the Spacegirl

[spacegirlstories]

Here to cry a lot and masturbate a lot and ask my heart to get bigger a lot sometimes more than I feel like I’m capable of. here to laugh a lot and be lonely a lot and here to not have the answers a lot, here to do everything right and still feel fucking sad a lot. Here to daydream about your naked body a lot, here to read a lot, here to love those I thought were my enemies a lot. Here to understand a lot, here to misunderstand a lot. Here to know a lot and still not have the answers a lot. Here to work a lot, here to not have a lot, here to miss you a lot. Here to miss everyone a lot, actually. Here to ask a lot, here to give a lot, here to still not feel like enough a lot. Here to feel powerful a lot but here to feel powerless a lot more. Here to teach a lot but here to listen even more. Here to learn a lot. Mostly just here to grow a lot though. 

[spacegirlstories]

its been a long time since my bed has felt like a sanctuary but I’ve made it every day since I saw that video on facebook about how changing the world starts with making your bed so these days, i’m feeling more like miracles are possible. 

I want to thank you for reminding me that I am better at joy than I am an cynicism even when i’m depressed. also especially when i’m not. it turns out that I am a believer in love all the time and my heart rests happy when i let it do its thing without wearing a helmet. 

i thought i would die when you left me. i have vivid memories of every place i cried. i remember the starbucks i sat in to charge my phone and buy that bus ticket. i remember that bus filling with the sound of me softly sobbing. i remember that red chair in herald square that i sat in, i remember the staircase at that one internship. i remember how much i read that summer. i remember the new york public library. i remember how it reached out its arms to save me from my broken heart. i remember how it went on for months. i remember when i dyed my hair first blonde and then pink. i remember the night i got my tattoo. i remember how slowly the wound stopped bleeding but when i say slowly that is only hindsight speaking. i remember for months how it would not stop bleeding. 

in the middle of all of that tom almost died. later declan almost died too. there was someone who wanted to marry me. there was a lot of love. and i would dream about you. not very often. just often enough for me to be certain. when i lived in turkey i had a bedroom the size of a closet and it was never clean. that was where, before i fell asleep every night, i imagined telling you. i imagined kissing you. i imagined it all the time. 

when it happened a year later there weren’t actually any words. and there weren’t for a long time. the words that came were guarded. i don’t think i breathed for six months. i waited for you to leave me. i made the conditions perfect. i gave you an out. when you didn’t take it i doubled down. i planned for my life without you. i ran my hands over my scars and prepared to open them again. i began dressing them at night as if they were already bleeding. i began speaking to you as if you already left me. 

but then, in my big bed in my big room in missouri, i let myself imagine you and i a year from now. i let myself imagine us in japan. i let myself imagine falling into bed. brushing our teeth. sleeping on airplanes. how i never want to move when you fall asleep on my shoulder even when it starts to cramp. i let myself imagine you at the end of the aisle. i picture your smile. my favorite thing in the world. and suddenly things felt different. 

it turns out my heart only wants to love you. it turns out my insides only want to be loved by you. it turns out that when i let it, this is my kind of magic. love is transformative. love makes me my best self. when i let myself love you wholly and without my defenses that i love everyone else better too. turns out this is what my heart is supposed to do. 

it is now september. when i imagine my life a year from now, i imagine that i go to sleep at night next to you. it makes sleeping alone right now not so hard. i love having infinite more time to love you. i love that i have finally given myself the gift of trusting that to be true. i love you. i always have. 

here’s to many future adventures~~

[minuty]

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future … This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Jobs (via minuty)

[eccebitch]

‘Men say,’ Liz reaches for her scissors, ‘“I can’t endure it when women cry” — just as people say, “I can’t endure this wet weather.” As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen.’

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (p92).  (via a-witches-brew)

[pastel-lipz]

I wonder who’s arms would I run and fall into if I were drunk in a room with everyone I have ever loved

(via pastel-lipz)

this is the best thing I have ever read

(via babyleft)

[thequotejournals]

It’s not you. It’s anyone. Sometimes I don’t want anyone around. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.

Joan Didion, Run River (via thequotejournals)

[wordsnquotes]

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Winter of the Air. (via wordsnquotes)

[buttonpoetry]

the boys and i are playing quarters with double shots of vodka and i am winning. by winning i mean i am not one of the boys but i am the next best thing. by the next best thing i mean i am a girl and i am drunk. every time i miss a shot, johnny gets to flick a quarter against my knuckles and now my knuckles are bleeding onto my thighs but every time i make a shot i get to knock back a throat full of liquor. i slam down the glass until it cracks up the side and now the game is about who will still drink from it, who will risk shards in the belly, who will cut up their insides for a pack of newports and it’s not that i even want the cigarettes, it’s just that i am not afraid of blood which is also part of being a girl. but being the only girl means making yourself lose when you’ve won too much so i bounce the coin off the rim of the shot glass and let johnny slice me open. in thirty minutes, johnny is dragging me out of the bathroom by my wrists and i can hear him saying something about blood on the carpet, about a drunk girl in the house who is staining everything and i think that means i must be the champion of quarters. johnny is the kind of guy who sleeps with a gun, not women. but johnny is always the one inviting me over for a game of quarters and sometimes i wonder if this is how johnny fucks. like maybe he is the kind of man who only screams when he is underwater or lets me feel how strong his fingers are without actually touching me. maybe that’s why we’re all here, even the boys, to let johnny hold us like a barred window. i work a double one day a week and on this day, don’t answer johnny’s call. by one day a week i mean two men break in and shoot johnny in the temple for two thousand pills and i am scraping pasta from a businessman’s plate into the trash. at some point i’ll tell you why i didn’t go to the wake. i guess i never really knew johnny like that. by that i mean sober or in a church. when i say i didn’t go to the wake i mean i drove by his house every day for two years and the for sale sign never got taken down like the house would always be johnny’s, like maybe the whole town knew what happened there. like maybe no one could get rid of the blood.

Olivia Gatwood, “Backpedal”

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(via buttonpoetry)

[buttonpoetry]

a boy said he ‘liked my hair the other way’ so i shaved my head instead of my pussy.

Olivia Gatwood, “Alternate Universe in Which I Am Unfazed by the Men Who Do Not Love Me”

Only a few days left in our Goodreads giveaway of Olivia’s new book. Enter for a chance at one of 25 free advance copies!

(via buttonpoetry)

[inkywings]

if Icarus was a Muslim boy, I imagine his wings would rustle as he knelt to pray. I imagine, in the pomegranate pit of sunrise, he would fly towards God as the world yawned awake beneath him. not knowing that some truths ache. not knowing that brown burns best. in my Icarus’ city, dawn’s quiet stretches for years. in the elbow’s bend of his home’s ruin, the hour before sunrise is most sacred and also most sword — silence is relative to booming, to blast. clean sky is relative to spark, to smoke. when we talk, my Icarus and I, I wonder if his mother still calls him her olive, still wakes him with lips to forehead for fajr, still feeds him dates out of the good silverware. when we sleep, an entire unkempt ocean apart, I wonder, as the world yawns awake around him, if he asks God for salvation. I wonder, as rooftops shed their nightgowns and mango trees cast slow shade, if the salvation is me.

Fajr | Ramna Safeer (via inkywings)

[actuates]

and four years later you’re dancing around your kitchen with a pint of milk in your hand. the windows are open wide, the neighbors are still awake, and they are watching you. they are watching you fall in love with being alive.

from my drafts. |(morsus engel)| (via actuates)

[dwnsy]

[spacegirlstories]

So this is my act of contrition. A letter to the fires I couldn't put out. It begins: thank you for letting me try. It ends: fuck you for letting me try for so long.

fck.

[wellconstructedsentences]

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’ definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

Zadie Smith (via wellconstructedsentences)

[michellekpoems]

you will do well to remember this this feeling, this ache. This is how his love feels: hungry and a little angry. men who have been bruised and beaten are apt to be the last ones standing with a hand raised in the air. And I am not here to say how you should never love someone who has lived a life filled with demons. rather, remind you to find the ways his arms match his father’s and his father’s father’s. rather, remind you how they have ripped people like us from seam to seam. you will do well to remember this.

Michelle K., remember This. (via michellekpoems)

[goodreadss]

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Rumi (via goodreadss)

[bostonpoetryslam]

when you move you move like a carousel of flames see: a row of broken chairs in the pinerot see: a petal pressed between needle and skin

Kaveh Akbar, “Poem to a Conquerer,” published in The Rumpus (via bostonpoetryslam)