You just lean into each step, and before you know it, you’re home.
How could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: it was the weight of all that time wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life, gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever undigestible, everyone hungry for more.
We like to build on the edge, don’t we? Right on the edge of disaster. Because if we don’t, it leaves room for someone else to build between us and whatever it is we desire. We’re all like Icarus in that way.” Ness points toward the natural jetty to the south. “Let’s walk the shell line this way.
We held each other clumsily, four legs proving more stable than two, as we joined the others in running. Running and surviving.
The races I study still employ their immune systems, and the parallels between those systems and us as a race are striking. For we have become what Earthlings would call white blood cells. We remove foreign bodies from the cosmos. And every one leaves an imprint, a bauble of tech or a new idea, all of which we neatly coil into our lives, into our molecular structure. We are an immune system, and we are immune to death. This last, alas, is our curse.
The futility, dread, and exhaustion from the day before were gone. All that remained was a small twinge of fear that these dour feelings could return, that this exuberant elation was a temporary high, that if she stopped, if she thought on it too long, it would spiral away and leave her dark and moody once more.
We survive in order to struggle. Struggling means we’re winning.
Maybe God would hear her thoughts and rat her out.
Memories of bright and colorful worlds swirl together. The one thing in common is the brown mud on my boots. Slogging through battlefields. Noticing details like how the insides of sentient things have much in common: the same blood that colors red in the air, the sacs for breathing, the sacs for pumping blood through tubes, the tendrils for turning thoughts into things.
I think that, with a lot of art, you just have to be bad at it a long time before the magic happens.
The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinction required something else, something with more vision, something impossibly patient.
She would’ve been torn between acting cool and nonchalant and wanting to geek out over the experience.
We tend to discover only those things we seek.
Juliette had somehow crossed an uninhabitable void, had gone from one universe to another, was possibly the first ever to have done so, and here was a graveyard of foreign souls, of people just like her having lived and died in a world so similar and so near to her own.
I’m a chipper guy, once you get to know the raw, dark dread and petrified fear that lurks in my breast and that I battle with every waking moment and that sometimes has me sobbing into my palms when no one is around and makes it really hard to be in crowds or to stand any loud sounds and has me thinking I’ll probably never be in a functional relationship again, platonic or otherwise. Once you get that, you have to say to yourself, “Hey, why’s this guy so damn happy all the time?
Back then she’d been unfairly treated, but at least she’d been safe. There had been injustice, but she’d been in love. Did that make it okay? Which sacrifice made more sense?
This was what happened to the dying soul; it scrambled for some perch, some stairway to cling to, some way not to fall.
Here, kids celebrated whoever got away with the worst behavior while shunning anyone attempting to do the right thing.
The things we recognize flash right by, where once they held our attention. Only the new bears careful contemplation, and the new gets harder and harder to come by.
Symmetry, by surrounding us, makes itself invisible.