Loneliness Is A Severed Tongue (on Adopted Languages)

If you have a bad morning, it does not mean that the rest of the day will be a disaster. If you feel absolutely down in the evening, it does not mean that every little good thing that happened before is erased. Yes, life is a tough battle, but you my love, you are a tough fighter. Through the good and the bad, you hold on as tightly as you can and you make it through. You always make it through. Be proud of yourself. Stop for a second and look how far you have come - look what you have already conquered, darling. Picking yourself up over and over again is the hardest challenge of all but look at you winning. You are so capable. Go you.

Them: you should have sex at least once just to try it

Me, the asexual: would you have sex with someone you weren’t attracted to?

Them: ew no

Me: me either

Them: but you should at least try it!

Me:

summer’s almost over so here’s some summer themed drawings~

emotional processing is so funny because sometimes you’ll be violently sobbing on your bedroom floor over something that happened 4 years ago and then you’ll just. get up and make coffee. and go to the grocery store. and take all this fundamental sadness for a walk. and ponder the cosmic experiences of humanity while eating a sandwich. and that’s healing.

longing for a home that doesn't exist ࿏

giovanni's room, james baldwin / the girl who chased the moon, sarah addison allen / @electraheart2012 / mercy, mercy, me, john murillo [art: @heavensghost] / my tears ricochet, taylor swift / the graveyard book, neil gaiman / biome, ryan galloway / there is a light that never goes out, the smiths / don't throw out my legos, AJR / mad, bad, & dangerous to know, samira ahmed

image descriptions below the cut

1. Blue text on a white background reads, "you don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back."

2. Black text with yellow highlight on a white background reads, "I'm homesick all the time... I just don't know where home is."

3. Black text on a white background reads, "being alive is like: you want to go home. you don't know where home is. you want to go home. you don't know where home is. you want to go home. you haven't known for a long time. you want to go home but you don't know where you'd go. you want to go home you want to go home you want to go home"

4. A grid of six images. Clockwise starting from the top left, the images show: a hand holding three white flowers on a blue background; dark green leaves; a green bush with white flowers; a blue sky with clouds; a house with an empty porch; the side of a building and adjacent sidewalk. Individual words in various colours and fonts are pasted over the images. The words read, "Maybe memory is all the home you get"

5. Black text with grey highlight on a white background reads, "And I can go anywhere I want / Anywhere I want, just not home"

6. Black text on a white background reads, "bod said, “if i change my mind can i come back here?” and then he answered his own question. “if i come back, it will be a place, but it won’t be home any longer.”"

7. Light coloured text on a dark green background reads, "and… that’s what i fear. that nothing will ever make me feel like i'm safe again. that once you leave home, you never get it back."

8. An image of a white car driving on a road, facing the camera. In the background, there are green trees along the horizon, and a dark, cloudy sky. Lines of black text on a purple background is pasted onto the image. This text reads, "Driving in your car / I never never want to go home / Because I haven't got one anymore"

9. Black text on a white background reads, "Oh no, I'll come by when I'm grown / It won't be the same though / I can't go even go home, go home"

kaveh akbar, 'calling a wolf a wolf' // doc luben, 'love letters or suicide notes' // @/nutnoce, tumblr // 'my body's made of crushed little stars', mitski // @/ojibwa, tumblr // 'spring', mary oliver

“Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual with his instincts and intuitions, with his sensibility and his mind, searching relentlessly for the perfection that is neither in mind nor in nature, but in the unknown. I do not mean this in an other-worldly sense, only that the form of the flower is unknown to the seed.”

— Herbert Read, The Origins of Art (via mesogeios)

clio m.w. hamilton, “still life as a dreamscape on pause”

What the Dragon Said: a Love Story

by Catherynne M. Valente

So this guy walks into a dragon’s lair      and he says why the long tale?                  HAR HAR BUDDY says the dragon                  FUCK YOU. The dragon’s a classic the ‘57 Chevy of existential chthonic threats take in those Christmas colors, those impervious green scales, sticky candy-red firebreath, comes standard with a heap of rubylust goldhuddled treasure.                  Go ahead.                  Kick the tires, boy.                  See how she rides. Sit down, kid, says the dragon. Diamonds roll off her back like dandruff. Oh, you’d rather be called a paladin? I’d rather be a unicorn.                  Always thought that was the better gig. Everyone thinks you’re innocent. Everyone calls you pure. And the girls aren’t afraid they come right up with their little hands out for you to sniff like you’re a puppy and they’re gonna take you home. They let you put your head right in their laps.                  But nobody on this earth ever got what they wanted. Now I know what you came for. You want my body. To hang it up on a nail over your fireplace. Say to some milk-and-rosewater chica who lays her head in your lap look how much it takes to make me feel like a man.                  We’re in the dark now, you and me. This is primal shit right here. Grendel, Smaug, St. George. You’ve been called up. This is the big game. You don’t have to make stupid puns. Flash your feathers like your monkey bravado can impress. I saw a T-Rex fight a comet and lose. You’ve got nothing I want. Here’s something I bet you don’t know:      every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies.                  Something about seeing and being seen                  something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem                  I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.                  That last blockbuster took out a whole family                  of Bhutan thunder dragons living in Latvia the fumes of their cleargas hoard hanging on their beards like blue ghosts. A dragon’s gotta get zen                  with ephemerality. You want to cut me up? Chickenscratch my leather with butcher’s chalk: cutlets, tenderloin, ribs for the company barbecue, chuck, chops, brisket, roast.                  I dig it, I do. I want to eat everything, too. When I look at the world      I see a table. All those fancy houses, people with degrees, horses and whales, bankers and Buddha statues the Pope, astronauts, panda bears and yes, paladins                  if you let me swallow you whole                  I’ll call you whatever you want. Look at it all: waitresses and ice caps and submarines down at the bottom of the heavy lightless saltdark of the sea                  Don’t they know they’d be safer                  inside me? I could be big for them      I could hold them all My belly could be a city      where everyone was so loved they wouldn’t need jobs. I could be the hyperreal post-scarcity dragonhearted singularity.      I could eat them      and feed them      and eat them      and feed them. This is why I don’t get to be a unicorn. Those ponies have clotted cream and Chanel No. 5 for blood and they don’t burn up like comets with love that tastes like starving to death.      And you, with your standup comedy knightliness, covering Beowulf’s greatest hits on your tin kazoo, you can’t begin to think through      what it takes to fill up a body like this. It takes everything pretty and everything true      and you stick yourself in a cave because your want is bigger than you. I just want to be the size of a galaxy so I can eat all the stars and gas giants without them noticing and getting upset. Is that so bad?                  Isn’t that what love looks like?                  Isn’t that what you want, too? I’ll make you a deal.      Come close up stand on my emeraldheart, my sapphireself the goldpile of my body      Close enough to smell everything you’ll never be. Don’t finish the poem. Not for nothing is it a snake that eats her tail and means eternity. What’s a few verses worth anyway? Everyone knows poetry doesn’t sell. Don’t you ever feel like you’re just a story someone is telling about someone like you?                  I get that. I get you. You and me we could fit inside each other. It’s not nihilism if there’s really no point to anything. I have a secret down in the deep of my dark. All those other kids who wanted me to call them paladins, warriors, saints, whose swords had names, whose bodies were perfect as moonlight      they’ve set up a township near my liver had babies with the maidens they didn’t save      invented electric lightbulbs      thought up new holidays.                              You can have my body                              just like you wanted. Or you can keep on fighting dragons writing dragons fighting dragons re-staging that same old Cretaceous deathmatch you mammals always win.                  But hey, hush, come on. Quit now. You’ll never fix that line.                  I have a forgiveness in me                  the size of eons                  and if a dragon’s body is big enough                  it just looks like the world.                                                          Did you know the earth used to have two moons?

I AM LESS OF MYSELF OUTLOUD.

franz kafka, edit unknown / rachelle toarmino / charlotte brontë / franz kafka / richard siken / nayyirah waheed