where the hero shifts from one foot to the other

the end of project hail mary is such a ‘just this once, everyone lives’ moment bc the safety of earth and erid relied solely on grace and rocky meeting. earth would have never retrieved the taumoeba if rocky has not used his engineering skills and xenonite to retrieve it, nor would erid if grace had not made the scientific breakthrough and turned back for rocky. put other people (and sentient rocks) in their place, who may have allied but not had such a poignant connection, and the equation is missing a crucial component. everything truly did depend on them loving each other

you don’t realize how important lunch is until you’re wandering around thinking about how unloveable and untalented and uniquely cursed you are and then it’s 4pm and you finally eat lunch and you go Oh. oh right.