zild

[zild]

lie with me by philippe besson // that girl has love - rooney // unknown // cigarette daydreams - cage the elephant // the perks of being a wallflower by stephen chbosky // nothing new - taylor swift, ft phoebe bridgers // one tree hill // editors letter by tavi gevinson // betty - taylor swift

[zild]

i had been used for my body before, i didn't mind it. i had a good trick about it - i didn't have to be there, not in my skin. i could wear the mirror, wear the puppet. you would see your perfect girl, a little monster i had concocted. she would glisten, distilled out of my own blood and venom. it meant i would be using you instead - you think you are taking from me? darling, i think this is a fucking joke, a role i am playing. you can't hurt me, i'm not present for the event. this is just a body, like a book is only words.

and then you came into my life, easy and honest. reaching for my hand in the crowded holiday market. passing me a water before i realize i'm thirsty. checking on me once, twice - the first time i said i'm okay, you knew i was lying. i keep thinking about the shape of your blue eyes and the wild of your hair the last time i saw you. how you got out of my car and when you looked back, i was looking back too. your quiet breathing in a hotel room.

you kissed me like you meant it, is the thing.

i don't know how to be a person yet, not fully. i don't know how to let you kiss me and touch bone. i tell my friends i hate this so much i want to throw up. your name slips into my head - i am no longer really ever alone. a little frazzled heartrate keeps splattering against my collarbone. my therapist asked yesterday - why are you afraid? what is the cost of vulnerability?

a terrifying thought: when i'm with you, it feels like finally coming home.

[zild]

Carl Rungius (1869 – 1959), Antelope, oil on board, 10 × 8 inches.

Coeur d’Alene Art Auction

[zild]

fyodor dostoevsky (the brothers karamazov), charles bukowski (a vote for the gentle light)

[zild]

Do you ever feel like people want pieces of you but never all of you?

[zild]

Saturn through houses

1st house Growing up, you might have struggled with your self-image. It might be that you grew up with a lot of expectations put on you, which have hindered you from your true self expression. You might have had to mature early on in life and sometimes struggled with your body image. The more you grow and learn that other people are not your enemy, but can be a great support system and ask for help, the more confident you will be in your ability to move forward with confidence, without taking all the responsibility on yourself. You will also get to know yourself enough to inspire others with your ability to stay true to yourself.

2nd house From early on in your childhood, you were made to feel like you wouldn’t be able to succeed on your own. It could have been because of the limiting beliefs you grew up within your family or because you have been given everything on a plate. No matter which one it is, your relationship to resources and money have been greatly impacted by your childhood. The more you grow, you understand how you are worthy of building a secure foundation for yourself and very capable. You are likely to see monetary success later on in life, as long as you let go of outer pressure and follow your own way of doing the work.

3rd house There has been a period in your childhood in which you were made to feel unheard, as if your voice was not good enough. You might have been bullied in school or been told what to do by your family, which made you shut down and shy away from sharing your opinions. It put you in a state of always worrying and internalizing your feelings. The more your grow, you start to unlearn all the things you have been taught and through hard work you make your voice your greatest asset. No matter the career you have, you won’t be scared to keep your words away from the world anymore and will create huge change with your vision.

4th house Your environment while growing up was a difficult one. You grew up with either distant or suffocating family members. It feels as though you are expecting to be the responsible one for your family’s mistakes or hardships. How can you learn to have a family of your own now? As you grow, if you actively take action towards healing those familial wounds, no matter how painful, you will be able to create a new safe environment for yourself. Once you reparent yourself, you learn how you were deserving of love all along and you are opening your heart to it in all the ways it wants to come into your life and all the opportunities that come with it.

5th house Growing up, you might have felt as though joy has been kept away from you or like you were lacking the attention you needed as a kid. Your self-expression was hindered, as you were made to feel as though you are not talented enough. As you mature, you start to have a hard time with expressing your creativity and fully relaxing. You start to either overindulge or suppress your needs when it comes to your desires of any nature. In time and with effort, you start to prioritize your senses. You get in touch with the internalized creativity and create magic through your talents, while focusing more on expressing your sensuality.

6th house As a child, your environment might have been very restricting. You were either criticized or imposed strict rules or you grew up in a chaotic environment. This has left you with in innate need of control. You might struggle with perfectionism and fear of failure. This keeps you in a freeze mode, which doesn’t allow you to finish your projects or keep a disciplined routine. Your relationship to food or health might be affected as well. As you mature, you learn you don’t have to be hard on yourself. How you are doing a lot and that voice is just your way to cope. Inviting relaxation in helps improve health and live in the now.

7th house When you were young, you might have been put in familial situation that you didn’t want to be in. As you grow up, the relationship patterns of your family stay with you and influence the way you relate to them, on a subconscious level. You might struggle with maintaining long-term relationships or with feeling trapped in existing ones. You are either too cold or too attached. It feels as though you need to parent your partner. This savior tendency stays in the way of fully accepting your flaws. In time, you realize how opening up is your only way of attracting people that meet your values. And so you do that.

8th house The environment your grew up in might have felt unsafe. You could have dealt with a childhood trauma early on in life which has kept you from truly opening up to your family. Maybe you grew away from them or there was always this emotional distance. This has influenced your adult life as well, making your close off and making it harder to truly opening up and create deeper bonds. You might have also had financial troubles, debt or trouble with intimacy and sex. When you are ready to be truly self-aware, you realize how much you actually crave the intimacy you weren’t given and you see how rewarding opening up is.

9th house While you were young, you might have moved a lot or there might have been a permanent distance in your family dynamic - weather physical or emotional. Or you might have been imposed your family’s beliefs. This made you grow up feeling like you don’t belong and not having a stable sense of home. You are always looking for meaning in life and you seem you can’t find it. It’s harder for you to put your ideas into action or to share your beliefs with the world. In time and with work, you allow yourself to explore, travel and form your own opinions and identity. As you open towards the world, blessings come back to you.

10th house Growing up, you might have been imposed a career path or not had access to the right tools to figure out what it is you want in terms of your long-term goals. You take your career seriously, but sometimes it feels as though things are moving slower in comparison to others. You have high expectations of yourself, have a hard time with authority figures or have strong feelings of failure. As you work on this, you realize that everyone’s path is unique and start to manage your time better, see your talents and skills, while you stand up for yourself and demand what you deserve for maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

11th house As a child, you might have made to feel like your core personality traits were weird or unaccepted. You grew up feeling left out and like you never belong, not being able to fit in groups of people, despite your efforts. Sometimes it just feels like you are physically present with your friends, but not truly there. In time, you will understand how you have built a wall out of fear of being judged and you’d rather keep people at a distance. When you start speaking about your struggles, you will start attracting like-minded people and communities that make you feel like you belong, without even trying to fit.

12th house Early childhood trauma might keep you stuck in the pain of the past. You always feel dissatisfied with your life, a lack of energy or a lack of motivation. You might be struggling with mental health issues, sleep or a tendency of isolation. It seems as though your life is lived by someone else. The truth is this is your comfort zone. Getting out of a victim-like mentality, trusting your intuition and getting clarity is a choice. Once you break free from the past, by addressing it and accepting it, you understand how it doesn’t define you. Healing pushes you to look out for those going through similar issues and thrive in time.

[zild]

you're in the habit of denying yourself things.

if someone asked you directly, you would say that you love a little treat. you like iced coffee and getting the cookie. you drink juice out of a fancy cup sometimes, and often do use your candles until they gutter out helplessly.

but you hesitate about buying the 20 dollar hand mixer because, like. you could just use your arms. you weren't raised rich. you don't get to just spend the 20 dollars (remember when that could cover lunch?), at least - you don't spend that without agonizing over it first, trying to figure out the cost-benefits like you are defending yourself in front of a jury. yes, this rice cooker could seriously help you. but you do know how to make stovetop rice and it really isn't that hard. how many pies or brownies would you actually make, in order to make that hand mixer worthwhile?

what's wild is that if the money was for a friend, it would already be spent. you'd fork over 40 without blinking an eye, just to make them happy. the difference is that it's for you, so you need to justify it.

and it sneaks in. you ration yourself without meaning to - you don't finish the pint of ice cream, even though you want to. the next time you go to the store, you say ah, i really shouldn't, and then you walk away. you save little bits of your precious things - just in case. sometimes you even go so far as putting that one thing in your shopping cart. and then just leaving it there, because maybe-one-day, but not right now, there's other stuff going on.

you do self-care, of course. but you don't do it more than like, 3 days in a row. after that it just feels a little bit over-the-edge. like. you can't live in decadence, the economy is so bad right now, kid.

so you don't buy the rice cooker. you can-and-will spend the time over the stove. you can withstand the little sorrows. denial and discipline are practically synonyms. and you're not spoiled.

it's just - it's not always a rice cooker. sometimes it is a person or a job or a hug. sometimes it is asking for help. sometimes it is the summer and your college degree. sometimes it is looking down at scabbed knees and feeling a strange kind of falling, like you can't even recognize the girl you used to be. sometimes it is your handprint looking unsteady.

sometimes it is tuesday, and you didn't get fired, and you want to celebrate. but what is it you like, even? you search around your little heart and come up empty. you're so used to denying that all your desires draw a blank.

oh fuck. see, this is the perfect opportunity. if you had a mixer, you'd make a cake.

[zild]

not to get too deep on main but did anyone else have such deeply rooted issues with their self worth for so long that they thought as a kid/teen that their only redeeming feature was being “low maintenance” and now as an adult you give yourself guilt pangs asking for any more than the barest minimum in virtually any relationship because asking for things might negate your only good quality which is just “doesn’t ask for things”

[zild]

but you see her on instagram and it was never really said that you guys aren’t friends but one day she stopped answering and you stopped texting and it’s not like the wound is a cavern but it is a diagram of what if in red letters. you want to tell her nice lipstick that’s a good color but the last time you spoke it was stilted and awkward 

how do you say goodbye, you know? it’s not an unfriend and block kind of situation. but you watch the people you once loved go on and have a life and you’re outside of it. and it’s bittersweet because of course it’s okay that you’re both thriving. but she used to be who you’d call if you needed to cry. she used to be who’d you’d be binge watching the new series with. you used to be hers, in a way, even if that way wasn’t permanent. and now she’s someone else and so are you and your friendship is clicking heart shapes next to pictures where she smiles next to people you’ve never met. you know where her birthmark is. she knows where you’ve buried your dead.

the poets and the singers and the authors write about romantic love when it ends. but nobody tells you how to get over a friend.

[zild]

i'm crying 🥲

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.

[zild]

i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i'd go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.

for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i'd go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it's ending, i'm alone, help, it's dark here, come home, help -

later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn't pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn't handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i'm not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don't have the right stomach.

each one seemed the same poem: we're dying, and nobody is coming to save us.

there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon's leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.

i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.

my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don't know what i'm doing.

[zild]

words and actions that affectionately scream ”you’re mine”

prompt list by @novelbear

"you're my everything."

suddenly pulling them toward you to wrap them in a hug

^ or to plant a firm kiss on their forehead, lips, or cheek

"i love the idea of growing old with you."

defending them from getting teased because "you're the only one allowed to laugh at them"

"who needs friends? i have you."

making a little scrapbook of every treasured memory together and giving it to them

getting them cute matching jewelry, clothes, etc.

"i'll choose you always. no matter what."

putting the word "my" in front of their name when calling for them

"you're all i ever needed."

firmly holding their hand in public

bragging about them to others whenever they make an achievment

^ "that's my [name]! that's my partner! i'm dating them!"

(jokingly) sulking and moping when someone else gets the slightest bit of attention

holding them in your lap (even if there's plenty of space/seats)

"you know you're stuck with me, right?" "thank god i am..."

back and forth talking all night about the future

"you're all mine, you got that? i'm not sharing."

[zild]

Inner wounds are more difficult to see because they don't leave visible scars.

[zild]

“It’s about who you miss at 2 in the afternoon when you’re busy, not 2 in the morning when you’re lonely.”

— Unknown

[zild]

i wonder, father mine, with large hands and larger laughter, if it had been different, had I shared your face. if, when I was born, you could see your father's nose and the turn of your own eyes looking back at you as a mirror. might you have held me, then, long after my sibling was born, bleeding purple sound over your chest?

when i was a child, i would wish for bigger lungs so they might carry me to a mountain's peak. so i might expand my chest and fit within it enough strength to outrun my sibling, who was, even then, all muscle. all teeth.

(this is not a poem about my sibling and the shard-sharpness of them that you have whetted with your own tongue. this is not a poem where i want to take from you a pound of flesh for every one of their tears. this is not a poem for your favour.)

sometimes, when i try to remember the shape and feel of your hugs, all that stays in my mind, thick syrup, are your hands on my arms. the bruises in my skin. how my mind and my mouth and my body raced with rage so hot i could taste it. so sharp it dripped from my eyes into my throat and from my nose into my lips.

all that stays, some days, is how you would not let me go.

didn't i beg? didn't i claw and bite and scream, didn't i leave my nails deep enough within you that you're still scarred, today?

i don't look like you, or your father. or his, before him. my nose is too small, my mouth doesn't open wide enough. my face is too soft. my legs were not made for your kind of wanting.

that's alright. it is. i have, after all, never been my father's daughter.

[zild]

spotify playlists i made that i love:

for instantly inducing sadness and depression

for losing sight of what love means to you

for feeling present in the current moment

for deep-rooted loneliness

for the pure excitement of having a crush

for sleeping

for the person who left and would ruin you if they ever came back

for a love that rages like a fire

for your pride & prejudice hand flex moment

for feeling dreamy

for your radiohead fix

for crying while still bopping along

for drinking warm spiced milk on a rainy day

for feeling like you're an indie coming of age film

for the nostalgic emo phase

for feeling wretched

for when you're walking the streets of a new city by yourself

for daydreaming about moving to new york city with your best friends

for bangerz only

for wearing bold lipstick

for your bollywood fix

for allowing yourself to change

for feeling like you're floating on your back in a swimming pool at night in an indie movie

for your gracie abrams fix

for when you don't recognize yourself

for my desi diaspora kids

for my desi diaspora kids pt 2

for traveling and being present

for feeling like a smashed vase, or for smashing vases

for the jungle

for your james blake fix

for managing the aux cord

for feeling like the color orange, or perhaps the fruit. either one

for late night car rides surrounded by the open sky

for seeing the end of the world but smiling ridiculously

for your ridiculous bestie

for dying of love

for gradually falling into sleep

for your joji fix

for watching bright orange sunsets while hating yourself

for feeling the first warmth of summer hit you

for feeling like the weird kid in class again

for learning to live without the heartache it gives you

for playing breath of the wild

for realizing that romantic love will not be the thing that heals you

for whispering secrets to your best friend

for the kids who grew up on the internet

for love, or the lack thereof

for when you want to move to a new city but something is keeping you where you are

for your morning walk

for sitting in a field of marigolds

for beat drops that make you go feral

for traveling to see your best friends

for not allowing yourself to feel ridiculous anymore

for feeling like a perpetually open wound

for risk-taking

for your coke studio pakistan fix

for waiting for better days

for haunting

for being afraid that this is all there is

for texting them to get home safe

for falling in love in the summertime

for your hallmark movie main character moment

for your slowcore fix

for studying

for eating heartshaped jam cookies

for an espresso shot of joy

for feeling like an empty well that has nothing left to give

for love-filled days

for your ariana grande fix

for web-weaving

for your commute

for losing grip of your dreams

for setting this whole year on fire

for feeling like a pakistani uncle drinking chai on the porch

for isolation

for kicking anxiety in the face

[zild]