Not People Thinking They Can Escape Heartache. Avoiding It At All Cost Is Itself A Form Of It

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

loré pemberton

She asked me if I miss her while she's on sick leave from school.

What do you want me to answer? I wrote a poem about you on the train heading home from your place after we binge-watched Netflix together. I check Whatsapp way too often, heart chipped a little more everytime you didn't reply just to completly heal up once you do. I miss seeing you in my peripheral vision when I look at the board. I miss sitting beside you in silence during break while you draw, eating my sandwich. I miss looking up and seeing you infront of my desk. Free periods hurt, cause I've never eaten the entire orange alone. I've always shared quarters with you.

Yeah I miss you. We're in high school, and my love is appropriately rediculous.

I’m sorely I just. This is the most inspirational thing I’ve seen this week.

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

realizing that sticking to the "do it bad" "do it scared" mentality implies theres also a "do it bored"

thank god or the universe or whatever for cycles and seasons though like yeah life right now is unbearable. but every two years the olympics come around again, and every december i have christmas and every year there is an autumn where leaves change and fall and the air is crisp. every year has a halloween, and a national pie day, and my cat's birthday, and national star wars day, and the arbitrary date in february when my family watches the princess bride together, and every fall i watch over the garden wall. next year i'll see my second total solar eclipse. there will be new tomatoes next summer and fresh applesauce the season after that. the sun will come back even when march seems like it will never end. don't go yet. it will be your day off soon. the olympics are next year. it'll be someone's birthday soon. everything changes and everything will come back around again, if you stick around to let it.

unknown, from pinterest // Maurice (1987), dir. James Ivory // "Silent Noon" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti via poetryfoundation.org // Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), dir. James Weir // Renoir (2012), dir. Gilles Bourdos

“you’re my best friend, now i’ve got no one to tell i’ve lost my best friend.”

….

oh, these blue-eyed boys, these firestorm boys with constellations in their teeth, these back alley boys with bloody knuckles and painted smirks, these snowfall boys with quiet rage and quieter hopes.

pity these blue-eyed boys gave mercy on these blue-eyed boys because the world will have no mercy for them and they are born with almost etched in their bones.

he almost loved him. he almost kissed him. he almost held him.

he almost followed him. he almost stopped him. he almost caught him.

he almost saved him. he almost made it. he almost came home.

he almost—      he almost—           they almost—

they almost had a chance.