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We are made of the bones of the earth

@ofplanet-earth / ofplanet-earth.tumblr.com

megan; 30; ace

A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life. Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

this fucks me up every single time

I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.

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fr3ight-train

This is so fucking important and I think it’s something I needed right now

Hello and welcome to Deep Space Nine. We are a space station, not a starship, so you’ll be spending a lot of time with all these delightful side characters like: bisexual fashion lizard. hologram of Frank Sinatra. goblins. goblin comes in 3 varieties: bartender, nephew, and idiot. our doctor is a twink, our commander is antifa and the captain talks to the gods sometimes. our policeman is sometimes a liquid and the science lady is part worm. we have many fine storylines, such as: Goblin Does A Crime, Watch The Irishman Suffer, or The Horrors Of War. As you stroll along our promenade enjoying a raktajino or delicious jumja stick, watch out for our nefarious villains: Pope Karen. clones of Jeffrey Combs. and a horny bastard reptile man who seems convinced this is actually his show. we suspect he may be possessed by demons. Have fun!

Deep Space Nine: now with Worf™!

do yall think about how easy it would be for gideon to pick up and carry harrow around like Entirely Too Much or is it just me. it's rent free in my head. harrow throwing her entire body at gideon when they're in their bodies again. gideon catching her easily, holding her tight. harrow hissing at gideon like a feral little cat as gideon picks her up and carries her away from her desk when she's been working late into the night. gideon scooping harrow up just cause she feels like it and her tiny necromancer is suffering from a lack of kisses. harrow not only allowing it but begrudgingly liking it. what's a cav for if not to hold you with their big muscles??

“Griddle?”

“Harrow?”

“Is this real?”

“Yes, Harrow. This is real.”

“Oh.”

“Is this real?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I promise.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“That it’s not a hallucination.”

“Feel that?”

“... Yes.”

“Maybe I’m imagining this. And you.”

“Hey. Harrow. C’mere.”

Gideon...”

“There. No way you’re imagining that. Your brain can’t comprehend it.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“You’re still here, aren’t you?”

“Gideon?”

“Yes, oh mistress of mandibles?”

“Stop that. I need to ask you something.”

“Ask away, my twilight princess—hey, ouch, no pinching!”

“I’m serious!”

“So am I, Harrow. I’m always serious about you.”

“Gideon.”

“Hmm?”

“Kiss me again.”

*shows up to the harrow nova bbq a week late, sweating, w/one hand clutching my side & the other holding a potato salad that NONE of you should eat because it has GONE BAD*

One Flesh, One End

Bruh Gideon the ninth has left a cut in my heart so incredibly deep I fear I may never heal.

Guys imagine the angst potential if the time-travel lead does pan out. Imagine it. Essek can go back and stop himself from cutting that deal with the Cerberus Assembly. He knows that if he does he’ll forestall a war and save a lot of people a lot of pain…but now he’ll never meet the M9.

Without a beacon in the Empire, the Assembly never contracts Yeza Brenatto to brew potions. The Dynasty never sends a specops team to kidnap him. The crew never follow that team’s trail back to Xhorhas. Essek never meets the Mighty Nein. Or if he does it’s cold, in passing, from a distance during a negotiation or formal court visit. Without his guilt over the beacon theft he never decides to try to gain their trust for his own ends. They never befriend him by force. Essek never knows why his future self was so determined to come back and stop the beacon trade. He never knows why that self seemed so different, so much more worn but also impossibly happier. 

Imagine that self telling him, “There’s a group of people in the Empire that you have to find. They don’t know you. They don’t even know each other yet. But they’re the most important people in your life, even if they’ll never know why.”

“You know that you do not have to do this.”

“No,” Essek agrees, looking down at the circle, looking down at their feet. The runes scrawled across the floor, spanning forty feet in diameter of solid Aeorian stone, are not of his mind alone, nor of Caleb’s. Instead they are a fusion of both teleportation and dunamancy - a movement not through space, but through that elusive fourth dimension, time.

(When they completed the circle Essek offered it to Caleb, once. It was a gift only one of them could use, after all; whoever traveled back in time would unwrite this future, and there is every possibility that, in this next life, they will never meet again.

Something sad had come over Caleb, after that. Essek had recognized the look. It was the look of a dream, once held dear, forsaken for something better.

“No,” Caleb had said, in that soft, rust-red way of his, and smiled with the faintest movement of his lips. “No, I have found my family. With what I have here, I am content.”)

Caleb joins him studying the circle. Pointless, of course; they have both traced and retraced the runes so many times that they could recreate the whole thing blind, that they see it behind their eyelids in dreams. His voice is that same tenor of quiet when he says, “But you will go anyway.”

“Hundreds of people, Caleb. Thousands.” He surprises himself with the intensity of grief in his voice. He does not clear his throat. He has nothing to hide here. “You understand better than any, I think, what is at stake. Many of them lived here.”

“Many of them were Dynasty as well.”

“I am beginning to understand that this does not make a difference.”

Caleb claps a hand on his shoulder. “You have come far, Essek Thelyss.”

Essek lets the compliment settle in the core of him. Time, Caleb had told him, once. It would take time.

In more ways than one, he was right.

“You are sure?”

“I should be asking you that, I think,” Caleb says. “In any life I will find them. For you it is not so.”

“No,” Essek agrees, more heavily this time. It is nothing they have not discussed before but here, on the precipice, the eventuality of a timeline in which he does not meet Caleb - in which he does not meet any of the Nein - is very nearly something he could reach out and touch. “No, it is not.”

(The Nein had taken some convincing, Beauregard in particular. When Essek flatters himself he thinks it was partially because they will miss him, even if they will not know what they miss. He is not such a fool as to think it is all for his sake - there is a war and thousands of lives in the balance, after all - but when he and Caleb had proposed their plan there were tears in Jester’s eyes and resignation in Caduceus’s gaze and Beauregard had been angry, that firebrand sort of angry she gets when she feels as though she is about to lose someone she loves.

Essek is honored beyond words to be counted one of that number. To be counted one of the nine.)

“Well then, Shadowhand,” Caleb says, a humorous formality in his voice to disguise its tremor. He steps back and holds out his hand to Essek, to shake.

Essek bypasses it. Instead he takes Caleb’s face in his hands. Gently, he kisses Caleb on the forehead.

“Until the next life,” he says, and steps into the circle.

Time dissolves around him. He feels his body unstitch in a way adjacent to the encroaching embrace from death. And as his breath leaves his chest for the final time in this world, he hears Caleb murmur, “Until then, my friend.”