— Anna Akhmatova, “And in the depths of music…” from Poems, 1957-1966, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (tr. Judith Hemschemeyer)

“When I was a kid, I thought Marathi was a forbidden magic language.” Jaya smoked and counted the birds on the telephone poles. One, two, three, four, she mouthed the words in what I presumed was English.

“Chār,” she finally said and smiled at me from under her sunglasses. “Did you feel that? There’s a power there, in that word. When you think of the word ‘char’ in English, you’re thinking of something burning, something on fire. Dark marks of a painful oxidation. And Marathi just uses that word to mean the number 'four’.”

I aimed my phone at the telephone pole and took a picture of the birds. One of the birds ended up blurred as it took flight exactly when I pressed the fake button on the screen.

“My dad taught me, when I was a wee lass,” Jaya said. “He wanted me to know my heritage, where I’d come from. He always said that if you don’t know where you’re coming from, how will you know where you’re going?”

I checked the picture in my phone gallery and wondered if I should delete it. “I don’t know if that makes much sense,” I commented.

“Right?” She turned to me. “He was that sort of man. But right, yeah, he taught me a lot of words. Each word was like a talisman, something with a special, hidden power. Everything sounded so occult. Man, everything sounded so wrong.”

“Did he teach you grammar?” I asked.

“A little bit. After he became project lead, he just went from one task to another, and he spent less and less time with me. That just made the words all the rarer, you know? It made them more forbidden. The little grammar I knew became incantations, spells, like dark mantras that you can use to curse your enemies.”

“Did you?” I asked.

“Yeah. There were a couple boys back in school, they used to annoy the shit out of me. I cast a spell on them.”

“What was the spell?” I watched her look away.

“I’m too embarrassed to say.”

“You’ve made it this far, might as well go all the way.”

She shook her head a little. “I said, Āmbā mānzar khāto. It scared the shit out of them, they thought I was a voodoo bitch.” Jaya spat out her words, like she wanted to get to the other side of the sentences as soon as possible.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

She laughed. “Mango eats cat,” she said. “Or maybe it’s the other way around, I can’t tell. I never really figured the grammar out very well.”

I didn’t laugh, but I could have, if I was less dead inside.

“He taught me these words, but we still spoke in English all the time. So he’d tell me that ’zhāḍ’ means 'tree’, and I was supposed to believe that. I mean, that sounds like the name of a vampire demon or something.”

This time, I laughed.

“But I kept the words, yeah,” Jaya finished her cigarette and pressed on the stub with her sneakers. “Kept them locked up here, in my head. I couldn’t use them with anyone, and I couldn’t see any reason to use them with myself, so they just… floated in there, I guess. In my head.”

“A forbidden magic language,” I said whimsically. “That’s a very alien concept to me. I’ve only ever known one language, so I can’t even imagine what it’s like to understand another.”

“But that’s the thing,” Jaya took her sunglasses off. The sun had retreated, and the sharp orange sunshine had melted into a twilight. “When I went to Dad’s hometown, I was eighteen. I didn’t know what to expect. But then, there was everyone there, saying words I new, stringing them together into mantras and spells. And none of them were occult.”

I opened the car door and got into the driver’s seat. She went around and sat in the seat next to mine.

“My grandmother would just say ’Yeīl tenvhā dūdh māse ye… or something like that, I forget how you string them together. Anyway, it sounded so surreal, and all it meant was 'Get milk and fish on the way back’. Bit by bit, I felt like all the secret, forbidden, occult magic words I’d learned were slipping out of my grasp.”

I pulled the car onto the highway and pressed on the accelerator.

“I think around then is when I began talking less to dad. The mystique was gone. It was like the rain had washed away something about our relationship. No, it had washed away something about me.”

“No more magic,” I said dryly.

“No more magic,” she repeated and didn’t say anything after that for a while.

Later, when the twilight was giving way to the dark, she groaned. “It’s a sad thing,” she said, “When magic leaves the world, that is. It’s not a sudden death. It’s more like the realisation that someone you knew online is probably gone, and they’ve been gone for a long time, and no matter how many times you text them, they’re never going to text you back.”

I glanced at her to check if she was okay.

Her eyes were closed. She mouthed the word ’bābā’.

a veces estoy normal y de la nada empiezo a tener fantasías sexuales violentas

what does it mean when a guy says hi to you 

he’s lying

A Guide To Exploring Abandoned Churches

ok but the tweed stays on during sex

✧･ﾟplaylists to help pass the time *:･✧

hi everyone! it’s been a while since i made a huge playlist masterpost, but i thought that right now when we’re all stuck inside wondering what to do with our time i would make a list of all my playlists. listening to music is so calming and definitely helps me pass the time…so enjoy! - cam

i’m listening to #71 right now and it’s rlly good so far 😌

Handed in my first assignment on Wednesday. Kinda nervous about it but it’s a 40% pass mark and it’s a pass/fail so hopefully should be fine!!

Today on things that I’m weirdly and ridiculously emotional about, does anybody else get the spontaneous urge to cry when they see a really gorgeous piece of Architecture? Especially if they happen to be Theatres, Museums, Book Stores, Libraries or Art Galleries? That might sound weird, but seriously, just look at these things:

The Winter Garden Theatre, Toronto Canada

The Margravial Opera House, Bayrueth Germany

El Ateneo Grand Splendid, the Theatre-turned-Library in Barrio Norte, Buenos Aires

The Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest, Hungary

The Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey

The Florence Cathedral in Florence, Italy

The Abbey Library of Saint Gall in Saint Gallen, Switzerland

The Baroque Library of Metten Abbey in Metten Germany

Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland

The Vatican Museums in Vatican City

Konpira Grande Theatre in Kotohira, Japan

Kabuki-za Theatre in Tokyo, Japan

I can’t be the only one who finds these places gorgeous, right? Add your own favorite Architectural Wonders in the comments!

Conocí a un chico hecho pedazos

Tiene una sonrisa rota,

y un corazón enorme.

Conocí a un chico misterioso,

lleno de inseguridades y tristeza

pero con una gran capacidad de amar.

Conocí a un chico roto,

con unos ojos color universo 

y una sonrisa preciosa.

Conocí a un chico dulce, 

que me besa con ternura

y me mira con verdadero amor.

Conocí a un chico que se parece al cielo

pero que es caliente como el infierno.

Conocí a un chico que parece ser un invierno en Alaska, 

pero que es cálido como un atardecer en la playa.

Conocí a un chico lleno de estrellas,

y mucha magia. 

Conocí a un chico con olor a poesía y pecado, 

lleno de caos y decadencia,

que me besa el alma con pasión 

y me susurra que me ama con todo el corazón.

Conocí a un chico que no tiene miedo de amar el desastre,

que besa mis cicatrices 

y me abraza los miedos.

Conocí a un chico maravilloso,

con una belleza realmente magnífica

y yo simplemente no pude evitar enamorarme de él.

— SAMM 

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Director: Wes Anderson

Cinematographer: Tristan Oliver

FILMS THAT WES DIRECTED THROUGHOUT THE DECADE

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Isle of Dogs (2018)

hope that everyone have a happy new year!!

Películas dirigidas por Anderson esta década

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Dir. Wes Anderson 

You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that’s what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant… oh, fuсk it.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) dir. Wes Anderson