#upsetting content

welcome to my iterator OC's ask blog! ヾ(ˊᗜˋ*)

⚠️warning: there is a good chance of seeing heavy and disturbing subject matter and emotionally distressing content! please proceed with caution!

rules and info under the readmore!

No, not something. Someone.

It’s not you. You think. You’re pretty sure. You’ve never been so hungry before. Never been the kind of person to get mad, either. But now it feels like everything's turning your stomach into knots, demanding - something.

You can remember things, too. Someone else’s name. Someone else’s body, built different from your own. You keep tripping over things, expecting your legs to be longer, your centre of gravity to be higher.

It’s not you. You don’t know who it is.

Today, after a week of ramping up quarantine and isolation measures and general mounting paranoia, we got woken up at 6 am from deep sleep by the strongest earthquake recorded in these parts in the past 140 years. 5.5 Richter with a 5.0 and 3.7 immediately afterwards and numerous smaller aftershocks might not sound extremely severe to some, but in a not super well off eastern european country, in a city full of old austro-hungarian buildings it is... pretty damn bad. Collapsed roofs and chimneys, houses wrecked, tons of cars done for, people panic-pingponging between the "stay inside" police enforced orders of days just before and staying out in the open until damage assessment can be done for buildings and people can be let back in. The famous cathedral tower broke off, which is the photo all the media's been reporting with. Luckily and perhaps miraculously, no casualties reported so far (by now at 3 pm: one, sadly) and few serious injuries. But the biggest issue are of course hospitals, some of which were hit pretty badly - including, distressingly, the biggest local maternity and neonatal center - which has now been evacuated into tents previously set up for corona virus treatment capacity expansion. Some reports from a local paper with photos and video.

Our walls are cracked, some more badly than others, no huge immediately apparent and threatening damage to the apartment or the (pretty old) building... so far... that we can see... for now. A lot of people I know have gone to be with their families. My mum's tiny 20 year old car is probably completely toast, but none of us really want to go out in the street to check. Me, my mum and brother have mostly spent the morning in the building's little yard out back, where there are no people (because of course the virus is a huge concern... waiting to see the shitstorm in a week or two, alas) and are... well, I can't say I feel very confident writing we are safe and I have no idea when, if ever, I will feel like that again, but we're all bundled up and have packs prepared with water bottles and documents and power banks and whatnot. Going back in every once in a while, wrapping up in totally legit shock blankets, armed with whistles gathered from various protests past, just in case. We went inside for good around 1 pm (it's 4 pm as of my actually posting this). Gas seems fine, electrical and plumbing too. Kind of having trouble telling my own shaking apart from any aftershocks, but definitely no sleep tonight. Dealing with extreme twitchiness at the slightest of sounds, handling feeling like "home" is gonna come crashing down around your ears if you let your guard down for a moment, that's gonna take a while. Generally speaking people are understandably deeply shaken up (I don't want to be making even inadvertent puns but I literally cannot think of a better word), jumping at every noise, some that have been displaced and/or evacuated are being taken to vacated university student housing.

Home internet is a bust, phone signal is super weak, just wanted to type something out for people and check in a bit... and occupy myself just a tiny bit too. All while being ready to scram at a moment's notice.

Currently feeling like grimly joking about how I can now add a viral pandemic, lockdown quarantine, and a terrifying earthquake to my wartime bomb shelter childhood experience list and, uh, that's quite enough, thanks.

There’s no healing here. No collagen production, no gentle knitting of tissues. Xe’s a puppeteer, encouraging skin to melt and slide together, bones to knit, splinters to smooth over, nerves to fire.

It’s so, so easy to break a body. It’s a lot harder to put one back together.