4.28.2015

Inward




If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.


Sylvia Plath

4.27.2015

Saudade



“saudade”

(noun) A Portuguese, untranslatable word romanticizing nostalgia in its purest form. This beautiful feeling captures the yearning for someone or something that you love, which is now lost. It is a melancholic longing. Saudade’s pronunciation varies according to the speaker and country, which only adds to its sincerity and vulnerability.

4.22.2015

Acto



Her concise speaking style was strangely persuasive. From every word that came to her lips, he felt a precise, wedge-like thrust. He still could not tell though, how seriously he should take her. There was something out of the ordinary about her, a screw slightly loose. It was an inborn quality, perhaps. He might be in the presence of an authentic talent in its most natural form, or it could all be an act.



-  Haruki Murakami

4.21.2015

Irremarcable


Mara tells me that he was
no one special. Okay.
I believe her.
He was no one special.
Unremarkable, even.
A newspaper man with coffee
breath and ugly sneakers.
Mara tells me to let go.

But I waited for him, Mara.
I ate the scraps of his heart like
a starving dog under the dinner
table.
I slept at his feet and then by the
door when he was too far away.


I dreamt of coffee. I brought
the newspaper in every morning.

He was no one special, but it
didn’t matter, Mara,
because I kissed his stained teeth.
I brushed his unremarkable hair,
rested my head on his soft,
unremarkable stomach.

There was no hunger like my
hunger, Mara.
No man like my plain man.
No torch like my torch.

"

Caitlyn Siehl, Unremarkable (via alonesomes)

4.16.2015

Titus



When I saw the couple get into the taxicab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her.



Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought. But it would be well to test what one meant by man-womanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausing and looking at a book or two.

Coleridge … meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind… And if it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that condition now than ever before… No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own…

4.13.2015

Castigado



Here I go again,
talking myself up the side of another
treacherous mountain.
I work my way up.

And then you come through,
blowing my progress down with your
turbulent zephyr.
You take me back down.

I fumble and fall,
tumbling towards the ground of the
tentative bottom.
I fracture the ground.

And it’s you who comes,
saving me from dropping beneath by
throwing yourself in.
You prevent the drop.

But you can’t go on,
pulling me off the endless sea of cliffs
time and time again.
We need for this end.

We must leave the heights,
flying to the ground below the cloud’s
triggering descent.
We meet solid ground.



Sarah Marie Pardy // Grounded

4.08.2015

4.07.2015

Our Little Disaster




We are all a little damaged. Some of us hide it better than others, and others just have in different ways than most. But on some level we are all torn up. We take it out on others and beat through life carrying it all and we will end up damaging someone else. And most of the time we won’t even notice or bother to care, because we are busy with our little disaster, that we call life.

4.03.2015

El Eterno Optimista



I am the eternal optimist for love.
I believe you can find love anywhere.
You can find it anytime, any place, with anything.
It will hit you unexpectedly with the last person you thought you were capable of loving.
Love is the strongest force in this world. Maybe in the universe.
I am the eternal optimist for love.
I am the eternal optimist for people.
There are good people in this world.
Believe it or not there are people out there who are not out to hurt you.
If you stop judging those you don’t know you will realize that everyone is in a battle.
Everyone is struggling in someway. Notice.
I am the eternal optimist for people.

I am the eternal optimist for life.
Never take for granted the things that have happened to you.
Life has a plan for everyone. Everything happens for a reason as cliché as that sounds.
Regardless if you haven’t fallen in love or haven’t had the right people walk into your life.
Be thankful for these things, they are lessons you never thought you could learn from.
There are the things that make life so easily enjoyable and so easy to hate, but regardless of the emotion or feeling, fall in love with life. More importantly fall in love with everything in your life.
Be the eternal optimist for life.



Kimberly Marie // The Eternal Optimist

4.01.2015

If I Hadn't Abused Words



This is April again. Roller skates rain slowly down the street
Your voice far away on the phone
Once I would have jumped like a clown through a hoop—
but
“Then the area of infection has increased? …oh …What can I expect after all—I’ve had worse shocks.
Anyhow, I know and that’s something.” (Like hell it is, but it’s what you say to an X-ray doctor.)
Then the past whispering faint now on another phone:
“Is there any change?”
“Little or no change”
“I see”
The roller skates rain down the streets,
The black cars shine between the leaves,
Your voice far away:
“I am going with my daughter to the country. My husband left today. . . No he knows nothing.”
“Good”.
I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories, The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.
Once the phial was full—here is the bottle it came in.
Hold on there’s a drop left there. . . No, it was just the way the light fell
But your voice on the telephone. If I hadn’t abused words so what you said might have meant something.
But one hundred and twenty stories
April evening spreads over everything, the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paint-box.



F. Scott Fitzgerald

Childish




We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.



Anaïs Nin