Don’t You Dare Pity Her She Traded A Suffering Soul For A Throne Of Bones She Exchanged Watchful Eyes

In some versions of the story it wasn’t the sun that Icarus flew too close to- it was the ocean with it’s tantalizing blue depths and salt water that stripped his wings of glue and down down down he fell sinking into the waves no one ever taught him how to swim. in some versions of the story Persephone walked into the underworld with her head held high eyes forward ready to take and take and take she stole the pomegranate seeds and when Hades found out he was furious and sent her away but every six months the seeds brought her back to the gate and a crown made of thorns grew on top of her head and she was queen. in some versions of the story Artemis fell in love with a mortal and when he broke her heart she grew cold and unfeeling not even her brother could pull her from her darkness there are days when she still finds herself at the windowsill waiting waiting waiting for her lover to return knowing he’s with another. in some versions of the story Medusa grew lonely she lived in a garden of statues and no one came to visit anymore and all she wanted was someone to love she became angrier and angrier at the cursed serpents on her head until one day she grabbed gardening shears and one by one by one chopped off the heads of the snakes but with their life force went hers and they bled out together and with a knowing look in her eyes she faded away. in some versions of the story the Gods and monsters and legends are still among us in churches and diners and battlefields they sit hunched over on dirty porch steps with cigarettes in their hands or across from you as a dinner date they have become us in more ways than one in some versions of the story the myths never faded from our minds because they are still in front of our eyes and you are the main character you are the reason we are all still here.

You’ll never know how much you mean to the stars– Lily Rain (via wont-time-love-us)

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House (via quotespile)

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

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

Time passes you by...

Slowly and all at once as vivid as the shining amber lights on the wet concrete at night.

Walking on that burnt orange stone, home, home.

I look to the past and it's forgotten.

I'm standing outside in the driving rain, it ushers me away.

Pressed up to the window panes, fogging up sodden glass.

Looking at a stranger's past.

That little room with its sandy paint and coffee curtains.

Lights snapped on and Nora Jones sings out of the stereo.

It's soft and milky.

Clouding and brewing softly.

Time.

Past is present and present is future.

And it's all already passed me by.

I flip through shining photos and those familiar faces smile at the ghosts behind the long, lost cameras.

Choppy hair and sharply slit winds softened by a flash decades ago.

Moments so dear, a sun so golden, people lost to ticking clocks, they forgot long ago.

And they kept it all down.

Those shining cards with their little people.

The faces you see in the warm ripples of a bath.

No malice, just ghosts.

Ghosts of happy days and burnt orange stones.

Do you remember their names?

Did they ever learn mine?

I walk and I know I'm already gone.

Just a face in a photo.

I stand faded in smooth cards on Christmases and birthday nights in orange lights.

Smiling and laughing.

Running on tiles, on wood, on carpet, sand and stone.

I stand young and small.

I doubt I could even tell you why these photos exist now.

But they did.

Those people breathed that long lost air and time thawed once the flash faded.

We carry on.

Until the next photo's taken

“Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

valentines day is coming up,, if you ever wanted to gift me a sword with an engraved romantic message,,, now is the time

In that great discourse with the living dead which we call reading, our role is not a passive one. […] We engage the presence, the voice of the book. We allow it entry, though not unguarded, into our inmost. A great poem, a classic novel, press in upon us; they assail and occupy the strong places of our consciousness. They exercise upon our imagination and desires, upon our ambitions and most cover dreams, a strange, bruising mastery. Men who burn books know what they are doing. The artist is the uncontrollable force; no western eye, since Van Gogh, looks on a cypress without observing in it the start of a flame. So, and in supreme measure, it is with literature. A man who has read Book XXIV of the Iliad - the night meeting of Priam and Achielles - or the chapter in which Alyosha Karamazov kneels to the stars, who has raid Montaigne’s chapter XX (Que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir) and Hamlet’s use of it - and who is not altered, whose apprehension of his own life is unchanged, who does not, in some subtle yet radical manner, look on the room in which he moves, on those that knock at the door, differently - has read only with the blindness of physical sight. […] To read well is to take great risks. It is to make vulernable our identity, our self possession. In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream (Dostoyevsky tells of it). One is somehow lifted free of one’s own body; looking backbone sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one’s own person, and there is no avenue of return. Feeling this fear, the mind gropes to a sharp awakening. So it should be when we take in hand a major work of literature or philosophy, of imagination or doctrine. It may come to possess us so completely that we go, for a spell, in fear of ourselves and in imperfect recognition. He who has read Kafka’s Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.

George Steiner, “Humane Literacy” from Language and Silence (via mesogeios)