Listen, The Silhouette Of A Person Is More Human Than AI Will Ever Be. Can You Hear Me? You Are A Body,

Care in their caress

through pain pricked fingers.

Love in the weaving

of comings and goings

Pas de deux He was a mortician. She was a seamstress. They wove stories of coming and going. All the unanswered, the unclaimed, the unknown became secondary. There was a lot of rain across a parched earth and they only saw relief of the end of a dance. But one dance leads on to another and another. The joy is in the twists, the dips always righted.

We have always been here

Vintage wlw will forever own my heart. We have been here for ages, and we won’t leave.

To all my darlings, and the ones I'll never know.

By @themararosa on twitter

all of the sudden you’re twenty-nine, standing on the sidewalk barefoot before bed, and the crickets sound just like they did when you were seventeen, sleepless with the windows open. when you remember sadness ran through your body like a fever. nights you were so familiar with the dark—the kind you watched break into daylight around 5, and the kind of restless sinking that never quieted. you remember thinking long and hard through those unceasing nights, in the hidden journals written in your young handwriting, that you’d never live past 18. whether a goal or a prophecy, you weren’t sure, but something felt definite that this grief would be the thing to pull you under, if only hoping a small peace would follow.

the sidewalk is rough, but still warm under your feet. it’s been so long since you’ve thought about this; somehow both twelve years and a lifetime ago. the dog finishes sniffing around the trees and bounds back to you, a happy familiarity once he catches your eye. you’ll both go upstairs to the room you love and fall asleep, in the house you love and share with your best friend. tomorrow, you’ll spend the day laughing, fingers intertwined with your partner, in a loving relationship you’d have never imagined possible.

twelve years after. how easily you saw it over, and what friendships, trips and cross-country moves, published books, new talents, heartaches and bad hair cuts, gardens, and long indulgent breakfasts you’ve accomplished since. you forgot there was a time you couldn’t see yourself alive past eighteen. now, you can’t picture ever wanting to leave this.

A special shoutout to LGBTQ+ Mormons and exmos this pride; to you in the closet, sitting awkwardly in sacrament meeting, finding excuses to duck out of homophobic Sunday school lessons, you, wearing a rainbow pin to girl's camp, you out and proud and still attending, enduring side eye from sisters and comments to "maybe tone it down" from your bishop. You, afraid to bring your partner home, you who's only Mormon on Sundays but can't bear to let your parents down (earthly and heavenly). To you who took the bravest step and left the church and your community, and feel like you'll never find a new one. To you who hears "no way you were a mormon!" but are still unravelling the trauma of purity culture.

I see you.

I love you.

It gets better.

First five years spent poor

Beaten, clawed by toxic stress.

A rough start, darling.

Acrylic paintings by Jason Limon on Instagram