Hope everyone's doing okay. I'm on my 4th week of overtime and with this blessed day off I wanted to make a little announcement so people knew I was alive!
Progress still really slow due to life, and more so now that I am training my new help at the pharmacy. Being a manager is certainly no easy path. The light is at the end of the tunnel, though. Once my new help is trained and settled, I think this saga of chaos will finally close. I don't want the quality of this particular episode to be poor because of my life being really borked right now. This one is important to me. Thanks for everyone's support and patience. Most of these few days off are spent recovering from my work week. At least the theme of the episode is fitting for my current situation. Makes drumming up the emotions easy. Haha (save me)
Tl;dr: I left the country and everything went insane when I returned to the country then kept getting more insane. Almost done~
If you would like to see WIPs of the line art and eventual coloring, page 30 of 50 is complete on line art for the finale, and you can join the Discord to see.
It's actually rather depressing when you realize that for so many men, it doesn't even cross their minds to care about fictional characters who aren't male. Like at all. I know this isn't true for all men because I thankfully grew up with a dad and older brother who view women as people but just. trying to talk to the average male fan of any mainstream media is absolutely dismal because it just doesn't occur to them that the female characters are meant to be seen as equally "people" as the male characters. It's totally normal and acceptable and "right" for women to have a plethora of favorite characters who are male, but a man having a favorite female character for any reason besides being sexually attracted to her is somehow an outlandish idea. I'm tired.
The gallery hallway is quieter, colder, the faint smell of cigarette smoke seeping through the courtyard door. Leaned against a wall, I stare down into my drink, gone flat now, swishing around in the glass. It doesn’t taste good. Never was a fan of champagne, or any drink with an opinion of itself. So much commotion, it seems, over something with the power to disappoint instantly.
I hear her coming before I see her. Those shoes with the needle-thin heels clacking across the floor, through the gallery doors. In these, she’s tall enough for us to see eye-to-eye. Unsettles me a bit.
I straighten up. “Hey.”
“Hello,” the buzz of conversation continues behind closed doors. “They really like to talk, those men.”
“Yeah, seems it. He–they seem impressed by your stuff.” I don’t intend for my words to have a curve, to have their back up like a threatened cat, but it is how they come out. She hardly seems to notice.
“It was Steffan’s friend, really. He writes for an architectural journal, and wanted to talk about doing an article about the exhibition. My pieces remind him of soft brutalism.”
“Ah, yes. Soft brutalism. That’s what I thought, too. Found it obvious.”
Clumsy joke, worsened by my flat delivery.
She doesn’t smile. “I never got the impression you thought that.”
“Oh, well, like, I didn’t. Not really.”
“You thought it was challenging, you said.”
Hesitating. Did I say that? It takes a beat. “Ah, yeah. Anspruchsvoll.” Fantastic, really, to know what the word means. “Yeah, I do. I think it’s challenging and ambitious and fucking… uh, sophisticated.”
She half-smiles. “Ah, that’s what Steffan said, too.”
Violent irritation jolts through my spine. Words slipping before I can catch them. “Ah, and was he talking about the work or about you?”
Her eyes sharpen. “What?”
“Just...” I look past her down the hallway, at the abstract painting hanging on the wall. “He thinks a lot of you, doesn’t he?”
She scoffs. “It was kind of him, actually, to come tonight and support me.”
“Alright, yeah. It was.”
“And it was kind of him to introduce me to his friend, the writer.” Her voice takes on that careful, measured tone. “That was an important networking moment. I’ll need these connections when I leave—”
“Yeah, but did he have to keep touching you all the time?” The words come hot and fast.
A thick silence. She crosses her arms, spine straightening.
“On your...” My hand gestures vaguely in the air between us. “All over your arm every time you said something, his hand on your back. Christ, Astrid, the way he looks at you—like you’re a piece in his art collection.”
A muscle twitches near her temple. “So this is why you’re standing out here sulking. You were waiting to have this argument again. It’s like déjà vu.”
“Again? You mean after all the times he insisted on holding you back after class? Or the critique session last month?” I lower my voice as someone passes by. “I don’t know why you can’t acknowledge the way he talks to you, like you’re—”
“Like I’m what, Jude?” Dangerous edge to her voice now.
“Like you’re his. His student, his discovery, his—” I struggle for the word in any language. “It’s the way he ferries you around to his friends. Like you’re his little protégée, or like he wants them all to get a good look at you. It’s...”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “What exactly are you implying?”
“I don’t know!” I snap, then check myself. Quieter now: “It’s not right. You don’t see how his eyes follow you when you walk away?”
Astrid takes a step back. Controlled voice. “It sounds as though you spend a lot of time thinking about Steffan.” She tilts her head. “Do you think he thinks of you quite so much?”
The question hits like a slap. “Right. Jesus. Okay.”
“You’re so interested in him, in this idea of what he thinks of me, or why he likes my work so much.” She studies me like I’m one of her art pieces. “I just wonder why.”
“Because it feels obvious that he also likes you,” I say tightly. “For reasons that have nothing to do with your work.”
“Oh, because a woman who looks like me could not possibly create something valuable.” Her voice rises, color touching her cheeks. “Any success I have must be entirely because of the way I look? Is that what you think?”
“You’re twisting my words. I meant—”
“You meant what? That my adviser appreciates me for my looks rather than my talent? That my work is secondary to whatever imagined attraction you’ve conjured up?”
“No, I—”
“Okay, and what’s the endgame here? You think we will sleep together? That’s the kind of person you assume I am?”
The conversation slips from me like fistfuls of water. “No. That’s not my point. It’s that he… and I… It makes me feel—”
“Ugh, God,” she groans and throws her eyes to the ceiling. “It makes you feel. It hurts your feelings. It’s always so melodramatic, these conversations, repeatedly. Since you got back from Ireland, this is every day for me. I’m tired of defending myself against things I haven’t done.”
I keep my mouth shut. Stomach souring with shame and anger.
“Do you know what Steffan said to me tonight? He said my work shows remarkable confidence. Confidence.” She lets out a bitter laugh. “Meanwhile, my boyfriend is hiding in hallways because he can’t bear to watch me succeed.”
I stare at the champagne glass, rum my thumb around the rim, wishing for something stronger.
“Please,” she says, genuine fatigue in her voice now. “I want to enjoy my evening. I want it to be about me, not about you, and what is making you sad and insecure today. Enough.” She takes a breath. “I’m going to go back in. Will you come?”
The question hangs—an offering, despite everything. “In a bit,” I say finally, and she turns, loud heels across the floor as she pushes through the door into the noise.
I stay where I am—the sound of her swallowed by the gallery’s chatter. Slipping back into her world, a small group crowding her, and Steffan’s hand there, appearing by her elbow before the door swings shut.
Drain the champagne. Horrible. Leave the glass on a plinth.
Outside in the courtyard, freezing air, cigarette smoke dense and seductive. I borrow a smoke from someone I know from college, chatting to some others, their fluent German filling the space. I say “Ja, sicher, genau,” about fifteen times, picking out the words I know from their conversation, contemplating the ones I don’t.
Later, half an hour, maybe, I’ll go back into the gallery, stand by the edge of her spotlight, practice words under my breath that might impress someone in her group. Vielschichtig. Eigenwillig. Facettenreich. But for now, I lean against the cold, flat wall, silent, and let myself be foreign.
If you're curious about what having CFS feels like in the heat, it feels like I'm being simultaneously crushed and roasted in my bedroom today (T_T)
Do you know the feeling of when you're swimming in a pool and you suddenly get out to walk somewhere? The feeling that gravity is tugging you down very hard? It feels like that. But anytime I'm somewhere hot... I live in Arizona :,-)
