“When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? Anything at all?
All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and your mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says hell I don’t know. Further north, I’d guess.
The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up. He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey. Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quilt. If you stacked them up, they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly.
Damned if I didn’t get the urge to drive to Arkansas last night, he says.
Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy.
Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand out there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do.
It’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin.
And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody-anybody-who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens or pinches, only rolling abundance. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.”
excerpt from Cherry by Mary Karr, context being after a suicide attempt at age 13
frisk is just a fucking baby. and everyone just monologues at them
alphys: you know i… i used to hate myself, before you came along. i don’t know… i don’t want to use you to boost my self esteem but i just want to say… thanks, you know? for giving me a little more confidence, i guess. you’re really special to me
white lgbt westerners will make endless excuses for their ignorance, for their racist and sexist and homophobic behaviour because they were never taught anything in school, they’ve never seen a world map until they were 23 years old despite having access to the internet their entire lives, because they grew up in a conservative family and everyone has a nazi phase as a teenager so really what’s the big deal? but if someone living in the largest concentration camp ever built has a homophobic thought in their head that’s grounds for them and their entire people to be genocided. you people treat yourselves like adult infants who should be given endless amounts of second chances while baying for the blood of Palestinians. genuinely you make me sick. I want no part of your homonationalism, you are a fascist and your quirky little queer identity does not in any way take away from that
