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January 6 - January 15, 2021
hate salt water. Doesn’t mean I pick fights with the tide.
When everything around you is artificial, you have to lean a little harder on the real people.
She wanted to live forever, maybe, Nat says. With people fighting over her heart. Buying it and selling it and killing for it.
Here’s the reality, girl, girlfriend, goddess, goddamn goner: You’re gonna have to get out of hell all by yourself.
You’ll think that marrying Zeus will fix your problems, but shocker, spoiler alert, hello woe, it won’t.
This will be your punishment. You’ll remain uncomfortably human.
This is the fourth myth, unwritten in the larger canon, but it goes like this: You will be the woman who finally walks back into the place everyone else calls hell, and you’ll stay there.
You will not, in the end, be broken by this history of hell, these hurts, these old boyfriends and husbands and rapists and forget-me-nots.
How many times will you survive, a woman made of her own history, and more than it? How many times can you put your heart back together?
You are still trying to learn how to give it up in the entirety, and you’re doing it with the rest of everyone, because hello heart, hello hope, this is how motherfucking goddesses of love get made.
I was made to be given away to a woman with the wisdom of the bees.
I am a mistress of the bees now, and I can never turn back.
All three of them had their own brand of terrifying dreams, but they’d gotten better at soothing each other through the worst.
Sometimes you have to be more vulnerable in the short term, so that you can become more formidable later.
“I’m the first human to come down here with my eyes open, knowing what awaits,” Alyssa said, loud enough to echo through the tunnel.
“I would very much like not to feel any of what I’m feeling,”
maybe learn to become more than just a raw mass of anxiety with nothing to say.
I’d rather … I’d rather die than be a part of another injustice.”
People died, even nations flamed out, but you need somebody left behind to carry the important stuff forward.
because words had a different kind of precision, and there were truths that could only be shared in word-form.
I am not dead. And this is a problem.
It’s who we are, it’s what we do. And love, we go out to find all the love we can and try to keep it…”
She was figuring she’d start by unloading the books she’d enjoyed but knew she’d never read again—she’d moved them up with her, but she didn’t have enough space and anyway, they were mostly just gathering dust. Passed along to someone else, they could be read and enjoyed and used.
For a long time, the navigator thought only of their search for a space in which to hide, between the maps of the world.
“Why a new map of the same place each day?” “Because it is a different day,” the artist replied.
“For maps fade and alter with time. Sleep. When we wake, this place will be different still.”
They drew lines between the places where they’d broken, or had been broken, they showed these to anyone who came close. See: this is a map of my mistakes.
You laughed and forgot, and teased and remembered, and you grew so big you defined the entire world.
The slap of a fist against flesh isn’t the stuff of ’80s movies, and the recovery certainly isn’t from any film with a knock-down, drag-out fight.
But it was like puking because the spins won’t end; once I stuck my fingers in my throat, there was no holding back the deluge of years in silence.
Everyone has a different creature inside of them that appears at an uncomfortable or unwelcome touch. The creatures are only ever insects, arachnids, or—I looked this word up myself when I was eight—myriapods: centipedes and millipedes.
Delilah remains near me while giving me space, all the while not chastising me for my indiscretion. They only ever smile, the curve of it so gentle on their face.
“Do you have that big a problem with AIs being treated as people?”
I do not wish to speak with the voice they have given me, Proteus Three said. I have no more shape than water.
Are any of us both who were then and now?”
The day that changed my life was a Wednesday. Admittedly, most days here are Wednesday, but still, I noted it.
Don’t mistake me: I’m not a misandrist. I dislike most people, men and women both. I maybe just dislike men a touch more.
In essence, she chose madness over death.
A bit of madness makes the things that one must do seem sane sometimes.
No, there is no dilemma. I love Alice, cherish her in a way that a fish loves water or an oyster hides a pearl or any number of explanations. The point is that she is both essential and my treasure.
Ours is a mad, mad world, and I am grateful to serve my queen.
How could I have been so fucking stupid as to think I owned my voice?
I kiss Jasper because I am not wholesome. I’m a fucking weirdo. A queer—that’s the word everyone’s terrified to use. It doesn’t matter if I was born a girl, as long as I blend in, now. I’m a man, now.
The moment when we were our full selves, gone. Our voices at stake.
But we will continue to use our voices to support one another. As long as someone is listening. As long as we have each other. We’re here, we’re here.
Something about a boy buried alive in a hillside—“planted,” in his words—who took over the entire hillside, like a weed, and spread for miles around.
and she’d auditioned for the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament but been cut when she accidentally said “fuck” to Alex Trebek.
Just a kid who got lost and when she found her way home she realized she’d arrived back without her body, and her parents didn’t even notice the difference.
They generally operated on a complaint system. Maybe that was where she’d gotten the habit of lies and exaggeration: She’d realized early that only extremes elicited a response.
Little by little, she replaced herself with parts of other people she liked better. Parts of stories she wanted to live. Nobody lied like this girl. She believed her own stories so completely, she forgot which ones were true and which were false.
