zimowe notatki o wrażeniach z lata

my coworkers did surgery on me at work?! NOT CLICKBAIT

no, she doesn't

bonus:

Dress

c. 1875-1880

Taffeta, satin, and lace

Italian

And like yeah, obviously there's more to it than that. They're a team, a Grace alone would have probably died trying to get the samples from Adrian. Or, tbh, might have never got out of his original Mental Breakdown phase and just gone fully crazy.

But from Rocky's perspective, this has to feel insane. Like we talk a lot about Grace feeling inferior to Rocky, but there's no way that Rocky wouldn't have a similar (or worse) complex about Grace.

And this isn't getting into the fact that (from Rocky's perspective) the moment he leaves Grace, everything goes to hell again. Goes to hell again because, as he later finds out, Grace bred the taumoeba in xenonite breeder tanks that Rocky designed.

Do we think he wondered, on the way back to Erid, whether things would have been fixed 46 years ago if it had been one of the Blip-A scientists who survived, and he'd just succumbed to the radiation?

Do we think Grace had to reassure him, over and over, that it was if anything Grace's fault for not foreseeing that the taumoeba would adapt to the xenonite, and that there was no way that Rocky could have designed the tanks better?

I've said this before, but centering the absence of something in your life can only make you feel good for so long before it makes you empty. Once you make peace with the absence, you're going to need a presence in your life. For many of us, that presence is friendship. Many of us yearn for connection and unlearning the idea that romance is the most important connection of all means learning that any type of connection can be a priority because it depends on who it's formed with, not on what type it is. It's not replacing romance, it's understanding that romance is not essential. You cannot make the absence the core of you identity forever. Aromanticism doesn't doom you to a sad life of isolation, but basing your entire sense of self around the absence of something rather than the presence of what does make you happy will inevitably lead to emptiness.

Queen Victoria of Sweden’s Wedding Dress

c. 1906

the slaughter/ the spiral/ the web