mitalee deshpande

creating a chaotic space within the calm

[mitaleedeshpande]

Sometimes, when I’m feeling down

​​​Sometimes, when I'm feeling down about not finding my one true love who can adore me to the fullest, I console myself by thinking about all the people who live their lives never having crossed paths with love. I imagine all the souls out there, content in never finding the right person to love, never having the right person love them back. Whenever I'm feeling down about not finding my one true love, I tell myself that I'm not alone. If hundreds of others can live this way, what right do I have to wallow in pity?​

- excerpts from a book i'll never write

[mitaleedeshpande]

The constant reminder of everything lost

Decades and decades ago, there was one photo frame hung high up on the cream wall, surrounded by souls, breathing and laughing and crying and just living their daily lives. As I grew up, year after year, the photo frames began taking up more space in the house than the living, breathing souls. 

I visited my mum a couple of months ago, and I was surprised to see the photo frames of my grandparents and my father and my uncle haphazardly stored in a closed shelf. Dumbfounded, I couldn’t quite make sense of the bare walls anymore. 

Months later, it finally hits me. My mum has been living in a house that is largely filled with the memories and never-spoken words of the dead. And who am I to stop her from packing them up - them and their constant gazes and smiling faces that were captured in those frames without knowing that this is how everyone would remember them in the future. 

Who am I to stop her from packing them up, them and their constant gazes, so she can at least try to live a life without the constant reminder of everything lost.

- mitalee deshpande, अकथित - untold, unspoken, unsaid

[spitblossoms]

[thoughtkick]

I want to talk about what happened without mentioning how much it hurt. There has to be a way. To care for the wounds without reopening them. To name the pain without inviting it back into me.

Lora Mathis, If There’s A Way Out I’ll Take It (via thoughtkick)

[sosuperawesome]

Stamp Pins

MMADshop on Etsy

[mitaleedeshpande]

sometimes i wonder what we might be doing right now. maybe i'd be sitting next to you on the red sofa with my legs in the warm blanket and your head in my lap. there's soft music coming from the tele as we watch the series we've been waiting for. the sun is hiding behind the clouds, and outside the apartment, the cold wet air is glad for our absence. I would lazily run my hands through your soft hair, watching the strands slip out of my grasp. and you're quietly moaning from the pinpoints of pleasure my fingers are creating. we would lounge without a care in the world surrounded by each other in a bubble of our own. it's sunday, and the world can wait, my darling. the world can wait for tomorrow.

excerpts from a book i'll never write

[hedgehog-moss]

I was wondering last night if it was at all possible to translate sign language poetry into writing, when translating poetry from one spoken language to another that uses the same communication devices is already a headache. So I found a book about sign language poetry (by Rachel Sutton-Spence) and it is a delightful read! At one point the author describes a poem by Clayton Valli about a boat, in which the rising and falling pattern of the words he chose (which are located at different heights in the signing space) evokes the bobbing motion of a boat on the water as it approaches a bridge. And, okay, it will never be the same thing but you can tinker with written words to create similar effects, like how Victor Hugo’s poem The Djinns uses rising and falling line length to convey quietness then frantic action then a return to stillness.

Then the author analyses a Christmas ASL poem by Dorothy Miles and at first you’re like, this is translatable—she lists things children ask for Christmas, and includes signs like “pets” and “cake” which both involve touching the back of one hand with the other, creating a visual rhyme. The English translation pairs “pets” with “candy cigarettes” to preserve the rhyme. The author adds that symmetry in signed poetry is comparable to assonance: instead of signing ‘2 people walking’ with one hand the poet might sign ‘1 person walking’ with the right hand and ‘1 person walking’ with the left hand, for poetical effect. As English doesn’t have this opportunity for symmetry, you can translate the intent behind this deliberate, aesthetic symmetry as a rhyme. But then the author goes on to describe how Miles uses gentle, fluttering-open ‘5′ handshapes to convey a feeling of magic and excitement, and adds extra finger-wriggling or fluttering to some signs to make them ‘sparkle’, so the poem goes something like magic-shivers-up-arms, magic-run-downstairs, magic-feel-bumps-through-stocking and as a translator, how do you not ruin the specific charm of this poem?? You would have to draw actual sparkles around every verse to convey a similar effect.

I really love poetry for how great it is at making us aware of all the resources and hidden treasures of our own language, that we often overlook in everyday life, but I also love the other side of the coin, how poetry in translation gleefully makes us aware of all the cool things our language lacks.

[sunsetquotes]

I missed you in a small way. Tiny enough to fold up and put in my pocket, and carry that loneliness with me everywhere I went. I’d forget all about you, until my hand accidentally brushed against that slip of memory.

Unknown (via sunsetquotes)

[thatsbelievable]

[mitaleedeshpande]

Soon to be email greetings of 2020

[lifeinpoetry]

harmony / is a kind of grammar and I am not / a native speaker

Kaveh Akbar, from “On Bridges and the Shadows of Bridges,” published in Colorado Review (via lifeinpoetry )

[gracebriarwoodwrites]

If I create enough metaphors, build enough bridges to carry meaning from here to there, can I defeat  the divide between every element of the world?

- Grace Babcock © 2017 (via gracebriarwoodwrites )

[animatedtext]

[killtheprotagonist-deactivated2]

Kill off your main characters. Please. Not as a cheap ending, or right at the beginning for shock value. Kill them in the middle, and do it well. Leave every character reeling and unable to comprehend what happens next. Leave your antagonists without a solid enemy, wondering if they've gone to far.

When you shatter the heart of a story, a thousand tiny shards will spilt away and grow. Focus on the side characters; the supporting cast, the love interest. Think about how they would change, break and reform. Think about the growth, the quiet moments of reflection and depth.

You don't have to do it, but at think about it a little.

If your story stops with a single character, your story is weak.

Kill the protagonist.

[iwhumpyou]

Yes.  This is a great way to find out which of your side characters had plots of their own because everyone is the hero of their own story.

Corollary to above: kill the antagonist.  Shoot them dead.  And watch as that doesn’t solve the problem, because when has killing one guy ever stopped anything?

[thehopelessopus]

I actually read a trilogy in which the antagonist and protagonist were killed in the first book.  It’s the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson.  The side characters suddenly became the main characters and turns out that everyone each had a very important purpose.  Good stuff.

[hurglewurm]

something small n weird

[leohearts]

In another universe, destiny didn’t separate us, where I belonged to you and you belonged to me. Right now, my heart is there, living with you.

(via leohearts)

[fireandsteelofangels]

when the world uncovers my bones, they’ll find traces of you still etched into my soul, still drawn on my heart because I am made up of the broken pieces of me and the parts you choose to give me I don’t think I ever truly realized how much I took from you how I spun your echoes and made them my gravestone until the stars forced us miles apart until the promise of more that we said with our eyes seemed broken luckily, we’ve always managed to overrule the universe and you crashed back into my arms bringing with you the messages I sent up to stars and the touch I never dreamed I’d feel again

just like that, the heart restarts by Abby S (via fireandsteelofangels)

[pencap]

must it always be a tragedy? the Boy asked the Sky. must I always lose him? must he always leave? must we never learn to fly together? it’s always been a tragedy, the Stars replied.  that’s just the way it has always been, and it always will be. we’ve watched over a thousand lives,  a million stories,  but the ones like you? it’s always a tragedy. it’s called Fate,  the Sun said. and there’s nothing you can do about it.  I loved a Boy once too, you see,  but I lost him.  I lost him too.

how could a Boy do what the Sun couldn’t? ( j.p. )