Now, I’m Not Saying Romantic Relationships Are Inferior, Or That They’re Useless, Or That You Being

Fuck you. This is the coward's way out. This train will not bring you back in time.

It will not take her arm, or his eye. It will not gift your cheeks their stubble. It will heave its way through English fields and English woods and English towns and English rain, and our mother will sit in that compartment with you.

Have you considered that? Mother, who looks at you as a chicken beholds the fox beneath the fence, as a farmer beholds the wolf by the gate, mother, who has long since washed all colour from her face.

Mother, who is grey and damp as the rain.

Hours in a locked tomb. Hours with her. What will she say? How will she sit? What things will she drag from your mouth?

Will she pin you, with those tired eyes, with those faded hands, to the fabric of your seat, to take from you the answers we have been keeping from her for years?

And how could you ever tell her? How could you dare?

Mother, your little boy has died. Mother, your little girl has seen battle. Mother, your children have commanded armies. They've sat thrones and mourned children. They've lost their people.

Twice.

Mother, you are tired. You are weary. You would not understand.

By the lion, you'd despair.

Mother, a witch has spelled your son when his ears still stuck out and he missed your husband with all the violence of a schoolboy. She took him, pointed nails and pearl-teeth, god, she carved flesh and bone and sinew until that paper-thin skin held nothing at all.

Mother, the son you sent to the countryside with the world digging into his shoulders has died. In tiny pieces, at first, and then all at once, as a trickle turns first into a stream and then into a raging river.

Until finally, it spreads into the sea.

Your child lies buried in every decree, every law, and- Christ, who are we kidding, the Narnian soil. The golden boy you wanted so desperately to protect lies in pieces next to the witch, rotting into the earth.

We cannot return him to you.

Will you tell her, I wonder, about the razor blades underneath your floorboards? Will you bare your neck and show her all the mess you've made of the soft skin there when the nights were long and the tremors were terrible?

What of the knives under our little ones' pillows?

Fuck you.

When I was born, I had you. When I was little, I had you. Those terrible, wonderful years - I had you. How am I meant to go on without you? Brother, I don't know how.

Already my lungs are refusing their work. Already my stomach turns. My teeth are aching, my bones have chilled. My cheeks are stained - big red streaks of salt.

Of blood.

I have carved a way for myself through the chalk and the limestone and the mud. With my hands and my teeth, on the last bit of hope I could still heave up in between the cigarettes and the whiskey, I dug my way to sunlight. For days, for months, for years.

With my bare fucking hands, brother.

And you? You've never put the sword down. You've never looked at the dirt. You can't, you say. You're not made for it. Your mouth is the wrong shape and your eyes want nothing to do with the ground.

Instead, you've spent your time picking out the perfect mortician, the right funeral shroud. The coffin. Instead, you've drawn maps and routes into a home that has long been plundered.

Brother, where has your hunger gone?

Crabs amaze me. They’re the perfect life form, a tank made of legs and living hate-armor. It’s not just about their physicality, though; it’s the soul of the crab. See, no crab in the bottomless history of the sea has ever questioned itself, doubted itself, worried, or been afraid. A crab is pure motion. A crab is pure id and unrelenting forward force. Crabs invented the word violence and they will scuttle on the surface of the world while the red giant of Sol creeps closer to devour everywhere we’ve ever known. They will look into the sky and clack their claws and there will be no fear. 

Some new sigil designs that will be avaliable on the 30th

game tip: make your scavenged treasures into Cool Ass Accessories

It is deeply, deeply beneficial to TERFs if the only characteristic of TERF ideology you will recognize as wrong, harmful, or problematic is "they hate trans women".

TERF ideology is an expansive network of extremely toxic ideas, and the more of them we accept and normalize, the easier it becomes for them to fly under the radar and recruit new TERFs. The closer they get to turning the tide against all trans people, trans women included.

Case in point: In 2014-2015, I fell headlong into radical feminism. I did not know it was called radical feminism at the time, but I also didn't know what was wrong with radical feminism in the first place. I didn't see a problem with it.

I was a year deep into this shit when people I had been following, listening to, and looking up to finally said they didn't think trans women were women. It was only then that I unfollowed those people, specifically; but I continued to follow other TERFs-who-didn't-say-they-were-TERFs. I continued ingesting and spreading their ideas- for years after.

If TERFs "only target trans women" and "only want trans women gone", if that's the one and only problem with their ideology and if that's the only way we'll define them, we will inevitably miss a vast majority of the quiet beliefs that support their much louder hatred of trans women.

As another example: the trans community stood relatively united when TERFs and conservatives targeted our right to use the correct restroom, citing the "dangers" of trans women sharing space with cis women. But when they began targeting Lost Little Girls and Confused Lesbians and trotting detransitioners out to raise a panic about trans men, virtually the only people speaking up about it were other transmascs. Now we see a rash of anti-trans healthcare bills being passed in the US, and they're hurting every single one of us.

When you refuse to call a TERF a TERF just because they didn't specifically say they hate trans women, when you refuse to think critically about a TERF belief just because it's not directly related to trans women, you are actively helping TERFs spread their influence and build credibility.

My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.

I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”

shout out to ace and aro kids who are constantly bombarded with the opinion that sex and romantic love are directly connected to living a happy life.

you have invited strangers into your home, helen pevensie, mother of four.

without the blurred sight of joy and relief, it has become impossible to ignore. all the love inside you cannot keep you from seeing the truth. your children are strangers to you. the country has seen them grow taller, your youngest daughter’s hair much longer than you would have it all years past. their hands have more strength in them, their voices ring with an odd lilt and their eyes—it has become hard to look at them straight on, hasn’t it? your children have changed, helen, and as much as you knew they would grow a little in the time away from you, your children have become strangers.

your youngest sings songs you do not know in a language that makes your chest twist in odd ways. you watch her dance in floating steps, bare feet barely touching the dewy grass. when you try and make her wear her sister’s old shoes—growing out of her own faster than you think she ought to—, she looks at you as though you are the child instead of her. her fingers brush leaves with tenderness, and you swear your daughter’s gentle hum makes the drooping plant stand taller than before. you follow her eager leaps to her siblings, her enthusiasm the only thing you still recognise from before the country. yet, she laughs strangely, no longer the giggling girl she used to be but free in a way you have never seen. her smile can drop so fast now, her now-old eyes can turn distant and glassy, and her tears, now rarer, are always silent. it scares you to wonder what robbed her of the heaving sobs a child ought to make use of in the face of upset.

your other daughter—older than your youngest yet still at an age that she cannot be anything but a child—smiles with all the knowledge in the world sitting in the corner of her mouth. her voice is even, without all traces of the desperate importance her peers carry still, that she used to fill her siblings’ ears with at all hours of the day. she folds her hands in her lap with patience and soothes the ache of war in your mind before you even realise she has started speaking. you watch her curl her hair with careful, steady fingers and a straight back, her words a melody as she tells your eldest which move to make without so much a glance at the board off to her right. she reads still, and what a relief you find this sliver of normalcy, even if she’s started taking notes in a shorthand you couldn’t even think to decipher. even if you feel her slipping away, now more like one of the young, confident women in town than a child desperately wishing for a mother’s approval.

your younger son reads plenty as well these days, and it fills you with pride. he is quiet now, sitting still when you find him bent over a book in the armchair of his father. he looks at you with eyes too knowing for a petulant child on the cusp of puberty, and no longer beats his fists against the furniture when one of his siblings dares approach him. he has settled, you realise one evening when you walk into the living room and find him writing in a looping script you don’t recognise, so different from the scratched signature he carved into the doors of your pantry barely a year ago. he speaks sense to your youngest and eldest, respects their contributions without jest. you watch your two middle children pass a book back and forth, each a pen in hand and sheets of paper bridging the gap between them, his face opening up with a smile rather than a scowl. it freezes you mid-step to find such simple joy in him. remember when you sent them away, helen, and how long it had been since he allowed you to see a smile then?

your eldest doesn’t sleep anymore. none of your children care much for bedtimes these days, but at least sleep still finds them. it’s not restful, you know it from the startled yelps that fill the house each night, but they sleep. your eldest makes sure of it. you have not slept through a night since the war began, so it’s easy to discover the way he wanders the halls like a ghost, silent and persistent in a duty he carries with pride. each door is opened, your children soothed before you can even think to make your own way to their beds. his voice sounds deeper than it used to, deeper still than you think possible for a child his age and size. then again, you are never sure if the notches on his door frame are an accurate way to measure whatever it is that makes you feel like your eldest has grown beyond your reach. you watch him open doors, soothe your children, spend his nights in the kitchen, his hands wrapped around a cup of tea with a weariness not even the war should bring to him, not after all the effort you put into keeping him safe.

your children mostly talk to each other now, in a whispered privacy you cannot hope to be a part of. their arms no longer fit around your waist. your daughters are wilder—even your older one, as she carries herself like royalty, has grown teeth too sharp for polite society— and they no longer lean into your hands. your sons are broad-shouldered even before their shirts start being too small again, filling up space you never thought was up for taking. your eldest doesn’t sleep, your middle children take notes when politicians speak on the wireless and shake their heads as though they know better, and your youngest sings for hours in your garden.

who are your children now, helen pevensie, and who pried their childhood out of your shaking hands?

all I want is to have a room that looks like I'm old biology professor whose been away from human civilization for half a century in the forest who spends my evenings reading old books researching about cryptids with my cat surrounded by my many treasures and trinkets I've collected over the years and my many, many growing plants that nearly take over all of my house.

*slides in* *whispers* Keanu Reeves as a water silo... *skitters away*