Elijah 20 California

[haleyincarnate]

Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

[jomcitrus]

out of WHACK

[929miles]

5:09, Saturday, May 28 I'm hoping when all is said and done, and my life has been meticulously packed and unpacked, I can finally breathe, and not just for the Elijah who's been holding his breath for the last couple of months, but for the Elijah who's been holding his breath for the last four years, or even twenty. I want to live a life I don't have to justify or explain, a life I don't have to apologize for at the dinner table. I want to welcome chaos into my life without fear, and spontaneity without anxiety. I want to cherish and decorate my soul with souvenirs from this life, ugly and beautiful, instead of wishing I was dead.

[desertislandcomics]

[929miles]

Dear Elijah, I know you're scared right now, of the future and of new beginnings, but I promise you, there will come a time when peace finds you. You're going to miss home a lot; not the town, or almost all of the people in it, but your home; Mom and Dad and Jinx, and their big TV and their Keurig and their comfy couches. You're going to miss the lakes and waterfalls and the collection of places you've discovered with your friends, who you're going to miss a whole bunch as well. Despite all of that though, you're going to blossom, more so than you ever have before. You're going to invite beautiful souls into your life and show the exit to the ugly ones. There will come a time when peace finds you. There will come a time when peace finds you. Until then, take care. Elijah June 17, 2016

[dearlightning]

notes to self by dearlightning

[lora-mathis]

Look at you. Crying in a forgettable place. Trying to will the tears away so no one on the street questions you. Everything that you put hope into is failing.  You feel like there’s nothing for you to cling to anymore, like there’s nowhere else for you to go. 
But you have survived for years on the thought that things will get better. And look how far  you’ve come. You have survived all of the things that you thought would kill you.
 Even the hardest years have passed. Things changed, and you with them. You became new, tougher, 
and proved yourself resilient when you were
 not even convinced you could leave bed. Quiet the scared piece of you that doesn’t believe you can do it again.

Swallow Impossibility and Pick Yourself Up, Lora Mathis (via lora-mathis)

[lora-mathis]

Prints of this poem available here. 

[wordsthat-speak]

I hate this little town. It’s so small, too small. Everything about it is small. The people here have small ideas. Small dreams. They all want to marry each other and live forever… I want to leave as soon as I can.

Sherman Alexie (via wordsthat-speak)

[929miles]

i'm stuck in this stupid town and i don't think theres another way out and i can't handle it anymore

So many of us are stuck, anon; in towns and in bodies we don’t want to live in but I encourage you to use that discomfort as a catalyst! There’s still so much living to be done, explorations to be had and love to find, both externally and internally and it’d be a damn shame for you to give up that search now. Life is awful and unrelenting, at times, and sometimes it seems it’d be so much simpler to end it, but I encourage you to do the opposite. There’s not enough beauty in this world, so disregard anyone or anything that attempts to convince you that you have none to offer.

P.S. I rarely receive messages on tumblr, so I'm sorry it took me 16 days to respond. Hope all is well.

[mostlyfiction]

and hopefully I’ll be fine when I try to forget you.

[asoftwrongness]

#104

[929miles]

Right now, I'd do just about anything to not be in this skin, in this town of empty promises.

[loveserum-deactivated20191021]

I know you don’t love me. I know you don’t think about what it would be like to trace your fingertips along the edge of my jaw and across my eyelids and on the inside of my knee. I know that I think about you as sunlight and that you don’t think about me at all. I know it’s a one-sided kind of love, the kind where you don’t taste acid on your tongue when you see someone’s hand around my own. I know you don’t love me. I know you don’t, but I can’t help the fact that I love you. I love you so much that I slur it in drunken hazes and think about it when I go to sleep. I wish I could press my love into every inch of your skin and bruise it into your heart so that it could beat to the sound of my love, but you’re too out of reach and I’m too hard to love. Please know that I love you more than I can begin to stand. Please let me know if one day you wake up and suddenly see me in a different way. I know you don’t feel me in your bones, but if you ripped my chest open all you’d find is your smile and your eyes and your laugh in the inseam of my heart. You’ll find the love that I possess, and the bleeding cracks from the love that you don’t.

Unrequited (via extracold)

[929miles]

The problem is you think you have time but you don't because you're flicking it from the end of your cigarette and coughing it into the wind And you get so fucking high because you've never felt so goddamn low and your eyes are never red from crying because you don't Oh, but sometimes your heart leaks and your body aches because the sadness pools at your feet and before you know it you're drowning

[sickpage]

[haleyincarnate]

It was like losing a vital organ. It was night after night of liquor-drenched dreams and waking up with a hangover that felt like rebirth each morning. It was your name still tattooed on the inside of my bottom lip; my tongue still grazes over it, memorizing the impression silently. It was the days where I heard your name mentioned on the street; the earth shook beneath me, threatening to crack apart and offer to swallow me whole. It was still going in your old room to smoke a cigarette out of the window, thinking that if I exhaled enough smoke I’d create a ghost resembling you. It was tirade after tantrum after meltdown and breakdown. It was learning that you were happy, and I was falling.

it was, and still is, and will continue to be (from my upcoming chapbook, What Happens When You Leave A Writer) // Haley Hendrick (via haleyincarnate)