The cacophony of opinions on the embedded machine is exactly why I took the app off my phone. I’ve never used AI for creative writing and I don’t need AI to tell me what writing was written by a machine. That writing tastes like metal.
I miss the days before everyone felt compelled to have a Hot Take on every breaking headline. Or perform that opinion to an audience of faceless onlookers. The Nothing is taking over. The only breaking news I want is an obituary.
I'm so sorry to say this but that was such a well written comment and you stuck the landing so hard it's actually the best hot take I've read in months. SORRY. THANK YOU. scritches to Riddle, text you later
My breath stopped about a third in. I began again. Still, I found myself holding my breath until I blurted out loud, F'ing A, this woman can write. Then I finished reading and, truly, really, no making it up, I cried. I'm so grateful you're in this world.
With mention of forest dwelling, I'm reminded of Shiva and how one of his go-to places is deep deep within the forest where distractions fall away, where he meets the wild unconsciousness, where he reconnects to the vastness of his heart and dances his dance of ecstasy and grace. Be in good company, Marya.
Yes, yes, yes. You are a hero, Marya. I agree with every word of this brilliant, blistering piece. I'm not running away to the woods (not that you are either) but I often feel like it. Sending solidarity - and huge admiration.
far from heroic, but - you know as well as I do - there's this enduring necessity for somebody to go trekking out into the middle of the mess and start hollering about what we see - you're much more elegant in doing so than me, of course - solidarity and huge admiration to YOU.
Wow, @Marya Hornbacher! I’m nowhere near your league on the writing front. But I will truly cherish these words. On with the hollering in the shit-show. Perhaps one day there will be less need. We can only hope…
I read roughly half of this out loud to the guy sitting across the room. Likely won't make a lick of difference, but the work deserved at least that much.
Elizabeth, you're a treasure. Also, I love that you read it aloud - I don't know where you were when you did it but I find the idea of it being maybe a coffee shop and the audience a stranger - the visual made my day. Thank you, as always.
Your frank writing is such an admirable thing. I learn from you.
AND.
I'm copying this with credit to you, Marya. Hope that's all good, if it's a problem lemme know. You worded the frustration with more grace than I ever have, no matter how many times I try.
And - all due respect - it’s absurd to have to keep begging people who are clearly reading our work to like or restack it in every single post. Some of you do - bless you - but the vast majority of our readers - who we know are reading not only because we can see our analytics but because they often respond, at length, in detail, off the platform - do everything OTHER THAN the thing we are literally begging them to do, the one thing that would actually help, which is to like or restack the damn post.
Friends, for the love of god I am too fucking old to keep begging rational adults to click a fucking heart.
Janice!! I KNEW you'd understand ;) I don't always word the frustration well - often enough without any grace at all. I still think it matters that we tell it true. So happy to see you here. Thank you.
I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this.
One gift, or curse, of my neurodivergence is that, like you, "I can see what's coming a long way off." Another is a lifetime of practice at masking, which I've repurposed into the superpower of performing the role of an adult in polite society to help hold my community together while simultaneously knowing the wheels are coming off; paying bills, for example, while knowing that money is just a polite word for debt, which, like gender, race, nations, and presidents, only exists we've agreed to believe in it, and only has the power we freely give to it.
There's nothing like time in nature to regain perspective, to remind ourselves of what's real and what's an artifact, and of the existential danger of giving artifacts real power. May you, as a friend wrote, "find a place that doesn't hurt, and from there, relate to the pain." For me, that place was Glacier National Park.
Lastly, please don't give up on writing here. Writing can reach places the spoken word cannot. I have friends and neighbors who are also subscribers. They first make sure no one else is listening, then tell me they've read one of my harder-hitting pieces and thank and compliment me. If I try to extend the conversation in person, they change the subject.
But I know they wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it.
I think I need to get to Glacier before the snows this year. Email incoming to you shortly, but in the meantime - I am glad/sorry you woke up thinking about this, but as you know, it is a great comfort to me to know we're both out here shuffling around in our Cassandra suits - and every time we meet to chat, it warms my heart all over again. Thank you, John, for all the things.
Marya, oh my god, Marya. Everything you said about enshittification, exploitation, our "government"—it got my blood up. I don't know if that's the rightest or most accurate expression, but it feels apt because reading your words, my heart is literally pumping in my chest harder than it was a moment ago.
You've never held your literary punches, as far as I can tell. When you put tempered words out into the world, I'm sure they are actually tempered and not falsely checked just to keep from pissing people off. When I read your tempered words, they are a comfort, not because I ask of you or expect you to give me solace, but because I see that it's possible to observe all the horrible crazy shit with clear eyes and not go batshit with rage or think I'm crazy for thinking it's horrible. I feel like I'm simply enduring nowadays.
I am estranged from family members. I fucking hate that, even though it is ultimately my choice more than theirs. Because the thing is, they sit in their white privilege which is just expansive enough to include me though I am by all measures the embodiment of the person they want deported and stripped of rights, even while they applaud what is happening to people like me—maybe the only difference between me and them is that those people don't have family members who look them in the eye and say "but we don't mean _you_." I've witnessed this shift in some family members to a kind of pleasured cruelty at what we've all been seeing, and that is what I most personally cannot abide. I don't even feel animosity towards them anymore because I understand them. Like you, I can't agree, I will never agree, but I understand. But I also can't forgive and can't forget and can't look away at what they've done and condoned.
And I guess I've been keeping up with you in the way I can (not having any other media apps) for going on a couple of years now. Your interviews of people that were published through...was it the SF Chronicle? I read them all. I subscribed to it for your writing. They were phenomenal, and they were utterly, shatteringly important.
In these times, I cling to stories, both real and made up. Because...I don't know. I always go back to story. Stories are fundamental, I think, to humanity, to what makes us human. It's not our intellect that separates us, I think. Other beings of the world are not less than us. We know that myriads of the other beings with whom we share the world are sentient and have their own cultures and languages and probable a deeper simpatico with the planet, but none of them looked at the stars and created myths around them nor tools to more more deeply investigate the stories we learned to tell ourselves.
While the world feels like it's on fire, I look to stories to help explain it, but also because I hope. There is something powerfully hopeful about preserving the importance of stories.
I'm reading Hearts in Atlantis at the moment. I can't help thinking that the united states is low men in yellow coats, and always has been, in a way. The ideas noble, the manifestation of our Founders' ideas profoundly less than noble. Yet, what I love about Stephen King's work is that he is ultimately a hopeful optimist. He always gives the "good" side a chance.
I understand that the people we are fighting against, some of them I love, are not bad or evil themselves, but they are not on the right side of morality and I refuse to look away from that fact like it doesn't matter. I refuse to let those people marginalize me by saying things like "It's only politics, you're taking things too seriously, you're too sensitive." They live in fear. Their fear is what drives them. But I will not abide that the cost of their fear is the ashes of freedom in _all_ our mouths. I'm saying this now because in reading this most current writing of yours, I've felt my tempering crack apart. I'm sure it will be back. It must, because I will not let myself go permanently to pieces. But gods, it feels good to momentarily yowl out with you.
Carly, I know I've said this before, but I mean it just as much every time - the comments you post in response are wiser, more thorough, and more insightful than 98% of what I write IN THE POST - I am beyond grateful for your contributions here, but even more so I am grateful to know that a mind and heart like yours are in the world. Also, yowling is underrated. We should do it whenever we please - it really does help.
And you, my friend, are deserving of a long breath of peace while sitting with Luna Moonbat around a night time camp fire, maybe munching on some small treat, or two or ten. The lack of noise aside from peepers and crickets will help.
Your words for the SF Chronicle were indeed incredible writing. Every one you wrote shared exactly what the heart of the people said who let you in, and touched every single reader.
The issue is that those who needed to read it never even saw it. It should have been read from pulpits in the Deep South and the far reaches of North Dakota, northern Michigan, all of Texas and Oklahoma. None of those ignorant white pearl clutching women ever read it. I know. We know.
What I can promise you is a bit of solid truth that science can attest to: the earth will always win in the end. Nothing humans can do to it will outlast this planet. Eventually, it takes back what it must, and it might well be another catastrophe event that stops this insanity. God knows the people who believe snakes can talk won’t stop it. And many of them still believe that man has the right to own his woman and children, to beat them with a stick the diameter of his thumb, to kill people of color for simply existing, and to rig every single election they can.
What they cannot do is to make you not be yourself, nor can they change your beliefs.
I know you’ll not give in. Nor will I. I will continue as Viktor Frankl did, to maintain the one thing no one can take… my choice.
Please also remember that encouraging those of us who are of like mind is valid, speaking the truth is always valid since it helps keep us sane, and making your own personal choices will always matter. Caring about people you choose to care about will always matter. Just be you.
Can't remember who made the joke most recently about being oneself because the alternative isn't so good ;) Tey, your friendship and companionship on the road means the world - especially as it seems to narrow and darken a little these days, but I know it's going to be all the more crucial when we make it over the pass. xo
I get it. I so get it. As one of those Evil College Professors who systematically sets about forcing our Youth To Go Woke, I’ve had countless conversations with colleagues and students regarding how we can hang on to who we are and continue what we do. There are times when we’ve talked about turning inward, just focusing on our own little circle of what we can control. Yet, at the same time, we have the power to fight back constantly. Every time I help a student, whether academically or personally, I fight. Every time I assign a reading or discussion that would make those numb nuts women clutch their pearls tighter, I fight. Every single time I walk to the front of a fucking university classroom and engage students, I fight. I know it gets tiring – you can only be raw for so long.
Be well in the woods. But please know that you, along with your writing, are a huge inspiration to someone like me.
Christa, replying to someone who contacted me about an interview just yesterday - a professor - I wrote, "thank you - you're doing the lord's work - and sorry about ...higher ed." Same to you - and you are equally an inspiration to someone like me. xx
Lordy, can you write! You pull off the one hat trick that many try but only you do so well. What is it? Writing a big honkin paragraph with one sentence. After I read it three times to make sure I'm believing what I'm seeing, I recall English class where we had to diagram a sentence. Probably, I would be a world class writer now if my teacher had dropped one of your monster sentences on me, with a stopwatch in her other hand.
For what it's worth, my aunt, who reads this newsletter, hates those sentences. Once she posted a comment in response to one that was even longer, "What an absolutely horrible correct sentence." Thank you so much for being here!!
Thank you so much, Dr. Cathy. I continue to be crushed that Americans have not yet fully adopted "bloody" as a superlative. We'd be much better off if we did.
I love a good superlative - Americans use of ‘fucking’ as such has always impressed. So much to be fucking sad about there right now I imagine. Keep writing about it all - I love your words ❤️
If you’re in the Minnesota North Woods, I recommend you contact Doug Wood, a kindred spirit to us old & tired Lefties, who writes nearly as eloquently as you, just with less “fucks” in his sentences, and whose latest work on substack is called “The Enemies List,” and, fortunately, both you and I are on it, being sentient beings with some formal education who read books, find facts important, and think the Constitution is more than advisory. https://douglaswoodmn.substack.com/
And, OMT, your kick-assity is always appreciated, and looked-forward-to. So don’t despair so deeply that you quit; because, MH, several us NEED your writing, not just admire it. So there ya go - now off with you. woman, and REJUVENATE!
I love the idea of kick-assity as a quality! and I am thrilled to be on the Enemies List in your good company - thank you for introducing me to Doug's work!! also I use all the "fucks" because it confounds AI. I'm not kidding. some dude told me he'd asked his stupid chatbot to write whatever whatever "in the style of Marya Hornbacher" and first of all I was like wtf is the matter with you, don't do that, and second of all I asked, "ok but did it drop a bunch of f-bombs?" and he said "no, that's how you could tell it wasn't really you" - good lord has it really come to this - thank you so much, Marc, see you back here soon!
I'm in awe of the writing, the honesty, the moral rigour, in despair for how much we know and see coming and how absurd the human world has become. I hope the woods are a place of deep peace and the writing flows because your writing absolutely matters. xx
Jan, having spent the last several weeks with your next collection, it stuns me to read this - all of those same qualities in your work have sustained and inspired me all the way through. Can't wait to discuss - coming your way Monday as planned, and what a privilege it's been. xx
The cacophony of opinions on the embedded machine is exactly why I took the app off my phone. I’ve never used AI for creative writing and I don’t need AI to tell me what writing was written by a machine. That writing tastes like metal.
I miss the days before everyone felt compelled to have a Hot Take on every breaking headline. Or perform that opinion to an audience of faceless onlookers. The Nothing is taking over. The only breaking news I want is an obituary.
I'm so sorry to say this but that was such a well written comment and you stuck the landing so hard it's actually the best hot take I've read in months. SORRY. THANK YOU. scritches to Riddle, text you later
That writing tastes like metal!
heavy metal
This was maybe the most inspiring thing I'll read all year. Thank you MH.
bud, you've been inspiring me for what's it - 27 years? I got catching up to do. ;)
My breath stopped about a third in. I began again. Still, I found myself holding my breath until I blurted out loud, F'ing A, this woman can write. Then I finished reading and, truly, really, no making it up, I cried. I'm so grateful you're in this world.
With mention of forest dwelling, I'm reminded of Shiva and how one of his go-to places is deep deep within the forest where distractions fall away, where he meets the wild unconsciousness, where he reconnects to the vastness of his heart and dances his dance of ecstasy and grace. Be in good company, Marya.
you always have just the right gods for the occasion ;) it's a gift - as are you. xo
My teacher would be proud. 😀
Yes, yes, yes. You are a hero, Marya. I agree with every word of this brilliant, blistering piece. I'm not running away to the woods (not that you are either) but I often feel like it. Sending solidarity - and huge admiration.
far from heroic, but - you know as well as I do - there's this enduring necessity for somebody to go trekking out into the middle of the mess and start hollering about what we see - you're much more elegant in doing so than me, of course - solidarity and huge admiration to YOU.
Wow, @Marya Hornbacher! I’m nowhere near your league on the writing front. But I will truly cherish these words. On with the hollering in the shit-show. Perhaps one day there will be less need. We can only hope…
I read roughly half of this out loud to the guy sitting across the room. Likely won't make a lick of difference, but the work deserved at least that much.
Hope you and Luna Moonbat have a good month.
Roger, and out.
Elizabeth, you're a treasure. Also, I love that you read it aloud - I don't know where you were when you did it but I find the idea of it being maybe a coffee shop and the audience a stranger - the visual made my day. Thank you, as always.
Your frank writing is such an admirable thing. I learn from you.
AND.
I'm copying this with credit to you, Marya. Hope that's all good, if it's a problem lemme know. You worded the frustration with more grace than I ever have, no matter how many times I try.
And - all due respect - it’s absurd to have to keep begging people who are clearly reading our work to like or restack it in every single post. Some of you do - bless you - but the vast majority of our readers - who we know are reading not only because we can see our analytics but because they often respond, at length, in detail, off the platform - do everything OTHER THAN the thing we are literally begging them to do, the one thing that would actually help, which is to like or restack the damn post.
Friends, for the love of god I am too fucking old to keep begging rational adults to click a fucking heart.
Janice!! I KNEW you'd understand ;) I don't always word the frustration well - often enough without any grace at all. I still think it matters that we tell it true. So happy to see you here. Thank you.
Enjoy your time off the grid, my friend. xx ~J
I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this.
One gift, or curse, of my neurodivergence is that, like you, "I can see what's coming a long way off." Another is a lifetime of practice at masking, which I've repurposed into the superpower of performing the role of an adult in polite society to help hold my community together while simultaneously knowing the wheels are coming off; paying bills, for example, while knowing that money is just a polite word for debt, which, like gender, race, nations, and presidents, only exists we've agreed to believe in it, and only has the power we freely give to it.
There's nothing like time in nature to regain perspective, to remind ourselves of what's real and what's an artifact, and of the existential danger of giving artifacts real power. May you, as a friend wrote, "find a place that doesn't hurt, and from there, relate to the pain." For me, that place was Glacier National Park.
Lastly, please don't give up on writing here. Writing can reach places the spoken word cannot. I have friends and neighbors who are also subscribers. They first make sure no one else is listening, then tell me they've read one of my harder-hitting pieces and thank and compliment me. If I try to extend the conversation in person, they change the subject.
But I know they wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it.
I think I need to get to Glacier before the snows this year. Email incoming to you shortly, but in the meantime - I am glad/sorry you woke up thinking about this, but as you know, it is a great comfort to me to know we're both out here shuffling around in our Cassandra suits - and every time we meet to chat, it warms my heart all over again. Thank you, John, for all the things.
Marya, oh my god, Marya. Everything you said about enshittification, exploitation, our "government"—it got my blood up. I don't know if that's the rightest or most accurate expression, but it feels apt because reading your words, my heart is literally pumping in my chest harder than it was a moment ago.
You've never held your literary punches, as far as I can tell. When you put tempered words out into the world, I'm sure they are actually tempered and not falsely checked just to keep from pissing people off. When I read your tempered words, they are a comfort, not because I ask of you or expect you to give me solace, but because I see that it's possible to observe all the horrible crazy shit with clear eyes and not go batshit with rage or think I'm crazy for thinking it's horrible. I feel like I'm simply enduring nowadays.
I am estranged from family members. I fucking hate that, even though it is ultimately my choice more than theirs. Because the thing is, they sit in their white privilege which is just expansive enough to include me though I am by all measures the embodiment of the person they want deported and stripped of rights, even while they applaud what is happening to people like me—maybe the only difference between me and them is that those people don't have family members who look them in the eye and say "but we don't mean _you_." I've witnessed this shift in some family members to a kind of pleasured cruelty at what we've all been seeing, and that is what I most personally cannot abide. I don't even feel animosity towards them anymore because I understand them. Like you, I can't agree, I will never agree, but I understand. But I also can't forgive and can't forget and can't look away at what they've done and condoned.
And I guess I've been keeping up with you in the way I can (not having any other media apps) for going on a couple of years now. Your interviews of people that were published through...was it the SF Chronicle? I read them all. I subscribed to it for your writing. They were phenomenal, and they were utterly, shatteringly important.
In these times, I cling to stories, both real and made up. Because...I don't know. I always go back to story. Stories are fundamental, I think, to humanity, to what makes us human. It's not our intellect that separates us, I think. Other beings of the world are not less than us. We know that myriads of the other beings with whom we share the world are sentient and have their own cultures and languages and probable a deeper simpatico with the planet, but none of them looked at the stars and created myths around them nor tools to more more deeply investigate the stories we learned to tell ourselves.
While the world feels like it's on fire, I look to stories to help explain it, but also because I hope. There is something powerfully hopeful about preserving the importance of stories.
I'm reading Hearts in Atlantis at the moment. I can't help thinking that the united states is low men in yellow coats, and always has been, in a way. The ideas noble, the manifestation of our Founders' ideas profoundly less than noble. Yet, what I love about Stephen King's work is that he is ultimately a hopeful optimist. He always gives the "good" side a chance.
I understand that the people we are fighting against, some of them I love, are not bad or evil themselves, but they are not on the right side of morality and I refuse to look away from that fact like it doesn't matter. I refuse to let those people marginalize me by saying things like "It's only politics, you're taking things too seriously, you're too sensitive." They live in fear. Their fear is what drives them. But I will not abide that the cost of their fear is the ashes of freedom in _all_ our mouths. I'm saying this now because in reading this most current writing of yours, I've felt my tempering crack apart. I'm sure it will be back. It must, because I will not let myself go permanently to pieces. But gods, it feels good to momentarily yowl out with you.
Carly, I know I've said this before, but I mean it just as much every time - the comments you post in response are wiser, more thorough, and more insightful than 98% of what I write IN THE POST - I am beyond grateful for your contributions here, but even more so I am grateful to know that a mind and heart like yours are in the world. Also, yowling is underrated. We should do it whenever we please - it really does help.
And you, my friend, are deserving of a long breath of peace while sitting with Luna Moonbat around a night time camp fire, maybe munching on some small treat, or two or ten. The lack of noise aside from peepers and crickets will help.
Your words for the SF Chronicle were indeed incredible writing. Every one you wrote shared exactly what the heart of the people said who let you in, and touched every single reader.
The issue is that those who needed to read it never even saw it. It should have been read from pulpits in the Deep South and the far reaches of North Dakota, northern Michigan, all of Texas and Oklahoma. None of those ignorant white pearl clutching women ever read it. I know. We know.
What I can promise you is a bit of solid truth that science can attest to: the earth will always win in the end. Nothing humans can do to it will outlast this planet. Eventually, it takes back what it must, and it might well be another catastrophe event that stops this insanity. God knows the people who believe snakes can talk won’t stop it. And many of them still believe that man has the right to own his woman and children, to beat them with a stick the diameter of his thumb, to kill people of color for simply existing, and to rig every single election they can.
What they cannot do is to make you not be yourself, nor can they change your beliefs.
I know you’ll not give in. Nor will I. I will continue as Viktor Frankl did, to maintain the one thing no one can take… my choice.
Please also remember that encouraging those of us who are of like mind is valid, speaking the truth is always valid since it helps keep us sane, and making your own personal choices will always matter. Caring about people you choose to care about will always matter. Just be you.
Can't remember who made the joke most recently about being oneself because the alternative isn't so good ;) Tey, your friendship and companionship on the road means the world - especially as it seems to narrow and darken a little these days, but I know it's going to be all the more crucial when we make it over the pass. xo
I get it. I so get it. As one of those Evil College Professors who systematically sets about forcing our Youth To Go Woke, I’ve had countless conversations with colleagues and students regarding how we can hang on to who we are and continue what we do. There are times when we’ve talked about turning inward, just focusing on our own little circle of what we can control. Yet, at the same time, we have the power to fight back constantly. Every time I help a student, whether academically or personally, I fight. Every time I assign a reading or discussion that would make those numb nuts women clutch their pearls tighter, I fight. Every single time I walk to the front of a fucking university classroom and engage students, I fight. I know it gets tiring – you can only be raw for so long.
Be well in the woods. But please know that you, along with your writing, are a huge inspiration to someone like me.
Christa, replying to someone who contacted me about an interview just yesterday - a professor - I wrote, "thank you - you're doing the lord's work - and sorry about ...higher ed." Same to you - and you are equally an inspiration to someone like me. xx
Thank you so, so much Marya. I greatly appreciate this! 💜
Lordy, can you write! You pull off the one hat trick that many try but only you do so well. What is it? Writing a big honkin paragraph with one sentence. After I read it three times to make sure I'm believing what I'm seeing, I recall English class where we had to diagram a sentence. Probably, I would be a world class writer now if my teacher had dropped one of your monster sentences on me, with a stopwatch in her other hand.
For what it's worth, my aunt, who reads this newsletter, hates those sentences. Once she posted a comment in response to one that was even longer, "What an absolutely horrible correct sentence." Thank you so much for being here!!
Can I just say yep. Oh and damn, you never cease to inspire.
right back atcha, luv. xo
So good. Depressingly bloody good 🙏
Thank you so much, Dr. Cathy. I continue to be crushed that Americans have not yet fully adopted "bloody" as a superlative. We'd be much better off if we did.
I love a good superlative - Americans use of ‘fucking’ as such has always impressed. So much to be fucking sad about there right now I imagine. Keep writing about it all - I love your words ❤️
If you’re in the Minnesota North Woods, I recommend you contact Doug Wood, a kindred spirit to us old & tired Lefties, who writes nearly as eloquently as you, just with less “fucks” in his sentences, and whose latest work on substack is called “The Enemies List,” and, fortunately, both you and I are on it, being sentient beings with some formal education who read books, find facts important, and think the Constitution is more than advisory. https://douglaswoodmn.substack.com/
And, OMT, your kick-assity is always appreciated, and looked-forward-to. So don’t despair so deeply that you quit; because, MH, several us NEED your writing, not just admire it. So there ya go - now off with you. woman, and REJUVENATE!
I love the idea of kick-assity as a quality! and I am thrilled to be on the Enemies List in your good company - thank you for introducing me to Doug's work!! also I use all the "fucks" because it confounds AI. I'm not kidding. some dude told me he'd asked his stupid chatbot to write whatever whatever "in the style of Marya Hornbacher" and first of all I was like wtf is the matter with you, don't do that, and second of all I asked, "ok but did it drop a bunch of f-bombs?" and he said "no, that's how you could tell it wasn't really you" - good lord has it really come to this - thank you so much, Marc, see you back here soon!
I'm in awe of the writing, the honesty, the moral rigour, in despair for how much we know and see coming and how absurd the human world has become. I hope the woods are a place of deep peace and the writing flows because your writing absolutely matters. xx
Jan, having spent the last several weeks with your next collection, it stuns me to read this - all of those same qualities in your work have sustained and inspired me all the way through. Can't wait to discuss - coming your way Monday as planned, and what a privilege it's been. xx
So looking forward to reading your insights and thrilled and honoured that the collection has spoken to you so deeply. xxx
THANK YOU
We are awake and listening and will be here when you return, restored.
sometimes a comment like this just hits me in the feels. thank YOU.