Rec
🐸
I don’t know how to be impressive. Not really. I flail in the presence of people who matter, who know they matter. My words stumble over themselves, disfigured by desperation. I shrink. Collapse in on myself. Press my body into the ground like penance, licking at the boots of whatever authority has been installed that day, professor, prefect, commander, man. I freeze, hollowed out by something obscene. Fascination, maybe. Or the kind of awe that borders on revulsion.
Who is he? What did he have to sacrifice to become that way? What dogma does he worship? And is it true, what they say? That the world is peeling open at the seams, rotting quietly beneath our feet, spiraling toward something so black and unknowable we dare not name it?
It burns. Deep. Right where marrow meets soul. Gaia is waking. She’s not benevolent. She doesn’t cradle; she devours. She claws her way up from the planet’s molten gut, a mother scorned and rabid with grief, carving new canyons into the crust with the rage of a thousand millennia. The ones we see now, the Grand, the majestic, the sacred, will look like cradle cracks by comparison.
Who is he? What did he have to sacrifice to become that way? What dogma does he worship? And is it true, what they say? That the world is peeling open at the seams, rotting quietly beneath our feet, spiraling toward something so black and unknowable we dare not name it?
It burns. Deep. Right where marrow meets soul. Gaia is waking. She’s not benevolent. She doesn’t cradle; she devours. She claws her way up from the planet’s molten gut, a mother scorned and rabid with grief, carving new canyons into the crust with the rage of a thousand millennia. The ones we see now, the Grand, the majestic, the sacred, will look like cradle cracks by comparison.
4d ago
Related Recs
Rec
They said ink was forever, but no one told me how it would feel to wear history under your skin, how it brands you not as a person, but as a relic. I want it out. Carve it from me, slice the memory from flesh, gouge each symbol until there is nothing left but blood and the sound of breathing through gritted teeth. Translate every line, every curve and cruel little mark, into agony, a night of reckoning beneath a sky that doesn’t look away.
Melt the gold. Let it burn. Pour it over my spine until it finds the fault lines in me, seeps into the fractures and remakes me. Not soft. Not forgivable. A statue, maybe. Something radiant and cruel, something you look at and flinch from because it gleams too brightly to be alive. I would rather be beautiful in my ruin than pitied in my suffering.
And still, beneath the gold, the river runs. The Styx coils in my veins, ancient and slow, and where it touches my soul, the skin splits open. He asks for penance. I have none. I have only these hands, these scars, this rage.
So I march with the rest of them. The dead who were never buried properly, the mourned and unmourned alike. We rot together in the open air, no prayers, no justice. Only the endless shuffling forward, bone against bone, ghost against ghost, hoping that pain might, someday, become something more than just pain.
Melt the gold. Let it burn. Pour it over my spine until it finds the fault lines in me, seeps into the fractures and remakes me. Not soft. Not forgivable. A statue, maybe. Something radiant and cruel, something you look at and flinch from because it gleams too brightly to be alive. I would rather be beautiful in my ruin than pitied in my suffering.
And still, beneath the gold, the river runs. The Styx coils in my veins, ancient and slow, and where it touches my soul, the skin splits open. He asks for penance. I have none. I have only these hands, these scars, this rage.
So I march with the rest of them. The dead who were never buried properly, the mourned and unmourned alike. We rot together in the open air, no prayers, no justice. Only the endless shuffling forward, bone against bone, ghost against ghost, hoping that pain might, someday, become something more than just pain.
Rec
I lower the veil like a penance. Thin gauze, soaked in sweat and smoke and something older than both, obedience. To live is to bleed for others. My body doesn’t move; it’s already behind me, slumped and gray and rotting, bones gnawed clean by expectation. I drag it anyway.
The thread cinched around my pinky is baby pink, deceptive in its softness. It cuts deep. Double-knotted, like a pact I never signed, a debt I inherited. I pull. It resists.
My spine folds. A knot blooms in my back, vertebrae twisted, swelling like a beast’s hump, monstrous and obscene. Then, rupture. Skin tears. A cactus erupts, wet and thorned and trembling. The monsoon follows. I’m drenched. It hurts. It hurts in the open air.
No one sees it. They only see the veil, and thank me for being polite.
The thread cinched around my pinky is baby pink, deceptive in its softness. It cuts deep. Double-knotted, like a pact I never signed, a debt I inherited. I pull. It resists.
My spine folds. A knot blooms in my back, vertebrae twisted, swelling like a beast’s hump, monstrous and obscene. Then, rupture. Skin tears. A cactus erupts, wet and thorned and trembling. The monsoon follows. I’m drenched. It hurts. It hurts in the open air.
No one sees it. They only see the veil, and thank me for being polite.
1h ago
Rec
My room is a corridor of doorways. Not a space, not a shelter, but a network of half-thoughts and abandoned exits. The floors reek of piss, like some wild dog marked its territory and then left me to rot in it. The walls pulse with memory. Or maybe delusion. Either way, it’s loud in here. Thoughts swarm like ants — frantic, mindless, pathetic — all scrabbling for something to hold on to. Information. Meaning. But there’s nothing. Just famine. Starvation of sense. A thousand tiny legs searching for crumbs in a house that hasn’t been fed in years.
And every day the sky breaks open again. Not metaphorically. The rain here isn’t poetic. It hammers. It devours. It doesn’t cleanse; it drowns. The ants drown, but they don’t die. They keep moving, twitching, twitching, twitching. Not alive. Not dead. Just full of guts and nerves and the viscera that keep them twitching. That hard carapace we all grow when the storm doesn’t stop. That’s all they are. That’s all I am.
Sometimes I think I’ll dig my way in. Crawl through the iris of my own eye — molecular, meticulous — and enter the network of my brain like a savior. A surgeon. Maybe a god. Maybe I’ll find the ants and teach them how to be more than twitching muscle and damp despair. Maybe I’ll name them. Maybe I’ll give them something like hope.
But dry drowning is real. No matter what they say. And the terrifying thing is — there’s no evidence it isn’t.
And every day the sky breaks open again. Not metaphorically. The rain here isn’t poetic. It hammers. It devours. It doesn’t cleanse; it drowns. The ants drown, but they don’t die. They keep moving, twitching, twitching, twitching. Not alive. Not dead. Just full of guts and nerves and the viscera that keep them twitching. That hard carapace we all grow when the storm doesn’t stop. That’s all they are. That’s all I am.
Sometimes I think I’ll dig my way in. Crawl through the iris of my own eye — molecular, meticulous — and enter the network of my brain like a savior. A surgeon. Maybe a god. Maybe I’ll find the ants and teach them how to be more than twitching muscle and damp despair. Maybe I’ll name them. Maybe I’ll give them something like hope.
But dry drowning is real. No matter what they say. And the terrifying thing is — there’s no evidence it isn’t.
Top Recs from @baixwar
Rec
For a man who follows his heart can never be weak. That’s what I used to believe, once, before the bodies piled up like autumn leaves, and belief curdled into something thinner than blood.
I caught the whistle player once, a man stitched together by calluses and riddles. His tune wasn’t music; it was a wound dressed in melody. It scraped something raw inside me. A song of mystery, yes, but also of cruelty, a tune without mercy. When I asked him how he knew such things, he only laughed. Said the desert had taught him.
Said that Mother Gaia, if she ever existed, didn’t whisper. She screamed. Through the grains of sand, she dragged him down, ankle-first, bone-deep, until he touched her molten heart. Said he came back remade, not better, just aware.
"Men," he spat, as if the word itself offended him, "have always been the destroyers."
Not gods. Not fate. Not even history. Men.
And I realized then: this isn't about nations or borders or wars. It’s about the individual. The one who chooses to light the match. The one who watches the blaze.
It is the gender.
It is the myth we wrote in our own image, thinking ourselves gods, when all we ever were, are, was ruin.
Rec
I knew this love of mine was tired. Not the kind of tired that sleeps, but the kind that floats, listless and unmoored, like a feather dislodged in a storm. It drifted upward, aimless, circling, caught in the breath of things that once felt steady: laughter, warmth, the scent of jasmine from my grandmother’s porch before the war of illness took her away. Joyful people are rarely light. The ones who care the most often carry the heaviest sorrow, but they smile, because someone has to.
I understood this, too late, maybe, as the weight settled on my back like wet wool. I stood by the grave, the earth soft beneath me, and felt my heels sink into the mud. Ruined, cheap patent leather borrowed from my mother, now darkened with soil. She should have been angry. On any other day, she might have been. But not this time.
There was no room for anger. Only silence, shared between women who have known the quiet violence of duty.
I understood this, too late, maybe, as the weight settled on my back like wet wool. I stood by the grave, the earth soft beneath me, and felt my heels sink into the mud. Ruined, cheap patent leather borrowed from my mother, now darkened with soil. She should have been angry. On any other day, she might have been. But not this time.
There was no room for anger. Only silence, shared between women who have known the quiet violence of duty.
Rec
Last night, I dreamed, though I can’t tell you what of, not exactly. There were fragments. A lawn, half-mown, or cats, dozens of them, maybe. Their shapes flicker now at the edge of memory, insubstantial. That’s how it always goes. I dream every night, I know this, but each one slips through my fingers by morning, evaporating like steam before I can grasp it.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I kept a dream journal. Religious about it. Woke up, wrote it down. And something about that changed me. Sharpened the recall, made dreams more solid. Realer. And then, over time, something turned. Now they vanish even faster. Like the act of remembering too hard wore out the muscle.
I’ve thought about starting again. Journaling. Documenting. Not just the dreams, but the moments around them, the texture of waking, the taste of forgetting. Because vivid dreams begin with remembering, don’t they?
But I hate recollection. The way it drags old feelings back up, stale and bitter. The way it stains the present with shadows of things that never happened. There’s something foul in remembering too much.
Still. Maybe I’ll try.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I kept a dream journal. Religious about it. Woke up, wrote it down. And something about that changed me. Sharpened the recall, made dreams more solid. Realer. And then, over time, something turned. Now they vanish even faster. Like the act of remembering too hard wore out the muscle.
I’ve thought about starting again. Journaling. Documenting. Not just the dreams, but the moments around them, the texture of waking, the taste of forgetting. Because vivid dreams begin with remembering, don’t they?
But I hate recollection. The way it drags old feelings back up, stale and bitter. The way it stains the present with shadows of things that never happened. There’s something foul in remembering too much.
Still. Maybe I’ll try.