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peeks out of the grave with a starbucks in hand,

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Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

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william blake, titania and puck with fairies dancing (detail), 1786 / florence welch and her witches, big god, 2018

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My father used to hit me so hard that I used to see stars. So I decided to name them to not feel so alone. Now the night sky is a portrait of wounds from when I was a child. If I cannot pray to the stars, then who? My prayers, they echo through space looking for a home, but home is just as empty as childhood.

— Hannah Green, from “Night Sky.”

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Mahmoud Darwish, from Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi)

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deathless ♚ sentence meme

You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.

You are going to break your promise. I understand.

You’re lonely too.

It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be.

I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable.

I am your servant.

I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased.

For you alone I will be weak.

I belong here, and you will not deny me.

I say these things, and the world listens.

I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried.

In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.

I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories.

I moved the earth and the water for you.

You will always run away with her.

You will always lose her.

You will always be a fool.

You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear.

You have already done all of this and will do it again.

No one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough.

We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying.

What we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.

There need never be any rules between us.

Let us be greedy together; let us hoard.

Do not leave me, swear that you will never leave me.

I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.

Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.

I can’t abide a poor liar.

You look like a winter’s night. I could sleep inside the cold of you.

Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians.

Scold me; deny me. Tell me you want what you want and damn me forever. But don’t leave me.

Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.

In his own country, Death can be kind.

What is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

Men die. It’s practically what they’re for.

I am no one; I am nothing.

Nothing in me was not made by you.

A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.

Just tell yourself a story that’ll satisfy you and pretend he told it.

Forever isn’t bright; it isn’t like that. Forever is cold and hard and final.

I savor bitterness - it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived.

If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.

What did I do wrong? Was I boring? Did I ignore you?

Don’t you dare speak to me like that.

I have worn nothing but blood and death for years.

I have fought all your battles for you, just as you asked me.

I have learned not to cry when I strangle a man.

I have learned to watch everything die.

I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too.

Are we not devils?

No one is now what they were before the war.

I have not seen you without your skin on.

Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.

We obsess. It’s in our nature.

I’ve a devil of a habit for being right.

In war you must always choose sides.

If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.

We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive.

My old bones will follow yours soon enough.

It is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair.

I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love.

After love, no one is what they were before.

I have survived, but I have not been spared.

In the space of one heartbeat to another I loved you and I was lost to you.

Frighten me, make me cry, only come back.

It’s not so bad, my darling. Being dead. It’s like being alive, only colder.

You’ll think it’s love, while he dines on your heart.

You will be so beautiful when you are old.

I cannot keep you and I cannot let you go.

You will live as you live in any world…with difficulty, and grief.

I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.

She said you’d come and I swore to eat your heart.

I still want to kiss you.

My heart is being cut in two. I cannot bear it.

What happens to anything beautiful?

I have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.

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someone said, “anger is sadness that had nowhere to go for a very long time” and I’ll never forget it.

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rainy night at maekawa by kawase hasui / “punisher” by phoebe bridgers

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remember when annie looked kenny thee ackerman in the eye and went ‘ you’re my dad! you’re my dad. boogie woogie woogie ’

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-It’s not the red of which we bleed- 

  watercolour on paper, 2019

@xwristitlo

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Sylvia Plath, from, “Three Women.”

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“Cemetery flowers after the ice storm”

by Peter Fricke

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Sue Zhao // Dialogues on Love #4 // “Maybe I already do”

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at this point: fuck it, i’m un-canoning the crystal

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Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

[Text ID: “As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.”]

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BERTHOLDT.

He walks towards the light in the window. Overhead it flickers in the dark, one hole in the wall that promises warmth. The sidewalk is cracked and black under his marching feet. Broad-shouldered and towering in shape, the warrior sweeps across the compound. His mind is set on his destination, one comfort in a landscape of jagged edges. Bertholdt must take this time to make himself human again. And this is something he must make, must compose of all the shattered pieces he keeps rattling inside his head. The person he is when he stands in front of hateful generals, when he sits with an aching back through briefings and bends down to have the yoke set around his neck again, that is not the person he can present to her. 

When he unlocks the door to his apartment, government-issued, a pittance, so Marley’s warriors won’t sit like half-bodied veterans on street corners, Annie is there. He knew she would be. He saw the light burning, a small shadow streaking across the far wall. But that is not the same as seeing her. Briefly, his creaking heart stutters in his chest. Relief pools in the cavern of his ribcage, drowns out the mechanical pistons that punch fear into his lungs. She greets him with a statement, some confusion on her tongue. 

You’re home.

So it seems. How strange, to be home. All his life all he ever wanted to do was to go home. His mind has ached and strained towards this fairytale place, this barely remembered idea. He painted it better in his memories, when he was so far removed from it, it didn’t seem real at all. Home was a fantasy. Home was just another word for ‘anywhere but here’. And now he has arrived, another ‘here’. So, where to next? 

Annie pads over to him, her translucent fingers melting against his chest. She intercepts him His pulse flutters in answer to her quiet offer but all he can think to do is nod. He peels the jacket off his shoulders and relinquishes it to her hold. He has done this before and it startles him, the way that routine settles in his muscles memory, the way he stops balking at her attention. Annie speaks softly and he answers in turn. Quietude is their refuge. “Did you wait for me?” His voice is deeper than it used to be, a low rumbling somewhere in the depth of his throat. He’s talked himself sore today. 

An errant hand, large and warm, skates up Annie’s arm, as if to guide her back into the room, away from the door, the cool draft of the outside world. But there is something heavier to it, something deeply ingrained in the meandering paths of his mind. He must touch her to know she is there, to convince himself that she is more than a trick of the light. Exhausted eyes map the shape of her, peering out of sunken hollows. He seems half a mirror of his titan, half a skull, not yet flayed. The eyes, he has been told, are always his own.

“Sorry. I had to go over some things with Reiner after the meeting.” He carries on, his heavy gait following her lightfooted foray into the living room. This place is so strangely static. Sometimes he barely feels as if he belongs in it, a small cramped place made of shapes and tentative routines. But if he doesn’t belong her, then she does all the more. He sees Annie in every corner, on every counter. A glass on the window sill, a discarded shirt at the foot of the bed. This, too, they have started to share. He doesn’t recall which one of them followed the other, whose whispered invitation was finally heard. It is all done to the gentle ringing of the funeral bell in their blood, chanting the old song: Don’t leave me. Not yet. So they didn’t leave. Eventually they just didn’t leave anymore. 

And now here she is, no longer foreign, no longer icy chill and furtive glances, and asks him about dinner.

“Do we have something left over from yesterday? It’s too late to cook anything.”

HOW STRANGE THAT THEY ARE ABLE TO SLIP INTO THIS LITTLE HAZE, shutting out the world with the click of a door and the turn of a lock. the fight will never leave them, but they will try be human, anyway. so she takes his coat, turning to grab a hanger and put it in its place within the closet. there is humanity to be found in routine, in normalcy, and annie will savour it all while it lasts. 

at his question, colour rises to annie’s face, and she manages a nod to confirm what he already knows. this too is part of their routine, taking turns waiting on each other. she remembers the day bertholdt first pressed a key into her hand; annie didn’t come around for almost three weeks after that, but on the fourth week, she had arrived at his door bone-tired from an intel operation. annie stood there in his doorway, holding the neck of a bottle in one hand and a pack of quality cigarettes in the other— a peace offering and a silent apology both, in the form of their favourite vices. 

and he let her in, of course, then and all the times after. annie has only kept on haunting him since, and somehow hasn’t found herself turned away or fleeing just yet. 

the weight of his hand on her arm is an anchor, and annie allows herself to be grounded by it as they pad in the living room, closer to where the light casts a warm glow over the space. at his apology, annie simply hums in response. it’s nothing out of the ordinary for them to be kept up late, with the brass all too eager to expend the warriors’ time and energy— a constant reminder that they are weapons, mere extensions of marley’s war machine. 

she wonders what the discussions had been about, if there was any intention to open a new theatre of war. questions are already forming on the tip of her tongue, but annie files them away for now. she will save them for the quiet moments when they lie awake, restless in the small hours of the morning when sleep inevitably evades them. 

annie’s footsteps come to a halt at the entrance of the small kitchen. she turns her head to look at bertholdt, realizing that his hand is still on her arm, solid and steady as ever. her own moves to cover it, dwarfed in comparison, thumb skimming over his warm skin. the gentle touch tells him: you can let go now, and i will still be here. “ no more leftovers, but i did go to the market after i left the base. ” she says, finding the confession abashing somehow. 

she nods towards the pot on the stove, which housed some stew and rice that she’d seen in passing on a restaurant window on her way home. “ i didn’t make it, but you can count on it being edible, at least. ” annie tries for some humour, hoping to ease the tension she'd seen in the outline of bertholdt’s shoulders, making her way to the stove and turning it on. “ this shouldn’t take too long to heat up, so— ” she glances around from where she stands, eyes landing on the table that sits spotless and empty. “ do you mind fixing the table? ”