the story breaks free here

Back in 2013-2015 I wrote a metric fuckton of fanfiction for The Newsroom because I like one type of man and it's a middle aged petty bitch with therapist certified Daddy Issues and pathological self-denial. So my wife read my fic, liked it, and started following me on tumblr. We had vaguely known of each other before then, because we've both been in the same circles since joining tumblr and being active on tumblr as Sansa Stark fans in the dark ages that was season two of Game of Thrones. We didn't interact until 2014 and honestly probably didn't become mutuals until the next year and didn't really become friends until we had both long moved into The 100 fandom and were like, the two people aboard the Clarke/Roan dinghy in 2017. From there we started to become friends.

And honestly? It took us a really long time to become friends. There was no magical moment where we became insta-BFFs or where we knew the other person was going to eventually become the person we would fall into a natural orbit with. She had just moved to South Carolina, was broke, and was working on overcoming a lot of trauma. And I was broke in NYC, working on overcoming a lot of trauma, and going through drug and alcohol related struggles of my own. We weren't ready or capable of the kind of emotional intimacy and trust that we share now. We'd chat on the brand new tumblr messenger and occasionally she'd help me with a fic. Then in 2018, she came to BookCon in NYC and I missed being able to meet up with her because I was busy with a museum gala and didn't get the tumblr notifications for her messages letting me know she was coming to the city -- so I insisted we move our conversation to facebook messenger so I wouldn't miss a message from her ever again.

And, like the useless lesbians who had done a lot of therapy and DBT workbooks that we were, didn't realize we had both set our facebook settings so that only friends of friends could send us friend requests and just assumed the other person was holding the silent boundary that they didn't want to be friends on facebook. And we wanted to respect those absolutely not true boundaries.

But we talked. Constantly. All day. Still about fandom, mostly, and fanfiction, but real life started leaking in. I had stopped doing drugs but was still struggling with binge drinking. Her mom died when she was in college and had a brand new stepmom. We had some shared childhood traumas. Through the lens of fiction we talked about what kind of relationships we wanted for ourselves, if we wanted to be mothers, what kind of mothers we wanted to be. Our relationships with sex. Our relationships with food. Our definitions of the word "family." Our experiences with religion. Our careers. Our intentions for our lives. How we expressed and wanted to be loved. How we both felt we could never go home again. How we both know how it feels when calamity comes, and you know your life will never been the same again. I dragged her into professional wrestling. She dragged me into being a person capable of communicating her emotions and wants and needs. Her dog died. Another nephew I would never meet was born. Eventually we both realized we wanted to be facebook friends but were both desperately trying to respect the other person's boundaries.

By November 2018, we looked back and realized we had essentially been in a long distance relationship for six months. In May 2019, I moved down to South Carolina to be with her because I couldn't imagine putting myself on a plane back to LaGuardia ever again. We got legally married two weeks later due to fears that if one of us got hit by a bus, we wouldn't be able to visit each other in the hospital or make healthcare decisions. Neither of us could stomach letting my family run the show if I died.

We've known each other for almost ten years now. We've been together for almost four. Married since 2019 and are going to finally have a wedding this December after postponing it twice.

The fic that made her think I was the kind of person she could marry? Paterfamilias, written and posted in the fall of 2014 as I was getting a C-PTSD diagnosis after finally disclosing to a therapist the abuse I endured as a child.

And now she gets all the fic spoilers and to read everything I write long before everyone else does, which she assures me is the fic reader's dream. You can follow her at @echrai.

…does it ever drive you crazy

Just how fast the night changes?

today we bought the boy an absolute shit box of a truck that's a year older than him for about two thousand in the grand tradition of white trash oldest sons in the south. how's that for gender affirming???

i had a lovely birthday weekend. dirty thirty 🎉

Thanks!! Entering my thirties is a fucking trip in the best way

I think that inherently kids are adaptable, so long as they're supported through the change. As long as they have parents or other adults in their lives giving them that backstop of emotional care and attention, they can get through a big shift in schools or social norms or location.

If the schools are the draw, I do strongly recommend Metuchen or Woodbridge Township schools. Even if your kids come in needing a little support, they're going to go to schools where it's readily available to them. I'm less familiar with Edison because I wasn't old enough to attend school when we lived there, but I had friends who went there. I'm still close with several teachers I had in Woodbridge and Metuchen as well as the county arts program.

My personal recommendation would be to live in a town on the NJ Transit line because then you can very easily get to NYC -- I have fantastic memories in high school of catching the train in with friends and getting rush tickets for Broadway shows. I ended up living in NYC for three years after college.

I lived in NJ the first twenty-three (ish, with college) years of my life, and have been gone long enough to feel comfortable to say that I lived in Middlesex County in Edison, Woodbridge, and Metuchen.

It's a good place to raise children, if you have money. Having now lived in both the north and the south for substantial amounts of time, I think it's hard for people not from the northeast to conceptualize how fucking expensive it is to live there. There's a reason that every other person you talk to in SC or FL are from NY or NJ -- people can't afford the goddamn property taxes. My wife who is from WV was astonished at how much houses cost, even before factoring in everything else. Seeing a 2-2 go for $500k in my hometown made her want to vomit.

But the money does fund the best public education system in the country. (Cue the joke about NJ's biggest export being college students.) When I graduated high school in 2011, I did so with 33 college credits. I had a genuinely good public school education, especially when compared to what I hear from friends and loved ones who weren't incubated in an ugly McMansion off the Jersey Turnpike.

NJ is also a cultural melting pot. Within 90 minutes of entering the state my body obligates me to order Indian food. Your neighbors are from all different countries and regions of the world. You will hear more languages than you knew existed.

As a child in NJ, I never saw, handled, or shot a gun. There's very little gun culture outside of people who go hunting. That's not to say there's not gun violence -- I was in Menlo Park Mall when this murder-suicide occurred in 2007, ten minutes from my house.

There's also still white supremacy. The Klan actively recruits in areas of South Jersey, was openly recruiting when I was in high school. NJ still has active sundown towns. I'd recommend staying closer to Philly or NYC, if the reason you're moving is to flee a red state with restrictive LGBTQIA and abortion laws. The western part of the state is a lot of rural communities and a lot of farm land and a lot of Trump country.

As with moving anywhere, I'd recommend researching where you're moving to very thoroughly.

It's going to be a big culture shock, especially if you're moving from a state that sees small talk as a requisite for politeness. The traffic will be terrible. All the roads have tolls, you have to buy an EZ Pass. Practice your bagel order before you get to the counter. The biggest sin is wasting someone's time.

I love SC, and want to stay and fight for the town where we currently live, which is about to host it's third annual Pride festival. The schools suck, but my wife and I are never going to agree on a working definition of a "good" school because our experiences with public education are wildly disparate. But I can sympathize with you deeply -- I have a trans son, and every time we reach a new election cycle I wince and wonder if my marriage will be undone for political scorekeeping. I don't understand the love affair with guns. I doubt I ever will. But it's worth fighting for, and right now the cost of staying in the fight isn't too high -- there are people we love in SC who are also staying to roll up their sleeves and refusing to budge.

For now.

But NJ is my home. If I could afford to live there, I would move back in a heartbeat.

"I thought you would have met me at the airlock," Garak sniffs, putting on a bad attempt at being offended.

"There were people who were dying," Julian answers.

Quark's has turned into a place that exists with one foot in bar service and the other in an ad hoc refuge camp. It's a better excuse than any Julian's ever had to perform a patient examination over a cocktail.

Physically, over a cocktail. Figuratively yet to be seen. Quark is across the room haranguing Starfleet security over how many cots they expect him to accommodate.

"How did you know I wasn't dying? How do you know I'm not dying right now?"

Julian has to physically restrain himself from rolling his eyes; the familiarity of the rapport is comforting. "Because Nerys would have scruffed you to the infirmary herself."

"I promised myself I would have died, rather than be parted from Cardassia again."

Ah, the heart of the issue.

Julian looks at the readings on his tricorder. Garak's hypoglycemic, a little hypothermic, and his blood pressure is a little low. The murmur in Tain's heart that eventually ticked over into infective endocarditis is present, a nascent warning flag, but nothing that can't be managed with medication and lower stress levels. (As if.)

"Well, you didn't try very hard," Julian replies. "Hardly a scratch."

Garak narrows his eyes. "Well, pardon that I didn't work harder at catching a disruptor beam."

"All those years of Obsidian Order training?"

It's a familiar cadence. Julian watches Garak's blood pressure raise on the tricorder--along with a small jump in endorphins. They're wildly predictable, the two of them as a pair.

Baring his teeth, Garak's mouth finds something similar to a grin. "Wasted, my dear doctor."

With somewhat of a defeated sigh, Julian pats him on the shoulder, the palm of his hand lingering for just a moment longer than strictly necessary.

"No need to wait around to be assigned quarters," he says, an endearment hanging around in the back of his throat. He was worried, even if he'd never embarrass Garak by being earnest in public, let alone show open affection. "You can bunk with me."

"Just like in the last war," Garak grumbles. "You are a creature of habit, Dr. Bashir."

"Oh, you can't get me with that," he replies, helping Garak gingerly extract himself from a bar stool. "You wouldn't tolerate me if I was predictable."

things continue to turn the corner. nothing ever gets unshattered, but you do get to eventually clean up the mess and move forward. i turn 30 in ten days; grey has asked us to formally adult adopt him; i'm planning a dinner party to mark his first anniversary of going on t; we have so many fun weekend trips planned as a family for this summer; we keep building healthy routines and habits and inside jokes. life has changed so much in five months

alright I got a fill in and had my nail tech file down my claws low enough to type at 100+ wpm, let's see what the trauma churns out on this auspicious mother's day weekend

me, exhausted, texting my best friend if I can re-use the funeral program I made for her dad's service for my wife's beloved grandmother