Have Been Fundamentally Changed As A Person (

My brother cracked my rib one morning and gave me half of his orange in the evening.

I remember being younger and sometimes wishing to be a single child, to have all the attention and gifts and time but when he was away from home for the first time, I remember crying and stroking his side of the sofa as if blurting out my first wish- for him to be home, without thinking twice, without a shadow of doubt. Even the genie cried. Growing up with a sibling is like being the only people on a stranded boat, constantly figuring out how you can live with them and questioning how you could ever live without them.

One evening, in a fit of anger, I told him how I never wanted him to be my brother and he yelled that he didn't ask for it either. The air smelled like kerosene and my chest was filled with arsenic. I was raging and threw his favorite toy aeroplane down the window, 7 stories of guilt and shame. He cried all night and I wanted to cut off my right hand, the hand that hurt my baby brother. I didn't know if he was ever going to forgive me or even talk to me. The next morning at breakfast, he didn't look at me or say a word, I felt like my chest was about to explode and guilt clouded my vision. But then, I felt a hand quietly holding half of an orange my way.

The only people on a stranded boat. How do you live with them? How could you ever live without them?

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

Edit: I added a visualizer for this on my YouTube channel. Check it out here

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

Mine is foresight ✨️🕯

Derek Jarman, Chroma

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love [transcript in ALT]

220820 KEY ✨ SMTOWN LIVE 2022 : SMCU EXPRESS in SUWON (© 1214923k)

musings on June

1.anne sexton (“the truth the dead know”), 2. anne sexton (“suicide note poem”), 3. mary oliver (“august”), 4. l.m. montgomery (“anne of the island”), 5. morgan parker (“the black saint & the sinner lady & the dead & the truth”), 6. found poems: sylvia plath / peter k. steinberg (“percy key among the narcissi”) artwork by hugo grenville

buy me a coffee  

Deprimere (2021) - Sj Clain

there is this horror at being left behind

starting line, luke hemmings / fleabag (2016-2019); s1e6 "episode #1.6" / working for the knife, mitski / x / it chooses you, miranda july / ryan o'connell / x / via flickr / aristos the musical / x / the hours, michael cunningham

image descriptions below the cut

1. Black text highlighted in grey on a white background reads, "I wake up every morning with the years ticking by / I'm missing all these memories, maybe they were never mine / I feel the walls are closing / I'm running out of time / I think I missed the gun at the starting line".

2. Frame from the TV series "Fleabag." A woman with short, brown hair is sitting at a restaurant table in front of a window. She has tears in her eyes. Text at the bottom of the frame reads, "Either everyone feels like this a little bit and they’re just not talking about it or I am completely alone. Which isn’t fucking funny."

3. Black text on a white background reads, "I always knew the world moves on / I just didn't know it would go without me".

4. An empty playground structure illuminated at night, in front of an open field and the starry night sky.

5. Text on a grey background reads, in all caps, "all I ever really want to know is / [white text on a blue background] how other people are making it through life. / where do they put their body, hour by hour, / and how do they cope inside of it".

6. Black text on a white paper background reads, "about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you're not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are."

7. Blurry and grainy greyscale image of silhouetted people walking.

8. Worm's-eye view image of two silhouetted people holding hands while scuba diving. Black text on a white background in the top left and bottom right corners of the image reads, "I often wonder if life is easier for other people or they're just better at faking it".

9. Black text on a white background reads, "[Patroclus]: Remember what you once said about growing up? How it's like running after someone, but always falling behind?"

10. Text on a white background. Black text reads, "he was more lonely than the rest of his friends, he thought." Blue text reads, "but that's just not something that you talk about."

LIVING THROUGH MEMORIES.

thomas campbell // suzanne collins, gregor and the code of claw // czesław miłosz, the issa valley // vladimir nabokov // antonio porchia // l.m. montgomery, the story girl