we won't sleep

"The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness. And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, and for me, now as then, it is too much. There is too much world." Czeslaw Milosz

[bookmania]

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale (via bookmania)

[ephemerenet]

prompts 07/11/16

bruises as flowers

an aching softness 

small town idolatry 

tears in the rain 

alternatives to love

[hypothesy]

1. after goodbye but before leaving. alone on a tree branch that stretches out over the river, into the blue-gray sky. the half-light of late afternoon in a valley. strewn along my arm, purple blossoms. i don’t know where they came from. you don’t know where to go next. a line i read once ringing in my head, a body bruised with love never feels the pain.

2. a long drive through the desert. tinted sunglasses stain the entire southwest a deep red. in the distance, a white-gray fog curls at the base of the mountains. hundreds of miles in silence. in a gas stop in arizona, i let my hair down. become a person who doesn’t know your name.

3. it doesn’t do any harm to admit it now: this was always supposed to be an escape. out of the valley, into the city. a new start in a place i never belonged. texas was supposed to be floodlights and football and concrete streets with people that didn’t demand to be loved. but the city glitters and the people are real. i take a job with the best of them. when they smile, i’m in love again, just like that. the problem with idols is they’re everywhere. the problem with small towns is they’re in your head. the problem with texas is i don’t want to leave anymore.

4. five men die in dallas and the news doesn’t sleep so neither do i. you don’t text me on my birthday and i don’t mind. in the station parking lot the warm rain taps on the hood of my car. a call from home. for the first time, answering. are you okay? yeah. 

5. leaving / the glow of the reunion tower at 5 a.m. over the empty freeway / the quiet in the control room when the president speaks in your city / the first time you call it your city / black coffee you can finally stand / summer rainstorms on the longest days / the sound of terror as it lapses back into quiet / the sound of laughter as it breaks through tears / texan sunsets on brown shoulders / staying. 

[endless-unfolding]

I wrote your name  right out of the poem.  I’d like to tell you things will get better.  I’d tell you that you matter because you mattered to me.  Maybe I should write you a letter.   I’d type that the seasons are turning into goodbyes I can live through.

Nate Pritts, from “Another Last Letter to You” (via a-pair-of-ragged-claws)

[inothernews]

Sunlight filters through a bullethole-riddled roof atop a souk, or bazaar, in Homs, Syria.  (Photo: Yazan Homsy / Reuters via NBC News)

[hypothesy]

it comes back like it never left. the longing, that infinite longing. here it is again: absence like abscess, like something untreatable. it’s almost a relief. there was no name for it when it was gone. what do you call the absence of absence? for a second there you weren’t even heartbroken and wouldn’t that have been worse? snow falls differently when someone loves you and you almost forgot. but it comes back. it comes back like you never left.

[wordsnquotes]

I belong to quick, futile moments of intense feeling. Yes, I belong to moments. Not to people.

Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice  (via dieworten)

[endless-unfolding]

So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.    The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.

Jane Hirshfield, from “The Weighing,” in The October Palace (via soracities)

[lizsierra]

:::Roman Pool Reflection:::

Hearst Castle is a thing of beauty, this here is one of the amazing pools on the premises, the Roman Pool. I shot this with my canon camera then processed in LR4

[mesogeios]

I do not believe home is where we’re born, or the place we grew up, not a birthright or an inheritance, not a name, or blood or country. It is not even the soft part that hurts when touched, that defines our loneliness the way a bowl defines water. It will not be located in a smell or taste or talisman or a word… Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is from this moment that we begin to build our home in the world. It is this place that we furnish with smell, taste, a talisman, a name.

Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault (via mesogeios)

[hypothesy]

The is the green we grew up in – the humid blue of the blur of our adolescence; the weedy heat. The are the roads we drove into the country with whoever had sweet, cheap wine. The song of gnat and firefly and nightingale and frog. This is the sky of watery silk under which we wrecked our hearts, cried out. Wild onion in the high grass, and magnolia – cloud of blossoms – where we lay some nights till dawn beside the one, the one, the only one, and then another love. This is the place I chose exile from, sharp-hearted, sure of some brighter world. And, still, how it takes me back. How the dark trees make a leafy arch above us as we pass. How you grip the wheel and laugh, don’t say, Remember. Don’t say anything.

Cecilia Woloch, “Postcard to Ben, with Ben, from Paris, Kentucky,” Carpathia

[bonitavista-deactivated20190411]

Cambridge, England

photo via irene

[hypothesy]

hi world, this is me, back on tumblr... a few years older, hardly wiser, only slightly more cynical. 

looking for new blogs to follow, too! writing, journalism, art, etc. hit me up. 

also hit me up if we knew each other because I probably miss you.

[weltenwellen]

You can decorate absence however you want―but you’re still going to feel what’s missing.

Siobhan Vivian (via lesbian-a-la-mode)

[hypothesy]

please remember that your worth as a human being does not depend on the thoughts of the person literally goes out of their way to avoid you or even the love of the person who cares about you so much they'll tell you embarrassing stories to make you feel better, but just you. you. and all the worlds inside you and stories you have yet to tell. that's what matters. caring is never something to be embarrassed about, but care about yourself first. because you're beautiful.

[larmoyante]

My heart itself is already in tangles. A web of nonsense and a drawerful of necklace chains that I will never have the patience to separate. I am sounds mixed with different mediums of light. Six thousand eight hundred dialects of flesh that I don’t have enough time to translate into words. This dictionary of skin is unreadable and Latin is dead because of what we never had the balls to tell each other.

Shinji Moon, I Don’t Want To Be Loved. I Just Want To Be Untangled (via larmoyante)

[woluf]

[hypothesy]

Mike Monteiro

[corsicans]

(par foreign films)