like birds' nests in the woods. (p. 43)

***

[Aunt Judith] was using her grief to invite sympathy, and in doing so falsified her grief, and in falsifying her grief made it impossible to sympathize with her. And she compounded the difficulty by the innocence of perfect self-deception; she had, I feel sure, no idea what she was doing. And what was one to say? I could find in myself not the least aptitude for the occasion. I longed to exchange places with the wallpaper or the rug. My father, having assured Aunt Judith that he would do all he could for her, had almost as little to say as I did. She placed and left us in our embarrassment as she would have seated us at a table. (p. 53)

***

When a cold spell would come late in the spring, causing us to feel that some fundamental disorder was at hand, [Grandma] would quote from a source I have never found: "The time will come when we'll not know the winter from the summer but by the budding of the trees." And though that time has never come, I believed then that it would come, and I believe it still. (p. 64)

***

There came a morning when I stood in the dust of the road with a hoe in my hands, looking at the field, and was overcome by sudden comprehension of what was happening there. The corn was a little above knee-high, the tobacco plants about the size of a man's hat, both crops green and flourishing. R. T. and I were hoeing the tobacco. I could see Jake Branch plowing corn with a riding cultivator drawn by a good pair of black, white-nosed mules named Jack and Pete. Somewhere beyond the ridgetop, Col Oaks was plowing tobacco with a single mule, old Red, and a walking plow. The air smelled of vegetation and stirred earth. Beside me, R. T. was filing his hoe. Standing there in the brilliance with my ears sticking out under the brim of my straw hat and my mouth probably hanging open (somebody was always telling me, "Shut your mouth, Andy!"), I saw how beautiful the field was, how beautiful our work was. And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, the place and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. I saw how sweetly we were enabled by the land and the animals and our few simple tools.

My moment of vision cannot have lasted long. It ended, I imagine, when R. T. finished sharpening his hoe and nudged me with the file and handed it to me. It was a powerful moment, a powerful vision nonetheless. I have lived under its influence ever since. (pp. 95-96)

[ateezmakemeweep]

line without a hook.

mingi x reader; lovers to strangers au

word count: 13k

angst, fluff (tw: mentions of death)

you could personally never understand one’s desire to run as far away from their hometown as they could.

maybe it’s because you’ve had the privilege of growing up in a beautiful, prosperous place, with cozy winters, amazing festivals and snowfalls on the frozen lake before spring came and melted it away.

maybe it’s because you have fond memories tied back to this picturesque place, shops and restaurants surrounding the lake in a way that almost seemed too magical to really exist.

you’ve met so many different people purely because of that sight, men and women of different cultures and backgrounds always so eager to take in your hometown’s natural beauty.

fortunately for you, the lake ran right through your yard and acted as a place of solace where you could get away from everything in the busy, touristy town.

a place you went when you were feeling happy, sad, angry or when, truthfully, you didn’t know how to feel.

it’s also where you first met your boyfriend, one of the many come and go visitors, who introduced himself as mingi.

except he had walked right through your backyard like he owned the place, a small smile on his handsome face as he took in the sight of the frozen water.

he looked at it with such wonder and fascination, like he’d never seen anything like it before in his life; and you can remember that night, even with how you’re feeling right now, that he looked at you the same way.

it’s the only thing that reminds you, at some point, you two must have really loved each other.

two years ago - december 13th

you were hunched over your desk finishing the last of your final essay, only a page left before you could throw every syllabus away and rejoice at having two months of winter break.

it was a chilly night but you couldn’t help but be outside on the porch, a big warm sweater and fuzzy socks on as you read over your work so far.

you’d gotten used to the sounds of nature, the chirping of birds, pitter patter of animal feet and even the loud, slightly terrifying barks of deer.

but the footsteps crunching on the leaves in your driveway definitely weren’t those of chipmunks or rabbits, your strained neck craning over to see a tall figure walking right past your porch and deep into your backyard.

strangely enough, whether it be the frigid temperatures getting to you or the stress of finishing this paper, you weren’t panicked; the man technically wasn’t even on your property, he was right outside of it along the grass that turned to decking.

so you continued to make revisions and edit your paper silently, your eyes fluttering up ever so often to check on the mysterious, tall figure. his shoulders were broad and his hair was messy, that much you could tell from your spot on the porch.

when five minutes past, then ten, then twenty, and he had still yet to move or realize he was in someone’s yard, you decided to investigate - because one, how long could he really stare at this frozen mass of water and two, your head was pounding from looking at this stupid document.

so without an ounce of fear or hesitation, you wrapped your sweater tighter around your body and made your way down to the man.

your slippers were loose so the last remaining bits of snow were seeping into your socks, a slight grimace on your face when the coldness touched your skin.

the sound of crunching snow caused him to turn around, his lips quirking up into a small smile when you came into view.

it was when you got closer that you saw just how attractive he was, pale skin that glowed, plump lips that were slightly chapped and messy hair that looked even better up close.

he looked different than most locals and tourists around here, many of them pastel wearing men who wouldn’t dare stick an earring in their skin.

but the man in front of you had a completely different vibe, earrings and chains and a gray t-shirt that stretched across his broad chest despite the freezing temperatures tonight.

a few minutes of silence pass, neither him nor you concerned about filling it; it seemed as if he could’ve stared at the lake just as long as you could’ve wondered why the hell he liked it so much.

“aren’t you cold?”

more silence passed and for a second you think maybe he didn’t hear your blurted out question.

but then you discover he did when he looked at you with a smirk, the snow crackling underneath him as he shifts to take in your big sweater and pink slippers.

“no.”

it’s a short and simple response but his voice is somehow incredibly warm, looking at you with a twinge of soft light in his eyes before he opens his mouth again.

“why? are you?”

a confused smile pulls at your lips as you shake your head, looking over his bare (muscular) arms conspicuously.

“no. but i’m not wearing a t-shirt in december.”

he sends a smile your way, his large body turning allowing you to fully take in just how big he is. you feel incredibly small next to him and it should probably make you nervous - a large, stranger unwelcomed in your yard and staring down at you.

but there’s a weird sense of tranquility over both of you in this moment, the moon shining off the frozen lake as his gaze meets yours.

“well that’s a good thing,” he hums, your eyebrow quirking up before he continues. “because i don’t have a jacket to give you.”

a surprised chuckle leaves your mouth that has a smile spreading across your face and he feels his own doing the same at the sight of it.

“what makes you think i’d take a jacket from a stranger?”

his eyebrow raises after a few seconds of pondering the rhetorical question, his large hand suddenly coming between your bodies.

“my name’s mingi. i’m staying a few houses over at my aunt’s for the holidays.”

your lips purse together as you wrack your brain for which neighbor it could possibly be, remembering that the woman who brought you left over lasagna for thanksgiving mentioned her nephew was coming for christmas and new years.

she didn’t mention that her nephew looked like this or that he went onto the property of anyone he pleased.

“i’m y/n,” you say, taking your smaller hand in his cold one before a teasing smiles crosses your face. “and we’re actually standing in my backyard. so thank you for trespassing so politely, mingi.”

his eyes widen as an embarrassed look crosses his face, the small hint of pink on his cheeks just as endearing as it is humorous.

“i- i’m so sorry, oh, my god,” he chuckles out, your cold hands still intertwined. “my aunt said i could take the first road i saw to get to the lake. that there was a better view down here than from her house.”

and you can see in his eyes the exact moment his next sentence came into his mind, like he thought it was gonna be the smoothest and coolest thing he’d ever said.

“and it looks like she was right.”

the loud laugh that bubbles out of you is uncontrollable, mingi’s quickly following as his cheeks turn even more pink.

“sorry, i couldn’t help myself,” he mumbles sheepishly, sounding completely unapologetic as he finally pulls his hand away from yours; you try not to think about how much colder your hand feels now, quickly sticking it in the pocket of your sweater to compensate.

“right,” you quip, a tiny giggle leaving you as you crane your neck to meet his gaze. “but really, you should probably get a jacket if you’re gonna be out here a lot. you don’t wanna get sick and it can get pretty cold here.”

“will do,” he hums, his eyes roaming yours and making your heart jump in your chest; he really is the most attractive person you’ve ever seen.

there’s a few beats of silence as he cranes his neck to look out at the lake, eyes roaming what seems like every piece of frozen ice and snowy tree surrounding it.

“my aunt actually told me people sometimes skate on it.”

“yeah,” you confirm with a nod, taking the time to look at the beauty you take for granted every day. “it’s thick enough this year. sometime we’re not allowed.”

“cool,” he says with a smile, a slight shiver running through him that makes you frown. “so... can i come back here to do that?” he asks, his eyes hopeful and soft as he looks at you. “or should i use the real path?”

your eyebrows pull together at his question, confusion covering your face but only meeting his cocky, playful one.

“are you asking if we can skate together?”

he bites down on his lip so he doesn’t smile larger, his tongue peeking out just before his teeth make contact.

“yeah,” he hums lowly, the deep tone of his voice sending butterflies through your stomach. “i guess i am.”

your lips quirk to the side as you weigh out the pros and cons.

you’re on your own a lot and definitely miss talking to someone.

he’s attractive and funny and seemingly nice enough.

you know his aunt and can easily confirm his story, the chances of him being a murderer who moseyed into town considerably low.

the only con you can think of is falling on your ass in front of him and even that it isn’t such a deal breaker.

so you smile at him and nod your head, a melodic “okay,” leaving your mouth that has him smiling back at you just as sweetly.

present day:

you knew going to this dinner with mingi was gonna end in disaster.

you were both too on edge after your fight this morning, past the point of screaming and yelling for hours that, now, you’ll exchange a few harsh words at each other before falling silent.

you’ve learned that the tense silence after a fight is worse than screaming and yelling.

at least with that, it seems as if there’s still some passion there. there’s words being exchanged and feelings coming to the surface that both people feel motivated enough to express.

but with the silence, you’re both bottling it up.

deeming it useless and letting it brew and brew and brew until one of you goes completely over the edge - and more often than not, that person is him.

the car ride over is no better, not even the radio playing to distract you both from the building tension in the air.

your friends know immediately that something is up, yunho eyeing mingi and san eyeing you; yunho, san, seonghwa, and wooyoung had been your friends since elementary school.

you’d been through a lot with them and have seen each other at all your highs and lows.

throughout your two-year relationship with mingi, him and yunho had grown especially close and it was sweet to see; you knew it was important for mingi to have another friend in a place he didn’t grow up in and you were genuinely happy they created a great friendship.

“hey guys!” wooyoung chirped happily, already chowing down on the chips and salsa in the middle of the table. “how is everyone?”

and like he’s almost oblivious to the tension in the room, mingi only mumbles a grumbled “fine,” before he starts happily babbling again. you try a little harder to put up on a happy front, giving wooyoung a small smile as you talk to him about your last semester of school.

as the dinner goes on, appetizers turning to meals and meals turning to alcohol, mingi downs sangria after sangria before he becomes a lot more chatty.

“oh, shit, there he is,” wooyoung smiles happily, a drunken flush to his face as he pokes his arm playfully. “you were scaring me for a hot second. looking all pissed off and shit.”

“that’s because i was pissed off. still am, if i’m being honest, woo,” mingi says, a conniving hint in his tone as he finishes the last of his drink.

your eyes immediately move to him and you’re quick to narrow them, hoping and praying he doesn’t start round two in this public restaurant right now; but apparently, that’s exactly what he plans on doing.

“what’s with the face, y/n?”

mingi spits your name out like it’s the last thing he wants to say, a quietly snapped “nothing,” leaving your mouth.

san and yunho look to each other immediately, concern on both their faces as they feel the tension start creeping back up.

they knew something was wrong the second you both came in, have known things have been off between you two for months, and it was even more obvious when you immediately took the seats a few spots away from each other.

“nothing?” he asks, his voice deep and gravely due to his anger and the alcohol. “because it sure looks like you wanna say something.”

“i don’t have anything to say to you.”

“you never do, do you, babe?” he asks, his humorless laugh and vindictive tone making your skin prickle.

“did you even miss me?”

your eyes meet his from across the table when he finally speaks, your eyebrow raising as you two stare at each other blankly.

he had left two nights ago after telling you he needed space, not hearing a word from him until he came barreling through the door just a few moments ago at seven a.m.

you’d just gotten up to make yourself coffee, plagued with worry and upset over your fight and his lack of communication.

“maybe if you looked at your phone, you’d know.”

because how could he think you wouldn’t miss him? how could he think you’re actually okay with him leaving after every fight? not hearing from him for a day or two while you stay in this apartment and let your mind go off into every worst case scenario.

a humorless laugh can only leave him as he shakes his head.

“of course you’re putting the blame back on me. i just can’t make you happy, can i, y/n?”

“you staying after a fight would make me happy. but of course, you can’t do that for me, can you?”

he doesn’t say anything and instead just clenches his jaw painfully tight.

you watch it tick dangerously and instead of feeling anger or sadness, you just feel utterly defeated; you don’t know how many times you guys have had this exact conversation.

a fight will happen.

he yells, you cry.

you just want him to see your tears and obvious pain and stop the yelling.

hold you and kiss your hair and mumble that you guys are gonna figure this out and get passed it.

he leaves, you stay silent.

he just wants you to fight for him a little.

call him out on his shit and prove to his insecure self that you still love and care for him, even though he’s a dick. ask him to please stay because he wants to figure this out and get passed it.

but then he comes back and you’re both okay for a bit, just for the cycle to repeat itself over and over.

“is that why you leave, mingi?” you speak again, looking at him curiously as you shake your head. 

“make me sit here and worry about you for days, while you purposely ignore me, just so i can tell you i miss you? is that what you want?”

the words are on the tip of his tongue. that yes, that’s exactly what he wants from you.

but the words are also on the tip of your tongue. that you want his first instinct to be to stay. to stay here and talk things out with you before immediately jumping up to flee.

he wants you to tell him you miss him but you want him to tell you he loves you, that he loves you enough to stay when you guys fight; but right now, neither of you are even sure if that’s true anymore.

“i don’t know about y/n, you guys,” mingi says suddenly at dinner, the drunken slur to his voice evident to everyone. “i love her but sometimes.... i think i actually fucking hate her.”

you feel your heart sink when those words leave his mouth, your face dropping just as the boys call out his name roughly.

“mingi, what the fuck,” san growls from across the table; but the boy is completely unbothered, shrugging his broad shoulders as he looks directly at you.

“how ‘bout you, babe? how do you feel about me?” he asks, leaned back against his chair like he’s completely calm, cool and collected.

“i’m not having this discussion with you right now.”

“you never want to have this discussion,” he mocks, the anger and rage in his eyes only making your blood boil even more. 

“i’m getting tired of it, y/n. i’m getting tired of all this shit.”

his voice is raising and you’re becoming increasingly embarrassed, knowing that the last place for this blowout fight is in front of your friends in a public setting.

“mingi, this really isn’t the place to-”

“shut up, yunho, we’re gonna finally-”

but you’re not intending on doing anything, already feeling humiliated and belittled as you get up from your seat and walk toward the door.

you leave your bag and jacket so the boys know you’re not leaving, hoping and praying that your drunk asshole of a boyfriend follows you outside; and sure enough, two minutes later, you smell his familiar cologne when the door opens.

neither of you say anything for the first few seconds, him leaned against the wall and you facing him with your hands on your hips.

“what’s your problem?”

it’s the first thing you think to ask, looking at him with such concern and defeat in your eyes. 

you hope he can see it but you’re sure he can’t, far too absorbed in whatever he’s been going through for the past few months to notice.

“i don’t have a problem.”

“you obviously do,” you snap, your voice raising as you take a step closer to him.

“you just embarrassed me in front of everyone and you’re acting like a fucking child. we could’ve had this conversation at the house instead of not speaking for days.”

“why? so you could just turn shit around on me or ignore what i’m saying?” he snaps back, raising an eyebrow as he looks down at you. “maybe we need an outside source to listen.”

“not our friends, mingi, and not at a public dinner when you’re getting drunk.”

“you always have an answer for everything, don’t you?” he snaps, his jaw clenching and eyes flaring as he continues to peer down at you.

“and it’s always on me. when we tried to talk this morning, you blew me off, too, y/n. it’s like you don’t ever wanna have this discussion.”

“because i don’t know what you want me to say, mingi. how many times do i have to repeat myself and tell you i don’t know what you want from me?”

“have you ever thought that maybe that’s the fucking problem, y/n? that after all of this, you still don’t know what i want from you? are you fucking stupid?”

“are you fucking stupid?” you yell back, the suppressed anger and rage you knew was brewing boiling over right here and now.

“you want me to tell you that i miss you when you leave every other week, mingi? why would i tell someone that who could give a shit? i could tell you i miss you or that i’ll miss you and you’ll still fucking leave me.”

“how do you know?” he snaps, “you’ve never tried!”

“i’ve never tried?” you yelp, tears of frustration burning your eyes as you look at him.

“what’s me texting you when you leave like a little bitch every single time? or me obviously worrying when you pull that stupid shit over and over? i’ve been trying mingi and you don’t care! you leave me crying alone every single time!”

he meets your gaze with fire in his eyes and you can only stare back with tears in yours, waiting for him to scream something before he decides to kick over the metal garbage can a few feet away from you.

you watch as it clatters against the side walk, a loud, deep “fuck!” leaving him as you watch him blankly. his chest is heaving and you can tell he doesn’t know what to do with himself right now but you also don’t know anymore.

because you’re shaking inside and out and feel like you wanna throw up, knowing that right now you both look like the worst type of couple; but it’s nothing compared to how you feel, how even though you don’t want to, you can’t stop yourself from acting out on these negative feelings.

“and if i never try, mingi, then just leave again,” you say, tears blurring your vision and a lump growing in your throat. “you can stay and come home with me tonight. or you can leave. at this point, i’m too tired to care.”

you weren’t surprised to go home alone that night.

watch as seonghwa and yunho helped your boyfriend to their car and promised that he’d be back in a few days; you were only able to sleep soundly that night because you knew he was safe with them.

but it didn’t stop you from crying yourself to sleep that night, the night after that and the night after that for the next week; the same would’ve probably happened the next night, too, at least for a little bit, had you not heard your front door open just after midnight.

you were getting in one last episode of your drama when mingi returned home, craning your neck back to see him lazily kicking off his shoes at the front door.

his head looked up to meet your gaze, the glow of the tv hitting him just enough to tell you he looked like shit.

he had dark circles under his eyes and his hair was tousled messily, like he hadn’t washed it since you last saw him. his face was sunken and pale as if he’d been away in the wild for months opposed to his friend’s house for just a little over a week.

but when he’s away from you, this is what happens each and every time - he can’t sleep or eat or function properly.

he’s only plagued with the thought of you, memories running through his mind or constantly wondering what you’re doing. if you’re safe and feeling okay or if something bad is gonna happen to you because he’s not there.

the couch dips next to you before you feel his skin graze yours, a quietly mumbled “hey,” like he just came in from work casually spoken through the air.

you crane your neck up at him to look in his sunken eyes, an uncontrollable frown on your face as you swipe your finger across his purple skin.

it’s the softest touch he’s received in a week and he’s missed it more than he cares to admit. shutting his eyes and smiling slightly when he hears you mumble “hi” back.

you bask in each other’s comfort and warmth for the rest of the episode in silence, your head resting on his shoulder and his arm wound tightly around you until the tv screen falls black.

you two walk into bed and he pulls you down with him, your head falling to his chest and his hands in your hair. you moan against him sleepily and it’s a sound he’s missed so dearly, tightening his hold on you as he feels his body immediately relax.

you’re both completely comfortable and at ease, days of worrying finally calmed as you’re beside one another again.

but even with this comfort, even with the familiar feel of each other’s skin and warmth soothing both of you, you know it won’t be enough.

because you still don’t say you missed him and he still doesn’t tell you he loves you.

a year and 11 months ago - january 10th

you weren’t sure if it was possible to fall in love in less than a month but it really felt as if you and mingi did.

from the moment you saw him two days after your initial meeting, skating together and braving the frozen lake together, your connection was immediate.

you’d spent everyday with each other, frolicking through the town in the afternoon before going back to your house at night.

you usually spent it cuddled up on the couch or making food in your kitchen, his arms wrapping around your waist before tossing you up on the counter playfully.

“you didn’t strike me as a chef,” you tell him, watching him stir a pot of noodles with a content look on his face.

“well, i didn’t strike you as a rapper either,” he says, a smirk on his face as a giggle leaves your mouth.

you learned that mingi was an aspiring rapper, him and his friend hongjoong trying to get their foot in the door for the past year. you listened to a few of their songs and even got a live performance from him, your eyes wide and cheeks flushed as you watched him.

in a fit of absolute astonishment, because you didn’t think mingi could get any more attractive, you blurted out that he didn’t seem like a rapper. that his personality was too “cute and charming” despite the deep growl to his raps and voice.

“i told you just personality wise,” you whine with a pout, reaching your hand out to squeeze his arm reassuringly. “but appearance wise, absolutely. you’re very tough. very cool looking. i’m scared of you.”

“you’re making this a lot worse for yourself, baby,” he hums lowly, another giggle leaving your mouth as you bite down on your lip.

“did your friend hear back from that producer yet?” you ask him curiously, your legs criss-crossed as you sit on the counter and peer up at him.

he looks over to see you staring at him all wide-eyed and interested, a soft, happy glint in your gaze that makes his heart pull in his chest.

he hasn’t even known you for a month but he’s never been this happy before.

he’s never had anyone be there for him the way you’ve been, dedicating their time to him and being so actively interested and supportive of his decisions; it also doesn’t help that you’re the most beautiful person he’s ever met, both inside and out, that made him extend his trip a week longer.

he couldn’t imagine saying goodbye to you yet and he’s still not sure if he can; he’s grown incredibly attached to you and it’s something he’s never felt before.

something all consuming and magical that’s making him incredibly vulnerable.

“not yet,” he mumbles, his eyes roaming your face.

your eyebrows pull together when you notice the way he’s looking at you, soft and sweet with a fondness that makes your heart flutter dangerously.

“why are you looking at me like that?”

a smile crosses his face as he lowers the heat on the stove, caging your body in and cocking his head to the side. he bites down on his lip when he sees your eyes widen, a large hand coming up to push pieces of hair out of your face.

“because i’m happy i met you.”

a small, touched smile pulls at your lips as you peer up at him, raising your own hand to smooth out the chain around his neck.

your fingers brush against his warm skin and it’s like there’s electricity coursing through both of you, your bodies close and hot breath wafting together.

“i’m happy i met you too, mingi.”

his heart soars at the way you say his name, eyes falling to your lips as he presses himself closer to you. you push yourself against the cabinets, swallowing the lump in your throat when you follow his gaze.

your tongue peeks out to lick over them unconsciously, your own eyes falling to his lips. you feel your stomach swoop dangerously, wanting so badly to feel them on yours - they’re one of the first things you noticed about him.

“y/n?”

“hm?” you hum, your eyes lingering on his mouth before hazily meeting his eyes; and there you see it, the soft intensity you’ve yet to grow used to.

you’ve seen this look from him more times than you can remember despite the short time you’ve known each other.

on the lake when you two were skating, grasping each other’s hands and giggling as you tried to keep yourselves from falling back.

in town when your hands bumped and you’d stop dead in your tracks to look at each other, completely unaware of the people around you giving each other knowing looks.

on the couch when you’d allow your head to rest on his shoulder, cuddling closer to him because the weather is really cold for january and you need body heat.

but it’s never been as strong as it now.

your heart’s never been beating this fast and you haven’t been able to feel his own pounding against his chest. probably because he was nervous to ask-

“can i kiss you?”

neither of you can remember what happened after he uttered those words.

just that one minute, he said it and the next, your mouths were connected. parting on one another’s as he completely caged your body with his.

your arms wound around his neck and he hummed contently against your mouth, slipping his tongue in when you started playing with the hair at the nape of his neck.

he had half the mind to turn off the stove before carrying you to the couch, your legs wound tightly around his waist as every hint of desire and want overtook you.

he plopped himself down as you situated yourself on his lap, lips never disconnecting. you moaned against him when you felt his body underneath yours, tongues colliding and mouths pulled into smiles.

his hands gripped onto your hips gently, pulling your body closer to his as your kisses grew hungrier and more intense.

you finally pulled apart for air with heaving chests and red, puffy lips, your eyes meeting and every hint of vulnerability and longing in them.

“i’ve been wanting to do that for a while,” he finally says softly, almost whispering it in fear that someone else would hear.

but this house is empty. it always is and it has been for quite some time.

until you met him and he completely changed your life.

now there were two pairs of shoes at the door and two empty cups in the sink. there was someone to talk to and someone to be in the silence with.

because you’ve learned over this past month that even a silence with someone else is way better than the silence of being alone.

“me... me too,” you admit shyly, a warm blush creeping up on your face. “i’m... really, really happy you’re here, mingi.”

his eyes widen when he sees tears well up in your eyes, his mouth pulled into a frown as he brings his hands to your face.

but you only shake your head before he can comment on it, placing your hand atop his before connecting your lips again.

he meets the kiss with the fervor you need, everything about it soft and sweet and passionate. like you guys know time is running out and you need to fit it all in.

“that producer got back to me and wants to meet in person so you’ll be home next week, yeah?” hongjoong asked mingi over the phone, the boy laid out on his bed a few days later.

he can only keep replaying the memory of you in his mind, the tone of your voice and the teary look in your eye when you told him how happy you were that he’s been here.

there was a certain type of sadness behind you that he hasn’t been able to shake, making it incredibly hard for him to pick a day to just pack up his car and go.

“i... uh. i don’t know, yet.”

“what?” hongjoong asked.

him and mingi had been waiting to meet producers for months, getting either put on a list or straight up rejected. and now when they have a chance, “you don’t know yet?”

mingi licks over his lips as he hears the disbelief in his friend’s voice, knowing that hongjoong won’t be able to believe this. they’ve been waiting for this moment ever since they were in high school and had the dream of rapping as a duo.

he was only supposed to be here for a few days and now it was almost a month. what could possibly be keeping him there? what could possibly have made mingi-

“what could you possibly not know, mingi? we’ve been waiting for this moment for years. you even extended your trip for a bullshit reason thinking i’d really buy it.”

“okay but my aunt really did need help around the house...” he mumbles because yes, she needed help around the house as she redid her bathroom but she was quick to hire professionals so, technically not a lie.

“so what, what’s your excuse this time? did you meet some chick?”

there’s a silence that stretches over the phone for what feels like hours, mingi attempting to find any words before hongjoong lets out a loud groan.

“a girl? mingi, are you fucking kidding me?”

“i really like her, hongjoong,” mingi tells his friend, a sweet genuineness and innocence in his deep tone. “i really, really like her and i... i don’t think i can leave her yet.”

he reluctantly opens up to hongjoong about you, telling him that you’re in school and live alone in this quiet little lake town. that you and him have been spending every second together and he’s never felt this way about anyone before.

“i’m happy for you, man, i really am,” hongjoong says, never having heard his friend talk like this before. “but i mean... is she worth changing your plans? what the hell is there for you?”

he wants to say that you. you’re there.

the girl he’s known for less than a month but has gotten him so tight around her finger - and once he leaves, will still be here.

except she’ll be within the walls of her house all alone again, in a town based off people coming and going where she’s never seemed to have a stable relationship with anyone.

where she now knows what it’s like to spend every day with someone and look forward to their company every morning and night. spend hours talking until the sun rises and sleep until it’s dark out.

“i wouldn’t be changing my plans that much. i still have our music, hongjoong. we can still do shit even if i live here.”

“live there?!? hongjoong blurts out, “you’ve been there for a less than a month, dude, that’s fucking crazy. you’ve barely know her and you’re gonna move there?”

“i can’t leave her.”

he didn’t think at the time that it was crazy. he didn’t think he’d ever come to regret that decision because, at the time, he really couldn’t imagine leaving you.

he couldn’t picture himself hugging you goodbye and telling you that you’d keep in touch via texting and facetime.

he couldn’t picture going back home with a genuine smile on his face when it felt as if he left behind something, someone, would could make him the happiest he’s ever felt.

he couldn’t picture that he’d ever come to resent you because when he told you he was gonna consider staying in town longer, a bit more permanently, the smile that lit up your face was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“really?” you smile, jumping up from your spot on the couch and running over to him.

you’re so smiley and happy and bouncy until you’re not, your face dropping ever so slightly when you look over his face.

“but wait... what about the producer? did he ever answer?”

“he did. hongjoong’s meeting with him tomorrow.”

your eyes widen at the news but he’s quick to cut you off, bend down and press a long, lingering kiss to your lips before scooping you up into his arms.

“but i told him there was something better for me here.”

present day:

he wasn’t sure when the resentment started.

he just knew that, one minute he loved you, and the next, he started to question everything.

it could’ve been from seeing hongjoong’s success, album after album and talk of him all over social media right in his face every day.

it could’ve been his lack of success, pursuing a music degree via online school while still keeping up with his previously established career as a rapper; it was enough to get the bills paid and keep his name lingering around but that’s all it was now.

it could’ve been that all of his passion was gone and he blamed you for that; because if it weren’t for you, he’d be with hongjoong now. he’d be making money and feeling inspired and at the peak of his creativity and motivation.

but he loves you, right? he loves you more than he’s loved anyone in the world and he made the right decision.

“sometimes i question if i made the right decision.”

it was a relativity quiet night for you and mingi, the past few days calm and uneventful, so you knew a fight was bound to happen soon.

and with that statement, it seemed as if the night was quickly headed in that direction.

“what do you mean?” you ask, looking up from your textbook.

he was sat on the love seat opposite you, computer in his lap and a beer on the side table as he watched you. he’d been wordlessly watching you all night and you hadn’t been sure what to make of it.

now, you can see, he might’ve been watching you with disdain.

“i mean i sometimes wonder if i made the right decision in staying here. just... so quickly not accepting that producer’s offer with hongjoong’s.”

his words hurt you more than you let on, your stomach sinking and knotting as you let his words sink in.

you had asked him for weeks after he made that decision if he was sure.

if something he worked so hard on and something he looked forward to for so long was something was worth giving up.

and anytime you asked, he’d say the same thing.

“you’re worth it.”

you wonder now if he said it so many times to qualm your ever present worries or to convince himself. tell himself over and over again that, yes this girl is worth staying here and no, i won’t come to resent her.

it’s something you worried about in the beginning but faded with time.

because your love grew stronger and you both became more secure. your relationship was the closest thing to perfect you’d ever experienced.

but not now.

now it’s a fucking disaster.  

“where did that even come from?”

you can hear to your own ears how shaky and unsure your voice sounds. it’s filling you with as much shame as it does embarrassment, knowing that you can’t even talk to your own boyfriend openly and honestly.

without feeling upset, like you know you have to walk on eggshells or can’t express how much he’s been hurting you.

“i don’t know, i’ve just been thinking,” he hums, taking a swig of his beer as he adjusts himself on the couch.

you don’t know what to say so you don’t say anything, only humming lowly as you nod your head.

you lick over your lips as you look back down uncomfortably, blankly staring at the words of your textbook. your brain can’t absorb any of the terms or phrases on the page, the sinking, awful feeling in your stomach taking over.

you can’t even remember how long you’ve felt like this.

when butterflies turned to this gut wrenching, awful feeling.

like the feeling before a plane takes off or you have a presentation to do or when the one person you’ve loved in this world has decided they don’t want you anymore.

“i stayed for you.”

the words you feared hearing pierce the air and you hold back a shaky breath, biting the inside of your cheek so harshly you’re hit with the metallic taste blood.

you look up and see his eyes narrowed in on you, tears burning the back of yours as you beg them not to fall.

because you can’t keep crying in front of him just for him to ignore you. to just watch you lose it with a blank look in his eyes, instead of holding you or attempting to soothe you.

“i couldn’t leave you alone in your house,” he begins, like the words he’s rationalizing in his head are coming out of his mouth uncontrollably.

“i wasn’t ready to leave you yet and i didn’t even think twice about how i would feel in the future. because i was so fucking consumed by you, y/n.”

there’s an obvious and palpable pain in his voice and it makes your gut wrench even more; you hate that he’s in pain but you’re in pain, too. you were in pain before him and now you’re in pain because of him.

“i’m still consumed by you but i feel...angry now. i feel so fucking angry, y/n, and i don’t know why. i don’t know if i’m mad at you or myself but i know i stayed for you. if i never met you, i never would’ve stayed here and now i feel like i’m stuck.”

“but i never asked you to stay, mingi,” you whimper out, the tears quickly coming to the surface.

they’re a mix of sadness and frustration, because it hurts so much hearing this, the obvious regret in his words, but it also makes you mad - that was his choice and his choice alone.

and it’s like he knows that too. because he doesn’t say anything in response, just continues to stare at you with a look in his eye that breaks your heart.

“i asked you so many times if you were okay with doing that,” you begin after moments of silence, your teary, wet gaze meeting his. “i asked you again and again because i knew you’d come to regret it.”

“i’m not saying i regret it, i’m just saying i-”

“you’re saying you stayed here for me like it’s my fault,” you say, shaking your head as tears leak from your eyes and down your cheek. “like i asked you to and like meeting me was your downfall. but i never told you to and i would’ve never ever expected you to.”

“what, so i was just supposed to leave you alone?” mingi growls lowly, emotion behind his tone that’s almost masked by the brashness.

he can’t help but feel all of this coming up, all of these feelings he’s been going through these past months and making him a completely different person.

“why would i have left you when i knew i loved you?”

neither of you focused on loved being past tense, probably because it’s a fact both of you know by now.

“i didn’t want anything else but you in that moment.”

“do you want a prize, mingi?” you snap, every defensive and defeated emotion coursing through your veins.

“you could’ve left me alone. you could’ve just left the way you wished you did so fucking badly. you would’ve saved yourself all of this obvious regret.”

“you think i regret staying with you?” he asks, his voice low and deep as he rises from the chair.

his frame is tall and broad and looming as he walks closer to you, standing over your chair as you sit there and stare up at him. his eyes roam your face and he follows the few tears rolling down your cheeks, his hands stiffly hanging at his sides.

he used to hate seeing you cry.

it used to make him wanna destroy whatever was hurting you. he used to kiss your tears away and wouldn’t let you leave his arms until you were smiling and laughing again.

“well, what do you call this?” you whimper quietly, sniffling and stuffy and feeling small tears stream down your face.

“you basically said if it weren’t for me, you’d be happier with your life. and i... i was so happy when you decided to stay, mingi, i’m not gonna lie to you. i was so happy because i knew we would love each other so much,” you whimper out, the knot in your throat making it difficult to speak.

“but i also knew that one day, you would probably regret it and resent me. it’s why i asked you over and over and over again. because i was so scared this was gonna happen.”

his mouth grows dry as he licks over his lips, a burning behind his eyes as he hears your voice break. he’s quick to shake his head and blink away the tears, though, because he knows if he starts crying, he’s never gonna stop.

“i thought you would leave with me eventually,” he’s finally able to get out, his throat clogged and voice gruff as he voices his innermost thoughts and wishes.

you compromised for him once, why wouldn’t you do it again?

“i thought if you actually loved me the way you claimed to, you’d be able to go.”

“well, i was always honest with you about that too,” you murmur, feeling utterly defeated and guilty as you meet mingi’s glossy eyes. “you know i never intend on leaving.”

a year and 5 months ago - june 19th

he learned about your parents accident on the 4th year anniversary of their death.

he had noticed that week you were especially gloomy, a sad look in your eye and the fake smile on your face making him cling to you just a bit more than usual.

and apparently, you had noticed too.

“mingi, are you okay?”

the words were muffled against his shirt, your face pressed against his chest as the two of you lay on the couch. his hand had been running up and down your back gently all night, like he’d been trying to calm you without any words.

like he knew there was something wrong, even though you hadn’t said a word.

his eyebrows pull together in confusion, placing his fingers under your chin. he lifts your face as his eyes search yours, that sad look behind them masked by a soft curiosity.

you’re trying to hide your pain because you think he’s hurting and that alone only makes him even more sad.

“of course i am, baby. but are you okay?”

you can’t find it in you to say yes so you only nod shyly, a small smile gracing your face as you look at him.

his eyes are full of such warmth and love that it makes tears prick behind your eyes, dropping your gaze quickly as you bury your face back in his chest.

the movement causes him to swallow nervously, adams apple bobbing as he presses his lips to the top of your head.

he knows something’s wrong. he knows something’s very wrong but he doesn’t know what happened or what’s brought this on.

“you can tell me anything,” he mumbles against your hair, his arms wrapped tightly around your body. “you know that, right?”

because he also noticed that you started seeming off when he mentioned moving in together, looking at apartments in town for himself before getting the idea to live with you.

you guys are already together all the time, it only made sense for you two to live together as well.

but he could tell immediately the idea unsettled you, you clutching desperately on to him as you muttered that you’d think about it.

at first, he would’ve assumed you didn’t wanna go that far with him. that it was too serious a commitment and you were completely uncomfortable with that.

but it was the way you were clinging to him, burying your face in his chest like you were begging him not to leave you that made him realize something deeper was going.

it’s why he dropped it at first. looked for apartments on his own with the idea that, best case scenario, you’d move in with him too.

could that be what’s wrong right now? you dealing with moving in with him and fears coming from that? or something else entirely?

he just knows that when he starts to hear you cry quietly into his chest, he needs to know what’s been wrong because he hates seeing you like this.

“hey, hey, hey,” his deep voice mumbles, large hands pulling you from his chest and wiping at your face. “what happened, baby? what’s wrong?”

and since you started crying about this, remembering the day and the circumstances around it so well, you won’t be able to stop. you can only continue to cry into him, tiny sobs wracking your body as you clutched onto him tightly.

“i... i can’t.”

you couldn’t talk, you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t tell him, he wasn’t sure.

that’s why he shook his head and pulled you back into his chest, the warm safe place you’ve come to know so well and usually calmed you whenever you needed.

“i don’t know what’s wrong but i promise you’ll be okay,” you hear him mumble against your head, his hand running up and down your back gently. “i’ll try to help you in any way i can, baby, but i’m gonna need to know what’s wrong.”

but he can’t help you bring back your dead parents.

he can’t help you time travel the way you so desperately wish you could to tell yourself not to go on that senior trip.

that if you didn’t go, your parents never would’ve driven you to the airport and they never would’ve gotten in the car accident that took their life on the way back.

you’d spent a week in a foreign country while they spent a week in the hospital, your aunt and grandparents dealing with the repercussions before you came back and said your goodbyes in a dingy, hospital room.

mingi doesn’t know how long you both sat there in silence, your cries muffled against his chest and his arms wound tightly around you.

he loosened his hold immediately when he felt you try to pull away, watching as you stared at him, wiped your eyes and told him everything.

“my parents died four years ago, today.”

he watches with soft, sympathetic eyes and a breaking heart as you tell him about your guilt.

how if you just decided to stay home after weeks of begging them to go, they’d still be here.

“they didn’t have the money but i begged them for weeks, mingi,” you tell him, tears in your eyes and voice thick with emotion. 

“i wanted to go so badly because all my friends were going and i was too selfish to see they really couldn’t afford it.”

he can tell you’re not done talking so he only presses his lips together and grasps your hand tightly. squeezes it reassuringly as his thumb gently rubs back and forth against your skin.

“they both worked overtime for two weeks straight and gave me the money the last day it was due. and i barely thanked them,” you remember, the scene you’ve replayed in your mind hundreds of times flashing yet again.

you jumped up from the couch and snatched the money from their hands, throwing your arms around them in a quick hug before screaming your thanks and running up to your room to tell your friends.

“a drunk diver hit them on their way home from the airport and the doctors couldn’t believe they both didn’t die on impact. a-and no one in my family could even call me so i said my goodbyes when i got home, in the hospital.”

you look to mingi with tears streaming down your cheeks and you see wetness in his own eyes, his hand grasping onto yours tight.

“i couldn’t even talk to them one last time. or hear their voices. i don’t even know if they heard me.”

your voice breaks off after that, not being able to handle recounting this after years of staying silent about it; he’s the first person you’ve talked to about this besides the counselor you saw a few months after their death.

he pulls you in his lap and wraps his arms tightly around you, rocking you back and forth as he presses his lips to your head.

your eyes are closed tight as you focus on his breathing and soft murmurs. his deep, full voice muttering sweet nothings and quiet reassurances.

that your parents did hear you and they loved you till the end.

that it was no one’s fault but the driver who decided to get in a car after getting drunk.

that you shouldn’t put any blame on yourself, because your parents would want you to be happy and thriving.

“i know but it’s just hard,” you tell him, you teary face pulling away from his wet chest.

you look around the living room full of books and wooden furniture, a family portrait hung above a cluttered-filled desk; it was taken when you were ten and you remember hating that day because you had to wear an uncomfortable dress and tights.

“i don’t know how i’m ever gonna leave this place,” you voice aloud to him, one of the many concerns that muddled your mind when you started deciding on college or jobs or moving in with your perfect boyfriend of almost a year.

“it’s the last thing i have of them. i don’t... i don’t know if i’d be ever to leave this place, mingi.”

not after what happened last time.

not wanting to leave the house you grew up in to strangers who would create more happy memories and replace the ones you made with your own parents.

his face contorts into one of sympathy and pain, his heart breaking as the obvious guilt and dread is in your eyes.

he’d always seen a bit of torment behind them but you were always able to smile.

laugh with him and tease him and push whatever demons he knew you had aside; but he started seeing it again when he mentioned moving in, fear and anxiety and discomfort that he hated to even see behind your eyes.

“i don’t know how that will effect us, it’s something i’ve thought about a lot recently,” you confess quietly, playing with the edge of the blanket nervously. “especially when you mentioned us moving in together. i... i want to, so bad, because i love you and i think it’d be fun. but... i can’t leave.”

your tears start up again and a frown crosses mingi’s face, his body hovering over yours as he takes your face in his big hands.

he wipes at the tears threatening to slide down your cheeks before placing his lips on your head, breathing slowly and calmly against you as his warm breath wafts over you.

“baby, i understand completely, i really do,” he says, everything making sense now but... “but i don’t think your parents would want you to... limit your life like this.”

because you obviously had an interest in seeing the world. you obviously wanted to see different places and cultures and sights in the world that even your precious little town doesn’t hold.

but he can see tonight isn’t the night you’re gonna see that, if the way you shake your head and bury yourself back in his chest doesn’t show that.

and because he loved you more than anything else in the world, he understood it. held you and kissed you and made sure you knew he’d be by your side in whatever way you needed.

it was with his patience and love and unconditional support that you were able to live with him. keep your parents house as a sense of security but slowly move yourself out of it.

leaving a toothbrush at the apartment, a few sets of clothes, some shampoos and soaps until one night, you were waking up and falling asleep with him every morning and night.

present day:

the fight that ended you and mingi was over a trip to disney.

something meant to be so childish and fun and innocent morphing into a blowout, gut-wrenching fight that left the two of distraught.

hit both of you with the realization that whatever you once had had fizzled out and turned so horribly toxic, you were both losing yourselves.

it had started with yunho, san and wooyoung planning the trip, mingi over their house one day after the tension in the apartment got too much. he had scoffed when san mentioned it at first, wondering what business they had as college going twenty-somethings booking a trip to disney.

“it’ll be sweet!” san said, “we could go to the parks for a few days, everyone loves roller coasters! and then we can drive down to the beach, go surfing and go to bars and shit. it’d be so much fun, guys.”

and the more all of them thought about it, the more excited they got. looking at flights and car rentals and getting all their swim suits in order - that was until mingi came back home a day later and informed you of these plans.

“me and the guys were talking about booking a trip to disney,” was the first thing he said to you. not a hello or how are you or sorry for leaving and making you worry for a week.

“oh?” you hummed quietly, looking up from your spot at the kitchen sink; you’d made breakfast for two just in case he came home early but it was another serving of eggs and bacon in the trash.

“yeah, so is that something you’d wanna do?”

there’s something off about his tone that you immediately pick up on. snippy and on edge and defensive, like he’s already fully prepared to break out into a fight.

because he already knows you won’t do it. you won’t leave the 70 mile radius you’ve trapped yourself nor will you even try to go out of your comfort zone for him and you or anyone else.

and quite frankly, he’s grown really fucking sick of it. call him selfish or call him someone looking out for you, someone who knows this type of living isn’t normal, he can’t deal with it anymore.

“i... well i mean...how would we get there? and when?”

“we were looking at flights three weeks from now,” he says, carefully observing your face with slightly cold eyes. carefully waiting for the next hint of a breakdown he’s not gonna properly respond to.

you bite the inside of your cheek as panic starts to stir in your chest.

you haven’t been anywhere since the accident. you’ve gotten yourself so used to this environment that going anywhere else seems terrifying.

but you’ve seen how bad things will happen when you try to venture out. you left to do the same and it cost your parents your life - who’s to say you wouldn’t get your karma soon?

leave mingi without a girlfriend he doesn’t even care about anymore or your grandparents without a granddaughter you can’t help but feel they blame for their child’s death.

tears are quick to prick your eyes as you try to push down all of these feelings, looking down at the floor in a move mingi already knows is dismissive.

you hear him scoff and it sends a flurry of emotions through you, not even needing to lift your head to know he’s shaking his head.

“figures,” he hums lowly, making extra noise as he puts down his bag or plops down on the dining room chair. “i don’t know why i bothered asking.”

“mingi...” you begin breathlessly, guilt and shame and sorrow filling you.

“no, y/n.”

his voice is firm and hard and makes you meet his gaze, the look he’s throwing you icy and completely empty. he’s done and you’re done and there’s basically a ticking time bomb between you two.

“you didn’t even let me give you an answer.”

“because i know what it’s gonna be!” he roars, feeling stupid for getting excited when he knew damn well you wouldn’t be able to leave. “i know you’re gonna make up some bullshit excuse about school or work or money and you’re gonna say no.”

you can’t say anything because you know he’s right. but what he doesn’t know is that you’re trying. you try every day and every week and every month to push yourself out of your comfort zone and it just doesn’t work.

you’ve tried going away with him and you’ve tried expanding your horizons - you’e even moved out of your parents house to live with him. but it’s hard when you’re constantly reminded by the fact that your decisions ended a life.

while it was technically the drunk driver’s fault, your survivors guilt heavily outweighs that. intrusive thought after intrusive thought until you start to question why you’re even still here, too.

“i’m trying, mingi,” you say, your voice shaky and defeated. “i’m trying but you don’t even see that.”

“how are you trying?” he asks, watching your dejected form a few feet away from him. “you haven’t done anything different since you moved in with me. we’ve been living the same life for the past two years, y/n.”

but you just remember how patient he was when you first tried moving in. how he was so patient and kind and gentle and was everything you needed him to be.

but he can just remember how much he loved you. how patient and understanding he was, not fully grasping the severity of what happened to you and how incapable he was of dealing with it.

“i’m... so fucking sick of it. i’ve grown to be so sick of you and i hate that, y/n. i hate feeling like this but it’s the truth.”

“and you don’t think i am?” you blurt out, the dam of tears breaking as you hear him say those specific words to you - i’ve grown to be so sick of you.

your frame is smaller and fragile and you’re like a shell of the person you were when you first met as you make your way up to him, looking over him with all the pain and exhaustion in your eyes.

“you don’t think i’m sick of feeling this way? of seeing how much you obviously hate me and are over this when i can’t stop feeling this way? because i’m sorry it’s been inconveniencing you, mingi, but it’s been ruining me, too. sometimes i can’t even believe i’m still here.”

the last part of your sentence stirs something in him but he can only focus on your broken state. watching as you grow weaker and weaker because of him.

“you haven’t even been helping me,” you suddenly say, words quiet and soft-spoke but filled with an obvious hurt. “i... i don’t know why you’d even wanna go on a trip with me because we’d just fight, mingi. we’d just fight and i’d cry and you’d leave me. th-that’s what we keep doing.”

tears burn the back of his eyes, a knot growing in his stomach so big it feels like he’s about to puke.

“because i don’t know what to do anymore, y/n,” he say, his voice less harsh but still holding a certain degree of bite. “i tried so hard with you and nothing seems to work. i loved you, i still love you, and i was there for you and i tried so hard with you but... i don’t know how to help you.”

“you think yelling is the way? or leaving me is the way?” you laugh out manically, tears rolling down your face that you desperately try to reach out and wipe. “you’re sick of me but i’m sick of you, too. i’m sick of feeling this way and i’m so fucking sick of thinking you still love me.”

“you don’t think i love you?” he asks, rising from his chair and making his way over to you. 

his looming height should make you nervous, the way he’s looking down at you and threatening to trap you against the counter should make you nervous, but it doesn’t.

because coming to terms with this right here is the worst part. the conversation you’ve been avoiding for months and the obvious change in what you two have become.

“i don’t,” you say, finally meeting his gaze and seeing hurt and anger swirl behind them. they used to hold such a sweet softness that would sometimes make you feel better, even if just for a little bit.

“because even if you do, you’re still sick of me, right?”

one year ago:

“what if you get sick of me?”

the newest compromise had been his family coming here to meet you.

you and mingi had booked refundable tickets for a week in his hometown, a part of you wanting to desperately prove you could do something for him. something that would make him happy and maybe prove you love him a little more than you can convey.

but the second you got on the highway to the airport, you knew you weren’t gonna be able to.

memories played through your mind of you in the backseat of your parents car, laughing and talking with them as you promised to be careful and take a lot of pictures with them.

hearing them tell you they loved you and were so happy you were able to go after all.

and then you’d looked to the other side and see in your mind a car hitting the other. spinning out and smacking into the divider as an eruption of fire, car parts and the chaotic screeching of breaks echoed through the air.

mingi had to pull over to calm you down, bring you back to the real world in the form of hugging you close to his body and his hand running through your hair.

“i’m- i’m sorry, mingi, i’m sorry, i-”

“sh, you don’t have to apologize, baby, there’s nothing to apologize for,” he hums against your head, pulling you over the console to rock you gently in his lap.

he was warm and broad and soft spoken and everything about him made you feel safe. you couldn’t grasp at the time how or why he was so understanding and sweet but you didn’t even wanna question it.

because he was the one thing in your life that made you feel okay. that you had him and he had you and there was nothing that could be that bad if you had each other still. 

he didn’t let go of your hand once as pulled onto the highway, got off the exit and made his way back home.

he guided you back into the apartment and told you to go lay down and that he’d be there in a second. 

he cancelled the flight and called his mom, telling her you guys got rained out and that, if it was okay, he’d pay for them to fly out here next week.

the bed dips a few moments later, broad strong arms wrapping around your waist before you’re pulled into his chest.

it was after a few silent minutes stretched between you two, the calming rise and fall of his chest against your back, your small voice pierced the air.

“i’m sorry, mingi.”

he could tell you were gonna cry before you even started, turning you in his arms as he pulled you closer to him.

“baby, i already told you you don’t have to-”

“but i do,” you cut him off, lower lip trembling and stomach knotting guiltily. 

“i... i don’t think this is normal, mingi. i should be able to move on with my life and travel somewhere. i wanted to go so badly and meet your mom but i-” your voice breaks as tears fill your eyes and you try to catch the breath threatening to suffocate you.

“i’m scared i’m gonna be like this forever,” you say quietly, looking up and meeting his soft, sweet gaze. “i’m scared i’m gonna be like this forever and you’re gonna become tired of it.”

“baby... that’s never gonna happen,” he assures you, voice gentle but firm as he runs his fingers through your hair.

“and you’re not gonna be like this forever. we can get you help. and i can help you,” he says, his eyes looking into yours with such a raw honesty and love. “i... don’t really know how but i’ll do whatever it takes.”

“what if it’s not enough?” you ask, because at the time it’s like you knew just how bad this was gonna get. that even with as low as you felt then, it wasn’t even rock bottom.

“what if you get sick of me?”

“i won’t,” he reassures, pressing a long, lingering kiss to your head before settling you onto his chest carefully. “that’ll never happen because i love you, y/n. and i always will.”

present day:

in a turn of events, you were the one who left after that. 

came right to the place you first met, except now the lake isn’t frozen over and the late-afternoon sun had just set.

his words were too harsh and reminded you too much of his broken promises.

you felt too weak and pathetic and completely hopeless, the tense silence so horribly loud between you two you left without a word; and he hadn’t said anything either.

and now, as you sit at the spot you’ve always come to and found solace in, you can feel why he was always so hurt when you didn’t ask him to stay. because even though you were fighting and even though you both hurt each other, you wanted him to ask you to stay.

to please not go because that would’ve been the last possible way for you both to see there was something still there - even though it’s plain to see there isn’t.

too many fights and too many words have been said. too many lapses of silence and too many unspoken thoughts that now when uttered are just hurting both of you.

you’re both too hurt and you both have too many things to sort through that you can’t do together. 

one second you were staring down at the lake, your own broken reflection staring back as your feet hung in the water, and the next you couldn’t see. tears flooded your vision and sobs wracked through your body, loud, ugly, horrific sobs that you’ve been holding back for far too long.

you cry because you know it’s over with him, you know it’s been over for a while, but now it all feels real. 

you cry because you know you need some help to get past all of the guilt you feel, how if you don’t get help, you’re never gonna leave this town and see what else is out there.

you cry because you don’t even know where to start and know, even though it hurts, you have to do it alone.

you’re so lost in your thoughts and the way your cries echo through the yard that you don’t hear footsteps approach you.

you don’t even know anyone’s behind you until someone bends down and pulls you into their broad, warm chest. a chest you know far too well and a body that hasn’t held you like this in what feels like forever.

he knew you’d be here and he couldn’t stop his legs from jumping in the car and coming to see you after you left. half because he knew this had to happen and half because he was far too scared for you to be out here like this.

he knew what conversation was gonna follow but he knew had to hold you one last time. he missed holding you and he missed wiping your tears away.

“i don’t know what happened to us, mingi,” you whimper into his chest, the tears that have been building behind his eyes finally coming to the surface.

he doesn’t know what happened either. he doesn’t know when or where you guys went wrong or when you stopped talking to each other. he doesn’t know when he stopped loving you in such a way that was all consuming, where he knew he’d do anything and everything for you.

“i don’t... i don’t think this is working. i don’t know what to do but i know i can’t do this anymore.”

“i don’t know what happened either, baby,” he mumbles against your head, his words wobbly and wet as he tightens his hold on you. it feels as if every part of is heart is breaking, for the way he’s neglected you and the way your crying against him.

“i’m sorry i can’t help you. i wanted to so fucking badly but now... i just, i can’t, baby.”

you cry harder as you shake your head against him, feeling him plop down and pull you into his arms tighter.

it feels every bit as heartbreaking and upsetting as you both knew it’d be. it’s probably why you guys put it off for so long. because even though you feel the love you used to feel, you both know nothing will change.

he’ll resent you and you’ll resent him right back.

he’ll say he stayed for you and tried to help you and you’ll say you never asked him to do any of it.

you both sit there and cry and hold each other until the sky falls dark and air turns crisp, the moon reflecting off the lake in a way that hasn’t changed in two years.

but everything’s changed between you both and it’s too heartbreakingly obvious.

“i’ll miss you,” you mumbled to him.

because you know he’s gonna go on and do all the great things he’s wanted to. move out of this town and pursue whatever dreams he put off for you, the girl he once loved more than anything.

“i love you,” he confesses quietly against your head. “i really really did love you.”

because he knows he still does, he knows he always will, but it’s not something either of you can bear to hear right now.

you both have said what the other needed to hear and when you guys part tonight, maybe you’ll finally start feeling better. fix yourselves and the damage you’ve caused each other and maybe reunite when the universe deems it right.

two and a half years later:

it had always been your dream to see the northern lights.

something about them had always fascinated you, how they almost didn’t see real or were just a figment of fake editing that would only ever be seen in photos.

but you had an overwhelming need to see them before your very eyes. see the sight before you and marvel in just how truly fascinating and beautiful it was.

so that’s exactly what you did.

you wrote down a list of all the places you wanted to see: the egyptian pyramids, the great wall of china, the taj mahal, the eiffel tower, all of the sights that you knew in order to see, you’d have to leave the perfect little town you loved so much.

it took a lot of attempts, a lot of tears and anxiety and frantic calls to your therapist, but finally, you were able to do it.

it was the third to last place on your 6-month journey around the world, jet lag getting to you immensely but an extremely fulfilling pride and excitement within you.

you were able to do it. see the sights and meet hundreds of different people and experience all the things you convinced yourself you didn’t need or want. 

and you didn’t have a single regret until this very moment. 

because the rookie mistake you made within this amazing, journey of self-discovery around the world was not investing in a parka.

the biting temperatures of alaska were surely getting to you right now, your glove covered hands over your ears as you trekked through the snow with other groups of (properly dressed) tourists during the aurora season.

you found yourself in a snowy, freezing field, tall evergreen trees above your heads as you waited patiently for the sky to change perfectly, a buzzing excitement and low chatter from the people around you.

footsteps crunching on snow filled your ears from every direction, your eyes on the trees and large sky above you. a harsh gust of wind whipped past you and you let out a tiny squeal, your hands shooting up to your red, wind-burnt face.

you could hear a quiet, low chuckle beside you, something about the strangely familiar sound sending a whoosh of butterflies through your stomach. you didn’t understand them at that moment, ignoring your bodies odd reaction and keeping your eyes focused on the sky. 

it took hearing his voice, the same one you’d fallen in love with in your own backyard, for your eyes widen and quickly look over the snowy vast of land surrounding you.

mingi stepped in front of you, eyes full of amusement and pride and even disbelief, looking over your face with the same type of a fascination he had when he first met you.  

“aren’t you cold?”

inspired by: line without a hook by ricky montgomery, ty tiktok

tag list: @mochibabycakes @atinyarmyx1 @middle-of-a-wonshua-sandwich @chrryhwa @baekhvuns @marksflvr @bunbaebae @markleeyeosang @inkigayeo​ @nlost21​ @toffee-hwa​ @hyunjeansuniverse​ @cherryeonii​

[path-of-my-childhood]

CABIN FEVER - Aaron Dessner: Producing folklore and evermore

Sound On Sound Magazine // March 2021 issue // By Tom Doyle

The pandemic gave Taylor Swift a chance to explore new musical paths, with two lockdown albums co-written and produced by the National's Aaron Dessner.

Few artists during the pandemic have been as prolific as Taylor Swift. In July 2020, she surprise-released folklore, a double-length album recorded entirely remotely and in isolation. It went on to become the biggest global seller of the year, with four million sales and counting. Then, in December, she repeated the trick with the 15-song evermore, which quickly became Swift's eighth consecutive US number one.

In contrast to her country-music roots and the shiny synth-pop that made her a superstar, both folklore and evermore showcased a very different Taylor Swift sound: one veering more towards atmospheric indie and folk. The former album was part-produced by Swift and her regular co-producer Jack Antonoff (St Vincent, Lana Del Rey), while the other half of the tracks were overseen by a new studio collaborator, Aaron Dessner of the National. For evermore, aside from one Antonoff-assisted song, Dessner took full control of production.

Good Timing

Although his band are hugely popular and even won a Grammy for their 2017 album Sleep Well Beast, Aaron Dessner admits that it initially felt strange for an indie-rock guitarist and keyboard player to be pulled into such a mainstream project. Swift had already declared herself a fan of the National, and first met the band back in 2014. Nonetheless, Dessner was still surprised when the singer sent him a text "out of the blue" last spring. "I mean, I didn't think it was a hoax," he laughs. "But it was very exciting and a moment where you think it's like serendipity or something, especially in the middle of the pandemic. When she asked if I would ever consider writing with her, I just happened to have a lot of music that I had worked really hard on. So, the timing was sort of lucky. It opened up this crazy period of collaboration. It was a pretty wild ride."

Since 2016, Aaron Dessner has been based at his self-built rural facility, Long Pond Studio, in the Hudson Valley, upstate New York. The only major change to the studio since SOS last spoke to Dessner in October 2017 has been the addition of a vintage WSW Siemens console built in 1965. "It had been refurbished by someone," he says, "and I think there's only three of them in the United States. I heard it was for sale from our friend [and the National producer/mixer] Peter Katis. That's a huge improvement here."

Although the National made Sleep Well Beast and its 2019 successor I Am Easy To Find at Long Pond, the band members are scattered around the US and Europe, meaning Dessner is no stranger to remote working and file sharing. This proved to be invaluable for his work with Swift. Dessner spent the first six weeks of lockdown writing music that he believed to be for Big Red Machine, his project with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon. Instead, many of these work-in-progress tracks would end up on folklore. Their first collaboration (and the album's first single), 'cardigan', for instance, emerged from an idea Dessner had been working on backstage during the National's European arena tour of Winter 2019.

"I sent her a folder and in the middle of the night she sent me that song," Dessner explains. "So, the next morning I was just listening to it, like, `Woah, OK, this is crazy."

On The Move

As work progressed, it quickly became apparent that Swift and Dessner were very much in tune as a songwriting and producing unit. There was very little Dessner had to do, he says, in terms of chopping vocals around to shape the top lines. "I think it's because I'm so used to structuring things like a song, with verses and choruses and bridges," he reckons. "In most cases, she sort of kept the form. If she had a different idea, she would tell me when she was writing and I would chop it up for her and send it to her. But, mostly, things kind of stayed in the form that we had."

Dessner and Swift were working intensively and at high speed throughout 2020, so much so that on one occasion the producer sent the singer a track and went out for a run in the countryside around Long Pond. By the time he got back, Swift had already written 'the last great american dynasty' and it was waiting for him in his inbox. "That was a crazy moment," he laughs. "One of the astonishing things about Taylor is what a brilliant songwriter she is and the clarity of her ideas and, when she has a story to tell, the way she can tell it. I think she's just been doing it for so long, she has a facility that makes you feel like you could never do what she's capable of. But we were a good pair because I think the music was inspiring to her in such a way that the stories were coming."

Swift's contributions to folklore were recorded in a makeshift studio in her Los Angeles home. Laura Sisk engineered the sessions as the singer recorded her vocals, using a Neumann U47, in a neighbouring bedroom. Live contact between Swift, Sisk, Dessner and Long Pond engineer Jonathan Low was done through real-time online collaboration platform Audiomovers.

"We would listen in remotely and kind of go back and forth," says Dessner. "We used Audiomovers and then we would have Zoom as a backup. But mainly we were just using Audiomovers, so we could actually be in her headphones. It's powerful, it's great. I've used it a lot with people during this time. Then, later on, when we recorded evermore, a lot of the vocals were done here at the studio actually when Taylor was visiting when we did the [Disney+ documentary] Long Pond Sessions. But Taylor's vocals for folklore were all done remotely."

Keeping Secrets

Given the huge international interest in Swift, the team had to work with an elaborate file-sharing arrangement to ensure that the tracks didn't leak online. Understandably, Dessner won't be drawn on the specifics. "Yeah, I mean we had to be very careful, so everything was very secretive," he says. "There were passwords on both ends and we communicated in a specific way when sharing mixes and everything. There was a high level of confidentiality and data encryption. It was sort of a learning curve.

"I'm not used to that," he adds, "'cause usually we're just letting files kind of fly all over the Internet [laughs]. But I think with someone like her, there's just so many people that are paying attention to every move that she makes, which can be a little, I think, oppressive for her. We tried to make it as comfortable as possible and we got used to how to get things to her and back to us. It worked pretty well."

Drums & Guitars

For the generally minimalist beat programming on the records, Dessner would sometimes turn to his more expensive new analogue drum generators - Vermona's DRM1 and Dave Smith's Tempest - but more often used the Synthetic Bits iOS app FunkBox. "There's just a lot of great vintage drum machine sounds in there, and they sound pretty cool, especially if you overdrive it," he says. "Often I send that through an amplifier, or through effects into an amplifier. Then I have a [Roland) TR-8 and a TR-8S that I use a lot. I also use the drum machine in the [Teenage Engineering] OP-1. So, a song like 'willow', that's just me tapping the OP-1."

Elsewhere, Dessner's guitar work appears on the tracks, with the intricate melodic layering on 'the last great american dynasty' from folklore having been inspired by Radiohead's In Rainbows. "Almost all of the electric guitar on Taylor's records is played direct through a REDDI DI into the Siemens board," he says. "It's usually just my 1971 Telecaster played direct and it just sounds great. Oftentimes I just put a little spring reverb on it and sometimes I'll overdrive the board like it's an amplifier, 'cause it breaks up really beautifully.

"I have a 1965 [Gibson] Firebird that I play usually through this 1965 Fender Deluxe Reverb. So, if I am playing into an amp, that's what it is. But on 'the last great american dynasty', those little pointillistic guitars, that's just played direct with the Telecaster through the board."

Elsewhere, Aaron Dessner took Taylor Swift even further out of her sonic comfort zone. A key track on folklore, the Cocteau Twins-styled 'epiphany', features her voice amid a wash of ambient textures, created by Dessner slowing down and reversing various instrumental parts in Pro Tools. "I created a drone using the Mellotron [MD4000D] and the Prophet and the OP-1 and all kinds of synth pads," he says. "Then I duplicated all the tracks, and some of them I reversed and some of them I dropped an octave. All manner of using varispeed and Polyphonic Elastic Audio and changing where they were sitting. Just to create like this Icelandic glacier of sounds was my idea. Then I wrote the chord progression against that.

"The [Pro Tools] session was not happy," he adds with a chuckle. "It kept crashing. Eventually I had to print the drone but I printed it by myself and there was some crackle in it. It was distorting. And then I couldn't recreate it so Jon Low, who was helping me, was kind of mad at me 'cause he was like, 'You can't do that.' And I was like, 'Well, I was working quickly. I didn't know it'd become a song."

Orchestra Of Nowhere

Meanwhile, the orchestrations that appear on several of the tracks were scored by Aaron's twin brother and National bandmate, Bryce Dessner, who is located in France. "I would just make him chord charts of the songs and send them to him in France," Aaron says. "Then he would orchestrate things in Sibelius and send the parts to me. I would send the parts and the instrumental tracks to different players remotely and they would record them literally in their bedrooms or in their attics. None of it was done as a group, it was all done separately. But that's how we've always worked in the National so it's quite natural."

On folklore standout track 'exile', Justin Vernon of Bon Iver delivered his stirring vocal for the duet remotely from his home in Eaux Claires, Wisconsin. "He's renovating his studio, so he has a little home studio in his garage," says Dessner. "It was Taylor's idea to approach him. I sent him Taylor's voice memo of her singing both parts, and he got really excited and loved the song and then he wrote the extra part in the bridge.

"I do a lot of work remotely with Justin also, so it was easy to send him tracks and he would track to it and send back his vocals. I was sending him stems, so usually it's just a vocal stem of Taylor and an instrumental stem and then if he wants something deeper, I'll give him more stems. But generally, he's just working with the vocal layers and an instrumental."

Vernon also provided the grainy beat that kicks off 'closure', one of two tracks on evermore that started life as a sketch for the second Big Red Machine album. "It was this little loop that Justin had given me in this folder of 'Starters', he calls them. I had heard that and been playing the piano to it. But I was hearing it in 5/4, although it's not in 5/4. 'Closure' really opened everything up further. There were no real limits to where we were gonna try to write songs."

Given the number of remote players, Dessner says there were surprisingly few problems with the file swapping and that it was a fairly painless technical process. "It was pretty smooth, but there were issues," he admits. "Sometimes sample-rate issues, or if I happened to give someone an instrumental that was an MP3, that sometimes lines up differently than if you send them an actual WAV that's bounced on the grid. So, sometimes I'd have to kinda eyeball things.

"If there was trouble it started to be because of track counts. I probably only used 20 percent of what was actually recorded, 'cause we would try a lot of things, y'know. So, eventually the sessions got kinda crazy and you'd have to deactivate a lot of things and print things. But we got used to that."

Soft Piano

Aaron Dessner's characteristic dampened upright piano sound, familiar from the National's albums, is much in evidence throughout both folklore and evermore. "The upright is a Yamaha U1 that I've had for more than a decade. Usually, I play it with the soft pedal down and that's the sound of 'hoax' or 'seven' or 'cardigan', y'know, that felted sound. It kind of almost sounds like an electric piano.

"I always mic it the same way, just with two [AKG] 414s, and they're always the same distance off the wall. I had a studio in Brooklyn for 10 years and then when I moved here, I copied the same [wooden] pattern on the wall. And the reason I did that is 'cause of how much I love how this piano sounds bouncing off that wall. It just does something really special for the harmonics."

When on other folklore songs, such as 'exile' or 'the 1', where the piano was the main sonic feature of the track, Dessner played his Steinway grand. "A lot of times we use a pair of Coles [4038s] on the Steinway, just cause it's darker. But sometimes we'll have the 414s there as well and choose."

Keeping Warm

On both folklore and evermore, Taylor Swift's voice is very much front and center and high in the mix, and generally sounds fairly dry. "I think the main thing was I wanted her vocals to have a more full range than maybe you typically hear," Dessner explains. "'Cause I think a lot of the more pop-oriented records are mixed a certain way and they take some of the warmth out of the vocal, so that it's very bright and it kinda cuts really well on the radio. But she has this wonderful lower warmth frequency in her voice which is particularly important on a song like `seven'. If you carved out that mud, y'know, it wouldn't hit you the same way. Or, like, `cardigan', I think it needs that warmth, the kind of fuller feeling to it. It makes it darker, but to me that's where a lot of emotion is."

Effects-wise, almost all of the treatments were done in the box. "There's no outboard reverbs printed," says Dessner. "The only things that we did print would be like an [Eventide] H3000 or sometimes the [WEM] CopiCat tape delay for just a really subtle slap. But generally, it's just different reverbs in the box that Jon was using. He uses the Valhalla stuff quite a bit and some other UAD reverbs, like the [Capitol] Chambers. I often just use Valhalla VintageVerb and the [Avid] Black Spring and simple things."

In some instances, the final mix ended up being the never-bettered rough mix, while other songs took far more work. "'cardigan' is basically the rough, as is `seven'. So, like the early, early mixes, when we didn't even know we were mixing, we never were able to make it better. Like if you make it sound 'good', it might not be as good 'cause it loses some of its weird magic, y'know. But songs like `the last great american dynasty' or 'mad woman', those songs were a little harder to create the dynamics the way you want them, and the pay-off without going too far, and with also just keeping in the kind of aesthetic that we were in. Those were harder, I would say.

"On evermore, I would say 'willow' was probably the hardest one to finish just because there were so many ways it could've gone. Eventually we settled back almost to the point where it began. So, there's a lot of stuff that was left out of 'willow', just because the simplicity of the idea I think was in a way the strongest."

The subject of this month's Inside Track article, 'willow' was the first song written for evermore, immediately following the release of folklore. "It almost felt like a dare or something," Dessner laughs. "We were writing, recording and mixing all in one kind of work stream and we went from one record to the other almost immediately. We were just sort off to the races. We didn't really ever stop since April."

Rubber & Vinyl

Sometimes, Dessner and Swift drew inspiration from unlikely sources; `no body, no crime', for instance, started when he gave her a 'rubber bridge' guitar made by Reuben Cox of the Old Style Guitar Shop in LA. "He's my very old friend," says Dessner of Cox. "He buys undervalued vintage guitars. Stuff that was made in the '50s and '60s as sort of learner guitars, like old Silvertones and Kays and Harmonys. These kinds of guitars which now are quite special, but they're still not valued the same way that vintage Fenders or Gibsons are valued. Then, he customizes them.

"Recently he started retrofitting these guitars with a rubber bridge and flatwound strings. He'll take, like, an acoustic Silvertone from 1958 and put a bridge on it that's covered in this kind of rubber that deadens the strings, so it really has this kind of dead thrum to it. And he puts two pickups in there, one that's more distorted and one that's cleaner. They're just incredible guitars. I thought Taylor would enjoy having one 'cause she loves the sound. So, I had Reuben make one for her and she used it to write `no body, no crime'."

Another friend of Dessner's, Ryan Olsen, has developed a piece of software called the Allovers Hi-Hat Generator which helped create the unusual harmonic loops that feature on `marjorie'. "It's not available on the market," Dessner says of the software. "It's just something that he uses personally, but I think hopefully eventually it'll come out. I wouldn't say it's artificial intelligence software but there's something very intelligent about it [laughs]. It basically analyses audio information and is able to separate audio into identifiable samples and then put them into a database. You then can design parameters for it to spit out sequences that are incredibly musical.

"When Ryan comes here, he'll just take all kinds of things that I give him and run it through there and then it'll spit out, like, three hours of stuff. Then I go through it and find the layers that I love, then I loop them. You can hear it also on the song 'happiness', the drumming in the background. It's not actually played. That's drums that have been sampled and then re-analyzed and re-sequenced out of this Allovers Hi-Hat Generator."

The song `marjorie' is named after Swift's opera-singer grandmother and so, fittingly, her voice can be heard flitting in and out of the mix at the end of the track. "Taylor's family gave us a bunch of recordings of her grandmother," Dessner explains. "But they were from old, very scratchy, noisy vinyl. So, we had to denoise it all using [iZotope's] RX and then I went in and I found some parts that I thought might work. I pitch-shifted them into the key and then placed them. It took a while to find the right ones, but it's really beautiful to be able to hear her. It's just an incredibly special thing, I think."

Meet At The Pond

Taylor Swift finally managed to get together with Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff in September 2020 for the filming of folklore: the long pond studio sessions, featuring the trio live-performing the album. It also provided an opportunity for Swift to add her vocals to some of the evermore tracks.

"It did allow us to have more fun, I think," says Dessner. "Y'know, drink more wine and just kinda be in the same place and have the feeling of blasting the music here and dancing around and just enjoying ourselves. She's really a lovely person to hang out with, so in that sense I'm glad that we had that chance to work together in person.

"We were using a [Telefunken] U47 to record Taylor here," he adds. "Either we were using one of the Siemens preamps on the board, which are amazing. Or I have Neve 1064s [preamps/EQs] and we use a Lisson Grove [AR-i] tube compressor generally."

One entirely new song, `tis the damn season', came out of this face-to-face approach, which Swift wrote in the middle of the night after the team had stayed up late drinking. "We had a bunch of wine actually," Dessner laughs, "and then everybody went to sleep, I thought. But I think she must have had this idea swimming around in her head, 'cause the next morning when she arrived, she sang 'Us the damn season' for me in my kitchen. It's maybe my favourite song we've written together. Then she sang it at dinner for me and my wife Stine and we were all crying. It’s just that kind of a song, so it was quite special.”

National Unity

One key track on evermore, 'coney island', features all of the members of the National and sees Swift duetting with their singer Matt Berninger. "My brother [Bryce] actually originated that song," says Aaron Dessner. "I sent him a reference at one point - I can't remember what it was - and then he was sort of inspired to write that chord progression. Then we worked together to sort of develop it and I wrote a bunch of parts and we structured it.

"Taylor and William Bowery [the songwriting pseudonym of Swift's boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn] wrote 'coney island' and she sang a beautiful version. It felt kind of done, actually. But then I think we all collectively thought, Taylor and myself and Bryce, like this was the closest to a National song."

Dessner then asked the brothers who make up the National's rhythm section, drummer Bryan and bassist Scott Devendorf, to play on 'coney island'. Matt Berninger, as he often does with the band's own tracks, recorded his vocal at home in Los Angeles. "It was never in the same place, it was done remotely," says Dessner, "except Bryan was here at Long Pond when he played. It was great to collaborate as a band with Taylor."

No Compromise

folklore and evermore have been both enormous critical and commercial successes for Taylor Swift. Aaron Dessner reckons that making these anti-pop records has freed the singer up for the future. "I think it was very liberating for her," he says. "I think that's the thing that's been probably the biggest change for her has just been being able to make songs without compromise and then release them without the promotional requirements that she's used to from the past. Obviously, it comes at this time when we're all in lockdown and nobody can tour or go on talk shows or anything. But I think for her probably it will impact what she does in the future.

"But I also think she can shapeshift again," he concludes. "Who knows where she'll go? She's had many celebrated albums from the past, but to release two albums of this quality in such a short time, it really did shine a light on her songwriting talent and her storytelling ability and also just her willingness to experiment and collaborate. Somehow, I ended up in the middle of all that and I'm very grateful."

INSIDE TRACK - Jonathan Low: Secrets of the Mix Engineers

Sound On Sound Magazine // March 2021 issue // By Paul Tingen

From sketches to final mixes, engineer Jonathan Low spent 2020 overseeing Taylor Swift’s hit lockdown albums folklore and evermore.

“I think the theme of a lot of my work nowadays, and especially with these two records, is that everything is getting mixed all the time. I always try to get the songs to sound as finalised as they can be. Obviously that’s hard when you’re not sure yet what all the elements will be. Tracks morph all the time, and yet everything is always moving forwards towards completion in some way. Everything should sound fun and inspiring to listen to all the time.”

Speaking is Jonathan Low, and the two records he refers to are, of course, Taylor Swift’s 2020 albums folklore and evermore, both of which reached number one in the UK and the US. Swift’s main producer and co‑writer on the two albums was the National’s Aaron Dessner, also interviewed in this issue. Low is the engineer, mixer and general right‑hand man at Long Pond Studios in upstate New York, where he and Dessner spent most of 2020 working on folklore and evermore, with Swift in Los Angeles for much of the time.

“In the beginning it did not feel real,” recalls Low. “There was this brand‑new collaboration, and it was amazing how quickly Aaron made these instrumental sketches and Taylor wrote lyrics and melodies to them, which she initially sent to us as iPhone voice memos. During our nightly family dinners in lockdown, Aaron would regularly pull up his phone and say, ‘Listen to this!’ and there would be another voice memo from Taylor with this beautiful song that she had written over a sketch of Aaron’s in a matter of hours. The rate at which it was happening was mind‑blowing. There was constant elevation, inspiration and just wanting to continue the momentum.

“We put her voice memos straight into Pro Tools. They had tons of character, because of the weird phone compression and cutting midrange quality you just would not get when you put someone in front of a pristine recording chain. Plus there was all this bleed. It’s interesting how that dictates the attitude of the vocal and of the song. Even though none of the original voice memos ended up on the albums, they often gave us unexpected hints. These voice memos were such on‑a‑whim things, they were really telling. Taylor had certain phrasings and inflections that we often returned to later on. They became our reference points.”

Pond Life

The making of the National’s 2017 album Sleep Well Beast and the setup at Long Pond were covered in SOS October 2017; today the studio remains pretty much the same, with the exception of a new desk. “The main space is really big, and the console sits in the middle,” says Low. “In 2019, I installed a 1965 WSW/Siemens, which has 24 line‑in and microphone channels and another 24 line channels. WSW is the Austrian branch of Siemens usually built for broadcast. It’s loaded with 811510B channels. The build quality is insane, the switches and pots feel like they were made yesterday. To me it hints at the warm haze of a Class‑A Neve channel but sits further forward in the speakers. The midrange band on the passive EQ is a huge part of its charm, it really does feel like you’re changing the tone of the actual source rather than the recording. Most microphones go through the desk on their way into Pro Tools, though we sometimes use outboard Neve 1064 mic pres. Occasionally I use the Siemens to sum a mix.

“We have a pair of ATC SCM45 monitors, which sound very clear in the large room. The ceiling is very high, and the front wall is about 25 feet behind the monitors. There are diffusers on the sidewalls and the back walls are absorbing, so there are very few reflections. Aaron and I will be listening in tons of different ways. I’ll listen in my home studio with similar ATC SCM20 monitors or on my ‘70s Marantz hi‑fi setup. Aaron is always checking things in his car, and if there’s something that is bugging him, I’ll join him in his car to find out what he hears.”

Low works at Long Pond and with Dessner most of the time, though he does find time to do other projects, among hem this last year the War On Drugs, Waxahatchee and Nap Eyes. When lockdown started in Spring 2020, Low tacked up on supplies and "had a bunch f mixes lined up". Meanwhile, on the Eest Coast, Swift had seen her Lover Fest our cancelled. With help from engineer aura Sisk, she set up a makeshift studio which she dubbed Kitty Committee in bedroom in her Los Angeles home, and began working with long-term producer nd co-writer Jack Antonoff. At the end of April, however, Swift also started working with Dessner, which took the project in different direction. The impressionistic, atmospheric, electro-folk instrumentals Dessner sent her were mostly composed nd recorded by him at Long Pond, assisted by Low.

Sketching Sessions

The instrumental sketches Aaron makes come into being in different ways," elaborates Low. "Sometimes they are more fleshed-out ideas, sometimes they are less formed. But normally Aaron will set himself up in the studio, surrounded by instruments and synths, and he'll construct a track. Once he feels it makes some kind of sense I'll come in and take a listen and then we together develop what's there.

"I don't call his sketches demos, because while many instruments are added and replaced later on, most of the original parts end up in the final version of the song. We end up in the final version of the song. We try to get the sketches to a place where they are already very engaging as instrumental are already very engaging as instrumental tracks. Aaron and I are always obsessively listening, because we constantly want to hear things that feel inspiring and musical, not just a bed of music in the background. It takes longer to create, but in this case also gave Taylor more to latch onto, both emotionally and in terms of musical inspiration. Hearing melodies woven in the music triggered new melodies."

Not long after Dessner and Low sent each sketch to Swift, they would receive her voice memos in return, and they'd load them into the Pro Tools session of the sketch in question. Dessner and Low then continued to develop the songs, in close collaboration with Swift. "Taylor's voice memos often came with suggestions for how to edit the sketches: maybe throw in a bridge somewhere, shorten a section, change the chords or arrangement somewhere, and so on. Aaron would have similar ideas, and he then developed the arrangements, often with his brother Bryce, adding or replacing instruments. This happened fast, and became very interactive between us and Taylor, even though we were working remotely. When we added instruments, we were reacting to the way my rough mixes felt at the very beginning. Of course, it was also dictated by how Taylor wrote and sang to the tracks."

Dessner supplied sketches for nine and produced 10 of folklore's 16 songs, playing many different types of guitars, keyboards and synths as well as percussion and programmed drums. Instruments that were added later include live strings, drums, trombone, accordion, clarinet, harpsichord and more, with his brother Bryce doing many of the orchestrations. Most overdubs by other musicians were done remotely as well. Throughout, Low was keeping an overview of everything that was going on and mixing the material, so it was as presentable and inspiring as possible.

Mixing folklore

Although Dessner has called folklore an "anti-pop album", the world's number-one pop mixer Serban Ghenea was drafted in to mix seven tracks, while Low did the remainder.

"It was exciting to have Serban involved," explains Low, "because he did things I'd never do or be able to do. The way the vocal sits always at the forefront, along with the clarity he gets in his mixes, is remarkable. A great example of this is on the song 'epiphany'. There is so much beautiful space and the vocal feels effortlessly placed. It was really interesting to hear where he took things, because we were so close to the entire process in every way. Hearing a totally new perspective was eye-opening and refreshing.

"Throughout the entire process we were trying to maintain the original feel. Sometimes this was hard, because that initial rawness would get lost in large arrangements and additional layering. With revisions of folklore in particular we sometimes were losing the emotional weight from earlier more casual mixes. Because I was always mixing, there was also always the danger of over-mixing.

"We were trying to get the best of each mix version, and sometimes that meant stepping backwards, and grabbing a piano chain from an earlier mix, or going three versions back to before we added orchestration. There were definitely moments of thinking, 'Is this going to compete sonically? Is this loud enough?' We knew we loved the way the songs sounded as we were building them, so we stuck with what we knew. There were times where I tried to keep pushing a mix forward but it didn't improve the song — 'cardigan' is an example of a song where we ended up choosing a very early mix."

The Low Down

"I'm originally from Philadelphia," says Jonathan Low, "and played piano, alto saxophone and guitar when growing up. My dad is an electrical engineer and audiophile hobbyist, and I learned a lot about circuit design and how to repair things. I then started building guitar pedals and guitar amps, and recorded bands at my high school using a minidisc player and some binaural microphones. After that I did a music industry programme at Drexel University, and spent a lot of time working at the recording facilities there.

"This led to me meeting Brian McTear, a producer and owner of Miner Street Studios, which became my home base from 2009 to 2014. I learned a lot from him, from developing an interest in creating sounds in untraditional ways, to how to see a record through to completion. The studio has a two-inch 16-track Ampex MM1200 tape machine and a beautiful MCI 400 console which very quickly shaped the way I think about routing and signal flow. I'm lucky to have learned this way, because a computer environment is like the Wild West: there are no rules in terms of how to get from point A to point B. This flexibility is incredible, but sometimes there are simply too many options.

"l met Aaron [Dessned] because singer-songwriter Sharon van Etten recorded her second album, Epic [2010] at Miner Street, with Brian producing. Her third album, Tramp [2012] was produced by Aaron. They came to Philly to record drums and I ended up mixing a bunch of that record. After that I would occasionally go to work in Aaron's garage studio in Brooklyn, and this became more and more a regular collaboration. I then moved from Philly up to the Hudson Valley to help Aaron build Long Pond. We first used the studio in the spring of 2016, when beginning to record the National's album Sleep Well Beast."

Onward & Upward

folklore was finished and released in July 2020. In a normal world everyone might have gone on to do other things, but without the option of touring, they simply continued writing songs, with Low holding the fort. In September, many of the musicians who played on the album gathered at Long Pond for the shooting of a making-of documentary, folklore: the long pond studio sessions, which is streamed on Disney+.

The temporary presence of Swift at Long Pond changed the working methods somewhat, as she could work with Dessner in the room, and Low was able record her vocals. After Swift left again, sessions continued until December, when evermore was released, with Dessner producing or co-producing all tracks, apart from 'gold rush' which was co-written and co-produced by Swift and Antonoff. Low recorded many of Swift's vocals for evermore, and mixed the entire album. The lead single 'willow' became the biggest hit from the album, reaching number one in the US and number three in the UK.

"Before Taylor came to Long Pond," remembers Low, "she had always recorded her vocals for folklore remotely in Los Angeles or Nashville. When I recorded, I used a modern Telefunken U47, which is our go-to vocal mic — we record all the National stuff with that — going straight into the Siemens desk, and then into a Lisson Grove AR-1 tube compressor, and via a Burl A-D converter into Pro Tools. Taylor creates and lays down her vocal arrangements very quickly, and it sounds like a finished record in very few takes."

Devils In The Detail

In his mixes, Low wanted listeners to share his own initial response to these vocal performances. "The element that draws me in is always Taylor's vocals. The first time I received files with her properly recorded but premixed vocals I was just floored. They sounded great, even with minimal EQ and compression. They were not the way I'm used to hearing her voice in her pop songs, with the vocal soaring and sitting at the very front edge of the soundscape. In these raw performances, I heard so much more intimacy and interaction with the music. It was wonderful to hear her voice with tons of detail and nuances in place: her phrasing, her tonality, her pitch, all very deliberate. We wanted to maintain that. It's more emotional, and it sounds so much more personal to me. Then there was the music..."

The arrangements on evermore are even more 'chamber pop' than on folklore, with instruments like glockenspiel, crotales, flute, French horn, celeste and harmonium in evidence. "As listeners of the National may know, Aaron's and Bryce's arrangements can be quite dense. They love lush orchestration, all sorts of percussion, synths and other electronic sounds. The challenge was trying to get them to speak, without getting in the way of the vocals. I want a casual listener to be drawn in by the vocal, but sense that something special is happening in the music as well. At the same time, someone who really is digging in can fully immerse themselves and take in all the beauty deeper in the details of the sound and arrangement. Finding the balance between presenting all the musical elements that were happening in the arrangement and this really beautiful, upfront, real-sounding vocal was the ticket."

A particular challenge is that a lot of the detail that Aaron gravitates towards happens in the low mids, which is a very warm part of our hearing spectrum that can quickly become too muddy or too woolly. A lot of the tonal and musical information lives in the low mids, and then the vocal sits more in the midrange and high mids. There's not too much in the higher frequency range, except the top of the guitars, and some elements like a shaker and the higher buzzy parts of the synths. Maintaining clarity and separation in those often complex arrangements was a major challenge."

In & Out The Box

According to Low, the final mix stage for evermore was "very short. There was a moment in the final week or so leading up to the release where the songs were developed far enough for me to sit down and try to make something very cohesive and final, finalising vocal volume, overall volume, and the vibe. There's a point in every mix where the moves get really small. When a volume ride of 0.1dB makes a difference, you're really close to being done. Earlier on, those little adjustments don't really matter.

"I often try to mix at the console, with some outboard on the two-bus, but folklore was mixed all in the box, because we were working so fast, plus initially the plan was for the mixes to be done elsewhere. I ran a couple of mixes for evermore through the console, and `closure' was the only one that stuck. It was summed through the Siemens, with an API 2500 compressor and a Thermionic Culture Phoenix and then back into Pro Tools via the Burl A-D. I will use hardware when mixing in the box, though mainly just two units: the Eventide H3000, because I have not found any plug-ins that do the same thing, and the [Thermionic] Culture Vulture, for its very broad tone shaping and distortion properties.

"The writing and the production happened closely in conjunction with the engineering and mixing, and the arrangements were dense, making many of the sessions super hefty and actually quite messy. Sounds would constantly change roles in the arrangement and sometimes plug-ins would just stack up. So final mixing involved cleaning up the sessions and stemming large groups down."

Across The Rubber Bridge

The Pro Tools mix session of 'willow' has close to 100 tracks, though there's none of the elaborate bussing that's the hallmark of some modern sessions. At the top are six drum machine tracks in green from the Teenage Engineering OP-1, an instrument that was used extensively on the album. Below that are five live percussion tracks (blue), three bass tracks (pink), and an `AUX Drums' programming track. There's a 'rubber bridge' guitar folder and aux, OP-1 synth tracks, piano tracks, 'Dream Machine' (Josh Kaufman's guitar) and E-bow tracks, Yamaha, Sequential Prophet X, Moog and Roland Juno synth tracks, and Strings and Horns aux stem tracks.

"Most of the drum tracks were performed on the OP-1 by Aaron. These are not programmed tracks. Bryan Devendorf, drummer of the National, programmed some beats on a Roland TR-8S. I ran those though the Fender Rumble bass amp, which adds some woofiness, like an acoustic kit room mic. There's an acoustic shaker, and there's an OP-1 backbeat that's subtle in the beginning, and then gets stronger towards the end of the song. I grouped all the drum elements and the bass, and sent those out to a hardware insert with the Culture Vulture, for saturation, so it got louder and more and more harmonically rich. There is this subtle growing and crescendo of intensity of the rhythm section by the end.

"The 'rubber bridge' guitars were the main anchor in the instruments. These guitars have a wooden bridge wrapped in rubber, and sound a bit like a nylon-string guitar, or a light palm mute. They're very percussive and sound best when recorded on our Neumann U47 and a DI. On many of those DI tracks I have a [SPL] Transient Designer to lower the sustain and keep them punchy, especially in the low end. There's a folder with five takes of 'rubber bridge' guitar in this session, creating this wall of unique guitar sound.

"I treated the 'rubber bridge' guitars quite extensively. There's a FabFilter Pro-Q3 cutting some midrange frequencies and some air around 10kHz. These guitars can splash out in the high end and have a boominess that's in the same range as the low end of Taylor's vocal, so I had to keep these things under control. Then I used a SoundToys Tremolator, with a quarter-note tremolo that makes the accents in the playing a bit more apparent. I like to get the acoustic guitars a little bit out of the way for the less important beats, so I have the Massey CT5 compressor side-chained to the kick drum. I also used the UAD Precision K-Stereo to make the guitars a bit wider. The iZotope Ozone Exciter adds some high mids and high-end harmonic saturation sparkly stuff, and the SoundToys EchoBoy delay is automated, with it only coming on in the bridge, where I wanted more ambience."

Growing Pains

"Once we had figured out how to sit the 'rubber bridge' guitars in the mix, the next challenge was to work out the end of the song, after the bridge. Taylor actually goes down an octave with her voice in the last chorus, and at the same time the music continues to push and grow. That meant using a lot of automation and Clip Gain adjustment to make sure the vocal always stayed on top. There also are ambient pianos playing counter-melodies, and balancing the vocals, guitars and pianos was the main focus on this song. We spent a lot of time balancing this, particularly as the track grows towards the end.

"The vocal tracks share many of the same plug-ins and settings. On the main lead vocal track I added the UAD Pultec EQP-1A, with a little bit of a cut in the low end at 30Hz, and a boost at 8kHz, which adds some modern air. The second plug-in is the Oeksound Soothe, which is just touching the vocal, and it helps with any harsh resonance stuff in the high mids, and a little in the lower mids. Next is the UAD 1176AE, and then the FabFilter Pro-Q3, doing some notches at 200Hz, 1kHz, 4kHz and close to 10kHz. I tend to do subtractive EQ on the Q3, and use more analogue-sounding plug-ins, like the Pultec or the Maag, to boost. After that is the FabFilter Pro-DS [de-esser], taking off a couple of decibels, followed by the FabFilter Saturn 2 [saturation processor], on a warm tape setting.

"Below the vocal tracks are three aux effects tracks, for the vocals. 'Long Delay' has a stereo EchoBoy going into an Altiverb with a spring reverb, for effect throws in the choruses. 'Chamber' is the UAD Capitol Chamber, which gives the vocal a nice density and size, without it being a long reverb. The 'Plate' aux is the UAD EMT140, for the longer tail. These two reverbs work in conjunction, with the chamber for the upfront space, determining where the vocal sits in the mix, and the plate more for the depth behind that.

"At the bottom of the session is a two-bus aux, which mimics the way I do the two-bus on the desk. The plug-ins are the UAD Massive Passive EQ, UAD API 2500 compressor, and the UAD Ampex ATR102. Depending on the song, I will choose 15ips or 30ips. In this case it was set to 15ips, half-inch GP9. That has a nice, aggressive, midrange push, and the GP9 bottom end goes that little bit lower. There's also a PSP Vintage Warmer, a Sonnox Oxford Inflator, plus a FabFilter Pro-L2 [limiter]. None of these things are doing very much on their own, but in conjunction give me the interaction I expect from an analogue mix chain."

[sea-tempest]

if the slayers & hashira were dads | DS edition

headcanons including: Tanjiro/ Inosuke/ Zenitsu/ Genya/ Sanemi/ Giyuu/ Kyojuro/ Uzui/ Iguro/ Himejima

a/n: first time doing this, hope you enjoy!

Tanjiro

Lives in the mountains for the rest of his life because he loves the peace and quiet, but will bring his kids often downtown to meet with uncle Zenitsu and aunty Nezuko

Kids are kinda scared of Zenitsu cause he’s so noisy and hide behind him

Firstborn is a boy, but he will have a lot of children

Sometimes cries at a strange time and place, tells people it’s for no reason at all, but it’s actually because he loves his family so much and can’t picture his life without them

Hand-crafts toys for his children and tools for his wife all the time

Spends at least a brief amount of time with each of his children and listens to their aspirations and dreams with interest

Piggyback rides all day all night

Throwing kids in the air because they find it hilarious and giggle a lot

Tucks them up at night and gives them forehead kisses

Zenitsu

Lives in the town suburbs with Nezuko

Will only have daughters. A lot of them. Probably 4.

“KYAAAAA they are all so gorgeous I am keeping them for myself, Nezuko why are you so beautiful, look what you’ve done askjfkasfha”

Screaming and crying simultaneously every time he talks about them

Gathers all of them in his arms protectively and continues to scream

His daughters respect him, but his reactions always make them laugh

“Papa calm down, please stop crying, we’re not going to leave you”

They group hug him a lot

He buys them clothes and jewelry all the time

Every time Nezuko mentions how they will marry well because they’re indeed very beautiful, he gets triggered. The air around him starts to crackle.

Inosuke

Lives in a hut in the heart of the mountain

Has no idea how to be a parent

Something weird and small is following him around all the time, it kinda looks like him

Annoying, can’t keep up, always needs saving

Predators often think the baby is food. Predators end up sliced in pieces.

Baby ends up being a daughter. A very stubborn one.

They end up fighting each other for 10 hours a day. Fights end with blood and heavy breathing. There’s a lot of yelling.

Daughter loses fights up until one day when she wins and he’s silent for a week

She later finds him pig assaulting a tree, tears in his eyes. She doesn’t ask him why.

Tanjiro’s firstborn gets stuck in a snow-drift at some point and Inosuke’s daughter ends up saving his sorry ass.

Tanjiro’s son is enamored

“I’ll cut your throat, that will shut you up”/ “You’re so beautiful...”

Genya

All babies magically calm down when he’s around

He definitely finds it very weird, but doesn’t say anything about it

Tries to lull his baby to sleep, ends up falling asleep before it

Babies sleep all over him throughout the day, but he’s fine with it. He can remain perfectly still for hours if he has to.

Protec™

Probably great at singing lullabies

Doesn’t mind playing with pink and glittery stuff

Wakes up every day, trying to convince himself he really has a family that loves him

Openly aggressive if someone hurts his kids

Sanemi

Protec Intensifies

Will try to train all his kids for battle from the moment they can walk

But in the brief time between their birth and walking moment, he’s immensely soft

Spends all his time with baby in his arms, shows it off to people

Enjoys having walks with it in spring

“Aww, so cute! Can I touch it?”/ “No.”

Will break your limbs if you decide to touch after all

Intense staring at the baby as it sleeps next to him on the bed, for a few hours

Will play a princess/commander if asked, on condition there isn’t anyone else in the house

Giyuu

Started crying the moment the baby was born, three years later still crying

Can’t believe he has a family

Thinks he’s trapped in a good dream and is anxious that it will end some time

“I did nothing to deserve this”

“Is it okay to be this happy?”

Probably has twins, boy and a girl. Cries about it.

Poor at handling basic baby-care tasks, but his love is profound and the babies feel it because they rarely cry for long

Spends hours watching over them, makes him cry

Sometimes takes both of them in his lap and sits outside on the engawa, watching as it rains or snows

Thinking about their future makes him nervous so he holds them close and sighs, promising to be there for them no matter what

Kyojuro

The most fun dad ever

Drops everything to spend time with his kids, no matter how important his task is

Goes into wild places and teaches them how nature works and how they have to be in harmony with it

Always tells the most intriguing, cool stories at night before bed. Kids make him tell more and he never refuses. It always ends up very late before anyone falls asleep

Has unnecessary amounts of pets in his house, always shelters strays and kids love it

Gets incredibly sad seeing any of his children fight and never says anything about it, but they notice and apologize to one another and to him

A just dad, every game and every chore is done and assessed fairly

Uzui

Has at least 8 kids

Probably has favorites and it shows

Forgets birthdays, sometimes names

Mostly annoyed cause there’s less time for sex and it’s inconvenient around so many kids

Devoted tho

Will do anything for his kids

“All my kids need to learn how to be more✨flamboyant✨”

The great amounts of love he receives from everywhere makes him very, very happy

When he’s surrounded by this warmth, he’d forget how annoying kids are most of the time and he’d find any of his wives right away

“I want another one”

“Uzui, I told you yesterday Suma is already pregnant again”

“But you’re not.”

Iguro

Secretly hopes none of his kids look like him

Only first one out of two does so he’s only semi-bitter

Feels very guilty and sorry to put Mitsuri through pregnancy both times

Is extremely anxious for 9 months, falls ill with worry while she’s near labor date

Mitsuri ends up taking care of him and thinking it’s very cute

Labor goes smoothly every time because she’s strong, but he can’t help the worry

Is constantly fascinated with the very concept of having kids and that they love him unconditionally

Ready to die for them any time

A harsh and strict dad

Self-loathing intensifies after he’s being harsh and strict and he goes to Mitsuri’s and his room, where he can be privately upset about it

Himejima

Externally, calmest dad in the history of calm dads

Internally, in eternal agony over past memories of personal failure concerning kids

Spends a lot of time trying to banish fears that some events might repeat and thus punish him for his failures

Will protect his children with his life, of course

Loves hearing them laugh or just being noisy around him

Smallest daughter loves sitting in his lap and babbling to him about tiny bugs she’s seen in the forest

Sometimes she’d bring said bugs in her hand and place them on his palm so that he can feel them and tell her what he thinks

Most of his children dream of life in the city so they all end up living there except the smallest daughter

Her love for her dad and nature is too strong so she remains with him and looks after him till he’s old

Eventually marries, but she and her husband still live in his house