♡

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken

[weltenwellen]

Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

[weltenwellen]

Jenny Slate, An Interview with Jenny Slate

[moreloev]

loneliness that settles into your bones, makes a home - ask polly // richard siken // rachel ingalls // pain and glory // hanya yanagihara // fleabag // julian randall // jenny slate // tilthat // hedgehog-moss

[fireandsteelofangels]

“there’s nothing in the world I want less then this gutwrenching feeling of emptiness that I feel when I try to speak to you because you tossed me away like I was a moldy piece of fruit something you once intended to savor but instead completely forgot about, until to you it was all stink and I wish I could hate you for making me feel worthless once more for making me feel stupid and lost but I think about the late nights, the way you once talked me down from the cliff the way you made laugh when the world felt like the stars were gone and I don’t know what I did to make you look past me to make you put my hello’s to never respond but it had to be something I couldn’t bear it if it was simply that you took what you wanted and never looked back and left me standing on the side of the road, a map in hand and a suitcase packed but the car’s far gone now and god, I never wanted to learn how to hitchhike but I guess I just stick my tumb out and hope”

— still doubt it will work by Abby S

[dreams-of-a-teenage-carnie]

“When a relationship ends, it sort of makes sense. People fall out of love with another, situations change, and there’s nothing you can really do about it. Your lovers come in to your life at a certain time and you give what the other one needs. Sometimes they’ll want what you’re giving them forever and sometimes they won’t. Even though breakups are terrible and earth shattering, they almost feel a little less personal than the end of a close friendship. I mean, there are countless movies, TV shows and books about this, remember? They’re a fact of life. It’s not you, I swear, it’s just how the cookie crumbles sometimes. But the end of a friendship is all about you. It’s nothing but you. It’s almost like a personal attack on your character. Someone who once thought of you as a beautiful soul now sees some ugly in you. They wanted to talk to you everyday and now they’re willfully distancing themselves. Meanwhile, you’re left thinking, “What did I do wrong? Where’s my partner in crime? Why don’t you want to be a part of my life anymore? I planned on you having e a major role and now you’re reducing yourself to a cameo.””

— Ryan O'Connell

[griefunfolding]

“People kept giving me space, all of us hoping my grief had a half-life, but I didn’t need space. I needed people to say Miles’s name out loud. I needed them not to flinch when I said it. Weren’t they curious about the color of his eyes? I needed them to acknowledge not just that he had died but that he had lived.”

— Artis Henderson, Unremarried Widow

[schuylerpeck]

My grief and I are still so ill-acquainted; two strangers sharing one body. We bump into each other while reaching for the toothbrush, while walking the dog across the street. And I’m so close to recognizing her, I’ve listened to her cry at the bottom of the bathtub and watched her rub her eyes at a funeral. I want to tell her it’s all okay, I’m here too, and we can be here together, I am just too afraid to speak.

Schuyler Peck, Parts of Me I Haven’t Met (20/30: Grief)

[i-wrote-you-a-poem]

grief, i’ve learned, is really just love. it’s all the love you want to give but cannot. all that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and the hollow part of your chest. grief is just love with no place to go.

-1:25am

[misserinmarie]

Heavy by Mary Oliver

That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying

I went closer, and I did not die. Surely God had his hand in this,

as well as friends. Still, I was bent, and my laughter, as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found. Then said my friend Daniel, (brave even among lions), “It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it– books, bricks, grief– it’s all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not, put it down.” So I went practicing. Have you noticed?

Have you heard the laughter that comes, now and again, out of my startled mouth?

How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe

also troubled – roses in the wind, the sea geese on the steep waves, a love to which there is no reply?

[forestcwhore]

𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒎 𝒏 𝒄𝒐𝒛𝒚 ☁️

[the-meaninglessness-of-existence]

[roach-works]

terrible years really make you understand the point of a new year. i know nothing much will have changed between dec 31 and jan 1, but we need to be able to partition off everything that’s happened to us, we need a moment to say, ‘that’s done, we’re done with it, it’s over’ and have a little hope that the future will be different. we need to be able to stop and take a breath and sing, in the middle of winter, and prepare ourselves for spring.

[theunvanquishedzims]

#humans live life as a story#it doesn’t have real endings and beginnings so we make them ourselves#we need them to make sense of things

[literary-structures]

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.”

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (p. 74-5)

[schuylerpeck]

My grief and I are still so ill-acquainted; two strangers sharing one body. We bump into each other while reaching for the toothbrush, while walking the dog across the street. And I’m so close to recognizing her, I’ve listened to her cry at the bottom of the bathtub and watched her rub her eyes at a funeral. I want to tell her it’s all okay, I’m here too, and we can be here together, I am just too afraid to speak.

Schuyler Peck, Parts of Me I Haven’t Met (20/30: Grief)

[jackalopiel]

100 good questions to ask your friends at 4:02 am when you can’t sleep (can also function as an asks list)

Are you bothered by your cosmic insignificance?

Do you mourn for a place or person you’ve never known?

Do you really think there is somebody for everybody?

Do you place any value in gender roles?

Do you have to be related to be family?

Are your platonic relationships just as valuable as romantic or family ones?

Are you in love? Do you want to be?

Do you think you can put love into categories (family, platonic, romantic, etc.) or is it just one general sensation?

Would you be happy with a life without romance? 

Are you always going to be a little in love with somebody?

Would you change your appearance if you could?

Do you have the feeling you’ve lost something you might have had in another life - whether it be a person, a place, a world, a language, etc.?

Do you believe in reincarnation?

Would you want to be reincarnated?

Do you think you’re special, or just another person amongst billions? Can you be both?

Do theoretical ethical debates have any value? Is it important people discuss ethical dilemmas, e.g. the trolley problem?

Did you have imaginary friends? Do you still have them?

Are you religious? Do you think your religion is ‘correct’?

If you aren’t religious, do you wish you were? Why?

Do you want a grand adventure?

Do you have somebody, whether it be a friend or stranger, who you think you could have loved if the circumstances were different?

How long does it take you to fall in love with somebody?Is the sensation of ‘falling in love’ or ‘being in love’ better?

Is love about convenience or something more? Can it be about both?

Do you think you really understand your gender and sexuality?

How fluid is your concept of gender and sexuality?

What’s the most life-changing choice you’ve made so far?

Are you afraid of growing old?

Would you want to live forever? How about for a billion years, a million, a millennium, a century?

Do you believe in some form of god/s?

Are your choices fated or of your own free will?

Do you have a hunch about how you’re going to die?

Do you believe in star signs?

How old do you have to be to be considered an adult?

Was your childhood happy?

What are you missing from your life?

Have you ever met someone who had a very similar personality to your own? Did you get along?

Do opposites attract?

Is your life what you expected it would be five years ago?

Do you know what you want out of life?

What makes a person ‘good’? Are you a ‘good person’?

What fundamentally matters do you?

Is freewill an illusion?

Do you create art? How do you define art?

How often do you lie? Is all lying inherently bad? Are you generally truthful?

Do you want to be remembered after your death? What for?

Is true world peace ever possible?

Do you have to suffer to truly understand the human condition? What is the human condition? How can you really experience it?

Are you free? Will you ever be? Can anyone be truly free?

Do you hold yourself to higher standards than you hold others?

What do you expect from a friend or partner?

What question could you ask to find out the most about a person?

Do you justify all your beliefs or have you just inherited/absorbed some?

Which beliefs do you have that is most likely to be wrong?

Can human really understand the complete nature of the universe, space and time?

Is a conscious what makes someone a person?

What do you think about artificial intelligence?

Do you thinks humans are obsessed with escapism (books, video games, movies, etc.)? Are you looking for an escape? Do you think that’s a bad thing?

Are we eventually going to ‘run out’ of new combinations for music, art, language, etc.? Is there a limit to human creativity?

What do you think the next era of music will be like?

What do you think the next era of fashion will be like?

Do we live in tumultuous times, or do they just seem so strange because we’re living in them?

Would you want to meet a clone of yourself? Would you like them?

How confident are you, really?

How consistent is your perception of time?

What age should people be allowed to vote? Should children and teenagers be allowed to vote?

How do you feel about the idea ‘an eye for an eye’?

What’s the worse thing a person can be?

How do you feel about monogamy?

Can you be in love with someone and still fall in love with someone else?

What’s the tragedy of your life?

Would your life make a good play?

Should people be prosecuted for crimes that weren’t considered crimes at the time?

Would you fight for your country? Do you feel a sense of loyalty to your nation?

Do you believe in gender equality in every aspect?

Do we have a moral obligation to care for others? To what extent?

Do you crave approval and/or praise?

Is there comedy in all tragedy and tragedy in all comedy?

Are you ever going to be satisfied?

When you are sad, do you listen to music that conveys your emotions or music that makes you happy?

Is your music organised by mood or sensation or do you just listen to everything at any time?

Would you marry a friend if they needed you to (e.g. for citizenship)?

Are you a deep person?

Given the chance to live your life on Mars, with no hope of returning to Earth but with the promise of scientific discovery and glory, would you take it?

Are you who people think you are?

Do you think you would be happier if you had been born a different gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality or religion?

What’s your toxic trait? Are you trying to improve yourself and fix it?

Do you anger easily?

Are you a jealous person?

If you lost all your memories, would you have the same personality?

Given the chance to reset your life (with none of the knowledge you currently have), would you take it?

Is hate as strong as love? Who do you hate?

Do you speak multiple languages? Which do you dream in? What language would you want to learn?

Do you draw meaning from your dreams, or do you disregard them?

How would you describe yourself when you love? Do you love forcefully, unconditionally, gently, quietly, desperately?

Is unrequited love real love?

Is your perception of yourself similar or the same to how others perceive you?

Are you overly analytical?

Do you ever feel that you are really a terrible person, and only act good out of societal or some other obligation?

Do you believe in magic? Are you superstitious?

What belief do you have that isn’t logically grounded, but you still firmly believe in?

[poems-and-word]

“I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.” - Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

[greelinged]

man isn’t it great how I invest myself entirely into fictional ships in order to forget the fact that no one in real life is ever going to love me that way and that it’s the only way I’ll ever know what love means i mean isn’t that fucking brilliant