In Light Of Recent Eventsi Think Its Understandable That My Voiceis A Little Shaky & That I Cant Speakany

in light of recent events i think it’s understandable that my voice is a little shaky & that i can’t speak any louder than a whisper. scar tissue is building up in my throat layer by layer & i can feel it begin to grow. this is a reminder every time i open my mouth that burns take a long time to heal. even years from now i don’t think that i will ever stop rasping my way through explanations of my fears at night when i am alone & a list of reasons why my voice shivers when it rains & how i always sound like i am the rough-hewn edges of a dock scraping against the murky water, waiting for someone to jump off it.

SCAR TISSUE :: o.m. 5. august 2016

love defined

storge• /ˈstɔːɡɪ/ noun, Greek: Στοργή (familial loyalty)

1. your brother likes to tease you about everything relentlessly but the one day someone else says something is the day when he stands up and punches that boy’s lights out because “no one gets to talk about her like that” and he just smiles when you ask him what happened after he comes home with a black eye. 2. when you come out to your family accidentally in the check out line of a Meijers your mom just laughs (and for god’s sake you were twelve and you didn’t know a thing except that you were pretty sure you liked everyone and not just boys) but she still took you to church on Sundays and said “what did you think i was going to do? you’re my daughter, you idiot. i love you.” 3. the only one in your family who knew what you were saying half the time was your father because you both spoke sign language and could yell at each other across the room saying “KANGAROO!” and start laughing while everyone else looked on. you made a habit of trying to learn new languages together until you could both speak in German and French too but the only words of Gaelic you spoke were the ones you said every day- mo gaol orst, tha gaol agam orst. 4. family is not what you think it is and neither is love. both are what you make it and both are worth fighting for

philia• /ˈfɪliə/ noun, Greek: Φιλιάς (friendship)

1. there is a divot in the road up ahead and it’s caught all the rain that fell while you were walking through this quiet neighborhood with your bare feet, sneakers in one hand and Emily’s shoes in the other. 2. she has green flip flops that match the green trees and it’s the last day but also a beginning, the start of another road that you walk down when you turn the corner. 3. you are barefoot and you splash through every puddle, every crack and you walk down the middle of the road together. this could be sad but instead you talk about conjugating French verbs and how there is a way to say you, me, us, we, together, forever with no strings attached. 4. Alyssa said if you ever needed to talk to someone that she’d always be there, don’t worry about it because that’s what friends do, right? and the thought of that makes you want to cry because who ever knew how much it meant to have someone who would be there.

eros• /ɛɹɒs/ noun, Greek: ἔρως (romantic love)

1. what arrows struck the hearts of men and caused them to feel a love like this? what arrows and what bow, what reason could there be to inflict us with this strange and bitter wonder if not to make us feel alive? 2. had you known how fast and how hard that you would fall im not sure you would’ve made the same decision but i am sure that you would have believed in and made the same love. 3. open your mouth and swallow them down like sugar and blueberries that turn your tongue purple but your lips red like kisses. you are a pair of hands begging to be held and a pair of lips waiting to be kissed and kissed and kissed until you are dizzy and the world is made of shining colours. 4. there are epics and poems and songs and movies and books and thousands of words written to describe this love and yet the story can be told over and over and over again without us ever tiring of it.

agape• /əˈɡeɪp/ noun, Greek: ἀγάπη (selfless love)

1. selfless love of one person for another (especially love of a spiritual means) 2. love that knows no body or no boundaries. love that can give and give and give until there is nothing left but everything, because there can always be more. 3. you couldn’t begin to understand how to love like this because to love like this is to be god but you can try because heaven knows that we can be good when we want to. 4. this is what was meant to be known as love.

/lʌv/ EXPLAINED :: @cityskylinesofimaginaryplaces

shitty love poems and other ways to say i think i love you

I decided to compile a masterlist of works for this collection, so here it is! This collection (title above^^^) is about unconventional love and the kinds of love you don’t think of as love but really are. It’s love sometimes in a scientific or simple or complicated way. If you have any comments or constructive criticism I’d love to hear it.

i think i love you

you’re overdramatic in your assumptions about love

steps to falling in love*

wave(particle)

particle(wave)

love defined

WE ALL DIE (don't say i didn't tell you)

there is all this talk of finding god in a boy’s mouth and how we are invincible, impossible, forever-young and reckless creatures lying on the edges of the night we refuse to call oblivion. or we are the morning sun rising, burning burning burning but we won’t burn out (and i know i’m guilty of this too, watching the fire and saying let it burn until all there is is ashes and we will rise out of them like red-gold phoenixes or at least i used to before i stopped believing in young gods and the promise of salvation in a bottle if you took one more honeyed kiss, honeyed sip.) i’d like to talk about the inevitable, if you don’t mind because no matter how much you say it nothing can last forever and i don’t think you understand what that means. what is inevitable? some day we will all die and there is nothing you can do to change that. you can’t save everyone, no matter how hard you try. we will grow old if we’re lucky and i don’t want to be lucky, do you remember how we used to promise we’d never grow up and we never said it out loud but we knew we weren’t talking about staying young at heart, child-like in wonder. i meant i want to die before i’m old and it’s selfish but only because i thought i wouldn’t be able to bear it, watching all those kids that think they’re invincible be so stupid. that’s the inevitable i’m talking about, not your endless void and poetic words. disillusionment and heartbreak and i just want to remind you that you can’t find god in a boy’s mouth (though they never said anything about girls; guess you could find god there if you wanted it just might not be the god you’re looking for and how tragic is that even after all this time we are still searching) you can’t find god so don’t go looking and you might think you’re invincible but you sure as hell don’t have on any armour if you light that fire i can promise you you’re gonna get burned because you spilled gasoline all over your clothes and when all that’s left is ashes you won’t come rising out because you’re not god, kid. do you have a moment to talk about the inevitable and how even if you look you might not want to see what you find because nobody’s waiting for you? his mouth tastes like smoke and i don’t want to say i told you so but someone will. it’s inevitable.

holland and magic shell

[laying still underneath the trees i think]

this is not bad. quiet can be good. i smell like lake water and chocolate, ice cream melting into my tongue. i have done nothing of importance today and it has been alright; i could call it happy even. this is a change from what im used to, this sudden quiet drop into happiness. shockingly cold i slide into it without warning, the way i stutter and take that final step over the dune and plunge into the clear water expecting to take another step. that last gasping breath, pulled out of me sharp and the way it feels being submerged, that lovely under.

we all bleed red (a lament for millennials and generation Y)

we have grown up with our heads pressed into the muzzle of a gun. we have lived in fear our entire lives, and if not fear then in outrage if not outrage, indifferent silence. there is no in between and we flip from one to the other like a switch triggered by a trigger going off in the hands of someone with twitchy fingers. we cannot remember a life before this one; before metal detectors and bomb sniffing dogs and evacuations and guns. always guns and words and no one ever doing anything to help. every child born in the past twenty, forty years has never known a world without all this fear. our parents had wars; we have our own kind of terror. we have this, a world that is not one any longer. we have shootings in movie theatres, in schools, in grocery stores, in parking lots, in apartments, in houses, in homes, in departments stores, in train stations, at bus stops, in aeroplanes, in airports, on trains, in cars, in front lawns, in parks, in cities, in towns, in fields, in clubs, in our dreams. there are guns going off in every single place that we live and breathe and we’re all just hoping not to die. since when did it become so typical for someone to to decide whose life deserved to be lived and whose did not? since when did we know the names of places, of tragedies by heart and the worst part is that we can’t even remember a fraction of the list. there are too many to even begin to name and we have lived through all of them. no. that’s not right. we have existed through all of them and pretended like it wasn’t going to happen to us, hoping the next one wouldn’t be right outside our door. it’s too late because now there is no door; now we are all standing in the same goddamned place getting shot down, getting held hostage by the same guns, feeling the same bullets rip through our skin. how can we pretend that we are all different and that just because it happened there doesn’t mean it will happen here? we are all human. please remember that we all bleed red. and that red is all over and we cannot remember a time before everything we knew was red. there has never been a moment when we could stop to breathe, not between rounds or bullets. we have learned that you walk a little faster, sleep a little less, look around a lot more and judge quickly before you end up dead. that’s what this war has taught us; that this is not a war fought in another country or overseas. our home is the battle ground and we are the soldiers, we are the civilians, and we are simply so tired of this that we cannot bear it. we don’t know what to do because we don’t know what we’d be without this, what decisions we would make without that gun held and fired point blank into our skulls every time someone writes the words “mass murder” because that’s what this is. this is four, five, fifty, twenty, one hundred, an entire culture being murdered en mass. how can we even begin to change and fix this? we have never known life without the taste of gun powder in our mouths and violence in our eyes. we think we’d like to.