#Thinks about Cyrus to cope one million times

[edns]

I'm not a child anymore.

Thinking about Cyrus's backstory pre timeskip/academy got me doodling things

[amor-immortalem]

Everything Undesired Epilogue

chapter 12

It’s been fifteen years to the day since Cyrus disappeared without a trace. He and Arella had long since graduated from RAD alongside his brothers. They had gotten married and have three children together now. Mammon remembers back to when they told Cyrus he would be a big brother- how excited he had been to not be the only child in a house full of adults. Now his son would never have that experience and it was all Mammon’s fault so it’s here in the room he and Arella had saved for Cyrus that he sits.

Surrounded by everything that reminds him of the child he’d lost, the Avatar of Greed flips through a photo album that Levi had made in honor of the little one, eyes wet with fresh tears. This room stays locked for the entire year except for today. The twins know they’re not allowed in here, even if they don’t exactly know why and his youngest is too young to even care about the door that’s always locked. They never told their children about their older brother- it was far too painful for both him and Arella, neither of them having accepted that their son was really gone forever.

In the aftermath of losing his heir, Mammon had become extremely over-protective of the twins and Mahlon. He would never allow this to happen again- he might actually die from a broken heart if he were to lose another child due to his carelessness.

“I wish I knew where ya were...” his voice catches in his throat. “I know you’re alive- that you’re out there... somewhere... I can feel it.”

And that was the sad truth of it all. As the years went on, he’d watched carefully over his only daughter, Azalea. If Cyrus was truly gone, it would be her that would inherit his title and throne. But she never developed all the abilities necessary to be Mammon’s successor. With every year that passed without the development of those powers, the demon only became more certain that his oldest was still alive.

For as overjoyed as he would be for Cyrus to return, he knew it would only cause friction in their little family. Azalea had gone her entire life thinking she was meant to be her father’s successor. She always took pride in it and Mammon now feared that the revelation that she was never meant to be would destroy his daughter’s world. Another thing that was his fault. She had assumed all this because he and Arella couldn’t find a way to break it to her.

Things were already tense between them after the birth of her youngest brother. She had pulled away from them in fear that she was being replaced and they didn’t want to lose her completely now. Azalea was considered a trouble maker to anyone who didn’t know the real her, often getting herself into more fights than anyone could count. If they told their daughter the truth now, she would think they were taking the position away from her and giving it to one of her brothers as punishment. Mammon and Arella were still trying to convince her that she wasn’t being replaced- that they still loved her regardless of all the trouble she gets into on a regular basis but it hadn’t been working.

And it was now, Mammon realized all the mistakes he’d made in not biting the bullet in talking about Cyrus. The white-haired demon resolves to tell them today when they come home for dinner as they did every Friday night since they’d moved into the House of Lamentation after they had gone off to RAD. He wondered how they would take the news. Would it be shock? Anger? It had to be now or never.

As the front door opened, Mammon perked up. He could hear the twins whispering amongst themselves, neither wanting to risk waking their little brother and then there was a soft gasp from the both of them.

“Zay, the door to that room’s open,” it’s Aurelius’ voice that sounds first.

“Mum and Dad don’t want us seein’ what’s in there so we should prolly jus’ avoid it. There’s a reason it’s always locked...”

He was about to call them into the room when his D.D.D. rang. It was a call from Lucifer so he answered.

“You need to come to the House of Lamentation as soon as you can.” and then the call cut off- not even a good bye which only served to worry the Avatar of Greed.

Mammon’s first fear was that something had happened to his wife on her return trip from the mortal world. He hoped it wasn’t that. As he got up, he left the door to Cyrus’ room open.

“Hey, I have to go to the House of Lamentation really quick, can ya stay with your brother, please?” The demon knows he should have waited for a response from the teenagers but this was an emergency in his mind. He needed to be quick.

Azalea and Aurelius only exchanged a confused look before Azalea called after their father. “Wait, I wanna go too!” And off she ran after him.

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“Damn, at least slow down, Old Man!” She shouts although she doubted he could actually hear her with the wind in his ears. Azalea was having a hell of a time keeping up with Mammon as she hopped from roof top to roof top, having to transform into her demon form to even have a chance at keeping up with her father. She really wishes she was born with wings as like her twin.

As the pair reached the doors of the House of Lamentation, Azalea tries to catch her breath and as Mammon pushes open the doors open, their breaths catch in the throats at the sight before them. There, sitting on the floor having Arella using healing magic to tend to the nasty cut on his cheek, was Cyrus.

The Avatar of Greed rushes forward quickly, a million thoughts racing through his mind as he embraced his son in a tight hug. He doesn’t even know where to start with his words, he was so relieved to see Cyrus safe and mostly unharmed as he pulled back to inspect him.

He’s mostly unchanged but his white hair had grown out a considerable length, tipped with black indicating that it had been dyed at some point and as expected he had grown- nearly as tall as his father now.

“What happened to you?” Mammon’s voice is soft, “Do ya know how worried we were? Where did you go?”

Cyrus couldn’t answer. Instead, he just wrapped his parents in a tight hug as he cried and cried. He just buried his face in their shoulders as they rubbed his back.

“Shhhh, it’s okay, Baby.” Arella said as she held back tears. “It’s okay. You’re home now. You’re safe now.”

Azalea just stood in the doorway as she watched her parents. She didn’t know what to think. It felt like her whole world was crashing down around her. Who was this person her parents were fussing over? When it finally clicked in her mind that she had an older brother- that she wasn’t her father’s heir- she sank to her knees. Great, she thought, yet another person to compete against for Mum and Dad’s love.

“Azalea?” Lucifer's voice called as he knelt next to her. “Are you alright?” He can tell something’s not right with the girl.

“I....” she turns her head, “I.... I don’t know. I... Why didn’t they tell us about him?”

“When you lose someone you love, sometimes it can be very hard to talk about them. Especially when you can’t accept that they were lost.” The Avatar of Pride stands his niece up, letting her hold onto him for support- for grounding. “Your parents have wanted to tell you for some time, but they just couldn’t bring themselves to. They didn’t mean to deceive you.”

Even with her uncle’s words, Azalea was still unsure. She just wants to escape right now, feeling like she was suffocating. “I... I think I’m gonna hang out in my room right now. I need some space.” With that she dashes up the stairs, an action not unnoticed by her parents.

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“Azalea, can we talk?” Arella opens the door to her daughter’s room- the one that had once been her husband’s.

“Yeah,” The girl says softly as she thumbs through a book absentmindedly.

Arella takes a seat next to her daughter as she opens her arms for her, a little relieved when the half-demon takes the invitation, the book discarded to the side as she buried her face in her mother’s chest.

“Why didn’t you guys tell me that I wasn’t....”

“We weren’t sure how- at least with you, my little flower.” She runs her hands through her daughter’s hair. “We didn’t want you to think we were punishing you in the worst way possible...”

“So what happens next for me? What’s my purpose now?”

“I’m afraid that’s something you have to discover on your own. You’ll find it one day, but you’re free now from the weight that your father’s title brings. You can be whatever you want.”

“Do you and Dad still love me? Am I good enough...?”

“Of course we do. We will always love you, princess. You are enough for us so don’t worry, okay?” She presses a kiss to the top of Azalea’s head. “We’re heading home now, okay? It's time for dinner and we can’t leave your brothers waiting.”

Azalea nods as she rises from the couch and they head out to meet Mammon and Cyrus. As the four of them walk home, everything feels right once more. With Cyrus back, their family finally feels complete.

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And so the story has a happy ending. I could possibly do another fic all bout how Azalea copes with not being Mammon’s successor anymore but I haven’t decided yet. I’m going to write a tumblr exclusive fic for Aurelius first instead of a comic before I do any of that though.

find more on my masterlist

[tabloidtoc]

Globe, December 28

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Farewell to 93 legends we loved and lost in 2020 

Page 2: Up Front & Personal -- Steve Martin holds a green pepper on the NYC set of Only Murders in the Building, Derek Hough is light on his feet at the MTV Movie & TV Awards 

Page 3: Julia Roberts looks scary skinny during a solo stroll in Hawaii, Chris Pratt hoists a hoverboard during an L.A. workout 

Page 4: Troubled twosome Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are hoping to put their year from hell behind them by renewing their vows over the holidays in a desperate big to keep their love alive -- Ellen wants to prove her long-suffering wife comes first ahead of Ellen’s daytime talk show and her many celebrity friends and is going all out to show it -- penny-pincher Ellen opened her wallet as wide as her heart telling Portia she could spend whatever she wants on clothes, food, drinks, music and invite whoever she wants at the New Year’s vow ceremony on a Santa Barbara beach

Page 5: Obsessive Blake Shelton is so stressed over his upcoming wedding to Gwen Stefani he’s turning into the Groomzilla from hell -- he is sparing no expense and shelling out millions to redo his Oklahoma ranch to impress the couple’s Tinseltown friends but the mountain of stuff still to be done is driving him around the bend even though no one’s putting pressure on him but he’s obsessed with the wedding details and driving his staff crazy with his constant orders and revisions -- he’s building a chapel on the ranch and a lighted boat for a romantic wedding cruise on the lake and picking the style of the canopy for the banquet floor and re-landscaping the grounds and adding a color-themed garden

* Kenya Moore of Real Housewives of Atlanta reveals she went on a date with Kanye West but bolted when she caught him watching inappropriate flicks -- she described the outing with Kanye as a disaster date and they ended up going to his house where he left her alone, wandering around and when she followed the noises he was watching something on TV that he probably shouldn’t have been and that was her exit 

Page 6: Matthew Perry was such a slave to his addiction his former galpal Kayti Edwards says he’d send her to score drugs while she was pregnant and Matthew insisted she was the perfect drug mule because he believed cops wouldn’t stop a gal in her condition Kayti claims in a shocking tell-all about her 2011 romance with Matthew -- she says his ravenous cravings for cocaine and heroin were so out of control that he once superglued his hands to his legs and he took up to 80 Vicodin pills daily -- Kayti claims she was trying to protect Matthew because she feared he’d end up wandering around the streets and being nabbed by cops or snapped by photogs but she was also getting paid big bucks like $3000 to $4000 a day 

Page 7: Duchess Camilla’s taste for an early morning tipple has rubbed off on husband Prince Charles who is now so hooked on the sauce he starts the day guzzling a powerful gin martini with breakfast and now Charles’ alarmed staffers and pals are talking about an intervention to remind him not to go down the path that put his second wife in rehab -- Charles’ booze consumption has been off the charts for years but drinking first thing in the morning with his breakfast is a new low -- Charles laughs off suggestions he has a booze issue but one look at his bloodshot face tells the story 

* Now that a COVID-19 vaccine’s been approved in Britain Queen Elizabeth says she’s going to get the shot but wait her turn instead of pulling royal rank but she and husband Prince Philip won’t wait long because at their ages they’re in the second group to get the vaccine which is health care workers and people over 80 

Page 8: Helena Bonham Carter has a world-shakin’ suggestion for gals frustrated by the COVID-19 lockdown: get a vibrator -- she says women shouldn’t worry about snaring a beau during the pandemic but that’s easy for her to say because she’s currently cuddling with toyboy writer Rye Dag Holmboe 

* George Clooney confesses wife Amal Clooney had him shaking in his boots when he popped the question and she didn’t answer -- he asked her out of the blue but instead of squealing yes immediately the brainy lawyer just stood there -- George says he was on his knee for like 20 minutes and finally said he was going to throw his hip out -- Amal finally agreed and the couple have three-year-old twins 

* The nip/tuck freak daughter of Olivia Newton-John is being blasted as a hypocrite for coming out against the new COVID-19 vaccines -- Chloe Lattanzi claims she doesn’t trust doctors or the vaccine but critics note she had no problem shelling out an estimated $550,000 to plastic surgeons for nose jobs, super-sized boobs and ballooned lips 

Page 9: Since his life-threatening health scare game show icon Pat Sajak’s been testy and snapping at contestants and crew members leaving insiders fearing he’s heading for a breakdown -- the once-cheery Wheel of Fortune host is a different man since recovering from emergency surgery for a blocked intestine and is having difficulty coping with the workload -- he just can’t keep up with the pace and he’s pushed to the very limit and can’t seem to function doing this job and it’s all spilling over and manifesting into these ugly outbursts which are shocking viewers -- he even glares at long-time help-mate Vanna White when he gets frustrated or forgetful and she is really too nice to complain about it but she’s definitely been taken aback by his behavior 

Page 10: Proof UFOs are real -- new photos taken by Navy jets reveal we are not alone 

Page 12: Celebrity Buzz -- WWE legend Ric Flair (picture), Real Housewives of Orange County’s Braunwyn Windham-Burke maintains she’s not attracted to men despite renewing her wedding vows with her husband of over two decades -- she says she is gay but she loves husband Sean Burke and they plan on staying married although they don’t sleep in the same bedroom and they are raising their kids together but he knows the girl she’s dating and he’s been given the thumbs-up to date too, Liam Payne believes he’s being haunted by spooks -- convinced spooky spirits were inhabiting his West London digs Liam moved but spooks popped up at the new pad and he thinks the new house is even more haunted than the old one, George Clooney handpicked an even better looking doppelganger to play his younger self in his new flick The Midnight Sky who is screen legend Gregory Peck’s grandson Ethan Peck -- George said it was tricky because people know what he looked like when he was 35 years old but he rejected the high-tech gizmos used to weirdly reverse Robert De Niro’s age in The Irishman but he did mix his voice with Ethan’s since his voice is pretty recognizable, Matthew McConaughey’s kids Levi and Vida used their phones to photograph him for his latest magazine covers because of quarantine they couldn’t do normal photoshoots so the kids became the photographers 

Page 13: Tom Arnold dines out in Rome (picture), Aubrey O’Day (picture), Brooke Burke in Mexico (picture), pregnant Meghan Trainor was diagnosed with gestational diabetes and she’s healthy and her baby boy is healthy but she has to really pay attention to everything she eats 

Page 14: Luke Evans denies hiding in the closet to advance his Hollywood career saying it was the last thing he had because everything else he’d given to the world and adding that he left home at 16 because he was gay and went into the world as a kid because he had to, Mindy Kaling managed to keep two pregnancies under cover and kept the kids’ middle names under wraps until now -- a fan wondered why Mindy who is of a Indian heritage gave her kids Caucasian names but their names are Katherine Swati and Spencer Avu 

* Fashion Verdict -- Blanca Suarez 3/10, Olivia Palermo 1/10, Nicky Hilton 9/10, Bella Heathcote 2/10, Catt Sadler 8/10 

Page 16: True Crime 

Page 17: Martha Stewart confesses her painful divorce in 1990 was a terrible thing and she hasn’t talked to ex-husband Andrew Stewart since but she bounced back from the pain and her infamous prison stint because she’s very strong and motivated to get on with life -- still Martha admits being dumped by her husband for another woman after 29 years of marriage nearly did her in -- Martha also reveals serving five months in West Virginia in 2004 on a federal insider stock trading rap was a struggle but she got through it by working on her arts and crafts 

Page 19: 10 Things You Don’t Know About Don Lemon 

* Dolly Parton pulled no punches when discussing her longtime romance with Carl Dean dishing she and her husband have been together for 57 years and married for 54 and she’s sick of him and she’s sure he’s sick of her -- the couple have rarely been seen in public together and she says their marriage succeeds because she stays gone and they’re not in each other’s faces all the time 

* Miley Cyrus says she’s mastered the art of staying safe during lockdown love and it’s by having online sex -- she said the safest sex in these COVID-crazy times is the virtual kind and that’s where Miley has been hooking up

Page 21: Cover Story -- Thanks for the Memories -- tribute to the stars we loved and lost in 2020 

Page 22: Alex Trebek 

Page 23: Kobe Bryant and daughter Gianna, Kelly Preston 

Page 24: Kirk Douglas, Sean Connery 

Page 25: Olivia de Havilland, Chadwick Boseman 

Page 26: Robert Conrad, Naya Rivera 

Page 27: Regis Philbin 

Page 28: Kenny Rogers, Roy Horn 

Page 29: Eddie Van Halen, Little Richard 

Page 36: Health Report -- eating bread can toast your brain 

Page 38: Ghostbusters icon Dan Aykroyd has turned into a ghoulish recluse who rarely leaves his $25 million Martha’s Vineyard estate where he’s now eerily planning his own funeral -- the bizarre 68-year-old appears perfectly healthy yet he spooks around in his bed clothes muttering about who he wants to officiate at his memorial service and the goodies the chef should serve at the wake -- the curious thing is he appears to be in no danger of dropping dead anytime soon and he’s sturdy as a horse which is surprising given the cigars and the vodka and the big meals he enjoys -- Dan’s wife of 37 years Donna Dixon has gotten used to her husband’s ghoulish monologues

* Bob Dylan sold his extensive back catalog of more than 600 songs including Blowin’ in the Wind and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door to Universal Music in a blockbuster deal topping $300 million 

Page 40: Patrick Stewart confesses he’s been furious all his life and he’s still seeing a shrink to control his rage -- he reveals he’s burned with rage inside since childhood when he witnessed his dad’s violence against his mom and he had to suppress all that anger -- at age 14 he feared he’d explode and kill his headmaster when he caned him and later he worried he’d hurt his two children with first wife Sheila Falconer in a fit of fury and now at age 80 it’s still there so he sees a therapist every week 

Page 44: Straight Talk -- The Weeknd has his nose out of joint because he wasn’t nominated for any Grammys this year and he claims he’s being snubbed because he’ll be starring on the February 7 Super Bowl halftime show a week after the Grammys 

Page 45: Jeffrey Epstein’s accused madam Ghislaine Maxwell is a paranoid mess losing her hair and wasting away in federal prison where she’s terrified shadowy forces have marked her for death -- the shrinking British socialite who denies recruiting and grooming underage girls for Epstein’s twisted lust is charged with sex trafficking minors as she rots in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center awaiting trial next year 

Page 47: Bizarre But True 

[heart-eyes-kippen]

Inhibitions

Word Count: 4871

Summary: 

"Maybe he just had to do it. Maybe he had to let go of his inhibitions, his pre-conceived plans, everything, and march right down those stairs with nothing but intent."

A.k.a Cyrus comes out to his parents, and suddenly they understand why he talks about a certain boy so much. Also TJ gives him a hug because it's what he deserves.

You can read it on AO3 here

~

Hey dad, hey Sharon, I’m gay. 

 Hey, what’s up guys, I don’t like girls!

 Hey, you know those grandkids you’re looking forward to in future? Yeah, they may be logistically impossible. Sorry. 

 Hey, you know Ellen? The TV show host? Yeah, the gay one. Anyway - just thought I’d let you know that her and I share a trait and that’s not liking the opposite gender. 

 Cyrus let out a heavy sigh, blowing some of his hair up in the process. He placed his hands down on his desk, feeling butterflies begin to swarm his stomach at the prospect of what he was planning. His heart was soaring, and his clammy hands were shaking, and was the room supposed to be spinning like this? 

 Maybe he wasn’t as ready as he thought it was. Or, maybe, coming out would always be a nerve-wracking process no matter how long he waited. 

 He’d spent a countless amount of late nights staring up at his plain white ceiling, with nothing but deafening silence to give him company as his mind raced with a million different scenarios.

 Each option was becoming more and more convoluted, to the point where he wasn’t sure if his parents wouldn’t even recognise he was trying to come out to them. He supposed it was his mind’s way of escaping, of recoiling from the prospect of coming out. 

 Cyrus was hyper-aware of the media his parents consumed, in hope it would shed some light on their view of people like him. All he’d gotten so far were tiny inclinations, tiny indicators that maybe this wouldn’t go terribly. 

 He let out the breath he’d been holding, turning his attention to the window. Through it, he could see the last remnants of light fading, with light wispy clouds drifting peacefully across the darkening sky. His body felt stiff now with nerves as his grip on the desk tightened. Distantly, he could feel the cool wood pressing up against his skin, turning his fingers white with the pressure after a few moments, but it somehow provided him with a tiny sense of relief. 

 The swings weren’t an option. Not anymore. So here he was instead, left with a ball of anxiousness that had initially settled in the pit of his stomach, but seemed to be clawing its way up to the surface now.

 Why was this so anxiety-inducing? 

 He’d crossed a major hurdle in allowing himself to utter the words ‘I’m gay,’ which held weight in comparison to simply admitting that he was crushing on a guy. Those words had kept him awake at one time, but now they brought him relief. He’d felt light as air after saying them aloud, solidifying them, and it was that moment he was sure as ever they were true. 

 It wasn’t an ‘I don’t like I girls as much as originally intended,’ or an ‘oh god that boy is kind of cute,’ it was a ‘no - this is me.’ This is who I am. This is the part of me that shouldn’t matter as much as it apparently does, but here he was, having a full-blown freak out over telling them to his dad and step-mom. He’d always prided himself on maintaining some form of rationality when it came to others, but that didn’t apply to himself nearly as much as he wanted it to.

 When the silence became too much, Cyrus began flicking through his phone desperately in search of some music to fill it, hands still trembling as he did so. A warm night-light, in the shape of a dinosaur, lit the back corner of his room. Apart from that, he was enveloped by darkness as stars began to speckle the night sky, accompanied now by a clear view of the moon. 

 He turned up the music, not focusing so much on the lyrics as he was on his own thoughts. Hearing another voice, despite it practically becoming white noise, alleviated some of the ever-present loneliness that was pressing down on his chest. 

 Cyrus’ thoughts turned, once again, to the predicament at hand. He crossed the room, away from the glow of his night-light to his window. The parted curtains allowed pale moonlight, muted slightly by the clouds now, to pour inside. He leaned up against the window sill as though it was providing him with some kind of life support.

 At that moment, maybe it was. 

 Desperate for more noise, he fiddled clumsily with the lock for a moment before lifting the window with some effort. Cool evening rushed by him right into his room, whistling softly as it did so. 

 A sigh of relief escaped his lips.  

 Maybe he just had to do it. Maybe he had to let go of his inhibitions, his pre-conceived plans, everything, and march right down those stairs with nothing but intent. The scared boy he once was would never have even dreamed of doing something along those lines, but that wasn’t him anymore. There was a flame of confidence inside of him now that hadn’t been there previously, and although it flickered on occasion, even coming close to burning out, it somehow managed to remain there. 

 He could do this. There was no one telling him he couldn’t, apart from himself. So why were his feet seemingly rooted to the carpet beneath his feet? 

 Cyrus thought about his dad. He thought about the way those eyes always crinkled with laughter right after his own jokes, he thought about the way they clouded with concern whenever Cyrus walked through the door with slumped shoulders, exhausted from the drama of that day. He thought about the rare but impossibly warm hugs he would wrap Cyrus up in when he’d had a particularly bad day.

 Then, his thoughts shifted to Sharon. The way her laughter became high-pitched shrieks of glee whenever they’d watch trashy TV shows together and a particularly funny moment cropped up. They way she’d given him space at first to become accustomed to the new house, and the way she’d embraced him with nothing but warmth.

 They wanted the best for him. Of course they did. But did that extend to this? Would that make them perfectly okay with having a gay son?  Even if they were accepting, would Cyrus have to live with their private disappointment about what would’ve been? Would he see it constantly in the way they looked at him, or the way they interacted with him?  

 Cyrus had always been acutely fearful of being a disappointment, and it seemed nothing he did could wipe away the impression that he was, to his friends, to his family. 

 To himself. 

 He swallowed thickly, fingers trailing along the surface of his window sill as he continued to look out at the white sky. The clouds had parted again, revealing the entirety of the bright moon that was briefly hidden away. 

 Some of his shakiness had eased, but his heart still felt as though it might beat out of his chest with how rapidly it was thudding away. Adrenaline was surging through his veins, and nervousness was rising his throat as he turned to his bedroom door, which stood ajar only slightly. 

 He decided upon sending a quick text, the light emanating from his phone momentarily illuminating his face, before setting it down on his desk again and squeezing his eyes shut.

 Cyrus took one step. Then another. Music was still ringing out in his room, reverberating off the walls with how loud it was, and for a moment he was able to register shock at the fact that his dad hadn’t come up to ask what was going on. 

 He padded down the stairs, tugging nervously at the sleeves of his shirt as he did so. Step by step, he made his way towards the kitchen. It was hot down there with the heater running, almost too hot, and he felt his face warm slightly as he came to a stop.

 The fireplace was crackling away, filled with hunks of fresh wood and stone-grey ashes. Shadows were cast onto his face, which was visibly pale even in the warm light. A speckled marble counter separated him from his dad, who was stood in the light of the kitchen by a chopping board. 

 Cyrus’ heart was racing. 

 “Dad?” 

 His voice was timid, and the sound of it almost made him wince. He didn’t think he’d ever sounded so scared. 

 “Yeah?” he hummed back distractedly, attention focused on the head of broccoli he was systematically chopping up. 

 “I need to tell you guys something.” 

 His dad halted in his movements, gaze turning towards him curiously. Cyrus placed his hands down against the cool marble. 

 “Is...this something important?” 

 Cyrus gave a meek nod. His dad placed the knife down immediately, features softened slightly with concern now. 

 “Okay. I’ll be right back.” 

 This was it, he thought to himself, trying desperately to keep his breathes steady. He couldn’t hide behind jokes this time around, although a part of him sincerely wanted to. It was his immediate coping mechanism in situations that were serious, and not being able to lean on it was daunting.

 His dad re-emerged almost a minute later, Sharon in tow now. They sat themselves down on the black bar stools opposite Cyrus, who stepped back immediately to put some distance between them. Being close seemed to make things all the more real. 

 Briefly, he noticed that they’d both assumed their therapist positions, but he tried not to linger on that fact. 

 Cyrus felt as though he was on a stage, with blinding spotlights beaming down on him, for a performance he hadn’t rehearsed for in the slightest.

 Except - he had. He’d spent hours upon hours imagining every detail of this exact conversation, every detail of every possible outcome. He couldn’t depend upon that now, though. 

 Three words. That’s all it would take. He didn’t have to drag any of this out, but of course, he was Cyrus and his natural response to nervousness was to blurt out whatever crossed his mind. 

 “Okay, I, um...I just want you to know that I’ve been wanting to do this for ages but I kept holding off because I wasn’t sure about it and yeah, I guess it could kind of come as a shock, but I just...need you to know that the last thing I’d ever want to do is disappoint either of you, and I really hope this doesn’t change how you think about me, and I hope it doesn’t change how our Rabbi thinks of me and I hope this doesn’t have to be a big deal even though oh boy, I’ve made this a big deal in my head! Um...I’m rambling, aren’t I? Yeah, I’m rambling.” 

 His dad and step-mom had expressions on their faces that resembled shock, although only vaguely. They’d both been trained to conceal emotion and it had always been somewhat of an obstacle at the best of times. 

 His dad was the first to speak, leaning forward on his elbows. 

 “Cyrus...you can tell us whatever this is, okay? If it’s causing you this much stress, then...I think it’d be good to get off your chest.” 

 Sharon nodded along in agreement. The only sounds that filled the room at that moment we’re the crackling of the fire, the low hum of the fridge running, and the muffled pop music blasting from Cyrus’ phone from upstairs. 

 He took in a deep breath, before letting it out again with an audible whoosh. 

 “I’m gay.” 

 Silence. 

 Cyrus’ eyes darted desperately between their faces, searching for any hint of emotion that would give away what they were feeling. His heart began to sink with disappointment, and he had to take a moment to swallow the lump that had appeared in the back of his throat. His mouth was dry, and his hands were becoming clammy again.

 In reality, only a few seconds had passed, but it felt like minutes.

 “Cyrus...” his dad trailed off, gesturing towards the stool that was placed opposite them. 

 Cyrus bit his lip, before timidly stepping forward to sit down. His dad reached across the counter to take his hands, officially closing the distance between them. Sharon reached across too, a kind smile gracing her lips now, and Cyrus felt relief flood his system in one big rush. 

 “I’m sorry you were scared to tell us, and I’m sorry we haven’t been there for you...the thought of that just...” his dad took a deep breath in, shaking his head.

 Sharon chimed in. “Cyrus. We love you no matter what, okay? All four of us. Our Rabbi loves you. This world...it’s harsh sometimes, and unfair, but nothing could possibly change the way we feel. You’ll always have us.”

 After trying hard to fight the tears that were pricking at his eyes, Cyrus finally allowed a few stray ones to slip down his cheeks. His friends had been one thing, but his dad and step-mom had been a whole other thing, and those words had somehow managed to alleviate the heavy weight he felt pressing down on his chest. He choked back a small sob, before standing up from his chair and rushing around to them both. His dad was up in an instant, pulling him into a tight hug that Sharon was joining in on soon enough. 

 “We’re here now,” he heard his dad murmur, followed by the feeling of a soft kiss being planted on his head. 

 Cyrus grabbed onto his dad’s shirt, smiling despite the lump in his throat. He’d worried so, so much about this, and it had all somehow turned out fine. One of his many talents was getting himself worked up, and now he was finally unwinding again after what seemed like

months. An embarrassing amount of tears were making their way down his face now, being caught by the soft fabric of his dad’s shirt. 

 “Thanks,” he responded, in a muffled whisper.

 ~

 It was about forty-five minutes later that his dad called to him from the kitchen, announcing that dinner was ready. Cyrus’ tears had long dried up by now, and despite looking like somewhat of a mess he felt a lot more content than he had just over an hour ago. 

 After rushing back up to his room to pause his music, he’d settled down on the couch and flicked through a few channels, eventually stopping on a soap opera he’d never heard of before and allowing all of its contrived drama to entertain him for a while.

 Cyrus opened his mouth to respond, but shut it almost immediately when a few sharp knocks sounded at their front door. Confusion was written on his face as he got up from the couch, padding over to the darkened hallway and flicking on the light switch. He squinted for a moment, trying to make out who it was through the strip of stained glass beside the door, but eventually, he gave in with a shrug and moved forward to open it. Shadows shrank away from the light as it poured out onto the porch.

 There, in all of his adorable glory, stood TJ.

 Cyrus almost wanted to laugh. He’d completely forgotten about sending that text.

 His cheeks were tinged red from the cold and he appeared to be out of breath, chest rising and falling rapidly as he stared back at the Cyrus. He was wearing a faded blue hoodie, the basketball printed onto it barely recognisable, and Cyrus couldn’t help the smile that came to his lips. 

 “Hey,” he breathed out. 

 TJ gave him a bright smile, seeming somewhat bashful as he reached up to rub the nape of his neck. 

 “Hey. Sorry, I just got out of practice, but I got your message. How’d it go?” 

 Cyrus tipped his head to the side at that, taking the boy in for a moment longer. His features were softened slightly by the glow of their overhead lamp. His hair was still slightly damp, presumably from showering, and his eyes were soft as they met his.

 “Sorry, it’s just - you came,” he murmured, huffing out a laugh, “I didn’t expect you to.” 

 “Of course I came,” TJ smiled back, “this is big for you.” 

 The two looked across at one another for a few long seconds, cool evening breeze gusting over them. The sounds of approaching footsteps broke them both out of their seeming trances, and soon enough Cyrus’ dad was stepping out into the hallway.

 “TJ! Hello,” he greeted, a pleasant smile on his lips as he walked forward. 

 His eyes flickered from Cyrus, who was looking down at the ground, to TJ, who was nervously wringing his hands together. 

 “Hey, Mr. Goodman!” 

 His dad stared a moment longer, and Cyrus’ stomach flipped at the realisation that swept over his face.

 “Such a gentleman,” he mused, huffing out a laugh as he stepped aside, “you can just call me Jack. Would you like to stay over for dinner? We have plenty.”

 TJ looked conflicted for a moment,  but eventually, he nodded. “If that’s okay, then that sounds great! I’d just have to check with my mom.” 

 After sending a quick text, TJ was stepping in and toeing off his shoes by the rack, lingering for a moment by the doorway. Cyrus’ dad flashed them both a knowing look, before disappearing into the living room again. Cyrus turned to the boy again, a visible flush reddening his cheeks.

 “It went well. I’m really glad I did it,” he told him, face lit up with a beaming smile.

 TJ’s looked fond as he held out his arms, allowing Cyrus to step into them.

 “I’m proud of you,” TJ mumbled against his neck, and Cyrus felt himself melt right then and there. He could barely keep the smile from his lips as he buried his face in the fabric of the boy’s hoodie. It smelt faintly of soap, and the usual scent of his cologne. Briefly, he considered the thought of just staying like this forever.

 Unfortunately, though, they parted after what was maybe a moment too long. 

 Butterflies were swarming his stomach as he looked up at TJ, leaving him with an almost dizzying feeling of jitteriness. He cleared his throat eventually, turning towards the doorway.

 “We should probably, you know...”

 “Yeah,” TJ agreed, somewhat breathlessly. 

 They traipsed out into the dimly light living room, at the edge of which was their dining table had been set up for five people. With a giddy smile, Cyrus made his way over and settled down in the seat opposite his dad. TJ sat down beside him, and the pair shot each other a confused glance as Sharon began looking between them, much like his dad had just done.

 Deep red candles were placed carefully in the centre of the table, glowing in the darkness, and it took Cyrus a moment or two to register that candles were definitely not a normal thing for them at the dinner table. He hastily brushed the thought off.

 “Thanks again for this,” said TJ.

 Cyrus’ dad waved him off. “No problem! It’s always nice having you.” 

 In typical fashion, their dinner started out with questions about school, which Cyrus and TJ answered as cheerfully as they could. 

 “Hey, you guys know how TJ is like, a basketball god?” he asked after a few minutes, eager to change the topic.

 He heard the boy laugh softly from beside him. “Well, basketball mortal. I haven’t upgraded to god status yet.” 

 “You have in my eyes,” Cyrus protested, expression softening at the adorable smile on TJ’s face. He stared, for what was likely a moment too long, before snapping himself out of it. “Um, anyways! Today during lunch break TJ got a perfect basket from all the way across the court, literally standing backwards, on the first go! It was amazing. I could practically feel the power radiating from him.” 

 TJ shook his head at that, face reddened slightly as he waved him off. “I’ve practised it a few times before-“ 

 “Not today though! See what I mean, guys? He’s a modest basketball god.” 

 Cyrus’ dad looked on in amusement, exchanging a fond look with Sharon before turning back to the pair. 

 “That sounds impressive,” he agreed, voice heavy with implications Cyrus really didn’t want to unpack, “I can see why you’re captain.” 

 “Thank you,” TJ huffed out a laugh, reaching over to place a gentle hand on Cyrus’ shoulder. 

 “I wouldn’t be anywhere without this guy, though. He’s the best cheerleader anyone could ask for.” 

 Cyrus beamed at that, taking a quick sip of his water. “I do pride myself on my signs,” he bragged.

 “I’m glad those signs are appreciated,” Sharon chimed in, “I swear I see you working on those day in and day out.” 

 “I’m very dedicated,” Cyrus agreed with a nod, “three sporty friends mean a sign for each of their games.” 

 The conversation continued on from there, the fireplace still crackling away in the background as they ate. Cyrus felt himself relaxing more with each second that passed, which was a side effect he’d noticed whenever TJ was around. Lately, seeing the boy with Kira never failed in stressing him out and making his throat close up - nothing at all like how he usually felt around him - but he was grateful to have that same peaceful feeling back.

 Eventually, Cyrus’ dad asked a seemingly innocent question that had him very nearly choking on his water. 

 “So TJ, do you have a girlfriend at all?”

 After a few moments of spluttering, he managed to recover, flashing everyone a timid smile. 

 TJ, who had previously seemed relatively relaxed, shifted nervously in his chair. He put down his cutlery with a slight clatter, opening his mouth to respond before closing it again. His eyes never left Cyrus’ as he responded, and Cyrus could feel the air seeping out of his lungs.

 “No, I don’t...I’m uh, not really interested.” 

 Sharon‘s eyebrows shot up at that, but otherwise she nodded and gave him a polite smile. His dad on the other hand, had a knowing glint in his eye as his gaze met Cyrus’. 

 He blushed, suddenly finding his plate of food to be the most fascinating thing in the room. Luckily, Sharon reverted to asking TJ about how his parents were doing, and the boy was more than happy to fill her in. 

 They excused themselves after about twenty more minutes, retreating upstairs towards Cyrus’ room. It was dark when they entered, with the warmth from his night light illuminating one side of the room, while moonlight lit up the other. 

 He walked over to his window, closing it to prevent any more wind from gusting in, before settling down on his bed. TJ followed suit, smiling gently as he crossed his legs. 

 “You know what I wanna get?” he asked.

 Cyrus, who had been somewhat preoccupied with the way the moonlight was currently falling onto TJ’s face, blinked at him for a moment or two. 

 “Um,” he paused, clearing his throat, “what do you wanna get?” 

 “A tattoo,” he answered eagerly, hands clasped together on his lap.

 Cyrus gave him a confused smile. “A tattoo? What kind?”

 “Like...” TJ trailed off, seeming bashful all of a sudden, “maybe an inside joke between just us. Somersault or something, you know?” 

 “That’s super sweet...apart from the fact that you’re fourteen and tattoos are permanent,” Cyrus told him, clicking in his tongue in disapproval, “stealing a golf cart is one thing, but illegally getting a tattoo is a whole other thing.” 

 TJ just grinned. “One day, then.” 

 Cyrus nodded. TJ’s eyes were gleaming mischievously in the moonlight, and he had what was possibly the most adorable smile on his lips to contrast. It made him feel warm but jittery inside at the same time, which proved to be a pretty odd combination. He shifted slightly, eyes never leaving the boy. 

 “You know...tattoos are permanent, but markers aren’t.” 

 TJ bit his lip at that, clearly fighting back a smile. “Are you asking me if you can draw a tattoo on my arm?” 

 “A design, not a tattoo,” Cyrus corrected, getting up from the bed and moving over to his desk. He rummaged through his drawers for a moment, before pulling letting out a triumphant ‘aha!’ as he pulled out a black marker. 

 His phone, which was still sitting on his desk, lit up with a notification. Cyrus glanced down at it for a moment, before disregarding it and resuming the pop music he’d been blasting earlier, at a reasonable volume this time. 

 TJ flashed him a smirk as he made his way back over to the bed, sitting across from the boy. 

 “I’m ready for my tattoo.” 

 With an eye-roll, Cyrus gave his shoulder a playful shove. 

 “What design would you like, Sir Kippen?”

 TJ hummed thoughtfully at that, looking out at the night sky for a moment as he did so. 

 “A heart with an arrow going through it, with ‘somersault’ written inside of it.” 

 Cyrus felt his face grow warm, and he prayed it wouldn’t be noticeable given the low amount of light. He shuffled closer to the boy with a faint smile, chancing a glance up.

 TJ’s eyes were warm, and his lips were parted slightly, and now that his hair had dried it looked so ridiculously fluffy. Cyrus had to close his eyes for a moment to redirect his focus. 

 “Okay,” he murmured, gently taking the boy’s arm and resting it on his leg, “I’m not a professional by any means, but I’ll see what I can do.” 

 Sparks danced in the air around them, particularly with each point of contact, and suddenly that swarm of butterflies was making a reappearance in Cyrus’ stomach. He took in a shaky breath, hoping to god TJ wouldn’t notice how nervous he was, before taking the lid off of his marker. 

 He glanced up once more to find TJ watching his every move, and a small smile came to his lips as he set to work. 

 “Okay, so...I’ll do the word first,” he whispered, voice competing slightly with the upbeat music that filled his room. 

 Cyrus shuffled impossibly closer, before carefully writing the word ‘somersault’ in cursive on the inner part of TJ’s wrist. He wasn’t sure if he’d actually heard the boy take in a sharp breath, or if that was just his guileless mind imagining things. Either way, he had to bite back a smile.  

 “Okay, I think that’s good. Now the heart,” he said, in a murmur this time. 

 He glanced up again to find that TJ was clinging onto every word that left his mouth. Letting out a breath, he returned to work. 

 It ended up looking decent in the end, and a strange sense of disappointment filled his chest as he shuffled back to his previous position. 

 TJ gave him a roguish smile. “I think I just illegally got a tattoo. A very nice one too, might I add.”

 “Shut up!” Cyrus giggled, and TJ only narrowly managed to dodge the pillow he aimed at him. 

 ~

 The glow of a street lamp was the only thing to illuminate TJ’s features as the boy gazed back at him. His smile was soft, and his eyes were alight with something Cyrus couldn’t quite pinpoint. 

 They were stood where Cyrus’ lawn met the pavement, silence filling the air apart from the cars that occasionally passed by.

 He shoved his hands in his pockets, bashfully directing his gaze towards the concrete. There were unspoken words there, he knew there were, but neither of them seemed to be ready to acknowledge them just yet.

 Instead, they settled in the air, covering them like a blanket with the promise of something more later on. In that moment, it was more than enough for Cyrus. 

 He stepped forward, closing the gap between them, and reached out to place his hands on TJ’s shoulders. His heart was racing all over again.

 TJ smiled gently. “Thanks for having me.” 

 “No problem,” Cyrus returned, acutely aware of the fact that he was currently in the boy’s space. “Get home safe, you rebel.” 

 TJ laughed softly. “I’ll consider it.” 

 “You better! We still have that detention, and I’m not suffering through it alone.” 

 The boy’s expression softened. A pitch black sky stretched above their heads, speckled with burning stars, and Cyrus didn’t think he’d felt so peaceful in a long time. 

 “I’ll be there,” he promised.

 “Good,” Cyrus whispered back. 

 They lingered there for a moment longer. Cyrus let out a shaky exhale, which he could briefly see in the air.

 “I’ll message you later tonight,” he added.

 TJ took a step back then, still smiling. “I’ll be waiting. Bye, Cy.” 

 He turned around and walked away, looking back when he reached the next street light to give Cyrus a wave. The boy smiled and returned it. 

 At the streetlamp after that, TJ jumped up, tapping his shoes together, and Cyrus let out a giggle that cut through the silence. 

 He pretended not to notice the knowing looks he received when he went back inside. 

[supergraphicultramoderngirl]

when i watch the world burn

a chaptered fic, inspired by the album “doom days” by bastille

summary: The world is ending in six hours, how do the GHC and friends manage and cope?

word count of chapter: 1,650

next chapter

—————————

chapter 1: quarter past midnight

“before it falls apart, help me piece it all together”

The alert came out at 12:15am, or at least it did in Shadyside.

Out of the Good Hair Crew and friends, Buffy was the first to see it. She was unable to sleep, a usual occurrence for her lately, up late thinking about a million things at once, when she heard a notification go off on her phone. She didn’t think much of it, she usually only got notifications in the middle of the night if it was a GHC emergency, so she picked it up and turned it on. That’s when everyone’s life changed.

Scientists have alerted the public of a large asteroid heading directly for Earth, caught too late to try to prevent any detrimental circumstances. It is expected to hit at 6:47am EST. This is the end of the world, prepare yourselves as best you can. -Alert received 12:15am

Buffy’s hand covered her mouth as she gasped in surprise. She immediately went to the group chat to text them, “Let me know when you’ve heard the news.” She then ran to her parents’ room and hugged them as tight as possible, sobbing.

“Whoa, honey, what’s wrong?” her mother asked, brushing Buffy’s hair out of her face.

“The world is ending,” she replied through broken sobs.

“Buff, whatever it is that’s bothering you, I’m sure it’s not that bad,” her dad responded.

“Check your phones. Turn on the TV, I’m sure it’s on there too,” Buffy retorted, still crying.

They both turn to look at their phones, reading the message, then turn back to their daughter in one of the biggest hugs they’ve had.

“This is it.”

•••

Andi was the next to find out.

She woke up about two minutes after the alert was issued, a restless itch in her bones that she couldn’t manage. She picked up her phone to see Buffy’s text.

News? What n— oh.

She scrolled down a bit to see the alert. After she read it, she dropped the phone as if it would burn her with just a small touch. Of course, tonight was the one night Bex and Bowie went out to have a night to themselves, at the music festival they’d been looking forward to all month. It should be over by now, right? Andi thought as she picked the phone back up to call them, hoping that they would answer.

Oh, thank god. “Hey, what’s up, honey? We’re driving back right now,” Bowie’s voice rang through the phone.

“Have you gotten the alert?” Andi replied, panicked.

“What alert?”

“Just turn off your aux and put on the radio, I’m sure it’s announcing it on there,” Andi sighed.

She counted the seconds while waiting for her parents to respond, getting to thirteen until Bex cut in, “We’re almost there, okay? We’re here for you, Andi.”

That’s what made her break into sobs.

•••

Soon after Andi was Jonah.

He was outside, wandering about, trying to get his mind off things, off certain people, ready to start skateboarding, when he got the alert on his phone. He scanned it over, and immediately grew panicked. He didn’t want to go home, couldn’t go home, not while his parents were still mad at him, not while they didn’t know about his panic attacks as he was almost definitely about to have one. He tried to take in his surroundings, seeing if he was near any of his friends’ houses so they could help, and luckily enough, he spotted Buffy’s house just down the street. Had he really been wandering that far? Whatever, it doesn’t matter now. He shakily made his way over to her house, knocking on the door.

A tear-stained Buffy opened the door with, “Jonah, how are—“

“Buffy, help,” he pleaded through his gritted teeth.

Buffy straightened. “Oh my god, you’re having a panic attack, okay, um, come sit down,” she said, guiding him to a kitchen chair, “just remember to breathe. This will end, okay?”

Jonah nodded frantically, while Buffy’s parents were hurrying down the stairs. “Is everything alright?” her mom called.

“Can you grab a glass of water? Jonah’s having a panic attack,” Buffy responded.

Great, more people who know.

It took a few minutes, but he was able to calm down eventually. He took the glass from Buffy gratefully and leaned back into the chair.

Buffy squatted beside him. “I’m assuming you got the alert, then?”

“Yeah,” he whispered in reply. “I can’t believe it.”

“Me either.”

•••

Cyrus was the last to find out of the four of them.

He’d been asleep, actually, drained from being upset the entire day. He had to deal with seeing Kira drag TJ around everywhere, feeling simultaneously disappointed and crushed. TJ’d apologized already, sure, but it wasn’t exactly in depth. It wasn’t the explanation Cyrus had been looking for. But, hey, they were on speaking terms at least, which was better than radio silence. Maybe.

Anyway, he’d been having a nightmare, so he was honestly grateful for being shaken awake, that is, until he found out why.

“Cyrus, your dad and stepmom are on their way. Everyone’s just gotten a notification that the world is ending, get up. We’re spending the last few hours together.”

It was as if his brain went on overload. The world was ending? Impossible. He’d never even gotten to experience his adult life, he’d never made up entirely with his friends, hell, he never even had a boyfriend. He hadn’t lived. And now he’d never get the chance.

He broke into sobs in his mother’s arms, but in all honestly, the only thing he felt was an overwhelming sense of numbness. He felt grief for himself. No, not just himself, for him and all of his friends who never got to finish their stories, either.

“Mom, can I just text my friends? See if they’re alright?” He asked, pulling away a bit.

“Of course. I’ll go wait downstairs. And if you want to see them, that’s not an issue. I know how important they are to you,” she replied, pressing a kiss to the top of his head before making her way downstairs.

First, he replied to the group chat, but after he pulled up a contact he hadn’t sent anything to in weeks.

“Hey, TJ, are you holding up alright? Have you seen it?”

•••

TJ and Amber found out at the same time.

TJ had been having a nightmare for the fourth night in a row, over the same thing again and again. It was of him trying to thoroughly explain Costume Day to Cyrus, but the boy would just get disgusted and angry at him and never speak to him again. Amber had woken him up and calmed him down each time, and this time she was fed up with it, she needed to know what was bothering her brother.

“I know something’s up, just tell me what’s going on, Teej. You can trust me.”

He twiddled his thumbs in his lap, looking down at them. “I know I can trust you, but I don’t know if you’ll hate me.”

“Impossible.”

He took a deep, shaky breath, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’m gay.”

“Okay? Me too,” she replied simply.

TJ’s bloodshot eyes widened. “What?”

“I am a massive lesbian, is this surprising to you?” Amber joked.

“Um, kind of?” TJ replied, exasperated. “So I could’ve been talking to you about this whole situation the entire time. Great.”

“What situation?” Amber asked, leaning forward to pay attention.

“Basically, this girl noticed how I acted around Cyrus and then implied she would out me if I didn’t do a costume with her instead of him. She probably just wanted to get on the basketball team or something since Buffy kicked her off the girls’ one,” TJ explained.

“I’m gonna kill her,” Amber deadpanned.

“What? You don’t even know her na—“ TJ was cut off from a notification on his phone.

“Who’s texting you this late?” Amber asked as TJ read the alert.

“Not a text,” he replied slowly as he passed her the phone to read it.

After doing so, she nearly drops it on the bed. “Oh my god.”

“That’s it, it’s just over? We don’t get to live the rest of our lives? What the hell?” TJ began yelling, getting up to pace around the room.

“Teej, there’s nothing we can do about it, we might as well just face it, right?” Amber asked, trying to calm him down for the second time that night.

“You don’t get it, Amber, I’m going to die while Cyrus isn’t talking to me. I’m gonna die with him mad at me. The only person I’ve felt real feelings for is going to die without me,” TJ ranted.

“We still have a little over six hours, right? You can still talk to him. And if he gets mad at you over it, we’re all gonna be dead in six hours anyway,” she reasoned.

“You’re right. You’re totally right.” TJ stopped pacing.

“You’re not gonna talk to him, are you?”

“What am I even supposed to say? I—“

His phone went off with another notification sound.

“—am gonna kill my phone if it keeps interrupting me. Pass it over.”

He quickly scanned it over, then looked up at Amber. “It’s Cyrus.”

“Well, what are you doing? Answer him!” Amber exclaimed.

“Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve got Amber with me, at least, but I’d at least like to see everyone one last time, yanno?”

•••

The six kids decided to meet up then, for one last hurrah, in the downtown area near the Spoon.

They all ran towards each other in a massive group hug, all holding each other tightly, sobs falling from each of them.

“I’m gonna miss you all so much,” Andi whispered.

“Hey, we still have six hours,” Buffy replied softly. “Let’s make them count.”

—————————

song for the chapter:

[thymeandlemons-blog]

save the last dance for me (1/4)

TJ/Cyrus [fluff, light angst, miscommunication, school dances and cheesy songs]

Summary: With the school dance looming, TJ tries to keep his crush on Cyrus under wraps to avoid ruining their friendship. Jonah accidentally overhearing one of TJ's many lovesick rants makes that much easier said than done.

Read on AO3

TJ’s not worried.

Well, maybe he is slightly concerned.

The thing is, him and Cyrus have a routine. They meet up in front of the water fountain by the West hallway at exactly 12:03, stop by Cyrus’ locker to drop off his books, and head to the cafeteria to line up for lunch by 12:05.

And now, it’s 12:06, and Cyrus hasn’t shown up. Cyrus always shows up.

He’s nothing if not punctual, and if he’s going to be late for any reason, he texts TJ to give him a heads up. He sends him multiple texts actually, always far too apologetic, no matter how many times TJ assures him he doesn’t mind waiting.

Today, there have been no texts, and TJ has spent the past 3 minutes running through disaster scenarios in his head. What if something happened and Cyrus had to leave school? What if he was snacking during his designated 11 AM snacking window, and he ate something he didn’t know he was allergic to, and had to be rushed to the hospital? What if his biology class took a field trip and they went to the field behind the equipment shack that always has a ton of crickets, and while Cyrus loves most animals, he hates crickets, and he saw them and panicked and-

“Hey, TJ!”

TJ’s pretty sure he gives himself a mild concussion with the speed at which he whips around, but there he is.

He quickly runs his eyes over Cyrus; face - scar free and cute as always, arms - don’t seem to be scratched or bruised, legs - no cast in sight, eyes - brown and chocolatey and bright and warm, oh so warm, and-

“TJ?” Cyrus asks with a chuckle. TJ really needs to get better at this look-at-your-crush-without-getting-distracted-by-their-face-and-staring-blankly-at-them-for-several-seconds thing.

“Hey, sorry, I just... I just drifted off for a second” he admits, hoping his cheeks aren’t as red as they feel. “You worried me, is everything okay?”

Cyrus’ eyes light up as he starts walking towards his locker, TJ quickly following after him.

“I have the wildest story to tell you” he says, pausing for dramatic effect in his trademarked Cyrus Goodman way. “You know Ben Miller, right?”

All it takes is a nod for Cyrus to continue, handing over his books for TJ to hold while he opens his locker. As TJ is trying to balance Cyrus’ books, he sneaks a peak at the Tupperware container Mrs. Goodman always packs for the two of them. He’s pretty certain he sees lemon scones, TJ’s absolute favorite.

“Well, as it turns out, Ben hasn’t read any of the assigned books this year, and he has been paying Jenny Lemiski from 9th grade to write all of his papers. Can you hold this?” TJ hands him the books and takes the prized scones instead, watching Cyrus meticulously put his books back in their alphabetical order. “And this time, he was in a rush to catch the bus, so when he printed the essay, he also printed Jenny’s email about how she wants to up her price per page. He handed it to Mrs. Hussein just like that, e-mail included! Scandal.”

Closing his locker, Cyrus turns to TJ expecting a grand reaction. And to be fair, TJ’s not really surprised about Ben, and he has done far worse things in the past so he has no room to judge, but Cyrus looks so excited telling the story that TJ fashions his expression into a look of appropriate shock as they make their way to the cafeteria.

“No way! What did Mrs. Hussein do?”

“She suspended him! He can’t even attend the dance!”

The dance. TJ’s usually not one for dances, but TJ’s also usually not dealing with an enormous crush on the cutest boy in the world who is very much obsessed with school dances. He has been wanting to ask Cyrus about his plans ever since the theme was announced, he just couldn’t find a way to bring it up that didn’t make it pathetically obvious that TJ wants to go with Cyrus.

And he does. He really, really, really wants to go to the dance with Cyrus, but there are about a million reasons why that’s not a good idea. A million reasons why he can’t just ask Cyrus… As much as he wants to take the next step, he has been there before, and it didn’t end well. So instead of acting on it, his method of coping with his crush is talking to his sister for hours upon hours about how fluffy Cyrus’ hair looked on that one particular Tuesday they went to the mall.

Still, this might be his chance. Even if he can’t ask Cyrus on a date, he can ask him on a friend-date. A group hang? Being dance friends?

“So…” he starts, his voice coming out far too squeaky to be inconspicuous. “So,” he tries again, much steadier this time, “speaking of the dance… What are your plans? Are you going with Andi and Buffy?"

“Yes and no” says Cyrus, “Buffy asked Walker to be her date, but Andi and I are going to go together. Jonah might tag along if he can’t find a date, which, let’s be honest, he probably will. Do you… Do you have a date?”

“Don’t you think I would have told you if I had a date?” he asks with a smile. Cyrus should know by now that he’s the first person TJ goes to whenever something exciting happens in his life. Well, with the exception of crush-on-Cyrus-Goodman related developments, for obvious reasons.

He isn’t sure whether he’s imagining the blush on Cyrus’ cheeks, but his smile and the teasing spark in his eyes are definitely there.

“So no date?”

“No date.”

“Cool. That’s cool… Would you… Would you maybe want to go with me and Andi?”

TJ’s heart may or may not be beating out of his chest, but he needs to play this cool. “Wouldn’t Andi mind? I don’t want to bother her.”

“She wouldn’t mind” assures Cyrus with a smile, “it’ll be really fun. Please?”

“I guess I could turn down my many other admirers for you” he teases, laughing when he sees Cyrus scoff. “I’d love to… Thank you, for asking me.”

“It’s a date, then” says Cyrus, and TJ would probably find the way Cyrus�� eyes widen comical if only he could manage to breathe. “I mean, it’s... I- Not that… I just-“

“Is it going to be tots and fish sticks or tots and chicken fingers?”

It’s Betty, one of TJ’s three favorite lunch ladies, here to save the day. He looks away, pretending to weigh his lunch options as Cyrus orders, when in reality he’s just trying to calm his heartbeat.

It’s a date.

Clearly, Cyrus didn’t mean it the way it sounded, if the way he backtracked was any indication, but TJ probably would have reacted the same way if he had let something like that slip. What if Cyrus does feel the same way?

“TJ, for you?”

“Oh, just tots please” he orders, watching as Betty piles on extra tots on the plate, and sneaks a few chicken fingers in there. She has seen the remnants of Cyrus’ Tater Theater on their lunch trays, so she always gives TJ extra food for Cyrus to pick at.

He thanks Betty and turns around to follow Cyrus, smiling as he watches him stick his tongue out in concentration while looking for a table. How is TJ expected to survive lunch let alone the dance?

Cyrus finds an empty table and waves him over, TJ smiling as he makes his way there.

Date or not, TJ already knows the dance is going to be one of the best nights of his life.

[gaymusicchart]

GAY MUSIC CHART – 2019 week 08

 Welcome to the Gay Music Chart, the LGBTQA related music videos TOP 50 actuality and most request.

Please notice that we received dozens of suggestions, and it's impossible to present all of them in the same week edition because the video would be too long. We have three months late to catch up, so it will take some times.

 Vote for your favourite LGBTQA related music videos by leaving a comment for this post on :

YOUTUBE (in the comment section of the video of the week) : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz7yfp-xq-b08tD6mAWwclA

BLOGGER : http://gaymusicchart.blogspot.fr

FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/GayMusicChart/

TWITTER : https://twitter.com/GayMusicChart with #GayMusicChart  

TUMBLR : http://gaymusicchart.tumblr.com  

 Here are some other sites which also makes LGBT charts or presents some LGBT artists :

https://tadslgbtmusiccharts.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/gaymusicgossipshow/

http://picdeer.com/gaymusicgram

http://thecountdownwithdjbaker.blogspot.com/

https://lgbtqmusicchart.uk/

Don’t hesitate to visits their sites !

 Here is the recap for this week :

 OUT : Erik Altemus - "Desidero" LW: 26 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 24

OUT : Greyson Chance - "Good As Gold" LW: 27 / WO: 8 / PEAK: 10

OUT : Clean Bandit feat. Marina & Luis Fonsi - "Baby" LW: 35 / WO: 4 / PEAK: 35

OUT : Years & Years - "All For You" LW: 39 / WO: 17 / PEAK: 01 (x1)

OUT : Blair St. Clair - "Irresistible" LW: 41 / WO: 6 / PEAK: 09

OUT : Tuure Boelius - "Vihaan rakastaa sua" LW: 43 / WO: 1 / PEAK: 43

OUT : Sam Tsui - "A Million Pieces" LW: 44 / WO: 5 / PEAK: 31

OUT : Pet Shop Boys - "On social media" (lyric video) LW: 46 / WO: 1 / PEAK: 46

OUT : Michete - "Yum Yum Big Slurp" LW: 47 / WO: 1 / PEAK: 47

OUT : Tim'm West - "Shoes" LW: 49 / WO: 1 / PEAK: 49

OUT : Tokio Hotel - "Melancholic Paradise" LW: 50 / WO: 1 / PEAK: 50

  01 (+ 2) : Calum Scott - "No Matter What"

LW: 03 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 01 (x3)

UK - 2018 - from the album "Only Human" (Special Edition)

This really personnal song tells the story of Calum Scott telling his parents he was gay and their reactions of loving him "no matter what". It's a deep and emotional power ballad.

 02 (- 1) : Jax Jones, Years & Years - "Play"

LW: 01 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 01 (x1)

UK - 2018 - from the EP "Snacks"

 03 (- 1) : Troye Sivan - "Lucky Strike"

LW: 02 / WO: 6 / PEAK: 01 (x2)

Australia - 2019 - from the album "Bloom"

 04 (+ 6) : Lauv & Troye Sivan - "i'm so tired..."

LW: 10 / WO: 4 / PEAK: 04

USA / Australia - 2019

 05 (+ 4) : Saara Aalto - "Dance Like Nobody's Watching"

LW: 09 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 05

Finland - 2019 - from the album "Wild Wild Wonderland"

A music video about a transgender teen who wants to do ballet against the will of his father.

 06 (=) : Trinity The Tuck - "The Face The Body"

LW: 06 / WO: 3 / PEAK: 06

USA - 2019

 07 (+ 13) : Courtney Act - "Fight For Love"

LW: 20 / WO: 4 / PEAK: 07

Australia - 2018

The drag queen came 4th at "Eurovision - Australia decides", the Australian national selections for the Eurovision Song Contest 2019.

 08 (+ 8) : Federica Abbate - "Finalmente"

LW: 16 / WO: 6 / PEAK: 08

Italy - 2018

This song came second in the first part of the Sanremo Giovani 2018 Music Festival for emergent artists. The lyrics talk about a love relationship badly judged by the entourage. If the lyrics aren't specifically gay, the music video is, with the portrayal of a young man who comes out to his father who rejects him in return. So, the young man can only be reconforted by his boyfriend and his friends. Until... Beautiful.

 09 (+ 3) : Calum Scott - "If Our Love is Wrong"

LW: 12 / WO: 3 / PEAK: 09

UK - 2018 - from the album "Only Human"

 10 (- 6) : Manila Luzon - "Go Fish"

LW: 04 / WO: 3 / PEAK: 04

USA - 2019 - from the album "Rules"

 11 (- 6) : Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper - "Shallow"

LW: 05 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 04

USA - 2018 - from the OST "A Star Is Born"

This song won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song 2018, the Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance 2019 and Best Song Written for Visual Media 2019, the BAFTA for Best Film Music 2019.

 12 (+ 1) : Not.Your.Regular.Boy. - "It's All Yours"

LW: 13 / WO: 5 / PEAK: 12

The Netherlands - 2018

This is his third single.

 13 (+ 9) : N.E.F.O.R.M.A.T - "Чужие Судьбы" (Aliens Destiny)

LW: 22 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 13

Russia - 2019

For their first music video, these two have guts to do this kind of music video in their country: they show their homosexuality, they kiss, they flirt half naked in bed, they rebel for freedom. Respect, men!  

 14 (- 3) : Tiago Braga - "Ilusão"

LW: 11 / WO: 25 / PEAK: 06

Portugal - 2018

A story of infidelity.

 15 (+ 18) : Christopher Sorensen - "Afterglow"

LW: 33 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 15

USA - 2018

A touching music video about a teen dating a mature man, but his life collapses when he discovered he's a married man with child.

 16 (- 9) : Netta - "Bassa Sababa"

LW: 07 / WO: 3 / PEAK: 07

Israel - 2019

This is her first single her victory at the Eurovision Song Contest 2018, still composed by Stav Beger.

 17 (=) : Jão - "Me Beija Com Raiva"

LW: 17 / WO: 4 / PEAK: 10

Brazil - 2018 - from the album "Lobos"

It's the first time the singer talks about his sexual orientation with this song, writen for an ex-lover who broke his heart.

 18 (NEW) : Robyn - "Send To Robin Immediately"

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 18

Sweden - 2019 - from the album "Honey"

 19 (+ 2) : Bilal Hassani - "Roi"

LW: 21 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 05

France - 2019

Bilal Hassani won Destination Eurovision 2019 and will represent France at the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel Avivwith this song about self esteem.

 20 (+ 4) : Theo X - "You Don't Wanna Dance"

LW: 24 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 09

Denmark - 2018

In this cute music video, a young teen dares to give an invitation to dance to another boy. Love is love.

 21 (- 7) : Sam Smith, Normani - "Dancing With A Stranger"

LW: 14 / WO: 5 / PEAK: 14

UK / USA  - 2019

This is a passionate duet about coping with loneliness and trying to get over a lost love.

 22 (- 8) : Sam Smith - "Fire On Fire"

LW: 15 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 07

UK - 2018 - from the OST "Watership Down"

"Watership Down" is a BBC mini-series adaptation of the book, which tells the story about a warren of rabbits fighting to survive numerous perils as they search for a new home.

 23 (NEW) : Trinity The Tuck feat. Peppermint - "I Call Shade"

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 23

USA - 2019 - from the album "Plastic"

 24 (+ 5) : Calvin Harris, Sam Smith - "Promises"

LW: 29 / WO: 12 / PEAK: 01 (x1)

UK - 2018

 25 (- 6) : Mark Ronson feat. Miley Cyrus - "Nothing Breaks Like a Heart"

LW: 19 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 04

USA - 2018

 26 (- 1) : Brandon Stansell - "Hometown"

LW: 25 / WO: 3 / PEAK: 25

USA - 2018 - from the album "Slow Down"

This song is kind of a representation of his coming out story, with his family who didn’t respond very well. It was named one of the TOP 10 COUNTRY MUSIC VIDEOS of 2018 by Rolling Stone.

 27 (NEW) : Ben Platt - "Ease My Mind"

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 27

USA - 2019 - from the album "Sing To Me Instead"

With the second track of his upcoming album, the actor and singer officially comes out as gay in this music video, where he's dating Charles Carver.

 28 (+ 8) : Allen King feat. Amor Romeira - "My Boy"

LW: 36 / WO: 9 / PEAK: 03

Spain - 2018

 29 (+ 11) : Urgence Homophobie - "De l'Amour"

LW: 40 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 10

France - 2018

As homophobic attacks have increased by 15% in 2018 in France, 70 French celebrities made this song to fight homophobia.

 30 (NEW) : Filatov & Karas - "Au Au"

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 30

Russia - 2019

A man is pregnant in this music video.

 31 (+ 1) : Michael Medrano - "Love Somebody Else"

LW: 32 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 11

USA - 2018

The song was previously presented in our chart, but the music video was only released during our break.

 32 (NEW) : Lady Gaga - "Joanne (Where Do You Think You’re Goin’?)" (Piano Version)

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 32

USA - 2018 - from the album "Joanne"

She won three Grammy Awards this year, including for Best Pop Solo Performance.

 33 (NEW) : TIN - "Don't Say His Name"

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 33

UK - 2018

 34 (- 16) : D. Prime - "GAY" and "HAPPY-NESS"

LW: 18 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 18

USA - 2019

 35 (+ 3) : JORDY - "Just Friends"

LW: 38 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 35

USA - 2018

A love declaration.

 36 (NEW) : Ben Platt - "Bad Habit"

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 36

USA - 2019 - from the album "Sing To Me Instead"

The singer and actor will release his first solo album next March 29th. People wonder if he has just come out as gay with the appearance of Charles Carver in his apartment at the end of the clip.

 37 (- 29) : Lizzo - "Juice"

LW: 08 / WO: 6 / PEAK: 02

USA - 2018

 38 (- 1) : Greyson Chance - "shut up"

LW: 37 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 37

USA - 2019

 39 (- 16) : Super King Reza & Groovebox - "Horchata"

LW: 23 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 23

USA - 2018

 40 (+ 2) : Someone Who Isn't Me - "Gomenaki"

LW: 42 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 40

Greece - 2018

 41 (- 7) : Silva - "Duas da Tarde"

LW: 34 / WO: 6 / PEAK: 08

Brazil - 2018 - from the album "Brasileiro"

 42 (- 14) : MNEK - "Girlfriend"

LW: 28 / WO: 2 / PEAK: 28

UK - 2019 - from the album "Language"

 43 (NEW) : Years & Years feat. MNEK - "Valentino"

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 43

UK - 2019 - from the album "Palo Santo"

We can't show the music video due to copyright restriction.

 44 (NEW) : LOBODA - "INSTADRAMA"

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 44

Ukraine - 2019

 45 (- 14) : Miss Benny - "Rendezvous"

LW: 31 / WO: 4 / PEAK: 31

USA - 2019

Miss Benny is the new project of Ben J. Pierce aka Kid POV, aka Benny, well known here for his previous singles, included "Boys Will Be Boys". Welcome back!

 46 (NEW) : Savoir Adore - "Bloom"

LW: - / WO: 1 / PEAK: 46

USA - 2019 - from the EP "First Bloom"

 47 (RE-ENTRY) : Pabllo Vittar - "Seu Crime"

LW: - / WO: 2 / PEAK: 31

Brazil - 2019 - from the album "Não Para Não"

 48 (=) : Echo Black - "Poison Apple"

LW: 48 / WO: 5 / PEAK: 37

USA - 2018 - from the album "Dawn"

The queer lead singer of the band is Danny Blu.

 49 (- 19) : Electric Fields - "2000 and Whatever" (Lyrics Video)

LW: 30 / WO: 3 / PEAK: 30

Australia - 2019

Zaachariaha Fielding and Michael Ross mix electronic music with Aboriginal culture. This song came 2nd at "Eurovision - Australia decides", the Australian national selections for the Eurovision Song Contest 2019.

 50 (- 5) : Troye Sivan and Jónsi - "Revelation" (Lyric video)

LW: 45 / WO: 7 / PEAK: 11

Australia / Iceland - 2018 - from the OST "Boy Erased"

The song was nominated on the 2019 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. The movie "Boy Erased" follows the son of Baptist parents who is forced to take part in a gay conversion therapy program.

  NEW THIS WEEK

 Nimmo - "No More"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

UK - 2019

 Pet Shop Boys - "Give stupidity a chance" (lyric video)

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

UK - 2019 - from the EP "Agenda"

 Bring Me The Horizon feat. Grimes - "nihilist blues" (Lyric Video)

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

UK / Canada - 2019 - from the album "amo"

 Drake Jensen - "Talk Me Down"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Canada - 2019 - from the album "Sideshow"

 Jackie Shane - "Any Other Way" (audio)

LW: - / WO: 2 / PEAK: 18

USA - 1962

The transgender singer has died at the age of 78 years old. RIP.

 King Princess - "Pussy Is God"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2018

 Dorian Electra - "Man To Man"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2018

 Tacocat - "Grains of Salt"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2019 - from the album "This Mess is a Place"

 Galla - "Nightsong"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2018

Adam Gallagher is a fashion influencer, who releases his first single.

 Nima - "Are You Serious?"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2019

 Matracia - "Slow"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2019

 Ben Levi Ross & Taylor Trensch - "Only Us"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2019

A gay cover of the song from musical "Dear Evan Hansen"

 Bobby Newberry - "Love You Like I Do"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2019

 CupcakKe - "Squidward Nose"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2019

As usual, it's for an adult audience with these explicit sexual themed lyrics.

 Abdu Ali - "Chastity"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2019

 PrettiBoiRoq - "Wanna Be Me"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2018 - from the EP "Haus of Ken"

 ILoveMakonnen feat. Gucci Mane - "Spendin" (Official Lyric Video)

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

UK - 2019

 Silva - "Brisa"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Brazil - 2019

 Jaloo feat. Nave - "Dói d+"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Brazil - 2019

 Funtastic - "Taku Fogo"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Brazil - 2019

 Criolo - "Etérea"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Brazil - 2019

 Filipe Catto - "É Sempre o Mesmo Lugar"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Brazil - 2019 - from the album "Catto"

 Ana Gabriela - "Mais De Nós"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Brazil - 2019

 Mateus Carrilho, Tainá Costa - "Toma"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Brazil - 2019

 Yhago Sebaz - "Vou Embora"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Brazil - 2019

 Rodrigo Alarcon part. Liniker - "Amor Acidente"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Brazil - 2019 - from the EP "Parte"

 Diego Diaz - "Caótico"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Argentina - 2019

 Agustín Malandra - "Madrugada Índica"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Argentina - 2019

 Dj Nelasta feat.Titica & Paulelson (Mr. Aleluia) - "Tonga"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Angola - 2019

 Gyre - "Quarantine"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

South Africa - 2018    

 Yaariyan LGBTQ Flashmob 2019

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

India - 2019

 Netflix Presents: The Valentine's Day Special

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

India - 2019

This is a gay themed advertisement from Netflix India.

 Love X Stereo - "Zero One"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

South Korea - 2019

 Yanni Burton - "Mess Around"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Australia - 2019

 Philippe Jaroussky - "Che città"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

France - 2019

 Colin Meyer & Burçak - "Pornstar"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

The Netherlands / Turkey - 2018

 Merol - "Hou je bek en bef me"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

The Netherlands - 2019

 Daniel Schuhmacher - "Venus or Mars"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Germany - 2018

 Electrosexual - "Darkroom"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Germany - 2019 - from the EP "Era#03 - X2"

 Divines - "Ponad"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Poland - 2019

In this music video, LGBTQ bullied students take their revenge and go to prom.

 Azis feat Azis Group - "Jeno Biagai"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Bulgaria - 2019

 teo entertainment - "OMG Fuck Me Hard"

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Russia - 2018

 MARUV - "Siren song" (live @ Vidbir 2019 - Final)

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Ukraine - 2019

The song won the national selections and will represent Ukraine at the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel Aviv.

 Alen Chicco - "Your Cure" (live @ Eurovizijos 2019 - Grand Final)

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Lithuania - 2019

The song came 5th in the Grand Final of the Lithuanian national selections for the Eurovision Song Contest.

 Junà - "Strength of A Woman" (live @ Eurovizijos 2019 - Grand Final)

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Lithuania - 2019

The song came 8th and last in the Grand Final of the Lithuanian national selections for the Eurovision Song Contest. This time, the backdancers wore high heels.

 Sigmund - "Say My Name" (live @ Melodi Grand Prix 2019)

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

Denmark - 2019

The song came 5th in the Danish national selections for the Eurovision Song Contest.

 P!nk - Live at The BRIT Awards 2019

LW: - / WO: - / PEAK: -

USA - 2019

She has received the Outstanding Contribution to Music Award at The Brit Awards 2019.

[allison-rosewood-maximoff]

I will NOT tolerate HATE!

Dear haters that come from the land of bigotry, You are most welcome to my blog as you can see I am a multiverse fan I come from Riverdale/Stranger Things/ MCU/ Harry Potter and so on. I’ve decided to address the issue that has come to my attention. HATE

Whether you Anonymously send hate or publicly with your name attached you have willingly opened the door for a dispute.

I have noticed a certain few members of the online community here have stated their right to publicly ridicule, mock, scorn and belittle another human being… and those human beings are the actors of the shows. 

Quick Question: What Right do YOU Have?

If you find that said actors of said shows *COUGH* Riverdale *COUGH* are not upholding the standards of being actor tell me this… why do you still follow them? why do still search their name? why do you willingly spend time looking for them? Hmmm? Waiting for your answer….

I would personally like to see how well you’d do in front of millions of people daily. Would you crack straight away? Would you spiral down hill? Maybe you’d survive?

 We have NO right to judge an actor for how things turn out. We don’t understand the constant pressure they are under from fans, management, directors even their parents. As I started to grow up I finally understood what happened to Brittany Spears in 2007 and Miley Cyrus in 2013. The stress and pressure of being an idealised actor in this generation is scary and terrifying in its own right, any wonder many celebrities take on drugs and alcohol… just so they can cope.

SO, heres a few things you should probably look at if your one of those people who think about sending HATE.

1. It’s inappropriate to be THAT invested into an actors PERSONAL life (catch yourself on)

2. To harass an actor to such an extent that you have openly and willingly unleashed the doors to hell.

3. If you’re going to send hate be prepared for the shit storm that will come your way because let me tell you this… it will not be pretty for you or anyone else involved.

4. Quit tagging your hate and your foul mouth into the tags no one wants to see that on their timeline or when they search a tag… if you have a problem deal with it yourself don’t ruin anyone else’s time.

5. You find yourself disliking where a character has gone on the show (Riverdale for reference here) or the introduction to new characters that’s YOUR opinion no need to broadcast it through ominous amounts of hate towards the people who actually care and like the character(s)

6. Anonymously or not i’ve found that many of a message popping into the inbox has been a disarray of words so disorganised that they make no sense whats so ever…. ummm LEARN TO WRITE!

7. Starting rumours and spreading lies about other individuals (especially about actors) just because you hate the character, is a whole new low if you’re one of those haters because let me tell you something you must have hit an all time low if you’re going to stoop so low to spread lies across the net. 

8. ACT YOUR AGE! Learn to grow up you are no longer a child or toddler running around in middle school. Nobody should have told hold your hand and tell you whats right and whats wrong. (The age to use tumblr is 13+) You’re old enough now to understand!

9. You should really LEARN to differentiate between what is REALITY and what is FANTASY because if you can’t tell the difference and you’re shitting on a character based on your incapabilities to differentiate then you need to seek medical advice PRONTO!

10. Finally, if you don’t like how the writers of said show(s) have taken the series  so far I suggest you yourself should write the show and SEE how well you’d do? Guarantee you it wouldn’t make it past the Pilot!

To end this speech I will simply close with this quote “Always remember… Rumours are carried by haters, Spread by fools and Accepted by idiots”-  Ziad. K. Abdelnour 

[erickhtge927-blog]

7 Simple Secrets to Totally Rocking Your Unique Dining Tables For Small Spaces

Someone could reinforce the body's immune system and therefore quite simply develop resistance to an HPV virus in basically as short of time as a few months, sooner than it could trigger any important injury. (Short Review of Book)

Peradventure have you ever suffered through acute rhinitis? By any chance did you get rid of the infection? Obviously you survived it! You will not cure a runny nose directly, however your immune system normally creates immunity to any type of cold infection within several weeks. We call that cured by your own immune system!

No doubt you will possibly acquire an additional cold virus, because there remain more than 300 different cold viruses. However you will certainly never ever acquire the exact same cold virus that you had previously because you have developed resistance to that particular cold virus.

Adults have previously had a great deal of the cold infections. Adults have acquired resistance to the viruses they have actually had. Therefore there are not numerous cold infections remaining for adults to become infected with. That is why grownups only acquire a couple of colds annually whereas children usually get 10-12 colds each year.

HPV is the same because human papilloma virus is just another infection. Therefore you can quite simply create immunity to HPV virus. Nonetheless, human papilloma virus is more capable at concealing from your immune system than are the cold virus viruses. Moreover you should work a little harder to obtain resistance to HPV virus.

Assuming one does nothing it could take a couple of years to establish resistance to HPV virus. If a person follows the writer's recommendations, it takes just a few months to generate immunity to HPV virus. The longer one has HPV virus, the longer it can cause damage. Therefore it is ideal to create immunity and eliminate human papilloma virus when reasonable.

A person may enhance the body's immune system and consequently normally create immunity to an HPV infection in basically as short of time as a few months, prior to the time that it can begin any serious cervical injury. (Sneak Peak Book Review)

Many individuals get puzzled and think they have not created resistance to HPV virus merely because they get infected again by a different type of the over 100 HPV infections. However somebody could stay clear of additional direct exposure and also new human papilloma virus infections.

Clearly this publication sheds light on human papilloma virus infections, one of the most common STD infections in the US, impacting over 20 million males and females. Human papilloma virus creates cervical dysplasia, cervical cancer, genital moles, plantar moles, miscarriages, infertility as well as penile cancer.

No matter how this information entered into your possession. Just what is of concern is exactly how you make use of such data just like hundreds of others that have actually eliminated HPV virus.

The insightful writer explains how she carefully turned around the symptoms of human papilloma virus as well as absolutely recovered her own body of the HPV virus issue by reinforcing her body's immune response.

Just what in the world is HPV virus? She kept http://lanehvdh438.image-perth.org/miley-cyrus-and-colposcopy-directed-biopsy-10-surprising-things-they-have-in-common asking herself this concern when she got the findings back from her gynecologist. The writer was devastated, puzzled and also horrified. She had lots of concerns however she did not like the responses she was getting. HPV, a STD issue that may bring about cervical cancer cells, is a lot more common than what most people usually think. The writer created this writing to assist others get rid of HPV virus.

A person may strengthen immunity and consequently generally establish immunity to an HPV virus in only a matter of a few months, prior to the time that it could establish any type of severe infection. (See Book Sneak Preview)

Right here is the bottom line, this publication has to do with healing HPV, but it is not just about HPV. It is about living the very best life we might live. It has to do with acknowledging HPV as a remarkable possibility to take responsibility for our own health and wellness. When seen in this manner, somebody could be thankful for HPV. Yes, happy! And keeping that thankfulness and everything else discussed in this writing, someone could, and somebody will certainly, heal the body! The writer understands this works since it benefited her - it transformed her life and her health.

Look at what people are stating regarding this motivating book: "I examined around the net as well as located several other women that had actually followed your recommendations successfully. They are currently human papilloma virus FREE with normal Pap smears, and also they did not have any surgical treatment and also they may still have children! What a joy!"

"I acquired this publication in hopes of getting more clarification about this virus. I genuinely appreciated reading about the tale of the author and also I do not really feel so all alone anymore."

Someone could strengthen the immune system and normally develop immunity to an HPV virus in only just a few months, sooner than it might make any type of severe cervical damage. (Selected Chapters of Book)

"I am so pleased I came across your publication because it actually aided me to start reframing my ideas about myself as well as this situation, as well as I am going to keep it near to me as I start this trip of healing myself. Thank you a lot for your positive power and also for sharing this fantastic recommendation with me!"

"This easy-read publication offers valid hope to women detected with HPV virus. I am so glad I reviewed it several months earlier, due to the fact that I valued her frankness and agree completely that HPV is a virus, not an ethical judgment. Newest clinical tests show my severe dysplasia has actually gone away."

"As a professional psychologist and yoga instructor, I can vouch for the incredible power of the mind-body link. Thank You For HPV not only attends to the recovery power of your mind, it also gives you details devices on how you can lower your stress degree and cope with more health and wellness, tranquility and delight. (Sneak Peak Book Review)"

You may strengthen the body's immune system and generally establish immunity to an HPV infection in literally a matter of a couple of months, before it might generate any kind of important injury. (Short Review of Book)

Perchance have you hitherto endured a common cold? Likely did you recover from the issue? Naturally you did! You cannot heal an acute rhinitis itself, nevertheless your immune system usually establishes immunity to a certain cold infection within a few weeks. We call that cured by your very own immunity!

And of course you will possibly cave in to another cold virus, since there exist over 300 different runny nose infections. Yet you will certainly never Small Dining Sets For Small Space ever acquire the same cold infection that you had in the past because you have actually established resistance to that virus.

Parents have currently had a great deal of the rhinitis infections. Parents have actually created resistance to the colds they have actually had. Therefore there are not quite as many cold viruses around for grownups to acquire. That is why grownups just succumb to a couple of runny noses per year whereas children get a dozen colds each year.

HPV virus is comparable in that HPV is just one more infection. Therefore you will most likely develop resistance to HPV virus. Nevertheless, human papilloma virus is much better at hiding from your immunity than are the rhinitis viruses. So you must work with more diligence to obtain resistance to HPV virus.

https://med.stanford.edu

If someone does not do anything it might take a few years to establish resistance to HPV. If an individual takes the author's suggestions, it takes just a couple of months to develop resistance to human papilloma virus. The longer somebody is infected with HPV, the longer it could create damage. Therefore it is best to develop resistance and remove HPV as soon as reasonable.

You may reinforce immunity and normally develop immunity to an HPV infection in literally a matter of a couple of months, before it might trigger any compelling injury. (Sneak Peak Book Review)

Many individuals become puzzled because they assume they have not created immunity to HPV just because they get infected again by a different strain of the more than 100 HPV viruses. However somebody may avoid additional direct exposure as well as additional human papilloma virus infections.

This publication sheds light on HPV issues, the most common sexually-transmitted infections in the United States, infecting over 20 million males and females. Human papilloma virus creates cervical dysplasia, cervical cancer cells, genital verrucas, plantar warts, losing unborn babies, inability to conceive as well as penile cancer.

No matter how this website came to be in your hands. Just what matters is how you utilize such data just like thousands of others that have eliminated HPV.

The book's expositor shares how she simply reversed the signs and symptoms of HPV virus and absolutely recovered her very own body of the human papilloma virus issue by enhancing her immunity.

[onestowatch]

Tayler Buono Is No Longer Stuck [Q&A]

Tayler Buono is an incredibly talented artist whose breakthrough single “Technically Single” landed her a deal with RCA Records. Her single shot up to Spotify’s U.S. Viral 50 chart and continues to grow with nearly 27 million streams to date. Yet, not long after, Buono’s record deal with RCA fell through; she was left with an unclear direction and multiple unreleased projects up in the air. 

Now, she is back and stronger than ever. Her latest single “Screen” is a perfect introduction to her newfound freedom as an artist.

If I had to pick one way to describe Buono’s “Screen,” it would be unapologetically honest. The track begins with the opening line, “Should probably delete my fake account and stop stalking my ex / but I just can’t put it down.” I cannot speak for everyone, but from personal experience, it is a wholly universal sentiment. Scrolling for hours without putting my phone down, without giving myself time to heal. 

Buono excels at putting these difficult to capture feelings into stirring song. With its emphasis healing, self-love and growth, it was my unique pleasure to speak with Buono about “Screen” and her journey thus far,  

Ones to Watch: Who is Tayler Buono?

Tayler Buono: I’m an artist/singer/songwriter from Orlando, FL. Currently based in LA.

Tell us about your journey so far in the music industry and how it led you to where you are now.

I started writing songs when I was 14 after I learned my first four chords on guitar and I became obsessed and determined to find a way to pursue music. When I was 18, I won the Florida Grammy Showcase and moved to Nashville shortly after to pursue my dreams in music. I took college classes online, drove for uber, and invested all my energy into writing with anybody and everybody I could. Eventually I wrote a song that changed my life. I released “Technically Single” independently in July of 2016. That song was real and raw for me to write as I was low key in a gray relationship with someone for two years who was very noncommittal with me while I was very committed to him. I was “technically single but emotionally unavailable.” The relationship was so bad for me at the time but the song… went viral on Spotify and suddenly all the major labels were hitting me up. I had never gone through anything like that before so it was a complete whirlwind taking meetings and felt surreal.

In January of 2017, I signed with RCA and I moved from Nashville to LA. “Technically Single” boy stepped up and made me his girlfriend (technically). I had a lot of buzz in the industry and everything looked promising. It felt like all my dreams were really gonna come true... But after the radio push with “Technically Single” didn’t work because the timing wasn’t right, everything slowly started to stall. I didn’t really have a champion at the label fighting for me. I started to doubt myself and overthink everything. Then my bf, the one I had been with for four years, dumped me a couple days before Christmas over a text message. (Ya let that sink in, took me awhile). Then, a few weeks later, top of 2018, my manager leaves me. Happy new year? I was having a HARD time... The enthusiasm in the label had died and after going back and forth for a long time we decided it was time to split. The process itself of legally getting out of the deal took about a year.. sooo much waiting. I was stuck.

But for as long as I can remember, anytime I didn’t know what else to do in life I’d just put my head down and write another song. That experience pushed me a lot and caused me to grow the most I ever have in my life and I think it’ll make me a stronger artist because of it. All the growth, pain, heartbreak ended up inspiring my upcoming project and I’m finally independent again and am excited to start fresh and put out all my music!

What has quarantine life looked like for you?

Quarantine life has been an interesting mix of emotions. I flew home to Florida to quarantine with my parents. I definitely struggled to get out of bed for a bit as my head was in a funk, as I’ve been struggling with the state of the world. I wasn’t really motivated to do anything until I started putting my energy into my art. I ended up self-shooting a music video on my iPhone so that was really fun to make! However, while I was working on that my dad ended up getting sick with COVID-19, pneumonia in both lungs, and was in and out of the hospital. It was really scary but thankfully he’s doing so much better and is COVID free now! Besides all of that, I’ve been enjoying time with my family, doing lots of yoga in the sunshine, reading, having lots of conversations about social justice, and just trying to be kind to myself and others as we’re all living in this strange, yet necessary, time together.

What made you want to pursue music in the first place?

I’ve always gravitated towards the way music connects people. It’s like a universal language. Ever since I wrote my first song I knew it was what I had to pursue in life. Writing songs has been the way I cope and process anything heavy in life. It’s like therapy. I love the way it can turn something painful or messy into something beautiful. :)

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?

Keep writing. Enjoy the journey. Follow your gut. Write a song that is so honest it makes you uncomfortable.

What would you say has been the biggest influence on your music?

The healing process after getting my heart broken and learning to let go and love myself inspired my upcoming project. :)

Do you have a background in dance? From your previous music videos and on stage appearance it feels like you might?

No I don’t! I wish. I LOVE to dance so much but in no way would I ever call myself a good dancer. Haha. I’m a WEIRD dancer. It definitely came out during my “Screen” video shoot. I’ll just continue to embrace it though because dance parties are one of my favorite things in the world.

Walk us through your songwriting process.

My favorite way to write is starting with an experience I can visualize in my head and being in a room with people I can have honest conversation with. It’s gotta be emotion led and feel real. I love to start with a track, beat, or sound from a producer that inspires me then freestyle on a mic. Sometimes melody will come first, sometimes lyrics, or sometimes both will naturally fall out together when I’m lucky. I love co-writing because I feed off of others’ energy and it inspires me. It’s way more fun to collaborate and work with people than work alone.

If you could go on tour with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?

Coldplay, Rihanna, Adele, Florence + the Machine, Alanis Morissette, Queen, Madonna…

You filmed and produced your own music video for “Screen” during quarantine. What was that process like?

It was so fun!! I originally was going to shoot a professional music video but then the pandemic happened and of course had to rethink everything. I ended up shooting it on my iPhone. It was cool to challenge myself and try something new I had never done before. I put my phone on a tripod and filmed several takes on a green screen that I ordered online, in my bedroom, and in my living room. I pulled a lot of all nighters working on it.

Who are your Ones to Watch?

Lennon Stella, Tate McRae, Noah Cyrus, BENEE, and Elina lately are some of my favorite upcoming artists I’ve been listening to a lot lately. 

Listen to “Screen” below:

[dancingcorpus-blog]

Danse Macabre: an emily corpus mix

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.” ― Jalaluddin Rumi

SIDE A: ONE OF THE LIVING

i. million reasons - lady gaga // ii. holy lover - keaton henson // iii. valerie - amy winehouse // iv. thinking out loud - ed sheeran // v. cheek to cheek - lady gaga & tony bennett // vi. esmeralda: female variation - royal academy of dance enterprises ltd // vii. ordinary people - john legend // ix. 10am gare du nord - keaton henson // x. skyscraper - demi lovato // xi. try sleeping with a broken heart - alicia keys

SIDE B: LEFT FOR DEAD

cranes in the sky - solange

I tried to drink it away / I tried to put one in the air / I tried to dance it away / I tried to change it with my hair

This is what she calls her recovery song. After the accident , Emily didn’t know hot to cope or what to do to move on. She tried to drink, she tried to smoke, she tried to sleep her life away; but nothing did much. No matter how much she tried to make the bad thoughts go away, they didn’t. And when she heard this song, a song that seemed to just get that feeling of driving herself crazy as she tries to cope.....it made it a little more bearable. Plus she could imagine herself dancing to it. Her bitter tears became those of mourning as she listened to this song.

bittersweet tragedy - melanie martinez

Sweet, boy, straight out of the movie screen / Candy hearts and chocolate dreams / I, met, my prince upon a popcorn bowl / He held my heart and let it go / Ice cream, upon a summer's day / Beginning sweetness never stays / Melting through the cracks in my hands / I guess I held on for too long

This song perfectly describes Emily’s relationship with Barkis. It felt like a dream come true in the beginning; he was sweet, perfect, and Emily gave him her everything. It was sweet and innocent. Emily would even call it her first real love. But it ended so wrong and so bitter. 

make me (cry) - noah cyrus & labrinth

You'll be the death of me / Sage advice / Love, lovin' you could make Jesus cry

Whenever Emily hears this song, she can’t help but think of the warning signs there were in her relationship with Barkis. She was so dependent on him and he knew it. She needed him like air, questioned her passions because he made her think they might not be what she wants. He wanted her to only want him and think about wanting him. He made her so mad sometimes too, always wanting things to be his way, but she still needed him. She couldn’t help herself.

hate u love u - olivia o’brien

Feeling used / But I'm / Still missing you / And I can't / See the end of this / Just wanna feel your kiss / Against my lips

Yet another song about Barkis. Emily is tired of every single song reminding her of Barkis, yet this one is one that makes her the most upset to hear. It reminds her that as much as she despises Barkis with every inch of her being, she still loves him so much. She never understood how people stayed with their abusers, but as time passes she can’t help but wish she did sometimes.

liability - lorde

They say, "You're a little much for me / You're a liability / You're a little much for me" / So they pull back, make other plans / I understand, I'm a liability / Get you wild, make you leave 

To Emily, this is how people see her now. Before astra, everyone who knew her back home avoided her like the plague after things ended with Barkis. But not at first; people would say if she needed to talk to go to them, but once she did they pulled away. And after a while, Emily figured that this is how anyone would see her once she told them about what she went through.

scared to be lonely - martin garrix & dua lipa

Do we need somebody / Just to feel like we're alright? / Is the only reason you're holding me tonight / 'Cause we're scared to be lonely?

Emily adores this song greatly. She loves the beat, it makes her want to cry and dance at the same time. Almost every single song on her playlist is something she wants to dance to, but this one speaks to her heart and her fear of being alone in addition to being a fun dance song.

lightweight - demi lovato

I’m a lightweight / Better be careful what you say / With every word I’m blown away / You’re in control of my heart

Emily uses this song to caution herself every time she thinks she is about dive into another relationship. She finds the words of this song to speak truth about her own habits when it comes to love and she doesn’t want to let herself fall so hard and fast again.

[adambstingus]

Parkland Teenagers Taking on the Worldand Winning

We haven’t heard the last from survivors of the deadly February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Dozens of the high school students who were thrust into a mortality crisis before they could order a beer at a bar have graduated from teenage angst to social justice, and they’re continuing to sing truth to power while pulling together to help one another to heal.

Recently, Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Pena, the teenage songsters who wrote “Shine,” the anthem of their movement #MSDstrong, performed in Washington, D.C., at the Fords Theater annual gala. They sang directly to Vice President Pence and FLOTUS, demanding change in gun laws. Then they joined a chorus of classmates from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to sing at the New York Public Theater’s annual gala, following the chorus’ surprise appearance at the Tony Awards that won them a rousing standing ovation.

The musical partners invited me later into their pocket-sized hotel room in Times Square, aghast at the shrinkage of space in our island city.

“Is this what a New York apartment looks like?”

For months, the dominant emotion in their lives was sadness. Then anger: “We’ve gone through an experience that someone who’s 80 might not have gotten close to going through,” exclaimed Sawyer, “so they can’t lecture us on what gun laws should be because they haven’t gone through this!” She plucks at the strings in her jeans. “But lately, I’ve been feeling inspired.”

And as of this week, the two drama students have started volunteering at Camp Shine, a ground-breaking summer camp program that families of the school have launched to help the children heal through the arts. “We had to find a way to keep these kids together,” says Wendy Simon Garrity, mother of Sawyer.

Her instinct was spot-on. Children of trauma most often shut down; they can’t express their feelings, so they withdraw into numbness, or wrestle with the inner crisis of fight or flight. When the families connected with Jessica Asch, a board-certified trauma therapist at New York University, she endorsed their hunch.

“The antidote to trauma is community,” Asch believes. “We have to meet these kids where they are and keep them together.” Her broad experience in working with adolescents, veterans, and other PTSD sufferers including Holocaust survivors has shown her how effective it is to use various art therapies to encourage trauma victims to be in touch with their real feelings and to find support in the embrace of their fellow survivors.

“‘In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,’ Sawyer said. ‘It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels—it’s just us teenagers against the world.’”

“Parkland has had so much media attention, these kids haven’t had an opportunity to be messy, they’ve been so busy performing,” for their cause, says the psychologist. An academic research study will be conducted on the Parkland program by the trauma center at University of Miami. The long-range hope is it will result in a curriculum that can be made available to other communities shaken by their children’s exposure to violent death.

At the camp, Garrity and Pena are joined by 35 students, six of them among the wounded, who are being guided in music therapy, art, drama, and storytelling and other relevant artistic expressions such as graffiti and photography that are therapeutic for victims of trauma. Their charity, Shine MSD, has raised just enough money to provide a two-week camp. They hope to attract donors who will fund another month of the camp to reach all the traumatized students. The program is designed by some of the nation’s leading creative arts therapists, and it is thus far supported by the royalty fees earned by their song “Shine” on iTunes, and from donations by a few celebrity benefactors like Miley Cyrus.

The two girls told me the story of how their celebrated anthem came to be.

Last Valentine’s Day had started out for 15-year-old Andrea Pena in an exchange of gifts with her boyfriend. At school everyone was cracking jokes about being single, passing around a box of Pringles and saying, “I’m a single pringle.” When a weird second fire alarm sent her and Sawyer and scores of kids and adults outdoors, the girls joked, “Oh, Culinary burned down,” referring to kids in the Food Services department who often burn while they learn.

The words “Code Red” drove them back inside. Sawyer Garrity, then 16 and all of 5-foot-1, jumped over a table to get into an office in the Drama Department that turned out to be full of windows. For the next hour and half, she and Andrea and 10 others crouched beneath a desk while hearing the shots and screams of friends’, sounds that would never be muted in their minds. Seventeen people, including teachers, lay dead.

I asked them, as many do, “Do you think you can, through your art and music, convey the reality to others that his might happen to you, to your school, to your children?” Sawyer replied solemnly, “I don’t think we could ever push the feelings that we felt onto other people. No one can relate unless it’s happened to you or to your child.” Both girls admitted that when their drama teacher, Melody Herzfeld, tried before the shooting to rehearse them into imagining how they should respond to a gunman’s attack, they paid no attention.

“Oh, it’s never going to happen here,” they thought.

The first two days after the massacre, the girls had spent in solitary anguish, slouched in their separate homes, Andrea bent over her Yamaha keyboard (“I’ve never had a big fancy piano”), Sawyer glumly picking at her guitar. She has been writing songs since she was 6 years old. Her father, Joe Garrity, told me he’d scratch his head when his little daughter would emerge from her bedroom and say, “I’ve got the bridge!” But Sawyer, who will be a senior this fall, admitted to me that she had never taken her guitar seriously until she faced a mortality crisis decades before she was ready to cope. The two classmates began texting each other.

“We have to do something,” Sawyer wrote.

Andrea, a rising junior, fiddled around with a few chords on her keyboard. “This could be something,” she thought. She didn’t dare voice the intention of writing a song; she had never done that before. So she sent Sawyer a voice memo of a riff. It touched something in the baby-faced girl with spigots of curls falling over her eyes. Sawyer played those chords again and again until some lyrics popped into her mind.

“You, you threw my city away…”

She texted them back to Andrea, the granddaughter of people who fled Castro’s Cuba and found refuge in Puerto Rico (though young Andrea never wanted to learn Spanish when her kindergarten friends in Florida teased her for her accent).

Andrea sent another voice memo, more chords. Sawyer’s sorrow suddenly released a powerful chorus of resistance:

You’re not gonna knock us down

We’ll get back up again

You may have hurt us

But I promise we’ll be stronger

A couple of days later, they got together and finished off the song as if it all came naturally.

They first shared “Shine” with the public at a town hall a week after the massacre. With 15 minutes to teach the lyrics to a chorus before performing, they weren’t even aware that CNN would be broadcasting their song to untold millions around the world, beyond the 7,000 in their audience. But they had been well taught how to hold presence during a performance. And they had words ready to stake their claim to being, not just authentic, but real:

We’re, we’re gonna stand tall,

Gonna raise up our voices so we never, ever fall

We’re done with all your little games

We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.

The audience response was rapturous. But the most touching moment for the girls came when the news anchor of CNN, Jake Tapper, came down to their dressing room and told them, “That was the most moving song I’ve ever heard.”

Belonging to a rather nondescript new generation, the girls told me they don’t even know what their “name” means—“It’s just a letter. Gen Z.”

I suggested they should be called Gen Now.

“I like that,” Andrea said. Sawyer chimed in: “I like that one.”

They recalled Jimmy Fallon saying at the school’s graduation ceremony, “Everyone’s saying you guys are the future, but I feel like you guys are the present.” They liked that, too. I proposed they might belong to a Third Culture generation.

“I definitely think so,“ Sawyer said. “Not just because of our awareness of gun violence, but also the way we’ve been speaking up for Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights and all. We’re so open to new culture now and more willing to listen—and we’re not as closed off and ignorant about other people. It’s like we’re coming together and embracing each other more than anything before.”

But of course, it’s not unlike anything that came before. And the girls have recently recognized that—it’s called the civil rights movement. And they want to build on it.

“In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,” Sawyer said. “It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels right now—it’s just us teenagers against the world.”

But they both notice more and more adults coming to their performances and wanting to learn from them, just as they find themselves learning from their parents’ generation and their fearless protests against the Vietnam War. “There was nothing ever like that before, where young people and then people in general were coming together and standing together,” Sawyer mused. “So powerful.”

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182923245687

[samanthasroberts]

Parkland Teenagers Taking on the Worldand Winning

We haven’t heard the last from survivors of the deadly February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Dozens of the high school students who were thrust into a mortality crisis before they could order a beer at a bar have graduated from teenage angst to social justice, and they’re continuing to sing truth to power while pulling together to help one another to heal.

Recently, Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Pena, the teenage songsters who wrote “Shine,” the anthem of their movement #MSDstrong, performed in Washington, D.C., at the Fords Theater annual gala. They sang directly to Vice President Pence and FLOTUS, demanding change in gun laws. Then they joined a chorus of classmates from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to sing at the New York Public Theater’s annual gala, following the chorus’ surprise appearance at the Tony Awards that won them a rousing standing ovation.

The musical partners invited me later into their pocket-sized hotel room in Times Square, aghast at the shrinkage of space in our island city.

“Is this what a New York apartment looks like?”

For months, the dominant emotion in their lives was sadness. Then anger: “We’ve gone through an experience that someone who’s 80 might not have gotten close to going through,” exclaimed Sawyer, “so they can’t lecture us on what gun laws should be because they haven’t gone through this!” She plucks at the strings in her jeans. “But lately, I’ve been feeling inspired.”

And as of this week, the two drama students have started volunteering at Camp Shine, a ground-breaking summer camp program that families of the school have launched to help the children heal through the arts. “We had to find a way to keep these kids together,” says Wendy Simon Garrity, mother of Sawyer.

Her instinct was spot-on. Children of trauma most often shut down; they can’t express their feelings, so they withdraw into numbness, or wrestle with the inner crisis of fight or flight. When the families connected with Jessica Asch, a board-certified trauma therapist at New York University, she endorsed their hunch.

“The antidote to trauma is community,” Asch believes. “We have to meet these kids where they are and keep them together.” Her broad experience in working with adolescents, veterans, and other PTSD sufferers including Holocaust survivors has shown her how effective it is to use various art therapies to encourage trauma victims to be in touch with their real feelings and to find support in the embrace of their fellow survivors.

“‘In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,’ Sawyer said. ‘It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels—it’s just us teenagers against the world.’”

“Parkland has had so much media attention, these kids haven’t had an opportunity to be messy, they’ve been so busy performing,” for their cause, says the psychologist. An academic research study will be conducted on the Parkland program by the trauma center at University of Miami. The long-range hope is it will result in a curriculum that can be made available to other communities shaken by their children’s exposure to violent death.

At the camp, Garrity and Pena are joined by 35 students, six of them among the wounded, who are being guided in music therapy, art, drama, and storytelling and other relevant artistic expressions such as graffiti and photography that are therapeutic for victims of trauma. Their charity, Shine MSD, has raised just enough money to provide a two-week camp. They hope to attract donors who will fund another month of the camp to reach all the traumatized students. The program is designed by some of the nation’s leading creative arts therapists, and it is thus far supported by the royalty fees earned by their song “Shine” on iTunes, and from donations by a few celebrity benefactors like Miley Cyrus.

The two girls told me the story of how their celebrated anthem came to be.

Last Valentine’s Day had started out for 15-year-old Andrea Pena in an exchange of gifts with her boyfriend. At school everyone was cracking jokes about being single, passing around a box of Pringles and saying, “I’m a single pringle.” When a weird second fire alarm sent her and Sawyer and scores of kids and adults outdoors, the girls joked, “Oh, Culinary burned down,” referring to kids in the Food Services department who often burn while they learn.

The words “Code Red” drove them back inside. Sawyer Garrity, then 16 and all of 5-foot-1, jumped over a table to get into an office in the Drama Department that turned out to be full of windows. For the next hour and half, she and Andrea and 10 others crouched beneath a desk while hearing the shots and screams of friends’, sounds that would never be muted in their minds. Seventeen people, including teachers, lay dead.

I asked them, as many do, “Do you think you can, through your art and music, convey the reality to others that his might happen to you, to your school, to your children?” Sawyer replied solemnly, “I don’t think we could ever push the feelings that we felt onto other people. No one can relate unless it’s happened to you or to your child.” Both girls admitted that when their drama teacher, Melody Herzfeld, tried before the shooting to rehearse them into imagining how they should respond to a gunman’s attack, they paid no attention.

“Oh, it’s never going to happen here,” they thought.

The first two days after the massacre, the girls had spent in solitary anguish, slouched in their separate homes, Andrea bent over her Yamaha keyboard (“I’ve never had a big fancy piano”), Sawyer glumly picking at her guitar. She has been writing songs since she was 6 years old. Her father, Joe Garrity, told me he’d scratch his head when his little daughter would emerge from her bedroom and say, “I’ve got the bridge!” But Sawyer, who will be a senior this fall, admitted to me that she had never taken her guitar seriously until she faced a mortality crisis decades before she was ready to cope. The two classmates began texting each other.

“We have to do something,” Sawyer wrote.

Andrea, a rising junior, fiddled around with a few chords on her keyboard. “This could be something,” she thought. She didn’t dare voice the intention of writing a song; she had never done that before. So she sent Sawyer a voice memo of a riff. It touched something in the baby-faced girl with spigots of curls falling over her eyes. Sawyer played those chords again and again until some lyrics popped into her mind.

“You, you threw my city away…”

She texted them back to Andrea, the granddaughter of people who fled Castro’s Cuba and found refuge in Puerto Rico (though young Andrea never wanted to learn Spanish when her kindergarten friends in Florida teased her for her accent).

Andrea sent another voice memo, more chords. Sawyer’s sorrow suddenly released a powerful chorus of resistance:

You’re not gonna knock us down

We’ll get back up again

You may have hurt us

But I promise we’ll be stronger

A couple of days later, they got together and finished off the song as if it all came naturally.

They first shared “Shine” with the public at a town hall a week after the massacre. With 15 minutes to teach the lyrics to a chorus before performing, they weren’t even aware that CNN would be broadcasting their song to untold millions around the world, beyond the 7,000 in their audience. But they had been well taught how to hold presence during a performance. And they had words ready to stake their claim to being, not just authentic, but real:

We’re, we’re gonna stand tall,

Gonna raise up our voices so we never, ever fall

We’re done with all your little games

We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.

The audience response was rapturous. But the most touching moment for the girls came when the news anchor of CNN, Jake Tapper, came down to their dressing room and told them, “That was the most moving song I’ve ever heard.”

Belonging to a rather nondescript new generation, the girls told me they don’t even know what their “name” means—“It’s just a letter. Gen Z.”

I suggested they should be called Gen Now.

“I like that,” Andrea said. Sawyer chimed in: “I like that one.”

They recalled Jimmy Fallon saying at the school’s graduation ceremony, “Everyone’s saying you guys are the future, but I feel like you guys are the present.” They liked that, too. I proposed they might belong to a Third Culture generation.

“I definitely think so,“ Sawyer said. “Not just because of our awareness of gun violence, but also the way we’ve been speaking up for Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights and all. We’re so open to new culture now and more willing to listen—and we’re not as closed off and ignorant about other people. It’s like we’re coming together and embracing each other more than anything before.”

But of course, it’s not unlike anything that came before. And the girls have recently recognized that—it’s called the civil rights movement. And they want to build on it.

“In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,” Sawyer said. “It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels right now—it’s just us teenagers against the world.”

But they both notice more and more adults coming to their performances and wanting to learn from them, just as they find themselves learning from their parents’ generation and their fearless protests against the Vietnam War. “There was nothing ever like that before, where young people and then people in general were coming together and standing together,” Sawyer mused. “So powerful.”

Source: http://allofbeer.com/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/02/19/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/

[allofbeercom]

Parkland Teenagers Taking on the Worldand Winning

We haven’t heard the last from survivors of the deadly February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Dozens of the high school students who were thrust into a mortality crisis before they could order a beer at a bar have graduated from teenage angst to social justice, and they’re continuing to sing truth to power while pulling together to help one another to heal.

Recently, Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Pena, the teenage songsters who wrote “Shine,” the anthem of their movement #MSDstrong, performed in Washington, D.C., at the Fords Theater annual gala. They sang directly to Vice President Pence and FLOTUS, demanding change in gun laws. Then they joined a chorus of classmates from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to sing at the New York Public Theater’s annual gala, following the chorus’ surprise appearance at the Tony Awards that won them a rousing standing ovation.

The musical partners invited me later into their pocket-sized hotel room in Times Square, aghast at the shrinkage of space in our island city.

“Is this what a New York apartment looks like?”

For months, the dominant emotion in their lives was sadness. Then anger: “We’ve gone through an experience that someone who’s 80 might not have gotten close to going through,” exclaimed Sawyer, “so they can’t lecture us on what gun laws should be because they haven’t gone through this!” She plucks at the strings in her jeans. “But lately, I’ve been feeling inspired.”

And as of this week, the two drama students have started volunteering at Camp Shine, a ground-breaking summer camp program that families of the school have launched to help the children heal through the arts. “We had to find a way to keep these kids together,” says Wendy Simon Garrity, mother of Sawyer.

Her instinct was spot-on. Children of trauma most often shut down; they can’t express their feelings, so they withdraw into numbness, or wrestle with the inner crisis of fight or flight. When the families connected with Jessica Asch, a board-certified trauma therapist at New York University, she endorsed their hunch.

“The antidote to trauma is community,” Asch believes. “We have to meet these kids where they are and keep them together.” Her broad experience in working with adolescents, veterans, and other PTSD sufferers including Holocaust survivors has shown her how effective it is to use various art therapies to encourage trauma victims to be in touch with their real feelings and to find support in the embrace of their fellow survivors.

“‘In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,’ Sawyer said. ‘It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels—it’s just us teenagers against the world.’”

“Parkland has had so much media attention, these kids haven’t had an opportunity to be messy, they’ve been so busy performing,” for their cause, says the psychologist. An academic research study will be conducted on the Parkland program by the trauma center at University of Miami. The long-range hope is it will result in a curriculum that can be made available to other communities shaken by their children’s exposure to violent death.

At the camp, Garrity and Pena are joined by 35 students, six of them among the wounded, who are being guided in music therapy, art, drama, and storytelling and other relevant artistic expressions such as graffiti and photography that are therapeutic for victims of trauma. Their charity, Shine MSD, has raised just enough money to provide a two-week camp. They hope to attract donors who will fund another month of the camp to reach all the traumatized students. The program is designed by some of the nation’s leading creative arts therapists, and it is thus far supported by the royalty fees earned by their song “Shine” on iTunes, and from donations by a few celebrity benefactors like Miley Cyrus.

The two girls told me the story of how their celebrated anthem came to be.

Last Valentine’s Day had started out for 15-year-old Andrea Pena in an exchange of gifts with her boyfriend. At school everyone was cracking jokes about being single, passing around a box of Pringles and saying, “I’m a single pringle.” When a weird second fire alarm sent her and Sawyer and scores of kids and adults outdoors, the girls joked, “Oh, Culinary burned down,” referring to kids in the Food Services department who often burn while they learn.

The words “Code Red” drove them back inside. Sawyer Garrity, then 16 and all of 5-foot-1, jumped over a table to get into an office in the Drama Department that turned out to be full of windows. For the next hour and half, she and Andrea and 10 others crouched beneath a desk while hearing the shots and screams of friends’, sounds that would never be muted in their minds. Seventeen people, including teachers, lay dead.

I asked them, as many do, “Do you think you can, through your art and music, convey the reality to others that his might happen to you, to your school, to your children?” Sawyer replied solemnly, “I don’t think we could ever push the feelings that we felt onto other people. No one can relate unless it’s happened to you or to your child.” Both girls admitted that when their drama teacher, Melody Herzfeld, tried before the shooting to rehearse them into imagining how they should respond to a gunman’s attack, they paid no attention.

“Oh, it’s never going to happen here,” they thought.

The first two days after the massacre, the girls had spent in solitary anguish, slouched in their separate homes, Andrea bent over her Yamaha keyboard (“I’ve never had a big fancy piano”), Sawyer glumly picking at her guitar. She has been writing songs since she was 6 years old. Her father, Joe Garrity, told me he’d scratch his head when his little daughter would emerge from her bedroom and say, “I’ve got the bridge!” But Sawyer, who will be a senior this fall, admitted to me that she had never taken her guitar seriously until she faced a mortality crisis decades before she was ready to cope. The two classmates began texting each other.

“We have to do something,” Sawyer wrote.

Andrea, a rising junior, fiddled around with a few chords on her keyboard. “This could be something,” she thought. She didn’t dare voice the intention of writing a song; she had never done that before. So she sent Sawyer a voice memo of a riff. It touched something in the baby-faced girl with spigots of curls falling over her eyes. Sawyer played those chords again and again until some lyrics popped into her mind.

“You, you threw my city away…”

She texted them back to Andrea, the granddaughter of people who fled Castro’s Cuba and found refuge in Puerto Rico (though young Andrea never wanted to learn Spanish when her kindergarten friends in Florida teased her for her accent).

Andrea sent another voice memo, more chords. Sawyer’s sorrow suddenly released a powerful chorus of resistance:

You’re not gonna knock us down

We’ll get back up again

You may have hurt us

But I promise we’ll be stronger

A couple of days later, they got together and finished off the song as if it all came naturally.

They first shared “Shine” with the public at a town hall a week after the massacre. With 15 minutes to teach the lyrics to a chorus before performing, they weren’t even aware that CNN would be broadcasting their song to untold millions around the world, beyond the 7,000 in their audience. But they had been well taught how to hold presence during a performance. And they had words ready to stake their claim to being, not just authentic, but real:

We’re, we’re gonna stand tall,

Gonna raise up our voices so we never, ever fall

We’re done with all your little games

We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.

The audience response was rapturous. But the most touching moment for the girls came when the news anchor of CNN, Jake Tapper, came down to their dressing room and told them, “That was the most moving song I’ve ever heard.”

Belonging to a rather nondescript new generation, the girls told me they don’t even know what their “name” means—“It’s just a letter. Gen Z.”

I suggested they should be called Gen Now.

“I like that,” Andrea said. Sawyer chimed in: “I like that one.”

They recalled Jimmy Fallon saying at the school’s graduation ceremony, “Everyone’s saying you guys are the future, but I feel like you guys are the present.” They liked that, too. I proposed they might belong to a Third Culture generation.

“I definitely think so,“ Sawyer said. “Not just because of our awareness of gun violence, but also the way we’ve been speaking up for Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights and all. We’re so open to new culture now and more willing to listen—and we’re not as closed off and ignorant about other people. It’s like we’re coming together and embracing each other more than anything before.”

But of course, it’s not unlike anything that came before. And the girls have recently recognized that—it’s called the civil rights movement. And they want to build on it.

“In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,” Sawyer said. “It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels right now—it’s just us teenagers against the world.”

But they both notice more and more adults coming to their performances and wanting to learn from them, just as they find themselves learning from their parents’ generation and their fearless protests against the Vietnam War. “There was nothing ever like that before, where young people and then people in general were coming together and standing together,” Sawyer mused. “So powerful.”

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/

[deafeningdespair]

Manic Depressive Disorder.

DISCLAIMER, this article contains profanity and graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.

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

~ Help me, it's like the walls are caving in. Sometimes I feel like giving up, but I just can't - it isn't in my blood. Laying on the bathroom floor, feeling nothing. I'm overwhelmed and insecure, give me something I could take to ease my mind slowly. "Just have a drink and you'll feel better." "Just take her home and you'll feel better." Keep telling me that it gets better. Does it ever? Help me, it's like the walls are caving in. Sometimes I feel like giving up - no medicine is strong enough. Someone help me, I'm crawling in my skin. Sometimes I feel like giving up, but I just can't - it isn't in my blood. I'm looking through my phone again, feeling anxious. Afraid to be alone again, I hate this. I'm trying to find a way to chill, can't breathe, oh. Is there somebody who could help me? It's like the walls are caving in. Sometimes I feel like giving up - no medicine is strong enough. Someone help me. I'm crawling in my skin. Sometimes I feel like giving up, but I just can't - it isn't in my blood. I need somebody now, someone to help me out. I need somebody now. Help me, it's like the walls are caving in. Sometimes I feel like giving up, but I just can't - it isn't in my blood.

- Shawn Mendes, In My Blood.

*

Okay, y'all, here goes.

Lately, I've been feeling down, kinda lost. I've felt like my heart is quite literally breaking inside of my fucking chest and those stupid little shards are getting lost in my blood stream, slowly making their way through my veins. It's painful and nauseating. They're slicing me open from the inside and eventually, I'll just be lying on the bathroom floor, bleeding out, and the worst part of it all is that I can't even cry out in pain or call for help because there's these massive hands gripping my throat. They're choking me, shaking me, bruising me as the voices in my head scream at me that I'm too weak to fight off the hands or the pain or even the fear. The voices tell me that I deserve what I'm getting and that I'll be getting this exact treatment for the rest of my life.... which, by the way, will only be a few more seconds - because, well, don't forget about the shards tearing me apart from the inside.

It feels like I am dying.

But I'm not.

I suffer from M A N I C depression - which is just a fancy way of saying that I am B I P O L A R ..... only, there's more to it than that, right? Well, yeah, there's more to it than that.

A major misconception about bipolar disorder is that one can go from feeling happy to mad or sad, and so on and so forth..... but that's not true. That's a mood swing, and I don't have mood swings. I have manic depression, remember?

Sometimes, I have highs, and let me tell you something - when I have those highs, I fucking /have/ those highs. I'm on top the world! I feel so free and H A P P Y. I could cry these big, whopping alligator tears full of joy and excitement. Whenever I have these epic highs, it's like I'm a goddamn princess with this flashy gold tiara that's lined with the most beautiful and precious diamonds and rubies, and there's thousands of people throwing white roses and orange tulips at my feet while they bow down to me and.... well, I'm sure you get the picture.

^ THAT is the "mania" part.

Mania (noun) | ma·nia \ ˈmā-nē-ə , -nyə \ - - excitement manifested by mental and physical hyperactivity, disorganization of behavior, and elevation of mood • excessive or unreasonable enthusiasm. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Think on that for a second.

Now, when I have my lows, I'm nothing short of a natural disaster. Miley Cyrus says it perfectly, I come in like a wrecking ball. I'm destructive with no regard to anything or /anyone/ else. I'm like a hurricane - no, a tsunami. I crash in unexpectedly and drown everyone, I leave debris scattered about recklessly, and do you have any idea what the best but worst part about that is? It's the fact that I don't even care. I couldn't give two whole shits about the people standing in my path that I'm destroying, and that just makes it all worse. As much as I want to care about them and save them, I physically and mentally C A N N O T.

^ THAT is the "depression" part (in case you have no idea what depression is, see below).

Depression (noun) | de·pres·sion \ di-ˈpre-shən , dē- \ - - a state of feeling sad : dejection • anger, anxiety, and depression : a mood disorder marked especially by sadness, inactivity, difficulty in thinking and concentration, a significant increase or decrease in appetite and time spent sleeping, feelings of dejection and hopelessness, and sometimes suicidal tendencies. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

If you're feeling frisky and you wanna do some reading on what bipolar disorder is, I'll help you out. Click this guy > here < and it'll tell you all you need to know.

But if you'd rather hear the short version, keep on reading my mess.

Basically, I can go weeks feeling the mania. I can be nothing but happy for days on end, for months even. I'm that happy, peppy, silly (and let's face it, obnoxious) Alex you all know and love.... but then, suddenly, almost like literally flipping a switch, I'm broken. I'm surrounded in darkness and it's eating me up. I don't know how long it will last, and there's really no way to pull me back to the light, just like there was no reason for my demons to even surface in the first place.

When I get in these moods, I like to joke about it because it's the only way I know how to cope. When you ask what's wrong, I simply say with a weak giggle, "I'm just emotional today." but we all know that it's more than that.

So, what I'm getting at here is this - please stop making me feel like I'm this stupid little girl that just thinks she's sad for a minute. Don't tell me to smile or get over it - I'm fucking TRYING and it's not working. Don't ask me a million questions because truthfully, I can't even remember what my name is half the time. Don't even tell me that it's going to be okay because I know that's just what people say when they've run out of nice things to say, and I also know that things w i l l n o t be o k a y. I'll feel better eventually, I'll have a high again - but you know what they say? What goes up, must come down.

What can you do to help? Just accept me for who I am, love me through my chaos, and hold my hand when I ask.

I'll leave you all with this final quote...

"Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing."

David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family *

[motbr-blog]

CNN article about the rapture...

(CNN) -- HBO has just launched a new TV series based on a novel by Tom Perrotta called "The Leftovers," which in turn is based on the fundamentalist Christian idea of the rapture. Apart from the title, which suggests a refrigerator full of stale food, the series looks promising. It's a terrific premise: Jesus returns and calls to heaven 140 million people, leaving behind billions of stupefied, confused, and grief-stricken others. In the show, a mother loses her baby, who disappears. A boy's father seems to have vanished as he pushes a shopping cart. Cars collide as drivers go missing. Chaos strikes in the fictional Mapleton, New York -- and throughout the world. How to cope? Jay Parini Jay Parini The famous "Left Behind" series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins was already out there. It consisted of 16 best-selling novels on the same premise, and it's about to come to the big screen again, in a film starring Nicholas Cage. The original film adaptation (of three) appeared in 2000. And then there is the Christian real-time strategy video game called "Left Behind: Eternal Forces." If anyone hasn't noticed, the rapture has become a commercial juggernaut, endlessly shape-shifting, finding new and highly entertaining outlets. But what about the theology behind this industry? The rapture notion goes like this: Jesus is coming back, and when he does, he will first return before a time of so-called tribulation begins, calling up into the clouds with him those who are "saved." Horrible suffering will then occur on the miserable Earth for seven years. Then Jesus will come yet again, for a final judging. There are many different versions of this scenario, so it's difficult to summarize. It's fair to say, however, that only fundamentalist Protestant churches bother to think about the rapture at all. (Catholics discount the idea completely.) The rapture concept is relatively new. It started with an Anglo-Irish theologian, who in the 1830s invented the concept. This may come as a shocker to many, but it's a fact: Before John Nelson Darby imagined this scenario in the clouds, no Christian had ever heard of the rapture. The idea was popularized by Cyrus I. Scofield, an American minister who published a famous reference Bible in 1908, one that developed the idea of an elaborate series of final periods in history known as dispensations. Scofield, like Darby, read the Book of Revelation as a vision of the future, not a fiery dream of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70. The latter view remains, in fact, the most common interpretation of the Book of Revelation by mainstream theologians and was described recently by Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels in "Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation." It's a problem, however, for rapture-minded Christians that the word "rapture" doesn't appear anywhere in the Bible, unless you're willing to think in broadly metaphorical terms. Rapture thinking is most often traced back to the Apostle Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, where he writes: "For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then we, who are left alive, will be snatched up with them on clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord." (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) Jesus' greatest Hollywood hits Does papyrus say Jesus had a wife? A Jesus film for a new generation 'Sexy' Jesus heats up new film First, it's important to note that Jesus himself never talked about the rapture, ever. We read in Mark about the "Son of Man coming in the clouds," but this is a reference back to the Old Testament Book of Daniel, where we get the image of a "son of Man" who is actually going the other way, up to meet the Ancient of Days. It's all broadly metaphorical, a kind of dream. In Mark, the oldest gospel, this passage is about the vindication of Jesus as he comes to heaven and is recognized as a true son of the father. In Luke 19, we read about a returning king, but close study of this passage suggests that Luke is talking about God coming back to Jerusalem, not about Jesus returning to Earth. It's clear from looking carefully at everything Paul says about the future, as in I Corinthians 15:51-54 or Philippians 3:20-21, that he believes only that some day Christians will experience a kind of physical and spiritual change. They will be resurrected, but this is a complex term that suggests not necessarily resuscitation but evolution, a thorough transformation. In Thessalonians, Paul is writing like the poet he is, creating a spectacular vision of a returning lord who will be given a great reception in the air. The crucial word in the relevant verse is "meet": Those who are left alive will be caught up on clouds to meet the Lord in the air. The word "meet" in Greek is "apentesis," and it means to gather for a reception for visiting dignitaries. Even the idea of being "snatched up" is thoroughly inadequate for the Greek word "harpazo," which is better translated as "gathered" -- a point made by many biblical scholars over the years. In any case, Paul is being dramatic, imagining a holy reception committee that will greet the returning Christ. And why not? Yet it's amazing how scriptures get misused, and relatively new theological ideas -- such as the rapture -- get deeply embedded in certain circles. The rapture is really a plot device for popular entertainment and a bizarre theological teaching in fundamentalist circles, where it functions in a variety of ways. But it's bad theology, and Jesus himself would have been astonished to learn that thousands of years after him there were such notions afloat. At least he won't have to watch "The Leftovers" on TV. Read the full article