deadstarshauntedatoms

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

“you will never be too much for someone who can’t get enough of you”

— Unknown

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

Jane Austen, Emma

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

" "My God, you have lost it." I'm stung, but I don't release his wrist. I'm tired of people telling me I'm unhinged. I know when something is wrong; it's not my fault no one else does."

"The gun safe is locked. There is no one here. I try to breathe relief but I can't. There isn't a smell, but there is something stronger, like my body instinctually is tuned to a frequency, a knowing without knowing why. So even though I tell myself I'm being paranoid, letting myself get carried away again, the way Jed warned me I do too often, I know now, in a way I only thought I knew before, that something is wrong."

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"I watch him fade into the night. And I'm all mixed up. I don't know who I am or where I'm going. And I wish I could follow him into the dark."

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"All the missing women, and the story ends the same way. The story ends when people stop looking, when they stop searching, when no more evidence is found. I won't let your story end that way. I won't let my story end that way. I won't give up. I won't stop looking. If Jed is right, if I'm looking for you because I'm lost too, then finding you will save you and me both. I still have my list of names. I still have Clementine. I think of what she said about you, that you were friends when you were young, when everyone was friends. Tasia said that same thing, and I think how alike we are in our aloneness. I think that no one would look for me if I disappeared. But then I think you might."

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"We were twinshoots sprouting beautifully on a tree. When our branches spread, our shade stretched and our buds flushed, but time snapped my other shoot."

-poet unknown. Written on her brother's death, according to some sources, or her husband according to others. I think this seems more likely to have been written for a cherished sibling "twinshoots" sprouting from the same tree. Though I can see the argument for a lover as well.

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"to my inner child- i am sorry you never learned how the words i love you were supposed to feel i am sorry you were ignored i am sorry you were never told

you are enough"

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"i just want to be loved i just want to be loved i just want to be loved i just want to be loved

without condition"

-michaela angemeer

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"Give me space For a second Stop blowing dandelion seeds in my face I need a field of sunflowers Showing me which way to look your weeds arent welcome anymore I am done facing down Give me something greater than the earth Give me wide-open water I'm tired of this stream Please let me have the ocean I need to swim for a while I need to let the waves carry me I need salt I need healing Please just give me this space"

--michaela angemeer

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"The dead girl, still moving somehow on her feet when every part of her stinks of corruption... She turns, asking, in the little language of twisted trunk-paws "Are you well? Can you walk? It's just a little further. We'll go together." And even this much We is enough to drive the fear back into the high grass. Her mind stills. Her legs unstiffen. Together they cross the overwater, men flytrailing behind them. Together they go to sing the song of their undoing, the joining, teaching, come-together song."

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"The final fruit to be plucked is not rage, but song--a learning song, a teaching song, a joining-together song. She rolls it on her tongue, careful not to split if before its time" "There is still fear in her heart. To be is to be wary, and so there is still fear in her heart""She smells her ending, and her feet plant themselves...She struggles with the man and the fear, but if the man can be ignored, the ending-fear cannot. It lies deeper than hurt and deeper than the need to sing her own undoing song, a root buried so far within no tusk can pry it free."

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"Topsy reaches down. Her trunk curls and uncurls, twitching at the tip like an agitated cat's tail. For the briefest blip of a second she hesitates and Regan thinks maybe she won't take the bottle, that she's sadder than she is angry, that her execution will amount to nothing more than a pitiful sentence in a history book swollen tick-tight with so many injustices the poisoning of a factory full of girls and the mean public death of a small god don't even register as particularly noteworthy. But that's somebody else's once upon a time. Gently, gingerly--the way any soul would handle their own death--Topsy takes the little vial and tucks it away inside her mouth."

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"Pity the poor humans! Their noses were stumpy, ridiculous things and they couldn't smell the Wrongness, even as they rubbed it across their teeth and faces. All they could see was how bright it looked, like sunlight through new leaves. For want of a trunk, much sorrow would come to them--and on to us, though we knew it not in those days."

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"They killed their own just to see time pass. That's how it started. Humans were as hypnotized by shine as magpies, but no magpie has ever been so thinkful about how many days it has left before it turns into a told story. Even in the dark they fretted, feeling the stars bite like summer flies as they migrated overhead. They built shelters to block out the sight of their passing. This only succeeded in making things dimmer; the unseen lion in the tall grass is still a lion that exists...[they stayed] clinging to the sun's fiery tail like frightened calves."

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

"There is a secret buried beneath the mountain's gray skin. The ones who put it there, flat-faced pink squeakers with more clever-thinking than sense, are many Mothers gone, bones so crumbled an ear's flap scatters them to sneeze-seed. To fetch up the secret from Deep-Down requires a long trunk and a longer memory. They left dire warnings carved in the rock, those squeakers, but the rock does not tell her daughters, and the stinging rains washed everything as clean and smooth as an old tusk a hundred hundred matriarchies ago. The Many Mothers have memories longer than stone. They remember how it came to pass, how their task was set and why no other living creature may enter the mountain. It is a Truce with the Dead, and the Many Mothers are nothing more and nothing less than the Memories of the Dead, the sum total of every story ever told them. At night, when the moon shuffles off behind the mountain and the land darkens like wetted skin, they glow."

[deadstarshauntedatoms]

I hate to love like other people I hate to write like other people. I wish my mouth were a church And my letters were bells. - Nizar Qabbani