the bolter

but in a box beneath my bed there's a letter that you never read, from three summers back. original writings are tagged #mine

[crinkledletters]

what i'm hoping the life of a show girl by taylor swift will be like:

profound songs with deep meaning disguised by an upbeat tune.

alaska young's favorite record because she is also unresolved trauma with a pretty face.

the record i would have loved when i was 12 because my favorite color was orange and I could've said she wrote it for me

[feral-ballad]

Jeanette Winterson, from The PowerBook

[literarymood]

Averno by Louise Glück

[crinkledletters]

maybe the whole point is allowing it to hurt. maybe it's allowing yourself to open up, to trust, to be okay with needing people. maybe it's being afraid of showing your true colors but doing it anyway. maybe it's being messy and true and going with your gut. maybe it's creating, maybe it's being silly, maybe it's those fragments of joy between all the frustration. and maybe, just maybe it's being who you wanna be.

[sleepingpigeon]

the biggest lesson im learning is that nothing is as extreme or as permanent as our emotions convince us they are. nothing is certain and things are always fluctuating and there are always exceptions and there are always mistakes. there is always pain and there is always love. everything is a delicate touch away from changing

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— sylvia plath (via letsbelonelytogetherr)

[leonardcohenofficial]

marina literally never stops winning huh

[leonardcohenofficial]

they really are the two people that get it huh (the above text of the TIME article is also included below)

I always loved Leonard Cohen’s music. Once, I went on a date with him.

I’d been complaining about my love life to Rufus Wainwright and his husband Jörn Weisbrodt—I’d just been through a bad breakup—and they said, “Why don’t you go out to dinner with Leonard? He’s single.” Rufus knew Cohen from Montreal, so he phoned him and asked.

It happened that I was traveling to Los Angeles for my work, so it was perfect. Leonard came to my hotel, and—I’ll never forget it—there he was waiting in the lobby, this tiny man with a gray flannel shirt, gray trousers, with the fedora. He said, in that voice, “Let’s go to dinner.”

We went to dinner.

I don’t remember where we ate or what we ate. He took me somewhere, I don’t know. We talked and talked; everything around us disappeared. He told me about the dark times he’d gone through. I’d listened to so many of his songs, especially after my breakup, listened so closely to that deep, dark voice singing, “I’m your man,” and “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” Now here he was in real life, meeting my pain with his own. It made me feel less alone. I knew he’d been through as much as me, maybe more.

He was close to 80 at the time, but he had an incredible vitality — even his descriptions of severe depression were completely alive. He told me how he’d found a Zen master in Los Angeles, an old, old man, close to 100, who’d never heard of Leonard Cohen or his music. Leonard went to the master’s monastery and stayed for a year; when he came back to the real world, his depression got even worse. So he returned to the monastery, and stayed for five years, waking every morning at four to meditate, washing his master’s room and making breakfast, lunch, and dinner for him. Every day. Five years.

“Marina,” he said, “one day I woke up, and the depression wasn’t there anymore.”

We talked for four hours, but it could have been 30 seconds—the time vanished. I was enchanted to hear about Leonard’s five isolated years of concentration and discipline and spirituality, away from his work, away from everything and everybody except for that very old man. I have gone on many retreats — sometimes for a week or two; once, in Tibet, for three months — but five years was far beyond anything I’d ever attempted. It was a renunciation I’m not sure I would be capable of.

Leonard told me that even though he had left the monastery, he still woke up every day at four in the morning to meditate. I looked at him with fresh understanding. This, I suddenly saw, was what gave him that incredible aliveness in the eyes, in the movement of his limbs. He was like a little bird — he just jumped. I had never encountered a presence quite like this.

Such aliveness doesn’t just go when the body goes. Leonard is gone, but his voice and his energy will be with us forever.

[crinkledletters]

love feeling so lost that when i find myself again the city screams my name and the wind caresses my face just right and the sun kisses my skin and i realize that everything is made for me. love feeling behind in life so i can truly taste every new experience and let them melt in my mouth like the chocolate bars i bring on the beach every sunday. love not making sense and being weird so i can make my people feel less alone and misunderstood. love feeling everything intensely so i can be dramatic and pretend that i live in a normal people remake. love appreciating myself and life just as it is

[strokeofserenity]

[crinkledletters]

so. i completely forgot i had a new tumblr. and at the same time, i completely forgot that i knew how to write. not at a basic level, like lea michele cannot read, but on the deeper level that writing is what i do. writing is what i turn to. and this morning i went to a guided journaling session and one of the girls there said that people are called to earth to cook or to paint and she is here to write. and i felt that. and we were all saying that we don't feel like we are consistent with journaling and the girl leading the session was like: consistency doesn't mean writing every day. consistency can mean journaling every saturday for five minutes. and i forgot how true that is and how i kept pushing journaling away because i didn't have time and i wasn't consistent with it. most of my recent entries are like: i'm not being consistent and i feel bad and like girl,,, why do you even need to. anyway, i don't know where i'm going with this, but it's nice to write again and i don't need to earn the right to journal or write or do whatever makes me happy. i can just do.

[symphony-calamity]

"do it scared" ok but I would like to do something some other way occasionally. Like at least once. For a change.

[crinkledletters]

sometimes when i'm spending too much time in my head, i question why i keep writing at all. why i keep coming back to it, even though it made me literally sick. to the point that i had to stop completely because it was another way to punish myself, another way to feed my demons who were screaming that i was not enough.

and naturally, when people asked me who i wrote for, i used to say that i wrote for myself, because you'd sound pretentious if you didn't. but truth be told, i lived for the thrill of watching the zero turn into a small number, and then a medium number, and eventually a big number. i was always chasing the high of that big number. me, who notoriously hates numbers!

so now i'm gonna come clean and say that yes, i write for you and i write for validation. but i found another thrill, the one you get when you realize that you created something new, something that would not exist if you weren't so stubborn to keep picking up the pen anyway.

[crinkledletters]

so today i met a friend and we went to the park to read, but since she wanted to go home early because she was tired i decided to go to a cute cafè nearby and it's the classic aesthetic instagrammable spot that i'm so weak for. anyway, i was thirsty as hell so i asked the waitress what drink she would recommend. she recommended a juice and i love juices so i was pumped. unfortunately they ran of juices so she was like,,,coconut water? i've never had coconut water and i love coconut milk so i was like,,, why not. let me tell you that coconut water is the nastiest skank b*tch i have ever met. and since it was a fancy place i ended up paying 6€ for nausea and a headache :))) but i saw bus drivers saying hi to each other on the bus home so i guess that evened out.

[podencos]

reeeeally been learning a lot about myself lately like oh. my life is actually just beginning

[mournfulroses]

Constantine P. Cavafy, from The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy; "September, 1904,"

[blackheartbiohazards]

People used to comment on web comics.

People used to comment on fanfiction.

People used to comment on fanart.

People used to comment on OCs.

I hate "content" culture.

I hate "consuming content" and scrolling immediately to the next thing.

People used to be excited about the art that other people created.

People used to want to share that excitement with creators.

I hate this future.

[depodraws]

Once someone tagged art that I made with "woah" and I think about it at least once a week. Someone else said "oh neat" once. Someone else WROTE A WHOLE DAMN POEM IN THE COMMENTS. Anyways even just one word can change how someone sees their art. You don't even have to think about it too hard. You could put a keyboard smash and I'd probably cry from joy.

I'm also trying hard to interact more, I understand that it's hard to break away from opening your phone and being in Content Consumption Mode.

[sakichi56]

I honestly hadn't stopped to think about this until I saw this post... I used to think people would get annoyed if they were notified everytime someone posted a comment on their art. I never thought about it being like fanfiction and that they might appreciate comments. Frick, that means I'm part of the problem on here. Thats gotta change.

[gatoma]

Every tag, every comment, every reblog with some kind of reaction/opinion or even just one word. All of these things are precious to creators!

I spent countless hours reading and rereading tags full of love people left under my art. All the people i could gift a laugh to or even inspire with something I made mean more to me then you could ever know.

It's what makes me proud of my art!

And to think that you could have enjoyed my art in silence and I would have never known.

[kaynineacademy]

i wonder if you are well. if you ate breakfast this morning. if you took your dog for a walk. if you called your mother like you’d promised. if you listened to music on your way to work. if you thought of me.