And my heartbeat
Is getting stronger
And I just wanna hold you
Take me far away from here
brisk & vagabond feat. DMO - away from here

PROLOGUE

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i got my first phone christmas of 2019. 10 years old. i was so excited for all of the cool stuff that i could do on it. after i installed all the apps i wanted but never could have, i was left a little bored. but, i remembered that for the past two years i had been searching for this song. this song i heard on a vine when i was 9. (or 8 idr man.) when i was younger, after my parents divorced, my only access to the internet was my grandparents ipads on the offchance that i would see them. i would watch vines, vines but with a warriorcats skin on them, and fnaf sfms. i explicitly remember being fascinated by the vine where birds run from a wave on the beach, and wanting to fine the song from it. i did a few variations of the simple search "birds running from wave vine song" and found it after a few tries. renard - you got curves, she got curves. exactly as i remembered! just not bass boosted/earrape.

fast forward three years to 2022, the new year was a few months fresh. i was finishing my recent interest in bandetto, and turned my eyes to kitcaliber because of DIGI-ORDER on ON TRAX vol. 3. i was 13. i started off with HALCYONDAZE simply because it looked interesting. Oh brother

thus, began my fascination with the alias. i watched the album stream many, many times. the beauty and the wonderful tunes that accompanied it dragged me deeper and deeper into the rabbithole. as a form of "denial fixation" (a term i coined, i'll make a rextionary soon...) i became interested in kit. i drew a lot of fanart of her, and i still like a decent amount of it still. that lasted for a month. it felt like my hyperfixation was coming to an end and i needed to round back to home base (renard,) but i kept on listening and watching the album stream. at this point i had listened to the other albums, but i loved halcyondaze the most in terms of visuals. i was grounded from the rest of my devices and only had access to my vr headset to spend time with my vrchat addicted (at the time) sibling.

may 8th, 2022. i was watching the stream. during noise gate, i finally accepted that i probably had a crush on him and tweeted about it. from my oculus

finidhing latre im at shcool andt ired

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH A CONCEPT

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while i'm not sure how to describe it in title terms, nor do i know how to write an introduction without cutting to the chase, i have some strong damn feelings. i've tried to replicate it with other characters, but to no avail. it comes randomly. the feelings that have lasted for years for caliber are an enigma, and they've never happened with other characters... except maybe zuko, because i feel the exact way about him that i do caliber. maybe it's because they're both so close to how i am? as if they are me, but in different forms. minus one thing, otherwise it's essentially the same. while i've had short little crushes on other characters before i laid eyes on caliber, none of them made me feel so strongly and attempt to recapture that feeling. the feeling of my chest and every limb hurting from the longing, the constant living in my head rent free, and everything reminding me of him.

it literally hurt to live. obviously, i knew he isn't real. it just really hurt that i couldn't talk to him, touch (not in that way brotha) him, and feel him close to me (Not In That Way Brotha we stay sfw in this house but i won't deny that i've had 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 thoughts.) i wanted to feel his presence and i didn't have the privilege of him being real. most of it was romantic. which was odd. aren't i an aromantic? why am i feeling romantic emotions? i guess i only feel them towards fictional characters. we'll get into how i dropped the aspec labels after accepting that i'm a ficto in 2024 at a different time.