Here I was, dying inside, and they were talking about perpetual motion.

On fanaticism, girlhood, moving beyond, and the endless search for 

emptiness, prompted by my life's collision with Nicholas Hoult's.

At seventeen, I was invincible and stupid. 

I was a year out of high school and, having finally left behind the suffocating (and very limited) confines of my Catholic secondary education, I was eager to discover what else was out there for myself. I was reading over ten books a month. I was writing poetry almost compulsively. I was exploring my city and getting mugged and learning to love both train rides and walks home. I was starting to become preoccupied with planning and putting together a webzine with a small team composed of my friends, which in a couple of months would become Elision, its name picked out of a list of obscure music terms, referring to the occurrence in which a note begins where another note ends.

I hadn’t fucked up my life yet, but I would. 

I wasn’t dating or rounding up the requisite vices of a reckless youth—not for a lack of trying, mind you. That kind of thing just didn’t come naturally to me, I guess. It still doesn’t. Instead, like a true-blue loser, I busied myself with a slew of come-and-go fixations, live music, bands, and the internet. My days turned into a series of hotel lobbies, fiction and indiscretion, and close encounters, too close, with false heroes who no longer matter to me as much, if at all. Years have passed since I deleted their music.

This part of my life is very well documented. I feel like it’d be redundant at this point to recount it all here, and, if I’m being honest, downright embarrassing, although I know it sort of makes no sense without context to the people who have no idea what I’m talking about. But I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t miss it. I miss my friends most of all. “Look at our lives,” we’d say in jest, echoing some cyber-phrase we had learned off of Tumblr back when it was socially acceptable to be on it. “Look at our choices.” 

And I do look at them now, and I think, Well, shit. All those horrible decisions. All that wasted time. 

But what’s a past self if not the most ideal recipient of a swift kick in the face? 

The friends I made on the internet because they liked the same bands that I did, we’ve come to look back on these days as though we were buddies who’d been through war. We were, for lack of a better word, part of a scene. It felt at the time like it would never end, but a subculture—especially one rooted in music—was always going to be ephemeral, a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing. Eventually, of course, we were pulled apart by differing interests, college, and whatever else. For me, I suppose, it was Elision and having outgrown the very musicians I once cried over and claimed I would love for the rest of my life. Somehow, we turned into our very own “Where are they now?” 

We began to think of ourselves as “veterans” of a dying movement. We’d seen it all and done it all. We were growing up and we were ready to move on. 

*

When I think of the year I turned seventeen, I look at it in terms of markers—what I was listening to, what I was obsessed with, what I loved. One of these things was Nicholas Hoult. 

I first became truly conscious of who he was two years earlier when I found him in an issue of Teen Vogue. I remember finding it endearing that he’d had no idea who Tom Ford even was, aside from his cameo in Zoolander, before filming A Single Man. The article mentioned that he’s 6’3”, and in the accompanying photo, his pale blue jacket and the sky around him brought out the color of his eyes. 

That was the year I really started paying attention to Skins, already a couple of years too late. I had been too young and a little too un-hip to have been able to fully appreciate it at the time of its original release. His turn as Tony Stonem, the Sartre-reading, choir-singing, ambiguously bisexual (and equally ambiguously sociopathic) antihero with a heart of gold, gave me all kinds of epiphanies. 

He became Hank McCoy, he read a Nick Hornby audiobook and did funny voices, and he played a zombie in love. In real life, he was shy, sweet, and self-deprecating. He was the ultimate: this impossible dreamboat, this great ideal, on whom I projected my hopeless teenybopper admiration. He would never be within my reach. 

Magazines I’d read had called his type “cotton candy.” You could fall in love with him, and you could move on with your life. 

So when it was announced that Nick was coming to Manila for AsiaPOP Comicon, I was, as the kids say, shook. 

I found myself weeks later in a hotel lobby, alone and uncertain. Call it a Fangirl’s Lament: How do I unlearn the obsessive tendencies that anchor me to overemotion? How do you like something casually without needing to experience more? The days leading up to the Con and Nick’s arrival had come and gone, leaving me an unruly, unraveling bundle of nerves. This combination of excitement and unease manifested physically—I could feel it at the tips of my fingers, and dead center in my chest. The weirdness of it all settled over me and clung to my skin. 

Like I said, I was “retired.” I’d left that life behind a long time ago. My old crew was gone; when I asked my friends to come with me for old times’ sake, none of them were free. Four years ago, I didn’t even have to ask. I was too old for this shit, I no longer belonged. Well-adjusted, stable adults did not go to hotels to orchestrate meet-cutes with the boys of their girlhood dreams. I knew this, and yet at that moment I had become very convinced that I must take a photo of Nick on film. To do that, I needed to rely on old habits and attempt to make it happen. 

But the whole time I was there all I did was ask myself, “What am I doing here?”

My exploits as a teen superfan had never been so existential. 

I walked out of there at half past noon with nothing to show for it. I wasn’t disappointed—I was relieved. My body lagged with the after-effects of an unwarranted adrenaline rush that went to waste. I could live with it, but the blue-moon aspect of the situation, almost farcical in its far-fetched reality, followed me around. This was never going to happen again, and I’d be foolish to let it pass me by.

I needed closure. 

Before I knew it, I was standing second in line for a photo session with Nick, having spent over two thousand bucks for the assurance and the opportunity. All around me were people in costume. Talk about surreal: I was psyching myself up, telling myself that I was really doing this, in the presence of an inflatable velociraptor and the Winter Soldier and a Power Ranger and Prince Gumball and Jubilation Lee and BoJack Horseman. Cons are something else. 

What took place after has been playing and replaying on a loop in the back of my mind since that day, always happening, happening, happening in its own little Groundhog Day universe, so I’m going to write the next part in the present tense. 

The photo session starts fifteen minutes early. My first real glimpse of Nicholas Hoult arrives in the form of a silhouette, seen through the sheer black curtain of the makeshift booth. The ushers set the curtain aside to prepare for the oncoming chaos, and there he is. His eyes are blue even from where I’m standing, several feet away. I let out a “Holy shit” without realizing, and the chatty usherette guiding me goes, “Same!” and high-fives me. 

When it’s my turn, Nick gets into a faux fighting stance and motions me over, all silliness and charm. The first thing he does when I get to his side is literally pull me into a hug, romance novel clinch cover-style. (It’s at this point that my sanity and composure go out the window.) Note that I’m not allowed to touch him unless he touches me. His shirt feels very soft under my fingers—that much I will remember clearly. He untangles himself from me and says, “Hello, how are you?” 

And I swear I can’t answer for five seconds. 

I’m so far gone that the automatic “I’m doing well, how are you?” failed to initiate in my faulty system. “This is so surreal for me, I’m sorry,” I tell him when I remember how to speak. “I’ve loved you since Skins.” I rehearsed this moment probably a hundred times from the second I was made aware that it could happen. And here I am, fucking it up spectacularly. Still, he tilts his head, body language for I’m flattered, and says, “Aw, thank you so much.” From the delivery, I get the feeling that he means it, even though he’s probably used to it. 

I start to tell him that I loved his Happy, Sad, Confused podcast episode, to let him know I’m not messing around, but he cuts in and asks me what my name is. 

You have to understand. I decided early on not to bother saying my name unprompted, because it wouldn’t matter, anyway. No celebrity I’ve ever met, save for William Beckett, has ever asked me for my name, not even when signing autographs. And now Nicholas Hoult is looking at me, waiting to know what I’m called. It feels so, so nice.

“Fiel,” I croak. 

“Fiel,” he says back. 

We take the photo. Then another. The flash is disorienting. I thank him profusely. I have zero presence of mind. I think I mutter, “See you around.” Which is absolutely ridiculous. I’m never seeing him again. 

It’s over before I know it, of course. 

It will never be over, of course. 

The realizations and regrets hit me as soon as I walk out of the booth and claim my glossy picture. They come to me, at first in singular bursts, then all at once. Not enough eye contact—I’m the worst at it. I never got to ask him about his favorite book, or his favorite Salinger. I might have walked away too soon. The light glinted off my glasses unflatteringly in the photo, and I can’t ever re-do it or fix it. I was already forgetting details: what it was like to look into his eyes up close, the sound of his accent, how it felt to have his head resting in the crook of my neck. 

I was alone. I didn’t have this to look forward to anymore. I didn’t have any war buddies that knew exactly what I was feeling. I was empty, all too suddenly. 

I took the bus home and didn’t dare attempt to make any sense of it. 

*

When I got home from my first day on my first real job, I cried at the dinner table. 

“Why are you crying?” my mom asked, more out of amusement than anything. I had no answer, and to this day I still don’t. I think it had to do with the idea, plain as day, that my life was changing, and I couldn’t hold on to the comfortable constants I’d grown attached to. I couldn’t hide behind ignorance anymore. I was just overwhelmed and exhausted. But it also had to do with the fact that something huge and something wonderful had just happened, and now I didn’t know what to do with myself. All the overthinking and mixed feelings were getting to me. 

Whatever it was, I’m almost certain it was the same reasoning that prompted me to cry, once again at the dinner table, when I got home from meeting Nicholas Hoult. 

Sometimes I almost wish it never happened, that APCC never brought him here in the first place. If you had asked seventeen-year-old me to list things more likely to happen to twenty-one-year-old me than being within zero inches of Nick Hoult, she would have said things like going to the moon or winning the lottery, and she would have been convinced that she wasn’t lying. It was too real, too much, and it left me drained. 

It gets me thinking, now that I’m older, would it always be this way? What if I’m just setting myself up for disappointment every time? Every good thing is probably just escapism in disguise: thirty seconds of brilliance followed by a lifetime of disillusionment.

Then I snap out of it and tell myself: You’ve conversed with Nicholas Hoult! Nicholas Hoult knows your name! Then I snap out of that and tell myself: There’s an entire universe out there. 

I think it’s easy to read this piece and write it off as shallow and juvenile. I’m already doing it, myself. But I also think people shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the emotions experienced by anyone who’s ever loved something fanatically—it’s not being irrational, it’s being unflinchingly honest. Unrestrained. Real. And nobody should ever have to apologize for that, even if it does make us do some pretty screwed-up things.

Maybe I’ll never attain that level of “chill” that allows me to gush over my obsessions without being so emotionally vulnerable all the time. Maybe I’ll never learn to contain what I feel. Maybe next year I’ll be writing this exact same essay about someone else. Maybe I’ll never be too old for any of it, not really. And maybe I don’t really want to be. 

*

Before entering the booth for the photo session with Nick, I left the voice recorder app running on my phone and snuck it into my back pocket while the ushers reiterated that we weren’t allowed to bring anything in. 

I listened to it afterwards. He was so soft-spoken that his voice hardly registered. It makes me think of The Day the Dancers Came, and sometimes I imagine how I would lose the recording. I could accidentally delete it. I could lose track of where to listen so I’d understand what he was saying. I could stop caring altogether, and it wouldn’t matter what happened to it.

The audio is a mess of squealing fans, idle chatter, and white noise. The first time I heard it, I almost thought Nick wasn’t on it at all. But if I strain and really listen for his voice, I can just barely make out that nanosecond in which he spoke my name. 

No matter what I do, it comes and goes fast, and for a second I’m dazed and disappointed all over again. But for what it’s worth, I’ve come to appreciate it for what it is: a beautiful, imperfect, endless moment, now gone. 

photo diary #3

I've been thinking that I should get back to sharing actual concrete moments about my life, even the most minute, boring things, the way I used to when I first started Wonderless. five years ago. (Also, shit, five years?!) So, here's a summary of how I've been for the past few months, as told mostly through shitty phone pics. 

I finally started a real zine collection when I attended Lit UP 4 in June. It was a fundraiser for when the Faculty Center was destroyed by a fire in April, with a mini-bazaar held by independent presses and zine purveyors. There were performances by bands and spoken word poets, too, but once I got what I came for, I bolted out of there and waited for my dad at a McDonald's like a loser. (Double loser, because I saw people from school and pretended I was invisible.) Then I came all the way to Escolta for some zines by Sarah McNeil. Then in July I attended Local Loca's Kontrabando at Cubao X.

I'm obsessed with everything I've gotten so far—they're all so interesting and funny and well-written and intricate and creative. The illustrations and photographs are really good, too, of course. Some of my favorites are Strangers and さまよいます by Aga de los Santos, featuring film photographs taken in Japan; I've Gone Away by Alyssa Africa, a glossy, gorgeous collection of snapshots from her travels; and Feels;21 by Shin, which is full of drawings that convey existential dread, sadness, and dry humor.

Nothing much to say about this, really. I just love the lighting and I was pretty excited to have brought Annie out again, since I hadn't really used her since Singapore.

I was out grocery shopping with my parents at this place in Valenzuela and they had all these plastic cats and dinosaurs scattered throughout. I caught these cuties in a compromising position. I wasn't having the best night at the time but I really want to go back to that supermarket!

I saw the prettiest minimalist repurposed plastic dinosaur planters outside shoemaker and designer Maco Custodio's studio, which happens to be located right along Tandang Sora, very close to where I live. I was there to interview him. It amazed me, and we talked about this, how burgeoning creatives can be found right in the far north, in areas like Novaliches, among auto shops and everything. His studio, which is near his apartment, is in a really home-y compound. You never would have guessed. We were surrounded by his sketches and works in progress, listening to slightly outdated pop music on his radio, safe from hard rain. It was a really cool day for me.  

I got to do a behind-the-scenes/fly-on-the-wall feature on AlDub that I think turned out pretty well—I was never a fan but it was pretty cool witnessing all those raw moments and writing about them. I got to sit (well, stand) in while they filmed an episode of Real Talk and kind of felt like I was Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory. People said the whole Harvest Moon thread felt a little too convenient, but I swear that was the real deal! They also said they liked the piece, and it made our little "10k Club" with thirty thousand views (!), so I was really giddy about that, even if I did make a mistake that went viral thanks to an oversight when I was transcribing what they said during the interview. (I was mortified, of course.)

On July 30th, CNN Life partnered with Ayala Museum for its annual Inspire Every Day event, which doubled as the website's official launch. In the morning I attended a talk by Keiji Ashizawa about his project, Ishinomaki Laboratory, at the Met. Then I had lunch at Harrison Plaza's Village Square, which has an indoor koi pond surrounded by benches and bisected by a tiny bridge under a skylight. I loved that it was practically deserted, and, again, how it feels frozen in time. I wish I could've stayed longer, but I was on a pretty tight schedule.

I arrived at Ayala Museum a few minutes before my afternoon shift and visited the exhibits before clocking in, so to speak. I helped give away free totes at our interactive booth (more of a box, really). It was three hours of standing and speaking to all kinds of people, but I surprisingly had a really great time and I'd do it all over again, no questions asked. Near the end, I got to meet the other girls manning the booth with me and, honestly, it was just so nice hanging around with and speaking to them. They helped me rearrange the huge 3D Life logo to form my name; easily one the day's highlights. Then I took the P2P (a double decker!) on the way home and discovered the magic of Wendy's chicken nuggets. Really.

So, about those darn MSTs. Despite being saddled with regular priority for preenlistment, I actually got the three I needed. "You're lucky," the really kind woman who printed my Form 5 told me. And I guess I am—but more than that, I was someone who spent two days lining up for those slots in the middle of the night. I spent the first night with Cheska and the second alone with Saturday Night Live and two kind night guards.

I learned that hard work pays off, but there's a lot of luck involved, indeed. I learned that I love any kind of endless night in general, no matter who I'm with or where I am or what I'm doing, because I kind of had the time of my life. Also, dawn's favorite habit is sneaking up on you.

This little guy can be found near the bike racks outside the Math building! He is quite the big ball of fluff. I should visit sometime.

I love how matchy-matchy the colors are! The photo on the left is the cover of an academic study published by SUNY that I found in Booksale. The photo on the right features a pair of adorable tiny snails I hung out with while waiting for a jeep in the rain. The waiting shed was (slowly) crawling with them.

I wanted to replace Enid Coleslaw on my sidebar with actual-me. And I wanted to give myself the reverse coloring book treatment for a change. I just wish I could fill in the lace details on my top! I have to say, though, that it turned out to be a nice little exercise in self-actualization. I'm not usually big on self-portraiture or anything like that. (Unless you count all the confessional me-me-me writing, ha!) 

This is a screencap from when I watched The Nice Guys last month and really liked it. I thought the subtitles were a nice touch. And, well, yep. Me too, bud.

the further i go, the more that i know

It dawned on me the other day that since I started carrying my Aqua Pix around with me all the time, I've been unwittingly uncovering a love for this city I grew up in.

This rediscovered hobby has documented the recurring themes in my life (loneliness included) and, in my effort to look for subjects worth keeping in picture form, has led me to really stop and look at Metro Manila from a new perspective. And for every exposure, I keep finding new favorite things about it.

It's taught me to say, "Fuck it," and bring my camera out at a busy intersection to capture a moment, a person, an object I find too interesting for words. It's taught me to stay alert and to get off my phone and to remember why I love long bus rides and window seats. Sometimes, when I'm trying to finish a roll of film, I would take a detour on my way home and walk around somewhere in search of anything that sticks out—like this game I would play with myself on car rides, where I try to look for something I think is beautiful every ten seconds. Turns out it's not hard at all, and I'm never disappointed.

I feel like I've known how to define something—being a part of Manila—for years, but it's only now that I'm understanding it.

So, here, again, is a glimpse into my own personal Metro Manila.

I don't know if you can tell, but that's a cat.

She said, “Let it slide.”

A bit back I got this sudden urge to try out black and white film, just because I never had before, so I found myself splurging on a Kodak Tri-X 400 at Satchmi and loading it into my Aqua Pix. I finished it off relatively quickly, but when I went to drop it off for processing, the shop said I'd have to wait a whole month to get it back and see my photos. Luckily, I called after two weeks and was super excited to find that they were ready.

When I was using the roll, I didn't read up beforehand on how to properly shoot black and white. I had to learn to rely more on the textures and the moment to take effective and interesting images, because with color, it's so easy to hide behind vivid, bright subjects in all kinds of hues. So I would sometimes come across a really colorful object and couldn't do anything about it, because it wouldn't translate well in grayscale. And when I finally saw the pictures, I was so happy with how they turned out—especially considering they came from a toy camera!

These photos were taken all over Metro Manila (and all over my life, for that matter): UP, Vargas Museum, SM North and TriNoma, the MRT, Ortigas and Shaw, Cubao X. The final half were from the day I decided to walk around Avenida and Escolta by myself on Independence Day, in search of zines and a national identity. (Okay, not really the latter, but I'd never felt more like a citizen of Manila than I did exploring those streets and experiencing the slice-of-life culture fully on my own.) 

Fun, only sort-of related tidbit: I got lost on my way to Escolta, and just as I was inwardly slapping my forehead and telling myself Gob Bluth's catchphrase, "I've made a huge mistake," the bootleg music stand I was walking by started playing Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence." As in, "Hello, darkness, my old friend." One of my favorite moments ever in all my twenty-one years for sure.

It’s the best euphemism for getting the living crap kicked out of you that I’ve ever heard.

I was seven years old when Rico Yan died, gone to sleep and never to wake up again, aged twenty-seven and fresh off the immense success of Got to Believe! 

He’s been gone fourteen years. I barely remember anything, to be honest. But somehow, his impact on me remains, and it’s as great and painful as ever. I have no idea why, but the void he’s left is still unfilled, and in my head, his presence is still really vivid. 

In some ways, this was my first true brush with the experience of death, how tragic and unbelievable it can be, how bad its timing is. How it can affect a person. Maybe that’s why. 

*

I was ten when my mom pointed to River Phoenix on television and said, offhand and matter-of-fact, “Oh, that boy is dead.” Stand by Me was on HBO, and I watched that cigarette-smoking kid with his sleeves rolled up and his vulnerability fluctuating with strange fascination, because I couldn’t comprehend that he was right there, and he was also gone. 

I would see him years later, in The Thing Called Love, one of his last films, also on HBO. He was all grown up. He brooded even more than he did as Chris Chambers. He played guitar and sang softly, somberly. He was beautiful. “He’s dead,” my mom reminded me, sounding slightly sadder this time, her voice conveying the sayang of it all. 

In the years that followed I would exhaust River’s filmography and learn more about him than I ever had any business knowing. I would listen to his songs and delude myself into thinking that I understood him. The more alive—the more flawed—he seemed, the higher I put him on a pedestal. But I never quite forgot the fact that came before the rest: He’s gone. And call me morbid, but that only pushed my infatuation further.   

*

I was thirteen when Entertainment Tonight aired a visual obituary for Heath Ledger. I had never seen a single film of his; the most I ever heard of him was through a pop culture reference Meg Cabot made on All-American Girl. I started off detached and slightly curious, but I was a blubbering mess by the end of it. He had one of the nicest smiles I had (still have) ever seen. 

I fell into a routine: I made my dad buy me a VCD of 10 Things I Hate About You at the now-defunct Video City in SM North that I watched every day after school. I drew a black ribbon on my hand to signal my mourning; I’d refill it when it faded and draw it on again after it washed off. I read Wuthering Heights because Heath and his sister had been named after the central characters. When I got older, I started putting “The Weakness in Me” by Joan Armatrading on and walking around bookshops, pretending he was following me with a copy of The Feminine Mystique, as normal people are wont to do. 

But when I think of him, I think mostly of Patrick Verona and William Thatcher, and with that I do him a disservice, again and again and again.

*

It was around that same time when I was thirteen, my Heath Era, that I found Charlie Bartlett among a pile of pirated DVDs at North Ridge Plaza. The poster looked cool: skinny kid looking smug, doodles all around his head, Kat Dennings, pre-Iron Man/comeback Robert Downey, Jr. 

At this age I had begun testing the waters of nonconformity and embracing weird uncoolness. Charlie Bartlett sold prescription drugs to people at his school and was cheerful to a fault, unlike broody, moody me, but he was a wiry, vibrant outsider who was never anyone else but himself, and I found comfort in that. 

It was also around this time that I bought a back issue of CosmoGIRL! that featured Anton Yelchin—Charlie Bartlett himself. He was eighteen. He talked and made quick jokes (no doubt spoken in his signature animated tone) about taking pictures (he would end up getting a better camera than his late-2000s phone and get really, really good), buying vinyl (another factor that made me want to start my own collection), and sleep (he certainly looked the part). “Confidence is a big thing with [Charlie],” he had said. “He never feels like he has to be certain things for certain people.” 

I was pretty much a goner. I followed his career pretty closely after that: in New York, I Love You as a teen going to prom; in Middle of Nowhere as a lonely amateur drug seller; in Like Crazy as a young man in love and other things that resemble it; in Only Lovers Left Alive as a rock-and-roller with a healthy dose of naivete; in Rudderless as a musician with Fabrizio Moretti-like charm; and in 5 to 7 as a struggling writer who has an affair with an older married woman. And the ones that came before, like the brilliant, difficult Fierce People, and the better known titles, too. He could inhabit characters like, well, crazy. 

He became a constant, an omnipresent comfort. I’d been counting the days until I could see Green Room, and whatever else. There was going to be so much else. 

So when I woke up this morning, checked Twitter, and saw that a friend had tweeted: WHY !!!! DID !!!! ANTON !!!!!! YELCHIN! !!!!!! DIE!!!!!!!!! for the briefest of seconds I thought maybe, just maybe, she had seen a movie. Maybe it was even Green Room. Maybe I’d just been spoiled. 

I’m not going to repeat to you what you already know. I can’t.  

I went to sleep a mere thirty minutes Before. I’d been watching a film in which two sisters were hosting a party, not knowing that their mother was dying in a car crash. They looked so happy, so unaware, that it made me cringe. I never want to be in that position, I decided. 

The funny thing was, ironically, right at that moment, I was. 

My cousin texted me to ask what the hell had happened. That’s when it really hit me. We had discovered Charlie Bartlett together, come to think of it, and have had a joint obsession over Anton forever, I’m just realizing. It’s hard sometimes to convince her to see a certain movie that I love, but I only have to mention his name once to get her to agree. 

Rudderless is a hard film to watch on its own, heartbreaking, and it only gets worse with repeats. Of course, this only makes me like it even more. And now there’s this added layer of heartbreak—I almost feel like never seeing it again. In the 7-Eleven near where I work, I made the mistake of thinking it would be fine to listen to the songs Anton had performed on the soundtrack, where he sang lines like You’re so emotional...guess what, the music never stops, and It’s a long way down/Even longer way back up. 

I was so wrong. But, hey, my New Year’s resolution had been crying in public whenever I damn well liked.  

In the beginning it was odd even to me that this loss hurts this much, that it’s getting to me this deep. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. All of it was so abrupt. He was so talented, and so real, and so unlike anyone else. He was so young. He would never be twenty-eight. 

And once more it doesn’t compute in my head, which seems to be stuck in denial mode right now. 

I just had to get this off my chest, I think. Someday maybe I’ll write about him and do him justice. But for now I think I need to process. 

If you ask me why, I don't know

Here's some art. I miss spending more time in my own corner of the internet.

P.S. I found out a couple weeks ago that I once had cyber_witch2005@as-if.com as an actual email, which I desperately want back.