let me sleep

MAG 151: I should, of course, have fallen to the floor of the church, broken my neck. But that blue-painted sky welcomed me with open arms. And I never looked back.

Woke: Only Annabelle and Elias knows they're playing chess. Martin thinks they're playing checkers.

specifically, about how silent and insidious and intensely private by definition it is, which means often it gets overlooked or written off as relatively innocuous when it’s anything but.

isn’t it terrifying how it waits, and bides its time, and it won’t take you unwilling?

it won’t drag you kicking and screaming away from the ones who love you, but it will patiently creep at the edges of your life, breathing fog into the cracks of you until you can’t feel anything at all and you are worn and thin and exhausted to the point you’re barely there anymore. it’ll whisper in your head that it’s you, it’s you, you pushed the people who loved you away and it’s your own fault there is no one left to even miss you.

it lives in past tenses - someone loved you and you were enough and there used to be someone looking at you like it mattered, once.

and it’s fickle and uncaring and it will shroud you in its protection as long as you don’t know anything else, and you’ll be safe until the day you aren’t anymore. you’ll be safe, until the day you first open your eyes to realise the comforting weight of the fog is crushing your lungs after all.

above all, however, isn’t the utter indifference of it enough to chill you to the bone?

you’re screaming and there is no one left to hear you, and more than that, even if there was, they wouldn’t care.

you have spent your whole life making yourself useful before allowing yourself to be a person, and in the end it wasn’t enough to stop them from leaving and you have no idea who you are and they aren’t looking back to find out who you could be.

you pour yourself out on the floor of an empty hotel room in a foreign city, and cry until your head aches and pulses and you feel sick to your stomach, and when you call someone you trust the phone rings and rings and rings.

you hold the bleeding, shattered pieces of yourself in your hands, and you want to go home. the road is long and winding and you’re sure you’ll get lost, because you want to go home and you have no idea where home is anymore.

From quick research I know that this was one of three sumatran tiger cubs born at the Chester Zoo in 2015, so this is either Jaya, Topan or their sister Kasarna. If it is Kasarna I found an update pic from her zoo’s Twitter from when she turned four! (The boys seem to have been moved elsewhere?)

“why... just... why....?”