We Are Captives Of What We Love, What We Desire And What We Are

"And you became like the coffee, in the deliciousness, and the bitterness and the addiction".

-Mahmoud Darwish

Sometimes it feels like I've got a war in my mind / I wanna get off, but I keep riding the ride / I never really noticed that I had to decide / To play someone's game, or live my own life / And now I do / I wanna move / Out of the black (out of the black) / Into the blue (into the blue)

- Lana Del Rey

I'm a master of speaking silently. All my life I've spoken silently and I've lived through entire tragedies in silence

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

that one scene where ruth shows barbie what it's like to be human and it's just scenes of humans at birthday parties... humans dancing... humans playing in the park... humans doing mundane and everyday things and having FUN meant so much to me. the fact that it didn't include extraordinary things that only a few people accomplish in their lives but rather things almost every human as experienced, or a FEELING that almost every human has felt - joy, happiness, love - was so beautiful and important. you don't need to be the president or a nobel prize winner to be barbie, because barbie isn't about all that. yeah those are things that several barbies HAVE been and it's not impossible to be them, but stereotypical barbie is just... barbie. and she's enough as barbie. she doesn't need to be anything else. she doesn't need to win an award to be happy. she can just go to the gynecologist with the same smile. she's just barbie and that's everything. and who's barbie if not all of us.

been thinking a lot about anticipatory grief lately. i love you so much that i know losing you will devastate me. i haven't lost you yet but i already miss you. we still have time, but it won't be enough. i think about what i would say at your funeral, and say some of it to you now cause i need you to know how loved you are before you go. you will go where i cannot follow, but you will never really leave me. it won't make it hurt less but it is a part of healing somehow.

When you’re young you just want to be older, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

-Before I fall by Lauren Oliver

I can’t stop thinking about how perfectly Barbie portrays girlhood and growing up… How you’re born in a perfect pink world, where you make the rules and get to prioritise whimsies and friendship and beauty, and then you notice something has changed, you discover that something is wrong with you, and you’re offered an illusion of choice, but even if you’d rather keep wearing your heels and go home and be safe and comfortable, you have to choose the Birkenstock, you have to leave your home, you have to grow up. So you’re thrust into this gritty, unfeeling world, where you’re scrutinised and suppressed, where you want to disappear into yourself, because everything is harsh and big and you are tiny and fragile and inadequate. And as overwhelming and impossible as it seems, you survive it. You find truth in the things you believed in when you were young, the inherent good in humanity, connection and love; your friends who look at you while you are crying, and tell you that they cannot imagine what it is that you do not like about yourself.

And now the old puzzle would be replaced with a new puzzle: How do I go on when the person I love most in the world is in love with someone else? Someone tell me the solution, he thought, so I don’t have to play this losing game all the way through.

- Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

The recurring butterfly motifs and gargoyle statues in Qala are everything