#the gandhi outfit it's i just had a silly though

[bamburh]

I have 3 A

IDK WHY I DOING LIKE THIS BUT IT'S GOOD THO

[stonecoldjerseyfox]

Jersey on my mind (part 10)

When the darkness falls over the Safe-Zone, Mila gets Juri into a new jumper and combs his hair, to prepare him for eating dinner with the others, for the first time. Mila feels nervous, her hands are shaking as she makes sure the striped knitted jumper looks representable. Not that anyone Not that anyone will say something about it, but it's in her nature. In the mother’s milk. With a smile, as she combs her fingers through her blonde hair, Mila thinks of her own mother. Mama. How she, no matter how little they had, even though they were not really poor, made sure that Mila always had nice and clean clothes, kept her hair brushed and was fed proper food. Juri takes her hand, squeezes it between his and looks her deep in the eyes. They share a special bond. No matter what they have each other. 

”You look stylish.” Mila tenderly caresses him across the cheek. ”Are you hungry?”

Juri nods eagerly.

”Really? How’s that possible? You ate five Reese’s cups earlier!” she drills both her index fingers into Juri’s soft stomach. Juri laughs. It’s more like a faint chuckling, intense breathing. She would do anything to hear his voice, hear him call her ’mommy’. ”Well then.” Mila establishes. “Let's go downstairs.”

With great effort she, with the help of the bed frame, manages to stand upright, she swears gruesomely inside her head in pain. Mila turns to face herself in the full length mirror. 

As soon as they got back from the excursion to the gas station and the quarry, Mila staggered up the stairs and tumbled into bed, where she fell asleep, again, from exhaustion. She awoke by Juri climbing the bed with peanut butter and chocolate smeared around his mouth, with a strong scent of Reese's all around him. Mila ordered him to go wash off in the adjacent bathroom, while Carol proclaimed through the closed door that dinner would be ready within an hour, if they wanted to attend. 

I don’t have time to change, Mila thinks. Getting dressed earlier in the morning had taken long enough. She was close to leaving the bedroom without her pants on, since it was the most difficult garment to get inside when she couldn't bend her upper body properly. 

Juri, her constant supporter, gives her two thumbs up in the mirror; jeans and a sweaty top are apparently acceptable dinner clothes after all. But he won't get off so easily. Mila forces him to brush her hair and braid it before she considers them both representable for dinner and they head downstairs. At the end of the stairs, they bump into Daryl, who enters the front door.

”Did you also get a dinner invitation?” She greets him. 

”Sorta’.” he looks at Juri. ”Looking sharp, kiddo.”

Juri brushes up and thugs a bit on the jumper, whereupon he points at Daryl. 

”He wonders why you didn't dress up? It's dinner.” Mila explains.

Daryl looks down at his dark shirt with rolled up sleeves, the same clothes he wore on their trip to the gas station. It has probably not been washed in weeks. 

”Maybe next time, kiddo.”

They enter the combined kitchen, dining- and living room together. Sweat starts to run down Milas neck as she counts the attending dinner guests to ten. Shit, she has turned into a hermit. When she sees Morgan however, Mila relaxes slightly. And for some reason, it feels secure to have Daryl there, who probably think this is a worse scenario than the whole world’s population being wiped out, almost. Before she has gotten a grip of the very normal situation, as if it wasn’t an apocalypse going on outside the window, Abraham has stuck a bottle of beer in her hand and squatted in front of her, to praise Juri’s preppy dinner outfit. Without hesitation, Mila chugs half the bottle before she removes it from her lips. In the corner of her eye she sees Daryl staring at her. 

”Thirsty.” Mila says before she walks over to Maggie and Glenn. 

The entire ground floor smells of food. It’s pleasant, unusually normal. Juri wanders around the room and gets attention from right and left from the guests. 

”He really knows how to charm a crowd.” Maggie says. ”He’s a natural.”

”He’s three and a half.” Mila replies and takes another sip of beer. ”Being cute is a part of being a toddler. But yeah-” she sighs when she sees Juri, literally, charming the frayed sheriffs hat of Carl, who puts it on top of Juri's blonde mane. ”Yup, I have brought up a mingling expert.”

Few minutes later, Carol proclaims over their heads that dinner is on the table. They all move towards the dinner table and sit down. Mila takes a seat next to Juri. On Juri’s other side, Abraham settles. Next to Mila Rick sits, freshly showered and shaved, changed to a clean shirt. 

Carol serves them plates of spaghetti, sauce and green beans. Mila looks with amazement at the plate she’s handed from Carol. She still can’t understand that they get food on real china. Food that’s been prepared in a real kitchen. And freshly baked bread! Juri slurps and is very pleased. Mila eats under silence while listening to the others talking. Rick hands her a new beer when the old bottle is empty. He’s a nice man, handsome. On her right side, Juri tugs at her sleeve.

”What is it, malysh?” 

Juri forms his hand in front of his nose, pulling it down. She smiles and looks at Abraham. 

”He likes your mustasch.”

”He’s beautiful.” Abraham smiles at Mila, before returning to Juri. ”How old are you little guy?” 

Juri puts down his fork. Still with spaghetti hanging out of his mouth he repeats the procedure with his fingers. He’s three and a half fingers old.

”And your mom?”

”She’s twenty-five.” Mila says and spins spaghetti around her fork. ”You’ll have to use both your hand and toes for that one, malenkiy.” she smiles at Juri who giggles. 

Abraham smiles and points towards Juri’s plate with his fork. 

”I see you eat your vegetables. That’s good.”

Juri gives him a satisfied grin, mimes ’yummy’, and makes a wide circle over his belly. He does like vegetables, maybe because Mila has never cooked him meat, being a vegetarian. When she tells Abraham, she hears a faint grunt from the other side of the table, from Daryl. She catches his gaze over her beer bottle and lifts an eyebrow at him, gives him a sharp look, before he turns his attention back to the plate. 

”I think you have to teach me some of that-” Abraham makes some silly movements with his hands, which makes Juri once again laugh. 

While Abraham communicates with Juri, excited about all the attention he’s getting, Mila turns to Rick. 

”Tell me about the plan.” she says and leans back in the chair. ”Tell me about the quarry.”

”We're planning to lead the herd away from the quarry. We'll do a trial run tomorrow. The plan is to lead them about 20 miles away.” Rick explains and takes a sip of beer. ”And no, I won’t have you there.” 

”Okay. May I ask why?”

”Because you’re still badly hurt.” he puts the bottle down on the table. ”Still in pain?”

”I’ve given birth once-” Mila nods at Juri. ”But yeah. It stings. Have you involved the risk of stumbling upon those Wolves in your grand plan?”

Rick scratches his forehead.

”Not really. But we’re well prepared.”

”Well prepared, or just lucky?” Mila meets the former sheriff's eyes. ”Luck doesn’t last forever. Sooner or later you’ll run out of it.”

”Maybe that’s why I want you to stay here then.” Rick replies.

”Because I’m unlucky?” 

”Because you were sliced up with a machete barely three days ago.” 

She clenches her jaw. Fine. She’ll stay here while they pull off something that could be called the heist of the year. Lovely! From the other side of the table, she notices how Daryl looks at them. Smug son of a bitch. Just because he’s a part of the plan already. Mila takes a bountiful sip of beer. 

As if the dinner wasn’t enough, Carol has prepared dessert. A pie. It might as well have been Juri’s birthday. With widened eyes he follows Carol as she puts a smoking, freshly baked pie in the middle of the table. Mila must remind him to breathe when she also places a pitcher of custard next to the pie. He’s that excited.

”See it as a welcome party.” Carol smiles warmly at Juri, or both of them. ”Go ahead, dig in.”

Juri manages to push two pieces of pie down his small stomach before he leans back in the chair with a satisfied smile upon his lips. By then, Mila is on her fourth beer and begins to feel comfortably insouciant, to the point that Juri can crawl up in her lap to cuddle, without causing Mila to vomit from abdominal pain. She listens to the other talking, lulls the boy in her lap, while Morgan, in his reluctant manner, tells them about his life, about his friend Eastman, who tragically died.

”And then she stood there in the church. As the answer to my prayers. A sign from above.”

Morgan looks at her over the table, just as he did that day at the church. As if she were an angel. He couldn't be more wrong. She was, still is, only a young mother with alcohol problems and a lot of fucked up baggage, a broken past and a broken heart. But still, they found peace in each others company. 

”What’s your story?” Maggie turns and meets her gaze from the end of the table. “What did you do before all this?” 

”You heard. I was dropped from the sky one day, landing in front of Gandhi himself.” Mila cheekily nods at Morgan, making the group around the table laugh. ”It’s a… long story.” she shrugs her shoulders. “I’m from Russia. I came here when I was sixteen, to New Jersey. I became a mother while in university, totally unplanned. And now I'm here, at the end of the world with my three and a half year old son. We’ve survived so far. Now, can I have another beer?”

[the-end-of-art]

It takes pain to weep with those who weep

From Depression and Despair at Harvard by Jordan Gandhi (http://augustinecollective.org/harvards-editor-in-chief-reflects-on-depression-despair-and-hope/)

C.S. Lewis once wrote in Mere Christianity, “Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as friends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man’s psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.”

I realized that faith was the key difference between my last episode with depression – in which I not once contemplated suicide – and all the others. This time, in the deepest depression I had yet experienced, I still had hope. Knowing that my old suicidal habits had been transformed into hope amidst despair made it clear that my faith had made a difference in my life and that I wasn’t simply “a bad Christian.” Of course, the whole business of being “a bad Christian” is rather silly anyways; the reason I converted was because I recognized my own weakness and guilt. Following in Jesus’ footsteps does not require me to be perfect all the time, but it does demand that I seize the opportunity to really wrestle with life’s hardest problems with my friends rather than hiding behind a false veneer of strength. The Christian faith has never been about living up to God’s standards for goodness, but rather how God uses confession, hope, and faith to transform our brokenness and shortcomings.  My raw material may be shoddy – my genetic code seemingly designed for depression – but God is using it to transform me. My pride was my downfall, but my faith is my salvation.

I do not know if you share this faith, and you may find me foolish for believing it, though I think I have good reasons. But if you do, I pray that this story inspires you with the hope that I have felt, the hope that has seen me through my depression. If you don’t, I pray that you will at least be comforted by the knowledge that other Harvard students have gone what you are going through. Sometimes, it just takes patience to see the ways in which your struggles can serve as a comfort to others; it takes pain to weep with those who weep. Worry gets us nowhere, but waiting often brings us to a better place. Had I known in the fall that I would end up graduating on time, that I would end up working at my dream job, that I would be surrounded by friends who thought more rather than less of me for sharing, I probably would have approached my suffering differently. Of course, everything is 20/20 in hindsight.

Last night, Nick Nowalk gave a talk to Harvard College Faith and Action on hope and despair, and he pointed out that Harvard students have an abnormally high rate of depression compared to the population at large. Often expectations shape our emotions more than actual experiences. Nick suggested that because we have such high hopes for ourselves – we are told that we can take on the whole world – we feel our failings all the more astutely. Our highs are higher and our lows are lower.

In all your lows, may you still have hope. May you find solace in the company of those who share your sorrows. May you learn from my story and feel more comfortable sharing your troubles with those whom you love than I was. May you know that great strength often comes out of great weakness. May Cote’s family be healed from this tragedy. May Cote’s soul rest in peace.

Tonight, a group of student gathered in the Science Center to discuss these very delicate issues. The amazing thing is that though at first it is incredibly difficult to admit to our failures, mistakes, and struggles – it grows easier to do it in community. Confession – though painful – is cathartic. Knowing that you have told all you have to tell, that no one can discover some deep secret about you, that the Truth is out – is an immensely satisfying feeling. I hope that discussions like these can continue at Harvard; that students would have a place to share their common sufferings and to grow in true caritas together.

(Full article: http://augustinecollective.org/harvards-editor-in-chief-reflects-on-depression-despair-and-hope/)