Again I Quoted A Poet - To Avoid Sounding Like A Preacher Myself - Who Had Written, ‘What You Have

Consider:

Victorian England: 1837-1901

American Old West: 1803-1912

Meiji Restoration: 1868-1912

French privateering in the Gulf of Mexico: ended circa 1830

Conclusion: an adventuring party consisting of a Victorian gentleman thief, an Old West gunslinger, a disgraced former samurai, and an elderly French pirate is actually 100% historically plausible.

*walks into an antique store* i'd like to see your most evil items, please

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to to the person holding it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead - you first,” “I like your hat.”

- Danusha Laméris, “Small Kindnesses" 

what she says: I’m fine What she means: the haunted mask episode of goosebumps was about a girl who was sick of being victimized by boys so she rejects her entire identity both physically and personally to become monstrous, while carrying around an idol of her past self mounted on a stick. to get herself back she must fight off her demons by loving her true self, represented again by the head figure. self love could not be attained without first accessing monstrosity in self defense

i wish i could go back to when i was a child and i would make magic potions, collect flowers and line them up in a little rows, and make fairy houses out of sticks and leaves in the garden. everything felt so real then

“Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not the flowers, not the blackberries brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees; I won’t whisper my own name. One morning the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident, and didn’t see me—and I thought: so this is the world. I’m not in it. It is beautiful.”

— Mary Oliver, October (excerpt)

Worth gowns, ca. 1900

“ On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping

White Ophelia floats like a great lily… ”