Vi vi vi I need to know immediately you saw a girl so pretty you FAINTED????
Re: the authors note on beloved- You canNOT say that you saw a girl so pretty you fainted and not tell us the story. Come on! Please đ„ș(from @neil-kumiko)
you are a young college drop out of twenty carrying around a mound of student debt and and an undiagnosed heart condition.
(This condition is called POTS, aka Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome aka Stand Up Fall Down Disease
What this means is that your body is unequipped to handle any disruption to its homeostasis without having a very petulant fit, dropping your blood pressure into the abyss, and removing all the blood from your brain. this is, as i'm sure you've guessed, not good. I'm sure you can see where this is going.)
so off you fuck to find someone willing to hire your squirrelly barely-medicated ass, and you wind up working in a Store, which we will call, for the sake of anonymity, Gollar Deneral. Gollar Deneral does not require any references nor physical aptitude confirmation, which sucks for them because they just hired the modern equivalent of a tight-laced victorian maiden with consumption
you are a cashier in this store (tho at Gollar Deneral, as I'm sure you are aware, that means you are an "everything" at this store). you are also autistic, and hate every brain-melting hell-screaming minute of this exercise in human restraint. to conserve even one or two of the veritable cutlery drawer of spoons it takes to do this job, you do not make eye contact unless strictly necessary
this will be your undoing
things that count as "disruption of homeostasis" to your shoddy meatsuit are what other bodies would describe as 'piddly little bitch tasks.' moving too quickly from one position to another, falling asleep too quickly, any amount of sweating or heat. this includes rapid increases in your heart BPM
you greet the customer but do not look at her. you finish scanning her items, briefly glance up for your customary microsecond of eye contact, and-
This, as you know, being me, is the alarm that POTS helpfully sets off seconds before disaster. "Sit down immediately!" says POTS, in the language of blacking out and your tongue going numb
Flutter flutter, says your heart, which in this body is a category five hurricane of an emergency
you see, this woman who has stopped at the register, is the most beautiful woman you've ever seen. her hair is obsidian black and shot through with dark browns and silvers, making it look like a three dimension river of soil, an Oread in the flesh. Her skin is the warm gold-brown of patina-ed oak wood, and she's wearing a matching leggings + coat + hat combo in dark purple wool, looking like she stepping out of a fairytale.
And you, since you are me, are very, very gay.
she furrows her brows at your sudden slack jawed silence, because the thing about not having blood in your brain is that your brain does not work when there's no blood in it
"Are you okay?" she says, setting her bare hand on your arm.
When you are done doing your very impressive washed-up-jellyfish impression on the floor behind the counter and come to, your boss is already standing over you, having called an ambulance for your gay ass before you rejoined the landing of the living.
And the Night Angel, the Mountain Siren, she slumps in relief ("a kind heart! truly the most perfect woman to ever live!" says the part of your brain that has become a blithering moron in the face of pretty girl) and smiles (soft!! benevolent!! moonstruck in her light you are!)
"I'm so glad you're okay."
She does not wait for you to respond before leaving, which is good, because you almost fainted again there, just a little, and now you're revisiting the problem with brains and lack of blood again, you know how it is.
The EMTs arrive, and you spend the next twenty minutes trying to avoid admitting that the reason you had the organic version of a blue screen of death because you were, literally, too gay to function
