before you know about women, you hear that you do not need to love the man, just that you need to love him through his manhood. which is to say you have seen the future painted in lamb's blood over your eyes - how your mother shoots you a look about your father's inability to cook right. how your aunt holds her wineglass and says i'm gonna kill em. men, right! how your best friend bickers with her boyfriend, how she says i can't help it. i come back to him.
you learn: men are gonna cheat. men aren't going to listen when you're talking, because you're nagging. men think emotions are stupid. they think your life is vapid and your hobbies are embarrassing. men will slam things, but that's because men are allowed to be angry. if you get loud, you're hysterical. if a man gets loud - well, men are animals, men are dogs, men can't control their hands or their eyes or their bodies. they're going to make a snide comment about you in the locker room, about your body, about how you're so fucking annoying. you're going to give him kids, and he will give you the money for the kids, and you're going to be running the house 24/7 - but he gets to relax after a long day, because his job is stressful. the man is on stage, and is a comedian, and says "women!"
and you are supposed to love that. you are supposed to love men through how horrible they are to you - because that's what women do. that's what good women do. wife material. your father even told you once - it'll make sense when you're older. it was like staring down a very lonely tunnel.
it feels like something's caught in your throat, but it's all you know, so. it's okay that you see sex as a necessary tool, a sort of okay-enough ritual to keep him happy, even though he doesn't seem to care about happiness as-applied-to you. it is relationship upkeep. it is kissing him and smiling even though he didn't brush his teeth. it is getting on your knees and looking up and holding back a sigh because he barely holds you as you panic through the night. it's not like the sex is bad and you do like feeling wanted. and besides! he's a man! like... they're another species. you'll never be able to actually communicate, right. he isn't listening.
you just don't get it. you don't feel that sense of i'm gonna climb him like a tree. mostly it just feels fucking exhausting. you play the part perfectly. you smile and nod and are "effortlessly" charming. and it's fine! it's alright! you even love him, if you're looking. you could have good life, and a good family, and perfectly happy.
in the late night you google: am i broken. you google i'm not attracted to my husband. you google i get turned on by books but not by him. you google how to get better in bed.
the first time he yells at you, it almost feels like blankness. like - of course this is happening. this is always how it was going to end up. men get angry, and they yell, and you sit there in silence.
you mention it to your friend - just the once - while you're drunk. she shrugs and says it's like that with me too, i just try to forget and move on. men are always gonna hear what they want to. pick your battles and say sorry even though he's in the wrong. you play solitaire online for a month. you go to your therapist appointment and preach about how you're both so in love.
after all, you have a future to want. nobody lied about it - how many instagram posts say marriage is hard. say real love takes work. say we fight like cats and dogs but the best part is that we always make up. how many of your friends say happy anniversary to the best and worst thing to ever happen to me. if you really loved him - loved yourself too - you'd accept that men are just different from you.
the first time she kisses you, it's on a dare at a party. something large and terrifying whips through your body. you wake up sweating from dreams where her mouth is encrusted with pearls and you pick them off one by one with your teeth. fuck. you sit at the computer and your almost-finished game of sim city. you think about your potential perfect life and your potential future family. you google am i gay quiz with your little hands shaking.
you delete each letter slowly. you don't need to love him. you just need to keep going.
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"Marry me."
He’s hardly lucid enough to hear himself, but it's the first thing Vash whines when he sinks into your heat, allowing those baby blues to roll further into his head than his toes can curl against his soles.
"Marry me, marry me."
It takes some strain for you to hear those words over the incessant creaking of the dingy hotel bedframe below; but perhaps you should be grateful for moments like this. A life of sandstorms, drought, and scarcity follows the typhoon himself; and strays like you both— vagabonds, more like— are rarely afforded the luxury to settle and lap their fill.
It’s not your fault you ended up swept into bed, spread yet again beneath your dearest friend. He just looks so unbearably pretty like this. The waves of viridian lights that dust the night sky drip in through the window beside him, illuminating his face and sharply contrasting against the flush that creeps down his neck.
Jaw slack, eyes wide, and palms clutching the sheets on either side of your head; you never stood a chance at saying no to him.
"Jumping straight to marriage, huh." You twirl a blonde strand, wrapped around your finger. "That desperate? Aww, puppy," you croon with sympathy, and Vash buries himself at the sound of it. You’re aware it’s an attempt to hide when he shudders into your neck like this, bleeding insecurity alongside arousal; but it’s easy to forget the pangs in your chest when his hand paws between your thighs with a whimper, desperate to be of service to you.
"Please don't say it like that, miss," he huffs. "You'll make me— you know I'll— oh," he gives up halfway through the sentence and squeezes his eyes shut so tight he sees scorching, hot white. It's desperate, the way he grits his teeth, frantic to hold himself back.
Such a polite boy.
His pace picks up once more to the rhythm of the mattress, huffing with each indulgent stroke. The thick of it stretches you full; and judging by the stutter of his hips, Vash's restraint has been wound tight enough to snap.
"Sorry, sorry, sorry," he babbles, a mumbled apology lining each thrust, clipped wet in his watering mouth. "Feels so good." A shake of his head, a moan from his throat. "Don't think I got it in me to last, I'm real sorry—"
"It's okay," you soothe. "I gotcha. Let go."
And your words of permission wring the pleasure from him, sucking the air from his lungs. When his hips finally stall, it's with his teeth buried deep in your skin and a hiccup rising in his throat.
There’s an uncertainty in his pout once you both find your breaths. He chews one cheek and looks toward the open window when he whispers, low enough for no one but you to hear.
“I meant what I said, you know.”
"Yeah, I know." Your palm rests against his heated cheek. When he leans into it like a stray dog might burrow into a warm bed, it's with his eyes fluttered shut.
"Someday, pretty boy." You kiss the mark beneath his left eye, smiling at the scrunch of his nose. "Next time, I expect a ring."
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What Kind of Plants to Add
This is my sixth post in a series I’ll be making on how to increase biodiversity on a budget! I’m not an expert–just an enthusiast–but I hope something you find here helps!
I’d love to be able to give a quick and easy list of things to add, but frankly I can’t do that. I can strongly encourage you, however, to look at these categories of plants and do further research to discover what’s native to your area, so you can plant things that’ll have the most impact in your particular area.
With that being said, I will mention a few plants as examples. This is in no way, shape, or form me telling you that you have to or even should buy these specific plants. Not every plant works well in every place in every garden, not to even mention across countries. Above all, if you’re wondering what plants you should be adding, I can wholeheartedly say plants that are native to your area--or at least nonnative non-invasive.
Flowers
Flowers are some of the most common ways people work to increase biodiversity in their gardens, and who can blame them? Seeing pops of color out your window, and directly seeing the impact via butterflies and bees visiting the garden? It’s a win-win for us and the wildlife!
Flowers--especially native wildflowers--are a quick, easy, and cheap way to increase wildlife traffic in your garden. Perennial gardens are more likely to get you the most bang for your buck, as they’ll come back year after year if you treat them well. But don’t dismiss annuals--if you get ones that easily reseed, they’ll eagerly return on their own! If you can, do your best to ensure that the flowers you plant all have different blooming periods--that way, your garden can support wildlife throughout the year instead of for just one brief season.
Flowers are environmental super boosters. Their nectar and pollen can feed insects and birds, their stems and leaves can provide nesting materials for all sorts of creatures, and their seeds are a popular food source among birds at all times of the year.
Climbing Plants
Climbing plants can be fantastic options for maximizing your impact. If you have limited ground space, growing up can provide interest as well as additional habitat for all kinds of creatures.
Training plants up a trellis, fence, or bare wall offers food, shelter, and habitat. Trumpet vines, passionflowers, honeysuckles, and more will provide sweet nectar for pollinators as well as nesting and hiding spaces for other wildlife like birds, bugs, and lizards. Do note that in some cases, climbing plants can actually affect the structural integrity of walls and roofs if allowed to climb too much and too far along a house, so be careful.
Bushes/Shrubs
Bushes provide shelter for creatures, which then provides hunting grounds for other animals. Their fallen leaves and petals can be food and shelter for detritivores, amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals--and they also provide good cover for moving around the garden, for creatures who like to stay hidden. They can be a bit more pricey to obtain--unless you get cuttings or seeds and are willing to wait--but they’ll definitely be worth it, and they’re typically low-maintenance once they’re established.
Bonus points if you get a flowering and fruiting bush, like bottlebrush, serviceberry, lilac, or others. This’ll make your bushes not only a place of shelter, but a food source as well--and depending on the kind you pick, may be food for you too! Making a garden border with a series of bushes can be a great option to providing lots of habitat, if you can manage it.
Shrubs with pithy or hollow stems are excellent options for supporting solitary bees. Some examples you could look into are elderberry, raspberry, blackberry, or sumac.
Trees
Trees have a high up-front cost and take awhile to grow, but once they’re settled in place they provide crucial habitat to all kinds of creatures! Insects will be attracted to flowers they may provide, or to nest in the wood. Others may eat the leaves as food, or use them as nesting materials. Birds will perch and nest in trees, and feed off the fruits and seeds and insects that also use the tree. Squirrels also use trees as nesting places, piling up dead leaves into huge clusters to raise their young in, and will absolutely feast on any nuts the tree may provide. Mice, badgers, and more will feast on fallen fruits or seeds, and bats roost in the trunks when given the chance. Detritivores eat fallen leaves and decomposing fruits, providing further food for hunting creatures. Trees can also be good for us--they help block out noise and air pollution, and are the poster child for taking CO2 and making it breathable oxygen. Not to mention they can provide plenty of food for us, too. Nesting grounds, hunting grounds, shelter from weather, and more--trees are, in my opinion, likely to be the best way to boost biodiversity long-term. If you can get your hands on a sapling for cheap and can care for it for awhile, I’d definitely give it a shot! Make sure the tree won’t get too big for where you’re growing it, though--you’ve definitely gotta plan for the long-term before you plant any.
Some trees can be grown in containers. Though they won’t become gigantic branching behemoths, they’ll still do their part to support all the life that depends on them. Growing a tree from seed may take awhile, but could be an easy option to getting one if you have the patience--the trees are more than happy to help you, as they drop tons of seeds and fruit in fall for you to gather.
Groundcover
Bare soil is the enemy of microbial life in the soil, and while small pockets of bare soil can be great nesting places for bees and other insects, having swaths of empty soil should be avoided. Groundcover plants grow low to the ground in a sprawling habit, and will often spread quite easily on their own. This is a great way to provide shelter, keep soil temperatures cool, block out weeds, and give your soil life a chance to thrive.
Sometimes, ground covers don’t even have to be planted in the ground. Shallow-rooted plants like succulents, ferns, and alyssum can be planted into cracks in stone walls, and moss can be planted by making moss graffiti and painting it onto a surface. As with climbing plants, do make sure that you don’t cause extra damage to important walls and housing foundations.
Host Plants
Host plants get their own section, because plants of all kinds can be host plants for different creatures! It’s common to think only flowers can be host plants in the beginning, but in reality, many bushes and trees are host plants to dozens of species of butterflies and moths. Honestly, I feel that factor's not talked about enough. Look up what insects live in your area and what kind of host plants they need, and plant some if you can! Bonus points if you can plant a variety of them--I know that there’s hundreds of kinds of milkweed, each one flowering and leafing up around different times of the year. Planting several varieties of milkweed, then, would provide monarchs with food through several seasons, allowing many more of them to grow up in your garden!
Nectar Plants
Plants that provide nectar to insects is a great foundation to increasing biodiversity! This is, of course, many native wildflowers (and even nonnative wildflowers, though be sure they aren’t invasives who’ll do more harm than good), but many native bushes, vines, and trees will also provide nectar to hungry pollinators!
Keystone Species
To be frank, some plants can have a bigger impact than others in a landscape. By all means, every bit helps, but if you want to boost biodiversity quickly there are a few plants that can essentially serve as the backbone of local ecosystems that you can grow in anything from a balcony pot to a small patch of your backyard. These plants can be different depending on where you are, so do your research to find out what would be best to grow in your area. If you can’t get them all? That’s alright! But even hitting just a few of these target species really can do a lot.
That’s the end of this post! My next post is gonna be about things to keep in mind/continue to do once you get plants in the ground! Until then, I hope this advice was helpful! Feel free to reply with any questions, your success stories, or anything you think I may have forgotten to add in!
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You draw Jamil so kissable idk what to say <3 (compliment)
AUGSLDKJFSDL THANK YOU 😭💕
idk what else to say either but i'm giggling so much i appreciate the compliment a lot
seeing you say that jamil looking kissable in my style makes me go akdfjkhdlkjlds
also his eyes and his hair are my favorite parts to draw actually 🥺
anyways uhhh that reminds me just for fun i'm gonna take this opportunity to compile some jamiyuu art from a few months ago when i was still getting back into twst and jamil unceremoniously put my heart in a chokehold.
this was with my beloved first yuu :D
(now i've kinda moved them on to riddle and the rest of the heartslabyul gang bc i'm handing jamil over to yuusha)
(all of these poses were referenced from mellon_soup on insta!)
(specifically 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6)
i'm not that great with coming up with poses so i had fun with mellon_soup's when i was first drawing twst ship art.
sometimes i might still go back and reference because they have some other fun poses i want to try out 🤔
i'm also going to try and go back to this drawing style with yuusha because i think it's more visually appealing to me. my sketches/doodles are hella messy.
but i'm also kinda lazy and this takes more time. and i want to get ideas done before i lose interest in them. augh it's so hard to compromise 😔
but yeah anyways that’s all i have to unnecessarily ramble about. thanks for reading if you've reached this far!
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