Lumardy Case | All I Need

i want to repost an excerpt of death notes here, because i think it’s the best attempt i’ve ever made in explaining what the emotional and traumatic significance is of the social abuse lumardy (here referred to as “luke”) inflicted on me. it’s edited down from the original to just the aspect of social abuse, whereas the original describes a chaotic emotional mix of this and the feeling of getting trapped in quicksand letting in someone you like who’s bad for you. i think it makes less sense in isolation, but i have to post something like this cos i was never able to put into words the feeling of having your friendships raped. so here it is

it tells the story using radiohead’s song all i need

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i notice a theme emerging in my thoughts here. most stories represent a kind of primitive need i have but am denied. time passing has helped me pick out my strongest feelings and needs. i want to next observe luke from this pov. maybe this will be the bullet with which i finally get it right.. finally explain the emotional point of the lumardy case, and what is this thing called social abuse

i’m the next act waiting in the wings
i’m an animal trapped in your hot car
i am all the days that you choose to ignore

you are all i need
you’re all i need
i’m in the middle of your picture
lying in the reeds

i thought the tourist hit shatteringly close to home but this is even worse

i am all the days that you choose to ignore

idk how they manage to communicate these feelings of alienation so well

rooting around the youtube comments, many people just see this song as being about unrequited love. “i’m a footnote in her story, she’s a chapter in mine”. it’s been a theme in my writing as well, whether this “love” really exists or is just a random hormone. shit jordan rakei once described as “cupid’s cheese”. real love, if it exists, ought to be borne of knowing someone on a deep level and standing naked in eir world. things a cluster b’s ego prevents em from ever achieving

there are a few comments here and there that get it more. i still remember walking back to the hotel from banyoles rowing camp, alone, past some reeds. a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit the puzzle.. it may as well lie hidden in those reeds

this trip would’ve been more fun without you on it

i might fit in with those ducks more than my peers

i am a moth who just wants to share your light
i’m just an insect trying to get out of the night
i only stick with you because there are no others

you are all i need
you’re all i need
i’m in the middle of your picture
lying in the reeds

among the reeds of the tideway, there are islands. we call them aits. i would very much like to progress the english language and do away with some of the shittier spellings… weight, freight, eight. wouldn’t it be cool if it were “eit”? like ate. like ait. ait is a special one, cos it’s such a short word yet inexorably bound up with the tideway i come from. looking at the list of aits, i think it’s jokes there’s one called “lower horse island”. back on my regular walks during the pandemic, i once posted to sdll a picture of chiswick eyot and the enormous difference between high and low tide. when i read about lower horse island, my immediate reaction was to go to sdll and tell them about some of my local history. laff with them

except i can’t. because luke amputated my links to them

deep into the winter at age 24, i was already dying. the noise torture was so intense, and the pandemic was buffering a wave of reckoning with my incellism that i probably knew was coming. i was walking thru hamlet gardens, thinking about how the only thing keeping me going was this warmth i had in sdll, in my room in the late hours, and how it was under threat from my mum shutting down my ability to talk to americans at night. i was suicidal, scrabbling around for solutions, maybe noise insulation, maybe… it reminds me of my last few years spent trying to figure out the practicalities of my suicide. the same desperation. cos i knew, much as the alternative to death now is continuous hell, the alternative to losing sdll back then was death. because i was under round-the-clock torture from the building site and my own alienation

i was just an insect tryna get out of the night. and the light was occupied by luke. his “commanding presence”, quoting his own words, gatekept sdll. i only stuck with him, a narcissistic child who hated me, and with sdll, a thoroly dehumanised online society*, because there was no other warmth in my life. my history was empty. obviously, if i’d had better other friendships and more intimacy then luke would’ve been a passing crush. my warmest friendships wouldn’t have been online and i would have steered well clear of gabe. but luke and gabe felt so much more real than anything i’d ever had. not that i understand why. but there were no others

(*: when luke lamented that his friends complained about him and his friend discussing lgbt too much, legge’s reaction was “and that’s why i only have online friends ✅”)

so it was just unlucky that luke decided to dislike me, use me, and then choose to be an abuser. when he spun up those split narratives to me and my friends vs to sdll, telling them i’d abused him while telling us that they were being unreasonable, he kicked me down the well i was trying to claw myself out of

that first verse now reminds me of how i would feel if i were him, choosing to ignore what he did to me, but with my ghost waiting in the wings. denying his responsibility to make amends, to help me with the friendships he took from me. leaving me alone and not tormenting me with staged disappearances and returns, and hauntings. that’d be letting me out of the hot car. the radiator dream of anxiety i’ve often mentioned