What Was Left Behind

"For tomorrow we shall die. But alas, we never do." | Julia, 20’s | American West Coast Transplant | History and film photography

[trainstationgoodbye]

Claudette Colbert & Miriam Hopkins in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

[fablesandfoxes]

The Lindsay Clancy trial is reminding me of Gabby Petito from a few years ago. Cops arrive to a scene where some sort of domestic violence incident has occurred. And immediately, without any push-back, they take the man’s word for exactly what happened and blame the woman. The man is never even suspected of potential wrongdoing. Now with some hindsight, we all know what the cops failed to consider was Brian Laundrie was dangerously abusive, which would have been the easiest thing to figure out if the cops were actually interested in learning what was going on. I’m not saying definitively what Patrick Clancy did or didn’t do. No one will know unless he’s actually investigated. But the fact he was never even treated like a potential suspect when he was the only unscathed person at the scene of a crime is enraging.

[driflloon]

summer vibes: 张婧仪 zhang jingyi for elle china june 2026

[20th-century-man]

Elvis Presley, Sophia Loren / at Paramount Studios, 1958 / photo by Bob Willoughby.

[lokittystuckinatree]

Guess the grim reaper got tired of playing with Schrodinger’s turtle and said NEXT

[adoreaudrey]

Audrey Hepburn photographed on the set of “Funny Face” in Paris, 1957.

[uncleromeo]

if you don't do anything else today,

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.

[petaltexturedskies]

Anaïs Nin, in a diary entry dated 25 April 1928, from The Early Diary of Anais Nin: 1927-1931

[disease]

RICH GIRLS – BORDIGHERA, ITALY HELMUT NEWTON // 1982 [gelatin silver print | 14 x 11″]

[littlehorrorshop]

Josephine Baker in Zouzou (1934)

[strokeofserenity]

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned.

[newlyy]

Not that I think all marriages are doomed but when deciding who to marry you should ask yourself “is this someone I’d want to divorce?” As in, is this someone I believe would be mature and fair, even when they’re upset and don’t particularly like me at the moment. Is this someone I could continue to trust while going through an adversarial process? And if the answer is no, don’t marry them.

[the1920sinpictures]

1917 Lucile evening dress. From Pinterest.

[specialagentartemis]

Thinking about it, and I’d like to forward the idea that prejudice against single people (aromantics, asexuals, and also just… anyone who does not have a romantic partner) follows dynamics less like anti-queer bigotry and more akin to anti-fat bigotry.

Fatness, like singlehood, is seen at large as a state of failure. Everybody is supposed to want to be [thin / partnered], and if you are not, that is a personal failure on your part, and you are pathetic and mock-worthy. The popular idea is that of course everybody wants to be [thin / partnered], and everybody is striving towards the goal, and anybody who is not [thin / partnered] is either temporarily inconvenienced on their way to correctness, or has something fundamentally wrong with them. And because [fatness / singlehood] is something that is treated as fixable, if you have not fixed it, then there is something wrong with you—and thus discriminating against you is acceptable, because your [fatness / singlehood] is based on your own bad choices.

The world is, in some cases quite literally, not built for fat or single people. If you are fat or single, the world is much more difficult or expensive to live in, because it is structurally designed for the assumption that you are thin or that you have a partner. The normative Person, after all, is thin and romantically partnered. If you are not thin or not romantically partnered, there is something fundamentally less human about you.

[Fatness / singlehood] is something embarrassing, something worth mocking others over, something that reflects your fundamental unworthiness. Every fictional hero is thin, every fictional happy ending ends with romance. Everyone in your life is either quietly or not-so-quietly worried about you.

And all this is fine and acceptable. Because in the general perception, [fatness / singlehood] is not a real axis of bigotry. It’s a choice! You could just become a different person and stop being [fat / single]! You deserve the mockery, the derision, the attempts to fix you, the world not accommodating you, because you could just become a better person and stop being [fat / single] at any point. So it’s your own fault people treat you badly, really.

[semioticapocalypse]

Kees Scherer. Girl with Lily of the valley. Paris, 1950’s

[::SemAp Twitter || SemAp::]

[kitsunetsuki-deactivated2026051]

Guy Bourdin - Dress by Pino Lancetti (Linea Italiana 1982)

[achillesinhighheels]

dakar, senegal. 1998.

from ‘the art of african fashion’.