I remember damage. And escape. Then adrift for a long time in a stranger's galaxy. But I'm safe now. I found it again. My home.
30s/Bi/Lover of Cheese/Hater of Fascists
It’s waiting to meet me at the elevator like an old friend. It holds the door for me and lets me go in first.
His death is difficult to look at. It’s trying too hard. Trying too hard to distract us from the fact that it’s grotesquely early. That it’s impossibly unfair. Uninvited. Unwanted.
It’s at odds with his life. His life is still there when I arrive, though it’s not trying quite as hard. But it never had to try hard--it seems odd to expect that it will now.
To me, his death looks like him--but not like him. Not like the him in the hospital bed, but like the him I met when I was nineteen. The him I fell in love with. The him I’m still a little in love with, if I’m ever honest with myself.
I sit, and I talk to the him in front of me, the him I’m trying my hardest to hold onto and let go of in the same twisted and tangled breath. He tells me about his son. He’s only eight months old. We construct an elaborate plan for the baby’s life--the places he’ll go. The things he’ll do.
It’s just after we’ve decided that, after he wins an Academy Award, his little man will make an excellent astronaut someday, that he goes quiet, and I have to fight the urge to fill even the smallest silence.
But finally, I can’t take it, and I ask, “What?” Because he’s looking at me in a way that makes me want to ask him to stop and beg him not to at the same time.
“You really loved me, didn’t you?”
When he asks, the words echo from the corner. The shadow wearing his face moves his lips at the same time, making me wonder if it’s my friend that’s asking or his death.
Either way--both are waiting for an answer.
“Yes,” I say softly. “Very much.”
He nods as though I’ve just confirmed something he’s been turning over in his mind for too long.
“And I...” he stops and looks down. “I really hurt you.” There is no question this time.
“Yes,” I say again. “You did.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to...I never wanted to hurt you.”
The apology is twenty years too late, but it manages to land just the same. It slips beneath my skin and gently takes the hand of the broken girl who still lives at the back of my heart. It kisses her forehead and lets her tears fall where they may.
My tears stay firmly stuck in my eyes as I force myself to nod. “I know.”
He looks up again, and all I want is for time to stop. Just one minute, I think. I just need one minute. So I can remember the exact curve of his lips and the slope of his nose and remember every fleck of blue and gold in his green eyes.
But time does not stop, and in the corner, his death shakes his head with a look that tells me I should know better than to ask.
“I never understood why you ever talked to me again,” he says after another long silence has swayed gently between us.
“I’m a glutton for punishment,” I say with a vain hope to make him laugh. The best I get is a smile that lifts just one corner of his mouth. “And maybe because...I don’t know. Because love is like matter. At least to me.” He looks up again as I roll my shoulder in a shrug. “It can’t be created or destroyed, it just...changes shape and form.”
He nods again. “What shape will it take next, I wonder,” he muses quietly. Even though we both know it only has one more shape to take.
It will take the shape of the hole his death is about to carve inside of me.
He reaches across to take my hand, curling his fingers around mine like I’m the one who’s breakable. Like I’m the thing that is precious. “I’ll miss you.”
I shake my head and wonder how it’s possible that I’m still breathing with my lungs filled with broken glass. “You don’t know that.”
“No,” he says firmly and squeezes my hand just once so I’ll look up at him. “I will. I always miss you when you’re not around.”
And then the room is too small, and the air is too thin, and my heart is too broken, and all I want is to scream at that thing in the corner that it can have someone else instead. Even someone else I love, if it must. Surely there are other people it can look like? Other people it can take and be satisfied with?
Not this one. The words form as a whisper on the tip of my tongue. Please, just let me keep this one a little longer.
But I know I can’t ask for that. I know that at this point, his death will be a mercy when it finally pulls him from this fragile and failing body. So I don’t ask to keep him. I don’t ask for him to stay. Instead, I say, “Did you watch Station Eleven?”
The question surprises him, but he nods with a little furrow in his brow. “Couple times,” he says. His voice is hoarse, and for a moment, he sounds like he did when he was twenty-two. When we’d get high together and stay up too late in the basement of that house a block off campus. Or when he’d wake up before me and press his lips to the shell of my ear, telling me dumb jokes just to tickle me with the buzzing vibration from the sound. “Why?”
I swallow. “There’s a line that’s been haunting me ever since I heard it. Like it’s been floating around waiting for the right place and time where it might just fit perfectly.”
His lips twitch again. “What is it?”
“I’ve found you nine times before. Maybe ten. I find you, because I know you. And--”
“And I know you, because we’re the same,” he finishes quietly, saving me just before my voice can catch.
My throat is aching in the way it only does when it’s fighting a sob as I nod. “Yeah,” I say, letting him squeeze my hand again. “Don’t miss me,” I say finally. “Just...find me again.”
His thumb brushes the tops of his knuckles. “I will,” he agrees. “I’ll find you.”
In the corner, for just a moment, I could swear that the green eyes of his death looked glassy. But then Death blinks and kindly looks away.
And I tell myself it must have been a trick of the light.
Interviews with hockey players are fantastic, because it is a complex game that can be spoken about at length, but during the intermission they'll find the Wettest player imaginable on the losing team and for thirty seconds they'll ask them things like "what do you need to do to get more pucks in the net?" And the player (panting, haunted behind the eyes) says something like "well, we've got to get them in there"
Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.
(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)
Are you safe?
Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.
I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.
I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.
A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.
The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.
I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.
…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.
Voting ended onJul 14
(I've run this poll twice before, expanding it significantly for the second run. With about a year passed since that second run, I thought it was time to add another couple hundred names to the list and have another go.)
sam wilson is incredibly well adjusted which is why its so easy to ignore that he's crazy. sam wilson goes on a morning run and eats a balanced breakfast and goes to therapy. he also only talked to steve like twice before agreeing to kidnapping a government agent with the help of stolen flight technology.
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.
using "what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament" to mean "yeah i made an embarrassing reference but you understood it which is also embarrassing" is very funny to me
my favorite part is that absolutely nobody says this except here. so if you use it in public, it's a dead giveaway that you spent the last ten years on tumblr. but then again, they recognized it, which means they were at the devil's sacrament
I tested this theory in the wild the other day at work. I was on a call with my department lead and a few other folks and I replied to an email the DL had sent me, thinking that, because he was on this call, he wouldn't notice when I sent it and would not catch me multitasking.
However, he replied to said email within five minutes, asking a question that required an answer. So I answered and was like "Also, I was going to apologize for answering emails during this call, but I see we're both here at the Devil's Sacrament, so I don't think an apology is necessary."
I watched him read that on screen and try not to laugh. And then at the end of the call as everyone started saying goodbye, he goes, "Hey, MJ, I meant to tell you. I like your shoelaces."
And I looked straight into my camera, stone cold serious, and said, "Thanks. I stole them from the president."
And the rest of the team was like, "What...the fuck...?" before he abruptly ended the call for everyone.
So now my DL and I know this about each other. He could be any one of us.
The long-lost remains of King Alfred the Great have been found buried under a car park, investigators claim.
Alfred died in 899, and his bones were repeatedly moved. He was buried in Winchester Cathedral until 1110, when his remains were moved to Winchester's Hyde Abbey, where they were interred before the high altar between the bodies of his wife and son.
The abbey was demolished after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, and the place was left in ruins.
In 1866, during construction of a workhouse on the site, the English antiquarian John Mellor excavated the area, found what he thought were Alfred's bones and had them reburied at nearby St. Bartholemew’s Church.
But in 2013, when archaeologists exhumed and carbon-dated the bones from St. Bartholomew’s churchyard, they proved to date from over 200 years after Alfred’s death - sparking Graham's interest and search.
He said: "Whoever’s bones they were, they weren’t Alfred’s. So, I decided to discover what happened to them.
"The quest has taken me 13 years.”
snowghoul
origamiaround
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
areudirty
titsay
