Edge of Infinity

About

〚ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ: ᴄʜɪʟᴅʜᴏᴏᴅ ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ/ɴᴇɢʟᴇᴄᴛ, ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ, ᴇᴀᴛɪɴɢ ᴅɪsᴏʀᴅᴇʀs, ᴀɴᴅ ʀᴇғᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇs ᴛᴏ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ, sᴜʙsᴛᴀɴᴄᴇ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ〛

    Athena was the second child to her parents—unplanned and six years younger than her brother, she consistently came last in her parents’ priorities, who snubbed her when she couldn’t compare to Sethfire, their ‘Golden Child.’ Affluent, intelligent, narcissistic and very concerned by outside appearances, her parents valued not good grades, but excellent ones. They valued silence and studying over enthusiasm and activity; good colleges over good friends. Athena, an extrovert, struggling to cope with not only ADHD, but dyscalculia as well—who preferred soccer to social studies and questions to answers—well, she could never meet their expectations. Even as she excelled in sports and music, she could never compare to her academic older brother in her parents’ eyes.
    Over the years, Sethfire was more a caretaker to her than either her mother or father. He consistently challenged their pointed comparisons between Athena and himself, encouraged her and supported her, made his distaste at their unequal treatment so clear that any ill will Athena could have developed was prevented entirely. They were closer than most siblings, which made it all the more traumatic when Athena found Seth after his suicide attempt when she was just eleven. While her parents went ahead with paying for the extensive physical and psychological therapy recommended for her older brother, Athena was once again left behind. She endured middle school with some degree of PTSD; she couldn’t bear the sight of raw meat; felt sick and scared at the concept of blood. She struggled with nightmares and hypervigilance and anxiety...But she managed. And Sethfire promised her, with a pinky that it hurt for him to curl, that he wouldn’t attempt again. He went off to college—not the Ivy League that her parents wanted, but the perfectly pretentious NYU, which was as rebellious a choice as Sethfire could manage, and just far enough away for him to move out. Athena couldn’t blame him.

    In school, Athena—short-haired, queer, and sports-inclined—a bit of a tomboy and a total jock, got along fairly well with the other sporty kids at school...but fell victim to intermittent gay-bashing and bullying from some of her fellow students starting in mid/late middle school. The pressure from her parents was constant, and in 9th grade—after coming to his aid in an instance of bullying—she bonded with Kato over the struggle for parental approval and experience of homophobia alike. He was something of a pariah in high school, and her affiliation with him didn’t do her social favors. She held firm in her moral values to not be just another member of a clique, but it distanced her from her old crowd. 
    Her parents were unendingly on her case academically, and that pressure combined with social stressors at school and some unfortunate habits of her new best friend led to her slipping into anorexia over the course of 10th grade. It was less about physical appearance for her in the beginning than for most, maybe—it felt more like necessity or convenience at first: Lunch in the school cafeteria was a time-block of barbed jabs, snide comments, pointed laughter; it was easier to follow Kato to the school parking lot to smoke and shoot the shit rather than eat under judgmental eyes. Dinner at home was lectures, arguments, screaming matches with her parents over her grades or school performance, and she'd rather spend the evening hours drumming or teaching Kato to play the guitar. Skipping breakfast was just a way to get out of her house earlier in the day. Gradually, in the back of her mind, it occurred to her that maybe if she grew frail enough, her parents would care about her...Or at least treat her more gently. They didn’t, though, and starvation took its toll. When she finally fainted at school, weighing far too little, it was Kato who forced the phone into her hand and demanded she call Seth, tell her older brother what was going on. And it was Kato who went with her to Seth’s that afternoon and confronted her older brother in his own kitchen, demanded he keep closer watch over his little sister. And to Sethfire’s credit, he did: Athena moved in with him. He finished getting his BA in Psychology in traditional college, but he arranged for his pursuit of his MA in Counseling for Mental Health and Wellness to be mostly online, so he could be available to her, and persuaded their parents to allow him to be considered her legal guardian. Under her brother’s loving, gentle care, recovery was swift. It helped it hadn’t really been about appearance.

    When school started for 11th grade, Athena was the one who noticed Kato’s behavior: His anger, his jokes-that-weren’t-quite-jokes, the way he looked around and sneered and spoke. And when he kissed her out of the blue and told her to not come into school the next day, she spilled her fear to her older brother, trusting him to know what to do. Sethfire was able to talk Kato down and persuaded him to withdraw from school; he moved in with Athena and Sethfire, and she was overjoyed. After Kato dropped out, his presence was no longer a concern to Athena’s social status in school—but she’d become disillusioned with the cliquiness of the ‘jock’ crowd and didn’t list back toward them. Rather, she became something of a social ‘drifter’ and made a lot of friendly acquaintances across the board, though her closest associations were with more of the ‘outcast crowd.’ She formed a bond with Gabriel and Gracian; twins who were also musically-inclined and who’d experienced their fair share of bullying. They weren’t what one would call very close friends, but there was camaraderie there that all enjoyed. 
    Outside of school, Athena and Kato kept playing music together—and he started, in pieces and only for her, to test out singing some of the lyrics he’d been writing for years as fragmented poetry in his composition notebooks. December of 2011—the same year Kato moved in—it was Athena who spotted Anarchy, pale and sickly, in the recessed backdoor of a backstreet building, and felt something looked wrong and that this wasn’t just someone less fortunate sleeping on the streets. After they saved him from his overdose and took him in, Athena helped to encourage him in learning how to play bass, to sing and scream out his troubles as he recovered from his heroin addiction. A while after he started going to the gym to replace opioid frailty with raw muscle, she joined him—and they bonded over their shared love of physical exertion as well as music. The two of them and Kato all together eventually roped Sethfire into attempting to play an instrument, and when his hands couldn’t handle it, into some singing and songwriting. Athena graduated high school and decided college wasn’t for her just a month before they all released Edge of Infinity’s debut album, We Are Not Our Scars, to some degree of success, and much more of a response than they expected from self-producing. It wasn’t enough to live off of solely, and she eventually accepted a job at the gym as a personal trainer… But no matter the money, the relative success alone was something enough to double down on and work for.

    It was just over half a year after graduation and a little before before the release of Broken Glass Just Tastes Like Blood when Athena reconnected with Gabriel. He introduced her to his own group that he and Gracian had collected through their musical endeavors as Nightshrike, and Athena introduced them to the rest of EoI. Through playing together with other musicians, EoI was able to truly grow into itself; into its identity as a band. And Athena, who has believed in it all along, has gotten to watch it bloom: She’s proud of her band, her music, her friends. Athena, Kato, and Anarchy managed to move into a three-bedroom apartment of their own once Seth’s two-bedroom flat became increasingly cramped...though in late 2017, Athena left for a one-bedroom all to herself after hearing her brother’s self-destruction overhead and bearing witness to Kato’s constant personal apocalypses became too much. The distance has done her some good, along with the support she’s found in her girlfriend, Teagan, and her ever-growing circle of friends and fellow musicians.

    Athena is whole-heartedly dedicated to Edge of Infinity—both as a band and as its members. She loves being a drummer, a musician; she’s been able to watch the power of lyrics and microphones as they helped save Anarchy from his fight with addiction, helped save her from her own struggles with self-worth, helped save Aetos from his past after the band spotted him on the bridge that night in 2015. And still she worries that in the end music won’t save her brother, Seth, from his alcoholism. That for all the lyrics Kato throws himself into writing, music won’t manage to pull him from the vices he chases down. But Athena tries to be strong and fiery and optimistic as best she can anyway; tries to burn brighter and warmer. She stands alongside Chey and Aetos in trying to be light to guide those she loves. And eventually she’ll be able to stop worrying: Her brother will make it. Kato will recover. Her friends will thrive—just like her.

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*•.¸🎤 ᴀᴅᴅɪᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ɪɴғᴏ 🎤¸.•*

ȯ She has a pet spider named Beatrice and a pet ball python named Bread

ȯ She had an on-again-off-again girlfriend named Wendy in 2015

ȯ Part of her not relapsing due to stress in late 2017 and managing to pull herself together was due to the close bond she found with her friend Storm.

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