twist of fate

a little confused, i remember well...

[theparisreview]

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64 (via theparisreview)

[hirxeth]

[twistoffate]

Look but don't touch

[theparisreview]

There is no such thing as ‘was’ - only ‘is.’ If ‘was’ existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.

William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12 (via theparisreview)

[psychoticviking]

[exhaustedscreen-deactivated2019]

‘…she had for the first time in her life the most precious thing of all: solitude. She had a room all to herself. She could hardly believe that all this space was hers. And not a word was heard. So she danced in an act of absolute courage, since her aunt couldn’t hear her. She danced and twirled because being alone made her: f-r-e-e! She enjoyed everything, of this arduously obtained solitude, the radio as loud as it would go, the vastness of the room… I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my entire life, she thought. She owed nothing to anyone and no one owed her a thing. She even allowed herself the luxury of boredom - a quite unusual boredom.’

- Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (London: Penguin, 2011; first published 1977), p.33.

[philamuseum]

The Museum has a fantastic collection of eye miniatures—tiny watercolors from the turn of the 18th century that depict the eye of a loved one. Say “eye” love you by making your own on Wednesday Nights, Feb. 3, 10, and 17.

Photo via Instagram by @markatthemuseum

“Portrait of a Left Eye,” c. 1800, made in England

“Portrait of a Right Eye,” c. 1800, made in England

“Portrait of a Man’s Right Eye,” c. 1800, made in England

[twistoffate]

The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too)

While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, [...]

’The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.’

[twistoffate]

Teach me mortality, frighten me / into the present. Help me to find / the heft of these days. That the nights / will be full enough and my heart feral.

Jack Gilbert, from ‘I Imagine The Gods’  

[bbydontforget-deactivated202508]

[twistoffate]

always

[musicistheart-deactivated201901]

[melvillehouse]

goals

[slaughterhouse90210]

“Physical forwardness as intellectual high-wire act: the pleasure not of pleasure but of performance and revenge against the retainer, the flute, the stack of expectations. Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sound familiar? It is. No story on Earth is more common.]”

–Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

[funnyasxvideos]

When bae actin crazy for no reason 😂😭 tag a cry baby

[twistoffate]

'What are you thinking' he asked me that night with his teeth, and I thought about what I was thinking about and I worried that I was slipping away from making sense, but I gripped hard on that sense and said, 'Oh, nothing, just how I love you,' and I twisted my toes under the sheets and told myself to be a woman who lives normally, being loved and loving - and I could be her - couldn't I? Couldn't I?

Nobody is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey

[twistoffate]

As the years went on I sometimes could have sworn that the existence of my husband and the whole complicated mess of of him in my life was everything that was wrong with being alive and if I only extracted myself from him everything might go back to making sense the way it had when we had been new to each other. If he was no longer a part of my life then the fact that he was no longer a part of my life would be *new* and maybe the newness was what had made me make sense to myself - not him, another human, just fallible and breakable and not capable of creating redemption - because that's the thing: people can't really redeem people and I don't know what redeems people, what keeps people good, what keeps people in the sense-making part of being a human instead of the senseless, the unwell, the wildebeests that everyone has - because we all have them and there is a part of every human brain that just can't bear and be, can't sit up straight, can't look you in the eye, can't sit through time ticking, can't eat a sandwich off a plate, can't read the newspaper, can't put on clothes and go somewhere, can't be married, can't keep looking at the same person every day and being looked at by the same person every day without wanting to make him swallow a tiny bomb and set that bomb off and make him disappear, go back in time and never get near this man who is looking at you and living with you and being so happy to just love and be loved and we all sometimes want to walk away like it never happened. Isn't everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you're in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love - and to love someone is to know that one day you'll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame - and your wildebeest, everyone's wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can't bear the tension of walking around the world as if we're always going to be walking around the world, because we're not, because here comes a cancer, an illness, a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.

Nobody is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey

[twistoffate]

In that dark autumn and even darker winter we kept meeting for coffee, meeting in parks and plazas and diners and having long hugs and before this I had not been the type of person to want to hug a person, but no I didn't even think of who I had previously been and what I had previously done because now the only thing that made sense was our shaking chests pressed together because when we were together we were alive and human in a way we had not found in other parts of life, and we would spend hours sitting on benches in cold parks until it got dark and we would go and eat something together and we did this many days in a row, then after a few months we went to his apartment while it was snowing and we fucked like our lives depended on it, like every life on the planet depended on it, like the concept of death depended on it, like the state of being human, and being alive, in general, depended on our fucking. And this went on for a while and I became a haver-of-authentic-emotions, an openhearted, well-adjusted, and thriving person, a dependable employee, a woman who could go to a deli and order a sandwich and eat it and read the newspaper like a grown woman without thinking of the sentence 'I am being a grown woman, eating off a plate, and reading the news', because I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just *was* instead of a person who was almost. For a year or so I thought that was how it would always be, that I had achieved some plane of existence that was better than the one I'd been on previously and there was no going back, but I was wrong and there was going back and I went back, I went back and forth, and forth and back again--

Nobody is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey

[twistoffate]

Some people make us feel more human and some people make us feel less human and this is a fact as much as gravity is a fact and maybe there are ways to prove it, but the proof of it matters less than the existence of it - how a stranger can show up and look at you and make you make more sense to yourself and the world, even if that sense is extremely fragile and only comes around occasionally and is prone to wander or fade - what matters is that sometimes sense is made between two people and I don't know if it's random or there is any kind of order to it, what combinations of people work the best and why and how do we find these people and how to we keep these people around, and I don't know if it's chaos or not chaos but it feels like chaos to me so I suppose it is.

Nobody is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey