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Expectations.
They expect you to do well.
They expect you to succeed.
They expect your life to be good.
They expect you to try hard; to push yourself.
They expect you to be the best you could be.
They expect nothing less than your happiness.
That’s everyone’s expectations.
...
For you, however, they’re different .
You’re expected to fall in love with him. You’re expected to continue living life vicariously through digital characters and be entertaining at the same time. You’re expected to show up with something new in less than a month. They expect gossip and accidental innuendos that you know aren’t accidental at all. They expect new merchandise, and they expect new content. They expect topics. They expect relatable topics.
You’re expected to fall in love with him. You’re expected to be happy, when your topics are hinting your sadness. They expect your channel to be entertaining - entertaining your audience with your antidotes of failure. They expect you to have an existential crisis - an existential crisis no one takes seriously - and tweet about it.
You’re expected to fall in love with him. You’re expected to act fluffy, and use big words that seem too big for your mouth. They expect that you keep failing, but somehow make it funny in a way everyone can laugh at you. They expect that they can laugh at and with you. They expect you not to care. If you do care, they don’t care; they’ll make it into fanfiction.
You’re expected to fall in love with him. You’re expected to continue throwing the sarcastic jokes, and you are expected to clear society’s cruel acts, when society is just throwing you under the bus. They expect you to live with the fact that you’re terribly unfit, and they expect you to understand when they make fun of you; they expect you don’t care either. They expect you to understand the terrible remarks - “You’re hair is ugly, and so are you.” “You are not funny at all - go die.” “Ha ha ha, your life sucks, huh?” “Gaylord. Posh gaylord who is also fat.” “No one will miss you, selfish bastard” - because they expect that you know that is the kind of audience you have. They expect that you know it’s all sarcastic jokes; they expect you to think it’s all fake.
You’re expected to fall in love with him. The words are expected to ground harder in your brain. You’re expected to love him in so many ways, and everyone expects that it’s anything but platonic. They expect you to be in his every video, and for him to be in yours, because you’re expected to fall in love with him. They respect you that way. They respect you as a whole, not two entities.
They expect you to fall in love. To choose him over anything and everything else.
You’re expected to fall in love with him . Your expectations are nearly as bad as theirs. It’s like their expectations were just the crumbles of dirt beneath the grass, and your expectations is a whole different world; buried beneath the layers of the earth.
You’re expected to fall in love with who? It’s too hard now. Your expectations. Their expectations. They are two different things, but there’s so many of them. So many of them, that they start to blur together until you can only see one expectation in general.
Fall in love with him.
You’re tired of falling in love with him. You’re tired of expectations pinning you to the ground, and keeping you there for a long time. You’re tired of questioning life and your own existence at the entertainment of others. You’re tired of holding the white capsules in your hands as if your life depended on it.
Your expectations are worse. You said it before, and you’ll say it again. Your expectations are worse, and they can become so much more worse.
Your expectations go as followed: you expect that you meet your expectations. To go above and beyond. To be perfect. No, you aren’t the ray of sunshine (though you can imagine how hard that expectation must be for him.), but you are expected to be the realistic one.
And, at this rate, you can’t tell what reality people want you to live by.
Your expectations are getting worse. You expect of yourself nothing less than what they expect of you. You expect that you’ll fail, and they’ll laugh at you because of it. You expect you hide the face behind the mask you wear in every goddamn video.
YOU CAN’T FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM IF HE DOESN’T LOVE YOU.
They expect you and him to be soulmates; they expect you to love each other. But you expect that no one can love a soulless entity; someone that’s literally crumbling in the hands of society.
They demand your success, and you find that their expectations are now your job.
Your life is now revolving around these expectations, and you expect to find a bottle of beer from New Year’s in your fridge. You expect that he won’t be home, and that he’d be in America, living the Florida dream
You expect that he’ll cry, but then you expect he’ll never forgive you. You expect you’ll be hated when you’re gone; they’ll think your only solution to anything is running away.
They expect that running is the last thing you’ll ever do - physically and mentally.
You expect it’ll be all over when you put the white pills in your mouth, and take the last swig of alcohol; you’re ending it now. You expect he will find you on the couch with an ironic smile to hide the fact the expectations will disappear in a second.
You expect that it’s normal that the world’s spinning. You expect that you’ll stumble to grab the piece of paper and that you’ll fumble when you write the word in messy scrawls - stupid left handedism.
eXpecTatiOns.
…
Dammit, you thought it was over. You didn’t expect blue eyes, dammit.
They expect you to be quiet - this is a hospital after all. They expect you to make a choice. Asylum? You’re crazy. But that is a crazy idea. Therapy? You don’t want to, but they expect you to.
Or do you just want to try again?
He’s by your side. He tells you that they don’t know anything, but they expect that when you tweeted ‘just a bit sick’ that you were just a bit sick.
You are expected to go back to your own life. To live a robot-structured life of doing the same thing over and over again, and that the expectations in your head will continue to punch through your skull until it breaks it completely.
But there’s one thing stopping you: him.
He tells you that he expects nothing from you, and you think you’ll need to hear it from him again.
He tells you that he expects nothing from you.
You waited for the ‘except’ part. The part where he says he expects nothing from you except to get better. To be happier. To be himself.
You expect that he’ll say something, and add to the snowstorm of expectations.
…
But Phil Lester himself was something Dan Howell didn’t expect at all.
…
“I never expected this.” is the main part of your vows.
It’s been years. You’ve only kept one expectation that held against you, and you kind of hoped it was the one you would never keep.
Times change.
You hold his hands and say two words. He tightens his grasp and says the same. The man draped in black tell you to go ahead, and he smiles at you.
People would expect the veil to go up, but this isn’t a normal wedding.
No veil is brushed aside, but, instead, a jet black fringe.
You expect the Phandom will go mad.
You expect nothing less.
But you know you can’t escape expectations; you just need someone to help you expect the unexpected.
"Thank you, Phil Lester. Thank you for being unexpectable.”