#echo of an echo

[kallistoriae]

opening of the first part of this weird thing i’m writing.

[kallistoriae]

Rain pelted the oversized UPS jacket draped over his shoulders as he walked cradled in the heart of the valley, the land sweeping away from him toward boulderous clouds sinking into the horizon. He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light. He had not been forgiven and neither are you. The sky a benevolent grey as the afternoon drained to evening and the cold turned his breath to fog. Under his boots the tracks hummed from steady gales slamming the steel straps. Yes, it is beautiful here, which is why the ghosts never leave. I need you to know this as the town rinsed to a blur behind him.

— The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong

[kallistoriae]

sea-crossed prayers — 11/09/2025

i don’t really know what to think of this but it is emotionally important to me

[kallistoriae]

Promises are made to be broken. “Testifying from the inside … would mean the death and very suicide of the witness.” The tense is the future anterior—the past that will have been. Still I cannot quite get this right. I want so much to write in the subjunctive—the past that would have been—the mood/mode of subordination. That is why I am a top.

But I am a writer only when I surrender. For her, it is, I think, the other way around. She tops when she writes, she surrenders only for love. The writing does not heal, it merely smears balm on the savage wounds. She disagrees. We disagree.

Once upon a time we agreed to disagree about this, and we made up rituals where our conflicts could take full aim in the open air, under the trees where the crows sat on their perches and glared at us with their hot white eyes. They came every day, except when there was an abundance of rain that wet their feathers shiny black and weighed them to the ground. On those days, there was something missing, but we persevered and waited for the clouds to creep away from our sacred skies. For we had our memories and our hope. And we had found a way to make them one. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.

We kept the secret of our unholy rites. We believed that there was redemption possible in the repetition. The splitting and mending, tearing and suturing. We did not give a damn about the eyes that might have watched in horror our plunderings, our penetrations, our ravaged bodies calling to each other silently, holding, waiting, trusting that these ministrations could rip through the barriers of our past and keep us suspended together, forever, in the present.

A time without end. And the crows watched. First just one, then another lighted on the branch to partner the witnessing and watch the watcher. Now, there are three of them. The third one watches the other two watching, and marvels at their fixation on the empty space where two girls once lay naked, not nude, but bare and baring all. We risked everything. And lost. For there came a time when she began to retreat. Slowly she withdrew; I could see that her desire was curling up inside her chest, stagnating, festering. She had lost her ability to believe in the ways I had shown her to go deep into the wounds to scour them. I watched our fear growing until I began to be frightened of and for her. I dreamed that she spoke in a tongue I could not decipher. I took her in my arms and pleaded with her to let us work together to release the pain. One must go deeply into oneself in order to escape from oneself. I dreamed that I took her in my arms and screamed at her to come back, come back. Her eyes had become onyx. One bright day when mountains of snow from the blizzard were still piled high on the streets, refracting an even brighter light than the rays of the sun, I saw her from a distance and did not recognize her. Until afterwards.

— “Epilogue: Crows III,” Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism, Lynda Hart

[kallistoriae]

Clytemnestra, Gania Barlow

[id: Here is Clytemnestra’s grief:

It is sitting alone in a room too small for it. Arms and legs out the windows into the world. Moving, groping, kicking, sightless and swollen.

And somewhere someone is wearing Iphigenia’s perfume. Clytemnestra finds the scent in unexpected places, everywhere.]