#y’know what maybe for nanowrimo i’ll write down my family history because it is fucking weird. like you think we’ve scratched the surface

[fingertipsmp3]

My brother really messaged me out of the blue after 3 months of no contact then went offline huh

[andromedahawking]

NaNoWriMo Day 2

Day 2, 3,334 words total, complete! Have a look at today’s 1,667!

“Right…” she said. “…I’ll get it out of the way, you and I are both thinking about election day, right?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I’m not looking forward to it. It’s going to be one of the closest in recent history.”

“Closer than ’64, do you think?”

He frowned as he thought about it. “On an electoral level, probably not, but popularly, it’s going to be very tight. It could go either way.”

“I’ve been trying not to think about it, but… it’s hard,” she said. “I turned off my WiFi in October.”

“Same here,” he said, laughing weakly. “God, it’s just… it’s so much to think about. I want it to be over.”

“It’s never gonna be over,” Maria said. “They’ll be talking about this 'til the day we die.”

“Well, at least they’ll have less to speculate about by next Wednesday,” he said. “We’ll have a winner by then, and they can only analyse so much stuff.”

“Let’s hope so,” she said.

They ordered their meals, as well as some wine.

“So, that’s the elephant in the room out of the way, I guess,” John said.

“Yeah,” Maria nodded. “Good thing it got out quickly. I hate not talking about things like this when they obviously need to be talked about.”

“I agree with you,” he said. “It’s better to just get it out there, and spoken, so that way you can forget about it and you don’t have to deal with it later.”

“Exactly! I’m glad at least someone understands that.”

“Do you deal with a lot of people who don’t do that?”

Maria laughed. “I could write you a list a mile long with the names of all the people like that in my life. Nobody seems to want to talk about anything important! It’s all just, the weather this, and how's your sister that, and blah, blah, blah, nothing of importance is ever talked about! I could spend my time watching paint dry and get just as much out of it.”

“Goodness,” John chuckled quietly. “It sounds like you’ve had to endure this for a long time.”

“Years, John. Years.”

“Well, not to make you jealous, but thankfully, I spend a lot of time around straight-shooters,” he said, sipping his wine. “The curse that seems to follow me around wherever I go is that nobody ever takes me seriously when I want to be.”

“Ugh. That’s no good.”

“No. The only time anyone listens to me is on Sunday mornings, and even then a lot of the pews are filled with blank stares and moving hands.”

“Oh, is that what you meant when you said you have church stuff?”

“Yes, I have to get back home for the Wednesday service at my church.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Most people here don’t go every day.”

“I got lucky, I suppose.”

“That’s good. I sort of contribute to the problem,” she said. “I go on Sundays, but the rest of the time I just sleep in.”

“Well, that’s better than not going at all,” he said.

“Yeah, but… it feels like I’m being fake. Which would be an extra helping of guilt to add on, seeing as I converted instead of being born into the faith.”

“Your parents aren’t Christian?”

Maria smiled, tightly. “No. They are not Christian.”

John’s mouth twitched upward a tiny bit. “It sounds like there’s a story behind that.”

“There is,” she hissed through her teeth. “I’m assuming yu’d like to know what it is?”

“If you wouldn’t mind sharing it.”

“Okay then.” She cracked her knuckles. “This one is gonna be fun.

“So, both of my parents were raised in religious families. My mother was born in New York, and she grew up in a Protestant family that didn’t really take the whole thing too seriously. So she just sort of called it quits when she moved out, right? Then my father, he was born in Ohio, and grew up in a Catholic family that took it very seriously, which isn’t really that big a surprise, because Catholics, right? So naturally, he hated it, and when he moved out he also ditched the faith.”

“Sounds like two sides of the same coin,” John said. “Your mother lapses because it wasn’t taken seriously enough, your father because he felt it was taken too seriously.”

“A match made in heaven,” Maria said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “So when they got married, they agreed their kids wouldn’t be raised under a religion, but under the absence of religion! Isn’t that neat?”

“Oh no. Don’t tell me they raised you as an antitheist?”

“Mom didn’t give a damn either way,” Maria said, “but Dad. Holy shit, he hated the idea of me or Thalia joining any sort of religion. We were raised in a godless house with no access to anything of the sort. I couldn’t even buy a Bible just to read it for the sake of curiosity!”

“That’s just not the right way to raise your children,” John sighed.

“I’m glad you agree,” Maria said. “So of course, aside from all the other shit that I had to put up with from them, I couldn’t breathe a word to them about maybe kinda sorta believing in something other than the hellish emptiness of death that supposedly awaits us in this godless universe. No, I had to keep my pretty little mouth shut. It was pretty much the only thing I didn’t tell them about, even after I left.”

“So you converted when you were a teenager?”

“Mm-hm. I got baptised when I was 17.”

“What about Thalia?”

“She doesn’t really care enough to think about big questions like that.”

John laughed. “That sounds like her.”

“Yeah, there’s me, the uppity bitch who’s always doing things, and then there’s Thalia, who’s somehow just as uppity, but can’t be bothered to do anything herself,” Maria said. “And people wonder why I drink.”

“Taking care of a sibling by yourself is hard work,” he said. “It’s only common sense that there’s going to be tension in the relationship beyond normal sibling rivalry.”

“I guess you’re right. And most siblings aren’t disabled.”

“Right.”

“At least she isn’t, like, paralysed or something. Blindness is easier to work with on a social level than a wheelchair.”

John gave her a look. “Well, that sort of depends on who you ask, don’t you think?”

“Honestly, John, I’m one person,” she sighed. “I know that I grew up dealing with this, but I honestly think that having her be blind is less of a problem in society than if she had some other disability. She can rely on her other senses to do the work her eyes can’t, which isn’t possible for someone who has, I don’t know, diabetes, or a spinal cord injury, y’know?”

“It's a fair point, I’ll admit, but at the same time, disabilities aren’t created equal, so trying to compare them is a cyclical argument,” he said.

“You obviously need either more wine or less, saying something like that.”

—

They ended up walking around San Francisco after lunch for a couple of hours. Then John had to get to the Hyperloop station, and Maria’s phone went off with her reminder to go to the grocery store, so they said their goodbyes and quickly hurried on their ways. Maria still wished that John could’ve stayed the night, but now that “church stuff” actually had a description it was harder for her to be upset about it.

She got the groceries, and returned a little bit before 17. The sun kept getting caught in the rearview mirrors of the car, which pissed her off to no end. Then there was thinking about Thalia, which was an exercise in getting pissed off just by thinking, so by the time she got out of the car and went inside, she was in a pretty sour mood.

“Mornin’,” Thalia called out from the living room. “How was school today?”

“Thalia, I’m not in the mood to deal with your attitude right now,” Maria growled. “I got the groceries, did you shower like I asked?”

“Maria, I told you, I showered before you even texted me!”

“If I check upstairs, will Ms. Layton tell me the same thing?”

“Yes!"

“Okay.” She set down her backpack with a loud thump on the dining room table. “Just making sure.”

“What’s got you so ticked off today? Did you walk into a pole or something?”

“No, Thalia, I’ve just had a lot going on today, and my patience has long since been worn thin, so I’m trying not to lose my mind,” she said, pulling out her computer. “You can ensure tonight’s nice and quiet by not being a pain in the ass, m’kay?”

“Fine, Jesus Christ…”

“Hey, what did we talk about?”

“Sorry!”

Maria buried her head in her hands. “I can’t fucking win…”

—

In the end, the day could’ve turned out worse than it did. No group project work in History, meeting up with John went well, and all in all, the afternoon wasn’t the worst thing in the world either. Thalia kept pretty quiet and did her homework without a huge amount of bitching and moaning on the side, and Maria didn’t overcook dinner like Saturday night. By 21, she had finished up her homework for Wednesday, and had a few hours to kill before she absolutley had to be in bed.

So naturally, this was where dumb decisions were made, and she opened up the liquor cabinet.

“Breaking out the vodka, sis?”

“Shut up, Thalia. You’re not my nanny.”

“Thank god I’m not.”

“Thalia.”

“Thank goodness I’m not.”

“Thank you. And yeah, thank goodness you’re not, because I don’t think I could handle a 15-year old being my nanny.”

Thalia laughed at that. “It would be pretty weird to have someone younger than you looking after you.”

“Like having a boss younger than you.”

“Yeah. I would be so weirded out by that. Like, someone accomplished more than me, sooner, and they’re overseeing me? I wouldn’t like that.”

“All the more incentive to do well in school, so you never have to deal with that,” Maria said, pouring her glass. “Heck, you could be the young boss surrounded by older people.”

“Okay, I can get behind that. I would enjoy asserting my power over the elder masses.”

“You would, wouldn’t you.”

“What, like you wouldn’t?”

“I would,” Maria admitted. She downed her shot. “But then again, once you’re in your 30s, age stops mattering so much, so you wouldn’t really have as much of a power play.”

“Really?”