as long as we are under the stars, we are home

on nostalgia

Fancy and I lay in the grass near the neighbor's yard at 2:00 a.m. The grass is wet, the insects are loud. I sing a sad song to her but change the words at the last minute.

I'm somewhat hard of hearing. She responds to the sound of a bird's feet as it hops up a branch. I thrive on color, work with it every day, and there's a lot of it she cannot see. Her eyes detect motion faster than the refresh rate of my TV. I can taste sweetness better than she can, but she has a whole wilderness of umami open to her that I can't even imagine. She reads the past with her nose, myriad detailed stories unfold for her in a form of chronological and spatial storytelling I will never experience. I can just ask where Daddy has been. I feel and grasp with my sensitive hands, my skin senses temperature everywhere, but through whiskers and fur, she feels the motion of the air across her entire body.

I can see the birds on the power lines at the end of the street clearly.

I'm guessing wildly at this, but this is the Large Magellanic Cloud, the best photo I could find showing visibility up to magnitude 8.

Then my approximation of a human view at magnitude 6 from a dark sky site.

Then the same for a cat with blurry vision who can't see all the colors.

Worse than napkin math, but resources for this were strangely hard to find, and I'm not an expert, so don't take any of this as accurate.

But any way you cut it, her sky is so bright and everything is soft and blurred together, like trying to concentrate on something in a dream.

The stars don't move or smell like anything. She doesn't look up while we are outside. I'd be kind of spooked if she did. Instead of stargazing, she spends half an hour cataloging various pisses from the strays and listening to what I think is the sound of the geckos that live in the stonework and creepers.

I cannot perceive these things, but they matter to her, and from the way she lies on the needlework I'm trying to finish, I know she cares about my interests also. The geckos, the pissing, the sewing, the stars, it is all equally important. It all merges in a soft, blurry, bright mass.

Everyone is being so supportive it is great <3

Veronica Ngô as Quỳnh in THE OLD GUARD 2 (2025)

In Vietnamese, while the speaker is talking/arguing with their partner and suddenly switches to pronouns pair: tao (first person, gender neutral) and mày (third person, gender neutral), this often signals as an unofficial breakup, or the relationship is now on thin ice at best.

The English sub for the Vietnamese at this part is completely wrong. She 100% did not say "I curse you for all your lifetimes." That also has absolutely no emotional impact between them.

Instead what Quỳnh actually said was specifically a callback to their conversation earlier. At around 43 min mark, Quỳnh said, "You once told me the only thing you fear is being alone."

The Wheel of Time 3x01 | To Race the Shadow

Rough translation if anyone’s curious :

I searched. I did. I searched for centuries— But you stopped.

THE OLD GUARD 2 (2025)