You Hurt Me With Your Fragile Words;

   —  Anna Akhmatova, "The Sentence," from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer

[text ID: Today I have so much to do: / I must kill memory once and for all, / I must turn my soul to stone, / I must learn to live again—]

I am half finished, incomplete as the moon in it's phases, yet still I am curved into a crescent smiling at my shadowed half

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”

— Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’

'...from the nineteenth century onward, Cinderella conveyed the explicit message that personal goodness and virtue merit reward, and that goodness and virtue are, and will be rewarded. As a generality, it is fair to say that most people believe themselves both good and deserving; thus the message that goodness will be rewarded is well suited to the hopes and needs of the large part of every country’s population that does not live in comfort. Furthermore, stories like Cinderella, in which magical assistance plays a prominent role, foster an existential belief in eventual assistance, whatever the presenting problem may be, and support hope for a happier and better future. For poor girls in the nineteenth century, for whom so few opportunities for social rise from the depths of misfortune to the highest imaginable joys existed, Cinderella could stand for a way out and a way up.'

Ruth B. Bottigheimer, 'Cinderella: The People's Princess' in Cinderella across Cultures, ed. M. H. D. Rochere (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016).

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis // @i-wrotethisforme // Jorge Louis Berges // @smokeinsilence //@viridianmasquerade //Jorge Louis Berges // @honeytuesday // Kaveh Akbar // F. Scott Fitzgerald // AKR //Olivie Blake, from “Alone With You in the Ether” // Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrimage

Dont talk to me OR my gaping wound ever again

I know I'm turning ugly

A turpentine tree trunk

Twisted as the shadows

Lengthen and silhouettes

Soften, someone show me

How to make anything but

A fist— I bruise, I burn, I

Hold on to everything

That wants to let me go

I am growing stunted with

The skillet slant of the sun

Playing hide-and-seek

I have lost or I am losing

And the ink in my veins

Falls in splotches insensible

In this eternal, internal rain

I have a mouth made for

Despair, I have learned to

Chew the air before my

Weary lungs can swallow

Hold me over a rainbow

Hold me over the tearful seas

Hear the blackbird calling

Calling through the breeze

Friday, 23rd July 2021

The moon was swallowed in a throbbing light

As the thunder began its climbing flight

And in the dawn of a swelling tide

She saw inside the world dressed in spite

everything just really comes down to how I wasn't a person for most of my life. by which I mean I did not consider myself a person. it made such a profound impact on the way I navigated the world & yet standing on the other side of it I could hardly explain it to you