#afterthelonely

[100xgrounder]

paint me yellow and orange like the sunrise; and drown me in your palette. this is what i’ll die for.

a.s.

[mitchell-parker]

I always expect you to be grateful when I show you a new poem I’ve written about you, like I’m not handing you tendon and muscle and enamel.

Like I’m not wrapping up and sending via USPS every bone in my body, individually.

As if the poems were any different than an Ouija board carved in skin that doesn’t remember the scarring

(In the words of Trista Mateer, sorry for all the poems)

[mitchell-parker]

I’m afraid I don’t know the difference between a helping hand and complete codependence.

I’m afraid I don’t know how to love without being engrossed, hang me by my fingernails before I give up even a moment of you and me, shared.

I don’t want to apologize for dragging you behind me at a galloping speed. I’m just afraid I don’t know when to tell it to stop growing; I never learned to adore without squeezing you so tight I break ribs.

-Well-Intentioned Greed

[butbetheserpent]

i’ll use my mouth to make you love me and words won’t feel like spiderwebs carefully crafted and woven into something beautiful but instead like ribbons and bows and other things my mother said while falling asleep at the wheel but it won’t feel dangerous. it might one day seem like frozen in time when moments stand still and i am stuck retracing patterns in the planes of your chest and staring out windowpanes that only reflect what is staring back at them instead of the other way around. maybe this is how you’ll love me with my hair pulled back and my makeup smeared clean off by the slope of your neck, where blood meets beating in the rhythm of the drums in my ribcage but the bruises don’t burn like they used to. i’m not used to feeling okay with my brick barricades razed to rubble but i’m learning a new way to accept the vacant spaces where old lovers once lived because the empty lot just got bought up and someone started laying foundation and his eyes carry promises that his hands can cash in without causing damage and i’m starting to think the new tenant has a voice that sounds familiar and i think i’m okay with it saying my name.

[soracities]

“  [...]  this is not a good thing (i am not a good thing)                                            i am barely a thing at all.”

-- Darshana Suresh (x)

[oceanportals]

when i told someone how i felt about you for the first time, they only nodded.   never understood how monumental it was, how saying the words ‘i like her,’ was like saving the library of alexandria. how saying 'her,’ was like digging up atlantis with my own hands. her. not a 'him,’ but a 'her.’

Darshana Suresh, from “heartquakes & other monuments,” Fleur

[artificialmonsters]

remember the night we saw the finale of a tv show we could never agree on?

i said, “i can’t believe he was still obsessed with her, after all those years.”

you sounded hurt when you told me, “he never stopped loving her. isn’t that beautiful?”

i wanted to say that yes, it was, but the journey to the happy ending wasn’t. i wanted to tell you that their love story made my own heart ache. that i so desperately craved someone who would make grand gestures for me. somebody who would show up at my doorstep in the rain, the distance between us finally meaning nothing. i wanted someone who would accept me piece by piece and love the mosaic it created. i wanted someone to love me without thinking.

real life doesn’t work that way. not for me, at least. the universe isn’t rooting for me. there will be no signs, no epiphany, no frantic declarations of love. just silent yearning.

“it’s pathetic,” i said instead, trying to hide my own shame at wanting something lasting, for identifying with the protagonist. “it must never have been love to begin with.”

nobody even knows what love is, anyway. maybe it’s just the absence of loneliness. maybe it’s just having somebody to hold. maybe it’s just a coping mechanism.

you asked, “who hurt you?”

i laughed and replied, “who didn’t?”

[elisabethhewer]

To be fair, as a gif maker myself, most of us search for original posts of said wording/poems but often are unfound, which is why it's a common thing to "credit" back to the other gif set inspired from, which draws back to the (hopefully) original. Totally understand where you're coming from, but just saying!

Listen, I’m sorry, I don’t want to be combative on here and I really appreciate how polite this ask is, but—frankly, this is a lazy excuse. I myself make gifs and graphics, and I have always, always been able to find the source. And if I can’t find the original source, I can at the very least link to the post where I first saw the quote/poem. But it’s incredibly rare that that happens. Most poems now (mine included) are posted in ‘quote’ form, which means a google search of the phrase I want to use in my gifset (using the “quotation marks” to search) brings up the original post, or at the very least reblogs of that original post which I can click on, and then go to the source of. Most themes offer a source for posts so you have to click on a maximum of two or three to be able to find them.

Some of my earlier poems from which lines are often used were posted in photo form. Obviously, a google search of the phrases there are not going to appear. That’s fair enough. However, what does appear if you google search the lines most commonly used (e.g. “Look to your kingdoms / I am coming for them all” or “God should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men”) are links to pages where people have posted those particular lines (with credit to me) or where they have commented with those lines on the original post. Which, again, will ultimately lead back to me. 

Also, you said it in your actual ask—you credit the original post, which ultimately (hopefully) leads back to my poem. If you’re expecting the people who see your gifset to  follow that thread, why can’t you as the maker?!

I know people don’t feel like putting all this effort into something they don’t see as a big  deal. Because sometimes it is very hard to find a source. But this is a big deal. We pour our time and our hearts into writing these words, and it really hurts that people can’t even be bothered to spend ten minutes googling to give us the credit we deserve.