#alex is a menace about aia always

[gregorygerwitz]

Please tell me about mouse and the first verse of over it if you're still up?

[ song: Over It by Arrows In Action ] [ verse 2 - October 2011 ] [ bridge - November 2011 ]

Good morning, Shae!

I did see this before I went to bed, but I was so tired and it was almost midnight so I just curled up and went to bed. But now I'm up way earlier than I need to be for my appointment so you're getting a response at 6am (my sleep schedule is an absolute mess).

It's under a read more because really I'm just going lyric by lyric through the entire first verse and being sad about my backstory headcanons for Mouse. Maybe the entire song. There's a lot going on with my emotions because of this song right now. I'm sorry that my Mouse backstory is Like This.

Warnings: Mouse's mommy issues, references to homophobia, mention of past suicide attempt, mention of drug use/addiction

So, my backstory for Mouse involved giving him a lot of mommy issues, from Thelma's narcissism to being kicked out and everything in between. And the way these lyrics fit into that backstory are so specific to a three month "era" in Mouse's life? This went on my November 2011 playlist before it went on my general Mouse playlist, like it's gonna be sad hours up in here.

The first verse feels like... ~September 2011? It's right after he's been kicked out of his parents' place, but they're still inviting him to Sunday brunches when they go out, and they're still Thelma and Gregory™ so they're trying to have a little control over his life even after outright saying they don't want him to be a part of theirs. So the energy in the first verse is maybe he missed a weekend brunch because he had to work (since he doesn't have access to family money anymore and has rent to pay all of a sudden), and he still gets that kind of controlling energy, especially from his mom.

Hey, mom, I'm doing just fine No, I haven't called in a long, long time

And Mouse is never the one who calls them, because he doesn't have to be, because they will always call the second they decide it's been too long. And it's always been too long because he doesn't live under their roof anymore, so they don't have constant access to him and what he's doing (which would make more sense if he wasn't, you know, 26 years old). And Mouse knows this. He knows he's going to get the semi-regular calls no matter what he does, so he doesn't put in the effort to reach out to them because there's no reason for it. They're still gonna call him regardless of what he does.

But no news is good news, I swear

This lyric, in this context, is foreshadowing.

If the first verse is September 2011, and part of this period where his parents reach out to him, never the other way around. And, for the most part, that's fine. Mouse doesn't like talking to them anyway, but at least this way he can say he's putting it off as long as he possibly can. Because the first and only time it's the other way around, and someone calls them instead of them being the ones to call him, is two months later. It's in November, the night of his overdose, when jay calls them from the emergency room.

So no news, in this case, Mouse having no reason to reach out to them for anything, is good news in the sense that it means he's alive and physically healthy, even if he feels like shit emotionally.

I got a few new interests, Met another girl on the internet Can you tell that I'm full of shit from there?

This is how every phone call with his parents goes. Mouse doesn't mention his minimum wage job, or his crappy apartment, or any of the things wrong with his life, because they simply don't care. What they do care about is the family reputation, and what it would look like if their drug addict son (which they were already covering up for him) was gay on top of that.

So Mouse can spend every phone call downplaying the awful things he has to go through on a daily basis because of their judgement and misplaced fear, and say the kind of things that they want to hear. He can say he's found new things to occupy his time besides the drugs (he hasn't), and he can say he met a girl (he hasn't done this either), and he can say that life is fine even with all the changes he's adapting to (it's not), and in the back of his mind he's wondering if they can even tell he's lying, or if they would even care if they could.

Hate to hang up, but I'm late For getting punched right in my face By a world that wants to break me down

And he definitely doesn't hate to hang up whenever he finds a good excuse to get out of the rest of the conversation. Because what is he supposed to do? Keep lying and saying everything is fine when he's dying inside? When he misses his parents and wants to go home and not constantly wonder if he's gonna have money for food after paying rent? When half the reason he has a roof of his own and isn't living on the streets after what they did is because Jay probably helped him out?

And it absolutely feels like the world is out to get him after everything. He had the support of his parents and their money for so long, and that got ripped away so suddenly that he's scrambling just to stay alive. All the things that he got used to having there to lean on are just gone, and he's facing the world and the realities of it at full force.

And the chorus captures that energy perfectly:

Got my rent to pay, but I'm broke All my shoes are down to the soles Yeah, my bed is still on the floor And I'm so over it, over it Everybody's falling in love While I'm stumbling home, still drunk Twenty-something, down on my luck And I'm so over it, over it

Honestly, if the first verse is September, the second verse is October and the bridge is November and I could write more essays for those. This song is just the perfect vibe for the things I'm sad about constantly.

[gregorygerwitz]

Please tell me about mouse and over it some more, I'm invested.

[ song: Over It by Arrows In Action ] [ verse 1 - September 2011 ] [ bridge - November 2011 ]

Of course! I will happily take this to focus on. The song is gonna be on repeat for at least a few days - I don't think I've had a song that makes my serotonin machine work this hard in a while. Potentially the last time AiA released a single? Not relevant but interesting to think about.

Where the first verse was kind of the energy of September of 2011 in my Mouse backstory, the second verse has more October 2011 vibes. So we'll just pick up where we left off. (under a read more again because it's me and I'm gonna babble)

Warnings: Mouse's mommy issues, mentioned homophobia, depression/anxiety

Over all, October really isn't that different from September. Mouse is still going to brunch with his parents semi-regularly (I've never been able to solidify my headcanon on whether they invite him every Sunday or only every other Sunday, or if it just depends, but it's not a super important detail so), and he's still suffering through his mom's stupid comments about meeting her friends' daughters, and basically this denial from both of his parents about his coming out.

It's still this cycle of slogging through a week or two of work and his declining mental health, and then putting on a brave face and pretending that everything is okay and normal for a few hours so that he can keep the time he spends with his parents at an absolute minimum. He's there for the free food, not the conversation or the family connection, because that really was severed the moment that their response to him coming out was to kick him out of the house and not even help him find somewhere else to live.

And Mouse knows that the only good thing in his life at that point is Jay and their friendship, and there's that underlying fear that if he comes out and shares that part of himself with Jay, he'll lose that, too. And he absolutely wouldn't survive that but that's more November than October, so I'll get to that with the bridge.

Kinda wish a friend would text me Feeling like my wallet and my glass half empty

But he's sitting at these regular brunches, absolutely miserable and feeling alone because he's facing his parents without any kind of buffer or support. And he knows that Jay knows exactly where he's at and won't text or call even if it's an emergency, but Mouse definitely wants him to text. No real emergency needed. He'll make one up himself. Just give him the opening and he will happily leave the entire situation and barely look back (until the next time they invite him, because he's still struggling a lot and it's still free food).

Oh, I'm so sorry for the venting I ain't in a rush I'm just ready for the ending

And he complains, of course, because the entire situation was a mess. He can't really say too many details, and he can't tell Jay why they kicked him out in the first place, just something vague like they had a disagreement. Mouse probably brushed it off and said that he was the one who decided to leave so that Jay wouldn't immediately be ready to start a fight over all of it, even without full context.

But complaining helps. It gets some of the frustration out of his system that he'd been bottling up, and it's not a perfect solution, obviously, but it's something. And he feels bad for spending half of the time he spends with Jay just complaining about things, but the situation needs an ending. He needs to get some kind of closure for it - whether that means eventually repairing his very broken relationship with his parents, or cutting them off completely, or somewhere in between - but there's so many variables and things that he can't control that make the kind of closure he needs impossible.

Hate to hang up my complaints Like a showcase on display For a world that wants to break me down

Mouse hates that this is where his life is. He hates that things were so good, or at least not awful, and he ruined it, basically - he didn't, but that's how he sees it. If he had kept his mouth shut and stayed in the closet (even after keeping his sexuality mostly to himself for over a decade at that point, and having all of the internal turmoil that comes with that), things would still be normal.

He wouldn't be struggling to pay rent with a minimum wage job. He wouldn't be relying on his parents for a meal maybe once a week, or hoping Jay doesn't mind paying the tab if they go out for drinks one night. He wouldn't be in the situation he's in if he just kept things to himself, but he changed too much too fast for the people around him, and if he's not careful, everyone will see that his situation is his own fault and he doesn't deserve any of their pity or their help.

[gregorygerwitz]

Totally want that last bit of over it re: mouse please!

[ song: Over It by Arrows In Action ] [ verse 1 - September 2011 ] [ verse 2 - October 2011 ]

Absolutely!

The bridge is fairly short, comparatively, so this won't be as long as the other two posts, but I will still be putting it under a read more. Mind the warnings on this one, folks, because this is what we've been building up to, the big angst.

Warnings: Mouse's mommy issues, homophobia + forced outing, depression, drug use and addiction, suicide attempt

Look at the warnings again. Read all of them. Read them twice. Okay? Okay, strap in.

September and October were the beginning of the bad stuff, and Mouse's mental health getting steadily worse. And then November happened, and there was the one time he took Jay along to brunch and was outed to his best friend and an entire café of people, and for obvious reasons his relationship with his parents really was done after that.

His mother still called every other day at minimum, not that he ever answered the calls after that, and the messages she left usually boiled down to telling him to stop throwing a tantrum and to call her back. He didn't, of course, but that didn't stop the calls from coming. She still tried to make it about her without ever actually apologizing for what happened, or even trying, and it definitely didn't help the fact that his addiction was steadily getting worse with less access to relatively safer and "cleaner" pills from a pharmacy, because his money was going toward just staying alive, not being safe while he fed into his bad habits.

And that's when he hits his rock bottom.

Rock bottom just happens to be taking too many pills, and being extremely lucky that Jay picked that night to swing by and offer dinner, and waking up in the emergency room with only one person by his side. Because Jay absolutely got the number out of Mouse's phone and called Thelma and Gregory to tell them where he was, but showing up after their son tried to kill himself would probably be seen as admitting some level of guilt in how he got to that point I hate them and I will one day best them in physical combat.

But after that night? And after the three day psych hold where he also happened to be going through the worst of the withdrawals while in a psychiatric ward (I cannot imagine any of that week was fun for him in any way, shape or form)? That's a new beginning, a completely fresh start. Mouse hit rock bottom and the only place to go from there is up, which brings us to the bridge:

I'm so scared I'll end up back home Everybody says that I'm close At the bottom of a hill Nowhere to go but over it

After all of that, even years later when he's part of Intelligence and things are going well, there's still some fear there. A part of him is always afraid that he'll end up in the same kind of situation - he'll spiral back into the drugs and his depression, or he'll end up in a situation where someone else is making all of the choices for him and controlling his life the way his mother did. And, honestly, the Over it bridge in that context reminds me of 4x05, too, when he voices that fear to Jay.

And the key change in the last chorus adds to that energy, for me. It adds to that vibe of something has changed, while somehow staying very much the same. Mouse is still very separate from the life he'd been living for two and a half decades, still cut off from his parents, still mostly alone in all of it except for Jay. But the outlook is different. There's a sense of "this is the same situation I've been in for a while, but it doesn't have to stay that way forever."

Got my rent to pay, but I'm broke All my shoes are down to the soles Yeah, my bed is still on the floor And I'm so over it, over it Everybody's falling in love While I'm stumbling home, still drunk Twenty-something, down on my luck And I'm so over it, over it

Over It captures the energy of that very specific era from start to finish - from getting kicked out, to rock bottom, and the beginning of the upswing after that - and I love the song so much already. I've only had this full song for 24 hours but I'm basing like 85% of my happiness on it and this rollercoaster of emotions it's been causing me today.