the spectrum heart cathedral system

010718.
sunday.

We finally realized why Tobiko hasn't been the one purging anymore.

Food does not register as food.
We've been using food as a stim.

We've been using a LOT of things as stims, actually.
This explains the bathroom rituals.
We brush our teeth, floss, brush again, floss some more, use mouthwash, brush our teeth again, wash our face, wash our body, wash our hands, wash our face again… over and over and over and over. We do this for an hour, sometimes, just scrubbing at our gums and our flesh, scrubbing until we are red and raw sometimes. We do this in the shower, too-- we obsessively wash over and over and over, not even thinking that much about "being" clean as we are thinking about feeling clean. It's why we cut our nails down to the nubs and shave every hair off that we can reach. It's never about the end result, not literally. It's about how it feels. It's about purging everything that hurts in the most literal way we can think of.

We eat when we don't want to because it NEVER registers as eating. It registers as stimming.
This is why preparing food used to take, what, six hours back in PA? Because it was never about food. It was, again, a matter of stimming. Of sensory soothing.

Remember that one night in SLC where we sat on the floor of our bedroom, rocking violently back and forth and flapping our hands so hard our wrists ached, blasting Serph at high volume on our headphones and stretching our legs against that rubber band until they, too, were sore from exertion? Pure stimming. Pure mindless stimming. THAT'S the key here.

We've lost all our old methods. We can no longer walk in circles in the living room, or the kitchen, or the driveway. We can no longer go hide downstairs by the furnace, or lock ourselves in the bathroom-- although the latter was always a horrific trauma trigger, as was the attic, even moreso (which is why we didn't even bother to list it here.)
We can't even self-abuse in the "traditional" way anymore. We don't have razors. We don't have knives. We don't have blades. (and oh, how our heart aches at those words-- no, those names, beloved and tender as a wound) We can't bite our arms anymore, can't slap our face, can't yank at our hair, can't claw at our skin or punch our legs or stomp our feet. All our old stimming methods, as violent as we need them, are gone, are forbidden. And our brain is boiling over.

It's been shutting down a lot lately and that terrifies us, to be honest. OV has it easy. He can stim with an adorable little squishy macaron or peach or donut, can play with fidget spinners or kaleidoscopes or even just a piece of jewelry. That's enough for him, it seems, and that makes us super happy. We love him, we love allof them, and the fact that they can use such mild methods to soothe their addled brain is deeply soothing to ours-- in a different sense. We would never inflict this aggressive need of ours on them, not for the world. And yet, here we are, needing it, and terrified because we can't explain it to him, terrified because he thinks we're doing it out of hatred, out of rage, out of suicidal ideation. It's exactly the opposite. When we don't do it, the stress and pressure gets so intense that we wantto die, and we stop caring whether or not we do. That is what's lethal. Not the stims.

The problem is, though, that the stims are dangerous in and of themselves. All of Cannon and Gamboge's old methods drew blood, marked bruises, left scars. All of them beautiful and beloved, true, but still risky to our health… and yet what we wouldn't give to be able to flay this flesh wide open again, even though I can feel Scalpel shaking his head at that thought even now. Why so?
"It's dangerous," he says. "You're right. Even though it is effective, and beautiful, it's also just as addictive. You know just as well as I do that once we start that, we can't stop. We want to bleed and scar forever. And that will kill us."
So will this "eating disorder." But I suppose that's the point of this whole entry.

Food is the simplest, easiest, most "socially acceptible" form of stimming and self-abuse that we have left at our disposal. It's all we have left on days like this.
Except, now, we can't, not without risk of condemnation and distrust, not without hurting someone else more than we ever could before or would ever want to. OV knows we have a problem, but he doesn't know why-- heck, even we didn't know that until this afternoon!
But it's why we go absolutely bonkers in the kitchen once he goes to work and MC goes to sleep. We racked our brains over that for weeks, for months even. We don't want to abuse ourselves, we don't want to suffer or humiliate ourselves anymore, so why this? Why can't we stop this? Why do all of the nousfoni tied to this have such shockingly, irresistibly powerful anchors? Why can't even Laurie stop them? Why does NO ONE, deep down, even want to? Why does it feel like we're being "betrayed" by the System itself in these nousfoni being given free reign and full power over our body and actions in the middle of the night?
We know why, now. It's because they're trying to save our life.
They're STIMMING. They're desperately attempting to soothe our hurting brain, to ease our aching heart, to comfort the poor screaming ones inside. The ONLY way we've EVER known how is to somehow "burn it off" outside. Even now, right now, although we're enjoying typing, our brain is too high-strung and our body is immediately defaulting to the urge of "eating." We aren't hungry. We never are. But that's the point. This isn't about physical hunger. This is about spiritual hunger-- psychological starvation. This is about us needing something we still can't seem to get and scrabbling at the scraps of it wherever we can find it.
Truthfully, we just want to isolate ourselves completely, close our eyes, rock back and forth like a lunatic punching bag and just let our brain turn off as completely as possible. But the key, again, is isolation-- that terribly dear thing we have NEVER been allowed to truly get, not since childhood, and which we have been aching for for longer than we can remember lately. There are no locked doors here. There's no cellar, no attic, no closet to sit in. God how we miss it now, how we miss being a child, ignored and alone in that dearly forsaken house, feeling like we were the only soul(s) existing in the entire world. Just us, and the quiet, and the sunlight, and our heart. We need that like the air we breathe, and we don't know how to get it anymore, because we never realized until we moved out here how we need love like the blood in our veins, pun entirely intended.
That's the killer. That's the real awful thing here.
God I want to cry. Our body is desperate right now, we want to just… scream and punch things and stomp the floor until our knees hurt and throw things and bite things and just let ALL the steam out. There's no malice in it, ever. But it scares people. It terrifies them. We're a monster, and we love what we are, but… we're still a monster. We're a scary, terrible, incomprehensible thing sometimes, and it hurts when our sharp edges cut even the people who try to love us regardless.

Our body wants to food-stim because that's the only thing it can think of to do right now, and yet it KNOWS that it doesn't want to. The very thought of "eating" is making Overload want to scream and throw the plate across the room, is making The Destroyer want to set the entire freaking refrigerator on fire. We HATE food; we hate it for being the only accessible way we were able to dissociate and heal for years, without being hacked.

Yeah. Isn't that the bloody cincher.
Hacks. Why the heck do you think they kept happening for so long?? Why the heck do you think people stopped fighting after so many hellish years??
It's because they hurt, they ate hours of our time, and they isolated us from the world. Yeah, they were absolute hell, that's the indisputable truth-- but the other awful truth is that we didn't want to live in the first place.
God. Those poor, poor damaged kids, sacrificing their souls and selves just because the world at large outside was somehow even scarier than blacking out for three hours and waking up in blood and excruciating pain and mental terror. At least then they could shut down. At least then they could hard-reset their memory, splinter a little more, break a little further, forget most of their entire life and pretend nothing was happening. They just wanted to run, God forgive them, they just wanted to hide and sleep and rest and the ONLY way they could was by shutting everything off. God forgive all of us.

Hacks don't happen anymore. They can't. Not since 2016. Not since Infinitii's presence truly registered, not since we realized what we were actually looking for and what was actually happening in contrast. The truth of it, the harsh horrific reality of the situation, was too terrifying to ever allow ever again. And so hacks stopped completely.
And the eating disorder exploded.

We knew that was going to happen, really. Stop one addiction, but leave the reason why it developed in the first place, and a new addiction will return or appear to replace it. The body is just hopelessly wrecked, man, it doesn't know what else to do.
Why do you think we started flirting with EVERYTHING that would detach us from the reality our poor brain couldn't cope with anymore? We started drinking. We started smoking. We started abusing prescription meds. We experimented with asphyxiation and anesthesia and everything we could think of that would detach us from the awful soul-crushing loop of that toxic household, of that dead-end environment, of the unending mental stress.
And somehow, some days, some nights, that still hasn't changed.
Like right now.

We have nothing. No paint, no sewing kit, no exercise bike, no weights, no internet, no Xbox. No isolation, which is the TRUE need behind ALL of those things. We can't do anything if we aren't COMPLETELY alone, and it feels like a kick in the face to the Broken Arrows, but God forgive us it's true.

We want to run. But we can't. Where the heck would we go? Everywhere out there, there are people watching us, there are social contexts "to obey" and our poor terror-hardwired brain keeps kowtowing to ALL of them. Even just now, when OV laughed or sighed or whatever that little dear breath was, we looked up, wondering-- are we needed? Was that a call for attention? What is the proper way to respond?
And then we wonder why people like Quicksilver exist, why that girl who fronts in the early morning exists. The nousfoni that will even flip off the people they love and say "shove off, leave me alone." The ones that seem coldhearted and callous and brutal, when really all they are trying to do is get us alone. They're trying to PROTECT us, bless their monstrous hearts, and we know it.
We're terrified of coming across as a horrible person, like we did to the kids in SLC. This is probably why. But we had no idea this was even happening back then-- we didn’t even know we were multiple, for God's sakes. Now, though, not only do we know, we understand, more and more each day.
So when OV sighs and someone immediately fronts with a middle finger and stony expression, they aren't saying they don't care. They're saying, "we can’t care right now because we are too burnt out TO do so without utterly sacrificing our health and your respect in the process."
So we sit here, miserable and overloaded, yearning for the opportunity to just… be alone.

God we both love and hate the nights when OV works. We love him, we love all of the Broken Arrows, but… it's just like when we started doing too much for church. We adore our faith, we adore its practices, but when you're expected to attend every daily mass, every weekly funeral, every weekend mass, every choir practice, every group meeting, every picnic, every bible study, et cetera… well, something in you starts to hate it, in utter paradoxical spite, in total impossible parallel to the love you still feel, solely because it KNOWS that if you don't stop you are going to burn to the ground.
So it stops it in the most complete, sudden, brutal, total way it knows how.
It scares the bloody wits out of anyone standing in its way.
People don't like monsters. People leave monsters alone.
So we learned to be a monster.

…God. What do we do.
We're thirsty. We want to cry. More than that, we want to scream and punch things, but that'll frighten OV, and we can't… we can't risk that. That's the horrible, horribly irony of this. We have to sacrifice our terrible needs for the sake of terrible love. What do we do?

People stay up all night because we need to be alone because that's the ONLY TIME we can brutally soothe our psyche. It's always violent love with us, did you notice? Always compassion and cruelty, or at least, what others would see as cruel. For us, it's just the rawest, most selflessly pure form of love. Love that doesn't deny you your needs just because they're strange or "socially unacceptable."

We want to run outside and go hide in that stupid McDonald's bathroom because it's the only place in town that feels like an airport-- totally insulated from the outside world, cold metal and echoing tile, quiet as a grave, no time existing in there at all. It always feels like 3 in the morning there, when you're by yourself. But that's the problem. It's a freaking bathroom in a fast food joint. It's not EVER going to be a failsafe place to be safe-- heck, the sheer simple fact that it's a bathroom has ALREADY condemned the poor thing beyond hope, thanks trauma. (God, there's that awful thought process again. Poor hurting kids. I wonder how many of them we've never seen, how many of them are still contributing to this in our sub(terranean)conscious.) But the one time we were in there, we felt-- God have mercy, what a dearly desired feeling-- like we were the only people on earth. Just us, just this body, just this tiny bubblespace of a bathroom, no time or space beyond. Just that single isolated moment. THAT'S what we need. YES, it's a literal NEED. It's why we risk our mental health going out literally EVERYWHERE when we walk in the mornings, exposing ourselves to too many soul-draining social contexts, desperately seeking a place where that won't be the case, desperately seeking some secret quiet corner somewhere that we can privately own, like the study nooks at Marywood, like the tiny pockets of woods.
…I wish there was a church with unlocked doors around here. God, we wish. We're nearly in tears just thinking of that. The ultimate met need. Isolation, but in a soaring wide-open emptiness. The feeling of our dreams. Rolling hills and labyrinthine halls and massive abandoned buildings and no one, NO one but us in them. Not even a gnat for outside company. Nothing. Just us, and the air, and the sun, and the clock ticking second after second, counting down to nothing, looping without an hour hand. That's what we want. Just… infinity. Eternity. God help us, no wonder hacks were a thing, I want to cry so hard we vomit out our entire respiratory system. This is wrenching and it makes so much sense. How did we never NOTICE this before???

…
What do we do.

Where do we go. It's 7pm, it's a Sunday night, we can't stand this social context right now, we KNOW OV is worried about us and that simple passive attention is keeping our brain in overloaded status and we want to weep because we care about them, too-- so much our heart aches from it, but what do we do? We love them, but… what do we do? We'll never stop loving them. We'll love them forever. But… sometimes, we dream of running away, of just sleeping in a field somewhere, of packing a knapsack and walking the railroad tracks for days, of catching a bus and just riding it until the end of the line and wherever we are, we are. We want no roots, and yet we want a home to go home to when the solitude starts to bite. There's nothing wrong with being alone. Just… souls need souls. God split hirself because ze needed to love more. We are made to connect with those other pieces, with every other bit of reality. And humans, sure we don't identify as one but this body is one, and we adore people, we do, we just… need to do this in moderation, I suppose.

Do we have a list? Do we even have options when this happens? When our spoons are so low the entire silverware drawer is missing, what the heck do we do, where do we go? When we're so weak we can't get undressed, is there anywhere we can be that will feel like the world has ceased to exist outside? I don't know.
Maybe we can empty out the bottom of the closet, sit in there.
No, no no no, I can feel the children shrieking at that idea even now.
Idola seems piqued. Maybe we should try. See what happens. I doubt hacks will happen--
They won't, but they'll be threatened--
In isolation hacks are always a threat because we black out,

What do we do.

It's too cold outside to go hide in the woods, or to even go find spots where we can hide. But Jewel is so excited at the thought. She has ideas.
Maybe we should try anyway? Get a blanket or sleeping bag or something, bundle up good, find somewhere in the woods where it's just us and just… keep that in our heart if nothing else, if we can't go there. Find at least one place in this new local world where we can be ironically cut off from it for a while, without risk of sudden jarring intrusion. Walking distance. Where can we go?
Buses.
Buses aren't cheap, kid, we need somewhere we can go on a dime without spending a dime, that's the problem.
I'm sure there's somewhere. Let's check Google Maps, find something out. I'm sure we can. Right? Are we done writing?
For now, maybe. I… the other topics we want to write about are huge. The hacks, for one, and the eating disorder in light of this.
But we have been writing about it. Both of them. Haven't we?
Not in as brutal excruciating detail and honesty as we need to, no.
Should we start, then?
Maybe. Hold on a minute.


Food stimming.
Back in PA, we had a soup pot, huge and solid metal, and every day, we'd start the morning by blacking out over a cutting board.
I don't know what we did. All I know is that the smell of wilted lettuce is one of the biggest triggers in the world, and we still can't put spices on our food without shivering in dread. Indian food makes us dissociate immediately, as do potato chips, and ice cream, especially Klondike bars… avocados are still terrifying, so are carrots, so is mayonnaise.
All of those foods were used for blatantly self-abusive purposes in the past and you know what? I'm going to say EXACTLY why.
There was a phase, in 2016, where all we ate for about a week was namkeen. Indian snack food. Just bags of (name). It made us horrifically sick but hey, snack food is an easy time-consuming stim, right? Even if it makes you vomit nonstop for hours-- even especially because it does! Because purging makes you even more dissociative, makes you able to sleep for hours because your body is so wrecked from the past several hours to even consider staying conscious for another second. The last day we bought Indian food, someone filled at least six entire cereal bins with the stuff, separating them methodically by ingredient, then going outside (thanks Destroyer) and flinging them all into the woods… and then hours later, even days later, someone else went outside in a scavenger-desperate mess and picked the pieces off the ground and ate them. We still cannot look at that memory without feeling instantly, unbearably sick. I assume it was all purged seconds after, but memory is black, punctuated only by tiny shattered snapshots of fingers wrestling bits of chickpea flour away from bugs and brambles and rain-muddled dirt.
Remember why P&R became the devil's household?? Remember how many actual HUNDREDS of dollars were spent there over several months, because the food there was dirt cheap AND typically already was garbage? Remember the granola bags with mouse holes chewed through them? Remember the instant noodles with mold growing inside? Remember the hummus that landed us in the hospital due to food poisoning? I know you do. We ALL do.
Oh, but THAT'S the most important thing, something we've probably mentioned in the past before but NEED to reiterate today-- the MAIN reason food was our main stim for YEARS was because, if no one is watching, you don't have to eat it.
We would buy starchy, heavy, crunchy foods, time-consuming foods, chips and cookies and cereals and granola and things, and we'd chew them up, ingredient by ingredient, piece by single piece, and we'd spit them out. Organize, chew, spit. Over and voer and over. And then, when the bag or box was done, we'd chew up the chewed stuff, over and over, until it was too saliva-riddled to chew anymore, and then we'd eat that and purge it immediately, too racked by family-instilled guilt at the thought of "wasting it" by throwing it away (no matter how moldy or rotten or inedible it was) to do so, even at the risk of our own health. That went on for years.
Then we couldn't isolate anymore, then we started losing too much weight, then our body forced us to start bingeing instead in a desperate gamble to get some calories out of it.
The worst chew-spit binges were in that one autumn that we re-read A Wrinkle In Time, with whoever decided that raw oatmeal mixed with molasses was the best texture for doing so-- probably because it took ages to mix up, causing our arms to scream with exertion from doing so, eliciting the same response from our jaws once it reached those. Pain, once sharps were forbidden. A horrific rerouting. And we did that for weeks, if not longer, until the passive sugar-exposure made us SO sick we ended up bedridden with a trashed immune system and too much nausea and chronic pain and hideous gastric distress to leave the bed. But to this day, anxiety-eaten nousfoni in this system, poor desperate kids, always look to the oatmeal boxes in the grocery stores even if the sight of them triggers immediate massive panic. Part of them also remembers a time when that food was the only way they could numb themselves to the world. So they hesitate. They're afraid, but they don't know what other options they even have. And every once in a while, we'll find a box stashed in a drawer or a closet, inevitably doomed to be in the garbage within hours, either thanks to the Destroyer or some poor purgative kid who just wanted to feel like they were throwing up the pain along with the carbs.

God. No wonder so many of our Daemons are tied to food. I wonder what Rupture knows, if anything. She's mainly the fear of dying in the process, of blood in our nose and throat, of our stomach screaming at us to stop. I don't know who holds this, this stimming nightmare… no one except Chocoloco, at least, and he only catches the frayed-end dregs of it, nothing serious, nothing traumatic. He's just that initial desperate programmed seeking of comfort in places where everyone who claimed they loved you claimed it would always be, and yet never was. Chocolate and coffee. Our family's "soothing staples," both of them doing nothing but putting us through hell since childhood. Still, desperate, we never gave up trying. Choco is pretty pissed as that, although nowhere near as much as he is heartbroken. His heart-host is angry almost all the time but it's for the same exact reason that any of us are angry right now-- because we're burning up inside, ripped apart and overwhelmed and sad, and we just want to hole ourselves up in the corner of a coffeeshop somewhere, in the evening when it's dark and softly raining outside and no one knows we're here and we have nowhere else to be, just us and this warm quiet soft place, and we can weep and cry and ache inside and this tiny childlike part of us remembers the days when a muffin and a latte made us feel real, made us feel like we could exist as ourselves apart from society and our family and anyone, like this little rite of passage was proof that we could survive alone, and were, in that moment. THAT'S what our hurt ones keep seeking, in that sort of archetypal memory, but Chocoloco knows it's ultimately heartbreakingly empty, that it's not food or drink or chocolate or coffee or caffeine or sugar or anything edible that we're seeking-- we're seeking his heart, we're seeking love, we're seeking the love that only we can give each other-- we're seeking ourselves.
We can't find each other if we're suffocating in the outside world.

So. Trigger foods.
Someone once wrote about this, too-- probably Iscah-- the science of "combined" and "fused" foods (she says yes, it's in her journal in detail). Well I won't steal her thunder, but the principle of it was this: if you want to make a food inedible but still ingestible, in other words, if you're trying to make a "stim food" instead of a meal, you need to make it as easily palatable as possible in the most blatant way possible. Which means, usually, you liquefy it. You blend things. You cut things into miniscule pieces. You take things like spices, and condiments, and sauces, and drinks, and you soak every stupid thing you have with them until your stomach heaves at the very sight of it, and when it's a slurry from hell you eat that as quickly as possible so your body rejects it just as quickly. Ideally, the whole prep process will take hours, as will the purging process afterwards, in a desperate blacked-out state, trying to get every last crumb out of our system. This is how we spent our days for years, inbetween church activities and family demands.
And isn't that the irony?
We were left alone. We were ignored. And yet, we were never isolated. The grandparents were ALWAYS there, always a few feet or a room away, watching, waiting, vigilant. If we disappeared from their radar for a few minutes, they freaked out. The only time we could "get away with it" was by being in the bathroom, behind a locked door, pretending we were taking a bath, when in reality we were slumped over a toilet wishing we were dead already, sobbing because we really just wanted to be alive already.
But we were never alone. We wanted to be alone, God knew. We wanted a place where nothing could touch us but ourselves.
That's how hacks happened.
I can't talk about that right now.

Potato chips. Cookies. Trail mix. Things like that. Our grandfather would hoard them in his closet, and when we weren't allowed to prepare or eat food in the kitchen anymore without being perpetually critiqued by our grandmother or psychologically terrorized by our brother, we would sneak into his room and sneak into the closet and gorge down a whole bag, not even wanting to, just desperate to stim away the constant fear and pain by crunching something sharp and salty until our mouth bled. But potatoes and flour don't purge easy. They stick like glue in your stomach, and they WILL make the next few hours feel like the central circle of hell. We know. We made that mistake one too many times. We thought we were dead, a few times. But somehow we survived. 85 pounds and throwing up junk food for 8.5 hours a night and we still somehow survived.
There was a time when we first discovered P&R and someone bought cheese curls and chips by the cartful, but they were bean-based, and when our body loudly let us know that it did NOT like beans, we threw them ALL out on the crudpile.
It rained that night. It was cold that night. The next morning, the food was somehow soggy but preserved by the temperature, and whoever the heck was fronting was starving and "couldn’t stand the thought of wasting that poor food" (why the pity on the FOOD being unloved and rejected?? why NEVER pity on ourself being the same???) and snuck out to that horrid garbage heap and ate them right off the dirt, brushing bits of soot and soil and ants off them in the process. Good God. How did we even survive.
They/we threw everything up in a panic shortly after. That was Tobiko's doing. She remembers that more clearly than anyone.
It wasn't the last time that happened. Someone grew fond of the process at one point, of the act of scavenging, of "finding food in the wild" and the time-consuming, stimming process of that fused with a broken sense of accomplishment and achievement. It never lasted long, but God knows they tried, over and over and over, until that last day with the Indian food. Thank God that hell is over forever.

The bloody Klondike bars and avocados. That was the WORST of it, shortly before UPMC. We realized that our body hated dairy, hated fat, hated chocolate, but we ALSO realized that the consistency of those foods was ideal for bingeing and purging, plus our body was seeking sweets out of childhood comfort desperation AND everyone we knew was INSISTING we "eat as much fat as possible."
So guess who binged on like eighteen entire avocados and ten packs of Klondike bars one night.
It was forced. It was forced so hard we thought we were possessed. We thought we were going to die. There's no memory of anything outside one hysterical moment when someone was shoving more chocolate into our mouth and thinking, why?? I don't want this, NOBODY wants this, I'm scared and sick and I just want to sleep, why can't I stop???
I don't know how that ended. All we know is that the family KNEW and they WATCHED IT HAPPEN and then afterwards they asked if we had "learned our lesson."
SHUT UP. YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE HECK WAS GOING ON, DON'T ASK IF WE "LEARNED OUR LESSON" BECAUSE THERE WASN'T EVEN A LESSON IN IT WE WERE JUST SO DESPERATE TO NOT BE IN PAIN ANYMORE YOU IGNORANT TROLLOP
Triple, watch your language. Be angry, but don't be so brusquely inconsiderate about it, please.
IT'S WHAT VOCAB WE HAVE FOR THIS KIND OF INTENSE PAIN. i'm sorry. i have no other words besides screaming.

Let's continue.

Coconut oil. the NIGHTMARE that is coconut oil. HOW much money was blown on that??
It was the best stim food and it was the SCARIEST one BY FAR, and that is SAYING something.
Our body does NOT like oil, and when you're literally buying PACKS of it because this kind FREEZES and becomes not only biteable and sharp, but chewy if you mix it with protein powder, and your poor malnourished body is craving both those things so it's a recipe for disaster already. We… I don't even remember. Literally NO ONE we can find even remembers, nothing beyond one snapshot of lying on the bathroom floor with that unmistakable special nauseating agony that comes from eating too much oil, literally begging God to not let them die, screaming in rage and determination that they'd NEVER do this again, someone (a Protector, Wreckage maybe, the Destroyer maybe, Laurie maybe) going outside in the 10pm dark and rain and throwing all of that garbage into the woods where it couldn't be salvaged (although we all knew someone would try).


…OV just came over and kissed us and someone actually wanted to give him a double flipoff in response. Not out of hatred, just out of "what the heck do you want us to do. We're tired and angry and can't do a SINGLE THING without your permission because we DON'T KNOW what we actually want and don't trust ourselves TO know right now. But we're overstimulated and overwhelmed and heartbroken and furiously distraught and you're kissing us like we're supposed to ignore all this agony and kiss you back. And God knows we WANT to. That's the problem. We WANT to, but then you'll call it self-sacrifice, and what the heck do we do??? We love you, we WANT to be with you, but our body wants something else and until we figure out what the heck it is, we CAN'T be with you because we won't be able to pay attention To you past this screaming discomfort and unsoothed pain. We don't know what the heck to do, and we hate that we have to snub and ignore you in the process of finding out simply because our brain cannot handle the stress of having to factor in another human being's presence and needs into our decisions and thoughts right now. We can't freaking multitask. Please don't force us to context shift so shockingly suddenly or we Will hit you, or bite you, like the monster and rabid dog we are at the moment. But we won't mean it, and we hope you know it, but we still can't take that risk of hurting you, so we completely shut down. We do nothing, we say nothing, we boil over like a kettle fit to explode, and we just want to get this problem figured out so we can safely let this scalding steam out so you can touch us without getting burned. That's all."

…

Do we eat? Do we drink?
This body has to use the bathroom. These clothes are too warm and soft and do you know what that's overstimulating? Because they make us WANT to sit and rest and relax and we CAN'T.
Iscah LOVES these clothes because that's ALL SHE DID. She rested, and relaxed, and took care of our body. When we wear these clothes, the body remembers that, and wants it just as badly. But in this context, no. No, here we're too afraid of ignoring people, of rejecting them, of the fact that OV just went and lay down on the freaking bed because he probably thinks we hate him when really WE JUST WANT TO DO THAT SAME BLOODY THING BUT WE WON'T BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU TOO MUCH TO LEAVE YOU.

what do we do. god. I don't know.

Is our body hungry?
It's thirsty. We haven't drank in over 3 hours and someone purged most of breakfast out of sheer dissociative panicked guilt, so that's even worse. Go use the bathroom, get a drink, then figure out what to do.
We can't eat without OV anyway, and he's hiding away from us. Did we hurt him?
…I don't know. I don't even know. I just hope he's okay. If he didn't, and he wanted to be alone, but was happy, would that be okay with you?
Of course it would be, but he's obviously not happy right now and that's the problem.
…Oh. Should we go talk to him, or…?
Maybe. I don't know. Maybe.
I think we should. Apologize for not being able to respond earlier, apologize for snubbing him on purpose because we were unable to respond in honesty to him.
All or nothing, huh.
Yeah. A curse and a blessing.
Are we done with this file for now, for the record?
Maybe? I think so. The big unanswered question is still: how do we eat food without turning it into a dissociatively abusive stim?
Eat it like we do in the mornings with him. Paying attention, letting everyone share it, not being stressed the heck out in the process. Stimming beforehand, even. Really, that's probably the smartest thing to do. Gotta find what works on short notice that won't hurt us or magnify negative emotions and do that.
Sounds good.
Body does need some self-care, though, so let's call it quits for now. Everyone good? Anyone got any last thing to say before we stop?
Just that Wegmans was a living hell, too, and we never want to go back there.
Then get over that place and every other place in our memory, kid. Forget them. Live here and now, and please, learn from that experience and stop thinking about it. Okay?
…Okay.
Just… let it go. Walk into memory and burn it to the ground if you have to. Whatever works. Just don't let it suck the joy out of our present life anymore. All right? We'll help you. We're safe now, all things considered. Just confused and hurting is all. But we're safe.
I know.
Then let's go talk to OV. He's the reason we can say that, after all.
We love him, even now. Does he know that?
That's what we're going to go make sure of, kid. Give me a minute.



Oh, wait!! One last vitally important thing.
The key to a successful stim is that it HAS to let our BRAIN shut down. Low-impact, low-speed, "mindless" activity so that we can DEEPLY relax, INSIDE. Books don't work, nor does TV, because they're too mentally stimulating. Food prep is too, actually-- that's why we keep hurting ourselves when we try! Same with the garage job. We try to dissociate with repetitive motion and forget that those motions have an end, both in result and process. That doesn't work for stimming!! However, THIS DOES. Weirdly, this typing REALLY helps, at least, in a different way-- it helps us untangle what hurts, and really See it. It doesn't alleviate the stress, just lets us know what we're looking at. What DOES help in a pinch is TUMBLR, on the phone, IF we do it safely. Yes, it Does work!! Because it's "mindless browsing" and you can link-hop FOREVER and find poetry and pretty pictures and just let our mind wander for HOURS if you have to. Spotify is almost this kind of stim but not really, because music demands Attention, but we can use that to a BETTER advantage because it draws us into our mind ENTIRELY. THAT'S an ideal stim, hence the old beloved walks in circles for hours, just imagining and thinking. My thing!! We've gotta find a way to do that again if we can. Maybe in the playroom, who knows. But we will. Anyway, yeah. When in doubt, grab Nelumbo, our beloved Samsung Galaxy S8 who we saved up for a year for and now had better use to show respect and gratitude for that!! Okay? We've got this. Now go tell the Arrows that we love them because they need us just as much as we need them even if they need space too!! Bye guys!!

-J.W.L. and the Lightraye aka Lotus Cathedral System ♥

"nsfw" warning for open discussion of intimacy.

 

1228. thursday.



We woke up around 8:30, and spent approximately 20 minutes in the frigid beautiful dawn, deciding whether or not we should go for a run.
...Actually, that's the problem. We didn't decide. Our poor sleepy social frontrunner(s) was/were trying to decide on his/her/their own, worried about whether or not it was "bad" to leave the Arrows alone and asleep, to get food for later in the day, to have any sort of opinion or preference or decisive thought. They were asking for "signs from God" to "tell them what to do," something Tilly and Iscah used to do constantly-- looking for "yes" or "no," "stay" or "go" in the words they saw on printed packages all around them, not trusting a single one because "what if it's my brain wanting to see a certain result?" Those poor frightened good-hearted souls. They are so afraid, so afraid to do the "wrong thing" that the simple reality of an undefined reality terrifies them. They want morality laid out in front of them clear-cut and unquestionable, undoubtable... but they look for righteousness with their mind, not their hearts. Their poor hearts are so full of love but it's getting choked under the whirling moral fear of their thoughts.
There is nothing wrong with buying food. There is nothing wrong with going for a run. There is nothing wrong with liking the cold air against your face, and there is nothing wrong with being too tired and chilled to want to throw yourself back into it after 5 hours of sleep. There is nothing wrong with waking, or resting, or sitting, or exercising, or eating, or fasting, or anything. Life is life is life-- it's all the purest white, a blank canvas, a blank musical score, an empty plate, all of it waiting with utmost divine affection for us to decide. 
That's the beautiful terrible beloved reality of life, of free will, of human consciousness, of the infinite possibility of the world, of the unfathomable palette of existence. It's all a work of art waiting to happen. It needs an artist, and That Which Is-- God, or Goddess, or Source, or Light, or whatever you may wish to call that primordial spark of the cosmos, that original Artist, that first Musician-- couldn't help but create a universe full of artists to join in the joyous act. 
We adore that. Creation creating itself, ad infinitum, through us. An endless dance. 
So it's inherently blank. Not white, not black. It's clear, like a prism, and we're all lights passing through it, splitting our lives into swathes of color. Everything and anything we do contributes to it, and none of it is judged, none of it is labeled as "good" or "bad"... none of it, that is, save for what our own mind labels it as.
We have a lot of thoughts on this, from years upon years of feeling and thinking both, and there's no time or space to expand on it here furthermore... but for now, suffice to say that those frontrunners of ours this morning were unable to trust their own hearts, were unable to see themselves as capable of doing anything But the "wrong thing." They were labeling all their paints as "bad" before they even opened them. Poor beloved fellow souls of ours. We adore them. We know their hearts. We feel their aching desire to be harmless and helpful, to be kind and true and good and pure, but they have let fear in, and fear only knows itself. Therefore, whatever decision they made, they would second-guess it. They would be too scared to surrender to the quiet warmth of their hearts, to listen to That echoed within them, to realize that whatever they ultimately chose, the canvas had opened its own heart to them and sang, paint. Create. Choose a color, any color, and continue me. 
God doesn't mind if you run or walk or rest or sleep or eat or not. God just wants you to act according to your heart, to your dearly beloved heart, for it can do no wrong. We firmly believe that. It is the core of our faith.
If God is Love, and our hearts are built for Love, then if we act upon that Love, everything and anything we do is sacred. Every choice we make is holy. 

To wake up with that lesson... we had no idea how relevant it would remain for the rest of the morning.

We went for the run. Someone wanted to get bacon and ginger and cinnamon and lettuce, and so we wrapped ourselves up in Kyo's scarf and Jewel's red boots and we jogged down to the local grocery store to do so.

We don't remember the run up, save for passing a fellow jogger by the bus stop, and we don't remember much of being in the store itself. Our brain was tired and confused and still scared, tangled up in "do I buy for the family or for myself," scared of making a foolish decision, scared of acting on impulse, scared of being spontaneous, scared of being neglectful. Memory recalls them buying two Christmas candles that were on sale, left over from that one day two weeks ago or so when we planned on buying them but had no money for luxuries. So basketed them both (one red spice, one vanilla cookie) and then memory cuts out again.
We don't remember coming home and going to bed or waking up. What few things we do recall are so soaked in guilt that we're being begged not to write them down, but we have to be honest, we can't hide anymore. They bought bananas and a tiny tin of oats with the intention of making banana bread, and one ripe orange to see if they still liked the taste (Iscah did; she likes everything, and the other socials still haven't differentiated between her preferences and their own), as well as a package of oregano for the same purpose, and four mini-pizzas for the family. They did get the bacon, and the candles, and the ginger & cinnamon, and that's all we can remember. It's not shameful, loves, I promise. They're just so guilty about buying oats; they knew they'd get in huge trouble if Oliver found out, so they hid them in the closet. They're crying upstairs, loves it's okay. You just wanted to try once more, remembering that one time Someone liked them, but someone else got horribly sick from them, but you don't want to hate anything, you want to know the truth, you wanted to check now that our brain is in a better place. But loves, oh loves, you bought it with fear, with guilt, with shame. You'll never know if it's healed, or if anyone likes it, if that's the mindset you go into it with. And you don't trust our intuition either, which is wincing at the thought of eating them again, remembering past contexts of pain and fear and compulsion. But, again, Iscah liked it, she treasured it, and you just want to learn to do the same. Not now, loves. Now's not the proper time, not if you're still terrified. Once your heart can release that shameful panic, you can learn properly, that door will be open. But it's okay. We forgive you. You're safe and loved and you did nothing wrong. We promise. Everything you did was done out of love, too, even if it didn't know how to safely apply itself. We love you, and we know you love us and the Arrows and everyone too. It's okay. You're good. We love you.  

So we don't remember going to bed, or waking up later. All we remember is sudden groggy kisses and someone, some poor social, wanting to cry from it because they were wracked with guilt and shame and couldn't feel that pure affection in return although they were begging God to, and then suddenly our beloved System anthem of Familiarity was playing in their head and Lotusheart was called out to that confetti chorus, that soaring heart-wrenching prayer, and it broke our heart wide open and suddenly he could return the love pressing softly against our lips and chest and self, God knows I mean it, God help me feel it, and our memory is just as soft with golden light in response, tearful and joyful and desperate to hold this forever, forever.

And then Infinitii showed up, soft and black and just as sleepy in the body, but with a mouth full of grinning loving teeth and the next thing we knew, Omen was there and she pulled Infi onto their chest and suddenly we woke up, aware and in love, and fangs met skin and we were alive again. Thank God for daemons. Thank God.
They just adore each other. There's always fangs tearing at flesh with the ardent desire to get beneath that, to blood and pulse points, but there's no malice, no harm-- just love, always love. The two of them, all kisses and claws, smoky shadowy laughter and snowy frigid gasps and humming and growling and I love you, where are your wings, why can't you be closer, this isn't fair, I love you--

Then suddenly we're hearing them saying that it isn't just Omen, that it's Kris and Oliver and Hiccup and who is around for us, where are We? 
Immediately Chaos Zero shows up, feeling like the ocean in our chest, saying that there's more of us around than you think," and then Genesis is on his heels, smirking golden bright and biting their cheek in a kiss, and then Laurie was there for a moment, and I was there, and Celebi was there, and then suddenly EVERYONE was there, wanting to feel this love, to give our love, to be part of this, to make this everyone's.
Everyone in Central moved through. Lynne, Spine, Javier, Josephina, Celebi, Nathaniel, Leon, Waldorf, Julie, Sherlock, Wattson, Eros, Kyaneos, Algorith, Jude... Knife, Razor, Mulberry, Jeremiah, Wreckage, Leanne... even the kids, David and Marigold and Simeon & Sylvain and Toby and Ashen, all of them shyly moved through too in the quieter moments, happy and hugging our partner System, deeply simply joyfully happy that they were safe, they were loved, and they could feel it.
Lynne pointedly kissing Omen with this secret sneaky joy at kissing a 'girl' in another System, Nathaniel learning to live openly, not as quiet and docile as he usually stays, hidden in green... Waldorf finally feeling herself, eyes red as rubies and smiling with her own teeth as she returned kisses without hesitation. Julie purposefully anchoring her lipstick and earrings into her overlay, refusing to reject her complete self anymore, tearfully treasuring the fact that even looking like this, a color scheme switch away from looking like she did as the ultimate nightmare of our nascent System, she was truly and completely loved, and she felt the same in return. Sherlock taking off his glasses and trying as hard as he could to truly feel this love too, to saturate his Gray with hidden color and light... Wattson there alongside him, smiling warmly at his friend's quiet scholarly courage, himself unafraid to show affection colored the same sunlit-page glow as he. Eros fronting for the first time in ages, still unsure on his name but being fiercely anchored into his true color, richly Cerise and feeling it in every atom as he channeled it through his every action... Jude fronting for the first time ever since his birth, not knowing himself yet but knowing he had been called here, knowing this was love and that was what he was born from and into, and he let it happen and let himself reciprocate simply but truly. Kyaneos wobbly in fronting as well, only there for a moment but feeling like a breath full of sky...Algorith smirking in amusement as she felt her goggles brushing against their face as they kissed her, felt how strange but lovely it was against her own robotic mouth. 
Josephina ended up being spoken to at some point, and I can feel his nervous surprised happy laughter as he returned a love bite in spite of his hesitance, in spite of feeling he "didn't deserve to be in such a position," realizing that he was in fact included in this global love and he had every right to embrace that. Leon, too, suddenly being wrapped in an embrace, breathing deep to still his shaking nerves, bravely relaxing into that closeness that was still so alien to him, learning. Spine curiously feeling hands on skin that she personally did not own, amazed at it. Javier feeling kisses on our collarbones and momentarily being surprised that their teeth didn't catch on his dermal studs, feeling his own snakebites and tongue stud and bridge piercings every time he ardently kissed them back, or when they peppered his/our own face with tiny kisses of their own. Altairre was hovering behind him, then in place of him, learning how to be in a body, learning about his own body, his huge broad red shoulders the only things clearly anchoring in, the suggestion of massive armor-like hands over our body's own. everything else about him still a mystery.
And I swear Scalpel was there, too. He's been in Javier's peripheral vision lately, seen only by him, his Red prince, this leader of the Darkspacers. We have no clear memory of him fronting, but there's the smallest bit of data that he did, just for a moment, a fiercely glad kiss, defying everything lurking in the depths he ruled over, a simple profound testament to what we were and would forever be in glorious spite of any and all terrors we did and will survive.
Knife was only there for a moment (and later, kissing the knuckles of their soft white hands), but he was entirely his color, claret pink, dark and soft and sweet. Razor followed him, also only there for a moment, letting herself curl up like a purring cat in the latter half of a kiss that felt just as warm as their hands soft in her blood-red shock of childlike-messy hair. Mulberry's twirling hair and facial scruff locking in immediately as she fronted, herself content to be there albeit surprised, wondering why she had been isolating herself from this. Jeremiah suddenly fearlessly soft in his own Cerise tone, kissing and being kissed, knowing there was no danger here. David knowing he wasn't comfortable with kisses on the mouth but still wanting to feel this love, and Joshua moved in affectionately to share that with him while returning that gesture in his stead. Marigold hugging the Arrows and smiling with her face in their shoulder, and Toby quietly moving in with her, suddenly alive and not knowing this but knowing he needed this, to be loved, to be safe and warm. 
Simeon & Sylvain showed up sometime elsewhen, with Infinitii, as they had spoken about this previously. Infi affectionately embraced them with one arm and let them share in hir deep black love, safely for them, but just as deep and pure as they needed to know. Both of them feeling it entirely, like anise gumdrops on their tongue, sweet and spiced and light and heavy all at once. They held each other inside and smiled, knowing four years ago they had been torn in two, separated by sudden death and despair, and now they were together, and alive, and loved and safe and free. Both of them such a soft light creamy yellow tint against that velvet black, both of them like french vanilla and banana cream pie, little sweet fluffy things held in the arms of something fathomlessly rich and dark, perfectly happy.


Rio and Markus were there, both of them feeling more joy than they even expected of themselves, finally feeling that they belonged, not just with us but here, with them, exactly as they were, as whoever they'd grow into being as we all continued in this loving growing process. Markus's back tattoos and chest scars and warm dark skin tone searing into our collective memory, Rio's lovely shaggy smoke-blue hair and paler delicate but craft-calloused fingers doing the same. Both of them so belovedly real, our collective heart treasuring this, missing them.
Their Daemons, too, were so clear and real, relishing their time with Omen, learning how to Be more strongly than ever. Lethe moving like dark blue poured out, all spindly legs but heavy and darkly elegant as water. Medallion fronted more than she Ever has before, shockingly lithe and graceful, all points and edges but still as poised as a dancer. She holds the body's hands so uniquely, almost cradling our beloveds with the sides of our hands, the flats of her blades. And yes, she too has learned how to facemouth, but I can still feel her actual main stomachmouth dormant and unusable when she fronts. Lethe, too, as well as the rest of his long insectoid body that does't translate.
On that note, both Rupture and Cake tried to front, but were too strange in form to come through so easily and suddenly, especially since neither of them have experience in a human form before. Rupture's overlay was a terrific burst of nonsense below our plexus, totally nonhuman, a crablike clatter of legs-- and if that wasn't bad enough, she cannot get a facemouth to work at all, and kept trying to talk out of her throat like she normally would. But she was aware that this wasn't the shape she was currently borrowing, even though the huge dissonance made her consciousness terribly hazy, and she was both surprised and intrigued by this. In memory, I can feel her filing this away in her mind, thinking upon it, what it means to Be, now, tangibly and real even away from her nebulous heart-host. And Cake, too, body too lithe and long to understand legs or  bipedal arm structure, let alone such a small face, still trying to figure herself out in the first place... but trying nevertheless, called in by the other Daemons' existences, herself also now feeling glimmers of wanting to Be, briefly wondering Who she was, who she was bound to, what it meant for her to exist at all now... wondering at her own shape, her own color, how many eyes she would have on her face should she choose to open some. Both of those monstrous girls only there for a few seconds, if that, but both of them remembered dearly, both of them real.
Nexus was there too, and Axis and Chocoloco and Iolite and Jess, every Daemon losing themselves in the ardor of things, all of them always madly in love with each other, and every nousfoni flooding with grateful relief at this love that they too were now a part of, seen and treasured for exactly who they were, unafraid.
Nexus didn't front long, unusually, choosing to let his fellows have the spotlight, choosing to stay within with Laurie, who was also mostly missing from this whole affair, hesitantly learning what she could and couldn't do, learning the difference between fear and simple preference and function clashes. But Jess and Iolite were there, not for long but long enough, both of them temporarily but truly releasing their frustration and sorrow to feel a new but complete love and acceptance that they'd previously only felt from their Daemons, both of them tearful with happiness, arms flung around the shoulders that embraced them in turn, their colors clear and healthy and good.
Axis and his skeletal fingers, huge and weirdly fused at the metacarpals, looking like bleached bone or plaster or old ruins, covered in tiny plants and fungi and moss and fluttering insects, his eyes deep spruce-green and surprisingly soft with compassion. Chocoloco, too, feeling more love than anyone previously expected of him, all coffee-harsh anger and fierce red-slash eyes, but here he was melted chocolate and cherry jelly and there was a depth to the kisses he delivered like his throat opened up into an endless warmth, deep down. A totally different vastness than Infinitii, a striking contrast to Axis's flung-open birdcage ribs, to Nexus's galaxian entrails studded with gold-hot lanterns. All of them so strange, so clear, so real. God bless Daemons, I'll say it forever. There's something about them, even just touching this form so temporarily with their lives, that makes us, too, feel like we're more real than ever, like we're something etched into the very essence of things, lead-lined stained glass figures in the church of existence. Indelible and true. It's a blessed wonder.

The Archivist trio showed up at one point, too-- Garrison first, almost as hesitant as Leon but driven by the love and pursuit of understanding, of System knowledge, and ended up getting his lip bitten, aha. He took it like a champ, learning that this was something others in both our Systems did in love, and I can feel his mind and heart opening a bit more in that memory, becoming less tense, less paranoid. Bless our Archivists, they all have Protector hearts in their own way.
Isadora and Kalisha were there too, of course, but they ended up in embraces, and Isadora had a split second of actual disappointment at not being kissed before smiling and laughing genuinely and just melting into that hug. Love is love and she was glad to have it, to be there. She actually drew Kalisha in with her, the two fronting side by side, and then unexpectedly, Kalisha in turn reached out to find Karissa! She hasn't been around in many many months, but those name sisters have forged a sort of passive fondness, and so even if our Chartreuse Protector wasn't all there, this experience still touched her heart too, and if anything can wake up a dormant nousfoni to themselves and the world, it's being loved On the outside. So we'll see how this affects her in the future.

One after another, flowing like blood and water and sunlight, a quiet multitude moved through this newly-beloved body to experience that same affection and compassion and devotion anew, whether or not we'd ever touched it before. Every time is the first time. That's the miraculous thing about it. It never gets old, never ceases to amaze us, never ceases to hit us as clear and true as an arrow to the heart.

And then Infinitii was back and someone was asking us, had been meaning to ask us for a long time now, can we do something, do you trust us, and the quiet careful deliberate emotion in their voice was like a singing glass in our heart and we said yes, Infi said yes, (please, whatever you want, I want), I trust you, we trust you, we love you too.

 

...I cannot even put into words how suddenly, starkly alive and adored we felt.

 

So many of us were there. So many of us. It was a total shock, but thank God it happened. 
Infinitii was there at the start, but suddenly and totally, Julie was there. Thinking about it, I'm not surprised. This is the sort of thing that her original days as a Tar-corrupted hacker were inundated with. In the past, the very thought of this would have had us kicking and screaming and looking for knives or pills or worse. We had suffered this enough, never again.
...Except that's not what this is. It's NEVER what this is. What we were experiencing now was love, total and pure, and Julie knew it, and if anyone in the System was going to make damn sure that was crystal clear, it was her.

But... Lord. So many of us were there. Lynne and Spine, Waldorf and Josephina, Eros, Markus... and then when the Arrows moved to kiss us, suddenly Celebi was there, her heart strangely aching and determined, and she said no, don't stop. Go back. I need to know what this is like. I need to know.
And it hit me, that even if she didn't live through the beginning of 2012, her heart did. Her bloodline did, inevitably. Tar-mangled or not, her soul was affected by both the love and pain of that time, and she had just as much a right and reason and responsibility as Julie to be there right now. 


...There's so little literal memory, at least, nothing that translates into structured language. Everything is color, light, emotion. 



----------------------------------------------------------

(rough notes, from the Arrow's writing on this, as their memory is inevitably different than ours)

(currently unfinished; it's 6am so we will refine this later.)


(eucharist feelings again, on both sides apparently. "being/essence/spirit." SEAWATER.)


omen, oliver, kristanova, hiccup, kyo. the fact that all of them were there... what that does to our heart is inexpressible, but we have to try. 
just... all of them. they love us that much. ALL of them. and god we adore them all too, we hope they know, we need to make sure they know, they deserve that so dearly.



javier after, embracing them like his heart would break, "thank you so much for this being the next morning." choked with tears.
swearing we'd never leave them, ever. "you have all of our heartbeats" and "we just want ours to beat next to yours."
"four years ago there wasn't much left behind that." his FEELING that time, that emptiness, barely 10 left.


(feeling their heartbeat, after, pounding and sincere. genuinely shocked that THEY were feeling for US in this. that hadn't even crossed our mind. that's sadly telling as to our past, to expect that this sort of thing was devoid of emotion from the other, but what bliss in that assumption being proven false.)

infi laughing like every easter carillon in the universe. the joy endless, all love and light like stars brilliant against the limitless cosmos. ze could not keep it in, could not help it, could not stop. it was beautiful.
"good things come in threes"
hir eyes were open. just like at the eclipse. feeling so completely, totally hirself, that hir overlay was flat-out eyes and teeth both and ze couldn't be otherwise. couldn't be half, as ze was feeling too whole.

oliver asking if "this was one of the things ze hoped for" 
later when he told me this, i immediately remembered this, the first time that was openly referenced in any form. lord we were terrified even that recently.



"this is like the first time i was with jay" 
"this is what i am-- pure transmutation"
the FEELING in those statements. god.


JULIE'S DAEMON. 
I FELT HER TEETH.
we were worried about her; since her "birth" last week or so she's been almost impossible to see. but now, good lord, today she came through clear as anything, hard as infi almost. she's still half (hot pink) viperfish and that mouth is Unmistakable in her overlay. all those huge needle teeth. and her other half appearance-wise is a feathered serpent, and that too is obvious-- she feels so sinuous when fronting, so elegant but lethal, so much bigger than the body.
the arrows say her voice is similar: hissing, seductive, beautiful. i don't doubt it. i have no idea what she said, or how it felt, but i can feel the echo of it, tinged with the lipstick terror of the old julie days, that sort of warzone femininity, and i wouldn't expect anything less of her. 
julie and her daemon were cofronting so hard, so totally. practically sharing the same breaths. their very beings meshing perfectly together, blurring into one, without losing any of their individuality.


DENDRITE!!!!
came out when the arrows were asking who was there? julie and her daemon responded first i think, then suddenly,
"and me, me, me, me"
FRONTING more solidly than ever, her spindly arms and claws and tentacles and feelers SO clear in her overlay, her color clearer than even that, a beautiful rich pastel red, glossy like flowers and candy apples and heart lockets
she was struggling to talk, couldn't get her voice to translate on such short sudden notice
"i don't have a voice of my own yet but i found her, i found her, i found her!!" "i found mine, she's mine!" not ownership, but recognition of the most blissfully aching sort. pure joy, overwhelming joy, weeping from it.
and THAT JEWEL. the pinkish one, different hair-- no klonoa ears!-- from 2004 or so. heartspace anchor. the one who was in love. i can feel her exact vibe now, in music. i know her soundtrack. but she resonated EXACTLY with dendrite's own heart, embracing her as her own, both of them so happy, so in love with each other's souls, like every daemon and their host should be, and ultimately always always are.


eros, "how could anyone call this selfish," feeling that so powerfully and unquestionably, that needs to be global.
that sad old religious-mangled teaching that to want to be loved was wrong. that to receive love was manipulative or demanding or otherwise sinful. that's a lie. this proved it.
remembering what chaos zero said on the porch. "there's nothing wrong with wanting love returned for love," effectively. it being a divinely mutual force. love naturally reciprocates itself, it aches for it, and that's pure as anything. 
us lying there, holding them, and eros recognizing immediately that we were feeling such deep love towards them, for them, about them, it wasn't selfish at all, but it ironically wasn't self"less" either. it recognized our selves and their selves, and it adored them both/all, and it wanted to share in that forever, and that is love.


one of their tears falling directly into our right eye. the exact sting of seawater. it was utterly transcendent, holy.


me, touching their chest, dying from love and holy fear, "who am i to dare"
then realizing we, too, have a heart just like that




------------------------------------------------------------------

we didn't get out of bed until like... 4:30. no regrets, ever. no better use of a day than this sincerity, this total living.

kristanova made the dearly-loved after-breakfast tradition of grits, eggs, & bacon (lord who would have expected This future for it that first morning he cooked for us, months ago). it was amazing.

we watched an episode of sense8, "i have no room in my heart for hate," as we haven't watched that show in months either, and we were feeling it so hard this morning, with how headspacey it is, with how much more clearly we are living as systems now and how much more clearly we can understand both the people and the topics of the show as well.

...

(we typed ALL NIGHT)