#actually.

sometimes i keen into my pillowcase, and then i get up and do laundry. yesterday i fainted and had my first seizure. i picked up my phone and my first thought was to text you, of all people. disoriented on the floor of a volunteer opportunity, i wanted to tell my emergency contact something bad happened, come quickly.

i rarely tell people about how bad it really got - the split lip, the broken boundaries. despite their enormity in the moment, in hindsight each of them feels so distant and strange; a victim of parallax. from inside the assassination attempt; i mistook the gun for my wife.

in a little while, i am going to be in your area. i keep thinking about what i would even say. i guess the spotify-earned clarity of your mental state is refreshing, but the aggression is (still) somehow surprising. i never hated you; not even in the middle of everything. how could i? i could never hate a thing i loved. i could never try to destroy you - i spent far too much time trying to build you up.

there was this moment, during one of our final dates - i just knew we had stopped being there together. i could just feel the gap between us, a singular and particular ache. you were such a stranger to me, this alien person that was wearing the skin of someone who knows my deepest secrets. you had said that day that i was the love of your life. you had said i was the only one who actually understood any real part of you. at the time; i hadn't considered if you'd ever bothered to understand me. caught in the sunset desire for our future, i didn't realize the failure of reciprocity.

last night i had to google safe to sleep after a seizure? when a few months ago i could have just asked you to watch over me. i have been picking out the splinters you left scattered in my body. there is a certain gentle kind of closure in understanding - oh. it's because she hated me.

there is a temptation of all endings to make space for the "what-if". in another life, i'd be inviting you to the wedding. in another life, you'd be coming on the trip. i'd be curling your hair and holding you while you slept. i don't know if i would be happy. i don't know that we really had any happiness left. but we would exist there, in some way. it's hard to let go of that image.

I guess it just??? Feels somber??? Because going back to S1 and seeing Henry have an active social life that didn't involve his work, and seeing him just live like a normal kid really puts into perspective just how much time he was REALLY spending as Kid Danger. Even when he was out of costume and wasn't on some sort of mission, you can tell (and Henry literally said if himself in show), it just seemed like every aspect of his life somehow revolved Kid Danger in one way or another. So much so that he started neglecting shit like school, his social life, his family.

And another thing, it just feels so lonely. Like I said, back in S1, Henry was shown to be a pretty social kid at school. I'd argue even popular to a certain extent, he seemed pretty well liked. So much so, he had multiple love interests back then. His primary source of interaction with other kids his age was through school, and I guess the less and less he started showing up, he just became more and more isolated. The only people he actively interacted with were the ones who knew his secret; and that was his two best friends who were actually his age, his sister, and two grown men (more particularly, Ray).