Enough

Independent RP blog for Miss Jennifer Honey from Roald Dahl's Matilda Mainly book-based with strong movie and musical influences. Mun/Muse: 21+ NSFW will be tagged. Tracking: asmallbutstubbornfire

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

     “ There is no war in Ba Sing Se. ”

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

Starter Call.

[cruelonlytobekindarchived]

Alana Bloom is rapidly reminded why she hates good people. It comes on like a wave of sudden discomfort. She hates good people because she does not think like this. Because she sees the good in everyone but too often her nails have bit bloody crescents into her palms and her throat has burned of bile simply trying to keep down a sense of revulsion.

(One day she’ll learn the value is in choosing to be good, sometimes, and that’s why this will make sense, but in this moment she’s a kid who can’t see past years of bubbling anger.)

“I try,” she says softly, hates this. Her eyes must be that color like the ice is cracking and she doesn’t feel right anymore when her muscles aren’t tight.

“I want to do what I want to do because I figure if I’ve got this backwards thought process I might as well use it to help people, right…?”

She could go either way, truth be told, settled at this crossroads of her life. But more often than not, Alana Bloom will choose a path of sunlight and will be better for it.

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

“That isn’t....”

This way her head tilts to one side.  “I simply meant that I hope others have treated you that way more, not that you have necessarily acted one way or the other.  People tend to mark you one way or the other, regardless of how you act.  But people are just...people.”

The cloth is removed and it isn’t stained with blood, just dripped with it.  “I think it’s stopped bleeding.”  She gazes at the child, tries to take everything in. “There’s nothing else hurting, is there?  No cuts or bruises or sprains or...broken bones?”

She hesitates over that last phrase.

Jennifer Honey knows how to deal with broken bones, knows how to live with them when they are refused to be tended after, knows how to protect and still somehow use it to her advantage.

Then, a nod.  “Right.  That seems like...like a good plan, yes.”  And just like that, she is herself again, leaning back, hands in her lap on that little cloth.

[cruelonlytobekindarchived]

She wants to argue. This isn’t valid. It isn’t truthful. She doesn’t need anyone (but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t– want someone on occasion, that she doesn’t– wish she could need someone) and everything is too easy. In fact, it’s frightening. Alana Bloom does not understand codependency. She’s horrified of it. What an awful thing, to rely on someone else.

She winces– a sharp sound, one that is more helpless than she would like. (She’s walked a mile on a severely sprained ankle. Why does this make her flinch like a child? –Because you feel like one. And you hate it.)

“You really don’t– have to–” what? Care about me? There’s no reason for it. Alana’s difficult. Insistent. Monstrous about being looked after.

But she’s subsided, at least, baby blues fixed on those much warmer eyes than her own (she always wanted hers to be that color. Not this burdensome, harsh blue).

Those very small shoulders shrug, a little indifferent motion, “You come to accept difference. No matter how– decent or how– much you believe it is okay, difference does one thing– it sets you apart from everybody else. So the problem isn’t necessarily that– that it’s okay, but that it can be– a little terrible.”

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

“I do quite a few things I don’t have to do.”  The way her eyes flick up from the wound to meet the other’s eyes for a brief moment.  “I have found that those are often the ones most worth doing...the ones that tell us the most about ourselves - what we do simply on an impulse.”

She notes the wince as she presses the damp cloth there a second time; she doesn’t have much here - bandaids, a little cleaning alcohol, this cloth, a little gauze that gets washed and reused because she can’t afford to get more - but this, at least, she can help with.

Jennifer pauses with her hand against Alana’s cheek, blinks once - twice, then continues.  “People do not always know how to deal well with differences.  They can make monsters out of what they don’t understand and angels out of what they most desire.  Sometimes a person can end up an odd combination of both.”

     Some of us don’t bring up our differences.

“I hope that you, at least, have been an angel more often than you have been a demon.”

[cruelonlytobekindarchived]

She feels very young and very small– and she is, isn’t she? All I’ve blue eyes and faded pink hair and tired and angry. All the child she never got to be because she was forcibly too adult– had to be. For Eddie, for Jesse, for her mama. Alana’s had to grow up long before she knew what growing up was. And in some ways she hasn’t learned it just right. In some ways, she has more to do.

But she’s tugged closer and there’s this way her nose twitches, like she’s scented something, but mostly it’s just that– Alana has no idea how to take comfort. Her mama has always been that brand of gentle with her, and she would understand if she ever allowed it. Which she does not, stubborn Alana Bloom. This wild, vicious kid with this intellect and these weary hands. She feels the way her spine relaxes, her shoulders drop, how she leans in, how that fraction of discomfort exits like a balloon letting out air.

“I disagree,” she says softly, but the fight’s out of her. Her eyes are downcast, pale cheeks flushed a shade of darker pink, “I disagree because I’ve done just fine, and I’ll– I never needed anyone. And that isn’t to say I don’t love the people who are my family, I just–”

There’s a breath. She’s quieter, now, “–I’m different.”

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with being different.”

Miss Honey has known too many people marked with that term who carried it like a burden - different means set apart means not like anyone else means alone - and then used that as a distinguishing feature - I’m different than you and that makes me better, worse, superior, inferior, something you - no one - can handle, and I will always be that way, so it is better to separate myself now before I get hurt.  I’m different.  You won’t understand.

But what she has found is that, at their core, all people are fundamentally the same.  They love and they crave to be loved, they need someone to tell them that they are enough as they are, they want someone to be there when things get rough - not to protect or to fix things but simply to be there - a support---

Different and fine are just defenses for desires long thrown away and buried.  Different means alone and fine means I learned to do without.

“But it does not mean you do not - on occasion - need someone.”  She pulls away just a little bit, picks the damp rag back up, slowly presses it to the cut again.  “Hold still.”

[thebookhangover-blog]

♀ badass book ladies ♀ eight female dynamics [1/8] matilda wormwood & miss honey { matilda by roald dahl }

What she needed was just one person, one wise and sympathetic grown-up who could help her.

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

butimalwaysalana:

“I think I’d be sad. If I couldn’t find it in me to think of adventure. To be excited about new things. Most people are afraid of something they don’t know yet. Lack of control often lends itself to fear. I just– well, I sort of look forward toward the future inexplicable. I mean, maybe some of it can’t even be explained. Wouldn’t that be exciting..?”

She daydreams about the impossible things, sometimes. Her mama told her old ghost stories, plantation tales about specters and spooks and old blood decorating new dirt without warning and echoing southern tales where each and every story has a haunt attached.

“Borrow it. I promise it’s a good way to look at the world. It hasn’t steered me wrong, so far. I still love new things. And every new person is kind of like a new opportunity to wake up in the morning. I mean, there are more than five billion people in the world. And you won’t ever even get to meet all of them– which tends to make me sad– but think of how many you will get to meet.”

For a moment, Alana’s sheer optimism makes Jenny think of her children back at Crunchem.  It brings an easy smile to her face, and it is almost as if she can imagine the other girl next to her skipping down the concrete, even though she isn’t doing so.  But the image is still there in her mind, and she thinks this little girl must have been an adorably precocious...well, little girl.

But then she begins to talk about being sad that she might not meet everyone, and the kindergarten teacher cannot help but frown.

“There are people that it might be best you didn’t meet.”

She is, perhaps, thinking of her aunt.  We, perhaps, might think of other people entirely.

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

butimalwaysalana:

“No, not– not frivolously rude. Not– stupid impolite, or the kind of impolite that doesn’t– hold any weight. I mean the really– the intrusive rude. I mean– look, the simplest way to explain this is, a guy grabbed this girl’s ass in a bar five hours ago and when he tried to take her arm I might’ve introduced him to my fist so he politely introduced me to his. Yes, it was my fight to start but it just made me so angry and it wasn’t right and–”

Okay, so maybe it is possible that Alana’s teeth have clicked down sharply and she is all angles, almost crying in that way that is– that is the kind of upset that cannot fix everything. (She knocked a girl’s tooth out when she was fifteen for being pretty and it’s the only time Alana’s ever hit someone who wasn’t acting outright deserving of it and she remembers with startling clarity how it felt to hate herself for it. She still does.)

“I hold myself to higher standards because I think I can survive without the necessity to be sewn up or put back together. I think I’m just fine without having to be– looked after because sometimes I get too sad to do anything but try to break my hand on a wall. Because I can deal with it myself and in the end I’m just fine.”

Because I’m so angry and so upset and so sad and I’m too many things at once so I’d rather find a way to make something better but I don’t know this isn’t how you make things better.

She can see that Alana is near tears, and that breaks something in the core of her.  There are not a few things that bother Jennifer Honey, but there are few things that bother her so much as another person’s tears.  (She thinks this is the only reason she can still care for her aunt, the way the woman would often fall asleep in the middle of crying, silent tears soaking her pillow and sheets.)

If she were perhaps a more careful person, she would not act as she did now, wrapping one arm around the young girl and pulling her to her, rubbing her back soothingly with one hand.  “You did right, stepping in to protect that girl, but if you keep fighting other people’s battles, then--”

     --who will protect you?

But she doesn’t finish the statement, tastes the hypocrisy of it on the tip of her tongue, and she doesn’t say that there is a difference, a fine line, between forcing yourself to survive on your own out of sheer stubborn will and realizing that you will survive on your own out of necessity.

“Just because you can deal with something on your own does not mean that it is healthy for you to do so.  People...we need each other.”

She perhaps does not mean that emphasis, but it is there all the same.

[alighttwixttruthandintellec-blog]

She flexes both her hands. Thinks, I am here, this is me, I am sitting in this chair. She doesn’t know why this is sometimes difficult to discern but it is. It’s strange, but maybe it’s the way her spine is tightening, or how she tends to press a thumb into the ball of her wrist like moderate pain and nothing much else. Like she needs to feel it again, like a reminder of something she keeps forgetting. You’re too close. I don’t like it.

“I hold myself to a greater set of standards than I would a patient. I shape myself according to the best way I feel I can manage, and it’s how I’ve always managed. It works, so I do it. Someone says something that isn’t– particularly polite or is completely rude to someone else? No. I don’t believe that’s something that should be tolerated. So if I’m going to hit the guy? I’m going to hit the guy.”

So much pain in the world. How do people let it go by, stop seeing it? How do they just let it happen and do nothing?

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

“You hold yourself to higher standards, and yet you believe that it is completely sound to hit someone simply for being impolite or rude?” Jennifer’s eyebrows knit together, this pressing of her lips together, this shaking of her head - and perhaps she is blinking, perhaps more than a little bit, because this is confrontation, and this is someone who just admitted to hitting people simply for being impolite, and such words, though quite necessary, in her opinion, might be taken as rude.  She knows this.  She knows that to speak to her aunt in such a way - well, the fact of the matter is that she doesn’t speak to her aunt in such a way because her aunt would never listen.

She isn’t sure that Alana will either.

Her hands tighten - one on the fabric of her dress and the other on the little blue rag - and her knuckles are almost white.

[alighttwixttruthandintellec-blog]

Jennifer Honey’s pauses are louder than her words are. Alana hears everything in pauses. They sound like morse code to her ears. She wonders if she’s been called pretty often. (Alana’s been called pretty since she grew into that strong jaw and those baby blues and she hates it, hates it so.)

“Of course it’s an adventure,” Alana says, and she holds the door open for the other on the way out. Smiling, pushes a hand through dark hair, catches those mildly ravaged knuckles with a touch of pain, but it’s ignored and unnoticed, “Every solitary, confined moment in life is one. Minute to minute is an adventure. Therefore, and since I don’t know you until right now, every minute getting to know you? Adventure.”

Alana means that. She means it with the sound of her own heart on the tip of her tongue. Sometimes she wonders if people ever stop to notice how incredible they are. Thinks they should.

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

Alana is so achingly polite. There is the way the other holds the door for her on the way out, and that smile as she pushes that hand through her hair; and the very idea that getting to know her is an adventure.  Jenny does not believe it to be true, but it is touching and warm just the same. She shifts the paper bag to one arm - careful, mustn’t let it drop, but she has done this many times already and will for many more to come - and she nods, doesn’t quite smile, but the look of it is there.  “I am glad that you think so.  That is certainly an interesting way of looking at life.”

[alighttwixttruthandintellec-blog]

“You should,” Alana says gently. She hates that she’s caving. Hates the way the bite leaves her voice and her cheeks are a darker shade of pink and she isn’t embarrassed but perhaps she has no idea how to be cared for. So the lion lets down her guard and brushes a hand over ravaged knuckles– little catches and scabs, the way nothing unearths to a faint dusting of blood but probably will eventually, “Empathetic is the right word. But it’s a cleverness you learn.”

Her throat clears and she thumbs a small trickle of dark red from her cheekbone– doesn’t even wince when it smudges, takes her hands back to her lap, “I disagree. I think there comes a point when– for me, anyway– it’s so cyclical that the patience for healing has no real purpose. Never quite get up. Kneel, scrape your knees, but the point for up? You just learn to live from an angle where you can blow out everyone else’s kneecap from where you are.”

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

Jenny doesn’t say anything to  that - any empathy she has she learned at the hands of her aunt, not as a gift to help others but as an extension of self-preservation (this is the way her eyes crinkle just before she throws a punch, this is the way that she smiles when she is mad, this is the tone of her voice when she is baiting me but it will be worse for me if I do not give in).  She does not find that so clever at all.  It simply is.

“I find that to be an interesting point of view for someone who is studying to be a therapist.”  Her head tilts up just a bit, eyes meeting the others with something of a smile.  “I doubt you would tell one of your patients that there is no purpose for healing, or that the correct course of action is - how did you put it? - to blow out everyone else’s kneecap.”

[phenxmenon-archive-blog]

She stopped just in front of her teacher, a bright smile on her face. “I’m well, thank you very much! How are you?” She could hardly keep herself quiet long enough to hear the answer before she had to share her news.

“Look at what just came into the library! The Pickwick Papers! Charles Dickens’ very first novel!”

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

Miss Honey was doing well.  She was doing very well.  Or, at least, she was doing as well as she normally was, which is to say that she was doing well enough to get by.  She found herself mimicking Matilda’s smile when she replied, “I’m quite well,” but also knew to hold herself back, to listen.

Her eyes widened in excitement as she caught sight of the book  “That is exciting!”  The way she lights up - as if she hadn’t been before.  “Have you started it yet?”

[alighttwixttruthandintellec-blog]

An eyebrow lifts. It isn’t skeptical, but it’s almost irritated. Almost. “I really can’t stand clever people,” but she isn’t– she is clever, Alana thinks, to think or know when to back off and when to respond. But that statement wasn’t meant to be persuasive– Alana thinks it was honest, in its way.

Sometimes, the young future-Doctor-Bloom thinks about why she has such a contempt for that kind of kindness, that kind of innocence. Because she’s never naturally been that kind. (Her hands weren’t meant for hurting, but she’s going to have to grow into that.)

“This isn’t new territory for me. This territory’s so worn there are tracks around it,” she flexes her knuckles, unintentionally glances down at them in reminder. (She’ll learn to wear gloves in the winter. Never around patients. Gloves mean hiding.) When she’s not paying attention, Alana’s eyes can be a very cold blue, “at which point does the healing process become such an Ouroboros of activity that its purpose for existing is null?”

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

“It is a good thing that I do not consider myself clever, then.”

Her fingers curl into the fabric of her light pink dress - old and perhaps over-sized, something her aunt bought, wore once, and despised, threw out - she’d claimed it, then, as she always did with the possibility of new clothes, and taken great care to hand stitch the modified pieces together.  It is still too big, but she has grown used to such sizes.  She has not had anything that truly fit her in such a long time.

“There is never a void moment in the process of healing,” Jenny says, and perhaps her voice is softer there.  “No matter how much you are beaten down, there is always something worth getting back on your feet.”

She knows this from experience.

[alighttwixttruthandintellec-blog]

Alana Bloom falls in love with mannerisms. She doesn’t know how long this bright eyed lust for life itself will last, but it’s like having the air kicked out of her lungs each time she notices something new. So there’s the head tilt and if Alana wasn’t already in love with that voice– and she does easily fall in love with voices– she’s in love with that motion. Some people consider love earth shattering. Like a meteor breaking through. Alana? She considers it a part of her day.

(She can tell the cashier, for example, whose name is Diane, that she’s in love with the dimple at the corner of her mouth. She can tell Richard in aisle two that she’s in love with how his hands move when he speaks. Facts of life. Rolls off her shoulders.)

“That’d be cool. –I’m out of class for the day, anyway. I have a test tomorrow, but I always study better in the morning,” it’s her two PM child psych exam, and she’s been reading the same chapter so often it’s jack hammered into her brain, “What’s life if I can’t have mildly adventurous cups of tea with pretty strangers? Not life at all, really.”

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

“I thought you might be,” this smile, then a stuttering, “out of class, that is, not---” And her glance casts down, this little way she takes a breath and relaxes her shoulders, but the smile doesn’t fade.  Jenny isn’t always smiling, but she often is when she is around other people.  She would rather it be this way - to focus so completely on them and their positives than herself and her possible negatives. Nothing catches on the word pretty but her mind can’t help but notice it.  Few people have thought it of her, as far as she knew, and fewer still have taken the time to mention it.  Her children, perhaps, and she treasures it every time that they do, just as she will treasure it at this moment, too. “I’m not sure I would call this an adventure,” she says, voice soft, “but if you will walk with me - my house is just outside of the village.”

[awwww-cute]

Thirsty (Source: http://ift.tt/1DqUdXv)

[asmallbutstubbornfire]

Starter Call!

[simply--kels]

She is clothed with strength and dignity; She can laugh at the days to come

Proverbs 31:25 (via simply–kels)