stay or go

(he/him) — 22 —Trigger warning: csa, c-ptsd, etc Vent account

[tigeerie]

“gentle” // my art, okay to rb (click for better quality)

[tigeerie]

Anxiety/paranoia going crazy stupid hard lately…I just moved and am absolutely terrified of my future, I don’t know how I’m going to afford this or what I’m going to do, I feel like all my neighbors are going to hate me…this is terrifying. I can’t even tell whether finally being alone is more of a relief or just another fear factor. Probably both. God what am I supposed to do, I just want someone to tell me what to do

[0utlaw-t0rn]

pulldrone

@mothercain

[just-the-gatekeeper]

🥹💞ahhhh, I’m obsessed! Here's one last scene drawn from

“Talk To Me Dirty; Talk To Me Sweet” by thesweetestdream !

“Hey, I’m getting good at this right?” - Will Byers

I loved drawing the top-down view. I pictured it like a film when I was reading it. Mesmerized expressions of self-discovery.

“do you think they do this every night?” / “sounded like it”

Man… doing Byler art has been super healing for me, as someone who repressed their own identity/s3xuality for so many years. The fic is smut, but I get emotional reading it.

My Queer Journey / About My Will / My Art / Intro Post

https://www.etsy.com/shop/justthegatekeeper

[tigeerie]

Fanart for the fic “eye for an eye” by ileikbee

[tigeerie]

There is a heart monitor

Singing your soul into the room

A steady stream

Consistent confirmation

Is it mine?

Are you mine?

If we died here tonight

Would my last breath fill your lungs?

It’s all I want —

You’re all I want.

You are everything to me —

Will it be like this forever?

[tigeerie]

I want to know you

I’m sacred of what you’ll do if you know me

Are you a wolf? Am I?

I could never hate you

You could kill me and I wouldn’t even blame your nature

I want to know you

No matter the cost

I’ll give you anything if you pry hard enough

Will you pry hard enough?

Or are you scared too?

[tigeerie]

Everything tastes like communion wafers and cardboard.

[tigeerie]

IT GOT ME

—☉—

I’ve been so stuck for so long. Years. I can’t remember when it started. Maybe it was always there. This freeze. A cold so bone-deep and alive that I can’t even burn it out of me. Never all of it.

I used to know how to feel close to people. At least, I think it was real. It felt real.

But for so long, I haven’t even known myself enough to offer it to anyone. I can comfort, I can validate, I can advise, I can laugh and I can tell stories and I can get excited and I can listen intently. But it’s been years since I’ve been able to explain myself to someone else. Even just to myself. Even when I write it’s rushed, it’s a stream of consciousness, it’s lost, and I never read it back. I can’t even stand to remember my own lessons.

It’s gotten so hard to know what I’m thinking or feeling or wanting. Because it’s not even allowed. And the harder that got, the harder it got to show it to anyone, because there’s just nothing there. When people ask me questions I cannot think of any answers, like I’m my own estranged cousin. Everything quartered off somewhere deep inside, buried by a labyrinth and inaccessible from any angle. Every time I’ve tried to look — a blackout. The same cold and empty void, the crushing silence. The faint smell of something sickly sweet and rotten, something curdling in the dark. I am not allowed to acknowledge it, it was never supposed to be there in the first place.

I am forgetting everything. I am missing nearly every moment of my life, memories a giant black box of untouchable context and it has left me utterly confused because I have no reference points for my life anymore. I can’t even trust my own version of reality. I am not a reliable narrator.

When the things inside the black box are ripped through me in my dreams I forget them the moment I wake up, and I am left with nothing but the shivering soaking sweat and the sparks in my gut that burn cold like static.

I feel like someone else has been living my entire life for me, against my will, pushing and pulling my body through space and molding my mouth around foreign words. I don’t know how to move from my own intuition, my own instinct.

It makes me walk strangely, makes me hold my body upright in the wrong way, my neck always bent too far forward, knees locked and hips crunched, spine buzzing, shoulders hunched. I don’t know where to put my hands. I stay dazed and half aware. I stay frozen and waiting. I can never remember because I can never think, never sense, never process in live action.

And I think everything in me is hurting all of the time, and for as long as I can remember it’s been stretching my joints too far back and clenching every muscle, and everything in me is both overextended and straining and clutching and curling all at once. And it’s been like this for so long that I don’t know any other way to be and it feels like this is the way it is supposed to be and so it’s like I can’t even feel it. Like there’s no other option, so acknowledging it doesn’t make a difference.

I was so little when everything stopped. I was so little when I started hiding, avoiding, running. At some point I stopped playing with dolls, stopped going outside, stopped talking, stopped breathing. Stopped caring, stopped reacting.

I don’t know what it feels like to fill my lungs with air. I’m so terrified that if my breath stops stuttering, if the expansion is anything above shallow, it will find me. I spent every second of my childhood trying breathe silently, swallow silently, sob silently, trying to be somewhere else, just to not be at all. And it protected me, it worked, but now I’ve forgotten everything else. I don’t know how to be.

I want to learn how again. How to play. How to dance. How to look into someone’s eyes, how to recognize their face. I’m still so fucking scared of looking at people. Of really seeing them. I always get it wrong. Because more than anything in this world, I’m terrified of them seeing me. I’m convinced that being noticed is a threat, that being seen in my entirety is the beginning of every end. The way locking eyes with a wolf guarantees it will lunge. And all you can do is count the seconds until it does because looking away only makes it happen faster. I don’t remember what it means to be seen. I’m terrified that my seeing them will scare them too, make them run from me, make me the wolf. I’m terrified of living freely, of losing control, of going off script, terrified of being too much again.

I wince when I remember every time I’ve unleashed the floodgates on someone, like I am right now. Flinch at the naïve and childish need to be met in the middle, to be heard, to be held. There is something so buried, so muffled, a begging to be touched without implication, without incentive, without thought, without motive. Especially without pity. A softly screaming need to breathe into and from someone. The soul-deep desire to sink into someone, to lose track of where I end and they begin, to feel our body heat and breath mixing and building as we fall into a bottomless mutual wanting, needing, trying, reaching, to become weightless, to lose all capacity for thought in the face of the electricity burning us. All without ever having to ask. And how could this gentleness, this warmth, this trembling tenderness, this devotion, how could it ever be wrong? And then I open my eyes, and I feel — Greedy. Pathetic. Stupid. Delusional. Laughable. Small. Weak. Needy. Unworthy. Dirty. Like I’ve committed the worst secular sin. Letting myself believe in a childish fantasy, like I’m trying to warm my shaking, numb hands by a fire I’ve drawn in crayon.

So the need to stay in control wins every time. The need to reign myself in. Restrain myself. Remind myself that this is as good as it will ever get, this loving from a distance. If I can’t hold it back, I ruin everything. I get too loud. I’ve always wanted too much. I’ve always wanted things I can’t have. I am mortified at the thought of being taken seriously. I am terrified of loving people.

I am convinced that I was born backwards, born wrong. That this mistake is why everything bad happened, why I do not belong, why I’m not normal, why everyone can smell this difference on me. It is the reason that there is always something evil and repulsive pressing into me, pulling me apart, leaving me perpetually too-full and too-empty all at once and it’s my fault, and I know it’s my fault because I am the common denominator, I am the mistake, I am the shameful thing inside of me. I let it in and it got me.

And I know, logically I know, that this doesn’t have to be true, that this idea does nothing but relent to an external control, relent to a power that I don’t want to respect. And I know I can change this narrative.

And I know that I can be kind, and creative, and good. That I can make people laugh, or feel heard, or seen, or held. I know that I can be good.

But it doesn’t stop the feeling. It doesn’t stop it from feeling true.

Please, I want to learn again. I want to remember. To remember how to be here. How to feel the world on my fingertips. How to explore. To remember how to see someone. To remember how to love. I want to meet myself again. To meet some lovable tiny version of me, some small and innocent thing. How do I meet someone I can’t reach?

—☉—

[braaainwaaash]

[traumatizeddfox]

[jairus666]

[traaumaa]

[exponentialsuffering]

15/05/24

[tigeerie]

I removed the weight of sex to lift it from my neck, pull its boot from my tongue. I stripped away its power, its rage, its tools of torture. I turned it into nothing but an action, nothing but bodies, because it saved me from remaining filthy. It made me natural. Animal. Being. I peeled the morality and identity it has inked into my veins.

And at first it felt like freedom, like agency. But no matter how much I believed it, their eyes still became mine. I was still the same thing.

And then I realized I had simply made it empty, and myself emptier.

It is supposed to mean something. To mean trust or vulnerability or unity. Once, only ever with him, I felt it. I felt that oneness, the succumbing to merging, letting our Shame drip off our flesh in shades of crude oil. I was learning. I was learning to feel it. To feel the holiness of sex without the sin. But he kept fracking.

He fractured me with him.

[braaainwaaash]

[peeptheaesthetic]