TIME JUMP: Age 27 — and my first content warning

This is another landing page to help organize additional stories about these characters taking place around this point in time.

This is also me mentioning to anybody who is not in a place suitable to consuming content that goes to fairly emotionally bleak slash dark places—I'm going to be a bit open and briefly disclose that from about here out we are getting into a lot of content that was written during one of the lowest emotional periods in my life while I went through a protracted period of complicated-feeling quicksandy grief the last few years over the decline and eventual end of my romantic relationship with a partner I was with since summer of 1998 when we were both teenagers. I needed an outlet to burn off some of the most intense feelings I was reeling with, and for a while all I wanted to do was lean hard into the most outlandish melodrama I could cook up and plausibly sell myself on.

I mean I did kind of promise BETRAYAL! FUCKING! A JOB ONLY YOU CAN DO! (we have some ground to cover before the fucking, sorry)

IRL I'm not through the quicksand or anything I guess, but the swamp terrain is getting a little easier (why swamp—is it because I'm a hag come to claim my birthright? I didn't think this metaphor through). I held back sharing some of this stuff before because it's so disjointed, dark and painful at points. But also it's sometimes really funny and it means something to me if I can show the little handful of people who make sharing this story feel worthwhile. I thought I'd go ahead after all and share some of this disjointed and not very well organized or edited stuff I wrote in bits and pieces during a hard time in my life, and see if it sparks me into another writing streak to dip back in for a while. It's been almost a couple years and I think it might be good for me. Plus it would be nice to see if I can write anything halfway decent when I'm not utterly miserable.

It felt fair though to warn people that if you're in a headspace where potentially upsetting shit a la characters grappling with complicated and multifaceted grief and emotional shit, frequently in unhealthy ways and they sure as hell know better but fuck it might tip you into a less good place, maybe bookmark this section for a time you're more in the mood to handle that, or monitor these landing pages for signs that things might be letting up if you'd rather skip a bit.