Life Is Tragic Simply Because The Earth Turns And The Sun Inexorably Rises And Sets, And One Day, For

Shoutout to all the cavemen who gave their lives to find out which plants are poisonous and which you can eat

“No one has ever made you feel this way, how I am loving you now: remember, remember because nobody else remembers. I remember, I do. Imagine for example, how we tread the pavements with your leather shoes, when we cross the bridge when you suddenly hum a song you have heard from nearby folks. It is quite so lovely how you do it. You do it in your own way, that I am moonstruck, as if the moonbeam is coming from your voice, that spontaneous illumination with your movements, your hands that are vital to your nails– transparent, colorless, like spring water in the brooks. If it is with you, these memories, arise, gently opening my heart to take you in– and you will eat me whole, because I feel so small, so small that I am melting, melting and caramelized. We are here, we are here, and nothing has escaped between us, as if the earth and sky meets halfway to give us space: the momentary pause of this liquid ether we hold in our hands, the palpitation in your chest, that is, how I know, time stand still.”

— Chuck Akot, from The Color of Charcoal and Other Essays, IF THE EARTH AND SKY MEETS HALFWAY 

I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.

— Haruki Murakami

One of my favorite stories about Artemis is that after she required Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, she stole her away at the last moment and left a white deer in her place. After that, people disagree on what happened, but I like the story where Artemis transforms her into Hecate, because can you imagine them in the modern era?

Artemis, protector of young women and goddess of the hunt turned vigilante, hunting down the ones who attack girls in dark alleys, the ones with beer-hard hands and no sense of decency even if they’d been sober anyway.

But when Artemis finds the girls, she takes them to Hecate–Hecate, who was mortal once, led like a lamb to an altar by a man who was supposed to protect her. And sure, Artemis is the one who makes them pay, who delights in their screams and dances in the moonlight once she knows those men will be scared of the dark forever, spend their entire lives looking over their shoulders fearing her.

But Hecate… Hecate is good with herbs and potions and she understands the nightmares, the heart-pounding, sweaty hands panic that wakes them up screaming in the middle of the night, and she makes them herbal draughts to help them sleep, because unlike Artemis, Hecate understands. She isn’t vengeful, an angry older sister out for blood like Artemis. She’s the best friend, the mother, and the sister rolled all into one.

So Artemis avenges them and Hecate cares for them and the moon-goddess Selene shines her absolute brightest for them, fills every shadow with bright silver so they don’t need to be afraid of the dark anymore, and the three goddesses call these their Lost Girls, and at first Apollo was sort of skeptical but there’s no stopping Artemis when she sets her mind on something, and before Apollo quite realizes it, he’s running beside his sister, chasing a boy who couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and he’s never felt more right.

I always preferred the company of the dead. You try complaining about your life, surrounded by their wailing. Call it perspective.  And the living, well, they can’t look at me for too long, without dissolving into their most basic parts, only good for my cousin’s touch. Nobody likes looking at their own mortality. Everybody wants to die a hero. They don’t want to meet me with my howling dogs and lingering nature and blank eyes. I’m not unkind, no matter what the other Deaths say. I allow lingering goodbyes, lovers to meet again, scores to be settled. Just ask Patroclus, his hands fading  as he watched his lover weep.

Melinoe (a.v.p)

The excavation of the ancient city of Ur led by archeologist C. Leonard Woolley in Tell al-Muqayyar, Iraq, 1934 [859x611]

i am terrified that twenty years from now i will still look back and feel an ache when i remember the boy who broke my heart all those years ago. and i’ll somehow still miss you. but for you, i’ll probably be just one of the many girls you dated when you were young. you’ll look back and only remember a foggy memory of me; my face, a blurry vision in your mind.

— i think i’ll miss you forever

Sometimes we want our bodies to do a better job at showing the things that hurt us, the stories we keep inside us.

Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead (via ellacalm)

Have a Laurens with his eyes open because I was called out.

so my english teacher put up new posters in her class and