writing snippets

by ________

1st December 2024

about

hi, it's Nameless. This is for the stuff I write that ISN'T fanfiction. If you want to read fanfiction, click on the third link in navigation

The things I write here are, if they weren't already apparent, deeply personal to me. but so are my fanfics, to be fair! The author's thinly disguised projection or something

I wrote this in my AO3 bio once:

I tend to write about specific emotions regarding topics of trauma and otherness. my hope is that they resonate with other people as well

so that might give you an idea of what to expect. yeah

I don't know how much meaning other people can find in these works though. if you can, I'd be happy. I don't want to sound full of myself though. I'm just some random engineering student on the internet who happens to really like Goro Akechi dialogue and creative writing and whatever

My motivation to write is to get through things. To survive. To heal. To live. To grasp some meaning within the chaos of the past and the present, and to peer into a future that exists yet cannot be seen. It will exist, as long as one wills it.

(but I want other people to survive, heal, and live too)

30th November 2024

a confection too good for your tastes (2024/11/30)

Now that I'm no longer willing to bend at your will and kneel for your whims, you see me as an unruly and untamed beast. Now that I've broken the contract that bound me to your rule, I'm something that has yet to be sculpted and baked into something more desirable, a pretty and proper cake for your eyes.

But the cake is no good if it's overdecorated. My vigor is ugly to you, and the way I've done my frosting is full of blemishes yet to be redressed. It's unacceptable that it's unlike the rest you've seen, and not like all of the other products you've chosen to admire. My masterpiece is ignored in favor of your picturesque menu portrait. You claim to adore it, but what you adore is something it's not.

You should know that I've always hated desserts that were too sweet.

So when I brandish a knife and slash at that illusion-coated pastry in a manner that's not right, and desecrate your creation as I betray to you its insides, it is an infringement upon you. It is a transgression that the sweet that glazed your realm of vision be ruined in front of your eyes. It is a disaster whose reach you scramble to confine.

Yet even as you lapse back into the foolish illusion of your reins and I sheathe my weapon, the truth will always be known.

You were never the artist, and that confection was never yours.

29th November 2024

Betrayal (2024/10/27)

At a pivotal moment many years before, I searched and sorted through my many thoughts and found within it the notion of "trauma". Following countless pursuits of whys and what-ifs through that trauma, I dragged from their corpses the name of "grief".

My anger, which I had adapted to wield as a weapon, unraveled itself into a testimony of my grief. It was born from which orbited a single phrase, derived through a lens of a character that had touched me once upon two decades and once six years prior: to be failed.

I grieved for the many times I was failed, and for the child through whose sacrifice I was born as a byproduct of those failures. I sorrowed for the child who learned all the wrong things for themself, who learned to patch up their wounds in all the kind and unkind ways, and who grew not to expect anything at their efforts. They readied for a life that was barely a life at all.

I resented that child, but what I resented more were the eyes that turned away when they needed to be seen, and the ears that plugged away when their voice longed to be heard. What should have been there, and others would have taken for granted, was deprived from that child.

Through my grief once more, I unearthed a name for this hurt, this feeling of "betrayal".

How was I supposed to live on, drenched in the realization of all the hurt that child had endured at their own hands and at the hands of others? How was I supposed to repair that devastation, the domain of which spread to repercussions beyond my control?

How am I supposed to move forward, living in the shadow of countless betrayals that will neither meet nor accept apologies? No matter how much I'd wish to forward them, their true recipient cannot answer.

Even if I dropped to my knees and pleaded to them for answers, a ghost cannot respond.

.

.

.

I fantasize often, of an alternate life where a child is loved in both body and soul. When they cry, their mother comes to their side and asks them what's wrong. When the child replies, they won't be blamed for their tears, nor will the cause of their pain be trivialized. They won't be accused of being ungrateful, or be told that they're asking for too much. Instead, their words will reach their mother, who will be able to recognize her mistakes and apologize.

"I'm sorry," she'll say. "I didn't mean to hurt you. I'll do better for you next time."

This isn't that life. It won't be.

In that life, when a child is reduced to nothing more than a plague under the scrutiny of their peers, they won't be alone. When they cry in their mother's arms, their mother will be angry—not at, but for them. She'll realize the gravity of the situation and call the school, whose faculty will intervene and call in teachers, children, and the parents of those children. Perhaps afterwards, some kinder children will invite the child to be their friend, and the beginnings of a support system will form. That child won't need to whisper into a teacher's ears a wish to disappear.

Instead, they'll cry, "I'm happy I am understood."

This isn't that life. It can't be. Not anymore.

After all, at this moment, I exist.

.

.

.

There lives a ghost inside me. Sometimes I hear its cries when the world is too much. Sometimes I shun them—scold them for being so fragile. "Maybe if you weren't born this way, you wouldn't have been hurt. Maybe if you had been a better child, you would have been loved."

But I cannot truly mean what I say, because however much I will it, it is not their fault. I cannot truly reject them with all my heart.

My life is in my own hands, but I refuse to forget. I will not forget that child's cries—the tears that they shed under the burden of too much, and the unspoken ones they wrapped under lock and key—after all, there solely remains me to remember them. I am the living evidence of those betrayals.

I decided that this is the best of an apology I can give them. Give myself. To heal, for me, is to choose to live as an act of defiance—not in ignorance of all that shaped me, but to let it drive me in the present. To give the notion of a future a chance, while acknowledging that the past is just as integral.

To treat myself as "human" as that child had desired more than anything to be seen as, and to become the adult that they needed the most.

To the me who reads this in the future, I entrust you with this:

Do not forget this feeling. Etch it into the ripples of your footsteps. Burn it into the recesses of your soul. Let it impassion you. Let it haunt you for the rest of your life.

To allow it to die in vain is to re-inflict the betrayal done onto you.

29th November 2024

The Number That Have Hurt Me (2023/03/05)

The numbers I remember
are the ones that have hurt me.

Eight years, five years, four years -
a date, a year, a number to restart
the course of my life, flip it on its head,
invert my insides so.

A wound carved into a bottomless chasm,
presented as a mere figure.
So much time has passed, and yet so little.
How many more years do I wait to forget?

I remember the departure dates
of forgotten faces.
I remember the months and years
of when I was hurt and failed to forgive,
of when I hurt and was forgiven.

A number, just a number,
numbers that mean everything to me.

29th November 2024

I'm a person, and I can't go back (2023/11/09)

To be honest, sometimes I wish I could just explode.

Not in a suicidal way, and not in an angry way, but more in a way embodying the sensation that I am too much.

I am just a sack of flesh containing a volatile fuse, a living and breathing uncomfortable mass of organs mismatched with its body, with a heart that beats in unpredictability and whose lungs swell like a balloon waiting to burst.

But it never happens, and I often wish it did. I wish I could spontaneously combust and leave nothing behind, not even organs or blood or an unrecognizable heap of flesh. Just gone.

I wish the thing living inside my body was a little tamer, a little simpler. Without having to carry the permanent weight of scar tissue from an internal bleeding that lasted for too long. Something easier to tell people, something easier to explain.

Sometimes, I try to imagine a universe where that's the case. A distant universe where this body belongs to some, tamer being, who hasn't been beaten down and down again into a pulp of internal gore. Whose insides haven't been replaced with the ravenous disarray of guts forcibly transplanted into a body that wasn't compatible.

But somehow, the thought makes me uneasy. Feels more foreign to me than anything else in my body.

Because I realize.

That I am my insides, and my insides have become a part of me.

That despite countless imaginings of alternate universes where I don't exist, I can't be anyone other than who I am. That such wishes of being someone else are nonsensical, because really, I can't imagine being without being all of this.

If you scooped out all my insides and replaced them with a fresh, untainted set, and if you transplanted in me, a new beating heart in the place of something worn out and raw, then...

Would it really be me anymore?

Would I really still exist?

(I don't want to stop existing.)

And so, a desperate monster in my heart, above anything else, pleads me to not let this body go to waste. To not easily succumb to nothingness, so that when the time comes when the insides fall to the thralls of death, it would continue to live long after the body rots.

Perhaps this way, it screams the desire to justify its own existence. To prove its own existence.

And it claws in a futile struggle to make a dent in the soil of the Earth. It claws so that its words could be heard beyond the scope of the body it occupies.

So that it simply wouldn't fade away after it dies.

And perhaps then, so that it, or I, would feel justified in saying I was a person. So then, I would deserve to be a person.

And I would feel real, and I would feel like a person.

The monsters in stories never live beyond their endings. They are birthed by the narrative for the sole purpose of being slaughtered, for their significance to be reduced to a singular sentence, mere enemies a hero have to tackle to advance their own growth.

But if I were to live beyond that single sentence, and if I mattered more than just a passing character, would I too become someone worth telling a real story about?

...

The thing is, this isn't really a "what if", though.

Not when my ink has already bled onto someone else's page.

Not when part of me already lives outside of my body, lives in someone else's heart.

So I realize that I, despite having (or being) the foreign matter of whatever wormed its way into the walls of this flesh, am already a person.

I'm a person, and even if my insides feel uglier than any impression I've ever gotten of what a "person's insides" are supposed to be like, I am still a person.

And now, nothing can or will change that.

I am a person, and I can't go back.