Aonani
Aonani \a(o)-na-ni\ as a girl's name is of Hawaiian origin, and the meaning of Aonani is "beautiful light".
Even if you feel left hanging by the previous entry, you may want to skip this entry if you are uncomfortable with blunt discussions of sex.
Ugh. Okay, I started out rambling in my original draft, and I'm starting over to cut down on my fandom talk. It's still going to pop in once in a while, but I swear that it will have a point.
So, I texted him on Thursday night and set up the meeting. I was actually hoping pretty hard that he wouldn't meet me, because that would mean that I wouldn't have to meet him and I could stay in my little hermit bubble. You might ask why I even contacted him at all, but I have several friends who have been encouraging me to get out more, so I took it as a sign from the universe to expand my universe. When we confirmed the date, place, and time, he sent an additional message asking for a picture. My internal creep alarm rang loudly; FRACK. IS HE ARRANGING TO SELL ME TO SOMEONE? It took a while for me to turn it off, and I demurred with a "maybe next time."
We had arranged to meet on Sunday at 3PM in downtown. Saturday afternoon, he texted me a message wishing me a good day. Since we were supposed to meet the next day, I thought it would be okay not to respond in kind. Sunday morning, I went to tea with my mother, brother, and future sister-in-law. When I came back home, my iPad informed me that I received two text messages from him. The first one was reconfirming our meeting, and the second was sent ten minutes after the first, asking me whether I was going to turn up. It was tinged with a certain kind of "douche-y-ness," which you can consider yourself.
"If u want to cancel u should let me know. I planned my day to see u, if ur not free then pls let me know. Take care"
While I can somewhat understand his worry that I might blow him off, I can't help but feel incredibly irritated that he sounded like the world revolved around him. It also seemed a little needy, and I didn't need that shit. If anyone is going to be needy, it's going to be me. I sent him a message reassuring him of our appointment. He then asked if we could meet at Stonestown, instead. I was a bit annoyed at the last minute change, as I had planned to stop by the Main Library to pick up my reserved copy of Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End. (I need to read the book before I start watching the BBC's adaption of Parade's End. The main attraction? BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH.) In hindsight, it turned out very well, as I am much more familiar with Stonestown and the surrounding area.
(As I write this, I feel a bit burdened and would rather put this behind me than write and document it. This doesn't bide well, does it?)
I met him at the Stonetown platform stop for the M line. He hugged me. I suggested that we go inside Stonestown, and he informed me that he was kicked out of Stonestown. Oh, Good Lord in Heaven. This is not a good sign, is it?
So, the story is that he's been charging his phone inside the mall, and some girl thought he was stalking her. That girl called security, and security took him aside and asked him to leave. He started getting defensive and said that he didn't mind getting arrested and that he would call his father. Security ended up just escorting him out.
With that story told, my internal alarm didn't just ring. It screamed, "RUN FOR YOUR LIFE." I shoved the screaming to the side and drew on my default polite, amicable, and admittedly pushover persona to keep me going. I suggested going to Ambrosia up on Eucalyptus. As we walked up 19th Avenue, he took my hand, twined my fingers with his, and kissed it. I tried to make polite interesting conversation, while he was charming in return. He tried to be cute and asked whether my last guy was white and if he was a big guy. Alarms rang again, and I playfully answered that he was too inquisitive.
I decided to follow the M train tracks to cut through to Eucalyptus. Taking note of the surrounding, he kissed me. On the lips. There was even some feeling of tongue.
And in a moment of deliberate madness, I kissed him back. With a bit of tongue.
(I apologize for the short sentences and sudden stops. It creates a sense of drama and almost mocking incredibility that I don't intend. This is all very stream of consciousness, which makes the narrative incredibly convulted, but it's most representative of my state of mind.)
It felt cold and awkward. It was like kissing raw meat. But the oddest feeling and thought that came to me was, "I don't feel anything." There was no emotion involved. Neither passion nor delight. Neither terror nor disgust.
And this was my first kiss.
(Carrie Underwood's "Last Name," as performed by Kristin Chenoweth in Glee, comes to mind.)
He tried for another impromptu make-out session before we stepped onto Eucalyptus, but I demurred. Ambrosia had closed early, and I suggested going up to West Portal. He insisted on a quick rest under one of those fancy St. Francis Wood bus shelters on Junipero Serra Blvd. We sat closely together and again had quick spurts of kissing. He brought up the possibility of going to his place instead, but I declined. He tried to charm me with the "I wouldn't try anything," which only set off more alarms in my head and cemented my refusal. I felt nothing when we touched. Neither fear nor passion. It was only when he talked that I had the creeping suspicion that he would try to take advantage of me.
By this time, I more or less knew what he was after. He joked about getting sake bombs instead and kept making thinly veiled sexual innuendoes that I made myself in my first year of high school. Sex. Physical intimacy. Touching. Kissing. Caressing. To put it into words that are simpler but cruder, I was just an easy fuck to him. He probably thought that I fit into one of two categories. I was either a sexually liberated Asian girl who would have the same feelings as him about kissing, touching, and snogging, or I was a sexually repressed Asian virgin that he could easily convince to fuck. I don't think it hit him that I was both and not.
I should have left or at least put an end to his caressing and snogging, but the moment of deliberate madness mingled with my inner Madame Bovary, and I decided to let things happen as they would. Yet it cannot be denied that I let things continue to go on due to fear. Fear that he might be a rapist and that this was just the trap; fear that he might throw a sissy fit in public; fear that he might be a psycho stalker and pull some crazy shit on me. It would be safer to play along and wait for the right time to run like hell was on my heels. I could see through his charming act from a mile away, and if I continue to act like I was interested, he would keep going on his charm and not change up his act. I didn't want to be surprised and be set up for a fall I wouldn't be able to recover from.
I finally decided that we should continue heading to West Portal. He tried to play cute and stretched out his arms, asking me to pull him up. I didn't. I wasn't blind to his ploy; he wanted me to take his hand and let him pull me into another snogging session. He understood quickly that I wouldn't fall for it and followed me across the street. He tried to impress me with his arm muscles. I wasn't. I see buff guys at the gym all the time. I'm also a Marvel Cinematic Universe fangirl, which means that I spend an inane amount of time looking at pictures of Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth shirtless (Captain America and Thor, respectively).
We got to West Portal, and I bought myself an iced tea at Pete's Coffee. I desperately wanted to sit down in the shop, since it would be inappropriate to kiss inside. Unfortunately, nearly all the tables were occupied by those goddamn laptop users. So, we left and walked down West Portal. There was more impromptu kisses and snuggling, arms around my shoulders and waist. It felt perfectly cliched and boring. He suggested we go inside a bookstore, and I happily welcomed the distraction of books.
He made a bad joke about sex and magazines; I ignored him and headed straight for the fiction section. Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End and The Good Soldier; Evenlyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor; Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin. I love books. They are safe and perfect and don't kiss you and don't put their arms around your waist.
He stepped away for a while to make a call and came back. Arm around my waist and a kiss on the cheek and the lips. He told me he was on the phone and started angrily recalling the girl at Stonestown who called security on him. I took him out of the bookstore, since he was raising his voice in the sanctity of a quiet bookstore. I was getting exceedingly tired of his company, and a full hour hadn't even passed yet. I wasn't going to go anywhere private with him. Until it was clearly stated that we were going our separate ways, I would stay in full view of the public eye.
We sat down at the bus shelter in front of the San Francisco Waldorf High School. He continued on his tirade against the girl from Stonestown and moved onto how racist and awful people are in the United States. He added in details about how his father and uncle are cops, his mother is a lawyer, and how powerful his family is. He's been in Maryland, Thailand, Europe -- oh, yeah, did I tell you his family owns a hotel in France? His long narcisstic monologue about how great and powerful he is was was peppered again with snogs and caressing and petting my head and fixing my hair and touching my face and seemingly passionate looks into my eyes that I returned faked.
I even started letting more of myself show -- the blunter, angrier, more violent part of me. I told him that I would splash him with my ice tea and hope he gets pneumonia; he thought it was a cute threat.
He told me that he felt a little tired and dizzy; I jumped at the opportunity and insisted that he go home to rest. Before the train came, he kissed me again and rested his head on my chest, during which I realized physical intimacy and physical displays of affection are overrated and that I am more passionate and feel happier kissing and holding my stuffed animals. He even kissed the top of my covered chest, and it took every bit of self-control not to roll my eyes and scream that he just won the award for worst cheese in the history of the world. This is probably how unsatisfied housewives feel about needy husbands. They're bored and feel nothing and just want it to be over with as quickly as possible.
The train came, and we got on. He accurately guessed that I never ever call him again, and I dithered with a response. (The closest I will ever get to contacting him is in my dream, where I have him on a slab paralyzed, but conscious and still capable of feeling pain. I would perform my famed torture method on him: slowly break every accessible bone in his body before I cut open his back and see if it is humanly possible to rip out someone's spinal cord.) When I got off the train at Stonestown, I, honest to God, ran from the platform to the bus while looking back to make sure that he didn't follow me, because the possiblity that he might be a crazy psycho stalker was firmly rooted in my mind. After I made sure that he wasn't around, I sent a text to Vivian to tell her I was okay. I got on the bus and went home.
When I got home and sat down for dinner, I had the oddest sense of dissonance. I just just came back home from making out with a guy I didn't know or like would ever see again. And now I was having dinner with my family like it was any other Sunday. I felt so empty and fake.
It wasn't just a matter of taking a long hot shower to rid myself of that feeling (even though copious amounts of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash did go a long way). I soaked myself in my fandoms and bathed in it to remind myself of who and what I am. I didn't like the person I had been for an hour and a half. Playing interested and complacent, kissing and touching someone I didn't give a fuck about -- someone who if he was killed right in front of me, I would calmly wipe the blood off my face and ponder if the blood would ruin my boots.
As I began writing this, I took frequent and often breaks to watch videos on Youtube and listen to podcats and music to detox from the empty feeling. Benedict Cumberbatch. Comic-Con 2012 Marvel Panel. Robert Downey, Jr. Tom Hiddleston (on repeat, because he has a beautiful voice). Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me. Sweet Nothing by Calvin Harris featuring Florence Welch. They reminded me of who I am and that I like who I am.
Easing back into the person I was comfortable being, I thought that this whole experience might be a lesson of some sort. Maybe it could be distilled into another one of my humorous encounters with the opposite sex. And yet, as I actually write this, it has become a painfully deep introspective piece about myself.
I am reminded of the Gavin de Becker quote from his book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence: "At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them."
When I was with him for those one and a half hours, I felt boredom, irritation, suspicion -- but never downright fear. Now, however, I fully understand the reality of this quote. And it literally terrifies me to tears.
(The fact that I had to use the word "literally" to emphasize my terror makes me depressed.)
It's hard for me to sum up my feelings. It's mostly a jumble of emotions, and I jump from one emotion to another in seconds. I do know that I wasn't taken advantage of. I had the chance and opportunity to push him away and leave him in my dust; I just didn't. It's like knowingly dating a douchebag and still not breaking up with him when he mooches off you and plays Halo from morning until night.
More than anything, I'm disappointed with myself. The second he kissed me, I should known what was going on and walked away. Maybe I deserve the passionless snogging of a person I don't care about, but I don't want it and I'm better than that shit.
I am a terrible hedonist and narcissist like Emma Bovary; I want to be happy and have pleasant experiences. I want passion, beauty, the sensation of flying in my normal humdum life.
I know I'm not going to have that fairy tale life, and I'm mostly cool with that. I can live on with a humdum life and be content with it. But I'm not going to be content with a life or experiences that are boring, unwanted, and downright stupid.
I want to say that this is the lesson from this whole experience, but I would just be lying to myself. Rather, I've gleamed guidelines by which to live. One, don't ever ever ever call random guys who chat you up on public transportation. Two, I want chapereons with me at all times. And three, I want a dossier on them -- everything from their personal history to online purchases to deep dark hidden secrets that have yet to see the light of day.
I started writing this on Sunday night, thinking that I might finish that very night. What I didn't anticipate was that I felt so empty and fake and like someone that I'm not or even comfortable pretending to be. It only took one and a half hours to drain me of everything I am, and it took me four full days to become myself again with handfuls of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash; videos of Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston being charming and handsome; articles on the Doctor Who universe; and lots of food.
I feel like I'm supposed to have a conclusion here, but I don't think there is a conclusion.
Even if you feel left hanging by the previous entry, you may want to skip this entry if you are uncomfortable with blunt discussions of sex.
Ugh. Okay, I started out rambling in my original draft, and I'm starting over to cut down on my fandom talk. It's still going to pop in once in a while, but I swear that it will have a point.
So, I texted him on Thursday night and set up the meeting. I was actually hoping pretty hard that he wouldn't meet me, because that would mean that I wouldn't have to meet him and I could stay in my little hermit bubble. You might ask why I even contacted him at all, but I have several friends who have been encouraging me to get out more, so I took it as a sign from the universe to expand my universe. When we confirmed the date, place, and time, he sent an additional message asking for a picture. My internal creep alarm rang loudly; FRACK. IS HE ARRANGING TO SELL ME TO SOMEONE? It took a while for me to turn it off, and I demurred with a "maybe next time."
We had arranged to meet on Sunday at 3PM in downtown. Saturday afternoon, he texted me a message wishing me a good day. Since we were supposed to meet the next day, I thought it would be okay not to respond in kind. Sunday morning, I went to tea with my mother, brother, and future sister-in-law. When I came back home, my iPad informed me that I received two text messages from him. The first one was reconfirming our meeting, and the second was sent ten minutes after the first, asking me whether I was going to turn up. It was tinged with a certain kind of "douche-y-ness," which you can consider yourself.
"If u want to cancel u should let me know. I planned my day to see u, if ur not free then pls let me know. Take care"
While I can somewhat understand his worry that I might blow him off, I can't help but feel incredibly irritated that he sounded like the world revolved around him. It also seemed a little needy, and I didn't need that shit. If anyone is going to be needy, it's going to be me. I sent him a message reassuring him of our appointment. He then asked if we could meet at Stonestown, instead. I was a bit annoyed at the last minute change, as I had planned to stop by the Main Library to pick up my reserved copy of Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End. (I need to read the book before I start watching the BBC's adaption of Parade's End. The main attraction? BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH.) In hindsight, it turned out very well, as I am much more familiar with Stonestown and the surrounding area.
(As I write this, I feel a bit burdened and would rather put this behind me than write and document it. This doesn't bide well, does it?)
I met him at the Stonetown platform stop for the M line. He hugged me. I suggested that we go inside Stonestown, and he informed me that he was kicked out of Stonestown. Oh, Good Lord in Heaven. This is not a good sign, is it?
So, the story is that he's been charging his phone inside the mall, and some girl thought he was stalking her. That girl called security, and security took him aside and asked him to leave. He started getting defensive and said that he didn't mind getting arrested and that he would call his father. Security ended up just escorting him out.
With that story told, my internal alarm didn't just ring. It screamed, "RUN FOR YOUR LIFE." I shoved the screaming to the side and drew on my default polite, amicable, and admittedly pushover persona to keep me going. I suggested going to Ambrosia up on Eucalyptus. As we walked up 19th Avenue, he took my hand, twined my fingers with his, and kissed it. I tried to make polite interesting conversation, while he was charming in return. He tried to be cute and asked whether my last guy was white and if he was a big guy. Alarms rang again, and I playfully answered that he was too inquisitive.
I decided to follow the M train tracks to cut through to Eucalyptus. Taking note of the surrounding, he kissed me. On the lips. There was even some feeling of tongue.
And in a moment of deliberate madness, I kissed him back. With a bit of tongue.
(I apologize for the short sentences and sudden stops. It creates a sense of drama and almost mocking incredibility that I don't intend. This is all very stream of consciousness, which makes the narrative incredibly convulted, but it's most representative of my state of mind.)
It felt cold and awkward. It was like kissing raw meat. But the oddest feeling and thought that came to me was, "I don't feel anything." There was no emotion involved. Neither passion nor delight. Neither terror nor disgust.
And this was my first kiss.
(Carrie Underwood's "Last Name," as performed by Kristin Chenoweth in Glee, comes to mind.)
He tried for another impromptu make-out session before we stepped onto Eucalyptus, but I demurred. Ambrosia had closed early, and I suggested going up to West Portal. He insisted on a quick rest under one of those fancy St. Francis Wood bus shelters on Junipero Serra Blvd. We sat closely together and again had quick spurts of kissing. He brought up the possibility of going to his place instead, but I declined. He tried to charm me with the "I wouldn't try anything," which only set off more alarms in my head and cemented my refusal. I felt nothing when we touched. Neither fear nor passion. It was only when he talked that I had the creeping suspicion that he would try to take advantage of me.
By this time, I more or less knew what he was after. He joked about getting sake bombs instead and kept making thinly veiled sexual innuendoes that I made myself in my first year of high school. Sex. Physical intimacy. Touching. Kissing. Caressing. To put it into words that are simpler but cruder, I was just an easy fuck to him. He probably thought that I fit into one of two categories. I was either a sexually liberated Asian girl who would have the same feelings as him about kissing, touching, and snogging, or I was a sexually repressed Asian virgin that he could easily convince to fuck. I don't think it hit him that I was both and not.
I should have left or at least put an end to his caressing and snogging, but the moment of deliberate madness mingled with my inner Madame Bovary, and I decided to let things happen as they would. Yet it cannot be denied that I let things continue to go on due to fear. Fear that he might be a rapist and that this was just the trap; fear that he might throw a sissy fit in public; fear that he might be a psycho stalker and pull some crazy shit on me. It would be safer to play along and wait for the right time to run like hell was on my heels. I could see through his charming act from a mile away, and if I continue to act like I was interested, he would keep going on his charm and not change up his act. I didn't want to be surprised and be set up for a fall I wouldn't be able to recover from.
I finally decided that we should continue heading to West Portal. He tried to play cute and stretched out his arms, asking me to pull him up. I didn't. I wasn't blind to his ploy; he wanted me to take his hand and let him pull me into another snogging session. He understood quickly that I wouldn't fall for it and followed me across the street. He tried to impress me with his arm muscles. I wasn't. I see buff guys at the gym all the time. I'm also a Marvel Cinematic Universe fangirl, which means that I spend an inane amount of time looking at pictures of Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth shirtless (Captain America and Thor, respectively).
We got to West Portal, and I bought myself an iced tea at Pete's Coffee. I desperately wanted to sit down in the shop, since it would be inappropriate to kiss inside. Unfortunately, nearly all the tables were occupied by those goddamn laptop users. So, we left and walked down West Portal. There was more impromptu kisses and snuggling, arms around my shoulders and waist. It felt perfectly cliched and boring. He suggested we go inside a bookstore, and I happily welcomed the distraction of books.
He made a bad joke about sex and magazines; I ignored him and headed straight for the fiction section. Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End and The Good Soldier; Evenlyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor; Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin. I love books. They are safe and perfect and don't kiss you and don't put their arms around your waist.
He stepped away for a while to make a call and came back. Arm around my waist and a kiss on the cheek and the lips. He told me he was on the phone and started angrily recalling the girl at Stonestown who called security on him. I took him out of the bookstore, since he was raising his voice in the sanctity of a quiet bookstore. I was getting exceedingly tired of his company, and a full hour hadn't even passed yet. I wasn't going to go anywhere private with him. Until it was clearly stated that we were going our separate ways, I would stay in full view of the public eye.
We sat down at the bus shelter in front of the San Francisco Waldorf High School. He continued on his tirade against the girl from Stonestown and moved onto how racist and awful people are in the United States. He added in details about how his father and uncle are cops, his mother is a lawyer, and how powerful his family is. He's been in Maryland, Thailand, Europe -- oh, yeah, did I tell you his family owns a hotel in France? His long narcisstic monologue about how great and powerful he is was was peppered again with snogs and caressing and petting my head and fixing my hair and touching my face and seemingly passionate looks into my eyes that I returned faked.
I even started letting more of myself show -- the blunter, angrier, more violent part of me. I told him that I would splash him with my ice tea and hope he gets pneumonia; he thought it was a cute threat.
He told me that he felt a little tired and dizzy; I jumped at the opportunity and insisted that he go home to rest. Before the train came, he kissed me again and rested his head on my chest, during which I realized physical intimacy and physical displays of affection are overrated and that I am more passionate and feel happier kissing and holding my stuffed animals. He even kissed the top of my covered chest, and it took every bit of self-control not to roll my eyes and scream that he just won the award for worst cheese in the history of the world. This is probably how unsatisfied housewives feel about needy husbands. They're bored and feel nothing and just want it to be over with as quickly as possible.
The train came, and we got on. He accurately guessed that I never ever call him again, and I dithered with a response. (The closest I will ever get to contacting him is in my dream, where I have him on a slab paralyzed, but conscious and still capable of feeling pain. I would perform my famed torture method on him: slowly break every accessible bone in his body before I cut open his back and see if it is humanly possible to rip out someone's spinal cord.) When I got off the train at Stonestown, I, honest to God, ran from the platform to the bus while looking back to make sure that he didn't follow me, because the possiblity that he might be a crazy psycho stalker was firmly rooted in my mind. After I made sure that he wasn't around, I sent a text to Vivian to tell her I was okay. I got on the bus and went home.
When I got home and sat down for dinner, I had the oddest sense of dissonance. I just just came back home from making out with a guy I didn't know or like would ever see again. And now I was having dinner with my family like it was any other Sunday. I felt so empty and fake.
It wasn't just a matter of taking a long hot shower to rid myself of that feeling (even though copious amounts of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash did go a long way). I soaked myself in my fandoms and bathed in it to remind myself of who and what I am. I didn't like the person I had been for an hour and a half. Playing interested and complacent, kissing and touching someone I didn't give a fuck about -- someone who if he was killed right in front of me, I would calmly wipe the blood off my face and ponder if the blood would ruin my boots.
As I began writing this, I took frequent and often breaks to watch videos on Youtube and listen to podcats and music to detox from the empty feeling. Benedict Cumberbatch. Comic-Con 2012 Marvel Panel. Robert Downey, Jr. Tom Hiddleston (on repeat, because he has a beautiful voice). Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me. Sweet Nothing by Calvin Harris featuring Florence Welch. They reminded me of who I am and that I like who I am.
Easing back into the person I was comfortable being, I thought that this whole experience might be a lesson of some sort. Maybe it could be distilled into another one of my humorous encounters with the opposite sex. And yet, as I actually write this, it has become a painfully deep introspective piece about myself.
I am reminded of the Gavin de Becker quote from his book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence: "At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them."
When I was with him for those one and a half hours, I felt boredom, irritation, suspicion -- but never downright fear. Now, however, I fully understand the reality of this quote. And it literally terrifies me to tears.
(The fact that I had to use the word "literally" to emphasize my terror makes me depressed.)
It's hard for me to sum up my feelings. It's mostly a jumble of emotions, and I jump from one emotion to another in seconds. I do know that I wasn't taken advantage of. I had the chance and opportunity to push him away and leave him in my dust; I just didn't. It's like knowingly dating a douchebag and still not breaking up with him when he mooches off you and plays Halo from morning until night.
More than anything, I'm disappointed with myself. The second he kissed me, I should known what was going on and walked away. Maybe I deserve the passionless snogging of a person I don't care about, but I don't want it and I'm better than that shit.
I am a terrible hedonist and narcissist like Emma Bovary; I want to be happy and have pleasant experiences. I want passion, beauty, the sensation of flying in my normal humdum life.
I know I'm not going to have that fairy tale life, and I'm mostly cool with that. I can live on with a humdum life and be content with it. But I'm not going to be content with a life or experiences that are boring, unwanted, and downright stupid.
I want to say that this is the lesson from this whole experience, but I would just be lying to myself. Rather, I've gleamed guidelines by which to live. One, don't ever ever ever call random guys who chat you up on public transportation. Two, I want chapereons with me at all times. And three, I want a dossier on them -- everything from their personal history to online purchases to deep dark hidden secrets that have yet to see the light of day.
I started writing this on Sunday night, thinking that I might finish that very night. What I didn't anticipate was that I felt so empty and fake and like someone that I'm not or even comfortable pretending to be. It only took one and a half hours to drain me of everything I am, and it took me four full days to become myself again with handfuls of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash; videos of Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston being charming and handsome; articles on the Doctor Who universe; and lots of food.
I feel like I'm supposed to have a conclusion here, but I don't think there is a conclusion.