Which way is West?

Shallows, Daughter, If You Leave; 2013

As you look across the couch at her, you start to feel anxious. You feel bad about effectively forcing the two of you to stay in tonight, again. While you are always appreciative of your partner's efforts to take your feelings into account and help make sure you're socially comfortable, you sincerely worry that you're holding her back from enjoying a more fulfilling relationship.

The reality hits you over the next few days, and you spiral into a very deep low. You withdraw entirely and outside of work, you don't leave your apartment. You can't stop replaying the failures you made with her over and over in your head, wondering what could've been if you weren't such a fuckup. It's going to take you a long time to get over her.

Take Your Head Out of the Oven

Sylvia Plath Annotates Her Copy of The Great Gatsby

Lake Unknown

When I lost myself I lost you by extension.

Funerales

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Para Ser Féliz

Two Headed Virgin

This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.

Human life must be some kind of mistake. -Schopenhauer

Your side

Remember when you told me love is being both on the same side?

Mag

I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.

I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
I wish we never bought a license and a white dress
For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister
And told him we would love each other and take care of each other
Always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere.
Yes, I'm wishing now you lived somewhere away from here
And I was a bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away dead broke.
I wish the kids had never come
And rent and coal and clothes to pay for
And a grocery man calling for cash,
Every day cash for beans and prunes.
I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish to God the kids had never come.




Carl Sandburg

Acto de desvanecimiento

Apareciste con un traje espacial,
llena de electricidad,
a mitad de mi juego de solitario.

¿A donde te fuiste?

I'd still make mistakes

Things would be easier

She Quits

That's what she said. 

Aniversario

"before the minute strikes 12 midnight, I wish to tell my wife that i am still so very much in love with her on this day, 6 years to the day after we married on that stage in Abilene. there is, and never will be, any creature that possesses the beauty that is you. I will be with you til the end of time. You are my everything and my all....
and hey, you bastards, put this online, or whatever the hell you do! and be quiet, the wife is trying to sleep! I never should have let you stay down here..."

M.

Better Off Here

Cover your eyes

At Last Our Promise

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike

As the Ruin Falls

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.
For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

C. S. Lewis

I Quit My Dreaming

The Beauty and Damned

“Love is bitter and all there is… 
  the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth.”






On April 3, 1920 one of literary history’s most turbulent and dramatic relationships ensued — Scott was a ladies’ man since boyhood and Zelda developed an intoxicating obsession with ballet, which swept her into a downward spiral of physical and mental illness, which culminated with a breakdown in the spring of 1930. Perhaps ironically, despite spending the latter half of her life in and out of hospitals and psychiatric wards, Zelda outlived Scott, who died from a heart attack after years of heavy drinking, only to perish herself in a fire at Highland Hospital. Theirs was a love that burned with so destructive a flame that it charred both of them to the ground.

Brain Pickings

Against all Hope