n ✸ they/them ✸

𓆏 always sleepy, making art sometimes 𓆏

[weltenwellen]

Wildness Before Something Sublime Leila Chatti

[inkskinned]

you get used to it, but it's tiring, because they need you to understand your own life as a series of goalposts. what college are you going to, what's your major going to be, whatcha gonna do with that, oh where will you settle down, when can i expect grandkids.

for the longest time my goals have been so blurry that they track into each other, their undefined edges slipping quietly back into the soft night. today i want to be a writer; tomorrow i will want to be a doctor, later i will wish i took that law school free ride. how the fuck do people just know what they want to do with their life?

where do you want to be in five years? i want to be alive; which is a huge step for me. ten years ago i would have said i want to be asleep and meant i hope that i'm dead by then.

but i want a yellow kitchen and a stand mixer. i want a garden and a fruit tree (cherry, if i can make that happen) and a big yard for my dogs to play in. i want to come home and read poetry out loud to someone and have them close their eyes to listen. i want a summer watergun fight. i want to make snowmen. i want to be the house to go to for halloween. i want my life to settle around me in a softness, for it to lay down gently. if i am very, very, very lucky, i want to travel; finally go someplace overseas.

of course i don't know what i want to be doing professionally. what i actually want to be doing is curling up beside my dog, settling in to read. i want to be making myself a cup of good coffee.

i can't answer the other questions. whenever people asked me what do you want to be when you grow up, i used to say i hope i'm happy.

i hope i'm still kind, five years from now. i hope i never get jaded and mean. i hope i have stayed in therapy. what do you picture yourself doing? when will you actually be an adult about this? why are you so afraid of being ambitious?

am i not ambitious? the other day i rearranged my furniture which doesn't quite fit into my apartment. i watered my plants. i'm going to try to propagate a cherry seed. my five year goal is to spend more time laughing. to lie down in a patch of sunwarm moss. to relax for a minute. to close my eyes and think oh thank god. this is why i stayed. this is finally it.

[weltenwellen]

I Do Know Some Things Richard Siken

[petite-gloom]

a collection of cakes because it’s very important to acknowledge your effort in staying alive each year

[softandfierceart]

[weltenwellen]

Hanif Abdurraqib, "Glamor on the West Streets / Silver Over Everything"

[prinz-myshkin]

Bothersome beast, comforting friend

[julykings]

stay here all morning + melt into the mattress…

[rubypomegranates]

“What might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness? I am curious too. I am curious what might happen if I, and we, experimented with living beyond the dichotomy of fixed or failed. If we let ourselves know that our good, complex, messy, and at times painful lives are successes.”

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice”

[forest-woman]

[julykings]

persimmons in oil pastel

[madgirlscosm-deactivated2025051]

(excerpted from Leila Chatti's poem: "Tea", published in Missouri Review)

[firstfullmoon]

Maria Gray, from “Bad Nostalgia”

[softandfierceart]

suicidism (coined by Alexandre Baril) names the oppressive system in which suicidal people experience structural violence. it emerges from a worldview organized around the idea that wanting to live is the only acceptable position. suicidism shapes how society decides who deserves to live and whose lives are deemed disposable. within this system, suicidal people are controlled, silenced, and punished in the name of care or prevention.

suicidism harms people individually and collectively, and is especially violent toward marginalized folks, including queer, trans, disabled, mad, racialized, and Indigenous people. suicide prevention systems, as they exist today, intensify the harm they claim to stop by reinforcing and reproducing racist, sanist, ableist, and cisnormative forms of control and violence. to name suicidism is to politicize suicidality and recognize that suicidal people are surviving within an oppressive system that denies their autonomy and humanity.

[julykings]

i would like to hold on to everything

[soracities]

Town of Tashkent in Uzbekistan, 2000. ph. Bruno Barbey

[sentimentalbeing2001]