tyvm

[thoughtkick]

“How glad I am that you exist.”

— Vita Sackville-West

[carfoo]

My mind goes like that:

A circle of incoherent words following one after another, letters jumbled up, dots and lines inverted, a squiggle here and a squirm there; so turmoil did not deign to unfollow.

[soracities]

To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it.

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

[flowerytale]

James Baldwin, from Another Country

[strykerlancer-deactivated202405]

— Mary Oliver, from “White Pine.”

[carfoo]

Hardest place to be

A stone left by the wayside, a sediment never part of the concrete pavement nor fine as the sand that overlay the nearby beach.

Stone finds its way into a crevice and sticks itself in, but the edges weather and the crack deepens, so it becomes apart, again. The feeling of never quite belonging is fitting and accepted graciously, until when the pedestrians and moving cars clear, the scene across the road surfaces:

Another stone left by the wayside on the opposite side of the crossing, a sediment, as stone knows too well, never part of the pavement nor beach.

Stone doesn't find its way into any crevice. It merely sticks, blending into the grain of the pavement laden with sand.

One stone is not the same as the other. No favour for the stone that wants to stay. Effortless is the stone that inhabits a snapshot of your life, as one stands still, watching, wishing one's edges were not as weathered, that one were as fine and oatmeal as sand, as pasty as concrete. I wonder, I really wonder if you know that across the road is the hardest place to be.

[zarzava]

Declinism is a close relative of nostalgia, and objects of nostalgia are often atemporal, lacking aliveness. An example: Say you break up with someone and many years later find yourself nostalgic for the relationship. Who is it that appears in this melancholic yearning? Assuming they’re still around, it is surely not your ex-partner as they currently are, the one who has continued to age and evolve. Instead, it is a frozen, idealized version of them, like a hologram that survives within and despite the present. What’s more, some relationships arguably end in the first place because partners have stopped seeing each other in time, one partner having replaced the living, changing other with a static image that can impart no surprises, only a comforting presence. As we learned with the moss, to think you love and appreciate something or someone is, unfortunately, not a guarantee that you can assign them their own reality or that you know them at all. 

— Jenny Odell - Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

[carfoo]

Cardiac muscles contract and relax, so the heart heaves and tightens. Involuntary and striated muscles pushing against walls, leaning in only to be pushed away. One gets close, real close, to be as one, but one and one makes two, not one. It is the closest who feels the distance that came before and would come after.

[carfoo]

我最大的遺憾是你的遺憾與我有關

[carfoo]

He breathes in. He breathes out. He turns his head and breathes into the whorls of her ear; he breaths in his strength, his health, his all. You will stay, is what he whispers, and I will go. He sends these words into her: I want you to take my life. It shall be yours. I give it to you.

Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell

[oddwomen]

The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China by Tze-Lan D. Sang (2003)

[oddwomen]

Pride, New York City, 1977 © Meryl Meisler

[xb-bi]

Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

Autumn by Ali Smith 

[jazbaaati]

Adrienne Rich, Cartographies of Silence.

[feral-ballad]

We talk of people caring for each other in emergencies— (…)

but you look at me like an emergency.

Adrienne Rich, from Diving into the Wreck; “Trying to talk with a man”

[metamorphesque]

The opening page of "The Metamorphosis" (by Franz Kafka) from Nabokov's teaching copy

[carfoo]

Found a photograph of us looking into the midlands as if it were our future, in an album titled Family, in my mother’s phone.