It Wimdy

“My creative writing professor told me to stop writing about love. I asked him why and he said, “Because you have turned it over and over in your hands, felt every angle, every fault, every inch, every bruise. You have ruined it for yourself.” I spent the next 3 weeks writing about science and space. Stars exploding. Getting sucked into a black hole. How much I wished I could sleep inside of that nothingness without being annihilated. What an exploding star would taste like. If it would make our stomachs glow like fireflies, or tingle and shake like pop rocks under our tongue. My creative writing professor told me that those poems weren’t what he was looking for. He tells me to stop writing about outer space. Stop writing about science. Again, I ask him why. Again, he says, “You have ruined it for yourself.” I spend the next three weeks writing about my mother, how we are told we can’t make homes inside of other human beings, but the foreclosure sign on my mother’s empty womb tells me that women who give birth know a different, more painful truth. My creative writing professor tells me I am both talented and hopeless, that everything I write is both visceral and empty, a walking circus with no animals inside but a beautiful trapeze artist with a broken hip selling popcorn in the entrance-way. He tells me to stop writing about my mother. I don’t ask why. I pick up my books and my notepad and I leave his office with my war stories tucked under my tongue like an exploding star, like the taste of the last person I ever loved, like my mother’s baby thermometer, and I do not look back. We are all writing about our mothers, our lovers, the empty space that we will never be able to breathe in. We are all carrying stones in our pockets and tossing them back and forth in our hands, trying to explain the heaviness and we will never stop writing about love, about black holes, about how quiet it must have been inside the chaos of my mother’s belly, inside the chaos of his arms, inside the chaos of the spaces in every poem I have ever written. None of this is ruined. Do not listen to them when they tell you that it is.”

— Caitlyn Siehl, “My Creative Writing Professor Told Me to Stop Writing About Love” (via alonesomes)

i love you everybody who is trying to save their own life & love themselves back into the world, it's gonna happen for you don't doubt for a second!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is going to sound like such a little sibling ass take but i genuinely believe that being a little bit annoying is actually a greater sign of maturity and self awareness than being universally likeable and on good terms with everyone

thank your local trans girl for being alive right now

Everything is just sunshine and butterflies for this baby

At peace

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, from You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems, trans. Fady Joudah.

How much do you love her?

“Enough to not make her ask this question.”

Everytime I read Frankenstein, the same line makes me put the book down and stare at the wall. It’s my favorite line in the book; it has its own highlighter color in my annotations. The first time I read it, I literally detoured after my last class just to tell my lit teacher how much I liked the line because I couldn’t wait until second period the next day. Here’s the line:

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”

This is said by the creature. He wanted to live. He wanted to live life so badly even though he had had such a difficult one. He still loved the song of the birds and the smell of the flowers and the joy in the world even if he never got to truly experience that joy. I just. AHHHH.

He wanted to fight for a life he never got to live.