Tag: Reena S Xploration Challenge

Surviving the Shipwreck: Truth, Even If It Makes Us Uncomfortable

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Who writes history, anyway?

Is it a bunch of old men in a room, swirling sherry like it’s holy water, declaring what mattered and what didn’t with the confidence of people who’ve never been told to clean up after themselves? Do they lean back in leather chairs and decide what’s worth remembering, while the rest of the world cleans the dishes, changes the linens, and quietly disappears?

Because let’s be honest—history isn’t what happened. It’s what survived. It’s the polished version of a chaotic past, curated by those with power, perspective, and the privilege to speak uninterrupted.

But what about the ones who made that version possible?

Why don’t we ever hear about them? The people who provided the comfort, the nourishment, the spark. The woman who changed the sheets so a “great man” could sleep through the night. The friend who uttered a half-thought over coffee that later became a manifesto. The cook who fed the movement. The janitor who unlocked the building where the protest was planned. The lover who reminded someone they were human before they put on the mask of leadership.

History applauds the speech, but forgets the breath it took to say it.

We’ve been sold the idea that history is boldface names and bronze statues. But most of what matters happened in kitchens, back porches, alleyways, and hands calloused from lifting, not pointing.

We know the architects of nations. But never the bricklayers. We memorize the names of authors, but forget the unnamed soul who said something beautiful that stuck. We forget that for every “visionary,” there was someone behind the scenes keeping them afloat. Holding the ladder. Mending the net.

So no—history isn’t just written by the victors. It’s written by survivors. By omission. By spin. And often, by those who had the means to make a record in the first place.

The rest? The ones who lit the fires, bore the burdens, whispered the truths?

They became the silence between chapters. The invisible ink.

But if you look close—really close—you’ll find them. In the margins. In the echoes. In the way a melody lingers long after the singer is gone.

Because history wasn’t built on sherry alone. It was built on sweat, sacrifice, and souls that never asked to be remembered—just not to be erased.

But what happens when they get it wrong?

When, the ones holding the pen decide the truth is inconvenient? When the story is shaved, polished, and repainted, so it gleams just right in the museum light? What happens when history becomes less about remembering and more about marketing? About preserving an image, not a truth?

That’s when history turns into myth. Not the kind with gods and monsters, but the kind where the villains are edited out, and the uncomfortable questions are filed away—lost behind locked drawers labeled “context.” You know, for our own good.

And maybe they don’t mean to lie. Maybe they just optimize. Smooth the edges. Add a little glow to the legacy. After all, who doesn’t want their heroes to look heroic? Their country to feel noble? Their ancestors seem wise?

But shaping the past for the best possible result isn’t harmless. It’s rewriting the foundation while pretending the house still stands the same. It’s how entire generations learn pride without accountability, patriotism without honesty, nostalgia without nuance.

And what’s left behind in that process?

The guilt that never gets named. The reparations never paid. The patterns that repeat because we swore they never happened in the first place. The echo chamber grows louder, but the echoes grow fainter—until all we hear is what we want to hear, and not what needs to be heard.

See, history can be a mirror. Or it can be a mask.

One tells you the truth, whether you like it or not.

The other flatters you, and hopes you don’t look too close.

So maybe the question isn’t just who writes history?
Maybe it’s who dares to revise it, once they know better?

Because if we only protect the polished version, if we only pass down the parts that make us proud, then we’re not honoring the past.

We’re embalming it.

And you can’t build a future on something you’ve buried just to keep the story pretty.

But what about when they don’t just get it wrong?
What about when they try to remove history altogether?

Really? That’s the move?

As if tearing down a statue makes the blood it commemorates magically dry up and blow away. As if banning a book unpublishes the pain it contains. As if not teaching something means it never happened.

We’ve seen it before: whole eras scrubbed clean, classrooms sterilized, uncomfortable truths repackaged into “heritage,” or ignored entirely. Entire peoples flattened into footnotes, if mentioned at all. Because someone decided it was better to forget than to face it. Better to be comfortable than be honest.

But here’s the truth, they’re afraid of:
You can’t remove history.

You can burn the documents. You can whitewash the walls. You can call it “divisive,” “unpatriotic,” or “too upsetting for children.”
But history isn’t gone—it just goes underground into stories told at kitchen tables. Into songs, poems, and scars passed down like heirlooms. Into eyes that still remember, even if the curriculum doesn’t.

The attempt to erase history is always a confession. A silent, trembling admission that the truth still hurts. That it never really stopped. It’s not about healing—it’s about hiding.

And hiding doesn’t protect anyone. It just keeps the cycle clean enough to repeat.

So no—you don’t get to skip the hard chapters because they make your heroes look human, or your institutions look cracked. That’s not erasing history. That’s erasing accountability.

And let me tell you—if your story can’t survive the truth, maybe it wasn’t a story worth keeping in the first place.

Maria Popova got it right:
History isn’t what happened. It’s what survives the shipwreck of judgment and chance.

So maybe it’s time we stop polishing the deck chairs and admit we helped steer the damn ship.

Maybe it’s time we stood by the dusty words in old books—the ones that dared to say things like honor, integrity, and truth. Not just when it’s convenient. But when it’s hard. When it means admitting that the past wasn’t all parades and progress. That some of it—hell, a lot of it—would’ve earned us a solid whoopin’ from our mothers, wooden spoon in hand.

So, excuse me while I go through a stack of biographies on Lincoln.

Because if we’re going to keep telling the story—
Let’s at least try to get it right.

Author’s Note
Forgive the rant—but not the passion. That part, I won’t apologize for. The ranting? Yeah… I might’ve gotten a little carried away.

This piece was written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #386. I try to jump in when I can remember to pull my head out of a book long enough to notice.

Wait—what page was I on?

Entangled Contradictions

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FICTION – REENA CHALLENGE #385

by Julia Drake (and someone else entirely)

Dr. Eugene Irving Krane did not believe in metaphor, which was why he used it constantly in his head.

Standing before a lecture hall of half-conscious undergrads, chalk raised like a scalpel, he dissected equations with clinical precision. “Symmetry,” he said, “is not about aesthetics. It’s a constraint. A system obeys certain laws until one of them breaks. And that break is where the interesting physics begins.”

Behind him, the whiteboard bloomed with the Higgs mechanism—perfect arcs, cold beauty, tension contained.

Krane saw what his students did not. The math wasn’t sterile. It was tragic. Elegant. Alive.

He was an odd man, even by faculty standards. He collected things. Not stamps or coins—ideas. He had an entire drawer in his office dedicated to obsolete words, sorted by emotional tone: “Words That Die Alone,” “Words That Bleed Nicely,” “Words With No Home.” He took long walks at dawn to photograph patterns of fractured light in puddles and alleyways. And he kept what he privately called an “emotional landfill” — a file full of discarded breakup letters, apologies never sent, and confessions overheard in stairwells. He said they helped him write with precision.

These collections weren’t academic. They were scaffolding for something else—a hidden voice, one that poured all that silent debris into fiction.

From the front row, Tess Ramírez scribbled something in the margin of her notebook and suppressed a grin. She was in her forties, finishing a long-delayed PhD, and possibly the only person alive who would one day use the phrase “quantum betrayal” in casual conversation.

She respected Krane. She also suspected he had no idea how visible his loneliness was.

When class ended, Krane retreated behind his desk, where a stack of problem sets sat dangerously close to a notepad filled with scribbles. Not physics. Fiction. The bones of a scene for Julia: entanglement as metaphor, two characters locked in orbit, never quite in sync. He’d been shaping it since 3 a.m.

He tugged down his sleeves and nudged the pile toward Tess.

“If you could… the thing.”

She blinked. “You’re a world-class communicator, you know that?”

He blinked back. “That was implied.”

Tess rolled her eyes and scooped up the stack, including—unbeknownst to him—a handful of Julia’s latest pages.

—

Later that night, she was grading on her couch, jazz humming from the speakers, half a glass of Malbec on the coffee table. And then she saw it.

A page that didn’t belong.

“They spoke like electrons entangled: each word collapsing a possibility in the other. He didn’t touch her hand, but the air around it bent.”

Tess froze. Her wine glass stopped midair.

Her heart did a weird thing, like an extra beat—or maybe a skipped one.

She flipped to the next page.

“Lina stood in the field, symmetry broken, heart split by the simplest law of decay: what once was held cannot always stay.”

And at the bottom, tight and unmistakable: 
–J. Drake

Her pulse kicked.

No. Impossible.

She’d read every Julia Drake novel twice — dog-eared, underlined, whole chapters bookmarked for reasons she couldn’t explain. Not because they were romantic. Because they were honest. No one in Drake’s stories ever got rescued cleanly. They hurt each other. They tried. They failed better. It wasn’t fantasy. It was familiar.

Tess had never known who Julia Drake really was — just that she’d been through the shit. You couldn’t write emotional wreckage that clearly unless you’d lived inside it.

And now here it was. 
On paper. 
In Krane’s handwriting.

Her first instinct was disbelief. Her second was awe. 
Her third was: Does he even know how hot this stuff is?

—

Tess barely slept. She kept rereading the pages, flipping between disbelief and adrenaline. The idea of confronting Eugene left her nauseous—what if she embarrassed him? What if she was wrong? What if she ruined something by naming it? But the words wouldn’t let her sleep. They weren’t just good. They were true. And she couldn’t unknow that truth now.

The next morning, she didn’t knock. She barged in.

Eugene looked up, mid-sip of coffee, and nearly dropped the mug.

“You’re Julia Drake.”

He froze. Opened his mouth. Closed it.

“You are,” she said. “You’re my favorite author of all time. I thought you were dead. Or French. Or a collective of lesbians.”

Eugene stared at her like she’d just accused him of arson.

“You’re serious,” he managed.

“I’ve read everything,” Tess said, waving the pages. “Twice. I memorized half of A Constant Craving like it was scripture. You made me cry in a Denny’s, Eugene.”

He looked absolutely horrified.

“I was under the impression,” he said slowly, “that my prose was… categorically sentimental.”

“It’s not,” she snapped. “It’s vulnerable. And tight. And unbearably good. God, no wonder you hate small talk—your soul is in six mass market paperbacks and nobody knows.”

Krane went pink. Pink.

“I don’t—it’s not—people in the department wouldn’t understand.”

Tess softened. “I understand. I just didn’t expect my emotionally unavailable science mentor to be moonlighting as the poet laureate of romantic ache.”

Eugene rubbed his forehead. “Please never say that out loud again.”

She grinned. “No promises.”

They sat in silence for a moment, the weight of the secret between them now less like lead and more like gravity—still heavy, but pulling them into orbit.

For Tess, something shifted. She’d always seen Krane as brilliant but unreachable, like a locked cabinet full of equations and rules. But now, she saw the tenderness behind the rigidity. The collector of discarded feelings. The man who couldn’t say what he felt unless it was fictionalized. And somehow, that made her respect him more, not less.

“You ever think,” Tess said quietly, “maybe fiction is the only way people like us know how to feel?”

He looked at her, and for once, didn’t look away.

“All the time,” he said.

—

That night, Julia Drake began a new manuscript. As Eugene typed, he paused over one line and rewrote it three times—not for clarity, but for care.

The main character’s first real moment of connection came in a cluttered office, after a truth slipped out by accident. The other character didn’t flinch. She saw him. Not just the polished surface, but the hoarder of obsolete words, the photographer of lost light, the emotional archivist in disguise. Her name was Teresa.

It opened with a woman named Teresa. Sharp. Unafraid. The first character Eugene had ever written did not need rescuing or permission. She met the main character’s silence with curiosity, not pity.

And for the first time, Julia Drake wrote a love story that didn’t end in silence.

It ended in symmetry.

T. S. Eliot’s Cold, Snobby Guide to Poetry (Now with 90% More Dead Guys)

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ESSAY – JAVA & VERSE

What if greatness in poetry isn’t about your feelings, but your ability to disappear? T. S. Eliot thought so. And he said it with the intellectual force of a literary wrecking ball.

The Essay That Keeps Haunting Me

An English professor once handed me a stack of literary theories, as if they were polite interventions. I was emotionally raw, so naturally, I assumed the worst. One of the texts was T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent—a dense, icy essay I’ve come back to over the years, especially when I start thinking my writing is getting good.

Spoiler: Eliot never lets me feel good for long.

Tradition: Now with 90% More Dead Guys

Eliot opens by dragging the English for treating “tradition” as a brag or an excuse to never change. He’s not here for that. For him, tradition isn’t a safety blanket—it’s literary CrossFit. You don’t inherit it; you earn it. You read so much Dante and Shakespeare that their ghosts start charging rent in your brain. That’s Eliot’s idea of a “historical sense.”

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

If you’re not writing while haunted by the canon, Eliot’s judging you from his perch in the great library in the sky.

Your Poem Isn’t That Special

Next, Eliot drops the literary version of “you didn’t build that.” Your new poem? Cute. But it only matters in relation to what came before it. Tradition isn’t a one-way street—it’s a remix. Every time you drop a new metaphor, the canon must make room, like a snobby dinner party where you just showed up in a hoodie. The past adjusts—but only if your work is good enough to make it flinch.

Kill Your Ego, Save the Poem

Now for Eliot’s hottest take: great poetry isn’t about you. It’s not your diary entry. It’s not your breakup in verse. The poet should be like platinum in a chemical reaction—an invisible catalyst. You cause the emotional explosion, but leave no trace of yourself.

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

Your angst? Irrelevant. Your personality? A liability. Eliot’s poetic hero is the anti-snowflake: invisible, ego-free, and built like a Greek grammar book.

He’s not just dunking on confessional poets—he’s challenging the cult of authenticity. Writing as therapy? Valid. Writing as art? That’s a different game. Great poetry doesn’t wallow in feeling; it refines it. And yes, it takes someone deeply emotional to understand the need to flee from emotion. Cue the mic drop.

Feelings? Meh.

Eliot closes by swinging at sincerity. Feeling something doesn’t mean you’ve written something worth reading. You can mean every word and still write a dud.

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.”

The emotion belongs to the poem, not the poet. So if you’re writing about your fifth breakup in six months, maybe skip the sad-girl sonnet and channel Ovid’s exile or the fall of Rome instead. Just a thought.

Final Thoughts: Eliot vs. Instagram Poets

In a world obsessed with “finding your voice” and “speaking your truth,” Eliot reads like a literary curmudgeon with a PhD in gatekeeping. But there’s a weird freedom in his elitism. He doesn’t want you to be original—he wants you to be excellent. That means burying your ego, studying like a maniac, and writing like you’ve time-traveled through the entire Western canon.

So, don’t ask, “How do I feel next time you write?” Ask, “Would this make Virgil roll over in his grave?”

And if that sounds exhausting, good. Eliot didn’t write for quitters. He wrote for ghosts with PhDs.

This post was written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #378

Reach

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CHALLENGE RESPONSE – POETRY

problems left behind you—
ghosts with no mouths left to speak.
you walked on,
didn’t flinch.

bare your soul.
not for them.
for you.
because silence
never saved anyone.

whenever i look at the ocean,
i see a version of myself
that doesn’t need fixing.
just space.
just time.
just tide.

home—is
a sound you remember,
not a place you stand.
it’s warm light on old walls.
the echo of your name
spoken like love,
not demand.

reach for infinity.
not to conquer it,
but to know
you were never meant to fit in the lines.

This piece was written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #374. This week, she asked us to pick a blog or more to write something. I was surprised that I hadn’t written for her challenge before. I hope I got it right. Anyway, I chose the following:

Eugenia’s Moonwashed Musings, and then I ran into her challenge, Moonwashed Weekly Prompts. I don’t participate often, but I always enjoy myself when I get over there. This week is no different. Her poem for this week struck a chord, so I scribbled a few notes. It served as the bones of this piece.

Sadje’s KeepitAlive is another blog I read regularly when I decide to keep it out of my head. In her piece “Homecoming,” her line “home is” has quiet power and hits hard. As an old soldier, I remember the importance of “home.” So, I scribbled some more, and the bones got thicker.

Melissa’s Mom With a Blog hosts these flash fiction challenges, which I enjoy. Often, I scribble pieces for them, but they are used in something else. Every now and again, I manage to finish one just for that challenge and post it. This week, I found her piece, “coming home” whose opening line pushed me over the edge. So, I started scribbling a little more. Her image inspired by the graphics for this piece. I love the feel of that image; I will probably write something for it. And we’ll see if it actually makes it out of my notebook.

I haven’t written any new poetry in quite a while. My brain seems to be churning out the longer stuff. Thanks, ladies, for helping me find my way back.