#everything gothic

[vanessa-ghuleh01]

[vanessa-ghuleh01]

[vanessa-ghuleh01]

[freosan]

Pole Studio Gothic

You are marked, a red splotch on the inside of each of your wrists. When you see this mark on others you do not acknowledge it, but you remember.

No one will speak of those who came before. You ask for the history of the sport, and you hear a story about eight hundred year old dances done by men in faraway countries. It rings false. No one will speak of the ones who taught your teachers’ teachers their skills.

Oh god. Legs do not bend that way. Yours does now.

The pole is sticky on your hands, but slippery under your knees. No, it is slippery as you climb, but sticky as you fall. It is cold in your thighs but hot on your shoulders. It refuses to conform to ordinary physics.

Your skin is dry and cracked. You refuse any creams or lotions that might repair it.

You seek flow. You achieved flow once. You cannot describe it, nor can you find a way back to it. You dance until your hands are blistered and your shins are one long bruise, but you do not achieve flow again. Perhaps flow was a mere dream or a shared delusion. You will not let yourself believe this. You seek flow.

You cannot explain the marks on your body. You will not explain the marks on your body.

Your friend jokes that you could crush a man’s head with your thighs. She laughs. You laugh too. The next class she makes the same joke again. You don’t laugh this time, but she does. The next class she makes the joke again, and her laughter is high and cackling. Have you seen her in those rust-red shorts before?

Your skin sparkles red and gold in the fading light outside the studio. You didn’t put glitter on today.

Your instructor takes one hand off the pole, then the other hand, then one leg, then the other. As she hovers, she tells you she saw this move on Pinterest.

The pole will not let go of the flesh of your inner arm. You leave it there.

[thehappiestgirlinthewholeusa]

MAN i love anything and everything gothic americana like think about southwestern gothic with flickering motel lights and thieves and snakes hiding in sunset deserts, but also new england gothic with deep dark woods and bodies sunk into the bottom of freezing lakes, and appalachian gothic with dirty-feet tangle-haired children and small crumbling houses and the wind whistling eerily, and even midwest gothic with lonely tractors rusting away in the sunlight and endless plains and plains of vast nothingness as far as the eye can see, florida gothic (old bones sunk into the swamp), wisconsin gothic (the town's been snowed in for weeks now, who knows what's happening up there), california gothic (they don't call 'em ghost towns for nothing), colorado gothic (something's living up in those mountains and it only comes out at night) and of course southern gothic to rule them all, a landscape of witchery, poverty, hellfire and damnation