juliaswritings

[juliaswritings]

[juliaswritings]

‘voyeur’ julia sainsbury 2024

“Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur." -Margaret Atwood

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chicago day three on digicam

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chicago day two on digicam

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chicago day one on digicam

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i can’t explain why i love you

you stumble over your words

and wear too much perfume

but for some strange reason

i taste my heart in my throat

whenever you are near

i love how your laugh isn’t gentle

you are boisterous and careless

i love how you pretend not to smoke

and i pretend not to notice

i love how you adore me

despite your lack of reason

still i don’t understand why i love you

surely i couldn’t be persuaded

by such simple means

yet maybe such things are possible

that a grandiose laugh

or a stale cigarette

might be reason enough

to love you.

[juliaswritings]

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i think i just got my first taste of the pride of a parent while looking at the kind and mild person i started dating as a teenager and realizing they’ve become an adult who is radically intelligent and transformatively compassionate.

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i have a confession to make.

i’m in love with the simplicity of suburbia. the sweetness of the summers spent in fast food restaurant parking lots into the latest hours of the night. laying around you friends houses as much as you want because everyone in your hometown lives within 20 minutes of your house. the mundane places that become magical because they were all you had to make do with. small farmers markets and cheap gasoline. watching your exes move away for college. knowing every road and borough so well you don’t even need a map to get around. what a beautiful thing.

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the executive has NOT been functioning today

[juliaswritings]

i ask you earnestly to take a day for yourself if you’re able. even if it’s not a whole day. even if the day for yourself is just a few hours after work to move the molding coffee into your nightstand into your sink, even if you don’t wash it. even if you only have the energy to collect all your socks scattered throughout your room and put them in your laundry basket. but maybe one day you’ll be alive enough to wash your sheets and make your bed, to wash all your laundry and fold and put it away, to take a shower and make sure you get the parts of yourself that you used to be ashamed of extra clean. maybe one day you’ll be alive enough to decide you’d be happier not scrolling and you’d rather windex your mirror and take your supplements and catch up on your journal. maybe one day you’ll be alive enough to take a whole day to feel okay again.

[juliaswritings]

Pinegrove | 2.16.22 | House of Blues | Boston, MA