huh
love is a strange thing.
i’m still trying to figure it out. it has to do with truth. and sacrifice. and patience. and CHARACTER. and a strong will to do what it takes to keep this person in your life. it sounds so exhausting. like, from the outside looking in, relationships are pretty prosaic.
but the other person is too wonderful for you to NOT do all these things. not even wonderful. i don’t know. necessary. not like you need them to get along, but it is more possible to do things when you know they have your back. and you want them to understand that you will always have theirs.
i don’t understand anything about the world. i don’t know what i mean by love but i sure as hell am going to keep saying it to him!
(Source: kurthalseylovers, via canwegetthisright)
"
I dreamed that we were together in some old-fashioned room. I read at the table. On the other side, J. lay on a wide bed, also reading in his favorite position. Through a window directly across from him, the light of the rising sun fell on his body. I buttoned up some kind of white bathrobe and ran to kiss him.
—I greet you with the rising sun! I called out. We never speak like that in life.
In dreams artificial, literary formulas sometimes turn up.
It seems that the dead always appear in our dreams just before we wake. In this way they remain somehow half real.
In my dreams his body is always phosphorescent blue.
"Anna Kamienska
"
This can’t be love because I feel so well
No sobs, no sorrows, no sighs
This is too sweet to be love
Yet I long to look into your eyes
Ella Fitzgerald?
"When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.
She’s like a child crying
at nightfall because she didn’t want the day to end."
David Lehman
Looking at MRI Scans of My Brain
My husband and I held the films up against the sliding glass door in
Oregon the summer it seemed my sadness might never go away, trying
to make sense of whatever illness swirled there in black and white and
gray, so terrible the river winding through me seemed more real than I
was, somewhere beneath the Douglas fir’s shawl of liquid silver, the
grape leaves unfurling their fuzz of green.
Here were thought and memory, feeling and dream. I stared into those
transparent sheets of myself my husband traced with one finger as I’d
seen him trace our route across a ten thousand foot mountain, follow-
int the convoluted folds and cross sections as patiently as he followed
the slow lines of elevation.
And I thought, This is what matters—the transparent mind that lets the
world through like a window, one we can open any time, whenever we
want, the wind in our hair, mysterious, fern-delicate, human. Or is it his
standing beside me that I remember, ready to remind me that what felt
crazy was only a matter of degree, my footing on that mountain easily
recovered by reaching my hand out to his as he balanced, just a few steps
ahead, impossibly steady before me?
-Alison Townsend
"Five times today I thought I saw you moving
in the far corner of my chest, & brightness
begins: my cavalier attitude mapped out
on rose buds, winged clocks beating furious
time. Dear You, I want each & all of you
standing wet from the shower, Chicago light
streaming in, epiphany after ecstatic
epiphany spinning my head round the you
in front of me, the you I want to wake up to,
my hands resting & dizzy after nights
tracing paths on your skin. Dear You,
you wouldn’t know it but my sense of touch
is dead – I feel things that aren’t there & can’t
feel the real tremors tingling but I feel you
in different ways. You – in moments,
in lingering segments: that orange peeled
open & its bright bright sweetness; & you -
embraced all at once: your words read
in early morning as light floods the room."
(letter to her, with answers), Nate Pritts (via clavicola)
we don’t have “a song” because that is silly, but this one makes me think of him.
"I loved my boyfriend so tenderly, I thought I must transmogrify into vapor. It would take spectroscopic analysis to locate my molecules in thin air. No possible way of holding him was close enough. Nothing could cure this bad case of gentleness except, perhaps, violence: maybe if he swung me by the legs and split my skull on a tree? Would that ease this insane wish to kiss too much his eyelids’ outer corners and his temples, as if I could love up his brain?"
Annie Dillard
v said i reminded him of a statue of venus
i gained some weight and got all dramatic about it
but venus!
"In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other
in total friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other like
soldiers coming out of a battle,
bound with the tie of the birth-room, we
wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, we weave through the dark
soft air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other with the
huge invisible threads of sex, though out
sexes themselves are muted, dark and
exhausted and delicately crushed, the whole
body is a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of life,
the children deep asleep in their beds like a
vein of coal and a vein of gold
not discovered yet. I sit on the
toilet in the dark, you are somewhere in the room, I
open the window and the snow has fallen in a
deep drift against the pane, I
look up into it, a
world of cold crystals, silent and
glistening so I call out to you and you
come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it! I cannot see beyond it!"
Sharon Olds - True Love (via lightandplanetary)
from Amy Gerstler, “Dearest Creature,”
Remember when you said, after we’d
camped near Crater Lake for a week,
that I looked like the sort of tree one sees
in a dream? I made fun of you all day. Called
you loony. But now, with your tangerine tree,
the one you planted and fed fireplace ash
all its first winter, covered with hummingbirds
I know exactly what you were trying
to say that precious day. Dearheart: a single
word would be enough to summon me. All else
burns off like fog. I lie vividly awake. Waiting.
"Word magic. If you say a word, it leaps out and becomes the truth. I love you. I believe it. I believe I am loveable. How can something as fragile as a word build a whole world?"
from Chime, by Franny Billingsley (via plenilune)
my grandmother met him today, for the first time, and she said he was “un santo”
i think so too
