sixty-protons

[sixty-protons]

also, when that happens to you and is followed by actual danger enough times, your brain will learn the sorts of sensations that typically serve as precursors for the thing that repeatedly startled you and startle you awake to those, even if they aren't normally considered particularly startling.

for example, you could be a very heavy sleeper and generally not wake up to sounds at all, but if you startle awake from being attacked by a bear enough times, your brain will learn to startle you awake at the sound of leaves/twigs/whatever crunching underfoot, and every time some heavy animal comes near you while you're sleeping, you will 0–100 shoot up, heart racing, ready to fight.

Despite approximately 200,000 years of evolution, humans are still completely vulnerable while they sleep and lack any sort of defensive mechanism.

[sixty-protons]

i see this and i raise you: finally getting to the scene you've been wanting to write and then realizing you're out of steam and never actually writing it.

When you finally get to the scene you’ve been waiting to write

[sixty-protons]

"ooh" is drawn out with more 'o's and "oh" is drawn out with more 'h's and i will die on this hill.

[sixty-protons]

but isn't that simply what it means to truly understand something? in the end, aren't definitions just an imitation of the real thing?

words are just agreed-upon shorthand for concepts that exist outside of language. what would being able to explain that concept in terms of other concepts that will never truly replicate the original prove?

words are not the end-all, be-all of meaning.

the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.

if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.

[sixty-protons]

sometimes i feel like a bitter old man. like the kind of person who clenches their hurt in their fists and spills blood with it. my only true aspiration has always been to kindness, and sometimes, i fear you've taken this from me, too. but mostly, i know that if i have become what i hate, then you only gave me something to wrap my hands around. in the end, my limbs are my own, and i still threw the punches.

[sixty-protons]

i don't need sleeping pills, i just need someone to hold me and tell me everything's going to be ok.

[sixty-protons]

bet.

Really, it would have been comical if it wasn't so sad. Christine had been blessed with all of the features that fairy tale princesses were made of: pale, delicate skin; a slim waist; fine, blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. On paper, she should have been at the top of the high school food chain — the denizens of Garden Hills High School were exactly the type of people to base social status on those kinds of superficial details. And yet, here she was, sitting at a table by herself in the far back corner of the cafeteria where the trash cans were, trying in vain to wipe the tomato sauce out of her hair with a zero-ply cafeteria napkin, nothing but herself and The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe for company. Oh, and Earl. But Earl was a loner by choice, and he did not make exceptions — certainly not for Christine. The problem was that although Christine had all of the right features, she had them in all of the wrong ways. Her skin was the sort of pale you'd find on a corpse, veins showing through starkly even in places where it was entirely abnormal to see them. There were visible veins in her wrists, of course, but they extended all the way up her forearms, spiderwebbing into her biceps like the anatomical model in the biology lab. Her jugular stood out like a bruise on her neck, and sometimes she swore she saw it pulse faintly. All throughout her body, from her head to her shoulders to her knees to her toes, her vascular system was mapped out across her skin in a way that was entire unnatural to see on a living, breathing human. She had given up on finding any sort of makeup in her skin color years ago, and had in fact entirely dismissed the idea of ever breathing any sort of life into her appearance. She was skinny, but in the emaciated way, where her pants hung off her hips like a clothes hanger. Her face was so gaunt her classmates had volunteered her for the part of Yorick when they were reading Hamlet aloud in class. Her joints were thicker than her limbs, and her fingers were so knobbly they looked like they belonged on an arthritic 90-year-old rather than a high school senior. People threw sheets over her with hollers of "rest in peace" and submitted fake obituaries for her to the local newspaper. Her hair was a shade of blonde that was closer to white, and it was dry and hay-like in a way that would have looked more appropriate on a 2,000-year-old mummy. And sure, her eyes were a pale, pathetic blue, but people would sooner have described them as piercing for the cataract in her left eye that left her pupil nearly entirely white than for the color of her irises. This was all complemented nicely by her wardrobe. It's hard to find something half-decent to wear when the target audience for your clothing size is pre-teens — or, rather, those pre-teens' parents. And so it was that a good three-quarters of Christine's wardrobe looked like it belonged in the '90s, because anything was better than a bright pink t-shirt that said "Believe" in sparkly purple cursive. Between that and her literally ghostly countenance, she wouldn't have blamed anyone for mistaking her for a bona fide zombie. She knew she was disconcerting to look at. That did not, however, excuse the people who definitely knew she wasn't a zombie for pretending otherwise just because they got a kick out of ruining her day. And maybe she didn't help her own case, what with the obsession with death and horror and all that. But frankly, it wasn't her responsibility to make it easier for others to not be assholes. And anyway, isn't it only natural to be interested in the culture of your people?

the "i'm not pretty like the other girls because i'm pale and skinny" female protagonist trope is something i loathe more than almost anything else in the world but i'd be more willing to forgive it if the author was brave enough to commit to it. if your "unattractive" female protagonist is a snow-white waif then i'd better see you emphasising how nauseatingly corpselike she looks. how people shudder when her maggot-flesh fingers touch their bare skin because they're expecting her to be cold and damp. how her birdlike bones and dainty waist are contemptible rather than desirable. maybe even have her develop a degree of beauty by gaining some weight and colour for a change. put down the necromancer barbie template and show me a proper little freak.

[sixty-protons]

if i could paint the sky with all the colors that you taught me to see, if i could weave the emotions that i felt for you into a tapestry, there'd be no rainbow more colorful nor sunset more beautiful than what you gave to me.

[sixty-protons]

i resent the notion that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. you make you stronger, in the face of what doesn't kill you.