Notebook @shh-ellie - Tumblr Blog

reverie

A trembling glitch—this life— too mundane to archive, too ordinary to remember. And yet, one day, we will hunger for the sheer simplicity of a Saturday in June, when the sun warmed your skin,

and breath held the flavor of chlorophyll, sweet and careless— and nothing in the turning sky foretold how the cosmos, with unspeakable tenderness, would one day close your eyes in a rapture too vast for memory.

#poem

in the absence of shared certainty, there is still a body standing there like the last fact no one can argue away

truth has started to shed its shape breaking into drifting pieces in the air

I try different ways to cope move too fast and become dizzy or impose order on something that refuses it or step carefully around the places where other people have spilled their certainty too thick

can I trust myself to stay alive inside all this noise can I trust myself the way I trust temperature

disagreement feels like it changes me like I’m being rewritten by people who never touch me

and still I want to believe that meeting someone could be simple no translation, no verdict, just presence

what if the body is the only proof that doesn’t need agreement

even if everyone says it isn’t rain I can still feel it on my hand and call it rain

even if everyone says it isn’t safe I can still reach into the static feel something answer back and call it love

consent

in the place where time forgets its own shape you drag something soft across my throat and my body answers before I do

we laugh as if cruelty only matters when it’s named

you smooth the garden you planted in my sleep pull it up by the roots tie me to the red line on the bed as if it was never binding anything at all

my dove— I said it was only a dream when I asked you to loosen it

the night turns heavy the morning comes in yellow

and what’s left is not memory but the failure of it

not forgetting but something worse that still knows your name

tape my (explicit word) and (explicit word) my (explicit word)

oh.

the world's least convincing femme fatale

posting another caption written like she's God's strongest temptation.

three selfies. seven recycled buzzwords.

an entire personality assembled from Pinterest, other Tumblr girls' screenshots, and whatever song is currently romanticizing being emotionally unavailable.

underneath, the same congregation arrives.

grown adults pretending, and discovering object permanence every time a woman looks into a mirror and says 'she ruins lives'.

you'd think she'd descended from Olympus.

she took fifteen takes.

it's performance art for people who mistake low self-esteem for complexity.

because here's the trick.

interesting people don't have to keep announcing they're interesting.

dangerous people don't need captions explaining how dangerous they are.

if you have to market your own mystique, it's already gone.

and if you're buying it, i have terrible news.

you're not witnessing seduction.

you're watching branding.

she isn't impossible to understand.

she's chronically vague because depth is harder to fake.

he isn't captivated.

he's just relieved someone else manufactured a personality he can borrow.

because building one himself would require hobbies.

or convictions.

or leaving his bedroom.

it's a beautiful little ecosystem.

people with nothing original to say convincing people with nothing to become that this is profound.

everyone applauds.

nobody grows.

they keep calling it "energy."

what they mean is predictability.

they keep calling it "goddess."

what they mean is good editing.

they keep calling it "obsession."

what they mean is having nothing else scheduled.

and isn't that the funniest part?

none of this survives daylight.

remove the filter.

remove the captions.

remove the audience.

what exactly remains?

not maturity.

not depth.

certainly not chemistry.

just two profoundly ordinary people terrified of being ordinary.

one disguises it by exaggerating herself into a fictional character.

the other disguises it by worshipping the character instead of meeting an actual person.

it's a perfect arrangement.

she never has to become real.

he never has to risk rejection.

both get to confuse immaturity for sophistication.

the algorithm gets paid.

everyone loses.

eventually the algorithm starts plagiarizing itself.

eventually the fantasy gets mass-produced.

every caption sounds like the last one.

every face starts feeling like a repost.

every "bunny girl"

every "muse"

every "i'll ruin your life"

starts sounding like a product launch.

because that's all it ever was.

copy-paste individuality.

for grown up teenagers.

and somewhere underneath all that theatrical longing is a much smaller, much sadder truth.

they were never searching for each other.

they were searching for something interesting enough to distract them from the unbearable realization

that they've built entire online identities around never becoming interesting themselves.

it's more fun with an audience

when i was young

i invented a man

to witness me when the hours became unbearable

or the walls felt too close

like:

staring at the clock in algebra

imagining my own death

or standing alone in the outfield

waiting for a ball that might finally

earn me some affection

even then, inside the misery,

i knew i was lovely

and i understood there was something compelling

about a lovely girl in distress

so i wanted someone there to see it

he was a little bit time traveler

and a little bit something else

sometimes we talked without speaking

sometimes i acted as though i couldn't sense him

and let him have the pleasure of watching

he always carried the hint of a smile

my expressions entertained him

my feelings entertained him

look at you, he'd say

look at the situation you've landed in

and somehow the mockery softened it

turned trouble into a game

he enjoyed my tragic-girl performance

i enjoyed being enjoyed

my suffering became useful

and usefulness became desire

this was one way to survive the waiting

until happiness arrived

shh-ellie

ruinwork

I am not afraid of what this healing will undo— the slow collapse of neatness, the soft undoing of what once passed for strength.

Let it come apart. Let the seams fray like old threadbare linen, sun-bleached and softened by time.

I am not here to stay folded. I am here to loosen. To lay each brittle truth on the floor like photographs pulled from a forgotten drawer— grainy, out of focus, but still breathing.

I came to feel the weight of my own name. To run a finger along the cracked frame of my being and not look away.

This is not ruin. This is remembering.

And when it all falls quiet— dust floating in the hush of late afternoon— I will still be here, kneeling in the wreckage, gathering what was always mine.

instructions for panic attacks

No one told me the first rule:

curiosity weighs less than fear.

Fear pulls you down like gravity.

But curiosity floats.

So when the buzzing starts don’t panic.

Let it build.

It’s only the body forgetting to hold you.

If the darkness opens step forward.

You won’t break.

The strange thing is how natural it feels.

As if you’ve done this a thousand nights

and only now remembered.

gothredy

desire, uncorrected

I’m only just beginning to understand the full size of my wanting because only now do I have room inside it I can stand in it without flinching like turbulence I’ve learned to sit with on flights its scale no longer turns my stomach I do not turn away from myself

I love her

I refuse the idea that being human is something to erase or solve myself out of with clever sentences

sometimes I can lift up and out of my own life as if language were a ladder

I remember: I am not Elin or I am not only her

one hand holds the hand of the version of me that wants her a vast architectural house walls all glass her money, her rooms her lovers, her jesters—

the other hand holds the watcher turning cartwheels in a place without time

I am here and not here or no—only here always only here

there is only this screen with its endless channels there is only this laptop with its shifting windows

in dreams I am changing tabs in death I imagine I will still be looking up

I need to stop overthinking myself into fragments when I write

it is almost absurd that we believed we lived inside our brains that small dotted page that restless crossword its beeping and looping games

the brain is no more me than this laptop is me it is a tool I carry a processor of words sometimes an inconvenience, heavy and hot overheating in the park

it is me the way my voice is me

I thought recently: I like it when someone tells me I have a beautiful voice and maybe my body and my mind can be beautiful too just not identical to me

in the way I am not only Elin but also Elin’s keeper

overclassy

talking to strangers

The sun comes out— and suddenly everything is busy with it, the pink bloom thrumming like a small engine, bees entering each soft room as if they belong.

You see it and cannot keep it— not the sound, not the way your eyes move trying to hold everywhere at once.

So you say something simple— there are so many bees— as if naming it might make a bridge.

Sometimes the bridge holds: a smile, a shared glance, two strangers standing in the same light from different angles.

Sometimes it falters— confusion, polite laughter, people moving on before the moment can settle.

Still, you say it.

Because beauty does this— pulls something out of you that wants to be given away, even badly, even to no one.

Because once you stayed closed— walked fast, eyes down, armed against every voice— and it worked, in the way empty rooms work.

Now you kneel beside strangers, offer silence, offer listening, offer a hand that might shake, might say the wrong thing, might stay too long.

Sometimes all you give is attention— held steady like light falling through leaves.

Sometimes even that feels like too much, or not enough.

But the reaching— awkward, unfinished, half-understood— keeps happening,

like bees returning to the same bright place,

again and again,

without knowing if it matters.

#poem

gothredy

shh-ellie

trauma

Everyone wants to be understood— not just their personality but their childhood, and what exactly those two beasts have done to one another in the dark.