Captain Kirk And Emily Dickinson, Two Legendary Spinster Icons

For too long have I borne with your ignorance – whether willful or come by honestly, I know not – on the improbably striking number of similarities between Captain James T. Kirk and Emily Dickinson, God’s favorite immortal lesbians. This ends today. LISTEN:

• Real STAY-AT-HOME TYPES (The Enterprise was Kirk’s RV that she fitted up to take on a road trip to visit every ex-girlfriend she ever had and don’t you dare look me in the eye and try to tell me different, you’re still staying at home if you live in your van and take it everywhere)

• BIG READERS

• LESBIANS

• BOTH KNOWN FOR IDIOSYNCRATIC, HYPER-HYPHENATED FORMS OF SPEECH

• Both of them kept extensive personal diaries detailing their rich inner lives, WHAT ELSE DO YOU THINK A CAPTAIN’S LOG IS

• Both excellent students at Starfleet/Amherst Academy but weirdly everyone forgets that in favor of obsessing over the frequency and dimensions of their sex lives

• Traumatized by an early loss; Sophia Holland’s typhus for Emily, Tarsus IV for Jim

• Kind of religious but never goes to church, obviously both open-minded as hell but the crucial word here IS religious rather than spiritual, idk why

• Both of them make me feel bad about never having finished Moby Dick all the way

• Like I read the end, obviously, I didn’t give up, but I skipped A LOT of it

• Maybe a quarter of the book, possibly even a third

• I just don’t give a shit about candle making and that’s why I’ve never been as good a lesbian as either of them

• Both moody as hell but always trying to keep it together in front of the family, know how to stay professional

• 100% odds that they would both try to make me go hiking and I would overexert myself in order to seem like I fell on the same quadrant of the Outdoors/Reading axis even though I totally don’t

• Real “fresh air” bitches

• Equal parts The Mom Friend and The Recluse; might not answer the door if you knock after hours but will definitely leave, like, a lavender branch (whatever lavender grows on) and a book you casually mentioned wanting to read a while back on your pillow by the time you get back home, they’ll nurture the shit out of you but leave them alone first, you know?

• Studied botany/Rediscovered the Botany Bay

• Constantly misunderstood after death/going off the air (rewritten poems in the Republican/“Kirk Drift”)

FURTHER EVIDENCE OF CONGRUENCE

The Aesthetic

Emily

“Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a noted penchant for white clothing and became known for her reluctance to greet guests”

Jim

I Am As God Made Me

Emily

“She said of herself, “‘I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves.’”

Jim

Honestly same; also, canonically lists her height at 5’10 but it’s really 5’8 and everybody knows it

On Shallow Friendship, And Avoiding The Contracting Thereof

Emily

“Although she liked the girls at Holyoke, Dickinson made no lasting friendships there.”

Jim

Spock [as Kollos]: How compact your bodies are. And what a variety of senses you have. This thing you call... language though - most remarkable. You depend on it, for so very much. But is any one of you really its master? But most of all, the aloneness. You are so alone. You live out your lives in this...shell of flesh. Self-contained. Separate. How lonely you are. How terribly lonely.

True Fucking Full-Hearted Love

Emily

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Jim

McCoy: He's not really dead. As long as we remember him.

Kirk: It's a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. A far better resting place that I go to than I have ever known.

Carol Marcus: Is that a poem?

Kirk: No. Something Spock was trying to tell me. On my birthday.

McCoy: You okay, Jim? How do you feel?

Kirk: Young. I feel young.

Lesbian Eulogies

Emily

Because I could not stop for Death – 

He kindly stopped for me – 

The Carriage held but just Ourselves – 

And Immortality.

Jim

“We are assembled here today to pay final respects to our honored dead. And yet it should be noted that in the midst of our sorrow, this death takes place in the shadow of new life, the sunrise of a new world; a world that our beloved comrade gave his life to protect and nourish. He did not feel this sacrifice a vain or empty one, and we will not debate his profound wisdom at these proceedings. Of my friend, I can only say this: of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human.”