For @whataboutyouisamascot - written as part of the STblr Holiday Gift Exchange 2025 (also everyone say THANK YOU @elkkiel for organizing the exchange 🖤🖤🖤)
Fandom: Sleep Token
Rating: Teen
Relationship: Polyvessels
Words: 2.5k
Summary:
Vessel wakes up sick as a dog.
They're leaving for vacation in four hours.
And now his heart is breaking in a burst of coughing.
OR:
The band has winter holiday plans. Vessel has a cold.
Read it on AO3!
Notes:
for Z 🤲☕
i hope you have a restful holiday season 🖤
The hallway is littered with mismatched frames, undecided paint samples, and disjointed compositions. A weekend project overgrown and left in disarray. There are too many empty spaces reserved for perfect artworks that will never be found, leaving holes in a puzzle whose missing pieces don't exist. No amount of flea markets frequented or online storefronts sought will reveal what I'm looking for.
What am I looking for? What am I meant to put there? Am I even allowed to know? Every blank space is a memory of past reprimands for filling gaps with mediocre offerings. I am left with nothing but a sour taste in the mouth. A discerning taste.
The project is picked at occasionally as things are added, small adjustments made, the composition writhing slowly over years that stretch into lifetimes. My hesitancy is at war with my appetite.
I want to see everything. I want to look at everything. My eyes are hungry, like a man starved. If they are set loose upon something so meager as crumbs, they cannot be torn away from the feast. They devour sunsets. They consume the stars. I gorge them on color and texture and light.
And nothing is ever enough.
The things already hung on the wall make up a graveyard of my identities. Subject matter shifts drastically, style oscillates on a whim, the variety becomes dizzying as pieces are forgotten the instant they are hung. Oil-painted effigies of fleeting interests are mounted like taxidermied game. Trophies to collect dust. Their hunter moved on long ago. Each portrait serves as a tombstone, weathered but remaining while their corresponding memory rots.
Some of the portraits hang precariously. Their nail holes are loose. Their hardware is rusting. They clatter to the floor from the mere breeze of a passerby. The dust clings regardless.
Some portraits cannot be removed at all without damaging what's beneath. Humidity spikes have fused wood and wallpaper at some point over the years. Unsticking frames from the grime would only create new scars and expose more blank wall. The existing holes are already more than enough.
Indecision haunts the gaps. It leaks from the empty spaces, creeping along the hallway. It leaves an oily film on the hardwood floor. It stains the runner. It laps and splashes at the baseboards. I may drown in it.
Sometimes I just wish to start over. I dream of ripping down everything in the hallway, filling the nail holes, painting over the wallpaper, and throwing out frame and canvas alike. An indiscriminate cleanse. Maybe it would set me free, allow me to look at something new and untainted, perhaps finally sate the hunger.
But then I would be left with the reality of that fresh start. I have always mourned for What Could Be. I’m accustomed to that. I’m comfortable with that. I have built a home there in that expanse, in that neverending yearning. I fear that if I were to start clean, I would be forced instead to mourn for What Was.
I think the change would kill me.
The blank pieces of wall stare back at me. They are ravenous. Hollow. I know the feeling, and truthfully I’m not sure what I would be without it after all this time. I see myself reflected in the gaps more clearly than I see myself in the art.
I peer into the void, through that gaping chasm of identity, across the absence of substance, and there is so much of it that I could look forever without ever reaching the end.
Anemoia (noun, neologism): Nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known. Wiktionary.
There are probably others words that more accurately describe what I've been experiencing, but stumbling across this one in a chaotic discord server just felt right.
For the last few months, things with my mom's family have been... off. There has been illness, death, tension, distance, the list goes on. The details aren't important. Suffice to say, I've been on edge and fighting tooth and nail to cope.
One of my preferred ways to cope is reading. A few weeks ago, near the peak of the unfurling family affairs, I was enjoying a fanfic in which the main character struggled to adjust to major change. The character was very close with their mother, and decided to spend a weekend with her to talk about things and decompress. They made the decision like it was nothing. Akin to choosing what to eat for a snack. Inconsequential. So they went, spent time with their mom, and returned with a light heart and a clear mind.
And then this feeling hit me like a truck. I want to call my mom.
Suddenly I am eight years old, and all alone awake at a slumber party. It's dark and the house is unfamiliar and I am afraid. I want to call my mom. I need to hear a voice crackling on the other end of the line telling me that it will be alright. That I will be alright.
But I know that if I pick up the phone and call her, the person on the line will not be the person that I need to talk to. We never bonded over girlhood or womanhood or whatever mutual trials we've survived. We don't discuss relationships, and never have. We don't talk about our feelings, and never will. We don't communicate unless it is from behind a shield of humor. At arms length.
And I have felt a lot of different emotions about my mother over the years. Frustration, as is only natural. Anger, memorably. Fear, more often than I care to admit. But never before has it been overwhelming, suffocating sadness.
A few paragraphs in a story left me a sobbing mess on my couch. I don't know if the passage was written in a certain way or if I just read it at the right wrong time. But it mentioned so casually something that I didn't realize I would never have.
I crave comfort from a woman that I have never known. I am desperate to return to a relationship that never existed. I want to have been taught family recipes without being reprimanded for not knowing how to cook (she never taught me). I want to get advice from someone after opening up to them (she never allowed it). I want to understand how to navigate emotions (she never understood her own). I want to be able to mention my mom to my therapist and not have his eyebrows knit together in concern.
I just want a hug from her. But not from her. I'm confused about it. And I just want to call my mom.
