#my friend said im taking a day in bed to rot so its on brand

[bambinification]

I have a weird case of a degenerative spine disease that has only been aided in severity by me being on a chemo drug (yikes) for 10 years and counting. So in honor of the fact that I do not and probably never will get adequate treatment for it, I'm going to start calling it chronic wasting disease instead

[dulceackles]

How much salt can ants handle / Victoria De angelis

Requested: no 

summary: as the night sets y/n finds herself suffering with anxiety. However, she gets a call from victoria who takes her on an adventure beautiful enough to ease her racing mind and a broken heart.

Pairing: Victoria De Angelis x reader (she/her, third person)

word count: 1.7k

content and warnings: angst, tw anxiety

In a dim light the room looked heavy. Like the walls might stumble and the sealing might fall. In a dim light of her bedroom, y/n felt her mind touch the rye needle. The art of taking things easy was something y/n had never learned. In her mind, she didn’t know where the world ended or who loved her. A lot of the time what she knew was only the crooked feeling of her own skin tightening around her like a rigid corset or her breathing getting stuck in her throat. And so t was that night too. 

She couldn’t tell what were the big things so she made the big out of them all. And the future full of big things made itself terrifying to a small human. Y/n got up from her bed. She had been trying to sleep thoughts away but what didn’t come as a surprise, head full of disasters was hard to sleep with. The cold floor felt piercing underneath her bare feet. Slowly she walked to the old sofa sitting in the back of  her living room. 

Sometimes she made a list in her head of all the bad things that could happen. And after that, if she was ever ready, she made a list of all the bad ways she could react to the bad things happening. A lot of the time it felt like the birds didn’t arrive at the glow of spring or like the sky never cleared. She knew most of her fears were irrational, stupid as someone would say. Still, everything stopped them from going away. She wished that maybe when she was older it’d get easier but more than that she feared they never would. 

Corset, that was her skin was. Then what sounded like a firework in the silence, her phone rang. She looked at her phone screen with her tired eyes. It was Victoria. A million bad things could have happened for her to call y/n at night, atleast that’s what y/n thought but as she answered the phone, she heard Victoria’s warming voice. 

"Hi," her voice was energetic like it wasn't midnight at all. "I hope I didn't wake you up."

Victoria knew y/n ralely slept at those hours. Many times they had been texting at two o'clock in night, wishing time would stop and night would last little longer. And y/n loved that about her, that like the sky was for mountains she was always there for her. Over the last year that she had known her she had grown feelings towards her she was too afraid to admit outload.

"Oh no, i was awake." Y/n muttered to the phone her voice still slightly shaking and she wished Victoria wouldn't notice. She wasn't feeling great but Victoria defendly had snapped her out of her own stormy mind.

"I can't sleep, I think I took a little too long nap at 5 pm but I also heard there's a blood moon tonight," Victoria explained herself from the other side of the line. "So wanna come to watch it with me? To the swing?"

The swing was the place Victoria had showed y/n the first time they ever met. They'd been drunk at friends' party and the story had taken elsewhere and so the two girls had found each other on this forgotten field with only the threes and one old swing.

"a blood moon?" Y/n asked.

"Yeah. Thought i'd be pretty cool." Y/n could only imagine the expression Victoria had on her face. Sometimes she got really excited over spontanious things and y/n never wanted to be the one to ruin it.

"Sure let's go." Y/n said to the phone. She was pretty happy about getting outside the dark apartment she had been rotting in for the past few days and feeling all the emotions she didn't want to feel.

"Good cus im already at your door." Victoria laughed.

“What?” Y/n trots to the window on her left and as she looks down to the apartment front, she indeed sees the light-haired girl with a big smile on her face under the street lights.

Y/n chuckles a little bit, "alright, I'll come down in a sec."

There was only one store in the whole tinpot sleeping town that was open during the night and even though it meant a little longer walk, the girls were certain the moon could not be watched without a family-sized pack of chips.

The greenish-yellow drugstore light flickered over them as they searched the stacks from those one specific brand of cheap flavored chips they had grown found over mainly because it was what they always bought when they were together and it was night. It had become this unwritten rule that where there was night, food, Victoria and y/n, the food was these chips.

“I swear to God if they don't have them.” Victoria already blustered until both of their eyes snatched into the orange pack with pretentious font over it.

"There!" Both of them yelped at the same time causing the tired-looking cashier to glared at them like he was about to kick them out simply because the girls were too awake for him to have them in his store at that time of the night but then again, he hated drunk party people more than he hated night owls.

Victoria and y/n grabbed the chip back and ran to the cash register like there was only one second left. And how could have they known but as the chip back flowted on the black assembly line, y/n felt as if maybe there was.

" thank you!" Victoria thanked the cashier as she grabbed y/n's hand and began to hasten out of the store.

Victoria's shoft hand felt electric on y/n skin. Sometimes it almost slipped from her mouth that she wished Victoria's hand would never leave hers or more so that no stranger's hand would ever find Victoria's. But of course over anything she wished as an endlessly burning sun that one day Victoria would hold someone's hand that maybe was stranger to her but a lover to Victoria. Sometimes she wish it could have been her but something behind her eat whispered to her that prehaps she was the worst thing Victoria had ever gotten attached to and that's why it never slipped from her month.

The moon indeed was red that night. Hanging in the sky it shimmered the earth with its red cast. The dirt underneath their toes rustled as they finally reached the swing.

"Take a swing, I'll see how many chips you can catch." Victoria said as she opened the chip back and prepared herself to aim at y/n's month.

Y/n giggled. She maybe had played the game last time in elementary school but she also remembered being good at it.

Y/n pushes herself into the swing and launched herself forward, trying to get into the best speed possible.

The rough old rope felt foul against y/n palms as she holds onto the swing and Victoria tried to throw chips at her but quite frankly, in the dark y/n couldn't tell at all where the chips were flying at.

"This was harder than I remembered." Y/n laught as victoria waved her hands.

"Did you catch any?" Victoria giggled. They both knew this was dumb but it was the best part of it.

"No I mean one hit my face and that was the closest one" y/n stopped the swing from swinging.

"Damn. Well, the ants gonna have a diner party tonight then." Victoria walked closer to y/n and sat on her lap to the swing. A lot of the times they just came to the swing to sit and talk and because there was only one swing, they quite often also tested the ability and streight of the old ropes holding the swing on the tree.

"Not sure how much salt the ants can handle tho." Y/n said as she wrapped her arms around Victoria.

"Me either, maybe not at all." Victoria said as she watched the moon over them. "It is red indeed." Victoria signed.

"Yeah, it is." Y/n could smell the sweet smell of her soft hair. She wanted to lean her head against her neck but resisted because what she thought was prevailed to exposing the truth that she thought she was hiding.

"You know what else was red? Your eyes when you came down the stairs." Victoria got up and turned to face her. "So what's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong, Vic." Y/n let her cold hands fall to her lap.

"I also know when you lie." Victoria crossed her arms, eyeing y/n who still sat on the squeaky swing.

Y/n just stared right back of her. She didn't really know what to say or how to express what was wrong. In a way, she hoped she'd understand or that she'd know how she felt when everything felt big and the sky was falling. But she also feared she was a blue burden and so she didn't know what to say.

Victoria signed. It spiked y/n's heart because she didn't want to make her frustrated or angry with her, she just didn't know what to say and she didn't feel brave enough either.

But what came to y/n as an suprise, Victoria leaned little bit forward and pressed her warm lips againgst her fraught onces. Victoria's lips felt soft against hers and her tongue slowly traced her lips. It was tender sweet and y/n heart race and blush rose as she tasted Victoria. Y/n lifted her hands to gently pull her closer and Victoria slightly smiled into the kiss of how into it y/n was getting.

Soon Victoria pulled away, leaving y/n swollen lips. She looked up to her and Victoria gently run her thumb over y/n's lips before sitting back into her lap and wrapping y/n's arms back around her.

"When you feel like talking just tell me." She said as she watched the moon that was just as red as was her heart. "I truly believe you'd feel better if you sometimes talked to someone."

Y/n nobbed, and then she wrapped her arms tighter around her snuggled her head into her neck.

[saints-row-2]

the following is a creative writing ‘essay’ i wrote as part of a class on psychogeography, about Stilwater. i think i linked to this briefly before but i got asked to post it so im posting it now. 

But this Vision Remains Fragmentary

I came to Stilwater five years ago, mostly because I had nothing better to do and nowhere better to be. There were other options; San Andreas, or New Austin, or Los Santos, but I chose to come to Stilwater. On the edge of a lake, in the middle of Michigan, Stilwater is a tiny city that might have been nice forty, fifty years ago. The city has a huge factory district, so I guess it made its money off producing something at some point, but now they’re all closed. It’s a mystery how Stilwater makes any money at all. Most of the city just doesn’t.

Stilwater has always been rife with crime, had a crime family decades old stuck in a war with their younger rivals, tearing the city apart for only yet another gang to slip in through the cracks and monopolise the bits of the city not yet claimed. The three gangs divided Stilwater up into factions and fought hellishly on the boundary lines. Anyone could get caught in the crossfire, and anyone did – the number one cause of death in Stilwater was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It didn’t really matter where you were; the projects in Sunnyvale Gardens amongst the run-down apartment blocks, or the wealthy suburban houses in Tidal Spring, it was all open for invasion.

I came to Stilwater, but most importantly, I came to Saint’s Row. Saint’s Row is a small neighbourhood on the corner of Stilwater, surrounded on two sides by open water. Historically, it has been one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city, wedged between the Red Light district and the factories and truck yards in Charles Town and Pilsen. It is the wrong place. Long past its prime, half full of empty buildings and half full of homes rotting with people still inside them, Saint’s Row was a desolate place to live. By far the most violent neighbourhood in Stilwater, abandoned to be a failure inside a city that was already suffering. Somehow Saint’s Row never fell under the banner of one gang or another; people fought there, but no one ever claimed it for themselves, the title of ownership rolling around between factions until someone finally decided they’d had enough. It was a shithole, but as my friend Johnny said, it was a shithole with potential.

We were not the only ones who saw the potential inside Saint’s Row. Over five years they rebuilt the neighbourhood from the ground up, stripping out the decaying housing projects, remaking the landscape to form something useful to the people funding the rebuilding, something that the whole city could be proud of. Now it is a thriving centre of business and commerce, every skyscraper a shining beacon of success. The people who used to live in Saint’s Row are gone now, driven out by rising costs and the swift demolition of their homes. But that’s a small price to pay to have a place to put Stilwater’s brand new digital convention centre.

I never saw the rebuilding of Saint’s Row. I spent the transition confined to a hospital bed; left my home the way I had known it and returned to find the place wiped clean, as though the riverbanks had burst and drowned the old neighbourhood. Long ago, when an earthquake struck the Red Light district and caved in a part of the city, they built over it, the old buildings entombed deep below the ground like ancestors’ graves. But the old Saint’s Row is not buried, it is gone, scoured from the face of the Earth.

It wasn’t a safe place to live, a friendly place. I’ve said that well enough; it was dangerous, and it was decaying. Now it’s purified, scrubbed clean and perfect, a glass-coated vision of luxury without a soul and with no homes. I don’t know if having nowhere to live is an improvement over having somewhere unsafe to live. The apartment buildings here are a little out of the price range of the usual tenant of the old Saint’s Row.

I can barely find the street my building used to sit on, let alone revisit my old home. The block where my apartment sat was demolished, and they built a skyscraper on it. It’s a definitely a change from the squat three-floor building I used to rent a ground-floor apartment in.

It was a single room; bedroom, kitchen and living room in one. Hot and cold running gunfire at all hours of the day. It wasn’t anyone’s dream home, especially mine. It was a filthy mess in a block full of graffiti-coated shacks, and was barely able to keep warm in winter and keep out the sound of the street. It did have a garage though, which was a distinct advantage in a city where parking a car on the street is essentially asking for it to get stolen. And it had a beach view, if you stood on the roof, although the last thing you’d really want to do with Saint’s Row’s own Mission Beach was look at it.

The skyscraper that stands there now is like every other new skyscraper in Saint’s Row, a fifty-story art-deco rectangle cluster, with a thousand shining blue windows that are excellent for catching the sun and shining it in your eyes. No matter where you try to hide in Saint’s Row, if the sun is out, there is going to be a skyscraper shining the light right back in your eyes, like a spotlight that detects poor people. There is a huge divide between the old and the new in Stilwater; places like Downtown are an inharmonious mixture of old traditional and the new flash, which is why they have tried to eradicate everything in Saint’s Row that risks breaking outside of their strict template.

The only thing that remains from the old Saint’s Row is the church, and that’s still the greatest loss of them all. The church at the heart of Saint’s Row is white, like bleached bones picked clean by scavengers. The inside is gilded with gold and lined with oak floors, but it looks and feels like a rich man’s tomb. You can spend a million dollars to make a grave beautiful, but it still holds nothing but the dead. They call it the Saint’s Row Memorial Church now – it was just the Church before, it didn’t need a name to hold reverence – and claim it is a testament to the city’s tumultuous past.

When it was the place me and my friends haunted like violent ghosts, it was collapsing in on itself. The grey stone that the church was built out of was plastered in so many layers of graffiti that though it could have been white underneath, but you would never be able to tell. The pillars inside that held the second story were crumbling, the stairs to the upper floor torn out a long time ago. Most of the pews were gone too, only a few left, the wood black with rot. The graffiti that coated the walls was like a mural to the history of the neighbourhood, every gang and gangster that rolled through in the last forty years had made their mark on it. It was alive, with the people inside and with our love for the place. People died to protect that church. I fought tooth and nail to keep it ours. It was a crumbling ruin, but we were proud of it.

The memorialisation feels like mockery. What are they trying to memorialise? What has been lost is not theirs to mourn. The church was ours and they took it from us, and they have the gall to say that they lost something in the years that we were the ones occupying it. It was our right! To take what we had and defend our neighbourhood, that was our right. No one else was trying to look after the place, the police and the city officials had long since given up on the Row.

The Church sits now in the shadow of the Phillips Building, a goliath of a black and orange skyscraper that dominates the Stilwater skyline. The Phillips Building is the Ultor headquarters, and they want to make sure you can always see them. They funded the rebuilding of the Row, and they want to make everyone know it. The road leading up to the Church is four lanes wide and lined on either side with flags showing off the Stilwater city crest alongside the Ultor company logo, as if the two are halves of the same coin. Ultor billboards are all over the neighbourhood, branding their mark into every inch of the place so you can never dare to forget it. A BRIGHTER FUTURE AND A BETTER LIFE, their slogan claims. The future they’ve built is definitely brighter – it’s so dazzlingly bright that I’m blinded. Or maybe that’s just from the rage.

The Church was sacrosanct not because it was holy; it was an ordinary building, we the children played in it, we can hardly claim the refurbishment was an act of iconoclasm. It was precious because of what it meant to us. I wonder sometimes what happened to the bodies in the graveyard. Were they moved, to the bigger graveyard in the north of the city, next to the rich people’s suburban mansions? Or were they just paved over, buried under layers of concrete and tarmac, like the underground buildings in the Red Light district? It feels more egregious than the other crimes, even if we had little respect for the graveyard ourselves. People used to have fights out there, in ritualistic bonding activities, and half the gravestones were broken from our own bullets.

I say ‘people’ like I wasn’t one of them, and Johnny didn’t once nearly kick my teeth in out there amongst the tombstones. That kind of thing just felt natural in Saint’s Row. It probably doesn’t make sense to outsiders. It doesn’t make sense now they overthrew the neighbourhood and made it into something hollow, and empty. I couldn’t imagine behaving that way in the courtyard of the Memorial Church, our behaviour turned into something unwanted and vile, a blight on their glass paradise.

The change in Stilwater was less natural progression and more a like a sudden neon-clad viral infestation, eating through the bones of the city and making it flourish into hideous impractical new growths. You can stand on the river opposite Saint’s Row, on the pier in Downtown, and it very nearly looks pretty at night. When it’s too dark to make out the buildings themselves, all you can see is the sweeping orange spotlights around the leviathan Phillips Building, the way the millions of glass windows reflect in the river, and it looks nice. Certainly, better than it’s ever looked in the past. In the light of day, the old city looks grimy and unpleasant, the ugly practicality of the old architecture awful in contrast to Ultor’s garish new renovations. I’d say you can understand why someone would want to remodel the rest of Stilwater, but I’d be caught dead before I was seen sympathising with Ultor.

Saint’s Row is pretty from the outside, from the faraway side of the river, but it’s worthless within. There’s nothing worth reclaiming, and even if we called it ours, it never would be again. Beauty, when it does not hold the promise of happiness, has no right to exist, but we can’t tear down the billboards, the skyscrapers, the Phillips Building and find what we used to own beneath the shell. The Saint’s Row we called home is gone. Five years ago, we started in the Row and grew outwards. It was a struggle, but it was a war we were willing to wage. Now we are forever outside Saint’s Row looking in. It is a white void of land that is untouched and untouchable by the likes of us.

[rythmcale]

I dont remember my dreams but i remembered this one.

ok this is going to be disjointed, grammatically incorect, and the writting itself will probably bother some people cause my writting style? is trash.. i think. i had a wild cohesive dream last night and i HAVE to share omfg. i dont often remember my dreams.. if ever. I just started antidepressants like.. a couple weeks ago.  the day before this dream, i was working on my friends car (01 ford taurus limited) trying to replace the front complete struts (fuck those struts omg) been at it for more than a few hours. shit just was not going well. finally got one strut out after a shitload of hammering but the new strut just wont go in and i said fuck this car im taking a break. went inside and joing my already in motion dnd session that we are at level 20 now. were in the last part of hell, beating the shit out of a rockshasha (idk how to spoell it) pentagram on the floor. blood pooling into it. we beat him then get an image of th partys home town being waylayed by an army of demons, devils, monsters of all kinds. we plane shift back, and get told that a rift opened up and they just started pouring out just a few moments after we left to deal with the rockshasha. game ends, and i join my friends with some apex legends for a few hours. my head starts to hurt like a MOTHER and i bow out. i watch some youtube on my couch so the tv is further away from my eyes than the monitor but headache doesnt do away. its one of those headaches that feel like your brain is getting stabbed and it was on my left temple and behind my eye at the same time... i dont get headaches often. so i say fuck it, i take four pills of off brand ibuprofyn, and two off brand pill of acetamitaphin. eat a banana, can of cambells chuncky corn chowder soup and go to bed.

this is the dream i rememebr having after having the most restful sleep i can rememebr having i n a long while.

ok so i remembr three parts of it maybe more. first thing i remember is that it was dark and stormy night (cliche i know just.. just hang on) panning through an apartment you hear thuds and a scream or two. sounds like fighting. after panning through a tossed apartment you finally get to the bedroom where a woman lay exaushted on the bed, room is trashed. (no this is not erotica hang on) man is haunched, twitching somewhat in the shadows of the room. pan to the woman on th bed, its a beaten and bloody blonde.. (for some reason my head went brittney spears idk why) and shes laying there kind of laughing.. chuckling and finally says, i wont let you have your way as the guy lunges for her she takkes a bottle and breaks it over his head. broken sharp bottle in her hand she glances at it as the guy staggers backk some,he growls.  as he begins to lurch forward again lighting strikes and for a flash you see mangled, rotting flesh. eyes white, teeth missing, just horrible to look at, and groaning sniffing the air. presumibly for her. with the last bit of her strength she take the bottle to her throat amiling and crying that she both got away from this thing and sad that she has to die to do it.

im in a funeral home in what i normally wear, jeans, leather jackket, t shirt, bandanna, long hair. (it my dream of course im in it, just put yourself where i put me, im, mine, etc etc) Im standding therre waiting to go in and the same woman comes up beside me. Shes in kind of a black.. or whitish sun dress, depending how the light hist is.. or doesnt? with one of those hat that have a large... brim? (i dont know the word right now, those hat you see woman wear to the beach that offer a shit load of shade) around it. i rmember us chatting a bit and she finally looks at me. immediatly im struck with shock cause she looks like who we are going to the funeral for. I say "holy shit you like just like her" she says "oh yeah shes my twin, the only difference between our features is that i have one eye thats yellow". i then take notice of her eyes and finally ee that one ofo them is indeed yellow. but its not exactly?? its that thing that happens around the pupil that looks yellow and kind of spikey. idk what is called but it covered most of her iris. i told her this, ahs smiled and said "well thank you i never knew that" and walked inside. as i walked inside i saw everyone was well dressed and now im in a black suite and tie, hair pulled back. it was a large church with cielings that i could only imagine how high they were.

im in an attic type place. (presummably the area above the church??) im walking around lookks like the belfry from the first batman movie with michel keaton and jackk nicolson.. they arent there. its dark out, lights kind of peering through the cracks in the roof and slits of the wood. panning through the attic i see a particularly large crack in the wood. just big enough to look through. So i do. i see the guy who played glennn in the walking dead (i cant remember the actors name right now) standing there witha shotgun in hand and ak slung over him. looks like he did in walking dead (only thing ive seen that actor in so far -shrugs-) kind of decked out with grenades, a bullet belt, cargo pants, couple of boot knifes. hes talkingf to someone casually i cant make out what they are saying. suddenly he turns around in shock and yells run as he sharts fireing. can see everything inside the area now. its a long hallway.. ish? type area. looks the same as where i was. you see some creatures coming towards "glenn" and he stops grins and all of a sudden on ether side of the hallway is row after row of automatice guns. and they just start PUMPING they things full of bullets.. like they dont even stnad for more than a few seconds. after that he promptly runs to the side off where i cant see him anymore.

now im standing next to him and the woman from the start of this is in front of us, he hands me a knife. we both go in, shes jerking around but still as beautiful as ever, smiling and saying "you still think that will finish me do you, bwhahahah" you know that anime haha laugh that women do with the back of their hand to their mouth. me and "glenn" go in, with glenn warning of her dragons breath. and suddenly i have her in a choke hold and shes squrming. im trying to twist and break her neck, it just wont happen. shes smiling and i can see red creeping up her throat, smoke coming out of her nose and mouth, eye glowing red, keeps trying to grab my arm with her hands to get me to let go, shes held down by.. something idk. finally i say fuck this, i take the knife to go for her neckk and saw at her neck, its like rubber, the knife wont cut and suddenly theres wood covering it.. wind wipping around us. im sawing at the wood like my life depends on it. then i get pushed back as earth starts to form around her leggs and she gets lifted up on this mound. wood covering the top part of her and her arms. shes still laughing until shes not and is now panicked. im confusedas fuck cause i didnt do anything. th earth hardens into metal. so much pressure that the earth and rock turned to metal. the wood covering the top ortion of her, her arms become limbs of the tree and it grows from the top of her head and fully blooms in an instant then petrifies. her contorted screamingf face like a knot in the tree. "glenn" walks up next to me just as beaten and bloody as i am. somehow we are both standing. "glenn" asks "is it finally over?" and i say " it might.. for a while. but not forever" camera pans out as we both slump to our knees finally breathing and you se a cathedral that the funeral was in on a hude mound of earth and the city, landscape, everything is ether over grown or crumbling like in the game the last of us.

for some reason i think this would a wild ride as a movie or book or well written at all.. fuck