tinni’s space

21 [(she/her), bi] indian

[oilpalette]

Greek Kitties #9, 2026 by Timothy Adam Matthews (British); Oil on canvas, 16x20 in

[weltenwellen]

Buttercream Joy Sullivan

[virusmeadow]

“I want to be ripped apart by music. I want it to be something that feeds and replenishes, or that totally sucks the life out of you. I want to be dashed against the rocks.”

— Jeff Buckley

[existential-celestial]

“Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought — and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”

— Vladimir Nabokov in his letter to future wife Véra Yevseyevna Slonim dated July 1923, Letters to Véra

[mournfulroses]

María Casares, from a letter to Albert Camus, featured in Correspondance, 1944-1959

[luthienne]

Childhood does not end in one fell swoop, as we wished it would when we were children. It lingers, crouching silently in our adult, then wizened bodies, until one day, many years later, when we think that the heavy burden of bitterness and despair we've been shouldering has turned us irredeemably into adults, it reappears with the force and speed of a lightning bolt, wounding us with its freshness, its innocence, its unerring dose of naivety, but most all with the certainty that this really and truly is the last glimpse we shall have of it.

Guadalupe Nettel, from The Accidentals (tr. Rosalind Harvey)

[sourhearts]

[apoemaday]

On Living

by Nâzim Hikmet tr. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

I. Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel, for example — I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation. Living is no laughing matter: you must take it seriously, so much so and to such a degree that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall, or else in a laboratory in your white coat and safety glasses, you can die for people — even for people whose faces you’ve never seen, even though you know living is the most real, the most beautiful thing. I mean, you must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees — and not for your children, either, but because although you fear death you don’t believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II. Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery — which is to say we might not get up from the white table. Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad about going a little too soon, we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told, we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining, or still wait anxiously for the latest newscast… Let’s say we’re at the front — for something worth fighting for, say. There, in the first offensive, on that very day, we might fall on our face, dead. We’ll know this with a curious anger, but we’ll still worry ourselves to death about the outcome of the war, which could last years. Let’s say we’re in prison and close to fifty, and we have eighteen more years, say, before the iron doors will open. We’ll still live with the outside, with its people and animals, struggle and wind — I mean with the outside beyond the walls. I mean, however and wherever we are, we must live as if we will never die.

III. This earth will grow cold, a star among stars and one of the smallest, a gilded mote on blue velvet — I mean this, our great earth. This earth will grow cold one day, not like a block of ice or a dead cloud even but like an empty walnut it will roll along in pitch-black space… You must grieve for this right now — you have to feel this sorrow now — for the world must be loved this much if you’re going to say “I lived”…

[hyperions-fate]

Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821)

[huariqueje]

Bending Light - Jeremy Miranda , 2025.

American , b. 1980 -

Acrylic on panel , 16 x 20 cm.

[hikes-and-moans]

UNPOPULAR OPINION: A lot of "mental health issues" disappear when bills are paid, rent is secure, and the fridge is full. Peace is expensive. And pretending money doesn't affect mental health is privilege.

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Nina LaCour via letsbelonelytogetherr

[havingapoemwithyou]

Not Anyone Who Says by Mary Oliver

[soracities]

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

[kitchen-light]

“Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page; Shakespeare can’t hear us, but we can still hear him (and don’t ghosts wander through those estate houses upon the moors unaware that they’ve died?). […] Of all of the forms of expression that humanity has worked with—painting, music, sculpture—literature is the eeriest. Poetry and fiction are both incantation and conjuration, the spinning of specters and the invoking of ghosts; it is very literally listening to somebody who isn’t there, and might not have been for a long while. All writing is occult, because it’s the creation of something from ether, and magic is simply a way of acknowledging that—a linguistic practice, an attitude, a critical method more than a body of spells. We should be disquieted by literature; we should be unnerved.”

— Ed Simon, from his essay “Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story”, published in The Millions, August 18, 2021

[apoemaday]

Yes

by William Stafford

It could happen any time, tornado, earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake and look out -- no guarantees in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning, like right now, like noon, like evening.

[apoemaday]

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

by Jane Hirshfield

It was like this: you were happy, then you were sad, then happy again, then not.

It went on. You were innocent or you were guilty. Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent. Mostly, it seems you were silent — what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness — between you, there is nothing to forgive — but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened. Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.