My Flesh, My Home 🦪 🫧

Supporter, Nick Alm, 2016

Lavender Morning by Chris Cozen

musings on selfhood

1. Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life / 2. Su Xinyu / 3. Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life / 4. Su Xinyu / 5. Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life / 6. Su Xinyu / 7. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being / 8. Delfina Karmona / 9. Andrés Cerpa, The Vault / 10. Delfina Karmona / 11. Emily Dickinson / 12. Delfina Karmona / 13. Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

˗ˏˋ☕ˎˊ˗

Two Figures on a Bed, Pepijn Simon, 2020

on loving someone you can no longer have

beat me to it - brendan maclean/catalog of unabashed gratitude - ross gay/quietvoiced/it ends or it doesn't - caitlyn siehl/white ferrari - frank ocean/l.a. winter - louisa melcher/schuyler peck/honeybee - trista mateer/letters from medea - salma deera/harrow the ninth - tamsyn muir

[id: ten screenshots of lyrics and quotes. they read:

image 1: it's not that i'm alone/it's you're not here.

image two: i am sorry. i am grateful./i just want us to be friend now, forever./take this bowl of blackberries from the garden./the sun has made them warm./i picked them just for you. i promise/i will try to stay on my side of the couch.

image three: (12 minutes ago) she said: you're my favorite friend/i'm sorry that i want you like a lover.

image 4: it ends or it doesn't./that's what you say. that's/how you get through it./the tunnel, the night,/the pain, the love./if the sun never comes up,/you find a way to live without it./if they don't come back,/you sleep in the middle of the bed,/learn how to make enough coffee/for yourself alone./adapt. adjust./it ends or it doesn't./it ends or it doesn't./we do not perish.

image 5: i care for you still and i will forever/that was my part of the deal, honest/we got so familiar.

image 6: january 8th, i put on the dress you hate/laugh at my own jokes/fake a smile for my date/how do i love myself and not love you?/you made me too specific to be known by someone new.

image 7: i don't miss you. i don't. but it's hard to listen to songs from that time, the seven years of it, and not see the sunlight fade on that highway leaving vegas from your passenger seat. feel the hours we still have left to go -- the road ahead of us, the hum of a conversation too far now to hear. your shape and mine and how we existed in that moment, in love. when there was nothing other than the steadying idea that yes, of course i'm here, so yes, you are too. the anticipating rise of summer or a reunion of your family that felt like mine, or the two weeks of breath before school starts again. how to watch it all and not feel a twinge, never longing for it back. i can remember you, feel our ghosts in a room above my eyes and recognize we will never know each other like that again. allowing myself to exist in the memories i don't love anymore. it's okay. it feels as real to me as it did then, and i'm glad it was beautiful when it was. but there's nothing here i'd return to. dec. 14, 2020 [schuyler peck]

image 8: i promised no more poetry/i'd rather think of this/as a confession:/you are still the first person/i want to share new things with.

image 9: the centre of every poem is this:/i have loved you. i have had to deal with that.

image 10: you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. at least i'd had your full attention. /end id]

—On Love, Marina Tsvetaeva

[text ID: I just want a humble, murderously simple thing: that a person be glad when I walk into the room.]

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

“I was afraid of love, of being taken away. Everyone afraid of love is afraid of death.”

— Louise Glück, “Timor Mortis” from Vita Nova

ANNIE MURPHY as Ruth Brenner in RUSSIAN DOLL - 2.02 “Coney Island Baby”

earning it

halloween, phoebe bridgers | emily palermo | mommy issues: unlearning inherited pain, joan tierney | the last days of judas iscariot, stephen adly guirgis | nobody, mitski | georges bataille | love as an act of merciful conquer, silas denver melvin | gilead, marilynne robinson | giovanni’s room, james baldwin