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People talk a lot of shit about the moment in Age of Ultron when Cap punches one of the Iron Legion bots but man has serum hands of steel, his fists are their own weapon, it's literally Canon and in this essay I wi

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#You go girls

Bonus:

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Me: I want to write a thing

Friends: So write it

Me:

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The Shift

So I met this guy and I wrote about it because I had no place else to put it. Does anybody else feel this way? He sat there, six, maybe 7 inches to my left, the morning sun beaming in on us. We passed my favorite coffee mug back and forth, the one I bought at Fanny May’s the first time I came to Chicago, taking sips as if it were the most natural thing in the world. That little moment, those 5 minutes of waking up with coffee together almost undid me. It felt old, it felt sacred. It felt like easing your foot into your favorite pair of boots, worn soft over time, and shaped to the curve of your foot.              He felt like we’d already grown old together and this is just what life with him would be. Simple and beautiful and filled with music and early morning shared coffee and his tousled bedhead and watching him blink against the sun through the steam from the coffee.  It felt like something I had always known and was just discovering for the first time.              Its July 2020. The Caronavirus is still raging in the US, and some people are still quarantined. Most of the states reopened too early and there’s a second wave that’s hit, even worse than the first one. I quarantined alone for almost 4 months, in my 400 square foot studio apartment, when the states gave the shelter-in-place order. It was my first year in Chicago. Total isolation. At one point, I really did think I was actually starting to go insane. I just started questioning the reality of everything, because after so many weeks of looking out my one window onto the alley below, it really did feel like that’s all that there was to the world. This alley, my cat, my bed and my books, and me.              But it isn’t just me. He’s here too. Josh was sitting on the edge of my bed drinking coffee with me, sharing a mug with me, and I don’t know why but I can’t get away from the idea that sharing a single mug of coffee with someone else as you wake up is maybe the most intimate thing there is.              He’d been only too clear about the fact that he didn’t want to be in a relationship yet, with anyone. He’d been broken too. More recently than I had. But he wanted something good, I could see it, he was just terrified. Looking at him felt a little bit like looking at me two years ago. I’d been so scared to trust anyone with anything deeper than a first date with me then. Because even those usually ended badly. But he connected with me. I knew I wasn’t imagining that, and he had to feel *something* too, or we wouldn’t be here now. These are all the things I’ve told myself since I haven’t actually worked up the guts to ask him how he feels about me yet.              We’d watched this eerie Jake Gyllenhaal movie called Enemy, and then gone on a walk because his place didn’t have AC and it was a Chicago July night, weighing in at 93 degrees and full humidity. It was cooler outside, like he’d said it would be, walking around the quiet park than it was in that big, creaky old house filled with stories.              By the time we got back, our sweat was sweating and I didn’t think I could go much longer before I soaked through my whole shirt.              “I have an air mattress at my air-conditioned apartment. If you want, you’re more than welcome to use it.”              I could see him start to shake his head, maybe out of habit. We were both raised that way. You refuse everything out of pure politeness at least once. I’ve never understood that. If you offer someone something, you should be expecting that they will take it. If you’re expecting that they won’t, then why offer? Refusing help, or a gracious offer of any kind out of pure habit and social etiquette feels like a Midwestern thing. He’s from Texas and I’m from KC, so it tracks that we both have that automatic, “No thank you” built in. His head stopped mid-turn and he said, “Are you sure?” Ever the gentleman.              “Yes. This is miserable.”              “Okay, let’s go.”              Within 5 minutes, we were on the road back to my apartment. He hasn’t seen it yet, I just moved in last week. I called my last place, “The Shoebox” because it wasn’t much bigger than a shoebox. This new place is still a studio apartment, but it is bigger than The Shoebox, and as such has been upgraded to, “The Hatbox”. I live on the fourth floor at the very end of two incredibly long hallways, and it feels the most like me that a space has since my big airy loft in downtown Kansas City.              I let him in, and he fits right in with the furniture, the walls, moving easily past the colors flung across every surface of the apartment, as if he’s done this hundreds of times before. Maybe I’m desperately overthinking things. Maybe it’s because I’ve been isolated from all human interaction for four months and longer from human touch. Maybe it’s because he feels solid, and like someone I’ve already known my whole life, maybe it’s because I identify with his particular type of broken-ness, our parents both fucked us up and our very few and very serious long-term relationships made sure they fucked us up even further before they ended. And maybe I’m romanticizing things because that’s what I’ve always done and maybe he’s not that great but that’s just the thing.              He is the most wonderful person I’ve met since Houston. That distinction is important, because since Houston died, I’ve loved two men, but they were both terrible men with many little wonderful things about them. He is the most wonderful person I’ve met since Houston, like warm summer nights and winter evenings when the wind howls and crisp autumn mornings, the way the air smells after the rain in spring. He’s all of those things, and I think I could Love him. I think maybe I already do. I know that’s not as true as it could be if I’d known him longer, lived enough life with him to Love him in the way that you do when someone is just sewn into the fabric of your life over time.              But I think I Love him in the way that you Love those very few people, who, when you happen to stumble across each other, you discover that they’ve been sewn into the fabric of who you are all along, the good and bad, and you’ve only just noticed them. He could be none of these things, but seeing him turn in slow circles on my brightly patterned rug and exclaiming again and again how cute the apartment is, over old pictures and red paintbrushes, lit by the candles scattered through the room, I’m pretty certain that he is all of these things, that he’s as deeply a part of me as my bones and blood, that he always has been, and that he just hasn’t been yet.              So we make tea. I make the tea, and he blows up an air mattress and we sit at opposite ends of the tiny room like perfect strangers and we laugh about things I can’t remember and talked about things that were important and drink the tea slowly. But just now, all I can remember is the way the shadows danced across his face, the way his eyes are green and gold and brown and how it all depends on where you and the light catch him.              I gave him his choice of blankets, and after carefully running his thumb and forefinger over the textures of two or three, he picked a big navy blue velour one that my mom bought for me for Christmas three years ago. She loves comfort items. He rolls over, his hair curling up from the base of his neck to rest against the lavender pillowcase. Since I shaved my head I’ve missed the feeling of running my own fingers through my hair, it was a lifelong habit that felt secure, and I wondered what it would be like to run my fingers through his, through anyone’s again.              It’s midnight and we turn off Netflix, say goodnight, and I wait for everything to go dark. It’s 3:00 AM, and I can hear him saying, “Tess?” He asked me earlier tonight if I preferred Tess or Tessie. I told him either, and the fact that he chose the shorter, more familiar of the two sends something through me as I wake up, a feeling too quick to identify.              “I’m freezing, can we turn the AC off?”              I think I mumble yes as I sleepily flip the icy-cold window unit off. Minutes pass, maybe seconds, I’m not sure. Then I hear him say my name again, and my stomach does the thing again.              “Is there room up there?”              “Yeah, come on.”              I roll over to move pillows around and feel him slide in behind me, that old, familiar feeling of sharing the bed with someone else’s body heat coming back with a vengeance. It’s a twin bed, and it wasn’t made for two adults, but my sister said once that you’d be surprised what you can fit into a twin bed if you really put your mind to it, and she was right. It’s tight quarters but it only means that his entire body presses against mine, from his breath on my neck to his feet beneath mine.              Up to this point, there’s been no touching. He’ll hug me goodbye when he leaves, and I think our hands brushed once when we were trying to open a bottle of wine. But we haven’t touched. He’s careful to maintain distance. And now he’s everywhere. His scent, his hair, his warm body and his arm around my waist, tugging me into him.              I had to remind myself to breathe slowly. It’s too much. It’s way too much and in the dark I can’t feel or take anything in besides him. “Are you okay?”              “Yeah, I’m just really cold.” He says.              I snuggle deeper into his arms and let my hand drop below the blanket and on top of his arm, tracing tiny patterns into his skin with my fingers. Unexpectedly, he pulls me around until we’re facing each other and wraps both his arms around me, burying his face in my neck. My arms encircle him, running my hands through his hair and gathering it in fistfuls. The rhythm of my breathing has changed. It’s choppier. Ragged. His is too. He has to feel this, I know this, this is the brink, this is the moment on the edge when you make a choice and you can’t breathe the deep lungful’s of air you’re pulling in but you keep trying to anyways, and you suddenly feel like your body couldn’t possibly contain you for another second. Everything feels like a pulse, you are just your heartbeat.              It’s all done with a sort of sleepy fluidity, with the unspoken understanding that what’s happening now is not binding, it’s exploratory. With the knowledge that you probably won’t talk about it when you wake up, and if you do, it certainly won’t be in detail.              I couldn’t tell you if I kept my writhing under control, I just know that I felt like I was coming out of every edge and corner I’d ever known every time I felt his breath on my chin, brushing my lower lip, in the same choppy rhythm as mine. And then, just as suddenly, he moves again and I’m moved with him, his arms sliding up my sides to encircle my back, and then my head is on his chest and our breathing slows down again.              “I’m not trying to confuse you, but it is nice to cuddle.” He murmurs above my head, bringing his hand up and down my back in a slow, careful motion.              “I know that.”              I say it before I can stop myself. It was a reflex, the need to present as perfectly fine no matter the situation. I’m not confused, I want to tell him. I know exactly what I want. It seems like every time we get a little too close to each other for comfort, anytime the potential is there, he pulls back and makes sure to reiterate that we are just friends. It feels like he’s trying to convince himself as much as me, but maybe I’m just wishing for that.              And in any case, 3AM in a twin bed with a grown man that you have a unproportionately large crush on hardly seems like the ideal time to say, “Actually, this question has been killing me. How do you feel about me? Do you also feel an ancient, deep connection? Do you also feel safe enough to think about, for the first time in years, seriously exploring this romantically and sexually?”              It’s a loaded question, and he’s looking for a reason to run away at the first sign of danger. I won’t give him one. I know that look, I’ve worn it often enough. So I keep my mouth shut and decide that I will be the safe place, that he should set the pace if he needs to take this slower than I do.              I lay there and think about the fact that within the last year, I’ve come out to myself and publicly as bi. And the thought drifts through my head that I will never know what it would be like to have a female partner, because as early as it is, I’m already so far gone. And then I think about the fact that he is demi, and then that it really doesn’t matter “what” he is or, “what” I am because that is the whole point. To Love who you Love regardless of the body they come in.              Its 6AM. We push the snooze button on the alarm repeatedly, and once I get up to make coffee. He nods, a tangled, dark gold head buried in the pillow when I ask him if he wants coffee before he goes to work. He makes room for me as I pull back the covers to climb into bed again and pulls me tight against him once more.              When he pushes snooze again, I laugh at him and realize that it takes as many alarms to get him out of bed as it does for me. He says sleepily, “Not usually, but just today.” And buries his head in my back, nuzzling into my T-shirt and squeezing my hand. I haven’t stopped smiling since 3AM when he got into bed with me. Am I crazy? Was he really just cold, and touch-starved, like me? Does this really not mean anything to him? Can he really not feel this?              The sun streams through the blinds, insisting that we leave what has become a small cocoon, a tangle of arms, legs, and blankets, and we pull ourselves upright slowly. I fill a to-go mug with coffee and set it aside to cool, pouring the remaining coffee into my Chicago mug. I blow the steam off the top and try to reconcile that feeling of being fluid, of being warm, of being held all night. It’s foreign, like tasting a dish of food from your childhood and knowing that it is an old friend, but you haven’t seen each other in years.              His dimple disappears into a cavernous yawn and I pass the coffee mug to him without speaking, as if we’ve done this every morning at 7AM our whole lives. We both drink it black. He takes it without speaking too and turns on, “Speechless” by Lady Gaga, (one of his favorites, he tells me) and there is no need to talk. We take in the sunshine and the morning and the inevitable shift that occurs when you spend the night in the same bed with someone in comfortable silence. That little moment, those 5 minutes of waking up with coffee together almost undid me. It felt old, it felt sacred. It felt like easing your foot into your favorite pair of boots, worn soft over time, and shaped to the curve of your foot.              He felt like we’d already grown old together and this is just what life with him would be. Simple and beautiful and filled with music and early morning shared coffee and his tousled bedhead and watching him blink against the sun through the steam from the coffee.  It felt like something I had always known and was just discovering for the first time.              Its July 2020. That all happened last night. I’m still half-convinced I dreamed him up, that I’ve hallucinated the whole thing, the weeks of talking and the picnic we went on for our first date, and the phone calls and the movie nights and discovering a rainbow with him after a thunderstorm, and crying to each other on my old rooftop for old wounds, high above the city where no one would see but us, and falling asleep with him, and all the things that are just everyday life but also the most spectacular.              Its been just over two months since we met, and yet I’m more certain of this than things I’ve known and studied for years. I guess the best part of this, is that the whole story is left to be told, and I get to live it, whatever it looks like.  

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Excuse me while I try find my panties, they seem to have fallen off

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totally platonic ways to show ur platonic bro friend u care platonically - a guide by Steven G. Rogers

1. defy government orders and embark on a one man mission to walk from one country to another to save said platonic bro friend 2. listen to slightly more sensible friend when they suggest perhaps flying rather than walking, then jump out of plane directly into enemy territory to get to the bro friend 3. single handedly defeat a bunch of nazi’s using no more than determination and a tin foil shield to find the bro friend 4. literally jump over fiery pits of near certain death to escape back to relative safety with bro friend 5. refuse to fight for probably the first time in your entire life and drop ur defences rather than hurt ur bro friend any more than he’s already been hurt 6. have a phrase that sounds remarkably like a marriage vow - but obviously in a platonic way bc bro friend- that holds so much significance - platonically - that it resonates even through 70 years of brainwashing and torture and he remembers it before he remembers his own name 7. Become an internationally wanted fugitive but shrug it off like nothing because bro friend is still alive 8. Pull a helicopter out of the sky. With your own two hands. Nothing but ur own strength and determination. 9. Give up being what the world knows you as and expects from you, instead choosing him and choosing yourself. But like. As bro’s.

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when the mcu tries to gently Just Good Pals steve and bucky i want to laugh at them because, like. they were the ones who structured their arc, from the very beginning, as a story about leaving a plucky sweetheart behind in the states when you ship out. it could have been lifted wholesale from practically any wartime romance filmed between 1940 and 1950. “i just wish they’d take me into the army too– i’d go with you, show that fuhrer a thing or two– just promise me you’ll take care!”  “darling, don’t worry, you can do your part right here at home– it’s ever so important to the war effort!” it’s the theme of fucking “tender comrade” and “since you went away” and “mrs. miniver” and i could go on and on

the part where steve gets turned into a tall dangerous hillshire farms beef log is the surprising science fiction twist; but the part where he grumps about being Left Behind by a uniformed hottie is 1000% period-accurate romantic dramedy that could have been screenwritten by david o. selznick. i’m sorry mcu i don’t make the fucking rules. this is just how it is. give them their v-e day kiss already and let me rest

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anthony mackie hyping sebastian stan up: a thrilling saga.

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we really dont fuck around and wake ancient gods enough 

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Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) dir. Joss Whedon

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No matter how many times you get hit, can you get back up?