And aren’t we all alone in the end?
You put your head for a moment against my chest.

Then, all I could hear was our breathing. We were
both human and animal-hearted,
bound to the blades, bound to outrun them.

—Ada Limón, from “Forgiveness,” The Hurting Kind

I removed the knife
from my back

Oh, how satisfying
it would feel
to watch
your skin break,
to hear
your bones crack,
to paralyze
you
the way
you
paralyzed me;
to make you bleed.

Tempting

My grip loosened;
The blade fell;

Feet walking away

Is there a Sister in the House ? Luckily we have one… With all the controversial sinning that just “May” and I say “just may “ be going on here, we need a lady of god for quick forgiveness.

is assembling in the sky
like a golden blue
plum so big
all the slices
made entire
people pull over cut
engines stand in the streets
like they could swallow it whole
 
these moments feel
like bending
over self
forehead to ankles
to murmur
I forgive you
to our own anatomy
 
this honey dust
this flaxen split  
the body made open
to keep us close
 
within reach
a hummingbird flings
into orbit
its whole sphere
glows sapphire
 
it’s simple
it’s morning
what then
follow a prayer
 
in the throat there is a pit
grooved rift of our own frames
horizons arrivals this
upon us
 
yawning unlatched
sun drenched
drowning in an ordinary hum
flinging our forms into
whatever place will want us
next golden whole sliced
together swallowed blue
for now
that’s all we want to be
 
 
 

broken nails

i think life is a series of broken nails; sometimes you couldn’t have known, sometimes it’s more “i told you so”. sometimes it hurts, and sometimes it doesn’t, regardless it’s torn from you all of a sudden. but if you let it, it’ll grow back, the past remains as history. time can heal the tiny wounds — maybe not that of a gun, but you could never break my heart; my nails grow out and pass.

see this on instagram!

forget me

i’m frozen

winter’s cheek rests on mine

like a familiar pillow-friend

forgive me

he whispers

for where you wrote our beginning,

i must call our end

Valuing The Human

An innocent little six year old was mercilessly gunned down by someone in a fit of road rage recently.

I wondered how was this possible?

The Lord led me to the story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis.

Cain and Abel were two brothers, the children of Eve, “the mother of all the living.”

When her first son was born, Eve called him “Cain,” a name related to a word for “lament” or “wail.”…

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(Warning for spoilers to No Man’s Sky)

Today I left my traveller to float for eternity in their cute little space ship a mere 146,933.2 light years from the center of the Euclid Galaxy. From the get go we were told that the goal of No Man’s Sky was to reach the centre of the Galaxy. For the first 60 or so hours of playing the game I ignored this and spent much time exploring every single planet in so much detail other people were probably laughing at me. 

I fell in love with space creatures of all kinds. I was seemingly much more lucky than other people that were playing the game - I started on a very lush planet, in a system of lush and beautiful planets and it was probably 3 hyper jumps before I found myself in an ugly and seemingly desolate system.

Some of the space creatures seemed more like space monsters and I was okay with that. It seemed plausible at first. Again, I was lucky that it was many planets until I found myself creatures who’s animation was so weird and ridiculous that it was just ugly.

I fell in love with vista after vista. My favourite part of this early play time was traversing on foot and cresting hills to have my breath taken away from what was revealed beyond. I adored using my jetpack to soar above lakes and throw myself in, plummeting to their beautiful depths.

I watched sunrise after sunrise on a multitude of landscapes and it took me quite a while to feel like this was repetitive or old.

Being a sucker for science fiction and space ships I just couldn’t get enough of this world that was full of them! Space ships and trading hubs everywhere!

I tweeted my experience of No Man’s Sky as I do with many games and you can see all the images and little video clips under the twitter tag #crSky . You’ll probably notice that I went through an entire gamut of emotions and frustrations, from the lack of accessibility, to pure joy, to frustration and finally, boredom. 

The longer I played No Man’s Sky the more I got increasingly mad at it. If you play video games you may have even seen all of the controversy over this game. As with anything to do with video games on the internet it all got a bit out of hand and over the top, but as I played I did begin to see where that spark of anger first came to life. 

At first I loved it. It was beautiful (not the most beautiful, but with its own charm), it felt close to what I wanted from exploring space - especially finding, naming, cataloguing animals and flying around in a space ship. But then I got so dismayed at the game that all I could fathom was that this game was simply incomplete - that the developers had all of these big ideas but that they just didn’t get any of them finished and that some serious content was lacking. Now I’ve finished* the game I’m not so sure. *walked away from.

The biggest disappointment for me came with the lack of conclusion to following the path of the Atlas. The biggest frustration was the complete lack of instruction or feedback on what was needed from me as a traveller in my journey. 

As an example, I’ll tell you about the Atlas Path - the Atlas are a mysterious being or force (you never find out what exactly) that may or may not be the benevolent creators of the universe. Whatever they are or were, they’re long gone, but they’ve left behind a trail for a mysterious group of sentient beings* to follow by visiting interfaces they’ve left behind. *The Travellers - that’s you. 

You receive Atlas Stones for each Atlas interface you visit, and in order to ‘complete’ that quest you need pretty much every one. Except you don’t know this and they can also be sold at trade terminals and to aliens for a veryattractive price at a time when earning cash can be a slog. So, I sold most of mine and I got to the end of the Atlas path and I couldn’t complete the quest (!!). A quick internet search revealed that it was okay and I didn’t miss anything anyways, not even any animation… just a little bit of text and no proof that anything actually happened.

This brings me to what made me wary when I first started playing the game - there’s very little animation or real action in the game. Nearly everything is a text based description of what is happening, or simple lore. My initial reaction was what the fuck? did I just pay $80 for space dungeons and dragons with an invisible DM describing everything to me?

To answer this question after who knows how many near-infinite hours of gameplay - yes I did. But I’m not mad about it anymore. In my final two hours of playing the game I had an epiphany and I forgave the creators of No Man’s Sky for most of their transgressions. 

I forgave them for forcing me into a colonialist journey of claiming places I discovered that were already settled. 

I forgave them for the weirdly uncomfortable mix of sheer beauty, majesty, silliness and total ugliness of the procedurally generated worlds and creatures. 

I forgave them for making me feel like I had to spend countless hours searching for a rare random drop of the Atlas Pass v2 only to discover there was literally nothing but some new furniture behind those doors. 

I forgave them for not ‘finishing’ the intriguing stories they had begun to weave through this expansive galaxy. 

I forgave them for not giving me enough of an opportunity to learn the Atlas language so that I had no idea what the Atlas was saying to me, even though I worked hard and spent days searching for monoliths.

I forgave them for boring me out of my own mind scouring for resources, building up my equipment and cataloguing space monsters. 

I forgave them for making me hate entire alien races; I forgave them for making me love another but giving me no substance too.

I forgave them for making the journey to the centre of the galaxy so horrifically arduous and never ending that I simply gave up and left my traveller to float for eons in the vast emptiness of space.

But why? Why forgive a games developer for making a video game that seemingly failed to deliver on every promised front? My personal epiphany was that this is actually not far off what living this role in space would mean to a sentient being. Being completely alone and not even knowing who or what you are, but being told your destiny is to toil and travel and toil and travel and just do it for eternity over and over.

This idea poked into my brain several times while playing, but I kept pushing it back because I wanted more. I wanted to be entertained. I wanted an actual ending to my story; I worked HARD at this dammit, I deserve a good round, proper ending. I spent all this time barely being entertained and I don’t even get an ending? 

I read this article from Polygon and I saw what actually happens when you reach the centre of the galaxy and I couldn’t ignore that idea anymore. It’s perfect. It’s almost too perfect. You’re living an infinite loop of difficult hard work and wonder (but also boredom), continually searching for the illusive meaning to your journey. This is existentialism. This is the Franz Kafka video game I always wanted and I didn’t even know it until I finally let go of my traveller and left them to float for eternity in a beautiful expanse of stars.

wholeheartedsuggestions:

if you were truly a bad person, you wouldn’t be so hung up on the morality of your mistakes. the fact that you want to go back and make it right means you’re growing from this and you’ll try to do better next time.

Flowers for The Lady

Yes, you deserve appreciation

Yes, you deserve respect

Yes, you deserve love and laughter

Yes, you deserve rest

Yes, you deserve forgiveness

Yes, you deserve chances to learn from your mistakes

Yes, you deserve respresentation

Yes, you deserve equal pay

Yes, you deserve to lead

Yes, you should express your anger

Yes, you should show your pain

Yes, you should honour your tears

Yes, you should put yourself first

Yes, you should desire the best for your life

Yes, you should further your education

Yes, you should step out on faith

Yes, you should embrace your spirituality

Yes, you should ignore the naysayers

Yes, you should show up and show out

Yes, you should breathe

Yes, you can sleep

You are what you think, see and feel

Be blessed

And move with intention

You can do it Sis

Déolà

Author - @iameriwa

Model - @aapioo

Photography - @caramia

I can be happy again.

This is a long entry folks, and it’s about the ongoing story of me and my ex, and this is the final chapter. It’s been an eventful day today involving me and my ex, full of drama, fighting, and then reconciliation.
Where to begin…

It started last night. I was on Facebook talking to one of my ex’s friends that I befriended when I visited in PA. She’s a great person, very supportive, and she was hearing out my problems. We were discussing past relationships. Naturally my ex came up in conversation and I was foolish enough to ask details about her that ended up bothering me. On top of that, a post popped up on my news feed. It was one of my ex’s other friends, and she had posted a big paragraph praising her. I’m not proud of what I did, but I lost control and ended up writing quite a passive aggressive comment about her on that post. It was deleted within like 5 minutes, but that didn’t stop my ex from discovering it.

Fast forward to today and when I come home from school, I find my ex has written me on Skype, asking why I had bothered adding her back as a friend and why I said what I said. I tried to shove the incoming argument away, but there was no avoiding it. We ended up fighting and I said all the things to her to that I didn’t say when we broke up. That she was a bitch. That she didn’t have the decency to own up to what she did. That she was a horrible person. Etc.

How childish am I, right?

And when we finally stopped talking to each other, our mutual friend messaged me, as if on cue. I spent the next hour talking with her, telling her what just happened and spilling out my emotions and how I felt about my entire experience with my ex.

It was then I realized that I was doing something that I should have done long ago. When we broke up, I kept everything bottled up. I went into no contact for a month and tried to move on by myself. The sadness dulled, but there was still a little bit of unchecked anger, bitterness, and emotional pain lingering inside me. I had never properly vented these out. Never talked in detail with anyone about how I felt. About what really happened. Now I was there texting away with my friend, her listening to every bit and piece.

I was healing.

When I argued with my ex, I had finally released my leftover anger. When I talked about it all with my friend and listened to her wise words of experience, I left behind my bitterness and my emotional pains. It was then and there that this weight was finally lifted off my shoulders.

I had been the problem all along. I’m a stubborn and arrogant person, and when I lost my ex I had clung onto this brittle sort of hope. I was so arrogant that I told myself I could fix my ex, fix us. Like I had some sort of lesson to teach her. I hadn’t fully moved on, wouldn’t let go. It was so foolish and childish of me. Just because she had hurt me so badly doesn’t mean she deserved to have me attack her the way I did, and hurt her back. In all my arrogance, I had been so angered by her because I thought she was living some glamorous life, and that she hadn’t learned anything from what she did to me. In reality, she had lost practically all her close friends as a result, and there was now a war within her social circle. I felt awful.

She said it herself. People change. She changed. I just never wanted to accept that the sweet girl I loved so much was gone.

But after today’s events, I did. I finally let go. I finally accepted it. There was just one thing left to fix.

A few hours later I began talking with my ex on Skype again, and I told her that I was done being bitter. I told her pretty much everything I said above. No more bitterness, no more drama, no more bullshit. I told her, “Let’s be friends and never fight again. I can forgive you for what you did…for real this time. Can you forgive me for being a childish prick?”

Her response was yes.

We’re friends again, I’ve finally moved on, and the weight is finally off my shoulder.

Now I just wait. Wait for some special girl to pop into my life and take me by surprise.

I can be happy again.

St Bernard of Clairvaux, after receiving the message from Christ regarding the pain he experienced in his shoulder, sought to foster devotion to the Shoulder Wound of Christ, and penned this prayer:

Prayer to the Shoulder Wound of Jesus
O Loving Jesus, meek Lamb of God, I a miserable sinner, salute and worship the most Sacred Wound of Thy Shoulder on which Thou didst bear Thy heavy Cross, which so tore Thy Flesh and laid bare Thy Bones as to inflict on Thee an anguish greater than any other Wound of Thy Most Blessed Body. I adore Thee, O Jesus most sorrowful; I praise and glorify Thee and give Thee thanks for this most sacred and painful Wound, beseeching Thee by that exceeding pain and by the crushing burden of Thy heavy Cross to be merciful to me, a sinner, to forgive me all my mortal and venial sins, and to lead me on towards Heaven along the Way of Thy Cross. Amen.