i just collect words

currently reading: someone who will love you in all your damaged glory

[ivynightshade]

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am an observer, but not by choice.’

[text id: my fist has always been clenched around the handle of an invisible suitcase. / i am always ready to leave. / there is not a single room in this world where i belong.]

[wedarkacademia]

[stay-close]

“I keep that memory somewhere inside me—where it’s safe. I take it out and look at it when I need to. As if it were a photograph.”

— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

[charliejaneanders]

Random writing thought: the best stories are often the ones that only you could have written — but also the ones that you could only write at this one moment.

I couldn't write All the Birds in the Sky from scratch now if I tried. But the me of 2013 couldn't have written The Prodigal Mother either.

[neil-gaiman]

When people ask if I'd change anything about a book I've already written, I want to explain to them that I'm not the person who wrote that book any longer, and even if I tried right now I'd write a different one. Everything you make as a writer* is a combination of what you want to say and who you are at the time you are telling that story.

*possibly also as an artist or as a human being

[mothprincess]

Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

[silicxnn]

During a lecture on epic poetry like the Mahābhārata and Iliad in my first year of college, my professor said, “When the whole world dies, even when brick and mortar is destroyed, memory survives. It survives and lives on in generations to come. And literature carries that memory. All your geography, your economics, your psychology, they’re all based on the memory of man, passed down generations after generations. These epic poems and literature we are studying right now is to remind us that we too will be memories one day. And therefore, let us be good memories” and I think a piece of this lecture will live on in me wherever I go.

[beguines]

Neil Hilborn, “For Henry, Who Has Just Died”, The Future

[gnomebud]

[image descriptions: text that reads:

“For Henry, Who Has Just Gone

Henry was my pet rat, and he died last night in my hands. He was three years old, which is way longer than

an albino rat is supposed to live. To be honest, he wasn’t a very smart animal, but he was so sweet that now I wonder

if intelligence has anything to do with leading a good life. He had been sick for a few months, and every twelve hours

I had to apply antiseptic and lotion to both his back feet. By the end they didn’t really work anymore,

so he would just drag his feet behind him in a way so cute and sad that I started calling him my little sea lion. When he died it was, somehow,

a surprise: you would think that when your rat is older than older than dirt and has been sick for months you’d be sort of prepared: after I had laid out the towel

and mixed the solution, I picked him up and noticed his breathing was s slow. I lay down with him

on the towel, the towel where we’d spent the last few months, where I think we finally, really, completely loved each other,

not like humans do: humans always want something from you and he and I would rather just be together than apart,

and I pulled him toward me, and he chittered in that way that always meant he was wind coming in after a rain, his head fell forward, and there was so much less

light in the room. The lamp was so far away, like the light of a house to which there is no road. I know, he was just a rat. So many

just like him, all white, red eyes, die every day and only one or two people in white coats are even there to see it.

He was all in white, he was always there to see me. When I would wake from a nightmare, so many nightmares, I would turn on the light

and there he was, holding on, a constant companion to a prisoner, the prison being the apartment, the world being inside his cage. Once I was crying

in bed because of who knows why, and he sat beside my face and licked my tears away. I had a rat once, named Henry. Named Buddy. Named Mr. Big

Mouse. Named proof that something could need me and still love me. Named please can I have some of your apple? Or I know

you’re sad but I’m hungry. Don’t go; if you go I won’t survive: a child reaches for her father; a couple, buried in ash, dies holding each other;

a man and a woman in an office, crying slightly, sign sheets of paper; sparrows fall out of the sky together. Some day I’m going to have a child. She’s going to have

eyes like mine and such small hands. Just like she’ll need me alive then, she needs me alive now; I can’t say goodbye before I’ve had a chance

to say hello. I don’t stare off bridges anymore. I don’t count out little blue exit signs and even today, with Henry buried under a tree, a tree somewhere so far away

it feels like someone else buried him using my body, today I came home and only wanted to sleep for twenty minutes instead of always. Something needed

me once, and I know something will need me again. One day I’m going to have a daughter. She’s going to sleep through the night

sometimes. She is a light on a rock at the edge of a lonely see. You see that light out there? That’s where I’m headed. That’s home.”

/end id]

[surqrised]

“One day, whether you are 14, 28 or 65, you will stumble upon someone who will start a fire in you that cannot die. However, the saddest, most awful truth you will ever come to find - is they are not always with whom we spend our lives.”

— Beau Taplin, Hunting Season

[metamorphesque]

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

[lelif]

grieving the person you used to be

marian keyes// ?// bigger than the whole sky, taylor swift// fiona apple// @inkskinned// would've, could've, should've, taylor swift// father, the front bottoms// @inanotherunivrse// ?// memento mori, crywank// @dakotajohnsongf// @ryebreadgf// quote: deathless, catherynne m. valente edit:? // bojack horseman s6 e16// a pearl, mitski// would've, could've,should've, taylor swift// ?// ?// ?// @heavensghost

[luthienne]

claire schwartz, from poetry rx as featured in the paris review

[thoughtkick]

But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (via thoughtkick)

[metamorphesque]

why do all the words sound heavier in my native language?

—  @metamorphesque, Yoojin Grace Wuertz (Mother Tongue), Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky (by Garth Greenwell), Jhumpa Lahiri (Translating Myself and Others), @lifeinpoetry

˗ˏˋ☕ˎˊ˗        

[poems-and-word]

Poems & Words

[phlegathon]

i hate myself for feeling this way

1. the crane wife; cj hauser 2. dead inside; unknown 3. love of the wolf: “stigmata: escaping texts”; hélène cixous (tr. keith cohen) 4. my mother; georges bataille 5. twitter; @kvetchkween 6. the letters of virginia woolf, volume 3; virginia woolf 7. litany in which certain things are crossed out; richard siken 8. hoax; taylor swift 9. birds hover the trampled field; richard siken

[wedarkacademia]

She asks me to kill the spider. Instead, I get the most peaceful weapons I can find.

I take a cup and a napkin. I catch the spider, put it outside and allow it to walk away.

If I am ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, just being alive and not bothering anyone,

I hope I am greeted with the same kind of mercy.

𝐑𝐮𝐝𝐲 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨, 𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐮𝐦

[ritikajyala]

I lost my best friend 3 years ago- not lost as in dead but lost as in we only text each other on our birthdays now. Movies and books don't tell you that a friendship dying is like the sinking of a ship, you try to get higher and higher and hold onto the rails and unanswered texts, the captain tries to steer it to safety and salvage pieces of two broken hearts until you're left with memories of what once was. We were friends for a decade and knew each other's diaries by heart, I still remember her phone number and the way she took her coffee. Seeing her in streets is like breathing in a scent you forgot you knew but it immediately takes you back to a summer in '07.

Movies and books also don't tell you that friendships don't just end after one fight or incident, it's like the rusting of a bridge, the slow decay of flesh and bones and secrets. It took weeks, months- until one day I woke up and I realized I hadn't thought of her in a while. And I wrote a poem that day and I titled it 'The dying of a best friend' and I put all my love for her in a tiny box with my half of the matching pendant of a dolphin we had and stored them in a corner of my heart under the heading Grief. Where else can one hide unspent love?

It's been 3 years since I lost my best friend, lost as in I still carry our secrets in a tiny box but we only text each other on our birthdays.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

Edit: here's the visualizer for this piece