All That Remains

Older than I used to be, butch, lover of liminal spaces, tingly words, and afternoon naps. F, she/her

[recklessfiction]

What to do When you Find Yourself in a Fairytale

Relight your lantern, you should not have let it go out in the first place. Look for the path that led you here. It was dark dirt and well trodden, a hiking trail perhaps? If you cannot see it, look instead for a path of polished pearl. Once you have it beneath your feet, follow it.

Depending on the season, you may come across Spring as you walk the path. If it calls out to you, sit and let it weave flowers into your hair. Do not mention the hive in its eyes or the honey that drips from a cut on its hand. It  will love you, if you let it; as Spring loves all things. Desperately, sweetly, and only for a moment. Thank it for the flowers, let it kiss you, and continue down the path.

Approach any knight you see with caution. In this new place, even you are unsure of what you are. You do not want to become a quest or a feather in their cap, your blood glistening on their blade and your eyes burnished and set in a crown.

A Queen will ask you for a favour. Look only at her right most face for the others hold dark secrets and the fate of worlds which you have no business knowing. Take the token she offers you, a caged star, and deliver it to the Night as she asked. You are now owed a boon.

Beware the Lair of the Blind Dragon. Should you find yourself amidst its trove, beware. Without its eyes, it cannot tell trespasser from treasure, and so its hoard grows. If it discovers you, you will not be able to escape. Dragons spend centuries fawning over their newest treasures and you do not want that treasure to be you. 

Mirrors should be avoided at all costs. You are not from this place, remember? And so your self may become untethered. There are those who would use this against you, to trap you. 

Just like in dreams, you musn’t form any attachments. Not with Spring, or the Fir Trees, The Maidens or the The Mountain King. You must leave none of yourself here in this place, certainly not any part of your heart. That is, if you still wish to return home. 

Perhaps I should have mentioned this at the start but you will have to take a new name. Names have power, especially ones that come from Elsewhere. So listen well and the first chance you get, you must steal the name of another. It may be cruel, to leave someone adrift and unprotected without a name, but these things must be done if you wish to make it back.

Your boon from the Queen can send you as close to home as one can get in this place but remember, you only have one favour so keeping yourself safe is important. You would not want to waste it on breaking a curse or being turned back into a person after some encounter left you as a moth. 

Do try to get home, I know that fairytales can be attractive but you really mustn’t become a hero or a god in this place. If you make a name for yourself here before returning to your world, you will always be sought after. Young knights, wistful, romantic nobles, even armies will search for you and if you aren’t careful, they may find their way through. They may find you. 

[soracities]

Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

[Text ID: “As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.”]

[weltenwellen]

Margarita Karapanou, tr. by Karen Emmerich, Rien ne va plus

[peachpulpeuse]

Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. From the very first it had a great many intertwinkling facets. One of them was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania. Its gratification admitted of no compromise or exception. Already when I was ten, tutors and governesses knew that the morning was mine and cautiously kept away. . . . There came a July day – around 1910, I suppose – when I felt the urge to explore the vast marshland beyond the Oredezh. After skirting the river for three or four miles, I found a rickety footbridge. While crossing over, I could see the huts of a hamlet on my left, apple trees, rows of tawny pine logs lying on a green bank, and the bright patches made on the turf by the scattered clothes of peasant girls, who, stark naked in shallow water, romped and yelled, heeding me as little as if I were the discarnate carrier of my present reminiscences. On the other side of the river, a dense crowd of small, bright blue male butterflies that had been tippling on the rich, trampled mud and cow dung through which I trudged rose all together into the spangled air and settled again as soon as I had passed. After making my way through some pine groves and alder scrub I came to the bog. No sooner had my ear caught the hum of diptera around me, the guttural cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sound of the morass under my foot, than I knew I would find here quite special arctic butterflies, whose pictures, or, still better, nonillustrated descriptions I had worshiped for several seasons. And the next moment I was among them. Over the small shrubs of bog bilberry with fruit of a dim, dreamy blue, over the brown eye of stagnant water, over moss and mire, over the flower spikes of the fragrant bog orchid (the nochnaya fialka of Russian poets), a dusky little Fritillary bearing the name of a Norse goddess passed in low, skimming flight. Pretty Cordigera, a gemlike moth, buzzed all over its uliginose food plant. I pursued rose-margined Sulphurs, gray-marbled Satyrs. Unmindful of the mosquitoes that furred my forearms, I stooped with a grunt of delight to snuff out the life of some silver-studded lepidopteron throbbing in the folds of my net. Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species – vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward. At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and penstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes above timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak. I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak, Memory

[1introvertedsage]

[gatheringbones]

gradually I figured out that even if I were to go along with all the many many small tasks that the anxious controlling people I know have to make the people around them do, the good feelings will wear off in seconds and I’ll be right back in the revolving door of being a nonconsensual therapy object.

now I’m evil and just say things like “no” and “I’m not doing that” and “that’s not necessary” and they get to maintain the same level of anxiety around me at all times and it’s much more peaceful.

[beguines]

Pádraig Ó Tuama, "There Is Time for Time", Kitchen Hymns

[nonbinary-octopus]

honestly yeah, fiber arts is magic. you cast spell of warm gloves, spell of nice hat, spell of stuffed animal.

material component: yarn

wand: single hooked wand or double pointed wands, depending on caster's preference

mechanical component: specific motions repeated in a particular pattern

time component: a while

look seriously the first step in a knitting recipe is "cast on", and then it's a bunch of letters and numbers incomprehensible to anyone not versed in the arcane art. that's a spellbook. yes it's a book of knitting patterns but also. it's a spell book.

[exhaled-spirals]

“You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.”

— Paul Auster, Winter Journal

[sunsetofdoom]

“We got real furniture. I mean, it was Salvation Army, but it was real. Our names were printed inside a heart on the dishtowel that hung on the refrigerator door handle. We got it made at Crystal Beach. It was a brave thing to do. But later we spilled loganberry juice on it, so we used it for dishes because we couldn’t bring ourselves to throw it out. And there were marigolds in amber glasses on the windowsill, daisies in a green cut-glass vase on the kitchen table, fresh mint and basil growing in a flower box on the porch. It was a home. I grew up in leaps and bounds. I learned to reduce the anxieties of life by paying bills on time, keeping receipts and promises, doing laundry before I ran out of underwear, picking up after myself. Most importantly, I learned to say I’m sorry. This relationship was too vital to let dust accumulate in its corners.”

— Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

[adrasteiax]

Mary Oliver, from Worm Moon in “Twelve Moons”

[mournfulroses]

Anne Sexton, from a letter featured in Anne Sexton; A Self-Portrait In Letters

[luthienne]

Anne de Marcken, from It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over [ID'd]

[luthienne]

Anne de Marcken, from It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over [ID’d]

[worldsandemanations]

I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night—we can live. And we will.

Ocean Vuong, The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation

[engulfes]

Ada Limón on Preparing the Body for a Reopened World

[intactics-deactivated20250505]

what Work is the most important? the work you have to do next. narrow the scope of focus down to that singular glittering point.

[sisyphusshrugged]

How to get out of a rut