#trying to put more of my thoughts on tumblr
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
phantomspren · 11 hours ago
Text
I was just going to put this in tags but I'll put it here.
This is why I'm uncomfortable when people make sweeping generalizations about conservatives/Republicans.
On a fundamental level, I do disagree with the political beliefs that lead people to holding those labels.
But at the same time, there's such a huge difference between someone who is Republican because they think that we should have lower taxes, and someone who is Republican because they think rich white men are the only people worthy of rights.
When we make those blanket statements of "every Republican is racist" or whatever, we're making it less likely that those people are going to do stuff like this. Often it leads to people doubling down on their beliefs, even if they are inherently harmful.
You also have people like my mom. She is a registered Republican, born and raised in Idaho, super super Mormon.
She's a registered Republican because she thinks that society should be built to promote the family and help families thrive.
But she also supports universal healthcare.
I tell her all the things I think are cool about Harris and Walz and she's always like "wow, yeah, that is really cool!"
She's a high school teacher and because of that now supports gun control.
She doesn't give a shit that I'm aroace. (Haven't talked about gender stuff but I'd feel pretty comfortable bringing it up at this point to be honest.)
The thing is that the public/left awareness of the Republican party has shifted, following the people who are in power. Because those in power are getting more extreme.
There are people who have always held really extreme right-wing beliefs.
There are people like many who are voting for Trump who used to be less extreme, but have followed those in positions in power in gradually making their views more extreme.
There are those like my mom and dad who have some not great but far more reasonable beliefs who feel like the Republican party no longer represent them.
It's important to talk about those problematic beliefs that people like my parents hold, but at the end of the day they are genuinely good people. They've got internalized racism and homophobia and misogyny just like everyone else, but they're still good people.
Honestly even most hardcore Trump supporters are good people. (My grandparents voted for him! They're some of the kindest people I know!)
But if we just throw everyone under the label of "Republican" and then assume that includes things like homophobe, white supremacist, etc, you're going to end up with a lot of people who don't want to get behind what you're behind.
It's so much better, in my experience, to build a report, built trust, try to genuinely understand where the other person is coming from. I've talked to my Trump voting grandparents about trans people and they listened to me. I may not have changed their minds, but they have at least seen that other side from someone they respect.
That's going to go a whole lot more good in the long run than just calling them Republican and never talking to them again.
Of course there's more nuance than this, and if someone has like genuine beliefs that. Really really not great. Dump their ass. It's not worth it. There's a difference between someone who's a white supremacist because that's what they deeply believe, and someone who's just parroting what they saw elsewhere. The later deserve time and understanding, because they have the potential to turn into the former but aren't there yet.
And of course there are people like my mom. If she took a political compass quiz it would tell her she's liberal, hands down. Still a registered Republican.
Anyways, these are thoughts I've had for a bit and maybe I'll write something later that's a bit more planned out. Hope that makes sense.
And there's just a ton of nuance here that I can't get into because I've almost hit my time limit on Tumblr and I need to go take an exam. Plus it's dumb to expect me to elaborate on every possible way this could be misinterpreted. Just assume I kinda know what I'm talking about please, unless I accidentally said something blatantly incorrect. O7
Please vote tomorrow.
Be compassionate.
Imagine those around you complexly.
Think about my mom. :p
Have a cat picture for the road.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
i'm a huge fan of Republicans, conservatives or however you want to be politically labeled choosing country over party. please let me see more stories. it's a brave thing to do this. even if you voted for him in both 2016 & 2020 but you changed your mind now, WELCOME. it's a massive deal to get out of any cult successfully & MAGA is no different. being filled with anger & hatred, & fear is intoxicating & honestly easier than choosing to do the right thing. i'm glad you saw the light.
check your registration status often & don't stop talking about Project 2025. they can pretend they're distancing themselves from it as much as they want but it's absolutely their policy. we can do this though if we just show up & VOTE. we got this 💙
13K notes · View notes
aethesfaelibrarae · 11 hours ago
Text
Mouthwashing has given me a lot of brain worms and we've got thoughts—time to share them with the hungry void that is Tumblr. One of the last places I'm 90% certain my words won't show up stolen or regurgitated by machine.
Warning for spoilers about the game and rambling!
I believe that Mouthwashing is a modern-day Lolita. The storytelling is similar, in that, almost against their own better judgement and will, the audience finds themselves thinking like our unreliable narrator(s).
Most people.. Sorry, some people have cottoned on to the fact that Anya's personality is not that of a scared, timid and ultimately, useless nurse and she's been in fight or flight response for months now with no other choice but to fawn. As someone who has been in a similar situation for only one day a week for months, the fear only got worse, the longer I went without support. And the things that she does in the background.. No doubt similar to the way that Daisuke kept track of their food supply was brushed over and unsung.. So is the fact that Anya has been keeping a severe burn victim—with 4th degree burns so severe, any treatment we currently have is experimental and expensive.. If the pain does not kill you first—she's been keeping Curly alive for months with no help and incredibly minimal supplies. (I personally think that Anya probably was on the side of giving him an easier death or maybe even suggested a gentler way of giving him medicine—but (sterile) syringes in space? Limited water? An especially dismissive Swansea and go with the flow Daisuke?.. Easier to try and give Jimmy what he wants.)
But. I believe that people overlook the ways in which Catastrophe Jim's perspective on Curly twists our own. Pre-Crash Curly exists upon a pedestal—a good man, better than Jimmy could ever hope to be; a good, well-liked captain. Well-off, better looking (I say this because of the similarities in how Jimmy mentally views himself in similar shape and age as Curly) and still reaching for more. For better. People catch the underlying jealous and resentment for the life that Jimmy wants at all cost but.. They miss the pedestal. The miss the fact that if Jimmy says that Curly's better than he is, a good and better Captain.. That means that Curly is doing the bare fucking minimum: keeping them all alive year after year. Curly is a nice captain with the capacity to soothe over minor issues and keep a cool head and keep the crew on schedule.. But he is not a good one. He's not even a good person. Not really. Jimmy thinks of him as a good person, puts him on this pedestal that he's foaming at the mouth with excitement to pull him off of. Dirty the golden boy and spit on his silver-threaded bootstraps once and for all.
Except.. What evidence do we have that Curly is especially liked or respected? Where is this cheering crew? Where is Curly good?
Curly is a human, at the end of the day.
And.. Which comes to my more complicated and no doubt contriversal take... Curly is also a victim of Jimmy stuck in fawn response. This doesn't absolve him of the ways in which he failed the crew but Anya especially by letting Jimmy run amok and failing to take any action while he still had the chance. He stood by when Anya begins to hint at something beneath the shiny veneer of a happy tight-knit crew and most damningly, he stood by as Jimothy entered the cockpit immediately after suggesting a plan to kill everyone aboard.
I genuinely.. Genuinely.. Don't know what he thought would happen.
But he does take action.. And his last action is what makes he and Anya swap places. Except.. Not truly.
Yes, they are in similar situations—vulnerable to the whims of a psychotic madman with an inferiority complex and their plight largely ignored by the crew; a necessary sacrifice to keep the peace.. Just until safe harbor—but where Anya begins to gain autonomy and some relief from Jimmy no longer having a need for her.. Curly finds himself the center of Jimmy's world.
And that is not a great place to be in.
Curly is systemically isolated (bad-mouthed to the crew over and over again, berated publicly, blamed for an awful accident that Jimmy caused) and his torture and abuse mirrors the continuous, silent medical, emotional and physical abuse that many disabled people face. And almost in a worse way, his voice is stolen from him and used in such insidious inspiration porn.. A lot of people think that he actually said those things.
But we won't know. And if he did say these things.. Why does Jimmy only seem to (mis)understand them in the final acts? Recalling them in Curly's voice but not as the Captain but as a savior, his last charitable act to wipe the ledger of blood clean.
Jimmy doesn't want to see Curly better. He likes feeling useful. He enjoys having Curly watch him and in the same breath, he loathes it. He wants Curly's judgement. He wants Curly's praise. He wants.. Everything that makes Curly Curly.
Curly as a silent observer isn't remarked on often.. Nor is the fact that more than likely, the others heard Curly's sobs of pain from the medbay. But Curly is very conscious, very aware and very alone in his thoughts.
There's a point in which the perspective changes during Swansea's mercy killing—a gift that no one offers Curly—and once again, Curly is stuck watching all of his mistakes play out, one after the other. Unable to do anything but laugh.
But is it a laugh or a sob? Jimmy doesn't care and neither does the player—what's important is the objective: the gun. 739. Click. He steps over Anya's body like it's not even there and runs away.
We don't find out what set Swansea off—maybe Jimmy couldn't help himself and said something about Daisuke or Anya that blamed them. Maybe it was something else. Curly watches on. Helplessly.
There's something to be said about the black screens and the static that occurs when Jimmy hurts Curly or kills Swansea—like he's cutting the memory off before the guilt can get to him. And it's the same thing I'd like to bring up about Curly's voice. Yes, it takes a lot to speak without lips.. Or from what it looks like a tongue.. But there are more noises Curly can make. Noises that can refute Jimmy.
And in the same way that he's at the precipice of something so terrifying he keeps returning to the same spot that's slowly killing him, he's learned that fighting is useless.
It's 2 months after the crash when see Jimmy's perspective again, after all. And while Anya's requests for help seem to be new.. Who's to say that the beatings are?
The worse type of abuse is the type that leaves no bruises. After all, Curly cries all the time in pain.. What's the difference here?
To cycle back to my original point in this.. I don't see a lot of people consider Post-Crash Curly's living hell as another facet of Jimmy's abuse going unchecked by the people around him as anything other than comeuppance. As Karma. And it's the coldest take I've seen from the fandom so far. Allow me to reheat it up for you: disability so severe that you must rely on others is not divine punishment. It's not just desserts. Just as disabled people are your infantilazed, idealized, inspirational iron woobie that can take pain and push through it.. They are also not being punished by the divine. They are humans and sometimes shit just happens and it sucks.
The way that Jimmy views Post-Crash Curly as a saving prop.. Proof that he can indeed fix it.. is so normalized that as the audience, it can be something that you aim to achieve–one of the earliest and easiest achievements you can get is opening and closing Curly's mouth like a mannequin.
There's a relief that we share when Curly shuts up. There's a shutdown in empathy when Jimmy brutalizes him. Up until we can no longer look away.
Because Jimmy can no longer look away. And that is the chilling part of all this. Jimmy gets away with it—all of it—because of the crew's inability to overcome their own apathetic acceptance of the monster in their midst.
Just like most people accept the main character from Lolita as a gentleman, the crew accepts Jimmy as a guy. A little rough and short-tempered but what do you expect from blue collar work? Hold your nose, it'll be over in a year. In 8 months. In 10. Soon. It'll be over soon.
I can't help but worry if Jimmy weren't so bad at being likable and if he were even a smidgen of the charismatic mastermind, he so clearly wants to be..
We'd have another Valentino on our hands.
Mouthwashing is a horror that I can't help but devour. FEAST, indeed.
69 notes · View notes
puckszone · 16 hours ago
Text
my musings on how to leave longer & more regular comments on fics:
Tumblr media
We all know comments are good - readers have probably heard authors on tumblr talk about how valuable comments are for ages, and I hope most of the authors reading this have felt that validating joy first hand.
But we also all have lives, and only so much energy in a given day. Maybe you have worries about leaving a comment that's too "weird", or "awkward". Maybe you LOVE a fic, but have no idea how to put those strong emotions into words. Maybe you leave short comments, but wish you felt comfortable crafting the paragraph-long detailed comments that some readers gift to their favorite fics.
If you've ever thought about trying to comment more often, or trying to leave longer comments, then here are some ramblings of mine that will (hopefully!) bring comment-inspiration your way.
A quick table of contents:
Lower the mental stakes
How do I comment on porn?!?!?!?
My approach to paragraph-long commenting
My call to action: challenge yourself to go one step further
Tumblr media
Lower the mental stakes:
When I first joined a writing discord, I was genuinely blown away at the amount of support and love the HRPF community contains. I was also blown away at the amount of people that were actually reading my works and messaging about them!! It is still one of the coolest feelings ever.
In my mind, this is an example of a "lower stakes" ways to talk about fics: messaging a friend, or a group chat, or a discord server.
It takes a lot less energy for me to type a rambling text about how much I love the fic I'm currently reading vs. typing a cohesive, well-thought out comment for the author themselves.
One of those two options is much more intimidating!
I want so badly to tell the author how much I love their fic, but I'll never find the time to write all the things they deserve to hear!! So the tab sits open on my phone for months, and the comment never gets written.
If you relate to this: try to lower the "mental stakes" of writing your comment. Remember: this is a fun thing!! Fic is fun!! And I promise, you don't have to write the "perfect" comment to make an author's day.
A potential solution: treat the comment box a bit more like a message to your group chat. Not in a rude way - let's stay polite to the writers in our community, and recognize when unsolicited feedback isn't wanted.
But instead of forcing yourself to always have the "perfect" comment, think of something lighter. Think of what you would text to a friend if you were going to send them a link to the fic: maybe "dude this fic is so funny you need to read it", OR "this is INSANELY good", OR "i've been reading this all morning you need to check it out right now".
Then write that!
Comment: "this fic is so funny oh my god. love it!"
Comment: "this is INSANELY good"
Comment: "SCREAMING. I LOVE THIS"
Comment: "i haven't been able to put this done all morning! sooooo good!"
Comment: "i read the first chapter of this fic and instantly knew i had to send it to all my friends. i love this so much!!!"
Also, this might just be personal preference but: a discord message can get lost to time. AO3 is an archive, and comments there are much easier to look back on!!
So send that discord message to the author in a server you're in - they're going to appreciate it so much!! But consider copy-pasting that as a comment in AO3 as well, no matter how short it might be. It means a lot!!
Tumblr media
How do I comment on porn?!?!?!?
PWP fics are known to have a large number of hits, with less kudos and even less comments.
Listen. I get it.
Especially in a fandom like HRPF, where many fics are user-locked, it can be intimidating to comment with no chance to hide behind anonymity.
But remember this: anybody who might "see your username" has also clicked into that very same fic and gone alllllll the way to the end. We're all in this together!!! I promise!!
Maybe the actual logistics are difficult for you - how do I leave a comment on an 8k porn-no-plot fic?? how do I explain that I love this fic without making the author uncomfortable?? - so in that case, let me give a few brief ideas for you to work off of.
Some words I like to use a lot: dirty, nasty, HOTTTT, sexy, intimate, vivid.
If you're feeling especially blindsided by the Everything of it all: i like to throw in a good "stupidly hot". "my brain is melting out of my ears". "soooooo dirty nasty hot". "WHEWWWW this is making me feel insane".
Don't overthink it!!!! Speak your truth!!!
And, final point: don't be afraid to highlight specific favorite parts, like you would with any other fic! Say it with your chest! If you liked the frottage, then say "the thigh riding was sooooo stupidly hot". I promise, the author put it in because they also thought the same thing!!!! It's going to make their day (and maybe result in more fics with that same favorite part of yours).
Tumblr media
My approach to paragraph-long commenting:
I just want to reiterate: there is no right or wrong way to write a comment. But here's the general breakdown of how I think about leaving more detailed comments, if you want some ideas.
I copy snippets from the fic that call out to me as I read
I go into my clipboard to paste them all into the comment box
I write 1-2 sentences about WHY i copied down that specific snippet
Sometimes, it might be hard to know exactly why you were so affected by a given line. Here's some things you might especially appreciate in a fic:
Characterization: maybe the dialogue felt especially realistic. maybe the character's decisions made a lot of sense to you. maybe the way two characters interact is just exactly how you picture it. write that down in one sentence!! done!
Prose/writing style: maybe the line was a really gorgeous metaphor, piece of dialogue, etc. copy and paste that shit into your comment + add some "!!!"s, or maybe a single sentence like "this is so so gorgeous" or "INSANE metaphor" or "beautiful prose i'm chewing on glass"
The plot: "I have no idea where this is going next, and I can't wait to find out" / "OH MY GOD THE CLIFFHANGER"
The emotions you felt while reading it: this one's an easy one I promise! "the way you wrote [CHARACTER]'s pain hurt sooooo good" / "this is making me feel ill" / "i actually gasped out loud on the bus" / "i'm so nervous for the next chapter" / "i'm SO excited by where this fic is going" / "i teared up reading this"
A long comment will come organically & very easily, even if you only have 2 copy-pasted snippets!! And the author gets to hear very specific feedback about exactly what you're enjoying - that's SO unbelievably rewarding to hear.
Tumblr media
So, my personal call to action: challenge yourself to go one step further!
If you don't usually leave comments: try leaving one or two one-line comments this week. Throw in a quick "i love this!!" next to that kudos!
If you usually leave one-line comments: try leaving a couple sentences! describe one specific thing you liked about the fic, or one specific emotion you had.
If you often leave comments on the fics of people you know: try going outside your comfort zone and commenting on a stranger's fic. you got this!
Push yourself one step further, whatever that means for you! It's such a beautiful thing, to be able to read and love and discuss fic in a shared community, and it's worth the effort!
If you've read my ramblings the whole way through: thank you!!!! This was mainly an outlet for me to put all my thoughts into real words, and I sort of can't believe you read all the way through. <3
I welcome any and all additions to this post!!!! The more we talk about commenting, and the more we comment, the more this community grows - and that's a positive thing for all of us, readers and writers alike.
52 notes · View notes
astraystayyh · 18 hours ago
Text
u either hate me or want me to go into cardiac arrest because HOW COULD I COPE WITH THIS FEEDBACK???? HOW 😭😭😭😭😭😭 i cant tell u how happy it makes me that you dont just read my fics but truly read them. you allow my characters to live in your heart and mind and that’s the biggest privilege for me. thank you thank YOU for making writing so enjoyable, reading ur feedback is easily top best thing about this entire process.
NOWWW to actually respond,, truthfully i tried to search for an equivalent for déchirure in english but tear imo doesn’t convey the feeling of being ripped to shreds, in french it feels more raw, even when u pronounce it this combo of letters have a sort of blunt force in them, like something being teared apart not by choice but by a sick twist of fate (like our mc and hyune) that’s why i picked it!!! :p thank you for asking 🥹
THANJ YOUUUU 😭😭😭😭😭 no this is my favorite compliment i try to put sm thought into the characters and for u to pick up on that!!! on the floor rn…. i originally intended for the mother to apologize but then i realized that someone like her would still think that they did nothing wrong. in her mind, she was a mourning mother trying to make her late daughter’s memory live through her new one. but it doesn’t work like that. it still hurts. maybe she apologized later on, maybe she didn’t. still i think it would be too late anyway. so that’s why i left it at that. (also the dad just faded. anger is hard to carry)
also u calling it movie… im going insane. if one of my fics ever get adapted into a movie ull be front row PROMISE.
the characterization of mc hurt me a lot 💔 i mean i tried to make her as realistic as ever and i think the anger being directed towards someone who isnt here anymore helped her cope :(
i get u for the slightly rushed part 😭😭 it’s partly because i wanted the “good” parts to be short because there was this sense of impending doom, in a way, haunting them. like they both believed this happiness will end sooner or later and it did pass by quickly on both of them. but also because i wanted to post the fic because it’s been so long and i dont think tumblr dot com loves fics that are longer than 20k 😭😭😭
also SO HAPPY U PICKED UP ON THE DETAILS 😭😭😭😭 i love a good full circle moment. and i thought ending it in a graveyard would be nice. mc lived a good life loved by hyunjin and she has someone waiting for the day they’d meet her again. this was her biggest fear– to never be loved, because she grew to believe she hasn’t deserving of it—but she was. so i thought :D that sounds good. death doesn’t have to be a horrible depressing thing in this fic anymore 😭 also yes the olympics were my inspo i actually got inspired by many things while writing this fic u can tell it consumed my mind KANSND
i love YOU thank you for reading and for being so attentive to every detail and for being here in my life. like genuinely i appreciate your presence and existence more than i can describe. i hope u are always happy and healthy!!! i love you, my favorite reader :p
La déchirure 
You exist to mourn, to ache for what was and all that will never be. Even if happiness brushed against your fingertips, dazzling and radiant, you would not recognize its face, you would distort its features into the terrible grief you’ve always known.
Tumblr media
pairing: figure skater!hyunjin x ballerina!reader.
genre: angst. slowwww burn. heavy and recurrent grief. healing.
warnings: mc has a bad relationship with her parents. grief is a prominent theme here so please be aware. some allusions to sex but no smut. description of injuries.
word count: 21.8k
author’s note: heyyyy…. haven’t posted anything in 3 months i feel so shy AJNSJD i say this about every fic but this fic is truly my baby it took me so long to get it done and i poured my heart into it. so please if you enjoyed reading pls pls pls let me know. it means the world and more to me. happyyy reading!!! also thanks to @hyunverse for indulging all my brainrots about this fic i LOVE YOU
Your bare soles are bleeding across the graveyard. You don’t remember when your sandals slipped away from your feet, nor when your body decided to bring you here, heels scratched from the tiny rocks littering the ground.
But the pain doesn’t register in your brain, not yet. You’re only paying attention to the last name written on the tombstone— your last name, to be exact. 
Right now, more than ever, you wished your first name was engraved beside it too. 
You’ve memorized this graveyard like the back of your hand, know what sound the tree branches make during spring— gently swaying, like a melancholic flute, aching because flowers refuse to bloom upon them. And during winter too— even sadder, angrier, perhaps to mimic the sound of the souls left alone in the graves to fend off the cold.
Though you’ve never approached this tombstone before. You always remained a few feet back, each time your parents brought you to your late sister’s grave— every Sunday, for the past eighteen years of your existence, without fault. 
You don’t know the person they’re mourning.
You don’t know the person they wish to mold you after. 
Somehow, in a sick twist of fate, the course of your existence was set in stone before you could draw your first breath into this universe. 
She looks just like her sister, your mom whispered in awe, tears brimming in her waterline as she beheld you close to her bare chest. 
That is what your grandmother recalls about your birth, the rejoice of you being an exact copy of your sister’s features. There was nothing in her, in everyone’s memory about you. Everything orbited around your sister, the way the planets chase after the sun. You were, after all, born to replace the void she left behind. 
You sometimes wonder, is your physique the first setting stone of your pain? Had your hair been lighter, darker than hers, your lips smaller, plumper, would your parents be forced to look at you, behold you for who you are, learn to love you for who you would be? 
The question first popped into your brain at age five— maybe less intricate, a feeling that pressed against your ribcage: your parents don’t love you a lot, do they? You are now eighteen, the question has yet to desert you. 
You’ve always been aware of this reality— there are more pictures of your sister than of you in your house. Your parents always spoke of her, the perfect little girl, whisked away by a terrible sickness, at age seven. 
And she loved ballet. 
So, you had to love ballet too.
You weren’t given a choice, per se. At age four, you were thrust into a ballet class with little oblivious girls; just like you. Flushed cheeks and glossy eyes as you all tried to follow the teacher’s instruction. It wasn’t easy, it never got easier, year after year, only more challenging, only harder on your body.
Bigger bruises, sprained ankles from time to time, you’ve lost count of the injuries this art has inflicted upon your body. But thankfully, you ended up loving it too. You loved how graceful it made you feel, how the music seemed to whisk you away to an enchanting world, how the applause roared each time you came first in a competition, all eyes on you alone. 
Or so you hoped, you prayed. You wished to dance better, harder until all your parents could see was you. Not the daughter that came before you.
It was hard to admit at times, certainly something you never said out loud. But surely, yes, you were jealous of your deceased sister.
How could you not be when it seemed like you were competing with a ghost, someone whose absence weighed more than your presence?
Snippets of your life flash before your eyes as you stare at her grave. Pirouette, arabesque, plié, tendu— those are words engraved within your mind, ones you breathe in more than oxygen. You hear them in the voice of your ballet instructor, Jihyo. She’s a woman in her forties, though she looks older from the harsh lines framing her face. 
Her voice is high-pitched, her hair always tied back in a sleek bun you’re sure pains her brain, her words are harsh each time she corrects your posture.
And she’s the only person who believes in you.
She’s not nice, she has made you cry more times than you can count. So, you knew when she leveled her eyes to yours when you were nine, when she told you, “I see something magical in you”— that she was telling the truth. 
You wanted to prove her right, because for once, someone saw something in you, not in a ghost, not in ground-up bones.
In you.
You feel an uncontained anger swell within you, waves of relentless hurt swarming you as you fall to your knees.
You worked hard. You worked so hard. Between classes and ballet practice, the days strung you by like a puppet and sometimes you didn’t have enough time to breathe. 
Your entire life revolved around ballet. spin, point well, adjust your posture, you can’t stop now. Suddenly it’s two a.m. and you only get four hours of sleep before your classes begin. You didn’t have time to socialize with your peers, to have a crush on the sweet guy in your maths class, to giggle at an arcade with your friends. Soon after you were in your ballet class, even more spins, points, arabesque. 
But all of your exhaustion dissipated today. All of it seemed okay, for the first time in your existence, perhaps, the breath that escaped your chest wasn’t heavy. It was light, it was airy, it was one that yearned for the next, for the days that will follow, tinted with happiness, for once.
“I got into Julliard” 
That is what you told your parents an hour ago, voice brimming with uncontainable happiness, tears dripping down your eyes in an uncontrollable flow. 
Your mother’s eyes became teary in an instant. You thought the past was past you now. You’ll forgive eighteen years of coming second in your mother’s heart. Surely, she will only see you now.
But then her eyes set on the portrait of your sister on the wall, her tone desolate when she whispered—“she would have loved Julliard too.”
You don’t remember what happened after that. What curse escaped your mouth from the years of barely contained bitterness, when everything lashed out like venomous poison on your parents. 
You remember screaming, lots of it, something breaking too, you don’t recall if it is you who threw the vase or your father. The latter seemed more plausible— he was always bound to these sudden bouts of anger. Effects of grief, consequences of your sister’s absence. Her, yet again, poisoning your life. 
You remember feeling like a stranger in your home, a nobody, someone they’d kill in an instant to bring her back.
It was no longer a feeling, though. It was a fact. Your father cemented it loud and clear for you— “I wish she never died so you would’ve never been born.”
A pin-drop silence followed. Your father was always bound to bouts of anger, you knew that. He always regretted it afterward too, just like he felt in that instant, scrambling to apologize, to cup your cheek and say he didn’t mean it.
For how long has this thought festered in his brain, taken root in his veins, and flashed before his eyes each time he looked at you?
For how long did your parents wish you were dead instead? 
You don’t remember how you got to the graveyard. You don’t recall when it started pouring heavily on you. You only register the rain because the earth is wet as you clench it between your fists, as you punch the ground under which your sister is buried. 
You are crying, sobbing, a hysterical mess, you don’t know what you’re yelling, who you’re calling out for, what you’re trying to achieve by punching her grave. 
Unearthing her body and burying yours there instead, perhaps.
“What are you doing?” a stranger’s voice startles you, cutting through the fog in your mind like a thunderbolt. 
You don’t reply, simply turning around to look at the man standing a mere inches away from you.
“Do you know her or are you just desecrating her grave?” he asks calmly, as he brings a pink umbrella over your head. You realize that you’re drenched from head to toe, your feeble pajama does nothing to fight off the cold filtering between the fabric and your skin. 
You are freezing. You fear there is no place warm enough for your soul, not anymore.
“She’s my late sister,” you say, voice raw, scratched like a broken record. 
“She died young,” he says, looking at the dates engraved on the tombstone. 
You feel so horrible, for a millisecond. 
She was only seven. 
Her grave is too small compared to your body. 
But the anger quickly comes back to blind you. You invite it into your heart, push away the sadness and welcome the rage instead. It is the only thing comforting you in that instant.
“Did she do something to you?” he asks, his voice contrasting nicely against the heavy shatter of rain. It reminds you of the intro of your ballet music, soothing. 
“No,” you admit, a bit shamefully. But all sense of guilt dissipates at his next question— “then wouldn’t she be sad seeing you do this?” 
“What about MY sadness? MY anger?” you shout, lips trembling like the branches above your head. the storm picks up with your rising voice, the rain’s pitter-patter mimics the chaos inside your brain.
He remains silent and you can barely grasp the expression on his face, concealed by the umbrella’s shadows. You imagine that this conversation must have bored him, so you turn around yet again, your heart pounding angrily against your skin. 
But then, he kneels beside you, his umbrella completely discarded. You don’t dare to tilt your face towards him, so you simply stare ahead, your breath caught in your throat— what is he thinking of your most vulnerable state?
“I am rage,” he says, his voice permeating your being softly, the storm seems to calm down too to follow the ebb of his voice. “It means I am alive, or better, I am life, according to Armand, a modern art painter. You are alive today, and you get to be angry. That’s not something anyone here can enjoy,” he points out, taking a fleeting glance at the graves surrounding you. 
“You get to do something with that anger. But this, this won’t cure it.” 
He’s young, roughly your age it seems, but he speaks as if he beholds a wisdom beyond his years. You wonder what he went through to understand rage doesn’t fix anything. You wonder if he has ever been this angry, too. 
Did he move past it? Or did he drown the anger deep within the wells of his soul so he wouldn’t confront its ugly face? 
The question roams in your head as you watch him place a bouquet of red lilies atop the grave. You didn’t even notice the flowers at first, your view was too distorted by tears to grasp anything beautiful. 
“You’ll catch a cold,” the guy points out, smiling at you, or at least attempting to since the grin doesn’t reach his eyes. His words come out slower, as if weighed down by a sadness only he can feel. 
He is in a graveyard after all, the flowers were meant for someone else than you. 
“Wait here,” he says, quickly getting up and jogging out of the graveyard. 
What a silly request, you think, it’s not like you would dare move. Your feet are aching and you have nowhere else to go. 
He returns a few minutes later, a hoodie in his hands that he promptly pulls over your head. The warm fabric engulfs you in a cloud of roses and musk. “I tried to warm it up with the car’s heating,” he says sheepishly, and you blink slowly at his kindness, a pink tint blooming across your cheeks. 
“Thank you.” 
His eyes fleet to your bare, bleeding feet, and you fidget in place, trapped by a bout of embarrassment. 
“I have spare shoes in my car. Do you want me to drive you home?” His voice is gentle, as if speaking to a wounded animal, too bruised by the hands of humans. Tears spring to your eyes once more, you wish the earth could crack open and swallow you whole. 
“I don’t want to burden you.” 
“You won’t,” he says, and as if sensing your hesitation, he adds, “I promise. Leaving you here is what would burden me.”
You are very tired as he drives you to your place. You speak once when you ask him if he wasn’t there to visit someone, he says that it’s okay, he can come back tomorrow. 
You only dare look at him at the last red light before you arrive at your address. He’s beautiful, black strands sticking to his forehead, a tiny pout pulling his rosy lips forward. His cheeks are flushed from the cold, contrasting beautifully with the mole on his cheek. Then, by his jaw. Another at the beginning of his neck. You wonder if he has a map of ebony stars trailing down his chest.
You don’t know why this stranger instills such safety in you. Why would you rather stay in his car than set foot into your house once more. You dread what will await you behind those doors, you don’t think your heart could handle another tear at its tender flesh. 
You don’t think you could handle looking at your parents and only seeing strangers. 
But you know this safety has something to do with the way he placed the lilies atop the grave; as if it beheld someone dear to his heart and not a stranger. How he made sure you got home safely, how he didn’t seem to care that you dirtied his front seat and the carpet below your feet. 
He looks like a good person. 
You wish to tell your good news to a good person. 
“I got into Julliard,” you quickly let out as soon as he parks. You don’t allow yourself time to regret your confession. 
A breathtaking smile overtakes his face, the thunderstorm outside pales before the sun shining in his features. 
“Really?” he asks cheerfully, and you nod, a tiny smile painting across your lips. “Mm. Really.”
“That’s amazing!” his grin further widens, his eyes disappearing into two lovely moon crescents. “I know I’m just a stranger but, I'm proud of you,” his voice softens, “I mean it. I hope you’re proud of yourself too.” 
It takes you a few seconds to answer, you wish to bask further in the sound of his voice, to store his words into your memory, to revisit his kindness on nights that are too cold. 
This was all you’ve ever wanted to hear. 
“Thank you,” you smile softly. A moment of silence passes, you find yourself missing this stranger before you even leave his car. You wish to carry a piece of his memory within you, a souvenir of who he is— “I'm Yn, by the way.” 
“Yn,” he repeats, his voice tender. “Nice to meet you, Yn. I’m Hyunjin.” 
Four years later.
“You need to work on your landing more, but the rest is good.”
“Thanks, coach.” Hyunjin gives Jihyoun, his lifelong mentor, a thumbs-up as he loosens the laces of his ice skates. A dull ache is throbbing through his legs, like the faint buzz of bees circling roses. 
His body is weary, every muscle reminding him of the sheer effort he’s poured into perfecting his routine for the upcoming figure skating competition— the most important one of his life, by far.
“Are you leaving now?” Jihyoun’s voice pierces the delicate silence and Hyunjin nods, resting his head against the cold concrete wall. “Just gonna take a breather.”
“I’ll head out then,” Jihyoun says, patting his back gently, “make sure you get some rest.”
Hyunjin waits till his coach is far out the corridor to release a relieved breath. A familiar silence wraps around the ice rink like a comforting cloak, the stillness sits beside Hyunjin like an old friend. It is here, amid the soft hum of machines and the chill of the rink that Hyunjin feels most like himself. 
A few minutes trickle by, slow and silent. An uncomfortable feeling nudges at Hyunjin’s rib as he remains as still as a statue; he knows he’s on a losing bet to make time stretch forth, hoping that the sun outside will pause in its descent— a few more moments before the darkness completely sets in Seoul. Because the night will surely string along with it the next day, and the next day is one Hyunjin isn’t ready to face. 
When does he ever? 
But the sun always sets and rises once more, even if you dont wish for it to. 
With a sigh, Hyunjin grabs his bag and slings it over his shoulder. He makes his way to the vending machine upstairs, in the dimly lit corner near the dance studio. He drops a few coins into the slot, punching the number for his usual drink. But it gets stuck—of course. 
“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath, pressing his forehead against the cold glass before frustratedly kicking the machine.
“I am rage,” a voice suddenly teases from behind.
Hyunjin is quick to distance himself from the machine, startled, and admittedly, very embarrassed. His shame morphs to surprise when he sees you standing there. 
Your lips curve into a gentle smile, and your eyes sparkle with quiet amusement— that light, however, dims slightly when he doesn’t immediately respond.
It takes all of Hyunjin’s will to act like he doesn’t recognize you.
“You get to do something with your anger, but this won’t cure it.” You quote, your voice softer now. “You know, you told me this, near the graveyard…” You point vaguely behind you, each word growing quieter as if you’re no longer sure if that scene was real or a figment of your imagination.
Hyunjin nods in recognition, and you relax, the tension lifting from your shoulders.
“Miss Julliard,” he murmurs, a hint of nostalgia in his voice. Your grin brightens at his words and Hyunjin notices faint smile lines tracing your lips and eyes. It seems as if you’ve laughed quite often for the past four years. The thought brings him a strange sense of comfort.
“What did the vending machine do to deserve this?” you ask, tilting your head with playful curiosity.
“Stole my money,” Hyunjin mutters.
“You’ve got to hit the side when that happens.” You show him, tapping the machine with an experienced hand. His drink clatters down, and he shoots you a thankful grin as he bends to retrieve it.
In those brief seconds, with his head bowed, Hyunjin begs his heart to slow its frantic beating. 
“What are you doing here?” you ask once he stands.
“I’m an ice skater,” he says, and your eyes widen with genuine surprise.
“Really? That’s amazing!”
“Yeah… I guess it is. Are you back from Julliard?” His voice is softer now, more tentative, reminiscent of the day you met. 
“For a little while. Just a few months. This studio—” you glance around, “—it’s where I used to train before I went away.”
“I see,” Hyunjin nods, “I train upstairs, in the ice rink. Because I’m an ice skater,” he repeats, before closing his eyes in embarrassment as your giggles spill forth. No shit Hyunjin.
“I’ll see you around then,” he quickly mutters, eager to end the conversation, before turning around and hurrying away. 
He’s almost by the stairs when your voice calls out his name, urgent, pressing.
“Hyunjin!”
His body freezes before his mind orders it to—he’s not the only one who remembers, then. 
“Did you eat dinner?” you shout, a little out of breath.
“No,” he admits.
“There’s a place nearby that makes the best kimchi stew. Want to go?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“It’s my treat.” Your smile has slightly dimmed, and you’re unconsciously scratching the skin by your nails. Even from afar, Hyunjin can discern a shadow looming in your eyes, a plea unspoken. 
“Are you lonely?” Hyunjin’s question comes out before he can stop it, blunt and raw. He’s always been honest, maybe too honest for his own good. Time has taught him that every moment matters, that each second slips away faster than you expect, and that it’s better to speak the truth before it comes back to poison you. 
Your smile falters. “I just… don’t want to go home. not yet,” you confess quietly.
“So you’re using me?” he teases, leaning back against the wall with a smirk. You roll your eyes, muttering “Never mind” under your breath as you start to turn away.
“Fine,” he sighs, pushing off the wall. “But I’m craving sushi.”
Hyunjin’s eyes are more worn than the last time you’ve seen him. 
Four years ago, they were puffy, soft with exhaustion, their brown dulled like the last flower clinging to life as fall sets in. But now, the lights have gone out completely, like a bloom crushed underfoot, its color bleeding into the cracks of the pavement.
You steal glances at him between spoonfuls of kimchi jjigae (he silently followed you to your restaurant), watching for any sign of recognition. But he doesn’t seem to remember your name, nor the day at the graveyard as much as you do.
The thought strips you of embarrassment and clothes you in sadness instead.  
Hyunjin has written your name into his diary more times than he’d care to admit, even less so to you. 
He has always walked this earth alone, a stranger even to his own emotions, especially his grief— no one understood how his mother’s death consumed him whole.  
It is true that only one body was laid to the ground many years ago. But Hyunjin’s soul followed hers into the ground when he was just fourteen. 
His sadness made sense to his teachers, his classmates, and even the distant relatives who only came around occasionally. But no one grasped the depth of his anger—at the universe for taking his mother when he was still a child, at the illness that wore down her bones, at himself, mostly, for still breathing when she no longer could.
That rage had devoured him, tore through his flesh with its canine teeth. He only saw its reflection once—when he met you.
Hyunjin didn’t know who or what you were mourning that day at the graveyard. But he remembers your screams on his way to his mother’s grave, raw and stripped down to the marrow. It was as if he had stumbled upon his younger self, begging his mother to dig through the earth and hug his frail body once more, just once more. 
“How long have you been skating ?” you ask suddenly, your gaze flickering over his face. He blinks slowly, as if to bring his consciousness back to the present moment. 
“Since i was a kid, nearly two decades now,” he says. 
“Do you like it?” it is a harmless question, a natural succession of the one that came before it. But nothing was ever that simple with Hyunjin, because ice skating reminded him of his mother, and his mother was the wound that had yet to stop bleeding. 
“I do, I really do,” he speaks softly, a fragile smile curling his lips. He waits till you both finish the first bottle of soju to ask— how have you been? and it’s your turn to frown slightly. He notices the tightening of your fist around the spoon, the subtle tremor in your hand. You, too, carry an ever bleeding wound.
“I’m okay.”
The next question slips from him without thought, “are you still as angry?”
You remain silent for a few seconds, holding his gaze as the question settles between you. His cheeks flush, and he almost apologizes for his bluntness, but then you speak.
“Was I ever angry? I think I was just very sad.” 
Snippets of a younger Hyunjin flash through his mind. The numerous brawls he got in with his classmates, the way he pushed away anyone who tried to show him kindness— He was all thorns, keeping others from reaching the tender petals beneath.
Tears spring in his eyes, unbidden, and he bites his lower lip. He understands what you mean perfectly, you understand what he feels perfectly too. 
“I feel as if my heart is too tired now to bear such big anger,” you say with a smile. “Have you worn out yet? That’s what I’d like to ask.” 
“Aren’t you afraid of the answer?” he pauses, adding in a quiet whisper, “I am.” 
The chandelier above dances across his glossy eyes. You’ve never been optimistic—life hasn’t allowed you that luxury. But a small part of you wants to offer Hyunjin hope, to breathe life back into his weary heart, even though you no longer believe in hope yourself.
But no words of reassurance come. So instead, you offer something much simpler, much more realistic. “Let’s ask it another time, then,” you smile, pouring each other a new round of drinks. You quickly down three shots before laying your head on the table. 
“Are you sleeping?” Hyunjin asks with a quiet laugh, the sound light, like a melody played softly on piano keys.
“It’s fine,” you wave a hand in the air. “The owner knows me. He’ll wake me when it’s time to close.”
Both of you are running from home, or what’s left of it. Hyunjin watches you, your face softened by fleeting peace, so different from the grief he’s etched into his memories.
Far more beautiful, too.
“Then wake me up, too,” he sighs, resting his head beside yours.
His eyelids close instantly, lulled to a nice sleep by the buzz of the fridge and the soft hum of your breathing.
Many minutes pass by— quiet and uninterrupted. Hyunjin finds that the next day has come much slower in your company. 
The first time you saw Hyunjin figure skating, you were drawn like a moth to a flame to the music echoing from the ice rink.
You recognized the swelling violin of Can You Hear the Music, and paused by the entrance, torn between stepping in and turning back. What if it wasn’t Hyunjin? Worse, what if it was, and he didn’t wish to see you?
Still, your feet betrayed your hesitation, inching forward. You stood at the door, watching in quiet awe as Hyunjin leaped into the air, spinning with perfect grace. He landed effortlessly on one foot, the other extended behind him in a flawless arc.
The lights danced over his body, his flowing white blouse trailing his movements like a siren’s voice pulling in sailors. His black hair floated weightlessly with each spin, strands resting delicately against his forehead.
For the past four years, you had struggled to feel human. The world tasted bland, as if your heart had lost its ability to savor anything. You were afraid you’d lost the capacity to be amazed—by sunsets, by poignant art that once moved you to tears. So you chased after beauty, desperate for the feelings it could still stir in you, a fragile reminder of your humanity.
But watching Hyunjin skate— that gripped your heart more than anything else had in years.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” a voice startles you and you turn quickly, caught off guard by a man standing beside you, a bottle of water in hand and a kind smile on his face.
“Yes, he is,” you reply quietly.
“I’m Jihyoun, Hyunjin’s coach,” he introduced himself, extending a firm hand.
“Yn,” you hesitated, glancing at Hyunjin, who was still absorbed in his performance. “An acquaintance.”
Jihyoun nodded, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. You followed suit, unable to tear your gaze away from Hyunjin as he spun, cradling his chest as if holding a memory close, his body lowering toward the ground in a quiet ache. It was a pain you knew all too well.
As the music softened, Hyunjin stilled, closing his eyes, taking a moment to catch his breath. You were about to slip away, retreating like a shadow escaping the light, but Jihyoun would have found you weird, perhaps he’d think you were a stalker. So, you remained there. 
“Hey, coach,” Hyunjin waved, skating toward you both. Anxiety flickered in your chest like a match that refused to light up—you regretted coming now. You had shared a meal just days ago, but Hyunjin hadn’t asked for your name, nor did he seem to remember it. Maybe you held onto his memory more warmly than he held onto yours.
“Miss Julliard,” Hyunjin greeted with a soft smile as his eyes landed on you, and just like that, your worries dissolved like sugar in hot tea.
“Julliard? That’s impressive,” Jihyoun whistled, but you shook your head. You often forgot how prestigious your school was—perhaps because no one ever celebrated your acceptance in it.
No one, except Hyunjin.
“Have you eaten?” Hyunjin asked, gliding to the edge of the rink, his blouse clinging to his sweat-soaked skin.
“No,” you shook your head. He nodded nonchalantly.
“I’m craving kimchi jiggae again,” he tipped his chin towards you, “we can go again, if you’d like.”
“Sure, I’d like that,” you grinned.
“Okay. Wait for me.”
… 
Hyunjin’s routine has always been quite simple. 
He’d work out in the morning, the rest of his day lost in practice, his nights reserved for painting or reading, sometimes pouring his thoughts onto paper. It was a life untouched by turbulence, a pattern he rarely swayed from— until you wove yourself into it.
For the past two weeks, you always came to see Hyunjin at the end of his practice. Some nights you’d go eat dinner at your usual spot; sometimes you’d simply buy a drink and find a quiet refuge on the rooftop, watching the city lights twinkle beneath the stars.
There was a strange sense of comfort, he had found, in two bruised souls sitting with one another— an unspoken understanding of what your tongues had often failed to express.
But you hadn’t come to see him in two days.
It’s past one a.m. when Hyunjin finally exits the practice building. He pauses outside, turning back to see that the lights are still on in the dance studio. 
He hopes it is you dancing there. 
With a faint sigh, he takes the stairs two at a time, not wanting to dwell on the fact that, for the very first time in a while, Hyunjin, the ever lonely man, is seeking someone else’s presence. 
When Hyunjin pushes open the studio door, he finds you sitting on the floor, knees tucked to your chest. Your tutu encircles you the way petals would hug a stem— layers of soft tulle in pale pink, contrasting delicately against your sheer tights and pointe shoes.
You appear just like the water lily he sketched only yesterday—soft pastels and an unmatched delicateness. His cheeks flush at the comparison, and, in a hurried attempt to leave, he fumbles, catching his shirt on the doorknob and bumping into the door. 
He’s frozen in place, wincing when you call out his name in surprise. Does he have to embarrass himself each time he’s around you? 
He turns slowly, a sheepish smile creeping onto his face. “Miss Julliard,” he waves, and you grin in return, your eyes warm, “What are you doing here?”
The words are lost on him as you run over to him, stopping mere inches away from his figure. His fingers twitch for his sketchbook, a sudden urge seizes him to draw you.
“You didn’t come by yesterday so I came to see you,” he explains, voice soft like a summer breeze. 
Your grin brightens like the sun. “Ah, did you miss me?” you tease, and he rolls his eyes playfully, walking past you to sit on the floor. 
Did he miss you? no he didn’t, but his heart did ache, just a little, at your absence.
“Why did you look so defeated sitting on the ground?” he asks instead of replying, leaning against the mirrored wall.
You sigh, taking your place across from him, “practicing this dance is so hard, I got sick of it.” 
He nods, understanding the frustration that stems from being a perfectionist, always chasing ideals in your work.
“You know what helps me? Performing to a song I love. Reminds me what I love about the sport.”
You hum, before a mischievous glint sparks in your eyes. “There is this one song.. From a barbie movie.”
He blinks in surprise, laughing as you dash for your phone.
“Barbie?”
“Yes! The 12 dancing princesses. My mom made me watch it to convince me to take up ballet.” 
“Is that so?” he grins, placing his chin atop his palm. 
“Yeah, she wanted me to follow my sister’s footsteps,” you say, and he thinks back to the small grave you were both kneeling next to. “I wonder if I wouldn’t have become a ballerina if I didn’t watch it,” you muse, before clearing your throat.
“Anyways,” you force a smile on your face, as a whimsical melody streams through the loud speakers. Your grin turns childlike as you stand onto pointe, your raised foot grazing the knee of your supporting leg. 
You glide across the floor as if you are floating, your tutu catching the soft glow of the studio light. Your leaps are as light as air, and you slide to Hyunjin grabbing his hand to pull him up, drawing him into your orbit. 
You laugh, spinning around him, your movements fluid and free, yet your arms frame your figure with a rehearsed prouesse. He can’t help but laugh with you, the warmth of your presence filling the room, the music wrapping around you both like a spell. 
You’re a blur of pink and light, you appear like an angel dancing to the tune of childhood memories.
As the song reaches its end, you twirl one last time before bowing gracefully. Hyunjin claps, the sound echoing in the quiet studio.
“I haven’t danced to that in years,” you say, catching your breath. “I probably looked ridiculous.”
He shakes his head, his voice steady and sincere. “I think ballet would’ve found you anyway. It’s like you were born for it.”
Hyunjin is used to the cold bite of the ice rink, that is where he feels most like himself. But he is somehow drawn to the warmth of this particular studio—no, not just the studio. It’s the warmth you bring, the way your smile lights up the space at his words, that makes him feel, for the first time in a long while, that he could have a friend. That he doesn’t need to walk down the path of life alone.
You’re lingering at the doorstep of your home, keys gripped like a lifeline in your trembling fingers. It always takes you three heartbeats to open the door—one to shut your eyes, two to fill your lungs with air, and three to prepare for the tidal wave of hurt waiting on the other side.
You push the door open and slip inside, peeling off your shoes like a shadow trying to leave no trace. With each step, the house pulls you in, a black hole swallowing the warmth that once flickered in your veins, devouring any trace of light.
Dinner with Hyunjin still burns faintly in your chest, like the lingering heat of a fireplace after the flames have died. He makes you laugh a lot, because he’s clumsy, and a peculiar fan of weird debates. You had just spent an hour discussing whether humans have two buttcheeks or simply one.
But you wither down inside this home, your joy punctured like a balloon drifting too close to the sun.
The walls have permeated your sadness, they echo the killing sentence your father cast into your heart four years ago, a wound that festers no matter how much time has passed.
Hyunjin asked you a few days ago why you were back to Seoul. You told him you were competing in the Seoul International Ballet Competition, and he said that he was preparing for the Olympics selection. He then laughed, saying how strange it was that after a month of seeing each other every day, it was only now that you’d shared this. 
You tried to laugh with him, but the sound felt like a stone sinking in your throat. Guilt gnawed at you, not because it was a lie, but because it wasn’t the whole truth. The ballet may have brought you back, but something else called you home. 
At times you wonder if you had made the right call by answering it.
“You’re home,” your mother’s voice cuts through the quiet as you enter the kitchen. You nod, humming absentmindedly. 
“I made pasta, it’s in the oven. And I bought that drink you like,” she says, but her words are too sweet, too forced—like the artificial flavor of apple in fizzy drinks. 
“Thanks,” you whisper, barely loud enough to carry the word across to her.
“I’ll grab it for you,” she says, moving toward the fridge. But when she opens it, her hands falter, hovering over empty shelves. “That’s strange… I could’ve sworn I put it here.” You grip the counter tighter as she flits from cabinet to cabinet, her search growing frantic. 
“It’s fine, I’m not thirsty,” you murmur, but she continues, finally pulling open the dishwasher.
“Ah, silly me,” she says softly, retrieving the can with trembling hands. You keep your eyes low, unwilling to meet hers. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, her voice as fragile as a cracked vase, “I forget so much these days.” 
And just like that, she slips out of the kitchen, leaving behind a gaping hole in your chest that threatens to swallow you whole.  
You hate it when she forgets in front of you, because it shatters the illusion. You see her now, as something frail, crumbling under the weight of time. Her mind, like a worn-out book, is losing pages faster than you can salvage them.
And the cruelest part is that it forces you to forgive her—to hold her in the softness of your heart, knowing that one day she’ll forget who you are entirely.
But has she ever known who you were to begin with? Has she ever dared to ask? 
Has she ever cared to? 
… 
The first time Hyunjin spoke about his mother, you were both lying on the grass underneath a starry night.
You had been rambling about a specific bagel from New York that you missed, while he hummed absentmindedly, his thoughts entangled in memories like marionettes tugged by invisible strings from the past.
He hadn’t meant to ignore you; so when you turned to him, playful mischief dancing on your lips—“Are you listening to me?”—he could only offer a sheepish grin in response. 
“What’s on your mind?” you asked, and he bit his lip, worry knitting his brow. 
Hyunjin had never had anyone to speak to about his mother; her memory resided in the pages of his diary, the strokes of his paintings, the rhythm of his dances—never out loud, never to another soul.
But he suddenly felt an insatiable urge to speak of her; thorns pricking his throat, his skin growing feverish as he fought to form the words he longed to speak. 
“What’s wrong?” you pressed, your tone shifting to one of concern. He thought you wouldn’t mind if he shared her memory, but what he would even say? There was so much to talk about, so much he admired, so much he missed.
“My mom…” he started, his voice tentative. He had your full attention now, he could tell by the way you fully turned around to look at him. “She used to make the best kimchi stew,” he confessed, closing his eyes in slight embarrassment. Is this really what he decided to speak about? 
Still, he pushed through. “She made it for me whenever I was sick. I don’t attach it to bad memories because it was delicious, and I could feel that she made it out of love, out of concern.” He pauses, sucking in a deep breath. “I hadn’t eaten it at all since she passed away. I couldn’t bring myself to. Until you took me to that restaurant.”
His eyes glistened as they settled on you, “So thank you for taking me there. I think you would have liked her kimchi stew.”
Your eyes widened slightly, dewdrops brimming in your waterline before you smiled softly. “I’m sure I would’ve.” 
He cleared his throat, somehow emboldened by the tenderness of your gaze. He thought that her memory would be safe within the confines of your mind. He thought that he wouldn’t mind sharing her with you. “She was the best figure skater I’ve ever seen.”
“Was she? Is she the one who inspired you to become an ice skater?” you asked, curiosity lighting up your expression. He nodded eagerly. “Yes, she was graceful with her moves; it felt as if she floated atop the ice. The media dubbed her the best figure skater of her generation,” he spoke, pride swelling within him as he noticed the admiration in your expression.
“It was always just her and me, so I’d stay late into the night watching her practice. That was my favorite pastime. She’d always buy me the food I wanted afterward, as a thank you.”
“She sounds like a good mother,” you said, and your words morphed into fingers pressing on his tender bruises. 
“She was. She is.” 
“Tell me more,” you smiled, and so he talked, and talked and talked. He shared everything he could recall: their weekly picnics beneath cherry trees, birthday candles they’d blow out together, the medals she dedicated to him, and her silly jokes that had once filled their home with laughter. 
He spoke of her kindness, her joy that lingered even until her last breath, the love that she beheld for this life and her art, and him. He didn’t mention her illness; it was a mere passing moment, never defining her, never stripping her from the passion that bound her atoms together. 
When he finished, he found his cheeks damp with tears, but his heart felt lighter than it had in years. The air around you was sweeter, for once, it wasn’t fourteen-year-old Hyunjin weeping over the memory of his mother. The ache had softened.
His last words hung in the air, echoing softly in the stillness of the empty park. You didn’t speak; instead, you gently placed your palm atop his. 
It is his very soul that twitched at your touch. 
“What are you doing?” he asked breathlessly, a foolish question, perhaps. 
Your reply was even more obvious, simpler.
“Comforting you.”
“I…” he hesitated, eyes darting furiously over your face, then your hand resting upon his, then your eyes once more, watching him patiently, leaving him the space to retract his hand or intertwine your fingers with his. 
“I’m scared,” he finally admitted, the shadows of his fears looming large. It terrified him even more to utter such words, yet he knew you wouldn’t use them against him; you understood what it felt like to be deprived of comfort— somehow that only saddened him even more.
“What if… What if I forget the coldness of her fingers wrapped around mine?” 
“Your mom loved you, Hyunjin. And someone who loves you would want your hand to feel warm.” 
Something shifted within his heart, atoms rearranging themselves to spell out a simple truth for Hyunjin— your mom would want you to be happy. 
He nodded, willing his fingers to slip in the empty spaces between your fingers. You squeezed his hand—once, twice, thrice—each pulse a silent invitation for your warmth to seep through his veins, to permeate his bones and sink into his heart. 
He could get used to this, he thought. He wants to get used to your warmth, he realizes.
What does that mean? 
Hyunjin has always known who he was, memorized to heart the architecture of his personality. 
He knew he loved art, that he found solace in learning about artists past who, like him, seemed to have sculpted their solitude into something lasting.
He knew he loved painting, he knew he hated egg plants, he knew he’d rather die than not achieve his mother’s dream, for him. 
But something within him was shifting—unraveling. 
His eyes are drawn to the entrance of the ice rink, like a compass needle to true north. His neck craned almost instinctively as the clock looms over 11 p.m.— the time you usually come by to the studio. 
“Don’t worry, she’ll drop by,” Jihyon’s voice cut through his trance. Hyunjin startled, his cheeks blooming with the soft pink of a rising dawn.
“What are you talking about?” he mumbled, but Jihyon only grinned knowingly. 
“Miss Julliard,” his coach teased. Was he that obvious? Did you notice it too? 
That nickname clung to you both since the first time he uttered it near the vending machine. You never corrected him, never offered your real name, and he never asked—though he knew it well. He had thought of you often over these past four years, wondered if you had been well, wondered if you had ever moved on or if you still carried the anger, the heartbreak as if it were your own spine.
He felt guilty that he had found comfort in your pain all these nights past. 
Did that make Hyunjin selfish? Or lonely? 
“Don’t stay up too late,” Jihyon said as he waved goodbye.
“Don’t worry about me.” 
Jihyon lingered by the door, as if wishing to say something else, but he simply sighed before leaving.
It feels odd now for Hyunjin to stand in the stillness of the ice rink, feeling like a hollow shell without you. The quiet is no longer familiar, nor comforting, not when he’s grown accustomed to your giggles spilling all over the place. 
What does it mean, he wondered, when the heart learns to beat to the rhythm of someone else’s presence? When the mind begins to archive every detail, every smile, everything that the other person has ever loved?
Like clockwork you jog into the studio, waving at Hyunjin from afar. He skates over to you, leaning against the railing as he smiles, it is natural for him to smile at you.
“How was practice?” you asked, and he shot you a thumbs-up, his fingers drumming against the railing.
“Isn’t your competition next week?” you ask and he nods, “Can I come watch then?” you say and his heart stutters at your request.
“You can, if you want to, if you don’t it’s okay too, you actually don’t have to,” he mumbles, his words rushing out, until you pressed a finger to his lips, silencing him 
“I’ll be there, I have to make sure everyone cheers for you when you win,” you grin, self-assuredly, as if you have never doubted that he’ll qualify for the Olympics. 
His heart grows limp at your words, his limbs losing their strength as your finger lingers upon his lips. He gently grabs your hand, moving it away, goosebumps rippling across his skin at how soft your wrist feels.
This isn’t normal. 
“Should I bring pom poms? Actually, should I make them from scratch? What’s your favorite color?” 
“Will you actually come?” he whispers. Hyunjin has never had anyone cheering for him in his competitions, except for his coach, but he was obligated to do so, in a way. He doesn’t remember what it feels like to smile at someone in the stands anticipating your win. 
Somewhat, you sense the gravity of hyunjin’s question, the vulnerability it entails, one he doesn’t try to hide. He has never attempted to hide his emotions from you, now that he thinks about it.
“Of course I will,” your voice softens, your playfulness melting away. “I promise. I…” you point your pinky to him and he chuckles quietly, “I pinky promise.” 
You kiss your thumb pad and signal for him to do the same, he shakes his head before following your lead, pressing both your thumb pads together. 
“There, sealed forever.” 
You quiet down, before giggling for a reason that eludes you both. 
“Have you ever tried ice skating?” he suddenly asks and you nod, “I know how to skate, but not how to do all those fancy spins of yours.” 
“Do you want to try?” he smiles and you lighten up, “Actually? What if I fall?” 
“I’ll be there to catch you.”
A few moments later, you were both on the ice, Hyunjin spinning around you as you found your balance. “This feels so different from ballet,” you chuckle and he grins, “do you like it?”
“Yeah, i do.”
“Come here,” he beckons, reaching for your hand, and you don’t hesitate, your fingers intertwining with his as he leads you across the rink. 
Can you hear the music starts playing on the loud speakers and Hyunjin laughs, turning around to look at you.
“I’m scared,” you giggle happily and he shakes his head, “Let go of your fears and hold on to me.”
And then, without warning, he spins you, the motion sending your hair flying around you like wings unfurling in the wind. he’s spurred by the emotions this song alone can bestow on him. Can you hear the music?, it asks. Yes, he can, now more than ever, is his answer.
He wraps a secured arm around your waist, lifting you off the ground as he traces wide circles on the ice. Your laughter can be heard over the music, shouts of exhilaration ripping through you as you lift your leg to a ninety degree, as if doing ballet on ice. 
He twirls with you in his arms, as the music hits its crescendo, before finally putting you down, his arm still around you, your chests almost brushing against one another.
You’re so close, closer than you’ve ever been, Hyunjin can decipher the specks of light in your eyes, can hear the booming sound of your heartbeat in his chest. Your hand wraps around his bicep as you catch your breath, and Hyunjin is wrapped in a cocoon of your scent. 
He doesn’t wish to break free, he wants to remain in the chrysalis woven by the notes of your perfume. 
It’s a few hours later, Hyunjin laid on his bed, a pillow tightly pressed to his face. He wasn’t a stranger to late-night thoughts strung along by the twilight, but he had never thought before of this—of your lips, how soft they looked inches away from his, how it’d feel to press them on yours, to move slowly, tentatively, and then ravenously, hungrily, achingly.
“Fuck,” he mutters, further burying himself under his covers. Hyunjin wasn’t accustomed to these kinds of thoughts, he had never pursued someone, never had the time nor the energy to do so. Never had anyone grab his attention, in the first place.
Until you.
“Do I like her?” he murmurs to no one but himself, before shaking his head forcefully. “Go to sleep, Hyunjin,” he mutters, willing his eyes to shut closed, sewed so tightly together images of you cannot slip through his eyelids.
But to no avail.
He groans, kicking the covers off before heading to his desk. There, he opens his diary, grabbing a pen as if to write a new entry. But his fingers itch for the buried notebook from four years ago, the one he eyes from the corner of his eye.
He sighs softly before digging it out of its place, his fingers expertly going to his entry the night he came back from the graveyard. The night you met.
He remembers coming home slightly distraught after dropping you off, he had lingered by the door a bit, hearing echoing screams, a door being slammed, then an eerie silence once more.
Hyunjin had been too immersed in his pain to afford absorbing others’ sadness. A sponge that is too saturated, unable to welcome the woes of any other being.
But you had managed to crack through his defenses, frayed yourself a passage through the small gaps forgotten, shed sunlight on parts of himself he had thought were rotten, lost beyond salvation.
He felt an excruciating sadness for you, for your anger, for your sadness, for the way it consumed you whole, because he knew what would follow—when a body burns up, all that is left after is ashes, scattered everywhere, mingling with specks of dust, meaningless, a heart that serves no purpose anymore.
He never told you, he is unsure if he ever would, but it was the fourth anniversary of his mother’s death when he met you. He had planned to spend the night in a willowing state of sadness, an incapacitating one that didn’t allow for his limbs to move, similar to the first anniversary, then the second, then the third.
But he had spent the rest of it sketching your tearful eyes as you looked up at him, as you cowered away from his words, as you relaxed in his car.
That is the image he finds in his diary entry. But now that he thinks about it, he didn’t skillfully depict the moles scattered on your face, the crease near your eyes, or the way your hair reflects the sun’s light. He didn’t capture the arch of your eyebrow or the way beauty seems to reside in every nook and cranny of your face, seems to pour out of your pores like the sun brushing against a waterfall the way timid lovers do—magical, beautiful.
He sees you in a whole different light, now.
Hyunjin runs a tired hand through his hair, before grabbing his sketchbook. In the hours that ensued, in which he tried to do your beauty justice, erasing and retracing the shape of you time and time again, numerous questions ran through his mind, racing against time to find answers.
Does he like you? No, too simplistic of a question, too dim to encapsulate what knowing you feels like.
Is his soul drawn to yours?
Perhaps. Yes. Most definitely, his heart whispered.
Would he be a fool if he ever confessed it to you?
It is his mind that answered then. A bit forcefully, in fear, in warning: yes, a thousand times yes.
There are places in your parent’s house that you always stray from, the way oil stirs away from water. One, the vicinity of their bedroom, two, the living room— the ones in which you are most likely to stumble upon them. Three, the attic, in which you will most likely brush against ghosts from the past.
But somehow you found yourself exactly there, tonight. 
It's 10 p.m. The sun has long sunk below Seoul’s horizon, leaving behind a sky awash in an exquisitely deep blue, so inviting you almost wish to disappear into it. Today was your rest day, no dance studio, no late night escapades with Hyunjin.
You find yourself missing his giggles and how they would linger in your mind long after you part ways.
The attic is still, the floorboards creaking beneath the weight of your feet as you fumble for a light switch, your hand sweeping along the dusty wall. It flickers on, weak and golden, and you squint as the air, thick with age, coats your lungs. 
Old furniture crowds the room, remnants of a life you left behind four years ago. You’re surprised they kept your bed untouched in your room, one last string tying them to your memory.
Your eyes sweep over old paintings, broken suitcases, and wooden shelves, a hand mixer—useless now. And then, you see it, the reason you climbed here. 
Your mother had once mentioned a box, in passing, filled with things your sister wanted to leave for you. Your mother wasn’t pregnant with you at the time nor did she intend to, but she’d entertain the idea to make her favorite girl happy. 
You kneel and pull the box to your lap, the cardboard soft and weathered under your fingers.
“She was so kind,” your mother had said, too many glasses of wine in her system, her words loose and unguarded. “She gave up her favorite toys for you, before you were even born.” You never asked why they were never passed on, deep down you already knew the answer. She never deemed you worthy of having them. 
Inside, you find a small doll with golden hair and big glassy blue eyes, its pink dress dotted with strawberries, a swan hairpin missing some crystals, and tiny, delicate ballerina shoes, pale pink, unused, small—so small. 
And then, a note. 
Your heart stumbles, the bile rising fast to your throat as you grip the worn paper in your hands. 
Your sister had always been a myth, a memory passed down to you by your parents. An elusive figure you have only seen in photographs, until now. 
You’ve never had words that she addressed to you. 
The paper crinkles as you unfold it. You can somehow hear the rush of hot blood in your veins—uncomfortable, deafening. 
The words blur together as your eyes skim over the paper. You catch fragments— to my future sister—then something about how she wants to play with you, urging you to hurry, come quickly, before I break all my toys.
Your vision wavers, the small, careful handwriting barely legible through the haze. I left you my favorite doll and hairpin. So simple. So kind. I also left you my new ballet shoes. You don’t have to like ballet but if you do that would be awesome.
I would love to dance ballet with you.
The note crumples in your hand as your heart lurches, body jolted upright as if struck by lightning. You stumble out of the attic, discarding the box as the walls close in on you. They press, like the past, against your ribcage until you feel like you might suffocate.
You’ve carried resentment like a stone in your chest, a tide pulled by the moon, ever present, ever rising. You resented her because her memory haunted you, grew larger than life as you did. But she never asked for that. She was just a child, a seven-year-old who loved you before you even existed.
How horrible are you? 
Guilt is bitter on your tongue, sour as acid, and you swallow hard against it, tasting the metallic tang of regret. You don’t think as you barge into your parent’s room, blinded by feelings too entangled like vines to tell apart. 
“What’s wrong?” your mother asks, sitting in a bed too big for her alone. You throw the crumpled note at her. 
“Why did you never give me this?” you demand, and her eyes widen as she skims the lines, a sheen glazing her pupils. 
“I…” she stammers, and you laugh—a hollow, jagged sound—as your hands press against your forehead, fingers digging into the migraine feeding off your pain.
“You know I hated her, right? I– I hated a child, my sister because I never felt loved by you,” you choke, voice fracturing, “how– my god how pathetic is that?” 
“i’ve always loved you,” she says, voice tentative. but it is too meek of a reply, too hollow before the depths of your abandonment. 
“I’ve never, NEVER felt once loved by you! YOU made me feel as if I was competing with a ghost. She wasn’t here but she was everywhere and I was never enough to fill her shoes!” 
“I was a grieving mother!” she yells, standing up to face you, her face flushed and her hands trembling. “Do you know how terrible it feels to lower your child into the ground? Do you know how horrible I felt covering her grave when she was scared of the dark, when she hated the cold? She–” her voice cracks like fragile glass, unraveling as tears spill over her face, “She kept telling me that she didn’t want to leave us, that she didn’t want to die. How am I—“ She sobs, the sound raw, torn, “how am I supposed to forget my baby’s last breath? how am i supposed to be a perfect mother to you when I couldn’t protect her?” 
“i never wanted a perfect mother.” you murmur, eyes shutting tight, chest heaving with hiccuped breaths. “I never said you had to forget her. But I was right here. I was alive. I was breathing, hurting, waiting for you to see me, to love me.” Your voice breaks, you sound like your seven years old self and you hate that. “Did I mean so little to you?”
You smile sadly before her silence, your shoulders dropping low. You are too tired for an offense, too tired to tear down her defenses. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t always a good child. I’m sorry that sometimes I threw tantrums. I’m sorry for all the ways I failed you. I know I’m not perfect. I hurt, I stumble, I make mistakes. I am filled with resentment. I choke with it, and sometimes I hurt others too. But I try. I always try to make things right. And I apologize if I do.” 
Silence thickens between you both like browned sugar, though this moment is anything but sweet. You remain quiet, hoping for your salvation to come in the form of two words, two simple words— I’m sorry—that is all it would take to soothe your heart a little. 
You wait, and wait, and more seconds pass as the silence stretches longer and your mother refuses to meet your eyes. And slowly, slowly the hope withers within you. You know she isn’t apologizing tonight. Maybe not ever.
“Forget it.” you whisper as you leave the room and hurriedly walk out of the house. You need something strong, something to burn away the ache, something to scald the memory from your bones, to forget.
It’s nearly midnight when Hyunjin finally steps out of the training building. The air is crisp, cool against his flushed skin, but his relief is short-lived as his eyes land on Sohee, the owner of the kimchi jjigae place nearby, hovering by the entrance. 
Hyunjin’s frown deepens—something feels off. 
“Ah, hyunjin,” the fifty something quickly jogs up to him. “The security guard told me you still hadn’t left.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Yn has been drinking for the past hours, she looks.. Sad. And I’m worried she can’t get home safely.” Sohee’s tone sets off the alarm in Hyunjin’s mind. 
His worry tightens into a knot in his chest as he steps into the narrow restaurant. His eyes immediately fall on you—your cheek pressed against the table, five empty soju bottles scattered around you
He crouches in front of you, his heart twisting as he takes in the dried streaks of tears on your cheeks. What happened?
“Hey,” he whispers gently, afraid to jolt you awake. You stir, blinking groggily, trying to piece together your surroundings.
“Hyunjin,” you breathe, barely a whisper, and his heart softens at the sound. He nods, offering you a small smile, though concern darkens his eyes. “What’s wrong, hm?”
His words unlock something deep inside you, and your face crumbles like a porcelain vase breaking apart. The tears come swiftly, welling in your eyes until they spill over, your lower lip trembling like fragile branches in a storm.
“I’m a—I’m a horrible person,” you choke out between sobs, your voice trembling as much as your body. Your eyes squeeze shut as your shoulders quake, and Hyunjin’s hands move instinctively, gently covering your tightly clenched fists.
“No, you’re not,” he murmurs, his voice soft and steady, as if trying to hold you together with his words alone.
But you shake your head fiercely, a sob tearing from your throat, raw and unrestrained. “I’m a horrible sister,” you manage to whisper, your words barely audible as you wipe at your eyes, only for the tears to fall faster, harder.
Hyunjin watches you break, his heart aching with every tear that slips down your face. He feels weird, feverish, as if your pain has somewhat transferred to his heart. He glances at Sohee, who quietly steps out of the restaurant, leaving the two of you alone in the quiet, dim light.
With a soft sigh, Hyunjin gently cups your face in his hands, his palms warm against your tear-streaked cheeks. His thumbs trace slow, soothing circles across your skin.
“You didn’t even get to be a sister, how could you be a horrible one?” 
“I hated her for so long when all she wanted was to dance with me. I hated a child for so long, I’m a-a horrible person.” 
Hyunjin tentatively licks his lips, thoughts jumbled in his mind like wires. His heart is beating so fast as he wraps an arm around your back, bringing your face to the crook of his neck. You seem to melt in his embrace, tension loosening off of your back as he gently pats your spine. 
“I don’t think you hated your sister. You hated how your parents treated you. Those are two different things.”
Your tears are unceasing, trickling down his skin as you sob more and more. He doesn’t mind the dampening of his shirt, he would never mind a lot of things when it comes to you.
“Humans aren’t straightforward lines, we bend and twist and stray from our paths because our hearts are too frail and sometimes we carry emotions too heavy for us to bear. Sometimes we are pushed to feel certain things when we’ve never wanted to go through them.”
He never stops patting your back gently, his hand traveling from the top of your hair to the base of your spine. “A bad person does not worry about being a bad person. I’m sure your sister knows you love her. You have nothing to feel horrible about.”
Your tears are unyielding and Hyunjin feels as if it isn’t enough— to press your body to his hoping the rhythm of his heart would calm down yours, to think of words of his own doing to soothe your pain. He has not had to comfort anyone in so long, he doesn’t know how to stop your ache. He wishes he could soak your sorrow into his heart instead— he’s used to it, he can handle your pain and his, at once.
He’s racking his mind furiously for things to comfort you. In his memory he stumbles upon the poem of Mary Oliver that has held his hand in the dark.
“Would you like to hear my favorite poem?” he asks, in a whisper.
He feels you nodding against his chest, and he peels himself away from you, painfully, like removing a bandaid from a wound that has yet to scab.
Hyunjin’s eyes are wide and glossy as he peers into yours, as he looks beyond your irises and gazes at your soul, as he recites to you, with a steady voice like a current that doesn’t fall prey to the hazards of storms— “You do not have to be good.” He smiles softly. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” The verb strikes you like a thunderbolt. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
It passes him like a vision, a flash of white that blinds him, him holding your cheeks but without tears, him cupping your face, in the mornings and in the nights, because it is you his soft clueless flesh aches to love.
It’s gone as quick as it came, his words come out much slower, much more disoriented as he continues— “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”
“I want to tell you,” you hiccup, your cheeks are all rosy, delicate red veins protruding the white of your eyes. Your lips are all swollen from how hard you bit them to muffle your sobs.
“I will listen,” he reassures. Hyunjin stays true to his words. He drives you to his place, there, atop his couch, lit by a flower shaped lamp casting warm shadows on you both; you felt safe, a vanilla tea in hand, to talk, to tell Hyunjin everything, how you felt and how lonely, excruciatingly lonely you have been for the past years.
And he listens, he listens well, nodding, holding your hand when it shakes, wiping your tears when they slip from your face.
You feel a sense of gratitude swell in your heart, as if a hundred tulips bloomed in your chest at once. You feel safe talking about your biggest fears to Hyunjin, handing him your heart on an open palm, bruised, bleeding. He would wrap it in a gauze for you, he would keep it safe till you can heal it once more.
You doze in and off sleep on the couch, you can feel Hyunjin placing a warm blanket atop you. You swear he sat by your side for a long while, his hand gently patting your hair and threading through your locks.
You resisted the urge to pull his hand, to beg him to climb near you on the couch and have him encapsulate you in his hold once more. It would be too much for him to bear. Too much of you to ask. Too hard for you to handle a no.
Because even in your drunken state, with a heart weighed down by alcohol and ten thousand stones of grief, when Hyunjin cupped your cheeks in his larger, warmer hands, when he peered into your soul with his brown glimmering eyes, when it looked as if he could mirror your pain, as if he could understand the guilt, as if he could hold your hand through the grief— for one second, for a fleeting instant, it was all forgotten. 
The grief became a simple myth in your mind, a distant memory, something you could brush away as a bad dream slipping away with the march of time; simply because he was there for you through it.
… 
Hyunjin is beautiful.
This isn’t new knowledge for you, per se. You've known it from the moment your eyes met his, through a veil of relentless rain and the sting of unshed tears. Even then, you recognized it—he was the most beautiful human you’d ever seen. 
But somehow, you’ve managed to tuck this knowledge away, placed it in a forgotten recess of your mind. You had found other things to like about Hyunjin, things that wouldn’t be weird for a friend to admire— and Hyunjin made that an easy feat for you. 
You enjoyed the poems, all the ones he’d recite to you from time to time. You loved watching people’s eyes turn to behold him, and him unaware of this magnetic aura coating his porcelain skin. You felt warm hearing his bright and unrestrained giggles, seeing traces of happiness carved into his eyes, watching his lips stretch into a wide grin that seemed to swallow the world whole. 
But there are moments when it’s harder to forget. Like now—when Hyunjin stands before you, slipping on the finishing touches of his performance outfit. His sky-blue top clings to his frame, bedazzled with pearls and diamonds that cascade like teardrops, swooping around his small waist and hugging his broad shoulders. The fabric melts into his black pants, carving his silhouette like a chiseled statue.
There are only ten minutes left before his turn on stage. Last night, over quiet spoonfuls of miso soup, Hyunjin told you to please stay backstage with him, his voice so soft it felt like a secret only meant for you. And how could you refuse? Hyunjin wanted you close—Hyunjin asked for you.
He is nervous, you can tell by the slight tremble of his hands as he struggles with his earring, the delicate hoop slipping from his grasp. It falls, and before you know it, you’ve stepped forward, picking it up, your fingers steady as you help him clasp it into place. 
His gaze is heavy on you, and your heart beats a little too fast. You avoid meeting his eyes—he’s too close, too vulnerable of a setting for you.
You finish, stepping back, but Hyunjin’s hand finds your wrist, gently tugging you close again. He doesn’t let go, his fingers playing with the hem of your sleeve. He bites his lip, lets go of the plush flesh before biting it once more, then he confesses. “i’m scared.” 
Your fingers find his wrist, settle above his wildly beating pulse, a small part of you selfishly wishes it is because of your proximity. Your thumb gently swipes across his soft skin as you say, “you’ll do amazing. I’m sure of it.”
He nods, though something flickers in his eyes, something unsaid that lingers between you. He swallows it down, offering you a small smile. “Thank you. I’ll see you after.”
“Okay,” you grin back, “I’ll see you with a gold medal.” 
You’ve seen this choreography countless times before, memorized every twist, every subtle motion of his body. But watching him perform, under the harsh, burning lights, is like witnessing something new. 
Hyunjin moves with a grace that defies reason, a dancer molded by the music, his body bending to its rhythm, his face crumbling as the music swells. 
Hyunjin glides around as if he is one with the ice, he glows, like the sun on stage, mesmerizing, dipping low with the music and soaring high with its rhythm. Your hand is on your chest as you watch him deliver the killing move, a deep dip, head thrown back, his body a perfect arch on his knees. 
He finishes, under the roaring applause of everyone around. You’re first to stand on your feet and the entire arena follows, giving Hyunjin the standing ovation he deserves, the only one of the night. He bows deeply, a hand on his heart as he soaks in the praise. 
You feel like throwing up as you anxiously await the results to show up on the screen. One minute of silence passes by, then, you see it. His name comes in first. 
Hyunjin won. Hyunjin qualified for the Olympics.
He’s already skating towards you, and you’re moving, rushing down to meet him. You wrap him in a tight hug, feeling his chest rise and fall with quick breaths.
“How was it?” he asks, laughter bubbling in his voice. You find it to be such a silly question. 
How could he be anything but extraordinary?
“You fucking did it, Hyunjin,” you say, the words leaving you in a rush. He tips his head back, laughing, his happiness so pure it aches. You reluctantly pull away from him as Jihyoun comes to congratulate him, pulling him too for a hug.
“Proud of you son,” he says and you can see Hyunjin’s eyes well up with tears. you wish you could kiss them away, the tears and the sadness, will it to desert his heart, kiss his smile and happiness, learn the taste of his joys and sorrows. 
Oh god. 
The thoughts submerge you like you’re doused in gasoline, and being near Hyunjin is the crickling match that will set you on fire.
“There’s an afterparty to celebrate the man of the hour,” Jihyoun grins, patting Hyunjin’s back in a fatherly manner. You can feel the pull of the crowd, people waiting to shower him with well-deserved praise, like waves gathering to meet the shore.
“Are you coming?” Hyunjin’s voice is soft as his gaze lingers on you. You hesitate, and he pouts, a flicker of vulnerability crossing his face. “I want you to come, please.”
“Okay,” you smile, though your feet are already inching away. “But I left my phone at home. I’ll go get it and come back.” That is the truth, or maybe just a shadow of it.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
Hyunjin, ever the considerate one. His kindness cuts deeper than he knows, a dull blade slicing against your fragile skin. You hate how you pull his thoughtfulness to somewhere tainted with shadows. You hate how your mind cannot accept that someone could care for you. What if he pities you, still? It asks. What if he only sees you as the selfish girl sobbing at her sister’s grave? 
How could someone like Hyunjin, radiant as the sun pay attention to a mere rock floating in space, aimless, too unimportant to even be given a name? 
“No, it’s a quick drive. Enjoy your moment.” You flash a smile, hoping it covers the tremor in your voice. You quickly slip away before Hyunjin can notice, your pace quickening as his brow furrows behind you.
You’ve never dared to truly like someone. The harsh truth is that people like you, who were born sipping grief in their mother’s womb, only end up accustomed to its metallic tang on their tongues.
You exist to mourn, to ache for what was and all that will never be. Even if happiness brushed against your fingertips, dazzling and radiant, you would not recognize its face, you would distort its features into the terrible grief you’ve always known. 
It’s been thirty minutes since you left and Hyunjin’s eyes keep drifting toward the door, pulled by some invisible force. Jihyoun is talking, excitedly introducing him to someone new, someone important from the sound of it. He hears snippets of the conversation— Switzerland, the best coaching center, a guaranteed win, but the words are distant, like murmurs underwater. 
His mind is a whirlwind of paranoid thoughts as Hyunjin redoes the calculations: it was supposed to be a fifteen minute errand, at most. Where are you?
His heart feels tethered to a storm as he steps out, muttering a feeble excuse to Jihyoun, feet moving before his brain catches up. The air feels heavy like trying to inhale metal, only to end up crushed from all sides.
He searches the parking lot, scanning the faces mingling there, but he finds no sign of you. His feet keep moving, driven by instinct, by a chilling feeling pulling at his heart, desperate to glimpse you.
Then he sees it—flashing lights up ahead. His world dims as he watches a man on the phone, gesturing frantically toward a car. A car that’s all too familiar. Yours, crumpled like a piece of paper, flipped on its side, crashed against a tree. 
A loud ringing floods his ears akin to the buzzing of a hundred angry bees, at once. His legs buckle, his hand slamming against a nearby car for balance, but it feels like the earth beneath him is giving way. His eyes squeeze shut, his back turning away from the wreck. Not again.
Please, not again.
His throat burns with bile, and it feels like nails are clawing at his chest, ripping his skin open and exposing his heart. It’s pounding wildly, erratically, like it’s trying to escape the cage of his ribs and splatter on his feet. 
He can’t turn around—he’s too afraid of what he’ll see. But he has to. His breath comes in ragged gasps, his vision spotted with white as he stumbles forward. He taps the man’s arm. He struggles to find his voice as if it were never his to begin within. “Did someone get out of the car?” he whispers, broken, pleading. The man shakes his head.
Hyunjin rushes to the window, desperate to find you, to see you breathing, but the glass is tinted, hiding whatever lies inside. Without thinking, he throws his fist against the window. Once. Twice. Again. And again. His skin splits, blood dripping down his knuckles, but he can’t stop. He pounds the glass until it shatters, only to find nothing within.
“Hyunjin?” A voice, so achingly familiar, cuts through the haze. He spins around, breathless, and there you are—limping, disheveled, but alive. You’re breathing.
In an instant, he’s in front of you, his eyes wide, frantic, searching yours as if they behold the answer to every fear, every prayer he has ever uttered. His hand trembles as it cups your cheek, thumb brushing your skin, needing to feel your warmth. His gaze flickers over your body, checking for any trace of life-threatening injury, his heart lodged in his throat.
“Are you okay?” His voice is raw, stripped bare.
“I am,” you reply, and your words are his salvation. A sigh shudders out of him, pulled from the deepest parts of his soul, as if he’s been drowning and you’ve finally pulled him to the surface.
He falls to his knees, palms pressing into the ground. Tears spill from his eyes, hot and heavy, streaking down his face like rain in a storm. You kneel beside him, and his arms instinctively wrap around you, pulling you close. 
His fingers weave through your hair, pressing you to him, needing to feel you, needing to know you’re real. His body trembles as he buries his face in your hair, his tears soaking through your shirt, inhaling your scent, grounding himself in you.
“Yn,” he breathes, your name the only thing that could express the magnitude of his relief. He holds you tighter, the words tumbling out like a prayer, “I thought I lost you. My god, I thought I lost you.”
It takes a while for you to process his words, to understand the scale of his fear at the thought of losing you. Those are foreign notions for you, a sight you never thought you’d grasp one day. A sight you never deemed yourself deserving of. 
“You’d care this much if I died?” Your voice is a whisper, small, uncertain.
Hyunjin’s bloodied hand smooths your hair, his eyes red, chest heaving. “Yn, I…” He squeezes his eyes shut, voice breaking. “Yn, please don’t leave me.”
“I’m sorry,” your lower lip quivers at the sight of his tears, somehow seeing him sob leads to your own unraveling, as if your emotions are tied by one red string. “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to worry you,” you apologize, you the forgotten one, the ghost in your own home, apologizing because for once, your absence did hurt someone, because for once someone would miss you if you were ever gone.
Hours later, you’re in Hyunjin’s home, tucked into the safety of his bed. You’d refused to call your parents, not wanting them to know what had happened, how close their wish had become reality. 
The ambulance had taken you both to the hospital, where they patched Hyunjin’s wounds and checked you for a concussion. You repeated, over and over, like a broken record— “The brakes stopped working, and I jumped out of the car.” Hyunjin spoke for you when you grew tired.
“How are you feeling, Yn?” Hyunjin’s voice is soft, as he hovers over your figure. Your name sounds sweeter from his lips. It sounds as if it was always his to pronounce. 
“I’m okay. I’m sorry I ruined your night.” Your apology is quiet, but he shakes his head, pressing a lingering kiss to your forehead. Your eyes shut closed as his lips caress your skin, as if wanting to drown out all the other senses, useless, needing to focus solely on his touch. 
“If you’re okay, that’s all that matters to me.”
He goes to leave, but you catch his hand. You don’t overthink your next words, you think you’re long past that when it comes to him. “You called me by my name. I thought you didn’t remember it.”
“I never forgot,” he says, stepping closer. “I’ve known who you were since the moment I saw you. I… I thought about you a lot for the past four years, Yn. I think about you now too,” a pause, “for different reasons. Sweeter reasons.”
He remembered. He has come to know you and he still thinks of you.
“Me too,” you smile softly, “I think about you so much it feels as if you’re all I’ve ever known,” you confess breathlessly. Your eyes flicker to his lips, and his do the same.
Before you can think, you’re standing on your tiptoes, your lips resting on his, unmoving, driven by a desire so raw it blinded you.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry.” You pull away, stumbling back.
But his hands find your waist, pulling you back. “Can I do that again, Yn?” His voice is soft, and you nod, dazed. How could you ever refuse him?
His mouth returns to yours, slow and deliberate, like a melody reuniting with its refrain. Sweetness spills from his lips onto yours, a blend of honey and wildflowers and something that is entirely his. His breath surrounds you, intoxicating, pulling you into a world where all you wish is to melt into him, to slip beneath his skin and flow through his veins. 
Fireworks bloom behind your eyelids, explosions of colors you’ve never seen before, as if the universe itself has unraveled in the space between you both. His hands cradle your face, thumbs tracing circles along your cheeks that send a thousand butterflies flapping their wings throughout your being. Your fingers weave into the silk of his hair, a breath of relief escaping you as you touch him the way you’ve longed for. 
You’re still kissing him and yet you already ache to do it again, again and again, till you forgive the world every cruelty it has inflicted into you, if it allows you to hold his warmth a little longer, to keep your sun cupped between your palms. 
“Is this what happiness feels like?” he murmurs against your lips, a smile threading between your breaths, your teeth grazing his in the closeness. You laugh softly, your foreheads touching softly, “I think it is. It tastes so sweet.”
“Mm, I think I need to taste it again, to make sure,” he teases, his lips finding yours once more, playful and hungry. Time loses its meaning, minutes slipping away like sand grains between your fingers. By the time you part, your heart has memorized the rhythm of his breath and the weight of his lips upon yours, as familiar now as your own pulse.
… 
“So, how do we do this?”
Your laughter echoes softly down the corridor. Hyunjin has you pinned against the wall near the skating rink, his right hand braced above your head, the other hovering over your waist—yet, it’s that mere sliver of air between his fingers and your skin that ignites a wildfire within you, burning bright with longing.
“Wouldn’t it be strange if we just walked in, holding hands? I mean, Jihyoun knows me, but…” Your voice drifts away like chimney smoke, dissolving into the background of Hyunjin’s thoughts. He’s no longer listening—he’s observing. Memorizing. His gaze skillfully captures every curve, every shadow of your face, as if this is the last dawn he’ll ever witness. As if, by morning, he’ll be blind, and this moment is his only chance to engrave you into his memory.
“You’re so beautiful,” he breathes, his voice soft, almost reverent. Your words falter, fading like the final notes of a song only he remembers. He leans in, his lips brushing your cheek with a tenderness that paints your skin crimson red. 
He smirks, satisfied by the effect—perhaps, he thinks, that is how the sun feels as it kisses the horizon goodnight, leaving the sky a blushing mess. 
“You were saying?” he teases, and you roll your eyes, pretending to be exasperated. “I was saying that it would be—“ But his lips find yours once more, plucking the words from your tongue like petals from a flower. 
In the dim glow of the corridor, the world around you fades to an afterthought. It feels as though you exist only for this, only for him— to kiss and to be kissed by Hyunjin.
“Finally!” Jihyoun’s voice shatters the moment, ringing out like a bell, pulling you both apart. “Thank you for kissing him, Yn. Now he’ll stop with the longing stares at the door.”
“What stares?” you laugh, the sound bubbling sweetly up your throat. Hyunjin scratches the nape of his neck, shrugging innocently when your eyes meet, as if he has no idea what Jihyoun is talking about (though he knows all too well).
Hyunjin catches his coach’s eye over your shoulder, a wide smile tugging at his lips. Jihyoun once told him that he seems to bloom around you, like a flower starved of sunlight, finally nourished. The thought warms him—knowing that the people closest to him feel your presence like a balm to his soul. His mother would have loved you too, he’s certain of it.
“Will you stay with me tonight?” Hyunjin whispers later, as you’re leaving the practice building, his arm draped over your shoulder, yours wrapped around his waist. Natural. Familiar. Like two rivers flowing into one.
“I don’t have anything of mine there,” you pout, and Hyunjin stops, cupping your cheek, his nose grazing yours in a gesture so tender it makes your heart float within your ribcage. “That’s part of my secret plan—to get you in my clothes.”
“Oh, what a very secretive plan,” you giggle, stealing a quick kiss. “And what would we do tonight?” 
“Sleep together.” You raise an eyebrow, and he shakes his head, flushing crimson. “I mean—sleep, actual sleep, not that I wouldn’t want to make love to you,” Your laughter rings out, as his forehead finds its hiding place against your shoulder, embarrassed. “I just want to hold you close. That’s all.”
Your sweet Hyunjin.
“I want that too, Hyune.”
Hyunjin has never been much of a writer, his forté has always been to express himself with his body, spell out words out of the movement of his limbs. It is more evident as he opens the door to his apartment, with you trailing behind. As he looks at both your shoes sitting side by side near the entrance, your accessories resting next to his in the bathroom. 
He lacks the words to explain how right, how natural it feels for him to have you in his space, for you to fill it with the music of your voice and the fragrance of your perfume. As if it has always been his reality, to walk home with you, to watch you slip into his clothes, to brush his teeth next to you, to lay atop the bed with your warm eyes staring at him instead of a cold wall. 
“Do you believe in fate?” you suddenly ask, your thumb trailing alongside his neck, pausing right where his pulse beats. He has never been aware of the weight of life against his skin until he knew you. 
“I never did, I didn’t want to believe in something pre-written for me. Wouldn’t that confine who I am, who I could be?” he muses and you nod softly, inching closer to him. “But somewhat,” he trails off, lifting your hand to his mouth, peepering the sweetest kisses alongside your palm and wrist, like dewdrops caressing leaves. “I believe in it now, because of you.” 
“I think I was meant to find you that day in the graveyard. I think what I feel for you is too grand to be a pure coincidence,” he confesses. 
“And what do you feel for me?” you ask, your voice soft, curious. 
Hyunjin doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, he gently twirls a strand of your hair away from your eyes, before tucking it behind the cuff of your ear. He presses his forehead to yours, like two pages of a book meeting one another, then he exhales slowly, like a man who has found peace after a lifetime of searching. 
And in a way, he has. He can stop looking frantically for something that would stitch his soul up, he has found you, now. 
“I used to resent hearing my own heartbeat. At times it felt like a punishment, because existing felt like a chore. I wanted the sound to quiet down, I didn’t want to hear anything, nor feel anything anymore.” 
“But now,” he pulls you closer, your legs intertwining with his, like roots seeking comfort in one another, “it’s reassuring to hear, because it means there is still life within me to love you in it.”
Love. The word has long felt like a thorn ingrained into your skin. You have always recoiled from it, less from repulse and more in fear— if the people who were put on this earth to love you, didn’t, then weren’t you meant to remain unloved for the rest of your life? 
But looking at Hyunjin now, at the way the word rests gently on his lips, rolls off his tongue with such ease, with such certainty, you don’t want to run.
You want to stay. 
It is when Hyunjin traces maps along your skin with his lips, as you drift down the constellations of moles on his chest, as you find yourself lost within everything that makes up his being— his scent, his sounds, the weight of him pressed against you— that you find your words to reply, to breathe your first I love you to him. 
And in that confession, another realization comes, though this one is bitter, sour, like a chilling premonition: if Hyunjin were ever to leave, what would be left of you after? 
Hyunjin has never been fond of the concept of time, minutes seemed to march differently when it came to him— seconds stretching out like thin threads, nights unraveling in restless turns, sleep plucked right off from his eyelids. 
But with you, time softened, as the hours spun forward, swift and gentle. Around you, Hyunjin no longer felt the weight of passing days on his heart. 
Hyunjin didn’t feel the two months of happiness you bestowed upon him slipping from his grasp. 
He was lost, adrift in the gentle tides of your being—swept by the melody of your laughter, cradled by the softness of your curves. He often wondered if he was deserving of this happiness, yet never lingered long enough to find an answer. He selfishly accepted the joy you gifted him, for once. 
Your belongings filled the empty nooks of his apartment gradually, corner by corner—your satin pajamas settling just above his plaid ones, your skincare nestled near his on the bathroom shelf, your favorite mug clinking against his in the dishwasher. 
In some way, it mirrored how you’d seeped into him, like sunlight breaking through the longest of nights— threads of the sun illuminating what was once lost to darkness. 
He’d steady your chin to help with your mascara, your doe eyes looking up into his. You’d brush his hair, pressing gentle kisses along his shoulder blades. He’d do your laundry. You’d make his coffee each morning. He’d brew your tea each night.
You didn’t have much time to talk during the day, both of you engrossed in the practice of your respective arts. Yet, the knowledge that you were just a floor above him, close if he ever wished to see you, was enough to soothe his heart.
It was at night that you bared yourselves to each other, in ways that went beyond the tender grip of his hands on your waist, or the slow trail of your fingers down the curve of his back.
In the hush of the twilight, you’d unfold softly, revealing the hidden layers within—you’d share your dreams and hopes, and the moments that shaped you, letting the fragments of your pasts settle in the safety between you both. 
“I think I know my purpose now,” you whispered one night, and he hummed, pressing a soft kiss to the tip of your nose. “What is it?” 
“I think I kept ballet at a distance because loving it felt like surrendering to my parents’ dreams, like I’d be becoming what they always wanted me to be.” You paused, your voice a little softer, a little braver. “But I do love it, Hyunjin. I want to be the best at it. I want to honor my sister through it.” 
His gaze softened, as a tender smile blossomed in his lips. “You already do.”
Some nights were less sweet, tangled with heavy grief and unshed tears, yet it felt easier to walk through them if you were there holding his hand. 
“Would you go into her room with me?” he asked quietly one night, his gaze locked on his mother’s bedroom, its door sealed for a decade. He had never dared to enter it once more, afraid it would further cement the notion that she was gone.
That truth felt easier to confront with you near.
“Of course,” you replied softly. “Whatever you need.”
The room was just as he remembered, only stuffier with dust and heartache. Time hung in the air, dense and unmoving, clutching at her last moments alive, unwilling to let go. 
He looked to the bed, and he could almost see the shape of her there, frail and thin, her clothes too loose over a body worn out with sickness.
You held him close, steadying him as he took in each familiar corner: their photos framed with gold on the desk, her countless medals hung on the wall, her perfume and hairbrush untouched on the vanity, her rings resting in a small seashell container.
He walked slowly to the vanity, his fingers reaching for the ring he had loved most—a thin band of gold, crowned with a small emerald, dulled by time. Gently, he wiped away the dust with his shirt, before turning to you and slipping it onto your finger.
“Keep it,” he whispered. “It will live again through you.”
In the days that followed, you helped him breathe light and air into the room once more, sweeping dust from the framed certificates and photographs, polishing the medals until they shimmered as they once had. You washed the linens and her clothes, packing them carefully for a donation to cancer wards—something he never found the courage to do, until now.
Grief no longer felt like a knife lodged into his heart, its metal rusting with the passing of time. He saw its true face now—a soft ache, a quiet longing, a thicket of thorns that can only grow from the roots of love.
Your voice floated in his mind that night, echoing like the bells of a long standing cathedral. “your mom loved you, hyunjin. And someone who loves you would want your hands to be warm”— would want you to be happy.
Happiness swept into Hyunjin like an endless, gnawing hunger—an insatiable ache that demanded to be fed. He was ravenous for joy, longing to sink his teeth into it, dip his tongue into its sweetness and let it spill all over him. 
When an exoneree tastes freedom after decades of longing, it is the small breeze, the waves lapping hungrily at his bare feet that make his heart twitch. So it was with Hyunjin: the small joys swelled within his ribcage, vast and boundless. His heart strained against his chest, eager to burst free and feel it all. 
Somehow, Hyunjin’s biggest joy came from watching you dance— the principal dancer of your competition team. Whenever he had a break, he’d choose to slip away from the ice rink and climb the stairs at a hurried speed, slip into the dancing studio and sit in the corner. 
There, he’d watch you, leading the group of dancers you’ll perform with. You stood in the center, beckoning the attention of everyone around. Beautiful, so beautiful.
How foolish of him it was to try to deny it. How foolish of him to think that there was any outcome but to fall for you.
You always caught his eye across the mirror, your face breaking out in a wide grin, as you waved shyly at him, the strictness melting off your features and morphing into something warm. He felt special in a way, to be the sole recipient of such a breathtaking smile. He felt as if he could write hundreds of poems about that alone. 
That smile feels even more precious as you stand on stage at the Seoul International ballet competition, seconds before the light would turn on and you’d begin dancing. In the split second of darkness, it is him your eyes sought after in the crowd, it is him you wink at, before switching into your professional mode.
You aren’t as nervous as he expected you to be. Somehow your facade only slipped when five minutes before the stage you beckoned hyunjin in for a hug. “Do you need anything?” he asked as he kissed your temple softly, tightening his hold on you.
“I just need to hug you for a minute. It helps me calm down.” 
Hyunjin had always known you were a stellar ballerina. You were humble with your achievements, speaking of your art as if you don’t have years of practice to attest to your expertise, as if you hadn’t gotten acclaims nationally and internationally.
Still, seeing you on stage made a different pride bloom in his heart. You are the rightful star of the night, the swan of ballet as the media had dubbed you— delicate with your movements, spreading your arms like the unfurling of their feathers, spinning delicately into the air with a grace that made his breath catch in his throat. You were mesmerizing. 
You didn’t simply move, or dance, that would be too simplistic to encapsulate how you breathed life into this art. Into him. 
And it is hyunjin’s arms that you run into, scurrying down the stage steps, an overflowing bouquet in your right hand and a gleaming trophy held tightly in the other. 
“You won, my love,” he shouts, ecstatic as you throw your arms around his neck, as he cradles your waist, spinning you around like how he always orbits around you. 
He puts you down, leaning in to kiss you with no second thought, your eyes closed as you savor one another, as your lips move as if commanded by the stars, to part only to meet again, and again. Till your cheeks are both flushed and all he can taste is the strawberry in your lip tint. 
Your eyes lock on his, your pupils widening till they swallow your irises, mirroring your breathtaking grin. Hyunjin felt as if the sun had left the sky and lodged within his chest.
But what Hyunjin failed to understand is that, for souls like his, happiness is only a fleeting passenger. Even then, it isn’t meant to be swallowed whole; it is to be eaten bite by bite, back hunched, hidden from the harsh glare of the universe. Perhaps this is the price he pays for defying the sadness that shadows him—his own eager canines sinking into joy, ultimately tearing it apart.
“I think I’ll go to Switzerland.”
It takes a few seconds for Hyunjin’s words to settle into your mind, for the syllables to unfurl slowly, like a wave gathering its strength before inevitably crashing on the shore. 
Once, Hyunjin had spoken of a figure skating center in Switzerland, one that Jihyoun praised endlessly—the pinnacle for skaters reaching toward gold.
“Will you go?” you’d asked, and he’d only shrugged. “I’m thinking about it.” The conversation had dissolved then, lost in the press of his body against yours, in the paths his fingers traced down your stomach— dizzying enough to make you forget the sound of your own name.
But you should have known—some things cannot be buried beneath the covers. They always resurface, haunting, inevitable.
You draw in a deep breath, your gaze settling on your congratulatory bouquet. The flowers have started to wither now, despite the sugar cube Hyunjin dropped in the water. 
Were they a trigger for the slow withering of your relationship, too? Did the fall of that first petal set the course for your own undoing?
“Okay,” you nod, biting your lip anxiously. “When will you go?”
“In three days. Or else I’ll miss the deadline to join.”
Oh.
You remain silent, feeling as though barbed wire coils around your throat, each metal spike pressing deep into your flesh. He steps closer, his warm hands cradling your cheeks. It takes you a few seconds to meet his gaze.
You suddenly imagine a life untouched by him. The thought fills you with a horrible urge to weep.
“I know it’s sudden,” he murmurs, voice low, “I tried to delay it as long as I could, but Jihyoun kept insisting, saying it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I don’t want you to feel abandoned.” 
You shake your head, as if to push that thought away, as if the notion itself is meaningless.
“I’ve always known we wouldn’t stay in the same place forever. I have to go back to Juilliard soon, too. I just… never thought it would happen this fast.” You sigh softly, a tender smile slipping across your face as you bring your hands up to cup his cheeks. “But you’re meant for grand things, Hyunjin. If Switzerland is where you’ll find them, then I couldn’t be happier for you.”
“I love you,” he whispers, his nose brushing against yours, a gentle, aching gesture. “We’ll make it work, right?”
He searches your eyes, pleading, his brows drawn into a worried knot.
“Of course, we will.”
It is the first time you lie to Hyunjin. 
“I love you,” he repeats, gripping your waist and lifting you onto the counter.
“I’ve only known love thanks to you,” you murmur. That much is true.
Hyunjin kisses you with hunger, his hand tangled in your hair, his body moving with a fierce rhythm—passion and love dripping from each one of his touches, each one of his spilled i love you’s between broken whimpers and moans. 
He loves you tonight like he has something to prove. As if his fingertips must be etched upon your skin, as if his name should be the one carved deep within you, the one found if you were split open to your soul.
Lying against his bare chest, you feel his breath rise and fall beneath you, the tip of his fingers sketching aimlessly upon your skin. Yet, you sense as if there is already a rift between you both. As if the news of his living has seeped between your bodies— the distance has already laid its claim, separating you both.
… 
You’re back in New York, slipping into the rhythm of your classes like a puzzle piece wedged into place, not quite fitting, yet you force it to. You spend each waking moment practicing your final dance at Juilliard—The Sleeping Beauty—the ballet that will close this chapter of your life.
Your apartment has remained unchanged; the conversations with your classmates are as futile as ever. And your heart still pulses, aches for Seoul, for the warmth you found there, in Hyunjin.
Winter settles in, snow gathering in quiet drifts along the streets. Two languid months slip by, time dragging its feet, as if too wishing to remain right where you left Hyunjin. You lose yourself in the pursuit of a perfect performance. And yet, the praise of your professors and peers no longer fills you as it once did.
It all feels hollow, empty, when you can’t remember the last time you and Hyunjin spoke, actually spoke, the way you used to.
You’d already seen this scene unfold in your mind the day he broke the news—more vividly still as he walked away in the airport. You had known the first few days would be good—frequent calls and texts, sharing the smallest details of his new life and of your familiar one.
But then, the silence would settle in, as it has. Because you and Hyunjin are both perfectionists. Because without your art, both of you are left with nothing but shadows of yourselves— hollow shells calling out in agony to what truly pleases your souls. 
You’re afraid to say it out loud, but Hyunjin’s face is blurring in your memory, details softening as though sketched by an impressionist’s brush. All that remains clear are the shadows under his eyes on your last video call, dark circles carved deep into his soft skin, his exhaustion bleeding through the screen as he struggled to stay awake for you.
There is no one to blame, and somehow, that only hurts you even more. You could sacrifice your hours of practice, and so could he. But then the guilt would come, ravenous, gnawing at your soul. And guilt is a hungry being, soon enough it won’t be satiated by you. Soon enough it will turn to your love for Hyunjin. 
And you couldn’t afford that. 
You miss him most on days like this, when nothing seems right from the moment you open your eyes. The city’s chill feels sharper, as though mocking you, reminding you of the warmth you left behind.
The wind bites as you step into the night, wandering aimlessly, your feet carrying you to nowhere in particular. Tears hover at the edge of your lashes, but you refuse to let them fall.
There’s no grace in the way you don’t allow yourself to cry, no mercy in how you hold yourself together. You've always been a performer, haven’t you? Even your pain feels like a scene you must perfect. Is it tragic enough? Does it carve deep enough to justify being felt?
You bite your lip, numb fingers pulling out your phone. You type out Hyunjin’s contact— my love. Your last message to him was two days ago.
With a sigh, you press call. He answers on the final ring.
“Hi, my angel,” he says, a bit breathless. Probably mid-training.
You force a smile, hoping he won’t hear the tremble in your voice. “Hi, baby. Practicing?”
“Yeah.” He hums. “Are you outside?”
“Im going for a walk.” Your voice quiets as the lump in your throat tightens, a chain wrapping around your words, binding you.
“Are you okay, my love?” he asks gently, and you nod though he can’t see.
“I am,” you lie. “I just miss you.” The confession slips out before you can stop it, and the weight of it crushes you. You miss him so much it’s killing you.
“I miss you too,” he says softly. You feel like throwing up. You have to make it quick before your courage betrays you. 
“I think we should end things,” you say quickly, biting down so hard on your lip that blood beads up, sharp and metallic on your tongue— just like your words.
“What?” he whispers, and you hear his faint apologies, the rustle as he moves to someplace quieter, someplace where you can break his heart without an audience.
“Why do you want this? Don’t you love me anymore?” His voice is small, fragile, and you feel the tears welling in your eyelids, but not yet.
“You know there’s no one I love but you,” you say, drawing in a breath that doesn’t wish to be trapped by you. “But we’re both so busy it barely feels like we’re together anymore.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, baby, I’ll try to text more, I promise. I’ll cut back on my training for you, I’ll—.”
“You know I’d never ask that of you.” You cut him off, smiling sadly and he falls quiet.
You see him then, in a haze of memory—Hyunjin’s head resting in your lap, your fingers lost in his hair. You hear his voice again, soft and raw, “My mom’s last wish for me was to win that gold medal. I’m terrified of letting her down. Just thinking about it—” He’d let out a humorless laugh. “She isn’t here, and yet I still feel this debt to her. Isn’t that strange?”
You know it well—the pain of failing those you love, even those who don’t love you back.
“Your mom wanted you to win that medal, didn’t she?” you say softly. “I would never come between you and that.” A pause. “But doesn’t it hurt more to wait for a message that never comes?”
“I…” he stammers, a sniffle slipping through the phone, and it nearly undoes you.
“Yn, I- you know that I love you.”
And in that instant, you know he understands. It’s because Hyunjin understands that you love him.
“I love you too, my Hyune.”
“Then don’t say this,” he chokes out, “say something cruel—something that’ll make it easier not to miss you so much when you’re gone.”
You can hear him crying, and the sound permanently breaks a rib within your heart. It sounds so raw, so painful that you wish to abandon everything and run to him. Had life not been this harsh to you, perhaps you would. Perhaps you’d have enough courage to believe that love can suffice for everything. 
“I came back to Seoul because my mother was sick. I thought…maybe it would bring us close again. But I think now that I came back just to meet you, Hyunjin.” His name falters, slipping from your lips in a stuttered breath.
“Thank you,” you whisper, voice cracking, “thank you for making me happy.”
The call ends, and you fall to your knees in the snow, finally surrendering to the grief tearing through you. Sobs wrack your body, raw and relentless, so fierce it feels as if your heart might just stop, as if you’ve become nothing but an ache, a bruised, throbbing mass of memories, pulsing with each thought of him.
Is this enough for you? you want to scream at whatever cruel hand pulling the strings of your fate. Has my suffering finally paid the debt of my existence— for both me and him? 
… 
You’ve come to understand that the expanse of human emotions is boundless, as vast and unknowable as the space that holds the universe. And with each passing day, it feels as if another star dies within you, its light dimming slowly, far from rebirth.
You once thought your heart had grown accustomed to grief—your life spent in mourning: parents you wished you had, love you wished had dared, even just once, to find you.
But mourning the happiness Hyunjin brought is something else. It’s a different kind of ache, not like the eruption of a volcano that fades into a quiet resigning. This pain lingers, dull and relentless, day after day, a wound that refuses to close, a pulse that never stills.
It has been a month since your fateful call. Hyunjin first sent you a bouquet of white roses, with a note nestled within—To the one who made me find love again, I will love you until my last breath.
You didn’t reply, but Hyunjin kept sending bouquets, each one arriving with a message that tore at your heart a little more than the last. I am thinking about you often; please think of me, too. As if you could do anything but that. If I am to exist in only one place, let it be in your mind.
You’ve hung each note on the fridge, their words staring back at you every morning as you make your coffee, exactly the way Hyunjin likes it.
Sometimes, you’d let the water run, overflowing in the coffee maker as you read his words again and again. Then, you’d catch a glimpse of your own distorted reflection on the water’s surface, wondering what it would feel like to drown in the sea, to let the liquid fill your lungs and wash over you.
But you never let the thought linger too long, chasing it away with the hum of a song. You know it will only lead you somewhere scary.
After three, maybe four months, the bouquets eventually stopped arriving. Hyunjin had surely grown tired of your silence.
The heart is no rigid thing; it doesn’t stay frozen in one place. It stretches and contracts, bleeds, then patches itself together again. But you hadn’t done much to heal it—truthfully, you hadn’t believed you deserved to feel good once more.
Then month five came, and there was no time left to dwell on anything. A strange relief, you thought, for a mind like yours, that never quite stops turning, even in sleep. Graduation loomed on the horizon, and you were terrified of your efforts going to waste, of them somehow never being enough to set you apart.
But one night, your professor placed her hand on your shoulder, her gaze warm as it met yours. Suddenly, you felt seven years old again. “I think you could be this generation’s prima ballerina assoluta, she said—absolute first ballerina, the best of the best. 
“Really?” you whispered, hardly breathing, and she nodded. “Yes, if you keep going this way, you will be.”
You thought about calling Hyunjin to share the news, but quickly brushed the thought aside. Instead, you spent the night picturing his reaction. It was pathetic, maybe, but you liked to believe he would’ve said he was proud of you, called you angel, kissed the tip of your nose, his eyes crinkling into half-moons. You fell asleep with his words murmured on your lips, as if they’d been real.
Month six rolled in, then seven. You had been keeping tabs on Hyunjin’s name as the Olympics approached. There has been news of him wanting to attempt a quadruple axel spin— forty-four years after the triple one. An automatic win, some would say.
You knew that if anyone could do it would be hyunjin.
You wondered if he too read the articles released about your performances. Did he smile at them, his sweet dimple surging forth? Or did your name sting him, like droplets of acid falling into an open wound? 
Month eight arrived, genuine joy weaving into your life once more. You took your final bow on the polished stage of Juilliard, the roaring applause ringing in your ears for days to come. You had the highest performance score of the history of the institution. Your professor’s eyes then searched yours— “where do you see yourself now? where would you feel happiest?”
Hyunjin’s arms. You almost said. Barely holding yourself. 
“I don’t know. I think I’ll try at operas. I want to perform the white swan there.”
“Then go to opéra garnier in Paris. I have a friend there. Talk to him, feel it out.”
You had almost kissed her cheek right there and then. Not only because the Opéra Garnier had been your childhood dream but because now, Paris was where the Olympics would be held.
You now had an excuse to be there. 
You kept looking for Hyunjin in every monument you visited. In the hush of night by the Louvre, along the quiet flow of the Seine, in the gentle strokes of Monet’s paintings at Musée de l’Orangerie. What would you do if you met him on a random street in Paris?
Thankfully, or unfortunately, you still hadn’t decided, you never had to find out. You didn’t see him.
It is the men’s singles day at the figure skating Olympics, and somehow, you feel more nervous than in all your own performances combined. You’re seated close to the ice, close enough to feel the chill radiating from it, close enough to capture every detail of the performances.
Then Hyunjin steps onto the ice. If not for your seat, you might have collapsed, your knees a mass of useless ground bones. 
He’s dazzling—achingly, excruciatingly beautiful. His hair falls longer now, delicate strands brushing his forehead like a prince out of a fairytale. His outfit is pure white, adorned with emerald diamonds cascading like droplets of light. Instinctively, you reach for the emerald ring on your finger too. 
Your gaze follows him everywhere, drinking in the sight of him tipping his head back in laughter, his nose crinkling as he talks to Jihyoun, every stretch, every step, every quiet act of his being. 
He was still as lovely, still as beautiful as you have always known him. 
You wonder if he’s thinking of you, too, as his eyes flutter shut before his music begins. What image knits behind his eyelids in that instant?
It has always been his face for you. 
The air buzzes with anticipation, thick with belief and doubt alike as everyone knows what Hyunjin is attempting tonight. All eyes follow him as he skates, tracing wide circles across the ice, bending low to the ground, spinning in perfect arcs.
Then, he launches into the air.
The seconds seem to trickle by as slowly as blood droplets rushing to a dying heart. You see it— one spin, planets orbiting around the sun, aching to inch closer to the warmth. 
Two spins— seconds marching forward to catch up with the next ones in a ticking clock. 
Your breath freezes in your throat, your hands grip the chair so much your knuckles turn as white as the roses hyunjin sent you after you parted ways.
Three spins— fireflies dancing around the light, drawn to it like milky stars.
And then he does it.
His fourth and final spin— your heart orbiting around Hyunjin as he achieves his dream, as he breaks the world record he long yearned for.
You fall back in your seat, a rush of relief loosening the tension in your body as the crowd erupts into thunderous applause. Unbelievable is the word on everyone’s mouths. 
But not on yours.
Your Hyunjin did it, like you knew he would. 
Tears gather in your eyes as he stares at the scoreboard, his gaze fixed, waiting, breath held alongside every other skater. 
Hyunjin’s name comes first. 
He collapses to his knees, the weight of his victory pressing down his body, finally breaking him open. Jihyoun rushes over, cradling him, shaking him, laughing, “You did it, Hyunjin! You did it, son!” The tears won’t stop rushing down your face; they have a life of their own now.
You watch as Hyunjin circles the audience, waving at the crowd cheering his name. He drifts closer to your section, his eyes scanning the sea of faces until, finally, he finds yours. 
The world stills, you force the earth to stop spinning to have this one moment with Hyunjin. You lock onto his gaze, holding it, savoring the way his lips form your name.
Then, as if pulled by a force greater than either of you, he climbs over the stands, moving swiftly across the seats until he reaches you. In an instant, his arms are around you, his head buried in the crook of your neck. “Yn, I…” he chokes, and you nod, whispering, “I know. You did it, Hyunjin.”
“I did it, Yn,” he echoes, his voice trembling. He pulls back to look at you, his hands resting on your shoulders, both oblivious to the flash of cameras, the seas of people flocking around you. 
No one here could ever understand what this moment means to him. No one but him—and you.
As he takes his place on the podium, tears shimmer in Hyunjin’s eyes akin to the reflection of the sun across the sea. He bites his lip, struggling to hold it together as the bronze and silver medals are awarded. Then the official steps forward, gold medal in hand. Hyunjin extends his shaking hands, watching as the ribbon drapes over his head, at long last. 
Suddenly, the past eight months of heartache are justified. You would endure it all again, twice over, if it led to Hyunjin having this moment. 
“Miss Juilliard,” Hyunjin says softly as he meets you by the door. He had asked Jihyoun to tell you to wait for him. Jihyoun seemed happy to see you once more. 
Hyunjin is different now than he was twenty minutes ago, when he threw himself into your arms, overcome by emotions too vast to name. Now, he stands before you, more composed, more guarded, though his gaze remains tender. He’s never been able to hide his eyes from you.
“Congratulations on your win,” you say.
“Congratulations on your graduation.”
He knows.
In that moment, you see it all—the two paths unfurling before you. You could smile at him and he would smile back. Then you would part ways. And you would meet again, in a ceremony of some kind. And he would have grown only more beautiful, and the ache would have not softened. And his loving gaze would set on someone else but you.
Or, you could speak now.
“I made some tiramisu back at my Airbnb,” you say, your voice tentative. “Would you like some?”
Hyunjin’s shoulders stiffen, a debate flickering in his eyes. Then he exhales softly. “Of course.”
You sit side by side in the uber. His phone keeps lighting up with congratulatory messages until he switches it off.
“I’m sorry,” you murmur, feeling the need to break the silence. He tenses beside you.
“For what?”
“For stealing you away.”
His shoulders relax. “Don’t apologize. I wanted to come.”
The apartment you rented is small—studio-sized, really, but near Montmartre, where you’ve loved taking nightly walks by Sacré Coeur. Hyunjin slips off his shoes, placing them next to yours by the door.
For a moment, you both pause, staring at the sight of your shoes, side by side, once more.
He clears his throat as you gesture for him to make himself comfortable. He moves to the window, gazing at the city below, while you retrieve two plates, carefully setting a slice of tiramisu on each.
“Thank you,” he says softly when you hand him his plate. But neither of you takes a bite. It’s as if opening your mouth would lead to a torrent of words escaping, ones neither of you can contain. 
He yields first.
“You came,” he whispers, glancing over at you.
“I couldn’t miss seeing you win.”
“I missed you,” he says, biting his lip. Hyunjin has always been honest, especially when it comes to you. “It hurt a lot to miss you, Yn.”
“I’m here tonight.” 
Your words settle into the air as the hum of the world outside fades away. Hyunjin’s gaze, sharp and knowing, meets yours—those piercing eyes that have always stripped away your defenses, reading between the lines of your every unspoken thought.
He holds your gaze for a beat too long, and you fumble for your fork, needing something—anything—to diffuse the weight of what lingers in the silence between you.
Then, suddenly, his lips meet yours.
Kissing Hyunjin again feels like breathing in after being starved of air, like a cool breeze caressing your skin on a scorching day. A shiver spreads through you as he gently lowers you onto the couch, his body a pressing weight above you. Your hands find their way to his back, moving with the instinctive ease of muscle memory, while he kisses you with the fierce urgency of someone who’s finally tasted salvation. 
You wish to never part from him. You wish for your body to liquefy and morph into the hot rush of blood within his veins— anything so you wouldn’t have to part from him once more. You don’t think you can handle it. You don’t think you can lose Hyunjin again. You know you can’t.
When he pulls back, his cheeks are flushed a soft pink, like fresh dahlias, his eyes glossy and filled with something unspeakable as they trace over your face. “Tell me, Yn,” he breathes, “do you still love me? I need to know, please. It’s been tearing me apart.”
“I love you,” you say, with every bit of honesty you can muster. “I loved you before I even knew what love is, and I will love you, Hyunjin. Whether you are near or not. I will always love you.”
A breathtaking smile unfolds across his face, warm enough to thaw every frozen corner of your heart, to make decades of loneliness melt away. You would endure it all again, face the heartbreak and the grief. Fall at your sister’s grave and repent once more. You’d do it all if it means your path will cross with Hyunjin.
“I was always ever yours to love.” 
Epilogue. 
Hyunjin has always felt as if he has lived many lifetimes at once. Like a serpent, shedding its skin, he had lost parts of his being in various places. Some he managed to retrieve, others not. He had a lot to learn, overwhelmed by certain things past. His thoughts weren’t always kind. His hands didn’t always sweep gently against his skin. 
But on days like those, you were there to love him. He had learned and unlearned many things with you. Hyunjin had found that love wasn’t a sharp emotion, it didn’t slice away at the heart, it didn’t puncture. There were no sharp edges when it came to you. Even if he lost you along the way, he would round up a corner and find you there. 
And he did. Hyunjin found you, even when you didn’t wish to be found. You scurried from place to place, set foot into Paris to Seoul, Alexandria and New York. The distance lessened then widened. But it never tore you apart once more. Your souls were satiated in a way. You could rest side by side now. 
And you did, as you settled in Seoul, decades down the road. Where both you and Hyunjin built a new training center. Figure skaters on the first floor, ballerinas on the second. The days passed by in happiness, laughter and giggles. There was no curse. No punishment. Not anymore. 
You are in a graveyard once more. You watch as Hyunjin sweeps the name atop the tombstone gently. Prima ballerina assoluta, he reads, the swan of my heart. His weathered hands shake as they clutch a bouquet of fresh red lilies, and your heart still aches at the sight. 
It is late at night at the graveyard, the branches are still humming to one another, like a melancholic flute. You understand now that they speak to the buried ones. “Not so long now,” they reassure, “your loved ones will follow.”
You believe them, and you will wait. For now, you’ll find solace in the red lilies sitting atop your grave. 
They are now meant for you, at long last. 
537 notes · View notes
drawloverlala · 2 days ago
Text
November status update!
Tumblr media
So! Spooky month is over and now we are at November! so here's my monthly update!
🌼Social Media management
So first I wanted to give a bit of a announcement given the difficult situation with artists and social media in recent times, specially on Twitter and the recent choices they've made, I've been thinking on what to do 🤔
I've come to the conclusion to only post full art on certain sites that are more for art and artists and the rest will be cropped art or very tiny version of them (not full resolution or quality)
🌱Sites where you'll find my art without cropping and better quality:
Tumblr / Inkblot / Artfol / Sheezyart (eventually) / Neocities(gotta update it though)
🌱Places where I'll post it cropped and less better quality:
Twitter / Bluesky / Instagram
Thought I'd still like to use tumblr for posting art as well and specially sketches and doodles, it's just still a very comfortable place to put these kind of things, but I'll just just my watermark more often on them
But yeah, social media management is something I was very messy about, and in recent months I haven't been able to keep up with everything about it so I needed to make some kind of order in there
🌼October ink art challenges:
nah, I tried but I gave up on it pretty quick lol, I've been pretty stressed up with work and side personal projects that I just didn't make the time to draw too much of that lol
it was kinda funny how quickly I lost steam with that 😅 but well it's not an obligation, maybe next year I'll be able to be a little bit more consistent and have more energy for that.
🌼Commissions:
So I finished the batch I got on August, though there's still a comic pages commission from that but I'm putting that and one I got last month together.
as for the batch I got on October, I got a bit behind it, mostly because I was trying to finish with the previous batch first, so this next week I'll work more on the current batch for sure! 👍
hopefully I'm able to finish all chibis next week at least!
🌼Ko-fi shop:
still not finished with the new items to put on the shop, and I haven't started yet with holiday themed things, hopefully this upcoming week I get more time for that, I just gotta really make some kind of order in my schedule lol 😅
Tumblr media
Other than that, I guess the megaman X fan comic is coming along quite nicely, I'm still working on the inks, but dialogue has been more defined thanks to a friend of mine and there's about 7 pages left to ink!
but yeah that's all for now, hope you have a nice November!
Tumblr media
38 notes · View notes
strab3rr · 21 hours ago
Note
hi love,
How did you induce pure consciousness xx
i know u guys love big stories -i love those things too- but im sorry i don’t have any
but i can try to make it seem bigger 4 u.
it was a sunny day
Tumblr media
it was a normal day
Tumblr media
at least i thought it was…
Tumblr media
i make a brunch w my mom and then we go buy some groceries
did i mention it was a sunny day..
Tumblr media
there was so much sweat blood and tears(i was on my period)
then we got home
Tumblr media
i dayreamed while i study russian and math(tears again)
than i watched my fav show(supernatural)
and finally dinner time w my family 🎉🎉🎉🎉
Tumblr media
i got dishes and go straight to my room
usually we have some tea after dinner
Tumblr media
but i had cramps so i just go to bed w a pill
Tumblr media
when i realized the pill worked i tried to sleep and get some rest
but i couldn’t so i thought i can do pinteresting🎀
i add some pins to my silly little boards(therapy)
then i saw a pin/tumblr post(wait im gonna try to find that)
Tumblr media
after reading this pin, i remembered the posts i was readin on tumblr (b4dprincess’s posts)
then i opened tumblr and continued to read those
Tumblr media
when i was done w reading i was like 👍 ok this is it
its my reality how hard can it be?
i put my phone down and take one deep breath
(oh noooo theres only 10gif/image allowed on mobile, i was havin fun aaaaa)
life saving emojiiiss
😮‍💨
and thats it
i did nothing but taking that one deep breath (physically)
i focused on everything but my body
i think about the dates i will have w him
i think about my house, neighborhood
i daydreamed my pets
the clothes
friends and the more i think about these things i was feeling closer
some point i felt like im levitating and drowning at the same time, this is the part i got scared but be cool abt it
affirmations ive said while being cool:
i am detached from any realities
i am here and there, everywhere and nowhere
i am everything and nothing
i am, i am, i am
i am nothing but my soul
i am beyond of any physical world
i am i am
i induced my pure consciousness within seconds
i am
i am
i am
i said ‘i am’ till i felt nothing
for a second i thought i didn’t make it but again be cool abt it (bc: dont let them know ur next move)
i felt ready and opened my eyes and finally i was there and just as i imagined i felt everything and nothing at the same time
it felt forever and not even a second at the same time
guys
it-was-awesome 👏🏻
(for the clarification: i didn’t mock w anything with all those gifs)
its just im trying to tell you, i mean u want a recipe but there isnt any
there’s nothing literally nothing to do for enterin your void
well theres one thing: relax.
just relax, you got this, stop overcomplicating it. its inside of you not in the space, not in the underground not in the air not in the fuckn atmosphere its within you, so you dont have to worry about anything because its there. its always there and it will always be there
stop searching for some magic key. because you are the key. you are the void you’re searching for.
i know, having a lot with your life and everything is hard and you have goals to achieve, moments to live
well good news
you can change this and you should because you deserve better
only you can change this
(i talk a lot and most of them are nonsense but i am right abt one thing, and that is, you deserve better. so act like it)
loves, siena.
31 notes · View notes
peachjagiya · 1 day ago
Text
I don't know if I'm going to word this right but let's try.
This latest report hasn't revealed much to me about Taehyung and Jungkook's relationship with Hybe and hasn't changed much about my thoughts. All it's really done is reinforce what I already believed and added to the dossier if you like. It's been shocking to see it written down, maybe? Shocking to see how it's happened? Shocking to see that a fair few TKKrs on tumblr at least have been talking about this for as long as I've been around and how a lot of the theories that have developed here are absolutely spot on despite regular accusations of conspiracy theorising. But shocking like "I can't believe this!!!"? No.
I didn't even find JK defending NewJeans to be revelatory. Nor his calling out sasaeng outside his house.
(The first moment I realised JK was possibly not as much of a company guy as people thought was during Jimin's birthday live where he is audibly questioning staff about putting a mic on him and then the way he talked about being on his way home on camera.)
But TL;DR - It hasn't changed my thoughts on Taekook.
That being said:
Tumblr media
This is my first time watching this clip in a few months. I used to be on the fence about it - I think I answered an ask saying this - I was never completely sure if he was referring to his relationship with Army or with someone else. It's been a Taekook Maybe for me.
But watching this particular clip now... with the context... maybe I am looking at it a bit differently? Knowing who JK is, how conscientious he is to injustice (against himself, his loved ones and others), it feels a little more like he might be venting in a more personal way rather than a generic idol vent.
Maybe this report has slightly removed my inclination to try to explain things away cutely to uphold some kind of "rational TKKr" idea when actually other readings might even make more sense with the Hybepocalypse backdrop.
Does anyone know what I mean?
22 notes · View notes
miffy-junot · 3 days ago
Text
I really wanted to be kind, I really try to stay away from discourse, but my friend sent me a post containing opinions so rancid that I had to say something. I'm turning off reblogs and I will not name the user who made the post because I do not want any discourse, please be respectful of this.
Time to respond to the words of "Tumblr user X":
Firstly - I know not everybody here is Christian but to make a post being rude to dead people on All Soul's Day is immensely disrespectful, to say the least. Don't you have any graves to put flowers on, any people to remember?
1:
Tumblr media
The majority of people interested in the Napoleonic Wars think Junot is a blundering buffoon. You really have to dig deep to find nuanced sources on him beyond the usual "mad general" stuff. There is a niche community of Gen Z Tumblr bloggers who like Junot, by no means the majority of the Napoleonic community - and since Tumblr is very easy to curate, it's on you if you are stuck in this niche bubble.
Let me tell you, Junot does not have a good reputation at all. You can let the topic go, you are fighting against an enemy that you believe numbers in the hundreds when in fact it is a small group of mentally ill teenagers (many of whom are lgbtq+, which is something interesting in itself).
2.
Tumblr media
You are an adult, but how did you graduate high school with no skills of reading comprehension? Nobody has ever said that Junot's actions with Laure were "normal and okay". Once again, you are fighting an imaginary enemy.
Napoblr is essentially a war criminal fandom. That does not make it any more or less valid than other history communities, but it means that we have to take a slightly different approach to moralising historical figures. Almost every single person involved in the Napoleonic Wars would be a bad person if you took their actions out of the historical context. Most people relevant to the Napoleonic Wars were sexist, racist, imperialist pieces of shit who turned a blind eye to war crimes.
Because that makes up such a large percentage of these people, being overly judicious about their morality will leave you with the following group of "unproblematic people": a large gathering of peasants and children, none of whom we know the names of.
"Evil" is a very strong word to use, one which denies nuance, but let me speak in your language: all Napoleonic figures were somewhat "evil", if you are unwilling to deal with "evil" people then study art history, or any other subject that doesn't deal so much with moral complexity.
3.
Tumblr media
In my opinion war crimes committed as part of your job are still war crimes????????? "Indirectly" or not, there is little difference between ordering an execution and murdering someone with your own bare hands, in both situation you take away a life from the world and there is blood on your hands. Some might even argue that having a callous approach to life and death is even worse!
And like I have said above: endless moralising is counter-productive. There are better ways to use your time, such as researching things that actually fulfil you.
4.
Tumblr media
(just a tiny nitpick but please do not use that certain misogynistic term)
"Could have" and "should have" are words that cannot be used in the study of history. Speculation over endless possibilities of alternative realities is meaningless.
I thought we as a society had moved beyond calling addicts "evil", but apparently not! (and again, "evil" is a very charged term that leaves no room for nuance)
For the record, I support abstinence of all the things you mention. Irl I have a bit of a reputation for being a puritan. But even I will not blame somebody's entire morality on that, and call a man "evil" for being an addict?! Where is your sympathy?!
Self-destructive behaviour is a major symptom of both head injuries and personality disorders, but I doubt "Tumblr user X" has the thinking skills required to understand that properly.
And either way, even if it was all "his responsibility", so what? That's his personal life, why do you care? If you don't like it, go away.
5.
Tumblr media
Again, I genuinely thought people knew how to be sympathetic towards addicts but apparently not.
The emphasis on "self-restraint" is insane, if you had any restraint you wouldn't be bitching on Tumblr. You are sounding more like a 17th century Puritan than me, the person who gets accused irl of acting like one.
People on Tumblr find Junot relatable. That is why he is cute, because he is relatable. Additionally, it is big part of Gen Z humour to call bad men "babygirl" and to combine cutesy aesthetics with dark stuff, hence the whole coquette/girlblogger aesthetic.
Like I said at the beginning of this post - most people do not like Junot. The people who do are mostly mentally ill young people who naturally gravitate towards this "crazy but make it cute" aesthetic tendency, and the "I can make him worse" sort of mentality.
"Violent tendencies" is a lot to extrapolate from a single incident, but that seems to be something you're fond of doing.
6.
Tumblr media
You deliberately phrase this to imply sexual harassment. Here is what happened: he flirted with her and invited her to dinner, she had heard the rumours of his mad behaviour and ghosted him, he got very upset. Nothing physical ever happened.
Additionally, none of his mistresses ever mentioned any violent behaviour by him. In fact, in one anecdote related by Laure herself, Junot's Abyssinian mistress Xraxarane encouraged him to shoot an orange off the top of her head because she was so confident in his abilities with a pistol, and even though he knew he could do it, Junot didn't even try because he was too afraid of hurting her.
7.
Tumblr media
Do your research before making snarky comments, I am begging you.
While it is true that men wrote more passionately to each other in those days, "I who love you with the affection of a savage for the sun, I who am entirely yours" is not something you would say in passing. I'm not going to argue that Junot and Napoleon did anything romantic together, but it's undeniable that Junot's feelings towards Napoleon surpass those of a completely platonic friendship.
There are many sources that attest to Junot's fanatical devotion being unusual, not just Laure. And it was not a single remark in Laure's memoirs, but many anecdotes. Junot had many close male friendships, but they all took on a very different character to his friendship with Napoleon - his letters to other friends have a casual, jovial tone; the intense and poetic language used in his letters to Napoleon instead mirror his letters to women.
Is it really so unfeasible to you that, out of the thousands of men in the Napoleonic army, one of them might have developed feelings for Napoleon beyond those of conventional masculine friendships? Statistically, it is impossible that every Napoleonic man was straight.
8.
Tumblr media
Okay, I am going to be directly bitchy here.
Tumblr user X, YOU DIDN"T EVEN BOTHER TO READ THE JOURNAL INTIME BEFORE PUBLISHING A POST ABOUT THE INCIDENT.
When, in a discord server, I shared a small piece of the journal intime I had translated that was referring to Junot's affair with Caroline, YOU DOUBTED IT"S CREDIBILITY.
You claim to trust what women have to say, BUT YOU DON"T BELEIVE HORTENSE DE BEAUHARNAIS' CLAIMS THAT HER HUSBAND ABUSED HER. BE CONSISTENT.
And finally: THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO MENTION OF JUNOT TRYING TO RAPE LAURE AS YOU CLAIMED. NOWHERE IN HER ACCOUNT OF EVENTS DOES SHE ALLEGE RAPE. STOP MAKING THINGS UP, IT IS DISRESPECTFUL TO REAL RAPE VICTIMS.
You pretend to be diligent with your sources, but you are not, you only read things that support your pre-conceived opinion, you make posts based on false evidence. Shut the fuck up about topics you know nothing about.
9.
Tumblr media
Gurl we are not bureaucrats, we do not care about military efficiency.
"glorified cavalry skirmish" - is a group of 500 men defeating a force of 3000 men not glorious to you? Those are odds of five to one.
If you don't care about military history, don't talk about military history and get out of the military history fandom.
10.
Tumblr media
(fyi it's spelt crucify)
You are fighting imaginary enemies. Bessieres is adored, he is babygirled. Junot is loathed.
Nobody ever said Junot trying to kill Laure was cute. (I would also provide evidence that Junot never intended to kill her, but then I'll get accused of defending domestic violence)
Junot being babygirlified is not a recent thing. What about:
Rapp, who didn't think Junot was a great soldier but still defended him
Foy, who hated Junot but still wrote positive comments about him in his memoirs
Arthur Wellesley, who respected Junot as an enemy
James Forbes (and many others), who hated Napoleon but praised Junot for being kind to Englishmen in Paris
Antoine-Romain Hamelin, who didn't like most people he met but adored Junot for defending and rescuing him
André Delagrave, who wrote very sympathetically about Junot after serving him in the peninsular wars
Laure's letters
Junot's letters to Laure
Junot's letters to his daughters
+many, many more sources but those were the only ones I remembered off the top of my head.
And please don't disrespect Laure's own wishes and opinions. What about the highly affectionate language used to refer to Junot in her letters about her grief over his death? What about her letter to Berthier complaining about Junot being defamed?
Please be respectful here, I don't want any discourse. I shouldn't have to say this but please do not share this with "Tumblr user X", I don't want to have anything to do with that person ever again.
a little side tangent on the infamous incident between Junot and Laure:
When Junot went to break off his affair with Caroline Murat, he took two duelling pistols and khanjar (a Middle Eastern style of dagger) with him in case he was confronted by Murat and things got messy. This is very important - Junot had lethal weapons easily accessible to him and was willing to use them to kill his rival. So if he genuinely had every intention of murdering Laure, why didn't he shoot her? Why didn't he stab her with the fatal khanjar rather than a pair of scissors? Speculation on this point is useless, but it's vital to know that he could have easily killed her, but he didn't. I'm not defending his actions in any way, Junot certainly did something awful, but he did not intentionally plot to murder her.
20 notes · View notes
Text
Taishin reads as a neurodivergent kid whos ernest curiousity and innocent wasn't forcebily destroyed by the world.
As a neurodivergent person (90% sure currently self diagnosed only) it reads to me that Taishin was probably very loved and very sheltered. He also probably never had that many friends. The sheltering was probably a little to his detrument, but I think it's preferable to the alternative.
He is curious and ernest and eager to learn. Social situations and relationship are confusing. He also feels a lot for others. He latches onto the rules of a stan because that explains what he is feeling and the rules are simple and easy to understand and follow.
The problem of course that Takara doesn't want a stan and you can't have a close relationship (friendship or romantic) to someone you are stanning.
And also I think Taishin realized at the end that he wasn't a stan, or at least was about too, because even on the surface the idea of being a stan matches to what he was feeling. The idea of not being hable to be next to Takara or interact with him in any way made him sad.
His questions are not being answeared (as @lurkingshan pointed out here) and he doesn't know how to navigate new feelings or new situations with no guidence or knowledge of how to correctly identifying what the feeling of being in love or having a crush is.
There is only an actress for a Taishin Mom and we only saw a Mom and a sister in the phone call in the previous episodes. So I think his Mom might have been a single Mom. And he doesn't read to me as someone who is super into media or fiction or watching tv. That plus the sheltering and protecting and not having a relationship to observe probably left him very unware about love in general.
I definately agree with @lurkingshan that Takara is not answearing his questions because he wants Taishin to arrive there on his own and because of his own influence on him.
I think the new relationship between Emiri and Akira might put love and relationship in his head a little more and he will either arrive there on his own or ask for advice from someone else. Maybe Minami since she was so helpful during the welcome party.
I'm very intrigued and curious about Takara's backstory reveal next episode.
Another thing about Taishin that is very neurodivergent coded (at least in a very similar way to what I am personally used to) is that he is pretty good at realizing when he said something "weird" after he said it (he can recognize emotions and reaction in others decently well but not in himself and he is also probably used to getting reactions when he says something that other people find "weird"), but he doesn't seem to be able to recognize if something is "weird" to ask before hand.
Also the umbrella clutching at end, and how it turned to tense and stiff to exicted fidgeting. Perfection.
65 notes · View notes
crunchchute · 5 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
my attempt at a bunch of my fav artists styles :] idea by sootnuki!!
i would love to do more but this was already a huge challenge
if any artist here dislikes this/is uncomfortable with it/any reason i can take it down or turn off reblogs etc. otherwise i hope its ok 🫡 im not gonna tag anyone just gonna let it do its thing in the wild lol
#crunchchute art#my art#sam and max#sam & max#i hope it will be viewable as i dont know how much tumblr will crunch it#in any case i have it up on twitter also and it seems to be in good quality there#it looks like a 'the 7 human souls:' meme hfhdhf#hey i can put more thoughts in the tags right? so first i didnt really put enough effort into my own one and i kinda realized my style#is kinda mid ngl. cause im lazy + this coloring style might not really fit them. anyway.#for sootnukis style i adore the rendering of the clothing folds and stuff but i couldnt get it just right it remains a mystery to me#silcrow i tried to do a traditional drawing but kinda messed up some of the coloring especially on the pants#also couldnt figure out if its just markers or markers + pencils or what. so i kinda did my own take of 90% markers 10% pencils#mtsodie i love the color palettes and the shapes so that was a lot of fun to try; i like the outcome#narnour i absolutely love the tiny little eyes and how goofy and round they look so that was fun to try to replicate too#as well as the colors which i mostly color picked cause i couldnt get a red overlay right#zembo was a nice way to revisit a chalky brush that i havent used in ages not sure if i got it right though#applettoast i feel like theres some gorillaz influence or its at least something i used while coloring. as you might know i used to draw#gorillaz a lot and tried to replicate the coloring etc. and i think it fit here. correct me if im wrong lol#snuckeys was also hella fun cause i love the cartooniness and the details like the teeth showing gums and stuff. hope i did it justice#also the eyes! i love the big highlight and that the eyes are brown its cute#it was nice to branch out for a bit
573 notes · View notes
ganondoodle · 3 months ago
Text
got this reblog on one of my posts were i talked about being anxious about the future of the zelda series after totk and-
Tumblr media
i even went back and unblocked them just to check my own post and check twice what they meant exactly- but i still dont know how they got to these conclusions
i never said i 'want a good uwu ganondorf' (bc that would mean hes aligned with hyrule bc thats how goodness works!!!!11!1!!!), i also dont think of any of the zeldas as 'whores' (seriously, where did that come from?? neither me nor the addition of someone agreeing with me said anything like that??? did they think bc the addition called tloz misogynistic means we think zelda is a whore????? huh???)
its also funny how they say they want zelda to stay a simple fairytale rather than have 'people like me' bc .. one point i talked about in the og post was how the evil arab thing VS good white people media likes to do so much is so normalized here that its simply seen as a simple harmless fairytale trope instead of a big underlying issue in general media and the writers might not even realize it (which is worse) bc the most 'generic' appeal is to people who dont think of it as a problem in the first place, because it is so normalized
(huh, i wonder about what kind of person that part was about .. hmmmm)
(ALSO funny they mention princess hilda as nuanced villain ... like ... wow they are so nuanced about purple haired people!!- like guess why we want a nuanced/less badly/less flat written ganondorf and what he, in particular, has not in common with other villains! its not his hair color! .... or was that point supposed to mean .. look we have one female character that is a villain, its not misogynistic! idk honestly)
(and the classic, "you just call it this/dont like it bc its not what you wanted !!!!!!!2!"1!112!!")
also funny how its 'never gonna be progressive enough' like asking for the franchise to maybe put a little more thought and nuance into their white divine right vs evil desert man simulator instead of making it worse is already asking too much
(i dont know what the last point has to do with anything??)
(also yes totk is racist, like most if not all of the franchise and a alot of other media as well, shocker- you can still like it though, i and plenty of other people are still fans of it, we just wish they did a little more with their stuff and maybe not make the racism problem WORSE)
(also yes the hyrule monarchy is also evil :))) )
(and also not so secretly so either :)) )
183 notes · View notes
poorly-drawn-mdzs · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
Master manipulator vs Master manipulator
 [First] Prev <–-> Next
1K notes · View notes
gophergal · 10 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
You've always been a delicate disaster
Tumblr media Tumblr media
198 notes · View notes
jacksprostate · 5 months ago
Text
Treatise on why No, the doctor just giving the narrator of Fight Club (full name) his requested sleep medication or sending him to therapy would not have Fixed Him
Firstly, saying giving him the insomnia meds would’ve fixed him ignores the reason he has insomnia in the first place. He is so deeply upset by his place in society that he literally cannot sleep. Drugging him to sleep would not change that. That, of course, is the easy, quick response.
But with regard to therapy? The biggest flaw is that it ignores a central tenet of the book. Part of what tortures the narrator and drives him to invent Tyler is that his feelings about this collective, systemic issue are constantly reduced to a Just Him thing. His seatmates ask what his company is. He’s the only one upset at the office. He gets weird looks if he says the truth of what he does. People will do anything in their power to pretend he is the issue, as an individual, because it is far scarier to consider the full implications of the systemic issues implied by what he is saying. Everyone treats it as if the issue is him, so he goes insane. He does anything to get someone to say, holy shit, that’s fucked up, what you’re a part of is wrong. In an attempt to feel any sort of vague sympathy and catharsis, he goes to support groups to pretend to be dying, because then at least people don’t habitually blame him for his anguish. 
Saying therapy would fix him ignores that his problems are not individual. They are collective. It’s the reason the entire story resonates with people! Something deeply, unignorably wrong with society, where people would rather blame you for bringing it up than try and address it, because it feels impossible. I don’t blame people for this, really, because it IS scary. It’s terrifying to sit and feel like you’ve realized there’s something deeply, deeply wrong, but if you say something, people will get mad at you since it’s so baked into everything around you. Or, even if they agree, it’s easier to deal with the dissonance by pretending it’s individual.
And it’s not like that’s not the purpose therapy and medications largely serve, anyway. Getting into dangerous territory for this website, but ultimately, the reason the narrator was seeking medication was because it’s a bandaid. A very numbing bandaid. For these very large, dissonance causing problems, therapy does very little. Medications do what they always have, and distract you with numbness or side effects. It’s a false solution. He is seeking an individualized false solution because he has been browbeaten with the idea that this is an issue with him alone, when it's plainly clear it's not. 
Don't get me wrong. Obviously he has something wrong with him. But it's a product of his situation. It is a fictional exaggeration of a very real occurrence of mental illness provoked by deep unconscionable dissonance and anguish.  There is a clear correlation between what happens and his mental state and his job and how isolated he is. 
The thing is, even if he were chemically numbed, I do think he would’ve lost it regardless. Many people on meds find they don’t fix things. For reasons I’ll get into, but in this case because even if numbed or distracted, once you’ve learned about deep, far reaching corruption in society, it’s very hard to forget. Especially if, in his case, you literally serve as the acting hand of this particular variety. He’s crawling up the walls. 
So why do people say this?  Well, it's funny I guess. Maybe the first time or whatever. But also, often, they believe it, to a degree. Maybe they've just been told how effective therapy and meds are for mental illness, they believe wholeheartedly in The Disease Model of Mental Illness, maybe they themselves have engaged with either and have considered it successful. Maybe they or someone they know has been 'saved' by such treatments. 
But in all honesty.... What therapy can help with is mentality, it's how you approach problems. For issues on a smaller scale, not meaning they are easier to deal with my any degree, but ones that are not raw and direct from deep awareness of corruption; these are things that can be worked through if you get lucky and get an actually good therapist who helps build up your resiliency. But when your issue is concrete, something large and inescapable? It's useless. At best it can help you develop coping mechanisms, but there is a limit for that. There is a point where that fails. To develop the ability to handle something like this requires intense development of a comfort with ambiguity and dissonance and being isolated and a firm positioning of your purpose and values and and belief in wonder and all the other shit I ramble about. The things that the narrator lacks, which lead him to taking an ineffectual death knell anarchist self-destruction path. Therapy, where the narrator is, full of the knowledge of braces melted to seats and all the people that have to allow this to happen? It fails. 
And meds — meds are a fucking scam. We know the working mechanism of basically none of them, the serotonin receptor model was made up and paid its way into prominence. We have very little evidence they're any better than placebo, and they come with genuinely horrific side effects. Maybe you got lucky. I did, on some meds. On others? I don't remember 2018. The pharmaceutical industry is also known for rampant medical ghostwriting, and for creating 'off-label' uses for drugs that have gained too many protests in their original use, then creating a cult of use to then have 'grassroots' campaigns for it to be made a label use (ie, legitimize their ghostwritten articles with guided anecdotes). 
The DSM itself is basically a marketing segregation plot. It's an attempt to legitimize the disease model by isolating subgroups of symptoms to propose individualized treatments for subgroups that are not necessarily all that separate. But if the groups exist, you can prescribe more and different medications, no? Not to mention, if you use the disease model, you can propose that these diseases are permanent, or permanent until treated, considered more and more severe to offset and justify the horrific side effects of the medications. Do you know why male birth control doesn't really exist? Same reason. They can justify all the horrible side effects for women, because the other option is pregnancy. For men, it's nothing. 
And they're not bothering to invent new drugs without side effects. When they invent new drugs it's just because the last one got too bad of a name, or they can enter a new market. Modern drugs don't work any better than gen1 drugs. They still have horrific side effects. At best, the industry will shit out studies saying the old one was flawed (truth) so they can say this new gen will be better (lie). They're doing it with ssris right now. 
Fundamentally, the single proposed benefit of any of these drugs is that they numb you. To whatever is torturing you. It's harder to be depressed if you can't feel it, or if you just can't muster the same outrage. Of course, there is people who find that numbness to be helpful, or worth it. But often, it's stasis. For the people who have problems that can be worked on, it serves as a stopgap to not actually work on said problems. The natural outcome of the disease model is stagnation for those whose need is to develop skills and resiliency. It keeps them medicalized and dependent on the idea that they're diseased and incapable. Profitable. Stuck in the womb. 
I’ve been there. It’s easier, to wallow, and resist growth because it’s difficult and painful and unfair and cruel and you can think of five billion reasons to justify your languishing. But don’t listen to anyone who tells you you’re just permanently damaged, no matter how nicely they word it, no identity or novel pathologization, no matter how many benefits they promise, especially if they swear up and down some lovely expensive medications with little solid backing and plentiful off-label usage and side effects that’ll kill you. Some days it feels like they want us all stuck in pods, agoraphobic and addicted to the ads they feed us to isolate the markets for the drugs they’ve trained us to beg them to pump us with. Polarization making it as easy as flashing blue light for go, red like for stop, or vice versa. I worry about the kids, for fucks sake. That’s a bit dark and intense, and I apologize. But I want you (generic) to understand, there is a profit motive. Behind everything. And they do not mean well. They do not care about your mental health or your rights or your personhood or your growth. They care about how they can profit off of you.
For those struggling with immovable, society problems, like the narrator grappling with how his job fits into and is accepted by society while his rejection and horror in the face of it does not, it can work about as well as any other drug addiction. Your mileage may vary. From what I've seen, recovering from being on prozac for a long time can be worse than alcohol. They put kids on this shit. They keep campaigning for more. Off label, again. A pharmaceutical company’s favorite thing to do has to be to spread rumors of someone who knows someone who said an off label use of this drug helps with this little understood condition. Or, in the case of mental illness, questionably defined condition. And like, damn, I know I'm posting on the 'medicalization is my identity' website so no one will like all this and has probably stopped reading by now, but yall should be exposed to at least one person who doubts this stuff. Doesn't just trust it. Because I mean, that's the thing right?
It's so big. What would it mean, for this all to be true? Yeah, everyone says pharmaceutical companies are evil and predatory and ghostwriting, but to think about what that really entails. Coming back to the book, everyone knows the car lobby is huge and puts dangerous vehicles through that kill people. What does it mean if the car companies all hire people to calculate the cost of a recall and the cost of lawsuits? No one wants to think about the scale that means for people allowing it or the systems that have to be geared towards money, not safety like they say. Hell, even Chuck misses the beat and has the narrator threaten his boss with the Department of Transportation. And shit, man, if every company is doing this, you think Transportation doesn't know? That they give a fuck? You're better off mailing all the evidence to the news outlets and hoping they only character assassinate you a little bit as they release the news in a way that says it's all the fault of little workers like you, not the whole system. Something something, David McBride, any whistleblower you feel like, etc. 
So I don't blame you, if your reaction is "but but but, that can't be right, people wouldn't do it, they wouldn't allow it" or just an overwhelming feeling of dread that pushes you to deny all of this and avoid thinking about it. Just know, that's in the book. That's all the seatmates on the flights. That's all his fellow officemates. It's easier to pretend, I know.
But think about, how the response fits in with the themes of the book. The story, as a movie too. What drives the narrator’s mental breakdown? How would you handle being in his position? How would you handle being his seatmate? It’s easy to say you’d listen. But have you? Have you had any soul wrenching betrayals of how you thought society worked? How about a betrayal by the thing that promised to be the fix of the first? Can you honestly say you wouldn’t follow that gut instinct, saying follow what everyone says, that person must just be crazy, evil, rude, cruel, whatever it is that means you can set what they said aside?
For a lot of people, they can do that, I guess. Set it aside. Reaching that aforementioned state of managing to cope with the dissonance and ambiguity and despair is very hard. The narrator made the Big Realization, but he couldn’t cope. He self-destructed. Even when people don’t make the big realization consciously, they’re already self-destructing. It’s hard to escape it when it feels easier than continuing anyway. When it feels like the only option,
Would therapy fix the narrator of Fight Club? Would meds fix the narrator of Fight Club? No. He knows too much. All meds will do, by the time he’s in the psych ward, is spiritually neuter him. A silly phrase, but really. Take the wind out of his sails. 
Is he fixed if he doesn’t try to blow up town? If he just shuts up and settles in and stops costing money? If he still can’t cope with the things he’s unearthed? Do you see how this is a commentary in a commentary in a commentary?
Fight Club is an absolutely fascinating story because of this. The fact that it addresses the fallout of knowing. The isolation. The hopelessness. The spiral that results from a lack of hope. This is, I think, what resonates most with people, even if not consciously. Going insane because you’ve discovered something you wish you could unknow. It’s a classic horror story. Should our society be lovecraftian evil? I don’t think so. 
Do I think changing it will be easy? No. Lord knows a lot exists to push people who make these sorts of Realizations towards feelings of individuality and individualized solutions and denial and other distractions and coping methods. And to prevent people who make One realization from expanding on it and considering further ramifications. Fight Club itself gets into this; the isolation of men being a strict part of the role society shapes for their sex leaves them very vulnerable to death fetishes, in a sense, and generally towards self destructive violence. It helps funnel them away from substantial change and towards ineffectual change. Many things, misogyny, racism, serve to keep people isolated from one another, individualized, angry, and impossible to work with. Market segregation; god knows even appealing on those fronts has become such a classic ploy that companies do it now, the US military frames its plundering that way, etc. 
I’ve wandered a bit but ultimately, my point is this: Fight Club is a love letter to the horrors of critical thinking, and the importance of not falling into the trap of self destruction and hopelessness in the face of it. The latter is why Tyler was an anarchoterrorist instead of anything useful. The latter is why it was a death cult. It’s important to work through the horrors of critical thinking so you can do it, and stand on the other side ready to believe in each other. It’s worth it.
75 notes · View notes
seaofreverie · 2 months ago
Text
Sparkstember Day 11: Angst In My Pants (The Decline And Fall Of Me)
Tumblr media
Album two of two in the series of Sparks' immaculate new wave releases! Iconic in every way imaginable from the music to the artwork to ONE music video. I think it's more musically (and lyrically!) varied and mature in tone (besides... a couple exceptions. Yes, an album called Angst In My Pants) than its predecessor, which is a very good development. These songs will leave you chuckling and bopping along and also pondering the intricacies of human existence. Ok, maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but it can't be denied that behind much of the earnestness and theatricality here, there's lots of quite emotional, introspective and thought-provoking stuff to be found.
Thematically, this album goes everywhere. One moment we are in Sextown U.S.A, the next we're visiting Disneyland, California where we make friends among people and animals. On a more serious note though, I think the biggest emotional whiplash one could experience between different songs on an album is between Mickey Mouse and Sherlock Holmes. And yet there's still a very prominent element of humour, even in those songs that are on the more serious or dramatic end of the scale.
I said a few days ago that I'd try to return to the topic of Sparks' brand of humour and how it works, but I don't feel intelligent enough to analyse that today. And I'm pretty sure that from what I've seen, Other People And The Maels Themselves (Said It Better Than Me). So instead, as a little send-off, please remember: if a mouse can be special, well, SO CAN YOU!!! 🫵
Favourite songs (and other highlights):
Angst In My Pants: literally no other song like this one in this world. I can't tell why that is but it's just. So great
I Predict: I had a weird kind of effect where I heard this song in my early days of Sparking and it felt VEEERY familiar to me. I think it was due to the genre / style here, it reminded me of something specific, at first I thought it was very glam rock but I'm pretty sure that this is not it but something else (and I don't know what to call it in that case!). Anyway, banger song
Tarzan And Jane: whoa wait, am I already skipping to the third-to-last song on the tracklist?? I guess I am. This one's great and one of my early favs too (I wonder how long it will take until I run out of things to say about my fav songs and it all just becomes this list of 'it's very good and I like it a lot. next.')
The Decline And Fall Of Me: it's great!! I like it!! And, of course, "check out my pizzas"
Eaten By The Monster Of Love: personal reasons that lead to a printed and framed mini-comic of my making appearing on my desk, which features some of the lyrics of this song, which caused me to have it permanently stuck in my head for a pretty long period of time. And this way I ended up liking it much much more than I did in the beginning, when it still seemed somehow pretty unremarkable to me
25 notes · View notes
teapot-of-tyrahn · 2 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
hello !!! i'm ...
➟ sugar !! i also go by charlie , echo , scott , timmy -- call me whatever's more comfortable for u !!
➟ i'm genderfluid, asexual and biromantic + greyromantic !!
➟ my CURRENT hyperfixations are on NINJAGO and the TRAFFIC LIFE SERIES !! if you're seeing THIS pinned introduction, TRAFFIC LIFE SERIES is currently the MAIN brainrot !
➟ i am a 🚸 MINOR ⚠️ !! please interact with this in mind !!!
➟ i have GAD [ generalized anxiety disorder ] , separation anxiety disorder , social anxiety disorder , selective mutism , depression , DPD [dependent personality disorder] , ARFID [ avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder ] , and involuntary age regression ! though these topics probably won't be discussed at length , please keep them in mind when interacting with me !! at times i may go NON-VERBAL or slip into LITTESPACE , and i ask you be patient with me at those times, thank you !
➟ this is a FANDOM SIDEBLOG - my main blog is @sugrx !! here is where i post FANFICTION, FANART, ANALYSISES , AUS, USERBOXES,,, etc !!
Tumblr media Tumblr media
➟ basic ! queerphobes, xenophobes, misognists, sexists, ableists, racists, terfs, maps, pedos, fatphobes, etc - any and all bigots of ANY shape or form !! ➟ nsfw / fetish / kink blogs !! again , i am a MINOR , and though i'm fine with having mutuals who ARE 18+ , i'd rather avoid 18+ content , thank you !!
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
#tag system is simple ! ;;#writing is in →#my writing#and art is in →#my art#!!#most of my fandom-related content falls into either of those categories . i try to keep my system so it's not too difficult to navigate!#i also have a tendency to ramble - i put // in order to differentiate between tag rambles and actual tags#for example!#//#pinned introduction#trafficblr#hermitblr#mcytblr#life series#blog intro#///#ta-daa !#though usually actual tags come first and ramble tags are at the bottom for algorithum purposes !#anyway. i decided to make two SEPERATE intro posts because i couldn't decide on which theme to go w/ for it and couldn't find a way to -#combine them in a way which didn't clash LOL#this is also my first time talking abt copinglink on tumblr !! thought this be the best place to put this since my linktypes r fictional#i'm hoping it will help me deal with my anxiety better and stop w/ other actual bad coping habits !!#i don’t know TOO much abt the alter human community so pls lmk if I’m not allowed to kin this way / coping link is problematic ;; /gen#i did some research and couldn't find anything saying it was offensive / controversial and i just think it would be a healthy-#-way to gain confidence and adapt to healthy coping ! but pls lmk if this is discomfiting / upsetting to anyone and i'll stop !#or at least not mention it publicly . i mostly only copinglink around close mutuals / friends anyway -#- and tend to consider myself an ' au ' / separate from distinctly canon so don't mind referring to them as separate entites at all#if that makes ppl more comfortable !!
25 notes · View notes