#this has been sitting in my drafts for 2 months i really need to continue my rewatch oof

[zeltqz]

call me or not, it's up to you pt 2 | haitani ran

☰ — synopsis : you finally called ran back after a disagreement with your boyfriend.

☰ — pairing : haitani ran x fem!reader ☰ — length : 5.8k words ☰ — contents : nsfw and 18+ contents, mentions of violence, protected sex, protective ran ☰ — notes : this has been in the drafts for WEEEKS but i had to post for my mans birthday, couldn't miss it

On the way home, Ran’s peaceful drive was interrupted by the sound of his phone ringing. Initially he would’ve ignored it, but one glance to where his phone was sitting in the cup holder, he almost lost control of the wheel seeing your name. The streets were fairly empty at this time of night, so nobody was disrupted when he pulled over abruptly, clearing his throat before answering.

“Hello?”

Soft sniffles filled the car from where his phone was connected to his speakers, and his concern grew significantly. “Ran?”

“Why are you crying?” he asked, fingers tightening against the wheel as he waited for you to continue.

You paused briefly, exhaling exhaustedly. “A—are you busy right now?”

“No.” He started driving again, slowly. “But why are you crying?”

“I need you to pick me up. If that’s not too much stress for you. I, um, I really need help.”

“Sure, I mean. Send me your location.” You murmured a soft agreement and he heard your fingernails tapping against the screen, a notification message sliding down his screen seconds later. “Why do you need help? Talk to me.” Ran leaned forward to connect his GPS to your location.

“It’s a long story,” you sighed. He could hear your teeth clattering together as you shivered. It was incredibly dark outside right now, the skies pitch black, streets tinted orange from the streetlights, and the heavy rainfall that’d been plaguing the city for the last few hours. 

“We have time,” Ran responded simply. He could practically feel you hesitating. “(Name) I need the full story here. Talk to me while I come get you.”

You pressed your lips together tightly, wrapping your arms around yourself as you shivered, goosebumps erupting on your skin. Your shirt was soaked through at this point, your jeans soggy and the lack of a coat made you certain you’d catch hypothermia later. 

“I—uh. Basically I got into an argument with um, Masato. You know him? He’s the um, dude from my story. A month ago?”

“I’m aware,” Ran responded dryly.

You swallowed thickly. “Yeah well. He was driving me home and we got into an argument because I didn’t like how he was flirting with one of the waitresses at the restaurant. And then he wanted to check my phone. I said no of course, but not because I was cheating or anything. I just didn’t like how he kept deflecting whenever his issues was brought up. But anyway, the argument escalated and he basically kicked me out the car and left me stranded god knows where. All the buses stopped running an hour ago, and the nearest train station is a 45 minute walk away. I have no money so I can’t call a cab. My wallet is in his car…and everything is just such a mess. I don’t have a jacket, I’m cold and I just don’t know what to do.” 

By the time you finished your voice was tiny, and the sniffles came back as you fought from crying. Ran could practically picture your face right now, all teary eyed and sad and his grip on the wheel tightened immensely. 

“I’m about fifteen minutes away, baby. Okay? Is there anywhere warm you can get to?”

You looked at your surroundings. A lone empty highway, with a diner in the distance, the words “OPEN 24/7” flashing in neon lights. “Yeah. There’s a diner around here.”

Ran looked at the map on his phone and confirmed the location of the diner with you. You nodded and he told you to get there quickly and he’d order you something once he got there. You thanked him and hung up, slowly making your way inside. You felt like a crazy person when you walked in, clothes soaked and wetting their floors as you made your way to sit down by the heater. A few concerned employees and customers glanced at you, but you ignored them in favour of wrapping your arms around yourself, a pitiful attempt of creating warmth.

Ran’s speeding managed to cut the fifteen minute drive into eight, and you were too busy staring at the table, tracing the wooden pattern with your eyes to see him pull into the parking lot. It wasn’t until the bell rang as  he walked did you finally look up and meet his gaze. 

He rushed over to you and you stood up quickly, wrapping your arms around him. He dropped his head to rest on top of yours and he could feel you shaking against him. 

“You alright?” he asked and you nodded, not removing your head from his chest. He wrapped his arms around you tightly, feeling you clutch onto the front of his shirt. 

“Um excuse me?” The two of you broke apart, staring at the waitress that stood a few feet away from you both, a notepad in her hand. “Are you two ordering anything?”

“You hungry?” Ran asked, looking down at you. You shook your head. “Thirsty?” You thought for a minute before nodding. “Hot chocolate for the lady please. Put marshmallows, whipped cream, whatever’s available in there.” He handed her his credit card and turned his attention back to you. “Look at me.”

You tilted your head up to look at him and he reached a tentative hand out to your cheek, cupping it. Your face was wet, from tears or the rain he didn’t know, frankly he didn’t care. His thumbs wiped some of the water away from your cheek, tracing over your features softly.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, wiping at your own face. 

“For what?”

“For calling you like this. I didn’t want you to see me like this again. This is so embarrassing.” 

Ran dropped his hand down to your arm, soothing the goosebumps erupted on your skin. “Take this.” He shrugged his jacket off his shoulders and you held your arms out as he helped you fit in through it.

“I look ridiculous,” you said with a teary laugh. 

“You look cute.” He pinched your cheek and you pushed his hands away, a small smile on your face despite it all. The waitress came with your drink and the two of you sat down. He watched you take small sips of your drink, avoiding his intense eye contact.

After you finished your drink, he reached forward and wiped some whipped cream from the corner of your mouth. His thumb traced down to your chin, lingering for a few seconds before pulling away. 

“Thank you for the drink.” You pushed the mug in the middle of the table, wrapping your arms back around yourself. “I’ll pay you back—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Your eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t want you—”

“You just told me your wallet is gone. How are you going to pay me back?”

“...I’ll get it back—”

“Like hell you are,” he interrupted and you sat back, looking at him shocked. “You’re never seeing that man again. I’ll make sure of that.”

You scoffed, shaking your head. “Unbelievable. I didn’t call you so you can control every aspect of my life again Ran.”

He leaned forward, elbows resting on the table. “Why did you call me then? Last I recall, you have plenty of other friends that have cars.” 

“T—that doesn’t matter why I called you, Ran,” you spluttered, not sounding the least bit convincing. His eyebrows rose and so did your temper. “I’m serious. I called you because you were the first person I thought of. You’re thinking too much about it.”

“Sure. If that’s what you believe,” he said, tone dripping with condescension that made you roll your eyes. Times like this is when you realised that missing Ran is completely different than actually being around him. He was insufferable and you remembered exactly why you had to break things off. 

Ran stood from the table, dusting his clothes. “I’ll take you home. Come on.” He held his hand out.

Reluctantly you stood, grabbing your phone and storming past him, ignoring his hand. He simply smirked and followed after you. You waited outside his car, standing by the backseat with your arms crossed, his jacket over your head acting as an umbrella.

He unlocked his car and you slipped into the back.

 “You can sit up front,” he suggested, shrugging when you stubbornly shook your head, staring resolutely out the window. He rolled his eyes, a light smirk still on his face. He drove at a slower speed than he usually would when he saw you starting to doze off against the seats, driving around in circles just to give you enough time to rest. You woke up an hour later, rubbing your eyes and blinking to adjust to the bright lights. 

Looking around you realised you were parked in a familiar looking garage, the car empty. You slipped out of the car and into the house, walking through until you entered the living room. Ran was seated on the couch, watching tv and texting on his phone.

“Uh, Ran?” You approached the couch and he casted a glance in your direction. “Why am I here?”

“You really thought I’d take you home after that story you just told me on the phone?” His nose scrunched as he flipped through the channels. “I’m not stupid.”

“Okay, Masato isn’t like a serial killer or something. Relax. I’m safe at home.”

“Any right minded man that would leave a girl stranded on the streets in the freezing cold is definitely a cause for concern alright. You’re not going back there till I take care of things.”

“Oh. And by “take care” you mean getting your men to kill him? That’s it?” He stayed silent and you groaned. “I can’t do this. I’m tired, Ran. You know I hate violence. I don’t want the man dead either—”

“Well I do.”

“Good thing it’s not your call then,” you shot back, frowning. “This is my life not yours. You don’t get to decide who gets to stay in it or not.”

He tilted his head back and looked behind at you, the smile on his face turning into more of a smirk. “Do I get to stay or na?” You rolled your eyes and he reached behind him, grabbing your arm and pulling you closer to the couch. “Well?”

You shrugged, looking down at him. “I dunno.” 

Shrugging his jacket off your shoulders, you folded it neatly and slung it on the back of the couch. “It’s complicated Ran,” you said, placing both hands on either side of his head, on the back of the couch.

“Doesn’t have to be.” He grabbed one of your hands, caressing your knuckles.

You found yourself hard pressed to look into those violet eyes of his staring intently back into yours. “Ran…it’s not that simple.”

“It can be. You just don’t like simple.”

You forcefully removed your hand from his. “Excuse me?”

“You always feel like shit has to be complicated in order for it to work. I noticed that you know?” You scoffed, and he rolled his eyes. “Don’t act dumb. We dated for seven years, I think you’d know a person after that long.”

“Crazy because if I were to sit here and say false things about you, then you’d just deny them because I don’t know better than you. Isn’t that right?” 

“Nothing about what you say about me is false. You know this,” he said with an exaggerated sigh. He reached in his pocket, putting a cigarette into his mouth. 

“So if I called you cold and manipulative, would you say I’m correct?”

He lit his cigarette and tossed his head back to look at you, exhaling smoke from his mouth. “You wouldn’t be wrong, no. But you’re only focusing on the negatives.” He reached his hand out again and you hesitated for a split second before grabbing his hand, allowing him to pull you back closer. 

“I can’t think of any positives.”

He rolled his eyes. “Sure.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and patted the spot on the couch next to him. You walked around the couch, sitting beside him, cringing at the feeling of your wet clothes on his leather couch. 

He put the cigarette back in his mouth and examined you. “You’re still cold.”

“I’m fine.”

He wrinkled his nose, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “Go shower. Wear some of my clothes.”

“Are you sure?” 

He waved in the general direction of his bathroom and you thanked him. You returned back to the living room half an hour later, wearing one of his shirts that were too big for your body. Flopping back on the couch beside him, he offered you a cigarette to which you shook your head.

“Anyway back to me,” Ran said. You rolled your eyes. “You really can’t think of any positives to describe me? Come on, think deep.”

“This is starting to sound like couples therapy,” you stated dryly, He didn’t respond, just continued staring at you. “I dunno,” you said, picking at the skin on your lips. “Like, you’re funny I guess? You’re sweet, and caring in your own twisted fucked up way. You’re protective in a way that is a perfect mix of just good and overbearing. You’re fucking annoying sometimes too and—”

“Woah woah woah. Going off topic, a little bit?”

You smiled, a genuine laugh leaving your lips and Ran’s heart fluttered at the sight. He slung an arm over your shoulder, tugging you closer. You sighed, resting your head against his shoulder, closing your eyes when he kissed your forehead. 

“I missed you a lot, you know?” You hummed in response, snuggling up beside him. When Ran had came back home and let you sleep in his car, he turned the heating on in every room in the house for you. The fact you still snuggled close to him for warmth made him smile a little bit.  “Didja get my voicemail all those weeks ago?”

“Yeah.” You shifted to look up at him. “Gave me a bit of an ego boost not gonna lie,” you admitted.

He looked down at you. “Why’d you take so long to call me then?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm and level, to not show any betrayal of emotion. You didn’t respond and looked at the tv, distracted by your thoughts. He jostled you lightly. “Hm?”

“I don’t know,” you finally said after a few seconds. You looked back up at him. “I was petty and hurt still and part of me wanted to make you jealous.” You laughed lightly. “Was pretty shitty of me. I wanted to call you, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And I shouldn’t have left you hanging like that. But I’m sorry, Ran.”

Ran hummed, the sound vibrating from his chest into yours. He looked away from you, staring at the television with an unreadable expression.There were many times you couldn’t understand what he was thinking. Ran was a man with an unbreakable exterior, and you could only think of one time in your eight year long relationship when you actually managed to crack through that hard shell of his. 

When you found out Izana had died and Ran had gotten himself and his friends arrested. He was released a couple hours later and you came to pick him up from the station. It was hard seeing him more quiet than usual. He barely said a single word to you when you took him home and spent the night with him. That night was when you finally saw Ran cry for the first time and it was overwhelming for you. He wasn’t balling with tears, just a few drops and you wiped each tear drop away with your thumb. That night was so memorable for you and it stayed in your mind all those years later. 

Right now he had that same unreadable, blank expression on his face as he stared at the television, his fingers softly grazing the unshaven stubble on his jaw. You looked up at him, chin on his shoulder and waited for him to finish his thoughts.

“What’s his full name?” he asked after a long moment of silence.

You swallowed. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Just curious.” You were looking at him weirdly, eyes roaming over his face as you tried to uncover any hidden agendas he might have. It still pissed you off how irritatingly good his poker face was.

Squinting at him, you slowly pulled back to sit close beside him, fiddling with the loose string on the sleeve on your shirt. “Promise you won’t…hurt him?”

“I won’t… not kill him,” he said with a smile that grew when you looked up at him exasperated. “I just wanna ask him some questions, s’all.”

You nervously chewed your bottom lip raw by the time you decided. You sighed. “It’s Masato Hirakawa. He’s my accountant,” you told him and Ran shifted on his side to look at you better. “He asked me out one evening and I said yes. We didn’t make things official until like two weeks ago and then that’s when things started going downhill.”

“Whaddya mean?”

You scrunched your nose. “We got drunk at a club last week and Yuzuha drunkenly mentioned the voicemail you left me and I just laughed it off but Masato looked confused and asked what we were talking about. I told him not to worry about it and he got upset, thinking I was hiding shit from him which made no sense because you left that voicemail before we were even official so I wasn’t cheating. But he didn’t care. He then went down a rabbit hole once he figured out your name and started like internet stalking you. He was googling everything he could find about you, was stalking your Instagram, seeing your lifestyle and he took whatever he was feeling out on me.”

Ran’s eyebrows slowly rose as he considered what you just said. 

“Not physically,” you quickly added upon seeing his reaction. “No I mean he would get mad and yell at me, then one night he accused me of being a gold digger and using him for his money and I reminded him just because he’s an accountant that he’s not some millionaire and he needs to calm down. He started ranting and raving about you at any given time and it just got annoying. Every time I was on my phone he thought I was having an affair with you even though we haven’t been in contact in a literal year.” You laughed dryly. 

“It was so stupid. And for what? It was only a week and it made me feel like I was just so…” you paused, trying to figure out the right words. “I don’t know. I just hated it so much. Then today with the car I slept in the car and he took my phone and listened to the voicemail you left and then was convinced that I was sleeping with you while seeing him and he woke me up by yelling at me and stuff. Then kicked me out.”

“Is that why you called me?”

You nodded, fingers trembling as you played with the string. “I’m sorry, by the way. I didn’t mean for all this to happen. You were just the first person I could think of helping me in that moment. I didn’t—”

“Stop stressing.” He grabbed your wrist and you let go of the string as he guided your hand to his mouth, pressing a kiss to your knuckles. “You calling me back was the best thing you could’ve done.” You smiled wryly, meeting his eyes for a few seconds before looking away. “Come here.”

Slipping into his lap, he cradled you against him. “You mad at him?” he asked and you nodded. “Let me take care of this? Please?”

“I don’t know…”

“I won’t kill him if that’s what you’re so scared about. Just wanna spook him a little,” he said, making you giggle. 

You looked up at him and nodded. “Just a spook. Promise?” His eyes dropped down to your lips and your face heated up when you realised where his gaze was trained. 

He leaned down and kissed you softly, his hand rising to your cheek., looking searchingly in your eyes for the longest two seconds of your life. “I promise,” he whispered against your lips before pulling you in for another kiss.

Twisting your body, you turned to loop your arms around his neck, his hand sliding over your knee to pull you over, straddling his lap. His hands slipped under your shirt, rubbing up and down your back. He pulled away, smirking. “No  bra?”

“It was wet from the rain,” you mumbled, kissing him again. He groaned into your mouth, all decorum gone as moved his hands to your chest, cupping your breasts, your nipples already hard and poking his palms.

“Mmm take this off,” he said, tugging at your shirt. 

You shut him up, kissing him again as your hands flew to his shoulders, your whole body warming at the feel of solid muscle, still prominent even through his shirt, underneath your palms. “Take yours off shirt,” you replied, biting his bottom lip with a smile.

He rolled his eyes. “Unbutton me then.”

Now it was your turn to roll your eyes, his smile growing as you got to work, unbuttoning them one by one, your skin growing hot at black ink peeking through. He shrugged his shirt off and your hands flew right back to his shoulders, running them down his chest and letting your fingers trace along his abs. 

He sat up and kissed under your jaw. “Now your turn.” You cupped his face as he sucked, your fingers moving to his hair, tugging when his tongue licked and sucked harder. 

You pushed him back and he watched you lift your shirt up and over, stretching in the process and tossing it to the other end of the couch. He licked his lips as his hands flew to your hips, fingers dipping shallowly against the band of your panties, snapping them back against your skin.  You kissed him sloppily again.

His hands slipped under your thighs, lifting you up and carrying you as you squealed, legs wrapping tightly around his waist as he carried you to his bedroom. Depositing you on his bed, he wasted no time climbing on top of you, pinning your wrists to the mattress as he kissed down your body. 

He latched onto a nipple, his tongue snaking around it as he licked and sucked. The warmth of his mouth and his hands tweaking your other nipple were making you dizzy, biting your bottom lip hard as you began to get restless. He kissed down your stomach, his hands pushing your legs apart. 

“Holy fuck, you’re so fucking wet,” he breathed, eyeing the wet patch in your panties.  He peeled them away and ran his finger through your folds, smirking at the hitch in your breath. “All we did was kiss.”

“S—shut up,” you hissed, irritation turning to pleasure when he swirled his finger around your entrance, and he had to bite his lips to keep from groaning when your hips started stuttering, a silent plea for him to go further. He slowly sunk his finger in and you gasped, back arching against the bed. He pulled out before sinking fully in, teasing you with only the tip of his finger.

You irritatingly looked at him. “Stop being a fucking tease,” you complained, trying to shimmy your body further down the bed, needing more of him. Ran grabbed at your hip, stilling you and you whined loudly.

“Easy.” His voice was light and playful and that only angered you even more. Idly pumping his finger in and out of you, he added another and you writhed, restlessly moving to fight back the heat forming in your abdomen. His fingers curled against that spot that had you melting against the sheets. When you were least expecting it, your eyes closed and head thrown back, he leaned forward, wrapping his lips around your clit, and sucked. 

You moaned loudly as his tongue began working at your cunt, licking sloppily like a man starved. Slipping his fingers out, he parted your folds with two fingers, eyes trained on the way your pussy was gleaming with a mixture of your slick and his saliva.

 “Fuck,” he breathed. He looked up at your body, over the curve of your breasts. “Sit up for me. Wanna see that pretty face.”

“Nn-nn,” you said, shaking your head, writhing against the sheets as he buried his face back into your pussy, sucking obligingly at your clit. His tongue was making you feel everything at once, his fingers sliding back into your pussy making your hips stutter, your body was heating up, and you could feel the incoming pressure of an all familiar orgasm building until it stopped.

Ran simply stopped his ministrations and stilled his fingers in you, the thickness of his two fingers sitting in your pussy has you gushing a little more around them, and your clit felt cold without his mouth. 

You sat up and stared confusingly at him. “Why’d you stop?” 

He presses a longing kiss to your inner thighs. “You didn’t wanna cooperate with me. So why should I give you what you want?” You groaned loudly as he smiled, lips curving against your skin. He continued to lather kisses to your thighs, coming dangerously close to your pussy and just when you’d get your hopes up, he’d move back to your thighs. 

“Ran, please.” You moved your hand to his hair, trying to tug him away from the marks he was leaving against your thigh but he was nothing but stubborn. “Rannnnnnnn,” you groaned. 

“You know what I was want,” he stated simply, and your face scrunched imperceptibly. “You’re so cute when you do that.”

“Ran I’m serious. Eat me out or I’m leaving.”

He arched an eyebrow at you. “So bossy.” He looked up at you and you were still partially glaring at him. He smiled. “Keep looking at me just like that.” His head lowered, ignored hearing you call him a masochist under your breath and smirked at the sound of your breathing hitching, effectively shutting you up as he licked a stripe up your slit.

The eye contact was overwhelming and hard to maintain, especially when he slipped two fingers back inside you without warning. You were struggling to keep your eyes open and effectively failed, shutting them as his lips sealed around your throbbing clit. The pressure was re-building and your hands flew to his hair, gripping tight and tugging as you chanted his name over and over again as you came. 

Ran sat up, swiping a hand over his mouth as he rearranged you on the bed, wasting no time and letting you catch a breath before he pinned your wrists to the mattress with one hand, sloppily reaching for a condom in his bedside table with the other. 

He grabbed a condom and you watched as he rolled it on in record time, his eagerness rolling off him in waves as his hands darted straight to your hips, lifting them up at an angle, fingers digging into your skin as he slid his cock in slowly. His mouth fell open at the tight warmth stretch of your pussy, a low groan escaping him. 

You raised your arms up and he let go of your hips, leaning down to let you accommodate him, wrapping your arms around his neck as your legs locked around his waist. He slid his arms under your back and held you back just as tightly, his hips pressing flush against yours. 

You almost whined at the feeling of being so full, the thickness of his cock nestled between your walls dizzying. He pulled out and slowly pushed back in, his pace speeding up as you started to let your moans out. He buried his face into your neck, inhaling that sweet perfume you always love to overspray on yourself, taking in the heat of your naked body below him, and began littering your neck with kisses, sucking hard at your skin till it bruised. 

Your hands flew to his neck, taking your nails up and down and dragging red long streaks onto his skin. He pushed himself up, hands on either side of your head and began snapping his hips until you got louder. The bed was squeaking,  your voice was getting higher, and the wet sounds of your pussy reached your eyes making you feel hot. 

“I’m close,” you whimpered, gripping onto his arms, and he grunted at the bite of your nails digging into his muscle. 

“Me too baby.” He pressed down on your stomach with a firm hand, hips slowing down to slow but deep thrusts. You could feel his cock stretching you out as he hit deeper, his hand applying more and more pressure until it was unbearable. You came with another loud cry, his hips stuttering against yours before he cusses and pulls out abruptly, your body cold and empty and you push yourself weakly onto your elbows to watch as he sprays his cum on your inner thighs, painting them white. He tapped his cock against your pussy, sliding it up and down your wet folds before exhaling deeply. 

He sat back onto his knees and examined your spent body, how your eyes were unable to stay open for more than three seconds without slowly closing shut. 

He moved to lay beside you, gathering you in his chest. 

“Wait. I need to clean up,” you muttered, trying to keep your legs open to chase away the feeling of wet cum in your inner thighs. 

“Who cares,” he grumbled, hand sliding down your leg to throw it over his hip. “Sleep with me. It’s almost 3 am.” He fell asleep not even a second after finishing his sentence and you rolled your eyes, a fond smile on your face. 

Ran was nothing but a deep sleeper, and you took advantage of that to brush his hair out of his face and cup his cheeks, playing with his nose as he slept soundly in front of you. It took an hour for you to fall back asleep and you woke a few hours later. 

Rolling onto your side, you slapped around for his laptop on the bedside table and opened it,wincing at the bright screen. Through the blindness you were able to make out the time as 8am. Carefully you slipped out of bed and took a brief shower before heading to his kitchen. 

Ran was able to sleep through mainly anything, even his alarms, but the sounds of you clattering around his kitchen effectively did succeeded in waking him up. He snorted once he checked the time, mumbling “this girl,” under his breath and slipped out of bed to take a shower and brush his teeth. Whatever you were cooking ended up taking nearly a whole hour and you re-entered the bedroom with a tray full of food, Ran had been reduced to idly scrolling on his phone, scratching his stomach. 

“Good morning,” you chirped, climbing onto the bed and placing the food on his lap.

“Morning baby.” He pressed a kiss to your forehead and you smiled at him. “What’s all this?”

“I felt bad about um, getting you to pick me up yesterday so I wanted to uh, treat you I guess.” You sat beside him, resting your head on his shoulder and looked up at him. “I barely cook so you better finish every single thing on that plate.”

He snorted and pulled you in for a kiss. “I appreciate it. Thank you.” 

“No thank you. Seriously. I really owe you one Ran.” You smiled shyly at him before clearing your throat. “Now shut up and eat.”

He rolled his eyes when you grabbed the fork, forcefully stabbed the eggs and held it up to his mouth. “Say aaah.”

He stared blankly at you until you glared at him. He sighed and opened his mouth, the smile coming back in your face in full force as you fed the fork into his mouth. He chewed and you were already restabbing the fork on the plate to pick up some waffles when he stopped you. 

“I can feed myse—“

You shoved more food into his mouth. “Is it good?” You asked, trying not to laugh as you saw him struggling to chew with his mouth full. He nodded once he swallowed, kissing your forehead again and gathering you back into his chest. 

“It tastes amazing. My baby so talented. Come here.” He brought you back in for another longing kiss, his hand cupping the back of your head. You pulled away and removed your head back to his shoulder, tracing your fingers across his chest as he ate. He pushed the plate to the side once he finished and turned to face you. “What’re you doing today?”

You hummed and spread your hands flat against his stomach, feeling the slow rise and fall of his chest. “Me and Yuzuha are going to Masato’s to pressure him into giving me my shit. If he doesn’t then I’ll call the police.” 

He wrinkled his nose at the idea and you went back to dragging your finger across his skin, tracing his bellybutton. 

“I don’t want you going over there.”

“Relax. Hakkai and Mitsuya are going to be there too incase he wants to try something.” He wrinkled his nose again and you turned to look up at him. “Okay don’t be like that. They’re strong!”

“All it took for me was a brick and he was out.” Ran laughed when you rolled your eyes. 

“You’re not immortal, you know. Smashing anyone over the head with a brick would knock them out!”

“All I hear is excuses. Besides I thought you said you’d let me handle it, hm?” He jostled you playfully and you shook your head. 

“I was thinking about it and I really do not want you and your goonies to torture the dude until he’s on the verge of death. I hate him but I don’t want to hurt him either.”

“You’re too nice for your own good you know? People will take advantage of that,” he stated calmly and you sighed, settling back beside him. 

“…I know.”

“So let me handle it,” he proposed. You weren’t looking at him so he tilted your face back to his, forehead pressing against yours. “Let me take care of it. And you.” He laced your fingers together as you stared him deeply in the eyes, letting him attempt to persuade you. 

After a few moments you bit down on your lip and sighed. “Okay. Take care of it but I don’t wanna hear what you do or say to him. Alright?”

His grin turned wolffish and he pressed another kiss to your forehead. “You don’t gotta worry about a thing. Just get some sleep,” he said as he gently laid you back down on the bed and tucked you back in, “and let handle everything for you.”

[writingsfromhome]

If you Love Something

A/N: this has been an idea sitting in my drafts for a while. You and Harry had a brief but intense relationship as teenagers, were forced to make a serious decision then, and it’s aftereffects have lingered for the rest of your lives. It deals with some heavier topics so read with caution (alcoholism, depression, unwanted pregnancy etc). I’d describe it as sad but hopeful.

Part 2

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Age 17.

It started in secret. We’d found each other on the roof of a house party. Truth be told, I saw him sneak out of the window where people were crowded around the TV watching some controversial music video I hadn’t heard about. And I’d followed.

I knew who Harry was. Had him in English, Maths, and Biology last year. He was well spoken, thoughtful, and silly. I never spoke to him once though. Only admired him from afar.

Tonight I had my first drink and then another. I was feeling buzzed and despite being painfully shy for most of the time I’d known everyone here, I was suddenly gripped by the realization that we were approaching the last year we would all be together. Why had I waited this long to pursue someone I thought was cute?

I snuck out after him, when my friends weren’t looking. I even tilted the window more closed than usual so no one would suspect anything; I had the attic room at home so I knew how to maneuver the angled roof to get comfortable.

“You need any help?” Harry’s voice is clear in the silence.

“I’m alright.” I stand up to peer at him. He’s climbed near the top.

“Sure? You don’t seem steady.”

“Oh I’m steady,” I prove it to him by climbing up to where he was. “See?”

“I’m mistaken. My bad.” He holds out a hand to help me sit beside him and the night sky flashes brighter for an instant when I grasp his hand. My stomach is in knots.

“Harry. Styles.” I don’t know why I say his full name but I was nervous.

He repeats my full name back to me. I don’t know why I’m surprised he knows it. It’s not like we went to a big school.

“What brings you out here?”

I try to be bold about it, “You?”

“Party was getting too much.” He says. I stare at him in confusion while he complains about something his friends had gotten up to.

I replay my answer and realized it sounded like I’d skipped answering his question and asked the question back. Bugger.

“You know my name.” I interrupt him, forgetting he was telling me a story. Awkward.

“Yeah? Of course I do.”

“We’ve never talked.”

“We talked. Once in Maths. We had to grade each other’s answers.”

Oh yeah. I burn when I remember the 4/10 he’d given me with a smiley face saying that maths was masochistic.

“Barely.”

“I know you though,” he says with a softness that makes my heart stutter.

“Do you?” I look to him, resting my chin on my shoulder. He gazes down at me and I swear I could taste the colours around us.

His eyes draw me deeper as he inches closer. Was he going to kiss me? Oh my god.

I look back out to the roof and he jerks away. Omg.

“I do.”

“Oh,” I don’t know what to do after that awkward moment.

“I know you’re really quiet and shy but your smile is so loud you can see it from across the room.” He says and my breath catches as he continues. “You’re yourself with your friends, you really like Harry Potter and field hockey. You would kill Mal Adams if you could get away with it and you hate Maths just as much as you love art. You’re dating Oli Graves but your smile is only ever shining half as bright when you’re around him. Can I go on?”

I stop breathing completely halfway through his declaration of knowing me. All this time I had my eye on him, I didn’t know he was watching me too.

“I didn’t ask you for your opinion on my relationship.”

“You didn’t. I didn’t give you one either.”

I glare at him. He was right. He smiles knowing he was. I’m mad that I’m not mad at him. That he was right.

“What are you doing with a guy like that?”

Oli and I had been dating for 7 months now. He was loud and fun in a way I wish I could be. That’s why I liked him so much. That’s why I was at a party like this to begin with.

“He’s a good guy.”

“That’s all?” He asks. I look over but he’s looking up at the sky. I follow his gaze and get lost in the great expanse of nighttime.

“I think you deserve someone who sees you. Don’t you?”

“Did Ally see you?” I ask with a hint of aggression I didn’t mean to have.

“Ally and I broke up during Easter. So there’s your answer.” He’s unbothered.

“Well what do you want?” I ask.

“Right now? Or in life?”

I shrug. “Both?”

“I want to explore the world and meet all kinds of people. I wanna make the world a better place by being in it. It’s cheesy as shit so if you ever said I said this I’ll deny it and you’ll look like-“

“My lips are sealed.” I turn his way to promise him that. It makes me laugh at how serious he looks saying it all and when I do his face relaxes.

“You laugh is nice too. I forgot to mention that.”

That quiets me very quickly.

“And right now,” he continues. “I’d really like to kiss you.”

My ears ring. Did I hear him right? Could you get so drunk you hallucinate? I swear the cold air had sobered me-

“Did you hear what I said?” Harry’s moved in closer to me. Did I? I don’t know.

“What d-“

“I’d like to kiss you.”

I nod, afraid to talk and realize I’d hallucinated him saying that.

The world melts away when he kisses me. It’s tender, nothing like Oli and his jagged pushy kissing. In the nighttime air it’s warm, and soft, and easy.

“I know you,” Harry says when we part. I’d nearly climbed into his lap and I try to edge away, embarrassed, but he keeps a hand firm on my thigh.

“I know you too Harry,” I breathe. He smiles and it crinkles his luscious eyes.

I think I was falling.

***

We keep it a secret after I break up with Oli. For months, until mid-August when I invite him over for dinner after my mom insists on meeting “the boy I was all doe-eyed over”. The night with my family goes so well—Harry is the picture of a courteous gentleman that even my sister is swayed by him despite saying boys were gross. I ask him to hang out, in public, the next day. He doesn’t hesitate to say yes.

That’s what I love about Harry—yes love. He’s not pushy, he lets me go at my own pace. He respects me and sees me for everything I am and loves me anyway. I wanted to spend my whole life with him.

It was so intense and relaxed at the same time. It felt like no relationship I’d been in before. I felt different being with him, even my friends noticed.

When final year started, Harry and I were official but we didn’t flaunt it. We didn’t need to. My friends knew about us and they were happy for us, they told me I was more me. Whatever that meant.

Life was phenomenal and I was living in a dusky haze. Nothing could touch us.

Until one day in February. I was out with my sister, mum didn’t want to take her out and since I recently got my driver’s license with plenty of lessons from Harry, I was driving her to the mall. She needed Valentine’s Day cards.

“I thought you said love is stupid.” I remind her on the way.

“It is.”

“So why the hell am I driving you to buy cards for a made up holiday?”

“Because!” She crosses her arms and stares out the window. I flick her arm at a red light.

“You have a crush.”

“I do not!”

“Do too. Who is it? James? Mattie? Hamid?”

“Ew! They’re freaks.” My sister continues staring out the window.

“Why do you want to buy cards so bad!?”

“I just want them! For my friends!”

“Okay then,” I didn’t believe her. But I couldn’t bring her home crying or mum would ground me.

A lot of places have slim pickings. Wandering the aisle of Waterstones I catch sight of a family friend. She was my dad’s uni friend’s daughter, a few years older than me but by the time I got to secondary she had dropped out after getting pregnant. I remember the buzz when everyone found out.

I avoid her and find an aisle to occupy myself.

Harry and I were always careful, mum had already given me the talk and he never pressured me to do anything I didn’t. I imagine Harry as a dad. He would make a good one I think.

As one thought leads to another I go cold as I realize something. My last period was during the holidays.

I feel like I’m walking in a swarm of locusts as I walk to the edge of the aisle, scanning for my sister. Maybe I can pop into a pharmacy before she’s done. Maybe…

This was crazy. It was probably just a missed period.

But if it isn’t, another voice asks. I felt it in my gut. I had to do this.

I don’t remember getting home. I don’t remember anything about the rest of that day except two faint lines, and then two faint lines again, and a third time. I fall asleep before dinner that night and shut the world out.

***

“I know something’s wrong.” Harry’s walking me home after school. It’s Valentine’s Day and he’d been nothing but sweet. He bought me chocolates, flowers, and we planned to cook dinner together after school. I had bought him chocolates too, and had written him a heartfelt note with a bunch of photos of us weeks ago. The box was in my room, waiting for tonight. “Do you not like the flowers? Or is it dinner? We can go out somewhere instead?”

“No everything’s lovely.” I’d never heard Harry this desperate before. It gets under my skin even though part of me knows that’s not really it. But having him hover over me all week trying to figure out what was wrong was too much.

I’d spent every night this week with a hand over my belly. Thinking about it. I hadn’t told anyone. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. All I can think of was Jenny and I didn’t want that life. I couldn’t. I couldn’t be a mother.

“Please. What’s the matter.” Harry asks again, tugging at my hands but I pull them away.

“I just need some space!” I shout and he flinches. “I’m sorry Harry. I just need space right now.”

“Right now like…” he scratches his head. “I don’t get you. It’s Valentine’s Day, we’ve been talking about this day for weeks what do you mean you want space?”

“I can’t do this right now. Please.”

“Are you-are we…”

“I’m not breaking up with you.” I look at Harry with tears in my eyes, I didn’t want to cry out here. But every time I look at him I remember the reality. What’s growing inside me. I can’t take it. “I just can’t do today.”

I go inside my house. Leave him without further explanation. I feel awful, I can’t hold the tears in long enough to get to my room.

***

“Hey love?” My mum and dad knock on my door at half past 5. I lay in the dark, having cried myself dry. “We’re worried about you. Can we talk.”

“I can’t.” I say, voice stuffy.

“I thought you and that boyfriend of yours had plans,” dad says. He liked Harry but he rarely called him by his name. “Did something happen?”

“No!” I wanted them to leave me alone. “I just. I had to cancel. I’m fine.”

“Don’t sound fine to me love,” I feel the mattress dip as mum sits down. Dad strokes my hair. They whisper something I can’t hear and a pair of footsteps pad out of my room.

“Mum just leave me alone.” I try again.

“I’m not.” She pushes me further into my bed and leans down, tugging my blanket down. When I finally look at her she smiles kindly and kisses my forehead. That fills me up enough to start wailing again. “Oh love, what’s wrong?”

“Everything!” I sob into my blanket. Mom lays down beside me and I let myself be cradled like a child. God, I had a child. This was so fucked.

“Talk to me. We can figure it out together.”

I don’t know how my parents would react. They were never particularly strict, especially after what happened with Jenny I remember them always being sympathetic. We even visited her in hospital with a gift.

Mum strokes my hair and whispers that it’ll be okay. Slowly my sobbing eases into light sniffles. I had to tell her. She would know what to do. And if she hated me for it, I would just have to deal with it.

“Mum don’t be mad-“

“I won’t honey I-“

“No. Mum.” I cut her off. She moves back on the pillow so she can see my whole face, moving a strand of hair so I couldn’t hide. “Something…messed up. Happened. And…I was careful. We were always careful I don’t know what happened but I-“

I watch her face changed. Like she knew. She knew what was coming but she waits patiently as I muster up the courage to say the words that felt too real once I said them.

“Mum I’m…I’m pregnant.”

Her eyes fill with tears and she bites her lip. What was she thinking? Was she crying for me or with me? Why wasn’t she saying anything!?

“Mum-“

“C’mere.” She wraps me in her embrace again and kisses the top of my head. My body feels drained and limp. I finally told somebody. It was real. This living thing inside of me was real.

“What happened?” She asks next. And I tell her what I think happened. When. How I found out. She listens, holding my hand in hers. When I’m done and it’s poured out of me she smiles supportively. “This isn’t a bad thing okay? It’s okay. Any decision you make is up to you. I’ll talk to your dad but just know you call the shots okay? I love you.”

This is what carries me. The love.

She asks me it I told Harry yet and I tell her the truth. She urges me to tell him. I tell her I wanted to so bad but I was scared.

She leaves shortly after that, I hear her talking softly outside my room. Nobody calls me for dinner until 7, a soft knock on my door. My sister would never be so soft, I assume it’s dad so I tell him to come in. I was scared to face him.

It’s Harry instead.

“Harry!” I cover my splotchy face with my blanket, why was he here? Did mum invite him? This was soo embarrassing.

My heart pounds and Harry is silent until he takes a seat where mum had previously been.

“I came over, your mum invited me. She explained.”

She did what? For a moment I feel betrayed.

“She said you weren’t doing so well. Stressed? I could make you some tea if you’d like. But I told you y/n, you’ll get into unis. You don’t have to worry so…”

I sigh. Mum had told him a half-truth. But he had come. Of course he had.

I couldn’t even think about uni right now because that lead me down a road of what if I couldn’t go because I had a baby. And that life felt so bleak it made me depressed.

“Harry.” I inch my blanket down a little and his eyes go round when he looks at me.

“You look…awful.”

“I know.” I cover my face with my hair but he brushes it away and kisses my forehead.

“No. I’m worried about you. I brought dinner-“

“Oh Harry.” I spot the bag he brought with him.

“I made it all for us. With my mum’s help but mostly me. I packed it to bring to you.”

I didn’t deserve him. And I had to tell him. And he was going to break up with me. What high school boy wanted a child?

“Harry it’s not uni.” I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I was carrying another living thing. It was the size of a seed but I was carrying it inside me. Like a living breathing pot. I was a potted plant.

“Then what is it?” His brows crinkle. “Is it us?”

“No!” I rush to tell him. “I…I don’t know how to say this. And I don’t know how you’re going to react but it’s okay either way.”

“What are you talking about?” His hands slide up my lap. “What is it?”

“Harry. I’m um, I’m pregnant.”

I watch him freeze and stay exactly how he is, his brows pinch ever so slightly. I knew this look. He looked still on the outside but his mind was racing. And I was scared what was racing through it.

“Pregnant?”

“Yeah. From…the holidays.”

“How did-I thought we-“

“I guess it’s not foolproof.” I whisper. Mum had told me to go on the pill, and I hadn’t listened because all my friends told me it made them gain weight. If only I had listened. Now I was gaining weight anyway.

“What are we going to do?” He asks next. And I never realized six little words could weigh the world. If I could cut those words out and surgically implant them into my heart I would. Just to remind me the equal parts relieved and comforted they made me.

I hold his face in my hands, new tears springing to my eyes. He was in this. With me.

He kisses me and pulls me into a hug. I cry into his shirt again and he holds me so tight I swear I could break.

“I don’t know if I can keep it Harry,” I finally whisper to him.

His hands fist in my shirt, he holds his breath and after a long minute he lets me go with it.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Was he really okay with all this?

“It’s…I can’t make you keep it.”

“You’d want to keep it?” I couldn’t believe it.

“It’s…” he swallows his sentence and keeps his gaze on my stomach. I tug his hand and lay it over it. When his eyes meet mine I see a hint of heartbreak. We were going to break our hearts either way I think.

Not once did I think he might want to keep it.

“It’s okay.” Harry finally says. “We’re so young right? How would we keep a baby and go to school, and do everything we always talk about?”

“Yeah I don’t…I don’t know.”

“I love you.” He says with such a sudden passion. I wrap my arms around his and return the sentiment.

Eventually we lay down and just talk about everything. Truthfully, my head was telling me not to keep the baby but everything else felt dead thinking about it.

Maybe that’s why it took me until April to finally make a decision. It was the size of a plum by then, and a tiny bump was starting to show but only when I stood naked in front of the mirror. With clothes on, nobody was the wiser. But the longer I kept it, I think the more Harry fell in love with it. The idea of it.

We have a long talk during our Easter holiday. We talked in my bedroom until the sun comes up. I tell him I was sure of my decision.

I’d gotten accepted to Cambridge by then. Harry was staying in London. We knew it wasn’t feasible. To live the life we always wanted, we had to get rid of this new life we never knew could happen.

I don’t know why but I don’t tell him the day I go to do it. I go with my mum. Mum drops my sister off at school—she didn’t know. Mum said she had a big mouth.

We drive in silence. When we park mum asks how I feel.

“Sad.” It was the truth. I knew this was right. But it felt like shite.

“Yeah.” She rubs my hands. “Want to go in?”

“I just want to sit here for a bit.” I tell her.

“Okay. I’ll go sign you in.”

She takes my purse and hers and leaves me there. I take the moment to ground myself. Say goodbye to the other future.

When mum knocks on my window I jump.

“Yn? Is everything alright?”

“Yeah yeah I’m coming in.” I open the door.

“You know you’ve been sitting here half hour?”

I pause, one leg out the door and one still in. “I…I must have got lost in my head. Sorry mum-“

“Look. Do you want to do this?”

“I don’t know…I have to.”

“There are other options love-“

“But how can I give it up and live my whole life like that?”

“We can help raise her. You can go on and live your life-“

“I’d be a horrible mother.” Mum and I had this row so many times before. It always ended in me storming away but I couldn’t here.

“You don’t need to make the decision today.”

“But I do.” I tell her. “Otherwise it’ll drive me insane.”

I tuck both feet back into the car and rest my hand on my belly. I’d allowed myself to do that only in my room, when I was alone. Doing it out here made it feel even more real. Suddenly I couldn’t imagine going through with the decision.

“I can’t do this.” I tell my mum.

She smooths my hair down and kisses my temple. My door closes and a few seconds later she climbs in beside me.

“Think about it.”

“I can’t. But I can’t keep it either.”

“Okay.” Mum pulls me into her and I think I should cry but I can’t. I’m calm, maybe I know I’d made the right decision. Or just a decision. I was going to stick to this.

“I can’t raise it. I’m just a child I…maybe someone out there wants a baby and can’t have one maybe-“

“I’ll look into it for you.” Mum promises. “You set the rules remember?”

And that’s how it goes. Mum looks into it, we decide to go for adoption. We go to the hospital on the first warm day of the year. By then I’d taken to wearing jumpers over flowy dresses and been thankful for the first time in my life that I wasn’t skinny like other girls. At most angles you couldn’t tell my belly was so perfectly round.

By then too, Harry had accepted the decision. He seemed relieved. Thinking aloud he’d said maybe he could raise it, but quickly turned around when I asked him what he’d do about uni.

“Someone out there can take care of it better than us. Someone will love the baby like we do.”

During the summer, I tell all my friends I was staying with family in midlands. And I do go up there, that’s where the couple who was adopting lived. Harry and I meet them with my mum and his. It’s awkward, we run out of conversation fast. But their house is big and they already have a 2 year old from an adoption last year. My baby was going to be loved here. And have a sibling.

“We did want to discuss one last thing,” they’d said before we left. We all listen intently. “We…find it best when it’s a no contact adoption. We’ve had a lot of friends who keep contact open and it gets messy-“

“What?” I hadn’t really thought about this until now. Hearing I’d have to give the baby up and go on like it didn’t exist felt wrong. Harry’s hand slips into mine.

“This is typical,” Harry’s mum says from his side. “Let’s hear it out.”

“Right. So just to prevent future complications, we do no contact. Of course when baby’s older and wants to seek out the real parents we can’t stop them. But until then…”

“Thank you.” My mum steps in when it goes silent. I could hardly wrap my head around what they were saying. When it gets older?

Pretty soon mum is ushering me out and Harry’s hand is still clutching mine. We don’t let go until we reach my Uncle’s where we were staying until August. The baby was due in September. I was going to miss the first week of class.

“I can’t do this.” I tell them later. “How can we just have no contact.”

“I thought you knew.” Mum says. “I explained that some parents want this when they adopt.”

She might have. Ever since I hit the third trimester like my doctor said, I’ve had a hard time listening and understanding what someone was saying after they spoke too long. I was glad school was done—for obvious reasons, but also for not having to sit in a class and learn.

“We have no other choice.” Harry says from beside me. He rubs my back and slowly, I zone back into the conversation. “We can find another family but they might want the same thing.”

“What if the baby never looks for us?” I turn to him, our heads press against the other’s. “What if we go our whole lives just wondering?”

“What’s the other option?” Harry whispers. He was right. I just didn’t want to get it.

Acceptance slowly creeps into me over the course of the summer. It was always hot carrying another person around, I was always hungry and thirsty, and very cranky. Harry came up to see me every other weekend when he could, mum stayed with me and that summer was one I could never forget.

It was September 1st, a particularly hot day. Rain fell in the afternoon and by the time the unforgiving sun set, the cool air was heavenly.

I sat by the bedroom window, moisturizing my belly like mum had shown me, talking to the baby. I wrote it a letter last week all about me, that I loved them and hoped the best for them. I told the baby about my family, how Harry and I met, and then I sealed it in an envelope with a picture of Harry and me. It was taken last Halloween when we’d both dressed up as each other. I tell mum to give it to the new parents. In case the day came the baby wondered about who we were.

As I spoke softly, I felt a gush of something wet down my leg.

“What?” I stand up, confused. “I…”

It takes me a second. I was going into labour.

“Mum!” I shout. “Mum! Come here!”

She rushes in and confirms it. It was happening.

“But it’s supposed to be next week!” I try not to panic but that’s all I can do as mum grabs our things and my aunt rushes to the car. “Does this mean something’s wrong? Is the baby o-“

I freeze as a contraction forces me to fold. I’d felt the kicking and the nausea and everything in between but these. These were a bitch.

Somehow we make it to hospital. Somehow I lay on a bed and push when the doctor tells me to. I nearly pass out. I just wanted Harry here with me. He didn’t know his kid was being born.

With a final push that felt like I was ascending my body and leaving it behind, I hear a wail and I cry. The baby was out, they cried and everything was okay.

“Okay congratulations mummy,” a nurse crouches down to me. “We’re going to clean you and baby up. She’s healthy and looks okay.”

“What?” I can barely see with my hair in my face and the nurses around me. It was a she? I had a baby girl?

We were never told the gender, so we wouldn’t get attached. But I had a baby girl. The nurse just called me mum.

I feel the tears on my cheeks, I was crying too. I try to look around me but a new nurse is talking in hushed voices to the doctor.

“…outside…call…adoption…shouldn’t or….contact-“

“What’s going on?” I can barely get the words out. “What?”

“Oh my love,” suddenly mum’s in the room and things are a bit better. A bit better.

“Mum what’s going on?”

“The baby’s born. The parents are outside they’re going to meet her soon.”

“What?” I look at mum’s face and it’s shining with tears. Why was she crying?

“Oh she’s beautiful love, she’s perfect. But your job’s done now. You should rest.”

“Mum,” I cry. “Where is she? Can’t I hold her?”

“No love,” mum moves my hair out of my face. I feel something break in half inside of me. I couldn’t even hold the baby? The baby girl? Mine and Harry’s baby girl?

“Why? Mum why? I just want to see her-“

“I’m sorry,” mum says through tears. “It’s just the way it is. She’s going to a loving home okay? She’s good. You’re okay.”

I can’t stop crying. I was going to lose her last April and I stopped that but I lost her anyway. My baby, I was never going to see her.

I remember when my sister was born. I was 5 and I was angry she’d taken the attention away. But when I saw her with her perfect toes and angel face I was obsessed with her. I even remember her first steps, she’d taken them at a park with mum and dad and me together. I was never going to know these things about my own baby. I was never going to know her.

I must pass out soon after. I remember waking up to the nurses instructing me about something. I’m half asleep and barely remember what I did when I get up. When I do wake it’s morning and there’s a figure on the chair beside me.

“You’re up.”

Harry. Relief washes over me knowing he’s here.

“Harry they took her,” I tell him.

“I know. I know yn.”

I move aside and he crawls into bed with me. I must look disgusting but he watches me with love brimming in his eyes. I can tell he’s been crying.

“I feel empty,” I whisper. Like someone had carved me out like a pumpkin. Something I’d had with me all year was gone. “How can I just move on? Start uni and all that when I…they just took her.”

“I keep thinking that.” Harry says. “Khalil invited me to a party to meet some blokes from uni and I just sat in my car the whole time. I couldn’t even go in. She…she was never going to be ours.”

“I feel awful.” I burrow into his neck as he strokes my hair. “A baby girl.”

“A baby girl,” Harry echoes.

***

I head to uni a week later. My body still feels like it fought a war and lost. It’s like it still thinks there’s a baby there. I produce milk for a few days, continue to have contractions, my belly is saggier than usual and I can’t stop crying about everything.

My dad drops me off to uni. He tells me he was proud of me, that I was always his baby girl. I cry then just like I cried at home when I said bye to mum, or when my sister hugged me which she never does. I can’t stop crying.

When I move into my dorm I feel like a completely different person than I thought I was going to be. My dormmate fills me in on everything she’s learned, complains about a boy and a party and it just feels so irrelevant to me. Did I used to care about those things? I had a baby. And now I didn’t.

By October, Harry and I are in different worlds. We hadn’t broken up but we talk weekly. Each week there’s less to talk about. When I visit home in October, being around him just makes me sad. He tries to cheer me up, make it like old times, but I know he’s hurting inside too.

I decide to do the breaking up. And at first he’s angry, insisting we could make it work. He actually refuses and walks away. We don’t talk for a whole day.

But at a house party in South where his uni mates were from, he accepts the end.

Through tears we kiss each other one final time, we whisper sweet nothings, we pour into each other all the hopes and wishes we had for each other.

When he hugs me for the last time I leave something behind. It’s similar to waking up the morning after my delivery and knowing something was gone. I really feel the shape of the loss. It sits in my sternum, a hole that grows smaller with time, but not just yet.

I fall into a depressed state for most of my first semester but my dormmate doesn’t give up on me and eventually I go to my first uni party. Eventually my brain fog clears and I actually go to all my classes. Eventually my life, on the outside, looks like it could be back to normal but inside I ache with the loss. So much that it becomes part of me. I don’t know where it ends, and I begin. It lives in me.

Age 23.

“The first of many hey?” Mal clinks his bottle to mine. I barely knew Mal but we were both friends with Khalil and therefore both at his stag.

“Before you know it we’re all going down,” one of Khalil’s friends joins in. “Stag after stag, suit after suit, it’s gonna be a blur man.”

“Let’s enjoy it while we can!” Someone cheers and everyone raises their beers. I toast with a smile; blokes loved to act like being in a relationship was the last thing they wanted when I knew most of them were mush in their girlfriend’s hands.

I also smile knowing I bought an engagement ring a few weeks back. I wanted to propose to Shannon, we met on her 22 when a friend invited me along. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the birthday girl. We’d been together since.

“Who do you think’s next?” The bets start going and nobody bets on me. Everyone always thought Shan was too good for me, they were counting on us breaking up. I was going to prove them all wrong.

The night gets sloppier until we all head back to the air bnb we’d rented for this. Tomorrow we were all supposed to go play golf like we were cosplaying old money bastards when we all knew we were just broke blokes from East. But I guaranteed they’d all be too hungover. We would get to the club and just drink the hangovers away.

And I’m right. I update Shan that I’m right when the boys stay in the dining area of the club. They decide on lunch and I step out to talk to my girlfriend.

“No birds allowed this weekend,” someone pipes in when I excuse myself.

“That’s just cuz you’re miserable Eli.” I brush past as the boys laugh. At me. And him.

I catch up with Shan. It was a bright day for September and I stay a little longer after the phone ends. Shan was in med school, she was always stressed or sleep deprived. I tried to support her the best I could—right now she needed moral support that she was going to get an internship she was applying for.

“Mummy doesn’t like when I have sweets,” a small voice says to my left. I look at a father with his daughter. He’s crouched down zipping her sweater up while she rambles on.

“Well it’s going to be our secret.” The dad says. “Sundays are for sweets aren’t they?”

“I love sweets.” She responds.

The father catches my eye and I shoot him a smile.

“Her mum’s going to hear every detail when we get home,” he says as he stands. “Can’t keep a secret to save her life.”

I laugh. The way she was rambling on, I didn’t think so. “How old’s she?”

“6.” He says, smiling down at her fondly. My heart aches.

“Almost 7.” She corrects her dad.

“Birthday’s in the spring.” He says more to me. “But almost 7 sure.”

I see them leave with one more shared smile, like we’re in on something. I imagine that’s how it would feel to be a parent. Always knowing something your kid doesn’t.

My daughter was 6. Wherever she was.

Thinking about the daughter I never had, the girl I lost always leaves me a little winded. Today’s no different.

Yn and I both made an agreement and it had been the hardest thing I’d done. Letting her go. It took me a proper year to even think about moving on.

I liked to think about yn, doing everything she wanted to do. But when I thought about the baby I spiralled into a dark pit. Sometimes when I drank too much, it pulled me in too deep to get out of. That’s what Shan liked to call my depressive drinking. She’s limited me to 3 drinks since.

Before I go in I take a minute to think about yn, where she might be. I hear from friends in high school random facts about her life. But I wonder how she’s doing. If she thinks about our baby like I do. How life would have been if I’d been here, calling her on the phone instead, asking if our baby girl was doing alright.

Age 29.

I stare at the nape of the man in front of me. It couldn’t be, but I’d memorized the back of his head—amongst other things, nearly 2 decades ago and I would bet £1000 I knew who this was. But I continue staring until the cashier rings him up.

In the same voice I remember, the one from my memories and my fantasies, I hear him say: “debit.”

I wait for him to pay before saying, “Harry?”

He turns so quickly he drops his card, wallet, and keys.

“Hi!” I laugh awkwardly and crouch down to help him pick his things up. There’s an awareness that the people in the queue behind me are witness to a moment that feels more intimate than a grocery store chat and it makes me shrink a little in my shell like a spooked turtle.

“Hi I-uh,” Harry short-circuits in front of me as the bored cashier holds his receipt out and stares at him with eyes that have worked one shift too many.

“I’ll just bag-“

“Yeah we can talk later.” I give him what I hope is a reassuring smile but it feels watery. I couldn’t believe of all the places I’d run into him, it was a grocery queue. How intense in such a mundane place.

As I watch my total rise on screen I risk a glance at Harry. His hand hovers over a white reusable bag, I wonder if that was his. Or his wife’s. If they did their weekly shop in a mismatch of bags that looked like that or they were the type of couple to have a set.

His eyes are on me though, somehow here and not here. I feel the same way.

I look back to the cashier asking me how I was paying. She glances between Harry and I. I don’t look back at him. Or the growing queue a few feet away.

I take my groceries—just some items my mum asked me to pick up, and stuff them into the tote I’m wearing. Harry waits for me by the exit.

“Hi.” He says as his eyes scan my face. I do the same, taking in all the ways time had spent with him. It must have been good—he looked good. “I can’t believe-“

“A Whole Foods of all places.” I laugh. A grin splits his face but his eyes stay on me.

“That smile, that laugh. God I’ve missed you.”

“I…missed you too.” How I could miss someone I’d known for one year and then never again for nearly two decades…I didn’t realize it was possible until now.

“Are you busy?” He asks. “Maybe we can grab a drink or?”

“I don’t…drink.” I hated that I had to announce it to people. I was still at the stage where I was figuring out how to say it confidently, or find a way around saying it.

“Oh.” Harry glances down at my belly and I realize he’d misunderstood but it’s too unspoken to correct him. “Cafe?”

“Yeah. That sounds lovely.” Honestly going anywhere with him sounded lovely right now. I wanted to cancel all my plans for the day and just sit with him. Stare at him and catch up. I couldn’t believe he was here.

We walk in a comfortable but waiting silence, like taking a cold drink out to a park with the anticipation it’s going to be good , and no desperation to open it as soon as you get it.

“Usual? Tea?” Harry asks when we step into a nearby cafe. It’s big for a cafe but has enough students working on laptops to not feel empty. I nod, unsure how to feel that Harry still knows what I order at a cafe. Or that my order hasn’t changed since 17.

I find us a booth and pretty soon he’s sliding into the seat across from me. The two of us can’t stop smiling.

“Hi,” he says again.

“Hi…”

“You look good, the same but better.”

“I was going to say the same thing about you!” I exclaim. More smiling.

“How’s…I mean, how are you? How is everything? What-“

“There’s so much to ask-“

“I don’t even know how to ask what I want to know!” Harry laughs and I’m warmed from the inside out at the sound of it.

“This shouldn’t be hard!”

“No.” He scrubs his face. “I’m really buzzing that we’ve run into each other.”

“Me too. It’s a bit unbelievable.”

“I know.” He continues gripping his cup and not taking his eyes off of me. It’s the exact way he used to look at me when we were teenagers. It nearly takes my breath away. “You look good—but I already said that. Sorry.”

“No,” I laugh. “That’s all that’s running through my head.”

“Oh—I remember hearing you were engaged a few years ago-“

“Yeah.” I turn my hand so he can see the ring. “Married now. You?”

“Yeah,” he looks down at his own hand. He had so many rings on I couldn’t tell from a glance. “Coming up to 5 years now.”

“Wow. It’s only 1.5 for me but Tatum and I—my husband, we’d been since uni.”

“Took him a while.”

“Mhm,” it had been a sore subject way back then. Harry says it casually but he studies my face. I know he wants to ask more but he’ll politely maneuver around it.

“Are you happy?”

I let out a breath. “That’s more complicated than anything else you could ask!”

“Is it?”

“Yeah I-“ I shrug. “I don’t know if I am. But I also have no idea what I could do about it. So. There’s that.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” My stomach curdles with his words. I didn’t want pity, least of all from Harry. Harry. I can’t believe he was here. “I get it though. Everyone says your 30s are even more glorious than your 20s. We’ll see soon enough if they’re right.”

I meet his eye, they always intimidated me to look too long into. Even now, I glance back down at my drink. When I look up again he has a wry smile twisting his lips. He knew.

I was sorry to hear life hadn’t been as good for him. And then I understand, it wasn’t pity he was giving me. He truly was sorry like I.

I thought about Harry often. Of course I did. I liked to imagine him living out his dreams like he always talked about. I liked to imagine him happy and thriving.

“Do you ever think about us?” I have to ask. “If we did it all differently?”

“We would have had a 12 year old with us.”

Hearing him say it feels like someone had taken a screwdriver and opened me up. Raw and exposed. But looking at him I know he thought about her as much as I had. Both of us were apparently mourning a future neither of us had fought for.

“Yeah,” I breathe but I just sound winded.

“We were trying, at one point—Shan and I.” Harry fiddles with his ring. “Did all the tests and the trials and the shite. But no kids. It put a real strain on my relationship. I think we cracked instead of bending. And I don’t think either of us know how to make it right again.”

I grasp his hand and squeeze. “I know what that’s like. It’s hard. I…a couple years ago. I lost a baby. A baby boy. I felt like it was a punishment for-“

“Don’t.”

We hold onto each other, our drinks long forgotten. He holds my hand and it feels like being known again, like I wasn’t such an awful person. That someone could see everything I’ve done and still choose to have love for me.

“I’m sorry.” He tells me.

“Me too.” I bite my lip. With a sigh I let him go and lean back. Here we’d been so excited to bump into each other but we’d both been carrying sorrow and grief. It wasn’t very hopeful.

“So I guess you’re not drinking because you’re-“

“No.” I say, surprisingly without feeling awkward. “I’m just sober right now. Trying to figure out life without a drink.”

“Sounds like torture but I respect that. Sounds hard.”

“It was at first. I like the feeling now of thinking clearly. But I miss a glass of wine I do sometimes.”

We smile at each other.

“So do you live around here?” Harry broaches talking again after both of us had lapsed into silence for a while. I blink away the fog of the past.

“Yeah. You?”

“Nah. Shan’s out of town and I was feeling lonely. Came over to visit my sister. I’m just staying with her for the week.”

“Lucky me then.” I smile.

“Lucky me too.” He smiles back. It’s soft. We’re soft. It felt impossible to me after all this time the tenderness was still the strongest thing between us.

We chat a bit more, much about nothing. What we did for a job, anyone we still kept in touch with from school. Nothing that meant a lot.

“I need to head off now,” I say when my phone buzzes for a second time. “I was on my way to my mum’s. She keeps calling me.”

“Yeah. Don’t want to keep you.” Harry says but he stays seated. So do I.

We continue just studying the other until my phone rings again and I laugh. “It was…I really loved seeing you.”

I slide out and Harry mirrors me. I still come to his chest, he still smells the same and stands the same and looks just as handsome.

“How about uhm, how about dinner some time?” Harry asks. I knew it was coming, it’s still painful saying no.

“I…can’t. I…we can’t just do dinner, can we?”

“No,” Harry bows his head. We had too much history to just do dinner. From what he said—and I knew, both our lives were too complicated to add the allure of each other into the mix. I couldn’t do that to my life as tempted as I was. Especially not sober.

“Yeah.” He stands straight again and gives me space to head to the door. “Good seeing you. Give your mum my best if she doesn’t hate me.”

“She doesn’t.” I assure him. We stand awkwardly not sure if a kiss, a hug, or a wave was appropriate. We settle for a hug.

I remember the last time I was enveloped in his arms, tucked away into his tall frame. When we said goodbye forever, agreed to live our best lives separately. We’d both been too scarred to be anything together. Too much grief.

“Maybe we’ll run into each other again.” Harry smiles at me when we part.

“Maybe,” I say knowing full well I wouldn’t do groceries on the weekend anymore.

With a final wave we both part ways again, this time it doesn’t feel as much like closure.

Age 35.

“Graduation’s graduating, what a mouthful.” I say to Andie. We sit in the parking lot of a local pub back home. Both of us had avoided reunions after going to the first one 10 years ago and being reminded of how much people liked to remind you of who you used to be. But this year Andie found out an old flame was going and single. And this is the first year I saw that Harry had checked off going. So we’d decided to go together.

I could have easily reached out to him. Asked him about meeting up there. But I didn’t want to come across any way. I remember our run-in 6 years ago. We felt the same way—we would do anything for each other, and I didn’t want any affect over him coming. Last I heard he was still in a relationship. Just cuz I was didn’t mean I had to ruin another.

“Okay. We going in?” Andie passes me her flask.

I’d taken to drinking again. Originally I stopped after a particularly bad night when I was 28. It nearly cost me my wedding back then.

I stopped to get sober. To feel what it felt like not to rely on alcohol to keep from feeling my emotions. I had a lot of grief I never processed. And unfortunately being sober, and processing the grief and depression, had ultimately cost me my marriage. But I was better for it. I knew what unconditional love and support was. I didn’t want to settle for someone who only loved me at my best.

Now I felt in control when I drank. I knew when to stop.

“Let’s go!”

“Do you think he’ll remember me?” Andie asks as we walk up to the place.

“You comment on so many of his posts. I think he does.” I tease.

“Gah. It would have saved me so much heartbreak if I just told him back 18 years ago how I felt.”

“Maybe,” I think about my confessed love 18 years ago and the heartbreak that ensued.

“Well at least I would have gotten him outta my system. Oh god I see him-“

“Hi ladies,” we’re stopped near the front and given name tags, making small talk with the girls working the booth. I vaguely remember them from a club but I have to read their name tags to pretend I remembered them at all.

Andie ditches me pretty quickly but I don’t mind. I find some friends I saw a couple times a year. Guess this was the couple time this year.

The whole time my eyes scan the room. People had brought their partners and I wondered if Harry would do the same. Deep down, I prayed he didn’t. I just wanted to see him.

I spot him halfway through the night. He’s leaning against the bar talking to Khalil. I remembered they used to be friends, he was always nice to me while Harry and I dated.

I watch him talk and drink. I lose him for a bit and then catch him leaving. Shite.

I excuse myself and rush out but nearly trip over myself slowing down. He was just outside for a smoke break.

“When did that habit start?” I ask. He nearly jumps out of his skin.

“Fu-y/n you scared me.” He shakes his face dramatically, like he’s getting something off of it. I bite back a smile, he was pretty drunk. “When did you get here? I didn’t know you came to these things?”

“I don’t.” I correct him. I couldn’t tell him I came for him. “It was just the name of this reunion, Graduation’s graduating. How could I pass it up?”

This earns a laugh. Eases the air between us. “Did you see Oli in there? He’s gotten bald.”

“He looks like his dad actually,” I remember his dad was always coming to Oli’s football matches, screaming at his son to run faster.

“Glad you didn’t end up with him?” Harry smirks.

“Oh yeah. I heard last reunion he just kept going up for the karaoke sober. If I want my bloke to embarrass me, at least give him the excuse of being drunk.”

“Shit,” Harry laughs. “I remember that! I remember! Wish I could forget!”

I laugh with him. “Harry you’re getting pretty close to drunk yourself.”

“Ah yeah. More than 3 drinks that, I’m being naughty tonight.”

I scrunch my nose, no idea what he’s talking about.

“I can’t believe you’re here tonight,” Harry says again. “I thought I wasn’t going to see you again for another 12 years after our last time.”

“Thought I’d halve the time.” I watch Harry squash out the butt.

“Glad you did.” He looks at me and I’m 17 again. Why couldn’t we both be single? Why did I come here knowing I couldn’t have him.

Maybe I was as masochistic as the person who invented maths.

“Yn?” A voice calls out to me. “Oi! It is you I thought I was dreaming you up! What a sight!”

I’d been avoiding Oli all night. Not anymore.

I glance at Harry and he hides a smirk. Oli notices Harry then and his face hardens a little.

“Oli! Long time!” I go in for the hug he’s reaching for, unsure why he was so sweaty on an autumn night. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” he grins at me. “You look good! Not a day over 25.”

“Don’t flatter me Oli,” I roll my eyes. “It’s not going to get you anything.”

“I’m not looking! I swear it!” He says earnestly. “I’m just paying you a compliment. It’s good to see you. Hey, I’m actually in a good relationship. Gonna propose to her.”

“Are you? What’s she like?”

I stand in the brisk evening as Oli tells me about his girlfriend. I’m happy for him, what we had in high school wasn’t really a relationship but I never wished him bad. He was a good guy, I was glad he found his person.

I change the subject when he asks about my love life, tell him I was getting cold. We head back in and I tell him I’d catch up to him later. I’d lost Harry and wanted to find him again. I had more I wanted to talk about.

“Khalil,” I interrupt him playing pool. He goes in for a hug and I engage in polite small talk until I tire of it. “I’m looking for Harry.”

“Of course you are,” he wags a finger at me. “I saw him leaving ten minutes ago?”

“Jeez really?” I couldn’t believe I missed him! After coming here just for him. Maybe he had to get home, maybe he had a kid by now. Had to tuck him in.

“He’s not doing so well since the divorce-“

“What?” I stare at Khalil like he’s spoken gibberish. Why hadn’t I heard about that?

“Ehm yeah. He’s pretty private about it.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. He’s been separated a few years now but he just signed the papers a couple weeks ago. I dunno. He gets kinda depressed around this time of year. Probably the weather.”

It was September. It wasn’t the weather.

I had to find him.

I brush past the people I went to school with. I followed Harry outside to a roof 17 years ago and today I follow him out to find him again. We needed to talk.

I look both ways, hoping for a miracle.

I spot a figure slumped on the far end of the road. I recognize the church, it was where we went every Easter and Christmas growing up.

I walk towards the figure until I can make out the hair. It was Harry. Thank god.

“Why’d you leave?” I ask him when he looks up to my approaching footsteps.

“I drank too much,” he hangs his head again. I sit beside him.

“I heard about the divorce. I’m sorry.”

Harry shrugs. “We separated a while ago. It was coming for a long time.”

“Yeah. Still.” I say.

We sit in silence, the only sound is our breathing and the faint noises from the pub down the road.

“She’s in her last year by now.” I say without further explanation. I know he’d know.

“Our baby’s 17.”

Our baby? I feel choked up. All these years we’d been apart, built our own lives, and there was still an our even when there hadn’t been.

“It’s always been us hasn’t it?” Harry says. “Nobody understands.”

“They couldn’t. We were so young, making such a big decision.”

“Oh y/n.” He leans into me and I wrap my arm around his shoulder. He’s cold, his jacket pooled on the steps around him. I gather it to spread over his shoulder but he stops me. “How much heartbreak can you have in one lifetime?”

I sit, aching for the pain Harry was going through. Knowing it was mirrored in me.

“I’ve had enough for a lifetime. I know that.”

“Me too.” Harry sighs. “I miss you.”

“I’m right here.” I intertwine our hands. They still fit the exact same, all these years later. I examine them, but they looked the same too. I wonder if our baby girl ever looked at her hands, wondered who she inherited them from.

“D’you think she thinks about us?” Harry asks what I’m thinking.

“Maybe.” I say. “I like to think so. I just hope she doesn’t hate us for giving her up.”

“Yeah me too I think…” he hangs his head. I hear him sniffle. Seems like Harry hit the point of drinking where all you could feel is regret. I remember those days. I knew where he was.

When he doesn’t finish his sentence I fill the silence; “Me and Tatum split uh…four years ago now.” I update him. “You probably heard something about it. I remember my mum saying she ran into yours when it was happening. They probably talked all about it.”

I wait for Harry to give confirmation but he stays the way he is.

“I went sober a few years before then. Almost ruined our wedding cuz I was exactly where you were. Unprocessed grief and all I could do was drink about it. I’d given up a baby at 18, then lost a baby a decade later. It feels silly to say out loud, that something that never really came into this world—something the size of a fruit could act like the rock you push up the hill every morning. The grief you fight at your darkest times. How could we be haunted by something that didn’t even exist—not technically. But that’s just the way it was. And that’s the way it had to be when we were 18. I’m not always sure I made the right decision overall but I know it was a decision we had to make at the time. I’ve had to find my peace. So do you Harry.”

“Yeah. I-I have to. Y’know? Sometimes I wonder if I would have made her proud.” Harry sniffles. I had similar thoughts. My throat feels tight remembering. “I don’t think, right now, I would be.”

“She’s so loved. She is so loved Harry. Whatever…wherever she is.”

“I love you.” Harry turns to me. His face is raw with grief and emotion. “Never stopped loving you. But I don’t want to give you this version of me.”

“I’ll take any version of you Harry.” I reassure him. “I think we’ve seen too much of each other to be able to hide anything away.”

He tips forward slowly until his head rests on my chest. I hold him there, just like he’d done for me so many years ago. I tell him the type of thing that meant everything to me back then and I hope it helps him to hear it: “We’ll get through this Harry.”

***

“I don’t remember getting here.”

I look up from my book, Harry stands in my kitchen with a confused look on his face. It was weird seeing him here in my flat. But it was so right too.

“We walked home. I thought you sobered up.”

“Nuh-uh.” He takes a few steps towards me, hesitant.

“Coffee?”

“Maybe I’ll take a shower first?”

“First door on your right. Extra towels in the cupboard.”

“Thanks.”

We look at one another for a beat before he moves back. I make another pot of coffee and clean up from breakfast while he showers.

Next time he walks back in he looks a lot better. Smells nice too.

“Black please.” He says when I hold the coffee up.

I pour him a cup and watch him sip it.

“Thank you for last night.”

“You don’t have to thank me,” I tell him.

“I remember what you said to me. You’re right of course. I think I knew it, I just didn’t have anyone to talk to about it with. Nobody knew about us…”

“You didn’t have to keep it a secret ‘til this day Harry.” I was surprised he had. “You didn’t even tell any of your friends?”

“The only people who knew were my family, a-and Shan. But. Year after year it didn’t mean the same thing to her. I stopped talking to her about it pretty quickly. Think it made it worse because her and I couldn’t actually…”

“Yeah.” I understood.

“But I realized. I think it was losing both of you. I feel like you were taken away too. We just went from being around each other all the time to cold turkey. That was a loss too so…”

“Yeah.” Again, I understood.

“I’m 35. I’ve gotta…get my head on straight.”

I examine him. “Looks okay to me?”

He smiles and puts his cup down.

“I’m sorry to hear about your divorce.”

“Meh that was years ago. Hard then. Fine now. For the best.”

“I agree,” Harry moves around the table to stand where I am. My heart pulses just like it always does around him. He rests a hand on my hip, dragging it up to wrap around my waist. He must feel how hard my heart’s beating. “Did I tell you? That I love you?”

“Maybe?” I feel myself growing more present. The hole that always lived inside of me growing even smaller in this moment. It allows me to settle on the floor better; less air, more weight.

“Well I do. I love you. At 17, or at 35.” He says this with a soft kiss on the corner of my mouth.

“Well. I love you.” I return the kiss, relish in the way his hand grips my tank. “At 17, or 35.”

“Sometimes I wish I held on tighter at 17. But I look at you now and I’m excited to get to know you again.”

His words pour over me like honey. It was sweet we were still on the same page.

“I’m not letting you go this time.” Harry whispers in my ear. He pulls me in tight, swaying from side to side. “I want to spend 41 and 50 with you. I want all of you, every side.”

“Perfect,” I peer up at him. “That’s exactly what I want too.”

“And maybe one day,” he continues in a hush voice. “We’ll get a call from a young girl. She’ll tell us all about her life in a town up north. About a picture she has of her mother dressed like her father and her father dressed like her mother.”

“She’ll tell us she’s had a good life, and she’s thought about the people in the picture. She’d tell us she wants to meet them.”

“We would be able to show her the love we kept for her. Our love’s like a venn diagram, the bit in the middle is just for her. She’d know why she was born in the first place.”

“Closure,” I whisper to him. “We would know closure.”

I remember the day she was taken, how the loss of not even being able to see her felt bigger than the loss of her itself back then.

I think of a 17 year old girl, with green eyes and brown hair. With my smile and Harry’s dimples. My hands, and Harry’s height. She was loved by people, families, that she didn’t even know existed yet.

They say if you love something, let it go. If it’s meant to be it’ll come back.

As Harry and I stay intertwined in the kitchen of my flat, I send out a wish into the universe for her like I did most days. That she was healthy, happy, and one day curious enough to seek us out. That one day, she would come back.

Right now I focus on the man in my arms. The one I never thought I’d get to hold again. For now this was all I needed. I’d loved him, let him go, and after so many years apart, we were back.

[bestworstcase]

Hello! You've mentioned being a NanoWrimo veteran, and I was wondering if you had any advice for planning out your writing for the month? I was going to do an outline beforehand to prepare, but I'm not sure if that's authentic to the NanoWrimo spirit.

i am i’ve been doing nano most years with wildly variable success since i was fourteen. my best advice is:

start writing now.

not your actual nanowrimo project necessarily and not the 1.6k and change daily you’d need to ‘win’ but start writing every day right now. if i’m going into november from a dry spell i like to start with a daily goal of minimum 100-200 words for a week and then at the end of the week, set a new goal of a few hundred more than daily average. rinse repeat until you’re in the habit of writing a decent chunk every day. THE POINT OF THIS is to avoid hitting the “”two week wall“” which is a thing that happens because writing 1.6k+ words in a day is pretty easy but writing 1.6k+ words per day every day for a month is really hard if you don’t, you know. train for it.

you will get the most value out of nanowrimo if you think about it as a writing marathon. it’s difficult because it takes a level of endurance and discipline that you probably do not have unless you’re already a prolific daily writer.

outlining is in the spirit of nanowrimo and has always been part of the culture; some people outline extensively (‘planners’) some don’t (‘pantsers,’ as in writing by the seat of your pants), many fall somewhere in the middle. the only hard rule if you want the, like, pure nanowrimo experience as it was originally conceived is: don’t start writing the actual story until 12:01 AM on november first. you can have anything from zero plan to minutely detailed scene-by-scene notes for the entire novel locked and loaded, but on day one you open a blank document and start writing.

another thing i’d really recommend is trying to write over that 1.6k daily baseline. an extra 340 words per day for five days will net you a free day and those are nice to have in case you hit a day where you can’t write for whatever reason. it’s a lot less stressful to bank up extra words ahead of time than to miss a day or two and have to catch up.

if you don’t already have a process for turning off your inner editor, start trying to figure one out now. the temptation to delete and rewrite a paragraph dozens of times will bite you if you indulge it. try things like hiding your text so you can’t read it (set font and page to the same color, or use wingdings), try sprinting apps like write or die, stuff like that. you are trying to complete a rough draft. it’s okay for it to be rough.

lastly, use the time between now and november to figure out warm ups that work for you. these are quick, simple writing exercises separate from your wip that you do before every writing session. here are some that i like:

set a timer for five minutes and write continuously, stream of conscious, without stopping until the time’s up.

set a timer for five minutes and write a loose synopsis or ramble about the scene you plan to write: what happens, who’s in it, what subplots is it advancing, what pieces of foreshadowing or set up do you need to work in, what’s the emotional tone, etc.

pick an object in the room. spend five minutes describing it in exhaustive but simple detail. think “this cup is a tall red cylinder. it’s made of glass. there’s about a half-inch of clear glass at the bottom. the red is bright and saturated, firetruck red. it’s sitting on my desk with sunlight falling through it, casting a red shadow. there’s water in it with three ice cubes. the cup is about six inches tall.” <- you want a stream-of-conscious list of observations, basically.

use a random [name/setting/plot] generator and write 2-4 paragraphs of something stupid based on the output. just the silliest or most overwrought or edgiest grimdark or saccharine bullshit you can spew out.

take the last five hundred or so words of your last writing session. read them over. open a blank document and transcribe them word-for-word (or nearly, if you can change a word here and there without breaking stride). the idea is not to edit, but to write out a decent chunk of words quickly, without thinking much about what those words are. (i like to do another warmup and then this one and then just keep going when i hit the end of the chunk i’m transcribing.)

the idea is to preempt writer’s block by giving yourself 10-15 minutes of no thoughts head empty rapid-fire word vomit to get your brain on track and ready to go. warming up before your writing sessions will dramatically reduce the frequency of sudden creative paralysis when you sit down to write.

[akafred32092]

On Grief and Processing Loss

I started watching Dimension 20 in January of 2021 & quickly became feral. I consumed all of the Fantasy High content available, the 1st season of The Unsleeping City, and A Crown of Candy in less than 2 months. I took a pause on new content for a little bit after that just to process everything that had happened in ACOC, but the 1st season of Fantasy High became my go-to background noise for a while. I would listen to it while taking long drives to visit family or if I needed something to fall asleep or even work to. Call it an emotional support show or a hyper fixation, but either way, Fantasy High was a huge part of my early 2021.

In April of that year, one of my great-aunts passed away. Though I had seen her on and off in my early childhood, she'd moved back near my grandparents when I was a teenager, and I had a lot of memories with her. I loved her dearly, but it was also complicated. Complicated in ways I won't linger on in this random post on the internet, but in a way that kind of tinged some memories I had of spending time with her.

As I was visiting with my family after her funeral, I kept thinking about Sandra Lynn and the "You're allowed to be a complex person" line. The idea that my aunt could be the reason for a lot of good memories but was also a different person to different people & she was "allowed" to be a multifaceted human being really healed something for me in that moment. I know it's easy to say that in my late 20s that was something I should have realized before then, but sometimes you just need the right set of words to make everything click, and the Intrepid Heroes provided that for me.

Fast forward to this week. I got a call that one of my best friends, someone I've know for over 20 years, a person who I grew up next to and whose existence was irrevocably tangled with my own passed away suddenly. It's been *a lot* do deal with over the last few days. The pain and grief have hit me in waves and it's been overwhelming.

When I did turn on something just to have noise in the house, it was again Dimension 20 related. I just turned on the Sig Figs Collective and had it going for a while. (of course "Love Me for Me" would just have me sobbing again)

I got that call in the early hours of the morning on Monday & just cocooned myself for a while on the couch. Tuesday came and with that a new episode of Worlds Beyond Number. It was a welcome distraction & a known comfort show.

The scene with Eursulon and The Fox outside of the bathroom had me full body cackling, and it was the 1st time I had laughed since I got the news. It was the perfect thing to break the cycle of doom I was stuck in.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

That was 6 months ago. This has been sitting in my drafts for 6 whole months. I knew I'd post it eventually, and here we are.

In the time since my friend's passing, actual plays have continued to be a huge emotional support and comfort. Most recently, as I've been working my way through NADDPOD, I got to the "I will be your wings" scene a few weeks ago, and I had a good cry in my car as I thought about how even with my friend gone, her kids and all of our shared memories of her help keep a part of her alive.

This journey of navigating life after such a huge loss is still an evolving story, but I am eternally grateful for the friends and family that allow me to tell random stories about my friend (and coworkers who are extremely understanding of times I need to go have a cry in the bathroom) and these shows and podcasts that help provide laughs, comfort, and even catharsis as my new reality is still forming.

[doctorguilty]

horror ask game: 2, 3, 22

2. most recent horror movie you watched and hated

This was some months ago lol but Halloween Ends. That movie was SO BAD, in the middle of it I took out my phone and posted like "what the fuck am I watching" on tumblr (you may have been there for that sjfdkgs). I don't even know what they were thinking. It made Halloween Kills look like a masterpiece (which wasn't GREAT, but I did enjoy it, as a fun romp). Why was Michael Myers barely in the movie. the hell was all that.

already did 3

22. a horror character that actually creeps you out/scares you

I had this sitting in my drafts and forgot about it b/c I couldn't think of an answer at the time but I do have one now, it's just that it's kind of depressing and involves IRL death (as in, the fictional character's relationship to a person who died in real life makes me very unsettled when seeing/hearing the character on screen)

so cw for reference to irl death continue at your own risk

so the answer is The Unknown from dbd, and not b/c of the body horror or lore or anything like that

The Unknown was released on March 12th, 2024. It's voiced by talented trans voice actress Zoey Alexandria, who I wasn't familiar with prior to the character's release, but I did look at one of her social medias at some point and saw her talking about how much she loved voicing Unknown. Zoey passed away at age 29 from a rare autoimmune disorder on April 30th, 2024.. less than 2 months after the character's release.

If you're not familiar, Unknown is essentially some kind of ambiguous entity that kills victims and wears their skin in a visually grotesque way. It has voice lines in game that are one of the creepier aspects of it imo. Sometimes the voice is male, sometimes female, they're always varying degrees of garbled, and sometimes they're random nonsense like "have you seen my dog?" and other times they're distressed cries for help like "I need someone.. anyone.. help, please"

They're definitely chilling on their own and, most definitely an awesome case of "she has the range!" re: the transgender actress.

But I have a thing, in general, where I can sometimes feel really disturbed when watching movies/shows/etc that feature a person who I know is now deceased. It's probably a mental illness thing, I don't know, but hearing the voice of/seeing the face of a person doing normal things while they're no longer alive in reality just.. freaks me out. I don't cope well with death in general. I don't like to think too much about or dwell on death irl, even people I don't know or even care about, like celebrities. I start to have some kind of existential dread.

SO the case here with the Unknown... is that its voice actress tragically passed away young so shortly after its debut, which is already an objectively upsetting thing for me to think about, and I can try not to, but ............. whenever I play against the Unknown, and I hear those garbled voices pleading for help, all the hair on my body stands up and my skin crawls

though I don't mean to present this as an objectively bad and scary thing, like, I don't want other people to be upset when they interact with the character. this is my OWN disordered brain stuff, and I try to just remind myself when I'm feeling distraught, that the actress truly loved working on the project and, if anything, it's nice that she got to complete it before her passing, so that she sort of lives on in it (rather than say, needing to be replaced early or something...). and the words themselves are fictional.

but it's probably the most "creeped out" I've ever considered myself about a horror character because ultimately, something stabbing real deep into my psyche like that just by sheer coincidence is undeniably scary, I guess? that's just the way I feel!

[thee-rat-king]

S & D Tier Comic Adaptation - Issue 1 (draft one)

This is deeply unfinished by I believe in showing my work and this is my first time scripting a comic. It’s not professional formatting, but I’m doing my best and I’d like to share what I have so far. Constructive feedback is appreciated!!

(NOTE: I know that describing panel layout is a bit gauche, I have done it in a few places just for visualisation, as this is being read by anyone, not just a specific art team)

Page 1

Panels 1-4 - introductory splash art of four seperate FAIRNESS ASSOCIATION HEROS. (first draft first draft I don’t have all the details yet).

Panel 5 (central inset) - a group of FAIRNESS ASSOCIATION HEROS, led by THE CHADSTER are flying towards the outer atmosphere in the invisible jet.

Chad: my friends, this time I am certain we shall defeat this dastardly villain

FAH #2: [something vaguely reasonable, Alex is Big Scary blah blah blah]

Page 2 and 3 - a double page spread of SPACE!!! it is BIG AND EMPTY!!! To the lower left of page 2 we see the invisible jet. It is very small compared to the vastness of SPACE!!!

Page 4 and 5 - another double page spread. Wow!! I’m so creative. This also shows the vastness of SPACE!!! Except that now ALEX is in the centre. They look unbearably hot (details unimportant). To the lower left of page 4 the invisible jet has been disrupted as though by a sonic blast. To clarify ALEX is big enough that they could probably pick the jet up in one hand if they wanted to.

Page 6 (three single image strips with the vastness of SPACE in the background)

Panel 1 - FAHs 1 and 4 (I really need to give them names) blast out of the front windshield of the invisible jet

SFX: CRASH

Panel 2: ALEX grabs FAH 3 from the wreck, who is actively firing back at them with their laser vision (to no effect)

Panel 3: CHAD and FAH 2 watch on from the wreckage of the invisible jet, leaping into action (note: I cannot for the life of me remember what chads powers are rn. That is perhaps why he’s not doing much yet).

Page 7

No idea of the formatting, I got bored of vague art direction with no dialogue. It’s going to be a maybe 7 panel layout depicting a the heroes and Alex fighting their way back towards earth. Maybe a second group of heros in the distance. IDK how powerful I should establish Alex to be this early ?? (I’m not changing anything, but pretend this is going to be read by a fresh audience. Information is shared in bits and pieces.) (chants under breath: first draft first draft)

Page 8

Panel 1 - a column up the left side of the page showing a perfectly normal, if slightly industrial apartment building in a nice city

Panel 2 - wide shot! A nice, comfy apartment. One wall has a BDG-style conspiracy theory board, maybe with an old treasure map pinned to it, but otherwise the room in very normal

Panel 3 - mid shot, in an armchair MORGAN is reading a book. They are average looking (details unimportant), and wearing a soft jumper.

Panel 4 - MORGAN takes a sip of tea, and continues to read their book. Perhaps there is a fucked up statue in the background.

SFX: siiiiip

Panel 5 - wide shot of the apartment, from one side ALEX comes through the door loudly, while on the other MORGAN is in their armchair. (Or couch?? Maybe it should be a couch. Or a beanbag chair.)

Page 9

Panel 1 - close up of ALEX walking towards MORGAN

Alex: the heroes foiled my plans and blew up my castle

Panel 2 - MORGAN in their armchair, looking surprised as ALEX continues

Alex: then they chased me into the outer atmosphere! And they know I killed Rebecca the Rebreathable last month

Panel 3 - ALEX sits

Morgan: that’s weird

Alex: no, that’s pretty much the norm

Panel 4 - Morgan and Alex face each other, either in chairs or on a couch

Morgan: really? Because that hasn’t been my experiance at all

Panel 5 (this takes up like, the bottom half of the page). MORGAN talking happily while ALEX looks on in bemused confusion

Morgan: like, when they rescued that person I kidnapped last week they also fixed my toaster and found my car keys and all the pieces to the jigsaw puzzle I dropped last week, and they fixed the electrical issues with the cable car, and the cleaned up my junk draw, and set the timer on my microwave…….

Image fades into the bottom of the page with no hard cutoff, as MORGAN presumably continues on with the list of things the “point-and-click” heroes did.

———

Thanks for reading!! In case you didn’t know, most of the dialogue on page 9 is taken from the original video that started S&D Tier. I’m not sure how many changes will happen between this VERY PRELIMINARY FIRST DRAFT and the actual final comic, but I’m excited! (Yes this is just 9 pages. The next one will be longer. It’s a start.)

[colorguardsweetheartblurrsgirl]

Hey...Been a while (My Bad)

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy Holidays everyone!!! I know I'm late to the party, life's been kinda CRAZY BUSY Drama and stuff happened. Didn't have time to breath. I did want to post art for the Holidays, art I originally planned for last year. Didn't work out, Wil make eventually, as I love the plan still I set out to make last year and want to still create it. But some new stuff in life that effects schedule was new to me and the exhaustion it brought I wasn't used to. Things seem a bit better so I'm hoping to get back in the swing of it. Starting classes for a month soon so I will have a little less chaos and more time to work on art and stuff hopefully when that happens. (We'll see, prayers all the same)

So, been working on 1st Few chapters, cleaning up. Wanted to know for if you guys wanted me to post favorite lines on occasion. I know I've talked about it before... But maybe set a schedule of every other week or something to share. Like maybe share first lines? Let me know! #stry

~~~

In the meantime, while art has been slower, I have still been working on story bits (so much so I've had days I've tired myself out and wanted to work on other things. But I still have the drive for it. I just give myself occasional break cause you know you don't want something to be a chore when creating. It was more working on some chapters technical stuff which was the chore as it sometimes is. Seems more so when you have it pretty set in stone but have to fix little things that are annoying). I've also been dreadfully stretching out writing out the full outline, I have a form of it in my document (and a terribly built early version from the early days of this fix revolving around the first several chapters events).... However, due to having it fully thought out now I'm at the point I'm hammering nearly 24/7 in my head that while I want to work on art or more story writing I need to sit down and do this. As a visual and do it learner I know for me I need to more so get several printed paper laid out and write in order the outline (not timeline, but that to eventually I've got a very old draft from the early days of the timeline as well. But I need to work on that after too)... So yeah... Just something I'm procrastinating on that despite having the Outline fully or "mostly" fully embodied for the 3-6 books (with all that happens in books 3 or what likely is 5 & 6 I realize it could end up becoming 7 books, but I'm trying to not say that just yet)... But yeah, i have the main things figured out and mostly all events of Book 1 & 2 (most likely it will be Books 1-4 figured out) all the major events have long been in stone for all the books it's just the puzzle pieces of where certain things go and the figuring out battles that is the main thing of the later books not fully visualized ubt story beats are already in stone for the later ends I just realize some may be added to help flesh things out in the later books. Yeah, some reason the one piece of this story that's a chore is getting myself to sit down and do the outline, money isn't a issue at the moment. Though i have some house work that is why some things have been stalled. It's just one of those funny bits I can't get myself to do, despite creating continually for it...

So yeah, really part of me stalling has been trying to get myself to sit down and do what I need to do as a writer instead of relying on the road map in my head (cause I don't want to mess up). That said, lately due to a family member who has connections wanting to read the first few chapters. I've been really working on getting the first five chapters and the Overture (I decided due to length and as it fit better for the story the Prologue is more called the Overture) as I make many references to songs and other reasons. Just like the epilogue (which I long have written and last year I reworked and rewrote, I told my mom what the epilogue entails without reading it to her, as she doesn't want to read any of it till it's created my parents and larger family have been heavily supportive including my friends of me finally setting out to write my first original series... But she literally cried when I told her the ending and the epilogue which I call Before Curtain Bows (and something else that is a stage reference, i grew up on the stage so it's kinda fits to call these such for me and how the story is titled literally spelling out story I kinda pay homage to how they used to be told as if on stage).

Anyways, I know I said I wouldn't do any more long updates. BUt I felt since it's been a while I would. I hope to post more art stuff soon. Unrelated to what I was working on for a while (also to my friend waiting for the birthday gift, I decided to hold it till this birthday so you'll see it in a few months which allows me to work on it a bit more along with other things since it became slightly bigger then I expected it to be while working on it on and off).

Also with the "Recent Business" in my life, it kinda recently inspired me to make just a short, non scheduled Henry Stickmin Collection short random comic with the characters of THSC in a similar place and shenanigans inspired by my experiences in said place. I'll give you more info in the Update 0.5 comic I hope to post and get finished soon. Like I said was to busy to work on anything. But hope to get some of this up soon. I also have a update to my last post where I outlined it and added more details so I'll be posting that (I wanted to see if I can use my scanner but that rooms blocked off by boxes right now gotta figure out a way to navigate it to do so).

Anyways, that's all from me on updates....

Here's a sketch from the 0.5 Update to prove I'm doing stuff other then technical stuff on the novel portion.

THIS WILL BE DIGITILIZED LATER... just rough sketch dump from back when I made this little idea.

[sophieinwonderland]

While I'm venting about the SN, I should finish this draft post that's been sitting in my draft box for a while now... so here is me venting about a couple more of the bullet points from that document.

(Here are my responses to some of the other bullet points laid out in the document. [1] [2] [3] [4])

This is just objectively true. 😉

In all seriousness, this point is really bizarre.

Reminder that this is the context for the bullet points:

During November of last year, a moderator made a post on tumblr speaking to Ghost of the SophieinWonderland system. It was angry, it was charged, and it was bad. For context, during that month, Sophie had posted the following: [bullet point list of things I did in November] As well as more posts that I feel are unrelated at this time. The reason this is all detailed is to provide context (but not excuse) the behavior of the admin.

This along with the other bullet points is to provide context and help explain why the SN admin was in a mental state where they were intentionally trying to hurt me through fakeclaiming and malicious misgendering.

(You can find screenshots of the post the admin made here.)

So supposedly, part of the reason they were so "emotionally charged" was because I said God, who under the Trinity Doctrine where God is 3 people who are simultaneously 1 God, is plural.

I've talked before about internalized pluralphobia, and this absolutely reeks of it.

If calling the Trinity plural sends you into a rage spiral where you're fakeclaiming and misgendering systems, you need to seriously evaluate why you find the concept of God being plural so deeply offensive to you.

This one severely needs context. (Here's the post that was about for even more context.)

This was about retaliatory crosstagging. Ever since I got to Tumblr, anti-endos have constantly invaded pro-endo tags. This has pretty much exclusively gone one-way, with nearly all pro-endos besides myself avoiding anti-endo tags. And general DID and OSDD tags get to be completely free of posts from endogenic systems most of the time aside from positivity posts.

And one thing you certainly NEVER see is endogenic systems going into a traumagenic tag and posting hate about traumagenic systems.

It felt at the time that there was an anti-endo hate post in the endogenic tags almost daily.

There's an inherent unfairness when a double standard exists that a hate group is allowed their own spaces while endogenic systems aren't allowed safe spaces to exist.

So what I decided around July of 2022 is that if an anti-endo crosstags into our tags, I would write-up a response and post the response in their tags. These response posts would be tagged as anti-endo to make them appear to their community. And I would be sure to @ the offending user and request the anti-endo community take it up with that user if they didn't want me to continue posting in their tags.

This was actually a more respectful stance change for me.

Before this, I would occasionally just make random pro-endo posts crosstagged to anti-endo tags that I thought might convince them to change. Especially those that showed scientific support of endogenic systems back when I was naive enough to think you could convince anti-endos with evidence.

What I did here was turn around and say "if you don't want me in your tags, I'll stay out of yours and leave your community alone as long as you do the same for ours. But if we can't have a safe space, then neither can you."

I stopped making random posts in anti-endo tags like I had done before, and switched to a more defensive tactic where I would solely crosstag as punishment for bad behavior.

The reality is that my "support of crosstagging" late last year was me trying to prevent crosstagging in pro-endo tags, while resolving to only crosstag into anti-endo spaces in retaliation when they crosstagged to ours.

And... I think it worked. I think there have been fewer anti-endos breaking into endogenic tags since I started doing that.

We still get occasional offenders, but I don't see it happening every day or two like it had been before.

Of course, I'll acknowledge that correlation doesn't equal causation so I can't be certain how much of this was because of me. But personally, I believe that if I hadn't taken that step, we would still be seeing the same level of constant crosstagging in pro endo tags that we did before.

One SN mod, the one who I believe wrote up that list and the rest of the document, believes this is wrong. They argued with me over my tactics last August, and believe it should simply be our responsibility to endure and ignore a barrage of fakeclaiming and hate sent to our tags from the other side, while all the other anti-endos plug their ears and rant about the evil endos "invading spaces" the next day, spinning a fiction of victimhood while they're ones entering our spaces to attack and harass us.

I believe, as I did then, that the end this tactic has achieved has justified its means, and helped secure safer spaces for endogenic and pro-endo systems.

(For full transparency, you can see my history of posting in the anti endo tag here. It looks like I only broke this rule once since August, when instead of calling out crosstagging, I called out anti-endos engaging in art theft from endogenic systems and passing it off as "reclaiming".)

[basalamander-corner]

Camp NaNoWriMo Week 3 Progress

The first two weeks went by smoothly, and I reached the halfway point of my goal yesterday, which is awesome! Unfortunately, I didn't finish part 2 yet, as it's shaping up to be a bit longer than I expected it to. Regardless, progress is still progress!

Project Name: The Shifting Tides (side blog is @the-shifting-tides-wip)

Goal: 30k words

Tagline: Sometimes we must fight for a future we ourselves cannot see.

Genres: Fantasy, LGBT+, Romance, Adventure, Young Adult

Week 3 progress under the cut!

Day 15

Words typed: 533

Total words: 15,796

Times updated: 2

Although I updated twice today, I didn't write very much. Regardless, I'm still at my word count goal for today! The voyage has finally brought Saran and co. to the island, and hopefully in a few chapters we'll get to the main plot!

Day 16

Words typed: 1,177

Total words: 16,973

Times updated: 1

Woohoo! I skipped around a little from here (because that's my writing process, lol) and got to one of the more pivotal events of this draft. Specifically, the following line:

And in a single, fluid motion, the lepinl surged forward, skewering Saran with their massive horns.

I'll go back to write part 2 at a later date. Maybe not this month, but I'll have to finish it eventually.

Day 17

Words typed: 999

Total words: 17,972

Times updated: 1

Yo! I typed a pretty cool number today, exactly one away from 1k! I probably could have made it into 1k if I really wanted to, but honestly I was getting tired. I started writing at 10:30pm and finished just before midnight, so I honestly needed the break!

Day 18

Words typed: 181

Total words: 18,153

Times updated: 1

I'm hoping this will be the lowest number I type for this project. I've been really burnt out even though we're so close to being done! I think it has more to do with my recital coming up and the fact that I'm overwhelmed with schoolwork more than my draft, though.

Day 19

Words typed: 1,149

Total words: 19,302

Times updated: 1

I thought yesterday was a fluke, and it looks like I was right! I managed to write over 1k words in one sitting today (and that sitting lasted about an hour), so I feel really good about it. I just finished one of the most heartbreaking scenes in this draft so far, and I'm loving how much I've tortured Saran. This next scene will help move forward his relationship with Viridian, and I'm hoping to get to their first "awkwardly romantic" scene at some point!

Day 20

Words typed: 989

Total words: 20,291

Times updated: 1

Viridian and Saran's relationship is very rocky at the moment. Viridian has discovered that Saran is actually a holindal, and he's not sure how to feel! He thinks Saran is about to kill him, although Saran tries to convince him he won't actually do that. It's going to take a little while before they can learn to trust each other...

Day 21

Words typed: 1,124

Total words: 21,415

Times updated: 2

Although it won't be this way on the NaNo website, I actually updated twice today! Once during class (I know, I should have been focusing!) and once later at night. I did skip around a little because the inspiration for the current chapter wasn't hitting me, but that doesn't matter!

There's only 9 days left, a little over a week! I can't believe I've made it this far, and I hope I can continue updating daily!

@the-wip-project

[parksprout]

Sprout Journal 11/3/24

Hey Tumblr! There's some stuff I wanna talk about today, so I'm going to do a lil journal entry. I was doing journaling at home with pen and paper, but frankly my handwriting is so bad and I use my hands like that so infrequently that I was cramping before I got even close to writing all of my thoughts out each day. So I decided I'm going to put my thoughts that I can share out like this, it can be somewhat of a log of my own self growth! And also keep me a lil sane if I'm struggling again.

Today has been a really good day, actually! So I was on a really successful diet for about 6 months during which I got a 3rd of the way to my overall weight goal and built a bunch of muscle. Then, when I started college full time, I basically stopped altogether. I didn't gain any weight back, but I have been plateaued (least favorite word to spell omg) for a looonggggg time. This week, I've been finally eating how I want to again. My go to breakfast has been

Overnight oats: 1/2 cup of unrefined dried oats 1/2 cup of 2% milk 1 whole banana cut into thin slices 1 tablespoon of honey

Honestly I had it on like the 29th without any banana or honey and that SHIT WAS ASSSSSSS. It was so bland, but I hate wasting food so I downed that slop anyway and felt siicccckkkk ough. Honestly it's been really hard to eat lately due to my current tweak out sesh (breakup stuff) and forcing myself to down that was terrible ToT. This new version with banana and honey is AMAZING THOUGH LIKE ITS GENUINELY TASTY?

After I ate that I went to work and... honestly? As much as I hate my co-workers? It was really good to see them today. They may be bad people, but they are all really attached to me. I have been giving them all life advice for so long because I thought I had it all figured out, and it's very funny being on the opposite end of things now. I specifically asked them if they think I was being silly for reaching out and breaking no contact with my partner (they are my ex but... ugh it doesn't feel right to say that, it makes my stomach hurt). I explained to them why, how, and when I did it and... they actually supported me, they are the only ones in my life who think that reaching out was anything but a mistake. I probably asked 12 people about it and only those three felt like... maybe I'm not wrong for trying to continue the conversation more than we did. Either way, they responded yesterday and we've been talking a lot today. Us talking naturally doesn't mean we're automatically back together, but it might be a new beginning of sorts regardless of what the end looks like. I'm feeling hopeful that we might be able to talk things out and heal, but I can't say anything for certain for now and probably won't be able to for a long time.

I can say that... I found out today that they were thinking about me too. When they started replying to my texts today I snuck out of work to sit in the back of my car and just... take in what they were saying, and respond. They took a picture at work that had my name on it... that made me cry real, fat tears for the first time since this happened. It's strange how I had been sobbing but my cheeks stayed dry, but the moment I talked to them and saw a glimmer of us in their life I started bawling in the back of my own car.

Today is also the first day I've rested instead of heading to the gym after work since this all started. Oh my god my body is so sore. Right now I'm planning out the rest of my night and physical activity is NOT on the agenda.

- After I post this I'll give myself a bit more time to rest and relax - Then it's time to work on homework! First I have to practice for an oral exam I have tomorrow in Spanish class. Then after that, I have both a presentation and another project in Archaeology due on Friday ToT I also have this re-write of a short story for creative writing that I need to work on a second draft of - Then I want to work on OC stuff? I have some ideas for a sleep token OC that I wanna work on, and also I think I can refine my OC's for DnD, my personal writing projects and more somewhat? I think it'd been neat to try and draw them myself sometime soon - besides that I don't think I have plans. Maybe some video games or reading if I have extra time!

Thank you for listening tonight tumblr, you're the realest <3 if anyone sees this, I'm still looking for more mutuals! I wanna learn more about people who share my interests, don't be a stranger :3

[productivityera]

Life is weird

Today I:

Walked a dog (pet sitting/dog walking business)

Went to bunnings with my mum, bought a lot more than we came in for

Burnt my hand on a long black that was way too hot (from bunnings)

Researched my degree and found that instead of doing an honors year, I am qualified to go straight into my Masters degree.

Drafted an email - asked for help from a fellow research friend for tips and tricks

Read up on gene drives to be used as biocontrol on vertebrates for said email

Found some great potential supervisors - including a lab that focused of biosecurity work (which is my dream career path)

Made an asmr video that kinda slaps

I feel like throughout life, you get stuck in some places where you feel like you've set yourself on the wrong path, where you feel doubt and exhaustion. That has been the past yearish for me - I've been finishing up my Bachelor, and it's taking forever. I have so many unanswered questions about what I'm doing after I graduate (which is completely normal!). A few of those questions have been along the lines of "I have no idea what my life will look like in a few months, so how can I make any commitments now?". As a result of this question, I have been staying in this sort of limbo, forever anxious.

I live about a (maximum) 2 hour commute away from my university. Committing to an honours year may have meant doing this trip 5 times a week for full time study load. How could I possibly amass any savings with that sort of thing, while also keeping myself sane?

For context: I am like a little animal that needs nourishment, social life and exercise. If I go without those things, my mental health suffers. So - given that I need maybe one day a week to get in some time with friends, plus an hour (or less) a day doing some sort of exercise - how tf am I going to find a job that will hire me to support my train tickets and city coffees, and save up for a new car and pay off debts? How will I continue my pet sitting business? I have a few returning clients - if I pet sit - leaving for 10 hour days in the city isn't exactly healthy for their pets.

So many unanswered questions, so much has been building in my mind for the past few months. I need answers, and I'm afraid to get them in case they turn up new problems.

For the past year, my focus was to do an honors year - I was told I had to do this before I did a masters course if I wanted to study in the veterinary faculty. Since the veterinary faculty does not do mid-year intakes (which I didn't realize before now), in a round about way, if I do research in the biosciences faculty, I am able to do my masters without an honors requirement. Yay! I can finish my course in 2 years - and be very qualified for a job I am looking to apply for!

So - this turns up a whole new wave of questions and concerns and anxieties for me.

Am I smart enough to do a masters degree? Will my supervisors think so? What if the supervisor that has the perfect research project for me rejects me? What happens if everyone rejects me? Do I look like a smart person on the outside, but really I'm just faking it?

tldr: anxiety about supervisor applications

[kinetic-elaboration]

January 14: Writing Updates

I've been sitting here for about half an hour, trying to come up with a short ficlet idea but I don't think it's going to happen. I keep moving farther away from concrete ideas and closer toward spacing out and sleepiness. And I do still want to work on the drawer fic.

I did write today, and now I am only two (2!) scenes away from finishing the draft of the Time Loop fic. So close, so close. I'm not too concerned about when I finish those scenes but I feel pretty confident it will be this month. (Probably just cursed myself saying that haha, but it's a pretty reasonable suggestion given my current pace.) I've also started editing Ch3. It's the longest of the 5 so it might take me a while but again, I just no longer feel any sense of urgency or worry about this project. I see the end in sight. It will all be done eventually. It is fine.

I have also been rolling some ideas around in my head for the Hey, Sweetheart challenge. I haven't officially signed up and I don't know that I'll actually write anything but it's on my mind.

I've been keeping up with the drawer fic still, though I do feel a bit like I'm continuing now out of a concern for breaking my streak, more than because I'm looking forward to working on it each night. I'm a little afraid of running out of ideas soon, too. My original fantasy-story definitely want on a lot farther than where I am now, but the thing is I don't remember most of the ideas past where I am now. And that is starting to make me nervous. But I guess something has to. I still do want to continue writing this, I think I just need to run the fantasy again. I haven't touched it recently because I felt like I was getting waaaay ahead of myself, which I suppose I was. Hence the forgetting.

Anyway, I do think that having this regular low-stakes writing session in an environment that is relaxing to me has helped me with my other writing. I feel so much more chill about it. I think it's because even though the 'real' writing and drawer fic processes are very different, I'm still creating every day and so when I sit down on the weekend to work on a WIP, I'm not gearing up from a complete and total standstill like I did in the past.

So, I think after I finish the Time Loop draft and anything I may or may not do for Hey, Sweetheart, I will move on to the old Jonty fic. It will probably be way harder than I'm yet wiling to acknowledge but I'd really like to take something short-ish off the WIP list, especially since most of the ideas that really interest me are... not short. LOL.

I am excited to be down to two Time Loop scenes. I kind of doubt I'll work on it tomorrow... but still, only two. Only two and a lot of editing. Exciting, exciting.

[horizon-forbidden-sheesh]

Writing Process: Drafting

Sooooo, I started drafting Part 2 almost immediately after Part 1 concluded—and by now I've abandoned my Scrivener file entirely and am doing everything in Google Docs. (I talk about my switch from Scrivener to Google, here. ⚙️)

This time, I didn't have all the journal entries to work from, either. I was starting entirely from a blank slate. So at first, I just let myself WRITE. All the scenes I was most excited about, in no particular order, just to squeeze all the juice out.

I did that for like a month. And then, when I had about 15-20k words of random bits and bobs, I started to put them in order, and develop a through-line. That's where the draft docs & trackers came in.

✏️ Away from Scrivener, I needed some extra organizational tools to house my more general notes, research, & scraps. So, I built this li'l cutie with easy links to all my Google draft files, and included a brief summary that helped me greatly when plotting out the next set 10 chapters for Part 2:

*The chapter titles were updated as my outline changed, but the summaries did not! The descriptor for Chapter 20 is now, like, Chapter 23.

Keeping the descriptors short really helps me stay on task. If I have so much I need to cover in a chapter that it drops my formatting to the next line, I know I probably won't be able to cover everything in ~3,000-5,000 words.

✏️ Now, that's just the first page of the "Table of Contents." As of today, it's 13 pages long, and it also houses a TON of notes and working drafts and snippets of dialogue that I am saving for future, as-yet-unspecified chapters.

It's really messy—and sometimes when I'm out & about and my service is shit, I whip open my old Notes app, just to get a thought down. Here, have a taste of what's been rattling around in my brain...

Dialogue often starts as just the dialogue. I layer in tags & descriptors later, during the editing process. Most of the conversations I've written started with me talking to myself alone in the car, in the shower, or while washing dishes. (This works for copywriting too. My best ideas almost NEVER come to me while I'm sitting-down-looking-at-a-screen. Of course.)

For instance, that same conversation made it from the Notes app into a Google Doc and has since evolved to:

A li'l somethin-somethin from the upcoming Scorcher Season's Chapter 24 🔥

✏️ Once I've got all the major plot points written, I'll go back and write the "boring" stuff in chronological order. Okay, it's not really boring. It's just the filler information that helps a reader get from point A to point B, and I edit as I go. This ends up being like half of the total word count for the full 10 Chapters.

I'm currently hitting this point in Part 3—and you can see below that just writing my favorite parts here and there gets me pretty far on its own. Over the last 3 weeks, I've nearly exhausted my imagination developing the general story arc. Next up, I'll go back and start fleshing out each chapters one by one.

Wanna know something CRAZY?? Over the last ~year, I've noticed that I tend to write nonstop during Mercury Retrogrades. Like, I don't want to do anything else. I'm learning not to schedule any major projects for these ~3 week periods, so I don't blow my deadlines on account of being too obsessed with my fanfic to bother. 😅

After my decision to expand to 4 Parts total, my original ToC Doc got a bit... top heavy. (Also, I got really tired of manually calculating all the word counts.) So, instead of continuing in Docs, I added a tab to my spreadsheet:

*Hiding my chapter summaries so as not to spoil!! 😈

As you can see, I fill in the links as I create the draft docs... and I've already had to split a chapter in half due to scale, so the untitled <Scorcher 7> dropped to Part 4. I'm hopeful I won't have to split any more, so I can end strong on 'Ten Days.'

I don't usually start the finale until the very end, because I've learned that the wonderful comments I receive will sometimes give me extra ideas that I want to ensure make it into the fic!

✏️ Around the time I've fully completed the first 5 chapters, I'll give myself the green light to start posting. That leaves me just enough runway to finish out the rest of the season, and posting on a timeline helps keeps me motivated & accountable!

This is getting kinda long, so I'll write about Trackers & Timelines I've developed along the way in another post.

Thanks for being here! 🖤

xo, Sheesh.

[lizzieblabbers]

octobery bery long ????

so remember the vacation entry i promised to post?? well... in my defense, tho, life came in the way and i had to prioritize urgent big girl stuff so i really had no time to sit down in front of my laptop and recall all my province memories

but it's sitting sa drafts na, will not set a date anymore, it'll just... be up

so anyway

october was so long wtf hHASDHADHA

tODAY'S THE TENTH AND I FINALLY FOUND THE WORDS EHEHEHEH (see cleaning is the key)

so, october, to put it simply, is challenging yet rewarding. (big words from a big girl lyke me 8D *winks*

as i've mentioned in my previous post, i hadn't really had much time to kool down from the province high because i needed to be the adult that i am as soon as i arrived. it did not help that the professors had already started discussions and of course with those are activities with deadlines that were sooner than i had expected.

now, i really meant it when i said that october was sooooooo looong. or was it because i had too much on my plate that i barely had the time to rest and let time pass by? either way, it was the longest month i had this year because a lot was going on.

first week of october, i had to go somewhere, ALONE, without any idea of what am i gonna do there.

OKAY I HAVE TO STOP HERE its ten pm and i am fucking sleepy (yeah it be like that sometimes) im gonna continue this tomorrow

hi today's the day after tomorrow and wtf am i doing with my life

i have decided not to pursue the vacation post because i felt like i have already said enough about it in my previous entries (albeit trying to tone it down for, well, the said separate entry) and i think it would just be redundant??? idk, im messed up like that

ANYWAY OCTOBER

so much has happened this past month that i can't really keep track of everything. october taught me a lot of lessons which i guess i can generally apply to all aspects of my life.

for one, it taught me that life isn't and will never be black and white. there are tons of gray areas existing that we should maybe look at and examine its relevance and how it affects each of us. not saying we should always justify everything, but you know... it wouldn't hurt to have another approach to life

anyhoo why am i getting all wisdom-y word-y here, im not that smart

my october mainly revolved on school and adulting responsibilities, alongside some realizations. as for school, it took me a while to adjust to the new academic year because there has been a lot of necessary changes for a less-stressful semester but all in all i'm fine now and already on the process of hooking myself back up to how i was before the vacay.

as for adulting responsibilities, well... october 2023 is when i first received a salary for doing something!!! yay :D immediately put it in a savings account and stopped myself from buying unnecessary stuff because i really want to practice this until i already have a job (FUCK THIS ADULT THING IS GETTING REALER ANY MINUTE) and as much as possible, save save save because i know im gonna need a lot if i want to sleep peacefully at night

guess that's the highlight of my month? won't dwell too much on the negative shits because (1) i can't really remember them aotm, and (2) i don't want to remember them anymore

in case of a relapse, however, i would definitely head straight here and let out everything i think about

THAT'S IT FOR OCTOBER, THANK YEW

bubhyYEE

[radiantlyrey]

Thinkin' 'Bout NaNoWriMo

It's getting to be that time of year again--that time when writers everywhere sit down and ask themselves important questions. Questions like, "Am I doing NaNoWriMo this year?" and "If I am doing NaNo, what am I even gonna write?"

I am planning to do an abridged NaNo this year--probably not more than 20k words for the whole month. (Part of me always wants to shoot for 50k, but the rest of me knows me better than that, and knows that down that path lies horrific burnout, so.) I am having trouble choosing which story I want to work on.

Which brings me to you, Tumblr.

Here are my current story ideas for NaNoWriMo. There are five of them, and I've listed a little summary for almost all of them, along with some personal pros and cons.

Idea #1: Fantasy Titanic This idea came to me in a dream two years ago (no, really). The basic gist is thus: What if Titanic (1997), but instead of a love story, it's a heist story, and also there are elves and magic and shit? The summary:

The grandest cruise ship of the century is setting off on its maiden voyage. Passengers include young Neela, who is crossing the ocean to meet her fiance before their wedding, and Alice, a sorceress and unwilling conwoman/thief whose mother has chosen Neela as their next mark. The con is nearly done when disaster strikes--the ship hits an iceberg and begins to sink. In the chaos that ensues, Alice must make hard choices, not least of which is who she wants to be if she survives.

Pros and Cons: +I already have the first half of the story plotted out. +I already have extensive profiles of my two main characters written.

-I have to do a lot more research on the actual ship and the disaster. -I feel like some of the plot I do have needs to be reworked.

Idea #2: Beauty and the Beast Retelling This story is a rewrite of a story I wrote about 15 years ago in my online writing group. I've been wanting to retackle it for a while now, and I spent some time this past spring making plans for it. I don't have a formal summary for it yet, but.

The story follows the basic shape of the original fairy tale, but with some modernization and fantasy twists. The story is set in the US, and it's set in a world where magic has been gone from the western world for well over a century. Other than that, things are more or less the same: Penniless father of three daughters gets lost on the way home from a trip, ends up at a mysterious and obviously magical mansion. He accidentally offends his host, a monstrous Beast, who demands the father give up one of his daughters to the Beast, or else return himself. The eldest daughter (rather than the youngest) agrees to go in her father's place.

Pros and Cons: +I have almost three-fourths of the story plotted out. +I am eager to revisit this idea and improve on my first attempt.

-I may need to do some more worldbuilding before drafting can begin. -I’m not sure if I have a good grip on my main character yet.

Idea #3: TRON/Pacific Rim Crossover I have had this idea for about five years now, and it's a basic "what if I mashed these two universes together?" style crossover. My concept is a series of fics that follow TRON character Quorra's point of view of the Kaiju War, and her journey towards eventually becoming a Jaeger pilot with Sam Flynn (another TRON character). I've got about five or six of the stories already plotted out, though I don't have much more of a summary.

Pros and Cons: +I know how the next few stories are meant to go. +I am feeling enthusiastic about the story as a whole, and am eager to continue work on it.

-I am kind of blocked on the second story, and have been for a while. -I’m still worried no one’s going to read this thin, so what's the point.

Idea #4: TRON '82 High Fantasy AU Not much to say about this one except that it's very new, but here's a summary:

Chesst styles himself the God-Emperor of the Seven Realms, and has outlawed worship of the old gods. Those who still cling to the ancient ways are consigned to the empire’s gladiatorial arenas, forced to fight to the death in dangerous games. Tron, a former knight-paladin of the realm of Enqor, has spent nearly a year in the arenas, fighting and surviving and keeping his faith alive. The gods have not forsaken him yet, and he knows they will not let Chesst’s blasphemy stand. When an amnesiac prisoner named Flynn arrives at Tron’s arena, Tron and his friend Ram are tasked with preparing him for the games. As Flynn recovers and trains, it becomes clear that he is much stronger than even Tron expected. He has access to a powerful magic that he cannot fully control, even with Tron mentoring him. As the start of the games approaches, Tron can only hope that Flynn’s true power can be concealed long enough for him to control it, and perhaps long enough for the three of them to escape.

Pros and Cons: +It’s a new idea, which means it could spark a lot of creativity. +I think it could be a fun idea to explore at length.

-I’d have to do a ton of worldbuilding to get ready to write it. -I also need to plot the whole thing (or at least part of it), with the original film as a guide.

Idea #5: The Face in the Mirror This is also a new idea and yet another TRON story. Concept came about a post on here about what might happen if one program's disc was put on another program's body. I've billed this one as a horror story; here's the summary:

Metz is having a little trouble with his memory. He remembers… horrible things, things that don’t make sense. He remembers derezzing, or at least, he thinks he does. His best friend and lover, Starr, says that it’s just a packet of bad code that will purge itself in time. She reassures him that he’s fine, and he wants to believe her, but… Sometimes, it’s like someone or something else is inside his body. And every time he sees his reflection, he’s startled by the face staring back at him…

Pros and Cons: +I know the basic shape of the story already. +The plot will probably fit my lower NaNoWriMo goal of 10-20k.

-I have no idea how to write a horror story. -I’m not sure I have enough enthusiasm for this idea right now.

I do not promise to abide by the results of this poll, but I'm interested to see what y'all think of my conundrum.

[an-inbetween-place]

15. This was a going to be a 2 minute high note but ended up being a very enjoyable hour of straight writing

10:03 PM?

A note -- I've been beating myself up for feeling immature and insecure with David but it's because of my lack of a defined relationship (aka commitment) combined with a lack of reaching out (like reaching out and having good, long convos) and seeing each other/making time for each other (we didn't even see each other when he was on break lol) has led me for a long time (since before thailand even) to feel like I'm fighting for him to continue liking me. Didn't I send him that semi nude because I wanted to ensure I still had his interest? I felt like I was losing his interest because he was no longer making me a priority in terms of time and making time. Is that what's making me feel so terrible these last few weeks? The fact that I've been fighting a losing battle with him for his interest? Is this what it always means to be in a relationship? If so, I don't think I can bear it. I have to imagine not though -- that being in a actual relationship with commitment and constant reminders of a person loving you reduces one's insecurities. Potentially not to 0 I suppose. But when will one be able to ever not feel that? I suppose the same question lies with your friendships -- as long as you've made enough of an effort and aren't always an asshole, they cut you some slack and you feel comfortable in trusting that y'all will be in each others lives forever. When did I start feeling that with Deanna and Tina? I suppose that's all it is.. another iteration upon that.

I will say though -- as this draft grows ... I cannot go back. Sitting here and thinking about how I was about to type 'If love means being in this constant state of chasing and ensuring I kept his interest ... I don't know if I want it' is literally a sign in that I cannot go back. I spent the last few months in agony -- waiting for his texts, waiting for our dates.. and how shitty was that feeling? He literally just gave me just enough to keep me hanging... just enough attention at the end of the week to keep me on the line ... just enough conversation a day to keep me invested in him and let me not imagine a life without him. But I always wanted more -- more time to spend together, more conversations to go on... and for so long I feel like the power has been in his court. And that's what led to the last few months to be terrible... just a jumbled up emotional mess who's happiness depends upon when David decides to text me back. Or call me. Or do anything without me first asking for it. And that always made me feel like I was the insecure girlfriend, the one asking for too much from him and the only one who would bend over backwards to accommodate what he needed.

Why was I so touched yesterday when he said 'he would want me to be in his life forever'? I was lowkey shocked when he said that ... which means I wasn't expecting that to be true/wasn't anticipating him saying that cause I didn't think he meant it.

Shouldn't that be something that you should expect someone you're currently dating and want to be currently dating to think? I guess it was the long term-ness about it that shocked me.

That's it really. I am in my love sucks era because right now I cannot imagine love without this desperation.. this insecurity. This constant fighting for his attention and fighting to keep it. Like I must keep fit.. I must say something funny.. I must .. never be mad. I feel terribly embarrassed re: admitting my feelings for him to him .. but why? Because now that he's caught me, there's no more chase in it? But if all there was was the chase.. I think we were past that long ago.

I guess that's it -- I cannot imagine the beautiful aspects of love without associating it to the toxicity of the previous paragraph. If only I had more from him -- more commitment, more verbal and physical affection, more time and energy that shows me he cares ... And the fact that my view on love right now is so ... piss poor I think states why I can't go back.

He's showing me in all the ways that it matters -- in our text convos, in our time (1 in a month?), in our calls (the 15 min hard end) that it's just all not enough. I've been MISERABLE -- my self esteem feels like it's been stomped all over -- hoping that he doesn't move onto some other prettier girl and just hoping I don't lose his interest.. that our current setup won't work.

I don't have enough access to him -- I don't feel okay blowing up his phone and texting him and calling him and I'm trying to play it cool

Why am I trying to play it cool? Why was he making me chase for so long? It's clearly not working so I need to back off.

Keep thinking about how desperate you've been for his attention over the last couple of weeks. It shouldn't be like that. Not for a long time. It feels like when I was pining for Sung. It feels terrible -- like he's always going to be the conventionally hot and muscular guy that everyone in the office like and you're always going to be the fat girl in the class that nice but "just as a friend". And him talking to you is like him being kind and he's secretly embarrassed inside cause he knows you like him but he would never like you. It was the same way with Dennis Kan.

Wow I feel like I really am going to need the time and energy to work through that one. That was quite a nugget uncovered.

I think this time is even worse because David is really like ... not hot. It's embarrassing that I'm fighting so hard over a medium ugly man. But it'a repeating itself! That's why I'm so hesitant to tell him that I like him -- because I think he'll feel bad inside that I like him more than he likes me. Which is what I felt about Spencer -- and I knew all along that it would never move into a relationship for me. I even said so to Deanna multiple times.

So I suppose I should really dig into that -- that I thought Spencer was kinda embarrassing in his ... lack of being hard to get. And now I feel like the Spencer of the relationship -- coupled with all the stereotypes of girls trying to lock men down.

I guess what I'm thinking about ... is that a lot of my past few experiences with dating has left me with feeling very unlovable and with very low self esteem recently. Like I feel like every time I get close to a man ... he never likes me enough to make his girlfriend. I'm just desperate for a boyfriend right now that I'll take anyone that has lasted long enough it seems.

I'm lonely because I feel like everyone's found someone. I'm feeling very unlovable. I don't like that energy at all.

So do I even like David that much or do I simply like having someone around? To call when I'm drunk and let's be honest... horny? I remember doing that a little with Senior Diaz as well -- just liking having someone but for some reason I could cut away with that one. Maybe it was because school consumed me -- there wasn't as much emphasis on dating (at least in my eyes). Ever since I prioritized dating .. it's become much more of a emphasis.

Maybe that's what we need to do. Cut back down the emphasis. You gave it a good two years -- it's time to work back to enjoying what you had without the men.

I think that's the only way forward -- the only way to stop this from running your life and dictating your happiness.

Think of all the things that you didn't really enjoy this last year. The holidays! The first few days in THAILAND!!! Now that's truly a shame and you should be mad at him for that. For ruining your trip to thailand.

And think of the lack of courtesy he showed by also RUINING YOUR TRIP TO SPAIN?! Like .. this man only thinks about himself and what's best for him. And isn't that one of your least favorite things?

Doesn't that show what a good for nothing mfker that guy is? He couldn't even let you enjoy your vacations? Where you felt like there was this umbrella of doom around you?! Isn't that the way you felt yesterday?? You had to lie and pretend to be happy even though you haven't felt at ease or happy/content in your normal day to day life in months. And you felt terrible when you were at home and had to fake it in front of your mom. Or this week when your mom was here.

And what good thing is there about this man that is even worth mourning over. You don't think he's that hot, you don't have good sex with him, he doesn't make you feel special or treat you right. He's never taken me to do the things that I've mentioned that I wanted to do. And I'll always harbor some shame and sadness around that and my wants not being met.

Like was i not good enough to go hiking with?

I let this man make me feel this way and I cannot anymore. He is a nice man and .... whether or not I like him because of him OR if it's because I haven't had anyone else stick around as long or wanted to stick around as long (I guess if I didn't want them to stick around... then that means I was the one that broke it off and thus can't be THAT desperate yet). anyways -- he is a nice man but look at the way he's making me feel about myself.

I need to go back to back when my own life -- just me! -- made me happy.

Truly, I understand now -- you gotta make sure you can just be happy in your own life before you can merge it with anyone else's.

I guess I became codependent on having his interest and affection. And since I haven't been getting enough of it recently ... that's why I've been feeling so terrible.

Clearly it cannot continue. I will find someone that I can do cute couples shit with. It isn't going to be David so if I want to achieve that, I need to move on.

I should get more edibles. TO be fair -- David was right about this ... writing is so easy and touch feels great. We'll save it for our next boyfriend -- there's always a new opportunity out there.

10:57 PM

UPDATE -- WE ARE MAD NOW. WE ARE MAD THAT HE CAN'T EVEN SPARE THE TIME OR ENERGY TO THINK ABOUT US AND WHAT HE'S PUT ME THROUGH UNTIL HIS STUPID PAPER IS DONE. CAN YOU JUST WRITE YOUR PAPER??? YEAH SCHOOL IS HARD BUT IT AINT THAT HARD. FIGURE IT TF OUT. 23 YEAR OLDS CAN DO IT, AND I HAVE NO MORE PITY LEFT FOR YOU. SCRUB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!