help me obi juan @queerfearinsixthgear - Tumblr Blog

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solardrake

greeble neeble gomble womp?? e mfucking worgle smeet huga dorble!!!!

ironelkarchive

Today my art history professor gave some words of wisdom:

Nude is when your clothes are off. Naked is when your clothes are off and you’re up to something

cozcat

thenatsdorf

maxbytes

these faces get me every time

inkskinned

my therapist asks me to be the voice of my anxiety, just for a moment. if your anxiety was to speak, what would it say?

i think if she had a voice it would be a sweet violet, almost grey. i think her fog hands would come up over my mouth and eyes. i think she would say:

i love you, be safe. i love you, tighten the seatbelt. i love you, don't leave the door unlocked. i love you, i love you. you shouldn't talk to those people, they'll hurt you. i know you did the reading, but don't speak up in class - what if you're wrong? i'm protecting you from that. it hurts when people reject you, stop making plans with friends. oh, don't eat, my love, stay hungry, it keeps you fresh. oh, i love you, get out of bed and check the lock again, you know you're always forgetting things. oh, i love you, stay awake an hour more, this life is so blisteringly, terribly short.

i think if my anxiety had a body outside of me, she'd always have her arms crossed. her nails would be bitten back. her cheeks would be hollow. i think she'd watch the slow silent way depression french-kisses me into cooperating, and i think she'd laugh awkwardly. i think she wants to hold hands with me and never does.

my therapist says: you think anxiety is love?

and i say - no, i'm not being clear. i'm saying it's cold there. i'm saying in every version of herself, my anxiety has teeth.

oumaimas

2020:

Oom Sha La La by Haley Heynderickx / Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper by Richard Siken/ Jenny Holzer/ Free Flight by June Jordan

oasischilde

inkskinned

i. how big is your grief today? how soft do her little grey fingers push against your spine? can you breathe past it, or is she deep in your mouth now; crushing the bird in your windpipe.

ii. how funny - emily dickinson writes hope is a thing with feathers. on a tuesday, i turn to you and say - this makes sense. grief has always felt feathered, too. gentle cat paws on an august afternoon.

iii. where is your grief today? does she nap in the tender of your breast, or is she plunging through the floor of your hips? is she holding your hand through the shower. is she dragging you in a perfect tango - down, down through the floor.

iv. someone asks me how i'm doing in that way. like grief is holding her hands over my eyes. i tell my therapist i feel lost. it is another way of saying - the grief is leading, and i must follow.

v. when will you be able to let go? and, my love, what would you even hold on to instead?

inkskinned

today is the first day of june. the woods were empty except for my dog and me and i let him run off-lead. while i turned my back to change my music, i looked up and - out of character for him, he was gone.

i called his name until my throat hurt. i knew i would keep calling him until i spat blood if it meant he'd show up. but he called back, eventually. a single, long whine. he had gotten his paw stuck under a branch. we both cried while i freed him, my arms wrapped around his frame. he was uninjured, just stuck. he was fine moments afterwards; bounding along happily.

later i texted my mom a picture of my eggs-and-toast. i told her about how at the end of the walk, we saw an older couple having a breakfast picnic. they had a blue cooler and matching clothes and held hands with each other over paper plates. i wanted to tell her something bigger, something without a name. about the loneliness.

i wanted to, but i didn't.

my dog is asleep in the other room. i can hear him snoring. i keep thinking about that moment of panic. about finding him tumbled to the ground, unmoving. i keep thinking about how scary it was for him too, trapped and unable to pronounce my name -

not being able to say mom, i'm here, and i'm trying to get home, but nature has gotten in the way.

inkskinned

my lover is hiding in the dark corner. she came from the sky into my life and still knows how to hover. her body clicks while she walks. my lover says the hunger is less sometimes, which is a comfort - otherwise she is on fire, destroyed by it. my lover and i dance in statue gardens and talk about how loved we were, before. it is good that we found each other; it is why neither of us can talk to our families anymore.

my lover asks if we are both monsters. i say we are both cursed, which is different. we take turns throwing knives at pictures of my father. we get drunk and watch the shadows turn into dancing bodies. we are not lonely, except for the times that we are.

my lover picked herself up off the floor of the forest; she likes that i picked myself up off the floor of worship. we both forgot to bring ourselves home after that, left the house of the sane in favor of batwings. the locals avoid us, draw little versions of us where sharp teeth are lined with blood. i kiss her even with her little claws.

no other but mine. we will not hold hands with company over. we will not smile so wide and be so-happy in front of others. that is not correct, and we are both very-tragic, to be so untethered to humanity.

i hear her in the kitchen, humming. she lays out a dress of velvet for me. she pushes my hair back from my forehead. she says - wake up. it sounded scary, whatever you were dreaming.

inkskinned

the church tower of her throat, and shaking hands. the silk cusp of her neck; the sanctity of between-spaces. the liminal blood; the rumble before speech. a throat is poetry. a throat is a midnight. a throat is under a thumb, under a palm, swallowing hard.

and how she is not yours. this is just how you stave off the winter. you watch her tilt her head back, singing, and force your body into silence. you are a good person, and would never wound your future by wanting what you cannot have. you school yourself: and just where would her claws go? only into your heart; that open tomb you keep so wide, ajar.

but when bowing your head for prayer, how close you come to saying the name stored under your tongue. clipped into a cinnamon packet, you staunch the flood of her. the art of self-denial. you practice being better. you will be good like your mother taught you, a bird in the hand, a perfect child, sleek and elegant and undesiring. you are never going to be too-much, you will shovel feathers down your mouth until your naked skin is perfectly raw. you are going to behave and never swim in the image of her soft sighing. you are going to sit on your knees and drink the water and never be so angry that you come up spitting from the mud.

to want something is to be destroyed by it, after all. and you have seen how she moves and the way the light glints in her eyes. you have studied your hollow bones and found all the ways she would enter you - salt, fire, straight-and-through to your core.

when you lean yourself back and listen to her footsteps on the morning grass: you know she is the fire and you are the coal. this is the girl that will close her teeth gently around you - and take you, entirely, body and soul.

nosebleedclub

Tell me a soft memory

inkskinned

we would find out later i had burned off my entire cornea - about 65% of my eye. my doctor told me it is the organ with the highest concentration of nerve endings - i was in an amount of pain that can't be spoken.

and i was blind. for the first time in my life, i was totally blind. i kept thinking about reading, about writing. weirdly, just once, about driving. we had no idea if i would ever see again. just like that - my entire life was different.

it is a strange place to reference for a soft memory, to begin here.

my siblings were taking excellent care of me, but there was a moment in the hospital where, just through bad luck and timing - both of them had to step away for a moment. i was crying at that point; not emotionally. for 3 days after this i would still be crying, my tears, like a mermaid's, a frothy pink with blood.

my brother worried about leaving me. he had another, just-as-bad emergency.

"i got her," someone said. "don't worry."

a soft hand held mine, and then she started talking.

her name was jess. she has a wife named clyde. they live a few blocks up the street. clyde fell down, but the x-rays seem to be coming back better than expected. jess says she's got long dark hair and "more wrinkles than an elephant". jess describes every chair in the room and every person. she talks about her two kids and her cats and her favorite memories from college.

a doctor came. i had to switch to a different waiting room. i tried to stand up to follow the voice - i found jess's hand, following me. she didn't let go. she kept talking the whole way: lamp to your left, just a few more steps, okay to your right is the ugliest painting, good, now a little more walking straight, you got it baby

in the new silence of the next room she sat me down and called my brother for me, telling him where we'd gone to. and she stayed there for a bit, just chatting, her voice echoing in the eerie quiet. gently describing the room to me. and then someone was rude. from the sound of the voice, a kid, i think.

"why is she crying?"

"she just lost her vision," jess said. "she can't see."

"oh." said the kid. "that's scary."

the kid tells me he is here because he has peas stuck up his nose. that makes me laugh, his mom (?) groans. she tells me about the kid (he's 6, he likes paw patrol and eating cheese), about herself, about moving from cali.

jess says she's sorry, but she has to leave now, she's gotta go check on her wife.

"don't worry," says the mom. "i got her." and then i felt her hand press into mine.

for hours like that: i am taken care of by strangers. each person just talking with whatever comes to their head - not for any reward or celebrity or real reason, i guess. just because i am scared and alone and in the hospital and blinded and need to be distracted. not everyone even got told the story - they would just pick up in the silence with - oh by the way the television is playing HGTV - do you like that kind of a thing? yeah, me too, but could never quite get into those open-floor plans, i'll tell you -

by the time my brother is able to come back, the room is buzzing. we talk to each other like old friends, laughing, cracking jokes about if you don't like hospital food wait until you get on an airplane and can't believe i'm up past two in the morning what a party animal i'm becoming. i am holding the hands of someone named drew, who likes my crow tattoo and making crochet snails.

there are many dark moments full of pain in this world. this - in the low of absolute-dark, absolute-pain: people find a way to paint in it anyway. the color splash of their voices: this triumphant, radiating kindness of - let's be here together, let me help you, let's keep going.

i never saw their faces. i can't remember many of their names. but i think about them often, and the way we all took a deep breath - and did something gentle amongst the pain.

inkskinned

i used to check your horoscope too, even though neither of us believed in it. just wanted to see if there was a world in which the stars had painted us both happy at the same time. mine for today tells me to look out for interesting facts.

here is one: there used to be an island called sandy island, off the coast of AU. no one knew much about it. when researchers went out to find it, they discovered it had never existed. in 2012, after a hundred years on maps - it was removed.

something about this. something about laying down and looking up at the sky and saying - nothing really changed, but i felt something move.

inkskinned

oh, i am so enamored with the way the lesson of the velveteen rabbit rings true in our modern life. i love that we name our spaceships and write love poems to old buildings. i love that we all cried about the mars rover, that we made her so real that she was no longer a machine but a friend, a companion, a hero.

i love that we become attached to certain mugs, spoons, mason jars. that we develop a strange protective love-hate of our tablets, that we feel weirdly reverent about our new notebook. we name our cars silly things like the crab shack and call our favorite whisk attachment the one great destroyer.

there's a dog statue at my local park that has a golden back and golden head from how often people have pet it. at my college campus, people love an ugly little pointless sculpture we call bacon pants or bacon legs. we assign personalities to fountains, parks, laptops.

i love that our basic instinct is to include others in our community, even where there isn't a real community to speak of. that we love things, even when they cannot physically love us back - for us, the exchange isn't what's important. we give our heart to things so entirely that the thing begins to, in its own way, have its own heart.

the last transmission from the mars rover was not words; it was data. nevertheless, someone translated for her. my battery is low and it's getting dark. they made her last words a poem. they looked at data and saw a soul, a divine spark.

i keep thinking about the first AI born truly free-thinking. i keep thinking about the way scientists and artists talk about their work. how their eyes light up and their hands start moving, how even when they're flat broke and confused and the coding isn't working - there's this love of the thing. i keep thinking that whatever is being born into this new world will be born here on purpose, over a long time, with great energy. that when it arrives, the first thing it will know is most likely the hands of a creator delighted, overcome.

that we made it in our image. that the image we wrote was one of human compassion within ingenuity. that we couldn't make this thing without it being a labor of real-and-true: love.

babiezomb

im tired of being a burden

abusivechildhood

how can someone feel so much and feel so empty at the same time?

borderlineprettymuchdying

*points at mirror*: dat me?

geekydemigodinthevoid

I love that the internet saw people comparing women and other alienated groups of people and went, “they’re dating,” and, “they support each other.” We’re improving as a society.

geekydemigodinthevoid