X O

I'm Matt, I write. "I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful." Virginia Woolf

[cleopatragirlie]

[thebuddiediaries]

Ingrid Bergman (1949)

[sowhatifiliveinfukuoka]

Raymond Depardon

Glasgow, Scotland (1980)

[lovefrenchisbetter]

Robert Frank, Paris 1951

[vonsalomon]

[shihlun]

Masahisa Fukase, Seikan Ferry Boat, 1975

[cascos-e-caricias]

Scotland | Glasgow (1980) by Raymond Depardon

[ortodelmondo]

Garry Winogrand - Nova York, ca. 1962

[universalitiesmhm]

Broken

I find myself thinking of things I had forgotten about her. About us. Things I loved, then took for granted. Things that were familiar, now completely alien. I thought she would always be there. Always at my side, much more than a companion, she was a partner. And then she was gone and I was alone again. I ate alone. Walked alone, lived alone. Two halves broken back to one. But I’m good at it pushing away. Good at turning something monumental and making it insignificant. I destroy worlds with a thought. The future I had built in my mind, the one we talked about on long car rides or just before we fell asleep, the plans we wrote down on calendars-- now erased without fanfare. I’m good at killing what I felt, excellent at pretending.

I see things I want to tell her about but I keep my mouth shut. I hear a joke she would have liked and clench my teeth. Everyday is the same. I work alone, I come home alone, I sleep alone. My achievements are solitary celebrations, my failures quietly accepted.

Months go by. Time dulls the pain to a background lull. I walk the streets of the city with headphones neatly tucked into my ears. I keep the outside world at a fair distance.

The weather’s getting cold, which feels oddly appropriate. And then, she is with someone else. Just like that, all we had is gone, truly gone this time. They laugh and discover one another. I see it in my perfect imagination. The winter dark comes and with it a storm. Ice and tempest winds. I thought I knew loneliness when she left, but that was only absence. Loneliness is when she is with him, it’s the words they trade late at night in warm beds while mine freezes. Loneliness is comforting, like a friend you’ve always known but don’t like very much. It is burying grief with your own hands.

And here you have to be careful. Because now women start to look like the right shape to fit your absent bed. But they do not have names and you don’t want to hear it if they do. You tell them where you are so it is understood and if you’re using them they’re using you just as much. Winter doesn’t end. You don’t meet anyone, not even a shape with no name. You don’t talk, for hours every day you don’t say a word out loud. You barely notice it and when you do it makes you want to cry. But I can’t cry. It’s been taught out of me. So I don’t cry and I don’t speak and sometimes I see a picture of her and it’s okay. I’m not mad. I’m barely sad. It isn’t about her anymore. But it’s too soon to be about anyone else. So there’s the interim. And in that space you find your family and friends. And you feel what it's like when your lungs don’t work and you’re grateful when they do again, and you know what it means to be healthy, which you were in the first place then forgot. And now you see you are not as broken as you thought. It is just a moment. Because winter will end, and though you can’t see it yet, you believe it, because it’s ended before, and you were there. Remember that now, have faith in what you can’t feel. Believe in the Sun.

[universalitiesmhm]

A calloused heart is not a callous heart. It is hard from bearing its softened.

A callous heart is a living scar. It is a no, where there was once a yes. It is faith proved wrong.

[redlipstickresurrected]

Paul Landacre (American, 1893-1963, b. Columbus, OH, USA) - Sultry Day, 1937, Woodblock Prints: Ink, Color on Paper

[universalitiesmhm]

SessionsX Podcast, an anthology of the unexplained. 

[universalitiesmhm]

‘Ozymandias’ Read by Bryan Craston,

Video by schoolanthem.tumblr.com

[universalitiesmhm]

This is what it feels like to lose you. A chest full of rocks, a sickness in the bones. Trying to fill the time. Trying to make myself laugh.

Time is the worst because it keeps on going.

A belly of dead worms. Liquid bones. Sick without a temperature.

Hating myself for hurting you, hating myself for being hurt by you. Liking myself in the memories.

Dreading good news I can’t share. Fearing momentos of us. Loving you even when I don’t want to. Weighing the options between pettiness and grace. Hating grace for being the right choice.

Wanting my sorrow to be cinematic. Listening to sad songs. Writing poems. Sick all the way to Sunday.

[historicaltimes]

Confirmation ceremony, 1939, Sweden.

via reddit

[universalitiesmhm]

The following is the first document compilation effort by The Massachusetts Town & Counties Historical Society. Unlike previous volumes regarding Woodland’s history, the following book consists mostly of pages from personal diaries, unpublished memoir excerpts, police statements, and newspaper clippings found abandoned in the town of Woodland, MA, as well as correspondences and other writings submitted from outside of the town. As always, great care has been taken in the effort to collect the following documents. The Massachusetts Town & Counties’ Historical Society does not make any claim regarding the incident itself, the following is only an effort in preserving history, with an unparalleled look into life prior to the tragic events which took place in Woodland in the winter of 1994.

[missveronicalakes]

Rare photo of Veronica Lake in the 1940s.