even though life can get sad and overwhelming sometimes, the thought of us existing in the same universe feels comforting. knowing that we’re living and thriving underneath the same sky makes me feel closer to you even when we’re not speaking to each other. i wonder if we ever looked at the moon at the same time. have you ever wished that i was right next to you? sometimes i think the world is too big for you to be my only person but i truly believe that you are.
“And I thought that maybe there were ghosts inside of me that I hadn’t even met yet.” - Benjamin Sáenz ( Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe)
At the end of every day I look out into a darkness and see myself spinning further and further away from what I want, all that I’ve ever wanted. I’ve been so close, so exquisitely close. I’ve come within a whisper of it, this plainly elusive thing, my tangible ghost. I am never allowed to reach it. Like an Earth drifting slowly away from the sun. I am looking through the ship’s porthole as my lover drowns. The river carries me to safety as it pushes my child over a cliff.
georges bataille / emily palermo / olivia laing / @chaandajaan / georges bataille / cj hauser / @kvetchkween / @nicholasbraungf / vi khi nao / silas denver melvin
One more in the list of things telling me that the people who say “if you’re not happy single, you won’t be happy taken” are full of it. Certainly there are many kinds of unhappiness that a loving relationship can’t solve, but being alone can be its own form of unhappiness, and more forms can be more easily borne with proper support. That lie of a motivational message tells us to not even look for a relationship until we’re happy without one and that’s just cruel.
@curiousser These are beautiful in a poetic way, but now that I’m older and wiser, I think that if you don’t love yourself and don’t think you are worthy of someone, then expecting someone to find you and love you, only adds to the longing and the desperation, and doesn’t resolve these feelings. Pick yourself up, because if you want to love and be loved by another, then they also deserve the best version of you.
“Vivre, je veux vivre avec la même violence que j'ai eue parfois à vouloir mourir sans vraiment mourir, à attendre la nuit pour m'y endormir bellement.”
—Il était un piano noir…,Barbara.
“To live—I want to live with the same violence that I have sometimes used to desire death without really dying, to wait for the night to put myself truly, beautifully to sleep.”
“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”
Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies. No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain but has her death in it. The silence of her dying sounds through the carousel of language. It’s a web on which laughter stitches itself. How can my hand clasp another’s when between them is that thick death, that intolerable distance?
She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me that bird dives from the sun, that fish leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently than the way her dying shapes my mind. – But I hear, too, the other words, black words that make the sound of soundlessness, that name the nowhere she is continuously going into.
Ever since she died she can’t stop dying. She makes me her elegy. I am a walking masterpiece, a true fiction of the ugliness of death. I am her sad music.
It hadn’t been three months since he had died when we sat together in your living room, a green world going on outside, the June wind blowing hot and hard, bending each leaf and branch, while inside all was still: a still interior where three women sat in shadow stirring summer drinks, the room the same as it had always been,
but changed, his absence palpable. You said, “I thought I’d gradually miss him less, the way a craving for a cigarette lessens a little after weeks of going without. It’s not like that.” You paused, drawing in a breath. “It’s like a thirst that deepens as each day passes. Like water,” you finally said. “I want him back the way I want a drink of water.”
i was talking to a moth the other evening he was trying to break into an electric light bulb and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows pull this stunt i asked him because it is the conventional thing for moths or why if that had been an uncovered candle instead of an electric light bulb you would now be a small unsightly cinder have you no sense
plenty of it he answered but at times we get tired of using it we get bored with the routine and crave beauty and excitement fire is beautiful and we know that if we get too close it will kill us but what does that matter it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while so we wad all our life up into one little roll and then we shoot the roll that is what life is for it is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than to exist forever and never be a part of beauty our attitude toward life is come easy go easy we are like human beings used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him out of his philosophy he went and immolated himself on a patent cigar lighter i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity
but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself
I do not like my state of mind; I’m bitter, querulous, unkind. I hate my legs, I hate my hands. I do not yearn for lovelier lands. I dread the dawn’s recurrent light; I hate to go to bed at night. I snoot at simple, earnest folk. I cannot take the gentlest joke. I find no peace in paint of type. My world is but a lot of tripe. I’m disillusioned - empty breasted. For what I think, I’d be arrested. I am not sick, I am not well. My quondam dreams are shot to hell. My soul is crushed, my spirit sore, I do not like me anymore. I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse. I ponder on the narrow house. I shudder at the thought of men… I’m due to fall in love again.
