#interpretation

[lesbianwriter64]

I love the part where she's on the swing and the rock falls off... it's a two person swing, it's meant to be done jointly by two people, like in a relationship, but she's the only one pushing. And then the rock even falls off, BECAUSE of the motion, because of the work she's putting in, and she has to pick it up and put it back on herself. She's doing all the work in the relationship

[escapismsworld]

[bloodmoths]

[nemfrog]

The Universal dreamer : containing the interpretation of a great variety of dreams. 1860. Cover art.

[bigbrojacky]

I’m NEVER finishing this

[thirdity]

Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.

Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation"

[spr1ngpvrinbwunnie]

💭 Some random headcanons for Coat Guy, be honest I pretty interested in him :) tho I deadass thought he's a woman at first, you know what hell yeah idc. I might do headcanon for the others depending on which one I like!

Sometimes he’s too polite to knock on doors, he just stands outside until someone notices.

He apologizes before leaving, even if no one is there.

He forgets his own birthday but remembers everyone else’s, even people who’ve died.

He smells faintly of pine needles, smoke, and cold air after snow.

He never raises his voice, even when angry but the temperature drops when he’s upset.

Before becoming a Visitor, he might’ve been a human researcher or resident who tried to understand the Visitors, only to be “assimilated” 🤔

He’s almost always cold, no matter the environment; even in heat he feels freezing. He may avoid physical exposure, showering, etc., out of fear or because it hurts or reveals too much.

Now, he remembers fragments of mundane things: coffee steam, winter rain, a friend’s laughter,... but they come out distorted. He can’t tell which are his memories and which belong to the Visitor who replaced him.

He doesn’t feel pain normally, he feels pressure, but not heat or sharp pain. The cold numbed his nerves. This makes him oddly calm in dangerous moments and he doesn’t flinch from wounds because his body doesn’t send him those signals anymore. But he still remembers what pain should feel like, and sometimes he pretends to react so people don’t get unnerved.

He yearns for touch but fears it, he hasn’t felt genuine warmth in years. His body temperature is far below normal, so his touch is freezing enough to cause frostbite if prolonged. He longs for someone to hold him, but he’s terrified they’ll recoil from the cold or die from it. So he keeps his hands buried in his pockets even when talking to people he trusts.

What he calls cold is actually the sensation of emptiness, a metaphysical absence of self. Every time someone leaves, lies to him, or looks at him with fear, it gets colder. When someone is kind to him, he swears the air warms by a few degrees.

Because he’s a Visitor (or because of his condition), his facial expressions are muted; he struggles to mimic human expressions, or doesn’t quite “know” how to express them. And sometimes he would practice in the mirror, even though it frightens him. He doesn’t remember how real smiles feel - the muscles, the heat, the meaning. But when the protagonist treats him kindly, he catches himself smiling without trying, and it shocks him.

He definitely has a soft spot for cats maybe because they move like he does: quiet, cautious, but curious. he says they “don’t ask for warmth, they just share it”. If the protagonist (or you/reader, whoever) adopted the cat from The Cat Lady, he’d probably sneak in late at night to see it, leaving faint frost where he stands. Sometimes the cat stares directly at the door before he arrives, like it knows he’s coming. He never dares to pick it up at first. he just sits nearby, coat rustling faintly, whispering things like “you’re smarter than people, you know that?” or “you don’t mind the cold, do you?”

When the cat finally approaches him, he freezes — afraid his touch will scare it off. but it only bumps its head against his knee and purrs. for a second, the frost on the ground melts. He often leaves food by the door, even though the protagonist already feeds it. half the time it’s small things like a sardine can or a piece of bread wrapped in paper, clearly something he traded for. He prefer talk to the cat more easily than to people. Soft muttering, like someone remembering how to speak kindly.

He can’t stand strong light; his pupils don’t adjust. That’s why he always appears under lamps with broken bulbs or by doorways.

He speaks Russian with a strange, timeless accent, not old and not modern. When he says certain words, it sounds like they echo..

The inside of his coat pockets feel larger than they should be. Once he pulled out a whole book, once a dead moth, once nothing but a soft breeze that smelled like pine.

No one’s ever seen him take off his coat. One rumor says that the coat grew into his skin. Another says he was born wearing it.

When he talks, sometimes steam comes out of his mouth even indoors. Once he tried to hold your hand to “see if you can feel the same” and your breath froze midair.

He couldn’t stand the emptiness in his chest anymore, so he tried to dig it out, thinking he’d find whatever part of him was missing. Instead, the emptiness stared back, and it never closed. He survived because the body refused to die, just… became hollow instead.

He muses about what it means to be human, what “Visitor” means, whether identity matters. Feels disconnected from humanity and from other Visitors; sometimes wonders if “they” are just reflections of human flaws.

He will collect small, pointless human things like: pocket change, scraps of paper, old receipts, a broken keychain,... he keeps them in his coat pockets. He doesn’t need them, but says they remind him that people once made things just to have them. When he feels especially detached, he empties his pockets and lines everything up to “see if any of them feel real today”