#referential

10/17-18/2023. Pencil sketch on cream colored cardstock. Colored with Copic markers, Copic Multiliner Brush-M, Zig Clean Color Real Brush, Daler Rowney FW acrylic ink "White" (with dip pen), and Daiso Water Colors (with a paintbrush). Because my scanner makes images too light and drab, I did some adjustments in Krita, to better match my sketch in real life.

i was 16, it was late november/early december of 2012, and i'd first watched a dnp vid in mid/early november. less than a month after the vday leak. so. it was just over six years ago and it was late at night and i was on my computer after i was supposed to be asleep, i’m sure of that. it was dark out; nighttime during alaska winters is something that’s hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it before. it’s an omnipresent lack of light. 

so it was nighttime and i was almost certainly the last person awake in my house. my mom and sister always were asleep before me, and my parents had separated the summer before my 10th grade year so it was just the three of us at home. i would’ve been in the bedroom i’d had since i was seven. 

(replying to this ask feels weird, because even though i moved out when i was 18, i moved back in with my dad almost two years ago now and my bed is in the exact same place in the exact same room as it was when i was in highschool? it doesn’t feel the same as it did then, everything is better than it was when i was younger, but it’s still so weird to be revisiting this so many years later). 

my bedframe had drawers and storage built in, and i would tuck my computer away in the second drawer down and pull it out once everyone else was asleep so i could go back on the internet. i definitely did that, the night i saw the vday vid. i didn’t have a tumblr yet, then; i just would regularly check a handful of people’s blogs (the only person whose blog i remember looking at specifically is @thelionandthellama ! finding them again in the phandom this year was so wild and incredible for me). 

and like, it was november of 2012. 

the vday video was still on tumblr like.. i watched the vday video on tumblr. it was a different time it was a messy time. i probably saw something mentioning it, maybe this gifset? and i remember it.. didn’t take me long to find the video. the tumblr it was on wasn’t even password protected. i tried watching it again a little bit later, though, and the entire blog was gone. 

anyways. not to sidetrack right when i get to the part where i’m actually talking about the vday vid itself, but you know how there’s a difference between knowing something rationally and knowing something in your bones or in your gut? like, how sometimes you feel the things you know. 

i used to know in my bones that love wasn’t real, romance was 100% of the time inevitably doomed/not real/a lie, and that when people didn’t get divorced it was just because once they stopped being in love they still were friends enough to like, coexist in the same house and life. i knew love wasn’t real i knew it and i knew i was never going to find love and that there was no point. 

i was very sad. my parents’ divorce hit me pretty hard but i knew so many other adults who divorced like i didn’t have a reason in my life to believe that love was real or possible! i knew it was fake.

and then i saw the vday video and i remember sitting against my wall and the world just going still when i watched it. because i was anticipating something big, and i already believed that dnp would be good together-i think that’s the only time in my life i would call myself a shipper? before i knew anything. now i just consider myself a supporter of their relationship and someone who’s  inspired by/a fan of their love.

back to the video, though. i watched it alone in the dark and i didn’t beleive in love and i’m certain i watched it more than once in a row, that first time. i don’t think it was the moral question that it is now. i know there’s people who morally don’t feel like they can watch it or that they want to? and that’s so valid, and things have gotten awfully convoluted at this point in time around the vday video. but back then i was just a kid in the dark looking for something to believe in and i found it.

i think i cried? i probably cried. because like. i watched it and love was real again. love is everything to me the entire world is love it’s the thing i believe in more than anything else and the vday video made love real again. i watched it and then i watched videos of the halloween gathering and i just. i knew love was real again. i knew they’d said it was a prank. i knew that. but i watched the video and i knew it was real. i knew it. and love existed again. 

so, yeah . not to be soppy but dnp literally put my life on the trajectory that lead to me meeting or getting close with everyone i love and consider family and were the start of me figuring out my mental and physical health and what i want to do with my life and i remember sitting in the dark watching the vday video and now i’m in a world filled with light and love and i’m so fucking thankful every single day. this is soppy and long and perhaps not at all what you were looking for but like.

when i watched the vday video i knew it was real and i’m still certain of that and i still cry watching it sometimes. i can’t make eye contact with phil in the video i think watching the vday video is what made me realize how rare it is for phil to actually make eye contact with the camera and it fucks me up .