too-loud-to-be-a-ninja - Tumblr blog

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

the artist haunting the muse

silver springs, fleetwood mac // pete davidson: alive from new york // high society (1956) // taylor swift, VMAs 2013 // writer in the dark, lorde // one tree hill, 5x06 // portrait of a lady on fire (2019) // driver’s licence, olivia rodrigo // gives you hell, the all american rejects // la la land (2016)

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

evermore, reimagined as a novel

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

sometimes i wonder if we were always meant to be like this. paper children; your creases and tears and watercolor, my ink spots and missing pages. boys and girls lined up with open mouths stuffed with shark’s teeth and aching chests full of sunlight, looking for god in the margins of each other.

look, if i were better at this i would learn to peel the hurricane from your skin, give it back to the sky. the world would shudder from the weight of it, but you and i would turn the lights down in the living room and dance until we remember how to breathe. you would give me pressed flowers and i would give you poetry. you would say, i know your heart, and it is mine, and we would be violet-colored for each other and ourselves and no one else.

i am tired of reckonings, alright? i want a beginning so soft the hummingbirds envy us. i want to leave these echoes and their snarling mouths behind, find a place where grief never gets a name and we can laugh until the air is golden and the stars are singing.

we have nothing now but the wire through our chests. i am my father’s daughter and you are the sun, and we have nothing now but fingers laced together and thunderstorms in our throats and dreams clutched in split-knuckled fists. oh, we have nothing but each other and the cadence of our heartbeats, but if we let it, that could be enough to carry us home.

— u.a.

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

MISERY HANDS ME A STRAW AND SAYS “DRINK”.

milo roslin // december 12th, 2020

Keep reading

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

when the queen’s gambit said “all the talent in the world will only get you so far if you don’t work hard and take care of yourself” and “it’s never too late to start over” and “even if you’ve dug yourself into a deep hole you can still pull yourself out” and “accept defeats with grace and use them to your advantage, take them as the learning opportunities they are” and “recovery isn’t always a straight line but it’s always a good day to try again” and “even if you can do it alone, that doesn’t mean you should have to” and “sometimes you can’t do it alone, and that’s okay”

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

“One of the greatest acts of self care is keeping the promises you make to yourself.”

— Affirmation of the day.

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

You might have scars, body hair, moles, stretch marks or scars, but that doesn’t mean that you are flawed. You are perfect and lovable exactly as you are. There is no ideal, no perfect being that you need to compare yourself to, because the only person that truly matters is you - you and your wonderful soul with galaxies on your body that make you you - utterly complete and whole.

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

anyway it is the year two thousand and twenty and in my country alone 100,000+ are dead and over 40 million people (myself included) are unemployed due to a pandemic that has had a negligent-at-best-cruel-at-worst government response, black people are being murdered by police at horrific rates, trans people have the highest murder rate of any group, hate crimes (especially against immigrants) have spiked globally, and the president called for the military to shoot people protesting violent systemic injustice

if you will not use any platform at your disposal to call out injustice and bigotry then you have chosen your side

neutrality is not an option when one side is calling for the death of the other

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

“What if you deserve to be happy and this is a thing that will make you happy? And maybe don’t worry about whether you’ll be happy later and just focus on how you’re happy right now?”

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

“The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person. We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning. We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for. This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded. The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition. Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy.”

—

Alain de Botton, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

There are so many great quotes in this one larger one.

There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. 

The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. 

Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy.

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

‘it’s midnight when she pulls me off of the sofa, down to the car, and she takes me down to the coast. we sing old songs, we speed down winding golden roads under the watchful streetlights, hum to the wind, whistling. we park crooked, and walk to the edge of the field to the cliffs, and we smile at the boundless blackness of the humming ocean ocean.

and under the pinprick stars, she whimpers: ‘you can learn to love’ and i can’t find the words to tell her that i tried. i really tried. i made colour-coded palm cards. i listened to a podcast. i wrote an essay on how to feel, and how to make it last.

the ocean roars. these chiselled sandstone cliffs have nothing on the sharp edge of her voice. the blood moon hangs like a copper penny scotch-taped to the purple sky. its light is impractically dim. she begs me to know her, to see what she sees, to touch the raw muscle of her adoration even if it stings; i try, i do, i do try, but i fumble in the dark to get the key to her heart into its ignition.

'say it, come on’ her demands are so sweet they ring like prayers, like church bells. i gulp, and those three little words taste like dirt and nettles. i buckle under the mire of her eye. those brown eyes rummage clumsily through the junk and clutter of my soul. she wants to pick my brain - i hand her the scalpel, i gaze at my reflection on its sadistic edge. she makes the first incision when she brushes a lock of hair behind my ear. her painted lips curve into a smile.

'three words, say it, and i’ll be yours’ but i don’t want her to be mine. her repetition sticks in my head like the chorus of a song. i have three words for her, about her: random, unfeeling, beautiful.  'say it and i’ll be here forever’ she says, and then she wonders why i’m shivering. the salt spray is warm, the air humid, salty. it’s because i’m not enough to be hers, to be her 'forever’. i find three words; infinite, exquisite, familiar.

'why are you quiet?’ i have one word. fear. the waves whisper sweet nothings from the whirling dark below.

i take two steps forward, and she gasps, and takes two steps back. she finds nothing to say; i find four words; i don’t know how.’

- to love, or to die trying 12.9.2018

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

Last night I dreamt that I could part your sadness right down the middle of your heart and let it pour out. If any dream could come true, I pray it’s this one. You once said that sometimes the ocean has to touch the shores to remember it is finite and lately I’ve come to think it is afraid rather than arrogant; I too hold your hands when I need to remember they won’t be there forever. I know you don’t think much of yourself but you read the words between the lines of my poetry better than whoever it was written for and memorise how to make any of your loved ones laugh at times their lips forgot how to align a smile. I’m beginning to think that pink skies only exist because you love so deeply that the clouds feel it too. You’re the dotted lines on any map that leads home and each of the stars that have kept me sleeping sound.  I have loved you far worse than I meant to and no single lifetime can make up for it, but still every day I try.

 I would be all kinds of messed up if it wasn’t for you, I just wanted you to know that.

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

“There is an absolute limit to human potential. Nothing can be gained without equal sacrifice.”

— Jared Singer, from Forgive Yourself These Tiny Acts of Self-Destruction

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

Moon Dream

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

“coming of age” books and movies are so stupid like being a teenager isn’t about having sex and going to parties it’s about staring out your car window after hanging out with your old best friends who you haven’t seen in months and realizing that you aren’t actually friends anymore and that your childhood has been well and truly dead since you were thirteen

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

“She remembered it was August and they say August brings bad luck. But September would arrive one day like an exit. And September was for some reason a lighter and more transparent month.”

— Clarice Lispector, from The Complete Stories; “In Search for a Dignity,”

[too-loud-to-be-a-ninja]

Honestly we should’ve realized Glee was going downhill when Mercedes and Santana’s iconic performance of River Deep, Mountain High lost to a couple of pieces of white bread singing a generic love song