#serotiny

The Serotinous Cones of Lodgepole Pine

Wrote something up featuring Our Cohort. I’m trying to get a feel for these kids, and establish roles and personalities. Jordon (they/she) is the leader of the cohort since they are in Ops in the Personnel department. They’re already an experienced organizer and have a knack for knowing where people work best. This is, however, the first time they’re on their own, the cohort being deployed to their assignment.

Word Of The Day

The last few years Have been an ongoing exercise In determining what really keeps me breathing Realizing that the assured safety of a warm hearth Doesn’t make my pulse race And understanding how easily distracted I am By the promise of adventure Writing the definition of “need” With a pen full of my own blood And willingly sacrificing myself for the answers But I’m no stranger to fear And when the time finally came To unmoor this ship and set sail I couldn’t bring myself to stray far from shore So I compromised Splitting my heart cleanly in two Equal halves given in tribute To a girl who had sheltered me in her bones like home And a girl who loved me like an animal caught in an electric fence Balancing my existence in the space between them Knowing that it couldn’t last forever But settling for the tenuous existence Of counting the seconds until Armageddon And praying every night that I could make it until morning But some things are sudden and inevitable And in the space of only a few days They were both gone And everyone knows I’m an optimist That I don’t like giving up hope But that emptiness is beginning to resemble forever And how do you recover from that? They were the closest thing I had to foundation The constants that kept my fragile architecture from collapse And this gasping void that remained in my chest Left my heart without structure Nothing remained that was solid or stable or strong So how could I even begin to build a home here Capable of sheltering anything vulnerable? How could I ever again call this body a sanctuary If I didn’t even know how to protect myself? So I found a way to make giving up look like growth Hiding behind the chill of therapy and bottles of pills And after a while I got used to the cold Once the numbness sets in it’s really not so bad Eventually you just stop bothering to look for warmth Winter is a slow death but at least it’s relatively painless And after the monotonous press of darkness It almost felt welcoming But sometimes these things aren’t so predictable And despite all of the locks I had placed on my front door In a hopeless attempt to keep the past from repeating itself I suddenly found a girl standing in my living room With eyes the color of the still sky after a hurricane When you come up from below deck And the silence of sunrise gives you hope I know this sounds cliche But she was nothing like I had expected A combination of opposing forces That I never dared to imagine was possible Hard and soft in all the right places Quick wit and gentle hands And a body that melts so easily into mine But tempered with a delicious darkness A sea of secrets sitting just beneath the surface Sharpened and sure and drenched in promise And something about pressing her flint to my steel Created a spark that finally found a way To cut through that biting chill Igniting all of those dead parts inside of me Like underbrush in a California summer wildfire Burning so hot and fast and uncontrollable That even though it threatened destruction For once, I didn’t have the time to think twice Sometimes the choice doesn’t lie between safety and electricity Sometimes the choice is as simple as letting yourself catch flame So I walked into that inferno with my head held high and determined Because I heard a story once That there are whole forests built from trees Who need to burn to the ground in order to grow again And after so many months of relentless Winter Her heat is starting to feel a lot like rebirth