GUYS, PLEASE STOP ASKING ME TO JOIN YOUR FORUMS. I RARELY RP ANYMORE, IF I WANT TO JOIN YOUR FORUM, I WILL COME TO YOUR FORUM AND JOIN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, BUT PLEASE UNDERSTAND I'M EXTREMELY BUSY AND DO NOT HAVE TIME TO JOIN YOUR LOVELY FORUMS. THANKS SO MUCH. -- FELICITY

"The stories we love best live on in us forever. So whether you come back by book or the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home."

- JK Rowling ღ

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." -- Nick -- The Great Gatsby ღ

"The power of life goes on, and you contribute a verse." -- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

"Give 'em hell, Davina Claire." -- Kol Mikaelson, The Originals ღ

"Time signifies nothing." - Quentin -- The Sound and the Fury

"One moment of pain is worth an entire lifetime of glory." -- Louie Zamperini

"To be great, is to be misunderstood" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I am large. I contain multitudes." - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

"I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman." - Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova

"The universe looked inside of you, and for the first time--FOR THE FIRST TIME--it told you no." - Gamora, Thanos #6 (2018)

“I thought she was beautiful because of her spirit, but truly, wholly, absolutely, it was because of the distance between where she began and I ended.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful & The Damned

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Pg. 162

My belief is that our lives are epics. No, I don't mean 'epic' as an adjective. I mean vast and complicated allegorical twists and turns of Milton's Paradise Lost, the moral and spiritual doubt of Dante's Divine Comedy, and the dry, yet jam-packed musings of Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey.

In the times of 'old'--the time where they actually wrote poetry (complicated, crazy hard to understand poetry)--the epic was considered the highest form of writing. So, of course, you couldn't start with that. You had to start simple.

First, you would start with pastoral form that essentially performed an allegorical dialogue on the current politics of society. So, the little lambs, chickens, half-naked ladies, and fat babies were all alluding to a political narrative that (if you were smart enough) you could pick up on.

And so with time, you would build your 'fields of green' and 'naked ladies' into the epic. You're poetry would begin to create its own dialogue, movement, rhythm--music. You would mimic your predecessors, only to show them that you were better, greater, and had all the power to change the game...completely.

With that in mind, the epic was not 'achieveable,' by any standards. It wasn't something one could just walk into. They were written by men and women (read an epic by a woman, for God's sakes, women: Mary Wroth's The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania is a great one to start with :)) who had no idea if they were ready to uptake a mantle of greatness had been thrown onto them. That's gotta be why every epic is written as a fucking origin story. The point of epics is that the hero has to find their people a home, a niche--a bedrock.

So, like the heroes in the epics we, too, have to find our own sense of greatness. We have to endure the temptations of Satan to not choose evil, we lose our friends to the watery, vicious hands of Scylla and Charybdis, we crawl into the pit of Hell to find our identity...and by all means, we lose everything. But that's why I love the epics. Because, yes, we will lose everything in life. We'll have our faith tested, our formative bedstone burned to a crisp, our cores stripped of everything we hold dear...but we will find our home.

Yes, my darlings, because that much is true about all of life: We will find our home. Because we are the heroes of our own epics...and it's taken too long to work our way to even pick up the pen and write it down. Believe in the power of yourself, my friends, because you have the power to write one of the greatest unknown stories: your own life.

Completion is arbitrary...so was the epic. Write on and have some fucking hope. ღ