UU ch 21 + news

Originally this chapter was gonna end with Eli moving out of Marlin's place and promptly getting harassed over text and voicemail about "where'd you go" and "what's going on" and "what are you doing", and amid all that he was going to finally send Lynn his apology and get something in return, and then 22 was going to be the make-up scene, but.... after working on it a bit that felt like too quick of a recovery.

So I decided to pad it out. :'3

Did you guys hear about the Night In The Woods bullshit? By now y'all know that Unexpected, Undeserved is a story about abuse, with a good portion of what's going on between the characters taken from my own life and experiences. Because of all of this, a lot of Scott's post personally detailing his history with Alec made me feel... a whole dang lotta things.

For chapter 22 of UU, which I'm planning to head right on into after uploading this one, I'm planning on going back and showing y'all a lot of how Eli and Marlin used to be - like you remember the high-school-concert bathroom fun scene? Things like that. I wanna show you guys who, thankfully, haven't been in Eli's place in a shitty abusive cycle, how it's often impossible to notice and recognize what's going on until it's beyond too late, and how by that point it's far too hard to extricate yourself from the cycle in a way that feels manageable and doable. How trying to get out of something like this, even after you've realized it's awful and unhealthy, feels much the same as trying to scoop a big portion of your life and daily routine out and just leaving this gap there. It's scarier than just letting it go on.

Marlin's been presented throughout at the story as a pretty clear shitwad. That's been done intentionally: Eli's dealt with six years of this, and the novelty and sparkle of the relationship has long since worn off for him, leaving him with something less than perfect that he just hasn't known how to get out of, and which he hasn't been able to see is less than perfect. It took Lynn coming along and making him realize what love actually feels like to snap him out of that. Eli's done some pretty shitty things, too: that was obvious in the fight in 19, and you'll see some more of that coming up in 22.

The thing is, though, often people like Marlin don't know they're like that. They're not doing what they do intentionally. My ex, off of whom Marlin is like 96% based, was like that. I had to make some bad choices along the way, too, stuck between my boyfriend and my regular friends. This is where the "20/20 hindsight" thing I've mentioned a few times comes in: while in the relationship, you think you made the right choice, but once you're out of it and once you have that perspective, you really see what went on.

Should Marlin have treated Eli like this? Of course not. Should Eli have put up it with it this long? No. Should Lynn have reacted the way she did in 19? Well, no. Nobody's doing anything right. There was one line in particular from Scott's post that really stuck out to me and hit me deep: "Alec is gone. What he did to people remains." The thing you gotta take away from that whole situation is that, often with things like this, there's no happy ending. It's all this huge clusterfuck where everything's going wrong and nobody's doing what they should, and you can't blame anyone for any of that. 

From the start, though, I've planned for Unexpected, Undeserved to have the happy ending that all of us wish we got.

See y'all then - probably in chapter 23 or 24.

<3