one death: tragedy / a million a statistic / incommensurate

[roc_on]

Beila gives Dao space. He is extremely right that she's not the best person to be sad about his dead serial killer friend with and that seems to be his principal occupation, so - space.

Comments

[roc_on]

"Okay, side question, how actually difficult is not being a serial killer for you."

[thinklikethis]

He sighs.

"Not actually that hard. Like... the thing that goes wrong when I think the wrong way about it isn't that I start turning into a serial killer, it's that I start feeling really scared that I might, and those are really different things."

[roc_on]

"Okay, good."

[thinklikethis]

"Yeah."

[roc_on]

"So like... there's kind of not enough there there for me to even say 'we're not compatible', it's not like you want to move to Ember Island or devote your life to protesting various monarchies or something I couldn't be attached to like that, but that's... kind of not helping? Not incompatible but not present enough to be compatible in a more active sense."

[thinklikethis]

"...What do you mean, 'not present'?"

[roc_on]

"Your plans are all about places you don't want to be. There's not enough substance for me to think about in terms of the question I'm trying to get at."

[thinklikethis]

"What actually is the question, though?"

[roc_on]

"Whether I want to stay together that being the logical consequence of not breaking up."

[thinklikethis]

"Okay... I mean, what are your big life plans?"

[roc_on]

"Traveling around for Avataring projects and going back over all the bending forms to polish them and I'm ambivalent about having, like, kids, but I do want a relationship and while I'm listing things I'd probably rather it be properly monogamous at least once I'm no longer literally a teenager and I want to build that bridge and figure out how spirits work and see if there's dead people somewhere and if so whether anything useful can be made of that information and become immortal."

[thinklikethis]

"I'm still going to study structural engineering, I want to like... build stuff... I just don't know what stuff, or where, or anything like that."

[roc_on]

Nod.

[thinklikethis]

"...I dunno. I feel like we don't have to know for sure that we're going to be great for each other five years from now to decide not to break up immediately, but... maybe you don't feel like that."

[roc_on]

"I mean, there's... degrees of sure."

[thinklikethis]

"As degrees of unsure go, I think 'not having my life figured out yet because I'm only eighteen' is a pretty okay one..."

[roc_on]

"You're probably right."

[thinklikethis]

"Like, if you meet a guy tomorrow who already has his life figured out and is, I don't know, trying to reinvent the lost art of spiritbending, maybe break up with me and ask him out, but... I think I'm better than nothing? And I think I'm okay with being just 'better than nothing' and not 'literally perfect'."

[roc_on]

"Wow, that would... that would fuck me up real bad but I guess we've established we are very different people."

[thinklikethis]

"It would fuck me up real bad to think of it as my personal job to make every single person in the world happy, so, yeah. I'm, like... I sure don't think I'm perfect, so it would be weird to expect somebody else to? I don't, actually, have my life figured out, and I'm probably not going to reinvent the lost art of spiritbending, but I've got time to figure out what I am going to do."

[roc_on]

"Okay." She finishes her smoothie and set it down and leans on him.

[thinklikethis]

Hug.

[roc_on]

Snuggle.

[thinklikethis]

Snuggle!

[roc_on]

"You," she asserts, "are snuggly."