the Notebook

A niche gay ship from some anime has some of the most devastating pieces of literature on AO3 that I will ever read in my life. I don't know, it's so strange isn't it? I mean not to go off the rails but us as humans and the emotions we are capable of feeling are so strange.

Past few days I've just got nothing in my mind, not a single thought. I'm not unfamiliar with this feeling but I can't exactly name what causes this either, other than the fact that when everything is normal I can't fucking get away from this feeling of impending doom. My days blur together and nights are circular. As if it takes effort to feel something, even that is a hassle because I'm such a goody two shoes right? My morals and principles; it's funny to think that I thought it's something I should be proud of, thinking I'm better than the others.

I thought I would keep telling myself that over and over until it became the truth. But whenever I think I've got it all figured out some new revelation just fucks it all up again. It's exhausting to feel and to know but it's not any better to be unaware of it either. There's no point in trying to make a saint out of myself when all I've ever been on the inside is filth. I know it, something in me always has, no matter how much I blame it on my father's hands around my neck. It passes down, you can't escape it, you can't erase the filth of the blood you're made from.

Even nihilism is a fucking commitment and I cannot be bothered. I can't even stick with the narrative that "there is no point of anything, this life is only a distraction from the ultimate death". Because I know our lives are really not so significant but the memories we create are something larger than death. Yes there's no point in anything, but that doesn't stop me from feeling the blues of the skies and seas. Like what the fuck do you even label this as? Existentialism? Everything I do feels performative; I can't even cry without feeling ashamed to do so.

Guilt is such a strange thing.

Why does it silence my own pain? The suffering of those far away makes my grief feel like a luxury, fucking unearned, unwarranted. What do you do when the comfort of your present life overshadows the humiliation of your past? Like a stray cat that won't leave, no matter how much you shout, my shame is a walking person. It sits with me at supper every night.

And the ones who endured the same suffering, why do they look at me as if I've lost my mind? This guilt, this full plate, chokes me when I dare to weep. I don't know which version of me is real anymore. Am I the one who starved or the one who eats?

How does a person feel nothing and everything at the same time? What do I do with all these thoughts and emotions? I don't get those people who just cut themselves when something is overwhelming. Yeah, now I will have a lingering sting under my clothes but that does nothing to soothe my aching ribs. Actually, I guess I do understand their intention behind it, it's something divine even, sometimes I wish I could dig my fingers into my chest and open my heart from inside out.

I yearn and I yearn, this endless gnawing beneath my ribs, this hollow that no feast can fill. It's mine. At least this hunger will always be mine.

In a broken grove, there lived a specific trinity: the Chastier with his honeyed thorns, the Stormbird with her tempest heart, and between them, always wedged between them, the Wren.

The Chastier was a wretched, magnificent creature. On good days he stood tall and golden, showering the earth with fragrant blossoms and whispering, See how I bloom for you? On other days, his roots twisted up through the soil like fists, splitting the dirt in his fury. He could turn from a shelter into a weapon between one breath and the next. His shadow alone was a thing to be feared.

The Stormbird was beautiful in the way lightning is beautiful, all sharp cries and sudden, violent movements. When the Chastier turned cruel, she would beat her wings against the gale, shrieking her protests. The Wren, small and fiercely protective, would throw her tiny body into the fray, taking the brunt of the Chastier's lashing branches to spare the Stormbird's breast.

Yet when the storm passed, when the Chastier drooped his limbs and wept sweet sap in apology, the Stormbird always fluttered right back to his side. She would preen his shattered bark as if it were precious gold. Then she would turn her back on the Wren, pretending not to see the bloodied feathers littering the ground.

The Wren learned early that love often wears the face of betrayal.

She remembered the night she had wedged herself between them, her body acting as a shield against his rage, only to find the Stormbird nesting peacefully in his crown by morning. The Stormbird would bring her berries later, as though fruit could stanch the ache of abandonment. Both of them called this cycle love.

But wounds, like trees, grow rings. Each one is a memory.

One autumn, the Wren realized her voice had changed. Her cries emerged sharper, her songs threaded with a sudden crimson. The Stormbird merely clucked her tongue. Must you always make such a scene? she would sigh, even as thunder gathered once more in the Chastier's roots.

The Wren did not leave, not entirely, but she began slipping away at odd hours.

When the air in the grove grew too thick with the Chastier’s cloying resin or the Stormbird’s keening cries, the Wren vanished. Just for an hour. Just long enough to perch on a gnarled branch overlooking the river, where the water ran swift and entirely indifferent. There, she practiced a dangerous kind of magic. She practiced silence.

The grove misinterpreted her absences, of course.
The Chastier rattled his branches: See how she abandons us?
The Stormbird sighed: Such a selfish little creature.

Neither of them noticed how the Wren always returned with river-polished stones heavy in her talons. Neither noticed that her feathers carried the scent of clean, running water instead of rotting leaves.

She was building something, but it was not a nest. Not yet.

The next page, should anyone care to look, is filled with pressed wildflowers and a recipe for lavender shortbread. The Wren, despite the grove, still believes in beautiful things.

I picked up a paintbrush today for the first time in five years. I have always admired Bob Ross, less for the technicality of his art and more for the radical gentleness of the man himself. The way he spoke to a blank canvas, treating every structural error as a happy little accident waiting to be embraced, felt like a philosophy. I attempted one of his landscapes. He called it easy.

It began horribly. Every stroke felt clumsy, the pigments quickly turned muddy, and my sky looked more like a smoking warzone than a gentle gradient. Halfway through, the white paint ran out. I set the canvas aside in a sharp wave of frustration.

But I returned to it. I would have abandoned the thing entirely if not for that calm voice looping in the background, insisting that we do not make mistakes. So I kept moving the brush. By the end, the result was passable. It was not brilliant, but it was decent. It was a map of a genuine attempt.

I owe the momentum to my little sister. Some people are born with a natural fluidity, an inherent gift, and she is one of them. She is the one who nudged me out of my inertia. Her persistent, almost childish wish that we paint together finally dragged me out of an eternal rotting state. Perhaps that is the simplest shorthand for love: the small salvation of someone expecting you to show up, even if it is only to play.

My mother’s reaction was amusing in its sheer disbelief. You did that? she asked, looking at the canvas as if the sun had unceremoniously risen in the northeast.

I do not blame her. In her ledger, my only active interests are sleeping and more sleeping. She has no map of my interior. She does not know about the writing, the photography, or the hours spent dissecting niche cinema frame by frame. It is not that she is cold or willfully ignorant; her affection is simply long distance. Quiet. She admires me in fragments, from afar.

I find myself wondering what she thought of her own mother when she was my age. Probably very little. Around this exact time nineteen years ago, she was leaving her youth behind to marry my father.

Maybe tomorrow, I will paint again.

Blood because I never stop feeling. Because it rushes, pulses, drowns. Because everything in me moves too fast, too much. Blood because I stain everything I touch. Because I feel every bruise from the inside out. Blood because it keeps me alive and still finds a way to hurt. Because I can't hold it in. Because I don't want to.

Blood because it's the scream beneath my skin. Because I live in the burn of it. Because when it spills, it reminds me I'm real. Blood because it never asks permission. Blood because it's never quiet.

Flesh because I carry the proof of everything. Every wound, every want, every time I was touched too gently or too hard. Flesh because I remember things I never asked to hold on to. Flesh because I exist in weight, too much of me, too soft, too wrong. Because I am not armor.

Flesh because it molds around me like a cage. Because it never lets me forget what I am. Flesh because it betrays me. Because I can't crawl out of it. Flesh because I keep trying to make peace with something that keeps changing. Flesh because it's where all the ghosts hide.