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A candle lit in memoriam.

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During the last few months, I blamed myself for how everything turned out. I felt I didn’t work on me fast enough. I didn’t get better fast enough. Today, on an anniversary day, I took myself to therapy for the fifth time this year (barely had my emotions in check I should add) and the takeaway?

I put in work. I took myself to therapy when I started to admit that my issues were causing problems for us. I wanted to be better so I kept showing up in the relationship. After every fight, after every disagreement and even after the times we said we should just call it quits, I showed up, vulnerabilities and all. “Part of what we need from our partner is for them to make space for our vulnerabilities. But also realize that not everyone can - not because they are a bad person, but because of so many different reasons sometimes unknown to the rest of us. Sometimes even unknown to themselves. That’s just how life is sometimes.”

I often felt alone with my vulnerabilities. But here I am, still putting in the work. I continue to show up for myself despite being emotionally exhausted.

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There'll be a moment when you realise you're 27 when yesterday you were just 17; and you wouldn't be able to tell how a decade passed away and your life got divided into before and afters. The fury of youth will subdue and nothing will really change but everything will feel different when you look at old photographs and blurry videos taken on cheap mobile phones. Scents will remind you of childhood and certain friends you don't talk to anymore, hangouts will become reunions and mom's burnt pie will become the best food you ever had. And I know on some days you won't be able to show anything of those 10 years but I hope you remember to breathe, and let go of the knot in your chest. I hope you go out in the sun and live a little, because tomorrow is 37.

Edit- I added the visualizer for this piece on my YT, check it out here

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The Flesh I Burned

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Moving parts #kittycatandmanlyman

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“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.”

— Hafiz of Shiraz

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“Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.”

— Nayyirah Waheed

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when healing from a person.. you will have thoughts like “I loved them more than I loved anyone, I never knew I could love someone so much, I’ll never love someone that much again..”

It is important to realize that your ability to love that person didn’t come from them, it came from within you. You were always a lover, already someone who could love deeply. Just because they are gone doesn’t mean that goes away. They didn’t give you the capacity to love, they just gave you a place to express it. Don’t give someone else the credit for how hard you could love, that was you and it still is.

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“Whenever memories threatened to invade me, I would marshal all my strength to bar their way, snuff them out. I’d had to perfect a skillful method to get rid of them. First one must prepare the body to reach the mind: breathe slowly and deliberately from the abdomen; focus oneself by concentrating on this breathing. I allow the images to flood in. I isolate them by chasing away everything moving around them. I blink until they become blurry. Then I stare at one of them for a long time until I freeze it in place. I no longer see anything but this image. I take deep breaths, telling myself that what I see is only a picture that must disappear. In my mind I substitute someone else for me. I must convince myself that I have nothing to do with this image. I tell myself again and again: this memory is not mine. It’s a mistake. I have no past, and therefore no memory.”

— Tahar Ben Jelloun, from This Blinding Absence of Light (New Press, 2002)

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Sometimes the smallest act of love can take up the biggest space in someone’s heart.

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“I missed you in a small way. Tiny enough to fold up and put in my pocket, and carry that loneliness with me everywhere I went. I’d forget all about you, until my hand accidentally brushed against that slip of memory.”

— Unknown

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source

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pacific northwest ~ scott mitchell studio | photos © trevor mein

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It can be difficult - being in a cross-border, long distance relationship, especially with the current global climate. We both put a lot of effort in bridging gaps wherever and however we can, and within reason. We create illusions of being domestic, involving each other as much as we can... but what I’m really realizing is just how bittersweet “good morning” and “I’m home” texts are. The duality of things like getting ready for bed at the same time - you feel less lonely but also somehow further. You understand that a lot of things are out of your control, yet somehow you turn inward and focus on your own shortcomings. Unfortunately with increasing frequency lately, it feels a bit more difficult.

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Some days it is, plain and simple, just that difficult to feel alive. Some days I feel, at best, a fly on a wall, painfully mediocre; and all I can focus on is the crushing weight of all the lives I haven’t lived.

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Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet