You Think You’re Over It But Then You Hear The Two Songs You Played On Repeat All Throughout That One

just sent my irl best friend an incredibly risky fukinf link WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN WITH HER SPECIFICALLY i will shove my head in an oven

there’s a part in the howl’s moving castle dub where howl’s freaking out because he doesn’t think he’s beautiful anymore and sophie just says “you think you’ve got it bad? i’ve never once been beautiful in my entire life” and that quote’s been echoing around my brain since i was nine years old

desi pride moodboard: pride rainbow

"come, let us go and make the town a rainbow!" // ruskin bond, the room on the roof

[ image ID in alt text. terfs dni. ]

“I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. And that’s very appealing too. Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say – what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp. Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right? Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow. I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.”

— What People Really Look Like

“All of a sudden two decades have passed and you still have not kissed anyone with tongue, or kissed anyone at all for that matter, or had a 3 AM conversation with someone who would rather look into your eyes for ten minutes straight than talk. You have never worn a lover’s sweater or “forgotten” it at home in your bedroom just so you would have an excuse to see them again. You have never even stood face-to-face with someone who makes your hands shake so hard it feels like they’re both having a separate anxiety attack. This causes you much guilt and self-blame and sadness but above all, an overwhelming curiosity. Are you really that ugly, that unwanted, that uninteresting, that boring, that no one, absolutely no one, has ever looked at you like the only thing on earth? The answer is no. The better answer is that someone out there, somewhere in the world, is “wondering what it’s like to meet someone like you,” and they have two decades worth of love stored in their veins like a shoot-‘em-up drug, and they’re just about ready to inject it into someone else’s bloodstream. All you have to do is roll up your sleeves and wait for it to happen. At times you felt so lonely you could stand at the edge of a cliff with nothing beneath you but air and grass and a long, long way down, and you’d still feel emptier than that canyon itself. Maybe you even danced with yourself alone in your room a few times, arms outstretched around a ghost, pretending someone else’s hands were on your waist, someone else’s eyes boring into yours. Or maybe you fell temporarily in love with strangers on public transportation, fell in love with anybody who so much as accidentally brushed your hand on the way past. For you, falling in love with dozens of people a day was a coping mechanism for not having anyone to love you in return. But people are not eggs and falling in love with a dozen of them does not mean your shell will remain uncracked. One day you’re going to hit the point where you’re so desperate for human contact that you’re going to snap in half and all your love will bleed out like egg yolk. But someone out there is eating a bowl of Ramen noodles right now, or putting on slippers, or settling into bed. They are doing all the normal things that you’ve done in your own life. They are just like you. They have cellulite and extra fat in all the wrong places and goals and fears and doubts and bad handwriting. The truth is that they are just like you, and being just like you, they’re looking for a lover too. They’re what you might call a soulmate. They think they’re all alone in feeling the way they do, but you’re really both two halves of a whole. And one day you’ll meet them, bump into them on the street, and your two halves will be put together, and you’ll make one.”

— Writings For Winter - For Twenty Year-Olds who have never been loved  (via beepboopboopbeep)

🍯🐝 1. mary oliver, devotions: softest of mornings / 2. ponyo (2008) / 3. vanessa angelica villarreal, a field of onions: brown study / 4. only yesterday (1991) / 5. federico garcía lorca, new heart / 6. @heartcountry, the honey running down my arm / 7. red honey as a result of bees feasting on cherries / 8. nikos kazantzakis, report to greco / 9. by nur_light / 10. @heartcountry, the things that don’t rot 

the one (perhaps only) thing i’ll always like about growing older and maturing is the never-ending opportunity to develop and refine your personal taste in pretty much anything. fashion, food, music, literature, art, design, furniture: the older you get, the more knowledge, insight and experience you acquire and it all adds up to a treasure of source material to create a new you from. carve, prune, distill, expand, sculpt, evolve - you can recreate yourself always and aging gracefully is all about endlessly enriching yourself through that recreation.

you’ll find new people to have deep conversations with. you’ll find a new place to feel at home in. you’ll find a reason to be genuinely excited to wake up in the morning. you’ll find someone who will reinvent your tainted version of love. you’ll find a way to reconceptualise your feelings and turn to healthy ways to cope. you’ll find a way to reach your goal and improve yourself. you’ll find a way to live every day with inner peace and appreciation for everything you have.

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