“after All This Time?”

Nightmare number 113:

I am sitting in a very big chair and I cannot get out of it. My arms are tied to the chair arms but my hands are gone. There are people without faces standing around me feeding me pieces of paper that have all the things I am supposed to be written on them but they never ask me what I am.

- The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.

- Alison McGhee

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.

i don't know what younger person needs to hear this, but it is so valid to not want to drink alcohol at all, or to only want to drink very rarely. don't let others pressure you into joining in with those societal rituals. it is an outrage how normalized drinking alcohol is, to the point that those who choose to abstain are constantly forced to justify their private choices, be publicly questioned about what led to these choices or excluded from activities altogether. you do not ever need to justify your reasons for this. there are absolutely valid and important reasons to not drink, and nobody has a right to know your personal reasonings.

Sometimes I think about how different some books would be if they had been written by other authors.

For instance, if sylvia plath had written tsh it would've been in camilla's pov and everything would have been so much more unhinged. We'd get more of bunny's daddy issues and francis would've tried committing suicide back when henry told him he liked gucci.

So I noticed something about the stories in Sweet Sorrows.

The first and the last are about the pirate and the girl, the ancient love story (Once, very long ago…Time fell in love with Fate). Then there’s the Acolyte. The Zachary, the son of the fortune-teller, and the main narrator when the book is in the present (and the only one for this section of it). Then the dollhouse (something someone else mentioned was a little like a constantly growing Harbor itself, and which comes back when the bees do.). Then the Guardian story, which includes Dorian. Then our introduction to Elenore, then the inhabitants of Harbors (people like and including Allegra), then the Keepers (Now there is only one), then Simon, the man lost in time.

Introducing us to the main players. So I wonder, what if the Acolyte who sang the full month was Rhyme?

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist.

Jis hisaab se im awake all night...mereko part time guard ban jana chahiye

Mast pesa aayega bhai

We think we are alone. We think we are so special. We are deeply mistaken.

-Bunny by Mona Awad

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath