abalonesecrets

[abalonesecrets]

Do you still want peace?

I mean this in the gentlest possible way: I think I already have it.

[abalonesecrets]

[abalonesecrets]

for old times sake is actually such a heartbreaking and beautiful sentiment. let’s do it for the love that used to be here!! it is reason enough!!

[abalonesecrets]

i must admit, i am not the best at looking back.

i oscillate wildly between acceptance--acceptance of it all, of kissing all of my mistake fully and wetly and deeply and then leaving without regret--and between longing. a desire to soothe what i did wrong.

in my head, every person i have ever left has never moved from the spot where i left them. but that’s wrong. they move on just as you do. other people have other lives, no matter when the last time you were part of that. i’ve been through millions of selves, i’ve reinvented myself every thursday--i am different from those who knew me, and they are also different. i am happy for this.

sometimes, you make promises to someone that you know in your heart will never come to fruition. maybe it’s someone you thought you would see another summer. maybe it’s someone who you promised you’d be there, and then you weren’t. and it’s better for it. because you would have changed, and they would have changed, and you would never have gotten back that one summer of your life where their being in it made everything perfect. you need to stop chasing it. sometimes, it is just so beautiful, you may only experience it once. it will be enough to carry those memories with you.

it is better to move on. in perfect faith and hope. there is a beauty in letting sleeping dogs lie, and in knowing we will never get those days back. i am overjoyed at simply having experienced them.

and as always, i love you.

[abalonesecrets]

They really should teach people how to cook in school.

[abalonesecrets]

no matter what will happen tomorrow, nothing can recreate the feeling of being dead inside for months because of the lockdown and then completely on edge for days because of the presidential election, only to wake up to a text message that says “babe wake up, destiel is canon” and be hit by the fake news that putin is stepping down only seconds afterwards, like how are you supposed to recreate that feeling, how are you supposed to experience a mass hysteria like putindestielelection day ever again, I hope nothing will ever make me feel that way again but I will cherish that day for the rest of my life

[abalonesecrets]

Y'all. "Hell is empty and the devil's are here" is not one of those epic Tumblr quotes. It's from The Tempest. The Shakespeare one.

[abalonesecrets]

Actually, I couldn’t resist trying to capture this image, albeit very sketchy and rough! Rietta’s first appearance in @isfjmel-phleg’s “The Blackberry Bushes.”

[abalonesecrets]

i think the aesthetic echo chamber created by tumblr is more dangerous than the political one bcs im self aware enough to kno my politics r radical but then me and the girlies are on here reblogging body horror and very weird erotic poetry and i get offline and interact w a real person and jokingly say something like fungus is tangibly divine in the way it facilitates the eternal dance of creation and destruction which is really creation as or by destruction and theyre like what the hell are you talking about freak. the aesthetic barrier between me and a girl in a vineyard vines tee is literally insurmountable. i find the trout to be a very nietzschean fish

[abalonesecrets]

“This poem doesn’t rhyme.”

Dude about to make haikus:

“Oh you haven’t heard?”

[abalonesecrets]

kermit the frog was so fucked up for writing the rainbow connection

[abalonesecrets]

I looked back and you vanished down into hell.  I sank to my knees and wept on the threshold between dark and light.

Then I stood and walked over the line.

To walk into death and come back is rare for man, but to face death is common.  And so, although I wished never to wake up again after sleep-stumbling into a meadow, I did.  The heart does not stop beating when it breaks, the two halves keep moving as they knit themselves back together.  I dragged myself into the nearest town and lay in the square for three days, unable to move or speak.  I cursed the sun above me.

(Sometimes, I make my way to a lake or a river and nereids tear me to pieces.  This is not one of these times.)

A woman left bread on the bench beside me.  She did it without looking at me, dropping it softly by my head swift on her way.  The muscle in my chest echoed in my head, louder and insistent.  I reached up, the movement stiff, clogged by the dust seeping into my bones.  I tore off a piece and almost swallowed it whole, my body acting on instinct when my mind would not.  I finished the loaf and sat up.  The world looked different from upright.  A young man gave me a jar of olives and smiled at me with pity, for indeed I was pitiful.  My legs dragged me up, my arms supported me against a tree, and my heart beat within me.

I took the job of an goatherd.  I would not play (could not play, I had left my lyre somewhere between our world and the next).  I lost my music with my wife, I swore, so instead I wandered the hills and high crags, following my animals. Their soft bleats filled the mountainsides up and reminded me of the songs I used to sing with her, and I wept again, my tears swiped away from my face by the harsh wind.  Time moves quickly in the mountains, it’s too cold to do anything else, and lingering grief is not allowed.  Still, as I descended at night it all came back to me, her dancing, warm and bright in the light of the stars.  So alive as only those creatures that adore life can be.  

Autumn passed and so did Winter, freezing over, the worst it had been in years.  We huddled within our houses, an old couple had lent me a room until I could build my own so I sat beside them by the fire as they swapped their stories and their wine.

(Sometimes my body is left to float away from itself in the cold depths.  Here, I braved the frosts and gales to bring fuel for the fire, to keep others warm. Stories change.)  

Eventually they ran out of stories to tell.  After a week of silence, I wove one for them.  An old tale, of heroes and monsters, dragons slain and children freed from terror, and the gods, always the gods, giving hope, halting success.  My wife sat at the back of the room as I told it, and as I finished she dissolved again into my breath, leaving me mourning her anew.  But the couple was filled with joy, and as they took my hands I felt them warm my fingers.  

More stories followed, old and newer, ones made up out of my own head.  Neighbours scurried into our home to hear me, and stayed longer to talk to each other, gentle murmuring, in Winter all you can be is gentle.  They talked to me too, and I began to reply, to ask questions. Murmuring became words, became sentences, became lives, all tangled up together with joy and grief and loss. One evening I tried to tell a story of a woman who had died, and a man who had walked into the underworld for her. I was barely half-way through before I choked.  I could not finish, but the people came back night after night.  I told other stories, but as the weeks passed I tried this one, again and again.  Each time I failed to finish it.  Each time the people returned.  My heart beat, keeping out the cold.    

Winter faded into Spring, and that brought another round of tears.  Spring is the most melancholy of seasons, its joy filled with loss of things unknown, and as the goats gave birth and taught their kids to leap and climb my vision blurred.

(Sometimes my end is full of water.  This time, the only water fell onto my cloak and stained it with salt).  

One afternoon I heard a child trying out a lyre.  Her fingers were too fat, too weak for the strings, and her sound was tight and hard.  I followed the sound, and saw her throw the instrument down in disgust, plopping onto the ground beside it.  

I offered to teach her.  Instinct is not so easily broken, and music was an instinct.  It was a small and poorly-made instrument, but it sang like a human throat, and the next month I sang with it.  The girl improved and as I saw the joy it brought her I prayed to any god that could hear that she would not be stolen from her mother’s garden and taken to some place cold and dark and empty.  The people gathered now outside, heard me teach, heard her play.  One night I sat down with my couple and under the stars I told them the story of a woman who had died, and a man who had walked into the underworld for her.  I told it out, I told it to the end, and they wept as I did.  I told them the man had died.  I did not know yet if that was true, but I was beginning for the first time since I saw the grass again to believe that it might not be.  

My wife still echoed in my footsteps, and I still wept for her.  But August had come and olive harvest began.  I picked jars of them and gave them to young men.  I had no bread to offer, but I played and sang for the women. I taught the lyre.  I led my goats.  I told stories.  I had asked my heart before that it would stop, but it refused.  I grew again to love the sun.   

My wife and I, we are spun out by the turning of the world, again and again, as a tragedy.  Sometimes we are. 

But tragedy suggests an end, and this time, I do not die.      

[abalonesecrets]

“There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning, God was everywhere and everything. A totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists. “So God just leaves?” No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering. Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. But the sparrow still falls.”

— Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

[abalonesecrets]

Ao3 writers are the strongest Avengers

[abalonesecrets]

why don’t you shut your fucking mouth and look at the wikipedia page for sucking cock???????????

[abalonesecrets]

I just came up with a horrible drawing game.