I went to the place
where we come from, the sea,
and asked how to live.
Air and water touched me,
coming and going.
And along with the whole earth,
I breathed.
This is how, little one,
the sea whispered,
this is how we live.
“I didn’t want it to be one good memory that led to a lot of bad ones. I wanted it to stay what it was, one amazing moment, something that was strong and sweet enough to stand on its own. Something I could remember without any pain.”
— Elizabeth Scott, Perfect You
Tomas Tranströmer, from “Black Postcards″, The Deleted World: Poems (versions by Robin Robertson, bilingual ed.) [transcript in ALT]
“Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.”
- Neil Gaiman, Coraline
—
wyrds
Alfred Augustus Glendening, Jr.
Salman Toor (Pakistani, 1983), Immigrant Gathering, 2016. Oil on canvas, 122 x 81.5 cm.
“Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.”
- Neil Gaiman, Coraline
—
Jasmin Lee Cori, The Emotionally Absent Mother: How to Recognize and Heal the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect
Tomas Tranströmer, from “Black Postcards″, The Deleted World: Poems (versions by Robin Robertson, bilingual ed.) [transcript in ALT]
After Escape
by Gaia Rajan
Finally I was free to love anything I wanted. Instead I spent weeks charting each year of my history—I was beautiful, I was good, all my friends were beautiful and good, I lived in a narrow house where every night the ceiling closed on me like a lid. I hid knives in my textbooks, dreamt each night of a white table in a muddy field, a gun on the table, a woman holding the gun. I practiced answering her, rehearsed my own name, still bruised, so believe me, it wasn’t a surprise to hear them years later with floodlights, shouting my name. They said it wrong, they always did, and on every missing poster they’d painted my old face, so what was I to do, in the city they made evidence? I ran, and cab drivers wouldn’t look at me. I ran, and felt for a fingerhold, left nail marks on the interrogation table’s wood belly. I entered through the keyhole to a houseparty full of strangers. Racketed through the house’s narrow corridors, a pile of knees. And every time I woke up from the white table I woke without pain, remembering nothing, my own name on my lips. For months, I watched them grieve me— now it’s finally summer, my friend names her goldfish after me, the locusts come down on the hills, turning everything bone-white, there’s an ad in the newspaper for my body and then it’s over. I am free to love anything I want. And still I hate the black car down the road. Still I check every bathroom for cameras.
“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
— David Foster Wallace
Carrie Fisher, from The Princess Diarist.
“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous person, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the person in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
— Henry Miller
“The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.”
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
“I think you lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in everything. So you abandoned your physical body. You went to a world apart and you’re living a different kind of life there. In a world inside you.”
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
“I want to calm down, to rest, to outlive this nonsense.”
— Anne Sexton, from a letter to Dennis Farrell written c. June 1962
“For the moment I am really very, very tired of everything — more than tired.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“Being here alone with nothing to do, I’ve been thinking about myself too. Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly.” - Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
“If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible.”
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept