pidraya

[pidraya]

#ricochet

[pidraya]

🦋: Abstracted Definition || definitions, abstracted, transformations, conformity, expectations, psychopomps, self-abandonment, reflections, white lies

Abstracted (n): One now Passed who tried to escape and believes that it did. The Abstracted are not alive, but they fit the definition of life. The Yearning must cast either purpose or agency to the Void; the Abstracted chose neither. The Devil you know promises that the Void can be ignored.

~🦋

[pidraya]

Carrie Lorig | The Pulp Vs. The Throne

[pidraya]

can we have fun again. can we invest in strangeness again. can we want each other again. can we be lustful and bold. can we say big things softly and put our mouths on each other. let’s play pretend and hang off trees. let’s lick snowflakes off each other’s palms. i don’t want to be cool. i’m repulsed by nonchalance. our world can be a billion different worlds. i would like to make my blood move. i would like to stretch into a new skin every day. i want to sit in a tub of warm green paint and watch the sky float. i want to feel all of our pulses, all at once, beating in and out of rhythm.

[pidraya]

Kim Addonizio, Like That

[pidraya]

It’s about wanting and not wanting: about needing people to pour themselves out into you and then needing them to stop, to restore the boundaries of the self, to maintain separation and control. It’s about having a personality that both longs for and fears being subsumed into another ego; being swamped or flooded, ingesting or being infected by the mess and drama of someone else’s life, as if their words were literally agents of transmission.

Olivia Laing, from The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

[pidraya]

Going Mad at Sea: A Packing List.

Are you planning on a nautical severance from your sanity? Here are some things to consider packing along!

[pidraya]

The Shape of a Lack

You like a woman shaped like an absence / You like a woman who you can read like a mystery / You like an actress, ready and willing to recreate your favorite pornography / You like a good gander at your own reflection / You like a woman who is a mirror / She's flat, and bright, and all about you / You like a woman like a deer in the road / Crushed beneath your careless wheels / She's a mangled mess of thin, knotted limbs / But it's her own fault / She saw your lights and she froze / You like a woman like a blunt instrument / She's an implement to inflict injuries of your own self-hatred / You like a woman who you can put in a trophy case / So that you can invite other men to come have a gaze / So that other men can look at her and pat you on the back / So that other men can covet what you have / And just maybe that will heal the wound in the shape of your dad / You like a woman in the shape of a lack / She's a beautiful gap for you to fill / She's a handy little rag to clean up your spills / You like a woman you can burn through as quickly as striking a matchstick / You like a woman you can grift / After all, what use is having her if it says nothing of your own cleverness? / You want a woman like a party-trick / That, or a dog you can kick / You want to toss your stick out into the wilderness / Sit back and watch as she faithfully runs off to retrieve / You want a woman who won't ask you to stay / You want a woman who will never leave

[pidraya]

— The World Keeps on Ending and the World Goes On, Franny Choi

[pidraya]

“Only what is entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: there is a mania to call the lost thing until it returns.”

— Gunter Grass

[pidraya]

and it's so deserving

[pidraya]

ALL THINGS SHARP ARE SECRETLY PRAYING

a rabbit is biting down on the metal teeth of a snare. a scientist is watching a lab rat choose the wrong door over and over, the one with the needle, the one with the wire singing red against its ribs. they say it is because creatures prefer familiar pain to an unknown mercy. they say if you wound something slowly enough, it will call the wound home.

in a past life, i must have been a thing with claws, something that mistook the cold for a lover. i had a dream where i was born backward, came out of my mother’s mouth like a swallowed syllable, curled into the wet pink of her tongue, her teeth the last cage i ever knew.

my god, my god, i have never felt so tender as when i was tearing myself apart.

watch: a cat carries her dead kitten in her mouth, lulls it back and forth. watch: a man lights a cigarette with the match he struck off his own thigh. watch: a girl smiles in the mirror, red under her nails, says, i am fine, i am fine, i am fine.

one day, i will stop choosing the wrong door. one day, i will crawl out of the body i was given, the one that keeps flinching, the one that keeps bending toward the blade.

[pidraya]

BLACK HONEY DRIPS FROM THE TAP AND I LET IT RUN

the first time i saw a beekeeper i thought [god, what a way to be a thing / what a way to exist with hands full of honey & fear] but the second time i saw a beekeeper i thought [i could love like that too, i could let something sting itself to death just to prove i was worthy of sweetness] and maybe the point is the aftertaste of venom. you take it in sugar cubes, mix it into your tea, let the poison be palatable. // it’s just biology, baby, just the way things are (you say) but i watch the wax build in the corners of your mouth and i think no, no, this is something else, something with wings & ruinous intention. i try to spit the honey out but my teeth are already sinking.

they’ll only die if they love you too much—as if love wasn’t just another kind of death, i’ve spent years dripping with it, sticky with the weight of hands that only ever knew how to take. and my god, haven’t i been good? haven’t i let them sink their little barbs into my skin, again and again and again, willing to be stung if it means i get to be kept? take it, take all of it. i am the softest vessel.someone once said bees remember faces, that they can hold a grudge for generations. i imagine them circling back, drawn to the same open mouth, the same hands outstretched, the same invitation to ruin. come back to me, my loves, my wicked little creatures // let the swarm take me. let them think i am worthy of keeping.

[pidraya]

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

[pidraya]

“Angela, I don’t know how to tell you and begin, without hurting you. But I can’t stand you anymore. I’m going to invent another woman quickly. One who won’t be magical like you, one in whom I can go about walking the earth and eating meat. I want a real woman. I’m tired of lying.”

Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

[pidraya]

"I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman."-Anais Nin

Eager for affection and for disaster, oscillating between extreme audacity and the most dreadful anguish, as inconceivable on a scale of real beings as a mythical being, she tore herself on the thorns with which she surrounded herself until becoming nothing but a wound, never allowing herself to be confined by anything or anyone.-Georges Bataille

“…every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it.”-Charles Dickens

Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true.-Richard Siken

[pidraya]

Pathetic- Khoiba