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— Franz Kafka, The Castle | The Lovers of Valdaro

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writing these are addictive

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On the Communion of Curious Minds...

There is a particular kind of nakedness that happens not in the removing of clothes, but in the unwrapping of thoughts—when someone leans across the table, wine forgotten, to ask “But what do you really believe about the soul?” with the intensity others reserve for declarations of love. This is my own form of intimacy: the meeting of two minds barefoot in the territory of ideas, where every exchanged thought is both confession and caress.

We’ve been taught to eroticize the body but sterilize the intellect, as if the most vulnerable thing one can offer isn’t their flesh but their narratives—the half-formed theories whispered at night, the dog-eared passages of novels that shaped your inner world, the way your hands move when you’re trying to shape an image into the language of sight. To be understood in one’s thinking is a deeper penetration than any physical act; to have your metaphors cherished is a more profound surrender.

The ancients knew this. Socrates tracing concepts on Alcibiades’ skin with his words. Abelard and Héloïse weaving theology into their lovemaking. That night we spent passing Shire and Wynter’s back and forth like kisses, our fingers brushing over annotated margins—weren’t we, in our way, making love? The mind, after all, has its own erogenous zones: the place behind the ear that heats when someone dismantles your argument only to rebuild it better, the shiver when they quote your own forgotten words back to you.

Let others reduce intimacy to bodies. We’ll take the tremble in a voice when explaining Kant’s sublime, the gasp of recognition when Venn diagrams of belief overlap, the afterglow that lingers when two people have thought something new into existence between them. This is how philosophers love: with parentheses left open for the other to complete, with footnotes that say “See also: your eyes when you’re about to understand.”

(And when we finally come apart, it will be with our mothers’ proverbs on our tongues—half in forgotten, half in protest—as the ancestors lean in to catch the echoes of what we’ve dared to reimagine; salt and wonder and the faint metallic tang of all the words we’ve yet to spill.)

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poems to read while having breakfast at the heartbreak hotel

I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII) by Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII) by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Time does not bring relief (Sonnet II) by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

I Am Not Yours by Sara Teasdale

[you fit into me] by Margaret Atwood

You by Carol Ann Duffy

Be Near Me by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Blessed be the spectacle by Lev St. Valentine

You Are Tired (I Think) by E.E. Cummings

Hope you're well. Please don't read this by Lev St. Valentine

To Say Dark Things by Ingeborg Bachmann

Lilichka by Vladimir Mayakovski

Love and Hate by Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal

Sanctuary by Jean Valentine

the winter sun says fight by Peter Gizzi

The More Loving One by W. H. Auden

A Primer For The Small Weird Loves by Richard Siken

Dirty Valentine by Richard Siken

Morning by Frank O Hara

We Don't Know How To Say Goodbye by Anna Akhmatova

You'll Live, But I'll Not… by Anna Akhmatova

from “An Attempt at Jealousy” by Marina Tsvetaeva

The Last Toast by Anna Akhmatova

In Dream by Anna Akhmatova

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

Talking In Bed by Philip Larkin

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats

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𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐕𝐈𝐓𝐘 𝐎𝐅 𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐄 ━━━━ 𝐄𝐝𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐞

SUMMARY: A weary King Edmund encounters a celestial being of moonlight given human form—and in her eyes, he finds not judgment, but the quiet promise of peace he’d forgotten to hope for.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Just because I saw a portrait of a knight and a princess under the Golden Brown song but make it a king and an enchantress. Below 500 word count.

Edmund Pevensie moved through his kingdom like a hymn half-remembered at dawn—each gesture measured, each word weighted with the gold of hard-won wisdom. The crown upon his brow had long since ceased to be a burden; it had grown into him, vines of silver and duty twining through his dark curls until metal and flesh became one. His sword, once thirsty for justice, now rested in its scabbard with the contentment of a sated beast.

Then something—someone, emerged from the weeping willows as mist takes form—first a suggestion, then a certainty.

He stood at the forest’s edge, his crown catching the last honeyed light of dusk—not as a king awaiting tribute, but as a man who had long since learned to listen to the whispers of leaves.

And then—you appeared.

Not as a vision, nor a specter, but as the earth gives way to spring: tenderly, inevitably, and beautiful. Crushingly so.

It hummed with a warmth that had nothing to do with the fading sun. Your garment was spun from the whispers of jasmine and the last sigh of golden spring. Your hair like liquid onyx spilled down your back, threaded through with veins of quicksilver that shimmered with each breath you did not need to take, slipping through the mist like something half-dreamed.

The first thing he noticed was the scent—wild thyme and something colder, sharper, like frost on silver. Then, the light. Or rather, the way it bent around you, as if hesitant to touch your skin, dappling silhouette with fragments of stolen moonlight.

Yet, it was your eyes that seemed to lead him in his undoing.

They were the soft grey of dawn mist over still waters, twinkling sort that men charted courses by, flickering kind that danced just before the universe collapsed into itself. When you blinked, galaxies were born and died in the sweep of your lashes—twin abysses lined with stars.

As you looked at him, Edmund felt something in his chest loosen—not the unraveling of a noose, but the gentle slipping of a knot he hadn’t realized he’d tied. There was no judgment in your gaze, only a quiet understanding that flowed over him like soft balm.

“Son of Adam,” You breathed, and the words unfurled like smoke from an altar, “do you still taste the lies of winter on your tongue?”

Edmund’s fingers brushed the hilt of his sword—not in threat, but in remembrance. The leather groaned beneath his touch, whispering of frostbitten battlefields and the sweet, cloying rot of enchanted confections.

He could no more have refused you than the tide could refuse the moon.

“I taste only the wine of today’s council,” he replied, his voice the steady cadence of a heartbeat beneath armor. “The past has lost its flavor.”

You laughed, and the sound was the cracking of ancient ice, the first fall of snow upon a forgotten grave. For someone who loathed winter, Edmund seems to be adjusting well with the very terms you appear to represent. Then, a hand—pale as a communion wafer, cold as a buried blade—drifted toward his cheek.

“Tell me, does your lion still roar in your dreams?”

The king did not shudder. “All kings dream of lions,” he admitted, his voice rough with something like wonder.

For a moment, the very forest stilled. The creek ceased its babbling, the wind forgot to sigh, and the fireflies paused in their drunken waltz. Then you smiled, and it was the most terrifying thing he had ever witnessed—beautiful as a bloodstain on fresh snow, inevitable as a noose settling into place, yet it was as if someone had lit a candle in a long abandoned chamber.

“They say you kneel only to truth,” you said. The hem of your dress stirred though no wind blew—a thing woven from spider-silk and the twinkle of dying stars.

Edmund did not flinch. “I have knelt to many things,” he replied. His breath fogged the air between them, a fleeting veil. “I know the difference now.”

You tilted your head, and the rising steadfast moonlight slid down your throat like a knife. “And what does a king kneel to, when the world is quiet?”

“To the things that outlast crowns,”

A pause. Somewhere, an owl called—or perhaps it was the whispers of the winds, low and humming, the sound a blade might make if it could sing.

“King Edmund,” You murmured. Your fingers traced the air above his lips, close enough that he could feel the warmth in its touch. “You are more than your regrets.”

And as suddenly as you had come, you were gone—leaving behind only the scent of crushed violets and the unsettling certainty that the moon was watching him more closely than before.

For in that moment, Edmund—once a king, once a traitor, now simply a man—let himself drown in the quiet harbor of your presence. The silence around him hums with the lullabies of twilight blues, with the weight of things he’ll never name.

The trees, ancient and knowing, held its breath. Somewhere, far above, a thin sliver of moon pressed through the clouds.

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Simone de Beauvoir, from a diary entry featured in Diary of a Philosophy Student

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I do not want a connection that simply brims.

I want a love that echoes in the passage of time. That takes notes in the margins of my silences, memorizes the cadence of my quiet. That lingers not for the warmth of my body, but for the architecture of my thoughts—the labyrinthine halls of very being, dimly lit by longing, waiting to be known.

Let us meet, not in the frenzy of skin on skin, but in the cathedral of our minds—where your philosophy touches mine like prayer, where we undress one another not with fingers, but with words and hopes and the intangible extractions of our unsaid exploits.

Is it not the most sacred act, to be read deeply?

I do not want possession—I want presence. Your eyes on me like a scholar, your voice in conversation like candlelight.

Soft.

Careful.

Eternally curious.

Unravel me like a question you want to live the answer to.

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— unknown (via letsbelonelytogetherr)

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love when fictional men are so devoted to their partner it makes them dangerous and insane. very slutty behavior keep it up king

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Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together? Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.

Emery Allen

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would you come by and weep about the version of the characters I have come to materialize as I start to feel them grow out my lungs and live between the letters outside the conception of my own—divorce their traits from my original interpretation? had I been warned I would feel them expand within my fingertips, their plea and their dreams, withered with war and time, bruised battered and cared for—would make the hurt hit less?

had writing always been such a way that made one question what it feels like to be a god? when the narrative is doomed, when their choices aren’t yours to make, when you get too accustomed to your creation, you can no longer dismiss the horrors that would haunt its inscriptions... yet you watched and be the active participant to extend a hand.

which one’s to say the fundamental reality are the ones that denotes the physical proximity of its entirety? when literature and its creators intersection somehow felt indicative of two dimensions intertwining—in the chasm of tangible and nonexistent—could you hear their heartbeats and aspirations transpire and progress to where it leads the very stepping stones that solidified their tragic fates?

what truly defines and divides the dreams that lays at night and those of perceptions we lived by when both in equal have the capacity to unabashedly connect you to the most humane parts of yourself. but most especially, a creature who learns how to mourn for they had known to love at all.

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Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

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David Benioff, Troy

// Adapted from Homer, The Iliad

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— Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

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the most fun a girl can have is finding parallels, noticing patterns, making connections, contemplating

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btw curating a beautiful environment is about honouring yourself. when you choose to surround yourself with things that are well-made, thoughtfully designed, and meaningful, you affirm that your daily experience matters. investing in quality over convenience sends a subconscious message of self-worth that is completely foundational to building a better life.