[carlosatbv]

Very close encounter today. Almost like walking into the path of an oncoming train unknowingly. Maybe I'll never get over this.

[carlosatbv]

I almost sent you something today. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. It was innocuous, some quirky little video of a dude mispronouncing French words the way we'd do it. I don't know why the muscle memory kicked in like that.

I ended up scrolling through our conversations again. There are all these little pieces that I feel compelled to present to you as a "gotcha!", like if you somehow saw something contradictory you said before, it'd make you take back all these months of longing and missing. So, I ended up spiraling, wondering if you even meant those words back then. I don't understand why it feels like the pain is getting worse. There's this tinge of inevitability when it comes to you and me. Maybe I'm a dumbass and you don't think about me at all. I don't know.

[carlosatbv]

We'd spend so many hours on a call. Eight, nine, ten, time would tick on by. Finally, common sense would come creeping in around midnight or later, and we'd say good night, wishing each other we'd get "52 thousand zzz's" or some other ridiculously high number. It feels so empty. I don't really know what to do. It hasn't gotten any better.

[carlosatbv]

Writing about my feelings when it comes to you is a humiliation ritual. They get weaponized by you sooner or later, and sometimes I have genuine anxiety about what I've told you in private. Not that anything I've said is a particularly jailable or cancellable offense, but I'm afraid of you knowing them. What secrets and stories about me do you use to spice up your conversations? What caricature have you created for your friends this time around?

There are little empty spaces in my life where you used to be. I still feel the huge void of space you occupied, but it's always the little things that make me feel the most. Trailers for movies we'd wanna see, games we'd like, stories about multimedia franchises I don't give a fuck about that I tapped into because you liked them. I liked hearing your takes and rants on them. I miss your calls when you got off work, now more than ever, given my current job. I feel like we'd have so much more to talk about.

I think what's really gutting is knowing you want it too. If you could hit me with the Men in Black mind-erasing thing and just have me forget it all, you would in a heartbeat. However, this time I can't help but ask myself, "Why would I want you back in my life?" After being thrown away and treated like fucking garbage, why would I ever welcome you back? Why would I ever open myself to your special brand of "love" and make-believe safe spaces? Who's to say you wouldn't do it to me a 8th, 9th, or 10th time if the opportunity came back up?

So, I keep wondering what will open that door again, and who is going to admit they want the door open in the first place? Beforehand, it's always been me, undergoing the humiliation ritual again and again until you suddenly decide that it's "time". Suddenly, because the situation demands it, you become this sober version of yourself that can admit fault, talk about our relationship in a way that best friends normally would, and reconcile. Warm.

I still have nightmares. In every quiet moment, when you inevitably creep up in my mind, I still argue with you.

I fucking hate this. Nobody deserves to be treated like this.

[thecheatinghomunculus]

new reaction image

[rural-panoptes]

[saintjosie]

[damnpharos]

[captain-price-unofficially]

[deerkibble]

[sneakyspades]

[neraiutsuze]

[carlosatbv]

Is this grief?

I’ve been told more than once to pretend that you’re dead, mourn the loss of you as if you suddenly died. I think it’s supposed to make me feel better, to help me process what’s happening. I keep fighting against the label of everything between us being a “trauma bond”. I hate it. I hate that it couldn’t be genuine. “Mourn the loss of the person you thought she was”. How do I do that, exactly? How do I separate what I felt was real from what was the actual reality of our relationship?

I find myself actively pushing back against the labels, even the ones I agree with. Maybe it wasn’t abuse because I am 34 years old and have full control of myself, so in a way, I deserved it if I stayed. Why would I crawl back to you over and over again if you were inevitably going to hurt me in the end? Especially because I knew it was going to happen. I’m stuck between labeling the relationship for what it ultimately was and holding on to the parts that matter the most to me.

It’s not fair. You haunt everything I do. The ghost of you hides in every lyric, every movie scene, every joke, every game. How can I be surprised when this is how I felt last time too? And the time before that? I have always been left with this void when you leave that nobody else can fill. You said it before too: “My life was also lacking without you in it. I don't feel like I can be completely myself with other people and you just get me and my dumb jokes.”

Maybe you’re pretending I’m dead too. Maybe you wish I actually was. Maybe you wish you had never met me. I don’t even know anymore. What were the parts of you that were real? It doesn't matter anymore. I’ll stop writing about all of this before it gets turned against me somehow.

[carlosatbv]

There's something sinister about the simplicity of all of this, how much could have been solved by not engaging, or not feeling. The option to walk away was always on the table. Surely that would’ve been easier than staying.

My first instinct is to defend her. I try to add nuance into the way I talk about her, as if maybe that’ll make the events somehow less severe. I try to balance out the bad with the good. It was all vague. I’m still not even comfortable with calling what is happening to me “emotional abuse”, despite it being exactly that. Maybe I’m really just protecting myself. I feel so ashamed of being in this position again, of feeling like I did something irreversibly awful, like I deserve this. She told me that the weekend of the trip that the situation caused her to see me in a “new light” and that I don’t have a place in her life anymore. I keep replaying it, I keep wondering if I was supposed to just smile as she breached my comfort and boundaries.

I should’ve seen it coming. The month before, I became an emotional dumping ground for her marriage again. I expressed how bad it made me feel, and she told me how much she stressed about me not trusting her and thinking she was going to “suddenly stop” being my friend. She told me, “I am asking for some normalcy in these trying times from my best friend”, so I tried my best to “be normal” for her. More weeks go by, more surface-level conversations (outside of venting about her husband), more leaving me on read because she was watching movies or playing games with her other “friend”. I kept showing up even though she was withdrawing, trying not to be upset with the broken birthday promises and a half-hearted hangout, where half of the time was spent shopping for her family, being  “normal” about her going back on her word because she wanted to spend time with her “friend”, someone who was repeatedly coming up in more and more conversations. What was "normalcy" to her?

I hate that after being dehumanized, disrespected, belittled, my trust destroyed, faced with having to find a “separate living situation” thanks to my private chats with her being weaponized and shown to my roommates...and I still feel loyalty to her. I opened up about her to my family, but I left out anything that would’ve looked bad on her if other people knew, mostly out of embarrassment. After all, what was keeping me there? I could’ve just walked away at any point. If the relationship had always been transactional, if it had always been on her terms, if I was unhappy with how one-sided it often was, if I felt like I was a placeholder, if I truly felt like she was using me, why didn’t I just fucking walk away? How can I call it abuse when I stayed with her through all of it? When she discarded me and then a year later decided that we could be friends again, I crawled back to her. I reintroduced her to my rightfully wary friends. I defended her over and over again, even the week before that stupid fucking trip, I told my friends that she and I were “perfect, totally cool”, that she wasn’t like that anymore. "Our friendship is the best it's ever been, no need to worry. She's my best friend."

How can I still love her? Why do l still get anxious and worry that something I do or say might hurt her? I still get crushed thinking about her not having a real friend when she needs one. Years cultivating a relationship with someone who said they valued honesty, who told me over and over that she loved me.

Is there any way this can even be undone? Every discard before was something small and personal, something that nobody but her and I witnessed and felt. This time around, she humiliated me in public and made a show in front of her “friend” to...impress her? To show her that I actually didn't matter that much to her? What was the point of all of this? To hurt me? Am I that fucking worthless and easy to replace?

So here I am, left with all the secrets I kept for her, promises I made to her, conflicting feelings I'm still struggling with, all of it still rattling inside me. I feel an obligation to honor our “safe space”, even after she made that same space unsafe for me.

Pathetic.

[carlosatbv]

Last night, I almost killed myself.

I was going to overdose on my antidepressants. I counted how many pills there were. I wrote a will. I tried to think of anything important to me and wanted to make sure everybody was taken care of. Realizing I didn't have a whole lot to offer besides my ideas and creative work crushed me, but then it almost became methodical. I basically got into “work mode”, making sure everything was set up when I was gone: social media, wiping embarrassing files off of my computer, wanting everything I could give away to be accounted for. I called my mom and asked if I could come over, pills in my pocket. I hated the thought of dying in my room and with no one to discover my body. I didn't want to go out like that.

I am not oblivious to the fact that there are still people who care about me, who love me. But that rational side of my brain was geared towards making sure I could get it done “the right way”. My mom, brother, and sister talked to me for hours. I kept oscillating between these brief, intense feelings of sadness and bursting into tears and a quiet resignation that it didn't matter. I told my story for maybe the first time outside of writing: how I have been in an emotionally abusive relationship for 15 years, how I still miss her even after the 7th or 8th discard, how I still love her. I talked about the zig-zagged boundaries, the things we did while she was married, how I allowed it, tolerated it, and even welcomed it because it was the only form of intimacy she would give me, how much I normalized not standing up for myself because I was afraid she would throw me away again, but most of all, how the cold moments were punctuated with the closest moments I've ever had with anybody else in my life. I had a person who I could tell anything and, despite it ending up not being the case, I felt I could fully trust. Somebody who shared a language with me that nobody else did, a sense of humor that nobody else would get or understand. At the end of it all, I was grieving for a relationship that nobody except for me was going to mourn. I miss my best friend.

It didn't matter. The opinion on her wasn't going to be swayed, and there was nothing I could say that would make me feel any less ashamed or embarrassed. I basically went catatonic. They continued talking, continued giving their thoughts on her and how cruel she was, how I don't deserve what’s happening. I couldn't stop staring at the floor. I felt like my brain had shut off. I drove back home and talked to a friend who was rightfully worried sick about me and ended up watching a movie with her, every little silence punctuated with thoughts of everything happening in my life. An overwhelming wave of reality crashing into me over and over again.

I don't know what I’m going to do from here. I’ve thought about not existing before, wishing I wasn't here, but I’ve never made any kind of step towards actually doing it. I’ve never planned on hurting myself, but yesterday showed me how easy it could be, and how quickly my brain could rationalize it. I would say “that’s the scariest part”, but what scares me more is continuing to live. Pushing myself through another day, knowing that the feelings are going to continue to pile up and that the situation is going to get worse.

I hope something changes soon.

[nameselect]

Sketching some more Tenchi Muyo stuff.

[obiwan-kirk]

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Ryoko

[lynnmint8]

wanted to draw ryoko in my style 🩷

[unteriors]

Libode, Eastern Cape, South Africa.

[sgt-shivers]

[viktorsabbath]

Heather in burger costume.

"Worst part time ever"

[viktorsabbath]

Heather burger costume V.2.

When beef jerky isn't enough.

[loppiart]

[sanagii]

All he ever wanted was to have friends

[terminusest13]

Hey Term Im part of the Quake mapping discord and I was wondering if you guys have something similar for Doom where people can hang out and post their stuff. I think HD has something similar

Not especially, most Doom Discords are based around specific sub-communities or mods.

Sorry, mate.

[carlosatbv]

Hi Anon! I have no idea if you’ll see this response, but there is indeed a Doom Discord that is pretty general that would probably suit your needs and is fairly well-known. It’s called Joy of Mapping, a friend of mine runs it and it’s a super legit place. https://discordapp.com/invite/mjgCAHB There’s a couple of other ones of note, the ZDoom Discord has a ton of resources, but does require a ZDoom forum account. Other than that, every Doom community I can think of has a showcase/mapping/modding channel that would work for you.