tongaridyne

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High functioning dead girl

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basically a lot of my problems boil down to me being really bad at waking up. and also really bad at going to sleep

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you stupid fucking idiot i can’t believe you died and got resurrected and are now safely in my arms again. I’ll kill you

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ok universe i’m getting out of bed i’m drinking water i’m making breakfast i’m trying please have something kind in store for me ok. i need a win

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James Whistler (American, 1834-1903) - Nocturne in Black and Gold - The Falling Rocket - c.1875

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Everybody stop what you’re doing RIGHT NOW and celebrate the last Out of Touch Thursday of 2020

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AE HEE LEE, from "Prelude"

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There are no premature endings. There are no wrong answers. There are only fresh perspectives and new beginnings. This is a love story.

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For my followers living in the UK—it is extremely likely that members of parliament will convene on Wednesday, November 15th, to vote once and for all for whether or not the UK should join the majority of the world's states and vote for a ceasefire to protect the citizens of Gaza.

This is historic. The UK is one of the most powerful nations in the world and on the UN council, and it is one of the few that had been staunchly opposing a ceasefire for the past month. If the UK supports a ceasefire, it would go a long way in securing peace and dignity for the Palestinians.

Please, please write to you MP and demand that they support the ceasefire. Organisations are asking people to implement the idea of "No Ceasefire, No Vote"—let those in power (especially MPs who may not support the idea) know that they will not be voted for in the coming elections if they stand against this.

This is a link that sends the email for you. It takes less than a minute. If you would like to edit it to add your own reasons, do that. And if you're not British, share the hell out of this post.

Free Palestine!

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snarl. gouache watercolor 2017

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Richard Jackson, from "After All This"

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It's also worth pointing out that Ukraine has a population of 43 million, while Gaza's is only a little over 2 million

And yet...

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help

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Point Bonita lighthouse, oil on canvas. — Frederick Ferdinand Schafer (American/German, 1839-1927)

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It is over and everything is lost. This is the refrain repeated by Armenian families as they take that final step across the border out of their home of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In just a handful of days more than 100,000 people, almost the entire Armenian population of the breakaway enclave, has fled fearing ethnic persecution at the hands of Azerbaijani forces. The world barely registered it. But this astonishing exodus has vanished a self-declared state that thousands have died fighting for and ended a decades-old bloody chapter of history.

On Saturday, along that dusty mountain road to neighbouring Armenia, a few remaining people limp to safety after enduring days in transit.

Among them is the Tsovinar family who appear bundled in a hatchback littered with bullet holes, with seven relatives crushed in the back. Hasratyan, 48, the mother, crumbles into tears as she tries to make sense of her last 48 hours. The thought she cannot banish is that from this moment forward, she will never again be able to visit the grave of her brother killed in a previous bout of fighting.

“He is buried in our village which is now controlled by Azerbaijan. We can never go back,” the mother-of-three says, as her teenage girls sob quietly beside her.

“We have lost our home, and our homeland. It is an erasing of a people. The world kept silent and handed us over”.

She is interrupted by several ambulances racing in the opposite direction towards Nagorno-Karabakh’s main city of Stepanakert, or Khankendi, as it is known by the Azerbaijani forces that now control the streets. Their job is to fetch the few remaining Karabakh Armenians who want to leave and have yet to make it out.

“Those left are the poorest who have no cars, the disabled and elderly who can’t move easily,” a first responder calls at us through the window. “Then we’re told that’s it.”

As the world focused on the United Nations General Assembly, the war in Ukraine and, in the UK, the felling of an iconic Sycamore tree, a decades old war has reignited here unnoticed.

It ultimately heralded the end of Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway Armenian region, that is internationally recognised as being part of Azerbaijan but for several decades has enjoyed de facto independence. It has triggered the largest movement of people in the South Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Azerbaijan has vehemently denied instigating ethnic cleansing and has promised to protect Armenians as it works to reintegrate the enclave.

But in the border town of Goris, surrounded by the chaotic arrival of hundreds of refugees, Armenia’s infrastructure minister says Yerevan was now struggling to work out what to do with tens of thousands of displaced and desperate people.

“Simply put this is a modern ethnic cleansing that has been permitted through the guilty silence of the world,” minister Gnel Sanosyan tells The Independent, as four new busses of fleeing families arrive behind him.

“This is a global shame, a shame for the world. We need the international community to step up and step up now.”

The divisions in this part of the world have their roots in centuries-old conflict but the latest iterations of bitter bloodshed erupted during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Karabakh Armenians, who are in the majority in the enclave, demanded the right to autonomy over the 4,400 square kilometre rolling mountainous region that has its own history and dialect. In the early 1990s they won a bloody war that uprooted Azerbaijanis, building a de facto state that wasn’t internationally unrecognised.

That is until in 2020. Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, launched a military offensive and took back swathes of territory in a six-week conflict that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. Russia, which originally supported Armenia but in recent years has grown into a colder ally, brokered a fragile truce and deployed peacekeepers.

But Moscow failed to stop Baku in December, enforcing a 10-month blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh, strangling food, fuel, electricity and water supplies. Then, the international community stood by as Azerbaijan launched a 24-hour military blitz that proved too much for Armenian separatist forces. Outgunned, outnumbered and weakened by the blockade, they agreed to lay down their weapons.

For 30 years the Karabakh authorities had survived pressure from international powerhouses to give up statehood or at least downgrade their aspirations for Nagorno-Karabakh. For 30 years peace plans brokered by countries across the world were tabled and shelved.

And then in a week all hope vanished and the self-declared government agreed to dissolve.

Fearing further shelling and then violent reprisals, as news broke several Karabakh officials including former ministers and separatist commanders, had been arrested by Azerbaijani security forces, people flooded over the border.

At the political level there are discussions about “reintegration” and “peace” but with so few left in Nagorno-Karabakh any process would now be futile.

And so now, sleeping in tents on the floors of hotels, restaurants and sometimes the streets of border towns, shellshocked families, with a handful of belongings, are trying to piece their lives together.

Among them is Vardan Tadevosyan, Nagorno-Karabakh’s minister of health until the government was effectively dissolved on Thursday. He spent the night camping on the floor of a hotel, and carries only the clothes he is wearing. Exhausted he says he had “no idea what the future brings”.

“For 25 years I have built a rehabilitation centre for people with physical disabilities I had to leave it all behind. You don’t know how many people are calling me for support,” he says as his phone ringed incessantly in the background throughout the interview.

“We all left everything behind. I am very depressed,” he repeats, swallowing the sentence with a sigh.

Next to him Artemis, 58, a kindergarten coordinator who has spent 30 years in Steparankert, says the real problems were going to start in the coming weeks when the refugees outstay their temporary accommodation.

“The Azerbaijanis said they want to integrate Nagorno-Karabakh but how do you blockade a people for 10 months and then launch a military operation and then ask them to integrate?” she asks, as she prepares for a new leg of the journey to the Armenian capital where she hopes to find shelter.

“The blockade was part of the ethnic cleansing. This is the only way to get people to flee the land they love. There is no humanity left in the world.”

Back in the central square of Goris, where families pick through piles of donated clothes and blankets and aid organisations hand out food, the loudest question is: what next?

Armenian officials are busy registering families and sending them to shelters in different corners of the country. But there are unanswered queries about long-term accommodation, work and schooling.

“I can’t really think about it, it hurts too much,” says Hasratyan’s eldest daughter Lilet, 16, trembling in the sunlight as the family starts the registration process.

“All I can say to the world is please speak about this and think about us. We are humans, people made of blood, like you and we need your help.”

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Came back wrong? How about came back right, except that the world you came back to is wrong. Came back just like waking up from a long nap only to find that the people who love you broke themselves into shards and bloody bargains to get you back.

There are new stains that nobody will explain, hidden beneath the rug in the upstairs hallway. Your mother's left eye is clouded and strange. The cat no longer goes near your brother. There's a sharp-edged shadow now, under your lover's smile.

Everybody says you must be remembering wrong, but your sense of smell is just as good as ever. The closet that used to smell like cedar and cinnamon smells like sulfur, now, and nobody will tell you why.

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Turquoise and Velvet by Daniel F. Gerhartz