You let the thoughts pass by as you reach for his old bible amongst the stack of books he left for you. You pick it up gingerly, the cover tattered and worn. The spine is broken, snapped beyond repair. You're not much of a believer in pristine book collecting, but the state of it leaves you feeling an odd assortment of pity and intrigue.
The scent of him is thicker on the cover. Robust. You hold it to your nose and inhale. It smells ashy, of old cigarettes and charcoal. Pine. It makes you feel a little dizzy. The potency of it is strong, gluing to the fibrils of your lungs where it soaks, stains them with the sticky tar of his masculine smell.
The cover is made of old leather. You peel it back, and run your fingers along the inscription inside. To our boy, it reads, the scratch of ink pressing hard into the soft give of the hide. May he always find the answers he seeks.
This seems to be a hope he'd taken to heart. Blue lines bleed through the thin pages. Underlines, highlights. Sections smeared with oil and ink, blurring the words together as he thumbed across them over and over again. The margins are filled with his own notes. Doodles. Insights. He fills space with ink. Musing over his own questions, and underlining the answer he finds.
It almost feels intrusive. Voyeuristic. Had he not left it amongst the pile, you might have closed the book and put it away for the sake of his own privacy. But it draws you in. Ensnares you. His questions grow broader, the subject evolving. The answers he finds in the pages become less and less frequent.
It feels—
Lonely.
His despondency shows vividly when he covers the words in art. An entire page bears the face of a woman. The likeness is shaded around the eyes, in the arch of their nose. It must be his mother, perhaps. Maybe a sister. You turn the page, marveling at the artistry line in dark charcoal. A rifle. A bird. A skull. Cigars, scotch. Dog tags. A cross. Bible passages with toiling lines circled around them. Notes. Little insights stenciled into the margins.
Another page speaks about head trauma. Brain injury. Bullet fragments. Low caliber. tbi is circled in blue with lines branching out from the side of the curve. impaired thinking. memory issues. personality changes, depression.
remarkable the cognitive recovery is stenciled in between the passages over and over again, as if he was reinforcing this notion to himself.
It's jarring. Uncomfortable.
The next several pages are even moreso. It screams its loneliness into the thin paper and you read each divot until you can't anymore. Until the words run together, and stop making sense. It's all nonsensical. Scribbles, doodles, and numbers that mean nothing to you at all. Unnerved, you go to put it away—
Something catches your eye.
It's a photograph.
A younger version of Johnny, maybe. Shaded in black and white. He's barefaced, too. Beard shaved down to a thin dusting of stubble, an odd sight compared to the thick tangle of hair you're so used to seeing on him. His hair, too.
A mohawk. The shorn sides cropped as close to the skin as he could get. The top coiffed and styled for the photo. His asymmetrical hairstyle makes sense now. You trail your finger down the slope of his jaw.
You deep an indent underneath. Ink pressed tight to the thin page, bubbling up from below. You tuck the photo of him, all cocksure and rough around the edges, back into the seam before turning the page.
And it doesn't make sense. Not at first. A series of small sketches cover the page, littered across it like small pondstones leading to the bottom. Nahanni, you know. Recognise the magesty of this gorgeous park. You follow the trail, thinking distantly of your old art teacher in school and the magnetism of the gaze, and—
The bottom is a black circle. Needlepoints cutting through the curves. Sitting in the centre is woman. She sits in the valley watching a moose graze at the bottom of knoll, and in her hand sits an apple—
"What'd ye got there?"
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To me, the worst part of having an autistic meltdown isn’t the meltdown itself, but the overwhelming sense of embarrassment afterward. The “oh, I did it again…”
The embarrassment that I “acted out” in front of everybody and that sort of self-infantilization I feel. “Oh, you just transitioned from place to place too fast? You poor, poor baby.”
The internalized ableism that pounds in my skull for hours and it lasts so much longer than the meltdown. I know it’s not always within my control and it’s harder to manage it when I have to do stuff.
I just always feel so humiliated. Like a diaper baby throwing a tantrum again.
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hey are you a terf ? you've been reblogging stuff from radfems ...
No, I'm not a terf, I support trans people 100%. Also terfs are uncomfortably cozy with the alt-right and that's uhhh... a whole other layer of awful.
But I think I may be following a secret terf? Tumblr keeps showing me these posts that are like "liked by someone you're following!" And I follow 4k people so I'm not like. Keeping track of anyone but my mutuals. And some of the posts tumblr shows me are obviously terfy which makes me go HMMMM but then some of them seem fine? So it's hard for me to tell the difference between "posts tumblr reccomends me that are normal and in line with the regular leftist and feminist things I'm into" vs like "posts tumblr reccomends me because they're liked by whatever secret terf I'm following and have suspicious undertones that aren't immediately obvious to me". I'm certainly not intentionally following any terfs or following anyone who publicly identifies as a terf* or puts terf shit on my dash but I'm apparently following someone who doesn't blog about terf shit but LIKES terf shit (and I think it might be a fandom blog so that makes it harder to identify) and then those likes show up on my dash and it's not always obvious that it's terf shit or from a radfem blog-- it's just a random posts from a url I don't know. And sometimes the posts themselves are fine on the initial read.
So pls let me know what the radfem blogs in question are so I can identify and remember them if they pop up on my dash again
*caveat that I've been on this website for 10+ years and follow 4,000+ people and it's theoretically possible that a blog I followed multiple years ago that I never see on my dash now publicly identifies as a terf, but I'm not gonna go through all 4k of my following to try and find out if any of them have become publicly shitty in a way that doesn't affect my dash in the years since I've followed them. People get unfollowed as they bring shitty views to my attention. Hence the conundrum with the undercover terf bc they don't post terf shit, they just like it.
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^(above is sc of someone else's post) I don't want to be mean to this person but that's really not what people mean when they say that... the point is that for example cults will target people in a vulnerable situation, and different cults will have different target audiences. you will at some point in your life be in the kind of state that makes you vulnerable to cult abuse (grieving, tough break-up, experiencing or escaped abuse, living alone in a foreign country, financial instability, serious illness, etc) and there will be a cult out there that fits well with you and makes you feel good enough that it doesn't trigger cult cliché alarm bells.
it's usually addressing things like a very narrow public perception of what a cult is, so people don't recognise warning signs because the cult is christian, or left-wing, or versed in therapyspeak, or run by women, or completely non-religious. you think of cults as something that happens to other people (non-christians, drug users, hippies, gullible boomers, new-agers). obviously the entire point is that education about cults helps people to resist cults; the issue is that believing you're just innately not someone who would fall prey to a cult will stop you from being vigilant and put you in danger.
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