lucy’s heart

i am a part of all i have met

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— via knjfedog

[nixscriptum]

[mournfulroses]

Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer written in 1912, featured in Letters To Felice

[apocryphics]

“[…] for a long time now the remembrance of love had helped me not to fear death. For I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times.”

— Proust, Time Regained (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

[weltenwellen]

Taking Care  Callista Buchen

[dk-thrive]

All we have at the end of the day is ourselves. Falling in love returned me to myself. I shook my life upside down like an old purse. I put some things into a new purse and left some things out, and that was what I’d carry for some unknown length of time. My only orders now came from Dolly Parton: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose."

— Ada Calhoun, Crush: A Novel (Viking, February 25, 2025)

[feral-ballad]

Sandra Cisneros, from Loose Woman: Poems; "Bay Poem from Berkeley"

[vivalasigh]

Jericho Brown, "To Be Asked for a Kiss"

[petaltexturedskies]

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not how shall I correct it? Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, can I do better? Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows can do it and I am, well, hopeless. Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia? Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.

Mary Oliver, “I worried”

[firstfullmoon]

Leila Chatti, “I Too Was Worthy,” in Wildness Before Something Sublime

[mmaisonnnn]

[petaltexturedskies]

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Susan Sontag, On Photography (originally published in 1977)

[lunamonchtuna]

— William Shakespeare, Beatrice to Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (Act IV, Scene i) (via lunamonchtuna)

[ihopeuwill]

All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning-- clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections.

from All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, from “Culpable”, Instructions for Traveling West

[signedthemoon]

— isa b. this survival hasn't been soft

[weltenwellen]

A Conversation with Richard Siken by Thomas Hobohm