#they live in a strange liminal space where it always rains but is never quite wet

[winterechoop]

"... as per our last report, we still haven't found the true location of [Redacted]. While they have been spotted in a variety of locations within [Redacted], their exact method of travel is unclear. Given their physical forms, it is unlikely that it is any of the currently known locations. They don't seem to fit the uncanny décor, to put it lightly, unlike the other anomalies. They also seem to be benevolent towards humans, particularly lost ones, and curious.

And very aggressive and territorial towards other anomalies. How do they scream like that? I'm not sure they even need to eat but they swallowed them whole. They saved me but I keep seeing their gaping mouths and teeth--god so many teeth--in my nightmares.

Often times, they will guide our workers to safe areas while striking conversation. All employees have been advised to not act aggressively, but to also not give away too personal of information, as it is unclear what the [Redacted]'s goals are. After several incidents in attempts to secure testing subjects, they have been deemed "Safe with Restrictions" to interact with. A rarity within the [Redacted].

Yours,

[Redacted]

[husbants]

My 2020 Reviewed... in My Fic

Hello! I saw a few other people do this because of The Phanfic Awards and I figured I’d put together a list of my own, just in case you wanted to nominate me for something! Also, there will be at least one more fic coming out, my Gift Exchange fic coming on the 20th! In chronological order, I have included links, the word count, rating, and, looking back, an even shorter summary I’ve called the fic vibe.

~

In Which Dan Returns to the Hundred-Acre Wood

Word Count: 6742

Rating: T

Summary: Growing up comes with changes, Dan’s familiar with that. More responsibility. More difficult relationships. Less time running around with your favorite stuffed bear named Winnie the Pooh.

When the first day of year thirteen is finally here, Dan’s life is flipped on its head. He meets Phil, the new boy from the North, and he’s immediately smitten. Dan hates that the world doesn’t like boys that like boys, but maybe a visit to the Hundred Acre Wood, Pooh thinks, will help Dan realize that it doesn’t matter what the world’s opinion is.

Fic Vibe: A bittersweet high school AU where Dan plays the part of Christopher Robin.

~

Thunderstorm

Word Count: 1134

Rating: G

Summary: Dan watches a thunderstorm. Maybe he relates to it a little.

Fic Vibe: The most poetic fic I’ve ever written; Dan has some anxious thoughts, Phil’s there to comfort him, and it’s all one big extended metaphor.

~

Little Spoon

Word Count: 1468

Rating: G

Summary: In a not-too-distant future, Dan and Phil are engaged and preparing for their forever home. Dan has strong opinions about their silverware situation, among other things.

Fic Vibe: Just a silly little thing where they argue in an IKEA and snuggle a bunch.

~

What a Glorious Feeling

Word Count: 1220

Rating: G

Summary: It's date night for Dan and Phil. After their meal, the shower outside begins to wash away their inhibitions and they're suddenly re-creating "Singin' in the Rain."

...Not well, but they're having fun.

Fic Vibe: I used the tag “chaos dorks” on AO3 and I think it applies well, haha. After their dinner date, it’s raining outside. They make the most out of the situation (and smooch a little, too).

~

A Sickening Pair of Heels

Word Count: 977

Rating: T

Summary: Dan orders his first pair of heels. Phil isn't surprised that he finally did, but rather he's surprised by Dan's choice.

Fic Vibe: This seems to be the fan favorite, honestly. Also, yes, they’re the Kinky Boots boots.

~

An Intergalactic Kind of Love

Word Count: 1666

Rating: T

Summary: Phil has been acting terribly strange recently and Dan just can’t stop his emotions from running wild. (Or, alternatively, Phil is an alien and Dan doesn’t know.)

Fic Vibe: Honestly, I think this is my least favorite fic I’ve written all year. Idk, I was trying to step out of my comfort zone and write something kind of angsty and sci-fi. I think I definitely failed, whoops haha.

~

In Between

Word Count: 3617 (Not Finished)

Rating: T

Summary: Dan has never quite fit in where he is supposed to. He has lived in Heaven his whole life, but he's really half-angel and half-demon. No matter how hard he tries to act like a full-angel, he simply can’t. Things become even more complicated when he is reassigned and has to work as a guardian angel. And, his best-kept secret is compromised when he develops a massive crush on the guy he’s supposed to be guarding, a barista named Phil Lester.

Dan’s life is complicated, sure, but he wants nothing more than to feel less torn, less in between.

Fic Vibe: I wrote the beginning of this for the summer Reverse Bang and then couldn’t ever get back into it! I really do like the concept but can’t seem to continue right now. I’d really like it to have a a grand, magical, cinematic kind of feeling.

~

Your Face

Word Count: 547

Rating: G

Summary: Phil can't help but smile at his computer. Dan walks into their living room and questions what he's looking at.

Fic Vibe: A little something short and fluffy. Phil thinks Dan’s cute.

~

Hot Chocolate Therapy

Word Count: 1099

Rating: G

Summary: When Phil wakes up without Dan in the bed beside him, he worries. It’s a good thing that they can always calm each other’s anxieties. And, well, sometimes hot chocolate works okay, too.

Fic Vibe: I kind of wanted to capture that weird liminal space experience of waking up in the middle of the night. I’m not sure I quite captured that, but I sure do like writing fluff.

~

Up the Hill, Making Memories

Word Count: 2156

Rating: T

Summary: It's the night of October 19th, 2009. The bus has just dropped Dan and Phil off after their day in Manchester together. This doesn't mean the night is over, though: they've got one long hill to climb before they're getting to Phil's house. (And maybe they are a little excited to get to Phil's house.)

Fic Vibe: Right after I saw Phil’s “Tour of My Hometown” video and he showed us the hill, I was like “Yes! That’s fic material, Babey!!!” and wrote this a little while later for October 19th. This was also my first time writing 2009 so that was cool!

~

Homoerotic Vampire Make-Out Session

Word Count: 2148

Rating: T

Summary: It’s October 2015 and Phil wants to indulge Dan in a little festive vampire roleplay. Dan seemed to like writing “The Urge,” after all.

Fic Vibe: lol this is the raunchiest thing I’ve ever written just because of the sheer amount of sex jokes they make. This is my attempt at comedy, but I’m not sure it’s funny at all, haha. Also let’s just like assume this takes place back in their flat sometime between some of the TATINOF shows that actually occurred October of 2015.

~

[panspy]

Case #0181501

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Eide Burrows, regarding a man who may not have been her neighbor, and her hometown of Millport, Scotland. Original statement delivered through some folded sheets of notebook paper shoved under the office door while I was on a lunch break. Statement recorded January 15, 2018, audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

In the end, we’re all just shapes. Figures, either soft, angled, flat, or dimensional, all floating through space with only the hint of a purpose. I’ve always thought this made us pitiable. Shapes don’t have a purpose, their only use is to simply be. What is the meaning of a triangle? Any color, it doesn’t matter. How about a square? A dodecahedron? Exactly. It has no right to have that many sides all to itself, but it exists simply because we willed it into being. Shapes thinking of shapes.

Lines connect shapes and connect people. We have no reason to be, other than to just… exist. We think of shapes. Who thought of us? God, you could argue and many do. Argue about God, argue with God, argue in defense of God, argue against God. Argue, argue, argue. Just shapes arguing with shapes.

For the longest time, as far as I was concerned, Millport was nothing but shapes. Old buildings with new paint, old billboards with flashy new signs, old families run by new blood. Old ways and new people. They tried to cover up the old, and bury it like bones in a landfill. Cover it up along with the potholes with new asphalt and cement. Make it shiny and new. They still crack, anyway.

Hundreds of years, that town stood sturdy on soft ground. Founded by confident men with high hopes, big dreams, bigger egos, and empty pockets. Dreams make you blind, but people like to invest in them. Dreams give shapes a purpose, don’t they? Confidence fools others, and eventually fools yourself. Have you ever gone unnoticed in a place you’re not meant to be? If you walk with your head held high and false arrogance, people will believe you belong with them. For either to believe this façade makes them a fool. Not that anyone really belongs anywhere, and we’re all just foolish enough to believe it. Foolish shapes believing other foolish shapes.

I’ve always reckoned that it’s easier to be confident on uncertain legs than to fear falling on steady ground. Watching a frightened child stepping along a wide, even plank at the park is more likely to fall than a tightrope walker on a flimsy wire. Tightrope walkers are triangles, balanced and perfect. Children are parallelograms. Misshapen. Lopsided.

All the children in Millport are parallelograms. Some are flat and one dimensional, others forever rotating on an axis to show off their sides. Never the same for more than a day- I kept track. The adults were a variety of evolved and ever-changing polygons. But for some reason when I was little, looking at all these shapes going about their pretend lives, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t a polygon when the world seemed to be filled with them. When I looked at my skin, it was soft and squished under touch. My hair was coarse, dull, and brown, unlike my mothers which was static with energy and never quite the same after you blinked. My face was asymmetrical too, as many shapes are. Eyes that seemed to be too big, ears that poke out a bit too much, bags that never went away… well, I don’t think they did anyways. You have to understand, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. After a childhood of feeling as though the world hadn’t been fair enough to make me a nice red square, I just accepted it. I learned not to mind my lack of shape, and felt content to be liminal.

The first time I decided to look further into what made the town fit together into the odd puzzle it was, was the Masonic Lodge on the empty lot of Seymour and Drummond. It was always changing, not that it mattered enough to give it a second thought. In the morning, it could be a red trapezoid but by noon it would shift into a cracked yellow octagon. Personally I always preferred the trapezoid. The men who entered in the evening but never seemed to exit in the morning were also known to change. Whether by name, appearance, age, or multitude… who went in did not dictate who went home. Not that anyone cared about that, either.

When I was feeling especially curious, I would watch them enter from the dim car park away from a flickering old street lamp. As nights went by and I felt brave enough to stand directly under it, I found it made no difference as they never even looked at my direction. By the morning, the cars would be gone and the men allegedly returned home to their spouses and families. And I would leave, deciding to return again at the next meeting whenever I felt the disturbing pull in my stomach beckoning me to witness it. The scheduled days varied, but was always twice a week starting at 8:12 pm and ending when the street light flickered, shrouding the building and parked vehicles in darkness, then flickering on again to show an empty lot. They never met on Tuesdays.

My mother worked down the street at the Birdie’s Bed & Breakfast to help Bertha Goodwin when the old woman needed assistance navigating the cottage she’d rented her whole life, it seemed like. Bertha, though we always called her Birdie, was in her late seventies when I was born, and she was in her late seventies when I left for college. She was still in her late seventies when I returned home the next fall with nothing to show for it and a mother who didn’t even acknowledge I had gone in the first place. Not that they even noticed when I was living with them as a child either. When they deemed me old enough to care for myself, Mum would leave in the mornings with a freshly ironed apron, cleaning supplies I never saw opened, and my Dad would leave to work on blueprints of buildings I never saw built. After staring at my ceiling for hours, distracting myself with faded stars stuck up with putty and cracks in the walls, I would leave my blue square of a house and wander the streets looking for a clue to a mystery I wasn’t quite sure existed.

I tried to be academic, I really did. I wanted to leave that old town and its jagged shapes and build something for myself, but the longer I spent away the pit in my stomach grew more and even looking in the mirror hurt my eyes. I couldn’t feel the softness of my skin anymore. It felt like plastic. The faces of my classmates were static and boring-- none of them pulsed with the same energy as the people back home and all sounded the same. After barely a year I couldn’t take it and moved back home. The school didn’t even call to finalize my resignation.

As a child who grew up with strange disappearances monthly (Birdie said Misses Morgan moved to the States, but her car still collected leaves in the drive), stores popping up that never seemed to stay, and the absence of new neighbors, nothing was too out of the ordinary for us. But I’ve read some of the other statements, Jon, and it seems nothing was quite ordinary at all. Construction workers would vanish and it would rarely make the papers. The opening of a new chip shop was a blessing, but no one would ever be able to go more than twice before it was on its way out of town and replaced with some new fad.

Until the year the cemetery flooded and the school gymnasium roof caved in, about 2006 (it’s hard to beep track of the years), I didn’t think extraordinary could exist. Or at least not in any way that mattered. That was the year the Abbott’s moved in to the house on Cowley Lane, a house I had only ever seen out of the corner of my eye. On a street filled with shapes, this was a straight line.

They arrived as most families do, escaping an unpleasant moment in time by “starting fresh” and “turning over a new leaf”. I never quite understood that expression, as turning over a new leaf does not negate the old one. By turning over a leaf with a sullied edge to admire the green underside, it still remains the same leaf. Turning over a new leaf simply means the old one is left to decompose while you find a crisp, untarnished leaf, while the other still has a perfectly acceptable side to be admired. And, as most families do, they leave the unsightly leaf to be buried with the hundreds of others they’ve “turned over” and promise to change. The promises stay, but are never quite redeemed. Sorry, I got carried away… it's hard to find things to be passionate about these days. I'll continue.

The Abbotts integrated as well as they could, two children ready to attend school no matter the construction work in the gym or the fact it was well into November, and a third to stay at home as infants are wont to do. They threw a barbecue to get to know the neighbors, and the whole village attended bringing their own family recipes and baked desserts. I stayed home.

The Abbott's father, Mark, gained a quick job as an iron-worker while his wife (I never knew her name) stayed indoors looking after the baby. I’d see him in the mine, hacking away at rusty cars and rail too old to use and loading the scraps to be taken away. Hours, I’d watch, as he compressed the piles and laid the new framework to keep unwanted visitors from being crushed to death by eroding stone walls. The day he was called to help install the new wrought iron fence where the cemetery flooded and washed away, I followed him there too. Wherever he went, the shapes that once filled the town lost their vibrancy. Instead of fluctuating between tetrahedrons and prisms, they became either stagnant or frantic. Everything at once, or nothing at all.

I watched him dig in the downtrodden soil, unearthing rectangular caskets and hexagonal coffins. The rain that year had brought landslides and sinkholes, most destructive in the cemetery just outside town and disturbing the dead where they slept. Headstones, monuments, and mementos washed away and sank into the soft dirt, the running fence encircling the land broken up and dragged along with it. Once an infinite circle that cut the burial grounds off from the rest of the puzzle, the shape was now distorted and wrong. Without gate to close and make it whole again, I felt the muted shape of the cemetery slip away and become a tangled mess of string.

He dug for hours until the orange circle of a sun lowered itself behind the branches of the forest and their quickly disappearing leaves. Moving from one plot to the other, from the pristine headstones of recent years down to the protruding stones with names barely legible beneath the moss and decades of wear. Digging, digging, digging, all the while the formless fence to-be remained untouched. When the sky turned dark and snow clouds threatened to shed their weight, I finally turned my back on Mark and left him alone with the dead for the first time all evening, the man seeming blissfully unaware he hadn’t been alone in the first place at all.

The next morning when I went to check on his new project, the buildings along the way had lost their shape. No longer were streets lined with sturdy trapezoids, rectangles, and prisms. The colors were off, like a child with a crayon who had not yet learned the concept of limitation. They bled into each other and polluted the air, cracked frames unable to hold them back. The air tasted like static and I couldn't feel the ground beneath my boots.

By the time I got to the clearing, the holes had been filled and the new fence had taken shape in towering columns that crawled and stretched like spider webs across the dying grass. It was the same dirt, the same stone, trees, and air, but it did not feel like the cemetery I had watched be torn away the night before. I felt a chill settle in my bones and leave as quickly as it came like waiting for pain after burning your finger on a hot mug. From all my observing of the town, never once has a feeling ever driven me to run far away until what I was seeing before me was but an afterthought.

I passed by the Abbotts house, static growing stronger until I could barely hear the crunch of leaves or gravel beneath my feet. Only the wife's car was in the drive and a fresh coat of snow indicated there had only been the one all night, and the black pick-up Mark drove was nowhere to be seen. The sign on their door was new, barely two months old, but as I looked at it, truly looked at it, did it appear to have aged to rot. Abbott’s House it said in curvy lettering (with all the determination of a line pretending to be something it’s not) with five handprints beneath for each family member. Five. Mother, three kids, and… now four. The longer I thought about it, the longer I stared, trying to blink away the dots that kept getting in the way of my vision, the more my eyes convinced me there had always been four. Never two cars, never five hands. Through my haze, I barely felt my feet take me home. Even when I layed down to rest in a foreign looking room, I decided that my childhood mystery, a fantasy I had grown to accept, had found another clue and a little bit more of the town chipped away. Mark didn’t show up for work anymore.

Little things were changing, it just took a trained eye to notice. You don’t have to be a detective to see the details, sometimes you just have to be very, very afraid. The sign for Birdies Bed & Breakfast was now spelled with a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i’, and the apron my mother wore was now a faded lilac instead of a robin’s egg blue. The oak tree that stood tall in our backyard, old as the town itself with a slow swinging hammock tied to the branches, was now a young birch. I likened it to two puzzles cut from the same machine. Different pictures with pieces that fit together only in the most literal sense. The longer I noticed, the more I wondered which puzzle was truly mine, and which one was slowly being replaced.

Each morning the static filled my nose, irritated my eyes, and clouded my ears with a soft dizzying hum that slowly drowned out my senses. The shapes that made up my entire world were broken, dull, and chipping away until everything I knew was muddled and loud.

It was only when I woke up in an empty room, no posters, cardboard boxes, or dirty clothes, I found my feet barely touched the floor. I felt weightless as I wandered down to the kitchen where Mum usually got ready, feeling as though the back of my eyes were filled with cotton. There were only two seats sat at the dining table, and when I tried to open my mouth to speak my tongue tasted like ash.

Before I could blink or even cry, suddenly I was in the street. Red shapes filled my periphery and everything between, and the town was gone. A red sky bled into the houses, cars, and potholes cremating them like the dead. I felt myself falling away from my body and I finally saw my shape. It was a shifting mass of angles and colors and somehow I just knew it was me. When I finally did cry, smaller shapes fell from her eyes copying the drops that fell from mine. Was it out of malice? Pity? Understanding? Was she crying because she shared my pain or was she just a cheap reflection of who I thought I was or simply longed to be?

It’s been a while since I’ve been here, in this black and red. She still mocks me. Radiant and pulsing with color while I exist with imitation soft skin and coarse hair. They’re the only things I can be sure of, as I haven’t seen my face in a long time. Only hers. Now I’m not sure who she is, but she’s the only company in this void. Until I saw your shape, Jon. Blue and black polygons blinking between colors with the beat of a foreign heart. You lead me here to a library of pain that reflected my own, a reprieve from the emptiness I’ve been floating in. Maybe if I tell you my story you can bring me back to the shape of your world? I suppose only time will tell, and I have an eternity to wait.

Waiting for someone to save the outline of a person who isn’t sure they ever existed at all.

[thewritingsofwren]

Weather

The heat is oppressive. Its weight doesn’t force me into myself, grounding me. It forces me out. Displacing me like water in a tub as the weight of its body pushes me out of mine. I’ve lived in the heat my whole life. California, born and raised, the Golden State. Sunshine year round, sixty-degree winters. Wading through as if in dream, a hazy fugue.

Days of relief, moments of escape. Short trips to San Francisco, the foggy city. Cool air, a nice change. But it’s heavy, still so heavy. The fog is dense, a sponge soaked in water, clinging to your clothes, leaving you shivering but with lids weighed down, in a liminal space, a lucid dream. Longer trips to Half Moon Bay. Sitting as close to the ocean as you can get. Only on cloudy days. Only on cold days. Hopefully the wind is blowing hard enough to dispel some fog, to lift the weight. Maybe you roll up your pants, walk onto the wet sand. Feel the gentle give underneath your feet, the cold grains between your toes. Standing still. Waiting. Then the water comes, gripping your ankles, draining them of feeling. Numb. Awake. Finally.

Living on the East Coast. The first month and half is hard. It is hot. It is heavy. You left California for a reason, and you are disappointed. You become a full-time somnambulist. And then: seasons. Leaves change: brilliant reds, oranges, yellow, earthy browns. The air is cool… and crisp. Yes! There is a bite to it now, snapping at your nose, your ears, findings the gaps in your clothing, raising goosebumps on your skin. Traveling up through your nose, down into your lungs, spreading in your bloodstream, waking you up. Slowly.

Then the transitions. Back and forth between the hot and the cold. Never knowing which to trust; which is real? Can they both be? Your life doesn’t have room for multiple realities. It’s hard enough to grapple with just one. California to New York and then back again. One autumn in New York somehow produces sixty degree weather in November. I am violently disoriented. The red leaves dangling precariously from trees take on hues of blood, dripping slowly to the ground, floating down on currents of warm air that tries to lull my skin, my senses, to put me at ease. But something is wrong.

Back to California again, and I complain of being cold. My parents are confused. “Aren’t you used to the cold by now? We thought you preferred it?” They have a point. I don’t at first understand the problem, either. But the cold air has different qualities on the opposing coasts. When East Coast air gets cold, it gets cold. There’s no room for a middle ground. It’s the kind of cold that reaches the backs of my eyeballs, making me worry about their mostly liquid composition. Can people’s eyeballs freeze? I hope not. Did you know that eyes are the only exposed parts of the human brain? It’s true. They are directly connected to the brain, and there they are, out in the open, vulnerable to just about anything. The cold air pushes past, sparking signals in my brain, jolting me into a forced realization of my body. I am.

So what’s the difference, then? Between the cold air in California and the cold air in New York? California cold doesn’t do much to capture my attention; it’s a nuisance. Trying to garner a reaction, it gives me occasional chills, so I want to put on a coat or grab some extra blankets just so I don’t have to deal with it anymore. It is an inconvenience, something that I can complain about because it is so uncommon that it has become annoying. But the New York cold is undeniable. It is bigger than I am. It warrants a kind of respect, a level of acceptance. We have a symbiotic relationship. Of this I am sure. It gives me fodder for my complaints; I let it tinker with my mind. It brings awareness to my body; I let it dwell inside my spine.

You get older, and people begin to ask where you’ll live once you’re “on your own.” “Do you like big cities?” They want to know. “Rural cities? Something in between?” You try to answer, but you find it difficult. That’s not really what matters to you. “Somewhere not too heavy,” you want to reply. But you don’t; they probably wouldn’t understand. You think about this question a lot, and you realize that heaviness isn’t complete anathema to you. Regulated in small doses, it can be comforting. Like rain: a weight that exceeds the strength of the clouds, and so they let it fall. There’s a freedom in that, letting go.

You used to disobey your parents for the rain. Going out in the rare California showers, relishing this welcome weight, a relief after stratospheric stagnation. And then, on the East Coast, there are thunderstorms. Not the weak occasional rumble in the distance and the faint flash of light that you grew up with. Real live thunderstorms. So loud that it feels like your body is being used as a resonator, a temporary conduit for weight. A way for you to experience it without having to carry it around with you.

Even when I was younger, maybe six-years-old, I looked forward to moments of escape from the warmth. My grandparents used to live in Hartford, Connecticut, and we frequently made the journey back East for Christmas. Their property was immense, and I always wanted to be outside, playing in the snow or just sitting on the old wooden swing hanging from what I was convinced was the biggest tree in the world. Despite how big the house was and how much my grandfather loved books, the library was somehow restricted to a short hallway at the back of the house, from which the guestroom branched out like a hasty last-minute addition. This hallway was the coldest room in the house, which, combined with the books it contained, made it my favorite room. Because the hallway was narrow, there was no room for any sort of furniture, so I often just stood, staring at the faded titles on dusty, torn book jackets. My parents stayed in the adjoining guestroom and were often spooked when they heard soft footfalls coming towards them and then stopping just before their door for several minutes before retreating. They always talked about the relief of stepping out of that hallway into one of the two warmer surrounding rooms. I had the opposite experience. The hallway itself was a relief, a cool sigh, a light airiness.

My parents couldn’t be from more opposite climates. My father is from New York, and my mother is from Panama, a place where winter means ninety-nine degrees with ninety-percent humidity. Already, I’m starting to see some connections. But something I can’t get past is if these climates are in my blood, why don’t I like them both equally? If anything, I should prefer the warmth. My mother and I are stubborn, brooding, hyper-analytical, frequently paranoid and quick to judge. Despite the sense of humor and the interest in music that I share with my father, I am far more similar to my mother, but in ways that highlight the aspects of my personality that I frequently try to deny.

Growing up, and until very recently, I had set ideas of my parents in my head, completely contrary to their climates of origin. For me, my father was warm, open, out- and easy-going, and overflowing with kindness. My mother was colder, more closed-off, strict and prone to worry, kind but stern. But nothing is ever that simple.

As I test the waters of my twenties, the heat balance has begun to shift. No, that’s not quite right. In fact, I’m quite certain that the balance itself remains practically unchanged, but my perception of it, the clarity of my thermal imaging, if you will, has shifted, the image becoming more precise and honest. The complexities of the climates that run through my parents’ veins are more apparent now. Once, I could only see the cooler aspects of my mother and the warmer aspects of my father, but I’ve noticed qualities of warmth and coolness in both of them. My mother is warm, open, and fiercely loyal. But she carries an immense weight with her from the heat and the turmoil that she grew up in. My father is self-centered, colder, aloof, sarcastic, and occasionally too quick to laugh.

We travel together, the three of us, into the heat. We are on our way to the airport. My mother’s hand is cool and dry in mine. She has reached across the backseat of the hired car to interlace her fingers with mine. For some reason, whenever she does this, I find myself tensing, as if bracing for something. I always do this, and I don’t know why. I find myself concentrating too hard on not letting my palm get sweaty. We just sit in silence until she has to let go to open a bottle of water. I relax.

On the plane, my father asks if he can kiss me on the cheek. I nod; he delivers a quick peck and immediately starts a new conversation. It’s endearing, for a moment, and then it’s sad. Though, briefly, I thought the request odd, I didn’t mind it or the following kiss. But I realize that there must have been something uncomfortable about it for him. A discomfort similar, I’m sure, to the one I feel whenever my mother takes my hand. I feel guilty.

The Panamanian heat assaults me. We are driving along a body of water, with the windows down, and we are opposite the shore. I stare hard, wondering what feels strange about the scene. Then I realize that it looks like the waves are in reverse. Instead of meeting forcefully with the shore and gently retreating in on themselves, the waves aggressively retreat, barely gliding across the shore with each swell.

Is this how my parents feel? They watch me grow up. They see me get closer to them as I learn to communicate. They feel the shift as the hierarchy diminishes and we become more like equals. They watch me drift; like waves in reverse, fleeing from the shore.

My parents: I often find myself attempting to trace my need for the cold back to them. Now, I’ve distanced myself, turning from the cold and the heat in both. I search for my weather, longing for cold, afraid to get lost, buried, under the heat.