The only professional-level photos I actually own are from our wedding. In order to afford that one professional on our shoestring budget everything we had was homemade, including the flowers which were all handcrafted out of hot glue and old comic books.

I found the flowers colorful and interesting, and a good symbol for my geeky lovesick self.

Hmm. Interesting challenge.

They say you should write what you know. Well... here goes:

(sorry)

You Don’t Know Dick

It is the thing that has shaped my life and from which I will never recover. I will survive. I am a survivor and a warrior, slaying the memories that haunt me, that can drive me, that can pull me to the ground and cover me with darkness.

It is also the shape of that which I pleasure myself with, loving it and hating it at the same time. As I sigh with each orgasm, I hate myself for enjoying the thing that was used against me for so many years, that was flaunted in my face as a child, and the thing that stole more than my innocence.

And you, who carry it as a weapon, as the thing that makes you superior, you don’t know dick. You don’t stick around to see the aftermath of your actions, nor do you care. Your dick is a mantle of power over those who are weaker, more vulnerable than you. It is that which amuses you and, you think, dictates who you are...but...you don’t know dick.

There is some truth to the saying, “a man’s brain is in his dick.” Yet not every man, and I say this to convince myself. I cannot know what is in every man’s mind. I have been a victim, swayed by my own experiences. I carry my prejudice as a shield to the war I fight every day. There are those who tell me that it is the past, I need to move on. You don’t know dick.

As I wash that rubbery ‘toy,’ feeling its weight, its shape in my hands, I am disgusted with myself. Ironic, isn’t it? Judge me, talk about me behind my back, criticize me. You cannot do it as much as I have to myself. You cannot know the confusion, the self loathing, nor the pain that exists in just being who I am. But I am a survivor. I am the heroine of my world. Know it. Believe it. And those of you who continue to wield it as a weapon, as a power greater than the weak; those of you who continue to judge PTSD and the struggle of living with it, let me be the first to say to you,

You Don’t Know Dick.

Is life worth it?

I ponder this question often. Are the benefits enough for the pain?

Like loving a friend, just to lose them?

Or giving your time to someone in need, just to turn into that someone?

To hear a lovely melody, just to cry to the words?

To walk on a beautiful day, just to walk alone?

To be a part of a family, just to be betrayed?

To keep on learning and discovering new things, knowing you'll forget it in your old age?

To have blessings of children, only to have them abandon you?

Maybe there are ups and downs. Maybe we can't control it. Maybe life is out to get us.

But maybe, just maybe, the curiousity built in us, is the main reason life is worth it.

Maybe life sucks, but is it better ahead?

How will we know unless we live life?

It’s her job to float down through solid rock, wearing the interphasic suit. Atoms buzzing on a slightly different frequency to most of the solid matter in the universe. Nudged to an adjacent subdomain of time and space where she can still observe this one, but can pass through it like a ghost, without the usual resistance.

There’s the risk of catastrophic realignment, where the interphasic field collapses suddenly and she returns to solid matter while she’s still inside an asteroid. Nobody has any idea of what that feels like, when it happens. Your atoms suddenly coexisting in the same atomic space as solid rock and metal. It might be instant and painless. It might be long and horrifying. But that’s why her cut of the profit is bigger than anyone else’s.

She’s looking for shiny space rocks. Gone are the old days of exploratory laser-boring and magnetic surveys, long and laborious and often fruitless. It’s much cheaper for the big asteroid-cracking firms to just send a geophaser like her down to have a look around. If she finds anything worth extracting they can blast the whole rock to smithereens and mine the rubble.

She’s already got the feeling that this is a good rock. But she has a few minutes in which to enjoy herself, before she has to make her report. She glides down through alternating stratas of rock and iron. Following rich lodes of quadritanium and veins of tricobalt, formed over thousands of years in the strange pressures of the void. More beautiful for being hidden and secret. She’s the only person who gets to see them like this, written through the rock like ancient stories. They’ll very soon be scattered into space, pinwheeling and glittering as a fine dust, suddenly exposed to the shocking coolness of the void.

It makes her sad. There’s a big part of her that would rather let sleeping minerals lie. But the danger pay’s good enough to outweigh her compunctions. A few more years of this and she’ll be able to stop doing it. Move off Earth to one of the freeworld colonies. Buy a big waterfront cabin on Arethusa for her and Meg. They can finally get a dog, take it for walks around the lake. Breathe the fresh air, free of carbon.

Subspace static crackles in her earpiece. The mobile refinery Vega Challenger is idling eight kilometers away, waiting for her report. Preparing the onboard ore processor. Bringing its swarm of collector drones online. Warming up the antiproton beam. They probably want to know what’s taking so long.

“You reading me there, IX1?”

She sighs. “Yeah, recieving.”

“We’re getting some anomalous thermal readings. Take a look for us?”

“Copy,” she says. And dives down, down and further down, into the core of this massive thing. Frowning as she goes. This rock is twenty-seven miles in diameter at its widest point, but that’s not big enough for a molten core. There’s the small chance that somebody’s already at home here, that there’s some kind of habitat bored into the core. Smugglers, pirates. Illegal mining, maybe. Somebody scalping it for profit, the old-fashioned way, with tunnels and handheld mining lasers. Vega Challenger can’t crack it open if there’s already people here. The lawsuit would be astronomical.

So that’s vaguely what she’s expecting, when she dives down into the core. She’s not expecting it to be the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She puts her hand over her mouth. It goes right through her head, because of the interphasic field. But that doesn’t matter.

She’s floating in the middle of a crystal cathedral. Right in the centre of this rock there’s a crystal cave three or four miles wide. A massive viridium deposit. Some of the largest natural crystals she’s ever seen, all crowded together and criss-crossing the chamber from a thousand angles. Great pillars of green and white, standing like jagged knives. And singing, because of course they are. They’re viridium crystals. They have a unique harmonic resonance factor. They pick up subspace signals and amplify them, echoing whatever they hear. Singing the high and mournful song of distant stars, like a crystal choir. Just for her.

If she calls this in, she can retire tomorrow. They use viridium crystal cores for regulating the output threshold of antimatter reactors. They’re one of the most valuable substances in the galaxy. Her cut of the profits could buy a whole moon in the freeworld colonies, not just a cabin by the lake.

But she knows that she can’t allow this place to be destroyed. It’s a work of art, formed by the ancient forces that keep the universe turning. More beautiful for having not been planned by human minds, or built by human hands. She can just leave it here, undisturbed and wonderful, for the rest of time. Singing quietly in the heart of this rock. And she knows, in her heart, that that’s what Meg would want her to do.

She blinks a tear out her eye and sees it float away, a tiny globule of salt and water, into the maze of crystals. That’s the only thing she’ll leave here. She floats back up, through the ceiling of the cavern. Up through the miles of rock towards open space.

“Vega Challenger,” she says. “There’s nothing down here. Just a big hunk of rock.”

#scifi