#Most likely the earliest I can see my doctor is late next week

[risenwraith]

#4 I’d felt the lump when it was barely there.

A tiny thing that can be dismissed because it could be a bit of undigested cheese for all the impact and size it has. Only lumps of cheese don’t end up in your tit, so obviously something was going very wrong. All I’m saying is it gave me ample time to be terrified.

I trampled down several panic attacks, told my husband there was a lump in my breast, and cried because we didn’t have any medical insurance post-Covid.

He told me it was just a cyst - easy to remove - not an issue. 

Oh thank gods - yey! 

Only it got bigger, exponentially bigger, and I knew he was wrong.

“My wife needs a breast scan. … June? The earliest slot is June? Unacceptable!” (It was perfectly acceptable to me, but I wasn’t the one on the phone, so that didn’t happen.) For various reasons, but primarily the American Health Care System and the fact we were without insurance, what I felt in in my breast in November 2021 wasn’t investigated by a medical professional until late September 2022. 

Finally I was booked in for scans. Mammogram. Ultrasound. Then everything else – literally everything else with all the medical machines ever. Oh, and the samples that were taken with the stabby biopsy needles. 

(It doesn’t hurt, but it is scary, mostly because your body is convinced it will hurt, and also it’s bastard uncomfortable.) 

“You’re heart’s going like a little rabbit!” said the doctor as he lanced the needle through my breast into the lump. 

Yes, it is, isn’t it? But I can and will lie perfectly still whilst you stab unfeasably large needles through my tit and clip bits of tissue from inside me so you can see if they are cancerous. 

They didn’t tell me the results the next day, they just told me I had an appointment with oncology in a week, which in fairness told me all I needed to know.  The oncologist sent me off for blood work and told me about the other tests I would have - the tests that would show whether the issue was confined to my breast or had run amok through the rest of me. Lungs, heart, bones, any or everywhere really.

At this point in the process your own sense of mortality really kicks you in the face. Because here is the very real point when you could be told you have at most four months to live. This is not a fun point by any means. I got through it by thinking on how I would spend my four months - if it turned out that was all I had. That way, any other news was bound to be better.

[thepeakyfckingblinders]

Never Again || Thomas Shelby x reader

credits to @saralou23​ for the gif

⤠ MASTERLIST⤟

Anon requested/summary: “can I request a fic where the reader is found unconscious or faints in the shop or something and tommy freaks out? I just find protective tommy so ❤️💓💟!! Thank you, your writing is absolutely INCREDIBLE” (Thank you so much honeybun, you’re making me blush, pls, forgive me for being late ❤️)

Warnings: swearing, bossy Tommy, basically Tommy freaking out and being overprotective, me always loving him with all of my mangled soul

Author’s notes:

I hope you are okay darlings, I love you, please stay safe ♡

I’m so sorry for being this late, I have no excuses, forgive me. Also the end sucks, but I’m struggling with my writing lately, so, sorry again.

I love protective Thomas so much, he’s an ass, but he’s a softie, and I’m gonna lose my mind some day.

Behind each one of these works there are sleepless nights and something really close to multiple mental breakdowns, so, please, take a minute to send me a message about it, I need actual actual feedbacks to understand how to improve my skills and grow ♡

If you want to be added to my tag list, please, directly message me

I’m Italian, English isn’t my first language, so I apologize for every possible mistake I made. Also, please, help me improve my writing by telling me if there’s something wrong

ENJOY!

Birmingham’s gelid air hit your sensitive skin with no mercy as soon as your red mary-janes crossed the doorway of the Garrison, only to disgracefully sink into the greyish muddy loam in which the whole of Small Heath seemed to be covered.

Your fingers felt like rigid appendages burdening your already wearied arms, while you tried your best to wrap them around your coat’s edges, in a disperate effort to keep that warm tissue on your bulging clavicles left exposed by the woollen dress you were wearing. No matter how many heavy clothes you decided to put on, that implacable cold still succeeded in making you feel constantly out of forces, debilitated to the core; it had always been that way, since you were nothing more than a little girl obliged to spend one every two months confined in your bedroom, afflicted by incredibly high fever and sometimes even bronchitis.

Truth was that your body had never got used to England’s humid weather, yet, even though you poor healt had previously put you in danger, for your sake, thanks to the enormous progresses made by medicine in the past fifteen years, it was now easy to fight against the ruthless chill of those endless winters. Plus, since the earliest days of your attendence, your wardrobe had been perpetually refreshed with high-quality pieces perfectly in step with the times, for your fiancée had been literally covering you in furs and duvets of all kinds, concerned as he was that you could’ve eventually caught another bad fever, whose deathly consequences he had already experienced on his own thick skin. And for no reason in the world he would’ve even risked to lose you too.

So, as everybody could’ve easily predicted, Thomas was perennially paying attention to your wellbeing: the most famous specialists from inside and outside the United Kingdom had come directly to your country house; if one thing could be taken for granted, it was that your medications would always be settled on your side cabinet, together with a glass of fresh water, every day and every night; and, come hell or high water, he would accompany you during your routine visits to the hospital, even when it meant leaving all of his business without any prior warning.

Needless to say, you were perfectly able to do those things on your own -pheraps except for getting a crowd of world renowned doctors in your living room- and you sure as hell had tried to persuade him that there was no need at all for being so preoccupied all the time; still, he was Tommy Shelby, he simply couldn’t help it. 

The concern for his loved ones’ lives kept stealing his sleep, even on those nights when there was no trace of imminent dangers on the horizon, it kept excoriating the insides of his drained brains, to the point that, more than once, you’d had to sleep alone in your immense king-size bed or reach for him in his study, curling up on one of his uncomfortable armchairs, ready to appease his fears as best you could. In short, for as much as you needed him to relax, you were still able to understand his protective behavior, against which, as a matter of fact, no one could do much; thus you at least tried not to give him more reasons to be worried by paying some extra attention to all those small things you could solve without Tommy even knowing about it. Regularly taking your iron tablets, for example. Nonetheless, it had now been already a week since the Peaky Blinders had started a brand new business involving in effect every metalworking factory in and around Birmingham, and the whole family, you and Tom included, had been so turbulently tied up with work to let every other thought and need slither on the back burner. As a direct consequence, your doctor’s latest prescription was unfortunately left lying on the bottom of your drawer, that being the fourth day in a row you’d spent without taking those pills, and, even though everything appeared to be going well until then, that one Thursday morning your period eventually came and stroke the fatal blow, having you feel so faint and aching that, all of a sudden, the few metres separating your side of the street from the betting shop seemed to implausibly dilate right under your blurred vision, a vexing sense of nausea assaulting your empty stomach led you to lean against a lamppost, your skin still crawling beneath all those heavy tissues.  Dizziness and lethargy almost took over your sore mind, before you shook your head with an abrupt move in a bid to dispel those unpleasent sensations; clients would’ve arrived in less than a hour, Esme had taken John’s kids on a brief fieldtrip, Michael was already in his office, the boys were making their usual rounds of the mills, Finn and Isaiah were dealing with a couple folks in need back at the Garrison and Polly was nowhere in sight, which made you the only available blinder for the opening and, with Friday’s race approaching, there was no way the box-office could remain shut. Hence, more determined than ever, you chocked down the knot forming in your throat due to queasiness and just forced youself to put one foot in front of the other onto the dusty road, until you reached the shop door, not without the risk of tripping over multiple times in the process. Your frozen fingers clutched to the small side-wall now carring all of your weight, whilst your lungs tried to let in as much air as possible. And it worked, each plodding breath seemed to fight your sickness, also your heartbeat was gradually slowing down, thus you shut your eyelids and continued to inhale deeply for a full minute, before your trembilng hand managed to finally turn the key in the lock, giving you free access to the place. 

However, the small click produced by the latch closing again did not live to reach your ears, for they were already brimful of ominous hisses, in a scant moment a bulk of hypnotic grey worms prevented you from seeing anything else, they relentlessly squirmed in front of your dilated pupils, that repulsing view sending brutal shooks straight to your clenched stomach, again. And, before you even had a chance to realize what was going on, your brain completely blacked out.

                                                    ~ ~ ~

Words would not be sufficient to describe the fright taking over Arthur’s features the second your inert silhouette entered his line of sight. Just returned from their daily patrol, he had indeed noticed a small crowd waiting outside the office, cursing and fussing because of the lacked opening, and that alone had been weird enough for him to punch and kick his way up to the entrance, profanities spilling from his mustached mouth every time somebody’s elbow digged into his ribcage, inducing him to hit back so to stand his ground, only to eventually find himself powerless in front of that ghastly scene. It took him a while to recover from the shock, yet the eldest Shelby eventually regained control of his limbs and moved towards your shape with a single step.

“Polly! Pol, come here, for God’s sake!” Those hoarse yells filled the room, reverberating through the brickwalls, so loud that they could’ve been heard from the other side of the city, Arthur fell on his knees right beside you, gently placing a hand under your nape in order to lift your head. Blind panic streaming in his veins kept him for thinking clearly, he didn’t know what to do, thus he simply shook you from your shoulders, hoping in vain to see your eyes fly back open, but your neck just bent backwards.

“Where the hell is that bloody woman when I need her?!” he grunted those words in between his teeth while tigthening his grip on you, then his chest raised in a sharp move: “Jesus Christ, Polly!” He shouted once more, this time conveying all of his breath and blood towards his larynx, his abrasive voice shriveled and insisted on the last letters of his aunt’s name, until swift strides frantically hit the creaking steps, announcing Polly’s arrive. Her eyes struggled to remain open, her left palm was pressed against her forehead in a silly attempt to soothe the tremendous headache resulted from the previous night’s booze, she didn’t even have the time to put proper clothing on, since her mad niece was apparentely going berserk. “You, son of a bastard-” cursed words died underneath her tongue when she understood what was going on, soon her feet took on a life of their own, as they picked up their peace, leading her next to your body now held in Arthur’s arms.

“She’s freezing, Pol, she’s a fucking chunk of ice!” Hiccoughs shattered his worried cries, he almost whined, shifting his gaze from yours to Polly’s face over and over again, she, on the other hand, used the whole lenght of her right arm to clear in one smooth motion the closest desk. “Quick, lay her here” The deafening noise produced by those items colliding with the pavement barely grazed her hears, whilst she nodded to herself in the effort to impose some order on her obfuscated head, searching for a prompt solution that was late in coming, to the point that Finn beat it to the draw and stormed in, pointing a loaded gun to each corner of the room with fear in his cerulean irises. “What the hell’s going on?” That hysterical question echoed through the place, even though the young boy was finding it hard to get his breath, due to the crazy run he had made to reach the shop immediately after hearing that insane screaming. Nonetheless, in the space of an instant, he saw you as well and fell utterly silent, violent dismay caught him off guard, his wide eyes hesitated on your motionless figure; all of a sudden he didn’t know what to think, nor he could get the thought of your death out of his brains.

“My God, she’s as pale as death” Finn let his mind talk through that throttled murmur, regretting it right away, for silty goosebumps crawled on his skin under the pungent pressure of his brother’s instantaneous lethal glare. “Don’t talk shit, kid! Just fucking go and get Tom!”

The redhead didn’t waste any time, he somehow managed to recollect his guts and steadily disappeared behind the door previously left open. While struggling for air and internally searching for the right words to say in front of Thomas, Finn covered the whole distance between the office and the Garrison. Labored gasps coming out of his slightly parted lips in louder groans as he slammed the heavy pub’s doors open, using only his strongest shoulder; both Harry and Isaiah watched him run towards the back room where Tommy was going through the books, they did not dare spill a word and, after all, the boy didn’t even look in their direction, such was his concentration. Still, once he reached the place, all of a sudden his tongue felt dry, his well-organised speech faded away.

“Finn?! What’s wrong?” Tom’s icy eyes were now staring at him through his round glasses, the paper he’d been reading was instantly dropped, although his tone remained steady. “Y-you need to come, now! She... she’s-” A frown formed upon Tommy’s marble face at his little brother’s furious rambling, something wasn’t right, that was crystal clear, yet he wasn’t able to keep up with those hasty and stuttered sentences, so he approached him, putting both his hands on Finn’s shoulders in order to give him a little shove and maybe get some decent information. “Breathe, kid, and tell me what’s going on” That deep, adamant tone somehow sounded scarier than usual roaring inside the boy’s head, hence anxiety definitively won him over, gaining complete control of his mouth too. “It’s Y/n! I don’t fucking know, Tom, s-she looks dead!” All at once, time and space seemed to collapse around him, one single second dilated, covering the space of a whole lifetime beyond his vacant blue irises now fixed on an undetermined spot of the white wall behind Finn’s back.   A gruesome, yet familiar sensation raided his petrified body, it felt like having a beast’s fangs gnawing his throat off, lacerating his flesh to the bone, he could sense every little laceration, his chest being plundered, till even his sable heart was eradicated and then mauled. A strangled wheeze barely lived through his plump lips, that being the only sound he uttered, then his black pupils shrinked and immediately twitched, nailing his sibiling’s gaze. Without receiving an order from his brain, his fists violently gripped Finn’s jacket at the height of his biceps, bringing him a span away from his gnashed teeth with a sharp pull. “Where?” He snarled liked a rabid dog, striking, if possible, geater terror in the young man who struggled to spit an almost inaudible “The shop”, before being shoved against the doorframe as Tommy dodged him and rushed out.

                                                     ~ ~ ~

Polly held the bottle of her almond parfume she’d just put under your nostrils as if her life depended on it, Arthur’s rough palm, instead, began to pat your pasty cheek. “C’mon, love, wake up! Don’t play games, c’mon!” The dorsum of that same hand now poking the left side of your face, and then going back to the other, at incredible speed. You started to feel your face again when his nudges grew in intensity, until he was practically slapping you; soon a tremendous metallic taste invaded your mouth, or rather, you finally sensed it, whilst your eyelids battled against gravity to get back up. Arthur noticed it, he detected that brief flinch and it felt like being pampered with a fresh breeze after days of unsustainable heat. “Oh, fuck, I think I’m having a stroke” His tone held extreme urgency as he grasped for air, tugging with two fingers at his shirt collar; sure, he was great at knocking people off, maybe the best, yet, unfortunately, after that he’d never tried to bring somenody back with the living.

Blinding light rended your shrouded eyes, everything appeared blurred to the point that you couldn’t distinguish Polly’s features, although she was right beside you; nor your hearing was working, since the loud thud produced by the wooden door hitting the brickwall, and then your name barked by your fiancée’s coarse voice, sounded muffled to your ears. With a superhuman effort you succeeded in tilting your face towards the entrance, you recognized the navy-blue suit Thomas had chosen to wear earlier in the moring, still those nebulous images reached your brains with extreme delay, it was like watching vague movie scenes stream in slow motion. Your eyelids blinked as if a plumbeous burden was anchored to them, each flutter seemed to last a full minute, so that you perceived Tom coming to you in multiple shattered motions, while he kept calling you. The moment Tommy furiously jostled against Arthur, in order to take his place by the desk, you gradually went back to see and hear clearly, now being able to seize pure dread sailing those mesmerizing ocean eyes. “Thank goodness, y/n” His big palms envelopped both your cheeks, slightly squeezing them as he lift your neck, revealing all of his hidden delicacy that you, and you only, were able to bring out. “Y/n, love, talk to me” That order came out like a prayer, his voice betraying him once too often, his fingers shaking with worry, while one of his hands held your chin and the other went to caress your locks. Those loving strokes brushed against your skin, slowly infusing a little warmth into your gelid body, he touched you with the unbearable fear of watching you pass away in between his arms, having him struggle to breathe properly. “Do you hear me?” a single, salty drop fell from his long eyelashes and poured your lower lip, you heard his voice crack, distorting, until it became nothing more than a faint whine: “Please, love, talk to me” When his forehead pressed against yours, he finally gave in to the tears that had been held back with drastic ostination, shutting his eyes for a few instants he allowed brutal sobs to trounce his already aching chest. However, that moment of raw weakness was soon restrained, so that you returned to stare into his blue irises. Then, a small grin crossed your pale mouth and, even though your throat felt like gasoline on fire, preventing you from pronouncing a single syllable, you managed to guide your tiny hand to cup his sharp cheekbone. A burning kiss was pressed on its dorsum, before Tommy completely leant into your touch, giving you a look halfway between relief and disperation, he covered your hand with his own, holding it tight. “You’re okay, you’re safe” Those soft murmurs escaped his lips, probably aimed to placate the axphyziating terror still intoxicating his veins. Indeed, as hard as it was to conceive for everybody in that room, although you were the one just recovering from a sudden collapse, Tommy was now the one trembling like a fallen leaf, his arms rested on each side of your shape, sustaining his weight, as he barely stood on his own two feet. Slowly, you regained the necessary strenght to lift your bust, leading him to flutter in your direction, promptly enlacing his forearms around your waist in order to support your movements. “Hold onto me, darling, take it slow” His raspy voice was still unsteady and full of concern, he was holding his breath out of fear, gazing at you with wide eyes and tightening the grip on your hips as if to make sure that you wouldn’t vanish in his palms. You, on the other hand, gave him a rassuring smile, caressing his face mutliple times and placing a brief kiss on his mouth. “I’m fine, Tommy, I’m here with you” you eventually spoke close to his ear so to keep that conversation between the two of you “Let go, my love, I’m here” Your lips accidentally brushed against his forehead once he listened to you and abandoned himself to your tender embrace, gradually drowning into your soft chest while his arms clung on to your figure, his fingertips almost piercing the thick material of your dress as your cheek covered his head, totally annihilating the distance. “Don’t you ever do that to me again. Never again”.

tag list: @spidey-pal​, @shadow-of-wonder​, @stassaurus​​, @peachlle​, @livvtheangel​, @myjbphase​, @namelesslosers, @crazyonesarethebest​, @vxxn128​, @keithseabrook27​, @spaghettirogers​​, @writingstudent​​, @hp-hogwartsexpress , @eggingamazinglove​, @geeksareunique​, @cailoleaf​, @simonsbluee​ , @hereforsmutandfluff​, @starxtt​, @jenepleurepasbaby​, @staygold-bebold​, @marvelschriss​, @captivatedbycillianmurphy​

[mae-gi-writes]

Obtuse | Bang Chan (Stray Kids) - PART TWO

Summary ☆ "I don't know. I want to be his friend but then again, I don't. I mean, how can you simply be friends with someone when every time you look at them, you're thinking about how much more you really want?"

Genre ☆ bestfriends to lovers au, angst, slowburn, suggestive themes, college au, fluff, soft Chan x oc (Micha)

Word count ☆ 

. ° ☆ ° .

PART ONE | PART TWO

. ° ☆ ° .

Idiot, Micha kept on replaying the words like the words to her favourite song, Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

There she sat in the hospital chair beside her mother’s unconscious body, her life hanging by a thread with the help of the machine that beeped obnoxiously in the corner, and all she could think of was of the messed up realization that she was in love with her best friend.

Chan hadn't spoken a word as she'd sobbed and sobbed, even though she wasn't sure what she was crying about exactly. He'd only wrapped his arms around her, pulling her in to rest his head against hers in an embrace so firm and filled with warmth that her heart tugged in pain. He was so close that it pained her, the realization that he was so close yet so far was a blow that left a permanent bruise.

So she'd pushed him away, wiped her tears and gestured him to follow her.

He said nothing as he sat beside her, shifting every now and then as he succumbed to the dreadful silence filling the room.

And she hated it, that he was here as if this was the most normal thing for him to do. Because it wasn't. As if on impulse, Micha couldn't help but glance at his attire that confirmed her suspicions he'd just gotten out of the gym, probably having dropped everything to rush to her side.

"Who told you?" Micha asked. Her voice felt weird, strangled as she spoke.

Chan shifted and she felt his eyes on her face, the warmth of them permeating through her skin, "Felix called."

A stagnant pause ensued. In the silence, Micha forced herself to swallow down the lump of emotion stuck in her throat, forced down the feelings that seemed to have erupted through her every pore like she had just opened up a pandora's box of truths.

Go away, was what Micha's brain screamed. Go away.

But her heart protested. Please don't leave me.

Her brown orbs lifted to his side profile. Please don't leave me.

Even if I love you.

"You should go," is what she murmured out instead, "you're wasting your time."

"Don't say that," he replied, tone firm.

His silent assurance, that made it even harder to push him away. Micha didn't know how to feal with these feelings and though she wished she had stayed blossfully ignorant of them, there was no denying the cold hard truth that now blared atop her head like a red alert sign.

At some point, Micha's eyelids had fluttered closed for the next thing she knew she was squinting, disoriented and cuddled into a warmth that smelt of familiar pine and boy aftershave. Chan.

It was so familiar, laying on his chest and smelling that comforting scent of his, a scent that reminded her of home. She couldn't help but notice how well she fitted against him, the warmth of his hands casual on her waist and his nose nudging her temple and her heart skided to a momentary halt.

This was Chan. Just Chan, her best friend. Nothing else, nothing more.

So it was a relief once the doctor slid through the door, causing her to instantly jostle Chan out of the way. He stated that while her physical injuries would heal in a few weeks, though the one thing that worried him the most was the fact that her mother might not wake up from her vegetative state.

Micha would've fainted if not for Chan's strong hold on the back of her elbow and at some point, her father ushered her out with firm orders that the young man take her home.

"Here," he stuffed a few dollar bills in Chan's hand despite the latter's protests, "get some dinner. I insist."

The next few weeks were a blurry mixture of visiting the hospital while helping her father to run the family restaurant whenever she could. They took turns sleeping and watching over her mother's unconscious form, talked about the happenings of their everyday life in hopes that it would trigger something, anything.

The unforseen circumstances caused Micha to push back her internship by a semester and that so meant that she was permanently home and permanently swamped by none other than her best friend.

"What are you doing here? You’re supposed to have class," Micha asked upon noticing him slide out of the the kitchen with two sets of noodle bowls on a tray. It was no understatement to say that NomNom Noodles Restaurant was bustling with hungry customers as it was a Friday evening. What Micha hadn't expected though, was to see Chan's sloppy smile and sweaty forehead.

He shrugged, "your dad told me you could use the help."

Her heart tugged, partly churning with affection followed by this burning annoyance to get him out of her sight.

And he was helpful; he was a charming waiter that cracked jokes whenever he could, grabbing the dishes from her hands the moment she walked out of the kitchen, wiping tables he wasn't even assigned to. And all that made it harder for Micha to push him away. Oh how she wanted to ignore him, to make him understand that she needed a space, and a lot of it.

But she didn't want to hurt him. Not when he deserved so much better.

"Oi."

Micha was whipped back to reality when she felt Chan's finger poke her forehead, only to be faced with his dimpled grin, "earth to Micha. Customers are waiting."

Heat flushed through the back of her neck. She swatted him away, "don't touch me with your greasy hands."

"Aw shut up you," he made a move towards her, causing her to sidestep with ease, "stop it, Chan--"

She whipped around, almost bumping into one of the chairs as Chan's arms circled around her shoulders to pull her back to hug her close, "Chan!"

"Don't I smell nice? I'm just sharing it with you!"

And as if on cue, the door chimed open, both their heads whipping up with welcoming grins.

Only to face Ayeong's smile.

"Ayeong!" Micha all but shoved Chan away as she noticed the slight, barest slip of the said girl's smile.

Chan whooped and ran up to his girlfriend, cheeks flushed and eyes crinkling into crescents, "baby girl! You came!"

"And I brought company," she allowed him to kiss her cheek just as the door opened to reveal Minho and Seungmin bundled up into their coats.

Swalllowing down the sudden lump of pain, Micha went forward into Ayeong's open arms, "hey, it's been a while."

"I know!" Ayeong hugged her tight, so genuine that tears threatened to fall. Micha squeezed back slightly before quickly diverting her attention to greet the two other boys.

The restaurant was empty by the time their noodles were fresh out of the pot, meaning that they had the restaurant for themselves as they caught up on life and remembered their high school days. Micha learnt that Minho was interning at another restaurant, Seungmin had passed his Design projects with flying colours, and Ayeong had already signed a contract with the business hotel that she had trained with.

"That's amazing,” Micha said to Ayeong, "do you like it?"

"I do," Ayeong beamed, "and my superiors are nice too. They're all a bunch of guys so they aren't complicated."

"Careful Ayeong, one might think that you're gonna change boyfriends," Minho teased and caused the girl to stick out her tongue at him before leaning against Chan's shoulder.

Micha's eyes instantly shot away, swallowing hard at the knot forming in her stomach. She couldn't help it. It was like second nature to hurt herself by catching small glimpses of their entwined hands, of the adoration dripping from their eyes and she wished she could just make all the pain end.

It seemed like Minho noticed her unusual demeanour, for as they were leaving the restaurant after washing up the dishes, he'd stopped by the door to shoot her a concerned look.

"You okay, Micha?"

Surprise flitted through her face for a few seconds, "uh, yeah. Yeah I'm fine."

She saw him glance at Chan's figure before looking back at her with pursed lips, eyebrows knitted together as if deep in thought, and shook her head.

After all, who could deprive Chan of his happiness?

. ° ☆ ° .

It was safe to say that Micha fell into a routine; waking up to visit her mother in the early morning hours, replacing her father at the restaurant when it was his turn to sit at her mother's bedside, avoiding Chan at all costs even though he was practically throwing himself in her way, and locking up at around ten, nine earliest if the restaurant was void of clients.

She would've made a much greater effort at pushing Chan's helping hand away if not for the fact that her mother was mostly occupying the forefront of her mind. The truth was, a small part of her was actually relieved that Chan stayed no matter how angry she seemed, how cold she was to him. He was a big puppy constantly coming back for more no matter how much she kicked at his countenance.

And that made her feel even worse.

"Me and Aejong made pancakes the other day," Chan chatted on one late evening as they were clearing the tables, with Micha responsible for wiping them down while he mopped the floor, "she's a horrible cook. As unbelievable as that sounds."

"Why? Because she's too good at everything?" Micha knew she sounded bitter, but her tongue seemed to have a mind of its own, lashing out without control.

Chan, as oblivious as he was, didn’t seem to catch her sense of mockery, “maybe not everything. But she’s definitely very talented in many ways. I never knew she took piano lessons until she was seventeen. She passed the exams and all.” 

"Good for her.” 

“You know what’s the best thing though? I really like that she never boasts about herself. That, I admire that--”

“Yes Chan, I get it,” Micha finally snapped.

Chan paused in mid-mop, “What? What did I do now?” 

Her teeth sunk onto her lower lip as she kept on wiping down the tables instead of answering his question. 

“Why are you angry with me?”

"I’m not angry with you,” she folded her dishcloth a little too aggressively and turned to the other table. 

“Then why are you talking to me like that?” 

“It’s nothing.” 

“Micha.” 

“I said it’s nothing!” Micha finally whipped around to scowl at him and maybe it was the mixture of saddened pain whenever she thought of her dying mother along with the continuous stab, stab, stabbing of knives that pinched her heart every time she saw Chan so much as utter his lover’s name, a name that wasn’t hers, that brought tears to her eyes despite her not wanting to let him in, not anymore, not when he was one of the sources causing her pain. 

But the young man’s frustrated expression gave way to instant worry the moment he caught her eye. He made a move towards her. 

And that was when she burst into a fit of angry, heart-wrenching sobs. 

It was as though all the pain and the pent-up emotion that she’d stuffed at the back of her heart like an unused closet she could throw away the key suddenly burst open without warning, for once she started crying, Micha found that she couldn’t stop. Her tears only heightened upon feeling the warmth of her best friend’s embrace, pulling her closer and allowing her to sob her way through the tides of pain and worry and sadness that seemed to have taken over her countenance. 

Cheek pressed against the side of her head and hands softly rubbing comforting circles along her back, Micha just allowed herself to feel sorry for her state, if only for this one night where she thought that everything was slipping through her fingers; her mother, Chan. Her career. Her future. 

Once Micha had cried all the tears from her body so that there were none left, she could only rest against Chan as he rocked her from side to side, the only comfort that was holding her broken pieces together at this point. She hated it, loathed it. His kindness, his genuine concern for her. 

It made it so much harder to push him away. 

“How long have you been holding this in?” came his softened murmur against her hairline. She shivered unconsciously, hating the way her heart seemed to beat a little faster merely for his alto. Or maybe it was the closeness, the intimacy of his touch, especially in the dim lights of the restaurant with only the soft distant sounds of traffic in the distance to keep them company. 

“It’s not about how long,” Micha’s fingers unconsciously gripped the back of his hoodie, hoping to extend this moment for a little longer. Just for tonight. She continued in a mumble, “everything is...everything is just so overwhelming.”

"Want to talk about it?” 

Micha’s lips pressed into a thin line. When she spoke after her slight bout of hesitation, her voice trembled, “it’s like I’m not even in my life anymore. I feel like I’m in a nightmare-- and I can’t wake up.”

He hummed in reply, hugged her just a little tighter and kept rocking from side to side. That was all the encouragement she needed. 

“I mean, my mom’s a vegetable and she’s--dying,” a small sob echoed through her throat, “I know how these patients end up. I see no other solution. She’s going to wither away in that bed and I can’t do any fucking thing about it. And then there’s my degree which I’m not completing because we obviously need the money for mom so I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, to my life and to my career and just, I just can’t breathe Chan and it scares me, it scares me so damn much--”

“Hey hey,” he pulled back just enough to see another path of tears dribbling down her face, thumb reaching up to brush it away, “it’s okay, shh. Enough crying, hm? You know I hate it when you cry.” 

That only incited her to cry some more and Chan made a noise of protest before he cupped her cheek, gently wiping them away as they fell, “I know that everything sucks right now. I--I can’t even imagine how impossible everything must be for you, and I can’t tell you that things will sort themselves out because we never know what might happen.”

“But,” he continued with a gentle squeeze to her hip then and she tensed slightly at the intimacy of his gesture, “I swear it gets better. I swear it on my heart. And if you want to cry then cry, I’ll be here. If you need to shout, to scream, to punch someone, I’ll be there Micha,” tilting her chin up so that she had no choice but to gaze at him, he cracked the softest of smiles that left her all giddy inside, “I’m not going to let you go through this alone, that I can promise you.”

Swallowing thickly, it was hard not to squirm underneath the soft glimmer of his soft maroon-eyed stare. So she dropped her eyes while mumbling out a soft, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” he whispered back.

“You don’t deserve to be here, you-- you’ve done so much for me and I don’t even know how I’m supposed to repay that--”

“There is nothing,” he cut her off firmly while his hold tightened unconsciously, “to be sorry for.” 

Still, Micha’s eyes suddenly found interest in the patterns of her best friend’s shirt, knowing that there was no possibility of eye-contact now, not if she wanted to keep her self-control in check. Maybe it meant nothing for Chan to hold her so casually in his arms, but there was no denying the fact that anyone looking through their restaurant window could mistake them for a couple, and the thought caused Micha to reel back in self-disgust. 

As if sensing her inner turmoil, her best friend’s hand went up against the back of her head before he nudged her to his shoulder. And while Micha’s brain was shaking in disapproval, she couldn’t find the strength to fight against what her own body yearned for, returning back into his arms and telling herself that it was just for tonight. Tonight, she would push everything at the back of her mind and just for now, would enjoy the mere warmth and comfort that came with Chan’s arms.

Burrowing her face into the crook of his neck and taking in his scent, Micha allowed her eyes to slip closed for a moment, trying her best to engrave this into memory. 

Just for tonight, she promised herself inwardly. Just for tonight, she would be selfish. 

Just for tonight, she would imagine that Chan was hers. And no one else’s. 

. ° ☆ ° .

"Do I have to be there?"

Micha caught Minho's eye as he helped her hand through her coat sleeve. The said young man's eyebrow rose at her question as if she'd never asked a thing so dumb, "yes you do."

"But why?" She stomped her feet while whining, "I don't even like to drink. Or dance."

"It's my birthday. I call the shots."

"I hate you."

"Aw, me too," he pinched her cheek with aggressive fondness and Micha batted him away with her hands, scowling and muttering a string of curses under her breath as she trailed after him towards his car.

Minho's birthday was to be special as he was turning twenty-two, the perfect excuse to go out and drown themselves in alcohol. Felix, Changbin and Jisung had even rode all the way from their campus to stay over for the long weekend, taking advantage of the public holiday to party the night away.

"Hey, can I ask you something?" Minho asked as he slowed to a stop at a red light.

Micha turned to him, "yeah?"

He hesitated for a few seconds. Then, "do you like Chan?"

It was so sudden, like ice running down her back and making her go tense, fingers curling onto the material of her dark pants. Micha gazed out at the stop light until it went blurry, not knowing what to say to make it sound truthful.

"No--"

"I know he doesn't see you," Minho spoke up hurriedly, "but I see the way you look at him. I couldn't help but ask."

It wasn't like she had planned to let her secret out so soon. But he'd caught her red-handed. Her shoulders slumped, followed by the softest of sighs escaping her lips.

"You caught me," was the only thing she said.

Another pause that allowed the words to settle between them, before the light turned green and the car moved forward. A good distraction against the awkwardness sticking to Micha's heart like sweat.

"Do you..." Minho paused, "do you think you should tell him?"

"No."

"Don't you think he needs to know?" Minho turned his car down a street lined with pubs. They were slowly approaching their destination, “It’s not fair to him.” 

She kept her gaze out of the window, partly too embarrassed to face him and partly to keep herself from crying, "what good would it do?"

She was glad that they had reached the parking lot of the restaurant bar at that point, for she had no intentions of continuing a conversation that led to nowhere and, ignoring Minho’s call for her name, quickly jumped out of the vehicle and strode right up to the doors of Seniora’s. 

The restaurant was already full and she was glad that they had at least booked a private VIP spot in advance, thanks to Seungmin’s amazing organization skills. Micha weaved her way through in the dim spotlights shining atop dark mahogany tables that blended in with the darkness, trying to find their respective table among the throng of pretty, made-up girls in too-short dresses and guys who had no problem puffing out their cigarettes right into her face. 

“Guys!” Felix’s voice boomed through the jazz notes floating through the air, and Micha turned towards his voice to see him waving frantically, a huge grin on his childish face, ‘over here!”

His excitement was contagious as it caused her own lips to stretch into a mirroring grin. She bounded into his arms without hesitation, “Felix! You made it! You said you had an assignment to finish.”

“You know how convincing Minho hyung gets once he sets his mind to it,” the freckled man gave her a once over before he whistled, “don’t you look--”

“--Fucking gorgeous, Micha,” the pair turned towards the voice, seeing Changbin with open arms while she squirmed at his compliment. He was being too kind, though her sleek black jumpsuit that clung to her curves was definitely a contrast to her usual sweater and jeans. Behind him stood Jisung and Seungmin, as well as a few other of their classmates, girls and boys included.

Her eyes suddenly locked onto a familiar pair of dark orbs. Chan. 

“Hello! Hug, please?!” Changbin’s hand brought her attention back as he waved before her, scowling in mock annoyance. Micha grinned, wrapping her arms around his neck, “come here you big baby.” 

“Careful Mi, he might have wandering hands now that he sees you’re more than just a replacement for Chan,” Seungmin commented while giving her shoulder a squeeze. 

That earned the latter a glare from the said muscled man, “what? I’m just stating how beautiful she looks.” 

Micha made her rounds of greeting -- did Minho’s friend group triple by tenfold since she was gone?-- and was exhausted by the time she finally stumbled before Chan.

“Hey, look at you,” Chan offered her a dimpled grin and she swore she wanted to coo at how cute he was. Stop that, Micha gave herself a mental slap as he continued, “all I’m gonna say is, stay away from Changbin tonight.”

“He’s not going to do anything,” she rolled her eyes, “I’ve known him long enough. I’m basically his brother.” 

Her best friend said nothing, only gazed at her in that undecipherable way of his, like he was trying to solve a puzzle that couldn’t be solved.

“What?” she asked. 

“Uh--nothing,” he dropped his gaze, looked away just in time for their attention to be diverted by Minho calling for a round of shots, “alright alright everyone! I’ll open up the party, shall we?”

Before she knew it, Micha had been tugged along by none other than Felix only to be dragged to the counter where a row of shots were being filled to the brim. She didn’t have to ask, knew instantly by smell that this was definitely not water. Her nose burned at the sting of vodka permeating her nostrils and she cursed under her breath as Minho handed her one with a teasing, yet sympathetic grin.

“I think you’ll need it tonight,” Micha couldn’t stop herself from scowling at the underlying meaning in his words. She swore at him, “dick.” 

Micha hadn’t realized how monotonous, how boringly routine, her life had become ever since she flew back to her motherland. What with her mother’s situation in hospital and her running around trying to cover up all of her father’s blind spots, Micha had forgotten how it actually felt to be young, to be as carefree as she usually would be during university in-between her constant flow of assignments, how she used to get into this ‘fuck-it’ mood and hit up the arcade with the rest of the boys before winding up at one of the local bars, beers in their hands as they competed on who could chug down their drinks faster. 

So she took advantage of Minho’s birthday to let herself relax and actually pay attention to what was happening to her, around her. Just in this moment. Nowhere else. And it felt good. It felt...alive. Free.

She danced along to the music, chatted with the other girls who she now realized were quite cool and sassy in their own flirtatious ways, drank shot after shot every time another one of her friends dragged her back to the bar without realizing that maybe she should’ve kept count.

Until it was all too late. The alcohol didn’t have any effect. Until it hit her like a tow truck.

And maybe this sudden rebellious streak had manifested itself the moment her eyes lingered over the familiar pair of figures on the dance floor, chest clenching and heart crumbling at the sweetest brush of Chan’s fingers against Ayeong’s forehead. Micha turned away just in time to halt the tears burning through the corners of her eyes and she impulsively made a grab for Changbin’s arm before pulling him along with her, “let’s get another drink.” 

“Are you sure Mi? You kinda look tipsy already--”

“It’s on me. Now stop being a wuss and come on.”

Seniora’s was filled to the brim now that it was almost past midnight and the sea of bodies aided to calm the storm threatening to split her heart into. It made it easier to breathe, easier to push back the thought at the back of her mind as the alcohol paved its way through her blood and thrummed against her veins. 

It felt good. Too good. And Micha wanted this numbness to last forever.

. ° ☆ ° .

Unfortunately, it didn't.

"It's alright, you're alright," Changbin's soothing alto comforted her as she kept on throwing up the contents of her dinner, continuously dragging her hair back to hold it up and out of the way.

"Oh god--" Micha's stomach lurched "I'm sorry--" she couldn't stop herself from vomiting once more and boy, was she glad that Changbin had dragged her out of Seniora's just in time.

"So?" Felix called from the corner of the small street in which they were hiding from curious eyes. No point in giving people something to talk about, "how is she?"

"Holding up," Micha called back despite the sour taste in her mouth. When it felt like she wasn't going to pass out anymore, she slowly dragged herself upwards, throwing Changbin's concerned expression a weak smile.

To which he replied, "you look like shit."

"Thanks Changbin. That's exactly what I need to hear," Micha rolled her eyes, feeling his strong arm wrap itself around her waist. She allowed herself to lean into him just this once, fearing that she might trip over her feet and fall flat on her face if she wasn't careful.

They stumbled over to Felix who, upon giving Micha a once-over, stated that she was to be sent home at once.

"I'm fineeee guyssss," Micha whined through slurred words, "pluss, I really wanna...dance y'know?"

She swayed a little for good measure, only to stumble and she would've landed flat on the sidewalk if not for Changbin's arm holding her upright.

"I'm bringing you home," Changbin's tone was firm.

"Nooo, I don't want to go home yet!"

"Micha, you and I both know that you're too drunk to make those decisions right now."

"But Changbinnieeee I just--I really want to--" and as soon as the picture of Chan's face flashed before her eyes, she felt her resolve crumbling into the form of tears, "I want to...forget about him--"

It hurt too much. She couldn't keep it together. It was like she was forcing herself to hold in the pain burning through her loins and no sooner had had she tilted up to meet Changbin’s eyes that she burst into wretched sobs.

She felt him still for a moment, arm hesitantly tugging her closer, hand wrapping around her head in comfort, “h-hey,” he peered into her face, slightly panicked at her outburst, “what--what’s the matter?” 

“Mi?” Felix’s voice joined in. Warmth swept over her side, “Mi, what’s wrong? Do you not feel good? Do you want to go home?” 

Micha nodded, and felt herself getting tugged to Changbin’s chest. That made her cry even harder, for while his scent was nothing short of comforting, it wasn’t the warmth she was looking for.

All she wanted was for Chan.

But he wasn’t hers. And he never will be.

“I got her,” she heard Changbin’s words over the raging storm tossing her heart aside. Warmth circled her shoulders -- his leather jacket, no doubt -- and she allowed his hands to steer her away from the loud bass beats of the restaurant bar and she had to give that to him. No matter how much of a bad boy he was, no one could possibly deny him of his heart of gold. That Micha was pretty sure of.

They were halfway up the street with Changbin flailing for a cab when a familiar car pulled up their street. Its window rolled down, causing Micha’s breath to halt in her throat.

“Need a ride?” Chan’s eyebrow was raised in amusement, only to drop in concern upon noticing her pale composure, “what the--Micha?!” 

“No,” Micha quickly stuffed her face into Changbin’s shoulder, “Changbin, please...” 

The latter, as confused as ever, nudged her towards the car, “come on Mi. Chan’ll take you home.” 

“Nooooo.” 

"Not the time, Micha. Seriously, get in the car.” 

“I said noooo--”

Too late, for Changbin simply whipped her up in his hold, walked right around to the passenger door while ignoring her trying to sock him one, before plopping her into the seat. He slammed the door in her face and waved goodbye, “see you tomorrow, loser!”

Great. That was exactly what she needed. To be alone with Chan.

“Well someone drank a little too much tonight,” was the first thing he said the moment he pulled onto the street, a little smirk sent in her direction. Micha only sighed heavily, before leaning away to look out of the window pane. 

This was painful, sitting here with Chan with all those unresolved feelings burning her loins while he sat, totally oblivious and charming and just so breathtaking that it physically hurt her fingers from stopping any attempts to hold his hand, just touch his skin, just-- feel him. 

“Where’s...Ayeong?” she mumbled against the glass.

Just the name caused her chest to tighten. 

“I dropped her off with the other girls. They’re having a sleepover or something.” 

“She’s not spending the night with you?” 

“No.” 

“Ohh how dumb of her,” the words rolled off her tongue so easily now that there was alcohol swimming through her veins. It actually felt good to know that Ayeong was not to be with Chan that night, “it’s her-- it’s her lossss.” 

“Oh you are so drunk.” 

“I am...” she hiccuped and threw him a scowl, “not drunk!” 

Chan chuckled, reaching over to ruffle her hair playfully and that simple act merely got her heart racing, “I’ll see if I have some extra aspirin to give you for your headache tomorrow--” 

"Chan, can I--can I tell you something?” 

He stopped at the red light and as his head turned, eyes finding hers in the darkness of the morning hours, a surge of courage suddenly overtook her.

She wanted to blame it on the alcohol even though deep down Micha was certain a small part of her had always wanted to let her best friend in on the most deepest, darkest secret she wished she could carry to her grave.

But this secret that had been eating her from the inside out, was something that was making her heart to burst at the seams. And while she never even imagined of hurting Chan that way, she knew that this was inevitable. It had to be done, for her to move on from it. Because she’d realized then and there, that it would be impossible for her to just bury those feelings away, no matter how hard she tried.

So that left her with no other choice.

“I think that,” her hand rose up as if on instinct to poke his cheek then, eyes drooping with sleep, “I think I....might be in love with you.” 

-----

Tagging: @allyg-onz​ @elysianxshepherd​ @rindomo​ @freckledquokka​ @maedesculpaeusoubi​ @missskzbiased​ @seungoclock​

[katblu42]

I have tossed up whether or not to post this, but I've decided to just go ahead and see how it lands. It is very personal to me, and I'm posting it because today is 2 years since I had to say goodbye.

This is basically a rambling vent that came out after the most traumatic period of my life so far. I needed to write it all down, chronicle it and get it out of my head, and the original destination for it was (my other) fandom.

It is more detailed than the story I posted earlier in the week, but it requires all the same warnings for some pretty unpleasant stuff. Please take heed before continuing.

Warnings for Death Illness Hospital Cancer (Medical) Drugs Medical Procedures CPR

Deep breath Late in 2018 my husband, S, began complaining of a sore throat. He's the kind of male who won't go to the doctor unless he is literally dying. He finally went to his GP in January and was told there was an issue that needed more investigating. He was supposed to go back to the GP in 2 weeks, but we were on holidays then, so he ended up not going back until mid March. GP sent him to a specialist, but the earliest appointment was early April. Consultation, camera down the throat and $400 later the specialist says Cancer - two of them, one in the mouth, one in the throat. Next appointment is the biopsy. By now S has lost almost 20kg because he struggles to eat (and because apparently Cancer can do that to a person anyway). Now there are appointments at the local hospital with the Radiation Therapy Dr, the specialist in Chemotherapy and a dental team (who wanted to take all his back teeth out at first, but changed their minds when they saw where the mouth cancer was, and how hard it was for S to open his mouth wide). During all this I'm still juggling work commitments as we are building up to one of our busiest periods, which covers pretty much the entire month of May. I'm sharing appointment chauffeuring duties with his Dad. It is decided that due to S's weight loss and difficulty eating it is advisable to put a feeding tube (that they call a peg) in his stomach. This is basically a precaution in case he can no longer swallow anything at some point during early treatment. Surgery after Chemotherapy begins will be difficult to recover from. As it turns out the peg is never actually used for feeding S. The first cycle of Chemotherapy begins on Wednesday 8th May. The plan was to do at least 2, probably 3 cycles of Chemo and then begin combination Radiotherapy/Chemo. At first things seem to be going okay. Three medications are administered as part of the Chemo - 2 are done on the Wednesday at the Cancer Clinic, and the third he has to carry around with him for 5 days, returning on Sunday to have the rig removed once that one is done. The peg starts leaking during these 5 days. He is given advice over the phone not to worry about the leak - but I wonder about that advice. I can't be with S all day - work is busy, and he's a grown up who can ask for help if he needs it. Only he's the kind of male who will not make a fuss if he's feeling "not okay". By Tuesday (14th May) S is not feeling much like "eating" - which consists of swallowing soft stuff like milkshakes, jelly (jello), custard and the like - and I basically have to force him to go for a walk around the block with me, just to keep him from lying on the couch all day. (Tuesday is my regular day off). He seems okay, in the "so-so" sense rather than the "fine" sense. He's not particularly nauseous, just a bit Blah. Wednesday - while I'm at work - S stays home all day, which is unusual for him. He is a social butterfly who can't resist going across the road to the Bowling Club just to sit with his mates for a bit. The peg is still leaking, and he feels tired and a bit yuck. By now I have asked him a few times if I should be calling the hospital for advice and he says no - doesn't want to make a fuss. I don't stress too much because he has an appointment at the hospital on Thursday - it's with a Social Worker, but I know that he will be at the hospital, where they will ask him how he's feeling, and if they think he needs something they will take care of him. Thursday comes and he doesn't want to get out of bed. I go to work, telling him to make sure he gets to his appointment, even if he doesn't feel like going. His Dad calls me at lunch time and tells me S didn't go to the appointment. He got in the car, they got down the road, then S told his Dad to just take him home. His Dad tells me S doesn't look good, he thinks S should be in hospital and I wonder why he didn't take S straight there if he was that worried. I get home just after 5pm and S is in bed feeling miserable. I don't get much of a good look at him - the room is dark - but he talks

to me. He's not feeling nauseous, not throwing up, but also not eating or moving much. Over the next few hours he's up and down to the toilet at least once an hour. I ask if he has diarrhoea, because if he does I should take him to hospital. He says no, "not much is coming out". It's after 10pm, Thursday 16th May, when he calls out to me from the bathroom. Something about the way he calls out makes me get straight up to see what's wrong - normally I yell back "what's wrong?" or "just a minute", but this time I think I had an instinct that said something was wrong. I find him sitting on the toilet, slumped forward with his head between his knees. He can talk to me at this point, but I have to help him sit up - he really can't move - and his skin is quite yellow (which alarms me). By the time I have him sitting upright he's not talking to me any more, his eyes are only half open and not blinking and he can't squeeze my hand. I run and get my phone and call an ambulance. Now his breathing is laboured, and as the emergency call taker is asking me to "say now every time he takes a breath" his gasps are getting further apart. I have to get him clumsily onto the floor of our tiny, narrow bathroom and give him chest compressions. 2 ambulances are on their way. Minutes later I have 4 ambulance crew members working on my husband in our tiny bathroom, and I have no idea what is going on. By midnight S is in emergency at the local hospital, and I'm in a private waiting room, alone. I call my Mum - I've already called his Dad on my way to the hospital in my car (they didn't take me in the ambulance). It's about 12:30 when a doctor comes to talk to me. Infection. Kidneys and liver struggling. Blood pressure through the floor. No white blood cells. This is by no means good. By the time I get to see him in Emergency I have my Mum and his Dad with me. S is basically in an induced coma and about to be moved up to ICU. It's about 1:30am. Once he's moved to ICU we wait in another waiting room for more news. A surgical consultant comes and sees us - I think it's nearly 3am - she says surgery is not an option. The infection is in his digestive system. There is no clear area to surgically remove, and his system is so weak it would not take well to surgery anyway. S's Dad leaves soon after that. This is hard for him. It was only 3 years ago that he was here in this very ward with his wife. This is where she passed away after an infection she just could not fight. He tells me "don't let them put him down" - I guess because he had to make that decision for his wife/S's Mum. I think it's after 6:30am when I decide to go to the intercom and buzz the nurses station to find out what's going on. They let us in to see him. All they can tell us is that they are throwing every kind of medical support they can at him in the hope they can help him fight off the infection - blood products, meds to raise the blood pressure, antibiotics. He's been ventilated through a tube in his mouth since the ambulance. They have to run a heating vent to raise his body temperature. They let me into the room, but I see no point in holding his hand or anything - he is unconscious, he won't know I'm there. We go home. I had about 3 hours sleep. By the time I could crawl into bed it was about 8am. By 11am people are starting to text me asking what's going on, checking if I'm okay. I had managed to text my boss about needing to call an ambulance while I was in the emergency waiting room. He's now replied to say I don't need to be at work today, but in the back of my mind is the fact that I have a show to work on, starting on Sunday - we are so busy that there will be no one else who can replace me on this show. (And we had a Federal Election on Saturday as well, so I was going to have to fit voting in around visiting S). At some point on this day a doctor calls me to get permission to administer a drug to S. This drug is not approved for use in Australia, but it is approved in the US. As a result they will have to ship it in from interstate, because there is not much

stock in the country, and I have to sign my permission for them to use it. It is a reversal drug for the 5 day chemo medication. It works best if administered soon after the chemo treatment - we are already past the ideal timeframe, but it is our best shot at helping S. S is unconscious and fighting for the next couple of days, and I'm half dreading that call that says things have taken a turn for the worse, come now! Instead, I see him for a short period each day, but he doesn't know I'm there. And I keep doing the work I have to do - at least this show is close to home for me, and close to the hospital. He is being supported by the blood pressure medication (Noradrenaline) which they are slowly able to reduce in dose, his temperature is stabilising, and the chemo reversal drug has had some positive effect. His white cell count is coming up - probably with the help of the blood products he's been given. By Tuesday 21st May S is awake and aware, and they have been able to remove the ventilator tube. The Physio is concerned about how weak he is - movement in his arms and legs is limited. He is breathing on his own, but it's hard work because his muscles are weak. His lips and mouth have been bleeding a bit around where the tube was. Still, we are seeing slow, small improvements and hoping for the best. On Friday they have to re-insert the breathing tube - he is too weak to maintain his breathing without assistance. This is a set-back, and comes with a warning that the breathing tube can't stay in his mouth/throat for too long, because it can cause all kinds of complications, especially in his compromised state. They tell me that without marked improvement soon they may have to perform a tracheotomy and insert the ventilator there. By this stage they have moved from nasogastric feeding to Parenteral nutrition (intravenously). The peg is still leaking. I'm now getting into a rhythm visiting S when I can for as long as I can around my work hours, and answering enquiries about his health and well wishes from family and friends on both my phone and his. I no longer have rehearsals every night, and the weekend's performances go pretty well. I know he's still critical, but he's stable and despite the set back S seems to be on a path of slight improvement again. The next set-back comes in the form of a flare up of the infection. The gut is still very inflamed - particularly the bowel. More blood products, more antibiotics, Noradrenaline dosage increased again. There is a mention that he probably has a slow internal bleed somewhere. Clotting is a problem - the bleeding in his lips and mouth is evidence of this too. Before I go to my Friday show I have to sign the permission for them to perform the tracheotomy - they've decided it needs to be done, and an emergency surgical team will do it but it could be a day or two before the operation actually goes ahead. Through this entire week S has been awake and aware, communicating with me as best he can around the breathing tube and the bleeding lips, which are scabby and sore. He is still very much alive mentally, still able to laugh at our corny jokes and request the music be turned up! Being in ICU he's not allowed flowers of gifts or anything, but they did allow me to take in a little blue tooth speaker so he could have the radio on all day. I see him as early as visiting hours allow on Saturday 1st June - his 42nd birthday. I have 2 shows on this day, and won't be able to see him again until Sunday. I leave the hospital soon after his Dad and brother arrive for a visit, around 11:30. Around 12:30, while I'm running sound checks for the matinee show, I get a phone call asking me for permission to do the tracheotomy. At first this confuses me - they have permission already. Apparently they are now doing it in ICU, not in the emergency theatre or wherever. He was more drowsy on the Sunday, after the tracheotomy, but still essentially in the same condition - stable. I cried off sick for work on Monday and spent a bit more time with him - I knew I had to be at work on

Tuesday for a morning staff meeting. The hospital social worker called me before I went to visit S, wanting to arrange a "family meeting" for this week some time. At first we settled on Friday morning, but later they asked me if we could arrange a time earlier in the week. After re-arranging my work schedule we agreed on 3pm Tuesday, even though S's Dad would not be able to be there anymore. Then I arrived for my Monday visit with S. We had the radio on - S likes to have music playing, even when he's falling asleep - and the announcers were talking about the State of Origin (a Rugby League series of 3 matches between rival state teams, New South Wales and Queensland). I told him I'd make sure we put the radio on the right station on Wednesday night so he could listen. Suddenly the most important thing in the world for him was finding a way to be able watch the game! I told him I'd find a way. Tuesday comes and I get through my staff meeting and a few other things on my now half day before running back to the hospital for this family meeting. It turns out this is just me, S, his ICU team, his oncology team and the social working re-capping what S has been through so far, and then scaring me (and more so S) by saying out loud the words "Palliative care". Essentially they are telling us we are out of further options. He is being given everything possible to assist recovery - the blood pressure meds are now at a low dose, but they still have to support his blood pressure, he is still on a ventilator to assist his breathing, the infection is still not improving, but it has not got worse, they have run out of different antibiotics to throw at the infection, it still seems the bleed is present, the scabs on his lips are still apt to bleed more than they should if they are disturbed. If his organs start to fail there will be nothing they can do - surgery will more than likely not be an option, and one failure will lead to another until his heart, then brain will go and that will be it. So, if we start to see organ failure palliative care becomes the only option. This is the point at which I am in disbelief. He can't be that bad. He is still totally alive mentally. How can we be discussing "making him comfortable until he dies"? And S is even more disbelieving and scared than me at those words. Yes S has looked better, yes he has spent over 2 and a half weeks in ICU, yes he has a lot more hard fighting to do if he's ever going to beat this, but his brain is fine, he is completely aware of where he is and what's going on around him - just a bit inclined to tire quickly. I stay with him longer than I intend to that night because he starts to complain of stomach pain. It gets worse. Really bad. They give him morphine. He says it doesn't help. His breaths start hitching, like something is stabbing him or something. He finally gives me the description "like hiccoughs, but sore". I can see how swollen his stomach is - fluid retention. And he is also complaining that he wants to lie on his side. We have to wait ages for the right number of people to be available to turn him on his side, to a more comfortable position. But his stomach is still giving him intense pain and whatever spasms are causing the breath hitches and grimaces. I have to leave him like that - in pain, but with the nurse on duty doing whatever he can to ease the discomfort, administering Morphine whenever possible - visiting hours are over and I'm asked to leave. On my way to work on Wednesday morning (5th June) I get a call from the head doctor in S's ICU team. He wants to know what time I can be there today - S has had major abdominal pain since last night (I know, I was there!), and they are investigating the cause, but it looks like the kidneys are failing. He tells me he will update me via text when he knows more, I tell him I will get there as soon as I can after work. I get no texts all day. I get to the hospital around 4:45pm - armed with the all important iPad mini for him to watch the State of Origin game on (yes, that is still a priority for S! God

love him!!). I'm told S has been taken for a scan and I need to come back in about an hour. So, when I return and he's back from the scan, I get the iPad hooked in to the Wifi and open the app he needs. Then I have to have the conference with the doctor. His kidneys have failed. Fluid is building up in his stomach. They want my permission to put a drain directly in his belly to ease the pressure. I give it. I have to wait outside while they get this done. There is a brief discussion about surgery - but that would literally be futile. Again we have the conversation about palliative care. This is the beginning of the end. His body is shutting down. S can't fathom this. He says the words that still break my heart, pointing to his head to indicate his mind he mouths "I'm still alive". He has so much to say, but we can't understand him through the scabs on his lips and his inability to make any real sounds. We try to get him to write things down, but his hands are really too weak. The doctor has asked if he wants to have the pain medication increased so he can slip away peacefully. The sentence he writes is "I just want to see how I go" - he wants so badly to keep fighting. He doesn't want to die. Once the doctor is sure he is comfortable for now he leaves us to watch the game - no S has not forgotten the game! He does not administer the pain medication, but he gives the authorisation for its use once S requests it. And although I had not planned to stay and watch the game (which starts around the time visiting hours end), I do. They let me stay. He nods off a bit during the second half, but I know how much seeing it means to him, so I rouse him for the good bits, and make sure he sees the end - a good result for him, a come-from-behind win for his team. I say my goodnight and leave S to get some sleep. I have told my boss how dire things are, and he has told me I have leave starting now for as long as I need. I get a call around 9:30 on Thursday morning asking me what time I will be getting to the hospital. Apparently S has been asking for me. I had a couple of things to do before I could get there, so I arrive just after 11:30am. S is not as awake and aware as he was last night. They have started giving him the pain medication (Fentanyl) the doctor was talking about, and it has affected S's ability to focus, and therefore communicate. He has apparently been asking what's going on - last night he knew the story, now he's unclear. I wish they had held off on administering the drug. I would have liked to speak to my clear headed husband today. His kidneys have failed, the liver is failing. We are out of options. His Dad and brother are in and out today - we are kind of rotating our breaks until early afternoon. A Palliative Care consultant, and the social worker and the nurse looking after S want to have a meeting with me, and it takes me longer than it should to realise that this meeting is for me to give the final word on the beginning of the end. They are focusing on making sure I am okay with what's about to happen. Making sure I know that I have the final say, and once I give the go ahead they will stop all meds that aren't making him comfortable - the Fentanyl dose will increase, but the feeding, the antibiotics and finally the Noradrenaline will be stopped. It will then be a matter of minutes or hours before he is gone. I know they are trying to be helpful, but having them ask if I'm okay, having them tell me how strong I have been for him and how much of an advocate for him I have been is only making my heart break more. That afternoon, his brother, sister-in-law and their 4 kids, my brother and sister-in-law and 2 of their kids all come in to say their farewells. The Fentanyl dose has already been increased, so S knows they are there, but he is so drowsy it's hard for him to open his eyes. His sister-in-law wants to stay with me. She doesn't seem to understand I need to be alone with S for this. But, at last she gives me space. I'm the one who has to give the green light. It's really hard to do, but I know we

are out of options. As soon as they stop the blood pressure medication (Noradrenaline), S opens his eyes and looks at me. He is as focused as I have seen him all day, his grip on my hand is desperately strong, and I explain to him one final time what is happening, tell him I love him, tell him I'm sorry things turned out this way, sorry for all the things we had planned that we won't get to do together, and tell him it's time to stop fighting and just let go. I try to tell him not to worry about anything or anyone, that it's okay to go. I hope he understands. It must be about 40 minutes before he is unconscious. They stop the ventilator. I turn off the radio - he can't hear it anymore, and he and I have different taste in music! I know he can't feel it anymore, but I won't let go of his hand until he's gone. He holds on for over an hour without the ventilator. Then there are no more breaths. I know he's gone. His hand is already much cooler than it was an hour or so ago. I am a widow. It has happened so fast. It feels strange, but I don't think the full weight has hit me yet. I am bursting into tears at random moments. I am thinking of stupid things like "what am I going to do with all these Fruit Loops - he eats those, not me!", instead of dwelling on the hard things like having a funeral to arrange, and dealing with all the people who keep wanting to do things for me, or stay with me.

That was two years ago now. In excess of 300 people came to his funeral service - a testament to how many friends he made, how many lives he brightened just that little bit with his generous spirit and ever-present smile. Of course, I still miss him. I still have my teary moments. I still struggle with guilt. But I remember his smile, his laugh, the way he would sing along to the music and make up his own words (often to make the song about us), his spontaneous dancing and all the love!

[not-xpr-art]

Art Deep Dives #2 - The History of Fanart

Hi everyone!

This post is part of my Art Deep Dives tag, where I ramble about art-y things, often with some relation to art history in some way. 

just so you know, these essays aren’t formal in anyway lol! I just do them for fun & to hopefully be interesting in some way to someone!

This week I’ll be talking about the history and importance of fanart! It’s not the entire history of fanart, just some key moments and points in it that I feel are important!

(this essay is about 2500 words long btw!)

Part 1 - What even is fanart?

I think when a lot of people hear about ‘fanart’, they often think of it as a new thing, something that came along at some point in the last century when media begun to be mass circulated around the world.

But, of course, fanart has existed long before media like Star Wars or Doctor Who were created, and even long before photography was invented, even if it wasn’t necessarily referred to as ‘fanart’ at that time since the concept of ‘intellectual property’ hadn’t been introduced at that point. 

So I think at first we need to define what we even mean when we refer to ‘fanart’... 

Put simply, it’s artwork made by people who are interested in something created by someone else, such as a TV show, film, book, podcast, video game etc. However, by this definition, where do original characters created by the fans as part of franchises fit into the picture? Or celebrity fanart? Or artists who use famous people’s appearances as the base for their own characters? Or what of artworks of media that have long since passed copyright laws (such as Shakespeare works, Austen works, etc)? And where do illustrations of books fit into this?

So perhaps a wider description would be, artworks made by fans of and inspired by something “belonging” to someone else (either a piece of media or... themselves). The issue of this description is that most portraiture would fit into this. So... are we about to call Thomas Gainsborough or Joshua Reynolds, two of the most famous British portrait painters of the 18th century, fanartists? 

I think a lot of people in the art world would scoff at this concept, because even now the feelings surrounding fanart are pretty negative. They see it as less of a valid form of art and instead as ‘derivative’ and ‘unoriginal’. I’ve heard both non-artists and artists alike talk about fanart as ‘not real art’, and then in the next breath they’re praising portraits made by Leonardo da Vinci or Vincent Van Gogh. 

I also think it’s important to note that fanart isn’t exclusively portraiture too. Often artists will draw landscapes, still life works or even abstract pieces based on their favourite media. And as previously mention, a lot of artists and writers create their own characters within a world created by another person. So, for all intents and purposes, that is a form of original art, but it is often still put down in comparison to people who make up an entirely new story and world for their characters. 

Part 2 - Renaissance artists and Bible fanart!?

One of the most common defences I’ve seen for fanart is that Renaissance artists’ basically did Bible and Mythology fanart, and their artwork is considered ‘masterpieces’ so... that’s that!

Right?

Well, if we’re sticking with the definition of fanart being something based on a series of characters or concepts owned by someone else, then Religious or Mythological based art would definitely fit into this. 

(Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’, currently being held in the National Gallery in London).

But I think it’s important to note that the art world was a very different place in Renaissance Europe. Concepts and characters didn’t belong to any one person or group of people, instead everything was a lot more homogenised. There’s a reason why when we think of figures like Jesus or the Virgin Mary, we have a very particular idea of what they look like (a very white-washed idea, I might add). The same thing goes for portrayals of figures from Greek or Roman mythology. There were often motifs associated with these deities that dated back to Antiquity, and Renaissance artists looked back to this for their inspiration. But there was no one specific point of reference for these ‘characters’ other than the Bible, which didn’t actually ‘belong’ to anyone, not even the church.  

So, I think it’s valid to bring up Renaissance artists and how the modern concept of ‘originality’ in art was less important to artists or patrons, and much of the art they did was exclusively works based on something the artist did not come up with. In my first Art Deep Dive, I talked about how History paintings (which were often Religious or Mythology based) were valued for being the product of an ‘artistic genius’ and their connection to spirituality in comparison to portraits or landscapes that depicted the real contemporary world. 

But do I think it was actually fanart? 

... Probably not... Although I wouldn’t begrudge anyone believing it is, because in a way it does somewhat fit into the definition of fanart. Instead this was to look at how society’s relationship to art has changed drastically in the hundreds of years since that era, as has the purpose of art itself.

And I think it does bring up some interesting discussions of why we are so obsessed with ‘originality’ in art at the moment when it’s not something that was really important before, though! 

Part 3 - What about portraiture? 

So... What about portraiture huh? 

Now, portraiture has existed for as long as art has, essentially, but it took until the Renaissance era and beyond for it to be associated with patrons. Portraiture was more than just ‘old-timey photography’, since it was linked distinctively to a sign of wealth. I mentioned Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds earlier, who were two very influential portrait artists of the 18th century, who both fed into a market of middle and upper class patrons wanting their portraits done in this era. 

(This is a piece by Reynolds of the Actress Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse).

And in a way this makes portraiture probably the earliest example of fanart as we see it today. 

Except, a part of fanart that people who do it (including myself) often bring up is how it’s connected to a sense of passion and love for something. In a way, portraits done purely as commissions for an aristocrat for profit doesn’t necessarily fit into our modern notion of fanart. 

This brings us back to that darn description of fanart again. Because in our current world fanart can be defined as work of celebrities done as commissions. Except, perhaps, if you’re a known portrait painter (no one says the designer of the postage stamp did fanart of Queen Elizabeth, despite the fact that it... kind of is?). 

So, why is it that a portrait of the Queen is simply a portrait, but one of Billie Eilish is ‘fanart’? Who decides these parameters? And also who decides which one is more ‘worthy’ or ‘valuable’?

Places like the National Portrait Gallery are filled with portraits of famous people from history. But it’s never referred to as the ‘National Fanart Gallery’. I think in a way this boils down to who is doing the art, who the art is of and why they’re painting it. It is funny, though, that the distinction between fanart and portraiture of famous people is so similar that it requires such detailed specifications as to which is which.  

So, I think it’s clear to see that where portraiture fits in the history of fanart is a contentious one... 

Part 4 - Shakespeare, Fairy Paintings and other 18th/19th Century Curiosities...

From the late 18th until the late 19th century essentially saw the birth to what we now know as ‘fanart’, in a way. The growth of middle-class audiences in the early part of the 1800′s meant that there was a new found desire for landscape, genre and portrait art. And coupled with the growth of secularism, history paintings in their traditional sense had lost appeal. 

There was also the small matter of media being so much more accessible and wide spread to bigger audiences due to the industrial revolution. Books were being printed more easily and sold and a reasonable price, not to mention that a significant portion of the population could now actually read, or at the very least were given some form of education. More travel and trade (and also colonialism) also lead to an increase of new kinds of media being explored. Birth of the Gothic genre, Science Fiction, Fantasy, etc, all forms of fiction that we’re very familiar with now were only just entering the public’s consciousness at this point.

Much like now, technological advances were both a blessing and curse to the people of this era. And also like now, art was used as a way to express what was happening in the world. A great example of this is JMW Turner’s Flying ,,, which shows an old ship being transported into harbour by a steamboat, something that was very new to this era. It spoke of the new technologies overpowering the old, and the fears a lot of people had because of this.

This lead to the development of Fairy Paintings, to move to a new time of history painting that was more based on folktales and works of fiction by writers like Shakespeare, and were often used as a form of escapism. William Blake is a prominent figure in this type of painting, along with some Pre-Raphaelite painters. 

This is a piece directly based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth by Henry Fuseli and is completely undoubtedly fanart in essentially every way. Many of his works, and the works of his contemporaries, were based on the works of writers like Shakespeare. 

This piece, along with most of his other works, was also exhibited in the Tate Gallery way back in the early 19th century. Fanart like this was openly welcomed into galleries in this era, something that’s a far cry from my art teachers in school and college actively discouraging us from doing any kind of fanart for our projects. 

The mass appeal of these kinds of art lasted well into the 20th century and even after the advent of photography, which created an entirely new kind of media to be consumed. 

I actually think that a lot of this animosity towards fanart stems from a lot of fanart being born from drawing from photos as references, which is why I think artworks that are fanart from an pre-photography era are valued above artworks done now.

Part 5 - The Beginnings of Intellectual Property and Copyright Hell... 

Earlier I mentioned how fanart could be defined as work done inspired by media belonging to someone else. However, this begs the question whether a single person or company can actually own such things as characters and story concepts.

Copyright as we know it today essentially originated in the 18th century. Now, I’m not going to go into all the history of copyright here (partly because it’s confusing af), but essentially throughout the 18th and 19th century all across the world, intellectual property laws were brought in for books & later extended to other media types. They basically prevented any other person or publisher being able to copy, distribute or adapt the piece of media. As many may know, copyright laws run out after a certain amount of time (I believe either between 70 or 100 years), by which time they enter the Public Domain and are free to be used in anyway by anyone. 

Copyright laws can be a real detriment to fanartists, however, particularly when large companies like Disney cracking down on any small hint of one of their characters in the last few years. This feels particularly insidious to me given how most Disney films are based on old fairy-tales and legends. But in using these centuries old stories and giving them the ‘Disney flavour’, they have been able to essentially repackage the original story for their own profit. Disney of course aren’t the only company to do this, but given how Disney own basically everything media-wise now, they are the biggest perpetrator of this at the moment. 

It’s important to note that to this day, copyright doesn’t extend to ideas or themes. As well as this, copyrighted media can be used by people who don’t own it either by asking for permission or via ‘fair use’. But as a lot of Youtubers would tell you, this is often something that is ignored by large companies in favour of holding monopoly over the entire thing. 

This is of course not to say that copyright can’t be a good thing. I believe that artists and creators deserve to have the rights to their individual works. The issue is surrounding big conglomerate companies using copyright not as a way of protecting and supporting their in-house artists, but as a way of boosting profits. 

My thoughts are that copyright laws should exist to prevent other people or companies from stealing or overtly copying/adapting a work made by someone else, not preventing a small freelance artist from selling a couple prints of a drawing from a film Disney made 20+ years ago based on a stories written hundreds of years ago. 

(I know it’s not as simple as this, but you get what I mean lol)

In a big way, copyright laws were what created our modern notion of fanart, since prior to that no-one really had ownership of their works in the same way that copyright allows you. So, even thought I’ve been quite pessimistic about it, fanart really wouldn’t exist without it so... it’s not all bad lol?

Part 6 - Why is any of this important??

I realise that this is a strange question to ask at the end of this essay, but I really wanted to leave my true personal thoughts until the end in order to keep at least a vague sense of being objective through this lol...

To me, fanart is something that made me fall in love with art in the first place, particularly digital art. I was able to find communities of like minded people and make some really good friends, all because of fanart. 

I’ve also spoken to other artists who say how fanart allows them to connect to their favourite shows or characters or celebrities, and a way of expressing their love for something! It’s also often a gateway for artists to get into art as children, and some have said how fanart has allowed them to be more creative in general! 

Fanart is something so intrinsic to fandom culture, so much so that it has existed for as long as people have loved things (even long before the internet). And I know that a lot of public figures who receive fanart, either of themselves or of works they’ve created, often express genuine happiness of being the inspiration for someone else... 

So, fanart is important to us because it’s escapism, it’s freedom, and it brings us together in such a genuine way! 

I wrote this essay because I wanted to truly explore where fanart actually came from, and what I ended up discovering is that the artworld has never been clean-cut separated into ‘original art’ and ‘fanart’! 

The history of fanart is messy, confusing, but one thing is very clear to me: it doesn’t just run parallel to the history of art as a lot of people assume, it is instead interwoven into the fabric of all art! 

So for my fellow fanartists, keep on doing what you’re doing, because your passion and love is palpable in your work, and really isn’t that what fanart is all about anyway??

~~~

Phew... Can you believe I actually did try and keep this short lol?

Anyway, thank you for reaching the end! And a special thank you to the people over at Artfolapp (my username is dangerliesbeforeyou over there btw!) who gave me their thoughts on fanart! 

As always, my ask box is open for anyone who’s interested in discussing this further, and I also have an Art Advice Tag if you need help on improving your art!

[voyd-is-in-a-portal]

How to End Up Being an Inventor (In 5 Actions).

We consulted with numerous expert inventors to boil down the tricks of the craft. Some have made jobs out of an invention, others have found markets. If you're sitting on an idea that might be the next terrific American invention, below's your playbook.

1. Cultivate an Idea.

The record of the invention is studded with one-hit marvels, inventors whose solitary blockbuster suggestion made them a fortune. However one of the most prolific inventors can not switch off the idea maker. They are also troubled as well as creative. Inventors just see life's many obstacles in a different way than the average person, according to medical-devices inventor Robert Fischell. "The key to inventing is the awareness that a problem is a trigger from which an invention can be created," says Fischell, who holds more than 200 patents for advancements such as an implantable heart defibrillator and also enhanced stents. "When I'm in the operating room as well as a doctor tosses a device against the wall in irritation, I claim, 'Great, here's an opportunity.'".

Fischell, who at the elevation of his profession filed a new patent application every six weeks, wastes no time in determining whether his most recent concept satisfies the patent test of being brand-new, beneficial, and also nonobvious. He goes right to the U.S. Patent as well as Hallmark Workplace's database of released patents (patft.uspto.gov) and performs a search. "If you review a patent, as well as someone, has currently resolved the issue, after that you're still an inventor. You just arrived late," he says.

If, after an initial search, your idea verifies unique, after that continue developing it. Be reasonable concerning what you're obtaining right into. "The moment you commit will be dual what you believe it will be, as well as the buck amounts you devote will be 4 times what you assumed," Leatherman states.

Make drafts, execute examinations, expand principles, and keep comprehensive notes. Patent lawyers suggest their customers preserve a visit a completely bound notebook that obtains stamped by a notary public frequently. A logbook becomes essential in cases before the U.S. Patent and also Trademark Workplace including similar technologies, as the burden of proof is up to patent applicants to demonstrate that they were the initial to conceive of an invention.

At this onset in the video game, your investment of personal time and money will have been minor compared with what is around the bend. Before the case, you'll need to ask some hard questions about both your concept as well as on your own: Is my idea significantly different than any that precede it? Exists a large market for the product? Can it be developed and made at a reasonable expense? That is the client, and why should they get my product as well as not a competitor's? Am I prepared to devote myself fully to making this concept do well?

Inventors who have been via the process care not to undervalue the psychological and mental determination called for. "If you can't afford mentally and intellectually to fail if your vanity would certainly be wiped out after that don't do it.". see also InventHelp TV Commercial

2. Develop a Model.

With the schedule of powerful computing and computer-assisted layout software application like Autodesk Inventor as well as SolidWorks 3D CAD, inventors today live in what Kamen describes as "the utmost sweet-shop." The earliest versions of Kamen's first invention, a wearable mixture pump that provides specific dosages of medicines such as insulin, sprang to life out a computer system display yet in a workshop set up in the basement of his parents' home on Long Island, N.Y. Kamen was a teenager at the time.

Also when made in a highly exact digital CAD atmosphere, an item ultimately has to leap to the genuine globe in the kind of a model. Depending on the materials entailed and the complexity of an invention, the expense of making a high-quality prototype can empty a financial institution account as well as compel an inventor to look for financing at an extremely early stage.

Tim Leatherman supports taking a DIY technique. During an experimental phase lasting three years, he constructed prototypes of his groundbreaking multitool from cardboard, wood, as well as steel till he picked advanced layout. "By collaborating with my hands," he says, "I found out about barriers to performance as well as manufacturability.".

When you have your prototype, it's time to repair your invention. Obtain outside your head and go-to experts in the field, Fischell suggests. "Ask, 'Do you believe my suggestion has business benefit? Would certainly you utilize it?' Make them authorize a privacy arrangement," he says. For inventors, the possibility of copyright burglary is very actual, but way too much caution can become immobilizing. Privacy, or nondisclosure, the contract permits you to field-test in confidence.

Responses from Mario Salazar's target audience-- woodworkers-- compelled the Colorado Springs inventor to adjust his digital miter gauge. The mechanical prototype he constructed in the cellar with a blowpipe, an oscilloscope, and also a milling maker noticed eBay worked efficiently as well as felt ideal to Salazar, yet the tradespersons wanted it bigger as well as much more inexpensive. "You can't fall for your invention," he states. "Obtain responses and also make alterations accordingly.".

In the agitated company world, a patent protects the inventor by providing the unique right to leave out others from making, making use of, or offering his invention for 20 years. "When other people see you making cash, your patent will be the only methods you have for keeping control of the market," claims Lonnie Johnson, founder of Johnson ElectroMechanical types of equipment as well as the inventor of the Super Soaker water weapon. Follow inventhelp for more advice:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/inventhelp

https://twitter.com/inventhelp

3. Submit a Patent.

Patent law is made complex things, so get an experienced patent lawyer to write and also file your patent application. Anticipate to pay in between $3000 as well as $10,000. "Work with a patent lawyer who additionally has a level in the field you're making an application for a patent in and who understands your market," Salazar encourages.

A knowledgeable lawyer can prepare a wide patent that safeguards an invention against violation from any angle. In the case of Richard Phillips, proprietor of International Survival, his well-crafted patent application made it impossible for anybody to replicate the slim, shock-absorbing material he developed for his protective paintball vest. "My legal representative spread out the patent out thus far over and below my laminated foam product's residential properties that a competitor's vest would certainly have to be so hefty the wearer couldn't walk approximately light that the vest falls apart when struck," Phillips states.

On standard, patent authorization takes 3 years and may call for going back as well as forth several times with patent examiners. From the moment a patent application arrives at the USPTO up until it is either provided or abandoned, an invention is covered by patent-pending standing. In the situation of John Marsden, that created Pour 'N Shop, a bartending system of plastic containers, and also put spouts for beverage mixers, a pending patent amounted to a suit of paper armor.

According to Salazar, any kind of inventor has to be all set to do battle. "I'll have my attorney send out a cease-and-desist letter if somebody infringes on my patent. As well as in the end, a patent is just as great as the thickness of your pocketbook.".

4. Examine the Market.

When the patent application is in total, the inventor needs to change from developing a suggestion of developing a service. Rare is the innovative brilliant behind an invention that likewise has business chops-- or the interest-- to look after the manufacture, advertising, and also selling of his production. Even the brightest innovative minds can drop victim to the countless rip-offs and also doubtful invention-promotion companies whose advertisements clutter the Internet. Many expert inventors urge care with any kind of attire that requests for cash upfront to shop your suggestions about.

Tim Leatherman built up important know-how in business and also production by joining with Steve Berliner. John Marsden, the Pour 'N Store designer, partnered early on with service school grad Ed Harrigan. "If I had not had Ed, I probably would not have made it," he says.

Marketing research studies-- perform your own or appoint a market research company-- will certainly provide you data concerning market patterns and customer demographics. There is no substitute, nevertheless, for putting your invention in front of potential consumers as well as manufacturers, providers, and distributors to get a sense of its market value. For the inventor, this is an anxious time.

Salazar is a big believer in showing your items at trade shows. "You'll figure out who is doing what, whether you'll be able to contend and if somebody wants to get what you have," he claims. "However you're additionally dropping your cabinets and every person will see what you've obtained. Your item had better be 95 percent complete. Be ready to answer concerns: Just how huge is the market? That's mosting likely to buy it?".

5. Sell It or Make It.

Inventors make cash in two means: collecting aristocracies by certifying the right to produce their invention or production, distributing, and marketing the invention themselves. Louis J. Foreman, owner, and also the primary executive of Enventys, an item style as well as a design firm in Charlotte, N.C., and writer of The Independent Inventor's Handbook, has personally encountered that problem several times as the holder of 10 licenses as well as has encouraged many inventors as a lead court on the PBS program Everyday Edisons.

Then it's time to ask yourself one more round of questions: First, exists enough upside potential to merit the threat of bringing the item to market on your own? "Consider opportunity costs also," Foreman says. "If you have to quit a job that pays $100,000, can you make enough to counter that?" Second, do you have the financial resources to pull it off? If you don't, then where is the money most likely to originate from? And lastly, do you have the competence to run an organization? "It's one point to come up with a remarkable item, however, are you comfy marketing it, can you distribute it, restore it as well as satisfy orders if Walmart offers you a 5-million-piece purchase order?" Supervisor claims.

No question licensing is the less complicated path to getting an invention to market. It requires less dedication of time as well as up-front resources and frees inventors to do what they do best: invent. However, expedience comes with an expense. Royalty prices on patents-- created on the list price, production run, as well as various other variables-- average less than 2 to 7 percent of retail sales. Still, for a first-time inventor brief on funds and also know-how, a licensing contract can be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

[m-a-salter]

fic writer interview

tagged by @talldecafcappuccino and @chainofclovers; how delightful!

name: m-a-salter

fandoms (i write for): Ted Lasso lately, but I’ve also posted little stories for Hunger Games, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Death in Paradise, and Star Trek: Voyager. If we’re counting total number of words written (not posted, and of course you should not care about my unposted writing), I have been most prolific in Battlestar Galactica. Just haven’t gotten any of it out the door yet! I’ve also got some WIPs for Doctor Blake Mysteries (all Malice). In my youth I wrote in X-Files and West Wing.

two-shot: I have never posted anything but one-shots! Someday...

most popular multi-chapter: I am working on my first one, a (probably 4-chapter) bit of fluff giving Ted and Rebecca an alternate first meeting. I never would have guessed I would still be working on its first chapter on the eve of the start of season 2, but I am feeling grateful that it is an alternate timeline that cannot be disrupted by new canon.

actual worst part of writing: Proofreading? I usually experience a fairly sudden transition from feeling like a story is never going to be ready to feeling like it is so ready and I can’t wait to get it up. Once that happens, I find it very hard to have the patience to really read the thing a few more times. 

how you chose your titles: I don’t have one system. A line or phrase from the story that I think represents the theme is probably my modal style (Never Too Late, Century Partnership), but I am also partial to a bit of lyrics from the song that inspired the story (Whenever You’re Ready), and when I can’t think of anything clever, I go with straightforwardly descriptive (One Evening on the District 12 Train, Richmond Sunday Afternoon). 

do you outline: Sometimes, usually somewhere in the middle of the writing process. I tend to begin with a scene or a bit of dialogue I can’t stop thinking about, and then I use outlining as a method of brainstorming something resembling a plot that can contain that first little nucleus. Basically the amount of outlining I do is in proportion to the length of the finished product.

ideas I probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: I really would someday like to finish this series of BSG stories I have planned and partially written (Earth turns out to be perfectly habitable, nobody dies, happy endings for all in a Roslin/Adama-Kara/Lee kind of way). But I find it hard to muster the energy to write in a fandom when I’m not at least somewhat actively watching the original, so realistically it won’t be until I do another re-watch. And that might go like the last one, generating 60,000 words of notes and disconnected scenes, but not finished stories! I am still trying to figure out when in my day/week to put my writing time, and as long as it is not a fixed routine I am more subject to the whims of my own obsession. So it would be nice to get my clockwork muse up and running. 

Callouts @ me: Folks often ask me to write more. I love a first-kiss, or first-confession-of-love fic, and often have little interest in what happens next (or, what happens next is smut that I don’t feel capable of writing). My primary criticism of myself is that I don’t write consistently. Which is probably the real reason for all my unfinished work. 

best writing traits: I think my best strength is not about the writing so much, but about my attitude toward it. I am good at writing to please myself, and I generally believe that that is enough. I can easily just decide something is good enough, that it scratches a particular itch I had, and I don’t worry too much if other people are into it. And then when some people are, it’s impossibly lovely. I write fanfic in large part to try to train my brain to be more relaxed about this kind of thing in my other (non-fiction and professional) writing. The downside of this, of course, is that sometimes the half-written WIP is enough to scratch the itch. 

spicy tangential opinion: I have never cared very much about whether the  ‘ships I ‘ship becomes canon. Perhaps this is a result of some of my earliest ships: Toby/CJ, which never came close to happening, and Mulder/Scully, which was done very oddly. If TPTB aren’t going to do it exactly right, I would often rather they not do it at all, so one doesn’t have to contend with their weird takes. I don’t like to give the owners of the IP too much power over me. It seems to be an important premise of this avocation. This is not to say I don’t like using canon as a writing constraint--that is a fun exercise. And I do usually like to see my ships come to fruition in canon because I like to see hot people making out on my screen. But in my mind that is a separate payoff from knowing that the relationship is canon. And to some extent one can get one’s kicks in that way through other means: 

I would love to hear from: @allisonwithcats @professortennant @rahleeyah​ @theodore-lasso @doctoraliceharvey

[eveningcatcher]

Main six  when they lose MC at the market

Asra:

You were walking in the market, looking for some herbs that you've run out. You were wandering among the busy market, commenting about how this is the seventh time you've run out of this herb this week, however, Asra didn't seem to listen, instead, their eyes wandered at every store until they stopped at the freshly baked pumpkin bread on your favourite stalls. 

The two of you, without noticing it, got separated. Once they got out of the bakery, satisfied that they got the hot pastries for the two of you, they realized that you were nowhere in sight.

Their worry was rising every moment as he tried to find you amongst the crowd. Their fingers were moving until they felt someone lightly tap their shoulder.

"Found the friend!" Faust said as she was happily slithering on your left arm.

"There you are!" you said before quickly pecking their cheek. Once you moved away, you added, while playing with their hair, "I have been looking everywhere for you! Please pay more attention, I'll lose you for real once!"

They sighed in relief as they gave you the pumpkin bread they bought you. Later during the day, Asra gave you matching charm that would help find each other.

  Read all chapters here

Julian:

You two came up with a genius idea to see what tea and saltybitters taste like mixed so you went to the marketplace to look for the ingredients. The marketplace was especially crowded that day since the new goods were arriving. 

So it was no wonder the doctor lost you in the huge crowd. He couldn't believe his eyes. Just a moment ago, you were there, right next to them, and the next you're gone. He immediately started panicking, looking all over the place for you. Once he calmed himself down, he started to look for you in the shops you visited frequently, asking everyone if they had seen you. 

The time passed and you were still nowhere in sight. He started to lose all hope until he saw a familiar person walking around, completely lost. He quickly walked towards the person, giving them a tight hug, "There you are..." he wrapped his arms around your shoulders, "You had me worried sick."

Your shoulder relaxed at his sudden touch, feeling safe in his arms.

"Where were you?" you asked, "I went to the Rowdy Raven and you-"

"Rowdy Raven?!?" he pulled you away, gently gripping onto your shoulders, "What were you doing all the way there?"

"Getting the salty bitters?" you said, gesturing to the bottle of the said drink in your hands.

"Weren't we supposed to get the tea first?" he asked, raising a bag with the dry herbs.

"Ohh..." you lightly slapped your cheek, "You're right..."

He couldn't help himself but chuckle, forgetting all of the stress he felt minutes before.

~* Epilogue *~

 The two of you went home and made the said cocktail. After examining it, the two of you shared a worried look, before chugging the drink at the same time. 

In the beginning, the cocktail tasted bitter, with the tone of alcohol and caffeine in it, but it was still drinkable, and neither one of you seemed to mind it. In fact, it seemed Julian even liked this weird combination, judging by the way his lips moved into a small smile. However, that face of satisfaction seemed to disappear as soon as the drink got to your throats. You spat the drink, looking for a glass of water to remove the acidic taste that was stuck in your throat. Julian, on the other hand, exaggerated a bit, with him spitting the drink and gasping for air, accompanied by the words: 

"I'm pretty sure this is what Devil's piss tastes like."

Overall, the two of you decided to throw the drink away, not mentioning this incident ever again.

Nadia:

And once again, you've gone with Nadia for a walk through a marketplace, assuring her you don't need anything. The two of you have been chatting along the way, talking about some of the meetings Nadia has to attend this evening.

Natiqa approached Nadia, staring a little chat. You, however, didn't notice that she stopped and continued walking. 

"Oh, I have just come from Prakra," her sister said, "There were travelling magicians passing by,"

"And?" Nadia asked, there have never been any magicians in Prakra, not that she can remember though.

"And they pulled off some magic," she stopped talking for a moment to draw a rainbow with her hands" and suddenly birds and colourful butterflies were flying all over their place."

"I suppose it could be rather interesting," the countess nodded after listening to her story, "I have never seen something similar, what do you think MC?" she turned on her left, but only then she noticed you were gone.

"MC?" she called out for you once again, with a clear tone of worry in her voice, "Have you seen her?" she turned to her sister who only shrugged in response.

"I didn't even know the two of you were together."

"Where could they go?" she wondered as she looked through the nearest shops for you.

Once Nadia made sure she hasn't left any of the nearby shops unchecked, she stopped for a moment to think where you could have possibly gone. She would've most likely continued to run all of the possible scenarios of what could've happened to you if Natiqa didn't show up with you, who has been nibbling on the fresh pastry.

"Don't worry, Dia," she said as she pets your head, "This little troublemaker was just hungry."

Months after that incident Nadia would still tease you whenever the two of you would go to the Market.

 "Now, now, don't get lost because of some pumpkin bread."

Portia:

Portia had to go to buy Nadia something to mend her headaches, and you decided to tag along. As always, Portia would chatter with you, only stopping her small talk when she would see something interesting.

As she was 'debunking' one of Julian's many unusual stories, you were being pickpocketed. You've realised what was happening a bit too late, as the thief was already running away. When Portia saw your pouch in the stranger's hands she immediately started to run after them.

"Get back here, bastard," she shouted as she sprinted towards them.

The thief had soon realised that taking your pouch was a stupid idea since Portia was a lot faster than what she looked like. She quickly caught up with the thief, punching them wherever she could. The guards quickly noticed that something was going on, and they immediately took the thief away.

"That idiot," Portia said in between gasps, "I hope he gets what he deserves, am I right MC?"

She gasped for a moment, waiting for your answer, but she didn't hear it.

"What's wrong, Pepi got your tongue?" she turned on her left, but you were not there. At that moment, she realised that you most likely couldn't keep up with her speed, so she ran back to the place she has seen you last time.

As she was running, she noticed you amongst the crowd, asking some people if they've seen Portia.

"Oh, there you are!" she stopped sprinting and walked to you, "Don't worry, I got my pouch back. Come on now, let's go for that medicine."

The two of you bought the medicine for a surprisingly cheap price. Later on, the two of you spent the evening in peace, with you making Portia pudding as thanks, with her rambles about how her legs are sore here and there.

Muriel:

After many pleas and annoying beggings, you finally made Muriel go out to the market with you. He was a bit nervous since the marketplace was quite crowded that day, so he was surprised when he accidentally bumped into one lady, making her drop all of the goods she had bought.

With constant apologies, he helped her collect the dropped stuff, being careful not to ruin anything again. When he was done, he looked over to you, however, you weren't there. He straightened his posture and started looking for you, being too shy to call out to you or ask anyone for help. Eventually, he hid in one of the back alleys, imagining the worst scenarios.

What if someone hurt you? What if you got lost? What if you abandoned him because he just can't keep up a simple conversation? What if-?

His train of thought was suddenly interrupted by a certain magician giving him the tightest hug ever.

"Where have you been?" you asked, pulling away from him to put on a scarf you've bought for him around his neck, "I just saw this one and thought it would look great on you. Do you like it?"

He touched the sky blue scarf with his fingertips, still, a bit confused from everything that has just happened. After a couple of seconds, he responded with a small nod, returning the hug.

Since then he would always hold your hand wherever the two of you went together, not letting you go out of his sight.

Lucio:

The marketplace was loud and cheerful this lovely evening and it seemed like the two of you were the centre of that noise. Of course, Lucio enjoyed this attention and couldn't stop himself from talking about all of his great battles to the shopkeepers who clearly couldn't care less. You, on the other hand, were not so keen. So when the chance to sneak past him occurred, you quickly did so, wanting to see what that newly opened shop is selling. 

After the thorough monologue about one of his earliest battles, Lucio turned away from an uninterested shopkeeper, looking for your reaction on his marvellous story. Needless to say, he looked shocked when he saw you missing. He shouted for you, storming out of the shop, hoping to find you. The guards that were walking by were immediately appointed to find you. For hours he has been looking for you, checking every shop in hopes to find you. 

After many failed attempts to find you, he assumed the worst, you were kidnapped. He stormed back into the palace, ordering every guard to drop whatever they were doing so that they could find you. 

It was then when the servants informed him that you have long returned to the palace.

You came to the store Lucio was in to find him still talking about his journeys. You knew you had no time nor will make him stop rambling, so you went back to the palace, leaving a crimson cape you bought him on his desk before you went to sleep.

Read all chapters here

[guillemelgat]

[ OTHER INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE AWARENESS CHALLENGE POSTS]

I know it’s a year late, but I’m going to try to get back on track with the rest of my IYIL posts! Up this week is Mohiks uyôtowáwôk, known in English as Mohegan-Pequot.

Basic Information

The language was formerly spoken by Mohegan, Pequot, Montauk, (Western) Niantic, and Shinnecock peoples across what is now southern (mainly southeastern) New England, as well as on the eastern part of modern Long Island. It's also sometimes called the Algonquian Y-dialect, and multiple different varieties were spoken between all the different groups. Unfortunately, the language went dormant in 1908 with the death of Fidelia Fielding or Dji'ts Bud dnaca, so there is no population of speakers at the present time. The language is, like all the other languages of the region, an Eastern Algonquian language, and looks very similar to most of its neighbors (to the point where as far as I can tell there is some confusion over the number of distinct languages there are in southern New England).

Modern History

The Pequot Tribe and the Mohegan Tribe were at some point the same group, and the Pequot were a major regional power in the early 17th century. However, the Mohegans chose to ally themselves with the English in the Pequot War, which decimated the Pequots’ previous dominance. The Pequots who remained after the war were put under the authority of the Mohegans and the Narragansetts, and the ones who were ruled by the Mohegans became today’s Mashantucket Pequot. The two groups – Mohegan and Pequot – are at this point different but have a closely intertwined past.

The Pequot Tribe lost large tracts of land in the 19th century, as well as seeing many of its members move off tribal lands, but in the late 20th century it sought to get that land back and rebuild the local economy and culture. It managed to successfully sue for the recovery of land that had been sold illegally, with the support of the owners of that land and a delegation from the state of Connecticut, and has since managed to restore local agriculture, as well as building an incredible museum and research center (which I have been to and it’s definitely worth it to visit). The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation also gained federal recognition in 1983.

The Mohegans also kept some of their traditions alive and maintained a continuity of knowledge through the 20th century, much of which was thanks to Gladys Tantaquidgeon, who served as medicine woman for almost 90 years (1916-2005). She was born when there were still native speakers of Mohegan-Pequot and kept their teachings alive throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. She also had a doctorate in anthropology and was key in documenting Mohegan history, something which was key for the tribe gaining federal recognition in 1994. Along with her brother Harold and father John, she founded the Tanatquidgeon Museum in 1931, which is still around today. 

Other important historical figures include Uncas, who was sachem of the Mohegans and solidified their alliance with the English, bringing them to the status of a major regional power; his son Oneco, who brought an important case to court that concluded that the Mohegan sachem and the English monarch were peers and legal equals; William Apess, who wrote one of the earliest Native American autobiographies; Emma Baker, a medicine woman who helped to revive the tradition of the Green Corn Festival, key for maintaining culture in the 19th century; Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobal, current Mohegan Medicine Woman and an author and screenwriter; Madeline Sayet, an actor, writer, and director; and musician Willy DeVille.

Linguistic Revitalization

The language went dormant in 1908 following the death of its last fully fluent speaker, Fidelia Fielding, but her writings are now seen as key in revitalization efforts, with four diaries of hers being preserved and now being used in reconstructing the language. One of the linguists leading the project is Stephanie Fielding, a descendent of Fidelia, who has been attempting to build a vocabulary so that the language can be taught to people and eventually speakers can reach fluency again. The main resource is a website, with a dictionary and language lessons. I will say that it seems like the news of the revitalization project seems to have slowed down recently, but I’m not sure if there are more classes going on in-person (or were, before 2020 happened). Either way it seems like the groundwork has been laid for an educational revival like with Wampanoag, so hopefully the language comes back!

Support the project!

I can’t find any way to support the project, but both the Mohegan and Pequot Tribes have museums which you can visit, and businesses you can support.

Aaaaand that’s the post, please let me know if there’s anything I missed and I’ll be back next week with a post about Nipmuc!

[stevemoffett]

A Hard Nap, The Fall of Math, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Disco Point, and There You Are

In January last year, I noticed a sign in myself of the same cancer my dad had back in 2008. Unlike the usual symptoms that set off my paranoia, it wasn’t some vague feeling, it wasn’t an intermittent pain, and it wasn’t a general ill feeling—it was clear and unambiguous, out of the ordinary and one of those symptoms that, if you google it, is under the list of “call your doctor if you experience any of the following.”

It was also nonspecific: this symptom could mean cancer, but it could also mean about five other cancer-unrelated conditions. I called for an appointment that morning with my general practitioner, who said that the earliest available date was about two weeks later.

I knew that the only way my fear would be effectively relieved was with the one sure-fire diagnostic tool for this type of cancer, one that’s recommended for everyone, but not until about age 50: a colonoscopy.

For the two weeks before my GP appointment, I mentally prepared for death. For the record, I do this every time I interpret my body’s signals as cancerous, but the mental preparation usually stops after a few days when the symptom either goes away or when a clear alternative cause presents itself. This time, I didn’t get that kind of relief and, in fact, the symptom repeated more than once between setting the appointment and going to it. Each time, it was like an intrusive thought come to life: you’re going to die. You’re going to go through surgery and chemotherapy like Dad and you’re either going to die early, or find out like he did that the cure is worse than the disease, or maybe you’ll hang on just long enough to experience both.

Winter mornings in Texas can sometimes be surprisingly cold. While stepping out the door on a midsummer morning is like walking into someone’s hot exhale, as you might expect, a 33-degree morning is more like a slap in the face. When I packed everything I figured I’d need to move here a couple of years ago, I threw away my winter coat, thinking, I won’t be needing this anymore. (The coat was also about ten years old at that point.)

My first winter in Texas, I layered a bunch of shirts underneath a light jacket and wore a scarf on freezing days. The second winter, I decided that I’d had enough of being cold. After all, I rationalized, here in Texas it was monetarily possible to never have to feel cold again if you really don’t want to. So I bought the warmest coat I could find, an unstylish, bulky parka made by Caterpillar, the company that makes construction vehicles. No more layering, no more checking the weather before leaving in the morning. I could just put this coat on and not worry about it.

But now, under the shadow of a cancer scare these January mornings, wearing the big coat made me feel less like I was smarter than the weather and more like I was trying to smuggle a terminal disease wherever I went. Under my coat, tie, button-down shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, and muscle, something was growing silently in the dark. While maybe it had slipped up and showed some of its handiwork to me, it was already too late to do much about it now.

Since it has affected my life several times before, and since it is such an exquisite mixture of dread and uncertainty, cancer is one of my mind’s biggest bogeymen. I feel personally insulted by the idea of it. I treat you so well, body—why would you betray me? Was I not nice enough? Is this poetic justice for my vanity? Is it, as the old anecdotal saying goes, due to my worrying?

Not only did I feel like I was smuggling cancer under the big coat, I was also warming it up by drinking my coffee. I was feeding it directly when I ate something too sugary. And I was probably even giving it an evil sense of satisfaction when I got stressed out about it. If I was able to keep my mind off it by working in the lab, mixing and pipetting, using kits, and doing arithmetic in my head, it would come crashing back into focus when I was pulling my gloves off to wash my hands.

I pulled up incognito mode on my phone’s browser during my breaks, googling “5-year survival rate colon cancer age 35.” “Cancer staging colon prognosis.” “Colon cancer smoking.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack in college.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack 18 years ago.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack after seeing Luke Wilson smoking in The Royal Tenenbaums.”

At home, I suddenly started noticing the expiration dates on my nonperishables. What will last longer, I thought, the freshness of this baking soda, or me.

I knew I wasn’t going to be comforted by the first GP visit. After all, they’re usually the first stop to a specialist, unless you have a PPO insurance plan, which I don’t. The doctor listened to my symptoms and family history. “Well,” he said, “Given your history, it’s a good idea to refer you to a GI. But, you seem like you lead a healthy lifestyle otherwise, with none of the other risk factors, so we’ll see what he says.”

I made the GI appointment and had to wait two more weeks for it, with the same circular worrying and googling. At the GI appointment, I sat in the waiting room, the youngest patient there by a few decades, and I felt a little bit ridiculous. On the other hand, I’d also just read a harrowing story about a woman in her late 20s who had colon cancer and died from it. That was a real person, I thought, who at the first phase of it probably went through all the same feelings I was now, the I’m-being-ridiculous and is-this-worth-the-time-and-vacation-days, all the way up until her diagnosis. Not just because I was scared, I felt a pang of sympathy. A disease of the old picking a victim from the young is terrible luck.

And I figured, if it could be her, it could be anyone. But most of all, it could be me.

That last bit, I think, is one of—one of—my greatest flaws, the vanity of always thinking that the worst things will happen to you, in spite of the odds. It’s a way of making yourself feel special, but it has no upside. You don’t feel confidence with this type of special-feeling. In fact, you’re more likely to be timid and self-centered, and you just come across as weird to the outside observer. They might think, There’s only a few steps between that guy and Howard Hughes. Somewhere, deep in your mind, they think: Wires are crossed.

Shortly before I went in, another patient arrived, a man around my age or maybe younger who, despite a dozen or so free seats, declined to sit down. My name was called, and I passed a sign on the way to the back that said, “If you have recently traveled to China and have a fever you must let our staff know.”

This doctor’s exam rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind you’d see in a movie, instead of the usual dull and bulby, off-white plastic exam room interior. A Spanish medical student came in to give a pre-appointment questionnaire and to take my vitals. He asked, in much better English than I could have mustered in Spanish, “So. There is some blood in they crep?”

When he came in, the GI repeated what my GP had said, and since he was also the person who would be performing a colonoscopy, he said I should set an appointment for one with him. I managed to get a date three weeks later.

From other people’s stories, I knew two things about colonoscopies: they are no fun, especially the night before, but the general anesthesia on the day of the procedure, on the other hand, is fun. I was nervous enough on the day before that I actually asked someone at the pharmacy for help finding the items I was looking for: Polyethylene Glycol (or PEG, which we use all the time for lab experiments, and which I was going to have to drink 2 liters of), Gatorade, and laxative pills. I had to take about 800% of their recommended dosages, each.

The bodily effect of those chemicals was dramatic, and I will spare the details. The worst parts of it, I found, were the generally exhausting physical toll it took, and the feeling by the end that I had some kind of dangerous sodium imbalance: I was sweating between my fingers, for example, but the rest of me felt as dry as paper. At 10PM, I was too tired to do anything, but too nervous to sleep for more than a few hours.

One smaller worry that I felt the next morning, as I took a selfie in my hospital gown to send to a friend back home, making a backward peace sign to show off the IV sticking into my hand and also how brave I was being, was that I might just die right there on the table from the general anesthesia. Part of my grad school research was on Propofol, the most-used general anesthesia nowadays (which, incidentally, also killed Michael Jackson). This was the same drug I was to be given.

I’d never been fully put under anesthesia before. It was astronomically improbable that I’d have an adverse reaction to it and die (and by the way, Michael Jackson abused it, using it far outside of medical praxis—if you’re afraid to get a colonoscopy yourself, don’t be, it could save your life), but keep in mind what I said about my vanity.

“Hey, I’m really scared,” I told the anesthesiologist. He said something, muffled by his mask, that sounded like, “It’ll be all right.” Then he busied himself with a syringe, connecting it to my IV. He depressed it about a third of the way. “This should help you,” he said.

The last thing I said was, “Whoa…I feel it.”

After what felt like a hard, late-afternoon nap, I said, “Hello?”

My head was wrapped with something. When I touched my face, I could feel that there were cotton pads underneath the wrapping, holding my eyes shut. I guess that at some point either mid-procedure or after, my eyes had opened, unseeing, and they’d done this to keep them from drying out. “Hang on, sir,” I heard a nurse say, and my head was unwrapped.

“It’s over?” I asked.

“You’re all done,” he said.

“Gimme a minute, please,” I said, my South Jersey accent peeking out. “I feel a little weird.”

Eventually, I sat up. Two of the nurses helped me stand, and I pumped my arms like I was lifting light, invisible dumbbells. As I put my glasses on and looked around, I thought that they all seemed like they were fighting to not smirk. What did I say while I was blacked out? I wondered, with a twinge of panic, before deciding that it would be worthless to speculate. It could have been anything. There are literally millions of possibilities. Again—it would be worthless to speculate, I told myself, firmly.

An Uber driver, I had been told by hospital staff during a consultation, was not a legally strong enough party to take responsibility for me at discharge. Someone I knew would have to escort me to my apartment. Also, they said, they really would do that thing where you’re back in your own clothes, and they push you to the exit in a wheelchair when you’re all finished. After my procedure, my co-worker stood waiting in the discharge zone with his car as an orderly wheeled me out of the hospital exit. I stood up from the wheelchair and got into the passenger seat of his car, for some reason more aware than usual of the heat coming from the vent and the smell of the car’s leather upholstery. “I still feel weird from the anesthesia,” I said to my friend.

“I’ll bet you do,” he replied.

It was about lunch time, and I had taken the rest of the day off from work. When I got home, I ordered a pizza and lay on my bed. I ate the pizza and watched Star Wars. I had not felt any euphoria when I woke up, I thought hollowly. And my first solid meal in almost forty hours tasted unremarkable. I was still groggy, but not in a pleasant way. I felt cheated.

The hospital staff had put a manilla envelope into my hands as I left. It contained sheets of images the doctor had taken during the procedure. Once lucid, I leafed through them and compared the thumbnail-sized images on printer paper with googled images of cancerous tumors viewed through a colonoscope, trying to diagnose myself.

A couple of the images on the papers had shapes that looked weird, with what seemed like variations in the texture or color of my colon wall that to me, at least, appeared one hundred percent fatal. It was another two weeks before I had a follow-up appointment to go over them with the surgeon.

“See this?” The GI said, two weeks later, pointing to one of the images that had seemed completely normal to me, unlike other ones I had thought were much more scary and unusual-looking. “That’s a low-risk polyp. Of course, now it’s a no-risk polyp, ‘cause it’s gone.”

This medical episode ended only three or so weeks before the whole world changed, but I was all the more grateful for that. If I’d waited to be checked out, then I would have been weighing whether it was worth getting tested against the possibility of being infected with COVID.

The doctor recommended that I get a colonoscopy every five years from now on, but added, “If you want, you can go earlier than that.” I told him thanks, but once every five years sounded fine.

*

I wrote about the first seven weeks of the pandemic in my last entry. After that, May and June passed in the same way as March and April had. I went back to work in mid-June for two weeks before the first summer COVID spike closed things back up. I continued to play Quake, and I continued to fret about my family.

I had a job interview for a position in northern Maryland in April. I didn’t get it, but I had a good idea why I’d been turned down: the position wanted people with proven math skills. Which makes sense—for the last few years I’d said repeatedly that I wanted to have a job that involves less lab work and more data analysis. This was one of those jobs.

My graduate program gave me a degree in “Computational and Integrative Biology.” Sometimes I shorten it to “Integrative Biology,” or “Computational Biology,” but I always feel sort of dishonest when I tell people my degree. (Apparently this feeling is common among grad students). My own reason for feeling dishonest was because, in any other college, the work I was doing would probably just fall under normal old “Biology.” While it was true I had done course work that reflected “Computational and Integrative” Biology, they were courses taught in a remedial way.

When I say remedial, I mean that they were courses designed to get biologists up to speed on how to do higher-level data analyses with their experiments. For instance, in my “Biomath” course, we went over ordinary differential equations and graph theory. Those are both intermediate-level math types, ones you’d encounter in the later part of an undergraduate math degree program. Throughout that course, there was a lot of handwaving whenever I asked questions.

“Eh…,” the professor might have responded to something I had asked, “that requires a lot of background explanation we don’t need right now to handle the problem here. Just take it as a given for what we’re working on.”

In grad school, it’s common to be well-versed in only your narrow little research tunnel that leads outward to the edge of “known” biology. But a few times each month, several of us students would head to the bar down at the city’s waterfront after work to talk about our research. It usually began with a complaint—“This is the third time this kit wouldn’t work this week and it takes twelve fucking hours to run it each time,”—but to give us a more context for their problem, whoever was griping would have to go back and start at the beginning, recounting all the steps leading to their experiment’s failure.

This was a useful exercise, since a pair of new eyes on your work meant that at least you could get feedback on how to better relate the subject matter when you talked to a non-science audience, and at most, you might get a real solution for the problem you were bumping up against.

But I would sometimes get privately upset, as I sipped my beer and glanced out the window at the river, when a math-centered Computational and Integrative Biology student would start talking about their research. As someone who feels an unpleasant, TV static-like anxiety in my chest the moment I see letters in italics, or one of those big, orphan sorority sigmas following an equal sign during a math seminar, this upset feeling was directed at myself. Because, as a result of my insecurity, I would start listening to the beginning of the math student’s explanation of their research, trip over the first unfamiliar term I heard, lose the thread of what they were talking about, give up, and zone out. The math students, overall, just seemed light years ahead of me.

A critical vocabulary word that I began to mentally tie to the situation—slumming, these math types were slumming when talking to us biologists—was the grain of sand to my insecurity’s oyster. By the time I got my diploma a few years later, it had developed into a little pearl; now I had the feeling that I was, relative to those who’d come from a math background, a fake computational biologist.

Unhelpfully, the people in charge of hiring for the jobs I want nowadays seemed to agree. All the job listings I was interested in applying for made me feel the same panic that advanced math symbols on powerpoint slides did. The subjects they wanted their applicants to have experience in—machine learning, deep learning, regression analyses—were all frightening, impregnable terms, reminding me either of some kind of giant machine made up of endless tubes and valves, all spitting dangerously hot steam, or of a highly secure, underground bomb shelter that requires fingerprints or eyeball scans to get into. I knew from my previous learning experiences that if I didn’t understand the fundamentals and learned only the higher-level, applied stuff, it was just going to make me feel unworthy, and I’d forget it at once.

But summer had come—it was midsummer now, in fact. The pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, so what was I going to do if I didn’t start learning something? I ended up registering for three classes at a community college back home, which offered their fall semester online. For two thousand dollars, including textbooks, I got a spot in Introductory Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Calculus III.

Calculus III was a risk. I’d taken Calc I and II in undergrad, now about seventeen years ago, and I had earned Bs back then. I didn’t remember much of the material from either class. I’d tried watching Khan Academy videos at various points in the meantime, but could never stick with it. I’d watch several videos in a row, feel like I understood things, try a practice problem, get it wrong, and forget about it after a day or two. But now, I had put actual money into it and, in a few months, a grade would be spit back out, so this time I had real skin in the game.

But I had misgivings that I was too old to learn new stuff, or that I would be one of those students I remember when I was in undergrad, the older students who would grind class to a halt with their endless questions. Or maybe I would get worse grades than I had in undergrad, despite taking things more seriously now.

Two of the classes were taught asynchronously, meaning each lecture was a video that you could pause or replay at your leisure, and all tests were take-home, but the other class, Statistics, was done over Zoom. You might think a Zoom class could be a better way to learn—clarifying questions can be asked immediately, for instance—but for me, at least, it was not. Instead of focusing on the material being taught, the whole time I’d be thinking, “They can see me. Everyone here can see me. I can see me, and I have a dumbass expression on my face. Can they tell that I have a bedsheet instead of a curtain over my window blinds?”

My mind wandered during class just as much as it had while sitting in a lecture hall when I was eighteen, but now, these classes were held later at night, after I’d been working all day and had eaten dinner. As a result of this, and the fact that I find Statistics to be boring when it’s taught as a series of don’t-worry-about-how-we-derived-it formulas to plug numbers into, I did the worst in Statistics.

But Calc and Linear Algebra were more interesting. When I watched the class videos, I got familiar with the disembodied voices of the teachers, who each seemed to be trying to do an impression of Khan Academy videos. My Calc teacher, with his strong Vietnamese accent, would punctuate every few lines of derivation or proof with, “So what does that mean then?” Every time—new topic, new chapter, new problem, exactly the same tone of voice: “So what does that mean then?”

Eventually, in my head, his cadence merged with the tones of Woody Woodpecker’s laugh, and I began saying it to myself as I did chores around my apartment. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d half-sing at my garbage can liner as I cinched it shut. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to a wrinkled button-down shirt, enjoying the pepper shaker-y smell of my iron when it’s turned up to its hottest setting. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to the window blinds, when considering whether I should replace the bedsheet I’d hung there with an actual curtain, before answering myself that No, this apartment is too temporary for something as tony as curtains.

Sometimes I’d say it three times in a row, like Woody Woodpecker himself:

“So what does that mean, then?”

“So what does that mean, then?”

“So what does that mean, then?”

I kept a Google Sheet of how much time I spent doing work for each class, and found that I averaged about 20 hours a week total. That broke down to approximately an hour and a half each weekday, and on Saturday and Sunday I would go for about six or seven hours each. I’d get up at 7:30 those weekend mornings and brew a pot of coffee, then sit taking notes and working through every part of each assigned homework, not moving on from a problem until I understood everything about it.

I think that those Saturday and Sunday mornings may have been the happiest I felt during the year 2020. In the middle of a difficult Calc problem, not having the answer yet but certain I was on the right track, while also buzzing on caffeine, as a beam of early horizontal sunlight hit my kitchen backsplash and filled the apartment with more brightness than all my lightbulbs put together, I for once did not feel worried. I was unworried about my parents, my sisters, my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and nephew, and all the pets. Unworried about COVID, or cancer, or the work stresses of the week. Unworried about getting older, about being alone still, or about enjoying being alone too much; unworried about letting all of this time go by and still feeling like real life hasn’t started; unworried about my dad having another stroke, or about my mom just suddenly up and dying out of nowhere, or cancer, or whether my hairline is changing, or the fact that my heart has been skipping a beat sometimes lately, or whether my friends who I speak to on the phone were getting sick of me, or whether I am too graphic when I describe symptoms I am afraid mean I might have cancer, or whether my apartment neighbors will keep me up with their noise again tonight, or whether the tooth sensitivity I feel drinking cold water lately means I need to risk a dentist visit during a pandemic, or whether I will be able to have healthier boundaries with my parents whenever I return to the northeast, or whether I’ll ever feel truly satisfied and content, or whether I’ll ever feel actual joy some day, or whether my hang-ups, and anxieties, and fears, and regrets about my personal and professional choices will end up all ganging up on me at once, or, of course, whether at any given moment, I might have cancer.

My attitude going into the classes was that I would disregard whatever grades I got and simply aim for as much comprehension as possible. But about halfway through the semester, I lost my nerve and began to think of my grades as a direct indicator of my level of understanding. So I started fretting about my grades, and on days of Calc III exams during the second half of the semester, I took vacation time so I could spend the whole day working on them.

It got a little crazy toward the end, but finally, it was over, and I managed to get all As. That made me happy, even if I knew that that kind of satisfaction is a bit immature. But I felt like I was making up for some of the sins I had committed as a college student, my laziness and my previous lack of appreciation for education finally, in a small way, absolved.

*

I spent Christmas here in Texas. When I think back on Christmases from previous years I find that I can remember the past two years very well because I flew home and packed a lot of family and friend time into a few short days. Before 2018, though, I can’t remember any specific Christmas well enough to recount anything that happened on the day.

But when I was a little kid, I remembered each Christmas perfectly, mainly due to the gifts I got and the room where we put the Christmas tree—where “Christmas happened”: in 1990, it was in the back room and we got a magic set, and also my brother pretended to faint when he saw he’d gotten Reebok Pumps. In 1991, it was in the family room, and my brother and I got the Nintendo game “Base Wars.” In 1992, it was in the living room and we got a Sega Genesis along with the game “Sonic 2.” In 1993, it was in the family room again, and I got a Hot Wheels Key Force car, and my brother got the Genesis game “Hard Ball 3 With Al Michaels.”

In 1994, my grandfather died a few weeks before Christmas, and we got a Sega CD. That was the year I became aware that the Christmas spirit was vulnerable to external forces, one’s first experience with death being the most offensive of those forces, and after a few months I also became aware that a hot new gaming console like the Sega CD could “fail,” slipping into obscurity with a small and unremarkable library of games. As a result, the indestructible-seeming sheen of Christmas fell away, leaving behind a better idea of what Christmas really is: a bare, thin-glassed lightbulb plugged into the middle of the year’s darkest period. After 1994, I can’t really remember what happened each Christmas.

This past Christmas will always be memorable, though, because I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day pretty much doing one of three things: playing Quake (yes, that hobby still refuses to die), watching something Star Wars-related, or video chatting with my family. At any time when I wasn’t speaking to family, I had Christmas music playing in the background, including while Star Wars was on. I turned the heat up in my apartment to 75 degrees and enjoyed how money-wastingly hot it was getting, until my nose started to bleed from the dry air.

I want to take this opportunity to say that I much prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is generally all anticipation and guest arrivals, buoying the mood long into the falling night. From the viewpoint of Christmas Eve, any miracle might happen the following morning. But then after a late, over-buttered breakfast on Christmas Day, there’s nothing much else to do except think about cleaning up and regret how much you’ve eaten. The “anything could happen” feeling is now all gone, collapsed from a dazzling infinity’s worth of possibilities down to one homely outcome.

I hadn’t put up any decorations for my apartment, unless the Christmas music can be considered a decoration. This ended up being a good thing, though, since I didn’t have to take anything down once the holiday was over.

*

I started taking walks pretty early in the pandemic, my first walk happening after about one week of lockdown. That day there was a surprisingly large amount of people also walking. We all stayed far away from one another, since none of us were wearing masks—the width of even a modest suburban Texas street is still impressively wide, so there was no safety issue. I always took the initiative to be the one who crossed the street if I saw someone, exaggeratedly swinging my arms as I crossed so the person walking toward me could see my intentions even from far away. I did this because I figured it would be harder for the dog-walkers to wrangle their dog across the street and get out of my way, and the people without dogs were either old or were walking in a group.

In the beginning I was walking maybe twice a week, which then became three times, which became five. It held at five times a week during the fall semester because I’d have to be on Zoom from 6:30-8:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays, which took up the whole span of time in which I would usually walk. Nowadays, no longer taking classes, I walk every night.

For a while, I tried to get home before sunset, because I’m afraid of being hit by a car in the dark. After the clocks shifted back, I had to choose between walking earlier, during rush hour when everyone was arriving back at their houses from work, or waiting to walk until after the sun has set. I ended up buying one of those reflective construction worker’s vests for $8 on Amazon and waiting for nighttime. I feel like a dork when I wear the vest, but most of the people walking at night who I see are also wearing reflective clothes. Theirs are more chic than my vest, though, looking like they were ordered through an expensive fitness-wear catalogue. I’d buy the same type, but to me, walking is a meditative, solitary act, and I don’t want to feel that I’m catering to externalities like looking stylish while I’m trying to feel solitary. It also acts as a tacit acknowledgement that I’m not a criminal: “I’m making myself as visible as possible! I’m not casing your houses to break into them later on!”

Even though the focus of COVID is on the transmission of disease through shared, respired air, I still pay a lot of attention to contaminated surfaces. When I go out anywhere, I have a routine: first, I put on my going-out clothes (newly clean), then my shoes, which are possibly dirty, since I have to re-tie them sometimes with unwashed hands, so before I touch anything else after tying my shoes, I wash my hands. Then, I put on a mask, turn off all the lights except the one at the front door, pick up my keys with my right hand, slip my phone into my left pocket, and walk to the door. I put my keys in my right pocket (my wallet is already there), open the door with my right hand, turn out the light, step out the door, and take the keys out of my pocket to lock the door with, again, only my right hand.

I use my right hand pretty much everywhere outside—to push or pull open doors, to open my car to retrieve something from it, to open my mailbox and carry my mail in—because I know that if I use my left hand, my phone-operating hand, I’m going to have to put the phone into a little UV light phone-sterilizing box that I bought when I get home. And for some reason, I feel like it’s a small moral failure to have to use that UV box, so I try to keep my left hand from touching anything except for the phone. But I know that if I drive anywhere, all bets are off—both my hands touch the steering wheel, my left hand touches the car door handle while getting out, and I push open doors with both hands whenever I get somewhere. I’m sure that my left hand ends up touching something that may have SARS-CoV-2 on it as I carry out an errand, and therefore into the UV box my phone must go when I get home. But, when I go out to walk, there’s a good chance that I won’t need to touch anything with my left hand between leaving the apartment and coming back. If that’s the case, I can use my phone freely while walking if I want to, but when I get home, I can still just take it from my pocket and place it on my desk, no ultraviolet sterilizing waves needed. But of course then I still have to wash my right hand.

The walk is the same route every night now. It’s a vaguely circular, level 2.7 miles, starting northbound, bearing west, south, then east. It takes about forty minutes for me to walk the whole thing, plus or minus four minutes, depending on how warmed up I get while walking. My heart rate generally goes up to about 115 beats per minute for most of the walk, according to my watch, then spikes to 135 as I climb the stairs to my fourth floor apartment at the end.

Insulated by the sound of music or an audiobook on my headphones, and with my hands stuck in my pockets, actually holding onto the cloth pocket linings themselves, I feel less like a person on a walk and more like someone steering a large, inertia-filled thing—a sailboat that I have to tack against an unfavorable wind, or a bobsled whose blades I have to turn out of deep ruts on the ice. But despite feeling bodily awkward, I find suburbia to be a soothing place to move through. I really don’t understand how some people think of the suburbs as some kind of dystopia, to be honest. My neighborhood has wide streets, as I mentioned, and the houses are almost all ranch-style. The trees, like the houses, are shorter than they are in the northeast. Some of the trees look more like very tall shrubbery. As for the ground, the blades of grass are wider, and the soil is just a bit sandier. Sometimes, I see two-inch-long cockroaches, what people back home would call “water bugs,” creeping across the sidewalks.

I can’t remember the names of the streets on the walk, except for Forrest Street, which I noticed once when I saw the street sign while I was running and it made me think of “Run, Forrest, run!” and Kenilworth Street, which has the same name as a street back at home. Other than those, I only know points along the route by the informal names I’ve assigned to them. There’s a road where it changes direction from heading north to heading east, and it looks over a little park. The lack of houses there gives an unobstructed view of the western horizon. For that reason, I call that part of the route “Sunset Bend.” At another point on the route there is a house where, in the beginning of lockdown last spring, a family was always outside, the parents sitting motionless in Adirondack chairs while their kids all went nuts on the front lawn, playing with the sprinkler, or doing hopscotch, or sitting at one of those tiny plastic picnic tables, playing some board game. That part of the walk I called “Kidville.”

There were other houses that were always so inactive, so abandoned-seeming—the blinds were always closed and there wasn’t a car in the driveway—that I started to wonder if anyone lived there at all, and whether maybe the neighborhood association was mowing its lawn to stave off the shabbiness. But after the switch from walking in daylight to nighttime, I saw that some of those houses, while still shut up and silent, had lights on inside in rooms not facing the street. Looking at those houses is like staring into the vents of a space heater in a dark room.

Eventually I started thinking about how the walk is exactly 2.7 miles. Then, idly, I realized that if you multiply 2.7 by 30, you get 81. That number of years, eighty-one, seems like a decent amount of years to hope to live—it’s not greedy, you’re not asking for a hundred years, for example—but also, maybe when I get closer to 81, there will be better medical treatments and 81 will seem younger. Assuming that doesn’t happen, though, I think of 81 years as more or less “a complete life.” It is very sad, but not exactly a tragedy, to die at 81.

With this in mind, I started translating the distance along my walk to human ages. For instance, 1.0 miles into the walk, times 30, would equal 30 years. And 1.2 miles times 30 would equal 36 years, which is how old I am now. Since by the time I’d discovered this “conversion formula,” the walk was already so familiar to me that I had a very good perspective on how far into the walk any given point felt—the precise moment when I sense that I’m transitioning from the middle to the end phase of the walk, for example. So when I came up with the multiply-by-30 conversion formula, I was interested to see exactly what part of the walk 1.2 miles, or 36 years old, corresponded to.

The answer is that it was later in the walk than I’d hoped. The moment I reach 1.2 miles is long past the most scenic parts of the route; it’s just after a left turn that puts me on a long straightaway of modest houses leading to an arterial road, known to me as the hook-around part of the circuit where in past walks, I had thought, “Now I’m on my way back home.”

Over the next few evenings, I noted other points, ones that had come before the 1.2 mile marker, and compared them to parts of my already-lived life: I graduated high school at 0.6 miles into the walk, which was the beginning of Sunset Bend. I got my master’s degree in a spot where, at nighttime, a streetlight shines through the leaves on a tree, giving the street a dance hall, disco-ball kind of lighting (hence, “Disco Point”). That friendly, lighted patch of street, with a jaunty-looking house standing next to it, makes it my favorite part of the walk. As for points I have not yet reached: still ahead of my current age distance, at around 1.5 miles, is Kidville, but I haven’t seen anyone in the front yard there in months now.

Toward the end, almost back home, there’s a large school property. I’ve never seen anyone on the grounds, except for the occasional person who sneaks onto the running track to jog it. Along one of the fences that borders the school, in springtime last year, someone started zip-tying laminated sheets of paper with jokes written on them to the chain links. The jokes are all clean, and pretty lame—these days it seems like almost all kid-friendly jokes are just puns, like “How did the farmer find his wife? He tractor down!”

One time, I saw a kid about ten years old on his bike, riding along the sidewalk and stopping to read each joke. The fence ends at a small park for toddlers. There’s a big plastic sign at the entrance of the park, faded but still legible, that has a boy’s name displayed on it. Below his name is written a tragically short span of years, and below that, a message: “This park is dedicated to the memory of (the boy’s name), and to all of the little tykes of (the neighborhood).” Whoever it was putting up jokes on the schoolyard fence stopped replacing them with new ones some time during the fall, and I walk too late to ever see anyone playing at the playground. Well, that’s not quite true: very rarely, around 9 PM on warm nights, I might see what appears to be a young mother scrutinizing her phone as her kid swings in the dark.

*

I haven’t been to the gym to lift any weights since lockdown started. I’ve been able to do cardio in my apartment, but the result of all the cardio and all the walking is that I’ve lost a decent amount of lifting strength, as well as about ten pounds. This is consistent with how life in general has evolved: I have also reduced the list of spaces I travel to, leaving my apartment only to go to work, to pick up groceries, and to walk through my neighborhood. My body, and the edges of my life, have gone through a great miniaturization, but my perspective has adapted with it—each feature within this smaller space seems more detailed, and the day’s moments are of a finer grain. Inside my apartment, I have realized how much the lighting affects the atmosphere, and as a result the mood, so I can change which lights are on when to reflect the mood of each time of day. When I walk at night, sometimes I have the same feeling I did the week before I moved here from New Jersey, a sort of farewell feeling. That feeling started in the fall as a dessert-like flipside to my happy mornings spent doing math homework. Those evenings, I also felt like I was saying goodbye, to a more insecure, more ignorant version of myself, I guess. Nowadays, I get the feeling that I’m saying goodbye to the person who had, until now, always feared that he was missing out on things.

There will be a time, closer to now than now is to the beginning of the pandemic, when I will leave Texas. I will be happy and relieved to return home, whenever that is. But at the same time, there’s a new feeling that is starting to take root, and it’s a weird one: for all the hardship that the pandemic has presented to me, the anxiety for my family and the limitations it’s put on my mobility, social life, and career, for more than ten months now, its most memorable effect, unless I’m affected by the illness itself, will be that it made me love my neighborhood. I have walked more than 500 miles of it over the months, and scores of miles remain to be walked before I move away. I’ve walked during steaming afternoons, during cloudy sunsets, in pre-dawn twilight on cool mornings, and during soft, breezy evenings. It’s always picturesque, pleasant, very green. The houses look inviting, and the dog-walkers wave to me. I listen to music that suits my mood and do the geographical equivalent of palm reading. That’s all, really.

Can a person love a place? Feel gratitude toward landscaping, houses, parked cars, and people viewed only from a distance? Can someone feel affinity to a fox seen in a churchyard and streetlights shining through leaves in the night? Affection for lawn mower exhaust, for the noise of an approaching SUV slowly carving out a bend? Love for landmarks that correspond to moments in one’s past, or to moments that one might encounter in the future?

There will be a time, I hope, when my years in Texas are far in the past. But some day, I will hear a song, or see a house with a certain architecture, or smell a variety of grass, and Texas will return to me. At the same time, I also hope that it isn’t too overwhelming. I’ve found that I can never tell how potent a memory of a particular time or place will be until there’s a lot of distance between me and it. Sometimes, a memory will come gently, settling on me like a haze, ready to be indulged, even laughed at. In such cases I turn up the music that brought the memory, or take a luxuriating whiff of the scent, and I think back on the time, feeling only a little bit sad.

But other memories swoop down like some kind of predatory bird, and in those cases, the nostalgia feels more like the punch of the bird’s talons in the back of my neck. The sense of missing is so strong that it feels less like nostalgia and more like a distilled, portable homesickness. Ridiculously, I’ll even want to return to the memory’s time and place, despite knowing that in reality it had been fraught with pain or unease. Which makes the sneaking feeling growing during this time, at this place, all the more uncanny. I mean, all that this span of time has been, is me, and some terrain, and the wind, and the light of the sun or the moon. No one else. My nostalgia for anything before this was always about times and places with other people. So who will I be missing?

Someone once said, Wherever you go, there you are. But now, I wonder: is that really true?

[fallenfurther]

A drop into silence - Part 3

I decided not to leave this without a little hope for you all. I go a little into the science at the end, I hope I have kept it at the right level. I did have some fun researching stem cells.   Part 1 and Part 2. Enjoy

************

The next few days were spent lying in a hospital bed, a smile plastered on his face, keeping up appearances for his little brothers. He laughed at Gordon’s jokes, smiled as Alan relayed his latest adventure on Cavern Quest and tried to reflect the air of positivity that the doctors seemed to have. His fingers stayed pink and healthy, his wounds were healing nicely, and his bones had been repositioned correctly first time. He was considered lucky. Yet deep down, beneath it all, Scott felt despair. The support of his family kept him there, kept him present and he would have drowned without them. But part of him wanted to drown. With every passing day the neurologist looked less satisfied with his progress. A week after the rescue and he was discharged with physiotherapy booked for when the cast they sent him home in was removed. The joy on everyone’s face kept him going. They were like a storm, spinning around him with such force it carried him along. Yet that night, after he’d thrown his nightshirt across the room in frustration, he let the façade fall. Scott lay on bed shirtless, placed his head on his pillow and stared at the ceiling. Only then could he let the thoughts surface. The tears silently fell, dampening his pillow. When the sound of someone entering his room came, he couldn’t stop them, couldn’t pull on the façade he’d discarded. He was thankful when it was Virgil who pulled a chair up to his bed.

“I can’t feel anything, Virgil.”

The soft brown eyes met his, a sadness in them that showed the truth.

“The doctors say the feeling could still come back; your nerves just need time to heal.”

“Screw the doctors!” Scott growled, anger filling him as tears continued to fall. “What do you believe, Virgil? You’ve seen the scans; you know the medical facts. I know you’ve spoken with Grandma, gotten her opinion. Do you think I’ll regain enough feeling, enough movement?”

Scott watched as Virgil broke eye contact. His brother was bent over in the chair, and guilt spread through him. He should take it out on Virgil. It wasn’t his fault. The tear that Virgil shed made Scott want to reach out. He did reach out, except he didn’t. His left arm didn’t move, didn’t follow the command Scott gave it. Instead, Virgil met his eyes and held his gaze. Those hazel eyes were strong and held, ready to speak the truth.

“I believe you’ll regain some feeling, just not enough for you to use the arm. You would only be allowed to fly a specially adapted plane and your days as an International Rescue operative are over. Brains is already planning on a way to allow you to fly Thunderbird One but…”

“I won’t be able to do rescues. I’ll be a liability.”

Scott’s heart broke and he knew Virgil’s was shattering beside him. International Rescue would never be the same. It would go on, because it had to, but without him at the helm of Thunderbird One, it wouldn’t feel right.

“I’m sorry, Scott.”

Scott pushed himself up awkwardly, still not used to the dead weight of his arm and twisted so he sat facing Virgil. His gaze fell on his fingers, again he tried to wiggle them, every thought projecting down the arm. Nothing. Virgil picked up the hand and shifted so it lay on his knee. Silently, he started massaging the muscles and flexing the fingers. These were some of Scott’s assigned exercises, all of which were easier done by someone else. Virgil went through every finger, bending it and flexing it, being careful of the cast that stopped at his knuckles. The tender care of his brother’s touch was lost to Scott. Closing his eyes, his body felt still. None of the movement could be felt. He had felt the tug when Virgil had pulled his arm, up in his shoulder, above where the main nerve had been severed.

“Grandma is reaching out to all her friends, asking if there is any research that has evaded her that might help.”

Scott fought the sob. Of course, she wouldn’t give up. She was a Tracy too, stubborn as they come. It brought a smile to his face, despite the tear that escaped. He felt his hand being placed on his leg and returned his gaze to Virgil. The artist’s hands fell on his bare shoulders, an act that gave Scott the strength he currently lacked.

“We’ll get through this.”

Scott gave Virgil a resigned nodded. He still struggled to believe it could get better. Virgil got up, leaving Scott’s shoulders to feel cold, only to return with the nightshirt he’d discarded.

“How about we get this on?”

*****

Scott stood in front of the mirror in just his suit trousers. The skin on his left arm clearly displayed the scars, a fresh pink colour, that reminded him that even though he looked okay, he wasn’t complete. It’d been almost three months and there was no change in the arm. It just hung there, limp. The rest of Scott’s body was still toned due his continued use the island gym. Even though he couldn’t be a member of International Rescue, the need to maintain his fitness remained. Yet as Scott stared at his redundant arm, he could see the signs of wastage. The bicep had less definition and his forearm was looking slimmer. Signing, he turned and slipped the shirt from its hanger. He’d gotten the technique now, on how to slip his dead arm into the sleeve, though he knew it would create creases in the crisp ironed material. Pulling it up at the shoulder, he pulled it round and slipped his right arm in. Again, his fingers had mastered the one handed fasten, and soon the shirt was done up. The suit jacket followed in the same manner. Sitting he pulled on his socks and shoes. He had yet to buy any new dress shoes, not wanting another reminder of what he couldn’t do. Slipping on the shoes, laces left untied, he grabbed his tie and room key. Outside Grandma was waiting. She’d flown him over and insisted on staying to help him. He regretted that he needed help, but the tie slipped from his hand and was thrown over his head. Scott smiled at his Grandmother as she tightened the knot round his neck before bending down and tying his shoes tightly. These shoes hadn’t let him down yet, but his secretary was aware of his difficulties and she was good at discreetly helping him.

“All ready. Go get them, Scott.”

Scott couldn’t help the small chuckle at his Grandma’s enthusiasm. He’d taken to doing more Tracy Industries work, so he didn’t just spend his time watching, worrying, and envying his brothers when they were out on rescues. They were all being careful, his arm a subtle reminder of why they must be cautious. Yet at the same time, when in the heat of the moment, they could forget it and they had started to push themselves again. They had just returned from a rescue before he had left last night, so goodness knows what could happen to them while he was away.

“Thanks Grandma. Are you sure you’ll be okay by yourself in New York?”

“Oh, don’t go worrying about me. I’ve plenty to keep me occupied. Anyway, we need to get you to your meeting, can’t be late now.”

“I’m the CEO, they can’t start without me!”

Grandma looped her arm in his good one and started guiding him towards the exit. She was one of the strongest women he knew and as he peered down at the top of her head, he absorbed some of that strength. It was his family that got him out of bed each morning, his family that got him through the pain that rose when he found himself staring up at Thunderbird One, or when he went to the supply cupboard and saw his spare uniform. His family kept this grounded pilot going.

*****

The previous day had been tough, and all Scott had wanted was to be flown home so he could sleep in his own bed. However, Grandma had insisted that they stay another night and spend the day in New York. One gaze into his Grandmother’s hopeful blue eyes, her hands clasped together, and he relented. Maybe he needed some time away from the island.

“So, where are you planning to take me today?”

Scott smiled down at the older woman, who had her arm in his and was pulling him towards the exit. There was an energy in her that reminded him of Alan.

“Actually, I was hoping you’d agree to meet a friend of a friend I met yesterday. She’s currently doing some research you might be interested in.”

Scott’s heart stuttered in his chest. He knew what she was referring to and he tried to stay calm. There had been so many false leads, so much promising research that was still in the earliest of stages. They had even investigated bionics, though Scott wasn’t too keen as some of the early work was less than successful in the long run. He also had Brains working on an exosuit-like device that would be able to move his arm for him, but the prototypes were still bulky and hard to control. If Grandma thought it was worth his time then he would go, he just wouldn’t get his hopes up. The car out front took them to a skyscraper, and they were met in the lobby by a smartly dressed woman who embraced Grandma.

“It’s good to see you again Sally, and you must be Mr Scott Tracy. My name is Charlene Russell, I’m a neuroscientist and it’s my research that might be of interest to you.”

Scott shook her outstretched hand, noting the glance to his useless one. They were then led up to an office where they were subjected to a presentation. Scott didn’t miss the eagerness radiating from his Grandma.

“…so, as you can see, the rats regained full use of their legs after the treatment. When it comes to the same in humans, we have been given permission to start some trials in extremely specific patients, mainly in smaller less complex neurological deficiencies. We harvest the stem cells from the bone marrow, as well as the testis in men. Unlike earlier therapies we plan to harvest multipotent stem cells, so they still obtain the ability to become most cell lines. We have managed to find a combination of signalling proteins, hormones, and growth factors, which push human stem cells to become neuroectodermal cells, which is the first stage in the development of the nervous system in a foetus. We also have the right combination to produce neural stem cells. Our treatment involves injecting these cells into the area around the damaged nerves to allow the cells to trigger repair and in some cases, even bridge the broken strands allowing signals to pass along the nerves. It can take a few treatments to get the best results, but in our trials so far, patients have regained more function than expected from normal treatment alone.”

Scott sat straight, trying to take in all the science that was being thrown at him. The take home message seemed that they could repair damaged nerves in some patients. But would it work for him? He dared not hope for full movement but even some. If he could just feed himself and tie his shoes. To not have to rely on someone else for the simplest of things. It would ease the worry he saw in Virgil’s eyes.

“Do you think it could help me?”

“Well, Sally kindly shared with me your medical scans, and considering the nerve damage is limited to a few small areas, with the main break being at the top of your arm, this type of therapy has the potential to help. This therapy is very individualistic, and outcomes can vary, but if we could get even a few stem cells to bridge the gap at the top of your arm then that could restore some function, even if it’s just sensations of touch or pain.”

Even the feeling of touch would be an improvement. Currently he often bruised or cut the skin on his left arm because he couldn’t feel it. He had once left a trail of blood through the house when he’d cut his finger on something and hadn’t noticed.

“You said only a few selected cases could undergo the treatment, would I fall into this category?”

“Currently you don’t, however we have just been granted permission to try the therapy on a person with a similar injury in their leg. I believe we could apply to allow you on a trial as we could use your data in conjunction with theirs to assess the therapies potential in humans. We would have to apply straight away as the sooner after injury the treatment is preformed the better the success and you are already close to three months post injury.”

“Do you think we could get permission?”

“Yes. I believe the fact that you are Scott Tracy will help with your case too.”

“Then let’s do it. I have nothing to lose.”

Charlene smiled at him and Scott couldn’t help but mirror it.

“I’ll go fetch all the appropriate paperwork. I’ve had one of the medical teams on standby ready to do the required examinations and tests on your arm. These will have to be repeated at a late date for confirmation. Also, if you consent, they are also able to do the tissue harvest to start the process of extracting and culturing your multipotent stem cells. This would mean we could move quickly into starting treatment once permission is obtained.”

“So, I’m going to have a bone marrow harvest and you said something about testis in men, what does that involve?”

Charlene looked a little sheepish.

“Yes, the doctors will take a small slither of testicular tissue. They have assured me that it won’t affect your ability to have children and involves making a small incision with minimal scaring. The doctors will explain all the risks later, though from what I’ve heard most men don’t complain, especially if the bone marrow harvest is done first or at the same time.”

Scott swallowed, but nodded. There were always risks with new procedures, but this might be his best shot. There was a chance, a glimmer of hope if bureaucracy didn’t get in his way. Then he was Scott Tracy, CEO of Tracy industries and still considered Commander of International Rescue to most of the world. When had a bit of paperwork ever stopped him from getting what he wanted?

[toomanysurveys9]

1. When was the last time someone saw you naked? I don’t remember.

2. If you could bring someone back from the dead and spend an hour with them, who would it be and what would you do/say? My grandma. I want to tell her about everything and introduce her to my babies.

3. What is the greatest loss you’ve endured? My grandma.

4. How would you describe your current mood? I’m okay. I’m just really, really tired.

5. When was the last time you did something you were embarrassed by? I don’t remember.

6. What was the last thing you lied about? Being okay.

7. Where is your favorite place to have sex? Prefer the bed. It’s so much easier.

8. What is your earliest memory? One of them is singing at my grandparents house.

9. Do you ever drink or get high alone? Nah.

10. What type of a drunk are you? It depends. I start off happy and okay and then I get depressed and stuff.

11. What song (or a few songs, whatever) means a lot to you and why? I get to be the one by JJ Heller.

12. When was the last time you revealed your feelings for someone? Were they accepted or rejected? It’s been a long time, and we’re married now.

13. What was the reason behind your last visit to the hospital? Miscarriage.

14. How do you tend to deal with a breakup? I’ve never really had to “deal” with a breakup.

15. What is the “worst” drug you’ve done? Are there any you will never try, or any you want to try? Weed. And I never want to do any again.

16. What is something you’ve done that you truly regret? Self-injury.

17. What does it mean to you to be a good person? Do you feel you are a good person? I think in some areas, I am a good person. But I could definitely be better.

18. What is your philosophy on life/how do you generally choose to live or conduct yourself? Always keep fighting.

19. Do you view animals as being just as important as people? Why or why not? My pets are family. As far as other animals, while I’m not a vegetarian or vegan, I still believe they should be treated in a humane way and with compassion. There’s no reason to be cruel, such as abusing them or keeping them in harsh conditions. <<< This.

20. When was the last time you were up all night and why? I’ve been up all night a lot. I haven’t been sleeping too well lately.

21. What is the worst thing you’ve done to yourself? What is the worst thing someone else has done to you? I have engaged in self-injury in the past. And I have been sexually abused.

22. What is the most personal thing you’re willing to reveal? Uh, I guess what I shared above.

23. What made you stop talking to the last person you cut out of your life? We just grew apart I guess.

24. Is there a situation or person you haven’t been able to get over/forgive? Yeah.

25. Who was the last person to yell at you? Did you yell back? I don’t know. Either my mom or Jake. I don’t know that I yelled back.

26. Where did your last injury come from? I banged a chair leg into my shin about a week or two ago. It still hurts.

27. What are some kinks or turn-ons you have, if any? I don’t have any kinks. My turn-ons are pretty basic.

28. What are you like during arguments? These days... I tend to shut down.

29. What is the worst thing you have said to another person? I don’t know.

30. Where do you like to be kissed? Forehead kisses are sweet.

31. What is more difficult for you, looking into someones eyes when you are telling someone how you feel, or looking into someones eyes when they are telling you how they feel? Both. Eye contact is not my strongest quality.

32. Think of the last time you were REALLY angry. WHY were you angry? Do you still feel the same way? Something Jacob said to Wyatt that wasn’t okay at all. And yes.

33. You are on a flight from Honolulu to Chicago non-stop. There is a fire in the back of the plane. You have enough time to make ONE phone call. Who do you call? What do you tell them? Jacob. That I love him and to make sure he always tells our babies that I love him too.

34. You are at the doctor’s office and he has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? What do you do with your remaining days? Would you be afraid? I would definitely tell some people. And I don’t know. But I don’t want to think about this with my upcoming doctor appointment. And very.

35. You can have one of the following two things. Which do you choose? Why? There’s no choices to choose between...

36. You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late even once more, you are fired. Do you take the time to save the dogs life? Why or Why not? Yes I would. Because I can find a new job. The dog won’t have another life.

37. Would you rather be hurt by the one you trust the most or the one you love the most? They’re the same.

38. Your best friend confesses that he/she has feelings for you more than just friendship. He/she is falling in love with you. What do you (or did you) do/say? I’m straight, so there’s that...

39. Think of the last person who you know that died. You have the chance to give them 1 hour of life back, but you have to give up one year of yours. Do you do it? Why or Why not? No. People might think I’m horrible for that... but no.

40. Are you the kind of friend that you would want to have as a friend? I don’t know.

41. Does love = sex? No.

42.Your boss tells your coworker that they have to let them go because of work shortage, and they are the newest employee. You have been there much longer. Your coworker has a family to support and no other means of income. Do you go to your boss and offer to leave the company? Why or Why not? I’m in the same boat, so probably not.

43.When was the last time you told someone HONESTLY how you felt regardless of how difficult it was for you to say? Who was it? What did you have to tell the person? I don’t know.

44. What would be (or what was) harder for you to tell a member of the opposite sex, you love them or that you do not love them back? That I love them.

45. What do you think would be the hardest thing for you to give up? Why would it be hard to lose? Uhhh. Ice cream. It just makes me happy sometimes.

46. Excluding romantic love, when was the last time you told someone you loved them. Who were they to you? My daughter.

47. If there was one moment and one time in the last month what would you change and why? I don’t know.

48.Imagine it is a dark night, you are alone, it is raining outside, you hear someone walking around outside your window. WHO do you wish was there with you? Jacob.

49. Would you give a homeless person CPR if they were dying? Why or Why not? I’m certified, so yes. Compressions are the most important component if you’re uncomfortable doing mouth to mouth until help arrives.

50.You are holding onto your grandmother’s hand and the hand of a newborn that you do not know as they hang over the edge of a cliff. You have to let one go to save the other. Who do you let fall to their death? What was your rationale for making the decision? I don’t like this survey. I”m going to be up all night, anxious as shit. So thanks.

51. Are you old fashioned? I guess in some areas.

52. When was the last time you were nice to someone and did NOT expect anything in return for it? I never expect anything in return for my kindness.

53.Which would you choose, true love with a guarantee of a broken heart, or never loved at all? Why? True love. I would rather have been loved for awhile than to feel as though I don’t matter.

54.If you could do anything or wish anything, what would it be? I’d wish for all illnesses to be cured and to be able to stay this age forever.

55. What was the last thing you ate? Pizza.

56. What kind of guys are you usually attracted to? I don’t know.

57. What’s the stupidest thing that’s happened to you that ended a friendship? I don’t remember.

58. What’s the longest amount of time you’ve had sex for?

I don’t know. I don’t time it.

59. What reality shows do you watch? The Masked Singer. I Can See Your Voice.

60. Post a video of yourself here: No thanks.

61. Where do you work? A local center for kiddos on the autism spectrum.

62. Have you ever gone up to a car thinking it was yours and tried to get in it? Yeah. I’ve gotten in one once even...

63. Where do you buy most of your clothes? Walmart.

64. If you were very intelligent and had the capability to have any profession, what would you like to be? Psychologist.

65. What’s your most irrational fear? I have a lot of them.

66. How many radio stations do you listen to? There’s two I mostly listen to.

67. What kind of music do they have?

One is popular music, and the other is country.

68. Would you rather go to Greece or Hawaii? Greece.

69. Musicals: Yay or Nay? Eh. Not necessarily my favorite generally.

70. What are the next concerts you’ll be going to? I don’t know. I’m going to a musical in a couple weeks though.

71. What was the last conversation you had with your best friend about? Needing sleep.

72. Are you one of those people that LOVE to hug others? Depends on the person, but not generally.

[mischiefapprentice]

Absence Not Gone Unnoticed (Daniel Henney x Reader)

Author’s Note: This one-shot is also in my Tadashi Hamada Imagines in Wattpad. I also noticed that there are a few stories for Daniel Henney, so... It’s time for me to show what I got. 

"Guys, where's Charlie?"

Charlie Mercado's absence was noticed by everyone in the set of Criminal Minds. Being the youngest member in the Behavioral Assessment Unit of the FBI, of course, all of them worry for her. It was rare that she'll be absent nor be late. In fact, she was the one coming earliest next to Daniel Henney. Every morning, whenever no one is around just yet, she would always blast some music in her Bluetooth speaker and dance along to random songs. Well, she thought no one would notice it, but she got busted by Daniel. Being this shy girl she is, she immediately stopped her music and pretended to just walk around.

"You don't need to hide that, you know?" he asks as the black haired Filipina turned around to face him, her tanned face blushing as she played with the strings of her gray jacket. "You weren't supposed to see that, Daniel." she replies as she picked up her speaker, only for him to stop her hand. There was a mischievous glint in his eyes that made her brows frown. "What are you planning?"

She watched the half Korean pick her phone up and place it on her hands. "Play any music you got there. We are going to dance." This made her eyes widen, but the way he looked at her tells her he is being serious with it. Sighing in defeat, she played her own mash up of songs from TikTok.

They have been dancing for so long that they didn't notice their other fellow cast mates watching them from their own trailers and corners. Kirsten Vangsness even recorded one video of them dancing as they laughed their heads out, making the rest of the cast coo at them and murmuring that they should be together. All of them are aware that Daniel has been crushing on Charlie since the script reading day for season 13. There was an agreement between them that if she feels like dancing anytime, she could. That was the start of random dance showdowns whenever there was nothing to do.

"She's not responding to my calls." Matthew tells the group as he puts his phone in his pocket. All of them tried calling and texting her, but all ended up in voicemail. Daniel took the next call, but it also ended up in voicemail. Just then, they saw one of their directors who has a worried face. "Director, what's the matter?" Daniel asks. "Charlie won't be coming to set this week. We have to cancel's today's shoot with her due to some reasons she doesn't want to tell me, but it seems so important. And Kirsten, I believe she wants to talk to you in private."

Text Messages:      

CM: Kirsten. I won't be coming to set, but  can we meet later? I need advice 😭

KV: Why? What happened? I'll go to your house.

CM: Um, Kirs? I'm actually at the family doctors. Please don't tell anyone especially Daniel?

KV: Why the hell are you there? I'm coming over. STAY PUT.

KV: Don't dare move at least an inch.

CM: Yes, mama bear.

"Guys, I'm going home now. I'll see you tomorrow!" Kirsten says as she nervously gripped her phone and got in her car to go to the family clinic Charlie is in. A.J. Cook joined her as she also feared for her life. Little did they know, Daniel noticed their anxious state as they drove away. Matthew walks behind him as he placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. Daniel sighs in worry as he looked at his light brown eyes.

"Mate, whatever is going on with Charlie, I know she's okay." "I know, mate. I just can't bear to know that she's slipping off my hands. God, I barely told her my true feelings towards her." "Daniel. Do you even remember that you are neighbors?" 

      "Just give me a call when you need something, okay?"

Kirsten and AJ stayed with Charlie for the rest of the day. Her doctor asked for some tests like CBC (Complete Blood Count), Blood Sugar Test and an ultrasound of her breast. There is a pre-diagnosis that she has a breast boil that shows a large mass that has a large volume of abscess. She has been prescribed a lot of pills and ointments to take, and she cannot wear tight clothing like the ones she would wear on shoots. The director for the episode she is in is informed, and the production team decided to cancel for this week, since most of the scenes need her. Many 'get well soon' greetings from the production were said, but all the male actors aren't informed about it.

Just then, they heard the door bell ring. Kirsten opened the door to reveal Daniel clad in his white shirt and grey sweatpants as he wore his black Nike slides. He clearly just got home from set. "Hey, Kirsty. How did you know Charlie's home?"

She nervously laughed as she told him that her sister just lived a couple of lots away from Charlie. Daniel bought it somehow, but he told her about his worry for Charlie, and asked if he can see her. Unfortunately, Charlie told her not to accept visitors yet, since her fever hasn't died out yet, but she is already taking in the medicines needed. Just then, AJ popped out, waving at the two of them as she grabbed her things. "Hey, Henney. Are you here to see our youngest?" "Um, yeah, but it seems she still needed some time to rest." "Yes she does. Dan, we need to tell you something."

"So, are you telling me that she can have breast cancer if this gooey slimy thing doesn't pop out of that mound?"

Kirsten and AJ told everything from the shoot with the mud to that check up Charlie attended to. It saddened him, since he made her promise to tell everything that is going on with her. They really had no choice but to tell him about it. He could have gone with her to the doctors too. "Hey, we understand Charlie's reasons not to tell you. It really indeed is alarming, but you also deserve to know, lover boy." Kirsten tells him as he buried his face in his hands. "Don't let her slip away this time."

As the two women left, Daniel paced by the living room of Charlie's small bungalow, wondering how he could tell her his true feelings for her. Just then, he heard her faint calls for someone, and he went to her room, which is just as simple as his. Tissues, bandages, capsules and towels filled her nightstand. She held a hot compress close to her right breast. Her eyes widen as she saw his form standing by the room. "D-Daniel? How did you know I lived here?" "We are neighbors, Charlie. I can actually see AJ and Kirsten in your house. So, you got that?" He asks as he pointed at her, making her sigh as she shook her head yes. "Why didn't you tell me? I could have helped in some way," he tells her as he sat by the edge of the bed. "I didn't want to bother you with it. You might puke when you find out," she replies as she winces with the pain of the breast boil. "You? Being a bother? Impossible. And it might outrage me, but I will try my best to help you." Daniel chuckles as he rubbed his neck in bashfulness. "I nearly thought that I can lose you anytime."

They were enjoying each others company as they recounted stories from their childhood and misadventures and things that happened on the set. Daniel finds himself falling for the young lady as he gets lost in her beauty even though she looked sickly.

       "Is it still oozing?"

Charlie's boil popped the day after, and the girls had to get him out of the room every hour to remove the oozing pus. It was a lot of work, but it it worth it since it means that she will be okay. The doctor warned that if it won't pop anytime of the week, she will have to be confined in the hospital to perform some surgical draining, considering how dangerous the amount of abscess was found, and it can solidify into a tumor that can cause cancer.

He was finally let in, and smiled as he took in her recovering self. Her paleness has gone off, and her happy side is on again. "Daniel, you might wanna say something to Charlie," Kirsten teased as she threw the used bandages in the bin nearby. Charlie raised a brow, confusion filling the air. AJ and Kirsten leave them both inside.

"So, there's something I do not know?" she asks as she made herself comfortable. He sighs as he rubbed his neck off, not knowing how to tell her his true feelings towards her. "Um, Charlie... I have been... Ugh, forget it. It seems that I am a little bit old for you." Daniel tells as he looked down on the floor, back facing her. Charlie laughs as she messed his hair up. "Dummy, stop beating around the bush." she tells him. "I'm all ears."

Daniel just shrugs his shoulders and scooted closer to her as he enveloped her in a warm hug. "I missed this warmth. I missed your laughter, your joys, your dances to the music we play early in the morning, and most of all, I missed your whole being. I have been into you for so long, Charlie Mercado. I have been falling for you since that script reading session."

She was filled with laughter as she heard his confession. His brows furrow as he looked at her laughing form, her shoulders shaking as she tried to contain herself. "Daniel Phillip Henney, I have been into you as well for god knows how long."

       Since that confession in her room, Daniel never left her side. He didn't go home for some nights just to see that she's being attended to. Soon after, she got all well and she can now continue shooting some scenes with everyone, but she needs to be a lot more careful, since her wound hasn't fully healed yet. For her safety, the director requested a stunt double for her behalf even though she can do them all way before she got it. The other actors always made sure she is safe and comfy during shootings.

"It seems that you are standing up to your family position as a baby," Daniel laughs as she scrunched her nose. "Says the one who told everyone to treat me like one, since I am too 'fragile' like a baby." Charlie rolls her eyes as she laid on the bed inside her trailer. Little did they know, Matthew was recording the whole scene, the others right behind him as they squeal while they watch the new couple cuddle.

       "So, it's goodbye for us for now."

Daniel and Charlie stood by the entrance of the airports. He offered to bring her to the airport the week after the press cons for Criminal Minds, and the inevitable day she has to go back to her country for a short vacation came. He feels sad, since it has been a few weeks since they started to be in a relationship and they both wanted to be stuck together. "I believe it is not. We've got social media with us, right?" Charlie laughs as she placed her palm on his cheek, which he held to tightly. "But the time differences. I want to talk to you longer." Daniel pouts, making her laugh. "Stop whining you big baby. Roscoe's with you." Charlie laughs as she watches Daniel feign his annoyance.

Daniel was about to leave Charlie to herself when they both heard the announcement of cancelled flights to east. He listened carefully as he waited to hear her flight number to be mentioned, and his eyes lit up as he saw her laughing as she pulled her luggage. "It seems that your prayers have been granted." "It truly is granted." He chuckles as he pulled her close to him and pecked her forehead.

       "How on earth did you get in here, Romeo?"

Charlie's eyes widen as she saw her Romeo, or rather Daniel in her backyard, bringing his fluffy golden retriever with him. Clad in just his usual house clothes and sliders, he grinned as he hugged his girlfriend, but it was wiped off when she started spraying alcohol all over him. "What? I'm just killing off the corona virus you could be bringing!" she yelps as he grins mischievously, starting the small chase around her small home.

She got cornered in her sofa as Roscoe managed to make her trip off her run, making her fall back first on the sofa. She closed her eyes, fearing the inevitable war of tickling where she loses as always. She gasps as she just felt two arms wrap around her as she is being pulled down along, pecking her head in the process. "Why are you always too sweet for my own good?" she asks as she listened to the rhythm of his heart beating.

He laughs as he pats her head, hugging and pulling her close to him as he placed her head close to his chest, making her hear his heartbeat even more. "You deserve only the best things in life, my dearest Juliet."

They wouldn't ended up like this if it weren't for that absence not gone unnoticed.

[cinnamonrollstark]

Irondad Bingo: Trope: Sick Fic

@irondadbingo

□□□

Your toothbrush is the red one. Damn thing has your name on it- you've got no excuse to forget. The bathroom is twenty-two steps from the bedroom, and a sharp left turn away. It shouldn't be that hard.

But somehow, it is. If it weren't, Tony wouldn't get cavities in the back of his mouth, or piss his pants in search of the toilet. This is meant to be a natural occurence, and it likely would've afflicted his father were he to have lived long enough, and yet, it feels like an intrusion on his life, a bomb dropped for absolutely no reason other than to throw him off course.

If it were as easy as simply reminding himself of these things day to day, then Pepper wouldn't have to find him in the hall, confused and frustrated, and scared because he doesn't know which way to turn next. She wouldn't have to brush his hair or remind him to wash it when it gets oily. But she does. And that is how it goes.

Dementia robs him of most luxuries. It was always Tony's longtime goal to find happiness one day, and as soon as he'd found it, the rug had been ripped from underfoot, and he'd landed in an abyss, with no direction, no map, and no way to get out again.

And yet, some days, the confusion clears. He is lucid, happy. These days are getting rarer as of late, few and far between, but when they occur, he never takes them for granted. He steals lucid moments of sunlight, wind combing through his slowly graying hair. He hugs his daughter, who grows with such rapid force that he's entirely sure he's missed years of her life in between the clarity. He stands at the bank of the lake, toes dipped in the water, letting sand tickle the soles of his feet. He takes these moments in as deeply as he can, as often as he can.

Today is no different. It's been three months since he was last completely lucid, and lately his ability to walk and talk as he once normally did is fading. It's somewhat early in the summer, about a week into June. Crisp light filters in through scattered windows in the lake house, framing Tony's figure as he looks out the window. The day has been slowly slipping through his fingers, and he knows what's coming. For all the planning and paperwork they've put into this, it's far harder to come to terms with as it actually happens.

Slim arms weave through his own, his hands in his pockets, and wrap around his waist. Pepper, the familiar scent of her perfume. Her breath elevates his chest against her own, her chin on his shoulder. "What're you doing?" She asks, swaying a bit against his body.

Tony lets out a soft exhale and turns to face her, returning the embrace. "Just thinking," he admits, not quite able to look directly at her. "Not gonna lie, Pep," he clears his throat, "I'm scared."

Pepper runs a soft hand across his hair and smiles with tears in her eyes. "I know," she swallows, and the pain in her voice is evident, "but you know it's going to be okay."

This is a quiet, loving lie. They tell this to themselves to feel better about what will happen later tonight, what they've been expecting for months now. They are settled in their decision, of course, but are nowhere near happy about it.

Morgan is not quite old enough to understand it in its entirety; at eight, she is obviously intelligent, but the rapid decline of her father's health was beyond her comprehension in its earliest stages, and now, as it is coming to an end, she is more so confused about what will happen after than why it is happening at all.

Many long talks with her, mostly on Pepper's end, as Tony is often unable to get a clear point across, have lead her to a stable acceptance of the subject.

Peter, on the other hand, has been so against the idea from the beginning that Tony's been fearing the worst- that he wont show up at all. He's 19, now, taking a gap year between high school and college. Other than lower-level villain defense, Peter isn't up to much at the moment, and his freedom to participate in the last clear days of Tony's life makes his absence all the more painful.

◇◇◇

Pepper's fingers lather shampoo through Tony's dark hair. She plants kisses on his soapy, wet cheeks, and cries as calmly as she can. It's moments like this, moments when he's aware and lucid that she misses him all the more. Every good moment has felt like the last in recent months, and now that is truly how it is.

It feels odd getting dressed for the last time- casual, comfortable, but something other than his standard pajamas- and his wife helps him pick out his last pair of clothes. He's gotten quite skinny, still muscular, but much smaller. Her arms fir around his waist so easily that her wrists overlap. She whispers that she loves him into his neck, and he tells her he loves her right back.

Tony pays a visit to Morgan's room soon before the doctor arrives. His daughter is sitting on her bed, eyes locked outside the window. She hugs a stuffed animal to her chest.

"Hey Maguna." He sits on the edge of the bed with her, and she glances warily at him. "You doin' okay?"

He runs a hand over her soft but messy hair. Her lips pout out in the way that they do when she's about to cry, and he kisses her cheek as the tears spill over. She doesn't sob or wail; it is resigned mourning.

"I just don't get why- if you're okay right now- why you have to go."

Tony takes in a deep breath. He had a feeling this question would come, as it is a perfectly natural reaction. He swallows the lump in his throat and hugs her from the side.

"Its because I'm okay right now that I know it's time to go. Thing is, kiddo, that things haven't been so easy for me lately. Things that everyone else can do without even thinking. And I don't always get to look at you, and see you for you."

He has to pause in order to not break down- six months ago, he forgot who she was. Simply didn't understand why this stranger of a child was in his house. It hadn't made sense to him when she'd burst into tears, and why he'd followed suit, as if some part of him knew what a self-betrayal it was to forget his own daughter.

"And I always want to look at you, and know you. And know your mom. And your big brother. I don't lose those things because I want to; it's just not in my control. But this is."

Morgan nods, a tear slipping from her cheek and over her lip. "I know," she admits. "I just wish you could stay."

◇◇◇

They eat dinner as a family, waiting in anxiousness for the arrival of Doctor Kleptach. Three chairs filled, and four spaces set for the meal. There is an emptiness that has yet to be filled, and it certainly isn't meant for the doctor.

Pepper keeps catching Tony's eyes, trying to reassure him that Peter will be coming, there is no way he'd miss this, but Tony isn't so sure. It feels as if Peter has completely separated himself from the family, as if he's rejected this new reality. Tony can't blame him; the last time the kid saw him, he was lost in the hall, wetting himself because he couldn't locate the bathroom in time. It must have terrified him, or at the very least, grossed him out.

It's coming down to the last twenty minutes before the doctor arrives, and Tony is certain that he wont be seeing Peter again until... well, until the time comes.

But there's a timid knock at the door, a catch of breath in each person's chest- and a tidal wave of fear that the doctor has arrived early. It's Tony who stands and makes his way to front of the house weakly, terrified that this means his time has been cut short. The doorknob turns, the door slides open-

And he's there. Peter launches himself into Tony's arms and he holds him there for a moment, hugging around him tightly. Tony tries not to focus on the way that Peter is quietly sobbing against his chest. When he finally let's go, Tony sees it in his eyes- this willingness to fight his own disagreement for the betterment of everyone else.

It's when he sees Peter standing there, red-eyed and tear stained, that he knows he can't go through with this. As much as it may have felt right, once, Tony still has a family. And though he falls apart, so often, now, he still has his good days.

He pulls him in, again, another embrace, and no longer for the last time. There will be many to come, and many to remember, even as he slowly loses those recollections, and moments in time that seemly do not exist any more. He is here, breathing and living right now.

When he turns to see his family, who stand awkwardly by the table, emotionally weary, he nods- and Pepper seems to understand, a slow-spreading smile on her cheeks. "Really?" She asks, breathless.

Tony grips Peter around the shoulders and smiles. "Really."

◇◇◇

Over the course of Tony's last years, he still lives out his good days. Most times he can be found, sitting on the patio of the lake house, across the table from his wife, trying his best to play stuffed animals with his daughter, or telling the few old stories he remembers again and again and again to the boy he is so thankful to call a son.

He does not always remember their faces, but they will always remember his, and that is enough.

[kirj-of-perversion]

Billy Again (Part 1)

His whole life, Four has brought death and bad luck wherever he went. Now that he is no longer alive maybe his luck will change, especially surrounded by people who love him as much as he does them.

Or a story about Four’s  Many names

A/n: This is for @billytheskywalker​‘s awesome quote challenge! The quote I chose is “Here we are, born to be kings. We are princes of the universe.” Hope you guys like it, the formatting may be a bit weird, you can also read it on ao3 here

Word count: 5.4k

1. Billy

Four and Five were sitting on top of a roof.

That almost sounds like the start of a nursery rhyme, doesn’t it? The setting was right too, everything feels soft and fragile at sunrise. The sun looked almost shy as it peaked from under the earth, a faded red, the sky was pink and five was bathed in golden light.

They were sitting close but not touching, and there, in the cold morning air, Four could almost feel the heat radiating off of her skin. She was so close; if he shifted just the slightest bit he’d be able to press the line of his thigh against hers.

“-at’s why I got into medical school.”* He was only half-listening as she told him about her life before the whole fake death thing, they'd been trading stories for half an hour. He hated it, talking about his life before felt like playing with fire. But he’d never been able to deny her anything, or any of the ghosts for that matter.

“What about you, Billy?” Billy, he still wondered why he told them that damned nickname, why not William, or Bill, even Will; he’d been called each of those at one point or another.

“What do you want to know?” He smiled at her, couldn't help himself, even though talking about himself almost physically hurt.

“What’s your earliest memory?”

He hummed, deep in his chest, wondering how much he should tell her.

“My earliest memory, yeah? I think it was falling off the roof of my childhood home.” She punched him on the shoulder, giggling (and wasn’t that a thought? Five, their badass doctor, giggling.)

“You’re totally lying.”

“I’m not, I swear! My mum was so mad I could almost see the steam coming out of her ears. But it didn’t matter to me, the next day I was back on that roof, I’ve been climbing for as long as I can remember.”

She laughed, throwing her head back and he almost felt guilty for lying to her.

But after so many lies, so much secrecy, there were things he couldn't help but keep to himself, no matter how much he loved them all.

His actual first memory was of his mother, being held in her arms as a storm thundered outside. Her usual scent of clean clothes and lavender all around him and her quiet whisperings swallowed up by the darkness around them. He remembered with startling clarity the pain of his black eye, feeling it pulsate, and the words of his drunkard father.

Useless. Good for nothing. Dumb.

And yet, the pain hadn’t been so bad there. Curled up in his bed with his mother as she consoled him, late at night after his father had fallen asleep.

“You’re gonna do great things, my little lamb. Oh, Billy, people like you, born with stars in their eyes are meant to be great kings or rulers. One day you’ll see, the whole world will know who you are.”

He had barely believed her, back then. Even less so, a few years later, on his ninth birthday, newly orphaned and watching the still-hot cinders of his childhood home.

At that moment, he knew, he was destined to misfortune.

2.William

At the age of nine, with no relatives to be found and no will left by his parents, Four was sent to foster care. He lasted two weeks in the system before running away from his foster “parents” and never looking back.

Those two weeks were hellish, as Four constantly switched hands and institutions. Surprisingly, nobody wanted the bruised little kid who had night terrors that woke him up screaming and shaking every single night. The state-mandated therapist he saw only twice asked what the nightmares were about and he told her they were about the house fire (they weren’t, all he saw in his sleep were his father’s fists).

And they all kept calling him that, William, like he was a pet they had named. Nobody asked, it was just William here, William there. William was this new boy, a boy alone in the world whom no one would ever truly care for. Just another child of the system. And yet. And yet, a tiny part in him was relieved, because his heart seized in his chest whenever he thought about being called Billy, like he was disrespecting his mum, who had had so much faith in him.

He knew he would never be able to accomplish whatever hopes she’d had for him.

Midway through the second week, he was sent to the Whites, an idyllic little family with a charming father, a smiling mother, a little girl two years younger than him and a dog. They were nice, too much so, telling him they wanted to welcome him into their family.

“Hello, William, it’s great to have you with us. I’m sure you’ll feel right at home.” Said Mrs. White, running a silk-soft hand through his hair.

For three days he waited for the other shoe to drop, for the charming Mr. White to drink a beer too many and hit him. But he never did, instead, Mr. White (“it’s Gerard, kiddo”) called him champ and big boy, and tossed around a ball with him in the backyard. It was unsettling.

Billy’s father had been a charming man too, everyone liked him. He smoked cigars and laughed like thunder and everyone loved him. (“Oh Billy, why don’t you like your dad? He’s so nice!”).

So as nice as Mr. White was, Four, didn’t trust him. In his experience fathers weren't nice, at least not to their children. Instead, he tottered behind Mrs. White (“It’s Veronica, honey, or mum if you prefer”) and little Elysia, enamored by their twin heads of dark curls.

Mrs. White was nice too, prettier than his own mother and just as charming as Mr. White. She’d kiss his forehead at night and tell him and Elysia stories. She was strict but fair, assigning the children chores and explaining to Four how important homework would be once they got him enrolled in school.

For a few days, Four harbored a tiny flicker of hope. Of course, the universe promptly crushed it.

On the fourth day (And how’s that for an unlucky number?) Four dropped a glass of milk and Mrs. White slapped him across the face, her long nails catching on his skin and drawing blood. Elysia stood in the corner, watching them with wide eyes and a trembling lip as her mother devolved into a screaming fit.

“How dare you?! How dare you disrespect my family and my home like this?! We didn’t have to take you in you idiot!” Four stayed silent, looking her in the eyes as fat tears rolled down his cheeks.

She sent him to his room without dinner but instead of falling asleep he grabbed a plastic bag and shoved in the little belongings the Whites had bought for him, still crying, but furrowing his brows in determination.

Fathers, he decided, were not the only bad people there were. Mothers could be evil too, anyone really. And if parents could be so wicked, then he didn’t need them.

Not anyone.

He climbed out of the window with practiced ease, after years and years of climbing all over his own home. He slipped away on silent feet, distantly hearing Mrs. White berate her own daughter and husband.

After that, it was the streets, and Four learned about hunger, he learned how it felt to think you were going to die, for the first time in his life. Sure, at first people were willing to spare a few quarters for the cute little kid sitting on the curb, but as he got dirtier and scragglier they started shooing him away and shooting him dirty looks.

He ate fast food as often as he could, washed his face in McDonald´s sinks and changed into the least dirty of his clothes as much as possible, but he was still miserable. He felt weak all the time and he was just so tired.

And then he learned to steal.

3.Bill

Here’s the thing, most people are good at at least a couple of things, some talent is just innate and if you hone it enough then things start to get intense. And Four? He was good at stealing. Then again, stealing was more of an effect brought on by his talent at climbing and running, at moving.

He’d discovered parkour at twelve and started seeing the world differently. Everything, everything as just a way of enhancing movement, of being faster of getting just the slightest bit closer to the sky. He started moving all around England sometimes learning a trick or two from older guys who were like him. Fast and feeling the urge to move and bend reality around him like a constant urge under their skin.

So Four was good.

And people began to take notice.

Four was fourteen years old (and surely, whatever god there is must have laughed themself silly at the recurring number), and sitting on a roof, letting his feet dangle, eating a warm bagel when he heard footsteps behind him. Immediately he jumped to his feet, turning around and wiping the crumbs away from his lips. He’d met a wide arrange of people who hung out on roofs like him, but usually, there was some semblance of etiquette. The way this person had approached him and gotten so close before announcing his presence was just unnerving.

“Who are you?”

The stranger tilted his head to the side; he was half a head taller and probably a couple of years older than Four, with a generous smattering of freckles on his nose and dark, nearly reddish eyes.

“So you’re the little blonde kid who’s been stealing around town?”

Four bristled, he wasn't a kid!

“So what if I am?”

The kid gave him a cocky smile and extended a hand for Four to shake. Four didn’t move and the stranger shrugged before putting his hands in his pockets.

“My name’s Engel, what’s yours?”

Four took a wary step back, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he was at a disadvantage, only a couple inches away from a three-story fall, backed into a corner by Engel.

“Why should I tell you?”

Engel’s smirk widened, the look in his eyes nearly cat-like.

“Because, I’ve got a job offer for you, pretty boy.”

Four barely caught himself before taking another step back, instead tilting his chin upwards stubbornly.

“Don’t call me that!”

“Then tell me what I should call you.”

He bit his lip and his fingers unconsciously crushing the bagel. What was he supposed to answer to that? True, he was no longer Billy, but William felt crushingly unnatural. He looked Engel in the eyes.

“B-Bill. My name’s Bill.”

Engel smiled with an emotion Four couldn’t decipher and again extended his hand for Four to shake, taking a step closer.

“Nice name, kid. Now I’ve heard you’re good at stealing, and I want you to join my team.”

Engel's hand was warm as Four shook it.

Apparently, the group wasn’t actually Engel’s team, he was just a member who, like the others deferred to the eldest guys, a pair of twenty-year-old twins who didn’t bother introducing themselves to Four. He later found out through the grapevine that their names were Zaccai and Arlo, both sported shaved heads and looked bored nearly all the time. They only seemed to come alive during robberies.

Stealing with this team was completely different from the petty stuff Four usually did. The robberies were each carefully planned and they changed cities much more often than Four did, even countries. In his time with the twins, he traveled through most of Europe. The targets were also much bigger, even if the twins took the majority of the money. Four was sure that they could have retired with a mansion whenever they wanted, but they simply enjoyed their line of work too much.

The “team” was more than anything else, a gaggle of young people without any real organization, the members came and went as they pleased. Four never took off on his own but he sometimes accompanied Engel when he needed help with a side job. Sometimes Engel would leave him alone for weeks at a time and Four would wait anxiously, ignoring the rest of the team until he returned. Whenever anyone took too much time to report back, the twins wrote them off as dead and everyone got a free afternoon to wander off for a while.

The first time this happened, Four looked at Engel with wide eyes but the older one just gave him a bitter smile.

“That’s how things go in this line of work, Bill. You better get used to it.”

Engel was also the first one who put a gun in his hand. Four had been sixteen for two weeks and had finally grown a couple of inches taller than Engel. It was a handgun, small but unbelievably heavy in Four’s palm. Of course, he’d seen that most everyone carried at least one gun whenever they stole something but he’d never imagined he’d have to too. Everyone else did parkour but he was the best one, it was his thing and the reason Engel had recruited him, he didn't understand why he needed a gun like the others.

“You’re fast, Bill. But no that fast. You can’t outrun a bullet, the only way to stop it is to kill the other guy first.” A wink. “And I need you to cover my back too. You and me, yeah?”

And so, Billy learned, every day he would stand for hours, shooting targets until his arms were sore and he could barely keep his eyes open. But no matter how much he trained his muscles he never could bring himself to shoot anyone. His self-appointed mentor also taught him to fight, on dusty gymnastics mats the twins kept around in their hideouts. Engel would always win, but Billy was good too, fast and electric, wiggling out of chokeholds like an eel. But he never fought dirty enough for Engel’s taste.

“You’ve gotta go harder, Bill! Those guys out there are not gonna have any compassion when they’re fighting you. They’re gonna go in for the kill and if you don’t do the same, they’re gonna succeed.”

Four was seventeen, lying on those mats, sweat-slick and breathing heavy, when Engel kissed him. It was a hungry kiss, the kind that builds up for years and uncoils like an explosion. The kind of kiss where you feel the raw need in the base of your stomach, where air stops mattering. And you just want. They started… something after that, kissing in empty corridors and jacking each other off in dark alleyways, quieting their moans into each other’s necks. Four would never forget Engel’s face as he came, head thrown back and flushed cheeks, hair wild.

Despite it all, they never actually fell in love, Four didn’t at least. And Engel would still leave for weeks at a time, leaving him alone and burning. They started drinking together, sleeping with girls when the other wasn’t there and partying hard.

Meanwhile, their little skirmishes kept getting riskier, as Zaccai acquired a manic look in his eyes he hadn’t had before and Arlo kept shooting him worried looks when he thought no one was watching.

Suddenly one day, when Four was nearly twenty-one and easily a head taller than Engel, Zaccai announced he had decided he wanted to steal the Moussaief Red Diamond. At that moment, that meant nothing to Four, but he later found out it was the seventh most expensive diamond in the world, owned by a man named Shlomo Moussaief who lived in London. While everyone was extremely excited at the prospect of being set for life, late at night they could hear the twins argue in their room.

“We can’t do this Zaccai! We don’t have the manpower!”

“Don’t you see it?! It’s the ultimate challenge, the ultimate proof of skill!”

“You’re crazy! You’ve gone crazy, and I’m not letting you drag me down with you!”

Arlo stormed out of the abandoned apartments where the team had been squatting, leaving behind a string of worried whispers and bubbling panic. Zaccai smiled at them when he stepped out of the room.

“Don’t worry guys, we can do it without. When we pull this off, I promise you, we’re gonna become legends! We’re gonna be rich!”

Four shot a worried look at Engel, but the latter had a nearly identical look on his face to Zaccai, a demented smile, slashed across his face.

“Hear that, Bill? Rich. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Engel the millionaire.”

And so they prepared like they hadn’t ever before, scanning the building to find entrances and exits, paying for intel about the security personnel.

Finally, the day came when they silently entered the deceptively modest house where Moussaief lived, Zaccai at the helm.

And promptly walked into Hell.

It was obvious from that first moment that they had been given wrong intel or someone had ratted them off because they were immediately shot at. Men started dropping like flies in both sides of the fight, the sound of shooting deafening as Four gripped his gun so hard his knuckles turned white. They ran across hallways, Four’s teammates constantly shooting and dropping to flour, screaming with pain. Only Zaccai’s laughter rose above the rest of the noise.

“The diamond! Just get the diamond!”

There were only five of them when they finally got to the showroom, only to find it completely empty.

Of course.

Moussaief had probably flown out of town if not out of the country as soon as he'd been tipped off that something was brewing. And he's taken his fortune with him.

Zaccai stopped laughing; face blanching for just a moment before it exploded as they shot him in the head. The only lasting guard walked into the room and promptly shot the rest of Four’s teammates. He felt his heart stop as he watched almost in slow motion, the bullet headed for Engel’s chest. In just a couple of seconds he felt it all, nausea and sadness. And blinding anger.

He raised the gun, and shot, aiming directly at the man’s heart.

Bull’s eye.

The man fell to the floor, his last scream getting stuck in his throat.

Four shot again. And again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and ag-

“Bill!”

What?

“Bill!”

His hands began shaking, the gun clattering to the floor.

“I’m fine! It was just a graze.”

For a moment he stared uncomprehendingly at Engel’s blood-streaked side.

“You okay, man?”

He looked into Engel’s dark eyes, feeling numb as the older boy cupped his face with both hands.

“It’s okay, Bill. He’s dead. I’m fine.”

Four threw himself at Engel, winding his arms around his neck. He didn’t sob or make a sound, just shook as Engel rocked him from side shushing him softly. When he was slightly calmer, he and Engel took the fire escape to walk onto the roof, stepping over bodies, staining the soles of their shoes with blood.

Over them, the moon was nearly nonexistent, just a thin ribbon of light. Four licked his cracked lips before speaking.

“So, what next?”

Engel clapped him on the shoulder, pressing a hand against his injured side.

“Wanna go to Ukraine?”

4.Will

On the day they arrived in Ukraine, the day was overcast.

It was a few weeks after the failed Moussaief thievery, they had waited for Engel’s side to heal up, but Four was still wary of the new group they were going to meet. Apparently, they were friends of Engel that he sometimes helped for a little extra cash, though working for the twins had been more profitable. It stung, that in all the years of knowing each other, Four had never met them.

Besides, he didn’t want to belong to a team anymore. A team meant dead-weight and room for error, a team meant caring for too many people. Usually, Four thrived in variables. How many variables and different paths did the landscape have to offer? Human variables, though, he wasn’t so keen on.

When he voiced his opinions to Engel, the latter just laughed.

“They’re good guys, Bill. Well, as good as you’re gonna get for a bunch of thieves anyway.”

Kyiv was beautiful with high buildings made of white stone dark, lanky silhouettes of unlit lampposts. But Engel immediately led him to the bad side of town, where the buildings barely stood and the people lived on the streets. The smell of poverty was intense, but Four didn’t mind it, it had become home. The group had been living in an abandoned house, with no glass on the windows and peeling paint. Cigarette butts littered the ground outside.

The group inside was much smaller than Four expected, nothing like the twins’ group. There were only eight or nine people, sitting on metal folding chairs, the floor, and an ugly couch, around a deck of cards and three bottles of vodka. The first one to get up was the only girl, tiny and ballerina-like, with bird-boned wrists and lean strong muscle lining her arms. She raised an eyebrow playfully and fixed with an intense look in her dark, dark eyes. The other’s got up slowly, nothing remarkable about them except for a guy with tattooed lines streaked down his face like tears and the bluest eyes Four had ever seen and a man with a hulking figure that surely couldn’t be very good at parkour, hands the size of bowling balls and a gun hanging from his belt. The only one who carried one. Engel smiled wide.

“Well guys, this is Bill, the guy I’ve been telling you about for years.” A wink. “Bill, meet the crew. The scary fella over there is Axel, our gunman, and heavyweight. A bodyguard if you will.” Mr. Giant nodded slightly, his eyes focused on the street outside. “From left to right there’s Dima, Andrew, Andreas, Symon, Taras, Aleksander and the guy with the bad face tattoos is Mykola.” The latter frowned at Engel but didn’t say anything, before giving Four a shaky smile, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet.

Finally, Engel wound an arm around the girl and pulled her flush against his side.

“And this,” He bit his lip for a second. “Is the wonderful Oksana.”

She looked at Four with a smirk and he felt his knees go slightly weak.

“So this is the famous Bill.” She scrunched her nose. “Not a fan of the name, though. I think I’m gonna call you Will.” Engel frowned.

“Oh my g-d, Oksana you can’t just-”

“It’s fine!” Four cleared his throat, embarrassed. “I’m fine with Will.” Engel leveled an unimpressed stare at him.

“Fine, but you’ll be Bill to me. Now come on, I’ll show you the rest of the house.”

And so it was. The rest of the team stuck to calling him Bill, but that night when Oksana led him to her room instead of one of the communal rooms for the guys, she moaned the name Will.

Will. Will. Will.

Like a chant, soft and hoarse in his ear as her short, sharp nails drew blood from his back.

Will!

As she came, lovelier than anything else he had ever seen, her tan skin flushed all over.

It became a regular occurrence, more often than not he slept in her room and he stuck close to her wherever they went. At parties, he liked to have her closed, fingers grazing her elbow or her hip. When they stole something he usually kept her in his line of sight, more on edge than he had ever seen during a mission.

Of course, he still hung out with Engel. He was his best friend after all, but when the latter tried to go in for a kiss when they were sparring Four stopped him.

“It’s just, ya know, my thing with Oksana. You get it right?”

Engel stared at him and for the first time in a very long while, Four couldn’t decipher his expression.

“Yeah. I see how it is.”

The sparring ended quickly and awkwardly. Usually, Engel and Four fought as cleanly as they could, but at that moment, as Engel twisted his arm behind his back, straddling his hips, he was genuinely afraid he would break it.

“I win. See you later Bill.”

Four stared at his friend’s retreating back, genuinely wondering where he went wrong.

But it was okay. That night, Oksana took him to one of her favorite nightclubs and kissed his worries away. He felt like an idiot next to her, slow and lumbering, when she moved through crowds of people like a fish through water. Everywhere she went, she seemed to belong in a way he had never been able to. but she seemed to want him around and that helped.

And at some point, they started to spend nights upon nights just talking, about everything. Themselves, their childhoods, their wretched, awful childhoods. It was hard not to want when he was next to her. Not only want her but want to change to world for her, fix the injustices, the systems that had failed her, the streets that had sheltered her. Make her proud of him, like he had only ever wanted to make his mom proud.

Being with Oksana made him want everything.

Sometimes, he would whisper these dreams to her, like secrets, face pressed against the warmth of her sweat-slicked skin. She would laugh, quietly.

“You’re a dreamer, Will. I’m fine sticking to the earth while you search for the stars.”

She had always been much more realistic than him. She knew, that those dreams were nothing but fairytales. People like them didn’t accomplish miracles or even good things. He should have listened to her, maybe then the fall from the stars to the ground wouldn’t have hurt so much.

It was Oksana who took him to get his first and only tattoo, four big letters stretched across the knuckles of his right hand.

“What do they mean?”

“A letter for each of the people I have loved the most.”

M, for mum.

E, for Engel.

O, for Oksana.

And B, for the little boy he had once been, for the future his mother had seen in his eyes.

When Engel had seen the tattoo, he’d laughed himself to tears.

“Never get someone’s name or initials tattooed, Bill. It’s bad luck.”

And Engel was always right, wasn’t he?

A month later, they sat together, drinking. Oksana, was asleep, claiming cramps and a couple of the boys had gone out to a nightclub. It was just Andrew, Dima, Engel, and Four, drinking, a cigarette in each of their mouths. Usually, Engel was the best of them at drinking, but tonight he had been drinking much more than usual, taking generous swigs of two different bottles.

He kept asking Four about his relationship with Oksana, getting more and more aggressive with each drink he took. Finally, at four in the morning, he asked a question he’d been itching to ask, the words nearly flying out of his mouth without his permission.

“Aren’t you afraid of her?”

Four laughed, him? Scared of a small, cute girl like her?

But that wasn’t really what Engel was asking, was it? No, it went more along the line of, aren’t you afraid that you’ll fall in love? That you’ll give too much and she’ll take it without mercy? Aren’t you afraid that it’ll be too much, too fast, that you’ll be washed over by her tides?

Because girls like her, are the kind of girls who rip you open to feast on your heart and suck up your soul.

Because she had the power to ruin him.

This squirrely little girl, who looked like a gun made woman. His Oksana (except not his, never his), all muscles from climbing and starving, like him, all of them, street urchins forever and ever like his own group of lost boys.

“How could I be scared of her, I’m twice her size!” Andrew and Dima snickered, but Engel stayed silent, the flickering fire reflected in his eyes, casting strange shadows on his face.

“Whatever, Will” And he said the name like an insult, like a thrown stone. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you about her.”

“What’s his problem?” Asked Andrew and as Dima shrugged, Four took a gulp from the bottle of Rum at his feet and tried not to wonder how many times Oksana and Engel had slept together before he came to Ukraine.

From that moment on, he’d been expecting it, Oksana’s betrayal. Waiting for the fatal words to cross her lips: “I cheated on you” or even worse “I don’t love you anymore, I never did.”, asking himself if he would forgive her, shying away from the meaningful stares Engel shot at him and he dared not decipher.

And yet he was in love with her.

He could almost physically feel it, in the way he just seemed to breathe easier with her around him. In the way kissing her felt better than anything else in the world, that her presence brightened up a room. In the way he ached for her when she wasn’t with him.

He had killed for Engel, but he knew he would die for Oksana.

And they did stakeouts and ran to keep fit and listened to rumors. They kept stealing, here and there, but every single one of them was here for the big one. The necklace. Worth fifty million fucking dollars, the so-called “Garden of Kalahari” was even bigger than the Moussaief diamond. No matter how many participated in that robbery, they’d be set for life, and in this mission, the team was small. None of them could truly comprehend the amount of money the Kalahari was worth.

And it was going to be theirs.

There was a tension in the air, an itching in their veins, and at moments Four almost thought he could comprehend what had driven Zaccai to near-insanity. The feeling of adrenaline and expectation was nearly intoxicating. But still terrifying. The day almost snuck-up on them, there without warning. They had planned and re-planned a thousand times and yet, the Moussaief incident kept repeating itself in Four’s head. What if’s plagued him.

That morning, Oksana soothed him with a slow kiss.

“Welcome to the rest of our lives, Will.”

And so they went, the building was much older and unassuming than Moussaief’s home had been. But it made sense, the Kalahari belonged to an old rich woman, who hoarded her jewelry like a dragoness and who, after losing her businesses to younger more innovative competition, had let herself fall into poverty rather than sell her jewels.

Every morning she left the building unattended to go walk a decrepit old dog, both of them took nearly an hour for a short walk. More than enough time.

This group was much more acrobatic and parkour centered than the old one, so only the big guy, Axel, and Engel carried guns, the added weight wasn’t ideal for this kind of job. As soon as they walked into the building, Axel and Engel posted themselves at the door, guns drawn.

They had planned and re-planned a thousand times.

It wasn’t enough.

The first clue was the gunshots, the next one was the two heavy thuds by the door, Engel and Axel’s corpses falling to the floor. The final clue was Mykola shouting. Desperate, as if he wanted to tear his vocal cords out.

“Politsiya! Politsiya!”

Four never learned Ukrainian. He had meant to, he’d wanted to impress Oksana, but even he knew what the words meant.

When he found the Kalahari, it was almost like salvation. Maybe. Maybe, the mission hadn’t been for nothing.

More shots then, closer now, Four wasn’t keeping a head-count anymore. Just running, as fast as he could, until the oxygen burnt.

They were supposed to cross through the sign and he could barely comprehend when instead of doing that he was falling. Airborne. The only thing keeping him from certain death, from splattering like paint on the floor, was the too-thin cable in his hands. For the first time in a long, long time he was scared of falling.

And then she was there, Oksana. She grabbed the necklace and he knew that he was saved.

Except.

“Grab my hand! Grab my hand!”

His jaw hurt like nothing had hurt before, the jewels between his teeth felt like iron, like they would grind his molars to dust.

Oksana didn’t grab his hand. The look in her eyes was cold, empty, and Four felt himself go numb.

And then he was falling.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

[mcrmadness]

I’m at the point where I’m being really annoyed by mornings again. Or more like, that particular time of the time when I wake up because I know most people would say that 2pm is no longer a morning... Anyway, I just get up every morning to do absolutely nothing just to go to sleep eventually again. And now each “morning” is boring af, I get up, brush my teeth and come to my computer, browse Tumblr and don’t know what to do. For weeks I’ve been watching certain types of videos from YT meanwhile playing with nonograms or jigsaw puzzles online because it helps me to concentrate as I don’t like watching videos of people talking, it’s super boring, but that way I can still listen to them without feeling like losing my mind because of being so bored. But now neither nonograms nor jigsaw puzzles feel thay interesting NOR do the videos I’ve been watching. There’s really not much new stuff, just the same topics done by many many people and I can’t watch that for too long before I get bored with the topics too, because I already know enough. I’ve also been going through all videos on so many different channels and either there’s nothing interesting anymore or I literally have watched everything. So now every day after being done with browsing Tumblr, I try to find something to watch from youtube but currently my recommended page keeps offering me the same videos over and over again, the same topics, and also lots of videos I have already watched. I’d love to see something very random that isn’t particularly linked to my watch history but no, all videos like that are something to do with the goddamned crona hashtags and they’re already driving me crazy because I’m so fed up with all this corona stuff. And I have made several posts about this already and how I hate the superficial fake-happiness in all those videos where people try to come up with stuff for people to do so that they’d just stay at home. I’m staying at home 24/7 even without corona, so can’t you just NOT show those recommendations for me??? Oh I wish Youtube had some sort of tag blacklisting system...

But yeah, apart from all that, I’ve been dealing with my existential crisis a lot lately too. Not that it’d have ever went anyway in the first place, but just having these partly existential crisis, partly dissociation/derealization moments that I don’t know if I’m ever going to get rid of. Just been thinking about my fave band (dä) a lot lately and how stressed out they make me all the time. I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. I’m not the best with surprises but I’m okay with them, but what REALLY makes (and has always made) me distressed is waiting. Knowing that something is about to happen but you have no idea when and how and possibly what. That is what makes me so distressed. It’s like with ghosts and paranormal things too: I’m not afraid of ghosts and I actually do like them a lot, but I’m afraid of being startled and waiting for something that might come as a surprise to me. (This is why I don’t watch horror films - jumpscares are much worse when I know there will be some.) And I’ve started to hate the weekdays from Monday to Friday because I feel like I can rest only on weekends because maybe those guys won’t do anything during weekends. During other days anything is possible. And now they’re gonna open their webshop on Friday and it’s causing me SO MUCH PRESSURE here. And it’s again not that I’d be worried of what it is, but worried of the fact I am waiting for something now but I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I always need to be in control and ahead of everything, whenever I go to a new place, I need to have a look around the whole thing before I can do anything, and I really wouldn’t like the idea of being dropped right in the middle of action. That just makes me so overwhelmed and I start to panic.

To the existential crisis - I’ve also been wondering about myself and why dä? Imagine if the band was something else but this. And the fact this band is a “once in a lifetime” thing. There’s never been another band like them and never will be. Which is crazy and blows my mind. And this is where I start to dissociate with derealization because I somehow still feel like everything is a movie or a video game. I’m constantly thinking like “oh maybe in my next life I’ll be born earlier so I can become their fan in the 80s” or “maybe in my next life I’ve learnt from my mistakes in this life”. I basically feel like my life is like a video game that I can restart whenever I have played through the story and do different choices then. And some days it hurts so much to be dropped back on ground. But I will just climb up again and escape into my small bubble where things are not like that.

Also this other day I was wondering the age thing again. I’ve been having age crisis at least since I turned 25 because then I was closer to 30 than 20. And I’m turning 29 in less than a month and that had been so terrible thought for so long but now I’m slowly getting used to it. Even tho I still wish I was 19 or something. But at the same time it feels really absurd because I feel like... ten years ago I was 19, and that doesn’t sound that much but I still feel like last year was 2010. And me wishing I was 19 again... well when I was 19, most of my friends were not even teenagers yet. So that means I would not know those people. But then I feel like I’ve been wasting the last 10 years of my life. And if I was smart, I’d realize that I actually have not been wasting those years - I have been working with horses, studying horses, graduated and I’ve grown a pretty good knowledge over what it is to take care of and even train horses. I have got and learnt so much. But still I feel like I should have done that a lot earlier than what I did. But if I did it a lot earlier, then I wouldn’t have had work experience worth over 10 years. Which is why I wish I could have just stopped time for the time I was studying and continue then after I was done. Because I’m literally in the middle of an age crisis because I’m turning 29 but I basically feel like I’m near my end already. It’s like what my friend told me when I was 22 and started having similar thoughts: “You sound like you just discovered what people normally discover only when they turn 50.” Yeah, I’ve literally been having mid-life crisis since I was 22.

For the first time even I experienced some derealization moments was when I was 19 and working at a stable and I was cleaning up the stable and taking out a wheelbarrow full of horse shit. It just suddenly hit me that what I’m doing here, makes absolutely no difference. And I suddenly dived into this horrible state where I felt like nothing I do, matter because nothing will last. Like, why should I create memories if I’m gonna lose them anyway when I die? That really made it so hard to enjoy anything because I was just constantly obsessing with the thought of not having my memories forever and how everything felt so, so damn pointless. I don’t care if people know my name or not, I live for myself anyway so it felt really unfair that I should actually live here and do things and create memories if they are going to be taken away from me eventually just because everyone has to die. And I have always had really bad relationship with death. I remember being probably 7 years old and seeing something on TV about death and cemeteries and it caused me to have one of my earliest anxiety/panic attacks and I was literally sitting on the toilet floor hugging the toilet because the idea of death made me so, so sick. Which is why I then have been avoiding the topic as much as I can and I’ve been blocking those thoughts and stuff and why I love every time death is portrayed as non-permanent in fiction (my all-time favorite is Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice). Or when there’s some sort afterlife. Which is why I’ve been obsessed with ghosts and grim reaper and whatnot in my past. It just comforts me so much because I find it so scary to think that everything would just stop existing. I can kinda imagine that... emptiness that happens when nothing is anymore and it just feels so overwhelming and scary that I nearly start to panic from the thought alone. As a kid, I’ve been having panic attacks from the thought of the sun going out, a meteor hitting the earth, or just pretty much anything that would mean almost instant death. I feel like I probably developed derealization also for this type of fears. If the idea of death has made me physically sick at the age of 7, no wonder why my system decided to come up with dissociation to protect my mind. I always feel like when I keep having these deep thoughts, that my brains are on the edge of overheating (figuratively), it just goes so over my head but at the same time I’m understanding it, which then triggers dissociation because it’s too much to deal with.

I also have a medical trauma from when I was 3 years old, which is probably the core for all the dissociation too. It was an open heart surgery which pretty much means being half-dead already as you’re connected to the machines that keep up your breathing and blood circulation while the doctors fix your heart. Because of that, I find the thought it anesthesia highly disturbing. I know people undergo surgeries all the time for whatever reasons but I feel like I could never ever do one again because I’m so afraid of that emptiness becoming permanent. I can’t remember a thing from my surgery nor how I went to sleep or anything like that, but as an adult, I just find that so scary and I’m always really scared whenever I know people who are going to have anesthesia because what if they don’t come back? I know trans people who don’t have other option but to undergo some surgeries and I’m like... I’m nonbinary afab and I’d be happy to donate my own boobs away any minute but I could never ever go to a surgery from my own will. I rather just fantasize of a bodyshape that I don’t have than would actually do something about it because for me that would just not be an option. I sometimes wonder that if I had dysphoria or if I was trans, would I still feel the need for surgeries? Or what if I have dysphoria but I just don’t see it, because I can’t do anything about it so I just escape into my inner world and try not to think about myself? I do have some sort of body dysMORPHIA, tho. But I don’t know if I hate my body or if I just see it wrongly. But whatever the case, I try not to think about it too much, I avoid mirrors and spend most of time in my inner world. Because the outter world is too overwhelming and depressing to deal with and my existential crisis can’t take it.