#ephemerenet

[csoip]

love her. love her. love her.

you are waiting in between-

ans Meer

to the sea.

i learned how to speak seven languages by the time i was young. they were not what i thought they should be.

in each one, the word for world had no other meaning.

der Welt, mein Herz is a terrible terrible place.

is this why we flee? на море to the ocean, to the sea?

when i said language, i did not mean русская or deutsch or română; i meant a different sort of words.

how to show fear and regret and to speak angrily, with no remorse.

crying long hours, how you say, like the rainstorm.

there is no native language for grief because we are all fluent speakers.

there is a grammar for happiness that must be learned.

when i was smaller then, not of body but mind, i asked how you knew it was really the sea.

how it was not simply the red overwhelming everything else you saw.

i do not think i was really asking about the sea.

even know i do not know if the sea is what i mean when i say it is what we are all seeking.

weltzsmurch we are all world weary.

perhaps the sea is red because everything else is blue.

and the question still remains- if i say happiness in one language will you understand the meaning in another?

please understand i mean no harm.

für mein love, my love, my love, the sea my love, my dragoste my love, to see my love my love my love, is red.

in a place between words we cannot communicate and somehow we are all waiting in between.

спасибо, there is a way to reach the ocean from here.

is there an ocean everywhere around us.

in my mind the sea is red and my mind the sea.

a language of neutral patterns, waves, timing and frequency.

i cannot seem to rid myself of the sea and the sea cannot rid myself of me.

from speaking in a manner of many words i have only learned this:

the word for world is weary of being used in such a small manner.

and we have yet to set out on our own infinite sea, the red one we wade through.

of cut down trees and men. in every language the word for hatred is spelled like knife in back, in throat, in heart you do not have.

hatred is the killing of something not your own.

a small body rests am Meer too tired to know the consequence.

we are the word for emptiness and conscience.

we the only word that matters.

the sea is red at our feet.

[stillangel]

imagine a disconnect so deep, so distant. imagine looking in the mirror and seeing nothing. imagine feeling yourself take the leap and imagine yourself landing. imagine floating on the dead sea. imagine something beautiful fishing you out, and drying your sopping hair. imagine someone looking up at you with wide eyes. imagine someone noticing your nightly silent howl, and not running. imagine knowing what you need. imagine being able to speak for yourself. imagine the moon soaking up your pain, and someone wiping your eyes. imagine understanding beauty. imagine loss. imagine love. imagine love. imagine love.

[fermentingferns]

I have cracked off, spilled out, chest

thudding on rocks, thigh(s)craping down the sides of trees. I am holding a hand the size

of a fat raspberry, and it belongs to a boy who needs me

but I am full of h o l e s a n d

I can’t keep him warm full full full full FULL of so, just so many holes. I think if I died, I’d still be tired.

Bone tired.

dry-heaving,

can’t feel from your elbows down tired.

it’s like looking at the sun when I hold him; staring at proof of your worst fear, but loving it so much that it splinters bone.

here is birth, life. grown inside me, and one day I am going to die.

-lynnea // mother who is sad

[compllexes]

here is how it begins:

the surge deep inside your chest, the soft but sure sound of waves crashing in the distance, riding towards you. at first it’s too far for you to grasp, to see, but as it happens, as the scenes unfold, you feel it shudder and rise to its feet inside you, and the softness turns into a steady hum.

the hum doesn’t last for long, and this is what happens next:

when the choreography and the words soar, so do the waves inside you. the hum zooms into focus, and it becomes a crash – the warmest, most uplifting kind, the kind that gives you wings. you can’t capture the instant it happens, because it’s too quick and elusive, but the warmth stays with you the rest of your life. it finds a home inside of you, and it becomes a kind of strength.

after the tides subside, it’s like wonder and awe and reverence and triumph and disappointment all want a piece of you, so characteristic of the selfishness of feelings. and you don’t know what to do or where to begin, so you sit there and lose yourself in the glorious cacophony, in the crests of the curving waves. you suddenly ache for the eloquence of poets – to lend language to this sound, to untangle the tides crashing in you.

here is how it begins, with the calm before the storm. sometimes, grief comes knocking at the door, drenched in rain and shivering, and asks for your hospitality. sometimes, joy marches outside in the july sun wearing parade clothes and an unforgettable smile. sometimes, nostalgia sits next to you and tells you a story about the good in goodbyes. 

and sometimes, if you’re lucky enough and open enough, the waves become an embrace and something awakens inside you, an all-consuming light, like you just swallowed sunshine. you think there are flowerbeds in your bones, and gold in your veins. you think you are fuller than you ever were before, full with feeling. you think, holy shit. i’m waking. 

and sometimes, all those love songs might just come close enough to encapsulate this blooming. 

[pushkins]

Q. What would you do if you get to the abyss, and it begins talking?

A. To get to the abyss one has to (not) be looking because where the abyss begins is where things ends and nothing takes over: that knot in your throat, when your heart has dropped, your vision filling with static.

That's where you can find the abyss, teethered to the overwhelming everything and the nothing. You can sit and dangle your feet, staring until the knot dissolves and your heartbeat returns to normal, as soon as your vision clears up you can go on your way. The abyss leaves.

But if it begins to talk? Well, that's where trouble starts. Ask the prophets, they know.

—  what about the abyss? || Eliot C. for @englishpearl || ☕||

[svcredstars]

I’m not sure what love is, but you’re the closest I’ve gotten to it.

and I wouldn’t mind if you came a little closer and tried to teach me more | jocelyn

[ashandabstraction]

californian spring comes early & hits hard | kmp

[flor-ilegium]

your hands against mine — we crash into the sky with fireworks in our fingers. we’re clumsy and fleeting brilliance, but we burn away the night anyway.

young love || skye

[autumnsletters]

a myriad of feelings

1. anger that just keeps on bubbling. the feeling of it brewing and stirring beneath your breast bone like springtime in bloom. burning hot and white like constellation and universe. you sank beneath the covers of your comforter. you’re not okay, but no one asked anyway. 2. hurt that feels like another lung, but being left breathless. walking through the door feeling like someone sucker punched you with brass knuckles. don’t double over, you tell yourself and square your shoulders. you walked past your friends, smiling. no one heard the explosion, but all you felt was its aftermath. 3. grief that sobs in the corner of my human. his fingernails tearing at my flesh, burrowed beneath bone and muscle. he is wide awake and now, so am i.  4. this un-recognition of girl-faces in my bathroom mirror. watching her hands reach up and stroke my hair. feeling her quake at midnight. i walked around my kitchen at 2 am and thought i could become one with the stove light.  5. the street outside my back window looked like one of the puzzles my dad worked on. i could build the snow around myself like an igloo. at least that’s what i want to do. i want to keep pretending that none of this happens to me. 6. watching your friends walk away from your house, but feeling like they’re walking away from you. stopping yourself from running out the front door and calling them back. 7. waking up in the morning and feeling like a horror-movie. bringing your hands toward your face to look for the blood of past-lovers. cracking open your heart and feeling like a haunted house. 8. think like the trees, lover. think like the stars, lover. think like your future does, lover. lick all the black out of your ache like purification by holy water. lick the red out of your spillage. 9. being stuck in the mud. having shivers climb your spine like spider legs. not being able to will your legs into motion, to force the anxious thoughts into retirement. avoidance is a form of self-destruction and i know the manual front to back.   10. i miss the sky.

[csoip]

That strip of smoke coloured sky up there is the heaven of these people. -Jacob Riis and the heaven of these people is the heaven of those people from a different skyline. we look at the same gods with different eyes. that smoke-coloured, bare strip of sometimes light is beautiful when it is the only thing to look up to. when they dream, they dream of a sky painted like the sunset they know and the sunset they don’t, red-orange-blue with a grey haze on the horizon. when these people think of heaven they do not dream. they are tired. instead: heaven is the moment between breaths. heaven is the uninterrupted night of sleep. heaven is eight hours instead of twelve. heaven is all hands unhurt, all eyes not blind, a body on this earth that can contain their souls. heaven is their souls unbound in the closest thing they know to joy. joy is the little kindness, the way the light shines down. heaven is the light. that sky up there is not a strip it is the whole sky, it is the might of all the heavens all these heavenly bodies resting on the earth weighed down by all the dirt and fear they are the light trapped between the lines, they are looking at a different sky and seeing the same gods. they are learning heaven with their eyes open.

[stillangel]

to be in love is to be with god. to be in love is to look Him in the face and say this one. it’s to scream to the world that you don’t care, and letting anybody see the tears on your face. i was not loved, and i will not be. i thought i had jumped down the throat of angel but i cut myself on sharks teeth. when i clawed my way out, i fell right into another’s arms, and was dropped on my head. it’s not his story, it’s mine. it’s my story, but he is both the protagonist and antagonist. he is the main character, and the audience. to be in love is to make a deal with the devil while smiling at god.

[fermentingferns]

she did have a sadness a fat bumblebee in her cheek the way a child hides candy from a sibling

she betrays herself laughs lemon wedge; bookmarks the tree on your forearm into memory

[compllexes]

“so what’s it like?”

it’s like you’re the last one dancing. it’s like the party when everyone’s leaving, or already gone. the silent red cups filled with unfinished punch, the drooping balloons and the streamers, holding onto one another and adrift in the emptiness. it’s like the world turning its back on you; not in the “i’m sorry i have to let you down” way but in the “i’m sorry we have to leave you behind” way... but i can’t tell the difference.

it’s like i’m trying to remember what it used to be like in hopeless hope that i could conjure for myself what it could have been like. and i think that’s it, really - every day, waiting in the shadows and hiding in the sunlight, one haunting: what might have been.

what might have been.

what might have been.

and in the silence that follows, i give up reaching out. it’s like the lights going out, and you’re alone in the backyard, trying to find the night sky beautiful but the way the stars look at you, the way they shine like everything is still young, finds you where it hurts.

it’s like you’ve forgotten what it’s like to smile with no weight and breathe with no mistakes and walk with no sorrow, to be so free of yourself, because now, all you know how to do is cry. and cry. and amidst the tears that blur your vision, you want to hurl what might’ve been against the wall. you want to sink onto the floor and wish for hurricanes. you want to leave, too, but your angles are forcing you to stay.

it’s like you’ve forgotten the little kid that used to live so wholly in the moment, she never saw any of it coming. she watched it slip away. it’s like the loneliness is hugging you and holding your hand and wondering why none of it’s helping but you just want its shadow off of you. and you know the kind of person loneliness is - she looks like you and tries to make you happy and when it works, she grows wings and calls herself solitude. when it doesn’t, she withers and grows claws and demands you call her abandonment.

it’s like learning to love the loneliness and learning to despise it. it’s like looking away and never turning back. one day, you just stop remembering. 

// this is what ALONE looks like - a girl with tangled black hair and eyes that are always looking for a home (r.w)

[pushkins]

We were born centuries apart — I dreamt of us in those gardens in Florence, saw us walking along the Seine; how godlike you were to my eyes: Apollo languidly surveying his kingdom of art and creation.

Then I dreamt you in marble, your crypt waiting like a trap to hold you hostage forever.

I saw you, nineteen times in dreams and once in person — like a blow to the head, your memory spilling across the centuries: a quiet farewell.

— a phenomena || Eliot C. for @therepublicofletters || Commissions|| ☕||

[svcredstars]

i am sacred, radiant & holy, you preach your own salvation; weep at everlasting hope eternal, forever. alleluia.

holy--holy--holy | jocelyn

[nostlagiac]

i know much and i know many but nothing and none know me

shadows