Latest Posts by dreams-and-nightmares - Page 3

just a little guy grocery shopping

[grabs your shirt] listen. listen to me. the practical is holy. the everyday is sacred. the simple act of surviving is divine. do you get it? sanctity begins at home, in the hands that build and the lives we live and the deaths we die and the worms that eat our bodies. if making something by hand is not worthy of veneration then nothing is.

we still have the moon.

Enomoto Seifu-Jo, tr. by Kenneth Rexroth, from Written on the Sky; Poems from the Japanese / Tomoharu Okamura SUI-GETSU Japanese paper, Metallic foil, Mineral pigments, Pigment 2017 / Emily Skaja, from Brute: Poems; “No, I do not want to connect with you on Linkedin” / Still falls the rain, Daichi Takagi / Adonis, ‘Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea’ / Winter night in the Netherlands -  Stefan  Bleekrode , 2018. / e.e. cummings, from “the moon looked into my window” (excerpt from Is 5), Complete Poems: 1904-1962 / Golden House Nocturne   -  Christopher Burk / The Door, Margaret Atwood / Lois Dodd, New Moon Through the Trees. 2015 /

Night sky

Actually life is beautiful because the sound I make while trying to breathe around hot food sounds like my dog trying to eat an apple. When I yawn my cat tries to put his face in my mouth like a little dentist man and when he yawns I put my finger in his obligate-carnivore trapzone and we both know he will not hurt me. When I do not fold my clothes, they do not hold it against me.

I am demonstrably sad, and lonely, and full of fear. But there are other people who will hold my hand, who will point out the hawk overhead, who will give you That Look in a public place. The other day at a coffee shop a child said "look! It's snowing!" so all of us strangers went to go look out the windows. It wasn't the first snow and it won't be the last but wasn't it lovely like that?

How wonderful to live in a world where birds and frogs both say beep! How wonderful to have an ocean of beautiful sharks with their dinosaur teeth! How wonderful the moon and her changing face, how wonderful the bees and their dancing to communicate, how wonderful shrimp and their forbidden layers of vision! How wonderful, you, and what you will give the world! The way we love things enough to spend entire blogs devoted to them? How people will let me explain my Pokemon team to them? How we will both jump at the scare in the movie, how we laugh so loudly, how it feels to give someone your baking? How wonderful to be alive. I am sorry for forgetting.

This is the process of getting better. With wonderful people and wonderful strangers and wonderful friends: I am getting better, slowly. Thank you, whoever you are. In some way, you've been wonderful, and left a wonderful place in the world to ripple out to me. In some small way - isn't it beautiful - I promise, you've been helping.

oh, i am finally old enough to know why my parents took so long to grab their coats. why they would ask us to get ready to go only to sit down for another round of coffee. what would i tell myself, at 10 years old? it’s okay. sit down with them too. take in the extra hour with your friend and her family. when you get home, write down every moment in your diary. one day you will be older and you will be waving goodbye to your best friend, and you will turn the key to start your beat up little car engine, and you will look back over your shoulder. her hair will be blowing in the wind and she will be beautiful and you will be, for a moment, struck by all of it. what you will feel is so wide and nameless that it will engulf you. and you will think of being 14 and kicking her under the table in math every time you wanted to whisper something behind the teacher’s back. you will think about how long the days felt, and how you could hold her hand whenever you wished, but you didn’t. and you will think about all of the people you could have lingered with. and you will wish, more than you have ever felt a wish, that the universe just gave you that - more time to linger. more time to say - i love you. i know i need to leave, but i don’t want to leave you. and when i go, i am leaving a piece of my heart that lingers too. 

one more round of coffee. the days are so short, and you are so lovely.

I AM LESS OF MYSELF OUTLOUD.

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

Maria Del Carmen Calvo - Floating lily pads

I am asking you to endure it.

—Yiwei Chai, The Jacaranda Years

under no circumstances, kiera. k

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"

― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

it is tiring, being endless political just as someone existing. my teacher asks me if i’m writing more of that “feminist poetry.” a lot of it is just talking about me, being a woman, being afraid in the city. i write about walking a line, about how i am expected to choose between home and work, how each comes with a slew of its own insults; how it feels when i am wearing shorts and there are too many men outside. these are just facts of my life. someone in the comments says, “where are woman even coming up with these crazy generalizations in their feminism?”

i hold hands with the prettiest girl i’ve ever seen and someone sighs when they see me. “do they have to make everything gay?” she asks her friend, loudly, “like, do you have to force those views in my face all the time?” i can’t stop blushing. my girlfriend holds my fingers tighter, tighter, tighter, until my knuckles are white, and i let her. somehow, this is us, protesting.

my father’s cuban blood stains my skin, i think. when i am honored with a position in the dean’s private council, a boy sneers, “you only got in because you’re hispanic.” did i? i spend the rest of our meetings wondering if i was selected for my stellar academic record, for the multiple recommendations, for the clubs i lead - or if i was just a move the dean made, to make use of me. when we all take a picture, the dean brings me in the front. in the first three we take, i am not smiling.

it is odd. “i exist.” i say, “i deserve to exist.”

“oh my god,” he groans, “we get it, you’re a feminist.”

Confessional // Sue Zhao

dam…….. that website “you feel like shit” (it’s like a questionnaire / troubleshooting guide for when you feel like shit) really works………………….. im not even all the way thru it and i even half-assed a lot of the suggestions and i already feel loads better

feels like every few weeks I have to relearn how to exist, that I do need to sit in the sun and move my body and not drink too much coffee and dress in clothes that make me feel good and talk to my friends and journal and get off my phone sometimes and eat vegetables and drink more tea and generally reclaim the space in my life for myself ya know

Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”

O DEATHLESS SEA / irene by simon harsent / the invading surf by frederick judd waugh / the mediterranean in the ancient world by fernand braudel (trans. siân reynolds) / stormy sea by ivan konstantinovich aivazovsky / dancing in odessa by ilya kaminsky / i lived the beloved name by odysseus elytis (trans. olga broumas & t. begley) / strong winds and high tides battered a coastal road close to newtownards, northern ireland by peter morrison /  shipwreck off the cliffs of dover at night with dover castle in the distance by eugène lepoittevin / the odyssey, book 13 by homer (trans. emily wilson) / seebild by ingo kühl

ghosting

the way ivan aivazovsky looks at the sea…i think…i think that’s what love looks like.

comic about someone’s strange dream (and daydreams)

do you ever think about this quote by mary lambert because i think about it all the time

“Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.” ― Nicole Krauss

1.Rumi | 2.Holly Warburton | 3.Maggie Stiefvater | 4.Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 5.Nickie Zimov | 6.Clarice Lispector | 7.Nigel Van Wieck | 8.Georgia O’Keeffe | 9.Andrew Wyeth | 10.Mary Oliver | 11.Ilenia Tesoro | 12.Sylvia Plath | 13.Walt Whitman | 14.Nickie Zimov | 15.Jean-Paul Sartre | 16.Lydia Roberts | 17.Natalie Wee | 18.Lew Thomas | 19.Albert Camus

bathroom sink meditations, r.a.

Franz Wright, from “East Boston, 1996; Night Walk,” in God’s Silence

Chelsea Hodon, The End of Longing // MARINA, Teen Idle // Mitski, Townie

there is not a single day i don’t think about this quote in relation to tragedies