it's okay to be afraid

“Do you know what it's like when all possible futures coalesce into one? It’s not an epiphany. It’s not a very nice feeling at all. It’s a collapse. It’s—it’s a death. A death of possibilities, of maybes, of, of hopes. It all collapses to a single point. Such hopes. All those possibilities collapsed down to a point, and—and all the maybes strangled by a single is, and now those hopes are shattered. There's all sorts of ways that futures are cut down. Krynda Hulis wrote about it like gardening. Prune this tree back to give that plant more light. Make sure the mint stays where it belongs. Stars, Ari hates mint. Do you know how long it took to find toothpaste that wasn't mint? I think I went to all the pharmacies in a five kilometre cubed area just to end up finding this weird, tree resin-flavoured toothpaste in some little Tionese grocery hidden in a tiny corner of the Embassy Mall. It tastes like someone doused a bunch of herbs in vanilla.” “You're delirious.” “I have a compound fracture in my left tibia that I forced back inside me that I'm barely holding in place with the Force and you're here to kill me.” “Not if—” “Part of keeping a garden is weeding it. No one ever thinks of the weeds. There are good weeds, like taraxa and chasuka. On some planets it’s weed, not a crop. Remember—remember when we ended up stranded on Aduba-3, out on the Triellus, because of the problems between the miners and those native priests?” “The Modirin Mining Concern.” “Of course you remember all the details. They were so mad that those priests were conducting funerals and burying the droids and cyborgs alongside the miners killed when that one chromium mine collapsed? And Rael raided that one maze-stalk field only to find out that there were still months to the harvest, so all the ones he brought back were underripe? Three days of taraxa leaves.”