The golden age was a year ago. And I'm not handling this well. Makes me want to die, because the grief of it is ripping me apart from the inside and I just don't want to survive this and I feel like I could die of sadness. I'll live, yes. I mean, I know now that... my survival instinct would kick in, and it's pretty damn traumatic to get to this point, but...
...but to live without it, to live with that feeling that it's getting further and further away into the past, all the while I still am here, in all points... it's just. It's a pain I can only explain to someone as the pain of life having stopped somewhere. Somehow you're still in "the past", but the world has moved forward. Without you. And you could be accused of being "stuck in the past" all the while this is all still the present, in your mind.
Perhaps like those people who say they died in 2012 or 2020 and then life's been hell. Well, life wasn't exactly kind to me in the first place, but it feels like the world went forward in a way that makes no sense, while I remained there, in August of 2025, with Cepheus' team. With Cassiopeia. With my Hopoe. With all the group. Cygnus, Austral, Grey, Jolene, Megara, Gill, Bootes, Cetus, Libra, even Chin, I don't remember Virgo then but... she was likely here too. At the mess hall. Having fun. Being carefree, feeling finally safe, like I had a family, and slowly rebuilding my trust in people. Rebuilding, also, my ability to eat in a public place like that.
It all went down in October, when the visits started. Funny how the good times never last in my life, ever. They always get taken away. I don't even know why this pattern has been going on since childhood. The minute I'm happy and start to settle, it all goes down, as if life was putting away something it realized it had forgotten that was out of the shelves.
And then I'm left here, always with things getting worse.
I guess I either don't deserve to be happy or I'm supremely unlucky or this is some sort of karma for me.
***
In mid-to-late August it will be a year since... Hopoe and I were going well. I had just no idea that a year later, I would've almost died, that we would've had two major blow-ups, that she would close off just a month and a half later, that I would've gone through anything I went through this year really.
I was such a different person... a year ago, when I stepped first into this workplace, at my other job. Malva wasn't yet here. I had met her at Gill's place when we went to eat there for whatever reason. There was also my former colonel and her wife. I'll have to find her a name, even as I haven't talked to her in a long time.
I had just been left in the worst way possible by my ex, and I was trying to get her back. Silly me, or not so much. I just wanted it to work, even if... very honestly, she was entirely my type physically, but otherwise... void. Looking at me with those dead fish eyes every time I talked about anything deep. Then saying it was all about my anxiety and that I was "killing the conversation". Well how about you tried to use your brain, you idiot?
I wasn't even a driver. I was a month away from the exam, from getting it on the first try, and two from getting my very own car. My hair was shorter. I was living at my father's, having loads of trouble sleeping, had a memory foam mattress topper which made it a living hell to sleep in summer, and all that wake and all that little sleep made me a dull girl, which gave this blog its name. On the day I chose it, it was just a day after the last time I even cooked for the family, because my father came home with bruschettas or whatever else Italian and totally ignored the fact that I made the effort to cook green beans and lardons for three. The taste it left in me was so bad I threw away my portion because I could not eat it, the mere sight of it was enough to make me mad.
I wasn't yet entirely consistent with my blog posting, hell, it wasn't even on Blogger at the time: it was on Dreamwidth, and I moved this to Blogger in April of this year because DW looks nice but kind of really sucks otherwise, and the community is deader than a doornail. (Not that Blogger's seems to be more active, but at least, there's better coverage).
But I had just met Hopoe in June. I had been thinking of her here and there, wearing my pearl. I was actually eager to meet her at work.
The first time I went upstairs to see them, after Cepheus invited me to do so in mid-August, guess who was the first person I ran into? Yep. Hopoe. She was scanning papers I believe, but I recall exactly what she said upon seeing me:
You? In this building?
With that smile of hers that changes her whole face. Her rounded teeth. Yes, her fucking teeth. I love her teeth. And her voice. And I can still hear it, and I smile, and my heart hurts, and I want to cry, because just thinking back about it makes me wonder where it all went, and what I have done for it to...
Her cheeks were red. I didn't know then if she was just hot or if there was something else. I did her a bise, and my hands were going to her upper arms, but I restrained myself from touching her, at that time.
A while later, when I did her one while coming across them from the mess hall, she actually was the one to touch me. I was so caught off-guard that I didn't know where to put my hand, so I put it close to her waist, on her back. I don't usually touch people when I'm doing that unless I feel close to them or I have a crush. And given that Hopoe isn't exactly a person who is tactile, like, she told me she didn't need hugs when we once had a conversation over Whatsapp back when she started to close off...
At the time, she looked so massive. So radiant. She was... different. I don't even think I was just seeing her with rose-coloured glasses, she genuinely felt like a different person. At the time we were flirting, she looked just like that: radiant.
Now, she just looks small, and yet she hasn't really changed physically. She still wears the same rangers, still is the same height, I mean, she wouldn't have got any shorter. Fitter, yeah, she started doing sports again, likely for retaking that officer exam she said she wouldn't retake if she failed it... but still big. At the very least seventy-five kilos, but I think she hovers around eighty to ninety.
Now she looks small, dark, almost withered, just like me. But not withered with sadness, or exhaustion, like me. She looks... bitter. Gives off an energy of someone who is not aging well, though, again, she is only a year older, and not even forty yet.
Bitterness. Yeah. And negativity.
Far from the lost child I could see, sometimes. The glimpses of the young girl I would catch while watching her at lunch in moments she wasn't performing. Now, when she isn't putting on her smile, she just looks... like that. When I glimpsed her talking to Hani, and saw her eyes, they looked stressed. I hadn't seen her like that last year. I mean, save for when she started to close off.
I remember, and it still happens, how she'd directly spot me in a crowd. How once, I was half-hidden by the food stand at the mess hall, and she saw me and that smile on her face just told me everything. I just have it burned in my mind. Lowering her head, smiling, upon having noticed me. You don't do this if you're not unconsciously scanning for the person. I was dressed in green that day, it could've easily gone missed with all those military uniforms, but it didn't.
And she still does it. The others don't always notice me, but she does. We always notice each other.
We always seem to be on the lookout for each other, consciously or not.
***
And... well.
At times I would wonder if I am truly a different person than I was at that time. If I had truly changed, or if I was still that Aka who looked for answers and was apologizing to exist and who would always do her best.
Now I know. I am different.
And not in the best way. In fact, I feel like... Hopoe and I aren't that different in who we became. Except where anger seems to reside, for me, it's pure exhaustion and sadness.
I am more broken than I was a year ago. In August of 2025, for sure, I was enduring my father, his stupid shit, the constant stress of being in his home especially when my little sisters were here, but I had never yet attempted to end my life. Suicide was still relatively abstract in my mind.
That ended on the evening of November 24.
I had never almost died, even. A shelf fell on top of me on June 10.
Then, July 8.
In just a year I've had three brushes with death and a feeling that life was trying to get rid of me for whatever reason. Now I guess I feel that I've got something more solid in my bones. If I could survive that, then I guess... maybe I'm a cockroach (which is a valid option), or... I'm just not meant to go right now, even as I don't quite understand what fate is trying to tell me. I haven't done anything reprehensible or that's big enough to warrant such punishment, so what kind of sin would I be atoning for? None. What's the "lesson" that New Agers would absolutely love to pin on me? What does it want?
I don't think there's any answer to that.
I just had no idea that a year later, I'd be broken like that. 2026 has been eventful as heck so far. I started ori tahiti, I exited my father's place, I've got two tattoos in less than a year (December '25 and the one by Tane in March '26) and probably will be getting that third one in the last quarter of the year... I got my navel piercing... literally never had so much body modification in such a short period of time. I had years go between tattoos: 2017, 2018, 2020, 2025... 2026. Now boom, all of a sudden, a bunch of them. How.
***
I mean, even Cass... feels different now. She has cut her hair, yes. But the betrayal...
...could've I seen it coming, at all, last year?
I just had no idea.
And I still don't understand what happened. I'm still in August 2025. I'm still with my Hopoe. Sitting beside her. Feeling the charge, laughing, asking her things, telling her stuff about me and then asking her a question because I didn't want to be too probing, nobody likes to be grilled. It was awkward, yes, but I know for a fact I didn't make this creepy, otherwise 1. the atmosphere would've been weird, and 2. Hopoe would've put a stop to it.
Am I just stuck in the past, or is that intuition that things are not over... valid? That Hopoe and I aren't done with each other? This sense that out of all of those people, she's the one who will remain, besides likely Cepheus (because so far, even as he gave me platitudes, he has never betrayed me nor minimized me, unlike... Cassiopeia, fuck I hate saying this, it feels like I'm painting her as a villain unnecessarily or devaluing her or something), perhaps Austral, Cygnus... I sense that Libra may come back, too. I don't know how. Or when. But I feel an older Libra in my future, somewhere.
Hopoe in my baggage, or to be found after I leave the burning forest.
For real, regarding my job and all, I think I know the answer, but I just don't want to admit it, that I can't really be back, or not like before. Without Esme already I feel something is missing, and yet I never signed that contract for her. And I certainly am not going to look for work in her city because I hate it. I'll just stick to texts and calls, really.
I should go to bed. The air is fresh, it's probably not going to be as awful of a night as last one, which was heavy and humid and full of skeeters feasting on my legs and feet.
I just wish there was a simple solution to everything. It feels like all of this is some complicated puzzle I can't figure out, and it frustrates me, and pains me.