thanidiel

[thanidiel]

Invisible

Recommended: 27- Benthos | 19 - Turn a Blind Eye

After all these turns, all these volatile to-and-fro’s that may only ever be credited to me, and the lapping currents in which, thankfully, madness lays dormant, there is one marid in the room still. It’s a true one; a real one. Not a shoddily applied half-metaphor. And I won’t speak so foolishly and redundantly at this point - dear mind of mine, you’ve been the abject audience to so many of my stories regarding why I don’t speak to her as she wishes with all the what’s, where’s, and how’s. At this point, I would spare us both of the impotent ravings of my rationalizations. I know I brought my marids into this marriage too, we all know it. I have a flock of them, even, flapping their pink floppy ears up and down around us both while we pretended, for a very long time, that they were more nuisances than anything else. 

I’m well-fucking-aware. I know she feels like sometimes she must be living with an utter stranger, and I know, I know, I know, I know‒ I know everything about the questions she holds back. And, fuck, by the very fucking blood of my Father and Mother which made me, I’m so fucking ashamed of myself some suns that I’ve created my own haunts in her mind; where she wanders the same chewing hallways I once walked with a babe’s eye, this incomprehensible horror that always ends in a confused focus of where is she? and what happened to her? I know I did that to her.

I know, I know, I know.

I know.

And that makes it all the more frustrating to me that I’ve never managed to find a way for her to ever just speak to me. And that‒ however hypocritical it may be ‒pains me, though I’ve never once told her. I’ve always been a good lover in that regard. I don’t ask questions, I never press, I never say my love, what the fuck is up with you? I don’t.

So she just never tells me.

I’m the bad person here, so I play my role accordingly. I take the heat for being so close-mouthed, even though I have told, and told, and told her so many things, so many feelings, from the very start. I accept that script, and I embrace that spotlight.

I let her bow out, every time. 

Because I know I wear it better.

But you know what? She isn’t here right now.

So I’m going to say it.

I feel like I know my fucking wife less than my wife thinks she does me. And believe me, I tried the same thing she did. I tried the kindness, the welcomeness, the looks and the gentle affections, I even did the good ol’ you can always share anything with me lines of bullshit conversation.

It didn’t work, so I fucking stopped. I thought she just needed time. But here we are, and I haven’t told her this either, and on the inside I am so fucking sick of the way my stomach twists every time she reminds me that I don’t know anything about her, after all.

It’s even worse in this last turn. Because now we’ve reached this point that we’ve grown older, and sometimes I feel like she earnestly grew up without me all this time. I make assumptions now of things shared between us before and she corrects me on how so much differently she feels, like the last time those ideas were even hinted to me were like some delusional mirage of our togetherness. How is that creeping up on me? I dine with her, I live with her, I sleep with her. I suppose I can’t honestly say we’ve made love all that much (though we have in this past moon, happily?), but I fuck her too.

And she just won’t tell me anything.

But she wonders why I’m not just content with what we have? Her fucking father died within a sennight of her meeting me, and in those three turns I’ve heard her talk a little about how complex it was for her, two turns ago. Maybe some moons sprinkled atop of that. Her mother? Her mother is in everything there is about Evilie, she misses her so much (or who knows how fucking wrong I am about that, too?). But I’ve spoken more of my Parents and how their respective absences affected my life than Evilie has her’s‒ and I was allocated a fraction of the exposure that my wife received in her own life. Let’s not (I say, rhetorically, as I absolutely want to fucking get into it for fucking once) even get into her sister. I’m the one that woke Evilie the fuck up in the first place. But I hear more from Abrielle, honestly, and we haven’t been able to sit down for those make-up talks before a night out since she moved out. I hear about how Abrielle feels about them, I hear what Abrielle regrets about them, I hear where it’s healing-but-complicated-or-maybe-weird from Abrielle.

What the fuck has my own gods-be-damned wife told me about any of this? Why won’t she? Why is it that I’ve had to stand so stagnantly, so still, in all my unknown, as I watch her just keep fucking going ahead of me? I can’t even give myself the luxury of saying that she’s just balling it all in. Because I’ve watched her mind change, palpably, on all of those. Because I act like I’m busy and go straight to the armory or our bedchambers when I see there’s candles lit in the kitchen. Because I see when that bit of hair near her ear looks a little stiff from the crying that happened earlier when she was alone.

It’s not as though I want my lover to be sad, and be comforted by me alone in that sadness. Rather, I want it to be understood right now that while I have lived such an odd and shoddy life, I at least know it’s not fucking normal that, since we’ve been together anyway, that I’ve never seen Evilie cry unless I’m sad or nearly killed myself. 

Over the turns, I’ve told myself that she’ll reach out. I even made myself pretty optimistic for a while there, that maybe I could be there for her, and with her, if I just shook myself. If I got myself back into line with the sweet words, and sweet looks, and the conversations, and lovemaking, and that romance we knew we could feel, and started trying to show her that I’m not fucking sad about ‘us’, I’m fucking sad about how it’s all gotten to this point. I’m fucking sad enough to clamp my mouth closed and shut my eyes and just scream about how there was a place for me, and then suddenly I now find myself cold, in this awkward niche that isn’t as carved out as we imagined it to be; suddenly I now watch her at home in all of these spaces that either aren’t made for me, or apparently aren’t somewhere she wants me to be.

If that wasn’t the case, then why doesn’t she just talk to me?

Sometimes I feel like she’s made me into this hysterical thing, though I know well I would find a thousand other ways to serve out my usual regardless of where I am and who I walk with. Sometimes I feel like she’s written herself out of this relationship and there’s only ever me and how fucked up I am, and I’m trying to be relieved that I see her wanting to take up space now but that’s hard too. Sometimes I wonder why the fuck she keeps me around anyway, but there’s not really a nice counterpoint for that as I’ve done nothing someone else couldn’t do after I passed the reins off to Elise on the levies.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m so foolish that I wish someone with more wisdom than me‒ Severine, or Esen, or Kowa, or even fucking Elia‒ would just dress me down already for how stupid I look; vacillating, and vacillating, and vacillating, between ‘I’m fucking fed up and losing my mind!’ and ‘But actually I love her and I just need to keep trying’ with sometimes a splash of ‘look at how hard I’m trying with this metaphor that would make her scream’. Because I do look stupid. It even makes me look more fucking stupid than my other usual routine of trying to tell myself or other people, depending, that I’m actually not into Vander anymore every other moon.

It’s the two times in my fucking life that I wish I’d just stop talking with so much confidence.

Spirits, I can’t even tell you (as oxymoronic as that is to say to my autoaudientia), mind of mine, how easy it felt to love her this past sennight. It came so easily. I felt so enraptured with her, that awed interest on her face like she were enchanted by me, by us, all over again. And only because she was witnessing me love her purely, without anything else at all upon my mind - she was moved by that. It felt sweet, it felt like everything changed. And maybe some things changed, maybe I needed to be able to have enough space in my mind to just remember, genuinely, how much I love her in the grand scheme of the cosmos (versus the vaguely conformist pressure of maintaining the narrative of great love). Maybe it will be making things better for us now that we have (How I would suffer all I did twice over to just have this guarantee) stronger ground than we did before.

I pray for that; perhaps that will be the first thing I pray on when we’ve arranged where the shrine should go. I really do. I really do want to keep loving her, and I really do want it to all just be hot air and bullshit in the end on all of the meanness that wants to pass through my mind and into my feet, and I really do want to just be able to be content with where I am, and where we are.

And now‒

Now the marid’s back in the room.

And you don’t talk about the marid.

I try not to break the rule here, but I’m making myself nervous. I hate to even use the word, which makes the feeling worse, but I can feel this dread building up between my lungs because we’re back home and I swear to the fucking Fury I’ll kill myself if we just go back to how it was before our trip.

She’s taking off her gloves, and calling my name.

So I breathe in, and I look.

And the words fail me on how alive that smile looks on her face.

So I breathe out, and I smile back.

We don’t talk about Evilie.

#writing #xiaohu #evilie

[thanidiel]

Cold

“...they looked at me like I were Ishgardian, you know.”

In other words, chilled. They looked at her as though she were a cold thing, even Jaaster did - and he was close to the same ever-amiable nature as Ayla’s.

That was a turn ago, maybe more with how inaccurate her grasping assumptions have been lately. Xiaohu was finding it earnestly difficult to record time and its passing at this point in her life, too many affairs mixed with the need to leave no paper trails. At first, she never called back to that memory. It hadn’t breached her mind one onze, not since: there was relief that they had done as they bade for once, and there was relief that she wasn’t either dead or crippled (once again). There was no time, and scant interest, in even considering how her friends had taken her in.

But she thought about it, for the first time, just suns ago.

“If you want to ignore me in the process, the decision is your’s. You already do half the time as it is.”

She’d been listening to her own roar (proving the point) more than she was exactly listening to Evilie. And, originally, that sounded like ‘Fuck you, fuck this marriage, and fuck Gregoire while we’re at it’ within that gut of her’s. Then, when they were both running in the dark of that jungle, it swapped to the acquiesce of ‘I do ignore you. I do ignore you.’

It was considered later. Lightly; a surface level kind of polish that layered over the top of something that desperately should have been ground down first. Of course, guilt has sat there in the corner of the room since. But it never bothered to clear its throat and raise its voice. It was conveniently distant, as ignorable as Evilie. She didn’t have to say hello to him.

But blood has always had a way of reaching Xiaohu like no one else could.

Only blood ever seemed to stir her.

And it stirs her now.

Here, the Observatorium.

Evilie was preoccupied, and so Xiaohu went in her place. It was a logical tactic that they’d done before and would continue to do. Naturally, it was some sort of eager bid for investment. A real flex of academic might in the usual groping for purpose that most organizations here sought. Maybe another time, when they were younger, she’d have been more fascinated. She would have placed more weight herself into the standard literature of their times. But this is now and all she can think of is—

I saved someone’s life here.

Right there, in that very spot. Give her just a tick of the bell and she could recall it as clearly as a vision walked. She is recalling it as clearly as when the experience was first forged. That sluggishness of a bleed left for almost too long, that way it caked and peeled off of him like paint where her fingers pressed against coagulation, that vacillation between his wet, tortured, breathing and smothered silence.

It wasn’t personal at all, but she can remember that sheer, exhausted, relief that flooded her when she reversed the pressure and heard his gasping; heard that quiet, quiet, whistle of air leaving his punctured cavity. And though she was aware already of a secret to be taken to three graves, she felt proud for it: I just saved your fucking life, Austrant de Durendaire. 

She used to be proud about that sort of thing. By this Star, she used to be that person.

Would she have felt anything if that were now? 

When did she get so cold?

(Do you remember those dreams?)

“Where is your fortitude, your strength of spirit? Are you so easily influenced by the world around you?”

That used to cut her, and it was never meant for her. It had no meaning, no association.

“You’re hurting him. He’s crying because of you.”

That made her want to cry too, so much that the raise of her handgonne made her fucking sick to her stomach.

“Vander, are you okay?”, “Did something hurt her?”, “Are we all okay? I-Is Kowa okay? Tarkhan? Esen? Jaaster?”

Where did that change? That concern? It used to be for everyone. Not just them.

I stood up for someone once.

And she, outwardly steady, stood up for them so ferociously inside of herself (could she have died there for what she did in another Star?)

“Us giving to others doesn’t take away what we give to you.”

So why has she become so flippant, so reserved, in this giving that was so available, so limiting? It came so easily to her, once. She cried for that same cruel woman she argued against just minutes after— and she cried for so long around that mouthful,

“I’m just glad she’s okay.”

Before that, she cried for four, five— maybe a whole sennight, for another woman she never said so much as ‘Hello’ to, because she knew what it was like. After that, she cried when Vander broke his leg. She cried a lot more, for everyone. She cried for Evilie, for Avenai, for Torithas, for Silvestre, for Lux, for, for, for. And she stood up for so many people.

Vander doesn’t even know how many fucking times I’ve had to stand up for him when he wasn’t there.

She used to care, so much fucking more.

I shattered my fucking arm to protect something a dead stranger loved.

And now that’s all she could think of. She used to be so much fucking worse, so mean; so cruel; so eager for just that. But she used to be much fucking better in other regards, too. She used to be stirred by something other than blood. She used to cry for them. She used to stand up for them. She used to smile for them, too.

But I notice I don’t smile anymore.

Their smiles for her have gotten so much warmer, so trusting in her permanence; her support that was once always there. Syrupy in these quiet gatherings and their quiet departures in the past two turns, but she doesn’t do what she used to. She used to search for their eyes, implore for that eye contact, I see you there, and smile back. 

I turn away and I say farewell now.

She didn’t even smile when Vander left the gallery. That’s another eyeopener that things are fucked up, and have been fucked up for some time, that she can’t smile for Vander. She can still smile for Evilie, but, as she continues to walk, and nod, and loose the reins to a body that can entertain through the same automatic pathway as a heart or a stomach, something else begins to strike her now, too.

I don’t talk like I love her anymore.

When is the last time her wife has been able to feel wholly adored without it being an ephemeral thing? Perhaps two turns now. And there’s something truly dismal about that, even as she struggles simultaneously to hold onto that recognition enough to just make it finally feel real.

Guilt is sitting at that corner, and I can’t be fucked to say hello.

Frankly, did she even need to? It’s a thought that feels so indulgent, so confident; it’s the same sort of gratification of an ancient itch as that Dragoon she had spoken to. And maybe it’s that - that audacity to privately roll the selfishness of that feeling through her fingers over and over again, that makes her guilt stand up, and speak up. So exasperated with her, her lack of self-control.

Can you wager how many times she cries without you?

At first, it still feels unreal - like something separated and alone from her mind. Long enough for her to tune back in, finish the tour, sign off a donation, ‘listen’ to the personal gratitudes of some of the researchers, and eventually end up atop the back of a damnedable chocobo for her ride back to Ishgard’s walls. Then it circles right back,

She cries when you aren’t there. 

Then… then she’s back at home, at some point in this ocean of lost time. They’re both in the bedchamber, sitting at the table for supper. Though Xiaohu, at this point, has pushed her plate away along with her chair as well. Her body sinks back into the large, large, seat, one leg over the other and arms hugged tight across herself. Not an unusual pose for when they’d chatter slowly after the sun’s affairs, but changed some. For once, not hiding away the thoughtfulness plaguing her: no retreat to the study or waiting for her lover’s sleeping breaths; that weigh of her eyebrows and narrowed focus to her eyes, and the backs of two curled fingers pressed up to the grooves of her parted lips

When did I get so cold?

It is unusual enough that the taller woman, attuned as she is, seems to find it difficult to determine what sort of spirit lays there. Glancingly, under her own brow while she cuts into her meal, comes out that voice that plays so softly, so delicately, compared to the husk of smoke that airs her own, “...what is on your mind, my love?” speaks; wrapped up in a language learned almost entirely for Xiaohu.

Was it the marriage, or was it those catacombs, where I lost that warmth of mine?

She’s done such a shoddy job telling Evilie how she feels, the feelings so ever-present as they are, themselves, ephemeral as of late. It swells up there in her breast, so very real in that initial flush, with the smile broken so easily across that face. Patient and self-deprecative, her partner has never held an onze of shame leaning into the most done-to-death things, especially when she was attempting to redirect her mind, “Did I get something on my face?”

“I almost fucking died because of them!” I was so angry, I was so disappointed in those moons. It wasn’t the only thing, they weren’t the only people.

The smile comes easy (in spite of everything), though as she expected - her feeling starts to drip through her fingers like an hourglasses’ sands, “Do you think I would tell you even if you did?”

Or maybe it was the Crozier, itself, Kami, I was so disappointed. “...it’s crushing me… I can’t say no to Vander or Kowa.” And, fuck, did it hurt so much when… I shouldn’t. Not that part. Not now.

“No, no I suppose you have a point there. You’d get a kick out of Laroue’s face, letting me walk out like that.”

—it all started to hurt then. For all of that. It was that; it was that. I was so, so, fucking disappointed. I felt so powerless, so trapped. I was so exhausted from caring so ceaselessly. I had to care for everyone. I had to. Someone got hurt no matter what I did, because I couldn’t stop my own friends, my own family. It felt like no one was listening. I was drowning. Evilie had to watch me drown and drown until one sun my head didn’t come back up. I didn’t want her to see that. I was hurt so badly, so many times, because of them. And I cared for them so much still through all. For turns. I hid the blame for them, I was always doing that. I pulled strings I didn’t want to pull, I hurt people I would have never hurt. I let people go that shouldn’t have. I felt like I was amongst monsters, and I still cared so much. I fought with Evilie too, for them. Even there, I took the blame away. I did this until Esen told me to stop playing God and I—

“He looks like he has glaucoma whenever there’s something out of place, I absolutely would.”

—I gave myself permission to stop caring about anyone.

“...one moment, my dear,”

(I used to call her so many things much more often; my darling Evilie)

Another lurch in which time seems to bring her forward, in a blink, to another moment. To the jewelry box. 

I got cold from that.

It’s not hard to find at all - plainly visible. Always visible. It stands out like she has always stood out; like the things and the people who have stood out to her.

I’ve been so fucking cold.

Is it the aether pulling at some sense beyond her own, thrumming in that necklace? Or is it the memory, memories, so infused within?

And I keep taking it out on Evilie, I told myself I could take a break and stop caring about her too.

She tests every heartbeat; something she hadn’t done in so long. All three, mind, claw, and heart - throbbing with the steadiness of their lives, across the distances both forged and walked from one another. 

It’s easier to give myself that, and I really want to, most suns.

For a moment, she stops - frozen by the unadulterated feeling of a thought only half-experienced earlier. And her breath catches, sympathetic pain rushing across the network within her lungs,

SHE CRIES WHEN YOU AREN’T THERE.

Suddenly, it’s hard not to cry when she hasn’t cried in, generously, at least a turn. Her insides want to crumple in on one another, like the compression of a mass of unwanted papers, inward, and inward. The wetness blurring her vision is so minute, and yet it feels like a wellspring after so long.  she cries when you aren’t there.  But she needs to breathe, and she needs to do this. So she breathes. And then, she centers, with her thumb pressed to the animal’s tiny breast while she walks back. She pushes that aside; she focuses on the joy that Evilie, herself, manages to summon so often.

How could I love her so much when I have these bells and suns where my thoughts feel so cruel, so debasing, of us? How could I have been able to bear ignoring her for so long?

There’s always been an enjoyment she’s had with this before, to observe in this way. No matter how she felt about their marriage, there was a doubt in the back of her head that it would ever lose its novelty. 

Why have I grown so much more patient myself, so much more equal with her, and yet I’ve still found a way to continue to be such a wretched person?

The flutter thrum of her lover’s heart is like clockwork, whether it is when they, themselves, are flush or Xiaohu experiences this way. When Evilie knows that her wife’s attention is upon her, that the infinite world of her enigmatic lover has begun to narrow, and narrow, and so willingly mold itself to her; when she notices, and that weakness is in her heart.

Maybe I need to take a break from not caring anymore, too.

Maybe it will come in piecemeal, in the maddened back-and-forth of her soul, or in a fell swoop, or maybe it truly doesn’t come at all. However it would ultimately go, there is something in her core, her arms, that resolves with an aplomb that has been so scarce as of late. Her body moves fluidly, and somewhat distantly (Is this one of Felore’s recordings?) to a thrum of its own; separate from the chilled nothingness it had been subject to. Pacing, and mirroring, gradually to the thrum felt within her palm. She moves within an old element of her own (cast in a new light now), drawing up to sit atop the table where Evilie has already cleared her space. She feels her legs tap to a stop against thighs while she rotates to look upon her wife directly. And then her palms slide in a warm spread of her hands across both sides of the Elezen’s face; her eyes scrutinous in such a missed way while thumbs, so softly, brush over cheeks and cheekbone.

“I see you so much right now, my love.”

(My Darling Evilie.)

#writing #xiaohu #evilie #kowa #esen #vander #others

[thanidiel]

I'm a Bad Person

Why are you flirting?

Admittedly, she’d been flirting.

And, admittedly, she had wanted to step out with him - immediately. It was by the Kami’s graces bestowed upon her that she had caught that sweet-toned question, and dashed it atop her molars. Before that moment, it felt as though she was watching herself in one of Felore’s recordings. Grainy and curious; what is that woman up to? The way she had seen him alone, had seemed to know something, and had cut right through the crowd straight to him. It felt like a momentum that hadn’t been there in an entire turn, if not more - a kind of momentum you can’t stop, or you’ll collapse (in that bloodied way, with scraped skin and loose teeth). Almost careening, but not quite so. It was not messy, it was not terrifying. It was only involuntary, and thus vaguely uncomfortable.

But not because you don’t want to.

No, not because the want isn’t there.

She wanted to do this.

Just not here.

Not in front of Evilie. That turned it from a private, wicked, delight to something compulsive; something gluttonous. Something that made her feel smaller, the shape of a woman (no longer a girl?) standing there in the back of her mind - even as the blood of her bloomed and spirit sat just under her lungs heartily. 

Delight?

Clarification: not the man. Never the man, though there are some factors that she’s learned in the past four, five?, six?, turns that seem to stoke that wickedness. It was a different kind of a delight, a selfish delight. It was delightful because it made her feel…

Normal.

Another clarification: not normal, like every sun, like routine or vegetables at the market. Normal like…

…that you, my dear, are in control…

That I, darling and cursed mind of mine, walk easy.

Easier than you have since you’ve wed. 

Precisely so. Since I have wed. Since I have wed, have I had a single sun in which I have not tried? Mind of mine, hear, for it is you whom holds the catalogue.

Sometimes. 

What’s the through thread in those sometimes, mind of mine?

She can’t see you.

And what does it mean, mind of mine, that for just some minutes, I dared to live easily within the sight of my love?

You’re no longer trying.

Amendment: I didn’t try that time. I’m still trying. I’m actually quite offended, mind of mine, that you would imply that I am not. Who are you, cursed thing, to place judgment on something so unlike you?

Who are you, to live a life so unlike you?

As the people around here say, touché.

Why are you flirting?

Very insistent on this discussion, aren’t you?

Do you love her less?

Absolutely not. I’d hang you for that if I could.

Then why?

Why is it that my mind of mine hounds me now?

Because it’s reaching a point.

A point of what? Did you see her react? Because I didn’t.

You do this every time.

Every fucking time, you say, mind of mine?

Every. Fucking. Time.

Okay, fine.

Silence yourself for a moment, fucking mind of mine, and here I shall give you the lay of the land and its features. I’ve always been a stunning eye for detail. Why was I flirting? Because I’m sick of breaking apart my bones within the jelly of my own body, just to rearrange them and glue them together with clay, then polish them off with gold. I’m sick of doing this over and over again. I’m sick of how hard it is. I’m sick of how hard it always is. I’m so fucking sick of having to change. I’m sick of how, this time, it is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do (and, mind you, mind of mine, that I have learned languages and rituals and professions and artforms abound in the same span of time it takes for another soul to learn how to put their fucking trousers on by themselves without a sock sticking out). I’m sick of the fact that the last change I did was an irreversible kind of transformation. A face, a soul, can move lateral all sun. All fucking sun, I can throw on voice and affect and body language and charm or refinement or poise or the very opposite of all of those like men throw shirts over their backs. But, vertical? Much more fucking difficult, heart of mine. Once, another, already an aberration Herself, broke the very laws of universe to lead me where I ought to have never walked. Now here I am, midway atop a stormy mountain, unable to climb down when I am but a body, heart of mine, and the laws of mine own body say: you can’t use your hands and feet here. So how do I climb down? Heart of mine, how do I break immutable laws without a lawmaker Herself? Heart of mine, how do I tell someone who is where she ought to be, that I am a troublemaker and fool lodged in shadow and crevice she cannot (SHOULD NOT) hope to see herself? Heart of mine, how do I tell someone that I, effectively, have been a foolish liar in the last two turns of saying I’m okay with this, I’m learning, I want this, I can calm down. 

Well—

—Author’s note: rhetorical questions, heart of mine. Something you would be more familiar with if you had just heeded your fellow mind when they’ve a mind to speak.

Continuing right on; I don’t know how, you don’t know how, and the mind of mine only vaguely knows how to make a mean insinuation. So we stay here, sick of futile and uncertain labor that never seems to maintain a permanent and forward progress. So why did I do it? I did it because I wanted things to be easy for once. I wanted to feel like I had no responsibilities, just for a little bit. And you know what, heart of mine? It would horrify you to know that something so mild as that was not the first time, and horrifies us to know that it is likely not to be the last time.

I wanted to feel like I was in my element, because I have not been in my element for some time, that sun that I promised to be good to my own fucking wife. They, She, had never intended for me to marry. And certainly not within the light of the sort of marriage expected within these lands. It was an incompatible construct; it was too rigid, it was limiting. For multiple reasons, I was supposed to be limitless. When it comes to people, specifically, I was to be limitless because I was to be a wish.

Perhaps I’m still a wish. Admittedly— mind of mine, come here. For the heart of mine looks disinterested as we speak less of my spouse— I still want to be a wish. And I find that it itches at me oh-so-discomfortably the more that someone there, testing their boundaries at the alpine of this mountain, reaches up and swishes their hand back-and-forth with the intention of retrieving me from where I’ve been trapped on high. I become real, realized, with every graze of their finger tips against a toe or an ankle or the brushing sensation of a grip that needed an half ilm more to secure itself with.

I become real, and then there lays the conflict sown there between you two, heart of mine and mind of mine. I treasured you, heart of mine, and never had allowed you to see the world in full when we first began that trek of ascension. As for you, mind of mine, how could I ever do it without you? I was named for you, mind of mine, far ago by the first great Woman my life had ever graced. Of course you were to come with me, through everything.

You, my dear, are stuck here as much as I am stuck here. And, contrary to the imaginings of men, when a life wavers on the edge of survival - it fails to help itself. Someone in the snow strips of their clothes; someone thrashed within the sea bobs about furiously, only giving themselves a good gulp of seawater in their scrabble for air. I kick when I very much should stay fucking still, and let Evilie begin that process of rescue.

I’ve kicked a lot, petulantly and feverish, over the turns. Always controlled myself(ish), but never stopped myself. I wished I could stay a wish, and eat it too. The luxury without the work, as though we, mind of mine, never learned our lessons with the sheer industry of our lifetimes. There was that man, whom called to me because I could see it in his very aether (he spends his life looking for wishes, you told me informatively and ignorantly, heart of mine.). There were just under a dozen others like him, tall and strapping, and searching. Some women, usually with a glass of bourbon in my own hand, who found it novel to be so seen in crowds and more seemingly extravagant souls. The Garleans (one of those was another embarrassing indiscretion that luckily never seemed to make it back to my wife’s ears - to which I blame the adrenaline and too easily given access), many Garleans at that (to which cements the theory of familiarity behind this all). That eagle-skinned, hateful, brute (that was one of the closest calls, if he had ever taken up the offer to step inside…). A couple of charming others, some shade of approaching my own gregarious nature (though they were the least concerning, a truly harmless burn of energy).

And then there’s the overlapper sandwiched between Oosra and Evilie. He was actually the first person to know, within a sun if I remember correctly, when I ended the latter. I sought him out for it, he felt the same as this man here (but so much warmer, he delighted me with how ‘home’ felt at the time). Did we ever touch? I barely remember the details, I want to say there was a kiss at some point, maybe a playful farewell (or, maybe, this heart of mine assigns more familiarity to such a strange time in our lives). It went on for some moons. He had spoken to me, actually, after I’d gotten dressed from Evilie’s first visit to me in Ul’dah. It was so silly, so transparent. He wanted to show off the aquarium in his apartment, and by the Kami, if there were any intention left in him to only sip, I was going to make him an achingly dry man.

But the sun came, and I frankly blew him off for a night with Evilie on the linkpearls. Then he saw me and her, hand in hand, later (in Othard of all places), and that was that. Passing ships.

Heart of mine, before there is any protests to the implications of our nature here, I direct you to the mind of mine. For they may caution your foolhardy defense of character with the fact that we, I, did this to Oosra too. You were much more on board with it, all feelings considered, but it happened. Mostly, again, with tall strapping and wish-searching men. But, outside of practice, utterly dominated by the way Vander’s presence weighed so headily on all three of us.

I still regret that I didn’t do it (any more than I already did). And you two, pieces of mine, regret it too. Mind of mine, you felt as though it would fade at some point; how could it not? Between time, and change, and worthier love. But no, that is where we’ve disagreed (and, for once, the heart of mine agrees with something that would have landed so cruelly). I say it again, firmly now: I still regret it. I wish I laid more than just less than a handful of times with him, and the fact that only recently has desire (not my yes though) faded, solely because it is neutral and no longer an avenue of escape, reminds me of how I wish I would just follow my heart for once. I did not in those times, and I struggle to do so currently (though at least two of us here uncomplicatedly loves Evilie, and three of us love her in her entirety).

All in all, are you still listening, mind of mine? 

Not as though I had a choice.

Who does? Anyway, you ought to sit up straighter now that you’ve worked this out of me. Hear.

What is it, my dear?

Why did I do that? 

Get to the point.

Because I love her. Because I love her so fucking much that, unassisted this time, I have been trying to move the cosmos once more. I’ve been squeezing my muscles, twisting my frame. I try to work these mortal muscles again. I try to strengthen them to where they stretch and pull my bones back into the shape of a person, painfully, sun by sun. I move the thin-skinned, weak, seaflesh of my feet against the rocks that lodge me. I try to learn how to move like a person again. I wriggle my sides and my shoulders against a prison that cuts me with every moment. I try to survive like a person would, for one whom thinks is not one lost to the blizzard, or lost to the waves. And, against everything in me, I’m figuring out slowly how to lax the tense fear of my body. Finger by finger, muscle by muscle. I am trying to surrender as a person would.

I try to let her save me.

Because I love her that much. I love her so much that I move against my nature. I love her so much that she is my wish. I love her so much that I want her to be real, I love her so much that I want to try to be real. I love her so much that I have dedicated myself to becoming.

Can’t you see for once, on how hard that is?

But you love so easily.

Not to love. Maybe it’s time for you, mind of mine, to take some lessons from the heart of mine beside you.

Then what is so hard?

To live. To live a life you never had wanted to live, to bear the agony, the pressure of a dissonant soul; the bloody and endless scrape of your body for progress so minute, you can’t even see it unless you came back to look at me a whole turn later, because you love someone that much.

Can’t see you how hard that is?

Do you understand now on why it’s so hard to do this perfectly every single time?

It sounds like living was just never cracked out for you.

But I’ll make it for me.

Just be patient.

#xiaohu #evilie #writing #vander

[thanidiel]

Containment

It never could have been peaceful. 

She could lie to herself, to Evilie, all she fucking wanted - but peace has never had a proper trajectory in her. If, for her lover, peace was like an arrow in which all she had to do was imagine where it would go, and it would simply go, clean and deliberate in its area of impact… then, for Xiaohu, peace was like a comet. It blared through the cosmos, violently. It sparked, blindingly, like a meteor hammer crushing metal and blood vessels. And it roared like the scrape of artillery’s monstrous joints as onagers fire. 

In other words; it was observably finite.

An arrow does its job, and it stays there until someone sees fit to cut it free. It’s a frank object that conveys everything about who loosed it.

But starlight burns, and it goes away. A con-artist that uses this singular moment of grandeur, of excellence, of good behavior, and stretches it out as this story of infinity. And every time you hit something hard (bone, metal, aether) with the same weapon - you are casting a spell that makes it fade away. Microshavings dispersed by the blow, wearing it down for brittleness’s eventual characterization; the snap at the moment you needed it to stay whole.

How much ash is in the wind you breath after flame and stone meld into one self-destructive bomb?

How sticky is it in her spouse’s lungs, this piecemeal and crumbling offering?

She’s tried to smile. She tried to smile across years (it’s been years now?).

It was new, she had to get used to it.

It was uncomfortable, but she liked it ultimately.

It was her responsibility to change her very nature yet again, for this.

It was a long road she had to walk, but you all would walk with it her, wouldn’t you?

Did anyone believe her in all of her half-negative, half-positive, confessions, her soft assurances, or did they all just learn from the very best on how to convince even yourself on how genuine that smile is?

When did she become so foolish again, so as to successfully brainwash herself until the fractures finally made her buckle?

She thought she would have known better by now on how to direct a life. Shouldn’t she know better than anyone, at that? On how to mould to the circumstance? To force oneself to bend and flex into the adequate vessel for the occasion? 

Why is it so hard? Why is it always so hard? 

Nothing should be hard for her, especially not of her vast mind.

But this is hard. 

This dormancy is hard.

And now what has been the occasional tremor, that hungry rumble, across the last moons makes her shake. It makes her restless. It is the constant rhythm of keratin clicking and sheathing, her tendons tight with urge. 

Sometimes, when Evilie isn’t looking, when she rests with the illusion of peace’s feather quivering just inches above her skin— Xiaohu is pacing back and forth in the study, her palms squeezing her temples like the action could pop the celestialness planted in her skull like the madness-rich tick that it was.

From discontent waxing, to explosions that rapped at her mind near-constantly and pressed upon what was hidden behind her outward delicacy. Her breathing burned with every ash-flecked swish of air, she could gag upon the fumes shed from this feeble attempt. She has gagged. She is gagging.

There, the smoke.

There, the bile.

There, the lunacy.

There, the infiniteness, the perplexity of her, that refuses to be contained by finite matter.

Crawling out, expansive like the cold emptiness of the forever room.

Lonely and dizzy; metamorphosis and menorrhoea—

“I’ll do it.”

#writing #evilie #xiaohu

[thanidiel]

Second-Guess

TW: predatory behavior, vague description of nonpenetrative sexual assault.

There are some things that you only realize well into one’s adulthood. Past the dozen-or-so pats on the back where you tell yourself, yes, you’ve certainly made it, and, yes, you are certainly stronger than you were just a year ago (now imagine twenty years ago). And, honestly, the more people I talk to - the more I realize that there’s a generous slice of that pie of whom only pick up the extracurriculars when they’re silver, and therefore forcibly alone. 

Maybe there’s something good to my mix of forced-and-chosen aloneness in that. I have a whole lot of time to myself and my own thoughts that not many people get the privilege of having, at least without the underlying and ever-present dread that there’s something better they could be doing with their time. That doesn’t exist after you’ve walked back and forth for the last tick of the clock, plus those three and a half laps before mealtime, looking for something to do until you, or rather I, must surrender to the fact that there is really nothing else to earn my keep with so I really ought to just sit down on my ass and read my books.

I think the biggest breakthrough I’ve come upon through that came about five, maybe six, years ago. And it wasn’t very dramatic, nor as heady as those less hefty gates I was opening across the timespan of a foot to my height and several lines to my face. Honestly, it came on a little mutedly, like I caught it one day looking over from where I was sipping my morning tea. And instead of having this tumultuous leap of joy for myself like it were some signifier of my completeness; I felt tired. What did it matter for me to realize that now I know what a healthy life looks like, and feels like? Where was that wisdom when I was younger? I’m not a regretter (though I must admit that I live in the past in spite of all of my work to play the romantic), and I don’t agonize over my mistakes and what things could have been if they were not made - but I do wish that I dealt with certain people less.

I wish I dealt with Captain much less. I wish I had the sense to have told Bogrum and Khargol what happened. If there were anyone upon the Dunehound, after Erissalie who was dead at that point, who could easily throw social covenant to the very winds in the name of justice, then look no further than the Tumnosh twins. Not even Sai, sadly, I think would have found much to do about it aside from reminding me to not be alone with men. She knows the world, frankly, as disappointing. So how else is the world to behave aside from just that? We women have never been the best about that sort of thing; too pragmatic to go further past your collective sigh.

Of course, that wouldn’t have been an easy lesson for me to learn anyway as a child - that you aren’t supposed to be uncomfortable around anyone. Shy, yes. Awkward, to this day. Uncertain, certainly. But, uncomfortable? No, never. A child does not have much of a refined palate at all for the distinct notes of all of these different emotions; silly, silly, me, I should have paid more attention when Hakeesh was seasoning the fish heads.

But it is nice to occasionally indulge oneself in fantasy. I tend to flavor things that way whenever Captain breaches my thoughts, it’s a little less depressing when I can interrupt my morbid rumination of how lifelong and daily that business must have simmered with the image of a little girl, or a cockeyed teenager, or a young woman, all depending, possessing the power to walk away decisively. It’s nice to take those old memories and conjecture to what they could have been, if I did not have that back-and-forth constantly with myself. 

And it really was constant. Every single moment that I spent with him - constant. There are no memories betwixt us in which I was not uncomfortable, in which I am not uncomfortable. Every laugh I gave, every ‘permission’ I readily revised to be as much - I was uncomfortable. But, worse than being uncomfortable, I told myself that it wasn’t that I was uncomfortable at all.

Instead, I was ‘nervous’, I so-labeled. I just didn’t understand his allure, which he clearly had in order to captain such a loyal crew (if not outright kine… perhaps in both meanings of the word in retrospect). I didn’t appreciate his spirit as I ought to; all of my friends respected him. Jhareem and him were so close, why was it that I was the only one who seemed to find some sort of fault in the man? Why was I the only one that innately, so quietly, crumpled at the very consideration of being alone with him, or having his eye upon me?

It must have meant that I was the one in the wrong, of course. Tale as old as time, sex, and power dynamics. The one with the more outward flaws, such as the unreliable narrative of a young girl with no life experience to her name, is the person at fault. Clearly, I was only so ‘nervous’ that even the most mundane of situations made me feel besieged and boarded. And because I was so wrong in my ‘nervousness’, I wanted to love him like everyone else too. I wanted to be grateful such an esteemed gentleman would ever care to check in on me at all.

So I accepted all of the little talks he’d catch me out in the open for (I could not justify not being able to offer just a handful of seconds), the touches that I told myself were similar to how he and Jhareem interacted (how many times could I see his hand on another’s shoulder?). And it would have been nice for me if the little daydreams of walking right past him, staring dead into his eyes when his palm cupped my skin with a firm jaw, set teeth, and a firm spirit, of knowing better than to have come to him that last night, were the truth of the matter.

Alas, fantasies are fantasies, wishes are poppy, and I never threw a good punch in those years anyway. Maybe if things went that way I’d be Verita the Toothless, instead of just Verita. I think I like the level of hospitality I receive by pure virtue of my looks, as it were.

In exchange, I suppose I must admit that there is a silent little roar of anger if you sift just right and just deep enough past my breast. I don’t often say that, it’s crude and a little pointless (multiplied by the time and distance of those times now), but there it is. I’m not fond that, twelve years later, my heart seems to deflate with paper-thin, transparent and slick, walls with the thought of him; the background of his heat running up my stomach like smith’s steel, the obligatory, numb, rolling of my wrist that seemed to last that entire night.

And I’m not fond that, twelve years later, I stare at yet another letter penned by him that I, morbidly, cannot manage to simply leave in the rubbish. All these years later, the lessons learned that I needed to learn - and yet we’ve both also learned too keenly that I am nothing if not a second-guesser. I’m curious about his, their, plans as much as I want to find them absolutely dull. I’m still intimidated as much as I still want to know what Na’jhareem saw in him that I couldn’t, and I’m still held back by those revisions, those forced moments where I thought to write his actions kindly within those murky waters. 

No one else hugged me after what happened, or had the time for me to cry. It counts, in this animal sort of way, as much as it also counts for absolutely nothing. I know that, so I know the answer needs to be— “No.”— just like that. And from there, I’ll just walk away and forget about it. Slippery slopes, and whatnot. A means to an end is still a pretty shitty ride, all in— “...not now. Not yet.”— all— Hey, not like that. 

#verita #writing

[thanidiel]

A Visit to Skaven

“What is this, Sai?” came out in a tight voice, her want to laugh only barely suppressed as the, at the time, young woman’s hand brushed over the strangely inefficient clothesline: tied to a second stake no less than five inches away from where the first line had already anchored around another post. 

It was the sort of nonsensical, mundane, detail that a hundred people could walk by without a thought paid. Which then made it perfectly ‘Sayidra’, who always functioned even now it seems at a mundanely nonsensical level. Perhaps, terrifyingly, moreso now that she is completely non beholden to anyone, or any sort of communal responsibility.

And quite like the Redguard herself, so much so as to suddenly make this moment timeless, she responded by jutting her chin high in the air - not as though she had taken some offense to the remark and thus needed to draw herself up and fill her chest with air. But, rather, she simply did not see anything wrong with her innovation. 

So, she jut up her chin and the Redguard proclaimed firmly, “The rope was too short.”

There was never much room to ‘debate’ Sayidra on these things; she used to chop down potatoes and yuca into logs because it was the most straightforward way to process the vegetable. And when the Tumnosh twins, exasperated, had dropped themselves to the floor and gone to show her how their hearthwife and sisters would scrape off the skin with a spoon than to discard so much food for scrap, she had harrumphed and said she was to wash the dishes after the tubers. So how could she procure her own spoon?

Verita had wondered vaguely in the back of her mind as she journeyed here, on if Sayidra had modified her uncompromising order of operations at all now that she was buying her own food, with her own coin.

Right now, the odds did not look good.

“You have rope lying all around, why not just swap it?” This was a foregone sort of exchange without much hope to its name. But there was a charm to this routine, regardless. It made her think to when her legs felt so foal-like, and her hair felt so frizzy, and her mind so flustered.

“It was already tied.” Ergo, she resolved the immediate problem at the time. If the rope is too short, simply add another stick. To her older comrade, there was often no preplanning or perfect item for the task. It was only the items in front of her eye that progressed her to the next step. This sort of conversation often wisped by her ears between Sayidra and the others of the Dunehound.

And in a way, that ambient sort of hardheadness and desire to think only on moving forward, made her friendship, the consideration Sayidra had always paid to her on virtue of nothing else than Verita’s breathing life, a deeply intimate and unforgettable affair.

“Fair enough,” conceded. Though as she bent to finally acknowledge the pup that had been trundling after her heels since she arrived, with flattened hands that pat and rubbed along the flanks of its body, the Imperial found she could not help but to add further, “...aren’t you worried about cluttering up the yard?”

“Ongo sen tukta?” questioned back as Sayidra had moved at this point across the stone walkway towards the door. “This is my home,” reverted back to Cyrodilic after that peppering that their crew was once so fond of. “I hope to entertain no one except you and perhaps my brother’s family from here on out.”

“Not Hakeesh or Sahiri?” Most of everyone got along. But if anyone else could call themselves a friend of the older woman, it was those two. There were many a night in those days where everyone would filter out of the galley with their dinners in hand, and Sayidra would creep and slow until the last souls had turned their backs. She would settle somewhere in that scant space and solitary Hakeesh, too, of Skaven would be heard. And it was an even more known, common, sight for the Alfiq to grow bored of her inventorying and make her way to Sayidra to chatter, and chatter, and chatter, while the Redguard worked as steadily as ever.

That made her friend laugh while she, herself, had eventually risen from the ground and made her way towards the aroma of rich meat roasting in spices now freed by the wide-open door. “Hakeesh has grandchildren to harry him in his kitchen now, and I don’t think Sahiri can bring herself to travel without the Dunehound.”

“Remember when that zhazza in Wayrest tried to pick her up?”

“...yes,” and though the other woman had not nearly the same humor as Verita, for once her smile opened in a broad display of those coffee-stained teeth, “His goat-shriek still warms this heart of mine.”

These sorts of moments always came soaring on pretty little wings, free and fluttering with its momentum, “Bogrum was fucking enraged even when we all got back.” But, of course, when the weight caught up to it - that fragile thing could never have held up. “...I was so glad Jhareem and Erissalie were there,” continued on with a sudden quietness that changed the words entirely to I miss them, do you miss them?

And that sobered the other as she wrested free mutton from the coals, and scraped off flatbread stuck to the inside of the oven. Which, as suddenly as Verita had lost her loud voice, suddenly made her feel very selfish, and very oafish. A tight and braided twist of feeling through feeling within her gut, and she wanted to be very small then. So she meekly found the table, sat down, and clasped her hands together.

Of course Sayidra misses them too. How could she not miss a lover and a friend? If anything, she probably longs for this man that will never make and share a home with her, will never grey and grow fat with her, will never be here with her, every day. She didn’t need it rubbed into her face by someone else that will never know that same grief.

It made her simply feel worse, and yet more loved than ever, that the Redguard was now brushing her hand through hair much looser than the multitudes of thin, wiry, coils of her own after the meal had been placed down in front of the Imperial.

“Eat, child,” moved right on, stepped right on, continued right on in that so-timeless way of Sayidra’s. Grief, was also a matter of moving forward for the Redguard. No time to dawdle and cry, no purpose to be found within. The motherly run of callused fingers, with fine sand and ash pocketed within the lines of dark skin and pink palms, brought her back just briefly to a time less wondrous. Though mostly that hand just dug up another conflicted lurch of frustration, then self-criticism.

She wanted the older woman to talk. Talk, in this context, being a broad and shapeless idea that held the conveniently transformative weight of an emotional tornado. Which meant that she actually wanted her to cry, which actually meant that she wanted more comfort, or actually she wanted to be frankly coddled, which all actually stood for I WANT YOU TO GRIEVE LIKE ME. Or rather, actually, for her. Please, grieve for her, too, Sayidra. 

She wished that the world would stop and grieve for the days she still spent feeling just as top heavy as a tree about to snap in twain. That cursed weight of deep loss, of so many moving forces of her life all redirected in a shiver of fate, bearing down on her neck to where that, if nothing else, showed the distinctive identities of body and soul. 

For how is it that her body could have mustered a breath at all, when everything else had sagged so sadly as to waste away?

“...I wanted to show you and Jhareem this for years, whipped garlic. It was always too troublesome before,” muttered on as Sayidra spooned into a squat vessel and generously dolloped several mouthfuls of the spread atop tender goat’s meat. And in the Redguard’s way, that meant I see you. I’m sad too. Come with me.   

That was where things went inward again, the silent whispers of I’m stupid. How could I be so stupid? How else could she ever respond to a loved one’s concession? Pop, pop, pop-- there her thoughts sizzled in that lick of shame. You’re so selfish, when did you get so selfish? Mistakes simply loved to burn themselves out at the front of her belly.

Just be graceful, the churn of her guts told her.

So she tried a smile, there. It was tentative, and fake, and almost nervous to be here, but it was heartening too in its own way. The resolution to have made herself just smile, also came with the creaking momentum of wheels slowly starting to move again, and slough off the sticky muck that had snared it.

“Remember,” begins again. Quiet and almost rasping as she found her voice again, “When Erissalie first came, and she lost her mind at Hakeesh for serving garlic to the Khajiit?” That added a sprouting touch of sincerity to her smile; their dear friend was so foolishly outspoken with the way she let her heart lead so readily.

Her pack was still slung on her back, so she had freed it with a slump towards her hip that brought it gently thudding onto the seat next her. And then because the very sight of the plate afore her was too tempting, she saw about pinching off some of the flatbread and using it to pocket the delicate meat afore her. She’d meant to procure her usual offering to the Redguard— when did Sayidra’s skin start to thin and line like that? It shouldn’t have been long ago, but yet— but her own hunger always liked to tumble over itself all of a sudden. Inattentive until the compulsion ached ravenously through her belly and pushed up behind her ribs regardless of anything else rumbling in her blood.

So then it became another pinch, and another, and then all pretense to an already rude affair vanished entirely as the pinches soon changed to torn sections, flaked meat and garlic smeared like debris across a ship’s bow. She would have been more careful if this had occurred before someone less familiar (thankfully she, like most women, simply grew more elegant of hand as she aged from here). But Verita didn’t need to, so she ate just as she needed, chin tucked and eyes only occasionally tracking her taller comrade.

“She questioned me some months after that on if it hurt,” exchanged. Bluntly, exasperatedly, that sort of distaste rolling around her frank and heavy mouth that you reserve only for friends. That hurt again, like the faucet had to gush one more time even though the pipe was already closed up. Mostly because her lightness was already this wobbling little bird righting itself from the ground, and continuing the conversation felt like as if the young Imperial had righted the plumbing only to get called back and asked if she added any clay, if she examined the weakness proper, could she account for how long that would handle? Sometimes she felt stupid for other reasons than solely her tenderness. She started to feel stupid then because she was so quick to convince herself that she already fluttered up from the prior falter. Because she wanted to convince herself and like how those of only twenty-five summers do, she tried to convince herself in that moment with a chipper and false retelling of her feelings. A lie that was so dull it only lasted less than ten seconds.

Shame hissed in another lurching boil of her gut. If the last bout were like little licks tickling her skin, this felt like she was being held right over the flame. And before it’d leave her in peace to cook in it, it’d rip all the water out of her and make her curl up in this gristly little band of displeasing meat if shame had things its way. 

Just be graceful. Just be graceful. Just be graceful. You can’t change that they’re dead. It doesn’t help. Just be graceful. Please just be graceful. You can be graceful, old girl. She doesn’t need this from you.

This part of this old story was going to be a scrabble. The tears were frogging up below her chin and she needed to fuss and putter in any sort of way she could, before they could push any higher. Thinking was slowing down her escape.

Stop thinking. Just be graceful.

Generic response (as earnest as her squished little sense of befuddlement was at this time): “...if what hurt?” questioned. Appetite evaporated away at this point, not as insulated from the fire like the rest of her; her hands still playing at this aimless act of repetitively swishing soaked bread and meat to remake the diagram of garlicky lines on her plate.

Proudly, her friend replied with absolutely no cushioning or fanfare to the coming impact,

“Me and Jhareem.”

That sent the fragile little thing of her heart shrieking and aflutter, shooed away from where it had landed with its wobbly and flapping wings. Mixed up as it was, laughter bubbled out as much as her diaphragm began to spasm and hiccup with the surge of tears springing fat, wet, and dark, down shaking cheeks.

“—S-Sai, that’s so gross—”

I don’t want to be graceful.

#Verita #writing

[thanidiel]

Pause (Journal Entry)

To preserve formatting, whole piece is found here

"...I remember still on how much awe these same, same-old, things used to invoke in this heart of mine. It’s sad on just how sad everything feels when you learn everything in, out, and all around, and you know exactly how thin the veneer layer is to this sort of thing. Though I know even as I write this that a part of it is really the bore of these voyages and the procession of strangers. Not that I’m discounting myself like some uncertain girl. This is my journal and I can write whatever the fuck I like in it, including the lamentations..."

#verita #writing

[thanidiel]

Change

She was too old now to crawl up upon the great man’s legs and sit there when she sought out his words, his eye. This wasn’t something ever told to her— truth be told, she could have strung it out another year or two. But she knew she was getting there, and self-consciousness had a new habit at this point in her young life of beginning to swell and wane like the moon’s breath.

And so she didn’t clamper, and she didn’t make herself known in that handsy way of young children that tells you hello, it is I. Rather, it was a jerky sort of swing, interruption to an old habit, that brought her to settle upon the crate nearby tall Na’jhareem and his work. And because interruptions are always known, and always seen, one could feel the jarred sort of pause that had gone through both bodies. 

It was so inelegant. Many adults that had tread these decks, and many more novels, of children for whom greater things were destined, passed to her hands by Sayidra’s market trips - they had all spoke of these defining little changes in the pass between ages in which it had been as though the smallest strikes of independence, maturity, had been like shouting from the top of mountains. Like some conquest in which every corner of Tamriel was suddenly illuminated to them.

Instead, it was only awkward.

It was a little sad, too.

Not that she would be willing to admit this to herself of that longing for uncomplicated, unbound, adolescence she had felt in that moment. She wouldn’t do that for many years, not until it had struck her, truly so and in that sort of delayed way that grief sifts up new insights periodically from its sands, that she was realized and grown - and most of them were gone.

Jhareem was more honest with it, though. Through his feelings, there was nothing to prove to anyone, most certainly not a whelp like her, except for the reality of them at all; this is how I feel. And it was evident then across the ripples of his broad snout, and the sink of the fur that sprouted so wildly from his jaws, that he, himself, found a certain sadness in that impact of realization.

It was suddenly a little weird now.

And though many, when provided this look upon the lives of others, would lift their chin and proclaim that family is family, and angrily snort about on the evils of allowing society to modulate one’s actions; the simple truth to the matter is that context brews a quiet nuance, and the known patterns that spring and root are natural all unto their own.

So, from here-on-out, the relationship would change. For when what was inside of her began to shed a coat of her own and share to her that same lunar influence as pulled him and his kind, she was no longer the little girl that had once pulled on his pant leg and asked for life anew. Now a certain type of humanity, personhood, was implied to her existence.

In other words, she was now Verita; I, and not Verita; of the Dunehound’s charity. And to continue to father her would be to continue to look past this newborn identity of she unto her own. In one fell swoop, he was now a vague ground between ‘friend’ and ‘uncle’. So when she were to grow old, and perhaps bring to him lovers or babies or great friends, he now knew that the pride rightful to him would be of an older companion, mentor, than the one as tender, as intimate, as he had possessed the privilege of in these last five years.

That is, after all, the way of these found sorts of relationships.

All that and more is felt and known in this miniscule sliver of a moment. 

To call the world an ocean was, at first, a cheesy and tongue-in-cheek remark of romanticism in livelihood. Later for the young Colovian it became an observation of rhyme and flow. She would see how conversations were like these invisible currents twisting past one another, and all those silent decisions, and feelings, and despairs, and insights, and other components that all laid within like mineral composition— they liked to make the meat of everything even if you never thought about it. They liked to weigh, and to change the very laws of the water they themselves reside in. So some conversations were light, and free, and uncomplex in their flavor. And others liked to brood and sink, and they moved so little at a time with all the different things that filled them up. But all conversations had the capacity to find these little porous, empty, seconds in the world, and gush forth in this burst of everything, only to recede and leave the nothing there between words once again.

What had happened there?

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

She breathed, then, and spoke. And as she spoke, her mind boggled at the new light in which her friend came to her eye; his largeness now much more real than it had ever been before, to sit near him now as a young peer. 

“...what are you doing?”

His eyes never left the work at his hands, finished with pawing oil along the long length of the rope and then moving onto to wiping himself clean on a nearby cloth. A cake of wax was fingered after that, now to be rubbed along the fibers in the oil’s aftermath.

“What does it look like this one is doing?”

“You’re conditioning it.”

“Na’jhareem is glad this one has not suddenly lost her eyesight.” Another pause, though this one is no shock of revelation. Instead, in the way of one teaching, “What is M’Kreenya really asking?”

Her mouth felt claylike sometimes. And the demand of her to elucidate her language only refreshed the feeling as her mind slowly swished her thoughts about to dissolve the thickness on her tongue.

“I… don’t know why you’re oiling it,” settled after some steps were retraced. “You’re already waxing it before you heat it.” Instruction is a subtle thing, but this was a lesson walked before; to say what she meant. “...WHY…” began in that juvenile clumsiness, “...are you doing that first?”

“Because one should.”

“—No. Selim, Jhareem!” Of course, clumsiness and irritation played together hand-in-hand in these early years like a sapling struggling to keep itself rooted. “Explain it to me! What does the oil do? Why does it go first?”

He laughed at that; his laughter, she remembered, was this baritone chuffing that scratched and snorted, almost enough to make one’s blood and skin spring high with how akin he sounded to something so predatory.

He laughed at her spitting and her hissing, and then she had taken his tankard and struck him square on the kneecap.

#verita #writing

[thanidiel]

Prompt Eight: "Tepid"

“I can’t deal with this. I can’t deal with you guys in danger… everything I’ve stupidly tried to do to make a home here going up in smoke. No, I can’t stay.”

After all this time, through everything that has occurred, she could still say that she was, if nothing else, a person with ideas; conviction, in other words. Two concepts separated by language, although they are, in truth, conjoined - much like the stark twin woes that towered over this dust-swarmed land and its stone city.

“--if you’re going to be selfish, you might as well be selfish in selfish company than just leaving everyone else the debris and calling it even.”

Walking the only road you know isn’t the same as walking down the right choice.

“I did something I can never fix. And then I fucking ran away from her.”

She’s learned that.

“It’s about being responsible even if you never do enough to do right by the Gods or anyone.”

So that’s why she always makes the choice.

“...I don’t know if I can.” 

And that’s why she’s here.

“You haven’t actually ‘lived’ with it at any moment since I’ve known you. You have to live with your sins.”

Speaking like she has a place to speak.

“...I can’t fix this, I know that. But… maybe. Maybe I can at least own up to it. Take responsibility.”

Making the choices for everyone else, while she lets it all go at once. She lets the chaos fly, the mistakes dig their graves. Then she wraps everything up real pretty, real quietly, and glues it all together with the choice words, the ones that make her seem like the biggest person in the room when she’s been one of the smallest pieces of the puzzle; the nudge in a series of rocks thrashing all about and coming to teetering impasses. 

Paradoxical hypocrisy. Most people would just call it hypocrisy, but this world is too much for her to put it down that easily. Not in absolution— she doesn’t need it, and there’s bigger crimes for her to burn that up on. The matter of things is that she could break her skull open imploding and arguing the way it all should be, or she can keep a grasp on her sanity and make sure it all goes in the right direction.

It’s just easier.

It’s just numbers.

She did the calculations like she does the calculations for everything.

This is the right choice.

No changing that.

This is how things get done.

Play resolute just for a little bit; make contact, wait for them to just barely meet the tip of your finger— then watch them take the invitation for what it is, and tumble.

The lie is in the belief.

The truth is in the result.

“Been there, done that. You find things to live and make up for.”

Hey, maybe you just might.

#elia #xiaohu #writing

[thanidiel]

Prompt Eighteen: "Turn a Blind Eye"

Put yourself to work making beautiful things, and that is all the world cares to concern itself with.

If you paint, no one cares when your spittle lands on their faces.

If you sing, then no one is really listening to how you talk to them.

If you write, no one thinks that it’s wrong to have to mind your every base needs.

If you carve, and you polish, the maid walks around with teeth pushed a half-ilm too high into those flushed gums and no one says anything. 

Sew, and sew gorgeously, and sew in gold and lace, then no one complains and everyone bites their lip when you prick them like dolls for display.

Love, and love fully, and love with the right words and the tender moments, and no one can bear to weigh your personhood against that love. No gravity and its hungry fangs; no spectre with a mother’s eyes; no red-twined pool of life; no love to the end of all loves. No one. 

To be an artist means that no one minds the dirty little pacts they sign with you. Anything to be closer to you, the privilege of seeing that dazzle light up from the source. A morbid affair where they walk out a little more used, a little more hesitant on the step, and a little more loose on the bargains they’ll make with you, over and over again.

And they walk out that door, and they fasten their clothes, and they wipe away the pretty smears and they’ll lie to people later about those wounds. And when others ask of the time spent with you, they’ll tell them that the experience was transcendent, and profound. To be touched by you was a trigger of metamorphosis. An intimacy inaccessible by any other soul; you, a creature of niche and hook. 

Of course others would never understand the sheer humanness of it all; that celebration of everything so much more meaningful than life at its manifest, somehow able to be narrowed down to your inked skin and the picture-perfect part to how you hold your lip. An intoxication that bears down like ill-fit skin in that moment, but they’ll always speak of fondly.

You cannot tell me that any mechanism throbs stronger.

You cannot tell me that their blood sings free.

You are a lantern, and the bugs buzz.

The bugs are looking at you. 

You cannot.

You.

Every pleasure has been born of this.

Love is an art, and you, an artist.

That brush begs for you.

They beg for you.

“Encore.”

You.

And that’s where you give them it.

Here, is where the world begins.

Where the dazzle comes from.

Where it all lights up.

You always do.

Showtime.

You.

#writing #xiaohu #kowa #vander #adrian #felore #evilie

[thanidiel]

Prompt Two: "Bolt"

Curiousity has a reek to it. 

Understandably so; primal in its origin, base in its clawing maintenance against all odds. No one is good enough at hiding it. Not to the world, not to an eye that knew just how to watch the pulse of life and mind underneath another’s skin. 

It is just as natural to be curious as it is natural to scent it on a personhood entwined, and then mirror that sharp tickle, like a restrained impulse of a cough, that likes to solidify down the body like a cermet bar.

She’s so curious.

Silence is a veneer, a glossy polish that would obscure if not for that eye that so-easily hones upon the shape of it. A pelt may change, but the options of how one shapes the animal is much less magical in its transformation. 

So you see it. The tourniquet tie-off of nerves that could twitch and leap through those arms, their palms and fingers, if permission were given to trace. If she could spiral back the way you would spiral in that returning; feel the heat of a smaller hand guiding her back through a fresh path just walked together, encounter the fade of impermanent humanity, and renew decrepit roads to fallen empires.

She wants to know everything about you.

Of course she does.

Why wouldn’t she?

Why doesn’t she?

When do you unlock that door?

And why don’t you?

Maybe it’s too much confidence in the self formulated only through that tread. Maybe it’s better to be insecure in love, feel the need to sacrifice and give gifts and flesh with a shakily looped and misshapen linen-ribbon. I, as myself, am not enough - so I give you this, and I pardon myself for the time being. 

That’s certainly common enough, the tactic of piecemeal melancholy as diversion. She’s done it herself. When someone needs to think she’s sad like them, precious and intimate and listen to her, darling. She has no issue weaving the tales and pressing on knobbled scar tissue until she finds a blood pocket, and expresses it.

Sharing isn’t the obstacle.

Maybe it is that confidence. 

Maybe she is too confident in this to give the extraneous unto another. 

At first she thought, perhaps I find myself too ugly, shaken into shyness and a croak to her storytelling after the lesson learned of uncaring love. But that couldn’t be it (not because of the discrepant allure), because she has already shared the true ugliness of those times. Not the details, the paint and the lacquer, but what she did - what she’s capable of.

Yeah. Maybe that’s it.

That’s all that really matters.

As long as she knows.

And still makes the choice in that.

Who cares about how it was learned?

#xiaohu #evilie #writing

[thanidiel]

Prompt One - "Cross"

CW: derealization, implicit sexuality

My wicked other, I am the memory that circles your bed nights, that tugs you taut as moon tugs ocean. I claim you all mine… like it, or not, honey. -Sandra Cisneros, “You Bring Out the Mexican in Me”

Meat has a memory.

The soul is a hostage.

I am a prisoner.

I am not this meat.

But this meat has a memory.

This meat has a memory and this meat lies. This meat has a memory and the memory runs deep. This meat has a memory and it has a hunger.

You know it does.

You know it does.

You know I am seized by it.

I know that you know. This meat has a memory and this meat sees you. This meat has a memory and this meat has a longing you can’t fix. This meat has a memory and it needs more than what it has.

I don’t bleed enough in this memory.

This meat has a memory and this memory has a hole. This meat has a memory and it is happyunhappy. This meat has a memory and life does not satiate it. This meat has a memory and this memory is a captive thing.

This memory crawls over me, and it holds me down. It holds me down and it is a bruising thing. This memory hurts me and I can’t escape, I can’t escape, I can’t escape. I’m trapped; I’m trapped within this meat.

This meat is sick.

This meat is a grey-toned thing. This meat sees in two. This meat would collapse upon itself if no one were looking at it. This meat doesn’t know right from left. This meat is weak. This meat is a tangle of worm and wire. This meat bursts into milk and grain when you bite down. This meat is fragile and yet it interns me.

This mind is sick.

My mind is sick and this sickness has memory.

Your sick strings pull me everywhere.

Come here, then.

Madness kissed the mind of me once.

I’m always waiting for you to fuck me now.

Madness kisses the meat of me twice.

And so now I love you, dear madness mine.

You abduct me.

You bring out the nasty obsession in me.

I love you.

Come inside.

#xiaohu #writing

[thanidiel]

Godlike

CW: Brief, direct, sexual reference. Implicit sexuality. Afterbirth metaphor.

My God says that a soul is a bug. My God says that we’re all just bugs. My God says that bugs just fly in circles around a lantern until they die. My God says that I am a bug. My God says that She is a lantern. My God says that all of these bugs are annoying. My God says I could do better than that. My God says I can be like Her. My God says I can be one less bug in the world. My God says a soul is a skin. My God says that skin is meant to shed. My God says that I should take it off. My God says to bleed. My God says that She can show me how. My God says that there’s a trick to it. My God says I just have to let go. My God says that the Godhead is found inside. My God says I need to be brave enough to dig for it. My God says it starts as an itch. My God says it’s that perverse feeling, that hungry one buried in your loins. My God says think of that want that pulses deep inside and gets a little bigger every time you feed it. My God says, you know, like when you’re full but you could keep just eating until your stomach cramps and you feel it sliding up your throat when you gag. My God says think of when you come and there’s that little scratch that tells you could keep going, and going, and going, and fuck eating food and fuck going to sleep. My God says to remember what it was like the first time I hurt someone, really hurt someone, and how good it felt escalating it, and escalating it, and knowing I could escalate it even when they stopped moving. My God says that Godhood is about being sick. My God says that the natural is obsolete. My God says that I have to dig in for it. My God says that I eat my way to Godhood. My God says I should be obscene. My God says, specifically, to eat what makes you. My God says there’s a cord to break. My God says I can bite into it with my teeth. My God says I should do it. My God says to steal. My God says to chew. My God says to swallow. My God says how does that taste? My God says, good girl, and bye bye mama. My God says I can go farther than that. My God says there’s a trophy. My God says be naughty. My God says it’s on the floor. My God says I have teeth and I have hands. My God says to lick my plate clean after. My God says it’s good for me. My God says to open up when I’m done. My God says to show Her my pretty tongue and those pretty teeth. My God says I’m not a bug anymore. My God says I’m a lantern now. My God says I’m like Her now. My God says She made me. And then I say

STOP??

WAIT!

HOLD ON.

And I say, let Me think.

Then I say I thought about it. 

So I say I eat her. I say I dig deep into the loins. I say I take Me out. 

I say I am a bug.

#xiaohu #writing

[thanidiel]

The Villagers Never Liked You

@throughthemanorwindow @astrolevitation

"I only met her about a sennight after his passing but I cannot say I would have missed him if I had known him. His ghosts are queer things at that manor. Perhaps it was better for her."

That makes her muse, when she is back to a home of a kind. More time than before has been afforded to staying within the halls that creaked much less in the ear now, but still yawned with its elderly rattle in more subtle senses. Less focus on living; more focus on duty.

She didn’t mind.

In a way, it has been a comfortable change of pace. Domesticity, still quite alien to her: a sense of restlessness and wonder as to what there is to do, when all that can be done near to seaside warmth, has been done. You can like something and possess an uncertain mind to it all at once, of course. She likes that, there is no denying the attachment, that bright and soft amazement, to such a tangible concept of living and love.

It is only the sort of pause that one unlearned feels when judging whether boiled sugar is safe to lay upon the tongue or not.

But she cannot deny the roused occupation of her mind here than there. To read until she feels as though words coil through every square ilm of her mind; that quite-physical sensation wrapped around the cranium like the afterglow of exercise of a kind. To read and lire and étudier and to study.

And sometimes, in lieu of this mental strengthening, she raises her eyes to a thoughtful lover. There, she advises. And it all sprawls before the mindeye of her’s as it always has and always does and always will. Opinion laid, though it was never to be intercepted by anyone much less one treasured. Complexity reduced to step-by-step; easier said than done, ‘lest her hands found the work themselves and acted, somehow thoughtless and yet full of everything unthought of, under her primal order.

But command is not mutual, so she only counsels.

…

…

…

…from what she has heard of this ‘Gramond’, he had a tendency to command with a hand more feeble than those commanded. Which was the most significant of a tirade of mistakes, seeing that command is, ultimately, a deliverance of promises whether obeyed or challenged.

Which only aligns with the fact that the only mention of his life that she heard so far, that was not passing, involved the drone of faerie tales to his daughters. Grandeur in insubstance; promises with a catch meant to invalidate the contract.

…

…

It is natural in the way of partnerhood, she thinks, to develop distaste for the other’s parentage. A lover protects, and so a lover rages against malpractice in the hands that had shaped the other. And death is not truly gone, so he has no excuse nor escape to not be known.

If she were less certain of herself here, she would wonder if this is only the bristle of instinct. But she has never failed in assessment and evaluation–– so the prominent thought is that she would have disliked him even if she had naught to do with Evilie at all.

She only has more evidence, and reason, than she would have otherwise.

…

In fact, the evidence is everywhere.

The evidence is in the study.

The evidence is on the walls.

The evidence is counted in the ledgers.

Evidence innumerable. More evidence than she may speak in one, two, three, suns. Industry she has more-than-familiarized herself with, written within annals for epoch upon epochs upon centuries, and then suddenly abandoned. Absence of plodding, greaved, march that ought to be sweeping in and out from these manor grounds like blood flow. Adulthood, reached too quickly, seen in those very subtle lines on the faces of two daughters and their humour too gutting to denote a proper period given for innocence. That sadness of stagnancy and entrapment that has, only recently, left from her gut when she enters this unliving home.

…

…

Gramond was feeble.

She could have, and would have, drained the House empty if it had been him, and not Evilie, to take her service. He was the sort of feeble that just begs for a kick in the face; a hound that doesn’t know how to wait for the scraps and your boot is right fucking there.

She doesn’t like him.

…

She doesn’t like anything about him short of the fact that he ‘reigns’ no more.

She’s never thought of it that way before, not until she and Kowa had spoken. The man is simply too vaporous and ambient to provide him much thought unless purpose has identified itself. He’s a pricking little thing (because he was a prick) in the manor air. Like some gnat buzzing beyond your ears or a sunbeam shining in some annoying place.

How annoyingly, fucking, pervasive.

…

…

…

…

…

She reads until the linkpearl chimes and she is informed that meal is two-bells cold by now.

And within the entire time, her assessment has been remade.

Refined.

Reduced.

Down… and down.

Chiseled from wandering thoughts and a wandering mind until little more can be taken from it.

I’m glad he’s vanishing.

That’s all that needs to be said.

“...I am glad that may be the worst of her ills in this life."

And that’s extra.

You, in other words.

Goodbye, Gramond.

#evilie #xiaohu #writing #kowa

[thanidiel]

“My terror is not secret, but necessary, as the wild must be.”

— Jennifer Chang, from “Freedom in Ohio”, Some Say the Lark (via voirlvmer)

[thanidiel]

A birds anus can’t handle it

this is…regarding what exactly

[thanidiel]

I drew Hieronymus Bosch’s certified Very Good Boy, brought to my attention by @routezeros on twitter. Gave him a sucker fish mouth because it seemed appropriate.

PATREON | KO-FI