adiantum

sorrow found me when I was young

[ohkirra]

I am not a ghost.

I am alive, I am so alive. My blood is hot and the skin is peeling off my fingertips because I am so incrediby human and stupid that I bleached my hair without gloves again. I am not a ghost. I am the smooth neck and soft arms he longs for, the vanilla-lemon-rose-petrichor that rubs off on his shirt, the altar he kneels at filled with heady devotion. He is the marrow of my existence. The only steady hand. He gets hard with his fingers in my mouth.

My heart is, in medical terms, a bit dramatic, but it isn't fatally flawed. My cells are strung together like a daisy chain, he says it suits me and to keep my hands just like that. Everywhere my self loathing turns, his adoration is already there, fingertips creeping under my shirt. You're so beautiful, my soft girl, his version of a rosary. He's helping me rediscover the joy in a previously medicalised landscape.

I am not a ghost. I am alive alive alive.

[ohkirra]

bleaching my hair and going to gigs and smiling at toddlers plodding along holding their dad's hand and sewing my own clothes and making butter and trying to release the tension that has been in my shoulders for my entire life and trying to not be afraid and giving compliments to strangers and taking my makeup off before bed

[angelfiredpod]

RIP Sophie. A pioneer and an icon.

[seraphauna]

vintage Barbie funeral vignette

[themakeupbrush]

Rahul Mishra Spring 2023 Couture

[popgodz]

Kylie Minogue by Pierre et Gilles

[jenniedavis]

[thehautecouturelover]

Elie Saab FW 2016 Couture

[ur-daily-inspiration]

[ohkirra]

after twenty two years of missing him, we spent fifteen minutes at his gravestone.

the last time i kissed his face it had been in a fridge for days - my grandfather warned me that he would feel different, that this was his shell and not really him anymore. I didn't want to touch the very cold not really my dad skin or focus on the stitch I could see behind his ear lobe - autopsy felt like lead crushing my nine year old chest - or the fact that he was wearing cologne and not cigarettes & grass & motor oil. he wasn't my father anymore. every bit of space he used to take up was now a black hole.

the sun was baking the roses that grow in all that nitrogen around the edge of the plot, and the air was cloyingly sweet. neither of us knew what to do, the enormity of the situation bashing headfirst into the everyday ordinariness of being in fucking unanderra. How do you walk your wife to her long dead father's grave? How do you keep breathing when he's finally so close again?

When we found him, I knew before I saw. My knees gave out and I clung to the rock, tracing his name with my fingertips, again and again, pressing the A into my palm, kissing it, desperately trying to give him my love. To take a single atom back with me. to just die in that second and be with him again forever. He was with me when I first got my ears pierced and now here stands a thirty one year old woman, fully grown and fully traumatised, with those same holes in her lobes. I took off my earrings and buried them with him.

We said thank you to the woman who adopted my grandmother, next to him. He was always her clear favourite - he would buy her cigarettes after everyone else refused. I apologised for taking so long to visit. We left crystals on top of his gravestone. The next person to visit will know I've been. I have no clue who visits.

[ohkirra]

alternatively,

[flawless-imperfections]

it’s just you and i tonight, why don’t you figure my heart out

[ohkirra]

so glad that I married the person every horny teenage love song reminds me of

[fieldsarebreathing]

[ohkirra]

between putting the plug in

and pouring bubble bath

I realised that I would

die for you

When I stuck my hand in

the scorching water

I knew it was not 'for'

but 'with'

like the woman in ukraine

who climbed into her husband's

coffin

three thousand years ago & yesterday

alive and weeping and alive alive alive

and died

under the dirt

holding onto his rotting bones

[ohkirra]

yesterday, I made a coat in six hours. I ate hash browns in the bath. brushed the now very middle aged cat until he was conker-shiny and my husband came home.

husband husband husband home home home

we drank strawberry wine and kissed and ate leftovers and kissed and fucked on the very comfortable lounge. pink cheeked dancing to the 1975, he bought tickets to their next show then and there for my smile.

my my my you mind my mind my my my

today I woke up under blue skies and a pile of cats and six foot tall men and I am safe and I am happy and I love him more right now, this very second, in this delicate bubble, this sugar-glass fragile glimmer, than I have ever loved anything

[ohkirra]

I started sewing again. One of my tiny hopes was that some day I would make something good enough that Andrew would want to wear it.

Andrew died around two weeks ago. I feel crushed by grief. Grateful for our habit of sending effusive compliments when either of us got whiskey-drunk. Like I will miss my friend every day for the rest of my life.

[diabeticlesbian]

Lace bra & briefs pattern by Christine Browett