Look look look! Look at the cute animals!
Aren’t they all super cute?! Don’t you want to hang out with them?! And play with them?! And cuddle with them?! And kiss them on their tiny little noses?! Don’t you like them?! You have to like them! Yes?! Yes, I thought the answer would be yes.
Now: Do you know what gender any of these animals are?
No?
Hunh. Neither did I. Guess gender didn’t really matter that much, did it?
Let’s talk about anxiety. (Oh, and for those of you back home who’ve been keeping track since that last post, yes I have actually started editing my thesis. I swear. I know this looks bad. I mean, another blog post… no way she’s working on that thing she needs to graduate! But… c’mon, guys, a girl needs a break! I’ve deleted and changed and fixed and added in three whole fucking pages of new content from three new primary sources so look, it’s getting done, okay?!)
Right. Um. Anxiety. So, there are all those websites out there that talk about what “anxiety” is, right? All those ads with comic character-style people in it spewing out some symptoms for you and telling you which drug they’re promoting you absolutely need to buy? Maybe even a couple of helpful informational pamphlet things you shoved in the bottom of your purse the last time you visited the doctor’s office?
Yeah, so all those things, they’re probably telling you about how anxiety (and its devil spawn, panic attacks) can make it feel like your heart is beating really fast, you may be hyperventilating, basically it feels like you’re being run over by the pounding feet of a herd of elephants while your heart and stomach and brain are getting convulsed and squeezed and honked like clown horns?
Yeah, no. My anxiety isn’t like that.
I am scatterbrained. Not always in the “forgetful” kind of sense. Though sure, mental lapses of my to-do list are definitely a regular appearance in my day. But… I’m scatterbrained more in the sense that my brain is, well, scattered. It’s somewhat of a necessity, given that I’m finishing up two major with very different requirements, seeing how one is in biology (basically microbiology, since Caltech researchers seems to be wary of anything bigger than a cell…) and the other is in English (which here means “literary analysis”; here, read this book – now write a five-page essay analyzing some part of this. What? What’s this about creative writing? Journalism? Op-eds? No no, here, just mimic our motions of academia. There you go. That’s a good girl…)
Ahem. Uh. What was I saying? Oh. Right. Scatterbrained. I am that thing. But it’s because I have so many disparate sections of my life to keep track of. Bio major. English major. Wildlife volunteering. My personal creative writing.
Aaah, my personal creative writing. Even that is scatterbrained. Like, this blog. What the fuck am I doing here, guys? Sure, most of my posts are about writing, or about The Feels, but then I’ve also got a fair amount about feminism and rape culture and mental health, and then sometimes I also talk about writing, and then I randomly post about animals… and then there are poems and short stories and pieces of flash fiction… and if you are somehow able to lump all those things into one nice, cohesive genre, then God and Cthulu bless you, child, because I sure as hell can’t. “Uh, this one is fairy tale-ish fantasy… and this one is urban dystopia… and this is, uh, yeah I don’t even know what this one is…”
And then there’s the writing that I’ve still got under wraps. I have like seven lists of planned writing projects. Cultural/existential perspective pieces. Grunge fantasy series. Pop-sci-ish writing. Guys, WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING???
I want to write what’s interesting to me. But, as you can tell from my two majors, “what’s interesting to me” can fall across a highly broad range of departments. Sure, I could try to tie them all together in some grand way, putting more emphasis on areas and pulling less from others… but I don’t want to do that. Sure, I want to genre-bend and genre-cross in some ways, but I don’t want to make a giant messy lump of it. Some things I just want to look at, to write about in their own right. They are their own subject, and what I have to say about them is solely and uniquely for the stand alone entity. I don’t want to smush it all together for the sake of homogeneity, of some nicely-parceled, shrink-wrapped unified front.
This makes it very difficult to develop what I hear people refer to as “brand.” It’s the jack of all trades, master of none dilemma. I mean, sure, even if I am a master of one field (or many fields), apparently unless I restrict my writing to just that area, I won’t be perceived as an expert. It’s hard to become “known” for something when your image is spread across a smattering of work.
Which I find odd. I mean, sure, don’t spread yourself too thin. Don’t try to write about things you have business trying to speak on. But… while humans have strengths, sure, we’re not single-use automatons. Weren’t we all told to become like those lauded “well-rounded” people at some point in our lives? Heard someone referred to as “a regular DaVinci?” Plus… I mean… I DON’T WANNA SPECIALIZE I DON’T WANNA PICK JUST ONE I WANT ALL OF THEM AND I WANNA DO WHAT I WANNA DO WAAAANNNNHHHH! *stomps foot in proper two-year-old-fashion*
*Straightens tie.* Well then. As, uh, hyperbolic as that may be meant to be, it’s still fairly true. Picking just one path to explore, whether physically or mentally, is boooring. I’ve always admired the “Seniors” in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series. At one point, she describes them as something like “people who have refused to specialize too far in their wizardry.” They’re Seniors because they know a LOT. About LOTS of things. They are the higher thinkers, the ones who can approach any problem because they know how to get at it from a bazillion different angles. They have not narrowed their thinking to one particular hallway. They know the layout of the entire building. Hell, the really good ones, the Seniors that cover worlds and galaxies and whatnot, they’ve probably internalized the blueprints for the entire city. At the very least.
I’ve always wanted to be like them. To know how to slay beasts of any shapes with weapons of any calibre. To know how to climb any sort of face. To be able to comfort any person who comes my way. To speak the language of many types of knowledge.
Alright. I’ll stop with the metaphors here.(Oh god, coffee, why haven’t you kicked in yet???) You all get the idea. I think the world – the universe, actually – is a pretty interesting place. So I don’t want to restrict my writing to just one angle of it.
Hrm. If only that didn’t make so many literary agents raise their oh-so-skeptical eyebrows at me. Maybe I should just shave them all off. The eyebrows, that is. How do you like it now, disdaining agent? Where is your shock and surprise? I can’t see it! AHAHAHAHAHA!!!
*Ahem.* Well then. Perhaps I should go get another cup of coffee now. And hide all the shaving razors…
I have always felt the need to justify my existence. I’m not really sure when it started; I have no particular experience to point to, no exact moment in time when I can remember its instillment. There is neither any gradual buildup that I can trace; this need has just always been there, within me, existing.
Perhaps it’s from the early Catholic training I received, the anti-hedonistic education I received since birth. Perhaps it is the messages, subtle and otherwise, that pleasure should never be a reason, only an unhoped for side effect of righteousness, to be found only after death in a heavenly afterlife. Perhaps it’s that I was raised in an environment of business and consequences; my father, a self-employed salesman, and my mother, a harried keeper who ran around cleaning up after him. There were costs to life, and if you did not put in the effort to stay ahead of them, debt was an inevitability. Therefore one must justify every expenditure, and behind that, every whim. Can you pay the price of what you want? Can you afford the cost of what you are asking for? Are you providing enough return for this air, this water, this space that you are soaking up and taking in? Because if not, then there will be someone to come collect your dues from you. And you may not like what they take.
Perhaps it is that – I can remember creating powerpoint presentation as a fourth grader whenever I wanted to ask my parents for something: a book, a dog, a birthday party. Here, mother and father, are the reasons I want this thing. Here are the reasons that I am sure this is truly something of value to me, something worth your funding, not just some passing fancy that you will not see the returns of. Let me explain the form of my liquidated joy. Let me explain why this matters. Let me explain how giving me this thing will pay off for you, too. Let me show you how this happiness of mine is a worthwhile venture for your capital. Let me use these graphs and these bullet points and these arguments and persuasions to prove to you that I – that is, this thing that I want – is not just a risk. Let me show you why it is worth it.
Let me show you why I am worth it.
Or perhaps, perhaps it’s really that the universe somehow screwed up royally when I was born, and I was brought into this world with a piece of antimatter snuck into my core. And it’s been sitting there ever since, slowly annihilating me from the inside, destroying my internal and leaving me empty and so I have always felt this need for external, objective justification of myself because it is the fodder I have fed this antimatter core, the material I have been using to build myself up and keep the destruction at bay. I have needed to constantly build myself up because there is something else within me constantly tearing myself down. I have needed to prove myself to create a positive existence within myself that is being constantly drawn toward the negative.
Alright, alright, it’s probably not that I’ve got a bit of antimatter in me. But you have to admit, that would be more exciting.
And so I don’t know. I don’t know why I feel this constant imperative to show to myself – because it is to myself, really – over and over and over again that it is all right for me to exist. That is okay for me to be happy. The idea of doing something, well and truly and solely for my own pleasure – that is still an idea I am learning to be comfortable with. I mean, I’m still learning to be comfortable at all. In my body, in my mind, in my relationships. There is always some latent dissatisfaction, some missing piece, some screw up enfolded in the obscurity of a past that I somehow didn’t quite catch, that holds me back from every being truly happy. I mean, most days, my goal is just to not go crazy. Recently, a day without breaking down crying on my dorm room floor has been what’s counted as success.
Maybe I’ve just distorted that line about “everyone is here for a reason,” the whole “your life has a purpose” spiel. There’s a reason for me?! My life has a purpose?! What if I’m screwing up and not following through on what that reason for me is?! What if I’m doing it wrong?! What if I fail, don’t ever fulfill what my purpose was supposed to be?! What if I just fall short?! Every breath for me is a beat of “am I doing it? am I doing it? did I do it now? is this okay? oh god oh god oh god oh god…”
Heh. And people wonder why I have anxiety…
No, I am not looking for you to tell me that I am justified. I am not looking for you to tell me the right answer, to insist that I am alright, that it’s all okay, that I am good. You see, that’s part of the tricky business of the internal ruckus of mine. I require outside feedback to let me know that I am okay (because I couldn’t ever just trust myself, could I? that’s not objective observation…), but if I feel that it was given because I asked for it – well then, that just voids it right there. It’s like leading a witness in court. You said that because I directed you to. You may really mean it, but my brain doesn’t care about that. Nope, the only praise I can accept is the kind that has been spontaneously and freely given, that I have earned but not fished for.
(By the way, Miss Kim, I’m going to tell you again that I love you forever for the random messages you send me at like two in the afternoon while you’re at work that just pop up on my facebook chat telling me I’m pretty. You are a glorious, wonderful human being and I cannot exist without you. Also, I’m probably going to buy a mattress soon, like, for realsies and probably just have it delivered straight to the apartment, because fuck transporting queen-sized mattresses in a compact.)
I hope you all have a best friend like Miss Kim. Like Miss Kim, mind you. Because Miss Kim is mine. All mine.
*Ahem.* But really, I do. And I hope even more that perhaps this best friend is in fact some part of you. That perhaps you do not need an external positivity feed like I do. That perhaps you already have your own sense of justification, built into the infrastructure of yourself.
That would be nice.
But if you don’t – well, I understand. I’m here with you, too. And here’s to hoping that one day, we will be able to tear out that pesky piece of antimatter (using proper protective gloves, of course, gotta be careful when handling antimatter…) and finally fill that whole with some brick of justification that will finally stay and stick.
And until then, here’s to searching.
Quiet and I have such a strange relationship. I came across an article recently – well, actually I came across Time Kreider’s NYT opinion piece on the original article’s topic – about how Amtrak will (eventually) be offering residencies to writers in their Quiet Car. For me, a lover of train riding because of the unique ability of railroad tracks to send creative thoughts through my brain, the prospective chance of a residency within the Amtrak Quiet Car was simultaneously incredibly appealing and absolutely terrifying.
There is a magic to quiet. You can finally feel your mind settle into the lump of flesh that carries around the rest of you. There’s an integration of your consciousness, as it sits there together, all in one place, no longer drawn in dozens of little fragments to the noise in front of you and behind you and to the side of you, to the flashing lights and motion blurs all about the full range of your peripheral, the beating and banging and humming and whirring and shouting that divides our thinking capacity into a million different focal points.
No, in the quiet, suddenly your soul can hear itself again. And it’s a beautiful thing, as the voices that have been bourn within you by the stories and novels and letters and daydreams of your past mingle and birth new ideas for your mind to mill over.
It’s also a terrifying thing, if your brain also happens to host certain voices like mine.
They’re a bit louder, a bit harsher than the rest. They may not always all-out scream at you, but the small persistent whispers are just as distracting.
They are the voices of a mind used to abusing itself. They are the voices of mental lashing developed over the course of a young life in order to keep a yet-developing brain one step ahead from every other one around it – because if you can anticipate doom, anticipate fault, anticipate anger and criticism – then you can prevent it. It’s an entirely useful set of voices, when you are stuck in an environment that will kill you if you do not either learn to dodge or strike back.
But if you are one of the so-called lucky ones who manages to escape that environment, the brain that kept you going now becomes the enemy itself.
It’s much more difficult to dodge something that makes all the same movements that you do. It’s incredibly difficult for a hand to strike itself. It becomes a bit of a paradox, you see. The answer is to get away from yourself.
But, in that all too horrid cliche, wherever you go, there you are.
And so noise becomes your new coping mechanism. You surround yourself with stimuli – if you can feel the pressure of the world on your skin then perhaps you will not notice the perpetual lump in your throat. If you can blind your eyes with a TV show on a screen, maybe your brain won’t have enough sight left to envision all the terrible future scenarios that used to actually be legitimate threats but are now only figments of an anxious anticipation. If you can occupy your ears with the blaring electronica or chatter of a Youtube reel or the friendlier-toned (usually, at least) sounds of conversations about you, perhaps the wailing in your mind will not start. Or at the very least, perhaps, in a relative position, it will no longer seem so loud.
But to put yourself in quiet – that is to invite your mind to hear itself. And while you know that dreams and worlds and heroes have been born from the quiet that happens just as you slip from consciousness right before you fall asleep, you also know that when you are instead in the full-frontal awareness of agitated midday, and silence falls…
Well, sometimes the mind doesn’t have very nice things to say when you’ve shut it up from the world for a while.
Quiet is where the best thinking happens, in the still of a place where you can hear again the merest exhale of the soul’s breath. But unfortunately, it’s also where you can hear every last gasp of a soul that’s been crying.
Watch your language.
Words are important. They’re one of the primary ways we as humans communicate. Therefore, what we say, what our speech is, to ourselves and others, is important, right?
You fucking bet your ass it is! Seriously. “Bad words” are only “bad” when they’re used in a malicious way. But a word doesn’t have to be a four letter one to qualify for that. I’ve had personal experience seeing how much more damage the intentional use of the word “asinine” can have compared to casually (and amicably) calling someone a dick. So what is it that makes these particular words – you know, fuck and shit and dammit and holy crapballs and the like – “bad?” Well, mostly ’cause that’s what the stingy adults of the past 3 generations or so have decided. What words count as “unacceptable” changes over time. “Jiminy Cricket” used to be a highly frowned upon phrase. Now it’s the name of a featured character in a Disney movie.
I used to curb my language. For ever and for always. Now I pretty much allow myself to use whatever vocabulary I want – as long as I am also being respectful of the people around me. Like, I’m not going to use sailor language around my ten year old cousin because I know her mom wouldn’t like that. Just like how I’m not going to hug the friends I have who need really big space bubbles. But if I’m talking with a peer or hanging out with my boyfriend? I know that saying words like “ass” or I dunno, licking his arm or something isn’t going to cause either of them psychological damage or whatever.
And you know what? Watching my language – well, watching my language do whatever it wants – it’s been really freeing. I used to feel guilty as hell for just thinking the word fuck. And I didn’t even really have much choice over that! Now that I’ve realized I’m no worse a person for say damn and shit than I am for saying bubbles or rainbows, I no longer shlog around with the weight of a whip-wielding propriety judge on my back. I feel so much better. More confident. Stable. I mean, shit, that propriety judge was such a dick anyway.
Now, lovely readers, I’m sorry if any of you feel that the title of this post was click bait. If you’ve never read my blog before, sorry for any misrepresentation. But the rest of you – hopefully you all know how I feel about “5 Ways to Blah Blah Blah” style lists by now. Seriously. What did you think I was going to do, anyway? 😉
It’s odd, that Orion the Hunter would be my favorite constellation. That I would have in me a love for something so strange to my nature.
Perhaps it’s because he was the first constellation I was ever able to pick out from the night sky on my own. Perhaps it’s because if he is in the sky, then I can always find him. Perhaps it’s because I just know that he’s there, know the stars that outline his existence. He is familiar. And that is comforting.
It’s odd, how sometimes things so different, so contrary to ourselves are what we cling to, because they are familiar.
Or perhaps I do find a kindred spirit, beyond the acts, in the man the gods put in the sky. He is a Hunter – but in more ways than one, I am too.
We just hunt different things. He seeks animals that are not lost. I seek the animal that I am to become.
But both of us, when we find those things, devour them.
Voraciously.
Depression is no longer an atmosphere now for me. It is not a fog, not the ether through which every day plods, not the pervasive perpetual drowning that it was for months of my life. No, now depression is an interruption. An undercut. A startling collapse of the stage I thought I had so solidly built for myself to stand on. I’ll be walking through my day, seeing clear and breathing free the sparkling clarity of the air around me, when suddenly, I will sit down and some beam, some ballast will splinter and snap within me.
It happens without warning. It happens when I am unawares. And most often, it happens when I am alone.
Lots of the time, I think, at least, it happens just when I have decided to work. I have sat down at the keyboard, or opened a textbook at my desk, picked up a pencil and notepad to work on, and suddenly, my inner fortitude will implode.
Perhaps it is because it is at these times that I am most silent, most still, waiting and vulnerable. The mists of uncertainty can rise up from my soul and condense within me, until they form a painful, solid lump of memory that whacks at the legs I have balanced my new platform upon.
It’s in the solitary quiet that I am most a victim of myself.
That time when depression was the daily weather forecast, unchanged from when some meteoric prediction was made ages ago and left frozen on the screen, I think I set myself up for this. Unwittingly and without choice, sure.
I would come home from school, where I’d spent eight hours that day battling just to stay at the surface of my brain, but more often descending into the suck of its derisive, murderous quicksand. But on the outside, at least, even as I sunk deeper and deeper into the much within, I managed an appearance at least of neutrality.
Oh look, there’s our future valedictorian. Isn’t she pretty. So attentive to the teacher, so ponderous in her work.
People think our eyes are windows but they are merely cracks in a wall, and you cannot see through skin.
So, I would arrive home, flee up the stairs and behind my bedroom door, leaving it locked behind me, of course. And there, where I shed the weight of my backpack and nothing else from my shoulders, I let those walls shatter around me.
And I would cry.
I would cry for hours. Sometimes, I’d try to stuff the pressure of undrowned sorrows back, get to work right away, but that always proved a futile move. It was short and decisive, the tap it took for my mind to break the glass of my eyes, the non-windows.
But I was to be the future valedictorian, attentive to the teacher, ponderous in her work. The idea of returning to school with anything unfinished was anathema. And so the struggle would begin, the tug of war between my tear ducts and my pencil lead, two halves of my mind jeering as they pushed and shoved for control. The brain is a tyrant, and I was under its most merciless control.
School work, whether it was a chemistry set or page of physics problems or couple of chapters of biology reading, became a sharply painful task to face. Because there, with my mind fresh and sweating from its mental acrobatics, I was most prone to cramps from its internal infection.
The voice that says you should die is not a kind one, and it doesn’t give much of a shit about whether you need it to be quiet so you can focus on your calculus homework.
I learned to anticipate a lot of frustration whenever I’d attempt to work, that year.
And while I have slain so much of that monster that grew within me and called its name myself, there are still corners of rebellion in the recesses of my body that never quite gave over harboring that dark hulk of gnawing, piercing tooth and fatally sharp eye. And sometimes, the progeny or memory or still-unrejected parts of that monster rear up in me.
It’s usually when I’m alone. It’s usually when I’m not expecting. It’s usually when I’m trying to do work.
And so I do that thing that so many refer to as “dicking around on the computer.” I flit from sight to sight, trying to find some input that will reset my emotions and allow me to awake once more, refreshed and able to get down to business without the ghosts of old nightmares swimming before my brain and crowding, clouding my vision. I shove down the tearful thunder storms that seemed to appear out of nowhere, knowing that I have stared at my skies for hours on end, hashed and rehashed all of my weather systems, done my duty and attended to the cloud formations that have swept across my soul.
I distract myself. Usually with the internet. Browsing may be a solo activity, but the pages and posts, they whisper of other existences and remind me that there are other humans, others out there. And then I don’t feel so alone.
Some call it procrastination. I call it survival.
I have a rather intense fear of tornados. It’s just shy of a phobia, actually. I grew up in the Midwest, where there is actually a period of the year that’s fucking called tornado season. And, knowing full well that I would have to live through said tornado season, year after year at least until I turned eighteen, my parents saw no problem in letting five-year-old-me watch the movie Twister with them. For those of you unfamiliar with this movie, let me provide you with a few sentences from the IMDB plot synopsis:
“The father, in an attempt to save his family, tries to hold the storm cellar door down, but gets sucked into the tornado and killed.”
“The tornado hurls a section of a TV tower through their windshield, impaling Eddie. Both teams watch in horror as Jonas’s truck is lifted up by the tornado and thrown into the ground where it explodes, killing both Eddie and Jonas.”
“They find metal pipes inside this shelter and tie themselves to the pipes with leather belts. The tornado destroys the structure, and they are pulled upside down while anchored to the pipes.”
Happy happy joy joy, right? THIS MOVIE IS FUCKING TERRIFYING! And I was five.
Yeah, little me didn’t have nightmares about monsters. She had nightmares about tornados. These persisted until I moved away for college to beautiful, blessed, tornado-less California. Earthquakes? Not a big deal. Whirling vortex of doom taunting me with the possibility of tearing down my house and killing everyone I love because even meteorologists can’t be completely sure about its path and I therefore have to sit in a cold basement for hours listening to sirens and contemplating my potentially impending death? Yeah, no thanks.
Aaaaanyhoo. My response to those tornado sirens did teach me a fair amount about my priorities. From the time I was five up till I moved out at eighteen, any and every time there were tornado sirens, I moved the things I hoped to give some chance of making it through a tornado down to the basement. Sure, when I was five, those were all basically my stuffed animals. But once I hit eight or so, my priorities shifted. Fluff-stuffed bits of cloth weren’t what gave me comfort and identity anymore.
Words were.
So, once those tornado sirens started to whine, I would move my books.
Well, actually first I would move my dog, because she was a living thing and I was more likely to be able to salvage my books intact from the hypothetical future wreckage than I would my dog. But after my dogs, my books were first. Books and journals too, once I started keeping those regularly enough for them to be a significant container of my soul.
Oh, yeah, of course I was also yelling at my family members to get their butts down to the basement while I shuttled back and forth between there and my room. But my parents and sister, they have legs and situational awareness and could very well get themselves to safety. My journals weren’t going to move themselves.
And so, year after year, with each overly enthusiastic late-summer storm that sent wails through muggy air, I was presented with the terrifying opportunity to figure out what, right then and there, I wanted most in my life to save. What mattered most to me? What did I consider most valuable, most vital?
Well, yes, my dog. But after that, it was the writing in my life. My journals, the words I had set sail on the whispering sea of existence, they were what I had poured my identity into. My books, the voices of the authors and characters that had murmured in my brain through the years, they held memories more than any picture ever could for me. There are years tucked between those pages, pressed into the print by the weight of the covers.
Writing, it is the scrawl of my soul. It is my self-preservation.
I have nightmares sometimes. And by “sometimes” I mean sometimes they really are true nightmares, the kind that leave you cold in your bed when you wake up, frozen with a sense of gruesome horror. Sometimes, though, I call my nightmares “stress dreams,” because they leave me not so much afraid as weary and worried and anxious.
No matter what, I wake up to wet clothes and a body dripping with sweat. It’s unpleasant.
And sometimes, I shake when I dream. I’ll awake to my boyfriend’s arms around me, his hands pressing my head to his cheek, his voice low and whispering my name, begging me to wake up, or stating – and it is an assertion, no such flimsy thing as a coo – that it’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.
But sometimes, I’m awake before the shaking starts. I’ve left my dream and its festering or frittering behind, fully conscious if eyes closed there on the sodden mattress. And before I’ve time to take a first waking breath, my body convulses. I jolt from the center, hinging around my stomach as the contractions come. My body, railing not at a nightmare but at its existence, the tortured mess of nerves my mind has forced upon it, crying in the only way that muscles and tendons can, as they release the stress in heave after heave of screams that could not be made aloud, letting out the tension of a night spent tangled up in the dank sheets of my worried mind, paralyzed.
There is no fight or flight for the unconscious. You cannot run from dreams. And so my body racks and rages at the brain it cannot eject, trying to shake the bones within me awake, to move themselves and kick and fight and scream in claw marks down whatever has caused the adrenaline to course through my veins while my consciousness flails under the dredges of a restless sleep to put the world back together once more.
But instead they only curl my legs closer and wrap my arms together so that at least while my body still lies there, subsiding into twitches, the waking mind, just as much a victim, won’t feel so alone, hiding its face and rasping softly – please, forgive me my sense of horror.
Quill Aquiver 