RE: https://mastodon.com.br/@xkcd/115606802255500200
Aha! Unlike @xkcd@mastodon.com.br, unlike @xkcd@mastodon.xyz, does not block quoosts. Switching my follows...
I feel like talking about #Tigger and #JennyHypertwin but I also am not sure what to say; rambling now ensues, therefore....
[CW: very old death & sui refs follow 馃拃 馃И]
Tigger got cancer but didn't make it; Jenny either left on her own initiative or was killed by a deadly bullshit infection (evidence strongly suggestive but inconclusive).
"Do I sound like a 17-year-old? (I've only had two days to practice.)" -- J, who never got to be 18
馃幍
You might feel so bad that you wanna die
But if you died you would never know
That it didn't kill you
Soon you would've felt better.
[...]
You're not ever going to feel any better
Once you're dead, you don't get any deader.
[...]
Now you're never gonna get any older
And I really do miss you, but how would you know?
馃幍 -- Fastball, "Love Doesn't Kill You"
...and I would have done anything to have more time with either of them.
I sometimes think that maybe by honoring J's stated boundaries so thoroughly and literally, I gave her the impression that I didn't care anymore -- and that maybe she wasn't worth caring about, and maybe that's why she decided to do what she did. ...but there's no way to know, now. Maybe I just want to either blame myself and/or feel like I was still important to her.
We've had 22 (T) and 42 (J) years of not being together ever, not talking or smiling or looking at the sky or taking walks or just sitting in the same space, and it really sucks and the emptiness never goes away.
...and it occurred to me today to wonder if maybe I'm having a hard time taking the idea of new relationships seriously because they'd first need to achieve something on the order of the longevity of those existing relationships. I really first got to know both J and T around 1980-81; my relationship with both of them is (therefore) 4 decades old. A mere 15 years still seems like "recently", and I've only been nominally the right gender for 8 of those.
(...and at this point I run into things that I no longer feel free to talk about because it could too easily hurt someone I care about if I say it wrong, so I should probably just stop.)
