It's A New Day + The Sun Rose + You're Alive + You're Alive + You're Alive + Your Heart Is Beating +

i love the idea of ghosts not being dead people but just places where time is kind of thin

like one of my friends & his girlfriend have a ghost in their very old new england house that’s apparently an old timey little boy who does shit like jump on the bed and slam doors but if they tell him very sternly “daniel, stop that” the activity stops immediately

and i love the idea that years ago theres this rowdy little 19th century boy just being alive and playing in his room but if he gets too loud sometimes, the ghostly form of my 21st century friend shows up and is like “Hey! Cut it out.” and then vanishes and no one believes this child

*covered in blood* i will.... *trembling* CHOOSE TO BE KIND... *in pain* i will be... NICE to others... *wanting to kill* i will see good in EVERYONE *yelding a knife* i will NOT be like those who hurt me... *screaming* i will be BETTER than who i was...

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.

If someone would ask what my biggest need is I'd say touch. By Lord, please, pplesse I need to be touched. Right now. And if they raise their eyebrows and eyes flicker to my chest I will commit arseny. I need fingers pressing against my elbow as you pass. I need a hand at my back. The quiet presence of my friend appearing behind me. I can lean back. They have me. They gave me.

I need eyes. Eyes that meet mine and mean something. I need love. And by God isn't that a way to simple word. I want my friend to watch me turn away with a small smile before they continue their conversation. I want to elicit a warm feeling in a chest. I want someone to hug me and not as a goodbye.I need care. I need sustenance. Require it. Need your hand on my arm and need you to say hey, it's okay. How about a little walk before we continue this work, hm?

It touches me that this touched something in you

Normal is a memory

Normal is a memory, but time moves so slow, so much like it always has, that no one notices.

No one notices that we don't talk about jam anymore, or how beautiful your dress is.

Because have you seen the news? There are war crimes, beloved.

Your dress? The price of weeks of food thirty years ago

And it tastes like small hands working sowing machines.

The jam? No one has time for home mades anymore, my dear. There are tears to be swallowed.

I wonder if there ever was a normalcy, with Sunday brunches and sadness, not depression. Or if it was always a memory.

Always just a few generations out of our reach.

See, I was wrong.

We do notice.

James Baldwin talking about love

Yesterday was a bad day, my apartment was too quiet. Too empty. There was nothing, nothing.

Then suddenly I was turning on lights and they were the perfect shade of yellow and the music from my little speaker hit me so hard I almost cried in the kitchen and those socks I bought kept my feet warm and my warmed-up tortellini were so good with the scrapes of my mom's pesto.

I listened to Billie Eilish and Hozier and The Neighborhood and suddenly they were just people.

Sometimes I lay in bed terrified that I'll stop feeling. Yesterday was not that day.

Normal is a memory

Normal is a memory, but time moves so slow, so much like it always has, that no one notices.

No one notices that we don't talk about jam anymore, or how beautiful your dress is.

Because have you seen the news? There are war crimes, beloved.

Your dress? The price of weeks of food thirty years ago

And it tastes like small hands working sowing machines.

The jam? No one has time for home mades anymore, my dear. There are tears to be swallowed.

I wonder if there ever was a normalcy, with Sunday brunches and sadness, not depression. Or if it was always a memory.

Always just a few generations out of our reach.

See, I was wrong.

We do notice.

bird riding rhinoceros

Do you know what I hate? What I'm really, really angry at?

We're not allowed to express love.

And it pisses me off.

Yes! That boy in my class looks stunning in that green sweater! I gaze in awe at the way my friend looks like an urban goddess at midnight drenched in street lights, surrounded by dancing teenagers at a party in the theatre parking lot! Another one looks like dawn and summer fields fell in love with her! I adore the way my classmate dresses like a punk fairy, with dirty blonde braids reaching to her hips and grazing her red leather jacket! The boy who lends me his eraser has the most fantastic sense of humour, the way he looks down for a second before he grins!

I love herb gardens! And perfume oils! Old books and fantasy novels! Dope-ass boots paired with a nice coat and conservative scarf clashing with my pink hair! I love poems! And jasmine tea!

I love how the old Vietnamese lady runs the best soup bar in town. How excited my seat neighbour gets over fancy notebooks. I love it when a fellow teenage girl hesitantly smiles back at me across the street.

Why is she hesitant? Because there's that ever-lasting question. Is this the socially designated response? Am I supposed to react differently? Am I supposed to react at all? Wouldn't it be "cooler" to ignore me?

Is it weird when I tell a boy I hardly know that he looks epic in that sweater? Is it over the top when I tell that girl in my French class how cute her boots are every time she wears them? Is waving at people I barely know but I get a happy vibe from bad?

Is it wasteful and expensive that I love perfume and essential oils? Is me wearing my mother's expensive coat with leather boots and purple hair childish? Is my idealism and wide-eyed hope to be laughed at?

We're not allowed to express love.

I had so much of it.