By FDASuarez
@mel-lion
AnasAbdin
sheepfilms

roma★
tumblr dot com
One Nice Bug Per Day
todays bird

#extradirty
Claire Keane

PR's Tumblrdome

Kiana Khansmith
occasionally subtle
trying on a metaphor

izzy's playlists!
Three Goblin Art

No title available
Misplaced Lens Cap
Game of Thrones Daily
No title available

@theartofmadeline
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Bosnia & Herzegovina
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Sweden

seen from Canada
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@kingfisher95
By FDASuarez
@mel-lion
Quiet Wheels Get Grease Too
A few days ago I saw a new client with a very old Puggle that had quite a few health problems. The main concern was that the Puggle had begun coughing and it was getting worse. After a thorough examination I had a found several concerns in addition to the cough but I agreed with the man that out of all of them, the cough was the most important issue currently. He said he was interested in addressing everything but asked if I could please get him an estimate and rank things in order of importance.
We went over the estimate together and he told me he could afford about $300 and asked that I do only the most important things that would benefit his dog the most. I chose radiographs and discovered that the dog had quite a large heart and there was fluid in the lungs due to heart failure. The owner very politely listened to my explanation and asked about my recommendations. I explained that the best option would be having an echocardiogram done to assess the heart. Due to money concerns the owner elected to try medication first. The entire appointment was so smooth and the experience so pleasant that I actually made a point to ensure I wrote him a thank you card for making my job enjoyable.
The next day I called the owner to check on the dog and he said the medication seemed to have helped. He then explained to me that he had recently lost his job because both of his parents were critically ill and he had moved to be close to them, due to the amount of time he needed to spend with his parents he missed lots of work and was let go. The dog wasn’t his but his parents and he was trying to juggle taking care of them and their dog.
What struck me was that this man had never said a word about all of this during the appointment. There was no anger or outrage of the cost of things, he didn’t complain that I was heartless for charging money, he never asked that I discount anything, he didn’t make excuses for the health of the dog, nothing. He was professional and courteous the entire time. I told him how surprising this all was and expressed my sympathy for his situation and he said “It isn’t your fault I lost my job and you are just doing yours”. We got off the phone and I refunded the money for the exam fee, just to try and help him out.
There’s a lesson in here somewhere.
Personal, but if people want to give advice I’d be so grateful
I can’t do this any more. I can’t disconnect, I can’t unwind. My life has become this awful void.
I’m in that awful post-exam phase where I can’t remember what I used to do before I spent 24/7 either studying or complaining about studying. And it’s made me very reflective, and now I’m in a pit I can’t seem to crawl out of.
I love my degree, I love my time seeing practice. I love my flatmates and my friends and my family.
But I have no life outside of my degree.
In school I had several hobbies, but primarily my music. I was part of 4 bands playing different styles, attended camps, played concerts every term in numerous venues. My friends were musical, and I have never been able to rediscover that incredible feeling, like your heart rising in your chest till you think it might burst as the music swells around you, knowing your contributing a small but vital part to that harmony. I loved it. It kept me sane in school.
I am not a good enough player to continue my music in university.
I found a new hobby, my university sports team. I threw myself at it with all my passion and all my heart. I fell head over heels for it, and in the space of two years I became vice captain, was awarded colours and twice won the captain’s player award.
Slowly, slowly, I am coming to the realisation that I no longer love this team the way I used to. The scales are falling from my eyes, and I see that many of people I train with are manipulative and selfish. And more, while everyone else has progressed beyond all measure, I am stuck being only slightly better than when I started a few years ago and I hate myself for it. But without it, what do I do? I no longer write, I’ve come to despise my style and fear recrimination for it’s quality. And I’ve spent so long scared to write that I’ve lost much of the old style I used to prize. I cannot play, for no band would take me. I will not continue my sport as it is expensive only to come home loathing myself each session. I do not read like I used to as I lack the self discipline to set things aside and work when required. I have nothing else.
I have become bitter and twisted up inside. I just permanently feel like I’m drowning in self pity and I can’t seem to break free.
let’s stop seeing sex as the biggest thing you can do to show someone you love them
everyone knows that the real way to show someone you love them is to find them a really cool rock. not a diamond. just a neat rock that you think they will enjoy
Not a rock THE ARKENSTONE
Why just one rock Why not three Why not the silmarils
#i’m pretty sure there’s an entire book on the topic ‘why not silmarils’ (x)
And one on why not the arkenstone
You’re right. Just get them a ring.
do not get them a ring
Can’t not reblog this again
Geeky Merch Giveaway: 16 prize bundles, 3 winners!
It’s that time of year again, and in true Geeky Merch style we’re celebrating the festive season with a huge giveaway. 14 sellers have come together with us to offer some amazing prize bundles, and we’re so excited to spread the festive cheer again this year with even more geeky freebies.
By following us and reblogging this post before 30th December 2017, 3 lucky winners will have the opportunity to choose themselves 4 prize bundles each. The giveaway is open internationally and winners will be chosen at random.
Please click here for full giveaway T&Cs❗️
Prize bundles available:
3 subscriptions to Loot Crate - one for each winner! (12 month, 6 month and 3 month subscriptions available)
Winner’s choice of t-shirt from Yellow Dog Tees.
An Orion Constellation necklace and a Solar Eclipse necklace from Boutique Academia.
Console heart metal sign from Metallic Graphic.
Legend of Zelda keyrings and wall mount from Chocobo Square.
Your choice of three pins and/or patches from Band of Weirdos.
Steven Universe bracelet from Plot Bunnies.
Goats ‘n’ Scapes role-playing scenario from Espionage Party.
Bundle of 6 mashup prints from Burning Elegance.
Stranger Things poster and buttons set from Bruce Loves You.
Winner’s choice of Overwatch necklace from The Evergreen Burrow.
The Fault in Our Stars necklace from Partial to Jam.
Winner’s choice of t-shirt or tank top (sizes up to 5x) from NerdyKeppie.
Winner’s choice of digital or physical card from punCraft.
Just follow us and reblog this post to enter!
Don’t forget to check out and support these awesome sellers by clicking through to their shops, and keep them in mind while shopping for gifts too! If you buy an item and then win the giveaway you can always choose other prizes. 😉
Good luck!
A Little Apology And Then Some
So last year I dropped off of the face of tumblr, basically because uni was absolutely kicking my ass. But sadly that meant I left many things unfinished. One of these was a fic exchange which I got far far too dedicated to and kept saying to myself I would finish. I never did. @avatarquake I am so so so sorry. My prompt was - Daisy/Coulson, their vehicles and car races [fanfic, graphic, fanart]. Here below, for you and every Skoulson and Formula 1 fan, the first 2000 words of my fic which I do hope to keep working on. It’s very close to my heart, but I haven’t even got to the shipping aspect.
I also do not think I will return to tumblr for several more months, probably not until well into 2018.
It’s Geeky Merch’s 6th Birthday, and to celebrate we’re bringing you another massive giveaway! Some of the best geeky creators on the internet have come together with us to give you the chance to win some amazing prizes. By following us and reblogging this post before 20th August 2017, 4 lucky winners will have the opportunity to choose themselves 4 prize bundles each.
Prize bundles available
3 month subscription to Loot Crate. (Want to sign up? Voucher code ‘geekymerch’ gives you 10% off!)
Your choice of 3 pins and/or patches from Band of Weirdos
Euler’s Formula nail wraps from Espionage Cosmetics
Solar spectrum necklace from Boutique Academia
Harry Potter inspired Dementor’s Kiss candle from Nerdie Nifties
Wine chemistry stemless glass from Cognitive Surplus
Your choice of bronze skull pendant with a chain and display base from Fire & Bone
“Books! The best weapons in the world!” print from The Art of Flying
Pokémon coasters and keyrings with wall mount from Chocobo Square
Triforce Necklace, 8bit Heart Earrings and Triforce Bracelet from Koala Art & Design
A crocheted Pokéball, small Pokéball keychain and your choice of a chibi crocheted plushie of one of the 4 original starter Pokémon from Mostly Harmless Designs
Your choice of 4 sample teas from Nerdfelt
Star Wars inspired AT-AT Walker metal sign from Metallic Graphic
Riverdale inspired Jughead t-shirt from Bruce Loves You
Harry Potter inspired silver wand makeup brush gift set from Cookie Dough Deco
Princess Zelda’s necklace from Lightning and Lace
Game of Thrones mug and teabag tidy from Gallons of Ink
Wonder Woman inspired t-shirt from Jordandené
Stranger Things enamel pin set from Punky Pins
Your choice of 3 nail polishes from Incidental Twin
Just follow us and reblog this post to enter!
(And click here for further information and T&Cs) Don’t forget to check out and support these awesome sellers by clicking through to their shops. If you buy an item and then win the giveaway you can always choose other prizes, so treat yo’ self 😉 Good luck!
This giveaway ends tomorrow at 18:00 BST, so there’s just one day left to get your reblogs in! Good luck 😊
Briefly back on tumblr to take strength and heart from all the people spitting with righteous fury rather than just feel stung by it. And to say, I am so scared of my city, and I am so scared for my friends. But I am not “reeling”. I have spent the night checking everyone I know is safe (and that includes you, London mutuals) and now I am both frightened and furious, in the same way that when my friends are aggressively approached on a night out I am frightened and furious. It never stops me, I am a fighter, I am a warrior. I don’t back down from fear, you have achieved nothing tonight. London will go on, this wonderful, ugly city, and all her people will go on. And just you dare to face me, you terrorist bastards, you’ll see just what you’ve burned in every British heart. Hatred, vengeance, unity of purpose. You will never win.
Case Study #3
Alright vetlings, put your thinking hats on for Dr Ferox’s case study #3.
Patient was a senior, small breed dog with no significant medical history, treated in recent years for little more than a touch of arthritis and seasonal allergies. Lately her owner thought her current arthritis treatment regime wasn’t quite doing enough, so she came in for a health check.
She was a little quieter than usual, with a slightly stiff gait but no localizing lameness. Physical exam was unremarkable. A blood screen was taken before starting on long term NSAIDS.
Biochemistry and thyroid hormone was normal, but hematology looked like this:
So, tell me vet students:
WTF you think is going on
How worried should we be?
Ok so she has a regenerative anaemia of some sort. MCH is high but I assume this is artifact as it shouldn’t be possible and regardless MCHC is normal. SO a macrocytic normochromic anaemia = regenerative.
White cells are through the roof, neutrophilia (inflammation), lymphocytosis (infection) and monocytosis (macrophages). I’m thinking maybe some kind of infectious haemolytic anaemia? But the dog seems not systemically unwell... I’m really not sure how worried to be. Unless she has an autoimmune anaemia, but I don’t see why that would come out of nowhere, other than the fact that the dog has seasonal allergies so at least shows some immune weirdness.
I am utterly, utterly exhausted with family so I’ve gone to bed to read some christmas cousy fics.
i can’t wait to stay up until midnight on new years eve so i can watch 2016 die
I planned for this fic to be fast paced so that I could get it done and focus on these bloody vet essays but I’m 2000 words in and I just love world-building too much. The main characters don’t even know each other exists yet what have I doNE.
picking RPG clothes based on maxing stats instead of whether they match or not
My god, I really really need to get this fic written but it has now gone through so many iterations I’m struggling to get it to flow right. Why do I do this to myself.
Pardon the barrage of questions, but I have an OC who's studying to become a vet, and I'm prettyf pumped that this blog exists. Anyway, on to business: I know that vets run the risk of getting bitten by their patients while at work, but how often does that actually happen in practice? Have you (or maybe a colleage) ever been bitten badly enough that you required medical attention? Do most offices have a policy in place in case that happens?
Most clinics have a general policy that goes a bit like this:
Make sure nobody else can be injured
Secure the animal
Seek immediate medical attention
Fill out insurance forms later
Meanwhile, someone else deals with the animal. Depending on circumstance may refuse to see it conscious ever again.
I haven’t been bitten, but I have had lacerations from nails and second degree friction burns on both hands thanks to a horse, which is the reason I don’t see horses anymore. A colleague got trampled by a cow and concussed. Sometimes we die.
I’ve been ‘nipped’ by dogs on two occasions, not the patient’s fault in either case, and no blood drawn. For one dog I was examining their teeth, the dog sneezed, and smacked my hand with its canine teeth. For the other, it was being anesthetized and was a little too awake when I tried to place the endotracheal tube, and the jaw twitched strongly.
My boss and a nurse was badly bitten last year. A canine patient was waking up from anaesthesia, and still had an endotracheal tube in because it was brachycephalic and we needed to keep it alive. It woke up far too quickly, promptly went through an excitement phase and chomped down on the nurse’s hand as she removed the ET tube.
Boss came in to help nurse, dog is still freaking out and chomped down on his hand when he pried its jaws open. Boss then proceeds to sort of bear hug dog while it’s clamped on until it’s fully conscious and lets go.
(Dog apparently has no memory of this and since comes into the clinic sweet as pie)
Boss then stupidly scrubs into an orthopedic surgery he was scheduled to do (wouldn’t listen to me! Justified it by double gloving over the bandages and everything inside the glove was sterile anyway) and complains that the puncture wounds in his palm make it harder to do the surgery.
He sent the nurse straight to hospital, but fully intended to complete his working day before going. We rescheduled all his evening appointments and kicked him out straight after surgery anyway, but he intended to make a martyr of himself.
Now if you have an OC who’s studying to be a vet, I bet you’ll be thrilled to know there’s a whole vetblr tag on tumblr, filled with vet students. Despite the holiday season, many of them are probably still studying. You could consider following them to know what their lives are like in vet school.
Any student vetblr’s feel like raising their hand and making themselves known?
*raises hand* UK vet student. Also re the ask, we learn the best way to restrain different species to foremost protect the client (so your nurse or your student restrains the animal) and then yourself and your nurses. Most systems I’ve seen also incorporate a warning system so that if you have an animal client which is known to be fear aggressive or is just a horrible bugger in general, a bite warning will flash up when you pull up their file. This means you can be on your guard and will be more likely to muzzle or restrain the animal more severely, even to the point of sedation, instead of giving it the benefit of the doubt when it starts giving you aggression or fear signals,
I was so tall.
You were older then.
Can we talk about Susan Pevensie for a moment?
Let’s talk about how, when the war ends, when the Pevensie children go back to London, Susan sees a young woman standing at the train platform, weeping, waving.
First, Susan thinks civilian; and second, she thinks not much older than me.
Third, Susan thinks Mother.
They surge off the train, into their parents’ arms, laughing, embracing. Around them, the train platform is full of reunions (in her life, trains will give so much to Susan, and take so much away).
Over her mother’s shoulders, Susan sees Peter step solemnly back from his father so that Edmund can swoop in to get his hair paternally ruffled. She meets Peter’s eyes across the space, the way they saw each other over battlefields and tents full of the wounded, in negotiations and formal envoys.
She has always seen Peter when others only saw the king, only duty embodied in a young man’s slight, noble features. Susan can see him now, the way he looks at their father. Once, parents had meant protection, authority, solidity. But Peter’s shoulders are slender, are steady, will be weighed down every moment of the rest of his life. She can see it in him, the unreasonable hopes he had that as mighty a figure as a father might take some of that weight from him.
Their father has one hand on Lucy’s round cheek and he is weeping, for all he is pretending not to. He’s a good man, a portly one, thinner than when they left, but Susan can see the loss in the slope of Peter’s shoulders. This good man cannot lighten the king’s load; he only adds one more responsibility to the towering pile. Susan crosses the space to take Peter’s hand. He inhales and straightens his spine.
“You’ve all grown so much,” their mother says.
Edmund is too young to register, but older now than he was at his first war; Lucy, who had been so young when they had left, grew into herself in a world filled with magic. All of them, they have responsibility pressed into their shoulders, old ropes they can’t even grasp for. No one is asking them to take that mantle on their shoulders, and that’s the hardest part. You get used to the weight. You build your world around it, build your identity into the crooks and crannies of the load you carry.
Can we talk about how much the gossipy young girls who cluster in the schoolyard must feel like children to her? And Susan has forgotten about being a child. She is the blessed, the chosen, the promised. Susan has decades on them, wars, loss and betrayal, victory and growing fields, the trust of her subjects. It was a visceral thing, to have all those lives under her protection and to know that her subjects slept safe, peacefully, on dark nights. Here, on this drab concrete, her people are untouchable, indefensible; her self is vanished, her kingdom gone; she can feel the loss like a wound. She has lost her power, but that trust, that responsibility remains. It circles her ankles, trips her in the school hallways.
She barely speaks to her schoolmates. The first few years back, guilt lives in her shaking hands.
For a long time Susan doesn’t want to be tied down to anything (she doesn’t want anything tied down to her, because she has, it seems, a pattern of disappearing). Peter pours himself into schoolwork and extracurriculars. He wakes and works, excels in his steady way, like he owes someone something.
Lucy befriends wayward girls like they were shy dryads, sly naiads. Lucy walks the playground with all the bright, sprightly grace of a girl who could find worlds in the backs of wardrobes, and she finds smiles in schoolgirls, finds enough of herself to give away.
Lucy gives faith, Susan gives effort, time, work—there are many differences between them, these two sister queens, but this was one. But for a long time, after they return, Susan doesn’t give anything. She is a queen who has abandoned her kingdom and she feels that in the very bend of her spine. She will build no more kingdoms, she swears. Her shoulders ache under the weight of a responsibility she will never lose and now can never answer to.
It is Edmund, of all of them, who understands. He is the other who gets angry, for all he holds it in these days. He is Edmund the Just, after all, and weighs each word before he says it. She is Susan the Gentle, because she will give, will build; because where Peter is elevated by duty, she carries responsibility in soft hands, on worn shoulders, pours all she has into it.
It is Lucy who makes things more than they are. Girls are dryads and bullies are the cruel kind of wolf. Trees dance and every roar of a city bus is a hallo from a lion who is not tame. That is Lucy’s battle and she is as glorious as her sunrises. It would kill Susan to live her life strung between two worlds. They go on walks together, Lucy and her effortless blaze, Susan’s quiet sturdy stride. Lucy sings, but Susan watches; the trees do not dance. The trees are only trees.
A boy pulls at a girl’s pigtails across the schoolyard, yanks at the bow on the back of her dress. Susan sees a bully and she marches forward as a friend, a foe, a young woman furious and proud, a kingdomless queen. Susan draws herself up, the scant inches of height she will some day supplement with heels her siblings will scoff at. Dripping majesty, she moves across the ground (crowds part in her wake), and steps between the girl and the bully.
Let’s talk about how Susan was reading a book the day they went through the wardrobe; how she found it sitting, neatly bookmarked, beside her bed the day they came back. Her arms still felt clumsy then, her legs too short but also too gangly. She kept thinking about white stags, about if her mare got home safe, after, about the meetings she had lined up for the next week with the beavers, the heraldic university, the stonecutters’ union. She had paperwork on her desk she had meant to get to, petitions and letters from faun children who wanted to come on a field trip to Cair Paravel.
Susan had this waiting for her here, left out on her little bedside table: a penny and dime novel about a schoolgirl romance, half-read. Susan sat down on the twin mattress and took it in her hands. She remembered buying this, faintly (it had been years now; weeks before they boarded the train for the country, years from this weary shaking moment). She had wanted a detective mystery, but this had seemed more appropriate and she hadn’t wanted to look odd at the cash register.
At school, Susan sees a girl in mathematics who looks like a dryad, willowy limbs and distracted eyes. Where is your tree? Susan wants to ask. Is it safe? Is it blooming? She would fight to keep her safe, talk to her guards, go out on diplomatic missions, negotiate with the local woodcutters.
There’s a girl in the back row, shy, steady, who takes the best and swiftest notes in her very own shorthand. Susan finds herself wanting to recruit her for the Narnian scribe service. She shakes herself, but she approaches the girl after class anyway. Susan reads through wanted ads and helps the girl send out applications for internships.
Or another young woman; this one blazes bright, drawing people in her wake as she chases after efforts for raising money for a new library wing or cleaning up some local empty lot for the children. This girl laughs, shakes her mane of hair, and Susan wants to take her under her wing and teach her how to roar.
“Edmund is so solemn,” says her mother, worried, to Susan. “Is he alright? And Lucy seems even less…” Her mother hesitates, chewing a lip.
“Present,” Susan offers, because Lucy still has a foot in Narnia the way none of the rest of them do. Peter still holds the weight of his crown, certainly, and Edmund the load of his mistakes. Susan has the faded ink-stains of a hundred missives, orders, treaties, and promises she never got to send. (She wakes now, some nights, full of nerves for a formal audience the next morning, and remembers it is just a literature presentation. She feels relieved and useless).
But Lucy, Lucy walks in light. She dreams of dryads and when she closes her eyes she can hear them dancing in the wind on the upper boughs of the trees in the garden.
It is a stubborn faith, a steady one, harsh even. Lucy clings to things with two small hands that remember having calluses from reins, remember holding hands with dryads and dancing in the moonlight, remember running though a lion’s wild mane. Lucy grins (it is a defiance, not a grace, not a gift); she bares her teeth and goes dancing at midnight under trees that creak in a storm’s gale (she gets a cold and misses a week of school, for that). Lucy will believe until the end of the world, burning with that effortless faith.
This is not effortless. “Such a happy child,” their mother says of Lucy, sighing relief, glancing uneasily at Edmund. Susan is not a happy child, but she is not meant to be. She is their stability, their quiet, the little, gentle mother, the nursemaid wise beyond her years. No one looks. They rely, and it makes Susan want to scream.
“Luce?” said Edmund. “Happy? I suppose. She’s more a fighter than any of us.”
Lucy gets up early in the mornings and goes outside to watch the sunrise while she eats her toast. Susan is jealous of her ease, for years; an early riser, a morning person, effortlessly romantic. There are days, when Susan is angry at schoolteachers, or missing her seneschal’s dry wit, days when Susan cannot find even the most glorious sunset to be anything more than just glaring light in her tired eyes. But Lucy, no, every day Lucy watches the sun rise and lets that fill her. Easy thinks Susan, jealous, and she is wrong.
It is not for years that she realizes how much effort is tucked into Lucy’s bright smiles. The joy is not a lie, the faith is not contrived, but it is built. Lucy pulls herself out of bed each morning. She watches the fires of the day climb and conquer the sky, and dares her world to be anything less than magical.
Susan tired of bullies before she and her siblings had even finished with the White Witch’s defeat. She will stand it no more in this world than she had in Narnia. For the cruelest bullies: she digs up their weakness, their secrets, and holds them hostage. The misled, the hurting, she approaches sidelong, with all the grace of a wise ruler, a diplomat’s best subtle words against a foreign agitator with borders along an important trade route. The followers she sweeps past, gathers up, binds to her own loyalties. They may be allowed to become her fine guard if they deign to learn kindness, or at least respect.
Susan joins the newspaper because extracurriculars look good, and if she is going to live in this world she is going to do it well. She finds she likes it. She rubs ink into her palms and feels almost at home. She hunts down quaint little school stories overzealously, like the detectives in the novels stacked by her bed, like a queen hunting down secrets at her court.
(Lucy contributes poetry to the arts section of the paper. Susan only reads them on weeks she is feeling brave, because, like all of Lucy, her poetry picks you up and takes you away).
When Susan wakes up, these nights, dreaming of ink on her fingers, she doesn’t expect to find her desk at Cair Paravel. Or, when she does, she squeezes her eyes open and looks around at the newspaper room on submission night. The copy editor fumes quietly, a writer hyperventilates in a corner, another clatters away. An editor coaxes into the telephone, talking with their printer, negotiating for time. It is not quite a council of war, but it is hers. It is not quite a kingdom, but Susan’s still a child, after all. She has time to grow into this skin.
When Caspian’s horn calls them home, the Pevensies stand in the ruin of their palace. Thick, old trees, not saplings, not young wildflowers, grow over the graves of the petitioners Susan had never gotten to meet with, of the children who had written her letters in careful, blocky handwriting. When I grow up I want to be as beautiful as you.
Susan, standing in ankle deep grass on the cracked flagstones of the home she had spent most of her life in, has the gangly, growing limbs of an adolescent. A horn’s call (her horn) is ringing in her bones, centuries too late. That call has always been ringing in her, really, shaking her hands, reverberating her lungs, since the day a queen tumbled back through a wardrobe and into a life she hadn’t missed.
Susan stands under a mound, in the ruins of a castle, on a battlefield. Her Narnia has grown out of itself, grown into itself; her subjects are gone, but there is an army at her feet who trusts her. She left, but they did not lose faith. Susan does not feel absolved. She feels guiltier than ever, to know they kept faith she didn’t deserve. She wonders if this is how Aslan feels about Lucy.
The very shape of the land has changed. Mounds stand over old broken tables and rivers have become deep chasms. Her body is the body of a growing child, and her heart is that of a widow twice over.
When Susan leaves Narnia for the last time, she steps back into a world where she has ten articles to review by Monday, an essay due the next week, and a mathematics test on Friday. She has dishes to do and Lucy to keep an eye on. She wants to weep for days, but instead she goes home, plucks a detective novel off her bedside table, and tries to remember where she left off.
Susan doesn’t cry, but she hardly sleeps. That call is still humming in her bones (it always will, even when she learns to call it by other names). Susan snaps at her lioness, her dryad, her scribe; her bully boys flee at her short temper. One of her friends finally takes her aside. “What’s going on, Su? You can tell me.”
She forgot people could give you kindnesses back. “I lost something important,” Susan says, and the tears finally start to fall.
She weeps into her friend’s shoulder while she murmurs comforting things. “I’m right here.”
You are, Susan thinks. And so am I.
There is wind in the treetops. They are only trees.
Susan was the chosen, the blessed, the promised. She does not want to be promised. She wants to promise, instead, to take the hands of brave friends and try to build something new.
The only thing that will compare to this grief will happen years later, a train crash, a phone call to her flat to tell the awful news to the next of kin. Now, losing Narnia, these four are the only ones here who will remember that world. There is a loss in that. There is a fragility in that which terrifies.
After the crash, Susan will be the only one left to remember them.
Maybe it was a shunning and maybe it was a mercy, to leave Susan to grow old. She had had too many kingdoms ripped from her aching fingers to be willing to lose this one, so instead everything else she had was taken away.
Maybe it was an apology. Maybe a lion could better understand mourning the loss of a kingdom than the loss of siblings. Maybe he thought he was being kind.
As Susan grows, her schoolmates stay in touch, young girls who grew in her shadows or strode in blazing light before her (both are strengths), the ones who walked with her and learned majesty from her older bones. She gets letters from her bullies, too, the ones she subverted through threats or kindnesses. Some are fathers, railway operators, preachers, bookshop cashiers. Her girls are mothers, some, or running libraries, charities, businesses from behind the throne; one is a butcher’s apprentice of all things, another battling her way towards a Ph.D.
One married a farmer’s boy with a warm smile and moved out into the country. Susan goes out to visit and they go walking through her fields and little copses of trees. The trees are only trees, and some of Susan’s heart will always break for that, but she watches her friend’s glowing face as she marks out the edges of her land, speaks with her hands. The trees are only trees, but they are hers.
Susan goes home by train, the country whisking by outside. She pours over notes, sketching article outlines in her notebook, deadlines humming in the back of her mind. Her pen flicks over the paper, her fingers stained with ink. This is hers.
Years later, Susan digs up old copies of her school papers. She goes through them, one by one, and reads each of Lucy’s poems.
Cross-legged on the floor, she cries, ugly sobs torn out of her, offered out to ghosts of sisters and brothers, parents, Narnian children grown old and buried under ancient trees, without her. Lucy’s poems take her away (they always do) and leave her weeping on her living room floor in her stockings.
Susan stacks the papers neatly, makes herself a mug of tea and goes outside. The trees are only trees. This is a curse. This is a blessing. She breathes deep.
Peter was the only one who understood as well as she did what it was to be the rock of other people’s worlds. She remembers Edmund every time rage swells in her stomach, every time she swallows that rage down and listens anyway.
On early mornings Susan rolls out of bed, all groans and grumbles, and scribbles down a thought or two about her latest article if anything percolated during the night. She does her make-up on her apartment’s little balcony. Susan watches the rising sun light the sky and dares her life to be anything other than hers.
Companion to this post.