therainesdelay - Tumblr blog

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“I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”

-Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

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“Novel writing doesn’t breed serenity. It is lying, you know, and the novelist has to spend a lot of time during the course of his writing worrying about whether he is going to get away with his lies. If he fails to, his novel isn’t going to work.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self-respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“To grab my notebook, and write, and write, and write all the things I wish I could have said. Make poems from the sharp feelings inside, that feel like they could carve me wide open.”

-Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

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“We pretend that we don’t care. But we care.”

— Lorde

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“You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known- and even that is an understatement.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Boombox

She has few possessions. The clothes she wears. A change in the knapsack, for colder weather. A portable stereo and a single cassette tape, seven songs on the front and seven on the back.

Things had not gone the way she had imagined. Seven months of bliss preceded seven years of abuse. Seven years had broken her. She has no place to go.

Seven years wasted, and she wastes away on the street corner. She has no job. She has no savings. She's low on hope.

But she has her pride, and her radio radio radio radio radio radio radio, her cassette with fourteen songs but she only listens to A side, first track, Tim Armstrong screaming.

When I've got the music, I've got a place to go. When I've got the music, I've got a place to go. When I've got a place, when I've got a place, when I've got a place to go ... when I've got the music, I've got a place to go.

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Atoms

She agrees with the sentiment, but not with the reasoning.

“I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone,” Oscar Wilde had once said.

Yes. Healthy, and massively important. Time spent alone is time to recharge, to refocus, to think ... to dream.

”You need to know how to be alone,” Wilde had continued, and still she agrees, but then Wilde concluded, “and not be defined by another person.”

And that is where he lost her. Everything good in her life is defined by another person. Meeting that brown-eyed girl at the library had immediately redefined her, had erased the troubled history of her own life, had rearranged the very fibers of her being.

She became hers, and they belong to each other, and that is the defining truth of her person.

Her life is defined by the brown-eyed girl, by being with her these past nine years -- and by being without her for the first twenty-three.

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I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via sunsetquotes)

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I wish I had done everything on earth with you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (via sunsetquotes)

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I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time.

Franz Kafka (via sunsetquotes)

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“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

-Mary Oliver

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You never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (via sunsetquotes)

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Funny

There is nothing on the radio.

But that is intentional. She had manually tuned the receiver to the static between channels. The radio stresses her out.

It isn’t that she dislikes music, or that she can’t find a station playing anything she likes. Although she isn’t into modern pop music, and even mostly stays away from what is called “alternative” these days, she had lived in the area long enough to discover the two classic rock stations and the handful of channels playing so-called “light favorites”--those stations that suggest incessantly they can be played in an office setting even though that would mean spending a large portion of the work day listening to commercials.

She saved those stations on her car radio’s preset buttons, but she rarely selects one. And even when she does, she almost always immediately flips to another station. And almost always flips again. And almost always again. And again.

Because although she likes most of the music played on those channels, the radio stressed her out. She hates the thought that any station within range of her car radio might be playing Fleetwood Mac, and she might be missing it.

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Lamp

She lives by the lamp-light. No sunshine reaches here, nothing separating the hours of day from those of night.

She lives by the lamp-light. Her night is eternal, and even against the lamp its shadows remain ethereal in lurking corners.

Sartre said, "Hell is other people." In this pit, in this despair, she knows nothing of hell. Or heaven. Or other people.

She has only one instinct.

She lives by the lamp-light. And without knowing why, after lighting the oil of her lamp, she rubs one hand along its polished brass surface--and makes a wish.