#she was doing the signs as song from the rise and fall of a Midwest Princess if that wasn’t clear | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hisdarkconsort · 8 months ago

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100 Questions

I stole this from another blog and it was from years ago but I don't care. Most people either don't know me at all or only know me from The Rabid House discord server which I'm no longer in.

1. What is your nickname?

Saturn or Shay but I definitely go by Saturn online lately.

2. How old are you?

35 but mentally like 18-20ish (sometimes even younger) and I'm not just saying that to be funny. I am autistic.

3. What is your birth month?

October

4. What is your zodiac sign?

I am a Libra Sun, Scorpio Rising and Saggitarius Moon

5. What is your favorite color?

Blue and Black...not together. I wear alot of black head to toe cause I'm an alt girl.

6. What’s your lucky number?

Thirteen...and no I'm not a T Swift fan.

7. Do you have any pets?

Yes, a cat named Dekker. He's named after the gay actor/musician, Thomas Dekker, who I just say is the male version of myself because we just have alot in common as far as interests go.

8. Where are you from?

USA in the Midwest

9. How tall are you?

5 feet 6 inches

10. What shoe size are you?

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own?

I own alot but I only wear my Vans

12. What was your last dream about?

I have been dreaming alot about someone else's Dark Urge character, no not Sylvan.

13. What talents do you have?

Absolutely none.

Obsessing over characters and/or people to the point I lose sleep and annoy anyone I talk to.

14. Are you psychic in any way?

I say yes, but I predict shit on accident all the time.

15. Favorite song?

I've never had a favorite song in my life because it changes constantly.

16. Favorite movie?

Well I was obsessed with the Twilight series for YEARS. And owned/still own a shit ton of merch and own all 5 movies in several different versions. (DVD, Blu-ray, Extended) Plus the little BTS videos they were sold seperately. I was also really obsessed with FSOG.

17. Who would be your ideal partner?

Nobody because I am Aro. But my perfect guy would definitely be gay or at least bi/pan and a perfect women would be a hot lesbian lmao. Everyone has to be queer. LMAO But I don't want a relatonship tbh.

18. Do you want children?

No.

19. Do you want a church wedding?

Absolutely fucking not. Churches make me highly uncomfy and I am far from religious.

20. Are you religious?

Does believing in science and the supernatural count? Christianity is a cult.

21. Have you ever been to the hospital?

Yes.

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law?

Yes but never arrested.

23. Have you ever met any celebrities?

Not huge celebrities. But I have hopped into a live podcast just to talk to Thomas Dekker lmao and I used to talk to one of his besties occasionally on IG and she also followed me until they had a falling out. His sister still follows my rarely active IG account.

24. Baths or showers?

Both?

25. What color socks are you wearing?

Currently not wearing any.

26. Have you ever been famous?

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity?

No thanks.

28. What type of music do you like?

Everything.

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping?

I have. I'll spare the story though cause its a big yikes.

30. How many pillows do you sleep with?

Three.

31. What position do you usually sleep in?

On my right side.

32. How big is your house?

I live in a tiny apartment in an eleven story building.

33. What do you typically have for breakfast?

Left overs or whatever is available in my fridge that morning.

34. Have you ever left the country?

Never.

35. Have you ever tried archery?

Uh...no

36. Favorite clean word?

Trying to think of one...and I use too many dirty words...

37. Favorite swear word?

Fuck

38. What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?

3 days

39. Do you have any scars?

All over. I have acne scars, injury scars.

My bigger ones include my elbow from a bicycle accident when I was little, a round scar on my knee from getting pushed into my bed frame, and a cresent scar on my index finger from it getting shut in a heavy door at work that needed stitches and therapy. I still cannot bend my finger all the way but gaming with a controller helped alot.

40. Have you ever had a secret admirer?

Not that I care to know of.

41. Are you a good liar?

No, I suck. I"m way too blunt and honest.

42. Are you a good judge of character?

No. I’m ridiculously oblivious and don’t want to assume things about people.

43. Can you do any other accents other than your own?

I can do a shitty Kermit and a shitty british accent.

44. Do you have a strong accent?

No, its literaly midwest news reporter accent. I don't talk like a news reporter...just American news reporters lack accents so that they can sound clear?

45. What is your favorite accent?

I would say British or Irish but I'm so used to those accents because I watch so many things where people have those accents that I don't notice the accent.

46. What is your personality type?

I forget. I don't care enough.

47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?

I would say my old winter coat that I no longer wear...because one...it isn't my style and two...the zipper broke and it’s too small. My second would probably be my "The Shining" Vans.

48. Can you curl your tongue?

Like fold it? Yes. In both ways.

49. Do you have an innie or an outie bellybutton?

Innie.

50. Left or right handed?

Right.

51. Are you scared of spiders?

Mostly no. But if I see one suddenly and its moving fast...I might jump.

52. Favorite food?

Chicken

53. Favorite foreign food?

Italian Pasta dishes or Chinese food. Or Mexican.

54. Are you a clean or messy person?

I'm very messy and unorganized both. Its kinda embarressing.

55. Most used phrase?

I go through phases and its usually whatever the internet is saying. I keep up with slang even though I'm old. Lol

56. Most used word?

Honestly...the F word. I don't even realize I say it.

57. How long does it take for you to get ready?

Like 5-10 mins.

58. Do you have much of an ego?

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops?

Suck on them then bite when I think my teeth can handle it.

60. Do you talk to yourself?

Always when alone..out loud and I even have full blown conversations as if I were talking to someone else. Its very delulu but at least I'm actually aware I'm doing it. I think its a habit from my childhood that I never outgrew. I'm also autistic so it also might be why.

61. Do you sing to yourself?

Yes

62. Are you a good singer?

I stay in tune at least.

63. Biggest Fear?

Death

64. Are you a gossiper?

Sometimes.

65. Best dramatic movie you’ve seen?

I can't think of one on top of my head.

66. Do you like long or short hair?

I had long hair as a young child and then my old step-mom cut it off and forced me to have short hair and I hated it for years and then when I moved out, I grew it long but now that I'm older I prefer it shorter even though right now it's long but that's because Im due for a haircut.

On other people...I dont have a preference.

67. Can you name all 50 states of America?

Yes, but not in order.

68. Favorite school subject?

Lunch ( I hated school)

69. Extrovert or Introvert?

Super introvert!!!!!

70. Have you ever been scuba diving?

No.

71. What makes you nervous?

Dating. Not only does it make me nervous but it gives me major anxiety which now I avoid dating at all and have like no desire to.

72. Are you scared of the dark?

I used to be but now no.

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes?

I want to but I try avoiding it because I come off as rude when I do when its not even on purpose. That's an autistic thing.

74. Are you ticklish?

I would say don't even try because I'll kick you in the face.

75. Have you ever started a rumor?

Not on purpose.

76. Have you ever been in a position of authority?

Kinda. I hate it.

77. Have you ever drank underage?

Yes

78. Have you ever done drugs?

Does weed count?

79. Who was your first real crush?

I had lots of crushes as a kid. None lasted very long.

80. How many piercings do you have?

Just 4 in my ears. I'v wanted more but I 'm a very lazy person.

81. Can you roll your R’s?

Barely and I sound weird when I do it plus I cant say words when I do it.

82. How fast can you type?

Um, not super fast but fast enough. I make frequent mistakes. And I don't use the keyboard properly like I was taught in school because I don't have very good control of my pinkies.

83. How fast can you run?

I used to be able to run pretty fast but then I got fat...

84. What color is your hair?

Dark brown almost black but I'm actually graying pretty bad at 35 (thanks mom) so I have a ton of gray hair and honestly I can't wait until its full gray so I can dye it fun colors.

85. What color are your eyes?

Hazel green but people mistake them for brown all the time because of my deepset eyes and the shadow that gets casted over them or something. I don’t really know.

86. What are you allergic to?

Liars and bullshit.

87. Do you keep a journal?

I tried in middle school but then my step mom at the time liked to invade my privacy so I stopped.

88. What do your parents do?

My dad is a delivery driver for a local delivery and shipping company. And my mom works for an art supply company and she works in shipping in the warehouse. My step-mom is what I call unimployed but runs a Bible study group and cleans her friend’s houses or house sits. My step dad works for a powerwashing company, travels for it and is only home on weekends.

89. Do you like your age?

I'm 35 and I feel 80 :/

90. What makes you angry?

Unpatient people and people who are rude. (From working in retail)

91. Do you like your own name?

My real name no, which is why I go by half of it.

92. Have you already thought of baby pet names, and if so what are they?

I want to name a cat Vegas but also now Astarion.

93. Do you want a boy or a girl for a child pet?

I don't care.

94. What are your strengths?

Ask me another time.

95. What are your weaknesses?

Anxiety. Dweliing on things from years ago or just hours ago that I wish I can go back and change. I overthink alot which is why I don't date anymore. I come off as very negative and rude but it's mostly unintentional. I'm easily frustrated and overreact.

96. How did you get your name?

It comes from my dad's middle name.

97. Were your ancestors royalty?

No. Atleast not on my mom's side.

98. Have you ever been to a therapist?

Yes.

99. Color of your bedspread?

Which one? I have two.

100. Color of your room?

White because I'm not allowed to paint.

#my stuff #get to know me

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whatareyousearchingfordean · 4 years ago

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House Of The Rising Sun

Pairing: Dean x Reader (Past)

Word Count: 471

Warnings: Angst

Author’s Note: Written for @deanwanddamons Flash Fic Challenge. I got the song “House Of The Rising Sun” and I’m not really sure where this came from. Side note, it’s very hard for me to stay under 500 words. Brain does not comprehend. I did zero editing as well so enjoy xoxo Alex

There is a house in New Orleans

They call the Rising Sun

A flash of lightning lit up the dark sky as she paced in front of the dingy bar. The static traveled up her bones before the thunder followed, indicating that the storm was fast approaching and lest she gets soaked by the inevitable downpour, the time to make a decision had come.

Notes from a jukebox mixed with the excited chatter of the patrons inside the bar that sat in the middle of some midwest back road. The whole decrepit building reeked of stale beer and the twitching neon sign that hung in one of the two windows indicating it was open for business. It was exactly the place that she had been expecting to pull up to when Sam had texted her an address just a few hours back.

Accompanied with the single word, ‘Please?’, that was the first communication she’d had with either Winchester in over a year. The phone calls had stopped about a month after she disappeared herself. Even after she walked out of the bunker, the huntress couldn’t find it in herself to change her number, knowing that if they needed her, she wanted them to be able to get in touch. Not that the Winchester’s ever truly needed help from anyone, something she had been reminded of far too many times in her years hunting next to them.

Years she spent by their side, believing that she was an equal partner and allowing herself to fall in love with the green-eyed womanizer that everyone had warned her about. But life was short and she figured if she risked her life every day, what difference was it to risk her heart?

But she learned fast that matters of the heart were far more complicated than succumbing to the dark peace provided by death. It hurt far more to allow anyone close enough to see her heart than any wound ripped into her flesh by a monster. Dean Winchester had taken everything she had to give and stomped it into the ground like a finished cigarette.

The huntress buried down the ache that left a massive hole in her chest. There was a job to be done, and she’d be damned if she shed another tear for either of the Winchester brothers.

Quick in, quick out, you can do this. She repeated the mantra in her head one last time before moving in front of the heavy wooden door that led inside the barely legal business. With one last heavy breath, the huntress pushed open the door just as the raindrops began to spatter against the gravel, destined once again to be sucked into the lives of the Winchesters.

And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy

And God, I know I'm one

Forevers: @22sarah08 @440mxs-wife @akshi8278 @anathewierdo @asgoodasdancingqueen @atc74 @awesome-badass-cafeteria-sauce @briagallen @callmekda @dawnie1988 @deandreamernp @deangirl93 @deanwanddamons @ellewritesfix05 @emoryhemsworth @foxyjwls007 @hobby27 @janicho88 @jbsgirl4ever11 @jensengirl83 @lunarmoon8 @lyarr24 @mishacollins4evah @miss-nerd95 @mrsjenniferwinchester @msmarvelouswinchester @polina-93 @sleepylunarwolf @squirrelnotsam @stiles-stilinski-24-dylan @suckmyapplejacks @supraveng @tatted-trina6 @thoughts-and-funnies @traceyaudette @tranquility-or-chaos @waywardbeanie @winchest09

#deanwanddamonsrockflashfic #challenge entry #dean winchester x reader #dean winchester fanfiction #supernatural fanfiction #spn fanfic #supernatural #spn #alex writes #mine #house of the rising sun

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nightwingshero · 4 years ago

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Tagging Game

I was tagged by @bubblegumnebulaa thank you love!!!

Tagging: @strafethesesinners @water-writings @shallow-gravy @xbaebsae @dieguzguz @foofygoldfish @amistrio @smithandrogers @fadedjacket @rejected-beater @simonxriley @playstationmademe @chyrstis @geronimo-11 and anyone else!

rules: answer all thirty questions and tag as many people, as you can. let's get to know each other a little better!

Name/Nickname: Jodeci or friends call me Jo

Gender: female

Star Sign: Capricorn

Height: 5′03″

Time: 9:27 pm

Favourite Bands: Florence + The Machine, Avenged Sevenfold, Cage the Elephant, Panic! At the Disco, My Chemical Romance, The Killers, Arctic Monkeys, Queen, The Ramones, AJR, Twenty One Pilots, Incubus, Slipknot, Weezer, Imagine Dragons, The White Stripes, Pink Floyd, Fall Out Boy, Stone Sour, KALEO, Chevelle, The Chainsmokers, Green Day, Rise Against, The Neighborhood, Nirvana, The Beatles, The Black Keys, Highly Suspect, The Offspring, AFI, BANNERS, and tons more. I could go on forever, honestly.

Birthday: January 2nd

Favourite Solo Artists: Halsey, Hozier, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Elton John, David Bowie, Post Malone, P!nk, Khalid, Cherri Bomb, NF, Johnny Cash, PJ Harvey, B.o.B., Ruelle, Cyndi Lauper, Sam Smith, James Arthur, Jimi Hendrix, Billy Joel, Au/Ra, Billie Eilish, Hayley Kiyoko, The Weeknd, Matt Maeson, Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Meghan Trainor, Adele, Bruno Mars, and more...so much more...

Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: Arsonist’s Lullaby (I’m doing a lot of creating for Gabriel right now, and it’s an awesome song.)

Last Movie: Judas and the Black Messiah (highly recommend!)

Last Show: Young Justice

When Did I Create This Blog: 2019 (came here for fandom, stayed for the chaos that is my blog.)

What I Post: *in a weird voice* I do what I want! I post multi-fandom content, my edits and writing, and memes. Or...you know...whatever I want.

Other Blogs: That’s a negative, Ghost Rider.

Why I Chose My URL: Batman is awesome, his comics are my favorite, and Nightwing is my favorite Robin. And its funny, because he saves people...so being a heroes hero...is funny. But let’s be real here, he needs saving after what they did to him and Alfred. (Oh they fixed it--shush, that wasn’t at all a fix, you can’t convince me otherwise. Ric was a mistake, go back. GO BACK.)

Do I Get Asks: From time to time, usually when I reblog ask games or prompt lists. I’m not really a popular blog and I’m kinda off in my corner doing my own thing.

Last Thing I Googled: "Fire in Latin” I’m currently trying to name Gabriel’s vigilante alter ego...he has fire powers...I am open for suggestions...because mine suck and are cheesy...like naming Blair “Nebula”...(she was almost Nova or Galaxy...send help.)

I Follow: 516. I’m multi-fandom, so I follow all kinds of different blogs.

Following: 331. Like I said, I’m a small blog. But I’ve noticed that Tumblr has been like...telling me certain people aren’t following me when they are...so I really don’t know what that number is.

Average Hours Of Sleep: 6. A little less some nights, a little more on weekends when it’s a good weekend.

Lucky Number: 24

Instruments: Bass guitar.

What I'm Wearing: Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019 shirt and blue basketball shorts (what are you wearing?)

Dream Trip: Pretty much all of Europe. Most of Asia. Canada...I would love to move to Canada...

Favourite Food: Sushi, seafood, steak, burgers and fries, hot wings, cheesecake, ice cream, breakfast food, spaghetti and meatballs, mac ‘n’ cheese...a lot more because I love food.

Nationality: American (seriously, send help. I’m happily waiting.)

Favourite Song: Listen...this changes like the weather in the midwest, buddy. Team by Lorde or Fluorescent Adolescent by Arctic Monkeys...and Spacemen or Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine by The Killers.

Last Book Read: Circe by Madeline Miller

Top Three Fictional Universes I Wanna Be A Part Of: DC/Arrowverse because I have a death wish apparently, Lord of the Rings, and I guess either Star Wars or Percy Jackson (Greek gods, bro!)

Favourite Color: Slate Navy blue, grey, or black

#about me #tag game

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the-bottom-of-the-abyss · 3 years ago

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A Playlist on Paradoxical Love

This is a true story about the abuse I suffered from a past relationship that I wrote for a college class. I feel that sharing may help me but also others in identifying abuse and/or helping others heal.

I have no idea if anyone will ever read this but it was so, so hard to write but in the end, getting my feelings out in one place seemed to help

HUGE TRIGGER WARNINGS: nongraphic sexual assault, mentions of rape, mentions of suicide, emotional abuse, gaslighting, manipulation, coercion, self deprecation

The Night We Met

The Night We Met by Lord Huron; This was our song, one that we thought was of love and fortune, but turned out to be of love and regret. The lyrics rang truer the longer we were together.

It was a warm and sunny day when she first met him. He was a new student from California, coming to her small town in West Virginia and happened to be in the percussion section with her in band. His voice caused butterflies to make a home in her young heart, igniting a spark she had not felt in the fifteen years she had been alive. He made her feel like she was something to want, always listening when others would not.

The week she met him other members of the band were going to a Drum Corps International show in Pittsburgh. Seeing it as an opportunity to get to know one another, the girl volunteered her mother to drive the girl and boy.

Her mother obliged, picking them up from the school parking lot and listened to the conversation being had in the backseat. The boy told the girl of a family full of abuse and an absence of love. The young girl felt her heart grow heavier with each story he recounted. He told her about his stepmother clawing his face, leaving the scar beneath his left eye. She wanted nothing but to heal the pain he held in his heart, to absorb all the hurt he felt.

By the end of the night, he had asked her to be his girlfriend to her delight. After dropping the boy off at his house, her mother turned to look at her with knowing eyes. She didn’t want her daughter hanging out with the boy; he was only trouble. The girl did not listen, deciding that her mother didn’t understand him. She wasn’t there when he made her laugh or looked at her like she hung the stars.

Her adamancy to be with him only grew. As a gift celebrating one month of being together, he gave her a box of things that reminded him of her. Inside, there were the type of mechanical pencils she liked with the thin lead she insisted on using. He picked out colored pens, knowing her obsession with collecting them and also put in scented hand sanitizer, knowing that she was running out of the bottle attached to her purse. To top it off there was a king size Kit-Kat bar, her favorite candy. The girl had never received a gift so thoughtful from anyone. No one had ever spent the time to curate something just for her.

He swept her off her feet and she couldn’t have been more infatuated.

***

Sometimes I look back to that girl and wonder how she didn’t see the danger. I was naïve then, so young and unafraid of the world. Other times I know her naivety wasn’t her fault. How was I supposed to know that the person that told me they loved me would become a monster?

His words were like honey, always promising to give me the world and more, appealing to my doe-eyed view of his love. He would listen to my ramblings and musings about life that most people I knew avoided for the sake of saving time. His touches were soft and gentle in a way I could have only dreamed of. I couldn’t have known that those sweet words would turn to phrases that felt like poison, subtle when spoken but deadly when left to linger. I couldn’t have known that the same ears that listened to me would become the same that ignored my pleas for him to hear what I was saying and not twist my words. I couldn’t have known that those hands that held mine would become the same that forced me to please him after I told him no.

My mother was right and in typical teenager fashion, I ignored her advice.

Tennessee Whiskey

Tennessee Whiskey by Chris Stapleton; We went to Tennessee but in addition to that, the lyrics of the song spoke to how warm and cared for he made me feel.

The sun-kissed days of summer gently rolled into the cool, crisp season of fall. While the breeze strengthened day by day, so did their relationship. She swore she had never been so happy, standing tall by his side, feeling like a goddess in his cornflower blue gaze. When it was announced the band would be traveling to Nashville, she excitedly waited for the day for the charter buses to arrive in the cracked parking lot of her school.

October had granted them a clear day for departure, and she sat in the seat next to him, watching mountains she grew up in turn to flat plains of the Midwest. The bus was loud, filled with gleeful voices of their peers, but talking to him made it fade into the background.

She suggested taking a small nap, to help pass the hours of driving straight ahead. He declined, explaining he was an insomniac, and told her to rest without him. The girl convinced him to lay on her lap and decided to sing softly to him, as he did tell her once she had the voice of an angel. Somber tones of “The A Team” by Ed Sheeran floated from her to him for an hour before his breathing evened out.

The first day in Athens of the South flew by, taken up by the bone-tired exhaustion of the long trip and unpacking. On their second day, she dressed in her jazz band uniform, preparing for their recording in Studio B. The boy complimented her red blouse and dress pants as she stepped out of the hotel elevator, making her blush. She thought the uniform was unflattering and too formal to be worthy of his praise.

After the recording, the boy hugged her and told her how good she did and how proud he was. Proud. Someone was proud of her, of her performance. People had told her that she had talent and extended their compliments but none of it meant as much as his.

When the trip ended, she was woeful wishing for more time to escape any commitments back in her hometown. She reminded herself that there was always the Friday night lights that graced their football field and the memories it would bring. The girl was so excited to spend those nights on the field with the boy. The band would dive into the halftime show and afterwards, she could show him what a pepperoni roll was.

*** I sometimes look at pictures I still have from the trip to Nashville. I looked so happy and sure of myself. I thought of myself as a true grown-up back then, not knowing what the future would bring. He was so good to me, and even though there were signs here and there, nothing stood out as dangerous. There was no blaring siren, screeching to evacuate before the ship went down. We had only been dating a few months then, but he told me he felt like he knew my soul from a past life. He knocked on the door to my heart, and I opened it without a second thought, believing every promise he made.

I’m Your Puppet

I’m Your Puppet by Gregory and The Hawk; the lyrics “and I’ll undress, if you need it. But please don’t need it” is an accurate way to tell how fucked up my psyche was after this.

They were on the way home from a friend’s graduation party; it was exuberant, a great celebration of their mutual friend. The boy asked the girl if she wanted to pull over somewhere and fool around. It wasn’t even close to being the first time they had been together like that; they were actually each other’s first times. She was a little reluctant, hesitating to do anything that may land her in trouble. He told her that everything would be fine, so she relented, and the car pulled behind a small row of storage containers.

They both climbed in the backseat. A kiss was shared between the two, only lasting a few seconds before the boy pulled away from the girl’s shining lips.

“Can you give me a blowjob?” He asked her, looking with pleading eyes. “I don’t really want to,” she said, evading his piercing gaze, “I’m not really feeling it.” His face twisted, showing his disapproval at her response. “Come on, you never want to.

What happened to the girl who said she’d always be down to do stuff like this?” “No,” she told him, “I don’t want to.” The girl only had done it a few times, but she had almost thrown up once, and she didn’t want a repeat of that. She hoped that refusing again would make him stop asking.

He rolled his eyes and scoffed, “This is what you do when you’re in a relationship.” The girl went to object but didn’t get the chance. He opened the door and got out of the car, pulling her with him so they were standing in the gravel.

“I don’t want to,” the girl said, feeling panic rise, “let’s just have sex instead.”

“It won’t take very long,” he urged with a forceful edge that made her insides twist. With that, he put pressure on her shoulder to have her sink to her knees.

He said it wouldn’t take very long but it felt like eons to her. The rocks in the gravel pushed into the skin on her knees and that’s what she focused on. If she focused only on the pain, maybe everything else would cease to exist. She knew the boy saw tears rolling down her cheeks and heard the small, muffled sobs that escaped her. He only looked at her with lust, not giving a damn about how she was terrified, how he was making her feel.

After he finished, he pulled her up off the rocks, and helped her back in the car. Only once she felt the leather below her did she begin to full out sob. Instead of the harsh figure from moments before, she was met with the boy she knew, the one who loved her.

He pulled the girl into his lap and rocked her as she cried. “Shh,” he cooed. “I’m so sorry, I never should have done that. Please forgive me.” The girl nodded and buried her face in the crook of his neck, letting herself be calmed by his soothing voice. “We don’t have to do anything else,” he said.

To prove to him that she forgave him, she shook her head. “No, it’s fine,” she sniffled, “I’m fine.”

Once it was over, they drove home in complete silence.

***

That day still haunts me. It wasn’t the first time he had coerced me into something. It was far from the last, but it was the one time he legitimately forced me to do something I didn’t want to do and acknowledge it.

I blocked it out for a long time, trying to go on with life as normal. I only realized how wrong it was when I talked to a friend of mine who went through something similar. Even then, I brushed it off and told myself he didn’t mean it. It took even longer for me to see it as sexual assault. I still only remember the overview of what happened, the rest is somewhere in my mind, somewhere that it can’t hurt me. The one thing I remember is the gravel on my knees. The indents I saw when I got home that afternoon were the only things showing that it had truly happened.

This point marked when he knew he could manipulate me. I was so scared of doing something wrong, of disappointing people, disappointing him. At the notion I was beginning to become something he didn’t like, I tried my hardest to become what he said he needed.

If I think about what happened too much, I feel sick, like I need to take a scalding shower and scrub the memory out of existence.

Poison

Poison by Sofia Mills; This song brought me back to the hazy feeling of being high out of my mind and believing my person was the one pushing the drugs into my hands.

She had never gotten high before. The boy once told her he would never touch a drug, but that statement faded into explanations about how he wanted to live life. She was wary, weed was very different from the nicotine they both let swirl in their lungs. He told her for two months about how great it was until she agreed to try. She lied to her parents; the couple had been dating for a little over a year, but the girl’s parents still tried to limit their time together. Instead, she told them it would be a few of her friends from band sleeping over and that the boy wouldn’t be there.

The smoke burned in her chest; it left a distinct aftertaste she wouldn’t forget. Everything was fine until her body started to reject the hazy feeling trying to overtake her. She got sick, a feeling she absolutely loathed. Her friends gave her water and she sat curled in a ball on a chair outside, shivering as the high feeling started to crescendo. The boy stayed outside and told her she’d be okay. He grabbed a wet washcloth and dabbed her clothes before cleaning the hair framing her face. It was in that moment that she only thought of him.

No one else would ever do this for me, she thought. He loves me more than anyone ever has. I am so lucky.

*** That wasn’t the last time I got high. We would smoke at our friend’s house every weekend, spending lazy evenings in each other’s’ arms. That night in particular, I felt so special that someone other than my own mother would clean me up after getting sick and later help me feebly crawl up the stairs.

Wrong Direction

Wrong Direction by Hailee Steinfield; the lyrics “Every time you burn me down, don’t know how, for a moment, it felt like heaven” kind of explains what it was like when looking back on abusive relationships. Back then, the moment of the apology felt like a huge act of love, but now it’s obvious it was just an empty promise.

She had just gotten off a shift at work and got into his car, the clock showing a time around ten at night. The girl already told him that she felt too tired to do anything, but she would be alright for just cuddling before he drove her home. He nodded and drove across the street to the abandoned K-Mart and parked in the middle of the barren lot.

They got in the backseat and she leaned her head on his shoulder and told him about a tough customer she had to deal with. The boy listened to her and waited until her rant flickered into silence.

“Are you sure you don’t want to do anything?”

“Yeah,” she replied, “I’m so exhausted, I’ve been on my feet all day and worked an eight- hour shift.”

“Come on,” he urged, “we never do anything anymore.” She felt exhaustion seeping into her bones, and for the first time, didn’t give in, “No, I am too tired, I want to go home and sleep.”

Instead of agreeing she should get some sleep, he shrugged her head off his shoulder. She tried to reach for his arm, but he yanked it away from her and harshly rolled his eyes. “Babe?” She asked, not fully understanding what was happening.

The boy ignored her concerned gaze and opened the backseat door, loudly slamming it shut before getting into the driver’s seat. The girl took it as her cue to get into the passenger’s side. As he started the car, she once again reached for his hand that rested on the gear shift. Without looking in her direction, he moved his hand to the steering wheel, so quickly that it seemed as though her touch burned him. A permanent scowl took resident on his face and she tried again to talk to him.

“Babe? Please talk to me,” she pleaded, feeling the dread crawl into her throat. With no response, tears started to fall. The road to her house felt so much longer, filled with continuous pleas for him to talk to her, to say anything.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed, “I was just really tired. I’m really sorry, please forgive me.” There was no mistaking the sorrow in her voice, the boy knew she was crying, even if he refused to look.

He pulled into her driveway, looking straight ahead as she gathered her coat and purse. Before getting out she tried to lean over to kiss him, but he leaned away.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated before getting out, “I love you.” To her surprise, he didn’t respond. When she shut the door, he immediately backed out, leaving her tear-stained and feeling helpless.

When the boy apologized to her the next day, she forgave him immediately.

***

I have read that emotional abusers utilize the silent treatment because of how effective it is. After refusing him, the stonewalling struck me at my core, my worst fear coming true: becoming something he didn’t want anymore. I never stood my ground again after that. When he would want sex after that night, it would go one of two ways. I would still say no about ten times before he pulled a line that made me so full of guilt that I did what he wanted, or I promised “next time.”

In My Veins

In My Veins by Andrew Belle; This song really emphasizes the pain of the hole that is left when someone with such a stable place in your life. It feels like all that is left is their ghost.

“I don’t think we should be together anymore, Emily.” “What? What are you even talking about?” “I just need to find myself.” “What the fuck does that even mean? How can you just leave? I love you, please, we can work it out.”

“I’m sorry, I just think it’s for the best.”

*** The first time we broke up was over the phone while I was on a weekend vacation. It came after I kept pushing him to apply to college since he was going to be graduating later that year. I calculated what it would cost for him to live off minimum wage while paying rent and he got so angry. He broke up with me because he was getting annoyed with my insistence on going to college or a technical school. He hated when I got on him to not skip school or to stop smoking so much weed. He made me feel like I was so awful for trying to help him succeed. No one has ever made me feel like a burden in the way he did.

A week after, he came to my house and told me that he didn’t realize what he had until it was gone and I ultimately took him back, truly believing he would change.

Terrible Love

Terrible Love by The National; this point really marked the realization that I was in a toxic cycle of what I thought was love.

It was about thirty minutes before the girl was to perform with the jazz band for a Christmas concert. She had asked the boy to come, but he said he had plans already. This wasn’t surprising considering he left early from school on her birthday to get high. The girl settled for texting him instead.

She asked him what he was up to and he replied that he didn’t want to tell her, as she would get upset. Immediately, the girl felt worry build. Thousands of possibilities fleeted across her consciousness of he was indulging in. After pleading for him to tell her, for her own sanity, he relented and told her that he was going to be doing MDMA for the first time with a mutual friend he lived with. The girl felt irritation mixed with desperation bubble up inside her. He swore he would never do anything besides smoke weed but once again, he trampled over any promises ever made.

She texted him a long paragraph about how irresponsible it was and that he could get into so much trouble. He told her how uptight she was and how she was keeping him from living his life. The girl was fed up and told him not to text her for the rest of the night. It was a justified reaction, but her anxiety only told her she was a shitty partner for not indulging him.

She was so upset, so anxious about what he was doing and how in the recent months had been throwing his life away. He had recently began insisting that he would be fine living off of her in the future until he figured out what to do. The night went on with her panic staying at a fever pitch.

The next day the girl texted her best friend, the same one he was with, and ranted about the situation, hoping that the friend would see why she was so torn up. They had the following exchange:

The girl: He even said I wasn’t going to like what you guys were going to do. Because he knew I’d be super against it. But he said it was fine and it wasn’t a big deal and that I was overreacting. I don’t think I am. I just needed someone to talk to last night because I cried and just went over in my head what the hell I could do to help him. It’s not just this. It’s all of it. He doesn’t do his homework, skips school, or leaves because he feels like it, has no motivation and no desire to do the things he needs to. When you love someone so much all you want to do is see them succeed. Idk maybe I’m just an uptight bitch and a shit person but I do know I want the best for him.

Friend: You act like I want to see him fail. I don’t, Emily. I want him to succeed just as much as you do but I also want him to live his life to the fullest. Everyone needs to have quality of life or it isn’t worth living.

The girl: I never said you wanted to. I know you want to see him succeed just as much as I do. But I know for a fact if he doesn’t get himself together, there’s not much of a life to live. It sucks but life is hard and it’s not easy. No matter who you are, it’s never going to be easy. If he doesn’t graduate high school, there’s not much he can do. Even fast-food places can only pay minimum wage without a high school diploma and to be a manager you need a high school diploma. I’m looking for his future, not the next few months. If he wants to live in an apartment, he needs money. His dad isn’t always going to give him that. To get money, a decent job is required. Minimum wage won’t be enough. And he just doesn’t care. I try to make up for it and I try and try to push him to do his homework, to study, to make good grades. But it never works.

Friend: I’m upset rn so I’m not going to respond atm. I will text you later and we can talk about it then, okay?

The girl: Okay be safe. Please don’t show him all this unless you think necessary. I don’t want him to be mad at me because it makes me feel like the shittiest person on earth when people are mad at how I feel and like I shouldn’t tell people how I feel anymore.

*** It is hard to explain the way I felt when he told me he was going to do MDMA. My reaction wasn’t due to the drug itself, but more about the stereotypical, lazy deadbeat he had become. He once tried to impress me by telling me he brought up an 8% to a 32% in an easy class.

I felt responsible for the way he was. I thought I could fix him, that I would be able to pull him out of the headspace he was in and bring him back to who he used to be. Back then, I didn’t realize he had always been that way, only getting more obvious because I never called him out on it, save for a few times.

I recently found those texts while drafting out this paper. Reading them teleports me into the headspace I once held. Back then, I believed that I needed to help him along with the small voice that told me he was right, that I was overreacting. Now I know that my reaction was justified, I should’ve held him accountable by breaking up with him on the spot. But like many times before, I didn’t. I clung on to the hope that not all was lost, there was still time.

Honey and Milk

Honey and Milk by Flower Face; there are some lyrics in this song that really frame how the end of such a toxic relationship felt like. “And the love you made me fight for was never love at all. The red light shines through the window and I’ve got a black eye for every bed you’ve made. The honey and milk on my fingertips was never enough to make you stay.”

It was mid-April, spring out in full force when she couldn’t get ahold of him. Most days, she would have chalked it up to him deciding he wasn’t in the mood to go to school, but the day before, he swore he’d be there.

Halfway through the day, she saw him approaching in the hallway. The relief that filled her didn’t last long, though.

“We got busted last night,” he told her. “What?” “Yeah, we got caught with weed in the car and I got a drug charge.” The girl shouldn’t have been so shocked, but she was. Even worse, she shouldn’t have felt relief that he was handing her a reason to leave him on a silver platter. She finally had enough of the coercion in the bedroom, his confidence that she would never leave, and feeling like a burden.

“I can’t believe this,” she stated, shaking her head. “I’ll talk to you later; I need to think.”

The girl called him later, knowing that if she saw his face, she wouldn’t go through with it. She told him that she was done. He cried for the first time over her and told her that he wanted to take his own life. He went on for hours about how he was going to kill himself without her. The girl felt guilt settle in the forefront of her mind. She told the boy it was going to be alright and comforted him, trying to keep him calm, truly believing that he would leave his blood staining her hands.

She cried for hours after hanging up the phone. But she wasn’t crying for him, she was crying for the girl she used to be. It was almost two years that he had her in his clutches, two years of playing into his twisted games.

While she did feel used and irrevocably damaged, she could finally breathe. She was free.

*** I never went back to him, but not for a lack of him trying. I got myself as far away as possible and it was the best decision I ever made.

New Person, Old Place

New Person, Old Place by Madi Diaz; I struggled for a long time for a song that captured at least something close to my real feelings. This song captures the sadness, the trauma, and the moving on. I think that it really adds to the feelings of realization of how much I sacrificed for him: “I used to take all of your shit and carry it on my back. I’d leave what I needed behind to make room for whatever you had. I believed that I had to be strong just for you, so you wouldn’t crack”

I have thought again and again what I was going to end my story with. The optimistic and empathetic part of me yearns for a happy ending. I want people to know it gets better and feel hopeful. But the much larger, aching side of me wants to tear down the mended façade I have built and scream out all the hurt.

Most days I feel that I’m made up of an alphabet soup of emotions I couldn’t even begin to decipher. In one moment, I feel okay again and understand that I didn’t deserve what happened, but it is over. The next is filled with visceral recollections of all the worst parts that reignites every antagonistic thought. It truly feels like my psyche is in a never-ending pendulum, swinging between healing and absolute and total self-destruction.

While my thoughts on the matter are contradictory from one day to another, I think I have come to a few conclusions. I know that I am not okay, and I probably won’t be for a while. I cannot lie to myself by saying the shaking in my hands that accompanies thinking back is due to the cold instead of a physical reaction to trauma. I also have come to realize that I am so fucking angry, and I am allowed to be. A lot of people say that forgiveness is the way to healing but I think that is bullshit. I will never forgive him for what he did to me. He stole my naivety from underneath me and forced me to thank him. How can you forgive something like that?

Many don’t understand why survivors stay in abusive relationships if it is so awful. The problem is that it wasn’t always bad. There were times that I felt like I was on top of the world and others where he yanked me down to hell. I believed I deserved what he did, that I wasn’t worth anything more. He made me believe he was the only one that would love me.

It’s funny how trauma works. While he assaulted my body and tortured my mind, I mislabeled it as love, as flaws that I needed to accept since he loved mine. I didn’t start to notice the way he changed me until months later. Even now, almost two years since the day I left, I’m still tormented by the aftereffects. Over the course of writing about my ordeal, I tremble for hours, physically reacting to reliving the experiences, no matter how healing it is.

Suffering from abuse at such a formative age, fifteen to seventeen, left its mark on my psyche, etched deep inside. Because of this, I want others to know how to escape and that no one is responsible for the actions of others. Even if he was abused himself, he chose to continue the cycle and use me as a scapegoat for all his problems in life. I am grateful for one thing though; I will never, ever let myself be treated like that again. I would rather be alone than suffer the way that I did.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that most stories don’t have a happy ending; instead, most end in a nameless limbo between good and bad. My story falls into that majority. Many bad things happened, and they continue to come back again and again, like a stray that only found shelter in my mind. There is still so much that haunts me daily, but I also know that it is not all bad.

My soul is still covered with the ominous clouds his presence brought but every day, more slivers of sunlight poke through, causing flowers to bloom where it was once barren. One day, a full garden will grow and take over the parts of me that he singlehandedly ripped apart. One day, I will not feel so empty about the ordeal.

One day, I will be okay again.

#Trigger warning #tw #tw abuse #tw r*pe #tw sex assault #abuse #emotional abuse #trauma #intimate partner violence #domestic abuse #gaslighting #toxic relationship #abusive relationship #actuallytraumatized #coercion

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bluejaybabbles-archive · 4 years ago

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IS IT TOO GAY OF ME TO ASK FOR ALL THREE MIDWEST MONSTERS WIP CHARACTESR FOR THE SOFT MEME... i just love them DEARLY

IT IS EXACTLY THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF GAY TO ASK FOR ALL THREE OF THEM MAX

Putting this under a cut bc it got a bit lengthy!

Let’s go in alphabetical order! First up, Antonia Figueroa!

what they smell like

I haven’t thought about this much, but definitely something soft...like fresh laundry, or something floral! She tries to seem aloof and standoffish, but she’s really just. So soft, if you gain her trust, so I think her scent would reflect that!

what their favorite smells in the world are

Vanilla!! She has far too many vanilla candles. She also loves the smell of the ocean breeze. The last time she went to Puerto Rico, she used her magic to bottle the ocean breeze, and when she’s stressed, she opens the bottle and just sits in the scent for a while.

what pajamas they wear/what they wear to sleep in

Big t-shirts! She has a collection of graphic tees just for sleeping in. A lot of them have the Pepsi logo on them ajsdbsdufh and some of them are just like. You know those tacky shirts with the animals printed on them?? These ones:

[id: a grey t-shirt with images of a bald eagle, a mountain lion, a wolf, and a moose on it.]

Yeah.

my favorite ship (if applicable) and a cute hc about them

okay this one’s gonna be a little hard bc Toni, Javi, and Avery are all in a polyamorous triad so OBVIOUSLY I ship them all together but also! I definitely ship Antonia with Triss, a monster hunter from the Summer Court!! I can’t decide if it’s a casual thing or if Antonia is just also in a serious relationship with Triss, but Triss is over at Toni’s place all the time. Triss takes a big interest in Toni’s witchcraft and asks lots of questions, and she definitely curls up on her couch and reads spell books while Toni’s mixing potions or smth!

my favorite friendship (if applicable) and a cute hc about them

Antonia and Javi!! Like yeah they’re partners but a) they don’t start off as partners, and b) YOU SHOULD BE FRIENDS WITH YOUR PARTNERS!! They’re the kind of friends that bounce snarky fake-insults off each other and then just end up cuddling on the floor and playing with each other’s hair. They’d also definitely bond over their experiences in being Puerto Rican out in the Land of Corn and Ghosts and Corn Ghosts

a song that reminds me of them

Wild Roses by Of Monsters and Men! Specifically this part Gets Me:

Down by the creek, I couldn’t sleep, so I followed a feelin’

Sounds like the vines, they are breathing

(Oh it sounds like, it sounds like, it sounds like, it sounds, oh)

And I’ve seen the way the seasons change when I just give it time

But I feel out of my mind all the time

In the night I am wild-eyed, and you got me now

what animal i think they would be if they were an animal

She would ABSOLUTELY be a cat. 100% a grumpy cat who reveals her True Soft Nature around maybe one or two people. She says “mother I crave violence” but what she really craves is a good snuggle session

what position they sleep in

She starts off on her back, but she’s a restless sleeper, so she usually ends up on her side by the end of the night! She definitely starfishes, though, which becomes a little bit of a problem when she, Javi, and Avery start sleeping in the same bed aifhsidgh

their favorite drink

PEPSI!! She’s specifically a big fan of wild cherry pepsi, but regular pepsi also works. At any given time she’s probably wearing some sort of pepsi memorabilia.

a gift i would give them if i could

Spell ingredients! Dried plants from my yard! A ticket to PR! also this:

[id: a white shirt with the word Pepsi across the chest in blue. Beneath the word Pepsi is the Pepsi logo, a red, white, and blue circle. The shirt also has several Pepsi logos down the sleeves.]

Next up we have Avery!

what they smell like

Avery smells earthy and like. Fresh?? Crisp?? At the same time?? Kind of like a winter morning in the woods! Y’know that smell of “things are still alive here, the cold is just keeping them dormant”? That!!

what their favorite smells in the world are

His senses were enhanced during his time in the Court of the Moon, so he has some OPINIONS about smells ajfhsdiufhud that said! He LOVES fruity smells, specifically citrus scents! He’s also a big fan of the smell of fresh baked goods, whether that be bread or cookies or brownies!

what pajamas they wear/what they wear to sleep in

So Avery sleeps nude and keeps clothes next to the bed so he can put them on really quick if he needs to, HOWEVER! Javi eventually compiles a collection of lounge wear for him! (”Come on, you can’t just be in going-out clothes and armor all the time! Isn’t that uncomfortable?” “If I get uncomfortable I just get naked.” “I’m going out and buying you clothes right now.”) It’s honestly wild to see someone who wears mostly blacks and greys standing around his house in baby blue pajama pants with raccoons on them, or in a sheer green sleep shirt that says “Sunday is for snuggling”

my favorite ship (if applicable) and a cute hc about them

Okay so here I’m gonna focus on him and Antonia because holy WOW they’re so sweet, like!! Antonia feels like she can be herself around him, which is so rare. She’s his main supplier for spells and things since she knows the way he works, but also he says he goes to her because she “casts her spells/brews her potions with love” and that “makes them all the more effective.” He definitely comes to her place if a hunt goes wrong and she does the whole “patches you up while affectionately calling you an idiot” thing

my favorite friendship (if applicable) and a cute hc about them

Avery and Triss!! Triss is the first person Avery really opened up to after being released from the Court of the Moon. Even though the Celestial Courts are...different from the others, he felt that another monster hunter would be the one to understand him most. She helps him open up to more people, and shows him the beauty of the world. I imagine she gathers bouquets of wildflowers and “weeds” and brings them to him sometimes!!

a song that reminds me of them

Some Kind of Disaster by All Time Low! Especially these parts:

I woke up from a never-ending dream

I shut my eyes at 17

I lost every moment in between

I felt the sun rise up and swallow me, yeah

and

I crashed down from a high that felt so real

I never knew how much it would hurt to feel

You gotta hurt sometimes to learn to heal

You gotta get back up and learn to deal, yeah

AND

And it’s all my fault that I’m still the one you want

So what are you after?

Some kind of disaster (Some kind of disaster)

Fuck I gotta. I gotta go listen to this song now. I’m having Feelings

what animal i think they would be if they were an animal

Y’know, I was gonna be tacky and say a wolf, but now that I’m thinking about it...he’d be a coyote. Adaptable, can be a loner or in a pack, tend to be crepuscular when around humans, some people are very adamant about how they should be shot on sight.....

what position they sleep in

If he’s sleeping alone, he’ll sleep on his side, but if he’s sleeping with other people, he sleeps on his back so they can curl up on his chest!

their favorite drink

Water. Like, actually, he really loves ice water. Sometimes he’ll get frisky and drink *gasp* flavored water!

a gift i would give them if i could

A weighted blanket! Like, I know you have to be able to jump right up and get to work if duty calls or whatever, but can you please get one night of deep sleep?? And a hug. Someone hug this man

Last but CERTAINLY not least, Javi Justiniano!

what they smell like

Fresh rain on dirt, crushed rosemary, and fresh cut wood!

what their favorite smells in the world are

They absolutely ADORE the smell of peppermint! They’re also a big fan of pumpkin spice candles. It really is a shame they love seasonal scents so much sdifuhdiu I imagine they try to stock up as much as they can to last them through the year

what pajamas they wear/what they wear to sleep in

Okay so Javi is EXTREMELY tacky and will wear like. A sheer nightgown and silly patterned pants as pajamas. So a combination like this:

[id: a pale person with long, dark hair wearing a sheer and lacy white nightgown]

[id: a pair of black pajama pants with a red waistband and a red pocket. The pants are decorated with images of various red lobsters and the words “Pinch Me...I’m Dreaming”]

If anyone asks them about it they just shrug and say “I’m nonbinary, it’s allowed”

my favorite ship (if applicable) and a cute hc about them

Here, I’m gonna talk about Javi and Avery because Holy Shit I Love Them. Javi is EXTREMELY chaotic and Avery rolls his eyes about it but secretly adores everything about them. Like. Javi canonically drunk calls Avery and asks him to carry them to bed because they don’t think they can make it up the stairs and Avery actually does it. And when Avery’s about to leave, Javi asks him to stay until they fall asleep, and he stays until morning, and hold on I gotta sit down--

my favorite friendship (if applicable) and a cute hc about them

So I’ve already talked about how Javi and Toni’s friendship is AMAZING but I wanna give a shout out to Javi’s as of yet unnamed roommates! Like, they have to deal with the random monsters that Javi attracts and at this point they’re pretty unfazed by them. They walk into the kitchen and see a weird floating eyeball with wings or some shit and Javi’s like “I’m sorry it was there when I woke up” and they go “It happens. Does it like peaches bc ours are about to go bad”

a song that reminds me of them

3am by Halsey! Specifically this part:

My self-preservation and all of my reservations

Are sittin’ and contemplating what to do with me, do with me

Think I took it way too far

And I’m stumblin’ drunk, getting in a car

My insecurities are hurtin’ me

Someone please come and flirt with me

I really need a mirror that’ll come along and tell me that I’m fine

I do it every time

I keep on hanging on the line, ignoring every warning sign

Come on and make me feel alright again

Baby. Has some abandonment issues. It’s probably fine.

what animal i think they would be if they were an animal

DEFINITELY a dog. Like, a big, sweet, clingy dog whose adoption profile labels them as “Thinks they’re a lap dog, so they need to be taught not to fall asleep on top of you. Unless that’s something you want!”

what position they sleep in

On their tummy or their side! They don’t like going to sleep alone, so they have a couple people-sized stuffed animals to snuggle in bed. When Antonia, Javi, and Avery are all asleep in the same bed, Javi’s in the middle, curled up on Avery’s chest, and Toni is spooning Javi. It’s so good

their favorite drink

An iced mocha with peppermint syrup and LOTS of whipped cream! Most drinks are honestly just a vessel for whipped cream for them

a gift i would give them if i could

A big house with a nice backyard, and also a big dog to snuggle when they have to go to sleep alone! I’m totally not projecting!

THANK YOU AGAIN MAX, this was a lot of fun and I’m even more excited to write about these characters now!!

#goosemixtapes #ask games #this was so much fun akfuhsdfiushdf #midwest monster hunting wip #i should start using character tags again tbh #antonia figueroa #avery #javi justiniano #side note i nearly titled avery's section as #avery nolastname #anyway thanks max ily ily ily #like thunder below

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citrinekay · 5 years ago

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Roadtrip prompt! They’re going somewhere together (not for work). it’s just really domestic and they bought snacks and everything ❤️

There’s just something about these two driving in cars together that I can’t get enough of. Thanks for the prompt!

Bill hadn’t given any consideration to his mounting vacation days for some time until Wendy had announced she was taking a trip to the Florida Keys, and Holden had remarked that he hadn’t taken any days off in awhile either. He’d quickly turned to Bill to point out that they shouldn’t let Wendy have all the fun.

Bill shrugged. He hadn’t gone on a real vacation for a few years because he’d been too focused on work. He wasn’t complaining, though, because their work is important.

He’d forgotten about the conversation until the next morning, when the idea was fully gestated in Holden’s mind.

“We should go see the Grand Canyon.” Holden said, sitting up in bed with his disheveled hair and eyes wide and alert despite it being seven o’clock in the morning.

“Okay.” Bill said, rubbing a hand over his sleep-laden eyes.

“I always wanted to go as a kid, but my family never had the money for out-of-state vacations.” Holden said, “How many vacation days do you think you have?”

“I’m not sure. A lot.”

“I think we should drive.”

“What? Why? Don’t we drive around enough together as it is?” Bill asked.

Holden turned around to cast him a mischievous smile. “It’ll be an adventure. Please?”

Bill sighed, “It’s a what? - two or three day drive? Maybe more if there’s construction and traffic accidents - which there’s bound to be. Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Holden said, flopping down against Bill’s chest to pander with wide, pleading eyes. “It’ll be fun. Will you at least consider it?”

Bill considered it for all of one day, though “considering it” was a loose term. He could see that Holden already had his heart set on the trip, and wouldn’t be letting the idea go anytime soon. Besides, as it turned out, he had more than enough vacation days compiled to allow for driving time and a full week in Arizona.

They’d struck out two days ago on an early Saturday morning, bags packed, cassette tapes, snacks, and bottles of water stashed in the front seat for the drive ahead. Holden rolled down the window and sang along with the radio as they crossed the state line between Virginia and North Carolina, and all of Bill’s misgivings sailed out the window into the summer air along with the upbeat lyrics of “Tiny Dancer.”

Holden’s high spirits remained through the brief trip across the tip of North Carolina and into Tennessee. By this point, Bill had grudgingly given into his urging to sing - or rather somewhat hum - along with the music. Bill smoked another cigarette while Holden shelled peanuts out the window, popping them in his mouth in between mutterd song lyrics.

As they sped across the threshold into Arkansas, Holden leaned over to tuck his head against Bill’s shoulder. His fingers crept over to trace Bill’s knuckles and the back of his hand before nudging them in between Bill’s fingers. They were quiet for a long time as the landscape changed around them, rolling green hills rising up into rocky mountains peppered with miles of trees that seemed to go on forever.

Eventually, Holden sat up and started talking again, reminiscing about some of the different places his family had lived throughout the Midwest. Somewhere in between a story about Milwaukee and St. Paul, he’d made them both promise not to bring up anything work related. Bill agreed without complaint.

The sunset slipped across the sky in hues of gold and pink as they crept towards Oklahoma, the land dipping down into flattened stretches of grassy fields that allowed the dome of the sky to swell above them. Holden sank down in the seat, breathing a happy sigh.

“Thank you for this.”

“For what?”

“This trip.” Holden said, casting Bill a faint smile. “It means a lot to me.”

“Hey,” Bill said, catching Holden’s hand and bringing his knuckles to his mouth, “If seeing the Grand Canyon is what you want, I’m going to give it to you.”

“I do want to see it.” Holden said, a smile tugging at his mouth while his eyes went soft and hazy as a lake on a foggy morning. “But this is more important to me … You.”

Bill cleared his throat as emotion hit him suddenly in the chest, a yearning and a satisfaction that seemed to compete for residency in that space all at once.

“It’s nice, right?” Holden asked, sparing Bill having to respond immediately. “Driving, just the two of us.”

“Yeah.” Bill said, “It’s really nice.”

It was past ten o’clock by the time they made it to the hotel that Holden had booked in advance. Bill got out and stretched his legs, relishing not being cramped in a car for less than half an hour before falling into bed exhausted.

He woke the next morning to Holden curled up against him, golden sunlight through the window making the dark brown of his hair gleam luscious chestnut. Bill carefully traced his bare shoulder as he leaned in to plant a kiss on Holden’s neck, inhaling his familiar scent, drowning himself in the quiet solitude of his moment.

Quantico seemed to fall far behind them, a disant, gray outline that he could have seen in a book somewhere. This reality, his arms wrapped around Holden, felt like it was the only one that shoulder matter. It took all his willpower to get out of bed to face another day of driving, but Holden’s eagerness to reach their destination urged him along.

They drove for two more days, passing through Oklahoma, the northern edge of Texas, and New Mexico before the sign for the Arizona state line heralds a closing end to their journey.

Night descends on the desert like a shroud, plunging the colors of the cloudless sky through shades of blue, purple, and black before the pinprick of stars and the half moon hanging overhead are the only source of illumination outside of the intermittent streetlamps dotting the interstate. The radio plays at low volume, a hushed lullaby that had Holden’s head slumping down against the leather seat cover over an hour ago.

Bill carefully rolls down his window to light a cigarette. The scrape of his lighter cuts through the quiet bluster of the wind, unanswered by the echoing void just outside of the car. As smoke pours from his lips, he casts a glance over at Holden’s lax expression of blissful sleep. A smile tugs at his mouth.

Not two hours ago, Holden had been pressing whether Bill wanted him to take a turn driving or not as Bill had spent most of the trip behind the wheel. Bill had said no, he prefers to drive; more than that, he prefers to watch Holden sleep, rocked to dreamland by the steady motion of the car over never-ending asphalt.

Bill turns his gaze back to the road ahead illuminated by the yellow swath of headlights making out the black strip of road ahead.

Everything is quiet now with Holden slumbering beside him and the interstate all but vacant of traffic. Against the black backdrop of the sky he can begin to see the narrow, crooked outlines of the Grand Canyon’s myriad rocky formations beginning to emerge beneath the milky moonlight. The idea of driving them all the way into the town where neon lights and streetlamps could dispel the sense of distance that this place gives him seems like an offense he can’t abide.

Easing his foot on the break, Bill brings the car to a crawl, and guides them off the shoulder of the road into the sand. He puts the car in park, and turns his gaze to Holden’s slumbering expression cloaked in shadow.

He takes a drag of his cigarette and exhales slowly in the silence. The car engine ticks as it cools, but otherwise he can’t hear anything - not even the wind.

Taking off his seatbelt, Bill leans over to press a kiss against Holden’s cheek.

Holden stirs, uttering a moan. “Are we there?”

“Not quite.” Bill murmurs, stroking his thumb across Holdens temple where his hair begins to curl.

Holden’s eyelids flutter open in the darkness, searching the shadowed corners of the car and the street ahead for landmarks. “Where are we?”

“Just outside of Flagstaff.” Bill says.

“Why are we pulled over?” Holden asks, pushing himself upright in his seat to survey their location on the side of the road.

“Come on.” Bill says, nodding toward the desert.

Holden frowns as Bill shoves the door open with his shoulder, and gets out of the car. Sand shifts beneath his feet as he stretches his back, easing out the knotted kinks from hours behind the wheel.

Holden clambers out of the car, and peers over the hood at him. “What are we doing?”

Bill shuffles around to lean against the hood of the car, and waves a hand for Holden to join him. “Just come here for a minute.”

Holden hesitates for a moment before pushing the car door shut. He ambles around the hood of the car, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with his knuckles. Sitting on the hood beside Bill, he drops his head to Bill’s shoulder and suppresses a yawn.

Curling his arm around Holden’s shoulder, Bill draws him closer, and breathes out a quiet sigh.

“This was a good idea, you know.” He says, quietly. “Getting away for a little bit.”

“Now you agree with me?” Holden asked, teasing gently. “You spent the whole first day complaining about your back hurting.”

“Yeah, you got me there.” Bill says, uttering a low chuckle.

Holden laughs quietly, tucking his cheek tighter against Bill’s shoulder.

A slow breeze creeps in from the desert, void of the daytime humidity that is sure to come with the rising of the sun. Holden shudders softly, and Bill draws him closer, rubbing a hand over the goosebumps prickling his arm.

“Cold?”

“No.” Holden murmurs, defiantly.

“We can go if you want.”

“No, this is nice.” Holden says, tilting his head back to look up at the sky. “I’ve never seen stars like this, have you?”

“No.”

Holden lifts a hand towards the sky, his fingertips drizzled in pale, pewter light as if he could dip his nails into the smattering of stars.

“Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Orion’s Belt …” He murmurs, naming off constellations as his fingers wander across the blanket of the sky.

Bill slips his fingers under Holden’s jaw and turns his mouth into a kiss, interrupting the whispered string of names. A quiet whimper rolls off Holden’s tongue into the gentle stroke of Bill’s mouth, and his lips fall open to the gentle touch. Bill strokes Holden’s cheek, savoring the softness of his skin and the sweet taste of his mouth, the weightlessness in his chest while this moment unfolds privately in the darkness.

When he pulls back, Holden swallows hard, his nostrils flaring gently with a deep, shaky inhale. He leans his forehead against Bill’s, closing his eyes against the warm, wandering caress of Bill’s thumb working its way down his jawline and throat.

“What if we just kept driving?” Bill whispers.

“What?” Holden asks, offering a choked little laugh.

“We see the Grand Canyon like you wanted, and then we keep driving.” Bill says, nudging his forehead against Holden’s.

“Really?” Holden asks, despite the smile fighting underneath the bite of his teeth. “And never go back?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“I don’t think your back would make it to the West Coast.” Holden says, muting a laugh when Bill begins to scowl.

“Fine, forget it.” Bill says, leaning back.

Holden gazes at him sheepishly from beneath his eyelashes. “It’s a nice thought, though.”

“Yeah,” Bill says, scanning the dark shadows cloaking the landscape around them. “It is.”

They sit on the hood of the car for a long time, Bill smoking a cigarette, Holden resting his head on Bill’s shoulder. He tries to catalogue each second in his mind - the cool breeze, the endless desert making them small, the weight of Holden’s head on his shoulder, the warm gust of his breath on his neck.

Things have a way of slipping out of your hands when you aren’t watching, he thinks. Everything changes so quickly. Moments you think will last forever disappear in the blink of an eye. But not this one, not this time.

Half an hour later, they’re back in the car, driving into Flagstaff where the hotel awaits and the next day promises adventure just as Holden had predicted. Bill casts a glance up at the sky as they leave the desert behind. The moon hasn’t moved despite the distance traveled, and some things, like the stars, are forever.

#bill x holden #mindhunter #my writing #Anonymous

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bilgisticallykosher · 5 years ago

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Sanders Asides: Are There Healthy Distractions? reaction

Pre-anything: I'm not expecting to love this one as much as the last episode. Nothing terrible, but the disgusting trash man intro is just a hard thing to beat.

I’m expecting this to be SvS part 2. I'm expecting some sort of reaction and conclusion to Virgil's reveal at the end of DWIT. I'm therefore looking for any sign of confidence from Virgil immediately pointing to him being Deceit. I think it's likely not going to be addressed until late in the episode. Virgil angst until he comes back. Will Deceit be wearing Virgil's current hoodie? People have theorized that since he took notes on Roman's advice, it's possible for him to be better at pretending to be someone else. Especially someone who pops in, as opposed to rising up.

I'm also anticipating Thomas to come up with a different solution to the callback/wedding thing. Namely, Logan asking him if he'd just speak to Lee and Mary Lee, and ask to celebrate another time, more privately, and if he could go to the callback. Like, there's definitely a reason Deceit threw Logan in the back where he thought he'd have less influence.

I'm also waiting on Roman angst. We needed to meet another character (there's no way it wasn't Remus) before entering Roman's room.

OH GOSH they're doing animation, right? Or, another medium? That's gotta be for Roman's room! I was thinking maybe stop-motion or fluid animation. I'd also LIKE Deceit's name reveal, but I'm not sure we'll get that.

Post-title screen. I thought this was an old TS & Friends I'd missed. I, didn't love Frozen. This is an understatement. Okay. Still really like the name Sanders Asides, it's funny. That's. Hm. Well, it looks like Virgil. In a different outfit? Intriguing. So, distractions, like distracting yourself from wedding/callback? Also, "Are there healthy distractions?" Almost like "Can lying be good?" (At least, I have misremembered the title as "Can distractions be good?" at least five times already.)

Okay I'm also focusing too much on my theory and supporting it. I know Frozen has been used as a metaphor for Depression and/or other mental illnesses, so, maybe that's why Virgil's the focus in the title screen?

WATCHING! Y'know, despite the Jewish thing, I've only ever seen two episodes of The Goldbergs, didn't really get into- YES HELLO THOMAS. What. Is this an actual ad? Why does he sound like a pirate? HA! He acknowledged it. "What the hell is that accent?" Idk, a little Remus, a little midwest?

Okay, that was the opening? Wondering if the red jacket plays any special significance, or they just saw it and bought it.

I like the effects of the A. Virgil is. There already. Hnnnnnm. I dunno, man. This is supposed to be part of the chronological series, right? Oh it's a skeleton onesie! Canon onesie for Virgil!

WOAH EVERYONE! Ooh, Roman's Beast? I wonder if that'd change depending on what show either actual, or character, Thomas is in. They're all there! Different order, too!

OH MY GOSH is this taking place twenty minutes after DWIT? IS THIS DECEIT??? I failed at not pushing my theory, whoops. I'm still suspicious. (Roman's floppy horns.)

Literally nobody believes that you didn't put all Frozen answers in, Ro. "I don't wear those anymore, they're too childish." Still waiting on Logan angst, too… probably after Roman.

"Thomas is in a bad place" Virgil looks uncomfortable, but he also didn't seem so offended when Roman pulled his "twenty minutes ago" line. Well, it's definitely Logan, "Thomas is at home." Haha. Also, Roman's hood falling down was hilarious??

Okay, screw it, I'm pushing this. Virgil did learn last episode that repressing problems isn't the way to deal with them. But I feel like Deceit would also keep pressing for them to acknowledge why he feels bad? Also, Thomas's face, wow, discomfort.

I don't get the "Thomas in the movie" joke, it's a snowflake? "Or neutral." Burn! "This weird ice cutting song." Man, where's the Critic? "Externalization" he had a little smile, guys.

Some Logan vs. Patton tension AND some Logan vs. Roman tension. "Fear will be your enemy." Virgil looked at, Thomas, I think? Damn guys, this might actually be Virgil.

Okay I watched this four times, Virgil and Logan do not shout Joan. And Thomas does it sadly afterwards. "Passage of time," This might actually be Virgil!

I just choked! Oh my gosh, you guys, he is naked my throat hurts from not screaming. I'm having trouble getting over this. This cannot be a shock to anyone, but I want to hear him say "I sleep in the buff" several thousand more times.

"Did I screw everything up" oooh, I was wrong, it's Virgil, but who cares, buff. Thomas is looking at his phone, is it not too late for callback?

WOAH going right for Patton's throat! Ahaha, the tallies were hysterical.

"Why have a ballroom with no balls?" "*snrk*" Don't lie, Thomas, that's hysterical.

Patton's sadness and "without trust issues" hmmm. Shut out [her] whole life, is this supposed to be a comparison to anyone? Logan's "hey, yeah!" Is oddly hilarious.

Is the "he" that Virgil's talking about the director? "Well she really shouldn't be letting go of anymore of her clothing." Oh my gosh.

Oh, today is April 13th! The wedding is at night, so is he already missing the callback? ICE TOILET! Remus, my god. Also, just noting, minus hair and makeup, this is some easy Remus-ing for the crew. They didn't have to deal with the whole outfit.

Good point, Logan! This is not how Roman shows affection! Especially towards Disney! You guys, what if Roman is Deceit?... No, he hasn't been pushing the callback enough. But like. Beast/Prince symbolism? Hm. I'm watching him.

Wait, what the hell party? I, I'm confused, wait he's telling Thomas's friends? That doesn't sound like he's going to the wedding? Who is "he"? If he were missing the wedding, it'd be him talking about Lee and Mary Lee.

Unless he sent someone else to the wedding in his stead? So he could go to the callback? Did he send Deceit? That's. Unlikely. But misrepresenting his side? Idk idk.

"If he lied on purpose." MUSIC! Wait what's this about unsympathetic judgemental jerk? Who are they talking about??? This had better be revealed at the end. I went back, judgemental jerk used twice, and combative compatriot sounds like Deceit, what other "he" is there, but the Sides can't be seen by others, so????????

The music is still going. Rico? Oh, is that the answer? So is this unrelated to the wedding/callback? Okay, party isn't wedding. That was also an incredible act of breath control from Thomas. Standing ovation, dude.

Oooh, the grounding thing! Ice machine! Ice machine is one of my favorite Shorts characters, guys, I love him, he a loud boy. "Deodorant" *excited noise*... oh, no that's fine.

But I mean. Couldn't he do something now? Call or text an apology? Logan "have I mentioned that you called me cool yet" Sanders. Long ice powers list.

I just realized that the voting hat was Deceit's! I- oh, he's just literally off-screen. I'm. Fairly certain that I was wrong now, yes. Virgil hissy. Ha, they didn't want to do Deceit's makeup. Understandable. Oh, is this the animation thing?

"Love is an open wound" ooooh, nice. That was actually a cool re-write. In the buff. Is Thomas legit writing fanfiction now?

I do not like the holiday season, I'm Scrooge. I do love Joan, though! DARK SIDE SWEATERS I would legitimately never wear them. Ever. Because X-mas. But eyeballs and demons.

Logan angst is still incoming.

So, it was tied to the main narrative, but… Virgil wasn't addressed? So, is it just loosely tied, but not necessarily sequentially? It's real cute seeing them all hanging out together like on everyone's fanfics, and that had to be crazy to edit. And hey, the Frozen stuff was better with commentary. But I'm still waiting on SvS part two, I think. And post-DWIT "fallout," but I did really enjoy all of them together being (relatively) cute.

Sorry for being really focused on one theory. And, really, it's not like I'm disappointed with the episode. In and of itself, I liked it. It's just that I was expecting a direct continuation of the last two episodes, which this was not. And that's fine! I just, I hope we get that continuation. Like Thomas said, narrative has been building up for certain things, and they've been waiting on other aspects for a long time, so I'm sure they're even more excited to show them to us as we are to watch them. And have I mentioned editing? Must have been some job to do all that. Really great.

#new video reaction #character!thomas #sanders sides #ts spoilers #patton sanders #roman sanders #logan sanders #virgil sanders #janus sanders #remus sanders

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descent-into-dissent · 7 years ago

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Tag Game

Tagged by @Ikilledamanimeanwhat

Rules: 30 questions and tag 20 blogs you would like to get you know better (or don’t it’s up to you!)

Nickname(s): I have a lot. Kai, Ripple, Water. I’m on like my 3rd name change so clearly I don’t do “name consistency”

Gender: Trans guy

Sign: Pisces Sun, Virgo Moon, Cancer Rising

Height: 5”5’

Time: 6:09 PM

Fave bands: Of Monsters and Men, Fall Out Boy, Halestorm, The Mowglis

Fav solo artists: Seth Lakeman, Lindsey Stirling,

Song stuck in your head: How I Became The Sea by Owl City, Come On Get Higher by Matt Nathanson, Lady of the Sea by Seth Lakeman

Last movie I saw: Black Panther

Last show I watched: Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir

When did I create my blog: Too long ago. Sometime in high school, probably sophomore year

What do I post: Memes. Things that amuse me, jokes, cute animals, fandom stuff

Why did I choose my url: Because turn of phrase amuses me and inevitable heat death of universe etc

Following: 208 blogs, mostly my friends and blogs for my special interests. Poetry, fandoms, Greek myth, a few trans positivity blogs

Followers: 149 on this one

Average hours of sleep: Too little.

Lucky numbers: 2, 7, 11, 17

Instruments: At some point in my life I have played the violin, flute, piano, recorder, and middle-school-band percussion. Do I remember how to play any of these? No

What I am wearing: Black high top Converse, mismatching socks, jeans, a t-shirt acquired at a school event, a Riverdale Jughead beanie, a bunch of bracelets from a Clean The Oceans campaign, a moon phases bracelet, and a surfer shells necklace that I never take off despite ;living in the Midwest

Dream job: I am a college student having a Majoring crisis please do not ask me this question

Dream trip: Ocean. But also I have always wanted to visit Venice, because when I was a wee bab I read a book called The Thief Lord and it was really good and took place in Venice and the city being magical and beautiful was part of the plot and I want to experience it

Fav food(s): Not dining hall food. Fish? Sushi? Sushi.

Nationally: United States citizen

Fav Song: L.A. Devotee by Panic! At The Disco, because I really miss my best friend right now and that’s Our Song. She’s and Aries and I’m a Pisces so it’s Relevant

Last book I read: Love Her Wild by Atticus. Currently reading Given to the Sea by........ I can’t see the author from where I’m sitting. Google says Mindy McGinnis

Three fictional universes I wanna join:

1. Avatar: The Last Airbender. I need to be a Waterbender. There’s nothing else I could be

2. Corny I guess but Percy Jackson, bc Poseidon is my deity and it would be cool to be his son by blood, with all the powers that come with that

3. Throne of Glass, I’d want to be a fae

I guess I’m tagging @starspangled-pan-withaplan, @cleric-of-evil, @lightshot, @dysfunctional-robin, @coffeebeecutie, @thegenderqueerbatman

#about me #i was tagged #kai speaks

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thesupersecretbookstore · 4 years ago

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This Week’s Expert Picks

A friend recommended "Beyond The Gender Binary" to me shortly before I saw that the author, Alok Vaid-Menon, was doing a giveaway of 200 copies for educators, youth, and folks who work with youth. Being a broke, queer, youth worker I obviously signed up.

Whew.

First, the reviews on the back: Billy Porter, Sam Smith, and Princess Nokia. Are you kidding me? That's, like, an SNL line up.

Now, more importantly, the content:

I generally believe myself to be pretty on top of social issues, especially gender and sexuality. I'm a queer person who loves queer people, afterall. But I can still say I learned from this book. More importantly: it is written lovingly, with zero condescension, with the hope of being a teaching tool. This book is the perfect anti-flyer to give to friends and parents of trans and gender nonconforming folks in addition to being a perfect book to give to trans and gender nonconforming people themselves. I have been teaching folks (cis and not) about the gender spectrum and how to talk about queer issues for years, but Beyond the Gender Binary gave me better language, better references, and actual, tangible questions with answers.

Some quotes that made me think:

"People judge gender non-conformity because they are insecure about their identities. If they weren't, then gender variances wouldn't be so heavily policed. Gender non-conformity causes such a huge reaction because we're constantly taught that there are only two fixed and universal genders. Seeing other people defy this mandate bring the entire system into question." This is a pretty standard reaction to bullying, yes, but it put this question in my mind: What questions does this cause people to ask? The critical and judgemental people--what happens when they are confronted with folks of different genders?

"We thought fitting in would give us security--but is it security when someone else living their life differently unsettles us to our very core?"

"Whose definitions are we prioritizing anyway?" The folks who exist within the binary or the folks who don't? It doesn't make sense to let people set definitions if they aren't the people affected by those definitions.

"The selective outcry over new words to describe gender and sexuality--amidst the thousands of words that are added to the dictionary every year--is about prejudice, not principle."

On the difference between normal and normative: "normative is about what gets elevated by society to a position of power."

"Using gender neutral language isn't about being politically correct, it's just about being correct."

On biology-based arguments to uphold a gender binary: "This is part of a larger system of using science as a rhetorical strategy for a normative goal."

So. Many. Mic. Drops. That isn't even all of the times I need to pause and take note. It's a super-short book (64 pages including acknowledgments) so you can pick it up and read it quickly without me having to quote the whole thing here.

But you should read it. As a friend, an ally, a human sharing a planet with people of various genders. And, also, it's a good read. Fresh and compassionate language, easy to read and understand, no big words and no superiority. Just wholesome explanations and explorations. SE

I was lucky enough to win an advanced copy of this book, shoutout @goodreads. The book is broken down into five “moments” in which @nifmuhammad showcases Black performance in American culture. His ability to configure personal stories along with musical and cultural analysis is beautiful to read. Weaving together moments over his life with often forgotten about artists who were overshadowed or lost in time.

Abdurraqib includes artists and places in time that are known to some, and others you may never have heard of. He covers the death of Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston at the 1988 Grammy’s, Michael Jackson’s death, and the wonderful Josephine Baker. Through many of these performances and artists he traces how Black artists have changed and adopted American culture.

Some of my favorite chapters included the chapter about Merry Clayton. Such a fascinating story about her which he ties in to The Rolling Stones song Gimmie Shelter which she sang on. The chapter about playing spades during a simpler time with his boys. The Wu-Tang chapter hits hard, especially being able to see that sort of rise and fall of such a bonded group. The last chapter hit me hard though, only about 3 pages or so, talking about Hanif breaking down with his brother. It’s powerful, if you have siblings it’ll hit you deep. Loved the book, his prose continues to cut deep, and shout out to the Midwest. CJH

Hot Water Music is a cocktail of short stories by the one and only Charles Bukowski, with a splash (or floater) of poetics. Of course the collection deals largely with drinking, women, gambling, and writing, but it is an important collection that establishes Bukowski's minimalist style and his thematic oeuvre. I first discovered this book and most of Bukowski because of the punk band that shares the same name as this book. Like the band, this book is the punk rock version of the new what’s next. I dare someone (besides myself of maybe icon303) to write like this today. Yes, Bukowski is chauvinistic and a brute boxer, but he is also a romantic, especially to the hard-working idiosyncrasies of life’s doldrums and love. This book should be taught in kindergarten, because it is more important than algebra. RB

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exodusofthesun · 5 years ago

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Eternal Rain, Part 4

After a couple hours, the two left the elderly lady, with a tub of cookies of their own.

“What do you say?’ the man said.

“Thank you!” the daughter said to the lady.

“Of course! I hope you enjoy the cookies.” she said. She looked at the man. “She is more than welcome to come by anytime. You too.”

The man nodded. “Alright, time for us to go home for dinner. Hope you didn’t fill up too much on cookies.” They all laughed. The two soon left the older lady, who closed the door, with a wonderful goodbye. “We’re gonna have soup for dinner tonight, alright?” The girl nodded as they climbed the stairs. As they entered the room, the girl ran toward the kitchen to help make the soup.

And in no time, the beef and vegetable soup was ready. As the girl set the table, the man turned on the radio.

“Hopefully we’ll get Chicago Rose tonight.” he said as he returned to the table. He poured the soup in the bowls, placed some drinks on the table. As he sat down, the sound of a woman’s voice came on the radio.

Hey all you rain soaked Americans out there. This is Chicago Rose, giving you all the news from around the globe and country.

In global news, after a break in one of the pipes, China has lost a majority of their stockpiled oil and gasoline. This has resulted in a major loss for not only China, but many other southeastern Asian countries. Brazil has used the last of their oil and gasoline, making it the one hundredth twenty-seventh country to run out of oil, including among others, Germany, Japan, Mexico and the United States. Flooding has been noted in some major metropolitan areas in Europe, including Barcelona, Paris, London, and Athens. This comes after the last flood mark, where much of Italy, Denmark, and the rest of the Netherlands had been lost to the water.

Today marks the 5,065th day straight of rain in the globe, with Mumbai measuring the most rain, at approximately 50 inches per day as of this time.

In national news, catastrophically, Hoover Dam has finally given way, and collapsed. The famous dam, which has been seen cracking and starting to give starting two years ago, finally cracked large enough where the pressure from Lake Mead’s rising levels tore apart the dam. The result of this has knocked out almost all power to the Las Vegas area and much of northern Arizona. We are still waiting for the damage done by the flooding caused by the dam’s collapse. Experts predict that the remaining national power infrastructure will fail in two years. This follows the finding last month that as much as 70% failed during the heavy rain we received two years into the rainfall. Individual regions are predicted to not last longer than that. Manufacturing has also dropped approximately 17% so far this year, and is predicted to reach 0 at the same time as the nation runs out of power, backing up the correlation experts found between the power drop and manufacturing drop. The national average power infrastructure remaining is reported at 22%, with 9% power outputted from last year’s reports.

In sports, after a hard match, the Japanese national soccer team scored the game winning goal against Spain in extra time, winning 1-0. In football, Oakland defeated Seattle narrowly, 17-14 and Kansas City beat Green Bay 28-10. In baseball, the Yankees and Astros played into extra innings, but in the end, Houston beat New York, 5-4 in the twelfth inning.

The weather man tells me that the rain is going to be coming down harder in the coming fall months. It is expected that the average rainfall will be ten inches a day.

Well, Americans, hope you all stay dry tonight. This has been Chicago Rose, signing off. Up next, an hour of smooth blues music.

The man sighed. “Well, guess that’s the news. Want me to put it on Kansas City?” The girl nodded her head. He got up, turned the dial, and placed the radio on the Kansas City station.

…As it stands, the Jenkins farm will be able to put out 40% crop this year, as opposed to the 38% they did last year after the flooding. The Mississippi has risen another ten feet, meaning St. Louis and New Orleans are now completely lost to the river.

Fog and smog levels have actually lowered around the midwest states, though experts advise to still remain out of the mists.

With the collapse of Hoover Dam, only three dams remain in the nation, the largest one being the Bonneyville Dam in the Pacific Northwest.

The Midwest region has approximately 19% power infrastructure remaining, with only 11% power created since last year. Weather experts here predict about fourteen inches a day of rain until next summer.

This has been the news. Now, some jazz music. Up first, Édith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose”.

The girl gasped, getting up and sitting down next to the radio as the song played. The man looked at his daughter swinging back and forth to the music being played on the radio.

“You love that song, don’t you?” he said, with a smile.

The daughter looked back at him. “It’s my favorite.”

“Do you even know what they are saying?” he asked. The daughter shook her head, causing him to laugh again. As the song ended, the lights began to flicker.

“Well, guess it’s time.” the man said. “Time to get ready for bed.” As the two prepared themselves for bed, the lights went out across the entire industrial district of the city. The man looked out a window. “We must’ve made less electricity the past few days.” he said, looking out at the blackened city.

The man walked into his daughter’s bedroom, where he saw a candle lit next to the bed. He saw his daughter playing with the doll he placed on the pillow.

“Thanks, Dad.” she told him, as she was playing with it. The sight put a smile on his face.

“You’re very welcome, sweetheart. I’m glad you like it.” he walked over to her bed, and kissed her on top of her head. She placed the doll next to her under the covers.

The man blew out the candle. “You sleep well, alright? Have sweet dreams.”

“Ok.” she whispered back. The man slowly walked out the room, taking a look back at his daughter, before quietly closing the door.

He walked over to his room, and got into bed. He crawled under the covers, and stared at the ceiling, listening to the pitter patter of the rain. His thoughts ran toward that of his wife and the life that he had before all of this happened. And it was in those thoughts, while listening to the rain fall on the window in his room, that he finally succumbed to his tiredness and fell asleep.

#rain #industrial #dystopia #post-apocalyptic #creative writing #grey #fiction #writing #short story

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shanannigansthebibliophile · 8 years ago

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Solstice by Braxton A. Crosby is the 3rd installment in the Star-Crossed Saga.

What You Believe, Can Destroy You!

Solstice (Release Date: November 25, 2017)

William and Sydney have sacrificed everything to fortify their love, so much so that William dares to brave the depths of space to find a cure for their deadly Supernova bond, leaving both her and Earth vulnerable to Torrian Alliance attack. But with a full scale rebellion in play on Fabricius, the reality of Sydney’s execution from Torrian hands is diminished, only eclipsed by the certainty of a more threats – The Third Faction and The Dagmas Clan – lead by Dominic and his insurgent recruits. With overwhelming odds mounting against them, William makes a desperate attempt to find the last of the endangered Star-children only to be captured by a new menace, where he is forced to compete in the dreaded Gauntlet of sport. Allies surge to free Fabricius, seeking alliances across the galaxy while Sydney tries to keep her identity hidden and trains to master the third phase of her Star-child evolution: Solstice. With Sarah’s mysterious return home with clues to unlock the future, Noella’s training and Bill’s symbiotic development hope is restored, but will it be enough to unite the galaxy and destroy evil for once and for all?

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CHAPTER THREE

Sydney and Noella walked hand in hand along the small winding path leading to the top the Mount Dothan. The dusking sky painted a sheet of orange and red light across the woodsy terrain around them, giving the impression of wading through a sea of fire. Amid the grim moment of the day and the burning sensation rising in Sydney’s throat, the tone seemed fitting. Silence accompanied them, and it wasn’t until the pair hit the peak that Sydney finally broke the ice. “So what do your people call this ceremony?” she asked.

“The time of the harvest. It’s the moment when a fallen soldier is said to join the being of the sky. I think humans refer to it as God,” Noella said, her tone as flat as the expression on her face.

“Sounds cool,” she replied as she surveyed the surroundings; a patch of flatland that housed a family of hawks who watched cautiously from above in a lone cedar tree. From here, every inch of Madisonburg could be observed without the need of telescope or binoculars. A bed of dandelions and weeping willows greeted them in the center of the field.

“This way. I’ll show you where I buried his body,” Noella said.

She could see that Noella was visibly shaken, slowly unravelling before her eyes. Her hands trembled as her eyes began to redden. She wondered how long it’d take, amazed at how Noella had not said a word since Arrion’s death a few weeks ago, only morning him in silence, which she explained was customary on Fabricius. She had done the deed all by herself, refusing to allow Sydney to assist in his burial. From scouting the plot of land to digging the hole, Noella insisted that it was protocol on her planet for a lone fellow soldier to be assigned the arduous task of preparation. Seeing as though William had departed soon after, there was no better candidate left for the job.

She took Noella by the hand and drew her close, giving her the most delicate and firm hug she could muster. Noella stood motionless, sinking into her friend’s embrace. After a few seconds, she released her, unable to make eye contact. “I’m here for you,” she murmured.

“Thanks, Syd,” Noella replied, her voice ragged.

She finally looked up at her and gave a nod, following Noella’s lead over to the place where Arrion’s body lay. Surprisingly, the disturbed clay seemed more settled than she expected, dried from the sun and already showing signs of life as Bermuda grass had slowly began to encroach along the edges. A makeshift tombstone had been erected, fashioned from metallic fuselage scraps of the Daedallus, with only Arrrion’s name and handle tatted along the surface, minus dates to hide his identity to hikers in hopes that most consider it a memorial to a lost pet if they stumbled upon it.

Noella knelt next to the grave, slid her backpack from her shoulders and began to open it. Searching her bag, she retrieved a small oval-shaped disk and a satchel filled with purple powder. “These are crushed lilacs pedals. We must first prepare the path for Arrion’s ascension by sending tribute to the sky.” She stood and sprinkled a few handfuls over the grave until a thin layer had materialized before them. “On our planet we usually use the oil of a Tonosia Tree, which is a lot thicker substance and is used for sterilization. Sarah thought it’d be a good idea to use lilacs as a substitute because it was a similar color.”

“It’s beautiful,” she replied.

“I will now begin the ceremony.” Noella placed the disc in the center of the burial site, depressed a red button on the top and came to her side. The two joined hands as the disc began to spin and dig into the hardened clay. Noella pointed a hydrogen phaser at the site and fired a stream of fire upon it that scorched the sheet of crushed pedals. The disc disappeared beneath the flames and Noella broke out into song, in an alien dialect that Sydney could not understand. It was less about the words and more the moment that choked at her, forcing the tears to flow freely down her face. She squeezed Noella’s hand as she crooned on. By the time Noella had finished, a small fissure had opened in the place where the disc had entered and a cloud of embers swirled into the air; a mix of red, orange and yellow. It lifted high into the sky and faded into the clouds.

Noella dropped to her knees in a whimper. “It is finished.”

Sydney came beside her and held her close. “It was… beautiful.”

The two sat in silence with only sobs to drown out the sounds of the forest.

About the Author

Multi-Award Winning and #1 Amazon Bestselling Author Braxton A. Cosby creates vivid, original stories that focus on relationships and world building that brings characters to life. Braxton received a lot of his inspiration from watching the accomplishments and exploits of his famous uncle, comedic legend Bill Cosby. Braxton is the CEO of Cosby Media Productions, a full-service entertainment studio that focuses on producing content in the areas of television, film, and print media. Braxton is also an actor and radio show host. As a writer, Braxton’s novels explore the psychology of human connection, concerning themes of trust, faith and selflessness. He resides in Lawrenceville, Ga with his wife and a scruff Morkie named StarKozy.

Braxton Cosby | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

“The Star-Crossed Saga is daring, exciting and romantic. It’s an imaginative science fiction adventure, chock full of memorable characters, including the smart and alluring Sydney, who will inspire girls everywhere as they navigate the tricky waters of teen hood. Braxton Cosby’s debut delivers.” –Adriana Trigiani — New York Times bestselling author

“Braxton Cosby’s stories feel personal and well thought-out. I’m happy to welcome this entertaining writer to the YA science fiction field. I look forward to more of his work!” –Tananarive Due, author of My Soul to Keep “Even an eternity of travel may fall to emotion…ProtoStar is a blend of science fiction and romance…a unique spin of the doomed love, very much recommended.” –James A. Cox – Midwest Book Review “This Young Adult Sci-Fi book has it all: romance, innocence, mystery, intrigue, prophecy and adventure. …Cosby writes like a seasoned author and I look forward to the next installment in this series.” –Anne B. Readers Favorite “…a magnificent start to an inventive series by a talented debut author…strong prose is appealing, engaging and well-written. His characters glimmer like the sun…a cinematic literary epic adventure.” -Blogcritics “…filled with lots of action and great pacing…very descriptive and vivid.” –Jennifer Jabaley, author of Crush Control “…a really intriguing story that encompasses action, adventure, romance, drama and a measure of science fiction that helps make this multi-faceted book a very engaging read. Ending skillfully with a suspenseful cliffhanger, this book, with its well-developed characters and many surprising twists will leave readers anxiously waiting for the next installment in the Star-Crossed Saga.” –Literary Classsics 5/5 stars

YA Bound Book Tours

Blog Tour: Solstice By Braxton A. Cosby (Excerpt) Solstice by Braxton A. Crosby is the 3rd installment in the Star-Crossed Saga. What You Believe, Can Destroy You!

#Blog #Blog Tour #Excerpt #Sci-fi #Science Fiction #Series #The Star-Crossed Saga

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erinkappeler · 8 years ago

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Apostrophe, Animation, and Aeroplane

At some point between Jeff Session’s and Rex Tillerson’s confirmation charades and the preliminary votes to gut the ACA (we finally got our death panel!), after a night of informal group therapy/ranting with some beloved friends, I found myself lying on their kitchen floor, asking sincerely and hopelessly the question so many of us have been asking lately: what the fuck do we do? We’re powerless in so many ways now. Innocent people are going to die just from the ACA repeal alone.

I’m still committed to pragmatic action (keep calling your reps! sign up for Wall of Us!), but I am also overwhelmed. This is of course the intention of the GOP; you don’t rush confirmation hearings and push to dismantle protective legislation like this unless you’re trying to suppress dissent by opening all these fronts at once. Knowing this doesn’t make it easier to cope.

My kitchen floor breakdown happened in Boston. I also spent a lot of time in bookstores there, and I realized at some point while packing a suitcase to go back to the Midwest that I have been building my own protective wall out of books, as I’ve always been wont to do.

These are my recent purchases:

In the immediate aftermath I wanted the planning books, the ones with clues about effective organization. But I’m in a crying-on-the-kitchen-floor phase right now, and I want the ones that remind me of how many times authoritarianism has won, and how people kept living anyway (when they weren’t murdered). The ones that acknowledge how many losses we’re going to have to deal with. The ones that remind us that we’re not exceptional and our country has in fact created this same situation in other countries time and again. The Sympathizer is one of these books; it wrecked me in so many ways. I don’t know how to talk about it coherently yet. I haven’t finished Going to the Dogs (about life in Weimar Germany), but it’s giving me an odd sort of comfort, especially in the author’s preface to the 1950 edition, where Kästner describes the rise of the Nazi party:

“People ran to follow the Pied Pipers, following them right into the abyss in which we now find ourselves, more dead than alive, and in which we try to make ourselves comfortable, as if nothing had happened.

The present book ... is no poetic photo album, but a satire. It does not describe what things were like; it exaggerates them. The moralist holds up not a mirror, but a distorting mirror to his age. Caricature, a legitimate artistic mode, is the furthest he can go. If that doesn’t help nothing will. It is not unusual that nothing should help, nor was it then. But it would be unusual if the moralist were to be discouraged by this fact. His traditional task is the defense of lost causes. He fulfills it as best he may. His motto today is as it has always been: to fight on not withstanding!”

The Sympathizer ends in a somewhat similar place, actually:

“We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion. . . . We cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.”

I feel hopeless about the immediate future but I still believe in fighting on notwithstanding for our scandalous thoughts and extravagant hopes. A way out of this mess doesn’t exist if we can’t imagine it into existence.

But we also can’t live through this without mourning what we’ve already lost and what we’re going to lose. I find myself circling back again and again lately to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult classic album, in my ongoing attempt to reconcile loss and hope. In the Aeroplane is a concept album, a sort of palimpsestic narrative about an adolescent boy in the late nineties falling in love with Anne Frank (as much as it’s about anything – the lyrics are famously opaque and the narrative logic isn’t exactly linear). The songs seem to be about young love, sex, family trauma, and the Holocaust. They’re also about art’s ability to reanimate the dead and to help the living keep living. (In all of these themes it reminds me quite a bit of H.D.’s epic World War II poem Trilogy, another useful piece for coping with the persistence of human cruelty and our seeming inability to remember the lessons of the past.)

I think part of what I find comforting about this album is the way it insists on the presence of the past, both as inescapable burden and as an incitement to ethical action and imaginative creation. Historical traumas aren’t described at a remove – they’re part of the fabric of life in the present. “Two Headed Boy,” for instance, overlays an erotic encounter (Anne and Peter in their hiding place? the contemporary adolescent boy and an imagined Anne? the boy and one of his contemporaries?) with bodies in the Nazi death camps:

We will take off our clothes

And they'll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine

And when all is breaking

Everything that you could keep inside

Now your eyes ain't moving

Now they just lay there in their climb

The eroticism of these lyrics – taking off our clothes, exploring the shape of a body, the flickering image of eyes rolling back in an orgasmic moment – is inseparable from the absolute horror of the past – the starving body that makes notches in a spine visible, the struggle to hold on to something internally while being slowly murdered, the eyes that can no longer move, the inevitability of becoming another body cast aside. It’s a grotesque pairing, but it’s also beautiful in its desire to breathe life back into the lost and in its will to look fully at historical suffering and to count it part of our present experience.

This is also an album that understands the complications of giving voice to the dead in a particularly nuanced way. Apostrophe is the technical term for speaking directly to a dead person; Barbara Johnson describes apostrophe as “a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness” (30). In the Aeroplane flirts with and thematizes but never exactly uses apostrophe in a sustained way. The title track, for instance, describes the voice of a dead girl but does not throw words into her mouth; she is left present and absent, inescapable but untouchable. The desire to reanimate her makes the song, but the song stops short of presuming it can speak for her:

What a curious life we have found here tonight

There is music that sounds from the street

There are lights in the clouds

Anna’s ghost all around

Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me

Soft and sweet

How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

The usual direction of apostrophe is reversed – Anna’s/Anne’s ghost voice moves through the living speaker, making him into the ventriloquist’s dummy. And yet we don’t hear what she says through him, just that it sounds “soft and sweet.” It’s a dream of contact that can’t exist; the words we want to hear are left just out of reach. Leaving the content of Anna’s words a mystery is a beautiful solution to a literary problem: even if we imagine Anne Frank’s actual words here, some of which we have access to, being channeled through the living speaker, it is still the living speaker’s mouth that frames the words. We can’t hear Anne speak any longer, no matter how closely we listen. The next verse takes up this problem:

Now how I remember you

How I would push my fingers through

Your mouth to make those muscles move

That made your voice so smooth and sweet

This verse foregrounds the necessary violence in speaking for an absent other. It makes the figure of apostrophe fleshy and grotesque, describing the speaker as the ventriloquist who forces a corpse’s muscles to move through physical manipulation. It notes the fiction of speech at work here – the muscles in the corpse once made its voice smooth and sweet, but they don’t now. Now it is impossible for that murdered voice to be heard except through a brutal and clumsy approximation of what it once was.

In the Aeroplane’s simultaneous desire for and distrust of sustained apostrophe links it to Diana Fuss’s discussion of what she calls “historical corpse poems.” Fuss argues that twentieth-century literature is filled with poems in which corpses speak, but that,

the Holocaust appears to mark the historical limit beyond which the corpse poem hesitates to venture. The point is clear: after the unthinkable event of genocide, no fiction of the living dead can possibly be sustained. … The few Holocaust poets who do employ the voice of the dead tend to adopt neither an individual nor a collective persona but a unique voice that is both at once. “‘I am I’ -- /thousands of slaughtered I’s,” Jacob Glatstein declares in a poem that reveals not the poet’s desire to revive the dead but rather his own profound identification with the dead. Recent trauma theory reminds us that one might survive an unthinkable atrocity like the Holocaust and yet still not feel alive. (Fuss 64-65)

Anne Frank becomes Anna in “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” doubling her presence, making us think of a specific individual and of the mass of individuals simultaneously (how many individual Anne’s and Anna’s died in the camps collectively?). The song participates in the necessarily confused subjectivity of the Holocaust corpse poem. It also speaks to a belated survivor’s guilt – the guilt of one who wasn’t alive in 1945 but who recognizes that this is due to the simple accident of birth; the final line of the song is “Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.” Why is the speaker here to imagine Anne’s voice? How can he do that, and how can he not?

Fuss argues that a poet who attempts to write corpse poems about the Holocaust “tentatively seeks to reverse the depersonalization of mass murder by lending to the unmourned victims of genocide his own individual voice. These singular poems do not presume to resurrect the dead, only to memorialize them from the respectful position of writers confronting the enigma of their own uncertain survivals” (65). This is the delicate project at work in “Two Headed Boy Pt. 2,” where the speaker acknowledges the need and the impossibility of giving voice, and the way this act is and is not for the dead:

And in my dreams you’re alive and you’re crying

As your mouth moves in mine, soft and sweet

Rings of flowers ‘round your eyes

And I’ll love you for the rest of your life when you’re ready

The necrophiliac insistence on eroticizing the ventriloquism of apostrophe – now it’s not just words that move through the dead girl’s mouth, but also the male speaker’s body – is both disturbing and yet part of the impossible project of memorialization. Fuss distinguishes “political corpse poems” from “historical corpse poems,” but these are in many ways one and the same. Fuss notes that,

[i]n political killings, the corpse is intended to function as a sign – a message (and most often a warning) to the living. … Political corpses are killed simply to make a point; deprived of subjective voice, these corpses do not so much convey a political message as become the message. The violent reduction of a person to a sign literally kills the messenger, stripping the body that remains of any meaning of its own. By giving voice to the cadaver, political corpse poems belatedly seek to undo this semiotic violence by multiplying the ways in which the dead body might signify and by complicating the terms of both its utterance and its address. These poems ventriloquize corpses not to perpetrate upon the dead another kind of profanation but to make manifest the violence of turning any physical body into a form of political speech. (61)

Anne Frank has of course become one of the most overdetermined symbols of the Holocaust. The potentially profane act of imagining an erotic encounter with her in this song becomes a way to work against the “violent reduction of a person to a sign”; Anne Frank the symbol becomes Anne Frank the individual, engaged in a radically singular and personal experience. It’s an invasive imaginative act, but it’s also a way to de-signify her death and to return her to an imagined personhood that exists apart from or in spite of state violence. Like so many of the images in these songs, it’s awful and gorgeous, heartbreaking and stomach-turning. It succeeds and it fails in its desire to reanimate the dead and to somehow make individual deaths both less symbolic and even more meaningful.

Fuss argues that “[h]istorical corpse poems offset the cultural process of forgetting with the literary work of remembering” and “invent[t] paradoxical new grammars to articulate the terrifying new realities of modern death” (66-67). As part of this tradition, the songs of In the Aeroplane invite us to remember as part of a way to resist future acts of violence. In “Holland, 1945,” Jeff Mangum sings,

And here's where your mother sleeps

And here is the room where your brothers were born

Indentions in the sheets

Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore

And it's so sad to see the world agree

That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies

All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

We are not currently facing anything like the scale of death we faced at midcentury. But it’s hard not to think of that moment now, as our elected officials look their constituents in the face and tell them they would rather let those constituents die than support the ACA. I don’t know how to deal with people who’d “rather see their faces fill with flies.” I only know how to keep the dream of white roses alive, however fleetingly and imperfectly. And so I put In the Aeroplane on one more time and get ready to march and protest and call and write…

Works Cited

Diana Fuss. Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Duke University Press, 2013.

Barbara Johnson. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.” Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 28-47. JSTOR.

#notmypresident #neutral milk hotel #in the aeroplane over the sea #poetry

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