uma15

[uma15]

Restlessness

Sometimes the urge to put pencil to paper is so great that it feels like the words will gather beneath my skin and under my tongue and burst out if I do nothing about them. It’s a sudden surge of need and a craving so deep that it throws me completely off balance and I am unable to think of anything but stitching words into sentences and weaving sentences into stories.

Sometimes that yearning…

[uma15]

Happiness.

Happiness is that first bite into a hot waffle with your favourite ice cream. It’s that feeling you get when you see your parents cry with joy for you. It’s succeeding in something that you hold close to your heart. Happiness is your best friend smiling at you on a bad day, instantly making you feel better. It’s the warmth that washes over you when you step inside on a bitterly cold winter’s day.…

[uma15]

Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence

1.

I am six. My babysitter’s son, who is five but a whole head taller than me, likes to show me his penis. He does it when his mother isn’t looking. One time when I tell him not to, he holds me down and puts penis on my arm. I bite his shoulder, hard. He starts crying, pulls up his pants and runs upstairs to tell his mother that I bit him. I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone about the penis part, so they all just think I bit him for no reason.

I get in trouble first at the babysitter’s house, then later at home.

The next time the babysitter’s son tries to show me his penis, I don’t fight back because I don’t want to get in trouble.

One day I tell the babysitter what her son does, she tells me that he’s just a little boy, he doesn’t know any better. I can tell that she’s angry at me, and I don’t know why. Later that day, when my mother comes to pick me up, the babysitter hugs me too hard and says how jealous she is because she only has sons and she wishes she had a daughter as sweet as me.

One day when we’re playing in the backyard he tells me very seriously that he might kill me one day and I believe him.

2.

I am in the second grade and our classroom has a weird open-concept thing going on, and the fourth wall is actually the hallway to the gym. All day long, we surreptitiously watch the other grades file past on the way to and from the gym. We are supposed to ignore most of them. The only class we are not supposed to ignore is Monsieur Pierre’s grade six class.

Every time Monsieur Pierre walks by, we are supposed to chorus “Bonjour, Monsieur Sexiste.” We are instructed to do this by our impossibly beautiful teacher, Madame Lemieux. She tells us that Monsieur Pierre, a dapper man with grey hair and a moustache, is sexist because he won’t let the girls in his class play hockey. She is the first person I have ever heard use the word sexist.

The word sounds very serious when she says it. She looks around the class to make sure everyone is paying attention and her voice gets intense and sort of tight.

“Girls can play hockey. Girls can do anything that boys do,” she tells us.

We don’t really believe her. For one thing, girls don’t play hockey. Everyone in the NHL – including our hero Mario Lemieux, who we sometimes whisper might be our teacher’s brother or cousin or even husband – is a boy. But we accept that maybe sixth grade girls can play hockey in gym class, so we do what she asks.

Mostly what I remember is the smile that spreads across Monsieur Pierre’s face whenever we call him a sexist. It is not the smile of someone who is ashamed; it is the smile of someone who finds us adorable in our outrage.

3.

Later that same year a man walks into Montreal’s École Polytechnique and kills fourteen women. He kills them because he hates feminists. He kills them because they are going to be engineers, because they go to school, because they take up space. He kills them because he thinks they have stolen something that is rightfully his. He kills them because they are women.

Everything about the day is grey: the sky, the rain, the street, the concrete side of the École Polytechnique, the pictures of the fourteen girls that they print in the newspaper. My mother’s face is grey. It’s winter, and the air tastes like water drunk from a tin cup.

Madame Lemieux doesn’t tell us to call Monsieur Pierre a sexist anymore. Maybe he lets the girls play hockey now. Or maybe she is afraid.

Girls can do anything that boys do but it turns out that sometimes they get killed for it.

4.

I am fourteen and my classmate’s mother is killed by her boyfriend. He stabs her to death. In the newspaper they call it a crime of passion. When she comes back to school, she doesn’t talk about it. When she does mention her mother it’s always in the present tense – “my mom says” or “my mom thinks” – as if she is still alive. She transfers schools the next year because her father lives across town in a different school district.

Passion. As if murder is the same thing as spreading rose petals on your bed or eating dinner by candlelight or kissing through the credits of a movie.

5.

Men start to say things to me on the street, sometimes loudly enough that everyone around us can hear, but not always. Sometimes they mutter quietly, so that I’m the only one who knows. So that if I react, I’ll seem like I’m blowing things out of proportion or flat-out making them up. These whispers make me feel complicit in something, although I don’t quite know what.

I feel like I deserve it. I feel like I am asking for it. I feel dirty and ashamed.

I want to stand up for myself and tell these men off, but I am afraid. I am angry that I’m such a baby about it. I feel like if I were braver, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it. Eventually I screw up enough courage and tell a man to leave me alone; I deliberately keep my voice steady and unemotional, trying to make it sound more like a command than a request. He grabs my wrist and calls me a fucking bitch.

After that I don’t talk back anymore. Instead I just smile weakly; sometimes I duck my head and whisper thank you. I quicken my steps and hurry away until one time a man yells don’t you fucking run away and starts to follow me.

After that I always try to keep my pace even, my breath slow. Like how they tell you that if you ever see a bear you shouldn’t run, you should just slowly back away until he can’t see you.

I think that these men, like dogs, can smell my fear.

6.

On my eighteenth birthday my cousin takes me out clubbing. While we’re dancing, a man comes up behind me and starts fiddling with the straps on my flouncy black dress. But he’s sort of dancing with me and this is my first time ever at a club and I want to play it cool, so I don’t say anything. Then he pulls the straps all the way down and everyone laughs as I scramble to cover my chest.

At a concert a man comes up behind me and slides his hand around me and starts playing with my nipple while he kisses my neck. By the time I’ve got enough wiggle room to turn around, he’s gone.

At my friend’s birthday party a gay man grabs my breasts and tells everyone that he’s allowed to do it because he’s not into girls. I laugh because everyone else laughs because what else are you supposed to do?

Men press up against me on the subway, on the bus, once even in a crowd at a protest. Their hands dangle casually, sometimes brushing up against my crotch or my ass. One time it’s so bad that I complain to the bus driver and he makes the man get off the bus but then he tells me that if I don’t like the attention maybe I shouldn’t wear such short skirts.

7.

I get a job as a patient-sitter, someone who sits with hospital patients who are in danger of pulling out their IVs or hurting themselves or even running away. The shifts are twelve hours and there is no real training, but the pay is good.

Lots of male patients masturbate in front of me. Some of them are obvious, which is actually kind of better because then I can call a nurse. Some of them are less obvious, and then the nurses don’t really care. When that happens, I just bury my head in a book and pretend I don’t know what they’re doing.

One time an elderly man asks me to fix his pillow and when I bend over him to do that he grabs my hand and puts it on his dick.

When I call my supervisor to complain she says that I shouldn’t be upset because he didn’t know what he was doing.

8.

A man walks into an Amish school, tells all the little girls to line up against the chalkboard, and starts shooting.

A man walks into a sorority house and starts shooting.

A man walks into a theatre because the movie was written by a feminist and starts shooting.

A man walks into Planned Parenthood and starts shooting.

A man walks into.

9.

I start writing about feminism on the internet, and within a few months I start getting angry comments from men. Not death threats, exactly, but still scary. Scary because of how huge and real their rage is. Scary because they swear they don’t hate women, they just think women like me need to be put in their place.

I get to a point where the comments – and even the occasional violent threat – become routine. I joke about them. I think of them as a strange badge of honour, like I’m in some kind of club. The club for women who get threats from men.

It’s not really funny.

10.

Someone makes a death threat against my son.

I don’t tell anyone right away because I feel like it is my fault – my fault for being too loud, too outspoken, too obviously a parent.

When I do finally start telling people, most of them are sympathetic. But a few women say stuff like “this is why I don’t share anything about my children online,” or “this is why I don’t post any pictures of my child.”

Even when a man makes a choice to threaten a small child it is still, somehow, a woman’s fault.

11.

I try not to be afraid.

I am still afraid.

- By Anne Thériault

[uma15]

Hands + violin

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Hogwarts Houses common rooms in Halloween season 

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Our paths diverged a long time ago.

[uma15]

Favorite Stelena Moments - (1/?)

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[uma15]

Afterthought.

Second best. A feeling that one often feels in everyday life. You’d think you’d be used to it by now: having dealt with it for years, but it’s still a stab to your heart when you realise that they don’t care about you as much as you do for them. You always seem to be forgotten. Until someone sees you suddenly and is surprised, as if you hadn’t been there all along. Or if they completely ignore…

[uma15]

This might be the cheesiest thing I’ve ever written, at least that’s how I feel about it, which is why I am super anxious to post it… but in my defence Mofftiss tried to get away with gymbag!lock and other quite bizarre, unrealistic things so… anyway, this is a part of the TLS screenplay, based on the gifset fic I made, but of course a tad more complex/detailed.

P.S.: I have literally zero experience with this, I just… have been reading the scripts they had published (a lot) and decided to give it try.

[uma15]

Soulful.

(Dedicated to my best friend) To say that your soul is beautiful would be an understatement. I imagine yours to be so vast, and so incredible, that one would never be able to see the whole of it, or even begin to notice the smallest of details. Some people may think our souls are only one or two hues, but yours would be a riotous mess of wild, wild colours, with the occasional pale blue…

[uma15]

“you machine!”

[uma15]

Goodbye, John.

[uma15]

[uma15]

suspension of disbelief

@khorazir prompted: The boys watch some episodes of The X-Files together.

 Sherlock looked up from the microscope, blinked. John looked back at him, his face expectant.

 Clearly, he’d been speaking. Clearly, a response of some kind was required.

 "Of course,“ he tried.

 John raised his brows, looked both pleased and surprised. This—this did not bode well. Perhaps he should have asked John to repeat himself, but he did so loathe repetition.

 "Go on, then,” John said. He stepped over towards the fridge, perused the menus with a little frown of concentration.

 Sherlock hesitated. Go on?

 Judging by John’s preoccupation with the menus, he thought perhaps he may have agreed to dinner plans. Except, if that was all, then what was he meant to go on with?

 He stood up from the table, took a cautious step towards the sitting room. John had left the telly on. It was cycling through a DVD menu of some kind, eerie whistling music backed by piano. He frowned, looked back.

 John glanced up from the menus, made a shooing motion with his hand. Ah. It appeared that he’d committed to watching a film or—he paused, looked at the screen—a television series.

 He sighed, aimed a longing glance in the direction of his abandoned microscope, and settled himself on the sofa. He took up a bit more space than entirely necessary.

 The menu looped, started again. Piano. Whistling.

 John paced around the kitchen, phone to his ear, ordering the takeaway. Sherlock glanced at the menus, now rearranged on the front of the fridge. Chinese.

 He looked back at the television. Opened his mouth to speak.

 "I’m betting you missed this entirely, yeah?“ John said, sitting down on the sofa next to him. The cushions dipped, and Sherlock found himself wanting to lean closer, to blame the motion on his shifted balance—but no, best not.

 "Missed–?”

 "The X-Files.“ John said with a nod at the screen. "FBI agents, government conspiracies, aliens…? Kind of a big deal in the 90s. Ringing any bells at all?”

 Sherlock scoffed, looked away. “I had other things on my mind in the 90s.”

 John cleared his throat, looked down.

 The menu continued to loop.

 "Right,“ John said, after a long moment. He reached for the remote. "Food will be here in about twenty minutes.”

 He pressed play.

 *

 "Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?“ asked the man on the screen. He was being altogether too dramatic about the whole thing, in Sherlock’s opinion.

 "Logically, I would have to say no,” his recently-assigned partner countered.

 "Actually—" Sherlock said.

 John picked up the remote, pressed pause. Stared at him.

 "Never mind,“ Sherlock said.

 *

 "Time can’t just disappear,” said the woman on the screen. “It’s a universal invariant.”

 "No it isn’t,“ Sherlock said.

 "Shush,” John said.

 "But she read physics at university, she would know that—"

 "Sherlock,“ John said.

 *

 For some reason, the woman had decided to bathe by candlelight. She had only just begun to disrobe when something frightened her and sent her rushing through the rain into the arms of her male coworker.

 Sherlock sighed, rolled his eyes. Looked back towards the kitchen, where his microscope beckoned.

 "Just watch,” John said, through a mouthful of lo mein.

 The scene did not play out the way he’d expected.

 *

 "Another,“ he said when it was over.

 "What, really?” John’s voice was incredulous.

 He wrestled the remote out of John’s hand.

 *

 "It’s really not that easy to break into a secret government base.“

 "Er,” John said. “Yes, actually, it is. We’ve done it.”

 "We had the proper credentials.“

 "Faked credentials.”

 "Still. It wasn’t as simple as ducking under a chain link fence for God’s sake.“

 John chuckled, leaned back against the sofa cushions. At some point he had migrated closer, his arm warm where it brushed against Sherlock’s.

 "Now he’s gone and gotten himself drugged,” Sherlock protested, looking away. “That didn’t happen to me.”

 "No, it happened to me,“ John said, and swatted at him. "Arsehole.”

 "Another,“ he said, when it was over.

 *

 "I’m expected to believe that this man sleeps in a nest of newspapers and bile and emerges precisely every thirty years to consume five human livers?”

 "It’s not really so much believing as it is suspension of disbelief, yeah?“

 "No,” Sherlock said. “The dichotomy between the two main characters—”

 "Wasn’t talking about them,“ John said. His voice had grown sleepy. "Was talking about us.”

 "What, precisely, are we meant to be suspending disbelief over?“

 "The livers,” John said, gesturing vaguely towards the screen. “The bile.”

 "The lack of a romantic entanglement in spite of the clear attraction and the fact that both main characters clearly have no one else in their lives of similar importance?“

 "That too,” John said. A faint smile flickered on his face.

 *

 "Another.“

 "Sherlock, I need to go to sleep.”

 "Mm,“ Sherlock said, distracted. He slid over on the couch to give John more room. The loss of John’s warm comfortable weight against his side was jarring.

 He reached over, snatched up the throw pillow from the coffee table. Held it up for a moment, weighing his options. He thought about the warmth of John’s arm, pressed against his own, the way his chest rose and fell with each measured breath.

 He set the pillow in his lap. Waited.

 John hesitated for a long moment, studying him, his face difficult to read in the blueish light from the television screen. Then he carefully, slowly arranged himself so that his head was on the pillow, resting on Sherlock’s lap. He held himself quite stiffly, his shoulders tense, his movements unsure.

 "Suspension of disbelief,” Sherlock said. He spoke in a low, quiet voice, dipping his head down. John’s face was very close, in the dark.

 "What, exactly, are you trying to say?“ John asked. His voice was little more than a whisper. He shifted, the leather squeaking under his frame.

 "Lack of romantic entanglement in spite of clear attraction. And—” he stopped, swallowed. Could no longer bear to look at John’s profile in the dark. Turned his head towards the window. “No one else in my life of similar importance.”

 "Clear attraction?“ John asked, his voice sleepy, fond.

 "Well,” Sherlock said, his throat suddenly dry. “Yes?”

 John chuckled, shifted again, rolling over onto his side. He reached up a hand, cupped Sherlock’s cheek.

 He could not say with any certainty who moved in first. But his lips were pressed against John’s, warm and soft and utterly thrilling, sending electric shocks of sensation down his spine. His eyes slipped shut and he sighed, breath puffing against John’s face.

 "All right?“ John asked, quiet, pulling back. He no longer looked drowsy.

 Sherlock stared at him, at his eyes, gleaming bright in the television glow. At his face, expressive and endearing and so very dear to him. How? he wondered, and not for the first time. How had this happened?

 "Sherlock?” John asked again, his voice low, careful. He left his hand cradled against Sherlock’s face.

 Sherlock smiled. “Another,” he said, and leaned in.