eccedentesiast

trying to love with my heart half broken

[archiveofyearning]

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place // Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities // Warsan Shire, Conversations About Home // Fatimah Asghar, Partition // Aysha, Diaspora Defiance // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous // Kaveh Akbar, Do You Speak Persian? // Safia Elhillo, Date Night With Abdelhalim Hafez // Gustavo Perez Firmat, Bilingual Blues // Scherezade Siobhan, How to Welcome the Dead

[inkskinned]

i am sentimental today, forgive me, but i think it’s good so many people hate valentine’s day.

in general, i try to enjoy most things unironically. so what about the roses and the pink and the hearts and the candy. i’m sure there are many happy engagements and parties and dinners. 

but it could have been a day about love; you know? it could have been in the middle of winter, a little beautiful bright day. one last day of the holidays, to clean out the winter malaise, to call in spring, to love each other again. we could have spent this day going irresponsibly skinny-dipping, cleaning out our closets, undoing where we went wrong. a day about love as a concept - love as the thaw, as the turn from the cold, as admitting we are getting a-little-stir-crazy. love like a dancing dog, like firewood, like soon-spring-will-come.

and it isn’t. it is a day that has been made by commercialism, and it is a day that survives on the same backbone of the carcass it was made from. valentine’s day is a handmade holiday with no history to breathe life into it; a strange and red box; an amalgam of romantic tokens. it is full of impersonal consumerism; a holiday without the joy or tradition. it is just a checkbox. it feels like a checkbox.

and over and over, i hear - “i hate valentine’s day.” and you should. it’s heteronormative, it’s alienating, it completely misunderstands love. even happily married people will bemoan it - they do it to, like do something, i guess, but they don’t celebrate. many of us find alternatives - we celebrate our friends, we throw anti-valentine’s parties, we celebrate by ourselves.

and this is wonderful.

love cannot be manufactured. love cannot be written into a calendar. it cannot be transcribed into a series of actions, into a placement of gifts, into a hallmark card. love cannot be bought, nor can it be sold, nor can it be reproduced by capitalism. love will know its own name in each of us. love will follow us, dog-tired, until the end of the road, and love will still be behind us in our shadow. love will hold our hand in the shower and love will curl around our broken bones. 

how wonderful, is all. they said - here is when you will show your love for each other, this is the day and the hour and here is how you will move and how you will go.

and we said, one by one - what do you know about love? i have loved this whole winter. i have loved my friends and i have loved the moon and i have loved apple turnovers and i have loved songs and i have loved myself enough to know when i am too far gone. what do you know about love? i have loved the sun and i have loved puddles and i have loved the yawn of a cat. 

we said - i know what love is, when it is mine, and free, and of my whole being. i know what love is, and it will only ever just belong to me, and come from me, and come back to me if i am lucky.

[inkskinned]

today i am thinking about what we leave behind. in the store, on all of the bath mats, someone has drawn a heart or left a handprint. in the pen aisle, each page of the test paper is covered in names and little drawings and fuck covid and over and over again - hello hello hello hi hello. on the street i live, three houses have perfect hopscotch lanes carefully transcribed with rules and everything - jump here! now do a spin! graffiti of a deer on the side of a building, names scrawled into setting concrete. initials carved into park bench seats. In the bathroom, in silver sharpie - i hope you’re okay out there. i love you, you’re beautiful, keep trying. geocached tubes of trinkets, jackets left out in case somebody needs it. a note on my windshield - closed your door it was a little open have a great day and stay safe! my friends and i, fully grown adults, build a sandcastle on the edge of the ocean. 

inside of returned schoolbooks. inside of little secret pockets. hi hello hello hello. what a beautiful calling. you and i are in different times, and will never meet, but here is the greeting i’d owe you. if you never get to see this person, what do you say? hello! i love you. be good out there. be safe.

[blossomfully]

Sue Zhao // Dialogues on Love #4 // “Maybe I already do”

[seaoflove]

i think these go hand in hand <3

— “small kindnesses” by danusha laméris

— ross gay, from the book of delights

[seaoflove]

“We’re the cure for hatred caused by despair. We’re the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name, the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We’re every door held open with a smile when we look into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon. We’re the moon. We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.”

— richard blanco, from declaration of inter-dependence

[nosebleedclub]

When it ended, I looked at my hands. I kneaded dough and nestled the pale, sticky lump in the oven and baked bread. I boiled water for tea and sat down to my copy of The Bell Jar. I didn’t hug myself. Or cry. I didn’t feel worn out. Sometimes, endings don’t rush. They slip inside the door and your jaw cracks while you worry a toothbrush. Endings don’t always come like winter havoc. They sit with you and hold your scared little hand and they tell you stories like they are dealing cards. They snag your shirt on an outstretched nail and you will spend too many hours on the couch, trying to darn the holes that crept in somewhere between dusk and the disked, rancid hours of loss. The sun will cusp the bottom lip of the horizon, and the ending will look over at you through long eyelashes, and the ending will laugh. The ending doesn’t like The Bell Jar. The ending likes you reading alone, unable to focus on the words, wondering when the sorrow comes - the ending knows it has already hidden all that grasping nothing all around your home.

*

r.i.d. (@inkskinned) x nosebleed club

[letterful]

the blessing of lovelessness—

wisława szymborska / marina tsvetaeva / dunya mikhail / margaret atwood 

[lesbianherstorian]

“wild geese” from dream work by mary oliver, may 1986

[exitwound]

i used to think that icarus’ death was just a tragic accident—the kind so prevalent in greek mythology, where the hero survives the most dangerous part but tragedy befalls in the most unexpected/preventable way as a result of hubris/arrogance/carelessness. but icarus’ fate was no accident. tragic, yes, but also beautiful in its inevitability: a tribute to the inexorable entanglement between love and death, desire and destruction, intimacy and decay — all of which are ultimately just forms of want and loss. after all, everything has a price, an equal and opposite reaction.

desire is synonymous with fire. it’s something i think mortals are only capable of experiencing in tiny doses: little fires in our guts, live wires down our spine, warm flushes across our cheeks. like taking very small sips of too-hot tea, desire must be drawn out over a lifetime of intimacy—lest it burn us up completely. but apollo feels things with all his immortal intensity: he is pure fire and light and heat. i am not sure there exists a purer form of love than that of the sun.

this is why icarus’ fate is no accident, nor another allegory on the dangers of hubris. it was inevitable from the start. the same way achilles’ virility and vitality was paid for with his death at such a young age, the heat from apollo’s fleeting, fatal moment of desire for icarus is the same as a lifetime’s worth of slow-burning love between two mortals.

i like to believe that icarus didn’t lose his life—not exactly. he just lived it all at once in a single, blazing moment of intimacy with the sun.

[yearningheart]

thinking about all the times i went through something or had a pivotal or even a mundane experience in my life then read a book or watched a movie or listened to an album and was so pleasantly surprised at how much i could resonate (almost at an alarming level) and how comforted it made me feel. it's so lovely.......the timing of the universe and how it always offers you little pieces of art like books, movies, tv shows, songs and albums and slowly nudges it your way exactly when you need those things at a certain stage in your life, perhaps to make you understand your life and your experiences better and to sharpen the thoughts you already had, or clarify ones you weren't even aware you had

[hannahcsofia]

[mykgthco444]

there’s love in long messages. in late night phone calls. love when laughs echo around us. when we dance. there’s love woven into your “i saw this and thought of you” or “i can give you the space you need” or “i am here”. there’s love in your eyes when you understand. and in your smile when you don’t but still try to. it’s in the food we share. flowing through the tips of our fingers when we touch. and intertwining when our thoughts flow together. there’s love captured in our photographs and even better, in our memories. days pass and there is love. always love, still.

[casadabiqueira]

Lido di Venezia

Gianni Berengo Gardin, 1959

[httpboundless]

[anthropologyofwater-deactivated]

when tana french wrote "i wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack."

[dorian-grayyyy-deactivated20201]

Quotes that genuinely make me cry:

"I want to be good. I can't bear the thought of my soul being hideous." - Oscar Wilde

"I loved you completely. And you loved me the same. That's all. The rest is confetti." - The Haunting of Hill House

"I'm hungry and hollow and just want someone to call my own." - Richard Siken

“When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster?” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

"In my head I do everything right." - Lorde, Supercut

"The powerful play goes on and on, and you may contribute a verse." - John Keating, Dead Poets Society

"I am in the mood to dissolve into the sky." - Virginia Woolf

[neckkiss]

La jalousie