museofwriting

Hi, I'm Tal, she/they. I'm a queer nerd who writes things. I have too many fandoms to list, but prominent among them are: Shakespeare, The Adventure Zone, Voltron, MDZS, Boku no Hero Academia, Good Omens, and many others.

This account is going to mostly be a sort of media journal where I'll be posting about what I'm reading/watching/listening to, casual thoughts/impressions, etc. I will drop links when I've posted a fic or something like that, but this account will not be primarily a fannish space. If you'd like more fandom content I'd recommend you check out my tumblr (thatgirlonstage) or my twitter (museofwriting), or just head straight to my AO3 (MuseofWriting) if you just want to check out my writing :D

My default icon is Nyl from the webcomic Awaken by Koti Saavedra. If you like swords, magic, cool monsters, and overthrowing corrupt dystopian governments, you should check it out!

I suppose, if you'd asked me when I was young, I probably would have said I hate cats. It wasn't particularly true even then, and I've since well outgrown it – I'm still more of dog person, but I'm perfectly happy to snuggle a cat if one is around and willing. My relationship to cats nowadays tends to be either "both of us are happy to basically leave the other one alone" or "this cat has instantly adopted me for some reason and now it won't leave so I'll just keep scratching its ears I guess." But the cause for my considerably less charitable attitude towards cats as a child can be pinned squarely on two specific cats: the cat in my neighborhood who was, as far as I know, totally feral and somewhat dangerous, and my Grandma's cat, Hannah.

Hannah was the cat I had the most interaction with as a kid, and it was by and large Not Positive. To be fair to Hannah, a lot of that was my own fault – I was a little kid who wanted to pet the fuzzy and didn't understand why Hannah wasn't like my family's wonderful doofus of a yellow Labrador who thought everyone and everything in the world was his friend except cats and rabbits. I probably scared her to death a few times, poor thing, chasing her around the house trying to play with her. But even if I hadn't done that, I doubt Hannah and I would've gotten on much better than we did. She was a rescue, we believe abused when she was younger, and as a result distrustful and disinclined to be anything but viciously asocial to any and all humans who set foot over her threshold, including my Grandpa. The one single exception was my Grandma. Hannah loved my Grandma. Probably because she was the one who fed her.

I don't actually know when or how exactly Hannah died. No one told me at the time it happened, and I suspect I may not have visited the summer immediately after, so it was probably a couple years later when I was visiting, looked around, realized I hadn't seen Hannah that visit, was about to ask, stopped, started doing the math, quietly reached the obvious conclusion, and decided there was no point in bringing it up.

Fast forward a few years, and my Grandma passed away after two years of steeply declining health. She was my last living grandparent, predeceased by her second husband, my (step-)Grandpa, due to a shocking and tragically quickly lost battle with cancer a couple years earlier. My paternal grandparents had both died before I was ten years old. I think the official cause of my Grandma's death was something like kidney failure, but the doctors weren't completely certain, and honestly, by then, it hardly mattered. All her health was a ticking clock and she was generally miserable. She had never wanted or intended to outlive her second, younger, previously-healthier-than-her husband. She had not wanted to move out of her house and into assisted living accommodations all by herself. She was beginning to suffer memory loss and some form of mild dementia. Despite the best efforts of her children and grandchildren, very little seemed to bring her genuine joy in the last couple years of her life. She suffered an abrupt collapse, spent a couple days unconscious in a hospital bed, and at some point, with her two eldest children (one of whom is my mother) sitting with her, she simply stopped breathing.

I was away at college at the time. I typically only saw my grandparents once a year if that, so it was difficult to process them as being gone. Their absence wasn't really noticeable until summer family reunions without their presence or Christmas passed without a card or a phone call. And even then, it was difficult to feel it with any kind of sharpness or intensity.

I didn't attend her funeral. I don't remember exactly why, if it was actually impossible with my schedule or if I simply made the elective decision that my grief would not be best served by scrambling to arrange flights and homework extensions and class absences. But I remember a day beautiful and sunny and warm enough despite being fall in Vermont for me to go out and sit on the green, and I tried to sit in the sun and sift in my feelings for grief and pain and a sense of loss that ought to have been there but that I somehow hadn't found yet.

I don't know what made me think of Hannah. I really don't. Perhaps I caught a glimpse of a cat out of the corner of my eye. Perhaps I'd read something, a book or an article, recently, that used the name. Perhaps it was just free association. But for some reason, I had the wildly errant thought that I was glad that stupid, awful, bitey cat had died before my Grandma. I had a moment of empathy like I never once had for that cat the entire time it was alive where I was just so relieved for Hannah's sake that she hadn't had to lose the one single human in the entire world whom she had trusted. And out of nowhere, I started bawling. I was sitting out in broad daylight in the middle of the college green with tears just streaming down my face, and for fifteen minutes, I couldn't stop. Over the damn cat that I didn't even like.

To date, it's the only time I've ever cried about my grandmother's death.

Grief is messy, and confusing, and nonlinear, and it frequently doesn't make sense, and people focus on and respond to things in unexpected ways. I still half think I have to write my Grandma a thank you note every Christmas. I haven't gotten around to deleting her last address from my phone contacts. In a lot of ways, I still don't properly feel her absence from the world. But when I meet a cat who, for some reason, adopts me on the spot, and climbs into my lap, and lets me scratch between their ears and purrs, I think about Hannah, and a strange hysterical happiness wrapped in unspoken sorrow.

 Hmmmm so if I post something to a community there doesn't appear to be any indication on my main journal that I posted it, not even like, a private archive link for myself to access everything I've posted. Which I like the privacy of, but then if I, say, want to share a fic with a community, does it then become bad form for me to crosspost to my main journal so that as many people see it as possible? Or should I simply post it to my main journal to begin with and link the community to my public post? But then that negates the idea of the community having say comment discussions that stay contained, but if I ONLY post to communities I'm kind of limiting the number of eyeballs on my work... hrmmmmmm