Are You Free Tonight

October, Louise Glück

everything feels one room over

Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

DECEMBER 2023 (What I was given I shall never now forget / But my heart knows I'll never live this again)

May Sarton / Saisho / David Levithan / Emily St. John Mandel + Syllabillin / Hanif Abdurraqib / Svend Svendsen / Nia Vardalos / Naomi Shihab Nye [8,15] / Laura Makabresku / Mary Oliver [10,20] / Andrei Dobrynin / Hélène Cixous / Clifton Rooney / Walk the Moon / Rainer Maria Rilke / Heikala / Gracie Abrams / quinnie / Iris Scott / Mark Oliver Everett / Sally Rooney / Sara Roberts / Ask Polly

Salma Deera, Letters from Medea

In the future, children will think our ways are strange. "Why do old people always grow so much milkweed in their gardens?" they'll say. "Why do old people always write down when the first bees and butterflies show up? Why do old people hate lawn grass so much? Why do old people like to sit outside and watch bees?"

We will try to explain to them that when we were young, most people's yards were almost entirely short grass with barely any flowers at all, and it was so commonplace to spray poisons to kill insects and weeds that it was feared monarch butterflies and American bumblebees would soon go extinct. We will show them pictures of sidewalks, shops, and houses surrounded by empty grass without any flowers or vegetables and they will stare at them like we stared at pictures of grimy children working in coal mines

"my darling, you will never be unloved by me you are too well tangled in my soul"

— Atticus

My body is already an inhospitable environment, there’s no way a friggin baby would be able to survive in it

there is something wrong with me but together there could be something wrong with us <3

It’s weird to grow up in a family where you know you’re loved but you don’t feel loved. And then later in adulthood you understand how almost impossible it seems to cross that distance and let yourself experience closeness, how otherworldly love feels now and how love feels unbearable at times. You flinch when someone tries to wholeheartedly love you. And over and over you see so clearly how you cannot be loved unless it's from afar and love is mixed with that familiar sensation of distance and coldness.