Sudden wave of an immense love for humanity has hit me once again…
Just look at this. It's cruel.
He's hooked up to more life support than All for One after having his entire skull caved in and brain turned to paste.
They practically put him on display here.
He's got that hole in the base of his throat like what people who've smoking for 50 years. Why does thst medical equipment look like he's got knives stabbed into his shoulders?
Touya can't move, can only speak for a few minutes a day(which I assume is related to him only being concious for a few minutes a day), he's got no limbs, if he has any amount of physical sensation left he is in pain, and look at what is on his head
Those are going into his skull in multiple places. What is even the point of forcing him to endure this?
Look at his throat. Look at how little mass is left between his esophagus and spine. The rest of it is artificial, probably just to force him to keep breathing. Almost his entire lower jaw is fake too.
Why doesn't he have nose holes?
On a related note! How can he talk? He ain't got no lips left.
On an unrelated note! Why are his teeth the only part of him left completely in tact?
Overall: Forcing a corpse to keep breathing and putting it in a glass display case is dehumanizing and a worse punishment than anything else that has happened in this entire series, and it's being treated as a good thing because "Closure" or whatever.
And, like, he's still dying. He's not healing from this. They are literally just prolonging his suffering. They are forcing him to suffer so Enji can come and try to relieve his own guilt? So Shoto can have a sibling relationship with the charrred husk that used to be a human as it slowly wastes away? Maybe he should try building rekationships with his nonmurderous siblings with intact bodies and minds that aren't mummies suspended in a living hell. Spend some time with his mom, maybe?
cinderella marries the prince
and it’s… fine. The prince is great! They’re in love, he’s very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and songs, giving her anything she wants. The time she spends with her husband is great.
but cinderella is not royalty, her family was noble but she never spent time in those circles. She’s used to being busy, she’s used to cooking and cleaning and mending. There are hours, days, where she has nothing to do.
time passes. cinderella learns the fancy lady type of needlework. Learns to ride horses. Reads a lot.
as is normal for royalty at the time, they travel and are hosted by nobles or stay at castles owned by the king. But even that variety begins to become routine. The prince is distracted, there’s a lot of young women living and working on their route. Daughters of nobles. Younger and prettier with soft hands that have never done a day’s work.
cinderella needs something to spend her time on, and there’s a part of her thinking a couple-only trip might get her husband’s attention again, so she suggests making an old castle that’s fallen into disrepair their “project.” It was built in the time when castles were made to be defensible, so it’s quite sturdy, but it’s overgrown and secluded. The prince doesn’t know why his family stopped living there either. A hundred years ago it was their summer home.
so they go. And they work. And for a while it’s great! But when they leave for winter cinderella’s husband forgets her once again. cinderella resolves to make the best of her life and stop worrying about a man who has gotten what he wanted from her.
summer comes again and this time cinderella goes alone to the old castle (minus staff, of course, but cinderella manages to narrow it down to only repair workers and one maid). She can cook and clean and mend again, but this time it’s her own choice. She is happy.
this summer they make more progress on repairs. The workers say that most of it can be salvaged, except one tower that’s been completely overgrown with vines and briars. It will have to come down, eventually, but for now it can be safely ignored.
cinderella has more free time now. The old castle has a surprisingly untouched library, though time and moisture have damaged many of the books. Behind a collection of greek poetry cinderella finds an old diary. Very old, in fact, at least a hundred years. It’s rude to read a diary, of course, but whoever wrote this is long dead, and cinderella is bored, so…
from the description of activities the author looks to have been nobility. Maybe even a princess. She’s sensitive and sweet and smarter than she seems to realize. If circumstances had been different cinderella wishes they could have been friends…
after the summer ends cinderella returns to her husband. He’s spending a lot of time with a young musician and cinderella can’t even work up the energy to care. She does some research about the castle and the family she’s married into, finds out the name of the princess who wrote the diary.
aurora. Cursed and forgotten. She died young, they say, in a plague that also took out the castle staff and her own parents. Luckily they avoided a succession crisis, but not so lucky for the dead.
time passes. cinderella goes to the old castle again and again, even out of season. Soon enough all that remains to be done is the old tower, and the builders say they should tear it down and fill the gaps before it gets cold.
one night cinderella is restless. The princess from the diary had been fond of that tower, and cinderella is far more attached to a dead woman than she ought to be. She gets out of bed, reads by candlelight, and finally goes to walk the empty halls.
she finds herself going to the tower. Pushing past the vines that don’t seem so troublesome really. They almost part before her. The stairs are perfectly intact, the door at the top is already cracked open. As if she should have done this years ago, cinderella steps into aurora’s bedroom.
she’s as beautiful as the stories say. And sitting under her hands, crossed across her stomach as it rises and falls, is a book of greek poetry.
years later, people will tell the story of cinderella as a cautionary one. Don’t seek above your station. Don’t marry for prestige. After all, a girl who grew up as a servant once married the crown prince, and disappeared after only three years. She ran away, they say, she couldn’t handle the lifestyle.
two old women who run a bookshop together agree with the lesson. Marrying for the wrong reasons never ends well. It’s best to wait for someone you have things in common with, shared interests.
or, failing that, the more linguistic of the two says, wait a decade or ten for someone to fall in love with you from your diary.
her partner laughs and hits her with the socks she is mending.
let's talk about lily evans and the marauders, aka moony, wormtail, padfoot and prongs. given that i didn't use their actual names, i think you can figure out where this is going. it's also long as hell, so. canon vs fanon, marauder edition, except snek is sleep deprived.
now, before we begin, i don't dislike the marauders. or lily, tbh. if I'm being perfectly, genuinely honest, i still go back and forth sometimes but they've been growing on me for a while now. the canon versions, at least. fanon does them real dirty, and that's part of why i'm writing this, because i'm genuinely tired of it. it's an injustice.
you can at least make excuses for james and lily, who were so undeveloped that jkr practically dropped a fill-in-the-blank sheet of character information in our laps, but sirius, remus and peter were around long enough for y'all to get real acquainted with them.
in canon, sirius black is an unhinged mf. genuinely. this isn't to say he's a bad guy, in fact, we see that he's still capable of doing good things, still capable of love, still capable of all the things that prove he's actually not bad at heart, just,,, severely traumatised and very steeped in negativity from his time with the dementors. what i'm saying is that this man is absolutely, no questions asked, no holds barred demented, and how could he not be? the guy sat wrongfully imprisoned in azkaban for twelve years, a good portion of which he spent as a dog in order to protect himself from the dementors. he certainly wasn't completely insane, but you cannot tell me that he was all there. he got out of azkaban fuelled almost solely by the intent to get revenge on pettigrew, tried to commit murder in front of three witnesses who were also children—one of whom was his godson—ate rats and was also malnourished, which i'm certain did not help the situation any. this man is off his goddamn rocker, and you know what? you love to see it. good for him.
oh, but, snek, that's what he's like as an adult. what about when they were at school? before azkaban? my guy, the reaction he has to grimmauld place is not the reaction of someone without trauma. i don't believe that walburga and orion were the type to physically abuse their children, but whatever happened in that house helped to fuck him up enough that he skipped the joke of part of practical joke, and pranked snape by telling him how to meet a werewolf that he knew would be fully transformed and dangerous to humans. more than that, the werewolf was remus, whom he's friends with, and who—best case scenario—would be facing a trial if james hadn't stepped in. you can say that maybe he didn't think about or understand the gravitas of his actions, but at the end of it, that's not how properly sane people react to people they dislike, and that's not how they treat their friends. if anything, it reads like he was in the middle of a breakdown and absolutely losing his shit and he wasn't thinking at all.
my guy went through some serious shit, and was in no way completely mentally stable. we can see pretty clearly that he's got a serious dark side to him that probably would have gone unbridled had he not disagreed with his family, and yet, fanon took one look at him and went, "teehee, uwu bad boi go vroom."
fanon said padfoot is a pretty boy with nice hair who is tastefully traumatised from his horribly abusive household. sirius rides his motorcycle and plays jokes and flirts with anything that moves, but he can do no real wrong and always comes back to his soft, bookish, chocolate-loving boyfriend remus, who will laugh about his lycanthropy and quietly disapprove but secretly laugh at his friends' antics while hiding his smile in his cardigan.
respectfully, what in the absolute fuck.
i'd put that meme in here if i could, the one that's like, "well done, you've broken _______ down to its bare essentials," but no. i can't bc it doesn't even apply. this isn't a meme, it's theseus' fucking ship.
fanon broke it down, and replaced the pieces one by one until we got to this point, where we need to sit down and ask ourselves, "is this even the same character?"
the answer is no, by the way. it isn't. when people talk about woobifying characters—you know, taking away every flaw they have, romanticising everything they do and making them only capable of doing good, wonderful, lovely things?—this is what we mean.
and it'd be one thing if it was just the one character, but, no. fanon went all in and made them all squeaky clean and boring, especially peter, who draws the shortest of the straws.
remus got fucked, too. not just because fanon insists on sticking him into a relationship with sirius. which, we'll tackle wolfstar in a bit, but that's not even the worst of it. here, we have yet another example of blatant, rampant woobifying. again, is he a bad person? no. we know he's a good guy, we know he's generally kind and well-mannered, we know that he wants to fo the right thing but hey, fun fact. did you know that you can be nice and a coward? did you know that you can be benevolent and good and kindly and have the greatest of intentions and still be shady as fuck? no? ask dumbledore. the man played people like chess pieces when he needed to, and he was a twinkly grandpa. these are things that can coexist.
teenage remus is a coward who, understandably, does not stand up to his friends, likely for fear of being ostracised, and doesn't uphold his prefect duties as he should and takes part in their bullying of snape as a result. he lets them romp with him in werewolf form while they are in their animagus forms and then, he lets them continue to do so even after they have multiple close calls, which, again, had anything happened, would have resulted in a trial in the best case scenario.
grownup remus is still a coward, he tells no one that sirius can move about the school in his animagus form despite wholeheartedly believing that he's a mass murderer, he tries to run out on his wife and unborn kid. he isn't deliberately making attempts to harm anyone, but he's content to sit back and let things happen to him and around him so he doesn't rock the boat, although he is capable of action, which we see when he is more than willing to help sirius merk pettigrew in the shack. he can be careless, he runs out to the shack knowing he hasn't taken his wolfsbane and ends up transforming in front of the students he, as a teacher, is meant to be protecting. of course, this doesn't negate his good qualities, it just bears repeating that his flaws do exist, and they're pretty serious.
fanon moony is always pleasant and kind and soft-spoken and bookish, and he always has to have his chocolate. he knows when to tell off his friends, and he'll do it, even if he's secretly amused by everything they do and laughs about it with his best friend, lily evans, who coincidentally spends all her time with them so he and sirius can go on double dates with james and lily and no one has to remember peter exists.
why. theseus' ship 2.0. does the actual character still exist or is this something entirely different thing bearing the same name?
as for peter, who needs peter pettigrew, the actual, legitimate, fourth marauder when you have lily evans? canon pettigrew is opportunistic as fuck. he's latching himself to the biggest bad on the block and he's going all in. for teenage peter, that was james and sirius, and for adult peter, that's voldemort. canon peter is good enough at transfiguration to master the animagus transformation, just like his friends, and he's good enough at potions to brew the potion that gives voldemort a body. and honestly, you can't say he wasn't brave. he could've run off somewhere and died, or changed his identity or something after he faked his death and framed sirius, but, no. he goes and resurrects voldemort. that's fucked up, yeah, but it happened and honestly, i respect that it. he stuck to his guns.
fanon wormtail is lucky if he exists beyond being a spineless sycophant for james and sirius, or an evil conniving little rat who's looking to toss his entire friend group to the wolves at eleven.
of course, this isn't meant to negate his bad qualities, he still murdered people and framed sirius and sold out the potters to die, but his good characteristics do exist, and james, sirius and remus genuinely were his friends.
and now, we get to lily and james.
we have hardly any information on either of them. they're a pair of cardboard cutouts that we can paint and stick flyers to and colour outside the lines however we want. we can do whatever the fuck, as long lily is brave and smart and somewhat kind and james is brave and willing to die for his family. we were essentially handed a pair of ocs.
and yet.
what little bits of canon we have are thrown out of the window regardless.
james is privileged and rich, and he throws hexes for fun. he's willing to hex lily when she disagrees with him, and then, he goes behind her back to continue hexing snape after she believes that he's stopped doing so. and that's all we know about him until he dies for his family at twenty-one years old. once again, say it with me: this does not negate his good qualities. he definitely had them, he took sirius in when sirius ran away from home, he became an animagus to keep remus company as a wolf, and he saved snape in the shack, thereby saving remus and sirius by extension. him having flaws does not make him a bad person.
fanon prongs is a feminist. he fights for equal rights for women everywhere, and he constantly treats his girlfriend, lily, like an absolute queen. he's the hottest boy in school and everyone claps when he walks through the halls. mcgonagall and dumbledore are always patting him on the back and making jokes with him. he has a built-in dark detector that helps him sense when someone is a evil and needs to he punished.
give me a break. the dude's cool and all, but was the gary stu treatment necessary?
...oh, he needed to match fanon lily? right, right.
canon lily is a contradiction unto herself. she's supposedly a great friend, but since we see her at a point where they were already drifting apart, we see her putting little effort into keeping their friendship afloat. she victim blames based on rumours, she doesn't seem to care over much about what snape has to say about the people who have been tormenting him since day one. and she's justified, of course, she doesn't have to stick around. canon lily is a bit of hypocrite, she says that snape calls everyone of her birth mudblood, but then that begs the question why she still hangs around with him if that's the case. he calls her mudblood, she retaliates by calling him snivellus, and finishes up with a dig about his underwear, which, sure, it's kicking a man with a rusty spoon and pouring salt in the wound, but she's, again, justified. i get where she was coming from. and then, of course, she dies for her kid after marrying the guy who relentlessly bullied her quote-unquote best friend for their entire school careers. but, like i said, canon lily is, in many ways, a contradiction.
lily is basically a plot device. she pushes everyone's narrative but her own, and does little else.
of course, this trend would continue in fanon. fanon lily exists to be the perfect girl who gets really angry over the slightest injustice, and of course, she gets to be one half of one of the oldest enemies-to-lovers "it was just sexual tension" cliche pairings in the book. she's just,,, a mary sue. in so many fics, so many headcanons, she's just pettigrew's stand-in, a girl to form a gang with marlene, mary and dorcas—who happen to be more undeveloped ocs who also get the woobify mary sue treatment—to parallel the marauders. there is nothing compelling about her character when she's presented as a saint, and even less when she's supposedly the other moral compass for the marauders that doesn't actually work because she thinks that james is cute.
and this brings me to the next topic. jily. what, why, how. this was supposed to be a healthy, happy relationship that would have lasted in the long run? absolutely not. even for its time, i can't say that i see it lasting.
first of all, jkr presents james' crush on lily as just that: a crush. a mildly obsessive one, but a crush nonetheless, which she tries to liken to the pulling of pigtails. and then, we see that james' way of getting her to go out with him consists of blackmail, and when that doesn't work, he resorts to threatening her. this could have been set aside if he had actually, genuinely changed when they started spending more time together, but as we're told by sirius and remus, he didn't. he just got better at hiding what he was up to. and it has to be that he hid it, because if she knew, this further damages the character that she's set up to have and paints her out to be either unable to stand up to him or an enabler.
regardless, they get married. and while i have trouble believing that it was out of genuine love, there are scenarios that could make some semblance of sense. it's wartime, after all, and maybe lily is worried about her stability in the wizarding world, so why not marry into an established family whose son is already showing interest? or perhaps, she falls into the trap of every bad boy cliche ever, and she thinks to herself, well, i got him to be better then, maybe i can get him to do even better in the future. or maybe, she doesn't get into a relationship with him immediately and sees him on and off, until eventually, she accidentally gets pregnant and they scramble to have a shotgun wedding so as not to leave lily alone at nineteen with a baby. or maybe they marry each other because they're there and sure, neither of then is ready and they don't know what love even is but what else is there to do when there's a dark lord about? anyways, the point is, they get married.
and then what? if we count pottermore into canon, he goes on to further damage her relationship with petunia and vernon, to the point where she ends up crying. if we don't, she fades into the background enough that nobody has anything to say about her. she's harry's mum, she's james' wife, lily potter, she was kind and smart and brave and that's it. her agency is gone, anything else we have of her personality is gone.
jily just,,, wasn't built to last. and, yeah, this,,, this is a hill i'll die on.
same with wolfstar, honestly. there are so many reasons why it wouldn't work, but fanon has made it so fucking prevalent that it's literally everywhere no matter where you look.
first of all, i've said it before and i'll say it again. sirius is more likely to get with james that he is to ever end up in a relationship with remus. their chemistry is just,,, underdeveloped. net zero for a relationship.
secondly, sirius instigated the werewolf prank, and lupin would have paid the price for it. this could have been overlooked, but he doesn't seem the slightest bit guilty about any of it when it's brought up in poa. he could have been responsible for lupin losing the security of his place at hogwarts in the best case scenario, and in the worst case, his life. and he seems to look forward to full moons, even though they clearly aren't pleasant for remus, which,,, yeah, you're going to have fun, but like, maybe be concerned about the fact that your friend undergoes excruciating pain and it isn't a pleasant time for him? read the room, my g.
thirdly, they don't trust each other as much as fanon seems to think they do. they were both willing to believe each other the traitor before ever suspecting pettigrew. sirius thought remus gave away the potters, hell, he thought remus was a spy for voldemort, and remus was convinced that sirius was a mass murderer. neither of them needed to be convinced.
fourthly, maybe i'm reading too much into it, but like. sirius had money. remus had no money, since, yk, he was a werewolf and struggling for cash and still, sirius,,, did not leave him any money. i feel like if you had money to spare, you would give to your friend who is literally poor. but, again, maybe i'm reading too much into it and this isn't as valid a point as i think it is.
and ehh, the fifth reason is that it's,,, actually very much not the representation for the ltgbt community that fanon says it is but y'all aren't ready for that conversation.
anyways, just,,, even when you set the couple shit aside, the power dynamics between everyone here is fucked. like, james and sirius are clearly at the top of food chain calling the shots and egging each other on. then there's lily, who isn't even a marauder, but is always ever-so-slightly above remus but still not on their level, because, well. neither of them actually listen to her. remus is the novelty friend, the friend who's,,, alright, i guess, but you keep them around specifically because they're funny or they can dance or they have something that you can either show off to other people or keep as your little inside joke, your little secret, yk? and peter is just sort of there. like, yeah, he can do what we can but does that make him as good as we are? no. does he have a funny little something about him that we can exploit? nah. therefore he sits at the bottom. and like, yeah, james and sirius are on the same level, but james is yanking sirius' chain, not the other way around. anyways, like i said. power dynamic's fucked and it bothers me that we were given all of this, and fanon decided to take it all and throw it away so they could give us flamboyant!badboi!sirius black x softboi!motherhen!remus lupin going on double dates with feminist!trustfundbaby!james potter and saint!lily evans while ignoring peter pettiwho?
theseus' fucking ship, indeed.
anyways, this needed to be said. it might not make as much sense as i want it to, considering it's 4:12 in the morning as i'm posting this, after taking a break from writing to do some research and coming across way too much content about fanon marauders, but it's here and it still makes enough sense that you can read it and understand what i mean. and like, at the end of the day, you can go ahead and headcanon whatever you please, you can write fic and make art and do whatever you like, just,,, remember that they're exactly that. headcanons. stop presenting fanon as canon. please. i'm literally begging. we actually have evidence against it. just,,, acknowledge that they're headcanons and stop putting them forward as though they're able to fit into canon. please.
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Since the invasion, more than 3,000 cases of rape of Ukrainian women by the Russian occupiers have been recorded, said Dmytro Vernihor, chairman of the Ukrainian medical commission.
Your thoughts on wolfstar? I did not find anything in your marauders master post on it. It's just... such a weird pairing for me. I don't understand why it is weird for me, and at the same time I don't understand why people ship them.
I address them somewhat here.
As for asking me about pairings, well, I'll give my two cents but keep in mind that you're better off asking a shipper. If you want the how's and why's of someone loving this pairing, then it's best to go to the source.
I'm just here for the heresy of it all.
Thoughts on Remus/Sirius
Regardless, I don't see it. Or, rather, if I do see it then it's a toxic wasteland of a relationship that is terrible for all parties involved. (I'm about to get flogged for this, I'm sure.)
So, what's the trouble?
First, Sirius never seems all that interested in Remus. Throughout canon, and the glimpses we have in the past, he is far more interested in James. Remus is... the charity friend, it was James who was actually Sirius' best friend by far. This, obviously, is a big obstacle for the pairing.
Second, the werewolf incident. Sirius uses Remus, nearly causes him to become a murderer or else ruin Severus Snape's life against his will, and isn't sorry about it. Remus, had Dumbledore not covered for him, would have been expelled and likely imprisoned if not executed/banished. And Sirius did this for a laugh, because it was funny.
Remus knows all of this, and I imagine he never truly forgave Sirius for it. Certainly, when it looked as if Sirius betrayed the Potters, Remus didn't question it. Because, in retrospect, Remus could say he wasn't that surprised. Look what Sirius did before.
I doubt Sirius and Remus could ever truly be friends again after this. Oh, they pretended, but the friendship was broken. Shortly later, Sirius and James believe Remus is a spy. Remus has to live with everything that has happened. Given friendship's not on the table, romance certainly isn't.
Third, and somewhat related to the werewolf incident, but Sirius doesn't take Remus' condition seriously. He and James treated it as a joke, a cool quirk Remus has. And yeah, it's great they're so accepting, but Remus is living with a chronic condition that leaves him in agony every month, that will deny him employment for the rest of his life, and leave him destitute. And there's James and Sirius calling it his 'furry little problem'. There's this self-congratulatory air about it, that the Marauders thought they were so progressive because they were friends with a werewolf, without ever having to understand what it means to be a werewolf. And then, of course, Sirius using said chronically ill best friend to nearly murder a classmate.
And then of course there's Sirius. He spent ten years in hell on earth, comes out a broken and barely functioning man, and one who has to confront that his best friends are either dead, traitors, or believed he was the scum of the earth. I don't see Sirius ever truly forgiving Remus for believing he was a Death Eater, never mind Sirius thought Remus was a spy, but to me Sirius would never truly be able to forgive that. If Remus had fought for him, then perhaps Sirius never would have been sent to Azkaban. Remus didn't, and what does that say about how Remus views Sirius?
There's nothing left between them by the point we reach canon except barely restrained hostility, bitter feelings, and empty nostalgia for a time that will never return to them.
And if they did have a romantic relationship on top of all of this? It would be to make the other suffer, to take out all the rage over lycanthropy, the imprisonment, the werewolf incident, every little thing that stands between them after all these years. It would be thinly veiled hatred in the form of sexual intercourse.
Why Does Everyone Else Ship It?
They're Harry's cool gay uncles. The movies softened Sirius a lot and made him a lot less unhinged, they also made Lupin generally more pleasant, which makes them easier figures to ship. And with them you get the idea that Harry can have his found families (without the Weasleys).
He can have these two cool uncles who were his parents best friends and they can have breakfast together and eat waffles and wouldn't it be wonderful? They can tell Harry it's okay to like Draco Malfoy, not everyone's like those repressed muggles, and everything can be jolly and good in the world.
People adore this and they desperately want to fix Harry's situation, fix his world and his family life. More, everyone loves Sirius, he's the funny character, and Remus having such history with him, being a friend, is the obvious character to throw at him.
Which is why we get Remus/Sirius in many fics, even as just a secondary pairing to whoever Harry's chasing after today.
Dead Poets Society (1989) dir. Peter Weir
23th of February was so normal it hurts. It was the 23th day since my 26th birthday and 24th day since I’d finally started treating my MDD.
I don’t remember what it was that I ate. I don’t remember what song on Spotify was the soundtrack of that day. I have physical memory though - my whole body feels sore and hard to move because of the hiit exercises I started doing. It was painful to breathe, let alone walk or sit or even laugh.
I have a mental memory - I was scrolling through concerts’ ads hoping to see some rad bands performing in Kyiv in late April. My sister will have turned sweet 16 on the 28th, so I wanted to make that day a memory she could go back to every time she feels upset or broken or unable to keep pace. Be careful what you wish for, they say. Now I wish I did. As my little angel will never forget her sour 16 she met under russian occupation in Mariupol, dreaming not of Black Pink or Maneskin singing to her in the flesh, but of taking hot shower after 2 months of living in the basement of the Culture Palace she once used to go to dance classes. Once. How unfair this “once” was just 90 days ago. An eternity.
I have a memory that makes me angry and sick - an echo of a conversation me and my partner had that day. With my taking antidepressants I was also trying to finally try living again, first time after 6 years of isolation and self-destruction. We were planning to go to the Philharmonia and I was thrilled - it felt like I was going to meet the Queen, no less. Social anxiety will do it with you, beware.
I remember myself whining about the new Batman movie and how we’d rather go to the cinema if only there was any decent title. You see, I love Batman. The me from the 23th did, at least. The me who was complaining about going out to listen to some music live.
And that’s where I feel like throwing up. That’s where I get angry with my past-self.
How easy life was for her. How she took for granted the possibility to wake up to cars honking and birds tweeting outside along with a bunch of I-don’t-know-who-but-they-are-hilarious users on Twitter doing the same.
I want to scream at myself, say “why am I suffering now so much, why do I cry every night and beg the gods to take me in my sleep and not with a GRAD fragment splitting my throat open or cutting off my limbs or burning me alive in my own bed, why my concern is not that about how to find the money to finally get my mom to Prague on her birthday - cause she always wanted to visit Europe - but how to find a way to fucking just hear her voice and know she is still alive there, in Mariupol, for now she is still breathing, why am I supposed to live through this hell same way dozens of my Ukrainian ancestors did just because there’s a MONSTER neighboring my country, why am I to be exterminated just because I’m Ukrainian wanting to live in MY country and speak MY language, why the people I used to call relatives and friends who live in russia are telling me I just have to “bear with it” and “get denazificated” and “be corrected and thus saved”, why they deny every missile that hits my street or say I deserved it because I live in Ukraine, WHY?”
WHY DO I STILL REMEMBER HOW IT FEELS LIVING IN THE EVENING OF THE 23TH OF FEBRUARY?
I went to sleep at about 3 am. My body was sore and I was annoyed thinking that tomorrow I had a training scheduled. It’s a YouTube hiit marathon so I’d better not skip it.
It was about 4 am I fell asleep at last thinking about the fanfic I was writing to unwind. My personal lullaby.
And it was 5 something when my partner startled me into the reality. Fully dressed, in his Bershka parka and winter Martins. It was dark in the room and I couldn’t make out the features of his face, all covered in shadows. He was silent, probably waiting for me to fully wake up. But it suddenly felt like I’d never closed my eyes at all. The alertness was overwhelming.
When he opened his mouth to explain himself, I already knew what happened. That moment is still the one I’m trapped in. The one I died at and got myself buried in bomb shelter with kids crying and the old praying all around while the constant bombing laughs at them, knocking at our doors to let the “russian world” they brought us in.
My love opened his mouth and I think I will never be able to escape the word he whispered.
It wasn’t “war”.
It was “russia”.
Synonyms.
pic: our basement hideout at the first day of the War. People are settling in. Very cold and dusty and overall terrible. Still better to die under shelling.