Rncpoems / Johnson 4/20 @2009 By NEA, Inc. / pencap / Iloveskies / Hafiz / Unknown /  Sunlit. Oil

Vincent van Gogh. Evening Landscape, Nuenen, 1885.

I'll tell you a secret: I felt like I was better. It couldn't happen to me. I was worldly and supported and had a plan and I spoke well and in 2 languages. The world was waiting to unlock itself to my potential. Back then, I had the secret fear that the world was too small for me.

And it happened anyway. The terrible cliché I felt too good for. I got stuck in the home town. Plans didn't work, and suddenly almost a year had passed and I'd spent it in an internship that was my plan H in a place that was my plan Never. And now, with bloody fingernails, I've held on to the easiest dream I had. Not even the pretty, big ones that I thought I'd conquer for fun and joy. The easy one. And I'm sick. Two years at a minimum, first time I've been sick like this. I can do nothing.

Time is running out and university is drawing closer and I was sixteen in a school I hated and I PROMISED myself I wouldn't let it come to this. I wouldn't cave. I'd take the time I want and I'd see the world and I thought I was so prepared. I thought the world was waiting for me. I thought I was so privileged. I thought that meant everything would be butterflies.

Why can't it be butterflies.

Bothersome beast, comforting friend

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

“Oh how do you stay positive when the world is so awful how can you stay positive when our lives are falling apart-“ SPITE!!!!! ITS SPITE GODDAMN IT!!! REMEMBER WHEN YOU WERE ANGRY AT THE WORLD AS A TEENAGER?? THAT KID WAS RIGHT AND YES IT FUCKING SUCKS AND NO, ITS NOT FAIR, SO YOU HAVE TO KEEP TRYING TO MAKE IT FAIR!!!!

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

I bought a quarterly needlepoint magazine from 1991 today for $1 at an op shop, and there’s a four page spread about a woman who completely faithfully remakes samplers from the 1600s and the part that blows me away is that she was keeping women in history alive.

The original sampler maker was a teenaged girl called Loara she’s the only one known of seven siblings in that family. She was born approximately 1632 and had passed before her father had in 1656 which they know because it was mentioned in his will.

So in the 1630-40s a girl made a sampler, in 1991 a woman had put in years of research before recreating the sampler as Loara had 350 years earlier , and I’m reading about it in 2024.

Embroidery keeps women alive in history, and it’s part of why I love samplers so much.

Here’s a quote from samplers that I think about often:

anyone who told you much ado about nothing is good and worth watching was RIGHT and you should listen to them

September approaching…I feel I owe myself a brief respite of leisure and no rushing around. I can't face the dead reality. I want rainy days, lanterns and a hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing yet inside my head.

Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Aurelia Plath written c. August 1951

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”

— Ilya Kaminsky, from “A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck,” Deaf Republic