Lately I’ve Been Overcome With Emotion

"to be, or not to be"

to be seen without performing. to be heard without screaming. to be missed without disappearing. to be enough without proving it. to be held without falling apart. to be understood without explaining. to be wanted without conditions. to be. to be.

“He holds me as though I’m the only solid thing in the world.” —Jude about Cardan, The Queen of Nothing

“The odd curve of her ear was what he had noticed first. A roundness echoed in her cheeks and her mouth. Then it was the way her body looked solid, as though meant to take up space and weight in the world. When she moved, she left behind footprints in the forest floor. Because she didn’t know how to glide silently, to disturb no leaf or branch. He felt smug to see how bad she was at even such an easy thing. It was only later that it disturbed him to think back on the shape of her boot in the soil, as though she was the only real thing in a land of ghosts.” —Cardan about Jude, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

aka a love story summed up in two quotes <3

i like to pretend i already died and asked god to send me back to earth so i can swim in lakes again and see mountains and get my heart broken and love my friends and cry so hard in the bathroom and go grocery shopping 1,000 more times. and that i promised i would never forget the miracle of being here

— Devin Kelly, Ordinary Plots substack

Anaïs Nin, in a diary entry dated 27 February 1929, featured in The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol. IV, 1927-1931

—No Matter The Wreckage, Sarah Kay

I wish writing stained you the way art does: fingertips gray with charcoal, bright paint splattered against a face, wet clay drying on skin. To be looked at and to be thought of an artist. 

Sometimes I look at these hands and imagine ink dripping down my nails, my palms, my wrists. Onto the floor. Black blood and the type of visual beauty that doesn’t exist yet, and maybe never will.

tweeted excerpts from A Field Guide to Getting Lost, via Rebecca Solnit's twitter