the violence remains

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

[fukur0shi-ogw]

Every time I'm happy, it hurts

Tags: no fandom, original work. fem!reader, pregnancy, angst, grief, loss of a relative, overall pain, some comfort in the end. 

-

You were heaving while you lied on the bed, and he hugged you from behind, laying soft kisses over your shoulder. Your body was shuddering with the sobbing, and your hands clutched desperately to the pillow, trying to ground yourself from completely falling apart.

He was worried, given you had been to one of your ultrasounds without him, and that was how he found you at the house after you ignored multiple calls and texts messages asking if everything was okay.

"Love, what is going on? I'm worried" he cooed against your hair, as you tried to recover any rhythm to your breathing. He laid his hand over your baby bump, and caressed in gently with his thumb. "Are you okay? What happened?"

"I-... I..." Words were getting tangled and dissipating in your throat before you could push them out into existence. He buried his face in your shoulder and pressed his body against yours, thinking that if he did, this might help. 

You halted your breathing for a few moments, and it helped ease the pulling sensation hiccuping on your lungs, before you could answer. "I'm... Okay. The baby is too. It's-" you heaved, "it's a girl."

"You're not okay, honey" he said, pulling your hand and laying his lips gently on your knuckles. "Please, what happened?"

"I'm fine physically. It's just-" your eyes began watering again, and you shoved your face against the pillow, trying to see if drying tears would dry your pain, too.

It didn't.

He was silent, waiting for you to meet him halfway, and tell him why you were crying.

"He's never meeting our children."

Oh.

You hiccuped painfully with a heavy heart before continuing. "He will never meet any of them. He always said how much he wanted a niece, how he would pamper her and spoil her beyond repair, be the best uncle ever, and then... Nothing. He will never get to meet her."

He hugged you tighter, kissing your temple, unable to steal the grief away from you.

"Every single time I'm happy, it hurts. It hurts because I want to share this happiness with him, but I can't anymore. I never got to tell him I got into engineering school, I didn't get to introduce him to you, he wasn't at our wedding, and now, he's never going to know I'm having a girl, the niece he always wanted. This interrupted existence that never ceases to linger on for me. I'm so afraid."

"What are you afraid of, my love?"

"Forgetting" you said, brushing your hand over your cheek, cleaning the last tears that streamed down your face. "I'm afraid of forgetting the sound of his laughter, and how his brows furrowed when he was thinking too hard, or the smell of burnt eggs every time he failed to make breakfast. I'm terrified of forgetting. Each setting brick of a new milestone, it feels like he gets buried deeper in the past, halted in time. I'm afraid."

"That's impossible" he said, kissing your cheek.

You sighed, feeling a little better after you got some of the pain out of your system. "Why?"

"Because you see his face every day when you look at yourself in the mirror. Every time you laugh, it's his laugh too. And all the times you nearly gave me food poisoning, well, I like to believe it was also him."

You let out a chuckle, and rolled over your back to hug your husband, as he pecked his lips at your face lovingly.

"You see... He's permanently woven into your life. You won't forget him."

You locked your gaze to him, feeling so small you'd fit in the palm of his hand.

"Promise?"

"I promise."

[fukur0shi-ogw]

POP, POP. TWICE A DAY.

Piece of original semi-fiction about dealing with psychiatric medication. Song that inspired this: Shiny Happy People (R.E.M.) content warning (DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT): dark content, mental illness, prescribed medication, su*cide ideation, graphic descriptions of ideation, this is a translation and rewrite of an old piece of mine. I’ve been struggling to deal with side effects so I wanted to put this out. DO NOT READ IF YOU’RE NOT IN A GOOD STATE OF MIND (I’m serious).

The habit builds without you even noticing it. Pop, once when you wake up, and then pop, right before you go to sleep.

Pop, conveniently bottled up happiness twice a day.

Pop.

Pop.

Isn’t it just wonderful?

Oh, proper treatment? Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Everything you’re given for your open fracture is a band-aid and you pray, you hope, you beg in your faithless pleads for the God you don’t even believe in that the band-aid, please, may it work. 

But as it would be expected from life and its never ending expertise in letting us down…

Of course it doesn’t.

You take a twisty and turny road around those benzos SSRI’s hypnotics anti-convulsivants anti-psychotics anti this and anti that and oh did you hear that opiate addiction is at an all time high? Yeah, I saw it on the news. And now this medication yes the one you use to sleep did you know they don’t have enough research done and maybe just maybe it might break your already broken brain forever?

What day is it today?

What time is it?

Why am I still here?

And when the band-aid can’t keep holding your broken bone together anymore (did it ever, really?), you start thinking about a splattered version of you all over the sidewalk after a cordless bungee jump. Perhaps, who knows, even a bedsheet bent neck would suffice. 

No taking anything, though.

You’ve taken enough.

And then, no more wandering around empty and boundless like a corpse who forgot to die.

The bedside clock rings and it’s time to wake up from a sleep you haven’t had in three days.

Pop.

Pop.

Twice a day.

[fukur0shi-ogw]

— creatures of habit

One of my many memoir pieces that are to be translated someday. content warning: daddy issues (I figured that'd be obvious by now, lol), alcoholism, generational trauma.

-- The clink of the ice cubes swirling around the crystal glass was always my tell-tale sign that I'd find my father in his favorite — or, at least, not so loathed — place of the house: sitting by the sofa's corner while clinging onto his drink. His arm would always be neatly draped over the armrest and he'd usually have to his face a pensive frown sculpted by Rodin himself, going about his mundane, petty nuisances silently in his own pocket existence.

His usual poison of choice was whiskey, but eventually, as the years went by and he persisted from a failure of time, he ended up switching it for the more palatable half a bottle of red wine per day.

And as the creature of fleeting, disheveled habits I was, there I'd go to sit faux idly beside him to listen to his musings until he slurred his way into silence. That was the other tell-tale sign, the one to pick up his glass and put it on the coffee table, just to avoid shattering something else in the house other than my stolen hours of childhood.

His emotional lubricant after years of physical and emotional abuse by the generational shit everyone at that household endured was the alcohol, and damn, lubricated his emotions were. Usually a quiet and collected man, he'd start talking for hours on end to a child too scared and too morbidly curious to go to sleep even in the witching hours of the night (sometimes I wonder if that's why I have such bad insomnia).

What if he slept with a cigarette lit up? What if, then?

What if he let the glass break on the floor, and the rageful wrath of my mother found its way into the silent, peaceful living room?

Shit. What if, then? 

He'd always have a piece of advice when the slurring was just right enough, and to be fair, they always sounded pretty fucking terrible. To drink when in a social situation (or whenever I got sad, or anxious, or had any difficult emotion to process), to twist yourself into something else in order to fit as the missing puzzle piece in places, to be your best even if it costs you every inch of sanity you have.

Give them a show, kid.

It wasn't with delight that I realized, years later, how I twisted and turned around many different roads just to end up being every single thing he'd tell me to become in those coldly warm, quiet nights.

How I found a way to fall short in the very same ways that he did.

At least I knew — I know — this isn't ideal, that I'm not being extraordinary, I'm just falling short and out of myself.

At least I know that, right, father?

I just wonder if that's enough to break our curse.

But I'll try my best, I promise.

[caffeinatedopossum]

"I'm still kicking" is such a funny way to say "I'm still alive". Like lol. I'm still thrashing. Flailing. Writhing even. The violence remains.