#mer muses on the nature of love and connection and seperation

[ofmermaidstories]

currently thinking about how fundamental human touch is to us; how if we’re lucky we’re cradled at birth, soothed, held. Holding someone’s hand until we can run on ahead. And how it’s a downward slide from there — how the most human contact any of us will get is from lovers? Lovers to hold hands and rub the back of their napes and lean into and hang onto and be intimate with. And then maybe some of you might have kids, and it sort of repeats until you’re older and your lover has gone before you and your kids don’t visit much and even if they do, they don’t need you to hold their hand as you walk them to school anymore — they don’t need to be picked up and cuddled or held. older people are so touch-starved. nothing lasts forever — not our parents holding us, not our lovers, not us holding children — but i think that means you have to fill your life with as much of it as you can, and branch out to even more. hold hands with your friends (i say, like i don’t look at my friends like they’re crazy when they touch me LMAO but that’s the thing, isn’t it — we associate touch within such a limited sphere. i think we should reach out to each other more).

i’ve been wondering if this is why the female-gaze with hands is so potent. if this is why i’ve been writing my stupid little self-insert superhero romances where the love interest touches us; because the connection of being with another human being who reaches out to us is so fundamental that we need to work it into everything. every piece of art and literature and cheap piece of entertainment we make.

[ofmermaidstories]

You know how in relationships there are those silent things people do for their partners that are small but really meaningful? Like picking up xyz food for them without asking, readjusting their necklace, etc.? What are those small things between bakugou and reader in surrender?

We all agree that Katsuki’s love language would be action, right? Doing things — pulling out a vase for whatever flowers have migrated back to the apartment, cutting up some fruit, cooking. Watering the plants that start appearing in the living room. There’s a package in the mail, one day — a couple of water gauges for said plants, in the shape of little houses.

“Thought you’d like the — f’kin’ elf shit, or whatever,” He says, gruffly, tone at odds with the gentle way he’s pressing one into the soil of your biggest plant.

He’d manoeuvre himself so that he’s the one walking along the traffic, when you’re together in the streets. You learn to identify that he gets disappointed, when the flowers you bring home start to die: you bring him fresh ones, then. When you think of it, you throw his scarves into the tumble dryer to warm them — just before he has to leave for the outside cold. You bring him home extra spicy curry buns that you beg Akane to make, and even though the older woman is his arch nemesis, he always eats them.

He doesn’t like the back of his neck being touched; you learn to trace the curve of his ears, instead. He learns to let himself lean into it.

You make one (precisely one, [1]) throwaway comment about liking pillows — he nests you in them, and then grumbles when they all end up on the floor. He messages you with random flowers and interesting plants he sees, on patrol; pretty little weeds, growing up along the chain-link fence of a quiet neighbourhood. Someone’s prized potted pansies. You see a news reel, about some mountain, in the other end of the country — good for hiking. You search for everything you can about trails, and send them to him. You both learn about each other, and apply that to one another, constantly, carefully, until it becomes second-nature.

[ofmermaidstories]

i’ve been thinking about one of my favourite videos, lately, and i want to share it.

Beyond Ghibli is a video essayist who focuses on Japanese animation/entertainment. His most popular video is his first — a look into anime directors beyond Hayao Miyazaki, followed up by his videos on Akira, and its creator, Katsuhiro Otomo; and then how Studio Ghibli’s aesthetic and films have inspired Breath of the Wild. All of his videos are beautiful — and I mean that, beautiful, lovingly complied and narrated — but my favourite of his, however, happens to be his essay on Makoto Shinkai — and Shinkai’s 2016 runaway hit, Your Name.

There’s something very calming, about Joe’s voice. He’s gentle; carefully enunciated. And the things he chooses to focus on, in his essays, always underscore just how... powerful media can be. With his essay Shinkai - Not Separation, But Connection, he does it to incredible effect. Makoto Shinkai undeniably creates some visually stunning films — and Joe explores that, as well as Shinkai’s weaknesses in his storytelling. And yet it’s not a criticism — it’s just an observation, one that makes Shinkai’s work perhaps even more lovely, for being able to recognise it. There’s one particular beat, in the video, that encapsulates everything I love about Joe’s essays — it’s the lead up to him introducing Your Name, a passage where he summarises the core theme that reappears, again and again, in Shinkai’s works. I couldn’t tell you why it strikes me. On the surface level, I’d say it was the music it’s set to; Joe always carefully picks the score, for his videos, borrowing from whatever piece he’s talking about, and in this particular passage he uses a piece from Kashiwa Daisuke’s score for Shinkai’s 2013 The Garden of Words — The Afternoon of Rainy Day. It’s a beautiful piece, just by itself, divorced of any context; it sounds so much like the melancholy and the ache of being caught in a gentle rain, with no expectations of the day in front of you. Music is manipulative, and I have no doubt that using this piece has underlined the beauty of Joe’s words — but it’s what he says, the words themselves, that always make me pause. I think it’s because the whole passage represents what anyone who creates wants out of this world — to be seen. To have you, have what you create, be seen and be recognised as whole; flaws and all, and to still have it matter, even if it’s just to one person.

That hook, whether it be body-swapping teenagers, the Land of the Dead or girls who can control the weather, are all in service of a theme Shinkai has woven through every movie he has made: separation.

Whether by space, by illness, by d i s t a n c e, by age, or even by death — this beautiful, but heart-breaking motif is omnipresent in his work.

It would all be a little dour, perhaps, if Shinkai didn’t conveniently provide the antidote as well: because for all the melancholia of what separates us, these films are ultimately about what connects us.

It’s so simple. It is simple and it is loving and it’s the kind of mirror that I think anyone would be overwhelmed to have held up to them; to be reflected in. It does Makoto Shinkai’s career, and his art, justice. And he does it for every piece and creator he examines, in his essays; my next favourite of his is his two-parter on Mari Okada and her complicated relationship with her mother, and consequently, motherhood, in her work — specifically, Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms. But the one I’ve rewatched the most, after his Shinkai essay, is I Want to Eat Your Pancreas - The Fault in Her Guts, which is a look at the story over its varying adaptions, and what each one brings (and loses). It convinced me to watch the anime movie (which I did, and then immediately bawled through) which in turn convinced me to buy the manga. The soundtrack for it is one of my favourites — I had it as background noise whenever I was working on (or more accurately, daydreaming about) surrender. It’s hopeful, like the story itself — like Joe’s essay for it.

If you have some time to fill, or you just want some calming background noise, then — I cannot recommend his channel enough. Even if it’s just for his voice.

[ofmermaidstories]

I really like your blog because you have this really life loving vibe, the type of people that see all the beauty in the world and stuff, so I wanted to ask you for some advice, if that's ok. By nature I'm also like that, kinda mushy, very heartfelt, but a lot of mistreatment from people in my life made me also very cynical, judgy and distrusting. How do you manage to keep this wonderous mentality about life?

In the afternoon, I like to stretch out on my bed, amid my pillows and my blankets, and soak in the late light and the autumn chill. I follow a grocer on instagram in a city three hours away from me because they post pictures of the produce they sell: pumpkins cut in half, jewel-bright tomatoes held in someone’s hands, sourdough loaves made by a neighbour. On the weekends they offer bouquets of flowers, supplied to them by a woman who bills herself as “a weekend florist and full-time mother” — this weekend it’s red berries and sunflowers, bundled up like babies being brought home from the hospital.

On Sunday it’ll be Mother’s Day: I’ll be spending the day deep cleaning the house and ignoring instagram and facebook (mostly bc they’re boring tho, let’s be real).

I live a two-hour car drive from anyone I remotely socialise with who isn’t the cashier at the supermarket I go to. Sometimes, I get so mad that I have to force myself to mentally and physically shut down, like, complete black-screen mode, sit there and stare at the wall — it’s a self-defence tactic to spare whoever I’m getting angry at, and to spare myself: unfortunately, I’ve developed a bit of a talent for being able to say the right thing in which to hurt someone with. Unleashing it comes at a high price, and I like the people in my life, so I would literally rather bite through my own tongue then let any of that vitriol fly when I’m angry and not thinking straight.

The rubbish trucks come for the bins every Tuesday. On Monday evening, around 9pm, I’ll wheel mine out to the road. There’s no streetlights out here, and I live in a rural area — so on dark nights when we’ve lost the moon, you can look up and see the Milkyway, like you’re standing underneath a river of stars.

I buy myself flowers; the women at the florist in town treat me like I’m their most favourite person in the world (and I eat that shit up). Afterwards I’ll be carrying whatever weeds I’ve bought with me, through the supermarket or whatever, and someone will always comment on them. I’ve lost one of the pearl earrings that belonged to my Grandmother’s set, a woman long gone, now; I’ve also misplaced my favourite hairclip, pale blue with a shinning shell clasp, that I got from a seller that shut down during the mess of last year.

Last weekend, I visited the cemetery; I sat with who I was visiting and watched an old man half a lawn away from me sit in a folded chair and read a book, play a little radio. A couple, visiting one of the plots behind us, carefully took the decorations on it - frogs, lots and lots of frogs - and brushed them off, wiped them down. Reglued a few and then set them all back into place, proudly.

There’s a young boy, interred next to my person, who I never met in life; he was fifteen years old and it’s been five years, now, and his site is littered with rubgy scarves and laminated letters from his friends, photos of them together, photos of them separately, growing up without him. Empty bottles of beer, badly written poems about meeting again. I say hello to him as I peel mandarins as a offering for the possums that forage around the cemetery at night, and occasionally I brush the leaves off his footy scarves and when I go to leave I say goodbye to him, too. After my last visit, I went to the busiest shopping centre in the city and ate braised beef noodle soup, from a place where they make the noodles in front of you, pulling them and stretching them easily. I messaged a friend with updates about my meal, laughing as she kept me company even from thousands of miles away, and then just as I finished, some friends who live in the city asked if I wanted to have some cake with them — from their favourite cafe. They’d given me a key to their home, earlier, so I could come and go as I pleased. The key meant a lot to me, though they’ll never know it; it meant a lot because it felt like a physical manifestation of trust, of them saying that yes, they did want me in their lives, no matter how limited or what kind of time left we had together.

People are multifaceted; like gemstones. We can be mean and delightful and trusting and hurt. I lean into the soft, squishy parts of myself with abandon — a lot of the time it works out. I tell people I love them. I let them say they love me. A couple of times, people have left my life because they didn’t have the space in theirs for me anymore — it was hurtful and ugly each time. Humans can come together so easily, sometimes, that the joy and brightness of it can make you forget how ugly and hard it is when we leave each other in the wrong way. People and things will hurt you. That’s just a fact. Some days you’re not going to have the energy for anything but the self-preservation of being distrustful, or cynical, judgemental, and that’s okay — I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, sometimes we have to be selfish to protect what’s left of our hearts.

I keep a list of things that make me smile. I also keep a list of things that fucking shit me right off. The list of things that shit me is longer than the list of things that make me smile, but it’s because when I see something good — a bright red letterbox, a little kid that’s waving to everyone, a pleasing colour of the sky — I don’t think to write it down, because it’s generally so fleeting and so cheery. It does its job. Find the small things in your day to day that you like to linger over, that make you happy; the bad stuff still happens, and you’ll still have waves where it doesn’t seem worth the effort, but the small bright things fill the moments and remind you that it’s all part and parcel of this universal existence.

Here’s to a gentle weekend ahead, Anon. ✨🌻🍊🌿

[ofmermaidstories]

I read somwhere about the idea that only pain is realistic. That somehow softness and optimism and gentle love are silly and that pessimism was intellectual. I think we -or at least the circles I frequent online and irl- are coming around now. I see it in the flood of hurt/comfort and reblogs about loving ppl in their entirety. I see it in the discussions I have w friends and family about how us being together is enjoyable and worth it. "The world can be horrible but i'll hug u tonight" vibes.

i think.... i think tenderness is a choice. i think it’s easy to be caught up in pain — pain and fear are very primal. they are motivators, they keep us going, they make us avoid the things that are going to hurt, that are going to lessen our chances of more pain, more fear. being able to choose tenderness, to choose goodness and kindness and to be able to express them can be a... privilege, in a way. a privilege of safety. Safety in how we were raised, how we view ourselves; the families we build for ourselves in adulthood; the safety of having things in our lives go to plan.

Five years ago, if you’d known me, i would not have been tender or soft — and especially not optimistic. By nature I am a pretty sunny person — it’s just something inherent to who i am, something deeply encoded within me. But five years ago I did not have the safety of having had things go to plan; the natural buoyancy of my personality couldn’t carry me, anymore. I was awful and I was sad and when you’re facing something hard, sometimes you have to be selfish — to protect yourself, to let what’s left of you, what makes you, heal.

This is why the current — movement? trend? — expression of all those soft, wonderful things is so incredible. Because sometimes the world is scary. A lot of times, actually. People will hurt us — people we love, people we don’t know, our governments, society at large. And that makes it all the more important when we curl around that pain and that misery and we still choose to be tender, to let ourselves love. To focus on the small, fleeting good things in this world and in our lives. With the people we love, if we still have them. By ourselves. Especially by ourselves; the people around us, no matter how much they love us, might not always be able to express that love in the way we might want — and sometimes they can’t be here at all to. So it’s important to hold onto that softness, that expression of it, for them and for ourselves. Tenderness, in all things.

Like our Queen Mary Oliver says, in her poem In Blackwater Woods — to live in this world, you must be able to do three things; to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.