obsessed with stories where you can never go home
you can never go home because you fell asleep for a thousand years and when you woke up and returned there, your society had changed, your house had fallen and all of your friends were dead. you can never go home because you made a choice and were shattered into pieces and your home was destroyed in your wake. you can never go home because someone took you and changed you against your will and although your home is the same, the person who belonged there is dead. you can never go home because you committed a crime and your family expelled you and even as they extend a hand of reconciliation, you will never forgive them. you can never go home because your home was a person and someone murdered her and now you drift and grieve to the point of insanity. you can never go home because you never knew your sister but she gave you every opportunity you have and now she's dead and your parents see nothing but her in your eyes.
i love you mirror versions i love you possession i love you cloning i love you simulacrums i love you shadow selves i love you digital copies of a mind i love you alternate timeline versions i love you tropes that play with identity and what it means to be a certain person
I love you reincarnation
“My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Ilya Kaminsky, from Deaf Republic: Poems; “Alfonso, in snow”
[Text ID: "You are alive, I whisper to myself, therefore something in you listens."]
How lovely it is / you say / to have a bed to forget yourself in / in a city that doesn’t love you
— Gavin Yuan Gao, from “Glass City Aubade,” At the Altar of Touch
Coming Home
When we are driving in the dark, on the long road to Provincetown, when we are weary, when the buildings and the scrub pines lose their familiar look, I imagine us rising from the speeding car. I imagine us seeing everything from another place-- the top of one of the pale dunes, or the deep and nameless fields of the sea. And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us, but which we cherish. And what we see is our life moving like that along the dark edges of everything, headlights sweeping the blackness, believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things. Looking out for sorrow, slowing down for happiness, making all the right turns right down to the thumping barriers to the sea, the swirling waves, the narrow streets, the houses, the past, the future, the doorway that belongs to you and me.
-- mary oliver
“The boy began the long walk toward the unknown.”
— Andrea Hannah, from Where Darkness Blooms
“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005)
so i started watching the fran lebowitz show and .. yeah. everyone say thank u fran <3
“…people are consistently told “What can you learn about your own life from this novel, what lessons will this teach you? How can you use this…” This is a philistine idea. This is beyond vulgar. It’s an awful way to approach anything. It should take you away. A book should not be a mirror, it’s supposed to be a door.”
“I wanted to say something between a whisper and a prayer”
— Cynthia Manick, from “Pitkin Avenue and Stone,” Up the Staircase Quarterly (no. 23, 2013)
“Loneliness is an unlimited resource. Dip into it. Keep dipping.”
— — Niina Pollari, from “Ursa Minor,” Path of Totality