Queen Of Bitchville

the fact that i'm no longer the same age as the protagonists of novels and films i once connected to is so heartbreaking. there was a time when I looked forward to turning their age. i did. and i also outgrew them. i continue to age, but they don't; never will. the immortality of fiction is beautiful, but cruel.

nothing in the world makes me more evil than just being kind of annoyed

me when i'm in genuine agonising distress: i'm so sorry if i'm bothering you with my childish histrionics :/

me when i'm just in a bit of a bad mood: i hope hydrogen bombs fall on every living thing in the universe

in internet posts it is easy to cut them out of your life. they are hurting you! they aren't listening to you!

they held your hair back. they lent you lipstick. they held your hand at the train station and got you home safe. they rounded on your bully, got loud, said get fucked, spitting-mad in your defense.

they also cut the hair off again. told you that you should really think twice before wearing something like that. took you for granted. took your insecurities and threw them in your face again.

you know logically it should be easy. all the internet advice comments always read it will feel better. like an equation - if a person is rotten, you just remove them. you pull the tooth that's hurting.

but it was never a big flare-up moment. you don't live in a sitcom. they never tried to take your boyfriend or steal from your apartment. they showed up to birthdays and they wrote songs about you and bring you water without you asking. once you found out they carry an emergency inhaler for you, even though you haven't had an asthma attack in years - just in case.

where is the line? people fuck up. sometimes they fuck up badly. sometimes people have raw personalities, like a powerline, and being around them is dangerous. addicting. sometimes they can't help themselves, but you know they're trying. sometimes they are just rough-around-the-edges. sometimes they don't even realize how they sounded when they said that. sometimes it's just - you've both loved each other for so long now, the way this thing hurts goes back to the root.

and that's the fucked up part. you have pushed your fingers against the sweetheart of memory. things these days are electric, tense, harrowing. they didn't used to be. there were a lot of good days in there. sometimes you want to just close your eyes and say can this be over yet? do we still need to be fighting?

doing that would give up any chance you get of getting an apology, but you don't always know that you need an apology, you love them. once they flaked on your birthday party. once they told you to get over it, people are always dying. they also let you crash on their couch for a week after the breakup, handfeeding you when you were so sad you couldn't eat. they are also judgmental about everything, occasionally react to banal statements with an attitude that is weird and fiery. they also love you like a lighthouse sometimes, so strong they cut the storm like lightning.

but the problem is that you might be storm. you might be the thing that needs breaking. what if you are two forces who are desperately, horribly drawn to each other, shaped by the other person's passions, and both good for each other and bad in equal measure.

what if you're both just people, and you're no saint neither.

just cut them off! swallowing the saltwater, you catch yourself in the mirror. you've been shaking more than usual. there's an ache in you that is oblique, loud, impossible to soothe. is this what it looks like? when life is "easier"?

your mouth will always have a hole, is the thing, if you remove the tooth.

what’s it gonna take

i want to be a sweet and friendly girl but there’s all this anxiety. and the horrors

and rage

yeah and also the rage

did you really let them ruin that for you?

when i was younger i worked on a farm for 3 years. during late july and august we would have unfettered access to the strawberry plots. they were all warm and ripe and fresh. i think i ate a pound of dirt back then. i think i picked enough seeds out of my teeth to build a temple. the summer hours are long; i'd come home with the bruising stain of juice running in a seam along my cheeks and fingers and jaw.

why didn't you protect your precious things from other people? you knew this could happen.

i can't eat strawberries from the store anymore, they don't taste right. something about the florescent lights and the chill of them and the way they are absent from the vine. they feel bleached and bland, a wasted party dress. i watch other people eat strawberries and miss enjoying them. none of the store-bought strawberries will have mold or bugs, okay. they will be big and bright red and perfectly shaped. but they are not the ugly and real strawberries of my summer, awarded by the soil and the hot sun up ahead and hours spent crouched, plucking.

i didn't mean to let it get ruined. i wish it hadn't been. i miss having it. but i came back to it afterward and it just wasn't the same as it had been. i know love is never wasted. but it feels like - love did this. it's not that i never loved it, you know? it's that i did.

genuinely cannot stop thinking about how fucking metal it is that, in a world obsessed with telling people "it'll get better" as a platitude, with no intention of actually putting in the work necessary to make things better, fall out boy came in here and dropped an album with a message that amounts to "it may never get better, but it doesn't have to get better for it to be worth it." an album that says "sometimes pain is part of life, and you don't have to get rid of the pain to love the things you love." an album that says "the bad moments will not make the good moments mean less." an album that says "you will ache for the times that you were numb and felt nothing, and you will wonder if it would be better to be numb again than to feel pain, but i promise you, the living makes the pain bearable."

Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.

grieving the person you used to be

So Much (For) Stardust is an insane album 'cause it says the past is not dead we're simply not living in it anymore and it's almost like you could feel the vibration of every fob song ever playing at the same time, past, present, future, it's timelessness embracing you and giving back and giving back and giving back to the point you feel whole again.

and when they asked me what it feels like, to spend 154 days chasing a band that died tragically young fix their hearts, with the most honorable strangers you've come to know, to find yourself whole in the hands of a rockstar and in the roar of the crowd, what it feels like to be able to frantically mumble something incoherent to most but have your every word instantly understood by hundreds, watching from miles away as something brand new grows from the long forgotten corpse; i told her that not everything feels like something else.

of course i'm angry. do you have any idea how many times someone should have helped me?

the line 'you must fix your heart' kills me because gerard has talked for years about the trap of feeling like you need to be depressed to the point of crisis to produce good material that they fell down. this line, and foundations in general, is in direct response to that mindset; instead of tearing themselves open, foundations is a song about gerard reckoning with healing. it's not about being healed, or wanting to heal; you MUST fix your heart. it's not a suggestion at this point. foundations is a song about shifting away from martyrdom and working towards rebuilding oneself, not in spite of, but alongside one's past.

I know this is so unlikely but like please how funny would it be if for their second wwwy fest set the stage opens to just four plastic Halloween skeletons dressed vaguely as the band from the black parade era. and then the music starts and it's very clearly just a Spotify playlist. with ads and everything