EUPHORIA 2⨯04 You who cannot see, think of those who can

KILLING EVE (2018-) 1x05 | 2x05 | 3x03

Victoria Pedretti as Love Quinn | YOU 3.07 We’re All Mad Here

is it fruity to have sexual tension with your evil alter ego?

diversity win! the man and his hallucination are gay!

…Do you ever see people critiquing specific word usage in novels and wonder if they know that language can be used in fun and figurative ways? And that this is half the joy of writing?

An example off the top of my head - if I say ‘He gave a whisper of a smile’, it does not mean that the smile is literally whispering; it means that the word ‘whisper’ invokes a sense of smallness, due perhaps to subtlety or shyness, and that is something I want connected to your mental envisioning of this dude’s smile. 

Saying ‘But that makes no sense; a smile and a whisper are two different things’ misses the point e n t i r e l y

something bad happened to you, and you died, and you came back wrong.

not wrong all the way. the little ways. you forget important dates, stopped going out with friends. it's harder to make you smile. you're apathetic towards things you used to love, afraid of places you used to go to cheer up. quieter. flinching. different.

you came back for love. you're still here for love. what pulled you back was a brightness so loud that even death couldn't outshout it. death heard the call and smiled at you and said okay. go home. somebody is waiting for you.

but you came back different. like lot's wife; you've turned into salt. you used to chirp through life in hops and skips; but now you lose skin just standing up. you have to move slower, skimming across this world without-touching-it. most things feel dull - until they're suddenly all-too-much. life, and being alive just rushes up and over you and you get hopelessly crushed.

you try to explain it to them: it is ugly, but this is what you are, now. the huge golden hoop of your halo now a little bronze ring. you are still watering your plants and wearing the same clothes. after all, you worked hard to come home. this life; so odd and off-color, now that you are wrong.

but they waited for you - it's just that they wanted the "you" that happened before this. the "you" that could sing in the show and hug people tight and look at a blade without breaking down to cry. the you with a smile in pictures. god, holyshit, it's like looking at a completely different person, isn't it. that other-you; the one they actually wanted.

you are the consolation prize. you are the body that forgot the ghost. you are the memory of the bad thing, and the death after; like you are wearing that memory as a banner. you are a fragment, an assembly. simulacrum. you don't make eye contact in mirrors, afraid the light will glance off and your true nature will flash back at you.

you hear them talk about it in their hushed, desperate whispers. sometimes they even admit it to your face; harsh and violent, acid thrown at christmas dinner. god, can you just fucking be normal again. you do not remember what normal is. you had to climb so far to get back here; you are far too exhausted. you want to open the glass door of your heart and show all the gears. can you help resolve whatever got messed up?

you try so, so hard. you came back for them. because you believed they would love you, even when you were so horribly broken. because you believed they would be patient. because you believed unconditional meant "without exception." you cannot do things the same way. you just get tired too quickly these days.

you want to put them on a couch and pour them the tea with hands that shake more than they remember. you want to line them up and draw them a map of where you have had to wander. you want to show every bruise in a backsplash; the little helpless ant of your soul carrying all that weight, over and over. you want to say: yes! it is different! but i did it for love!

you want to say: "i'm not the same, but i'm yours and i'm here. can that be enough?"

Any nostalgia I feel is literary. It’s not the stillness of evenings in the country that endears me to the childhood I spent there, it’s the way the table was set for tea, it’s the way the furniture was arranged in the room, it’s the faces and physical gestures of the people. I feel nostalgia for scenes. Thus someone else’s childhood can move me as much as my own; both are purely visual phenomena from a past I’m unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

James Baldwin, from If Beale Street Could Talk Florence and the Machine, from Various Storms & Saints Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet

Heart imagery by Andrea Zanatelli Eye with Tear (oil paint and resin tear on canvas) by Nancy Fouts Douleur d'amour (detail) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

"So long, Hange."

"Shinzo wo Sasageyo"

Somebody took the lyrics too literally...

levi

– Rivers in the Dust, Radical Face