With the threshold of my thirties drawing closer, I find myself in a strange middle ground. On one hand, there is my "adult" path: healing and strengthening my spirit and body after years of suffering; building a future where I can live autonomously, facing the thousand uncertainties of the world outside my tortoise shell—hopefully with the financial independence that, as my parents age, can no longer wait.
On the other hand, healing also means mourning one's former self. It means trying to understand what remains of that slightly arrogant teenager with big dreams who, if she could, would have written fanfiction every single day. It’s about digging to see what stayed the same and what, instead, matured (...or worsened...) through an adult lens—a perspective that fortunately tends to lose the absolutism of youth, but also, perhaps unfortunately, that idealistic drive and hunger for the "Infinite" that seems to fade with the so-called "maturity."
In this middle ground, I sometimes find myself tidying up my room, opening boxes of notebooks from years past, and reading pieces like the one I recently rediscovered and will share with you shortly.
Speaking of the infinite,
I believe it was seeing the film Leopardi directed by Mario Martone that triggered that rush of words. As a biography of Giacomo Leopardi, the work received some criticism back in 2014, but it must be credited with inspiring someone and sparking interest in one of the most misunderstood authors in Italian literature. If it wasn't that film, it was certainly a drama from that period. Maybe The Danish Girl? I adored that when I saw it with my best friend years ago.
It happened often back then: I’d see a movie that stirred something powerful in me, I’d think back to the philosophy lessons with Professor C. and then I’d go home to write in my notebooks. I should go to the cinema alone more often. Or apologize to my friend E. when I don't stop to chat afterward, saying: "I have to go, I got stuff to tell the paper!"
I don’t know if this old page has any artistic value, nor if it will resonate with the sensibility of others, or if it will tell you something new or make you empathize with the past Orca Raminga. Trying to play literary critic on my teenage self, after all, would have the same pedantry that seems to seep through these pages when I cite the tension toward the infinite or Michelangelo. I have always been too self-critical, so your critiques would likely be more merciful than any I’d give myself.
Reflecting on what I wrote as a teenager, I’ve now written far more words than the work itself. Perhaps becoming an adult is also thinking too much about one's adolescence, rather than asking: today, after all this time, do I still believe that art is a black ocean?
I’ll leave you with my thoughts from back then, translated as i can without too much editing, because it wouldn't make sense any other way. Then, perhaps, one of you can explain to me what it means to be an adult with the ambition of living for and from Art (literary, visual, etc.), because I don’t think I’ve figured it out just yet.
Sometimes I have this strange, agonizing vision that haunts me so deeply, I must describe it to you: it is an ocean.
A black ocean, vast and wondrous, immersed into the deepest and darkest of nights. There is no moon, there are no stars. You know what it is because, in your tiny boat, you endure the motion of the waves—sometimes a cradle, other times a slap. Your ears hear the soft murmur of the water, the sky’s roar of rage when the storm breaks. Your mouth tastes the salt that seems to season the very air. Your eyes! You do not know if they are blind, your eyes, or if they see nothing simply because there is no light. Your only certainty is that you are nothing in the infinite marine vastness. A certainty that, however, makes you uncertain. The fear of losing yourself, or of being unworthy of such navigation, is overwhelming. It is so strong it paralyzes you. So you stand there, hands in pockets, hood pulled down, trying to guess where the horizon lies.
Your courage, if you have any, will be to take the helm rather than return to the safety of the shore, traveling through those mysterious waters until the first light of dawn arrives to tell you who you truly are—or until you lose yourself, drowning in those deep abysses by accident or by your own will.
This, to me, is the true conception of art.
An ocean you will never be able to see in its infinite entirety.
One has never seen an exalted violinist who was also an exalted sculptor, and I cannot imagine a famous architect also renowned for his lyrical compositions. The man, the ARTIST, yearns for perfection; he maneuvers (or tries to) through infinite styles and arts throughout history but, like Michelangelo’s Adam, he will never be able to touch the Supreme Source of that which shakes our soul and heart. He can only draw near. Close enough to almost brush against it, but never touch.
And it is this bittersweet awareness, perhaps, that makes us artists mad enough to be, at times, even self-destructive.
Because we cannot comprehend, we cannot SETTLE for being close, when our greatest desire is to embrace that something many would call God, some the Universe, and others, simply, the Self.
This light, this fire and lighthouse, is what we wait for so the sky may light up. So we may reach Certainty.
And even if this Certainty annihilates us, even if this Fire consumes us and this Lighthouse blinds us… we will never stop craving it, never stop feeding upon it.
Whatever the price of our choice may be.
uh have y’all read “daughter of smoke and bone” by laini taylor? yes? destiel au. no? allow me to explain. (spoilers for dosab)
so the plot of daughter of smoke and bone is that karou, the adopted human daughter of a ram-dragon-lion-bear monster who trades teeth for wishes through a magical quasi-teleporting shop, starts finding that the doors across the world that open into her dad’s teeth shop have been burned with handprints on them. before she gets a chance to bring this up to her dad, she gets attacked by an angel in morocco. the angel pauses just long enough to stop from killing her when she cocks her head a certain way and her snake-woman adoptive mom pulls her into the teeth shop to safety. she passes out, wakes up, goes through a forbidden door and finds a cathedral of more human-animal hybrid corpses with whom she has matching tattoos, one of them wakes up and tries to kill her, her dad shows up, rescues her, drags her back to the human world and kicks her out. a few days later all the doors, all across the world, that have all been marked with a handprint, burn away and karou can’t get back to her family.
a few weeks later, akiva, the angel who attacked karou in morocco, can’t get her out of his head and he eventually realizes that it’s because the way she cocked her head was the exact same way his dead monster girlfriend used to before she was executed. things happen, karou figures out how to fly, they beat each other up a bit, they go out for breakfast—eventually a few of akiva’s siblings show up to yell at him for ???whatever it is that he’s doing? fucking a human? they’re not sure. and akiva has some important revelations.
it turns out that through complicated magic involving teeth and pain her dad was building bodies for soldiers who were killed in the chimera people’s’ war against the angels. karou was one of these soldiers. she was mostly human and, and this is important, incredibly hot. an evil prince was creepy with her. at once point after a battle she found a dying enemy solider and decided not to kill him and instead tied a tourniquet and led her comrades away from him. akiva was instantly in love and he dedicated the next several years to finding a way to sneak across enemy lines and into a city where he would be both easily recognizable and killed on sight, just so he could thank her. he does find her again, he gives her a chance to avoid marrying the creepy prince, they dance, they fall in love, they have a month long sex marathon and plot to end the millennia-long war between their peoples, they get ratted out and imprisoned. karou 1.0 gets executed first, they make akiva watch, she possesses her snitch of a sister and frees him. he has no idea it was her and knocks her out and she wakes up as a human baby because her dad secretly rescues her and gives her a safe life as a human with no idea where she came from.
meanwhile akiva has gone absolutely crazy with grief. what does he do while karou was fingerpainting and playing with her dad’s tail? spends seventeen years planning a genocide against her people because they executed her. that’s what he was doing in the human world. that’s what he was doing those few weeks between karou getting kicked out and him returning to the human world. so he succeeded in pretty much wiping out her people and killing her family and he realizes too late that her family actually had saved her and he has fucked up badly.
it’s terrible and painful and brilliant. it’s the first book in a trilogy—the second one involves karou doing teeth magic in a sandcastle and akiva trying to save as many of her people as he can as penance, the third involves their respective armies in a tentative truce to stop another faction of angels before they can buy nukes from the pope and karou and akiva trying to have sex in a shower/on an autopsy table but his sister and his grandma keep getting in the way. it’s my favorite book series of all time.
all this to say: destiel au.
cas and dean have one (1) interaction and cas falls in love, leading him to eventually forsake his people? cas discovering a new and truer meaning of faith and hope because of dean? cas doing a genocide? cas doing insane things in monster land as penance for his crimes?
i didn’t get so much into it because if my summary of the book was any longer I should have just copied the book entirely, but karou is both an incredible badass and she blames everything bad that has ever happened on herself. who does that remind you of. also bobby would be his sorcerer adoptive dad. sam can take the place of karou’s human best friend and be like, a kid that dean met as a twelve year old living on his own and decided to raise. or karou 1.0’s much younger friend that looked up to her and tried to save her and later helps her stage a very very secret coup. doesn’t matter.
anyway all this to say: cas is an angel who commits genocide and does insane things in the name of the person he’s in love with regardless of how he’d feel about them; dean hurts himself for the convenience of others and refuses to let himself be happy; i would like to see them in my favorite book series from high school. someone, even if you haven’t read this book series, please talk to me about this au.
me saying ill be active but then not having proper time management with my irl shit and not getting time to be active for my silly lil online activities 😔😔😔
Why I Won't Listen Too Other's Opinion's of My Life.
Why I Won’t Listen Too Other’s Opinion’s of My Life.
Everyone has an opinion, a say in something. And that’s completely fine in some areas but not in others.
My life. My rules. I used to care and listen to people’s opinion’s about me all the time. I tried to become what they wanted and ended up crashing. Looking in the mirror I began to see what these opinion’s had done to me. So I broke all those chains, dropped the shackles and removed the…
“And maybe what growing up really means is knowing you don’t have to be just a character, going whichever way the story says. It’s knowing you could be the author instead.”
