typingnoise | Reading

Some quotes sit quietly in your bones, waiting for the right season to echo. This one found me again recently, and wouldn’t let go.

“The Past Is Never Dead. It Is Not Even Past.”
— William Faulkner

That line has been quietly resonating with me lately. Faulkner wasn’t just being poetic; he was pointing to something profound about how our past lives with us, not behind us. It’s not a dusty relic locked away on a forgotten shelf. It’s more like a shadow, sometimes stretching long and unexpected, sometimes warm in the midday sun.

For years, I tried to tuck my past into a box marked Do Not Open. After a long marriage where I was taught to shrink, that past felt like a weight - something to hide or outrun. But just like some of my favourite redemption arcs in fandom - Leverage, Buffy, even Doctor Who - the past isn’t something you escape by erasing. It’s a part of the story, messy and complicated, but also the soil where growth takes root.

In stories I love, characters don’t just leave their history behind. They carry it like invisible scars or secret powers. Those moments when they confront their past, whether it’s trauma, loss, or regret, make their triumphs feel earned, their healing real. The past is part of them. And often, it’s the very thing that shapes their found family, their hard-won joy, their redemption.

That idea feels deeply true in life, too. My past isn’t a chain but a map - sometimes tangled, sometimes clear, always guiding me toward understanding and reclaiming myself. It’s not about forgetting or pretending it never happened. It’s about learning how to live with it differently, maybe even to find strength and hope in the scars.

For anyone feeling trapped by history, whether personal or collective, Faulkner’s words offer a quiet kind of hope: your past is there, yes, but it’s not the whole story. Like any great narrative, it’s the groundwork for something new, something hopeful.

I’d love to know: how has your past shaped your story? Do you find comfort in those fannish moments when characters wrestle with their histories and find their way forward? Have you ever found a character whose history mirrors your own in unexpected ways? Or a story that helped you see your past with new eyes? I’d love to hear about the fandoms, and the feelings, that have stayed with you. Let's talk in the comments.

Current Mood: peaceful

typingnoise

there’s a particular way queer people look at stories. not just the ones written for us (rare, strange, often softened by compromise), but the ones that weren't — the ones that forgot us, misnamed us, or pretended we weren’t watching.

we still watched.

sometimes it’s in the gaps: a friendship that runs too deep, a rivalry that brims with tension. the girl who won't speak of why she left, the boy who won’t let anyone in. we know those silences. we fill them in with our own.

other times it’s not subtext at all — it’s just no one else saw it. or maybe they did, and they chose not to say.

we find each other like that. in the margins, in the misreadings. in scenes where something cracks and light spills through. where someone touches someone else’s wrist and the moment lasts too long. where longing outpaces language.

queer reading isn’t about “what the author intended.” it’s about what we needed. what we saw because we were looking for it. sometimes it's survival. sometimes it's reclamation. sometimes it's just delight — the kind that tastes like recognition.

i’ve been thinking lately about how queerness reshapes time in fiction — how chosen families resist linearity, how queer characters so often orbit love at strange angles. how the ending we’re given isn’t always the one we accept.

we rewrite them, quietly. sometimes in fic. sometimes just in the way we remember them.

sometimes i go back to a story i loved as a teenager and realise what i was actually looking for. how the ache between two characters mirrored something i hadn’t named yet. how it wasn't a crush on the lead actor, but something softer, more sideways. how the villain made more sense than he should have. how the girl who ran away was the one i followed, always.

queer reading is a kind of ghost-seeing. it’s knowing there’s something else underneath the surface — something that speaks in our language, even if it wasn’t supposed to.

tell me — what’s a scene you’ve never been able to unsee?

Current Mood: contemplative

typingnoise

some things never have names.
some things never need them.

there's a kind of love that doesn't look like declarations or grand arrivals, but like clocking someone's sigh and wordlessly passing them the right mug. like sending a song with no message attached. like walking side by side in silence, knowing exactly where to stop for the good chips.

what rituals do you share with the people who get you, quietly?

the quiet cup made at 3am because both of you woke from different dreams.
the playlist you always put on when driving the long way round.
the old inside joke you still resurrect like a prayer.
the split dessert order.
the soft glance when someone else doesn’t quite understand.
the swapping of book piles without asking.
the ritual of not needing to say: “i love you,” because it’s there in the shared cardigan, the returned lighter, the text that says just, you okay?

sometimes i think the deepest bonds are built not on intensity but on pattern. the repeated, the known, the small.

and not all rituals are nostalgic. some are stitched in real time — newer threads being added without fanfare:

i send her a photo of the sky when it looks like the sea.
he leaves voice notes where the silence between words says more than the words.
they always say “get home safe,” and it sounds like “don’t disappear.”

maybe the loudest proof we’re understood is in the quietest things.

if you’re reading this and thinking of your own shared rituals —
send the text.
share the song.
put the kettle on.

quiet doesn’t mean unspoken.

Current Mood: overcast
Current Music: the beautiful south - old red eyes is back

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What We Carry: Fandom, Recovery, and the Ghosts of Our Pasts

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