I Love This Website I Hope We All Make It

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

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.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Ibrahim Nasrallah, “Palestinian,” trans. Huda Fakhreddine

ORANGE BOSS 😺

a poem I wrote for Gaza :

How do you speak of a sacred earth beneath your feet,

Then sow seeds of sorrow where prayers meet?

Tell me, how does holiness reign in the land,

When mosques and churches crumble by your hand?

Where is the sanctity in smoldering skies,

In ancient trees set ablaze before our very eyes?

These silent sentinels, older than your lineage, burn—

How can you claim this holy ground, yet spurn

Its very essence with fire and fury unleashed,

Turning sanctuaries into battlegrounds, peace deceased?

How can you belong to a land you scar,

And still stand before it, claiming to bear its star?

ن -

"Every time a man yells you are seven years old again."

Clementine von Radics, “Mouthful of Forevers.”

The grandest waterfall in the world is not Venezuela’s Angel Falls, at 3,212 feet [979 m] tall; it’s on the seafloor between Greenland and Iceland, where cold, dense water from the Nordic Seas collides with the lighter, warmer water of the Irminger Sea and plunges over a hidden cataract 11,500 feet [3.5 km] down to the seafloor.

— Laura Trethewey, The Deepest Map