❄️ Celine 🐦‍⬛

ouu got him stressing out

the thing that gets me most is how easily it gets framed as a triumph. genius kid, early admission, excels. and yes, that's true. but capable and fine are not the same thing, and i don't think anyone around him ever really stopped to separate them. because think about what that life actually looks like. laundry, groceries, budgeting, getting sick alone, administrative forms, figuring out a new city - adults struggle with this stuff. he's doing all of it at 14, thousands of kilometers from his family, with no one physically there to ask. and because he's smart he figures it out every time. but there's always a gap between not knowing and figuring out, and he's living in that gap completely alone and then there's the social part, which i think is the loneliest piece of all. his classmates aren't mean. they're all kind. but there's a ceiling to how close they can actually get - they're years ahead of him in a completely different stage of life. and kids his actual age are back home in high school, worlds away. he doesn't fully belong on either side. he just exists somewhere in between. so he does what he knows how to do. he handles it. and handling it becomes his whole personality. and at some point he stops knowing how to not handle it and THAT is why mc matters to him so much when she notices he hasn't eaten. when she gets angry at him for pushing through a fever. when she refuses to let him brush it off with "i'm fine" - it's not just being caring for him,she's doing something that probably hasn't happened to him since he was a child. someone is putting him first. he spent years learning to take up as little space as possible. to ask for nothing. to need nothing. and she just doesn't let him do that. and i think part of him doesn't know what to do with it. and i think another part of him has been waiting for it for a very long time