#This particular imaginary friend just so happens to have encountered magic and is now real enough to play basketball with asteroids.

[phoenixcatch7]

In love with the idea of captain marvel being Billy's imaginary friend. Like, it'd be so easy. Early depictions had them as almost fully separate people sometimes, like one soul with two minds, rather than just two filters like we mostly see now.

But imagine a Billy down on his luck, hurt and hiding from police and criminals alike, daydreaming the hours away as children do, taking inspiration from all the superheroes rising to fame, making little stories to play out his dreams of saving the world with a generic action doll he found while dumpster diving once. Most of the paint's rubbed off.

Red's his favourite colour, his comfiest jumper is a bright ruby even after all the grime and washes. Gold, too, it's shiny and warmer than silver! A hero cape is a must, big and eye catching! And he can fly, of course, like superman, and in his daydreams, when he's sore and frustrated after a long day's grind, his superhero is smart enough and knows all the right words to get the bullies to stop without resorting to fighting.

His superhero fantasy is one he spends a lot of time on, the first one he goes for when struggling to sleep at night, and he can picture it so clearly. Captain marvel is big and bright and kind, strong enough to lift the boxes for the old lady up the road who's moving all by himself, fast enough to catch Jamie who fell out of the tree on Saturday and broke his leg and couldn't come to class for weeks. He appears at the entrance to alleys when Billy is cornered, he steps up behind to cover for him when he gets caught shoplifting, he sits at the bus stop with him when it's pouring rain and the right bus doesn't seem to be coming.

And then the wizard comes, or rather whisks him away, and like a magician from a fairytale breathes life into his imaginary friend until Billy feels thrice his size and a million times more invincible.

From then on, captain marvel is a real hero, just like Billy is a real boy, and as one they save the whole city, and then the whole world, and get cats down from trees and help Mrs Victoria move the last of her boxes and she gives them a pinch in the cheek and cookies for the road and sometimes it hurts but it's so much better than he imagined.

[imaginationstimulation]

Highlighted Excerpts from Miranda July’s “The First Bad Man”  5 STARS, absolutely loved this book, it literally changed my life.

The NPR book review: 

This cataloging of unglamorous inner life could be grotesque (and sometimes is) but there is something hugely generous about it. Writing about sex is a particular skill of July's — it is beautiful but real, not rapturous or misty or scene-lit.

Her humor comes from a careful literalness: a dragging out of the truth, and placing it in startling juxtaposition with the surface of things.

Quotes and highlights below. Expand to read.

YOUR KINDLE NOTES FOR: The First Bad Man: A Novel

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 7

“When in doubt, give a shout!” “Excuse me?” “I’m here for you. When in doubt, just give me a shout.” What silence. Giant domed cathedrals never held so much emptiness. He cleared his throat. It echoed, bouncing around the dome, startling pigeons. “Cheryl?” “Yes?” “I think I should go.” I didn’t say anything. He would have to step over my dead body to get off the phone. “Goodbye,” he said, and then, after a pause, he hung up.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 19

Once Carl had called me ginjo, which I thought meant “sister” until he told me it’s Japanese for a man, usually an elderly man, who lives in isolation while he keeps the fire burning for the whole village. “In the old myths he burns his clothes and then his bones to keep it going,” Carl said. I made myself very still so he would continue; I love to be described.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 22

As I walked to the door the map of the world detached from the wall and slid noisily to the floor. Not necessarily an indicator of anything.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 28

He was nervous—men are always sure they’ll be accused of some horrific crime after they talk about feelings.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 40

“Does it feel like we’ve known each other for longer than we really have?” “Kind of.” I could tell him or I could not tell him. I decided to tell him. “Maybe there’s a reason for that,” I ventured. “Okay.” He blew his nose again. “Do you know what it is?” “Give me a hint.” “A hint. Let’s see . . . actually, I can’t. There are no little parts to it, it’s all big.” I took a deep breath and shut my eyes. “I see a rocky tundra and a crouched figure with apelike features who resembles me. She’s fashioned a pouch out of animal gut and now she’s giving it to her mate, a strong, hairy pre-man who looks a lot like you. He moves his thick finger around in the pouch and fishes out a colorful rock. Her gift to him. Do you see where I’m going?” “Kind of? In that I see you’re talking about cavemen who look like us.” “Who are us.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 43

“She’s big-boned,” I said. “A lot of men think that’s attractive.” “Sure, a woman with that kind of body has a fat store that allows her to make milk for her young even if her husband isn’t able to bring meat home. I feel confident about my ability to bring meat home.” The words milk and fat store and meat had fogged up the windows faster than leaner words would have. We were in a sort of creamy cloud.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 44

“You’re the female me.” My heart started swooping around, like it was hanging on a long rope.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 45

I must have sat across from him at a hundred meetings of the board, but I had never let myself really study his face. It was like knowing what the moon looks like without ever stopping to find the man in it.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 47

His hand had a heat and weight that only real hands do. A hundred imaginary hands would never be this warm.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 53

This was probably the sign of a good therapist, seeming familiar to everyone.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 59

At the Ethiopian restaurant I requested a fork. They explained that I had to use my hands, so I asked for it to go, got a fork at Starbucks, and sat in my car. But my throat wouldn’t accept even this very soft meal. I put it on the curb for a homeless person. An Ethiopian homeless person would be especially delighted. What a heartbreaking thought, encountering your native food in this way.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 64

Our relationship is much more powerful and moving to me if we don’t compact our energy into our genitals.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 67

It’s one of those things that seems like a drag at first and then becomes second nature, until not doing it feels rude, almost aggressive.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 70

Suddenly it occurred to me that nothing might be happening. I’d done that before. I had added meaningful layers to things that were meaningless many, many times before.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 72

We’d been prehistoric together, medieval, king and queen—now we were this. It was all part of the answer to his question What keeps us coming back? He wasn’t done with me, and I wasn’t done with him.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 80

When she shoved me against my own desk I head-butted her and everyone else who wasn’t capable of understanding how nuanced I was.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 81

My eyes fell on the gray linoleum floor and I wondered how many other women had sat on this toilet and stared at this floor. Each of them the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someone to put their love into so they could see their love, see that they had it.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 82

I ate a pastry made out of white flour and refined sugar and watched the couple next to me feed each other bites of omelet. It was hard to believe they played adult games but most likely they did, probably with their coworkers or relatives. What were other people’s like? Perhaps some mothers and fathers pretended to be their children’s children and made messes. Or a widow might sometimes become her own deceased husband and demand retribution from everyone. It was all very personal; nobody’s game made any sense to anyone else. I watched seemingly dull men and women zooming past in cars. I doubted they all had written contracts like Ruth-Anne, but some did. Some probably had multiple contracts. Some contracts had been voided or transferred. People were having a good time out here, me included.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 83

This is nothing. We’ve seen fire and we’ve seen rain, I’d reply, quoting the song.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 85

Before every raw impulse there was a pause—I saw us through the homeless gardener’s eyes and felt obscene. Being outside society, he didn’t know about adult games; he was like me before I met Ruth-Anne, thinking everything that happened in life was real.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 90

Any two foes can fight in anger, but this was something rare. I was reminded of the Christmas Day soccer game between enemies in World War I or II. She still repulsed me, I’d still shoot her in battle the next day, but until dawn we’d play this game.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 92

Laughing like friends always emphasized that we weren’t. This wasn’t real like the laughing she did at home.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 92

“So what if it’s real for her?” she said, suddenly dropping her hands. “Real comes and goes and isn’t very interesting.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 103

The noise shook everything out of my head. What a magical way to get around. I’d always thought of these types of machines as toys for uneducated people who didn’t care about the environment, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe this was a kind of meditation. I felt connected to everything and the motor volume held me at a level of alertness I wasn’t used to. I kept waking up and then waking up from that, and then waking up even more. Was everything redneck actually mystical?

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 113

HER COWLIKE VACUOUSNESS DIDN’T REALLY bother me anymore. Or it didn’t matter—her personality was just a little piece of parsley decorating warm tawny haunches.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 114

She furrowed her brow and looked at the V my fingers were making. I had no idea what I was doing.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 120

It wasn’t really an appropriate card for a young girl; a group of rough-looking birds in rakish hats were playing cards with cigars in their beaks. It said something I can’t remember, but on the inside was a phrase like a virus or a self-replicating parasite waiting for a host. When I opened the card it flew out, gripping my brain with merciless talons: “Birds of a feather flock together.” It couldn’t be said just once, only repeated and repeated and repeated.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 123

It sort of worked. It wasn’t like saying abracadabra to make a rabbit disappear, poof. It was like saying abracadabra billions of times, saying it for years, until the rabbit died of old age, and then continuing to say it until the rabbit had completely decomposed and been absorbed into the earth, poof.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 125

Of course the point of being on the board was to be near him, but taking his place was interesting too. Almost better. For the first time I understood cigars and the urge to light one up and lean back.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 128

She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 130

A cool breeze moved past and I knew how nice that must feel on his sweaty face, but that was all. I didn’t know how anything else would feel to him.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 131

We listened to the squeals change as the animal approached death; the pitch had entered the human register, every exertion contained a familiar vowel. If words began to form then I would go out there and break it up. Words, even crudely formed ones, would change the game entirely.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 145

“Do you really think it’s necessary?” “Necessary? No. All that’s necessary is that you eat enough to survive.  Highlight (Yellow) | Page 147

I could see it so clearly, the zygote—shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 148

All these years I’d been looking for a friend, but Suzanne didn’t need a friend. A rival, though—that got her attention.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 148

When the meeting adjourned we both went to the staff kitchen and made cups of tea in silence. I waited for her to begin the conversation. I sipped. She sipped. After a while I realized this was the conversation; we were having it. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 151

But eventually she wanted it more than he did, and this made her lower than him. There was no way to knock down a woman who was already lying on the ground.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 152

He walked to the elevator. He pressed the button and we both listened, my therapist and I, and waited for this part to be over—the part where he had already left but was still with us. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 164

“This is the worst you’ll ever feel.” “Ever?” “Well, maybe not ever in your whole life. We don’t know how you’re going to die—that might be worse.” I had veered off course. I put my face right in front of hers. “You can do this,” I said.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 169

A bag of blood was rushed in; it was from San Diego. I’d been to the zoo there once. I imagined the blood being pulled out of a muscled zebra. This was good—humans were always withering away from heartbreak and pneumonia, animal blood would be much tougher, live, live, live.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 176

Her braids lay on her chest and she looked leaden with sorrow, like a picture from the Dust Bowl. You just knew her whole life was going to be hard, every second of it.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 179

After a long time, ten or fifteen minutes, the kissing slowed. There were a series of closing kisses, goodbye kisses, kisses placed like lids on boxes—then the lid would pop off and need to be replaced. There, this is the final kiss—no, this is the final kiss. This one is, it really is. And now I’m just kissing that kiss good night.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 180

Soft was the wrong word. Satiny? Supple? A new word, I would come up with it right now—which letters would I use? S, for sure. Maybe an O. Was this how words were made? How would I announce the word? Who would I contact about that?

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 181

followed the doctor across the room. I yearned for a lawyer and the right to make a phone call. But those rights were for arrested people. We got nothing. Whatever he told me would be the new reality and we’d just have to accept

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 183

They belonged here, both of them equally, as did the nurses and the doctors and Clee. None of them recognized the interloper among them, but they would soon. I’d gotten swept up in the drama of the situation and mistakenly involved myself.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 183

Almost! I said. There was no good way to be, so I was being cavalier, lancing my own heart. We came pretty close. See you next time!

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 184

The last of her crying came out in a clotted sigh after the first kiss.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 184

We began a series of impatiently off-center ones, as if we were too hurried to land them properly; then our mouths became fingertips, moving blindly over the bumps and hollows of each feature.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 185

It was like a dream, where the most unlikely person can’t get enough of you—a movie star or someone’s husband. How can this be? But the attraction is mutual and undeniable; it is the reason for itself. And like a surprise on the moon or a surprise on the battlefield, astonishment was native to these parts.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 186

They were terrible people, even slightly worse than most.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 186

Should I introduce myself or try to kill them? Not violently, just enough that they wouldn’t exist.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 200

Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 201

WOKE WITH A START like a passenger on an airplane—for a moment I could feel how high I was and had an appropriate terror of falling.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 202

A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 203

Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one. It just feels good all over. It’s like wearing something beautiful and eating something delicious at the same time, all the time.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 209

“Can the writing be a little more fun?” she said. “You mean a different font?” “Maybe.” I put everything in chubby cartoon letters as a joke. “That looks good,” she said. She was right. The cartoon letters had a love of life in them, and wasn’t that what we were celebrating here?

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 212

Suzanne fired him on the spot—her face shaking with regret about things she had not nipped while they were still in the bud.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 213

Clee held me from behind and our bodies interlocked like two Ss. “Not many people could do this,” I said, squeezing her arms. “Everyone does this.” “But not fitting together so perfectly the way we do.” “Any two people can do it.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 217

I didn’t bathe him because I was too afraid he would slip out of my hands or his belly button would open. Then one night I woke at three A.M. certain he was rotting like a chicken carcass. Only as I lowered him into the sink did I realize this was a crazy time to wash a baby and I began to cry because he was so trusting—I could do anything and he would go along with it, the little fool.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 218

Clee asked if he could see in the dark like a cat and I said yes. Later I caught my mistake but it was five A.M. and she was asleep. The next day I forgot. Each day I forgot to tell her he couldn’t see in the dark like a cat and each night I remembered, with increasing urgency. What if this continued for years and I never told her? My body was so tired that it often floated next to me or above me, and I had to reel it in like a kite. Finally one night I wrote “He can’t see in the dark” on a slip of paper and put it by her sleeping face. “What’s this?” Clee asked the next day, holding the slip. “Oh, thank God, yes. Jack can’t see in the dark like a cat.” “I know.” Suddenly I was unsure how this had begun. Maybe she had never asked. I dropped the subject with dark thoughts about my own mind.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 220

But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 220

If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 220

I began to understand that the sleeplessness and vigilance and constant feedings were a form of brainwashing, a process by which my old self was being molded, slowly but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mother. It hurt. I tried to be conscious while it happened, like watching my own surgery. I hoped to retain a tiny corner of the old me, just enough to warn other women with. But I knew this was unlikely; when the process was complete I wouldn’t have anything left to complain with, it wouldn’t hurt anymore, I wouldn’t remember.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 228

After smiling came laughing, then rolling over. The days and nights began to unwarp; three A.M. became an ordinary time. The first few months were hard for all new parents, a test, really—and we had passed!

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 231

For the first time in my life I understood TV, why everyone watched it. It helped. Not in the long run, of course, but minute by minute.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 232

what it felt like to be a mother, to be terrifyingly in love without the option of getting off.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 234

It must happen all the time, a fleeting passion overwhelms someone’s true course and there’s nothing to be done about it.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 236

one lone voice in an infinite cathedral, climbing and echoing and praising. The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of this life, even for the agony.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 242

Rainbows are alone; they’re the only thing like that. The crystal began to wind the other way, sending the bright fleet back across his body. I could tell he didn’t believe me; it did seem unlikely. I racked my brain for others of the species. Reflections, shadows, smoke—these things were morose and distant cousins at best.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 247

I cleared my throat. “I love you.” His head shook with surprise. My voice was low and formal; I sounded like a wooden father from the 1800s. I continued. “You are a sweet potato.” This sounded literal, as if I was letting him know he was a root vegetable, a tuber. “You’re a baby,” I added, just in case there was any confusion on that last point.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 252

we had only spent a few hours a day in the NICU with him. That wasn’t enough. It was enough for us at the time, but now it haunted me. Twenty hours a day he’d lain there alone. There would be other unpardonable crimes, I could feel them coming—things that in retrospect would become my greatest regrets.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 254

Ruth-Anne, I would say, can we put the past behind us? Better not to phrase it as a question. The past is behind us. That was good. Who could argue with that?

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 256

It was like being accused of a crime committed in a dream.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 257

As she looked up at him her whole bearing shifted; she became luminous. Not with the light of life, but like a husk lit electrically from within.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 258

Just his name on a piece of paper could set her off. Even a word like Broyard—barnyard, backyard—sent her into an exhausted loop of fantasies. Everything else in her life, including her own therapy practice, was faked. The spell consumed 95 percent of her energy but she was surprised to see that no one noticed; the wafer-thin 5 percent version of her sufficed.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 259

Something strange was happening with Ruth-Anne. It didn’t seem good.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 263

Each word he said was boring, but collectively the melody of them lulled me.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 263

I tried to resist, but just the weight of him, in pounds and ounces, was a relief. Always being the heaviest person in the house had been exhausting.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 266

“Of course I’m here for you,” I said. It was a relief; being angry at him was hard work.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 270

I’m the woman who just told her her feet smell; I could still see her enormous smile and how it fell.

[cardhouseandthecage]

I actually am wondering about the Star recruitment process, Denizen-Star communication, and the interface between our reality and Faerie with regard to all this. Like if you or I was to get sucked into the Star process, what would it be like in terms of ordinary logistics? How would they first reach out to us? What if we tried something like getting other people involved who legit believed in all this but the Cardhouse really didn't want them involved? Apologies if this can't really be answered!

an EXCELLENT QUESTION, friend, and incidentally a subject of ongoing investigation on my part. THE subject of ongoing investigation. My whole life. Which is to say: I can’t give you a complete answer—I can’t even necessarily give you a correct answer—but you have absolutely come to the right place. You wont get any kind of answer anywhere else. Here’s what I’ve pieced together from my research, thus far:I. The first thing you need to know about Stars is that they don’t actually believe in fairies. Not Literally. Not necessarily. 

You are familiar, I assume, with the Moment of Magical Proof™? You’ll find it with most stories that begin in the mundane. Our protagonist might want to believe in magic, but they can’t—magic is fake and everyone knows it—so they’ll rationalize for as long as they can. Then something happens. Magic intrudes upon their lived experience in a way they can no longer deny. YER A WIZARD, HARRY. Magic is real, and will continue to be real for the duration of the narrative.

That moment never happens.

There is no first contact for a Star, no revelation, no paradigm shift: it’s only ever a slow fade. And that little voice of in the back of their heads, the one that knows none of this could ever be real? It never goes away. That’s important. It’s part of what splits them—and without a split there is no harvest.

The Cardmaster settled upon this business model for a reason. Certainly he could present the Cardhouse more literally, but he’d be working against dominant trends: most people don’t believe in fairies literally, and our beliefs govern the channels through which fairies can contact us. So if you don’t really believe that some fairy bitch could pup up in your window and approach you with the deal of a lifetime, they’re going to have a really difficult time making that happen.* It’s much more cost-effective to build on a pre-existing system of belief than to overturn it. 

II. But what’s all this nonsense about the power of belief, HQ? Are you really going to sit there behind your screen and tell me that you subscribe to Magical Thinking? Who exactly is funding this study???

AHAHAHAHAHA NO ONE, naturally, but also: no. No, of course not! I may not be funded but I take myself very seriously here: I’m not arguing that our beliefs can change reality directly. Antoine was absolutely right about the tree root: that’s a thing in the physical universe and it’s going to go on existing regardless of what we think about it—outside of what we think of it. Oxygen doesn’t care about my feelings! There’s a side of things won’t budge, no matter what I believe (I know this; I’ve tried). Even if I clapped my hands and dreamed with every fibre of my being, it wouldn’t wouldn’t make a fairy into something I could bring into a lab and prove.

But my belief would change something. It would change the Faerie-Reality interface. If I believed fairies were real, they’d be real to me. It would change how they exist in the extra-dimensional space in my head. And that space in my head—in all of our heads—that’s the dimension of things that connects up with Faerie. That’s what empties into Faerie, perpetually, without our volition or consent. I’m fooling myself if I think I’m in control of that space just because my thoughts effect it: I didn’t choose most of my beliefs any more than I chose my body. There’s a whole world of thought that I inherited, and correspondingly a whole landscape of Faerie that’s built up in connection to Reality over time. By this mechanism, then, our beliefs can alter reality: indirectly. Reality generates Faerie, but Faerie is incessantly fucking with us in return, and the ways in which it fucks with us influence the actions we take in Reality. III. Any agency behind such fuckery I term “a fairy.” 

Fairies “live” in the backworld (they’re made of the same stuff it is) and can manipulate the residue that accumulates there: they’re not real by any means, but they do exist. It is worth noting that fairies, by this definition, don’t give a damn whether we believe in them. This may first strike you as counter-intuitive: if they’re made of our thoughts, then surely our belief means a great deal to them? To which I answer: yes, it does. Absolutely. Just not in the way that you’d think. I’m guessing you’ve probably encountered some version theory of belief-dependancy and the Decline of the Mythical? It’s related to a lot of things (many of which are true, see: placebo effect), but generally it asserts that the vitality of imaginary beings has diminished in direct proportion to our diminishing “belief” in them, and consequently there has been a great falling off in the power of gods and fairies and the like as we have entered the modern era. My findings suggest the otherwise. I say we still believe in plenty of “unreal” things, and as strongly as ever we did. Even our science feeds into the Faerie: it’s made of our thought! We use science to describe reality, but it itself is not fully “real.” Besides which, it’s not as if fairies are limited to drawing upon our literal beliefs. We don’t generally think of fiction as real, and yet it shapes us. And a desire can be every bit as potent as a belief. Fairies don’t care whether we believe in them: all they require is that we want to. They’ll play our beliefs against our desires and catch us between them, bring us to our knees before the impossible; we’ll yield our sacrifice readily enough, god or no god.  All they require is that we dream. 

So no, I don’t think we’ve impoverished fairies at all by sorting fact from fiction as we have. I think we’ve blinded ourselves to their power, locked the door and thrown away the key only to have them catch it. I think we’ve given them everything. I think we’ve spoiled them.

IV. But I digress. You asked me about the logistics of Star recruitment and Denizen-Star communication. 

It starts, traditionally enough, with a fairy ring.

Not a literal ring, generally (that’s very retro), but the there are certain channels of interface—certain ‘meta-forums’—that the Cardhouse keeps open as traps for potential candidates. For a while now, the internet has been the best “place” to set up such a forum, so they frequently overlay or branch off from real online sites. But they could be anywhere. Any work of fiction can easily serve as a jumping off point (provided it’s fantastical enough), or else game of make-believe, or even a good old-fashioned glade or a shopping centre or an abandoned house. If you’re intrepid enough you might find your way to to one through pure whimsy: it’s only a matter of stumbling into the right headspace.

Unfortunately, there’s no clear indicator for when such a stumbling has transpired. The meta-forums interface so seamlessly with what we think of as plausible that we don’t recognise them when we see them and we can’t tell once we’re in.** You can’t necessarily tell when someone else is in one either. It just looks like preoccupation—an obliviousness to the “real world.” But it also looks perfectly realistic, especially from the standpoint of the Star. Because fiction exists, and games exist, and there are all kinds of things you can get obsessed with on the internet and none of them especially challenge the laws of physics. They way you engage with the meta-forum doesn’t look different from how you’d engage with any other imaginary thing. Generally, it starts out as a game or an RP or a kind of choose-your-own-adventure story through which you get to know the characters and the basic setup. That setup presents itself very differently depending on what you’re into, but you’re usually given to understand that the Cardhouse produces very special magical items, and that you can help the Cardmaster gather ingredients for these items by undertaking quests or solving puzzles or making certain offerings or blending the perfect tea or getting your two favourite denizens to make kiss or doing whatever it is you’re doing that is “playing the game”. One denizen in particular serves as your primary contact and guide. You might also be given to understand that Cardhouse products are all a part of the ongoing effort to Fight The Encroaching Darkness. It’s a very all-consuming obsession, and while you’re immersed in you often ‘forget’ it isn’t real, but never in a way that raises any suspicion. For the most part, you know it’s just a game. And for some people that’s all it ever is, and they move on.

If you are destined to become a Star, however, at some point the game will change. One day, your denizen approaches you in great distress: the threat of the Encroaching Darkness, they say, is much worse than they had previously let on. The game might end, as if it had never been! You may well never see us again, in which case… farewell in advance! It will be a very moving performance, and naturally you, the potential Star, will be deeply upset by this news. If you’re right for the job you will offer up your assistance on the spot, unprompted. You will say the magic words. Is there anything you can do to help?

…Funny You Should Ask.

And now the denizen will lay it out: there is, in fact, a way. You may not know this, but you happen to be a very special sort of person: a Star sleeps within you—a great power—but its light is not for the human world. If you were to promise to fight on our behalf, we could help you unlock that power on the other side. You would swear fealty to the Cardmaster, pledging your light to the cause and security of our House, and help us to beat back the darkness. But be warned! It is no task for the faint of heart. You would be asked to undertake missions in the depths of the Wild Lands, where evils reign free. You would be placed in grave danger. So yes, you really could save us, but we would never ask anyone to accept such a burden! If however you should choose to do so….well. You would be richly rewarded.

If it’s gotten to this point, the potential Star (feeling very heroic) almost always accepts.They are assigned to a team and presented with a “cage” to help concentrate their powers and serve as a holding space for any magical items they’re give in Faerie. The cage exists between realms and the Star can access it from either side. Generally, the more they use their powers as a Star, the more it fills up with light for them to draw upon. Doing certain things in the Mundane however can cause that light to diminish or spill out, so they learn to avoid doing those things. Yet insofar as they are human, the Star still regards this all as a kind of fantasy. Insofar as they’re a fairy, however, it is very real. How any given Star rationalizes the paradox will vary, but at no point does the human fully “believe” that what’s happening is real. So a fissure develops between the two selves, and the more and more the Star invests in their fae identity, the deeper it splits them.

And here is the difficult part—the part no one understands. People often ask me what a Star’s human self is doing when they are a fairy. Are they sleeping? Unconscious? Physically elsewhere? Mentally dead? Sitting behind a computer screen as in hypnosis? All of those, possibly. None of those, necessarily. The trouble is that there’s not a one-to-one correspondence between time spent in Faerie and time spent in Reality, so it never maps on perfectly. It’s very difficult to make it add up: I don’t have a working model for this part at all.

But I do know this. When a Star is harvested, they are harvested whole. No one notices them go, and there is no body to find. Everything that ought to have been real about them has been redirected to the other side. They make ghosts of themselves. They split off without a trace.

——

*Oh, you might say, well if it’s as easy as believing…—no. Believing is far from easy, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not convinced? Then try! As an experiment: just try to alter your basic beliefs in what’s possible and what’s not. Tell yourself you might wake up in a flower tomorrow morning. It’s possible! Tell yourself the earth of flat (come on, really in vogue). Or tell yourself I’m right! Tell yourself believing makes any difference. COME ON JUST BELIEVE IN YOURSELF,,,YOU CAN DO IT!! Ha. Of course you can’t. 

**This may appear to stand in contrast to more traditional fairy-lore, but I think it’s actually very much in line (and it’s one of the many reason I’ve chosen to call these creatures fairies). Sure, in those stories, the human usually knows that they’ve crossed into some kind of Other Realm and accepts the fairies as real, but none of that especially shocks them. They’re not experiencing any major paradigm shift: either they’re in an altered state or this encounter still falls well within their understanding of “plausible.” But their conceptions of plausibility will only stretch so far: they don’t understand that time is passing differently in the other realm, that a very alien set of “rules” governs the very fabric of it. The shock only comes when the person tries to leave Faerie as they would leave a party at someone’s house, and finds that they can’t. And it’s the same with Stars. Our notions of plausible versus implausible have shifted a little, so the trick happens at a different level, but it’s the same trick. The human has passed into foreign territory, but they’re still processing it in mundane terms, and consequently they won’t pick up on the most “unrealistic” aspects of the encounter (if ever) until it’s too late.

[infobeanie]

CROW CILLERS RECAP: ELAINE

This month’s review is going to be a recap instead of a review, because so much is going on at this point that it’s important to establish what we know has happened before we can try to figure out what is happening. The focus of the recap here is the ostensible focus of the most recent episode: the character of Elaine, who might secretly be the main character of Crow Cillers. More than any other character, it is Elaine’s actions and decisions that have shaped the course of the show, mostly in ways she is completely unconscious of. Let us try and trace the evolution of the girl who’s changed her hairstyle so many times she doesn’t know what she looks like.

We don’t know much about Elaine’s pre-Marcus past. Everything is presented through a haze of memory and Ynce-Iche distortion. Chronologically, the first concrete scene we have with her, I believe, is her first encounter with Marcus, shortly before the events of season 1. It’s as if his analytical mind snapped her into reality. What we see, even at this initial stage, is a woman who has had enough of the Crow, of people like Marcus, of the useless trappings of life. Having remained aloof from these trappings, her life before this point is known only through half-acknowledged objects: a chocolate bar, a department store, a swimming pool. They exist as alien artifacts now, unable to be sorted properly into a coherent reality. As far as Marcus is concerned, she has no one but him at this point.

Wait, I’m wrong. The first scenes we see of her are with Jill.

Elaine’s obsession with Jill makes her unique among the heroes of the show, none of whom have so intensely latched onto any objective or object, especially one who is also a subject. (It does not make her unique among the villains of the show.) We’re never given much insight into the nature of her obsession, what initially attracted her to Jill and what caused it to take root so deeply, but it’s implied that this compulsive drive is somehow linked to her connection with Ynce Iche, and that it’s partially responsible for her throwing herself at Marcus’s project with a self-destructive intensity.

Season 1 Elaine is not a pretty sight. She is stretched thin, driven to desperation by some deep, implacable inner dissatisfaction with the world. The people around her are as alien & impenetrable to her as the landscapes she inhabits, the objects that have denied her pleasure: Jill, always standoffish and withholding, never the her that Elaine liked; Marcus, cold and clinical, hiding his perverted male gaze behind an unshakeable mask of composure. The slide kids of life keep passing through just to cause her pain, and they pass by entirely unaffected by anything she does. But Elaine does manage to affect Marcus, at her own expense, by giving him a glimpse of her own annihilation. Rejecting the boundaries of the real world, she destroys her discrete self, and plummets headfirst into the psychic echo chamber of Ynce Iche.

A mirror becomes a razor when it’s broken. The first shard to emerge from Elaine’s ego-schism is Elaine Jr., a defense mechanism come to life, designed to protect Elaine from the outer world whether she wants it or not. She manifests Elaine’s villainous side - the Jill-obsessed, misanthropic people-eater - in a form both more fully-developed and more fantastical than Elaine was able to achieve in the real world. She makes little distinction between what she’s already eaten and what is fresh food, between half-digested memories and still-living bodies. It is not so much that she is always hungry so much that she only consumes. 

Separated from her eating apparatus, it is Elaine Sr. who is always hungry. The new world around her leaves her empty, because it’s made up of her insides. Passive and pacified, she begins to see more clearly the cruel streak in Elaine Jr. as it operates independently of her, and begins to resist the imperatives Elaine Jr. sets to keep reality from filtering in.

Meanwhile, the unseen forces of attraction that drove Elaine into Ynce Iche are still at work, as the Crow Cillers find themselves pulled into the dream-world, and Marcus continues his attempts to gain entry. The same forces work on Elaine in the opposite direction: unable to attain complete inertia, she develops an increasingly defined sense of dissatisfaction with this new world. With Elaine Jr. off doing her own thing, the dissatisfaction is differently flavored from that of season 1 - instead of cutting like a razor-blade, it expands like water to fit the confines of whatever is containing Elaine now. Defanged, she yearns once more to penetrate reality. 

But something is missing - even here, in this land contoured to her consciousness, she’s unable to manifest her desires into something concrete, to make sense of the motions she’s going through. As Partydog predicted in the crossover episode, the script calls for real blood, and there is no real blood left in Elaine, it seems. But she has the knife - that’s real enough. And when she has finally had enough of Ynce Iche, she does the unthinkable, and does something. It’s hard to judge the ethics of Elaine killing Dustin; it’s a necessary sacrifice, the initial act of agency that frees Elaine from her purgatory of potentialities, of options but no drive.

In Season 3, Elaine seems to have reached an equilibrium ideal to her character. Her crueler nature is ensconced in its imaginary kingdom, now feeding off of the energy of That Kid and indulging in vindictive fantasies towards Jill, while her more peaceful self finds a more peaceful home with the Crow Cillers Cociety. Yet this place of recovery only fills her with new self-doubt. She can’t feel at ease with these people, living as she is under a false appearance, a false name. The CCC lead lives of double identities, pretending to be Crows in their work hours; with her unmasked face a mask of its own, she’s left with little assurance as to who she actually is, or what side she’s on. 

But she’s not ready to move off on her own again, for obvious reasons. As the courtroom drama involving Jill suggests, Elaine Jr. has always been the advisor, a voice in the ear of the queen, making no decisions but seemingly influencing everything with her madness. Elaine was the former queen, and while she’s ditched out on that particular voice, how can she trust the voices in her own head now? She needs the support group of the CCC to guide her somewhere better.

Unfortunately, she’s forced to abandon them at a key moment, when she again commits the one act that seems to come naturally to her, this time in defense of Mary. While killing to protect others instead of oneself might reflect significant character development, all Elaine registers in the moment is the shame and terror of being exposed, of having her true face reflected in the knife. 

The escape that follows is thorough; we don’t see Elaine again for almost 10 episodes. Meanwhile, Elaine Jr. finds a blood sacrifice of her own, and enters the real world for the first time as Elaine Jr. X. EJX, intriguingly, behaves in much the same way Dustelaine did in the prior season: reserved, guarded, restricting their bloodthirsty tendencies to the Ynce forest. But she’s still out of control, especially when it comes to Jill, and a confrontation seems unavoidable.

Finally, 4 episodes into season 4, we catch our first glimpse of Elaine (just “Elaine” now), trying to make peace with the funhouse mirror version of her body that she ended up in. Season 4, coincidentally, also looks like a funhouse mirror version of season 1. We have the group of misfit kids forming a friend-and-otherworldly-activities group called, through no agency of their own, the “Crow Killers”. We have Jill back at home with the Ru’crew. We have the Special Musical Act whose relation to the main plot is currently unclear. And at the center of it all we have Elaine, working a shitty job which sometimes involves murder. After all this time, it’s back to the Order, except no one is wearing a mask this time. This is perhaps the key difference - the strict symbolic language that governed and restricted the show in its early episodes, the literal order of the Crow, has finally broken down, and everything is up for grabs. A new symbolic language has to be formed from the images that were always there; the difficulty lies in translating it.

This shift exposes the sea change the series has undergone, which seems obvious when we walk through it like this. One of the basic goals of Crow Cillers has always been to penetrate the impermeable barrier of objects, to show the true context of an empty room. Now the lifeless objects that were given character space in the opening credits of season 1 really have come to life, and that’s its own kind of horror. The rooms of season 4 have broken through the false layer of objectivity and become one with the ideas they contain. This abundance of life is wonderful and threatening. It must be contained, countered, without being destroyed; it must be conveyed properly. It is no wonder that Beloved’s most evil trait thus far is not her schemes or her motives, which are still completely opaque, but her bad writing. (And appropriate she should find a foil in Emma, whose creative drive is at an ebb this season.)

I’ve gotten off-topic, and the topic is Elaine. Fresh Fries, the first magical manifestation Elaine has encountered that exists outside of her own fractured identity, serves as the latest catalyst to action for our girl. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her first non-murderous altruistic act is not only glossed over by omission, but murky in intent. Why did she take the horse home? To rescue it, or to own it? She’s terrified when she discovers its sentience; would she have saved it if she had known it was a subject and not an object? It’s easy to forget she’s wearing the body of the last guy who walked into her home uninvited. Like so much with Elaine, elision colors her actions with ambiguity. After three and a half seasons, do we know who she is?

No, we don’t, and that might be her saving grace. If she can keep something as good as a friendship with Brecken a secret, then it stands to reason that what continues to lurk unseen inside her might be more benevolent than anyone had suspected, least of all herself. Her reaching out to him at the end of the episode suggests that it’s this uncharted territory within herself she’s starting to explore now: the land of human connections, of shared meals, of recontextualizing those dreamscapes of capitalist debris into something slightly less intimidating. The blade she’s been holding onto since season 2, perhaps longer, has been sheathed. You can go anywhere from true neutral.

[jinxfirebolt18902]

We stopped fighting. (Newt Imagine)

She couldn't really explain at what exact time everything went to hell with him. Newt had already been nine months in the glade when she arrived. There weren't many gladers as now. Fifteen at most. Elizabeth had been the first girl but not the last one definitely. She thought maybe if she had been the only she-bean nothing would've happened and she could be in a good relationship with him these days. But things didn't work like she wanted. Things worked as the Creators wanted.

Within the first three months everybody knew they shared something. You could see it in their eyes, both hers and his. Something sparkled when they saw each other. The others gladers wouldn't say it often but at least once they had admitted they saw how Newt's eyes filled with some kind of magic when she looked at him. Or even when she smiled. They helpped each other to grow as better persons. It took some time at the begining of course, she wouldn't trust at the first. But when weeks went by, step to step they all learned how to keep working as a society. Then an almost imperceptible strong connection between she and him started to grow.

Eighteen months had passed since the beginning of the maze and everything kept growing, the Glade, the society (with some losses), the woods, the sistem of work. And so had their relationship. The gladers had started to bother them and make jokes about them. A small group annoyed Newt saying he was a coward for not asking her to be his girlfriend. He used to get really mad and tired of listening all of them talking about his life but she was always there to calm him down and change his mind. She talked to him till they laughed of the boys for talking all the time about them. She used to say they had nothing else to talk about. Thing is they were fine and pleased with whatever the level of the relationship was. They knew something happened between them. Oh hell... they knew perfectly well they felt a lot of amazing things for each other. They could literally feel the chemistry fluing. Everyone could honestly. But they felt comfortable, they didn't want to change things for the moment. They were happy and that was all that mattered for them.

All had seemed getting into place. At least she had allowed herself to think that, given they were still in the maze, but she was happy because of him. And vice versa. Now getting back to her wondering about being the only girl, almost every three or four months a girl was sent to the Glade. That wasn't the problem. First of all looking for girlfriends and boyfriends was no one's priorities, in second place even the new girls immediately noticed that thing happening between the couple and third of all sooner or later they always joined the rest of the people who made fun of them and wanted them to get together officially.

Problems arrived when the Creators sent a thirteen years old girl named Christianna. The moment the box's doors opened they all knew she was trouble. She was the youngest ever sent, she was already a crying mess, as anyone else you might think, but what made the difference is that the instant she saw everyone's heads popping up she started yelling like a newborn baby. Literally. And it didn't stop for the longest twenty minutes till Newtie got her to shut up and cry silently.... well better like sobbing.

That moment was historical for the Glade, someone should have recorded all the Gladers sighing in relief when the unbearables cries stopped. Gally even fell on his knees to the ground and thanked the Universe out loud with open arms. Maybe if Newt hadn't been too sweet or pacient to the little girl, she wouldn't have developed such an intense and childish crush on him. And Elizabeth would have saved herself all the bad times. But it's said over there that all those "what if" don't exist, what happened is the only thing that could have happened and it had a reason to be. So anyway little Chrissy had "fallen completely and utterly in love" with Newt. Of course at the beginning he took it as something platonic, he cared for the girl as a sister. He thought it was cute and he devoted a lot of his time to her.

Actually it wasn't that bad till Chrissy saw she had "competition". Soon it had started to bother her when she saw them together. When she saw how Newt hugged Elizabeth, when she paid attention he always had her grabbed by her hand, or that he smiled differently when he smiled to her. Also he spend most of his free time with her. So as any other child would have when jealous, she had begun to interrumpt their moments and make silly stuff.

It had happenend for the very first time in the bonfire of the greenie who came after Chrissy, while some were in the sand circle and others dancing, Minho, Elizabeth and Alby were talking and laughing at Minho's words. Newt had came behind her and slipped his arms around her waist resting his chin on her shoulder. She was still laughing when she had turned her head to look sweetly at him, her laugh calming down to a lovely smile. A smile full of love just for him. She had pecked his lips very quickly and they had continued listening to Minho, who of course had made a silly remark about what just happened.

Initially Chrissy had watched the scene with curiosity. Her brain had received new emotios she hadn't felt yet. She had kept her eyes on them while her brain processed the new information. A frown along with a pout had made an appearance on her face. She'd crossed her arms and with a pouty face she thought what to do about it. When a useful idea crossed her mind she'd immediately stood up and walked in Newt's direction. On the way she had prepared herself, got her eyes glassy and her pout had never faded out. She'd tugged at his hoodie from his back and he'd turned his head to watch her. When he noticed her crying eyes he'd let go of Elizabeth and he'd bended on his knees to look at her given she had her face looking down. He'd grabbed her gently by her shoulders and asked her subtly what had happened. She'd waited a second to answer, just to internally cheer he had gotten away from Elizabeth and to add more suspense to her lil show of fake sadness.

—I miss my parents... I don't want to be here Newtie.—she exaggerated even more her pout and inhaled sharply through her nose.

—Oh... it's okay sweetie. —he'd hugged her and she'd wrapped her arms around his neck. She'd looked up and saw Elizabeth looking at them with cuteness written all over her face. Which had surprised little Chrissy a bit. She thought it would bother her that Newt was now hugging her. She needed it to annoy the older girl. But she was determinated to make her plan work anyway. So she kept it going. Everytime they were together she would go to him with a lame excuse. First times it would be subtle and he wouldn't tell her no, he couldn't. But of course after some weeks it had begun to be a real pain in the ass.

Elizabeth had been working a lot in the Glade for two particular weeks where everyone had been kind of moody. For some reason the boys were a lil tense between each other and add a few girls in her period suffering cramps and bad moods too. So she hadn't seen Newt, who was overloaded with work too. Alby had been testing him to put him as Second In Comand. They'd barely greeted each others in the mornings when they were in different ways to or from breakfast or work. One of those mornings she had been sitting on a table drinking some coffee to wake herself up when Gally'd came and sat infront of her with his breakfast.

—So. How is your lover boy Liz? —he'd made one of his characteristics grimaces raising one eyebrow.

She'd been rubbing the tiredness from her eyes then looked up at him. —I don't know shank. We haven't really talked in a week or so... I have barely saw him actually. —her voice was a little raspy still. She'd laid her face on one hand holding her head trying not to fall asleep on the table.

—You look tired girl. —Liz had remained still looking at him with an expression that said 'seriously?'.

—Really? Maybe because I have been working my ass off... and why is everyone in such a bad mood? Even Fry almost snapped at me. —they both had looked at the boy at the back of the kitchen yelling at the last Greenie.

—I don't know shank but you're right, they are all at the edge. —Gally'd looked around at the other tables to watch the gladers. —Then I'm the "grumpy" one. —Liz'd laughed at him as she stood up and patted his friend on his big shoulder before heading out to the Gardens. When she was arriving her area of work Newt'd walked in a quick pace in front of her. If she hadn't stopped he would've crashed her. —Hey —she'd mumbled. He had looked at her never stopping his steps and answered an empty "hey".

—Well good morning to you too, how have you been? I'm fine thanks for asking —she pretended a conversation with him in a low voice as she grabbed some seeds.

—You're chatting with imaginary friends yet Liz? You're ready to go to the Maze now —Zart'd laughed as he patted her back as a greeting. She'd smiled back. —Hi Zart, good morning.

One more week had passed with a lot of hard encounters between gladers. Loads of hard work, bad quality sleep and poor social skills. Finally a new Greenie would arrive that day. Alby had gathered them all while having breakfast and spoke to them.

—I know there had been a few tough weeks with extra work and we have been all a bit... susceptible because we are all tired but that has ended, good that? Relax a bit, get back to normal pace and don't get over stressed about anything. We'll have a new Greenie today and as always a good fun relaxing bonfire tonight. Thank you for being pacients. I'll help Fry so tonight you'll have some nice tasty meals in gratitude. —everyone'd begun shouting in excitment and happiness, some boys'd whistled and hit the tables making annoying loud noises. Alby'd smiled and nodded with his head.

Liz had been done with her part and she was sitting on the Tower with her legs hanging at the edge. She'd been getting a real break from work and relaxing her body and mind watching the view from the highs. She had been so deep in her world she hadn't heard Newt coming up the stairs. She'd turned to see who was when he'd opened the gate from the floor. She'd gave him a small smile and turned back around. He'd made himself comfortable next to her in the same position.

—Hey... —as she hadn't answer he'd kept talking. —I'm sorry I've been absent the last... three weeks but I'm here now and ready to make it up for the time apart from you.... —he'd smiled at her and so had she.

She'd pushed him lightly by his shoulder —I missed you, Slinthead. —Newt laughed as he slided his left arm to hug her and drag her against him. After he kissed her head as she hugged him back by his torso. They had lingered there for a long time watching the sky change colours and the life in the glade get ready for the party. Chrissy was a ball of fire by dinner time. She had been watching them and her young blood was boiling. She had intended to interrumpt them again but one of the girls, the closest to Liz, foresaw her intentions and fooled the little girl for once.

—Hey lovebirds! Dinner is ready! We have a Newbie to welcome don't be rude and come down to show some manners! —they'd heard Alby's voice from behind so they were poking out their heads to see him, Alby'd smiled at them and turned around to walk away from the Tower and back to the crowd.

They'd looked at each other as a silent agreement to go with the others. She'd been ready to stand up but he'd grabbed her face quickly and kissed her with so much love she had wanted to froze the moment and stay like that forever. After the sweet kiss she'd smiled and stood up. Liz'd given him her hand for him to take it and help him stand on his feet. Her smile had never faded.

[[gifs not mines]]

[codysstruggleforgeorgia-blog]

The start of the story.

My name is Cody. I am a 23 year old male, currently living at home with my parents. Her name is Georgia, a 22 year old female in the same situation. We have known each other for going on ten years, and in that time we have hated each other, we have liked each other and we have loved each other. I know almost everything about her. I know how she reacts to things, I know when she is happy, when she is sad, when she is distant, when she is hurting, when she is scared, when she doesn’t care.. I can read her like a book. While I can not speak for her, I imagine for her it’s much the same with me. Very rarely do either of us surprise each other in regards to what we are thinking - unless a surprise is intended, of course, because we are not entirely dull and transparent. Nevertheless, it’s very rare for us to surprise each other.

Here’s the story of our history, and how a surprise has both formed and broken our relationship. I write this to give context to the daily issues I intend to post so that my every day thoughts and moments of depression can be recorded. Georgia and I met on a video game, online, with no knowledge of what human being was behind the other monitor. We were just complete strangers - both of us young, not even fifteen yet. In my eyes, she was this over the top ball of energy, she tried to be friends with everybody, and I found her annoying and eventually hated her.

The reason that I found her annoying was because I couldn’t believe in my young heart that she wasn’t a manipulative girl. I had the typical rough childhood, but as cliche and ‘other’s have had worse’ as it is, mine still affected me.

My father left when I was seven or eight and would never return to the every  day family life. I knew that he had been violent and unfaithful towards my mother because kids see and hear things even when their parents try to hide it. This departure from the family was kind of the icing on the cake for me, because even as a young boy, he was never really there. He always worked long shifts into the night doing manual labour work - although it turns out he used to come home so late mainly because of his post work activities, drinking and women. I didn’t know this as a kid though, so I used to stay up as long as my young mind would allow me to hoping to catch him as he returned home so he could fulfill his promise of playing Mortal Kombat with me on the Playstation. Even though I actually managed to stay awake long enough some times, it never did happen. So in reality I didn’t actually know my Dad very well to begin with, only the things I saw, the disappointments, and finally him leaving.

So I told myself that I hated him. I would not treat women the way he did. I would never cheat. I wouldn’t be a martial arts freak or be obsessive about fitness, as he was anal about health fitness and fighting and that was the violence I saw towards my mother and my family. I shut my young mind off from him and threw the idea of my dad being my dad from my life and taught myself to hate.

With him gone, we couldn’t afford to stay in Sydney with just Mum, myself and my sister - 1, and brother, a newborn. We didn’t have the money - well really, my mother didn’t have the money. I was in grade 2. So we moved back to a small town out in the middle of nowhere.

The first thing I did was move from one grade to a grade higher because of the interstate educational changes that came with the move. I went from grade two to grade three and studied at a catholic school. It was a very small school. It had one two story building a shed, a small sand playground and the toilet facilities. I was never christian, I never believed, so the catholic side of things didn’t really appeal to me, and on top of that I never really made any friends.

The friends I did try to make tended to be older than me by a few or many years, as they were the ones that would always play in the handball court, and all I ever wanted to do was be included, but they didn’t play regular handball, they played it with small plastic rackets, sort of like tennis rackets, and every time I tried to participate someone would pelt the ball at me as hard as they could, rather than play the game. So I never really had friends here. I played up here and there, but for the most part my school life there was much the same and only lasted two years.

Come time for grade 5, I was given the option to swap to the State School across the road, as it went until grade 12 and my current school did not. I guess my mother saw I was unhappy, or somebody convinced her - I wouldn’t know. I said yes though, wanting a change and swapped to that school. My first day of school there I got asked if I liked our country’s most popular sport and I said no. I got picked up by the throat and choked by one of the kids from the cool club and thrown back to the ground. Then later in the week the same group of kids decided to bully me again and dared me to ring the firebell, saying I was scared and wouldn’t do it. I didn’t know what it was, but I rang it anyway, just to get back at them in my own way, to show them I wasn’t scared and they were wrong.

I got my first in-school suspension because of that, which was essentially suspension from the classroom itself - so my bullying became everyone walking out of the classroom at the two separate lunch times laughing at me and throwing shit at me while I spent the entire day seated in the one corner of the school, unable to even join the kids for lunch because of my punishment. Much of my schooling for the rest of that year is a blur as far as specifics go but it was much the same as before, never really changing. The in school suspensions kept coming and eventually I had grown so sick of the students, and then in turn the staff because of the suspensions and the way everybody looked at me, that I didn’t want to be at the school anymore. It was no fun being suspended inside of the school just to be chased by kids on bikes throwing knives and other things at you.

Back then we had dial up internet. I used to attempt to play Pokemon Crater, an old flash pokemon game on the internet. I would sit there for an age waiting for one frame to change just to see if I had encountered an imaginary pokemon. I had been given a gameboy and pokemon silver as a kid and played it to completion so this was my new fix.

Eventually I would stop going to school during the time of my in school suspensions and as I had hoped they changed my suspensions to proper, removed from the school suspensions. By this stage I was in grade six, and I started playing a new online game. I leave the name out in case people stumble upon this because my girlfriend is paranoid - and sometimes, rightly so, so even though I believe nobody from our lives will read this, I leave out the specifics out of love for her.

As I was saying, I began to play a new game. It allowed me to interact with all kinds of kids my age from all over the country and it was phenomenal. There were groups for everything everywhere and one of the first ones I participated in was a wrestling roleplay, where we would type words at each other and imitate wrestling moves and try to outsmart, or outsell the opponent to show we were uh.. knowledgeable about wrestling, I suppose. This specific ‘roleplay’ didn’t operate quite the same as others, it was more about selling the fight, making it believable, giving the other person their chance to do their stuff, whereas others were more about speed, tactics, outsmarting the other person by being the faster typer and better strategist.

I didn’t spend very long, maybe just a year in this wrestling group - we were the first group of the server to do it and we ended up as ‘hall of fame’ members for years to come, much like they induct real wrestlers into the hall of fame. It was a cool little thing for us and some of us still talked when it ended - in fact, one in particular will be mentioned later on in this story. His name was Chris, and I met him here.

The focus of the story now swaps to the game, with my life as the background details, the inbetween information, because to me that was much the reality I lived - my actual life took a backseat to my pretend life.

There was a brief period of time inbetween my time with the wrestling roleplayers and my next roleplaying group where I lied about my age, and tried to e-date girls for fun because I was lonely and I enjoyed the company. There’s really not much to talk about here, it’s pretty much as I’ve just summarized it.

It was around this time that, in real life during the school holidays I would go to Brisbane to visit my father. They were not phenomenal life experiences. He would take us to his latest girlfriends place and leave us watching movies beyond our years while he had sex and did drugs, he would drink, he would sit us in a room without food while he did his martial art training, he would make me personally go without food because as a result of the bullying and staying home all of the time I had grown chubby. I developed an incorrect understanding of my own body - I was just a chubby little kid, but I thought I was disgustingly obese or something. Him treating me like this just made me want to embrace the fat life more though - and I did. 

That was essentially my school holidays over the course of the next few years - and the only moments of importance besides meeting my best friend, Tyson. However my story with Georgia continued despite the meeting of my now best friend and everything else is irrelevant, so I mention it now and only briefly so the rest can go uninterrupted.

Picking up where we left off in the game, I eventually moved out of my ‘social’ phase (lol) and joined a new roleplay group, this time for Naruto, a universe based around what was basically magic ninjas. This was the first time in my life I had been passionate about something. I studied the universe inside and out. I took notes - I recited them, I passed fake exams to move up ranks, I outsmarted everybody that I fought and I beat them, and eventually I became friends with the top dog, the leader of the whole roleplay who had made the rooms using his own stuff and built the system that governed all ranks and power. I got him banned by reporting him jokingly and we became friends by me apologizing and having a laugh about it. Through him I met Mitch, who would be another good friend in time but not yet. Eventually I made it to the top of the rank ladder - I was leader of my own village in the roleplay. I was the best in that village and one of the top 3 roleplayers in the entire scene. I had sincerely worked so hard for this and for one of the first times in my life I had felt incredibly happy. I had built this thing for myself through my own effort and dedication. The other people around me liked and respected me for it. I had my home away from home. I had my escape from reality.

Then the devil came.

Georgia, if you are reading this - you’re going to have to excuse my language, you know how I felt about you at the time.

This little cuntball of energy rolled into my escape from reality uninvited, unannounced, with an internet boyfriend at her side, 20 guys lined up waiting to lick the pixelated dust trail behind her footsteps, a parade of attention and affection and affirmation, and almost the entire roleplay being ready to bend their rules and change the ways we had to work and invest ourselves to get where we wanted to be - because of the power of the pussy. I fucking hated this creature more than anything else and to top it off, she spoke like you would expect an energetic teenage girl to talk when pretending to be a ninja: hehe LOL XD SHURIKEN JUTSU She drove me up the fucking wall. I genuinely hated this person. She had done nothing but pull apart the escape from reality I knew. The environment I had enjoyed began to turn to shit and eventually she got everything she wanted in one tenth the effort I had invested. Then to make things worse, a new founder of a new variation of the roleplay - so one removed from ours, joined and took her under his wing, automatically drawing like 50 cucks who must have believed if they sniffed hard enough they would smell the pussy through the net. 

The devil was Georgia.

Although she did not personally destroy everything that made my escape from reality what it was, she set everything in motion and I hated her for it. So I left, I joined a new roleplay for Star Wars, and I repeated the same investment of my self for a year and I used that as my new escape from reality. In the mean time, Brandon, the previous founder, and Mitch, had become friends with Georgia. I had no connection with anybody but them from NRP so I didn’t really care. I remembered nothing but hate for her.

Here’s where my real life finally began to interfere again. I met a girl named Maddie. She was dating Nikita, an old friend, who had tried out for the band Tyson, Tyler [another friend] and I had formed. I was the singer, Tyson and Tyler the guitarists, and she was meant to be the drummer. She brought Maddie, her girlfriend along and the two became regulars at our music sessions. Eventually Nikita gave up on drumming as she wasn’t very good at it but Maddie seemed to hang around, or want to, too often.  She had mental health issues and was dating an abusive girlfriend who cut herself and threatened her and blamed her for so many different things and I felt bad for her. And she fell for Tyson, my best friend. I told her to do right by Nikita despite their differences and break up with her properly before doing anything with Tyson. She didn’t listen. We lost Nikita as a friend as a result and Maddie dated Tyson for a few months, living with him, before her family eventually arranged for her to move to the coast with them. However, in the time where she lived with Tyson - his house being my #1 spot outside of on my game, I grew way too close with her and fell in baby love with her. One night after she was gone she was talking to me and asked me why I seemed so sad and In my sad moment of weakness I confessed that I had feelings for her and I was sad that she was gone. However rather than crucify me she confessed she had developed feelings for me too. At first it was nothing but given time it turned to something real. I told her to break everything off with Tyson properly before we took it any further - she promised. I moved to live close, in a new town 4 hours away and went to school there. On the school holidays, she came to visit me and I saw the girl I thought I loved for the first time since she had left town and it seemed perfect. That night I lost my virginity to her - and then right after our 2 hour session (I state the number proudly but it was more of an anxiousness and fear of not performing that kept me going so well), the first thing she says to me is that she just cheated on Tyson - that she had not broken up with him properly - and that the month before, when she visited him halfway between her new house and my old town, instead of get the clothes and belongings she had left behind and tell him it was over, she got it all and kissed him. She hadn’t even ended it with my best friend. So now I’ve lost my virginity to what I realize is a habitual cheater / generally unfaithful person and betrayed the trust of my best friend much worse than I thought I already had all in one night. And my life got flipped. However, I did make a new friend shortly after. Chris, from wrestling on my game, spoke to me on msn one day and I found out he actually lived where Maddie now lived - and went to the same school, so I asked him to take her into their friend group and look after her and he said yes. Eventually I would meet Chris when visiting Maddie, and many other friends I will mention through this.

I broke up with her a month later because she joined the slutty emo group at her new school, got into drugs and talked about one guy too much - and I just knew the type of person she was. I knew she had cheated. So I left her. I went back to my original town and eventually for Christmas I visited my dad on the coast. I had stopped playing my escape from reality game for the most part and rarely logged on at this stage - I was in the final two years of my schooling life after all. I visited my father for Christmas this year, and his new accountant happened to live on the coast that Maddie lived on. I thought nothing of it - then, by chance, she messaged me while I was there, completely unaware that I was and three hours later we were in her apartment blocks local pool having sex. And then relationship 2.0 started, I met some of the guys she had slept with in our time apart, she promised to change, I said I would work harder. I did, she didn’t. She didn’t make an effort to remove the other guys from her life - she flirted and let them flirt, and just generally made me uncomfortable. Then I met Sarah, new best friend, and Rhiannon, her other best friend [and also the chick thats like ay i heard u got a nice cok l0l but says it like one of the boys so u dont feel threatened like she’s gonna try to fuck u anyway random tangent back to the story]. Sarah was beautiful, she was funny, she was super nerdy, she was super nice and humble and was just kind of a follower at this stage of her life. She kind of just followed the other two. I pretty much connected with her instantly and we became awesome friends. It was as innocent as that to begin with. Then the unfaithfulness from Maddie continued, the abuse got worse, the lies got worse, and eventually on one of my school holiday visits to Maddie I found myself spending my very last night there at Sarah’s house, in her lounge room talking about how sad I was, talking about video games, just talking. I had told her that I was coming over to play games because I couldn’t sleep and she said no don’t do it you’ll get stabbed this late at night or something so to make her feel comfortable I literally ran the entire way there, nearly died having an asthma attack when I arrived and the cutie wrapped me in a blanket and gave me a warm drink like some sort of spiritual grandmother. Once we had played games and chatted shit about Maddie for long enough I said I had to go back, and she offered to walk with me part of the way back. We did nothing but talk and I explained to her that she was beautiful inside and out and that she should be stronger and not let people push her around and that she’s awesome and a rare breed of human being and she should be happy and proud of herself and only let herself get treated right and it was basically that same night I realized I had fallen out of love with Maddie and into love with Sarah. So I broke up with Maddie, I told Sarah how I felt (Maddie started shit talking Sarah and it made the decision to dump her easier) but Sarah took Maddie’s side thinking she was doing the right thing by her friend because she didn’t know or believe the nasty things Maddie said about her behind her back when I told her. So I dropped a toxic relationship and lost an amazing girl in one hit. But was that the last time I dated Maddie? Nope, ya boy’s fucking autistic.  I ended up back on the coast at some stage and Sarah and I had began talking again as friends - we never moved past being friends after all, but I still had feelings for her and the spiteful hateful part of me wanted to show her how shit Maddie was. Sarah wanted to make it up to Maddie by getting me back with her. because Sarah was a knob and didn’t believe Maddie was a cunt. I went to the party as Sarah’s invite, Maddie brought her ex/my friend to this day [guy is cool and also got used] Jackson. Jackson wanted in with Maddie. I was the man to make it happen. Maddie wanted in with me. Sarah was the girl to make it happen. Maddie wanted me however and I wanted Sarah. It was fucked up. Long story short, after ignoring Maddie’s emotional breakdown in attempts to manipulate me into feeling bad and being with her, Sarah flipped at me, I realized there was no winning situation. I told Maddie to be with Jackson. She didn’t listen. I got shit faced then smoked a bunch of weed, got far too fucked up and ended up banging Maddie in the public toilets while of my face. Apparently banging in the toilets while off our faces means we’re dating again so yeah, enter relationship attempt #3. This one didn’t last long, I had graduated Grade 12 by now, I moved to the coast, attempted to work and do uni, had struggles where family members intentionally sabotaged my ability to get real payments, worked 9 hour shifts with 30 minute breaks with no music or food I could keep on location and 10 mins to and from home as a trolley pusher every day. I couldn’t keep up with my studies. My mother was helping me by paying my rent - but my food money and personal money got sucked up by the succubus herself Maddie and my entire life ended up being shaped to how she wanted me to be - and given that she was unfaithful she anted me to be a lot of different types of guys so my life was miserable as fuck. Eventually Tyson and Tyler visited, I got high, crashed Tyler’s car, had to move home because it literally ran me broke and I had to rely on my mother to help me pay off the rest of the fixes, repaired his car, drove home with a big bag of weed and just Tyler and myself (Tyson flew home, he lived elsewhere now), and we smoked up for the full 1500km drive. I had apologized and I thought him and I would remain friends, but we didn’t, he got involved with people who did harder drugs and I had no interest. So I had lost my girlfriend [good riddance], lost my home and the only place I had made real life friends who loved me as I loved them, lost my uni attempt, my job. Everything I had worked for was gone. I was the most miserable 18 year old you will ever see. That’s when I became close with Brandon and Mitch again, and through extension Georgia.

Brandon would tell me that the nudes her ex claimed to have leaked were real - that he had them, and wouldn’t show me, because he had to keep it secret since he believed she would ‘fuck him in a heartbeat’ and he wanted to cheat on his girlfriend by getting her to fly to visit him and putting moves on her. There was a lot of talk like this in the past and I only mention it now because as I grew to know this girl I realized how disgusting he had been all those years and it played a part later on.

So this was the first time Georgia really became a part of my life. I mean she had rolled in like a wrecking ball before, but I knew only hatred for her. Even at the beginning I simply tolerated her being there in our chats and I saw her as the little slut Brandon would manipulate and get his own ego rise by having around, like a trophy side chick or something. I didn’t care for her.

Then I got really drunk one night and out of sheer boredom, not interest, as I had nobody else to talk to - I sent Georgia a message. She was in another country with a boyfriend at the time, living there, so timezones allowed my drunk ass to be awake at 3am and be talking to her at primetime for her.

At first we talked about very little. I had decided she wasn’t horrible enough to ignore and decided to talk to her as a friend on the regular because it was so convenient for the way I handled myself at the time - drunk as fuck at 3am in the morning.

Now at this point in my life I had nothing going for me. I was miserable, I stayed at home all day.. I played video games, I watched anime, I was fat. You know the drill. But I began to change who I was as a person through talking to this girl. You see, she was in another country, young like me, a year younger in fact, scared and sad because her boyfriend had been unfaithful to her and she was living in a foreign land with him having to see him and his family every day. She too had a less than amazing, in fact horrible experience in her younger years that had left some trauma with her and I resonated with this girl so much. I remembered all of the years hating her and I suddenly felt so silly. This girl was me but with a vagina, basically. 

But I didn’t love her yet - I just found purpose through her. I wanted to be there for her. So I was. Even when I wasn’t drunk I maintained my awful sleeping pattern intentionally so she would never have to feel too alone - I would sleep through the busiest parts of her days when I needed rest - and I would wake when the day became lonely, so she didn’t have to be too alone with her thoughts. My life slowly began to revolve around this girl.

Eventually I started to change things about myself in more extreme ways. I had begun to understand that I had feelings for this girl, that she would need time (if she ever wanted to be with me), and I would need to be better for her. I changed my diet, I walked every night, losing anywhere from 5-10kg a month for months on end, I worked and saved up some money. I got in shape to impress her, I got healthy to impress her, I quit smoking and drinking for a while to impress her [I’d cave on them both eventually for various reasons that in hindsight were never worth the damage I could have done to myself].

And eventually the time came. By this stage she knew how I felt about her. And when she knew, she became more involved with me than before, more supportive, happier at times.. and then she finally came back from across the ocean, back to the same country as me and all I could think was when the time is right I can finally meet this girl.

It was around Christmas time when this happened, because it was this same Christmas that I had decided to spend with Brandon and Mitch. For the week leading up to the trip, she had dropped out of my life almost completely. She told me she felt jet lagged and had so many people to catch up with. All she talked about was McDonalds coworkers who flirted with her on her facebook or in messages. It was a part of her life she had never revealed and I felt pretty second place to every guy she spoke about because she spoke so passionately about them. I felt sad for the first time in a long time but I also remembered all of the amazing things i’d achieved personally in pursuit of this girl that I had never driven myself to do before and I put the negative thoughts away. I loved her. That’s what I realized that Christmas. That I loved Georgia.

So I accepted that she’s settling back into normal life - it was reasonable and at the end of the day we were still officially just friends. It wasn’t my place, although I wanted it. So I went to Brandon’s for Christmas and met Mitch there. She talked to me more while I was there, and things started to seem normal again, she even said ‘no don’t worry about me, you go spend christmas with your friends’ on christmas - you know those moments where you stop and you think, did she just do a girlfriend thing? is there something there between us? like it just sounded so heartfelt and compassionate and sincere and I just thought wow I love this girl

And then she disappeared, for the better part of a month.

I can’t put into words how gut wrenching this was. This was the first time in my life I ever had a true breakdown due to my depression. Well, it was the first time that burned itself into my memory. I had done so much - changed, so much about myself just to maybe impress this girl - knowing we might not end up as more than friends, but loving her nontheless and having what I thought was the most amazing beautiful friendship with her.. and then she was just gone.

And when I finally heard back from her the girl I had fallen in love with was dead. 

You see, during my christmas trip, I had spoken to Brandon about things that we regretted, sensitive topics we wanted to get off our chest - and understandably, one of mine was Sarah. I had no love for the girl, but she had confused me by coming back into my life and talking to me not long before the christmas trip. She just wanted her friend back. We had never been more, or attempted to. And we never have since.. so it wasn’t anything I thought weirdly of, but it did bring back the memories, and I thought I was confiding in a close friend when I vented my regrets about that period of time in my life - I did regret some moments. Why wouldn’t I? But that didn’t mean I had desire for the girl anymore. They had been long dead. All I knew in my heart was Georgia but Brandon knew that and he was jealous because Georgia had been his little pocket bitch for so long and he didn’t want anybody from his group of friends to be closer to her - especially not me, because he knew how I respected and cared for her, and he knew I knew the nasty things he had said about her in private to me. Things I had almost completely forgotten and would have never mentioned.

Instead of being a good friend, he acted on his own sadness and jealousy and pitifulness and lied to Georgia and told him I had Sarah as my back up girl.

And this was the first time what I believe was Georgia’s anxiety and fear tore us apart and damaged her. Because rather than confront me about it, me, the guy who had done nothing but work on himself in hopes  that one day he might do well enough to simply impress her in the slightest, she believed Brandon, her ‘big brother figure’, and rather than address the issue with me, cast me out of her life.

And somehow in the month that I was gone she had forgotten all about our friendship and any feelings and came back a cold hearted, mean woman who wanted to only tell me how shit I was, that she had relationship interests and that Brandon had told her everything.

Naturally, I defended myself. Very passionately. I have never been angrier in my life bar the time my uncle tried to fight me and take his sadness out on me the night of my Grandfather’s passing. I blasted her for not having the stones to talk to me about it, for blindly believing everything he said, then laughed at her while telling her all of the cruel nasty things he had said about her and done behind her back all those years and told her I hoped she was happy with the shit decision she made. And that was the end of us. Not for good, but for that moment in my life the girl I knew and had began to fall for had died and your average, mean and hateful girl who would rather you know she’s getting new dick than let you try to be happy. Not that she ever specifically acted like that, I guess I just felt so hard done by that when she told me she had love interests that’s all I heard her say.

Anyway, the month leading up to this talk with her - the talk where I finally found out what went wrong, I had messaged her almost daily, basically begging her to tell me what was wrong, and she had the nerve to actually treat me like I’m stupid enough to believe the 180 in her behaviour and attitude towards me meant nothing was wrong and that she was ‘just so busy’. Georgia is good at many things but lying to me has never been one of them though she never ceases to try, always assuming I’m stupid enough to believe her. Nevertheless, I was relatively fine in this month, although sad and somewhat desperate. After the talk finally happened however I was broken. Everything I had done and in the end I walked away with no girl I love, nor the friends I originally had, who by chance happened to be all I had left in my life to begin with. I drank myself into the gutter, I used my last bit of money to pack my bags and catch a bus to the coast, where all of my friends I had met through my ex were, and I lived there, homeless, for the longest time.

I lived on park benches, in public toilets, broke, always hungry, always thirsty, always sore, always tired. I put myself through all of this because it meant more to me to be in the company of those friends than it did to be stuck in that miserable little town. I would occasionally crash at a friends place on the floor or on their couch, but I tried to do this as little as possible. A month or so in my friend Adam spoke to his mother about me and after some convincing [see, when I previously lived on the coast, I was also homeless for a short duration, then lived with Jackson and his family while trolley pushing before getting my own place, and during this time Jackson’s mother had innocently enough mistaken something on her credit card and assumed I had taken it and used her money - mind you I had never used one to pay for something before, I wouldn’t have known how for the life of me - but that gave me a bad rep as the families knew each other.] she had worked it out with her friend who needed somebody paying rent to help her cover costs that I could live there since I had just got a new job at McDonalds. She demanded I help her cover her phone bill, internet, and all matter of personal costs that no person renting a room should ever have to pay for, but I cared so little for myself short of wanting a room that I agreed. A week or so in, I sat in the loungeroom talking to her - she told me that she used to smoke weed with Adam’s older brothers, Hayden and Nathan, and I said oh yeah I’ve smoked with Adam, sometimes when our dealer doesn’t work out we call Nathan and he gets some for us through his dealer, and she went and told Adam’s mother that I had called Nathan my ‘dealer’ and the family just happened to have an uncle going to prison over dealing drugs at the time and it was an awful time for that fucked cunt to spin my words to try to get me in trouble [for god knows what reason, the help I offered would have saved her from her situation lol], the cunt was just fucked in the head I guess.

Anyway, that put me out of a home again pretty quickly. Then shortly after, while I was with my friend Josiah visiting his house [he occasionally gave me lifts to and from work], his mother found out I was homeless. It wasn’t an intentional thing, she asked me where I lived and I kind of just nonchalantly replied nowhere and then she said what do you mean nowhere and then I was just stuck in one of those odd situations where it was like ah man I shouldn’t have said shit, and I explained how I was technically homeless but it was ok that I had a job and I was sure I would manage to fix everything soon enough and there was no need to worry, but as it turns out Josiah’s mother is a beautiful soul and her response was pretty much ‘Is this true son?” - “Yes mum” - “Well no friend of my son is homeless if I can help it!” and bam I had a place to live. A normal place to live, with a normal family, that asked me for fucking nothing - $50 a week, it was crazy. I told them I could do more and they said nope don’t worry about it. So I had a place and a job and was living with a friend that became like a brother to me. Life suddenly wasn’t so bad. Josiah wanted to go to the Navy and was struggling with the motivation to get fit and pursue his goals so in my respect and appreciation for all he had done for me I pushed him and I helped him and I even resolved to go myself. I was genuinely going to go to the Navy because I had reached the conclusion that everything in my life so far was over and maybe I would find myself there.

And then Georgia came back. Now I don’t mean back in the full sense of the word. Georgia has been back once - briefly - at the start of our relationship for two months, in the entire time since then. I mean back in the true sense of what her and I were, and can be. But regardless of just how there she really was, she was there.

This time was different. She told me that she had realized that I was right about Brandon. She tried to laugh it off like it hadn’t hurt me so bad. I could tell she just wanted to talk again and despite how much I wanted to hate her all I saw was the chance that maybe that beautiful girl I fell in love with would come back. She asked me what I had been doing and I told her, although not in specifics, or why my life had turned out like this, because I didn’t want her to know I had gone downhill since she took Brandon’s side over mine, because the actions were still my own, as influenced by my sadness as I was. And that wasn’t ultimately her fault. I told her that I was planning to go to the Navy.

This is where she gave me one of the biggest slaps in the face she’s ever given me. She told me no, don’t go. Now we were both young and stupid in our own ways but as a woman with history with a man, you don’t beg him not to leave for the navy unless it means something. I felt that tug on my heart strings right away. That spark of belief that maybe there’s something here that her and I both want to bring back to life. I said I’d think about it. She pleaded with me not to go, that she wanted me here, that she wanted to meet me.  I did the only reasonable thing a guy in my situation would do. I met the girl I had loved so badly. We only knew each other online, so we both had to bring a +1. Well, I didn’t, she did to feel safe. I could have taken both u bitches don’t forget that if you’re reading this Georgia. I’m just messing around of course.  Uh.. yeah. anyway. I met her. I met the girl that had turned my life in so many directions. And I wasn’t wildly blown away by how perfectly beautiful she was or anything. Not that she isn’t beautiful - she is, incredibly so, but it wasn’t 100% this beautiful cliche meeting. I couldn’t stare the girl in the eyes. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, I didn’t eat the city food she ate, I made a fool of myself, I wasn’t even sure who I was eating with, if she still thought about me the same way, and it didn’t feel like she was all that interested if I’m perfectly honest. But I was so happy to have finally met this amazing beautiful woman that I actually didn’t hang onto those negative thoughts for once. I was so happy. I told her I wouldn’t go to the navy. I missed my appointment, which black listed my name and made me unavailable to attend again for a big period of time because I was ‘unreliable’. I gave up what I was working towards. She seemed happy. Then I asked her when I could see her again. When I could do our date over and not be so weird this time. It never happened. And she disappeared again. Just like before. The girl I loved had never really come back and after destroying my life when she left, to fixing it again.. I had ruined my chance at a career based off her desire that was never real to begin with and she was gone again. So again I was broken. But this time I was.. almost hateful. I didn’t know who the girl was anymore. I let it go. I hated her. She never cared about me, I told myself. She just wanted to fuck around with my life. She probably only met me to see if I was worth sleeping with. I told myself all kinds of things. And then I did something I’d never done in my life.  I quit my job, I told my Dad to come and pick me up and for the first time since I was a young child I lived with the father I had hated all of my life and I tried to become as much like him as I could to forget the memory of her. You see, my dad was a womanizer and a man whore but he had a natural talent for it. He was such a manipulative person that he had developed like a subconscious art for getting laid. I wanted that. I trained with him, I worked the same job as him, I lived through the abuse of his own depression and sex addiction, having my head pinned to the floor while he choked me and told me I was weak, being insulted every day of my life because he saw my mother in me and he resented it, I lived through it all just so I could forget about Georgia, and everything else in my life. All I wanted was women and money. And before I had the chance to get either, months, maybe half a year into living with Dad, after I had quit smoking and been training and studied for the job he set up for me, Georgia comes back again.

This time I throw my money at her. I tell her to come visit me. I don’t want the fake bullshit game with her anymore. If she’s interested she needs to be interested. I’ll treat her like a princess if she treats me like a human being. I tried to mix all the things my dad did with my own self, and my new found positivity and energetic outlook on life being so much healthier and fit than I was before. I thought maybe if I can be so appealing that we don’t have to play the same games as before, if she just comes and spends time with me, real time, not like the time in the city, maybe then this girl will love me.

And I spent stupid amounts of money on her. She even said to me “You’ve spent more on me than any real boyfriend ever has” and all I could think was cool well do I get to be your boyfriend. She stayed the night on one of her two visits to me during this time. She took my bed, and messaged me to come close the blinds for her. Every part of me told me that she wanted sex and to go for it, but I told myself no, you have loved this girl so many times, for so long. All of those years were not spent just so you can get a pitiful one night stand. Ask her out. So I went in to close the blinds, and when I looked at her.. she seemed so genuinely disinterested. I realized in that moment that to her I was literally a slave closing the blinds. I wrote her a letter, on the bench outside of my room for her to read in the morning, asking her to go out with me. She said no. Well, she said maybe, but anything short of yes with Georgia had always meant no. There was no real maybe in her heart, not to me. My dad asked me if I got any. I got mad, because that’s not what I wanted, but also mad because in my head I thought no I didn’t, not that I wanted it to happen that way, but now I’m certain it never will anyway. All he did was make me feel shit. He must have noticed and in his own jaded way tried to make me feel better by saying she was probably a gold digger since I said she comes from a well off family and her dad spoils her. I never told him these things in an attempt to paint her a certain way. It was more my innocent ramblings as I thought about her and I, and our history and all I knew about her. I told him she wasn’t like that. I told her what she said, and she basically disappeared. Then my grandfather, the closest man I had ever had to a real father figure and my favourite family member passed away and her and I lost contact all together.

I wouldn’t talk to Georgia for most of the next year and a half. Right after she disappeared this time, I quit my job, packed up my bags and asked my father for the money I had earned and put into a joint savings account with him. Enraged that I wasn’t following his every order and doing everything the way he thought I should, he told me I had no savings, and so I was homeless again. This time I lived at an internet cafe, paying $50 a week for access with my job as a marketer in a small business on the second floor above a series of restaurants - a little, quiet job tucked away out of existence. I mattered to nobody. I wanted no help. I wanted to die. I did drugs and I drank a lot. I met Jack, Steven and Corey during this part of my life, friends I still have now, my stoner buddies. Eventually it became too much and I had to go back to home.

I got a job at the BP with my friend Peter who I had met in the small town near the coast when dating Maddie, who I had then hooked up with my older cousin who he now had a kid with. A lot to take in. I became friends Nik  again  (previously nikita from my childhood/maddies ex, now sex changed). and his girlfriend of like four years Leah. Soon after Peter hung himself and I drove past his house to see the ambulance there as I went to cover his shift, just to find out what had happened mid shift. Work there was never really the same. Not for me. I hated everybody. A new guy named Kevin started working there, him and I moved into a new place together so we both had our own place and we smoked weed in all of our spare time. Nik and Leah broke up and I let Leah manipulate me like an idiot. She told me Nik had always been paranoid that I’d take her like I took Maddie (literally not what happened) and that behind my back he hated me and he only used our friendship as a way to keep tabs on me and look like he didn’t care anymore and when I tried to talk to him about it, since she had been doing nothing but hanging around my house (hanging around kevin more than me, pretty sure she fucked him at some stage), he didn’t talk to me. And that was it. I believed her shit. I told her I would help her sort her life. She quit her job that was giving her like 8 hours a week so she could find a new one. I covered her expenses - her fuel, her food, her smokes, her bills, her new tyres on the car - then she began flirting and I honestly didn’t are about Nik by this stage because I had been convinced she was not lying about it by his actions and I fell for the trap and kept catering to her, talking to her about how she wanted to move and stuff and how I was gonna help her do it- just to find out she had been planning on leaving town literally the moment her car was fixed [which I was paying for] and cutting me from her life. So I got a tattoo on my right shoulder, a lilypad with ‘Upendi’ written on it. I got the tattoo for my sister, because Leah her and I watched the movie The Lion King 2 together and in the love scene they ride lilypads and sing the Upendi song [which means love]. But Leah’s nickname was also lily. See she didn’t know that I knew about her bullshit yet. So I told her I got it because ‘she liked the movie’ and because ‘I wouldn’t love again’ to make her feel bad and I told my sister it was just because she told me it was her favourite movie and I have love for my siblings. Although the ‘I don’t want to love again’ part did resonate with me, I literally inked my skin to spite that bitch. And I don’t regret it because the real meaning of the tattoo is beautiful and now I’m inspired to get one for all family members. Anyway, that was the end of that. I called my Dad [going back for round 3, or 4, or some shit] and said hey I want to come live with you, organized it, quit my job, and left. I spent a few months with him working odd jobs I could find, swapping here and there trying to find something better, getting high all of the time with my mates Jack, Corey and Steven and attempting to study a diploma in website development which by the way was fucking boring as shit I hated it lol. And enter Georgia, again. This time was different. The moment I saw her name pop up in my inbox, I didn’t open the message. I went to a brothel. I fucked some girl. I literally tried to push her out of my mind by being with another woman paid or not. But eventually I replied and we started talking again. But this time there was no spark. There was no life to it. She just messaged me because she was in a toxic relationship and I guess all males she had in her life were gone in one way or the other - or maybe she genuinely thought of me when she needed help, maybe because of when she was overseas and I supported her then.. I don’t know, she’s never told me, all I have is my own speculation as to why she chose to message me. But she did. And for the better part of the first month, I actually managed to crush feelings for her. They didn’t exist. I got high every day, I worked my job, I did my own thing, and I occasionally messaged my damaged female friend who needed relationship advice. And I didn’t really care about it that much, I just told her my honest take and left it at that.

I can’t remember what the trigger was, but one night she snapped. Maybe she hated how in control of myself I was being. Maybe she had been playing games with me all along and she hated not being the game master now. But she snapped and said ‘You know you love me. Admit it. Say you love me. Tell me you love me.’

And even though in my head I thought I’ll bet my life she’s playing some sick twisted game on me right now, after like two hours of her flirting with me and asking me to admit it, I caved, all the memories of the good times where she had made me happy, not miserable, came back, and I said I love you to her. In the end I had helped her get out of her toxic relationship with that guy, which I spent the next month doing, even after I found out she had cheated, something which almost made me delete her from my life on the spot, on a guy since I had been out of her life, because I had been so badly burned by crazy and unfaithful women, I still couldn’t make myself fall out of love with her. I wanted her. She hated my life with my dad. She knew he mistreated me again and that I was never happy. So for her sake, not for mine, I moved back home. But I hadn’t finished being caught up in my terrible memories from home yet. She gave up on me for a little while yet again.

Then she came back and I told her, I would move to a new place, where Tyson my best friend was. There I would get back in shape, be happy, work. She seemed happy about this - involved again but then basically the moment I made the move, she wasn’t there again, when I needed her. And I didn’t hate her for it. I was numb. I worked one day at the job I got, realized I was too physically unfit to work the ten hour shifts at a meat factory, that I should have taken the dominos job, was forced to leave my friends house because without that job I had no more time to use up living there freely. So I left without saying a word to them, early in the morning, I drove until I ran out of fuel and I cried myself to sleep. I didn’t answer calls from my mother for most of the following day, eventually answering to tell her that I didn’t care, that I wanted to sit in my car and I wanted to starve to death, that I had no more fuel, not to send me money, that I was over it all. And I meant every word of it. But she sent me the money anyway. And as much as I wanted to fill the car up and drive off a bridge, I was raised by this mother all on her own, and I love her too much to do that to her, or to my friend, who I had left without a word to, or my siblings who I loved.

So I made the drive home across state. At first I pretended to try, I signed up for uni, I failed my semesters, and wasted most of my year doing that. Fighting with my step dad. Letting my mother down. Setting a bad example for my brother. I stopped caring. I contemplated suicide again. I googled how to do it in the ways my scaredy cat ass could find painless. Overdose, easy for me because I like to indulge. Bullet, easy for me because we have guns in the house. Those were basically the two options I found and I contemplated them every day.

My lack of action - complete stillness in my bed, over indulging in food, feeling like I had given up on life, not having any goals, or desires left in my heart.. it turned me into a fat sad guy who sat at home doing nothing but playing games.. using memes and the friends I’ve made on voice comms as my new escape from reality. Doing the dishes made my legs ache from standing still. Not because I was morbidly obese, but because my body had grown so weak as well as getting bigger.

Then, one day, once again.. Georgia returned. And this was the first time Georgia ever surprised me. You see, when she returned this time, I said the most selfish, yet honest thing I have ever said to her. I said Georgia, I do not care about myself, I do not care about anything, I am a shell of the person I used to be, and I do not care. I do not want a fake friendship with you, I do not want the same thing we have had over and over again through these long painful years, I do not want it. The only thing that I have ever known I have truly wanted - and the only thing I can still tell you honestly that I want, is you, but not the you that you’ve given me for so long, the real Georgia, the girl I know and love. I want to love you and be loved. I will not be in your life any longer, short of being your partner. I said this because I sincerely believed she would leave as a result, but also because it was sincerely how I felt in my heart. I’m sure if she had said no that day I could have easily killed myself and finally got it over with because it would have been the most succinct ending to our story and I would have been ok with that.

..

But Georgia said yes to me. She said yes. She said let’s try. She said let’s be together. It sent me into shock. I didn’t believe her for at least a week. I was sure she was going to destroy my life any moment and break my heart into a thousand pieces but she didn’t. Even though I kept my defenses up for the entire first week. And to make things better, it was the girl I knew and loved again. She was back. She spoke to me, she communicated with me, she was excited to have me in her daily life, to let me know what was happening, to spend time playing games with me. 

And for the first time in years I felt love and happiness more real than ever before. All along I had wanted this girl back, now she was back - and she was mine. She was my partner, my love, and she was beautiful, and energetic, and happy, and intimate, and compassionate, and understanding. It was like we had gone back in time and undone Brandon’s lies before they could take effect. Like everything was back to normal after all this time.

I played games with her every day. I spoke to her every day. I encouraged and supported her. Financially when she had no work, and even when she first got new work so she could spoil herself without setting herself immediately behind. I tried to understand her anxiety, what set her off, what made her happy and unhappy - it was a learning experience for me, she even threatened to leave a few times and I quickly learned what to do and what not to do. However I did not yet work. I still do not as I write this. I did not stick to a healthy routine. I did not exercise routinely. I made her promises and I wasn’t yet sticking to them. Although this was born out of laziness it was also born from pure happiness. I lived every day in a daze of love, catching up on love and happiness I felt I had been missing my entire adult life. I’m sure she noticed I wasn’t hitting my goals but she didn’t mention it. I was still me, and I was so supportive and helpful and just there for her to love her and never let her hurt. And she knew that.

But then I had a bad fight with my step father. He threatened to kick me out, said I was going to have to leave, and I was convinced. Georgia was stressed out and angry about how they treated me, but also angry at me, however she would not tell me that, instead she would internalize it and let it ruin us slowly, because that is what her anxiety does to her and she is as scared and as damaged as I am. I sent her the last of my money, and I asked her to buy my an internet dongle - so we would not lose the ability to communication, I promised to turn my car into a home and use my payment to get to a new town, keep data on the dongle, charge my phone through my car and never lose touch with her, so she would never have to worry. I had it all planned out. The only thing I did not account for in my costs was my antidepressants. The medication I had begun taking at her request so I could make bigger strides in getting back on my feet and out of my rut. They did help, I just failed to consider them in the big picture, as without a home, without my prescription from this town, without the stability, how would I afford life plus the medication weekly? I didn’t see how I could so I didn’t think to factor it in.

A week passed since the threat, I had gone a week without my medication. Georgia had grown somewhat distant at the beginning of the week, before my mood had begun to turn. She spoke to me less. She didn’t want to play our game with me anymore. She had found somebody else to play with. She needed the friend to help her because she felt she could not confide in me because of my situation. So she left me in the dark again when I needed her the most. But this time I lashed out in jealousy and anger. I accused her of not loving me. I told her she was running away from me again. That she was giving him my place. That she wanted nothing to do with me, that she was getting rid of me. I felt it in my heart too because I know exactly how she acts when she begins to, or has already left me. And I was in the wrong for lashing out the way I did, and it made me feel terrible. But she had started to go when I needed her the most - and after that, she was gone again, the way she usually was.

She assured me that we were still together. But she never spoke to me. And I saw her online, with him, and with other friends every day. I saw her see my messages, but never read or reply to them. I saw her gone. I messaged her frantically daily. She asked for space. I tried, and could last no longer than 2 days at a time without messaging her. She scoffed at this as if it was a weak effort. As if it was normal for her to want me to be able to not talk to her for so long. As if I wasn’t meant to miss and love her. As if I wasn’t meant to feel like she has abandoned me when I needed her and when I had trusted her. I had hurt her by lashing out but she had hurt me back in return and while my cruelty and rage was brief, her neglect and vagueness was never ending and it hurt me more than I had hurt in years because in my heart I believed she knew my situation, that she would not be like this solely because I had hit a low point because I had a rough few days without my medication, that surely she had always thought more of me during all of this and that it was less likely she would leave so easily and more likely that she no longer loved me..

So after a month of waiting, of begging, of staying distant, of caving and trying to connect, I made the decision to go. I removed her from my online contacts, on social media, on my phone, on the game we played.. I deleted her number, the photos, the conversations.. I blocked her on everything and I told her goodbye for good. Moments after I had finished doing this, my friend, Hayden, also friends with her on the game told me that her in game message was ‘Happy Girl’ and I cried because all I could wonder was how someone who claimed to be my partner, who claimed to love me, could be a happy girl in the company of this other man for a month while I suffer and cry out for her every day. And that’s when I decided I was going to hurt myself, bit by bit until I was ready to end it all. So that night I lined up as many of my antidepressants as my mind would let me take and I downed them all, quickly fell sick and passed out. I woke up the next day, more miserable than ever. I sat there. The day flew by me. At the end of the day, I lined up two weeks worth of anti depressants and a drink. And I sat there and began to google how much of it you needed to take before it became lethal. Because I wanted it to be lethal. Georgia and I were over. She had run away and disappeared like she always had and acted as if I was dumb enough to not see it. Especially when she had so easily given my spot to another person, when she had made me stare at her spending all hours of her day with him, every day, for a month when she knew how hard it was for me to trust, when she knew how depressed I was without her. The girl I loved knew me too well to do that and think it was innocent in my eyes. The girl I loved knew that I knew her too. So the only reasonable answer was: She doesn’t love me, she hasn’t this entire month, and her anxiety and fear of me killing myself is the only thing stopping her from leaving and being happy. So if I leave and kill myself where she will never see or know, then everything will be fine and she won’t get hurt.

And then Hayden, the same guy who broke my heart by telling me her league message was ‘Happy Girl’ after all my suffering, told me it had changed to ‘girl’ after the final message I sent. It shattered me. It broke my resolve. It gave me some faint hope that maybe she loved me. So I undid it all and I messaged her. And I told her the thing about the message. How it had given me hope. How I was so incredibly sad and desperate. How I needed her to tell me what she felt. That I needed her to come back if she loved me. That I was sorry. So much was said. Most of it my rambling, because I over think and I ramble when I’m depressed and she ignores it and hides when she’s anxious and depressed.

But she said she was here. That she would come back. Like she was admitting she had been gone after all this time, without actually saying ‘sorry for telling you that I wasn’t.’. But that didn’t matter and I just wanted her back. 

That is the story so far.

Georgia has said she loves me, and she knows I love her. She said that she will come back. I don’t understand why it is so hard for her. Why she still leaves me in the dark, why she spends no time with me, why it feels like she’s hardly back at all. I try to be strong but every day I spend without the loving relationship we had breaks me down again and again. I do not know what to do anymore. I do not know how to get her to come back. To understand my pain. To understand her worth to me. To understand why I keep begging, even when it seems selfish. She is still not back. Not truly. I know it in my heart and she knows I do. And I need her back so desperately. I cannot fight my snappiness and disappointment and sadness when I am so painfully aware of how little she is trying to come back nor can I understand why she does not try like she did. It hurts me so much.

So I write this now. This explanation of the story of Georgia and Cody, intended only for my eyes and hers, unless some strange soul stumbles upon this post and invests the time to read. I keep most important details short of our names hidden for obvious reasons. I intend to use the rest of this page for daily entries. I want to record my depression. I want to record every emotional reaction I have to her, to what she says, to what she does, and I want to write it here. I no longer want to be vocal about it to her over the course of the day. I just want to tell her I love her. I cannot fight her on it anymore. So instead I record my pain here on the daily, so that I can show her, at the end of the day, or the end of the week.. whenever it may be, I want her to be able to come here and read the raw emotion poured onto this page. I want her to know I love her and I am trying to process this. I want her back. I just want her back so fucking badly. If there is a god I pray you guide my girls heart back to me. So yeah.. this was the story so far.. daily entries come next..

[hottytoddynews]

Alistair MacLeod on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Photo from TV documentary, “Reading Alistair MacLeod”

With his little dog Blossom at his side, Gil Macleod, a native of Cape Breton Island who is related to novelist Alistair Macleod, is leading me to his cousin’s writing shack overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here is where Macleod penned his classic novel, “No Great Mischief,” (1999) about Cape Breton fishermen and miners and their Scottish ancestors who migrated to Nova Scotia in the 18th century. His other works include “The Lost Salt and Gift of Blood” (1976), “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories” (1986), and “Island” (2000).

In MacLeod’s stories, fiction and history are inextricably intertwined, and the literary pilgrim comes to Cape Breton Island expecting to find landmarks immortalized in his stories. “No Great Mischief,” published when he was 63, tells the story of the clan Donald’s emigration to Canada, led by patriarch “Calum MacDonald” during the Highlands Clearances. Driving north on Highway 19 from the Canso Causeway and winding along the coast, I’ve been keeping an eye out for “Calum Ruadh’s Point,” the fictional burial place of redheaded Calum MacDonald, which is worn away by storms “as if his grave is moving out to sea.”

Tall, blonde, and plain-spoken, Gil MacLeod warns against a literal interpretation of his cousin’s works. “People asked him all the time, ‘Is that where such and such happened? Is that bluff Calum Ruadh Point? Is that where the boy’s parents fell through the ice and drowned?’ And he said again and again, ‘It’s fiction. It’s not real. I made it up!’” Yet, although fictional characters and places are imaginary, MacLeod’s stories of third- and fourth-generation Scottish immigrants’ hardships in a starkly beautiful but unforgiving landscape are based on rock-solid reality. He once said of his works, “These are not true stories, but they’re real stories.”

Alistair MacLeod (1936-2014) was born in Saskatchewan. His parents moved to Alberta, where his father worked in the coal mines, then returned to the MacLeod homestead on Cape Breton Island when Alistair was ten. He grew up in the Dunvegan farmhouse his great-grandfather built in the 1860s.

Alistair McLeod’s family home in Dunvegan, Inverness County

Gil MacLeod’s path to the writing shack leads through a forest of white birches. Across the trail dead trees guard MacLeod’s right to privacy. We step over the downed trees, ford a stream by walking on a log, and emerge on a beach strewn with rocks and boulders. In the near distance on a bluff overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence stands the writer’s shack where Alistair Macleod wrote many of his stories.

The cabin, or “shack” as Gil calls it, is surrounded by thick ground cover that smells like juniper. The one-room shack has a fecund, creative quality common to writer’s havens. No electricity. No phone. A plywood board for a writing desk. A folding chair. Silence, sunlight and stories waiting to be told.

Alistair Macleod’s son, Alexander, a professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax whose short story collection, “Light Lifting,” was selected 2011 Globe and Mail Book of the Year, reiterates his cousin’s caution. “When you look out the window, this is the island you see,” he says. “But the figurative island is much more important than the actual one. Although he looked at Margaree Island a lot, and it dominates the view from our house [the MacLeod home just up the road], he was not writing about that particular island in a strictly realistic way. Yes, he was certainly interested in islands, and especially in all their metaphorical possibilities, but he was never trying to accurately represent one particular island. ‘Everybody has experience,’ he used to say, ‘but not everybody can make art.’”

Gil MacLeod stands on the beach below his cousin Alistair’s writer’s shack.

In anchoring his fiction in geographical places, MacLeod was following an honored literary tradition. Two of his idols, Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner, drew maps of their fictional counties. Hardy borrowed the name “Wessex” from an Anglo-Saxon kingdom located in the south of England. Faulkner discovered the Chickasaw Indian name “Yoknapatawpha” on an old watershed map of Lafayette County, Mississippi. Much is to be gleaned from encountering landmarks one first came to know as fictional settings. I read “No Great Mischief” in Oxford, 2,000 miles from Cape Breton, and yet when I got there, I was no stranger to MacLeod country. This is the magic of fiction. For Cape Bretoners, as for lifelong residents of Hardy’s Dorset and Faulkner’s Lafayette counties, a charged landscape comes with the territory.

My search for MacLeod’s fictional landmarks grows legs when I meet MacLeod’s longtime friend, Alice Freeman. “Every time we look at the island [Margaree Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence], we say that’s the island in ‘No Great Mischief,’” says Freeman, speaking at her gift shop on Central Avenue in Inverness. “Remembering the old things can be kind of creepy, actually, but he [MacLeod] told it like it was. One grandfather was rough and tough, and the other was proper. The grandfather on this side liked his drink, and the grandmother liked her church. Alistair was a character himself. Always dressed up and wearing his cap.”

When asked about the archetypal Calum Ruadh Point, Freeman suggests a likely spot. “There’s a point out from his house. The road is very rough. You’d break an ankle if you tried to go there.” As vague as this description may be, to one who would walk in MacLeod’s footsteps no clue is to be discarded.

Photo by Kathleen Wickham

In “No Great Mischief,” the narrator, Alexander MacDonald, is orphaned when his parents, keepers of a lighthouse, fall through the frozen ice of the bay and drown. Locals believe that MacLeod drew on an actual drowning at Margaree Island. Rankin MacDonald, editor of The Oran newspaper in Inverness, points out that the real victims’ son, like the fictional Alexander, was reared by relatives: “The son, Herby, still lives here. Herby’s a fisherman. Well, he’s retired now. But it was his parents [who drowned]. And then he was brought up by somebody else, relatives. We know who we are in our hearts and among ourselves, but then when [MacLeod] articulated it, we said, ‘That’s about my way of life. These are my people.’ And that’s what I think stirs in the hearts of everyone here, why we loved him so much.”

Learning of my search for a Calum Ruadh Point, Rankin MacDonald recalls a family cemetery on a bluff where a Scottish emigrant left instructions to be buried facing his homeland. MacLeod’s epic novel was based on his Scottish family’s emigration and their struggle to survive as fishermen.

Intrigued by MacDonald’s suggestion, I set out to find the Scottish gentleman’s grave. Half an hour later, I am driving along a high ridge overlooking the beach community of Inverness. The county roads can be confusing, but an elderly gentleman in a pickup truck stops to show me the way. In drizzling rain I tramp the woods and fields searching for an overgrown cemetery. My search proves fruitless but nevertheless is strangely satisfying. But I’m not done yet.

At the Downstreet Café, a local gathering place, Cape Breton author Frank Macdonald appreciates and perhaps sympathizes with my literary-landmark-compulsion. “Alistair does a very good job of not identifying a specific place, but the geography is so accurate and what he describes is all around here. You can walk to it, and it’s just around the next bend on the shore.” Yet, he adds, “MacLeod was adamant that these were creations, not actual places. He did a remarkable job of universalizing these people while keeping them so tremendously real, and you would expect to run into them on the street or in the tavern or in the mines.”

When I ask about Alistair MacLeod’s slow-but-sure writing technique, Frank Macdonald tells how his friend once came to him brimming with good news: “How much he saw ahead, what was coming, I don’t know, but at one point he did say, ‘I got the end of the book this week.’ This was three or four years before [the novel] was published,” adds Macdonald, “and it was probably the last sentence in ‘No Great Mischief’: ‘All of us are better when we are loved.’ He knew where he was going with it.”

MacLeod’s burst of inspiration could well have happened in the writer’s shack, bare bones and functional, a ray of sunlight blazing on the floor like spontaneous literary combustion. I recall looking out the window and seeing what the author saw when he glanced up from his tablet.  Alice Freeman’s words reverberate—there’s a point out from his house—his writing shack, she meant, where the salt-stained window reveals Margaree island shining in the sun, and just north of the shack a point of land facing the sea as if rushing out to meet it.

Macleod brought these coastal cliffs and harbors, country lanes and isolated cottages to life in New York, London, Tokyo, wherever No Great Mischief is being read. Yes, I know, the fictional Calum Ruadh Point was a creation of the author’s fertile imagination, but until someone sends me in a different direction, given the view from the writer’s shack, this fictional landmark of Alistair MacLeod’s Cape Breton Island belongs to me. 

Lawrence Wells is the author of two historical novels (Doubleday & Co) and six non-fiction books. He was awarded the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom prize for narrative non-fiction at the Words and Music Festival, New Orleans. Wells is a contributor of travel stories to the N.Y. Times Syndicate and lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

The post Lawrence Wells Walks in Novelist Alistair MacLeod’s Footsteps on Cape Breton appeared first on HottyToddy.com.

[chadpetersondatingblog]

5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself If You Think You Might Be Bisexual

When I was a mere youth (spoiler: I’m still a youth. I just mean when I was a youth youth) trying to figure out my sexuality, I literally thought my world was ending. I was all, why the F*CK can’t I figure this out? Why can’t I JUST like these sweaty, wet-puppy-smelling boys? Why do I feel all weird and tingly when I’m around magical, nice-smelling, unicorn-esque girls? Then, once I was a little older and knew WTF sexuality was, you could find me frantically googling, “Am I bisexual?” while probably eating a Lunchable as a fully-grown teenager.

Let me just say, the journey to where I am now — a raging, loud, bisexual who’s f*cking awesome at winged eyeliner — has not been an easy one. For one, winged eyeliner is the hardest thing in the goddamn world, definitely not for the faint of heart. But in terms of my sexuality, figuring it out involved a long introspection process that obviously benefitted me in the long run, but still made me have to pick apart myself, piece by piece, and put me back together again. Part of why this process was so confusing for me was because I didn’t really know where to start in figuring things out.

So if you’re in the same boat I was in, the best place to start is within yourself. So to make this process easier on you — and in honor of International Celebrate Bisexuality Day today — here are some questions you should ask yourself to get you started.

1. Do You Feel Attracted To Two Genders?

How To Tell If A Girl Is Gay, Explained With Pies

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Now, the thing is, I can’t tell you if you’re attracted to two genders. That would probably make things significantly easier for you, yes, but unfortunately, it can’t happen. I know how to do about, like, 4.6 things in life total, and telling you whom you’re attracted to is not one of them. So sorry, but you’ll have to figure that out for yourself, based on what you feel inside.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on general sexual and romantic attraction. However, romantic attraction and sexual attraction are two different things, and your romantic orientation and sexual orientation can be the same or different. If you’re interested in learning about your romantic vs. sexual orientation and attraction, go here.

OK, so, where were we? You know how when you see someone you like or if you’re around someone you like, you kind of get a warm, tingly feeling in your body, particularly in your nether regions? You might even think to yourself, “Wow, yes, that person is Nice™, and I would really like for my face to be on their face and my body to be on their body.” Of course, how you experience attraction may be different from the way others do, but generally, if you find yourself gravitating toward a person, thinking about them constantly, and feeling like you might want to be intimate with them, then odds are, you’re attracted to them. And if you feel this way about two genders at all (the ratio of these feelings for each gender does not have to be split evenly), then congratulations! You might be bisexual! Welcome to the best team, my friend.

2. What Do You Find Attractive About These Two Genders?

Daring Wanderer/Stocksy

OK, after answering that first question, if you’ve come to the conclusion that, yes, you might be attracted to two genders, let’s break that down further: What do you like about them? Asking yourself this will help you figure out whether or not your attraction leans more in a romantic and/or sexual way, or in the way of general admiration.

If what you find attractive about both genders is more all-encompassing, including more physical aspects of their appearance (i.e. in addition to being attracted to their personality, you’re attracted to things like their eyes, their lips, their body, etc.), then it’s likely you could be experiencing genuine romantic and/or sexual attraction to both genders, in which case, let me teach you the secret bisexual handshake after this. However, if your attraction to one gender centers more on the things they own, the profession they have, the fact that they have so many friends, the talents they have, and so on, then you could just feel admiration toward them. Perhaps you wish you could be friends with this person, or you wish your life was more like theirs.

Let’s get one thing straight (Lol), though: Whatever you learn about yourself in this respect is OK. And it’s also OK to still be unsure. You may not have an answer right away. Keep doing some introspecting as time goes on, and you’ll have a clearer answer, I promise.

3. Have You Ever Done Something Intimate With Someone Of The Same Gender?

Guille Faingold

And if so, did you enjoy it, and would you like to do it again? If you’ve kissed or gotten even ~more intimate~ with someone of the same gender and thought, “WOW, THAT WAS GREAT,” and you’re feeling ready for round two, that’s a pretty good indicator that you might be bisexual, so tell me what jacket size you wear, because I’m getting us all jackets.

And if you have hooked up with someone of the same gender, but you’re still feeling pretty confused about the whole thing, that’s OK, too. It just means you have a little more exploring to do before you’ll know for sure whether or not you’re bisexual, as your confusion could be related to a number of other things. Maybe you’re not actually bisexual, sure, but it also could be that maybe you weren’t as attracted to this particular person as you thought you were. Maybe nerves got in the way of you fully experiencing the moment.

Regardless, if you’re unsure, keep exploring. And if, after a few less-than-thrilling encounters, you’re not dying to keep exploring, that’s totally OK, too. You might have just been a little curious about your identity, rather than being bisexual. Exploring is fine. Whatever your identity is, even if it ends up not being bisexual, is fine. You’re fine.

4. If You Haven’t, Can You Imagine Yourself Doing Something Sexual With Either Gender?

Chelsea Victoria

Let it be known that hooking up with someone of the same gender is NOT a prerequisite to being bisexual. You can still feel attraction to someone without sucking their lips right off their face. (And similarly, you can hook up with someone of the same gender, and not identify on the LGBTQ+ spectrum.)

Still, if you haven’t sucked their lips right off their face, can you imagine yourself doing that with someone of the same gender? Can you place yourself in an imaginary sexual scenario with them? And when you do, do you enjoy it and low-key (high-key, let’s be real) wish it would happen in real life? If you can imagine this scenario, and you feel comfortable, happy, and excited about it, then you could be bisexual, bud.

Remember, you don’t have to hook up with someone of a certain gender to feel attracted to them. I don’t think any of my straight friends ran around saying, “Hmm, I’m not sure I’m attracted to guys because I haven’t had my first kiss yet.” (Although, if they had said that, I’d respect it.) All I’m saying is, if you figure out that your attraction to two genders is real, regardless of your hookup history, then bi-golly, you just might be bisexual. LOOK AT YOU F*CKING GO.

5. Are You Comfortable With The Label Of “Bisexual”?

Simone Becchetti

The most important thing you need to ask yourself if you think you might be bisexual is whether or not you, personally, are comfortable with that label. If you understand what bisexuality is, you think that best encompasses what you feel in terms of sexual attraction, and you feel good about calling yourself bisexual, then please excuse me for one second while I get some shots for us to celebrate the fact that you are, indeed, probably bisexual.

And even if you do feel attraction to two genders, but you’re not comfortable with the bisexual label, then fret not, because you certainly do not have to identify with bisexuality if you don’t want to or if you’re not comfortable with it. Isn’t that great? I think it’s pretty f*cking great.

While figuring out your sexuality is nothing short of confusing, it is able to be done, I PROMISE. It just takes a little introspection on your part. And while I’ll admit to being the first one to run away screaming bloody murder from anything that makes me have to confront deep truths within myself, I guarantee, once you sit and think about these questions for a little while, you’ll probably see things much, much clearer.

Check out the entire Gen Why series and other videos on Facebook and the Bustle app across Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV.

Check out the “Best of Elite Daily” stream in the Bustle App for more stories just like this!

Subscribe to Elite Daily’s official newsletter, The Edge, for more stories you don’t want to miss.

5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself If You Think You Might Be Bisexual

from Meet Positives http://ift.tt/2wJBYSY via IFTTT

[ashleyjacksonblog]

5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself If You Think You Might Be Bisexual

When I was a mere youth (spoiler: I’m still a youth. I just mean when I was a youth youth) trying to figure out my sexuality, I literally thought my world was ending. I was all, why the F*CK can’t I figure this out? Why can’t I JUST like these sweaty, wet-puppy-smelling boys? Why do I feel all weird and tingly when I’m around magical, nice-smelling, unicorn-esque girls? Then, once I was a little older and knew WTF sexuality was, you could find me frantically googling, “Am I bisexual?” while probably eating a Lunchable as a fully-grown teenager.

Let me just say, the journey to where I am now — a raging, loud, bisexual who’s f*cking awesome at winged eyeliner — has not been an easy one. For one, winged eyeliner is the hardest thing in the goddamn world, definitely not for the faint of heart. But in terms of my sexuality, figuring it out involved a long introspection process that obviously benefitted me in the long run, but still made me have to pick apart myself, piece by piece, and put me back together again. Part of why this process was so confusing for me was because I didn’t really know where to start in figuring things out.

So if you’re in the same boat I was in, the best place to start is within yourself. So to make this process easier on you — and in honor of International Celebrate Bisexuality Day today — here are some questions you should ask yourself to get you started.

1. Do You Feel Attracted To Two Genders?

How To Tell If A Girl Is Gay, Explained With Pies

/* */ window.NDA && window.NDA.initPlayer && window.NDA.initPlayer(‘nda-videoobject__embed–1622213–0’, { advertising: {“client”:”vast”,”tag”:”https:\/\/pubads.g.doubleclick.net\/gampad\/ads?sz=3×3&iu=\/49944529\/ed.vid&impl=s&gdfp_req=1&env=vp&output=vast&unviewed_position_start=1&url=[referrer_url]&description_url=[description_url]&correlator=[timestamp]&cust_params=area%3Ddating%26campaign%3Dnone%26environment%3Dwww%26page%3Dcategory%26tags%3Dnone%26Topic%3D%26article%3D2046260″}, playlist: ‘//cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/5ANmLxqe’, image: ‘http://ift.tt/2r2tFtR’, aspectratio: ’16:9′, width: ‘100%’, title: ‘How To Tell If A Girl Is Gay, Explained With Pies’, videoId: 1622213, tracking: { category: ‘Video: ED Player’ } });

Now, the thing is, I can’t tell you if you’re attracted to two genders. That would probably make things significantly easier for you, yes, but unfortunately, it can’t happen. I know how to do about, like, 4.6 things in life total, and telling you whom you’re attracted to is not one of them. So sorry, but you’ll have to figure that out for yourself, based on what you feel inside.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on general sexual and romantic attraction. However, romantic attraction and sexual attraction are two different things, and your romantic orientation and sexual orientation can be the same or different. If you’re interested in learning about your romantic vs. sexual orientation and attraction, go here.

OK, so, where were we? You know how when you see someone you like or if you’re around someone you like, you kind of get a warm, tingly feeling in your body, particularly in your nether regions? You might even think to yourself, “Wow, yes, that person is Nice™, and I would really like for my face to be on their face and my body to be on their body.” Of course, how you experience attraction may be different from the way others do, but generally, if you find yourself gravitating toward a person, thinking about them constantly, and feeling like you might want to be intimate with them, then odds are, you’re attracted to them. And if you feel this way about two genders at all (the ratio of these feelings for each gender does not have to be split evenly), then congratulations! You might be bisexual! Welcome to the best team, my friend.

2. What Do You Find Attractive About These Two Genders?

Daring Wanderer/Stocksy

OK, after answering that first question, if you’ve come to the conclusion that, yes, you might be attracted to two genders, let’s break that down further: What do you like about them? Asking yourself this will help you figure out whether or not your attraction leans more in a romantic and/or sexual way, or in the way of general admiration.

If what you find attractive about both genders is more all-encompassing, including more physical aspects of their appearance (i.e. in addition to being attracted to their personality, you’re attracted to things like their eyes, their lips, their body, etc.), then it’s likely you could be experiencing genuine romantic and/or sexual attraction to both genders, in which case, let me teach you the secret bisexual handshake after this. However, if your attraction to one gender centers more on the things they own, the profession they have, the fact that they have so many friends, the talents they have, and so on, then you could just feel admiration toward them. Perhaps you wish you could be friends with this person, or you wish your life was more like theirs.

Let’s get one thing straight (Lol), though: Whatever you learn about yourself in this respect is OK. And it’s also OK to still be unsure. You may not have an answer right away. Keep doing some introspecting as time goes on, and you’ll have a clearer answer, I promise.

3. Have You Ever Done Something Intimate With Someone Of The Same Gender?

Guille Faingold

And if so, did you enjoy it, and would you like to do it again? If you’ve kissed or gotten even ~more intimate~ with someone of the same gender and thought, “WOW, THAT WAS GREAT,” and you’re feeling ready for round two, that’s a pretty good indicator that you might be bisexual, so tell me what jacket size you wear, because I’m getting us all jackets.

And if you have hooked up with someone of the same gender, but you’re still feeling pretty confused about the whole thing, that’s OK, too. It just means you have a little more exploring to do before you’ll know for sure whether or not you’re bisexual, as your confusion could be related to a number of other things. Maybe you’re not actually bisexual, sure, but it also could be that maybe you weren’t as attracted to this particular person as you thought you were. Maybe nerves got in the way of you fully experiencing the moment.

Regardless, if you’re unsure, keep exploring. And if, after a few less-than-thrilling encounters, you’re not dying to keep exploring, that’s totally OK, too. You might have just been a little curious about your identity, rather than being bisexual. Exploring is fine. Whatever your identity is, even if it ends up not being bisexual, is fine. You’re fine.

4. If You Haven’t, Can You Imagine Yourself Doing Something Sexual With Either Gender?

Chelsea Victoria

Let it be known that hooking up with someone of the same gender is NOT a prerequisite to being bisexual. You can still feel attraction to someone without sucking their lips right off their face. (And similarly, you can hook up with someone of the same gender, and not identify on the LGBTQ+ spectrum.)

Still, if you haven’t sucked their lips right off their face, can you imagine yourself doing that with someone of the same gender? Can you place yourself in an imaginary sexual scenario with them? And when you do, do you enjoy it and low-key (high-key, let’s be real) wish it would happen in real life? If you can imagine this scenario, and you feel comfortable, happy, and excited about it, then you could be bisexual, bud.

Remember, you don’t have to hook up with someone of a certain gender to feel attracted to them. I don’t think any of my straight friends ran around saying, “Hmm, I’m not sure I’m attracted to guys because I haven’t had my first kiss yet.” (Although, if they had said that, I’d respect it.) All I’m saying is, if you figure out that your attraction to two genders is real, regardless of your hookup history, then bi-golly, you just might be bisexual. LOOK AT YOU F*CKING GO.

5. Are You Comfortable With The Label Of “Bisexual”?

Simone Becchetti

The most important thing you need to ask yourself if you think you might be bisexual is whether or not you, personally, are comfortable with that label. If you understand what bisexuality is, you think that best encompasses what you feel in terms of sexual attraction, and you feel good about calling yourself bisexual, then please excuse me for one second while I get some shots for us to celebrate the fact that you are, indeed, probably bisexual.

And even if you do feel attraction to two genders, but you’re not comfortable with the bisexual label, then fret not, because you certainly do not have to identify with bisexuality if you don’t want to or if you’re not comfortable with it. Isn’t that great? I think it’s pretty f*cking great.

While figuring out your sexuality is nothing short of confusing, it is able to be done, I PROMISE. It just takes a little introspection on your part. And while I’ll admit to being the first one to run away screaming bloody murder from anything that makes me have to confront deep truths within myself, I guarantee, once you sit and think about these questions for a little while, you’ll probably see things much, much clearer.

Check out the entire Gen Why series and other videos on Facebook and the Bustle app across Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV.

Check out the “Best of Elite Daily” stream in the Bustle App for more stories just like this!

Subscribe to Elite Daily’s official newsletter, The Edge, for more stories you don’t want to miss.

5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself If You Think You Might Be Bisexual

from Meet Positives http://ift.tt/2wJBYSY via IFTTT