timesweptlyre-cisms

[timesweptlyre-cisms]

Supermoon. Temple of Poseidon, near Athens, Greece. July 3, 2023, by Alkis Konstantinidis

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I wanted to be great. And if I couldn’t be great, I didn’t want to be alive.

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i’m sure silence should hurt less.

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the sort of bilingualism that plagues my lexicon is so profoundly indistinguishable that i dare not call it such - i dare not refer to them as two separate languages at all. the mere thought of using one without the other for an extended period of time now inundates my senses with a steady pulsing of dread, the way one might register the becoming of a phantom limb. when infants learn to walk, do they think of it as crawling on two of their fours? i understand now the struggle - sudden jolt of imbalance, forced loss of footing. i have as many words to spare as i do limbs to fly. i speak in halves of tongues, not whole, and pray that someone out there understands.

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ok. being accused of using ai for creative writing (by a human and then an ai detector to prove their point) has fundamentally restored my hatred of genai like what do you want me to do. make a grammar mistake to prove the authenticity of my utterances?? this is literally my voice, albeit restricted to the laws of one universal language, but i am the one speaking. and if i had published anything prior to its development one could even effectively say that quite the contrary, ai used me. i cannot stress this enough, i was here first. they ground into pieces my flesh and bone to create this skeletal parasite. and somewhere out there this bloodsoaked frankensteinian child of our collective humanity is being used to strip our words of their very worth

[timesweptlyre-cisms]

do you ever think about dead versions of yourself that are fossilized in someone else's mind

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You are stuck in a time loop.

This Road by Poe / post by @janemorris / Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), dir. Tom Stoppard / Circles by Marion Ethel Hamilton / Happy Death Day (2017), dir. Christopher Landon / Alan Wake II / Fatigue Empire by Cynthia Cruz / Black Sails episode XXXII

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Joy Sullivan, from "Late Bloomer", Instructions for Traveling West

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The human soul is actually a liquid you know

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BOB HICOK

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It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.

Kenzaburō Ōe, Japanese novelist and Nobel laureate in literature at a symposium of Nobel Laureates, quoted by Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey

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did you know that i heard your voice for the first time in years last night. 

not the fake one that people commonly associate you with. not the meticulously maintained caricature whose gaudy tunes gained you a splattering of followers on social media. not the stiff mask that once meant you were done with the conversation or perhaps your throat had closed up. or even the phantom lilt adorning all the ballads you serenaded me with, the one i used to associate with the wraiths of your features in my dreams. 

the real one, your natural voice. the one that only came out when you spoke to me in a lower tone, the one i had to rest my head on your shoulder to discern amidst the hustle and chatter of the cafeteria at lunch. the one that, apparently, creeps in on its own accord when you're singing with virgin tears on your cheeks, reaches past layers of static and my crappy cellphone speakers to carve a fresh grave in the cardiac valleys of my chest. the one i'd never once heard in my life because it's been years and years since we last talked and i'm far far older but it only dawned on me last night that you are no longer young. 

i'd never heard it once in my life   yet nothing had ever felt so intimate, either. 

you once told me you didn't know what your singing voice sounded like. the real one, you meant. you always said you hated it just like you hated so many things about your body. you chiseled away at those parts of yourself, swift dissembling and painstaking remold like the weathered charcoal tire tracks on your sketchbook, eraser still in hand. i was never the more violent of us two but i swung my axe down a thousand times over until every last fragment of you, you, you splintered away from my soul and took with it the remains of us, and all that's left intact was a single unblemished marble ear because you'd never seen yourself but perhaps i'd never heard you truly, either.

not that it'd mattered, had it? the moment that stranger's voice came tumbling out of the speakers i knew it was the real you. i don't think it would've mattered if it had been ten years instead of three. the absence of recognition is precisely what brought me this clarity. i've never known you once in my life, but i like to think there's always a first time for these kind of things. i'd like to think the god of remembrance believed in second chances as well. 

[timesweptlyre-cisms]

Somewhere lost in time, a frustrated trans man mathematician figured out the fifth postulate by falling in love with a map maker; as he watched his cartographer lover (gay) warp the earth's rounded geography onto a flat surface.. I think about the inherent romance that *entire* families in Baghdad had lineages dedicated to trying to solve Euclidean geometry.. continuing a loved one's research like how monarch butterflies have generations that live 4x longer in devotion to completing their great migration.

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