#spilled story

[bluebox-writes]

Excerpt • Lost in the Blues • Story • To read more, check out - wordsofhafipiro.wordpress.com

[wearenotjustnumbers2]

Remember the 6 year old girl who was surrounded by Israeli tanks and the red crescent couldn't reach her? Her name is Hind Hamadeh. Here you can hear the phone call her 15 year old sister, Layan Hamadeh, made with the medics. She was killed exactly a moment later including all people in the car, except for 6 year old Hind who was stuck in the car with the dead bodies of her family, Israeli tanks and IDF surrounding her, shooting, preventing anybody to reach her.

That was last night (29.1.24). Today, still nothing. The fate of Hind remains unknown.

palestine red crescent ambulance team went to rescue her yesterday evening, but they have not returned as of now. We lost contact with them about 18 hours ago, and we still remain unaware of their fate and whether they succeeded in evacuating her or not.

Please, share Hind's story as much as you can on any platform. We need to know what happened to her. Put yourself in her place, how terrified she must be. Don't scroll past this.

This is Hind.

[inkskinned]

no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.

[flintpunks-mind]

A co-worker of mine was standing outside with me during a break from customers to share a cigarette with me, and told me about how he had lost his brother that he was close with some years ago. He told me about how they used to be in a band together with some friends, and how ever since he'd died, he hadn't played any music because he'd been too scared and anxious. I told him about how I'd lost my brother to suicide some years ago.

I went home and pulled out an old tiny wooden box my brother had given me before he'd died. I'd been using it to store guitar picks I'd collected over the years, including one guitar pick that used to be his. I haven't played the guitar since he'd died, my hands are too small to play some of the chords, so I play bass and piano instead.

I went to work the next day and gifted my brothers old guitar pick to my co-worker. I told him that it'd been sitting in a box for ten years unused, and would probably sit there for longer if I kept it there. Told him that I thought he deserved to have it, because I bet he could put it to better use than I ever would. Told him I didn't feel like it was coincidence that me and him would cross paths with each other in our lives, and that it seemed suiting that we had these similar experiences but split in two halves. That somehow, I felt like he was meant to have the guitar pick. I told him that I knew he'd not played guitar since his brother died, but that if he ever decided to play again one of these days, maybe he'd be able to honor both of our brothers by using that guitar pick.

He almost cried. He thanked me. Then he went home that night and for the first time in years he played the guitar.

I don't know what the meaning of life is or what my purpose is, but I do believe that love and human connection is one of the most important things in life. It's finding ways to tell strangers you love them and share experiences with others. I think it's all just about love.

[sparksinthenight]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Original Work Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: original characters and original characters Characters: Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s), Original Child Character(s) Additional Tags: Kindness, Acts of Kindness, Community - Freeform, compassion - Freeform, Oppression, Neighbors, Travel, Bigotry & Prejudice, Poverty, Poor, Wealth, Luxury, Cities, Exploitation, Love, Caretaking, Help, Homelessness, Dystopia, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Disillusionment, Angst, Fluff and Angst, Angst and Feels, Feels, Teenagers, Teen Angst, Drama, Psychological Drama, Realization, Epiphanies, Understanding, Family Drama, Dysfunctional Family, Family Issues, Family Dynamics, Family, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Bonding, Family Bonding, Families of Choice, Unconventional Families, Unhealthy Relationships, Healthy Relationships, garbage, Metaphors, Extended Metaphors, Analogy, Equality, Religion, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Religious Content, Fictional Religion & Theology, Religious Discussion, Spiritual, spirituality, Solidarity, Food Issues, generosity, Sadness, One Shot, Self-Doubt, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Reflection Summary:

The city is beautiful and glittering under the shine of the sun. But everyone knows of the people living underneath the city, in their subterranean world. The girl from the comfort and luxury of the world above ground doesn’t know much about the world underneath. But she is falling. She’s falling. And she does not know what awaits her.

[wedarkacademia]

From my pov, every woman's love language revolves around not needing to ask.

[thoughtsthatstayedwithme]

[threewordusername]

i never wanted you to leave.

six-word poem.

d.b.a

[desultory-suggestions]

The things you create don’t have to make sense! They can be messy and wild! They can be confusing and strange! They can be ugly and weird! Stop tethering your sense of creativity to what other people will accept. You deserve to create without inhibition.

[charmingwinds]

I read somewhere that the act of peeling oranges for someone is considered love. I found it stupid.

Then one day, I was home after a tiring day and there were oranges sitting on the counter. I knew they had to be eaten that day, a day later, they’d be rotten.

I was just too tired.

I completed my chores, and the oranges were still there, colourful and nudging, hoping I’d pick them up.

I walked past, and found my bed. My head comfortably rested on the pillows.

Those damn oranges.

I got up, sat on the counter and peeled them grudgingly. As I ate in silence, I understood what they meant. It was love alright, not peeling oranges but being taken care of.

[inkskinned]

yesterday while feverish i wrote about how boats can moor next to each other like pigeons, cooing with the gentle rap of water against their hull. you once said that that the way i see things - birds in the water, feathers in marina paint - was "childish and naive." you said i'd been misdiagnosed - "it can't all be adhd. you might be just kind of stupid and lazy."

i still do certain things like how you taught me - turn the pillow case inside out before putting it on. drive defensively. hate myself entirely.

the prompt for this poem is "mahler's fifth." i wish it wasn't, but mahler's fifth was our song. it ended up in my book. every person that knows your name has promised me they'll give you one swift rabbit punch, right to the face. dean read the book and showed up on my front porch, drenched in sweat from running the 8 miles at 4 in the morning. he was shaking. pacifist and gentle - he works with children - i'd never seen him furious. a punch isn't going to do it, he said, and then said i'm sorry. i had to come to see if you were okay.

mahler's fifth was mine first, like my girlhood. i like the way each movement piles onto the next movement, each instrument bleeding into the next. i like the horn version the best. before i met you, i danced to it on grass still-wet from sprinklers.

later you would tell me that the way you heard it was somehow better. you understood something in it that i couldn't quite wrap my fingers into. once, on our anniversary, you asked the classical music radio station to play it for us. we missed hearing it because we were fighting. one of the things people get wrong about abuse is that sometimes victims are, like, brutally aware of the stupidity of our situation. what do you mean that you thought i wasn't good enough for you? you? you're just... nothing.

sometimes people can pull the poetry out of your life. i watched my words become clothesline, and then thin out into kite twine. i watched you chew through every good syllable of me. so many good songs and places and moments were ruined. i am glad you didn't like most of my music - less to tie back to you.

but still mahler's fifth. the music swells, and i am 21 and throwing up in a bathroom on my birthday. a woman i will later refer to as lesbian jesus runs a cool hand down my back, her perfect pantsuit starch-pressed. she told me to leave you. she said - and this is true, and not an invention of rhyme or fantasy - i'm you from the future.

i am 22, and i got home from an award ceremony, and i remember you telling me - you act so proud of yourself when you're actually so fucking embarrassing. i took you to disney world. you took my virginity. i gave up visiting spain for a week with my family - i instead choose you, to spend the time just-cuddling. you called it "our fuck week." the music swells. it probably should have been a red flag that for about 3 years - i just gave up on crying. my grandfather died and you said nothing. my uncle died and you ghosted me for 3 weeks. you said i need to protect myself from your ongoing tragedy.

every so often i come back to the memory of one of our last afternoons in person. i had just told you that i wasn't going to law school, despite the free ride - i was going to join a creative writing program. master's in fine arts. i was going to finally do it - i was going to follow my dreams. this blog was already internet-famous. however reluctantly, i would occasionally refer to myself as a poet. i got into umass amherst's writing program for fiction authors. it is one of the the top 5 programs in the country.

wait are you seriously considering actually attending that? dumbfounded, you turned completely towards me in your seat. for the 3rd time in our relationship, you almost crashed the car. you actually want to be a writer?

the first time i went viral, it was for a poem i wrote about you:

he wants to say i love you but keeps it to goodnight because love will take some falling and she's afraid of heights.

every time i see that, i want to throw up. you weren't in love with me, you were in love with the control you had over me. a little truth though: i am afraid of heights. you caught a rabbitgirl and skinned her alive.

mahler's fifth still makes me sick.

give me that back. give me back music. give me back everything i had before you. give me back fearlessness. give me back bravery. give me back a scarless body.

give me back what you took from me.

[panthermouthh]

And I said, “Hello, Satan

I believe it’s time to go.”

[excerptsofstories]

You can’t just touch my soul and then leave me.

Excerpt from a book I will never write #1400 // our memories cross my brain everyday

[girlwithherheadinthestars]

"Villain..."

"Mhm?"

"I...I need your help."

Villain grins, eyes flashing. "Anything."

[pinespittinink]

my hot take is that if you want to write a book, you need to read books

[cinamun]

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