I Want Someone To Run With Under The Rain, Someone Who Wants To Paint With Me Even If Painting Is Not

When I was younger, I was in love with the idea of moving out to a lone island and never speaking to anyone again. I wasn’t good at talking, physically, nor did conversations come easy to me, so I kept quiet and I was totally fine with that. But while the people closest to me rolled their eyes at my wishes (again, lone island), nobody told me how talking to people was fun. Nobody told me how nice of a feeling it was to feel a new friendship blossom, to have inside jokes with people, to hand out compliments and get them back, to ask questions to people who are excited about having the answers, to remember something that someone mentioned last time and make them feel heard, to flatter people, to share slightly embarrassing facts and be able to laugh about them, to have people to say hi and bye to. It took me years and years and years to gather the courage to speak, but it was so worth it. It’s so much fun.

“from the moment i met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. i was dominated, soul, brain and power by you. you became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. i worshipped you. i grew jealous of everyone to whom you spoke. i wanted to have you all to myself. i was only happy when i was with you.”

mr oscar wilde, you’re telling me that they’re just friends?

In Greek, "nostalgia” literally means "the pain from an old wound”. It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards, it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

Don Draper, “The Wheel”

Fiction doesn’t exist to provide us with comprehensive instructions to navigate life. It exists to provide us with the perspective, questions, critical consideration, exploration, beauty, and escape we need to figure it out for ourselves.

Some illustrations from Astronomy, Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles and Made Easy to Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics by James Ferguson (1799).

the fact that time passes and things change and people leave and you can only go back to a place physically and you will never be 14 15 16 again………….. i don’t understand how we are meant to endure that

Obsessed with the idea of sacrifice in a book being a selfish act rather than a selfless one. Their lover screaming at them: “How dare you leave me in this barren world? How dare you take away my choice to die for you and leave me with this grief?”. They are dead, and their lover is left - a gaping wound - bleeding into the ground. Do they love them so much that they would die for them, or do they love them so much that they forced the other to live without them? Sacrifice as a bitter act. Sacrifice as something wildly violent; something tormentingly cruel — but always, always built on love. Perhaps, they are both martyrs in the end.

Taylor Swift (2006)

Any nostalgia I feel is literary. It’s not the stillness of evenings in the country that endears me to the childhood I spent there, it’s the way the table was set for tea, it’s the way the furniture was arranged in the room, it’s the faces and physical gestures of the people. I feel nostalgia for scenes. Thus someone else’s childhood can move me as much as my own; both are purely visual phenomena from a past I’m unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

being an only child and not close with your parents is hard when you love talking and can’t keep your mouth shut and are constantly making jokes. like i’ve always just kinda talked to myself since i had no one to talk to and now being think i’m weird. i cant be the only one who will have full on conversations out loud with only myself, right?