#tw missing persons

[oldestandonlygirl3]

Prompt #105

"Her breath always smelled like gingerbread and peppermint, her laugh sounded like bells jingling in the night, and her eyes shined like tinsel on a Christmas tree."

"Sir, you're going to have to give me a more tangilabe description if you want me to file a missing persons report."

[rrr333sstuff]

[trans-axolotl]

thinking a lot today about protest and resistance while in solitary confinement. or while incarcerated (and/or institutionalized) more broadly. reading a lot of writing from incarcerated writers and through the prison journalism project and rereading sick woman theory by Johanna Hedva and just thinking about the quote "Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible" (Hedva, 5). and thinking about what it means to resist when all that is left to you is your body, a room, and time--how do you fight back? what options are left to you? what ways is your resistance legible, who is the audience to your resistance and does it still matter if no one ever sees? (yes, i think--i remember hours spent in restraint because i had hugged a friend and i keep thinking about the concept that protest is disruption, a refusal to allow business to keep happening as usual, and what that means about making cruelty visible by refusing to participate in that normalization. even as i was taken away, removed, made invisible--does that removal make my absence louder?)

thinking about the ways self destruction is used as protest when you have no other options--hunger strikes perhaps the most familiar iteration of this. what gets labeled as "symptom" and what is recognized as resistance varies by person by context by environment. thinking about how almost everyone i know who's been in solitary confinement started self harming eventually. what need does that meet? when all options for autonomy, privacy, and interaction is taken away, how do we meet those needs ourselves? i think a lot about survival, and remember YWEP's concept of self harm as resilience, and think a lot about what it means to keep yourself alive when all you have is your body and your mind and an empty room and time. what things become more important than physical pain? how might physical pain become important? how does our relationship between our body and harm change in that environment? how do you stay sane in solitary confinement, or maybe more importantly, how do you go insane in a way that hurts you less? what does sanity even mean when you have been placed in an unlivable environment? is resistance a basic need we need to meet when we are placed in such a hostile environment? how did i survive & how are my friends currently surviving & how many more people will i have to lose who were killed that way before this fucking ends?

[dewhander]

a memory

separate images

[raevenlywrites]

Tell me why in the tags

[accirax]

the costume design was a highlight

[bonefall]

Does leopard still have 3 lives in her final battle? Or was that changed?

Yep. I think she drowned her once, then Leopardstar lunges up refreshed, and she gets the upper paw on Mistyfoot with 2 lives to go.

(MAYBE tw gore, but I really did try to be tasteful about a head being smashed on a rock.)

On her back, splashing and thrashing furiously against Leopardstar's claws dunking her head under, Mistyfoot glimpses a wave breaking just over the tip of a stone-blue rock. Her only chance.

With a surge of power, her claws sink into her leader's golden shoulder and they tumble and roll to the right. Before the tyrant even realizes what's happening, she's yanked up, and then whipped backwards with a wet CRUNCH

And then again

And again

And again, until Mistyfoot can't even make out what's left of her leader anymore. All she can see is that it's a red, brown, and yellow blur, because her eyes burning with salty tears and her whole body is trembling.

She drops the corpse onto the stone and it slides into the water, lifelessly. After a moment it spasms aimlessly one last time, like an insect does after its head is bitten off, unlike the deliberate, agonized throes of Tigerstar suffering through his doomed lives. And then it's still.

There's only the tranquil sound of bubbling water, and Mistyfoot's frenzied panting. Her pounding heart makes it hard to hear either.

The blood is carried off by the shallow water in scarlet swirls, but the lake runs pale red as if it's washing it away. Some were aware of this prophecy, but Mistyfoot was not.

It isn't closure to her, or a fulfillment of divine decree. It's just blood that should be on her paws, slicked away by the complicit river. She wished it could feel like it's over, but she's smart enough to know the truth. Has been through enough terrible events like this to understand what comes next.

Her body will move foward. Her mind will need to consider her deputy. Her paw will come down on code-defying cats like Blackclaw and Greenflower. But her heart will stay here, next to the remains of Leopardstar, the same way another piece of it remains at Stonefur's side across space and time.

[tariah23]

This is such a harmful sentiment to push considering that you don’t necessarily have to be “attractive,” (beauty is subjective, yada yada) in order for men to want to harm you in the slightest… like man, what…

[yangjeongin]

HYUNJIN | 200925 • BACK DOOR ( for @hyunpic 💘 )

[uncanny-tranny]

Also, in response to the "testosterone making people angrier" myth, I've found that, personally, testosterone has given me the self-respect to recognize and call out when my boundaries are being overstepped in ways that I wouldn't have had the courage (or, frankly even liking of myself) to have done before. This is in addition to me working on my trauma responses, but testosterone was the spark that gave me the will to do this in the first place. When I see people sae that as anger and thus is a "bad thing," I wonder how much of that is just people being uncomfortable with us... having boundaries or enforcing them, and that the response to that overstepping is labeled as aggressive anger.

Frankly, I now actually respect myself enough to care when I am being mistreated. It seems that people sometimes take that as a personal failure on my end because I don't think I deserve mistreatment.

Caveat: Anger is a fine emotion, and it is a worthy thing to recognize and honour. I find that the accusation of trans men* and trans masc* people "being angry" on testosterone is a moot point simply because it is often a false accusation which uses anger as a punishment. My issue isn't that we're "angry," but that our perceived anger is used, often, as a transphobic bludgeon to punish those who either want to transition with testosterone or who currently are, and everything in-between.

[llewellyn-baxter]

"Huh.."

Llewellyn's hand braced on a tree trunk and he stood with his head bowed for several moments, trying to shake off the strange sense of fogginess and light-headedness. And his stomach churned... It was the type of sensation that occurred with a sudden unexpected drop. A mist eased throughout the surrounding area and there was a certain smell that couldn't be placed- earthy, for sure, but also weirdly enough, something more pungent. Why did his limbs all feel so heavy and achy? Why was he so tired? The man couldn't really recall what he'd been doing moments before, or where he was even at...

And he certainly had no clue that a faerie portal had just shaved ten years off his life. Ten years taken away with family and friends.

At some point, the tall gentleman began to walk. He wasn't sure how long or what direction, but somehow, Llew managed to wander within the town limits. "Welcome to Greywood.." he murmured to himself with a faintly bemused expression across features newly aged a decade. There was something familiar about this place, too, but that brain fog persisted. He couldn't shake that something was off and yet, there didn't seem to be anything out of place, either. It all looked normal enough. "Excuse me," Llewellyn politely reached for a passerby to stop them, "do you have any water?" He offered an apologetic and uncertain smile. "I'm sorry, I just- I could really use some water.." Boy, could he! Felt like he hadn't had anything to drink in days.

[bericas]

you would rather be with her, hearing the light buzz of her snoring, watching her sleep.

[bunisher]

yeah i do think it’s interesting how the guy who plays a character who kills abusers had one on his podcast and then was like hehehe frankcastlecore Bro The Character You Play Would Shoot You Too

[trans-axolotl]

this time last year, it was my seventh week institutionalized and it was one of the hardest weeks to survive. one of my dear friends said later that they saw the light completely go out of my eyes, and i think it was the week i cried the most. i remember desperately wanting to go outside, and feeling so much despair about not being able to experience the last few days of summer outside. i felt violated. it was finally starting to sink in that i was going to spend several more months locked up, and the extent to which my autonomy was taken away.

and then another patient who could go outside brought me back a pinecone, and i nearly started sobbing. that tiny kindness meant everything. even despite all the violence of confinement, we found ways to exist together.

today i walked outside and saw so, so many pinecones. it's been a year, and i survived, and all i can think is how much love i have for fellow psych survivors and how much i wish we were all free.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

not a dream

Days ago, I've discovered that a neighbor from the building I used to live with has disappeared. 21 days later and he's still missing. I've been sleeping badly since hearing about it.

We lived on the same floor, he was a few doors down the hall from my folks and I, and Ragnar and him really liked each other. There wasn't a time where he wouldn't come to pet him if he saw us out and about.

He was a veteran of the Croatian War of Independence and was completely destroyed by it. I know about it because not a lot of people talked to him, but I did, and he opened up to me about things.

He took to drinking, a lot. He wasn't aggressive, he was destructive to himself. Since meeting him up until the time we moved away, he lost a lot of weight and shrunk into himself.

Things he was saying stopped making sense. We had roaches on our floor because he never wanted to let the fumigation guys into his apartment. He sold his flat a little before we moved and the new owner had to basically tear it down to clean it.

One time the fire department was called because he fell asleep while cooking something and burned a kitchen towel and our hallway was covered in thick smoke. One time he broke a glass in front of the hallway door and left it like that. There were...incidents.

From talking to him, everyone could tell he wasn't doing well. He used to be very lucid, but he stopped having many lucid moments in the last few months I knew him. Last I heard, he moved to somewhere where he would be getting some help.

There was a time where he cleaned his act up for a while. He stopped drinking and was allegedly working. He met a woman. But that didn't last long. I was rooting for him hard.

Every day I check his missing person entry and hope for the best. It's still there. He's still missing. I've learned that he is only 55. I thought he was much older. Life hasn't been kind to him. I hope he is found, but everything in my body is saying that chances for that are none.

[roukabi]

Everybody loves a winner

so nobody loved me