As I Wrote One Day

Anyway

2012-01-22T13:02:00.002-05:00

"And he circled with watchful eye the sacrificial altar, where flickered the pure, chaste flame of his love; knelt before it and tended and cherished it in every way, because he so wanted to be faithful. And in a little while, unobservably, without sensation or stir, it went out after all."
—Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger

Tense

2012-01-15T11:03:00.007-05:00

by czechoslovakia

i used to be happy here, in the subtext, the footnotes. i used to forget the present here because the present was not all that they promised. it wasn't shiny or bright or beautiful or full. i let myself cling to the past here like crumbs at the bottom of a wet bowl. i have reveled in it, let its scent soak into my clothes and trail behind me like a sentence, i have doused my food with it, let my fork bend under its weight. and i have never been brave. and i have never been brave. and i have never been brave.

2012

2012-01-01T14:45:00.004-05:00

—Charlie Kaufman

I don't mind if you don't mind

2011-11-25T14:10:00.003-05:00

And there it is. The memory washes up on shore, unhinges its jaws and swallows me whole. The sun bleaching the grey sidewalks white, the heat fogging up my sunglasses, the cold panes of the record store's door, the black interior chilled like a freezer—

And I hold my breath, trying to hold the moment in, trying to let my lungs fill with it, let them inflate until I float again. But I can't. The moment passes and another breath comes. My chest compresses and my lunges deflate. Oxygen rushes in and the memory rushes out.

Lay out our monthly sorrows

2011-11-08T19:04:00.007-05:00

I want to tell you how I can't stand her silences, the clicking and the crunching that is building up and bleeding into my space, that has spilled onto the floor between us like a knocked over glass. I want to tell you that it feels like I'm dying here. Partitions and closed doors never did much to keep the monsters out. And I've put time on a treadmill and I'm just waiting for it to run out. I want to tell you everything but our magnets have fallen off and there's nothing left to pull us together. But don't be sad, so it goes: it happens to the best of us. The glue washes off and the leftover residue is scrapped away. My face is inked with guiltiness, with lies I didn't tell. It's fiction, I tell them because it didn't happen to me and it isn't my life I'm laying on the floor.

I tore this from a notebook

2011-10-09T20:30:00.001-04:00

Closed

2011-09-19T16:30:00.005-04:00

An Age of Innocene

I am 4 tightly pulled cello strings and the world is moving its hands across them like lightening, plucking and pulling, snapping strings and rubbing them together. I get lost in the blur, I can feel my hands begin to shake, a corset snaps to my skin like a magnet, slams against my ribs and my stomach quivers like a door frame. Then only short breaths are possible, if I breathe too deeply I will break, combust, shatter. Short breaths, staccato, and hope the tempo slows. I will be lucky to get to 30.

Hanging on a moment

2011-09-06T22:41:00.009-04:00

I don't know what I want to write here or what I want this space to be anymore. But two years feels like a lifetime and I have lived and died here and then lived again. I started this blog because I needed to know what I looked like on the inside. I needed to build a separate perception of myself. When I was younger it was so easy to believe the stories that my parents told me. And I have believed all versions of them. Up the grapevine and through it and then heard the same story shifted through different languages and funneled at me from friends and classmates. Standing in front of the mirror, I could see their faces, see their mouths moving around the words that threw the shadows of my reflection. My eyes made rounds in the mirror, sweeping across their faces but I never looked into my own face until I started this blog. This has been a simultaneous process of hiding and revealing. What I hid during the day, I revealed at night to a blank Word document. I used to be someone was the first sentence I ever wrote here and it's one of the truest things I've ever said. I used to be someone, I used to be a lot of people. First, I was a walking archive and then an arsonist, searing the past, memories and people alike, into ashes and then I was just some girl sorting through the wreckage. I can write myself out of anything, even the past versions of myself. I wrote until the multiplicity shrank so tiny that the ropes loosened and fell away. I used to be the person who needed to build this place but I don't want to be that person anymore. The clock has rolled back to zero and I am free.

Sweet water walls

2011-08-17T19:59:00.002-04:00

by orange pekō

You can't fold your secrets up and slip them into your back pocket anymore. You have to be careful. A stranger could brush against you and steal them in a heartbeat. And then they'd walk away without a second thought. No, you must smooth back the wrinkles, fold back the arms, the legs and hide them away. Store them in a trunk, push them into the dark places that no one visits and watch as the monsters lurking underneath your bed and at the back of your closet turn into shifting whispers that keep you up at night. And when morning comes, dig up the Earth, let the contents fall into its core and walk away believing that Nothing can be stolen.

Going crazy in your room again

2011-08-16T23:32:00.002-04:00

by zseike

You say I choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me. Maybe you're right.
You've lived 18 years flattened into a corner but you're the one holding the hammer. The emotions are there but they're not yours. They cling to your skin like lint, paint the shadows as smiles and steal away the sadnesses staining your face. There is more than just glue holding this story together and if you want to be free, you'll rip more than just velcro. The fabric has fused with your skin and the thread has been cut away, the hat sewn into your hair. This story has been written.

My gradual descent into a life I never meant

2011-08-14T14:11:00.004-04:00

by klipomaniaco

Well, I've never been good at lying or holding back secrets I should keep to myself. I always say too much so I'll confess that I never did like basement stairs even though I shouldn't. I hate how you could never see what you were getting yourself into until it's too late, until your body has already been lowered slowly into the ground and the earth has been slung on top of you as resolute as a solemn basement door slamming shut. And I never did like the shadowed space behind open doors, how you could enter a new life and meet something at the threshold that jolts you right back into your old one, how something could jump out from the darkness with a surprise and make you not want to move forward. I'm sorry I'm hard to live with, living is the problem for me.

2nd Birthday

2011-08-05T09:59:00.002-04:00

by Matt Comi

I've been blogging here for two years. I'm a very lucky girl. Above that, I am also very grateful. I want to thank everyone, all of my readers, from fellow bloggers to real life friends to silent browsers who come here by accident. What I write here wouldn't have meant half as much if I didn't have other people reading and relating to the things I feel so thank you.

This is a secret that I am telling you

2011-08-03T02:18:00.003-04:00

fromme-toyou

Stillness is a discipline that I'll never conquer. I know that my words cannot reach you from here but I'll write anyway. And I know that I can't breathe my soul out into my hands and press it through the cracks where the air bubbles drip in but I'll try anyway. I'll hope that it will find you, blow through the rooms where you sit, coast over your shoulders and blow secrets into your ear.

Cup in someone else's cabinet

2011-07-24T14:31:00.000-04:00

postsecret

Here's to

2011-07-19T01:12:00.003-04:00

by Judas Sylvester

I write best at night when I'm really tired. When it's 2am and I haven't slept and my eyes keep closing. Scenes pour through my eyelids like I plunged my head underwater. But maybe I'm just crazy and call it fiction. But if I'm crazy then those stories should be locked up in big white rooms, bound and wrapped in straight jackets. The characters should be strapped down to their beds, guarded by orderlies and not allowed to wander the soft grey halls of my mind in their bare feet with their staring eyes and uncut hair. Doctors should stack pills down their throats and make them comply. Who unleashed them? Who sent them dancing across papers in bottles of ink, drunk on speed? Who gave them permission to enter here banging pots and pans and then exit just as loudly clacking keyboards? Who told them that it was ok?

A Wager

2011-07-13T14:30:00.006-04:00

"Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are harder to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I'll take a chance."
—Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Nothing else I can say

2011-07-08T18:08:00.001-04:00

But I'm writing everyday. I don't know what to post here anymore.

The black swan burns

2011-07-01T14:38:00.005-04:00

(by violet allen)

do not enter those decrepit buildings. do not walk where the rusty air conditioners have stopped leaking and the light bulbs are dying slowly and painfully. i wake up in the middle of those rooms, the floorboards missing and the windows broken. the faces of people who no longer know where i live spin around me like tornadoes. i cough on the dust of old conversations, remember clipped sentences and words that were once tossed as lightly as salads now hit me like sand bags. that lake haunts me too. cold as black marble, as wide as a tomb. in my dreams i'm still there with the plastic chairs and jean jackets and the tired earphones. it was the summer of hp5 and i still can't get over it. it was the summer of golden retrieves, late breakfasts, and cold beaches. i write the memories here. i will write all of them out of me. i will bury them.

Kill the king

2011-06-24T21:14:00.003-04:00

I don't understand the impulses I feel. Someone turns a faucet on and the words type themselves. I take full responsibility but I am not just a vessel, a funnel that the words pour through. Before I could clasp my hands together, they dived onto the keyboard. Before I could yank my hands away, they committed mutiny. I feel the words have betrayed me and my hands have been their secret aides. And this betrayal has ruined everything. My hands have pushed these words out and they were too much, too soon. Too serious, too emotional. Too presumptuous.
I have assumed. I do not know.

Stirring symphony

2011-06-23T23:23:00.003-04:00

(by dimenticato)

"Think of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your own future—only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people."
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Booths

2011-06-20T02:39:00.009-04:00

(canwemakespoons)

I feel so scared I could throw up or burst into tears. I feel like doing both but it's one am and I know that I won't do either. I can't sleep. Or I distract myself from sleep so that I don't have to deal with the dreams. They run out of me like water but run through my fingers like sand. I told you that this writing thing was shit but I still won't give it up. I'm trying to figure out how to say everything without saying anything so I'm going silent for a year and moving to a candy city built from tic tacs to get away from the days that are swallowing me whole. I clear out tomorrow and I'm going to stop sending you letters but don't take it personally. I've got a problem with this town. It's rotting my teeth, making my hands arthritic. And I keep wondering why I'm sitting in this restaurant, with velvet red plastic sticking to my skin, spending hours crumpling acid bleached napkins, and ordering something that I don't want when I have to pay for it. I keep wondering why I don't just stand up and leave.

Taped in

2011-06-11T16:00:00.002-04:00

"We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them."

—Anaïs Nin

source: misswallflower

word catcher

2011-06-02T00:34:00.005-04:00

the words come back to me at night when everyone is asleep. when i am lying once again in my kingdom of mutiny. my own disorganization speaks out to me like a mini revolt. if you opened the door, you do not have a voice here screamed out. i was terrified of being silenced, of having someone remove every trance of me, of being wiped clean until i became clear and invisible like glass, until i did not exist at all. my room was my disruption, my heavy metal screaming and i was wildly jumping on the mattress of the Calm and Comfortable, of the Neat and Tidy like a three year old having a tantrum. i will have a voice i will have a voice i will have a voice drowned out every other sound around me. i screamed and screamed and screamed but they took my words anyway.

4 month eviction

2011-05-30T21:16:00.000-04:00

by Alyssa Loves Subtitles

Winning

2011-05-27T21:47:00.002-04:00

Chance has spoken and Jennifer Fabulous of I know, right? will receive the free copy of White Oleander. Thanks to everyone who entered.

free to live

2011-05-20T16:56:00.007-04:00

this was a bad dream. i will wake up on the side of the road and i will not remember. i will not have a name. my memories will be wiped clean like stolen security tapes. this will be zero, where it begins. the new moments will grow like invasive plants strangling calendars and swallowing bookshelves of dust covered conversations with their creeping veins. the past will die out of me. the silence after this explosion is deafening, the white noise glares at me like stainless steel in the sun. i bit down on the scream that tried to crawl out.

please enter my white oleander giveaway here. ends may 26.

To give away

2011-05-14T09:00:00.003-04:00

I own six copies of this book. Every time I see it in a thrift store or at a used book sale I have to buy it. White Oleander is one of my favorite books and I want to send a copy to one of my followers. Leave a quote from one of your favorite books in the comments by May 26th and I will pick a winner with a random number generator.

I don't have to tell anyone anything

2011-05-07T18:03:00.005-04:00

happiness comes in factors of #3

I am taking apart my life and handing it to you in pieces. I am documenting a world that I don't belong to, collecting the evidence so they'll know that I saw it all and still didn't find that place called home. I am leaving you a copy of a copy, a brown square of negative space. I would tell you about vanishing points if I knew how, about lines that expand like bubbles and dissipate on the horizon. I would tell you about goodbyes, about endpoints. But you still believe in forever and I won't be the one to tell you that it doesn't exist.

I wrote this for a competition & I may become a new writer on WJDKYY for a few months.

I don't have anything to tell you.

2011-04-26T20:33:00.007-04:00

I don't go there anymore. I pick up the pen and put it back down again. When I found out I didn't even cry. I wrote about who I thought I was, who I thought I could be. I wrote it in white chalk over the black pavement that hardened over my life and the rain came. Do you think, maybe I could find it again, perhaps if I put my face against the ground? I could soak into the earth, drip down into its core and swell its searing flame. I could crack open the earth and scoop the chalk water out if I cupped my hands.
Stop.
There I go. I lost myself again, it slipped right out through the soles of my shoes. The earth swallowed it whole and here I am telling you about it, trying to get it back.
Erase.
I don't have anything to tell you.
I don't go there anymore.

Sign in as a different user

2011-04-19T16:37:00.000-04:00

I stepped down into the little cardboard town.
All day and night we were posing.
I did not need to water or cut
Our plastic lawn, and I gave up shaving because
In my beloved's world no hair or green thing grew.
My teeth were exquisitely white,
My body fat absolutely zero.
We dressed from wardrobes without end,
And drove our pink convertible to the river each day.

One might think that we yearned for some controversy,
A little spice mixed into the bland stew of our days.
In fact, we were deliriously happy, content with our clothes
And gadgets, determined to look out
At the world's woe through the wise eyes of toys.

—"At Home With Dollface" by Robert McDowell

Cat, no mouse

2011-04-14T00:16:00.008-04:00

I could feel the dream turning bad. On the outside, the shell was unblemished, unchanged. They didn't notice that their seeds were rotting, that the land they had sown was too depleted and worn. I wanted to tell them but every moment was the wrong moment. So they kept believing that the weather would change and the good harvest would come and that we would have laughter and flowers again. I didn't know how to tell them about the world of unbalanced equations. I didn't know how to explain that 100 + 100 sometimes equaled zero, that spending money didn't always guarantee a return. I didn't want to tell them about bad investments, that they could go sour.
The unfairness sat on the table in its half empty glass and you drank it down like bitter medicine after breakfast.

Sick Sad World

2011-04-09T07:17:00.003-04:00

Nothing good

2011-04-01T16:21:00.006-04:00

she said all those lives got heavy after a while, all those garbage bag suitcases. she was thinner now, her clothes hung off of her, billowing drapes heavier than her years, but she was still all jittery knees and restless hands. she kept small pieces of the place she left behind, strips of wallpaper, cubes of carpet. she wanted to remember, the same way she wanted to forget.
a few months was a night in her world. in the morning she scraped off her painted face and put on a new one. she only believed in the throwaway life--paper plates, styrofoam cups, 99c toothbrushes, drinks in cans, vending machine meals. it all piled up like a landfill. when she died she said she wanted to lay on top of it while they hauled in the gasoline, while they scratched off the matches. she said she wanted it all to burn; said she wanted her own funeral pyre, made of the things she threw away.

Promises you can't keep

2011-03-29T23:43:00.003-04:00

She drove a '92 Chevrolet, dark green. It was as beat up as she was. It whined like a squeaky rat every time she started it. When the rain soaked the sidewalks and the streets ran like mascara tears, she would say that the soil soaked up everything--the toxins and pollutants. When the rain came, it didn't matter if it was bad; the soil let it in anyway. She said she was too dry for that now, too hard and compact. She said her cracks showed like wrinkles.

Drafty

2011-03-28T10:10:00.002-04:00

She rushed me into making this bed and now she's pushing me into it. Into string green sheets and cherry wood frames, into memory foam mattresses and too expensive box frames. There is no escaping. They should tell you these things before they staple you into the bandages of duct tape, before they bind you, before you can't move.

III

2011-03-25T18:58:00.001-04:00

—The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Hit

2011-03-21T19:14:00.001-04:00

Revolutionary Road

Dreams the color of memories

2011-03-20T22:58:00.006-04:00

Memories were falling out: the hours of staring at chairs the color of melted down Tide detergent bottles and the days spent crying on the sauerkraut couch in front of the principal's office. The school's steel skeleton left standing there like a ghost with a solid outline.
Scraps of metal were spread out like icing over the cake of dried mud, with the fence encircling it like a pan made of chain link.

The half moon sinks the color of brown rice, a thousand arcs of water filling it. Paper brown towels to dry our hands. Brown doors carved with hairpins to push past. Brown carpet, wavy strands of it flowing out of the corners where the little kids sat during time out.

They cleared out our desks and chairs. And they only left one tree standing; they pulled up all the rest. They tore down the swing set and the slide. They crawled through the grass with their machines, scraping up the destroyed wreckage.
They took all the grass but they didn't throw it like rice at our playground weddings.

Unseen and not seeing

2011-03-17T17:35:00.006-04:00

It's always going to be there—the cricket under the floorboard that you only hear at one thirty in the morning when you're afraid to close your eyes for too long because you don't want to dream about a place you're not sure you'll ever see. It's chirping in intervals. It flits in and out. Normality goes on breaks that seem more like vacations. It's the rock at the bottom of a lake that rises to the surface when everyone's guard is down.

So it goes

2011-03-16T18:10:00.003-04:00

by Austin Kleon via savemedear

Maybe nothing

2011-03-15T17:18:00.002-04:00

CK: I don't want to create a product. And I think a lot of what happens in the movie business is accepted: This is a product, and this will be marketed, and it will make people feel a certain way, and it'll leave the theater, and it'll go through a series of steps that are predetermined and formulaic. That precludes the possibility that you're going to create a work of art or a work that's expansive, and so I take that out of the equation, because I want something to be expansive, and because I feel people put crap into the world constantly in the media and in politics and in all sorts of public areas. And they lie. They constantly lie, and that creates a cynical, suspicious, alienated population of people, and I don't want to participate in it. I want to do something that, for whatever it's worth, maybe nothing, is at least what I think about things.
And maybe that's helpful to somebody.
—Charlie Kaufman
(source)

Cherry trees

2011-03-08T15:48:00.000-05:00

Take a second, take a year

2011-03-06T18:34:00.004-05:00

I know you feel it again; the waves are sidling up. I know you can feel the water rising up your neck, covering your lips, filling your nose. This sea that you tried to freeze, to contain is dissenting and now it's rising. You can feel yourself drowning. And you want so badly to let go. Don't you ever get a break or a moment to be off duty or a second to not be cool or funny or witty? You could wrap this sea around you like a blanket, pull it over your head and just sleep for a while because what you were didn't follow you in dreams. There you become a swirl of fuzzy colors and moving scenes, dizzying faces with asynchronous voices.

You have been loved

2011-03-04T21:32:00.006-05:00

Something was broken.
I slammed into a wall and the porcelain plates slid to the floor as the glass shelves inside crashed together. I want you to know that I tried to walk away; I tried to seal this room off, I tried to protect it from this but locked doors aren't protected from earthquakes. I have to keep my hands over my mouth to keep the broken pieces from falling out. I have to swallow back the jagged shards and when I talk I can hear my voice scraping through the glass at the back of my throat where syllables and conjunctions got lost. Every sentence became a fragment held together with commas. I was a dotted line and every day the space between the dashes grew larger.

I'm living in a silent film

2011-03-02T22:03:00.003-05:00

thechocolatebrigade

I feel like this a lot.

Fractured

2011-03-01T17:54:00.002-05:00

"The people who most interest me now are the people--are people who are older and who have sort of been through a mid-life crisis. They tend to get weird because the normal incentives for getting out of bed don't tend to apply anymore. I have not found any satisfactory new ones, but I'm also not getting ready to, you know, jump off a building or anything."
—David Foster Wallace

(source)

Penniless

2011-02-24T16:44:00.013-05:00

I can't write. All my words are bullshit. The world is moving under my feet. And I'm wondering when the story changed, when the key shifted and I'm wondering why no one told me. They always said that life moves fast, that's true but I guess I didn't know what they meant when they said there'd be no time for shock, no time to readjust. The room spun and the walls fell away, the doors rotated. That was all. You stumbled into your new life, unoriented and dizzy, gripping the door frame like a cane. That was all.

This month is full of ghosts. I fall into memories and have to spend days trying to swim back to the surface. My last February in this place was almost over and I didn't feel like visiting old scars. I've spent the last few weeks ignoring the aches, biting back the pain, disguising the grimaces behind blinks. I wish that I had something beautiful to give you but my words are the only things I'll ever own. And even those won't belong to me forever. I've got some notebooks I'd like to clean out, some words I'd like to sweep from under the chairs and couches and I'm thinking about cutting up those scattered sentences that don't make sense, boiling them back down to letters and rearranging them into words that mean something.

For all sorrows

2011-02-20T12:14:00.002-05:00

endofmarch:astrophysicalsolipsist

"So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking."
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

The check is in the mail

2011-02-16T17:56:00.003-05:00

ahhlayne

What was will never be again

2011-02-13T14:49:00.005-05:00

Dragging and dropping the same songs will never build the same faraway house to escape to. The grass rolled out like dough will never be as green. The inside of that bus was like a time capsule and somewhere inside of my heart it's still speeding after some dream. Are we there yet and almost, another hour still meet somewhere in the middle aisle. I'm still half awake, leaning against a giant window, using my coat like a blanket, listening to Hey Jude playing from the back, listening to the sound of heat rushing from the vents like a yawn that goes on forever.

The truth of a truth

2011-02-05T11:39:00.006-05:00

I wanted to stop pretending.
But it turned into pretending that I'm not pretending.
It's this doublethink Catch-22 circus I'm caught up in.
This game ends when I walk away.

Some words I'd like to sweep out

2011-02-01T13:58:00.002-05:00

The deep red curtain, its bottom lightly worn, is left dusting up an empty stage, ghost-like webs drape over the vacant seats now that the crowd has departed.
This theatre has gone out of business, it is slowly slipping into dilapidation. The greatest show on earth, your life, is now just a collection of broken chairs, of burned out light bulbs, of shattered glass and scarred floors, of black flower petals and silence.
My footsteps ring out but no one answers.
There's nothing left to perform and there's no one left to watch.
12/21/09

Convergence

2011-01-29T11:32:00.006-05:00

when your bird has flown, she'll never return home

though all your life you'll wait, she never will return

I want to believe in everything you believe

2011-01-22T20:50:00.004-05:00

I threw up a scream and the sobs came out like someone was kicking a deflating air mattress. The house was silent, you sat in your room reading the newspaper; its gray and black pages flicked through the minutes. I put my ear to the notebook I carried with me everywhere, as if I'd hear my words whispering back to me instead of the dry silence. My thoughts probed me like needles but I couldn't feel them anymore. I was a cloudless sky. Maybe my sanity was waning. Maybe it had visited the shores of my life for a year and then retreated like a wave. Maybe I was stuck, sinking in the wet sand, wondering when it'd be back again. I jumped when you passed my door, steadied my shaking hands as you slid half your body over the threshold. You said you'd say a prayer for me before you went to sleep.

Tightrope

2011-01-18T20:00:00.002-05:00

When the room freezes

2011-01-15T19:43:00.005-05:00

by 莫小段

"We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."
—Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Worlds and windows

2011-01-10T16:44:00.003-05:00

photo by alan del rio
The last time I saw her I told her that I didn't expect it to last forever. I told her that I was going to get lost again, find my stability quivering like Janga blocks and sometimes I would get so sad that I would lay awake all night, playing music in the dark and struggle to get out of bed in the mornings and I'd stop eating and people would start to talk again. Fear was the puppet master and I was just a puppet attached to the strings. It could grab hold of me, make me seize up, and snatch at my eyes until I couldn't see clearly. Fear was frozen inside of me, paralyzed like an ice cube bursting and expanding, making me sink.

July 11th, 2010

Strike up, pipers

2011-01-04T08:13:00.002-05:00

by rainbowstorm

I don't fear anything in this place we're in

2011-01-01T23:59:00.000-05:00

2011, be kind.

Lovely

2010-12-29T12:47:00.006-05:00

by froussecarton

This tag, posted each month by Erimentha, is based on a TV show called Skins and is a therapy video for one of the character's called Cassie. If you haven't seen it, please watch it HERE.
Thanks for tagging me, Lilah.
I would like to pass this tag onto:
>Binny
>K
>Hayley
To complete this tag you have to fill in 12 likes, 1 love and 8 hates like Cassie in her therapy video. Below, the bolded things are what you MUST include. Then tag 3 bloggers.

Abracadabra, Wow!
I like boys with humor and girls with kindness.
I like watching vinyl records spin.
I like freaks, geeks, misfits, deviants and outsiders.
I like used book sales, 99 cent paperbacks and all.
I like empty theatres with the actor's last lines still ringing around the seats.
I like the sound of babies laughing.
I like Avatar: The Last Airbender.
I like wearing lace with leather and denim.
I like the color of the sky in winter, pale blue and slate.
I like reading with lots of background noise.
I like empty restaurants when the sun is lazy.
I like writing down the books, movies, and music purchased and obsessed over each month.
I love 2 a.m. silences.
Today, I played "Californication" on repeat for an hour.
In some ways, I love everything.
It's less, It's less of a thing to like, it's less distinct, it's less particular.
I like things that I like but I love everything.
There's more choice in like.
Cause even things the worst things have things you love in them.
I don't know what you mean about things I hate.
I hate small talk.
I hate 35 hours a week.
I hate when people chew too loudly.
I hate group think.
I hate watching other people cry.
I hate when people don't fight for what they believe in.
I hate when someone makes silences awkward when they're not.
I hate the word succulent.
I hate when the subtitles are turned off.
I hate this, wow. Sorry.

White Coats

2010-12-26T20:18:00.007-05:00

I tried to tell her about the words that entered my head like an ice pick wedged into the left side of my head, pounding on my forehead from the inside like a cement block. And that I didn't want to create music anymore, I just wanted to soak in it for hours and hours, spin record after record until the sun crept down the walls and crawled back under its blue blanket. I wanted to explain to her that my tears were just warm white wine that I accidentally spilled on my pillowcases, and describe the torn wedding dress that I found in Vegas, tell her how I cut it up and made it into curtains, but they still wanted to fly out of the windows because they didn't belong with me even though they were anchored too tightly to the walls and every time they tried sliding out when I had my back turned, the wind just blew them back in. I wanted to tell her all of this but she only managed a short response in the spaces between the cramped words that jittered out of her pen. You're just a chemical mistake, she said. Nothing a few pills can't correct.

Make Believe

2010-12-21T01:00:00.003-05:00

wildedisciple

Every place I go I take another place with me

2010-12-11T16:12:00.004-05:00

Winter is coming and you're stuck here

Oh, and so is she
Now when the wind blows you cover your teeth
I told you to shed away and trade in your blues
Love is love's sad news

I took a faithful leap

2010-12-06T08:39:00.008-05:00

by aaaamandaaaa

"And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really."
—Synecdoche, New York

Tumult

2010-12-05T00:22:00.006-05:00

Sept 18 2009 9:35am
It's true that the music used to linger like the scent of your hair, clinging to the corners of the room like cobwebs. Music was a slow tornado that drifted in one day and swept us both up. And we were somewhere in the middle, with songs swirling around us and lyrics whispering to us like the wind, with nothing to hold onto except air. It felt so infinite but I knew that one day it would blow away, that we were caught in the center of a dying whirlwind, that one day we'd fall from the sky and when we did, I knew that we'd both hit the ground.

Our demons will follow us

2010-12-02T16:26:00.009-05:00

Nov 2 2010 5:03 pm
It wasn't about the perfect weight or a size 0. It wasn't because of image dysmorphia or peer pressure. That's what they couldn't understand. It was more warped than they could imagine. I wanted to feel the hunger bubble up inside of me, the headache hanging like a fog between my eyes, the dizziness waning in and out. I didn't want anything that could ebb the pain. I didn't want alcohol or laughing highs. I didn't want calories injected into my bloodstream or the comfort found at the bottom of a bowl of soup. I just wanted emptiness, starvation throbbing in my ear like a drum keeping the rhythm of my day. At school, the world blurred before my eyes, the colors ran into each other. I don't sleep at night anymore. I sit still too long and the world bleeds black. I wake up hours later, with the lights still on, unable to remember ever closing my eyes.
I could feel myself sinking into a pile of bones.

Made of words

2010-11-30T19:25:00.002-05:00

"Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. The Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W.H. Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howard’s End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."
— Susan Hill
(booklover)

The end of the joke

2010-11-29T00:49:00.000-05:00

Sick Sad World.

I've tried

2010-11-24T23:13:00.008-05:00

by benjaminlansky

"I want to say somewhere: I’ve tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back."
—Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

A month and half a year

2010-11-22T00:09:00.002-05:00

by redlips&icecream

I was 16 going on 17

2010-11-21T20:12:00.008-05:00

OCT 31 2009

How you said that I never fit in anywhere and that I don’t even make an effort to fit in. And how I said that trying was bad, because it meant changing and manipulating who I was to fill a spot that didn’t belong to me. And how you shook your head and laughed that fake laugh and said, “What do you mean? That’s the silliest thing I've ever heard.” And you kept talking even though I stood there saying, “What do you mean, what do I mean?” over and over but you didn't hear me or acknowledge that I was talking at all. And how you kept laughing like it was a joke and you were waiting for me to join in, nod my head and agree.

And then I did. I said, “Yeah, you're right. That is silly.”

But it was more sad than silly because I was lonely and the truth meant being on the outside and telling lies meant belonging. But I still hoped that I never tried to fit in again because I’ve seen what can happen, how I just end up standing around, laughing that fake laugh, agreeing on the outside, crying on the inside.

On the road to somewhere

2010-11-18T23:40:00.001-05:00

blueandbittersweet

It hangs in the air

2010-11-16T16:40:00.007-05:00

I love when the world turns gray.
When the headlights glow yellow in the fog like candles and the rain tracks run down the window like subway lines. The rubber tires grind the leaves into a pulp, press them into the concrete like stamps and the wind blows them down the sidewalks like red and yellow sprinkles. And the rivers of rains flow down the streets, pooling into lazy puddles, running towards the sea.

Because it was all too beautiful

2010-11-14T15:55:00.003-05:00

And

we were afraid
then
that
all through our lives
things like that
would happen,
that nobody
wanted
anybody
to be
strong and
beautiful
like that,
that
others would never
allow it,
and that
many people
would have to
die.

Your little cell

2010-11-13T10:52:00.003-05:00

"Growing up brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature's logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling and the noises and glares hit upon your little cell called your life, and shook it and warped it."
—Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

You went away quickly

2010-11-12T18:05:00.003-05:00

How did we get here?
With creaks in these chairs
Oh, there aren't enough hands to point all the fingers

But I sit transfixed by a hole in your t-shirt
Oh, I've said much too much and they're trying to sweep up

2 years

2010-11-11T21:19:00.004-05:00

I can subsist but barely.
Coexisting is easy when I'm standing straight, ignoring the depthless circle hovering in mid air. I can walk down the halls and feel my feet pressing into the outline of the footsteps left before and pretend to fill them exactly.
I have walked where they have walked and so we are the same.
I can laugh and smile and believe. I can peel back the artificial life and climb into its skin, become the main character.

Packing and unpacking

2010-11-05T23:23:00.000-04:00

(by prescience)

No one belongs here more than you

2010-11-04T21:16:00.001-04:00

(by Evergreen Trees)

Stabbed

2010-10-30T18:11:00.002-04:00

"What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and that if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings."
—David Foster Wallace
(source)

Over and Out

2010-10-25T19:00:00.005-04:00

sweet panacea.

Fragmented fiction

2010-10-21T15:41:00.006-04:00

So far from her, we were in another universe, Martians who did not live where she lived. She couldn't understand how sadness could push us back underneath the covers, how the pillows collapsed under the weight of our heads as we struggled to get out of bed each morning. I told her that I was moving to Vegas but I wouldn't forget. I would still think about her in the silent spaces when conversation fell off, I said. I wished that things really did get better. I couldn't tell her but I didn't believe in that anymore. He said that he would bring her by before I left, let her visit for a while so that I could say goodbye. But he never came. I waited for a week by the front window, jumping every time a red car turned down our street, my heart slipping into my stomach like a brick as they all rolled by.

Sleep

2010-10-18T20:55:00.001-04:00

there are hard times for dreamers

Letters

2010-10-12T00:20:00.008-04:00

clouds taste metallic by -raccoonology
virginiawoolf:btwnwindows

I'm writing you a letter of all the things I should have said these past 3 years. I'm stringing all the letters into one, pages and pages that your hands can crawl across, trails of sentences that your fingers can walk through. I will try to hand you the memories but there's only so much I can cram in between the lines, there's only so much I can show you. I left them on your front porch, wrapped up in manila envelopes. It rained that afternoon and the black ink splotched. Your name ran down the steps and left a puddle on the Welcome Home mat.

My heart belongs to October

2010-10-01T02:47:00.005-04:00

(by little gold poppy)

My heart belongs to October, to the kind of warm and the almost cold, to the yellows and oranges to the steel gray skies and the soggy sidewalks. To warm tea cups settled next to folded up paperbacks of Edgar Allan Poe and foggy windows.

A room

2010-09-26T11:02:00.003-04:00

(by christopherlandin)

"What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself."
—Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

I'm trying to hold on

2010-09-19T00:29:00.000-04:00

(by ┼)

Keep looking

2010-09-18T10:25:00.002-04:00

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

—Charles Bukowski, "Alone With Everybody"

Say goodbye to summer

2010-09-04T16:11:00.005-04:00

The light turned green and I wondered if I should take off. I was weaving through crowds of people, dodging taxis, running across the street in my too-high heels. Then I was finally there; standing outside the pizzeria, waiting for the revolving doors to stop spinning. I ran back to the car, wedged myself in the backseat and sat with the ridges of the passenger's seat digging into my knees and the A/C barely whirring and cut my slice of pizza into triangles, the tomato sauce seeping into the crevices left by the plastic knife and fork.

We were leaving in the next hour.

I watched as the GPS reloaded and the directions back to home slid onto the screen. And in that moment I couldn't tell you who I was. I was stuck in a half-world, wading between two different lives. I should have been used to it—it happened every time I started speeding into the future; I always got yanked headfirst back into the past. My head was pressed against the window, trying to photograph the sight with my eyes so that I never forgot.

Before I wasn't sure if there was a better life waiting for me in another city far away from here. I first started to pray for the future the summer I turned 12 and over time, I began to feel like I was sitting on a still sea, waiting for a swell that would never come. Six years later I'm praying for the changing tides, the swirls of faces, and the parade of shoes again.

I've been the eye of the hurricane and I've blazed cyclonically through the streets this summer and loved every moment of it.

My hope is not dead.

What might have been lost

2010-08-30T17:20:00.004-04:00

Lived through 6 years that felt like forever.
Now the scenery's changing outside the window and I don't know where I am.

Untitled by Christian Pitschl

"I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another."
—Albert Camus, The Stranger

Out on a ledge

2010-08-26T17:03:00.014-04:00

from sofia coppola and lelim

Feeling lost in a foreign country again and I don't speak the language. I tried to eat dinner tonight but my mouth wouldn't stop trembling.
It was supposed to be better.
There's a stack in my room a foot and a half high of catalogs and letters. I sat in the corner this afternoon, staring at all the different lives I could have.
Put them in a hat, shake it up and pull one out, they told us.
I dumped 3 bottles of pills that I never took down the sink last month and I watched the sink froth and the water tint red and white.
I thought that I could do this but I just don't know anymore.

Everyone wants to be found

2010-08-20T20:29:00.007-04:00

"I just don't know what I'm supposed to be."

photo by Running Wolves
from the film, Lost In Translation by Sofia Coppola

Goals

2010-08-12T20:32:00.002-04:00

"i just want to be myself. and i want to be with someone who's himself. that's all. i want to see through the performance and all the pretending and get right to the truth."
—Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

No ruby slippers

2010-08-09T17:38:00.003-04:00

postsecret

Welcome

2010-08-04T20:23:00.008-04:00

My one year blog anniversary passed and I didn't even realize it. Last year, I spent the first of August barricaded in my room. The first day of summer vacation I started locking doors--I canceled my cell phone, deactivated my Facebook and killed my old blog. Communication with anyone was kept to a minimum and I happily avoided it whenever I could.

violet skies by Yasmin Veenman

So it was a summer of closed doors and open windows. All summer Jenny Lewis played from the stereos day and night. Time could only be measured by how long it took for the album, Acid Tongue, to play from start to finish. The start of summer was strangled. It was hands clawing at ropes, pulling for loose space, feeling at bruises. Someone had died. I used to be someone. And now my life was a mess, I didn't know who I was and in a few weeks I was going back to school the one place where every day, everyone was telling me who to be.

The last week of July, I stayed up late reading, playing this song on infinite loop. There are some song lyrics that I won't ever forget and this one melted through the surface of my skin and ran through my bloodstream straight to my heart. To who you are and will never be.

Propped against the wall, watching the sun set through the light dancing through the screen of my bedroom window, I wrote my first post. With a few stacks of books, pages of underlined quotes, a folder full of collected photos and a notebook full of cramped writing, I started constructing this blog, blindly placing arranging pieces of myself into blog posts. And when I pull off the blindfold, I can see a mosaic that is sometimes scattered and messy and confusing. And perhaps one day I will understand it all but until then, it will keep me impervious to the crowds and I will continue to share what I have with all of you, people I do not know and have never met, to fellow bloggers who have grown dear and feel like kindred souls. As I Wrote One Day loads on the computer screen and to all of you I say, in the words of Howard Hall, "Whoever you are, however you arrived here, take a step inside."

Not very wise

2010-08-04T13:45:00.000-04:00

screencap from the film, An Education

as seen on Lux Lust & autumn armagnac

One way or the other

2010-08-02T16:05:00.001-04:00

"I hope you get where you're going, and be happy when you do."

"I always make it out and move along one way or the other."

—On The Road by Jack Kerouac

There's a bluebird in my heart

2010-07-27T11:58:00.002-04:00

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?
—from "Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski

Rain in July

2010-07-20T21:59:00.007-04:00

by Saria Dy

If you could go back three years ago as the person you are today and talk to the person you were then, would you? What would you say? What would you say to the girl with the rift inside, the cracked ice of the frozen lake, that felt like two different people overlapping, blurring the lines, ripping her apart? Would you try to stop that feeling from seeping in like invisible gas, the one that would make you stand on that dock by lake all night wrapped in a jean jacket with your fingers colder than the metal buttons? Would you try and stop your old self from vanishing like marks on a dry erase board? Would you answer the phone when those friends called, the ones who had stopped loving you when all the marks were gone and the board was blank and you were still unsure of your true colors and hesitant to start again?

by Saria Dy

Would you tell her not to cry the next year when she came home from her birthday party because she wasn't alone, just lonely and that loneliness would pass, even if it seemed like it would last forever? Would you warn her of the next two winters because they would be hard? Would you hold out your arms and tell her, "Oh yes, those winters will be hard, they will cut you, and you will bleed but you will live and May flowers will come and that's when you'll know that the scars spread over your arms are proof that it does get better?"

It will not let you fall

2010-07-13T16:28:00.002-04:00

"So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you greater than any you have ever known, if a restiveness like light and cloud shadows passes over your hands and over all that you do. You must think that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall."
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet