clarice lispector why this world: a biography of clarice lispector \\ fernando pessoa i have more souls than one: i see boats moving (tr. jonathan griffin)

kofi

"it gets easier with time" have you ever considered I want it to be easy now?

I'm writing paragraphs but like.. in my mind

oh it's called thinking.

How do you feel about yourself?

When the question is too much to answer, you sit there, shaking, as if upon you lies a tremendous weight, pressing you flat. Your smile shivers, you inhale with paper lungs. Everyone can hear the rustling. You're certain of it. Everyone can hear the ink-scratch of your thoughts being written, then crumpled, tossed aside. Everyone knows there's nothing there until their questions conjure you into being.

do it scared do it weird do it alone. holy trinity

kinda crazzzzyyyy how i have to keep going even tho the future is super uncertain and it’s so scary knowing that there is nothing but uncertainty in front of us and you can’t stop because then you’ll never know but you have to keep going cuz like ??? u have to want to know the future ?? but also im tired :(

you are more than the damage done to you

Marina Tsvetaeva, excerpt from Poem of the End, Selected Poems (trans. Elaine Feinstein, with Angela Livingstone) [ID'd]

— Hélène Cixous | The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous | The Perjured City

it still comes as a surprise that closeness cannot be achieved from a safe distance

you ever listen to a song 47 times in a row and every time you’re like wow what a good song. I’m gonna play it again.

When I was in seventh grade, we had an assignment in English class to write out the answer “if you were given one wish, what would it be?” I had possibly been waiting my entire life for an adult to ask me this and immediately laid out my carefully conceived plan, whereby I would be transported to a fantasy world to have cool adventures, live out a happy life, and at the moment of my death, be transported to another fantasy world to start over having more cool adventures, on and on forever. Between lives, my memory would be erased (I was fairly sure that immortality made you batshit otherwise) and I would start each life at age twelve, with childhood memories retroactively put into place, so that I did not have to waste valuable Cool Adventure time on potty-training, learning to walk, etc.

It was not until the next day when the teacher handed back our papers and commented “Most of you wished for world peace,” that I realized just how thoroughly I had botched the assignment.

i don't think you botched it at all

No, you did it better than anyone

having to come to terms with the fact that love is not an everlasting performance in which you attempt to retain the attention of your significant other but rather a release of control and putting faith into them and trusting them to choose to stay with you no matter what you have to offer

to love and be loved is to rest

Richard Siken, from "On Perplexity: Chrysanthemum"

Marin Sorescu, "Getting Used to Your Name" (trans. Gabriela Dragnea) [ID'd]

‘Love’ by Tavík František Šimon, c. 1900.

You’d love me if I was gentle, right? If I wasn’t so bitter at my mother. If I wasn’t so loud, so blunt, so damaged from my past. You’d love me if I was smaller, right?

My whole life I have been trying to make myself smaller. To live a life without an echo, without a shadow. I keep my curtains closed, my head down and use my inside voice just like I’m told.

I am just a girl, occupying the space I was given when I was 5, too afraid to ask for more.

I am confined to the smallest room, in a large, empty house. I know what I am and what I could’ve been. While they are discovering the ocean, I am still trying to unlock the door. And if all that lies on the other side of the door is settled dust, please find me a comfortable place to rest. I promise I will never ask for more.

I have seen what emptiness has done to my mother and the door never unlocks. The wound never closes.

— Hannah Green, ‘As The Dust Settles’.

— Danez Smith, king the color of space/tower of molasses & marrow

Louise Glück, from “Mutable Earth”, Poems 1962-2012

— Tony Kushner, Angels in America