growing apart (maybe in another life)
“p.s. i still love you” jenny han // hanif kureishi “intimacy and midnight all day: a novel and stories” // andrew wyeth “breakup”, 1994 // kevin wilson “nothing to see here” // sue zhao // christa wolf “cassandra: a novel and four essays” // zhiyong jing “the longing in your heart”, 2019 // frank ocean “white ferrari” // @wickleg
a face in the crowd
Vyara Boyadjieva / Hannah Lane / Lauren Humphrey / Gaetan de Seguin / Holly Warburton / Emily Grenader / Mouni Feddag / Olivier Suire Verley / Amanda Joy Brown
by Nicolette Sowder
May we raise children who love the unloved things–the dandelion, the worms and spiderlings. Children who sense the rose needs the thorn
& run into rainswept days the same way they turn towards sun…
And when they’re grown & someone has to speak for those who have no voice
may they draw upon that wilder bond, those days of tending tender things
and be the ones.
¡Oh, qué misterio espantoso es este de la existencia!
– Rafael Pombo.
I hope your heart heals from all the damage it took over the years
“How I’ve loved is not how I meant to love.”
— Carl Phillips, from “Wherefore Less Lonely”, Pale Colors in a Tall Field
Manovinoda, “Oiled With Saffron”, from the Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa anthology compiled by Vidyakara (trans. P. Lal)
[Text ID: “When she unties her garment (blue, cloud-blue) a tossing necklace of pearls circles her breast. The nimbus of radiance is more than lunar.]
some of you haven’t spent countless hours thinking up a whole universe in your head to escape to and it shows
tokyo: waiting by the bus station at 10pm. people come and go, but no one stops to stare. the smell of smoke trails into your nose—and it screams danger. but you’re tired. there is no where to run.
seoul: feeling claustrophobic in your own skin, you wish you could strip it off of you. home never felt so foreign, but where else is there to go? nails dig themselves into your thighs, but even then the pain is numbed.
moonchild: watching the dusk turn to dawn, and dawn to dusk. time moves, and it slips through your fingers the more you resist. “it’s okay,” you think. the fireflies in the sky blink in agreement.
badbye: lurking beyond the edges of your vision, it is a shadow. it is looming, a thing of darkness and coldness. in your blindness, you scramble to find purchase on something—until you feel cool glass under your fingertips. a mirror; it was you.
uhgood: swirling like whiskey in a bottle, your thoughts feel like lead in your brain. there are sights to see, things to achieve—but you stand as stagnant as the puddles after a storm. your mind is a jail, and you are its prisoner.
everythingoes: there is coffee trickling down the side of your cup, but you choose to watch the sun rise beyond the horizon. the final boss waits idly, waiting for your arrival but you pause to taste the scenery instead. there is no need to rush—the sun will come and go regardless. they will wait for you.
forever rain: the raindrops feel like weights against your skin. has the world always looked this gray? umbrellas and boots slosh their way past you, but no one takes the time to look back. it is only the cold arms of a winter night’s breeze that you can call your own.
Interior, No. 30 Strandgade, 1906, by Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916)
I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth. So without experiencing things, should I not find life?
─ Clarice Lispector, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (1943).
[…] we lose ourselves, the poem and I, in the hopeless attempt to write the things that burn.
– Alejandra Pizarnik, from “Cornerstone,” Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (New Directions, 2016)
