la petit poisson

I am an adult. It's weird, I know. I like cats and poetry and girls and travel and restaurants and various other enjoyable things. Pretty tragic at social networking, but it seemed like the thing to do.

[weltenwellen]

Tomatoes Joy Sullivan

[lacoupdecoeur]

There is a clicking into place: the clockwork mechanics of truth arriving like she always does.

The gentlest love sleeps easily, curled fetal next to me: tender, tender. The cat purrs, and I feel grateful for the beauty.

I spent the day in meetings and mediations, and exhaustion has me here at almost 2 am, awake.

To be seen and to be recognised soothes a wound that goes unnamed for so long; do I believe in my own mythology? (Yes, probably.)

Some final attempt at a resolution to a twenty year problem, and it is resignation inside a revelation: the wound is kept open for a reason, and it isn't mine anymore. There is nothing lonelier than being misunderstood, but the world moved on while you stood there with a shovel. I lay it to rest. It was never meant to be so transactional, and it is almost funny - almost. I guess that makes a farewell song, except this is not a birthday party and no one sings your name.

I don't sing their names.

I relay the instigation, the rebuke and response, the frustration and later acceptance. She kisses my forehead, reads me and understands, and I fall more in love with the way she chooses to know me.

I think about the choices we make, how I have constructed this soft, safe life; how she built it with me for three years and counting; how love is abundant in her lessons; how we give and take what we need.

I never knew that it could be like this.

My eyes grow heavy, the foot burns; we sleep, and I remember her face lighting up like a Christmas tree. It soothes the raw graze of my heart.

Sleep, sleep.

[lacoupdecoeur]

I do not know what it is about me and a midnight confessional, but I kneel in the gleam of my shimmering shame: call it ruby, call it diamond, call it a gemstone heart; take it on my tongue like the body and the blood.

You must know how I loved you, how it's grasping claw ripped open time and left a mess of loving you all over the many lives. I wonder in how many I had the gift of your body intertwined with my own, in how many we are rough or gentle. In how many you let me know you true.

Dear friend, dear love, dear heart before the heart, know when to pour your love like honey down the throats of those who earn you. Please make them earn you. Please drown them in honey, the sticky sweet of your eyes - their dangerous movements and how time splits open on each eyelash.

That is both an exaggeration and an understatement, which is to say I would let you love me feathersoft, the warmth of summer creeping into a life unrealised / I would let you take me out back heartless and put me down.

But the truth is that I didn't, the truth is that shame pilloried me and my makeshift crown. Call me majesty, call me holy. I am on my knees for absolution.

Her sleeping breath is a lullaby, and I would choose her in every universe that gifted me choice. But it is after midnight, and I have never not loved you.

[glozirina]

[bass-borot]

[officialmacgyver2-deactivated20]

Some ya’ll who are younger need to google Frank Serpico and read about his time in the NYPD and what the cops did to him and attempted to do to him up until the late 90′s. He literally had to go into hiding in Italy and Switzerland and multiple times people tried to kill him. He only came back to America after the mafia (who hated the NYPD a lot, obviously) said “you’re under our protection.”

[seriously-though-wtf]

Damn, NYPD is so bad, Mafia started protecting good cops

[helila]

Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

[anobeko]

👆Really really good article by the way. Feels like a good piece to show to folks you know who are still on the fence about things like police or prison abolition. Plus the pseudonym the author uses is hysterical, and he's really quite a good writer.

[subsequentlysilly]

extremely good article, please read it. at the very least read the "how to be a bastard" section, it outlines a lot of the ways cops will try to trick you

[lacoupdecoeur]

The pain is so bad tonight. I have taken extra medication, but this is just relentless.

It started as frost, my foot in ice throbbing. And it morphed into a beast.

It is like the tendons are being pulled in opposite directions to the point of tearing apart. It is a burn on top of road rash with chemicals poured on top in a band around my ankle and across the top of my foot. It is an open wound with needles pressing into the exposed gore. It is a slow scraping away of flesh from my mid calf in a line down to my ankle. It is an electric eel of pain waving its body down my veins from the side and back of my knee. It is a wringing of the muscle in the back of my leg.

It is this all at once for hours. It stops me from sleeping. It stops me from most everything.

I am beside myself.

I don't know what has triggered this flare but it has me ready to tap out.

[lacoupdecoeur]

Outside it rains; she gently weeps across the room. A disappointing morning as university bureaucracy delays her starting law school by a semester. She is heartbroken. She quit her job to do this.

I make a last ditch effort and contact the Dean because why not? I work at the neighbouring university, and nothing ventured - nothing gained.

I ask before I send, because I know it is an overstep - I know sometimes I have to just let the suffering happen. She consents; I send. I don't know if it will do anything at all. I just know that I love her, and she deserves this.

I am still in wait on what my future looks like - if we will be moving or staying put.

Last night we went with Theo to what we thought would be a queer pottery event, but was instead a queer painting ceramic plaques that will go in a time capsule event...... I made mine gay pizza where the pizza was the pink triangle and the toppings were queer symbols. I wrote silly and thoughtful things. I do not trust it will turn out well, but it was so nice to be amongst kin.

I am doing really cool things in my current role, projects that align with my values and that I'm really proud of building - if I do get this job, I will be sad to leave in the middle of them.

I love what I do, and I am so lucky to do that and make the kind of money that I do; none of that privilege is lost on me. I don't know why I always want more. I have tried repeatedly for the last four years or so to divert wanting. But I think that I am defined by my wanting.

There's a song that has been stuck in my head for over a decade.... 'I think I was born in a state of longing, born to be wanting, wanting..." And I just... that is what I have always been beneath any civility or kindness or warmth I cultivated into a character: just this unending want for everything all at once. My want is a starburst; my want is a framework for a life I reconstruct again and again.

I know love, have known love - have spent my life learning how to be good at the art of loving, how to be a soft and tender thing in the face of it - and I have been humbled by the process. My heart has been broken in ways I did not know it could move; I have loved beyond what I believed to be human capacity and felt it ripped away - slowly and abruptly in the same sweeping motion. Every time, it is different; every time it is beautiful and horrible and tests the limits of my capability to be lover. And yet - and yet, I choose it ceaseless, with all of my unending want, and it arrives, always with something new to show me.

I have never been loved like this - to be seen so kindly, revised by a commitment to my sparkling eyes and soft skin only: I never knew love could be this wholesome. I prepared for this, but I never could have known it would be like this.

When we met, I did not know immediately - it was not like the other times, where I felt a sense of knowing that exceeded the exchange. In my past, I took that feeling and gave it power, made it holy, made it royal - it was the sign of the primordial, the meant to be, the romantic arch that meant the love was true. Except it never happened in the way love is promised to each of us. With her, I felt.... like she was probably too good if I'm honest.

Don't misunderstand me - that isn't me dragging myself: I rate myself.

But this was something different. She was just so smart and funny and good - and I felt so nervous she would look at me and see something that did not deserve her goodness. But every moment we spent together felt like being in a gentle patch of sunshine; I'd never felt anything like it. I'd never felt so 'good' - like not just in the sensation, but in the sense of being good.

She told me after our second time seeing one another that she had a crush on me and asked if that was okay. I fell in love with her slowly, intentionally - by learning who she was and how she was. And I think I finally did learn the lesson on how to get love right.

I hope that I don't return to this in some months or years and have to confess that I was the fool again, but I do really trust her. And I've done that before with terrible loss, but the only way to love truly is like this - all in with all of my unquenchable want.

My life is a series of revolving pressures. We navigate them now together. I love her. I am so fucking lucky - even on a gloomy day where her dream has been delayed, and we teeter in limbo waiting.

[lacoupdecoeur]

Oops forgot tumblr bc post-interview angst consumed me.... just resurfacing now 🫠

[weltenwellen]

Louise Bogan, from "The Alchemist"

[corpsebrigadier-deactivated2025]

I'm always going to be an stalwart defender of both high art and complete trash. I also personally think that the best way to really open yourself up to the highs of the former is to be open to the guiltless pleasures of the latter.

[urban-bike-cryptid-deactivated2]

Universal Basic Income for everyone AND in addition Disabled people also get extra disability pay. UBI is not a replacement for disability aid and people who suggest it deserve to be vaporized into atoms by my brain.

[how2forgive]

this ask polly comment..

[theillustratedencyclopediao-blog]

[magic-of-eternity]

[lacoupdecoeur]

An interview on Tuesday.

All of the demands of this life fold on top of one another into sheet upon sheet of pressure and hope.

Tomorrow we go to the Food Show because I bought us tickets when high from the brownies we made.

I am watching poetry while my angel of a girlfriend does the dishes.

This is just fragments. I continue to try to edit poetry. I continue to try to be creative and find the beauty.

I am grateful for the growth, grateful for the life crafted.

Grateful for the love I have been lucky to feel and receive.

I am trying not to write poetry here but I don't have the room to write a confessional.

I have an interview on Tuesday, and it could be either doorway or window.

Maybe a new country, maybe a new life.

[lacoupdecoeur]

My girlfriend makes poke in the background, speaking to the tuna and herself about its beauty, about the way to cut it gentle. The cats fixate on her craft and the occasional shared bounty.

I fall more in love.

The fishmarket was humming, and even though it is winter, it felt a bit like a summer day - an impromptu market and some traditional raw fish.

I spend so many hours with her, more than I've ever spent in any other human's company - and it never grows tiring, never loses a gleam or sparkle.

I have never been loved like this.

It isn't that it has always been perfect, that there were not moments in our first year where I wondered if we would make it. But when love brought up for release and healing the things unlike itself, we dealt with them together.

Boundaries built, promises kept. We made a way forward. It was not perfect, but it was enough to get us over the line.

And we have continued to build this beautiful life that is so full of the things that matter to each of us.

I feel lucky and grateful, but she also makes me feel like this is what I always deserved - to be loved well.

I suppose we all do, really.

When we were first getting to know one another, I thought she was probably too good of a person to be someone I could be with actually - that she was too... principled, I guess? That she would find some part of the full truth of me silly or vapid or otherwise deficient.

But when I was actually interacting with her, whether in person or through messages, I just felt... good? Like about myself - in a way that surprised and confused me, in a way that I don't know that I ever have.

It was like being seen through the kindest eyes, and I did feel so seen.

I think maybe this is what love is meant to do, to see you true through the most beautiful light.

Soon it will be three years since we met. How is that even possible? It feels like so much longer and also like it has been no time at all.

Love does that, I guess, time magic and all.

[lacoupdecoeur]

Doing my best to not cry at my desk at 7:30 am over Andrea Gibson's death.

They deserved more years, and the world is less bright in their absence.

No words ever do.

[lacoupdecoeur]

It is the case that I try to say more than I actually do say - always.

I am trying to write again - but this has mostly included editing.

I am trying to craft a future that carries with it the feeling my promises of limitlessness have held - something beautiful and spacious and open. This is complicated by the present state of my interior - similar to today's weather (ie. grey, rainy, bleak - threat of torrential rain that could flood this city). That is an exagerration, of course - I am just feeling a bit midling.

We moved to Auckland just over a year ago. We love it here. I spent so long believing everyone in the regions when they said it was awful, but I'm a convert - I love this city (despite the current weather and threat of flooding).

My life was more complicated when we moved. I had two girlfriends and a young adult we had somewhat adopted during the most traumatic year of his life. We had been living together in Hawke's Bay for about a year before the move, and we moved - as a little chosen family.

My understanding of my sexual orientation evolved - I increasingly understood myself as sapphic rather than bisexual. My partner transitioned; I sustained a fracture in my left ankle and foot (almost ten years after a very similar injury). These things are related because the subsequent complication of a nerve injury and the development of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome trapped me on the second floor of our home for months - applying quite significant pressure to a strained relationship where I was trying to be romantically invested in a man - when that feeling was not happening organically.

The relationship ended - at first, with mutual love and respect; and later, when his hurt consumed him, retellings that twisted truth into something less kind than what had actually transpired. In time, through his words and actions, he severed ties with each of us.

I was angry at one point, at being so inaccurately rewritten - when that relationship stood as the first that I really felt that I had consistently delivered to my intentions when I choose to love anyone - everything had been about what was best for him (so long as I was not suffering harm), and I had given him everything that I could. I had never been harsh or unkind, and while I acknowledged to him at the end of our relationship that I had retrospectively identified things I could have done differently that would have potentially better served our relationship, even those choices were made in difficult situations where I was guided by trying to support him as well as I could. But I became too many things in our relationship - therapist, mother, manager, financial supporter, life coach, best friend, girlfriend, lover, etc., etc. It is too much to be so much to one person.

I am not angry now. I feel sorry that he burnt bridges and destroyed something I know once meant so much to him. I imagine the mental gymnastics required to distance himself from that truth. I regret how it transpired - I question what I could have done differently to prevent it. But I suppose one of the lessons learnt is that it isn't my job to make other people navigate these things well. I really can only control for me. I have to accept when people lie to themselves, lie to others, lie to me - I cannot make truth grow where it does not want to do so. I cannot force what I understand as truth into someone else's mouth - as tempting as that has been.

I have always liked for things to make sense - but humans very often just do not make sense. They make choices and take courses of action that are quite obviously to their detriment - something I have always found endlessly frustrating.

When I played The Sims, I would always make my Sims live these impeccable lives where they made the 'correct' choices and lived the best life I could create for them. I believe I have spent much of my life feeling frustrated that the people around me refuse to live a life like that. The autistic in me struggles with this obvious deviation from what is clearly the right choice.

I have examined this in myself - my pathological need to do what is 'right'. I have gotten better at it as I have gotten older, but I still feel acutely the remorse and disgust at myself for moments where I have failed to do the 'right' thing. It is my fool's errand - to be perfect, to be so good that no reasonable person would ever do anything but love me - and yet, I will never be - can never be perfect; and I have found lovers are rarely reasonable. No amount of perfection will protect me from hurt.

Love grows in the flaws, in the incongruencies that highlight why you should not, but yet - you choose to do. Love is unprecedented, and it is devastating, and it has no edges - no beginning or end; it always is, was, will be. And even when you are loved, it will not always be done well. We try to do it well. We fail. We try again.

My girlfriend and I moved into a two bedroom apartment in mid-town at the end of February, initially with Theo in tow; before he moved in with his boyfriend in a place just a few minutes away from us. We love it here. Genuinely, the only complaint I have is the size of the bedrooms and closets - everything else is as close to perfect as I can imagine any place being.

There are decisions that will need to be made in the coming weeks that will possibly change everything again.

That is all this life ever is - change and growth and change again. I choose to lean into it. I continue to try to choose to be happy.

Most days, it remains enough.