Catch me a star, I'll draw you the moon

She writes: stars are only kites we pull to the ground.

[inkstainedstarlight]

She wakes from dreaming abruptly, 2 barks of laughter escaping her thirsting tongue like wild birds frantically flapping their wings, daring darkness to catch them mid-flight. She rises, slowly, bones creaking, rusty box springs in her sunken skin. She stretches and peers at the clock by her bedside table. 6am. The hour of hushed sunlight peering behind folds of sky. The hour of clandestine goodbyes dressed in yesterday’s perfume. The hour of solitude. She moves slowly, almost like dreaming except through a fog. She goes about her routine. Turns on the kettle with its sharp steam. Feeds the cat with its begging meow. Runs the tap with its icy touch. All the while, she is left with the disturbing sense that she is no longer herself. She is a shadow, drifting, no branch to grasp, no raft to hang on to. The kettle whistles, alarming her out of her daydream. She pours hot water in a mug, a small splash scalding her skin momentarily. She sets the kettle down, picks up her mug, and goes back to her bedroom. She settles down in front of her dressing table, tea blowing warm steam around her. She slowly picks up her makeup brush and begins applying foundation to her face, layer after layer of liquid sweeping over her face until there is nothing left. 

[inkstainedstarlight]

Darling, you inspire men to make the grand gesture, yet you hold so much doubt as to whether you can keep their love for longer than a winter season.

[inkstainedstarlight]

You are always a writer even when you forget how.

Self-doubt is so much simpler to believe, but thank you x

[inkstainedstarlight]

Words aren't as simple as they once were when I was 19 and young and raw and still had the luxury of feeling. My mind no longer speaks metaphor. Poetry has become a foreign tongue and I am speechless. Every word is pulled out, unwilling, unyielding. They yearn to stay inside, stay lost in the abyss, safe, unturned, unexamined. What does a writer become if she runs out of words?

[luthienne]

But goddam it I want to write great heavy swooping things, to throw terror and glory into the mind.

Martha Gellhorn, in a letter to Hortense Flexner, from Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (via luthienne)

[inkstainedstarlight]

Evolution of a Writer

Gone were the days when her fingertips were inkstained and her pores leaked starlight, when she used to sit on cafe stools staring out of large bay windows, contemplating the shards of sunlight and swirling dust motes and wondering about the mysteries of constellations and how it would feel if leaves cried when they fell to the earth and what it would be like if her heart was an empty drawer. 

Now she deals in cold hard facts. She calculates people like robotics experts studying cogs and wires, wondering how each fits into one another and constantly worrying they will never be snug, a lone sock missing a partner. Instead of studying how stars fashion themselves into stories, she instead wonders why humans care so much about things and not enough about people. She still doesn't have an answer.

She longs for the days when she can go back to counting freckles on the back instead of pennies in the pocket. She is tired of pulling up the shades every morning. She wishes for sunlight to bathe her skin. She wants the moon to speak to her when she is waning. She wants the beautifully impossible.

She hopes one day she can find herself. She hopes, one day, that stars will have meaning again.

[inkstainedstarlight]

Goal: get through one more blistering sun, two more revolving moons. Reward: coming home to your arms and the green fields of your eyes.

[inkstainedstarlight]

Do you remember how we used to tiptoe around the future like it was a sleeping beast, so afraid that if we spoke our desires too loudly into the silent void, or if we ran too quickly into each other's arms, we would wake the beast that would devour our hearts whole and leave us hollow? 

But there is no beast, is there? There is only me, and there is only you. And there are only walls. There is only fear, clinging to our bones, entwining itself into and around our veins like ivy.

But smash those walls down, brick by brick. Water your fear with acid. Cut them away with scissors. Tear them down with your fingernails. Don't stop, even if you start bleeding, for that is when we know we've hit something true. 

Look at us now. Look how far we have come. We are so fearless. We tear our chest open, we break open our ribcage so that we may examine our swiftly beating heart. We pull our heartstrings one by one so that music may emerge from the hollows of our souls, because we know the other needs it to sleep soundly at night. 

Love. Look how our tongues no longer stumble at the word. Look how our eyes no longer look away from each other love, love, love. The syllables slip out of our mouths so easily now, soothes us the way aloe is balm to burning skin. We look boldly into each other's eyes, gazes reaching in like we can touch each other's cores with just one look, like the secrets of the universe resides in the pupils of the other's eyes.

Look at us now. We are radiant. We are burning for each other, except unlike stars, we are eternity. We last, despite the statistical probability that we won't. We last, we last, because our hearts know the rhythm of love, can sing it when sleeping, and the lullaby stretches over an ocean of separation, like a string connecting our chests. Look at how we move, rising and falling steadily to each other's heartbeats. Look at us now. We last. 

[inkstainedstarlight]

I am a bundle of frayed nerves tied with a braided rope of misery and insecurity and I don't know how to untie myself loose from myself for any stretch longer than a sliver of sunlight.

[inkstainedstarlight]

The perils of dating a writer is that you become the subject of her desires, daydreams, and desperations.

[inkstainedstarlight]

My problem is that I feel too much. My heart always feels overflowing that one more drop of water turns me into a hurricane. I destroy everything.

[inkstainedstarlight]

My body is a piano. This skin of mine is soft wood the color of mahogany. Battered feet leaning slightly to the left from constant lifting and dropping onto hard grounds, cracking corners from careless hands pushing me against walls, punching  into corners, chipped wood rough to touch, splintering. A layer of dust has settled over my skin, a soft blanket of disuse, comfortable in the familiar caress of loneliness. I have grown used to singing softly to the sun, pretending its rays penetrating through the window were fingers stroking my yearning skin. I sleep when God is listening to rain fall, because it reminds me too much of longing and falling through bottomless clouds. Most days, I sit in silence, content with letting dust gather in between my closed fingers. But some days, I feel an ache in my veins. I wish to be opened, pulled apart, retuned. I wish for fingers that know the art of bringing silence back to life. I wish for music to vibrate through my bones once more. I wish for mid-afternoon crescendoes swelling into dusk, for early-morning adagios just when the day is awakening. I wish for you, my darling, to come home and play me once more.

[amandahelmpoetry]

I love you in waves, and lately, everyday has been a hurricane.

Amanda Helm  (via weaverofstars)

[senpais]

Photo by (Marisa)

[inkstainedstarlight]

I am a boat with rotting floorboards and I am slowly sinking.

[inkstainedstarlight]

There are words I wish I didn't know. Like ache. Ache is exhaustion pulling at your skin. Ache is a hunger emerging from the pit of your stomach climbing slowly up your veins. Ache is the moon, sitting quietly in the dark sky with no one to notice her. Ache is such a lonely word. Lonely. Lonely. So close to lovely but can never become. Lonely is the star that adults forget. Lonely are the waves washing over the shoreline refusing to hold them. Lonely are heartbeats waiting to be heard. Silence. This is silence. Static. Unrelenting. Silence is a corner. Silence is a question. Silence is a trap. Silence are eyes peering at darkness. 

[inkstainedstarlight]

It's not them. It's you. It's you and your loneliness eating away at you til you're nothing but a rotting core, soft to the touch and browning acid at the edges. When they reach out to touch you with soft hands, you push them away, you huddle in the corner of the bed, you retreat into that inviolable corner of yourself, inside the comfort of your sharp elbows and knobby knees until they pull away, inch by inch, slowly, silently. And when you wonder why you're alone, here is why: you are what you are used to, you don't know anything else but your own solitude and anger and insecurities balled up so tight inside your small body and you won't make room for anyone else.