DEAR DIARY
02.16.2026 "Biodiversity" (Uni Parks, beginning to rain)
"The River Cherwell provides a rich riparian corridor connecting a series of floodplain meadows""This was farmland in the middle ages"
- devil's bit scabious (succisa pratensis)
- great burnet (sanguisorba officinalis)
- quaking grass (briza media)
- yellow rattle (rhinanthus minor)
(pictured clockwise)
"for meadow flowers to continue flourishing, soul fertility should be kept low by mowing the grass and removing the hay every year. The timing of the cut in late summer needs to be late enough to give seed time to fall, but not so late that more vigorous species outcompete delicate ones for sunlight and nutrients."
02.04.2026 + 02.12.2026
Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, there lived a king and queen who were very much in love.The queen had grown up in a small, damp castle overlooking the sea. The ocean snuck into the gaps in all things -- portraits of royal ancestors degraded; ermine crusted and clumped; silver tarnished dull and briny.
Her father's subjects were mostly fishermen and crabbers. The fish and crabs governed themselves.
One day, the Chief Advisor of M___________, a powerful and wealthy inland kingdom, looked out a window and saw war on the horizon. He ordered maps and books and reports, spread them out on a big table, and began preparing for brutal inevitabilities. Weeks later, he dipped a pen in red ink and drew a star on the surveyed coastline.
In an audience with His Lord the King, the Chief Advisor presented his Plan. A__________ was a poor kingdom, he explained, little more than a string of marshes and fishing villages. However, by triangulating and tracing and predicting and scouting and spying, the Advisor had determined that its coves and inlets could (with some investment) become a key naval base should tensions arise with D_________ (which they certainly would), leading D________'s allies in P________ to send reinforcements and provisions by sea.
The king must marry his third son, a plump, shy, disposable young man, to the eldest daughter of the King of A_________. M__________ could then quietly station weapons along their coastline and hide warships in their sheltered harbor.
The King of M___________ did not entirely follow this -- he did not entirely follow anything, ever. But he trusted his Chief Advisor and did not much care about his third son. Scrolls were prepared and messengers sent to the sea-swept castle.
The King of A_________ sent his own advisor back to M__________ to negotiate. The advisor returned with terms. The King of A_________ summoned his white-blonde eldest daughter. He gave her the news; she took it silent and expressionless.
The third son and eldest daughter were married soon after. It was a pragmatic union, but love invited itself in anyhow.
-------
In the following years, several expected and unexpected events took place:
- Rapid construction began in A_______, overseen by M________. Ships, materials, and troops were sent from allied coastal cities. Moored warships displaced fishing boats.
- War raged, as the Chief Advisor had predicted.
- The King of M________'s second son lost his life at the Battle of Pa_______, a sacrifice which historians later claimed turned the tides of war in M_________'s favor.
- Days after M________’s victory was declared, the King's eldest son died falling off his horse while riding drunk.
- The King himself died the following year of an uninteresting fever, which came on suddenly and burned him up.
- The third son was crowned King; his pale wife, Queen.
- The Queen lost pregnancies and mourned them privately. After over a decade of marriage, she delivered a healthy baby girl.
-------
The princess was born plump and pink. Her parents were so overjoyed that they did not know what to do. But the Chief Advisor knew what to do. He drew up a guest list for the christening: important persons, strategic allies, distant relations, barons whose presence was unnecessary but whose absence would be noted. Also invited were the eleven Wise Women of the Kingdom of M_________, who would bless the young princess with wonderful gifts.
The Queen sat pale in bed, singing her baby lullabies about long voyages and sea air. She bled, but less every day.
The christening came. Guests poured into the castle to celebrate the rosy-cheeked princess. When the vast platters of food had been eaten and the vast barrels of wine drunk, the crowd quieted. Eleven women stepped forward. One at a time, they knelt before the queen, who held the baby in her arms. They gave the princess their blessings:
"You will be beautiful."
"You will be kind."
"You will be virtuous."
"You will be humble."
"You will be graceful."
"You will be generous."
"You will be clever."
"You will be talented."
"You will be brave."
"You will be understanding of others and compassionate even when they make mistakes."
"You will be beloved."
There was a great round of applause, then a gasp from the back of the room. A cloaked figure pushed open the doors. The guards froze mid-lunge. The crowd found itself parted. The figure approached the queen, stopped within spitting distance and threw back its hood.
"Do you recognize me?" Hard grizzled face. Matted gray hair. Voice that lapped oddly gentle, like the sea.
"Yes" said the queen.
The Chief Advisor had not invited the Wise Women of the Kingdom of A________ to the christening. They were rag-wrapped old beggars who sold charms to sailors.
"Our sons were fishermen," said the woman. "Then you brought war to our beaches and they bled out on the sand. When the princess turns fifteen, she will join them: she will prick her finger on a fishing hook and die."
The Queen turned whiter than white, almost translucent. Guests cried out.
Footsteps from the back of the room. Another woman approached the Queen. Her face was even older, impossibly ancient, worn sharp in some places and soft in others by moving water.
"Forgive my sister. I cannot undo her curse but I can dull it: your daughter will prick her finger, but she won't die quite yet. She will fall into a deep sleep broken only by true love's kiss."
The first witch lunged, hissing, at the second, but lost momentum. The two women walked slowly to the grand ballroom doors, one leaning heavily against the other. No one stopped them.
The party ended.
The guests were ushered out.
The next day, the king ordered every fishing hook in the kingdom destroyed, on punishment of death.
-------
The princess grew to be radiantly beautiful. As years passed, the christening began to seem a distant dream. When the king and queen spoke of their daughter's future, they did so in definite terms: 'when she comes of age,' 'when she marries.'
They hired a governess to instruct the princess in history, philosophy, diplomatic languages, dancing, etiquette, ——, all the skills she would need to stride confidently towards adulthood. The governess was a young, plain woman with a drooping nose and sad eyes. She wore her hair slicked severe, brown so ashy it looked grey.
She loved teaching her pupil, who was kind and funny and earnest and desperate to learn. She hated teaching her pupil, who blindly embraced the future tense. The princess, freshly fifteen, would list all the things she wanted to do and see and learn, speaking in terms of "next year" and "the year after" and "when I'm married."
Nobody had told the princess her prognosis -- they were forbidden by law. She'd heard murmurs, whispered conversations between servants, but she could not comprehend and so would not believe.
One day, walking alone in a seldom-used castle passage, the princess saw a door open that was not usually open. Behind was a tight spiral staircase. At the top, a small, round room. Narrow windows offered remarkable views in all four cardinal directions. Forests, fields, mountains, the River L____ curving back and back to lands beyond. Sheep sprinkled white on a distant hill. The princess moved from window to window, trying to take it all in. Then she looked down and her eye was caught. Something silver had fallen in the gap between floorboards. It glinted in sunlight. Curious, she bent down and reached out.
She fell gently, like the last leaf in autumn.
All around the castle bodies froze in stylized tableaux. The king and queen were sharing a meal; their spoons stopped halfway to their mouths. The cook was slapping the kitchen boy; his hand stilled just as it touched jaw. A cat hovered, mid-arc, above a mouse.
The only thing that moved was the thorny hedge on the castle's outer wall. It spread with nightmarish rapidity. Thorns swelled, engorged, grew long and sharp as knives. Tendrils raced metastatically across stone, thickening and hardening. Within days, the castle was hidden entirely.
-------
Word spread quickly about the beautiful, sleeping princess in the thorn-wrapped castle. Heroes voyaged from far and wide to attempt to wake her and secure her hand. Soon, the thorn hedge was filled with corpses in varying states of decay, skewered and punctured.
The attempts slowed. The years passed.
One day, a young knight, famous for his cleverness and strength and handsome face, arrived in M__________ from the Western Lands. For hours he hacked relentlessly, a sword in one hand, a double-bladed axe in the other, as thorns bore down on him like teeth. He pushed through an archway and found himself in stagnant calm.
A castle yard. Figures frozen midway through various actions. A chicken running from a servant-woman. A smith polishing a blade. But something was wrong. The smith and the servant woman were gaunt and heavily wrinkled. The chicken was just a shell of a chicken, mummified mid-flight. A horse stood, foot half raised, skin pulled taut and leathery over bone.
Everything had frozen, even the worms and maggots. Except -- not the clock.
He wandered through the castle, past chambermaids in middle-age and posthumously shrunken courtiers. Allowing instinct to guide him, he reached an open door and climbed a corkscrew staircase. At the top, a small, round room. Its windows were obscured by vines, but through gaps you could see mountains, fields, the River L________. Sheep on a distant hillside. Sprawled on the ground was a woman, probably his mother's age, the young knight guessed. Still beautiful. Her girlish dress strained over curves. He kissed her. Again, harder. Harder. Nothing happened. He walked down the staircase, through the castle and the courtyard. The thorn hedge parted; he walked right out, past skeletons and their rusted swords.
-------
At the moment the castle froze, the plain governess was an hour away, attending her father's funeral. The event happened without her in it.
Afterwards, she had trouble securing a new job. People shied away as if scared she carried her ex-employer's curse, latent. She worked for several years as a governess to unimpressive aristocrats in large but shabby manors. The work was isolating and poorly paid. She left M___________ for a kingdom to the south and settled in a small, industrial city, where she could just afford to rent a pre-furnished new-build flat. She worked as an office temp for two years, then found full time employment as an administrator for a mid-sized shipping business. She filed paperwork, printed off reports, slotted them into a loud, taupe machine that punched holes in their margins and looped through a plastic coil binding. She restocked coffee beans and printer paper.
Eventually, she met a man. He was well into middle age and worked as a notary in her office building; they would often run into each other ordering coffee in the Starbucks on the ground floor. He wore baggy black suits. He used serious phrases, like "fiscal quarter," and asked serious questions, like "will you marry me?"
They had three children. She left the administrative job to raise them. The notary had a small house on the suburban fringes of the city that became her house as well. When the youngest child was three, they moved to a larger house in a newer development on the rapidly expanding margins of the urban nevus.
Two of the children went to college. The youngest had several difficult years, but eventually went to rehab, found a medication that stabilized his mood, returned to school, and got a surprisingly well-paid and fulfilling job as a kinesiology assistant.
Several years after her youngest son entered the workforce, her husband, who had been middle-aged when they met and gotten older with each subsequent year, passed on.
When she was nearly eighty and her days all had the same shape to them, she stepped out of her life and boarded a train that took her to the northern edge of the Southern Kingdoms. She transferred to a second train, then a coach bus, then a horse-drawn coach, at each stop thanking the impossibly young men who helped with her one small bag.
The capital city of M____________ was full of shuttered storefronts and graffitied walls. She walked from the coach stop to the square; up on the hill, overlooking the city, was a distant hedge the exact size and shape of a castle she'd once lived in. She walked towards it, knees creaking.
Standing before the hedge, the old woman saw bleached skeletons and rusted weapons, thorns as long as her arm. She opened her bag and pulled out gardening shears and a pair of well-worn rose gloves. She began pruning, speaking to the hedge as she worked: "just a little here, don't worry, now, I'm cutting at an angle so you won't rot when the rains come -- they say we're in for a terribly damp summer." When she neared her first skeleton: "Let him go, dear. You've held on long enough." Bones clattered to the ground as vines released and retreated. Soon, there was a tunnel in the hedge just big enough for a short woman.
She walked through the courtyard and the palace, nodding solemnly at each body she passed, the living and dead all collaged together in scenes of suspended action.
She climbed the staircase, clutching the handrail for support, and found herself in the round room. Sprawled on the floor was a woman in her late sixties, still wearing the flounced pink dress of a young girl. The governess knelt down, with some difficulty, and kissed the princess on her cheek.
Somewhere in the capital city, a church bell began clanging. The people who still lived in that decayed place (mostly those who could not afford to move elsewhere) ran out into the streets and watched in awe as the growth around the castle shrank and retreated until it was just a green dot beside a grand stone palace: a humble rosebush.
In the tower, the governess helped the princess to her unfamiliar feet. At the bottom of the staircase, on the other side of the door, some people were waking. Some weren't. In the days and years that followed, those who lived would try to find words and gestures to express new forms of grief. They would build lives on the unfamiliar bank of a channel into which most of their days had fallen.
The governess let the princess lean silent and heavy on her shoulder. Together, the two women looked out at the world in all four cardinal directions -- the familiar mountains, the unfamiliar factories, bald patches in the forest where trees had been cleared -- and watched the River L_____ curve back and back to lands beyond.
02.04.2026
The desk? table? in foyer of Science Library has this fancy two-pronged lamp on it, which does not seem to work. The table is positioned under a window, so, ironically, the lamp actually casts a black shadow on my page, obscuring my writing with local darkness.---
I have 2 projects right now:
1. Building journal (write it)
2. Find work
Also a 3rd project, which is meeting people and being in my body.
---
From Practicalities (Marguerite Duras) [via woman's blog]
"They [bad housewives?] think you can solve the problem of disorder by putting the tidying-up off until later, not realizing their 'later' does not exist and never will."
---
I thought I needed to learn the language of flowers but there is no point to learning the language of flowers until I have learned to identify and name my own feelings. Otherwise, how can I know what flowers to give? Otherwise, I am just asking flowers to reveal meaning to me, rather than commanding them to carry my message to an external other.
Today there is some sun in the sky, asserting itself between gaping clouds. After days on end of dull grey-white rain, these glimpses of blue are vital and radiant. I felt compelled to walk into it all.
Took ages to gather self enough to leave house. Hair disgustingly greasy so wore baseball cap and silk scarf. Listened to Deborah Levy's Real Estate as I got ready -- dislike reader's voice and am curious as to why. Sped her up 1.2x so she would lilt faster. This compression has not really made her more palatable, per se. Worry that Levy would consider (with interest) the power that I've exerted over the pace of another woman -- I've compressed her.
Have cold still. Maybe everyone has cold. Me here. Zach in USA.
Someone named Alex has liked me on Hinge.
In All Souls. Will leave now to greet Ginger.
(15 mins later, no Ginger, so on bench just outside AS library door)
Sun is a delicacy here. On the rare occasions it appears on the menu, you feel pressured to eat it no matter the cost. Then you all have to smack your lips with gusto and express your enjoyment.
[ended up crying on Ginger's shoulder slumped against wall of All Souls, saying how lost I feel -- I am so lost so lost and so, so scared. A man ran over, took a selfie with us and then ran off -- it's for a scavenger hunt, he called out, before darting away]
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