#my entire family is too sick with the same thing as me and cant eat sjfndjgnfn its literally all tinola and arroz caldo

[naturalbornlosers]

actually. i dont normally get this personal so i might delete this later but geez i need somewhere to put this or i'll go insane.

we lost my grandfather a year ago and Christmas has sucked ass this year. i'm overstimulated and exhausted. my family doesn't even try to connect with me. it's like i dont fucking exist anymore to them except as a problem-solver ("can you help me find xyz?") or a piece of furniture or someone to dictate later plans to or a fucking memory pad ("don't let me forget,") or a problem. we try to eat dinner together and i dont open my mouth a moment in the conversation bc there's no opening for me, there's no topic i can contribute to, no one even tries to include me, and the only time i'm spoken to is to tell me plans we're doing later. i wanna make something with my family and it gets brushed off. i wanna do something, it gets brushed off. i bought us a game to play and we're taking it down when we take my grandmother back home bc no one could be assed to remember to play it even though i made sure it appealed to all of our interests.

my mom made a joke about "oh we're just giving you money because we have no idea what you want haha!" and while yeah, i am grateful for the money, it fucking SUCKS that every time ive talked to her about my interests - about our shared interests and hobbies, too - it sounds like it's gone in one ear and right out the other!! i've shown her in person things i would like to eventually get in the future, all year. and it's like… none of it matters. no one tries. no one tries when it's me, but everyone else gets thoughtful things and i'm even still planning to get more things for my mom and my grandmother. no one tries to engage with my interests. my interests actually get made fun of here and there or outright dismissed ("i'm sure [person] doesn't wanna hear about xyz" is said often when im infodumping) and everything i like is trivial. everything i like is fodder to be mocked by my moms husband and just goes in one ear out the other with my mom and my grandmother has no idea what to do with my interests.

and, fuck, now my family doesnt believe i have endometriosis or pcos bc my ultrasound came back fine even though i explained to them repeatedly that it may not show up on an ultrasound. they dont want me to get a second opinion. they dont think its worth it, trying to find out why im in so much pain i miss class/life events and why im so sick and fatigued every month i cant leave the house sometimes. i just sit around like a decoration. i get teased for being on my phone. i get teased for not eating the same things everyone else does. and to top it all off, my moms husband vaguely threatened me tonight in front of everyone and no one did a fucking thing. no one even acknowledged that he just flat out went "dont do xyz, if you do xyz, there's gonna be a problem" in a very clear manner of 'you are going to be in deep shit'. which is fucking tiresome bc he tried to kick me out three separate times in 2020. once bc my bathroom wasn't tidy enough (just a bit cluttered, but i dont have much counter space, so naturally it was cluttered), once bc he wanted to turn my bedroom into storage and have me move into the attic spare room, and once bc "this is my castle and i am the king and if you don't like it you can leave". this was during a time i had no friends irl, no bank account, couldn't drive, no job, nobody around i could go to… he knew full well he could just toss me out and no one would say a fucking word.

i'm learning how to drive. and then i'll get a job. and then i'll move out. and then i'll put this shit behind me. but i fucking hate being in a room full of my family and feeling like none of them know me. that i'm entirely alone. that i don't fucking exist and everything i am is trivial and doesn't matter. if i make plans, there's a high chance they wont happen or will get changed last minute and then i get mocked for being upset about it like i'm a child who doesn't get how the world works. i'm twenty four. i'm young for sure, but fucking hell, i'm not six.

i just don't wanna be here. i'm gonna keep on keepin' on. but i want things to change for the better and i know they wont until i move out. i just don't believe i will actually, ever, leave this house. ughh. i'll survive but holy shit i'm gonna be screaming the entire time.

[leviathiane]

Ya boy took a sick nap and someone in my house make tinola so we are back on the grind!!

[sneezy-cheeseloaf]

recounting the entire avengers: endgame movie, which i only saw once when it came out, from memory

because i just took the SAT and i want to do anything except think about that so get ready for a fun ride full of holes and my reenactments of scenes and quotes that i remember from however many years it’s been now since endgame came out. buckle the fuckle up

movie opens, clint’s whole ass family fucking dies. cue killing spree fueled by grief and anger. HashTag Relatable

tony is floating through space with nebula and teaching her how to play paper football

holy shit is this how tony dies

“pep” ouc h

oh hey he’s home, dope

The Gang (tm) learns where thanos’s farm is somehow i can’t really remember

“perhaps i judged you too harshly”

“???? thor????” “what? i went for the head”

“five” five what?? days?? weeks??? months???? oh boy i can’t wait to find ou- “years later” HUH???????

steve looks the exact same, so i guess he kept up that workout schedule even through the snap. i mean good for him honestly

and is also running a talk therapy group like sam did

a single smidgen of gay representation but it’s a good start ig

i don’t really remember what everyone else was doing, i just know that tony and pep have morgan now but idk if that gets revealed now or later

the only reason we had a movie is because of a rat. everyone say thank you to Rat for releasing scott lang, please. round of applause

scott’s daughter is all grown up and catch me sobbing over the fact that he wasn’t there to see it

somewhere in here nat is crying and eating a sandwich and honestly girl same

“hey!!! it’s me!!!! scott lang!!! ant man???? also what the hell happened???? lemme IN”

cue scott lang having a single brain cell and bringing up time travel. i think it was him that proposed the idea. maybe not. but imma give him credit

oh yeah bruce and hulk are besties now and bruce is just permanently Like That

and cue everyone being shook at the idea of time travel

time to go see Science Man at his house on the lake

“i wish you had come for anything else.” ouch

gang leaves dejectedly

peter. that’s it. and suddenly tony is all hands on deck

cue science mumbo jumbo in the middle of the night while he eats something out of a bag that i can’t remember

“shit!!” “sHiT!!!” “NO”

“i love you 3000″

Science Man reveals that he has, indeed cracked the code to literal time travel

cue nat, the only person with an umbrella, going to find clint who is busy with murder, as he does

“don’t do that. don’t give me home” stfu budapest man and get in the car.

thor has. enlargened. and is now playing fortnight with korg as a means to cope with what happened plus losing loki, as i think we all would

The Gang is back together and working (surprisingly) coordinately and throwing ideas around and it’s actually very cute. and it makes my heart very happy. and i want to cry every time i think about it because we all know what comes next

scott’s taco gets blown away. bruce gives him another. all is well in the world

and in this exhibit we see the only brain cell in the whole group, which is being used by rhodey at all times

“why don’t we just,,,, (choking motion)” “to a BABY???”

during the time tests someone gets reverted to a baby but i don’t remember who and it’s highkey disturbing

“i consider this an absolute win!!”

cue slo mo walk with the cool white time suits that everyone looks so good in

“see you in a minute” that smile. she looks so happy. sobbing

i think it’s in here that all the color go through steve’s eyes, so let’s just take a minute to acknowledge how pretty he is

“just for the record, that suit did nothing for your ass.” “i don’t remember asking you to look”

“that’s america’s ass.” yes it is scott you’re absolutely right

“i cOuLd dO tHiS aLL dAy” “yeah i knoOoOW”

time for tony to give tony a heart attack and then just stare in what i can only assume is amusement. i’m pretty sure that comes after america’s ass but maybe not

somewhere in here steve is just staring at peggy through blinds and it’s sad when you see it but when you think about it afterwards, it’s so funny for no reason

time to get whacked by a very angry hulk who was not allowed to use the elevator

“NO STAIRS”

tony goes flying. so does the tesseract. loki, in handcuffs, is like “oh bet this is mine now” and. Leaves.

i’m pretty sure it’s bruce who goes and gets schooled by The Ancient One on the multiverse, and i say it’s bruce because i think he’s the only one out of The Gang who could ever actually wrap his head around it

i don’t remember exactly how they get the tesseract but they do

thor and rocket are in asgard and thor has a panic attack, as I think we all would if we had to talk to our dead mother and pretend like we don't know what's going to happen

and remember kids, slapping someone is not the way to handle a panic attack. anyways

a mother always knows

"i'm still worthy!!!!" you always were, thor. you never stopped being worthy

and we have our hammer back

cue sobbing on vormir

“clint. it’s ok. it’s ok.” that smile.

nat’s fucking dead and i’m fucking dead inside let’s keep this party goin

other stones are recovered and i don’t really remember how but hey we got all six

“where’s nat?” cue more sobbing from me and from clint as you can see each and every team member’s heart drop to the fucking floor. especially steve

yeah maybe we’re doing this for half the universe and all the people we lost, but mostly for nat now

tony’s makeshift infinity gauntlet has entered the chat

Green Man is the only one who can physically take the power of the stones, so the fate of literally everything they have ever done up to this point is on him

snap rest in peace bruce’s arm

cue every single person in the theater holding their breath

“guys. it worked.”

cue explosion as their facility gets bombed and i am terrified that it has killed the entire gang

but it obviously has not and i am once again a Class A Idiot

i can't remember if it’s steve or tony who wakes up first but one shakes the other awake and is like “get the fuck up bitch idk what just happened but we got a problem”

everyone is mostly fine. but they’re all alive and that’s what matters

and now we have the setting for the entire rest of the movie basically

oh hey thanos. that’s uh. that’s a big army you got there

i don’t really remember everything that happened with The Past thanos, gamora, and nebula but i remember that gamora once again sees what a twat her adoptive father is and is like “oh hell na”

cue the gang fighting for their lives against Past thanos. literally

oh shit thor’s about to be killed????

OH MY GOD HE HAS THE HAMMER

cue the theater screaming as they should

hell yeah. bonk that giant space grape with the god of thunder’s hammer. you go steve. and look like a badass doing it as you should

shit’s still fucked and they eventually get their asses handed to them one by one

somewhere in here the shield breaks just like we saw in age of ultron. and like damn bro i liked that thing

steve stands up by himself because bitch. you cant kill him unless he says so. he dies on his own terms. he didn’t live for over a fucking century to die like this

our mans is standing up against a whole ass army knowing full well that he can’t win but damn if he aint ready to try

“ok listen strange. you have to open the portal to his left. his LEFT. you hear me???”

“steve. STEVE. on your left.”

cue the most goosebump-inducing scene that i have ever seen and probably will ever see. i would do anything to see that scene for the first time again. that feeling was like nothing i’ve ever experienced

the amazing symphonics are NOT helping my already-about-to-explode-from-excitement heart

now the gang’s ALL here. and we all cry because all of our peeps are back from the dead and we all missed them and highkey grieved for them after infinity war

i can’t remember if steve actually sees bucky yet but i think he does and i wanted to cry on the spot because not only did i miss bucky but man did i just want them to see each other again

cue sick pan of the whole ass marvel roster like smash ultimate, including howard duck somewhere in there

PETER OUR BOY SWINGIN ON IN

“AVENGERS. assemble.” “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

but we all know damn well that not a single person could hear him whisper that shit. like steve bro speak up a little

and the battle for the ages commences

we get to see all our favorite boys are girls fuck shit up and it’s absolutely incredible. wow it really feels like someone’s missing who could that be.

this is now a very elaborate game of keepaway

“catch” “Catch” “CATCH “CATCH”

“hey queens” he remembered. catch me cryin

“hey peter. got somethin for me?” god i love her. flew through a whole ass spaceship. no stoppin her

t'challa remembers clint's name. he did care

oh yeah scott is fucking humongous again, but third time’s the charm ig. maybe he won't pass the fuck out this time

somewhere in here, strange starts holding like. an entire ocean back and i dont really remember where it came from

we get a whole segment of marvel women kicking ass and taking names and i think i just need to take a minute. WE collectively need to take a minute

carol flies straight through a spaceship and everyone is like ???? hello????? where have you been?????????

carol gets literally headbutted by thanos and doesnt move a fucking inch. and that look of murder in her eyes. she could tell me to walk into a pit of lava and i would not question it. the power

“launch the missiles!!!” “but sir, our army-” “DO IT”

damn thanos our expectations for you were low but holy fuck

somewhere in here i think petter quill sees Past gamora and is like gamora???? and she like kicks him in the balls or somethin and is like “this is the ones i picked?????”

the fight continues and honestly a lot of it’s a blur but damn was it not the coolest thing i’ve ever seen. 

cue strange knowing exactly how this was gonna go down, and holding up a single finger

i dont think ive ever seen that look on tony's face before

oh shit thanos has the gauntlet and all the stones. fuck.

wait holdup that gauntlet looks a little funky

WAIT HOLDUP

“i am inevitable”

“and i. am iron man.”

the theater, once again holds its breath

all is lowkey calm and everyone is shook

thanos’s entire army slowly fades away. including one of those big worm things that almost eats (i think it was) rocket but like. dusts right as it hits the ground and is a really cool shot

and thanos sits down on a rock. and finally is gone. and it's so cathartic

oh joyous day!! they’ve won!! they’ve done it!!! wait holdup where’s tony. i remember what happened to bruce where the fuck is tony

wait

wait hold on

wait hold on a minute

“we did it. we won, mr stark. we won. please, mr stark”

“pep.”

“it’s ok. you can rest. you can rest.”

i have officially passed away and am a sobbing mess. you can’t do this to me. he’s gonna come back. there’s no way. tony stark doesn’t die. no.

this is a fucking funeral. i am going to combust into tears

“proof that tony stark has a heart”

i just wanted him to be able to see morgan grow up.

but him and nat are eating shawarma together in the sky now.

“i’m recording this in case something goes wrong, which it won’t.”

“i love you 3000.”

oh we’re still rolling. oh we don’t even get a minute to process

steve is leaving??? wait holdup we cant lose both. no

“are you sure about this?” “i have to”

“i’m with you til the end of the line” so that was a fucking lie

but steve deserves to do what makes him happy. so i can’t be too mad. actually, nah i aint even mad i’m just sad

bucky looks so dejected. so sad. someone please give him a hug. he desperately needs it

oh hey steve. but you’re old now. hey then, grandpa. how did you. get there

buck and sam go talk to him as they should

“you wanna talk about her?” “no, i don’t think i will”

“how does it feel?” “like it belongs to someone else”

sam has officially inhered the shield, and by extension, his very own bucky barnes. it’s a packaged deal

clint’s got his family back. and they can finally finish their picnic or whatever they were doing at the beginning of the movies

and steve finally got that dance. finally. and he looks so happy. so content.

and that’s about all i remember

i have not watched endgame since i saw it in theaters when it came out because i absolutely do not have the emotional stability to do it again. but damn the disney plus shows have been bangin

i hope you enjoyed the ride, thank you for joining me in my. whatever the fuck this is

[betaamity]

nervous this is tmi an stuff but im. slowly realizing how depressed i am lately and how its all literally piled up leading up to this moment

i dont really. have any friends now that i think about it. i have some people i genuinely consider friends but i get nervous they dont think the same of me. i get nervous everybody is going to stop interacting with me entirely all of a sudden

i knew i never really got a childhood because it majorly consists of physical pain and neglect to the point i can barely remember any of it and if i do remember it its faint hints of traumatic events or my parents not even BEING there. and i could only uncover those memories about a few months ago in may, when i was trying so hard to doubt ever being part of an osdd system. even then i still refer to it as my past cause i at least hold the memories of it all

but i finally realized i never got to. be a teenager. i knew i was groomed in my preteens and thought that was it, i got to be a teen after i escaped right? no! cause i got repeatedly groomed afteelr that, but i at least escaped that too and it only happened for half a year thats it, still time to be a teen, right?

NO! because my trauma holder came to the realization that my ex also groomed me! so i feel so STUPID that i could let that keep happening to me! ive. never had a chance to be a kid at any stage in my life

i genuinely crave real forms of love because i do genuinely know ive healed, i could only uncover these memories and realizations and easily come to terms with them because ive healed so much. so i crave romantic love, i use dating apps to try and put myself out there. the only people that try to match with me are straight cis men that sexualize me being a lesbian or fake bot accounts. so it takes a big hit to my self worth, thinking im not interesting enough for anyone and just not. desirable in any way, i dont look good in any way and everybody knows it. and it hurts so much because i just want to be loved

and i used to make myself happy by streaming, but it feels like everything fell apart when i got really sick a bit ago. i stopped streaming because it felt useless if i can barely gain an audience, it feels like i lost a real friend because it feels like they avoid my entire existence and i dont know what i did wrong if i did anything, i feel like others dont really like my art because nobody really commissions me anymore, all stemming from when i was basically bedridden while i was sick

then on top of ALL of that and probably the most tmi but the one that fucks with me a lot is i finally figured out i have pcos and a lot of things make senss now, but i know one symptom is infertility and thats the one that genuinely eats away at me now. because my gender and all is fucky and everything, but i know i want. a family in my future. whoever i settle down with, i know i want a family with my partner(s). sure its 'still possible! but its much harder' or 'oh but its reversible! but you have to do so much with a doctor to be normal'

i can handle being the 'other' from a majority. i take pride in being the 'other' from a majority. but this is the one time where being the 'other' from 'normal' makes me feel sick to my stomach. i just. i want to be a mom some day. i want to be a good mom, a better mom than i had. but it fucking eats away at me that id have to try so much harder to even get there and i cant handle it

i want to make personal art to vent. i want to process these emotions with art to get a grip, but im nervous it would be frowned upon to make that personal of art if i could just shut up and keep making fanart instead

jus,, everything feels like its piling up and im trying so hard to keep it together but i dont know if i can

[ddaengyoonmin]

-Buried-

(part of my fic writing request game)

Pairing: sort of Taehyung x reader but I wouldn’t really call it a pairing...

a/n: okay she back.  you saw nothing.  the first time this was posted was...practice lol.  The ending is slightly more explained now as well. 

Warnings (spoilers):  Lots of creepiness and AnXIETYYY. Horror themes in general.  y/n is tied to a chair and doesn’t know why.  Supernatural mind eating?? Someone has lots of sharp teeth. (feel free to let me know if you ever want something added to my warnings on a fic <3 )

Word Count: 1300

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Your entire body was cold.  Not just cold.  Freezing.  Aching and unable to move without feeling like your bones might snap.

You didn’t know how long you’d been sitting here.  one moment you’d been in your car driving up to a motel that you’d planned to wait out the blizzard at, and the next moment you were sitting in a large plush red chair that had a backrest so tall that you couldn't even lift your head up far enough to see where it stopped.  And you were freezing your ass off.

Looking around the room it seemed like the typical lobby of a hotel, a few cheap chairs and couches scattered about, except the lights were turned off, and all the brochures lining the front of the lobby’s front desk looked as if they hadn’t been updated since the 80’s.  A thin layer of dust sat on all of the surfaces, except for a few marks on the table in front of you that looked like the ring of a coffee mug had been sitting there.

It was eerie and quiet, and you couldn’t help but find yourself shivering for a number of reasons.

You went to stand up and then realized you really were unable to move.

Your wrists, elbows and ankles were all tied tightly to the chair that you were sitting in.

You realized this is probably where you should scream.  But, you couldn’t quite get anything to come out.  Unable to even comprehend the situation you were in.

The ring on the table in front of you had you worrying about the return of that cup's owner.

A loud involuntary whimper left your throat.

“Hello?” A voice that seemed to speak almost in your ear suddenly sounded out.

If you hadn’t been tied to the chair you might’ve jumped right out of it, your entire body now feeling numb.

“Is someone there?” The voice spoke again.  It was so close.  

Your head was spinning every direction it could trying to find the voice.  But you couldn’t.

It had to have been coming from the only direction you couldn’t turn.

From behind you.

“W-who are you?” Your feeble voice was able to make out. “Whats happening?”

Silence for a while.

“Who am I? What kind of joke is that?” The voice returned venomously.  It seemed to be a man's voice.  It didn’t seem particularly menacing, but in the current situation your mind was spinning imaginative theories on the owner of that voice.

“I’m sorry?” You managed to reply.  “Please just let me go.” You whimpered, tears pooling up in your eyes.

The owner of the voice was laughing now.  Still coming from right in your ear.  It hadn’t seemed to have moved any further or closer since he’d spoken before.

“Me? Let you go?” Now the voice was completely laced with disgust.

“Please.” You begged.

“Okay fine I’ll play along.” The voice replied.

‘Play along’?

“What are you talking about?” You sobbed. You were growing increasingly frustrated alongside your fear.

“Yeah.  If this is some sort of sick game you’re playing, I don’t get it.  But I just wanna get back to my family.” The voice growled.

“Wait…” Realization hitting you. “You’re not the person holding me here are you?” You whispered.

“What?” The voice snapped. “Of course I’m not.  I can’t do anything with how you’ve got me tied up to this fucking chair.”

All of the sudden you felt a hard thud against your back.

“Wait!” You snapped at him. “You’re tied up too.  Just like me.  I-I cant see you.  I think our chairs must be back to back...” You seemed to be understanding as you were saying the words.

“Oh…” The voice replied. “Shit.  Yeah...sorry.  I just figured…” He trailed off.

“It's fine.  I did too.” you sighed.

“So you haven’t seen them? The person...or people.  Whoever did this?” He asked.

You sighed and shook your head. “No.  Last thing I remember is walking in the front doors and that was it.”

That really had been it.  It seemed strange but all you had done was open the door and walk inside.

“Me too.” The voice replied.  “Taehyung by the way.  Thats my name.  If we’re gonna die here you might as well know that.”

You gasped. “Don’t say that.”

It was a possibility.  Probably the biggest possibility here.

Yet, you didn’t need to spin yourself into a flurry of overthinking.  You needed to think of how to get out, how to survive.

It was quiet for a while.

“Sorry.” Taehyung replied.

“It's okay…” You muttered. “I-I’m y/n.”

“That's a pretty name.” Taehyung sweetly complimented, seeming to find some satisfaction in thinking on your name instead of the terrifying predicament you both were in.

“Thanks.” You muttered again.  It wasn’t easy to find the strength to push words out.

Hours seemed to tick by as you and Taehyung remained frozen to the chairs.

You talked occasionally.  You learned that he was a science teacher at a middle school in Korea.  He didn’t particularly think he was good at it.  But he enjoyed it.

He’d been vacationing in Alaska this winter because he’d heard it was a once in a lifetime experience.  When he’d gotten caught in that blizzard he pulled over to this motel.  And here you both were

He joked around with you quite a bit when he did speak.  He seemed to want to take the damper off the mood.

But there was no amount of joking that could truly distract the two of you from your fear.

Another hour passed.

“So tell me about you.  I feel like I've only talked about me.” Spoke the voice.

You laughed, realizing he was right.  He’d been rambling on and on and you hadn’t told him more than your name.

“Well…” You paused.

That was strange.  You could’ve sworn…

You had them.

They were there when you woke weren’t they?

Your memories.

Didn’t they exist?

“Well what?” The man joked.

You tried your hardest to remember.  So hard it almost hurt.

God. the ropes on your hands were really starting to burn.

You looked down to see if they had somehow tightened...only to realize that…

There were no ropes.

No.  That couldn’t be true.  You were definitely tied to the chair when you first woke up.

“One...one second” Your voice was sounding deeper than it once had.  You couldn’t pin this down.  You’d been on vacation.  The sights were beautiful but a storm hit and you pulled over at this motel.  There were no other cars.  It was only you.  It was only him.

“Are you okay?” Taehyung's voice started to sound panicked. “You sound...like…”

Finally.  It was as if the key to your mind was unlocked and all of the answers you needed were flooding out.

“I sound like…”

Taehyung gasped loudly.  His entire body tensing in fear.

“You?” you chuckled, standing up and walking over to the single red chair that sat in the middle of the room.

Walking around to meet face to face with the man sitting there.

His face was contorted in pure shock and horror as he looked you up and down.

How could it be possible...that you looked entirely identical to him, your voice was the same.

“And now I even have your memories as well.” You chuckled. “You know? That’s always the nastiest bit of finding a new host.” You groaned, dropping your jaw in an inhuman way to reveal hundreds of razor sharp teeth. All that was left was to take care of the old body.

You chuckled at Taehyung's squirming in his chair.  Betrayal and fear mixing into what you found to be quite an amusing ending to your little game.

His mind really had taken the longest of all of your prey to feed on.  

When he’d walked through that front door he was walking right into your lair.

You were able to plant a seed in his mind like a small parasite buried in his brain to eat away at everything making him...him.  Until he was almost nothing.  

You really hated the part where it messed with your own mind.

You let out a loud cackle at that thought.

“I almost lost myself there for a second.”

[gumnut-logic]

Minerva (Bit 1)

Okay, this fic is an attempt to get my mojo back. Every time I go on holiday it gets sideswiped. Being sick definitely did not help, though admittedly coughing all night last night may have made me my usual sleep deprived self, so who knows, it might have helped :D

But anyway, This fic is Kermadec because I needed a boat :D It also required a little research - Minerva Reef is a pair of actual atolls not far from Tracy Island. I’m not sure of the distance so I fluffed it.

Andre and Cecil are a pair of private nurses first mentioned in Gentle Rain. I like to recycle my OCs but I haven’t read that story in ages. Here’s hoping I’ve kept them true to form. They haven’t been sketched out in this much detail before, in any case.

There is fluff. I broke Virg again, oops, but there is resultant fluff. I’m sick, I can’t help myself. 

Many thanks to @scribbles97​ and @vegetacide​ for the read throughs and support. I haven’t forgotten about The Tattoo, I just needed a little self indulgence first.

This bit is mainly set up and I hope to write more asap. 1726 words.

I hope you enjoy it.

-o-o-o-

Two broken legs.

If there was anything worse than a broken limb, it was more than one and two broken legs was the worst.

Or two broken arms. He wasn’t sure as he hadn’t managed to break two arms as yet. But two broken legs definitely sucked.

Of course, it was worth it. Saving children was always worth it. But weeks of confinement, of being unable to do anything for himself, was about to send him around the bend, out the window and into the Pacific.

His brothers did their best and both Andre and Cecil, the family nursing staff - yes, they had enough injuries on enough of a regular basis to have nursing staff on their payroll -  had been called in on this one to cart him back and forth across the house, see to his necessaries, and pretty much do his bidding.

Which was fine, since he and Andre got on like a house on fire. The man spoke both paint and piano almost as much as Virgil and there had been fun times, despite his infirmities.

Cecil was a Gordon clone and those two got up to much more mischief than was really acceptable for an employee. But since Gordon usually took all the credit, even the time Scott had his eyebrows shaved, they got away with hell.

Besides, Scott’s eyebrows had been partly burnt off already and had looked stupid, so shaving them both off was an improvement that had to be done. How Gordon had managed it, Virgil didn’t have a clue...and also didn’t want to think too hard about it because it gave his rapscallion little brother powers that he really shouldn’t have.

Cecil played it straight and the Tracys put up with it. Because despite Cecil’s idiosyncrasies, the two nurses were very, very good at their jobs.

That and they came as a pair because Andre and Cecil were married.

So, other than expanding Gordon’s power of pranking, things were good. Well, as good as they could be while he had two broken legs. 

But there were days.

God, were there days.

Days, so many days, and today was one of them.

Scott had been called out early in the morning and consequently everyone was up. Alan was called next and he and Kayo were out dealing with yet another space freighter collision. Scott was going to kick some space agency ass about updating some space etiquette rules in the near future to stop this stupidity from happening, and considering how much profanity was bouncing down from orbit, both John and Alan would be there to back him up.

So three brothers were out, leaving Virgil imprisoned with Gordon, Andre, Cecil and Grandma. This combination wouldn’t normally be an issue, but Grandma was cooking up a storm and Virgil was trapped.

Gordon may be a pain at times, but he saw the hazard coming and he was a good brother at heart. So, with some assistance from Andre and Cecil, the Fish deployed his yacht, A Little Lightning, and suddenly the day seemed so much brighter.

Virgil was ensconced in pillows and the best of comfort on the back deck and had the privilege of watching Mateo pass on their starboard side as Gordon guided the yacht out into the open ocean.

Why he seemed to always be injured when aboard this boat, he had no idea, but Gordon was a life saver.

Virgil had no idea where his brother might be taking him and he didn’t really care. He just lay back and enjoyed a beautiful day, the breeze, the many sounds of water and the gentle bounce of the boat.

At some point he dozed off.

It had to be a sign of how much healing his body needed, but somehow he managed to sleep the entire trip, because it was the sudden change in the engine noise that woke him.

Andre was smiling at him in that soft caring way he had about him. Dark hair, blue eyes and a soft smile, the nurse was somewhat reminiscent of his big brother, but without the fire and the drive. The man was quiet and reassuring, exactly what was needed when ill or injured.

“It looks like you needed that.”

Virgil grunted, never a fan of waking up. 

But Andre knew this and had exactly what the injured engineer needed - a mug of steaming coffee.

Virgil forced the last few steps to full consciousness, and, pushing himself up, made a grab for the mug.

The mug moved away. “Uh-uh, stretch first.”

Shit.

It was a thing Andre made him do every time he woke. Before coffee, he had to stretch abused muscles that were forced to sleep in awkward positions due to his legs.

Virgil mumbled and grumbled, but did as he was bid. He knew how important the exercises were, but the lure of coffee was just cruel. He vaguely noted the yacht’s engine dropping to a slow cruise and the open ocean having just that touch more sway, rolling the yacht in the swell.

“Where are we?”

“Cecil says we’re visiting Minerva.”

“Oh.” Virgil blinked. He’d flown over the Minerva Reefs many, many times. They were a navigation marker not that far from Tracy Island. Though they were far enough away for him to have been asleep for some time. “How long was I out?”

That smile again. “Several hours. Did you good.” The nurse had placed the coffee on a side table and was helping Virgil sit up straight enough to consume the taunting liquid from heaven.

A breathless moment and the mug was in his hands and coffee was pouring down his throat. God, Andre made great coffee. Yet another reason to put up with his husband.

He surfaced at some point and managed a thank you that set the nurse grinning just as a coral reef started to drift past.

Virgil didn’t know much about the Minerva Reefs other than Melissa Fisher on Raoul swore about them..alot.

They were on the very edge of the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary and she had wanted to add them to the exclusion zone for a very long time. But the reefs were owned by Tonga or Fiji, depending on which country you spoke to and the environment continued to suffer from it.

He vaguely remembered Gordon saying something about visiting the reefs in Four on several occasions and Virgil had no doubt that he and Melissa were likely doing some kind of sneaky ecological monitoring or some such. After all, the reefs were rather close to Tracy Island and Gordon rather passionate about such things.

As A Little Lightning cruised between two reef headlands, Virgil surmised they were at the northern of the two atolls.

As Virgil guzzled the last of his coffee, the yacht came to a complete halt in the lee of one of the headlands - if you could call it that, the reef barely made it above the water line. He heard the sea anchor deployed and there was suddenly silence except for the crashing of waves against coral and sand and the breeze.

Virgil closed his eyes and soaked it in.

The empty mug was tugged gently from his hand and he vaguely registered a plate being placed on the table beside him. “Cecil made pie.”

That snapped him out of it. “Pie?” The prankster could cook and he was suddenly assaulted with a delicious aroma.

“Steak and bacon, topped with mashed potato and cheese.” The plate had a generous serving along with salad piled up beside it. Andre was grinning at his expression. “He’s mine, you can’t have him.”

Virgil had to grin. “Well, at least I know one of the reasons why you nabbed him.”

Andre’s grin softened, but it was still a grin. “In the top five.” A hand landed on Virgil’s shoulder. “Eat up, you’ll need it for this afternoon’s workout.”

That deflated him a little.

The nurse noted what must have been in his expression. “Okay, perhaps it can be a brief session today.” A shrug. “After all, an atoll is hardly a swimming pool.”

“Virg trying to con you out of rehab?” Gordon bounced onto the deck, a grin on his face and that look of absolute relaxation the man got whenever he was out on the water.

“‘S not rehab.” So Virgil was pouting and acting like a child. “It’s maintenance.” Of what still worked, until the casts came off and then the hell would really start.

“Don’t let those baby browns lure you from the path of righteousness, Andre.”

“What? Like you attempted last time?” The nurse was grinning at the aquanaut.

That brought Gordon up short.

“I have to say that your eyes are a lighter brown, not quite the same colour, but the manoeuvring is almost identical.”

“What?” It was a two Tracy chorus shot at Andre with two brows, one dark, one light, shooting daggers at the nurse.

Andre just laughed and turned back to Virgil. “You going to eat your pie?”

The nurse’s blue eyes did some manoeuvring of their own and Virgil found himself snatching up the plate and hovering over it to protect his slice of pie.

Cecil chose that moment to appear. As usual, there was never a laugh far behind him as he was wearing a bright pink chef’s cap canted at an angle. But it was the two plates of pie in his hands that drew the attention of the other two men on deck.

Gordon didn’t hesitate, grabbing his plate and shovelling pie down his throat with barely a thank you. Virgil growled in his direction.

“What? It’s good pie. Cecil knows I appreciate him, don’t you, Cecil?”

But the cook was accepting a gentle kiss from his husband as the man took his plate, his other hand drifting from Cecil’s shoulder, down to the small of his back in a gesture simple but intimate enough for Virgil to turn away to give them privacy.

His eyes landed on Gordon, who’s face had an odd expression as he looked back at Virgil, as if he knew something that Virgil didn’t.

Virgil glared at him.

It, no doubt, had something to do with Kay. He would slap his little bro about the head later.

In the meantime...”So, what are we doing here?”

-o-o-o-

Bit 2

[barnesandrogersfanfics]

Home - Part 12

A few weeks went by with no sign of Jack, Sam hadn't been able to find any trace of him still being in town. It was like he had a fallen off the face of the earth! .... i could only hope that was true!

Things had finally started to settle down, Pepper had called Bucky to tell him Ms Harper had been transferred to another school with a warning, one more wrong step and she would no longer have a career working with children. We were happy with this outcome as it meant she was away from Allie. Allie now had a new teacher, Mr Lang who she loved and said was so funny!

Bucky had sat Chloe down the day after her outburst at the house and told her that she was to show me the same respect as she gave to him, he had told her we were together and that the way she had treated me was unacceptable even if i was ‘just the nanny’! I had only seen her a couple times since and she had been perfectly fine with me but i could tell there was definitely still some jealously there.

I had also met Sam's wife Wanda who was lovely! We got along like a house on fire from the start, much to the amusement of Bucky, Steve and Sam. I was actually meant to be meeting her for coffee with Rosie today after dropping the girls at the school. But i had woken up feeling awful.... i went downstairs to find Bucky and the girls already sitting at the table dressed for the day and having breakfast.

"Morning, you feeling okay? you look a little pale" Bucky asked looking up from his iPad that he was reading the news on.

"I think I'm getting sick, i feel awful" i shook my head avoiding the coffee pot and grabbing a bottle of water and some Advil "my head and my throat hurts and i feel real shaky...."

"Go back to bed doll, i'll take the girls to school"

"What about Rosie?"

"I'll call Steve"

"You cant keep calling Steve, he has work too you know" i laughed and regretted it instantly when it started a coughing fit.

"Go to bed, i'll be up in a minute to check on you".

"Fine, but only because i might actually pass out if i dont lay down" i mumbled before heading back upstairs, i heard my phone start ringing from where it was charging in the kitchen and i soon heard Bucky answer it.

"Hey Wanda...... think you girls are going to have to reschedule. Yeah sorry, Y/N's sick i've just sent her back to bed" was the last thing i heard before falling into Bucky's bed and wrapping the covers around me.

"Doll..... doll I'm just going to drop the girls at school" Bucky was suddenly saying from beside me stroking my hair back from my face.

"Okay.... what about Rosie?"

"Wanda is going to take her for a few hours while i go into the office to deal with a few things. Will you be okay on your own for a while?"

"Yes dad i'll be fine home alone" i rolled my eyes at him which was a huge mistake, the sudden movement had me bolting out of the bed and rushing to the bathroom emptying my stomach in the toilet.

"I think I'm dying Buck" i moaned reaching for the flush as he walked in handing me my bottle of water.

"Your not pregnant are you!?" He suddenly asked making a joke of it but also part of him was serious.

"No Buck I'm not pregnant, I'm on birth control. Im just sick" i said stumbling back to bed "i'll be fine after some more sleep".

"Right, of course you are. I was just messing with you sweetheart" he chuckled before leaning down to place a kiss on my forehead.

"Dont get too close, i dont want you getting sick too"

"I'll be fine" he smiled down at me before finally leaving to take the girls to school.

The next fews days i was a mess! I had been in bed for most of it apart from when Bucky took me to see the doctor. I wasn't getting any better and i wasn't sleeping and he was getting worried about me. The doctor said I had a bad case of flu that had led to a severe throat and chest infection and gave me some strong antibiotics, he had also given me something to help me sleep. I just wanted to feel better already i missed spending time with Bucky and the girls, I had been keeping my distance not wanting them to get sick.

I was laying in bed when i felt a hand slip up my thigh and travel up until an arm was wrapped around my waist, a warm body pressed to my back.... soft kisses placed to my neck making me moan.

"Mmm Bucky I've missed you" i sighed smiling and welcoming his attention.

"I've missed you too baby, but I'm not Bucky" said the too familiar voice, i froze at the sound of Jacks voice in my ear and started to struggle but he just laughed "your mine baby always, i'll get you back soon dont worry!"

"No!!! Bucky??!!!!" I screamed still trying to push Jack away from me, he just looked down at me with a sinister smile spread across his face.

"Hey! Hey sweetheart wake up!"

My eyes shot open to see Steve leaning over shaking me slightly looking concerned. I was sweating and breathing hard as i realised i had been dreaming!

"Steve?"

"Yeah its just me, you okay?"

".... I'm fine" i shook my head feeling stupid "where's Bucky?"

"He just went to get some groceries. Asked me to stay to keep an eye on you while he was gone"

"Oh, okay"

"You wanna talk about it?" Steve offered "you seem pretty shaken"

"I dreamt Jack was here, at first i thought he was Bucky but it wasnt.... it was Jack telling me im his and that he'll have me back soon" i shook my head.

"It was just a dream sweetheart, your safe here"

"I know..... it just felt so real"

"Im here, i'll protect you" he smirked "you wanna come downstairs for a change of scenery? I dont think your contagious, we'd all have it by now if you were"

"Yeah okay, that sounds good actually" i nodded "Buck will probably freak that im not in bed resting still though"

"dont you worry bout him. Come on" Steve smiled easily scooping me up into his arms and carrying me downstairs.

"Steve i can walk you know"

"I know" he shrugged before putting me down on the sofa smiling.

"Such a dork" i rolled my eyes laughing at him "thank you for staying with me Steve".

"Anytime sweetheart".

Steve and I were sat watching a movie when Bucky finally got home.

"Hey baby, you feeling better?" Bucky asked dropping down on the sofa next to me and wrapping me in his arms as he placed a kiss to my temple.

"I still feel awful but Steve thought a change of scenery would do me good, he even insisted on carrying me down here"

Bucky laughed shaking his head at his friend "of course he did".

"Hey, you loved being swept off your feet sweetheart dont deny it"

"I would never!" I gasped and held a hand to my chest dramatically making them both laugh.

"You hungry? I got you some chicken noodle soup" Bucky asked looking down at me as his fingers played with my hair.

"Mmm yes please"

"Okay, I'll be right back".

"Hey Buck, can we go for a walk after I've eaten? I feel like i need some fresh air, think I'm starting to get cabin fever"

"Anything you want doll" he called back.

"It will probably make you feel better getting out the house for a while" Steve smiled over at me "clear your mind"

"Yeah i was thinking the same, i just wanna get back on my feet, the more I'm resting the worst i feel"

"At least your eating more now and keeping food down" Bucky added as he came in with a tray of soup and a bread roll "you had me worried" he said placing the tray on my lap.

"Oh i know, he even asked me if i was pregnant"

"Are you?" Steve asked with wide eyes making me roll my eyes.

"No! Dont worry there's no baby.... I'm just sick" i chuckled shaking my head before turning my attention to my food "mmm smells so good".

"For the record, i wasn't worried that you were pregnant. I was just asking a question"

"Oh okay" i laughed, the look on his face when he had asked me this morning told an entirely different story!

After i had eaten we went for walk around the park and it actually did make me feel a bit better. The evening was spent cuddled up with Bucky and the girls on the sofa which was so nice, id missed this the past couple of days.

I was laying in bed later that night when i felt a hand brush over my thigh and an arm wrap around my waist, a warm body press against my back.... soft kisses placed on my neck.... deja vu hit me like a ton of bricks and i sat up turning quickly to look behind me, Bucky looked at me like i was crazy.

"You okay?"

"Yeah..... yeah I'm fine" i nodded "sorry Buck" i said quickly with sigh of relief.

"Hey what is it?"

"I just had to make sure you were you....."

"Okayyyy.... who else would it be?"

"No one, i just..... i had this dream earlier that kinda freaked me out" i laid back down shaking my head before telling him all about it "Steve woke me up because he heard me shouting for you"

"But it was just a dream babe" Bucky said pulling me back into his arms, his body curling around me protectively from behind.

"I know" i said quickly "it just seemed so real....."

"I got you" he mumbled in my ear as he buried his face against my neck "and for the record, i really wasn't worried that you were pregnant.... i was just asking a question. Id be happy if you were"

"What?...."

"Id be happy. Y/N i love you so much and your already a great mom to my girls.... why wouldn't i be happy to add to our family?"

"Buck.... Thats the first time you've said you love me" i turned in his arms needing to see his face, to look into the eyes that melted my insides every time he looked at me.

"Ive said it so many times in my head doll" he admitted looking kinda embarrassed "i know everything with us has moved quick but its true, i love you"

"I love you too" i smiled pressing a quick kiss to his lips "i'll kiss you better when I'm not sick" i chuckled.

"You kiss me better now woman i dont care" he laughed diving on me and kissing me taking my breath away.

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[a-trying-writer]

cap stuff, because i want some happy juice that im happy to make for myself.

as i often wrote before, cap loves to pet kosch, but she also loves physical attention herself. no one knows why, not even herself, but she enjoys it. sometimes she purrs or sighs and/or sleeps on the person petting her. racter does this often to get her to stop having anxiety for a time, much to duncans chagrin.

cap is definitely a big eater, but she doesnt have an iron stomach like gobbet. still, the two do challenge each other over meals, and sometimes tries to pick each others meals, like uneaten fries or wings. more often than not, this leaves to a utensil fight, from chopsticks to forks and spoons. more often than not, no one wins, because they had spilled their meals.

cap enjoys challenging is0 in the matrix, even tho she knows that is0 is a master compared to her. she is kinda envious that is0 has huge servers in her room to do whatever she can, while cap has to rely on outdated software that she does try to tune up, despite the risks of it breaking. cap’s computer is also just a brick, but its still p useful. is0 doesnt mind helping her update it, tho some of the pieces dont fit the casing of the computer, so they have to do some further digging.

cap sucks at writing haikus, but she enjoys listening to gaichu recite them and japanese poems and books. tho she doesnt speak the language, she learns about some phrases and how they are valued in his culture. on a different note, being aware that he needs to eat people to sustain himself, she does feel very uncomfortable by it, due to her childhood trauma as the game states for seattle, which applies to her, but she does sometimes help hunt down the worst kind of people for him. otherwise, she minds her own business and stays away from that.

being siblings, cap and duncan are p cool with each other, sometimes getting into fist fights to practice, tho she is much smaller and lighter than him, ofc. he still helps her get better, even if she cant get the hang of it properly, buts its only for her to be safe than sorry. they also watch trideo programs together when they are bored, and joke around about it. esp around action flicks and dramas. (cap hates dramas funny enough, so she only watches them with duncan.)

cap enjoys hanging around heoi, to talk to some of the residents, or party in club 88. she is an awful dancer and singer, but its a blast. she also helps reliable matt with his drones by fixing them, thanks to racter teaching her. and while she doesnt approve of him using a chip to keep up a facade, she lets it be as long as it doesnt cause any harm. she also jokes around by calling him “beautiful” in return for all the times he said it to her.

since she is a decker much like is0, cap spends time around max law to scan through his wares, while bantering with him. she tends to forget he is a lot older than she thinks, so she tends to treat him like a younger brother or kid, before remembering that lil fact. they also talk about the journey to the west novels, and various adaptions, like video games, because of his boat that is referenced to the monkey king.

cap is p chill with ka fai family, and as i said before, enjoys partying in the club. tho, sometimes, if she becomes too rowdy, henry picks her up and drags her out where duncan waits for her to bring her back to the dowager empress. duncan is never surprised, but is often disappointed.

on a funny note, cap is frightened by both kindly and bao, so she never dares to enter the mahjong palor. the same could be said with crafty xu, but for a different reason. she adores xu, but the smell of sage gives her migraines and reminds her of her time in prison. otherwise, she does like to take a sneak peek at some of the books xu sends to her, and often talks about gobbet’s particular ways of cooking.

cap finds ambrose the most mysterious, given that what he says about himself, may or may not be entirely true. but at least he helps her and the crew a lot by supplying them with medicine. ofc, since she is sometimes up to shenanigans that leaves her with a few injuries, he is the one she always goes to, or has to go to, no matter how much she tries to assure the crew that she is all right. esp when she gets sick.

on a side note, tho it isnt canon to the game, but in my stories, cap often speaks to lucky strike, because of their relations to racter, and cap’s own past. there are some things lucky keeps secret, esp about bleak, caps old friend that went missing, if not had passed. its also hard for cap to hide that she finds lucky very attractive, but she believes its because some of her mannerisms reminds her of racter. thing is, she always has been attractive to the dangerous ones, much like how she was attracted to some of her exes in the past.

least to say, cap never really had a healthy relationship. but it is what it is, living the kind of life she has.

there are some things about lucky and cap that i might explore in the future, as i feel there is a lot of potential there, esp given her attitude in srd. but i need more dialogue refs of lucky to capture her character for them. im not too big of a fan to get back into srd, but ill be glad to do it for those refs, and other things, so i can get a better idea on how to write her. but this is a huge if.

[maybe ill write some rac/cap/lucky bits, because im starting to ship lucky and ract, but i deeply loathe the love triangle trope. and i never like the idea of cheating relationships, plus, ract did say that leaving their old crew made lucky hate his guts to the point that she was howling for blood. im not one to write unhealthy relationships unless there is a point to it. i also keep thinking its canon for some reason, but racter cant connect with someone like that, tho i do think its entirely possible for him to had slept with a few people, lucky included... hm. i guess it depends on how i feel about it... sometimes, tho, i feel like im obligated to write it too. like, is this what people want? i wont lie, i did touch up on this sort of thing before, but only between lucky and cap, but it was entirely consensual between cap and ract to allow her to spend time with lucky. and cap is something of a saucy individual. im okay with poly/open relationships, only because its the best alt than cheating couples and stupid love triangles... tho, in this case, i assume lucky nor racter connect with people like that. well, i appreciate any thoughts about this, tbh. i know i wrote about it before, this sort of thing, but what are others thoughts on this case? will it be okay for me to leave the relationship just between racter and cap, or put lucky into the picture as well, given their history? or maybe just keep lucky as a side character that is not afraid of speaking her mind to cap, about how things go in heoi and how racter may just leave her like he did before.

honestly speaking, id much rather let racter deal with cap only, instead of getting into something intense with lucky. ive read too many stories about unprompted hate kisses and rebounds, and i want to do something that isnt that. i just worry ill disappoint people... tho i have no reason as to why i do. i just feel that this is something i *have* to do, if that makes sense.

sigh i rambled on for too long. sorry. i just dont want to write any sort of hate s-x based things. it bothers me a lot. idk.]

[mousehole5000]

tgcf again chapters 174-191. im now midway through book 4. pain and suffering. and yet also.... this is really good.... but also.... pain...

okay cave of ten thousand gods everythings coming out into the light.... xie lian pretending not to hear fengqing drop their act im emotional..... fengqing silently working together to separate xie lian and hua cheng im emotional..... every word that comes out of mu qing’s mouth im emotional....

honestly reading the xianle trio discussing hua cheng.. its very hard for me NOT to project all the times ive been in a friendship trio and someone got a boyfriend the other two didnt like (which was every time. theres never been a bf everyone liked. sometimes i was the one who had the bf. there were no winners then and tbh i predict there will be no real winners here as far as this friendship goes but such is life)

mu qing is so smart he’s clever he’s tricksy i love it i love him ugh

“A pair of arms had circled around him from behind, and hugged him with force all of a sudden. Xie Lian had buried his face in his back, and also didn’t speak. Though nothing was said, it was enough.” okay i cant get into every different way im feeling about whats going down bc it would get Too Personal but this..... im emo. also xie lian saying “something like this has to be said clearly“ and then proceeding to not say a word just going in for a hug is a mood

“He heard Hua Cheng’s staggering voice coming from above. “...Your Highness. You really…will be the death of me.” - ok well DONT SAY THAT!! now im worried!!!

“Hua Cheng, however, only snorted, appearing as if his eyes could see through the thick rocky walls. He said darkly, “Don’t worry. If he kills one, I’ll make ten more. Fast and furious like the storms, I will never back down. Let’s see who’s the one left standing in the end.” Xie Lian’s heart skipped a beat for some reason, and he mumbled inwardly, “... Oh no, this is bad.” Even though Hua Cheng’s expression was subconsciously displayed, Xie Lian really was quite weak to this aggressive and rebellious confidence of his.” - fjadskfajsl its okay xie lian honey you never know whats going to do it for you

okay so are the murals and statues are only from the xianle era? im hoping hua cheng didnt secretly follow xie lian during his time as a mortal during the entire 800 years and then pretend to a total stranger that would be too much imo lets see. i still really do get why feng xin and mu qing are like “...dude wtf lets get out of here stay away from that guy” (also tbh probably if theyd all managed to stay close... this probably wouldnt be happening which isnt a judgement im just saying bc thats definitely how ive felt about friendships) although this whole thing IS indeed tinged with homophobia which i still dont think makes sense in this setting but whatever i guess.

BOOK 4!!!! im scared

“A few days ago he nearly fainted, and it was only after that did he realize it was because he hadn’t had anything to eat for several days.” - unfortunately relatable but :(

“Ever since Xie Lian was young, he had never had to consider these kinds of affairs, and this was truly the first time in decades that this problem gripped him. However, if gods didn’t even know what starvation felt like, how could they possibly understand the feelings of a starving worshipper? How could they possibly empathize? At this point, he could only take this experience as a form of training.” - TRUE THO!!!!!!!! i like seeing this even tho the circumstances are sad

wait does xie lian get his bad cooking skills from him mom? im gonna cry...

“After returning to the city, Mu Qing’s stomach was still turning. He said as he stumbled, “I thought…that porridge, it smelled like bran water, but I hadn’t thought it’d taste like it too!” Feng Xin gritted his teeth. “Shut up! Don’t force people to remember that pot of stuff! The queen is…body of ten thousand gold after all…never cooked…this is already…UGH!…” Mu Qing humphed. “Did I say something wrong? If you didn’t think it was like bran water, why don’t you…go ask the queen to grant you another bowl! UGH!…” The two were heaving back and forth, and Xie Lian grabbed hold of the both of them, patting their backs.” - xianle trio.... including simply because it made me do the pleading emoji in real life..... also the way the queen wanted to feed all of them... weeping

i didnt realize that mu qing would still be around during this time.... god the fact that i know theyre all going to split......

“It’s precisely because it’s a time like this that money has to be brought up!” Mu Qing countered. “A time like this? What time is it? Time when we’re starving! It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to admit it, but nothing can be done without money! Can you both not just suck it up a little bit?” - mu qing i love you. god.... for real the fact that he comes from a completely different background than the other two is so important to his character and i think it shows so much in the way he continues to be in the present. he gives me the vibe of someone who is smart and hardworking but is bitter about it and tbh!!!! i get why he is!!! he’s very aware of these kinds of concerns bc he’s had to be, while the other two kind of think theyre above it and its a big difference between them. he’s still separated by the circumstances of his birth despite how much harder he’s worked to get to where he is.... ugh painful and delicious

i really am enjoying the xianle story tbh. xie lian going from his highness, favored by heaven, well-intentioned but lacking in experience and understanding to living in poverty and fighting with mortals who disrespect him. fucking delicious i mean this sincerely and respectfully im sad but i really like his character arc. and then to how he is in the present....

“Mu Qing looked at him, speaking not a word. Then he bowed deeply and really turned around to walk away.” - OH NO ITS HAPPENING AHHHHH ;_; honestly all of this hurts but it feels real like i think mu qing has every right to want to leave honestly and he DOES have other family and other ambitions outside of the trio... and i get why feng xin is mad about him wanting to leave when theyre suffering!! and i get why xie lian lets him go.... friendships are hard man and the pain of them splitting is rough!!!!

“Mu Qing’s departure had really shocked him to the core. First, he had never thought that someone so close would just up and leave. Second, Xie Lian had always believed in “forever”. For example, friends would always be friends forever; no betrayal, no deception, no breaking up. Perhaps there’d be times when they’d part, but it for sure wouldn’t be over reasons like “life is too horrible” - pain. just pain. same as above i get it but it hurts

“Xie Lian didn’t know too well just how much money would be considered normal when buying over ten lanterns, and he never looked at the price tag when he purchased things in the past.” - i feel bad kicking him while he’s down and he’s still trying to be kind even when it costs him but this is the first thing that came into my mind

but also oh?? spirits of soldiers from the battlefield you say?? hmmm i wonder... who.... could possibly be among them....

“If you remain forcibly, you won’t be able to rest in peace,” Xie Lian said. The nameless ghost didn’t seem to care. “I pray to never rest in peace.” -  i cant lie this legit gave me goosebumps lol

“Xie Lian himself was alright in suffering through it, since there were far too many other things to worry about. But his mother, who had lived a comfortable, luxurious life, when had she ever done such crude labour? But if the queen didn’t do this work herself, who else could take over?” - hmmmm!!! housekeeping!!!! it matters!!!! rich people dont appreciate how much until they have to do it themselves!!! but this still makes me sad

oh god THATS when they pawned hongjing?? with the king sick and mu qing leaving?? :(((( even more emotional about its appearances in the present day

“That passerby chuckled. “You don’t know? This is too exciting! The servant is beating the master!” - oh god the dramatic and ironic timing of it all

god..... this is just... a sad time....

“MU QING ISN’T LIKE YOU ALL. HE’S MY FRIEND, HE WOULD NEVER HELP YOU!!!” [cut to] “Those were the only words echoing in Xie Lian’s mind, but he couldn’t utter a single sound, and could only crazily grab at anything at his disposal to throw. He didn’t care who he was hurling at, either. Finally, Mu Qing couldn’t take this anymore, and he steeled his face as he swept his sleeves and left. Xie Lian panted harshly for a bit and fell back down, spacing out again.”- IM SAD!!!!!! tbh i wonder if on some level xie lian kind of felt like mu qing owed him? i know he said to forget about that stuff to both of them but its one thinig to say it and think you mean it and another to have to deal with it

white no-face what is your DEAL!! also all the little fire ghost bits im...

“After having exchanged so many words, Feng Xin finally got the gist of what had transpired. He widened his eyes and pointed at Mu Qing, unable to speak. A moment later, he bent down and grabbed a sack and flung it over, roaring. “SCRAM! SCRAM SCRAM SCRAM!” Mu Qing was hit in the face by the sacks of rice he brought and backed two steps away. All three of them in the house were panting harshly.” - this is it this is the part where i closed my laptop and said “noOOooOOOoooo” out loud to my room im so upset... and mu qing still tried to leave the rice even after the broom thing im ;_;

“Feng Xin was completely convinced that he would never do such a thing, but that was precisely why this had become the worst-case scenario!” - pain, suffering, dismay, etc

“Feng Xin continued, “If Your Highness thinks your life might be in danger, I can finish this for you, I won’t tell Her Majesty, haha.” - bless your heart for trying feng xin

“But it shouldn’t be like this. The Feng Xin of the past would have absolute faith in him no matter what! Even if there was only twenty percent doubt, it was still unbearable!” - AHHHHHHH okay idk if i really have much to say about their relationship other than im sad but IM SAD!!!!

the differences between feng xin and mu qing’s relationship with xie lian are so interesting. feng xin has clearly always idolized xie lian a lot while mu qing hasnt at least not in the same way and he seems like he has some resentment towards xie lian (thats how i read it anyway thats what i said about it at the beginning of book 2 and i think its understandable and can be a very real part of friendships) that feng xin doesnt and i just think thats neat!!

“He was firmly tied down upon the altar, that broken base of the statue under his body. There were many people squeezed below the altar, and pair after pair of round, unblinking eyes were watching him.” - hmmm dont think i like where this is going

“Yet, before he could finish, he realized that the white silk that he used to cover his face had been undone. In this moment, the thing that had him completely tied down was that exact white silk.” oh my god wait is this ruoye?? is ruoye that same ribbon???? ill cry

“The hand stained with blood, the one that ended a life, was immune to the Face Disease.” - ohhh shit okay. okay okay. okay. shit okay. i See now.... so if youre an innocent civilian the only way to escape this fate (and the faces are actually the souls of other innocent civilians) is to get rid of your innocence... and doesnt this disease not actually hurt its just horrific? god.............

“White No-Face pitied, “You think they don’t want to do it? Wrong, it’s not that they don’t want to, it’s solely because no one wants to be the first, that’s all.” - shut up!!! youre the one who created this situation dont fucking preach about the way you think the world is

“He forced down the mouthful of blood and hissed, “What are you laughing at? You think that you got what you wanted? This was all forced by you!” The ghost fire within the ghost’s hand flickered even more fiercely.” - yes exactly!!! you put people in extreme circumstances sometimes they do extreme things!! youve proved nothing!! god i do love when characters say exactly what im thinking. plus the first ones who caved were trying to save their child

“He felt that, if he was to let them do what they wanted, there was something in his heart that would never return to its original state.” - :( also i kind of feel that in my life sometimes and i just hope xie lian’s heart ends up in a state he’s happy with

“He didn’t dare to look at what had become of the person lying on the altar, because what laid there didn’t look human anymore.” AHHHHHH!!! :(((( i mean i get why this event is what made hc... level up??? thats not a good way to describe it fjasldkfjaslk but you know what i mean... that line about being powerless to help your beloved OOOOOOF

okay well finished that chapter im. pain. hmmm. pain. i dont know if i actually have any words rn lol but im gonna stop here for now

[thetravelerwrites]

Monster Match #21: Astomi

The Traveler's Masterlist

For @moonlightreetops: Appearance: Mortal Woman, Pfp is me(straight brown hair, almond hazel eyes), short, scared, with sevral tattoos. Personality: INFJ, Cancer, loud, protective, generous, and I have a snort laugh; definitely a hugger. Therapist friend and proud. I believe I was born cursed to always be polite and kind to everyone. I'm not naive to the trouble I can get into this way but I still cant help myself. Oh! And I cry with every movie and sad commercial. It's annoying.

Hobbies: Hosting D&D, Collecting macabre things, Responsible Social Distancing. Likes: Roadtrips, Pretending I'm more fond of the outdoors than I actually am, Forest Paintings, My Nerd Family, Opposoms. Dislikes: Heights, Bugs, Cooking, Cockroaches (listed separately from bugs because I will panic cry)

Ideal Partner: Someone whose more grounded than I am but at the same time is understanding of my struggles and won't berate me for them. And preferably a monster who wont leer in my windows. (Still have fears of that from my childhood monsters) NSFW & SFW welcomed. My orientation is Pan. So you are free to throw whatever you like at me.

You’ve been matched with an Astomi!

Originating in Greek and Roman mythology, Astomies, also known as the Gangines, are an ancient legendary race of people who had no need to eat or drink anything at all. They survived by smelling apples and flowers. Megasthenes, a historian and Asian Indian ethnographer, located them at the mouth of the river Ganges. They are described as being hairy and having no mouth. When traveling, they would carry roots, flowers and apples to smell. They could die by smelling a strong, unpleasant smell.

There was a forest reserve near your home that you frequented to draw and paint. There was a section of it that was strangely green all year round, and you weren’t sure why. None of the trees were evergreens, so the hidden grove should have lost leaves and turned grey like all the greenery around it in the winter, but it never did. You never went into it, and you never saw anyone near it. It was just an oddity no one knew anything about. Lots of people said it was haunted.

The more logical minded people claimed there was a hot spring somewhere in the grove that kept the trees green, but that it was toxic to people, which is why no one ever went there. Though, that didn’t make sense to you. If it was toxic, why were there flowers and birds? The wildlife seemed unaffected by whatever odd supposed toxin existed in the grove.

It had struck your interest more than once, but you never went in. You loved ghost stories, but you weren’t necessarily keen on being in one. And the threat of a toxin was enough to keep you from venturing in.

Though, one day, as you were wandering close, you heard a mournful whimpering, as if someone were in pain. Your worry about ghosts and toxins flew out of your mind as you ran into the grove, looking for whatever was making the sound.

“Hello?” You called. “Is someone there? Are you okay?”

“Please!” They called. “Can you help me?”

“Yes,” You said, pushing past the thick foliage. “Just hold on, I’m coming. Keep talking to me so I can find you! What’s your name? How old are you?”

“Geras!” They said, coughing. “I’m ninety-eight seasons!”

“Seasons?” What was ninety-eight divided by four? “So you’re twenty-four?”

“I suppose,” They said. “But we don’t measure time that way.”

“We?”

“The people of the grove,” They said. “My family and I.”

“Wait,” You said, untangling yourself from a tree. “People live in here? I thought there was a toxin in the air that killed people.”

“What?” They actually laughed, which turned into a hacking cough. “No, of course not.”

“What about the ghosts, then? Are they real?” You asked with a laugh, but you were met with silence. “Geras? Geras! Keep talking.”

“Hurry, please,” Geras said, their voice hoarse. “Please.”

“Almost there,” You said. You finally managed to fight your way through heavy branches and dense underbrush and into what looked like an apple orchard. There were all sorts of apple trees there, and in between a copse of heritage apples was a person laid between the rows, unmoving.

“Geras?” You called. You couldn’t see much of them beyond the long brown hair all over. You could only tell that they were tall and gangly.

Next to them was a bag that stank to high heaven. At first you thought it could be poisons, but you looked inside and found a litany of gross hunting sprays: skunk essence, liquid ass, insect repellents, deer musk, and the like. The odor was so strong that it made you gag.

“Is this the problem?” You asked, breathing through your shirt. They nodded weakly. You weren’t surprised. It made you feel woozy, too. “I’ll get rid of it and come back to check on you, okay?”

“Yes, please,” They gasped.

You fought your way back out of the grove into the dead winter forest, back to the hiking trail to find a trash receptacle. It took nearly thirty minutes to find one, and another twenty to return to the grove. By the time you got back, Geras was not there. Worried, you followed the row up to a house.

The house was… old. Very old. So old that you couldn’t even determine what style or era it was from. It was tall and square, made of rough brick and thatched roof. There seemed to be no windows, but the entire front wall was open and had a rolled up flap that closed that side from the elements.

From the open side, you could see people moving around, hurried, almost frenzied, and you called out to them.

“Hey!” You said. “I’m looking for Geras! He… or she.. or they passed out from some garbage that got thrown in here. Are they okay?”

They all stopped and turned to stare at you from the shadow, and it was then you realized that there was no lights or electricity. There wasn’t even a power pole or lines anywhere nearby.

“Are you the one who helped Geras?” One of them asked. They had a feminine sounding voice.

“Yes,” You said. “Are they okay?”

“She’s not well,” The speaker said. “I am her mother, Foteini.” The woman came down and out of the shadows, and you took a step backward.

She was covered from head to toe in fur, except for her face, which was hairless, but possessed no mouth. Her eyes and nose were very large, however, and her silvering hair was long behind her.

“What are you?” You asked, your voice a little shaky.

“The people of the grove,” She said, her voice not coming from any sort of mouth, but rather from all around her. It wasn’t like telepathy; you could actually hear a voice in your ears, but it seemed to emanate from all over her. “Do not be frightened. We are gentle people.”

There were three other people there in that stepped out of the darkened interior, a black haired creature like Foteini and two much smaller ones the same color as the mother, likely children. They clung to the legs of the taller, black furred creature, seemingly frightened of you.

“Will Geras be okay?” You asked haltingly.

“I don’t know,” The mother said. “She inhaled much of the fumes from those poisons.”

“Is there something I can do to help?” You asked.

“You’ve already done her a great service,” Foteini said. “We would not have been able to help her, if we had found her, and if she had laid there longer, she’d likely have died.”

“Why?” You asked. “That stuff stank, sure, but it wasn’t technically poisonous. Not inhaling it, anyway.”

“We live on the aromas of nature,” Foteini explained. “Flowers, trees, fruit. Those sustain us. Pungent, unpleasant smells, like that poison you disposed of, are toxic and potentially fatal to us.”

“Oh,” You said, daunted. “Is there something that could help speed her recovery?”

Foteini thought. “Roses. They are among the most fragrant things that exist in nature, but we haven’t been able to grow them here in many years. Could you find some?”

“Yeah. Yeah! I… I’ll be back!” You said, and dashed back out of the grove before they could stop you.

You got out of the forest, dropped off your painting stuff at home, and went to a plant nursery.

“Do you have any rose plants?” You asked the clerk.

“Well, yes,” The clerk said. “But it’s too late in the year to plant them. If you want to grow from seeds, though, you can plant those now. I can sell you some seeds and give you a guide.”

That’s too long, you thought to yourself. Geras needed the roses now. “You know, I’ll take it, but I’m in a hurry.”

“Uh… alright.”

The clerk packed up the seeds of several types of roses and a guide for each, and as soon as you had them, you sprinted to a flower shop. You purchased a large bouquet of the finest, freshest, most aromatic red roses, and while it took a chunk out of your bank account, you didn’t want to run the risk of buying some that were less than perfect in fear that they wouldn’t work.

It was nearing sundown when you returned to the grove, and Foteini seemed surprised to see you.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d return,” She said. “Humans tend to stay away from this place.”

“I brought the roses,” You said, gasping for breath. “And some seeds to plant.”

“This is… most generous of you,” Foteini said. “Please, come inside. Night is approaching and you don’t want to be in the forest after dark. There are far less benign creatures out there than us.”

You shivered and followed her inside.

Geras was lying on a pallet in a far room, her breathing labored and raspy. Foteini began to lay out the flowers around Geras’s head, arranging the flowers around Geras’s head in a circle.

“Breathe deep,” Foteini said soothingly, rubbing Geras’s chest like a mother would for a sick child.

Geras made an effort to take a deep breath, but it sounded pained. However, after two or three tries, her breathing eased and eventually, after about an hour of tense waiting, she was able to breath without struggle. Foteini relaxed, and so did you.

“You should sleep here tonight,” Foteini said. “And eat as many apples as you want. We owe you a great debt.”

“I’m just glad I could help,” You said.

You fell asleep almost immediately after eating, having been exhausted by all the running. When you awoke, there was a new bushel of apples sitting next to you, and next to that was Geras, watching you sleep.

“Oh,” You said, sitting up and rubbing your eyes. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m much better now,” She said, smiling with her large green eyes. “Thank you for everything.”

“Of course,” You said with a self-conscious laugh. “You gave me a scare.”

“I’m sorry,” She said. “I know humans aren’t used to us.”

“No, I mean almost dying like that,” You corrected her. “I mean, I was a little startled, I’ll admit, but you guys seem nice.”

“You’re nice, too,” She said, continuing to smile.

“Thanks,” You said, starting to blush under the weight of her stare. “I, uh… I should get back, I have to go to work later today.”

“Of course,” Geras said, standing in a fluid movement and holding out a hand to help you to your feet. “Though… I hope… you’ll come back to visit?” She held out one of the roses for you to take.

You smiled at her, your hands still clasped. “I would like that very much.”

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Thanks for reading!

My Masterlist

The Exophilia Creator’s Masterlist

[noorengels]

reasons i am sad (friendship edition)

in year 4 my best friend invited everyone to her birthday party and not me and they all actually kept it a secret really well they almost pulled it off except she held her party in la plaza which basically is the hangout spot for families in that area i spent all my fridays there playing until midnight bc literally everyone from school would go. so i was walking home with my entire family inc grandparents and uncles and we went through la plaza and there they were! every single one of my friends at her party! apparently her mum didnt let her invite me bc apparently i hit her which i didn’t i hit another girl so her excuse is invalid and its the first time ive been so publicly excluded i cried on a bench.

in year 7 we hated this girl bc she was so fake i genuinely believe she is a psychopath like she has all the symptoms except shes in set 5 maths lol so my friend was like what if i spread a rumour about her and i was like lol do it and she did and for some reason i was blamed??? and lost all of my friends and she bullied me so hard but i didnt realise bc i was “friends” with her bc our mums were friends so shed like walk with me to lessons and talk to me while belittleing me and idk she was just a fucking bitch she made me feel so horrible like it was emotional bullying but also like telling everyone who i liked and saying lmao you literally have no friends “count how many friends you have? omg you literally cant even reach ten can you???” like in front of everyone but then shed also be really nice to me at the same time like idk it was like she was my friend but she bullied me it was so horrible saffa i hate you and the original friend who spread the rumour went on to become her best friend for like 6 years so uh hate that

managed to make friends with people not in my class in year 8! which sucked bc saffa had alienated people in my class so now they all just didnt like me i was the weird girl with no friends because of her and it was so horrible bc id always be forced to join the ready made groups between friends by the teacher  bc i didnt have a group to work with or id get paired with the weird girl like i was only the weird girl after saffa made everyone hate me this girl was weird bc she just is idk 

in year 10 they made a gc without me! i basically created that group tho like i gathered these friends i hade made in different lessons (obviously not in my main class lol) and they literally just??? decided to exclude me for no reason. and then theyd talk about what they talked about in the gc in front of me like “omg remember last night on the gc” isha ur so fucking boring no normal person talks about their gc with the same people again do u have no other conversational points smh

in year 11 it got so bad to the point where once i sat with them and they all just left! like they took their stuff and moved to the table behind me i wanted to cry so bad i did at home i think its the worst one out of all of these because it happened to my face? idk saffa was horrible too but this was just “were leaving” idk like ive never felt as horrible as i did in that moment i cant even describe how im feeling rn reliving it

its okay bc i made friends with my best friend from sciences + history bc our surnames are next to each other so we always sat together! i honestly clung to this girl after that bc i refused to spend a second longer with that other group after 3 years of enduring not even being liked by ur friends so i made friends with her friends which was easy bc yes! 

so by the first term of year 12 i had three friends! in fact one of them was like ur not having a birthday party??? im taking u out to eat so my first birthday event thing in literally years was all thanks to arun i am honestly so grateful for him he didnt even go bc he was busy and we planned it the day before my birthday but it was literally me and two friends eating pizza at zizzis and im crying so much rn but year 12 was when i found people who genuinely cared about me

we established a group of like 8 lol and were planning a holiday for the end of year 13! very skam of us! we had a gc and everything! we were gonna go to spain bc im spanish so i could speak!

this trip was unspoken of in year 13 and i was like lol kinda weird um okay but nope nothing weird about it they just created a chat without me and were still going to spain!!! one of them even sent me screenshots of their airbnb to translate its like u want me to know lol

i did complain to one of them but thats it i was just hurt on my own and coronavirus happened so it got cancelled anyways so i won really

in yr 13 i also got closer to this boy called adam! i remember my friend was like you two would get on so well idk why ur not friends and i was like idk its adam lol do i really want to and yes i did bc he is in fact the isak to my sana! but anyways i hate him but i love him we have that kinda friendship where were alwAYS trying to beat the other one up and honestly the most heart felt goodbye when schools shut was between us both bc at first we were fighting and then he just stopped and his eyes softened and i was like whats wrong with you why arent u punching me and he went come here and we hugged and its like wow despite being a dick ill miss you

anyways so uhhh quarantine we skyped often it was fun and then restrictions were lifted i went to spain and the second i land they all stop talking in the gc????? like im abroad not dead why are u creating a new one??? this gc was agressively spammed so i know for a fact theres another im not stupid

i come back from spain and theyre like can we meet!!! we meet three weeks later and theyr like i missed u so much im so happy uou came i love you and it felt really genuine like they genuinely missed me

two days later i find out through snapchat theyve all gone on holiday together!!!!!!!!!!!!! all of them and just ofc didnt invite me they went to the beach for two days and kept posting about it and im so bitter about it like bro???????? why so secretive????? like i cried so much when i saw bc they still just idk why does every single friendgroup ive ever been in exclude me like i must be the problem theres no other explanation for it i am not the kind of person people want to have around i am so funny but im a bitch and will come for ur ass because i have the inability to lie i have no filter either which i know makes them dislike me i know it does but thats the price you oay for being my friend i just say things as it is becauxe i hate secrets bc secrets are always about excluding me so i rather be honest and upfront but that clearly puts people off bc im too upfront and im not getting a personality transplant im not tryna be boring but im so sick of always being the one on her own

adam was relevant uh hews my only friend rn he checked up on me the other day so cheers adam for making sure im not completely isolated

the funny thing is that all my friends hate adam bc “hes a dick” hes not he just says things how it is were so similar so if they hate adam they hate me and im over being hated lol bye!

i start uni next week and i clearly have no social skills so im not gonna make friends im so scared of being lonely i hate being left out

this went from sad to full on angry like i was crying at some point and now im fuming like im so hot rn my blood pressure isnt doing okay

[thorsstorms]

The Bestfriend

Winter Soldier/James x Reader (soulmate AU)

She thought she had grown out of her night mares, until she has another years later, and she remembers it this time in vivid detail. The heartbreaking sounds of a man in pain. Her soulmate was not what she expected, but shared dreams means they are your soulmate, right? She was going to love him no matter what.

Warnings: Shit ton of angst and worry.

Marvel Masterlist

The Bestfriend

She stared at the TV screen on her floors’ lobby wall, watching it with peeled eyes just as a few coworkers next to her were. It was only a normal morning, they all start the same. But what kind of morning is it ever when something like this happens. Not to compare it to 9/11 but.. That was also a very normal morning. No one expects to be bombed while enjoying the start their morning. Especially not congressmen and women, leaders from around the world, and her own boss.

She could not think straight, watching as they covered what happened only minutes ago.

“Has anyone heard from Mr. Stark?” She hears someone ask from behind her. Mumbles were there in reply but she turned away from the screen and strutted straight back into her office, shutting the door behind her. It was alarming. What if the tower was next? Who was one to know?

She called Peppers’ cellphone with the land line sitting on her desk. It rings and rings as she taps on the desk nervously. Of course Pepper does not answer, to her own dismay. It was silly to think she would.

She left the tower, rushing the entire way home. She really just wanted to be in her safe space. Her apartment was cozy, nothing bad can happen within her walls, surely. Besides, she could do her own work at home. All she needed was her laptop and cell phone. Emails were easy to handle. The only reason she got her own office in the first place was because Mr. Stark, now just Tony to her, was asking for special favors that were not in her job description. There were little things… purchases, meetings, deliveries that he didn't want Pepper to worry about. Ahem, know about, so she did a little black mail. She was so sick of her little cubicle. She found it unnecessary if she could do it from home but her boss wanted her there, so she never complained. The office was such an upgrade though. The view, the large oak desk and the couch. Not to mention the wall of her own books and items of her own pleasure. The third coziest place to her. The second being her own apartment; the first is an almost forgotten dreamscape garden with her favorite person in the world.

She still considers her special James as her favorite person, despite the feeling of abandonment. She tried not to dwell on it anymore. She liked to pretend he was out there living his life happy without her, not bearing to think about an alternative.

She left messages for both Tony and Pepper saying that she went home, as well as over two thirds of the building. If they needed her for dealing with PR they knew they could just call, but until then she would be doing her work from home.

The TV got turned on after she settled herself on the couch. Her phone was eerily silent on the end table, everything felt eerily silent. The TV was her choice of background noise while she wrapped a blanket around her and opened her laptop knowing that she was going to be more than busy with Tony’s emails, considering.

~

“Yes, I’m fine Mom. I left the tower a few hours ago, right after it happened.” Her family knew where she worked, of course. Doing her own work became increasingly harder to do when calls and texts started to flood in as the news spread, all to make sure she was okay. She closed her own eyes and laid her head on the back of the couch. Overwhelmed was an understatement.

She listened to the ramblings of a protective, yet loving mother. She was always so worried for her daughters’ safety. Especially with no one else to keep an eye on her.

It seems like everytime she gets out or scrolls social media there was another couple. An engagement, a pregnancy, a new house together. Everyone is finding their soulmates while she gets to watch. Everything was happening around her and she was just there, along for the ride. Nothing exciting ever happened.

Times like these her mother wished her daughter could find her soulmate sooner than later. Her mother was clueless as to her daughters knowledge of her own solmate, or even her lack of knowledge on her soulmate.

He’ll show up, she tells herself every night.

“The bomber has been identified as James Barnes, also known as the Winter Soldier.”  

The world freezes as she stares at the screen. A close up shot of a masked man.

It couldn't be.

She feels her heart ache, tear in two with hope that he’s alive and fear that he’s alive.

They’ve made a mistake, she thinks.

“No, no.” She whispers to herself. The call was long forgotten and ended with automatic fingers. She covers her mouth as she watches the screen begging it for more information, but not much was given. Other then, “orders to shoot on site.”

She doesn’t hear herself as she cries into her hands, but feels the lump of fear try to morph into a feeling of relief that he was alive. She feels frantic. He’s so close to her. She may be in New York, but he was not too far. D.C. is not too far.

He’s real.

She doesn’t think as she dials Tony’s number again. He has to do something. She’s going to tell him that James is her soul mate. The dial tone ends and she clips the call off knowing he’ll never listen to a voice message. She types a sloppy text, fingers too shakey but way to urgent to fix it.

“Tony plese call me i saw the news you cant let them kill james hes my soulmte i promise ill explain bt dnt let htem. You have to do soemting”

“Tony pleae call me”

“You cant let them sget him first.”

He never texts her back. It’s horrible, he probably thinks she is crazy and she just knows he won’t understand. She can’t bring herself to eat. Or sleep, as much as she wants to sleep and get away from this mess.

~

It’s been two days and there has been silence on her end. The news has nothing new. There is know way to contact Tony, she’s tried everything. Building the courage to clean herself up a little and do something productive was not an easy task to accomplish so soon.

She moped around the apartment, not bearing to even look in the direction of her bedside table where a stack of dream journals lie. She knows what is in them. Her life with James was articulated on every page, ink covering every square inch, front and back. She can't look at them knowing that it could have all been for nothing.

It could never be for nothing, she would never regret what she feels for her James. Her James didn't do this, he could not have.

Her james was kind, and gentle with everything he touches. His fingers picking up a small pink Peonie and resting it on the table. Pink was his favorite. Her James was a curious soul, he always wanted to know more, even if he didnt vocalize it. She could see it in his eyes. Her James was full of life. He was trusting and showed his emotions through actions. She read him like a book.

Her James could not be this man they charge with killing the King of Wakanda. She doesn’t believe it for a second.  

A knock on the apartment door knocked her from wallowing and from the hole she was slowly digging her emotions into. She was sure she was at the stage of anger. How could anyone think of her James to be so cruel?

She quickly got dressed and walked to the door while  squeezing her hair dry from a shower. The persistent knocking continued until she whipped the door open, displaying her irritation. It was wiped quickly when she came face to face with Captain Rogers staring her down. She stiffened as the man stepped forward into her apartment, she backed up from him not protesting. He looks behind him, checking the halls right and left before shutting the door and locking it, turning to her.

She was tense, her face going pale by the look on his face.

Tony must’ve told him, and now Captain Rogers was here to get information so he could hunt down James and be the one to kill him himself.

“How do you know Bucky?” His voice commanded an answer.

“Who?” She asks, lowering her shoulders in confusion.

“Tony said you know him. Did Tony lie?” His tone was stern, giving no room for contemplation.

“James?” She tried to conceal how breathless her voice is. She doesn't want him to get hurt but honestly, Rogers was definitely scaring her.

“I- I don't, I. It wasn't him.” She mutters quickly. She is not sure how to go about this but knows she doesn't want to be the reason her James ends up with a bullet hole through his head. “He wouldn't do that. He’s not the Winter Soldier or whatever they are calling him. He-He just wouldn't do this! You have to believe me!”

She could feel tears welling in her eyes. She was not keen on confrontation, especially with someone that has such a demeaning presence but she would do anything to stand up for her James. If that means powering through and defying orders then she would gladly keep her lips sealed.

“I do believe you.”

“I promise that isn’t him- what?” He believes her?

“Just tell me how you think you know him!” Steve was close to losing his patience on this girl, raising his voice.

“He- I know him from my dreams. He’s my soulmate, we share dreams.” She rambles still stuck on the fact that he believes her. If he believes her then he might not want to hurt him, right? “I promise I don't know anything. I haven’t seen him in almost a year. He never let me ask about him. He didn't like talking about it. Really I don't know anything. But I promise you that James wouldn't have done this.”

She finishes trying to catch her breath.

“I’m going to find him.” Steve says. It’s final, she can hear it in his conviction.

“No, no, please,” She begs him, her heart thrown out the window and all sensible thought didn't make sense anymore. “Please they have the wrong person. James is good, he is kind. He loves me, I know he does.”

She feels a tear slip but she doesn't pay any mind to it. She was not letting Captain Rogers leave here without being convinced. He can't hurt James, he just can’t.

“He’s been hurt and there are bad people that have hurt him but he doesn't deserve to be framed for this. I don't know what he’s been through but I can only imagine. Captain,” She pleads, “if you could have seen him the first time I found him. He was screaming, for ages. Every night he was so terrified of something but I don't know what it was. They've done something bad to him but he’s escaped from them. He escaped the darkness.” She cries, ready to beg at her knees.

She is so consumed with convincing the man before her that she doesn't notice his own reaction to her words. How would it feel to hear that his best friend tortures himself with nightmares every night? Has been hurting for decades with no one to help him?

His eyes water at the thought but pushes it away. Steve reaches for her arms, but she flinches away from him, rocketing to the other side of the room.

Steve’s hands shoot in front of him to show that he earns no harm to her, his brow furrowing at the fact that she was scared of him, “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I won’t let anyone hurt him,” he assures her.

She calms, wiping her face and clasping her shaking hands behind her back. Who was she to argue with his declaration to keep her James safe.

“I don’t understand, Captain Rogers.” She mutters but he hears her loud and clear.

“He’s my best friend.” He takes a few steps closer to her, showing his hands in submission. He wasn't going to hurt her. “From before I went in the ice, he’s been my best friend since we were young. I dont- I dont know whats happening or why he’s still alive, I’ve run into him before. Hydra has done something to him. But I’m going to get him back.”

“Hydra?” She asks, her face darkening in confusion. “Is, is that what the darkness is called?”

“I assume so. I get it, when I find him, you will be the first to know.” He watches her face brighten up, a small twitch of her lips at the thought of seeing him in person. Alive and hopefully, well. “And please, call me Steve.”

Steve does not stay much longer with her. She has a number to contact him and vise versa but he leaves without giving her much more information. How cruel is it to turn this into a waiting game?

[thisartofeveryday]

For those of you who thought I should make my life story into a book…here is the outline. For the sake of clarity as you are reading, let me explain who the characters are. The kids from my Dads first marriage: Jim1, Patty, Seana. The kids from my Mom’s (Mary Ellen) first marriage: Mary Jane and Jim2. My brother that I am a full sibling to is Charles (chuck).

I think you might know that 95% of our lives are lived from the unconscious mind. From birth to age 7 a childs mind is in Theta wave (hypnosis) and everything that they learn in those years (mainly through observation and repetition) is the program that their minds run for their entire lives. Knowing this – I look back on the first 7 years of my life.

I think we moved 7 times in those 7 years. I am certain it was because of Dads extreme anger management problems and the fact that he is a sociopath, a pedophile and a rapist. Zero stability or chance to make lasting friendships. My dad was sexually abusing me and unpredictably violent. I was terrified of him. I was being terrorized/bullied by my brother, Chuck, who was every bit the sociopath that my dad is. My mom was overwhelmed by the number of children she was responsible for - none of which she actually wanted- and add to that, her husband was sexualizing all of the kids, so really being the last of her kids I was the last of her problems. Being the youngest (and as traumatized as I was), I was quiet and easy to forget about or push to the side. The older kids were the ones in the spotlight and where all the attention went. They were enrolled in activities and they were more the same age, so they were a unit. I was just an observer of them. I felt so left out and forgotten. Always.

I was a mistake and a burden (dads exact words to me on my 11th birthday). Mom made sure I knew that she thought I was mentally retarded- she would joke about it all the time. (I guess she never made peace with her sister being autistic) She also loved humiliating me even when I made it clear she was hurting me. Remember her sausage fingers joke or how many years I got called Boomer? I absolutely hated both of those things, made it clear, and yet she refused to give up the name calling and humiliation. There was very little respect for my personal boundaries. Dad would assault me in the middle of the night and I would wet the bed out of fear- then he would make me sleep in it to teach me a lesson. Mom would do nothing to help me, though she was awake in the middle of the night when I would work up the courage to go into their room to ask for help. She let him treat me like that. Goddamn…I remember the night terrors and being scared to be in my room at night because the scary man was sitting in the rocking chair, in the dark, next to my bed.

I have a memory of being in the garage in our house in South Windsor. I was playing with our basset hound, General…I was crawling around on the floor and the dog mounted me and was dry humping me. Dad got this sick laugh and let it happen. Mom walked in and got mad at him, but did nothing to help me. My personal boundaries were nonexistent. Nobody was protecting me from him. I remember him eating the food off my plate at dinner…or kissing me on the ear or touching me when I would tell him I hated it and to stop. I remember the baths dad would have me take with him and how he taught me to touch and work his dick. I remember the photos he would take of me after the bath. I remember being 7 years old and trying to lay on his bed and be sexy enough for him. I remember kissing mom passionately the way that dad taught me to and mom getting upset and asking me where I learned that. I remember having a baby doll that I drew all over, angrily, with lipstick. I remember being scared because my ass was bleeding and I told mom while her brother and sisters were visiting and she shushed me and scurried me away. I remember him also beating the shit out of me…sometimes for no reason. I remember being deeply attracted to and absolutely terrified of him. I was 7.  These are the only memories I have of my dad. I don’t remember him being there for me, or interested in me as a person, or engaged in anyway. I just remember him being what I now know is a predator.

7 to 13: I remember some stability in Connecticut because we stayed there for three years… but I also remember having moments of being deeply depressed and hiding in the basement of the house writing notes that I hoped someone would find, asking for help to get me out of there. When I look back, those were my first experiences with disassociation from stress and waves of major depression. While I was being assaulted during those years, those years were all about Mary Jane, Seana, and Jim2. These three had each other. These three were a team. I was just an observer to your lives. I had no voice, no opinion, no importance, never truly included and absolutely my feelings went unheard and did not matter. We can say it was the age difference, sure, that’s part of it…but that’s also just an excuse. Things could have been done to validate my importance too.  I had Charles bullying me….I had my Dad assaulting me. I was so alone.

My internal voice wants to shout: Why did nobody see this? Why did nobody help me? Where were my siblings? I guess everyone was doing the best they could…

Literally anyone looking in knowing the truth could have easily assessed that this was a horribly destructive environment for any child to grow up in. I know dad was doing this to all the kids. I wasn’t the only one. It is absolutely stunning to me that through the years of my life I have consistently been blamed by my Mary Ellen (narcissist/borderline personality disorder) and the people who chose to listen to her twisted opinions that there was something wrong WITH ME.  I mean, logically the mental health issues I have faced my entire life are perfectly normal and healthy reactions to a situation that was deeply flawed. But somehow the blame has always fallen on me.

The very first thing I think when I think of my mom is her asking me “Whats wrong with you Melissa”. Ive lost count of how many times she has asked me that very question.

I now know that its just deflection. Queen Narcissist cant take responsibility for her actions so she puts it on the person who she always denied a voice. That’s nice. Very loving and motherly. Doesn’t fix the 40 some odd years of my life that I believed her and wanted to die.

Right around age 9 or 10, we move again. I remember it being a big scandal – I think the truth came about that my dad is a sociopath, a pedophile and a rapist. (By the way, that’s in my DNA. I get to live my life connected to that. I look just like my dad. I think like a Painter. It’s fucking unsettling.)  I remember all the pressure to say nothing about the move and to constantly behave as though we were the perfect family and nothing was wrong. So incredibly demented.

I remember a HUGE fight about Seana and Jim2 staying behind in Connecticut. (by the way: I also remember Jim1 leaving for the Marines and wondering where my brother went and why he never talked to me. At one point he came back to visit and gave me a beautiful geisha doll in a glass box that mom destroyed in a fit of anger at me…she intentionally violently knocked it off the top of my dresser in one of her vindictive off the handle rages…Im sure at 8 years old I totally did something to deserve it, right.)

And, of course I remember the night Seana was killed. (why did the man that killed her not serve jail time? Why are bad people never held accountable?) Dad wasn’t there. Again, Dad wasn’t there. As I recall he was having an affair with some woman in Arizona? Mom was already distraught to be back in Michigan. That night, I remember being awake before the call came in…watching the clock radio in my bed… it had a short in the wire that would spark. I was listening to the Beatles: My guitar gently weeps…. To this day, I hate the Beatles.The phone rang. Mom screamed to you “Mary Jane, OMG, Seana is Dead”. I didn’t understand what happened. I just knew we were packing up like we did so many times before to take yet another long drive across country. It felt to me like another move. I didn’t understand death or that my sister was gone forever. I didn’t get it.  

(an aside: I struggled in school. When I was in Beginning Algebra One for some reason that class would make me check out and I would always soul travel to the night Seana was killed and it felt like it was happening to me. I took that class 4 times including summer school before I passed.)

(later, when I was maybe 13, my dog got hit by a car in the street and now I knew what death was so I freaked out like Mom did when Seana died and I remember Mom shaming me: You cried more over than damn dog than you did at your sisters funeral. Very nice. Very motherly. Very supportive and kind of her.)

At Seanas funeral, I remember not knowing what was expected of me. I was just so focused on getting it right and who I was supposed to kiss (because that sexualized stuff was already so ingrained).

There were so many goddamn rules for behavior, (rich white republican ex-military country club going family that we were) and I remember getting it wrong and being scowled at all the time. Mom was always angry and stressed out. We had to BE someone and over and over again: “Don’t forget the family name” and how important our clan was (hilarious that she kept the Sterling last name because her current husband is too ethnic and this sounds classier to her than her own actual last name)….

Meanwhile, My developing sense of self was being assaulted and neglected/ignored out of me and I felt wrong all the time for every single action I took.

I think we moved back to North Carolina briefly and then to Florida? Whatever the case….

Then we move again. Again. Again. Now we are in Florida. Im 10. My parents are getting divorced. Mom is deeply goddamn depressed. My family is falling apart. I don’t know where my brothers and sister are. Everything is exploding. Im powerless and hostage to all this. I cannot underline the importance of that sense of being hostage to a situation that I was powerless to escape and having my feelings and my personhood completely ignored and erased. It consumed me. I wanted to die. I am, as always, the least of moms concerns.

In Florida I was so incredibly dissociative. I was experiencing C-PTSD. I remember feeling numb all over. Having no ability to react to this little girl that fell off her bike in front of me….I just stared at her…the adults nearby yelled at me for doing nothing. I went further into my head. I was so checked out. People just thought I was quiet or shy or retarded. I was deeply traumatized and needed help.

I remember Mary Jane and I sitting on the bed watching this music video by The Cars. In the video there is a woman who is laughing and crying. I remember asking MJ what she was doing because I do that too and I think she told me she was having a mental break down.  

I remember getting a Walkman and listening to the Police nonstop. That was my only retreat from how much I hurt. WHY DID NOBODY SEE THIS AND HELP ME?

I remember during that time that I was given another baby doll. I remember MJ and mom watching me play with it to see what I would do. I felt scared of them both and the creepy way they were lurking to watch me. I felt ganged up on. I couldn’t trust anyone. I was so alone. I wanted to die.

In Florida, I remember my birthday and dad cocking his fist back like he was going to punch me in the face…he did that sick laugh and told me he wished I was never born and that I was a mistake. (later when I told this to Patty she explained he punched her in the face on her 11th birthday. Im related to all that. That’s in my dna.)

My body was changing. I was getting my period. I felt crazy. I was in that HUGE school in Jacksonville and I had no friends and I was so scared. Everything was terrifying….and Dad was getting more unhinged thus Mom has Jim and Lynn move in to protect her and had you come back… and then I remember walking in to the living room in the middle of a sunny afternoon and mom on the pull out sofa, trying to make dad jealous, was fucking the guy who was there to buy the house  that we had just moved in to because we were MOVING AGAIN….

Not to mention, I remember MJ and I quickly taking Dads gun to the beach to bury it so he because he wanted to kill us all.

Im not even 13 yet….. Are you exhausted?

Any one of these things would make a fully functioning stable adult fold like a house of cards. “Whats wrong with you Melissa?”…. It took something like 20 years of therapy but now I have some clues to answer that question. Here are some more clues:

We finally make it to Boone. Mom followed her best friend, Mary Jane. After all that… that incredible pressure cooker of my pre teen childhood we arrive in bumfuck nowhere, North Carolina….and everyone is gone except the sociopath brother. The house is basically empty. Everyone abandoned ship. Where did my brothers and sisters go? I remember coming home after school and there would be nobody home. For my entire life I had come home to my family but now there was no one. I would sit on the couch and watch the clock with growing anxiety and cry until mom came home from work. It was beyond torturous. And then she would be pissed off that I needed her because she just got home from work. At this point Mom is just angry and exhausted all the time. She had to get a job outside the home for the first time in her life which she hated, she was sick of being a mom…she wanted it all to be over so she could have HER life. Charles was getting more and more abusive- physically and mentally and had to be sent away for our protection.

And then she starts dating Don Bailey. I think the sex must have been amazing because the guy was an utter low life. He was living off of her/my child support money… and beating the shit out of her. Their fights were never goddamn ending. I would hide in my room after school and not come out. I was so alone. I had no friends and no escape. Mom was friends with Mary Jane, not with me. Mom wanted nothing to do with me. One day we were driving home and I was so attached to her. I needed my mom so goddamn bad… I was struggling to make friends at yet another new school and the PTSD made me feel so distant from everyone but I had no words for what was wrong with me I just thought I was terrible at making friends (I remember this: pathetically I checked out a book at the library: How to be your own best friend)… She pulled the car over and told me “we cant be friends.” Mom has some glorified memory of us driving around looking for our favorite tree in Autumn… the only thing I remember is that conversation…her rejecting me when I needed her the most… after we moved to the town my sister lived in so she could be close to her.

Again, still no help with the major depression, the CPTSD… just a lot of blame “why cant you be happy Melissa…whats wrong with you?” and I cant be clear enough about this: all her spare time at home was spent on Don, not me. I didn’t have clubs and groups and activities that she as sure to enroll me in. I didn’t have my brothers and sisters there with me. It was just me, after all that, trying to figure it out.

I was a burden to her. She couldn’t wait to get rid of me and be done. I felt it always.

An aside: When she was unsure if she wanted to stay in Boone, I remember her asking Charles if we should stay or go back to Florida…after he chimed in with his answer, I gave my opinion which she angrily scoffed at me and told me it didn’t matter what I thought, Id go where they tell me to go.   My voice didn’t matter, I was a burden to her. I had no value as a person. I was powerless. So there I was in my bedroom that was the walkway between the living room and her room… at the mercy of whatever happened with no privacy or power over my life….. whats new.

Another aside: During that time we had gotten a dog that was a total pain in the ass for her to take care of. She gave it away while I was at school. I came home and the dog was gone and I was tearful thinking it ran away. She gave my dog away without telling me.

Then we moved out to Valley Crusis (9 miles outside of town…so isolated. I was so alone. The isolation was killing me. Where were my siblings. I needed help. I needed someone who was just there for me.) and Dons abusive behavior got even more extreme. I remember him picking me up from a concert that I was at….because he had sent Mom to the hospital with a sprained wrist and a busted lip. He was laughing about it when he told me to get in the car. Another time I remember Don looming in my bedroom door when Mom was at work and it was just us in the house… telling me: “Go ahead and call the police, nobody will believe you anyway.” I remember the woman who lived up the hill from us, with the curly hair…I think her name was Susan… coming down to the house while Mom and Don were gone and telling me If it ever gets too bad, you can always run up here. The neighbors knew I needed help. Where were my brothers and sisters? Where was my Mom? FUCK.

I remember Mom having many off the handle rages at me because I looked like a boy and my hair was crazy and I was so fucked up. I remember one morning after she had raged at me so hard that I was in stunned silence… we were sitting at breakfast at St Sinners and MJ kept looking at me, she knew something was wrong, I was clearly checked out and fucked up. I needed my sister. I had no voice or ability to speak up. I was scared of her husband, Glenn. Nobody helped me. Mom was the star of the brunch party!

I remember getting my first job at 15 and working at St Sinners…. Then, when mom bought the restaurant I stopped getting paid. She cut me off from my paycheck and told me it was my “duty to the family”… but she had Jim2 and his first wife Lynn there working and they were getting paid…and also stealing her money to fuel their coke habits. She didn’t value me, or my efforts but her golden son Jim can do no wrong even when he is fucking her out of her business.

I remember Jim2 offering me coke at a house party and John Golden and another friend getting me out of there away from my own brother. I remember Lynn being LIVID that I would stop by their house when I was lonely and wanted my family but instead I got shamed for thinking I could stop by and see them…and mom would tell me that “they had BUSY LIVES and I should leave them alone.”

I remember being so fucked up and alone in Boone….I mean, I now know I was just in shock and experiencing major depression. Mom kept asking me Whats wrong with you Melissa…when I was your age I had to choose between boyfriends… etc. Its incredible to me how Mom normalized my childhood abuse and completely erased my feelings or my personhood then blamed me for somehow being a problem child or wrong in whatever way….more incredible: people believed her.  

During those years in Boone I remember her doing things like openly making fun of me when I thought I might be gay, fixing regular hamburgers and telling me they were tofu when I became vegetarian…starting a burn pile in the back yard full of toxic things after I told her how important recycling was to me and laughing at me as I cried…..every chance she had to make me feel awful about being me and disrespected she took.

Once I visited her at her office and she told me I was “too ugly to look at and she didn’t want anyone to know I was her daughter and to never come to her office again.”

Shes right, we were not friends. She was a jealous mean girl, obsessed with appearances and her shitty boyfriend.

Lets not forget when she, with Mary Janes help, stacked my portfolio with MJs lithographies and coached me how to lie to get me in to Governors school for the summer. She wanted me gone and she got her wish. I remember feeling like a fraud that summer. I wasn’t good enough to be there. I had to lie to be included. I remember she didn’t even drive me there. She had Don do it. He harassed me in the car all the way there, 3 hours…. then dropped me…16… off on the curb in front of the college and drove away. All the other kids had parents excitedly helping them get set up in their rooms…excited about their major accomplishment of getting in to Governors school… I was there with my milk crate of shit, a fraud. alone. Acting like a tough girl who didn’t need anyone. I was a pro at that. Mission accomplished, she was rid of me.

I remember how deep my depression was becoming by the time I was 18. That last year of high school I would bang my head against my bedroom wall in an attempt to knock myself out, in hopes that I would get sent away to a treatment center or something. I couldn’t take all the fighting between her and Don. I fucking hated him and he was in my house and there was nothing I could do about it. I tried to throw myself down the back stairwell at school. I barely graduated high school my depression was eating me alive.

Amazing that nobody IN MY FAMILY SAW THAT I NEEDED HELP. I was invisible. Mary Ellen cast her proclamation that all was well, she was amazing and I was a problem child and that was that.

I have a million stories about Mom demoralizing me during those years…. Whats weird is that I have no memory of my Mary Jane there. I think she was so involved with Glenn and way up the mountain, I had no way to reach her. And I was scared of her husband Glenn. And, we were never close. And, she was Team Mary Ellen…. So I was just alone and wanted to die. Sincerely. Goddamn. Let it end.

I remember Don telling me that Mom was using my child support payment to make her car payment. So I asked her about where my child support was going and she told me she used it for my Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance…. So I called the insurance company to see if I had coverage…. They had no record of me. She was, again, a liar….

When I graduated high school she couldn’t get me out of the house fast enough. She pawned me off on my boyfriend Gebeaux and expected him to simply take care of me. We broke up. He didn’t sign up for that. I was basically kicked out of the house in valley crusis. I wasn’t prepared for life on my own. I wasn’t ready. She just wanted to be done being a mom so Hey..I came back to the house one day and all my stuff was packed and that was that. I had to figure it out. Fuck me.  

At one point during that time I was living in a trailer with my friend Stacy. Mom was horrified about this. I was getting food stamps and she was so ashamed of me for being so low class. She came to the trailer and was completely off the handle. She said there was “no air” in there and grabbed a 2x4 and smashed out all the windows. Mind you from her perspective it was just another example of what a loser I am, living in a trailer on food stamps how did I end up such a piece of shit when she is such a wonderful mother… it must be because there is something inherently wrong about me.

She has seen me as trash who is incapable of being anything great my entire life.

Somewhere in there she stopped dating Don and started dating lawyer Rand Sterling…who broke her ribs multiple times and literally pushed her out of a moving car and then she walked 5 miles back to his house to be with him.  That relationship took her to Texas. She followed the money. The insanity of that relationship is all I heard about from her. She needed Jim2 to come protect her from her husband multiple times. I absorbed all of this through her very rare but insane emails to me. She has always used me as her emotional manipulation dumping ground.

I had my first total mental break right around 19 years old. I was fetal position on the floor at my girlfriends house… Jenn… I couldn’t stop crying for multiple days and I felt my mind split in two. I literally went into a black hole and was begging for death. Jenn and the next door neighbor scooped me up off the floor and drove me to the Watauga County Mental Health and got me some help… but at this point I was having a total mental collapse… the part of me that was traumatized was a child denied her voice or any recognition of her Self, so I had no way to articulate what was wrong and Mom had denied and normalized the abuse and denied me voice and my personhood for so long that I had ZERO chance of articulating what was wrong… it was buried so deep inside of me and I was so scared to trust anyone…. I was experiencing schizophrenia and Major depression.

Jenn helped me with my depression. Jenn made sure I was housed and fed. Jenn took care of me. I owe her my life.

I mean, that is an extreme mental health episode. Where was my family? How could none of the people who were supposed to love me the most see any of this? Why did none of them help me? Why did all of them think I was to blame? (my guess: Team Mary Ellen)  

Somewhere in that year my friends were moving to Chapel Hill so I packed up the car that my child support paid for and I went down the mountain. She threatened to call the police on me for stealing the car.  She told me I needed discipline and needed to go into the Army. She just didn’t know what to do with me…such a problem child. If I remember correctly, you echoed her sentiments. Everyone was always so angry at me for being so wrong and so bad. None of my family (meaning MJ and mom because my brothers had long bailed on me and my extended family has never made a single attempt to reach out to me or know me at all.)  were my friend, or loving, kind or compassionate.

I got away….I went to Chapel Hill and lived with my best friends Kerry, Lesley, Julie, and two other guys in Kerry’s Moms rental house. I was working at the Columbia Street Bakery and dating this boy, Richard…. Who happened to be a really abusive drug dealer… who held me down one night and violently orally raped me and when I called mom for help she told me with the exasperation of a mother who had supposedly tried so hard to do the right thing and raise her child with love and support but that child was just tragic and terminally fucked :

“I don’t know whats wrong with you Melissa, I guess you just like the bad boys.”  

Again, no self reflection on her behalf…she did nothing to help me.

I didn’t know how to get away from Richard who was playing mind fuck with me and I was getting high with him (LSD) …which was basically, me being drugged and him using me for sex but not being loving or kind in any way (felt like home)  Eventually, Richard got busted for selling a page of lsd to an undercover cop and threatened to kill me because he thought it was my fault… so I had to get out of there and I went to New York to chill out and work for the summer at the Omega Institute of Holistic Learning… to just be around hippies and eat good food. I hung out with Baba Ram Dass and Ben & Jerry…and took a class on the whirling dervish… These moments when I wasn’t in the pressure cooker of my life were both brilliant because I needed healing but also the worst because all this trauma would start to surface and I didn’t know what it was or how to speak about it. I would start to shatter again.

I believed it was my fault and there was something inherently wrong with me.

I was so lost. I needed help. I needed a parent or loving compassionate family or someone trusted to guide me through that time in my life. I had no one but my friends from North Carolina who were just as fucked up as me. I needed help. I needed help. Oh my god, I needed help.

Omega ended…I had no money to get out of there, nobody to turn to for help, no clue what to do next, I certainly couldn’t go back to Mom who hated me and was living with Rand so fuck that… I had no idea where my brothers and sisters were and no relationship with them so that wasn’t on my mind as an option…..so I caught whatever ride I could get and ended up in Boulder. One of my friends from Omega hooked me up with her cousin for a month and I tried to make it work… it was basically winter in Colorado at this point and I was out there door canvassing for Green Peace making no money and freezing to death. Just walking door to door for Greenpeace… looking in on other families and their loving lives together. I was so fucking sad. I was hungry and scared and completely out of options. I had to get out of there.

I called Mom for help. She said: “You got yourself into this, get yourself out”…. And hung up on me. The bitch hung up on me. I was stranded and so scared and I needed my mom. She hung up on me. She blamed me. She wanted to punish me for being such a problem. She was done being a mom. She hung up.

I remember having gone to the Planned Parenthood to get some medical help because I was sick. I explained my situation and the nurse looked at me incredulously and said “where are you parents?” I explained to her that Mom hung up on me.  I was devastated, living in a constant state of shock. Scared out of my sense of self or ability to connect to the present moment.

I was a fractured soul in every possible meaning.

My month at my friends place was over and I had to find an apartment or live on the streets. It took me another month of begging whatever guy I could find to give me a place to stay and then I contacted the boy I was dating at Omega, Scott, and asked him for money to get a bus back to North Carolina. He helped me. Bless him. He got me out of there.

I got on the Greyhound and ended up going to Idaho to visit with my friend Stacy (who I lived in the trailer with) and stay with her for a couple weeks to get grounded and feel safe with a friend for a minute. My mental break was coming back full force. I was inconsolable.  I remember laying on her bed fully having an out of body experience from the stress and being so disoriented. She is so patient and kind. She took care of me. When my time with Stacy was up, the next layer of insanity: I got on the Greyhound and took a 5 day no sleep, no food journey across country. I got chased down, carrying all my bags of things and looking like a little hippie… on a layover, by a group of drunk men in Wyoming…they almost got me but I found a laundromat that was open and full of people so I ran inside and hid until my bus was leaving again. I was terrified. By the time I made it back to Lesley and Kerrys house in Chapel Hill it was New Year night…I got some hours back at the Columbia Street bakery I was working at and got some money rolling in.

I want to mention that Poverty, which I have lived most my life in, is no joke and more damaging than anyone outside of the experience can understand. It is cyclical, like bi polar…. Living paycheck to paycheck or however you get just enough to maybe hold on for a moment longer but never knowing if more will be coming is a terror. Always feeling like the bottom is going to drop out…and never knowing when youre going to eat…and what that does to your hormones and your mental health…. Poverty is proven to damage people on a cellular level and have lasting effects that lead to chronic illness.

After making it back to NC, few weeks later the boy from Omega came to Chapel Hill and told me he wanted to marry me and wanted me to move to Boston with him. So we took a little road trip and eventually ended up in Boston. As a surprise to no one sane, that was not a lasting relationship. So after a year of misery in Boston, (more poverty, more loneliness, more no family) Scott drove me back to Chapel Hill and that’s when the girls and I all moved up to Asheville. All the while, checking in with Mom who was yelling and shaming me for being such a fuck up.

I can’t underline enough: I was disassociating the entire time. I was having episodes of schizophrenia. I was experiencing major depression and bi polar disorder. The stress of my entire life was more than I could handle and I had no support and no compassion and nobody validating my experience or me as a person. People just thought that was who I was. I was just fucked in every way possible and believed she was right and all that was normal and I was a terrible piece of shit. She had everyone believing that.  

Mary Jane believed her. She echoed her sentiments to me. Go Team Mary Ellen.

I moved up to Asheville and got somewhat stabilized. I was again living with my friends and I got a decent job at the Laughing Seed Cafe. I met Mark and I had decided to go to college because I thought that would make Mom happy and I needed to DO something with myself.  

Mark and I were together maybe 8 weeks before we moved across country and started a life together. Eight weeks.

I was so adept at being a high functioning  dissociative major depressive and I had no way to articulate what was wrong with me (all that stuff that had been normalized and ignored…all the ways my feelings and personhood was erased)… I just knew something evil bad was in me and it took me out from time to time. I thought it was my fault and I was ashamed of myself.  I was living in a constant state of shock. CPTSD.

So, I get myself into college and thanks to Mark and his truck we move across country.

When I hear my friends now talking about saving money for their kids college and really setting them up for success by helping them choose a school and get settled in or making sure they don’t have to work so they can focus on their studies and have a healthy social life with friends and do activities Im so confused. I didn’t know parents and families helped their kids with such things. I didn’t understand that in other families they help, protect and support. I made it through without any of these blessings.

Mark and I get a shitty apartment (the ceiling caved in out of rot and the place was full of roaches. The property managers stole my drum set and we would catch them on the roof at night peeping through the skylight to watch us), I get a full time job managing a restaurant…in addition to schooling full time...Im overwhelmed by the workload, scared to be across country, freaked out by college and the expectations… it was too much. I was away from the source of my abuse and things started to surface… I NEEDED HELP.

I needed my family except, honestly, I have none. Additional mindfuck: when I tried to talk to people about this I get the old trope about how everyone has tough relationships in their families and I need to love my mom and work it out with her.SO I KEPT GOING BACK FOR MORE WITH MOM BECAUSE I NEEDED HER LOVE SO BAD AND I THOUGHT THE PROBLEM WAS ME. Further, because I was so regressed I just sounded like a petulant child when I tried to talk about the abuse I had no accurate words for so nobody outside the experience really got it or could conceive how bad things really were for me… why would they? My family is extraordinarily fucked up, like nobody I have ever known.

In college, nobody comes to check on me and make sure Im ok. Nobody was calling. Id get rare emails or letters. When I would tell mom how hard it was, mom would mock me and tell me to suck it up when I would reach out to her and “complain” about how things were going for me… See, because its always my fault and Im never measuring up.

An aside: To this day, 40 years later, Jim2 has yet to even send me a single email to check and make sure Im ok or get to know me at all. He has never responded to the multiple emails I have sent him, so I stopped reaching out. I used to cry to mom about it and she would tell me that he “has a busy life” and I had to understand that’s why I wasn’t a priority to him. Personally, I cant imagine anything being more important than making a connection with your little sister, but I guess Im biased and not like him: busy getting high and drunk and being a cool party guy.  

During my college is when he married Lori. I worked over time and got a plane ticket to be at his wedding. I was sick to my stomach at the idea of having to be around my family but I love my brother and I wanted to be there. He ignored me the entire time I was there. I was a HUGE FUCKING DEAL that I could afford the ticket and made the effort to be there for him. I showed up for him….He ignored me. I was devastated and felt invisible and so worthless.

Another aside: I was 24 and that very first Christmas on the west coast Mom calls me, driving herself to the ER to get her stomach pumped from a suicide attempt. She was dramatically telling me her goodbye in case she didn’t make it. I was stressed and powerless beyond the telling of it. I cried all the way through that Christmas. Again: Mom always uses me as her emotional manipulation dumping ground. Out of all her children, Im the one with heart and she gets the sympathy she is working me over for.

During my college years, I would ask Mom for help she would mock me “Im sending baby Sava (MJs daughter) a care package…are you a baby? Do you need one too?”

Mean girl jealousy that I went to college and her life was taken from her by her children….

In college I had no friends, just Mark. No time for activities and my mental health was so fragile I had no ability to form friendships. I was barely hanging on. I would be catatonic in my time at home. We had this geometry screensaver on the computer and I would be frozen staring at it for hours while my brain felt like it was going to shatter. I was an absolute wreck and a shell of a person…but I was determined to prove I could graduate college and I wasn’t a fuck up. I wanted Mom to be proud of me.

I guess it should come as no surprise that after 4 years of no time off, working and schooling 80 hours a week, getting zero support emotionally or financially from my family …. that absolutely NOBODY FROM MY FAMILY CAME TO CELEBRATE ME AT MY GRADUATION.

Nobody came. Nobody celebrated me. Nobody saw the value in me or my hard work.

I remember being on the phone with Jim2 the day of my graduation. I had called him to ask why he wasn’t there for me. I was in tears. He told me that if that was the worst thing that ever happened to me, congratulations on your nice life. He thought it was bullshit that I was so upset. He thought I was being a baby. This loser dropped out of college which he had a scholarship for and did nothing with his life but drugs and alcohol and saw no value in me or what I did on my own. He didn’t show up for me.

Me going to college and graduating on time with full credits was a major fucking accomplishment on so many levels.

Not one of my family was there for me and I will never forgive or forget that.

We moved to the same fucking town Mary Jane was in when she was in college and never ONCE did anyone come to check on me and be interested in what I was doing or validate how amazing it was that I was in school and making it happen on my own.  

When I talk about how alone I feel in life, its in my bones.

I had worked over time to get Mom a plane ticket so she would be there for my graduation and she called me a couple days before to tell me pathetically “She couldn’t get the day off work.”  (Lie: I think she has some legal issue and couldn’t leave the state or something like that.)

After she called to bail on my graduation… at 27 years old… I had a heart attack on my walk home. I collapsed in my living room. Mark found me on the floor when he got home from work. She literally broke my heart. I was devastated. I was in shock. I was dissociating. I was so fucked up. I needed help. Poor Mark. He didn’t know what was wrong and neither did I.

Shortly after my graduation, MJ graduated and she drove to see her and was sure to tell me about it. I mean, they are BFFs so, no surprises there. GO TEAM MARY ELLEN, right?  

Whats wrong with you Melissa? My family. My family is whats wrong with me.

During college I was stressed to the point of being catatonic when I wasn’t at work or school. My mental health was tanking in every possible way… but the pressure cooker of school and work kept me hemmed in and my desire to prove that I was someone worth loving (because god knows I wasn’t going to be loved just for being me…No one was simply going to show up for me or simply be there. I had to earn it.)

…. then we moved to Seattle and I had three years at Amazon in that pressure cooker of a job… (10 to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week) working as a Lead running a team of 200 people to keep me too busy to feel my feelings or connect to emerging myself.  

At some point after I graduated and it no longer mattered, I remember MJ came to visit me one time. That was nice of her. Thank you for trying, MJ.

But heres the fun part: Mark. Mark loved me.

Mark is the very first and to this day ONLY person who has been intimately involved in my life who loves and respected me just as I am.

It was Mark loving me that allowed me to start developing a voice and for that very young very traumatized person inside of me to start coming to the surface. Mark was the very best thing that has ever happened to me….and, ironically, it was because he loved me that all that evil finally came to the surface…and was our demise.

All the things dad did to me, all the never ending abuse from mom that sought to vilify and demoralize me… all of the hurt from the abandonment from my brothers and sisters… all that evil came up because he Loved me enough to make me feel safe and supported…I just didn’t know that then and couldn’t see or feel that he was the most tremendous gift this life has ever given me ….

and I started sexually assaulting myself in my sleep (woke up one time with an entire box of tampons inside of me and had to go to the doctor to get them all out). I would throw punches in my sleep. I was having an utter mental breakdown/ breakthrough… and then I started acting out sexually with other men that I met online. I felt like I was being puppet mastered from some evil unknown source. I was manic and acting out sexually. That default programing from my childhood was calling the shots. I didn’t have a sense of self so I was acting from what I knew and what Dad taught me about myself and the self-worth that mom made sure I didn’t have.

I say acting out sexually. What I should say is reenacting the trauma…which there was so very much of. I was on auto pilot and at that time if you asked me if that’s what I wanted to be doing I would have said yes out of programming but the core truth of who I am knew it was not at all right or who I am or what I wanted…that core didn’t have a voice yet.

2001, Amazon had laid us all off. I got hired working at a treatment center for abused youth.  I was major depressive and would be fetal position on the floor and cry for a month at a time but I didn’t know why or what was wrong… I was just deeply goddamn depressed and wanted to die. All the time. Goddamn. Let it end.

Poor Mark. He didn’t know what was happening. He was the perfect boyfriend. He tried so hard to help me. I honestly could not have asked for a more perfect man to come in to my life…and he was stuck with me. Mentally fucked Melissa with no clue what was wrong… and worst of all, I thought I had to get out of my relationship with Mark.

Crazy,right?….I asked Mom for help. She had no relationship with me and no clue what was going on in my life…She is a complete train wreck of a human and so deep in her own denial and so wrapped up in her latest abusive relationship with a rich man that she could honestly give a fuck about me and thought the worst of me anyway… so yeah, break up with him and oh my god Melissa I don’t know what to do with you.

I kept cheating on him over and over again. I was off the rails with my manic depression. Spending, fucking, driving my car too fast…. Through a chat room, I got mixed up with a man that felt like Dad to me and I was entranced and captive to him. Mark asked me to marry him and I broke up with him, moved out.. I was off the rails with the sexual acting out/re traumatizing myself.

(Mark immediately met the woman he has since married and has been with for the past 18 years. I would give anything to have that man back in my life…Throughout these years, my memory of how he treated me has been the standard by which I have held all other men and nobody measures up….Beyond his character and integrity, the art, music and intelligence that lives within this handsome and kind man is incomparable. I blew it. Fuck. I pushed away the most incredible man I ever knew and he loved me. I still love him to this day.)

At that same time I heard a rumor at work that one of the counselors (reggie, 24) had slept with a client(raya,16). I knew reggie was capable of it (I had slept with him) so I reported it to the Unit manager, Big Mike. ……What I didn’t know is that Reggie, Mike and the guy I was so into, Cash were all friends who grew up together and in the same gang……

and so it was that month that I moved out from Mark that the man that I was so “in love with”, Cash, drugged me at a house party and raped me with 4 of his friends to teach me a lesson for reporting Reggie.

I remember sharing a beer with Cash and then feeling tired and dizzy and asking to lay down and then multiple hours of being barely coherent and having no control over my body and being passed around for everyone to fuck over and over again.

Cash was a sex trafficker and grooming me all along. No wonder he felt like home. My need for family and my daddy issues in full effect, I couldn’t break the spell. I was terrified of him and wanted him to think I was so sexy…..He was masterful with the mindfuck and kept me under his thumb at all times which felt like attention and love to me and was intense enough that I could feel it.

At that time, in Washington, you had a statue of limitations of 8 years to report a rape.

Mind you, I was so dissociative and still had no idea I was a person or had any rights to my thoughts or my body… I was really goddamn checked out at that point in my life….I was in shock. The childhood assault trauma was just surfacing and I had no words for it because it had been normalized and my feelings negated by my parents So, I didn’t know if I had been raped or not….it took me years to figure out that its wrong to drug someone and have all your friends fuck them…

I didn’t know I should or could ask for help. I didn’t believe I could be helped. I didn’t think anyone would help me. I didn’t know I was a person. I didn’t know I had rights. I didn’t know I could escape or how.

ANYONE CONFUSED ABOUT WHY I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO GET HELP OR THAT I DESERVED IT???????

Whats wrong with you, Melissa?

In the meanwhile, Cash was making sure I wouldn’t report it.

He knew I was away from Mark, had a history of sexual assault and no family, and that I lived in absolute poverty so there was zero chance I could escape him.

I was in so much trouble. I needed help. I called Mom. I explained that it all to her. I explained that they were a gang. That it was sex trafficking… that I needed help…. To which she said “Let them play godfather. Whats the worst they can do?”….. (nice way to minimize the extreme danger I was in and negate me as a person, don’t you think?)

that bitch loves to see me suffer and struggle, doesn’t she. Doesn’t it make her look amazing when I look like shit? So she didn’t help me. She shit talked me to the rest of the family like I wanted to be in that situation because I was trash. Nobody helped me.

I remember talking to Mary Jane around that time explaining that I was getting counseling and she, like mom, shamed me and told me I didn’t have bipolar or something like that… She was Team Mary Ellen all the way and me getting counseling was just attention seeking or something like that.

See, this is why MJ and I have never been friends or close. I cant trust her. Shes not someone I think of as an ally. Sorry about that, MJ. Im not trying to be mean but… look at why I think that.

I really do look up to her though. She is so smart and capable. But I cant trust her and this is why.

By the way, here’s just a few of examples of the worst they can do while “playing Godfather”: They were so invested in making sure I never spoke about the rape they made sure I was living in such constant fear for my life (mental domination) that I was too scared to talk to anyone about it:

*They had voyeur cameras in my house…that they were making money off of.

*They had software on my laptop to collect all my personal data (social security, passwords, answers to security questions) so I am owned by them to this day.

*They had GPS on my car to track me everywhere I went and would leave notes on my car to let me know I was constantly being watched.

*They flipped my therapists office and stole all her files to make sure there was no record

*They poisoned my dog every day for a month while I was at work…I would come home to Milo cowering in the corner like he had been abused all day long and diarrhea all over the floor until one day I yelled out in my home with nobody there that I would find Cashs son and do the same to him…and I went online and found his childs home address…yelled that out to my empty apartment…and after that day Milo was never sick again….

*Then there are the 2 times they broke into my apartment in the middle of the night, drugged me in my sleep and did whatever and dumped me at the park. One of those time I woke up with half my face slack and paralyzed as though I had a stroke. By the grace of god I got the feeling back but to this day its still a little droopy.

*They sent their equally psycho boy Alex into my life to keep watch on me. He was horribly mentally abusive. I was so broken and demoralized. I needed to get away. Instead, I got pregnant. Alex also gave me syphilis ..and so I had an abortion. I had to get two Orders of Protection to get Alex away from me. When I called mom for help with the pregnancy, she was off the rails hysterical and I was yet even more scared and alone. Mom blamed me for all of it. Further evidence Im trash. I got pregnant by a mistake by a black man.

There is more, I mean it was 8 years of daily torture… but I think you get the idea. Complete mental domination was the name of their game.

I had no friends. None. I was so fucked up. I was terrified to speak to anyone because everything felt like danger. Just these men showing up when they felt like to to fuck me and terrorize me. Eight years. My 30s. I was miserable beyond the telling of it.

Whats wrong with you Melissa. I needed help. I was so scared. I needed my family. I got yelled at and shamed. I was so alone. I wanted to die. I was so depressed and fucked up. Goddamn. Let it end. And the worst of it all is that I really didn’t even have myself. I never had a chance to be safe enough to develop a self. I was a shell of a human. I was out of my head. I was so checked out with the PTSD and the trauma of it all. I was scared to be alive. Soul fracturing is real.

This was how I spent my 30s. Somehow pulling myself together to go to work during the day because I didn’t want to be homeless, coming home and having a total mental collapse at night and all the while being mentally tortured by a gang of sex traffickers and when I reached to my family for help I got blamed for being a fucked up piece of shit.

I had no one. When I talk about my isolation and how alone I am, its cumulative.  Its all this and more.

I don’t need to volunteer at a shelter on Christmas to be with someone for the holidays. I don’t need to get a dog. I need family. I need to be validated on a daily basis that I matter and am loveable just as I am. I need someone safe who is simply there. I need people in my life who celebrate me without me asking. I need people who are there for those simple mundane acts of living that define us…I need to come home to love.

The miracle: I kept myself employed and was successful in my corporate career path, I kept myself housed, and drug and alcohol free the entire time. I had the where with all to get counselling and try to work through my shit. I never gave up on myself even though I didn’t yet know who I am and my family had absolutely written me off from day one.

Then the Recession happened. I, of course, had never learned money management skills so there really wasn’t any savings to rely on. I was comfort eating like a motherfucker, I had student loans, a car payment and insurance and a foolishly large and expensive apartment, I had these lecherous men that were taking advantage of me financially too… I was manic depressive… I was paying for counselling (which if I am not mistaken over the years has totaled $100k) But to be honest, I don’t know where my money went… so when the Recession hit it took about 2 months before I was selling off everything I own and living in my car….where I stayed for the next year with my dog.

Nobody help me stay safe or in my integrity. I had no friends in Seattle to turn to. Mom told me to put my things in garbage bags and throw it all away…take the dog to the pound… and work with my counselor (she was angry about me getting help because she perceived it as being me trying to vilify her and this was her chance to punish me for getting help) and find a shelter to check in to because I wasn’t welcomed at her home.

Let me say that again: My mom knew I was losing everything, told me to throw my life away, dump my kid at the pound and told me to check into a shelter, I wasn’t welcomed at her home.

MY MOM.

Shes sees me as trash. She threw me away. Doesn’t she look amazing when Im failing?

Work in Seattle was impossible to find. I literally had 700 resumes out. Understand, I have held a job consistently since I was 15 years old and somehow mom thought this moment was me being a lazy piece of shit and just trying to manipulate her for money when I asked for help.

Sure. Ok.

I spent the next year in my car with no money coming in other than whatever odd jobs I could grab on craigslist to make my car payment. I drove back to North Carolina to seek help from my friends and my brother. My friends back home were not in a position to help me in any long lasting way but bless them all for what they did…

but Jim 2, who lives in Raliegh, was. He just declined. He made me a sandwich…told me there was nothing he could do for me (he has three houses)…and I spent the night in my car outside my brother’s house.

I had an ex acquaintance from Seattle who lived in Raleigh. He was part of the abuser sex trafficking gang. He let me sleep on the floor but would beat the shit out of me if I tried to sleep on the couch. I was so demoralized and out of my head, I needed literally anyone to be there for me….so, I stayed there, on the floor, for a month.

My brother was 15 minutes away, could have kept me safe but my brother chose to do nothing to help me.  

Whats wrong with you Melissa. My family. Definitely gonna say my family.  

When it was clear that North Carolina wasn’t going to be any better for work than Seattle I decided to drive back to the west coast. I had to drive through Texas and I didn’t stop at Moms house. I didn’t even try. Why would I?  I was so hopeless and out of my head with depression and PTSD. I was screaming into the great black nothing. I was cutting myself all over to get the evil out. I would punch my own face black and blue from self loathing… again, thinking it was all my fault and that I was defective. I mean… my own family didn’t want me. Nobody did. It was me. I was a horrible piece of shit and deserved to die. Nobody loved or wanted me. Nobody kept me safe. I was deeply lost in the void. I wanted to die. Goddamn. Let it end.

That year in the car was by far worse than the 8 years of being tortured by sex traffickers or the 13 years of living with my sex predator father or the 7 years of being stuck in bumfuck North Carolina with my moms abuser boyfriend stealing the show.

Without question having nobody and knowing that nobody cares if you are safe, in your integrity, have a door to lock, privacy of any kind, if you are fed or showered… knowing for a demonstrated fact that there is not a single person on earth who cares enough to validate your humanity is the absolute worst feeling I have ever known.  Being completely dehumanized, demoralized, erased. I begged for death.

Whats wrong with you Melissa?

Fun fact: during that time, instead of helping me or offering me a job at her business doing the exact job I did so well at Amazon (I asked for one and told her I would sleep in the attic at the office and she told me No), to mock me and show me what a failure I am and that I was just trying to manipulate her for money because Im a lazy loser

Mom went to her local Costco and applied for a job to show me how easy it was for her to get hired.

I mean, if youre going to be void of a soul, you should really go for it. Kudos, Mom.  

I drove through California on the way back home to Seattle and met my sister Patty for the first time. We look like two peas in a pod. We think exactly the same. She is undeniably my sister. It was the most incredible feeling.

For the first time in my entire life I actually felt and thought the same as someone else.

She casually declined to introduce me to her family. They kept looking at me incredulously because we look just the same… but she would shoo them away when they would come over to talk. I met her at her restaurant and then she took me to her palatial home. She has a huge family. She had tons of photo albums… and then she started talking about Dad…like she was in a trance and talking about a favorite lover… it was clear that Dad had sexualized her and maintained that relationship with her well into her adult life and that was the reason she had no contact with us and didn’t want a deeper relationship with me. One conversation was all I got with her. I slept in my car outside her home. My sister didn’t help me. Whats wrong with you Melissa???

In one shot from LA I drove back to Seattle. I figured out that the Queen Anne neighborhood had the lowest crime rate so I parked there. I was so sick to death of all the nights that year that I would wake up with someone trying to break in to the car. Thank god I had Milo with me. He saved me multiple times from intruders that year. My body was a wreck from car living and shit food. My mental health beyond destroyed. I was really just done. Run through. All the way run through.

I did a brief stint staying in Silverdale with my friend from NC that I managed to re connect with on my drive back… but the hour drive into Seattle from Silverdale was too much so I lumped it and just slept in my car in Queen Anne once I secured my job…..

I went in to Top Pot Doughnuts every day for a month and demanded a job until they gave me one. I was 8 weeks into that job, still sleeping in the car but I had forward momentum when I totaled the car. I had the very last car payment in the seat next to me I had worked so fucking hard to maintain my payments in good faith despite it all and come out of that situation with my car but nope…fuck me. I was on my way to the gym and I was giving myself a pep talk telling myself everything was going to be ok….and I ate it…40 miles an hour into a stopped truck on the West Seattle Bridge. Entirely my fault. Milo went to the pound. All my earthly belongings went to the impound yard. I went to the ER…. And I called every single person I knew and who I thought could help me.

Just when you think you have nothing left, turns out you can go lower. Nobody returned my call.  

Me, the unwanted, loveable piece of shit. I could die and nobody cared. Whats wrong with you Melissa?

I got out of the hospital, I had made contact with my online friend Rishad and he let me stay for a couple days… BLESS HIM… In those two days I got on the bus. I took the bus that goes through Capitol Hill and up to Queen Anne where my job was. I wrote down every apartment for rent phone number I could see and I started making calls. In the first true lucky break I had in years, this apartment manager woman at a really sweet little apartment on the hill heard me out…heard my story… it was the 15th of the month. I had my car payment check and I cashed it and gave her the money… She gave me the keys and a wink and told me I could move in “on the first”, that’s what the money I gave her would pay for…. and that she definitely didn’t know anything about a dog so no pet fee was needed.

I went right upstairs, LOCKED MY OWN DOOR and laid on the floor with literally nothing left to my name and cried so fucking hard.  

I had whiplash from the accident. I fractured 4 molars on my steering wheel and over the years as my dentist promised they have slowly one by one fallen out of my face. I had broken both my feet and wracked my knees…. But I had a place that was my own and a job and that’s all that mattered.

I went right to the pound the next day and got Milo. I went to the impound lot and got what was left of my life. I missed a sum total of two days of work…. I was so thankful to have a job again I blocked out the pain from my broken body and I just kept going.

(Mind you the only thing Mom has ever been proud of me for in my lifetime is losing weight. That’s what got her attention…that’s what she was impressed by. I went on a diet.)

That next year, I lost 70 pounds at the gym. I perceived my training team as the family I never had and I was good at lifting weights. They weren’t honestly my friends or family but it was something consistent and I needed that stability and I needed them so fucking bad. It took 5 years to start to return to a somewhat functioning human... Lifting helped me get back into my body and stop checking out so much. My nutrition plan made me focus on myself every moment of every day…and nothing beats depression like clean food and working out. Structure and consistency.

My PTSD was off the rails though. I was worse than a soldier coming back from war…I never signed up for that shit and it started when I was a child. I was suffering. I wanted to die. Every moment of every day. I was miserable to be around. Nobody wanted to be my friend. So, trust me…just work and the gym with my illusion that people were there for me and me inappropriately and overly attached to them.

The irony is that I looked amazing and strong and I was, yes. The reality is that I wanted to die. I begged for death. I had two suicide attempts in those years….I surprised myself and cut my wrist with my house keys on the way to work one day and another time I walked into traffic but the car swerved.

Coming out of all that happened and processing all that trauma took more will power and resolve than anything I have ever done. It was so dark. I felt demon possessed. I was out of my head. I would find myself walking out of my place into public with no skirt on just my tights or other crazy shit like that. I was talking to myself, having heated arguments with nobody there all the fucking time. I was punching myself in the face. I was cutting and other such self harm.

It was really bad. I was hurting so fucking much.

And, I had another sociopath boyfriend taking full advantage of my disadvantage…keeping me fucked up because it kept me there for him. Thomas was in my life for 7 years. Absolute Scum. But he was the only person who would show up in person for me. I needed to be held. I was so out of my head and I still had no friends in my life…just people on the internet.… So again, this familiar situation: I just let him use me so I could have literally anyone there. The social and emotional isolation was killing me and I was convinced I was in love. He felt like home. He kept telling me we would be together if I waited. That he loved me. That I was the Key! I was the only time he was happy. The reality was he wouldn’t speak to me during the week. He would just show up on a Friday or Saturday night when he felt like it, from 1am to 3am…literally show up with his dick out to fuck me…very often wouldn’t speak to me when he was there…then he would leave and that was what I considered my relationship and love. It was about 2 years into our “relationship” that the truth slowly started to surface that he was in a long term relationship and he lived with her….

The details of how twisted he is and how he manipulated my daddy issues is disgusting. How he used neglect to keep me working so hard for him to be there and begging for his attention….really sick.

He felt like home which is the worst part. He was exactly like home.

It took me three years at the doughnut shop to get emotionally stabilized enough to make a plan for next steps. I was too emotionally fragile to go back to corporate work or be in an office environment. I knew I wanted to go to massage school and I really thought it could be an answer for me even though Mary Jane and mom had previously shamed and mocked me when I said I wanted to go. Mom didn’t think I could be anything better than a waitress. She told me to stop complaining that I hated my work and just go do it.

It was around this time that I had to move out of the apartment because they raised the rent by double on my sweet apartment and I found my way into squatting in my Art studio, where I have been for the past 7 years.

This studio has been so needed and healed me in so many ways. It is private enough to have a complete mental collapse and since it was a former isolation tank/jail… Nobody can get in here….bars over the windows and a steel door…so, I could sleep at night for the first time in years. The rent is crazy affordable which allowed me to go to school and later afford activities to try to learn social skills and be a real person in the world…. This place is my everything.

When I had my first art show… consisting of the photos that I took when I was living in my car. One of the ways I survived and changed my paradigm to get out of the car alive was that I would walk around and task myself with Looking through the eyes of Love. I would try to find one thing each day that I could see beauty in so I could continue to see good in the world…thus my collection of flower photos that I maintain to this day as my gratitude practice.

Mom picked up the phone and called me the night of my show.

(Mind you, she has never been there for me. Over the years since she kicked me out I think we have talked on the phone maybe 10 times. There have been years where she refused to give me her phone number…she made a game of it for years…I would email and ask for it she would say she was going to give it to me in her reply but never would. Then she finally did and a week later she changed it again. Psycho. Another time I can remember a time we talked on the phone and I ended by saying I love you and she was silent and struggled to say it back. Whats incredible is that she has always pretended to be someone who knows me and knows whats going on in my life and talks about it with such authority. This is a narcissistic abuser in action. What she was doing was scanning my social media and whatever scraps of information she could get and twisting it into whatever story she needed to support her storyline about me being a problem child and a fuck up and what a wonderful mother she is so she could continue to live in denial. She cant face the past and she has never done any work to own her part or apologize. So, now Ive cut her off. She does things now like call the place where I get my mail and had the people who run the PO box office tell me my mother called and she is worried about me and she asked them for whatever information they had on me -so I had to get a new PO Box place where the owners have English as a distant 2nd language-  or she will go through my friends list on social media and contact people to see if they will keep tabs on me for her and share her story about what a problem I am and how she is just a loving mother who I have scorned and of course people believe her. She said the magic word: Mother. Nobody would suspect what kind of Mother she actually is and they see me all angry, regressed emotionally like a child and so fucked up and struggling in the world so she must me right about me, yeah? Text book actions when you try to break away from a Narcissist)

So…I get into the studio and Im all set up for my show and she called me to say this: “So, youre having an art show huh? You think youre so great. Youre still alone though aren’t you? (the mean girl was jealous that I somehow retained a sense of self and did something neat to be proud and again, she wanted to punish me…the woman is demented.) You know, the longest relationship you’ve ever had is with that damn dog.” And then she laughed at me. Made some shit comment about my basement studio “not having air” and some other bullshit and we ended the call. My party guests were arriving. My self-confidence was missing in action for the rest of my night.   Nice, right? That’s my mom.

Shortly after I get in to the Studio Milo got sick. Really really sick. As I promised him from day one, I would never let him suffer for my own selfish reasons…. So, I rented a car, took him to the vet and had him put down. The love of my life and my great protector. This sweet soul that was my constant source of love and hope for 14 years. When I posted on my facebook thread about his passing, mom commented that she was devastated at her loss. Because, you know… Milos death, this dog that she wanted me to throw away, was about how it impacted HER.  …yeah….ok.

I want to mention out of the context of a clear timeline that somewhere in here I trained for and ran two Tough Mudders. They are 12 mile courses with 20 really fucking hard obstacles. They are designed to be run with a team. I ran them both solo because nobody wanted to join me. On the days that I went to the events, neither my Trainer or the man I was so in love with, Thomas, sent me as much as a good luck text to wish me well or acknowledge my accomplishment. My previously 215 pound ass had shrunk to 140 pounds and, at 40 years old ran a team event solo and made it through in TWO AND A HALF HOURS completing every single obstacle, no excuses…. And nobody who should have been excited and invested in my success said a word.

I was still invisible. I still did not matter. I was still not celebrated by the people who should have been there for me.

I want to point this out: Even I did not think I mattered or what I was doing was noteworthy. I was still so checked out and erased to myself that it didn’t click in my head that my life and all that I was doing and surviving was me doing the impossible.

My friend Luke (who I met online dating but I knew we were meant to be solid friends for life) made a point to come with me to the first Tough Mudder. He spent the entire day out there and he took photos of me… He is the reason that I can now reflect on what I did and actually SEE MYSELF. That gift is immeasurable. Luke evidenced me. Im here today as a whole person in part because of him.  Also of note, the transition time between the apartment and the studio: Luke let me stay with him. He kept me safe and he was my sounding board and my true friend. I have nothing but the deepest most heartfelt love and respect for him. His story is equally harrowing and he is a miracle in action. Thank you Luke. I love you. Youre in my inner circle for life.

Now that Milo was gone and I was feeling somewhat more stabilized as a human, I knew it was time to make my career plan and try to get into massage school. Here is the next great stroke of luck in my lifetime: I went to Discovery Point and I talked to the women that run the school I explained my situation and that I was completely broke. They let me go to school for free in those 9 months with the understanding that I would clean the school on the weekends, make what payments I could as I went along and work out a payment plan immediately after graduation and that they would hold my diploma until that was complete.  OH SWEET MERCY.

My days during those 9 months were 17 hours long. I would manage the café in the morning 5am to 1pm, go to the gym to lift and run from 2 to 4, then to school from 5 to 10pm…all the while walking to get to each place. I was getting something like 12 miles a day. I did it. I made my 9 months of cleaning the school and keeping my life on track ( no cheering section, nobody doing laundry, cooking, keeping bills paid or there to comfort me but me: Whats new?) , I passed my exam and I was on track to move my life forward.

I feel like there should have been a celebration when I graduated because that’s fucking astounding…. but, hey… nothing happened, nobody in my life said a word of congratulations about it. Surprise.

I live alone. I have no friends beyond those that exist on the computer, acquaintances from community, and a few co workers that I have hung out with from time to time and I always make a big deal about that on social media which gives the illusion that I have people, but I really dont. My only contact with others is at work. I go home to an empty room and there is no support or comfort. Its really impossible to describe to people who have people what it is like to live with this constant isolation and utter lack of emotional intimacy and how it eats you alive…but this has been my life.

People who don’t understand tell me to get a dog or volunteer or pay for therapy for companionship. That’s a cruel tone deaf response. People need people and it is reasonable to want to be loved, intimately, from the outside in. What I want is to simply matter, and be loved and valued, and have someone who is there without having to do something to receive that…..

Because I have yet to be understood when I talk about it, I have for the most part stopped talking about my isolation that is to this day very real for me.

Im so lonely I just want to die. Whats new.

In the next year, I was waiting tables still and somehow managed to pay off $10k for my license… on a year where I only made $24k. again, no celebration when I told my co workers about it…. I thought it was a big deal.

During that year I went to the doctor and discovered that I was literally malnourished. I was pushing it too hard with working out and keeping everything on track and my personal trainer wasn’t actually reading the food journal I sent him each night… so I got pneumonia as well….but just kept going.

I also got my Personal Training Cert and my Nutrition Counseling cert that year and started working as a Personal Trainer while I looked for a Massage job. Things were lightening up for me. The tremendous crushing weight of my entire life was lightening up.

But the reality of who my Trainer was and what a fraud he was came to the light. He was sleeping with some of his clients and I have a laundry list of unethical things he, and his business partner, were doing. When I held him accountable that was the last straw for him. He was sick to death of weathering my PTSD and how fucked up and sick I was and how fucked up I was over Thomas all the goddamn time… and additionally I was calling out all the ways he was unethical: I was bad for business. I was bad for him in the fitness community.

He kept gaslighting me to try to get me to leave but that was my community for 5 years and I didn’t know what to do…….So, Matt did whats guys do: Shes crazy… and shit talked me throughout the fitness community.  He kicked me out of his gym and I now have no gym to work out at and no trainers willing to work with me. Thanks Matt! Super appreciate you!

I maintained my own lifting program for another year but honestly, I was in it for the community and sense of belonging that I never had before in my life. Without that and with Matt shit talking me in the background so I had no support elsewhere my program started to slip…. Add to that, I had begun  working full time in massage and my shoulder got burnt out. I have a repetitive stress injury from my Amazon days that was made worse at Tough Mudder when I got my arm yanked nearly out of its socket in an obstacle… so, Lifting started to fade… and honestly, I was burnt out on the regiment of it all. I needed a break. I deserved a huge break.

I think it was right around 2014 when Mom had me come to Houston for Thanksgiving as though we are friends or she was a Mom. The highlights of that visit include her telling me the reason I wasn’t welcome in Houston during the Recession was because her husband Rumi forbade it.

(I forgot to mention that all through the years of her being with Rumi she has painted this picture of him being physically and emotionally abusive. That she was hiding money to escape him and what a horror he is. She had some secret email account that she sent me emails from at one point and told me that she was trying to hack his email to see who he was having affairs with or some other drama….. but you know if you ask Jim2 who his best friend is, its Rumi…apparently they text all the time…so, you know…she loves to lie and paint these horrific pictures of who people are to support whatever her manipulation is to get sympathy or whatever pay off)

Anyway, While I was in Houston visiting her she was acting like everything was normal and fine and that I had just made up whatever it was that I went through during the Recession. She reminded me that since I “left home” at 18 she has had to give me something like $20k in support and implied what a burden I am and how I always have my hand out. She has kept track of the financial support she gave me as a parent and wanted me to feel like shit for needing her. Cool….

Another example of how mentally deranged she is: While I was there we went out to lunch. Mind you, I have maybe $100 to my name at that time. I offered to pay for lunch at this fast food place and after we ordered she commanded me to go pick a table. So I got a booth with a chair. I sat on the booth side so I was facing the café and could see her when she came out of the restroom… I waved her over and she sat in the chair. Unbeknownst to me, the booth side made me taller than the chair side…. She got this twisted angry look and became livid that I thought I was better than her. Paying for lunch and sitting above her like that….. The next day Mom and Rumi started playing a really fun game where they forgot my name and kept calling me “Savannah” (my niece) for the remainder of the time I was there …. You know… because at 44, they saw me as a child. Nothing like a little game of erasing your daughter’s person hood and replacing it with infantilism to let your daughter know you really see her and respect her.

I really hope this is making clear why I have a strict no contact in place with her that I will never change.

Now its 2017 and I get hired at my dream job. The Spa that I am at is beautiful. My co workers are the best. I make really fine money. My mental health is slowly coming together. I got Thomas out of my life and have enough mental clarity now to really see him for who he is.  I had spent yet another holiday season alone and the isolation was killing me, as per usual…so I decided that the best thing for me to do to help pull me out of my PTSD and stop being so scared to be seen or heard would be to go to music school…. Learn how to make friends for the first time in my adult life and be with people who were not my co workers. Try to trust people again. Try to trust that I could be liked for who I am….though rejection has been a very prevalent theme in my life… Try to learn some social skills that I missed out on basically my entire life.

How to simply hang out and play….was brand fucking new to me. Music school was really really really hard… not to mention I have no musical ability and I get triggered by stress pretty quickly and freeze… but I knew it was the right thing to do to reparent the kid inside me who never learned to make friends or be in activities with others and who wanted to play drums…. So hell yeah. I did it.

Thank you to Katy,Tracy,Melissa,and Kiyan for coming out to see a couple of those shows and being there to support me. You have no idea how much that meant to me.

I thought if I could make friends there I would have people to go out with and maybe could have a chance to meet a man and have a relationship… but all the women there were married with children and had little interest in going out at night, and I still wasn’t fully integrated as a Self yet… so that was a bust.

Music school was really me making up for my 20s and 30s when I should have been out at shows and hanging with friends and making art and and dating but instead I was being mentally tortured by my entire life. I gave it a good shot, but Im a mixed media artist not a musician and that’s really that. I have to take it in stride: Bless my heart for trying. Thank you to all my bandmates for being so kind and supportive of me and for being stellar humans

I was in my first year of Music school when I met the most amazing man, Joe. He was magical. He honestly loved me for me and I loved him right back. It was fast and deep and I felt so completely seen and wanted by him and OH MY GOD I NEEDED THAT FOR SO LONG. He made incredible things happen and took me on dates that made me feel like a Queen…. But Joe was terminally ill and two months later took his own life. I was in shock again….but kept going as I do.

Also out of context of timeline: When I got into that sweet little apartment I would go down to Edge of the Circle which was just a couple blocks away and get Tarot readings from Raven and Kiyan. I didn’t know how to simply ask for friendship so I would buy Tarot readings to have someone to talk to. These two helped me so much in so many ways…through their compassion and through helping me develop my Self and my skills. Over and over again these two have shown up as real people who have treated me with integrity. People who genuinely care about me and support me in my developing personhood. Ive made it through because of them and so many others along the way.

The shitty thing about being knocked out of your self is that even though you have people around you who care, you often cant see it or feel it and like a dick minimize what people are doing for you because the all-consuming feeling that nobody is there is so much larger than the gentle loving efforts of those around you…. And what happens: you push away the people who are there for you because they have self-respect and youre unwittingly being a dick. I want to say Im really sorry about this because I know for sure Ive done this.

Also out of context of timeline: Somewhere in here I started working in Tarot and caught a lucky break and got hired at Percys to be their Reader. Huge shout out to Krista who made that so possible for me. That Tarot night did more for my sense of Self and well being than I can explain and I was a success there largely because Krista made it so beautiful and kept that night going for me.

I also want to say Thank you to Tracy, Katy, and of course Brian who were my friends and co workers at the RowHouse Café… through those early massage school years. Endless support and encouragement from these guys, even when I was too fucked up to really receive it or reflect it back. Im really lucky to have met you and have had you in my life.

It was right around the solar eclipse and the night before that hurricane hit and flooded Houston and moms house got flooded that I emailed her a long list of things she had done that hurt me and explained that I would be taking time away from her and Id let her know when we could speak again. The next morning after I sent that email I again felt puppet mastered…. But this time by the little kid inside me… I literally woke up, jumped out of bed and started to dance. I was filled with glee. I was amazed by myself. I don’t know where that came from except to say that the kid inside me was OVERJOYED to be free of her.

In the coming years I kept proving to myself that I wont let her back in and that Im safe now… and as I have been staying true to this practice of not letting her, or anyone like her, back in my life… I have become happier and more whole as a human being…. More capable of making good choices in friends and finances….

She made an attempt to contact me around the holidays this year. I saw her call but let it go to voice mail. The message she left was something to the tune of her wanting to know if I had forgiven her yet and gotten over it. …See, because its about me and what I need to do because its my damage that is the problem here…. Nothing had changed with her. It was still my fault. No apology. No self reflection. Had I forgiven her yet. For fucks sake: I will never forgive her.  

I have learned to celebrate myself, take my self on vacations and to my great delight I had friends who spent time with me and took care of me!!!!!! Incredible!!!!!, give myself the compassion and nurturing that I always wished I had and reasonably should have had from my family. I have been working on being able to see the love that is there for me from the people that I have in my life, though I still struggle with that.  I have been working so hard on Self Love, Self Respect, Healthy boundaries, creating safety and stability in my life in all way and I know that Im doing great work because my inner me, those little kids inside of me that needed a parent are really responding to the parenting Im giving them…. Check this out:

A month or so after I declined her call I was out at the café in my neighborhood, having a treat and a coffee and doing some writing. I was sitting at the table and this incredible feeling came over me as though a golden light was shining on me and I could see it glittering down on me. I started laughing and crying like when you cum really hard and youre filled with ecstasy and bliss. And then I had a vision of being in a hospital room that was in the forest… it was just two walls of the room and then the woods…I could see deer and birds. In the hospital bed there was a person in a full body cast. The cast had moss growing on it and tiny sprouts of pine trees. The Doctor walked in to the room to check on the patient. I was both the Doctor and the Patient. I told myself: Hey, its time to get you out of there. And I grabbed my circle saw and started to cut my cast from end to end and crack to open like a sarcophagus. I told myself Welcome Back! We are so glad you are here!!! Go slow, take your time getting up. No rush.

I was so elated. I walked home immediately. Upon arriving at my studio I had another vision of all the ages of myself, down to the youngest and up to the oldest and wisest all linking hands. I recognized these women as my Sisters/MySelf… all of us agreed that the next would watch out for the next and that nobody would ever hurt us again. SOUL RECLAMATION.

For the first time in my life I am here, in this body, in this present moment. The first time in my life I am ME. Im currently 6 months in to my actual LIFE. THIS IS ME. I AM HERE. OH MY GOD. I MADE IT.

Yes now, of course, the world is ending and my career in massage is tenuous at best and I might be fucked again…. But so not worried because honestly, Ive survived worse with less. So I will figure this out and keep myself alive, housed and fed.

Over the years my attempts to talk it out with Mom were pointless… she would erase my feelings and angrily tell me that it was hard on all of us. She would hold no space for me and just be my mom and have some compassion for her baby girl. Nope: It was hard on all of us so stop complaining… but see, I was a child and they were my parents and that was my family and I had no choice…. So really, at this point, Im done. Im better off on my own.

I don’t know what else to say other than those yearly years were tremendously bad for everyone in my family, yes. I can now at this time in my life see and understand why everyone did what they did…. That my parents were also victims of abuse from their parents and all that and yeah, I have compassion and Im really sorry they had to go through that….But it doesn’t make it ok or make mom someone I will let back in my life. I mean, I went through it and Ive dedicated my lifes work to helping others heal and I try to be so good to everyone around me so…. No excuses. And, I still have questions like: Fuck, why did dad never go to jail? Im guessing it was about the money…..and really, how did nobody in my family see that I needed help?

Anyway… Ive done epic amount of self work to be here today as a whole person and really change my reality to one where I have value and can share love. Im still working on it… My social anxiety is still the worst. I can barely form words into sentences when Im out in public and I dont have a job to do as my role to play....but you know, I keep trying and its easier and keeps getting easier… and I have amazing friends like Brad to have mini adventures with… and I have my Studio to do my art in and now that Im feeling so much more whole as a person I think I might actually see some work through to completion that I can be proud of… and I have a job that I love and Im getting training for some other skills to expand my skillset and I feel that things can only get better from here so

I feel so lucky to be alive and so fucking grateful to be me and I really like myself. It’s a miracle. All things are possible if you just remember: LOVE IS THE KEY and keep moving in that direction.

That’s my experience and now you know.

[cybernightwanderer]

“ My Reiki and Yoga New Free Soul Brother - Once an abuser manipulative thieve , money driven leach “

Well thats a big tittle to describe one person entirely. So my ( midle ) brother across my kid years and then teenager developing to adult, my brother was an interesting person. For example, in school my brother would pretend he didnt know me , and if i even dared to aproach him he would shame me in front of everyone, even thought they already knew i was his sister, i was bullied a lot in school so at the start i tried a few times reaching out to him , specially because i didnt have any friends and id always be alone. This motherfucker who was already a teenager completly dismissed me , BUT would actually seek me out or talk to me when he needed lunch money because he already “ spent his”, funny enough hed get mine to eat coz he didnt wanna use his, and if i didnt gave him even though i hadnt eaten , he would guilty me badly , and being the kid that i was , my brother was everything to me , even tho he didnt gave a shit about me.

So in consequence i started drawing a distance line between me and him, at home id start to distance myself and ignore him. And he started getting like a really attention whore, hed always annoye me , and force me to hangout, and i didnt he would threaten me or do some shit at the house and blame me for it , because my mother at the tinniest shit at home would beat the crap out of me , so me being the little kid that i was tired of getting beatings for no random reason , id play along. My brother would literally antagonzie me and scare the shit out of me while so. Everytime my family went anywhere , for example the beach, id try to go to the water alone for some peace this motherfucker would sneak behind me and try to drown me as a joke , like every 5 minutes, id yell in panic and my mom wouldnt do shit, eventually id end up actually chocking on water and  hit my head on the sand and cry the rest of the time. So yeah FUN ! Did my mom do anything ? ofc no , “ hes just playing around “. I had BD collections that id buy with my lunch money that sometimes id save up, disney movie cassettes and so on. Sometimes id have snacks in my room to eat when studying or something. My brother, being a full grown ass teenager that he was , would steal everything without me even catching a glimpse of it. My brother would “ borrow “ things without asking then hide them because he wanted. I had two final fantasy collectible caracters that i spent my leftover bday money on, and my brother would take it as his own. Yes because whatever birthday money i got wether it be 50 euros or even 20 from my grandma or aunt, my mom would take it “ borrowed” for herself with no justification, shed always say “ Ah lend me i need it  / or / I always buy you clothes and everythings, i buy you food , you owe me this , thats the minimum you could do / “ or / she would just take it without me knowing , she would inspect my bday gifts and take it before hand , the problem is that my grandma or aunt would always after if i was gonna save it up and id ask what and they would question what i did with the money and i would ask what money and blah blah , you get where this is going.

OH and if i didnt give my money the money she would beat me up ! wich is funny asf. My brother literally sold all my things behind my back, my original BDS, MY FUCKING POISON IVY STORYLINE BD, my disney cassetes , my collectibles, and my snacks he would steal and eat. If i had saved up money hidden, first he would try to borrow it and guilty me with the “ im such a good brother to you , you cant even lend me money ? i will pay you back, trust me “ ... ofc he never payed me back , but every two weeks he woul do this shit. And if i by any chance didnt gave him , hed just steal, or sell my things, wich regardless of me lending him , he would do it anyway. Fast forward to my early teenage years, i had to start working , i quit school because we entered that internet deth with my moms company, wich my brother also contributed to but let the blame to me ofc, i was already the punch bag of the family what is one more thing. My brothers were always my moms “ babies “ even tho one was already a full grown ass man and the other was already on his way. My brother did nothing at home , didnt take the dog outside, didnt take out the trash, didnt make food, didnt wash the dishes, didnt clean the house, basicly sit on his ass all day playing video games and eating, and selling my shit for money. My brother was unemployed for 3/4 years in between those i studied and worked at the same time , and did all the house chores, even if i had to walk the dog as 2/3 am after work i would have to, even tho my brother was in bed all day. My mom would literally yell at me and make my life a living hell and threaten to hit me if i didnt do it or even dared to complain. I would get home trying to study , trying to recorver at school ,and she would yell non stop until i didn every house chore, wich i would only manage to finish at midnight or later, and then id be too tired and unmotivated to do anything so id just sleep, and id always get late to class thanks to that. When my brothers started working, it was at my dads wearehouse, where i was forced to work too. Id work 8 to 10 hours , sometimes more, because we got payed by publicity stock packs, each pack was worth 1 euro, wich also 1 pack took 1 hour and 15/20 minutes to make. So if i wanted to make the day worth anything i had to rush , no eating breaks or pee breakes. My hands at the end of the day would literally be filled with newspaper and printed paper ink and dirk, and tons of cuts and sores , that would be leeched in paper ink, wich make it hurt even more at the end of the day, and was really hard to take it out. My brother would take breaks every 30 minutes to smoke , be on his phone or even go to bathroom or eat randomly, i wouldnt stop the 8 hours straight, and when i actually had to go to the bathroom or eat something because id get sick, my brother literally stole packs from me, or try to “ negociate my help for X “, the thing about my brother is that hed always try to negociate something , ofc it was always entangled for his own benefit and not both.

So it was like this my brother came up to me all excited and say “ oh if you do this to help me , ill split the profit that way we will make more and will be less exausting “ stupid like i was id always give in, specially because if i didnt  hed steal anyway.... Hed always change his methods and works, and guilty me if i didnt do it, so id always have to do so. If i didnt hed just change the pack registration list either way, without me even seeing it, and fake my signature, i only found out we had to sign an official paper a few months later when my dad asked, before that my brother would always tell me to note them on my phone then send the numbers by the end of the week, and since he was the bosses son , every one backed up that story ofc.  Eventually when i started to get older , i cut ties with my brothers and dad. And my ( midle ) brother was constantly trying to reach out and play nice and shit , also he was still working at the wearhouse . Anyway , fast forward when i got unemployed after the 5 star hotel due to rape attent and shit like that, i was unemplyoyed for 4 moths?! My brother tried to reach out , and even came home before my mother to try and persuade me to enter one of his schemes, i explained to my brother that i didnt have any money and that i wouldnt believe anymore of his stupid schemes and blah blah. He swore he was only trying to make up to me , and the plan was , i would pretend to work at my dads  wearehouse, but i would just be there 2 times a week and he would give me a cut of the protfit, coz if he didnt want my dad to hire some random slow guy, so he set up to do a two persons work, and give me 30 % of the monthy rate and all i had to do is show up a few times for my dad to see i was there, and then go home. That motherfucker insisted for 3 days straight promissing it wasnt a scheme and that he was serious this time. OBVIOUSLY THAT DIDNT HAPPEN OBVIOUSLY- with the last 10 euros i had, i bought train tickers to the wearhouse, the first week he actually stick to his word, a few days later the shit started, he actualy forced me to deliver shit and stuff. Wich for me was really difficult because its when i started to develop hernias, and the pain was too overwhealming, and that fucker didnt care and still forced me to, eventually i told him i was out , and found out he still used my name in his shit plan  and pretended i was still working there to my dad for two whole months , and then begged me to lie to my dad on the phone, hed literally call me before my dad trying to get me to lie, and promissing the money, and hed ask my mom to pressure my to help him. What could i do??!! what happend after you may ask? did my brother gave me the money? OFC NO ! NO! He gave me 115 euros of the cut , and he made 996 euros to himself. And told me it was only for the days “ i actually worked “  NEVER IN MY LIFE  I VERBALLY EVER SAID TO ANYONE , FAMILY OR NOT  “ I hope you die, you are shit , you are nothing to me , seriously i hope you die “ and acually meant it and wished it. For the first time in my life i actually wished so hard for my brother to just die. I was done, i was officialy done , i had never been so done with someone. I was officialy done with my family. I blocked my dad on everything, i told my dad to fuck off. I told my older brother to fuck off. I told my middle brother to go die. And the last person was my dying grandma who was a snob ass piece of shit who only gave a shit about me when i was a little girl ( because its only cute when they r kids  ), to stop trying to call me and told her to just go and die. She literally sent me a voice message of 5 minutes crying beggin me to see her, and i just told her to go and die, its not because she is dying that is gonna erase the fact that she didnt gave a shit about me after i actually grown. And the fact that i did this apparently scared the shit out my dad and brothes, specially because i did it so naturally. AND TO THIS DAY I DONT REGRET WHAT I SAID AND I STILL DONT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT HER. OH AND PLOT TWIST SHES NOT DEAD NOR WAS SHE DYING, LAST YEAR SHE TRIED TO SCHEME MONEY OUT OF MY MOM, AND BEFORE THAT SHE WOULD ALWAYS TREAT MY MOM LIKE SHIT AN CALL HER NAMES, FUNNY ! Now they try to sneak into my life really AGAIN ... ffs Since the end of last year, apparently my brother turned into reiki and yoga and shit and is now driving a motivational fuck page for people who wanna “ grow spiritually and open the third eye “ and is trying to reconnect with me again, obviously i cut him off before he could even talk to me. So he spent 3 months or so , coming here and trying, and since he didnt get anything since january and february hes trying to manipulate me behind my mother, my mother is venting to my brother about me being closed off to them , and my brother is DIAGNOSING ME AS A PROBLEM, BECAUSE HE IS SO WISE AND ENLIGHTED... WTF??? diagnosing me??? ur not a fucking therapist you asshole ! The other day i heard him tell my mother in the living room , that “ SHE CANT LIVE LIKE THIS ITS VERY TOXIC FOR HER, SHE HAS TO TALK TO YOU AND BE A BETTER SISTER AND DAUGHTER SHE NEEDS TO BLAH BLAH YOU NEED TO KICK HER OUT IF SHE IS LIVING OFF YOU  “ WHAT THE FUCK?? im living off my mother?? the woman that forced me to give her more than half of my paycheck, thats doesnt give me privacy or respect and that literally threatned me if i ever tried to leave that she would chase me down???????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OR SEND ME TO A MENTAL HOSPITAL????!!!! ... My older brother is doing the same, keeps trying to get me to go visit his kid, and to meet his kid, keeps trying to get my mother to see pictures of the kid or to call them. They keep trying to guilty me “ oh you cant take it out on the kid, its not the kids fault , he needs to know his aunt, you are his family “ BITCH FAMILY?????? FAMILY??? family doesnt mean shit. Yesterday even sent photos of his kid trought a new number LOL. I actually did went to the kids birthday, first time a few months ago, and guess what , my brother still the NO ONE ASKED- OPINIONATED asshole he was about my whole life, he literally takes one glimpse of me and judges my whole life and starts yelling shit at me ...ofc thats not gonna happend again. People dont change. People. dont. change. PEOPLE DONT CHANGE ! BITCH ?? WHAT? WHO THE FCK?? HOW THE FUCK??? In conclusion my brother is still the same piece of shit he was , and now even more narcisistic, and manipulative, he cant get what he wants from me , so now hes resourting to my mother again. I NEED TO LEAVE THIS HOUSE, I NEED TO LEAVE THIS FAMILY OMFG. Funny enough he does this shit then tries to get me to go to his house to celebrate his birthday because he “ MISSES ME AND THE OLD DAYS” ???? OLD DAYS OF YOU MENTALY ABUSING ME ? NOT TO MENTION THAT YOU ALMOST BROKE MY ARM BECAUSE I WOULDNT LEND YOU MY COMPUTER 3 YEARS AGO????? my mom literally told him we were gonna go there without even asking me if i wanted or even if i was gonna go. LOL, shes trying to emotionally manipulate me with older pictures of me and him , and games we would play together LOL. OMFG PLEASE SOME ONE, I DONT EVEN KNOW I NEED TO DIE OMFG... I CANT TAKE THIS FAMILY ANYMORE.

[tania-grey]

Look.

I dont care what y'all do. Y'all can protest or whatever for your freedom after the pandemic. I get it. Y'all're scared that this thing is gon' be permanent, that the right to assemble will be taken permamanently. I get it. These are terrifying times.

But for those in the USA, can I jus' remind yuns that all presidential rein is temporary? That, almost guarunteed the next batch of candidates is gon' undo everything the current president put in place like he did to Obama? Like nearly every new president (slight exaggeration, but still.)?

Look. Im not for trump, i ain't against him cuz my allegience belongs somewhere else entirely. What I'm saying is y'all're so focused on yer own rights that you don' care if you spread this thing further. I saw plenty o' posts talkin' about how 'healthy people should be allowed to leave home.' Excuse me, but are you not gettin' the same news we are?? You can look and feel 100% healthy for literal weeks (a month) prior to testing positive, but still be carryin' that little bugger around an' spreadin' it everywhere. For all intents an' purposes, we are all sick before we ever feel the first symptoms!

If I'm feeling fine and have zero symptoms, that means squat. It literally means nothing when we are in the middle of a corona virus/covid19 epidemic. In this light, is it really that hard to believe and understand why governments world wide, including the US of A, is enforcing a complete lockdown? Please keep in mind that they have been using social pressure to try and keep people home. That's why the schools in the state of MO all locked down before the governor ever put out a statement to do so. The problem was- and is -that people still think its a joke, that its not a real problem and think its just like the flu....until it lands right on their front door step.

If Corona virus/covid19 was just like the flu, then we could invent a vaccine to create an immunity and insist everyone get the covid shots just like they enforce the flu shots. But there are two glaring flaws with this logic.

Research to create the needed shot will take time. Time that is not available during a wide-scale, very high mortality rate pandemic. But the doctors and supplies needed to safely carry out this research isnt properly available in the first place because of the sheer numbers of those infected and the high infectious rate with which it spread and the stark shortage of protective and medical equipments.

To have a functioning vaccination, it relys on bodily immunity that naturally occurs from exposure. The way vaccines work is they take old or weak versions of the sickness and insert it into your body. This gives your immune system the chance to successfully fight off the illness and retain a memory of the illness it fought. With this memory, it can effectively fight the full strength of the illness with minimal symptoms, if any at all.

The problem with a covid vaccination is that people who fought covid19 successfully are not immune to it. In fact, they have it again. This means there is no vaccine possible and that the only hope is to find a cure, rather than a vaccine, since the human body is not capable of 'remembering' the covid virus to fight it off effectively.

So if you see people trying to prevent a mass gathering, dont be so shocked. Those nurses see first hand the horror of what goes on in hospitals and are doing you a favor. They weren't asked by the government to protest your protests. They asked themselves if they could live with letting people get even more sick, making more patients suffer through covid 19 and they looked at themselves and asked what kind of nurse or doctor would they be if they did. And so when they get off work, instead of sleeping or eating, they stop you from making the pandemic worse because they are thinking about your individual well being. Because they cant handle the thought of yet another person dying from asphyxiation and blue lips. They cant stand having to watch yet another person getting a tracheotomy. Having to force people in pain to stand up and walk around their room when it literally is the painful equivalent of glass in their lungs because that they only way to break it up and the patients are begging to lay back down where its comfortable. People are are getting painful bronchitis and pnemonia from this thing and now... doctors are saying it can even be spread through farting. How the h*ll are we supposed to protect ourselves from farts??

For the love of all our grandparents. For the love all those with immune disorders. With lung disorders. With allergy disorders. For the two week old babies testing positive. For the love of yourself. Just. Stay. Home. Its not some flipping joke. My sister is not a joke when she says a doctor in her hospital just got a tracheotomy a whole week later than he should have because the people working there were too emotionally attatched to treat him like any other patient. Yeah. Because dying people is joke (#sarcasm). Please be selfless to save other people. The laws made are because of idiots who dont listen so if you wanna go off on someone, go off on the idiots instead who let their children bike around the neighborhood with their friends and make large gatherings at the local parks talking and drinking and not caring if there's over 15 people withing a single 8 foot radius. They are why lockdown is now politically enforced.

Would you like some more facts about covid19 that makes it terrifying? Its stays in the air for 3 hours. You really think its a bright idea to go protesting about literally anything? You really think a mere 6 foot distance is gonna help you when you walk through that same air space mere seconds after the last person did when its stays in the air for three flippin hours?? I'm sorry, but where is the logic in this?

To protect me, to protect my family, to protect my friends, to protect literally every human I'm surrounded by, I'm happy to give up my right to assemble. Because you know whats more important than my individual rights? Human lives. And that is the hill I will die on.

[standfortheangels]

"Cant sleep?" (Brandon at Mike please~)

Sometimes, life was a little weird. And not just because he was a guardian angel in a relationship with an overworking demigod and had a list of ever-growing predetermined friendships he was entirely responsible for. Which, would be a lot of weirdness, to be fair. But, that wasn't what bothered him.

Mike knew that an angel's age was a complicated subject, and, it was one he tried not to think about too much. The age from when he was born til now, the age from when he was REborn til now, and then the one most angels went by. Because an angel could only age physically, when they aged mentally. The phrase "you're only as old as you feel" was a lot more literal for them. Except... Was it?

Some things about his life here, he loved. The people in his life and his relationships with them, getting to help his charges.. having a job at all was pretty cool. And he loved the cool night air on this balcony, and the warmth of the mug he wrapped his hands around to keep his fingers warm. But... Maybe some things... Were just a little.. off.

His thoughts were interrupted by the soft sound of the glass door sliding open, and he offered Brandon a little smile as he stepped out. Suddenly he wished he'd had another mug of cocoa here to offer him.. "want some?" He asked quietly, sliding the drink in his direction a little, but drawing it back when Brandon declined.

"Can't sleep?"

He half smiled and looked out at the world around them, a kind of sadness creeping in. "I had a lot to think about." He settled for.

Brandon's eyes showed a glint of concern. "Like what?"

For a moment, Mike stayed quiet, now looking down into the chocolatey drink in his hands. "Brandon? .... Do you think I'm immature?" He glanced back up at him now, no smile left on his face. "It's okay if you do, I won't be up- well. I won't be offended at least. It's just... I know some people- other guides- don't like the way that I do things. And I know I'm still new compared to them and maybe it's just an experience thing but.. They don't take me seriously either. Even my family don't really. And you know how much I love them, I would never say anything bad about it but- ... They are always calling me the baby, you know? Baby brother, baby of the family... And I get that, but, still."

He left a long pause hanging for a moment, eyes moving around but not really settling anywhere for long.

"When I died.. I wasn't actually... Old enough to be harvested. They made an exception for me, I mean, it's not something they haven't done before, but, you know, people remember that kind of thing. And they.. well, it's complicated, but, when they have to make you a new body to be in.." He laughed and leant one arm up on the railing, to rest his head in that hand. "This must all sound so weird to you, but, they make you a body and then, you spend a while learning stuff and growing your wings and whatever else. And, with me, they made me older than I was. So I could blend in or something I guess. And they said that, when I actually got older in my head, my body would follow." Now his eyebrows pulled together, and he looked back down into his mug again. "But I don't look any different." He watched the steam flow lazily upward for a moment. "I mean... I feel different, I think. I'm responsible, o do my job, I live on my own- mostly~ I'm not a kid anymore. But how could anyone else know that? They can't look at me and see that I'm older, and it seems like any angel I meet, it's just a matter of time before they realise who I am. I... I don't wanna talk badly about them but, I'm a little sick of people treating me like a kid. Yesterday, some guide in another region called me a pumped up twerp! What's what about??" Now he looked at Brandon briefly, holding that look he had when he got worked up by something. Thankfully, it quickly faded.

"I wanna believe they're wrong, I want to tell them that, right to their entitled, smug, turned out little faces. But then, I go home and the people I love act like I'm a kid too. And, I kinda like it, when it isn't dad thinking he's the boss of me. I'm no good at landings, my wings are smaller than everyone I know and I know they'll get bigger but that's not the point. I get scared at night if there's a noise in the house, and then... All I want is mom to come fix things. And she's really gentle with me, like, more than the others. Like I'm too little to treat the same way. And then at the end of it all, what do I do? What do I when I'm troubled by the whole thing? I make hot cocoa and eat marshmallows. Or- I do what I did tonight and realise I already ate all the marshmallows last night and didn't buy more, so that kinda sucks." He tilted his head towards Brandon, hoping to lighten the mood a little.

"I just... Wonder sometimes if they're right, you know? I look, I mean what, 19, 20 maybe? Older? But, I can't know for sure that's what I am. I do childish things and I get all excited at the holidays.. But it's not like I don't do grown up stuff too, I mean, I'm a mental health worker, a social worker, support worker, recon.. guy, all in one! I take my job seriously and I work hard at it, find out what people need and try to make it happen. It's just not great when this thing follows me around. As soon as someone thinks I'm challenging them or questioning them it's all "kid" this and "butt out" that and "go play with your little friends". How about Lay off, Sarah?! How bout that?"

He sighed a little and drew up his knees tighter. "I just don't know if I'll ever get them to take me seriously."