take what you need

| Zaz | she/her | 23 | saudadeonly on ao3 |

[moonydulac]

I just love love the idea of r/s being exceptions to each other. passive, conflict avoidant remus demanding that sirius listen to him when they fight and impulsive, confronting sirius calming down and taking the heat coming from remus cause "woah he'd never ever lose control for nothing!" but also, sirius, the infallible, being vulnerable with remus and admitting to being lost here and there!

[moonymode]

i hope it's okay to preserve your tags here because you've articulated this specific, vital aspect of their dynamic so well. that their relationship is as noteworthy, romantic, and meaningful as it is in the text because it shows how far they're willing to compromise for each other, in a way that is endlessly forgiving of not only the other person but also of themselves! they are each other's redemption! tangentially, this is also why i find it hard to believe that either of them would hold a grudge (post-poa especially) or manufacture drama in a 1:1 comparison to ron/hermione or whatever is the most recent fanon template for romance that fans will happily apply to r/s and pretend is canon-compliant. in fact, their biggest source of drama literally stems from how unconditionally compromised they are for each other, where protecting each other despite suspecting the other had thrown in with voldemort and was willing to (successfully) murder their closest friend and his family is actually a hugely valid source of guilt. to the point where it kind of doesn't even matter that both were innocent, like just look what they are willing to let each other get away with (this is specifically in keeping with the implication that sirius didn't tell anyone that he suspected remus in the first war and that he didn't confront remus personally either, despite sirius's double standard for peter and his tendency towards proactive justice, especially when his family is in danger).

when i first got into r/s, i was briefly convinced that there were so many odds stacked against their relationship, so many reasons to give up on each other, that it didn't make sense in a canon-compliant reading. but the truth is that this is actually the point, the most compelling aspect of their ship. they hold onto each other so tightly in spite of everything, even when it hurts, even when it doesn't make sense, for the simple fact that they simply love each other...like, they just do. they choose to balance each other on purpose. they grow as people and step out of their comfort zones for each other. they are the definition of "i love you on purpose."

[saudadeonly]

it's been 3 years since i first wanted to kill myself and i had coffee with a boy i kiss sometimes today and i stood in the sun with my classmates and i swear it renewed us and my favourite person and i absolutely butchered a song that came out this past year and spring took me with its life-cold hands and unravelled me with precision that burned the back of my throat; i laughed with my mother and i kissed her cheek and i told her i love her for the umpteenth time since then. it's been 3 years since i first wanted to kill myself and it's not always good, but it's better sometimes; it's good today.

[saudadeonly]

it's been 6 years since i first wanted wanted to kill myself, 3 since i wrote this. i got to kiss the boy for a year and a half; we have not had coffee for nearly as long. i have other classmates now and they stand in the sun and the shade with me; their presence dragged me to the border between the two. i've only just started talking to my favourite person again and i'm not sure he's my favourite anymore but he'd still butcher a song with me if i asked. spring is even colder now but it unravels me still, puts me back different than i was in winter; i wait for summer and autumn and look forward to every day until then. i cried over my mother and told her i love her for a thousand times since and we still smile at each other over coffee. it's been 6 years since i first wanted to kill myself, 3 since i wrote this, and it was awful in between but it's better a lot of the time; it's good today.

[thebrownart]

8 months of Genocide and, 15,500 children killed

30,000 orphans

35,000 child amputees ( Gaza has the largest population of child amputees in the world)

and there are people out there still justifying this??? like are you not human enough?

DO NOT STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE!

[thenameisgul]

[sharp-tender-shock-deactivated2]

This is a comment someone appended to a photo of two men apparently having sex in a very fancy room, but it’s also kind of an amazing two-line poem? “His Wife has filled his house with chintz” is a really elegant and beautiful counterbalancing of h, f, and s sounds, and “chintz” is a perfect word choice here—sonically pleasing and good at evoking nouveau riche tackiness. And then “to keep it real I fuck him on the floor” collapses that whole mood with short percussive sounds—but it’s still a perfect iambic pentameter line, robust and a lovely obscene contrast with the chintz in the first line. Well done, tumblr user jjbang8

[headspace-hotel]

I hate that my aesthetic sense agrees with this but everything you just said was correct

[headspace-hotel]

I went back to dig up this post because I was thinking about poetry.

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

From a technical standpoint (and ive taken 300- and 400-level poetry classes so I can say this) this is damn near flawless as a poem.

[agent-octopus]

Kept thinking about this ever since I saw it and had to do something

[headspace-hotel]

there's art now

[jetlaggingbehind]

[questions-within-questions]

Ah dang to go further; the floor is framed as a refuge. As if there is literally no other space in this house that hasn't been populated by his wife with flimsy inanimate fakery. There is no space for this man in this house save for the floor. There is no space for him on the sofa, oon the counter tops, and most notably, no space for him in the marital bed.

[normal-horoscopes]

I’d also like to point out the use of the word “has.” The wife has filled the house with chintz. She isn’t filling the house with chintz. She doesn’t fill the house with chintz. She has filled the house with chintz. Use of the past-tense makes the wife a subtly removed element in the story, someone whose presence we see in the environment, but who is blissfully distant during the actors throes of passion. There is an element of physical as well as emotional separation from the wife that is catalyzed by being fucked on the floor. Use of the past tense is an end to the wife presence in the actors life, a carnal catharsis amid cold fragility and emotional distance.

[stargazing-enby]

This is my new favourite post in the world

[astronomical-bagel]

everyone cheer for the one (1) time tumblr had reading comprehension

[iamnotshazam]

The tight meter and punch-in-the-face meaning shine bright enough to overshadow the other poetic engine at work here: not rhyme, but alliteration! A form of poetry literally older than English. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_verse

Alliterative verse - Wikipedia

Alliterative verse - Wikipedia

Two shared syllables / across the caesura

at front of words / forgoing aft,

this poetry makes. / Pops in English ears,

a memory long buried / of mighty lord Beowulf.

"His wife has filled / his house with chintz."

H W H F / H H W Ch

The alliterative pattern seems immediately broken by the parenthetical comment "To keep it real" but I think this is a necessary alert we are swinging to more ~earthy~ topics and breaking a pattern helps that

But it is then reestablished quickly by "I fuck him / on the floor" and it also pulls back in the hanging F from the first half of the previous line. "Chintz" is left isolated, a loan word alone among all the other very very basic English words, hightlighting the unnatural quality of the decor in the house.

[swallowedgirl]

Anna Haifisch

[deirdreskye]

Babe are you okay I saw you reblogging "here's the life I've always longed for"

[agalarianzigzagoon]

for anyone curious there is a follow up image:

[saudadeonly]

Lisbon, 2024

[tamarrud]

Israel has killed more children in Gaza since October than in four years of worldwide conflict

[tamarrud]

Like it's been said before that when Israelis and Zionists cry "why do you single out Israel?!", they should in fact be reminded that Israel singles itself out. I mean, who commits violence at this magnitude and then bemoans being the victim??

[sayruq]

[beardedmrbean]

[woody112704]

They really want people to start torrenting again eh?

[advanced-procrastination]

[reffitt-blog1]

Remember kids, piracy is bad. Stay away from these sites.

[inkskinned]

i know we’re both just messing around pretending to be whole but look at me. if the train was coming would you move. if the ground was falling from under your feet would you even notice or would it just be another tuesday for you. if somebody stabbed you could it hurt worse than you already do. what i’m saying is that i love you but i think we both drive over the speed limit when it’s raining. what i’m saying is that i want to hold your hand and i understand about how you sometimes have to sit down in the shower. what i’m saying is that i’m here for you and if the train comes please move.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this 7 years ago, somehow. every day someone else finds it and whispers to me - oh, i understand this. something always turns in the wash of my stomach: i am so, so glad you feel seen. i wish you had no idea what this post was about.

i wrote this while working in a program for new writers. on wednesdays, two of the teachers would be contractually obligated to read our writing aloud to the group of 300+ teens. i had never read my work in public before. i had something like 6k poems and was panicking about it. none of them are good enough. sometimes the train is howling. it is hard, actually, sometimes, even as an adult.

and then i thought - what is one thing i wish i could tell all of them. each of these 300 kids. what did i need to hear, at 16?

i wanted to tell them about the day you wake up, and the sun feels warm finally. i wanted to tell them about carving a life out of soapstone, your hands turning bloody. i wanted to tell them that sometimes yes - it actually does feel easy. i wanted to tell them about weddings and cookie dough and long road trips. about albums of new music and old friends laughing and the sound of snow falling.

you will learn the pattern of the train. you will learn to close your eyes when you hear the engine rumbling. you will learn to let yourself have the grey days in their lily-soft numbness. sometimes it will feel like life is wet paint, and god has smeared your canvas across a sewer grate. sometimes it will be so boring it isn’t even pronounceable - the tenacious, soundless blankness. survival isn’t just ugly nights and wild mornings. it is also the steady, unimportant moments. it is just driving with your seatbelt on. it is calling a friend on the way home. it is burying your face into the fur of your dog.

when i had finished reading this poem aloud, the auditorium was silent for a solid minute. someone stood up to take a picture of where it had been projected onto a screen, and then three more people followed the action, and then - like a bad internet story, people remembered they were supposed to be clapping. kids came up to me after it - thank you for writing that. i think i hear a train coming.

i would write this differently now, i think, but it has been 7 years. i still live by the tracks. i also haven’t picked up a blade in over 10 years. the scars are still there, but these days i only pick up scissors to cut my hair. i know why you can’t tell your mom about it. i know how the numbness slips over everything, a restless horrible cotton. i know how when you dropped the dish, you weren’t crying about the broken glass. i know about feeling like all the roads have closed their exits, that you aren’t supposed to still-be-here - and yet.

i am still here, and still yours, and i haven’t forgotten. what i’m saying is if any hope is calling to you - i know it’s hard, but you have to listen. i’m saying keep driving, but slow down the car. sit down in the shower, i’m not judging you. we can stay in the dark with the good hot water and do nothing but stare. notice the stab wound. make it through another tuesday.

i know what it is like to miss yourself. do what you need to. come home to me. i am writing to you, my past self, from the future. i’ll be waiting for you.

and when the train is coming - please move.

[saudadeonly]

the coexistence of i'm worried it will always be you and god, i hope it's always you

[inkskinned]

i love my therapist but i hate being in therapy. 10 minutes before my appointment, i'm in a meeting with my boss - we discuss my artistic choices; my boss recommends i artistically choose less. 10 minutes after therapy, i wash my hair and think about everything that was said, and then i have to switch it off, like a lamp, and go back to work again.

i was on a walk the other day and someone had the perfect combination of his cologne and whatever-else. it was almost exactly his scent. i fucking hate that. after all these years, i remember that? i tell my therapist - i feel like a fucking wolf. try telling a middle-aged blonde lady. oh i scented him on the air. i'm 30, and i'm having a panic attack over something that would be a plotline in the omegaverse.

what they don't tell you about mental illness is that if you are lucky enough to survive it into adulthood; it becomes a weird slice of your life. because you do, eventually, have to build a life. i realized in a panic somewhere around 22 - oh. i don't know what i'm fucking doing, because i always assumed i'd just go ahead and die. i didn't die, and i'm grateful for that, and i'm very happy about that choice. but it does mean that i am an adult in an apartment, living with my conditions side-by-side like. oh, that's my roommate, adhd. ignore the glass, bytheway, that's ocd.

so you pick your stupid life up by the scruff of the neck and you're, like glad for it (so much laughter and light and friends you would have never thought possible, when you were in the worst of it). but it feels so strange to be dancing around these odd little microcosms, these patchwork moments of your symptoms. if you have a panic attack at night, you still need to wake up and walk the dog in the morning. if your depression is making everything boring, well, you don't have any sick days left, and a job's not really supposed to be that exciting anyway. your ocd tears out each individual leg hair, and then, an hour later, you sigh, patch up the bloody bits, and go get dinner with friends. and the life is kitten-quiet, mewling and pathetic, but it's also like - it's yours, so you're fond of it.

and it's like - you're real. so you still enjoy pushing the shopping cart really fast and then riding on the back of it down an empty aisle. and you're not, like, so sick anymore that when you accidentally drop a mug you burst into tears (except for the days you do that. which are bad). and no, you're not allowed around certain items anymore. oops! but you've learned to be good about brushing your teeth most days of the week. and you sometimes in the middle of the day you have a little freak-out about how fucking unfair it all is, how fucking hard, how other people can just do this without having to fucking hurt the whole time. and then you sigh and force yourself to sit down and fucking journal about it so you can tell the nice middle-aged blonde woman yeah i had a hard day but i practiced grounding. you still sometimes want to burst out of your own skin, but you force yourself to eat kind-of healthy and to take your vitamins. you let yourself chop off all your hair in the sink in a dramatic poetry of control and relief - and you also have developed good hobbies that help you move your body more frequently. you feel helplessly behind, lost in the shuffle - but you also practice gratitude, taking stock of what you have garnered. because you're trying. even if you're never gonna be normal, you have something... close enough.

and the little kitten of your life, this mangy, starlit tigercub, this thing you expected to rot so young: in your arms, it turns itself over, belly-up. exposing this new soft part, all the organs and guts. like it's saying i trust you now. you won't give me up.

[tea-and-secrets]

My friend got pregnant at 17. Deeply religious family (she would be kivked out if they found out), one night stand, she just could NOT have the baby. Thing is we live in a country where abortion is illegal. Our only option was to illegally buy some pills online and hope they worked and we didnt go to jail

But these are hecking expensive and we needed to rush

So i set up a twitter/fb/insta/furaffinity/etc account and advertised my furry art EVERYWHERE. Im not that good but i said id draw basically anything no matter how weird (not cub art or anything illegal). I got a lot of weird coms (vore, scat, inflation and some i dont even understand) and for two weeks i did nothing but draw weird shit all day. My hand hurt so bad, but i got the money.

We spent a week afraid we'd been scammed and afraid we'd get caught, then a weekend afraid my friend might die once we did the procedure in my house. But it worked

I never told her how i got the money and i never will. Id rather die than tell her i funded her illegal abortion by drawing the wolf from robin hood swallowing robin through his belly button. Im pretty sure she thinks i was a prostitute for those two weeks and id rather her think that

To this day i gift her condoms on her bd as a joke bc im never doing that again

.

[mr-deep-downer]

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

You just don't get content like this anywhere else

[vanquishedvaliant]

ngl deep respect to this person for hauling ass and getting shit done for their friend like laugh all you want but this person was RIDE OR DIE

[inkskinned]

"the curtains weren't blue on purpose. why should we care?"

my love! let me ask you this - did you eat breakfast today? this tiny moment in your life. just think about it. did you?

for some of you, the answer is yes and for some of you it is technically and for some of you it is does coffee count. some of you reached for cereal or gmo-free overnight oats or frozen waffles or 3-day-old pizza. sometimes we eat the same thing, every day, for weeks. i get tired of eggs randomly, only to go back to craving them desperately. i'm cuban; i take my coffee like my father showed me, very milky and sweet.

some of us ate in a hurry. some of us hate eating breakfast but if we don't we will get nauseous later. some of us took our meds first or took our meds after. some of us have a kitchen 5 feet wide and sometimes it's the biggest room in the house. some of us are confident there will be food in the pantry and some of us flinch and say well, the paycheck is coming. some of us turn on a podcast while we eat or we scroll our phones or write in our diaries.

some of us are choosing, specifically, not to eat breakfast. some of us are too busy. some of us are pretending we "just forgot," but we are ignoring the warning signs that everything feels too-heavy. some of us are so consumed with anxiety or grief that we can't eat. some of us can't stand up long enough to make our coffee. some of us have no table to sit down and eat.

i cannot tell you what an artist "meant" by their choices. but they did have to make a choice, conscious or otherwise, to give you information. to give you a little bit more light. each of these choices are little stars of data; connecting speckles for you to weave through, drawing a line.

you cannot use a mirror in a dark room. for some of us; we will not care that the curtains are blue, because that will just be a data point and not enough light to see by. for some of us, the blue curtains will be the same as our childhood bedroom. it will make us seasick. for some of us, blue will be the color of frostbite. it might look like a pixel up close; but from a distance, oh! the picture blooms.

i cannot tell you what will stick out for you. what will carry meaning. some of you will read the sentence "i didn't have breakfast today" and say "this means nothing." some of you will read that and say "oh, me neither." some of you will say "this means the character is probably a little grouchy." some of you will say "oh, i wonder if they're okay. why didn't they eat anything?" ... art is a mirror. i am holding hands with you, over space and time, and asking you to feel something with me.

i want you to read my work and find a blue pair of curtains. i want you to read my work and find things in it that i never imagined placing. i have no way of knowing what will resonate with you, that's true. and maybe i just was hungry while i wrote this, and thinking about the eggs in my fridge. but if you found meaning, that meaning is yours. it cannot be erased just because i didn't "intend" it. you created a different world by interpreting my work. it's collaborative! that's beautiful! that's stunning!

just! imagine looking at the night sky and saying - it's stupid to have a favorite constellation or a favorite star. they're just there.

because here's the thing - across centuries and cultures, we look up. we still find meaning in the stars. these beautiful, lovely scattered accidents. are you looking? they call. and we look back and say oh! of course we are!

[charlataninred]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[meraarts]

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

[eater-of-hopes-and-dreams]

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

[blitzlowin]

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

Goblin Men (Canines)

[tippenfunkaport]

there is something so darkly comical about tumblr potentially outliving twitter

tumblr, which is held together with duct tape and madness, run by three raccoons in blood stained Yahoo! hats and a handful of crabs, its only discernible source of income the sale of shoelaces from an inside joke so inside no one knows the original source anymore and fake blue checkmarks... that website still lives on

truly the cockroach of social media and I love it for that