"what Is Beauty When It Is Born In Part Of Evil?"

"what is beauty when it is born in part of evil?"

"no less beautiful."

when i was a young teen and extremely mentally ill, i made weird abstract pieces since it helped get my jumbled thoughts and worries out onto paper in a visual style. i had done this once for a sketchbook cover and my mom (with my permission) posted it on some art subreddit because she was so proud of it. i checked back on the post and it got a surprising amount of attention, i was thrilled seeing the hundreds of upvotes on my work. then i looked at the comments. all of the top ones and most of them in general were people making these shitty jokes, some not even joking about it and trying to actually convince my mom i was doing mushrooms and had to be talked to. i was so fucking pissed. the fact people needed to be told "i'm not a druggie, this is just how my brain works" felt so insulting. thats not even mentioning how countless people genuinely trying to tell my mother i was definitely doing drugs and couldn't have made that art any other way would have been so, so dangerous for me if i didn't live in the lax household i did.

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it's a letter, T, standing for Taylor or Travis or Todd or Tiffany

it's a drink, tea, green or black or oolong or chamomille, served hot or cold

it's the pin that holds up a golfball, tee, plastic, shiny, coming in shades of red or blue or white or yellow

silly, isn't it?

it's a letter, C, standing for Corey or Carrie or Carter or Camille

it's a sense, see, windows to the soul, one of the things that let us experience colour and light and ugliness and beauty

it's a body of water, sea, covering most of our earth, vast and unknown and beautiful and terrifying

interesting, isn't it?

a letter, B, standing for Beverly or Beatrice or Bobby or Bruce

a verb, be, to be happy or upset or fearful or excited, to be playing or running or laughing or crying

an animal, bee, small and fuzzy, keeping our planet healthy, pollinating flowers and crops and herbs and weeds

isn't it funny how one letter can mean so many things?

it's called a gramogram

isn't that funny too?

When I was young my dad offhandedly told me he thought people treated fish with so much casual cruelty because fish can’t scream.

The words branded themselves across my soul.

As an adult I think he may have been joking. He payed no especial attention to any indignities fish suffered in our household but I could never forget. I saw fish in a different light after that.

Fish kept in tiny bowls, breathing their own poisons, dying by inches. Fish kept in cold tanks, casually disposed of. Fish touted as being short lived when they could outlive the better loved family dog if only they could breathe. Fish casually won and discarded in cheap plastic bags, thrown away a week later.

How they would scream, if they could.

"A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger."

Charlie Gordon, from Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon

did i follow you?

mod is a little stupid and made this his main. my actual main:

@scozthewoz