Invictus - Tumblr Posts
12.10.21
“My head is bloody, but unbowed.” —William Ernest Henley
As a disclaimer, I am still further behind in my schoolwork than I should be, but if I fail I will know I gave it my all. I finished nearly a week’s worth of classwork for linguistics, studied for the LSAT, and took care of my mental health. And for the grand finale…
“Gentlemen, as of this moment, I am that second mouse.” —Catch Me If You Can
I received an awesome scholarship for maintaining a high average in my classes last year. Emotional displays are not within my repertoire of skills, but I assure you I am feeling many emotions.
“My boy’s wicked smart.” —Good Will Hunting
Listening to:
everything sucks—vaultboy
INVICTUS
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
Quan fénoir y arrive, i entour a ou
Quan li vé râle à ou dan' fon lo trou
Mi di merci bon dié, p'importe qui li lé
Pou mon fonkér embravé dan' fierté.
we all bleed red (a lament for millennials and generation Y)
we have grown up with our heads pressed into the muzzle of a gun. we have lived in fear our entire lives, and if not fear then in outrage if not outrage, indifferent silence. there is no in between and we flip from one to the other like a switch triggered by a trigger going off in the hands of someone with twitchy fingers. we cannot remember a life before this one; before metal detectors and bomb sniffing dogs and evacuations and guns. always guns and words and no one ever doing anything to help. every child born in the past twenty, forty years has never known a world without all this fear. our parents had wars; we have our own kind of terror. we have this, a world that is not one any longer. we have shootings in movie theatres, in schools, in grocery stores, in parking lots, in apartments, in houses, in homes, in departments stores, in train stations, at bus stops, in aeroplanes, in airports, on trains, in cars, in front lawns, in parks, in cities, in towns, in fields, in clubs, in our dreams. there are guns going off in every single place that we live and breathe and we’re all just hoping not to die. since when did it become so typical for someone to to decide whose life deserved to be lived and whose did not? since when did we know the names of places, of tragedies by heart and the worst part is that we can’t even remember a fraction of the list. there are too many to even begin to name and we have lived through all of them. no. that’s not right. we have existed through all of them and pretended like it wasn’t going to happen to us, hoping the next one wouldn’t be right outside our door. it’s too late because now there is no door; now we are all standing in the same goddamned place getting shot down, getting held hostage by the same guns, feeling the same bullets rip through our skin. how can we pretend that we are all different and that just because it happened there doesn’t mean it will happen here? we are all human. please remember that we all bleed red. and that red is all over and we cannot remember a time before everything we knew was red. there has never been a moment when we could stop to breathe, not between rounds or bullets. we have learned that you walk a little faster, sleep a little less, look around a lot more and judge quickly before you end up dead. that’s what this war has taught us; that this is not a war fought in another country or overseas. our home is the battle ground and we are the soldiers, we are the civilians, and we are simply so tired of this that we cannot bear it. we don’t know what to do because we don’t know what we’d be without this, what decisions we would make without that gun held and fired point blank into our skulls every time someone writes the words “mass murder” because that’s what this is. this is four, five, fifty, twenty, one hundred, an entire culture being murdered en mass. how can we even begin to change and fix this? we have never known life without the taste of gun powder in our mouths and violence in our eyes. we think we’d like to.
you could be the master of your fate, you could be the captain of your soul but you have to realize that life is coming from you and not at you and that takes time
Excerpt from Invictus by William Ernest Henley, 1888