Status: Closed
This round has closed. It remains open for fills, comments and remixes, but prompts are no longer accepted.
About
"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more."
"What is grief, if not love persevering?"
"You kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath"
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. Each prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, and more. Steal from a literary classic, or WeVerse drama. Have fun!
Examples
Minghao + Ocean Vuong
The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.
Ocean Vuong - night sky with exit wounds
Hoshi/Anyone; "Beauty is terror"
Thinking about these two quotes together and the idea of on/off-stage personas:
"Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful we tremble before it. And what could be more terrifying or beautiful, to the Greeks to to our own, than to lose control completely?" - Donna Tartt, the Secret Histories
"I am calm in everyday life but when I put on my in-ear device and step on stage, I can feel the tension and hear the cheers getting louder as the music gets louder. When the staff tells me it's time to step on stage, I feel something boil inside me. I feel it steaming inside and I think I have to give a burst of something, spill what is inside me." - Hoshi in Hit the Road Ep. 04
Any ship; "It's been so many years"
Hello, hello there, is this Martha?
This is old Tom Frost
And I am calling long distance
Don't worry 'bout the cost.
'Cause it's been forty years or more
Now Martha please recall
Meet me out for coffee
Where we'll talk about it all.
Tom Watts - Martha
Rules
- Sign up is not required.
- Fills have a minimum of 400 words for prose, haiku-length for poetry (3 lines), and 400px by 400px for art (memes are also art). Other mediums are fine too!
- There is no maximum cap.
- Tag and provide content warnings at your discretion, but a good guide are the Ao3 four (Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage) and this list of common CWs (cr: SportsFest).
- NSFW/Explicit content should be tagged
- NSFW art should not be visible, please provide a link and a warning. You may crop the artwork and embed a SFW preview.
How it works
Prompting
- Click on [Post a New Comment] at the bottom of this post;
- Change the subject to something interesting;
- Copy+Paste the following HTML into your comment and edit the sections. Feel free to add as much detail as you want!
Filling
- Reply to the original prompt;
- Change the subject to [FILL], you may add a title or stay chaotic;
- Copy+Paste the following HTML into your comment, edit the sections, and add your text.
You may also upload your fill to the AO3 Collection.
Remixing
- Post as a reply to the fill you are remixing, using the same HTML as above;
- Change the subject to [REMIX].
Art/media
- Upload your work to any platform (twitter, imgur, youtube, soundcloud, google maps, etc.)
- Using the same HTML code as above, copy the link into your fill or remix. That's it!
- Optionally, you can embed a picture into your comment. Please use the following code instead.
(To explain, the HTML resizes your picture to 400x400px so that it fits on most screens. Users can view the full size if they click on it. You can also add a link to your work on twitter so that others can share it, or to any other website you want)
Note!
On dreamwidth, you can't edit a comment once someone has replied to it.
Navigation
|
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
:)
(Anonymous) 2021-12-26 05:10 pm (UTC)(link)Major Tags: Character Death
Additional Tags: Grieving.
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
[FILL] love, persevering
Major Tags: Parent Death(s), Illness
Additional Tags: Non-idol/Modern AU, Grieving, Second Person POV
Permission to remix: Please ask
***
The last time you speak to your father is the first time you scream at him.
Courtesy, deference, innate understanding and the shaking, trembling, anxious fucking pounding of your chest broken away from just this once, to cradle the phone closer to your roaring lungs.
You’ve never screamed at your father before. He has never called you too late to tell you he’s dying before.
Unbidden you’re struck by the memory of a touch: your mother brushing ointment on the bruises on your knees as you sit cross-legged on the cold kitchen floor; your clumsy hands badly peeling a cucumber while she tosses chopped pieces into a large bowl.
Your dad loves this with a bowl of naengmyeon in the summers— what do you think, Wonwoo-yah? Like it?
No matter how hard you try, you can’t recall what it tasted like.
Quiet kids grow up to be quiet men. You know this, and you know that your family knows this, so you take it for granted. What is a phone call on which no one speaks but a building cavity of silences, a hollowness of your own making.
University flies by in a flash and train fares make the annual budget you draw up less and less.
Your aunt tells you you’re lucky when you make it back home at last, climbing out of the old town hospital elevator just in time to watch your mother die.
At least you got to see her one last time, say goodbye.
Nobody teaches you the art of bidding farewell to someone you love, not when they leave and especially not when they die.
Besides, is there a difference, you wish to ask, between seeing off the living who won’t speak and the dead who can’t.
There is, you learn the hard way.
Your train is on time and you’ll be home in three hours but you already know, in the way that dogs know of oncoming earthquakes, that your uncle lied to you on the phone, that your father is already dead.
There are no lies, no continued pretence on arrival. Just a corpse and its silence.
At your mother’s funeral, your father pats your shoulder and pours you the drink, twisting away to down his own before he walks off to greet new guests.
At your father’s, you pat your uncle’s shoulder and watch his son pour him a drink. Guests come, guests go. You pour and you pour, splashing liquid onto glasses. This is not a silence you are responsible for.
Or are you?
You almost miss the train back, locking up a house housing the remains of all your past lives, every slow step away from the front door heavier than the last. Your travelling bag is the same as it was when you arrived and you wonder what you could be carrying that is turning your footsteps to lead.
Time passes as it always has, the seasons change and the sun rises and falls. You are. You are.
The guksu place is on the street next to his apartment building is cheap—convenient.
The man at the counter recognises him now, putting down a bottle of soju and a glass before you can ask for it.
The naengmyeon is quickly placed before you, pre-made in the mornings. He offers to pickle you a fresh cucumber, to take off the heat.
You watch him peel the green skin and put the length of the cucumber down on the counter before he makes fast work of chopping it, the art of practised hands that do not need to wait for conscious thought to begin doing the needful.
It unravels slowly, the string holding your chest hostage in a bind. Fingers brushing through the fringes on your forehead, soft kisses on your nose, tinkling laughter at the dinner table, delighted ribbing in the living room, ambient, sunny music crackling from the beat-up speakers of an ancient sedan.
It was the silence, you realise. You have been lugging it all along, all this long and it’s a wonder you have been walking steady, instead of watching your feet sink into concrete as if wading quicksand. So achingly, terribly dense is the load now unfurling.
The man finishes prepping the cucumber and washes his hands before seasoning it in a bowl. He tosses in some oil, some gochujang, some sesame seeds. His hands are large and his knuckles coarse and torn but the movement of his fingers through the mixture is so, so gentle.
Everything pours out of you now like a monsoon thunderstorm.
I miss you. I’m sorry.
I love you. I’m sorry.
Nobody teaches you the art of saying goodbye to the dead.
There are some things about grief only you can teach yourself.
There are some things about grief you will find teaching yourself over and over again.
You’ll learn that these are just the kind of silences time cannot undo.
Re: [FILL] love, persevering
Re: [FILL] love, persevering
Re: [FILL] love, persevering
Re: [FILL] love, persevering
Re: [FILL] love, persevering
i'll never stop saying just how much i think your words have an impact. the second person narration works so well for this, it strangles the heart and makes me feel everything in a much stronger manner. you're so great, ily.
Re: [FILL] love, persevering
Re: [FILL] love, persevering
another favorite section: Your train is on time and you’ll be home in three hours but you already know, in the way that dogs know of oncoming earthquakes, that your uncle lied to you on the phone, that your father is already dead.
There are no lies, no continued pretence on arrival. Just a corpse and its silence.
Re: [FILL] love, persevering
Re: [FILL] love, persevering
Re: [FILL] love, persevering