#but he emotionally matured as well. her departure certain helped put things into a better persepective. he finally comes to realize just.

[kash-phia]

greenie

[shimmershae]

Some, okay a lot, of pre-mid season (tri? season) finale thoughts.  As if you actually asked for them, lol.

And no, I haven’t actually watched the last episode yet.  I’ve been putting it off all morning.  For reasons.  Reasons that I felt the inexplicable need to put on paper, er, screen.  

If you care at all to read the purging of my fatigued TWD fangirl mind, please look beneath the cut.  Fair warning.  It’s long so pull up a chair maybe, lol.  

I’ll admit it.  The spoilers indicating a significant lack of Carol/Melissa content has dampened much of my enthusiasm and there wasn’t all that much to start with.  

Let me tell you why--

The season, so far, has been woefully unbalanced in favor of the Reaper storyline and the Maggie/Negan conflict (which ties back to the Reaper storyline by the flimsiest of strings) and I’m just not invested.  

Why?  

Well, it’s multifold.  

#1 reason why?  Having a third of the last season ever of TWD devoted to going inside “the lions’ den” of villains I have no emotional connection to or curiosity about is a big fat fail.  

You might say “but there’s the Daryl double agent” aspect and I say “so fucking what” because it was so poorly conceived and has felt like such a WTF set of fraying puppet strings for this plot Angela was apparently jonesing to tell from the GO, damn the torpedoes she had to know where inevitably coming her way.  

Seriously.  I had talked myself into accepting that which I could not change, citing Daryl’s emotional brokenness after Rick.  Convincing myself he’d lost his anchor to goodness and hope and fulfillment in his years of self-imposed exile from Carol and what was left of his family and to a certain extent?  I can still by that explanation.  But really.  It’s the Leah of it all.  

Let me attempt to explain.  

To do that, maybe I should detail how I’ve always perceived Daryl.  

Daryl, IMHO, began this journey with us and the rest of Team Family with a figurative fortress erected around his true, core self.  

He was prickly.  Defensive to any overtures of kindness because he inherently did not trust them.  Loathe to form any real connection to anyone other than Merle, his blood.  

Daryl balked at the possibility of emotional connection and flinched in learned fear from physical touch.  

He did not recognize or accept affection or respect at face value because it was something rarely shown to him before.  

Anybody else remember that childhood abuse book from Consumed?  You know.  One of those first times the showrunners/writers dumped a character nugget in our laps and left it to us to do all the backstory in our own imaginations so they didn’t have to enrich their own characters beyond the scratch and sniff, wham bam this is who they are work?  

Anyway.  We were left to extrapolate from that what most of us h ad already suspected--that Daryl’s formative years were already a living hell before the ZA ever happened.  

So he was standoffish.  He didn’t form emotional connections lightly and physical intimacy was something light years out of his comfort zone.  

Until Carol.  

Daryl’s defenses started to crumble from the very start with Carol because she piqued his interest.  He looked at her, watched her withstand Ed’s abuse, and recognized something of himself.  

Against his will, Daryl started to care and when Carol lost the one good thing that had come out of her miserable life with Ed--Sophia--Daryl’s core identity started to be revealed to us and probably?  To himself after burying it so deep for so long.  

Long story short?  Daryl connected with Carol pretty quickly on a base level through the trauma of Sophia’s loss.  

The real connection, the emotional work it too to peel all those protective layers away took more like--like planting a flower from seed and tending it to help it survive and flourish.  

Simply said?  The work was put in and Daryl bloomed with Carol’s (and Team Family’s) care.  They all put in varying degrees of work but Carol planted the seed of his “belonging.”  

And the thing about Daryl?  Once he bloomed?  He grew strong.  He stretched toward the sun.  

He and Carol essentially bloomed and fought their way toward the sunlight together.  

And little by little, Daryl learned to accept the kindness, trust, and love he always deserved.  

From that newly confident man emerged a Daryl not so fearful of forming connections and none have ever been more powerful than his connection to Carol.  

I’ll spare ya’ll the paragraphs of how Daryl and Carol gravitated toward each other like magnets no matter the means of separation.  

I’ll just spell it out like this:  their bond supersedes all others, even Daryl’s bond with Rick.  And with Daryl only accepting affection from those he trusts implicitly, Carol and Daryl have been the only potential “romantic” pairing that has ever fully made sense for his established character.  

At least the character before Angela launched the grenade of Leah into the mix.  

Leah was a fail from the start.  

And you know what?  I’m thinking that was largely intended (for various reasons) but I still think they could have shown Daryl as receptive to having a “romantic” relationship to those willfully blind to the possibility that he’s actually been in a “romantic” relationship with Carol since Season 2.  Never mind that Carol and Daryl haven’t (yet) crossed certain physical boundaries yet.  Emotionally? They are already there even if neither is able to admit it out loud with the actual words yet.  But I digress.  The people that never wanted to “see” Carol and Daryl as “romantic” because they couldn’t fathom Daryl as seeing Carol in that light had already deemed that Daryl just didn’t feel that way about her, that maybe he didn’t feel that way about anybody (if they couldn’t have their way and have him feel that way about their preferred choice for him, they preferred him alone), and Angela wanted to show them differently.  To show them the light.  

That said, if Angela was so hellbent on doing Leah?  There were a multitude of better ways.  

Here.  I’ll give you one of them.  

Daryl isolates himself from his family after Rick’s “death” same as he did in Angela’s version.  

Carol’s been being pulled more and more to the Kingdom because Henry’s needing a mother figure is like catnip to her hurting natural-born, hurting Mama’s heart.  So Daryl’s anchor to the man he’d matured into, the one with all these earned emotional attachments, is reeled back in, little by little, leaving him unmoored.  

Dog literally runs into him just as before.  It hardly makes sense given how young and floppy and uncoordinated puppies are and thus vulnerable to danger, but this is the least of things we need to worry about suspending disbelief for right?  ;)

Dog and Daryl continue to have these run ins until Daryl decides to retrace the puppy’s clumsy trail and viola!  He finds Leah’s cabin and Leah inside.  She levels the same shotgun at him, they have a standoff, until---

Leah suddenly lowers the gun and incredulously says Daryl’s name.  

That’s right.  One simple change and Daryl and Leah have an undefined past already.  

Daryl doesn’t completely let his guard down because he’s Daryl, but he relaxes enough that we see he doesn’t immediately regard Leah as dangerious to his own well-being.  

From that point on, instead of tying Daryl up and threatening him, we could have been told the story of how they knew each other from before.  

My version goes a little something like this--

Daryl met Leah through Merle.  Merle, in turn, met Leah through the military before he got discharged.  He and Leah had an ongoing “I scratch your itch if you scratch mine” thing and Leah?  Well, she always had a bit of a soft spot/interest in Daryl that Daryl never really returned.  

The thing is, though?  With losing the chosen brother that filled the hole left behind by his lost blood brother Merle and losing Carol to her chasing after a chance of a new family (because she feels Daryl’s out of her reach too, our too blind and stupidly, silently in love idiots)?  Daryl finds himself embracing the shared memories however minimal of that brief past and his grief and loneliness leave him receptive to Leah’s eventual advances in ways he never was before.  

We’re still given hints of their unfolding relationship and we still don’t like it, but it makes more sense for Daryl to cling to the past when he feels he’s lost his future.  

Leah still gives her ultimatum (there’s a reason she gravitated toward Merle in perhaps his most toxic state, she’s more than a little fucked up too) and it’s not as much of a hard sell that Daryl might be pulled in Leah’s direction when he feels Carol is all but lost to him.  

Hell.  They could have even explicitly discussed Carol.  But wait!  Angela would have never allowed that because she doesn’t want to shatter all the crackship dreams in one fell swoop.  

But the story from that point on could have continued just as it has and probably I still wouldn’t have liked it but I could have at least bought it somewhat and understood it.  

Obviously, it didn’t. 

I don’t buy the Leah of it all.  Angela built that “relationship” with monopoly money and it shows.  

Because I don’t buy Leah period.  I don’t buy Daryl giving even giving a shit about trying to or feeling like there’s a snowball’s chance to redeem her so I’m not engaged whatsoever with this Daryl double agent story and him even givign her crumbs about his real family.  

That part rings false.  

So that’s a big problem right there and we haven’t even gotten to the other part I don’t buy.  

You know what else I don’t buy?  

#2?  

Why the hell are the Reapers so bloodthirsty for Maggie’s departure from this mortal coil?  

Without giving better reasoning than they’re just cray-cray, the entire faceplants and considering it’s taken up about 70% of 11A’s focus?  I’m pissed.  

Because, IMHO, they should go big or go home on this to give it any entertainment value because it’s all stale, recycled air if not.  

Maggie’s been established as a much darker character this season.  Which led me to believer the Reapers probably had a legit beef against her, but it seems Angela is reluctant to go all that way down the rabbit hole and doesn’t want to commit to what could be a more entertaining and potentially fascinating story than just Maggie’s in the right, the Reapers are just evil.  

Maggie is right about Negan, IMHO, but she’s also wrong in not listening to him when what he’s saying reeks of simple common sense.  Ignoring sage advice makes her seem more like an angry toddler stamping her feet in defiance than the leader they are so bound and determined to tell us she is.  

You know what?  The window for me to give more than the half a fuck I’m giving right now as they beat this dead horse to dust closed when Maggie decided letting Negan rot in the ASZ jail cell was enough and spared him when she finally had her best chance to end him once and for all.  

Maybe if they stopped having the same damn conversation and they didn’t take up 20% of the screen time left after the boring Reapers/Leah shit, I would be less resentful but I’m not and again, I’ll tell you why.  

BECAUSE.  We are in the last season of the OG TWD ever and this show has chosen to waste screen time on stories nobody cares about to the exclusion of the ones we’re yearning for more of.  

Like ASZ.  We’ve barely seen more than an hour of the eight hours devoted to Carol, Aaron, Rosita, Lydia, Judith, Kelly, Jerry and Co. in total.  Especially since they’ve been trying to establish the Commonwealth on the side, too.  

I mean, I never really expected to dig the Commonwealth so my expectations for it were lower than low so they’ve been exceeded at a miniscule level.  But I expected and hoped for ASZ and those characters we’ve cared the most about to receive much more emphasis and the fact that they haven’t in this last season so far has been the biggest FAIL.  

And okay.  Selfishly, I want more Carol.  She’s like salt.  She makes almost everything go down better.  

But really. Give me more of all the characters we actually care about, please.  The Reapers and the offshoots from that story wheel aren’t it.  I love Daryl but I hate this retread story for him.  Leah is a weak point that pressed upon?  Makes this weak ass arc collapse.  Maggie and Negan are giving us nothing new.  They are the definition of the word STALEMATE and that’s not what you want or need on the finale season of a show.  

Yes, I have enjoyed the majority of the episodes overall, but that was because the moments I loved I weighted more than the ones I didn’t and know they have the most impact on the show down the road.  

Probably 11A will fare better when all is said and done and the show can be binged but standalone?  It’s been an overall disappointment and that saddens me more than I can say.  

Anyway.  I’m going to stop rambling now and try to psyche myself up for episode 8.  I’ll be back with thoughts on it later, maybe.  

Sorry for the word vomit, but I felt maybe I could in someway give voice to some of the feelings floating around out there and let you know that you are not alone.  

Until later, lovelies.  

[writingcommons-blog1]

“Fairy Tales” by Meredith M.

It was July 29th. The mutual feelings of nervousness, happiness and sadness seemed to blend together with our company. We were standing outside my house, it was nearing about eleven o’clock in the evening. We were barely even strangers. I remember more than anything the wind, how warm it was, how it seemed to stir my insides, all the feelings coming up now, they had been hidden before, and now they were keeping me from moving. Once I walked inside the night would be over. I wouldn’t see him again for five months. We both knew this, so we stayed glued in place, just on those steps outside my house. Neither of us wanted the night to end, so we controlled it the best we could. No matter how sad I felt, I couldn’t help but smile. I remember his as well —it was a strange one, one I haven’t yet seem to come across again. But the utter bittersweetness of this, of meeting so soon and having to leave so soon, it was nonetheless unnerving—so I think all I was compelled to do was smile. I considered myself lucky to have even met him, right now, only to leave… Something in my mind knew that this was different, it was one of those fleeting feelings that grabbed at everything inside me, that somehow this boy would remain a part of my life forever…

Could it be love at first sight?

My mother always told me that teenagers could not fall in love—deep, true love. To her that was only an adult thing, like R-rated movies and wine. I didn’t fully believe this. Not wanting to tell her any different, I said I understood. I was careful not to say “the L word.” Many other people fear “the L word” in terms of commitment. I feared it because it was somehow beyond my own capacities now, a forbidden thing. Teenagers couldn’t fall in love simply because they were teenagers, but two strangers on reality television were convincing enough to persuade an entire audience of middle aged mothers that love was real. This couldn’t make sense to me. It sounds silly, but why should we deny someone their feelings because of age? I refrained from ever discussing this with my mother, because even my own beliefs felt immature. Anything I knew I wanted to say would be countered with my age and lack of experience. I would be labelled as another melodrama. Like any child wanting to please their mother, I didn’t want to seem like another angst-enveloped juvenile. I had a desire to be mature in front of my mother, to be an exception. But this struggle of wanting to be someone for her and the person I wanted to be for myself constantly prodded at my insides. I wasn’t sure why I denied myself, but it became my identity. I deprived myself of what I felt in order to seem like someone else—an adult.

The denial continued to be apart of me. I was hurt physically and emotionally by the experiences this ideology led me through. I couldn’t seem to ever find anyone that made me think there was some other rhyme or reason behind this. The pain seeped inside my body and I discovered it was I who was causing the harm. Yet I still denied myself. I felt an a numbness, and I wasn’t sure what exactly I told myself—what I wanted to tell myself—anymore. From one episode to the next I soon was going to therapy every week, and the process of attempting to recover my wounds began. After about a year I felt better. Depression was no longer a warning label on me—but instead an ingredient, just like my freckles and strange laugh. But it certainly wasn’t the main ingredient. I was going good, but I still felt undoubtedly strange. There remained a question inside of me. I was searching for something without realizing I was, but I knew that whatever the cause, I didn’t want the hurt I had experienced to be for nothing. I had no idea I was looking for validation, for happiness, for a teammate; but I found it in Drake.

We didn’t have much of a history before this. As I later learned, much like I was suffering before I met him, he was as well -- only we didn’t know each other’s names that time.Even when we look back at it now, we laugh about how much of strangers we were. Drake was a star on the soccer team and that was about the extent I knew about him -- other than the fact that he dressed very nice and also looked very nice. So that was all I let it amount to, just gossipping to my friends. Did you see how good Drake looked today? I always had a slight crush, but failed to learn anything about him. I didn’t want to think too deep and get hurt again. That being said, through mutual friends, we somehow found each other. Anytime we were out I was always extremely conscious of where he was —in the back seat, he was leaning forward a bit—or at the climbing gym—he was behind me, almost a little awkwardly, I wanted to stand next to him, but couldn’t think of a way to start conversation—I just stayed as silent as possible, too afraid of saying something stupid. Somehow he had seen something in me —something I certainly didn’t-- and we went on a couple dates. I had never been more nervous and more happy, a ridiculous level of excited. I remember clearly sitting next to him, turning it over in my head how close we were, and how much I wanted to hold his hand, as it sat alone on the carpet, a few inches from mine. It never occurred to me that this conscious check of physical boundaries would soon include our hearts, as they would melt into one.

Any time I was with Drake I felt a feeling that was so far beyond just simple excitement. It wasn’t fireworks, it wasn’t explosions, it wasn’t a wildfire inside me -- it was something more spiritual, something I couldn’t define with just sensory detail. And it never felt like selfish infatuation. My younger self was crying out, trying to tell me it was just naturally love, but I didn’t acknowledge her, I kept her quiet. I wanted to focus on him while I could. Drake had told me he was leaving for basic training on July 30th. I couldn’t risk getting hurt too early, when we had barely begun. I just met him and I already didn’t want to lose him. But the young girl within me knew it was possible. To her, there was no way it couldn’t be true.

But I suppose it wasn’t technically love at first sight after all (though Drake’s looks could fool anyone.) Our time spent before the night of the 29th was great, but there was that part of me that still denied feeling everything fully. Or maybe that it was just I refused to put a name on it. I had felt the best in a while, it was the kind of happiness that made me realize all the times I thought I was at my high was just a taste of what life could be. Being with Drake made me, and still makes me, feel that way. The strength of the feelings inside didn’t even scare me anymore. I realized, maybe this was the reason to not be in denial.

I couldn’t even hear my mother’s voice inside my head anymore. Maybe I had experienced even the most taboo version of love of all—love at first sight. This is enough silliness to turn away any reader at this point. But as I sit here now, over a year in the future, with the same -- even stronger—feelings than when I first met him, I can be convinced of no other thing. But the question still stands. Does love at first sight exist?

It was July 29th, 2016. I remember riding down the county road to my house. We were in Drake’s sports car, he was taking me home after his going away party. Even though he loved to drive fast, I could tell his foot was hesitating on the gas pump. Neither of us wanted this ride to be over. Once he dropped me off we would be on our own, with our fates up to the heavens to decide. Drake had decided to take control over that. He had taken his last chance to see me to ask if I wanted to be his girlfriend. I think my exact words were “Duh.”

The wind felt different that night, almost sweet. Perhaps it was nature’s way of lightening the clear sadness between us. I remember my house was lit up, but the sky was dark. It reflected in his ebony, smooth hair. We stood there in front of my house, slow to move out of the car, slow to move up to the steps. We said a few empty things just to prolong the time. Truly bittersweet.

Two people, more connected than ever possible, standing in front of each other, knowing that come tomorrow their worlds would be entirely different. Or entirely the same, now they had each other. The speed of it all, how much all of this was up to chance really struck me. The probability that this could all be happening somehow -- it almost felt spiritual. I believe we saw enough of the same feelings in each others eyes that we didn’t need to address it aloud.

To be honest, I don’t quite remember the words that were exchanged, but I am certain that our emotions were synchronized. I have a feeling we were the same, in that moment, on that night. Drake leaned in, hands offering, holding my face, and we kissed for the first time, veiled in that warm July night.  Butterflies was not enough to describe the feelings inside. I felt weightless. I remember he pulled back, we embraced -- the desperate thought of not wanting to let go tearing at both of our hearts -- and that was when I saw him, his face pointed down, hand covering his eyes. Drake was wiping a tear away. Instantaneously I felt it too, and we stood for another second staring at each other, smiling, crying, grasping at the night to last. I have never seen him cry since.

But of course, Drake had to leave. He had a duty. But his departure sparked a new beginning for us both. When I ask him now how he felt, he tells me, That night was the highest point in my life and since that day a new light was shed. It showed me the ever-continuing climb of trust, commitment, and confidence in a relationship I know will last forever.

My younger self asks me, So do you believe in love at first sight?

He makes me think yes.