Saw An Opinion I Disagreed With And Didn’t Say Anything About It. +350XP

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”

— Ilya Kaminsky, from “A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck,” Deaf Republic

from hildegard of bingen - the woman of her age by fiona maddocks

“𝐵𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑒𝑥𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑒𝑥𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑑, 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑐”.

– 𝑂𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑟 𝑊𝑖𝑙𝑑𝑒

@deutsche-bahn geb's zu, hättest du sein können.

When I graduated high school my folks decided to go on a family trip to Europe. I was extremely surly about this as I had an undiagnosed UTI but I was extremely excited to speak German with native speakers, convinced I would be an asset to my family across our travels.

Tragically, it was immediately apparent that three years of public school German meant I could communicate at the level of a first grader.

I was nonetheless elated when a child approached me at the train station to ask “Haben sie ein Kuli?” “Do you have a pen?” I was able to say, “Nein, aber ich habe ein Bleistift!” “No, but I have a pencil!” The kid seemed confused by my triumphant tone but borrowed my pencil anyway.

But my absolute greatest victory in vocabulary came during an airline check. They had me go through a metal detector, and they assumed my belt had set it off. I knew my belt was non reactive metal but! My favorite jeans had lost their zipper and I had them safety pinned shut.

The man approached me with a metal detector and seemed puzzled my belt wasn’t reading. I remembered the safety pin in the front of my jeans and I happened to know the word so I joyously announced, “Ich habe ein Sicherheitsnadel!” “I have a safety pin!”

As if to an infant, the man said slowly, “Nein, das ist sein Gürtel.” “No, that is your belt.”

I waved at my crotch and insisted, “Nein, in mein Hose ich habe ein Sicherheitsnadel!” “No, in my pants I have a safety pin!”

I couldn’t remember the name for zipper but luckily he caught the shine of the metal where a zipper should be and finally realized why this crazy American teenager was gesturing to her crotch. He scanned his machine over the offending pin which pinged and he cleared me to go.

I marched off to board the plane in a glow of pride that I had gotten to use an obscure word and the poor man got to return to his day.

isn't it a bit crazy that when I was young I wanted everything you can think of and now all I genuinely want is peace

wait are there really new people joining this site. i thought it was a hoax.

But honey, I was born with the world crumbling around my mother's hospital bed

I grew up stepping around the shards with childish innocence

If you didn't want me to take up weapons,

you shouldn't have shattered the world with yours.

i have no plans to have children, but if one day i do, i'm going to break that cycle like a motherfucking glow stick.

i don’t know. i’m barely a person. i just want to be kind and hold someone’s hand. eat an ice cream cone. stare at the lake. feel the sun on my skin. lay in the grass. run through a sprinkler. it’s so easy to forget life is supposed to feel like a deep breath and not a gasp