#shoutout to whatever the fuck split a few nights ago

[artificialqueens]

you learn to need the things that stop you dreaming (biadore) - dylann

Texting Bianca that she has to crash at her place, the ride there, showing up at Bianca’s front door in full drag and carrying a corner store bottle of white wine all sound like things Adore would do. She doesn’t quite remember doing any of them but… it sounds about right.

A/N: hell is a quiet apartment in the middle of the night and all the things that never get said. welcome to all of that, and a side-order of mutual pining, exhaustion and people who have absolutely no concept of self care.

i use drag names for both; he/him for bianca and she/her for adore.

the title is from a song by passenger.

shoutouts to dandee and goneawaygirl for screaming at me and pointing out my typos xo

content warnings for implied drinking and maybe some drug use, all the perks of bad hangovers, so much pining

Adore wakes up because there’s noise. It’s low and steady and for a while, it makes her dream of trains, and then persists until the trains dissolve and there’s only darkness, and then she’s awake.

Her head is pounding and the bed she’s woken up in is cold, and it takes one blind fling of her arm to confirm that she’s also alone. The noise is still happening and now that Adore’s aware of the headache, it’s somehow even worse. She groans and pushes herself up to sit, legs dangling off the edge of the bed as she pulls the covers up around her shoulders.

Under her feet, the floor is smooth, cool hardwood. She blinks a few times until the shadows of the room start twisting into shapes as she adjusts to darkness. It must be really late — there’s a window at the other end of the room, and the blinds are half-cracked, and yet barely any light filters in at all. It’s almost unsettlingly dark. In the city — any city — there’s always some light, a bit of street noise—

This room is dark. The only noise is the constant train-like clatter filtering in through the walls.

Adore thinks to herself that if this were a movie, this is where the music would get low, subdued and terrifying, as if the shadows could morph into the monster that jumps out and swallows her whole any second now. And yet the room stays mercifully still and too quiet — no monster at all in sight — so when Adore feels awake and steady enough to move, she gets up to her feet and heads out into the hallway, hands pressed to her chest and clutching the heavy covers like a cape. The ceaseless noise has faded into the back of her head, the way sounds tend to disappear when the mind accepts them and they melt from annoyance to being forgotten in the background. Still, it’s louder in the hallway and Adore follows it down the hall.

The door to the room at the other end isn’t quite closed; there’s warm light bleeding out under it and illuminating the hardwood in hues of brown and bronze-like orange, just to remind Adore that the world exists past the colorless darkness of the apartment. She pushes the door open just a little bit further, and holds her breath as if that would prevent it from creaking.

The light is coming from a desk lamp that’s perched on a table in one corner of the room, and at the table, with his back to the door, Bianca is bent over his sewing machine, glittering red fabric pooling around him as he works.

Unnoticed, Adore leans against the doorframe and watches him for a moment, the edges of the scene dark and blurry like an old film through the lens of her sleep-heavy eyelashes. The back of Bianca’s head is a mess of pillow-crushed short hair, and his neck curves uncomfortably down as he leans forward and bows his head to get a closer look at some detail. The desk lamp casts its light at him from an angle which leaves him in half-shadow from where Adore is standing, his slim shoulders rimmed in a gold outline which makes her think that if she could see his aura — like, literally, actually see it — it’d probably look exactly the same.

When Adore can no longer bear the vague guilt from sneaking in and watching, unannounced, she speaks up softly, in a sleepy lilt, and leads with a joke because anything else would feel off.

“Aren’t you, like, rich enough to pay other people to do this shit for you?”

Bianca doesn’t quite flinch at her voice but he goes very still for a fraction of a second and then picks up his sewing again as he answers distractedly,

“I started a sweatshop, actually, but my workers unionized—“

“Or are you just makin’ sure your geriatric old man hands still work?” Adore prods, walking over to hover by the desk, right where she knows she’s in his line of vision.

Bianca takes a breath to answer, but holds it in a moment too long and shrugs instead,

“Something like that,” and then, immediately, “How the fuck are you even awake right now?”

The question gets Adore to focus on herself for a moment, and suddenly she’s once again all too aware of her headache, her dry mouth, the vague nausea twisting up her gut. Texting Bianca that she has to crash at her place, the ride there, showing up at Bianca’s front door in full drag and carrying a corner store bottle of white wine all sound like things Adore would do. She doesn’t quite remember doing any of them but… it sounds about right.

“Not by choice,” she shrugs and makes a show out of glaring at the sewing machine. Bianca makes just as much of a show ignoring her and carrying on his work instead.

“I was gonna crash with a friend but she bailed on me,” Adore starts, almost apologetically, as she leans with her back against the wall next to the table.

“Yeah. You told me at least three times.”

“—and I could’ve texted someone else, I guess, but…”

“You knew I was home and wanted to see me anyway, yeah,” Bianca’s voice is halfway to an impression of Adore but just a little too tight to really sound the way he usually does when he’s joking. Adore’s head pounds with each clack of the machine and she lets out a long groan as she slides down the wall to sit on the floor. The surface is too cool against her bare skin, so she pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps herself up in the covers she’d brought, until it’s just her head peeking out, hair falling out of the remnants of her bun to frame her face.

Bianca finishes a stitch and glances down at her, and between the silence as the machine stops and his eyes on her, Adore feels like she’s suddenly under a spotlight. When she looks up to meet his eyes, he’s looking at her in that Bianca way, measuring without judgement, just slightly exasperated but light, all of his annoyance laced with a perfect dose of amusement. He also looks tired.

He looks exhausted in a way that is beyond being fixable with a good night’s sleep.

Adore hasn’t been there for more than a few hours so she can’t be the reason for the tight set of his jaw, the shadows under his eyes, the slightest downward turn of his lips. She takes it all in silently and she must be crashing because what was vague unease minutes ago is morphing into a heavy anxiety which settles at the bottom of her ribs and pulls her down. Adore dreads to think about what it’ll feel like when she’s sober, fully sober, and irritable and hungover in the morning.

“You’ll give yourself wrinkles,” Bianca half-scolds and Adore feels her face drop into neutrality. She hadn’t even realized she was frowning. “And I ain’t paying for your facelifts,”

Bianca adds, just slightly louder, sharper, three quarters of the way to his character voice but not quite there. It’s the not-quite-thereness that unsettles Adore. Bianca is teetering between whatever is weighing him down and constant attempts to return to his usual self, and it’s like watching an underrehearsed high wire act that’s half a second away from disaster.

“Bea—“ Adore starts, carefully, and when Bianca looks away and picks his work back up as a clear sign that he doesn’t want to talk, she shrugs and offers instead, “I can pay for my own facelifts, thank you very much.”

Bianca almost laughs — his shoulders twitch up, which feels like a victory — and then he turns all of his attention to the unfinished garment under his hands. Adore settles in her cocoon on the floor and resolves to ignore the way the sound of the machine feels like drills working their way into her temples and splitting her head open. It is, realistically, a small price to pay in exchange for being in Bianca’s company. It’s been too many months since the last time they’d hung out, and if that’s the way it has to happen tonight, then Adore’s willing to accept the side effects.

Adore’s head swims and her thoughts blur into vagueness for a while but she doesn’t quite drift off. She listens to Bianca work with her eyes mostly closed, breathes evenly to keep the nausea at bay, tightens the covers around her body when she begins to shake.

Bianca, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind her company but he’s not actively acknowledging it either, which is okay. They have learned a long time ago how to share a space in silence, and falling into that rhythm after so many months apart is more grounding than conversation.

Eventually, Bianca swears and the machine stops and it jolts Adore away from her half-sleep.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, shifting to sit up on her knees so she can look at the table, even though there’s no way she’d be able to help at all.

“Fucking— nothing. The fucking needle broke,” Bianca shrugs and he’s already twisting the broken needle off, still swearing under his breath as he sets off to replace it. It’s clear in the way he moves that this is, usually, the kind of issue that would get settled within seconds without ever being a cause for concern. Right now, though, it speaks to something bigger and is enough to set him off, and Adore wants to ask so many questions and offer all of her help, but it feels like prodding at something that possibly doesn’t belong to her and she doesn’t know how to begin.

Bianca changes the needle and then the machine is clattering away again, and Adore settles down with her head nearly resting on Bianca’s thigh. His leg twitches in response and he looks down at her in a way that would be quizzical if he didn’t know her as well as he does. An Adore who’s coming down and sobering up will always be cat-like, desperate for contact, all stray hands and an open invitation to be touched, regardless of the circumstances. Tonight doesn’t have to be, and isn’t, any different.

“What are you making?” Adore asks, using that one second to catch his eyes. That’s her checking in, cracking the door open for a conversation that doesn’t have to be heavy if Bianca doesn’t want it to be: he can just go on and on about fabrics and construction and his ideas, and Adore would listen, and they could feasibly pretend that the air in his workroom isn’t thick with unvoiced anxieties and just enough anger to truly throw any carefully built semblance of calm off balance.

“I don’t know. I mean—It’s a dress. I don’t know why I’m making it, though, it’s not like I’ll ever wear it—“

“I’ll wear it.”

Bianca scoffs at that and Adore isn’t about to let on that it actually stings a little. Instead, she sits up on her knees, her covers-cape slipping off her shoulders, and repeats insistently,

“I would. I’d wear it.”

Bianca arches his brows as he stares down at the garment. It’s a heavy, sparkling red fabric, it will end up becoming the kind of gown Bianca looks breathtaking in, and Adore has never worn. Somehow, his eyes fixed on the unfinished dress are enough to convey all of that.

“I’d wear it if you made it for me,” Adore adds earnestly.

There’s a moment of complete silence, save for the steady hum of the machine when it’s on but not in use, and then Bianca exhales a sigh, his shoulders shuddering with it. It must be the way light hits his body — his frame looks even thinner than usual, and Adore imagines she’d feel bone if she’d reach out and press her fingertips against his back.

“Bianca, what’s wrong?”

He must’ve expected the question, must’ve anticipated it since the second she walked in, because his answer comes swift and immediate, with a decisive shake of his head,

“You’ve got enough on your plate, you don’t wanna know.”

Adore hardens a little, resists the urge to be sharp when she argues, and says quietly, “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t wanna know.” When Bianca doesn’t answer, she pushes, “I showed up at your house and you let me crash in your bed, B, the least I can do is listen… You know I’m a good problem-solver.”

“Who told you that?”

Bianca is, as usual, lightning fast and biting in that terrifying way that’s been making Adore’s head spin since the very first time they’d spoken, and she doesn’t have the time to deal with the way it makes her something in her ribs twist just a little, just as a reminder that it’s still there and is probably never going away.

“Fine,” she relents instead. “Maybe not a solver. But I can listen?”

“Honestly, not much to hear,” Bianca shrugs. The machine picks up again and he redirects his attention as he speaks over it. “This is what most nights look like when I’m home, actually. Some— variation of this. Who the fuck knows. Sleep is for the weak or whatever.”

“You don’t sleep?”

Adore’s voice drops to very gentle concern, in a whisper, because she’s been trusted with a confession and her heart twists with the weight of it. It’s messed up that she’s grateful for the trust; she shouldn’t be happy that Bianca is letting her in when it’s happening like this, when Bianca’s quiet turmoil should be so much more important than her own selfish reasons to consider herself lucky.

Bianca, in turn, shrugs and motions vaguely around the room. The space is cluttered with most everything that makes Bianca Del Rio look the way she does, floor-to-ceiling shelves, too many drawers, racks upon racks of garments, brocades and velvets and satins bleeding out into the space from each crevice. It’s breathtaking, almost, to look around and realize that one room can hold so much stuff - so many gorgeous things - and that it’s Roy with his painfully arched back at his sewing machine in the corner who’s behind all of it.

Not literally, of course. Not quite. And yet, Adore can’t help wondering how many of the gowns that litter the space are the product of his sleeplessness, she wonders if she’d ever complimented one of them, wonders how many of Bianca’s “I made this myself ‘cause I can’t trust any other bitch not to fuck it up” looks have come from nights like this.

She imagines that some nights, it’d be Bianca with a can of Elnett and a rattail comb, teasing out his anxieties into a wig pinned to a foam head, or meticulously detangling costume jewels and organizing them into the plastic drawers that line half a wall, for hours on end with nothing but his thoughts for company.

“Bea—“

“Please. Really. I don’t wanna talk about it.”

Adore swallows but nods, pushing herself to her feet. She knows a thing or two about not wanting to talk, about the way her throat sometimes feels like it’d close up and collapse on itself if she tried to, about when to stop prodding and just offer comfort instead.

“Not now?” she offers lightly, because she needs Bianca to know that when he’s ready, she’ll still be there in her bad problem-solver, good listener glory. He concedes with a nod and reaches to pick up the sewing again but his hands falter when he touches the fabric and he huffs out a sigh, almost annoyed at himself.

Adore rests her hands on his shoulders and squeezes a little, and hates the way he shifts into the touch the moment it happens as if the smallest contact is what can keep him from tipping over some edge tonight. Adore’s head hurts for him because she understands, but it also hurts for herself because she’s still probably not even sober and this is nearly too much, and she feels too helpless at the realization that she can only offer some comfort and not much else.

Under her careful, steadying grip, Bianca shivers again so she reaches down quickly and grabs the covers from the floor, wordlessly wrapping them around his shoulders the way she’d glided across his apartment like a child playing royalty, cape-like. Bianca sighs and grips the covers from underneath, holding them to his chest.

“You should come to bed,” Adore offers tentatively, actively compartmentalizing the way the words could sound. That’s an issue for another time, for a night where she’s far away from him and not in the present danger of being too close and too vulnerable in that late night way which feels so far removed from the rest of the world. She can’t think about any of it, not right now. “This stuff will still be here in the morning.”

Bianca exhales another very quiet sigh, and Adore watches as he touches the garment, fingertips so light that it doesn’t move at all. His fingers flex on the fabric, contemplative, and then he reaches to the back of the machine and flips the little light that illuminates the needle off.

“Great,” Adore encourages softly, giving his arm a light pat as she takes it upon herself to turn the desk lamp off. Her eyes retain the glimmer of the dress a second longer and she feels its brightness exploding between the walls of her skull as the room fades to darkness.

Bianca gets up and his chair slides across the hardwood with a scratch, making Adore’s skin crawl. She feels the slightest hint of guilt at her own self-induced irritability, which frankly isn’t anything Bianca should have to deal with right now, so she sucks it up and bites her lip and follows him out into the hallway.

There’s really no debate to be had. Adore isn’t about to pretend that she’s even considered offering to crash on his couch. Instead, she walks ahead of him toward his bedroom, absently brushing her hand across the small of his back in a guiding gesture as she rushes forward.

“Come on. Bedtime,” she announces once they’re in the bedroom, and Bianca, terrifyingly, complies. He heads straight for the bed and drops the covers down from his shoulders without saying anything. Adore sits down with her back against the headboard and watches him — just a silhouette in the dark room — pull his sweatpants off and change into another t-shirt.

“Have you had enough water?” he asks suddenly, and Adore can feel more than see his eyes on her as he settles down on the other side of the bed, kicking the covers into a pile at his feet instead of pulling them up. “You’re gonna feel like shit tomorrow but you might as well be hydrated—“

“Bea,” Adore interrupts, shaking her head. I already feel like shit, she thinks and doesn’t say. “I’m fine. You don’t have to— I’m taking care of you right now.”

Bianca makes a noise that may be a suppressed laugh or a scoff, Adore doesn’t want to know which, and then nods to himself, shifting to curl up onto his side with his back to her.

He doesn’t say goodnight. Adore watches as his breathing slows and her eyes adjust to the darkness just enough that she can study the outline of his back, the way his shoulders seem to soften and drop more than any time when he’s awake as he drifts off.

She doesn’t move for a while. A few minutes, maybe, or perhaps an hour. It’s too late for time to really matter, and she’s worlds away from the nearest human, her chest tight with an uneasy cocktail of nausea and want and helplessness.

Eventually, when it gets too hard to keep her eyes open, Adore shifts and lies down on her back and only hesitates for a second before rolling over to face the wall that Bianca’s facing. The back of his head is a dark blur that covers most of what she can see, and her chest twists as she spends a moment looking at his sleep-flattened hair.

Then her eyes can no longer stay open, and she’s halfway to sleep when she whispers,

“Night, Bea,” into the overwhelming silence of the room.

It takes a minute — or more, again, time stretching out in that late night way, but then Bianca shifts, moves closer with an air of decisiveness even as his breathing remains steady and deep, as though he’s been asleep for a while.

Adore’s too full of unnameable things to resist.

She drapes an arm over the dip in his waist where he’s curled up, exhales a soft sigh and knows it must hit the back of his neck. Bianca shifts into the weight of her arm and settles there, and says nothing for long enough that Adore doesn’t notice when she stops thinking and drifts off.

**

Adore awakes to a pounding headache and a dry mouth, and she has to dash toward the bathroom before she can register or overthink the fact that she never pulled away from where she’d crashed.

When she tiptoes back into the room, pale and shaky but freshly showered and wrapped in one of his towels, Bianca is still curled up in the middle of the bed, and he looks younger and calmer in his sleep.

Outside the window, through the half-open blinds, the sun is approaching noon.

[imcomingback]

The Confessions of a Broken, but Healing, Man

What's this!? Two updates in one week? 

This one is probably going to be what the last one should have been; less ranting and more actual relevance to my current situation. Probably. At least that's what I'm aiming for. Sometimes I go off on random tangents though. And by sometimes, I mean often.

So, I inquired with HR at my company and straight up told them that I have struggled with depression for a long time and have had trouble with the motivation to figure out how to get help. I kind of regretted being that up front since I have this constant paranoia that admitting my struggles to someone in such a position will result in my health insurance being more expensive or even the company thinking I'm too much of a risk and laying me off or something.

But, I'm pretty sure that's just me being stupid. So, I asked them to help me with the process. They gave me a phone number for the insurance folks. Super personal touch. But hey, they at least included a line that was something like "I hope things improve." I at least tried to take the first step! We'll see how Future Geoff handles the next one. It's funny, I say "Future Geoff" sort of sarcastically, but it's not really a joke. I often feel like I have split personalities. Talley says that that's not the case at all and she has a Masters Degree in Psychology, so I'm inclined to believe her. But I don’t know, I have this constant voice in my head telling me bad things; that I suck, that I'm a failure, that I'm a burden... That I should give up. A lot of my days seem to come down to a battle between me and the asshole within.

At this point, I want to give a shoutout to my friend Roberta, who, years ago, gave me the best piece of advice I've ever heard. We all do self-talk, and we're all overly-harsh with ourselves I think, but Roberta told me that when you're critiquing yourself, imagine that you're talking to a friend and not yourself. We're all so much more rude to ourselves than we would ever be to someone we care about. If Talley or Greg or Dylan or John or any of my other friends - even River or Bane - ever came to me and said that they felt like they sucked or they were lame or whatever, I would be so freakin' supportive to the point of being forceful probably. But when I'm talking to myself, Sad Geoff says something like that and Angry Geoff just responds "Yeah. You're right. You fucking suck and you know it." But, since I got that advice, I've managed to break through more often and instead have a third voice that says "No, hey. Stop. You're doing fine." Sometimes it gets drowned out, lately it's been getting overpowered, but I know to at least let it speak. So to get back to the main point, from like five paragraphs ago, no I probably don't have split personalities. We all do self-talk and we're all very harsh on ourselves. But I'm so mean to myself that it spawns those thoughts that I legitimately have two personalities. It's sort of a scary idea, but at the same time it would almost be comforting if it was true; then it wouldn't really be "me" saying the terrible things to myself.

Anyway, these are all things that I'm sure I'll get to flesh out when I eventually figure out the therapy thing. Shoutout to my last therapist for definitely helping me, but we were never in a "traditional," or perhaps cliche therapy environment where I'd get to just vent these kinds of concerns. So, that's where I am right now. I told you guys that I would try my best to be positive, but I also promised to be honest. This is more the latter. I've been feeling very run down the last few weeks. I guess that's what happens when you have, like, four different enormous events at the start of your summer and then nothing for months. I got to see an amazing person in one of my best friends, Matt, get married to an amazing person in Maritza while also seeing the amazing city of Boston in April. 

I got to spend a week fulfilling a longtime dream of visiting Seattle, riding the Great Wheel with the love of my life, hiking to the waist-deep snows of Mt. Rainier, and overall falling in love with a region of the country that I had always been infatuated with from afar, in early May.

I got to watch two of my best friends ever in John and Emily tie the knot in the place we all met, Ripon College (which did not at all restrict a 9/11 memorial) in late-May. And I got to head across the pond and see Buckingham Fucking Palace, Winchester Fucking Abbey, the Fucking Royal Observatory, the Thames, and FUCKING Wimbledon and FUCKING Serena Williams in June/July.

So, naturally, the months after that spree were going to feel shitty. But the thing is that today felt good at first. I woke up, I worked, I got the cats to sort of tolerate each other through the bribes of food and treats, and then I was productive as hell at work. I even helped out with a story in actual Milwaukee and not just the suburbs which helped to make me think that maybe my more experienced co-workers wouldn't just think of me as a dead-weight millennial who is clearly next on the chopping block for layoffs. Everything was good. And then, a bunch of little things happened. The cats started fighting, the day got less productive, I randomly saw myself in the mirror and thought I had gained weight, and my friends and I got into some pointless argument that ended up actually resulting in legitimate anger. So, when Talley came home, while I had been a bubbling fountain of positivity at 3 p.m., she found a husk of a human playing "Fortnite" and not even being mad, but being just sad and dejected with every death. It's amazing how quickly moods can turn. Or at least how quickly mine can. But, I did find that while other things turned and made me upset, the fact that I had at least been productive work-wise today sustained me through the other strife. No, I wasn't happy. But I was okay. The self-talk; the voice, tried to talk shit. But I had a solid rebuttal this time. The moral of this story is how quickly a small thing can change the mood of a person as insane as me. Does that sound harsh? I don't care, I'm willing to own it: I'm insane. Anyone who legitimately thinks about throwing themselves off of a bridge is insane. The natural priority of any living being, whether it be a human with mental struggles, a gazelle fleeing from a cheetah, a fly fighting to break free from a spider's web, or a cat hissing at another cat in a one-bedroom apartment, is to survive. And so to legitimately defy that natural instinct and consider destroying your own survival? That is certainly insane.

The Brewers beat the Cubs at least, and Talley and I ate pizza and wings for dinner. So the night ended well. Overall, here's the summary of the last few weeks and this entry which ended up being (Sorry) just as cringey, awkward, negative, and rant-filled: We have a long way to go. 7 weeks ago, when I pledged to you guys that I was coming back, I meant it. I still do. But it's going to be a harder and longer road than I expected. I thought that I could rally, fight, and sort of just get back to the happy-go-lucky person I was as a kid... No such luck. But I will get back. I promise that I'm trying. I promise. And I've never tried harder at any single thing in my entire life. Be patient with me; I'm still coming back.