Land of Cotton [Afterword] | Farewell · 11:28pm Jul 23rd, 2022
RarityEQM followed me in the middle of April 2019.
The name stuck out to me for some reason. Couldn’t tell you why. Maybe I’d seen them in the feature box—or read a story of there’s once upon a time. But, for whatever reason, the name stuck. And that’s the part that matters most of all.
I’d gone to their page and asked them why they followed me. It seems like, whenever someone of merit takes notice of me, I’m always curious to see why. I’m not a good writer. Not even a good person. I try my best—but that doesn’t stand for much.
RarityEQM responded with a plethora of affectionate reasons for the follow, from the expected to unexpected. Soul Sister placed great importance on giving what others lacked. Maybe she took that roleplaying of generosity too much. It’s funny how we can base our lives on fictional characters. But, then again, it’s the fictional characters that sound truest to life, or of a better life, that stick more with us.
Maybe that’s how it goes. Perhaps our love or emulation of a fictional character is based on that realness. It sounds like a gimmick when I say Soul Sister practiced generosity because of a fictional character. That she tried to be like that fictional character in her day-to-day life. She could sound like a weirdo or someone of a lower standard in that regard.
But I think the reason why we fixate on fictional characters is because they present something that rings in us. Something already there—or the potential to be there. RarityEQM saw that, in being generous, she could help others.
And that’s what she did with me.
She saw that I was insecure about many things and needed someone to talk to. That I needed to be reassured and consoled on matters unable to be spoken to by others. She was the sister that followed me into the strange world and helped me in processing all that came with it. If you were lacking love, she gave it. If you were lacking confidence, she instilled it in you.
If you felt like you didn’t matter, that your writing was worthless and that you wanted to give up—she would threaten a bitchfit so dramatic that even God would take notice for a day. It was those lively things that made the difference between ‘existing’ and ‘living.’
Where one feels more important like they matter because the people around them care.
It’s easy to lose yourself and keep to a grind. To forget that you are a person as you keep with the quota. When you lose everyone that made you feel like someone who mattered. It was RarityEQM, in threatening to do something dramatic, that caused me to chuckle and feel better. Silly little gestures like that, things that curve around the ‘norm’, makes your life feel special.
I decided to return the strangeness in return, saying that she would become my rival and that we would duel it out. Something to add to the narrative; another game to be played. We had our little fun with that. But Soul Sister, knowing I was down in the dumps, wrote me a story called Land of Silk.
None had ever done that for me. None really had a reason to do that for me. RarityEQM saw I was down and knew how much I liked micro/macro. She read my words to see the things that I fixated on. Then she went and wrote the best she could on a story meant to lift me up. It did. And I cherish that story every day.
RarityEQM and I would talk at 3 AM every day.
Both of us usually couldn’t sleep. It was around that time when the mind darkened, and one’s words sound heavier. It helped to have someone there during those periods. She would fill me in on her life, her projects—and snippets of the next story. Land of Cotton.
But life and depression entered. She’d tried writing with expectations placed on her. RarityEQM wrote to me that she lost her passion for writing. She sent me more snippets of other stories, and even though I didn’t notice much, she said that she had written them ‘cold.’ That means one does not enter a flow state. Or that the words come easily.
Every sentence is extracted from your suffering mind. Where there is no love or warmth inside the composition. Where the characters feel wooden, and the dialogue is barely serviceable. Where the prose is repeating without a cadance to carry out its melody. One doubts everything here. You don’t know where the story is going to go. The scene itself is already forced.
RarityEQM didn’t really outline. Thought and dreamt and had an idea. It hurt to write from beat to beat, filling in the gaps between, not really creating, just following instructions. Try as she might, she couldn’t get unstuck. So she took a break. I still encouraged her to write and try. To return that love and praise. Maybe I went too far at times.
It could have been frustrating to be praised for work you no longer think yourself capable of.
Or forced to return to a craft your heart isn’t in.
RarityEQM got busy with life after a while. I needed her during tough times, but, as someone who worked a lot of overtime and rarely had any rest, she needed to tend to herself first. I didn’t get that right away. I assumed the worst, as I always did. This created a rift between us. Something that, thankfully, was patched near the end.
And it was at the end of 2020 that I fulfilled my promise to her. That, should I try to draw, I would show her a finished piece of Rarity. I did. She liked it, and we talked and how we would do so again. She’d been down a laptop for the longest time. Now she had one with a VR headset.
Which she used to make a garden with her own OCs and such. It seemed to help her into that fantasy world she’d tried to bring onto the page. Things seemed better for her. All that working had left her pocketbook less tight. The year break from writing had returned some of the creative juices.
RarityEQM wanted to come back strong. She had friends who were published writers that encouraged her to try for higher. I think that she would have. I think that, in the way she wrote, she would have found her own way in original fiction. That enough people would love her prose, characters, and stories that she could become a full-time writer.
That she would have entered a different kind of life.
Not that it was required. So long as she wrote every now and again, for whatever medium she chose, I would have been happy. Or even if she never wrote again but found something else to enjoy—I would have been happy. Hell. If she was still just alive—I would have been happy.
But on the day where I wrote a blog on how I don’t know how to properly mourn those important to me, Soul Sister passed away. The day had been like any other. She came home from work, played and read on her computer, then went to bed. She didn’t wake up the next day.
I always wonder if the same will happen to me. If my addiction to energy drinks will take me at the same age—or sooner. But with life as it is now… I mind that fact less and less. Soul Sister passed away on January 10th of 2021. And it left me devastated for nearly a year.
She made me into a better person before I became a hollow one. She was the one who listened to me during the dark times. She gave me what I was lacking and allowed me to feel full. I feel so selfish in speaking about all that she did and all that I took. But, alas, I am selfish.
Besides the myriad of lessons from her death, RarityEQM left me only one thing.
The unfinished manuscript of Land of Cotton.
It took me a long time to be ready enough to write that story.
She had struggled with where to take it. RarityEQM had given me enough rough ideas to offer a framework for the story. Extracted from blog posts, personal messages, and the text itself, it would be that Spike and Rainbow would end up in at least three sexy scenarios with three other girls. Each would be short, kinky, and written in delicious prose.
RarityEQM left me the middle of the story. This meant I had to create what came before and after and still have all three parts connect and make sense. Spike was already in Rainbow’s underwear by the start of the story with teases of how he’d been inside of here before. That meant that I would need to find an innocent way for him to wind up there.
I had decided, in pacing and plotting at work, that he would wake up shrunk before her home, chase Rainbow into the bathroom and, thinking she would look down to her clothes to see him—instead was picked up with the batch and worn. Next came Flitter. I devised what I could from the text that she would be the aggressor, the one on top of them all.
And the rest of the beats followed that logic.
At first, I had tried to write like RairtyEQM but, when the prose turned confusing and not at all seductive, I had to give that up. I tried before to write like her, and no matter the years that pass, I never will. I’ve been accused of not writing micro/macro well. Truthfully, I’ve been accused of just not writing well.
And I have to agree with both assessments.
But that didn’t matter. I had to write this story for the sake of writing this story. And I had to do every little thing in a way that felt right. RarityEQM chewed me before for trying to write like her. Be inspired, sure. But write like yourself. Write in a way that feels right. You can only follow your own direction.
So I decided to scrap what I had and try again. This time I wrote like myself and, when it came to the editing, chopped like how I never chopped before. I’m still not good at editing. Blame the lack of practice. But I did my best to write the story in such a way that the shift from my chapters to hers wouldn’t be too noticeable.
And that is the story told.
This story was written more so for the sake of finishing it. A fanfiction of a fanfiction. I would like to say it’s for the people who enjoyed that batch of micro/macro content from 2019… but I don’t think there are many of us still around. In truth. The letters of Soul Sister are faded in colour. As are many other things.
I do miss her. And even if we never spoke again—I wish that she was here. The world should be with people like her and without people like me. But that’s just how the dice roll. The way the game is played. Soon my time will be up. And I still have to decide how to live it.
I wanted to be like Soul Sister. To give others what they were lacking, to offer gifts that really helped people. But I was never that kind as a person, never that talented as a writer. It’s more chore than pleasure to read my work—or keep with me. I am a person fated to be a failure and then abandoned.
But this blog, as much as I’ve made it about myself, isn’t about me.
This is to show what happens to one after someone is gone. When the important elements of their life have vanished. RarityEQM left me something that didn’t feel right not to finish. The reception to the story is poor—but that’s what happens when you put it all over the place.
But that doesn’t matter.
This story was my way of saying farewell to an absent friend. I wish my words could spur more life into you. That I could talk about what you could have been, all the things that could have happened, how better life became once the worst of the virus went away. You never saw things improve. Just the starting hint of what’s to come.
The people who miss you… still miss you. There are people still reading your work and coming across you every now and again. I’m sorry your story stopped before its ending. That you didn’t have that chance at something better.
But none of that, in the end, matters.
Even if you were to become a success, that you finally became a full-time, original writer, or any of that stuff—it wouldn’t have mattered. You still would have been you. You would still be going around on random pages and giving love to those who needed it. Adding taste to the tongue with your colourful use of words.
For it was you who was most important of all.
It doesn’t matter if you never achieved all that normal stuff.
Because what you were was already special.
I’m sorry I didn’t turn out better.
I tried my best.
And all I can do is keep trying my best.
It won’t matter.
But I’ll keep trying anyway.
My last vow is to draw the cover for this story.
But until then.
This is my final farewell.
I love you, Soul Sister.
You are on my mind often.
~ Yr. Soul Sibling, B
Ever onward, one day at a time.
Good work.
😥
This and you are really sweet, just try and take care of yourself for her sake too
You are a good person, a good friend and a good writer, B. RarityEQM knew that, too. She always told me how much she liked you and admired your work. It’s nice you’ve honored her by completing her story. I’m looking forward to seeing the cover art. Take care and be good to your, B.
5674866
Thanks, Olden.
Please be well.
~ Yr. Pal, B
5674867
You as well, B
Also The Land of Denim exists.