i'll show you every version of myself

wasted like all my potential

[for-evervale]

“Is it just me,” Alexander said, “or is this the longest day of everyone else’s life?”

“Well,” James said. “Certainly not Richard’s.”

“James,” Meredith said. “What the fuck.”

[for-evervale]

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Upstream by Mary Oliver

[taylornation]

shimmering beautiful. bejeweled. I like shiny things. she shines so bright.

We couldn’t choose just one so here’s all four. Can we hear a little commotion for this TS | The Eras Tour outfit? 😩

[for-evervale]

I NEED TUMBLR USERS TO READ BABEL BY RF KUANG I DONT CARE IF YOU DONT READ BOOKS GO READ IT

[for-evervale]

He had met plenty of sailors at the docks, had seen the entire range of white men’s faces, from the broad and ruddy to the diseased and liver-spotted to the long, pale, and severe.

Babel by R. F. Kuang

[for-evervale]

renaissance by beyoncé is so damn good she deserves that album of the year

[for-evervale]

god i miss reading

[for-evervale]

i am here now?????

[ourobores]

SEPTEMBER

song of the simple truth: the complete poems - julia de burgos / a september day - george henry / excerpt from a letter to aurelia plath - sylvia plath / french autumn - artem tolstukhin / earthquake weather - janice gould / blue shutters - kim english / a girl ago - lucie brock-broido / little women (2019) dir. greta gerwig / september garden party - jane kenyon / constanze saemann and charlotte foubert photographed by ryan brabazon / september 1st - dante émile

[for-evervale]

OLIVER

I open it with clumsy fingers. Ten lines of verse are scratched in the middle of the page. It’s James’s writing still, but more jagged, as if it had been written hastily, with a pen that had little ink left to give. I recognize the text—a disjointed, mosaic monologue, cobbled together from an early scene of Pericles:

Alas, the sea hath cast me on the rock, Wash’d me from shore to shore, and left me breath Nothing to think on but ensuing death. What I have been I have forgot to know; But what I am, want teaches me to think on: A man throng’d up with cold: my veins are chill, And have no more of life than may suffice To give my tongue that heat to ask your help; Which if you shall refuse, when I am dead, For that I am a man, pray see me burièd.

I read it three times, wondering why he would choose such a strange, obscure passage to leave me—until I remember I haven’t heard these words since he chanted them to me, lying drunk in the sand on some beach in Del Norte, as if he’d been washed up beside me by the tide.

I am all too aware of my own desperate need to find a message in the madness, and as it takes shape I am suspicious, afraid to hope.

But the implications of the text and its small part in our story are impossible to ignore, too critical for a scholar as meticulous as James to overlook.

[for-evervale]

Zachary looks at him wordlessly, without a proper answer. He thinks it might be a week, or a lifetime, or a moment. He thinks I feel like I have known you forever but he doesn’t say it and so they only hold each other’s gaze, not needing to say anything.

[thesecretsecrethistory]

what me and henry winter have in common is that we both fucking suck at math and i love that for us

[for-evervale]

He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.

Circe by Madeline Miller

[moonlitswims-deactivated2024010]

I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.

This is how you lose the time war, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

[for-evervale]

What I can say: It was very cold out on the ice. Your letter warmed me.

[for-evervale]

I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us.

Hamlet—Act III, Scene I, 132-140

[for-evervale]

I catch my reflection. I appear as I did just a few months ago, on the eve of my graduation. Same body. Same face. Only the eyes are different. I look into the pale gaze of the woman in front of me. For a moment, I see Helene Aquilla. The girl who hoped. The girl who thought the world was fair.

But Helene Aquilla is broken. Unmade. Helene Aquilla is dead.

The woman in the mirror is not Helene Aquilla. She is the Blood Shrike. The Blood Shrike is not lonely, for the Empire is her mother and her father, her lover and her best friend. She needs nothing else. She needs no one else.

She stands apart.