bitter as gall.

Signal-boosts first:

+ help, help, I'm being erased! by such_heights.

+ "It's now time to tell." by sheafrotherdon. Trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence.

+ Reducing the Suicide Stigma, by Suresh Unni. Trigger warning for mention of racially-motivated assault.

Still so angry over this; sleeping on it hasn't helped at all. When I look at this man's incredible, REAL life, I see echoes of the relatives I know and love; Harrison Ford's imaginary scientist is more of a personal violation than any distorted reflections that I have seen of myself. I've been trying to purge myself through words because I keep choking on it, this ugly surge of biliousness- but the right ones won't come. I don't have the vocabulary, I can't gain any distance and the results of my lack of these things are like trying to put out a bonfire with gasoline, so have something beautiful instead:

The Shortcut Home

In my sister's story,
God can't find us
in any of His coat pockets,
not in the empty, and not in the filled.
We're in none of His hands, the kind or the terrible;
none of His shoes, the giant or the minute.
And neither are we hiding inside the apples,
neither in the perfect nor the ruined.
Not in the first mouthful, and not in the last.

In my brother's story,
our death sings to us from the highest branch
of the oldest tree the birds remember
in song, and we wander our father's house
in search of the origin of the hours.

In my story... But I don't have a story.
All I have are a few names of the flowers:
Morning Glory, Seven O'clock, Mother of Wings,
Story Carried Backward Up a Stairs. All I have
is a sown path I follow back to sleep:
Painted Face, Clouded Pane, Song in a Jar,
Burning Threshold, Bloody Scrimmage,
Voice Strewn on the Rocks.

-- Li-Young Lee

... Ficlets by tomorrow, I promise.