Rock On

Some neat crystals that I now have listed for sale! ✨

Hello folks! I'm Boggle and I come to you asking for some help! Like I mentioned before, I am officially scheduled for top surgery in January. The surgery itself is paid for, but for a few reasons, I'll be paying privately rather than through Canadian medicare. Which means I'm spending a good deal more than I had originally intended.

And surgery means post-op care, which means supplies! I've got some things listed here that would make my life much, much easier and more comfortable once I'm out of there and healing.

Hi everyone, I’m so sorry I’ve been gone for so long - but as I’m sure you can imagine, I have an insanely busy life as a young journalist and college student in NYC. Right now I’m working on my final article for my Reporting Underrepresented Communities class - it’s due Monday night. I have NO sources and I have to do three interviews. I’m freaking out.

I’m writing my article on plus-sized performers in theatre. If you identify as a plus-sized performer in theatre (or have been one at some point in your life,) PLEASE contact me for a brief interview (five questions), my grade depends on it. I’ve posted on all my other social media and received nothing despite a wide array of followers. This article with your interview will not be published anywhere, it will just be turned into my professor for a grade.

You don’t have to be a professional performer - community theatre and high school theatre are totally fine. Anything that’s had you on a stage. I will need a last name for the interview, but I promise I am just a normal college student trying to survive, and I’ll give you my LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever makes you comfortable so you can give it a little sweep to see that I’m not a weirdo.

If you’re interested, you can send me a private message here, OR you can DM me on my Twitter, @ megmnyc.

Please, guys...I need help. I’m starting to think I won’t get anything and I’m terrified. I have two days to do this.

These little snippets, scraps of pieces, of thoughts and feelings, scattered through books and articles and letters.

(As if someone lit a fuse, in the middle of a life, and cast its pieces to the four winds, to be assembled in dusty archives by trembling fingers, tears welling in eyes.)

That his fingers were long, and his smile beautiful, and his vocabulary better-endowed than to use the word “scum.” That he loved sailing, and music, and books, and walks by the Atlantic, and was skilled at building cut-stone fireplaces, the practicality of the work, the same hands that sought pulses and palpated chests and played the accordion and picked flowers for the one woman, the best woman. Hands skilled to hold a gun or sign documents in writing illegible.

That his eyes were hazel, and his hair fell over his forehead, and his smile was especially sweet when he could not hear, and he polished his glasses as a sign that it was time to leave, skipping down the stairs like schoolchildren escaping to freedom.

His pronouncements grave like diagnoses, his voice soft because to be hard cost him breath, cost him time, resolute to the point of pacifistic militancy.

The contemplative squint to find the perfect word, the little defiant nod, the self-editing and faint hesitancy, re-framing, re-phrasing, a slightly shifted narrative.

That he could be firm and stern and yet prevaricate, could change his mind and learn and adapt, beliefs tainted, cast aside to connections torn asunder, the discomfort in remembering that which was touched and known by others who would have no more to do, those he could have no more to do, the association festered and raw, wounds on the soul, in the heart of a man given to great feeling, great emotion, and hearts ruled by great emotion are easily shaken and re-aligned in betrayal and perceived betrayal and the grief of what might have been.

That he was all of these things and a bundle of contradictions and more, that he was a walking oxymoron, but never moronic.

And they discount him and what he was, on the grounds of inconsistency, of bitterness, of vindictiveness.

Not inconstant, but changing, damaged. Not bitter but hurt. Not vindictive, but outspoken.

A heart that could hold a city, hold an empire, hold a world.

And they would not see, because they could not let themselves think. And he could not fit a paradigm, or a mould, or be shaped to fit, because he just was.

Just was.

Human.

The cold in your back, deep into your spine, creeping into your ribs.

Curl up tighter, try to fit yourself to the blankets, to the contours of the bed, your hot water bottle half-chilled.

No shape that will do, no contortion, the cramp in your hip, in your side, in your shoulder telling you this is too far, too much, you’re not sixteen anymore.

(And thank God for that.)

To not be alone.

To not be alone, to curl up and feel someone curled behind you, one arm circling around your waist, drawing you closer, back pressed in to a warm chest, a beating heart, a voice soft in your ear, telling you to sleep, that you will not be cold again tonight.

Such dreams, sweet dreams.

As if your imaginings have conjured her real, the click of the door closing, footsteps padding across the carpet, the dip of the bed.

(Already you feel a little warmer, just at the thought of her coming.)

Only right that he should go first, what a different daughter said about a different father. He would be lost without her, companion across thirty years and more.

Shift.

An ocean away, a different man, a different woman, two daughters just the same, the mirror. The thought of one without the other unthinkable. A pair, a partnership, a life shared over sixty years.

That he, too, would be the first to go.

(Better to be the one to go? Better to be the one left behind? Or was she, already, the one better equipped to cope? So many years of worry, and that it would be borne out, in the end.)

(It would never have been fair, one way or the other. Never have been right. Only terrible, equally so.)

The very question, cruel in its simplicity. The silence that greeted it, the only answer.

(How could mere words suffice? There is no language that could twist to suit, no sounds formed by a searching tongue.)

That it would be him.

(for @bogglebabbles)

She has never sculpted a face before, but she would try it now. Try it, and render that face in clay, the sternness of it, the angle of that jaw and the slight knowing tilt.

She has never sculpted a face before, but she has made a study of this one, studied the words written by others (one a scholar, one who knew that face better than any other in the world), studied the images of it, smiling and stern and in slight bemusement and in unawareness of the camera pointed at him, the sharp focus pointed elsewhere.

She has never sculpted a face before, has never had much faith in her ability to sketch, but she has sculpted animals, has sculpted flowers tiny and delicate, and those are reminiscent of the flowers plucked by the hands that went with the face she would sculpt, those tiny bouquets given as gifts, picked just because they caught his eye in a moment, because they reminded him of her, the one woman, the best woman, who memorialized him in words when she could have him no more, her own gentle tribute the inspiration for she who would sculpt his face.

If you were an artist you would sketch that face from memory. Sketch every line, every crease, every dimple and dip and angle of cheekbone. Each lash individual, precise, the cracks of the corners of each eye. Two hundred and eighty-seven individual hairs in each brow, dark and delicate and feathery, so soft beneath your fingertips.

And you would not just sketch that face once, but ten times, a hundred times. Marvell and his coy mistress…”a hundred years should go to praise/thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze…” recited by soft lips into the curve of your neck, whispered low and warm and you swallowed and shivered, mouth too dry for words.

Not just sketch that face, but a hundred different lights, different angles, tilt of jaw and knowing gaze and faint impassivity and mild sternness, and grinning, laughing, smiling at some secret joke, shared only with you. Try to capture the precise way the light hits that hair in the early morning sun.

The planes of your face are not your own.

It’s the oddest thought, one you’ve never had before, one that’s never entered into your head.

But your face is not your own.

Whatever of the angle, whatever of the light, you see it now in all these photographs, old and not so old. You find your nose, find the angles of your cheeks, the line of your jaw. And the firm set of his head is not quite the firm set of your head because you have never carried your head firm, but it feels like it could be, feels like you could arrange your face to match those features.

But it is not your face.

Not your face, because it’s his face, his face just a little changed, just a little tweaked, something around the eyes, something about the mouth, and you wear your hair loose, not swept back in faintly academic sternness.

His face, the same as yours.

Not his face either though, not his and not yours, but his father’s, his father’s face passed down through these generations, through blood and breeding, his father’s face as it might have been, the proud rigidity the same and there are no photos of his father’s father, but you find yourself wondering now what that man was like, and how he carried himself, and if your grandfather was like his father, then maybe you’re more of your grandfather’s grandfather.

Who’s to say, now?

(Would it be so terrible?)