Valentines Day Is Coming Up,, If You Ever Wanted To Gift Me A Sword With An Engraved Romantic Message,,,

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde

You say prisoner, and you think of her: the girl whose veil smelled of wildflowers snatched by bone-fingers she clutches the grass and the earth bears stitches in the shape of her fingernails she clutches the grass and the earth screams. You say prisoner and you think of her: the cursed girl she has known death without having died. You say prisoner and you think of her: you think of him, soaking up what last breath of wheat still remained in her; the shadow of her collarbones as the sunshine dies on her skin. But you do not know: she kissed him first. Her lips have tasted death and you know she liked it. She fed the pomegranate to herself; she devoured every last seed until juice ran down her chin. He gives her sunshine and she does not want it. She rules death with fingers still pumping with heartbeat and when she laughs the Underworld shakes, and Hades with it. You say prisoner, she says queen.

persephone, you were never doomed. (via aarontveiits)

Best fucking thing I’ve ever read.

[The Queen Below - @hynpos]

“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 

via weheartit

the art of saying no was a numbing in our mouths. we learned how to form it gently, to swallow the punch, to let down with gentlest hands. we learned how to fake a smile, to force a chuckle, to take disgust and turn it into polite denial, to take fear and weigh our options and submit.  he said he needed sex because oh it hurt how we made him. he said we should have just smiled back at him. he said that we could have learned karate to fight them. he said that we couldn’t say no, he was our boyfriend. 

how many girls are raised to feel guilty for no. we feel it must come with a reason. our no has to have qualifications. if our no isn’t enough, we are expected to cave in. 

the battle of our inner strength and our outer bodies. how we calculate small injustice versus our personal safety. how we’d form no in small ways that made him feel like it was our fault. how we’d let him down in a way he wouldn’t follow us home. we’d say no without the words; lying about sudden appointments or phone calls, we’d invent husbands, we’d suddenly become best friends with the woman beside us. we always had someone waiting at home for us - usually big and angry - who would notice if we were missing. we enter in our phone numbers with the last two digits switched. we say we’re going to the bathroom we’ll be right back before we take off running. 

and our no, those two letters, was never good enough. we either rejected him too harshly or not clearly. if we said no, we weren’t in love. the no was too forceful, the no was too gentle. the no meant ask nicely, the no meant keep persisting. the no was because we’re all catty and cruel and hate nice men. the no was because we’re all paranoid bitches. the no was wait long enough and it’s a yes. the no was playing hard to get.

and our life was learning. it amazes me sometimes when men tell me, “but she never said no” and i hear her story. how he was her boss and she would lose her job and it was her everything. how he said no but men aren’t allowed to refuse these things. i was thirteen the first time i had to spend a two hour train ride gently turning down a middle-aged man and someone else told me i should have just screamed or hit him or done something. how the girls i told all nodded solemnly because they know what it’s like to be thirteen and scared and to be eighteen and scared and how to be twenty-three and scared. because we’ve all said no and had it blow up in our faces. we’ve watched men turn from flirty to aggressive. we’ve seen what happens to our friends.

but in the end it’s our fault. don’t you know a man can’t take rejection.

I. Hera makes ambrosia tea from her keurig for the girls who leave her house each morning, to cleanse all defilement from their lovely flesh. She watches them all leave, like what they’ve done is something to hide, Hera knows anyway. She will wake Zeus later and make black coffee for the both of them, and pretend the young women are just fantasies of a withering god. II. Athena has twenty tabs open in her web browser, monitoring the political climate. Wars are no longer fought on fields of wildflowers, they are held behind screens and in lines of code. She learned the language of code quickly, protecting those who hack valiantly from phishing sites and from a Trojan horse of a whole new kind. Athena’s fingers are no longer calloused, but ice cold hovering above her keyboard. III. Aphrodite smells of expensive perfume and taste like vanilla lattes. She preaches self-love from her mall kiosk, selling bath bombs infused with rose and honey. She watches young girls skip meals and chase men who hurt them, and Aphrodite cries herself to sleep. When she can’t sleep, she takes to the streets– which is far worse. She sees her name abused, used on products of defilement and artificial beauty. IV. Persephone clings tighter to her husband in the cold nights of the winter and fall, knowing their days together are becoming fewer in number as the world’s climate changes. Spring comes too early and summer stays too late, and all she can see is her mother’s hollow smile. There can only be one queen in the warm months, and pomegranates aren’t in season during the summer. Persephone isn’t the only one affected by this arrangement; Hades quivers like a leaf under her first touch each fall.

The gods are dying, what of the goddesses (5/20/17)

Don’t you dare pity her She traded a suffering soul for a throne of bones She exchanged watchful eyes for a court of her own The seasons of the earth depended on the very breath she took She had death wrapped around her fingers and spring at her beck and call and the ruler of the heavens tasked with finding her She turned the world upside down to find freedom The daughter of flowers escaped her prison made out of roots and thorns and became the queen of death and forged her new home out of shadows and power

Persephone was the real winner (via starlightpoet)

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.

Instead of doing literally anything else that may be considered “productive” I went ahead and made this.

I present to you my list of Classic Lit Authors Sorted into Hogwarts Houses:

William Shakespeare - Ravenclaw

Emily Dickinson - Hufflepuff

H. P. Lovecraft - Ravenclaw 

Leo Tolstoy - Gryffindor

Edgar Allan Poe - Ravenclaw

Oscar Wilde - Slytherin

Robert Ervin Howard - Gryffindor

Jane Austen - Ravenclaw

Mark Twain - Slytherin

Ernest Hemingway - Gryffindor

Aldous Huxley - Slytherin

Sylvia Plath - Ravenclaw 

Ray Bradbury - Ravenclaw

William Blake - Slytherin

James Joyce - Slytherin

William Wordsworth - Hufflepuff

Lewis Carroll - Ravenclaw

Walt Whitman - Slytherin

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Ravenclaw

T. S. Eliot - Ravenclaw

Victor Hugo - Gryffindor

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Gryffindor 

George Orwell - Slytherin

Virginia Woolf - Ravenclaw

J. R. R. Tolkien - Ravenclaw

Toni Morrison - Gryffindor

Mary Shelley - Ravenclaw

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ravenclaw

Charles Dickens - Gryffindor

Charlotte Brontë - Gryffindor

Emily Brontë - Slytherin

Anne Brontë - Hufflepuff

George Eliot - Gryffindor 

Louisa May Alcott - Gryffindor

Joseph Conrad - Slytherin

Jack London - Gryffindor

Henry James - Ravenclaw

Bram Stoker - Slytherin

Franz Kafka - Slytherin

E. M. Forster - Hufflepuff

Ayn Rand - Slytherin

Joseph Heller - Slytherin 

Harper Lee - Hufflepuff

J. D. Salinger - Slytherin

Arthur Conan Doyle - Ravenclaw

Agatha Christie - Slytherin

Roald Dahl - Ravenclaw

Frank Herbert - Slytherin

Octavia E. Butler - Ravenclaw

Vladimir Nabokov - Slytherin

This is obviously not a complete list (there are 50 here) and there will be a follow-up with more in the future! I am very sure about some of these (anyone who has ever met me or looked at my blog knows how hard it was to restrain myself from putting Oscar Wilde first) but I’d love to hear other people’s opinions if anyone has some!

Special thanks to @amapofyourstars for helping me sort these people even though she had little to no interest in any of their lives.