soft in the middle, shelby eileen // 14 lines from love letters or suicide notes, david “doc” luben

⁂

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titsay

roma★
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
NASA
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

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if i look back, i am lost
Show & Tell
Acquired Stardust
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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sheepfilms

Love Begins

Kaledo Art
occasionally subtle
Sweet Seals For You, Always
YOU ARE THE REASON

Discoholic 🪩

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@crimsoncompendiumvol2
soft in the middle, shelby eileen // 14 lines from love letters or suicide notes, david “doc” luben
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
WHILE I’M ALIVE YOU WILL NEVER SLEEP WELL
I am sorry if my fingers tremble. I promise they can hold anything that knows
staying.
— Natalie Wee, from “On Average, Human Beings Survive 7 Days On Water Alone,” Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (Amazon / Goodreads)
“How I lost you, and how I never had you, and how much I loved you.”
— Lillian Hellman, from Collected Plays; “Days to Come,” (via violentwavesofemotion)
When I saw my great-grandmother peel a tangerine with her bare hands while men used knives for oranges, she became God. I imagined what she could do with the sun.
—JP Infante, “Poetry No. 51”
Mistral’s memories of her hometown are few and thin now, threadbare and tattered like a well-worn (and well-loved) garment. In those days she was sealed away from the sorrows of the world, oblivious to the muted grief in the faces of parents who knew—long before she did—that their time together would be too short.
She remembers her mother’s exaggerated reminiscing and her father teaching her the names of winds. She can remember sprinting through narrow, sunlit rows, imagining herself a gale or brandishing a stick sword. She can just remember what it was like to have had no real revelations, to have no concrete opinions on anything of consequence.
The memory that defines her time there happened on a typical still afternoon. The oppressive summer heat had a way of sapping her energy for play. Instead, she would climb the stairs to her grandmother’s room.
Amisna’s stories weren’t as hammy as Ninieve’s, but their delivery was no less fascinating to Mistral. Her mother had had great adventures all over the world, but her grandmother made the mundane magical. (The clandestine sweets didn’t hurt, either.)
Tangerines grew in groves beyond the village byways. They were a fixture of life there—every household had a few. Mistral’s was no exception. She had eaten hundreds of them throughout the course of her childhood, their sweetness always worth the sticky fingers and the occasional toothache. Her parents would quarter them with glinting knives, then lay them in her small, eager hands once the requisite pleasantries were out of the way.
This afternoon, Amisna needed no knife for the bribery. This afternoon, she sank her thumbnail into a tangerine’s navel and peeled it with her hands alone. For Mistral, it was an epiphany.
It would take years of examining for her to truly understand why. On that day it meant she could have as many tangerines as she wanted. When she was ten it meant no longer having to ask for them. When she was fifteen it meant independence. When she was twenty it meant self-sufficiency. When she was thirty it meant that there was always some other way to get something done.
Now that her hands look like her grandmother’s did that day, it means love.
by Maéna Paillet
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Have you ever tried to cross a bridge while it is burning?
Come here, make love to me.
I do not know how else to explain it, the question
— Koleka Putuma, from “Twenty-One Ways of Leaving,” Collective Amnesia
“I always wanted to please and always found other people’s indifference wounding.”
— Fernando Pessoa, tr. by Margaret Jull Costa, from “The Book of Disquiet,” [18/9/1917]
Natalya Gorbanevskaya, from Frontier of Light/1964, “I leave nothing behind,”
BURNING 🔥
to love anyone by victoria chang / demon by brian luong / fragment 38 by sappho / burn it down by brian luong / straw house, straw dog by richard siken / skeleton by brian luong / a burning hill by mitski
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War
[…] “I have shut my heart As one shuts an open door, That Love may starve therein And trouble me no more.”
— Sara Teasdale, from Love in Autumn & Other Poems; “A May Wind”
– Kenji Miyazawa
“I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself.”
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and, however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness