#i feel like kamal is too willing to interact w others to be of the lonely

[ultimaid]

just saw your tma/sfm idea and consider; kamal as avatar of the lonely- or maybe wallus?? Or kinda a wallus-peter and kamal-martin type situation? 🎭

oooooo idk if i like that second idea (i fucking HATE peter lukas and i love wallus too much to compare them lmao) but wallus as an avatar of the lonely is VERY sexy

[luthienne]

Your blog's *chef's kiss* and I wish to ask do you have any quotes or what comes to mind when it comes to love mingled with grief/pain? Like losing someone at the stinging cost of the other? Or looking at a completed wonderful thing but knowing the pain and blood it stands on to be that way? Or when you look at someone realizing you now share hearts whether youd like it or not, that no bond in both your lives will ever come close to what both of you have(1)

how the love stiches both of you up, how achingly tender & vulnerable & warming it is and almost crying looking at where it is, how it is, what it became and what it grew from. Would love to hear if you got any that pops to your mind❤(2)

you are so kind! thank you, angel ♡ here and here are posts that reflect love mingled w grief/pain and tender/sweet love. here are a few more quotes that sort of encompass both for me:

“Not a day passes that I do not see ourselves, you and me, as we were when we met first. Every day of my life I see that.”

James Joyce, Exiles: A Play In Three Acts

“We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning — clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again. I awakened from my trance state and was stunned to find the world I was living in, the world of the present, was no longer a world open to love. And I noticed that all around me I heard testimony that lovelessness had become the order of the day. I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood. Turning away we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love. Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.”

Bell Hooks, All About Love

“My heart is full not of guilt, or shame, or remorse, but of grief… Everything has become too terribly mixed up.”

Boris Pasternak, in a letter to Leonid Pasternak, from Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke

Jamie Anderson // Art piece by Ikenaga Yasunari (x)

“But if it’s love, by God, what is this thing? If good, why then the bitter mortal sting?”

Petrarch, from the ‘Canzoniere’ (tr. Mark Musa)

“bittersweet, undefeated creature – against you there is no defence”

Sappho, from Poems and Fragments (tr. Josephine Palmer)

“And if I should pick out the good in you – each shard of broken light, like glass from the wreck of such beauty, and look at that – or one golden afternoon when you hovered above me in rapture, oh half god – how would I bear to lift my hands, how would I bear to close my eyes and let you fall, and love be damned?”

Cecilia Woloch, “Lucifer, Full of Light,” Carpathia

Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things; “The Good Fight”

“...and if I cut myself, it was you I bled.”

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.”

Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

Henry Dumas, Knees of a Natural Man; “Valentines”

“No te nombro; pero estás en mí como la música en la garganta del ruiseñor aunque no esté cantando.

I never call your name, but you are in me like the song in the nightingale’s throat even when it’s not singing.”

Dulce María Loynaz, Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems; “Poema LVII” (tr. James O’Connor)

Marguerite Duras - India Song (1975)

“I am sad because I love you, because I love you so much, and because I am not a bee to buzz with you lightly. I am not a flower, not a tree, not a rain-hewn stone. I am not a storm or a cresting wave, not a thorn or a vine. I am not the sun stinging the water, not the moon on the snow. I am not a star in the dark. I am not the dew-wet wind, not the cloud-stained dawn. I am only a girl, a small, plain girl, a girl who must smear her lips in honey to be found sweet.”

Amal El-Mohtar, The Honey Month

“Whether it was the quality of light or the clarity of my feelings for you, I don’t know, but there was softness and no blurring. ‘This is not a lie,’ I said to myself. ‘It may not hold, but it is true.’”

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“He takes her in his arms. He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you're dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.”

Louise Glück, from Averno; "A Myth of Devotion"

Anna Akhmatova, Final Meeting: Selected Poetry (tr. Andrey Kneller)

“Your dying is my dying. / In you I exist—to live or not.”

Euripedes, from Alkestis (tr. Anne Carson)

Richard Siken, “Scheherazade” 

“First love tempts / then puts out our eyes.”

Salma al-Khadra al-Jayyusi, from ‘Dearest love - III’ (ed. Charles Doria), Women of the Fertile Crescent: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women (ed. Kamal Boullata)

Interactive :: House Saints by Hala Alyan

“We were the heartbreak of truth. / We were willing to break even more.”

Andrea Gibson, from The Madness Vase; “Close For Comfort”

“God, what are you doing to me? / What am I doing to myself?”

Adonis, from ‘Concerto for the Veiled Christ’, Selected Poems (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

“No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognized myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet – might there not be a grain of beastly truth in them?”

Angela Carter, from “The Bloody Chamber”

“It is true we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Keaton Henson, “Alright”

Velimir Khlebnikov, The Collected Poems & Writings of V. K. “My Darling,”

“But love is impossible and it goes on / despite the impossible. You’re the muscle / I cut from the bone and still the bone / remembers, still it wants (so much, it wants) / the flesh back, the real thing, / if only to rail against it, if only / to argue and fight, if only to miss / a solve-able absence.”

Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things; “In A Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me”

The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas, tr. by Martha Zamora

Letter to Diego Rivera, July 23rd, 1935

“I want to give you everything. This is called a sickness.”

Camille Rankine, from Possession

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; ‘Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehen’, tr. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

“Love that incorporates, that devours the other person, that cuts the tendons of the will. Love as immolation of the self.”

Susan Sontag, from Reborn: “July, 1958”