#like jesus fucking christ i think suicide is the only solution for you

[17gz]

white guy from a country where everyone and their mom has names like John Baker and Jake Smith and Sarah Johnson and Chris Williams and Josh Brown:

its just reeeeaallyyy suspicious that your name is ahmed or mohammed :/ ummmm bot alert! scammer! yes my country is actively supplying weapons to kill palestinian people and i've donated $500 to ao3 in the past 6 months but what about my moneeeyyyy?????? anyways anyone i disagree with is part of a belgian scam ring. this is a logical step rather than viewing brown people as human beings for once in my life

[kaiasky]

lots of people in my local sphere are praising bushwell's self immolation as a brave thing to do and it does kinda fuck me up. In my worst moments there is no greater comfort than the fact that if I killed myself in a specific way at a specific time then I could turn all my suffering and pain into something commendable and people would love me for my death in a way they never could in life. I think that's a little incoherent but you get what I'm saying right? I don't want to live in a world where that is an "necessary" or "beautiful" or "brave" sacrifice to make but when people refer to it as that- I'm forced to confront the fact that I do live in a world that thinks like that. That I live in a world where I really would be of more use dead. Again I'm being a bit incoherent but I felt the need to say something and get it off my chest I understand it's a complicated and touchy topic for everyone.

(re this) yeah.

idk, it's... i think we valorize lots of people for dying as a part of broader culture. war heroes, people who were assassinated, every martyred christian saint. including Jesus Fucking Christ. And so in that sense i think it's hard to blame someone for seeing somebody who killed themself and go, this is martyrdom, this is heroic, reblog reblog reblog. it hits you on a gut level.

But then like you said, you think about it and you go, oh yeah, valorizing killing yourself is a terrible thing (both morally, in that it encourages other people to consider killing themself, and politically, in that if all the most devoted fucking adherents to your movement kill themselves who will be around to fucking fight for change??)

I hope and suspect that the people who reblog this kind of stuff are simply unaware of this logic and that through having it gently pointed out to them they'll also come to see what's wrong with valorizing suicides.

Ultimately like, I think the choice to continue existing or stop existing is a decision everybody (gets/has) to make for themself, but we should do as much as possible to tip the calculus in favor of "keep existing" as possible.

It goes without saying and sounds sappy, but to all of you, you wouldn't be of use dead. if you were gone, regardless of how or why, it would be nothing other than a tragedy and a huge, irreplaceable loss.

(Tangentially related, but the only advice I've ever found that like, worked for me (ymmv) for dealing with suicidal thoughts is a post like, "alright, if you're seriously contemplating suicide, then you can do that whenever, there's no rush, it's be a waste to not fuck around before ending it, so you should 1. quit your job and become one of those cool ski bum guys who couch-surfs in the summer and works as a ski instructor in the winter, and try a year or two of that out first." And so whenever I'm doing bad, I think alright, is today the day I pull the trigger on the ski bum lifestyle? And for whatever reason that feels more extreme than suicide and so it snaps me back to "hm, maybe there are less-extreme solutions than those two")

[dreamsclock]

one thing i can’t stop thinking abt is the idea of jack confronting tubbo about the “dead man’s switch” on his nukes, which he NEVER told jack about. jack is so confused because, “i thought you were finally happy, though? yknow.. with ranboo? what happened, tubbo? why would you..” and tubbo just. doesnt answer him. goes all quiet. you can never be too certain, he thinks. because it’s not like there is much permanence in his life, anyway.

c!tubbo makes me so goddamn sad and this ask actually had me crying this morning LMAO i’m so emotional,,,, c!tubbo deserves so much better than he gets and the implications of him building a dead man’s switch and not telling anyone is DEVASTATING :(( have this little thing i wrote bc i’m really enjoying writing c!tubbo right now !! pls heed the warnings though 

warnings: suicidal thoughts, discussions of suicide, trauma, alcohol, nightmares, PTSD, explosions, death, general dark themes (c!tubbo is pretty fucked up :( pls be careful while reading! if you need more tagged, let me know)

Tubbo can’t meet Jack’s eyes. Everything is so close, suddenly, everything is so close and quiet and focused that it crushes his chest like Dream’s netherite chestplate which is too big for him, far too big for him, but that he can’t afford to take off in case he’s killed. With a jerky inhale, he shrugs, keeping his eyes fixed on Michael, very carefully keeping his voice light.

“It’s- You know,” he says, awkward, “it was a precaution. In case one of us ever needed to use it, you know?”

Jack doesn’t know. He’s too smart for that. “Which is why you didn’t tell me about it,” he replies, frowning, “Tubbo, if you’d ever meant for me to use it, you would’ve told me about it. I’m not stupid.”

He’s not. Tubbo feels the prick of something in his throat: tears, maybe. Humiliation, thick, syrupy embarrassment at the situation, more likely, because he hadn’t ever wanted anyone to find out about this - it’s stupid, when the server has a lot bigger problems.

A boy and his dead man’s switch aren’t important enough to pursue solutions for.

“I thought you were happier,” Jack pushes, voice soft, confused, “you know, you have Snowchester, and- and Ranboo and Michael and me. Even Tommy’s still alive, you know, that’s a fucking miracle.”

Tubbo snorts, throat burning. “It is a miracle,” he agrees, trying to sound amused, “and- and I am. Happy, I mean. I am happy, Jack.”

But isn’t that the issue? Isn’t the underlying issue that he’s happy, and that happiness is so fleeting, so terrifyingly short-lived, that he can’t afford to underprepare? It’s not that he wants to die, not really - that would be silly, he thinks, because only sad people want that, and he’s lucky, he has a husband and kid and friends and isn’t that all he’s ever wanted? He has no reason to be sad, not really. 

But Dream’s inevitable escape still hangs over him like the world’s weight on his shoulders. The Egg is still a problem. The Syndicate could kill them, squash Snowchester like bugs if they cared enough. Tubbo is missing a nuke. And, like usual, he can still see horns in his dreams, the sight of horns and the scent of alcohol and the sound of his name roughly being called from the President’s office, an unsteady “Tubbo, Jesus fucking Christ, I’ve been waiting for you for hours”, and Tubbo hears his own voice, higher-pitched, filled to the brim with anxiety, reply with a “sorry, sorry, I’ve been- I’ve been busy”.

Still has nightmares about his old life - his days spent with Schlatt and Quackity and his nights spent with Wilbur and Tommy, falling apart at the seams trying to follow the orders of two madmen that get him killed, and more often than not those nightmares will spiral, sending him pressing his back to the side of a box and saying “Schlatt, I can’t- I can’t get out” and staring down a firework and then he explodes and L’Manburg explodes twice, under his rule both times, and he can’t do anything to stop it and it’s because he failed and-

And oh great, he’s crying. With a shaky snort, Tubbo scrapes a hand roughly over his eyes, shakes his head, and pulls himself together. “I am happy,” he says again, and there’s a falseness in his voice now, ringing out brightly while he shuts down, “I wouldn’t use it unless I had to, Jack. I promise.”

(Wilbur Soot whispers to you: techno is on our side he won’t hurt you)

(Wilbur Soot whispers to you: i promise)

Jack blinks down at him, squeezes his shoulder uncertainly. He’s never been the best at comfort - he and Tommy have that in common, which is funny, considering how tense they’ve been recently, really, Tubbo thinks, they’re both more alike than they realise. 

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” Tubbo sniffs, choking down the pressure in his throat. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

Jack releases his shoulder with a sigh, still looking unsure. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?” He presses. “I’m here for you, man. Really.”

“I know.”

He does know. If there had been anything Jack could fix, Tubbo would be at his door in a heartbeat. As it is, he stands frozen in his house, with Michael toddling near the window happily, while Jack sighs and begins to head for the door.

“Jack?”

Jack turns, furrowing his brow. “Yeah, Tubs?”

Tubbo swallows, turning to face his friend. “Don’t tell Ranboo,” he says, as firmly as he possibly can, “alright? Promise me.”

“...Tubbo, I’m not sure if-”

“Hey,” Tubbo snaps, “Jack, I promised you I’d be careful with it, alright? I don’t- I’m not about to worry Ranboo over something that isn’t even a worry in the first place. He’s got enough to worry about without this adding to it!”

Silence. Tubbo wonders if he’s been too harsh. 

“Yeah, okay,” Jack says tiredly, “I promise not to tell him. Okay?”

He regrets snapping at Jack. It reminds him of Schlatt. Nausea rising in his throat, Tubbo runs his fingers over the tiny horns on the top of his head, trying not to think about it.

“Thanks,” he says softly, and then Jack leaves him with Michael, colder than ever. He hopes Jack actually believes him: because it’s not a problem, not really. For all intents and purposes, he’s got his happy ending.

Out of the window, his eyes dart to the vault, hidden in the hill, where Dream’s armour and weapons lie.

...The problem with a happy ending is that it’s not allowed to be a permanent thing. Tubbo’s learned that the hard way, and he doesn’t want to be ill-prepared for it to end suddenly. Nothing bad has to happen to his home or family this time. Nothing bad has to happen to anyone except himself.

“It’ll be okay,” he whispers, because it makes him feel less small, “it’ll be okay, Michael, trust me on that.”

(A game of chess isn’t lost over a single pawn. Tubbo knows that better than most. His hand curls round Checkmate, and he wonders how long he has before Dream forces him to make his move.)

[geralehane]

in any world you find me (and i you) 

Lexa groans and struggles to sit up, rapidly blinking as she slowly comes to it. A quick mental check up lets her know nothing is broken – at least, nothing vital. She groans again as she rolls her head back and forth, gingerly, and reaches to unfasten her seatbelt with numb fingers.

Clarke, she thinks and barely stops herself from springing to her feet. She’ll be no use if she hurts herself. Slowly standing up, she makes her way to her co-pilot, and almost collapses with relief when she sees her chest rise up and down. Alive. She’s alive.

or, Lexa and Clarke meet their doppelgängers because multiverse. that's it, that's the fic.

READ ON AO3

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Lexa groans and struggles to sit up, rapidly blinking as she slowly comes to it. A quick mental check up lets her know nothing is broken – at least, nothing vital. She groans again as she rolls her head back and forth, gingerly, and reaches to unfasten her seatbelt with numb fingers.

Clarke, she thinks and barely stops herself from springing to her feet. She’ll be no use if she hurts herself. Slowly standing up, she makes her way to her co-pilot, and almost collapses with relief when she sees her chest rise up and down. Alive. She’s alive.

She brushes Clarke’s blonde hair away from her face, selfishly allowing herself several precious seconds of quiet adoration before gently shaking her shoulder. She grins when Clarke lets out a groan similar to hers as she wakes up, long lashes fluttering before revealing hazy blue eyes.

“Lexa,” she rasps, confused. Then, her eyes widen as she remembers the crash. “Oh fuck. Are you okay?”

Lexa silently orders her heart to calm down. Of course Clarke would be worried about her friend. “Yes. I’m fine. Are you?”

Clarke nods. “I think so. What the fuck was that?”

“Orion? Orion, are you there?” Raven’s voice crackles through the radio, and Lexa coughs before telling the spacecraft’s system to connect.

“Jester is on,” the depersonalized voice of the ship lets her know, and Lexa coughs again before speaking.

“Hey, Raven,” she croaks out, foregoing formal speak. It’s not like they need it in the first place. They are essentially space pirates, for Christ’s sake. “We’re here.”

“Jesus fuck, Lexa,” her friend breathes out on the other end, sounding half-relieved and half-furious. “What happened to you guys? You went off radar. I was ready to jump after you but--”

“Which would have been a suicide,” Lexa points out. She sighs as she slowly stands up and looks around. The ship didn’t get too banged up on the inside. No visible cracks as far she can see, but she needs a thorough examination before she can come to any conclusion. “We encountered a -- vortex, of sorts. Got sucked in. I don’t know where we are right now. Probably landed on a nearby planet.”

“You’re not hearing me,” Raven says, sounding increasingly irritated. And worried. “You went off radar. As in, I don’t see you anywhere in the Universe. I was ready to jump after you before it happened. Now, even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to find you.”  

“Uh.” Lexa blinks. “What?”

“Rae,” Clarke’s standing up, now, too, and her eyes are as wide as Lexa’s. “Are you trying to tell us we’re – what? In another Universe?”

“I built the map myself,” Raven says, sounding unusually solemn. “You know what it runs on. The Eye doesn’t lie and doesn’t make mistakes.” She lets out a slow, disbelieving breath. “And it doesn’t see you now.”

Lexa and Clarke exchange an alarmed glance. “But that’s impossible,” Lexa says. It’s more to convince herself than to counter Raven’s argument. The Life Crystal that they stole for Raven several years ago that she dubbed The Eye isn’t called that for nothing. It can detect any form of life in any corner of the Universe, cyborgs included. Or, apparently, almost any corner of the Universe.

“Maybe the planet we’re on has some sort of magnetic shield that doesn’t let The Eye see us,” Lexa proposes as her mind quickly works out any possible solution to this.

“Well, it might, but if it does, there’s a high chance it might be poisonous to you guys,” Raven points out. “Wherever you are, though… I’m so fucking happy you’re alive,” her voice cracks with emotion she’s clearly trying to suppress. “For a second, I thought…”

“We’re fine,” Lexa says, softly. “We’re not on your plane of existence, apparently, but we’re fine.” She moved her jaw from side to side, thinking. “I’m surprised you got through. So the signal reaches us, but not The Eye?”

“That’s not even Twilight zone level of fuckery,” Raven confirms. “I have no idea how that’s possible.”

“I propose we explore where we are,” Clarke pipes up. She’s rubbing her forehead, and Lexa tries to ignore the sharp pang of concern in her chest. They’ll deal with this a little later. “Let’s send JD outside to get the air sample.”

“Probably the best thing you can do,” Raven tells them. “I’ll try to figure something out on my end. We’re working on getting you back, guys. Just sit tight.”

“Not much else to do,” Lexa snorts to herself. Still, she appreciates Raven’s enthusiasm and her willingness to help. “We’re gonna get JD ready and survey any possible damages to the ship. Keep you posted.”

“Alright. Talk to you soon.” With that, Raven disconnects, and they are left staring at each other in what promises to soon become very awkward silence.

“Alright, well, I’ll go--”

“I’m sorry I kissed you.” Clarke’s eyes widen after she blurts that out, cutting Lexa off and causing her to splutter with surprised embarrassment. She wasn’t sure they’d ever bring it up. It was – a sour of the moment thing, or so she’s told herself. They were full of adrenaline, being chased by the Feds, fired at left and right. It honestly felt more like an act of desperation. Something to feel even more alive and revved up. Clarke’s bright eyes met hers, and next thing she knew, their mouths crashed together before Clarke pushed her in her chair and jumped into hers, buckling up and flipping the lightspeed switch.  

Lexa frowns. Lightspeed. They travelled at lightspeed without giving the ship clear directions, and it took them to the vortex – and now they are here. That is a vital piece of information that they definitely should have disclosed to Raven.

And they will once she gets her mouth to work and replies to an expectant Clarke. “Uh.” So far, so good. “Why?” Clarke begins to frown, and she hurries to correct herself. “I mean – I’m not sorry you did.”

“Oh.” Clarke’s voice is small, unsure. “But – you’re the Commander. And I’m – me.”

Lexa gives her a muted smile. “Are you worried about violating the Code of Conduct? Because last time I checked we didn’t have any. Since, you know. We’re intergalactic criminals and stuff.”

“I was thinking more of Robin Hood and his Merry Men kind of thing,” Clarke says. A tentative smile blooms on her lips, and Lexa wants nothing more than to kiss it until it grows and spills into laughter. Maybe she’ll actually get to do that. “It’s not about any Code. I just – I kind of ambushed you without checking if you’re okay with it.”

“Tell you what,” she says, grinning. “You can ambush me any time you want. Because truth be told, I’ve wanted to do the same pretty much ever since we’ve met, but I, too, was worried about… ambushing.”

“Oh. Oh-kay,” Clarke nods to herself, like an diligent student. “Ambushing is on the table. Good to know.”

“Yeah. And -- oof!” She’s noticed that sometimes Clarke is too quick to act on things. Right now, however, she doesn’t mind.

When they break apart, it’s slow, with neither willing to let go just yet. “Duty calls,” Clarke whispers, regret coloring her voice. Lexa chuckles.

“That, and I really wanna get out of here so we can do this more.”

Clarke’s beautiful when she blushes, she decides.

***

JD, their rusty but trusty robot that’s especially beloved by Raven due to being one of her first successful projects, beeps readily when Lexa finishes programming him to get the air and ground sample. He whirs as he turns around himself and wheels into the small hallway. Lexa waits till he gets in there and shuts the door, ensuring the ship’s sealed and foreign air won’t get in. Then, she pulls the lever to open the external hatch. Most of the things around the ship have to be done manually, but that’s what she loves about it. She specifically didn’t let Raven tinker with the system, only allowing her to install the navigation. Everything else, she can manage just fine.

They split up and quickly check the ship for any damages while JD is at work. Aside from a few dents, it’s not too bad. Yet, the attempt to take off fails.

“Must be something outside,” Clarke notes apprehensively. “I hope it’s not the engines.”

“What else could it be?” Lexa states more than asks. Clarke shrugs.

“I don’t know. Maybe we’re just stuck.” She shrugs again when Lexa throws her a look. “What? Just trying to keep the morale up.”

“I appreciate your efforts,” Lexa deadpans, but that doesn’t work, because Clarke only grins and pecks her lips. If that’s how it’s gonna be from now on, well – she’s at peace with that.

JD comes back in twenty minutes and brings a curious discovery with him. Apparently, the atmosphere outside is identical to that of the Earth. Clarke and Lexa glance at each other, bewildered.

“That’s next to impossible,” Lexa voices what they’re both thinking. Her co-pilot hums, thoughtful.

“But not impossible,” she points out. “Congratulations, babe – we might be the living proof of string theory.”

She can’t resist. “Babe?” she asks, quirking an eyebrow. Clarke scoffs, failing to hide her blush.

“Shut up.”

“Make me,” she teases.

“Not the time, but maybe later,” Clarke fires right back, a lopsided grin playing on her lips. “Also I can’t believe you’re flirting with me when we’re standing on the verge of the most important scientific discovery.”

“Do you really think we’re in a parallel universe?”

She watches as Clarke bites her lip, clearly excited. “What else could this be?”

“Well,” she stands taller and straightens her leather jacket, feeling determined. “I suppose there’s only one way to find out.”

***

They jump out of the ship, blasters ready. Lexa inhales the air, frowning. “Smells like spring,” she says quietly, and Clarke hums in silent, astonished agreement.

She doesn’t know what she expects to see once they climb out, but that’s not it. The scenery is rather dull. It reminds her of those old sci-fi movies from the last century. And of the Grand Canyon from the inside. Sand and rocks and occasional shallow caves.

It’s the caves that have her worried. She immediately recalls everything she knows about space parasites, and shudders at the thought of contacting one. They are definitely not going in there. They’re not going anywhere, period. Lexa decides then and there that they’ll check the ship, fix whatever it is that doesn’t let them take off, and get the hell out of here.

Clarke, however, clearly has other plans. “Lex,” she whispers urgently, nudging her with her surprisingly sharp elbow. “There’s someone in there. Looks human.” And points at one of the caves when Lexa glances at her.

Fantastic. She sghs and comes to stand in front of Clarke, looking her in the eyes. “You’re probably imagining things,” she tells her calmly. “We’re worked up, it makes sense. Let’s fix out ship and go home.”

But, as it often happens, Clarke doesn’t listen. “There!” she quietly exclaims, looking over Lexa’s shoulder. “It’s a girl. A human girl. What if she needs help? What if she’s hurt?”

“We don’t help, Clarke,” Lexa says lowly. She tries her hardest not to sound threatening,, but she’s not sure she succeeds.

Blue eyes meet hers, defiant. “Except you helped each and every one of us,” she says, almost accusingly. “If it weren’t for you, half the crew would be dead in a drug den on the outskirts of the Leo Cluster.” She pauses, gauging Lexa’s reaction, and nods, clearly satisfied with what she sees. “She could be in danger. Maybe she got here the same way we did.”

“Escaping the Feds?” Lexa snorts. “All the more reason to stay away from her.”

“Fine.” Clarke raises her chin, and Lexa groans inwardly, because she knows what’s coming. “Stay here and fix the ship. I’ll go to her.”

“Yeah, I will allow that to happen,” Lexa deadpans, and tightens her grip on her blaster. “Stay close to me and don’t hesitate to shoot. Remember shapeshifters from CG18?”

Clarke shudders involuntary. “Roger that. A kid tries to bite my hand off, I shoot.”

“Good.”

***

Not only Clarke doesn’t shoot – she doesn’t let Lexa do that, either. Granted, there are no bloodthirsty children involved this time, but this can’t be normal. Lexa’s more than convinced those are closely related to CG18 bastards. Have to be same species. Because how else would she explain meeting their doppelgangers?

“Lexa, wait!” Clarke cries out, grabbing her hand with the blaster just as another Clarke dives at another Lexa, shielding her from them.

“What the fuck,” she sighs, annoyed. “I thought we had a deal.”

“Shooting ourselves wasn’t the deal,” Clarke states indignantly.

“Are you hearing yourse—they are not us!”

“Lexa,” Clarke slowly, loudly breathes out through her nose. She’s more than willing to bet that she’s counting to five in her head. “We’re operating under the assumption that we ended up in a parallel universe. Which, if it’s true, means that there are parallel versions of us.”

“We’re not from here,” Clarke – another Clarke – pipes up, then. She looks as close to fainting as Lexa feels, and her blue eyes, so familiar yet foreign, are wide with astonishment as she looks between them. “We have no idea how we ended up here, or what here even is.” She gulps as her gaze falls down to the blaster in Lexa’s hand. “Look, we’re totally harmless. I’m still in high school, I mean – come on,” she chuckles nervously. Lexa – the other Lexa – blinks at her before glancing at them.

“Yeah,” she says. “Um – could we stand up?”

Her Clarke gives her a look that’s both begging and warning, and she sighs, lowering the blaster. “Fine. Get up. Slowly.” The others nod and hastily scramble to their feet. Now that she has the chance to really look at them, she notes how young they are. They can’t be older than eighteen. Her gaze stays on the other Lexa a bit longer.

She definitely wasn’t this scrawny when she was eighteen.

The other Clarke is probably thinking the same thing, because right now she’s looking between her and the Lexa she came with, and her eyes are sparkling with curiosity and, dare she say, appraisal.

Her Clarke sighs. “Cut it out,” she tells her younger copy. “Focus. How did you get here?”

“We don’t know,” the other Lexa speaks up. She finishes methodically dusting herself off and fixes her buttoned up shirt. Lexa rolls her eyes when she notices her Clarke’s gaze soften. Now who needs to focus? “We were in my room, and then there was this swirly thing--”

“A vortex,” the Other Clarke helpfully supplies, making the Other Lexa sigh.

“Whatever. Point is, we got sucked in and now we’re here.”

“Well, what were you doing before the vortex appeared?”

Both the Other Clarke and the Other Lexa blush, and Lexa thinks she has a hunch. “Pretty sure there were tongues involved,” she murmurs to her Clarke, turning to her and lowering her voice. “Also pretty sure they’re not gonna tell you about it.”

“We were -- studying,” the Other Clarke says meekly. Lexa sighs as she feels a headache approaching.

“I’m still not convinced you’re not some type of space parasites,” she tells them warningly.

“I swear we’re not,” the Other Clarke says. “So, is this like – Mars, or something? Are you guys astronauts?”

Lexa lets out a dark chuckle. “Do I look like astronaut?”

“Not really, no.”

It’s during that awkward lull in the conversation that a blinding flash of light sends them scattering for cover. Lexa grabs the Others and shoves them behind her as she points her blaster forward, discouraged because she can’t exactly see what she should be pointing it at.

Just as quickly as it appeared, however, the light disappears with a loud clap. In its wake, two bodies are left rolling on the floor, familiar groans making Lexa sigh. She’s the first to stand up and slowly approach the newcomers.

“Let me guess,” she says, offering her hand to a new Clarke and helping her up before doing the same with the new Lexa. “You got sucked in a vortex.”

“Yeah,” the New Clarke says, awed. “And I did not expect to end up in Heaven.” Her bright gaze dims somewhat when she looks around and sees the other versions of herself next to different versions of Lexa. “Oh,” she says, sounding mildly disappointed. “Okay. I can work with that.”

“I wish I didn’t know what you’re thinking about,” Lexa tells her sincerely before glancing at the New Lexa. She’s older than the Other, much closer to her own age, and much more confident, too, as she meets her gaze with her own steely one. She takes an extra second to appreciate the dark blue suit. Raven would probably make fun of her for a month if she ever wore something like that, but damn if it didn’t look good.

She doesn’t even flinch when the light flashes again.

***

All in all, they end up with three pairs of the copies, excluding themselves. Lexa doesn’t quite know what else to call them, but she’s wise enough to keep that to herself. She’s still not convinced this isn’t a parasite playing tricks on their minds.

“This is probably mass psychosis, or something,” Kid Lexa mumbles to Kid Clarke, whose eyes flash with fear. “I don’t think we’re even here, physically. It’s one big hallucination.”

Lexa hates to admit that she’s a little hurt by that. No one’s ever called her a hallucination before.

“I feel pretty real,” Corporate Clarke – Lexa’s not proud of the nickname, but it seems the most fitting considering her and her Lexa’s outfits – says, frowning. “Can’t say the same about all of this.” Her eyes meet Lexa’s, and she hurries to avert her gaze, blushing. Lexa guesses she was still dazed from the vortex experience when she unabashedly flirted with her earlier. She sighs.

“Maybe you know what’s going on?” She addresses Lexa the Scientist, and immediately cringes at the name. Sounds like a cartoon character. But, given the situation they’ve found themselves in, maybe they are all exactly that. This is too surreal to be a part of real life.

Scientist Lexa nervously straightens her glasses, and Lexa barely refrains from grimacing at that. She does not do nervous. “Well -- if we don’t settle for the mass psychosis theory…” Kid Lexa perks up at that, but Lexa shakes her head, and she deflates. “Um, we could be at the intersection of several parallel universes. The vortex is a portal of sorts.”

“Really helpful,” Lexa scoffs.

Clarke places a hand on her arm, giving her a pointed look. “Be nice,” she warns softly.

“I have to remember that,” Corporate Clarke murmurs. Her Lexa shoots her a quick smirk in spite of her tense posture. She clears her throat, then, gathering everyone’s attention.

(Lexa can’t help but be amused by Kid Clarke’s blush whenever she glances Corporate Lexa’s way. She really needs to find herself a suit, if only to test a theory.)

“While I am, no doubt, as interested in the inner workings of the Universe as all of you,” she says, calmly, “I am more interested in getting back to my universe first. Any ideas how we can make that happen?”

Lexa inwardly groans. She can’t believe that in some universe, she’s the type of a person they rob and make fun of on a regular basis. She’s never been more thankful for Reyes’s absence, because that’s not something she would’ve ever lived down.

She quickly considers renaming Corporate Lexa to Rich Jerk Lexa, but ultimately decides against it. That’s the level of self-hatred she hasn’t mastered. “Would we be standing here with you if we had any?” she settles on replying. Corporate Lexa’s green eyes narrow at that. It’s barely noticeable to any outside observer, but she knows herself, and she knows she’s irritated.

“We will employ your services if the answer turns out to be brute force,” she lets her know. Lexa sighs, mildly disappointed. That was way too obvious. Not on the level she’s expected.

“Yeah, I’m the muscle, what a low blow,” she deadpans. “Luckily, we do have the brain.”

Everyone, aside from Corporate Lexa who’s eyeing her now, turns their expectant gazes to Scientist Lexa. She swallows. “Well, uh – I don’t really know how to get back to our respective universes. But I also d-don’t really think we need to do anything in order to go back.”

Lexa quietly implodes when she doesn’t continue. “Oh, my God, can you just tell us why?”

“Hey, chill out,” Kid Clarke demands and she suppresses the urge to throw her hands up in air and walk away. But because it’s Clarke – young, bratty version of her, but still her – she doesn’t.

And because it’s Lexa she’s just snapped at, her Clarke throws her a disapproving look, leaving her feeling both warm and frustrated. She’s ready for all of this to be over.

“She can speak for herself,” Scientist Clarke speaks up, then, giving Kid Clarke a dirty look. “But also – you do need to chill,” she tells Lexa next.

Lexa only shakes her head.” Are you seriously jealous of yourself?”

“Well, aren’t you?” Corporate Lexa chooses this moment to snidely ask, and Lexa thinks about her Clarke trying not to look too much in her direction and grinds her teeth together.

“How do we send your asses back.” She states, trying not to glare at Scientist Lexa, whose adorable fiddling with glasses and the sleeves of her cardigan must’ve awoke the soft side of all Clarkes, because they all collectively frown at her harsh tone.

Maybe she can convince her Clarke this is the space parasite after all, when she’s done killing them.

“Well,” Scientist Lexa starts, increasingly more nervous, “I don’t know if it’s the same in all of the universes, but in ours, there’s been a discovery recently. We proved the string theory.”

“What do you mean we?” Lexa demands. There’s a coiling deep in her stomach that she does not like. At all.

“Um,” Scientist Lexa glances at her Clarke, who hugs herself. “We as in her and I.”

Lexa can practically hear the thoughts flashing through Corporate Lexa’s head. Mainly because she’s having those same ones as well. “Tell me,” she murmurs as she slowly stalks to Scientist Lexa, “that this isn’t a part of your research paper.”

“No, oh, no!” Scientist Lexa shakes her head, eyes wide with fear. “I had nothing to do with this. I just – have a hunch about the reason we’re here. Like I said, we’re at the intersection of the universes. It could be that the universes summon an identical part of themselves here in order to continue functioning. It could be something as trivial as stones, or something as… not trivial as people.”

“Why would they need to do that?” Kid Lexa asks, confused. Lexa can’t blame her.

Scientist Clarke shakes her head. “You don’t want to get into that. Especially since, if we’re right, we will all go back to our own universes any second now.”

“Our memories will probably fade, too,” her Lexa points out. “So write everything down now if you want to remember any of this.”

“I’d rather not,” Lexa quips, making each Clarke chuckle. Well. She’ll miss that, at least.

“If anyone ever wanted to make out with themselves, now’s the time, just saying,” Kid Clarke jokes. Or – Lexa’s not entirely sure she was just joking. Kid Lexa immediately blushes. Lexa only sighs with sympathy. She remembers those teenage hormones all too well.

“Alright,” she says loudly, interrupting the sudden chatter. “This has been bizarre. Nice meeting you. We should go,” she tells Clarke, who gives her a dumbfounded stare.

“We’re not going to see them off?”

“Why can’t they see us off first?” Lexa tries to argue. When Clarke doesn’t budge, she sighs. “Look, I’d rather be on our ship when we get thrown back. What if we end up back where we started, and not on our home planet?”

“Oh,” Scientist Lexa speaks up, concerned. “You will absolutely go back to the point where you got picked up. So if that was somewhere in space, I’d at least consider wearing a spacesuit.” That little shit, Lexa thinks with sudden, adoring amusement. Which feels weird, since it’s essentially herself she’s thinking about, so this is basically emotional masturbation.

She shakes her head. “Right. Thanks.” Clarke’s hesitant gaze meets her own determined one. “We gotta get back to the ship. You heard them. We could get sucked in any second now.”

“Okay,” Clarke relents, then. She throws one last look at the group of their doppelgangers, who watch them with a mix of awe and sadness Lexa’s not ready to admit she’s feeling as well. “Um. Good luck with -- everything. Have great lives, guys.”

“You, too!” Kid Clarke beams, waving. “Can I just say – I love how everyone’s ignoring the fact that we end up together in every universe.”

“Fate is a pretty heavy burden,” she hears Scientist Lexa quietly reply before she ushers Clarke away, and they jog to their ship.

Once they climb inside, no one speaks for several seconds. JD beeps at their arrival, and the system lets them know Raven’s tried to contact them twice – Lexa immediately feels bad, because their friend is probably worried sick. “Oh, damn,” she says, then, disappointed. “We didn’t ask them if they knew Raven.”

“I hope they do,” Clarke says, chuckling. “We didn’t ask a lot of things, you know.”

“I was a little busy trying to make sure we made it out alive,” Lexa points out. She feels a little silly for pouting, but now that they are back to the safety of their ship and their survival isn’t at stake anymore, her curiosity decides to wake up and drive her up the wall. How long have all of them been together? Are any of them married or about to get married? Do they live together? When did they meet? She sighs, shaking her head in defeat. Some questions just aren’t meant to have answers. But those could’ve if it weren’t for her constant worrying and—

“Stop,” Clarke demands, jostling her out of her musings. “I can see you beating yourself up. Stop. You went with your gut and focused on the important thing. Surviving. If it did turn out to be the parasite or a violent shapeshifter, you would’ve been prepared, unlike me. That’s why you’re the Commander. That’s why…” she trails off, then, and Lexa admires the pretty pink dusted across her cheekbones.

She swallows and reaches out, gently brushing Clarke’s hair behind her air. “Fate really is a heavy burden, isn’t it?” she says softly. Clarke’s lips curl in a small smile under her thumb.

“Not when it’s shared,” she whispers. Her lips taste like dust and warmth and spring, and Lexa happily allows herself to disappear in it, if only for a mere moment.

“Lexa,” Raven’s urgent voice makes them break apart, but they do so slowly, savoring each other’s taste. “Please tell me you’re there.”

She doesn’t look away from Clarke’s sparkling eyes as she replies. “Rae. We’re here, we just got back. Will tell you everything once we get out of here.”

“Not to crush your hopes and dreams, but you sound mighty confident that you will get out of there,” Raven jokes darkly. “As in, I have no fucking idea how to reach you. I still don’t know where you are.”

Lexa lifts the blinds up, and sure enough, the vortex is there, right in front of them, and getting closer by the second. She smirks. “Doesn’t matter. See you soon, Reyes.”

“I hope you haven’t gone insane,” Raven says cautiously, and they laugh.

“We’re of sound mind,” Clarke reassures her. “And we’ll leave the same way we ended up here – through a vortex.”

“A vortex? What the fuck?”

“Exactly. Don’t worry, it’s harmless.” Lexa blinks as she realizes that they probably won’t remember any of this once they are back to their universe. She looks up to find Clarke’s eyes, and reads the same thought in them.

“Mute us.” The system complies, and Raven’s line goes dead for the time being. “Should we tell her?”

Clarke shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says honestly. The vortex is almost there. “We could. But what would it change? We’re space pirates. No one actually able to do something with our discovery will believe us.”

“Right.” She squeezes her hand as they stare into the swirling void before them. “If we remember – we tell her. If we don’t…”

“…then we live,” Clarke concludes for her. In her blue eyes, Lexa sees all the universes they’ve lived in. “Then, we live.”

She thinks she can work with that. And then, they disappear.

[lovelivresse]

A non-exhaustive list of reasons why Baz needs therapy

those are only the examples I could think of when I wrote this, there are probably other things

That boy is suicidal or “I don’t have a death wish” my ass or RAINBOW PLS ADDRESS THIS 

“Stake through the heart?” he asked, falling back into the corner and resting an arm on a pile of skulls. “Beheading, perhaps? That only works if you keep my head separate from my body, and even then I could still walk; my body won’t stop until it finds my head.… Better go with fire, Snow, it’s the only solution.” (Carry On, Chapter 17) Baz… Baby… You know too much about how to kill a vampire. Also, talking about the boy he loves killing him, and genuinely believing that the boy he loves would kill him… not cool

“She would have killed me.

She would have faced me, what I am, and done what was right.” 

and “He will … Finish me.

Snow will do the right thing.” (Carry On, Chapter 40) He thinks of him dying as something that’s “right” TWICE, and also the whole being killed by loved ones thing… Baz you need a hug

[about the fire] “This is what I deserve” (Carry On, Chapter 60) NO IT’S NOT 

“I could hear him singing, even after I’d been walking for ten minutes. “Ashes, ashes—we all fall down.” (Carry On, Chapter 17) This one doesn’t really count, it just hurts my feelings that the part of the song Baz is singing that is highlighted is the one about ASHES. 

So in conclusion, after his LITERAL SUICIDE ATTEMPT it’s never addressed again that he has some serious suicidal tendencies. He says he doesn’t have a death wish and that’s all, it’s completely overlooked after that when CLEARLY, he HAS a death wish.

Fucked up things that seem to have impacted him the most or you think that Fiona is a better parental figure for Baz than Malcom but she isn’t really, Baz is just biased

“I know fuck-all about vampires. It’s not like I got an instruction pamphlet when I was bitten.” (Carry On, Chapter 30) A BIG part of who he is is completely unknown to him. As seen before, what he knows best about vampires is how to kill them. On top of that, even the things he thinks are true about vampires aren’t necessarily (Lamb can bite a human without killing or turning them) and he gets mixed signals (Nicodemus seems to age normally while Lamb is something like hundreds of years old and he still looks like he’s in his thirties)

“I don’t think my father ever would have mentioned it, even if he’d caught me draining the maid [...] Though he’d much prefer to catch me disrobing the maid.… (Definitely more disappointed in my queerness than my undeadness.)” (Carry On, Chapter 40) Malcolm’s complete lack of acknowledgement of Baz’s vampirism + Baz thinking that his sexuality is even a bigger deal to his father than his vampirism. He has those two things that are both parts of his identity that he didn’t choose and that are both considered to be something bad by his father, that CAN’T be easy and it definitely caused him a lot of shame and self-hatred. We have the point of view of 18-year-old Baz, I’m not sure he would be nearly as okay with his sexuality as he is if we were in the head of the Baz who just came out/thinks of coming out to his father

“My father never acknowledges that I’m a vampire—besides my flammability—and I know he’ll never send me away because of it.

But my mother?

She would have killed me.

She would have faced me, what I am, and done what was right.” (Carry On, Chapter 40) Once again, Malcolm’s complete lack of acknowledgement of Baz’s vampirism + the fact that Baz thinks his mother would have KILLED HIM if she knew he was a vampire. 

“He swings his wand and practically howls, spraying fire all around us. “This is what my mother would want for me, you idiot. [...] “My mother died killing vampires,” he says. “And when they bit her, she killed herself. It’s the last thing she did. If she knew what I am … She would never have let me live.” (Carry On, Chapter 60) Natasha wanting him dead because of his vampirism is something that’s mentioned again after chapter 40, here in chapter 60, which shows that 1) the opinion his mother would have of him really matters to him 2) he believes this opinion would have been VERY negative 3) he doesn’t even CONSIDER the option that his mother might have loved him enough to accept that he had been turned

“My father still isn’t ready to admit I have a boyfriend, and it would be too exhausting, living in a place where I have to pretend I’m not a vampire or hopelessly queer.” (Carry On, Epilogue) Malcolm please stop ignoring most of who your son is I’m begging you

I also wanted to say a few words about Fiona because I feel like in general we (as in, the fandom) really see Malcolm’s bad behavior towards Baz but not Fiona’s, while she’s also far from perfect. She saved him from the Numpties, that’s a good thing, that’s what we see, but look : “She berated me all the way home, and all the way back to Watford. She made me sit in the back seat of her MG. (A ’67. Glorious.) “The front seat is for people who’ve never been kidnapped by bloody numpties. Jesus Christ, Baz.” 

The front seat thing is a joke now but when you really think about it and when you focus on that whole paragraph and not just Fiona’s words, this is the situation that is presented : Baz just spent 6 WEEKS locked in a coffin, starved, not knowing what would happen to him, and instead of, I don’t know, TRYING TO COMFORT HIM, his aunt “berates” him, as if he was the one to blame in this situation. Jesus Christ, Fiona, give the boy a hug and ask him if he’s okay instead. 

And then there’s this : “Then the Coven made her a vampire hunter” (Carry On, Epilogue) That part would have fit better in the 3rd category but since I’m talking about Fiona let’s put it here. SHE LITERALLY KILLS VAMPIRES AS A JOB. I love Fiona but it makes me so angry whenever I think about it. I don’t know, I feel like a NORMAL PERSON wouldn’t become a VAMPIRE HUNTER when their nephew IS A VAMPIRE. That must fuck Baz up so bad that she does that, even if he doesn’t even realize it himself, and I hate that the impact of Fiona killing vampires for a living on Baz isn’t tackled at all.

So in conclusion, Baz thinks that is father is disappointed in him for existing, basically, he thinks that his mother would have wanted him dead AND KILLED HIM for what he is, and then there’s Fiona

Other fucked up things that are just barely mentioned or RAINBOW PLS ADDRESS THIS part 2

“He slipped a flask out of his jacket and took a swig. I didn’t know that he’d been drinking” (Carry On, Chapter 17) Baz was drinking. Was it a one time thing? Did Simon somehow catch him the ONE time he got drunk in the Catacombs? If it was not the first time he went there and got drunk, did he have a problem with alcohol in fifth year? I NEED ANSWERS 

“Of course I’ve read Anne Rice. I was a 15-year-old closet case whose parents pretended they didn’t notice when the family dog disappeared” (Wayward Son, Chapter 22) Once again, his family doing a poor job when it comes to handling his vampirism but we've been over this. INSTEAD CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE FACT THAT HE FED ON HIS DOG, AN ANIMAL THAT HE VERY PROBABLY LOVED, BUT THE BLOODTHIRST WAS JUST TOO STRONG TO RESIST???????? It must have been so difficult and traumatizing for him, and it’s just dropped like that in the story like it’s nothing while I’m over here crying about it

[nbapprentice]

You said a while back that while Supergiant games (Bastion, Transistor, Hades) was mostly okay, you had some words about them. I was curious as to what those words were, since Hades' full release is soon.

okay. alright. ive been playing hades lately so i definitely want to give my two cents (or dollars by the size this is gonna get). but let’s go Step by Step

the good: i want to throw a whole Endorsement over supergiant games with the art direction and its characters, which is what keeps me coming back again and again, and what i can assume is that most people are attracted to. 

gameplaywise, they have a Format they stick to which has become their staple, not to their detriment but to their advantage, like... gameplay tropes, so to speak, that they stick to (such as the addition of special conditions that give a disadvantage in exchange for more long-term rewards)

i fucking adore that they take one concept per game, go for it, and when they’re done they are Done; they don’t bother with sequels, they don’t want to run things to the ground and i fucking respect that. They have their themes, and they stick to them (to various degrees of success).

that said, like every piece of media, they are not perfect and this has to be analysed and spoken about

CONTENT WARNINGS: genocide and ethnic cleansing, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, suicide, and mentions of incest, and a general Spoilers warning

bastion: touches on ethnic cleansing, and not in a way i’d say is satisfactory. our narrator and one of our Sympathetic characters is one of the men who worked on a world-ending weapon meant to use against the Ura (a group of people coded as East Asian) which after a bit of googling is literally called “the final solution” if there was ever a war between the Ura and the Cael (who feel like rly tan white people to me). jesus fucking CHRIST.

we also meet more Ura other than our two named characters and we have to kill most of them. so that fucking blows.

the game tries for “being a genocidal monster will get you fucked up and blown up” which duh, but i feel we shouldn’t have had a person responsible for war crimes be one of our friends no matter how bad he feels about the whole thing, or the people victim of war crimes become villains in the latter half of the game. zia’s father could’ve taken ruck’s role ez pz.

transistor: the weakest of their games, imo; the lore and writing are fairly flimsy and i did not come out feeling Satisfied, especially because it had this rly good build-up that did not pay off. not to mention... their villains? 3/4 were gay people. lol. two married guys (not even explicit, you only realize by their shared last names) and the ps*cho lesbian trope (iirc she wanted to kill the protagonist’s lover or something). the female protagonist also ends up killing herself to live forever in a digital paradise with her dead lover. it’s. god. 

very Aesthetic, GORGEOUS music, interesting gameplay; had potential, i do not feel like it lived up to it at least as far as the story goes.

pyre: now this one. this one’s BEEFY. where transistor felt flimsy, pyre is rich; lots to sink your teeth into, rich in lore and loveable characters, again w the beautiful music, themes of cooperation and togetherness. my favorite of the cast is volfred sandalwood, the only Black (or, well, Black-coded) revolutionary i’ve ever seen portrayed with this amount of sympathy.

onto the bad: they literally have a Class of character named “Savage”; there’s the “mystical mentally ill person” trope; there is an overwhelming amount of explicit m/f pairs (one of them being. a romance that formed in a single day and then both of the characters were somehow willing to risk it all for each other? PLEASE) while the only hints of gayness are... hints. especially when Jodariel (another of my favs) is teased to have feelings for the player regardless of gender then only gets an ending with a male character with whom she has nothing in common 🙃

hades: and now. this one. music: gorgeous. character designs: spectacular (aphrodite is straight up naked but it’s so... natural and casual, it doesn’t feel sexualized at all). voice acting amazing. character interactions charming and endearing. as a greek mythology nerd, it was nice to see them go for the obscure shit like Zagreus at all, NOT portray Persephone and Hades as a loving couple, AND portrayed the gods as the bunch of petty assholes (some more benevolent than others) that they are. imo they’re too generous with their portrayal of achilles but i’ll allow it.

and finally... it seems all those criticisms about having all the gay characters hidden in the shadows paid off, cuz we got (aside of patroclus and achilles) a bisexual polyamorous protag. Holy Shit! and it’s not even playersexual, romance whomever you want shit without the routes recognizing each other: he explicitly talks about how he’s thinking abt them both (though it’s like “yeah usually mortals take one lover but gods love many huh” polyamory is a human thing too bro!!!!!)

and this is where it all goes, well, at least vaguely downhill lol. ok so the incest warning i gave up there? well. it’s not... outright incestuous. but it has some ugly implications. i want to emphasize: the characters never refer to each other as siblings, nor do they treat each other as such (thanatos, in fact, only recognizes hypnos as his brother, and megaera only sees the other furies as her sisters), but they were all raised by the same woman, Nyx... zagreus and thanatos even grew up together (im assuming megaera didnt meet zagreus until he was fully grown).

this is complicated even worse by the fact that they tried to trick zagreus into believing Nyx was his mother. he realized pretty early on this was not true but like... adoptive mothers, anyone? granted i can believe that bc of the attempt at deception that probably ruptured any attempt at actual familial closeness, and it’s not like hypnos and thanatos saw zagreus as their brother at any point, so they were p much aware of the truth too. with the fact that thanatos even looks like goth miles edgeworth (im not kidding you can google him up right now its literally edgeworth in a cowl) i rly feel they were aiming for Childhood Friend Anime Rival Man than the “surprise kiss bc ur not actually related <3″ shit. zagreus never once refers to nyx as his mother in-game, and also refers to thanatos and hypnos as her sons, never his brothers.

so yeah, like. if one’s feeling generous, zagreus and thanatos are more of a “my father is emotionally closed off and neglects me so my best friend’s mother basically raised me” kind of situation... just pulled off in, perhaps, the worst way possible (why didnt they just say Zagreus was told Hekate was his mom, that’s such an easy fix? or that he was born of nobody other than Hades??? [gestures at athena])

but then, the gods. aaaaaaaahhhhahahahh the gods. demeter shows up! and she calls zeus, hades and poseidon... her foster-brothers. which somehow would make the persephone thing less fucking awful, apparently. they really. really really did not need to do that. she could’ve just said “my fellow gods” or whatever. or my “god-brothers” or something, to pretend it was just a weird god alliance thing??? i dont know but implying that foster family isn’t family is just... bro, the dynamics still exist.

Don’t Like That.

i even contacted supergiant games over this. they reassured me they were even trying to avoid the incest of the original myths bc they didn’t want to mess with such a heavy theme. i believe them... but i really think they didn’t think this through. compared to something like fire emblem fates this is nearly benign, but the implications don’t look good :/

tl;dr of the tl;drs: i admire their artistic philosophy and the heavy emphasis on fresh gameplay, characters and their relationships; i appreciate that it seems that they listen to criticism?; i don’t appreciate that they didn’t think to at LEAST talk to adoptees when making a game about family.

[neutralnuance]

Wow I am a fucking mess

I am a depressed bitch with no self control. What have I been doing for the last eight days? Fucking eating. And I don’t mean in a “good!!!! recovery Kween 🥰” kinda way. I mean in a “Jesus fucking Christ how has your stomach not ruptured from the mass volume of food you’ve been consuming per sitting” kinda way. I mean in a “you were kind of healthy sized, a little on the chubby side before, but I feel like this week alone you’re starting to gain a lot of weight” kinda way. I mean in a “pup, as your mother I think you need to get back on your diet. You’re putting on a few pounds” kinda way.

I feel so broken. I don’t know what to do. I pretend to take notes in each class but I’m really just writing prose about how miserable I am. I think it’s a suicide note. Idk. I’ve written a few but I have a little box in my closet I put my notes in. I don’t know what to do. I feel so empty and meaningless and the only solution I have for myself is food. I feel so low and immovable and there’s only a couple things left to do.

Why can’t I just be skinny and happy

[jokerfan99]

What? (RWBY/RVB) Crossover by Necroceph

RVB Opening Theme

At the tank/Sheila's corpse

BANG BANG BANG

How to stop the tank firing? Well, Tucker and Caboose are trying to discuss that problem.

Tucker: Okay, which wires did you pull out? Caboose: Blue, Green, anything that makes Sheila move. Oh! And I also pull out the purple one too which is connected to an ice making machine. Tucker: This thing has an ice making machine?! I didn't know that! Caboose: Yeah but all the ice that came out is all browny and rusty. It tastes like rotten licorice. Yuck! Tucker: So which wire did you pull out that 'turned the tank on auto-fire? Caboose: I think the red one. Tucker: Well what are you waiting for? Put it back.

Caboose opens the junction box at the tank's side and reconnects the red wire back to its place, but after putting it back the tank still keeps firing.

Caboose: Did Sheila stop? Tucker: It's still firing! Did you really put it back at the right place? Caboose: I put it back in the hole with the same color as the wire. Tucker: Fuck! Turret's not responding anymore. Any ideas? Caboose: Maybe we should wait for the turret to finish all the ammunition. Tucker: Fuck that, that'll take too long. How about we just tear off the tank's battery? No wait, the thing's got a backup solar generator. Caboose: Or maybe we just climb on the turret and jam the isnide with a rock. Tucker: Oh! Uhm... yeah that sounds like a good idea. Hold on, I'll get the ladder.

On the base's roof

Church: You have to be the most suicidal girl I have ever met!!! I mean- who the fuck would be stupid enough not to wear armor in a middle of a war?! This canyon is filled with trigger happy idiots who'll shoot anyone at anytime, regardless if you're carrying a flag or not! You would not believe how much that hurts, but you... oh, you won't last a day here! Weiss: Mr. Church, I am fully aware of what you're saying, but I have a strong reason to why I refuse to wear my armor. Yes, I am violating rules and regulation, but a soldier still have rights to have proper equipment. Church: Proper equipment? The fuck are you talking about? The Mjolnir system is a good enough armor in this army. Weiss: Except my armor isn't a Mjolnir.

Moment of silence

Church: ... Wait wait wait. Could you repeat that? Weiss: They gave me a different armor. Church: Different armor? Since when did Command started giving new armor, I wasn't informed of that. Weiss: They don't, sir. We're still using the Mark V, but what they gave me is a substitute. Church: Substitute? As in there aren't any available Mjolnirs? Weiss: Yessir. You want to hear the long or the short story? Church: Long so I can understand better. Weiss:  Okay. It all started back at Command shortly before I was deployed here. I was promised to be equipped with my personal Mjolnir Mark V armor, until they all ran out all the sudden. Church: Ran out? What happened, some big planetary battle happened? Weiss: That's the same thing I asked the quartermaster and he said no. There was an accident that happened at one of our bases at the Anima system and... sigh... you would not believe the idiocy that happened there. The soldiers stationed there have been trying to create a metal eating culture that they can use against the REDs. I was quite impressed by the results after they launched it at the enemy, until the solution also started to eat their creators' armors and equipment! Amateurs. Still don't understand the dangers of biological weaponry. Church: And they gave you a 'substitute'. Damn must be tough to be in your position. So what's this substitute armor, mind showing it to me? Weiss: I prefer if you don't. Church: Oh come on, just a look that's all. Weiss: Well okay. But you better not laugh once I showed it to you.

Back at the tank.

A panel dropped beside Tucker. Close one for it could've hit his head.

Tucker: Jesus! Watch where you throw that! Caboose: Sorry! By the way I've opened the turret! Tucker: Great! Now jam the rock into it. Caboose: What?! Tucker: Man that firing's blocking my voice. Just do what you have to do, I'll be down here if you need me!!! Caboose: Okay! Tucker: Nah screw it, I'm sure Caboose will be okay without me. Time to have good chatr with the new babe. What the?

Before Tucker leaves, he saw a flash of light flickering within the junction box. He looks closely at the inside and notice that one of them, an orange wire, is sparking out electricity.

Tucker: *whistle* This looks dangerous. I better pull it off but not sure what'll happen. Hey Caboose, what does the orange wire connect to? Caboose: Oh that wire? That connects to the air conditioning! Tucker: Huh, then it's okay.

Tucker pulls the wire.

Back on the roof

The tank stopped firing at last. Church sighed in great relief as he thought those two won't be able to fix it and they did. Now to turn back to the new recruit. He sees Weiss taking out each pieces of her armor out of her duffle bag. Helmet, vest, boots, etc. Church doesn't recognized this substitute armor before. Back at bootcamp, he was lectured to identify all types of body armor, but never this one.

Church: So that's your 'substitute' armor. I've never seen this type before. Weiss: I knew you haven't, so let me give you a brief lecture. This armor dates back before we found an easier way to mass produce the Mjolnir system. It is called the M52B body armor, designed back before the Great War and was worn by soldiers of the UNSC Marine Corp. Unlike its Mjolnir counterpart today, it is not made out titanium alloy and does not possess a personnal shield generator, but consists of several layers of ballistic shock-absorbing and heat reduction gel layers to help reduce velocity and felt shock from ballistics, shrapnel, and explosives as well as reducing the burn caused by plasma once it reaches the flesh. Any questions? Church: .... Uhm... yeah, mind telling me the shorter version? Weiss: It means it's shit you dunce!!! Yes, this armor has good protection, but since our weapons have been advanced with the help of the Sangheili after the Schism, the chances of survival while wearing this thing has dropped down to 68%. And that's not a chance I'm willing to take! Church: *whistle* Okay that armor's really shitty. But regardless, you can't just go unarmored all the time! Weiss: I know that and besides, Command said it will soon deliver my Mjolnir. All I need to do is wait its arrival. Church: And when will it arrive? Weiss: about three days time. Church: Huh, won't take that long to get here. But still you gotta wear that junk just in case. After those two morons you saw earlier used 'auto-fire' on the tank, some of the shells might've landed on the RED's turf. I know the RED Seargent here very well and whenver we 'attack', there's always a very high chance that he will launch a counterattack and...... What?

Weiss is making a shocked expression as if she's seeing something. Church is puzzled by her sudden reaction.

Church: What? Why are you making that face? Caboose: TUCKER! PUT IT BACK, PUT THE WIRE BACK!!! Church: [turns around] JESUS CHRIST, CABOOSE!!!"

Church became horrified to see what he's seeing. He sees Caboose hanging on the turret's barrel and that's not all, the turret is spinning around up to 3km/h!!!

Caboose: CHURCH, HELP ME!!! Church: This is just plain FUCKING fantastic! Rooke, follow me! GOD!

Back at the tank (again)

Tucker: Oh this is not good, this is not good! What do I do? What do I do?

What have I done?! he thought. Caboose said the orange wire was connected to the air conditioning. Perhaps he didn't hear him correctly due to the firing. He had reconnected the orange wire, but the turret is still spinning! Then he started pulling every wire in the box, only to make things worse! The effects of the removal causes the tank to making a loud commotion in the canyon by producing bizarre sounds through its horns and headlights flickering different colors. He better stop this before Church...

Church: TUCKER!!!

Never mind.

Church: Answers, now! Tucker: Church, I could explain! One of the wires were sparking, I pull it out and... Church: Yeah yeah yeah, I can tell the work that you'd been doing here! Goddammit, Tucker, I was still in a fucking meeting! Tucker: Hey don't blame me! Caboose is the one that started al this mess. Caboose: TUCKER... I don't feel so good... DID IT!!! Tucker: Shut the fuck up! Church: Okay, how do we stop it? Should we remove the battery? Tucker: Hell no! This thing also run's on solar power, it'll still function! Maybe we should wait till nightfall. Church: We can't wait till nightfall! Reconnect the wires, fix it, I don't care, just DEACTIVATE IT!!!

VROOOOOooooooooommm

Church: What the-?

The tank stopped!

Church: Well that was fast. Good job, asshole. Tucker: I didn't do anything!

A nauseated Caboose drops beside the two.

Tucker: Yo, Caboose! You okay? Caboose: Ugh... [stands up] Oh excuse me!

Caboose rushes to a nearby rock to release what's left of his breakfast. Church and Tucker wonder what deactivated the tank, until Weiss approached them with an annoyed face.

Weiss: Of all the other soldiers I have met back at bootcamp, you two, not you Church, are by far the most idiotic men I've ever met! Tucker: Well well, come to meet with the handsome guy, eh? You've come to the right time 'cause I was- Weiss: No. By the way, don't you guys know there's an emergency off switch beneath the butt of the tank? Tucker: Wait, what?!?! Church: There's an emergency off switch on Shei- I mean, our tank?! Weiss: Of course! Every tank needs to have some kind of precaution in case it goes wild. Didn't the tank's tutorial program told you something like that?

Church and Tucker looked at one another. Luckily their helmets blocked their embarrased faces.

Church: No it didn't say anything about an emergency off switch. Tucker: I've heard the tutorial program a lot of times, I never heard about that. Caboose at rock: Sheila did told me... BLAARGH!!!... I forgot about it. Church and Tucker: Shut up!!! Weiss: Wow this war is starting to get pretty.... fun. Was I really deployed in the right place?

A/N: Sorry about the long wait for another episode of this crossover. Been lazy. Plus I also edited the previous episodes, just to fix em up a bit. I'm not sure if I'm proud of creating this story but at least I tried my best.

Deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/necroceph

[berniesrevolution]

On the list of America’s irrational fears, Palestine is near the top. This is no small feat for a “country” with no actual territory and a population about the size of South Carolina. Despite its lack of an air force, navy, or any real army to speak of, Palestine has long been considered an existential threat to Israel, a nuclear-armed power with one of the most powerful militaries in the world and the full backing of the United States. Since there’s no military or economic justification for this threat, a more nebulous one had to be invented. Thus, Palestinians are depicted in the media as hot-blooded terrorists, driven by the twin passions of fanatical Islam and a seething hatred for Western culture. So engrained is this belief that the op-ed page of the New York Times can “grapple with questions of [Palestinian] rights” by advocating openly for apartheid, forced expulsion, or worse.

This worldview demands an Olympian feat of mental gymnastics. It can only be maintained so long as most Americans have no firsthand contact with Palestine or Palestinian people. Even the smallest act of cultural exchange is enough to make us start questioning the panic-laced myths we’ve been taught since birth.  

Of course, the best way to discover the truth about Palestine is to visit the country yourself, though most Americans don’t have the free time or financial resources to do so (this is not a coincidence). This means that those of us who are fortunate enough to visit have a responsibility to share what we’ve seen and heard, without lapsing into pre-fabricated narratives, even “sympathetic” ones. We can’t fight untruth by telling untruths from the opposite perspective. What we can do, however, is report what we saw and heard in Palestine. We can try to provide a snapshot of daily life and let people come to their own conclusions.

With this in mind, here’s what I learned during a recent trip to the Holy Land…

The Palestinian doorman of the Palm Hostel in Jerusalem is a large and friendly man who insists his name is Mike. My fiancée and I are skeptical, as we’d expected something a bit more Arabic. We ask him what his friends call him.

“Just Mike,” he says, and taps an L&M cigarette against the wooden desk. He’s sitting in a dark alcove with rough stone floors, nestled halfway up the staircase that leads from the fruit market to the Palm’s small arched doorway.  A pleasant, musty oldness floats in the air. You could imagine Indiana Jones staying here, if he’d lost tenure and gone broke for some reason. To Westerners like us, it seems too exotic to have a doorman named Mike.

Before we can ask him again, though, Mike pounces with a question of his own. “You’re from the States, right?” He speaks English with a thick accent and slow but almost flawless diction, an odd combination that is causing my fiancée some visible confusion, which seems amusing to Mike. I tell him that we’re from Minnesota, a small and boring place in the center-north of the USA. His grin gets bigger, which makes me self-conscious, so I also explain that Minnesota has no mountains or sea, and the winters are very cold.

“Yeah, I know,” says Mike. “I lived in El Paso for thirty years. Border cop, K9 unit. It was a nice place. Had a couple kids there.” Now it’s my turn to gawk, and I start to race through all the possible scams he might be trying to pull. Mike seems to guess what I’m thinking. “Really. I even learned some Spanish.” He scrunches his brow in mock concentration and clamps a hairy hand over his forehead. “Hola. ¿Como estás?Una cerveza, por favor.”  He opens his eyes and laughs. “Welcome to Jerusalem, guys. Damascus Gate is that way. Enjoy.”

I don’t know why I’m so surprised he knows a handful of Taco Bellisms, or why this convinces me of his honesty. However, now it’s impossible to walk away. We have too many questions. The first one: Why’d he return to Jerusalem? Mike looks down at his cigarette, smoldering into a fine grey tail of ash. He flicks it against a stone and a bright red ember blazes to life.

“This is my home. I had to.”

Later, as we sip sweet Turkish coffee outside a rug shop in the Old City, it occurs to me that Mike was the first Palestinian person I’d ever spoken with face-to-face. His life story seemed unusual, but I have no idea what’s “usual” when it comes to Palestinian lives. I’d never thought about them before, to be honest. The world has an infinite number of stories, and the days are not as long as I’d like. It’s not like I’d chosen to ignore Palestine. I just hadn’t chosen to be interested in it.

Which was odd, because Palestine has been all over the news since I was a kid. There isn’t a single specific story I recall, just a murky soup of words and phrases, like “fragile peace talks” and “two-state solution” and “violent demonstrations.” They all swirl together, settling under the stock image of a bombed-out warzone as the headlines mumbled something about Hamas or Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority. I remember reading about rockets and settlements, refugees and suicide bombers, non-binding resolutions and vetoed Security Council decisions. Not a single detail had stuck. I could feign awareness of some important-sounding events—the Balfour Declaration, the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Summit—but I couldn’t say what decade they happened, or who was involved, or what was decided.

For years, I’d been under the impression that I knew enough about Palestine to be uninterested in what was happening there. This isn’t to say I felt any particular animosity toward the Palestinians. But it’s impossible to fight for every cause, no matter how righteous, if only for reasons of time. Every minute you spend feeding the hungry is a minute you’re not visiting the sick. Life is a zero sum game more often than we’d like to believe.

As we headed toward the Via Dolorosa, the road that Jesus walked on the way to his crucifixion, I began to feel uneasy. The Israeli police (indistinguishable from soldiers except for the patches on their uniforms) who stood guard at every corner still smiled at us, and they were still apologetic when they forbade us from walking down streets that were “for Muslims only, unfortunately.” Their English was excellent. Many of them were women. They were young and diverse and photogenic, a recruiter’s dream team. But all I could see were their bulletproof vests and submachine guns. Above every ancient stone arch bristled a nest of surveillance cameras. Only a few hours ago, I’d been able to block all that from my sight, leaving me free to enjoy the giddy sensation of strolling through the holiest city on earth.

The road ended at the Lion’s Gate. Just as we approached it, a battered Toyota came rattling through. It screeched to a halt and a squad of Israeli police surrounded the car. All four doors opened and out stepped a Palestinian family. The driver was a young man in his 20s, with short black hair cut in the style of Ronaldo, the famous Real Madrid footballer. When the police told him to turn around and face the wall, he did so without a word. It was obvious this was a daily ritual. The policeman who frisked him looked as bored as it’s possible to look when patting down another man’s genitals. Soon it was over, and the family got back in their car. One of the policemen pulled out his phone and started texting.

If I’d made a video of the search (which I didn’t) and showed it to you with the volume off, you probably wouldn’t find it very interesting. The Israeli police didn’t hurt the man, and he barely made eye contact with them. There were no outrageous racial slurs or savage beatings. The only thing you’d see is a group of people in camouflage battle gear standing around a small white sedan, with a middle-aged woman and a couple of young girls off to the right. Unless you have hawk-like eyesight and an exceptional knowledge of obscure uniform insignias, I doubt you’d be able to tell “which side” any of the participants might be on. All you could say for sure is that the police wanted to search the family’s bodies and belongings, and the family looked very unhappy about it, but the police had guns and cameras, and that settled things. It’s interesting what conclusions different people might draw from a scene like that.

Later that night, after we get back to the Palm, I tell Mike about what we saw. He asks what we’d thought. “It was fucked up,” we say.

Mike sighs. “You should see Bethlehem.”    

Jerusalem is so close to Bethlehem that you barely have time to wonder why all the billboards that advertise luxury condos use English instead of Arabic as the second language before you arrive at the wall.

The wall is the most hideous structure I’ve ever seen. It’s a huge, groaning monument to death. Tall grey rectangles bite into the earth like iron teeth, horribly bare, cold, sterile, a towering monstrosity. The wall makes the air taste like poison.

We’re in the car of Mike’s cousin Harun, who is Palestinian, but his car has Israeli plates so we aren’t searched at the checkpoint. We inch past the concrete barriers and armored trucks. Harun holds his identity pass out the window, a soldier waves us through, and a few seconds later we’re in Bethlehem, a short drive from where Jesus Christ was born. It feels like entering prison. I don’t say prison in the sense of an ugly and depressing place you’d prefer not to visit. I say prison in the literal sense: a fortified enclosure where human beings are kept against their will by heavily armed guards who will shoot them if they try to leave. This is what modern life is like in Bethlehem, birthplace of our Lord and Savior.

Looking at the wall from the Israeli side breaks your heart because of its naked ugliness. On the Palestinian side, the unending slabs of concrete have been decorated with slogans, signs, and graffiti, which break your heart for different reasons. One of the hardest parts is reading the sumud series. These are short stories written on plain white posters, plastered to the wall about 10 feet up. Each story comes from a Palestinian woman or girl, and most are written in English, because the only people who read these stories are tourists.

One in particular catches my eye, by a woman named Antoinette:

All my life was in Jerusalem! I was there daily: I worked there at a school as a volunteer and all my friends live there. I used to belong to the Anglican Church in Jerusalem and was a volunteer there. I arranged the flowers and was active with the other women. I rented a flat but I was not allowed to stay because I do not have a Jerusalem ID card. Now I cannot go to Jerusalem: the wall separates me from my church, from my life. We are imprisoned here in Bethlehem. All my relationships with Jerusalem are dead. I am a dying woman.

The flowers are what gets me, because my mother also arranges flowers at church. Hers is an Eastern Orthodox congregation in Minneapolis, about 20 minutes by car from my childhood home. That’s about the same distance between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, although there aren’t any military checkpoints or armored cars patrolling the Minnesotan highways. Until today, I would’ve been unable to imagine what that would even look like. The situation here is so unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in real life that all I can think is, “it’s like a bad war movie.” For the Palestinian people who’ve been living under an increasingly brutal military occupation for the last 70 years, an entire lifetime, I can’t begin to guess at the depths of their helpless anger. What did Antoinette think, the first time the soldiers refused to let her pass? What did she say? What would my mother say? There wouldn’t be a goddamned thing she could do, or I could do, or my father or my sisters, or anyone else. We’d all just have to live with it, the soldiers groping us, beating us, mocking us. No wonder Antoinette gave up hope. In her place, would I be any different? We walk in silence for a long time.

We end up in a refugee camp called Aida, where more than 6,000 people live in an area roughly the size of a Super Target. Here, the air is literally poison. Israeli soldiers have fired so much tear gas into the tiny area that 100 percent of residents now suffer from its effects. If they were using the tear gas against, say, ISIS soldiers instead of Palestinian civilians, this would be a war crime, since “asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases” are banned by the Geneva Protocol. However, such practices are deemed to be acceptable in peacetime, since there’s no chance an unarmed civilian population would be able to retaliate with toxic agents of their own. Without the threat of escalation, chemical warfare is just crowd control.

Before we continue, there are three things you should know about Aida. The first is that there’s no clear dividing line between Aida and Bethlehem, so an unwary pedestrian can easily wander into the refugee camp without realizing it. The second thing is that it doesn’t look like a refugee camp, at least if you’re expecting a refugee camp to be full of emergency trailers, flimsy tents, and flaming barrels of trash. The third thing is that the kids who live there have terrible taste in soccer teams.

We meet the first group as soon as we enter the camp. There are five of them, all teenage boys. One of them is wearing a knockoff Yankees hat. They’re staring at us, and at once I’m very aware of my camera bag’s bulkiness and the blondeness of my fiancée’s hair. A loudspeaker crackles with the cry of the muzzein, and it’s only then that I realize how deeply we Americans have been conditioned to associate the Arabic language with violence and death. The boys exchange a quick burst of words, raising my blood pressure even higher, and cross the street toward us.

“Hello…  what’s your name?” The kid who speaks first is tall and stocky, wearing the same black track jacket and blue jeans favored by 95 percent of the world’s male adolescents. He’s also sporting the Ronaldo haircut, as are several of his friends. Two of the kids start to pull out cigarettes, so I pull out my cigarettes faster and offer the pack to them. Is this a bad, irresponsible thing to do? Sure, and if you’re worried about the long-term health of these kids’ lungs, you should call the American manufacturers who supply Israel with the chemical weapons that are used to poison the air they breathe every day.

I tell the kid my name is Nick, and he shakes my hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Shadi.” He’s carrying a rolled-up book, as are his friends, so I ask if he’s going to school. “Yeah bro, exams. We have three this week.” His friends laugh, and then engage in a quick tussle for the right of explaining that they’re heading to their math exam now, which is a boring and difficult subject, and I agree that it is, although at least you never have to use most of it after you finish school, a sentiment that earns me daps from Shadi and his friends, and we stand there giggling and smoking on the street corner of the refugee camp, though for a few moments we could be anywhere in the world.

My fiancée and I, both teachers by trade, start to pepper the kids with questions. Shadi says that he has one year left at the nearby high school, which is run by the UN refugee agency that was just stripped of half its funding by Trump. After he finishes, he plans to study at Bethlehem University. The other guys nod with approval, and speak of similar hopes. I ask them who their favorite footballer is, and they all say Ronaldo, at which I spit in disbelief, because everyone knows that Ronaldo sucks and Messi is much better, visca el Barça! Shadi and his friends break into huge grins, since few elements of brotherhood are more universal than talking shit about sports. Seconds later we’re howling with laughter as Shadi’s buddy makes insulting pantomimes about Messi’s diminutive size. A small part of my brain is loudly and repeatedly insisting that everything about this moment of life is batshit lunacy, that there’s no reason why I should be standing in a Palestinian refugee camp, yards away from buildings my country helped bomb into rubble, with my pretty fiancée and expensive camera, talking in English slang with a group of boys whose lungs are scarred with chemicals made in the USA, the exact kind of reckless young ruffians whose slingshots and stones are such a terrifying threat to the fearsome Israeli military, and the craziest thing of all is that here in the refugee camp, surrounded by derelict cars and rusty barbed wire and 6,000 displaced Palestinians,  we are not in danger, at least not from whom you’d think. Here, in the refugee camp, we can joke around with people who speak our language and know our cultural references and actively seek to help us navigate their neighborhood. None of this is to say that Aida is a safe, comfortable, or morally defensible place to put human beings, but only that the people who live there treated us with such overwhelming kindness and decency that I have never been more ashamed at what my country does in my name. I tell Shadi and his friends to take the rest of my cigarettes, but they smile and decline.

“We, uh, have to go now,” says Shadi, as his friends start to walk up the street. “Do you have Facebook?” We do, because everyone does, and as we exchange information, I wish him good luck on his math exam. “No way, bro, I suck at math,” he says. We both laugh, and I pat him on the back.

“Fuck math. But hey, you’re gonna do great, Shadi.”

“Thanks bro. Fuck math.”

I hope he gets every question correct on his exam. I hope he goes to university and wins a scholarship to Oxford. I hope he invents some insanely popular widget and it makes him a billion dollars and he never has to breathe tear gas again.

We continue walking through Aida camp. The buildings are square, ugly, and drab, but the walls are decorated with colorful paintings of fish and butterflies and meadows (along with a somewhat darker array of scenes from the Israeli military occupation). We meet a group of cousins, aged four to 10, all girls, who ask if we can speak English. When we offer them a bag of candy, they take one piece each, and run away yelping when a man limps out the front door of their house. “Thank you,” he says, his face a mask of grave civility. Cars, all bearing green-and-white Palestinian plates instead of the blue-and-yellow Israeli ones, slow down so their drivers can shout “Hello!” We meet another group of kids, boys this time, who grab fistfuls of candy and make playful attempts to unfasten my wristwatch. We make a hasty retreat from this group. The streets are scorched in spots where tear gas canisters exploded.  Narrow strips of pockmarked pavement lead us down steep hills and into winding alleys, and soon we’re lost.

This is how we meet Ahmed. He’s a tall man, about 40 years old, with a small black mustache and arms as thin as a stork’s legs. A yellow sofa leans against the concrete wall of the three-storey apartment building where he lives. Ahmed is sitting there with an elderly couple. He asks if we’d like a cup of tea, and although we’ve been warned about the old “come inside for a cup of tea” scam, we accept his offer. The elderly couple greets us in Arabic, and I try not to notice the large plastic bag of orange liquid peeking out from beneath the old man’s shirt.

While we climb the stairs to Ahmed’s apartment, he tells us that the old people are his parents. “They live here,” he says, pointing to the door on the first floor, “because they don’t walk very good. My mother has problems with her legs, my father is sick from the water.” He traces the pipes with his finger, and we see they’re coated in a thick reddish crust. “Here is the home of my big son,” he says when we reach the second floor. “He has a new baby.” We congratulate him on becoming a grandfather. “And I have a new baby, too! Come, I show you!” One more flight of stairs, and we arrive at Ahmed’s apartment.

It looks remarkably similar to a hundred other apartments we’ve visited. Framed photos of various family members hang on the living room walls, which are painted the same not-quite-white as most living room walls. There’s a beautiful red rug and a small TV. A woman is sitting on the sofa, nursing a baby as she folds socks. “My wife,” says Ahmed.

She speaks a little English too, and says that her name is Nada. She has a pale round face and long black hair. Her eyes are soft, kind, and completely exhausted. Yet if she’s annoyed or embarrassed by our presence, she doesn’t show it. She just hands the baby to Ahmed and goes to make the tea.

“I’m sorry for my house,” says Ahmed, cradling his son like a loaf of bread with legs. “We try to be clean, but…” There’s not so much as a slipper out of place, but I know what he means. “We rent this flat. And my son, and my parents. All rent. Before we have a farm, animals, olive trees, but now, we rent.” I ask about his job. He smiles and shakes his head. “I want a job,” he says, “I love to work. With my hands, with my mind. I love to work. But here, haven’t jobs.” For a second he looks like he’s going to continue this line of thinking, but he stops himself. “I help my wife, that is my job.” Ahmed laughs and passes his baby to my fiancée. “And he, he helps in the home?” She demurs while I protest in mock indignation. I do the dishes every morning before she even wakes up! Still laughing, Ahmed rubs his shins, and again it’s easy to forget we’re sitting in a refugee camp in Jesus’ hometown.

Then the baby wheezes. It’s a dry, scratchy wheeze. Ahmed squirms in his seat, looking embarrassed. The baby begins to cough. My fiancée rubs his back as the coughing turns wet and violent.  Machine gun explosions blast from his tiny lungs. As an asthmatic, I recognize the sound of serious sickness. The baby writhes in my fiancée’s lap, struggling to breathe. He’s gasping and it’s getting worse fast. At moments like these, personal experience tells me that a nebulizer can be the difference between life and death. I don’t insult Ahmed by asking if he has one, because it’s clear that he doesn’t. All I can do is rub the boy’s chest with my finger, a stupid and useless massage. He kicks and stretches as if trying to wiggle away from the unseen demon that’s strangling him.

Nada hurries back with the tea. “I’m sorry,” she says, picking up the baby. She coos to him in Arabic and rubs his back, both of which are comforting but neither of which can relax the inflamed tissues of her infant’s lungs. “My baby…” Unable to find the words in English, she looks to her husband.

Ahmed rubs his cheek. “When she is pregnant, one night the soldiers come. They say the children throw stones. They always throw stones. So the soldiers shoot gas in all the houses. In the windows, over there.” His voice gets quieter. “And she is very sick. When the baby is born, he is sick too.” I ask him if it’s possible to find medicine. “Sometimes yes,” says Ahmed, “but very, very expensive.” For the first time, there’s a note of frustration in his voice. “Everything is expensive here. You see this,” and he picks up a pack of diapers, “it cost me thirty shekels. 10 dollars, almost. And the baby needs so many things. It is impossible to buy. I haven’t money for meat, how can I buy medicine?” He points to a plastic bag with four small pitas. “This is our food. One bread for my two sons, and two breads for my wife. She must make milk for our baby.” When I ask him what he eats, he holds up his cup of tea.

Somehow Nada has soothed the baby out of danger. His breathing is almost normal again, just a quiet raspy crackle. She’s still staring at him, her big brown eyes wide with worry. I don’t know how many times she’s done this before. I don’t know how many times are left before her luck runs out. 

Somehow she’s keeping her baby alive with nothing but the sheer force of her love. I ask to use the toilet so I don’t have to cry in front of her.

(Continue Reading)

[howyoutalktostrangers]

So,

I’ve decided to publish another story from my manuscript.

This one’s called “Post-funeral”, and the main character is named Joel Bishop. He’s a friend of my main characters Paisley Troutman and Neil Solomon, and in this story his older brother has just committed suicide after running for political office in Garibaldi. It’s the 10th story in Whatever you’re on, I want some.

It’s raw.

The Literary Goon

Post-funeral

by Will Johnson

FIRST WE swallowed bitter shards of MDMA, spent hours slip-sliding over each other’s bodies giddy and feverish. I’d been staying at my brother’s mansion with my ex-girlfriend Kylie, up in Garibaldi, for nearly two weeks. We wandered the streets shirtless, dove into foggy backyard pools that didn’t belong to us. We did blow off the toilet tank. We sipped mushroom tea, pinkies erect, then watched Jurassic Park while we waited, dopily dragging on cigarettes and ashing on the freshly installed carpet. We smoked salvia and hash, hot-knifed thumb smudges of tar-black ooze. We were doing okay, food-wise: salmon steaks, cheese-drowned Tostitos, frozen blueberries. We drank Black Label and Bailey’s-infused coffee. Some days we binged on Chinese food and pizza; more often we wandered the linoleum barefoot and mind-fucked, sniffling and twitching, having forgotten what hunger feels like.

And whenever we got bored we circled the neighbourhood spearing my brother’s campaign signs onto unsuspecting people’s lawns, just to fuck with them. Vote for Joshua Bishop, indeed. 

One night Kylie fled. I careened along shadowed boulevards in my brother’s minivan just after 3 a.m., wearing sweatpants and a pair of Santa Claus slippers, chain-smoking cigarettes to keep my headspace level. The night dew-misted my forearm hair from the open window. When my headlights slashed across a lawn three blocks over I glimpsed Kylie under an expansive, shadowed oak with thick, threatening arms. She was curled fetal, wearing red bikini bottoms, dollar store flip flops and my Garibaldi Elementary GRAD OF 2004 hoodie. As I lugged her limply off the grass a dog-walker in a peacoat paused on the sidewalk.

“She had a little too much to drink,” I explained. “We’re all good here.”

“And who are you to her, exactly?” he asked, cell phone palmed. “It looks like she needs some assistance.”

“We’re fine, honestly. I’m just taking her home.”

“I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”

Kylie moaned in my arms as I lift-shoved her into the passenger seat. Her legs slackly dangled towards the concrete as I gathered up her feet and slammed the door shut behind her. Peacoat man flapped his arms, distressed and honking.

“If you fuck with me,” I said. “I’ll kill your little dog and drink its blood.”

I don’t remember what he said after that, but I do remember the electric surge of hatred that blood-dumped through my veins. This man’s banal existence, his uncomplicated morality, the look of fearful revulsion on his face—all of these offended some feral version of myself I’d unleashed during those weeks. I battered my chest, squeezing out wild tears, and roared in his face until he retreated with his little dog yipping.

Kylie wore a thick-padded bra with metal crescents scooping under each fleshy handful. She whined as I undressed her, paranoid of the oil-like substance pooling on the walls and overflowing into the living room ceiling. I worked my fingers under each goose-pimpled boob, inhaled her chest glister. Kylie wasn’t mine exclusively, but our experiences were our own. I took her earlobe in my mouth, her weight supported in my arms, and worked it with my tongue like a soother. We’d tired of our porn-inspired routines and were finding creative ways to exploit each other’s bodies lazily, gluttonously. A tweaked nipple on mushrooms is like a chest-explosion, while a firmly gripped dick on acid can change your life. Cheek to arm pit, sole to shin, elbow to pelvic bone, we chest-banged and hugged, childlike, in the trenches of our sweat-soiled blankets.

Then we slept.  

Sometimes I get brain whispers from my former self, little buried guilt yelps from the Christian kid I used to be. He’s horrified. Kylie struggles to believe I used to be religious, that I used to keep a prayer journal, that I was once scandalized by swear words. She can’t visualize it, can’t reconcile it with the version of me that she knows: a hipster rich kid with no moral code to speak of. She can’t understand that it’s all the same impulse, that God is nothing more than the Drug of all Drugs, that the hardest thing I ever had to kick was Christianity. Driving by St. Catherine’s I’ve got multi-year histories flashing across my vision. Our youth pastor Trent Stonehouse sings at the front of the sanctuary, takes kids on missions trips to Tijuana and Brazil and the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, and then there’s all the kids I knew—Amber, Turner, Paisley, Neil and Ty—they’re all memory-cached, worshipping with the Agape Soldiers onstage while I sway awkward in the pews and try to figure out how come I’m the only one who does’t seem to feel it. Sure, I’ve felt the Holy Spirit before—or at least I believed I felt it at the time—and I’ve been one of those ultra-pious kids seizing on the ground, overcome as the Church Moms lay blankets over our God-blissed teenage bodies. Slain in the spirit.

But spiritual awakenings wear off. Slowly, one day after the next, I felt the emotional intensity drain. Outside the context of the St. Catherine’s sanctuary all the meaning dribbled out until I had to go back, soul-hungry, for more. Being a disciple of Christ meant living this special type of life, meant elevating yourself from the mundanity. At Camp Evergreen, around the campfire, we sang “Jesus, I am yours” and two hours later Rachel Peachland gave me a hand job behind the girl’s cabin line, a frantic and gasp-filled spectacle in the shadows. I was a little perv, shame-soaked but undeterred, obsessed with girls but convinced that every lustful thought was a freshly disgusting sin, something to beg forgiveness for. Do you know how exhausting it is to be ashamed all the time? To spend your life hearing how sinful and hopeless you are without Jesus?

Turner used to say the whole point of grace is you don’t need to feel guilt, that God’s already forgiven you before you even dream up our next transgression.

But who said we need to be forgiven at all?

“If you could go back and be Christian again, would you do it?” Kylie asked, morning squinting in my brother’s bed, her voice grumbly from sixteen hours of sleep. I gripped sleepily at my dick while urine hammered into the shower drain.

“I think about that every day.”

“And?”

“Are we talking like a lobotomy-type solution here? Like would I have to give up part of my brain?”

“No, just say you believed again.”

“The thing is, to make that happen I’d have to give it up.”

“What?”

“My doubt. My fucking reason. I’d have to give up my whole personality.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Yes necessarily. Unless God fucking prances in here and goes ‘hey, Joel, I’m fucking real’, this shit isn’t going to happen.”

I slump into her lap. Kylie was born in a Burmese orphanage, got adopted by white Canadians. Didn’t find that out until three months into our thing, when I met her crazy Mom. She kept all that to herself, and I understood why. People project shit, put labels on you. Who wants to be the starving kid from one of those World Vision commercials? She didn’t want pity; she just wanted to be Kylie.

I liked her way more than I realized.

“But what if the thing with Trent never happened?”

“It wasn’t about him. I stopped going to St. Catherine’s way before all that shit in Mexico, before any of those other guys.”

“Do you think he raped anyone you know? Like anyone in the youth group?”

“Fuck, what’s gotten into you?”

“I’m just so curious. I’ve never met someone who knew a real child molester.”

“You talk like it’s a movie star or something.”

“Or a serial killer.”

“So what do you think? Do you think he was doing like pervy, Catholic-style shit?”

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

“But what do you think?”

“I mean they say he molested this Mexican kid, right? Or two of them? That’s why he got arrested originally, in Tijuana. But they never came up with any Canadian victims.”

“Who’s they?”

“Investigators or whatever. He was down there for eleven years years, and it’s kind of like why press charges and do all that work if he’s not even in Garibaldi?”

“Shit.”

“But eventually they figure he’ll be back, right? I mean, the Mexicans can’t keep him forever.”

“When is that going to be?”

“The system’s so corrupt down there. Guilty til proven innocent, all that.”

“Turner told me he got letters.”

“From Trent?”

“Yeah, a while back he was telling me stories about Trent. He told me the letter said ‘you can’t turn your back on God’ and ‘don’t let this be an excuse to lose your faith’, all this shit.”

“Are you serious?”

“From prison he was giving him a sermon!”

“Fuck.”

“I mean, we were smoking a joint but I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth. Wasn’t he like Trent’s little favourite? Do you think it was him Trent messed with?”

I’ve considered that plenty of times, but it’s different to say out loud.

“Trent had a weird thing with Paisley Troutman, one of the girls in the worship band. People were gossiping about that for years.”

“But doesn’t he fuck little boys?”

“Yeah, but maybe he’s just like a non-discriminating deviant, right? Just raping whoever, wherever. Dudes’ fucking evil.”

“I heard there’s some people that think he’s still innocent.”

I light a cigarette, roll across the bed and go looking for blow.

“I’m not one of them,” I say.

Kylie sat cross-legged and hungover in the minivan’s passenger seat, reorganizing her purse while we descended the Sea to Sky. Cliffs draped with steel netting loomed to our left. To the right was nothing but open, cloudless sky. The road slalomed along the mountain slope, twist-rising and falling just as quickly. Ocean air swirled around us. A grey thumb of stone emerged in the distance, thrusted up hitchhiker-style, with a few stubborn bushes defiantly alive atop it’s wind-blasted summit forty feet above the road.

The mansions along the highway—stilted and gleaming in the trees—reflected the Pacific’s blue glow from giant mirrored windows. These were the people in my brother’s voting district, who had proudly displayed his campaign signs so they would be visible for commuters passing through the construction progress below. Vote for Joshua Bishop.

No more.

“The last shit we got from Turner was dirty,” Kylie mumbled. “Fucking weak.”

“That wasn’t his regular guy.”

“Says him.”

A bored, sunburned teenager wearing a Solomon Development Ltd. uniform waved us off the highway, past some pylons and orange fencing, and towards the razed shoulder currently being paved. Steamrollers grumbled a few kilometres further on, while in front of us six men guided a crane-suspended concrete median into place. I parked beside a line of trucks facing oceanward, overlooking Howe Sound, and texted Turner. Within a few minutes he appeared, knuckle-rapping the window, and Kylie unlocked the sliding door behind her.

“You two’ve been voracious lately,” Turner said. “You’re outpacing my coworkers, even.”

Kylie ignored him, sullen.

“I’ve got five hundred here, that’s two for last time and three for now,” I said.

“And you’ve got time for a couple lines now?”

An ice-blue sky populated with drifting gulls appeared as I took my first hit. Their beak-tips were dolloped with bright red. I thumbed a nostril for leverage, snorted with all my might, and sucked back. It filled me like sunlight. Wave-crests built frothing and burst into chaos amidst the rocks below.

“That feels better, huh?” said Turner. “I’m gonna fire through my afternoon.”

“I don’t know how you do this dip-shit job, man.”

“Whatever.”

“I would feel like one of those historical Chinese guys they used to dynamite the tunnels, you know? Like some expendable pawn they use for the hard labour. A slave they can just blow up whenever they feel like.”

“Yeah, so what’s your fucking job, Bishop?”

Kylie dabbed residue on her gums, sucking her finger. The world continued outside our windshield, introduced a dangling silhouette to our view-scape. It took me a moment to take this character in: parachuting past with some magical floating canopy, he was trailing an unfurled sign that read NO OLYMPICS ON STOLEN NATIVE LAND while filming with a camera strapped to his wrist. He was wearing those stupid shoes with individual toes, the ones rich men wear, and spandex head to toe—like some gravity-defying ninja spirit. I almost laughed.

How long had he prepared for this moment? What did he imagine he would see, hanging suspended and superior over us? The afternoon wind carried him sideways, tilting.

“Look at that piece of shit,” said Turner. “Look at him flying high.”

On the way back to town, Kylie asked if we could swing by her friend Lauren’s place. She lived in one of the new townhouses by the highway, Garibaldi Estates, on the fifth floor.

“This bitch owes me like a hundred bucks,” Kylie said as we rode the elevator up. “She’s always doing shit like this, and I can’t let her get away with it. You know what I mean?”

I shrugged.

The hallway hung silent following Kylie’s door-battering, but after a minute or two the door rattled and opened. A girl wearing a short pink bathrobe leaned into view, her bed-shagged hair streaked a similar hue. Her eyes were half-closed.

“Uh huh,” she said.

“You gonna let us inside?” Kylie asked.

“I’ll come out’n talk,” she said, pained.

I pretended to ignore them while they argued in the hallway, and watched as a dishevelled crow shifted uncomfortably on the edge of the roof, its talons clicking, just outside the window. Kylie paced shouting while Lauren listened bored with her beautiful brown legs.

Eventually Kylie turned back to me, exasperated. “Let’s go, Joel.”

Once we got back on to the Juan de Fuca Hill she held out her palm, two chalky pills cradled in the creases.

“This is supposed to be boss stuff. It’s K. She didn’t have any cash.”

How can I capture that moment? Kylie halfway-swivelled against the seatbelt, her forehead salmon pink from the sun and her white palm-skin outstretched. The grassy bluffs leading up towards the towering dominance of Mount Garibaldi were stretched out behind her, floating and blurred, while within the carpeted boundaries of our little vehicle we were safety-bathed by the air conditioning. I swallowed the pill. We hurtled towards our future.

“Will you put some more signs up with me later?” I asked. “After?”

“Of course.”

“There’s still so many, babe.”

“We can put up as many as you want, babe.”

Sixteen years old I thumb-dabbed my goggles, donkey-kicking, my headphones tucked under my swim cap. The finals heat for the 100 butterfly at provincial championships, and I was the one standing in front of Lane 4. Ty was there, Sketch and Neil too. I spat air, flailed, my feet splashing on the tiles. I expected to win my whole life, always anticipated easy victory—what does that say about me? I had this daily suspicion that I was a little more interesting than everyone else, a little more talented. My brother Josh was the same way, and all during the campaign I wonder if he had any idea how wrong things could go, how easily his future would evaporate. Vote for Joshua Bishop. I can see his temp’s bemused face, the self-satisfied sneer, as he ruined my family’s life with every fucking word he spoke. As soon as my brother’s news went public, our family scattered into our own grief trajectories, none of us sure how to handle the sudden scrutiny. And before we could decide whether we forgave him, before we could prove to him that being a part of the Bishop family means more than some sex scandal, some political campaign, before my father could even talk to him, he was gone. The ocean will take us all, I figure, but we were left with his body, shower-dangling, at his mansion in Garibaldi. That house! White carpets like cat fur underfoot. This is where I belonged, not slave-waging away in Vancouver.

Underwater is where I feel best, dolphin-kicking streamlined. Life made sense at 16, when my evening revolved around 58 seconds of frenzied exertion. Fuck real life and the future and the present moment too because I’m suspended mid-dive, dripping, while around me the bleachers erupt with cheering. Ice-wind slashes my cheekbones and stings my eyes shut.

Rotting clumps of mown grass collected on my boots as I worked my way up the St. Catherine’s lawn, past the youth trailer in the parking lot, up towards the stained glass window at the apex of the sanctuary. As kids we played this game called Gestapo where the youth leaders would chase us through the streets of Garibaldi with flashlights while we raced from Diefenbaker Park to the safety of the church. I scanned the treeline for spectators, but I was alone. I was thinking about this thing Turner once told me, about how we’re all just energy morphing from one form to the next. In reality, he was the first one to ditch on Jesus. He was braver than I was, less scared of the social consequences, or maybe he was just more honest.

“When I die and go to Heaven, I’m going to walk into the throne room of God and I’ll have three simple words for him: what the fuck?” Turner told me, perched in the Sky Train window, when I asked him about why he wasn’t coming to church anymore.

“If you had kids, what could they do to stop you from loving them?” he asked me.

“Nothing, I guess.”

“So why are we worshipping a deity who routinely condemns whole swaths of society to Hell? It’s so fucking arbitrary, Bishop! You’re born in India, you’re fucked. You’re born in China, you’re fucked. But if you’re a white Christian dude, everything will be fine and you’ll be a happy little saved boy.”

I didn’t know what to say then, and I still don’t now.

“A God like that doesn’t deserve my love.”

The way Turner talked, he didn’t miss religion. He didn’t miss understanding everything, having that communal reassurance. He liked to be an outlier, a rebel, a heathen.

“You can’t spend your whole life pretending,” Turner said. “Sooner or later you have to admit we wasted our teenage years on a medieval crock of bullshit.”

All that meaning, all those years of prayer, all that struggling and learning—for what? I speared the first campaign sign firmly beside St. Catherine’s front entrance, another one beneath its stained glass, and the final one at the top of their hilly lawn. My brother’s plastic face smiling from each one. Then I sat, butt-damp in the grass, and lit a cigarette. My brother was 33 years old when he died, the same age they nailed Jesus to a fucking cross, but he wasn’t dying for any reason. He didn’t get to close his eyes knowing he’d made some huge sacrifice, knowing that he left the world a better place than when he arrived. My brother died tormented and hopeless, kicking against the porcelain, and who deserves that? How come he got hand-picked for that fate? I felt personally robbed of decades of experience, of the chance to see his face wrinkle, his voice change, his hair go white like Dad’s.

“I really wanted to believe in You,” I told the looming, dark church. “If I had a choice, I’d still be here. You know that.”

I couldn’t believe I was praying. I was still high.

“If there’s something more to this, something I’m missing…I guess what I’m saying is if you’re going to keep me around, You’re going to have to do something.”

I sat there quiet, wondering what God could do, short of flashing across the sky in all His radiance, to convince me of His presence. I heard this quote once, attributed to a 16th century hymn writer: “a God comprehended is not God”. If that’s true, then why even attempt to grasp the mystery? Why call out to Him, why pray, why devote yourself to a deity who can’t (or won’t) respond? When I was a kid I used to make little faith bargains, sending mental requests for God to manipulate the circumstances around me. (“If you really exist, make that kid put something in the garbage can as he walks by.”) Sometimes it even worked. It was like having an Almighty, imaginary friend. But now I’m an adult, a real person, I’ve read fucking Nietzsche. I won’t be so easy to convince. A warm feeling in my chest won’t be enough, a whispered voice deep in my psyche was completely inadequate. I needed something tangible, a Burning Bush-style sign, and I would accept nothing short of a miracle. Maybe my brother could bound out of one of his election signs, let me know this was all an elaborate dream sequence, or maybe Trent would materialize in front of me and explain what happened down in Mexico all those years ago. He’ll tell me our youth group’s implosion was part of some larger, mystical scheme, that St. Catherine’s has some continued role to play in my life. 

Or what? An angel! A demon! Anything. These sorts of visions end up in sermons and heartfelt testimonies, in parables. These experiences alter people’s entire lives, give them purpose and direction. Why not me? Why couldn’t I, just once, be allowed a glimpse of something beyond all this? Why couldn’t I be the one with the faith, the one who understands the light while everyone else stands in the dark?

“Will You speak to me?” I said, my voice trembling. “Are You there?”

[thenosebleeders-blog]

Depressive Episodes 19/11/17

Jesus Christ, depressive episodes hit you like a fucking tidal wave. You brush them off for a week or two. You think, I'm just sad! My period’s probably due! God forbid if it actually is because it only amplifies the depression even more. You sit there thinking, nah, I'm only suicidal because of hormones - yeah because that’s normal you dickhead. Then it continues on for a week, then the next. It flat out fucks you up for months.

It’s ridiculous how easily these episodes sneak up (much like the Prozac Nation gif at the start of this post - gradually then suddenly) - but once they’ve hit it’s unbearable. You can’t get any work done because the sheer thought of it makes you want to cry and hurt yourself. You feel useless, tired, a complete burden. Every slight difficulty leads to the same solution. Slight issue > what am I going to do? > there’s no good solution to this whatsoever > I should kill myself. That cycle continues on until the episode ends. It’s ruthless. The negative cycle of thinking is addictive, it becomes too comfortable. You think - why even bother breaking out of this cycle, this is who I am. This is my natural way of being! Everyone that is happy is oblivious and stupid and has their priorities in the wrong order. No, you dictating mess of a mental illness - you are the fuck up. Everyone else is what you should be.

People without mental illness can’t understand it. “But why do you want to stay like this? You should be working to make yourself better!”. Yeah okay, prick, be a bit more understanding. Mental illness is very similar to being an addict. It’s just being stuck in a cycle of negative thoughts rather than a cycle of taking heroin or coke. There’s an ignorance towards substance abuse and mental illness both, so there’s no point me explaining. If you’re dead set on thinking addicts are lazy and mentally ill people are faking it, you’re not gonna change your mind because of me.

The cultural misunderstanding of mental illness is disgusting. The amount of people you hear describing depression as a trend, or saying that young people can’t be depressed because they’ve experience no hardship is absolutely ridiculous. I wish for just one or two weeks those people would fully experience depression, anxiety, bipolar, anything. They wouldn’t be able to cope. I think a lot of the ignorance comes from a lack of education during school. All they ever taught us was to look out if your friends seemed sad or overly anxious (even when most people try to hide their mental illness due to shame and social stigma). They rarely covered anything other than depression and anxiety, too. People say they want to get rid of the taboo with mental illness, but I think if you’d have mentioned bipolar or schizophrenia to one of the teachers at my school assemblies they’d have had a seizure. Why even bother trying to educate us if you know nothing about the subject and you’re terrified of giving us the whole story? 

Even so, schools have no fucking right acting like they care about mental health with the amount of pressure they put on students. “Students, we really care about your mental health, we promise. However, if you don’t complete this one bit of homework, or don’t revise for this exam, you will fail at school and you won’t get a job. You will end up homeless and dead in a ditch”. Thanks for that great message school - I'll make sure to remember that completing work is better than valuing my own mental health. If society wants to see suicide rates decreasing maybe they should start funding mental health care more (hint hint tories) and promoting the idea that your mental health is more important than work.

[starkillersbae]

personal

hay tumblr, I know I don’t usually post on here, but jesus christ, the only thing I can think to do is try and get some of this out somewhere. 

Im so tired. Tired doesn’t even cover what im feeling right now. I feel like i’m over full with all these bottled up uncomfortable emotions that you can’t just spill out in to the streets because its so toxic, so you just have to carry it inside you. But my body can only hold so much of it, so my seams start to show and things spill out in little sloshes and dripping puddles. Just enough that it hits the people around you but never gives you any relief because nothing is better.  I tried to vent it out like opening the flood gates, but jesus, the third time around I figure I’m just a bad caller with the hotlines. I was trying to find out the cheapest funeral options, and better yet how to write in to a will for my parents that they ought to just burn me in a cardboard box to save the expense. My mom isn’t the grave yard type, so why take out a loan for a rock no one will visit and I won’t even use?  Figured it was kind of a shitty line of thinking and searched a suicide hotline.  I knew I was all manic energy, my heart couldn’t stop racing and my brain was scrambling in every direction because every direction I turned was painful, leaving no place to settle, and no steady stream of thought to prevail.  So I called and got Charlie.  Charlie wanted to find a solution to everything I said. If you don’t like your job get a new one. You can’t because of school, then drop out of school. You can’t drop out of school because of loans, then get a job that pays for your loans. You can’t get a job that pays for your loans without school, so go to school.  We chased eachother in circles, I could tell he was frustrated, he wasn’t trained to handle this, he was trained to hand me numbers for nice local charities that might help me pay the bills to keep the lights on, but he told me himself, he couldn’t help me. I know you wanted to make my day easier Charlie and had best intentions, but I wanted death for reasons that didn’t include needing free day care, or the catholic charity that might help with my bills. I needed a light to give me a reason to pay the bills, but paying them wouldn’t give me that light.  I’m sorry Charlie, I wasn’t the call you wanted or needed, and none of your phone numbers were what I wanted or needed either.  Next I got ‘Unimaginative’ on 7cups. I know 7cups isn’t a suicide prevention line, but I needed someone to listen to maybe ease the pressure off an ever growing weight. Unimaginative wasn’t trained either and told me so his third message to me, and it became clear enough english wasn’t his first language, or else he simply didn’t wish to hear a single thing I said.  I disconnected the chat when the only bright side he could come up with to my life after 30 minutes of talking was that I must be pretty if my work put me infront of people.  I could laugh. I tear myself apart with needles and knives on all the soft sensitive overly fat places I wish gentle hands would touch. But I know there isn’t one out there who would be subjugated to me for life, so I read love stories on my phone screen at night, and when the jeans and bras come off after work, I rip apart the body parts that no one will ever get to see.  So a day passed and it got worse. I figured one more try to release.  I got Grace.  I hoped you’d be a saving Grace, or atleast a woman who wouldn’t break me down to body parts in the most unimaginative of ways.  Instead I cried to you and said I didn’t understand what the point in living was anymore. Of 7 billion people crowded on this earth, how could I have any worth, how could anything I do have worth?  You told me God with a capital ‘G’ loves every single person on earth and has a special plan for us all.  I didn’t want to argue and outright state I didn’t believe in a divine plan or a creator who molded each and every special little soul in the palm of his cosmic hand and set us down with a plan full of love and hope.  I believe in a cosmos full of more stars than humans. I am less than a grain of sand. So why bother?  We walked in metaphysical loops, it was clear you knew I didn’t believe but were sure God with a capital ‘G’ and divine love would save me from what I really want, a quiet return to earth and nothingness as my cells break apart in to new materials.  So round and round we went untill you told me you couldn’t help me. I needed therapy and you wished me the best, but you had an internal light and couldn’t understand why I didn’t have the same. I feel like I’m screaming for help, I’m scratching at the walls and howling and pounding and tearing at this lock box that is my psyche. But no one wants to open that box, no one has anything that could fill it.  I just want it all to stop, and maybe I feel better now or at least I will now that i’ve spilled this all outside of my seams, but whats left now? I’m so fucking tired. 

[buggerjagger646]

nobody is going to like this and i just dont care at all.

alright.

im gonna rant

because my head hurts and maybe this will make it a little less terrible. 

How very not buddhist of me, but fuck you “fat acceptance” or “mental health acceptance”. fuck. you.

allow me to introduce myself in a way that makes me cringe at my very core, for this is the way that so many talk about themselves these days and i find it fucking deplorable to define yourself not by the content of your character or the achievements which you have brought to yourself, but instead these fucking bullshit words which hold little to no meaning of who YOU are. fuck that. but for the sake of the argument of this rant, ive been seeing a therapist for several months after what i can only think of as a fairly serious break and im being monitored for some variation of depression and suicidal whatever, and also for anorexia, apparently.

to the “accept my mental illness” bullshit - screw off. just screw off. it was suggested at my most recent session that i might need to enter a hospital facility for the apparent severity of my thoughts. i have to go to a long, pain in the ass diagnostic session in a couple of weeks to see if theyre going to medicate me, and that session was very difficult to get because hey apparently very few prescribing mental doctors who take my insurance deal with people who have eating issues. so fuck that first of all. 

“accept my mental illness, i dont need to see a therapist.” go to hell, quite frankly. i force myself to be honest with my therapist. i keep a stupid log of my “emotion states” because she asks me to even though i think is ridiculous. i read and listen to many psychological figures and ideas and force my own self to do everything i can to try to figure out some way to get around all of this. fuck you and your “accept me as i am because i dont want to/am too scared to do any real work for my own wellbeing”. fuck you. get fucking help, do some fucking work, get the hell over yourself for the love of everything. stop moaning and telling ME, ME who is working herself raw to figure out what the hell to do, that you dont have to do the same damn work as me. get off it. get yourself together, damnit. do some damn work. 

moving along, 

“fat acceptance” can fuck. the hell. off. right off. so far off that i never have to see that bullshit again in my life. they weigh me once per month at my doctor. the doctor who i had to sit in front of like a little kid and admit that i was barely eating and watch THAT look. you dont know THAT look unless you know THAT look. the doctor who i was given the (appropriate) ultimatum of ‘go to the doctor to be sure youre not dying or we cannot continue’ by the therapist i already mentioned. i just happened to find and like the one who had a specialization in eating disorders. lucky me. i keep a food journal on and off where i have to describe my feelings around what im eating. and when i hand them off i get to watch her get that little look of repressed concern, going ‘this cant be all that there is’. they primarily consist of the feeling “i hate this” and “im forcing this down my throat and i feel terrible”.

so fuck your fat acceptance. dont give me bullshit about “glandular” this and “hereditary” that. the overwhelming majority of you who are fat are so because your food intake is complete and total shit and entirely more than it should be, and you dont fucking care. or, frankly, youre lazy. and dont sass me, ive had a number of fat people admit to me directly that they are too fucking lazy to learn to cook or to cook for themselves or to eat within healthful bounds.

fuck. you. 

you know what? if you want to destroy your body and your general well being and youre somehow content there, fucking go for it. but dont fucking demand that i accept the fact that youre too stubborn or lazy to do well for yourself. fuck you. if i have to shove food into my mouth and i have to be fucking uncomfortable and i have to fucking deal with this, fuck you, you can fix your diet and stop being an ass. and for the record, anyone who is pushing this shit for children is absolutely, sickeningly, deplorable. children should not be fat. they have every metabolic and physical reason to not be fat unless their jackass parents are too ignorant or arrogant to do something. and yes, thats fucking child abuse. if your kid is fat, its almost certain that you are doing something wrong and you need to either seek assistance or have some kind of repercussion. fuck up your life if you must but dont try to bring kids into this. 

fuck you. if i have to force myself to eat, if i have to make myself be honest with what not eating does to me, then you assholes should be held to the same accountability. you know that the food you eat is shit and/or too plentiful. you KNOW it. dont give me this shit about “fat acceptance”. get your shit together and learn how to accept yourself and you might find that in most cases, youre well aware that youre fucking killing your body and you really dont actually like it. if anorexia is an eating disorder, then most of the overeating is so as well. your relationship with food is just as unhealthy as mine is, stop fucking lying to yourself because youre too lazy to be honest and to find the better solutions. 

fuck your acceptance bullshit. 

almost no one knows whats broken in me right now and im damn well going to fucking keep it that way. because i will be fucking damned if i am going to be defined by this shit as opposed to the things that i have done or will do or the person who i am or my long thought and pondered ideas. and even better, ive been completely betrayed by one person i trusted with this information of me who was so enamored with these labels. and ill tell you, it certainly hasnt helped my view of these label lovers. 

get over yourselves. figure yourselves out, give therapists something to do. if youve got problems, fucking address them. if you want something, fucking go and do the work for it. you dont get things just because you think that you somehow deserve them. work for it. and be someone worthy of what you want. dont be a weak little cowering barely person who demands things from people to try to fulfill something youre not willing to work for. and jesus fucking christ, dont just sit there being broken and insist that we have to take you as you are broken or accept your delusions.

i force myself to eat. i work my mind in circles trying to figure out how to be in a better mind. you “accept me” people are so full of shit i can barely stand it.  

[nightcoremoon]

no offense but ouija boards and prayer* have the same level of power.

which is none whatsoever.

it's a fucking stick and some hopeful thoughts.

you're not gonna summon demons or talk to ghosts, and you're not gonna cure grandma's cancer.

*I'm not talking about jews or muslims which have a different system of faith entirely than christianity which is what i'm talking about. discoursers calm your tits, you're not gonna get any woke points or popularity from this post.

ouija boards merely operate on humanity's subconscious mind to make our hands show us the letters we want to see, just like a pendulum based gender test. you hold a pendulum over a person's palm and if it goes in a circle they're a girl and if it goes in a straight line they're a boy. except wait, there's no scientific reason behind that- yet it works. but wait, there IS a scientific reason behind that. it's because your brain will send covert signals to your hand that will make you add velocity to the pendulum whether it's rotational or newtonian, without you ever being consciously aware of it. ouija boards are the same way, except when you're like four or five people it's a lot easier to do because you're literally at least quadrupling the amount of movement which could result in possibly an oooohhhh spooky ghost moment. except that's a load of shit. beelzebub, prince stolas, and screwtape don't give a fuck about ouija boards. if they wanted to possess you they'd have done it already.

and I've discussed my thoughts on christian prayer before. if god awards miracles based on how many people pray for a person, christianity is a popularity contest. he isn't gonna charge you a dozen hail-marys for a sin, he already paid off all of humanity's sin through jesus. it doesn't make any goddamn sense. if I prayed for my sister's baby's safety, it wouldn't do shit since the baby's survival is directly dependent on the actions of my sister and all the medical professionals she births with. if all the dumbass republicans prayed for school shootings to end, it wouldn't do shit since school shootings are caused by male ego, entitlement, unregulated access to firearms, bigotry, toxic masculinity, and to a very minor degree, a supreme lack of mental health education, awareness, and care. I'm not saying that every mentally ill person is violent and dangerous, nor that every violent and dangerous person is mentally ill, or even that all school shooters are cishet white men; just that if a shooter were mentally ill, they did not receive the help they may have needed. because if they did get that help they probably wouldn't have killed people in that situation. but I don't give a shit if klebold and harris WERE depressed and suicidal, they were fucking neo nazis. and anyway, if everyone in the world just prayed sickness and disease and viruses away then surely there wouldn't be any sickness and disease and virus. prayer is a stupid fucking concept and it DOES NOT WORK post-christ. it doesn't need to. god can just sit back and let his creations go fucking crazy since they're all covered and secure in their one way tickets to heaven. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodoxy, and every other denomination who disagrees,

SHUT THE FUCK UP

because I don't care what you have to say.

again, since discoursers have shit idiot brain fungus and can't read, jewish/muslim prayer is its own thing and I am not discussing those at this time mainly because I don't know much about those religions. same goes for any other non-christian religions that utilize prayer. this is purely a discussion about christian prayer. ok? great.

now, as I discussed earlier about the ouija boards and why I even mentioned them in the first place, is remember what I said about the pendulum? your brain subconsciously nudges your hand in the direction you want it to go in? well, prayer and having a relationship with god and talking to him is basically rubberducking. prayer is literally just rubberducking god. you won't magically bless the rains down in africa but if you pray it can often give you hope to conquer the obstacles in your way because if you truly believe god can help you overcome your obstacles, god has blessed you with the greatest miracle of all: hope. if you need just that little bit of extra oomph, you can reach down into your reserves and make it one step higher. god didn't wave his wand and tap his heels three times saying there's no place like home, he already handcrafted humanity with the inherent ability to achieve, to excel, to take one more step even if all seems lost and there's nothing good left in the world. if you talk to god you can logic your way through most of your problems. you treat god as a perfect and all powerful being, you talk up to him, you lay out your humility and your shame and your grief and all the emotions that society wants you to bottle up and you bare your soul, then even if there wasn't a god out there listening, you're still spiritually healing by letting the toxicity and the negativity out and talking out your problem so your subconscious kind can start to feed you solutions. god isn't sending you those messages direct via fucking bluetooth, he has already made us with those tools necessary to get us through dark days and fought times.

prayer doesn't work. not in the way you think it does. it only has the power that you yourself give it. prayer is just the middleman between hyping yourself up and giving you hope and unlocking the answers through the power of your own logic brain. prayer CAN help you if you utilize it PROPERLY. but it's not a magic trick. not like ouija boards. which are totally harmless outside of shit-tier horror movies. if you're afraid of ouija boards, you might as well lock the door in case Freddy's waiting for you, bar the windows in case Jason's watching you, get a $20 bill ready in case Slenderman wants a hug, saw the legs off your bed to squish the goddamn Boogeyman, and never say a phrase three times in a dark bathroom with a mirror: not Bloody Mary, not Candyman, no, not even Beetlejuice. Because those all hold the same power as fucking ouija boards.

"But I once had a scary experience with a ouija board" no you didn't, you freaked yourself out over nothing because you believe in silly little superstitions. And even if you did, the reason WHY the demons are harassing you is because you're easy prey. You let them get control over you. You gave up. Me? Beelzebub's a punkass little bitch and nowhere near as cool as Prince Stolas. In fact, I wish ouija boards had power because I'd love to chat with Prince Stolas. I mean yeah he commands 26 legions of hell... but I'd chat with him about science shit all day.

That's right kids. I'm glorifying ouija boards and demons while decrying the power of prayer. I'm rubbing my grubby little blasphemous queer hands all over your precious little religion. The fuck you gonna do about it?

[tumblunni]

Man i'm remembering how raw all of Nami's early arcs were in One Piece and how much it sucks that she just got completely sidelined later on and increasingly turned into a sex symbol as well as being pushed further into the box of 'token weak normal human who can never win a fight' while usopp eventually escaped it. Oh except she can sometomes win sexualized fights against other sexualized women. *sigh* That moment where she got fuckin assualted ny an invisible man while naked in the shower and it was all played as sexy to the audience and sanji makes a shitty joke about wishing he had the invisible power to perv on girls and then EVERYONE ELSE EXCEPT NAMI gets some damn resolution on beating up invisibiluty asshole and its clear the whole thing was just an excuse for the author to show tits and her feelings dont really matter. Oh and the fuckin literal soap bath battle with the lady whose power is magic soap that makes people extra slippery and shiny like JESUS CHRIST BRO

Anyway lets not go on for an hour about the bad nami stuff and instead remember the great stuff!

Like that FUCKIN RAW moment in her backstory arc where theyve played the reveal of her being part of Arlong's crew SO WELL that you genuinely cant tell if she was really evil all along and is really betraying everyone. And then they slap you right in the face with what seems to be a scene of her murdering usopp! And its just done so damn great and dark and shocking, like right down to the framing of it where it looks like he escaped for a second and then he barely has time to gasp out a word before she stabs him. And they let this ride for a decently long amount of time too before revealing she's not evil after all. Just enough time to sink in and make you believe it! And the circumstances of the reveal are SO DAMN GREAT, yo! I think its straight up the most badass heroic thing anyone has ever done in the entire series and i hate how it doesnt get remembered much or aknowledged as much as the bigger more dramatic fights.

Cos you see...yeah Nami was not in fact evil and was just pretending to be loyal to these villains because theyd been blackmailing her for years ans she had a plan to trick her way out of it and wanted to keep her friends safe from being involved (and loads of other complex shit!) But she REALLY FUCKIN DEDICATED HERSELF TO HER ACTING cos she knew just how damn dangerous these bastards are and how much it was gonna take to fool them. The real reason Usopp got cut off mid sentence into a strangled scream is because Nami stabbed HERSELF to fake killing him! She wrecked the shit out of her arm and rubbed the blood on him and told him to stay down, and then managed to not let out the slightest sound of her pain and continue pulling off her amazing fake villain acting while bleeding out underneath her sleeve. Its not really brought up again but from the degree of how goddamn much she injured that hand and how she wasnt able to get it treated until after HOURS OF HIDING THE PAIN, it probably would have left her with permenant muscle spasms and difficulty moving her fingers. And she's a mapmaker so thats an injury that would really affect her career for the rest of her life. She risked all that to save a friend who believed she'd betrayed him and was 100% down to fight at that moment! Like seriously they also had some great development with usppp realizing he was wrong and working hard to overcome his cowardliness and put his own life on the line to help save Nami later on. It was such a good arc!!

Oh and of course theres the entire context to this whole thing that this villain group actually murdered nami's mother when she was a kid and groomed her into joining them. And right from the age of like six years old she was already planning how to out-manipulate the manipulators and gain the trust enough to take revenge someday. And she faked joining the villains, faked being fine with it, faked not mourning her goddamn mom. She let herself be treated like a heartless demon child by everyone she ever knew, so she could make these monsters believe she'd betrayed them and thus someday save them all. Save all those people who never even fuckin believed in her! And the villain dude fuckin branded her like a cow and she was so traumatized she tried to dig the tattoo out with a knife and seriously man her left arm must be so damn scarred and i hate that they dont atually show it just cos 'she's gotta be sexy'. They used to show the scar underneath her life-affirming happier replacement tattoo, but it just got phased out around the same time her waist became 2cm wide...

Also it really fuckin sucked that this arc just ended with Nami's decade long plan to save her family failing and she cries into the dirt and then all the male characters save her aand defeaat the bad guy instead. Even worse that this started becoming a trend where every new arc from now on would have some sort of femle character who was very sad and her grand character development was admitting she needed luffy to save her and then everyone else except her gets to defeat the bad guy she has this deep personal reason to want to defeat. Sigh!

So yeh seriously Oda i know ur tryin real damn hard to amp every damn battle as the biggest thing ever now but nothing will ever be bigger than back when you had more simple fully realized concepts that gave the whole cast time to shine and aalso very specifocally nami who was the best most goddamn engaging character and you suddenly somehow forgot this. "Woman who is so much of a damn hero that she'd stab herself to save her friends who didnt even believe she wasnt evil" is like the fucking apex of what this series has ever achieved and i wpuld personally like to remember her always as the way she was in that moment.

Also seriously it would have been way better if nami got to contribute towards defeating arlong AT ALL, and especiaally if she could have dealt the final blow. Like yeah she isnt some beastly strong superpowers guy like luffy and co, but it would have been so satisfying to see all her intelligence and planning pay off! Instead of just bullshit 'arlong somehow magically knew everything she was ever planning and he only let her believe he was fooled so he could have fun shooting down her hopes when she got so close'. Nah yknow what would have been really satisfying and great? If we still had that moment but then it was revealed nami actually double-doublecrossed him! Like he's boasting about seeing through her whole plan and then suddenly he stumbles and realizes she poisoned his drink or something. Would have been extra mega double triple satisfying if this was after him actually beating all the main brawn-over-brain characters in a physical fight, and it looked like our heroes were all doomed but she managed to take down this guy they couod never hope to defeat. Though some very simple clever trick that he never expected because he underestimated her. And also this could work well to introduce the seven warlords kf the sea without immediately undercutting them, like if we clearly show that arlong actually WAS wildly out of their league and they genuinely could not defeat one of the warlords at their current power level, they just got lucky with a creative solution. That would have worked better than having zoro fight mihawk for literally no reason except 'i wanna prove im stronger than mihawk'. Srsly so much of zoro's goddamn honor shit seems so dumb on a rewatch, he outright stabs himself to give himself a handicap cos something sonething honor, and refuses to accept help because honor and fights people who didnt wanna fight him because honor and generally this looks more like signs of the man being suicidal, geez! Also stabbing yourself for no reason is nowhere near as raw as stabbing yourself to save a friend. Also zoro fuckin passed out from blood loss and nami not only didng do that but also completely hid her injury from a literal shark man who can smell blood. And stared him right in the face and lied about murdering her best friend. Nami is the highest goddamn power tier in one piece and if the creator cant figure that out then i have no interest in reading any more of it

WE ARE NAMI STANS FIRST AND HUMANS SECOND

[hope-whispers]

Maybe I should hand write this, but I don’t think I can get it out fast enough.

I’ve been watching too many monthly vlog diaries. Maybe I haven’t been watching enough.

There might be a lease in my mailbox right now. I might have a panic attack when I go to the post office to send it back. I might have a panic attack from now until I’m completely moved in.

To some town in IL. I don’t even know if it’s a real place. Not truly. Not personally.

Jesus fucking Christ.

The Methodist Church upheld the traditional plan.

I’m afraid the election was rigged. I’m more afraid it wasn’t.

I’m afraid of never moving anywhere further than this point in my life. I’m just as afraid of the day when I inevitably do.

My manager asked what my long term plans were and was disappointed but happy for me when she found out I’d been approved for an apartment. It was so easy. The last time I did this, my manager was pissed.

The store I used to work out went out of business and is now a different store, still owned by the same company. Probably still selling all the same overpriced shit.

Me too, now that I think about it.

I’m relating too much to people I don’t even know. I’m feeling too nostalgic for things I’ve never had. I’m everything, too much. I almost miss when I was nothing at all.

I’m twenty-two and even with every life lesson I know I’ve learned, I still have to sit here and be reminded of how much everything hasn’t changed. Because my past still haunts me and my future still scares me and my present is still, always, too much for me to truly hold on to. Even when, really, it’s nothing much at all.

I’m worried that only one thing will ever really make me feel alive. That the only solution I can manage is truly awful. And I’m worried that even that is losing its effect.

I’m afraid that living alone has broken me, and when I have to again, I won’t know how to be a roommate or a friend or a person.

I’m worried I have anger issues. I’m worried it’s just because I haven’t vented to someone in months. I’m worried one day I’ll let it all go and lose everything around me. I’m worried that I don’t really care.

I’m worried I have depression again. I’m worried it never went away. I’m worried it never existed at all.

I’m afraid I’ll never actually have a group of friends again. I’m afraid I’ll always be in the middle of people who don’t quite get along. I’m afraid that no one is good at keeping in touch and we’ll all just generally drift apart. I’m afraid that, every single time, the common thread is me.

Once while getting to know each other two other people and I asked, what’s something you would ask about people you just met if it was socially acceptable? My answer was that I wanted to hear about the lowest they’ve ever been. Not just because it’s nice to know I’m not alone—although that’s definitely part of it—but because, maybe if I hear about how fucked up they’ve been, I’ll feel a little less out of place next to them.

I’m afraid that I’ve romanticized last year in my head, just in response to how bad this year has been. And once I’m out of this situation I’ll expect everything to fix itself. I’m afraid nothing will ever be fixed, no matter what I do.

I’m afraid I won’t find a job. I’m afraid I won’t even try. I’m afraid I’ll never get to New York and I’m afraid that I might and I’m afraid that one day I won’t even want to anymore.

I’m terrified that one day I’ll wake up and decide my dream just isn’t worth pursuing anymore.

I’m afraid of settling.

I’m afraid of being alone.

I’m afraid of being stuck.

I’m afraid of giving up.

I’m afraid of going on.

Somehow, in the mess of things, I’ve become afraid of being seen.

I’m afraid of going back to who I once was, which is another way of saying I’m afraid that I’ve never really grown at all.

I’m afraid of my parents dying, because somehow that’s become a worry the past few months.

I’m afraid I’ll never be close to any of my family, but I also don’t think I really care. I’ll just, you know, get really sad about it once a month and move on.

I’m afraid of getting married and of never meeting someone.

What if one day I wake up and I’ve been left behind by everyone? What if one day I’m the one who leaves everyone behind?

I think I’m losing my ability to talk to people, and it’s not even like I had much talent there to begin with.

I forget to reach out and I forget to respond and I forget that I still exist in other people’s lives when they’re not actively speaking to me. I’ve almost come to believe that once I step into my apartment I step out of the world. There are times when I have to shake myself awake and remember that things are still happening, even when I don’t have the energy to participate. And I never have the energy to participate. Or maybe I just don’t have the motivation. Either way, people text me or call me and I have to remind myself that I don’t just blink out of existence whenever I collapse into my apartment.

I get anxious climbing the stairs to check the mail. I flinch whenever my phone lights up with someone’s name. I dread going to visit people because what if they look at me and see the dishes piling up and the laundry I haven’t done and the way I haven’t cooked a good meal in weeks. Or worse, what if they don’t see any of that, and they don’t see all the guards I’ve felt myself putting up over the past six months, and both of us just continue on like everything is and always has been fine.

I feel like I’ve been miming for help because I have no voice and no actual words to say something as simple as “hey, I’m not okay.” Because for all I know, this is my okay. This is my standard for the rest of my life. And there are so many times when my voice won’t actually work because I don’t really want to be heard, anyway. I certainly don’t want to be ignored. So maybe it’s easier to reach out when I’m alone, and that way no one has to know how bad things have gotten. Because if they haven’t noticed in general, maybe I really am fine and I can just keep going like this.

Maybe it’s only hard because I’m not trying.

None of this makes sense I just. I was happy last week. I was still exhausted by work and I was still nervous about the future and I was still stressed by the things life has thrown at me in the past year or so, but I felt like I was going somewhere. I felt like I was resurfacing. But the thing is, I didn’t even know I was under the surface to begin with. Like, fuck, I knew I wasn’t doing great. But I didn’t think I was so fucking miserable. But I was, and now I am again. So a couple of days of feeling lighter is more like a slap to the face when really, nothing’s changed. I just now remember what it feels like to not be…this.

And it just seems like all the good things I’ve done don’t really exist. I made a resolution to teach myself to draw, and I’m doing it. I have pages and pages of sketches and drawings and I’m proud of them. And I think I’m getting better. And it’s fun, and it feels good. But as soon as I walk away from that notebook, it doesn’t matter. I can pull up the art blog I made and it always makes me smile, no matter how many times I’ve seen every post. But as soon as I open a different tab that feeling vanishes.

I’m keeping a journal and it helps. I can sit on my kitchen floor while dinner’s cooking and listen to music and pour all these thoughts out of my head and it’s nice and it’s cathartic and at the end I can feel this weight lifted from me. But those thoughts come back in, or other thoughts do, and I know one day I’m going to reread it all and see my handwriting become illegible as I try to get rid of all these horrible thoughts that are making me miserable. And maybe when I reread it those things won’t bother me anymore. But something else will. And always, just like now, I’ll still have all this bullshit from the past that jumps back up and screams at me that nothing has ever been as alright as I think it is.

Or maybe it has been, and it’s just a bad mental state now that’s making everything feel awful. But even if I wake up tomorrow and feel better, I know I’m going to feel bad again. Even when this passes, something else will come up. And maybe I’ll have a support system then, and maybe I’ll be on antidepressants or seeing a therapist, and maybe I’ll be further along in some sort of career, and maybe I won’t feel so fucking alone. But maybe I will. And maybe I’m just scrambling through every bad phase and enduring every low period for nothing, because maybe one day it’ll hit me at just the wrong time in just the wrong way and that’ll be it. Because fuck, I’ve been suicidal again in the past year. I thought for so long that totaling my truck was it. I had that low point. I experienced that blinding, screeching hysteria, and it was terrifying. I still remember perfectly what it felt like spinning off the road and thinking this is it, all these years and I’ve finally done it. Yes, I had that cliché of ‘oh fuck, I didn’t mean it, I don’t want to die.’ But I guess that only holds you off for so long, because here I am again, in that same mental state that led me to drive too fast on a slippery road, or to go walking in the middle of a busy street at 3am.

And I don’t know what to do because of course I wasn’t naïve enough to think I was truly past this. But I did think I’d made progress. I get that recovery is a process and I’m too young to really have a normal to get back to. But I’m falling. I’m slipping further down and I don’t even have a good work ethic or productivity to hold it off anymore. Everything good about myself is disappearing. I’m not there for people I should be there for. I’m clinging to my selfish impulses instead of trying my best to be a good person. I’m judgmental and snarky and I’m losing hope in every cause I’ve ever believed in. The first time I was seriously depressed, it was my senior year of high school and I wanted to burn my entire life down and just start over. Now, I want to burn it all down again, but I don’t want to start over. There is no starting over. I can ghost my entire life and run away—I even have the means to do so, at least for a little while—but I’m just going to run into the same problems anywhere else. Or, more likely, I’m going to hole myself up the same way in a different place and I’ll die alone, only a bit sooner than I imagined. Maybe my biggest fear is that I could run away and, after a month or two, no one would be trying to find me.

I’m posting this to tumblr, probably with parts edited out, because even after all this time and all my desire to fight the stigma, there are parts of my mental health I’ve never told some of the people closest to me.

Who am I kidding. I’ve known it’s been bad for months. I guess I just didn’t feel it getting worse. And god, it’s gotten so much worse. And I’ve gone from fully blaming myself to fully blaming other people to thinking that it’s probably some combination. But maybe I’m still the most at fault because I let these things happen, and I let myself go quiet and hide away instead of reaching out to my friends or facing any of my problems. But how do you even face your problems if the biggest problem is just…where you are? And with a lease and a job that gives me actual financial stability and parents who can be disillusioned but are still wonderful—I mean, what am I supposed to do? And how am I supposed to remake myself into a better person when I can’t even find the good parts of me anymore?

And maybe the best thing to do is shut it all down and take a deep breath and build it back up again. Quit social media and only open my laptop for writing or paying bills. And I should open the windows more and go on more walks and spend a little more money to buy stuff to make real food, because I can actually afford it. And I should write to people more or even just call them. But the thing is, the biggest reason I’m not doing all that stuff now is because I’m clinging to the alternative for support. I should stop spending five hours a day watching youtube videos, but most days that’s the only good thing I do. I should stop scrolling obsessively through tumblr and twitter and instagram but sometimes I see nice things or things from my favorite celebrities, and even if I don’t then reading other people’s thoughts helps push back my own for a little bit longer. And yeah, fucking hell I need more sunlight and real food and human interaction. But I feel like I’m using every bit of energy I have just to drag myself to work and back. And anyway, I feel like people would just be disappointed in me if they saw me too often.

So, I have no solution. I have no good thoughts to end this on. I don’t even want to end it, because at least writing it down gives me something to do. And trying to actually put this into words at least funnels it into something that isn’t so overwhelming. But as soon as I stop, it’ll still be there. I’ll read it back, tonight or tomorrow or five years from now, and it’ll still fucking hurt. Because that’s just it. It hurts, and it hasn’t stopped hurting. It’s just kept hurting worse and worse for the last 6 years, and even during those days or weeks or even months when it feels like it’s going away, it’s really just numb for a little bit, and it’s just sitting there and brewing and growing until the next time when I get to feel it again. And I know there will be better days, and I know I’ve survived everything so far. I’m the one who always picks myself up and I’ve gotten good at it. But my life has also gotten so good at throwing worse and worse stuff at me, so what happens when I can’t pick myself up? What happens when I still can, but I just don’t want to anymore?