février 2012
“Man is the dream of a shadow.”
– Greek proverb
The femur can support up to 30 times the weight of an adult, and yet the adult can shatter given the brush of a body, now foreign, once known.
I love you like dirt loves the crescents beneath...
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not feel.
I do not feel that I feel.
I do not feel what I should feel.
I do not feel that I should feel.
But I do.
And I do.
I do.
A-pathos.
A-trophos.
An-oresis.
A single thread, spun of onion skin and the whiskers of a cat, encircles my waist.
“Je vois de la lumiere noire.
I see a black light.”
– Victor Hugo’s last words
When Yeats writes on Innisfree, as he elaborates, constructs, this secure realm for himself, as he visits its shores and submerges himself in the superficial ripples of the lake, he says that he “shall have some peace there”. He shall have some peace there; some peace. He does not say he shall have peace there. I am not looking for peace. Pax, pacis. I do not think that it is...
Happiness is not the absence of sadness; sadness is the presence of sorrow, not the negation of joy. Dolor and delight must coexist, dynamically shifting- the tectonics of emotion, shaking and quaking away within chests.
The Spectator
Night visions have etched
Blueprints for familiar illusions
Upon your orbital cavities,
Orphanages for low-lidded twins,
Sullen bulbs.
You collect mirrors in your mind,
Shards unearthed in the estate sales of the universe.
Amidst the jumble of evidence:
Things had, things held,
Trampled suns, vestigial blessings,
A wilting lotus, a collection of splinters.
My anorexia has become a conscious yet...
Sheena is a punk, Jesus is a carpenter.
Did they make him build his own cross?
I am too much. I spill over, I surge outwards, I overstep my means, my bounds. I am too little. My insignificance stymies me, and though I used to laugh my shoulders have stopped shaking with the tremors of forced humor now. I am searching for enough. Satisfaction; from satis, enough, and facere, to do or make. To make enough. To build enough. To do enough. Enough.
It is always too much and...
My mother is coming to visit me in Portland this weekend. I suppose she is concerned.
People are concerned about me. This concerns me, but it does not concern me; it involves me, but I feel no true concern for their care.
The boy in the coffee shop where I dropped off my baking on Tuesday told me to, “Take care,” as way of bidding me adieu.
Take care. Seize it by its thinning...
There are so many people telling me how to live, depositing brute figures and calculations into my palms. I teem not with life but with instructions on how to live. Yet not a single one of these benefactors has told me why to live, nor do I believe that they are capable of such a feat. I am not concerned with how; it does not matter. I am concerned with why. I am stricken with an ache for...
Lupercalia>Valentine's Day.
I am lousy with doctors who do not know how to die...
I am offered a smile, but I am unsure whether it...
I feel that if I began to write, I would never be able to stop. I feel that, if I began to cry, I would never be able to stop. I feel that, if I began to eat, I would never be able to stop. Inertia is comforting. Motivation levels are dismal. Momentum, memento, memento mori.
“I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk.”
– John Huston
Apparently, when my mother was in the hospital when I was in first grade, having her head cut open to stop the bleeding, I refused to see her. I refused, outright. I denied she was sick, I denied she was in the hospital at all. I remember rain. Always rain. All the rain.
My therapist has spent the last 51 minutes attempting to convince me to go either to the emergency room or an urgent care center. Hmm, hmm. No.
I am interested in human beings. I am not...
Isobel has told me to let the boy who shows me Casablanca and warbles along to First Day of my Life into my head. I do not want him in my head. I do not want me in my head. I want to be alone with myself. I want to be free. Loneliness stifles instead of liberates.
My mother is coming to visit me in Portland. I do believe that she thought, when we quarreled on Wednesday and I failed to respond to her texts on Thursday, that I had done something verging on the dreadful. I was translating the Aeneid, Book VI, last night, applying what mental faculties I retain to Virgil with what determination I could muster, when she asked if I would like her to come.
I...
Wake up on Saturday morning after a truly terrible night where you cried all over your copy of the Aeneid. Find that roommate has vomited all over your floor.
Happy, happy day.
“The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a...”
– A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
The distinction between pity and mercy is one...
Passion and patience share the same roots, the...
From the Latin pati, patior, passus sum, a deponent verb meaning, “to suffer.”
janvier 2012
I do not want to let this go, so here it is as I cannot invest much of myself now because I do not have much of myself left. He took me back to his apartment. We watched Casablanca and I curled into myself. We sang along to First Day of My Life as he drove me home. He is everything I was ever promised and never given, everything that I have made excuses for the absence of, and now it is my own...
fadetodust a demandé : Hello, I love your tumblr. You are an amazing writer. Would you like to say something about yourself? How old are you? Where are you from?
“Cura, curae; feminine noun, first declension; care, anxiety, grief; love.”
This is why I love Latin.
I laugh a lot in my classes now. I don’t laugh otherwise. People look at me oddly, they look me in the eyes and they will not let go. I am not used to being so held by gazes. They hold me in existence, they tether me to it and all I want is to sleep. We are reading the Aeneid in Latin, and experiencing that class, that text, makes me feel connected to the ages of human history. I brush up...
There are some, yes, some I have seen and heard murmured mention of, who sport their skin with delight. They are generous with their joy, effusive in their exuberance for life, for death, for anguish, for ecstasy. There are some, yes, one I fear I have become, who writhe within their flesh, enraptured in a perpetual tantrum against existence. I agonize over the most minute details and the most...
If home is where the heart is, then I am surely in...
I am back at school. I do not know where I am, who I am, or why everything hurts as it does. My mother reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut or maybe J. D. Salinger. I want to see Nick today but I don’t want to see anyone else. I have to get through 6 weeks and then I can go back to my other cocoon. I don’t know how I will do this.
No, I never wanted to die. I just didn’t want to be alive.
I never meant to be so cold. When did I begin to...
My mind protests; my body groans. I am, I am, shaken, shaking. Blessé, blessed.
The Saddest Places in the World
Grocery store parking lots in January.
The libraries of Atlantis.
He had never yet found a ship at the bottom of a...
Levi, my friend, you modern Menelaus, you are dead. You fell while hiking, you snapped your fibula the way I used to snap twigs in the back country of Colorado, the way my mother snapped her fingers in church, the way these flimsy strands of habit made of spun sugar and glass (melted sugar, melted sand, it all tastes the same) just… snap. You were alone. You were alone. Alone. I am sorry...
I don’t know how to explain this fatigue, this frigid expanse of time that stretches without possible respite before me. I know I must write; I know I must sleep. Now, sleep.
I mutilate my apples in the morning, slicing them so thinly I could use them as slides for some pathetic projector. Every day feels like backwards day. My world has inverted, flipped its belly up to the sky and moaned. I have become more afraid of the absence of a higher power than the potential presence and the potential divine power. I have become more afraid of the absence of a clear definition...
I sweat out sunbeams and wake, dehydrated and gasping for the blood of vultures, in a bed I do not recognize. There are symphonies conducted outside of my window, and I peer through the curtains with delighted, frightened awe. Awe-full. Snow like sawdust softens the trees, and the ghosts of leaves flutter upon the ground. I sleep. I sleep. I sleep. Clocks are dysfunctional in dreams, did you know?...