be tender. be kind.

maia, xix.

[wovi]

*

mortifying ordeal, etc. 🕊

(claire schwartz / coco mellors)

[wovi]

white oleander (2002) dir. peter kosminsky

[girlfictions]

— Fiona Apple

[gentlier]

Text ID:

When I was a kid—10, 11, 12, 12–the thing I wanted most in the world was a best friend. I wanted to be important to people; to have people that understood me. I wanted to just be close to somebody. And back then, a thought would go through my head almost constantly: “There’s never gonna be a room someplace where there’s a group of people sitting around, having fun, hanging out, where one of them goes, ‘You know what would be great? We should call Fiona. Yeah, that would be a good.’ That’ll never happen. There’s nothing interesting about me.” I just felt like I was a sad little boring thing.

[exitwound]

franny choi

[weltenwellen]

Franny Choi, from "Bird Watching"

[tls123]

[text ID: I can't touch anyone without crying, so I look out the window, let the trees play back the memory of tentacles in my hair, how small I made myself, how I pleaded quiet as a bird knocked out of the air. /end ID]

[lispectorisms-deactivated202301]

from “James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78,” interviewed by Jordan Elgrably, Paris Review (no. 91, Spring 1984)

[camillamaecaulay]

graves grow no green that you can use.

gwendolyn brooks

[itsdlevy]

“In my opinion, camp is simply a matter of doing things as if you are doing them. Diving into a swimming pool? Throw your arms heavenward and give it the full Esther Williams treatment. When you dive into a pool as if you are diving into a pool, as opposed to executing an earnest quotidian plop, the result is magical—that pool is transformed from a grody Band Aid–strewn chlorine bath into a veritable LAGOON! Smoking a cigarette? Perform the action as if you are a French existentialist.” — Simon Doonan, Transformer: A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock & Loving Lou Reed

[andrumedus]

Solmaz Sharif, Look: Poems; “Look”

[loveliesttime]

where's that quote abt like. being embarrassed abt the thinness of ur life the way ur embarrassed by a threadbare piece of clothing. bc like yeah

[loveliesttime]

Olivia Laing

[scuhlly]

Devin Kelly, All that wanting, right?

[alisonzai]

bee real, my senior thesis

[louisegluckpdf]

umm how to be a dog by andrew kane. btw.

[louisegluckpdf]

in case you didnt fucking know

[deathlonging]

[ID: How To Be A Dog

If you want to be a dog, first you must learn to wait. You must wait all day until somebody returns, and if somebody returns late, you must learn to wait until then. Then you must learn to speak in one of the voices available to you, high and light or mellow thick and low or middle-range and terse. Whichever voice you learn to speak, you will meet somebody who does not like you because of it, they will be wary or annoyed or you will remind them of something or someone else. Once you have learned to speak you must learn not to speak unless you absolutely must, or to speak as much as you feel you must regardless of how many times you are told to stop, or sit, or placed behind a door-this will depend on what kind of a dog you want to be. And indeed there are many kinds. It may not feel as though you get to choose, and that too is a kind of dog. Next you must learn to relinquish all control over everything you might wish to control. You must learn to prefer to be led about by the neck on a piece of string, or staked to a neglected lawn by a length of chain. You must learn, once you have sampled the freedom of a life without a chain, that it is better to return and be chained again. Or you may learn that it is not— a fugitive is also a kind of dog. Of course you must learn to love, to love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much as the violence of your own love. You must learn to be confused but never disappointed by a deficiency of love. You must give up your children and not know why. You must lose yourself wholly in activity; you must never feel an itch that you do not scratch. You must learn how to wait at the foot of the bed and hope, silently, that somebody is drunk enough or lonely enough to invite you up, and you must learn not to show your excitement too much or overplay your hand. If you want to be a dog, you must learn to believe that you are not in fact a dog at all.

End ID]

[firstfullmoon]

Christopher Citro, from “The Hay Out There and the Hay in You”

[leonardcohenofficial]

leonard cohen, "one of these days"

[pilgrimattinkercreek1974]

The two times i loved you the most in a car thursday

[pilgrimattinkercreek1974]

you understand.

[savagedefectives]

[niktipolos]

Thin Places, Jordan Kisner. 

[myonegin]

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”

— Alice Walker, Living by the Word