My Own Little Faerieland

A nautical dictionary. A diagram of ships with all the strange parts labelled. Hearing tales of sea-faring and focusing on the unknown words.

Words that taste like brine and wood and iron.

You trace the lines of the gaffs and masts. You peer over the differences between cable and cablet, cross current and cross seas, dead ahead and dead astern.

And with book in arms you wait for days at the seaside, where the wind cuts your skin and leaves it cold and burning with salt. Where the very air tastes like a promise, tastes like a hunger that’s partly sea-farers’ wanderlust and partly breathless desire for something you can’t quite name, but you think you can describe with the words from your books.

The very day you’re old enough to wander apart from your parents, you’re off. You got your fill of the grit of sand and shells beneath your feet long ago. You are drawn to the docks, the clashes of metal and wood and sound.

And so you are wandering the shipyard, where the saltscent is mixed with the tang of burning steel and the heavy sweetness of cedar and the elder note of oak.

And the woodscent and the metalscent taste right, but overpowering, not quite balanced, and your body yearns to ride them out into the saltscent.

But the workers shout to each other in harsh, salt-laced voices and your ear is caught by the angles of the words.

And the way ‘timber carvel’ curves around your mind, soft and sharp and as clean as salt.

And you hear the words ‘halliards’ and ‘leach lines’ and ‘futtock shrouds’ spoken aloud for the first time, and your mind knows them.

Knows the lilt in ‘halliard’ and the glottal stop in ‘futtock’, even though you’d only read them before, never daring to say aloud the words which left their traces on your tongue.

But now you do, now you whisper ‘mizzen channel’ into the cedar-laden air and the salt burns the traces it had left, burns the trace into your mouth, along your tongue, down your throat, down, down, and ‘bowsprit’ leaves your body keening forward as though you were the hull of the ship in construction before you.

And then you’re standing by the keel, avoiding swinging planks, listening for each word that lights your soul and whispering its echo into the gull-song wind

And later, hours or days or weeks or years, later you’re sitting in the library across from your room, perhaps you’re supposed to be sleeping, perhaps studying, perhaps writing important letters, but you’re kneeling on the floor, next to the shelves.

Kneeling in front of the book that traces in ink the words that are traced in burning steel on your spirit, and you are tracing with your tongue the memory of their sound in the grey air.

And they catch at your heart just as much as the sight of their meanings did, the shape and taste of ‘foremast’ meaning just as much as the great pillar of wood did as it rose in the air.

And the words you don’t know taste as much of blood-tangy salt as the words you do know, the words that exist only on the page (and in your mind, and for all you know, only in the mind of the author, having no true existence) dripping through your veins, with all the words that you saw in the shipyard.

bowline ,  forecastle ,  barquentine ,  lagan ,  binnacle ,  davit

And as you whisper, you shiver, and the salt burns its way through your veins, coldly burning down your throat, down, down, down

mrs-orange:

queendread:

I don’t understand the USA, all your roads are straight and all your cities look like they were planned using Excel.

Everyone knows the only way to build a city is to wait until a bunch of tiny villages merge together over centuries and create a sprawling clusterfuck of winding roads that make no sense and have no street signs and are impossible to navigate unless you’ve lived there all your life.

you built this city on rock’n roll

clintofbartonia:

thejohnlockgames:

iwillalwaysfindyousnow:

onceuponatimeinerebor:

consultingsuperhusbands:

jashingirl:

i-o-u-an-assbutt:

for-the-love-of-scarves:

a-mind-occupied-by-tennant:

p0isone:

I will never get over the inequality that men’s jackets have inside pockets and women’s jackets don’t. 

Amen.

I have nowhere to put my sonic screwdriver.

or my fake fbi badge

Or my pocket magnifying glass

or my wand

or my psychic paper

Or my precious

I lost it at my precious

so did smeageol

everyonelovesrobots:

ohshiitakemushrooms:

Can Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp star in a live action The Road to El Dorado together?

Can I please have this?

bemusedlybespectacled:

if you ever think mythology is boring or serious business or whatever shit

just remember that cerberus, the hell-hound and guard dog of the underworld, comes from the root indo-european word ḱerberos, which evolved into the greek word kerberos, which got changed to cerberus when it went from greek to latin

ḱerberos means “spotted”

that’s right

hades, lord of the dead, literally fucking named his pet dog spot