silverishy

[silverishy]

[silverishy]

it costs zero dollars to be niceys, and friendly. it costs two dollars fifty sense for a ice pop from the ice cream truck. do you want me to spot you? im happy to because i love ypu

[silverishy]

with every injury I develop, I take the time to cover it and treat it well so there's no scarring. the world is rough on all sides but I make sure all of my wounds heal to soft skin once more. I will be warm to this cold weather, I will not let life put calluses on my hands just so it can make me scratch everyone I touch.

[silverishy]

treading in the snow but leaving no tracks. I can write in the fog on windows and in the dust on shelves but my existence doesn't carry enough weight to make an impression in your mind.

[silverishy]

1. Meg Day 2. Haruki Murakami 3. Edouard Labrosse 4. Rainer Maria Rilke 5. Ron Hicks 6. Virginia Woolf 7. Joan Didion 8. Ron Hicks 9. Sylvia Plath 10. Anne Magill 11. Franz Kafka 12. Peter Wever 13. Vi Khi Nao 14. Peter Wever 15. Anna Akhmatova

[silverishy]

squirm

[silverishy]

sometimes I feel like I'm living in an empty house, and I'm leaving signs out that say I'm open but I always lock every door and window when people stop by to say hi.

there are lights on inside, and through the window you can see someone moving around and occupying themselves, and you look at the signs and they all say "open" and "visitors welcome" and you try the doors but you can't manage to get them open, and there I am through the front windows, looking out at the potential guest but my feet refuse to move to the door to unlock it,

because everything inside this house is dusty and the walls are full of cracks that get bigger by the day and the floor creaks wherever you walk. every time I pick up a pretty memory that makes me happy, I find a flaw and drop the item in surprise so it shatters on the floor and I'm left with what are now broken and sad memories. I pick up the pieces and piece it together but it's not the same, it doesn't make me happy anymore when I look at it and now I forget what it used to look like. every time I think I've fixed one thing of mine, there's a scratch in two more.

one would think the cracks in the walls would bring in a little more light, despite ensuring that the building is now more fragile. but no, when I peer through them all I see is darkness. sometimes I get letters in the mail saying that passerby see bright light shining through the windows and shining from me but for me, the light dimmer is continuously stuck at the lowest setting. I can only manage to get it unstuck sometimes.

I think what I want is for people to break down the doors and fix this house with me, but I know that I'm the sole owner of this house and always will be and it's no one's job but my own to make repairs. it's my responsibility to fix myself and no one has the key to my locks but me, so it's only myself that can decide when I open up to people. and I don't know when that will ever be.

[silverishy]

Sue Zhao

[silverishy]

you realize you are lonely in the grocery store, when you look over to your side and ask if the bread is all gone at home, but you look over and there's only a roll display that heard you talking to yourself. someone sneaks english muffins into someone else's cart and they both laugh softly. you feel your heart crack open like the eggs in the refrigerated isle and focus on the smell of wheat and grain. it smells like home but a house is not a home without enough people to fill it up.

you remember you are lonely in your car, when you change the stations to find a song you like and start singing along, and you almost expect someone to start singing along with you, but it's only the artist on the radio that sings about love and loss with you until it ends and the woman starts to talk about weather. there's no one else to reach over and change the station so you sigh and do it yourself again, pretending the knob on your hand is someone's knuckles brushing against yours. instead of singing, you hum to yourself softly so you can hear if someone joined in despite knowing no one will.

you remember you are lonely at home, when you kick your shoes off at the door and don't hear anyone calling out "honey, is that you?" as they recognize your footsteps on the stairs. it's only your cat that runs up to greet you, and it's a small relief as you pick him up, but it quickly diminishes when you run your hands through soft fur and imagine that it's someone else's hair. your cat watches you open a bottle of wine but can't tell you that this is your third one this week, and you know this but it would be nice to have a verbal reminder that "you should stop drinking less, y'know" or a physical restraint of someone taking the bottle from your hands gently and putting the alcohol away.

being aware of loneliness isn't always looking longingly at couples making out in the street, or feeling bitter on every valentine's day, or becoming teary-eyed when you watch romcoms. the strongest feelings come from realizing the cards on the shelves in stores will never be addressed to you, and making a new meal for yourself that you wish you could share with someone else, and seeing animals on the side of the road you wish you could point out to someone that would fawn over them with you. plucking flowers for yourself that would be paired well with a ribbon and someone else's vase won't always help, and visiting new museums without a guiding touch and someone's excited smiles can't stave off the hollow feeling forever.

[silverishy]

“I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don’t know how to be. If that makes any sense?”

— Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

[silverishy]

Unto Sir Launcelot, flower of all noble knights that ever I heard of or saw by my days, I, Sir Gawaine, King Lot’s son of Orkney, sister’s son unto the noble King Arthur, send thee greeting, and let thee have knowledge that the tenth day of May I was smitten upon the old wound that thou gavest me afore the city of Benwick.

[silverishy]

waking up in the morning and looking at the bare walls, once adorned with their smiling face.

reaching for your phone to invite them to a new movie that they would absolutely love to watch, but realizing the last conversation in your messages with them was four months ago, and even then, it was polite and strained.

no one tells you how to cope with losing a friend.

there's overwhelming advice on how to get over a lost lover.

everyone tells you to binge ice cream and romcoms, they tell you that the best way to drown out your loss is to drown yourself in one-night stands and alcohol, they tell you that the pain will soon heal and you'll be with your new other half soon enough, once you cut your hair and start your life over.

but when you lose a friend, there's rarely a dramatic fight that ends with one person in tears on one side of the door, and the other punching the other side of the wall. there's no calling things off and agreeing to see other people with the secret knowledge that you'll find your way back to each other.

there's talking on the phone ever day, and then every few days, and watching those days turn into weeks and months while the silence between you turns into radio static.

you remember their birthdays and why they shut everyone out on every June 26th and what their dad's laugh sounds like and what they no longer hide under their mattress and what their favorite Halloween candy is.

and you don't know what to do with all this knowledge, since you can't just tell them that "I still remember which skeletons in your closet you have still hiding in there, and which ones I helped you dispose of. I still remember your favorite childhood memory and which arcade game you're still determined to beat. I still remember the night you broke up with Emily and how I helped you paintball her house in a fit of petty rage."

you cradled the memories in your head until you pack them away tight, like the stuffed animal they left at your house one day and never asked about again, and the dream journal you two created when you were 9, and the anklet they asked you to fix and never got around to fixing.

you grew up with each other in your hearts, but the space inside never grew along with you both. so as you grew up, you broke each others' hearts.

... so how do you cope with losing a friend?

do you visit their favorite places whenever they're preoccupied just so you don't have to run into them and stumble through awkward, stilted conversation, and follow the same routine as they did whenever they visited those museums or parks? you run your hands along the spines of the mystery and science fiction books they used to buy in large quantities and pick up a book they used to love, but remembering that they're no longer in your life, you pay for it and annotate it until it's full of bittersweet notes and you tuck it away to never be seen again.

do you clear your head of everything they left behind in your mind and throw yourself into your existing friendships? you may keenly feel the loss of one friend, but you still have other friends that are feeling the loss of friendship, so you can mend their wounds while they help heal yours, through late night campfires and early morning jogs. if your old friend was part of your friend group, just know you aren't the only one suffering and you can heal your wounds all together. you can only staunch your bleeding for so long until you become too weak to fend for yourself, so let others help you out in your time of healing and you'll feel inclined to do the same for them.

do you start to meet new people through book clubs and yoga and immerse yourself in the worlds that are now new to you, and slowly come to accept that you're becoming fast friends with them already? you learn some of their secrets during late-night conversations, and grow platonically intimate through nights of strip poker and days of acoustic concerts. there will always be more opportunities to lose those friends but there will always be opportunities to make more, and that's just the beauty of life. your friends will remember all you bared and they will miss you when you leave their lives, but you had the mutual joy of meeting a kindred spirit, and the building blocks of friendship and the finished product that forms the shape of a long-term friend will always be more powerful than the loss.

slowly, the pain of losing your close friend dulls until it's just a familiar but rare ache in your chest that only appears when you think you see them in a crowd but they've already gone, or when you think you hear their name in someone else's conversation but it was just someone else. you no longer have a ruined mood when you hear the song they loved to play in the car, and your hand falls back to your side when you see a comic book they would have loved to read.

you'll lose friends and you'll make them, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. you can't force someone to fit in your life when the shape of your hearts no longer align with the spaces you previously occupied inside. they smoothed out their jagged edges and you had to cut off some of your own. everyone is part of one giant puzzle, and it's hard to find people you match up with, but you'll enjoy the time you have with the people you meet, because everyone is always changing and for everyone that steps out of your life, there will be someone else that fits in perfectly with the space the other friend couldn't quite fill.

[silverishy]

Being sensitive while pretending to have a thick skin is like getting stabbed with a sword while wearing metal armor: The sword may not have visibly injured me but it left a helluva bruise underneath.

[silverishy]

being just like other girls is so fun. taylor swift and twilight and rom coms, "I didn't have it in myself to go with grace", little women and midsommar, crystals and plants and wandavision, "she would've made such a lovely bride what a shame she's fucked in the head", olivia rodrigo, florence pugh, tangled and howl's moving castle, "women have minds as well as just hearts, and they've got ambition and talent as well as just beauty", pride and prejudice, "if I could dream at all, it would be about you. And I'm not ashamed of it", squishmallows, harry styles, mitski and phoebe bridgers and ukuleles and led lights, polaroids, makeup, planning outfits, "what is grief if not love persevering", pink, literally what's not to love

[silverishy]

god I hate it when people say they wouldn't want to be immortal because they would get bored. bs, you can't entertain yourself forever? I'm a thanatophobic with ADHD, I fear I don't have enough time to learn all my hobbies before I die so I jump from one skill to the next every month. You could learn fencing and painting and how to play cricket and you could help historians factcheck because you were around for a historical event and you'll live to see space exploration and then you could travel to other plants and learn everything about them. "I'll get boreed" my ass, you'll only get bored after thousands of years, you're just a coward.

[silverishy]

photo of a pond :) it looks like an impressionist painting, or even watercolor.

I don't know how to focus on moving subjects with my camera yet.

[silverishy]

Somebody loved me and I have never felt more happy in my life.