#language barriers being broken by love and hard work my beloved

[celestialkth]

mourning the loss of your boyfriend's beloved childhood pet, he surprises you with an afternoon that helps to mend your broken heart.

➵ pairing ; taehyung x fem reader

➵ genre ; fluff

➵ word count ; 2.3K

➵ warnings ; talking of losing a pet , use of affectionate nicknames , some language , they're v in love w each others

➵ author's note ; first drabble that occurs in the mikrokosmos universe ❥ a lovely friend and moot ( @axialitae ) mentioned that i could write drabbles about this couple, then work on their origin fic. so that's what i'm going to do •ᴗ•

i'm excited to write more drabbles about them and introduce them to everyone. i've seen other authors open their inboxes for people to ask their characters questions, and i would love to do that with them. i'll link it below if you'd like to talk with them •ᴗ•

masterlist | series masterlist | chat w the characters

boyf <3 [4:54]

bad news

miso died

[4:55]

NO

PLEASE TELL ME YOU’RE JOKING

boyf <3 [4:55]

babygirl 

:|

why wld i joke abt tht

[4:56]

ok ASSHOLE

that’s not what i meant

boyf <3 [4:58]

can’t believe my duck died an ur bullying me

[4:58]

how are you doing?

boyf <3 [4:59]

im ok. he was old an wasn’t eating. kinda expected it

what abt u, tho

eomma was more concerned abt u

[5:00]

i feel like i’m going to be sick

boyf <3 [5:00]

nooooo

deep breaths

[5:01]

i’m just so sad

i love miso so much

and now he’s gone

i can’t feed him anymore

or give him kisses

he’s not going to lay in my lap anymore

boyf <3 [5:03]

:(

u were his fac

fav*

loved him mom. eomma’s boy

[5:04]

eomma’s boy :(

boyf <3 [5:04]

i was his dad but fuck me ig

[5:05]

thank you. that made me laugh

i’m so sad, tae

time to change my lock screen

to that photo of you and miso

the one i love sm :(

boyf <3 [5:06]

what abt the one of u w him?

[5:06]

noooo. i want you two

my boys <3

boyf <3 [5:07]

cute

i love you, babygirl

[5:08]

i love you too

very, very much <3

Two weeks have passed since losing Miso. A week and a half since Mrs Kim had made the decision to rehome Namjoon’s duck to someone with an entire flock. The first visit to Tae’s house had felt lonely. Your heart aching when you had looked out the back door, hitting hard when realizing there will never be another moment where you can see the duck that had captured your heart.

Never another time where you’ll see him waddle around his enclosure, swimming in his little pond and feasting on his food. No more chances of teasing Tae that he should’ve chosen the name ‘Cow’ instead for Miso’s black and white features. Tae had held you close when you lost it in his room. Quieting you each time you tried to apologize for being so dramatic and telling you that it’s never easy to lose something you love.

Comforting you when you should’ve been comforting him.

He’d been the one to lose his childhood pet. He’d been eight when his parents introduced the idea of getting their sons a pet to help combat the stress of moving to a foreign country and the difficulties of language barriers. But dogs were out of the equation. The high maintenance of providing a good life clashed with their bustling one. And cats didn’t stand a chance for consideration with Mr Kim’s allergy.

The idea of welcoming birds into their home merely falling into their laps on a random afternoon when they’d traveled to the local farming supply store, and Namjoon had been enraptured by the assortment of ducks and chicks for sale.

Miso had been there for Tae through it all. Through his high school graduation, through his romances and heartbreak. Through the heartache that came when Jin and Namjoon moved out to study in prestigious universities in different parts of the country. He’d always been there, and it hurts that now he’s not.

boyf <3 [11:02]

u home?

[11:05]

ya

in my room

boyf <3 [11:06]

im outside

let’s go for a drive pls?

[11:07]

cannot lie. that’s a little concerning

boyf <3 [11:08]

hush. its not bad :|

im trying to be cute n spontaneous 

[11:09]

give me like five minutes to change?

boyf <3 [11:09]

ok :)

He’s scrolling through Twitter when you climb into his front seat. His gentle humming to the unfamiliar song from his Spotify is music to your ears. “Hi, Babe.” Tae closes out of the app, dropping his phone into its designated cup holder before leaning across the console to greet you with a kiss.

“Hi,” you smile, buckling yourself in. “Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.” Showing that he’s serious about being spontaneous. He’s never been one to do surprises, always spoiling it before he can stop himself. “But it’s a bit of a drive. Would you like a silly little beverage for the ride?”

“Of course.”

The neighborhood is quiet. Despite the picturesque sky and the warm, welcoming sun, there’s not a single soul in sight. It’s the perfect weather for a leisurely adventure.

“You’re very serious about being spontaneous,” you comment. He reaches, his hand finding its favorite place upon your thigh. “You’re usually horrible at keeping secrets.” Tae bursts out laughing. His beautiful smile filling his face. “But I love it. I can’t wait to see what you have planned.”

“Trust me,” he snorts. “I almost blew this one too.”

He stops at a small gas station not too far from your house. Gathering a snack and drink each before piling back into his car to begin the adventure he’s so excited about. Road trips with him are fun. From singing along to your favorite songs, forcing him into duets of songs he pretends to hate, to the ridiculous little comments made that send you both into fits of lighthearted giggles. Even with no clear destination in mind, it doesn’t feel like you’re traveling for long, and after an hour, you arrive.

“An industrial park?” You tease. Pretending you don’t notice the sign for a small trail tucked away in a mess of trees. Tae lunges at you, wrapping you in his arms and lifting you off the ground. “I was joking!” You exclaim through giggles.

“No, not an industrial park, you dingus.” His own laughter mingles with yours, and he sets you back onto the ground. “Hobi was talking about this trail. And I found this. Thought it would be fun to get out and explore.”

And so you do.

Following the paved pathway through winding trees. Gentle sounds of rushing water are distant background noise but loud enough to coax you away. You set out to explore, finding dirt paths and stairs, worn down grass and hills to climb. A beautiful little creek hides amongst it all, and you’ve never felt so carefree.

The path is small. A welcoming swing overlooks a hill that peers down onto the water, but after finding a spider hidden within the webs and Tae’s refusal to kill it, you carry on. Going until the path ends in another parking lot and you start making the trek back.

“This was fun. I’m glad we came.” You swing your hand entwined with his, basking in the different sights and noises that surround you. And Tae beams, proud of himself for a successful day. “I bet there are so many more beautiful places to discover.”

“We’re not done yet,” he promises. And when you return to his car, rather than get into it, Tae drags you along, continuing the walk. Following a sidewalk that runs alongside the creek and leads into a busier part of this small town.

“Now city hall? Are we going to pay our property taxes?”

He heaves a sigh. Trying his hardest to seem annoyed but falling victim to a laugh. “Fine, that one was funny,” Tae admits. “But no, we’re not going to city hall.” The sidewalk ends, a marker points in the direction of where the trail reconnects. And after crossing a small street and passing through another parking lot, you’re back on track. Stumbling upon a small pond.

“This is cute,” you smile. Loving what different treasures are hidden about. Even in the midst of the bustle of small town traffic, the cutest little pond offers peace. “I can’t believe this is here, and that you found it.”

“Wait, there’s more!” Tae reaches for your hand. He drags you along, moving a little faster than before. A small red bridge crosses over the creek, and he doesn’t stop until you’re on the opposite side. “Surprise!”

And tears spring to your eyes. A small flock of ducks. All gathered under the tree for shade from the unforgiving sun. A few stragglers even swim in the water. “Taehyung!” He beckons you into his arms. Holding you close and his sweet laugh is music to your ears. “I can’t believe you!”

“I wanted to surprise you.” His hand wraps around the back of your head. Holding you, comforting you while you sob into his chest. “It’s been so heartbreaking seeing how hard you’ve been taking Miso’s death.”

Your heart floods with warmth. The tears that fall are filled with the love that overflows, and you can’t find the words to describe all that he is to you.

“I love you,” you beam. “I love you so much.”

“And I love you even more.” Tae presses a soft kiss to your head, giving you an affectionate squeeze before slipping from your grasp. “Come on, let’s feed them. There’s a machine over here.” And he drags you back across the bridge towards a large stand where two dispensers are filled with pellets.

“I left my wallet in your car.”

He scoffs, “As if I’ll let you pay. I’ve come prepared.” Tae dips into his front pocket, retrieving a handful of quarters. And with the largest, proudest smile upon his face, he thrusts his hand towards you.

“I’m so spoiled.” But he passes a couple to you, holding the rest securely while the dispenser releases a load of pellets into your awaiting hands. “Come on!” You beam. Leaving Tae being as you race back towards the flock.

But he doesn’t speak. Still watching with a loving smile, he allows you the moment to bask in this happiness.

A couple ducks take interest at what’s in your hands. Inching their way towards you when you toss food in their general direction. Tears of utter bliss threaten to spill, and you lower to your knees when others become curious.

“Tae,” you whisper. He stands off to the right, not wanting to risk scaring them off if he were to come closer. “Look at them. Look at the babies.” He digs for his phone. Memorializing the moment with pictures.

He’s unaware that your heart is on the brink of exploding. From the overwhelming love that resides for your second favorite animal to the immense love that your heart possesses for him and only him. A few tears slip through your lashes, the only way you can express the emotions that bubble inside you.

You’ve never had someone care so much for you. And you’re not sure what you’ve done to deserve this.

Tae’s patient as you continue feeding the ducks. His smile not budging each time you return for pellets, and when his stash of change runs dry, it’s your cue to leave. You walk back to his car hand-in-hand. But you cling to him, your arms wrapped around his. Your head against his bicep, desperate to shower him with your love and affection after all he’d done for you. You’re desperate for him to know how in love with him you are.

“Have fun?” He asks.

But he has no idea. You nod. “Best day ever.” And a small tint of red burns in his face. “I love you so much. Thank you for doing this for me.”

He shrugs, as if it were nothing. But his permanent grin gives him away, how proud he is that he’s come up with this idea. “I’m glad. You deserved this,” he replies, and you heart is not safe. Seconds from combusting. You’re impatient to get back to your house and love on him well into the night.

The drive back is peaceful. Exhausting settling in from the heat, you two ride in comfortable silence. Halfway through the drive, his phone buzzes with a message from his mom. He asks you to answer, sneaking the briefest glance at the screen. And when his phone unlocks, opening to their last conversation, one of the numerous photos he’d taken stares back with a message in Korean that you can’t understand.

“She replied with a heart,” you answer. “And something I don’t understand.” Coming to a stop at a green-light-turned-red, he looks at the screen, nodding but not uttering a word. “What did you tell her?”

He starts to smirk. Leaving you to dread whatever’s going to come from his mouth. “It’s right there,” Tae teases. “You can’t read it?” His laughter fills the car when you groan. Delighted in your reaction as he always is.

“No,” you answer. “I’m trying to learn, but my tutor always get distracted during lessons.”

“Can’t help it. Hearing you speak Korean makes me want to kiss you. Is that such a sin?” He scoffs. “If wanting to kiss your girlfriend is a crime, then lock me away.” The light switches to green, the car in front of you hesitating a second before slowly crossing the intersection.

“Charges dropped. But please tell me what you said? Please, Tae Tae. Pretty please.”

He laughs a little more. “All I said was that you have no idea how happy you make me.” The tips of his ears turn a little red at his admission. But your heart is damn near close to exploding again. “I think she said that she loves us. I’m not sure, I didn’t really read it.” His attention remains focused on the road.

But yours is stuck on him.

“I love you.” His lips curl upward, sneaking a glance before turning back to the road. “I wish there was something stronger than love. Because I more than love you.” Tae peels a hand away from the steering wheel to take yours.. “Do you realize how frustrating it is to look at you and not have any words that can tell you how much you mean to me?”

He nods. “Every single time I look at you,” Tae replies. “But actions speak louder, and I can feel how much you love me in everything you do. I am one lucky man.” You want to throw yourself at him, want to shower him in your endless love and affection. But you settle for a squeeze of his hand. One that you hope he knows means you’re lucky too.

And you pray that he’s yours forever.

[psychewritesbs]

Chapter 160: How much of Yuji’s life has been orchestrated? + Megumi the stage-five clinger

Happy JJK-Sunday!

If I had to describe chapter 160 with as few words as possible, I would say: Oh f*ck...

My favorite moment was, of course, Megumi acting like a stage-five clinger. His interaction with Yuji in this chapter is especially ominous in light of Yuji being adamant of protecting Megumi from Sukuna.

A second favorite was Sasaki showing up in this chapter because of the implications moving forward.

Let’s jump right in. 

How much of Yuji’s life has been orchestrated by Kenjaku?

We start the chapter with Kenjaku talking to none other than Sasaki, one of the members of the Occult Club at the high school in Sendai that Yuji used to attend.

Of course, the bomb that Gege dropped on us in this chapter is when Kenjaku thanks Sasaki “for getting along with my son”. 

Like... excuse you?

Not only does this 100% confirm that Kenjaku used Yuji’s mother’s body to give birth to him, but this specific moment + some foreshadowing from previous chapters also opens an interesting can of worms about Yuji’s life: just how much of Yuji’s life has Kenjaku orchestrated?

For me, the implication is that Sasaki had an assigned role to play in Yuji’s life that would inevitably lead to him eating Sukuna’s finger. 

I am assuming this because although we don’t see Kenjaku’s interactions with the other people in Sendai, we get to see that, in addition for thanking her for getting along with Yuji, Kenjaku is incredibly kind to Sasaki. We also learn that she’s the only one who has received a special message from him (thanking her).

Ready to make this whole interaction more ominous? Someone pointed out that the kanji in Sasaki’s name means assistant. 

All of this brings us right back to Yuji’s free will--or lack thereof?

We already know that Kenjaku claims he made Yuji “ingest” Sukuna’s finger and that Megumi is rightfully concerned with this idea because he witnessed Yuji eat Sukuna’s finger “of his own free will.”

It’s also becoming increasingly obvious that Yuji was "created” solely for the purpose of becoming Sukuna’s vessel. 

What this new reveal about Sasaki does is that it makes everything feel like certain events have been part of Kenjaku’s master plan all along. While this still feels a little farfetched, it will come down to how Gege works this idea into the story moving forward.

Come to think of it, even Yuji’s grandfather’s dying words to Yuji take on a new meaning since we know Wasuke knew something was definitively up with Yuji’s mother.

Another possible bit of foreshadowing all the way in chapter 1: While the intersection in the second panel below could be ANY intersection in Japan, it sure looks like the Shibuya crossing:

A quick note on the importance of kanji meanings in JJK before moving onto the next section: knowing the meaning of Sasaki’s name tells us that names are important in JJK. If you haven’t, I recommend you read my break down on the meaning of Megumi’s FULL NAME. His first name is important, but so is his last name.

The plans moving forward

Going off to Tokyo Colony #2 are Panda and Hakari. 

As the strongest, Hakari feels like he should take on Hajime. As for Panda, it looks like his focus will be on hunting down Angel.

Side note: I love that Hakari is still calling Megumi names. Guess Senpai can’t help himself.

I must admit I was disappointed to find that Kirara will stay behind to report, but it is what it is. I am assuming Gege could see no use for Kirara and decided to leave the character out of the action for the time being. 

As for Megumi and Yuji, they’ll be heading to Tokyo Colony #1 to target Higuruma, everybody’s new favorite Law & Order boss. 

This brings us to Megumi’s current state of mind...

Megumi the stage-five clinger

I had a hard time coming up with the title for this section because what I see happening is that Megumi is starting to feel the pressure of the looming deadline for Tsumiki joining the Culling Game. What his behavior shows, however, is that he needs Yuji with him and is clinging onto him but won’t come out and say it--opting instead for aggression towards Yuji, the very same person he needs most. 

His behavior reminded me of how Megumi could be mean to Tsumiki even though he clearly adores her. Apparently that’s the meaning of being tsundere. I’ve read about the term tsundere before but it never “clicked” until this moment and I just love Gege’s interpretation of the trope through Megumi’s character. 

It goes without saying that it was REALLY interesting to me to see Megumi’s dynamic and interaction with Yuji in this chapter because it looks like Gege is letting us know Megumi’s state of mind continues to be one of desperation--remember that dogeza bow from chapter 157?

The thing about Megumi is that he looks stoic on the outside, but he’s actually an incredibly emotional person who doesn’t often show how he’s feeling. 

I hadn’t caught on, but in chatting with @justafrenchlondoner​ about the chapter, they pointed out Megumi’s behavior in his dynamic with Yuji appears nervous and aggressive.

Upon a second look I have to agree that Megumi is acting out of character and aggressive with Yuji when all that Yuji really wants is to protect Megumi from Sukuna.

And yes, let me go ahead and sound like a broken record as I remind you of Yuji’s rather ominous words from chapter 143 yet again:

And this is the part of the chapter that knocked the air out of me: Megumi telling Yuji to stfu about Sukuna but Yuji thinking to himself “as long as I’m around you will suffer” back in ch143 is so damn ominous.

Oh f*ck...

But this is what REALLY gets me about this whole interaction and why I’m calling Megumi a stage-five clinger...

Even though Megumi is calling Yuji selfish, in reality, the one being selfish is Megumi.

This is, of course, my own interpretation of the situation, but to me it feels as though Megumi is clinging onto Yuji’s strength for dear life. 

It’s almost like Megumi needs not just Yuji’s physical strength, but also his unwavering conviction or mental strength.

If you think about it, Megumi has only recently started fighting to win. Remember how unsure he was of himself when fighting Sukuna for the first time? It wasn’t until he went up against the Cursed Spirit from the Yasohachi bridge that he let go of his inhibitions.

Megumi’s battles during Shibuya were the pinnacle of his growth as a character in that moment. If I remember correctly, according to the timeline of events, the Shibuya incident happened around two weeks prior to the current chapter. You could say that although he is more comfortable in his strength than before, Megumi is still growing into his strength at this point.

The thing about Megumi is that everybody and their Divine Dog believes in him and sees his potential except for him. As Gojo tells him “you undervalue yourself.”

Looking back, the way Megumi asks begs Yuji for help in chapter 143 is very enlightening of how Megumi needs Yuji’s strength: 

I initially had read this to mean Megumi needed Yuji’s physical strength. Upon second look, however, Megumi has always seemed to have admiration for Yuji’s conviction.

With the looming deadline for Tsumiki’s vow to join the Culling Game, as Megumi starts to feel the pressure to make his plan work, who better to keep around than the person who will always go for the home run and whose strength he admires?

In other words, like hell he’s going to let Yuji leave his side. Which, again, only makes it more heartbreaking to think Sukuna is up to no good regarding Megumi and Yuji wants to protect him from that.

Oh f*ck.......

The panel below feels like a bit of a lighthearted and comical moment, but it’s also interesting to note that this is the second time they “fight”.

The first “fight” having taken place during the Cursed Womb Arc.

If you will remember, Gege used the Cursed Womb Arc and the Origin of Obedience Arc to show us how much our favorite trio had grown. 

Not sure Gege is going to parallel something here again, but just interesting to note.

Oh f*ck...

Ya, please excuse the French.

Despite the many words I’ve shared here, this chapter left me mostly speechless. 

I feel like I’ve been trapped in Gojo’s limitless domain expansion and all I can think is “oh f*ck” or “halloween” (if you catch my drift).

Chapter 160 was incredible because it looks like Gege has finally finished putting all his pieces into place and is ready to go for the kill by: 

Starting to unravel the story bit by bit, giving us all of the twists we both saw and did not see coming, and

Ramping up the stakes. Taking into consideration the estimates that JJK is somewhere around 60-70% done at this point, It’s not a matter of whether some of our beloved characters will die, but about who, when and how they will die

One last detail

I love the last four panels of the chapter showing Panda, Hakari, Yuji and Megumi all wearing their uniforms (barring Panda) and getting ready to become official participants of the Culling Game by entering their respective barriers.

Knowing that Gege is a very talented artist capable of showing and expressing emotions through his art, I feel like these panels tell us a lot about what the characters might be thinking and I thought I’d expand on that. 

Bear in mind this is my personal interpretation as an artist:

Panda looks excited and ready to fight, perhaps even confident. Panda is saying “bring it!” with his body language

There’s a hint of something I can’t describe in Hakari’s face. It’s almost like he’s coming face to face against how big of a challenge this is going to be and yet he’s resolved to walk straight into “the depths of hell itself”

Yuji looks focused, determined to go in and give it his best no matter what comes his way--that’s just who he is

And then there’s Megumi. I’ve been drawing Megumi recently, and one thing I noticed is that he has very specific micro-expressions. In his panel, he’s warming up his wrists as though he’s getting ready to fight, he has a focused look on his face, but the shadows around his eyes say he might be feeling like he is carrying the heavy burden of the uncertainty surrounding the situation he’s going through

With all that being said... the Culling Game is officially starting and we’re in for a one-way ride straight to hell.

Thank you for reading and happy JJK-Sunday!

What about you? What did you enjoy most about chapter 160?

[witchbitchheadedtoaditch]

Shadow Work Prompts Part 2

Hello my loves! I'm going to add some more shadow work prompts (primarily because... Kaye needs to do shadow work and maybe this will convince them to do it. (It won't. We all know it won't. But we can hope....))

I'm gonna put these below the cut just so people don't have to scroll through this long as fuck list on their dash if they don't want to see them lol

Some of these are really, really heavy, and do touch on things like sexual assault, abuse, death, etc., so this is the trigger warning for you.

A lot of these are also focused on women and AFAB folks because I'm trying to reconcile with my femininity and whatnot.

Anne Carson Quotes

You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. ... Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me.

Desire is no light thing.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

All mortals owe a debt to death.

...sex is a substitute, like money or language.

...your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

There is no person without a world.

If there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me.

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing... life.

The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.

Girls are cruelest to themselves.

What really connects words and things?

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

I am talking about evil. It blooms. It eats. It grins.

I don't want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.

Beauty makes me hopeless.

The dead... are victims of love, many of them.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

You read a hundred military manuals you won't find the word kill they trick you into killing.

I went mad, a god hurt me, I fell.

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

Love does not make me gentle or kind.

Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.

You can never know enough, never work enough, ... never leave the mind quickly enough.

Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.

Where does unbelief begin?

Everything that is me is with me.

A wound gives off its own light...

I began to think I was someone thirsting for God.

You are a person in love with the impossible.

When we are denied a story, a light goes off.

Some conversations are not what they're about.

I lack myself.

Who knows what will happen if I'm alone with my grief.

I... forbid that you should ever lose your screams.

You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

There is a loneliness that fills the plain.

The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.

We live by waters breaking out of the heart.

Time as hunger. Time passing and gazing. Time as perseverance. Mountain time. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.

What are we made of but hunger and rage?

When I look at you, even for a moment, no speaking is left in me.

Kelly Cherry Quotes

I didn't find my story; it found me.

There is blood everywhere and I am lost in it. I breathe blood, not air.

The story of [their] great-grandfather [or any ancestor]... was [their] own story, too.

Ashe Vernon Quotes

Don't you dare, for one minute, believe that my kindness makes me anything but insurmountable.

Understand that I am not your next victim in a laundry list of broken girls.

I will eat you alive before I let you make a meal of me.

What they don't tell you about standing up for what you believe in is that your feet will bruise and your legs will ache.

I'd like to take a moment to submit a formal apology to my soft parts because they kept me warm when I was trying to freeze to death, and I hated them for it.

I let myself be afraid.

When you learn you are only as good as your beauty routine, you forget how to define yourself by anything else.

I will know how to be vulnerable with you, but I won't know how to not regret it.

I know how to put my body inside someone else's but not how to make it beautiful.

I love better at a distance.

I am as much lion as I am lion tamer.

I got good at inflicting pain the same way I got good at soothing it.

Quit picking old wounds and going tor walks in the aches and pains you already made it through--you call it healing, but it sounds like a good way to take a haunting home with you.

I am a cathedral of almost-lovers

Louise Gluck Quotes

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.

Intense love always leads to mourning.

You will never let go, you will never be satiated.

It will feed you, it will ravish you, it will not keep you alive.

Why love what you will lose? There is nothing else to love.

I speak because I am shattered.

I don't need your praise to survive.

Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.

Nakedness in women is always a pose. I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

I am tired of human... I want to live on the sun

Death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.

There are places like this... you enter as a young girl... you never return.

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance, too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.

The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind. The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.

It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

You're not a creature in body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity.

And then, suddenly, something is over.

You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love silence and darkness.

Sappho Quotes

Someone will remember us/I say/even in another time.

Their heart grew cold. They let their wings down.

What cannot be said will be wept.

What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful

Once again love drives me on, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet creature against which nothing can be done.

Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees

Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables.

I know not what to do, my mind is divided.

The female creature is a letter.

No holy place existed without us then

She who loves roses must be patient and not cry when she is pierced by thorns.

Because I prayed this word: I want.

If you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say, shame would not hold down your eyes but rather you would speak about what is just.

Wealth without virtue is no harmless neighbor.

I am weary of all your words and soft, strange ways.

Paisley Rekdal Quotes

Does it offend you to watch me working in it, touching my hands to the greening tips or tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild the living and dead both snap off in my hands?

I can wait longer than sadness.

It is such a small thing to be proud of.

Should I, too, not be loved?

We are even now still so young

I loved him. I loved forgiving him.

Yasmin Belkhyr Quotes

Contrary to wound, I still know nothing of defeat.

Contrary to ache, I still know nothing of guilt.

I help: a good daughter.

Someone always ends up holding something mangled.

It wasn't enough to feel... he had to see, to know.

Adrienne Rich Quotes

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath. It will be short, it will not be simple.

You look at me like an emergency.

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

There is no 'the truth', 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.

The moment of change is the only poem

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which the patriarchy is erected.

The scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has been created between people.

You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you

Silence can be a plan rigorously executed, the blueprint to a life, it is a presence, it has a history, a form. Do not confuse it with any kind of absence.

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

We have lived with violence for so long.

This is my body, take it and destroy it

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for... many facets of our own oppression.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

A language is a map of our failures.

The more I live the more I think two people together is a miracle.

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

How do you make it, all the way from here to morning?

An honorable human relationship--that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"--is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in loneliness.

We write from the marrow of our bones.

The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

William Styron Quotes

We're all in this game together.

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come-not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul

We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

Reading--the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Let your love flow out on all living things.

Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression--in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.

Kai Cheng Thom Quotes

I wanted to protect you, but I'm starting to think that the best thing you can do for people is teach them how to protect themselves. Every girl needs to be at least a little dangerous.

A sanctuary is a place where the door only locks from the inside.

Sometimes to be somebody else, you have to be nobody first.

You will be able to stop hurting people when you stop hurting yourself.

When you're a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological depravation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is out of your control (since the problem is not that you're unloved and deprived; it's that you're Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.

It's good for you to cry sometimes. Even if there isn't a reason.

When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, & activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier.

You are mine like nothing has ever been before.

Safety is, I believe, an inherently classed, raced, and gendered experience that frequently runs the risk of being used for regressive ends--ironically, for restricting the freedoms of the vulnerable, those who are never really safe. Often, we see the call for safety actually reinforce the power of oppressive institutions, like the police and the prison system, in our lives. When we choose safety over liberation, our movements fail.

When they looked at me and my sister, even their love was hungry.

Some people will cling on to anything that makes them feel even a little bit free.

Forget, if you can, all the promises you've ever made and the lies that you've told.

Once you start hurting people, you can't stop

I feel tired. I don't want to be myself anymore.

Sometimes it's important to be alive.

Sometimes, there is nothing you can do but surrender.

You are always disappearing in the hope of being seen. You are always shrinking to fit into someone else's arms. You are collapsing ever inward, a galaxy to become smaller.

Gregory Orr Quotes

If we're not supposed to dance, why all this music?

Even hell is holy.

I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other.

Maybe she loved me, maybe not--who knows? Not even the gods can see into a human heart--it's that dark.

Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what's important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us.

And to live only once--what if that's not enough?

Maybe it was always simple: loss surrounds us. Who would deny it? We ourselves are loss, are lost.

I want to study the book of the world: every vanishing page.

The dead sing us songs I'm learning to answer.

[johnhardinsawyer]

No Longer Strangers

John Sawyer

Bedford Presbyterian Church

7 / 18 / 21

Ephesians 2:11-22

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

“No Longer Strangers”

(A New Harmony)

Have you seen these flags that are flown at homes and businesses and put on t-shirts and bumper stickers?  They look like American flags, but instead of being red, white, and blue, these flags are black and white.  Have you seen these flags?  Now, I’m not entirely sure what brought these white and black flags about, but someone, somewhere, is making some money selling them.  I guess some people think they look kind of cool – and, maybe they do – but I’m not entirely sure what, exactly, these flags mean to many of the people who fly and wear them.  I mean, I kind of know what these black and white flags mean, but a flag is a symbol – a powerful symbol – filled with so much meaning.  Now, I want to be careful and say that I’m not trying to make a judgment statement here about who flies which flag.  I am concerned, though, because it has begun to feel like the United States of America finds itself living under different flags – different ideologies, different forms of expressing ideas and loyalties – “United” in name, only.  There is so much dissonance and very little harmony.  We’re estranged from one another – strangers in this strange, yet beloved, land.

This is not the first time it’s been this way.  Our ideological and cultural differences can cause us to operate in different social worlds, different media worlds, different social media worlds, even different physical worlds in terms of which town or neighborhood we choose to live in  (or which town or neighborhood welcomes us in).  We might live in the same country, and we might technically be speaking the same language as our neighbors – like English – but we’re really speaking different languages about what is important, and true, and good to us.  And it is so hard for us to understand one another.  It happens between people of different races and cultures.  It happens between people of different ages, and generations, and socio-economic backgrounds, and access to technology.  It happens within families and in schools.  It even happens in the church.  

So, whether we’re talking about God, or who we voted for, or where we think the country is headed, or what we think about the complexities of race relations and the police and school curriculum and all of the historical and emotional baggage contained therein, there are so many ways that people can be so far apart on so many things.  We are strangers from one another – and, as we were taught as children, strangers can be dangerous, so. . . we stay away from one another, and the divide grows.  

And then, along comes today’s reading from the Letter to the Ephesians and it totally upends the tribalistic differences to which we might cling.  Because in Jesus Christ, any differences we might think are so important – any differences we might have to those around us – are wiped away and everyone is given a new identity.  The artificial barriers of thought, and feeling, and education, and money, and other things that we humans build, are dismantled.  Anything that separates us is torn down.  

The Letter to the Ephesians was likely written by someone who was close to the Apostle Paul – one of his followers, perhaps.  And the letter is written to the church at Ephesus, but it is really meant to be read by church – including ours.  

Just so you know, the ancient city of Ephesus was a port town in present-day Turkey – across the Aegean Sea from Greece.  Back in the time this letter was written, Ephesus was already well over 1,000 years old, and it was a thriving place with beautiful buildings, and a gigantic road from the harbor to the city – a first-century super-highway where eight chariots could ride side-by-side.  Ephesus had a huge amphitheater, and a library the size of our sanctuary (a rarity in the ancient world), and the temple of Artemis, which was at least four times the size of our sanctuary.[1]  In Greek mythology, Artemis was the daughter of Zeus – the goddess of the hunt.[2]  

So, in addition to the local – native – people, and the Greeks who conquered and settled the area, and the Romans who later conquered and settled the area, people from all over the known world traveled to and through Ephesus over the years, bringing other cultures and religions with them.  These included Jews from Palestine and, later on, Christians.  As you might imagine, this bustling melting pot of cultures, and races, and religions, was not without conflict.  Sound familiar?  It was like there were multiple flags flying over the same city – as many flags as there were viewpoints and loyalties.  And, apparently, there were people who thought that their way of living and practicing religion was the best way – that they were the in-crowd and everyone else was out.  There might have even been people in the church at Ephesus who felt this way about other people in the same church.  Can you imagine?  Shocking, I know, but people back then didn’t have many options in terms of churches.  It’s not like they could pack up and leave to go to the other church down the street.  There was only one church at Ephesus.

And then this letter arrives, stating that God has a different way of life, and faith, and community in mind for us.  There’s only one church, after all, so maybe we should live and work to make it so.  Now, many of the people in the church were so-called Gentiles – they were not ethnic or religious Jews, descended from one of the twelve tribes of Israel.  Instead, they were locals, of Greek, or Roman, or some other lineage, and they had heard the good news about this Palestinian Jew, Jesus Christ, and had come to believe in him.  Just prior to today’s passage, we can read the words later made famous by Martin Luther and other Reformers:  “[f]or by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. . .” (Ephesians 2:8)  Another way of putting it is that, in the very act of coming to have faith in Jesus Christ, you and I are saved by God’s grace.  So these Gentiles in Ephesus, who have come to trust and follow Jesus, now find themselves as members of Christ’s body.  They are adopted, as we heard last week, and are given a new identity as God’s own children.

There’s only one problem, though.  They go to church with people who love Jesus, too, but who look down their noses at these Gentiles because they are not Jewish.  I mean, Jesus was Jewish, so shouldn’t everyone who loves Jesus be Jewish too – with all of the Jewish rules and regulations, including being circumcised?  To which the author of the letter to the Ephesians says, basically, “Don’t you know that God is up to something new and different for all of humanity, not just one small part of it?”

You see, there are these things that divide us as people.  Maybe it’s where we’re from, or what we believe, or who our family is, or what we’ve been taught about who we are.  And all of this makes us different from those people, whoever they may be and whatever flag they may be flying or pledging allegiance to.

But, as the author of today’s passage writes,

. . . now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (2:13-14)

In other words, Christ Jesus bridges the divide between human beings and, through his loving sacrifice, he draws us close together and makes us one people.  No more walls.  No more hostility.  No more flags.  Only the cross of Jesus Christ.  

Can we still fly a flag?  Yes, if we need to.  Can we still love our country or our heritage?  Of course!  But, in Christ Jesus, our true country is God’s kingdom and our true heritage is built upon the loving and faithful foundation of prophets, and apostles, and Jesus, himself.

In so many ways, the dividing lines that we draw and walls we build might feel like our natural default setting as human beings, but they really go against who we truly are – who God made us to be.  As the Celtic Christian author, Philip Newell, writes:

Like never before in the history of humanity, we are becoming aware that what we do to a part we do to the whole, that the parts will not be well as long as the whole is neglected, and that the whole will not be well if the parts are neglected.  We know that it is meaningless to speak of being truly well as parents if our children are unwell.  We know that we cannot claim true wellness for our nation as long as other nations are suffering.  And we know that the human species can in no sense be considered healthy when the body of the earth is deeply infected.  Wellness is found not in isolation but in relationship. . . [The Holy] Spirit is breathing a new vision of oneness into our awareness today.  And it transcends the narrow boundaries that our nations and religions have tried to place around us.  A new and vast Pentecost is stirring in the human soul.  How will we serve it?[3]

Now, this was written ten years ago, long before Covid-19 vaccines and Delta variants, but it somehow rings quite true in the face of all that we’re facing.  We are connected to one another, even if we don’t act like it.  I find Newell’s question compelling.  The Holy Spirit “transcends the narrow boundaries that our nations and religions have tried to place around us. . .  How will we serve it?”

How will we serve the Holy Spirit in the spirit of the oneness to which God is calling us, and leading us, and perhaps dragging us against our wills as we pray with our lips for things to be on earth as they are in heaven and yet live in such a way that we would gladly have nothing to do with a neighbor who thinks or acts or lives differently from us?  

This is tough stuff, my friends, but in Christ Jesus, the God who might seem so far off from sinful and petty human beings, like you and I, brings us near.  And in Christ Jesus, the people who might seem so far off from us are brought near, too – from Mitch McConnell to Nancy Pelosi, from rainbow flags to MAGA hats, from Tucker Carlson to Bill Maher, from Black Lives Matter to Blue Lives Matter, from wherever you may be – and whatever flag you fly – and how you see the world to wherever those who are most strange to you and estranged from you are.  

How will we serve the Spirit?  By living and working and serving and loving until all people are no longer strangers.  We have our work cut out for us – whether that work takes place deep in our own hearts or out in the world, dismantling our pride and our prejudice and making us one.  Who is farthest away from you and how is the Spirit moving you to become one?  In Christ Jesus, God is creating a new humanity that embraces our very human need for one another – our need for harmony and wholeness and peace. . . even with those people who seem so far off from us.  

We have been saved by grace and this is not our own doing, but may we respond to God’s grace  by living and working for God’s harmony, and wholeness, and peace.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

-----------

[1] Watson E. Mills, ed. Mercer Dictionary of the Bible (Macon:  Mercer University Press, 1990) 255-256. James L. Blevins - “Ephesus”.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis.

[3] J. Philip Newell, A New Harmony:  The Spirit, the Earth, and the Human Soul (San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 2011) xiii-xiv.

[saeyoungs-sunflower]

Hiraeth (Seven x MC)

Hello! So...this is my first Mystic Messenger fanfic and the first part of my word series, which is basically just where I find an unusual word and make a fanfic out of it. Easy as pie! If you like what you read, feel free to send a request.

Right, on to the fanfic! Enjoy!

WARNINGS:

Contains spoilers for Seven’s route and Secret Endings

Strong language

References to child abuse (only hints, nothing explicit)

NOTES:

Slightly angsty with poofs of fluff :3

hiraeth (n.): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.

PART 1 - The Agent (2 years ago)

“You’re slacking, 707.”

He knew he wasn’t in his right mind that day, who would be on a day like this?

“Listen to me kid, this is serious. You know exactly what happens to people like us when they don’t get things done in time. There is a reason they are called deadlines,” Vanderwood said smoothly.

Luciel felt a chill crawl down his back at the memory of agent 425, who for some reason disappeared out of thin air after ‘a small accident’. Luciel knew the danger of the situation, he knew he needed to get this done, he just couldn’t keep thoughts on track, “Sorry.”

“What’s wrong with you? You’re usually much faster than this, are you sick or something?”

“I’m fine.”

Vanderwood let out a sharp sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. This kid was going to be the death of him. He knew all this time what was wrong with him, it was the same every year. “Listen, is this because today is the anniversary of when you left home?”

Luciel flinched at his choice of words. Anniversary sounded too jubilant to be wasted on such a day, it should only used for a day that should be celebrated and  not loathed. However, home was the word that hit him the most. That place was not home. It was an empty shell, a hollow space that seemed only to be appropriately filled with the screams and cries of those who were too weak to escape it. That had no privilege to be called home.

“I said I’m fine, Vanderwood,” he said steadily.

Vanderwood let out another sigh, this one much lazier than the last. Whilst he wasn’t supposed to, he knew this kid had had a hard life; that even though he supposedly chose this path, Vanderwood knew deep down that when it came to the bottom of it, he had no choice. “Whatever it is, please at least try to focus and get this done. I have things that I need to get done so I’m going to trust that you will finish this, okay?”

“Sure.”

As soon as Vanderwood left, Luciel rocked back on his stiff chair. This was torture. He let his mind wonder and his rather vivid imagination took over him. He thought about all the terrific places he could have gone, all the beautiful things he could have seen, all the brilliant people he could have met. Was this really the right choice? What other options did he have? What other ways could he have saved him? He snapped back into reality at the thought, and as if by instinct he reached for the floppy disk hidden inside a book of fairytales and inserted it into his computer. Everything melted away as he scrolled through the photos of his other half, and his chest ached and he felt a lump form in his throat at the nostalgia of their smile and how their eyes squeezed shut as they did so. This is why he went through this torture. It was for him. Maybe Vanderwood was right, maybe he did leave home behind after all.

Luciel shook his head and shut off his computer, all the colour that enfolded him gradually fading into a cold, bland grey once again. This was for the best. Deciding that he needed a break, he plonked himself onto his bed and logged onto the RFA chatroom.

Yoosung★: Failed my midterms fml T_T

707: Cuz u played LOLOL all night lol.

Jumin Han: If you want to work for our company, you should take care of your GPA.

Yoosung★: I’m still on the list?! +_+

Luciel quietly chuckled to himself as he read through the chat, joining in here and there. He truly loved the RFA; it was the closest thing to family that he had, the only secure thing in his rickety life. But he had to put up a barrier between himself and them, to ensure their safety and to prevent things from getting…complicated with the agency. That barrier just so happened to be painted with silly jokes and a happy-go-lucky persona, which was both exhausting to keep up and a refreshing distraction from his other life. This was all apart of the game he had to play, the balls he had to juggle and stones he had to step on to keep everything in his life as balanced as it could be.

He had come to the realisation a long time ago that he will never live an honest or steady life, since it appeared that he would never see his brother again and the RFA could never know who he truly was. He was slowly loosening his grip on the fantasy that he will ever have a true ho-

707: Wait!!

Yoosung★: Why?

ZEN: ??

707: Think someone entered the chatroom;;

PART 2 - The Apartment (1 year and 358 days ago)

“Seven, why the headphones? Are you avoiding me?”

Dammit. He knew his meaningless flirting in the chatroom was turning into something…maybe not meaningless. Now he was here with her in Rika’s apartment, and he could no longer keep up the facade like he had in the chatroom.

His barrier was being broken down.

This was for the best, he thought. Just push her away and eventually she will give up, she’ll move on and be happy with someone else. Someone with an honest life, a good job and a secure future. This was right. This was good. This would 100% ensure her safety and well being.

So why did it hurt so much?

He carried on typing to stop himself looking back at her, otherwise he would never be able to say no to her. He kept his focus as his fingers moved across the keyboard like he was being repeatedly shocked by electricity. It felt like that too.

He glanced at the clock on his laptop and noticed that he had been working for several hours, which meant it had been several hours since MC had last spoken to him. Did his plan work? Had he finally got her stay away? Was she finally safe?

In that sense he was relieved, but something just wouldn’t settle in his stomach. They had only known each other for a week, but he knew MC well. She was stubborn, there was no way she would have given up so easily. He slowly removed his headphones, expecting to hear the sound of pans clashing in the kitchen or the shower running or loud music leaking through earphones. Nothing. Feeling everything in his stomach sink, he darted to the kitchen. Not there. Bathroom? Not there. Living room? Not there.

His heart was pounding against his ribs as he frantically searched the apartment, nearly turning it upside down. Shit. His breath started to grow more rapid as memories of her spilled into his mind from when his beloved twin almost took her away from him. For the first time in his life, somethings clicked:

“Seven!!!! I love you!!!”

He was loved.

“Seven…are you okay?”

He was cared for.

“Alright, I’ll trust you, Seven.”

He was safe.

Seven froze as he reached the one room in the house he hadn’t yet searched: her bedroom. Lightly he rested his ear on the door, only to hear gentle and quiet sobs coming from the other side. His beaten heart split right down the middle and he squeezed his eyes shut to prevent his own tears spilling out. Gathering up all the strength he could find within his shattering form, he gently knocked on her door.

“MC?”

The crying abruptly stopped, apart from a few sniffles before a small voice peeped from the other side of the door, “Y-yeah?”

“Can I come in?”

“Mhmm.”

Slowly he clicked the door open and creeped into the dim room. He could just make out her crumpled figure lying on the bed, hiding her face from him. He knew it, she was stubborn. He knew he shouldn't have, but he impulsively wrapped his long arms around her body in an embrace. MC was shocked at first, but eventually gave into his warmth and wrapped her own arms around his torso, her head resting in the crook of his neck, “I-I just-“

“Shhh it’s okay MC, I know.”

Together they sat there in silence. Neither spoke, neither needed to. They just sat there in each other’s arms as their breathing and heart beat synced. Time passed and MC could feel her eyelids growing heavier and heavier, until the power of sleep over took her. Seven felt her eyelids flutter shut against his neck, and laid her down on the bed to keep her in a comfortable position.

When he was sure she was going to stay asleep, he removed his arm from under MC and laid the blanket over her sleeping form. Before leaving her to rest, he pressed a gentle kiss against her forehead, “I’m sorry, MC, but I think I might be a little bit in love with you.”

And with that, he went back to work. New thoughts started flooding into his brain, thoughts of how he had almost lost her twice. Once to Saeran, once to herself.

He found her, then he saved her.

He saved her, then he shoved her away.

He found home, then he burnt it down.

Seven laughed at his own stupidity and the ridiculousness the situation he had found himself in, “People like me aren’t supposed to settle,” he thought to himself, “we’re supposed to forget.”

…

“We’re made to lose.”

PART 3 - The Housewarming Party (Present day)

“Hello? Earth to Saeyoung?”

Saeyoung snapped back into reality and turned his head away from the view from the balcony to find an even more stunning view in front of him, “Terribly sorry m’am, the Defender of Justice just received a call from the Space Station. Apparently they have run out of napkins for our wedding so we will have to bring some ourselves.”

MC playfully slapped his shoulder before hugging his arm and looking at the rest of the city. This was their favourite time to watch the city; all the little lights from the buildings blended perfectly with the stars, a light breeze flowed through the air, and it was quiet. The only sound to be heard was the sound of music coming from inside their new house. More specifically, music from musicals (it was Jaehee’s turn to choose). MC looked up at her fiancé before pressing a kiss on his shoulder, “This is our home now.”

“I guess it is. We did a pretty good job finding this place. Nice neighbours, amazing view, gre-“

Saeyoung was interrupted by his lover’s giggles. God, he wasn’t sure if he would ever get used this. She settled down and once again rested her chin on his shoulder, “That’s not what I meant. I mean, you’re not wrong, it is a lovely house. But, that’s all it is right now, a house. It will become home in time.”

“And what is home to you, oh wise MC,” Saeyoung queried.

She shot him a playful glare before turning serious again, “Well, I think home can be a lot things. A place, an object, a person, an idea, anything. It’s not really about what it is, it’s the feelings that you get from it. It’s where you go when you have nowhere else, where your heart takes you when you are most lost. Home is where you feel all fuzzy inside, like when you’re drinking hot chocolate or when you’re snuggled up on the sofa watching your favourite movie. When you’re home, you’re cared for and looked after. It’s a bandage, a medicine, a kiss better. Home is warm, it’s safe, it’s love.”

When he went quiet, MC turned to Saeyoung but was caught off guard when he leaned forward placing a firm but soft kiss on her lips. How did he get so lucky? How did he find someone who understood him so well? He laced his arms around her waist, bringing her closer to him as she wrapped her own arms around his neck. They could go on forever, completely lost yet found in each other, something neither could describe. But a familiar salty taste brought MC back to reality. She loosened her grip to look up at him, tears streaming down his face. She would have asked him what was wrong, but she didn’t need to. She knew the answer, and she knew those tears had been held back for a long time. So instead, she just gently wiped away his liquified fears with her sleeve, never to be seen again, “And what is home to you, Saeyoung?”

He let the corners of his mouth curl upwards and leaned towards her again, his hand cradling her neck. Yes, he thought to himself, this is it, right? This is hom-

“Ew.”

Almost flying apart, they looked at the doorway only to see a familiar figure standing in the middle of it, “S-Saeran!”

“Uh sorry to…interrupt but um we’re going to take some photos inside…” Saeran said, looking at the floor and rocking on his feet.

“Oh yes of course! We’ll be out in just a sec,” Saeyoung replied cheerfully.

“Actually, uh, Saeyoung?”

“Yes, Saeran?”

“I just wanted to say,” he paused, “thank you for letting me…live here with you guys. I know I’ve been a lot to handle over the past few years, but thank you for not giving up on me and watching over me. When you first helped me escape Mint Eye, I thought I was being betrayed, but now I see that you took so many risks to help me and save me. Thank you, you two…are my family and I..love you both.”

Both Saeyoung and MC were stunned to silence at this sudden outburst. Saeran was usually so bitter and had spent most of his time blaming Saeyoung for everything that had gone wrong in his life, but now he was thanking him? And saying he loved him? His initial thought was that Saeran was just playing some sick trick on him, but the rosy flush over his cheeks told him otherwise.

Saeran’s figure started to blur through Saeyoung’s eyes as they once again filled with tears. Overcome with emotion, he lunged towards his twin and engulfed him in his arms, which Saeran reluctantly returned. One step at a time.

“Um, should we go and take the photos now?” Saeran said, though his voice was muffled in his brother’s hoodie.

“Yes, yes we should,” Saeyoung quickly wiped his tears with the sleeve of his hoodie, “um, you two go ahead, I’ll be right behind you!” he shot them his signature cheery grin.

“Okay, don’t stay out too long, it’s getting cold out here,” MC said before pecking his cheek and following Saeran inside. She linked arms with him and playfully ruffled messy hair with her free hand, the sight of them interacting like that made something warm bubble in Saeyoung’s chest. His heart may be be damaged and bruised, but it was healing. They were healing him. Maybe home wasn’t just one thing, maybe it was in the form of two people? Taking a deep breath, Saeyoung went back inside his new house. The whole RFA was there preparing for the photo.

“Jumin, move! You’re blocking my good side!”

“Every side is your good side, Zen.”

“Well, you’re not wrong, Jaehee.”

“Yoosung, you’re standing on my foot. Please remove it.”

“Oh! Sorry Jumin! I’ll just sit here instead.”

Saeyoung chuckled warmly at them, which grabbed the attention of the blonde who was moving round the red sofa, “Saeyoung! You’re back! We saved you a space next to MC and Saeran.”

Taking his place on the sofa, he looked round at all his friends. They were all smiling at him, at each other, laughing and settling into their own positions. Saeyoung felt that familiar warmth in his chest before something clicked.

“Ready!”

He had waited so long.

“3!”

This was it.

“2!”

He found it.

“1!”

It found him.

Click.

“Woohoo! Good job gang! It looks great!”

“Lemme see!”

“Me too!”

“I would like to see.”

“Jaehee, can you see it from there?”

“I can, it’s wonderful.”

Only MC and Saeyoung were left on the couch, a few seconds passed before MC spoke up, “You okay?”

“I think I know what home is to me now.”

MC smiled fondly at him, relieved that he had finally found peace, “I’m so happy you found it, you deserve it.”

Saeyoung leaned back on the couch, MC in his arms and observing the chaos in front of him. Sure, it was messy, but it was his mess. It took him his whole life up to this point to find his haven, and it finally came to save him. The RFA was home, his brother was home, the woman in his arms was home.

This was home.

There we go, my first piece of writing for Mystic Messenger. I know it’s not perfect and it’s a bit rough round the edges, but hopefully I’ll improve with time. As I said before, requests are open and I have some more ideas in mind, so stick around!

Have a fab day everyone!

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

I was tagged by @tiny-teapot-stuck-in-a-burrow AND @aconitum-napellus !! Thank you both!!!!!! I added both your new question. Sorry if I write too much.....

rules: answer all questions, add one question of your own and tag as many people as there are questions.

1. coke or pepsi: Coke, though I really don’t drink colas much. When I do drink sodas I prefer a root beer or ginger ale/beer.

2. disney or dreamworks: Disney I guess, considering their entire body of work and owning Pixar. 

3. coffee or tea: I drink more coffee but prefer tea. Go figure! LOL

4. books or movies: No, don’t make me choose!!!! Technically I prefer books, but I get so little time to read anymore. Movies are much quicker to take in. Actually, both are art, just different kinds, and it depends what medium best suits the individual story.

5. windows or mac: windows, sort of.

6. dc or marvel: In comics-DC, not that I read many superhero ones anymore. And if you count my entire life, when I adored the mutants, Marvel. In movies- Marvel

7. x-box or playstation: neither, I don’t have the money for gaming

8. dragon age or mass effect: Dunno. Back when I used to visit my brother I got to play both a bit, but mostly I was stuck watching him play the, NOTHING is more boring than watching someone else play a game! LOL I can’t remember having a preference. 

9. night owl or early riser: Night owl!! Early mornings make me feel ill. Seriously!

10. cards or chess: I LOVED playing chess but I had no one to play with (parents had no time and my brother wouldn’t play things he lost! LOL) So, cards. At least you can build a house of cards or play solitaire with them!

11. chocolate or vanilla: for candy- chocolate, for milk shakes- vanilla, for ice cream- anything else

12. vans or converse: Neither. Since my feet and ankles are so messed up, I long ago gave up worrying about shoe fashion. If it is big enough for my giant feet and ankle brace, and it supports my bad ankles, I get it no matter how hideous. That’s harder than you think....

13. Lavellan, Trevelyan, Cadash, or Adaar: I think this is a gaming thing I’m not qualified to answer.

14. fluff or angst: Both! Gotta keep a balanced fictional diet. Really, I just  want to put characters through the wringer AND have them happy, so mixing the two in one story is a thing I do. Not that any of you have read any of my stories! LOL

15. beach or forest: Both!!!!!! I grew up spending my weekends at the beach and a lot of the rest of the time in woods, so it’s too hard to choose. 

16. dogs or cats: BOTH! I wouldn’t want to offend half the non human part of my family by picking favorites!

17. clear skies or rain: Rain, with a special fondness for hurricanes (before the boat respinsiblities got so overwhelming). Besides, I burn too easily in the sun.

18. cooking or eating out: Take out from some really good place, so I don’t have to eat in public or do as many dishes. I REALLY hate washing dishes! Though cooking is nice when I have a nice recipe to work with...

19. spicy food or mild food: Mildly spicy. The sort of level where those that like spicy mock you for being a wimp and those that like mild (looking at you Mom) find your cooking too strong.

20. halloween/samhain or solstice/yule/christmas: ACK! BOTH! Those are my favorite times of year, or at least they were until last year got so melencholy at Christmas.

21. would you rather forever be a little too cold or a little too hot: Cold. I have lived both (thank you lack of heating and unreliable air conditioner). Cold you can just wear more, bundle up, and even get down right cozy for sleeping that way. But hot is miserable and keeps you from sleeping. Plus, I’m unfortunately someone that sweats easily, and society really, really hates that. 

22. if you could have a superpower, what would it be: Immortality! Life is far, far too short to see and do even a fraction of the things I want. Heck, I won’t even live ling enough to read all the books I own! Plus you get the facinating chance to watch the world change, to get to see things playout, and gain the perspective to know that impermanence  of it all...well, except for you.

23. animation or live action: Animation. It allows so much freedom of apperance, so many individual styles, embracing the surreal, strange and dreamlike on a regular basis. 

24. paragon or renegade: depends on what this is refering to. I have seen it used in a game somewhere, so in that case I don’t have an opinion. As a general term, renegade. 

25. baths or showers: Shower, though not based on preference so much as neccesity. When I was tiny they cut a notch out of the bathtub here so my grandmother could step into it, but the patch Pop put in after she died has broken loose. So, more than a couple inches of water you flood the floor!

26. team cap or team iron man: Cap

27. fantasy or sci-fi: BOTH! Sometimes the line between the two is very thin anyway.

28. do you have three or four favourite quotes, if so what are they: Not really. I find them interesting but never memorize them. I horrified my teachers when I refused the quote book for my graduation speech. I like what others say, but I prefer to speak for myself. Now if you wanted me to recite Jabberwocky or favorite dialog I have memorized..... 

29. youtube or netflix: youtube I have a poor internet connection and no money, so netflix is out.

30. harry potter or percy jackson: Harry Potter, though since I haven’t read any Percy Jackson or seen the movie, maybe I should abstain.

31. when you feel accomplished: When I get to the end of the day and I have something completed, like a bit of sculpting, but this is usually immediately followed by absolute dissatisfaction  with the results and questioning whether I should have done something else instead! 

32. star wars or star trek: Aww, now you are talking about my childhood. I suppose it depends on what section of these universes. Both have areas I hate (see everthing about the SW prequels or that smug lot in the Next Gen and my desire to take a lead pipe to Kirk) and aspects I have just skipped. The orginal Star Wars trilogy has a special place in my heart, but don’t tell my beloved Spock! 

33. paperback books or hardback books: Hardback, which might be one of the reasons my floor first collapsed under one of my bookcases! LOL

34. fantastic beasts or cursed child: No opinion. I haven’t seen the first or read the second. 

35. evans, pratt, hemsworth, or pine: Um, Chris Evans as in the guy playing Captain America. Maybe? I mean, it depends on what part they are playing since I don’t know anything about the actors as people.

36. tangled, frozen, or moana: I don’t know. I liked Tangled, I was generally underwhelmed by Frozen but loved the redefinition of true love to not be romantic, but I haven’t had a chance to see Moana yet. 

37. opera or ballet:  depends on my mood, but generally ballet. Maybe. At least then the language barrier doesn’t get in the way of comprehension. 

38. perfume or incense: Perfume. My fragile lungs hate smoke, even nice smelling stuff. 

39. Voldemort or Sauron: Sauron He feels more like a force of nature, rather than someone that keeps having his evil plans messed with by a bunch of a kids. 

New question: Would you rather time travel to the past or future?

I cannot possibly tag 39 people!!! 

Most of you will not want to do this, so don’t. It REALLY is ok!

I’ll tag some of you, but please do NOT feel you have to do it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

@omegadalek  @theramblingrogue @whitexblackrose @orcface @takethekeyandlockherup @kimikokat @awesome-beatles-fan @antonnightwatch @arsenalofmerit @aigooylgaifyllina @jamisings @kleurenblind @pupsik11 @runningbarefootthroughtheforest  @camerawakened @woodsong @nakila-rimmer-bear @aeqvat-omnes-cinis @imagetornwing @invisibleme59 @javiroa226 @dendroica @lzbarnabas @eleonoraalva

Anyone that wants to do it just pretend I tagged you!

(I am going to lie awake worrying I offended some of you by tagging. ) 

[mylymedlife]

I Love Writing my Blog, but I Am Not a Blogger.

Are you confused? Let me try to explain.

I enjoy writing these posts. They help me, and my most sincere hope is they help someone else. But the reality is cultivating an online audience requires more or less constant social media activity. And that’s just not me. 

For example, we recently returned from vacation in Mexico. If I was a blogger, I would have been posting the entire time, as there was so much opportunity to show how I manage my illness while traveling. But I didn’t do that. It’s not because I don’t care or don’t want to help others.  I didn’t post during vacation because I have learned that once I go down the posting road, I start looking for Instagram Moments. And when I start looking for Instagram Moments, I start missing the Actual Moments. Instead of really feeling and soaking up each experience, I’m thinking of the perfect headline or trying to get the perfect shot.

I didn’t want to spend my vacation doing that. Instead, I wanted to be present with my vacation and with my family.  I didn’t want to be present with my phone. In fact, I aggressively avoided my phone. 

So, I’m not really a blogger.

But if I was a blogger, here are some of the things  would have told you about traveling while living with chronic lyme disease, anxiety and fatigue:

We packed heavy. I brought an entire extra suitcase, which we call “The Bag of Life”. It contained three tubs of protein powder (remember I am on a liquid diet), a bottle of liquid coconut oil (for my protein shakes), along with various supplements and powders I need to make my life work. ( I did not photograph our huge pile of luggage, because I wasn’t being a Blogger).

We also brought two boxes of food. I know. It sounds funny. But I have several food intolerances, and so does my daughter, and many of the foods that are safe for us to eat are hard to come by in Mexico, so we brought our own. I ordered from Thrive Market, which is sort of like an online Costco for natural and organic food. You pay a small annual fee, and in return you can buy at a discount and in bulk. Free shipping on orders over $50. They do an amazing job of packing the food so it doesn’t get destroyed, so it was an ideal option for the airplane. We simply checked the boxes, and everything arrived intact. (same comment as above on the lack of photo).

We went to the grocery store to pick up fresh fruits and vegetables to supplement the packaged goods we brought (cilantro photo above).

As always, we stayed in a home with a full kitchen, and we ate most dinners at home. My family was actually very happy with that option, as the setting was beautiful, and everybody feels better with home cooking. (again, no photos. I was focused on eating and laughing).

When we did eat out, we had the concierge call the restaurant and explain our food allergy situation so there was no difficulty or confusion caused by language barriers.

Every single morning I took a walk at dawn (pool photo above). My dawn walk is an essential component of my anti-anxiety regimen. That walk soothes, centers and calms me. But it only works if I go while the world is still largely at rest. There’s just something about the feeling in the air at that hour. For me, a dawn walk is medicinal. A walk after dawn is just a walk. 

We were gone over Easter, so I surprised my daughter (and her friend, who is like a daughter to us) with Easter egg dying supplies. (egg photo).

There is a stunning chapel on the grounds of the resort where we stayed (bottom right photo). I discovered it on one of my dawn walks, and the sight literally stopped me in my tracks. There was stillness all around. First light had just broken. And here was this chapel, doors flung open, lights ablaze. It just beckoned me in, and I dropped to my knees and felt God’s presence. Experiences like that are one of the many reasons I walk at dawn. It would not have been the same at high noon.

Neither my daughter or I can tolerate onions, which obviously rules out most restaurant food. But the great thing about Mexico is the guacamole is usually made table side. So, we simply asked them to hold the onion (guac photo). It was such a treat for my daughter and I to get to actually eat guacamole at a restaurant. You have no idea.

I lost my beloved brother a few years ago, and orange is the color we use to remember him. Orange is always popping up at the most unexpected moments. One morning on my walk, I came across orange flowers scattered along the path, so I put one in my shoe so my brother could walk with me. (shoe photo).

You may think I look thin in the top three photos, but I weigh significantly more than when we made this same trip last year. It’s a joy for me to see the difference. And I am no longer adverse to having my photo taken with bare arms, which I avoided for years because I looked so skeletal. Credit my liquid diet for the weight gain. (PS -- my daughter is a rock climber and extremely buff, so you can’t compare my arms to hers).

To keep my fatigue in check, I made sure to plan down time each day, and I got plenty of sleep. Both are critical for me. (no photo).

So, there you go. The vacation I would have blogged about if I was a blogger.

[theadventuresofharryandlaura]

Best of 2017

As 2017 comes to a close, I am using the first quiet days I’ve had in quite some time to reflect on the last year. One of the problems with the itinerant, episodic life of a musician is that I don’t always get a chance to digest a musical experience before moving on to the next one. So, I will attempt to process some of the best parts of this year through writing this post.

Though, as a country, we seem to be descending into the Worst of Times, 2017 was for me, musically, probably the busiest and most exciting year I’ve had yet. I spent about 210 days on the road this year. I took countless flights, got hung up by the cello time and time again, got stranded overnight 3 times, and visited Japan, Mongolia, Malaysia, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, Nepal, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as 25 US states. I played 120 concerts and about 100 more educational workshops, outreach events and masterclasses. As with previous years when I’ve looked back on what the year held for me, I feel a profound sense of gratitude for this life and for all the people who help me to lead it. So, I offer my favorite 10 experiences of this year, in chronological order, and why I loved them.

1. Asia Tour with Break of Reality

2017 kicked off with an absolutely epic tour with my cello band Break of Reality, organized by the US State Department. We spent over a month touring to Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Mongolia and the Philippines, performing many concerts and workshops. You can read a perhaps TOO-detailed account of the tour in my last blog post (yes, I’m ashamed that that was many months ago..), but now that I have a little distance from the experience, what has stuck with me is the collaborations we did with local artists in each country. The notion that music is a universal language rang overwhelmingly true during these collaborations, allowing us to inhabit totally different cultures quickly and naturally despite spoken language barriers.

3. Brahms and Lindberg at ChatterABQ

In April, I traveled to Albuquerque, as I often do, to perform at a wonderful series there called Chatter. The concert took place on Easter Sunday morning, and the program consisted of two monumental works for clarinet, cello and piano by Johannes Brahms and Magnus Lindberg. My collaborators were the incredibly talented James Shields (clarinet) and Conor Hanick (piano). The Brahms is just a staggeringly beautiful work, one that I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of playing a few times before (but could play hundreds of times and never tire of it!). The Lindberg, on the other hand, I was learning for the first time for this concert. It helped that I have some experience with Lindberg’s complex, dense, yet riveting writing, but still I spent more hours than I care to admit learning the cello part for this piece. Though Lindberg is very much still with us and the piece was only written ten years ago, the piece has a timeless gravity to it that our audience really seemed to respond to. It was worth the many, many hours spent to learn it, especially since the three of us had the opportunity to play it again as part of the Music Today Festival at the University of Oregon a few months later, and will present it again in NYC in 2018! Stay tuned for details...

4. Sybarite5 @ Osaka Competition

I believe I wrote about this same competition in my highlights of 2014 blog post, and this past May, Sybarite5 was once again invited to the live, semifinal round of the Osaka International Chamber Music Competition & Festa. The “Festa” portion is what we played for: it is an audience-judged, free category encompassing all types of groups from a Mongolian horsehead fiddle quartet (actually my friends from my visit to Mongolia earlier in the year) to a Japanese percussion collective. Older, wiser, and more sure of ourselves than ever, we put what we absolutely felt was our best foot forward, presenting our most exciting, energetic works with conviction. And, we were eliminated in the first round, beat fair and square by a Japanese jazz flute and guitar duo. What we learned from the experience is that we can’t be anyone other than ourselves, and we can’t control what audiences will want, especially in different countries. We took a few days to explore beautiful Japan, and then headed home to move on to the next adventure, which was...:

5. Silk Road Global Musician Workshop

I could write an entire, lengthy blog post on this week alone, but my thumbs can’t take it, so I’ll keep it brief. A mere 24 hours after our not-so-triumphant return from Japan, Sybarite5 re-packed our suitcases and headed to Greencastle, Indiana, where we participated in the Silk Road Global Musician Workshop. GMW is helmed by our old friend and cello tour de force Mike Block, who assembled a dizzying array of talented faculty to teach their unique musical styles to a collection of curious musicians and music-lovers of all ages and walks of life (including us). We were all placed in separate “bands”, which were each led by a different faculty member. In my bands, I was lucky enough to learn about and play Indian music with tabla master Sandeep Das, klezmer with renaissance man Hankus Netsky, and extended cello technique with Mike himself. It was both transformative and humbling to be in a student role again after all these years. I loved getting outside of my comfort zone and being forced to try things that I wasn’t good at. The whole environment was wonderfully supportive, and the group felt like a family after 7 days of very intense music-making and soul searching. It’s a very special festival, and I think any musician could benefit from it.

6. Boyd Meets Girl CD release/ US tour

In July, my dear husband Rupert and I released our first album together as a cello and guitar duo. Boyd Meets Girl is the name of the duo and the album, and we are very proud of both. The album, recorded in October 2016 at Sono Luminus studios in Virginia, reached No. 3 on the Billboard Classical Chart, received many positive reviews, including Gramophone magazine, has been played extensively on terrestrial and satellite radio, and one of the tracks has nearly 100k plays on Spotify. We are thrilled with how it came out, and to celebrate we performed about a dozen concerts around the US in July and early August. The highlights for me were the wonderful Guild Hall of East Hampton, which was packed despite us never having played the region, a return to our beloved Newport Music Festival in Rhode Island, and my first performance in Taos, New Mexico since being a student at the chamber music festival there 10(!) years ago. We even sold out of CDs at the last concert, but thankfully we had time to go home and get more before the next adventure...:

7. Boyd Meets Girl Australia/New Zealand Tour

Over a year and a half ago, before the album was even recorded, Rupert began contacting presenters in Australia to organize a truly epic tour of the country. Through hard work and incredible attention to detail, he managed to organize 18 concerts for us in every state and territory, covering every major city and many smaller towns as well. We also flew to New Zealand at the beginning of the tour, to catch up with Rupert’s brother and play one concert. I will not lie, the schedule was grueling, with two stretches of 6 concerts in a row with plane travel each morning, but it was just exhilarating to get to know so many corners of Rupert’s home country, including some places that not even many Australians have been! Highlights included performing in the historic Melbourne home designed by Rupert’s grandfather, Robin Boyd, who was one of Australia’s most accomplished architects, playing in Perth and Albany, Western Australia (on the West Coast of the country with no other major cities anywhere near), performing in the stunning ballroom of a private mansion near Hobart in Tasmania, traveling to Uluru, the “red center” of the country and the heart of Aboriginal culture, and from there taking a 6-hour bus ride to Alice Springs, the closest city and place of our final concert! I am so proud of Rupert for his hard work in organizing the entire thing, and for booking every single flight (of which there were many) over the PHONE because of the cello.

8. Gharana Music Festival

After a few weeks back home, in which Rupert and I played several more concerts closer to home including our official NYC album release at SubCulture, we once again traveled across the world. We were lucky enough to be invited back to the Gharana Music Festival in Nepal, in which we had participated in 2016 as well. Most of our concerts took place in Kathmandu in extremely charming venues: a bar/restaurant/plant nursery and the grounds of a fancy French restaurant. But the memorable part of this year’s festival, for us, was the “run-out” to the town of Janakpur, in the south of the country close to the border with India. I use quotation marks when I say “run-out”, because getting from Kathmandu involved a 10+ hour ride each way in a van, through gorgeous but terrifying high mountain passes in the Himalayas. I must say, our driver was an absolute legend, never once losing his concentration while driving on the one-lane, cliff-hugging roads where only small and often broken bricks separated us from a sheer drop. The city of Janakpur reminded me more of India than of Nepal, with cows and goats roaming freely in the streets, and dirt roads running through the city. The most outstanding feature of Janakpur is the truly spectacular Janaki temple, and this was the site of our concert there. The concert consisted of a set by a local band, a set by us, a set by the well known Kathmandu-based band KUTUMBA, and then a collaboration with all of us. The morning of the show, we got together with KUTUMBA, who explained to us that their mission is to make traditional Nepali instruments cool, and to fashion themselves as rock stars playing these instruments, which they have absolutely done, and they tour the world selling out huge venues. They taught us one of their songs and asked us to mash it up with one of ours, and we chose the Faure Pavane. Somehow it came together naturally and quickly, and their tunes were so catchy I couldn’t get them out of my head! That night, a huge stage was erected in the area in front of the temple, and we presented what felt like an actual rock concert. A crowd of thousands gathered to hear us, and Rupert and I played our Bach inventions and other rep just the same as we always do, except MUCH more heavily amplified. We also wore traditional kurtas to match the Nepali performers, and during the concert, giant grasshoppers landed aggressively on our fingers and instruments. It was a wild, unforgettable experience.

9. IRIS Orchestra

This year, I had the pleasure of playing two concerts with the wonderful IRIS Orchestra. The orchestra performs in Memphis, but its members come from all over the country, converging about five times a year. I will write about the most recent time, just a few weeks ago, since it was more intense and also fresher in my mind. There is something magical about IRIS in that it’s a different group every time, all culled from the same large roster, but the exact personnel for each concert changes every time. So, everyone gets together for the first time on Thursday evening and by Saturday is concert-ready. For this particular concert, which was the “strings-only” concert that the orchestra presents once a year, I was leading the cello section, and also doing outreach concerts around the community with my string sisters Sarah Whitney and Angela Pickett. So, our schedule was particularly busy! The rep for the concert was curious: Bach���s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusic, two pieces which I have played so many times I lost track a decade ago, paired with piano concerti by Hindemith and Bloch which I had never even heard, much less played, before, and which required some time in the practice room. But, I always cherish opportunities to learn new music, and the piano soloist, Orion Weiss, played both of them with such conviction (even though they were new to him too), that the concerts were so much fun. I feel lucky that I get to go back to IRIS in just a few short months.

10. Northwest Bach Festival with Break of Reality

My final trip of 2017 was a lovely one. After a 12-hour turnaround from Memphis, I flew to Spokane, Washington to meet my cello bandmates for the “Winter Classics” series of the Northwest Bach Festival. The festival is helmed by the talented and dynamic cellist Zuill Bailey, whom we had the pleasure of getting to know, and hear play, throughout the week. We did three concerts, which progressed from an educational daytime, acoustic show for the inquisitive students at Eastern Washington University, to an intimate acoustic show in a cozy, atmospheric winery, to a full-blown rock show with drum set at a converted cracker factory. This last show was also special because we unplugged for one tune, a 4-cello arrangement of the Bach 6th Suite Sarabande, for which Zuill joined us (it is a Bach Festival, after all). The whole thing was so unique, and it was the first time anything outside of traditional classical chamber music had been presented at this festival. We were so thankful to Zuill for believing that a cello rock band could work in the context of a chamber music festival, and we hope to return to Spokane again before too long!

So, those are my favorites for 2017, though there were many other memorable moments! I am so thankful to my colleagues and to those who consume and appreciate music. I will leave you with my “Year in Cities” 2017, which is a list I keep of all the places I sleep (not drive through or go for the day), so that I don’t forget! Onward to 2018....

New York, NY • Okinawa, JAPAN • Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA • Kota Kinabalu, MALAYSIA • Seoul, KOREA • Busan, KOREA • Daegu, KOREA • Pangyo, KOREA • Ulaanbaatar, MONGOLIA • Manila, PHILIPPINES • Zambales, PHILIPPINES • Newport, RI • Lancaster, PA • Tucson, AZ • Scottsdale, AZ • Fort Worth, TX • Memphis, TN • Cleveland, MS • St. Cloud, MN • Minneapolis, MN • Iowa City, IA • Albuquerque, NM • Wichita, KS • Hesston, KS • Pittsburg, KS • Muncie, IN • Nashville, TN • Montreal, CANADA • Eugene, OR • Portland, OR • Osaka, JAPAN • Kyoto, JAPAN • Tokyo, JAPAN • Bangkok, THAILAND • Greencastle, IN • Ithaca, NY • Montague, NJ • Chatham,MA • East Hampton, NY • West Hartford, CT • Burlington, VT • Taos, NM • Telluride, CO • Cortez, CO • Santa Fe, NM • Jackson Hole, WY • Toronto, CANADA • Auckland, NEW ZEALAND • Cambridge, NEW ZEALAND • Figtree, AUSTRALIA • Canberra, AUSTRALIA • Adelaide, AUSTRALIA • Melbourne, AUSTRALIA • Perth, AUSTRALIA • Albany, AUSTRALIA • Wagga Wagga, AUSTRALIA • Hay, AUSTRALIA • Deniliquin, AUSTRALIA • Brisbane, AUSTRALIA • Crows Nest, AUSTRALIA • Sydney, AUSTRALIA • Hobart, AUSTRALIA • Yulara, AUSTRALIA • Alice Springs, AUSTRALIA • Fargo, ND • Kathmandu, NEPAL • Janakpur, NEPAL • San Francisco, CA • Anahola, HI • Three Oaks, MI • Hart, MI • Chicago, IL • Spokane, WA