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Dear You,

ordinarywonder:

When I was a child, I found some ammonia. I’m not sure why, but curiosity got the best of me, and I took a deep whiff from the bottle. It felt like I had just inhaled fire. The sharp aroma shooting up my nostrils and making my eyes tear up.

It was one of the most jolting sensations I’ve ever experienced, sort of terrible and overwhelming, but somehow… refreshing. It was one of those moments when I felt truly awake. Later that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I never wanted to sniff ammonia again, afraid that I would melt my sinuses and burn away my sense of smell, but that wide-eyed feeling of recognition… the mixture of surprise, pain, fear, and reverence that something could elicit such a powerful and immediate response from me… always stayed with me. I think that I’ve been searching for it every day since then, in one form or another.

If you ever wondered why I fell in love with your writing, it has a lot to do with this childhood memory of learning something so profund, instantaneously. For acquiring a taste for things that entice me, even in uncomfortable ways, to feel… something. When I read you, it’s like a sucker punch to the face, or gut, something that makes me flinch or double over. It’s almost reflexive; whether it’s emotionally or intellectual. 

And sometimes you wrap your hand around the throat of my darkness, that primordial beast that struggles in tar pit of my shadow, and you pluck it from the ooze to let it run rampant through my consciousness… but still dictated by the will and pressure of your fingers, within the confines of your narrative and under your creative thumb. Which lets me feel safe, even if there’s real danger implied. 

No one else has ever dialed me in that way, channeling all the conflicted parts of me into a singularity of want… and that’s just your words that have this spectacular effect on me. Can you even imagine what the rest of you does to me?

Sometimes I can be fickle… but I know that as long as I sense there’s something between us to hold onto, I… could really feel this way for the rest of my life. Which is very uncomfortable… maybe even a tad embarrassing to admit… especially for someone who has a tendency to expect the ground to open up and swallow me down at any moment. 

But, I believe in you. And I’d rather just enjoy the time we’re together than being worried about if/when/how it will end. 

I’m just glad you’re not a pungent chemical… because if that bottle of ammonia had been you, I would have burned a hole in my face ages ago. 

My Secret Dalliance With Self-Dissolution: Valentine's Day

burningmuse:

Editor’s Note: Thoughtful. 

cindersontheskyline:

Between all our holidays and celebrations, every day is special for us now.  Every day is some patron saint’s or national festival, dedicated to feeling better.  We don’t feel better, though.  We get stressed over having to plan parties, the weight we’ll gain, the people that will be there, if we’ll be able to drive home, if we can even remember in the morning what it was like.  We’re trying too hard to be happy, forcing it on ourselves and it comes out all stunted and wrong, legs too long and head full of misconceptions.  We make the things happen because we feel pressured to have a good time, to enjoy our life because it’s the only one we have.  

I think we have a thousand lives, they’re just all happening with once.  Each person I see views me differently, and I’m different in their eyes from anyone else’s.  One might think I have a nice shirt, another that I looked at her sister weird, but it’s all the same me, living as many different lives as can the sun set on.  Feeling better should not be about excuses to drown the liver and pound the headache pills, nor should it become a reason to look down on ourselves because we’re not celebrated.  Just because you are uncommitted for Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean you’re alone; I know enough waiting in the hold of a relationship, feeling more alone than they would single because their special someone couldn’t make the time for them on that day.  For all you know, a hundred people are thinking about you today, and each one only wants to see you smile.  We need to stop feeling bad because of holidays; they’re meant to make us smile and enjoy life, to value what’s out there.  If we spend all our time focusing on how we’ll never properly enjoy those days, instead of just waiting for one that does brighten the monotonous week it adorns, they’re worse than nothing being there.

Stop feeling guilty because you aren’t celebrating or “properly” enjoying one of these days, especially one about finding love.  You can’t send chocolate to the job that you’ve always wanted, no flowers to the place you’ve always wanted to live, and no passionate kiss for knowing you’ve finally felt proud of yourself and worthy of living, so how can we say it’s a day about love?  Love what you will, person or not, but don’t feel guilty about being “alone”, because those most alone are the ones tearing out the rest of themselves to make room for the guilt of that day not living up to their dreams.

Home.

So much this.

burningmuse:

staff note: this is great.

loveandfoxes:

I once thought that home was in the arms of a mother, cradled against the heartbeat which hatched my own. I once thought that home was found between lines G and B, stroked with a horse-stringed bow, and perfected with a fork knocked gracefully against a countertop. I once thought that home was in chocolate kisses, and the father who gave them to me. I once thought that home was the rusty old springs of a trampoline, which creaked and moaned in warm, Texas summers. 
But, the mother’s arms are filled with a man who leaves just as quickly as he comes. The horse-strings snap from the bow, and the fork bends, altering space A out of tune, and throwing the music off into an unreadable key. The chocolate kisses go straight to the thighs, and the father who gave them laughs drunkenly, and drives away towards the stormy horizon which swallows him whole. The springs uncoil and the trampoline breaks, spilling the secrets it promised to keep.
I looked for home at the bottom of a bottle. I looked for home in the smoke as it drifted towards the sky, shielding the waxing moon. I looked for home in fluorescent lights and synthesized melodies, with a pill under my tongue, pointing out the way. I looked for home in the tequila-tasting mouth of a boy, with wandering hands in my pockets and slurred whispers in my ears.
But, the bottles break and the smoke fades, and the lights go out, just as the serotonin awakens in my body, and the contents within it, and the boy brushes his teeth, removing the bitter taste of tequila, and of me.
I thought I found home in the back of your truck. I thought I found home in your dog, your swimming pool, your tripod that I always knocked over, and your grey/white comforter that covered your bed. I thought I found home in your golden hair and your hazel eyes.
But, now you’re gone, and I’m left trotting down an empty street, with only the voices in my head, and my shadow to comfort me, and I realize that I have no idea where home lay. If home is where the heart is, it is under the soles of every person that has ever walked away; the full armed mother, the chocolate kissed father, the tequila mouthed boy, and you. It is buried beneath the gravel of the road to hell which I paved myself. It is in the clock work of every compass which has pointed in the wrong direction, and has never guided me back. No, if home is where the heart is, I think I’d rather wander for eternity.

‘Window’ by Andrea Gibson.

burningmuse:

Lead Staff Note: Lovely.

shadow-writer:

If everything is a window, if the wound is a window, if heartbreak is a window, if grief is a window, if the storm is a window, if illness is a window, if loss is a window, you will say you live in a house made entirely of glass, you will say the moon is so close you can catch its reflection on your silver spoon, you will say your spoon is a silver spoon, you will feed yourself light, you will be hungry for nothing but people whose hearts will never close the blinds.  

revel

burningmuse:

Staff Note: Just read it. 

theredsun:

365 days in a year and I can’t seem to remember which one’s end in even numbers. The months are personified and our memories become events, or downfalls, or missteps. There are no celebrations left to remember.

January is frigid and ferocious. The New Year and thousands of changes as he dangles a cigarette over my mouth with a smile and inhales. We are giants at large, stealing old candy canes from left over pine trees and taking ownership of promises we couldn’t keep. Reserving batteries and using our bodies to heat up the already sweating walls. We are always taking stock of what matters most.

February is a heartbreaker. Her round, perky ass and her bitten lips reflect in the pools of my eyes. Her orange cream perfume is dabbed perfectly between her wrists. I want her, but no, I don’t. Oh, her taste; so maroon and copasetic. I feel her arthritic hands aching between pulsing thighs.

March brings the madness and soon we are all banging pots and pans together on the nylon kitchen floor. Sick from electric power and the sickly sweet smell of firewood fizzling out from the wind. It rains every day and the streets flood with saplings and Pinocchio noses and dust. And he comes like a lion.

April is coy and curses under her breath as the rain stops pounding the crumbling pavement for the first time in thirty days. She brings a soft sunlight and glowing skin and bare knees. The grass flourishes as the flowers burst from their seedlings and spiral up towards the sky. We lose fifteen pounds after our winter breakup. Fresh blueberry ice cream doesn’t taste the same anymore.

May is the sick smell of head colds in the morning. June shakes my wrists and pushes me to the cold ocean, dragging me out with the rip tides and letting me drown. July is a melted Popsicle and a heaping helping of pound cake with whipped cream slathered on it. August is a day spent in bed filled with longing and overwhelming regret.

September is forgiveness and very thin sweatshirts. October is another year older, wearing last year’s boots. November is the written word foraging for food in a forest made of paperbacks. We hardly ever return. December is strung out on heroine and the ache of another year gone and lost.

And that’s the saddest part of each year. One year you’re something and the next you’re nothing and maybe one day you’re dead or maybe one day you decide to live forever. This month has been a nightmare wrapped in cellophane. Somehow I can see all the fault lines and hairline cracks, yet I am still going on with my mornings. I taste the apple in my mouth. Chunks of juicy fruit sliding down my chin and that’s it. We are William Tell and his failed attempts at rapture. Benjamin Franklin and his favorite kind of coffee.  Simple humans that let sleeping dogs lie.

We are all a watermark, leaving our fingerprints on everything we touch. I reach my hands out towards the ocean. I have finally realized that we are the seasons, changing violently and without reserve, leaving everything and nothing behind all at once.

themountainsleeps:

And as he lay there a jumbled, lung-rotted, tooth-decayed, fidgeted cold-addled thing having and seeking warmth, a voice his own yet not spoke, saying,

“Your visions of death and loss, of alien realms bordered by terrible pain will not cease—will not allow further passage or growth—until you have repented and told the truth. The more you struggle for truth while destroying it, bit by bit, so shall you be destroyed, bit by bit. Like any high-minded human you enclose pain, keeping it inside so as to find a way to destroy it. Admirable, noble, beautiful, but false. There is a holism to life that you have lost, an all-encompassing explosion of self that is self. If do not find a way to endure and accept pain, you will forever destine yourself to a half-life of servitude to the thing you actually hate, finding a million ways to say the same thing you never say—‘I hate and love you, and here are all the reasons why.’”

You Are Not Alone

ordinarywonder:

As writers, I think we have this uncanny ability to break down even the most complex ideas and intense feelings into clever ramblings or beautiful musings. I believe that every writer, even the most cynical among us, is to some degree an idealist. Because what’s the point of scribbling words if you don’t believe that they have some sort of power — even if it’s just the power to hurt yourself? We make sense of the world through words, even if our point is that life has no meaning… or that everything is nonsense. 

Well, I don’t have anything clever or beautiful to say today. I don’t really know how to describe how, or what, I’m feeling. My feelings are a solid block of concrete in my intestines that makes it hard for me to tip-toe across this tightrope experience. My thoughts are a noxious chemical cloud or a vicious electrical storm that makes me want to cover my face as I curl up, and just try my best to breathe through this disaster situation…

This world. Fuck. This world… Fuck this world. This shitty world that really knows how to knock you on your ass. It loves to punch you in the throat, and when it brings you to your knees it likes to kick your teeth in.

This world… Love this world. This wonderful world that also knows how to help you back on your feet. It loves to kiss you on the bruises, and when it scoops you off the floor it likes to lick away the tears.

Always bloody, but gorgeous; bloody gorgeous, because this world contains everything that we can be certain we’ll experience… love… or hate. This world is where we wallow chin-deep in the bullshit of our despair and insecurities; the parts that hurt us the most… but it’s also where we store all of our hopes and dreams; the best parts of us that also hurt us sometimes too. 

I don’t know if I believe that there’s an objective reason for everything that happens. I just know that we have the power to interpret what events, people, places, and things mean to us. We can’t always control how they affect us, but we can always choose where we want to channel that energy; how we express it. 

We’re generally taught to swallow down our negative feelings… and let’s be honest, it’s mostly because it makes other people feel uncomfortable. Some people are terrible at it. They can’t help but to create a vortex of bitterness that sucks you in, unwillingly. Some people are great at it. They compress all of their sentiment under the sediment of their being, between the complex layers of themselves, into lumps of coal… and sometimes you don’t know how those lumps burn holes in their souls; all you feel is the warmth. 

Then there are the rare people, who refuse to voluntarily choke on their discontent. But when they speak, no matter how much it hurts to confront the reality that life can be ugly (we can be ugly), you step into their point of view willingly.

Even if it reminds you of being lonely, or sad, or hopeless… it also reminds you that there’s still beauty that exists somewhere out there. It lets you know that you are separate, but never alone. That we are individuals on a journey that no one else can experience for you, but we’re also walking shoulder to shoulder — united by our humanity. That sometimes we are gifted with the clarity to feel for others that we often deny for ourselves; empathy, forgiveness, sympathy, love. They can feel it for us too…

I think for a lot of us, Elianna’s (Kayla’s) writing (meeting or knowing her) made it obvious that she was one of those rare people. I can’t lie. When we lose someone like her, who so freely and sincerely shared her feelings, herself, with us… the world feels sadder and looks darker…

We grieve. We wonder how we can heal from that sort of wound. We may even contemplate if we deserve to endure in her absence; the intolerable quiet. But we can’t let sadness, or pain, stop us from living. That would only add to the tragedy…

I believe that if you felt something for or because of her, this is no time to fall apart, or fall silent. Because if you can’t think of any other good reason to continue living… you can at least live to be one of the lucky people in this world whose life she touched. 

You can keep her alive, by staying alive, and keeping her in your memory. 

You can keep feeling. Keep writing. Keep sharing.

You can offer to others what she offered to you. A point of view that makes you feel less crazy and miserable for how you feel, because someone else is feeling something similar.

A voice that says no matter how ugly or damned you feel:

You are not alone. 


________

Spoken

Tumbling Towards: Almost Whole

tumblingtowards:

He is leaving again, and it’s times like these that I’m glad the heart isn’t just a metaphor for the part of us that loves someone.  Because if the heart was the only  thing that kept us alive, the metaphysical heart, I would be long dead, as beaten and broken and opened as mine has been.

Sometimes it almost seems easier that way: to die rather than suffer the anguish of loves lost. Maybe Romeo and Juliet had it right back in the day (even though we call them extremists in our literature classrooms). And they were only teenagers.  I’m 30 years old and still find it hard to bear any kind of loss with dignity. No one remembers the girl who cries in the back of the cab, who soothes herself with pizza and glossy magazines and new shades of hair dye and TV shows with heroines half her age.

There is nothing grand about modern love—not in this digital age of Facebook profiles and nude text messages.  Great romances are rare. We all know too much about each other, but all the wrong things.  The life that goes on inside us, the part no one else can see, it is burying itself deeper and deeper until we’re lucky to find it ourselves—let alone allow another person to plumb those depths and come out on the other side and decide to stay.  It takes superhuman courage.

And I don’t know why, but suddenly I am the lucky one.  I have not been a good enough person to call him a blessing. I have not done enough good in the world to call him my fate.  But I have found this one, this one who takes the ache away. This one who has seen all there is to see of me and chose to keep looking.

It’s his hand against my cheek, my skin flushing back into his palm. The commotion inside of me stills.  The world outside of me slows down and softens. One moment, a single touch, and that is all:  we are suspended in some place where we just exist, without words—or maybe we are the words on some blank page, and we are becoming this story.  And it is realer and more romantic than anything else. It is transcendent, this thing our hearts do, called love.

Usually, disappearing is bad.  But when he reaches for me and everything fades away, it is good. It is the only place where I feel that goodness is possible in this world, in that space between two people as it goes from an expansive plain to a tiny sliver of light. Almost whole: that’s as close as we can get.

This piece was inspired by this photo and is posted here.  To learn more about Spark, go here.

“The life that goes on inside us, the part no one else can see, it is burying itself deeper and deeper until we’re lucky to find it ourselves—let alone allow another person to plumb those depths and come out on the other side and decide to stay.  It takes superhuman courage.”

That part that’s inside, that part that’s often beyond words, that’s what I want to know in myself and others, that’s what I want to share.  I’ve always looked for that and am beginning to wonder if it’s actually possible at all.  But I still hope.

Listing

ordinarywonder:

Kinky posthuman sentimental and literary terrorist suffering from hot and cold flashes of anarchistic impulses and nihilistic tendencies, ISO Perverted transhuman sympathizer and visual-arts vigilante afflicted by highs and lows of popculture mania and postmodern depression. Looking to collaborate on an existential crisis of ontological fuckery, in the form of a graphic novel… and possible longterm “moody digital-noir detective meets wacky cyberpunk femme fatale” relationship. Familiarity with psychedelics, wormhole travel, and cyborg-mutant, human relations mandatory. Chaotic good alignment a plus. Safety not guaranteed.

I love the way this is written!

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