i lean to you, numb as a fossil. tell me i'm here.

oskar they/them qilori.carrd.co

[theoptia]

Simone de Beauvoir, from Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27

Text ID: I observe how much I have matured since last year despite my belief that I was losing myself, how something strong was born from the painful experiences survived and from the numerous minutes that I believed were wasted.

[popularsizes]

Kurbad Königstein, Königstein im Taunus, Germany. Opened in 1977.

[sawaisanna]

Sandra Hüller as Sandra Anatomy of a Fall (2023) dir. Justine Triet

[rainformation]

formative years? aren’t they all?

[guooey]

Patrick Ness, More Than This

[sobcat]

who up wanting to change the way they conduct their everyday life

[ceniwen]

who woke up the bird

[vingler-mirror]

So let's talk about the lyrics Isolde and Kakania were singing at the end of "Through the Glass"!

As the story described, Isolde was singing a part of the opera "Tristan und Isolde," specifically the part where Isolde is waiting for her rendezvous with Tristan.

In this part, Isolde ignores the calling of horns that signals the arrival of King Marke—the king she's supposed to marry—, insisting that it's just the rustling of the wind or the trickling of the stream, even though her maid tells her over and over that it IS the sound of the horns and the king is nearby.

In our Isolde case, I think we can interpret the call of horns as symbolizing the reality that Isolde doesn't hear—or rather, doesn't want to hear. Because "the calling of horns does not sound so sweet" compared to "the silence of the night" (the peaceful dream she doesn't want to wake up from), and the promise of meeting with "He who is waiting for me in the silence of the night," which—I think we can agree—is Kakania in her dream.

And unlike the "run away with me, Cavaradossi" scene, this time Kakania responded with her part!

Or at least... in the loose sense of it, because the part Kakania chose to sing skipped a lot of events ahead from Isolde's part, which is very interesting! Isolde's lines are from Act 2, while Kakania's are from Act 3: after the king catches Tristan and Isolde in the middle of their rendezveous, Tristan gets stabbed by his betraying friend, and he wakes up with a severe injury that will kill him very soon.

I think this might be intentional—to symbolize that Isolde is stuck in the past, in the happiest moments of her life, while Kakania is facing the reality of the present, in the aftermath of everything that has happened to them.

Unlike Isolde, who sang her part faithfully to the opera, Kakania took the full creative liberty of only singing a few lines from Tristan's part and straight up skipping the rest of it. Which is a bit disappointing at first (the time she actually played along with the opera act and she didn't even do it properly, smh), but this means that every single line she sang was deliberately chosen to convey what she wanted to say to Isolde!

I interpreted the first part of the lines as her expressing how lost she felt after the Storm washed away their era. She fully expected to get reversed by the Storm to atone for her sins, and now that she's left as the only survivor, she has no place nor people to return to. Her life, her purpose, the dream she worked on all her life, and the people she strived that dream for... all gone. She no longer knows where she's standing in the world and what lies ahead for her.

We can also interpret this as Kakania responding to Isolde, who was singing and waiting for Kakania as her "Tristan," saying that she can't meet her in fear of triggering Isolde's trauma and making her condition worse.

And the second part... is Kakania's resolve, that even if everything has changed, even if she's stranded with no era to return to, she will still stay on her path of striving to the betterment of the world, of trying to fix "the cracked mirror" no matter how fragile and broken it is. Back then, by fighting for the rights of arcanists and the other "outsiders" in Vienna, and now by doing all she can to help with the Storm.

...and this also means goodbye. Because Isolde chose to stay in the past, and Kakania, who took a different path, respected Isolde's wish and headed on alone into the future.

But goodbyes don't always last forever. And as Kakania said at the end of her story:

[jamjoob]

"To my dear Galinda"

[hangsawoman]

my hobbies are pining longing yearning desiring craving and umm. wanting

[sagradofemenin0]

The Witch, 1893 by John Collier

[hawberries]

you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting

[farmlesbians]

[anxeious]

remembering the beauty i see in everything is a reflection of who i am

[fellshish]

I love ships where one of them desperately needs to hear they are loved and Good Enough i’m sure it means nothing about me lol

[vevesec]

golden winged king

[supecci]

🦋 ˚˖⁺‧₊ ˚ ˖₊‧⁺˖