i would‘ve 100% loved mdzs as a teen, but jc and wwx hit way harder for me with more life experience: the grief at the end of a relationship you thought would last forever, having to accept that you can’t go back to how it was before no matter how much you both still care...

the idea that you can love and miss someone so deeply and still be too hurt (and have hurt them too much) to ever fully reconcile is something i don’t think it’s possible to understand until it’s happened to you. like, it feels completely illogical, but it’s absolutely real.

not to mention the sadness of living a life that’s so different from how you expected it to be. the feeling of comparing yourself to the person you thought you’d be as an adult, the life you thought you’d have, and seeing all the ways your actual life doesn’t measure up.

the sense that you’re a letdown — not only to the people who had such great hopes for you, but your childhood self. that you’d be embarrassed, if you somehow were able to speak to them and they asked you whether you lived out all the plans they’d been so sure of.

figuring out how to carry that weight, without letting it crush you — that’s jiang cheng and wei wuxian’s story.

i love postcanon fix-it fics for wei wuxian and jiang cheng as much as anyone (probably even more). but it’s very important to me that their reconciliation doesn’t happen in canon because sometimes broken relationships stay broken—and their brokenness never stops weighing on you.

i didn’t know that as a teen. i don’t think i could have known that, could have internalized and understood the full implications of that, until i lived it. everything feels like it’s forever when you’re young and there’s always more time... but there isn’t.

anyway, these are your sad thoughts for the day!