#nobody read wuthering heights bc then all my good lines will look like cheap imitations

[timelesslords]

your response reminds me of the time i went to a talk from maggie stiefvater (she's a great author if you don't know her) and i asked if she aimed to make her readers suffer and she said that when she read the time travellers wife she was ugly sobbing. like snot bubble ugly sobbing. and said that her goal was to do to someone what time travellers wife did to her.

so my question is: what broke you?

the way carrie asked me basically the same question when she was beta-ing this lol 😭 the god's honest truth is just life in general but that's not really what you're asking lmfao

Honestly there isn't like a piece of media that "broke me" per say, I don't really cry a lot at books and movies and stuff. But when I started writing this I was rereading chapter 9 of Wuthering Heights (as I am prone to do) and I figured if I could get this fic to make people feel the same gut punch as reading the paragraph I chose as the epigraph, I would've succeeded:

I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself.

I feel like it just perfectly captures the feeling of desperation and helplessness that comes with watching someone you love have to go through something and being powerless to stop it. In this part of the book Cathy is coming to terms with the fact that the only way to help Heathcliff is to emotionally devastate them both. All she wants to do is take away his pain and all she can do is cause more of it, because they love each other and they're tied together and causing pain to one of them causes pain to both, and they're trapped in this endless dysfunctional cycle of hurting each other even as they desperately try to do the opposite.

Anyway, Emily Brontë is obviously brilliant and did what I tried to do in 15,000 words in about 60 but yeah, that paragraph is what "broke me" that I wanted to inflict onto you all lol. There's heavy influences from all of chapter 9 of WH in this will end but the epigraph is the biggest one