Being blood.
Feb. 1st, 2022 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainiesI've got homework from the therapist, right? I'm not gonna do that, though. Been thinking on it a few days now and it's just not happening. Feels like twisting a knife in an infected bullet hole. Like yeah I might be able to get the bullet out, sure, but at what cost? What I'm hoping for is that it'll just scar over by itself. It won't - thanks to the infection - but yeah I'm not sticking a knife in there either, not yet. It's already killed me once, what worse can happen?
So I'm going to talk about something that doesn't feel like that. Specifically, I'm going to talk about Jay. Maybe Martin a bit too, I don't know yet. I sat down here to talk about Jay, though. It's pretty much my last chance based on how I feel now, before we hit the episodes where it gets rough again. I want to write about how I feel after a year of living together with him, away from all of that. Specifically with who he is now, rather than who he was before.
The first thing I have to get out of the way is that I know I killed him. We haven't talked about that a whole lot - touched on it probably eight months ago or something, because it was digging at me. It doesn't dig at me anymore so I guess we reached a conclusion. At the time, I didn't give a fuck about killing him. I have to say, to my credit, that sacrificing Jon wasn't that huge of a deal in the context of what we thought we were doing. Knowing what we know now, yeah, it was pointless, so was my death, none of it actually mattered just like my fucking life in general, just another pile of shit on top of the rest, but we didn't know that then, so my context then was obviously different. I thought the world was going to end if I didn't do what I did. The fact that I felt... actually, not gonna go there. How many bullet holes are there, exactly?
But yeah, Jay. So - after that whole thing, there was just nothing as far as I can tell for a while. Stasis, like I called it someplace else. I don't want to say I didn't exist. It wasn't like that. It was more like lingering, the way when you're asleep, you don't feel dead but you could as well be. If you'd tell me that explosion put me on pause I'd believe you. Next thing I know, I'm waking up here. I'm waking up here. That's how this stupid story starts. There was a kind of a period of acting on instinct, living half there and half here and half someplace we built for ourselves. I wasn't aware that I was here. I thought I was in London. I mean, that checked out, right? We had a whole explanation for how I wasn't dead and everything. And Jay didn't know that he was dead back then, so it was fine. A lot of shit happened in that weird halfway place, things we can't say for sure were real, things that definitely didn't really matter one way or the other, though. That was somewhere else, and we were some other people. Seeds of ourselves, potential, pathways that hadn't diverged yet.
And at first, it acted kind of like a bandaid over everything I'd felt for Jay when my life ended. I mean, I despised him. I hated him. I didn't hate him enough to wish bad things to happen to him, but enough that I didn't really feel that sad about ending his life. You know? From my perspective, this guy was the reason everything was going to hell. At least he hadn't fucking made it any better. But yeah, perspective helps. He was an easy target to hate. I mean, he made it infinitely easier all by himself, but what it comes down to is that it was something that I could control, something I could focus on. Hating him, that is. It was just so fucking easy and in that place if it gave me satisfaction I was taking it, even if it gave me no joy or purpose. Nothing mattered either way. There's a twisted sense of pleasure in really, really hating somebody like that. But none of that really existed when we came here. There was this calm instead, this sense of - like I was actually glad he was there. I was with my people, despite everything.
"My people." Yeah. That's Jay and Martin. There's something there that I can't explain properly. Obviously I'm closer with Martin, but when I sleep next to them, I tend to get close to Jay instead. The other night, I crawled all the way up into him, had his arms around me, did the whole little spoon act perfectly snugly against his bony fucking body. And in the middle of the bed, my knees and hands touched Martin's, but that's all we really need. I've never told this to anybody. Out there, we kind of keep up the act. It's my job to be spiteful and shitty to Jay. Like, who am I if I don't do that? But it's not the same kind of shittiness as before. I'm not angry with him anymore. I mean - sometimes I am. It rises like bile to the surface. I don't want to ignore that or act like it doesn't matter. Sometimes I want to bite him until I draw blood. It's an instinct. I hate him. But I also love him, like family. It really feels like family. It feels the same way I felt with my own back there, but weirder, like our essences are tied together. I know that's it for them, with what happened at the end for them. They're properly fucked up that way. I'm not, not like that, but I'm connected to them in a way that feels like being blood. (And yeah, don't start with the fact that we live in the same body. That's not it. I don't feel this way about anybody else, nor do they. It's just us three.)
It's kind of like... we come from the same place, it's as if we come from the same root. The same experiences got us here, the same story, and we went through the same purgatory. And at some point, I had to admit to myself that I'd take a bullet for him without thinking twice. I love him, the same way I hated him. Deeply. It's not romantic, but it's not platonic either. Or queerplatonic or anything like that. It's really just familial in a way that I don't know how to really compare; he's not a brother, not a father, not an uncle, not a cousin. He's just my blood. And this isn't a onesided thing either, we all feel this way. It's us against everything else, no matter what. Us over everything else. I think we're supposed to work on expanding that outwards into the rest of the system, but there's a certain detachment there if that makes sense - a wall of, you're not my blood. You're someone I care about but there's distance. It gets more obvious as time passes. We're less involved and more with our own cliques, particularly us three. And like, I don't think that's supposed to happen, but on the other hand, there's such a deep sense of peace that comes with connecting with my family. I feel like I belong with them.
So, kind of diverging from that, it's kind of shitty when people treat Jay and Martin like they're their own deal. I'm not just saying this from the perspective of jealousy, which, yeah, it exists, but creating that kind of a separation between us - that they're inherently two, and I'm other - hurts. It hurts all of us, actually, which kind of... I don't know if I can say it surprised me, but I didn't expect it, or at least I wasn't thinking about it. But yeah, for pretty much everybody, it's "Jay & Martin, and then there's Tim." Which, yeah. Feels kind of like taking a blunt butcher's knife to tough meat. You hack at it, doesn't really do shit to cut it but it sure bruises the flesh. We're not married - we're not in love - but some bonds go deeper than that. I wish that was as obvious as their marriage is.
So I'm going to talk about something that doesn't feel like that. Specifically, I'm going to talk about Jay. Maybe Martin a bit too, I don't know yet. I sat down here to talk about Jay, though. It's pretty much my last chance based on how I feel now, before we hit the episodes where it gets rough again. I want to write about how I feel after a year of living together with him, away from all of that. Specifically with who he is now, rather than who he was before.
The first thing I have to get out of the way is that I know I killed him. We haven't talked about that a whole lot - touched on it probably eight months ago or something, because it was digging at me. It doesn't dig at me anymore so I guess we reached a conclusion. At the time, I didn't give a fuck about killing him. I have to say, to my credit, that sacrificing Jon wasn't that huge of a deal in the context of what we thought we were doing. Knowing what we know now, yeah, it was pointless, so was my death, none of it actually mattered just like my fucking life in general, just another pile of shit on top of the rest, but we didn't know that then, so my context then was obviously different. I thought the world was going to end if I didn't do what I did. The fact that I felt... actually, not gonna go there. How many bullet holes are there, exactly?
But yeah, Jay. So - after that whole thing, there was just nothing as far as I can tell for a while. Stasis, like I called it someplace else. I don't want to say I didn't exist. It wasn't like that. It was more like lingering, the way when you're asleep, you don't feel dead but you could as well be. If you'd tell me that explosion put me on pause I'd believe you. Next thing I know, I'm waking up here. I'm waking up here. That's how this stupid story starts. There was a kind of a period of acting on instinct, living half there and half here and half someplace we built for ourselves. I wasn't aware that I was here. I thought I was in London. I mean, that checked out, right? We had a whole explanation for how I wasn't dead and everything. And Jay didn't know that he was dead back then, so it was fine. A lot of shit happened in that weird halfway place, things we can't say for sure were real, things that definitely didn't really matter one way or the other, though. That was somewhere else, and we were some other people. Seeds of ourselves, potential, pathways that hadn't diverged yet.
And at first, it acted kind of like a bandaid over everything I'd felt for Jay when my life ended. I mean, I despised him. I hated him. I didn't hate him enough to wish bad things to happen to him, but enough that I didn't really feel that sad about ending his life. You know? From my perspective, this guy was the reason everything was going to hell. At least he hadn't fucking made it any better. But yeah, perspective helps. He was an easy target to hate. I mean, he made it infinitely easier all by himself, but what it comes down to is that it was something that I could control, something I could focus on. Hating him, that is. It was just so fucking easy and in that place if it gave me satisfaction I was taking it, even if it gave me no joy or purpose. Nothing mattered either way. There's a twisted sense of pleasure in really, really hating somebody like that. But none of that really existed when we came here. There was this calm instead, this sense of - like I was actually glad he was there. I was with my people, despite everything.
"My people." Yeah. That's Jay and Martin. There's something there that I can't explain properly. Obviously I'm closer with Martin, but when I sleep next to them, I tend to get close to Jay instead. The other night, I crawled all the way up into him, had his arms around me, did the whole little spoon act perfectly snugly against his bony fucking body. And in the middle of the bed, my knees and hands touched Martin's, but that's all we really need. I've never told this to anybody. Out there, we kind of keep up the act. It's my job to be spiteful and shitty to Jay. Like, who am I if I don't do that? But it's not the same kind of shittiness as before. I'm not angry with him anymore. I mean - sometimes I am. It rises like bile to the surface. I don't want to ignore that or act like it doesn't matter. Sometimes I want to bite him until I draw blood. It's an instinct. I hate him. But I also love him, like family. It really feels like family. It feels the same way I felt with my own back there, but weirder, like our essences are tied together. I know that's it for them, with what happened at the end for them. They're properly fucked up that way. I'm not, not like that, but I'm connected to them in a way that feels like being blood. (And yeah, don't start with the fact that we live in the same body. That's not it. I don't feel this way about anybody else, nor do they. It's just us three.)
It's kind of like... we come from the same place, it's as if we come from the same root. The same experiences got us here, the same story, and we went through the same purgatory. And at some point, I had to admit to myself that I'd take a bullet for him without thinking twice. I love him, the same way I hated him. Deeply. It's not romantic, but it's not platonic either. Or queerplatonic or anything like that. It's really just familial in a way that I don't know how to really compare; he's not a brother, not a father, not an uncle, not a cousin. He's just my blood. And this isn't a onesided thing either, we all feel this way. It's us against everything else, no matter what. Us over everything else. I think we're supposed to work on expanding that outwards into the rest of the system, but there's a certain detachment there if that makes sense - a wall of, you're not my blood. You're someone I care about but there's distance. It gets more obvious as time passes. We're less involved and more with our own cliques, particularly us three. And like, I don't think that's supposed to happen, but on the other hand, there's such a deep sense of peace that comes with connecting with my family. I feel like I belong with them.
So, kind of diverging from that, it's kind of shitty when people treat Jay and Martin like they're their own deal. I'm not just saying this from the perspective of jealousy, which, yeah, it exists, but creating that kind of a separation between us - that they're inherently two, and I'm other - hurts. It hurts all of us, actually, which kind of... I don't know if I can say it surprised me, but I didn't expect it, or at least I wasn't thinking about it. But yeah, for pretty much everybody, it's "Jay & Martin, and then there's Tim." Which, yeah. Feels kind of like taking a blunt butcher's knife to tough meat. You hack at it, doesn't really do shit to cut it but it sure bruises the flesh. We're not married - we're not in love - but some bonds go deeper than that. I wish that was as obvious as their marriage is.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-07 06:51 am (UTC)I know we have words about this that we haven't spoken out loud, some of which are here in your post, and some that we've simply let each other know, but to emphasis all of it - you are more than welcome between us anytime you need it, or simply want it. You are as much a part of me as you describe me being of you; I feel all these same things in return, which is... a relief, to know that you feel it too. You know how I feel about all the ways I let you down and I'm forever insecure about what that means for us here, but your love is welcome and reciprocated, I can only hope to be worth it this time around.
When it comes to your anger, I don't blame you for it. It's yours and you're entitled to it, as I am to my regret and guilt. I do hope that as time passes, we'll be able to heal these things together, and I hope that I can pay you back for the pain I caused before. From my end, you owe me nothing; what you did to me you did because of necessity, and if you hadn't, Orsinov would have done worse. So thank you, for everything. You gave so much for our sake, and I never thanked you for it once. Not... properly, anyway.
edit; Christ, has it been a week since you posted this? I'm sorry it took me this long.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-09 03:32 am (UTC)