#especially with how difficult it has been for this past few years to keep constant contact with friends

[mikimeiko]

My favourite kind of friend is that friend that you can see once every few years and still fall into conversation and happiness like you just saw them the week before.

[apomaro-mellow]

some time travel shenanigans

Eddie thought the hardest part about time travel would be convincing everyone of that fact. Turned out he didn't need to do much convincing. Perhaps that was due in part to the fact that he was only from a few years ahead and thus didn't look too different from the version of himself lying comatose in the hospital.

His hair was just a bit longer and he had a beard now. But everything else was about the same.

No, the real struggle was holding back certain truths of the future. Of course, many of them had questions and the more logical ones reasoned that they shouldn't know anything unless absolutely necessary. So thankfully Eddie was spared from a constant barrage of questions. But even that wasn't the hard part.

The biggest challenge, the most difficult part of being here, was having to pretend that he wasn't head over heels in love with Steve.

To have to watch him from across the room and not be able to kiss, him, to embrace him, not even being able to hold his hand. And it cut him every time their gazes met. There was a question in Steve's eyes that he longed to answer.

The first night he spent in the past, Eddie could only think of his Stevie. How easily he'd been allowed to touch him in his own time. But he couldn't now. He had to wait. In a few days his younger self would wake up and the near-death experience would give him the guts to tell Steve that he was gay.

And then a few days after that, he'd reveal that he had a crush on someone. And then about a week after that, he would find Steve about to kiss another man and find the nerve to cut in between and confess.

Now that Eddie thought about it, he guessed he had to thank the guy who tried putting the moves on Steve. Having his feelings out in the open had made him feel more confident, stronger. And that passion helped aid in defeating Vecna's second coming. Eddie almost wished he knew who the guy was.

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

Everything had been going just as Eddie remembered it. The Harrington house had become the base of operations, even when Steve's parents returned. The military set up too and while they helped stem the demodog population, they did very little to help with Vecna.

His younger self woke up, injuries healed thanks to the bat venom now coursing through his veins. His return came with a message from Vecna. One that was a riddle that Eddie already knew the answer to.

"I can tell you what he's planning and how to counter. But some of you won't like it."

"Um, hey, who the fuck are you?"

Both Eddies stared each other down and it was so quiet you could hear a cotton ball drop.

"Who was supposed to tell present-Eddie about future-Eddie?", Robin asked.

"I'm sorry, who!?", Eddie exclaimed.

"You from the future, try to keep up", Dustin said.

Eddie's eyes were glued to his so called future self. And then only tore away when he caught a movement on the side. Steve shifting his balance. Steve.

"Okay, if you are me from the future, I have some questions."

"Most of which I can't answer. Especially that one."

"So you're useless then."

"Give him a break", Steve said, coming to the older man's defense. "If he told us everything that'd mess with the whole space-time whatever."

"Continuum", about three voices said for him.

"Yeah the whatever."

"...How long has he been here?", Eddie asked, wondering just what his future self, someone who seemed more bold and comfortable in his body, got up to with Steve.

Older Eddie just shook his head and chuckled in a way that reminded him too much of Wayne. "I haven't been here long enough for what you're imagining."

And then things progressed just as he knew they would. He knew his younger self was about to go and tell Steve about his crush. He could recall it happening during a supply run and even remembered that Steve had been wearing a camo jacket with a soft blue shirt underneath.

Seeing them get closer just made him long more for his own Stevie. Was he thinking of him now? Sometimes Eddie met the gaze of Steve from now and wondered if he could see the future they had together.

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

Steve knew the other Eddie was hiding something. At first he thought it might be how the venom was effecting Eddie's body. But once present-Eddie woke up, that had been made apparent and he was still acting weird. Steve didn't think it was malicious anymore. But it was definitely something.

Sometimes he caught the other man staring at him. Other times they had to hand things to one another and his touch lingered, like he wanted to touch Steve more. Steve knew yearning when he saw it. He just didn't understand why it was being directed towards him.

He got an opportunity to seek out answers one night. A lot of people were housed at the gym as a shelter after the quakes. But life was more dangerous now and that meant a lot of patrols in a lot of areas. So when someone reported odd noises outside, Steve, future-Eddie, present-Eddie, and a few well armed citizens went to check it out. It was about half a dozen of them in total and they broke off into groups.

Nancy's group was the one to find the thing, kill it, and radio in that everyone should get back inside before it got too late. Steve grabbed older Eddie's wrist, stopping from following orders. They were alone now, having split from the group. There was no better time than now.

"You keep acting weird. Especially around me", Steve said.

"Well someone thinks they're special", Eddie grinned.

There was just a sole light on this corner of the building and it mostly shone on Steve, which was fine by Eddie. He was having a hard time schooling his expressions now that they were alone.

"Something happens to me in the future, doesn't it? Do I die? Is that it?"

"No, no Steve you don't die", Eddie assured him.

"It's not just the way you act. You say my name weird too. Do you really hate it that much? Hate me?"

"No", Eddie bit out, turning his body half away.

"I thought we were really becoming friends. You-he's told me things. Secret things. But the way you're acting now it's like things change between us. I wanna know why. Is it me? Did I do something?"

Eddie heard his voice hitch up and then clear and knew that was how his baby sounded when he wanted to cry but held himself back.

"Stevie, sweetheart, baby", Eddie breathed out and held his face and it felt like a weight lifted from him. Calling him just 'Steve' had felt like walking with dumbbells attached to his ankles.

Steve's shoulders relaxed too, like he had also been carrying a weight. "That's what you call me, then? All that?"

"All that and more, my love." Eddie's voice was hushed, afraid someone or something might overhear.

"So that crush Eddie told me about is...?"

Eddie nodded, eyes closing for a moment, glad that he could at least have this about being apart for so long.

"Then you know how I feel", Steve said.

Eddie's eyes opened and he looked into Steve's. There was that question. One that Eddie longed to answer but he feared it wasn't his to reply to. Not at this time. Not now. And yet....

"Please", Steve whispered, eyes flickering to his lips.

Eddie wasn't strong enough to deny him. Not as a dying man in a drought being offered a drink of water. Just as he was about to give him, he was shoved back. Hard. He saw his own familiar curls and bolted, and odd sense of deja vu hitting him just as hard as the shove.

"Steve!", present-Eddie unknowingly took his older self's place in front of Steve. "I have to tell you something. Something really important and I need you to listen, okay?"

"Eddie?"

"I'm a goddamn idiot. An absolute fool for you and it shouldn't have taken some other guy trying to kiss you for me to get the gumption to tell you but it did and there it is and I...and I..." His expression pinched. "Wait, who was that guy?", he turned slightly to look for him.

Steve touched his cheek and brought his attention back. "It was...it doesn't matter who it was. You're here now."

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

When Eddie next opened his eyes, it was immediately followed by his Stevie kissing him all over the face. Everything came back to him, as well as new pieces of information.

"Wait, so that guy who was putting the moves on you that night-"

"Was you, yes", Steve confirmed, face splitting with how big he was smiling.

"And you just sat on that for years? Wait, how does that even work, you knew it was me but it couldn't be me until I got back to do the time travel and-"

"Don't think too hard about it, babe", Steve kissed his temple. "Just be grateful something gave you the kick in the pants to do it."

[stxrvel]

the routine (4)

heeeey guys. this is a short one but i wanted to share something with you, since it's been a while! it's getting harder to write, but i found some peace of mind today so i wanted to give you this. hope u like this! love u all and hopefully see u next time. i promise it's gonna get better, just give me some time :(.

summary: trying to settle into life after what happened has proven to be just as difficult for both you and Azriel… pairing: azriel x fem!reader words: 1.5k warnings: still just angst.

part 1: the cliff

part 2: the house

part 3: the court

There was something bittersweet hanging around your house since that argument with your parents. It had been a week since you had returned and, sadly, things didn't feel as good as they used to. You didn't expect you all to be exactly the same either, you and your parents had been through specific times that wouldn't allow them to ever be the same again, especially when they were so reluctant for you to return to the Night Court. Even you didn't know if you would be completely ready to do so in the near future.

One good thing was that, during those days, you had learned to manage your emotions to keep them from running strongly through the bond you shared with Azriel so as not to overwhelm him. Perhaps it was the only thing that had distracted you during that time from rethinking what had happened, even more than your parents' attempts at conversation.

There was also the matter of the shadows. You knew they were Azriel's, you thought they belonged to him, but some of them were constantly accompanying you, and they got scares out of your father from time to time.

Going back to your parents was supposed to bring you peace, but you felt calmer every time you looked at the tattoo running down your arm and the promise Azriel had made to you with crystallized eyes.

“I hear your thoughts all the way over here, you know?”

You lifted your head, blinking faster. The wind caressed your cheeks and moved your loose hair, for a moment forgetting where you were. Shadows gathered around your feet.

“I'm sorry, did you say something?”

Alya had a posture with her arms up, sending you a curious look. Your childhood friend barely needed to hear the tones in your voice to know when you were lying, but she seemed to want to let it go that time. The people around you didn't seem to know how to deal with the conversations when word got out that you were back, but Alya had a talent for knowing when to touch on topics and when not to.

“Several things,” her body moved toward the fruit baskets, taking the last basket in her arms and starting to walk in the opposite direction. “My brother got married.”

“Really?”

“And he has children.”

“Really?”

“Twins.”

You let out a laugh, remembering Alya's rebellious older brother. Your visits to her house were always accompanied by the constant whining and fighting between Trav and his parents because he didn't want to start a family in the near or distant future. He was so insistent about it, even though it was the only thing his parents wanted. According to Alya's accounts, it was impossible for him not to start imagining that future when he met his mate.

“What about you?”

“Ah, no, please, no. There is nothing interesting to tell about my life. I assure you that Mrs. Taylors had a more exciting life for the past few years than I have,” Alya and you arrived at her mother's fruit stand, where she dropped the last basket of goods you had helped her move all morning. You marched beside her, detailing the look of nonchalance she was trying so hard to maintain.

“It couldn't have just not happened. It was… too many years,” despite the boastfulness with which you wanted to carry the conversation, your voice reached to cut off finishing the sentence. Alya turned to look at you, her worried eyes analyzing your face before grabbing your wrist and walking away from the fruit stand.

“You know you don't have to pretend around me, right?”

Alya closed the door to her house behind her. Her family had gotten a very homey house right in the heart of the city's commerce and they kept their very well kept stall right in front of it. Every corner of the place felt like a home because of the great dedication and love her whole family put into it. Even when her brother was missing, it seemed that the house had not lost any strength or presence.

Maybe that's why you felt a wave of longing and nostalgia hit your body, leaving you more vulnerable than you had been the last few days.

“Living with my parents hasn't been so great,” you began, lowering your gaze with a frown. Alya had moved into the kitchen and you had happily settled down on the counter right in front of the stove. Your hands in front of you on the white ceramic were moving nervously, interlocking and clattering your nails on the hard material. “After so long I thought that… I thought that nothing would change when I came back. I thought we'd be even closer together than before, I even thought we'd sleep together. I spent so many nights… alone and so cold. I couldn't bear the thought of going back and having to go through that kind of torturous loneliness again.”

Alya moved in front of you, setting aside the tea brewing to clasp her hands in yours, still twitching in nervousness and anxiety. Her expression was no longer one of dread as she noticed shadows moving around you.

“Is it because of him?”

You nodded, and acknowledging it once again was no less painful.

“It's illogical, I think,” Alya rested her arms on the ceramic, frowning slightly. The warmth of her hands, even though it wasn't a bit chilly in her house, brought you just enough coziness to try to soothe your heart. It reminded you of that moment at the border of Court Day next to Azriel. “After so long without seeing you, why not take advantage of the indefinite time you'll be with them? They stress too much about something that could happen in two decades, even.”

“I've tried to tell them, but I don't think they'll be happy until I tell them I'm not coming back.”

“What about him?” Alya cocked her head to one side, and at your confused look added, “He wouldn't be willing to come?”

“What? No. I couldn't even suggest it to him,” you shook your head as soon as the words left her mouth.

“Why not?”

“His whole life is in that court, Alya. Asking him to give it all up for me just because I wouldn't be willing to do it for him, wouldn't that be too selfish?”

“You must keep in mind that you've been through special circumstances. If he really feels a quarter of the bond love, then he won't mind giving up everything for you.”

“I don't want to talk about this anymore. The tea is going to dry up.”

Alya shifted letting out a gasp of surprise.

“Fine. But you have to keep in mind that it's not just about you now. You're not alone anymore. You don't have to make decisions for him or stop making them because it's not just your feelings you have to be careful with.”

-

Azriel still didn't understand how Mor had convinced Tarquin and Rhysand to meet for that reunion on the day you finally returned home, but he was immensely grateful that she had been able to negotiate the terms down to the last instance. The same thing he would've done.

“Are you ever going to see him again?”

“Not as long as I live.”

The aforesaid appeared at the training camp when Azriel was taking some time away from the crowd of people living in the Town House. He would never have believed that he would rather strain his body until he passed out just so he wouldn't have to meet Rhysand's or Cassian's face at every corner. The blood in his veins burned as if it had poison in it, one step away from starting to spit in their directions as if they were the only ones to blame for everything that had happened.

As if he needed to find a culprit for your departure.

But there was no one to blame. It had been your decision. And every day since then Azriel's sentence became significantly larger and more tedious to carry. The worst part was not even knowing when that ordeal would end. Living with that bitterness in his heart and that emptiness in his soul, he didn't believe there could ever be peace in his relationship with his brothers. No one in the house overlooked that.

"She's fine," Mor changed the subject abruptly, knowing exactly how to appease the flame of his anger.

Azriel nearly melted with his forehead against the punching bag. His shoulders slumped in momentary relaxation, the only relaxation he'd allowed himself to have since you'd left.

“You saw her?”

“Yes, she was spending time with her friends. She was smiling. Laughing. She looked happy.”

Azriel had to fight the whine that wanted to escape his lips. He shook his head in assent, trying to keep the emotions at bay, sending a silent thank you through the masses of air. He felt his heart squeezed inside his chest. Every day was a constant uncertainty because he couldn't even feel her anymore…

Mor had to travel weekly to Summer because one of the terms of their agreement with Tarquin required it and for the last three weeks all Azriel had been waiting for was news about you, to know that you were well, that you looked well, that you were really happy there, at home… away from him.

“You know that doesn't imply that she wants to forget you, right?”

The mere implication made his head fall back on the sack. Azriel tried to nod, feeling the words and his own emotions choking him. His body would become an inert object at some point, that much he knew, because he couldn't spend too long living like this. He couldn't even imagine it, if he was just beginning the period that could last for years, even centuries for all he knew.

“I know…” his voice came out choked, almost mistaken for a sigh. “I know.”

He repeated again to himself.

Azriel dreaded knowing how things were going to be from now on.

-

taglist: @isa1b2h3 @naturakaashi @anuttellaa @tele86 @amysangel @fxckmiup @inloveallthetime @fightmedraco @railingsofsorrow @fandomarchiveilyd

[mynameismckenziemae]

All of Me

Part 3

(previous part here, next part here)

Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin x You

Summary: You take a stroll down memory lane and Jake surprises you in more ways than one

Warnings: 18+ MDNI! Smut, oral (m receiving), premature ejaculation, accidental facial, cumplay. Mentions of medical stuff/blood, probable naval inaccuracies, probable medical inaccuracies, mentions/memories of losing a spouse

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

The note with Jake’s number is shoved into your desk drawer to be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

Wrong.

You find yourself thinking of him often as the week goes by; wondering what he’s doing while you’re in a meeting, hoping he’s not eating alone as Drew tells you about his day over dinner and remembering his touch when your fingers trail between your legs.

The weekend comes and goes quickly. Saturday is spent at Drew’s baseball tournament and Sunday is catching up and prepping for the week.

You fall into bed that night, exhausted, and drift off in minutes, which is a rare but welcomed occurrence as sleep likes to evade you. Once Drew’s down for the night and the house is dark, you struggle to fight off the underlying loneliness that’s always pressing in on you. Coming back to a quiet house is especially difficult after the constant hustle and bustle at all hours while deployed.

You wake up gasping just a few hours later; pillow damp from your tears as you reach for Andy beside you.

But the bed is just as cold and empty as your heart has been for the past 8 years.

Sleep then evades you, like it normally does after dreaming of your first love.

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

Rolling over with a sigh, you reach for your phone, but the doom scrolling does little to quiet your mind.

You were a brand new resident when Andy came in with a laceration above his eyebrow and a possible concussion after a training accident.

Even with the swelling, blood and the start of a black eye, you could see how attractive he was.

It had been a busy day and your preceptor left you to suture him once the concussion was ruled out as she was pulled away to help with a more pressing matter.

“This your first time?” Andy jokes, noticing the way you stalled; how you kept checking and rechecking you had all the supplies needed on the tray and looking at the door, praying your supervising physician would be back soon.

“Of course not,” you scoff dramatically before giving him a small smile, “I’ll have you know, I’ve put stitches in plenty of oranges and chicken breasts.”

His colleague, tasked with bringing him to the ER, chuckles from behind you.

A code-blue is called overhead and you sigh. There’s your sign that you’re on your own.

“Sorry,” you murmur when he hisses at the burn of the lidocaine you were injecting to numb him. “Almost done.”

“You’re going to feel pressure and pulling, but let me know if you feel anything sharp,” you tell him after giving the lidocaine time to work, taking a deep breath when he nods.

“Ow,” he says quietly as soon as you touch him. He’s teasing you again but it still makes you jump.

“Seriously?” You scold but he’s got the cutest grin and you can’t help but smile too.

“Sorry, I’ll be good,” he apologizes, still grinning.

“You better be,” you reply as you poke him with the curved needle. “Your pretty face is my hands. Okay?” You ask when he doesn’t flinch.

“Just fine,” he confirms. “You think I have a pretty face?”

“Maybe you do have a concussion,” you tease him, keeping your eyes on the work your hands are doing. “I never said that.”

“It’s true, Kernsie,” his friend pipes up from behind you. “She said your shitty face is in her hands.”

You can’t help but laugh.

“Oh fuck you, Bradshaw,” Andy chuckles too. His hand brushes accidentally brushes your waist when he reaches around you to flip him off and color rises in his cheeks. “Sorry ma’am.”

“It’s okay,” you murmur, just thankful that you’re halfway done.

“What’s your name?” He asks with 2 sutures to go. “Your first name.”

“Reese,” you reply.

“Like the peanut butter cups?”

“Exactly,” you confirm. “My mom craved them the whole time she was pregnant with me. They’re also my favorite.”

“Mine too,” he says and his eyes flick to yours. “You have beautiful eyes, Reese,” he murmurs lowly, so only you can hear.

It’s your turn to blush as you finish up.

“All done,” you say, stepping back and handing him a mirror. “I was able to follow your brow line so the scarring should be minimal.”

“Thanks for keeping my face pretty,” he smiles, making your heart skip a beat.

“Shitty,” Bradley coughs.

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

“Reese?”

You nearly jump out of your skin and reach for the pepper spray on your bag as you walk to your car an hour later. You were distracted having a mini pity party because you’ll never see Andy again that you didn’t notice someone waiting on the bench outside the door.

“Shit, sorry!” Andy says, rising. “It’s me, Andy, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“What are you doing here?” You ask, hand still on your pepper spray.

“I-fuck.” He sighs and turns to a light blue Bronco in the parking lot. “I told you this was a bad idea, Bradshaw. I scared the shit out of her.”

You squint and see Bradley giving him a double thumbs up from the driver's seat.

“I’m-uh, gonna go,” Andy says, stepping toward his ride. “I’m really sorry again, for scaring you.”

“Wait,” you take your hand away from the bottle. “Are you okay? Did you need something?”

“No, I’m fine. You did a great job,” he assures you. “I just…”

“He wouldn’t stop talking about you,” Bradley calls out the window when Andy hesitates. “He said he wished he would’ve asked for your number and then made me stop at a gas station before coming back and-“

“Thanks, Bradshaw, she gets it,” Andy interrupts, flustered. Somehow, it makes him even cuter. “Here,” he hands you a plastic bag.

Inside are Reese’s peanut butter cups.

Unexpected tears prickle in your eyes at the sweet gesture. Once your mom figured out that you liked them too, she never bought them again.

“Thank you,” you say softly, smiling.

“You’re welcome,” he replies, returning your smile before opening the door. “Have a good night.”

“Wait,” you call as you pull out your phone. “Can I get your number?”

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

You finally fall back asleep only minutes before your alarm goes off and you’re dragging by the time you get Drew to school and yourself to work.

You’re filled with a mixture of butterflies and nostalgia when you see the familiar orange package on your desk when you enter your office.

Though there isn’t a note, you know it’s from Jake; you had mentioned the love of your namesake the night you’d spent together.

A smile pulls at your lips as you slide it into your top drawer to eat later, right next to Jake’s number.

Your heart pounds as you add his number to his phone. It can’t hurt to have another trustworthy man just a phone call away. Especially if Ron, Roo, Iceman, and Mav are busy.

That’s how you justify it at least.

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

“Can I take Drew tonight?” Bradley asks, eating his lunch in your office on Friday.

“Maybe,” you reply, taking a bite of the sweet chocolate treat that was left on your desk this morning. There had been one on your desk nearly every day this week. “If you tell me what you guys are gonna do.”

“You know I can’t tell you that, Kernsie,” he rolls his eyes. “What happens at boys nights-“

“Stays at boys' nights,” you finish with a sarcastic sigh. “Fine.”

“You should get laid while I’ve got him, maybe then you won’t be so-hey!” he laughs as you throw your wrapper at him.

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

Bradley picks up Drew at 5.

By 6, you’ve typed out but deleted multiple messages to Jake.

You put your phone face down and sigh as you sit on the couch.

Forget it, Reese. He’s probably got plans; it’s a Friday night and he’s hot, young, and single.

Another hour and several frustrated sighs later, you hit send.

Reese: Thanks for the peanut butter cups.

Your heart flutters when your phone rings a minute later.

“Reese? Hey,” he says when you answer. “You’re welcome. How was your week?”

Long. Exhausting. Lonely.

“Busy, you?”

Faint laughter in the background has your heart sinking.

Of course, he’s not sitting at home on a Friday night.

“I’m sorry, you’re busy. I shouldn’t-“ you start but he interrupts.

“I’m not busy. Nat and Javy’s invited me over so I’m third-wheeling as usual,” he assures you. “I’m happy you reached out. I’ve been hoping I’d hear from you.”

You smile.

“What are you up to tonight? Drew asleep already?” He asks.

“I doubt he’s asleep, he’s having boys' night with Bradley.”

“I see. So you’re home alone.”

“I am.”

“How do you feel about that?” He asks, hope lacing his tone.

“A little lonely,” you admit.

“I could keep you company?” He offers. “No strings, no expectations. Just two friends hanging out.”

“Can friends fuck?” You blurt out then wince.

Real smooth.

But you smile at his sharp inhale.

“I don’t see why not,” he replies after a beat.

“I’ll text you my address.”

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

Reese: 418 Magnolia Lane.

You toss your phone onto the bed before changing out of the old, threadbare shirt of Andy’s you had put on after work, ignoring the pang of guilt. Not bothering with undergarments, you slip on a silky pair of shorts and a tank top, shivering at the way the material feels against your nipples.

Your phone dings as he replies.

Jake: Got it. Be there in 15.

Jake: Actually, might be closer to 20. I’ve gotta stop and pick up condoms first.

You’re surprised and a little relieved that he doesn’t have any on him.

Reese: Good thinking. See you soon.

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

He rings your doorbell exactly 23 minutes later and you have to force yourself to not rush to answer it.

“You’re late,” you tease when you open the door.

“I am,” he admits and hands over the pretty arrangement of flowers he’s holding. “My mom would smack me silly if she knew I showed up somewhere empty-handed, so I stopped at the flower stand.”

The butterflies in your stomach come back as you take them and step back to let him in. “Thank you, Jake.”

He gives you a smile and follows you to the kitchen to find a vase.

A wave of sadness washes over you though as you set them on the counter.

“Something wrong?” Jake asks, brushing your fingers with his when he sees your mood shift. “Are they too much? The guy said yellow roses mean friendship and I-.”

“Not at all,” you shake your head and give him a sad smile. “They’re beautiful, really. I just…I don’t remember the last time someone gave me flowers.”

You do remember, actually. It was Andy’s funeral. But you’re well aware that talking about your late husband makes people uncomfortable.

“Not since Andy died?” Jake asks softly.

You shake your head but then paste on a smile. “Sorry,” you say as you turn and open the fridge. “Have you eaten? I made dinner earlier and there’s leftovers in the fridge.”

“I ate earlier but thanks,” he replies, reaching for your hand. You expect him to kiss you, but instead, he pulls you in for a hug.

It feels so good to have his arms wrapped around you and he smells amazing; a heady mix of clean laundry and a hint of expensive cologne.

Your hands slide under his shirt as you start your relax and goosebumps follow your fingers as you trace over the warm skin of his back. Your breath hitches when he hardens against your stomach

You gather the thin material of his shirt in your hands and he helps you pull it over his head.

You bite your lip as your eyes hungrily roam over his tan chest and the cut ridges of his stomach before he pulls you back with a cocky smirk.

He leans in for a kiss but dodges your mouth, making you shiver when he instead presses his lips against your ear to murmur, “Like what you see?”

It’s cute how he thinks he’s got the upper hand.

“Yes,” you sigh, as your hand slides down his chest and over his belt to palm his cock, straining against the confines of his jeans. “I‘ve pictured you every time I’ve touched myself since our night together.”

He groans softly against your ear and his hips push further into your hand. “Tell me more?”

“I remembered the way you fucked me against the door,” your head falls back as he kisses down your neck. “How you looked up at me from your knees, figuring out what I like making me cum,” your eyes close as he hums against your shoulder, remembering too. Your hand slides up to the button of his jeans and he stills. “Imagining what it would be like to return the favor. Can I?”

He sucks in a breath before nodding.

You loved giving head, but it was intimate for you. Since you’ve only had a few hookups since Andy, this would be your first time in over 8 years. So your hands shake as you undo his jeans and you pull them down with you when you kneel.

Jake notices, ever observant.

But you tongue the precum through the fabric of his Calvin’s before he can protest and you moan when you’re rewarded with another burst.

“It’s just…it’s been a while,” you explain, looking up at him from under your lashes and do it again before you tug down his briefs. “So let me know if I do anything you don’t like.”

He nods, tucking your hair behind your ear.

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

“So big,” you murmur when you bring a hand up to wrap around him and your fingers can’t reach your thumb. He sighs as you trace the vein running the length of him.

He’s quiet, only breathing heavier while his hands clench and release at his sides as you continue teasing him with licks and flicks of your tongue before you finally pull him into your mouth.

“Oh Reese,” he breathes, closing his eyes as he leans back against the counter.

You nearly whimper when you look up at him. He looks wrecked; cheeks flushed pink and a light sheen of sweat covers his heaving chest.

Your other hand trails up your thigh and over your shorts as you start to bob your head, starting slowly and pulling a little more of him into your mouth each time.

“Fuck,” He gasps, knuckles turning white as he grips the edge of the counter when your lips meet your fingers circling him and you swallow.

You can tell he’s starting to get close.

His eyes fly open at the moan that escapes when your fingers find your clit through the silky material of your shorts.

“Oh God,” he rasps when he sees you touching yourself. “W-wait.”

“What’s wrong?” You pant, pulling him from your mouth.

“I can’t-I’m gonna cum,” he winces before he looks to the ceiling in effort and staves off his orgasm.

“Good,” you murmur and you begin to stroke him with the hand still gripping him.

“But I-fuck!”

He startles and his hips jerk when you draw him back to the wet heat of your mouth. He cums with a choked groan as he coats your chin and chest with thick white stripes.

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

“I am so incredibly sorry,” he says lowly, obviously mortified as he looks down at you covered in his spend.

“That was…” you bring your fingers up to wipe your chin, “so fucking hot.”

He watches with rapt attention as you bring your fingers to your mouth to suck them clean.

•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•

A/N: Sorry, kind of an abrupt ending. So…we find out more about Andy. I hope I’m not being annoying by including him so much…just trying to portray how hard it’s been on Reese.

What do you guys think?

As always, any interaction is appreciated but I love hearing what you think in comments/reblogs!

Please let me know if you want to be added to my taglist (sorry if I forget anyone, I won’t be mad if you remind me).

@lexixstewart

@dizzybee03

@its-the-pilot

@hookslove1592

@hisredheadedgoddess28

@atarmychick007

@littlezee80

@buckysteveloki-me

@k-k0129

@phoenix-rising-starbird-one

@jessicab1991

@djs8891

@lonelysoul504

@mrsevans90

@landpiranha-blog

@bellaireland1981

@angelbabyyy99

@writtingrose

@shanimallina87

@mizzzpink

@dempy

@linkpk88

@hardballoonlove

@lynnevanss

@entertainmentgirl80

@coldmuffinbanditshoe

@midnightmagpiemama

@emma8895eb

[orcasoul]

Oh Baby!

Summery: Pedro Pascal and reader are in a relationship. Pedro's career is sky rocketing and reader also has a demanding job. Throw in an unexpected pregnancy and well...... shit!

Warnings: Swearing, Pedro being and not being an asshole (you'll see). Use of Y/N.

Italics indicate inward thinking.

Gripping the edges of the bathroom sink, you take slow, deep breaths to steady your breathing, while your mind is going into overdrive. Your chest feels tight and your legs are like jelly. Slowly you raise your head to stare at you reflection in the mirror. You don't even feel like yourself right now, almost like you're having an out of body experience. Reality suddenly feels foreign to you, like you're trapped in a surreal dream. But this is no dream. It's real, oh it's definitely real. The two red lines on the four pregnancy tests sitting on the under sink cabinet can attest to that! "Shit," you mutter quietly, still looking at yourself in disbelief. "This can't be happening." It wasn't supposed to happen . You'd been on the pill for two years and always used extra protection if you had antibiotics. You were always so careful, but careful obviously wasn't careful enough. How would you even begin to tell Pedro that you're carrying his baby? How would he react? Your mind keeps replaying one specific interview of his you'd seen. "I don't even have kids. And I'm not gonna!" His words exactly.

He'd mentioned to you once that his hectic work schedule doesn't allow time for kids, and honestly it wasn't high on your priority list either. Your job as an editor is very demanding and sometimes trickles into your home life. Both you and Pedro had grown accustom the stresses and scarifies you've both had to make over the past couple of years when it comes to your jobs, but you'd both made it work and were happy and comfortable together. But adding a baby into the mix just seemed impossible. You try to remember your last period but you'd been so busy with work lately that you hadn't even noticed you'd missed..... shit, two! Two periods. It was only the past few days of constant queasiness and dizzy spells that led you to suspect what you'd hoped wouldn't be true. But here you are, the "truth" staring right back at you. "Oh my god," you whimpered while rubbing your hands over your face, "Fuck, what now?!"

You try your best to keep it together but you can't contain the rush of different emotions that are encompassing you at this moment and the tears begin to fall. It's exhausting trying to process everything you're feeling; fear and uncertainty but also a gravitation and protectiveness you've never felt before. This baby was certainly not planned and you couldn't deny that you wished the tests were negative, but knowing that it's definitely there has awakened an instinct in you that has always been present but dormant, just waiting to be unleashed. How is it possible to want and not want it at the same time? Will Pedro want it? Will he be mad? Pedro had been away for two weeks filming for a new advert and had a photo shoot straight after so he'd be away for another two weeks, at least. You both video called each other every day. You'd always looked forward to it but the thought of today's impending call left your stomach in knots! There was no way you could tell him something so life changing over the phone. You'd just have to keep it yourself until he gets home and try your best to act normal when talking to him.

It turns out pretending nothing had changed wasn't that difficult for the next week. Maybe it was because of the distance and the fact that you could make up an excuse to end the call when your anxiety began to creep in. But in one week's time he'd be home and you know it'll be harder to act nonchalant around him, especially now that your lower belly has started to swell slightly. Slight enough that you could blame it on junk food if he noticed, but it's only going to get bigger. After a long day at work, you finally get to relax for the evening, settling down to watch one of your favourite shows. Leaning back into the settee you found yourself gently smoothing your palm over the curve of your abdomen, wondering just how much would change in the coming months and how Pedro would take the news. You still struggled to get your head around it yourself but now that you've had time to think, you know there's no way you'd get rid of it, no matter what happened. Well, I have one more week to figure out how I'm going to tell him, you ruminate..... or so you thought.

"Y/N I'm home." Pedro called out as the front door slammed shut. You shot up off the settee faster than a rocket as Pedro walked into the living room with a wide grin. You stood frozen to the spot as he dropped his bags and rushed over to you, picking you up in a tight hug. With the fervour of a man touch starved he kissed you as if he hadn't kissed you in years, deep and sultry. You instantly dissolve into his mouth, wrapping your arms around his neck. "Wow," you whispered breathlessly as you pull away to look into his eyes. "Missed me that much, huh?" You teasingly ask, trying to sound as though your heart isn't beating a million miles an hour. "What do you think?" he relied with a smirk, setting you back down. "How are you home so soon?" You hope your question did come across the wrong way. Of course you're thrilled that he's home. You always loved it when he returned home earlier than expected, and it happened so rarely that usually you'd be on cloud nine, but this one time you wished you had that week. A week where you could prepare for every eventuality. "We were ahead of schedule for once. I thought I'd surprise you instead of calling ahead." Your silent stare made Pedro chuckle, his soft eyes creasing at the corners. "That surprised, are you?"

You suddenly realise how off your reaction must seem to him and quickly collect yourself before he can think any more of it. "I just wasn't expecting you so soon. Great surprise though!" you smile genuinely as you tip toe to kiss the end of his nose. "I really missed you. How was it?" "Oh you know, early mornings, late nights, hours of hair and make up, retake after retake, blah blah blah....," Pedro trailed off while waving his hand in the air dismissively. "How have you been sweetheart?" He asked while stroking down the curve of your back. I've missed you like hell." "Yeah I've.... I've been fine. Works been fine." Your voice ever so slightly, nervously shook at his question, making you cringe inwardly but luckily he didn't seem to notice your change in tone. "Well, you go unpack and I'll make us something to eat," you offered, trying to keep your composure, even though you felt like a deer caught in headlights. As Pedro heads to the bedroom to unpack you hurry into the kitchen and pour a glass of water to quell your nerves. Not quite the same effect as alcohol, you huff inwardly.

You get to work preparing Chilean Avocado sandwiches, as it's one of Pedro's favourite foods. But after only a few seconds you are hit with a strong bought of nausea from the smell and lunge towards the sink, making it there just in time. After violently retching up what not only felt like the contents of your stomach, but also every organ in your body into the sink you are startled by a warm and gentle hand rubbing your back. "You okay, baby?" "Oh fuck!" You turn swiftly, wiping your mouth with a tea towel. "Uh... yeah... must be a virus or something. It's going around. My sister's kids had it last week." You hated lying to Pedro. Well, it was half a lie; Your nieces and nephew did have a bug last week but you know that this is definitely not a virus. Pedro looked at you with a creased brow, clearly concerned. "Why don't you go lie down? I'll take care of this," he suggested, looking over at the ingredients on the kitchen counter. When he realised you were making his one of his favourite's he turned to you with an adoring smile.

"Aww, you were making my favourite sandwich, thank you darling." "Anything for you, baby," you lovingly reply, pressing a kiss to his cheek. "I think I will go and lie down for a bit." you concede. "A bit" actually lasted until the next morning. Your body felt heavy and exhausted as you dragged yourself out of bed for work. The next three days were hard going. The morning sickness began each morning from the moment you woke up, getting stronger every day. Pedro became more and more worried asking, no begging you to call in sick for work. But each day you'd insisted you didn't feel that bad. The truth was you felt like shit! The unabating nausea and fatigue left you feeling on edge, knowing you can't keep this a secret for much longer. He's going to figure it out any day now or at least suspect, your anxious mind keeps telling you. By the evening of the third day Pedro couldn't take the worry anymore. "You've been ill for three days Y/N," he observed, uneasily, while sitting beside you on the bed, his hand caressing your cheek. "If you're no better in the morning you have to see the doctor." His face betrayed the apprehension he's feeling. "Ped, no I'm fine-" "You're not fine and you're starting to worry me." He cut you off in an urgent but not angry tone. "I'll drag you there if I have to." "Okay, Okay. I'll go," you groggily reply with a small smile. Relieved, Pedro leaned down to kiss your forehead. "Get some sleep baby. I'll check on you in a bit."

And with that he walked out of the room, leaving the door ajar. You closed you eyes and sighed. You knew this time would come. The time when you'd have to spill the beans, as they say. You weren't entirely ready for it but you have no choice now. You know he'll make you go to the doctor tomorrow and you can't use work as an excuse to worm your way out of it since it's one of your days off. You have to tell him tomorrow. The next hour was spent pondering what you would say to him and all the different ways he might react. Eventually, exhausted both physically and mentally you drift off into an uneasy sleep.

******

"You're what?!" Pedro's voice reached a pitch you didn't realise he was capable of. His earthy brown eyes were as wide as saucers and his jaw hung slack. Your eyes dart to your feet as you feel your cheeks burn and your fingers begin to tap the sides of your hips in anticipation. "I'm.... pregnant," you repeated, voice shaking. "I don't know what happened. The pill has never failed in the past-" "We'll it fucking has now, hasn't it!" He shot you a choleric look. "Or maybe you just weren't careful." "Excuse me?!" You snapped back with furrowed brows. "Don't you dare blame this on me. I never missed one pill and we always used extra protection when needed. You know that!" "I don't know anything right now!" Pedro shouted through his hands which were now rubbing his face in exasperation. "Well I didn't make this baby all by myself so don't put this all on me!" Hot tears begin to cascade down your cheeks despite your best efforts to hold them back. "I just.... FUCK!" Pedro cried out, booting one of the kitchen stools, making you jump.

"We can't do this. I can't do this." "Well it's too late now," you huff at him with your arms folded across your chest. "Not if we don't want it to be," he stated flatly. Your eyes widened and your heart clenched at his cold demeanour, causing you to instinctively place your hands across the small swell of your belly in protection. "I'm not getting rid of it Ped. I.... I can't," you exclaimed. "Y/N," Pedro sighed, shaking his head "This would change our lives completely. Neither one of us has the time for such a huge commitment and-" "I don't care," you cut him off sharply, fixing him with daggers. "I'm not getting rid of it. If it means I have to work part time then it's something I'm prepared to do." Pedro threw his head back to look at the ceiling, seemingly annoyed at your obstinate determination. You continue, "Weather we like it or not this is happening and we need -" "No it's not." He quickly stated, with finality. You stare at him dumbfounded. "What?!" "I'm not doing this. If you want to keep it you'll have to do it alone. I never wanted this and you know it." He returned your own words to you with clear contempt.

You open your mouth to say something, anything but words have now failed you. Your brain is unable to form a coherent sentence as the realisation of his words hit you like a punch to your gut. You feel numb as your heart shatters piercing your soul. He can't mean it! He's just upset, you try to rationalise internally, still to shocked to speak. Pedro turned away from you, grabbed his car keys off the kitchen island and stormed to the front door. "Make sure you're gone before I get back," he demanded in an emotionless tone. Seeing him walk away from you, immediately loosened your frozen tongue. "Baby wait!" you sobbed after him as he slammed the door shut without a backward glance. You instantly drop to your knees on the cold kitchen tiles, embracing yourself as your grief becomes unbearable. Your head begins to spin as you try to suck in deep breaths. It's no use. The despair is now consuming you, seeping into every crevice of your being, gripping you and tearing you apart. "Y/N?" You continue to sob. "Y/N?!" The familiar voice sounds muffled through your tormented cries and you can feel phantom hands gently shaking your shoulders. "Y/N?! Baby wake up, wake up. Look at me!"

You gasp as your eyes snap open. You are met with concerned caramel eyes, glowing in the dim lamp light. Pedro was leaning over your body, holding onto both of your shoulders. "It's okay. It was just a bad dream," Pedro soothed you while cupping your cheek. The feel of his warm skin against yours brought a sense of calm to your confused and distressed state, helping you to catch your breath. He sat up, slowly pulling you up with him. "Jesus Christ, you scared the hell out of me. What the hell happened?" he asked nervously as he wiped away a mixture of cold sweat and tears that had soaked your face. "I...," your voice gave out as you realised it was nothing more than a nightmare and the man you love is right here beside you. "I... can't remember." Your voice didn't sound convincing at all, and Pedro's raised eyebrow told you that he wasn't convinced either. "You're pretty shaken up sweetheart. You can tell me." "It's just a blur now." You choke out, wrapping an arm around his broad, tanned chest and leaning into his shoulder. "Okay," Pedro replied, still sounding unsure. He wrapped an arm around your shoulder and you snuggle into his neck as you both lay back down. You wrap your arm and legs around him like a baby koala, desperate for some comfort and reassurance that he indeed hasn't left you. "I've got you," he whispered, while holding you firmly and stroking your hair. "Let's go back to sleep."

*****

The sunlight spills in as the curtains lazily blow due to the partially open window. Your eyelids are heavy from the lack of sleep. Groaning you turn to the bedside table to check the time. 11:30am. "Shit," you mumble while rubbing the sleep from your eyes. You never sleep this late. You throw the quilt off and sit up slowly, the nausea returning as you do. Downstairs you can hear Pedro in the kitchen. "Okay, let's get this over with," you sigh, knowing you can no longer avoid the inevitable. As you approach the kitchen you stop and lean against the door frame with your arms crossed. Pedro's back is to you and you take the opportunity to just watch him, appreciate him and contemplate just how much you love him. A small smile tugs at the corners of your mouth as you just absorb the mere presence of him. But as soon as the smile appears it evaporates as the nausea increases momentarily, pulling you back to the here and now, reminding you of what you must do. In a few minutes everything will drastically change for the both of you.

Images from last night's dream flash before you, making your heart race slightly and your palms sweaty. A part of you knows deep down that Pedro would never treat you so cruelly and walk out on you, but it would be a lie to say the dream didn't shake you and make you feel somewhat apprehensive at this moment. "Hey darling," Pedro smiles as he turns to see you idling in the doorway. "How long have you been standing there?" "Not long," you shrug with a wan smile. He set his coffee mug on the counter and walked over to you, wrapping his arms around your waist. In return you run your hands up his arms, gently holding onto his triceps. "How are you feeling?" He asks with a creased brow. "Okay." An obvious lie. "Why didn't you wake me?" "Figured you needed some extra time since you didn't sleep much last night. I felt you toss and turn all night long." Worry and unease laced his voice. A few moments of silence pass before you clear your throat. "Baby, can we talk?" "About what?" he enquires with trepidation. "Just come with me," you exhale softly as you lead him by his hand into the living room to sit next to you on the settee.

With a deep breath you turn to face him, and feel your heartbeat quicken while twitching your fingers in your lap. A nervous habit of your that Pedro knows all to well. He places his soft palm over your fumbling hands to calm you. "You're making me nervous Y/N. Please just tell me what's wrong," he all but begs you. "I uh... I don't know how else to say this so I'll just say it..... I'm pregnant." Shock adorns Pedro's features as his hand slips off of yours. The cold feeling of emptiness where his warm hand had just been resting caused your breath to catch in your chest. You couldn't hold his gaze any longer and dropped your head, anxiety threatening to consume you. You wait with a sense of dread for his possibly angry or fearful reaction but are caught off guard when he delicately takes both of your hands in his, causing you to look up at him in anticipation. "Are you sure?" He whispers, his voice shaking slightly. "Yes," you nod. "I took four tests...all positive. I'm so sorry...." You began to ramble, "I didn't mean for this to happen. I don't know how it did. I know you never wanted-" "Hey, hey shhhh.... take a breath." Pedro cooed as he pulled you into his chest, cupping the back of your head with one hand and smoothing up and down your back with the other.

You begin to weep desperately as the past weeks' tension and worry finally break through the mental and emotional dam you had built within. "I'm sorry," you wail into his shoulder, chest shuddering as you try to regain some semblance of self control. Pedro cradles both of your cheeks in his hands and pulls you upright to look into your weary eyes. "Why are you apologising? Last time I checked it takes two to make a baby. You are no more responsible for this than I am, so please stop saying you're sorry." Your breaths become less laboured as his thumbs smooth small circles over your cheeks, the action soothing and reassuring. "It's just.... I know you never wanted kids..." You begin in a slightly exhausted tone. "I just don't know what else to say except.... I'm sorry." Pedro takes a a deep breath. "It's true I've never seen myself becoming a dad, and I never would have purposely had a baby," you look down and nod in understanding, feeling guilty for putting him in this situation. "But..." He tilt's your chin up to make eye contact with you again. "If it was going to happen, I'd only want it to happen with you."

The sincerity of his words took you by surprise. "Really?" You ask astonished. "Really." he assures you. "Is this why you've been acting so strange and been so sick lately?" You gulp and nod once. "How long have you known?" "A couple of weeks," you confess quietly. "And you kept it to yourself all this time?" It was more of a statement than a question. "You should have told me straight away. You never should have had to go through this alone," Pedro said with a hint of sadness in his voice. "I was scared" You admit somewhat timidly. "I was scared of what this would mean for us. I was scared because I want to keep it." Pedro smiled softly. "You know I'll support you no matter what, right?" "I know." A relieved smile made it way onto your face. "Was what happened last night anything to do with this?" Pedro questioned while reaching for your hand. "Yeah, but it doesn't matter now." You try to shrug the question off. "Tell me. I wanna know." "You.... you got angry," you shifted uncomfortably in your seat. "You blamed me, told me I'd have to do this alone and... you left."

Pedro's shoulders slumped as you finished speaking. "You didn't think I'd actually do something like that, did you?" The hurt in his voice was clear and it broke your heart. "No! no of course not," you cut in quickly. It wasn't a lie. You know what kind of man Pedro is and that he'd never hurt you like that. "I guess it was just all the stress and worry coming out in that dream. I know you and I know you love me. I know you'd never do anything like that." His face visibly relaxed hearing you confirm what he already knew to be true. "I do love you, baby. I know this is a huge change but we'll make it work. I promise." "I just don't want you to ever resent me or feel trapped-" "Shhhh..." he gently interrupted. "I could never feel that way, okay?" His voice left no room for any doubt. "I love you so much," you exclaimed, eyes beginning to fill again, but this time from relief and happiness. "I love you too, darling," Pedro whispered as he pressed his lips to yours. After several seconds he pulls away to look down at your belly, noticing the tiny bump through your pyjama top for the first time. "Can I?" He asks almost shyly. "You don't ever need to ask," you laugh with adoration. You take his hand and gently place it over the swell of your belly, watching as his eyes widen in amazement. "Wow!" He breathes out in awe. You both look at each other, eyes conveying the love you have for one another and now for this little one. The stress that had plagued you for the past two weeks began to dissipate like fog being burned away by the sun. The uncertainty of such a life altering future hung in the air but you know that together you can both handle whatever that future brings.

Oh Mama A Continuation

[messycunt]

everyone fawns over hucow!Epel, calling him cute and doting over him... it makes him so mad!! he wants everyone to see him as a big, strong, manly man! he gets all huffy with his handlers and starts nipping when they call him cute. imagine: Crowley assigns him a new handler because the other ones are sick of getting headbutted and nipped. in comes his cute new handler, and they're so perfect! they treat him well without being condescending and he really thinks he's finally gotten the perfect handler! then... he gets called cute again. Epel decides to show them how manly he is and make sure he never gets called cute again.

fun epel facts: there's concept art that was displayed at an exhibition showing epel fully cross dressed, it's p cute actually 

his final design also looks almost exactly the way his grandma did when she was younger

cw: josou seme, afab reader, dubcon(reader kinda lets Epel get away w it even though they're not feeling it tbh), hybrids(hucows), male lactation, doggie style, name calling(stupid mutt, bitch, slut etc), slapping, hair pulling, blackmail,

Having been warned that your assigned cow was extremely difficult to work with, that he had run through almost a dozen handlers and that you'd probably quit in a few days had you high strung on your first meeting.

After meeting him you were confused to say the least. 

Epel was polite, soft spoken, and aloof at times. It seemed to be an intentional attempt at distancing himself from you.

But he opens up to you in due time.

You see him as an equal. Unlike his past handlers you don't patronize him. He loves that.

He tries showing off for your attention often but even if his attempts aren't successful he's still going to try. He wants you to think he's cool!

Maybe the stars just aligned at the right time or Vil just trusts you enough to take care of Epel the same way he would but he's less helicoptermom-y now that you're around, much to Epels delight.

Vil will be Vil but at least he's not forcing his way into almost every facet of Epel's life anymore.

Still, not much else has changed.

It's not that he doesn’t like doing shows, he tells you. It's that they treat him more like a heifer than a bull.

He's forced to wear those stupid frilly outfits for shows, all lacey and tight, just to put on performances for venues full of older men. He hates the way they look at him.

He can't wait until his growth spurt finally kicks in, then he'll finally be taken seriously as a bull.

Milking him is easy.

The machines tickle him on good days and make him a little sore on bad ones. depending on which type of day it is he will be either staring into space blankly or blinking away frustrated tears from overstimulation hoping you don't notice.

His milk has a subtly sweet taste.

Unlike with his past handlers Epel doesn't mind taking baths with you, especially if it means getting to spend more time with you in the main house. 

It means alot to him when it's you. Leaning up against your neck while basically feeling him up while washing him is almost like heaven for the boy, almost. 

He wants more but you must not see how frustrated and wanting it leaves him.

It makes him so angry with you truthfully. He wants you so bad and you wouldn't even consider him in a million years.

"See! I ain't some precious lil' calf that needs protectin' so stop treatin' me like one ya bitch!" Epel shouted from behind you, yanking your head back by the hair he held in his balled up fist. 

Droplets of water falling from his still damp lavender pelt onto your back in time with his thrusts.

His movements are frantic and unskilled. Too worried about clumsily chasing his own pleasure to care about much else.

The cold tile of the bathroom floor was uncomfortable to kneel on to say the least, and the hard marble of the tub pushed up against your chest uncomfortably. 

The constant jostling of your body didn't make it easier to ignore.

But you didn't say as much. Trying your best to keep quiet, you don't say much of anything.

Maybe this was your fault? you had no way of knowing a quick compliment would set him off the wrong way but… maybe you should have?

Maybe letting off some steam would be good for him? the poor boy must be so pent up right? maybe it's best to let him go at it till he tires himself out.

Epel's slender hands moved from gripping your hair to desperately tugging at your hair to gripping at the fat of your hips in an attempt to keep his frantic pace.

"I really did think it would be different this time. But y'er no better. Patronizin' me just like the others" he said between pants.

A harsh slap against your thigh echoed in the bathroom before he went back to pulling at your hips.

His continued attempts at pushing his dick as far into the back of your cunt as physically possible became even more frantic, if that was even possible, he was close.

 "But maybe ya' are different. I never had one of those pretty ladies let me mount them so easy before! Y'er jus' like a stupid mutt in heat."

That comment did earn a defeated whimper in reaction from you

With that Epel's petite body stiffened up and he emptied himself of all he had inside of you. White filling your insides in excess and leaking down onto the bathroom floor to form conjoined puddles. 

You didn't even bother to try sitting up.

Not that you could easily with his wet warm body laid out against your back. You took this time to catch your breath while you had the chance.

His softening cock still lay nestled inside of you

"Don' fall asleep on me" he slurred " You still gotta clean me up okay? It'd be a shame if Crowley and Vil found out that the sweet new girl they trusted so quickly was a good for nothing slut that couldn't control herself around even the smallest bulls wouldn't it?"

Sitting up and pulling back enough to slip himself out of you Epel stretched.

The high pitched whine he let out as he did was cute, not that you'd verbalize that, you learned your lesson.

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

This is extremely long and apparently subject to change, which is part of why I'm copy-pasting this version below. I don't agree with significant parts of it (in particular, I take umbrage with some of the delegitimizing language she uses for the Jewish/Israeli narrative and history that she doesn't use with the Palestinian narrative and history), however, I think it's a really really important read, because she addresses a lot of the real problems with the current discourse and real-world impacts that has.

I think this paragraph in particular was something I needed to read:

Arguing with the far left is a waste of time. They have no self-awareness, they are delusional, and they will never stop. They are as fanatical as any of the mob. The only way to make them stop talking is to actually sort this problem once and for all and work for the freedom and dignity of all. And when all is said and done, the ones that will keep complaining will finally be exposed for what they truly are.

She also winds up positing the A Land For All solution as the most likely to succeed, which I do agree is probably correct, for the main reason she argues, which is that it is the option that gives the most people the greatest amount of what they want, the basics of what everyone needs, and hews most closely with answering the competing narratives that exist.

There is No Magic Peace Fairy. Version 2

For anyone who might have read the previous version of this piece of writing, this is quite different from the original. Its spirit and essence are the same, but much has been added. It is very long, but it seeks to understand some extremely complicated and difficult things.

I should have realised when I first wrote it, and then sought to follow its instruction — to listen and learn from a wide spectrum of other people — that it was only ever going to be a working and evolving piece of work. This is version 2. There may yet be a version 3, 4 or 5.

Why did I even write it? Initially — truthfully, and honestly — it has been for myself. It started as catharsis, and it has become a compulsion — the way to “make it make sense.” The way to cope with horrifying scenes across the television and social media, witnessed day after day, and feeling utterly powerless to stop it.

It comes from years of witnessing, and sometimes partaking in long and sometimes very bitter family arguments. Arguments that became spectator sport for friends who would come over especially because they knew they would happen. Arguments that, in retrospect were not actually remotely funny for those of us living through that constant emotional turmoil, nor considering the subject matter. It has been the way to work through those conflicted feelings, and some things that were never really reconciled.

So, yes, it started for myself. But now I have written it, I do want people to read it. I think it may help others to work through some of the same things. And then it would have been worthwhile, especially if it may help some people to find a way to salvage lost friendships and lost relationships from the last few months, because it seems there is a giant rift forming in our communities in Britain.

This has nothing to do with ‘both sidsing’ anything, and it has everything to do with problem-solving. As far as I am concerned, in all of life, you cannot solve a problem that you do not understand. And I really want to understand it. So, I look at both narratives that the Palestinians and Israelis know as the history of their peoples, and think about the lives of individual Palestinians and Israelis, and then I wonder, how could this ever actually be fixed? Is there really any hope for the future?

It is not meant to justify or apologise for anything anyone has done.

I am sure this writing will includes things that almost everybody will take issue with, but it is my hope that by doing my very best to do justice to our collective stories that people can read without anger what it is that I have to say — and please do read to the very the end if you are intending to pass judgement on what that is.

Most of all, I think this will interest people in the diaspora with family, friends, and personal links and connections to the region — Israel or the Occupied Palestinian territories — who wish nothing more than to see their friends and family living in freedom, with dignity and security.

If you have read version 1, the stories of the 15-year-olds have only minor additions, but the narratives and the rest of the article have changed a lot. If you get to a bit that sounds very familiar, skip a bit further down — it is very long to read it twice.

~~~~~

What is the most important narrative of the Palestinian people?

(You do not have to agree with this — I am just telling it how it is told).

Something like –

“The defining event of our history is the Nakba (Catastrophe)

Before 1948, we used to live in Palestine. We loved Palestine. We lived there for centuries. We lived peacefully. We had a deep spiritual and emotional connection to the land. Our ancestors are buried there. Religious sites — Christian, Muslim, Jewish — that had great meaning to all of us were there. It was a rich tapestry of different religions and cultures containing a beautiful and sacred shared heritage.

We had wonderful villages and beloved homes that we built with our own hands. We had gardens with trees and plants that our grandparents planted. We had treasured possessions. We had friends and families and good lives. We could go and come as we pleased.

We had neighbours of all faiths, including Jewish neighbours. We lived contendly together. Some of them had been there for centuries just like us and we liked them, we lived there together happily and in peace.

In the 1900s, more and more started to come. They were fleeing persecution. We gave them refuge. We had no problem with them coming. They were being hounded in Europe and they needed somewhere else to go. Where better for them to be but here in Palestine, where the history of their people was born? And many of them were respectful and we had good relationships with them. We liked them.

But some of them wanted a country. Some of them fought with us, and some of them attacked us, and terrorised us. How could they have had a country in our land? We had been there for generations, and what would have become of us if we had agreed to it? Where would they have stopped? The problem was never them. It was them trying to make a country. And if they hadn’t tried to make a country, everything would have been okay. We could have had a country all of us together. What a beautiful country it could have been. But the country they wanted did not include us.

Some of them were clear they would have kept going until they got more and more of our land, and there is no question they would always have driven us away. Some of their leaders where unashamed and brazen in the way they looked down on us, in their statements that dehumanised us, in their disdain for us, in their colonial intent. They under-estimated us.

The Nakba (catastrophe) was a disaster for our people. In 1948, there was a war. During that war, the Israelis attacked us, killed us, stole our property and ethnically cleansed us from our land in order to create their Jewish state. We left in fear of our lives. We were not the ones that started that fighting. We wanted nothing to do with it. That is why we left.

We didn’t think we would be gone for long, surely once the fighting had subsided we would be back. But then days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into years.

Then it finally sunk in — they weren’t going to let us back. And we realised we were divided and dispossessed. That nightmare was only the beginning for us. They have never, ever allowed us back for 75 years. We lost everything. Our human rights are denied to us. More and more of our land is taken every day. We are not free. Some of us have no freedom at all and no rights.

We want to stop being ethnically cleansed. We want to go home, to go back, to see our homeland, our ancient sites, to be back where we belong, where we have always belonged. We want our dignity, and we want our freedom."

~~~~~

You do not have to agree with the way this story is told, but it has, in some form, been passed down through generations and generations of Palestinians.

~~~~~

What is life like for a 15-year-old Palestinian who lives in the West Bank?

You are told this story of your people from the day you were born. You live under a military occupation. More and more violent religious settlers move into the lands around you. They build new homes and can do whatever they want. They come and go as they please, in and out of Israel. You are not allowed to go anywhere except the West Bank. Their soldiers are always there with guns. They are in charge.

The settlers terrorise you all the time. They stop people farming their land and so you struggle to survive. A few weeks ago, a settler shot one of your friends. They never get punished and they never go to prison. But recently your best friend went to prison for throwing rocks at the soldiers. You really miss him.

Your grandparents left Palestine in 1948 with four children, and very few possessions. Your grandmother thought she would be back in a few days or weeks. Your grandmother’s sister ended up in Gaza and they never saw one another other again. She died recently. You have a cousin who is the same age as you. You know you could have been close if only you had even met.

You see no future the way things are now. There is no hope. You want a different life. You want the things your grandparents had. You don’t want to be constantly afraid of being attacked. You dream of leaving. You dream of the day you go back to Palestine where the house you should have had is, even just to see it, to be truly home, to live the life that is rightfully yours.

What do you do? You resist. In the only way that you can, with the only things that you have. You throw rocks at the soldiers. One day, you get caught, and you get put in a prison. You are tried by a military court, and you stay in prison for a really long time. In prison, people do appalling things to you. Finally, they let you out. What do you do?

~~~~~

What was life like for a 15 year old living in Gaza?

You are also told the Palestinian story from the day you were born. There are good things about your life. You go to school, have friends, and family who you love, you can go out and do things. There are hospitals, and you can get a lot of things that you need. You love Gaza. But you can’t leave Gaza. You can’t go anywhere else in the land or the world except Gaza.

Your life is still hard. Your family struggle for money and to survive, to get the things that you all need. There are a lot of things that would make your life better and easier, but you can’t get them in Gaza. You know that if you lived in Israel, you could get whatever you wanted and needed. You have family in the West Bank you have never met, but you know about their struggles. You have a cousin the same age, who is enduring unimaginable hardships.

The people in charge of Gaza are not good leaders. They can be dangerous and violent if you oppose them. A lot of people in Gaza don’t like them, although some people support them. Your own parents really can’t stand them. These people have been in charge of Gaza since before you were even born. You have learned that there was a civil war in Gaza before that and hundreds of people were killed or wounded. There has never been an election since.

You know they fire rockets into Israel because they want to dismantle it. You want a different life, but it’s never really worked or got anywhere. It seems futile. And you know that every few years, the bombs will come. Everyone you know has lost someone or something from the Israeli bombs. You don’t remember that much about the last time, but you do remember being really terrified, and you remember that your Dad cried when his brother was killed.

Then one day you hear news. News that Israel has been attacked by Gaza. Israelis have been killed, and some are even being brought into Gaza. Your heart sinks. You have a funny feeling in your stomach. You know what is coming.

~~~~~

To these two children, these cousins, Zionism can and only ever will mean catastrophic dispossession, oppression, and Jewish supremacy. The only Jews or Israelis they have encountered have either bombed them or terrorised them. Israel is a colonial entity. It never had a right to exist. Israelis are settlers. All they ever do is steal land. How could you expect them to see it any other way? There can never be any nuance, or any grey area about it. It could never have any legitimacy in their eyes. How could you expect or ask them to empathise with Israelis when you consider what they have lived and are living through?

For them, anyone who describes themselves as a Zionist in any form, even a liberal Zionist, could only ever be perceived as somebody that cannot be reasoned with, is trying to justify and support the unjustifiable, and is nothing but a settler and a tool of their oppression.

~~~~~

What is the dominant narrative of Jewish/Israeli people?

(You do not have to agree with it — I am just telling it how it is told).

It may be slightly different for secular Israelis and Diaspora Jews, but it goes something along these lines:

“We are the people of Israel. This is where our religion and our language were born, where we built temples and our ancestors are buried. We have and always have been surrounded by enemies on all sides. For millennia, we have been scattered throughout the world. We were driven from Israel and we went to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Throughout history people have always tried to kill the Jewish people. They didn’t like us being Jewish. There were always pogroms and mass killings. In some places people would hide and pray together in secret. It is our duty to keep the Jewish religion alive in their honour.

In Europe the pogroms got worse and worse. A few of us left Europe for a better life in Palestine. But most of us stayed in Europe. And most of us died in Europe. Six million of us. They did it because they said we were responsible for everything bad that had ever happened in the world.

Most of our so-called friends and neighbours said nothing as we were terrorised and led away. They carefully planned and counted how they could get rid of each and every one of us. They tried to annihilate us completely from the face of the earth. But as a people we lived on.

Jewish people had been coming to Palestine from Europe for years before 1948 fleeing the persecution. We came and we bought land fairly and built our lives there. We were happy. We wanted to all be together again, in a place that had meaning to us, where we would be safe. We knew we needed freedom and independence, so that this time it would never, ever happen again.

People say that we never needed a country, but what do they know? Jewish history has taught us things that they can never possibly understand. Jewish history has taught us that the world will always betray us, and when that day comes, our friends and neighbours will walk on by. We are a minority, so we must stick together, protect one another, keep one another safe. We knew we needed freedom and independence, so that this time we would have a safeplace where we can go and live when the world finally turns us on again, as it always does.

And In 1947, the UN agreed we could finally have a state of our own. We were so proud and overjoyed. What an achievement for us after everything we had been through.

We never wanted to fight with the people already living in Palestine. Yes, before 1948, some of us lived together peacefully. But it wasn’t a Utopia. Some of the people welcomed us and provided us with a safe place to live. We had good relationships with them.

But some of the people didn’t want us there, we were outsiders and they never liked us. Some people went to the British to get them to stop us from coming to Palestine. And even before 1948, there was a lot of fighting between us, and some of us were massacred even in Palestine.

But we could have found a way to live together peacefully, in two states, and they could have lived in our state just as we could have lived in theirs, just so long as we had a State. That is all we ever wanted. We could have divided and shared the land.

But they could never let us have it. Never. And when the British finally left, we saw our opportunity, we declared our state. We had no intention of taking anything from anyone. We just wanted a state. And then every single one of our neighbours, all the countries around us invaded us, from every corner of the land. Enemies on all sides. They surrounded us and we found we were alone, again, just as we always have been.

But this time we fought back. We fought for our freedom and independence and dignity, and our right to live and exist and not just accept to be killed, and mainly, for most of us, because we actually had nowhere else to go. It was a war, yes, we took land yes, but we didn’t start that war. It was existential, because how else exactly do you expect we could have guaranteed our security and safety surrounded by neighbours who were baying for our blood? What would you have done?

Then after 1948 the Middle East erupted. The Jews in the Middle East had always experienced persecution. But this was worse than ever. It was intolerable. They blamed those Jews for Israel. Hundreds of thousands of us were ethnically cleansed out of homes we had lived in for centuries, from Ancient communities all across the continent, and we left to build new lives in Israel. Over half of Israelis today are descended from those Middle Eastern Jews.

Now we live together in Israel. We stick togehter and we fight together. We have fought war after war after war. They have tried to kill us from all sides, time after time. But each time, we fight back harder, and we win. We have and always will be surrounded by enemies, but we will always fight back.”

~~~~~

You might not agree with a single word of this story. But this story, in some form or another has been passed down through generations and generations of millions of Jewish and Israeli people.

~~~~~

Now imagine the life of this 15-year-old born and living in Israel

You have been taught this story since the day you were born.

You live in a Kibbutz. You have friends. You like the outdoors and sports. You get good grades in school.

Your grandparents live nearby. Your Grandad came from Yemen as a refugee, as a child. He told you that his family were being attacked and threatened after the 1948 war, so they left their possessions and homes behind in Yemen, and they came to Israel instead.

Mostly you are happy. You are so excited you have a new boyfriend or girlfriend who you really like, but your parents don’t know yet.

But you really hate the rockets. You have never known any life without rockets. You know that some of the rockets get intercepted, but they still get through all the time.

There are bomb shelters everywhere. At school, in the playgrounds, in the bus-shelters, and at home. The sirens can go off at any time and then you have to run to the shelter. Even if you are busy doing your homework, or asleep, or on the toilet. The noise of the sirens never stops making you jump. You are used to it, but you still get scared and you hate it, and the sounds of the rockets make you shake.

You know in a couple of years you will be conscripted into the army. Everybody goes. You do and you don’t want to go. You want to go because you know it is your duty to protect the State from its enemies, just as everyone in your family has always done. But you are scared about it, and you don’t know what it will really be like. People don’t talk about it.

One weekend, your parents agree you can spend the night with your cousin. They live 40 minutes away. She is like a sister to you. So, you go on Friday. You have fun, watch a movie, chat for ages, and you fall asleep late.

The next thing you know your Aunt is waking you both up. It is Saturday morning. She is in a panic. Something is happening. Your parents have messaged. Something is wrong. She says there are men everywhere in the Kibbutz with guns. You turn on your phone. There are messages from your parents and your brother. They are in the bomb shelter. You try to call them. You can’t get through. You feel the panic rising in your chest. No, please, no. You ring your boyfriend or girlfriend. No answer.

~~~~~

This child has never met a Palestinian that lives in any Occupied Palestinian territory. All he/she knows about them is that they fire rockets at Israel and have done his/her whole life, and once every couple of decades they commit extremely violent and horrific terrorist attacks. That is what he/she knows because that’s what they have been taught and also what their lived experience has taught them.

Many Jewish and Israeli people believe when they talk about Zionism they are talking about, “Somewhere safe for Jews to live where they will not be attacked, where they can call home, and where they have self-determination.” How is it possible for this 15 year old child, given the stories they have been told and the life they have led, to be anything other than a Zionist, when it is defined like that? And if they are told they are a ‘settler’, or an ‘evil oppressor’ and that that is why they deserve to die, they will look at you with wide eyed wonder and assume you are a lunatic.

The reason they can conceive of the Jewish people as settlers who live outside 1967 borders and not themselves is because they do not see them as being in the, ‘Right for somewhere safe to live’ group of Zionists. They are considered to be religious extremists and supremacists, what they see as a distorted and extremist form of Zionism, and they don’t consider it the same.

~~~~~

There are many incredibly sad and depressing things about all of these stories. But the part to me that makes it seem most tragically futile — is that for a very large number of individual human beings that ended up living in either Israel or in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the 1950s -1960s — their stories are almost the same. Most of them were running away from something, and most of the time, the people who are doing the running away are not the people doing the fighting or the massacring.

It is a story of being a refugee, of fighting for survival against all odds, of 20th century dispossession and mass displacement. A story of being blamed for things they did not do and being held to account for debts that they did not owe. The tumult of 20th century history created a shared heritage — that over a very short time hundreds upon thousands of people were displaced — Jews fleeing Europe to Palestine, Palestinians fleeing during the creation of Israel, and almost all the Jews across the Middle East then fleeing to Israel in the few years after it started.

Part of that shared heritage became about yearning to return to a Holy piece of land that carries promise and a deep spiritual connection. It really shouldn’t be that hard to explain to one another — and indeed the rest of the world, why we cannot just ‘let it go’.

I am not trying to rewrite history and say that every single person in the years leading up to and including events in 1948 was an innocent bystander. Absolutely not. I am just saying that, generally speaking, as is almost always the case — when it comes to atrocities, it is normally extremists that engage in it, that end up calling the shots for everyone, and it is them that end up dictating history.

And it is extremist ideologies that are plaguing us today. One is an ideology of Jewish supremacy. God’s chosen people, Israel is God’s gift and therefore comes with a right to take land off anyone and everyone. The other is an extreme, dangerous and corrupted version of Islam — a highly repressive ideology where human rights do not exist, and it exalts in the death of Jews.

These people — all of them — they are the mob. ‘Death to the Jew. Death to the Arab’ One or the other in their rightful place, subservient to the other, or better yet, dead in the ground.

Most people are not the mob. Most people are not sociopaths. Most people just want to live and get on with their lives, they want to have their basic needs met, their human rights, and they want their children to grow up happy and healthy with a bright future ahead.

It is important to understand though that the bonds of community and peoplehood are also part of a basic human need. The need to maintain relationships with brothers, sisters, cousins and friends who live in our communities together with us, who have a shared history with us, who support us, and to whom we are loyal — it is part of the human experience.

The stories of our own and our friend’s grandparents, the loss of livelihood and dreams for the future as they packed their bags and fled — these are the stories that make us peoples. And it is these stories that bind us together within our communities much more closely than any ancient religious text or any ancestral DNA test ever could.

And so when people say, “The Jews and Israelis are not a people. They are fakers, they are ‘Europeans’ pretending to have links to a land that has nothing to do with them.” Or people say, “The Palestinians are not a people. They are just ‘Arabs’ who could have gone anywhere, who have no real history and whose only goal in life is to terrorise Jews,” these will both only ever be seen as inherently anti-Semitic or Anti-Palestinian statements that erase and deny large parts of our collective heritage, and neither will lead to any kind of constructive dialogue. Who is anyone to make judgements about what another people is that they do not belong to?

And so we end up where we have got to today –

From the Palestinian side, what I think is difficult for somebody who is not Palestinian to understand, is that telling them that they should give up on the right to return — for many — is impossible. They can’t do it. Understanding and honouring Palestinian history, which is rich, and complicated, and is largely unknown to many people, for them it is part of their identity. Poetry, art, great thinkers, great writers — they are all there for the world to see if only they would bother to look.

And even worse for a Palestinian, to suggest that everything that has befallen them was somehow their fault because they refused to give up on their history, this could only ever be met with fury and be seen as gaslighting.

It is essential as well to remember that this land — it is not just any land. It is not so easy to walk away from it as any other place on earth. It is Holy Land. It has meaning to everyone associated with it, and everyone wishes to be able to walk free inside it.

Having an enduring determination to free themselves from a brutal occupation that does nothing but dehumanises them and steals from them — and a longing, ultimately, to return to their homeland, this is inherent to being a Palestinian. They cannot ‘Un-Palestinian’ themselves.

So the Palestinians will say, “What world would you have us do? You the world have done nothing to help us. You who have been silent and you care nothing for our oppression. You have abandoned us to unthinkable injustice and suffering for decades. You who sit comfortably in your homes have no right to moralise at us or criticise us and tell us what we should or shouldn’t do. We have no means whatsoever to fight for our freedom. No one is on our side. We are alone. We will do whatever must be done to fight for ourselves, our human rights, our land.”

The Palestinians are living in an impossible nightmare. There seems to be nothing they can do to free themselves that doesn’t make their situation worse. What exactly are they supposed to do when they live under an occupation, have no civil rights, no means to fight for themselves, and the people with power that could do something are not standing up for them? And when all means of civil and non-violent resistance are completely denied or futile, support for more violent resistance will become inevitable.

And it was indeed inevitable that 7th October would come. Warning after warning has been given about the Occupied Palestinian territories and the blockade. Warnings about human rights abuses have gone unheeded. Warnings that if Palestinians are not given their freedom what would happen. Warnings that it was totally unjust, immoral and illegal for Palestinians in the West Bank to be under military occupation. Time and again it has been said it is a danger to the security of Israel, and it was ignored.

But the problem for the Palestinians is that terror was never ever going to work — because the people in Israel believe it was established and is needed as security because of the risk of terror against them. So the idea that they could be terrorised into giving it back, or into leaving — this is an absurdity. People talk of ‘Hasbara’, but terror is and feeds Hasbara. October 7th has done nothing but make people believe in Zionism even more (a safe place to live in their eyes). Zionism burns greater than ever with the fuel of the fires from the Hamas rockets. All terror has and can ever achieve is further encroachment onto Palestinian territory — the literal opposite of a free Palestine.

What happened in 1948 is horrendous. But what of it, to that 15 year old Israeli child? Whose own grandparents had nothing to do with it, and were themselves dispossessed, as is the case now for so many people living in Israel. That child who has only ever known Israel as their home.

So Israelis will say, “World, what would you have us do after October 7th? People outside Israel, you can say whatever the hell you want, but we are here alone. We have and always have been surrounded by people on every side who wish to murder each and every one of us until we are annihilated, and in the most painful and brutal possible way, as has just been demonstrated plainly for all the world to see. You, who do not have any understanding whatsoever of what that is like, do not get to tell us what to do. We will do whatever we think is necessary to strengthen our position to ensure this cannot happen again.”

What people are missing is that this conflict is unique to any other case of the ‘coloniser and colonised’ in history, because the people doing the ‘colonising’ are half the people of the land, people who have a genuine existential fear of everybody around them that does not come from nowhere, and is deeply ingrained into most people’ psyche. Most do not have anywhere else to go, because most of their grandparents came to Israel as refugees, and so they cannot perceive themselves as a ‘colonial settler’ in any way. So they will never stop fighting back at terrorism for their right to live without fear of attack.

This links to the Jewish people in the diaspora who support Israel and is extremely difficult for non-Jewish people to understand.

For many Jewish people, memorialising the repeated attempts to eradicate Jews throughout history, most notably the Holocaust, and remembering and honouring ancestors who have died to keep the Jewish religion alive is considered essential.

Every festival, every prayer book, every cultural activity and a very large number of conversations includes this on some level. It is integral and inherent to most people’s identity. So if people feel that their Jewish counterparts, and very often family in Israel are in existential danger, they can and only ever will see it as a moral imperative that they must be supported.

Asking Jewish people to somehow disavow themselves of this notion is impossible. To tell most Jewish people they need to ‘get over it’ because, “they are a coloniser and their needs do not matter,” is completely meaningless to them.

It is not grounded in reality, and something that can and will only ever be perceived as an attempt to ‘UnJewish them’. I.e. to eradicate significant parts of Jewish history and day-to-day life and community, and thus could only ever be perceived as deeply antisemitic in its very nature. The more these things are denied as relevant, the more people will fight back against what they see as gaslighting.

But for those people in the diaspora who have blindly, unquestioningly, dutifully and uncritically supported Israel, while its government drifts ever further into the grip of right-wing extremism and corruption, must surely now see that was a mistake. If you had a friend or a loved one on a destructive path of self-sabotage, would you just let them carry on?

It is great tragedy of Jewish history for both Jews and Palestinians alike that self-determination and independence for the Jewish people, at a time when they needed and wanted it so badly would come at someone else’s expense. Something that is so freely and unquestioningly given to so many other peoples, but not the Jewish people. Yes, it is unfair. But it did come at their expense. I think that most Palestinians only opposed it, not because they oppose Jewish people — it is the bit about it being at their expense.

We can argue forever and eternity about, “Oh, but it never needed to be this way. If only you could have shared with us. If only in 1947 this or that. And if only in this peace agreement this year or that year,” or whatever.

But what of it to those 15 year olds living in Gaza and the West Bank? It is an irrelevance what was ever intended. What was intended bears no resemblance whatsoever to their lived reality. The Jewish dream of Zionism became their nightmare. I know this is an extremely painful and bitter pill for people to swallow, but Zionism since its inception has resulted in nothing other than subjugation for them. And it is not normal for a country to not have any proper borders, and for one people to control another in some parts of it.

And while it continues to happen, Zionism will continue to be seen as Jewish people being allowed to have control over other people. This was never ever how Zionism was originally intended for a lot of people, and it is not what they think it means. Far from it. But this is where it has come to, and intentions do not matter, because it is our actions that count. Once you understand this, it is really not difficult to see how this is fuelling dark and extremely dangerous conspiracy theories about Zionism, which are dragging us back to a place in history that we most definitely do not want to go, and it endangers us all.

We need to open our eyes to reality. As the bombs reign down in Gaza, destroying thousands of lives, after well over 100 days, there are people dying from starvation. This must end, immediately. It is abominable. The rockets are still coming. And even if you stop them today, while there is occupation in any part of the land, they will just come back tomorrow or the next day or the week or the year or the decade after that. And surely from the Israeli side, negotiating whatever terms to get as many of those hostages out alive, going through what must be unthinkable terror, at any cost, must be prioritised above all else.

And I am very sorry, because I know people will not like this. But this ‘war’ — it is not about destroying Hamas. It is becoming increasingly clear by the day that not only is destroying Hamas impossible, but Israel’s government are violent ethnonationalists. The far right threaten to collapse it at every mention of a ceasefire — the only thing that will get most of those hostages back alive — and so it carries on. And extreme ideology is much more widespread within the government than just the furthest right that are propping it up. The very leader of Israel himself is at the heart of it.

When you hear what they are saying, it is very clear that they have far more sinister intentions, and we must take them at their word. Allowing people to starve, making plans to drive them off their land into other places, destroying heritage sites, and yes, mass killing — that is ethnic cleansing. It is the definition of ethnic cleansing. It is illegal under international law, and it must stop.

People say, “Oh, but Hamas are stealing the aid.” Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t care because it is an irrelevance at this moment in time to that woman looking into the eyes of her hungry child as they wither away and die. It is enough.

Could it ever be solved?

There are those of us that would be willing to give up on the dreams of our respective peoples, and not because we wish to throw them under the bus. But simply because we would just accept any solution, in whatever form, that would bring the suffering of all people to an end, and as quickly as possible. Because we believe that none of any of this is worth the blood of anyone’s children.

Because we look at those dreams of security through self-determination, rights to return, and we look at where we are today, and we see that none of any of it has delivered on its promise. We see that the world is a very different place to what it was in 1948. We recognise that there are people on the ‘other side’ that we would much rather share a country with than the ‘mob’ on our own side.

Because we know that our histories are worthless if they demand that we ‘unhuman’ ourselves.

Because we recognise that we have inherited the most Unholy mess.

But we are few in number, because the majority of most peoples cannot let go of their respective narratives, either in whole or in part. And so the solution that must be found is one that could satisfy the majority of the narrative of both peoples.

Israel already has half of what it wants — it has the state. But it does not have security, and any pretence of it has been an illusion, one that was violently shattered on October 7th.

The Palestinians meanwhile — they have nothing of what they want.

A one state solution — this does not satisfy the Israeli narrative, because it requires the undoing of Israel. It gives many Israelis nothing of what they think they want and everything they are afraid of. If you were that panicking aunt of that 15 year old Israeli child just now, would you be agreeing to open that border?

But I do not think the two-state solution really satisfies the Palestinian narrative. Because in that narrative, things were better before Israel, before Zionism, where everybody just lived together. And mainly because people want to able to walk free across the land — the right of return. The two-state solution may bring freedom and dignity, but I am not sure if it would give enough people what they really want.

Ultimately it comes down to one of the reasons this has been so intractable for so long. The Jewish State and the desire to control and ensure the continued right of Jewish immigration to Israel, and the presumed need to maintain a Jewish majority to enable that, vs the Right to Return of the Palestinians. ‘The War of Return’ as it has been called. The thing that neither side seems to be able to give up, that seem to be in direct conflict.

So what do we do? Throw our hands up, put it down to a bad job and just give up. (What the world has done). Keep blaming each side’s ‘propaganda’, each side’s education system, each side’s unwillingness to budge. But it won’t work, because it is asking people to let things go of things that they cannot let go of, things that are integral to the history of their peoples.

Human beings have been solving problems since we existed and there is no reason why we cannot solve this one.

There are many possible ways to solve it. The confederate two-state-solution is one example of a way to square the circle: https://www.alandforall.org/.

I suggest it not because I am wedded to it but because it seems to me that it would satisfy enough of both narratives to work. There may be multiple other ways to do it.

How do we get to it? As a possible example. We start with two states. Real states. Not a bit of a state or half a state with the other bit not connected to it and some people still being occupied that could never be acceptable, and was always going to be fought against. A real Palestinian state, whose borders are secured through international peacekeeping. But with that state must also come the promise and the goal that over a reasonably short period of time, everybody who wishes to cross that border gets to cross that border, until eventually, one day, ideally, there isn’t a border. People live wherever they want, but retain citizenship in their own state. And with regards specific land and homes that cannot be returned, real reparations are made. This is just one example of how it could be done.

As we keep hearing — 7 million Israelis, 7 million Palestinians. No one is going anywhere. But at some point, it is my opinion that, probably, for this to ever end, everyone must be able to go everywhere.

Two peoples living side by side. All free to live and move freely across this ancient and Holy land that is so special and meaningful to all and must be shared. Finally able to mix and become humanised in each other’s eyes. Christian, Jew, and Muslim, free to access their ancient and Holy sites. All of us united together in the spirit of mutual respect and tolerance.

Cooperating together to fight the only war that there should ever have been — the only war worth fighting.

Everybody vs the mob.

Not a religious war, not a war of the us or them, not a war over rights to the land and houses. But a war of the moderate and the just against the extremists that have desecrated our respective religions and turned them into something ugly. The lunatics marginalised, silenced and rejected. As opposed to what we have now — the sociopaths leading the charge and everyone else marching dutifully along behind.

People will say this is idealistic nonsense, a pipe dream. But what is the other option? Another twenty or thirty years of failed peace agreements and more of the same all over again? And with every round of violence, the violence gets more violent, the mob gets stronger and more popular on both sides as their ideas are seeded. And the mob is hard to fight, because the mob involves fanatic religion that cannot be reasoned with.

If we keep allowing them to get stronger and stronger, I think they will eventually set each other, themselves, and quite possibly the entire world, alight. Literal World War 3 with Jerusalem at the centre.

“How can you ask us to negotiate with them?” I hear you say. “Them, who are ethnically cleansing us,” or, “Them who wish to annihilate us,” depending on which side you are on. But here is the rub — you cannot terrorise people into leaving and you cannot bomb people into submission. Neither has ever worked. We cannot ethnically cleanse or genocide our way out of this for either people, one way or the other. Any other solution other than a diplomatic solution will lead us nowhere but the abyss.

Israelis and Palestinians are not all inherently genocidal oppressors or inherently genocidal terrorists. (As unfortunately lots of people are saying) Of course they are not. Maybe right now in Gaza most Palestinians do support Hamas in what they see as armed resistance, and most Israelis do support the actions of their government in what they see as a war. But both things have become intertwined with both mobs, and so they are not what each respective side thinks they are. The ‘armed resistance’ — a pogrom style massacre by the ‘death to the Jew’ mob, and the ‘war’ a flagrant breach of international law and an obvious attempt at ethnic cleansing by the ‘God gave us Israel, death to the Arab’ mob.

I am not very sure that most of any of them either know or believe exactly what has or hasn’t happened. The information they are receiving is very different to ours. And in times of heightened escalation of violence, people retract into the respective narratives of their people as they become reinforced. “If it’s a choice between us or them, I choose us. And for me to be able to look myself in the mirror, I must choose to believe what I choose to believe.”

Both believe so deeply within their heart and soul that they are on the side of righteous justice. For one it is ‘the right to just exist’, For the other, it is ‘the right to life, dignity, freedom from cruel and violent oppressors’. So they are both engaging in the collective delusion that because theirs is the side of the right and good, their soldiers/fighters must also be right and good.

Their people can’t possibly be the ones committing the crimes against humanity, and they cannot believe the worst things that are being said about their own side, only the other. But this is not the reality of wars and fighting, and definitely not in a conflict that has gone on for this long where this amount of hatred has become so entrenched, and most of all not ones which involve religion. To me it seems very likely that most of the worst things that are being said about both sides, are in fact, the true things.

As it turns out, many of them were always, are becoming, or have become, the mob.

I think almost everyone, whatever they say, would in fact be appalled if they were actually to see the violence that has happened, and is happening with their very own eyes. But they do not want to open their eyes to see it for what it really is, because they are on the side of the right and the good.

I know there are people of every colour and creed who no doubt I could become friends with, get along with, and love dearly. But also there are people of every colour and creed that I could not stand to be in the same room as. I know this because I am not a racist. Human beings are human beings, that is all we need to know. And if we find ourselves making any collective statements about all of a people, we are probably becoming the very thing we so vociferously claim to the world we are not.

I think that racism may well have become entrenched on ‘both sides’ but I am not sure that it is exactly racism — perhaps a better way to put it would be ‘othering’. “They did this, they did that. They support this, they support that.” And the only way to stop doing it is not to tell each other that we need to unlearn or erase our respective histories and ‘un-brain’ wash ourselves. It is the opposite.

We have to first human ourselves. And then we might have to temporarily UnJewish and UnPalestinian ourselves for short amounts of time. Then we learn each other’s history. Then we will be able to find solutions together.

How can we work together to solve this?

This part of this piece of writing — specifically — it is for us in the diaspora. Hardly anyone in the Middle East is in a place to hear any of this this right now, and too many of them are much too busy trying not to die or get killed.

We in the diaspora, we are trying very hard to do what we can to stop this, and to help. But how is it possible, that all of us who seemingly so desperately want the same thing — freedom and dignity for everyone, and yet still don’t seem to be able to get anywhere without offending and upsetting one another? How can we expect people in the Middle East to co-exist, if we cannot even have a conversation?

I believe we are talking to each other in languages we do not understand, and until we realise this, we will only ever talk past each other. Almost every conversation will have the opposite of its intended consequence, and make the other person believe they are even more right.

We will only ever find it inconceivable that people or friends or colleagues that we thought were ‘nice’ could have views that seem totally barbaric in our eyes. But if we could talk in languages each other could understand, it would get easier. Or at least if we can’t, if we tried to hear what the other is really saying.

We are not listening to, or being respectful of one another and as a collective we are so much weaker and so much less powerful for it. Because the discourse has become so toxic that we cannot work together to find solutions.

I know I myself have been done these things, but even as we try to so hard to understand and explain, it is so easy to offend. I think the reason we are offending each other is because the words in the mind of the speaker sound very different to the ears of the listener.

If the conversations are had respectfully in the spirit of achieving genuine mutual understanding, that is great. But if it is an argument to convince the other person that you are right, forget it.

Take the debate about whether shouting ‘Intifada’ is Anti-Semitic.

If you tell some Palestinians that shouting, what to them means ‘resistance’ against a state which is and has been exercising immense and disproportionate power against them and has done for three quarters of a century, is anti-Semitic, they will inevitably wonder what planet you are living on. How exactly it is that you expect they can possibly fight for their freedom? And why do you continue to engage in this collective delusion that just condemns them to suffer and die?

But if you try to tell most Jewish people, that what they perceive as the indiscriminate killing of Jews in terrorist attacks is not antisemitic, it is inevitable that they will not believe you. In fact, they will see you as yet another of the seemingly innumerable people in the ‘Death to the Jew’ mob.

Every conversation is having the opposition of its intended consequence. Convincing the other person they were more right than they were before.

Think about the way that we frequently use each other’s non-mainstream diaspora voices as a stick to beat each other with. (And this is not necessarily a criticism of those voices — some of them are very important — it’s just explaining how they are seen).

People say to Palestinians:-

“Look, this Palestinian is good, they think Zionism is okay, and you should just accept it. If only you could stop being so silly like them it would have all been over a long time ago. They agree that you haven’t exactly helped yourselves.”

How could a Palestinian ever consider this as a legitimate argument? Views that surely could only be perceived as incredibly anti-Palestinian. Surely they must think something along the lines of…

“You are privileged not to be in Gaza grieving incommensurate losses. You are one of the lucky ones whose entire family is not now dead. You who are not hungry and ill and exhausted and cold and terrified of being killed. All of your hopes and dreams do not lie in ruin before your eyes. You are enabling and emboldening our enemies. You are throwing us under the wheels of the bus of occupation all the while benefitting from living in the countries that side with our oppressors. You do not, and you will not ever, speak for us.”

Equally Jewish people are constantly bombarded with -

“Look at this Jewish person or that one. They are reasonable. They believe Israel is a colonial entity and should be entirely dismantled. They agree you are weaponising the Holocaust and playing the victim. Why are you not a good Jew, like them?”

This is not in any way a mainstream Jewish view because it is mostly perceived as -

“Lucky you, not to be one of almost half the Jews of the world that ended up living in Israel, to not have been born there, to not have a friend or family member that has been killed or taken or mutilated.

Lucky you, who can align yourself with the baying mob, and in so doing throw your Jewish Brothers and Sisters in Israel under the wheels of the bus of annihilation by the people that have demonstrated time and again that they hate them, because it is not your problem. You are not and never have been part of the community, and you do not speak for us.”

If we constantly tell both groups that we don’t hate them, just so long as they agree with something that is a total anathema to them, it will never wash. I am sure it is incredibly offensive to everyone.

“From the River to the Sea.” What do you mean? Genocide the Jews? Genocide the Palestinians? Arab Nationalism? Jewish Nationalism? Or simply freedom and equality for all?

And when it comes to ‘Zionism’. Forget about different languages. We are on completely different planets.

For everyone and anyone else watching the nightmare unfold, who can’t make sense of any of it, they must be thinking, “Surely none of any of this can be okay in the name of human decency?” But they do not know what to do. Because to ‘both sides’ it is to offend everyone and convince no one. ‘Both sidsing’ it has been declared not allowed. You will always be seen as a sell-out or a bus-thrower-under, one way or the other. So they are silenced, their voices not heard, reduced into a despondent, hand-wringing depression.

Yes, in the Middle East, one group has all the power. But in the diaspora, we are more equal. We have equal rights, we mostly live in countries where we are free to speak our minds.

Both sides are busy trying to expose each other’s mob. Both sides have “traitors” who are busy helping. The traitors have totally denounced their own side as either misogynistic, or racist, or both, and have joined the other team. And most of everybody else is on the scale of moderate, somewhere in between the views of the ‘mob’ from their own side, and ‘traitor’ for the other side. None of us even agree with each other on our ‘own side’, and very often, the people on our own side annoy us even more than the people on the other, and amazingly, sometimes the people we find the most annoying are the people we agree with the most.

In the first version of this I wrote, “We are mirror images of one another, yet it seems we mainly hold the mirror up at each other, not at the self.” So we never get to see what it is that we might have been missing.

Maybe is the other way around — we only hold the mirror up at the self and not the other. Something like that.

This is a long and, yes, very complicated story affecting and involving millions of different people across the world, across time and space, with millions of different stories to tell. For there to be any genuine hope of mutual understanding or respect, every single person is going to have to concede that most things about this story they can never truly understand because they have not lived them.

We cannot know, if we have not lived it, what it means to be born and live in a country that has only ever been at war. We cannot know, if we have not lived it, what it means to be born and live your whole life in a territory that is brutally occupied, or is under a blockade, by another people. Nor can we know, if we have not lived it, what it is like to have friends and family caught up on any side of this, whose safety and wellbeing you are desperately worried about.

We in the diaspora, so desperately worried for people in the Middle East, we are all working so hard, but we are not doing the right work. We are digging the hole deeper than ever. The magic peace fairy is not coming. They will not simply just descend from the sky, sprinkle us with magic fairy peace dust and make it all better.

When was the last time we tried to have a meaningful conversation with someone who is saying things that seem incredibly offensive to us? When was the last time we took the trouble to ask them why they think what they do? Or to ask why it is that we have offended them? To ask them about their lives, what happened to their grandparents, and their families and friends, and their parents and the stories that they were told growing up. About their hopes and dreams and aspirations. About their fears for the future.

Whenever the violence escalates, the historians cash in. Suddenly people have more motivation to understand, so we start reading and re-reading the history books. But mostly history will not give us the answers that we are looking for. It is people’s stories that will do it. And reading books that reinforce things that we already agree with will not give us the understanding that we need. It is the great writers from the other side that might.

Social media has many ills. But one huge positive is that it allows us to connect with all sorts of people whose thoughts and ideas we would never have been exposed to. We can observe fascinating conversations between other people we would never have been party to before. We can gain understanding, share ideas and solutions. It is definitely happenning. None of this was there in any previous attempts to fix this. It might just be the gamechanger that we need. We must make the most of it.

We cling to our positions like shells to a rock, not budging at all, so sure that we and we alone can see this for what it really is. I know I was. We could have been working together to stop this, but we never make any progress, and as a result, inadvertently, each and every one of us is complicit in the most unforgivable human suffering.

People say that there is no point talking about peaceful co-existence because it has never worked — but neither has violence. Ultimately there are only two choices — wait for the magic peace fairy, and die together. Or we can do the work to make the ‘peace’ that we all want, and maybe we can live together.

Addendum

And now I speak “as a British Jew,” to anyone in our community who is willing to listen.

I can tell the story of the Jewish story because I know that story. I have grown up listening to it. I was taught it in the Synagogue, in Sunday school and by family and friends. I have also tried, as best as I can, having not lived it, but by listening to the voices of Palestinians and with the help and feedback of allies, to do justice to their story. I hope that I have. It may not meet the mark, after all, this is only version 2. And anyway, neither ‘side’ is a monolith, we would all tell our histories a bit differently, so I definitely cannot satisfy all.

It is important to say that there is one thing yet unmentioned about these two stories. It may be the most important thing. I think it belies the biggest lack of understanding between us.

I have talked much of the similarities in our stories. But there is one very big difference.

The Israeli and Jewish story is about running away. It is about running away from terrible persecution, and of moving forward. It is about moving on and building a new life. The idea of wanting to go back in time, wanting to turn back the clock — it is unconscionable. There was never anything worth going back to. So, for example, when some of us are suddenly being offered citizenship in European countries because our grandparents lived there before the Holocaust, this is not something that we could ever comprehend wanting.

So many Israelis feel, “Why couldn’t they have just moved on like we did? Why did they spend all of their efforts ruining things for us when they could have just moved forward, let it go, made the best of a bad lot, and made new lives like we did?”

Apart from the multitude of reasons I have already explained as to why it was never that simple and why their material circumstances and the occupation has made that impossible for most people — what we need to realise is that their story is the other way around. Our story starts from a place of misery, and moves onto something better. Theirs starts from a place where they were happy enough, and moves onto something horrific. It starts from being at least content for hundreds of years, running away — something they thought was temporary — and never being allowed to go back.

And I say this part as gently as I possibly can. There is a very deep and particular sorrow that many Jewish people will know. It comes with realising that we do not want to look back, because looking back is much too painful. Knowing that for some of us there is no point going on ‘ancestry.com’ because there is no ancestry left to trace. And is it that sorrow that was felt so keenly after the atrocity that was October the 7th. People do not understand that something cannot be weaponised when it is so genuinely heartfelt — there is no intent behind it.

But for the Palestinians — seeing that people from other countries can go and visit, go on holiday, and walk around in a land where their grandparents built their homes, left with whatever they could carry only for them and their families to encounter ever more worsening horrors on their onward journey right up until this very day — and yet they can never set foot in that land — I think what they experience when they see that — it is a very similar sorrow. And I am sure that they have been feeling that sorrow most keenly with each and every passing day, and most particularly in these last months.

I do not believe, as I have argued, that is the case that Israel must cease to exist with all the people in it, to allow the Palestinians what they clearly want, need, and, I believe, are indeed entitled to. The idea that our millenia-old right of return is still in date but their 75-year-old right of return has somehow expired is completely logically incoherent.

And I am coming to understand that suggesting that it has somehow been indulged is a bit like telling us we are weaponising the Holocaust. I think that nothing could be more insulting.

The problem with our version of the story that we were taught — The story of the Jewish people, our losses, our sacrifices, our spilled blood — it is only half a story. It is history through only one lens.

And that story is not the only thing that is taught in our homes and in our Synagogues and in our Sunday schools. We are taught values. We are taught values of respect, justice, and ‘do unto others’. We are taught the words of the Talmud ‘Whoever saves a life, saves the world entire,” (words that can also be found in the Quran).

Most importantly of all, we are taught, “Do not stand idly by while the blood of your neighbour is shed.”

And because we are taught those values — there is a cognitive dissonance that so many people in our community feel — but don’t quite understand — that parts of this story don’t really make any sense, that what happened, and is happening, is definitely not okay. That dissonance — it will not hold forever. It will tear our families and our community apart. It already is.

Yes, there is a death to the Jew mob. Yes, they are a massive problem. But I think we have no right to make mention of that mob unless in the same breath and multiple times over we are making mention of our own mob. Because our own, ‘Death to the Arab’ mob — they have been running around the Occupied Territories unchecked for decades. And it is both mobs that need to be brought under control before there can ever be any hope of resolving this. The Death to the Jew mob will come back stronger than ever while the Death to the Arab mob roam free. And who are we to lecture Palestinians for not getting their house in order, when it is our side that has all the power and all the resources, and yet we have allowed it to carry on? We who demand that they condemn the “resistance” whilst refusing to condemn the “war”.

And we must understand this — If Gaza is allowed to be resettled — it is over. Ever more untold and unimaginable horror for the Palestinians, and in our silence we will have handed Israel on a plate to those ethnonationalists, to the people that should have had nothing to do with what Israel could have been — and in fact people that have nothing to do with us and our values.

People keep talking about the two-state solution like it is some kind of utopia that, like the magic peace fairy, it will just fall from the sky. It is not that easy. Trying to dismantle settlements in the West Bank to make that possible — it is probably almost undoable as it is. Some of them have been there so long now and the Palestinians have very little faith that it could or would ever be done. In fact a confederate version of the two state solution may in some ways be easier to implement because it does not necessarily require the dismantlement of all settlements, something that looks like it is getting harder to do.

And If we think antisemitism is bad now, it will be nothing compared to what is in store in years to come if the resettlement and reoccupation of Gaza were to happen. Israel, hated among nations like never before, until eventually the world will finally not tolerate it. It is dangerous and it leads I know not where, undoing it, I know not how. An epic holy war ahead of us, and in the process we will see what we are already seeing in Israel — free speech and dissent a thing of the past — and Israel’s democracy — burned to the ground.

We are doing our cousins and our friends no favours by parroting off the same old arguments, and ignoring the occupation that has been allowed to become normalised within Israel. It is high time for a different conversation. It was a long ago, and it is now or never.

We need to speak up, loud and clear. When it comes to armed Jewish settlers running around the West bank and terrorising Palestinians, we are anti — it, and we always have been. But how can we expect other people to know this if we do not have these conversations in the open? If we do not call a spade a spade. Our refusal to use particular words and talk about things in a particular way in front of other people even if we do it behind closed doors has led to a lack of education within our community — and I am sure that there will be some people when I talk about these things, that have literally no idea what I am even saying. This is a very big problem. I hope some of those people are reading this now.

And what exactly is it that we are so afraid will happen if we put our heads above the parapet? It is evidently clear that Israel has not been abandoned by its allies. Put yourself in the shoes of an ordinary Gazan just now. Heartbreakingly, it seems to me, that being abandoned by the world — that that has become their destiny.

And, “What of the far left?” people will say? How are we to do deal with their antisemitism?

Yes, the far left think they are supporting armed resistance but have in fact aligned themselves with the ‘death to the Jew’ mob. They bleat on about ‘Hasbara’ — something they clearly have no understanding of whatsoever because if they did they would realise that they are it. Or at least that they are feeding it. Literally they are walking, talking Hasbara.

But of the multiple problems with the far left — and there are many — to me the worst is that there are those of them who have no connection whatsoever to the lives of anyone in the region — no ordinary Israelis or ordinary Palestinians, and yet they cheer for ever more death and destruction. They cheer on “armed resistance” from their comfortable homes in their comfortable lives, and it is not them who will have to face the consequences.

And maybe this round of violence will be the last round, the round that ends it once and for all — I hope so. But it has come at the most appalling and unacceptable cost.

Who are they to think they have a right to declare that somebody else’s family, somebody else’s child — Israeli or Palestinian — even one — let alone thousands and counting — is an acceptable sacrifice?

Maybe it is because they did not understand that October 7th could only ever have been a suicide mission. Because as a consequence of the rigidness of far-left ideology that does not allow for self-critical thinking, they refuse to understand this problem in more than one way. That you cannot fight evil with evil. That yes, it is more complicated than just ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’, more complicated than their warped version of reality where even children are fair game.

Probably there are some of them that knew what would happen after October 7th, and just decided it was probably worth it if it would eventually ‘free Palestine.’ Either way it is unforgivable because it was not their decision to make. And all that has happened as far as I can see, all October 7th has achieved is all it would ever achieve — to enable an extremely racist, harmful, problematic and untrue stereotype that ‘Palestinians are genocidal terrorists’ to be reinforced in the eyes of Israelis and the rest of the world. Around 3,000 people crossed that border on October 7th, of a population of over 2 million. But undoing that sterotype will be extremely difficult, taking us further away from where we need to be.

You cannot help but wonder where we might be right now if only all those people had used all that effort to lobby for a real diplomatic solution. But we can’t turn back the clock.

Arguing with the far left is a waste of time. They have no self-awareness, they are delusional, and they will never stop. They are as fanatical as any of the mob. The only way to make them stop talking is to actually sort this problem once and for all and work for the freedom and dignity of all. And when all is said and done, the ones that will keep complaining will finally be exposed for what they truly are.

That there are outspoken people within our community that think that the correct response to these people is for us to align ourselves with far right Islamophobes — we who have traditionally been proud of being anti-fascist — this could not be more ludicrous. It will lead us into that abyss. “I think the Jewish Chronicle is the Daily Mail for Jews.” Yes Dad, we all finally agree.

So where do we go from here? We need to start doing that right work. It is incumbent upon us more than anyone. Because it is only us who can help our friends and family in Israel, because it us who share history with them, who love and care about them. It is us who can help them see this through another lens.

We need to change the conversation, and we need to do it fast. Because the Palestinians do not have the luxury of time, and as far as I am concerned, neither do we.

There are people in our communities — both Israeli and Jewish — that have already been doing that right work for a really long time. It is time to listen to them, and elevate their voices. We need to start to be willing to be offended and to listen to other points of view. And unfortunately some of the right work does sometimes involve wading through what feels like a massive steaming pile of anti-Semitic shit, in order to get to the heart of some of the problems. But we also have an opportunity to meet some incredible people, and hear some amazing and wonderful voices that we would never have had a chance to hear. We have to get this done, to fix this once and for all.

We cannot hand this legacy to our children. We have to fight (non-violently) for a different future. This is the chance to do it. The world’s eyes are on Israel, and the time is now.

[hellsite-yano]

Porky, I wanna know how you keep your head up high. I don't wanna share my sob story and general negativity, but it seems that I can get into really depressing spirals sometimes and then when I bring up concerns I have I get called a doomer. Aside from just not caring, how do you remain positive?

I've been stewing on this message for about a month cause I received it at a particularly low point. I know you said you don't wanna share your sob story so I hope you don't mind if I share a bit of mine.

Basically the landlord decided to sell the place I've been living in with my fiance for about 7 years. This was obviously devastating, especially for my fiancee who had to put 70% of her things into storage. After some initial friction between me and my family who were happy to have me back except my kinda neurotic brother, we're staying in their (very small) spare room.

The other issue is that my mum's bed-bound, which is fine, but she needs constant care so the flat is basically a revolving door of carers and district nurses and constantly seeing (and having to constantly let in) strangers is pretty awkward and tiring. I understand this is nobody's fault though, it's just a huge difference to the quiet home life I'm used to. Doesn't help that the building's next to a main road as well.

My auntie also pops in from time to time and while I'm grateful for everything she's done for my mum (basically uplifting her whole life for the past 5 years to constantly make trips to her) and me (buying us furniture and such when we were moving in), she very clearly has undiagnosed ADHD/OCD which, I gotta be real, makes her extremely difficult to be around. It's just one of those families where every little thing has to be a massive drama and it's tiring. The mum and auntie are also jehovah's witnesses but this comes up less often than you'd think, though it's still a point of contention sometimes.

As for how I remain positive, I've been thinking about this question a lot recently. I suppose I try to count the remaining positives. I'm not homeless, I'm still with my fiancee and cat, and I've finally got a decent full time job with a lot of good perks. I'll also be saving a ton of money because I'm paying a fraction of my previous rent (ideally I'd like to save for a deposit).

Another thing that helps is just setting attainable goals. Right now for me it's to hold down this job and endure the housing situation for the time being. I've got a pretty big tax bill coming up in the new year (long story) that I need to save for which is why I opted for my family instead of just renting again. That and renting prices are fucking atrocious right now and you could lose it at any time.

Anyway, that's the situation as it stands. I'm still in the middle of unpacking what little we could bring and the move was particularly stressful, which is why I haven't posted much over the last few days. Times are bad and I've cried a lot but I believe things will get better because I'm working towards it.

[skippyv20]

Basic Hygiene Rules at Public Events (for grifters and ex-royals)

Hi Skippy & Friends-Pilgrim checking in, quite astonished and even alarmed observing the constant hugging by the two twits putting on the ritz in front of hundreds of people from all over, many with medical problems. Our dear Puke and Pukess of Suckeths need a refresher course in both physical cleanliness and proper public behavior especially when the flu season is back in action including a new variant of Covid on the rise.

First, I am not a medically trained person but we have all been on a serious learning curve for the past few years about how to not get sick. When we followed those rules to the letter humans were far better off. We kept a polite distance from strangers or those worried about being infected with a cold germ or worse. We wore masks, especially if we were the sick ones so we didn’t give it to everyone we walked by. We used sanitary hand cleansers after shopping, getting gas, touching doors, etc etc etc…Now that we are going back to schools and workplaces guess what? Colds, flu, childhood diseases and bodily bugs are all back. With our nation’s borders totally wide open and very ill people arriving daily, old infectious diseases our society was protected from are being discovered.

What made me crazy was watching JH and the ILBW march up to anyone, move in with arms raised insisting on a big personal hug! I would have freaked out like lots of kids did. Adults acted like deer caught in headlights. How many germs did they spread around for days? As I said earlier, some of these athletes might still be very fragile having gone through difficult medical procedures. The staged group shots for their filming crew, with people sitting shoulder to shoulder, making believe they were in jammed stadium seating, cued to sing, wave flags, cheer on their favorite major league teams was just nuts! Wide angle shots showed they were surrounded by rows and rows of empty seats! “Say, lets breathe down each others throats for the next half hour so we can make a film and get paid tons of money. Oh and you guys…well you get to tell people you were hugged by us and we made believe you were our best friends!” Ha. When back home are those selfies going to be worth it while dealing with the “minor aches and pains of the flu”? Will they reealllly impress your friends or be valuable on eBay?

Here is the first aid list for them to start following: Wash all wigs & extensions whether real hair or synthetic every 6-8 wears so pungent smells, molds and bugs are kept at bay. Don’t fling you hair around in people’s faces. Keep your hands away from your sweaty, germ covered hair especially when around food. Keep your hands away from your mouth and nose. Cover your crotch and feet in public places. Whoever decided that the Suckeths needed to hug absolutely everyone they were introduced to, put a medal on or walked by in the street was sorely perverse. It is impolite, not royal, not decent, not sincere and downright dangerous. Not to mention just plain cringe worthy!

Over and out from a normal Cape Cod. PS the laughs have been great!!!

Greg Post dear Pilgrim!  Ewwww, last paragraph…the best…😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

[heliads]

Growing Up

At some point in his life, Harry Potter must stop being a teenager who grew up too fast and start being an adult in a regular world with a regular life. It is not as easy as he thought it would be. It is not easy at all.

masterlist

Harry James Potter is restless. He is stuck somewhere in the slow blend of ages between 20 and 30; past being an adolescent but still not sure enough of himself to rest comfortably in adulthood. His hair has already begun to settle itself out, no longer quite so wild as when he was growing up; his eyes have both sharpened and hollowed all at once. He is, at the end of the day, still Harry Potter, still The Boy Who Lived, but he has lived much longer than expected, and that would affect anyone to a certain degree.

Especially Harry, that is. He finds himself lacking in purpose without something like a war to hold him down. It’s like being stuck in the sky during a Quidditch game, unable to stop himself from endlessly scanning the horizon for enemy players, but curfew has been called and all the spectators have long since disappeared indoors to friends and family who need them. Harry is left up there on his broom, circling and waiting for someone to strike who never will.

Harry always thought that he would know what to do when it was all over. He spent so much time chafing against the seemingly endless danger, always wanting to skive off studying or run away from that constant chokehold tension keeping him in place. Every year, he silently pleaded for a school term that would be normal, for once, and every year he was disappointed.

And now, all of a sudden, everything is normal, and Harry has no idea what to do with himself. All of his knowledge of how to operate like a human being is built upon the unsteady pillar of certainty that he would be killed or worse before he got far enough along in anything, but now that entire worldview has crumbled away to ash and dust. Harry is fine, he survived, and now his universe is completely outdated.

That is the nature of war, he supposes. Children wish for it to be over, and it isn’t. Adults grow up and then it is over at last and they do not know who they are when it’s gone. Harry picks up a job as an Auror; it’s the least he can do, the closest thing to what he does. Did. It’s not fighting a war against Voldemort while he’s still in grade school, which is both a relief and somehow a disappointment. It feels as if he should be doing more, but there is nothing more to do. 

He tries to focus on other things besides war and the empty cavity in his normal day-to-day activities. He loves Ginny more, marries her, watches Ron do the same with Hermione. It is all blissfully complacent, or at least it’s supposed to be, so Harry goes along with it.

Harry briefly considered taking Ginny’s last name. It would finally let him sink into the depths of obscurity, something he longed for as a child after too many years of fame that was only his because he didn’t die alongside his parents. He doesn’t feel much like Harry James Potter anymore, not taking enough risks to be worthy of sharing so much name with his father.

He wonders what sort of job James Potter would have undertaken had he survived past twenty-one. He thinks, not for the first time, of what his parents could have done had they not had him so early. Had they not had him, period. Would they have lived longer, done more? Is this Harry’s fault in the end, like he’s been afraid of deep down in that twisted part of him that doesn’t hold a Dark Lord anymore?

Back when they were freshly out of the war, just a few months into normalcy, Hermione had once asked him if he would consider taking a post as a professor at Hogwarts with her. You know, when they were older. When they had more experience under their belt, as if there’s anyone out there with more. The process is supposed to be difficult, but it’s fairly common knowledge that three of them will be accepted into any profession they desire. It’s the wizarding world’s way of paying dues to the kids who had to protect them all without a shred of safety for themselves.

Harry had entertained the notion for a second, fleetingly, and then an imagined scenario crossed his mind. Him, Harry, sitting at a desk, his name on a placard in front of him. He imagines that his hair would be grey by this point, but of course it’s never occurred to Harry that he would live long enough to experience such a thing.

Some would-be student of his knocks hesitantly at the desk, then scurries inside when Harry calls for him to enter. He’s determined, this testy student, and wants his question heard. I want to know why you marked me down in class, Professor. I thought my disarming charm was fine.

Tenured Harry would sigh, look the kid straight in the eyes and speak at last. It was fine, you’re right. Nothing more, though. You need to mean it. You need to mean it like you’re on the ground next to one of your murdered friends when you’re about to be killed yourself. When that charm is the only thing between yourself and death.

Then the boy would grow still and sickly with horror, and it would occur to Harry that this child is eleven years old and will not have to face any of that in his lifetime, or his son’s, or the son after that. Harry would be like those war veterans he remembers seeing on Muggle TV when he was growing up, the ones who couldn’t get it through their heads that the fighting was over and it was okay to let their guard down.

Harry had shut her down in a heartbeat, tried to disguise it with a nervous joke. I never made it through a single year as a student without causing all kinds of trouble, Hermione, who knows what I’d do as a teacher?

Hermione accepts this excuse with a laugh and no indication that she’s guessed where his true thoughts lie, but it would be just like her to see through him anyway. Hermione has always been the brightest witch of her age, in that sense nothing has changed since schoolboy days.

So she can spot his restlessness, who else? Ginny most likely, she’s around him the most. Even she is busy, though, her place in the Holyhead Harpies keeps her moving. Harry travels with her to games, watches her swoop through the sky, and waits for Dementors to attack the pitch or Death Eaters to apparate out of nowhere, even though they never do.

Most of the time, though, Harry distracts himself with his children. It is easy enough to do; they are young and hopelessly dependent on him. It is terrifying, holding something so small and fragile and knowing that you are the only thing keeping them from death. Again, Harry thinks of his parents, wonders how they could have possibly cared for an infant during the First Wizarding War. Harry is already stressed out of his mind and he’s not even under attack, how could Lily and James do it with Voldemort actively hunting them down?

The answer comes to him later, whispered in the form of old photographs and the few letters he’s managed to piece together:  friends. James had his Marauders, Lily had Marlene McKinnon and Mary MacDonald and Dorcas Meadowes, as well as other members of the Order Harry either vaguely remembers meeting or couldn’t because they died in the first war. The Potters had support.

Harry does too. He used to meet up with Ron and Hermione at least once a week after Voldemort was killed. It was like an irresistible itch if they didn’t, a silent screaming voice in the back of their heads that if they did not physically see the others, there was no promise that anyone was still alive.

Those visits started trailing off as the months turned into years. Nowadays, Harry can send an owl if he is grasped by that unutterable fear again, but it isn’t the same. Nothing is, and that is both a better twist of fate and somehow worse at the same time. Every time that fear comes, Harry forces himself to sit down, unclenching his hands finger by finger until he is calm, or is suitably in control of himself to pretend otherwise. His scar doesn’t ache. It won’t. He knows that, but it doesn’t stop him from checking anyway.

The best thing he can do right now is move on, but that is far harder to say than do. Harry Potter is not Harry Potter without the war, without his inevitable death, without the slow marching of everyone he loves towards ruin. When his children are finally old enough to go to school, Harry makes them promise to write whenever something seems even slightly wrong. He lies awake at night thinking about how James might fare against a Basilisk, what Albus would do if faced by a Death Eater, if Lily would be able to protect herself against an Unforgivable Curse.

Harry remembers naming his children. It had been yet another one of dozens of surreal choices he’d had to make since leaving school. It seems so insignificant, but a name stays with someone until they die and then forever after that. In the end, he’d ended up with a rattling thread of names, the ones that echo against his temples whenever he closes his eyes, everyone he’s lost and some he misses, too. James Sirius Albus Severus Lily. Plus Luna, because Ginny insisted that at least one of their offspring not be completely named for the dead.

It is a difficult thing, sharing a name with the deceased, but in a way Harry likes to think that it offers them some sort of protection. He has met enough ghosts to know that death is not the end of a person, just a stepping-off place in the grand scheme of things. If he can get his children any more safety through their names, he would do it. He would do anything to keep them alive and free from harm.

And so he sits now, alone in a quiet house, his children off at school and his wife staying late from work. Harry only arrived at home a few minutes ago himself, Auror work tends to keep him occupied. It is not a life he expected from his years at Hogwarts, it is not the life he thought he’d have during the war. Still, it is his, and that means Harry must follow it to the end.

For once, it is not the worst thought in the world.

harry potter tag list: @rogueanschel, @cameronsails, @neewtmas, @lovesanimals0000, @with-inked-solace, @sher-lokid7, @amortensie, @frenchgirlinlondon, @23victoria, @ilovexavierthrope

[mariacallous]

Since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago, a constant challenge for outside observers has been divining Russian public opinion. Making sense of what Russians “really think” has never been simple, but wartime censorship, an unrelenting crackdown on dissent, and the fact that few now travel to Russia make this task all the more difficult. 

We do know about pro-war Russians, as they can more openly express views that typically align with official government narratives. Anti-war exiles are also vocal for the obvious reason that the Russian authorities cannot so easily punish them abroad for criticizing the “special military operation.” But it’s risky to conflate emigres with the anti-war Russians who never left. Many in the West seem to assume that Russians who dare oppose the war are either in prison or exile. In reality, anti-war Russians are far more than the alphabet soup of exiled organizations and activists who have tried to lead or at least influence the movement against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like clouds, this group doesn’t have sharp edges. Its views are sometimes incoherent and contradictory and always a work in progress. The group eludes simple definition, but its core beliefs haven’t changed: principled opposition to war and violence, fatigue with Putin’s long authoritarian rule, and a yearning for some semblance of a democratic future in Russia. 

To find out what has changed over the past two years, we spoke (on condition of anonymity) to several anti-war Russians still living in Russia about the trajectory of their views on the war and how it’s affected their lives.

On the back burner

The war has become part of daily life somewhat in the way Russia’s increasingly authoritarian political system became normalized over the preceding two decades. Although the invasion continues to dominate news headlines, the regular reports on missile and drone strikes, frontline battles, and civilian suffering have morphed into a kind of white noise that people can partly block out. 

Most who spoke to us described the heavy emotional toll that staying up to date with the war takes on their mental well-being. At the beginning of the invasion, it was easy to get trapped in a vicious cycle of doom scrolling, watching video after video of destroyed buildings, and reading horrific reports of besieged cities and mass murder. In the throes of disbelief, people frantically sought out information. But constant exposure to distressing news is exhausting and disorienting, especially when you lack the power to change anything. 

Two years later, some anti-war Russians have tuned out the uninterrupted flow of news about the war in Ukraine and political repressions at home. As one person in St. Petersburg explained: "If something really important happens, then I'll find out about it, one way or another." When talking about her decision to disconnect entirely, a graduate student told us, "The only piece of news worth reading now is news that the war has ended." 

At the same time, events that are harder to ignore, like the deadly attack on the city of Belgorod that killed more than two dozen people in December, increasingly fail to elicit shock. For some, the surprising part is that attacks like these didn’t happen earlier. 

In daily conversation — whether via messaging apps or face-to-face — simply mentioning the war can be a faux pas. It’s an energy drain, and it’s naive to keep raking over something no one can do anything about, let alone argue about the war when many took a side long ago. The initial hyper-divisiveness over the invasion has faded somewhat. But like a pot on the back burner, you can’t completely ignore it. 

In search of normalcy

It’s often said that the Russian authorities seek to create a sense of “normalcy” at home despite the far-reaching and detrimental impact the war is having on the country, from the thousands killed or injured on the battlefield to a buckling economy. That much is true. But so, too, ordinary Russians do part of this work for themselves as they seek to maintain the “normalcy” in their own lives. 

A news-free diet can be just part of this coping strategy, as can discussing anything but the war. When, back in January and early February, we asked our contacts in Russia what news stories stood out to them the most in recent months, they didn’t mention missile or drone attacks or bring up any of the near-daily jailings over “war fakes” or “discrediting” the armed forces.

Instead, they brought up stories like the star-studded “Almost Naked” party that sparked a conservative backlash in December, as well as the pet cat named Twix, who last month was thrown from a train by a railroad employee and froze to death in January, causing an uproar on social media. 

It’s bewildering that stories like these would capture the attention of a public whose country is entangled in a war with its neighbor. Behind-the-scenes political engineering might partly explain the attention — the Kremlin allegedly sought to fan the flames of public outrage over Nastya Ivleeva’s scandalous party. 

Fixation on these otherwise trivial events would suggest a desire for relief and diversion from the war, to engage in a shared, risk-free experience. Both the “Almost Naked” party and Twix the Cat are relatable to so many Russians who know the celebrities involved in the scandalous event and are cat owners themselves. But the bottom line is that the media environment, despite overt state censorship (as well as self-censorship), is in many ways still like any other society. 

In some respects, the story of Boris Nadezhdin’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency and the emotional response to Alexey Navalny’s death should be seen in the same light. The personal feelings these events bring out show how people need some kind of release. In Nadezhdin’s case, pro-peace Russians discussed his platform, personality, and history with animation. That he skyrocketed in popularity reflects a public starved of the much-desired opportunity to talk real politics. In Navalny’s death, people projected the loss of hopes and deep feelings of grief much bigger even than the man himself. 

Of course, not all adaptation is strictly political in nature. There are also more mundane approaches to adjusting to war and life under sanctions. 

As one young woman in Moscow told us: “We’re Russians, we’re used to adapting, living a hard life” — a long-standing cliche about Russians’ ability to accept suffering and isolation. Mundane adaptation can mean many things, and some of it is proactive. People are focusing more on their pastimes, both consumption-oriented activities like eating out or shopping but also vacationing, sports, and other hobbies.

Narrowing horizons

One constant is growing pessimism. The unrealistic clutching at straws, such as Nadezhdin’s election bid, is itself a sign of the general malaise — the search for a silver lining. Uncertainty about the future cannot really be distracted from or adapted to, and it was in discussing future prospects that our contacts gave some of their most candid responses. 

How do anti-war Russians envision the future? As one person put it: “More of the same, but worse.” Several others echoed this sentiment, if only in different words.

No doubt, the war has wreaked havoc with life plans, sometimes dramatically. The uncertainty has forced Russians to narrow their planning horizons to weeks or, at best, months, which feeds into the coping strategy of focusing on the small and mundane aspects of their lives they do control. “There’s no way I can think about what could happen more than a few months from now,” explained one young man, who said he worries about being drafted into the army. “We play things by ear because, who knows, maybe there will be another mobilization after the elections.”

Similarly, the war and its impacts on society have been an exercise in managing expectations. When Moscow first invaded Ukraine, anti-war Russians could have vaguely hoped that Kyiv would swiftly push out invading forces, as Western support seemed boundless and Ukrainian society was rallying. When Ukraine’s army pulled off a stunning counteroffensive in September 2022, this sort of scenario seemed all the more plausible, even if “victory” itself remained a fuzzy idea. 

But as the front line has barely inched forward for months, and both sides show no sign they’ll agree to a peace deal soon, anti-war Russians have resigned themselves to the chance that the conflict could last for several more years. Facing this prospect, few of them are thinking about the invasion in terms of winners and losers. They see only destruction. And so, many anti-war Russians now hope for any kind of end to the conflict, even if it means large territorial concessions by Kyiv.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that this loss of prospects or “fear for the future,” as Russian pollsters call it, also has a continuity about it — it links to the entire trajectory of Putinism going back to 2011-12 and dissatisfaction with his return. The war makes it more acute and more broadly felt, except among a narrow category of economic winners. But this group is relatively small. 

Amid all of this, some anti-war Russians have come to view Ukrainian President Voloydymr Zelensky as an unreasonably obstinate figure as he insists on restoring control over all of his country’s internationally recognized territory. “His rhetoric is harsh,” one young woman said of Zelensky, only to clarify immediately: “But it’s not as though I’m saying I like Putin. He’s much worse. But that’s obvious.”

In this way, a trend that began a while ago is becoming more visible, as even some anti-war Russians are starting to believe that Ukraine’s continued resistance is making the conflict worse or at least prolonging unnecessary suffering. 

We should be careful not to misinterpret this as anti-Ukrainian sentiment rearing its head among those who oppose the invasion, as they hardly blame Ukraine for the war or its impact back in Russia — whether those be deadly attacks on cities like Belgorod or sanctions.  

And yet they do expect Kyiv and the West to bend more rationally to their own country’s intransigence. “Putin is ready to wait this out,” one person told us. And with Western support for Ukraine still up in the air, “it looks like Ukraine will lose territory, either way,” they say, and “so, it’s better to reach a peace agreement now than to let more people die.” 

This is said without any enthusiasm for the “gains” made in the Donbas.

* * * *

In the days following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, one of this essay’s authors observed that many Russians were retreating into forms of denial to help them cope with disbelief at the fact that their country attacked its neighbor. Rather than an enthusiastic rallying around the flag, this was a negative patriotic response of “defensive consolidation,” in which feelings of victimhood and bitterness permeate. It was neither support nor condemnation of the invasion. 

After two years of war, international isolation, and unabated political repression at home, mixed with an immense feeling of powerlessness, anti-war Russians have grown more detached and defensive about the conflict and its impacts, somewhat in the way that those in denial were from the very beginning. These Russians are still deeply against the invasion, but they are also exhausted by the uncertainty it creates and increasingly disillusioned from their past hopes for positive change in their country.

[just-promise-me-jm]

Make it right, it's gonna be all right

I'm just going to include this gif at the top because its one of my favorite Jimin gifs from this past year.

I had meant to come back here sooner, but to be honest my life is kind of a mess right now and work has been killing me so I haven't wanted to spend any more time on the computer than I have to during the day. But as we approach enlistment week, I felt like it made sense to come back on here and share some of the feelings I've been trying to process since news of Jimin's enlistment first dropped.

There are a couple of things that I feel like are important to preface before I share the rest of my feelings:

I am not Korean and have never lived in South Korea, so I don't have an intimate understanding of how the enlistment process or military service in South Korea works. I will do my best to just share my feelings and opinions without getting to deeply into things that I don't really have a place to comment on.

Generally speaking, I am a pacifist so I wish that we lived in a world where no one had to serve in the military, voluntarily or involuntarily. I also understand why that isn't always a reality.

I am a woman, so in most cases mandatory military service isn't something that would apply to me and therefore I can't really speak to how this would make me feel if I was in his shoes.

Obviously we knew this day was going to come eventually, especially once Jin had started the enlistment process, but it doesn't make it any easier to sit and think about not having Jimin around for the next 18 or so months. It's a weird set of emotions to process the absence of someone who you don't know personally, but who has been a constant in your life for years. The fact that this comes during December, a month which many people (including myself) find to be a difficult time of year, only makes it harder.

Because a conversation around whether or not the members of BTS should have to serve is basically irrelevant at this point, I'd rather focus on some of the conversations I've seen around whether or not Jimin will "do well" in the military.

Now, some of what I've seen posted is coming from PJMs or other Jimin fans who are concerned with his welfare and whether or not he will be subject to bullying or harassment like some other idols have experienced. I've also seen some really unhinged takes saying he is too "weak" or won't be able to cope due to some imagined mental health issue (obviously this is not coming from anyone who really cares for or supports Jimin). I even saw posts detailing Jimin's martial arts prowess meant to defend him against those accusations.

So let me be real for a sec - I think Jimin is one of the most dedicated and hard working people I have ever come across and I'm including people I know IRL in that calculation. That isn't just about his martial arts background (even though he could definitely kick some ass if he wanted to), how many hours he spent on his own practicing his singing and dancing leading up to and after his debut, the amount of work he put into FACE, or even how grueling the life of an idol can be. I think it comes down to the type of person he is at a fundamental level - no one can keep up that level of effort on an ongoing basis unless it's hardwired into them. Ultimately, this is what I think will help Jimin to survive and even thrive during his service.

Beyond all that, seeing how well Jin and Hobi seem to have done during their service so far also gives me a lot of comfort. Knowing that Jimin and JK will be stationed with Jin for the next few months gives me hope that he can show them the ropes and help them get settled in. Having those familiar faces will have to make things easier, especially in the beginning.

Even though I'm sure Jimin will be fine, I am wondering what the best way to cope with all of this will be. It feels a little weird to be worried about his fans in a situation like this but at the same time I know I'm not the only one who cares deeply for him and will be impacted by this situation. I think my game plan right now is to light a candle that day for Jimin and send out some positive vibes for his happiness and a safe return, but if anyone has some good suggestions please share.

I probably won't be able to be super active on here until after the holidays are over, but if I think of anything slightly interesting to share I will try and post that when I can. I've also been thinking of what I might want to do in the new year to continue to celebrate Jimin until he comes back. I was considering doing some posts discussing some of my favorite songs or music videos of his, but would be open to suggestions if there is anything you would like to hear my thoughts on. I'm also happy to be here to listen if you need someone to chat with about missing Jimin.

Hope wherever you are you are having a good morning/day/evening/night 💗.

[arionwind]

So there's a trend I've been seeing, well for a while, but lately it's been grating on me especially hard with regards to the Crimew No-Fly List "hack". It's that genre of post that, often angrily, but sometimes just condescendingly/disappointingly tells people that they aren't taking a topic seriously enough or focusing on the correct part of it. I wanna break down just why I am find it so upsetting, and this event is an exceptional case study for it.

Because on the surface, it's entirely understandable. This is public-facing evidence in the government's own hand of a staggering litany of human rights abuses that really does deserve more in-depth discussion than it has been getting. People are absolutely justified in feeling frustrated that more discussion hasn't spawned at all social levels about this and while it's natural to cry out asking why that isn't happening, I think there's a few points that need to be kept in consideration.

A lot of us have been, in one way or another, dealing with this for years. Part of the horror of the No-Fly list is the sheer scale of it - so many people have been and continue to be harmed by their baseless inclusion on the list that it is difficult to even conceptualize how much pain has been inflicted, and that does matter. And I promise you, every single person on that list knows how big a deal both the list itself and this latest (though not the first) leak of it is.

The people on the list know. Their families know. For those lucky and brave enough to try and fight their inclusion in court, their legal teams know. All these people know, viscerally, how wretched this list is and have been bearing up under its weight for years, only talking to the select few they trust. My partner has been open about their inclusion, but I also have professional ties to people who have worked on cases trying to get names removed. Attempting to talk about their work publicly results in harassment by law enforcement and, if kept up, inclusion on the same or similar watch lists.

The angry calls for greater discussion will certainly cross the dashboards of people who are treating this whole thing like a silly meme, but it's also going to hit those of us who have been not discussing but living this constant pressing horror for years now. Hearing people say that, because we are enjoying some levity being injected into this constant source of suffering in our lives we don't "really give half a fuck about tearing down imperialism and colonization" or that we are "laughing and not actually caring" is gut-wrenching. Especially when it comes from people who also regularly talk about the need to avoid activist burnout or for marginalized people to care for themselves.

But I get the impulse to lash out like that. I have had to write and rewrite this very post more times than I can count now to cut out angry and inflammatory phrasing on my own end. And I know that, both in personal posts in the past and in reblogs, I often still fall prey to that thinking of "this is (rightly, justifiably) upsetting so I am going to lash out at people who don't seem to care".

But in this introspective moment, I am trying to stay aware (and want to try to stay aware in the future when I am tempted) that at least some of the people reblogging and posting these things are also hurting and responding to that. And while my first impulse is to cast aspersions on the people hurting me (even in this sentence I had to stop myself from slyly giving an "example" of what I would say if I wanted to lash out and thus satisfying that spiteful desire without admitting to it), I'm also trying to keep in mind my goal here.

I am hoping that at least a few people who have made (or at least reblogged onto my dash) these furious posts - both about this and other issues - will also consider what it is they are trying to accomplish. I also (again) want to keep in mind that I and people like me who are hurt by these posts aren't the only ones impacted by the No-Fly list. That people making these angry posts can be too, and as such I don't want to say that their justified expressions of frustration and rage need to be made more palatable, because they don't.

I do need to point out, though, that I've found the best way to start a discussion of a topic on the internet is to start discussing it in an open medium where others can join in. And when I look in the notes of the inflammatory calls for discussion (or even just awareness), I mostly see people talking about the call itself.

And there's nothing wrong with being angry and wanting to vent. There's not even anything wrong with being angry and wanting to vent in a public space where others can commiserate with you and help you feel less alone. But it *is* going to be much better for everyone - yourself included - if calls for awareness focus on calling for awareness and venting frustrations focus on venting in ways that don't further compound frustrations. Because looking at the notes of all of these more furious posts on these topics, I cannot imagine the constant fighting the OPs wind up doing feels soothing.

[angeltreasure]

hello, please pray for me. I have been struggling with strong sexual temptations since childhood and as of recent they usually flare up as a response to stress. I was triggered badly today; my family has been extremely stressed and we have not been able to do our daily Rosary for a few days now. I’ve abstained from explicit content for several years. Ive been to Reconciliation twice in the past month and as I committed the act i wanted to cry in despair… I know God loves the fallen but I don’t know what to do; praying does not come second nature to me in that I don’t know what to say, so my prayers are often my trying to bear how I feel in silence, and I don’t know how effective this is. I have moved away from my constant confessor and I can’t talk to anyone about this… and my family wouldn’t let me see a counselor if I asked

I would do two things, 1. Go to a new confessor and 2. You must get rid of all which leads to those sins. If you must do this: delete all sinful apps, block sinful websites, throw bad magazines and movies in the trash, delete all the music that has those sin references, stop hanging around bad people if they try to influence you to sin, cut down on social media time if you find the sin by social media, and most importantly stop isolating yourself. You need to surround yourself with family even if you’re stressed together, you need to have good friends you can reach out to. If family cannot keep you accountable for these sins, a true friend will. Just like any person with addiction to drugs and alcohol, they cannot heal by being isolated. Now replace all of the bad with good, true, and holy things.

Praying might seem difficult especially when we are stressed, but when we are in a state of mortal sin, we must not feel ashamed to pray to ask for help, even if we feel we can’t pray well. If you need to go every week to confession, keep going. Do not fall into despair. A simple prayer can be good try this: “God, please have mercy on me, a sinner.” I know struggle with habitual sin is not easy, I’ve also cried from the pain I know I must have caused to offend God. You are not alone. I will absolutely pray for you my brother or sister, as well as your family. When you go to confession and do penance, did you know that all of Heaven rejoices? Ask your guardian angel to help you fight away this temptation. That is one of his special abilities. I can’t promise tomorrow will be easier but I can promise you that God does indeed love you no matter what and no amount of sin you make can drive Him away. Your sins are just a tiny drop in the ocean of His mercy. God waits for you in the confession (and the Eucharist) with open arms, ready to run to welcome home the Prodigal Son. Come home. Do not be afraid.

[echologname]

Phone addiction and ADHD

Phones give a mind numbing constant stream of a dopamine high like doom scrolling. If you're sucked into this habit for hours on end every day, it can mess up your brain's dopamine regulation and then everything that's not your phone seems dull, not as stimulating and boring, so all you want to do is go back to that rush, and pick up your phone again.

With someone with ADHD, the brain already struggles with dopamine regulation for focus and motivation and so, I think we're especially susceptible to phone addiction and the repercussions are perhaps more pronounced than a neurotypical person.

I've definitely noticed a concerning change with my attention span. I didn't get a smart phone until I was 19 and as a kid, reading books was my favorite thing to do, now it's like when I sit down to read, it's like I have to uncomfortably force myself to read a page or two and I start wanting to pick up my phone again because it's so much more stimulating. I don't have to have any patience, any song, show, book, movie or thing I want to learn about is all instantaneous. I've never had issues with impulsivity, poor decision making and poor time and money management (at least minimally), but when my brain has become so used to being relaxed and used to "imaginary" money just disappearing and objects appearing at the door a day later, is an unprecedented dopamine addiction.

My phone is great when I use it MINDFULLY not MINDLESSLY. I find I actually find more enjoyment from my phone when I'm intentionally doing something specific like drawing, reading or listening to music. Getting sucked into a doom scroll or WAY off track, just makes me feel dull, and sad that I let it happen for the umpteenth time.

For the past few years, I've experimented with finding activities to replace phone time. I got a Sony ereader Pocket Edition ERS-300. Why get an old device made in 2009 when I could have gotten the latest Kindle? I didn't want something with wifi or ads, so, I prioritized simplicity and I miss devices with tactile buttons for sensory purposes. I got a handheld radio to use before bed and when I wake up instead of being on my phone. I also got into retro gaming because it's better than being online and on social media. I decided to take up origami again like when I was a kid as well as baking, playing with my dogs, drawing, crafting...etc. At first it was difficult to remember what I did for fun as a kid, what did I do before my smart phone? I'm glad I'm figuring it out though.

The best thing I can do right now is make my smartphone "dumber," like turning on greyscale, uninstalling distracting apps and only leaving the necessary "tools" and turning on Do Not Disturb. Basically make it boring. I did order a Light Phone II (I couldn't get my childhood flip phone to connect to modern cell networks), so when it arrives, I'll see if that helps since keeping my phone in "boring" mode seems to be a struggle to stick to. It's like I'm so used to it being stimulating, I feel like it SHOULD be that way, I expect it to and being boring feels wrong but I guess that's just another symptom of the hold it has on me.

I realized I had a genuine problem when I spent like 8 hr on my phone then sat down in bed and I felt like I didn't know how to exist without me staring at it. Like a substance addict's brain being buzzed and never satisfied without the thing that makes it feel that way.

This has been a genuine issue for me and my ADHD sister as well, so, I'm just making this about my experience and I hope to support anyone who might be dealing with the same issue.

[peace-coast-island]

Diary of a Junebug

Like with hopes and dreams, the flowers too will bloom again someday

Wildflowers are said to be surprisingly resilient despite their delicate appearance. It’s said that the sight of them growing in desolate places is considered a good omen, so it’s something people look out for during difficult times. There have been some cases when the flowers that emerged were once believed to be extinct, which makes their reappearance even more telling.

This flower event with Leif and Nabil has two purposes. One is just being a fun event, especially since it’s been forever since we’ve really used the garden for something. I hate to admit it, but I’ve kinda fallen out of practice when it comes to planting flowers. Really, if it wasn’t for events, I don’t have much of a reason to tend to the garden myself.

The second reason has to do with Nabil’s research regarding the reemergence of rare wildflowers that were thought to be extinct. There’s one in particular that seems to be popping up in a lot of places, and they’re called Chilling Snowdrops. They’re named that because the petals kinda look like icicles and tend to grow in colder climates where there’s usually not a lot of sun.

It’s believed that the Chilling Snowdrops died out due to constant wars and natural disasters, especially in places like Karephira where the land had been pretty much obliterated to ruins. Even after nature reclaimed the area, a lot of the local flora and fauna was just no longer able to grow because of the damage. And even if some do resurface, Nabil says it won’t be like how it originally was because the environment had changed so much.

In the past year, there has been reports about Chilling Snowdrops blooming in various places. Nabil took an interest in that as he actually studied a bit about them as an undergrad because they once grew in certain parts of northern Adrikha centuries ago. So he jumped on board when the researchers invited him to join in on the study, especially after Connie showed interest in the whole thing. After all, Connie’s actually seen and worked with some of these extinct wildflower and herbs back in the day, as did Raiden, Dainn, and many other long lived individuals.

And because Chilling Snowdrops were once native to Karephira, Connie recommended that Nabil take Raiden and Dainn along as sort of consultants since they have some familiarity with the flowers. Based on their accounts, there’s no denying that these are indeed Chilling Snowdrops, which is fascinating. Like I said, wildflowers are just built different and play by their own rules.

Then Leif got involved too and wanted to meet up with Nabil, so that’s why they’re all here. Of course, Sadiki and Amina tagged along, as well as Makoto with Raiden and Dainn. Qingmei would’ve tagged along too, but she’s tied up with a mission somewhere that ended up taking longer than expected. Connie wanted to join too, but they’re also tied up with other things.

Aside from having a connection to his former homeland, Dainn has personal reasons for seeing the Chilling Snowdrops for himself, probably to get some closure, he believes. They happen to be a favorite flower of his mentor, the previous Stardust Warrior. Since her birthday’s approaching, she’s been on his mind a lot as her death still weighs on his mind.

Since I last saw him, he’s been really working hard on learning how to play the cello. He, Makoto, Raiden, and Qingmei have sort of formed a songwriting quartet, which is nice, and it’s been proven to be therapeutic for all of them. There’s something so freeing about expressing yourself through art, especially when you have a lot to unpack and don’t really know how to let those conflicting feelings out because you’ve been conditioned to keep all that inside.

The last few songs they’ve written has to do with past relationships, particularly with Dainn’s mentor Mem and Raiden’s brother. Complicated relationships are, well, complicated, especially when it involves someone you look up to. Raiden and Dainn admit they’ll never fully get over how things turned out, but they’re not gonna dwell on that as what’s done is done.

Now that things have finally settled down and he has nothing but time on his hands, he realized that in order to move on, he has to finally confront the past. Of course, in his case, it’s complicated by the fact that he’s a human cursed with immortality. In other words, it’s almost like his mortal self was a different person. Kinda like what Madeleine said about putting up an act for so long that you end up losing your sense of self.

One of the things Dainn is trying to confront is his unresolved grief over Mem’s suicide. Losing her later played an indirect role with his relationship with Raiden’s brother, and that’s a whole ‘nother story. Basically, he’s now able to look back and accept that while a lot of things went terribly wrong between both of them - usually because of shitty circumstances they had absolutely no control over - that doesn’t change the fact that they were once friends he could rely on. Obviously there’s still gonna be some resentment over how things turned out, and maybe he’ll never get over that, but he’s not gonna let that hang over him. Really, that’s the best way to accept what’s said and done.

Like he and Raiden said, the whole songwriting deal has been therapeutic for them. Dainn had never really talked about his past much for obvious reasons, but since he started getting into music, not only he’s opening up more about himself, he also seems more at peace in general. It’s good that he, Raiden, and Qingmei are healing from the burdens of their pasts. The fact that they survived is a miracle, and so they don’t want to waste that gift.

Promises is a ballad about trying to move on from someone who you used to be close to, only for them to hurt you badly in the end. Writing the lyrics was kind of an eye opening experience for Dainn as he realized how much anger and resentment he kept locked away for centuries. Of course, at the time, he had much more pressing matters to deal with that his own personal feelings seemed trivial, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was deeply hurt by those he looked up to and trusted.

The song’s basically his way of letting go of his mentor, someone who was the closest thing he had to a family, and coming to terms with her death, something he blamed himself for. He didn’t want to admit it, but even though she acted tough, she was burdened with a lot of troubles that she was never able to overcome. She hid that well, never letting on that she was unhappy, which was why her suicide came as a surprise to everyone.

He was the one who found her body and was convinced that she was murdered given her status as a high ranking knight who was known for talking back to authority. Anything was better than accepting reality, which is still incompressible to him. In other words, she was considered a loose cannon who greatly influenced those who worked under her, especially Dainn. Around the time of her death, she had become even reckless in terms of her politics and personal life, making her the target of many groups who opposed her. An impending disaster waiting to happen, it seemed.

After being forced to accept that her death was a suicide, Dainn began taking on her vices like heavy drinking, showing up late, and mouthing off at authority figures. Looking back, he realized that Mem’s death contributed to the growing instability in Karephira that later resulted in its downfall. Sometime later, he met Raiden’s brother, who stopped him from walking off a bridge. And that led to another chain of events - again, a whole ‘nother story.

Now he knows that she never intended to hurt him, though that doesn’t change the fact that she did, and that’s something he’ll have to live with. Despite what happened, he still respected her as she opened his eyes to the injustices of the world, which he believed allowed him to fight back against a doomed fate. In other words, she taught him how to use cynicism as a weapon to protect himself, and that’s what ended up saving his life.

The second song, Mindreader, is about Raiden and Dainn’s frustrations with a certain someone, particularly with the deception and lack of communication they had to deal with. Raiden’s feelings towards her brother is a lot more complicated. While time usually helps you see things in the past more clearly, it can sometimes lead to more questions than clarity - stuff that will sadly never get resolved no matter how hard you try to analyze things.

While Raiden still loved and respected her brother, the more she looks back on it, the more glaring the flaws and weaknesses of their relationship becomes. Part of it has to do with their upbringing with him being the elder and having authority over her. She didn’t mind living in his shadow too much, but as she became more independent and opinionated, a rift began to grow between them that eventually became a chasm. It seemed like no matter how hard she tried to bridge that gap, it pushed them further apart to the point that it was beyond repair.

The song highlights a major flaw regarding the low to nonexistent communication between two parties with one expecting the other to know exactly what’s on their mind by pushing them around. In the case with Raiden’s brother, she described him as sort of authoritarian, the kind who expects others to do as they’re told without asking too many questions. He was also the type to deceive people and play 5d chess to achieve something, which made him difficult to get along with.

Like with Dainn and Mem, Raiden is also at the point where she’s accepted that some things will never be resolved and there will always be some resentment, but she’s not gonna let that ruin things between her and her brother. On one hand, looking back made her realize how dysfunctional they were, and yes, it does make her angrier the more she thinks about it.

She didn’t want to admit it, but some of the stuff she and her brother went through was pretty fucked up, shit that shouldn’t have happened for x, y, and z reasons - some which could’ve been prevented, most, not so much. Sure, he was looking out for her and trusted her enough to figure things out for herself, but he also expected her to take his word and see things the same way he did. Sounds like he had a roundabout way of dealing with things.

In the end, he basically sacrificed himself for the greater good by forcing Raiden to kill him in order to avert another calamity. Since they parted ways centuries ago, so much had happened that the siblings pretty much became strangers, which she felt was his intention.

There’s no way for her to know what exactly went on and led to him being led astray by some misguided form of justice - or retribution, she feels is more accurate - and the more she thinks about it, the more she realized that it’s pointless to speculate. Sometimes you just have to leave things be and just move on. To dwell on things to the point where you find yourself spiraling downwards is not only doing a disservice to you, but it’s also disrespecting of the sacrifices that were made to ensure your future. Again, sounds super complicated - I can’t wrap my head around it and yet I can make sense of her logic.

I think Raiden’s situation is similar to Aurelie’s in terms of loving and respecting someone who raised you while at the same time not hesitating to call out their bullshit because it ultimately ended up doing you more harm than good. There are just some things that simply can’t be forgiven, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that as long as you just kinda leave it alone and not let it cloud your judgement.

Even if it’s not intentional, we all are capable of hurting those closest to us, and we have to be aware of that. I think it’s so easy to get caught up on the here and now that the long term simply doesn’t cross your mind. After all, it’s natural to act without thinking, mainly because there’s no way of knowing exactly how your actions will affect others, especially if you act without clearly communicating your intentions.

Sure, you might be doing something for the greater good, but what good is it when your actions ultimately result in those closest to you constantly questioning your integrity long after you’re gone? These are some things that’ll forever hang over us.

Mindreader kinda touches on that in a lighthearted way since it’s an upbeat, sort of dance club kind of song. The message is basically saying that the singer’s not gonna let themselves get tied up on bad communication anymore. What’s the point if you can’t get your shit together and be honest to each other? Also, it’s not up to you to have to pick up the slack when the other person refuses to be open with you and their intentions.

There comes a point where you just have to put your foot down and say, “Fuck it, I’ve had enough of your games. Say what you mean and mean what you say - stop dancing around the subject if you need to tell me something. If you keep this up, then I’m not gonna waste my time with you anymore.” People like that are so frustrating to deal with because you’re pretty much almost always walking on eggshells with them. A relationship like that just isn’t healthy.

That song became an unexpected hit, not just because of the message, the beat’s catchy too. It’s got a sick bass line with Makoto on electric bass and Dainn on cello like a double bass, coming up with this unique sound that immediately catches your attention. Raiden’s singing hits the mark as usual, and she also plays the violin, which is prominent in the song as well, perfectly complimenting her voice and the bass line. Overall, this is the kind of sound I can totally hear at a club or dance party that everyone would be singing along to.

They’re also working on a lot more songs, though because a lot of it is super personal, they can’t say if they’re gonna release it public or not. Part of the reason why they were comfortable with uploading Mindreader and Promises is the fact that the subject/inspiration/person in question are long deceased and enough time has passed that they’re not gonna get in trouble for it if someone connects the dots. Like I’ve heard many songwriters say, once it’s out there, it takes on a life of its own - and chances are, other people can relate to how you feel, and that’s the beauty of it all.

With Promises and Mindreader coinciding with the reemergence of Chilling Snowdrops, it seems almost too coincidental. Best not to question things like that too much and accept them as they are, good signs that time heals and there is a future worth looking forward to.

Read on AO3