i am being perfectly fucking civil

Andrew isn’t heartless, Andrew is hurt. Andrew has been breaking apart since he was seven years old, and he’s been shown time and time again that feelings won’t change a thing. When he said ‘please’ and it did nothing. When he saw bruises and tears from Aaron but she’s my mother and she loves me and it’s okay Andrew, it’s okay it doesn’t even hurt. When those men found his cousin, his caring and soft cousin, and they hurt him. They hurt him and Aaron’s pleading did nothing but Andrew’s fists sure as hell did.

Andrew isn’t heartless, but he’s almost convinced himself that he is. Twelve years of hiding it all has dulled things, his meds blanketing them where his feigned indifference doesn’t.

And then.

And then he sees a boy with dark hair and a darker past. And there’s a flicker, a little push under the apathy that swaddles his mind.

And another push when he meets eyes the blue of a glacier.

Another when the rabbit becomes the wolf for the world to see.

Another. Another. Another.

And he feels the slab of concrete he’s laid over his emotions start to crack, feels the little fissures as they spread with every new secret he learns about this boy who is so much more than he thought.

And he chalks it up to the medicine, the little pills that change his world so drastically.

But the meds are long gone and there’s still a boy, now with hair like a flame, and he still feels the pushing and cracking and crumbling.

Only it goes so much faster with the medicine gone.

A shove when the boy threw himself in the line of fire for Andrew’s sake.

A deep fissure when his phone rings because the boy chose not to run.

A million bits of debris falling with every kiss, but no he doesn’t want this, he can’t feel this because that means he has to feel everything else but he can’t bring himself to stop, he thinks maybe making himself stop when they both want it might actually kill him.

Cracks and pushes and blue blue blue eyes and letting go of a promise and then-

And then a dirty duffle bag full of equipment, an abandoned phone with a message saying 0, and the slab of concrete crumbles all at once like was never even there.

And Andrew feels it all, feels his heart shatter which should be impossible because he thought it was in enough tiny shards already but there it is and he might not be able to survive it and Neil is gone Neil is gone Neil is gonegonegonegone

And maybe this is what grief feels like, because Andrew didn’t know this boy a year ago but now the thought of being without him is more than he can possibly bear and-

A phone call, and suddenly Neil’s three hours away.

Two hours.

One.

And they’re in the same city but the distance is still too far.

Fifty feet.

Ten.

Five.

One.

And- there.

Andrew isn’t heartless. Andrew isn’t heartless, because his heart is a boy with fiery hair and a personality to match. His heart is a pair of eyes like ice chips that saw through it all, saw down to the very core of Andrew and didn’t flinch. His heart is Neil Abram Josten, and maybe that’s not entirely true but Neil helped him find it again.

Uneducated people will fail to see that your experience is not allonormative and because you feel what they feel right now, you "must be just like them," yeah... I don't believe that a greyromantic person's experience is the same as an alloromantics' or that of a freysexual person is SO allo. aro and ace spectrum people's experiences will be inherently different. Hence why it wasn't a matter of "meeting the right person" but rather "gaining a better of understanding of where I lay in the spectrum."

And this people will say "see, it was pointless to use that label!" and to that I say: fuck you. in those moments when all I felt was lost, confused and broken because I wasn't experiencing the same feelings my friends did, when I felt alieanated from this society because I couldn't fall in love or desire sex like everyone around me seemed to do, it was the asexual and aromantic communities that were there for me, to assure me that my experience was valid and valuable and that I was not alone. Using the aromantic and asexual labels helped me understand my experience and those were simply the labels that I related to the most, at the moment.

The history of corporate propaganda.

'Nobody wants to work' fails to mention the poverty wages and horrible workplaces.

We must reframe the narratives/dialog.

In my opinion one of the bigger issues regarding this situation is the fact that people are taught that their romantic partner should always be prioritised over their friends.

I think that most allo-romantic people feel so offended when you tell them you don't have romantic feelings for them, is because they view love as a ranking system. With strangers being the lowest and romantic and or sexual love on the top. Therefore if you tell them that you experience 'mere platonic feelings' for them, they see that as a lower ranked emotions and feel underappreciated. Since most people are told that romantic partners and romantic love is more valuable than friendship and platonic bonds, they will interpret it as a rejection of saying 'I don't value you as much as you value me'.