OUR LOVE IS AN OPEN WOUND

Joanna Klink, from Raptus

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.

- Jim Morrison

#PersonalRevolution

good essays i’ve read this year

“the siren song” by nina maclaughlin

“out there: on not finishing” by devin kelly

“illuminating kirinyaga: meaing and knowing in mount kenya’s forests” by tristan mcconnell

“on the igbo art of storytelling” by ikechukwu ogbu

“poetry fills tehran streets as iranians adapt nowruz rituals to corona restrictions” by alex shams

“writing emails to my late father” by krista stevens

“panic is worse than pain: how fiction failed me after trauma” by jenn ashworth

Be who you are, even if it kills you.

It will. Over and over again, Even as you live.

Break my heart, why don’t you?

— Joy Harjo, from "Break My Heart," Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

“I’ll have it. You have to give it to me. It’s gotta go somewhere.”

Fleabag | 2.04

(Favourite female characters: Holly Golightly.)

Yes, I think that she was aromantic or at least in the aro spectrum. She was only with the man at the end of story, because it was 1959 and her character was kind of problematic itself. I love her so much. She is endearing and while a traumatised character, Holly was goofy and perceptive enough.

Emily Dickinson, from her poem titled "1188," featured in The Emergency Poet

girlhood this girlhood that. woman you are 26

I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.

I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?

—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Edward Hopper

Drawings, 1920s