#keirren shut up

[wildestthicket]

So I finally talked to her about it. Or like, iv did while I let them know what to say.

And everything went fine. She apologized for stuff I didn't even know was happening, it made a lot of sense. She said what happened made a lot of sense on our end too when iv explained that she basically had two different friends and the second one had to pretend to be the first without ever knowing what was happening.

Also, it happened again, we made friends with someone who was super traumatized before we had any idea what had happened to us.

Now with everything out in the open I don't know if I even want to try to be friends with her again. I think I needed the closure more than I wanted her in my life again. It sounds like she's grown up a lot, but I don't know if we have anything in common or if we would just be chasing what we almost had when we were shitty teenagers. That's the other problem, I'm permanently seventeen and she's... Twenty four? I think?

But yeah we did it. We barely felt anything while it was happening and all I feel now is body panic because we unrelatedly scrolled into one of iv's triggers right as everything was wrapping up.

But yeah I don't really feel angry at her anymore and I have this looming feeling of... Finality? I guess? But it's not a totally bad thing. I guess sometimes your time with people just ends, you get your run, and then eventually it's just over. I think I'm okay with it ending here if it does. I'd rather be alone with my memories than hurting us both by trying to chase them. But maybe I should try? If it's going to fizzle out again then at least this time it'll be my own damn fault.

[wildestthicket]

She came into my work the other day, which isn’t like. Impossible. I work at a specialty store that people come into every day and she just happened to show up when I was working. I didn’t know she was back in town, she didn’t know I worked there.

My brain was so jarred that it spat out someone who didn’t know her or recognize her, and she pretended not to recognize us either. I went to the back and had a meltdown after she left.

She messaged me on facebook about a week after it happened to apologize since ‘I’ had asked her never to contact ‘me’ again. She wanted to check to see what she should do so I felt safe at work to the point of offering to get someone I didn’t know come in and get stuff for her so I wouldn’t have to see her again.

I just want to tell her what happened and why shit fell apart the way it did so I’m going to write it down here to sort it out for myself at least and so I don’t message her on an impulse because this all feels too much like fate.

In high school I became the host again (afaik iv, Fe, and Sly showed up intermittently when they needed to, as you do) and met her. Long story short she was my best friend and I was completely in love with her. We had a lot of the same interests, she introduced me to books and music that are still important to all of us. Most of my world had her somewhere in it. It was like that for two years and I know there were problems, things weren’t perfect. There was the self professed ‘native american fetish’ of hers and other stuff I can’t call to mind right now. I didn’t have the guts to bring it up and chance losing the most important person to me right then.

And for once the person who was the most important to me seemed to really care about me too? We talked constantly and. Yeah. I don’t know. Two years of having someone I could tell anything and feel like just maybe it was mutual. I got a notebook that I was determined to use as the notebook to plan my novel, which she’d listened to me blab about for hours on end. She wrote something for me in the back of it and made me promise not to read it until I had filled the book.

Then she graduated and I had my back surgery. I’m not sure at which point I went dormant, but it was somewhere in the first two months. It was too painful, and I was horrified that in my eyes I had elected to ruin my body. Eli became host because he was made for handling pain and we still aren’t sure if our brain copied my pertinent personality traits onto him, if we were similar to start with since we were two versions of the same kid but with different jobs, or if we had a drastic personality change that everyone around us chalked up to growing up and going through intensive surgery.

Either way, I went away. In my place was someone who knew who Kelowna was, but didn’t have any emotional attachment to her whatsoever and was terrified and disgusted by himself over how little he cared. But he couldn’t have. He also couldn’t have known. I used to hate Eli so much over letting her go and not trying harder to hold on to that relationship, but how could he have?

For a while he kept texting her, he went up to visit her a couple times after she moved away. I think I showed up at one point during the second trip. There’s an entire page of a sketchbook we bought on that trip filled with the words ‘MAKE IT WORTH IT’. There was this feeling that Eli had of going through the motions while we were around her.

At some point after that second (I think there were two? I honestly can’t remember) trip communication started to drop off. I think that was when I stopped fronting altogether because I thought we might never be able to transition because of our back surgery. The next bits are blurry for me. At some point during grade 12, after not having talked to her for a few months, Eli got a new follower who started to interact with a lot of his transition related posts. Their url kind of implied that either they were trans too or at least were trans centric, he didn’t think much of it. He liked the attention, like any of us would. There’s one specific post we remember where this follower said something like ‘oooh can you make me coffee in that outfit?’ and another where they called Eli handsome in one of his shirtless binder pictures for a review of it so we decided to check out their blog to determine if this was a creep or someone we wanted to maybe be friends with.

We scrolled for a little while, it looked like a diary blog and an account of her wife’s transition. Then at the very bottom of the blog there was an apology post addressing Eli (or me, I only chose the name Keirren because when we sorted system stuff out, Eli was the one doing it and the name was effectively his at that point. I chose Eli when I figured out I was trans, but Keirren was the first name I chose for myself online so I went with that one in the end) by name. I can’t remember the exact contents of the post, that memory is Eli’s, but the gist of it was that she felt at fault for letting the relationship fall apart. Eli knew that he was the one who ghosted, but at that point had no idea why he’d done it.

He exited the tab and decided to just not address it. School was too stressful to bother with much else, our Nanny had just died (which made iv go dormant for a while, also cutting off even more of our emotional range) and our parents’ abusive behavior was at its worst then.

A couple weeks later he decided it was best to just say something instead of beating around the bush, and went to find the apology post so he could reference specific bits of stuff to make sure he got everything. The post had been deleted. He figured that the apology (that he didn’t really think was necessary, in fact he thought he should be the one apologizing) was retracted, that she didn’t want to get back in contact with us again.

That was that. For a while. She kept interacting with him through that blog, and had no identifying information that would have tipped us off to it being her on it if we hadn’t seen that post.

There were a few instances of him checking the blog to see if she had made another post at us and the two of them vaguing back and forth.

Eli felt. Skeeved out. But he didn’t know how to go about addressing any of it because there was this big fucking hole in his memory, or reasoning, or something, about why he’d just let go of someone who had been so important to ‘him’. He graduated, took a gap year, and at some point during that, she texted us.

We had no idea she still had our number, and she sent us a shitload of texts. I don’t remember the contents of any of it, all I know is that it ended in Eli telling her to fuck off and never contact us again. Partly because he was scared of sounding like he was making excused or a bad person for not knowing why he did what he did, partly because he was understandably angry and freaked out.

I think it was a few months after that that Eli finally gained an inkling of what was going on with our brain, that there was an ‘us’ instead of a ‘him’. At that point it was just Fever and iv. Then we went to university.

Cue one of the worst mental breakdowns Eli has ever had, bad enough that he got sucked inworld after a hospitalization and I got spat back out to the front for the first time in... Three years? Maybe a little less, but this was the first time I was solidly present for more than a handful of hours in at least two years. At least that.

The last two years while we were away at school and trying to survive halfway across the country aren’t. Super relevant to this so I’ll give some highlights.

Eli told his partner about all of the above. We figured out that it was me who was friends with Kelowna, mostly since I missed her so fucking much and kept wanting to get back in contact with her. I became a member of the main fronting group after pulling some really horrible shit and consequently patching things up with the people I hurt. I grew up a lot, and I’m so fucking happy I got to where I am.

There were a couple times that our paranoia got so bad that we thought we saw her around the city we were in even though that was nearly impossible.

During a visit home with Eli’s partner (wait shit, this particular instance would have been before they moved with us. Okay so this was with Eli’s partner, but just before they moved with us) we put all of the stuff of Kelowna’s we still had in a bag, drove down to where her parents lived in the middle of the night, and chucked it over the fence. Eli wanted closure, I knew all I would ever do with that stuff was use it to cling on to memories and a relationship that would never go back to how it was before.

So for the time between my re-emergence and now, I’ve grown up a lot, but I still spend a significant amount of time thinking about her. About what could have happened differently. Wanting to tell her what happened. Sometimes knowing it’s just out of my need/want for closure over the whole situation, and other times self righteously going ‘She deserves to know after what I did to her!’. I’m not sure how true either of those things are.

I’m either a holder for all of our feelings and memories of her, or I just plain old fucking miss her because she was my best friend. Maybe I’m bitter because I want my life back still. Because I didn’t get to grow up and I probably never will. All I ever wanted was to prove that I could make it out of high school and survive out from under my parents’ thumb and not give up or kill myself and that didn’t happen. Maybe I’m projecting. I didn’t kill myself, but a lot of me still feels like I gave up. I don’t know. i have a lot of shit to sort out and this tangent is getting out of hand.

About half a year ago, we moved back here to get our shit in order. We got a job, we got on assistance, we figured out a living situation for the time being.

And then she walked into our job about a month ago.

Then she messaged us about two weeks ago.

And all of this, all six years of this condensed down into rapid flashbacks and memories I wish I’d never tried to push away coming back to me, came bubbling back up.

I miss her so much.

I know it’s the stupidest thing but the messages sent us just sound like she’s grown and changed a lot.

I still want to tell her and I have no idea what to do.

So I spent an hour writing all of this so I wouldn’t message her and so I could get all of this sorted out in order in my head and I think I have things as in order as I’ve had them in a while

And now I have no idea what to do with all of it.

Like, great, I have a chronological account of what happened how I remember it happening, but where do i go now? At this point I’m just writing this to keep myself from switching back to the Facebook tab I have open where I have her message up and talking to her.

So. Yeah. That’s been my month.

[wildestthicket]

I just keep swinging back and forth so hard on this. She was perfect, she was the worst. I missed the most important opportunity of my life, I dodged a bullet. Nothing is ever going to be that perfect again, and.... I don't know, I don't think I am ever going to be that happy again because that was when the body's life was mine so this could just be nostalgia. I was miserable then too, just periodically less miserable around her and being miserable with her was okay too. I figured out a lot of really important things about myself with her and I wonder if she would even want to be friends with who I am now. I think I do really miss her. A lot of the animosity was from things that happened after I was gone. But who knows if that's how I would have turned out anyway, because she couldn't have known what had changed since we didn't know either. There was just suddenly this rift and all these conflicts and then nothing and then the thing happened and I was so deep inworld that the new host didn't even try to keep her around. I just wish I'd been there I guess. She's my biggest what if and I wish she wasn't. If I'd been the one to wreck it all at least I would know it had been me.

[wildestthicket]

God. This is so vague but I wonder if she still thinks about me as much as I think about her, or wonders what would have happened if our friendship hadn't crumbled or if I had just gone ahead and read the note she left for me in the back of my notebook right away. I keep thinking about how much she loved me and how much she didn't want to let me go, and how much of a punch in the gut it was to only know that once she was half a province away and engaged to someone else. How I disappeared into my own head and got replaced and he couldn't understand why trying to be her friend was so alien and hated himself for not being able to care more.

I just want to message her and tell her what happened since everything blew up in their faces in the end. Like I want her to hear it from me but i can't tell if this is a really fucking stupid idea.

Maybe I just need someone to talk me down. I don't know. Is there anyone who would be down to let me talk through this with them?

[wildestthicket]

Sly

An explanation of why the Sly tag is kind of a personal thing and why I’d rather people didn’t reblog just for aesthetic/inspo. TW/CW for abuse, self harm, and dissociation mentions. Nothing graphic.

Imagine someone who’s the epitome of cool. Not necessarily someone you want to be, but he’d be your favourite character in a lineup of any. Now imagine he spends all his time with you, knows what you’re thinking, and always has something to say.

Now imagine that he hates you.

But he loves you. He believes that you can do whatever you want if you try hard enough. 

And if it keeps your life interesting enough for him.

Sly is kind of fucking complicated. 

I think we were… Fourteen or fifteen the first time we had the thought ‘It feels so good to be me again’, and I’m pretty sure that was Sly coming to front. I know that when that happened ‘I’ did things I would never do.

There were other times when we were younger that are so obviously switching and dissociation looking back, I can think of a few instances in elementary school. And then so so many times in middle school when we would do or say something, and it was like watching someone else from the inside, or feeling a million miles away.

But anyway. Yeah. That lines up with starting grade nine or ten, which is when I became host and everything kind of went to shit.

Sly is mine, I’m pretty sure. Like Fever is the current host’s? Sly split off just for me and only me. Lucky, right?

I’m stalling, with all that shit up there, I just don’t know where to start explaining what he is and how this all works.

Getting clinical, he’s an alter, but so am I. 

He doesn’t really have a filter or any inhibitions and he doesn’t care about consequences as long as he stays entertained. He definitely feels fear, but since it’s another emotion, another experience, he kind of embraces it and takes up as much of it as he can when it happens since it doesn’t happen often, and that’s why he seems so brave and unstoppable to me.

He thinks that I can be great, but only because greatness would lead us to something new and amazing and interesting. 

He doesn’t find incredible experiences in the mundane shit like Zero does.

If he gets bored, or more specifically if I bored him, his first instinct is to devise a plant for us to run away and live our life on the road. Because if I fail the obviously there’s no way I’ll ever succeed, and this is our only choice now for getting out and seeing the world.

When it wasn’t an option, he would just do shit to trigger me or make me upset because he gets a thrill out of having so much power over me. He’ll hurt the body because it’s fun, but never enough to leave marks or do permanent damage, just enough to scare me.

When I was depressed or suicidal while I was host, I remember this feeling of, ‘No, that’s a waste, just let go of control and kill the people who are hurting you and run away’ and I have to wonder how much of that was my own brain shit, and how much of it was his influence.

As far as I can tell we’ve always had a Sly/Fever like alter for all the big bad emotions and urges because of shit our mom did around the time of our split while raising us, but since this all happened when we started getting really depressed, that probably played into a lot of how Sly got shaped.

But even though he does all of this horrible stuff, he at least wants me around and wants me to succeed, even if it’s just for his entertainment. And he’s always been there, always has something to say to me when I fuck up. Gave me an ideal to aspire to.

He hates me, and sometimes I really hate him, but at the same time he’s my best friend, and I’m his only hope.

So it’s… Complicated. And a lot of the times other people make snide comments about him being a shitty edgelord and stuff like that or draw comparisons between him and Lucifer or HABIT or Alex or Demon!Dean and stuff and I mean… I guess he got a lot of his personality traits from them but that was because I loved those characters and thought they were the ideal picture of cool. So I mean, I guess it’s neat that people think the aesthetic is good and it doesn’t surprise me that he reminds people of their ocs or characters from stuff I like, it just feels weirdly belittling because it reminds me of people talking down about him or making me seem like I was faking this to be cool or to get attention.

[wildestthicket]

The House

A while ago one of our friends walked us through a headspace construction meditation thing. We basically sat down and answered a bunch of questions about how things are shaped inworld and I was pissed off at everyone at the time because I thought it would be a bad idea (because of Sunny and Sly mostly...) and kind of hid.

The house is shaped like a bed and breakfast we went to a few times as a kid, I don’t know who would have been host then, but it was probably either Iv or my predecessor. It’s this big wooden colonial type house in the woods that looks over a garden. Probably definitely haunted.

This one feels different, I mean how we got there was weird anyway.

Normally our headspace is tiny. Like a car. Always driving, the space just outside familiar but unnameable. Originally it was a pun about how we say whoever is fronting is ‘driving’ and if anyone else is around they’re in the other seats. 

(Note: when I say ‘we’ I mean that I remember it through other people, except for being in my room, and the moment in the motel room that no one else remembers except for Iv.)

We started out driving down the highway through the flats outside of our hometown at dawn, and then we blinked and we were driving through the mountains at dusk and pulled into a motel parking lot when the sun set. A few minutes were spent gathering him, Iv, and Fever (I wasn’t invited) in the parking lot, and the host making a safe spot in the parking lot in case things went to shit in the motel.

The motel had two wings, one to the right and one to the left, with the reception/office recessed into the middle (I’ll draw it sometime), and he went into the room closest to the office in the left hand wing.

The host doesn’t remember this next bit. I wonder why I do?

The tv was on in the room, but it was just playing static, and there was a nearly empty pot of coffee with the burner on under it in the coffee machine. The bedclothes were rumpled even though it was made, like someone had been on it but not in it. The bedside light was on. There were sneakers just inside the door and pill bottles on the bedside table. It felt like someone had just been there and was trying to get away from us. 

It was a shitty motel room, bright orange shag carpet, and the walls were whitewashed cinder blocks, sheets dubiously washed at best. It looked exactly like one I’d stayed in on a roadtrip with our parents when we got lost. 

The door out was opposite and a little to the right of the door in, and was in a tiny hallway made by the footprints of the walls that made the bathroom to the left and the closet to the right, the door to the bathroom was in this hallway.

Someone was in the bathroom and was fucking terrified. Our friend tried to get us to talk to them and they just kept quiet for a bit before telling us to go away, then screaming at us to go away, so we left.

Iv and I remember this first hand, to the host (and maybe Fever? We didn’t ask) the tv was on to static, but silent, and it felt like someone had just left. He was creeped out by it, and kept going.

Our friend thinks it was a memory. Maybe I was the one in the bathroom.

Anyway. In the actual motel (from the road trip, not headspace), this door went into a hallway that had more rooms to the left, and the check in desk to the right and forward, but when we opened the door it went into the front entryway of... a version of that bed and breakfast, but things were different. Like I know the building and would recognize it, but the floor plan here was different and I could draw that, I just couldn’t tell you exactly how?

The main room we just walked into had two staircases on either side, and a big arching double door between them that went into what we’d later find out was the dining room and sitting room that looked out over the back garden, and had one of the other alter’s studies to the right (and someone else’s bedroom behind his study, but she’s weird and is gonna get pissed off if I talk about her more than this). There was also a hallway to the right and left, we were standing in a door that was just inside the hallway to the left, there’s something to the right and behind, like a foyer or something, but we never went there.

Once we were in the hallway the door we just came through became a door to the basement, and that’s my room now. I get to make it look however I want and make it as big as I want and I know what it looks like sort of. I just wish I knew where Sly was in the house.

Everyone else made their rooms (by which I mean the host and Iv, Fever was... Weirdly fuzzy, Zero was omnipresent but was never... Inside the house, Sunny just sort of scurried around, and the new guy and girl didn’t want to participate or share what was in their rooms) after that, and I just sort of hid in the basement blasting music. I think it was Heathens by 21p but I’m not sure.

I kind of wish I’d... Tried to participate, but I wouldn’t want me around either so I guess I can just work on my room by myself to pass the time until I figure this out.

[wildestthicket]

Just a note to ask you all not to reblog anything in my sly tag for inspo/aesthetic. Sly is another one of our alters and the one who's closest to me. Our dynamic is... Complicated but the stuff in the tag is reminiscent of Sly and I would just rather it stay out of people's inspo and aesthetic tags because it makes me feel like I'm faking.

[wildestthicket]

I want to start posting more and making friends like everyone else but it's... Hard I guess when everyone else in my system fucking hates me and literally my only friend in here also repeatedly hurts me. So yeah I don't know I don't have that much motivation to be around when I've been like. Replaced by the new host. I don't know this is fucking stupid ignore it.