imaginemirage

[imaginemirage]

👻happy halloween

schuylerpeck / instagram: hiitssky / substack

[imaginemirage]

love as recognition

anna gavalda / friedrich nietzsche / clarice lispector / jandy nelson / rebecca perry / mhairi mcfarlane

[imaginemirage]

I know that I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it. And I get it. The tortured artist is the artist that gets remembered for all time, particularly if they either perish or overcome. But the truth is that so many of us are stuck in the middle. So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I'd rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone's life.

Hanif Abdurraqib

[imaginemirage]

At this age, my body is a stranger that I keep meeting over and over again. The words "I am" are slowly transforming into "I used to be" because every year, the past tense finds a larger house inside the neighborhood of my everyday vernacular.

Rudy Francisco

[imaginemirage]

All freedom is relative - you know too well - and sometimes it's no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they "free" wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough.

Ocean Vuong

[imaginemirage]

When I was little I didn't know I'd grow up. Or I knew but didn't feel it. Time at that age doesn't exist. Each day it's the same kitchen table With the same backyard outside, And sadness, when felt, Is sadness, but you aren't sad.

Fernando Pessoa

[imaginemirage]

And if you missed a day, there was always the next, and if you missed a year, it didn't matter, the hills weren't going anywhere, the thyme and rosemary kept coming back, the sun kept rising, the brushes kept bearing fruit

Louise Gluck

[imaginemirage]

I move from one ache to another,

not knowing how to breathe in the moments between.

I think I'm more obsessed with longing than love.

More interested in dreaming of lovers

than actually holding them in my arms.

I think I've learned to define myself by being empty,

by always craving and never having.

A heart that doesn't know what to do

when it gets what it wants.

L.E. Bowman

[imaginemirage]

Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.

Ocean Vuong

[imaginemirage]

How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying, our mothers? Or divorcing, or not divorcing, our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing, or leaning? For shutting doors or speaking through walls? For never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it. If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

Sherman Alexie

[imaginemirage]

We have reached a verdict, your honor. This man's heart is deficient. He loves, but his love is worth nothing.

Tony Kushner

[imaginemirage]

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.

Thucydides

[imaginemirage]

You made me while I made you; nothing is owed.

Rebecca Foust

[imaginemirage]

Do not take the crimes of those who have manipulated us and place them at the feet of the world.

Siobhan Thompson

[imaginemirage]

There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.

Octavia E. Butler

[imaginemirage]

Take a body, dump it, drive. Take a body, maybe your own, and dump it gently. All your dead, unfinished selves and dump them gently. Take only what you need.

Richard Siken

[imaginemirage]

It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare, How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes Or toes. How soles of feet know Where they're supposed to be. I've been thinking about the patience Of ordinary things, how clothes Wait respectfully in closets And soap dries quietly in the dish, And towels drink the wet From the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window?

Pat Schneider