letters-to-starlight - Tumblr blog

[letters-to-starlight]

what do you mean i'm not important? or that you're not important? the other day i stood and watched a tree all full of flowers shivering in the morning wind. i was the only one around. who else would have watched it dance? who else but you will notice the way the sun is slanting through your windows? how the rain scoops over your roof? the most important thing is to just exist, you see. by observing the world, we celebrate alongside it.

[letters-to-starlight]

Colleen- Soul Alphabet Cover (Move by Nirve) - SoundCloud

Listen to Colleen- Soul Alphabet Cover (Move by Nirve) by Nirve on #SoundCloud

I imagine Bob and Linda Belcher reminiscing on a far-off night when they heard this song in a club somewhere, singing and giggling and touching each other's noses as they dance around the restaurant.

Wouldn't that be cool? To get my song on TV, sung by beloved characters?

This is a cover btw. Of an instrumental by Colleen on her album Soul Alphabet. None of the music but the words belongs to me. And one day, I hope to form a band or meet composers who can make this kind of music with me, so we can all have ownership and make mula 💪🏽.

Gosh I'm thankful to be a writer.

Anyway. Thanks for listening and reading my dreams. I hope yours come true, too. Best wishes to you and your loved ones.

Love,

Banana Carmell

F(A?)KA: Nirve

[letters-to-starlight]

Blue Hour | Takashi

[letters-to-starlight]

Nu (a modern-classic fanfic)

If she noticed him she made no indication.

He’d already tried and tried again, in vain, to bore through the black lenses positioned like shields over the bridge of her nose. The ad had warned him not to, but he did anyway, and thought she must be watching the birds in the orchard beyond her porch. They dipped between branches, singing revelation pains and awe to the newborn sunset. She was spread out like butter on her wicker loveseat, purportedly oblivious to the battered man and truck that had rumbled up her dirt driveway, though they, too, were in her line of sight.

He checked his watch-- NO PHONES, the ad had said-- and left the vehicle on unsteady feet. 

“Hello?”

The birds tittered at the hitch in his voice, the wobble in his gait,   but the man marched on.  

She smiled, bright and toothy; on a screaming  impulse, he ducked his head.

“Hello!” she called. 

He was at the bottom of her porch now, looking up at her headwrap. Geyser of deep greens and blues shooting up two feet from her hairline. Her dress inhaled as she stood to greet him, catching a gust of summer wind  that turned the simple beige garment into a robe reminiscent of the ancients. 

She descended, and he noticed she wore no shoes. 

“I’m Greg,” was all he could say. 

“Nu.”

“Well. We should. Start then?” 

Nu waved a hand. No polish. No rings. “No rush.”

She breathed in deeply. He joined--the air was weighty with overripe fruit-- and on the exhale, they fell into step on the clay path that wound through the front garden, into the orchard, below the writhing banner of birds.  

He eyed her between conversation:  the pecan complexion blessed by the golden hour; the tiny feet that drove down  into the ground immune to stones and bramble.

Between the faint smile and the headwrap, though, would remain a mystery until  the end of the night.

They pressed on until the rose-gold sky went lavender, and the lavender grew heavy and dim. By now, the house was a hazy memory, and the heady-sweet fumes of tropical fruit lulled him, almost as if the branches were massaging his back. 

“You got any questions?”

He shook his head. She noticed a trembling start in his ankles and shimmy up up til   his frame quivered like a web in the wind. 

“Everyone has questions.” 

But the man only bites  his lip and looks  to the grass for comfort. Or answers. Honestly, if his bones were bells he’d wake up the ones who came before him. 

Nu sighs, letting that familiar weight in her chest set up shop for the night. 

She looks to one of her trees, who only motions to its roots. 

Her children are hungry. This man is the first to answer her advertisement in months.

Her phone usually rings twice a week. The patrons shuffle in half as often. The trees and her bank account grow fatter every time. 

Oh , you never heard the tail of Menusa? Hiding under that sweet plain dress? It rattles when she’s shaken. Strikes when she’s ready. And constricts when she’s hungry. 

No, she’s never eaten a man. Not directly. These days, she mostly eats the fruit from her orchard in the mountains. Fruit thick and ripe on  broken, stony flesh. 

She haunts the churches and the bars, places where guilt thickens the blood, where the running fellas stumble, leaving her shadow, her cards, a promise, and a number. 

Her service--a wine, dine, turn to limestone kind of deal--is cheaper than most hitmen and euthanaisias, and she doesn’t really need the money, since no one can find her if she doesn’t want them to. But she understands that cash speaks louder than magic in this world, and she sends her earnings to her grandvictims. That is, the victims of her victims. That is, the families huddled in shadows, the bruises unhealed, foundations upturned. 

Some call her righteous, but she doesn’t feel like a champion. 

Back when she was called Medusa, on the temple floor, at Athena’s feet: she wailed, grief heaving her body until the weight became a dull ache, and blindly stumbled about in that until she was flailing, and a flame somewhere deep inside her caught on and a voice she never knew lived in her tore out. 

“Weaponize meee.”

She’d never known how to be angry. Only beautiful. But Athena, after watching her seethe, then simmer, then sit to cool in the steam, after forty days of  listening to Medusa’s morphing heart, granted her the gift of the Gorgon. 

Tonight. She uses it on her umpteenth visitor. 

The tail lashes out and sweeps the man’s ankles, catches him before he falls and pulls him in close, coiling tighter as the distance, as his meager life, fades. 

“Take off my shades.”

He does, slowly, and she can feel his heartbeat stutter at an unnatural pace.

She gleams down at him as the veil is lifted. 

“Look at them.”

He does, at her teeth. 

“My eyes.”

She hasn’t seen her eyes since the baptism--a fiery affair--but she likes to imagine their color based on reactions. 

This one wrenches himself into lockjaw, strangle-screamed contusions, bugging like a mealworm in her grasp. 

Hmm. so gray then.

Mmmm 

The ground rumbles, thunder from the depths, and the first root inches its way out. They like to watch Mama at work in their kitchen. 

“My headwrap.”

The man must use all his strength now, to reach up and undo the cloth, to release a cumulonimbus cloud of hisses and fangs, some still unfurling themselves out from bantu knots. He’d surely marvel if he weren’t writhing at the gates of death--the snakes are  done up in beads of all colors, colors he hasn’t even seen on Earth, and some sport painstakingly crafted grills. These are the calcified hearts.

She holds his eyes in hers. Sweet Menusa. Who wanted nothing more than a farm before she enlisted in Athena’s army. 

There’s no filter but divination, for the ones worthy of her gift. Some crawl to her on broken wing, hoping to be forgotten by a world they littered with fearful decisions and empty gray dawns. These she turns back, with a few curt words of encouragement. 

“You’re not evil. Just depressed.” 

But some. Some come in and she can smell, Athena willing, the shame on them--shame they’ve packaged as love and pounded into the ones they draw close. Leaving body after body mangled, spirit after spirit snuffed. And these she welcomes. 

Now, Athena is a just goddess, and she wouldn’t send a bloodthirsty soldier to do her bidding. So Menusa is cursed to smell the joy on them too--the innocence of little boys shunned to corners of the mind, watching the world from hollow sockets, starved-skinny arms waving and begging for a scrap of something. 

It was their choice to cut themselves off, Athena consoled her when the scent first  hit her and dredged up mourning. 

Menusa offers meals to the boys. Tries to talk to them, to see them play again. And they’ll crawl up to the glass but the men, their gatekeepers, decline her warmth, beat the boys back into cold recesses. 

“No need to gimme false hope,” one told her drily. His eyes were almost as hostile as hers. “I came here to end all that.” 

so the orchard feasts. 

And the souls sit in the fruit, waiting to be packaged and shipped off around the world. 

If they are lucky enough to be eaten by someone hoping for a child, they will latch in the womb and be reborn. 

If they spoil, or land somewhere unfertile, they will get in line with the other spirits readying for reincarnation. 

Menusa looks into the eyes of her umpteenth visitor--the eyes are the last thing to harden--and holds them, bores into him her gift. She weeps, but never wavers, for the fate of his soul is a spectacular horror that she must impart. 

“You,” she whispers. “Will be reborn.”

His eyes are stilling. Fogging over. 

“You will be reborn: a woman.”

[letters-to-starlight]

When I get frustrated with myself, I talk it out like this.

I feel like I’m being too hard on myself. But the back and forth makes for a beautiful reveal.

“...every light wave bends. To know this is to know that you’ll adjust”

[letters-to-starlight]

~~

Oh, I saw this a few days ago! So cool. Humans have always been humans, but most of all kids having always been kids

[letters-to-starlight]

She had this peculiar way of rolling her eyes at the end of every sentence. Something as simple as “goodnight” was given to the sky with a wry smile and an aloof shrug, as if she could play down the eager blue light in her eyes. The same light that, at 57 earth years, had seen a matching shade of afternoon-lagoon in a bottle

and wanted it for her head.

So now when she shrugged herself off, she caught a glimpse of her reflection. The color of her eyes musing boldly back down at her in a playful fringe that tickled her waiting lashes.

—inspired by a librarian with bright blue hair I used to work with.

[letters-to-starlight]

When I was a kid, maybe 14 or so (which is, you know, 20+ years ago), I belonged to a Yahoo! mailing list for an anime called Gundam Wing. It was mostly populated by other teens, of varying ages, as it was started by a teen and her friends. Eventually it migrated, when Yahoo! groups started as forums, and even branched off into non-GW related stuff in a second forum.

One of the things I remember the most clearly is the oldest person in the group. Her name was Steelsong. She was a 40-something Dom with a sub whose name we knew even though we knew nothing else. She ran her own fanfic archive because the web was still handmade HTML and navigated in webrings and I’m pretty sure Google didn’t exist or was only barely, barely launched and not well known. She was kind and patient and we loved her. She treated everyone on the group with the respect given any adult, even though most of the rest of the world was still treating us like we were children. Not teenagers even, but children. She never once condescended to any of us, never made our youth a barrier to her respect, never treated us like we were incapable of being full people or like we were less than her because we were young.

I remember that she hosted our fanfiction, as absolutely terrible as it was (and I still have some of it, I am WELL aware of how cringingly terrible it is, just absolute nonsense garbage), right there alongside of other fic that was soul-achingly beautiful. Not a separate section for her friends or for kids, just right there like we were good enough to feature alongside other authors. I never once received crit from her that I didn’t ask for, only support. Only love. I am still writing today partly because Steel was so kind about our fic, fanfic and original.

I remember that when I started doing clay sculpture, she commissioned a tiny pair of dragons from me, to support me doing artwork. She sent a check my mom cashed for me, and my mom helped me mail it when it was finished. It broke in transit, and Steel assured me that she mended it and that it was still beautiful. It was a small gold dragon curled up with a small silver dragon.

I remember that her patience knew no bounds. I remember that she was there for us, regardless of reason. When we wanted to know silly things like what to do with a single AA battery, she answered. When we had serious questions about sex, she answered.  When we had questions about writing, she taught us. When one of our group members, a young gay teen in Australia, ended up in the hospital and then stopped making posts, and we all knew what had happened, she let us talk to her about it because we couldn’t go to our own parents, even though we had just lost a friend.

She was not a replacement to my parents, but she was an extra parent, in some ways. A friend, certainly, but someone that had been through more life than we had and was willing to pass on knowledge if we asked for it. Someone older that we trusted with things that were too uncomfortable to go to our parents or teachers or whatever about, because we already knew she wasn’t going to judge us or something, and that we would get an honest answer.

I don’t know why I’m remembering this so hard tonight, and I’m not sure if there’s a point to sharing this, except that I know she’s gone now. She was ill the last time we spoke, and her site went down a long time ago, and I miss her. She was a huge influence on my life, then and now. She was hope, for me, that life as an adult didn’t have to be boring, it wouldn’t have to mean giving up the things I loved and Becoming Only Responsible With No Fun. Her presence meant I had hope I could still write and play with friends even when I wasn’t ‘a kid’ anymore. And she’s gone, and I miss her, and I wanted to share her from the perspective of youth, and the perspective over twenty years later has provided me.

And I think of her, when people go off about older folks being in fandom with younger folks. I’m an older folks now, or at least middle aged folks because there are certainly folks older than me still, but I wasn’t always. I’ve been here since i was a younger folks, and I know how much Steel’s presence and support meant to me, how much she helped not just me but everyone on that group. And I think of the people saying older folks don’t belong in fandom, and that they shouldn’t interact with younger folks at all, and I just think… I can’t agree. I needed that kind of solid presence in my life back then and even at the age I am now, I need the folks older than me to stay. I want them here.

So I guess, like, if you’re here and you’re 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 or whatever, I want you here in fandom with me, still. Your presence here is a comfort. It is hope. It is a reminder that life will continue to be fun, even as I get older, myself. And if you’re younger and you have this sort of elder in your groups, I hope that they are like Steel. I hope they are kind and patient and supportive, and that knowing them gives you hope for your own future. I hope in twenty years you look back and remember them fondly.

[letters-to-starlight]

✨James Webb Beauty ✨

[letters-to-starlight]

Thinking about parasocial relationships. On the internet, and on the ground. There are so many ppl in my head who I’ve idolized because from afar it feels like they have their life together. Like they believe in themselves. And i want that belief, but it stems from me.

How are we pruning, today, the memories of olde gods?

How do we let our beliefs shine thru the crowns of trees that were once just seeds of another? Hopes we collected that we planted, convinced that theirs was the surest path to acceptance?

Today is a good day

To give that grace

To its source

To ourselves.

Peace

Love,

Banana Carmell

[letters-to-starlight]

Marvel movies have completely eliminated the concept of practical effects from the movie-watching public’s consciousness

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we are not made to endure alone! we are not made to endure alone.

[letters-to-starlight]

[letters-to-starlight]

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Text to sister. Screenshot, circa 2020

[letters-to-starlight]

A few words inspired by generational patterns. We defend what we’re willing to keep. There’s so much in my toolkit I can put down. And so many treasures I’ll discover as I move on. Continue 💪🏽✨

[letters-to-starlight]

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