but i will remain

dream tiger,,,,,, she has bewitched me,,,,,,

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

To the Person Who Asked If I Was OK

And for whenever someone mistakenly tells you that humans can only hurt nature -

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

like, this is most obvious in Homecoming, where Peter wants to upgrade from the baby heroing of stopping street level crime to fighting space gods, and the progression of his arc is him gaining the experience to get that “promotion”. The implication is kinda that stopping a bus from crashing is kinda lame, cuz you only save like, what, twenty people?? And if you fight a space god, you save millions of people. There’s no point in helping someone carry their groceries or saving people in a burning building, because the numbers are too small to mean anything. What’s the point of saving anyone if you can’t save everyone? If you’re not incredibly powerful, you can’t make a real difference.

And I think this is the MCU’s disconnect from the superhero genre. We’re not watching people who have a passion for helping others and using their abilities to alleviate suffering—we’re watching people win glory in their personal epics. The soap opera of gods and giants. That’s not a bad type of story, but it lacks one of the core emotions of superhero stories—the fantasy of being able to make a tangible difference. This extends into the MCU’s unwillingness to disrupt the status quo, as described in this excellent video by PopCultureDetective. (One example of his that really stood out to me is how in Age of Ultron, Stark and Banner’s attempt to use their superhuman genius to create something that will benefit all humanity is framed as foolish, dangerous hubris.)

This incongruence is most obvious when comparing Spiderman movies, because the core of Spider-Man’s character is “great power, great responsibility”. The thing that makes Peter Parker stand out is how no matter how broke, lonely, or even powerless he is, he still tries to use what he has to help the people he can.

I think it’s also noticeable how the MCU superheroes don’t really have Helping People as their Job. Like, whatever they’re doing in between movies, when we’re not watching, when there isn’t a massive problem to solve, they don’t have Rescue as their day to day Job the same way most superheroes do. Plenty of them have Beating Up Bad Guys as their Job, but that makes them more……soldier than superhero. More military than first responder.

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.

"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was.

We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.”