#kybee writes

[kar-takyber]

You watch The Clone Wars.

Each clone is so vibrant, with their quirks and personality traits and different sets of armor, similar yet completely different. You want them to be happy.

It's a lost cause.

Confident, assured, ready for battle, they march on despite the danger, hold the line. It's not wise to get attached, but it happens anyway. And anxiety rises with each episode, with each fallen brother in the line of fire. Heartache. But the battles continue, and each fallen soldier is replaced by another.

What is it like, to live knowing you were born to die? What does it mean, to be born and bred for war? To live it, to wage it, to die in it? And what is worse - having a name to be remembered by, or having none at all?

Such a wild, unknowable thing, to be one in a million of identical faces. Same blood and bones and flesh, made to fight in a war no one else knew was coming. Possessing nothing but your own skin, your own armor, and the name you chose for yourself. To carve your own identity out of the one they set into your very DNA.

"You are less than nothing," they tell you. "You are property, you are objects for war." Living shields, cannon fodder, pawns on a chessboard. Disposable, irrelevant, easily replaced.

[But the truth is, they cannot win without you.]

But you grit your teeth and march onwards, fight in their war, and don't dare to hope for anything more than another sunset, another sunrise. You remember your fallen, because no one else will, each identical face and identical body, carve the names into your heart, onto your armor. What else can you do but remember, and hope to be remembered?

[kar-takyber]

So I. Write fanfic. I was on a break for the last two years but got some lovely motivation to post a chapter.

It's a KHRxHP fic, if anyone's interested. here's the link:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

*skittish b/c I posted after two years*

[kar-takyber]

R,

Maybe this will mean something to me in the future. All I know is that you're still there, in my dreams, reassuring me this is real. Maybe I would have been less obsessed with you if I'd been able to know what you'd been up to. Facebook, Instagram, something to let me know how you're living. Instead I had nothing, and so I constructed my own fairytale, my own Peter Pan, your face frozen exactly as you were at twelve years old. Finally, in one desperate moment, I thought of emailing you with the old address I had, just to let you know I was still thinking of you. But then I found them, next to you, bright and happy and newly married. I tried not to look at the pictures. What claim did I have, on someone who had never been mine? I think I've gotten over it. It'll pass, they say, as it always does. It hasn't yet, but maybe only because I haven't told you. So here is my message in a bottle. It doesn't have a purpose, probably isn't going to be sent. What reason do I have? But how should I feel? I hope and long for it to pass, but each night you're there, in my dreams, reassuring me that it's real.

N.

[kar-takyber]

E,

How do I say any of this? The words used to flow like ink before, but now when I open my veins there's nothing but dry bones. I used to think that the only way this was getting better was once I ran far enough away, but the road is a circle and I come back to this. You bleed. I know this. But what is stopping me from bleeding again? Have I gone so far off I cut myself off?

I thought poetry would heal me, but the words of mine don't seem to be doing much. I keep yearning. You think you learn the more you live without what you desire, but all that's in me is an emptiness that widens each time I try to feel. Next to that gape is the never-ending sorrow, the sea of tears. I seem to be balanced on the knife-edge of them both. Either I fall, or I drown. Numbness is so much easier to handle, even each step draws blood underneath. I can't feel it. I don't know if I want to - no, I do know. I'm afraid, always afraid, and instead of opening myself to my own feelings I bury myself in the feelings of others, in the sentimentality of fantasy. Where do you go from here?

Courage, and hope. Easy to say and easy to dream, but with each passing day the dream grows darker and the weight gets heavier. Courage, for what? Hope, in who? It feels like I've been asking these questions for so long that they've lost the shape they began with. Am I losing what little I had to begin with?

I'm happy, sometimes, and that terrifies me. How do you live the mundane? How do you live with hope for tomorrow? I've spent so long thinking I wouldn't survive past this, survive to dream. They tell me to think of my future, of my passing days, and I scared to death. I'm afraid that becoming mundane will strip me of my brightest and darkest moments, will pare me down to nothing but everyday drudgery. I'm so afraid of becoming more numb than I am now. What keeps you from apathy the farther you are from feeling?

I'm lonely. I'm reminded each time I dip myself back into feeling things. It gnaws so deep within me that I wonder if I'll ever grow past this. I've trapped myself in a glass box and the walls are creeping in. I'm careening so wildly between apathy and insanity that I'm afraid to stop, afraid I'll be stuck in one place. And so afraid of apathy.

Grace. Grace for you, for me, and yet the gleam seems so far away. In the end, are we left on our own? It's so hard to connect, and it feels as if I'll never be truly understood. And I know the 'right' answer for this, I do. But I've never been able to truly believe. Am I doomed? Abandoned? How difficult it is to believe the truth, how my heart and mind cry out for a tangible thing.

I'm also angry - of course I am. Angry at them for making me like this, for not being good enough. Who else can I be angry at? I've spent so long blaming myself for something that was out of my control, and I hate them. I hate what they did to me. I hate that I'd be happier if they had been better people. I hate that it isn't their fault, that there's nothing I can do to change what happened. Why does it have to be this way? Why me? It's so unfair it makes me sick, and it hurts more to think that the world has always been like this.

Circular arguments. I'm sorry. Maybe if I apologize instead I'll be able to breathe. But to what end?

Despairing,

N