lead us through the night

Paramedics show up, study you thoroughly and agree that while they can’t see any apparent sign of death, you are, indeed, dead, and ask you to climb aboard the ambulance. You’re taken to the temporary corpse storage that hospitals have.

On the way there you ask them whether this kind of shit happens often, and while they won’t look at you, the paramedics agree that they’ve never had a talking corpse before, though they won’t question the fact that you’re moving on your own.

You’re eventually led to a morgue, where you’re shown a slab to lay on, and at this point you don’t really even question it, you just climb onto the Corpse Shelf and lay down, maybe have a little nap, with no idea what’s going to happen next.

Then you wake up to someone walking into the morgue, who has the shit scared out of them when you move, and they’re like “dude what the fuck, you’re not supposed to be here, this place is for storing dead bodies” and when you’re like “aw man sorry I thought I was a dead body” they have no idea whether you’re joking and they don’t care, you’re just chased out of there.

And you just kinda go home and take a shower, show up to work normally the next day and nobody questions it.

tom hardy doesn’t actually know he’s being possessed by an alien yet in the story. he’s just resigned himself to whatever fucking meltdown he seems to be having. he doesn’t even seem particularly surprised that things have gone this way for him. like ten minutes later he finds out his heart stopped working and hes just like “you asshole” and he throws his alien parasite against the wall like a water balloon. and then he just leaves and is immediately kidnapped. what a fucking wild ride tom hardy is on. 

tom hardy’s actual superpower is being the exact same level of dysfunctional no matter what is happening in his life. so when everything’s going ok for him he self-destructs spectacularly, but when literally everything that can happen to a human being happens to him, he does, like, unrealistically well. climbing into a lobster tank and eating a live animal with large claws just like… “well, this is what’s happening to me today. i’m so sorry you have to watch this, man. anyway here goes, i’m going to bite into a living creature with my human mouth and then LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS”

during the standardized test, we were allowed to keep a post-test book on our desk. i diligently got started on part 1: english. at the time, all of the answers went on the same sheet, but all of the questions were in different booklets. so i finish all my english questions, read in my extra time, and then it’s part 2: math.

i realize i have answered all of my english questions on the math portion of the answer sheet. at first, annoyed but undeterred, i’m like. okay great i gotta erase every bubble. but i get bored around question 5 of doing this because… like… harry potter is sitting on my desk and i could just give them the wrong answers. so i answer maybe 10 whole questions in the math portion, copy the english answers over to where they actually belong, and then crack open the book and call it a day.

i obviously failed. this is the real life, not a movie. my parents were called in. i had scored in the lowest percentile. i was bad at math. i was concerningly bad at math. i could have done better just guessing than how i did with the english answers. 

if this was just a funny story, someone would ask me “why did you do so badly when you usually get fairly average grades” and i would have said “i wanted to read harry potter, not take this stupid test.” but it’s the real life, and nobody asked. instead, i was branded stupid and bad at math. i got placed in a lower math than i needed to be in; got bored, stopped paying attention. knew i was in the “worst at math” group, started saying “i’m bad at math” and 100% stopped trying because the further i fell behind, the worse i got. through the rest of my academic career - until senior year in high school, i never got above a c on a math test, because i was “just bad” at math.

i had undiagnosed adhd. the only reason i know now i have adhd is because at 22 years old, i finally went to a therapist, who effectively said, “are you kidding me you have the most obvious case of attention deficit i’ve ever seen.”

but nobody had been looking. my one test grade had given teachers permission to not look, because, obviously, i was bad at math. the one time i got 100% on a math test - that one time in senior year - i remember my math teacher looking at it and saying “it’s clear that if you just focused, you could do the work.”

in college i’d take a math class and i actually “just focused” for the first time in my life - meaning i treated math as a challenge, but one i could overcome with the skills i’d learned all on my own, through constant work and practice. i got the highest grade in my class. i still think i’m bad at math.