the hunger inside

“Often when I imagine you your wholeness cascades into many shapes. You run like a herd of luminous deer and I am dark, I am forest.”

[inthegoldenblue]

“Our lives exist on the constant movement of atoms and subatomic particles. And our thoughts are trapped within the structures of language. I’m baffled both by the profundity of the former and the limitations of the latter. And the distance between them makes me feel sick every time I think about it. To a certain extent, everybody in my life, the ones I deeply love, and the ones I pass on the street, is the same. We are objects in this universe, confined by our epistemological limits. We brush against each other for an exceedingly short moment and drift apart. We will never be able to understand ourselves, let alone each other.”

Yan Ge, “No Time To Write” from Elsewhere

[tristealven]

“Winter is the only true season of touching. In winters, no matter how efficiently you dress up, a raindrop will find you. Fogs will enshroud you and leave their wetness on your face. Dry, cold air will crack your lips. As you inhale, mist will touch your nostrils and the inside of your throat. You will feel winter’s touch on the backs of your ears. Winter’s physicality reaches everywhere.”

— Nikita Arora, A history of botany and colonialism touched off by a moss bed (via halcynth)

[lostonyoubabee-deactivated20250]

[soracities]

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What’s so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak state, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inwards from the world at large?”

— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

[soracities]

“Like any unloved thing, I don’t know if I’m real when I’m not being touched.”

— Natalie Wee, from ‘Lonely’, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines

[lifeinpoetry]

I am hungry for touch & ashamed to be looked at

— Safia Elhillo, from "Summer," Girls That Never Die

[inthegoldenblue]

“I thought freedom was the chance to become anyone, but I was beginning to think I had been wrong. I needed to learn how to look at the woman inside me without flinching, learn how to to feed her and care for her, to recognise her as me.”

- Jessica Andrews, Milk Teeth

[inthegoldenblue]

“I wonder if love is a need or a want and whether that means I can have it.”

- Jessica Andrews, Milk Teeth

[inthegoldenblue]

“I want you to go and be in your own life but you have done something to me I do not fully understand. I am used to being independent, swallowing my needs and getting on with things, but now I am itchy with want, on the soles of my feet and between my breasts. I am not the kind of person who falls in love easily. I am not the kind of person who lets myself curl up softly in the folds of someone else, but you took my mottled shell in your gentle fingers and I slid out, wanting”

- Jessica Andrews, Milk Teeth

[remanence-of-love]

[letterful]

— ANNA “SWIR” ŚWIRSZCZYŃSKA, trans. Czesław Miłosz.

[serratedpens]

Reginald Dwayne Betts “BALLAD OF THE GROUNDHOG”

[theglintoftherail]

WHY ARE YOU LONELY: A TEXT GAME - Mallory Ortberg

WHY ARE YOU LONELY: CHOOSE ONE

FAILED TO NURTURE RELATIONSHIPS BORN OUT OF CONVENIENCE ONCE CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES REQUIRED ACTIVE PARTICIPATION FROM YOU

WATCHED NETFLIX FOR SEVEN HOURS INSTEAD OF SLEEPING BECAUSE YOU HAVE ONCE AGAIN MISTAKEN INERTIA FOR REST

CONFUSED “SELF-CARE” WITH “SELF-INDULGENCE” AGAIN; YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF EXPERIENCING GENUINE REFRESHMENT OR RESTORATION BUT YOU DO SPEND A LOT OF MONEY AT NAIL SALONS

ONCE AGAIN CONFUSED “EMPATHY” FOR “TAKING RESPONSIBILITY” AND INVITED OTHERS TO UNLOAD THEIR EMOTIONAL BURDENS ON YOU WITHOUT FIRST ENSURING RECIPROCITY, WHOOPS

ANTICIPATORILY BLAMED OTHER PEOPLE FOR NOT CALLING YOU WITHOUT ONCE ASKING YOURSELF WHY YOU CAN’T CALL THEM

ASSUMING ANY TIME SPENT TOGETHER THAT YOU HAD TO INITIATE IS SOMEHOW LESS AUTHENTIC THAN REQUESTS FOR TIME SPENT TOGETHER THAT YOU ACCEPT

BELIEVE “PERIODICALLY EXPERIENCING THE HUMAN CONDITION” MEANS SOMETHING IS FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN WITHIN YOU

CONSTANTLY LIE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS THEN WONDER WHY YOU FEEL LIKE NO ONE KNOWS YOU

MISTAKENLY BELIEVE THAT NEGATIVE FEELINGS MUST BE MISTAKES EITHER TO BE AVOIDED OR FIXED RATHER THAN EXPERIENCED

DESIRE TO BE FULLY UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT THE CONCOMITANT WILLINGNESS TO FULLY EXPLAIN YOURSELF

BELIEVE TRYING AT SOMETHING A LITTLE BIT SHOULD RESULT IN INSTANT PERFECTION AND FIND YOURSELF HORRIFIED AND ASHAMED OF MAKING REALISTIC PROGRESS

TRY COCONUT OIL

CONVINCED THAT HONESTLY ADMITTING YOUR PROBLEMS WILL DRIVE PEOPLE AWAY BECAUSE NO ONE LIKES COMPLAINING SO INSTEAD YOU OFFER EVERYONE A PISS-POOR SIMULACRUM OF BEING EASY-GOING

STILL JUST WAITING FOR THINGS TO HAPPEN TO YOU INSTEAD OF EXPRESSING YOUR DESIRES ALOUD

THINK YOU’RE BEING PLAYFUL BUT ACTUALLY YOU JUST GET MEAN WHEN YOU DRINK

SPEND ALL YOUR TIME SAYING THINGS LIKE “EITHER’S GOOD” OR “DOESN’T MATTER TO ME” WHEN IN FACT ONLY ONE THING IS GOOD AND IT DOES MATTER TO YOU BUT YOU THINK “NOT EXPRESSING A PREFERENCE” IS THE BEST PERSONALITY TRAIT YOU HAVE TO OFFER OTHERS

PEOPLE ACTUALLY MORE AWARE OF YOUR BARELY-CONCEALED CONTEMPT FOR THEIR CHOICES AND RELATIONSHIPS THAN YOU THINK THEY ARE

NO GOOD REASON, SORRY

Mallory Ortberg plz stop laying my psyche bare for the world to see

[dirtydirtychai]

He goes by Daniel Lavery now, for anyone looking for his current stuff! :)

[vlindervin7]

All I can think abt is that one quote that basically just describes that you can’t be your true self in your native language bc there’s too much emotional attachment, but that second languages allow speakers to be truly free with their words

[vlindervin7]

“Some things could only be written in a foreign language; they are not lost in translation, but conceived by it. Foreign verbs of motion could be the only ways of transporting the ashes of familial memory. After all, a foreign language is like art—an alternative reality, a potential world. »

- Svetlana Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky”

“Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. (…) But, it first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents.”

- Love in Translation by Lauren Collins from the New Yorker, August 8 & 15, 2016

[kafk-a]

Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

[weltenwellen]

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours

[metamorphesque]

Ocean Vuong ||| Nickie Zimov