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unoriginalmess · 3 years

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A Second Mask: Chapter 4

Did that just happen?

Hello guys! It's me. I'm finally writing again. Sorry about the delay. I'm going to explain more at the end of the chapter, but I'm just going to keep the beginning short. So here is chapter 4:

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To say Adrien was concerned would be a huge understatement. He was downright disturbed. Its been weeks and still Marinette hadn't changed back to the happy, peppy, nice girl that he knew. AND SHE WOULDN'T EVEN TALK TO HIM ABOUT IT!

He tried to talk to her for a whole week after her original trasformation, but after the repeated firm rejections, he stopped altogether. He figured that maybe with some space, she might be able to work through whatever she was going through, but at this point, he's losing hope.

When he is feeling this distressed about something, he usually turns to his lady, but she has been acting weird too. Ever since she suggested they start sparring, she's started to show that she is going through kinda a rough time as well. She is the same ladybug when everyone is watching, but when it's just the two of them, she looks sad and tired. She has also started saying some concerning things while they are sparring. She has started talking about how she has started taking being Ladybug and the Guardian more seriously, and how she has less distractions now, which would be a good thing if she didn't say them so sadly.

The good thing is, the sparring has given him a chance to get out his aggression because of the whole Marinette-situation and his anger at his father in a safe environment. He didn't like the idea of hitting Ladybug at first (especially in the face) but with her not holding back on her hits, he felt more comfortable doing the same. It has helped them fight better too. He hopes that whatever Ladybug is going through in her civillian life will work itself out soon, but until then he will be there for her. He just needs to figure out how to be there for Marinette.

•••

Felix was making good progress with Marinette. After they first asked marinette about (insert fashion question of your choice here, I legit know nothing and I didn't have time to research anything for this chapter), she had started answering their questions on a daily basis. After a couple of days of that, she had started to rant to them about different things in the fashion world that were bothering her, exciting her, or confusing her that particular day. In response to that, they had started to respond to her rants with their own opinions on the subjects and even start their own rants.

It had gotten to the point where Felix would now consider them to be friends, though they know that Marinette would never call them as such, it was fine with them. They know she has trust issues, and they can understand why, so they are fine with being friends in everything but a name.

Felix was looking forward to their daily banter as they waited in their seat for Marinette to arrive. When she did, she was followed by a very pissed-looking Alya. Felix turned to look at her and noticed that she had what looked to be tears forming in her eyes. What they didn't notice was the little black butterfly that had entered through the window in the back of the room, and was making a beeline towards her.

•••

Marinette walked to school in yet another one of her newest fashion creations: a pair of oversized grey ripped jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt. She was actually really liking her new look, and the comfort that it offered was just an added plus.

She was actually feeling excited to talk to Felix about Gabriel Agreste's newest fashion flop. They were the only person that she had met that actually cared about fashion as much as her. It made her happy to talk to them. It kind of scared her how excited she was. Shouldn't she be distancing herself from everyone? she thought to herself. No. Felix isn't my friend, they aren't close to me, they are just someone I talk fashion with. Like a coworker, yeah. Totally. Felix is just a coworker. ("Liar" says the inner voice in her head)

She was shocked out of her thoughts when she was pulled to the side by someone as she entered the courtyard. Her mind immediately thought of an akuma, when the person spoke.

"Marinette! Girl," Oh it's just Alya. Wait Alya? "How long are you gonna keep up this cry for attention? Are you really THAT jealous of Lila? I know that Adrien likes her, but that doesn't give you the right to act like this! And you are hanging out with Felix, who accused her of sexually harrassing Adrien on their first day here-?" She looked absolutely furious at her, but Marinette had heard enough. She cut Alya off in the middle of her presumably long rant.

"ALYA!" Said girl jumped at both the inturruption and the tone of voice used, "First of all, this isn't a cry for attention, if anything its a cry for leaving me the fuck alone. Second of all, I'm not jealous of Lila. I'm not in love with Adrien anymore, and haven't been for a while. You knew that I was dating Luka right? Why would I care who Adrien likes? Lastly, I am allowed to hang out with whoever I choose, whether you like them or not. It's none of your fucking business Alya, and if you think that I'm just some jealous, attention-seeker why do you even care?" With that last question she stormed off to the classroom, leaving a speechless Alya behind her.

When marinette sat down in her seat, she just kept thinking about how Alya was just talking to her. How could she think that about her? They used to be best friends, and Alya wasn't even concerned about her not talking to her anymore, she was just concerned about her being "jealous of Lila". It made her so furious that she could feel tears trickling down her face. She sees the black butterfly out of the corner of her eye and without hesitation grabs it out of the air.

(Next part is taken from this post by @bigfatbreak)

"Go ahead and akumatize me- See what happens, Hawkmoth!" She screamed the words with a slight madness that the energy of the akuma was giving her, "Every leash has two ends! I just have to pull until I find where you're holding it!"

At this point, the entire class was frozen in place watching her and listening to her crazed-sounding voice threaten an actual terrorist. Marinette felt Hawkmoth's confusion and terror through the bond. What in the- She's sensing me through the Akuma?! The akuma then started to fly away, and when it couldn't it zapped her hand like it was made of lightning and fluttered through the same window it came from. Marinette felt like she had failed yet again and collapsed down on her desk, muttering, "Uuuuggghh. It escaped anyway... What a waste. I didn't realize that Hawkmoth was such a coward. He usually likes grandstand..."

She was startled when her hand was picked up by Felix's, "You likely scared him off by managing to locate him like that... A risky move, I should mention. I would ask that you not attempt that a second time. No one knows what his akuma is truly capable of. You'll want to keep off of this hand for a while, too."

"Oh, are those the doctor's orders? Why, Felix, it almost sounds like you care about meeee." Marinette was all too amused by Felix's concern for her. She also liked to tease them... AS COWORKERS DO.

"I have an investment in your presence. Now don't be cheeky and let's get you to the nurse's office," They said while holding her wrist and gently pulling her in that direction.

Marinette scoffed, "'An investment in my presence'??"

Felix chuckled while still semi-dragging her by the wrist towards the front of the room, being careful not to hurt her injury even worse, "What did I just say about being cheeky?"

On their way out of the door they passed a VERY distressed-looking Adrien. He seemed to be sharing the sentiment with the entire class of: Did that just happen?

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And thats chapter 4. It is VERY LATE! I know. I've been swamped with work, and when I went to write it, I had zero ideas on how to write this chapter. I never ended up getting those ideas. I just went where my writing took me, so if it doesn't really match the characters that's why. I will try to be better at updating regularly, but it probably won't happen. Sorry to everyone with a normal sleep schedule, but this is the time that I write things. Also I didn't have my outline with me while writing this chapter, so it might not have everything I planned to write in it.

I would like to thank you all for all of the support I've been getting on this fic. Despite all of the chapter delays, you guys have stuck with me through all of it, so thank each and every one of you. I love seeing so many people loving this au as much as I do. Without you guys this story wouldn't exist, and I would've stopped writing it after the first chapter.

As always, constructive criticism is always accepted. I love being able to improve my writing whenever possible.

Thank you for reading. Have a nice day/night/whenever you are reading this. See ya next time guys, gals, and non-binary pals.

Taglist

@queer-illusion @apasponsor @heckinggremlin @1-ahiro-1 @hewantedbeefintheparkinglot @sassakitty @lennauts @rianoel @dorkus-minimus @khneltea @welp-that-was-unexpected @mlnchlymrshmllw @lovelyautumnsunflower @chariphrasis @lovesbooks @komatsuna-yuki @polyvirnl @innocentlyguiltyfrenchfry @qhobias @ive-tumbled-down-a-rabbit-hole @hammalammadamdam @cloudydaysomewhere @alcoholic-barney @basenikon @xxbehindthemaskxx @corporeal-terrestrial @shadowymemoirs @moonlight-densetsuu

#a second mask #feralnette #feralnette au #felinette #miraculous ladybug #ml fanfic #adrien agreste #felix culpa #marinette dupain cheng #here it finally is #idk why some of the tags arent working

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docholligay · 3 years

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An Overwatch Christmas Carol: Stave IV-- The Last of the Spirits

Creeping out of the shadows of the subway station, little bits of shadow began to move toward her, and even as Ana stepped back, they came into a pile on the ground, growing higher and higher. As it grew she heard voices overlapping, little snippets of conversations, things that could not be, in contradiction with each other, wave upon wave of idea, none real and all real, at once.

The shadows became one. It was a tall, imposing figure, the face unable to be seen, its body barely formed, wavering in the air. The darknesses overlapped one another, shade upon shade, and Ana felt a chill knowledge come into her heart that she was looking at her very own future. Darkness upon darkness. Shade upon shade. Moving and whispering in every second.

The future.

“Are you,” her voice sounded so high and so fearful even to her, but she could not control it, “Are you the ghost--the spirit---that Jack and Reinhardt and Tra--my friends. Are you the ghost that my friends have sent to me?”

No face fell into view, just that same blue and grey and black in a muted palette, brushing up against each other, as the spirit nodded and whispers of a dozen different voices emanated from in it and around it.

Nem. Ja. Tak. Of course. Ken. Oui. Yes.

“You’re here,” she walked cautiously about the spirit as it towered over here, “to show me things that haven’t happened yet.”

More nods, and more whispers, and more shadows. The shade of an arm outstretched, and pointed on toward the stairs that led up and out of that tube station, toward the future. No longer was Ana concerned with narrative structure, nor surprised at the spectre of a spectre itself, and yet, in a way that no spirit before it had managed, she felt herself tremble before the gliding shadows and barely audible whispers in some form of human shape before her.

“Are you,” she thought of those that had come before, “A friend?”

No. Nein. Nyet. Nej. La. Meiyou.

She gave a low, shaking chuckle. “Not that you need to be. I’ve worn out my chances with that, I think.”

The spirit did not respond but with the same hand, pointing up the stairs, out of the darkness into a far more terrifying morning gloom. Ana’s eyes followed the hand, knowing where she had to go, wishing she could go anywhere else.

“I am afraid of you,” she steadied her voice, let herself like in that terrible, vulnerable truth, “In a way I have not been of any ghost before you. But I know they would not send you if you couldn’t help me. I will try to learn from you, more than I ever have have before, Spirit.”

A shadowed finger to the stairs, the only response.

“Yes.” Ana tightened her scarf and tied her robe tight, trying to crack a smile, “Come on, then, as Tracer would say.”

They started up the stairs, but they did not so much climb them as the stairs fell down around them, revealing the city as they fell away, and suddenly Ana was on a snow-dusted street, and then the cafe with the black awning and the gingham tables, and then they were inside of it, the two women behind the counter, same as they were every morning.

Ana looked around, not much about the place but a few pastries left here and there, the two women cleaning up tea pots and chatting amongst themselves. She knew this place well, had frequented it many times before, and yet she was nervous to enter it again.

“You seen that old bat of ours lately?” One of them said to the other.

“Oh, the one grumbling every morning, with the coffee? Naw, not for a week or better now.” She did not seem to give the matter any thought, but squeezed out a mop.

“Wonder if she’s died.” From over a wiped off counter.

“Think we might have heard?”

The first burst into a peal of laughter. “From who exactly? Not as if she’s ever with anyone, right? And I’m more noticing than mourning, mind you.”

The other chuckled appreciatively. “Maybe it’s only that she’s decided to grace someone else with her growling.”

“We should be so lucky, I think!”

The women collapsed into laughter as the sides of the cafe fell away, and then more walls began to be constructed in its place, newspapers on the walls falling away to clean, crisp white, the floor from wood to a highly polished stone, the counter becoming a front desk with pictures behind it, the plaque above them reading For Those Who Gave All In The Cause Of Good.

“Well I don’t know anything about it, just that she couldn’t be reached. Commander Amari said to send someone over later, been two weeks since she checked in,” the little secretary laughed behind the desk, ‘She told me, the agent is either gone rouge or dead, and handed me plans for both, said not to worry till after the holiday. Commander Amari said I should go home to me and mine, it’s nearly Christmas.”

“That was kind of her,” a dark haired man leaned against the edge of the desk, “I think it’s only a handful of us that don’t bother with it on today. You know,” he laughed, “I’d really rather her be rouge. More entertaining, and I don’t have the energy for an official Overwatch funeral.”

“Oh,” she stood up and grabbed her coat, “I doubt there’d be any kind of funeral, even if the devil has taken his own at last. Or a cheap one, none of the trimmings.”

“I mean,” He laughed, “I’ll go if there’s a tea at least. I heard when Commander Oxton died, there was a spread for the gods.”

She slipped on her coat. “Not likely to be that. Maybe a bag of crisps, for the memory.”

They laughed together, him wishing her a Happy Christmas with her family, and again the walls fell away as Ana turned to the spirit. These conversations were so small and could have been insignificant, and yet Ana felt something twisting around her heart, tighter and tighter. It came to her so fast, here with this cold and silent spirit, this lesson, and yet she cursed the Ana of the past, and the present, who had taken so long to see their own lessons.

“I understand, Spirit.” She nodded slowly. “This woman could be me. My life--it does support that sort of treatment, right now. I won’t ever forget this lesson that you’ve taught me, but--what about...my Fareeha? She must--”

But before she could finish the thought, the walls fell away again, and constructed just as quickly, until they were on that same street she had seen with Tracer, in what had been earlier this evening, and so long ago. It was no more impressive than it had been, though certainly more built up, no longer many empty shells of what had been bombed and shot out in the Battle for London, but apartments and a market, a pub and a bakery, all the street looking so much more complete for all of it.

Pharah and Mercy’s home was there, standing where it had before, in a row of newer apartments made to incorporate the old bits of what had been there before the unpleasantness of battle.

The apartment was not at all decorated, a light in the upstairs window the only indication of anything at all. In the dim light it glowed like a candle, beckoning them on. The doors to apartments around them were covered in garland, trees lighting up the windows, but this one was quiet, and undecorated.

“Fareeha.” The name escaped her lips before she could even finish the thought, “I know this part of the story. I mistook Tracer for Tiny Tim but--She must have---” she paused, and looked down at the snow made dull and muddy by the traffic that had already walked by. “She was so angry. And I never did anything. I encouraged it, in her. I told her to set it aside. I never helped her deal with it. And now--”

She looked back to the spirit, who simply pointed to that grey door, a hole opening in it, darker grey still, overlapping colors of the night so much like the spirit itself.

Kommen. Ma. Priyti. Come.

“But, I have to see. Yes.”

She walked into the house, and looked around. Still dark, thought it was fully eight am and if Pharah had been here there would have been a flurry of activity, certainly. She smelled a hint of cinnamon in the air, that must have been wafting over from one of the other close-knit apartments, but she stared and stared up those stairs, where she knew that bedroom sat, where she knew she would have to look and see what all her failures had wrought.

The Spirit pointed up the stairs, not even whispers from its lips as it points, Ana looking up into the hallway that should have been cheerful and bright, but seemed so foreboding, so dull, so frightening. A step. She had to climb.

“Poor Angela.”

It surprised her even as she said it. She had spent so long thinking that Mercy was weak, that she wasn’t built for the work that she had chosen to do, that she would have been better off choosing a softer job, marrying into a softer family. Now, she felt a stirring in her, something that could remember Mercy had lost her parents young, Mercy had seen soldiers crying for their parents in their last moments, Mercy had plucked dead children out of rubble. And she refused to callous. She cried every time.

Maybe she was braver than Ana had ever given her credit for. Maybe she was braver than Ana.

She turned around, nearly up the stairs now, to the Spirit. “Are you going to tell me what happened to their child?”

An outstretched hand, pointing.

Another step. Another turn, another pause.

“Pharah can’t be dead. I know this, because she was mentioned at Headquarters.”

Nothing but that finger, those moving, shifting, shading darknesses. Ana turned around, and took those final steps. Staring down the hallway where the light circled the door, waiting to be opened, knowing she had to do it.

“I can’t imagine Fareeha leaving…”she kept walking, even as she feared it, “Angela must have left her. I should have...This is all my fault. ” She stopped at the door. “Oh no. Angela can’t have died, Spirit, that would be the most unfair thing of all. I could have--I will stop it. I will.”

She rested her hand on that cold, hard doorknob, and let the rage flash in her. Knowing that she would change Mercy’s death, knowing that she would heal Pharah, knowing that she would go back and fix it all. She twisted, and let it open.

Pharah lay in bed, her arm not even on, reading a book in the dim light. The smell of coffee filled the air, and that cinnamon she had been so sure earlier was coming from another house was the cinnamon roll sitting by her side of the bed.

And Mercy’s. Mercy was tucked in next to her, hair piled high on her head, in an oversized t-shirt and her glasses, paging through her own novel. Between them was a little blonde girl, sitting crosslegged and also determinedly reading her own book, a blanket drawn around her shoulders, a battered stuffed sloth tucked into her lap, helping her read.

“Mama,” she turned to Pharah, “Can I have a bite?”

“Of course.” Pharah smiled warmly, and the little girl crawled onto her, mouth open as Pharah chuckled and stuffed a piece in her mouth.

“I love you, Mama.” She chewed on the bun.

“I love you, too,” she swung over her arm and pulled the little girl onto herself, “Don’t talk with your mouth full. You could choke.”

The little girl nodded, and carefully swallowed, then treated Pharah to a sticky kiss, Pharah smiling contently all the while, as Mercy looked on, licking her fingers from her own cinnamon roll. Pharah tucked her own blanket around the little girl, and patted her affectionately.

“We’ll have to dig into the cookies, at this rate. And so early.”

“Oh do we?” Mercy sat up and looked over at the both of them.

“Avi’s stolen most of my cinnamon roll, you see.”

“Nuh-uh!!” Avi protested. “You said I could have a bite, Mama!”

Pharah gave a deep laugh. “I should have made more.”

Ana looked at her daughter as she leaned against the doorframe. She had told herself as she came up the stairs that now was the time when she would see all the mistakes that were made, that now was the dark part of this story, that there was nothing but sadness to be seen here. And yet. It was warmth and coziness and comfort, all. There were none of her fears, either of the old Ana or the new, in this family.

“But I thought…” Ana stepped forward a few steps, staring at Pharah.

There was no red about her at all, no halo about her spelling trouble, just, if anything, the gentle light of a contented love.

The breath left her as she realized.

“It has nothing to do with me.” She felt it catch in her throat. “Her anger...she didn’t need me. She, she let it go herself. Because I mean nothing to her.”

The floor dropped out from beneath her, falling, falling, through all the grey and the darkness, like smoke surrounding her and clouding her, entering into her as she opened her mouth to scream.

And then, as soon as the fall started, it stopped.

She was on the floor of that same raggedy hallway in her apartment building, with that same flickering light, though it seemed somehow even dimmer than the last time. She struggled to her feet as the Spirit materialized beside her, extending that same arm, pointing to the door that she knew, oh, very well indeed.

“Am I--going home?” she looked for a moment, confused, and then let the moment settle in. “No. This is the woman everyone was talking about. This is the woman no one was talking about.”

She took a step.

“I have a question. The future, I mean, these can only be the shadows of what might happen. Things could change, in any moment. This is true of the future, it always is.”

There was no response, not even a whisper, just pointing, pointing. Ana looked at the door, and slowly inched forward, knowing she had to see the truth, knowing she could hardly bear it. She reached out her hand to the knob, and could feel the cold breeze coming from inside the room. She took a shaking breath, and tightened her grip.

She lost her nerve, and pivoted, looking back at the Spirit, so close behind her she could smell those hundreds of smells, just like the whispers, one overlapped over the other.

“I know what’s behind that door. What is the point of any of this? Why bother showing it to me if I can’t change!? It exists only to torment me!”

Ana felt her hand on the doorknob, though she could not remember placing it there, and heard that horrid, dark click as the door creaked open, calling her inside.

“No.” She whispered.

But she looked, because she must look, and there it was, on the terrible, dank, threadbare carpet, but her own self, stone dead where she had fallen. There was a squeaking Ana realized could not longer be coming from the door, and she adjusted her vision a moment, saw two rats eating at the edge of her hand, their own Christmas feast offering the filling warmth Ana never had otherwise.

She cried out, bent against the doorframe. How long had she been here? Days, and no one had noticed she was missing, more than a week, at least, and in that time not one person had reached out to see her, to check on her, to even know that she was dead. How much longer might her body lie there, eaten by rats in the cool of the evening?

Ana looked up at the Spirit, hurt and angry, most of all with herself and her own thousand failures.

“Tell me who you are! Let me at least know the face of my accuser!”

The Spirit stepped back away from her, and slowly, slowly the shadows began to drift, two hands becoming many tiny hands as they ringed around the cowl that hid the face, the horrible face that Ana had asked to see and yet now wished to see no longer, and she took a step back as it pulled away the cowl, like a peel slowly retreating from the fruit.

Pharah’s eyes glowered at her, and Ana shrank back, shaking her head, opening her mouth to apologize, to say something, and then the shades turned and moved and became Waldemar, and then again to Mercy, to Tracer, to Zeina, to Reinhardt, moving and shifting between all these people she had known, all their voices and whispers surrounding her and cutting her as she held back, and then, there it was, locked in and staring furiously: Ana herself. The whispers started, the accusations, everything she had learned and already known coalescing in her head, tying tight around her, and she felt that same chain, cold and hard.

She fell to her knees, grasping at the Spirit.

“Please! I can change! Jack must have sent you because he knew!” The words choked up in her throat and stuck there, tears coming to her eyes, “Tell me these things can be changed. Why show me if these things can’t be changed? A life CAN BE CHANGE--”

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angsty-violet · 4 years

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Agony - Chapter 22

Agony Masterpost

@whumptober2020

When Tuvok woke, he was confused by his surroundings. Usually, he awoke in his cell, on the floor, pressed tightly against the back wall and utterly exhausted. This time, he woke handcuffed to a hard bed. The ceiling above him was white and unremarkable. The most noticeable change was that his mind felt sluggish and slow.

Tuvok carefully assessed his own thought processes. Even while tired, he didn’t have such trouble stringing together thoughts. He knew that hypothermia could make you slow down mentally. It was one of the reasons it was such a killer. You didn’t keep thinking about your survival, your mind wandered, and before you knew it, you had done something that would seal your fate.

However, Tuvok had experienced hypothermia before. He knew well the symptoms and dangers. Although it slowed your processes and made it hard to stay focused, it didn’t affect him this way. He could still think clearly, even if much slower. He was able to continue to operate even if it was at a glacial pace compared to normal.

With this, all of his energy was going towards thinking through his symptoms. He could barely focus on anything but his own heavy eyes. He had no clue of his surroundings or who else might be in the room with him.

“I’ve given you a sedative to keep you from moving around and pulling out the IV. I need to keep you as warm as possible, and that means limited movements and lots of warm liquid. That’s much easier to do when you aren’t moving around a lot. However, as you warm up, your instinct will be to get up and move around. Attempt to generate the heat yourself. I just can’t allow you to do that.”

“What kind of sedative did you give me?” The words came slowly to Tuvok. He pushed through the urge to just lay there and do nothing. He needed to know what was being put inside of him.

“Just something that will slow you down a bit. Not true sedation. That would be dangerous in your state. I just want to make sure you don’t move around, not hurt you in any further. You shouldn’t have been hurt at all. However, you neglected to mention you were from a warm planet and used to heat.”

Tuvok tilted his head. “I hadn’t realized that you liked to have the life stories of each of your victims. More than that, it didn’t seem prudent to give you ammunition in your efforts to torture me into insanity.”

Kell’an frowned and looked insulted. “I want to know everything about you. I also don’t want to torture you into insanity. I want to find someone who won’t be tortured into insanity. That is the entire purpose of my work. Clearly, you haven’t been listening to me.”

“I often choose to ignore people when they are spouting amoral and unstable theories. It isn’t just you. I don’t it with anyone I think is not in their right minds. It is illogical to spend time on something that isn’t worth the effort of listening.”

Tuvok was a little surprised at his own boldness. Up to this point, he had limited how much he said. He kept his more sarcastic thoughts in. Choosing to tread carefully in the waters of crazy that seemed to surround Kell’an.

Kell’an stared at him, mouth open in shock. “I had no idea you really felt that way. The drug must be lowering your inhibitions. If that’s how you really felt, why didn’t you say anything?”

Tuvok narrowed his eyes. It was true that the drug was removing his ability to censor what he said. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try and keep the worst of it inside. “I don’t believe in saying things that would only serve to distress the individual they are directed at. It is illogical that if they aren’t constructive, there is simply no point in saying anything at all.”

Kell’an smiled a little at him. “I suppose that does make sense logically. I forget that you don’t feel spite or annoyance. You aren’t driven to hurt others with your words the way that so many others are.”

Harry Kim was proud of the group he had created to make Tuvok’s return easier. Tom could see it in his eyes. He couldn’t help but take some credit for the ideas that they came up with. As good and right as it seemed, Tom was still concerned about the group itself. They were operating on the belief that they would retrieve Tuvok. That he would come home and then need help.

What worried Tom was how they would take it if he wasn’t there or was already dead. Tom didn’t like to contemplate losing a crewmember who, according to their new friend, had been alive just a little while ago. There was something deeply wrong about going to rescue someone and getting there too late when if they had moved faster, they might have been able to save him.

However, he had to be pragmatic. Tuvok had been there for weeks at this point. Every minute that he spent in the hands of a man torturing him increased the likelihood of not getting out of alive. They still had 3 days to go. Even if he was alive now, he might not be when they got there.

Tom knew it would be a horrible blow to the entire crew’s morale. There had been a distinct mood lift when they searched their crewmember with an actual lead. For the time they hadn’t had anything, the entire ship had felt blanketed with sorrow and hopelessness.

However, the people how had made it their mission to make Tuvok as comfortable as possible when he came back, would take it so much worse. They were pouring their heart and souls into this project. Using it to fuel them until he was rescued. Making action plans and putting all of their hope into it. Retrieving Tuvok would carry them for a long time. It would be the ultimate win. When they were so close to getting them back, losing him might just break them down completely.

#whumptober2020 #no.22 #drugged #fic #star trek voyager #hurt tuvok #injury recovery #angst #pain #torture mention

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stevemoffett · 3 years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s over?” I asked.

“You’re all done,” he said.

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

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

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

“I’ll bet you do,” he replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what does that mean, then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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onwesterlywinds · 4 years

Text

One Last Step

So still this broken melody And therewith shoulder thee One last step only leaving An empty hearth down by the sea

Content warning for suicide. | Contains spoilers through 5.0.

In the weeks before the Calamity, Ahtynwyb Eynskyfwyn often dreamt of a tempest of mythological proportions. In those dreams, the storm would bring itself to bear against the mighty cliffs of Quarterstone, upon which perched her grandparents' cabin. The seas would rise in a deafening pulse with waves fit to level any lesser artifice, breaking against the wall of stone and sending their spray up into the blustering sky.

And she would stand alone at the top of those cliffs and know, even in her dreams, that naught would ever be the same again.

II.

The Cabinet of Curiosities held a trove of books. Throughout her travels, throughout her journeys through ruins long forgotten and civilizations engulfed in war, she had wondered every now and again what works she would preserve if forced to do so - if the only remaining testaments to a culture were the things that she and others like her could carry on their backs and in their minds.

She had seen Doma's answer; Ala Mhigo's, too, was becoming clearer by the day. But the Crystarium's had taken her by surprise for the sheer breadth of it: thousands upon thousands of tomes encompassing the last vestiges of mankind. Each book contained not only knowledge, but the dreams of those who had carried it to safety and given it up for the betterment of all. Each book had been entrusted to the community and its future, free for any to peruse.

And after no more than a morning of taking stock of the catalog, Ahtyn left the library to explore the Crystal Exarch's private collection.

She scanned the topmost shelf in his study, her heart pounding in her ears, until she laid eyes upon a tome she'd spotted from afar earlier in the week. Though slightly shabbier around the edges, its pages far more yellowed than she had remembered, she could not have mistaken it for the world. Her feet carried her across the room in a daze. Once she lifted the book from on high, she massaged the intact spine; as she flipped through the volume leaf by leaf, she found not a single page missing.

No book in the Cabinet of Curiosities could mean as much to her as this one, for none of the books beyond this room had come from the Source. None of them had traveled across time and worlds in the very subject they depicted - the Crystal Tower - and not a single one had been her favorite companion as a child.

Her eyes filled with tears as they rested upon the opening lines:

Once upon a time, four young Warriors of Light journeyed forth to right the wrongs of Allag.

III.

It had been bound to happen sooner or later. Looking back, she had ignored all signs from the beginning that her first-ever adventuring party had not been meant to last. One of their number had an ego; another prioritized too many commitments back home; another found fault with everything the others did. Ahtynwyb, for her part, had spent too much of her time smoothing over the fissures emerging in their group with each passing day. Regardless of how or why they had gone their separate ways, the excuses for why they would never have been a team worthy of legend brought her no comfort.

And on a more practical note, her lack of a party left her that much further from entering the Binding Coil of Bahamut.

Though if she were in the Binding Coil, she thought, she wouldn't be able to see the stars over Silvertear. She could stare at that dusk sky forever, with its gathered clouds still purple-hued over the lake and the Crystal Tower shattering the horizon.

She would be inside that tower soon enough. That had to count for something.

"Ahtyn!"

Cid made to throw her some sort of bread but then, noticing the book in her hands, jogged it over to her instead. It was a flaky pastry the size of her face, wrapped in paper and filled with spiced vegetables and cheese. "Fresh from the Toll. Figured you could do with a pick-me-up after running around the lake all day."

"Thanks, Cid."

Either Cid hadn't yet seen her teary eyes, or he had enough grace not to comment on them. "What's that you're reading? Something of the Scions'?"

She shook her head. "No, I've had this one for a while. It was my grandpa's." She closed the pages on her index finger, the better for him to see the cover emblazoned with the very tower before them without losing her page. "Just some old stories. They're a little childish, but they've always been kinda nostalgic, you know?"

Cid let out a long, low whistle, then thumped her on the back a little harder than she had been expecting. "G'raha!"

From where he sat at the center of Saint Coinach's Find, the young man's ears perked up in the middle of his swig of ale; he jumped to his feet in a single fluid motion. "Y-Yes?"

"You said the key to the tower was in legends, yes? Something that the ancients wouldn't have thought to preserve via tomestones?" Cid beckoned G'raha over with a wave of his arm. "You're going to want to see this."

IV.

"Find what you were looking for, then, hero?"

She gave so great a start that she very nearly dropped her book. Emet-Selch leaned against the closed study door, examining a nearby desk and all the clutter the Exarch had left lying atop it. Ahtyn opened her mouth to tell him he wasn't supposed to be in there, then, given the nature of her own trespass, thought better of it.

"I did," she replied, cautious of the venom with which he spoke the word "hero." "And now I'm going to stay in here and read. Alone."

Emet-Selch cast a conspicuous glance at the tome's cover and heaved another of his sighs. "Hmph. How very tedious."

She pointedly ignored him and turned a page.

"And you say this book has been in your family for generations?" Rammbroes murmured. He rubbed the back of his bald head, a sure sign that he was deep in thought.

G'raha Tia turned the book over to reexamine the front cover, even holding it up to where the tower stood to their north. It was a perfect representation, down to the positioning of each crystalline turret. "Despite the fact that the Crystal Tower has not been seen in millennia," he said, echoing Ahtyn's thoughts perfectly. He returned the book to her, bequeathing it as gently as one would hand over a tool of one's trade. "Could your family be descended from survivors of the Allagan Empire, perhaps?"

She shrugged. "I guess there's that chance, but... we're farmers on one side, and pirates on the other."

"After thousands of years, one could never truly know where one's ancestors-"

"What I meant was," she interrupted, "I think if we were descended from Allagans, we'd have way more family stories to tell about how we single-handedly saved the world."

G'raha squinted at her, then at Rammbroes, who was chuckling somewhere over her shoulder. "She's described Roegadyn culture in a nutshell for you," Rammbroes specified.

VI.

"But how can you throw together two whole worlds without things getting smushed?" she had asked her grandfather once during the climax of one of his stories. "Wouldn’t that hurt a lot of people?"

"Sometimes," he replied. "But other times, it’s just what everyone needs. Ye know what the stories say happens when there’s nothin’ but light. Sooner or later, the darkness comes back, and then what’re ye left with? Ye’ve got to have some some darkness to balance out that light once in a while, aye. Because it’s not light that brings the heroes home at the end, Liveen - it’s balance."

VII.

"What is it that so captivates you about that book, then?" Emet-Selch asked some twenty-odd pages later. She had no idea if he'd ever left the study at all - but strangely, even after his constant pestering in the Rak'tika Greatwood, she found him something of a welcome presence. There was, after all, no danger of him revealing her.

"It reminds me of my grandpa. And of a lot of friends."

He let out a noise that might well have been a yawn. "How quaint."

"I thought you were supposed to be a big fan of stories like this one."

"This may surprise you, but omniscience is not among my many talents. I'm afraid I don't know the first thing about it."

"Sprawling epics, dramatic motivations, tragic flaws. I thought Solus ate that shit up." The mention of that name caused him to stop examining his gloves and start actually looking at her. "At least," she continued, with some smugness, "that was what I heard on the Prima Vista."

Emet-Selch's lips twitched into a brief smile as he let out a barely perceptible chuckle, leaning to rest against the nearest wall with folded arms. "So my grandson's suspicions were well-founded: you did meet with Jenomis after all."

"I have."

"He spoke truly. I never will say no to a well-constructed story - particularly not from a master of their medium, as Jenomis is. It's fitting that you were able to bear witness to one of his performances. I can only imagine his resultant works will be better served for your collaboration."

Her eyes were too busy tracing the next line of text-

For why would the hero have thought to look for the villain in her own shadow?

-to immediately register Emet-Selch's words. By the time she did, they took her somewhat aback. "...I think that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

VIII.

"Hey. Alphinaud."

The crunching footsteps to her right slowed but did not halt. The fulm-deep Coerthan snow made it difficult for them to traverse side by side, but despite lacking her long stride, weather-resistant armor from the Crystal Tower and overall affinity for the cold, Alphinaud had always preferred to keep an even pace with her on the road whenever possible.

"You okay?"

Alphinaud did not stop, even surpassing her on the wooded trail. He made some small noise to indicate he was paying attention but otherwise did not turn to look at her.

"Don't worry. It should start to warm up once we get closer to Mor Dhona, especially around the next hill."

He gave another noncommittal nod, though he shivered a bit through his tunic.

"I wanted to ask you something," she continued. She followed in his steps, mostly so as not to leave him behind - but also, if she had learned anything over the past few weeks, it was that eyes and ears truly were everywhere, and that a misplaced shout could be fatal. "While it's just the two of us." The understanding that Haurchefant would be too overbearing to take part in such a delicate conversation would have to go implied.

"G-Go on," said Alphinaud.

"What Ilberd said, back at the Observatorium, about the prisoners he'd taken into custody." She waited. "About how they would be thoroughly interrogated."

"Do you find fault with his methods? If so, allow me to raise your concerns with him. I imagine he would be amenable to finding an alternative method of..." He trailed off, presumably to search for an acceptable word.

"Gathering intelligence?"

"Precisely."

"You're well within your rights to ask him what his methods actually are, Alphinaud," she said. "And to tell him to stop, if he goes further than you'd like. But if he's one man operating alone, without your oversight-"

"Thank you, my friend," Alphinaud snapped, "but I would rather we speak of something else for the remainder of our journey."

They continued their trek back to Mor Dhona in utter silence.

IX.

The waves over Quarterstone had ebbed since the Calamity, but the ocean still reached a far greater height than she remembered from her youth. She would never get used to such a view, even less so now that her grandparents' house no longer stood: it had been drawn over the cliffs not even a year after their family had relocated to Moraby, its foundations too weathered to withstand the constant onslaught from a changed world.

Grehswys merely sipped at her wine, looking as much at the road on which they had traveled as she was at the horizon they'd memorized throughout their shared childhood. At length, she passed the bottle over to Ahtyn, and she took as long of a swig as she could get away with.

"There's one thing I've come to appreciate about adventurers," her sister said. "You've learned how to talk about shite like this. Most of you, at least."

"What do you mean?"

"You've met folk from all over the world, right?"

"Right."

"So you've had to describe this to them, if it ever came up. What it meant to you, that is, and what it meant to lose it."

Ahtyn racked her brain and was surprised to recall several such conversations: with the Leveilleur twins, with Mupal, with Sairsel, with a full bar at the Sandsea on at least a couple occasions. For something that she had thought of as some great weight, she had brought up the topic more than she'd thought. "I... I guess so. Yeah."

Grehswys shrugged. "That's what's so horrid about staying here. We all went through it, but... we just keep it bottled up. A story everyone knows but never tells."

The void was wearing on her in subtle ways. Or perhaps it was that the creatures she'd fought here had been stronger than any others she'd encountered throughout her adventures thus far.

But the Cloud of Darkness was fading with each passing second. Devoid of its summoned monsters, devoid of immediate purpose, the air in the void was beginning to grow stale - heavy. All around and above her lay a roaring expanse of abyss. It was dizzying to be so entrenched in the dark, save for a ripple of aurora to mark a semblance of light at the end of the tunnel, or a silver lining, or some other grandiose metaphor she didn't have the energy to engage with.

"Right," said Aoife Mahsa beside her, waving a hand in front of her own face. "So... what now."

Ahtyn took as deep of a breath as she could, though the burgeoning void was constricting her lungs with a sickly sweet sort of taste. "Find a way back to Hydaelyn," she said, and ran further toward the aurora. "I'll find G'raha and Nero!"

"Yes!" Aoife replied, bounding in front of her before she could protest. "WE find a way back to Hydaelyn, with G'raha and Nero! You're really on the ball, aye!"

"But Aoife-"

"Don't you 'but Aoife' me!" the bard scolded. "I'm not leaving you alone in here! Besides - if you got lost in the void, Cid and Baithin will each give me at least one lecture!"

Her eyes suddenly stung, and this time, she didn't have any light to blame it on. "Okay," she said, and stepped straight into the oblivion stretching out before them both. "So uh... dibs left void?"

XI.

Ahtyn knelt in the black sand to gather up the last of her belongings from the camp, the better to hide a sudden spike in her anxiety - the first distress she'd felt since wandering along the coast of Valnain more than a moon ago. With Ultima defeated and the Orbonne Monastery cleared of its haunts, Hrjt would have no cause to leave her home for the foreseeable future.

And Ahtyn had yet to overcome an inability to remain in touch.

Her movements stilled over her pack as she considered her impending return to the life of a solo traveler; then a slender finger tapped her twice on the shoulder. Ahtyn turned to find Hrjt's outstretched hand, and Eternal Wind clasped in it.

"You forgot this in my robes," Hrjt said.

There was such earnestness on her companion's face, without a hint of mischief or irony, that Ahtyn couldn't bite back her chuckle. "Okay, sorry. This isn't my strong suit."

"What isn't?"

"I should've just been direct. Hrjt, it's a gift."

"But-" The ends of Hrjt's ears twitched as she frowned. "Oh, no. I couldn't. You said this book was your favorite."

"It is! Which is why I think you should have it."

Hrjt gestured outward with her other hand - the one holding her staff - toward the remaining visible stretch of black coast. Through the heavy fog, Ahtyn could barely make out the dark tides forming a powerful rip current stretching far out into the Valnard Sea - and for once, the sight did not make her wistful for La Noscea.

"Ahtyn," said Hrjt, firmly. "This is how I live. I won't be able to keep it safe or dry with me."

"That's fine," she replied, even as the wind cast a fine spray across her cheek.

"You wouldn't wish to leave it to someone? A future child, or a pupil? Besides, what if I never have the chance to read it?"

"That's shite and you know it; you'll get at least four hundred more years than me."

"And what should happen if I'm instead captured by a voidsent and become lost to the lightless abyss forever?"

Recognizing her deadpan jest for what it was, Ahtyn grinned. "That's just depressing."

"There is, as you would say, a non-zero chance."

"Okay." Ahtyn held up both palms in surrender. "If you really aren't sure, I'll take it back."

She waited, unsure if she had been too pushy from the first. As Hrjt hesitated, her eyes gleamed with a sort of shyness Ahtyn had yet to see from her. "If you're sure... I'll keep it as safe as I am able. I promise."

"I'll visit you again soon," Ahtyn said, and meant it.

XII.

She could not reconcile the sight before her with the weeks of intimacy she had come to take for granted. The aether tugged at her senses; it sparked in the air like diamond dust as Ysayle Dangoulain made her descent against the sickly green sky. She fell faster than gravity, faster than flight. And yet time itself slowed as Ahtyn watched her from the airship, with Cid's hands pulling her back at the arms and the sounds of her own screams deafened in her ears.

She had never, never been able to reconcile the vibrant woman she'd come to know with the dead-eyed primal she had once fought, so long ago, when she'd still been convinced that doing so would bring about Eorzea's salvation. For all of Shiva's conjured majesty, she could convey none of her ideals except to those already devoted. They had had countless conversations during their Dravanian journeys; they had spoken in Ishgardian and Common and tongues long since lost to other mortals, sharing in the wonder of their blessing and burden, partaking together in the joys of being understood as equals. Shiva's summoner was far more wondrous bereft of her power. Ahtyn doubted, even now, that the same could be said of herself.

It was none of it fair. Ysayle was not meant to be the one to fall-

The hull of the Agrius froze, then shattered, then exploded - and soon the flames from the dreadnought's engine melted every last trace of ice. Ysayle's aether, too, was beyond her reach forever.

XIII.

"There are so many things I don't understand," said the young Minfilia, staring out across the hillside at the ribbons of Light pouring over Lyhe Ghiah. "But most of all, I've been wondering... how you manage to do it all on your own."

It was a question she'd been asked time and time again - only this time, she didn't wave away the girl's concerns. She didn't deflect with humility, insisting that the Scions had been at her side all the while or some such. Someday Minfilia would have to tread this same path, as her namesake had before her. Honesty would be the kindest possible gift.

"Well," she began, and the word hung in the air for a little while. "It helps that I've always been the type to want to save the world. Even when I was your age. Mostly I wanted someone, anyone, somewhere down the line, to know that someone tried to make things just a little bit better." She didn't say that when she was Minfilia's age, that desire had usually manifested as an abstract, foolhardy vision of self-sacrifice. "And when it's something you've grown up feeling, when it's that innate to you-" Twelve, and she thought she'd had it bad with merely a preference for books; from what Urianger had divulged, Minfilia had spent her childhood locked in a tower with only a name and a responsibility. "-it's usually less about finding the will to go on and more about... not burning yourself out, or spreading yourself too thin. I'd say that's the hardest part."

Minfilia nodded in the direction of her knees. "It must be difficult," she murmured. "Thancred's told me only a little of what you've done, but I... I can't begin to imagine it."

"It helps when you can be yourself in the day-to-day," she admitted. "Though of course, that's much easier said than done." It was why she had never come around to feeling comfortable in Ishgard: the more Edmont and Aymeric and all the rest came to revere her, the more she wondered if any of them had ever truly known her. "Aside from that, I try to vouch for others as often as I can. It relieves some of the pressure, it helps make some real allies, and... and sometimes it gives people another hero to focus on for a bit. Much as people don't want to hear it, it's not healthy to rest all your hopes and dreams on one person."

From beside her, Minfilia took in a deep, shuddering breath.

"D-Don't get me wrong," Ahtyn stammered. "I'm not saying I think everyone has to be strong enough to look after themselves. That's not a charitable way to think about things, and it doesn't account for all the people who haven't had a choice - like people from occupied territories." She was rambling now. "And there are some real advantages to having a single hero, like being able to take decisive action when it matters most. But I've seen it go wrong: once people get it in their heads that one person, one being can fix all of their problems, they'll go to all sorts of lengths to make it true."

She breathed in deeply, staring hard at the Light. "And honestly, I thought it would be different here in the First, when I heard people resented their Warriors of Light. I thought it'd mean they'd rely less on heroes and more on each other. But I still see it with the Exarch, and with you, and-"

She took one look at Minfilia's wide eyes and finally had the sense to curb her thoughts.

"I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to get so heavy, and none of this is your problem, and... and I don't know how much it makes sense. Long story short, it's just... it's something that gets me because it's..."

"...Because it's not fair," Minfilia finished.

XIV.

Ahtyn had come face to face with a siren before - the creatures that sang to sailors of their purported destinies. Once she had seen a captain walk into a siren's arms against the heeding of his crewmen, and the gory aftermath that had come of that scene had haunted her dreams for nearly a week. And as a song foretelling her own destiny rang out through the reaches of Azys Lla, she wished she could know its promises to be false.

The Goddess regarded her with heavy-lidded, dispassionate eyes.

It’s not light that brings the heroes home at the end, Liveen.

And then the scales tipped.

For a moment she was weightless. She fell through the golden air, watching Sophia grow ever further from her. When the others righted, she did not; with another lurch, with her own balance stymied, she tipped backward over the edge.

"AHTYN!"

A hand, small but strong, grabbed her at the wrist. It hoisted her, perhaps with the added strength of others, upwards and upwards until her feet regained their purchase on the platform and A'zaela Linh's worried face returned into view.

"Thanks!" she called. Sylvan Rain and Crimson Bull were holding off the primal in her momentary absence, pushing back against the Goddess' Daughter with their shoulders and no shortage of will to keep her from reaching Arae'sae and Nivelth. And still, for a moment, she merely stood. For the briefest of instants, the primal's call had granted her a vision clearer even than the Echo, though now it faded from her like water in her hands. She made to charge and then, in a terrifying second, realized she could not find her shield; only when A'zaela handed it back to her did she raise her sword to provoke the Goddess to face her again.

"How's that for judgment?!" she cried. "Now come and get me!"

XV.

No one spoke in the Ocular. Not even a plate of the Exarch's famous sandwiches could tempt them into conversation after their discoveries in the Qitana Ravel. For all their earlier bickering, Y'shtola and Thancred cast identical glowers of fatigue. Alisaie sat cleaning her rapier with single-minded dedication; Alphinaud paced from one end of the hall to the other. Urianger thumbed through a tome Ahtyn didn't recognize from the Exarch's private library. Minfilia pivoted her gaze from one Scion to the next, always folding and refolding her hands in her lap.

"Maybe this is hypocritical," Ahtyn said at length. "But I don't think this really changes anything."

They all turned to her.

It was wishful thinking, but if she had to continue to ponder in silence the possibility that she could be tempered, she would likely lose her mind.

"I agree," drawled Emet-Selch from out of nowhere behind her. "Listen to the hero. Continue your course." He took a bite of a sandwich and, presumably unsatisfied, set it back down onto the tray. Only Minfilia had the energy to glare at him.

"What I mean is," she continued aggressively, "if it's true that Hydaelyn is a primal, then anything we do to try to change or mitigate that fact could have serious consequences for the Source, if not other worlds."

Urianger nodded his agreement. "This matter requireth deliberations with our esteemed colleagues in the Source."

She opened her mouth to promise that she would raise the topic as soon as she could, but the Light suddenly heaved in her chest. The wave of nausea cut off any of the promises she might have made, any reassurances that the foundations of their worldview would remain intact.

XVI.

Even with the power surging around and through him, she held out a hand. She held out a hand as though doing so could undo all that he had schemed and dealt throughout the past half year, as though she could pull him from that precipice through her own sheer will.

Instead Ilberd Feare stared directly into her eyes, his eerie grin widening, as he stretched out the hands that held the eyes of Nidhogg and leaned further and further backward-

"COWARD!" Alphinaud screamed.

The Griffin gave one last tip of his head - a nod in her direction, it seemed - and she was seized with a horrific calm as he fell from Baelsar's Wall.

XVII.

The knock, quick and quiet, came upon her inn room door at nearly three in the morning. She staggered out of bed in a flash, halfway to grabbing her pauldrons. It could only be another Eulmoran attack, or some other initiative that required her urgent participation, and Captain Lyna would just have to get over her dishevelment. Then she threw open the door and found Alisaie in a robe and nightgown, carrying a pillow.

"May I borrow your floor?" Alisaie asked, conveying somewhat more consciousness than Ahtyn had expected, given the hour.

"Uh, yeah," she grumbled, albeit before she'd fully processed the question. "Of course."

Alisaie slipped inside, kicking off her slippers with enough force for them to land yalms apart. "It seems neither Alphinaud nor I can sleep. Only he insisted on making cocoa, and conversation-" Ahtyn could not determine from Alisaie's tone which of these she held in greater disdain. "-and I simply didn't have the heart to tell him I wasn't remotely interested."

Despite the proposal she'd agreed to, Ahtyn shepherded Alisaie toward her bed and took the floor for herself. There was more than enough room for them to share the mattress; then again, she had experienced all too often Alisaie's sleep-kicking during their expeditions in Gyr Abania and the Far East, when she or Lyse would have to share accommodations with her. The sight of the smallest among them enjoying her own sleeping mat was one that had never failed to bring Gosetsu to fits of his boisterous laughter. One by one, the memories of their adventures flickered through her head, bringing with them the crushing realization of how much of Alisaie's life she had missed while they had been worlds apart.

With the both of them settled and the lights long extinguished, Ahtyn whispered, "How are you holding up, really?"

She had expected a groan of frustration, or a muttered curse. Instead, Alisaie rolled over and stared in the general direction of her voice. "As always, I'm worried for you. ...I suppose that's why I can't sleep."

XVIII.

Her first thought, exhausted as she was from the interdimensional battle with Shinryu and the mere sight of Zenos lying dead in a pool of his own blood, was that Lyse looked beautiful with her arm stretched aloft. Her second thought was that Lyse had an incredible singing voice, and so did Ashelia Riot, though the latter was leaning the entirety of her weight against her husband and trying to look inconspicuous while doing so.

And as she stared out from atop the ramparts of Cotter Tor, she had never been prouder to stand among a crowd. For once, for once, all was put to rights. She did not quite know how she had come to stand here, beside Arenvald and the pennant, with a throng of Ala Mhigans far below. Between her and those people - the people whom she had played her own part in protecting - there lay a drop of half a thousand fulms.

"Ahtyn!" Lyse clasped her from behind at the shoulders, giving her a little shake to pull her from her reverie. The others behind her had begun to disperse back into the royal palace. "We're regrouping back at Porta Praetoria. Unless you need a minute?"

She shook her head. Better to look into Lyse's eyes than to peer into that empty, dawn-hued sky; better to have Lyse's hands on her than to trust in her own feet not to take her over the edge.

XIX.

It was easiest to take hold of his hand, crystalline though it was. They both needed the fresh air, but there was little to be found, even on the tall cliffs of Kholusia: she could scarcely smell the sea over the tinny smog from the dwarven forges.

But the Exarch did not appear to mind. He recovered slowly but steadily from his moment of collapse, his breathing growing more and more regular the longer they shared their simple contact.

"Construction on the Talos is proceeding apace?" he asked.

She nodded. They lapsed then into an easy, comfortable silence, presiding together over the Light-strewn sky. Soon, if all went as planned, that Light would be gone - contained amongst the vast sea already rising within her.

"It still doesn't feel right to me," she said at last. "None of this does, without the wind."

The Exarch's face gave no movement that she could see, but she could sense the smile in his words. "Then if you have a moment yet to spare, I would ask you to indulge me with a tale from your people - Eternal Wind, wasn't it?" As he turned to her then, she could see his grin in full. "Perhaps it would put both our hearts at ease, given the impending juncture."

It did not matter that he could easily have known of her connection to that book through any of the Scions, or learned it from gazing through the rift to the Source.

She knew then who he was for certain.

Her grip on his hand had grown so tight that it had begun to ache against the crystal. "Thank you," she whispered. "For everything."

And then she burst into tears.

"Oh, no no no," G'raha Tia murmured. His hood visibly shifted as his ears went flat. He reached out with his free hand, his hand of flesh, as if to touch her shoulder; instead, his hand lingered somewhere above her pauldron. "I'm so sorry, my friend; I-I never meant to-"

"I just-" She was sobbing now, as hard as she had cried alone at the banks of Silvertear Lake after she and the rest of NOAH had said their farewells to him. "Whatever happens next - no matter how it all ends - I want you to know h-how much it means to me. All hundred years of it! Everything you've done, everything you've been through... gods!"

He did not confirm her praise. As she rested her head upon his shoulder, still weeping for him alone to see, he laid his own head against her - his lips brushing mutely against her temple.

XX.

Tucked three-quarters of the way into Eternal Wind lay a strip of dyed Dalmascan paper, with words written lengthwise upon it in a hasty scrawl:

For the Ironworks.

May her light guide our journey home.

Hrjt Brotin

XXI.

"My dear, beloved sapling," Feo Ul crooned.

But she was beyond such praises now. All the different parts of her lay fractured. Here, atop the watchtower and brimming with sacrifice, she was neither savior nor warrior nor woman. She could not be anything, let alone the one thing she needed to be. She could scarcely maintain her consciousness without focus, let alone a process of thought, let alone the weight of her disparate memories. She was fit for nothing save destruction, save an Ascian's machinations.

"You are lost - confused - and have precious little time to gather your wits."

Time was not what she needed. Oh, to rule from Lyhe Ghiah forever would be a wondrous dream, a blissful reprieve - and yet it would be an ending, and one she was unworthy of at that.

"Stand very, very still," said the king. "Think not of where you need to go, but where you are right now at this moment. At this time, in this place..."

Ahtyn breathed in deeply. She let Feo Ul's words flow over her, like a steady breeze to greet the waves of Light breaking over the ramparts of her body. A single tear slipped down her cheek; Feo Ul swiped it away with the point of a single finger. The gesture, surprising in its intimacy, provoked an unexpected chuckle.

"I'm still here," she whispered. "And I still have you." And the twins, and Ryne, and all the other Scions. Her family, Hrjt, every friend whom she had ever known and loved. G'raha. "I know what comes next. But I'm... I'm so afraid, right now. And it feels silly to be so afraid." What would happen to the Light if she burst from all the fear and sadness and guilt?

Feo Ul shook their head. "It isn't silly at all at all, my sapling. But as you set off for who knows where, making even more of a mess of that aether of yours - remember that you have withstood this before, and you will surely do so again." They laid their hands upon her cheeks, flitting close enough to touch their tiny forehead against hers. "And know too that for all the miseries you have endured, you give back joy in equal measure."

XXII.

[Let us debate today the topic of our colleague's newest collection.]

The tide of Light had carried her to the deepest reaches of the Tempest, to a place where shades treated her as one might treat a misbehaving child. She sat staring at her own feet in the Hall of Rhetoric, a means of grounding herself against the aether's pull.

The masked, robed figure sitting opposite her gave a grandiose gesture with his arms. [It is an outrage, and a danger to young ones such as our guest.]

[The work is certainly unconventional,] his identical partner agreed. [Yet a danger? It inflicts no pain, and it neither incites nor promotes harmful behaviors.]

[It serves as a call to action and is therefore inflammatory by its very nature and purpose. Its themes are like to instill ideals of nonconformity within the most impressionable.]

[My friend,] the masked figure beside Ahtyn said, [it sounds to me as though you oppose the mere idea of this work. Have you yet read it?]

[Er... no. I have not. But I have heard enough from those I trust to know that it challenges the very fabric of the society we all labor so hard to uphold.]

[And yet these trusted friends and many other noble souls have read it, and are presumably no less patriotic for having done so. It seems to me, therefore, that this work is but a touchstone for a broader debate: that of censorship, and if some individual ideas deserve to be curbed in order to better provide for the needs of all.]

[What's this work about?] Ahtyn asked. She could not follow the conversation, even as she recognized each and every one of the arguments they made.

The figure across from her held a finger to his lips but otherwise ignored her. [You know I am all in favor of creation as self-expression,] he insisted. [But creation necessitates responsibility. We employ the Bureau of Architects to ensure that a patent is not accessible to those of insufficient skill and understanding. There is no such way to determine whether ideas could or should be similarly judged to ensure that those of weaker wills do not take it upon themselves to... to act upon ideas which they do not fully understand.]

[You raise a valuable point, my friend,] the specter beside her acquiesced. [Perhaps we shall discuss this matter with Emet-Selch. He is ever impartial with moral quandaries such as this.]

With their final debate settled, with their purpose served, the two figures faded into peaceful obscurity.

XXIII.

"You truly don't remember."

The more the Light surged within her, the more she wanted to, even as she feared what else that remembrance might bring. Her ramparts already threatened to crumble amidst the Ascian's private hell; were they to fall now, were the Light to overtake her, she would be lost.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you, girl."

The words filled her with rage, as they always had, but neither could she tie them to any particular memory - and so she stared up, trying to summon anything more than a growl of pain in her throat.

"Well, retorts never were your forte." Emet-Selch knelt, the better to grasp her chin and tilt her face up toward his, forcing eye contact. Beads of sweat borne from pain obscured her eyes, nearly blotting out her vision. "And neither was irony, apparently. That you of all people should forget."

A new crop of Light rose in her gut, burning like bile as she spat it out onto Emet-Selch's Garlean boots. "Tell me." For words meant as an order, they rang pathetic from her lips. "Tell me who I was." Who I am.

He rolled his eyes and stood, dragging her up only part of the way before releasing her to crumple once again onto the crystal floor. "You were full of potential, most of it wasted. Just as you are now." He swept an arm wide, across where she lay half-broken upon the cold aetheric surface. "You could have been something, had you applied yourself - had you cared one whit beyond your own stupid dreams! You could have saved all of us. But no!"

"What did I do?" For whatever great sin she had committed, she had no doubt that it contributed in no small way to these people's destruction.

Emet-Selch's arms fell; his shoulders slumped. "What did you do?" he repeated, incredulous.

When he turned, he turned to face her without a hint of mischief in his eyes - only a mad grief.

"You created stories. Long, long ago, you wove a tale about a hero's journey - and from that tale sprang every other legend of heroes and journeys these sundered worlds have ever known."

The next breath she drew in was painless, steadying. Filling.

Emet-Selch drew himself up to his full height, coughing into his fist before adopting an orator's pose. "'A hero leaves her home, with the knowledge that naught will ever be the same again. She is tested, time and again - by monsters, by enemies, by allies, by the great and irrevocable struggles taking place in the world and in herself. She endures an ordeal graver than any other, something she has worked towards perhaps without ever knowing it, and in so doing sacrifices a part of herself. And when she returns home, if she returns home, she is changed - not in the way she hoped but in the way she needed.'" He sneered down at her, at the Light pouring out from her. "Is this the glorious homecoming you always imagined, my dear? Is this the necessary change you so envisioned for yourself, at long last... Sappho?"

Over the Light, over even the humiliation and fear and regret, that name triggered within her an ancient knowing. She staggered to her feet. Cold, unfeeling aether burst from her spine like wings, like a Passage of Arms given form.

The others could not save her now, for there could be no saving her. For all her insistences, she was the only one. There could only be this end - her end.

"You could have saved them!" Emet-Selch screamed, even as she transformed further into the broken creature he had sought for his own ends. "It was not enough for us to beg to you, oh, no. You decided you alone wanted no part in creating our savior, our god. And so we were left to summon Zodiark without your guidance."

He laughed so loudly and for so long that the sound doubled him over, even as she found the will to stand tall. By the time he composed himself once more, his voice was as soft as death.

"But you were correct on one point," he seethed. "My world will have no need for heroes."

XXIV.

At the end of days, the world needed a hero. Amaurot had chosen Zodiark.

Against her fears, against her protestations, the ritual would be performed on the morrow.

She stared down at the burning city, at the end of days. She wished she could evoke pity or grief for her people. She wished she could summon anything but her own worthless guilt.

A stillness emanated from the horizon, the first vestiges of Zodiark's lightless dawn. She tore off her mask to greet it.

They had used her own words to justify it. At the end of days, a savior comes. Would that she had never written at all.

With that thought etched into her mind, Sappho stepped from Amaurot's tallest cliff.

XXV.

"This world is not yours to end." Ahtynwyb Eynskyfwyn, the Queen Light, drew her sword against the Dark. "This is our future. Our story."

"Very well," said Hades. "Let us proceed to your final judgment. The victor shall write the tale, and the vanquished become its villain!"

???

And when she sat down upon her bed, aching and purposeful and devoid of every last obligation but one, she opened up a spare notebook to its first page and wrote:

Once upon a time, a young Warrior of Light journeyed forth into a realm reborn.

I tell you someone will remember us in the future.

-Sappho, Sapphic Fragment 2

#Livvy Ahtynwyb

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yeoldontknow · 5 years

Text

an update and some food for thought

hi friends. this will be the only time i will address the things that have gone on the last 24 hours on this blog. i do not, under any circumstances, enjoy drama or attempt to invite it to this space. my blog is meant to be a place of positivity, creativity, expression, safety, and conversation. it is not a place where i welcome negativity or harassment, and i certainly dont like having my friends or followers feel put in a position to defend me. im aware i did not ask them to, but who i am as a person doesnt actually like being the center of this kind of attention. and that is why i am saying the following once, and only once so that this conversation can stop.

i am putting my thoughts under a cut because i dont want to clog dashes.

balls deep, as with all my stories, was written from a place of fantasy. there is, quite honestly, nothing real about it. logistically, it makes no sense. hygienically, it makes no sense. but it is a fantasy of what if, an exaggeration of a very real kink i have. this is not to say i am unaware of the questionable morality of the setting, nor am i glossing over the very obvious problems of the location. and most of all, i absolutely do not condone the themes of that story. what i am saying, is that i walked into writing the story knowing that some would be uncomfortable with it. as with anything i write, i dont write to fulfill a large, broad group with perpetually safe topics. i write to experiment, i write to explore, and i write to learn. you can call this experimentation a failure, but i was very happy with it. i have never ever written anything like that before, and it is a stepping stone to other things i want to write. does this mean those types of settings will be used again? i cant really say. what i can say is that there are other, more morally ambiguous ideas i want to explore when it comes to sex, kinks, and emotions, and while i absolutely can see the perspective of the anons who voiced their concerns with me, i wanted the opportunity to voice my own.

this did not happen due to a number of anons that offered absolutely no constructive criticism or feedback. there were only three anons out of 27 that wanted to offer opinions about how this story made them feel, about how the structure or setting could have been different. the rest? told me i deserved to die. that i was a pedophile. that i need to go to prison. that i deserved to be banned from tumblr and writing altogether. that i was a disgusting excuse for human being. that it was offensive id even suggest they read the story. but, i never ever expect everyone to read what i write. the story was properly warned and tagged and the moodboard is a visual of where the story heads. now, i dont ever want to say a person shouldnt read what i write. i love giving the benefit of the doubt, and i love learning how others with the same kinks as me feel about what i write. if they genuinely were into the warnings, and read and saw something that was inherently wrong, i was ready to talk about it. but i got none of that. instead, i was met with majority harassment and hate.

the anons i received that voiced concerns were exciting for me, and taught me a valuable lesson. i was able to see their reasoning behind some of the issues they had, and went back and edited some of the dialogue to mitigate the concerns. and even though the story was properly warned, moving forward i will be changing my warning methods. i am still deciding how this will look, how deep i will want to go, but im astutely aware of the very real triggers this may have roused in some readers, and i want to make sure - in the effort of maintaining this safe space - that those kinds of responses dont happen again with my readers, friends, or strangers. my intention with anything i write is to inspire, to encourage conversation or criticism, and to explore methods of self-expression - no matter how wrong or uncomfortable. hero, for example, contains incredibly triggering themes - chapters 7 and 13 spring immediately to mind. brooklyn is burning also contains some pretty irresponsible smut and triggering themes. and my upcoming work for joyride & finesse will also be extremely triggering. so the responses i did receive from respectful anons was considerate and helpful for me.

again, i want to make clear i am not glossing over the setting. if anything, the types of settings included in public sex kinks range from places like this to other, more open spaces. amusement parks. parks in general. fairs. ive even read a story that took place in a bouncy castle. kink, in many cases, intersects with fantasy - it is a kink because we want to try it or think about it, feel excitement from it, but are told we morally shouldnt and therefore it becomes regarded as a kink. the term kink itself contains a range of definitions, including sexual perversion, participation in uncommon sex acts, and non-traditional sex acts. that’s just scratching the surface. in order for me to grow as a writer its important i branch out and try things not everyone will enjoy or approve of - sometimes, things not even i would approve of. so i thank those anons for voicing their opinions - it was an excellent litmus test for the rest of my days on tumblr.

but for those who thought spouting hate and vitriol my way would be an effective way of telling me never to try something, i am sorry. i cannot let you win. ive said before the readership on my blog is important to me, and i am fully aware i have been called a role model or an inspiration to young writers. if they see someone like me, someone much older and confident in their skills, let someone harass them into silence, that is worse to me than upsetting a handful of people. so no, you did not win.

balls deep has been edited and will be posted again sometime this week, in its new form. anon asks will remain off. because if you want to voice your concerns, i want to speak with you and see you. i want a real conversation, not hate.

thank you all for your flood of warm, kind, and supportive messages. i really am thankful for the ambush of support that has stemmed from this. from now to eternity however, i am seeking mature conversations and helpful, considerate feedback. that is how you foster an open, expressive community. i love all of you to the moon and back.

#psa

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itsyourturnblog · 4 years

Link

What I’ve learned: running during quarantine

Three lessons from running and using guided run coaching as a way to think about life in general

Photo by Jenny Hill on Unsplash

There’s a Chinese proverb that asks the question, When’s the best time to plant a tree? And there are two answers — the first one, Twenty years ago. The second one, If not 20 years ago, then today. Today’s the best time to plant a tree.

Thinking about that, I’ve run on and off my whole adult life — and over the past few years, I’ve fallen away from it. A couple of years ago, I won a coveted spot in the New York City Marathon lottery but I didn’t run the qualifying races or volunteer to help because my life felt too busy. My life was happening all around me, happening to me. I didn’t have time. I wanted to but… Always that pesky but. I didn’t make the space and that opportunity went unused.

Then, last year my family moved to San Francisco from NYC in late summer — which seemed like a good time as any to make other life changes. Weather permitting, I would ride a bike (some of the way) to work in SoMa, we took regular family walks, I even meditated here and there. And then, the novel coronavirus comes on the scene earlier this year. COVID-19 and quarantine ensue, causing everything to be thrown into a swirl, including work, school, habits, even the construct of time itself.

And so what to do in a time of great change and uncertainty? You guessed it, plant a tree. I planted a tree two months ago. I started running again. I mean, why not? And I began with the Nike+ Run Club app using the guided runs feature.

I promise this isn’t a commercial for Nike, I only own one pair of Nike shoes, but the guided runs really have been a lifesaver for me. Previously, when I would run, I would have company — friends, family, and people who might have signed up for the same race later in the year, my dog, some other kind of motivation — but nowadays, these things are near impossible. And so this is how coach Chris Bennett, NRC Global Head Coach, and others — including Sally McCrae, Cory Wharton-Malcolm, Shalane Flanagan — inhabited my headphones as I ran 50,000 meters (a bit over 31 miles) this month. And here’s the evidence:

Screenshots from my Strava (left) and Nike+ Run Club (right) apps — Strava’s a bit lower than NRC because some of the segments I initially logged as hikes so they don’t count as run distances

🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌 🎉🙌

So, let’s get into it. Let’s cross that proverbial starting line and get going. What are three things that I’ve learned from my time running that can apply more broadly to my life and my work?

Start slowly, or go slowly

We’re all in a hurry — we’ve all got to-do lists a mile long, someone’s waiting on something, there’s that email, has the kid eaten lunch?, that thing took longer than we thought and now we’re behind, has the dog been fed?, did you reply to that message from your uncle?— but we all have time. It is something that exists for all of us. Though it does have value, it doesn’t cost any money. And whether it feels like it or not, you are in control of the next 30 minutes, the next hour, all of it. You are in control. And whether you’re running on a trail or you’re staring down a deadline or about ready to begin a design sprint with a client team, you control the cadence. You don’t have to drink from a firehose. And in order to not drive yourself into the ground, you need to start slow. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement, heart-pounding, trip over the hype, the blood rushing in our ears, to say yes, and jump in.

On the flip side, it takes strength, resolve, and focus to start slow. Because it’s tough to sit in that tension, it’s hard to say no, to really consider the whole effort — especially when it’s in-flight, you don’t know exactly what that entails. How can you know how much fuel you’ll use if you don’t know everything about the journey of which you’re in the middle?

True, you can pick up the pace later, that’s always an option but warm up first. Prep as much as you can. Stretch. Shake it out. Keep your arms loose, keep your legs limber. Then, do the icebreaker before you plow straight in. Start smart. And start slow.

Recovery is important, be easy

Be easy on yourself, even in the middle of a run. That goes for after a run, between runs, before a run. The same goes for life. Life can be hard, it will get hectic, it is crazy at times so be easy on yourself. Being easy doesn’t mean lowering your standards, it doesn’t always mean running slow. But set those things for what you need. There’s a guided run on NRC called Tough Day, Easy Run, it’s been one of my favorites because it speaks to that.

During a speed run, you may run fast, but not too fast. Or try to be the fastest. If you’re running with someone, how are they doing? Are they able to answer simple questions, maintain a conversation? Are you trying to run faster than they are? Are they trying to run faster than you? Are you able to talk to them? How are you feeling? You should feel good. If you’re feeling something else, you’re not being easy. Running should feel good.

Coach Bennett talks about how an easy run should feel, how a recovery run should feel. He says something like:

And easy doesn’t mean slow; it means just that — easy. And easy, when it comes to running, easy doesn’t mean slow. And remember we talked about slow — starting slow doesn’t mean that that’s the pace for the whole route. Taking something easy isn’t a slow run. It’s an easy run. It’s your normal, everyday run. Because if it’s not an interval run, a long run, or a speed run, it’s an easy run. It’s a recovery run. Easy is not a pace or a distance; easy is a level of effort. So go easy.

I remember one of the NRC trainers pointed out — don’t recall who it was— that runners typically have slower paces the third and last quarter of a run. And that’s not necessarily a good thing, it probably means that runner has exhausted themselves — it means I’ve been running too hard for the first half. That means I wasn’t running slow, really pacing myself, and I didn’t make it easy for myself. I’m making it harder than it needs to be. That’s me, making it hard.

How many times have we complicated something in our lives? If you’re anything like me, a lot. Whew, it’s easy to lose count. And many times, I make things in my life and my family’s life a lot harder. Why? Any number of reasons — pride, ego, stubbornness, some rigid idea that something has to be a very specific way, not accepting help, not asking for help, all sorts of reasons. If we’re easy about these things, even just a bit more, it won’t be so hard.

It’s okay to fail

The intention at the start of the run isn’t always how it plays out. Like how the best-laid plans for some Tuesday lunch or a family bingo game night or a client retro not turning out the way it was intended. What is the joke — do you want proof that god/God has a sense of humor? Make a plan.

You might start out on a run and think, I’m going to run 10K today and I’m going to crush it, but if you listen to your body and listen to what’s going on with you, that may not be the best way to run. Sure, you can dig deep and pull something out in the last quarter and thug it out but you should still start slow and be easy with yourself. Digging out that low gear, keep that in your back pocket. There’s always time for that.

In 2007, Arianna Huffington woke up in a pool of blood with a broken cheekbone and a cut over her eye. She had been at home on the phone and was checking emails when she passed out and fell. Huffington had been working 18-hour days building the Huffington Post website. She didn’t know what had happened and after weeks of medical tests, doctors came back with a simple answer: she was exhausted.

Arianna Huffington attending the premiere of The Union at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival, photo by David Shankbone

Huffington took personal steps to stop this from happening again in her own life. And then, she became a champion for getting more sleep, urging others that instead of bragging about our sleep deficits to see how we can do more with more sleep. She did one of the most popular TED talks in 2010 on the subject— it’s been watched over 5 million times — and wrote Sleep Revolution in 2017.

I say all of that as an example of what it means to reset your expectations. Listen to yourself, listen to others, the thing that you had in mind might not be the best thing or the right thing to do just now.

There’s a ton more I could say. There are things I’ve missed, sure— running on narrow trails in this time of COVID-19 precautions puts a whole new spin on politeness, how, and when to yield (bikes, runners, walkers, horses, etc.), a lesson is there to be learned in kindness. For sure. Or staying focused on the path in front of you as a metaphor for remaining present. Because there’s always a crack in the sidewalk or an exposed root that’s visible after the fact. But I’ll stop here and appreciate the fledgling tree.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think.

You can find the Strava and the Nike+ Run Club app on the web, in the iOS store, and in the Android store. Maybe other platforms, though I couldn’t find any others. You can find Arianna Huffington’s book, Sleep Revolution, in any major book retailer, but I would suggest getting it from your favorite local bookstore.

What I’ve Learned: Running During Quarantine was originally published in It's Your Turn on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Skipper Chong Warson via It's Your Turn - Medium #itsyourturn #altMBA #SethGodin #quotes #inspiration #stories #change #transformation #writers #writing #self #shipping #personaldevelopment #growth #education #marketing #entrepreneurship #leadership #personaldev #wellness #medium #blogging #quoteoftheday #inspirationoftheday

#ItsYourTurn #It's Your Turn #IYT #altMBA #Seth Godin #Inspiration #Stories #Change #Transformation #Blog #Medi

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whimsicmimic · 7 years

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what's marbleverse?

i hope u dont mind that i answer this publicly because im about to write you a real fuckin long response.

So You Think You Lost Your Marbles (aka Marbleverse) is a massive project ive been working on for the past few years!! The easiest way to describe it is a modern magic universe with a bit of a post-apocalyptic twist. Or maybe its a post-apocalyptic universe with a modern magic twist?

who knows maaan. think elves living in rvs.

yknow how in most stories with magic, magic is a very old concept? like, elves and dwarves and fae existed long before humans? that isn’t the case here.

Basically, these weird crystal growths just started rapidly forming one day in seemingly locations, reaching higher than 15′ and 20′ wide in as little time as a week. And when folks were trying to figure out exactly what the hell was going on with these dang rocks, it was discovered that when a chunk was paired with even a very weak electrical current, it had the potential to power entire buildings for months!

‘course, the catch is that these fuckers were volatile as hell. The less beneficial discovery was that when exposed to certain conditions, they fucking exploded in a pseudo-nuclear fashion. Scars in the earth were torn across the countryside. An entire city was leveled, leaving nothing but wreckage and ruin where it once stood. Those who could leave left. In most cases, those who survived were left with nothing. And while those outside the blast radius did give aide to some areas, a lot of people were just left that way.

People are hardy as hell, though. Those who were fucked over sought each other out. People banded together, built shantytowns which turned into more permanent structures and settlements over time. This aint some nitty gritty survival of the fittest story. People took up agriculture, people took up construction and carpentry, people learned what they could about medicine, people became teachers, regulators, chroniclers, spinners, weavers. A lotta them became scavengers, picking their way through the wreckage and finding a use for what was left. And shards of spiritstone, as these crystals would come to be called, proved to be invaluable as ever. A handful of the dust of it could keep a flashlight lasting for weeks, a handful of the dust acted as a catalyst for plant growth, with heavy alteration, even the smallest shard could power a vehicle for a long while. The very thing that ruined folks lives and tore apart the earth became as valuable as gold to em.

it was valuable to everyone else as well; those unaffected by the blast offered a pretty penny and supplies to scavvers in exchange for shards found, as they made an invaluable energy source. Was it shitty? yeah. Did they still do it? yeah. Such an offer meant a golden ticket out of the Wastes. Some took it. Others turned their backs on those outside just as those outside turned their backs on them. Some held a grudge. Others just wanted to be left alone at this point.

The largest town they built directly above the epicenter of one of the blasts when they learned it was safe. They called it Haven, because that’s what it became to them, and that’s what they hoped it would continue to be for years to come.

The land would recover from the blasts. Plants grew at an accelerated rate for reasons unknown. Animals would come back with time. They would live and they would thrive.

With the passage of time in months, years, generations, they’d say that the energy within the spiritstone that was released during the blasts rooted itself deep in the blood of those living in the Wastes. They’d say that it felt like something was always watching them, despite no one being around. They’d say that they could’ve sworn a plant had moved of its own volition, but maybe it was just the wind after all. They’d say the inhabitants were capable of peculiar things, things that shouldn’t be possible by any means at all. They’d call it magic, but magic doesn’t exist, does it?

The first true magician was a man with an affinity for flame. They say he burned himself alive by mistake after his magic turned on him and ate him whole.

They got a lot more careful after that.

The outsiders didn’t even think of them as human anymore; after generation by generation living in the Wastes, they looked less and less human, shaped into something human adjacent by the magic in their roots to prevent spells from backfiring as severely. Their lifespans became longer, the telltale signs of age slowing after a point of maturity. Some they’d call elves or fae or satyrs, gnomes or imps or harpies after the stuff of legends. But as a whole, they were simply called the Waste-touched.

And in the years to come, the Waste-touched would leave the citadel of Haven or the numerous other towns scattered throughout the Wastes, curious about how the world has changed outside since their isolation. In years to come, a new city would be built atop what once was the wreckage of the old one, leveled so long ago. They would call it New Haven, in hopes of creating a place with the potential to start anew once more, in hopes of tearing down the walls built between the Wastes and those who turned their backs on them so long ago.

And that, my guy, is where we begin.

THERES A HELL OF A LOT MORE TO IT THAN THIS like this is. Barely even a slice of whats in store.

tl;dr, humans fucked up and those who had to live with the consequences were turned into magical creatures/users over the course of generations to better adapt to the aftermath.

family portrait is a collection of drabbles I’m going to be putting on my writing blog as practice! Its about a traveling circus made up of these magic users, and the drabbles are snapshots of the lives the circus members lead. Ive already finished the first one, but I’m holding on to it until I have a few more to post!!

this is probably more information than you wanted and for that I apologize, but I’ve been working on this project for a REALLY LONG TIME and I’m suuuuper excited about it and I loooooove talking about it

#creampuff rambles #lost marbles #a walnut #IM SORRY IK THIS IS A BIT LONGWINDED i get very veery very very very very excited #send me asks abt marbleverse and i will excitedly talk for long periods of time because i get very very excited

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verdigrisprowl · 7 years

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April 5 Blurr’s Horror Stream - Abattoir

Soundwave and Prowl both more or less agree that this movie constitutes a rather senseless waste of lives and resources.

Welcome to the 'speedxstealer' room. The chat room has been cleared by the moderator. B l u r r: / trudges in and settles on his couch. tugging flexibands off of his arm / ItsyBitsySpyers: *Ushers the twins in before him and heads right for his spot. Gets nice and comfortable there.* FakeProwl: *appears* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Pings hello to Blurr and Prowl both* B l u r r: / waves claw. Throws flexi band aside / ItsyBitsySpyers: //This one!// ItsyBitsySpyers: *Rumble's going along, as always.* FakeProwl: *nods. sits with Soundwave.* B l u r r: [[ lemme know when you're all ready, I guess ]] ItsyBitsySpyers: ((ready when ye be)) Whirl: ((o7 I am!)) FakeProwl: ((ready when this song is over)) FakeProwl: ((i'm learning hamilton one random song at a time)) B l u r r: [[ some guy in an african american lit class said slavery was necessary for our country to be this way ]] B l u r r: [[ and I literally slammed a hand down and went ALEXANDER HAMILTON DID NOT FIGHT FOR THIS SHIIT ]] B l u r r: Hamilton is 100% historically accurate and it makes my life complete. Also if you guys are ready , im ready. ]] FakeProwl: ((ready!)) B l u r r: [[ ive never seen this movie, but its about a haunted house so... okay [[ FakeProwl: ((yee)) FakeProwl: ((haunted houses are my fave)) FakeProwl: ((haunted things in general. haunted or possessed.)) B l u r r: same ]] FakeProwl: ((creepy invisible things in places)) B l u r r: [[ i just dunno how like good the movie is in general [[ ItsyBitsySpyers: *A quote about houses imprisoning its inhabitants. Off to a relevant start already* B l u r r: / lot of murder. He likes it / FakeProwl: *leeeans on Soundwave* FakeProwl: So. He lives on the road. He deceived people who resented him for it. He sold them a "promise," they sold him "themselves." ItsyBitsySpyers: *Adjusts himself to allow for good leaning contact. Would Prowl like to scoot up under a stretched arm?* B l u r r: Hey, Frenzy. /waves claw/ ItsyBitsySpyers: \\HM?\\ FakeProwl: Prediction: he's a drug dealer. B l u r r: C'mere. FakeProwl: *... yes. he would like to.* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Then so it shall be, and a hand resting gently on the far side arm. In the meantime, Frenzy jogs over to Blurr and bobs his head. Sup?* B l u r r: / leans foward a little / Think you and your twin-thing can come sit with me? I have... stuff for you mechs. ItsyBitsySpyers: \\WHO, RUMBLE? YEAH, SURE.\\ Raises his voice a little more. \\HEY, BRO. C'MON.\\ And plop, a Frenzy next to Blurr. A Rumble will follow shortly after. B l u r r: / smirks and looks at them both/ Comfortable? ItsyBitsySpyers: [[She brought him a plank?]] ItsyBitsySpyers: //Guess so, yeah. How come?// FakeProwl: ((the dialogue and costumes made the scene at the newspaper look like it was 40, 50 years ago)) FakeProwl: ((then she gets home and suddenly it's Modern)) B l u r r: [[ im so confused on time period ]] ItsyBitsySpyers: ((same)) B l u r r: ... How come ? /twitches finials/ I just got back from Earth. B l u r r: I've brought you things. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Shakes his helm a little. That was a corny line.* FakeProwl: Did she not say that fraternizing with the police introduces a conflict of interests? ItsyBitsySpyers: //Wha, me?// Slow blink. //I, uh. ... Okay, sure.// FakeProwl: If it does for her, then it probably does for him as well. They both need to take their work more seriously. B l u r r: ....Oh. They're dead. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[He seemed overchar--]] ItsyBitsySpyers: [[...All right.]] B l u r r: / looks at Rumble and Frenzy / Yes. Which one of you wants gifts first? FakeProwl: ... You know what, never mind, she's about to walk into a brutal murder scene and she could use a police officer with her. B l u r r: [[ okay now hes in modern clothes ]] ItsyBitsySpyers: *Each of them grab an arm and start chanting 'me'* FakeProwl: ... Why is there only one officer? ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Low film budget?]] FakeProwl: *snorts* B l u r r: [[ probably ]] B l u r r: ... All right, you can't both get it at once. Let's do... pick a murder weapon. B l u r r: I'm thinking of a weapon. One perfect for my most despised enemy. B l u r r: What is it? Whoever guesses it gets their gift first. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[He extinguished the youngling as well?]] ItsyBitsySpyers: //Duct tape.// \\PFFF.\\ B l u r r: mmm. Wrong. ItsyBitsySpyers: \\YER FIST AT LIKE A BILLION MILES PER HOUR?\\ B l u r r: ... Close enough. B l u r r: Someone stole an entire room? ItsyBitsySpyers: *Looks at Prowl.* [[Is that possible?]] FakeProwl: ... Not in one piece. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Frenzy cheers and sticks his hands out* FakeProwl: ... He's collecting murder scenes? ItsyBitsySpyers: [[It sounds like it.]] B l u r r: / plops a box into Frenzy's servos. Inside are a few interesting additions for better drill power / ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Where would he keep them? Build a new house out of murder scenes?]] FakeProwl: Perhaps. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Frenzy holds them aloft, bounces up, and does a small lap around the room. It's safe to say he's excited and happy with his gift.* Whirl: ((frenzy omg)) Whirl: ((patoot alert)) B l u r r: / well, that works / FakeProwl: ... All of those murders are highly implausible. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Why?]] FakeProwl: A contractor murders his employer? A landlord murders someone he just rented a home to? FakeProwl: Botched burglaries make sense. Crimes of passion make sense. FakeProwl: What motive could a contractor have to murder the person who hired him and then kill himself? Or for a landlord to murder tenants he'd known a week? B l u r r: You're assuming that there needs to be a motive. FakeProwl: There's always a motive. B l u r r: Not always. FakeProwl: Always. FakeProwl: *gestures at the movie* Because these murders are so unusual—and because of the way that movies work—it's likely that this collector doesn't just happen to take crime scenes. FakeProwl: It's possible he causes them. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Frenzy stops mid-run* ItsyBitsySpyers: \\TROPHIES?\\ FakeProwl: Perhaps. FakeProwl: He wants a room—a room somehow tainted by murder—and causes it to happen. B l u r r: /shrugs/ B l u r r: Murder doesn't need a motive. B l u r r: Sometimes it just needs an itch. FakeProwl: An itch is a motive. ItsyBitsySpyers: \\WEIRDO. PULLIN' PIECES OFF IS EASIER.\\ FakeProwl: Or, alternatively, the room itself causes the murder, and he... I can't think of a better phrase than "arrest." He arrests the room. Locks it up where it can't cause damage. B l u r r: / shrugs / ItsyBitsySpyers: *Frenzy sits down to inspect the box's contents deeper. He's gonna get these installed as soon as he gets home.* ItsyBitsySpyers: [[It is a room. How does a regular room murder?]] FakeProwl: I don't know. Movies pull supernatural nonsense like that. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Wait. Isn't this what happened in the ghost busting movie?]] FakeProwl: It is. FakeProwl: So. He's constructing his own "ley line" nexus. Whirl: ((i can't tell what this guy is tryin to do with his voice. it almost sounds like he's trying to mimic a southern cadence???)) Whirl: ((wat r u trying to do linguistically my dude)) ItsyBitsySpyers: *Rumble nudges Blurr and sticks his hand out. He doesn't know what Blurr would think to give him, but... he's curious now.* FakeProwl: ((idk but i wish he Wouldn't)) B l u r r: / looks at Rumble and reaches for a box. Rumble's is bigger / B l u r r: I notice you seem to perk up at certain... things. /tilts helm / So, I thought I'd stop by a few places and get you something interesting. /it's the only thing he knows Rumble likes / ItsyBitsySpyers: [[It is a good thing Cybertron does not have these... ley lines. He does not want to think about what would come from them.]] FakeProwl: I'm fairly certain Earth doesn't either. It's just an interesting fiction. ItsyBitsySpyers: //Yeah?// He'll get to opening it, a little more cautious than his brother. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Earth doesn't need them. It has Unicron.]] ItsyBitsySpyers: [[That is, arguably, worse.]] B l u r r: Mhm. /props chin on claw / I noticed you were a little fond of - well, more than fond of- anyway. B l u r r: / motions to the box with his claw. Inside is a larger book with the good ol' hamilton star. And some sheet music, some signed things. A lot of concept art and costume designs. / ItsyBitsySpyers: *Rumble's visor could light up the room by itself right now* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Guess who's not paying attention to the movie for the entire rest of this film* FakeProwl: ((i was in the wrong window for a second, why did she come to this town? is it tied to the person buying the rooms?)) FakeProwl: ((i caught the story she gave the sherrif, just not whatever reason she had before it)) ItsyBitsySpyers: ((i missed it too, was shooing the cat off something)) ItsyBitsySpyers: [][][]I have that effect on people.[][][] [[It is easy to see why. Who touches another's helm like that to make their presence known?]] ItsyBitsySpyers: *Rumble mumbles something that sounds like a thank you while he works his way through the human language a bit at a time* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Content capable of destroying lives, you say. He's definitely curious.* FakeProwl: ... Their children died before them... FakeProwl: They've turned away from their god... FakeProwl: She pointedly states that if she likes old things, she'll love this town... Did he make them immortal? B l u r r: / sees rumble's interest and settles back into the couch / ItsyBitsySpyers: [[...They slaughtered their young?]] B l u r r: / seems like everyone likes their presents / FakeProwl: Possible. He spoke of sacrifices. FakeProwl: *the officer is controlling, insults the person he claims to care about, and threatens to abuse his power. Prowl disapproves of him as a person and a cop.* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Everyone l o v e s their presents. Blurr will probably get a few himself next week.* B l u r r: / oh geez / ItsyBitsySpyers: [[No he didn't.]] FakeProwl: ((don't freeze now!!)) ItsyBitsySpyers: ((nooo come back screen)) B l u r r: [[ is it back? ]] FakeProwl: ((she was dragging her hands down her face and the music was building, what happened??)) FakeProwl: ((now I've got music and a random frozen screen)) B l u r r: [[ idk i havent been watching for the last good hour ]] ItsyBitsySpyers: (( ^)) FakeProwl: ((okay, now it's moving again)) FakeProwl: ((what happened to her face)) B l u r r: [[ ive been getting yelled at 8') ]] ItsyBitsySpyers: ((can we see her fa--oh dear)) FakeProwl: ((... i guess her face is normal now???)) ItsyBitsySpyers: ((are you gonna be ok speedy?)) B l u r r: [[ idk she's yelling at me cause dad's wasting money and it's my fault?? ]] ItsyBitsySpyers: ((no it's not. :| )) B l u r r: [[ i lost the whole movie lmfao. ]] B l u r r: [[ let me know when it's over, i guess ]] ItsyBitsySpyers: ((i'm so confused)) FakeProwl: ((same)) ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Did he not JUST tell them not to look.]] FakeProwl: "They're hiding something." And the sky is black at night. ItsyBitsySpyers: *huff* FakeProwl: Did he also not just tell them that nobody ever successfully finds it? B l u r r: When's someone gonna die? I'm bored. FakeProwl: So. He's been to hell. He's come back with... magic? ItsyBitsySpyers: [[She was killed because she escaped?]] FakeProwl: He does unknown things for the town and in exchange they sacrifice other people to him. FakeProwl: She wasn't killed because she "escaped"—she never escaped, her sacrifice was merely delayed. FakeProwl: And he's collected... they're not random tragedies, are they. Are they the sacrifices he was pledged? ItsyBitsySpyers: [[He thinks so.]] FakeProwl: And when he gets them all, what—hell opens up? ItsyBitsySpyers: [[The jailed human did say it was a case of cracking open the prison and letting the prisoners out.]] FakeProwl: That explains why all the murders sounded so peculiar. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[He does not like either officer.]] FakeProwl: *murmurs* me neither. FakeProwl: I'll be willing to consider the sheriff was offering a mercy once I actually know the alternative. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Small squeeze of Prowl's arm. A much better cop, as far as he has ever been on the side of the law.* FakeProwl: *isn't sure why he got squeezed, but takes a hand to squeeze it back* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Also good.* ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Where do the screams come from? Do the dead echo?]] B l u r r: ... / that house is IDEAL / FakeProwl: Apparently. B l u r r: What a great house. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Tilts his helm. It's... it's hideous.* FakeProwl: ... Consecrated ground. There's no evidence of a school in all of this. So the school wasn't added to the rooms. Is it the foundation upon which this house was built? ItsyBitsySpyers: [[How does a murder happen in a room that was already taken away when the room was not taken away until there was a murder?]] B l u r r: What a great house... FakeProwl: ... None of them were taken away until after the murder, were they? ItsyBitsySpyers: [[She watched a video of someone next to a wall with a separation in it.]] FakeProwl: ... The video was taken inside this house, not inside her house. FakeProwl: Perhaps he simply recorded the replay of her death. FakeProwl: A murder is committed, the room is removed and reconstructed here, the death replays and can be recorded. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[...He supposes that is possible.]] FakeProwl: That also explains how her mother had a video of that boy being sacrificed where the wall was already bloodstained. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Slow nod. All right, that makes sense.* ItsyBitsySpyers: ((i missed that)) FakeProwl: ((it was a brief mention.)) FakeProwl: "... It would be a tragedy for you to go one step further." Apparently this whole... ritual, will be completed with a tragedy. FakeProwl: Do the both of them in there combined form the tragedy? ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Perhaps he kills her.]] FakeProwl: Perhaps. Stupidly waving the gun around like that when the only thing in the house is ghosts. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[They are bound to be on edge in this place. One wrong startle...]] ItsyBitsySpyers: [[It would also give the dealmaking human the last child.]] FakeProwl: It would, yes. FakeProwl: *slowly slouches forward so he can put his elbows on his knees and cover his audials* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Looks over, concerned* ItsyBitsySpyers: @Prowl: (txt): Noise? FakeProwl: @Soundwave «Noise.» FakeProwl: *... has it quieted down? tentatively uncovers audials* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Nudges them back over. There's probably a lot of screaming to come.* FakeProwl: *... half covers* ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Well. He was half right.]]] FakeProwl: *mutters* He certainly didn't seem to love her for who she is. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Agreed.]] ItsyBitsySpyers: [[...Why would the murdered victims be punished? What have they done?]] FakeProwl: They weren't punished. They were sacrificed. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[This involves them suffering? He would think their death was enough.]] ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Human theology is strange.]] FakeProwl: He sacrificed his family for his hell-granted powers. FakeProwl: He used those powers to sacrifice hundreds, just to get his family back. FakeProwl: He could have saved himself a lot of time, effort, and grief—along with everyone else—by not sacrificing his family in the first place. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Indeed.]] FakeProwl: I'm sure that's the point. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Taps his free fingers against his leg.* B l u r r: / vents a little / ItsyBitsySpyers: [[He wonders if the hell creatures kept their promise. Such beings rarely do.]] RoBart: what song is this? B l u r r: [[ Aaron Bur, Sir ]] B l u r r: *Burr RoBart: thanks ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Dangle a promise, gather hundreds more, take back the original murderer and give nothing up.]] FakeProwl: He gave up years of his life and years of effort. FakeProwl: For no net gain. FakeProwl: From the evidence given, the powers he received were used for no purpose but undoing the original bargain. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Shakes his helm.* FakeProwl: *?* B l u r r: / twitches finials and claws / ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Many, many wastes. And the New English humans who benefited from his powers are likely bound as well. It is all disgusting.]] ItsyBitsySpyers: *Rumble is distracted from the book by the music and the twitch. He looks up at Blurr* ItsyBitsySpyers: //Ya okay there?// B l u r r: / glances at/ Hn? B l u r r: Ah... Dodge likes this music, too. /snort / He's excited. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Rumble scratches his chin for a second, then shrugs. Yeah, why not.* //Tell him he got good taste.// B l u r r: / smirk / Hear that? He says you have good taste . /snicker/ He says thanks. FakeProwl: Did any of them "benefit"? We see no signs of a benefit. Just promises. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[The human in the chair stood and walked.]] FakeProwl: Ah. Right. ItsyBitsySpyers: //He's, uh. He's welcome.// B l u r r: /hums/ You know, you don't have to be nervous. He's the nicer one. FakeProwl: What of the rest of the town? The evidence indicates that none of them are satisfied with the bargain. There's reference to them being afraid. The town looks half-abandoned. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[...He cannot recall anything for them, no.]] ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Traditional human interpretations of immortality are being held at one age forever. They would not have grown older.]] A pause. [[Unless he was cruel and their immortality comes when they are near-- ItsyBitsySpyers: death. He doubts it.]] FakeProwl: Mm. Yes, immortality seems unlikely. ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Then he sees nothing else.]] ItsyBitsySpyers: [[Still. They agreed to pledges and sacrifices. They do not come away clean.]] ItsyBitsySpyers: *Stretch.* B l u r r: / leans back and crosses arms behind his helm / Well, when I stop by Earth again, I'll get you something. B l u r r: / to rumble / ItsyBitsySpyers: *Immediately* //Sledgehammer.// B l u r r: A sledgehammer? ItsyBitsySpyers: //Big one.// B l u r r: A big sledgehammer... got it. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Rumble cracks a smile and nods, then hops up and carries his box over to Soundwave's couch.* ItsyBitsySpyers: //Yo.// Half-afted salute to Prowl before he scrambles up the couch and gets docked on the arm* FakeProwl: *nods to Rumble* Hi. ItsyBitsySpyers: *Through Soundwave's speakers, a whisper:* //Next game.// FakeProwl: ... Hm? ItsyBitsySpyers: *Places a baseball on his screen.* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Frenzy runs back over to Blurr and sticks a hand out in the meantime* B l u r r: ... / looks at Frenzy/ Yes? B l u r r: / holds out claw? / ItsyBitsySpyers: *SHAKES THE HECK OUTTA IT then runs off to Soundwave too* B l u r r: / oh uh shake shake / B l u r r: ... / confused but he assumes that is a thank you / ItsyBitsySpyers: *Yep.* B l u r r: / oh well good / B l u r r: / he's glad the kiddos like their gifts / ItsyBitsySpyers: *You bet your aft they do.* ItsyBitsySpyers: [[We should be going. We have... things to repair.]] FakeProwl: *a farewell nod to Soundwave and to Rumble* B l u r r: / waves claw / FakeProwl: *next game. whenever that is.* ItsyBitsySpyers: *Tomorrow, actually. He'll set Prowl up with a feed. In the meantime, one last tiny squeeze and then he gets up, nods, and makes his way out.* FakeProwl: *that soon? he's lost track* FakeProwl: *flickers and disappears*

#chat

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veryangryhedgehog · 5 years

Link

“Scattered Pieces,” an Ede Valley story by Hedgehog.

March

When Cindy awoke, it was to the beep of hospital monitors. She bolted up suddenly, nearly dislodging the IV from her arm, and glanced around the unfamiliar room rapidly. Where was she? What had happened? The walls were white. Was she dead? Then her eyes fell upon Marcell, half-dozing in an uncomfortable chair next to the bed she was laying in, and she relaxed. If she was dead, then there was no way Marcell would be here.

He blinked at the noise, and smiled, relieved. “You’re awake,” he breathed. “I was getting worried.”

“What… happened?” she asked. “St. Adelaide’s, the Truth? Is everyone alright?”

“They’re all fine,” he grabbed her hand. “As for Adelaide’s, well, I might as well show you.” Sighing, Marcell grabbed a remote from the bedside table and flicked it towards the TV.

Cindy gasped at the image. Behind the scrolling text of the news program was live footage of St. Adelaide’s hill, or at least, what used to be the hill. All that was left there now was a gigantic crater.

“Oh my god,” she muttered.

“When we woke up, we could see the sky. Thank god it was dark by that point.” Marcell stared nearly wistfully at the TV. “When you were still out cold, we got you to the hospital. That was three days ago.”

“Three days?” Cindy’s eyes widened. “And… the Truth?”

Marcell made a face. Not the greatest of signs. “It’d be best if Aurum explained. But right now you need to rest.”

“I have been sleeping for three days, you know.”

“And now you’re going to sleep a little more,” he intoned before kissing her on the forehead. “Oh,” he added. “Before I leave and let you sleep…” he suddenly looked very guilty. “About what happened down there, when I… lost control…”

“When you almost killed me, you mean?” Cindy confirmed.

He nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never should have—the two of us, it’s… too dangerous.”

But Cindy just rolled her eyes. “I forgive you. And no, it’s not. If the only time I’m in danger is when you’re being forced into an existential crisis by an unfathomable cosmic entity, then I think I’m alright.”

Marcell just shook his head. “I’m never going to be able to dissuade you, am I?”

“Nope.”

“Then in response to your words down there,” he managed a small smile. “I love you too.”

Cindy’s smile then was the sun itself. She grabbed his hands, and he pulled her in for a soft kiss, and in that moment, Cindy knew that everything was going to be okay.

~~ o ~~

The three of them were always there now, just on the edge of Doug’s vision. They sat in the chair in the hospital room, they looked out the window to the parking lot below, they never got too close, and they never spoke. But they were here now, in the real world for good, brought out of the depths of his head in a plume of mercury off-gas. A barrier had been crossed, and there was no going back now.

Doug took this development as he had taken most of the others in his past; he shrugged, and simply thought: “Great. I guess this is my life now.”

It had been three days since that Niko kid had brought him here, and at least there had been a little improvement since then. His vision was mostly back to normal—sans the constant visual hallucinations—and his thoughts weren’t running through his mind like the extra thick kind of Aunt Marma’s Genuine Maple Syrup anymore.

The shaking and the spasms, however, had only gotten nominally better. “That will improve with time,” the doctor told him. “But it’s unlikely that they will ever fade entirely. Mercury poisoning is not something that can be easily reversed. Some of the damage to your motor functions and other parts of your brain might be permanent.”

The doctor seemed nearly perturbed at how well Doug was taking all of this, but he couldn’t very well tell him that this was just the culmination of over two years of near-constant abuse. Then he’d be recommended a counselor and that would be a pain and Doug would much rather deal with it in his own special way: bottling all of it up and figuring it out himself. Sure, it probably wasn’t the most effective, but it was certainly the easiest.

But he wasn’t thinking about all that now, not really. Because for the last three days, only one thought had been dancing through his mind, cavorting around his dreams: how he was going to kill Abigail Hodge.

The first step of this complicated, multistage plan was to get out of this hospital. Then he was going to track her down and murder her dead. There were of course a lot of auxiliary steps in between this, not all of which made sense to anyone except Doug. But that was all that really mattered. He was going to kill her.

For now, however, all he could do was bide his time. He still could only walk about to the bathroom and back before his legs began to give out from under him. But he was getting better, slowly regaining his strength back. Any day now, he would begin his quest for vengeance.

Except of course, that nothing could ever go according to plan for Doug. Because the next morning, something wholly unexpected happened. A nurse just strolled into his room, grinned at him as if nothing was wrong, and said: “Doug, your sister is here to see you.”

Doug’s blood turned immediately to ice. It was Abigail. It had to be. She was the only person who knew about that. But wrong again, for an instant later, the woman who strolled through the door set him into an even more confused panic.

At first he thought he must be hallucinating the whole thing, because she should be dead. The last time he’d seen her she’d been through the windshield of Morgan’s car. But it wasn’t in his head, because Cocaine was in the corner, snorting something off the rim of the sink.

This couldn’t be real. Elizabeth was dead.

He couldn’t say anything, his throat glued closed.

The nurse merely smiled at him, then turned to not-Elizabeth. “I’ll leave you too alone, Ms. Bailey.”

“Oh please,” she grinned. “Call me Jilli.”

Ah, he understood now. This was all some kind of trick. Some bizarre mercury-fueled dream. Clover’s relation, Elizabeth’s face, Jilli’s name. If he squeezed his eyes shut he’d wake up in a second.

It didn’t work.

“If you’re thinking this is a dream,” the woman smirked, “you’re wrong.”

“Who the hell are you?” Doug asked.

“Me?” she grinned. “My name is Kei. I’m a warrior princess from the moon. And I’m here to make a deal with you…”

~~ o ~~

April

Both Cindy and Tommy had been in and out of the East Branch a lot over the last few weeks. After a short recovery, the whole group met once more and Aurum explained the situation.

“Unfortunately,” she sighed. “It seems out mission is not yet complete.”

“What do you mean?” Niko asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

Looking upwards, Aurum attempted to explain. “When you stabbed the Truth, you didn’t destroy it, merely fragmented it. Which is good, it’s far less harmful that way.”

“But we still have to track down the pieces,” Marcell sighed.

“This doesn’t seem all that uncommon,” she added apologetically. “Abigail claimed to have it in her mind, after all, and… other times.” It was subtle, but Tommy didn’t miss her glancing over to Servus. Strange.

So Cindy was in and out helping Marcell and Aurum do research. She proved nearly invaluable with both her technological and magical advantages.

Tommy, however, was there for a different reason. Even after everything that had happened, Mathilda still refused to budge, and he had come to the conclusion that she was broken. But then he remembered something: Aurum had said that it was probably Atlantean in construction, and now… well now there were two Atlanteans living temporarily in the library. So he asked them for their help.

“I was raised in seclusion far outside of the city,” Gil confessed. “But Muirne may be able to help.”

“Aye,” she nodded. “I’m no expert, but my mother was a makinist. You said this was a wagon?”

“That travels between dimensions,” Tommy nodded.

“I’ve heard of a few prototypes. I’ll take a look.”

Just as they were about to leave, Tommy felt a tap on his arm. He looked down to see Servus staring at him with his usual deadpan expression. That had been the other reason Tommy had been coming to the library.

Ever since that first raid on St. Adelaide’s, it appeared that Servus was beginning to develop a personality. It was very subtle, he had trouble emoting and especially speaking, and seemed to be terribly confounded and confused by all of this. And so from one lost kid to another, Tommy just kind of… took him under his wing.

“Come?” Servus asked, one of his eyebrows twitching up an inch. Even though he was slowly becoming more human, Tommy had a feeling he would always be able to win first place in any resting bitch face competition he ever decided to enter.

“Sure,” Tommy shrugged. “Why not.”

After waving goodbye to Aurum, the four of them made the trek out to Mathilda, still in the abandoned lot across from the elementary school. Tommy frowned as he saw that weeds had begun to grow around her wheels, and he grumbled as he pulled them out.

Muirne and Gil waited patiently for him to finish, while Servus bent down to help hm. “Thanks,” Tommy nodded, patting him on the head. Muirne looked over at the automaton, a slightly pained expression on her face.

“Alright,” Tommy straightened. “Welcome to my humble abode.” He gestured ironically, and opened the door to the inside.

He’d forgotten how musty it smelled inside. No one else had been in here in a long while… except maybe Cowell once or twice. He crawled over the pile of blankets to pull the small window on the side open, then stuffed the big comforter into the back.

Muirne and Gil stepped inside, both politely avoiding crinkling their noses. “Mind if I poke around?” Muirne asked, and Tommy waved the affirmative.

“Yes, this is definitely Atlantean,” Muirne muttered, running her hand along the carvings on a wooden beam. “Which means that somewhere along here…” she pressed the center of a decorative sun, and a small panel emerged from the wall.

Tommy’s eyes widened. “Wha—?”

“You never knew this was here?” Muirne chuckled.

“Not a clue,” Tommy shook his head. He wondered if Remus had known about this.

Muirne turned a few dials and examined the window, which snapped closed on it’s own to reveal a pale sort of overlay.

“You know you’ve had this on ‘automatic,’ right?” she asked after a minute

“Automatic?”

“Aye. You’ve just been letting the old girl go wherever she wants.”

Tommy felt a little weak in the knees. “You’re telling me… that all this time… there was a manual setting? I could’ve left at any time?”

“That is what she’s saying, yes,” Gil raised an eyebrow.

A grin began to spread over Tommy’s face. This meant… why, he could go wherever he wanted now. Any place in the whole cosmos, any adventure he wanted. He could leave Ede Valley, get out of this place that put so many bad memories on his shoulders. Free as a bird, nothing to tie him down.

“Well shit,” he said. “Maybe I’ll…”

But he broke off as he happened to glance over at Servus. It seemed to be dawning on the kid what it meant if Mathilda was fixed, if Tommy could leave. His first thought was to see if Servus wanted to go with him, incredibly fitting, after all. But he realized then that it wasn’t just Servus keeping him here.

It was Cindy, who he’d just met again after all of these years. It was Mike, who he’d never known and right now needed help from people who could understand. And besides, how the hell could he quit his job at the Smiling Goat? Literally how. Cowell would somehow twist his words around in his mouth so badly that he’d be working more hours instead.

And he realized then that the thought of flying away was a distant pipe dream. As much as he hated to admit it, he had roots here.

As he was mulling this over, Gil and Muirne had been discussing something in the corner. As Tommy stirred from his internal monologue, Muirne jumped on him. “Please,” she said, “before you go, allow me to study her. If Gil and I had a machine like this…”

Tommy smiled. He knew what Remus would want him to do. “Take her for a while,” he said.

Gil and Muirne blinked. “Truly?” Gil asked, recovering first. “You are not ‘pulling our legs’?”

“Not forever, keep in mind,” Tommy shrugged. “I expect you to take good care of her, and I expect her back in one piece. And don’t make a mess. I know exactly what’s going to go down in here.” And what had, many times over the last couple years, with many different people, he added to himself.

Blushing furiously, Gil spluttered. “I don’t know what you could possibly be referring to.”

Tommy clapped him on the back, and winked. “Yeah, you do. Anyway, give me one more night in her and I’ll clean out my junk in the morning.”

“Thank you,” Muirne blinked. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Just keep her safe,” Tommy requested. “She’s got a lot of good memories in her. Come on, Servus,” he added to the automaton, who seemed to have perked up considerably over the course of the conversation. “Let’s get you back to Aurum.”

“Alright,” Servus lifted one side of his mouth an inch.

“Hey, you almost did it!” Tommy beamed. “You know what, let’s get some ice cream on the way back. Wait, can you eat ice cream?”

Servus blinked. “Don’t know.”

“Welp, I guess we’ll find out, then,” Tommy hopped down Mathilda’s creaky step after Servus and they walked down the road as the sun began its slow descent into the horizon.

~~ o ~~

May

Cindy had never expected so many people to show up to her high school graduation. Not that it was really a big deal for her, it was just a celebration of her assent from hell itself, but she was flattered nonetheless. Lucius was, of course, sitting with the teachers, but she kept noticing him glancing over in her direction with a slightly goofy grin. Tommy, Niko, Servus, and Cowell were on one side of the bleachers, and Tommy waved as she walked in. Servus held his camcorder, no doubt so Aurum could see as well. Her mother was on the other side of the bleachers, a handkerchief clutched in her hands, and Mike sat next to her, a finger hovering near his ear as if he was casually trying to block out some of the noise. He was trying for a grin, but Cindy could tell that he was very overwhelmed.

She was surprised at the sheer volume of noise that accompanied her rise to the stage. In fact, it nearly knocked her off her feet. She’d been expecting polite applause and not much more. Then again, she supposed the friends she did have were not the quietest bunch.

Though she couldn’t help noticing Mike leaving the bleachers shortly after she sat back down.

As soon as the ceremony was done, families and friends lingered in the gymnasium, but Cindy snuck out as fast as she could. She found Mike just inside the front doors of the school, his eyes closed.

“You alright?” she tapped him on the shoulder, to which he jumped slightly.

“Yeah,” he said, “Just the people and… a little overwhelming.”

Cindy frowned. “Sorry.”

“’S not your fault,” he shrugged. “It’s not anyone’s really.”

“Abigail’s,” Cindy supplied.

“I’m not ever really sure about that,” he gazed off into the distance. “She’s just a slave to human instinct, curiosity. Just like all the rest of you.”

It still felt strange whenever he didn’t include himself in ‘people’. He’d been acting more and more like Mike over the months, as he got some of his memories, some of himself back, but it was times like this when she knew that Mike would never truly return.

Their mother found them a second later. “Oh, Cindy,” she said, wrapping her arms around her enrobed daughter. “I am so proud of you.” She pulled away, and began to tear up a little.

“Moooom,” Cindy rolled her eyes, but she smiled. “Thanks.”

Tommy and the crew emerged from the gym a minute later. “Oh, there’s some friends,” Cindy said. “I’d better go say hi, I’ll be right back.”

She ducked through the crowd, and came up behind them, tapping Tommy on the shoulder. He grinned, and they hugged. “Congrats on being the only one of us to actually finish high school,” he beamed.

“Hey, I got pretty close,” Niko pouted.

“Yeah, only missed by a whole entire year,” Cowell shook his head in mock disappointment.

“It’s better than Tommy,” he insisted. “He didn’t make it past the third grade.”

Tommy frowned. “I still got a good education,” he said. “Just not a very… conventional one.”

“Oh yeah, what’s pi then?”

“Uh, something you eat? Duh?”

“I rest my case,” Niko folded his arms before looking over to Cindy. “But congratulations.”

“Thanks,” she nodded, “and the only reason I’m even here right now is because while all of you were off having adventures I was stuck back here in good old Ede Valley.”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said, glancing over to their mother and Mike. “I wouldn’t knock what you’re got.”

“Tommy,” she put a hand on his shoulder. “You know you could always go talk to her.”

“Yeah…” he paused for a moment. “You know what? Yeah, I think it’s time.”

“Good luck,” Cowell smiled pleasantly. “Try not to give her a heart attack.”

Glancing over to him, Tommy looked a little worried. “Please don’t tell me that’s one of your predictions.”

He laughed. “Not this time. Merely being facetious. Or am I?”

“Yes, you are,” Cindy said. Even though Cowell was still largely a mystery to her, she’d found that over the last few months her ability to read people had grown even stronger. “Come on, Tommy. We’ll see you guys later.”

The three of them waved as Cindy and Tommy made their way back over to Mike and their mother.

Carol Miller for a second only looked at the newcomer with mild interest. “Oh, Cindy, is this a friend of y…” but she broke off as she looked up at his face.

It felt like an eternity before Tommy could say anything, an eternity of their mother staring up at him, vague recognition and confusion dawning on her face before he was able to open his mouth. “Hi mom,” was all he could manage, in the end.

“T… To—” she sputtered, as if almost afraid to say it. “Tommy?”

He smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. I’m back.”

Tears began to well in her eyes as she tackled him in a bearhug. “You’re alive,” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry, Tommy, I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect you.”

“It’s alright,” he said. “I forgave you a long time ago.”

“I love you so much.”

“I love you too.”

And finally, after so long apart, after runaways and psych wards and boarding schools, the Millers were at last all together again.

~~ o ~~

The four of them went out for dinner after that, Tommy filling their mother in on some of the details of where he’d been, and all of them enjoyed being together again. But once the food was cleared away and their mother had paid the bill—after refusing Tommy’s offer to do so instead—Cindy looked at her phone and saw the time.

“Oh, is it that late already?”

“Do you have plans tonight?” her mother asked.

And it was at that moment that Cindy realized something. She wasn’t a high schooler anymore. She no longer had to lie. “Yeah I uh….” She couldn’t help grinning a little. “I… have a date.”

Their mother gasped. “Really?” she asked. “Do I know him?”

“No,” Cindy said. “And I can’t introduce you quite yet,” far too soon still, there’d be a few more weeks of minor sneaking around yet. “But I hope to soon. Anyway,” she stood. “I’d better get going. I love you all, I’ll see you at home. I think I’ll be home tonight.”

Her mother looked worried, but she nodded. “Text me if you won’t be, alright?”

“Will do,” Cindy smiled.

This whole time, Mike had been glancing out of the window towards the slowly sinking sun. A small figure was standing besides a nearby chain-link fence, waiting for him.

“I… think I’m going to… go too,” he said absently.

“Mike, it’s getting late…” their mother frowned.

“I’ll only be a few minutes,” he explained. “And it’s not that far home, I’ll walk.”

“Okay…” Carol began to look a little sad as Mike got up and left too.

But Tommy was still there. “I’ll come home with you, mom,” he grinned, and stood, holding out his arm for her. She took it , and they left the restaurant together. “There’s still a lot of things we need to talk about…”

~~ o ~~

Mike waited for Tommy and their mother to leave the restaurant and be well out of sight before approaching the fence. The small girl with pigtails was there, waiting for him. They had never met, but he knew who she was.

“Alpha,” he said, to be polite, even though she no doubt already knew he was there.

“Beta,” she replied, without turning to him.

They stood there for a moment, staring off into the distance. “I’m sorry for what she did to Mike,” she said finally. “It’s been so long for me that I barely remember what it’s like to be human. But you…”

“I’ll live,” he shrugged. For the first time in the last three months, he could stop pretending to be human. It felt… good. He let his face drop into a neutral expression. Expressions were the hardest thing to fake.

“I’m going to leave now,” Buttercup finally turned to him. “I’ve atoned for what I’ve caused.”

“Of course,” Mike nodded. After all, if there was nothing holding you here, why stay? “Where will you go?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I believe that I’ll just start walking. But Beta,” she gazed up at him with her old eyes. “Don’t follow me. I have a wish for you.”

He tilted his head.

“I have a wish that someday, you can figure out who you actually are. I didn’t live long enough as a human to do such. But you… you have a chance.”

Mike… Nihil… Beta, whoever he was, he nodded. “I’ll try.”

“Thank you,” she said before she started walking. “I’m sure we’ll meet again some day.”

He blinked once. “I’m sure we will.”

~~ o ~~

Cindy sat on the balcony overlooking the back of Marcell’s house, her head on his shoulder. Her feet dangled through the posts of the railing, falling into nothing below the cliff’s edge. For the first time in a long time, it seemed at this moment that everything was alright.

Neither of them said anything, they didn’t need to. Cindy’s Mother had already been messaged and the night was young. For once, they were in no hurry to do anything.

“It’s almost over,” Cindy said.

“What is?” she felt the rumble of his voice in her bones.

“The secrecy. The sneaking around. We won’t need to hide anymore after this summer.”

“People will talk regardless of how long we wait,” he warned.

She shook her head as much as she was able. “But now there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Marcell chuckled. “Fair enough.”

As they sat there, listening to each other breathe, Cindy pondered something as she looked down at the only town she’d ever known. “I want to go somewhere this summer,” she said. “With you.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I really just want to get in a car and drive.”

She could hear the slight smile in his voice. “Why not? It could be fun.”

They watched the moon slowly rising over Ede Valley, over the crater that used to be St. Adelaide’s. Cindy was excited, and nervous, and many other bundled-up emotions besides that she didn’t have names for. But she knew that whatever happened, it would certainly be an adventure.

#ede valley #i ain't tagging this shit there are too many characters and i am tired

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clockworkmoose · 5 years

Text

mmmmnnnnnyh personal work related fuckery

I function best when I can make repetitive schedules or plan for events far in advance. I’ve got agendas and notebooks and calendars and agendas and notebooks... to the point where if something is sprung on me and I’m not given enough time to properly draft a resolution to modify the plans, take it to the council, put the motion to a vote...

my snap response is to get really testy and panicky and I default to this thirty second breakdown of COOL! GREAT! WHY DON’T WE JUST CANCEL ALL THE PLANS!!! WIPE THE BOARD CLEAN! NOBODY NEEDS TO KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING! TIME IS A CONSTRUCT AND THE FUTURE IS CHAOS! I’M THRIVING!!!!!!! before I can wrestle myself back to “no, we can do this now, this other thing can be moved to tomorrow, it’s no problem, just pencil it in.”

And I know I do this and that it really stresses me out so I really try my best to, first, plan things out properly in advance so I know what’s upcoming and it’s not a surprise, and then, second, also be communicative with people about what events and plans might get tossed at me so that it’s not a total surprise when it’s tossed at me.

So I’m sitting here today, trying to make the schedule for the second half of March for my two employees and myself.

One of my employees has a full time (30+ hours) job, and is a part time student. Last semester, she worked Monday-Wednesday-Friday evenings after her classes, and then Saturdays (10 hours a week). And she liked this schedule, so for an entire semester the schedule was consistent for her, me, and my other part time employee.

This semester, in early January, she informed me she was going to have a late class on Tuesday and Thursday, and requests Wednesdays off. So the first two weeks of January pass with her working Monday-Friday-Saturday (8 hours), and then she comes to me and says she’d like her Saturdays off so she has a day for homework, and can she work Tuesday or Thursday instead of Monday and Friday so she has time for extracurriculars at school?

But here’s the thing. She is in class until 7:45, we close at 9 on Tuesday-Thursday. After driving, she would have a 1 hour shift, and I would have 10 hours. And with the way she arrives to her shift and then immediately launches into stories and she does not shut up even if you rudely tell her you need her to be quiet you’re literally on the phone with a customer and can’t listen to her jabbering on about writing a screenplay (that is already so good hollywood’s going to be salivating to turn it into a blockbuster) about a giant colonial era cotton plantation and also someone gets murdered while her brilliant centuries-ahead-of-her-time self insert that everyone calls “yum yum dog food” makes references to the modern year and takes over running the plantation, but there’s no slaves in this story because she doesn’t want to deal with writing about slavery as it would ““““““put a damper””””” on the story?????......... Rant-ception, sorry.

It takes me so long to tell her what needs doing that I would end up being there almost until 9 anyways trying to disengage from her and get out. And I do not want to. I tell her that’s not going to work. She understands, so she asks if instead I can schedule her only 2 days a week.

So for the next two weeks, I schedule her Friday-Saturday only, and I work a 9 hour day on Wednesdays so that my other part time employee isn’t working Sunday-Thursday every evening in a row. And then she comes back and says that 6 hours? Not enough paycheck. Can she also work Wednesdays? And Fridays?

So. 10 hours. Her original schedule. More than the 8 that was “too much.” I schedule her that for ONE week, anticipating it’s going to be “too much” and SURE ENOUGH yes it is. And she comes back to me asking if I can give her less hours again. Either week days or week ends, but not both. She is officially dubbed wishywashy.

At the same time, my other employee who has thus far not caused me any problems has requested Saturdays off (she has since she began working for me and it’s been fine) and maybe some weekday morning shifts instead of evening shifts so she can spend time with her girlfriend in the evenings. And so far this employee hasn’t caused me any stress or grief and although I don’t really want to work evenings either (I hired both of them for nights and weekends specifically!) I’ve already been working evenings to cover other employee’s too-many-hours-not-enough-hours wishywashyness, so sure, I can work on accommodating that.

So now I’m looking at the schedule for March I’m trying to make.

I’m obligated to work on Saturdays, that’s part of my position. And if I give wishywashy employee just weekends, that means I don’t get a day off during the week, I work 6 days straight, and my good employee has to work every single weekday, 4 out of five being evening shifts. And she loses her Sunday shift that she enjoys working. If I give wishywashy employee just week day shifts, she can only work Monday-Wednesday-Friday (which was “too much”), and good employee has to work Sundays, evenings on Tuesday-Thursday, and Saturdays which she would prefer not to work. And either way, this is ringing a little too much like punishing the employee who does a good job to reward the employee that does a bad job, and that doesn’t sit right with me. (Found out from last job the reason I never got the backup help I asked for was that I was too good at my job, and the lazy person who took over my position immediately got backup to make the job easier, so wtf! Uncool!)

So I’m sitting here stressing out over how I’m going to juggle the schedule to appease someone who just CAN’T be appeased and changes her mind every single week about what she wants... and I’m realizing I haven’t had a consistent weekly schedule at any point in January or February. I’ve had to work on what should have been days off and I’ve been working anywhere between 3 and 11 hour days, and right now, working 14 days in a row without a day off.

Which is explaining a lot???

I haven’t been able to properly plan out anything or anticipate my schedule and have just been in a general sense of anxiety for weeks now and did not realize just how much battery power it takes just to be stressed. I haven’t had the social energy to chat with or hang out with with anyone since the holidays because I’ve been dancing around what’s going to work for a part time employee so much I’ve completely neglected what’s going to work for me? I think I’ve logged into discord maybe five times? Haven’t drawn since December, haven’t done fantrolls or RP in as long, and pushed back three of our weekly dnd games just because I wasn’t feeling up to DMing or talking to friends? And was debating just straight up not going to our weekly trivia game because time is a construct and the future is chaos who even cares that trivia has been well established and consistent for almost 2 years, fuck the whole system!!!

And holy shit, now realizing the cause of my general withdrawing from everyone and everything that’s supposed to be stress RELIEVING is a huge relief in of itself? I still don’t have any sort of consistency going in to March, but at least now I know why I am struggling and failing and can properly attribute it to a cause rather than just feeling like I’ve fucked up somewhere and can’t function properly as a human being.

And for the second half of March, I’m going to start scheduling what’s best for me, and if wishywashy can’t handle her shifts, that’s going to be her problem to solve, not mine.

4 more weeks of this though.... fuck me for making the schedule in advance so my employees can plan their lives out in advance rather than throwing it up the day before the week begins lmao!!!!!!!

#moosemun #work blogging

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nrlrbhh · 5 years

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Umrah and Ziarah; Allah is the best planner

Man, by only typing the title, i already feel like crying.

it was surreal. everything was like a dream. alhamdulillah, thummalhamdulillah, thummalhamdulillah. to be given chance, to be invited by Him, to be able to remember everything that happened throughout the journey, i feel blessed.

since i was small, to be veyr honest, when my friends were about to go for umrah, i didnt feel anything. maybe i didnt know what it feels like to travel overseas bc ive never done one. or maybe, i was too small to even understand things. it was all started after me being a travel-person, loving to travel to other countries and appreciating the cultures and everyhting. since 2012, it was like an annual thing for us to travel once a year to anywhere. one day, mama asked us to pray that we can go and perform umrah as soon as possible, and be determined of it. that day when everything hits me. when suddenly i felt the longing to perform umrah eventho ive never done even once in my life. i set a goal in my mind and in my heart, plus saving money all i could because i said to myself, i need to pay this umrah for myself, at least half of the price bc i am big enough. things happened, our plan was postponed bc of the election. the plan started in 2017, but only being confirmed after May 2018. everyhting happened so quickly. the confirmation, the documentations, the flu shots and everything happened so quickly.

until few days before the day. i didnt start packing yet up to two days prior. just then i start to talk to myself again lol. it is happening now. your dream is coming sooooo close.

bam! we arrived in madinah. first of all, the excitement was crazy. the feelings was jist too beautiful. to be able to step on the same ground rasulullah has stepped on thousand of years before. to be able to experience the surrounding the companions lived in thousand of years before. along the way from jeddah to madinah, our mutawwif selawat with all of us. i cried for a moment. i know this is the environment that i miss. i know this is what my soul has been wanting before. since we arrived at midnight, we didnt go to masjidil nabawi right after eventho it was just 50 m away from our hotel. we went up and rest, ready for tmr’s journey, started with qiyamullail. hamdulillah, first step inside masjidil nabawi, i felt so calm despite the crowds. ive never felt that calm in my entire life. mama lead our way inside the masjid and we sat together and perform our first prayer inside. big thanks to mama that already been there thrice, she lead us well and ensure that we experienced every beautiful moments.

days passed by so smoothly. it was our routine to ‘tawaf’ around the masjid after asr or isya so that we can remember every bits of the environment forever. since in madinah we had no umrah or other activities beside ziarah to other places by bus, we had quite plenty time to spend everyday. days passed by comfortably not too quickly. after two days, we felt so comfortable that it felt like already a week. everything feels so familiar to us already.

i remembered the last day we were in madinah, specifically in masjidil nabawi. we went to perform ziarah wida’ that afternoon. we stopped right infront of makam rasulullah saw and bid our last salaam to him and the companions, i read the du’a right there. it was so so sad that i cried while reading it. the du’a says something about dont make this ziarah the last for us, and if the death meets us first, Allah has witnessed our faith. it was so sad as if you were about to bid farewell to your beloved friend that you’ll never knew when to meet them again in the future, but this is rasulullah, the one that sacrificed everything, that sacrificed his own life so that islam came to us. thank you, ya rasulullah saw.

went inside the bus, we were about to depart for mekkah this time. at this moment, i feel like everyhting was changing. if in madinah, we keep selawat-ing everyday, now, we started to read talbiah together along the journey from the miqat to masjidil haram. it took us around 6 to 7 hours to arrive so most of us rest in the bus but not for me haha. i didnt sleep at all eventho i felt tired. maybe the excitement this time to go to the second of the haramain. i clearly registered in my mind the fact that as soon as we arrived, we’ll be performing our first umrah there, but still, i didnt get any sleep inside the bus. alhamdulillah, i dint feel too tired bc madinah was a very calm place for me, i took too much rest there yeap.

we finally arrived, thummalhamdulillah, our hotel was very very comfortable compared to madinah. i’d say 3x more comfortable. we took a 30 mins rest or time to prepare ourself before performing our first umrah that night. it was definitely a whole new experience. everything feels new to me. from tawaf, to saie, to tahallul. i will definitely remember this moment forever. seeing kaabah right in front of my eyes, when all this while ive been staring the picture only through monitors. subhanallah, at that time, i really feel invited, feel welcomed to be there eventho i was full of sins, eventho im a sinner.

our first umrah ended at 2 in the morning i guess. umrah can be a lot faster than that but since it was our first umrah with this trip, the whole trip wanted to follow our mutawwif instead of going alone or with families. so the waiting after each tawaf and saie makes it draggy a lil bit but we enjoyed every moment together. since masjidil haram was going through major constructions, most of us chose to follow mutawwif bc we afraid that the route might have changed a iil so we let the mutawwif showed us the way first.

there was four umrah sessions prepared for us all together. one down, three more to be done for those who wanted to do it. alhamdulillah i managed to do it thrice and voluntarily chose not to do the fourth one (with my own reason hewhew). every umrah journey was different. my first, second and third were different between each of them and that definitely teach me thousand of lessons.

every places we went for ziarah, mekkah and madinah, reminds us to every specific seerah. alhamdulillah, our mutawwif is very very excellent in telling every stories that happened in the most exciting way, so we could enjoy without feeling bored. from jabal uhud, to tsaqifah bani saidah, to manasik haji, to taif, and more, every places contain it own seerah. alhamdulillah ive learned most of them in school and usrah, so i could revise every stories while the mutawwif tell them to us.

i have lots more to write, but i think i should continue once im ready with photos included for my own future reference ahaks. thummalhamdulillah, the whole journey was very beautiful. the fact that we went to the best cities in the world, and to be accompanied by a great mutawwif, and a great whole trip itself that really feel like family, i am very grateful for having to experience the best first umrah in my life. i am targeting for hajj next, for sure, insya allah. but if there is any opportunities for me to come back for umrah every year, or any years, i’d love to do it. umrah gave me new spirit and motivation to continue life in 2019 onwards, and definitely lift up some of my worries and make me see the world differently. alhamdulillah.

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bluewatsons · 7 years

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Deborah Flynn, Narratives of melancholy: a humanities approach to depression, 36 Med Humanit 36 (2010)

Abstract

This paper explores narrative literature as a means of inquiry into the sense of self in depression. Described as a disease, an identity and a way of life, depression is influenced by both internal and external factors. Although brain research has provided new insight into the relationship between neurotransmitter function and depression, the symptoms are experienced by individuals whose lives are intertwined with historical and sociocultural interpretations of illness and its manifestations. At the intersection of science and the humanities, narratives aid in the interpretation of lived experiences, provide a window to that experience, and a public medium that engages writers and readers as they interpret the world. Engaging narratives to interpret both experience and medical jargon may reveal for both those experiencing depression and those engaged in their care, a way of mediating that experience. Narratives can help dissect and thus illuminate the official language of medicine and psychiatry and the personal language of depression. Such a window can enhance the opportunities for empathy and care.

Sense of self and depression

Described for two millennia and known by various names, clinical definitions of depression have not always represented individual experience. A contemporary definition of depression, taken from the DSM-IV-TR, includes the presence for at least two consecutive weeks of either depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure in previously pleasurable things, in addition to at least four of the following: significant change in appetite and/or weight, sleep disturbance, psychomotor disturbance, fatigue, feelings of guilt or worthlessness, difficulty concentrating and recurrent thoughts of death; the presence of these symptoms must result in a change in previous functioning.1 In 1621 Burton noted, “The Tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues as this chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms.”2 In 1917 Freud wrote, “Even in descriptive psychiatry the definition of melancholia is uncertain; it takes on various clinical forms (some of them suggesting somatic rather than psychogenic affections) that do not seem definitely to warrant reduction to a unity.”3 More than 50 years later, Beck concurred, “[a]lthough depression (or melancholia) has been recognised as a clinical syndrome for over 2000 years, as yet no completely satisfactory explanation of its puzzling and paradoxical features has been found”.4 Similarly, in a memoir of his own depression William Styron remarked,The disease of depression remains a great mystery … The intense and sometimes comically strident factionalism that exists in present-day psychiatry—the schism between the believers in psychotherapy and the adherents of pharmacology—resembles the medical quarrels of the eighteenth century (to bleed or not to bleed) and almost defines in itself the inexplicable nature of depression and the difficulty of its treatment. (Styron, p11)5

Culminating a long history of attempted definitions, Radden commented, “About clinical depression we seem to have more questions than definitive or enlightening answers.”6 Thus, in order to understand the experience of depression one must look beyond the changing definitions to the experience and expression of symptoms. Narrative can provide a window into the understanding of an experience that has been historically difficult define.

Each person perceives and mediates experiences through a distinct sense of self, and some experiences may change the sense of self. Individuals experiencing depression have described a loss of self, a second self or a disintegrated self. Clifford Beers described a self unlike what he had known. “… in telling the story of my life, I must relate the history of another self—a self which was dominant from my twenty-fourth to my twenty-sixth year. During that period I was unlike what I had been, or what I have been since.” (Beers, p5).7 William Styron remarked, “[M]y own sense of self had all but disappeared” (Styron, p56).5 Later, as he wrote of contemplating suicide Styron commented that, “[a] phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self—a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it.” (Styron, p64).5 Thus a sense of two selves, one well and the other ill, may obscure a sense of an integrated self. Styron's observation that the individual's concept of self is enmeshed with the human response to illness, particularly when one experiences a psychological disorder, coincides with others' reflections. John Head mused, “[P]erhaps I was on a path to understanding who I had been and who I was becoming” (Head, p79).8 This concept of self alludes to a changing sense of self as both time and illness act as mediators to perceptions of lived experience. Just as reflections on the past influence present perceptions, illness can provoke a sense of self of which one has not been previously aware. Struggling with a changing sense of self, a common concern becomes identifying the real self.

Narrative stories aid understanding of an otherwise perplexing world and so help to make meaning of experience. Beers noted the impact of narratives on the question of slavery and asked, “why cannot a book be written which will free the helpless slaves of all creeds and colours confined today in the asylums and sanitariums throughout the world?” (Head, p176).8 Anatole Broyard observed, “[m]y initial experience of illness was like a series of disconnected shocks, and my first instinct was to try to bring it under control by turning it into a narrative” (Broyard, p19).9 Because an essential part of what it is to be human is to know oneself, narratives can provide a way to reaffirm one's sense of self through an exploration of the experiences and relationships one encounters. Ochs and Capp explain, “[t]he inseparability of narrative and self is grounded in the phenomenological assumption that entities are given meaning through being experienced” (Ochs, p21).10 Narratives can be particularly helpful to seekers and providers of mental health care in understanding how illness experiences shape the sense of self. This has important implications for models of care, especially because narratives assist those diagnosed with mental illness to maintain or reclaim previously established notions of self, relationships and roles.

Impact of social structures

The relationship between social structures and sense of self is an important one. Frank points to both the personal experience of illness and the social nature of illness stories.11 Kleinman suggests that “the experience of illness has something fundamental to teach each of us about the human condition” (Kleinman, pxiii).12 In contrast to disease, which Kleinman notes is the “recasting of illness in terms of theories of disorder”, and is the concern of the practitioner, illness represents the perspective of the symptomatic individual (Kleinman, p18).12 Shifting ideas about whether the body and mind are intricately entangled or represent two distinct entities of the self confound the experience, expression and ultimately the treatment of depression. For example, notions about the immutability of the mind and thus the self are reflected in efforts to confine and control individuals labelled as mad, in the asylums of 17th and 18thcentury Europe.13–15

Foucault placed mental illness within historical, political, social and cultural settings when he asked, “[i]s there not in mental illness a whole nucleus of significations that belongs to the domain in which it appeared—and, to begin with, the simple fact that it is in that domain that it is circumscribed as illness?” (Foucault, p56).13 Thus, the environment within which one lives serves to frame the perception of illness and so separates the well from the ill. Consequently, the development of a sense of self as well as its expression are interpreted and understood (or misunderstood) within the constraints of history, society and culture.

Though it is unclear how the onset of depression is instigated, it is clear that both biology and context are involved. Changing scientific paradigms concerning the cause and course of depression as well as changing attitudes and beliefs both about depression and those experiencing depression, contribute to this lack of clarity. Interestingly, the experiences of depression bear a remarkable resemblance to each other when compared across decades. While it is evident that, as Jamison notes, each person experiences illness ‘idiosyncratically’, it is also evident that a distorted sense of self is common among those experiencing depression in all eras, even while the theories and treatment change.16

Of interest is the extent to which sense of self is influenced by biological (inherited and adapted) and environmental (historical and sociocultural) processes. Vrettros noted that during the 19th century, conceptions of illness were shaped by Victorian cultural narratives.17 Whether medical histories or literary texts, the narratives provided form and substance to the private and public worlds of Victorian life and these in turn shaped accepted notions of self and social relationships. According to Grob, early psychiatric practice “reflected the role assigned to it by society”.18 Thus, care of the mentally ill reflected the sociocultural values of 18th century American society as opposed to the rigours of medical science.

This idea is important to the construction of self. Butler's concept of emergence suggests there is no control over one's beginnings therefore any concept of self is related to external forces such as historical and sociocultural influences.19 Beers' upbringing clearly defined his sense of self and influenced his responses to his hospital attendants. Despite their treatment of him as simply another ‘mental incompetent’ his education both at home and at school prepared him as a gentleman.7 His cultural narrative, then, influenced his response to both his illness and his care. In describing her conception of self before and after her diagnosis Jamison commented,

I was used to my mind being my best friend … I missed my home, my mind, my life of books and ‘friendly things,’ my world where most things were in their place … Now I had no choice but to live in the broken world that my mind had forced upon me. (Jamison, p37, 97)16

Jamison drew a very clear line between her past and present lives. She implicated not only the significance of her role as researcher and educator in creating a sense of self, but how that conflicted with her experience of illness.

In the last 2 decades, brain research has gained much notoriety, most notably through new techniques in neuroimaging. However, while the images provide an extraordinary look at the brain in action, they cannot tell the story of a life. Depression is not a distinct illness with a specific treatment; it is a conglomeration of signs and symptoms that affects its host in idiosyncratic ways, shaping both biology and disposition. Solomon averred,

Although depression is described by the popular press and the pharmaceutical industry as though it were a single-effect illness such as diabetes, it is not … Depression is not the consequence of a reduced level of anything we can now measure. Raising levels of serotonin in the brain triggers a process that eventually helps many depressed people feel better, but that is not because they have abnormally low levels of serotonin. (Soloman, p22)20

Furthermore, understanding the chemical mechanisms involved in altered mood does not necessarily translate into improved function. In describing her manic-depressive illness, Jamison asserted that, “[a]n understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally skeptical that anyone who does not have this disease can truly understand it.” (Jamison, p176).16 Thus while brain images can show where and when drugs affect neurotransmitters and this can lead to the development of medication that lifts the symptoms of depression, these are only part of the remedy. In the end the body that consumes the drugs contains more than a brain and chemical messengers; it contains the soul and personal life of a human being.

Jamison noted her reluctance to acknowledge her illness and that uncontrollable symptoms of her illness may be perceived by others as anger, irrationality and willfulness. “Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behaviour can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.” (Jamison, p91).16 However, as an authority on manic-depressive illness, Jamison understands its biology as well as its implications for the lives of patients because she is one.

I believe, without a doubt, that manic-depressive illness is a medical illness; I also believe that, with rare exception, it is malpractice to treat it without medication. All of these beliefs aside, however, I still somehow thought that I ought to be able to carry on without drugs, that I ought to be able to do things my own way. (Jamison, p102)16

Doing things one's own way preserves the sense of self that is often threatened in mental illness. Because of some of its most outward signs, for example, sleep disturbance, difficulty concentrating, and a loss of pleasure in previously pleasurable things, it is difficult to maintain one's own way. Solomon observed, “[t]he insistence on normality, the belief in an inner logic in the face of unmistakable abnormality is endemic to depression” (Solomon, p72).20 Claims to normalcy are based on the preservation of whom one was before depression. Any sense of change in self jeopardises not only claims to normalcy but claims to one's self. Attention to narrative can provide insight into the experience and expression of depression, particularly the relationship between sense of self and social structures. Additionally, clues to sociocultural differences, as expressed through language, metaphor and story, may help to tailor interventions to a diverse group of individuals, leading to a better appreciation of mental health disparities and a means to begin to bridge the treatment gap.

Humanities and narrative medicine

Though narrative is an integral part of the medical consultation, of concern is the loss of the patient's voice as symptoms are transformed to diagnosis. During the modern period, the focus of medicine moved from the patient's experience to the technical expertise of clinicians.12 The natural sciences' inability to explain illness as experienced within a sociocultural context has been documented by others and underscores the assertion that narratives redirect attention usually focused on disease to include the patient and the lived experience.21 22 What emerges is a better understanding of what life is like outside the medical encounter. This is key to determining appropriate modes of care.

Placing narrative and medical technology in conversation with each other can enrich understanding of illness and wellbeing. Kirklin noted, “[f]amiliar with the culture and vocabulary of medicine, [medical educators] may be only partially aware of how both the culture and language of medicine, as opposed to the language and culture of the person who is ill, are dominant in the medical encounter” suggesting that the dominance of the medical culture and language in the doctor-patient interface must be acknowledged and bridged.23 Thus, the treatment community's history and culture represents an additional influence on the perception of both self and illness.

Noting the difference in both language and approach, it is important to reiterate the significance of the central question of the humanities, that is, what is it to be human, and to articulate the relationship between the extrinsic value of medical science and the intrinsic value of the nature of the human response to that science. Edgar and Pattison suggest that the humanities are important to medicine because the humanities compel us to scrutinise those scientific structures upon which medicine is based to the extent that they reflect beliefs about what humans are or aspire to be.24 “Within the humanities, this question—the question of how human beings understand, experience, and practice (sic) their own humanity—is typically addressed indirectly, by looking at the products of human existence, including language, beliefs, writings, paintings, and social institutions and organisations”.24 Although science raises questions about accommodating scientific inquiry, discovery and the ethical use of its knowledge, it does not provide answers to those questions; it is here that the humanities can provide guidance.24 Medical science derives from the validation of objective realities independent of what humans think or believe. The importance of the humanities derives from its response to those objective realities, attempting to understand them and scrutinising them in the context of what it means to be human. Scientific medicine, though it validates objective realities, is a product of human activity. Thus, in order to address both the objective realities of science and the subjective realities of humans and their societies, a multifaceted approach is necessary.

This inquiry reveals one inevitable barrier, and that is language. As Virginia Woolf put it, “[t]o hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache”.25 Despite eloquent expressions of self and depression, those on the outside can only catch a glimpse of what the experience is like. Wittgenstein noted, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”.26 This is not to contradict the ideas presented here but to acknowledge that listening to those who experience it first-hand is imperative to understanding illness. It is also to acknowledge the inherent complexity of making meaning of experience through words.

Assuming that language is an artefact of each cultural paradigm, that is, that language emerges to describe and convey sociocultural constructs and experiences, a lack of language to describe some experiences says something about the understanding and acceptability of that experience. Remembering that even personal experiences have multiple writers—for example, in addition to the individual, there are the keepers of the sociocultural history and traditions—it follows that these become the signposts for behaviour and markers of sociocultural norms. Thus, the individual, though attempting to express a very personal experience, is bound by the prevailing cultural language. This illustrates the difficulty of conveying to another the unique experience of self in depression.

Historical and sociocultural influences both shape the understanding of illness and inspire its research. The experiences of asylum patients instigated investigations of mental hospitals which eventually led to deinstitutionalisation. The experiences of soldiers and psychiatrists in WWII shaped mental health policy and practices in the 1950s and 1960s, and the experiences of neurologists in laboratories shaped the present era of neuropsychiatry. Throughout these eras the patient's narrative has slowly but surely been replaced by the medical narrative. The patient's voice has been in many cases usurped by the medical voice, leaving more room for the management of disease than for understanding the experience of illness. Patient narratives can place the patient's voice alongside and in conversation with the medical voice. This placement permits a consideration of human subjectivity along with the scientific objectivity that guides medical practice. There are obstacles however, when patients struggle with the language of illness.

Rose suggested that two concerns in attempting to tell a story of illness are the “fall into medical discourse and the escape to a view of illness as metaphor … [m]edicine and I have dismissed each other … [w]e do not have enough command of each other's language for the exchange to be fruitful”.27 Though patients often try to adopt medical terminology in an attempt to place themselves equally with their physicians, its use may unintentionally reinforce the authority of the medical establishment because even while the patient uses it, the medical language is divorced from experience.27 The result is often that patients surrender to the power of the medical narrative.

The second concern, viewing illness as metaphor, has been addressed by Sontag. Sontag suggested that not only is illness not a metaphor but to treat it as such is a distortion of the reality of illness.28 She asserted that metaphor permits the illness to represent the sufferer's, as opposed to the illness', character. “Sadness made one ‘interesting’,” noted Sontag (p31).28 There may be times when individuals experiencing depression, looking for the words to describe their emotions, must use metaphor. The depth of sadness in depression is difficult to describe without using some other image to shape it and make it real. However, Sontag emphasised that a disease should simply be regarded as a disease, though it is doubtful that Sontag would have asked narrative authors to cease the search for language to describe their experiences. Thus, the use of metaphor offers opportunities for understanding unlikely in technical language.

Conclusion

Because health is often something of an afterthought until it declines, there is frequently more to learn from the response to illness than from the response to good health. Morris asserts that “[i]llness always seems to tell us more about a person or an era than health does”, and suggests a biocultural approach to 21st century illness (Morris, p52).29 Narratives then, including firsthand experiential accounts, official accounts such as medical records and diagnostic criteria, and especially those culturally common accounts, such as popular literature, that express the attitudes and beliefs of a particular society, can be particularly helpful in a biocultural approach to illness. According to Morris,

Narrative will never replace lasers … medicine attuned to the influence of mind, emotion, and culture can help greatly in addressing illnesses that … involve … issues of personal behavio[u]r and of public health … In respecting rather than dismissing a patient's narrative, it can offer a means of healing where cure may be impossible … (Morris, p276–7)29

Though discoveries in medicine only point out what was there even before it was known, the ability of medicine to transform that discovery into something that assists human health or alleviates human suffering presents both gifts and challenges. However, neither scientific discoveries nor the human response to them occur in a vacuum. Each must be considered within their historical and sociocultural contexts. Applied to this inquiry, the humanities probe the official language and practice of medicine and their historical and sociocultural contexts.

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