Ellie stories
I have pretty bad impulse control around eating. If there is food in front of me I struggle not to keep picking at it even if I’m already uncomfortably full and even if I don’t like it that much. I generally don’t keep sweets or alcohol in my house because I tend to binge through it if it’s there. Moderation is not something I am good at.
One thing Ellie used to do sometimes is hide chocolate bars around my house and then, when I was in need of a treat, tell me where to find one or pull them out herself. She was incredibly sweet. I found a Galaxy caramel bar in the back of the kitchen press this morning. One last birthday present from her.
And now I guess I just want to share stories about her. We watched a lot of TV together. Just cuddling on the sofa or in bed and watching television had honestly become of my favourite things. I came over to her place once when she was watching Evil, enjoyed it and then she rewatched it with me from the start and we carried through all the way to the end together. She talked about watching a video essay (I do not recall who by) about Miraculous Ladybug and how it matures and grows more complex each season and I basically downloaded it and made her watch the first few episodes as a joke and then just sort of fell into continuing it because I cannot resist sticking to a bit well beyond what is warranted. It was a bit of mindless fun to put on and cuddle and chat. We were most of the way through the third series.
Just feeling the warmth of her body against mine is one of the things that I miss most of all. I got her a rose gold Zippo lighter for her last birthday. She liked fire and burning little things. She could be a real little very tall gremlin. She had left the lighter in my house a few days before she died. I had it with me to give back to her when we found her body. Sometimes I light it for a while and then just feel the warmth of it in my hand. Somehow that feels like the closest thing to having her here again.
We were also rewatching shows we liked as teenagers together. She was showing me Wolf’s Rain, I was showing her Outlaw Star and we were revisiting The Big O together. She loved R. Dorothy. We had also started rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist together and had gotten as far as The Alchemy Exam back in September and then it took eight months till she was finally in the mood where she was happy to sit through Night of the Chimera’s Cry again just a few days before she died. Seeing as this has turned into the anime paragraph I will also say that we had both enjoyed Dungeon Meshi but had watched it separately as I was watching the dub and she was watching with subs. She loved Falin, too. She related a lot to robot girls and monster girls.
She was a big, lovely, autistic, dork and I cannot describe how wonderful it was watching her unmask and being earnest and silly about things she was self-concious about. I understand deeply the shame of trying to be normal, of burying stuff you are enthusiastic about, and I loved seeing her dig it all up. One time while we were hanging out at home I turned a corner to see her standing stimming in the middle of the living room, shaking her hands back and forth and bouncing a little. When she saw me she withdrew a little bit. She was a bashful about it but it was adorable. I wanted to encourage her. I asked her to keep doing it and when she demurred I cupped her head in my hands and begged her “Ellie, I need you to be more autistic!” She cringed into herself shyly from that but smiled and giggled and said, mock-ominously “You know not what you ask!” and I just kept saying it until she said she would. From then on “I need you be more autistic” became something I would implore when she was being self-conscious about herself.
She really liked making characters and just fucking around in games. I’d watch her play WWE 2K24 and she would often play a random match and not even particularly try to win. Just have fun and being playful with the narrative of a wrestling match, showboating, playing a referee and being as obviously biased as possible to the worse wrestler. She talked to me about some of her RPG characters. She had restarted Baldur’s Gate 3 a few times but had never actually gotten to the end. Her current character was named Drizz and she had a whole backstory thought out for him that she spent an evening explaining to me (with a lot of interruptions to explain details about the world because I do not know much about Dungeons & Dragons).
Drizz was a drow trans man, raised to be an assassin in a cult dedicated to Lolth, who was shunned for not wanting to be a woman, betrayed by his mentor and ended up living rough for a long time. There was a lot more detail but I confess my memory is very poor and I don’t know that she ever wrote any of this down. She played Drizz as angry, brash and socially inept, deliberately making obviously risky or poor choices with him that would piss people in the game off. She saw a bunch of scenes she hadn’t before with previous characters as a result. Also it’s definitely Drizz and not Drizzt. He gets mad if you call him Drizzt. He did not name himself after Drizzt and is annoyed at people who assume he did.
I am not good at conclusions. She was wonderful. She’s gone, but she was wonderful.