I return to you from the grave. I come bearing the hardest kind of wisdom, the kind that asks you to shut the fuck up and actually listen instead of pretending to care without thinking about it, the kind that tells you that you are exactly what you are: brief, and very, very vulnerable. I bring to you the worst wisdom, about how hard it all really is, when you realise that what is lost is fucking *lost*, and never will be given back.
Oh fandom, I am sorry to return to tell you that I'm still here, and that you're still not entitled to be a dick without me at your back for it. But I have returned from the grave, lessened, sharpened against the whetstone of the world. I come bearing wisdom. I have learned a few things, finally, about what the fuck the point of any of it is. Thankfully I had a very good and kind and patient teacher in these matters. Because finally, in all of the loss that life is, not yet too late I've learned that there can be *mercy*. Finally I understand the balance. No darkness ever makes the light less bright; but then no light is more than the dark. These things simply are, the truth of light and dark and summer and winter and earth and water, and mortal bodies, that live and die.
You are not entitled to my private life. Here is what I choose to share of it anyway: my mother died three days ago. I have been her full-time carer for six years now. It was, to me, the death of all things. Who I am is so tied up in her life that the loss of her was the loss of myself. Death is never singular. Death kills indiscriminately. Who I am is so intimately connected with who she was that the loss of her killed me; what I am now is no longer myself in her eyes, myself against the way she frustrated me, myself against what she stood for, myself as the daughter of a proud woman, myself as genetic hostage to someone I frequently loved bitterly but loved still. Death came for us all: it took her and it took me. Every conversation I will now never have with her. Every time I will no longer fetch a cloth and mop her spilled drink up. Every time I will never again rinse the shower out after her, again again again and never again.
Oh, tears.
Death kills all of us when it kills one of us. You who never met her will now never see yourself in her eyes. Possibilities blown out like a candle in the dark; you are less because you can never meet her self, never be enlarged by your self touching hers, never be the self she would have given you. We are lessened by our every loss, every one is potential taken from all of us. They tell you that a death is a new beginning; ignore them, if you can do only that. They may mean well though I have too little patience to do anything but hate them for it right now; at the very least they misunderstand what they're saying. There is nothing equivalent for what is taken. I'm sorry to tell you this but that's not how the universe works (I am Cassandra, and no-one cares for the black wisdom I bring back from the grave). There is no balance in the gain for what you've lost, this wisdom you find is not a trade off but a booby prize. Every life lost is a *loss*, and your new beginning is one of too high ceilings, too quiet houses. Your new beginning is cold and empty, because it's not a new beginning. It's a death. Call it what it is, because those of us grieving have no patience for your spinelessness. No-one ever dares to look grief in the eye except the grieving.
And them, through their masks, on cold streets in the night, every night.
I am so reduced by the loss of her I felt myself small enough to fall through the cracks of the world and disappear. The death of all things; nothing can replace what is lost. Understand that I bring you no false hope, on the chasm edge of grief there is no room for the fancy footwork of lies, the wisdom I bring is the wisdom of loss. Nothing replaces a person. It's not possible to balance that equation. Time does not run according to our begging. Death is not negotiable. This is why I despair of you treating each new person you touch online like only a new thing to scorn: every loss is forever and is irreplaceable and it lessens what your life will be, and every person you spit on is as mortal as you are. God damn it, humanity, I know we get tired but is this the best we can do?
You and I already know that it's not, because you and I know *them*.
I was sitting in the shade of the trailer, dog underneath my chair wheezing his unhappy sleeping breaths - nothing is right to him, he understands none of this except the hole in the world where she used to be - stunned into the size of my reduced life, too bleak even to move. I had done all the tedious things that must be done. I had called my brother and not screamed. I had arranged for the funeral, sent messages around the family, signed all the hospital's paperwork. Finally it was just me and the dog and nowhere to hide from the loss in my life. Empty desert, and my empty life, and a car rolling up dust down the road.
I was trying to work out if it was a family member, and if so who would come earlier than the funeral and why, dull with loss, aching with it, loss hurts the head, heavies the bones, hardens the hate; I was fully prepared to tell them to fuck off and wait for the fucking will to be read because they're not getting so much as a fucking coffee cup until then, unless they want to get it punched through their splintered eye sockets.
The car stopped, a taxi. The driver got out, and began taking a suitcase from the trunk.
From the other door Blackbindings climbed out, and it was in that moment already too late as she stood there crying too much to talk, walking shakily to me the last distance of the four thousand miles she'd already crossed between us, because it only takes one second to be too late, and I already believed in angels.
God damn it, Blackbindings.
Angel, from the Greek, angelos, a messenger, an envoy. Angels don't come to protect you, angels aren't your guardians. They come to tell you something. Angels bring you wisdom.
Blackbindings, on the wrong continent, crying so hard before she even reached me that she woke the dog who ran out from my chair to greet her whining, tail wagging wild, and all I could do was sit and stare so numb because. Because.
When have angels ever come for me?
Here is the wisdom of her skinny shaking shoulders under my arms, and the cool of her tears on my sun-heated skin, here is the wisdom of the woman who crossed from her far side of the river Styx to find me, envoy of life in the desert of death, message-bearing angel in the bleak and empty Hades I inhabit. Here is the wisdom of angels, when death has taken everything, which is exactly what it does take:
You're still here.
You can never go back. There will never be recompense. There will never be justice nor mercy nor pity. Your loss is the most solid part of your life. Your loss is permanent and it will *hurt* you. But you remain, little soul, poor vague animal, you're still here, and everything not yet lost is still to meet, and love, and lose.
Here is the wisdom of angels in the time of death: you will lose everything.
Make it worth losing.
You know that I'm not here just to tell you that there's a girl from England on the sofa beside me drinking coffee because, she told me quite gently with a kiss, we make bloody horrible tea. I didn't come back from the grave just to tell you that I live yet, and you do too, and my god, fandom, do what you can with it, fucking hell. No-one hauls themselves out of Hades just to hold your complacency in front of your face like a ball of your hair left to clog someone else's drain, I didn't come back here just to shame you into living.
The dog is trying to curl in her lap like a puppy; she is small and he is not so small, and laughter may make her spill her coffee, and she is quite the most perfect creature I will ever lose and I know it, and love is blade that will always fall, always, the most precious blade in the world, and worth every pain, any pain, anything, for a woman who will cross an ocean for you.
For her. No-one else would be worth the inevitable loss. But for her, and only her, anything.
I come with the wisdom of the grave. I come with the wisdom of angels. I come to ask you for what the universe will never supply, not for you nor anyone else, not even for them, when they deserve it if no other sorry member of this species does. I come to ask you for justice, and mercy, and compassion, in the face of death.
They return to you from the grave, the heroes at the heart of our fandom. They are now truly ghosts. What they have faced is loss, not just death but murder; they didn't ask for this outing, they did everything they ever could to avoid it. They face every uncertainty of loss and grieving. Their old life was murdered, everything they knew and lived is killed. Their *selves* are dead and yet they remain, as we the living do after each death - they are the gray murdered ghosts standing shocked on their own graves - and what I ask you for fandom from what shallow depth of my exhausted heart I can scrape down to right now is just *compassion*. Their lives are over, and they still have to live. The world bears down on them. They will have no privacy for their grief, no sacred space of the mourner for what they have lost, they have every news station in the country and half of them in the world tuned in to dismembering the corpses of their old lives and dangling the pieces from their gibbets. Grieving is *hard*. It hits you *hard*. I don't doubt that they're being strong, but I respect their right to feel weak under this onslaught. They were never our dolls. They were always those two young men - my god, barely more than children, we always knew and never could really face that fact (Blackbindings informs me that they're older than she is; Blackbindings, my angel, everyone is older than you are) - they were always real people, themselves, just themselves, doing what they could. If you could never view them as truly human before then *please* try to do it now. Their lives are being hung, drawn, and quartered by salivating journalists for *our* consumption, and we're supposed to be on *their* fucking side.
I tell you that they have always been angels, fandom. It's always been important that they protect people but what has always been as important is what they *say* when they do that. To rescue someone because they don't deserve what would have been done to them; to tell someone that they did nothing to deserve that, to tell them of the preciousness of their life however someone else's actions denied that, to tell them that they *should* be safe and cared for and protected, to deny the not-human that someone else made of them. I tell you that they were always angels because they told us of our preciousness and of our right to not be wronged, and more than that they always told us of our own power, our power to protect each other, to care for each other, our own power to not do wrong, to treat each other *right*. They were messengers of death from the beginning, the envoys of our own mortality, imploring us every night that they faced the grief of the streets to treat each other, to treat ourselves, the way we *ought* to, the way death teaches you to.
Their love for each other has always been flowers blooming in a graveyard, the message of life even in death. They are difficult ghosts. They tell us hard truths. Angels are terrible creatures, if you've read your Bible then you know that, angels are awesome in the oldest sense of the word. They are messengers sent to us from death, from life, to tell us that the black and white dichotomy of the two is always a lie, to tell us that we always exist in the gray space between them, because we are always alive on the edge of death, the two are each other's constant companions, life *is* the inevitability of death. And yet it's still life. The hardest gray space of all to inhabit: to know death, and still to know life. Because they don't only tell us the truth of death but the truth of living too; they tell us that we who will inevitably die (*they* know that) are still worth saving. Our lives still matter, even though they will end. Things that end ought to be appreciated while they can be. Every night they go out in the dark and risk terrible things to save other people from terrible things. Death and life and love and power: they have taught us *so* much.
And I tell you that some of what they have to face now is death every day, loss upon loss, taken from them to satisfy the world's appetite for scandal, and I tell you now that as she strokes my shoulder and asks me if I want her to start on dinner and I finally have the strength to say it, fandom, they need their angels too. This world will kill them over and over. They need the voice of life in the midst of death just as much as we do, to tell them the hardest wisdom: you're still here, and there are still things worth having, worth losing, worth living for.
They need their angels. They need to hear better things than just the loss and loss and loss.
No, I don't mean camp out underneath their window with a banner about how much you love them. Not even if you did use glitter paint.
They need to hear softer voices amongst the screaming, telling them that they're respected; that their humanity is still intact, that they have always been real and we *know* that; that we care that they are human beings, and need some sphere in which to feel like human beings, that they need their privacy and their quiet and their space, in this madness, to grieve and pick themselves up again. Their lives can never be the same again. They were perfectly ordinary people despite our inability to see past their masks. They had family and friends, work and studying. All of that has been taken from them. They will never know anything 'ordinary' again.
Please. If you won't do it out of compassion then do it because you *know* what we owe them: respect them. Give them their space. Let them breathe, and be. Don't greedily gobble down every butchered piece of them that the blood-maddened media will serve to you. Remember that to those who can make money out of it they will only ever be *things*. To us they are people; people who don't deserve to be turned into dolls, people we have no entitlement to own, everything they ever gave us was a gift. The only entitlement at work here is their entitlement to your respect. You do owe them it. They are as mortal and human and beautiful as any of us: *let them be that*.
We who grieve need time, and space, until the pain no longer suffuses even the breath in our lungs, until the wisdom of the angels can penetrate the numbed thickness of our skin. The message they need angels to bring them now is that some people give a shit. That we care enough to not suck the marrow from their bones. That we know that they face death and life, the worst both can bring, and the best, the sweetest sting, of what love in the midst of all this gray means. They have been our angels for years of dark nights, they have walked the edge of life and death and lived the gray space between them that an honest approach to both is. They have suffered, and we know it, for us; they have sacrificed, and never asked for recompense. That they don't ask for mercy doesn't mean they don't need it and it has never meant that we don't *owe* them it.
If you ever loved them then you must have listened to the message they brought you. Listen to it now. Love them now, when that means not loving paparazzi shots, scumbag exes spewing bile to the tabloids, not actively spreading the gossip and rumors behind their backs like high school bullies, not writing exploitative incest threesomes within thirty seconds of finding out that Phalanx's brother is Cooper Anderson. They are so outnumbered right now. Give them *time*. They don't need you using them as well. They need angels on their side.
She asks me if I want a beer with dinner, because she knows me, and loves me. They know better than anyone how just one person can rescue you, if they're the right person. Let them have each other, until they're ready to deal with all the rest of us too. Let them have themselves. They were never our puppets. Let them be *them*, unharassed, unjudged, until if, not when, they're willing to offer more.
Let them be human, in this moment. Let them be not superheroes, not symbols, not dolls, not angels. Just let them be human, so they can put themselves back together again, after all that's been broken these last few days.
Let yourself be an angel, for once. Be a bearer of quiet wisdom. See what it feels like to actually be on their side.
I know what it is to be rescued, now. I know what it is to finally *feel* that I still matter, because she crossed an ocean to tell me it. I know what it is to believe in angels. It's a belief, a knowing, so sure that it must be shared. They need angels too.
Tread the gray spaces with wisdom. Treat them the way people should be treated. Treat yourself that way too. Respect yourself enough to actually listen to the angels: your life is brief. You will never again have the chance to make these choices. Choose *wisely*.
I have to go. Dinner is ready.
It's so strange to still be alive, after death. Cutlery, and washing the dishes. All these little things that still exist.
Let them have their normality, unless they actually *offer* to share it. Let them remember how to be human, now the world has screamed at them that they're not. Let them feel the blood warm in their bodies again, after the death that took their lives.
No but seriously, she says, it's getting cold, fucksake.
Let them have the time. God knows it's the least we've ever owed them.
