Loveliness - Tumblr Posts
I found the most delicate boy, who steals looks when the thinks I don’t notice. And, oh, he’s going to ruin me. He really is. I already know it. He watches like he’s afraid to want me and I watch like I’m afraid to be wrong. I am cataloging every look, every sideways glance, every shy smile that has us both looking at our laps. My chest feels heavy. My hands are too warm to keep all to myself and I’m burning up. Like an ancient sun. And I want him. And it’s going to ruin me. I just know it.
mama, I think I figured out how wind makes rubble out of stone, by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
Lonely is January; he is never quite there until he leaves. He is hanging limbo over your head and begging you not to let him fall. He is tying ropes to your fingers and waiting for you to move, to drop him into you. He is never quite there until he leaves, until he cuts your fingers off and slips down your walls. Longing is February; she is dipping herself into open fire and waiting for her eyes to light up. She is spitting stardust down your throat and telling you love tastes like sores and stomach acid. She wraps chains around your ankles and drags you after her, waits for you to run at her. You never do. Angry is March; he bruises you while trying to love you. He doesn’t know much about self love and he takes that out on you. He turns you stringed-puppet and makes you run for him, drags you around to take his falls. He doesn’t leave until you are skin and bones, he doesn’t leave until he takes too much of you to ever feel whole again. Shy is April; she smiles from across the room and never meets your eye. Sometimes you see her in improbable places, hiding in someone else’s eyes. She is soft and timid and she loves you this way. She is making space in her own skin for you, but you leave before you get a chance to love her back. She hangs around you like a ghost now. Seduction is May; she is dancing around you in a little black dress and daring you to touch her. You almost do. She is rose thighs and a waist that grows only thorns. She is spring flowers threatening to turn summer weeds. You hold her but she is never really yours. She drops her leaves into your hair and convinces you that a mess is beautiful. Lust is June; she kisses you like she’s trying to breathe right out of your lungs. She is summer sweat and high tops and she presses against you like trying to find a place under your skin. She teaches you that your hands can make fire out of human bodies, she teaches you about gunpowder blood. Heartache is July; he tells you he loves you when he needs to hear it back. He wants you to save him but he’s holding your head under water and wondering why you stopped breathing. He tastes like forest fires and the longest day of the year. He sticks to you for months and you can’t scratch him off your skin. Uncertainty is August; she shifts back and forth into your life like summer rain. She is open fires and waiting for you to burn yourself trying to hold her down. She meets you at a point in her life where she cannot love you, where she can only love herself. You understand this later, you understand that summer flames only take and never give anything back. Vanity is September, he turns your eyes in looking glasses that only point to him. He stands over your head and makes you beg for him, puts you on your knees for him. You believe you are nothing in his absence and so you drown yourself in him until you forget what its like to breathe in open air. Greedy is October; he is bones that never stop breaking. He dips his fingers into your heart and says he wants more. You crack open your spine for him and he finds a makeshift home in the debris you left behind. You carry him around inside you and he grabs onto anything that shows him love. Regret is November; she has her head in her hands and never stops screaming. She carries her ghosts at the back of her throat and finds lips to spit them into. Everything she sees is in black and white and she teaches you this way. She teaches you that nothing ever goes forgotten. She hides you like her biggest mistake, her only wrong turn somewhere along the way. Closure is December; she is soft and warm and holds you when you need it. She tells you she is going to leave eventually and you understand because you’ve loved her and lost her too many times to let it break you anymore. You’ve loved her and lost her until you stopped losing pieces of you every time she turned away. Her hands find their way around the back of your neck, and you let her. The next morning she packs her clothes and leaves without a sound, and you let her.
Reena B. | Twelve months and how they lived inside my body. (via wordsnquotes)
A little something I wrote for my Valentine, Michael Faudet ♥
Cold, I was, like snow, like ivory. I thought He will not touch me, but he did.
Carol Ann Duffy, excerpt of Pygmalion’s Bride (via starseas)
True intimacy is more than fooling around with somebody you’re attracted to. I want to share myself with somebody who will press her hands through the surface of my skin, curl herself up inside my soul and say, Here, this is who I am.
Beau Taplin (via wordsnquotes)
When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (via podencos)
Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.
Mortimer Adler (via fyp-philosophy)
I refuse to be reforested. I stay razed as a reminder.
Nina Puro, from “houses all the way down, or, the slope mine” (via christophercarrioned)
the year of letting go, of understanding loss. grace. of the word ‘no’ and also being able to say ‘you are not kind.’ the year of humanity/humility. when the whole world couldn’t get out of bed. everyone i’ve met this year, says the same thing: ‘you are so easy to be around, how do you do that?’ the year i broke open and dug out all the rot with own hands. the year i learnt small talk. and how to smile at strangers. the year i understood that i am my best when i reach out and ask ‘do you want to be my friend?’ the year of sugar, everywhere. softness. sweetness. honey honey. the year of being alone, and learning how much i like it. the year of hugging people i don’t know, because i want to know them. the year i made peace and love, right here.
Warsan Shire (via peppermintcafe)
My sophomore year of college, I had to take this class called Honors Human Sexuality. Which was a strange kind of class to wander into because you had a dozen kids: nerdy enough to be top of their class, getting scholarships just for doing their homework, but also who were willing to have completely honest, frank discussions about sex. (What I’m saying is, it was awesome.) So our first day, the professor went through this list of intimate acts, and wanted to know what we believed qualified as sex. She said kissing, we said no. She said oral, there was some controversy. She said anal. And one– one singular girl, in the corner of the room, said no. And god, with that one word, I could tell you her whole life’s story: I could tell you about the Bible Belt, Southern Baptist home, the “your virginity is a gift you give your husband.” I could tell you about the pushy high school boyfriend, the First True Love and how he said things like “blue balls is a medical condition” and “no, this is totally six inches” and “baby, baby, anal doesn’t count as REAL sex.” The tragedy here is not her ignorance, or her warped perception of human sexuality. The real tragedy is the education system that failed her– the way female sex drive is treated like a myth or a side-effect of heterosexual marriage, the way the clitorus is left un-labeled in high school text books or how I learned the word vulva on the internet. It’s the society whose obsession with sex can only be rivaled by it’s shame of it. How there is no right way to have a body: virginity treated as prudishness, promiscuity treated as lack of moral compass. In a world where boys talk about losing respect for the women they sleep with and yet never lose respect for themselves, it is not her fault that she didn’t understand what she was getting into. When she stumbled over her explanation that she thought anal counted as sex in gay couples, just not heterosexual ones, it made my chest ache. She was putting up parameters, working in clauses all so that what she’d done wouldn’t fall under the terrifying title of Real Sex. Because growing up under the Lone Star State of Abstinence Only turns the freedom of choice into a heavy burden where we are taught how to say no but not how to say yes– where women are valued by the state of their bodies. Did you know you can’t even pop a hymen? That it’s a muscle and it stretches and if you bleed the first time, you’re not supposed to? That stained sheets are not a rite of passage or a sign of purity. To every teenaged boy who’s ever bragged about how tight she was, here’s the part where I tell you that when she is aroused everything lubricates and loosens, she was only that “tight” because you have no idea how to turn her on. (Which is not something to brag about.) It is unacceptable that someone could make it to college—two decades of their life– without getting the bare bones basics of sexuality. And no, fear tactics and wait-until-marriage don’t count as an education. We can’t be so caught up in shaming sexuality that we neglect to teach how to express it safely. Because if Abstinence Only really works? Then I guess anal isn’t sex. It’s just cardio.
HONORS HUMAN SEXUALITY by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
I’ve got rage in my throat Hot coals like screaming in empty houses. I’m tearing through things I used to love Easy as tissue paper— The shrapnel of them too soft. Nothing to throw that doesn’t drift downward. But I can feel my insides collapsing Toward the singularity in my chest. My heart: the star gone supernova. I will not apologize For being so big I was insurmountable. I will not say sorry for the fury in my blood That had me burning hot When you wanted me tepid. I will not be small for you. I will bear my teeth and dig tunnels through mountains. Because I am magma and lightning. I am a young Earth: red and broiling. I am primordial hunger in the belly of the beast. I am no Wilting flower. I am a force of nature And I will not be soft for you. Quiet for you. Less for you. I am tall and terrifying and terrible. I will not ask for permission Just because you said please.
Ladylike, by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)
You tried to change didn’t you? closed your mouth more tried to be softer prettier less volatile, less awake but even when sleeping you could feel him travelling away from you in his dreams so what did you want to do, love split his head open? you can’t make homes out of human beings someone should have already told you that and if he wants to leave then let him leave you are terrifying and strange and beautiful something not everyone knows how to love.
Warsan Shire (via wordsnquotes)
