tunes of the times
Kinshift(s)
Fandom(s)
Comfort Character(s)
Other Favourites On the other hand, there was a quiet sense of emptiness that came along with walking the school that I once walked with Kagome. It wasn’t quite as raw and bleeding as what it had been before–the time had passed, long enough that the wound of it was beginning to scab over–but it was unmistakably there. I distinctly remember on the first day of 8th grade, arm in arm with Shippo and Kirara while I chirped out the words “Inu-tachi! Inu-tachi!” and Kirara, her smile edged with sadness, reminded me–“You know it’s not really the Inu-tachi though, right?”
Of course not. It couldn’t be, not truly. Not without her.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy what was there, though. Almost all of my closest friends, within arm’s reach, who I would never take for granted again. Not only that, but from the first day I had the unshakable feeling that this would be my year–as an 8th grader, I had top of the social pecking order. I had a solid friend group that seemed to only be growing in number. I had a boyfriend who loved me, and who I was utterly enamoured and obsessed with. And because I finally looked and dressed the way I wanted to, I felt confident in myself and it shone off me like sunbeams.
Since I was very little I was told that I had a charisma about me. Autistic thing that I am, I honestly can’t say if that’s true, nor do I feel I’m an expert in discerning charisma in anyone. Nevertheless, though, it was always a word I heard about myself, and I can see with my eyes and brain that there is a large amount of evidence backing the claim up. After Kagome, I found that I… never had trouble making friends again, growing up. Those lonely, dark times I spent alone and isolated were little more than a blip on the radar, and so long as I never consigned myself to that prison of loneliness ever again, it wouldn’t be hard for me to live my life surrounded entirely by people. I think this was the year that I realized… that was my dream. My dream, and the key to my happiness, was simply to always have friends on every side of me, laughing and smiling and keeping the atmosphere alight.
Just like that, I became a perky.
My edgy loner attitude fell off me like a second skin. The darkness of my wardrobe, however unintentionally, began to accent itself with tiny, bursting specks of vibrant colour. It never was a phase, mom, but it was also a means of expressing a part of myself that was slowly dying–an aesthetic laden with spikes and darkness that warded off anyone who might think to hurt me. Back off, it said, I’m solo, and I’m dangerous.
Try as I might to fuel all my angst at losing Kagome into this identity, I simply could not lose her entirely. She remained, in the new lease on life she stamped upon my heart–nothing in life requires solitude. You can always, always rely on those who love you.
And so I did.
Again, this was the year that my outsides finally began to match my insides, and all of that was emboldened by Gwen, who seemingly just fell out of the sky and into my hands. There had been goth girls in the media I watched–anyone who was around then will recall, cartoon goths kinda ran the show for a while–but none of them quite stuck with me the way that Gwen did. They were often defined by their dry wit and condescending attitudes, and though I was incredibly dry and pretentious myself, I think I felt that they lacked nuance beyond the stereotypes.
When I try and put my finger on what made Gwen different, it’s easy to unpack the complex parts of her, but I was attached to her long before I saw those complexities. On surface level, it’s harder to say, but I can certainly speculate to a degree. For one, Gwen was a bit colourful–the turquoise streaks in her hair, the matching accents on her skirt and lipstick, that horrible sleeved corset she wears that was all the rage in 2008. Right off the bat it gives the impression that there’s more to her, and right off the bat it draws the eye. Most animated goth girls around that time either wore all black or black and red, and even though red and black was quite literally my favourite colour combination, something about seeing a cool-toned goth girl in blues and greens appealed to me simply for its novelty.
Another thing that was immediately apparent about Gwen was how badly she craved connection, and the fact that she was not only an artist, but a romantic. On the previous page I cited episode 3 as the turning point for me and Total Drama–that episode is what turned me from a passive watcher who needed to kill time to a rabid, frothing fan. A large deal of that can be owed to the way it portrays the new and budding romance between Trent and Gwen, who I am still–to this day and despite everything–obsessed with. TDI leaned hard into the concept of “opposites attract,” and choosing to ship the staunch nonconformist with the laid-back complete conformist is something that should not have worked as seamlessly as it did and still does. Gwen stomps onto the island and acts like she is better than everyone, fully intent on letting absolutely no one in and getting kicked off early for her bad attitude. Instead, she immediately finds herself welcomed into the arms of the biggest normie there, falls hard, winds up surrounded by friends who genuinely like her for her, and becomes the series’ first runner-up.
With the full breadth of everything now laid out before us, I can now say that TDI-era Gwen was a loner who leaned into her preferred subculture because she likely felt there was something inherently un-friend-able about her. She reclaimed that standoffish, abrasive aura in an attempt to make it her own, until one-by-one the people she met on the island tore down her walls and made her remember that she didn’t actually ever want to be alone. As it goes, then, the more I saw of her, the more I saw myself.
Becoming my macabre self came in slow, chugging steps. Finally feeling some semblance of control over me, Virginia had let me dye my hair black, but I didn’t feel quite complete in graphic tees and distressed jeans. There was an aggressive, almost theatrical aesthetic I had in my mind’s eye that I was desperate to achieve–one with accessories, and layers, and statement pieces on every outfit. I was looking to draw the eye wherever I went, not to blend into the darkness unseen. I did not want to be the black night as it fell, I wanted to be the horror lurking in its shadows.
The hair was the first part. With Gwen as my inspiration, I did eventually achieve it–fuckass bob, big chunky streaks of blue that broke up the monotony of the black, layered to high heaven so I looked bigger than I was. Grandma Carrie, angel that she was, funded my Hot Topic shopping sprees every year, and I discovered arm warmers and corsets and raver pants and big, chunky jewelry. Decorated in studs and straps, my lips painted blue, black, purple–I was finally me. I was big, and conspicuous, and no one in town looked anything like me.
I dove headfirst into the subculture with rampant enthusiasm. My music taste mostly skewed emo and alt rock, but this was the year I started listening to Siouxsie, and Bauhaus, and the Cure, and the Birthday Massacre. The music, especially, felt transcendent in some way, like the mere act of listening to it had me exhuming some version of myself forced into hiding. Beneath my father’s roof, I had all the freedom in the world to do whatever I wanted, and countless nights were spent in the town graveyard, often until the sun rose. I’d pop out at 3 AM with my iPod Classic and its peeling headphones in tow and climb upon the rotting picnic bench far past the cemetery gates. Back to the wood, I’d turn my music all the way up and gaze into the vast chasm of the starry sky while the world slept peacefully around me. Sometimes I’d bring a booklight and read Anne Rice, too.
Despite everything that movies and TV had led me to believe, being alt fashion did not ruin me socially. Quite the opposite, really–I had never been more popular than I was that year, and I was never, ever that popular again. Beyond the aforementioned charisma, if I had to guess why people liked me I’d just chalk it up to the fact that I looked cool and was friendly. Or, perhaps, that I subverted peoples’ expectations. When they saw me dressed the way I was, they had an idea of how I might behave. And when I wound up being a staunch pacifist who believed in the tried-and-true tenet of “kill ‘em with kindness,” they were immediately endeared to me. I don’t say this lightly or to brag–everyone liked me. There were no glaring preps to put up my middle finger to.
This was also the year I got into Wicca and, much more significantly, karma. I learned about threefold law and the religious concept of karma as a silent score the universe kept, and more than anything before it, I made that idea my bible and my comfort. From this point on until forever, I would internalize and cling to the idea of it, worship at its feet as though it were a personal deity–one’s karma was absolute. Whatever you put out into the universe–be it good or bad–will return to you in time.
In the moments where I felt abandoned, hurt, cheated, and low, I held onto karma like a fire in a whirling snowstorm. This pain will have its place in time, and whoever hurt you will feel that same hurt, threefold. On the other end of things, it kept me kind–I believe in rolling with the punches and letting anger wash off of me as it came. If someone were to strike me, I would not strike back–karma was looking out for me. Karma would do that, so long as I allowed her the time.
In no time at all, I had done a complete 180 from the abrasive, hot-tempered, bratty thing I was. That fire still existed in me, and my passion for that which I loved and believed in never once waned. But it simmered beneath a cool, calculating, patient exterior, now–one that felt enlightened, and felt no need to strike back at the cruelty of the world. I was still MadiYasha, but more than that, I was Madi–the smiling, friendly, perky goth girl who loved cartoons, drawing, anime, and making friends. And if you had a problem with me, I was serene in the knowledge that it would likely just be a problem for you in the long run.
(If, by some longshot, you saved anything by a youtuber called MadiYasha, please email me.)
With this, my friend circle would remain twofold, and grow in both directions. There was my online life–both established friends from KHV, and new friends I met in the TDI fandom–and my in-person one. Shade remained my best and closest friend, especially now that Sora was in a public high school and kinda doing her own thing without me. Shade, though–Shade and I only grew closer as we grew together, and with him now forced to attend a different school, we more or less spent every second we could together.
Beyond him, I was kinda just friends with everyone I could get my hands on. Every transfer student got scooped up into my arms, every kid who bullied me in elementary school was suddenly someone I wanted to hang with forever. There were many key players in my life this year, and you can see the most relevant ones on the ‘characters’ page above, but chief among all of them was Mello.
From day one, something about my relationship with Mello felt different this year. Honestly, I can’t place what it was that changed besides just us. I had definitely become a more agreeable individual, much more secure in myself and much less angsty. And while Mello probably had a million other things going on I wasn’t privy to–most of all, breaking out of their shell and becoming a little more rebellious and unsheltered–they really did just seem like the Mello I remembered, just slightly less encumbered. Maybe it was their newfound love for anime, fandom, and writing fanfiction. Maybe it was that I was no longer a ball of angst and edginess. Whatever caused it, Mello and I just kinda… stopped fighting the way we always used to. There wasn’t some new drama every week that I was most certainly feeding into while they rolled their eyes at me. We just… got along, all of a sudden.
Right off the bat, there was Cici. I met Cici in the most classical way you can meet a friend in middle school–she saw the picture on my binder and chatted me up about it. Obviously, it was Total Drama fanart, and she was the first person I ever met IRL who liked the show, who wasn’t someone I had introduced it to. I clung to her immediately, of course, and she quickly cemented herself as someone crucial to the lore of my life, simply by way of being herself.
Because, you see, Cici liked to give people nicknames. Rather, she liked to give people Nicholasnames, they were more often than not much longer than the person’s actual name. And Cici was simply tickled by the fact that I looked like Gwen, she wanted to call me by my namesake, of course. But she also wanted to do it her way, and thus it was her who first spoke it to existence–
Gwendolyn.
More accurately, she sung it. In a high and playful voice that betrayed adorably her boxy body, whenever Cici saw me across the room, she crooned out that name. With a joy laden in every word that couldn’t help but remind one of a dog wagging its tail, Cici named me this, something that I found cute but wholly insignificant at the time.
Often, I long to find her again, if nothing else, so that I can thank her for helping me discover my true name. I would still go by Madi for many, many years, but I couldn’t help the rush of euphoria I got whenever someone called me Gwen.
I spent my weekends with Trent. Virginia’s weekends, I’d beg to walk over to his house to varying results. Dad’s weekends, he’d have his own dad drive him all the way out to see me. We were very lucky. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but after a lot of teasing and suggesting on the basis of our namesakes, Trent picked up a guitar and never put it down. If you’ll forgive me for the spoilers, he now opens for bands we used to listen to as teenagers, and I can’t even try to put into words how proud and happy I am.
Before all that, though, it was just me and him cuddling on my parents’ couch, watching TV. Sitting on my laptop. An absolutely gratuitous amount of making out, of course. In my fondest memories, we are sitting in relative silence in a room that’s finally starting to look like mine again. I’m browning deviantART or KH-Vids, and he’s on the end of my bed mindlessly fretting Smoke on the Water in that special way only an amateur can. It’s so hard to summarize the breadth of our relationship, but it was every beautiful cliche of young love you can possibly think of. We went to the movies and held hands at the mall. We laid on the grass and stared up at the stars. We set our PFPs to pictures of us kissing. Most of all, we annoyed the everloving shit out of everyone around us with how disgustingly in love we were.
I floated around befriending whoever I could. There was but one sole exception, an unfortunate continuation from my previous time at GFMS–Heather. She still had it out for me, and was desperate to get anyone else to have it out for me too, to little avail. She remained little more but a thorn in my side for most of the year, doing annoying things like dying her hair the exact same colour as me. I was much too secure in myself to care, thankfully–reinvigorated under karma’s protection, I paid her little mind. There was a smug sense of satisfaction in having this sole enemy, though, and wondering how it looked from the outside in–after all, if someone loves and befriends everyone, how must it feel to be the one sole exception? That thought, cruel as it was, kept me warm at night.
As is to be expected, the bulk of my time was spent at school, which I continued to half-heartedly be present for. My grades were more or less dogshit as ever and I had no desire to fix them, continuing to struggle with undiagnosed and unmedicated ADHD which left me unfocused and unmotivated on anything that wasn’t fandom and my own creative projects. As always, this frustrated my teachers through the roof, because at the barest glance alone they could see how incredibly intelligent and well-spoken I was, but as is the textbook story of neurodivergence, that did not translate to academia and no one was helping me. Most of my time in class was spent half-assing everything and drawing to keep my hands busy.
I read a lot. Specifically, anything I could get my hands on that involved vampires. Twilight scratched an itch I didn’t know I had for vampire-themed YA, and I would quickly go to town devouring any book I could find that was even slightly similar. Hilariously, my favourite wound up not being a novel, but a manga called Vampire Kisses about a perky goth girl and her vampire boyfriend.
The other notable event of the fall was the fact that I may have adopted a ghost. A graveyard crawl with my friends saw me rudely clambering atop the biggest headstone in the cemetery in a foolish bid to get a sick myspace PFP. When we looked at the picture, we noticed a ghostly wisp obscuring the left side of the image, and immediately thereafter a lot of weird shit started happening in my room. Flickering lights, odd shadows on the walls, things toppling over, friends hearing voices in the night. I shrugged it off and assumed I must’ve ferried a restless spirit home that night, who I quickly named Oscar after the man whose grave I used for clout. The only thing I can tell you about this ghost is that he hated men and caused twice as much trouble whenever they were in my room.
For a while, things were pretty routine–school, draw, friends, youtube, sleep, fuck around in the graveyard, repeat. Total Drama Island was premiering in the states at this point, and I greatly enjoyed sitting down to watch it every Thursday night after school. Finally, though, we eventually arrive at the point where I started recording just about everything I ever did or said. Finally, we arrive at–
I’m still very tickled by the way I christened this new diary, writing verbatim on the first page a passage that Gwen wrote in her own. A perfect encapsulation of where I was at–obsessed with TDI and madly in love with the cutest musician I could find.
Most of this diary is just me chronicling my feelings about fandom and internet culture. I was deep into the edgenet around this time, specifically Encyclopedia Dramatica and a very prolific lolcow that I found through the website. I spent a lot of my time in “troll” communities, unfortunately, piling on harassment and cooking my brain with cringe culture like I wasn’t living my best cringe life. I talk a lot about Trent, and how weird it is being in love with both him and a girl who isn’t even around anymore. I talk about Heather, and her constant co-opting of alt fashions and aesthetics despite her lack of any reverence for the subcultures themselves.
Around this time is when Total Drama Action began airing in Canada, and of course I was right there with my VPN and ten million thoughts. What started out as boundless excitement eventually morphed into a lot of anger and resentment at what was done to my favourite characters, and though you can see me trying to be optimistic throughout all my talking on the second season, it’s clear that I’m not happy with the direction things went.
On the bright side, though, this was also when I connected with another BNF (that’s ‘big name fan’ for the youngins) in the TDI fandom and started a fan forum. I had made quite a name for myself on YouTube as arguably the most well-known and prolific TDI creator, and that had led me to the good graces of another youtuber who went by the name Saradomin. Saradomin started a forum called “Total Drama Fantic,” and this is where I spent the majority of my time discussing TDA as it aired and meeting other fans. Though I was having the time of my life meeting like-minded people, this was, in effect, just another attempt to keep alive a slowly-dying flame.
Stuck in that amorphous grey state of “fading special interest,” I did what I could to keep my fandom-brain busy. Winter break saw an excessive amount of snow that kept us out of school for way longer, and I cozied up inside and watched a whole lot of anime in 3 parts on youtube. Digimon 01 was the champion during this time, but I also got really into Powerpuff Girls Z. At some point, Shade busted out a copy of Wind Waker–at the time, my favourite Zelda–and that interest reawakened itself hard as well. Lastly, I discovered the musical Wicked, and immediately started projecting myself and Kagome onto Gelphie while I tore into both it and the book it was based on.
Around this time I began growing closer and closer with a newer friend of mine, a girl called Ryuzaki. Having met her through Total Drama, I very quickly took a shine to her and slotted myself into the role of a sort of mentor as well as a friend. Her parents were the kind of strict that should honestly be illegal–she wasn’t allowed to dress how she wanted, or go out with friends, or do anything more than sit at home and watch TV, and that was pretty much all she did. I will never forget the outright awe I was in the first time I saw her recite an entire episode of 6teen from memory, simply because she had seen it so many times. She had nothing else to do to keep herself entertained.
More than anything in the world, I was protective of her. I wanted to save her, I wanted to show her a good time, I wanted to help her be herself. I started sneaking extra clothes to school for her just so she could wear them, I acted like a perfect angel around her parents so they would trust me enough to have her over, I did everything in my power to give her the adolescence I thought she deserved. Eventually, somehow, I became privy to the knowledge that Ryuzaki had never heard of or experienced Death Note, and of course I had to change that, too.
Something wonderful and bright awakened in her. If it wasn’t apparent, by the fact that I’m calling her Ryuzaki, a nickname I’m pretty sure she wears to this day. She became utterly obsessed, and I couldn’t help but find her enthusiasm contagious. I fell headfirst back into Death Note, resuming my fixation on Beyond Birthday (expected) and gaining a second one I never in a million years saw coming.
In-between my late night BxL smut RPs through text messages with Ryuzaki, I was also on MSN chatting up Mello. Mello had been into DN for a while, and I knew that they were a fan of the MelloxMatt ship, but at some point they had informed me that there was a second ship they preferred a little less that was growing on them more and more–MelloxNear.
Honestly, I can’t remember how it happened, and it all happened so fast. Something about Mello just lightly suggesting it had me rotating the concept of the ship in my head, astounded that I had never considered it before. Astounded that I had never considered Near before, having only really thought that he was a cool successor to L and nothing more than that. Now, though, I was thinking about Near. I was thinking about Near, and I found I could not stop.
Like many of my kintypes, he’s one of those ones that has little rhyme or reason to his connection to me. Near and I aren’t very alike, our experiences don’t really align, the resemblance is wholly negligible. Kintypes like that always really cement my fictionkin identity to me, because why the hell else would I be so drawn to seeing myself as them if there’s no logical reason to? In any case, I couldn’t change the fact that I am and was kin with Near, and so I did what I always did when a kinshift would suddenly hit me–I embraced it, explored it, and leaned into it.
Mello would introduce me to a visual novel called D.Nd Poisoned. It primarily focused on Mello and Near and their budding chemistry, and I shamelessly played through every single route in a night, completely and totally addicted to the ship and all it had to offer. Obviously, Mello and I bonded over this, and it was this inciting incident that ramped up everything that would come thereafter, almost too fast for me to even process it.
Specifically, Shade was crushing on Mello. Honestly, it came way out of left field to me, but the more I thought on it, the more it made sense–they had a lot of little common interests here and there, but beyond that, it was really difficult to not fall for Mello. They had this magnetism about them I struggle to put words to, an identity that was so unique and concrete in itself, it simply can’t be compared to anyone or anything. Mello did what they wanted and said what they felt. They aligned with no stereotype or crowd, simply made friends wherever they went. They were upfront and honest about their feelings, never afraid to speak their mind. And of course they were beautiful, you couldn’t help but stare.
I couldn’t help but stare. Mello had this fluffy, cropped hair, and it was a colour that I’d literally never seen anyone else have. People in their life tried to define it, they’d been called a redhead and a dirty blonde and a ton of other things that weren’t quite right, and I did feel a point of pride when I was the one to pin it down to a shade they liked the sound of–copper. Mello had this shimmering, multi-toned copper hair that fell flawlessly at their shoulders. And Mello had a body to die for, curves in all the right places that were never not decorated in the most stylish clothes. Mello’s wit was quick and sharp, their humour gut-busting, their aura undeniable. I loved the nervous tremble they carried despite their confidence and coquettish grin, an involuntary shaking of hands that might have alluded to something more beneath that unmarred surface.
Most of all, Mello had the fullest lips, glossy with a sheen of cherry chapstick they took everywhere. That scent–of the ever-present chapstick, and the mint gum they liked to chew–was something that made me dizzy like a fool. I’d trip over my own feet when it wafted my way, unable to push the thoughts from my head, thinking maybe that buzzing feeling would go away if I just leaned in and…
Of course Shade had a crush on Mello. Who wouldn’t?
With SakuraCon on the horizon, we began planning our Death Note cosplay group. Though I so badly wanted to go as Near, I didn’t quite have the skills to pull it together and feel confident walking the floor with it, and so instead I went as Beyond Birthday and elected to debut Near at a “cosplay weekend” hangout a little while later. Looking back, it’s very funny–I don’t remember the convention at all, but I remember the cosplay weekend and photoshoot like it was yesterday.
When I write about my feelings for Mello, I very pointedly refer to it as a “cosplay crush.” I wouldn’t come to know what fictionkin was until much later, and in an attempt to explain to others my connections to my kintypes, I would often say things like “I cosplay them / relate to them / roleplay them.” This cosplay weekend would be the first time I would ever actually cosplay Near with Mello, but by my account we’d been at it for a few months by then. Slowly ‘falling’ into our characters as we went about our day-to-day, calling each other by their names, viewing each other through their eyes. At one point, I asked Trent if it would be okay for me and Mello to take shippy pictures in cosplay–holding hands, kissing, the like–and he said it was fine, if I recall correctly with some sly-eyed comments about it being hot.
Looking back on it, it’s all really hard to untangle where my head was and how I justified it to myself. Myself and Shade were both very upfront about our feelings, and so was Mello–by their account, they weren’t interested in monogamy, and they let us know right off the bat. They enjoyed the attention, and they enjoyed being single and free and happy, and I was grateful to know that about them and intent to not expect anything more. Why would I expect anything more? I was dating a boy whom I loved more than anything in the world. I had no desire to leave him for something I was much less sure of the outcome of.
I think all that is why I viewed my relationship with Mello so casually despite my very intense feelings. That, and the fact that my friends and I were just a very flirty bunch–it wasn’t uncommon for us to flirt with each other, kiss each other, joke about sexual things with each other. The first time Mello kissed me, my boyfriend was watching, and everything was fine. And right after they kissed me, they turned around and kissed Shade, too. From where I was standing, none of it mattered–yeah, I had a thing for Mello. But that thing wasn’t ever going to bloom into anything more, and so I went along with the motions and didn’t think too deeply about it, despite the feelings burning me up from the inside.
Mello and I cosplayed two characters we likened ourselves to, and sometimes we kissed for effect and for the camera. I was attracted to Mello, and from what I can tell they liked me, and nothing would ever come of that so we were just having fun. That’s the closest I can get to explaining how I felt as it was all happening… too fast.
The night of the cosplay weekend, I went over to Mello’s house with Kirara and Clair. We all plodded around, watching TV and crowding around Mello’s computer and doing what teenagers do. At one point, I wandered outside with a bug zapper and amused myself by grilling hapless moths beneath the stars. Mello came and found me, and we sat there in the warm night for a while, and I realized I wanted to kiss them again, and again, and again, and again. Even crazier, it seemed like they wanted to kiss me, too.
I don’t think we kissed, but I fell asleep holding them that night.
A few days later, Mello and I and some of our friends were meandering around the elementary school after hours, and my most crystallized memory of my feelings for them lives on this sunny Wednesday afternoon. Whenever I think about falling for Mello, I think about this moment, suspended in time–I even drew it for an autobiographical comic about my life, much much later.
Mello walked over to the grassy hill overlooking the monkey bars and laid down on their side. Like a moth to a flame (or perhaps an electric bug zapper) I followed. Nervous, and shaking, and sweating like an animal, I wiggled down beside them so that we were face-to-face, and laid my arm down on their side.
I could almost hear the music from D.Nd Poisoned playing through my mind. I walked over, layed down next to her, and watched her open her eyes. They were beautiful, really. I turned over to my other side, and couldnt help but smile when she wrapped her arms around me. There, with the sun beating down on us… the world felt so peaceful. Even now, Sukishyou is flowing through my brain when I think about it… I don’t go outside much, but Mello makes me adore the feel of the sun. She left that day… When her mom called, I kissed her goodbye. She tastes sweet… like chocolate-coated cherries. Chocolate because she’s always eating it. Cherry because it’s the flavour of her chapstick. I just wanna write so much about this girl… but what is there to say?
– Diary Entry dated 5/21/09
The next day, Mello would leave for a student leadership conference, and I would be without them for four too-long days. On the day Mello came home, I was feeling lower than low trying to compete with Shade–who I could tell Mello liked just as much, and who they were not shy about showering in just as much affection. With everything I was, I had spent the last few months trying not to resent my best friend for the feelings we shared for this wonderful person. Mello had said upfront that their greatest fear was driving a wedge in-between us, and I didn’t want anything like that to happen either. Losing my best friend over something as frivolous as a crush would’ve broken my heart.
It was difficult, though. Every word that passed Shade’s lips related back to Mello. In no time at all, they were all Shade would talk about, and they didn’t seem to care that I was held hostage and forced to listen. Reconciling my own jealousy, feelings of rejection, and pain with the desire to be a supportive friend was something I’d struggle with today, let alone with my disordered and traumatized 13-year-old brain. If my diary entries are anything to go on, I mostly just closed in on myself–slunked off to a corner, held my tongue, and kept quiet. Oftentimes, while Shade and Mello were canoodling three feet away.
Those long four days were punctuated with this, my patience rewarded with a whole lot of standing idly by while my crush kissed my best friend. I kept to myself and tried not to implode about it, and did what I always did to distract myself from emotional turmoil–I got online, where I was met with a message from Mello, sent mere hours after the hang-out and prompted by absolutely nothing:
“I just feel like I should tell you that I am in love with you right now. It's unbearable, really. I don't feel this way about anyone.”
I sat there, agog at my computer screen, just silently crying. Relief and confusion and joy and anxiety all at once–what was I to do with that? How was I to express that I loved them, too? How could I, with everything standing in our way?
There was no picking favourites with Mello and Trent. I loved the both of them, just as much, in different ways, but I had no intention of breaking my boyfriend’s heart or cheating on him. I saw a future with him, but I didn’t know what Mello wanted, and last I checked, they didn’t want a relationship at all. That may have been a bending of the truth to spare mine and Shade’s friendship, I would soon learn–the more and more Mello saw of Shade’s clingy, over-the-top, borderline obsessive behaviour, the less and less they wanted anything romantic to do with them. And, conversely… my solitude and lonely nature only drew Mello to me.
Still, I didn’t know what to say or do with any of this. Okay, they chose me, fantastic, but I knew I could not choose them, not in any meaningful way, and maybe less so now that there were feelings involved on both sides. For the first time in my life, I found myself caught between the love of two people, and I had no idea what to do or how to cope, and so I didn’t do anything.
I told Mello I felt the same. We talked about Shade. Life carried on around us… and refused to slow down.
Under the stars, I held her hand and kissed her deeply… it was beautiful. I’m glad that she knows her place… she’s not trying to steal me from (Trent), she isn’t even jealous… It’s great. We’re just two friends playing games, with a bit of a deeper meaning. She spoke to me about how she’s been contemplating her love for me since 6th grade… we’ve always been rivals, yet she completes me.
– Diary entry dated 6/1/09
With school wrapping itself up, I spent it the way one might expect a teenager with a hopeless crush to spend it. Ignoring my school work, writing unsent poems and love letters, and trying to kill my romantic rival with my mind powers. Everything from this point on was recorded in a much less linear fashion for reasons that will become pretty immediately apparent, so do forgive me as I attempt to piece them together in all their suddenness.
Some time in mid-June, after school was out, Trent dumped me out of the blue for reasons you can probably guess. When I think back on things, I don’t blame him at all for attesting that I cheated on him, even if there is a small part of me that still feels the urge to protest. That part of me is something I have a lot of complicated and tangled feelings toward, because while it was all happening, I really did not feel like that is what I was doing. I thought that I had put every measure in place to ensure that he didn’t feel I was doing anything behind his back. I thought that the lack of any believable end result to the flirting and physical contact somehow meant that it ‘didn’t count.’ I thought a lot of childish, confusing, inexplicable things because I was a confused child who could not explain to myself or others what was going on in my head.
I think if I were to define how I feel about everything now, I’d just say that I don’t feel like I meant to cheat on him, but I was complacent as hell in not fighting harder to remove myself from the situation. If you’re reading this and thinking that I sound like an asshole, maybe you can rest assured in knowing that almost every partner I’ve ever had since him cheated on me, too. Karma and I still walk with our fingers entwined by choice. I do believe She has never left me, remembering the vows I so often made to her. All of that is proof alone that I was in the wrong.
Knowing that now didn’t make it any easier then, though. Seldom in my life have I felt the way I did upon experiencing my first breakup, few times have ever come close to the incredible sense of grief, doom, and overwhelming urge to die at any cost again. At some point, when I wasn’t paying attention, someone had introduced Trent to Heather. With their similar love for music and near-identical taste, with the way I had been too caught up in my feelings for Mello to be attentive, with the way I was emotionally immature and severely mentally ill and treated him like dogshit far too often, my life was over the second they became friends. He ran to her the day he ran from me.
On that day, as you can probably imagine, the mental breakdown I had was severe and regrettable. Like everything else that summer, it only exists in my mind in ephemeral bubbles, like memories of memories. I remember bashing my head into my laptop screen until I bled because I was melting down so hard. I remember trying and failing to kill myself with sleeping pills twice. I remember publicly attesting on Facebook that I was just ‘messing around’ with Mello and completely and totally breaking their heart for no reason other than I was so emotionally volatile I was incapable of forethought, let alone compassion. Just like that, I lost her too.
Out of nowhere, then, Shade was suddenly there again.
Due to a lot of things that won’t happen for a while, I can’t claim to know why the two of us grew close again. In my heart, I like to believe it was because we’d both loved and lost and knew that there was no better place to be than with each other. There was a new Kingdom Hearts game coming out in September about our favourite characters, and so we holed up in my house and replayed the first two console installments together, falling back into the fandom to the backdrop of a golden sunset.
As far as I remember, this is when it began. Shade and I, and the sunset and ice cream. As often as we could, whenever we could, a ritual that would only grow more important with time. I had always likened myself to Axel, and this was the first time I can remember that I had the thought that Shade might just be… ‘my’ Roxas.
Roxas or not, we were best friends again, and that was all I could really hope for.
A lot of things happened in a much less cohesive order after all that, and I procrastinated on writing this chunk of the biography for ages because I couldn’t figure out how to unravel and order them all, let alone make them pretty and storybookish the way I did everything else here.
One, I somehow acquired a little black kitten and named him Beyond, as in Birthday. Having something to take care of helped minimize how often I thought about killing myself.
When I think about the early days of the breakup, I think about him and I think about Shade, and I think a lot about sleeplessness and heaviness and doing everything in my power to make the weight of being alive hurt less. A consistent theme in my long-term breakups is the necessary avoidance of everything I used to associate with the person who left me. Most notably of all, I was forced to re-tool my entire music library and get rid of any love songs or songs that reminded me of Trent.
As a result, the music I was listening to that summer sticks out to me, intentionally or unintentionally. I permanently switched my bedside radio to an alt rock station I only ever listened to in passing, one that played heavier or less mainstream stuff than the more top 40ish stuff I liked. A lot of nights, I laid in bed awake in the sweltering summer heat, waiting for it to cool down in the darkness of my room, just staring up at the love letters and poems I wasn’t yet ready to unpin from blood-red walls. Every time I think back on those nights, the radio is playing Kids by MGMT, or 21 Guns by Green Day, or It Ends Tonight by All-American Rejects. I still feel a cold stone of dread sink down in the pit of my stomach when any of those songs hit my ears, years later.
XTC had long since been the band I named whenever anyone asked me who my favourite artist was, but in actuality I was pretty picky with their discography always. I liked the later stuff I grew up listening to, especially Apple Venus 2, but not a lot before that. I was into the high-energy power pop but couldn’t really vibe to the early, dirty, new wave-y stuff they were putting out, and everything in between those two extremes was kinda just a grey area of occasional earworms or growers.
This summer, though, I pretty much just let my whole music library play while I dissociated through life, not bothering to skip songs unless they were ones that reminded me of him. As a result, I listened to a lot of albums by artists that I liked, but didn’t like to that extent. This is important, because one of those albums was XTC’s Skylarking.
My father, the only other XTC fan in the entire world, would talk to me much later about the moment he ‘got’ Skylarking. This phrasing made me froth at the mouth, because I understood with no elaboration what he meant by that. Skylarking was not an album that hooked me. It was not an album that I felt the need to listen to any of the songs from. It was not an album I considered memorable, or close to my tastes, or representative of the sort of music I like to listen to.
It remains, to this day, my favourite XTC album.
Somewhere into ten or twenty braindead, breakup-addled listens, I finally felt that I was hearing Skylarking. All the bells and whistles, all the harmonies, all the clever instrumentation and unique turn of phrase, everything I was not hearing before. With that came the inexplicable feeling that I was somehow a newborn again, hearing music for the very first time. Nothing in my past, present, or future sounded like Skylarking. How magnificent. How terrifying.
It’s very difficult to put into words. But I fully believe the planets aligned for me, there. Alone in my empty bedroom with a kitten scratching at my rolling chair, sweating through a tank top I stole from a friend, curtains lazily thrown across an open window to spare myself from the sun. Empty-hearted and sluggish, I felt the music grow around me, tangle its verdant vines up into my rib cage and plant flowers in the charred earth of me. Summer’s Cauldron remains my favourite song ever, capturing the feeling of drowning within the mercy of nature as the world turns around you.
I did feel I was drowning. Still, outside, the sun shone.
My family made our trip to Lincoln City, where they humoured me by allowing me to do a real-life marshmallow ceremony that involved ‘voting’ someone off the proverbial island. Trent played around with my heart, using me for sex and cheating on his new girlfriend who, of course, probably just thought I was a liar when I told her as much. He talked to me often about how he didn’t actually like her that much, and to this day I do still wonder if their relationship formed solely on the basis of hurting me. I don’t remember it lasting long.
Mello and I made some sort of amends a short while after I came back from Oregon. One of my fondest memories of that horrible summer was going camping with them and their parents in Eastern Washington. We watched the sunset on mountaintop, shot soda cans with some of their cool relatives, and baked ourselves alive sleeping in their parents’ van. I don’t remember if we were properly dating or just fooling around at that time, honestly, I felt like I’d be no good as a girlfriend with how obsessed with my ex I was. I remember Mello trying to flirt with me, ease me into it, pick us up where we left off, and I remember being timid and scared and spineless in response. I had hurt them once, and I was desperate not to do so again.
Come August, I found myself pretty much completely alone. A video I’d uploaded of myself and Trent kissing had pissed Mello off. Ryuzaki moved states. Shade was going through some sort of emotional episode and said they needed a few weeks to get themself in order. They promised they’d be back with me on August 13th to celebrate AkuRoku day, but that didn’t change the fact that I missed having them around. I missed having anyone around.
I threw myself back into online fandom and roleplay. That’s where I met Drew, a girl my age from Alaska who shared my passion for Total Drama and Gwent. Not only that, she somehow matched it in full, a complete and total rarity. The two of us started RPing Gwent over Skype, drawing fanart of our escapades, sending each other massive manilla envelopes full of fanart and letters.
Toward the end of summer, I wrote in my diary about how desperate I was for school to start back up and offer me something to do other than sit alone in my house and cry all day. I talked about how badly I wanted to keep a new diary for the new year, document everything, with my usual wild fantasies about preserving my own memory and being worth remembering some day.
Late into August, after a lot of playing around with my heart, Mello gave me another chance, and this time I felt confident that I wasn’t going to take it for granted. With Shade back by my side, with my friend group slowly coming back together despite its missing pieces, and with the thought that maybe High School would only draw us closer… I psyched myself up and resolved, this time, to do it right.
Maybe it was the change in paradigm, but a lot of much brighter memories followed that decision. Like the night Mello and I spent alone in their house, sharing comfortable silence in their upstairs bedroom. Them sat on their lime-green cube they used in place of a computer chair, me on their bed reading Looking for Alaska. I remember getting to that oft-reposted paragraph, the one that was all over tumblr and other hipster-y websites back in the day, the one that probably reads as pretentious and cliche now. Back then, though, I just remember reading it, and looking up at Mello’s profile, lit by their computer screen. I just remember staring at them for a moment and thinking, yeah.
Somewhere in this small window of time, my fondest teenage memory took place, inexplicably smack dab in the middle of the worst summer of my entire life. I did not write about it in my diary. I suspect because I knew with certainty that I would never, ever forget it.
I’d been sleeping over at Clair’s house with her best friend, a typical one-floor suburban box stuck down a crumbling road somewhere. Like most places in Granite Falls, the residential area was surrounded on all sides by forest, and one of these forests led downhill to a shallow river.
In the dead of night, the two of them pulled me through the tangle of trees and stickerbushes, across rocks and dirt and leaflitter until they had me stumbling downhill. Until we reached the rocky shore, the song of rushing water, the parting of the trees. With zero decorum, Clair and her bestie threw off all their clothes–bare as the day they were born–and tore off into the freezing water.
They had warned me that they were going to do this, of course, and I had politely declined to join in. I was never more insecure about my body than when I was young and beautiful, the idea of anyone seeing it, even beneath the cover of darkness, was mortifying. But something about the nonchalance with which my friends displayed their own changed me–I looked at their bodies, unique and imperfect, and all I saw was skin. No part of me felt the urge to judge how they looked, or how they compared to myself, or scrutinize every mole and misplaced hair. All I could think was that they looked like they were having a lot of fun.
So, off I went. My first and last time skinny dipping, off in the woods somewhere while my friends laughed in the background. Once their cheering had stopped and the water warmed itself around me, I took a deep breath and realized… this was some sort of perfect dream.
I was experiencing life for the first time in what felt like forever with two people I loved. Overhead, the stars were bright, and the moon was completely full. I inched my way over to one of the bigger rocks peeking out of the water, laid on my stomach across its smooth surface, and stared up at a midnight sky that looked endless and beautiful. And then I felt something graze the curve of my back, just barely.
At first I thought it was my friends messing with me, but when I looked around I saw them off a ways, closer to the shore. I was situated in some water that was closer to still, and so I rolled around a bit on the rock and kept on looking, wondering if it was just the wind. After a moment, the shapes in the darkness began to register, and I saw them.
Bats.
There were bats circling the water. No more than a few, but they were swooping low to eat and drink, barely skimming the water’s surface. In all my time before that moment, and all my time since, I had never once seen a bat in real life.
So, there I was. Beneath a full moon in the dead of night, swimming naked with bats. I do not mean this in a depressing way or to say I will never experience joy like that again, but I do think that was and always will be the most goth I have ever felt.
Just like that… I wanted to live again.
And yet, it wasn’t quite perfect. All I could think about as the moment came and went was, I wish Mello was here.
With summer’s dying breath, Mello and I finally went on our first real, official date. Their parents took us to the state fair, where we did all the cute cliche things that teenagers are supposed to do, like kiss on the ferris wheel and fail at every attempt to win each other cheap prizes. After three impossibly long months, I finally felt close to normal again.
Usually, when I’m writing these autobiographies, I like the timeline to be consistent, you know–a year of my life means birthday-to-birthday. September 20th to September 20th, it just makes the most logical sense. Maybe I’ll do a little recap on what the school year is looking like before the 20th, but everything else you’ll find on these pages takes place solely within the parameters of my birthday. It just makes the most sense.
I don’t really know how to wrap everything up in a nice bow and send you onward to the next ‘phase’ of my life with September 2009, because you cannot possibly fathom the amount of shit that happened in the span of twenty days. To put it all here at the end would not only break the rhythm of everything that precludes it, but end things on an awkward cliffhanger that’s a little too cruel for even a writer like myself.
As a compromise, I’m just gonna tell you the short version here, and the long version on the 2009-2010 page. Give you a little taste of what’s to come, and then you can just plod on over to the next year if you’re craving more. Good? Good.
*ahem*
Shade meticulously changed their entire self-image to resemble my comfort character, flirted me into an uncomfortable corner until I falsely believed I had a crush on them, convinced Mello I was cheating in order to get the two of us to separate, and then started fucking Mello behind my back.
Catch you later, folks!
