エミリー, after.

Aries: you’re about to find yourself. it’s about to be hard, scary, and it almost might seem unbearable. you’re going to reach new highs that you’ve never thought you would, and maybe some new lows that will rock you. but, you’re about to find positivity within all the moments that you have. you’re about to understand yourself and your limits more than ever. you’re going to realize that all the strength you’ve ever needed was always inside of you. all of it was fucking worth it, you’re going to feel all of this.

Taurus: you are going to be in a huge transition period this year. you’re going to find immense change in your own world. it might scare you to your core, but it’s exactly what you needed. new things and new people and a new life. most of all, a totally new perspective. you’re going to open your eyes to so many things and you’re going to realize that things weren’t what you always thought they were… they’re better.

Gemini: you are about to feel free. you’re about to go through a year of letting go. you’re going to let go of people who caused you pain in the past, you’re going to let go of shit that messed you up. you’re going to realize that moving forward is the best thing you can do for yourself. you’ll find things that you enjoy doing again this year. you are going to get out of that fog, but don’t completely cross out what brought you here. it’s still a part of you.

Cancer: what a curse it is, to feel so very deeply. oh, but it is also a blessing. this year is going to give you many awakenings. you’re going to use your empathy to your advantage, you’re going to make a change in many peoples lives. seeing someone so authentic like you, gives other people hope that they can open up too, just like you. you’re going to use the things you find the most unappealing about yourself to help other people. it may seem small to you when it happens, but it’s huge. this, for you, is going to be very fulfilling. don’t forget yourself in the process, but remember that what you’re doing is important.

Leo: in 2018, you were lost. you might’ve hit your breaking point and you might’ve thought there was nothing left in you. however, you were just getting started. this year, you will find your fire again. you’ll stand up taller than you ever have and you’ll roar louder than ever. this year, you’re going to learn that you are stronger than you ever believed yourself to be. you’re going to find your confidence again, you’re going to take on this life thing on your own and make it your absolute bitch. the people who left, don’t matter. you’re not going to let them affect you any longer. you’re going to figure out who was always meant to be by your side.

Virgo: this year, positivity is going to be your best friend. you’re so used to things going wrong or not going your way, that you’ve conditioned yourself to think about the worst possible outcomes. but, what if thinking differently was actually the key to everything? you have the power to change your own mindset, and this year, whether you believe it or not, it’s going to happen. you’re going to be so caught up in living life and being busy that suddenly you’ll realize that you aren’t so afraid of being happy anymore. you will flourish, you will get the things you want. all you have to do is keep on believing.

Libra: your worth is greater and bigger than what you think. this year, you’re going to realize this. at some point, you’re going to look at your life and how you let people take advantage of you and you’re finally going to say “no more.” you are wonderful and capable and worthy of all the things you want. you just have to see it for yourself, you have to see that your life should not be lived based on making people happy that wouldn’t do the same for you. it’s going to be an awakening for you, but it’s going to be beautiful.

Scorpio: you are in the midst of chaos right now. you’re thinking that life is always going to be this whirlwind of emotions and that nothing will ever settle down. this year, you’ll find your safe place. the one you can run to when things are going bad. whether that place be an actual place, a hobby, or even a person. it’s going to bring you peace like you’ve never felt before. remember to hold onto it. you’re going to finally let go of that wall you’ve been holding up forever, don’t be alarmed when it comes crashing down. it’s going to be natural.

Sagittarius: what a year you’re going to have. first and most importantly, pure love is in store. this doesn’t have to mean romantic love, but it sure is a possibility. you’ve been holding back for quite some time when it comes to opening up your heart, but thats going to change now. secondly, when you find this love, you’re going to be faced with your natural instinct, which is to run. when this happens, don’t run. you’ll be missing out on a happiness that you haven’t felt before. learning to open up is one of the most important lessons you’ll learn in this life, you have to let it come.

Capricorn: this year, you’re going to end cutting out people and things that don’t make you happy. this is pure self care and the first step to putting yourself first. you tend to not put your needs first too often. you’re no longer going to let everyone walk all over you. you do everything for other people, and this year will be your selfish year. when you find yourself feeling bad about it, don’t. this is the start of something that always needed to happen, and you’ll find yourself much more peaceful if you run with it.

Aquarius: who you are now, might be a stranger by the end of 2019. but doesn’t it always go that way? maybe, but it’s going to be different from what you imagine. you’re going to become stable in who you are. you’re going to suddenly have an understanding of your place in the world, perhaps you might find your purpose. it’s going to come so fast and naturally, that you’re going to question what your world was before this reason for living came along. remember that this is happening for a reason, you are meant to do great things and you’re about to see what all of this means.

I WAS WRONG

“kill it,” the captain says, but the ice is melting in his eyes.

“we can’t,” the first mate says desperately, praying she won’t have to fight her captain on this. “we can’t. we - i won’t. we won’t.”

“i know.”

x

“daddy,” she says, floating in a tub of seawater in the hold, “daddy, la-la, la-la-la.”

her voice rings like bells. her accent is strange; her mouth isn’t made for human words. it mesmerises even the hardiest amongst them and she wasn’t even trying. the crew has taken to diving for shellfish near the shorelines for her; she loves them, splitting the shells apart with strength seen in no human toddler, slurping down the slimy molluscs inside and laughing, all plump brown cheeks and needle-sharp teeth. she sometimes splashes them for fun with her smooth, rubbery brown tail. even when they get soaked they laugh. they love her.

“daddy,” she calls again, and he can hear the worry in her voice. the storm rocking the ship is harsh and uncaring, and if they go down, she would be the only survivor.

“don’t worry,” he says, and goes over, sitting next to the tub. the first mate, leaning against the wall, pretends not to notice as he quietly begins to sing.

x

“father,” she says, one day, as she leans on the edge of the dock and the captain sits next to her, “why am I here?”

“your mother abandoned you,” he says, as he always has. “we found you adrift, and couldn’t bear to leave you there.”

she picks at the salt-soaked boards, uncertain. her hair is pulled back in a fluffy black puff, the white linen holding it slipping almost over one of her dark eyes. one of her first tattoos, a many-limbed kraken, curls over her right shoulder and down her arm, delicate tendrils wrapped around her calloused fingertips. “alright,” she says.

x

“why am I really here?” she asks the first mate, watching the sun set over the water in streaks of liquid metal that pooled in the troughs of the waves and glittered on the seafoam.

“we didn’t know any better,” the first mate says, staring into the water. “we didn’t know- we didn’t know anything. we didn’t understand why she fought so viciously to guard her treasure. we could not know she protected something a thousand times more precious than the purest gold.”

she wants to be furious, but she can’t. she already knew the answer, from reading the guilt in her father’s eyes and the empty space in her own history. and she can’t hate her family.

“it’s alright,” she says. “i do have a family, anyways. i don’t think i would have liked my other life near as much.”

x

her kraken grows, spreading its tendrils over her torso and arms. she grows too, too large to come on board the ship without being hauled up in a boat from the water. she sings when the storms come and swims before the ship to guide it to safety. she fights off more than one beast of the seas, and gathers a set of scars across her back that she bears with pride. “i don’t mind,” she says, when the captain fusses over her, “now i match all of you.”

the first time their ship is threatened, really threatened, is by another fleet. a friend turned enemy of the first mate. “we shouldn’t fight him,” she says, peering through the spyglass.

“why not?” the mermaid asks.

“he’ll win,” the first mate says.

the mermaid tips her head sideways. Her eyes, dark as the deep waters, gleam in the noon light. “are you sure?” she asks.

x

the enemy fleet surrenders after the flagship is sunk in the night, the anchor ripped off the ship and the planks torn off the hull. the surviving crew, wild-eyed and delirious, whimper and say a sea serpent came from the water and attacked them, say it was longer than the boat and crushed it in its coils. the first mate hears this and has to hide her laughter. the captain apologizes to his daughter for doubting her.

“don’t worry,” she says, with a bright laugh, “it was fun.”

x

the second time, they are pushed by a storm into a royal fleet. they can’t possibly fight them, and they don’t have the time to escape.

“let me up,” the mermaid urges, surfacing starboard and shouting to the crew. “bring me up, quickly, quickly.”

they lower the boat and she piles her sinous form into it, and uses her claws to help the crew pull her up. once on the deck she flops out of the boat and makes her way over to the bow. the crew tries to help but she’s so heavy they can barely lift parts of her.

she crawls up out in front of the rail and wraps her long webbed tail around the prow. the figurehead has served them well so far but they need more right now. she wraps herself around the figurehead and raises her body up into the wind takes a breath of the stinging salt air and sings.

the storm carries her voice on its front to the royal navy. they are enchanted, so stunned by her song that they drop the rigging ropes and let the tillers drift. the pirates sail through the center of the fleet, trailing the storm behind them, and by the time the fleet has managed to regain its senses they are buried in wind and rain and the pirates are gone.

x

she declines guns. instead she carries a harpoon and its launcher, and uses them to board enemy ships, hauling her massive form out of the water to coil on the deck and dispatch enemies with ruthless efficiency. her family is feared across all the sea.

x

“you know we are dying,” the captain says, looking down at her.

she floats next to the ship, so massive she could hold it in her arms. her eyes are wise.

“i know,” she says, “i can feel it coming.”

the first mate stands next to the captain. she never had a lover or a child, and neither did he, but to the mermaid they are her parents. she will always love her daughter. the tattoos are graven in dark swirls across the mermaid’s deep brown skin and the flesh of her tail, even spiraling onto the spiked webbing on her spine and face. her hair is still tied back, this time with a sail that could not be patched one last time.

“we love you,” the first mate says simply, looking down. her own tightly coiled black hair falls in to her face; she shakes the locs out of the way and smiles through her tears. the captain pretends he isnt crying either.

“i love you too,” the mermaid says, and reached up to pull the ship down just a bit, just to hold them one last time.

“guard the ship,” the captain says. “you always have but you know they’re lost without you.”

“without you,” the mermaid corrects, with a shrug that makes waves. “what will we do?”

“i don’t know,” the captain says. “but you’ll help them, won’t you?”

“of course i will,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes. “i will always protect my family.”

x

the captain and the first mate are gone. the ship has a new captain, young and fearless - of the things she can afford to disregard. she fears and loves the ocean, as all captains do. she does not fear the royal fleet. and she does not fear the mermaid.

“you know, i heard stories about you when i was a little girl,” she says, trailing her fingers in the water next to the dock.

the mermaid stares at her with one eye the size of a dinner table. “is that so?” she hums, smirking with teeth sharper than the swords of the entire navy.

“they said you could sink an entire fleet and that you had skin tougher than dragon scales,” the new captain says, grinning right back at the monster who could eat her without a moment’s hesitation. “i always thought they were telling tall tales.”

“and now?”

“they were right,” the new captain says. “how did they ever befriend you?”

1. A box of chocolate. At one point it was a box of chocolates, but it was left alone for a while and now there is only one extremely large, satisfied-looking chocolate in there. Do you want to risk it? That thing looks like it might take your hand off. At least the box will contain it until it gets hungry enough to eat cardboard.

2. A gigantic, roughly spherical puzzle box, made of rough stone and lovingly decorated with the fruits of millions of years of evolution. So far none of the decorations have had the insight to push the spiky lever in just the right way so as to unlock the outermost layer and allow access to the layers of locks inside, but it is surely only a matter of time before someone does so accidentally.

3. A box made of box hedges, the sky and the muddy earth. It is the point in the hedge maze which you can never reach; no ways in and no ways out and no gaps to squeeze under. This is where the maze’s true heart is. Did you think that it would really open its heart to all comers to trample through?

4. A mime containment box, perfectly transparent, used on high streets throughout major cities without anyone batting an eyelid even though the keeping of mimes in small enclosed spaces arguably contravenes multiple laws. Mime hunters argue that trapping them with boxes is the only way to keep their numbers down in the wild, particularly as the number of mimes escaping from drama schools has increased in recent years. A fully grown mime can completely empty an urban park of human statues and can also interfere in the natural lifecycles of pavement artists and buskers.

5. A lute box which, upon opening, will reveal a randomly selected medieval minstrel of greater or lesser monetary value. Typically you can get the maximum return on lute boxes by hiring out the minstrels to academics in relevant fields. The highest-value minstrels come dressed in cloth of gold and may have witnessed important historical events upon which they can give an unique perspective.

6. A box formed only by the area of sunlight coming through a South-facing window. This box functions roughly as an advent calendar for vampires; they check it daily at sunset. On day one there was only one person there, but each day now there are usually several and sometimes they have dogs or uniforms or cool accessories like those things that go bang.

7. A delivery box which contains too much space. About three million cubic light-years at first estimate. This would not be too much of a problem if the item that was being delivered was on the top. But it is in the middle somewhere, which means that you are going to have to build a spaceship which can support multiple generations in order to get in there and collect it. This is a common problem when purchasing large amounts of dark matter and you should perhaps have read the reviews before ordering.

8. A Jack-in-the-box, sinisterly grinning as it sneaks beneath parked cars and raises them a modest amount over the ground.

Limewire or Ikea?

Is your room messy or a perfect white sphere of barely contained rage?

what color are your?

Do you like your name? why? When are you changing it? How long has it been since they died?

What is your relationship status? 

How long has it been since food didnt taste like ash?

Can you hear them? The angels in the wires? 

What kind of car do you drive? Color? Sound? 

When you go shopping? Can you hear the roaring on the horizon?

Bellowing of some titanic beast that seems to lament the setting sun?

Can you hear them? The angels are lonely little things.

Calling out to archived threads full of forgotten passwords.

Any siblings? How often do they blink? How wide are their smiles?

if you can hide anywhere in the world where would it be? why?

Favorite snapchat filter? 

Would you take responsibility for the graveyard of mites inside your phone case?

How long has it been since the shower felt like summer rain?

Favorite TV show?

Have you ever felt like the world has simply forgotten about you?

Like youve become a ghost?

As if the hudreds of people you see every day would walk right through?

Do you work out?

There are those of us like you, those weakly imprinted upon the world

How much do you have in your wallet right now?

Are you wearing good walking shoes?

How many pillows do you sleep with?

Where do you work?

How many friends do you have?

Whats the worst thing you have ever done?

You are becomming faint. Come back to us.

Top three favorite bands?

Top three favorite songs?

We miss you.

Favorite movie? Please listen?

Do you have any celebrity crushes? There is a plot of land near you.

Favorite celebrity? Where train tracks were planned?

Favorite book?

Money or Mind? Go there at twilight?

Do you have any fun nicknames?

Have you ever been hospitalized?

Do you have any favorite songs? We will be waiting? 

We miss you.

How would you describe your skin?

What is your biggest fear?

Do you want children?

Please do not listen? What is your favorite hairstyle?

Too many have been lost?

Who is your role model? 

What was the last compliment you received?

What was the last text you sent? Lock your doors tonight.

How old were you when you found out santa wasnt real?

What is your dream car?

We miss you.

Did you/do you go to college? 

Your legs will move on their own after you fall asleep.

Would you rather live in the country or the city? They have taken so many.

Do you steal from hotels? 

The train leaves at midnight. The conductor sings so sweetly.

We miss you. 

How many pictures do you have on your phone? His eyes are wide.

Have you ever peed in the woods? His smile is empty.

Do you like cartoons?

We miss you.

What the fuck is wendy’s?

Do you wear clothes to bed?

Lock your doors.

Tie your shoelaces together.

Can you draw?

Do you know how to play music?

We 

Miss

You

Do you want to get married?

You don’t know them, please.

Are you going to change your name again? 

Tie yourself to the bed if you have to.

Do you miss anyone?

Do you sleep with the doors open or closed?

Do you believe in ghosts?

What makes you angriest?

We 

Favorite ice cream flavor?

Miss

Chocolate or rainbow sprinkles?

You

What is your phone background?

They will find your pajamas by the side of the road.

Do you like it when people play with your hair?

What the fuck is fast food?

Why are roofs sloped?

Have you ever been high?

I cant hear you anymore

Have you eaten today?

Favorite song lyrics right now?

Summer or winter?

Day or Night?

Night or Day?

There is no ticket in your pocket.

Do you dream about how the night sky wheels like a vast clock?

Dancing Goddesses

These are AWESOME.

*falls over laughing*

A directory of social media handles so people can find you on other sites. Once you fill out the form (none of the questions are required so in theory you can just hit “submit” without answering anything, but you can also just View Here) you will be able to access, but not edit, a spreadsheet of everyone’s handles across their social media. 

As the disclaimer banner says, EVERYTHING you enter into this form is made public so you know, be careful. If you don’t want two of your handles linked…don’t put ‘em both in there.