Someone I follow recently posted about how when they get a random bad feeling, they read angsty fics with happy endings and trick their brain into thinking that the bad feeling is because of the fic, and then the happy ending makes the feeling go away. (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the post. But that was the idea.)
Anyway, turns out, that works really well for me with fics about depression.
In related news, I’ve caught up on
Landslide, and it’s pretty magnificent. I have now finished catching up on all the stories I was
whining excited about yesterday. Yay!
(@jhscdood - comment left on AO3, as requested. :) )
My other go-to when I want to be weepy, besides sad fanfics, is the Russian book I posted a paragraph from the other day. It’s called The War Was Tomorrow… (Завтра была война…) and it’s about high school kids in Russia in 1940. I always cry buckets.
Here, have the next little bit.
In the photo, we were class 7’B’. After our final exams, Iskra Polyakova dragged us all to the photographer’s on Revolution Avenue: she loved arranging all kinds of activities.
“We’ll get a picture taken after seventh grade, and then after tenth grade,” she expounded. “Imagine how interesting it will be to look at them when we become old grannies and grandpas!”
We crowded into the narrow waiting room; before us, hurrying to be immortalized, were three newlywed couples, an old lady with her grandchildren, and а squad of forelocked Cossacks. They sat in a row, all picturesquely leaning on their swords, and stared directly at our girls with their shameless Cossack eyes. Iskra didn’t like this at all; she immediately requested that we be called when the line got to us, and took the whole class to the neighboring park. And there, to prevent us from running away, picking fights, or, God forbid, trampling the grass, she declared herself the Pythia. Lena blindfolded her, and Iskra pronounced our dooms. She was a generous prophetess: each of us could expect lots of children and buckets of happiness.
“You will give humanity a new kind of medicine.”
“Your third son will be a brilliant poet.”
“You will build the most beautiful Palace of Pioneers in the world.”
Yes, they were marvelous predictions. It’s only too bad that we never got to visit the photographer a second time, that only two of us became grandpas, and there turned out to be far fewer grannies, too, than there were girls in the photograph of 7’B’. When we came once to a school reunion, our whole class fit in one row. Of the forty-five that had been once in 7’B’, nineteen lived to see grey hairs. Having discovered this, we would no longer show up to school reunions, where the music thundered so loudly and where those younger than us met so happily. They would talk noisily, sing, laugh, and we would want to keep silent. …
(I stick too close to the original when I translate. There are definitely phrases in there that are much more awkward when you don’t have the original phrasing in your head. So if anyone wants to point them out, I would be eternally grateful.)
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