"You should thank Rosa! She really helped me a lot with it!"
"...I'm sorry I forgot but look!" Luffy took out a card from his pocket with big sloppy hand writing and started reading it (trying to be secretive) aloud. "The flowers are pretty... but ... sometimes the seasons... come late but... they are still really..." He flipped the card over. "Pretty and nice like you."
“If a clock could count down to the moment you meet your soul mate, would you want to know?” [x]
4:59. Whomever designed this facet of the universe certainly didn't take into consideration the possibility that we might not actually want to be warned about an enormous life crisis just five minutes before it happens. If anything, we might not actually want to be warned at all. Meeting another human being even in normal circumstances is stressful enough without kismet harassing you intobelieving you and a stranger have chemistry. Can you imagine what this must be like for other people? At least I had known I was going to see you today. I just didn’t know it would be under these circumstances. Nevertheless, as the -:-- on my wrist suddenly flares to life as I’m brushing my hair and putting on my makeup, only minutes away from meeting you for the first time in the many months we’ve known each other, dread turns my blood to ice.
4:30. 4:29. 4:28. I stare dumbly at the timer on my wrist, watching the numbers fall away intractably. Denial lasts for all of a silent, futile wish for the countdown to stop, and then it’s straight into acceptance. Which isn’t so much the calm receipt of impending doom as it is giving myself permission to tell the universe off for playing childish games as I handle the situation like a grown-up. I set my brush down on the table and examine my wrist clinically: 3:59. 3:58. 3:57. I'm too well trained to show any hint of alarm but inside, all my strings are fraught with tension. One miscalculation—one wrong breath!—and I will implode. 3:05. 3:04. 3:03. This must be what a time bomb feels like.
2:30. My friends return from the cafeteria to find me still in my seat, unchanged and unmoved. I’ve been so erratic since I met your charming concentration of electrons on the Internet—smiling all day about a joke you made the previous night, other times sobbing then staring mutely into space in turn, et cetera—that yet another break in routine only mildly surprises them. The cursory Oh, you didn’t eat lunch? question is asked, and I give them a flippant smile and shake my head, and we slip into normal girlfriend behaviour patterns. My being secretive is something they are used to. They see more of me than anyone else is allowed to. But there are some things I keep selfishly to myself. Like the perplexing, affectionate things you call me, or the ridiculous countdown to Armageddon embedded in my skin. If they sense that something is off, they take it in stride. My friends let me keep my secrets.
2:00. In truth, I would have been up to my eyebrows in nerves whether or not these numbers appeared on my wrist at this moment. What if upon meeting me, you find I don’t measure up to whom I claim to be? On writing, it’s easier to be fascinating, when you have both the luxuries of time to compose brilliant answers and the absence of physical attributes getting in the way of your wit. It’s nothing like trying to dazzle another person in the flesh. And I’m not just talking about me; what if upon finally meeting you I find you wanting? After months of building expectations like castles and keeps in the sky, if my own faulty engineering came crashing down around me, I would die. Of disappointment, and of shame.
Or—1:30—what if it isn't you? I could be jumping the gun again, like I've been doing recently, ever since I realized I couldn’t predict anything when it came to you and if every outcome was possible, what was stopping my wildest dreams from coming true?
Except maybe the equally possible outcome that they wouldn’t.
1:00. I didn't know which would be worse.
0:30. I reach beneath my chair for the books I was going to lend you—and stop myself. If it wasn't you, I would never forgive myself for definitively assuming that you were my...soul mate. As if I wasn't already revolted with myself for even believing such a concept existed for me, would I let you mistake me for some tragic maiden who had nothing else to do than wait around desperately for a man?
Perish the thought. I straighten back in my seat. 0:10.
0:05, 0:04, 0:03. My friends claim my attention again and I miss the last crucial seconds of my vigil. The timer goes off, but I don’t feel it or hear it (did I really expect to?). Instead the conversation breaks off abruptly and when I raise my head, there, framed in the window of the classroom door, are you.
The timer on my wrist reads 0:00.
There is nowhere to go but forward. I take my books—and my nerves—in hand, and walk out the door. I remember my friends are watching and you are waiting, and I drop my shoulders and hold my head a little higher. This makes you raise your eyebrows as you greet me, something casually teasing about the way I walk that I don’t trust myself to reply to. I pull a face instead, all familiar as if I’d known you forever. I wonder if this is lack of pretension is how it’s supposed to feel, and I hope so because there is no way I can be dazzling now. Every high mental faculty is concentrating on not making an idiot out of myself in front of the guy who’s just been revealed to me as my (ugh!) soul mate.
I search for any sign in your demeanour, any tell as to whether you’re aware of what you are to me. A chunky plastic watch in bright sunshine yellow sits on your wrist, completely obscuring your timer. My panic hikes to new levels: Has he simply not seen it? Has he seen it and this is his way of being casual about it? Did his timer even go off for me, or not? It’s happened before. Sometimes, you’re bound to another soul not for romantic purposes. But I never envisioned a life where my reason for being born is to become someone’s second best or best friend. I don’t want to be second best. I want————I want————I want. And it opens a void deep and wide inside me, an abyss that stares back into me and demands to be filled. A tomorrow made up of this emptiness is unimaginable.
I pull myself out of the void, back into the frenzy of the here and now. My brain unwraps you like a Christmas present it’s been waiting until July for and files information away eagerly. Nike lanyard: purple, my favourite colour. Collar: askew, my fingers itch to reach up and straighten it. So tall: my heels do nothing past raising my gaze level with your shoulder. Nameplate: middle initial, L. Voice: forceful with the accent of your city, but warm with undercurrents of laughter. I move upward to scrutinize your face and pause, because I. Can't. Look. At. You.
I can't look at you, because if I do, I will stare. You're not ordinarily good-looking—you don't have the kind of face people acknowledge as handsome then move on from without a second thought to scrutinize the rest of you. Yours is the kind that invites the audience to study you a little closer, to try and figure out why the hell is it that we can't look away. That I can't look away.
I cast around for something else to focus on. I settle on the trilogy of books you’ve brought me and ask you to show me their correct order, marvelling at your slender, almost candle-like fingers as you disassemble the stack (I give up—even your hands are perfect.). You explain the plot of each book as you go. Half of me is immersed in the conversation, intrigued by premise of the series and their interesting titles. The other half stands separate from the scene, watching two people having an easy, intelligent exchange of ideas, and fairly bursts with elation that we are those two people. My earlier anxiety ebbs away slowly when I find you’re just as charming in the flesh, and the castles in the sky grow a few extra turrets.
We’re standing side by side now, and as you talk, your elbow keeps bumping against mine. Granted, elbows have about a square inch surface area of skin, but right now every point on that inch is alive with the solid sensation of you. Longing jumps like an electrical charge from one nerve to the next. I need to keep feeling you are real and you are here, and I don’t move away so like a pair of magnets attracted to each other you brush against me again and again. I don’t assume it’s anything more than accidental. But when you hand me back the books, your fingers touch mine, and they stay too long on my skin, tarry too long not to be deliberate. Seventeen years without a timer did not mean I grew up naïve; inside my head, flags go up and warning bells ring. Such a tiny gesture—almost nothing—makes no sense, but the oddest variety of suspicion floods into me like a shaft of sunlight, bright with logic and warm with intuition, and I think I know what it means.
Something flashes deep and deadly in my chest that's more imperative than want and more compelling than longing, and my heart sinks when I identify the feeling as hope. Hope that maybe this ease, this perfection, this attraction could be meant for me; a surrender to the frighteningly vulnerable state of signing my own death warrant if I turn out to be mistaken. Want and longing are calls that could be denied, but hope is a choice, a conscious decision to take a risk. Hope leaves you with no one else but yourself to blame.
I could fall into that void and never come back out for the rest of my life, and I would be doing it willingly. Or I could fall into the obvious, and even then there would be no peace; the maelstrom of emotions of the last ten minutes would go on forever. There would be blood and tears shed even if we claimed the castle, and my heart could never be closed again. In whatever way the universe has tied me to you, I am in deep trouble. There could be a number on your wrist like mine, or there couldn’t. But right then, I know it doesn't matter. For better or worse, I am going to see this through.
Just when I think I’m going to fly apart into a million pieces, it’s over. I hold your books close—my first tangible pieces of you—and tell you it was lovely to finally meet you. You give a courtly little wave goodbye, and when you lift your hand, the chunky yellow watch slips down your arm, exposing your wrist.
And I know, oh hell, I know, that I am in very deep trouble indeed.
This is a day late but I wasn't feeling great on Valentine's Day so I wasn't on at all. I would like to thank all my followers for following me and I hope that you sweet loves would continue to follow me. It means so much that you choose to follow me.
I'm sorry this was shit. I tried to do a follow forever then I gave up because it didn't feel right to single out a few hundred people when my followers mean more to me than those I'm following.
And those that I have interacted with me are even more special.
However, there is one special lady whom I would like to thank: valkyromanov Without Val, I wouldn't be able to share my love for The 100 and I'd still be some obscure blogger (technically, I still am but without her, I'd be non-existent). It's even better that I've met this wonderful woman real life and Tumblr brought us closer as friends.
I know I am late on so many of my fics but at the moment, it's not a good time for me to write fics.
EXCUSE ME. THERE ARE TEARS IN MY EYES. if he really just said “i’m say, it’s pretty unfortunate” i have so many mixed feelings because that means modest IS keeping him (and possibly harry as well) in the closet and that is FUCKED. UP. and that fact that he’s drunk and i just… feels, man. so many feels.
so along with an amazing day, david gave me the sweetest card (that's a reminder that we're gonna be married someday) and he bought me tickets to paramore's writing the future show in clearwater in april which is probably going to be the most important night of my life
lol i could say plenty of bitter things about everything, but today, i won't. hope today is pleasant for y'all and that you're continuously given the space to take care of yourselves.
