#growing up

[ryancrossfield]

from @victorianpoetry

[teenagewhimsysoul]

what the flip i hate growing old☹️. not old in the sense of “oh im __ years old!” but in the im gonna go to college soon when it felt like i was just entering kindergarten yesterday🙁 and also the fact that my parents aren’t immortal and that they can’t be here with me all my life, as well as losing and gaining new friends which in all honesty isn’t all bad but i don’t know, i feel like it’s all going too fast, i need life to slow down.

[makellovenotwar]

My little girl went to her second day of kindergarten today and thats the equivalent to ripping your heart out and stomping on it

[whiteknightblade]

[ludacu1]

My birthday!! :)

Llendo a comer jajaja be kind !

[enchantedlovergirl]

Not Just a Building

Pairing: N/A

Summary: Aladdin goes back to the place he used to call home one last time before it's torn down, and finds a few pieces of his old life waiting for him there. Word Count: ~2.4 (estimate) Warnings: None Author's Note: this one was actually a request from @midnightking24!! 🥹 i'm also SO sorry it took me forever to get this one out, and i'm sorry it's a little shorter than i originally intended 😭 thank you so much for being patient with me!! i hope you enjoy this little piece, and thank you again for the request and for waiting so patiently for me to get it done!! as always, feedback and constructive criticism are always welcome :) also it might be a bit different from cannon since its been SO LONG i have watched aladdin♡

The market is louder than it used to be. More silk stalls, more spice merchants, more children chasing each other between the legs of camels instead of stealing bread off unwatched carts. Agrabah is fed now. Aladdin made sure of that. And still, some mornings, he finds himself walking the old quarter out of habit, like his feet remember a life his title is trying to make him forget.

That's how Aladdin sees the notice. Nailed crooked to a support beam, half-covered by a fruit seller's awning.

BY ORDER OF THE PALACE — STRUCTURE CONDEMNED — DEMOLITION WITHIN THE WEEK.

He doesn't recognize the building right away. Not until he counts the windows. Not until he sees the crack running down the third floor like a scar that never healed properly, and his stomach drops somewhere past his sandals and into the dust.

That's his building. That was his building.

Aladdin stops a worker hauling rope toward the scaffolding. "When does this start?"

The man doesn't recognize him at first—no crown, no vest, just a plain white shirt and the kind of walk that still remembers running from guards. Then he does, and he nearly drops the rope bowing.

"Tomorrow at first light, Sultan. It's not safe. Half the roof's already caved on the east side."

"I need to go inside."

"Sultan, I really don't think—"

"Ten minutes." Aladdin is already moving toward the door hanging crooked on one hinge. "I used to live here."

The worker doesn't argue after that. Nobody argues with that particular tone, the one that isn't royal command so much as something rawer underneath it.

The stairs groan like they remember him too. Third floor, end of the hall, the door that never quite closed all the way because the frame had swollen with one too many rainy seasons.

Aladdin pushes it open with two fingers, the way he always did, careful not to wake anyone—except there was never anyone to wake. Just him. And Abu, when the monkey felt like coming home instead of sleeping in the market rafters.

There had been a window that looked at nothing—just the wall of the building across the alley, close enough to touch if he leaned far enough. He used to lean anyway, just to feel like the world was bigger than four cracked walls and a floor that sloped toward the corner where the rain came in.

The room is smaller than memory made it. Everything is, once you've slept in a palace bed the size of a rowboat. But Aladdin remembers exactly where the loose floorboard was—third one from the wall, the one that hid the coins he never spent because spending them meant they were gone, and having them, just having them, felt like enough some nights.

He kneels and pries it up. Dust. A few corroded coins, worthless now, worth everything then. A scrap of cloth, moth-eaten, that used to be a blanket in winter and a curtain in summer and, once, a sling for his arm after he fell running from a very determined guard captain.

He'd stolen because the alternative was starving, and starving was quieter than anyone tells you it is. It doesn't announce itself. It just takes, a little at a time, until you forget what full even feels like.

Aladdin had forgotten how it smelled in here. Dust and old stone and something like the ghost of the bread he used to dream about—the good kind, the kind with honey, the kind he'd only ever smelled drifting out of the palace kitchens from three streets away.

He remembers being fifteen and hungry enough to cry about it, curled in the corner where the wall met the floor, telling himself that tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow was rarely different. But he kept telling himself anyway, because the alternative was letting the street win, and he was too stubborn—still is—to let anything win that easily.

He finds the mark on the wall by the window—the one he scratched with a stolen knife the night he first saw the palace lit up gold for some festival he wasn't invited to. A crooked little star. He remembers pressing his thumb into the stone afterward and thinking, someday. Not even believing it. Just needing somewhere to put the wanting.

Aladdin traces it now with a hand that wears a ring instead of a thief's calluses, and it feels like touching a boy who doesn't exist anymore, except he does—he's standing right here, he's under all of this, he never fully left.

Downstairs, he can hear the crew shifting, waiting. He doesn't have much longer.

Aladdin almost leaves without taking anything else. What is there, really—a few coins, a rag, a scratch in a wall no one else would ever notice or miss. But then his eyes catch the corner by the door, and there it is: a single carved wooden bird, crude and lopsided, one wing shorter than the other.

He'd forgotten he made this. Some winter when the cold kept him up and his hands needed something to do besides shake. He'd wanted to give it to somebody, once—some vague, faceless somebody, because even street rats dream of people to give things to—and then he never had, because who gives a lopsided wooden bird to anyone, and who did he even know well enough to give it to.

He has people now. A wife who would love this ugly little bird more than any jewel in the treasury, because she'd understand exactly what it cost to make it. A friend made of magic and mischief who would probably burst into tears and turn into seventeen different shapes trying to express how touched he was. A father-in-law who'd smile the sad, proud smile he gets when he remembers exactly where Aladdin came from.

Aladdin has somebody now. He just took the long way finding himself first.

He slips the bird and the scrap of cloth into his pocket. He leaves the coins. Some things belong to the floor they were buried under.

Outside, the foreman is waiting, rope coiled over one shoulder, watching Aladdin with the careful patience of a man who has learned not to rush royalty even when royalty is standing in a condemned doorway looking like he might cry.

"Get everything you needed, Sultan?"

Aladdin looks up once more at the crooked third-floor window, at the wall of nothing it used to stare at, at the crack running down like a scar that healed wrong and stayed anyway.

"Yeah," he says, and means it in a way that surprises him. "I think I did."

He doesn't watch it come down the next morning. He has a kingdom that needs him, a wife who's saved him a seat at breakfast, a monkey who's almost certainly stolen something from the kitchens again. But that night, Aladdin takes the lopsided wooden bird from his pocket and sets it on the windowsill of his palace room—a window that looks out over all of Agrabah instead of a wall three feet away—and he thinks about a boy who used to lean out just to prove the world was bigger than his walls.

Turns out he was right. It just took him a while to believe it.

Jasmine finds him there, wraps her arms around him from behind, rests her chin on his shoulder without asking what the bird is or why his eyes are wet. She just holds on, the way she always does when she can tell he's somewhere she can't quite follow.

"Good trip down memory lane?" she asks softly.

"Yeah," Aladdin says again, and this time it comes easier. "I think I finally said goodbye to it properly."

She kisses his temple, and outside the window Agrabah glitters gold the way it did that one night Aladdin scratched a crooked star into a wall and dared himself to want something he wasn't supposed to have.

He got it anyway. He got all of it anyway. And every home he couldn't keep just made room for the one that finally kept him back.

[chrisvanorman-blog]

Adulthood: The Cult I Couldn’t Wait to Join

The entire time as I grew up I couldn’t wait to be old enough.  Old enough to stay out late, old enough to eat what I wanted, when I wanted to.  Old enough to be finally considered an adult.  Being adult seemed so cool.  I could be in charge, I could make my own rules and live without constantly getting yelled at because I did something wrong. I somehow found a way to get through high school and…