Latest Posts by vrgl - Page 5
go to florence. look in the eyes of michelangelo’s david, chiseled in stone but softer than rosemary. they say he wore a crown of gold once before it was taken from his head. he is planted in stone but his eyes are too human for your liking; they beg you, put it back.
the antinous mondragone, the marble smooth and cold like winter ink. you remember it was unpacked with lipstick marks on its cheek; someone at the louvre with lips smeared cherry red had made herself hadrian and kissed it. you remember thinking, who could blame her?
sappho and erinna in the garden at mytilene, captured by simeon solomon. it’s been a while since you’ve cried at a painting. you’ve gone to museums armed with ways to analyze what you’re seeing; you know what clouds are saying, you know the language of flowers. but you looked at the painting of those two women clouded in their embrace and didn’t even realize you were crying until you looked at your notes in your lap and the pen was smudged with tears.
the universality of love. it hasn’t changed: two boys swathed in light, two girls in a garden teeming with flowers, a gaze from across a room. in the statues and paintings we are captured in our gentle, tender humanity, in the places where we think no one is looking, where we are allowed to feel vulnerable. where we are finally able to say, look, this is me, this is you, this is everything that love should be. i want to make you feel it.
the picture of dorian gray // oscar wilde
I wish I could terrorize ancient people with things that are commonplace today
my playlists (+ descriptions)
asparagus is in season: character playlist for francis abernathy from the secret history
dark academia but it’s girls: imagine the secret history, dead poets society, and if we were villains but all the male characters are replaced with female counterparts
donna tartt’s walkman: some music donna tartt probably listened to from her bennington days into her secret history days; also evokative of a sexually ambiguous classics student from a homoerotic dark academia novel
the holy trinity: florence, mitski, and hozier
prep school nostalgia: best of my effy stonem phase
scary girl fall: inspired by the gory girls from suspiria, midsommar, the vvitch, the moth diaries, and ginger snaps
turtleneck season: 'tis the season to become the pretentious protagonist of a modern greek tragedy (dark academia but it’s girls pt. 2)
slavic androgynous bette davis and the incongruous meathead: playlist for the goldfinch starring russian vampire and erudite sad boy
push yourself to get up before the rest of the world - start with 7am, then 6am, then 5:30am. go to the nearest hill with a big coat and a scarf and watch the sun rise.
push yourself to fall asleep earlier - start with 11pm, then 10pm, then 9pm. wake up in the morning feeling re-energized and comfortable.
get into the habit of cooking yourself a beautiful breakfast. fry tomatoes and mushrooms in real butter and garlic, fry an egg, slice up a fresh avocado and squirt way too much lemon on it. sit and eat it and do nothing else.
stretch. start by reaching for the sky as hard as you can, then trying to touch your toes. roll your head. stretch your fingers. stretch everything.
buy a 1L water bottle. start with pushing yourself to drink the whole thing in a day, then try drinking it twice.
buy a beautiful diary and a beautiful black pen. write down everything you do, including dinner dates, appointments, assignments, coffees, what you need to do that day. no detail is too small.
strip your bed of your sheets and empty your underwear draw into the washing machine. put a massive scoop of scented fabric softener in there and wash. make your bed in full.
organise your room. fold all your clothes (and bag what you don’t want), clean your mirror, your laptop, vacuum the floor. light a beautiful candle.
have a luxurious shower with your favourite music playing. wash your hair, scrub your body, brush your teeth. lather your whole body in moisturiser, get familiar with the part between your toes, your inner thighs, the back of your neck.
push yourself to go for a walk. take your headphones, go to the beach and walk. smile at strangers walking the other way and be surprised how many smile back. bring your dog and observe the dog’s behaviour. realise you can learn from your dog.
message old friends with personal jokes. reminisce. suggest a catch up soon, even if you don’t follow through. push yourself to follow through.
think long and hard about what interests you. crime? sex? boarding school? long-forgotten romance etiquette? find a book about it and read it. there is a book about literally everything.
become the person you would ideally fall in love with. let cars merge into your lane when driving. pay double for parking tickets and leave a second one in the machine. stick your tongue out at babies. compliment people on their cute clothes. challenge yourself to not ridicule anyone for a whole day. then two. then a week. walk with a straight posture. look people in the eye. ask people about their story. talk to acquaintances so they become friends.
lie in the sunshine. daydream about the life you would lead if failure wasn’t a thing. open your eyes. take small steps to make it happen for you.
literally every aspect of life including just sitting in your room to study becomes more interesting and fun if you pretend you're the main character of a dark academia book and you're busy covering up a murder
you’re allowed to get up one day and just decide to change who you are. dress differently, speak up more, laugh out loud even though you’ve never liked your laugh, say what you want to, say hey to people you wouldn’t normally, get that confidence going. we don’t have to stay the way people see us out of the fear that they won’t like the us we want to be.
hey babe did it hurt when you fell from heaven? it did huh, emotionally, right I get that, because of the– yeah the irreconcilable separation from goodness as a result of a single decision that can never be undone or atoned for, uh huh, sounds rough
“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
— Ocean Vuong, from “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”, published in The New Yorker (via soracities)
if she’s your girl then why is she ripping MY body limb from limb in the midst of a bacchic frenzy deep in the woods
do you ever think about how weird it is that the moral of Frankenstein is kind of less just “graverobbing is weird and creepy” and more “take some fucking responsibility if you’re going to do so”
i spend way too much time on spotify and thus have way too many playlists, but here are some of them as a thank you for 11k !!
neptune / soundtrack to a warm coffee on a sleepy afternoon
pluto / 3am, lying upside down off the bed with dim phone light on your face
saturn / laughter, pillow fights and intentionally bad singing-along
mars / quiet piano floats through the window on a warm, windy evening
lunar / during windows-down summer car rides with your friends
solar / fingers tracing on a thigh and quiet evening humming
jupiter / gentle, wordless, beats to see you through revision
eclipse / a soft voice paired with a guitar, and a cup of tea
earth / for dozing off amidst gentle yawns, wrapped in blankets
cosmos / a face amongst the crowd, stairs to the subway, city lights
galaxy / clink of glassware and muted murmurs amongst background jazz
sapph / for the girls who love girls
cappuccino / the feeling of a 9am coffee on a gently sunny morning
update ;; here is part 2!
thinking about life & its twists and turns today……a lot for an armadillo to deal with but i’ll be okay………….
not doing great?
clean your room
open curtains/windows
take a shower
put on clean clothes
get out of your room a bit
stretch
drink a glass of water
get the hard/important stuff out of the way while you have energy
set some (any!) goals
remember that it is okay to have bad days
when will we as a society branch out from white sheets for ghosts. where’s the self-expression, where is the drama. when will i get the couture bedsheet looks i deserve
if you see me wandering the windswept moors and highlands in nothing but a nightgown plastered to my skin with rain, wailing and wringing my hands as i stumble over the already mud-trodden hem, i ask that you do NOT approach. i will be FINE. i just need to work through some stuff & be dramatic first. please respect that.
when oscar wilde wrote “there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands” i felt that