#felt the Ennui coming on so I took myself out to take pictures and had a great time

[gaytobymeres]

Sandstone and sky: Edinburgh in September

[permian-tropos]

diary entry sort of thing. personal. content warnings under the cut 

cw: mentioned suicidality

I’m trying to look with a clearer head at like... how, if it is possible, to heal my passion and relationship to this fandom, and I keep going back to this really early incident that was an obvious bad omen.

Last summer I got in the habit of exercising and it was really fun, me and my brother were really building muscle and it felt great, and I actually got into Pathologic specifically because I put playthroughs on in the background. I’d be holding planks and trying to do dips while watching the funky plague game on my tiny iphone screen, it was pretty great. 

So I watched parts of playthroughs of both games, I’d already started consuming some fandom stuff, funny youtube memes mostly, and met a few people while poking around on tumblr and reddit, and the endorphins I got from exercise put a rosy tinge this experience. 

And then I saw the first thundercloud of discourse on a blog I was scrolling through, where someone was trying to stir up trouble against a particular content creator for associating with ~gross kink~ and there were several other gut punches when I saw people I recognized whose fanwork I’d begun to admire joining in. 

The next exercise day came around and in the middle of it I genuinely started crying from stress. If you think this is cringe then like... you’re wrong lol, people have feelings. But whatever. I was worried that the handful of friends I’d already made would abandon me if they found out I didn’t approve of policing ~gross kink~ and that I’d be dragged into a) admitting the dark kinks I do have and getting people to treat me like shit or b) hiding it but having to witness constant discussion of kinks that do squick me out, conducted in a manner to deliberately exacerbate the disgust, which is super awful for someone with anxiety and intrusive thoughts. Because that’s how these discourses always go. 

I couldn’t finish the day’s exercise routine because of the emotional distress and that was the last time I worked out. I couldn’t go back to it, the routine just fell apart. And that was probably quite bad for my long-term mental health. The discourse was kind of a hypervigilance trigger, where I couldn’t release pent up stress physically because my body feared it would leave me too exhausted to deal with the Looming Threat of social rejection or trying to figure out who was safe to interact with.

But with that in mind it especially sucked later on to have troubles with the people who sort of innocently advertised “safety” to me because the “safety” was only in the form of not being judged for your fiction, and for a collection of reasons it wasn’t safe for the problem of being neurotic in fandom. In letting out their frustrations with being treated badly, in trying to protect themselves in an unideal situation, even if they were being hyperbolic and didn’t intend to do anything untoward, people were communicating their own hypervigilance. It was clear that being in the fandom meant being scrutinized on all sides. Almost every conflict I got into was about this issue of keeping tabs on others, because I would be thinking, “oh god, if I wasn’t here in this conversation, people would be scrutinizing me, and some of the stuff they’re reacting badly to seems like stuff I could hypothetically say/do... maybe? I don’t know”. 

People found that I was triggering their neuroses by reacting badly, because now I was scrutinizing them back. Well, fuck me, if it isn’t my old friend the mortifying ordeal of being known. Plus, their perspective of “I genuinely feel unsafe” was being greeted with what seemed to be “don’t worry so much”, so that felt insulting. But it wasn’t really that I didn’t want people to worry or be upset about being wronged. It was that I had no way of communicating or fulfilling a need I had for a fandom space where none of this was necessary.

I didn’t want a choice of what to be neurotic about. I didn’t want to be neurotic at all. 

I said in a now deleted post that I regretted socializing at all, but the thing is that’s not true, I really did need to try to socialize. Except... well... this fandom was kind of a toxic fucking minefield (especially back then) and there was no way for me to engage with it without something going wrong.

That moment when I felt like I couldn’t exercise anymore because all my spare energy was inevitably going to go towards ruminating and fixating on how not to let things Go Wrong in some way... that wasn’t the point where things started to go bad because almost everything good came after that too. But it was still pretty indicative of the problem to come. 

In the end of summer 2020, after battling through the horror and ennui of the early pandemic which definitely was not easy, I was starting to find ways to be consistently happy, and briefly I was physically healthy, creatively inspired, eager to make friends. A year later, I took a long walk in the woods at night, heard a creaking tree branch, and imagined the sound was my body hanging from a noose. 

There’s no one cause for that. There’s other stuff I haven’t mentioned. This is hardly a full picture for anyone on the outside. I’m not assigning a villain, I’m just saying... yes, something obviously went wrong. 

It really didn’t have to be like this. But as a reassurance: yes, I’m well aware that the person I was a year ago would not want me to feel this way, and in a way I’m inviting them to come back from the past and take charge of how I’m going to care for myself moving forward. Maybe I’ll try working out. 

[scarlettsabetlondongirl]

Poet Scarlett Sabet

In conversation with poet Gerard Malanga for London Magazine.

The London Magazine is England’s oldest literary periodical, with a history stretching back to 1732. Today – reinvigorated for a new century – the Magazine’s essence remains unchanged: it is a home for the best writing and an indispensable feature on the British literary landscape-London Magazine  

See here

“After meeting at a French New Wave Cinema book launch in London in November 2019, poets Gerard Malanga and Scarlett Sabet have since kept in regular correspondence via email.

In this unique interview, conducted over several weeks while thousands of miles apart, the two writers discuss shared influences, the recent passing of the Beat Generation poet Michael McClure, and the grounding influence of poetry throughout the international lockdown. 

This interview is based on the poets’ original email correspondence and has been edited for clarity.”-London Magazine   

GERARD MALANGA: You ask how my week has been? I’ve been in lockdown now for 3 weeks or so, though I might’ve lost count. I have plenty to keep me busy in the house here, plus I have responsibility towards my 3 cats. And then there’s dreamtime, between 4 & 6 in the morning.

But suddenly I felt days back this ennui coming on, like, did the poetry suddenly disappear? Sometimes I’m concerned—but just for a moment mind you—whether I can match or even better the last one? There’s no way I can predict when the muse will appear. If I had the answer, it would vanquish the mystique.

Since I’ve been in lockdown, there’s no going out for me for the morning coffee and The New York Times unfolding on the table. Many a first draft has begun that way, but now with a physical displacement of sorts I can’t claim to be an habitue of the cafe life. The kitchen table serves me well – or wherever I happen to be outdoors – so long as I have a small notebook in my pocket. I even prop myself up in bed with a clipboard pressed against my knees. I follow where I feel a poem coming on. When I start, then I know I’m in for it, but don’t give it the slightest thought. I’m in for the ride.

SCARLETT SABET: Yes, I find sometimes walking in the morning, having a destination, getting into my body and moving get’s the ball rolling with writing. I can understand the ritual of going to a cafe. I’ve written on trains a lot, the motion and rhythm helps, and because I’m in a vacuum in transit I can’t be reached.

I love the image of your 4am dream writing, I think that’s a great ritual. Sometimes I write three pages first thing in the morning, and it’s just anything on my mind. I’ve also found meditation helpful, deepening my state of consciousness and then writing straight afterwards to see what comes out, kind of like automatic writing in the spirit of Austin Osman Spare.

We were both raised Catholic, I wonder if that has had any bearing on your writing or practices? I find a great sense of divinity in art, those moments of inspiration.

GERARD MALANGA: Funny that you would mention that. No one’s ever asked me about my spirituality, that I recall. People have weird notions about me, like I’m some kind of guy about town. I may have a little bit of that too. But spirituality for me is to be able to laugh at yourself. Even when I talk to my cats, I’m laughing at myself. I don’t mean physically laughing as such but going about life without being self-conscious. It helps when I’m writing a poem.

Back in 1970 or so, I had a spiritual conversion. One of my closest friends, a guy named Jim Jacobs, turned me on to the first two Carlos Castaneda/Don Juan books; so we were basically comparing notes and one of the themes that came through for us was to follow your nature to be happy. Suddenly we found ourselves wearing white clothing and calling ourselves the white lights. When we went to London we ended up buying an all-white 1939 Bentley convertible with one windshield wiper not wiping, and it basically gave us the freedom to go visit friends in the English countryside. It sounds hysterically funny when I look back at this, but we were quite sincere in our endeavors. If this was going to be our path we had to be true to the discoveries we made along the way.

During our travels we decided to split off and agreed to re-connect a couple of years later in the Massachusetts Berkshires where he’s from and continue where we left off. Jim ended up being one of the top dealers in the secondary art market handling the likes of Judd and Cy Twombly, and now he’s curating shows. I continued to write poetry without a care in the world and became more attuned to the pictures I was taking. I truly feel I’ve become a better photographer because of the experiences I had. You have to be courageous to suddenly drop out and then drop back in.

Back in ’74, I had this idea for a book of my spiritual poetry that would have as its cover one of those kitschy paintings of Jesus. I called it ‘Poems for the Fat Lady’. You know, the Fat Lady was a phrase I’d picked up from reading Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, where he’s actually equating Jesus with the Fat Lady, that they were one. That’s pretty neat, I thought. It didn’t go over too well with my publisher who rejected the idea outright. He thought I was joking. So I settled for a kind of even-balanced title, Incarnations,’ and changed the poems around.

Perhaps, the Fat Lady was the closest I ever got to God, though I don’t give it much thought these days. It’s the inspiration and the love that come from it which is the driving force and source for much of what I’m writing nowadays, and that’s the joy when I finally finish a poem. A state of happiness sets in for me.

SCARLETT SABET: And what you said makes sense, I can understand it. Did you have a period where you rebelled against spirituality or Catholicism and were, say, atheist? Although it’s bizarre for me to admit it, once I left school I did swing to atheism, I guess as a way of rebelling or a reaction. School can be dogmatic.

GERARD MALANGA: In hindsight, to embrace atheism, Scarlett, would deny the spirituality within me which accounts for a lot of my poetry as well. There was no real rebellion on my part. I always felt that my guardian angel was looking after me when I was fated to become a poet. Who would I be, otherwise? It’s a scary proposition, come to think of it.

SCARLETT SABET: True, looking back I realise I’ve always had a Guardian Angel too. I’m so sorry for the loss of [influential Beat poet] Michael McClure, and I was moved by the picture you took of him in San Francisco, 1972. What was that day like?

GERARD MALANGA: If I live long enough, God willing, I may end up not knowing anyone because at this juncture a lot of my friends have already passed. Many of them in the obituary series of my most recent book Cool, which you have. I don’t want to slip into a consciousness of perpetual mourning. Yet I hadn’t anticipated that I’d be writing a poem for Michael, but then I opened up to myself and his consciousness flowed right in. Perhaps I had a vacuum to fill at that moment from an external point of view, taking Michael’s place for the poem that would talk to him and he to me.

I remember little of that when I came to visit with him and made his portrait. It was a serene afternoon. Just him and me. I remember distinctly that we went off in his car, perhaps to a restaurant. We were driving somewhere, and that made sense. But for the life of me I remember nothing of what transpired over lunch. With all the history—and it ain’t an awful lot—there’s still a history there to be acknowledged. You know, I performed the part of Billy the Kid in Warhol’s movie which we adapted from Michael’s play, The Beard. Hardly anyone knows this; perhaps in part because I believe the movie has never been shown. So the friendships last and last and continue beyond the grave.

SCARLETT SABET: I’m always struck by the structure of your poems. I was wondering what your approach to this was, whether there was any major influence from particular poets of your youth, or even whether the way that you frame scenes and ideas within poems has any crossover influence from your work in the wider art world?

GERARD MALANGA: Yes, there’s probably a very strict structure to my poems, but it’s casually applied in what the work proposes as possibility, which I don’t even notice when I’m starting out. For instance, for a very long time, the opening to the work begins with an indented first line of let’s say 8 characters. It’s my way of engaging myself and the reader into a form of poetry that’s a radically different departure from what may be normally perceived. Yes, it’s a poem, but I like to think of them as prose poems as well.

I left ‘influences’ behind decades back. I’m pretty much on autopilot. I’m my own navigator. I travel the journey alone. My earliest influence when I literally started was Gerard Manley Hopkins. I was enchanted by his system of ‘sprung rhythm’ which he basically invented with no imitators following. That would’ve been 1959 during the start of the high school year in my senior class. In 1962, I believe, John Ashbery made a profound influence on my early work with his book The Tennis Court Oath. That became my Bible. I’d carry it around my duffle bag wherever I went. But it was Ted Berrigan with his Sonnets in ’64 that unlocked the door for me into what Ashbery was doing and that was a sheer liberating factor. From there the work continued to expand on its own.

The only ‘crossover influence’ that I imagine, as you put it, in the ‘wider art world’ would be my own life, and not the art world, per se. So what we have here is the tendency to open almost all the work in the form of what appears to be a letter on the surface, but is actually a message. I’m addressing the subjects of my poems directly; they’re not ‘about’ the subject. I’m talking directly to them, as if they’re right in the room, whether it’s a person or a cat.

SCARLETT SABET: You mention you don’t write about your subjects but address them directly in your poems. I think this is what makes them so arresting and intimate, particularly in the ‘Lives They Lived’ chapter in your beautiful collection Cool & Other Poems [published by Bottle of Smoke Press]. Each poem is a visceral portal, allowing the reader to be present with you, and witness Christopher Logue against a snowing sky before warming his hands around a mug of cognac, and Anita Pallenberg a vivacious, laughing woman sitting opposite you at Cafe Flore. Also in that chapter you include a poem entitled ‘Gerard Malanga dies’. The poem contains the line ‘I am my only guide now,’ which I found so powerful. Could you tell us how that poem came to be?

GERARD MALANGA: Putting together that section, ‘The Lives They Lived’, I figuratively had to step outside myself. That’s how close I was with many of those listed and to the memories I have of them held dear. It was not an easy section to compile. By the way, ‘The Lives They Lived’, is borrowed from the New York Times‘s annual round-up supplement. I called my contact at the paper to get permission to use it and he saw no problem involved.

Writing ‘Gerard Malanga dies’ was a tricky situation in the need to make it work. It was one of the final poems in the section and it presented me with an opportunity to address certain issues surrounding death and to those friends I’d already acknowledged over a period of nearly 40 years. I also lapse into a bit of my own personal history, as if I’m contemplating how others might see me after I’ve gone: ‘The rabbit hole is waiting for my plunge.’ Somehow, that image of the rabbit hole has emerged in a few of my poems and also echoes back to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, one of my favorite childhood books.

The rabbit hole is an image for both death and resurrection, as I see it. Here, I question myself, ‘Am I preparing for another life? A return to life?’ And so I treat this poem as slowly nearing its own end with a ‘journey’ back to life ‘…and on and on…’. I equate this with an actual journey I’d taken by train from ‘Glasgow down to Central London…’ back in 2014 where I’d been dreamily staring out the window at a passing landscape I might not ever explore at any other time.

‘Will I even find my way home to the Bronx’ alludes to a movie I’d seen years back I recall, called ‘The Swimmer’ adapted from a John Cheever short story. Starring Burt Lancaster, his character is swimming across a series of backyard swimming pools and encountering neighbors he knew poolside in attempting to reach home. And when he arrives in the pouring rain and runs up to the door, he discovers that the door’s locked and the house is empty. Such a potent ending and darkened cinematic metaphor, brilliantly done. And it’s these private memories in my life resurfacing that I feel nourishes my work.

SCARLETT SABET: We met at a book launch in London, and you were immediately swarmed, surrounded by people. I think that is a testament to the impact your writing has had globally and across generations. How has your home city of New York and its literary landscape changed and evolved for you over the years? Is it something you feel especially connected to?

GERARD MALANGA: Your question speaks volumes, but I’m going to try to be as brief and succinct as I can hope to be as the facts show. I’m seventy-seven now and there have been no accolades to show for it. Cool came out last year and Whisper Sweet Nothings two years prior and together they comprise the best of anything I’ve ever done, and yet they’ve been totally ignored by the New York literary press overall. In the five decades I’ve been publishing I’ve received not one grant or fellowship or any of the prizes totaling in the millions. Nada. Zilch. I can’t even get my memoirs published and I have thousands of fans waiting for this book. You would think that would count for something. I’m grateful for the European attitude towards my work. That’s what keeps the work alive for me. That’s where my audience is and they relate. I love what I do, and I know it shows through the work from the responses at the readings I give and that’s how my work thrives. I love my audience and that’s the truth of it.

SCARLETT SABET: A year ago today, I finished my waitressing shift, went home and listened to what Jimmy [Page] had produced from the recordings we had made of my poems. this became our spoken word album Catalyst. It was a joy to be able to give you our album as I am so moved by your work. It had a sense of synchronicity also, as years earlier, Jimmy had given me a signed edition of your beautiful poem ‘Devotion’.

You said that ‘Cut Up’ was your favourite track on Catalyst. I had christened that poem ‘Cut Up’ simply because it was the first time I had used the William Burroughs/Brion Gysin method. I always feel it’s a handing over, a leap of faith to a higher power, to introduce another energy to it, and it came out with it’s own dark, random rhythm. Burroughs said “when you cut into the present the future leaks out”, and in that sense it has a spell like quality or possibility.

Some poems I’ve written in one sitting, a sort of channeling, like ‘Fifth Circle of Hell’, which is also on Catalyst. But part of the reason I found the cut-up method so liberating that first time was that I was trying to write a poem to encapsulate that period. I felt cautious because the subject matter was focused on the events in Europe and the Middle East, and the horrors and blood shed of the Bataclan attacks in Paris. I think my own identity and ethnicity – my mother is French-Scottish and my father is Persian – gave this piece more weight personally. So really, the cut-up was a way of detaching through the process, which was effective. I suppose I wonder what your thoughts are on cut-ups?

GERARD MALANGA: Scarlett, cut-ups are a tricky business. They almost feel spontaneous, but with every move there’s no turning back. They’re the antithesis to parallel grammatical structures which is how we reform language to make things sound right. You see Bill [Burroughs] stuck with it all his life. Cut-ups were his language and he embraced the process. It’s okay to experiment with language so long as you come out at the other end with something that satisfies you and encourages you to want to do more, to go further. That’s a big commitment. The one thing you want to avoid is being self-conscious in the process, as you put it. There’s no room for self-consciousness in cut-ups. You have to operate on a more or less unconscious level like when you dream.

Of course, you realize this in dreams. I don’t need to tell you. In dreams, nothing really connects or relates. Dreaming is a series of visual and mental disconnects. One thing leads to the next but you don’t know why nor do you have time to stop to know why. It’s like you go with the flow. Excuse the corniness of this. Dreams are the cut-ups of the unconscious. You can’t go back to change anything to make it better. There’s nothing qualitative about it. When that happens to me, I try to maintain the balance of the good and the bad together. All of it. Yes, I’ve done a little tweaking here and there, but only because I’m now in the conscious state and I want to make the lines sound just right. So it’s okay to prune. Robert Lowell taught me how to prune. But you have to know what you’re doing. It’s trusting your instincts. That’s what I do. If I throw out a perfectly terrific line, it’s because I’m trusting my instincts. But, of course, only I know that. The reader doesn’t, nor does he need to.

One of my earliest poems was a form of the cut-up. My English teacher in high school, Daisy Aldan, who introduced me to the world of poetry, gave us an assignment in class to cut out words at random from the newspaper and fill a paper bag with them. The next step was to reach into the bag and pick out one word at a time and place them on a page, and then to transcribe those words into a text, including all the capital and lower-case letters. I did one better and glued them onto the page. This all had to do with chance. Remember, Stéphane Mallarmé, in his last poem ‘Un coup de dés’ said that a ‘a throw of the dice NEVER NEVER will abolish chance.’ Well, he was right about that. You take your chances, you trust your instincts.

SCARLETT SABET: I’ve started reading Gysin’s novel The Process. I bought it last year at Shakespeare&Co but started reading it now to feel closer to Morocco, a place that I really love, while still in lockdown. I wondered what places have meant the most to you?

GERARD MALANGA: I have Brion’s book on my shelf, but I’ve yet to read it. Perhaps I’m still not ready for it yet. Right now I’m immersed in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. What I like about it is that it reads like it’s not translated but written directly in English. That’s probably the best kind of translated work.

The first place that comes to mind that has meant the most to me, although there may have been others, is the Cafe Flore. It was my first introduction to cafe life when I arrived in Paris in the spring of 1965. And henceforth whenever I’ve visited Paris, I would arrive punctually every morning during my stays. There’s no other cafe that does it for me. Of course, there’s the cafe in the Luxembourg Gardens, but that’s more like a restaurant; a different ambiance entirely. The Flore has a certain something, a certain charm about it that allows me to immerse myself reading the morning papers or writing a poem even. The food’s good too. The croissants, the omelettes, the cafe creme. Some years back, I started referring to it as my ’office’ whenever I had an appointment to meet with friends. And I’d be certain to book a hotel room within walking distance. Anyway, the Flore is the start of my day.

SCARLETT SABET: Well, I hope one day, when the lockdown is over, we can meet you at Cafe Flore.

Photos: London Magazine

[clarasimone]

Just before leaving my Iphone in a friggin’ taxi

I cannot believe this: my life is on that IPhone... Have alerted the taxi company (I HOPE I lost it there), am frantically awaiting news by my fiend’s phone... My Knight wants to go on a rampage but I need him by my side ;-)... It’s so bizarre to be able to see most of the pics I took this evening because they had time to make it on the cloud and then on my computer. So, from me, to you, the red carpet and screening of Terrence Malick’s testament film A Hidden Life :

Needless to say, I risked my reputation taking Jorah’s pic from inside the Grand Palais LOL I was seated front row (They show us the remaining of the red carpet on the big screen while we’re inside) What follows is from before and after but selfies are now forbidden while on the red carpet, a good thing because frankly it was becoming surreal the last few years...

Love this pink trail I was hypnotically following :-)

Here’s a pic from the film, a true masterpiece, so moving ! @myloveiainglen, it’s even better than Days of Heaven !!

I was able to capture the director’s proud reaction during the 10-minute long ovation after the film (he’s so modest, he didn’t walk the red carpet coming in, only his two leads did)

his actors, as shown on the big screen during the ovation

Coming out of the Grand Palais, I took these amazing pics of the moon with my Knight but they’re not (yet ?) appearing on my macbook/Icloud :-(

God I hope I get my phone back...

Here is the Los Angeles Times piece of the film. It just flabbergasted me and everyone there... It’s a deeply spiritual film.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-cannes-terrence-malick-hidden-life-20190519-story.html

Cannes: Terrence Malick’s ‘A Hidden Life’ is a return to form and a spiritual call to arms

In the eight years since Terrence Malick won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for “The Tree of Life,” his magisterial drama about childhood’s end and the spirit’s awakening, the standard critical line is that he has become an artist lost in the wilderness, stranded in an artistic limbo of his own making.

His most recent features — “To the Wonder,” “Knight of Cups” and “Song to Song” — are wispy, fragmentary tales of romantic ennui and moral drift, full of visual beauty but absent a comparable sense of transcendence. I admired them more than many of my colleagues did, though it would be disingenuous not to admit that I, too, was left wondering if this great and singular filmmaker would ever give us another movie to love.

I wonder no more. Sunday marked Malick’s return to Cannes, and it felt like a homecoming in more than one sense. His extraordinarily beautiful and wrenching new movie is called “A Hidden Life,” a title that quotes from “Middlemarch,” though one that could easily be misinterpreted as a reference to this famously press-shy auteur himself. But it also sounds an echo of “The Tree of Life,” which may be more than mere coincidence: If that 2011 film was Malick’s most personal and autobiographical work, then this one feels like a decisive return to roots. It’s at once a linear, almost classically structured drama and an exploratory, intensely romantic work of art.

“A Hidden Life” tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter, a peasant farmer from the Austrian village of St. Radegund who was imprisoned and executed in 1943 for refusing to fight for the Nazis. It’s the writer-director’s second World War II picture, after “The Thin Red Line,” except that here not a single shot is fired. The focus is entirely on Jägerstätter and his family, his growing discontent as Austria falls into Adolf Hitler’s grip and his heroic, ultimately fatal decision to become a conscientious objector.

After some brief archival footage of Hitler at the height of his powers, the movie settles down in St. Radegund, whose rolling green pastures and mist-wreathed mountains may constitute the most astonishing vision of earthly paradise Malick has given us, which is saying something.

You will recognize some familiar sights and sounds: the babbling of a brook, the rustling of wind in the leaves, the orchestral blasts of Bach, Beethoven, Handel and Dvorak on the soundtrack. And you will settle into the movie with a sigh — or perhaps a groan, depending on your persuasion — as Malick immerses us in yet another blissfully idealized evocation of family life.

Pushing plows, threshing wheat and taking care of livestock is hard work, but Franz (a haunting August Diehl), a man of joy and contentment, also loves chasing and playing with his wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner) and their three young daughters. But the family’s deep ties to the land and the surrounding community are disrupted when their fellow villagers take up the call of “Heil Hitler,” submitting freely to the grip of a murderous totalitarian regime. When a local bishop urges Franz to submit as well, he makes a decisive break with the church — though not, crucially, with God, whom he continually presses and wrestles with in prayer.

I am still wrestling with “A Hidden Life” myself, and imagine I will continue to do so long after its eventual release. The lengthy middle act, in which Franz finds himself called up for military duty and imprisoned after refusing to fight, feels lumbering and oppressive, which may of course be entirely the point; the claustrophobia here is physical and spiritual. Given the ensemble cast, which includes the late Bruno Ganz in one of his final roles, I wish that Malick had simply committed to shooting entirely in German, rather than a mix of German and English. (A particularly nagging choice: The Nazis are often heard barking in German, while Franz and Fani’s mellifluous voice-overs are in English.)

But the conviction of this movie would speak forcefully in any language. “A Hidden Life” is both an intense portrait of Christian devotion in practice and a damning study in how religious institutions, among others, can align themselves with evil. Malick sees no contradiction between these two truths; for him, sincere doubt and serious belief have always gone hand-in-hand. When a character murmurs, “To follow Him is insanity” — the first and not the last time the movie quietly broke me — you register fully what it might mean, and cost, to obey a doctrine of peace in violent times.

Malick may be making the same movie he always has: a gorgeously expansive cinematic poem that is forever carving out fresh emotional tributaries, but which always cycles back to the despoiling of Eden, the fear of violence and mortality, the calm acceptance of the unknowable. But if his camera is still given to flurries of ecstatic movement, it also seems more stationary, more grounded than usual, as if the director were pausing to gather his thoughts and clear his throat. He has an awful lot to say.

At its simplest level, “A Hidden Life” exists to disprove the snarling Nazi soldiers we hear telling Franz that his act of protest is meaningless and that no one will ever remember him. (They have admittedly already been disproved, thanks to the scholarship of Gordon Zahn and Thomas Merton, as well as a 2007 papal declaration of Jägerstätter as a martyr.) But it is also a call for moral vigilance in any era, the present one very much included: It is hard to watch this movie and not think of the rise of far-right and nationalist movements across Europe, or the Trump administration’s chokehold on evangelical Christianity.

That particular charge may be implicit, but it’s also unmistakable. Unless you are allergic to near-three-hour running times, there is nothing particularly difficult or elusive about “A Hidden Life,” nothing too cosmically elevated or metaphysically overreaching, to cite some of the dismissals frequently leveled against this director’s work. If we understand pretension as an attitude that leaves no room for humility, then is there any filmmaker working today lesspretentious than Terrence Malick, any artist more generous and unassuming in the way he exalts the beauty of the everyday?

Just as importantly, in our era of ever-expanding options and decreasing patience, is there an audience still willing to accept that challenge and see that beauty as he does? Even when tarnished, Malick’s legend looms large at a festival like Cannes, where he can be dismissed as a scourge and hailed as a god, but where he will never elicit an indifferent response. He deserves an equally impassioned reception when this imperfect, wise and entirely heroic movie comes out of hiding.

[ancientbooshartifacts]

The Even Stranger Tale of the Crack Fox

Author: PlanetBanjo

Year: 2008

Rating: NC-17

Characters: The Crack Fox

Thud. Thud. Thud. The rubbish bags land heavily somewhere above, waking me. Vermin. I sigh heavily, switch on my cine-film projector and sip some cat’s blood. Artic foxes fuck and flicker across a make-shift screen. Soon I’ll make you wear a little dress and hurt you. Soon. ^~*~^ Elderberry Wood bored me rigid today. Dante drove me to distraction with his incessant ranting. Yesterday, he shot a man clean out of a tree just for ‘looking a bit ginger’. I warned him that we can’t have humans taking an interest in a badger, especially not one with racist leanings and a rifle. OK, so there was the horrendous incident with the shovels but no matter how much Dante attempts to justify his actions, I shall always decline to agree with him. And there’s dear Nicholas with his fixation with tennis. I admire his tenacity and dedication to the sport yet his unwavering determination that a rodent will play at Wimbledon is becoming a little repetitive and grating. Poor misguided Nicholas. His habit of continually pissing himself plays havoc with his tennis whites. All so dreadfully dreary. I can’t shake off the feeling that life elsewhere is so much more interesting. ^~*~^ My cousin, Jack Cooper, sent me a letter! Jack’s an urban fox. He often tells me stories about London Town and the people he meets there. I must say, those town fellows sound rather over-familiar types. He once told me about an experience he had whilst staying in a peculiar-sounding place where animals are held captive so that humans can come and look at them. Jack said there was a tall, shifty-eyed chap with a moustache who worked at this odd place and that the man had tried to touch his cock. When this chap said he just wanted to clean him up, Jack said ‘no’ and tried to bite him but then he was given something that sent him into a deep slumber. Jack says that he doesn’t recall what happened afterwards but he was sure it was very bad indeed. He said the moustached fellow often passed by his cage and gave him a sinister sideways glance that made his hackles rise. My cousin is now free of the animal prison and lives on the streets of Dalston. He says he’s happy there and that his diet is better than the one he endured in Hackney. He advised me that a diet of fried chicken, false nails and crack pipes leads to acute tummy shame. However, Jack’s letter only served to increase my feelings of general ennui. Life here is dull dull dull. ^~*~^ Today I took a ride on my penny farthing along Leafy Lane and decided to rest a while on a grassy knoll. As I cast a disinterested gaze around me, I caught sight of a discarded magazine lying in a nearby hedgerow. Its glossy coloured pages fluttered in the breeze, sending out waves of a curious smelling perfume. I leant across and reached into the bush, tugging it free. Upon wiping the dirt from the cover, I saw that the magazine was called CHEEKBONE and so I sat down beneath a willow tree to read it. It is not like the usual magazines that I find tossed into the bushes. There are many photographs of people inside its pages and they talk of restaurants and nightclubs and music. And they are all wearing very nice clothes. The magazine is very exciting. I have already read it several times, over and over and over and over. I think I would like to go to London Town, one day. ^~*~^ I am on a train to London! Dante and Nicholas were resolutely against me going away. They said: “Jerome, this is a big mistake. You’ll be back here in a fortnight with your sorry tail between your legs.” Dante hit me hard with the butt of his rifle, as if to change my mind but I insisted that I want to see more of the world and that I must take this opportunity to sample the lifestyle I have seen in CHEEKBONE magazine. I told my friends that if I spend one more afternoon punting along the river through Cambridge Town then I would eat my own ears in pure frustration. After all, if all the stories Jack has told me are true, the life of an urban fox will be far more stimulating than an existence spent entirely in Elderberry Wood! So, I have new clothes, which are just like the ones worn by the people in CHEEKBONE and I have applied a little of the perfume contained inside the paper flap on one of its pages. I assume all people in London smell this way? ^~*~^ Oh, this situation is quite intolerable! I have visited all the labour exchanges in this part of town and yet there are no vacancies! Do these humans not recognise a hard-working fox of good breeding and intelligence when they see one? If my cousin were not an urban fox, I would blame those grubby town creatures for giving my species a bad reputation with their nightly rattling and scattering of dustbins and their yapping and yelping in back gardens. Should I wrap myself in plastic carrier bags and wear rotting fruit on my head? Would they employ me then? Would that be more acceptable? And Jack was right - the edible pickings here are atrocious. A young fox cannot survive on a diet of saturated fat and sticky sauce sachets. I must have freshly-made cucumber sandwiches and drinking fresh spring water, not this abomination on the taste buds! Isn’t it enough that I have to battle with the rancid humans that live on the street for the best scraps? They scuttle around in their filthy blankets like common vermin, scurrying amongst the rubbish, which means I often miss out on obtaining the better take-away leftovers. These people are thoroughly unpleasant and they smell nothing like the paper flaps of my magazine. This really isn’t cricket. ^~*~^ Three weeks in London now and nothing. Trying to survive on wits and wile alone is proving arduous, even for a fox of my calibre. Winter is drawing in and the nights grow colder. There are no snug burrows to retreat to when the black frost creeps across the pavements. I spend my days wandering aimlessly, growing increasingly grubby and despondent and sleeping under railway arches until I am shoo-ed rudely away by the Street People. My clothes grow filthy and worn. I pawned my monocle to pay for a few nights in a hostelry. The people there gave me hot soup and blankets. They found my copy of CHEEKBONE and told me that the people in its pages were immoral. They said a young fox shouldn’t believe everything he sees in fashion magazines and then they showed me some pamphlets. The pamphlets were filled with brightly-coloured drawings of a man with a beard and a flowing gown. He had light coming out of his hands and people looked up to him and smiled. My copy of CHEEKBONE magazine, constantly in my pocket, is now tattered and torn. Where on earth do I find the people inside its pages? ^~*~^ Finally, my fortunes have changed! Whilst sifting through the meagre pickings at the rear entrance of ‘Dixie Fried Chicken’, my eye fell upon a scrap of local newspaper that carried the following advertisement. ‘WANTED – FURRY FRIENDS FOR SELECT NEW CLUB’. Well, I’m furry! And I’m seeking a select club! So I spruced myself up a little and went along to the address to see what it was all about. The gentleman running ‘The Tufty Club’, Mr. Soames, was very hospitable. He warmly welcomed me into his office and gave me some freshly-cooked chicken and clean water, which I devoured hungrily. There were pictures on the office walls just like the ones in CHEEKBONE! He was a little evasive when I pressed him on the matter of wages and hours but I expect this will all be worked out as we go along. Then he provided me with a small cash advance, gave me instructions about the kind of clothes I will be expected to wear and told me that I could start tomorrow. Apparently I am exactly what the club is looking for! I’m still not sure exactly what I’m going to be doing there but...I’ve got a job! ^~*~^ What a night! There were lots of flashing lights and lots of smiling people and loud, loud MUSIC! At first I was a little wary about what I had to do. Lots of men with moustaches and white vests stared at me. Was this the place Jack had told me about in his letter? One of the men approached me and he held out a little glass pot, telling me to sniff it. He said it would help me work better. Well, I pressed my snout cautiously to that little pot and - WWOOOOOOOO!!! I felt really fine and the world was full of colours and the man span me round and held me in his arms and I was dancing! I danced all night and into the morning in my little white vest! And there were lots of other men who also danced with me and Jack shouldn’t have been so scared of that man with a moustache because he didn’t want to hurt me! He helped me feel good with his sniffy-pots! All I have to do is dance on a little podium and shake my tail around and let the men stroke me! Ha ha! These are fun-fun times! ^~*~^ Mr Soames pays extra attention to me. He lets me sleep in a nice warm cupboard in his flat. He says that he has a special job he would like me to do, and that he will pay me twice my hourly wage if I do it. I am not sure what my hourly wage is – there has been a cash-flow problem, apparently, which has resulted in a slight delay in my payment – but he assures me it will be easy work and that the money will be very good indeed. He is a kind man. I am happy to perform any extra tasks he has, especially if it pays well. Who knows? One day I might have enough money to have my own flat, and then Jack and I shall have dinner parties for other sophisticated intellectuals. We shall be proper urban foxes about town! ^~*~^ This evening, Mr. Soames showed me the job he wanted me to do. He invited me into his office after my shift. He said it wouldn’t take long. He asked me to remove my trousers and then told me to stand on all fours on top of his desk and face the wall. I was a little cautious but he had told me the job would pay well, so I complied. As I faced forward, I heard him undo the belt on his trousers. He gently took hold of my tail and pressed his large warm belly against my haunches. I tensed a little as I felt the hot, wet tip of something long and hard rubbing against my fox-anus. I gave a startled yelp as he pushed the hot wet thing – which I rapidly released was his man-cock – right inside me, sliding it in deep with a groan. I struggled against him but he held me fast, stroking my fur, telling me to be quiet and not to worry. Then he pushed himself against me, back and forth, making lots of grunting sounds that reminded me of Nicholas playing tennis. I dug my claws into the desk surface and gazed up at the people in the photos around the office walls, concentrating on their smiles, trying to bear the pounding at my rear, telling myself this job would pay well. After a few minutes, Soames gave a gargled scream. He tugged his cock out of me, hurriedly refastening his trousers, tossed 100 euros on to the desk and left the room. I delicately stepped down from the desk, hitched up my garments and collected the money. What a very interesting experience this is turning out to be! ^~*~^ The stupid creature screeched as I grabbed and twisted its neck, its front paws scrabbling frantically in mid-air, claws protruding sharply. I gritted my fangs and smashed its head hard against a brick wall. The cat’s body went limp in my grasp, its eyes rolling shut. With my syringes, I slit its throat and watched its blood begin to trickle slowly from the wound. As I licked at the warm viscous liquid, I noticed the tag around its neck read ‘Puffin’. Puffin shouldn’t have taken what wasn’t his. ^~*~^ Last night after work, Mr Soames introduced me to another man who wanted me to do a special job for him, too. I told the man that I felt a little weary after a night’s podium dancing and that I needed to rest. He laughed and said he had something that would help me stay awake, adding that he would pay me 200 euros if I went to his flat right away. The man gave a wide smile from beneath his large moustache. He reassured me that all I would have to do was wear a little dress and dance for his friends. It sounded easy enough. ^~*~^ if I have an entire paw of needles then I can take more drugs and I can forget about the cold and the wet and the terrible hunger because I’ve eaten nothing but old bottles of shampoo and squeezed-up tubes of toothpaste and pieces of shit for the last four weeks I’m not proud of it but when you’re hungry and you’re on the streets and you’ve got nothing to eat but handfuls of human faeces and a fox has got to do what a fox has to do and the Street People talk of a drug that’s so powerful that a single drop can make you King of the World and everyone will do your bidding but I don’t know because they are bombed out of their tiny minds for most of the time and what a ridiculous idea a drug that can give you special power over everyone and everything and who the hell would want power over those shambolic filthy creatures who spend all day gulping their electric soup and having fights and is this really what mankind has become it would be so easy to get them to do anything I wanted them to do ^~*~^ I can’t...I can’t do this anymore. The men never stop. They give me their special powders and they pound at me for hours and... They never stop. So I’m running away. Back to the streets. I can’t go back to Elderberry Wood. Dante and Nicholas will laugh at me and constantly remind me they were right. ^~*~^ The green-toothed man in the filthy blanket had it coming. His neck...it broke...beneath my claws. It broke...so easily. As easy as a cat. Then I plunged my syringes and pushed them deep into the veins of his throat and I watched in fascination as he screamed and struggled beneath me. I felt the pulse in his neck gradually fade away. A misty vapour formed around his mouth as he gave his last breath. FIDDLE-DEE-DIE. I see now that Dante was right. Humans are vermin and must be destroyed. Why didn’t I ever listen to him? ^~*~^ Thud. Thud. Thud. I watch and I listen. And I see the small man put the large glass bottle into his special cupboard and he locks it away. Then he gives the key to the pretty man who looks like a lady. I will rule these pathetic creatures. I will command them. So I wait. My time will come. I watch and I wait.

[yeoldontknow]

It Was The Night: 4

Author’s Note: WELCOME BACK TO CHANVEMBER!! I hope everyone is having The Best Time <3 Pairing: Chanyeol x Reader (oc; female) Genre: drama; historical au; suspense; romance Rating (this chapter): PG Word Count: 2,122

IV.

From that day forward, I weekly received letters placed carefully under my pillow, scraps of sheet music folded over with the letters A.S in perfect calligraphy. Most days, they contained notes on my performance, praises or critiques to help structure my performance as Antigona. I enjoyed these notes, most particularly the ones that contained praises. These sent a flock of butterflies alight in my stomach, made me smile and resolve within myself the will to please this imagined maker.

But some days, the days that kept me living for the next, the letters would simply contain verses. I did know if these words were intended for song or intended for scripture, all I knew is that they were intended for me alone. Each line contained the essence and notion of a high romance, an ideal that every young craves. Between the lines I could discern the affection, the respect, and the yearning, or perhaps it was simply my own projection of longing that made me cleave so desperately to these notes.

I had yet to encounter his visage, but in these letters I was weekly encountering his soul, weaving his spirit and his nature into my own. So entwined and enamoured with him was I, that not long after the commencement of these letters did I start to think of myself as betrothed. This was a secret I kept tightly to my breast, refusing to give anything away - even when the seamstress asked why I suddenly had given over to airs of lightheartedness. It was not that I was apprehensive of refuting this belief, for I very well knew the difference between sentiment and reality, simply that I did not want the gold of it all to be tarnished.

Mysterious and alluring as he was, he was still a stranger to me, a man and a myth that moved only in shadow - a shadow, still, that only I had seen. Explanations always eluded me, and yet I did not have it in me to feel fear. Fright for me was disregarded in place of glorious confirmation that my opera ghost was one and the same as Aeon Smith. Beyond that, I cared for very little.

Still though, questions tore their way through my mind at alarming speed:

Why had he picked me as his star? Where were these pieces of music from? With regards to the extra music, surely not all could be composed just for me? Why would he hide? How long had he been living? Was he trapped within the walls of the opera, a construction accident gone horrible awry?

He was my favourite and most dear mystery. And, in consideration of his features, there was not a single moment where I imagined him to be anything less than magnificent. True, I did not know how to picture him and thus he was a grey thing, a formless thing whose edges bled into their surroundings, but even this warmed me, made my heart flutter within the confines of my chest. At my young age, I decided this was love, or at least something like it, and let the knowledge of this turn my blood into honey.  

On the opening night of Antigona, just before the gala of the first performance, I received my first full piece of instruction from Aeon Smith. In my dressing room, so full of objects, wigs, costumes, and finery brought to me by patrons of the house, I immediately noticed the single, most humble piece of paper placed gently on the vanity with a box of chocolates as its weight. The nature of its origin was immediately apparent, the red sealing wax catching my eye even from across the room.

Receiving chocolates was an entirely new experience, his gifts taking the shape of words and music, scratched ink that bled through parchment and likely stained his fingers. It became apparent, then, that the sweets were a cover, an excuse, a reason for the letter to exist so plainly at all.

My fingers were eager, shaking in their excitement, as I tore the letter open. With careful eyes, I glanced around my dressing room, checking for maids or eager companions, hoping no one would burst through my door in a fit of glee. I wanted silence, then, wanted this moment of intimacy, as public as it was. Perhaps that is what made the moment so thrilling, the risk of exposure in plain sight.

I am the unseen sun. Keep close to my shadows, where the burns of modernity shall never mar thy skin.

Meet me in the chapel at 01:00. A gift remains to be given.

All at once the matter of polite society became a most vexing curse. How was I meant to continue the evening, shaking hands with the ennui that encompasses members of high society, when the very essence of truth was waiting for me? In my blood, the nerves that coursed through my veins shifted suddenly from those of performance jitters to the trepidation of truth. It suddenly seemed impossibly easy to perform in front of a full house, for every piece had been rehearsed. I knew my music, knew my lines, had blocked every scene, but had been wholly unprepared for the responsibility that came with knowledge.

Looking back, I view the opening night performance as rushed and hurried, messy simply because I was too eager to meet my angel. The only thing that slowed my tongue was the thought of my angel watching me, high in the balconies or even above the stage, moving among the ropes and rafters. Then, more than ever, I wanted to make him proud. At the end of the performance, I practically ran to the chapel as the last of the patrons departed, adept at timing Madame Catherine’s rounds to remain completely unnoticed, coming to pause only at the slightly ajar wooden doors.

A wave of excitement consumed me, carried my feet in hurried motions through winding halls. In there air, there was a chill that licked at my ankles, made my skin turn to gooseflesh, but I paid these sensations no mind. With every step, I was closer: to answers, to love, to him. A wry smile pulled at my lips, the sight of the chapel doors opened minutely, just enough for slivers of coloured light, filtering through the stained glass windows, to dance along the stone floor. Just beyond the threshold, I stopped, closing my eyes at the sounds of an organ softly being played by adept fingers. The gentle music coaxed the nerves from my bones and left me feeling somewhat weightless, as though I were floating through time towards the arms of my lover.

Silently, I slipped through the door, admiring how very different the chapel appeared in the night. The statue of Mary at the head of the room, body bowed in mourning, appeared haunted in the light of the moon by something far more sinister than the crucifixion of her son. Something about her marble seemed too bright, her shadows too deep, the genuflection of her grief too profound. Turning in the center of the room, my fingers danced along the cold wood of a pew, making the wood creak against my touch as though the seat itself had come to life.

At this sound, the music came to an abrupt halt and I found myself standing the precipice of great disappointment when, from above me, a letter glided elegantly through the air, ornately folded and sealed with the same crimson wax I had come to adore.

I leapt to catch it and quickly tore it open, my impatience taking an uncharacteristic hold of me.

‘I knew you’d come,’ I read aloud, my voice little more than panted breath.

Distantly, and from the direction of the letter, I heard soft footsteps bending the wood high in the ceiling and I raised my head to stare at the angels in the mural above me. Idly, I imagined them as the keepers of our secret, the watchful eyes of cherubs and holy beings silently offering their blessing.

‘How could you know?’ I whispered to them, wondering if he too had been blessed with soft wings.

‘It’s in your eyes when I see you in the mirror. You’re so hungry for knowledge.’

The voice came, strong and melodic, from an entirely different part of the room. He seemed to be surrounding me, every direction consumed by him. In my mind, he was the chapel, the opera house itself, and I suddenly felt terribly ignorant to have imagined him as anything else.

Eyes scanning every crevice my gaze could touch, I found myself desperate to know him. ‘Who are you?’

‘You already know,’ came the echo of his tenor.

‘Aeon Smith?’ I did not mean for it to sound so lost or even so unsure, I simply needed to know the truth.

‘Are you questioning yourself?’ he intoned, suddenly behind me. As I turned, eager to see him, I smiled at the sound of his gentle, teasing laugh. ‘I deemed you more clever than this.’

It was melodic, this sound, tearing through from somewhere within the walls, and I found myself starting to swoon.

‘Only because that cannot be your real name,’ I countered, though the intensity of my smile as I turned, chasing his noise, made this statement sound terribly playful.

‘And what would you have my name be?’

The question came from the seat of the organ, his neck and shoulder illuminated by the moon. He sat so straight and tall, I imagined him a partner to Mary, standing beside her in great contrast and allowed only on hallowed ground so long as I remained in the room. My legs took care of action and thought for me, my hands clutching the letter to my stomach and as I moved forward.

‘Stop,’ he commanded. ‘Do not come any closer.’

‘Whyever not?’ I whined. ‘I want to see you.’

‘I am not to be seen. Not now, and certainly not here.’ He sounded so remorseful I had to stop myself from reaching out to him. Within minutes he’d turned me into a greedy, obsessed little creature. I shivered, wanting to melt this new skin away and remain as he liked me, curious and pure.

‘Won’t you tell me who you are?’ I begged, sounding somewhat petulant. ‘What you are?’

‘You know who I am,’ he said, patiently, keeping his tone even. ‘You’re the only one who’s ever known. I’ve told you from the start.’

‘Aeon Smith is not a name,’ I repeated, exasperated.

‘Aeon Smith is a truth,’ he replied, taking one tentative step forward, though I still could not truly see him, ‘and a scandalous one at that. Aeon Smith has grown tired of hiding.’

I sighed, and placing my hands on my hips as I spoke. ‘And what do you think you’re doing at the present?’

‘This is not hiding,’ he chuckled. ‘In the darkness, I exist. The darkness makes me real.’

‘Things exist in the daylight,’ I countered, feeling slightly dazed from the sound of his playful laugh. ‘Many would argue the darkness renders you into nothing but a dream.’

The shadow of his head cocked to the side, and I imagined him to be smiling. ‘Do you happen to be sleeping?’

‘Still waking sleep, that is not what it is. This love feel I, that feel no love in this,’ I breathed, though even today I do not know why the words came to me. In that moment I fancied myself Juliet, sleep walking and living without the return of my desires. I was just as lost and confused as the tragic characters I seemed born to play, speaking to a blackness that threatened to swallow me whole.

‘You have proven you know me without proving it to yourself,’ he said. ‘In one simple quote you have revealed me. Now you must reveal it to yourself.’

With that, he disappeared from the room before my eyes could adjust to the path he took. Disgruntled, I slowly walked the long path that lead to my bedchamber, fondling the letter in my hands and running my fingers over the wax seal.

And that was when I noticed it, the warped and bent pattern, purposely broken and misshapen in the press itself. I had to stifle a laugh as I could not believe I hadn’t noticed it before: it was almost exactly the same as the pattern on Monsieur Park’s waistcoat buttons. Within moments, the mystery was no mystery at all.

What’s in a name!, I wanted to cry.

Aeon Smith, the unseen sun.

Aeon Smith.

I am the son.

[getreadytosmash]

The Past that Smashed

Chapter 20

Red’s POV

Everyone went towards different places of the base, but I decided to be closer to Leader. We never know who it could be. They could possibly be one of Leader’s allies or something and I’m not going to lose that small green bean since it takes forever to get him again.

So far, nothing happened, but…I felt like something was there. I looked back and swore something moved. It didn’t look too big but it wasn’t small either, so it wasn’t Icarus. It had to be a person.

I cautiously walked through the halls. Then I noticed a shadow that glided through the right hallway, too close to where Leader was. I flatten myself to the wall on the right and quietly went to the where it ended. I was at the corner to I turned fast to see if anyone was there. Hmm. It was empty.

I turn around to see a pair of strings dangling there. I glance up to-OWW!

Someone has kicked my face while doing a flip and landed on the floor. What the hell?! Who’s the fuck is this guy?! I’ll show him not to mess with me.

He was a lanky man with messy black hair with a black mask that covered his face but had black and orange goggles. Black shirt with grey lines, no sleeves, black pants, black gloves and combat boots….wait. He kinda looks familiar. The weird part is that he had bandages wrapped around his whole arms to where his wrist was, like a mummy, but the ends were long enough that it looks like two whips. A bit comical if you ask me.

He ran towards me, so I swing my right arm first. He then slid in order to avoid me, but wrapped his bandages around my arm to swing up to the ceiling. I almost tripped so I glared at him.

“What’s the matter? You never fought a Hulk before?” I mocked.

“…”

Suddenly he jumped onto my shoulders and covered my eyes with those goddamn bandages.

“Hey! Get the hell off of me!”

I tried to grab him but I kept missing. I must look like a blinded idiot trying to catch this fucking bug.

I tried to throw myself into a wall but he jumped off before I can squish him. It’s useless! Why am I the one getting hurt?

He then ran towards me again. I tried to focus on him NOT going either above my head or the ceiling. I gave an attempt to grab him but he slid between my legs and those bandages of his were in front of my legs causing me to trip.

How am I getting beaten by a half mummy with no powers?

“Hmm…pity, I thought it was going to be a thrilling fight. But turns out to be a huge disappointment,” he casually said.

“You want a fight?! Well I got one!”

I charged after him growing multiple punches at him. He kept dodging them by doing flips or swing from the ceiling. As he spun, I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen him before. When in the hell with he stop moving?!

“Red! What’s going on?”

I saw that Hulk and Skaar was coming towards us. I looked back to see the guy being distracted so I punched him before he could move. I did see him fly but I turned to the other two.

“I found the pest who broke in. Be careful though since he is a slippery guy,” I warned.

I then heard two gasp from the other side. Walters and Jones both have horror looks on their faces.

“Red! What did you do!” yelled A-Bomb.

“What do you mean-WHAT THE HELL!?”

I turned around to see the guy laying on the floor but in a very disturbing position. Can legs even bend like that? It looked like he was run over by a bus.

“Red? What happen here?” asked Hulk in disbelief.

“I didn’t punch him THAT hard!” I argued.

“Oh god! How do we hide a corpse? Let’s make Devil bury him,” suggested a panicking A-Bomb.

“Rick! We don’t even know if he’s dead,” argue Hulk.

“That’s true, but I’m not going over there to see if he’s alive,” said Jen.

We started arguing on what to do with him. We didn’t noticed Skaar walking towards him and poked him.

“Intruder still moves,” announced Skaar.

We all looked at him, dumbfounded, until we saw his legs twitch. He slowly got up in the most disturbing way, as if he was a balloon being inflated. He stood up and started at me like nothing happened. He turned to She Hulk and walked over to her.

“Sorry. I was looking for Lady Liberty but I found an angry tomato. The only reason why I attacked him was because I was bored and also wanted to observe his fighting skills. I positioned myself that way on purpose to see everyone’s reaction,” the intruder scoffed indifferently.

“Okay? But why are you here?” Walters asked.

“Do you not remember the messages?”

“Jen, what’s going on?” ask Hulk.

“What messages?”

He let out a sigh before looking at Walters and replied, “I’m Agent Rag Doll. I’m here for the computer thing bullshit from weeks ago. I also told you to not tell anyone else .”

She Hulk looked at him with confusion and then realization.

“You’re a guy?”

“Last time I checked, I was.”

“But I thought you were-”

“It’s the name, isn’t it. You are not the first one to make a mistake like that.”

“How do we know we can trust you?” asked She Hulk.

“Yeah. How do we know that you’re not some other villain trying to get information on us?” I sneered and stood in front of him.

He was going to respond until we heard some footsteps heading towards us. Another guy was running I’m the halls then stopped, almost slipping, and ran between us. Wait! Isn’t this guy-

“Okay! No fighting, please! We came in peace, even if this idiot came running alone. So everyone no punching, no poking, no petting, no patting, no pulverizing, no pinching, no prodding, no….any other p word I miss?” wondered David Jerry.

“How about puking?” offered the other man.

“Oh, and poo-”

“Stop!”

“David Jerry! What are YOU doing here,” exclaimed A-Bomb.

“Well, we came because-AHHH!” screamed David.

We looked back and saw Icarus trotting to me with something in her mouth. A-Bomb went behind me. Isn’t this the photo that Albizu was going to show us in the morning?

It was a picture of two boy at a dance. The one with the orange shirt must have been Sammy. The other one….wait.

“Is it me or have we seen the black haired boy before?” wondered A-Bomb.

The guy then slid is mask down and his goggled up. We both stared at him. This is the guy who danced at the concert and supposedly left with David.

“Sup. I’m Ennui Shorts. I lied about the whole computer thing. Yeah, I’m just here for Sams,” Ennui confessed.

“Well it took you long enough to get here,” said a voice behind Hulk.

Carla came out, holding Icarus, strolling to where Ennui and David was.

God! How many more people are coming anyway? Does this kid have an army or something?

/Ahh! Another chapter finished. I have nothing to say so I hope you enjoyed it./

(Woo! The fight was great, Red, you suck at fighting smaller guys -_- and I loved how everyone thought he killed Rag Doll until he did the creepy rising from the dead part lol. And so, another person of Sam's arrives! I'm looking forward to this reunion and maybe soon they'll learn who this mysterious child really is...)

[emulateharry]

Story of my life

Chapter 10

As always, I could not do this without the help and support of my Alex (@niallandharrymakemestrong). 

THIS IS NSFW

Kacey was beside herself.  The last five and a half weeks had passed by while she sat at home alone and Harry finished up the North American leg of the tour. 

After dropping the boys off at the airport, Kacey had cried all the way home.  Laura had been subdued as well and they consoled themselves by spending the day in the entertainment room watching favorite movies and eating loads of carbs.  And ice cream, always ice cream.  Legally Blonde and Clueless helped pass the time until the boys texted that they had landed and were safe.  Kacey went to bed that night hugging the stuffed moose.  She had slept on Harry’s pillow and fell asleep breathing his scent. 

She moped around for the next week, brightening only when Harry called or texted.  On day six of what Laura had termed ‘the dark days of waiting’, she told her to go back to England because she was messing with her ‘investment guru mojo.’

“I love you Kacey, you know that, but you are seriously cooling my vibe and that is costing us beaucoup bucks.  Pack up your shit and get the hell back to England; you can sulk all you want and I can get back to making us money.”

So, Kacey had flown back a week early and was greeted by a cool rain at Heathrow.  Perfect.  She puttered around her flat in a cloud of ennui until Harry asked her, in a concerned tone during a Skype session, if she was sick.  Realizing that she was being ridiculous, and feeling guilty for worrying him, she set her alarm for 7 the next morning and got up and went for a run.  Okay, a walk, she went for a walk.  But it was a long one; all the way to Harry’s house and back.  She showered, ate a good breakfast and sat down at her desk to write. 

Amazingly, the words flowed.  They spilled onto the keyboard as fast as she could type, her recent mood matching the darker setting of the story.  She worked long hours taking breaks only to eat, exercise, shower, and talk to Harry.  She barely noticed the passage of time; she was so engrossed in getting the story out of her head and onto the page.  It was cathartic too, all her frustrations from her trip home were excised and all her longing for Harry was placed upon her main character to suffer.  As Laura had predicted, Ronald and Louanne had died horrible deaths for their comments about Harry.  She was in the zone and stayed there for weeks.  When she came up for air, she had finished her third book.  Kacey loved it when it all came together like that, like it was meant to be.

She was eating a sandwich and checking out the concert videos on YouTube when she realized that the next concert, the one that evening, was the last one—Harry would be home in less than 48 hours.  Her heart gave a little leap.  And then it gave another when she realized that, during her writing binge, she had neglected certain bodily maintenance activities.  She immediately made an appointment at Bliss for what her grandmother would have called ‘the whole shebang.’  Fortunately, they had an opening that afternoon.  She grabbed her purse and her keys and headed out the door.

Four hours later she returned having been buffed, waxed, plucked, kneaded, coiffed and deforested.  She had also made a stop at Coco de Mer dropping a couple hundred pounds for some lace confections.  While there she debated getting more but determined that three pairs were enough.  Then she debated about getting some toys but decided those could wait; right now, she wanted nothing but Harry.  On a whim, she toured the luxury bondage area but had to leave almost immediately; 5 weeks without sex had left her starving and she was afraid she might come on the spot just imagining Harry strapping her into some of the gadgets she saw there. 

 Checking her phone, she saw that it was nearing 3PM in Massachusetts.  She decided to send Harry a picture to make sure he remembered what he was coming home to.  Nothing too risqué just in case he got hacked.  She went into the bedroom and slipped on the ‘minerva open knickers’ and presented her derriere to the mirror.  Flexing her leg, she snapped several pics and then reviewed them on her phone.  One was perfect; the black lace sides open and held together with a corset like satin string, her cheeks peeking out at the edge of the frame.  Grinning mischievously, she sent it to Harry with the comment “did a little shopping today…”

Her phone buzzed almost immediately with a reply that made her clench: it was a picture of Harry’s jeans, clearly bulging at the zipper with the caption “Are you trying to kill me?”  It buzzed again with another picture, this one of his mouth with his tongue sticking out, accompanied by the message “Tomorrow, baby.”

*

Harry was impatient.  Sitting in the back of the car he could see no reason for the trip from Heathrow to Belsize Park to be taking this long, especially at this time of night.  He realized that he was tapping his foot when the driver looked at him in the rearview mirror.  Taking a deep breath, he willed himself to be still.  It had been forty days since he left Kacey at the airport.  Forty days and forty nights of missing her company and craving her touch.   He had wanted to head straight for the airport when they walked off stage last night but he had obligations:  the goodbye party for the North American crew and celebration of the second leg of the tour being over.  The text Kacey had sent almost made him blow it off and leave on the next flight out but he would have felt guilty.  The crew had worked hard and he wanted to be there to thank them properly.  He had waited to leave until that morning, as originally planned, and passed the time on the six-hour flight by sleeping.  So here he was, sat in the back seat, running his thumb over the picture of her satin and lace accented ass willing the car to move faster.

Harry was out the door as soon as they pulled up, muttering a ‘thanks’ and grabbing his bag.  Bounding up the stairs, he unlocked the door with the key she had given him their first weekend together. 

He had just closed the door when he was hit by squealing blonde bundle that came flying at him around the corner.  He snagged her in his arms and then his mouth was all over her.  Hands roaming everywhere, tongues intertwined, neither one spoke.  Lifting her up, he maneuvered to the first horizontal piece of furniture he could find: the kitchen table.  Sitting her on it, he stepped back to look at her.  She was wearing a tiny lace bra with no cups, her nipples covered with black pasties which he immediately thumbed off.  He was eyeing her backless panties and considering just tearing them off, when she took his hand and demonstrated the open crotch.  The sight of her leaning back and panting, slick with need, almost undid him.  He managed to get his jeans unfastened and down to his thighs in record time and, without warning, plunged into her.  He gasped as she enfolded him, bucking her hips, urging him to move.  It was primal.  It was two people, almost crazy with desire, fucking.  The soft words and touches would come later, after the hunger was appeased. 

Kacey, so full of Harry, began moaning and urging him on with “Please!  Oh Harry, please!”

He complied, burying himself in her again and again.  He reached down to stroke her and at his touch she came apart.  He could feel her pulsing around him but he didn’t stop.  Gritting his teeth, he continued moving into her, her cheeks slapping wetly against his thighs.  She was keening, her back arched, leaning back on her elbows.  He could feel her body tensing again and he pushed himself even harder and faster, his thumb flicking and circling her. 

He growled out a “Come for me baby.  Come for me again.”

At the sound of his voice she let go, her orgasm overwhelming her and sweeping Harry along in its wake.  He felt almost paralyzed as the sensations washed over him, unable to do anything more than breathe. Bending down, he pulled her to him and cradled her against his chest. 

“Baby, I’m home,” Harry whispered against her hair.

“Oh, I’ve missed you,” Kacey whispered back.    

*

Kacey and Harry spent two days holed up in her flat, most of that time wrapped in each other’s arms.  They were sitting in her bed one evening, Harry was answering texts, when he grunted and frowned at his phone. 

“What’s wrong?” Kacey asked, looking up from proofing her book.

“Mm?  Oh, Gemma is mad at me,” he replied, a hint of chagrin in his tone.

“Why?  What have you done?” she asked, curious. 

“It’s what I haven’t done.  Haven’t called or gone to see her since I’ve been home.”  His phone vibrated again.  “She’s decided that I am taking her to lunch tomorrow,” looking at the screen and breaking into a grin. “I’ll have to explain myself then.  Not my fault—you’ve been distracting me.”

“Don’t you dare blame me!  I do not want your family to have any reason to dislike me!” Kacey responded, horrified.

“But it’s the truth.  I am the loyal, loving brother who’s been lured into your entirely too sexy clutches.  I’m so bewitched, I forgot about everyone else,” he proclaimed pulling an innocent face.

Kacey was beginning to pale, her eyes growing wide, her breathing becoming more rapid

“Kassidy?  What’s wrong?”  Harry looking at her, concerned.

“Please don’t tell her that.  I…I’m…I don’t want…” Kacey couldn’t get the words out.  Her hands had left the keyboard of her laptop and were wringing each other gently in her lap. Harry was alarmed to see that her eyes were moist.

“Baby, I’m only joking.  What’s all this about?” as a tear threatened to spill out.

“I just don’t want your family to dislike me,” she managed after swallowing several times.

“Kassidy, love, how could they not like you?  You are charming and witty and kind and interesting.  Everyone loves you.  You’re also their favorite author.  They’ll be worried about impressing you not the other way ‘round,” he soothed, pulling her into his embrace.

“I’m not good with families.  I don’t know what to say.  It’s worse than chat shows or even the red carpet,” she said around the lump in her throat. 

“Why don’t you come with me tomorrow?  You’ll meet Gem, we’ll have a nice lunch and you’ll wonder why you were ever nervous about it,” he predicted, planting a kiss on her forehead.

“Harry, I don’t want to butt in on your time with your sister.  I’m sure she wouldn’t appreciate that at all.  Maybe I could meet her another time,” Kacey tried.

“Okay, not lunch.  Then join us tomorrow for pudding,” he substituted.

“Oh, Harry, I don’t know---” she began reluctantly until Harry cut her off.

“Please.  Come with me.  I know you two will get along famously,” he entreated.

“Okay.  I’ll come.  But please don’t tell her that I write.  I would rather she like, or dislike, me for me and not because of my books,” Kacey relented.

Grinning wide, Harry kissed her forehead again then stretched to kiss her lips. 

*

Kacey was so agitated she thought she might vomit.  She was almost to the restaurant and was becoming more nervous by the minute.  She had agonized over her outfit finally deciding on her favorite dress, a vintage one made of pink gingham, and sandals.  She had pulled her hair into a messy bun; her only jewelry was a sterling silver and sea glass drop necklace and matching earrings that Harry had brought her from Boston.  Pulling into the valet parking, she handed her keys to the attendant and climbed out of the mini.  She paused for a moment before entering, trying to slow her breathing. 

The hostess led her to the table in a secluded corner where Harry and Gemma were sitting, she with her back to the door.  Harry’s eyes lit up when he saw her and he rose to greet her.  Understanding that they were in public, he gave her a quick hug before turning to Gemma.

“Gem, this is Kassidy Day.   Kassidy, my sister Gemma,” he introduced, smiling broadly.

Kacey was reaching out her hand when Gemma pulled her into a hug. 

“Kassidy! It’s so nice to meet you. Harry has been telling me all about you,” she greeted warmly. 

“Hello, Gemma,” Kacey said smiling. “It’s good to meet you too.”

Kacey sat down and Harry poured her a cup of tea, beaming at the two of them.  They ordered dessert and then set about getting to know one another.  Harry sat back and watched, sipping his tea, as they discussed their respective university careers, Kacey’s roles on Mortwick Murders and the Terrier Chronicles, and Gemma’s column at The Debrief.  He was thoroughly enjoying their conversation, even when Gemma started telling stories about him as a young boy.  Kacey laughed until she had tears running down her cheeks, grateful for the waterproof mascara. 

They had exchanged phone numbers and were walking towards the door to leave when Gemma exclaimed “Oh! I almost forgot, Harry several of our crew from Cheshire are in town this weekend and we’re all going out.  You and Kassidy should come too.”

“That sounds good.  Text me the details and we’ll check our schedules,” he said.   He was driving Gemma back to her flat before returning to Kacey’s.  The valet brought his car and he turned to give Kacey a purely platonic hug, whispering that he would see her back at her flat soon.  He and Gemma pulled off with a wave and Kacey only had a few minutes to wait for her car to arrive. 

*

Kacey had been home for about 30 minutes when her mobile rang with Harry’s ringtone.  She had left her purse on a table by the window and she hurried to retrieve it, grinning.

Hello, handsome,” she began.  Harry cut her off.

“Kassidy, move away from the window,” his voice displeased.

“What? Why? What’s wrong?” she asked, confused.

“There’s a pap across the street from your flat.  He’s staring up at your window.  Baby, move away from there.  We forgot to pull the shades this morning,” his voice showing a hint of anger.

“Oh no!  Does he know you were here?” she responded, worry creeping in.

“I don’t think so, there’s only one.  I pulled down your street and saw him, he didn’t see me.  Shit! You’re flat is too accessible.  Baby, pack a bag then come out the back of the flat.  I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to my house.  It’s more secure,” Harry instructed.

Kacey ran to her room and grabbed a bag and threw some clothes into it.  She retrieved some toiletries and her toothbrush and tossed them in.  Snagging a pair of trainers, she packed them as well.  She was about to walk out the rear entrance when she made a decision.  Dropping the bags and turning into the lounge, she walked to the window.  Making a show of squinting and shielding her face from the sun, she pulled the shade across the window then stepped back.  Looking out she saw the man standing across the street.  When she bought the flat, she had invested in some high-end shades that blocked 100 percent of the outside visibility in the day time while still letting the light, and the view, in.  She was confident that they would thwart any paps that tried to get pictures that way. 

Moving quickly, she set a timer on the lamp. Picking up Harry’s bag as well as her own, she quickly walked out the back of the flat, locking the door behind her.  Harry was waiting for her in an alley behind her building.  She put the bags on the floor and climbed in.  They pulled away as soon as her door was closed.  Driving past the end of her block, she glanced over to see that the pap was still staring up at her window.

She breathed a sigh of relief that they had not been noticed.  She turned to Harry who was still frowning. 

“Thank goodness for your pap-dar,” she smiled.

“My what?” he asked, still frowning.

“Your pap-dar.  Pap radar.  You know, like your spidey sense?” she intoned seriously.

She was rewarded with a dimple.  Glancing at her he replied “You don’t ever get to make fun of my jokes again after that one. Pap-dar indeed.”

Kacey laughed and leaned back for the short ride.

*

Harry had carried the bags up to his room and then joined Kacey in the lounge on the sofa.  He was dreading the discussion he was about to initiate.  Sitting next to her, he took her hand and a deep breath.

“Kassidy, we need to talk.  I’m sorry.  I should have warned you about all this that first night,” regret edging in.

“About what?  About paps?  Are you serious?” she was looking at him quizzically.

“Yes.  About the paps.  And the fans,” his tone becoming more worried.

“Harry Styles! Do you think I’m ignorant? Do you think I don’t know that you are hounded everywhere you go?   That you can’t be in the same room as a single female without the paps and the fans melting down the internet? That the fans, while wonderful, can be rabid bitches that attack anyone you are seen with?” she asked, amused.

“Um, yeah. I mean no. I mean, you know all that?” he said flustered.

Kacey was grinning now, “Yes Harry.  Directioner, remember?  I’ve seen all the ridiculous theories and rumors and the mob scenes and…it’s not okay.  It’s not okay that they treat you like that,” she stated a little more forcefully than she had intended.

“It’s not me I’m worried about.  I don’t want them to attack you on twitter and insta and all the other social media sites.  And the gossip sites will try to tear you down as well,” sadness and anger competing for dominance in his voice.

“Harry.  I’m not afraid.  I understand the risks.  I’m not frivolous, I rarely read anything on social media, I don’t trust many people and…I think you’re worth it,” she finished softly, reaching up to smooth a piece of hair that had wandered over his eyes.

“Baby, it won’t just be you.  They’ll go after your friends, ex-boyfriends, they’ll go after your family,” his quiet tone lending weight to the words.

“Okay, Styles.  First off, can you imagine them coming after Laura? Seriously?  Do you know that she has a concealed carry permit and is a damn good shot?  She’s in Kentucky; there are more guns there than in all of England and I think half of them are in my house.  It would be extremely ill advised for them to try anything with Laura.  As for ex-boyfriends, I could not give a rat’s ass what they might say.  The fuckers,” her volume rising as she ticked off the list. “My family.  Let me just promise you that anyone who tries to harass or harm my family will deal with me.  I would hunt them down and the outcome would not be pretty,” she finished firmly.

Harry just blinked at her for a moment, then nodded and smiled. “Okay, good talk,” he said then kissed her nose. 

*

Saturday night they joined Gemma and a group of friends from Holmes Chapel at a pub.  The friends were a bit surprised that Harry brought a date and watched them with amusement.  Kacey was wearing a bulky maroon V-necked cardigan, buttoned all the way, up over skinny black jeans and black knee boots with a 3-inch heel.  Kacey enjoyed the banter and joking enormously.  Harry’s friends vied to tell the best ‘young Harry’ story making him blush and grin.  The crew were consuming beer as if it were a drinking tournament while Kacey, not a huge fan of the stuff, sipped red wine.  After an hour or so, they decided on karaoke and goaded Harry into starting them off.  Bowing with a goofy grin, he stepped to the mic and performed “What is Love” by Haddaway, his voice cracking as he laughed through the song.  The group next turned to Kacey who protested that she was no singer to which Gemma responded that no one else was either.  That earned a grimace and a “heeey” from her brother.  Finally acceding, she grumbled out “What is with you Brits and karaoke?” as she walked to the mic. 

“This is a song by my favorite singer,’ she announced seriously.  The group all turned to Harry with an ‘awww’.  The music started and they looked a little confused; no one recognized it.

“When I’m feeling lonely, sad as I can be.  All by myself an uncharted island in an endless sea,” Kacey started.  “What makes me happy, fills me up with glee?  Those bones in my jaw that don’t have a flaw, my shiny teeth and me.”

Kacey was giggling as she belted out the rest of the song from ‘Chip Skylark.’  Harry and Gemma were laughing and cheering as she walked back to the table.  The rest of the group clapped politely but gave each other side glances.  Half an hour later, Kacey excused herself to go to the restroom.  Looking in the mirror as she washed her hands, she saw the flush on her cheeks from the wine.  Her eyes were sparkling and her smile was bright.  She was a having a good time. 

As she neared the table, her phone worked its way out of her back pocket and fell.  Bending to retrieve it, she heard two of Harry’s friends talking.  About her.

“She seems nice enough but she’s not the type he usually goes for.  Dresses like a fooking librarian.  And that song! What was that?  She’s too vanilla for him.” 

Gemma overheard them and turned and smacked the closest one on the back of the head.  Telling them to “Shut it, you wankers,” she saw Kacey picking up her phone.  She tried to catch her eye, but Kacey kept hers on the floor.   

Kacey was quiet after returning to her seat.  Harry, engrossed in the conversations, didn’t notice immediately.  Her turn at singing was coming up again and she signaled the waitress, ordering some fortification before her next song.  After his turn, Harry bounded back to the table, soundly kissing her before taking his seat next to her again.   He announced that it was time for her just as the waitress placed two shots of John Jameson’s finest in front of her.  Giving him a sly smile, she quickly downed the shots and licked her lips.  Fanning herself a little bit, she remarked “Ooh, it’s hot in here all of a sudden!”

Still fanning herself, Kacey stood up and began to unbutton her cardigan.  Harry smirked and shook his head, not knowing what she had planned, but sure it was going to be interesting.  She shrugged the jumper off her shoulders and handed it to Harry.   Underneath she was wearing a black leather and lace bustier with corset ties holding it together in the front.  Every male jaw at the table fell and Gemma busted out laughing.  Kacey strutted up to the mic and chose her song.  Harry knew it was trouble when he heard the drumbeat start.  She had chosen a Joan Jett version of an old Gary Glitter song.  Once the guitar started, the gaze of every man in the room was on her. 

Kacey cocked a hip and started singing directly to Harry.

“We've been here too long tryin' to get along Pretendin' that you're oh, so shy I'm a natural ma'am doin' all I can My temperature is runnin' high”

Her gyrations and body rolls would have done any exotic dancer proud.

“Do you wanna touch? (Yeah) Do you wanna touch? (Yeah) Do you wanna touch me there, where?”

Her pointing fingers left no doubt as to where.  At the bridge, she undulated on the microphone stand her hair flipped over one eye, attention firmly on Harry.  He, in turn, was staring at her with a knowing smile.

Making it through the rest of the song, she gave a body slide and crotch grab worthy of Mr. Styles himself as the last guitar stroke faded out.  She carefully stepped around the microphone stand and walked primly back to the table amid cheers and whistles from the men in the room (and sidelong glares from the women).  Gemma’s grin was huge and the rest of the crew sat stunned. 

Harry cleared his throat.  “Well, then. On that note…” he faded as he helped Kacey back into her jumper and began his goodbyes. 

Gemma hugged Kacey fiercely and whispered “Well done, you.”  Kacey grinned at her.

She walked ahead of Harry toward the door and heard him comment to his friends “It’s more of a spicy vanilla actually.”

Grinning he followed her out to the waiting car.

[trendingnewsb]

5 Ways Life Changes When You Suffer Depression As A Child

Can you imagine anything sadder than a clinically depressed eight-year-old? Just sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of Cheerios, watching Power Rangers before school, but unable to lift the spoon because he feels like he has a swirling black vortex in his chest sucking away all joy? Well, that was me.

Only 2 percent of children suffer from depression. Not only was I one of them, but I was also unlucky enough to get a side dish of intense childhood anxiety, which resulted in a series of panic attacks that often made it feel like the world was collapsing in around me and only me. I’m better now, but there is much to be learned from my awful, awful experience.

5

For A Kid, There’s No Frame Of Reference

A depressed adult at least knows what they’re going through. You’ve spent your entire life hearing about depression or knowing people who have it (even if they’re fictional characters; modern comedy is almost entirely about depression). You’ve seen commercials for antidepressants. Kids don’t have any of that — or at least I didn’t at the time. Muppet Babies and Batman: The Animated Series didn’t take the time to explain how sometimes you’re going to wake up feeling like you’d rather not exist and you won’t know why.

A lot of people suffering depression walk around looking at happy people and wondering how they do it. Now imagine you’re a child who’s looking at everyone else frolicking on the playground, wondering why they don’t want to break down in tears and sleep all day. “Very sad” was as much as my limited vocabulary and frame of reference gave me.

Read Next

David Goyer Is Too Broody For The Awesomeness That Is He-Man

For as confused as I was, the adults around me were even more baffled. My mother and teachers didn’t know whether I was suffering through a traumatic emotional experience (this all occurred after my parents went through a messy divorce), or if I just had overactive tear ducts that exploded every now and then. No one knew what to do with me, so I was treated like any other crying third-grader — either told to shut up or offered a shoulder to cry on that did nothing but give me a golden opportunity to smear snot all over someone’s shirt. For teachers, a problem they couldn’t yell at or tell to go to the principal’s office was a problem they couldn’t solve.

4

I Got Really Good At Hiding My Emotions

Sometimes childhood depression counterintuitively comes bundled with a ton of energy. It’s a sugar rush fueled by ennui. I was just as excessively irritable and prone to temper tantrums as I was to fits of profound sadness and endless streams of tears. As such, my fight-or-flight instincts were always on high alert. I was constantly on the lookout for the next thing that was going to hurt me, which eventually led to a series of panic attacks.

I remember that one day, we were sitting through a presentation in the cafeteria/auditorium when the entire student body broke out into a loud applause. The cacophonous hooting and hollering created a wave of sound that crushed me beneath it. I covered my ears and ducked my head. I went as fetal as I could while maintaining as much of my cool as possible. In what I still consider to be one of the greatest achievements of my life, I somehow managed to have a complete breakdown in the middle of a large crowd without a single person noticing.

After that, it almost became a game. Whenever I felt an attack coming on, I’d judge how well I was hiding it against how well I had hid previous episodes. I’d take into account all sorts of factors, like the intensity of the attack, the situation I was in, the number of people I had around me, and how embarrassed I’d feel if I got caught. I used all of those factors to determine how well I had performed. I was Moneyballing my depression. The auditorium episode scored pretty high.

Another time, I had an attack during a visit to the orthodontist, brought on by the stresses of getting my braces tightened. I disguised it as a coughing fit. I really should’ve gotten some kind of medal for that one, so I’ll give it to myself now.

Pixabay

3

I Had No Idea How To Talk To My Friends About It

Children, in fact, do a lot of silent suffering. They can’t verbalize much of anything other than the backstories of their favorite action figures (in excruciating detail, to anyone who’ll listen). So when I was around all my friends trying to have fun, unable to escape this ominous sense of despair, I had no idea what to do or say. Even then, I could recognize the innocence of childhood, since I had experienced it in all of its glory just the day before. But then I’d look around at all my friends and wonder how to break it to them that life is nothing but a bubbling cauldron of shit.

I was never able to figure out how to tell my best friend that I didn’t feel like climbing that big spooky banyan tree at the end of the block because getting all worked up like that would draw out the emotions. “Nah, you go ahead. I’ll be down here identifying with the dead leaves on the ground.” The only way to achieve some semblance of normality was to put on a tough face and pretend I wasn’t falling apart.

This meant never declining an invite to participate in childlike fun. I’m down for a bike ride, just as long as I can linger in the rear of the pack, so I can really wallow in being the last-place loser I felt like. I was always down for a neighborhood-wide game of manhunt, since it offered solid crying-in-the-neighbor’s-bushes time. It gave me even more motivation to find a great hiding spot. You might be shocked to learn that no, these coping mechanisms did not work out in the long term.

2

Not Being Able To Talk About It Turned Me Into A Bully

Humans have a horrible tendency to deal with negative feelings by making others feel even worse. Some kids master this at an early age. At least, I did.

One afternoon on the school playground, a friend said something which, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have cared about one way or another. Since I was on a depressed quest for vengeance against no one in particular, I angrily told him that if he didn’t shut up, I was going to spit on him. I then said that all eight or nine of us standing around in a circle talking would also spit on him (none of them had actually agreed to that).

He didn’t speak for the rest of the day. He told his parents, and his towering father, who I remember thinking looked like a hippie lumberjack, pulled me aside one afternoon. Rather than scold me, he told me that what I had done to his son was “very uncool.” As a kid obsessed with trying to be cool, that was devastating. I had a sense that some adults knew more about what I was going through than I did. He was one of them.

Not that it made a difference. I got into a lot of fights. I lost most of them, and didn’t care — fighting felt good. It was a way to channel the anger while pretending I was a Power Ranger fighting another one of Rita Repulsa’s hapless bad guys (it’s important to keep picturing me as a small child through all of this). If anyone slighted me, no matter how insignificant the infraction, I would unleash every curse word I absorbed through the couple of R-rated movies I’d caught secretly on cable.

I became an expert at targeting my victims’ most closely guarded insecurities with deadly precision (cruel people get that way via practice). Once, I asked a girl in my after-school care program if my friends and I could play Connect Four when she was done with it. She told me to get lost and stuck her tongue out. My human vulnerability sensors detected that she walked with noticeable limp, so I called her a cripple. She burst into tears.

I’m certain that this period of my life landed me a permanent spot on more than a few Kill Bill-style revenge lists. I was well on my way to being an adult with multiple felonies when my mom and school faculty started to piece together what was wrong.

1

I Had No Idea I Was Going Through Therapy

After my mom spoke to the administrative staff about how I was a walking cliche of troubled youth, I started seeing the school guidance counselor a couple of times a week to just talk. People may not realize that guidance counselors have degrees in educational psychology — they’re equipped to handle kids with mental health issues. They are the unsung heroes of any school, along with the janitors who clean up vomit and the lunch ladies who must heroically summon the will to not spit in the mashed potatoes every day. That’s the Justice League that keeps a school running.

I had no idea I was going to therapy. I thought I’d won a lottery where I got to take an hour-long vacation from class a couple of times a week. I figured that if all I have to do to get out of class was rip out my heart, lay bare my soul, and reveal every dark twisted horrific thought rolling around in my childish little brain, then great! Better get a box of permission slips ready, because I’m about to miss so much class that by the time I get back, everyone’s going to be uploading textbooks into their brain chips.

Everything I didn’t know was tormenting me came to light without a hint of resistance. I wasn’t put on medication, even though antidepressants are a common treatment for childhood depression. Someone just sat me down and asked me what was wrong. This helped tremendously. It still does.

I was fortunate in that this is all it took — a chance to explore my mind with a trained professional who knew how to sweet-talk kids into spilling their guts. It instilled in me tools I still use today, and it makes one wonder how many kids need this but don’t get it.

Earlier, I said that 2 percent of prepubescent kids suffer from depression. That figure comes from this study, which also points out that it’s hard as hell to spot it. Depressed kids may only complain of physical things (like bellyaches), and may even excel in school. Some channel their low self-esteem into attempts to please everyone, rather than just becoming an an angry little shithead. Still, if you see a raging little monster on a path to becoming a terrifying adult, remember that they may be one trained professional away from turning their life around.

Luis is hiding in the bushes crying again. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

Childhood is rough stuff. Remember, Disney movies will always be there for you.

If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-life-changes-when-you-suffer-depression-as-child/

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2BhKaaB via Viral News HQ

[mittel-schmerz-blog]

ava and olivia

I’m looking at the impossible amount of dust motes and hairs that have worked themselves into minute tumbleweeds in the space between the toilet and the wall. My cheek is pressed against the cold tile and I’m wondering how long I’ll stay down here. I was planning on just using the bathroom as usual... but then I felt a jolt.

It was Ava letting me know that she’s finished with work and will be here in an hour to pick me up.

When I first got my iBrow done it was radical; now I just think it’s fucking annoying. Eight months ago, I spent $2,500.00 on what was being hailed as ‘the only dermal piercing with a purpose’, but now I’m seriously considering getting it removed.

Honestly, the fact that notifications pop into my line of vision when I’m doing things like driving is just much more unsettling than I had anticipated. Once, I set up a Google Alert for Saint West. Then, that Thursday, as I was driving to work, I felt a shock and he was suddenly sitting right there on my dash, telling me about his latest endeavors.

Maddie sold me on getting this thing implanted in my face even though I was content with my Apple Watch. She told me how totally psychotic I looked talking into my hand in public, that this new low-touch technology would be perfect for my lifestyle. She, of course, kept her Apple Watch because she maintains that she can utilize the technology in an acceptable, ladylike manner and besides, she would look stupid with an eyebrow ring.

“God, Olivia, I don’t see why you’re content to collapse all the time,” Maddie says, exasperated. Right now she’s sitting on my bed, boring holes into my bottom half which is sticking out the door of my bathroom.

Now, sometimes, when I get a text message, I get so startled that I trip and fall. The alert is a low frequency hum, so you feel it more than you hear it. No one else on earth seems to have this problem, however. I asked the technician about it as she was putting the piercing gun to my face but all she said was, “Don’t worry, the mechanism is self explanatory” and pulled the trigger. So now I’m too embarrassed to admit to anyone that I still can’t figure it out. Even after going through all the training modules, I only ever seem to turn it off by accident.

The only thing I can do reliably is turn the whole thing off -- which seems counterproductive -- so I’m just trying to learn to live with it.

“I’m fine,” I say, but it comes out muffled because my face is glued to this floor.

Maddie can make out what I’m saying from this position even though my voice has to travel around the toilet, off the tub, and out the door to reach her. We have been here before.

“Bullshit,” she sniffs. “You’re always falling into things and then I have to scrape you off of disgusting public floors!”

“Well at least this time I fell in my own bedroom.”

“Ha.” But she’s not laughing. “You know, if you would just talk to Dr. Elano, I’m sure she would prescribe you something to prevent these spells, since you refuse to just, you know...” She Frankenstein-shudders like she’s being electrocuted.

She adds, quietly, “I know you’re down on it, but I really think a little ECT could be just the ticket.”

Electroconvulsive Therapy is the new ‘it’ thing again among celebrities and popular psychiatrists.

As far as Maddie knows, I’ve just had another fainting spell. The first time I fell in front of her, she called me a klutz. But then I got really somber and told her that, I had never told her before, but I suffer from Acute Early-Onset Clinical Ennui and that one of the symptoms was fainting in times of anxiety, and she believed me.

She doesn’t know shit about mental illness, but she reads Us Weekly enough to know words like ‘clinical’ and ‘anxiety’, and she understands them, if only in a very LA kind of way. I should just correct her, but I get a little thrill from the irony of her suggestion that I seek out convulsive therapy for my falling issue, so I let her keep suggesting it. I stifle a laugh.

“You have to admit,” I say, “The episodes are getting less and less frequent. I’m doing better!”

After the latest update, the vibrations are milder and even moderately refreshing. They still catch me off guard sometimes though and then, bam, I’m back on the floor.

“Olivia! You’re on the fucking floor! For Christ’s sake--”

To pre-empt a lecture on how I should 1) get up and 2) stop furrowing my brow she’s just trying to help I say, “Damnit, Madison, don’t start. I’m fine, okay? Just let me live.”

“I would hardly consider this living.” She pauses, pouting. “You could at least clean your bathroom regularly if you’re going to be spending extended periods of time on the floor in there. You’ve been down there for five whole minutes.”

“Nah,” I say, haltingly returning to my feet.

“Well at least take a shower. You haven’t showered in four days. Didn’t Ava say she’d be here at 7?”

“What does it matter? She’s gonna take one look at the hump on my back and leave.”

“It’s not as big as you think it is.”

“Oh really?”

“Listen, ‘Modo,” she croons, “You’re a total catch! Don’t worry about it.”

She thinks that calling me Quasimodo is funny. It’s not an actual hump but it might as well be.

I groan and pretend to shoot myself in the head and stumble into the shower.

Then, as much as I wish I didn’t, I worry about it. I worry about the superfine lines that criss-cross my body. Everyone who got an iBrow before it was debugged in June has the same all-over lightning flowers. Mine are fainter than some others’, only visible in direct lighting, but still noticeable.

The company was apparently made aware in February last year that the the radio waves emanating from the iBrow piercing caused scattered collagen inelasticity, but they didn’t go public with it until November. In the interim, the technicians made a cut on every sample of hydrating serum they could send you home with, plus they made commission on referrals to area plastic surgeons.

A class action lawsuit made it so that anyone who underwent the procedure before the system-wide upgrade is eligible for free monthly Restylane injections to counteract any premature wrinkle development caused by the technology. Getting people hooked on collagen fillers doesn’t exactly seem like justice though.

I’ve seen some of the women in my office when they’ve had to skip their standing appointments with their dermatologists, their skin sagging sadly, their faces looking like tufted couches. It’s tragic, really-- I committed too early. The current technology was so obviously on the horizon.

Another buzz. Ava says she can’t wait to meet me in person finally.

“Olivia! Don’t forget to moisturize!”

I do like she says. After I’ve toweled off and put on my bra and underwear and struggled into a dress with a too-long zipper, I spread melting coconut oil onto my ankles, knees, and elbows and then dab on a light facial sunscreen.

Once it’s had time to sink in, Maddie sits me down, her hands firm on my shoulders.

I must look nervous because she says, “Stop freaking out-- you’re gonna be fine. You like this girl, remember?”

But as much as you think you can know someone, you can never know them until you meet them in person.

Maddie expertly pulls my hair out of my face and positions it over my shoulders. She sweeps light and shadows across my face, adding to me a dimension and depth that I generally lack. She stands behind me smiling as I look at myself in the mirror. Somehow, the lightning blooming across the bridge of my nose looks charming.

Getting here, to tonight, took work. I’ve always felt uneasy about online dating, but having the profiles pop up spontaneously has taken all the pleasure out of it. Each woman seems more conventionally beautiful than the one before her. It also doesn’t help that their profile pictures appear at a 1:1 scale in front of me, which adds a disquieting sense of deja vu to every first meeting. Being single is impossible now.

The InYourFace InterfaceTM is seamless, but now it’s much more difficult to pretend I’m not just ignoring people when I don’t respond right away. It’s overwhelming to be so available all the time. Since January, I’ve steadfastly turned the iBrow off from 9:00 PM to 9:00 AM to preserve my own sanity and a healthy sleeping pattern.

Tens of women have been off-put by my mixed messages: I show only intermittent enthusiasm, according to my stats. But I’ve really, really been trying with Ava. We average 1 message exchange per 20 minutes which makes her my “Soul Mate” according to the app, up from “Sweetheart” last week. It’s the only time I’ve considered someone promising in the last four years, so I’m working my ass off.

I turn to thank Maddie but I don’t have a chance to say anything because as soon as I open my mouth, the doorbell rings. I lope over to the door as slowly as possible, trying to be cool. But I’m too excited and I can’t help but to fling the door open. When it opens, Ava is standing amid the green glare of my porch light.

In this sickening glow, she looks devastating. Her eyes are shimmering and she has these lovely, fluttering eyelashes. Light pools in the waves of her hair, making her tresses more than a little bit mesmerizing. I’m standing there thinking how thrilled I am to see her, this woman who looks so ethereal. Even though we’ve only been talking for two weeks, it feels so full and perfect.

“Hi, Olivia?”

“Ava!”

She takes the two steps between us and hugs me, taking me a bit by surprise. She laughs.

She tells me how great it is to meet me and asks if I want to check out this dive bar over on 4th that serves the most excellent fried artichoke hearts, and also, do I like fried artichoke hearts? Because she loves them.

I can barely move my mouth to respond because I am overcome by the sight of her standing here in front of me, but I manage to eke out, “Yeah! Let’s go!”

I turn around to Maddie behind me who has a grin and two thumbs up. I suppress a laugh and close the door behind me. After locking it, I turn back around and follow Ava down the stairs and onto the sidewalk.

We walk the six blocks to the bar and the conversation is light and funny. We bump forearms and exchange sideways glances, and I feel like I’m standing on the edge of something.

Over nervous beers, we talk about our weeks. I tell her that I’m dying because work is killing me. Some people have two iBrows, one work and one personal, but not me. My face has been numb all week. I tell her about my business-and-pleasure iBrow piercing, and how much I hate it, that I’m scheduling the removal for this week; I just can’t stand being this plugged in, you know? She nods along.

Sizzling golden artichoke hearts appear in front of us before she can respond. I pop one into my mouth, rhapsodic, and she coughs.

“So let me get this straight,” she says, “You hate talking to people.”

“I don’t hate talking... I just don’t like talking all the time… Is that weird?”

I push up my glasses and absently finger the lightning strike on my nose, feeling my face heat up.

“Well,” she clears her throat and shifts in her seat. “It just makes me feel like this whole thing would be kind of an imposition on you.”

“How do you mean?”

“Here’s my perspective, right?”

“Okay…” I lean in.

“I meet this girl. And I’m talking to this girl for two weeks and she seems really cool. I get to her place and I’m so excited to see her in person. We’re on a date and as she’s sitting across from me, all big eyes and dazzling wit, and she tells me that this thing that I’ve really been enjoying and wanting to expand on has been a huge chore.”

“It’s not that way at all! It’s--”

“Oh come on, you just said as much. I mean, you hardly text back-- it’s like, what are you even doing? You always have your phone on you.”

I rear back, shocked.

“For the last two weeks I’ve talked to you more than I’ve talked to anyone else, I have done nothing but swoon since you showed up on my stoop. I’m really tryin’ hard here!”

“It shouldn’t feel like work-- it should just be easy.”

She futzes with her purse like she’s getting ready to walk out of this bar.

“Wait, are you leaving? You’re writing me off after two weeks and one hour?”

“Look, Olivia, you’re entitled to talk to people on your own schedule, but I want to be with someone that wants a partner. It doesn’t sound to me like that’s something you’re interested in.”

I look at her for two long seconds, mouth open.

Slowly, I say, “I don’t know why you’re assuming that… but what you’re talking about… I guess I’m just not wired for that.”

“First of all,” she says hotly, “You are literally wired for it.”

[trendingnewsb]

5 Ways Life Changes When You Suffer Depression As A Child

Can you imagine anything sadder than a clinically depressed eight-year-old? Just sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of Cheerios, watching Power Rangers before school, but unable to lift the spoon because he feels like he has a swirling black vortex in his chest sucking away all joy? Well, that was me.

Only 2 percent of children suffer from depression. Not only was I one of them, but I was also unlucky enough to get a side dish of intense childhood anxiety, which resulted in a series of panic attacks that often made it feel like the world was collapsing in around me and only me. I’m better now, but there is much to be learned from my awful, awful experience.

5

For A Kid, There’s No Frame Of Reference

A depressed adult at least knows what they’re going through. You’ve spent your entire life hearing about depression or knowing people who have it (even if they’re fictional characters; modern comedy is almost entirely about depression). You’ve seen commercials for antidepressants. Kids don’t have any of that — or at least I didn’t at the time. Muppet Babies and Batman: The Animated Series didn’t take the time to explain how sometimes you’re going to wake up feeling like you’d rather not exist and you won’t know why.

A lot of people suffering depression walk around looking at happy people and wondering how they do it. Now imagine you’re a child who’s looking at everyone else frolicking on the playground, wondering why they don’t want to break down in tears and sleep all day. “Very sad” was as much as my limited vocabulary and frame of reference gave me.

Read Next

David Goyer Is Too Broody For The Awesomeness That Is He-Man

For as confused as I was, the adults around me were even more baffled. My mother and teachers didn’t know whether I was suffering through a traumatic emotional experience (this all occurred after my parents went through a messy divorce), or if I just had overactive tear ducts that exploded every now and then. No one knew what to do with me, so I was treated like any other crying third-grader — either told to shut up or offered a shoulder to cry on that did nothing but give me a golden opportunity to smear snot all over someone’s shirt. For teachers, a problem they couldn’t yell at or tell to go to the principal’s office was a problem they couldn’t solve.

4

I Got Really Good At Hiding My Emotions

Sometimes childhood depression counterintuitively comes bundled with a ton of energy. It’s a sugar rush fueled by ennui. I was just as excessively irritable and prone to temper tantrums as I was to fits of profound sadness and endless streams of tears. As such, my fight-or-flight instincts were always on high alert. I was constantly on the lookout for the next thing that was going to hurt me, which eventually led to a series of panic attacks.

I remember that one day, we were sitting through a presentation in the cafeteria/auditorium when the entire student body broke out into a loud applause. The cacophonous hooting and hollering created a wave of sound that crushed me beneath it. I covered my ears and ducked my head. I went as fetal as I could while maintaining as much of my cool as possible. In what I still consider to be one of the greatest achievements of my life, I somehow managed to have a complete breakdown in the middle of a large crowd without a single person noticing.

After that, it almost became a game. Whenever I felt an attack coming on, I’d judge how well I was hiding it against how well I had hid previous episodes. I’d take into account all sorts of factors, like the intensity of the attack, the situation I was in, the number of people I had around me, and how embarrassed I’d feel if I got caught. I used all of those factors to determine how well I had performed. I was Moneyballing my depression. The auditorium episode scored pretty high.

Another time, I had an attack during a visit to the orthodontist, brought on by the stresses of getting my braces tightened. I disguised it as a coughing fit. I really should’ve gotten some kind of medal for that one, so I’ll give it to myself now.

Pixabay

3

I Had No Idea How To Talk To My Friends About It

Children, in fact, do a lot of silent suffering. They can’t verbalize much of anything other than the backstories of their favorite action figures (in excruciating detail, to anyone who’ll listen). So when I was around all my friends trying to have fun, unable to escape this ominous sense of despair, I had no idea what to do or say. Even then, I could recognize the innocence of childhood, since I had experienced it in all of its glory just the day before. But then I’d look around at all my friends and wonder how to break it to them that life is nothing but a bubbling cauldron of shit.

I was never able to figure out how to tell my best friend that I didn’t feel like climbing that big spooky banyan tree at the end of the block because getting all worked up like that would draw out the emotions. “Nah, you go ahead. I’ll be down here identifying with the dead leaves on the ground.” The only way to achieve some semblance of normality was to put on a tough face and pretend I wasn’t falling apart.

This meant never declining an invite to participate in childlike fun. I’m down for a bike ride, just as long as I can linger in the rear of the pack, so I can really wallow in being the last-place loser I felt like. I was always down for a neighborhood-wide game of manhunt, since it offered solid crying-in-the-neighbor’s-bushes time. It gave me even more motivation to find a great hiding spot. You might be shocked to learn that no, these coping mechanisms did not work out in the long term.

2

Not Being Able To Talk About It Turned Me Into A Bully

Humans have a horrible tendency to deal with negative feelings by making others feel even worse. Some kids master this at an early age. At least, I did.

One afternoon on the school playground, a friend said something which, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have cared about one way or another. Since I was on a depressed quest for vengeance against no one in particular, I angrily told him that if he didn’t shut up, I was going to spit on him. I then said that all eight or nine of us standing around in a circle talking would also spit on him (none of them had actually agreed to that).

He didn’t speak for the rest of the day. He told his parents, and his towering father, who I remember thinking looked like a hippie lumberjack, pulled me aside one afternoon. Rather than scold me, he told me that what I had done to his son was “very uncool.” As a kid obsessed with trying to be cool, that was devastating. I had a sense that some adults knew more about what I was going through than I did. He was one of them.

Not that it made a difference. I got into a lot of fights. I lost most of them, and didn’t care — fighting felt good. It was a way to channel the anger while pretending I was a Power Ranger fighting another one of Rita Repulsa’s hapless bad guys (it’s important to keep picturing me as a small child through all of this). If anyone slighted me, no matter how insignificant the infraction, I would unleash every curse word I absorbed through the couple of R-rated movies I’d caught secretly on cable.

I became an expert at targeting my victims’ most closely guarded insecurities with deadly precision (cruel people get that way via practice). Once, I asked a girl in my after-school care program if my friends and I could play Connect Four when she was done with it. She told me to get lost and stuck her tongue out. My human vulnerability sensors detected that she walked with noticeable limp, so I called her a cripple. She burst into tears.

I’m certain that this period of my life landed me a permanent spot on more than a few Kill Bill-style revenge lists. I was well on my way to being an adult with multiple felonies when my mom and school faculty started to piece together what was wrong.

1

I Had No Idea I Was Going Through Therapy

After my mom spoke to the administrative staff about how I was a walking cliche of troubled youth, I started seeing the school guidance counselor a couple of times a week to just talk. People may not realize that guidance counselors have degrees in educational psychology — they’re equipped to handle kids with mental health issues. They are the unsung heroes of any school, along with the janitors who clean up vomit and the lunch ladies who must heroically summon the will to not spit in the mashed potatoes every day. That’s the Justice League that keeps a school running.

I had no idea I was going to therapy. I thought I’d won a lottery where I got to take an hour-long vacation from class a couple of times a week. I figured that if all I have to do to get out of class was rip out my heart, lay bare my soul, and reveal every dark twisted horrific thought rolling around in my childish little brain, then great! Better get a box of permission slips ready, because I’m about to miss so much class that by the time I get back, everyone’s going to be uploading textbooks into their brain chips.

Everything I didn’t know was tormenting me came to light without a hint of resistance. I wasn’t put on medication, even though antidepressants are a common treatment for childhood depression. Someone just sat me down and asked me what was wrong. This helped tremendously. It still does.

I was fortunate in that this is all it took — a chance to explore my mind with a trained professional who knew how to sweet-talk kids into spilling their guts. It instilled in me tools I still use today, and it makes one wonder how many kids need this but don’t get it.

Earlier, I said that 2 percent of prepubescent kids suffer from depression. That figure comes from this study, which also points out that it’s hard as hell to spot it. Depressed kids may only complain of physical things (like bellyaches), and may even excel in school. Some channel their low self-esteem into attempts to please everyone, rather than just becoming an an angry little shithead. Still, if you see a raging little monster on a path to becoming a terrifying adult, remember that they may be one trained professional away from turning their life around.

Luis is hiding in the bushes crying again. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

Childhood is rough stuff. Remember, Disney movies will always be there for you.

If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-life-changes-when-you-suffer-depression-as-child/

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2BhKaaB via Viral News HQ