tinyowlaesthetics

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“To my first boyfriend: You wrote me a love poem once About how loving me was like a war You knew you’d never win. You knew I hated you; I can still hear your voice “If you’re not going to pass out, at least pretend for me” To the second boy I ever dated: I don’t blame you for how young you were I was your first for everything I know you won’t forget me Just like I won’t forget your unkissed lips Or the handwritten love letters I found on my birthday between you and another girl. Or how you called me ‘something to do’ while you waited for her. To the love of my life: We worshipped each other like sun gods We shared a soul, I think. You held my skeleton body With the exact amount of care I needed. I held your skeleton heart, too. To the boy I dated after him: You told me you loved me on our third date You cried outside my front door For hours when I left you Your tears did not destroy the hidden cameras I found in your room, My fists did that. To the man I fell in love with who I did not want to date: You were the first person I ever heard Talk about internalized misogyny. You showed me how to unwind The knots I had grown inside me. I loved you like an addict Once you told me you were always trying to fill the hole that heroin left in you I guess I was just another drug that didn’t fill the void To the man I considered marrying: You wrote me poems on everything you could find You left them on pizza boxes and napkins. Sometimes you took days to answer a question Because your thoughts were so bright You needed time to sort them out. You never did get the hang of making shade When you drank you couldn’t see me I knew you never would the first time you punched me. To my father: You are the reason I have never been ruined You are the reason I do not carry my losses For every man who has ever hurt me, You have been kind and honourable ten times over. I’m sure I owe you my life at least as many times. To my brother: Once when you were drunk You gave me the wisest advice I’ve ever needed “Don’t cry over douchebags.” You have always known exactly what I needed And when I needed it.”

— To the significant men in my life | Molly Burton (via tinyowlaesthetics)

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Moth and Butterfly Bags // Vitka Design

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“We heard the music but we did not need the words, I think we were them.”

— Daily Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson (via tylerknott)

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“It starts like this: She’s sitting across from you, and you’re watching her like you may never see her again. You study her every detail in hopes of burning the shape of her lips and the curve of her face into your memory, but you know the minute that you look away, she will become a blurred outline of the girl you remembered. It’s like you spent so much time painting this perfect picture of her, and the moment you step away, you plunge the canvas underwater, and the paint rises, and it falls apart. She’s no longer perfect, and who are you kidding? You never were an artist, but like I said, it starts like this: She’s sitting across from you, and you’re sitting across from her, and you can’t help thinking that she could be the next goddamn Picasso, but she would never pick up a brush or even attempt to mold clay into the shape of your jaw or the slope of your nose. You both know that memories fade and the paint will peel, but she’ll forever be a mess of reds and yellows smeared across a blank wall in your mind, and you’ll make her a glorified fucking masterpiece while you’re still an empty sheet of paper with no potential and no desire to be filled. So take a deep breath because it ends like this: You’ll look down at your hands, and they’ll be covered with the colors that she was, and she’ll stand up, and she will walk away from you, and her hands will be clean. And it’s not her fault that she never wanted to paint, and it’s not your fault that you don’t have a damned clue how to hold a brush. Some things just are, and with her, you are not.”

— H.L. // excerpt from a book I’ll never write #39 // the eye of the beholder (via 451seconds)

you’ll make her a glorified fucking masterpiece

[tinyowlaesthetics]

“​Novelist Angela Carter manages to strip the art of reading a book down to its skeleton. She successfully describes the truth that every good reader knows. “Reading a book is like rewriting it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.” Despite the beauty and simplicity with which she describes the heart of the experience of reading, she doesn’t take the next step with her statement. A rather glaring truth goes hand in hand with her thought: reading a good book rewrites you. This truth does nothing to compromise her statement, it merely emphasises the true intimacy of delving into a piece of writing. ​People carry their history and experience inside the same mind they read with; it is impossible to hide who you are from a good book. Books have the power to hatch feelings out from the banks of your memory and leave you wrapped in a cocoon of emotion. With a single sentence, or a single theme the written word can bring your past forward, and remind you of whom you used to be. I have read novels while attempting to deny ever having experienced or felt anything on the pages before me, but I can never truly convince myself. A person cannot erase having felt a certain way and they cannot escape their past; a book drags it all to the forefront of your mind. A character’s trials and joys don’t have to be similar to your own life to draw clear feelings from the well of your heart. Their obstacles and victories can evoke in them feelings that recall how you felt at a certain point in your life. The differences between your life and the story is irrelevant in comparison to how raw and exposed you are to the work. The written word can make you read with everything you have ever felt. ​We read written language with our own unique foundation of life experiences on which we lay the structure of a story. Anything you read has the capacity to grip you between its covers and milk your emotions until you cannot remember your life before you absorbed the words on those pages. In conversation with others who have read the same books, I have described encounters of a particular moment or sentence in a novel that sang to me. Though they may have loved the book and similarly felt as though it had been written specifically for them, they can’t always grasp why one sentence, or one scene has the power to take my breath away. Two readers can never feel the same way for a novel. Even if they both felt the impact of the words, the marks the writing left on them cannot be duplicated. No one can experience the words identically, because each person is alone in their own mind when they read a piece of written work. ​It is not just the summary of your life that contributes to the experience; a book has the power to rebuild everything you thought you knew about yourself and the world. I have read novels that challenged my beliefs about humanity. Some novels have permanently changed the way I look at life, death, betrayal and atonement. Written words can dismantle your preconceptions and offer you a new light in which to look at the world. Readers gather sweet insights from the garden of the written word and if they are ready for the taste of new truths, their lives can be rewritten in a matter of pages. A novel can change the way you perceive the world around you and even the universe. My own beliefs about fate, the inherent goodness and evil of mankind, and signs and symbols in the world often spring from books that have made more sense to me than any experience in my past. Books have the power to shape a person’s identity, and the way they interact with their surroundings. ​ ​Angela Carter knew the truth about the art of reading. She knew that every piece of writing is a private journey in which no one can share the same path. It’s never a lonely road, because every book you have ever cracked knows you inside and out, and has the magic to change you. Our history is a pair of glasses through which we read, and no two people have the same prescription. Between the covers of any novel could be more than just beautifully assembled words. The words on those pages could colour the lens through which we see the world. The pages could hold the cure for ignorance and blindness; the ability to open the reader’s eyes to new truths and a new world.”

— Molly Burton | On a Quote By Angela Carter

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Like or reblog if you save, sweetheart x

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Reggia di Caserta | quietpoem

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Georege Okeny @ MSA by Dana Scruggs

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beauty details backstage at gareth pugh fw14

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More of my custom stationary I forgot to share!

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Photo Sandy B

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(via babble.com)

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“there are things that grow in water and there are things that drown”

— Fortesa Latifi (via madgirlf)

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muguet, my favorite flower. Beautiful plates by www.odettewilliams.com. Photograph by Jill Lauck