Lakelore

My bad days, they're part of me. And the things I make, those are part of me too. Especially the things I made during bad days, because they remind me that I still made something out of those bad days.

Once you get past the fear of being seen, you can get to the part where you know you’re not alone.

You only like everything about me because I don't keep the parts no one would like.

There's a certain way that falling for someone can only ever feel when you've fallen at least a little for yourself first.

We go forward. To the rest of the world we vanish, but to each other we’re seen.

I open the cabinet where there’s a shelf that’s all tea. Every lesbian needs a ridiculous amount of tea, and that goes double for a couple composed of two lesbians, Mom always says. It’s in the manual they gave me when I came out. I can show you.

Who I am uses up all the space the world is willing to give me, and even that, I have to fight to keep open. I am already a living confrontation. My story doesn’t get to be complicated.

The worst mistake I've ever made is bad all on its own, but I never think of it on its own. Some mistakes come in sets, and my worst mistake had a part one that came seven years earlier.

So many of us are haunted by versions of ourselves we wish we could exile. But the pieces of our beings don’t pull apart that easily. If we try to unweave ourselves, we unravel at the edges. So we all do the work of reconciling who we are now with the ghosts we once were..

I used to think the only options were the World Under the Lake and the world above it, good moments in my brain and bad moments in my brain, parts of me worth keeping and parts worth forgetting. But maybe that makes as little sense as thinking there’s only boy and girl and nothing in between. I’m proof of what exists in-between and so is Lore and everyone like us. Just like the World Under the Lake is proof that there is something between air and water.

When you came back, I remembered that sometimes people see me. All of me. And that was terrifying. You woke up that feeling of me being seen and I didn’t like it because I’d forgotten how much I need it.

The World Under the Lake isn’t just holding the parts of myself and my history I don’t want to think about, it’s holding the ways I adapted and lived. "Sometimes you can’t separate the hard things from the good things.

This sign gave me my name. After I left that strange world underneath the water, and the boy who led me into it, I saw these letters. I’d been looking for my name for months. The name I’d been given when I was born had a kind of weight I couldn’t carry. It was so distinctly feminine I didn’t know how to hold it up.

And that’s going against the current of how I’ve lived with ADHD, trying to make it small enough that it doesn’t inconvenience anyone.

I was holding four different tasks in my head, and three different customers’ questions, and when another customer touched my arm, everything flew out of my brain, because that’s what happens when someone touches me and I’m not expecting it or don’t want it or both. Everything spills out of my brain. My working memory chucks it all into long-term storage, and good luck to me if I want to find any of it anytime soon.