Author K.J. Torres

⟢ "I need you to bail me out." - "Again?" - "...the number of times is not the point right now."

⟢ "I have a plan." - "Last time you had a plan I had to explain to three separate adults why we were on a roof." - "This is a different plan." - "Is it though."

⟢ "You're my best friend." - "You literally just said you hated me four minutes ago." - "Yeah and now I need a favor so."

⟢ "I would die for you." - "I just need you to return this library book."- "I would die for you." - "It's two weeks overdue." - "I would absolutely not do that."

⟢ "Nobody has to know." - "Seven people already know." - "Nobody important has to know." - "I'm important." - "Debatable."

⟢ "This is your fault." - "You made the decision." - "Based on your advice." - "I said and I quote 'that sounds like a terrible idea.'" - "In a very convincing tone!"

⟢ "I need you to pretend to be my partner for one evening." - "What do I get out of it." - "My eternal gratitude." - "I have that already." - "Fine, I'll buy you dinner." - "I want to be your fake partner so bad right now."

⟢ "You could've warned me." - "I did warn you." - "You said 'this might be mildly chaotic.'" - "And?" - "There were police involved." - "Mildly is subjective."

⟢ "I'm not saying it was a bad idea." - "It was a terrible idea." - "I'm not saying that." - "You're thinking it." - "So loud."

⟢ "We need a code word." - "For what." - "In case one of us needs to be rescued from a conversation." - "What's wrong with just leaving." - "SOCIAL ANXIETY, DEREK."

⟢ "Tell me honestly, on a scale of one to ten, how much trouble are we in." - "Eleven." "So a four, roughly." - "An eleven." - "I'm going to need you to lie to me right now."

⟢ "I can explain." - "Please don't." - "It's actually a funny story." - "I don't want to laugh right now I want to be angry." - "You're going to laugh." - "...okay but I'm still angry after."

⟢ "You're a bad influence." - "You love me." - "Genuinely against my will."

⟢ "I followed your advice." "- I have never given good advice in my life, why would you do that."

⟢ "We should do something productive today." - "We could." - "Yeah." - "...you wanna do literally anything else." - "So bad."

⟢ "This is fine." - "Nothing about this is fine." - "I'm choosing to believe it's fine." - "That's not how reality works." - "Watch me."

⟢ "Nobody panic." - "Why would we panic." - "No reason. Definitely no reason. How do you feel about light jogging."

⟢ "I googled it." - "You're not a doctor." - "I googled it very confidently." - "That's worse."

⟢ "Do you trust me?" - "Absolutely not." - "Perfect, follow me anyway."

• Beautiful: Attractive, Appealing, Alluring, Bonny, Comely, Delightful, Gorgeous, Good-looking, Glamorous, Fetching, Fascinating, Picturesque, Ravishing, Resplendent, Stunning, Splendid

• Mad: Angered, Angry, Ballistic, Choleric, Foaming, Fuming, Furious, Hopping, Hot, Incensed, Infuriated, Indignant, Inflamed, Irate, Livid, Outraged, Roiled up, Ticked

• Horrible: Appalling, Atrocious, Awful, Alarming, Blood-curdling, Dire, Dreadful, Fearful, Frightening, Frightful, Formidable, Ghastly, Gut-wrenching, Grotesque, Gruesome, Hideous, Horrendous, Horrifying, Horrific, Lurid, Loathsome, Macabre, Monstrous, Nightmarish, Nauseating, Obscene, Offensive, Repugnant, Repulsive, Revolting, Shocking, Sickening, Terrible, Unspeakable

• Happy: Blithe, Blissful, Buoyant, Cheerful, Delighted, Glad, Gladsome, Gleeful, Gratified, Joyful, Joyous, Jovial, Lighthearted, Mirthful, Pleased, Satisfied, Sunny, Upbeat

⟢ "We used to talk every day. I don't know when that stopped. I don't know which one of us let go first."

⟢ "I miss you and you're right there and that's somehow the loneliest thing I've ever felt."

⟢ "We grew in different directions and nobody did anything wrong and it still feels like losing something."

⟢ "I saw a photo of us from four years ago and I don't recognize either of those people anymore."

⟢ "You know me in a way nobody current does and someday that's just going to be a fact I carry."

⟢ "I keep meaning to call. I think you keep meaning to call. We're very good at meaning to."

⟢ "You were my person for a decade. I don't know what the word is for what you are now."

⟢ "I heard something funny the other day and I thought of you first and then remembered and put my phone back down."

⟢ "We just--stopped. Like a clock that nobody noticed had run down."

⟢ "I think we held on past the point where it was working because we both loved who we used to be to each other."

⟢ "You were at my worst and my best and now you're just, someone I used to know, and that doesn't feel like enough of a word."

⟢ "I don't know if I should reach out. I don't know if you want me to. I don't know when we became people who don't know that about each other."

⟢ "I think we made each other into who we are and then outgrew each other and I don't know if that's beautiful or devastating."

⟢ "The friendship I thought we'd have forever quietly became a friendship I have in past tense."

⟢ "I wish there had been a fight. Something to point at. Instead there was just--less and less, until nothing."

⟢ "I'm glad you're doing well. I mean that. I just wish I heard it from you."

⟢ "We were the kind of friends who didn't need to explain ourselves to each other. I miss being known like that."

⟢ "You're living a whole life I'm not part of and I had to find that out from someone else and I didn't know it would hit like that."

⟢ "I think about calling you when something big happens. And then I remember we're not that anymore. And I sit with that for a while."

⟢ "Nobody tells you that some friendships just quietly die. That there's no funeral. Just absence."

⟢ "We were so good together once. Maybe that's enough. Maybe that has to be enough."

⟢ "I don't want to be strangers. I just don't know how to be what we were. I don't know if that place still exists."

⟢ "I think losing you taught me more about grief than any actual loss I've had. That feels important somehow."

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When a character is suspicious:

»-♡→ Eyed »-♡→ Sized up »-♡→ Studied »-♡→ Observed »-♡→ Watched »-♡→ Measured »-♡→ Scrutinized »-♡→ Kept an eye on »-♡→ Regarded carefully »-♡→ Looked over

...or if they're watching from a distance:

➺ Observed ➺ Monitored ➺ Followed with their eyes ➺ Kept watch over ➺ Tracked ➺ Shadowed with their gaze ➺ Looked on ➺ Witnessed from afar ➺ Viewed ➺ Surveyed

...or if they're confused:

➵ Squinted at ➵ Peered at ➵ Blink-and-missed ➵ Looked twice at ➵ Examined ➵ Stared at ➵ Tried to make out ➵ Struggled to see ➵ Looked uncertainly at ➵ Focused on

...or if they're remembering or realizing:

̗̀➛ Recognized ̗̀➛ Discovered ̗̀➛ Realized ̗̀➛ Found ̗̀➛ Noticed at last ̗̀➛ Became aware of ̗̀➛ Caught themselves seeing ̗̀➛ Finally spotted ̗̀➛ Identified ̗̀➛ Perceived

...or if they're in awe:

⬩➤ Beheld ⬩➤ Witnessed ⬩➤ Gazed upon ⬩➤ Took in ⬩➤ Marveled at ⬩➤ Stood transfixed by ⬩➤ Basked in the sight of ⬩➤ Soaked in the view of ⬩➤ Absorbed the sight of ⬩➤ Looked on in wonder

...or if they're being observant:

➯ Perceived ➯ Discerned ➯ Detected ➯ Made out ➯ Registered ➯ Noted ➯ Distinguished ➯ Observed closely ➯ Identified ➯ Recognized

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When a character notices something quickly:

»-♡→ Spotted »-♡→ Caught sight of »-♡→ Glimpsed »-♡→ Noticed »-♡→ Detected »-♡→ Clocked »-♡→ Picked out »-♡→ Espied »-♡→ Observed »-♡→ Sighted

...or if they're searching for something:

➺ Scanned ➺ Surveyed ➺ Examined ➺ Inspected ➺ Searched ➺ Swept their gaze across ➺ Looked over ➺ Studied ➺ Pored over ➺ Scrutinized

...or if they're admiring something:

➵ Beheld ➵ Gazed at ➵ Admired ➵ Marveled at ➵ Took in ➵ Drank in ➵ Appreciated ➵ Feasted their eyes on ➵ Reveled in ➵ Absorbed

...or if they're shocked or horrified:

̗̀➛ Witnessed ̗̀➛ Stared at ̗̀➛ Gawked at ̗̀➛ Recoiled from the sight of ̗̀➛ Bore witness to ̗̀➛ Froze at the sight of ̗̀➛ Locked eyes on ̗̀➛ Gaped at ̗̀➛ Couldn't look away from ̗̀➛ Found themselves staring at

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⟢ ⟢ ⟢ LONG POST!!! ⟢ ⟢ ⟢

⋆˙⟡ Grief is not sad all the time and that will mess your character up more than the sadness does. There are going to be hours where your grieving character forgets. Where they're laughing at something stupid on their phone or annoyed about traffic or genuinely hungry and thinking about what they want for lunch and then it comes back and the forgetting makes it WORSE. The return of it after a moment of normal is its own specific violence. It feels like betrayal. Or it feels like proof that you're not grieving right, that you didn't love them enough to remember every second. Writers keep their grieving characters sad in every scene because it reads as respectful and consistent and it is WRONG. The grief that ambushes you in the cereal aisle is realer than the grief you perform at the funeral.

⋆˙⟡ THE STUFF!!! nobody talks about the stuff. Someone dies and suddenly there is a BODY and there are OBJECTS and both of these things require immediate logistical decisions that do not pause for your feelings. What do you do with their half-finished cup of tea. Their reading glasses on the nightstand. Their voicemails still on your phone. Their shampoo in the shower that you cannot bring yourself to use but also cannot throw away so it just. Sits there. Getting lower somehow. Did someone use it. Did you use it without noticing???? the material reality of someone's absence is brutal and specific and most grief writing floats above it in abstraction like feelings are the main event. The feelings ARE happening inside a body that is standing in a house full of objects and that matters. SO WRITE THE OBJECTS.

⋆˙⟡ Grief makes people act completely out of character and everyone around them handles that badly. Your character might get mean. Might get inappropriately funny. Might make a terrible financial decision or sleep with someone they shouldn't or stop showering or clean the entire house at 3am for the fourth time this week. Drief does not make people into better, softer, wiser versions of themselves on any reliable schedule. Sometimes it makes them into someone they don't recognize and that is terrifying on top of everything else. Snd the people around them (friends, family, whoever) they want the grief to be legible. They want it to look like grief is supposed to look so they know what to do. When it doesn't look right they get uncomfortable and then they get scarce and then your grieving character is also somehow dealing with the secondary loss of people who couldn't handle it. which is its own thing.

⋆˙⟡ Someone died and your character didn't like them very much. Or loved them and also resented them. Or is relieved and then immediately guilty about the relief. Or is grieving someone who hurt them, someone with whom things were unfinished in a way that can never be finished now, someone who they had been estranged from, someone who they were about to reconcile with, someone who they had been slowly losing for years before the actual death so the death was almost anticlimactic except that it closes the door in a way that slow losing doesn't. Grief for a complicated person is complicated. You grieve who you wished they were alongside who they actually were. You grieve the relationship you deserved and didn't get. None of this is clean. None of this resolves. Stop writing grief like the person who died was beloved and simple. MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT SIMPLE.

⋆˙⟡ The body keeps doing its thing and that's horrifying. You know what happens the week someone close to you dies? you get hungry. You get tired. You wake up at the normal time. Your body does not know. It has not been informed. It wants breakfast and it wants to stretch and at some point it is going to want things you feel like you have no right to want right now. The physical continuation of your own life in the immediate aftermath of loss is one of the stranger things a human being has to experience and almost nobody writes it. Your character needs to eat. They need to sleep. Their back hurts. They have a headache that won't quit because they've been crying and dehydrated for four days. They are a body doing body things in the middle of the worst thing that has ever happened to them and those two realities exist at the same time with no resolution.

⋆˙⟡ Anniversaries and dates are only half the ambush. the random Friday is the other half. Everyone knows about the first birthday without them. The first holiday. The one year mark. Those dates are braced for. Your character knows they're coming and steels themselves and sometimes that even works. What nobody warns you about is the random Tuesday in March that isn't any significant date at all except that something small happens: the light is a certain way, a song comes on, they see someone wearing the same jacket, and it is somehow worse than the anniversary was. Grief has terrible aim. it does not respect the calendar you've organized it into. it goes quiet for weeks and then destroys you on an unremarkable Wednesday because you drove past a gas station you used to stop at together. Write the random Tuesday. it's realer than the anniversary scene and it will devastate people who know.

⋆˙⟡ People say insane things to grieving people and the grieving person has to just stand there and take it. They're in a better place. Everything happens for a reason. i know exactly how you feel, when my dog died--and your character cannot say anything because this person means well and grief has a strange etiquette where the bereaved is somehow responsible for managing the comfort of everyone who comes to comfort them. The grieving person ends up performing okayness for the people who came to check on them. Ends up reassuring people. Ends up saying thank you for coming when what they want is for everyone to leave and also for no one to ever leave. This role reversal is so common and so rarely written and it is one of the most exhausting parts of early grief. Your character is drowning and spending energy making sure everyone else feels good about the life jacket they brought.

⋆˙⟡ The person who died keeps getting fixed in time while everyone else moves. This one is strange and i don't see it written enough. Your character ages. Changes. Has experiences. Develops opinions. And the person they lost stays exactly the same age they were, exactly the person they were, forever. Which means the gap between who your character is now and who the person was gets wider as time passes. You become someone they never knew. You have thoughts you can't tell them. You reach an age they never reached. Eventually you outlive them. You are older than they ever got to be. And the version of them in your memory is younger than you now. The relationship you carry continues to evolve even though only one of you is still here to evolve it. That is bizarre and sad and completely human and almost nobody writes it. WHY??? :///