#@inkskinned

[tomonkey4]

If my body is a temple, then what deity is worshipped within?

Those who use this phrase usually have an answer for you, but they have their own temple, and you need not let them dictate your life, your virtues, or your praise. How many temples does their god require? And should we praise one so greedy?

Do you want to sing your words of worship? Do you feel like dancing will bring praise to your values? Do you sometimes sit in your temple with closed eyes and meditate? Or perhaps like me you write your prayers and cast them into the void hoping that they will reach someone, and that they may send something in return so that you know you are not alone?

Do you worship a god of blood, of war, of terror? Do you praise the struggle against death, or the benefits of community, or the bounty of the world? Perhaps it is silence, peace, and ease that you hold dear?

Whatever it is that you have enshrined within your temple, engraved into the boney pillars and the domed ceiling, painted in a thousand colors on the mural above the altar, and filtering the light of the world through those two stained glass windows above the door from which your songs (or silence) ebb forth... Be sure to act within your temple in a way that glorifies those things.

I would like to encourage you to open your doors often, and let your worshipers spread the virtues to the world in which your temple belongs; I know however, that there are those who worship destruction, and those who insist they follow a better god, and there are many who would shutter your windows and bar your doors so that they are not forced to think about what others may worship. Therefore I also must caution you to not spread your art of praise where there is danger, but pray at all times within your temple so that your god never forgets you, so that your values are never corrupted, and that your life story is one that tells of how your temple mattered.

[pixelins]

thinkin’ about the quiet kindness & care in trinkets & treasures x 

[cryptidfuckery]

I don't want to become a tree.

I have a fascination with death. Not how it happens, not what happens after. I have a fascination with how death is handled by the ones left living.

I talked at length about it in the Egyptian gallery with you, surrounded by bodies misplaced. "Most of history we learn through the way we treat our dead." Which is true, I think, for the most part.

We have written and oral history. We have the skeletons of buildings and cultures left behind for us to interpret. But before that, before the corpses of civilizations we're still able to uncover, we have our own.

The oldest body ever found is argued to be 230,000 years old. Hundreds of millennia, a culture so lost to time and decay we can't hope to uncover significant artifacts.

Our bodies become the artifact. The way we were buried, where, with what, with who. Was there care put into our final resting spot? Was there effort put into the ends of our lives?

Most often, there was. Our bodies tell our descendants our status. Our injuries. Our community. Our loves.

Perhaps they'll debate. Perhaps they'll misinterpret. But millennia later, your body might tell someone how we lived. How we loved. What we cared about at our core. What we thought would help us after death. What we thought we'd want to continue our comfort. What the living needed to let us pass on from their lives.

You tell me you still think about what I said.

Many people talk about becoming a tree when they pass. It is a beautiful notion, one I've considered. A natural, living reminder of a life lived. A place for their loved ones to share a connection with. In a way, the continuation of a life; albeit in a different form.

But I don't want to become a tree. I'd rather become a forest.

Maybe it's a notion toward the state of our world. The lack of top soil is one of the prevalent factors of our declining environment. The way we've stripped it of the nutrients of decay.

There are ways to decompose naturally. In the ground with nothing but a natural shroud is the oldest and easiest way. A new, human composting method has been created for an urban option when the easiest is unavailable. An alternative to cremating. One that can give back to the earth.

My body might not be one that tells the story of my time alive on this planet. My body might tell a joke, or rest peacefully, or ideally decay away. My DNA will dissolve into nitrogen and an assortment of other elements. I will become no different or better than the dirt that lies around me. What was me will become something else entirely.

I'd rather become the top soil. I'd rather become the forest.

[holywaterandblood]

commentary on addiction

it begins with your hair falling out in chunks in the shower and you think - it wasn’t supposed to be like this. it begins with you stealing the money from your mother’s wallet, and going to stay the night at rebecca’s house (the one with the big eyes? yeah, her). you sleep on a park bench - you and rebecca haven’t spoken in years. 

it begins with her finding the little black box you keep in your backpack. you see, she saw the light slowly dying behind your green eyes as the powder turned your blood into fire. she saw it before your father, who puts whiskey in everything these days. she saw it before your brother (you two used to be so close). she saw it even before you.

it begins with her trying to save you, with her stroking your tired face until you’ve thrown up all the hurt, all the anger, and then she flushes it down the toilet. it begins with her staying up all night, wondering where you are, praying that bad man hasn’t yet caught up with your lies - i’ll get you the money. i just need more time.

it begins with the rashes on your arms, with your fingertips turning blue, and you realize you’ve been dead far too long to still be breathing. it begins when you decide to finish the job, because maybe the people at the funeral home your mom books (even though it’s far too expensive) will fix you up real nice. you think - it wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

[akaiiros]

and it goes like this: a game of truth or dare and a quiet “no” when i’m asked if i’ve lost my virginity yet, the other girls in the group haven’t either and i don’t want to be labeled as a slut or anything, it had been a mistake and i didn’t like counting it anyways.

my best friend corners me afterwards, she knows, of course she does, smirks at me. “you lied,” she says, conversationally. “yeah.” “i thought you never lied?” she raises an eyebrow. i don’t lie about my opinions, about the things i choose to say. “about this, i do.”

it goes like this: a game of truth or dare and a “yes” through a smile when she’s asked if she’s lost her virginity, the reptilian eyes that cut towards me as i shrink within myself, exit the game a few rounds later because some of these people know far too much about me as it is.

she comes up to me again, maybe a little drunk now, i sigh. “i may have let something slip?” she starts, my mouth twitches. “did they put two and two together?” i ask. “i don’t know how they would have. but maybe,” she admits. i roll my eyes and my veins turn to ice. she owns the only two of my secrets i want kept and candy rolls out of her mouth every time she opens it.

“i’m sorry,” she says. “it’s fine, it doesn’t matter anyways,” i say. it’s the kind of thing i don’t want people to know. it’s the kind of thing kept hidden even if it doesn’t mean anything and if everything stays the same. it’s the kind of secret you admit twenty years later at a reunion that everyone’s shocked by. i shrug.

“i’m really sorry,” she repeats. we pass the boy with the lizard eyes and he grins at me, sickly sweet, accusatory smile. i give him my best puzzled glance, try not to trip while walking past. months later, he’ll ask me about it, and i’ll glare at him until he apologizes.

“it’s okay,” i repeat. “i mean secrets are never kept forever, people were going to find out eventually.” only the two of us knew, of course, so it wasn’t a given. but whatever. a year later, we’ll finally say it out loud and admit it to ourselves, but not today.

we get back to our shared hotel room. the beds are just short of comfortable and the thin covers are overly warm in the blistering rainforest heat. i change into the lightest sleeping clothes i brought. she settles into her own bed a few feet over, hair an unbrushed mess. “at least take your contacts out,” i sigh.

minutes, hours pass. “do you want to cuddle?” she asks, no preamble. i turn over on my side, trying to pretend to be asleep. i can hear her nose scrunch all the way from my side of the room. “i’m sorry, okay?” she says again. “it’s fine. c‘mere.” i always give in.

it’s too hot for this, i think, but she manages to tangle all of her limbs through mine, latching on like a koala. my hand finds it’s way to her hair, starts brushing out the knots. i might have kissed her forehead, she might have been asleep. we wake up and nobody knows for sure.

and it goes like this: i always get an extra box for food because i know she never finishes hers, and she always shows up an hour late for plans because she fell asleep. i call her at night to tell her to stop procrastinating by stress-cleaning her room, and she brings me coffee at school in the mornings. she steals all of my clothes even though she owns forty different sweaters and if i ever ask her to pick me up, we have to end up going back to her house so she can finish getting ready.

it goes like this: i love her, and she loves me back.

[wokeuplateagain]

it’s dark out.

the sun set a day ago and my mouth is filled with a taste somewhere between blood and you. actually, it’s exactly like that day you pulled me out of the water, i almost drowned, busy trying to see something down at the bottom. something that looked a bit too much like me. you pushed air back into my lungs and i coughed so hard my spine felt the weight. you kept me from there on out, said you liked me but i think you were afraid because of all the words neither of us would say.

here, i’ll say them now.

you didn’t save me, i promise. i was out there trying to find what was down and up so i could sink beneath the light and never return. i wasn’t leaving anywhere, i was finding my way home in the only thing strong enough to raise me. i’ve been a sea creature since the day i left my mother’s body. i was never meant to have legs, long and thin and perfect for you to tie down. scratch the skin at the nape of my neck, feel the scales and be afraid. look into my eyes baby, they’re blue-green and murky. they’re everything you didn’t see when you pulled that corpse out of its grave. faded at the edges and tinged with black. everything you tried to ignore. say what you want, and how you think you feel. they lied when they told you sirens weren’t real.

[take-me-to-a-fictional-land]

A quick sketch of an inkskinned quote that hit close to home

[holywaterandblood]

I send this in the aftermath. Always more painful than the pain itself is the memory of what came before. It’s like when a bomb goes off in a village. People die, sometimes many. There’s pain, and there’s fear, but after the bomb has gone off, in the weeks, months, sometimes years that follow, that pain is amplified by nostalgia and regret. I’d love to say that I was innocent, that you came with your fire and your dynamite and held me against the floor, but the truth is I burnt my own village to the ground.

I send this in the aftermath, knowing that nothing I could say will change your mind about me, about what I did. I’m tired, and I’m angry at you, but I’m more angry at my self-sabotage. At my inability to keep a good thing from devouring me, from becoming me, until I’m desperate to get away. “You’ve always had a very obsessive personality,” my mom told me, “be careful your version of him doesn’t consume you.”

I send this in the aftermath. Don’t you see how easy it was becoming for me to just put on the skin of this girl that you wanted, this character that I began to crave playing, until I didn’t want to take it off at night? So I left. Leaving: a word that here means the destruction of the girl you loved, and the birth of a girl that I will learn to love. I left because the more I adored you, the less I stand myself. I stayed because my lies came more naturally than the truth. I send this in the aftermath.