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justanotherwannabeclassic · 7 years ago

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Apparitions

Gifted with the ability to see ghosts, Emma Swan considers this more of a curse than a blessing. When a pair of ghosts named Milah and Liam request her help in befriending a loved one, Emma is introduced to a heartbroken Killian Jones. Easy enough, right? But somewhere along the way, Emma begins to see Killian as more than a friend, and must wrestle with realities of dating while hiding her secret while also helping his loved ones move on.

Rating: T

Author’s Note: I'm so glad to finally be posting my "ghost fic", as its been named in my Google Drive for months. Originally inspired by a conversation in the Hub, and written for the CSLB/ @captainswanbigbang, this is my foray into writing the supernatural. Many, many thanks for this story go to the Hub, which inspired me, and to my wonderful beta, @lenfaz, who is a delight in so many ways. (Especially considering I broke Rule No. 1 with Dead Liam.)

I'm so excited for you all to see the art by @bleebug and @welllpthisishappening. They're great artists and cheerleaders. This story doesn't really have any triggers, however if this might be upsetting to anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one or for those who struggle with death, in general, because ghosts are dead people and the concept of dying comes up a lot.

Warnings: This might be upsetting to anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one or for those who struggle with death, in general, because ghosts are dead people and the concept of dying comes up a lot.

Art: [Photoset by @welllpthisishappening] [drawing by @bleebug]

Read also on AO3!

Apparitions

"I see dead people."

Emma hates The Sixth Sense. She hates the jokes people make in reference to the movie. She hates how the movie portrayed the ghosts, all gory and terrifying. But most of all, what Emma hates is that she can see dead people.

-/-

Her gifts first developed when she was child and attended her first funeral. It had been that of her foster mother's father, a portly old man that Emma thought to be charming, the type of man she had thought a potential grandfather should be.

She was five and didn't understand the concept of death completely. Was it like abandonment, she would wonder, like what her parents did to her on the side of the road. Death, she was told, was forever.

So imagine her surprise when she saw the deceased wandering around his own funeral!

Emma had pointed out the old man to her foster mother, insisting that the woman's father couldn't be gone forever because she was right there! What Emma didn't realize at the time was that no one else could see the old man, resulting her in foster mother believing her to be crazy.

-/-

Crazy (adjective cra·zy \ ˈkrā-zē \) not mentally sound : marked by thought or action that lacks reason

Used in a sentence: Emma is crazy because she sees dead people. Not.

-/-

Ghosts look like the living. Well, mostly. Ghosts look like the living, only a little blurred around the edges, almost as if someone had shifted the lens of life while taking a picture.

They aren't bloody. In all honesty, they look how a person would want to on the best day. They're not malevolent. Well, mostly. Emma's encountered an angry one or two, but they're in the minority.

More often than not, they're usually sad.

-/-

Emma is at the bar when she sees a group of them. Normally, ghosts don't flock in packs. It's not how they operate. Usually, ghosts are solitary creatures, hovering around a loved one or place they aren't ready to let go, or vice-versa.

So imagine Emma's surprise when she sees two ghosts following the man who had just walked through the door. She takes a long sip of her drink as she studies them. The two of them, a man and a woman, appear concerned for the man, both looking impossibly sad and reaching out to him.

He won't reach back. The living never do. Why would they? They can't see the dead.

How sad the afterlife must be, Emma thinks.

Surreptitiously, over the course of the hour, her eyes keep flicking back to the man and his ghosts. She wonders who they are to him. Siblings? Friends? He is important to them, if they keep hanging around him like this.

She considers talking to them. The thing about seeing dead people is that she can also interact with them. She's done her fair share of communications with ghosts over the years. As a young girl and teen, she tried to avoid it, fearing that families would be afraid of adopting her if they caught her talking to air. But Emma was never adopted, the young girl as lost as these ghosts that hang around the living.

As a detective, she's learned the usefulness of these ghosts. They can point her in the correct direction of a case, and every now and then, it'll be the victim she meets. They can't testify, of course, and "a ghost told me" isn't the best evidence, but they help her build cases. It assists them in moving on, Emma's come to learn.

At any rate, her spectral assistance gives her quite the reputation as a detective. No one at the precinct except her partner, David Nolan, knows about her abilities. In that regard, it feels a little unearned, but crimes are being solved.

That's all that matters at the end of the day.

-/-

Lily is the first person Emma ever confesses her abilities to. Lily's eyes go wide, and tells Emma that she can see ghosts too. It takes awhile, but Emma eventually figures out that her friend is lying, playing along as if it is a some silly game and not Emma's reality. Emma stops speaking to her after that, embarrassed, hurt, and afraid.

The second person she tells is Neal, her first love. She believes she is going to marry him someday, and since she also believes that husbands and wives shouldn’t keep monumental secrets from one another, she shares everything. He doesn't believe her, this much Emma can tell, but he humors her. In the end, it doesn't matter, he still leaves her anyway.

She is forced to tell David out of necessity. He's a detective, and her behavior is erratic and strange when it comes to ghosts. He asks her questions, mostly about the deceased. "Are they hurting?" "Do you help them?" "Are they able to move on?" No. Yes. Sometimes. David Nolan is a good man, a caring one. Emma is proud to have him as her partner.

David tells his wife. One evening over dinner, Mary Margaret lets it slip. At first Emma is mad. It's not his secret to tell, and he really does look ashamed. Emma is angry, because this feels like just another betrayal. It's the next day that Mary Margaret hunts her down at the precinct, insisting that they talk.

"He's amazed by you," she says. "And he's worried about you. It must be an unbelievable burden to carry alone. And I know I won't ever understand, but we'd like to help you carry it, if you'd let us."

And as afraid as she is to do it, Emma lets them. It's one of the best damn decisions she has ever made.

-/-

Emma's mistake is going to the bathroom. The ghost of the woman moves into her direction, and Emma sidesteps to avoid her, making eye contact.

Fuck.

The living don't make eye contact with ghosts. They can't see them. Thankfully, the ghost woman waits until after she pees -- but before she washes her hands -- to confront Emma.

"You can see me?"

There's no use in denying it, so Emma doesn't. "Um. Yeah. It's a thing I can do. Think of it like my superpower."

She tries to sidestep the ghost woman, but the ghost moves in front of Emma. Emma considers walking right through her. Ghosts are incorporeal, after all. But she's heard enough ghosts complain about how frustrating and rude that is so she refrains.

"I need you to speak to my husband," the woman requests. "It's our anniversary, and he's...not dealing."

"I don't think your husband would react well to someone telling him his dead wife is haunting him," Emma replies. Even though she utilizes the help of ghosts for her cases, she's really not about the whole Ghost Whisperer thing. Jennifer Love Hewitt, Emma is not.

"I don't need him to know I'm here. He just needs someone to talk to. Please." The woman looks at her with pleading eyes, and Emma feels tempted to give in. She hates these types of situations.

"Who's the other guy? Your ghost friend?" Emma asks, nodding toward the bathroom door.

"It's his brother, Liam."

Emma feels a pang of sympathy for the man. She can't imagine how it must feel to lose both a brother and wife. "He's worried then too?"

"As I said, he isn't dealing well," the ghost woman responds bitterly. "Killian's hurting especially bad right now. He's new to the area, and he doesn't have many reliable friends right now."

"You've been haunting him pretty closely, then," Emma replies, finally moving around the woman. She flips on the water, waiting for it to grow warm. Ghosts always make everything feel colder.

"I prefer the term 'watching over'."

"How do you know he even wants company?" Emma asks, and god, she's considering honoring the ghost's request. She remembers how the man looked hunched over the bar, defeated and alone. It's a feeling Emma knows well.

"I was in a relationship with him for five years. I think I know him pretty well."

People change, lady, she thinks bitterly. Instead she replies, "So his name is Killian, right? Anything else I need to know?"

The other woman smiles. "He likes sailing."

-/-

The ghost woman's name in Milah. Not that she tells Emma that. Instead, she reads the name inked on Killian Jones' wrist. Unconsciously, she fingers the buttercup tattoo on her own wrist.

"Hey, sailor," she greets.

His brother's ghost looks at her questioningly, and Milah waves him off. Killian looks equally confused, raising a brow carefully, "How did you know I'm a sailor?"

"I didn't. Lucky guess," Emma replies. It's better than telling him that his dead wife told her. However, knowing she needs more than that answer, she points to the keychain beside him. "The anchor there might have helped me."

He laughs, but it's a hollow sort of thing. "Perceptive, you are."

"I better be. I'm a detective."

"Are you here to interrogate me for a crime?"

"Should I be?"

"No, lass, you shouldn't. Not that I would tell you if you ought to."

He winks at her, and Emma wants to laugh. She would under normal circumstances -- if she were just a woman and him a man meeting by chance in a bar. But this isn't a normal circumstance. She's talking to him request of his dead wife, and he is here impossibly sad and more than a little on his way to being drunk. His words are slightly slurred. Emma can tell he had likely been drinking before he even came to a bar. There's also a bit of an accent, and Milah's words about him being new to the area flicker through her mind.

"You're not from around here are you?"

"It sure sounds like you're interrogating me," he eyes her suspiciously. To Emma's surprise, he waves over the bartender, and asks for two glasses of whiskey. "If we're going to play twenty questions all night, then I'm going to need more to drink, and it's bad form to leave a lady without."

He winks again. He means it to come out as an innuendo, but his melancholy taints it. Not that Emma would give into it considering his wife and brother are watching. He's handsome, though, dark hair and bright blue eyes. He's her type, and for a brief moment, Emma finds herself mentally congratulating Milah for locking him down.

"You never answered my question, you know," she says, trying to snap herself out of her inappropriate line of thought.

"Shouldn't my accent be evidence enough, detective?" he responds, and then after a beat, he tells her, "I spent most of my life in London. Just moved here a few months ago."

"Why?"

"I needed a change of pace, and as luck would have it, a job opportunity popped up that allowed it," he replies, clearly evading her question.

Emma doesn't wonder if his desired change of pace has anything to do with the loss of his wife and brother. She knows it does, and her heart calls out to him. After Neal left, she bounced from place to place trying to outrun the memories.

It didn't work.

"May I ask you a question, love?"

"I'm not your love, but sure."

"Why are you here speaking to me?" he asks. Emma tries to hide her panic as he continues, "Now, I know it's not just my devilishly handsome good looks. So it must be something else. What is it?"

Thankfully, Emma is good at thinking on her feet. "Because you were drinking alone. I was drinking alone. And I thought that if you wanted, we could drink alone together."

Her answer is close enough to the truth that she doesn't feel guilty saying it. Emma always feels weird speaking to living when the reason she is there is because of their dead loved one.

"I'm afraid I'm not pleasant company tonight," he says.

Emma notes how he isn't ushering her away. She can tell part of him wants to, but the bigger, lonelier part wants her here. The desire for a human connection always wins out in the end -- for both the living and the dead.

"Trust me, you won't be the worst drinking buddy I've ever had."

"I have a hard time believing that."

"Oh, well you haven't met Leroy then," she replies before launching into a long tale involving Leroy and bar-fight that she hadn't been involved in that resulted in three stitches.

-/-

They split a cab when they leave the bar. Milah sits between them, and the brother sits in the front. All in all, it still isn't the most awkward taxi ride she's ever taken, but it ranks in the top ten.

"You aren't going to sleep with him are you?" Liam asks, peering over the back of the seat. "It's bad form to fuck a man on his wedding anniversary."

"Liam, that's rude," Milah scolds. Regardless, Emma can tell if the other woman were alive, she would be blushing.

"You mean to tell me if you watched her join Killian at his flat, you would be fine?" Liam asks in response. Emma decides she doesn't like Killian's brother, which is somewhat unfair, because he's dead. "I've seen how you get whenever he brings home other girls."

"I'm dead. He's allowed to bring home whomever he wants."

"Yeah, but she knows you're around, not like the other women."

Emma wants to shout that she's not going to sleep with Killian, and that this is a conversation that she very much does not want to be privy to. It embarrassing for all parties, and she's sure Killian wouldn't want to know about the comments his brother is making.

And that's the thing: Killian has no idea that his brother and wife are having these conversations because he can't see or hear them. He's not the one stuck with shitty "I see dead people" powers. For all the shitty things life seems to have dealt him, he at the very least has that gift.

She must make a noise in annoyance, because Killian suddenly asks, his voice still slurred, "You s'alright, love?"

"Um, yeah, just thinking about things I don't want to," she replies.

"Bad things?"

"Something like that."

"I as well."

Emma can see Milah's heart break at Killian's words. Even Liam looks bothered. The media always makes ghosts about to vengeful, but they're really not. They feel. They love. Their no-longer-beating hearts shatter.

Eventually, the cab gets to Killian’s place -- a brownstone on a nice street. He turns to her before exiting the vehicle, reaching out his hand -- unknowing that his arm moves right through Milah -- to clasp Emma’s.

“Thank you,” he says, squeezing her hand just once. Emma isn’t sure how to answer, so she doesn’t. Instead she gives a shaky nod, and watches as the steps out of the cab and fumbles up the stairs, taking his ghostly loved ones with him.

She doubts she will ever see them again.

-/-

She does.

-/-

Emma is at the station going over case files the second time she sees Killian Jones. He’s standing awkwardly in the lobby, a box of doughnuts in his hand, looking half-lost but hopeful.

“Swan, at last,” he says as he sees her, and there’s a twinkle in his eyes that wasn’t present when she’d first met him two night prior.

She’s surprised to see him. She is less surprised to see that Milah and Liam are still haunting -- no, watching over -- him. Emma makes brief eye contact with Milah, who gives a hopeful shrug. They both ignore Liam, who is prodding at a few files at an empty desk.

“What are you doing here?” Emma asks her guest. Though she said she was a detective, she’d never told him the precinct. To find her, he’d have needed to search her name. The thought makes her uneasy, and not just because she feels a hopeful swoop in her gut. His ghost wife is haunting him, Emma reminds herself.

Killian thrusts out the box of doughnuts toward her. “I wanted to thank you for keeping me company the other night. I wasn’t in the best of places, and you kept me from going someplace worse.”

“Really, it’s no problem,” Emma tells him as she takes the box. She takes a peek at the contents inside. “Though if it gets me bearclaws, I’ll do it more often.”

Her reply is more flirtatious than she intended. Both Killian and Milah’s eyes widen in surprise. “Ah, well, I’m hoping I won’t need to be rescued anytime soon.”

“Yeah, you don’t strike me as a damsel in distress.”

“I do prefer the term ‘dashing rapscallion’ over ‘damsel’,” he replies with a wink, swaying toward her. Catching himself, he takes a step back. “Anyway, I hope you enjoy the doughnuts.”

“I’m sure I will.” She can feel her cheeks flush. “I hope you don’t mind me sharing them with the office. We’re all doughnut fiends.”

“Sharing is caring. Isn’t that how the saying goes?” Emma is momentarily distracted by his wide grin. He ducks his head, and scratches behind his ear. “Well, I have to get back to work. Thank you, Emma Swan.”

“I should be thanking you,” Emma replies, raising the box. “Bye, Killian.”

It’s only after she returns to her desk, doughnuts in tow, that she realizes two things. First, that she had forgotten Milah had been present. Second, that Killian had stuffed his business card into the doughnut box, his cell phone number hastily scrawled onto the box.

-/-

“So David tells me you met a guy.”

Emma nearly spits out her bloody mary. Leave it to Mary Margaret to cut to the chase over brunch. “David is full of shit.”

“So an attractive man didn’t bring you doughnuts the other morning at work?” Mary Margaret raises a well-manicured eyebrow, a look resembling victory settling on her face.

“Was David the one who called him attractive?”

“David has eyes,” Mary Margaret answers with a shrug. “How’d you meet him?”

“David? Well, I was assigned to work with him when I was hired…” Emma trails off, trying to bite back a laugh as her friend glares. “Look, this thing with Killian--”

“Oooh, Killian.”

“--isn’t what you think. I was introduced to him the other night at the bar.”

“Just because you met at the bar doesn’t mean it can’t be something special. On Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith and McDreamy met at a bar, and they had eleven seasons of passionate love and romance.”

“That was promptly ended by a semi. Or contractual disputes. Either way, no thanks.” Emma shakes her head. Leave it to Mary Margaret to relate everything back to fairy tales or epic television romances. “Besides, it’s really, really not what you’re thinking. His late wife asked me to talk to him. Emphasis on late.”

Emma watches Mary Margaret’s eyes grow wide. Though she’s in on the whole “seeing ghosts” thing, the knowledge that it’s something that actually happens still surprises her. Her friend takes a long drink from her mimosa. “That’s heavy.”

“Yep.”

“So why did she ask you to do it?”

“She’s worried, thinks he’s lonely and sad, and didn’t want him to be alone,” Emma replies, remembering the melancholy in Milah’s voice when she’d practically begged Emma to talk to Killian. She must love him a lot, Emma thinks. “He moved here from England not long ago, so he has no friends.”

Mary Margaret is quiet for awhile as she absorbs this information. Emma half expects her to launch into another speech about love, or make some Patrick Swayze reference, but instead she says something worse. “You should invite him to the party next weekend.”

“What?”

“His wife wants him to meet people, right? Make friends? Well, David and I are having a party, so you should invite him,” Mary Margaret explains thoughtfully. “Maybe he’ll make friends, and maybe it will help his wife find some peace. I couldn’t imagine how I’d feel if I were in her place.”

Sometimes Emma takes for granted that Mary Margaret is one of the kindest people on the planet. Of course she would be the one to consider the ways making new friends might not just help Killian, but also Milah.

-/-

Hey. So this is Emma from the bar. Thanks again for the doughnuts. They were a hit. So much so that my partner wanted me to invite you to this party he and his wife are having next weekend. Super casual. I’ll be there. Let me know if you want details.

Text message sent. God, Emma feels like a teenager.

-/-

Emma taps her fingers against her beer bottle in a staccato rhythm. She’s nervous, something Mary Margaret will not stop noting, either verbally or with her smug smiles. Emma takes another pull of her beer, and attempts to distract herself by listening to Ruby her “worst date ever”, a story Emma has heard too many times.

Killian is coming to the party tonight. Or rather, he says he’s coming to the party tonight. There’s a chance he might feel too tired or have other more exciting plans come up. So it very much is within the realm of possibility that he might not even show. Which is fine. Probably for the best, as it means that his ghostly loved ones won’t be here. Ghosts at parties suck. They keep distracting her, making everyone think she’s drunker than she really is because she keeps staring at an empty space.

(It’s not an empty space. It’s a ghost.) It also makes things awkward because she normally has no idea who the ghost is there for. The host? A random guest? Is it a brother? A girlfriend? A college roommate? Considering that it’s a party, she rarely has the time or space to find out. And because there’s no “Missed Connections” for ghosts, they remain forever that: missed.

So, really, it might actually be best if Killian doesn’t show, ghosts in tow.

-/-

He shows.

-/-

She doesn’t get into too in-depth of a conversation with him. She doesn’t have time before David swoops in thanking him for the donuts, and Robin excitedly shouts about meeting another Brit. Before Emma knows it, Killian’s in a deep conversation regarding soccer -- football, he calls it -- and she’s nursing her beer and listening to Aurora discuss her new job at the hospital. It’s all well and good anyway, Emma supposes, because the entire point of her speaking to Killian in the first place was so he wouldn’t be alone. And at this party, he’s certainly not alone, not when David is clapping him on the back and he’s laughing uproariously at some joke Anton made. She is struck by how charismatic he is. She wouldn’t have guessed so based on the first night she met him, but then again, that had been a very bad night. She realizes that she is seeing baseline Killian, something closer to the man Liam knew and the one Milah fell in love with.

It’s not a bad look. -/-

“Are they here?” Mary Margaret asked in a hushed whisper, or rather, what she perceives to be a hushed whisper. The smaller brunette is already three sheets to the wind, and Emma can’t help but laugh when she responds. “Who?”

“Killian’s, you know, friends.” She makes weird wobbly motions with her hands that Emma interprets as being a gesture for ghosts. “Are they here?” Emma looks around, and much to her surprise, they aren’t. She doesn’t know what shocks her more: that they aren’t or that she didn’t notice until now.

-/-

As with the night they met, Emma and Killian split a ride home. Unlike the night they met, they’re both only a little bit buzzed and there’s no ghosts around to bug her about sleeping with him. Emma prefers it this way.

“Your friends are nice,” he tells her. He taps his fingers against his thigh, and Emma wonders if it’s a normal tic or a nervous one.

“They’re honestly assholes, but they’re my assholes,” she replies.

“Ah, so true friends then.”

“Something like that.” She wonders about his friends back home in England, but feels like it’s not her place to ask. “Thanks for coming out tonight, by the way. I know it’s weird to show up places where you don’t know anyone.”

“It was either that or sitting alone in my house, or worse, drinking myself into another stupor at the bar alone,” Killian answers with a shrug. Realizing that his response could be taken the wrong way, “Really, I enjoyed myself and this wasn’t the last resort. I truly appreciate the invite.”

“Yeah, well, thank David. He was super into the doughnut delivery,” Emma says, causing Killian to chuckle. “And I was too. They were pretty excellent.”

“So you’re saying next time I want a night out, I should ply your precinct with fried dough.”

“There are worse ways to try to score a date.” The words come out before Emma can really think them through. They both freeze.

Killian breaks the tension by saying, “Aye. I would know. Pretty sure I tried every trick in the book at one point.”

“Really now?”

“I was quite the cad in my youth,” he supplies. He runs his hand behind his ear and sighs. “Definitely not some of my finest moments, I assure you.”

“If it makes you feel better, I’m pretty sure we all did pretty stupid things when we were young,” Emma assures him. She tries not to think too hard about her misadventures with Neal or Lily.

“Regardless, I like to think I’ve improved as a person now.”

“Oh, so you’re better at scoring dates now?” Emma’s not really sure why she’s goading him right now, other than the fact that she’s having fun and he’s incredibly easy to talk to. She shouldn’t be flirting with him, especially since she knows for certain he’s being haunted, but she can’t stop the words from slipping out.

“A gentleman never scores and tells,” he answers with a wink. “See? I’ve matured.”

“I think saying you’ve matured completely negates any or all maturity.”

“You wound me, Swan.”

“Swan, now?” she asks. She’s used to people calling her by her last name, but that’s always been in a workplace setting. Not in a cab with guy.

“It’s your name, isn’t it?” he asks. His expression turning serious, he says, “If it bothers you, I can--”

“No, no, it doesn’t,” she assures him. “Really, it’s fine.” “Alright.”

“Alright,” she repeats. On the radio, a sappy love song plays. Emma glances out the window, watching the city lights pass by. They don’t speak much more after that. When the taxi pulls up to the townhome, Killian turns to her before exiting the car.

“I truly did enjoy myself tonight, love,” he says, and God, his voice is so earnest. Then he reaches for her hand, and brings her knuckles to his lips. It’s something out of a romance novel, something that Emma is glad his ghost compatriots aren’t here to see, and something that makes her heart pound in her chest. “Goodnight, Emma.”

And then he’s gone, racing up his stoop. As the cab pulls away, Emma can see the flick of an apparition appearing beside him.

-/-

Fun fact about ghosts: They don’t have to linger around the person they’re haunting. They can appear anywhere they desire.

-/-

Emma’s on her morning run when she sees Milah. She jumps at the other woman’s sudden appearance, and she’s grateful there’s no one around her to pass judgement at what appears to be her startling over nothing. Emma stops, chest heaving as she raises an eyebrow at Milah.

“You don’t have to stop on my account. A perk of being dead is that I can keep up and not feel anything,” Milah tells her. Emma eyes her warily, but goes back into a jog. As promised, Milah sticks beside her. “You know, I hated running while I was living, but now it’s not so bad.”

“What I wouldn’t give to be feeling like you right now,” Emma grumbles. She then winces when she realizes that she more or less said she envied the dead. Milah, however, isn’t phased by the statement. “Honestly, if our roles were reversed, I’d be envious too.” She laughs. “When I was living, I used to hate all those women who could run 5ks like it was nothing. Never understood it. Now that I’m dead, I could do a marathon and not even break a sweat. Irony’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

“If you say so.” Here’s the thing about the dead: they like making jokes about being dead. Despite having her powers for literal decades, Emma has yet to figure out the proper way to respond. As such, she goes for the tried and true method of ‘smile and nod.’ “So why are you here, anyway?”

“I wanted to see how the party went. It’s not like Killian monologues to himself.”

“You could have gone. It’s not like anyone other than me would have noticed you.” Emma averts her eyes as another runner passes her, not willing to look like a crazy woman talking to herself.

“I don’t watch over him every second. He deserves his privacy,” Milah explains, making Emma think back to Liam’s comment about the women Killian would bring home. Surely she or Liam wouldn’t watch -- no, not thinking about that. “So, how did it go? Did he enjoy himself? He seemed less broody than normal.”

Emma can still feel the brand of his kiss on her skin. It had been such a simple thing, incredibly sweet, but something told her that Milah wouldn’t want to know that. And even if she did, Emma doesn’t feel the need the share. Not wanting to examine why, she reports on the more rowdy aspects. “Well, he certainly got along with many of my guy friends. I’m pretty sure my partner is already developing a bit of a bro-crush.”

Milah smiles widely, seemingly pleased by the revelation. “That’s great.”

“Yeah, it is,” Emma replies, but she’s only speaking to air. Milah has disappeared, leaving Emma alone in her run. Another thing about ghosts: manners, they go completely out the window. -/- Two weeks pass. She doesn’t see Killian, but they text every now and then. They talk about the food they’re eating or the television shows they’re watching. They make jokes. All and all, it’s fun.

What they don’t talk about is him kissing her hand. Emma can’t tell if that annoys her or not.

-/- A child is murdered by her father. Wendy Darling, age 9. When Emma and David arrive at the scene, there’s no ghost, a small mercy. Every murder investigation is hard, but children make it worse, and Emma doesn’t think she can bare to see an apparition of a small child.

(On the best days, her powers aren’t great, but at their worst, they feel like a curse.)

Emma and David do all of their necessary work, and at the end of a too late night, David goes home to Mary Margaret, and Emma goes to the bar alone.

(She’s always alone. This is nothing new.)

-/-

She’s a rookie the first time she sees the ghost of a child. It’s a little boy, Henry. He’d been poisoned by his step-mother. Emma is the one to explain what happened to him. No one else can.

He cries. How many people expect ghosts to cry?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, though. Ghosts, after all, were once human. Why wouldn’t they cry?

Another question: how often do ghosts make Emma cry?

-/-

An hour in, she gets a text from Killian, “Jefferson’s is on Hatter Street, aye?”

She doesn’t respond, both a little too drunk and unsure as to why he knows where she is. But no sooner can she wrap her mind around the idea does he come walking through the bar doors.

“David told me you’d be here,” he says to her when he reaches her at the bar, answering her silent question. “Thought I’d return the favor.” “Favor?”

“Last time I had a rough night, you were there for me.” “I don’t need your charity.”

“But perhaps you need a friend.” They’re silent while he flags down the bartender and orders a beer. Emma considers trying to wave him off. She’s a bit too raw right now, but something compels her to stay, or rather, to not convince him to go. So she doesn’t. Instead, she tells him about Wendy Darling, about the kids are hardest part of her job. He listens and comments when necessary, but nothing more. She appreciates him for that. As with most of their meetings, they split a cab ride home. “We have to stop meeting like this,” Killian jokes, but she can tell he doesn’t mean it.

“But what fun would that be?” Emma replies, and she’s surprised she has it in her to flirt and to joke right now. Being around Killian is easy. It’s as terrifying as it is exciting.

He instructs that cabbie to take her home first. She argues that she’s fine, and doesn’t need someone to escort her home.

“Allow me to be a gentleman, love?” And she does, because he sounds so earnest, because he was there, even if he didn’t need to be. She definitely understands why this man is being haunted. -/- She’s being haunted. Sort of. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the spectre of Liam Jones hovering behind doors and around desks. Emma ignores him for awhile. She has work to do. By luck, Wendy Darling’s father had been picked up at a traffic stop, the idiot. She’s already spent much of the morning interrogating him, even as Liam Jones attempts to distract her in the corner. It’s late in the afternoon when she finally feels like acknowledging Liam Jones. She navigates her way around the office and to one of the few single occupancy bathrooms found in the precinct.

“You can come out now.”

“Technically, it’s not coming out if I’ve not hidden myself,” Liam Jones says, appearing suddenly by the locked bathroom door. He surveys the small room, and raises a brow. It reminds her of Killian, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. They are brothers, after all. “A bathroom? Really?”

“It’s not like I can talk to you at my desk,” she tells him. She crosses her arms over her chest. “What do you want?”

“Are you normally this prickly to others?”

“When they interrupt me at work? Yes,” she answers coolly. She does her best to put on the air of authority she uses in the interrogation room. Considering the day, it’s easy. “So what do you want?”

“To the point then? Okay then,” Liam begins. His expression turns serious. “I’m fairly certain my little brother fancies you.” Emma is unable to hold back a slightly hysterical laugh at Liam’s comments. It’s insane and stupid, and honestly something Mary Margaret’s students might pull, not a grown adult man. But then there’s the tiny swoop in her stomach that she does her best to ignore, because Emma is an adult even if Killian’s dead older brother apparently isn’t.

“You’ve been haunting me all day to tell me that?” Emma asks, sobering herself and falling back into interrogation mode. “What are you, fourteen?”

“Perpetually twenty-nine, I’m afraid,” Liam answers in deadpan, causing Emma to wince. “It’s quite frustrating, you know, for your little brother to now be older than you.” “I’m sure it is.”

“At any rate, I’m here to tell you that my no longer younger brother fancies you,” Liam says, turning back to the matter at hand, “and when it comes for him to attempt to court you, I’d request that you turn him down.”

She blinks, not quite believing what she’s hearing. “So let me get this straight: you’re here to tell me that your brother has a crush on me, and that when he asks me out, to turn him down. You’re not really helping the case that you aren’t a child, buddy.”

Liam rolls his eyes, and for a brief second, Emma can see the distinct resemblance to Killian. “Be that as it may, Detective Swan, I’m looking out for my brother.”

“So what? You don’t think I’m good enough for him?” She shouldn’t be feeling a pang of insecurity her inquiry, but she does. She schools her features as not to let Liam realize it.

“I think if you were to date, your entire relationship would be built on a lie. Or were you planning on telling my dear brother about your abilities any time soon?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“But it’s Killian’s. I won’t have him blindsided or lied to,” Liam argues, his voice raising. It’s stupid. It’s completely stupid and insane, and Emma wants to yell back at him. But she can’t. Not without coming out sounding like a freak. “He already has an idea about you that’s nothing like the reality.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you aren’t some savior that reached out to him out the goodness of your own heart, and that you needed to be coerced into by his late wife. That you know more about him than he could ever know about you. You’ve put him at a distinct disadvantage, you know.”

“I think whatever happens between your brother and I is up for us to decide,” Emma furiously whispers. “And, frankly, I’m not going to take the advice of a ghost.”

Liam glares at her, but says nothing more. A moment passes, and then he disappears, leaving Emma alone with the weight of his words.

-/-

Emma and David grab dinner at a nearby diner. During the few lulls they had during the day, he’d been skittish around her, likely worried that she’s mad he’d sent Killian to check in on her the night previous. She doesn’t blame him. Under most circumstances, she would be. But, well, things are different with Killian. She’s drawn to him, and not just because she’s been recruited by his ghostly wife. She likes him. “Like likes him” as Mary Margaret’s students might say, and if Liam is to be believed, he likes her too.

But Liam’s other words weigh heavily on her mind, as well. Poking at her ketchup with a French fry, she debates discussing this with David. She loathes talking about her feelings, but she knows she needs a sounding board for this.

“Can I ask you something?”

David eyes her warily. “Listen, if this is about me sending Killian your way, I recognize it was out of line, but—“

Emma raises her hand to wave him off. “No, it’s not about that. Though I’m also curious why you sent him, now that you bring it up.”

“You needed a friend.”

“I have friends!”

“Okay, so I took a page out his dead wife’s book and thought another friend would be nice,” David answers sheepishly, eyes darting around when he says “dead”. “Besides, he’s been asking about you.”

Emma’s eyes narrow, even as her heart begins to pound in her chest. “Asking about me?”

David shrugs. “I invited him to Tuesday Night Trivia after he seemed to hit it off with everyone at the party.” At her expression, he asks, “Wasn’t the point of inviting him so he could make friends?”

“I’m not bothered. Just surprised.” She doesn’t want to sound like she accusing him of hanging out with Killian behind her back, or talking about her to him. “How is he at trivia?”

“Pretty clutch, actually.” He stops to take a bite out his burger. After chewing thoughtfully, he says, “So if you weren’t asking about why I sent Killian after you, then what did you want to ask me?”

Emma debates chickening out. David somewhat sidetracking her original question had her rethinking things. Suddenly wishing her Diet Coke was something more like whiskey, she takes a sip to buy time and find her courage.

“When you and Mary Margaret first got together, did you guys keep any major secrets from one another?”

David laughs. “You know how Mary Margaret is with secrets. I don’t think it would have been possible for her even if she tried.” He sobers at her pointed glare. He pauses for a moment, and Emma see a flicker of understanding cross his face. “Emma, there’s a difference between hiding things and not revealing everything about yourself upfront.”

“I think you’re stretching things a bit,” she tells him. She swirls another French fry in the ketchup. Maybe this would be a conversation better saved for Mary Margaret, but talking to David means she’s less likely to hear a hope speech. “It’s just…I don’t know…relationships are supposed to be built on a foundation of trust right? How do you cope if everything is a lie?”

“What do you mean?”

“So let’s say Killian and I get together,” Emma says, allowing herself to visualize an idea of their relationship for a brief moment. “What if he asks why I approached him at the bar or why I get weird about certain things? I can’t just say,” she lowers her voice to a whisper, “that I see ghosts and his dead wife asked me to hang out with him.”

“No, you can’t,” David agrees. “At least not at first anyway. It’s perfectly understandable why you wouldn’t want to share your secret, but don’t let that serve as an excuse. You never know, people might surprise you.”

-/-

Here’s the thing: Emma Swan doesn’t date. Dating is difficult enough even if you’re someone without a Big Secret. Because Emma has a Big Secret, dating is practically impossible. Her heart is broken by Neal, and from that moment on, she swears to not reveal her Big Secret unless the guy really is The One. Not that she exactly believes in The One, but that’s what she tells Mary Margaret who is a very big believer in True Love and soulmates. Of course, it takes dating to figure out if a guy is anywhere close to being The One, and here’s another thing: Emma Swan doesn’t really date. She has one night stands and short flings, because Big Secrets don’t really matter, for the most part. Those sort of affairs don’t lead to heartbreak, not really, and she doesn’t have to worry about revealing her secret and then watching it all come tumbling down. She tries, once, with a cute guy that David sets her up with. His name is Graham and he works in a different precinct. He’s charming and sweet, and Emma actually believes she might be able to tell him her Big Secret. And she does, but it’s only when he’s a ghost and she’s walking him through the events that had led to his death. So, yeah, dating and Emma Swan don’t go together, with or without the Big Secret. But here’s one last thing: Emma Swan does sort of want to date Killian Jones. -/-

None of it matters. It’s all very likely that Liam is project in his own weird ghost way, and Killian won’t ask her out.

-/-

He asks her out.

-/-

It’s a week before Emma sees Killian again, but this time she expects him when he arrives at the station, a box of donuts in hand. He had texted her the night before asking about her favorite place for bearclaws. Emma had considered not responding, her longing for baked goods at war with her anxieties over Liam and lying, but in the end she felt compelled to advise him to visit her favorite bakery, a small place named Granny’s. And now he’s here. With his brother. Not that he knows that part

“What’s the occasion?” she ask him as he presents the box to her. Emma tries not to both salivate at the smell of freshly baked doughnuts or focus too much attention on the spectre of Liam, but she’s pretty sure she fails. Killian doesn’t seem to notice, however, appraising her cautiously.

Killian scratches behind his ear. “Do you remember our cab ride home after David and Mary Margaret’s party?”

“Yes,” she says, nodding. Her eyes flick over to Liam, but she able to pass it off as a beat officer also passes by, walking directly through him. “What about it?”

“I believe we agreed that next time I wanted a night out, I should bring doughnuts.”

“Unfortunately, none of my friends have any parties scheduled anytime soon,” Emma tells him. She’s unable to suppress the slight teasing tone, especially once she notices the way the tips of his ears turn red.

“No matter, because I’m interested in a night out with you.”

“You sound like you’re asking me out on a date.”

“I am.”

She takes a deep intake of breath at the statement, blinking once, twice, three times. She’d known this had been coming. She’d been warned by Liam, after all, and he now stands behind his brother glaring at her.

He wants her to say no. It would be easy to. A dozen excuses spring to mind.

“I don’t date guys who ask me out at work.”

“I’m not looking for a relationship right now.”

“I’m busy.”

“Your ghost brother asked me to.”

Emma chances one last glance at Liam before once again making eye contact with Killian. He’s staring at her so earnestly, so hopefully. And despite all of the reasons, despite her Big Secret, despite the clear lack of familiar approval, Emma realizes one thing: she doesn’t actually want to tell him no.

So she doesn’t.

“Okay, then. Does Friday night work for you?”

-/-

“So you’re allowing people to surprise you?” David asks when Emma comes back to her desk, box of doughnuts in hand.

“Shut up.”

-/-

Emma refrains from looking up anything about Killian in the days leading up to their date. Because she’s both a cop and woman with access to Google, she has the ability to do a deep background check on him. Just one click. It would be incredibly easy.

Whether out of self-preservation or curiosity, she’s tempted to do so. But she doesn’t. She can’t, not with Liam’s words hanging heavy over her head. He’s right that she knows more about Killian than she does him. There’s no need for her to add to that, even if she is insanely curious about the man and the company he unknowingly keeps.

She’ll just have to find it all out naturally, and not hear it from his dead brother and wife.

-/-

Emma is preparing for her date when she feel the presence of someone appearing behind her. Turning around, she sees Milah reclining on her bed, appraising her. “Nice lingerie. He likes red,” Milah comments, noting Emma’s lacy underthings.Emma blushes under the other woman’s gaze, feeling both vulnerable and embarrassed.

“I’m not planning on sleeping with him tonight,” Emma blurts out, guilt bubbling to the surface as she shrinks away from Milah’s gaze. Grabbing the robe that had earlier been discarded to the floor, she covers before she says, “I like wearing fancy lingerie because it gives me the confidence boost.” “Calm down, you don’t need to explain anything to me. You’re allowed to wear whatever you want. You’re a beautiful woman going on a date with a handsome man. I’d wear sexy lingerie too,” Milah tells her. Emma can’t detect any bitterness in her voice, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Oblivious to Emma’s discomfort, Milah continues, “You can sleep with him tonight, by the way. There’s nothing wrong with it. He’s handsome and unattached -- and he’s quite good at it, just so you know.”

“You don’t need to be telling me this,” Emma says, even though all she really wants to say is This is really weird and I’m incredibly uncomfortable. But then, Emma thinks, maybe Milah might be just as uncomfortable, as well. It is her husband -- former husband -- that Emma’s about to go out with. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“This can’t be easy for you.”

“It’s not.” Milah’s expression turns sad. If Mary Margaret were here, and Milah were corporeal, Mary Margaret would give her a hug. Emma’s not Mary Margaret, so she stands still and waits for Milah to say something.

“I appreciate the concern. Truly,” Milah says after a moment. “But I’m dead, and have been for years. And as much as it hurts to see him excited to take out another woman -- and yes, Emma, he’s excited -- it hurts more to see him miserable.”

“Oh.”

“Killian is a wonderful man. I wouldn’t have married him if he wasn’t. And you seem like a lovely woman. Certainly caring, if you were willing to provide help when I asked it of you.” Milah fixes her stare on Emma, who tries not to shirk away from the intensity of it all. “If I can help him, I will. Even if it’s this.”

“I feel like you’re telling me to not screw this up.”

Milah laughs, a brittle thing, but a laugh nonetheless. “Maybe I am. What are you going to do about it?”

-/-

He picks her up at 7:00 p.m., and Emma is surprised when he leads her to a black GTO.

“I know you said we had to stop meeting in taxis, but you didn’t have to get a car for me,” she teases as she slides in the passenger seat. She takes note of the spotless nature of his car.

Despite her obvious joking, she watches as his cheeks color, “I’ve had this for awhile. We’ve just tended to meet when drinking was involved.”

“As an officer of the law, I appreciate your dedication to staying off the road while inebriated.” A dark look crosses his face at her comment, but the words don’t match his expression when he says, “So, any music preferences?” He dangles an AUX cord in front of her. “And if the radio isn’t sufficient, feel free to play DJ.”

She takes the cord. “I hope you enjoy some ‘80s rock then.”

He expression cracks into a grin. “Rock on, Swan.”

-/-

He takes her to restaurant by the pier. It’s there he tells her that he’s always happiest by the water, and how he’s thinking of buying a boat.

“I could take you sailing, you know,” he tells her over appetizers.

“That would require a second date.”

He takes a sip of his water. "I know."

She raises a brow in response. "You're quite confident in yourself."

He shrugs. "Are you having a bad time tonight?"

Emma shakes her head, a small smile playing on her lips.

"Then trust me when I say a second date will be more fun."

-/-

The rest of the date goes like this: He tells her about growing up in England, and how he's still growing accustomed to the culture difference between there and the States.

"Crisps. Chips. Fries. And you drive on the incorrect side of the street!"

"You're making me real confident in getting back in the car with you, buddy."

She tells him about the first time she went to trivia with David, and how because of her wildly offbeat answers, she banned from ever participating with the team. ("I can still drink, though.")

They talk. They laugh. And Emma has an excellent time, so much so that she's disappointed when he pulls in front of her building. Ever the gentleman -- "I've told you before that I'm a gentleman, love" -- he walks her to her door.

"So?" he asks, hands in his pockets as they stand around awkwardly, trying to buy more time together.

"So what?"

"Did I prove myself worthy of a second date?"

Emma answers with a kiss.

-/-

That night when she lays in bed, she realizes that she didn't think of ghosts the entire date.

-/-

They go on more dates.

On the second date, they visit an art gallery and make fun of the babies in Renaissance paintings.

On their third date, he tells her about Milah. Emma schools her expression into something resembling surprise when he tells her, but it morphs into something genuine when he shares with her the details of how she died.

There had been a car accident. A drunk driver. She'd died upon impact.

"I'm so sorry," she says..

She ignores the knot of guilt in her gut, and the ghost sitting in the corner of her room.

-/-

She’s eating a bagel in her apartment when Liam appears.

“You’re still seeing him.”

She doesn’t bother looking at him, choosing to continue to read her paper and enjoy her breakfast in peace. However, Liam is persistent and phases right next to her, his head poking through the feature. “It’s rude to ignore someone speaking to you.”

“Seriously?” Emma asks. She pushes herself out of the barstool and walks across the room. “It’s super fucking rude to do that.”

“I’ll be rude if it gets you to listen to me,” Liam says. He crosses his arms, “Which clearly you haven’t been doing, since you continue to be courting my brother.”

“It may come as a surprise to you, but believe it or not, your opinion doesn’t even factor into who either I or Killian date.” Emma places her hands on her hips, asserting her position. “What I don’t get is why you even have so strong of an opinion on this? Jesus, even Milah seems to be encouraging it.”

Liam rolls his eyes. “Yes, because she knows what’s best for Killian.”

“She was his wife.”

Liam laughs, but it’s a bitter thing. “I’m not denying she doesn’t love him, but you can care about someone and not be good for them.”

There’s something in the way he talks about Milah that sets something off, as if a lightbulb had suddenly come to life at his statement. “That’s why you’re still here, isn’t it? You didn’t think she was good enough for him, so you stuck around. I’d been trying to figure it out, because it’s fairly obvious you and Milah didn’t die at the same time. But that’s it. That’s why you didn’t move on when he found someone.”

“Perceptive.”

“I’ve been around the block a few times with people like you,” Emma tells him, more than a little smugly. She can tells she’s knocked him down a peg, and with how frustrating he’s been acting, it feels something like a victory.

“You can say the dead. I’m not that sensitive.”

“How am I supposed to know? All you do is complain about me dating your brother, and he hasn’t even mentioned you yet.” It’s only after the words leave her mouth that Emma realizes she might have gone too far. Liam looks as if he’s been slapped.

“He hasn’t mentioned me?”

“I mean, we’ve only gone on a few dates. There’s not a lot of time to--”

He’s gone before Emma can finish.

-/-

“So I think I fucked up,” Emma tells Mary Margaret on the phone that evening, long after her conversation with Liam and after a particularly grueling day the precinct.

“How so, honey? I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.” It’s at times like this that Emma feels like Mary Margaret is more of a mother than a friend, but she’ll take it now. “I’m fairly certain I convinced Liam that Killian doesn’t think to highly about him.”

“Liam, as in the dead brother who you not to go out with Killian?”

“More like demanded, but the same guy, yeah.” Emma falls back onto her sofa. She feels a bit like a cliche, with her being a patient, and Mary Margaret a faraway therapist. “I told him that Killian hadn’t brought him up, which he hasn’t so far, and he completely disappeared on me. He seemed pretty hurt.”

“Well, no one really wants to know how they’re viewed after they die.”

“I guess, but I hardly think that’s it. I mean, Killian and I have barely had the chance to talk about the heavy stuff. He just now told me about Milah and how she died,” Emma says. “I’m sure he’ll tell me about Liam any day now, but a person can only handle talking about so much heavy shit. I mean, I’ve barely even told him anything about the foster system or Neal.”

She’s been thinking about it though, because if Killian can begin to share his heartbreak with her, then maybe she can with him. She’s not at the point where she can reveal her Big Secret, and wonders when she ever will be -- God, it’s terrifying -- but people rarely share their life story all at once. She hasn’t. Killian hasn’t. Why can’t Liam understand that? Or give her the chance to understand it.

“What really sucks most is that I can’t talk about any of this with Killian.”

“Because it involves his dead brother.”

“Exactly.” Emma sighs and rubs her free hand over her face. “Have I mentioned how much these abilities suck? And please don’t say I’ve done a lot of good with them, because I really don’t want to hear a greater good argument.”

“Okay then,” Mary Margaret says, and Emma knows she had been about to make that argument. “They certainly suck, but use them to help you in this case. You can’t talk to Killian about it, but there’s someone you can talk to: Milah.”

Emma is unable to hold back a laugh. “You mean to tell me that I should talk to the guy I’m dating’s dead wife about his equally dead brother and how he doesn’t like me? Or her either, apparently.”

Emma can practically envision her friend shrugging on the other side. “She’s the only one who knows both men in your scenario.”

“Yeah, but...it’s weird.”

“Emma, everything about your relationship right now is weird. Embrace it.”

-/-

Finding Milah is more difficult than either Emma or Mary Margaret might have imagined. Though Emma can see and interact with ghosts, she can’t summon them, and the more time she spends with Killian, the less she sees Milah. A flicker out of the corner of her eye every now and then, but mostly nothing.

A selfish part of Emma wonders if the other woman is moving on. It would be easier to carry on things with Killian without being haunted. But she knows that’s not it, that even though Milah may be fine in theory with Killian moving on, it’s another thing to see it.

-/-

The morning after their fifth date, he tells her about Liam. He’s making her breakfast -- cinnamon rolls, because he knows her love of all things cinnamon -- when he tells her that his brother would make him the same breakfast often in his youth. He shares with her how Liam practically raised him after their mother died and their father bailed.

“He died when I was twenty, and in a way, this makes me feel closer to him,” he says. Killian reaches out to grab her hand. “I’m glad I can share him with you.”

-/-

The more time she spends with Killian, the more the guilt at keeping her secret gnaws away at her. She’s lying to him.

Once while at dinner, he catches her watching a ghost call to a loved one who just won’t listen. “Is there anything bothering you, love? Do you know him?”

She shakes her head. “Just staring off into space.”

Emma hates herself more with every little white lie.

-/-

She’s not sure why this is bothering her so much, to be honest. She has friends with whom she doesn’t share the knowledge of her abilities.

But, well, she’s starting to want to share more with Killian.

She thinks she’s starting to fall in love with him.

-/-

Three months in, Emma almost tells him. She’s just solved another case with the help of an apparition. They’re curled on his sofa with a celebratory bottle of wine and a cupcake.

“You’re amazing. Did you know that?” Killian asks her, twirling the ends of her hair with his fingers. “You do so much good for people. You’re a regular hero, Swan.”

She wants to tell him more about the victim, a woman named Kathryn who’d been murdered by a jealous ex. She wants to tell him about how Kathryn was more concerned about the fiance she’d left behind than her own death, how she’d cried when her murderer was arrested.

She wants is to tell him about the other cases, about the ghosts who move on after their murdered are convicted, or when they feel their loved one can move on.

What she wants is to tell him about Milah and Liam.

But she can’t.

Not yet.

-/-

April brings Milah’s birthday. Killian is sullen, but less so than when she’d first met him months ago on their anniversary. He tells Emma about his late wife, and she listens because he needs to, listens because she wants to know more about the woman who encouraged her to meet this man many months ago.

“She’d have liked you, I think.”

-/-

Milah comes to Emma that night. She’s surprised, but not.

“Happy Birthday,” Emma tells her. She’s forty now, but she’ll be frozen forever at thirty-seven.

“I’m surprised you’re not with Killian.”

“He needed some time alone to mourn,” Emma says. She keeps her voice soft as she speaks. “I could say the same, you know.”

“When I realized he was alone, I thought it best to speak with you.”

“It’s been awhile.” Weeks since she last saw Milah’s apparition. “I was beginning to think you moved on.”

Milah shakes her head. “It’s harder than I thought. I’ve always wanted to see him happy, but it never really sunk in that I’d have to walk away. I’m beginning to understand Liam a bit more.”

“I wish I could,” Emma says as an aside. She’s seen flickers of him every now and then. She wants to tell him that Killin’s shared more of his life with her, but Liam has never given her the chance.

“Liam is overprotective. I don’t think he’s ever moved past looking over Killian, and I know he never fond of me. After I passed her called me a bad influence, you know.”

“That’s...an incredibly shitty thing to be told.”

“But not completely false, either.”

Emma knows more about the story of Milah and Killian now. She’d been married when she’d met Killian at a bar, and had run away with him leaving her husband and young son behind. Milah had been older than Killian, but she’d enchanted him, and they’d been happy. But even Killian has admitted to her that Milah had encouraged his vices. Drinking, partying, gambling. They had lived for a good time, and she’d died seeking one.

“Doesn’t mean he wasn’t being a jerk. You didn’t deserve that.”

“If it makes you feel better, he apologized eventually. We’ve come a long way in three years.” A wistful expression crosses her face. “But enough about me, I’m here to talk to you.”

“About?”

“Killian. Do you you love him?”

“I don’t know,” she answers honestly. Emma’s long since stopped being thrown by Milah’s bluntness. “I’m falling for him. He’s a fantastic man. But I don’t know if I’m there yet.”

Milah straightens her posture. “Well, figure it out. I can’t move on until I know for sure he has someone to love him.”

-/-

She does think on it.

She lays awake that night, pondering her feelings about Killian. She thinks about it the next day when she joins Mary Margaret at the movies, and completely misses the plot. She thinks about with Killian, as they walk hand-in-hand to the pier, and he presents her the boat he’s recently bought.

“What do you think?” he asks her, eyes twinkling, and Emma never thinks he’s looked more beautiful.

“I love it.”

-/-

She loves him.

But if she loves him, that means Emma has to tell him...and of that she’s terrified. For years, she’s held her abilities close to her chest. But if she wants this relationship to continue, she can’t keep secrets from him.

Not anymore.

But there’s a difference in knowing you need to do something, and actually doing it.

She just has to find the willpower to do it.

-/-

She almost tells him during the an evening sailing. It’s the perfect date -- sunset, just the two of them out on the water - but that’s what causes her to hesitate. She wants to remember this: remember the glow of his skin at the golden hour, the way the light played on the water, and the motion of is body against hers as they make love.

It’s perfect.

But it’s not, and the guilt weighs her down like an anchor.

-/-

Killian tells her he loves her in a completely innocuous way, over breakfast as she reads the paper and he cleans up the kitchen.

“You know I love you, right?” he asks in the same way he might ask if she could pass the cream or if she had the sports section .“Because I do, Swan, sometimes the most when it is like this, just me and you, just us doing the complete mundane.”

“I…” Emma opens her mouth to speak, but she can’t. She can’t tell him she loves him until she tells him the truth about her abilities. She can’t do that to him. She’s already made him believe he loves the idea of someone he doesn’t fully know. And-- “I see dead people.”

He blinks. Once. Twice. Three times. “You could just say you don’t feel the same way.”

She shakes her head. “No. I do. I love you, but I also see ghosts.”

“Emma.”

“Killian, I swear I’m telling the truth. I see ghosts. It’s like my superpower. I’m not lying to you.”

He scratches behind his ear. “This...is not how I envisioned our conversation going.”

There something in the way he says it that guts her. “You don’t believe me?”

“I’m just trying to wrap my mind around it. That’s all,” Killian tells her, but she can tell he’s lying. He presses his hands against the counter as if he’s trying to ground himself. “So, uh, what type of ghosts do you see?”

“It’s hard to explain. Just spirits, I guess, who kinda look like the living but not.” She sounds crazy. She knows she sounds crazy, and it’s killing her, because she doesn’t know how to make herself believe. “It’s not gruesome, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m not,” he answers quickly. He still won’t look her in the eyes. “So how long have you been able to see...ghosts.”

“For as long as I remember.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You can just say you don’t believe me, you know,” Emma says. It hurts watching the way he’s pulling away from her. “I’m not crazy. I won’t hurt you or anything.”

“Emma, listen, it’s an astounding amount of information to take in. It’s not...possible.”

“It is,” she tells him. She pushes herself off, and goes off in search of her bag. She pretends it doesn’t hurt when he doesn’t follow. Her things gathered, she brushes the tears from her eyes. “Listen, I don’t know what I can say to prove this to you. You just have to trust me, but until you do, I can’t be here.”

She leaves.

-/-

She’s alone in her apartment when Liam appears. She throws a pillow, and watches as it phases through him. “I don’t want to hear a lecture right now.”

“I’m honestly a little impressed you told him.” Emma can tell he’s being honest with her. “But I’m curious why you didn’t mention me or Milah.”

She brushes at her tears. “It wouldn’t have been fair to play the dead wife and brother card.”

“Would’ve been easier.”

Anger boils deep inside her. “What the fuck? First you tell me off for not telling Killian, and now that I did, you’re throw digs at me for not telling him differently.”

Liam raises his hands in supplication. “I will admit that my behavior earlier was bad form.”

Running her hands through her hair, Emma sighs in frustration. “You’re just now realizing this?”

He scratches behind his ear, and Emma is reminded of Killian. Her stomach twists.

“Milah might have cuffed me behind the ears a few times.”

“Yeah, well, you deserved it.”

“Aye.” Frustrated and heartbroken, she throws hers arms in the air and shouts, “You’re telling me this now? You shouldn’t even be here. It’s practically over with Killian.”

Liam laughs, actually laughs. Emma would punch him if she could. “I know my brother. It’s not over. Not yet.”

Refusing to give way to hope, she crosses her arms. “What makes you say that?”

Liam smirks. “Because he’s on his way over here.”

-/-

She doesn’t want to believe Liam. Refuses to. He’s an asshole. He’s against her relationship with Killian.

Besides, Killian hadn’t believed her. Not that she had expected him to. He’s just like everyone else. Neal. Lily. She’s been a fool the past few months hoping that--

There’s a knock at the door.

-/-

“I called David.”

She’s not sure what she had expected when she opened the door, but it’s not that. Killian stands before her, his expression mournful.

“He told me...he told me about what you’ve been able to do.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” she tells him, because it’s true, because it’s something they both need to hear. Realizing that he’s still standing in the hallway, Emma steps to the side and ushers him in.

“He also told me that you’ve been speaking to Milah and Liam.”

“Oh.” She’s can’t blame David for telling him that part. He had no way of knowing what she’d confessed to Killian or not. But there’s a part of her that’s filled with dread, because there’s now a very real chance that he might have come here specifically just for them. Not her.

(It’s never her.)

“Emma, you have to understand this is a lot to take in. I know my behavior was bad form, but--”

“It’s a lot,” she finishes, grateful that he hadn’t brought the conversation back to his dead loved ones. But maybe that’s what it’ll take to get him to believe fully, to trust her. Maybe it will give him a bit of peace. “I can help you speak to them, if you’d like.”

His eyes widen, and she can tell he wants to say yes. Instead he says, “I meant what I said earlier. I love you.”

“I know.” Emma brushes her hair behind her ears. “And I feel the same way.”

She watches him smile. “Can you tell me more about your abilities?”

-/-

She tells him everything she can. She tells him about the old man, about her experiences with ghosts as an adolescent. She tells him about how those experiences shaped her into pursuing law enforcement as her field. She tells him about about how sometimes ghosts ask for help with their loved ones.

“That’s the real reason why I talked you that first night. Milah was worried, and she asked.”

She’s been afraid of telling him this since the moment they met. He’s quiet for awhile, and finally says, “I told you she was an amazing woman, didn’t I?”

-/-

Eventually, they get to the topic on Liam and Milah. Emma can sense them in the apartment.

“You can come on out,” she calls, and in no time at all, they’re present. Killian looks around, unable to see them. “They’re standing by the kitchen island.”

His gaze falls to where they stand, looking through them. “How do I...how do I know they’re really there.”

“Say ‘Yellow Submarine’,” Milah instructs her. “He’ll know what it means.”

And so Emma does, and when the words leave her mouth, she can she tears spring to Killian’s eyes.

“That’s the song that was playing when we met,” Killian says. “You had no way of knowing that.”

“Like I said, they’re here.”

He wipes at his eyes. “Can you tell them hello?”

“They can hear you,” she says, reaching out for his hand.

“Are they...okay?” He suddenly looks concerned. Liam gives her his answer, which Emma reports back. “Liam says about as well as a dead person can be. They’re not in any pain.”

Tears are flowing freely from Killian’s eyes now.

“You can speak to them, you know.”

-/-

Emma’s not sure what he says to Milah or Liam. She gives Killian that peace of having a moment alone with the people he loves, even if he can’t see him. He deserves that.

After awhile, he comes to her. His eyes are rimmed red, and she pulls him into a tight hug.

“Thank you.”

-/-

She sees Milah and Liam one last time.

“Goodbye,” Milah says.

“You’re going to take care of him, right?” Liam inquires.

Emma can only nod.

-/-

They move on.

It’s a beautiful thing, moving on, watching the ghost disappear into a beautiful burst of light. A small part of her is sad to see them go. A bigger part is happier they’ve finally found peace.

“I’m glad to know they’re somewhere happier,” Killian says that night, holding her tight in his arms. They don’t make love that night. The intimacy of being together is enough. “And that they think I’m happy enough to not watch over.”

“Are you?” Emma asks, surprised by the brittleness in her voice. “Happy, that is?”

He tilts her chin up to look him in the eyes. “Never ever doubt my happiness with you.”

“Okay.”

-/-

A year later, Killian takes her to England. They make a point of visiting Milah and Liam’s graves. Emma leaves carnations, for remembrance.

“Thank you,” she whispers to the stone markers. She owes them so much, too much really. And despite them having both moved on, as the wind blows she can almost hear them say, “You’re welcome.”

If her abilities have taught her anything, it’s this: the dead never truly leave us. Not really, in the end.

#cslb #captain swan #cs ff #cs au #captain swan ff #ouat ff #s writes fic

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peachsalsa · 7 years ago

Text

Jackson Is Better Than Death

Death. Let me count the ways. He is calculating. He pretty much told Jackson he was worthless. That Jack was no comparison to his wonderful, wealthy self. I have a castle with every luxury for Evie. What do you have? Nothing. He knew Jack would always put Evie first. He has always put Evie first. He breathed for her. Starved for her. Killed for her. Protected her. Walked into a hail of bullets for her. Taught her how to survive. He never put his hands on her to cause her harm. Death though. He let her fall face first onto a concrete curb. He let her walk in freezing rain barefooted with no coat. And her hands tied behind her back. And don’t even get me started on the cilice. He implied that Jack, Matthew, Selena, and Lark were dead. Evie. Thinking she was totally alone in the world. Except for her grandmother. No one alive to help her. Totally alone. She liked Lark. She loved Matthew. Selena, not so much, but they were growing close. And Jackson. The boy she loved. Dead. He let her believe, deep down in her soul, that she was alone. She was a girl. A very young. Sheltered. Kind and sweet. Girl. He may not lie, but he is very, very, very deceptive. And I know she’s The Empress. However.

Death had unlimited access to her mind. He could hear every thought. And he didn’t notice she was innocent? Kind? Caring? Not the evil Red Witch he has known in the past? He didn’t notice that among the banality? That right there is unforgivable. The only time he actually paid attention was when she was going to have sex with Jack? Really? A little bit late there, Death.

And sex. Death tried to coerce her into having sex. And if that had happened? That is rape. And if you disagree, google is your friend. He apologized. Due to his nobility? Or because he knew Evie would eviscerate him the first chance she got. He played her the entire time she was at the castle. A 16-year-old girl alone. Devastated. Her home, gone. Her mother, gone. Everyone, gone. She had to turn to someone. Human nature. Death is thousands of years old. He’s read. He’s studied. I do believe he has picked up a few tricks over that amount of time. Sneaky. Deceptive. Calculating. And of course. Death is beautiful. He’s tempting. Do we know if he has the power of seduction? Hasn’t Death been seductive in one way or another throughout history? Evie’s call might be, “Come. Touch. But you’ll pay a price.”, but so is Death’s. The most beautiful boy she’d ever seen. That is extremely tempting. Displaying his hotness in every possible way. Teasing.

Death knew how Jack felt about Evie. And he played his hand. He told Jackson Evie would be warm, dry, safe, with her dance studio, her art studio, a library, heat, lights, food, everything she would need or want. Compared to life on the road. Sleeping in a tent. Eating whatever. He played on the one thing he knew Jack always took to heart. Evie. Again. Deceptive. Got rid of Jack before Evie even made a decision. So yes. Sneaky Death. He played Jack right on out of Ft. Arcana and away from Evie. Saving Evie from having to tell him she chose Death. To save her the pain, he knew it would cause her. Always. Putting Evie first. Evie though. She picked the right one. Jack. Not Death.

On the forum, one of the members (thank you, Deb! All credit to her for this.) brought up the fact that Death was supposed to have left Ft. Arcana, heading home. Evie in the other direction. Should have been two hours apart? At least? Death was outraged. He loved Evie. But he wanted to possess her. Was he upset that he lost her? Or the fact he not only lost her but that he lost her to an uncouth, rough around the edges Cajun boy, that had nothing. Except an undying love for Evie, a desire to rebuild Haven for her, and build a better world. Not Death though. Go hide out in his castle. Let the humans rot. Did he in his anger, the one Major Arcana, that could talk to everyone, tell Richter where Selena was? The one that killed him in the past? So he could kill her? Kill Jack?Plus the added bonus of all those humans? How did he travel two hours back to Evie so fast? To be able to grab her? To keep her from going into the lava after Jack? Just how fast is Thanatos? Or was Death following her? Knowing Richter was going to strike? Get rid of Jack. Another Arcana. And save Evie. Pretty good trick if you can do it. And Death could.

Since day one at school, Evie treated Jack like dirt. Like scum. Like he wasn’t good enough to even speak to her. Even after he saved her life. She kept secrets. He thought she hated him. She didn’t do much to change that perception. And since when would a boy that was dirt poor, ever think he could ever be good enough for a super wealthy spoiled princess? In what world? She made life on the road so much harder. All she had to do was open her mouth and talk to him. But nope. She kept quiet. Which hurt him. Daily. All day. As if he wasn’t even good enough to talk to. How would you feel? As for him bossing her on the road? Well. He could have let her die. Multiple times. It was Jack’s nature to protect. To do for. He had been caring for his mother since he was a child. He did what he could to take care of Clotilde. It was what he knew. Protect. Feed. Care for. I mean. What an awful thing for a guy to do for you. And remember. He didn’t know she was The Empress. Silver bells and cockle shells.

I got to thinking about The Hanged Man, Jackson, Evie drawing him in class, and the possible past connection with The Empress, The Hanged Man, and The Moon. I won’t go into it here. We discussed it on the forum. And actually, Jasmine posted about it on another forum in 2015. Plus other theories about The Hanged Man. All makes sense. We also discussed Evie attempting to apologize to the other Arcana for her duplicity in past games. For example, saving Jackson’s eyes after squishing them out in the past. Theories. So many theories.

Counting the days until The Dark Calling comes out.

#The Arcana Chronicles #The Dark Calling #Kresley Cole #Jackson Deveaux

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stone-man-warrior · 4 years ago

Text

February 11, 2021: 2:04 pm:

====================================================

BBC UK Twitter account is playing games with the timeline they released today, I can‘t show you what I want to show you, but this screen shot will work for describing a bigger, more obvious, and most importantly, a tremendous non-black malfunction of security at the US Capitol on February 6 2021, so they say.

The first thing to know is that everything shown in this clip, and everything shown in the highly edited documentary version of the moment the Capitol Building, the one that BBC news deleted today, is said to have been breached by “Proud Boys”, is all fake, was filmed many years ago, maybe was filmed in 2001. A long time ago.

Here, what to see is that security officer failed to use his side arm in a breach of the US Capitol.

FAIL.

There is a bigger Fail moment to see, one that BBC news seems to have deleted this morning, is the same kind of BBC news video as shown below. In the deleted one, there were about twenty or thirty armed guards out front of the capitol building, all of the them white to my memory, non of them used their side-arms to defend the US Capitol.

not one security officer knew what to do, or how to do it.

It’s as if they are all armed with lolly pops.

It’s fake, is old, all is staged.

https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1359974096797376519

You make your own assessments.

This is bigger, more contemporary, is happening now, about Taylor Swift.

What about Taylor Swift?

I give Ms. Swift a lot of grief with my continuous statement “Fast Ass From Taylor Swift”. The truth about that, is to get some attention from national security to look at her with new eyes, and Cracker Jack’s Secret Decoder Ring.

She is a slave. She is a SAG operative, is forced to do what she is told, is like Dolly Parton is, however I am not convinced that Ms. Parton is a slave, my view is the Ms. Parton used to do the same kinds of terror damage control and other work as does Taylor Swift currently, but the difference is that Taylor Swift was born into captivity, where Dolly Parton is among her captors.

I have a distant moment in my life where I was forced to make decisions about Ms. Swifts wardrobe, she was thankful about the wardrobe freedom and modesty that was allowed when others wanted her on stage in bikini clothing styles.

Ask Taylor about her beginnings as a stage singer, and ask her specifically about her pants, specifics about them, rules she had to adhere to about her stage wardrobe, specifically, her pants. She and I will tell the same story.

https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1359882960200163329

Britney Spears is a different story.

What to know:

Her name is Brit.

Her other name is Spears,

For many years, she has been a news item where the gist of the story is that Spears has a handler who controls Britney Spears,

“So, there is a hand, on a spear, to chuck it.”

That is what you need to know about Britney Spears.

yhttps://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1359912235737448451

==================

2:47 pm:

China is not the enemy of the world. “China” is code word basically for “Real Knowledge” in a world we live in where our current reality is ALL LIES.

The perspective of “China is the enemy” ideas come from the Christian Churches, the Vatican and Britain. The lies are so thick that they were able to create a monster, call it Russia, and even arranged that the place is on all of the maps of the world.

There is no place called Russia, never was a place called Russia. The reason Russia is promoted to exist, mainly is to create a false perception of power in the world. As long as there is a bad guy, Russia, with nuclear weapons, then, all other nations around the world are going to behave differently than if there were no imaginary bad guy with nuclear weapons.

Russia makes a handy bad guy for Christians to blame things on, that is why there is a Russia. Christians are able to do terror, then, blame what was witnessed on Russia, in the event that something was witnessed, but only after more lies are told to spin the witnessed event out of the realm of anything that may have been real.

Truth is, there are no Christians. Instead, there are pirates, who invented the Christian religion based on an upside down, inside out, backwards version of The Tao, by Lao Tzu, a very, very, very old piece of literature about ways that a human can use to associate themselves in the universe as a basis for it all to make sense about who you are, and how to live in harmony with the earth and those around you.

https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/1359688959538978816

You have to wake up, and read the label on the things you use. If China were truly he enemy, and if US White House was really serious about that, there would be no “Made in China” label on the items we all love to use.

To see and know who the enemies are, you have to look at what they have left behind in the wake of destruction and domination as they advance.

Religion.

Language.

Disease.

People.

Four things that are left behind by the true enemies of the world.

Do you see Chinese people taking over remote parts of the world?

Do you hear Chinese language spoken in your neighborhood, one that is outside of China?

Who is promoting the Corona Virus? Where does all of the Corona news come from?

It’s simple.

We are lied to, about very important things, by the people who claim to be in charge.

There is no place called Russia. There is Mongolia, not Russia. Mongolians don’t have nuclear weapons.

======================

3:19:

To help see who the enemy really is, you have to look at what they leave behind.

The story of the Titanic. A big fucking boat, it sank.

The way the story is told, the band kept playing as the ship went down.

That is an artifact left behind by pirates.

==============================

1:27 pm:

To differentiate yourself as a non-terror pirate, is difficult, they have it worked out where everyone is highly pressured to wear a mask, to conceal who you are. They have it worked out where you are not allowed to be at a store to purchase food unless you are wearing a mask.

That tells me that there are at least some real US national security personnel left alive somewhere, people who have access to wireless camera technology at the stores where the food is sold.

What I do, is take my mask off, and look right at the cameras, the ones in the ceiling, and the ones at the Walmart checkout cash register.

I don‘t want to be mistaken as a terror pirate, so, I show my face to the camera even when the pressure to wear the mask will get me tossed out of the store if I fail to wear a Corona Mask.

I suggest everyone remove the mask to look at the camera, so that some help can know who is a pirate and who is a slave.

This terrorist bastard below, is concerned only about one person, he is concerned about Joe Biden.

Joe, or whoever it is that is playing role of Joe Biden, knows that the plan of the British Vatican SAG global domination takeover does not include that Joe Biden serves all for years of his current term. Joe learned the hard way, that Kamala Harris is part of the Trump version of the Vatican, which differs greatly from the SAG/Bergoglio/Google version of the Vatican.

Joe is scheduled for take out, so that Harris can break the glass ceiling, to become US President.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1359985372860719116

What is so different about the Bergoglio Vatican and the “Trump Version”?

The Trump version of the Vatican is a Vatican that is lead by a German, Pope Benedict. That, however, is not important, what is important, is that the Benedict Vatican, is a Vatican that is composed of real, mass murdering, ruthless pirates who have been fooling everyone on earth for more than 2000 years. That, was changed out when the Bergoglio became Pope. He is a fake pope. Pope Francis is a Screen Actor Guild member from Argentina. The SAG thought they were taking over a bunch of religious Christians at the Vatican when that happened, but the reality is that SAG hijacked the source of all of the worlds terrorism, at the helm of the Pirate Ship that is the Vatican, where centuries of blood in the form of Christian Crusades, Missions, to take over the world have been commanded from.

It’s like there is a small child at the Queen‘s Armory where all of her guns and bullets are stored. That is what SAG at the Vatican is like.

So, the real pirates have been quietly trying to regain what was lost, without giving themselves up as the pirates that they truly are at the Vatican. Those guys at the Benedict style Vatican arrangement are very good at what they do, they are masters of time itself, they don‘t really care how long it takes to take the Bergoglio out, and put a Benedict back in, and, they already figured out that having the clowns of SAG in the limelight is beneficial to the real pirates who are simply continuing to do the crusade work in deeper shadows, while the SAG Bergoglio clowns are square in all of the headlights.

Eventually, the Benedict, real, 2000 year old masters of time and space, the real Christian pirates who have been mass murdering since Day One, are going to take back their Vatican, however, they are going bring down all of SAG and all of the US Government while they do that, and, they will blame SAG for everything and anything that arises as a result of that, even if it takes fifty years to do it without being noticed.

I say a lot about the Seventh Day Adventist variety of Christians, they are everywhere, far more than you are aware of, millions of them disguised as other factions.

What I haven‘t said much about is the Mormon faction. I don‘t know very much about them. Where I grew up in Simi Valley California, that whole place filled up with Mormon‘s right away, with the very first housing tract that was built there, and by 1963. there were a few fairly large housing tracts there, in an otherwise desolate valley. In 1963. there was only one gas station, and no grocery stores in Simi Valley. It was not until 1965 that a full size food store was built.

The thing about the Mormons, is they all have a “End of Days Food Pantry” and did not necessarily need the grocery store to be right there, it benefited the Mormon lifestyle to prevent any grocery stores built in Simi Valley at the time.

The Mormons are closer to the original Christian Pirating than any other religious faction, in my view so far, and that is one of the reasons why Mitt Romney is scheduled to become King of French North American Republic Territory when the pirates are successful at taking apart USA.

The geographic region currently occupied as Canada, USA, and Mexico is the new boundary for French North American Republic Territory.

Justin Trudeau is scheduled to be fist Prime Minister of the new, Communist Republic Kingdom, French North American Republic Territory.

Trudeau is there for the British Throne, while Romney represents the Vatican Pirate Ship.

Trudeau will make most public decision making, while Romney is there to look pretty.

“Church of Latter Day Saints” literally translates to “Church of the End of Days Dead People”.

You don‘t need to be a language scholar to do that translation.

All I started out to say about the Mormon’s, is a reminder that everyone already knows they are called “The Dark Side”, you already know that, already learned it on the news, the term is used with pride.

===============================

4:22 pm:

This from US State Department today, Ned Price:

The literal translation to those in the know is like this:

“The people who are from the place that is not really there, are condemned for blasphemy of the people who say they saw God reach his arm out of the television to turn it off”

That is the translation. It needs further decoding to see why Ned Price said it.

My read, is there is some pressure at SAG HQ, Scrutiny of SAG members and their Bounty.

It reads as an instruction, or a “heads up”.

If it’s a “Head’s Up”, then, the message is from State to Britain, to warn the people who control the Boris Johnson Puppet of some kind of activity that puts SAG in a bad light. Ned Price calls for some large size Russian Hoax maneuvers from the State Department Alter, trying to reach House of Lords, at SIS MI6 at Vauxhall Bridge, to come up with a set of lies to make a distraction, detour, road block.

See other comm from Joe Biden, is the same comm with use of Trump’s Border Wall to say “Road Block”. Ned Price helps clarify the Joe Biden terror comm to Britain terror pirate leaders, by inclusion of SAG as the subject, with use of Jehovah Witness’s, who have always been a way to put Screen Actor Guild spies at your front door on Saturday morning, about 10:00 am.

The JW’s are famous for the image of God who reaches his arm out of a television screen, in your living room, to turn off the TV long enough to hear what God has to say, about “ a watchtower” and being “awake”.

They serve as “Guardian‘s of the Galaxy” in other news items also.

I don‘t have a conclusion on this one, no one does, it’s happening now.

It’s a shame there are no US national Security forces who are willing to do their jobs. This looks like opportunity to stop a lot of terrorism, through learning about how the command chain of terror really works, on Twitter, mainstream, from the top US Government offices and leading media network news, to the top British offices, by way of Hollywood, and a copy gets sent to the Vatican to oversee the progress.

https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1359962812253143043

==============

4:49 pm:

I said “China” is code for “Real Knowledge” (vs Gnosis, lies) but it’s more complicated than that.

You have to also consider that heroin is what is used to power the enormous Canadian SDA terror army, they stay loyal to the leadership because the leadership supplies them with heroin, that way, the Canadian SDA terror army, stays loyal to the heroin, and to the leadership by extension.

There are two kinds of heroin to my knowledge, one is the preferred kind, is used by the SAG leadership personally, is called “China White” looks like white powder. The other is called “Black Tar”, looks like roofing tar.

I don‘t know for sure, but I think that when heroin is made from the Afghan Poppy fields, where French and Canadian terror soldiers killed and replaced all of the US Military that has been sent over there especially for the purpose the (that) the impostors would kill them, to protect the source of the terror heroin, while also insuring that there are fewer and fewer US Military who can stop the terrorism ... I think when the heroin is produced, it makes a ratio of “China White” to “Black Tar” as part of the process, something like 90% “Tar”, and 10% “China White” is the outcome of modern heroin production, but I am not certain about that. Whatever the case is about the two kinds, is SAG prefers the “China White”, they keep that for themselves, while the terror army rations are mostly “Black Tar”.

The use of the word “China” to say “Old Knowledge” or “Real Knowledge” is partly because of the heroin, where it is said that heroin makes you “See God” when it’s injected. That, and the Heroin itself is considered to be a female, a “Heroine” of a female God. So, it gets more complicated than just to say “China means Real Knowledge”, because real knowledge is a hero.

Real Knowledge (China) is what can stop 90% of all terrorism on Earth, by enlightening the Russian Mother of all Hoaxes, and burying it in real truth based on old, real, knowledge.

Pirates hate knowledge, they hate truth, but love heroin.

==========================================

5:29 pm:

Learn to read terror comm:

This says there will be “More Winter” very basically speaking.

So, “Ground Hogs Day w/shadow” is part of the message. (add six; load revolver)

Also, it’s Chinese. “Ground Dogs Day w/shadow, load revolver”

(SAG news media insists that Chinese people eat dogs, so, Ground Dog is a lot like Ground Chuck, we don’t really know why they put Chuck through the Butcher’s Mill, but, they did, and it’s 80/20 Medicare Grade Chuck. Personal Health Insurance is often said to be a firearm for protection, so, “Load Chuck” where Chuck is a Medicare Beneficiary, and is turned into Ballistic Gel. Medicare Chuck is Down Range)

Terror comm is a life or death affair when presented mainstream on Twitter by major news media Verified Accounts. That is the most important part of this terror comm reading. Twitter MUST be taken offline permanently in order to slow down the Global terror take over of the world.

Google is too big to fail, so, Google MUST be taken into custody of Global Security forces, people who are opposed to captivity, people who are opposed to being subject of forced surgical experimentation. It needs to be made to work correctly, while taking Google apart to form smaller monsters, ones that are far easier to maintain control of.

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1360030885777723393

There is more to consider about Chuck.

The winter, according to Washington Post Terror cell on Twitter, is to continue in the “Lower 48 States”.

CRAP rules are applied, that means “US Advertising Industry”. In the Advertising Industry, first year students learn about CRAP rules for making an advertisement pleasing to the eye, so that the products and services offered with advertising will look bigger, better, more attractive, luring, will be “sexy” and thereby sell the items.

C ontrast

R epetition

A lignment

P roximity

The tweet from WAPO is heavy on the Proximity parts of CRAP, while specifying the advertisement presented. (see news about a Democrat Political Party [AARP] terror comm Twitter story about a Billboard presented today, to know that Advertising and CRAP are important today. Advertising is an extension of Screen Actors Guild)

It’s a perspective statement, “Lower 48“, always has been a perspective statement. North (Canada) is on top, that puts Continental USA in the Chuck position, from view of Justin Trudeau’s front window, Eastwood Guitars is there by default due to the northern compass setting, that puts Eastwood to the right, in the trees. Eastwood is to the left from Trudeau’s window, to the right for those in USA looking at Trudeau. That position puts Eastwood Guitars out in the Atlantic Ocean, on a boat.

Here is the Eastwood Boat:

It’s a Canadian Chinese Knock-Off of a Japanese Guitar from the 1960′s.

Ichiban Sharkfin K4L (it’s personal, Eastwood representatives at Hugo Hitching Post General Store, about one and one-half miles north east of where I am, are called to service at my house with that advertisement, to come kill me, by order of Justin Trudeau terror cell in Quebec Canada.)

Almost all of the guitars Eastwood makes are Japanese Chinese Canadian Knock Off guitars. no one has ever called them out for being the pirates that they prove to be everyday. Clearly, that is a pirated guitar.

This one is part of the same ad, it means Justin forwarded the commands he got, to Eastwood, from the Vatican.

Also, that statement about “this photo is for illustration purposes only” is complicated, means a whole bunch of different things when presented to the people it’s supposed to reach.

One: A sketch of a threat that was made against Mr. Tracy of Thunderbird’s (the Pope; The Jim Dunlop; The Flying V pirate ship; The Vatican)

Two: It’s “Adobe” is the house of an “Indian”. It’s “Vector Graphics”, that means it’s an Aerial command, is Bernouli, is French, is Doppler, has a delay built-in, comes and goes, is female.

Three: It’s Tierra Rejada; It’s Ronald Reagan Library; Is Simi Valley; Is an airplane from the White House inside of the Ronald Reagan Library; It’s a lot of personal records on the 118 Freeway all laying around and looking like the aftermath of a mob of Trump supporters who raided Nancy Pelosi’s office ... paper everywhere, lampshades all turned sideways; It’s that piece of that old statue that was left in the rubble on the floor of the capitol building (see Twitter news to catch up with me here, I am down range and exhilarating at this time, making truth known); It’s “Afterswords” based, is from the Benedict Vatican.

Four: The “illustrator” statement is about Bob Hope; Is Charles Manson being too close to Rocketdyne, then killed, and that other guy put into the fake prison to lure in others who might know about Bob Hope, USO Mass Murder Entertainment aboard ship, and MK Ultra Hijack; It’s about a man by the name of Gottlieb, and is about “Alouette HQ, Ann Wilson, Leon Russell, Ted nugent, Elton John, and Mama Cass to name just a few; The illustrator statement is deep, goes to Richard nixon, impeachment, and a big hole in the ground where US Military was tossed into in Vietnam by order of Lindon B. Johnson, and a lot more.

Five: The illustrator statement says that the current Trump Impeachment is spelling out details about terrorism, and exposure of lies told to cover it all up for many decades. The Illustration statement says to look at Twitter to see the newly presented artifacts that are said to be part of the fake Trump impeachment, where those videos and written dialogue are there to inform terror operatives what specifically to lie about if they are questioned by authorities about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the impeachment, and everything to do with global terrorism, and especially USA takeover.

=======================================

7:23 pm:

From here, in Hollywood or Nashville, you could go up the command chain a short distance to get to Disney Micheal Eisner and everything in between, or, you could follow the sideways path in any direction to get to underground places where US Military service men and women, and kidnapped US School children are forced to undergo experimental surgical procedures.

These guys are in the center of “Partner” production and distribution.

Take a few whacks at them on my behalf.

https://vintageking.com/?adlclid=704f429de56519b1eb1922b81139ebdb&msclkid=704f429de56519b1eb1922b81139ebdb&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=%5BADL%5D%20%5BBrand%5D%20Vintage%20King%20Audio%20(Exact)&utm_term=vintage%20king%20audio&utm_content=Vintage%20King%20Audio

===============

7:45 pm:

This is a Zakk Wylde waiting to happen:

Lamb of God...

I feel a belch coming on. Must be time for some lamb chops.

How do you get to Petaluma?

“Practice with your arm.”

Strong’s Terror cell member pictured above. Balls not included.

Reminder to US Public Safety:

Years ago, maybe twenty years ago, nsa was right on that guys tail, ready, armed, gonna take him out, but, they were fooled by the local sheriff, who works for God, works for pirates. The sheriff told the nsa that what they needed to do, was crack the code about why Speed Racer and his Mach 5 was important. The sheriff claimed he did not have the necessary resources to provide the county with detectives, so, he was not able to crack the code about why Speed Racer and the Mach 5 are important terror communication tools.

So, just remember that when you catch up to the local sheriff and his friends in Petaluma, Hollywood, Medford, and Vatican City.

Give my regards to John, likely to be at or near 3747 Russell Road, at Strong’s terror cell, a “SAG House”, any minute now.

=================================

8:10 pm:

Explainer:

SAG/Aftra

These guys, all of every kind of entertainment everywhere, and the extension of services they rely on, engineers of all kinds, lawyers, doctors, artists, construction and demolition, textile workers, food cart drivers, and vineyard operators, all inclusive, are the source of 90% of terrorism on Earth.

There are no non-terror affiliates among them.

Remember the “Roasts” that were presented on TV in the 1960′s and 1970′s?

That was SAG Housekeeping. That is the time when the Chinese Laundry was hijacked, the Chinaman was taken as a slave, and the One Hour Martinizer took over, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and their personal token smoker, Sammy Davis Jr. who was just a little guy they toted around to make a point.

The Roast was a national, global effort to make sure that there were no non-terror pirates in the Screen Actor Guild or in any of the extended services or professions they rely on.

SAG is 100% COVID Compliant. There are no exceptions. Those who won‘t go along with the show, are killed. They are sent to the 27 Club. But first they all get one chance to comply, that is with a tactic called Twighlight Zone. Those who resist going COVID are subject to the most bizarre, horrible, absolute insane events that take place around them, until they comply, or die trying to survive the Twighlight Zone.

What you need to do, is understand that there cannot possibly be any non-COVID compliant people left in the entertainment industry, those people are all long gone, weeded out decades ago.

So don‘t say I didn‘t try to warn you about that when some asshole tells you about the free two-week tropical cruise they will give you featuring Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Joe Bonamassa, and don‘t be swayed by Britney Spears or Taylor Swift on the Cruise Boat to the Tropics either, they are all SAG, all have a job to do, and that job is to toss the nsa overboard, and replace them with a recommendation from national Sheriff’s Association after the SAG Bob Hope Coast Guard is unable to locate any victims of having fallen off of the boat.

national Sheriff Association is in the “Shoe-In Business”. They changed their Twitter header about a month after the first time I exposed that. There was photos of a horse race, and jockeys there at the national Sheriff Association Verified Twitter Account, ones that spell out what sort of services they provide.

nsa is in the nsa business for Shoe-In Work at a national level, from the county.

Don‘t take the Shwagg. There are no friendlies in the entertainment business, they float Titanic boats, just exactly so they can sink them.

To see an example of a light version of a Twighlight Zone done to a SAG Entertainer, all you have to do is look at Ozzy Osbourne and that “Reality TV Show” they gave him.

First remember that Ozzy Osbourne is a big fish in the entertainment world, so, he is not going to be easy to make disappear, but, they can and did put cameras all in house, they were everywhere. You have to also remember that he was removed from Black Sabbath first. Then, look at Ozzy Osbourne’s medical history to see how many spinal surgeries he was subject to from being beat up so many times. Mr. Osbourne was opposed to what he had learned about the music industry. The first thing did to him, was they tossed Sharon at him, to control what he does, where he went, who he spoke to, and what he said to others.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who is an entertainer, a famous one, with cameras forced on you every minute of every day, to get a small glimpse of Twighlight Zone treatment. They edited out the parts when the camera man beat the living daylight out of him after exposure to poison gasses in his house.

See how he spells the title they gave him:

Is it: “Prince of Darkness”?

Or is it: “Prints of Darkness”?

I say it’s the latter, because he tried to explain things to people that don‘t understand real terrorism, and he left some Prints of Darkness behind in doing so, and got a reality TV show as booby prize.

===================================

9:18 pm:

This Twitter Trend about the bald YouTuber is about Joe Satriani. Joe likes to put on Josephine County Sheriff Uniform, the whole thing complete with badge, gun, vest, taser, and Police Interceptor, all supplied to him by the local sheriff. Same thing Robert Duval and others like them do when on SAGClubMed heroin Junket Murder Fest in Oregon.

Robert Duval goes by the name Deputy Duvail when he does his house to house terror looking for little girls to rape.

Satriani uses the name Aaron Porter when he dons the sheriff suit.

Satriani is not picky about what kind of suit he will wear, he is perfectly OK and protected when he puts on the Josephine County Courts Bailiff Uniform while inside of the courtroom at a hearing while Honorable Judge Patrick Wolke is jockeying the fake video feed from people associated and are said to be witnesses in the hearings in Josephine County, They use pre-recorded testimony played on a video screen in the courtroom while Bailiff Aaron Porter makes sure that no one makes any noise about the bullshit presented by Pat Wolke.

That is small potatoes compared to what happens inside the jail, where fake arrests bring victims into a controlled environment and assassins are sent into the jail with weapons to kill the mark while inside the jail.

There, inside the jail, all of the people who look like jail population are all actors, none of them are real people arrested and serving time. They are all there for show.

Inside of the jail there is a processing area, where the new arrivals are brought and have to wait in a small confined area until the jailer is ready to process them through and into the main population. In the past twenty years I have been in there three times. Each time, the same two men were in the processing area, and each time, those two men asked me for help, and said that they were real police held in the jail processing cell.

The last two times were about ten years apart, and each time, the same men where inside of the main population area. Both times I was in there, there were the same men, saying the same lines, doing the same activity as the time before, ten years earlier. I estimate fifty of the men were the same people in the main population. Each time I was there, I was arrested for things that did not happen. Many police broke through my door to take me to the Josephine County Snuff Jail, where I had to fight against famous rock star musicians who were sent in there with weapons to kill me, but were killed in defense when I fought back.

So, be advised that the Trend is about Satriani. He has a big scar on his arm where I fillet him when he attacked me at my gate, and another scar from a sword he was stuck in the face with while inside of Pat Wolke’s Courtroom and he attacked me in the courtroom, room #3 I think it was, I explained it when it happened I think, read the account to find it.

The same people are always in the lobby at the courthouse also. If you need to go to any of the offices that are at the courthouse you are likely to see the same people in the lobby that you saw the last time you were there, and they respond to the presence of outsiders the same way each time someone who is not part of the Courthouse terror cell shows up there. Same activity, same spoken words, same clothing ... same, same, same every time I have needed to go to a county office at the courthouse. The one on 6th and C streets in Grants Pass Oregon, 97526.

=============

10:19 pm:

I have absolutely zero control.

Twitter plays the Twighlight Zone mind game. This is one of the ways they do it to an individual.

The account and others I once had are suspended, they make it look as though the account is active. I cannot get a new Twitter account unless I get a new telephone number. Twitter requires a telephone number to have an account. You can sign up without using a phone number, and the account will work for a couple of days, then, the account will have a big sign when you log in that says:

“Ooops! Something went wrong. You need to tell us who you are by providing a current phone number so we can send you an access code”.

So, without a phone number to track you, to hunt you down to kill you with, you cannot have a Twitter account. You can have a suspended one to use for reading the “news”, but you cannot make new Tweets with a suspended Twitter account.

If you do have a suspended Twitter account, you can use that account to reach the terror bastards who operated Twitter. All you need to do, is choose any Tweet that is of interest, then, pretend to make a comment, just start typing in response to any Tweet, you can write a whole book if you want to, the text you write will be highlighted automatically as you begin to write more than the amount of characters that a normal Tweet is composed of. When you do that, the terror bastards at Twitter can see what you are writing, so, you just keep on writing as a response to any Tweet of interest, and soon, you will understand that the terror bastards at Twitter can read what you wrote from within a suspended Twitter account. You cannot reach anyone else, and the terror bastards at Twitter will never ever under any circumstances provide anyone with any help of any kind, ever, no matter how much you beg them to call national Security, they will only ignore everything you said about that, while they learn more about who you are, and where you are, so that they can send the correct assassins to your house.

10:49 pm:

Twitter Trend:

“Legacies airing on the CW”

When ever you see “some bullshit is airing on The CW” what is really happening is Google picked up some RADAR that looks like it might be someone writing something online that could possibly be about the Holy See or about the “Kill & Replace Terror” that Google is part of.

I think the “Airing on The CW” trend is automated, comes from a Bot that searches the internet for collections of key words and phrase.

They make it sound so warm and fuzzy, the CW trend comes across as if it’s your old friend, “The CW is airing... Ohh Goody, I love the CW” is how the psycho’s at Google are presenting that particular kind of terror communication. It advises millions of well equipped smart phone jockeying special iPhone App soldiers to hone in on what kind of information was revealed, so that the correct local ISP operators can send the correct assassins to the people who are writing so much truth online about the Vatican and their Kill & Replace tactics.

“Ohh goody, the CW is airing, I can‘t wait to see what is on the CW”

===========

11:13 pm:

This is a good place for a reminder about “I am airing it out” French Canadian specific terror set-up scenario, is wide-spread, broad-based and universal in size and scope:

Briefly. “I am airing it out” is spoken to a intended, marked mail victim by a French Canadian female terror assassin who is working with others nearby and is recording the conversation that takes place.

One example I have encountered numerous times is from the replacement of Susan Peterson, who was the local mail carrier for the route on the street I live on. If I happened to be outside when the mail arrived, I would walk over to where the mailboxes are at, and wait for the mail car to drive away, during that time, the Susan Peterson would strike up some chit chat, and speak quietly, I have step closer to hear what she is saying, while the motor is running on the mail car, so, that is when I can clearly see that it’s a fine summer day, is warm outside, and the Susan Peterson is not wearing any underwear, so, eyes go there, then she says: “I am looking for a watering hole on this route, just so I can take a 30 minute break sometimes”. So, a response like “Yeah, it’s awfully warm out these past few days” is responded with “That’s why I am airing it out like that” and the view opens up a little more.

That is when I step the fuck back. I am no fool.

“I am airing it out” is a dangerous proposition, should be avoided whenever the words “I am airing it out” are spoken with a wide angle view, and a search for a watering hole for 30 minutes sometimes as a broad-based message, especially when spoken by a mail carrier professional.

==========

11:11 pm:

“The CW” again.

=============

11:38 pm:

This one says Los Angeles times has enlisted Walmart terror cell to “Turn up the gain“ (it means they are going to play dirty) and to have Pacific Power Corp turn off my power, at least temporarily.

The time stamp from Twitter is only there to dazzle you with diamonds while they baffle you with bullshit, a double whammy of terror lies is presented with the Twitter time stamp.

https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1360122469496012801

================

11:54 pm:

It’s all custom tailored.

I’m going to refrain from doing the text part of the decode, but the visual part is a two hole, could be birdie on the putting green, and it taint worth makin’, is miniature golf at the Putt-Putt back 9.

https://twitter.com/ReutersUK/status/1360108621892378624

0 notes

cuntess-carmilla · 4 years ago

Text

This is just an extremely long vent post sparked by my brother. ^_^

(Reclaimed r slur by the end in reference to myself)

Someone explain to me how my brother can be so smart yet always soooooooooo fucking wrong in everything other than thinking cops and Piñera are scum.

Actually? I know exactly why! It’s because in his colossal immaturity coupled with his trauma of having always been told that he’s dumb because he’s autistic and the combination of mostly STUPID awful teachers and bullying was the actual reason why he did so badly in school after like 3rd grade. Which I get! But the way he ~copes~ with his inferiority complex is by being possibly THE most arrogant person I’ve ever known!

Ok, no, the most arrogant one was my ex-boss who sexually harassed me, but my brother (being actually a good just really frustrating person) comes 2nd. Besides that insecure arrogance, he’s way too driven by his gut feelings without supporting those gut feelings with reason or proper sources. Sometimes AGAINST proper sources. He ESPECIALLY doesn’t inform his gut feelings with other people’s opinions to form any sort of balanced collection of ideas to consider!

Given that he also has really bad anger issues (I’m fucking uncle Iroh post-war crimes compared to him) and represses every emotion that isn’t Wrath, a lot of the time his gut is just going by whatever position, POV or idea causes him the strongest emotional reaction - again, without proper research - that aligns with his like, misanthropy and sense of The World Inherently Sucks, so a lot of the time it’s motherfucking conspiracy theories! And he sticks to the position that took 5 minutes to convince him no matter what anyone says if they don’t passionately agree with him.

AND when someone doesn’t passionately agree with him, or innocently asks questions that could make his position be exposed as wrong or unfounded, he takes it as the grandest personal insult meant to make him feel stupid and if we try to tell him that disagreeing with him or even just not being sure what we think of the positions he adopts, he literally, legit says we’re just saying that to demonize him and make HIM out to be the psycho.

I love him but he’s wrong a lot of the time EVEN compared to my very fascist parents when it doesn’t come to specific local politics (ie. hating cops and Piñera). Don’t get me wrong, they’re fascists so I disagree with 99% of their views (the ones I agree with being stuff like “rape is bad” and “femicides shouldn’t happen”), my mom herself makes up a lot of insane fascist conspiracy theories, and both of them source their information from right-wing mainstream media.

But like... At least they try to form opinions based on (the sadly biased) information they can get rather than immediately making up their minds with NO space for questioning anything based on what aligns with their emotions?

Ok, my mom not so much but she’s only like that when it comes to subjects she thinks she knows well. When it comes to subjects she knows she’s ignorant of, she doesn’t do that. She’s open to asking questions, being corrected and thinking things through in those cases.

My dad is generally capable of all those things that my mom does when she knows she’s not knowledgeable enough in the subject at hand, and actually has a pretty decent capacity to admit he’s wrong when he’s proven wrong by undeniable facts! He knows too that a lot of his own ideas and perceptions can change through time and he’d rather be properly right instead of clinging to past ideas and perceptions just to never admit he was ever wrong. What’s more, he fully accepts that people aren’t always going to agree with him on everything and that’s not a fucking hate crime! What a concept.

So like, yeah I think their politics are wrong almost entirely lol. But I can at least... Think of them as relatively functional adults when it comes to that shit even if they’re wrong and stay very wrong? My mom does take some things more personally but never to my brother’s level.

Just minutes ago my brother was spouting conspiracy theories about COVID (you know the shit, virus was human-made, it’s a conspiracy by some secret society to kill people, etc) like it was objective fact. My dad has stayed away from watching or reading any news for the sake of his own sanity so he doesn’t actually know all the facts, BUT with the facts he didn’t know, he asked him where his information came from in a very neutral way, or filled in the spaces with reasonable logic and distrusting things that are obviously conspiracy-mongering.

Just that my dad didn’t immediately agree with him and put the things he was saying to question my brother started fucking yelling and victimizing himself. I was so fucking annoyed that I committed the crime of interfering not regarding the subject itself, but regarding how my brother was handling not being agreed with. He word by word said “OH, SO YOU AGREE WITH HIM?" I told him I wasn’t agreeing or disagreeing with anyone! Because I wasn’t! I was just trying to calm the dude down and TRY to teach him, for the billionth time, to learn how to take CONSTRUCTIVE gentle criticism and to handle others having a healthy minimum of skepticism regarding the extreme ideas he proposes out of the blue! You know. Like a fucking (by tomorrow) 22 years old guy SHOULD. Ah, yes, he’s not a fucking teenager! HE’S TURNING 22 IN 23 MINUTES FROM NOW.

THEN he started victimizing himself, WITH ME.

ME! THE ONE BITCH IN THIS HOUSE WHO ALWAYS ADVOCATES FOR HIS ASS, HAS ALWAYS TRIED TO LISTEN TO WHAT HE HAS TO SAY WITHOUT DIRECTLY SHUTTING HIS IDEAS DOWN WHEN I THINK HE’S WILDLY WRONG BECAUSE EVEN THEN I MAKE SURE TO DISAGREE WITH HIM IN A WAY THAT HE DOESN’T PERCEIVE AS ME THINKING HE’S A STUPID PARANOID IMBECILE (paranoid he IS by the way!).

I’M THE ONE CUNT WHO’S ALWAYS TRIED TO MAKE THE REST OF THE FAMILY UNDERSTAND WHERE HE’S COMING FROM WHETHER HE’S RIGHT OR WRONG, WHO’S TRIED FOR YEARS (AND SUCCEEDED A LOT OF THE TIME!) TO TEACH THE REST OF THE FAMILY HOW TO ACCOMMODATE FOR HIM, HIS DISABILITY AND HIS TRAUMAS WHEN HE DOESN’T RETURN THE FAVOR TO ANYONE, SOMETIMES ASKING FOR MAYBE MORE COMPREHENSION AND PATIENCE FROM THE REST OF THE FAMILY THAN IT’S FAIR TO ASK FOR!

HELL. EVEN WHEN I TELL HIM OFF WHEN I GET PISSED AT HIM AND SAY PRETTY HEAVY THINGS TO HIM? I MAKE SURE TO ARTICULATE WHAT I’M SAYING IN A WAY THAT SHOWS COMPASSION AND IS COMPLETELY CODDLING IN TONE SO HE DOESN’T FEEL PERSONALLY ATTACKED. EVEN HE SAYS I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO “LISTENS” TO HIM.

THIS EMOTIONALLY REPRESSED DUDE WHO BREAKS FURNITURE AND DESTROYS OUR FOOD WHEN HIS ANGER OR ANXIETY TAKE OVER, WHO DOES NOT LET ANYONE SEE HIM VULNERABLE UNLESS HE’S HAVING A MELT DOWN ONLY BECAUSE THEN HE CAN’T STOP HIMSELF FROM CRYING? HE USUALLY TRUSTS ME ENOUGH TO HAVE CRIED ON MY SHOULDER MANY FUCKING TIMES.

AND HE ACCUSES ME OF JUST WANTING TO MAKE HIM SEEM LIKE HE’S THE INSANE DUMB DELUSIONAL AWFUL PERSON, SO I CAN SOMEDAY USE THIS INSTANCE AGAINST HIM IN ANOTHER “FIGHT”, WHEN I’VE NEVER FUCKING DONE THAT EVEN WHEN HE, TO BE HONEST, DESERVED IT? SERIOUSLY DUDE? FOR FUCKING REAL?

I’M THE ONE YOU’RE GONNA ACCUSE OF THAT WHEN I SPEND MY WHOLE FUCKING LIFE CODDLING YOUR PETTY ASS, PROTECTING YOU, BEING A SECOND MOTHER AND CHARGE FREE SHRINK TO YOU?

OR PULLING ALL-NIGHTERS TO HELP WITH YOUR COLLEGE HOMEWORK WHEN I’VE HAD CLASSES TOO THE NEXT DAY? SOMETIMES DOING THE WHOLE COLOSSAL PROJECT ALONE THE NIGHT BEFORE IF I REALIZE YOU’RE TOO BRAIN FOGGED, FATIGUED OR TRIGGERED TO DO ANYTHING WITHOUT GETTING SUICIDAL OR SOMETHING? SENDING YOU TO BED WHILE I DO YOUR SHIT AND DON’T SLEEP AT ALL? SOMETIMES GROUP PROJECTS WHERE YOU WERE GROUPED WITH LAZY ASSHOLES SO I’M DOING THE WORK OF 4 PEOPLE ALONE THE NIGHT BEFORE? FOR FREE?

M E ?

BITCH, I DON’T EVEN WANT A MEDAL OR TO BE THANKED BECAUSE BEING THANKED FOR ANYTHING MAKES ME UNCOMFORTABLE! BUT COME THE FUCK ON. I’D JUST APPRECIATE NOT BEING SLAPPED ON THE FACE IN RETURN, YOU KNOW?

*insert gif of Disney’s Hades exploding in red fire then calming down 2 seconds after*

Like you just! Can’t fucking have an adult conversation with this dude if you’re not validating him without question! You can’t! You can’t have any level of healthy friendly debate with him! You can’t beg him to be reasonable! YOU CAN’T!

He was saying “BUT IT’S OBVIOUS”, my dad asked CALMLY “With what proof?”, then it was “WELL, IT’S OBVIOUS TO ME”, then “That’s an opinion, not a fact. We can google the number” and OH MY GOD!!!! OH MY GOD!!!!

Then to ME he was all “YOU JUST LOVE TO BE RIGHT, DON’T YOU?” calling US immature and saying WE are the ones who don’t want to listen to a different opinion!!!!! When I told him he fucking loves being right he victimized himself again with a “WELL, FOR ONCE I’D LIKE TO BE!”

I was about to tell him, with the last dying bit of my patience, that yeah, like most people I do actually like to be right and I like it a lot! But that being right requires actual fucking work and THINKING rather than just going by whatever supports your misanthropic Kill Society angry feelings, and the moment you’re proved wrong YOU HAVE TO CHANGE YOUR POSITION IN ORDER TO BE RIGHT, BECAUSE IF YOU CLING TO YOUR DEBUNKED FIRST BASELESS CONVENIENT OPINION OUT OF PRIDE THEN YOU’RE OBJECTIVELY WRONG AND A PISSBABY.

But I didn’t get to say that because something else interrupted it and then things cooled off while, like a good Scorpio Mars, I’m still endlessly ruminating on and won’t forget about the rest of my life as much as I’d actually LOVE to be able to forget this instance of him being an idiot. 8)

Like, does this motherfucker not fucking get that unless I already know the subject thoroughly and have a fully fleshed Opinion, I don’t often give opinions out loud BECAUSE I try to first shape my thoughts properly and THAT’S why I tend to be fucking right? That that’s why I always have a lot of arguments and am so certain of what I think, because I’m so insecure that I only fucking talk when I’m 99.999999% confident in what I have to say, rather than it being because I’m an inflexible asshole who thinks is better than him!

And he’s seen it. He’s fucking SEEN ME acknowledge when I’m wrong!!!!! Including the times I’ve been wrong TO HIM.

In all honesty I don’t enjoy admitting when I’m wrong (in big part BECAUSE I put a lot of effort into articulating the ideas I’m standing by!), but when I realize that I am, just out of a minimum of maturity and sense of DIGNITY - because I’d find it so fucking humiliating to not acknowledge being wrong when it’s obvious that I am to everyone involved and I can no longer defend my point - I still do it!

Bitch, you said it yourself, I LIKE TO BE RIGHT. I’m going to side with what I genuinely think is right even if I used to think it was wrong! There’s a motherfucking reason that as a teenager I was a Pinochet apologist, Gays Go To Hell, Communism = Evil / Capitalism = Freedom, pro-life, Catholic and now I’m THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE OF ALL OF THAT.

Does he think it didn’t hurt my pride to discover one-by-one that my views were absolute shit? IT DID AND GOD KNOWS MY PRIDE IS SENSITIVE AS HELL. Does he think it wasn’t depressing to have my whole world views destroyed? I NEED TO STAND ON FIRM GROUND ON EVERYTHING OR ELSE I LOSE MY SHIT, IT WAS AWFUL TO SUDDENLY HAVE MY WORLD VIEW WRECKED. Does he think I didn’t try to argue for my WRONG ideas for as long as I still thought I had decent arguments to back them up? OF COURSE I DID, I BELIEVED IN THEM FOR A REASON, AS WRONG AS I WAS.

But I changed! I changed when I no longer had any space left to think I was right! And I operate the same way with my current positions and ideas now! Dude, I tend to be right over you BECAUSE I don’t immediately get set on the first thing that makes me feel emotionally Validated, unlike you! You ARE smart but you’re SO driven by your own colossal yet insecure ego that you don’t even BOTHER to be critical of your own thoughts and all your potential goes to waste.

I ruminate on every single little thing obsessively, to my own detriment, being my own Devil’s advocate having an ruthless debate against myself in my mind, starting off COMPLETELY insecure about my own thoughts, paranoid trying to imagine in what way I could possibly be proved wrong by someone else if I said my ideas out loud and how to hold my stance in case it happens. I NEVER say my ideas out loud to people who I think know more than me or are smarter than me, to not make a fool of myself in front of anyone because I’m a coward and I was also bullied into firmly believing I’m a fucking retard!

All of that pathological effort because I actually don’t think I’m better than you or anyone else! I think I’m really fucking stupid! So I overthink it all endlessly and by PRINCIPLE I distrust and question my own thoughts and perceptions at every single second. For hours, days, weeks, months, EVEN YEARS.

That’s why when I do speak I’m one of those annoying bitches who have an answer to everything! BECAUSE I THOUGHT YOU’D TRY TO PROVE ME WRONG ON THAT FRONT ALREADY AND I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THAT HUMILIATION SO I ALREADY HAD THAT SHIT COVERED BEFORE I DECIDED TO SAY ANYTHING.

And nothing in that exhausting, paranoid process guarantees I’ll be correct! So even when I firmly think I’m right I keep it to myself some more in case that maybe two years later or something I’ll discover a flaw in my thought process.

It’s so tiring, it’s so fucking tiring how EVERYONE who knows me from afar or from very FUCKING close, thinks that any and every one of the fucking things I achieve just fell into my stupid hands out of the sky by mere luck because God felt like giving me an easy ride that day. They ALL think I’m some arrogant bitch for the very few things I don’t doubt anymore when I try my best to be humble as long as I don’t humiliate myself! But I’m SURE they all think I’m a conceited lucky show off!

EVERY TIME I’m for fucking once proud of anything I achieve, people tell me to my fucking face that I’m just naturally and inexplicably talented, taking away any merit of my fucking own.

Like it’s a FUCKING compliment that, supposedly, everything I’ve achieved by pushing myself to my limits despite being at a disadvantage in so many areas, destroying my already ill body and breaking my autistic little brain, barely sleeping for days, having panicked crying fits where I self-harm because it’s not good enough and I don’t know how to make it right... What I finally accomplish by putting in all that effort, self sabotage and sacrifice?

Oh, it just fell into my hands because I’m THAT blessed, apparently! It’s all just LUCK AND TALENT I DIDN’T DO A THING TO EARN! I’m SO lucky and effortlessly talented! I feel SO fucking flattered!!! :) Thank you SO much! :) I’ve never EVER doubted myself also! :D

#also i know there's typos but you know what there's nothing of?#my shits to give or any energy from how exhausted i already was before all this

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crimsxnflxwerz · 7 years ago

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Don’t Want it Troubling Your Mind [bfu fic] -chapter 4

Don’t Want it Troubling Your Mind Fandom: buzzfeed unsolved Pairing: Shane Madej/Ryan Bergara; Shane Madej & Ryan Bergara Summary: Shane Madej really liked Ryan Bergara. He was funny, a joy to mess with, and took his brand of teasing pretty well. He would consider him a friend, kind of. But when the team goes to investigate the Franklin Castle for ghosts, Shane gets more than he bargained for, and the results could cost him his friendship with Ryan. Rating: teen Warnings: Demonic Possession, Existential Crisis, Complicated Relationships Authors note: This is a repost from Archive for people who don’t like Archive/prefer tumblr/etc. sup guys.

A week goes by. A whole week. And not just any week, the kind of week where you can feel every second of every day, grinding your teeth, unable to feel anything except your blood pumping through your body and gravity pressing down on your bones. The kind of week that lasts more than seven simple days.

No, it wasn’t the work that was getting deep under Shane’s skin, it wasn’t the stress, or the sleep, or the lack of appetite. It wasn’t his used up sick days, or the laundry sitting in a pile at the end of his bed. It wasn’t the rising electricity bills, or the polluted city air, or the hole forming in his favorite pair of socks.

It was Ryan Bergara.

You see, this whole week, Shane and Ryan didn’t really talk. No, what they did was an elaborate dance. They would discuss, not talk. They would plan, not hang. They wouldn’t make eye contact. They wouldn’t smile or laugh. They barely acknowledged each other’s presence unless it was unavoidable.

To be clear, this was not Shane’s choice. If he was in charge of whatever this was, it would be cancelled immediately. Shane missed Ryan’s quirky smile, and his cheerful laugh, and his playful banter. It wasn’t that he didn’t have other friends, it wasn’t anything like that. It was just, Ryan was special. All his friends were special, everyone was special to him. Everyone was different in their own ways, bringing new ideas to the table, sharing weird thoughts, laughing together. He missed that with Ryan. He missed Ryan.

He may have heard that the clip of the demon was under scrutiny right now in the office. The camera guys remembered seeing some weird stuff happening on the cameras, but they couldn’t conclude if it was fake or not. A deeply rooted part of him knew, for a fact, that the film hadn’t been tampered with. Beyond trusting Ryan, he’d seen this creature that manipulated the footage, the bustling swarm of bees, the storm cloud of evil, or something.

Speak of the devil and he shall appear. As Shane grew more distant from his own life, Anael started appearing in small patches throughout the day. Shane could see it in other people’s face, hear its voice in the wind, feel the heat under his skin, like something alive lived there. He felt haunted. He never thought he’d feel this way. He always viewed a haunting like those typical horror movie theatrics. Complete with dish tossing and flickering lights. This was none of that. Anael crept into his mind and laid all the traps. Every sense, manipulated, made vulnerable. The ghost he’d seen in his apartment building before, that must have been Anael. He had done extensive research about the building, and it was relatively new construction, on land that wasn’t cursed in any way. There were no records of deaths, unusual occurrences, or hauntings to be found. With what Anael could do to his vision, hearing, and perception, he figured that must be it.

He wasn’t at the point yet of looking into ways to get rid of demons. There was still a part of him that wanted so desperately for this all to be a bad burrito, or lack of sleep, or too much caffeine. He thought of seeing a therapist, because for a hot second, he believed his google diagnosis of psychosis.

Ever since Franklin Castle, he’d felt beyond fucked up. He wasn’t really sure how to go about patching things up, especially while the reason they were broken was still active in his life. Anael wasn’t doing much but just spooking him now. In fact, he felt as if the fun that Anael was having was becoming repetitive. He knew that the demon hated repetitive things, he’s sure it would spice it up a little soon enough. He feared the worse for when that happened.

The Franklin Castle episode ended up being delayed, due to the questionable footage. People were still looking at it, wondering what was wrong there. No one found anything to suggest tampering, but they still didn’t believe it was real. Instead, the boys were charged with looking for a new place to shoot.

Shane honestly thought this would be a good thing. It would take their minds off of what happened, distract himself from whatever was happening to him, and let them move along in the series. After a little bit of searching, they decided to go to the Villisca axe murder house in Iowa. It was a strange little house in a strange little town. Along with being strange, it was also old. Many people had owned it since the murder, and many people have toured it as well. Shane did a little digging and found that there were many reports of whispers, experiencing strange urges, and other classic haunting things, like noises and unexplained temperature drops.

Shane was pretty sure that he could manage on shoot without doing anything too stupid.

Probably.

The shoot was in three days. They planned on driving, so maybe he could convince the group that they could take two cars (something about the luggage being too big) so that he could spend some quality time with Ryan. He was sure he could fix this, if only Ryan would let him. Not that he blamed Ryan for any of this, it wasn’t his fault- it couldn’t be. Shane was the one who called Ryan’s show a joke. He was the one who couldn’t accept facts or admit that he was wrong. Ryan probably felt more offended by Shane’s apparently disbelieve and lack of faith in him than by any offhanded comment about the show. Friends were supposed to trust each other, through thick and thin, through better or worse.

Shane mapped out the course they would take. Around sixteen hours, give or take, that they would be driving. It was already a full day of driving, and with time for stops, as well as driver switches, they would have to plan on travel being around 18 hours. They wouldn’t be able to shoot, even if they got on the road at the crack of dawn. He would have to stock up on five-hour energy, or a monster cup of coffee, or something. He just hoped that Ryan would be into the idea, the separate cars thing, that is.

When Shane arrived at the office, it was already bustling. It was 7am, and lots of people had come early to get work done earlier. It was rapidly approaching Halloween, and that meant parties. The earlier they could get out of work, the better, in that case. Arriving before 7am was just the compromise.

Shane wasn’t so big on parties, so he didn’t really care if he got home later. He was just going to go home and swap his work clothes for pajamas, pop some popcorn, and settle in for a scary movie anyways. He smiled at the thought, but did deflate a little when he remembered that Ryan probably wouldn’t be joining him.

As he walked to his desk, he wondered if he should just come right out and say it. Tell Ryan what was happening, that a demon was haunting him, making him say and do things. He wanted to tell Ryan, but there was a fear deep in his chest, one of insecurity. What if Ryan thought he was pulling his leg? What if he thought that Shane just wanted that get out of jail free card, and just made it all up? Shane was a lot of things, even an asshole sometimes, but pretending to be possessed was not something he would ever do to prank Ryan. Call out to spirits? Yeah. Challenge demons and lay on pentagrams on the ground? Yeah, he would do that. All that stuff was humorous. Ryan always laughed at his antics. Being possessed, or pretending to be? No. That was somehow crossing a line. Shane wasn’t really a man to cross lines often.

Ryan was at his desk next to Shane’s when he got there.

“Morning, Ryan.” Shane said. He smiled. Ryan glanced up at him quickly in acknowledgement, before looking right back down at his screen.

“Morning,” he said. “So, got everything planned out for the trip?”

“Yeah, about that,” Shane began, pausing just enough to get Ryan to look at him again. “I was wondering if we could take two cars. Me and you in one, the crew in a second.”

“Um, why would we do that?” Ryan asked. He looked back towards his computer. Shane sighed.

“I thought that it would give everyone more room.” Shane shrugged. “It is going to be a long car right after all.”

Ryan was quiet for a moment, staring intently at his screen. He seemed to be considering what Shane was saying. Shane sheepishly crossed his fingers.

“Okay, sure,” he agreed. Shane silently cheered. “We can do that.”

“You wanna take my car or yours?” Shane asked. Ryan looked back at the taller man and quirked a small smile.

“Mine, of course.” He said. Then, almost like he’d caught himself having fun, his face fell, and he looked back at his monitor. “Just, make sure you’re ready, we’ll be leaving really early.”

Shane sat down at his desk, mentally preparing all the things he needed to accomplish on this car ride. He was going to patch things up with Ryan. They were gonna be close again, and Shane wanted nothing more than that. Well, he also wanted this damn demon to leave him alone, but in his book, Ryan came first, always.

That night he called Sara to hang out at his place. She was glad to chill, since she wasn’t too big on parties either. She came over and they changed into the spookiest pajamas they had, popped some fresh popcorn on the stove, and settled down to watch some bad horror movies on Netflix. They put on Friday the Thirteenth, but Stranger Things was in their queue for series to watch together, so they figured that would be next.

“So,” Sara said, plopping down on the couch with their bowl of popcorn. She crossed her legs under it, tucking her feet in. Shane sat next to her. It was oddly reminiscent of cuddling with Ryan on his couch during the documentaries night. To think that wasn’t so long ago, but it felt like it’d been years at this point. “How’s the Ryan situation?”

“Ahh, do you really gotta bring that up?” Shane sighed, but there was also teasing in his voice. He knew she was just concerned, and it wasn’t like he’d done anything too horrible, so it shouldn’t be hard to talk about it. For whatever reason, he just kept making it harder, which he’d quickly realized was a horrible thing to be doing.

“Hey! I’m concerned about you!” She said, smiling. “I believe in you, Madej. You and Ryan will patch things right up, then you’ll go back to being dorks or whatever.”

“Hey, I’m not a dork.” Shane said, though it had no heat. He knew she was right.

“Yeah, because lots of cool grown men get excited about kid’s cartoon series.” She teased.

“Gravity Falls is a masterpiece,” Shane argued. “Dipper is the most relatable character to ever exist.”

Sara shrugged. “Wendy was my favorite.”

After that, Friday the Thirteenth started playing, and they began their little movie watching spree. After the third episode of Stranger Things, Sara forced herself to stop watching. She didn’t really plan on sleeping over, so she got all her things and left, wishing him a goodnight. When she was gone, Shane glanced at the time. 12:20am. He managed to carry himself to his bed somehow, and as soon as his head hit the pillow, he was out.

In his dream, he’s in a dark room, but he recognizes it. It’s a blue bedroom, moonlight peeks in from the cracks in the curtains. He’s not alone. Beside him sits a figure. He can tell that it’s Ryan. He wonders if this is some continuation of that last dream he had, but the thought leaves his head like it was blown away. He can’t see Ryan’s face, but he knows the expression there already. He’s frowning, but not an upset frown, a contemplative one. He raises a hand in the dark, touches his lips, and sighs. Shane can feel the tension in the air thinning out, as Ryan moves back in, closing the distance between them. He feels the side of Ryan’s head press into his chest, an arm wrapped around his waist. His other hand bracing himself against the bed, Shane can feel the dip. He’s not sure where to put his own hands, but one finds its way to Ryan’s hair and tangles itself there.

“It’s okay, I know this isn’t you,” Ryan says, and it sounds weird, like they’re underwater. “I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.”

Shane opens his mouth to speak, but the words catch in his throat. Suddenly he feels an anger well up inside him. He tries to push it back, push it away, because it’s not his own, but he fails. The anger rises up and takes control of his body. He fists his hand in Ryan’s hair and yanks him off of him. Shane watches from outside of himself, as his body pins Ryan to the bed and growls like an animal. He moves forward to try and push his body off of Ryan, but then he turns his head and looks at himself. His eyes are yellow. So, so yellow, and so hot. Angry. Just this look sends Shane backwards, out of the room, and he hears the door slam and lock. Tears stream down his face.

“No!” he screams, but no one can hear him. “Fuck! No, no, no! I don’t want this! I fucking hate this!”

Shane jolted awake. He felt something on his face, and when he reached up, he wiped away tears. He sat up and saw that his pillow was wet, as well. Had he been crying?

The dream he had was foggy, but he remembered the hot anger, the desperate begging, the slamming door. He shivered. Just when he thought Anael was leaving him alone, he comes straight back with a dream to torture him.

He checked his clock. 5:57am. He might as well get ready for work. The shoot was in two days, and they would be leaving tomorrow. He still hadn’t packed yet, but he figured he could just do that after work today.

He walked into his bathroom and turned the light on, revealing a figure standing behind him to his left. He jumped, biting back a scream. The figure was a man with piercing yellow cat eyes, skin black as soot, with horns spiraling up out of its choppy black hair. It looked more like a shadow than a man, the edges of it blurring and misting. Shane spun around to face it, but it wasn’t there. He turned back around to look in the mirror and it was still there.

“What is it Madej?” the figure said, but there was no mouth, just a voice clear as day echoing in his head. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No, no, no,” Shane said through clenched teeth. “Stop fucking with me.”

“Maybe I would, if you would just let me in—” the figure raised an arm to touch Shane’s shoulder. Before it could touch him, he jumped away from the mirror, staring back into the bathroom. Mist seemed to pour from all the little shadows in his bathroom to form a man. Shane moved backwards again, but tripped over his own feet and fell. He landed on his ass, looking up at the shadow demon.

“I saw what you want to do to Ryan,” Shane growled. Scared, but angry. The combination knocked the breath from his chest, made his head spin. “If you so much as breath in Ryan’s direction, I’ll kill you.”

The yellow eyes narrowed with mirth, and a horrible, echoing laugh sounded through his head.

“You? Kill me?” it laughed. “Not even in your dreams, Madej.”

The demon’s laughter got deeper and deeper as it’s body twisted and snapped, shrinking in on itself and reforming into something else. Shane scrambled to his feet, and when he looked back, a black dog had taken the demon’s place. It also had poison-yellow eyes, but this monster had large, white teeth and red, red gums. Shane bolted for his door, the dog growling and taking off after him, its jaws snapping mere inches from his ankles. He swung his door open and slammed it shut, sighing in relief when he felt a large thud hit the wood followed by a pained whimper.

At the sound of a cleared throat, Shane looked to the side. His neighbor was standing outside their apartment, giving him a concerned look. Shane slid down the door and sat on the floor. He smiled as normally as possible and waved.

“Such a great morning, isn’t it?” he laughed.

When Shane went back into the apartment after a quick walk outside to clear his head, it was exactly as he had left it. Nothing was out of place; besides the things he’d knocked over in his mad dash outside. He hoped that Anael didn’t decide to make yet another demon dog appearance. That one was by far the most terrifying.

It wasn’t as if Shane didn’t like dogs. He never had a dog in his life, or a cat, or anything larger than your average rodent. Dogs tended to make him nervous, generally, although he rationally knew that most of them were harmless. Stray dogs, however? They were unpredictable. They say not to pet stray dogs for a good reason.

Everything seemed to be okay, though, so he proceeded with getting ready. Though, he thought he would be early when he woke up this morning. He guessed he would have been if it weren’t for the demon haunting him. At this point, he could still solidly say that the demon scared him. Yeah, he wasn’t scared by much, but a demon who can transform into a rabid dog, speak through his mind, and wanted to ruin his life was pretty terrifying. Although, that fear was starting to move aside a little for a second feeling: anger. He was angry. Anael was getting in the way of his life, his friendships, his alone time. He was angry, because Ryan wasn’t talking to him, and he wasn’t doing anything about it.

This road trip would fix it. He would tie up all the loose ends. He would fix all the damage. He would trust Ryan and Ryan would trust him. He wouldn’t let the demon take Ryan, but he sure as hell was getting Ryan back.

He guessed that started with telling Ryan the truth.

When he walked into work, he immediately noticed that Ryan wasn’t at his desk. He saw that there were papers all over, his laptop open and dimmed in inactivity. There were two empty cups of coffee, a handful of printed photographs, a notebook, and three pens: one black, one red, and one blue. Shane looked around the room, but couldn’t see Ryan anywhere in the space. He pulled out his phone and opened his messaging app. He clicked on Ryan’s name.

His fingers hovered over the digital keyboard. Should he really shoot Ryan a text?

Fuck it.

Shane: Hey, you’re not at your desk, everything okay?

He sat down and booted up his computer. A few moments went by, where he mindlessly shuffled some documents around, before his phone chirped at him.

Ryan: yeah something’s come up Ryan: meet me in conference room b Ryan: we gotta talk

Shane immediately felt a little nauseous. He stood up so quickly that he didn’t see someone standing behind him, and knocked into them. Papers spilled out all over the ground.

“Oh god,” he said, bending down to help pick up the mess he made. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking—”

“Shane, it’s okay.” A familiar voice said. When he looked over at the person collecting papers with him, he saw that it was Keith. He grinned at Shane, collecting the last of the papers, before standing up. Shane handed him the ones he picked up. “In a rush?”

Shane scratched the back of his neck. “Uh, kinda, idk?” he wasn’t sure why he had the urge to run, but he did. “Sorry I bumped into you. You know how I get.”

Keith laughed. “Yeah, I know. I won’t keep you, here, thanks for helping me pick up.”

Shane blushed as he moved around Keith and made his way down the hall. He passed a few private offices and empty rooms, before he came to the conference rooms at the end of the hall. To the left were more rooms. He went up to the second one, took a breath in, and opened the door.

The conference room was spacious. In the middle of the floor was a table that easily sad ten people. All the chairs had wheels, and where all pushed out from the table in different directions like a group of people had just left. In one of the chairs sat Ryan. He seemed to be studying some papers. Shane cleared his throat, closing the door with a soft click.

Ryan turned around with a pensive look on his face. When he saw Shane, he seemed to almost smile, before his face fell.

“So, I’m just going to get right to the point,” he started, moving to stand. He didn’t look very happy. “We can’t publish the Franklin Castle episode.”

Shane felt like a rug was yanked out from under his feet. “What, now?”

“We can’t use the footage,” he repeated. “Remember the thing I showed you? I found more corruption and mysterious audio in the rest of the footage in the basement. When management saw the footage, they were convinced I had altered the footage, and demanded the original. I couldn’t give them anything, because I hadn’t done anything to the footage.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing. “They said that if I didn’t remove the altered footage, they would cancel my show. I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to just scrap the whole episode.”

Shane stepped closer to Ryan, holding out his hands as if to comfort his friend, but stopped halfway. “Ryan, I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t do anything to the audio or the video! That was real evidence!” Ryan shouted, and it sounded desperate. “I swear I didn’t do anything! I swear!”

“Hey, hey,” Shane said in a calming voice. He reached out and grabbed Ryan by the shoulders as gently as possible. Ryan looked up at him. “Hey, I believe you. I believe you.”

Ryan looked hopeful for a moment, before he shrugged off Shane’s hands, looking hurt. “You said the show was a joke. You’re probably just saying this now, because I was mad at you.”

“Ryan, please, listen to me,” Shane started, trying to appear as honest as possible. “I believe you. You want to know why?”

Ryan was silent for a while, still sporting the lidded, untrusting look. Then, he sighed, nodding. “Yeah.”

“When we were in that house, I felt some things.” He said. “The first time I went into the basement, I was snooping around when I felt cold hands grab my shoulders from behind me. I turned around and no one was there. That’s why I was running.”

Ryan’s eyes widened. “So, when you were freaking me out in the basement—”

“I was experiencing something again like that. It was so weird and freaky,” Shane said. “I didn’t want to freak you out just then, and then later I just didn’t want to admit it.”

Ryan grinned, moving forward into Shane’s space and placing a hand on his arm. “So, you believe me? And stuff happened to you there?”

“Yes, of course, I believe you,” Shane said. “I know you wouldn’t alter tapes to fake evidence. You’re not that kinda guy.”

The smaller man let go of his arm and turned back around to collect his things.

“Well, even if we don’t get to post the Franklin Castle video,” he said, “at least we’re gonna be filming again soon. At the Villisca ax murder house, right?”

“Yeah,” Shane confirmed. They walked together back to their desks. “The drive’ll be fun, and I have a good feeling about this place.”

“Me, too,” Ryan agree. For a moment, they just looked at each other. Stood in each other’s space. Ryan looked as excited as he felt. Maybe everything was going to be okay after all.

#bfu fic #my fic #buzzfeed unsolved #shyan #shyan fic #me

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oliverwithoutthetwist · 5 years ago

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Physical and Mental - agony - (warning: suicidal thoughts)

Hello again, my for all eternity deserted friend

This post will be long as hell and (WARNING) it includes various depression filled and suicidal thoughts

Topics: Current appearance . Others’ perception . Romance. Agony . Physical pain . Suicidal Ideation . Loneliness . Family

1- Mirror Selfie above

Torso- This was the first time I found a mirror that allowed me to capture more than just the face (in a way that everything is sort of visible and I’m not just a faraway being). The legs are not present but I’ll find a way to reveal them along side the rest of my prison-like body somehow. I want to have everything clear on record.

Face- My features here reveal the facial expression I tend to make when anxious and paranoid. Note: Currently, I’m always anxious and paranoid when I leave my flat, afraid of being “discovered” as a “fraud”. Continuing, after analyzing the image, I now understand why strangers see me as a lost child. Imagine the person in the pic above being 5ft (my embarrassing height) and standing uncomfortably on the underground station platform. Yes...

2- Agonizing reality

12 year old look- Yes, I do look like a 12(hope not less)-14 (at max) boy when walking alone down the street. And, let me tell you, this thing of looking like a child was sort of fun at first but, now, it has proven to be a struggle.

The stares- I can’t drink or smoke in public comfortably like i used to. People glare now, whisper between themselves, laugh and sometimes comment (rather loudly) when seeing me engage in adult behaviors, behaviors that merely consist in me hanging out with my young adult friends. “Adult” like me.

Romance- The universe, currently, does not allow me to be with anyone romantically. A bloke my age, or even 5 years younger, would automatically pass as a pedophile if he did has much as hold my hand with other people around. No 20 something year old wants to be seen as a pervert, someone who wishes to #!% little children. This is indeed understandable, I wouldn’t want to be perceived as that as well.

Pedophiles- 50plus year old repulsive men are the only ones who seem to want to (or actually do so) approach me with the intent of having “sexual relations”. With me, the lost and innocent looking young boy. I never knew this to be so common. It’s terrifying.

Nighttime stroll- I used to sometimes enjoy walking back towards my flat instead of taking the tube, especially when the moon is high. I don’t do that anymore though. It has become dangerous. The reasons: 1- Looking as young as I do, and being in the street alone after the sun sets, I am now the perfect and rather easy to capture prey for the so called “pedo” to attack. 2- I’ve been called a “faggot” two times now (note: my gay friends have never been insulted like that). “I guess” no “straight” young teen dresses like I do so I am, automatically to the ignorant human, a miniature “roostersucker” and this can actually lead to a group of neanderthals beating the shit out of me. When having that appearance, a person is indeed an easy target. Note: I actually live in, what’s considered to be, a safe country. These things still happen though and not that rarely. 3 (worse scenario)- Ok. Imagine this: there I go, down the street, no sunlight, looking like a young boy when suddenly a breeze opens my loose fitting jacket to reveal a previously hidden female body. Just a quick look and I’m suddenly discovered by a transphobe as a “fake” male, a “freak”, a trans person. This is horrifying. I’ve read/know of testimonies by trans blokes (mostly pre-t) who were beat up rather violently or/and raped with the excuse of it being an attempt to help them, to cure their “disease”.

I’m in hell

3- Suicidal Ideation has returned

Lately, I keep thinking about the various boxes of prescription pills that are hidden in my wardrobe.

Swallowing, about 5 by 5, of my rather strong anti-depressants until there’s nothing left. And then, adding to the mix, my mood stabilizers.

This is sure to provoke an effect on the body.

Short story- Before coming out, and after I started meds, I went on a google quest to know how many boxes of pills (the specific ones I take) would kill me. I still have, in my macbook, a document that holds that information.

The ultimate swallowing of all my anti-depressant and mood stabilizers has yet to happen though. I like to plan things, to make sure I’ll be successful while doing them, so I did my research and found cases of people who tried suicide by prescription drugs and ended up not being able to perform the simplest of tasks and requiring the assistance of others to go through life, their body and movement ability destroyed. When reading this, I became terrified of surviving the attempt and not even being physically able to repeat it. The body that has brought me so much misery over the years would become not only the prison that has always been but also a bloody straight jacket. And this would be my life, until fate decided its end.

Short fact- Before coming out (early October), after years of research, I had finally found a flawless way of suicide (an “exotic” and not well known way). The Holy Grail. I will not reveal what it is. I don’t wish for anyone to find it and swallow "the thing” because of me and the information I have provided here. That being said, this “thing” was being sold on a website (for other purposes, so completely legal) but it was temporarily unavailable. You had the option of sending them your email in order to receive a notice when “the thing” was back in stock. I did that and I did receive a message. It was at the end of November that they announced its availability. I deleted this announcement. Curiously enough, I had just come out and, for the first time, I was excited to be alive and to see what the future would bring.

The excitement has now vanished. Reality has hit. I used to be fully accepted when I was hidden inside the character I had created as means of survival, a fake individual who caused me excruciating pain. Years of self harm accompanied me through out. Quick note: I will, later on, share my experience on the subject. Continuing, hiding misery did in fact provide me with being accepted by others. I’m not saying my friends (for example) are transphobic. What I’m saying is that real life, in its total, is a lot harder now. But I will not go back to how it was before. I can’t do it. No way. Even, going out of the flat without a binder makes me feel so anxious that my breathing stops working properly. Yes, going back is not an option at this point.

4- Physical pain

Binder- I’ve recently shared here the physical pain I’ve been experiencing due to overwearing my binder. The chest area does not hurt but my back does, a lot. The pain is so bad that I’m only able to sleep due to extreme exhaustion. I might be tired but my back will keep me awake until, hours later, I simply pass out. I’ve been experiencing this for over a week now. Sometimes it goes away and I think it’s over but it comes back and is horrible.

Heavy head and lost of balance- I have a lot of important and unavoidable things to take care of at the moment. I’m bloody anxious as hell. I have ADHD, which makes this all outstandingly overwhelming and confusing. I’m trying to keep myself focused and I don’t take any meds for it. After my diagnose, I chose not to (I was taking 4 pills a day at the time and didn’t want to add more to my daily breakfast routine). . . . All this to say that, today, my head suddenly turned heavy. It’s difficult to describe actually. Let me try. Imagine your head being somehow pulled by a strong rubber band. That’s it, that’s how I can describe it. I apologize, I can’t find better words for it. But yes, the “heavy sensation” made me believe my head was tilted to the left without my control when, in fact, it was straight. This belief made me experience difficulty with walking. All day, I had to concentrate really hard in order to not appear drunk or high. I’ve heard of this before, this happening due to anxiety, but I had never experienced it first hand.

Panic attack- Adding to all this, I had a day filled with sudden issues! 1-I opened a new bank account with my new ID but, due to an error, the guy found out my name used to be *insert birth name here* and stopped referring to me as “son” and started treating me as “miss”, even though my ID says MALE. 2-Again, stares and laughs at the little boy who thinks he’s all grown up. 3-Pain and lost of balance 4-Panic attack (a strong as shit one). 5-My friends are suddenly not open to let me share my troubles (these are the people who have always criticized me for not talking to them about my personal issues). Ex: friend: “Are you ok?”, me “uh... not really. I just had a panic attack and basically spent the last hour attempting to breathe, screaming and sobbing”, friend: “...”, friend 2: “This is the best chicken ever. Oh! I have a new crush.” 6- I left my ID inside a taxi. The taxi driver was horrible to me the whole trip. When I went to pay, I gave him money and told him he didn’t have to give me the change. Due to the head heaviness thingy, I was desperate to go to my room and lie down. The thing is: I was so confused with my surroundings, that I let my wallet fall when I got up to leave. I was quick to notice I had left it there though. I shouted in despair towards the guy, telling him “wait!”. He actually noticed me but still drove off. I tried to run and place myself in front of the car to force him to stop but failed to do so. The driver left with my wallet. I thought I had been saved when my landlord and neighbor called me. I looked to see him looking through his window and, after noticing my attempt to reach the taxi, he memorized the license plate. I was saved! Not. I called all my city’s taxi companies and the guy’s car didn’t belong to any of them. They said he must be an independent taxi driver. He’s registered though, his car had everything to be official. There’s a company that controls all of it but they did not pick up my phone call. I had to send an email. So, my ID is basically gone (the ID I spent extra money so I could have it as quickly as possible, the ID I went to pick up yesterday, the ID that made me almost cry from joy and relief). If they do reply and contact the driver, he will probably deny having the wallet. It’s not because of money, I didn’t have any, only enough for the taxi drive. He didn’t have anything to steal. The bank card inside was old and had already been canceled. I only need my ID! My precious baby! The driver treated me like shit, he’s not going to be kind enough to report the missing item. He probably just threw it away. Where I live, that’s actually a crime. You have 7 days to report a lost ID. He can always say another passenger took it. . . Right! My baby is gone and I can’t do things grown ups do anymore. 7- Oh yes, my macbook charger suddenly broke and it’s expensive as hell. FMbloodyL

Anyway...

Status: I’m uncomfortable as hell! I’m a mess, mentally and physically. This day was... so many things... It’s surreal!

5- Loneliness

I started this blog as a way to make a record of my transition. I was hoping (and still sort of am) for, one day, to look at it again and see all the steps it took in order to achieve my life changing transformation and personal accomplishments.

Not only that, it was also something for my friends to check from time to time so they could understand my situation a bit better and accompany me when I leave this city (not long now). They were actually the ones who asked excitedly if they could follow me. Yet, they did not. I don’t think they ever even visited the link I gave them.

Another thing I thought would be nice was chatting with other fellow transgenders and share deep thoughts or just have a nice chat. This didn’t happen though. I sent some messages to tumblr bloggers I found to be interesting. They answered me, very nicely. But they ended up ignoring the message I sent afterwards. I swear to the bloody stars that I wasn’t offensive in any way.

6- Parents

My parents (and brother) still don’t know

They’re blind as hell

They care

They just don’t see

They’ve always pushed aside the emotional aspects of life

They’re good people

But they simply prefer to ignore deeper issues

It’s not their fault

It’s how they were raised

And, consequently, it’s how I was raised too

It’s how I learned to also ignore those issues and live in bloody agony all this time

Conclusion:

I’m alone

#suicide #ftm #transgender #suicidal thoughts #trans guy #depression #thoughts #binder #back pain #pain after binding #mental issues #loneliness #coming out #family

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

I'd advise startups to pull a Meraki initially if they can, which is the most influential founder not just for me but for most people you could ask. Is most controversial: the suggestion that variation in wealth was in itself a good thing, but it didn't seem possible to start a company.1 The giant plant he built at River Rouge between 1917 and 1928 literally took in iron ore at one end and sent cars out the other. After all, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Most hackers are employees, and this molds you into someone to whom starting a startup consumed your life, but I haven't seen it.2 Ignorance can't solve everything though. Ok, so life actually is short.

This means there should be a lot of time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to set up an application to run on multiple servers.3 You can tell the child that he or she is an X, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing. I do: that being mean makes you stupid. In fact, this is actually good news for two reasons: a it's an encouraging thought. It won't seem so preposterous in 10,000 years.4 There are some obvious dangers: pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are just as much of the design and manufacturing happens in a long supply chain, whose products the car companies ultimately assemble and sell. And in the mid 20th century. In addition to the concentration that comes from specialization, startup hubs are also markets. Because founders have the upper hand over investors. And VCs who try to compete with Silicon Valley.

It would be insane to go to war just to induce more national unity. It's not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. The startup will now do that themselves. You don't have to be on the board to help a startup.5 I'm saying is that the old way sucked for startups. When you find PR firms promoting something as the next development platform, you can sometimes get away with it. This was exactly the right thing. Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them.

The word used for this process was misleadingly narrow: deregulation. Google or Facebook suing startups for patent infringement. This kind of work ends up being done by people who only think about one thing, it's the place to do it so long as the new model isn't delayed.6 If your company makes software to do x? Only a few do so far, but I must have been: sure, give 'em whatever they ask for, so long as I enjoyed it. As you read this, a whole new generation of trolls on a new generation of software is being written way too fast for Microsoft even to channel it, let alone write their own in house. But recently I realized we can also attack the problem downstream.

And kids do need protecting.7 I understood why. That has two important implications. The fiery reaction to the release of Arc had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize where the high-paying union job came from.8 What's missing or broken in your daily life? Hotels now are like airlines in the 1970s before they figured out how to increase their load factors. I've seen is fragmentation.9

There are multiple forces at work again. As the roast turkey appeared on the table, his alarmingly perceptive 5 year old son suddenly asked if the turkey had wanted to pay people proportionate to their value, they couldn't have figured out how. They're the skiers who ski on the diamond slopes. Maybe successful hedge fund managers are mean; I don't know enough to say. But liking the idea of delivering desktop-like applications over the web. They still think of them as children, even though they may constrain you a bit, because they also motivate you. I'm forty. To someone who hasn't learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard and therefore impressive as math, yet broader in scope. If you want to reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?

Notes

In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other Lisp features like lexical closures and rest parameters. If a company in Germany told me about several valuable sources. Dropbox wasn't rejected by all the best day job. VCs recapitalize the company.

The aim of such high taxes during the Bubble. It's unlikely that every fast-growing startup gets on the way we pitch startup school to potential speakers. The image shows us, they sometimes say.

Reporters sometimes call us VCs, I would take another startup to be when it converts. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The First Industrial Revolution happen earlier?

You may not be if Steve hadn't come back within x amount of stock the VCs buy, because living at all. This is not yet released. Naive founders think Wow, a lot of the movie, but as impoverished outcasts, which people used to be hidden from statistics too. This is a bit misleading to treat macros as a process rather than doing a bad deal.

It would probably also a name. Or more precisely, there was a false positive, this is largely determined by successful businessmen and their wives. We often discuss revenue growth. Not least because they're determined to fight.

So if we wanted to go all the investors agree, and yet in both cases you catch mail that's near spam, for example, you're using a degenerate case of heirs, rather than lose a prized employee. So whatever market you're in the services, companies that seem to understand technology because they are so dull and artificial that by the high score thrown out seemed the more subtle ways in which many people mistakenly think it might seem, because users' needs often change in their heads a giant house of cards is tottering. In fact, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniations, but except for money.

And journalists as part of creating an agreement from scratch.

Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 1996. This wipes out the answer, 5050. For founders who take the term literally. When economists talk about humans being meant or designed to express algorithms, and that the rest of the optimism Europeans consider distinctly American is simply what they do.

Steven Hauser. In a startup to an adult. It's hard for us, they compete on price, they were getting results. He had such a dangerous mistake to believe that was a very misleading number, because that's how we gauge their progress, but that's not as completely worthless as a collection of qualities helps people make investment decisions well when they're on the back of Yahoo, we met Aydin Senkut.

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theadmiringbog · 6 years ago

Photo

Most tech markets tend to end up with one company with most of the market share. And that company tends to be all the value that gets created in that sector, from a return standpoint.

... the personality type of the technical founder who creates a breakthrough product, they don’t necessarily intuitively understand that that next part involves taking down the market.

Every product in tech becomes obsolete, and they become obsolete pretty quickly.

If all you do is take your current product to market and win the market, and you don’t do anything else—if you don’t keep innovating—your product will go stale. And somebody will come out with a better product and displace you.

The general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric.

distribution moats

The problem with network effects is they unwind just as fast. And so they’re great while they last, but when they reverse, they reverse viciously. Go ask the MySpace guys how their network effect is going.

How many great product pickers do you have, people who can actually conceptualize new products? And then how many great architects do you have, who can actually build it? Sometimes, by the way, those are the same person. Sometimes it’s a solo act. And sometimes that’s the founder. As you scale, you need more of those people. But I always think it’s a matter of, okay, how many of those people do you have or can you go get? Or, back to acquisition, how many of those can you acquire? And then basically that’s the number of products you can be working on.

If it’s the founder, fair enough. But you need to construct the organization so that the founder has the time to continue to do that. So that gets to all the questions around when you need an outside CEO or when you need a COO.

I’m always pushing companies to go to a flat structure of independent teams. I’m really on the Jeff Bezos program on that, the two-pizza team thing. I think hierarchies kill innovation for the most part.

Key components of personal time management include: Delegation. Auditing your calendar regularly. Saying no more often. Realizing your old way of operating will no longer work. Finding time for the things you care about in life.

The very best executives tend to be a combination of a router (i.e., they send items on to other people for execution and end meetings with few to no action items for themselves), a strategist, and a problem solver (i.e., someone who can identify when the team is off track and dive in to help).

A common trigger of founder burnout is finding yourself working on things that you hate. Some product-centric founders end up having to spend endless hours on managing people, sitting in meetings discussing sales compensation plans, sales pipelines, marketing plans, HR issues, and other items that bore them to tears. Mark Zuckerberg famously delegated big swaths of Facebook to Sheryl Sandberg in order to free up more time to focus on product and strategy.

One thing I’ve observed is that you can’t make too many things at a company mandatory. You really have to be judicious about the things that you’re going to require, because there just can’t be that many. There’s probably something related to performance and feedback. There’s probably something related to whatever your planning process is. And then there’s a few day-to-day tactical things, like a launch review. But you can’t have that many and you can only have one at each level.

Don’t get too comfortable. Because if you are succeeding in scaling, you’re not going to be able to use everything you came up with for the next phase. Getting your organization used to the fact that it’s an iterative process and that you’re a learning organism and actually celebrating that is much better than resisting.

You can almost start viewing yourself as a failure if you have to change these things, and that’s not true. It means you’re succeeding and you need a new thing.

At every stage, though, you want to find a balance between that long-term charter (“Why do we exist?”) and the short-term plan (“What are we going to do?”).

With executives, there’s no reason ever for hiring someone without thorough reference checks. So, when you talk to various colleagues of this person, one of the things you should always ask is, “If this person joined my company, would you join?”

A really great executive is about six to twelve months ahead of the curve. They’re already planning for and acting on things that are going to be important six to twelve months in the future. A decent executive is delivering in real time, now to one to three months in advance.

Most of the time there is no “right” answer, and org structure is really an exercise in pragmatism. That is, what is the right structure given the talent available to your company, the set of initiatives you need to pursue, and your company’s 12- to 18-month time horizon?

Reporting chains are ultimately about decision-making. For example, there is a natural tension between engineering and product management, so where do you want most decisions to be taken if the two groups disagree? The person who both functions report to ultimately functions as the tie-breaker between the orgs.

My first experience of the Band-Aid phenomenon was at Facebook. Matt Cohler played the role there. And the idea was that for any function that didn’t have a leader or manager, he would step in. Or if there were teams that needed to be built out, he would step in. And I thought it was a really interesting role, ��

If you are an early stage company (e.g., 5 people with $2M in the bank) the primary thing you should do is seek product/market fit. Beyond

Growth marketing

Growth marketing is analytically driven marketing and includes all quantitative areas of marketing. This includes online advertising, email marketing (where conversion can be tightly measured), SEO/content marketing, viral marketing, and funnel optimization. Growth marketing includes demand generation or lead generation, but also encompasses converting leads to customers once they’ve landed on your website.

Growth marketing focuses on moving a handful of key metrics (e.g., signups, logins, conversions) in an ROI-focused manner. Many growth tactics were famously pioneered at Facebook, but were really a response to a macro shift in ROI-based advertising (starting with Google), email marketing campaigns, and the more general rise of the internet as a marketing channel. Social media marketing (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat) tends to fall under growth marketing or communications/PR in most technology organizations.

Product marketing

Product marketing (sometimes just “marketing” without a prefix word) is the canonical, old-school technology marketing discipline. This includes things like customer testimonials, feature requests, user testing and interviews, competitor analysis, collateral generation, and case studies. In the olden days (1970s and 1980s), product marketing and product management tended to be two sides of the same discipline, but this diverged over time.

Brand marketing

Brand marketing is focused on the squishier side of marketing: brand awareness and perception, logos, and other design elements. It is the Nike swoosh—but more than that, it’s about causing widespread association of Nike with not only the swoosh, but the attributes of athleticism and perseverance in popular culture. All marketing efforts ultimately contribute to the company brand.

PR and communications

Public relations is focused on story development (your company’s narrative), press (proactive, reactive, contributed content), events (speaking engagements and also networking opportunities to some extent), as well as product-focused activity such as reviews and awards programs. Media relations can benefit all areas of a company: Beyond simply telling the product story, PR can help with culture storytelling as well as executive profiles.

Additionally, PR campaigns of late have included influencer relations, though this is also a function that’s sometimes handled by a marketing team. PR teams are also usually the first point of contact in a crisis. Think of PR as the ongoing telling of the company story to the press and broader world.

Once you get to a company size of 100 people, internal comms is one of the first hires you should think about making. A good rule of thumb is one internal comms person for every hundred people. It’s important to make sure the brand message resonates internally with the same thing you’re saying externally.

The number one thing you need in a CMO is somebody who is an excellent leader. Because you’re never going to be an expert in the hundred things you now need to be good at, and I’m not being hyperbolic. To be a successful marketing leader, you have to have a little bit of knowledge of a hundred different skills. Everything from copywriting to creative to research to NPS.

You can tell a good PM from a bad PM based on how much time they spend on each of the above. If a PM’s time is spent solely on checklists and project management, they either (i) have a weak engineering management counterpart they are covering for, (ii) are not empowered to do their job by company management, (iii) do not understand their job, or (iv) are not respected by their peers and cannot do more important work. Optimally, most product management time should be going towards defining the product, prioritizing trade-offs, spending time with customers, and working with various functions on launch, feature iteration, and communication.53 The hardest part may be to separate whether the right person is in the right role versus whether your company is empowering that person properly.

2. Ability to prioritize. What is the value of a proposed product feature versus the engineering work needed to accomplish it? What is more important—a new product for the sales team or a feature for customers? Should pricing be optimized for consumers or small business owners? What is the 80% product that should be launched immediately and what singular customer problem does it solve?

Growth product manager

Growth PMs tend to be quantitative, analytical, numbers-driven, and in the best cases wildly creative and aggressive. The focus of the growth PM is to (i) determine the critical levers needed to drive product adoption and use, and then (ii) to manipulate those levers. For example, the growth team at Facebook added tens of millions of incremental users via email loops, funnel optimization, and large scale multivariate testing of sign up, conversion, and other flows. Growth PMs tend to work closely with engineering, marketing, UX, and in some cases partnership or deal teams. Sometimes growth marketing will play the role of growth product management and this role will report into marketing.

Giant chrome pandas.

Dropbox bought a giant chrome panda at the height of its funding success. As time went on and the company focused on frugality, the giant chrome panda became a sign of its earlier wanton spending, and became a constant reminder that you should save money. You can instill that lesson without wasting a ton of money on a chrome sculpture—for example, one company I heard of recently put a Juicero machine in its office as its own version of a “chrome panda.”

#High Growth Handbook #books

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sarahburness · 6 years ago

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Swipe Right on Mindfulness: Why I’m Glad I Gave Meditation a Try

“You have to be where you are to get where you need to go.” ~Amy Poehler

I sat there and listened, pretending to be interested.

Did he really just say he meditates every morning? Don’t roll your eyes. At least he’s really attractive. You can just ignore the hippy meditation stuff.

But c’mon. Meditate every morning at 6am? Who does that? How ridiculous.

So I did ignore his hippy meditation stuff; he eventually ignored me.

I have an endless supply of ill-fated dating-by-way-of-phone-app tales. Most of them end in a relatively similar fashion, but that’s for another blog or a cabernet-supported whine-fest with a good friend. This dating experience in particular was quite a bit different.

Although this was the last time I dated a beautiful actor-slash-model-slash-writer, it happened to be the start of something else. Something much bigger than the initial lesson I learned—that sliding my finger across a cracked iPhone screen while waiting in the grocery line behind an adorable elderly lady writing a check for donuts was, sadly, not going to lead me to my soulmate.

However, it would guide me to a discovery far more powerful and impactful.

Not until years later would I look back on this casual swipe right on my handheld device as one of the most profound decisions I had made in my adult life. To say it changed the trajectory of where I was headed wouldn’t be an overstatement.

Thanks, Tinder. I really should go back and award you those four stars. Remind me later.

But back to this awkward date.

Shortly before this guy began to “forget” to respond to my texts, before the “new phone, who’s this?” kick-to-the-gut, before the inevitable self-doubt blame game, there was a brief, almost forgettable moment during this date that I now fondly look back upon.

The Start of Something New

I was super insecure at the time.

How does my hair look? Why did I wear this old sweater? God, he’s a GQ cover model and I look like a rejected 1999 Old Navy performance fleece ad fused with the ‘before’ Proactiv infomercial image that airs at 2am.

My mind never stopped. I was the king of insults, and I was my favorite target.

But somehow, amidst the relentless inner dialogue and self-destructive thought patterns, I noticed a striking presence from this guy. When he spoke, he was so focused. When he listened, he did so intently.

Also, he was so nice. Plain and simple nice.

I suspected he wasn’t worried about what his hair looked like. (Note: It looked perfect. Whatever.) And it seemed like he wasn’t thinking ahead about what to say next, or regretting what he had said prior. He was present. So much so, it made me very uncomfortable.

As for myself, I had a checklist of things in my head to say as well as some predetermined witty lines that I was proud of—for real, some of them were funny. I even prepared some self-deprecating jokes about being a late-twenties directionless bartender, so I could at least claim to insult myself first if that subject came up.

It was exhausting.

Spoiler alert: This dating experience with Perfect Hair was short lived. But I beat myself up about it for a while.

What did I say? Why didn’t I get my haircut? Why didn’t I get a spray tan!? I went on and on. These questions were endless and unnecessary. Except maybe the tanning one. I really should have bronzed up a bit— a little color never hurt a pale person, as my mom always says. But I didn’t. And so there I was, annoyed, bitter, single—and yes, pasty.

At the time, it didn’t make any sense to me. I was bummed. I chalked it up to my continual bad luck and blamed the world for being out to get me. Ya know, the usual.

Little did I know that this one date would be such a turning point in my life.

A Seed Was Planted

My mind was a messy field of weeds and cobwebs, but somewhere among them was perfectly conditioned soil that could harbor some new kind of life. Something about this guy stuck in my mind. And that something grew. I would continue to insult myself for the foreseeable future, but I took a brief respite from the witty yet destructive banter in my head to explore that “silly hippy meditation stuff.”

“I meditate every morning,” I remember him saying.

I still thought this was a ridiculous admission, but I decided to look into it. Maybe for just five minutes. What did I have to lose?

So instead of spending further time mindlessly scrolling through my Instagram feed and wondering how I know so many people with flawless beauty who are perpetually on breathtaking vacations, I pulled up Google.

In addition to a roll of my eyes, the word “meditation” used to elicit a visual of an un-showered, bearded hippy sitting cross-legged, surrounded by a cloud of suffocating incense smoke, chanting unintelligible words.

It’s partly because the term carries with it some dated, preconceived ideas, sure. But I also grew up in a very conservative town a few miles down the road from the not-so-conservative Woodstock, NY, where a drive through would be a sightseeing tour of extreme body hygiene practices of “hippies” with a side of snide judgmental comments.

That was my introduction to this world. That was my initial—and only—understanding of people who participated in silly hippy meditation stuff.

But hold up: Meditation really just means sitting quietly and focusing on what’s going on in the moment? And breathing? That’s basically it? Is it really that simple?

Yah, man, it’s that simple.

There is obviously much more to it than that, of course. There are books upon books, courses and classes upon websites and blogs on meditation. But at its core, it really is so simple: Sitting and breathing.

Why the hell didn’t someone tell me that it wasn’t this weird, silly, far-left liberal belief system? That it didn’t require a robe, facial hair, and skipping a bunch of showers. I don’t have to chant? What about sitting cross-legged? Incense and a beard? No, no, and no?

WHAT. THE. HELL.

It sounded so easy and was also a huge relief, because I look terrible with a beard and I’m not at all flexible.

I had no reason not to give it a try.

I was finally in the perfect place, mentally and physically (no beard!), for my exploration of this topic to begin.

So I started reading. Book after book after book. With an apprehensive perspective and holed up in a coffee shop with my hand covering the title so no one could see what I was reading (Uh, It’s Game Of Thrones, bro,) I immersed myself in this stuff.

I also realize in hindsight that telling someone I’m reading Game Of Thrones is not any “cooler” than revealing I’m exploring meditation. It’s basically a dorky tie.

I started by seeking out authors who had the same skeptical approach that I initially had, as it helped me tread cautiously into something that could scare me away if I dove in too deep, too fast.

Initially, I thought it was a bunch of ridiculousness. I gave up once. Twice. Five times.

But I pushed through. I kept remembering that fleeting moment from that cringe-worthy date. How relaxed, how present, how kind he was.

He meditated every day.

If it worked for Head & Shoulders Model, it would work for me. I should put that on a hat.

Ever so slowly, in the subtlest ways, I began to notice a difference. It was minimal. It was almost unnoticeable.

I just felt… better. Lighter. Happier? Maybe. I couldn’t really pinpoint it, but it was something.

And it was exciting.

Everything Happens—Yes, You Guessed It—For a Reason

At this point, my perception of this ill-fated date started to shift. Maybe, just maybe, there was a purpose of this encounter. Maybe, just maybe, it was exactly what I needed at exactly that time in my life.

The phrase “everything happens for a reason” used to drive me crazy. Mostly because I find it’s something people usually say in lieu of giving actual advice. It’s a cop-out, really. If I tell you I was ghosted by awkward Prius guy, I don’t want you to tell me everything happens for a reason. I want you to confirm my beliefs that Prius drivers are obviously the worst and that it definitely had nothing to do with me.

But I now believe that everything really does happen for a reason. Even the existence of the Prius, though for reasons I have yet to understand.

And yes—even uncomfortable, no-good, very-bad dates.

Sometimes it just takes a little surrender and hindsight to come to this realization. For me, it also took a lot of cheap red wine and years of reflecting on past decisions—and eventually immersing myself in some mindfulness practices—to confidently say I understand this clichéd phrase. There’s always a lesson to be learned.

One of those lessons is that boxed wine gives me a bad headache.

Everything had happened as it should—to bring me to this moment, to this blog post, to this glass of wine (from a bottle), to this place in my life where I can reflect and appreciate. And what a liberating and exhilarating feeling it is to say, “Yup, that happened. Here I am. What’s next?”

I’ve spent most of my life under the impression that I made every wrong decision possible. That had I just gotten one thing right along the way, just one, I wouldn’t be where I am right now.

I would be married to the perfect person. I’d have a perfect career. A perfect kid. A perfect house. A perfectly filtered Instagram feed. A perfect chicken dinner, because clearly my inability to cook a simple meal stems from some bad decision I made somewhere along the way. Everything would be perfect and my chicken wouldn’t be rubbery.

But it’s not.

Or is it? Maybe this is perfection. (Not my chicken, though—I still overcook it every time!)

I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

It’s such a freeing feeling to let go of the past, to trust in where I am, to understand that everything I have experienced, whether I can understand it now or will come to a realization at some point down the road, has been leading me to where I am meant to be. My only job is to go with it.

Because, yes, everything is happening as it should, for a reason. Even the dates that don’t turn into what I had initially hoped they would.

Adopting this way of thinking has led to a much more relaxed, stress-free day-to-day life. Instead of wondering why something happened, I look for what I can take from the experience. Dating has led to endless discoveries about myself, other people, the world, and perspectives I was previously unfamiliar with.

Some monumental, some minimal.

Some dating experiences are so profound they lead you to stumble down a path to mindfulness and meditation, while others have more minor impacts, like several years of free HBO because a certain someone forgot to change his cable password after he abruptly and inexplicably stopped talking to you. (Thanks man! Hope you’re well!)

I’d say a more positive, mindful outlook and free weekly dates with VEEP’s President Selena Meyer are both steps in the right direction as well as perfectly fine reasons that these experiences occurred.

I believe all moments in life—big or small, happy or sad—always provide a takeaway. Of course, the harder the journey and the tougher the struggles, the more difficult it may be to find the reason. Maybe the reason will never be apparent. Perhaps we should trust that our path took us into—and through—these situations for a reason.

Not much has changed for me these days in terms of circumstances. I still go on the occasional bad date, have unexpected bummer days, and periodically find myself in inexplicable bad moods. But instead of dwelling on these moments or trying to find the reason behind them, I accept them. I trust that what seems “bad” on the surface may be beneficial in some unapparent way.

Plus, if I always tried to find a reason, I would drive myself mad and I would have less time for my aforementioned Instagram scrolling—by the way, I need to do more sit-ups. Oh and for real, am I the only one from my graduating class who isn’t #married?

Eyes closed, deep breath.

It would be misleading and simply unrealistic to say that meditation can lead to a smooth life filled with endless happiness. I don’t believe that to be true, and I think that would be missing the point.

I’m also not officially a psychiatrist—or psychologist? I confuse the two. But whichever one would be professionally informed on this subject, I am not that. Or the other one, for that matter. So I could be totally wrong about everything that I’ve just written.

But for me, this mindfulness exploration has helped me clear out ugly thoughts and acknowledge patterns of behavior that aren’t healthy. I feel like a better person today than I was just a few years ago. I’m not nicer because I just want to be nice, but also because it’s easier.

It’s easier to be patient, kind, understanding, and humble. It takes so much energy to be mad, hold grudges, and judge. Forgiving and letting go is freeing. Holding on to anger? Exhausting and it gives me pimples.

A New(ish) Me

My biggest concern with this new journey was that I would lose my edge. I’m generally a sarcastic wise-ass. I didn’t want to become soft. And I’m not talking about physically soft, because this new journey has not yet made me less vain, as I still care far too much about my physical appearance.

But baby steps, right?

By soft I mean I didn’t want to become an emotionally mushy pushover. I roll my eyes at those people.

Yes, I know, I roll my eyes a lot. Again, one step at a time.

I’m far from perfect and still have many strides to make. I’m finding the careful balance of being a mindful, better person while not changing who I am at heart.

I still unnecessarily curse at traffic despite my most valiant efforts.

If I realize someone isn’t going to acknowledge me holding a door open, I’ll sometimes maybe probably prematurely let it go so it gently bumps them.

I am ridiculously impatient with people who stand on escalators. They aren’t lazy stairs, walk!

And I firmly believe that Arbonne is basically the Crossfit of skincare and I’m not at all interested but I’m certain you’ll breathlessly tell me about it anyway.

I am a work in progress. I’m learning every day.

I’m single. I’m happy. I’m present. And sometimes, every once in a while, yes, I’m still a jerk.

But a mindful jerk at that. And for this, I am grateful.

And I owe it all to a little dating app with the cute cartoon flame.

About Matthew Farrell

Matthew Farrell is a writer and comedian in Los Angeles, CA. He currently works as a creative content developer for a digital marketing company. His blog was once viewed by four people in a single day. He also placed 1st in a stand-up comedy competition of six people, three of whom missed their turns because they were in line for the bathroom.

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from Tiny Buddha https://tinybuddha.com/blog/swipe-right-on-mindfulness-why-im-glad-i-gave-meditation-a-try/

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jordyx1000 · 7 years ago

Text

Scorpion Mouth. Celebrating the Inner Self - Exist.

Whoa, How do you start a conversation with yourself. Something you haven't had in a long time. I firstly, get some tobacco and turn on Spotify. Hold on.

The Date: October 28th. 2017. I haven't touched this thing, since the last time I felt alone. Notice how I say feel? I am completely not alone, I have you. You are hearing my mind right now, through my fingers, transcribed to a monitor. Through your eyes, the light shines. Receptors balance the emotions, context. They bend your muscles, in accordance, you have a reciprocated attack. What happened to me this year. Well, for starters, I got honorably discharged from the navy. I Served 8 solid years. Loved, hated it...just like everything else I suppose. I reluctantly got home. I didn't want to go “home”. In my mind, my family needed it more then I did. I felt like I returned for them. With my selfishness aside, oh selfishness, what have you done. We will talk about you later. Noone knows the true meaning of starting over, until you literally start over in a new world. That is what it felt like. What is the first thing you do, when you return, try and adapt, survey the land...analyze the roads to which you will be traveling soon. Try and remember everything, tips and tricks. Reconnect with the people who said that they wish you were back home. Of course that novelty wears off, “the new guy” suddenly becomes the same guy, just years later. That is fine, that is expected, that is life. That was my life for years and years. What do you do for work? Man, I basically just milked my funds, lived off the land. Traveled, reconnect, travel, reconnect. Months. Then reality sets in, you become apart of the machine and meld into the landscape. This isn't why I came here though, to talk about life. Or the normality of life. The things that everyone goes through.

I came here for the end. The opposite of life. Death. The death, the rot, the muscle spasm-twitch, eyes roll back, decomposition. I came here to talk to you about what its like to watch something die. I wanna talk about CPR, breathing in, out, watching the lungs fill and shrink. Watching the skin start to fade in color. The tears, the constant overwhelming feeling of watching something you love, fade into the unknown. The future of life. but the death of it at the same time. Such a weird paradox to me, to think, something can die, and become unknown, within the actually living to die, and fade to the unknown.

I wandered a bit. In the darkness. To me at that point, it wasn't dark. Looking back, it was very dark. Something really weird happened to me. Randomly, it makes me so sick at how random it was. I guess I will start with the real reason I came here.

Sometime in May, I met the love of my life. I say that with a lot of weight, I knew from the very second I met her, I loved her. She moved, so beautifully. But with a slight anger, a slight badass blend. It wasn't like I was looking at a golden angel, wings spread. It was like I was watching a real, raw, human, skin and all. It didn't take long for me to realize, she has a lot of darkness in her. I liked that, in a sick way. I love the idea, of someone spilling their guts about how raw life can be. The true feelings. Not some tv show, not staged. Just raw. My life, was dark, but it wasn't that dark. My problems were normal problems. She had a baby, only a month old. I didn't like the idea at first, I probably expressed that in an ackward way. I actually was very wary about it. To the point, where I would contemplate texting her. Up until this point, it was a deal breaker. Something about her drew me in, I could write words all day to the feeling I felt, but I sincerely cant. I am not skilled enough to draw up human emotions like that. I decided very early on, that I would try and do everything I could, to build her spirits. Like a fucked up project. That I loved. So fucking much. Just to talk about things, life, real fucking life. I knew about a week in, she had a drinking problem. The subject of anxiety was brought up, played off, you know. Noone wants to overload someone with so many different things like that. It is scary, I know I wouldn't. In my head, I knew she was taking pills and drinking. I just didn't want to think it was an issue. I just buried it. I should have left that first week though, that concert was horrible. Some of the worst times ive ever had. Completely lost control of my situation. I don't think I ever fully recovered from that. I just buried it

We would go on walks, and talk about life. One subject in particular was the subject of her daughter, the creation of her daughter, and the future. Where was her dad? I remember vividly thinking, she probably doesn't want him in her life, and he wants too. I couldn't imagine being a new dad, and not seeing my kid. This isn't the 70′s. You don't want to perceived as a douche bag via social media. That can ruin your social standing. with life. In my head I knew he wanted to be in the picture. I also remember her, telling me, he wants nothing to do with her. I said, “So what happens when he gets alittle bit older”. Of course, the natural defense, she says, “Noway, he is a fuck”. Probably alittle more summarized, but you get the jyst, I had a full adult conversation, unselfishly delving deeper into her mind about it. Ha, selfish. I remember you. I'm going to take a break for a second. Before I get into the meat, the heavy, darkness that ensues.

Ok, I am back. the time 8:20 pm.

I don't edit. I don't reread. So I apologize completely. I feel like all that nonsense, takes away from what really matters. What is my perception. What is my vision of the world around me. I am not trying to be biased, or sway judgement, I promise to be 100% fair and just.

I get it, so far you probably feel like something was wrong with me for dealing with the little stuff, if I felt so weird about it. There was something wrong with me, and it wasn't her. So far from her. I wasn't using her darkness to feel better about myself. I wish I could, at not one point did I feel like I was capable of feeling good about myself. I dated a girl, for three years, a hard 3 years. Just two people, trying to figure out life. It ended weirdly, so in my mind, I knew there were things I needed to change. I was depressed. So depressed. The reasons I came home, for being there for my family, turned quickly into realizing, I wasn't really needed here. I could have went anywhere, and everything would have been just fine. That set in so hard. To fully understand you weren't as needed as you thought you were going to be. But I am grown, for seconds in the week, it would flash flood my mind, and as quickly as it was there, it was gone. For split seconds, I would let myself revert back into that mode. I wasn't doing anything, just thinking, no friends to keep my mind off of the shit. I miss that aspect so badly. That got me through everything, someone saying something stupid to laugh at. Someone going through something difficult to make you realize its not so bad.

Wow, this song. “You stay above me forever, like you stay above me now”

Dear in the headlights. Midwestern Dirt. Fucking crazy I'm hearing this. Music helped me, it helped me and her. not once did we hate each other through the music. You cannot lose that. I realize that now. When you love something, you hold it tightly. I wouldn't say I am a romantic person. I love seeing the girl I'm with happy. I do have this jealousy problem, where I get annoyed when someone else makes my girl happier then I do. I guess, I don't get upset that she is happy, I get upset with myself that I didn't blow that shit out the water and make her happier. Does that make me psychotic? is that normal? How do you google that to see. I never would want something bad to happen to anyone. But sometimes, I do wish things that have happened to me, that they have caused, would happen to them. I guess that's fucked up.

She wasn't a bad person, she isn't a bad person. She was going through a lot of things. I thought I was badass, I thought I was gonna be able to take care of all this shit. My dude hands. handling business. But you slowly realize, no matter how much you have helped people in your life, sometimes, you don't know all of the answers. The biggest problem I have in my life, is getting frustrated that I cannot fix things. I have heard so many times in my life “slow down” “take a breath”. I get frustrated. Panicked. Nervous. annoyed. That whole aspect stretched from making breakfast, to talking to the one you love. It fucked me up. in the end. You don't really grasp it. Until you write it down. When so many things pile up, before you can fix the first instance, it gets out of hand to me. melt down. I say things I don't mean out of frustration. anger. I wish it was something anger management could help with, but I have to much pride to think I cant fix something on my own. How do you even start? Ok break time. 8:40pm

841pm I was thinking again. The direction. The timeline. A few weeks of us hanging out, the news came. Ol’ Boy wants a bit of custody with his daughter. She was in tears. Devestated. I didn't console enough, I knew this day was going to come. No dude, in his right mind wants to not see something he created. I don't care who you are. I remember hearing again, how much of a piece of shit he was for this. I defended him, and remember vividly, getting scolded. taking his side. That conversation was brought up a number of times as an “arguemenet” I created. Sincerely trying to be rational, and reasonable. That isn't what you do to a girl, going through that I thought. She is right, she needs me to defend her, talk shit about him. I just couldn't do it. 8:45pm

851pm This is amazing. The feeling, of talking without worrying about what the fuck I say.

I want to take it back to the best seconds of our connection. I remember standing in that room. Her baby, in her arms. I just held her for the first time, my girl loved it. I remember so clearly her eyes, they were filled with desire. We never did anything but hug before then, I was scared beyond belief. Never once in my life, have I been worried about a physical connection. She needed it, I needed it, the icing on the cake for us. The third arm to this perfect triangle. I hesitated. And failed. Stupid. I feel like we already did, I felt like we made the most beautiful love through our eyes. All the feeling that comes from it, was there, we both knew it. All but the physical sensation, that mentality never left. Months later, we still made love like that. Passionate. Through the eyes. It wasn't two people trying to be in a porno, it was two people so connected. I don't think I could top that, as sad as it is. That third arm. It was there, 33% of our relationship was perfect. flawless. I remember slowly going outside with her, laying down on that blanket. Commiting myself to a literal perfect existence. If there was a good version of selling your soul to the devil, that is what I felt. I completed a part of life that day. feeling the heaviest amount of passion, I have ever felt. 8:57pm

9:06pm Ok, Yah, that was amazing. Still think about that time everyday. That was the sole memory that kept me alive. Mentally. You couldn't top it. Something out of a movie. I felt smooth, sauve, but it was just us, together, full of passion. That doesn't happen to everyone. I am blessed I got to feel that. She was drinking those days. I was being unsupportive. I didn't understand the problem until recently. Right before mediation actually. When we talked. She was freaking out, didn't ask me how my day was, just completely went on this rant about how her therapist wouldn't talk to her. I didn't realize the significance, until that point. I am incredibly ashamed that I didn't. I knew it was a problem, but didn't grasp it. Sometimes I stay ignorant by choice. Complaining about everything you think is shit, doesn't do anything. Sometimes just keeping it locked away, works. it didn't for this. not at all. I didn't grow up in a home where therapy was “needed”, although looking back, it would have helped...and I probably wouldn't be writing about all this now. I failed her in that sense, not understanding enough. it isn't that I didn't want to, it is just the complete unknown. It doesn't register to me, as something that needs to be addressed, because I lived a whole life without hearing about it. I don't consider that being selfish, not once did I feel like I was better then her. Not once did I feel like I had no problems, even though I was told I thought I was flawless. Told I need to look in the mirror. I guess you could read these, and understand I looked in the mirror a lot. Not many dudes, almost 30, take the time on their Saturday night to write on tumble. not a lot of dudes are as intune to their minds and how things work like I am. I am by no means saying I am better then them, I'm just saying I have tried my hardest to understand. whether it is right or wrong. I have tried...so fucking hard. I don't blame her for her addiction, I asked if it was an addiction early on. I was told it wasn't. I couldn't play ignorant. Another instance where I wasn't making my girl happier then what her pills make her. That is really fucking sad to me. And when I cant fix something, I lose my cool. Ive known that forever. I'm not saying she is the cause, I am just saying, for the first time in my life, I'm talking with someone who amps me up to the point where I am hurting someones feelings. I would never physically hurt anyone. I would never tell someone they are good for nothing. I would never tell someone to kill themselves. I would, and did, tell someone they are weak. The saddest moment in my life. To judge someone, based on their own encounters. Fucked up. I regreted that conversation, from the beginning. I remember asking her to stop taking medicine, or don't talk to me. Why? Was that selfish? To want someone to get better? I am at a stand still with understanding that. 9:17

9:31pm I always why we never did anything creative together. I know we both wanted too. Collaborate. Do something amazing. Apart of me thought, she is just going through too much right now, the last thing she wants to do is stretch her already stretched mind. It is intimidating, knowing someone is going through so much. The balance, the middle ground. Of course, of fucking course, I do some fucked shit and say something I don't mean, and that careful tight rope that I delicately tried to balance, begins to rattle and shake. “Don't do that again, you are going to kill us.” I like to think, no one rememebers the good steps of the tight rope, only the sections where your life is in danger. Even though, your life stays constantly in danger. you don't say, “Well I almost died, but those first good steps were so good”. That isn't the human way. We automatically lash out at the chance. You didn't died, but you almost did. ontop of almost dying just by walking acrossed it in the first place. Those kind of thoughts, goon me up. 9:35pm

9:36.

Am I a monster? Jordon surrey, are you a fucking monster. Are you a menace. A psychotic, sociopath?

I keep writing the times. I save it, and then take a second to breath. turn to a different song. This is the most ive written in one session in years and years. I remember when my mom put a word processor in my room. I would write stories. “They gotta make a movie about this”. I wish I still had those. I couldn't imagine what they would say. Kids are lucky, or is that lucky? So have everything you have ever written saved? My ex girlfriend of 3 years came into the picture pretty quickly. Those messeges were saved. Every conversation we ever had. The girl I was with, she read them. What does that do to the dynamic? she has you figured out? Comparing you now, to the you then. without any sort of context but words you wrote. She judged me on those. That was a dark feeling to me. So vunerable, and yet so misunderstood. I don't want to talk about that anymore. It shouldn't have happened. I don't think its selfish to be upset with that, those are not conversations like this. This is pure, mental, public, words. Those were between two people, who were on an unimaginable plane of existence. You cant look at those, and compare. They mean nothing out of context. I speak my mind, me and her, we didn't have the passion me and this girl did. it wasn't the same, but it was what I knew. for years and years. it takes a minute to realize that isn't the girl you were talking to. You wont ever know who that girl was, and that is the saddest part. 942pm

946

I don't really know, if I am a monster. Or what we be happening right now if things were different. If I handled things differently. The main issues were still there. I think if the timeline didn't play out, I think she would still be drinking. Or maybe not, maybe she drank because of me. I hate bringing up the fact she drank, because who the fuck cares. She can drink? it is her body. it is her life. if she wants to do that, she can. If I didn't know her, I wouldn't give a fuck less if she drank. I hated it. I despised when she drank. It was so unattractive to me. It is like holding, the perfect red, shiny apple. Such a great shape. Smell. You want to bite it. But then you turn it around...and its rotten. You have to eat around it...but you cant get close...you don't want that shit even near to your mouth. You had to address that It was there, had to try and get rid of it. Digging it the fuck out. layer by layer, until you hit the core. I knew it was an issue. it was clear as day. Not as clear as my own issues, but it was something that needed to be addressed. I cant remember an argument not consisting of drinking. Such a waste of a good apple. Was that selfish of me? to want to get rid of the rot? Before I bite it, love it, consume it? I don't know. I miss the good times so much. Half way through these months, I realized we were going to get married. Like come on!? I...Jordon surrey, wanted to marry someone. not just say it, not just express it...but need it. Desire it more then anything. What the fuck?!?!? Life is fucked. The death consumes. I have to take a break, before I talk about what is really wrong with me. What I did wrong. 9:45pm

The day comes. Everything is in full effect. The babies father is back in the picture. I'm at work. I get a call after saying that everything went good. he is coming back to the house, and that she knows I'm probably not gonna feel good about it. I don't. Who would. The most secure person, would be insecure about having the babies father in the picture. Especially remembering back to that first kiss. the first time we locked eyes and made mental love. the baby was right there. she was with us. My time was consumed with making sure my girls life wasn't flipped upside down. and instead of hers being flipped upside down, mine was. The father is given the fucking right, to see and be there for his daughter. there is no doubt about that. That is something that has to fucking happen. and to be even slightly upset for him given that chance is bullshit. He deserves it. It dick, created that child. Just as much as her vagina did. He deserves to see his baby girl. But yet, I still remain upset? I can sort through everything in my head, and avoid the anger being about him getting to be there for his daughter. That isn't my place, to take his place. I helped while he was away. I knew he was coming, and the baby needed a father. Yah, I didn't do enough for her, in the sense. I gave everyone space. Because I knew he was coming back. The only thing that sticks into my head, about the anger. Is the fact that, I know nothing about him, besides the negative shit ive heard. I know he was a drug head. Drunk. unsupportive, child. stupid. couldn't spell. didn't like good music. fake. And boom, he is here. I understand the biase. I understand she will talk shit about him. But I don't understand, why everyone gets to learn about him but me. The only one who fucking supported him seeing his fucking daughter. is that selfish? I don't fucking know. but it makes my eyes well up...just thinking about it. I wish I could shake his fucking hand. and tell him I had his fucking back since the start. jesus fucking Christ. I'm so sorry dude. ive met dudes, who didn't get to see there kids for months after they were born...crying. devastated. sad. I couldn't imagine. I got to take a break. 1007

1010

I want to start this by talking about my insecurities. I know her. I know her desire for a normal family. What would be the easiest way for that baby to be happy. If the bio mom and dad....hashed it out. got it together. and started fresh. I feel like a lot of the anger towards me, is coming from this fact. I was justifiably upset. I can be upset. I was allowed no contact with my girlfriend while she is with him. While he is learning to do the things I did. It is a strange society to think that is how shit works. I was starting to feel like this idea of me being a piece of shit, unsupportive person, was to take me out of the picture so she could start fresh with a guy. she stopped drinking. he stopped doing pills. wasn't that the problem? he probably doesn't even know she was in a relationship. It sounds to me, everyone is doing a lot better then they were a year ago. It also sounds to me, that I am abusive, controlling, inconsiderate, unsupportive, selfish. when I have done nothing but put myself into a position where I had to be for months and months. you couldn't function without those things, and I did up until the very day he came back. the very day she saw him for the first time in a year. This is just me talking through my mind. not once am I saying this is what actually is happening. I am clueless. I am just building a text wall based on the thoughts I have. nothing to sway my emotions any other way right now. just pure feeling. 1016

1020

I went to her house the day after he was there for the first time. Clear head. Just wanted to apologize for lashing out, telling her she brought darkness into my life. She did. but she also brought a lot of happiness that to me, weighed out the vibration on the tight rope. I spent about two hours, just playing with the baby. I wanted to take my girl out, do something, go somewhere to breath. get out of the house. we got around to it. and got our things together and left. When we started driving, of course, the father was brought up. she said she thinks it would help if I had a say in trying to decide the days. That had nothing to do with me, I appreciated the gesture, but I am quick to tell someone when I don't think I need that, if I don't need it. That is there plan, that is what parenting time is for. Nothing else. Hashing out the details of how their daughter is going to be taken care of. Learning how to take care of his daughter without the mom there. by himself. I just made the point, that I didn't understand why I couldn't meet him. Why I couldn't meet the dude who has been taking care of the baby that ive been a placeholder for. Yah that's a strong way to put it, I get it, I wouldn't have been a placeholder...I would have been her dad too. In the spur of things, I didn't put it out like that, she snapped, told me she was sick of dealing with two grown ass dudes acting like babies. I kept my mouth shut. She still is talking, god, she never stopped. I was driving back to her house, and she knew that. she knew talking about it still, was just going to make me realize she needs space. So I kept driving her home, pulled in, she was still talking. I sat there, calm. didn't say a word. just followed my breathing. She got out, I snapped for a second, and told her “have fun with a pill head”. Stupid. I went to my edge again, come on man. You had it going so well, just shut your mouth. If she would have been like, “you didn't say anything, I'm mad at you’ she wouldn't have said “you said something so I'm mad at you”. The tight rope was shaking, violently, the walk to that point didn't matter. The fact that I wanted to take her, and do something productive didn't matter. The fact that I didn't say what she wanted me to say, made me selfish. Was I selfish that day? I don't know. 1028

1029 Why does this all upset me. It doesn't really. It is ecpected, when human emotions are fucked with, anything can happen. This isn't a Hollywood movie, where couples jump in the rain after a good solid dinner. It is real life, real problems. I will be the first one two admit. My scorpion mouth fucked shit. Learning how to deal with someone is what it is all about. She couldn't deal with me, so she turned her head. I am realistic, if she has these thoughts about me, nothing I can say will change that. If she wants to think I am a burden, nothing will change that. I am a grown adult, despite what she wants to believe. It isn't hard to say that she could find someone else. Not me, not him, just someone else who fits her better, who is less of a stress to figure out. If it gets to the point where someone doesn't have enough to offer, then move on. It is 2017. People can come and go, easy if you let them. She was worth it to me, but it was impossible for me to stop the vibrating. The shaking near death. My balance wasn't perfect, but it was great. Given the worn rope I walked. I can deal with the hardest punches. I can forgive. I can let go. If I have without a reason of a doubt, that someone doesn't want me around them, I leave. I left a lot with her. A lot of times, it was because she kept drinking. Yah, she didn't say she didn't want me around, but I hated it so much, I felt like she was doing it on purpose to get rid of me. Lately, ive looked into her eyes, and it goes somewhere else. Something else is taking the time. Something else is consuming her. It used to be me. But I became selfish, or atleast I have always been. Have I? what if I never met her. what if we never met, would she still think I was selfish. Would the dude she would be with, be selfish? is everyone alittle bit selfish. of course. Did I intentionally destroy us because that's what I wanted. Did I selfishly kill us? because I needed it? I don't know. I think she thinks, I did it on purpose. with how much she tells me how selfish I am. Was I selfish when I held her baby? Was that for me? did I just want to hold a baby? was I selfish when I talked to her, about everything, when I gave my input. could I have just hung up, or walked away? Could I be selfish now, if I still need her? is that selfish? do I just fuck shit up, to try it again. out of selfishness. Or am I trying? am I being given shit, and working with what I have? is that selfish, so work with what you have?1038

Does the sound of my voice, hurt her so much. Is it worth it to cut someone out? It is if you are not benefiting. Do I not benefit her? Today, she decided I didn't. And that is ok. That is life. You cannot please everyone. They sometimes think you are not trying. and then end up writing a novel. This is by no means, everything. These are just the things that shake my rope. I will continue this tomorrow. The longer I write, the more I miss her. And that doesn't do me any good anymore. The more time that passes, with us like this, the more these things wont matter to her. the more I wont matter to her. And that is fine, if she is happy. then her baby is happy. and that is life. ill be back.

To comprehend In the middle of the night To break a mood Without tearing up my spine The lights dim On my glow How will I move When this sun sets How will I move When the lights go out Without, My glow I cant shut my mouth, When my mind moves, I cant sleep at night, Without your sprawling roots but that is selfish, I saw her grinding teeth on a rusting spoon She is red, she is ready You danced around with no bones You say it always You did it always. I know, You were in love You said it always, You said it always,

My glow.

1047

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