If you took ancientbruises tattoo survey a while back, you can read her finished paper by clicking the link.
(via thebarstoolphilosopher)
I remember when I fell asleep with you
for the first time.I was scared to. I didn’t want
to be late for my curfew but
you reassured me “It’s okay, I’ll watch the clock for you.”So I trusted you.
I rested my head on your shoulder
you put your arm around me
I put my arm over you.My internal alarm clock woke me up 45 minutes after my curfew.
You fell asleep too.
That should have been my first warning.
I never could trust you to keep your word.
Poem - “The Raven” (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
” ‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more.”Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore,.
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore,
Nameless here forevermore.
I wonder why more people don’t go to the post office at night. It is warm or cool, depending on what you feel like, just right really, and it is lonely as if it’s just aching for someone to come in. The part of the post office where most people go to huff while waiting in line and yell at the people behind the counter is closed early but the rest is entirely free 24 hours a day. I walk in and the lights are soft with the kind of yellow glow old lamps have. There’s one other person in the post office, a man, and he’s also visiting his P.O. box. I pass him as he looks up quickly, his face softening when he realizes that I’m another person with no plans this Friday night for whatever reason. I am visiting because everyone I love is away. I realize I haven’t been alone in over a month.
My P.O. box is number 772519 and it is all the way at the bottom right in the corner. I squat and keep my balance as I turn the key. There are letters inside even though I was just here two days ago. I reach in to take them out and I look all the way to the back. There is no back to the box and there is a room with light. I cannot tell what is there no matter how I twist my neck. I lock it again and walk towards a little area by the window. I open the letters with my car keys and I read them. I have had a P.O. box for a little less than two weeks and it is already becoming something quiet and intimate. Each letter and card I’ve received in the past few days has made me cry. Not always big tears but I tear up because the world feels very small when you think that people you don’t even know can understand the things you say to no one in particular. There were three cards from the same reader, one for Christmas, one for my birthday, one for my torn rotator cuff. There is a card from Michigan, another from Kentucky, Mississippi, Argentina, Denmark, Australia.
The Australian one felt thick in its envelope and as I tore it open, I saw that it was handmade, tied together with string and delicately adorned with an origami Christmas tree and a little elephant. I smiled at the careful reader who remembered my favorite animal. It felt weighty in my hands, not only because of the thick paper, but because the words inside stuck in my throat like all of the cards do, like all of the emails, messages, comments do. I selfishly think that I write for myself but I’ve come to realize that no matter how I feel about it, I have an audience and not only are they reading but they’re feeling and they’re reaching out. I cried the other day about it, oblivious to the fact that something on a blog could mean so much and overwhelmed by the fact that people were telling me they admired the things I write, that they were fans.
I thought of how I used to think you couldn’t be a writer unless someone else told you that you were one, that there was some sort of moment when you crossed over. I used to think that you had to publish a book or be in some very specific form of print to be a writer but the fact is as you soon write something, you’re a writer. There isn’t an epiphany or a moment when you become a writer, you just are one. I used to have an image in my head of a capital-w Writer living in a garret and struggling and selling his soul for a break but that’s not really the case, is it? There are all kinds of writers and writing and there’s no right way to be one or to put your work out there.
The part of me that grew up breaking the spines of books in the big chair in my bedroom still wants to publish a book and see my name in print but maybe things have changed, maybe it won’t happen the way I imagined when I was a kid. Maybe I’ll put out a book through a small press or self-publish or any other number of options. I keep hearing that publishing, that books are dead but I don’t think that’s the case at all. People are still reading, it’s just the medium is changing, it’s growing and allowing for all kinds of ways for words to reach people. I’m excited. I’m a writer and people read my work every day the way I read my favorite books growing up. I’m working on lots of things and I hope that very soon I can put my words on pages all bound for you to hold in your hands and read. Until then, you can hold your laptop or your iPhone or your Droid or your iPad or anything else you use to get to words. It doesn’t really matter how you get to them as long as you do.
I’ve never, ever in my life felt like I’ve been in the right place at the right time except for on the internet. I don’t know what this blog entirely is or what my writing is as a whole or where it’s going to go in the future but I know that whatever I’m doing feels damn right.
Paris Journal: Defying Digital Craze, Newspaper for Youngsters Is Thriving
(From left, Emilie Azoulay, Elisa Cammarota and Anthony Azoulay get to choose articles at a meeting at the Mon Quotidien office.)
“Both Elisa and Anthony are 10 years old and entering the fifth grade in the fall. And both are regular subscribers to one of the most popular daily newspapers in France.
On a recent morning, the two children sat at a large rectangular table with several of the newspaper’s editors. The paper, Mon Quotidien, or My Daily, invites several of its readers twice weekly to help edit the paper, except for the front page, choosing stories that will be featured in its seven other pages.
The national editor, Caroline Hallé, was proposing an article about a school in Britain that had bought hawks and falcons to drive off a plague of seagulls that were dirtying the premises.
Alternatively, she proposed news of how divers had recently found bottles of French Champagne that King Louis XVI had sent to the czar of Russia, but had gone down when the ship transporting them sank in the Baltic Sea.
‘How did Louis XVI end?’ asked Olivier Gasselin, 40, the paper’s deputy editor.
‘Guillotine,’ Elisa shot back, without raising her eyes from the notes she was making.”
One of the rare times that I wish I was 10 again.
(via NYTimes.com)
brain cells bursting. nerves overworking. acid lips. work your hips. move closer. a new order. over analyze over too much time. words slip. losing it. losing yourself in the mind of someone else. doesn’t take too long now. soft skin of golden brown. your eyes. mirror images of mine. full of battle cries. scars from the war. body sore. you say, “with you i can feel once more.”
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House.
If I can ever write an opening paragraph as good as that, I will count myself very fortunate indeed.
(via amonsteraday)
Oscar Wilde: On being cross-examined at his trial
- Mr. C. F. Gill (cross-examing): What is “the love that dares not speak its name?”
- Wilde: “The love that dares not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “The love that dares not speak its name,” and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
