“This morning I was up early to let the dogs out. I had a coffee and watched the sunrise with a clear head and it occurred to me that I’m the grown up now that I never thought I would be – the grown up that, maybe, at one time, I was running away from because I thought it would be so incredibly dull to be that person, whereas the absolute reverse is true.”
maybe this is all that love is. the stray eyelash plucked so softly off their cheek, collars adjusted mid-sentence, the ladle passing back and forth as the sauce simmers (and how you blow it gently before they taste and still – ’it’s hot, careful’ – and then – ’more salt? more ginger? five more minutes? yes, five more minutes’) and voices humming in the next room, happily distracted, and no one there to hear it, to know about it, but you and you listen, stopped in the middle of whatever you were doing, to listen without saying anything, without walking in because it is a moment entirely theirs, not for anything but listening to, knowing that your place is to just be there, to hold that moment, because it is a gift beyond words that you’re lucky enough to be there to hear it, until the humming stops, and the world comes back and all you can do is go back to your task, aware suddenly of how delicate, how fragile all of it is.
“Don’t promise me forever, don’t promise me the sun and sky. Don’t pretend to know you’ll never make me cry. Just hold me now and promise me you’ll try.”
I think like, the death of Vine and Rabbit, Wikipedia constantly needing to beg for money, Discord depending so heavily on venture capital, Facebook turning towards spying on users to generate a return on all the venture capital that got them started, Adobe creative suite turning into a subscription rather than a single product you buy, the strangulation of streaming entertainment as every company pulls their content and makes it exclusive to their service, are all great examples of how like, it really doesn’t matter if something is legitimately useful, efficient, or beloved, it is next to impossible for a service to exist if it doesn’t make shareholders increasing amounts of money year after year. Which may seem like a “no duh” type of statement, but it’s a very simple window into how the profit motive makes products and services worse, not better. And how that’s not just a matter of certain companies or ceos being bad and greedy on an individual level, but is an inescapable factor of an economy where existence is dependent on generating capital.
