Lucy Dacus, Please Stay

“I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.”

— Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters: 1920-1945

BARBARA KRUGER

Edward Hopper

Drawings, 1920s

somedays my heart feels so close to the surface like it wants to take me somewhere and is tired of the limitations of my body, of my feet always walking in the wrong direction. this isn’t really an original thought. i have told you this before. someone almost loved me and they come to me in dreams even now but i punish my daytime mind for any thoughts of soccer or duvet covers or carrot cake and i never think about him except when it is dark out and i am in the backseat of the car and no one can see the alternate life passing through me, the one where he laughs forever and i press my ear as close as i can because i am tired of the limitations of my body. someday things will be different. the losses will fall off of me like particles from another world, landing on a small unsuspecting planet. i will garden and have at least one big window where i can see the sky and have the good sense to look. but today i asked God to empty my heart of whatever wasn’t meant for it and he is still in there somewhere, occupying a small space in a big way. if i let myself reach out to touch it then i would probably find out that there’s small space inside of him too that flinches when he looks at the moon. of course it doesn’t help to know that. it doesn’t help to know that the dark sky is a cauldron we both sit in to punish ourselves for the life we didn’t have.

Joanna Klink, from Raptus

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

But when Kafka said Even in my strong times I wasn't very strong it broke something in me.

The dream

"James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78", An Interview by Jordan Elgrably

Call me by your name (2017)