For over a decade the Louvre has offered an official guide for the 3DS. A very cute meeting of games technology and art.

Ellie had wanted to go on a trip to Paris together and back in May, just over a week before she died, I had joked about needing to go before September when I read about the Louvre 3DSs being discontinued. That trip never ended up happening and as of today the service has officially ended.

I had completely forgotten about all of this until seeing a post about the Louvre 3DSs again just now. Funny the things that can send one into floods of tears. Echos of plans that never came to pass and reminders of what could have been. I had been considering doing the most cliché thing in the silliest way possible and proposing to her in Paris with a fidget ring I was going to get off of Etsy. Rose gold with symbols of the moon on it. I ended up getting one in my size instead that I have worn occasionally as one of my mementos of her.

I have been writing about Ellie since her passing but there is another person who died who I have failed to mention. Only week or two before she died Ellie told me that she was plural. She was under­stand­ably extremely worried about this. Worried that admitting to this would ruin her life, that I might judge her and leave her. She had, as I understand, never told anyone in person this, barely told anyone online. She thought that I would think she was crazy. I just told her that I don’t care if she was “crazy” or not. Many people would have considered the both of us crazy by definition for being transgender. It’s a vague and all-encompassing word for people that one doesn’t understand and hates.

Her headmate was named Kat and I feel a great loss that I never got to know her, but Ellie did tell me a bit about her. She did not really front ever. Her and Ellie did not consider themselves plural for a long time and just through of Kat as a negative voice in her head (they did not get on for a very long time) and Kat kind of hated having a body and physical sensation and was very repulsed by sex. I asked Ellie at one point if it is not very annoying for Kat when myself and Ellie were so physically affectionate and she just laughed and said “Yes” in a flippant and mischievous way, clearly teasing Kat as much as joking with me.

They were not the first plural system I knew but this is the first time I became aware that someone close to me was one and I don’t really know that much. I found asking Ellie about it fascinating. I was a bit self-concious that I was being invasive or treating them like some weird oddity but Ellie said she was happy to talk about it. Apparently alcohol and weed seemed to affect Kat less and even made her a bit more comfortable with the physicality of their body, dulling the sensations a bit I suppose—putting a barrier between her and it. Ellie told me that a few times when she got too blackout drunk to function Kat was able to front and safely navigate them home on the bus. So thank you, Kat, for keeping Ellie safe.

Kat was more brash, more impulsive, more of a bitch (a word she took some pride in as I understand it). They had different tastes but the only thing I know for sure is that when we were watching Outlaw Star Ellie did not really understand my love for Aisha Clan-Clan (her favourite character in it was “Hot Ice” Hilda and wished the show had been about her instead) but Kat was fully on the Aisha train with me.

Kat never spoke directly to me in person but passed on a few replies and opinions that Ellie relayed. Even that she found strange and awkward and difficult to get used to, but she made a Discord account and sent me a few messages the day before they died. This is the ony direct conversation I ever had with her.

hello!

this is weird

like i’m only doing this cause i don’t want you to associate stuff i say with ellie

i’m a bitch and she doesn’t alwasy say what’s on her mind

so i will

fuck this is so weird

lmao fair

gragjhfkdshgtoledsg;.s

yeah I assume this is very weird for you in ways I cannot begin to understand so no worries if it’s difficult

i know you probably think this is weird and stupid or maybe that i don’t exist and ellie is just fucking with you or crazy

but it’s not. i am here

so yea

fuck

i want to die now

goodbye /end of communication

for now

cool, talk to you when you are more up for it

you should set Aisha Clan-Clan as your avatar >:)

fuck off. i was just looking for a image of her

hahaha

fuck yes

she’s really cool. you have some taste

I really wish I could have gotten to know her better than that before they died. They both deserved so much more time.

it’s been two months
and it’s been five minutes
and it’s been a year

and tomorrow it will have been five minutes
and tomorrow it will have been an eternity

and again

and the next five minutes
and the next six months
and the next ten years

and again and again and again

I have been setting up a few mementos of Ellie in my house. One of the things that I’ve gotten was some prints of her Discord avatar from the original artist, Aitor Sebastián.

Also pictured: A small print of a render of a crystal by Luna which I got at the same time.

I’ll post some more photos of my little memorial to her when it’s more complete.

Do you trust your family to not bury you under your dead name? To invite your friends and partners to you your funeral? Do you trust that your family members who have the decency to do those things won’t allow themselves to be browbeaten by those who don’t?

Recently I had a reminder of something that every queer person was painfully aware of during the height of the AIDS crisis: If your partner dies and you have no legal relationship to them then you have no legal rights over what happens to them. That is perhaps a tautological statement but one that is worth internalising. When you die what happens to you is up to those that the state considers to be your family and in the absence of any legal documents saying otherwise that is generally your blood relatives. And of course there’s the matter of inheritance if you want to leave things to anyone other than your relatives.

What’s funny is that myself and Ellie had been discussing this. We had talked about looking into the process of getting wills written, etc. Her family did not take her transitioning well. Her brother refused to let her into his house to drop off Christmas presents for her niblings last year because he did not want his children to see her as a woman. We knew what would likely happen if she died, we just did not expect it so suddenly.

I don’t have any actual advice to offer for how to go about this. We hadn’t gotten around to it ourselves and if we had anything I could say would only apply to the Republic of Ireland.

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.

I have been struggling for the last few months. My health has been poor, it has been difficult to keep on top of things, I have just felt generally worn down and burnt out. But I have been managing. I have been trying to let myself rest more. Getting things off my plate. I have gotten ADHD meds. Most of all what has helped me get through is my partner, Ellie Cosgrove. We had only been together one year at the end of April but it was such a wonderful year. Being with her was healing in ways I cannot describe. I felt able to be fully myself with her. I was able to peel away masks I didn’t know I had been wearing all my life. I was learning to be myself through her. I was learning to love myself through loving her. I wanted to build my life around her.

She died on Wednesday night. The last few days have been the worst of my entire life. I have been looked after. Friends and family have been reaching out constantly. My mother and sister made sure that my fridge is more full than it has ever been and I had so much company over the last few days that it would have left me exhausted even in good circumstances. It hard to believe that it has only been a few days. It feels like so much longer. Like it has been weeks since this awful, raw thing crawled inside my chest and died. Weighing me down, wearing me out even more. So many of my everyday thoughts loop back to her and now everywhere in my mind there is just a horrible, grey, consuming, painful dead end. I’m thinking about This Is How You Lose the Time War again. About love infecting you and changing you and making the other person part of you. And in that last year that happened so much and so much more than I could have imagined. And now that part of me has been ripped away.

I keep coming back to this piece that she loved. I’m trying to internalise it. To remember to keep going. To remember that she loved me.

Okay. Come on, then. I love you, get up, we are going to keep going. Repeat this to yourself in a mirror or in a whisper or in the shower or in a shout. I love you, get up, keep going.

I am tired too. It’s okay. We will sleep in the car ride over. We will sleep on each other’s shoulders. We will sleep upside down and in the laps of new friends and on the bellies of our lovers and in the hands of better tomorrows. We will sleep and we will wake up rested and we will wake up happy and we will wake up home again.

I love you, get up. It’s time to write “maybe next time” on our gravesite. It’s time to write: it could not kill me, I would not die. It’s time to write a love letter to the sun and our one-act play and the history of our keychains. It is time to write a future where despite everything, we are finally warm and safe.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Get up. Keep going. We are going to be okay.

Rowan Perez

I would also appreciate any comments on this or any other post on this site, even just because most of the existing comments are from her and I would like to be able to review the Comentario dashboard without seeing her words at the top of it and be reduced to a sobbing mess again.

I am evil and kind, while my girlfriend is good and cruel.

We make it work.

my girlfriend is so sweet and kind and also evil and mean to me (in ways that are fun)

I lost and gained people I love in 2024. The year started off well. I won a Celeste race that myself and some friends do every New Year’s. I chosted a roundup of every film I had watched in 2023 to Cohost. I don’t think that I’m going to do that again this year. I don’t have the energy for it. I’ve been dealing with back pain issues for a while that are stopping me sleeping well.

In February I replaced my memory foam mattress with a spring one and it seemed to help for a while but then the pain came back. This repeated throughout the year with me finding things that seemed to give a temporary reprieve, only for me to start waking up in pain again. It’s not as bad as it was but I am still struggling with it. I am going to try going back to a physio again. I was not happy with the last one and when he moved his practise I did not feel very motivated to find a new one, but a friend recommended their physio to me over the holidays and I’ll give it another go.

Also in February my partner moved to Copenhagen. I knew it was coming, this had been planned for a long time, but when it actually happened it hit me very hard. She visited in the summer and I flew out to Copenhagen with some our friends in October too, but I want to make an effort to see her more, even if I do find travelling very draining.

Also also in February I dropped my phone in the toilet. It’s a Fairphone and designed to be able to be taken apart easily with just a screwdriver to swap parts, so it’s not very waterproof, and the screen stopped displaying anything. Thankfully disassembling it and drying it out thoroughly brought the screen back to life, but even if it hadn’t I would have been able to replace the screen.

In March I got a fancy folding, electric bike. I have not used it quite as much as I planned, especially over the winter when it has been cold and I have been struggling with lack of energy, but it has been very handy for certain journeys that public transport doesn’t adequately cover. I also experimented a bit with being horny on main with Cohost. It has really been the only place online where I felt safe and comfortable enough to do that. Part of that is just over getting more comfortable with myself and kink stuff, but Cohost was just a friendly place for me and I was inspired by other people I followed sharing their own kinks in very cute ways. Cohost shutting down has been upsetting for a lot of reasons but this is one of them and it’s hard to get comfortable about this stuff again in other contexts.

April was a huge month in retrospect. A friend asked me out and tentatively said yes, not really sure how it was going to go and I’ve never done polyamory before. I am so glad that she did. I love her so much. Both of my partners are autistic and A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. and getting to know them and how wonderful, funny and utterly charming they are has helped me explore those parts of myself and see them as something to embrace. I’ve been learning to love myself through loving them. I am still undiagnosed but I am pretty sure.

And me being undiagnosed is not for lack of trying. Also in April was my first appointment at a local public mental health unit that I had been referred to over a year prior for an A.D.H.D. assessment. I calmly explained how much I struggle day to day and what I have to do to cope with it, which the doctor seemed to take as me managing pretty well. I realised from this conversation that doctors are basically just like dogs: They don’t really understand what you’re saying they just hear tone and maybe a few basic keywords. The health service is a paternalistic, condescending trap and you need to ritually humiliate yourself to them until they deign you worthy enough of the charity they so magnanimously bestow. I dropped the masks, let myself unravel and started sobbing in front of them.

This got me another appointment. They wanted to dig into my childhood, interview my mother. Quite frankly I don’t give a shit if I had A.D.H.D. as a child. Requiring that as part of diagnosis seems utterly pointless. I do not have a time machine with which to go back several decades to when that might matter. I am struggling now. That interview never happened, anyway. Appointments got delayed, doctors were busy. I got given a multiple choice form to fill out about my childhood again, some of which asked multiple questions as a single item which don’t necessarily have the same answer. Was I a good student and did I do well in tests? No, I was an awful student who ignored her teachers whenever I could get away with it and just read ahead in the book myself because I found that more interesting and I did will exams. I struggled massively in university when I finally hit a wall of subject matter that did not come easily to me as I had never learned how to study properly.

I of course got fucked around for another few months before being finally told I have A.D.H.D. and they are not going to treat it. I guess I’m functioning too well, though I don’t have any of the specific reasoning because the doctor who told me this was one I had never seen before and was just paraphrasing a letter that she refused to give me a copy of. I am still waiting on the results of a Freedom of Information Act request for my documents from these appointments that is almost two months overdue.

I started singling lessons in April but I failed to keep going with them. That’s far from the only thing I have failed to keep at since then. I’ve been struggling a lot as the year has worn on. I hope I can get back to the energy and spoons I seemed to have last spring again in the coming months. Going back over my diary for the year it’s a stark reminder of how much things were looking up then. April was also the last time I saw my friend Hellen. She had moved away and was around for a visit. I had a lovely time with her. I didn’t speak to her much after that and she died suddenly in August. I did not make it to the funeral, it was overseas, but some other friends did at least. Back here we had a memorial picnic for her.

Before that the summer was pretty damn good, though. Got closer to the new partner, got to see the old partner. I tried ritalin that was given to me—by a friend, not a doctor—and wow that does certainly help a lot. I wish it was possible to actually get treatment through the medical system. Oh well! I rationed them for bad days and they helped me get through a lot of shit. I also marched in a pride parade for the first time. I also met some kink people in person who were lovely.

Well. They were certainly lovely at the time. In August I learnt that one of the people I had met there had be accused of repeatedly spiking drinks at other events. Hellen died, as established, and then in September it was announced that Cohost was shutting down. I hope it doesn’t come across as callous when brought up in the same breath as my actual friend dying, but I also have grieved for that website. I was devastated. Cohost helped me a lot in this last year to embrace more parts of myself, be more open about certain things and it was also just a place that was actually fun and a bright spot in my life. I wouldn’t be posting on my own site if it wasn’t for it. It sparked creativity in a lot of people and reminded us that we can be thoughtful of how we use the internet and communicate with people. This site existing in its current form is because of Cohost.

I visited Copenhagen in October with some friends. I had a lovely time but I find travelling exhausting. I think I was a bit run down afterwards and got sick a few times. I might still be recovering from it all. My cat also got out and was missing for a few days, which didn’t help, and coming up to the Christmas holidays I had the most stressful time I’ve had in my current job. I’ve had two weeks’ holidays and I feel like it really wasn’t enough.

I did have a lovely Christmas with my newer partner, though. We had Christmas dinner with a group of other local trans people, played Mario Kart and watched Doctor Who. Ideal Christmas.

And now. I guess I still need to recover and heal. As I’m writing this my back pain is flaring up again. I need to get up and do some stretches before this year’s Celeste race this evening. We’ll see if I can keep my crown. I haven’t done much practising but I don’t think anyone else has either. It’s just a bit of fun.