The World of Narrom

In court that day, the judge asked the boy, “Are you afraid?” No, the boy said.

Pipes says the judge seemed surprised, and asked, “Why not?”

Chief’s thesis was that a child who has been abused by an adult can benefit psychologically from the presence of even more intimidating adults that they know are on their side. “When we tell a child they don’t have to be afraid, they believe us,” Arizona biker Pipes told azcentral.com. “When we tell them we will be there for them, they believe us.” ( Article)

They go on runs to protect the child if they feel even the slightest threatened no matter where. If the child needs them to go on vacation with them, they do. Bikers come from across the nation to watch over and take shifts for these kids. And the best part is once you’re adopted into this family as a BACA kid, you’re always one. Even when you’re 40 and the perp gets released from jail, they’ll come meet with you and find your best options for avoiding the person and maintaining the life you’ve built for yourself. Once a BACA child, always a BACA child. In Florida, there’s 100% rate for identifying the perp based on the child’s testimony. Why? Because BACA stands with the child and supports the child so they feel comfortable enough to point out their attacker.

They’re in Canada as well and probably other countries. I met and talked with a native guy who runs the place near me. His name is Shaman. I got in, and I’m considered a BACA child now. Despite being 17, turning 18 when I talked to them. They spent time with me when my abuser was over, they gave me therapy resources. They give you something called a ‘level 1′ where they go to your house with as many bikers as they can, i shit you not a solid 20-40 bikers came from even out of province, and met me. I got to choose my biker name and I got a vest with patches on it and my name on it. They all hugged a Teddybear before giving it to me, and told me if I ever felt the BACA bear was running out of love, to give them a call and they’d refill it for me, and then I got a ride on one of their bikes. Just a day or so ago I went to an annual party with them and they we ate food one of them cooked and had a lot of laughs. 

I’ve never felt as loved as I did being a part of the BACA family. They also gave me dog tags with the names, and phone numbers of my 2 workers.  So I can call them whenever I feel scared. 

BACA is an absolutely wonderful group that will do everything in it’s power to help any child whos been abused. 

And it doesn’t end when you’re 18 either. As long as you get in contact/get your level 1 before you’re 18? you’re ALWAYS a BACA kid. I’m 18 now and they still invite me to parties, ask me if I’m okay, and are there for me. They’re still trying to find me resources for therapy. 

BACA has changed my fucking life. 

I noticed it when I was in third grade. We had this globe on my father’s desk in his office from the 1970s. My father got a kick out of things that were slightly wrong or outdated or simply nonfunctional in the regular sense.

This map in particular still had the Soviet Union on it and in one piece. It also mislabeled Arkansas as “Arckansas” which he loved and they also forgot to print half of New Zealand. It’s almost impressive at that point when you manage to forgot half of an entire country.

It was also one of those topographical maps with edges that stuck up and ridges that represented mountains or oceans. I used to like to sneak into his office when my mom was on the phone with her friends and my dad was still at work.

I would run my hands up and down the ridges of the rocky mountains and trace my fingers over the valleys in India. I was always a kinesthetic child: plunging my hand into the sandbox just to feel the granules, threading my fingers through my mother’s soft hair when she’d let me, doing as much finger painting as possible with long watery strokes.

I was lost to the feel of those fine little details of rivers and valleys when my eye caught on something. It wasn’t large or very impressive, but it did strike me as odd somehow. There was a perfectly round dot in the middle of the big fat state of the Soviet Union. I stared for a moment at the dot next to the printed word “Siberia.” I frowned at it for a moment and then went back to tracing the Himalayan mountains. I knew even by then that my father’s old globe wasn’t to be trusted- it was missing half of New Zealand after all.

So I ignored the dot the first time.

—————

We were doing a unit on the countries of the world in fifth grade. It became impossible to ignore it at that point as our teacher put huge yawning maps on the projector and pointed out different cities and landmarks.

We were placed into groups to do projects on the wildlife and food of different regions. I was assigned to Australia with a group of three boys I didn’t even like. It was the second day of the unit and my eyes were hot-glued to the corner of the map, like an itch you can’t reach or a smell you can’t place.

I raised my hand high in the air and sat up perfectly straight. Mrs. Stevenson paused in her usual spiel on how exciting the pyramids were and the benefits of the Nile river and then pointed at me. I rarely raised my hand in class so she looked excited to call on me. “Yes, Astrid?”

I frowned delicately and shifted in place. I had already practiced the question in my head several times. “Excuse me,” my cheeks were already heating up from the sound of my own voice. “But what’s that spot on the map?” I pointed to the dark, perfectly round smudge on the world map that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

It was small, but very dark and it had started to bother me the second she put it up the day earlier.

My teachers brow folded in, “that’s Russia.” She said as she followed my pointer finger.

“No,” I said stubbornly and the jabbed the finger, “inside of it.” “Oh,” My teacher clapped her hands together, “that’s Siberia. Siberia is an enormous swath of land in the north with a wide range of natural beauties, including the tundra and a lake made of mostly-” “No.” My voice pierced the air and many students whipped their heads around to look at me as I took a hard tone. “What’s that dot in Siberia? The big black mark.” My teacher’s mouth twitched and she stared back at me for a long moment. She smoothed her skirt down, “We have to get back to Africa now, Astrid.” She said coolly, “If you have any more questions like that you can ask me after class.”

I folded in on myself as she said those frosty words and I glanced around. Why were they all staring at me? It was only after I overhead a harsh whisper that realized something was very wrong. “What is she talking about?” Someone hissed to their neighbor and I bit down on my cheek.

I would ask my only other friend in class, Kelsey, about the smudge later. She said there was no such smudge on the map to begin with.

That was somehow the worst possible answer.

—————-

I became briefly obsessed.

I stopped and stared at maps on advertisements and paintings of the world in hipster coffee shop walls. I bought a world map at the local mall. I snuck onto my family computer and googled it over and over again: Siberia. Siberia. Siberia.

They were all the same. There was a hole directly in the middle of nowhere as far as I could tell. I would have dismissed it, maybe my globe in my dad’s study was misprinted, maybe I was just seeing things that day in class, maybe I had an eye problem.

But every single map I looked at was the same, it wasn’t a city, it wasn’t a mountain, it wasn’t any kind of landmark according to any databases. It was just an empty spot.

I wrote my projects on Siberia after that. I looked up what tundras looked like and conifer forests and how much snowfall the region got and what kind of animals and people lived there. Most of it was average information such as fun facts (there is a diamond mine so large in Siberia that helicopters are not allowed to fly over for fear of being sucked in!) and the type of currency used (rubles) and languages spoken (a lot).

I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I was sure I was sane, at least at that age I was sure, but there was no explanation I could find.

“You don’t see it?” I asked my mom one day over breakfast as I pointed to a map in my textbook. I pointed right at the dot.

My mom looked over her shoulder, “Oh this again.” She tutted, “you want us to take you on a trip, is that it? You’re just like your dad. We can’t afford anything like that right now.” I knew by then that mom wasn’t seeing anything. I didn’t know what everyone else saw, but somehow they either didn’t care about the blank spot on the map, or couldn’t see it.

————–

My obsession with the black spot flared up and down for years until it became concerning. I was in the 8th grade by then and the idea of the spot sometimes still gnawed at me, bothered me somewhere in the back of my mind.

I was on one of the school computers during my lunch and was trying to finish up an essay for LA, but two girls next to me were chatting.

“You have to try the airport game.” Miranda Green was saying to her best friend Haley. “You drop yourself off anywhere on google maps and then try and find your way to an airport.”

I glanced at the two of them. I was half-way through a sentence about Shakespeare’s use of metaphors when my hands danced across the keyboard. I wasn’t allowed that much computer time at home– especially after my mom found me looking up mass hallucinations and collective delusions of a populace.

I had heard about google maps though. It came out a few years ago.

I went onto the website and waited as it slowly loaded. My eyebrows rose as colors and shapes took form on the screen and modern technology really was something. I spun the little map around with my mouse and zeroed in on my favorite location.

Just like on the physical maps and other online maps and maps printed on the back of cereal boxes: there was a hole there. I started zooming in. I got closer and closer and it seemed to drag on as I slowly took my time blowing the image up.

The closest town to the spot was “Yakutsk” and there was nothing but green around it and a distant blue splash representing a lake.

I zoomed until the colors of the map disappeared and the words disappeared and the whole screen went cool and black. It wasn’t like it turned off. It was more like it was splashed with a total darkness that was blacker than black- smooth and shiny and strange.

It was depthless, feelingless, empty black.

“Astrid!” I jumped at the sound of my name. “Are you just sitting there? The library is closing.”

I turned left and right and the lights in the library were dimmed and the two students sitting next to me were gone. In fact, everyone was gone except one librarian with hands on her hips. “How long have you been here?” I glanced out the closest window and realized the sun was setting. I jerked to my feet, “what time is it?!” She shook her head. “It’s almost 5pm, were you playing one of those online fighting games? The boys always manage to crash the computer with those. Do you know how long reboots take?” I looked down and the computer had a large blue screen over it. It had crashed. It seemed to have crashed hours ago.

“I have to go.” I reached for my backpack, cheeks burning and thoughts spiraling. My mom would have been trying to pick up two hours ago.

I had missed my afternoon classes. I had been sitting at that chair staring at that screen for apparently five hours.

I stopped actively searching for the spot after that.

———–

I avoided looking at maps too closely in high school. I purposefully placed myself in the lowest social studies classes and disengaged with most world history classes.

I just didn’t have the time or energy to look anymore. I kept my head down and I tried to do what I had always tried to: not stand out. Make sure no one could tell I didn’t know how to answer them. Make sure no one could tell I didn’t know how to start conversations. Make sure no one can tell you’ve never held a hand or kissed someone.

I think I lied more often than I told the truth in those painfully slow years of high school. “I’ve course, I’ve been on dates,” I’d laugh as someone casually asks me by our lockers. “Of course, I’ve had friends sleep over at my house.”

I knew people casually and didn’t know them at all.

My mom was always worried about me: when are you going to bring a friend home? When are you going to bring a boy home? When are you going to try a little harder, Astrid?

I was trying as hard as I could, but there were two opposite forces at work inside me: I could reveal myself and unveil that lack inside me. Or hide myself and have them never really know me. Never really connect to me.

Walking across that graduation stage at 18 was the largest relief I ever experienced.

——————–

It was just my luck that I had a roommate in college with an enormous map on her wall. I had almost forgotten about it by then, willfully so. She was an international studies student and had a map with golden and red stars on it. The red stars represented places she had been, and the golden stars represented places she wanted to go. The map was absolutely covered in stars.

As far as I could tell the dark dot in Siberia was also just there to specifically annoy me. I was on my bed staring at it one day while Wendy Jackson lay on her stomach and typed away at some homework.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away and my heart squeezed in my chest. “Hey,” I said softly and Wendy’s eyes floated up toward me. We hadn’t talked much in that first month and I could see her polite attention being focused on me for what felt like the first time. I toyed with the next words out of my mouth for a full minute before they spilled out. “Do you think everything in the world has been mapped?” She sat up in bed and shot me a funny look. “What’s that?” I looked away. “Nothing. I was just looking at your map. Thinking… stuff. About mapping.” I finished lamely. She gave a lopsided grin, “Cool, right?” She sniffed, “I mean, like, only like twenty percent of the ocean’s been mapped.” She said and stretched toward the ceiling. “We know more about the moon than we do our own oceans, which is crazy, right? Especially since the ocean’s like, most of our planet.” I nodded and shifted on my own bed. “Right… But do you think some of the land… can’t be mapped though? Even with the satellites and stuff. Like, places that no one’s seen before. That we’re not supposed to see.” “What are you talking about?” She was definitely giving me another funny look again.

“Nothing.” I pulled back. “Just thinking out loud. A little philosophy.” “Uh, right,” she flopped down on her stomach again. “Hey, what’s your major again?” I leaned back against the wall and stared up at the ceiling. I closed my eyes, “architecture.” She must have something like “cool” or “nice” after that but I was still thinking about holes and gaps and empty places of the world.

—————–

It was easy to forget. It was easy to get lost in my life: the classes and passing faces and trying to play the conversation game where I never really felt like I was winning.

I did meet someone. His name was Josh and he was in law school, he wore brown button-ups and had long shaggy brown hair and played two instruments (poorly). I think I liked him because he put up with me and the long silences between us.

I think I liked him because he was the sad type of man and sometimes we could just sit and be sad about the world and quiet together. I liked the way he held me. I liked the way he looked at me. I liked the way he liked me. For a long time, I thought that was enough.

We moved in together after college and I couldn’t help but start to ask myself– is this what I wanted? Is this what I was supposed to want? Was there a road map to the “after” part of my life that would make sense? After high school and after college and after finding someone to date.

My mom was pleased nonetheless. She loved Josh and pet his hair and cooed over him every time he went over to the house. She was getting divorced from my dad and it was hard for me to be in the house with them at all without Josh there with me. It felt too much like being an unmoored buoy in the ocean when I saw how they didn’t even look at each other in the face anymore.

I started dreaming that second year I lived with Josh. I was working at a high-end grocery store because I couldn’t find any jobs in my field and we were planning on getting a cat soon. I loved cats. A cat would make things better.

It was in the middle of summer, right around 3 am, when I sat bolt-up in bed, panting like I just been running a marathon and my entire world spinning. “Oh God,” I tore at my face. “Oh God.”

Josh turned over and sleepily reached for me, “what’s up?” I batted his hand away as if on instinct. “Something.” I grasped for the dream but it slipped between my fingertips like receding storm clouds. “I was dreaming about it.” “About what?” He sat up and seemed to be fully awake as my chest heaved.

I blinked a couple times and bowed my head low. “Something.”

—————

It was my third year with Josh and second year after my parents divorce. I was getting sick of having the same dark dreams I couldn’t remember. I was sick of packing food for rich snobs and I was sick of living in a one bed-room apartment with shitty air conditioning. We never did get that cat.

I was sitting on the couch one day and I pulled up a map on my phone. Google maps had been getting better and better and I went onto street view near the city of Yakutsk and started going in any direction.

The roads went on and on through faceless thick forests and narrow empty spaces, yellow hills and dark little houses. I scrolled until my thumb ached and I didn’t know what I was seeing anymore. I kept scrolling. My head snapped up hours later when the sun was wispy yellow on the horizon and keys jangled in the door.

“I’m home.” Josh gave an attempt at a smile when he saw me on the couch. “Having fun on your day off?” I looked down at my phone and realized the battery had died and the screen was blank. It might have been dead hours before then.

I curled up into myself. “It wasn’t my day off.” I shook my head, “I just called in sick again.” Josh frowned and made his way over to me, “Having another shitty day?” I just shook my head and he took a seat next to me, but not that near me. “Can you tell me what’s wrong? Like, actually wrong.” Me, I wanted to say, it’s always been me.

He put his arm around my shoulders and kissed my temple and then seemed to wait for me to answer. I tried.

“Do you ever,” I attempted to articulate, dipping into some deep crevice inside myself and dig it out, scoop it out, force it out and leave it bleeding and open on his doorstep. “Do ever feel like you’re missing something?” A moment of misgiving flashed across his expression before he kissed my temple again. “Of course.” He chuckled. “I was missing you before I met you.” I should have felt warm in my chest for him saying that. I should have felt like I could put down that gnawing feeling in my gut.

I turned toward him and tried to smile. “Very cute.” “You’re cute.” Feel it, I ordered myself as he helped me stand back up after I had been cramped on the couch for hours. Feel it, I growled to myself, Love him, already dammit.

If I had been paying attention those thoughts were the beginning of the end. He never really did understand me.

But truthfully I didn’t know if anyone could.

——————————-

It was Thursday. It was raining. My bank account was exactly zero and my answering machine was stuffed full with messages from my mom.

She had just found out about me breaking up with Josh, which I didn’t want to discuss with her because it had happened months ago. I sat in the terminal of an airport with my back completely straight and my only luggage a baby blue backpack with a broken zipper.

A little girl the size of a large melon was playing peekaboo with her father a seat over. A businessman in a full-suit was on the phone demanding answers. A woman was whispering in Russian to what I assumed was her grandmother and patting her hand softly.

Kids passed. Security passed. Little old men in wheelchairs passed. They kept making announcements over the loudspeakers and I kept drinking more water despite not being thirsty anymore. I tossed my phone into the trash. I tossed my keys into the trash.

I boarded the plane without really looking at anything and put earphones in the second I sat down.

I don’t remember the plane ride very well. Or the train ride where I got yelled at in Russian several times, or the taxi ride that I barely managed to snag.

“You sure?” The taxi man said as he dropped me off in the middle of a random dirt road with no houses around. “Nothing out here.” I waved my hand absently and handed him the rest of my rubles I had on me. “Alright, lady.” He drove off.

I turned toward big hauntingly dark evergreen trees with fall coolness trapped under their branches and small animals scuttling underneath. The sky was narrow and bleached blue overhead. It was quiet except for the pine needles crunching under my boots as I walked. Early October chill bled through the wind and flushed my cheeks. I walked with a touch of fever to my movements.

The world became very small: my steps and my breath and a distant dizziness in my body that I ignored. I barely ate for those long hours it took to trek through the dark and the mud and past the lakes and streams and calm looking dear.

It was early when I finally slowed down. The sun ghosted over the treetops and my body ached in every possible way. I shouldn’t have been able to hike through the night and I shouldn’t have been able to keep my eyes open or feet moving all that time. But I did.

There was a clearing ahead, a place where the trees opened up and the grass was turned blue in the early morning light. A handful of people were standing in it: a round woman wearing a large-brimmed red hat, the type you might see at the beach. A teen boy with a ripped-up black t-shirt and strikingly blonde hair. A woman with elaborately twisted black hair, purple crocs, and thick glasses. A white-whiskered man who was staring at the sky blankly.

A final woman in a thick parka coat turned to me as I entered the clearing and I shivered from head to foot. We nodded at each other, “you’ve seen it too?” She asked in a dusty voice and there was nothing else to do but nod.

There were trees ahead, just like there were trees behind me. But the pit of my stomach said there was something more too. The soreness in my muscles told me I could stop. The prickle behind my neck told me I could start walking again soon.

My whole body was singing with it, frozen with it, burning with it. The empty spot on the map was just beyond those trees.

“Sunrise,” the old man muttered. “Sunrise.” We all gathered toward him and the portly woman in the red hat tisked at me. “You almost missed it.” I gave a soft smile. “I wasn’t sure… before.” “You will be.” The teenage boy said and turned toward the gap in the trees. “We’ve gotta be.” The group of odd people and strangers and the only people I ever felt would truly ever understand surrounded me. I apologized to my mom in my head at that moment. I told my dad I really had cared for him even if I never showed it. I told Josh that it hadn’t been him– it was really me.

Someone took my hand. Another person put an arm around my shoulder, everyone huddled close together. We walked as one, forward, outward. Something shivered ahead- like the air itself was dancing and I heard metallic ringing and tasted something bitter in my mouth.

My heart beat rapidly in my throat and my feet crunched on the ground.

And together, we walked off the map.

————-

Oh.

Oh, no.

I know about this dog. 

(uwu a great find)

—-

….gl-n-h-hd.

Blue is followed, white is not

also i’m wondering what ur qualifications for gay are lol. like are we talking the general overarching term used to refer to the entire community as a vague descriptor? or are we talking just sexualities? we talkin both romantic and sexual attraction here? r u followin ppl who id as:

- queer?

- questioning?

- trans and/or enby?

- pan?

- ace/aro?

EVERYONE CAN RB THIS

Ace? Yep!!!

Pan?? Fuck yeah!!

Homosexual?? Of course!

if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to?

have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who?

list your fandoms and one character from each that you identify with.

do you like your name?  is there another name you think would fit you better?

do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do?

are you religious/spiritual?

do you care about your ethnicity?

what musical artists have you most felt connected to over your lifetime?

are you an artist?

do you have a creed?

describe your ideal day.

dog person or cat person?

inside or outdoors?

are you a musician?

five most influential books over your lifetime.

if you’d grown up in a different environment, do you think you’d have turned out the same?

would you say your tumblr is a fair representation of the “real you”?

what’s your patronus?

which Harry Potter house would you be in? or are you a muggle?

would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else?

do you love easily?

list the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order.

how often would you want to see your family every year?

have you ever felt like you had a “mind-meld” with someone?

could you live as a hermit?

how would you describe your gender/sexuality?

do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”?

on a scale from 1 to 10, how hard is it for someone to get under your skin?

three songs that you connect with right now.