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Building secrets takes energy. Not the kind of telepathic "energy" Sunset talks about. Real energy. Mental energy. A secret is like a castle you built with your bare hands. You have to drag and place each brick, one by one, inside your head. To keep the secret safe. Until you end up building a castle. A strong, well-guarded castle. And there’s something so beautiful about that castle inside your head. That castle that only you can see.

It’s almost sacred.

I let people into the castle. But they have to earn access to my castle. Slowly. First, I let them in for a brief visit. Once a month. Then, the visits get longer, and more frequent. Once a week. And the trust grows. And, yes, it can grow fast. (Did you know bamboo can grow was fast as 1ft per day?) But always at a natural pace. Not in the two seconds it takes to touch a hand. That’s not the way things should be.

Think about me for a moment. I think I deserve it after all this time. Imagine you took all this time to build a perfect secret. Then some random person who never even bothered to say hello to you comes waltzing into your life, and, with just one magical touch of her hand, she blasts apart every single brick you stacked. Every single paver you laid.

With dynamite.

No matter how much she has changed. Or will change. How can I ever trust someone like that?

The long, lonely lunches in cafeteria. Where 20 minutes felt like 20 hours. That zing of hope when I first found the memory stone. No matter how realistic Sunset’s so-called “energy” is, I’m the one who experienced all that. No one else but me. I was the one who sat in that chair. I was the one who felt the cold metal of a locker door pressing against my back.

I’m the only one who deserves to feel those things.

Just because she knows everything about me doesn't mean she's my friend. She doesn't deserve to be my friend.

Comments

[Mica]

oops

[BezierBallad]

5424863
Woah. How’d you do that?

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Secret mental castles?

[Scampy]

for the curious, it's set to zero opacity, copy/paste it to another place to read it

also HYYYYYYYPE OMG MORE ANGST WALLY YES PLS

if she and Sunset don't smooch by the end of this little series you've got going, I will throw balloons full of water and glitter at you and it'll be really wet and sparkly and inconvenient

[Trick Question]

5424869
I did one of those once.

There are Unicode kinds of spaces that are rarely recognized as whitespace by code. Usually one of: zero-width spaces, hair spaces (though these are not as good because they can still barely be clicked on), or mongolian vowel separators (also zero-width) will do what you need.

EDIT: Not what was done in this case, but works for the title.

[BezierBallad]

5424952
Cool

[Bahamuttone]

5424938

for the curious, it's set to zero opacity, copy/paste it to another place to read it

Hm that is somewhat akin to throwing said stick of dynamite...