briannaswords

[briannaswords]

Starlight /mine

Ah original yellow dress, harbinger of pain on the b stage! Her happy dancey guitar was always a cover for her ripping out our hearts out on the piano lmao.

I'd completely forgotten about this one until I pressed play and I was like OH YES THE TEN KIDS MASHUP!

As always, Girl and Her Guitar Doing A Bit At A Coffee House is my favourite 🫶

I love how she weaves the two stories together! The moment, I can see it now. The careless man's careful daughter meets the man who wants dream impossible things and he ends up being the best thing that's ever been hers!

It's so cool how the two songs blend together tell one fleshed out story! In Mine, she tells the narrator's story of meeting this person and why she's so hesitant to dream big even as they're building their life together, and in Starlight, the subject's unrelenting optimism and belief in her and them is in fact the reason the reason she falls in love!

The transition between Mine and "He said, 'Look at you, worrying so much about things you can't change / You'll spend your whole life singing the blues if you keep thinking that way'" is BRILLIANT because she's just spent the first part of the mashup telling us why she's a flight risk with a fear of falling, and then in comes her beloved telling her, "hey, you don't need to worry so much."

ALSO, I just noticed the link between "Do you remember, we were sitting there by the water? You put your arm around me for the first time," and "He was trying to skip rocks on the ocean saying to me, 'Don't you see the starlight?'" Even though they're two completely different songs from different albums and different inspirations, they end up being perfect together!

And I think the sweetest (and most telling 👀) transition is:

Braced myself for the goodbye 'Cause that's all I've ever known Then you took me by surprise You said, "I'll never leave you alone" ... Ooh, ooh he's talking crazy Ooh, ooh dancing with me Ooh, ooh we could get married Have ten kids and teach 'em how to dream

Because again: it's the same story in both songs, but together they paint such a touching picture! Both songs are about finding your person and building your life together despite obstacles, and about the anxious girl with baggage and the hopelessly romantic dreamer boy who makes her believe anything is possible and makes it happen.

And the sweetest part? Ending it with: Yes, I can see it now. 🥰

[briannaswords]

i hope my deer caught in headlights stare and off-putting nature captivates you

[briannaswords]

i. A pigeon flew into the window during assembly. 

Yeah, I know it sounds absolutely ridiculous and if someone else was telling me this, I’d laugh in their face and call them a liar, but I swear it’s true. It took everyone by surprise, one minute Mrs Tode’s droning on about ‘responsibility’ and ‘resilience’ and the next—BAM! 

Flora and I couldn’t stop laughing! We weren’t the only ones too—it took ages for the teachers to get everyone to shut up again, and by that time we were late for Period 1 so Mrs Tode had to dismiss us. I should write that pigeon a thank you note. If it’s not dead.

ii. I meet her when I’m trying to avoid Flora.

It’s a random Tuesday. Or is it Monday? No, it can’t be, today doesn’t have that usual Monday grey and gloom and anyway Flora found out about—well—she found out on Monday and I haven’t talked to her since and it was the first time I went home without a phone blowing up with texts and calls from her so—yeah. Definitely Tuesday.

It’s a random Tuesday and I’m power-walking to the field because I need to be somewhere, anywhere else. I haven’t spoken to Flora since Monday morning and it’s Tuesday afternoon and I’m scared. I’m scared to face her.

I don’t think you’re supposed to be scared of your best friend.

Of course, I’m not scared of Flora. Just—just the rumour. What she might’ve heard. How she might’ve taken it. Because it’s all bullshit, all of it, not a lick of it is true but some people in our year are very good at taking true things and turning them into things that aren’t true. And Flora doesn’t always believes me when I tell her things that are actually true.

I’m walking and thinking about all of this and trying not to think about all of this when—WHAM! Just my luck, I crash straight into a girl carrying a bunch of sheets of paper.

“Shit, sorry!” I cry and try to help her collect all the sheets up again but the wind decides to join the conversation and blows half of them away. I wince, another ‘sorry’ on my lips, ready for her to start sighing and groaning and cussing me out but she just looks at me and winks.

“Race you?”

Then she takes off after the sheets. And it’s so bizarre and my brain is fried from all my thinking and not-thinking that I just…follow her. And it’s kinda fun? And by the time we’re done and finally collected up all the sheets again, we’re kinda laughing?

“Sorry!” I say again, breathlessly, handing her the last of the sheets. The girl smiles, tilts her head like a cute owl. 

“You say that a lot, don’t you?”

“Oh. Uh. Yeah, I guess. Sorry,” I say stiltedly, looking down. But the girl shrugs.

“It’s okay. I just mean—you don’t have to. Apology accepted,” she adds, waving a hand as if she’s waving my sorries into the wind. “Hey, could you help me carry some stuff to that bench over there?”

And I don’t have anything better to do, or anyone better to meet, so I agree. And as we’re walking, we’re talking, and suddenly I don’t care about Flora anymore.

The girl’s name is Debbie. She has two dogs and wants twice as many when she grows up. She’s just moved here from Scotland and she’s only been here a day but she already knows she prefers it here because it’s way warmer. She’s a writer. A poet. I’ve never met anyone who could say that with such conviction. It makes my chest do something funny. 

iii. I had my first boyfriend in Year Nine. 

His name was Kyle. He liked football and video games and giving his hoodies to me even when I said I wasn’t cold. He’d gone out with Molly Keller before me and dumped her after four months and everyone said it was because she wasn’t a good enough kisser.

Kyle didn’t say anything, though. Whenever anyone summed up the courage to actually ask him about it, he just shrugged and stayed silent.

And that’s when I started liking him.

That’s a thing he was very good at, Kyle. Silences. There’s something funny about the way they consist of nothing but they’re still heavy, still thick, still has hands that can wrap around your throat and squeeze ’til you suffocate. Falling for Kyle was like flying but the thing about flying is: we’re not supposed to be able to do it. We’re not supposed to be able to go that high in the air. There isn’t enough oxygen.

Flora’s first boyfriend was supposed to be Dan. She wanted to do everything right, not like me, who jumped in headfirst and didn’t stop to remember that I’m not supposed to have wings. She was going to be careful. That’s why she got me to talk to Dan first, feel things out, see if she stood a chance.

And Dan’s nice. Really nice. Funny and a little bit clueless but not so clueless that it’s irritating. He would’ve been perfect for Flora—he would’ve laughed at all her jokes, mellowed out her rough edges, bought her roses for Valentine’s Day.

Except he wouldn’t have because Flora didn’t stand a chance with him after all. I think you can guess what happened.

iv. When I was younger, I wanted to be a teacher.

I didn’t realise university was a thing. I didn’t think there was a certain place you had to go to achieve that dream—I just thought you’d wake up at school one day and be in a position of authority. My teachers weren’t people to me—they were school entities, living, eating, breathing school. I loved school as a kid; I never wanted to leave. I wasn’t even that good at lessons and I didn’t have any life-changing teachers—I just loved my friends. I loved Flora.

I hate how things change.

v. Flora and I planned our double wedding in Year Four. 

Our teacher had nipped to the toilet in the middle of our maths lesson and we were bored, so she flipped to the back of her maths book and started drawing.

We decided it would be in a church (because Flora’s religious) with red roses in the bouquet and Flora would wear a blue headband and I’d wear a purple headband because those were our favourite colours at the time. And afterwards we’d have a massive party with Flora in charge of the music and me in charge of the food and it would be absolutely amazing because it would be the best day of our lives and we’d be together. Forever. 

And when Flora had her first child, I would be the godmum and when I had my first child, she would be the godmum. That was the plan for as long as I could remember but then I brought it up casually, three days before The Dan Incident and Flora just laughed.

“I can’t with the stupid shit we came up with as kids.”

“It’s not stupid!” I said, trying to laugh too. But I was serious. Totally serious.

“Yeah, okay.” Flora looked at me incredulously. “And we’re really going to have a double wedding! Grow up Kira.”

I wonder why growing up is synonymous with growing alone. And I wonder when Flora started doing it without me and how I didn’t notice until now. And I wonder when she started envisioning a future without me, and when she got so used to the idea that it morphed from a possibility to a certainty.

Three days afterwards, Dan tried to kiss me outside the girls’ toilets and a pigeon flew into the window during assembly. Flora laughed. And I wonder when she started taking pleasure in others’ pain. 

(prompts from nosebleed club)

[briannaswords]

generally you shouldn't write run-on sentences because they get confusing and it doesn't give the reader a break. that doesn't apply to me though my run-on sentences are fun and understandable and they have a rhythm to it that makes you want to keep reading

[briannaswords]

[briannaswords]

sometimes I read a radioactively bad take and just sit there like "not only do you not understand this story but you fundamentally do not understand how stories work in general, and you have never considered that your discord with every piece of fiction you come across could possibly be a problem on your end"

[briannaswords]

i hate seeing people drink the openai/chatgpt koolaid 😭😭😭 genuinely feels like watching someone get seduced by scientology or qanon or something. like girl help it's not intelligent it's Big Autocomplete it's crunching numbers it's not understanding things i fuckign promise you. like ohhh my god the marketing hype fuckign GOT you

[briannaswords]

people are really fucking clueless about generative ai huh? you should absolutely not be using it for any sort of fact checking no matter how convenient. it does not operate in a way that guarantees factual information. its goal is not to deliver you the truth but deliver something coherent based on a given data set which may or may not include factual information. both the idolization of ai and fearmongering of it seem lost on what it is actually capable of doing

[briannaswords]

[briannaswords]

i literally beg of you: STOP USING AI

[briannaswords]

you learned god and kept him locked in a sonnet. here is the church. here is your head bowed and your hands shaking. here is a sunday without bread. 

here is the steeple. in second grade you write a song about a girl, a spell you create. you sing together a stitched dream - and then you burn it, knowing the problem is too great, for bigger people, for adults. you pocket shame so generously. fistfuls of the stuff.

open the doors, here’s all the people. the flipped and wiggled fingers give you the chills. each finger a person, each line in your hand a branch you will not walk on. you picture each life you could live like a hangnail - choosing only the good-girl, only the right-for-you.

you will not make your grandmother unhappy. you will marry the right man even if he is not right, and you will have his kids even if they are your kids and he is no father to them, and you will live in the small apartment of matrimonial bliss, and he will kiss you with distraction. you will be a good and godly girl and you will hold control in your fist and you will never stray from this.

your mother warns you - don’t get attached to a mistake just because you took a lot of time making it. he is not a mistake, right?

you will not splinter your family. you will not embarrass your parents. you will not be that cousin or that wedding, you will marry this man who cannot remember to call you, and you will be five years down the line still whispering is-this-happy to yourself in the mirror. you will stand in the shower with your long hair and you will know this is just-it and that settling is good and that god will be with you at the altar.

here is the church. you fold your hands in prayer. here is the steeple. your spine like a knife. 

the angel chorus comes back when you meet her. the song of your second grade witch-spell unfolding. she smells like being outside, and candlelight, and home. she feels like you can unsheathe god and wear him like a cloak. she feels like holy fire. what if, you ask your father, hell is actually cold? 

you kneel before the man you will marry since you will stay (this you know, he has broken you so many times and you never actually get up and go) and know this is just it, there’s no better option, you will have to wash her out of you and you will pick the life that is a ring finger and you will never feel anything but scrubbed clean and wrung through and you will hold her name like a brand inside of you and you will be a pillar of the community and pick up after him and tell everyone he’s so good to you. 

here’s all the people. but her smell, and this room. eve in the garden, bringing a sword of flame to you. take this and eat. let the kingdom of forbidden knowledge be an open door to you.

[briannaswords]

@kazooreal

call my bed an ashtray the way there's fags in there

[briannaswords]

okay going to bed now goodnight everyone!!

[briannaswords]

I would love to see a fantasy novel where the lore that the reader / protagonist learns at first is not true

[briannaswords]

“Intertwined in the magic/tragic fabric of our dreaming” is insane

[briannaswords]

Do you guys have little Taylor-isms you’ve picked up over the years that aren’t super noticeable as a swiftie thing but you know deep down that it is? For me if I’m really excited about something I’ll say “ever ever ever” bc I remember Taylor saying Gillette was the rainiest rain show ever ever ever, feel free to reblog and add your own in the tags!