starryshua

[starryshua]

Art by Jourdan Tuffan

[starryshua]

Pixel Art by Chelsea Faust

[starryshua]

Snowfall by Tuomas Korpi

[starryshua]

quilt of lights

[starryshua]

Art by Roman Kosmachev

[starryshua]

Okay. Come on, then. I love you, get up, we are going to keep going. Repeat this to yourself in a mirror or in a whisper or in the shower or in a shout. I love you, get up, keep going.

I am tired too. It's okay. We will sleep in the car ride over. We will sleep on each other's shoulders. We will sleep upside down and in the laps of new friends and on the bellies of our lovers and in the hands of better tomorrows. We will sleep and we will wake up rested and we will wake up happy and we will wake up home again.

I love you, get up. It's time to write "maybe next time" on our gravesite. It's time to write: it could not kill me, I would not die. It's time to write a love letter to the sun and our one-act play and the history of our keychains. It is time to write a future where despite everything, we are finally warm and safe.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Get up. Keep going. We are going to be okay.

[starryshua]

i. there's three stages of wound healing (sometimes considered four, depending on the document). the last is largely invisible; called remodeling.

ii. they tore down my high school.

iii. the final wound healing stage happens below the dermis, after the scab has flaked off. it is a slow process involving repairing muscle and tissue - and often replaces lost viscera with scar tissue.

iv. i can't remember the order of it, but i know it went something like - pink blue purple white. since you braided it for me, i wore the bracelet for two years, long after it had started to disintegrate.

v. remodeling can last up to a year.

vi. i'm getting surgery soon. medically included hole. i can't wear metal during the process, so i have to take off all my jewelry. i told you once, right - i've been wearing this ring every day since i was 22. i'm worried about my cartilage piercing - i've never had to take it out before, i don't know how to put it back in.

vii. it is possible for skin cells to begin to lose their ability to duplicate, thereby losing their ability to heal. this might happen, for example, when a wound has not completed the remodeling stage but a second wound interrupts the healing process. repeated trauma causes a breakdown on the cellular level.

viii. can a body be a church? there is a vaulted difference between life's call before and the echo, resounding - after, after, after. the ringing click of heels on a stone floor. without looking, i know the steps are always leaving.

ix. scar tissue has no blood. it cannot coagulate. injury to scar tissue does not follow the same wound healing cycle as normal tissue.

x. it's okay. the high school had asbestos. the bracelet was something you made in five minutes. my abdomen will be professionally stitched back together. the worship i wasted will leak somewhere else, onto a different sun, a different life. a different poem.

-- "How do you heal?" ... well stefan frankly i don't // r.i.d

[starryshua]

Eight Rules For Writing -- from a long ago piece I wrote for The Guardian.

1 Write.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.

8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

[starryshua]

reconciling the perception of my religion online and in real life

it's really hard to recognize disrespect and mistreatment when you're taught to ignore it.

for context: i'm a christian living in a predominantly islamic country- malaysia. please do your own research about it, but basically, even though my country parades its 'freedom in religion'... there is no such thing. blatant mistreatment of religions other than islam is rampant, and we cannot oppose it for fear of legal retribution.

the first few times i descended into the underworld, aka the internet, and encountered discussions about religion... it left me confused. take for example, if you're familiar with k-pop, you'll know that there are accusations of idols wearing inappropriate clothing or using inappropriate props linked to race or religion every single day. sometimes it almost seems like their careers could end over the use of a single word. i watched all of this go on, and i was just so confused because, isn't this natural? my religion's symbol has been used for aesthetic purposes and trends for most of my life. my god's names are taken in vain every single day by millions of people. i've seen so many horror movies where they ridiculed my religion, over and over and over again. it's just natural... right? and this is the part where i realise that it's not.

i never knew that i deserved to be angry about these things. i never got to be. growing up, i learnt to keep quiet about my religion from my elders. just take it, because who knows when they'll take our freedom away? take it, because who knows when they'll take our rights? take it, take it, take it, because they could take our family, our community, our churches. at the time, i believed this to be the natural way of things; now i know it to simply be our survival strategy. i am not blaming other religions for this; i have many friends of different religions that are near and dear to my heart, and their hands, as well as countless others, are clean of wrongdoing. but i am now aware of how much the prejudiced system in my country has influenced my upbringing and outlook.

still though, that is just the case for countries like mine, is it not? why is it that i never see anyone outside of my country press the issue? why does it seem that even on the internet, christianity is not a respected religion? why are we not afforded the same rights and basic courtesy as everyone else? my brother once told me that when our family chose to believe in god, we chose to live a life of hardships. i thought that he meant just the life we live here, in a country rife with religious discrimination; but no, it's everywhere, isn't it? christians who speak up about it are silenced even outside of countries where it's illegal to do so. why? because of transgressions made before we were even born? because of harmful stereotypes? why are my beliefs, our beliefs, lesser than everyone else's?

those were painful questions to ask. even though i'm sure in the worth of my faith and myself, it's daunting to approach the issue because it's so normalized and i'm so desensitized to it. i think i have to though; i think i owe it to my faith and to all the ones who fought before me to fight tooth and nail for the respect and rights others have. because my religion is not lesser than.

[starryshua]

do you know what's my favorite phrase to say?

'i love you too.'

every time it leaves my lips i feel this little bubble of elation float up in my chest, and i get so giddy it almost hurts. because isn't that the most magical thing in the world? knowing that you cradle this person so close to your heart that they've carved their shape into it, and that they've done the same for you. that you can only feel warmth and light and softness when you see them smile, and that they feel the same.

sometimes i pause to think about that and it's enough to make my knees weak. because there is so much vulnerability in that; in trading precious things, in baring all the chinks in your armour, in acknowledging how easy it would be to ruin the other, and choosing not to nonetheless.

it is simultaneously the most horribly terrifying and breathtakingly beautiful thing i've ever experienced.

[starryshua]

When you are born in a burning house, you think whole world is on fire. But it's not.

— Richard Kadrey, Aloha From Hell

[starryshua]

Farewell online privacy

[starryshua]

Sweet love, what are your biggest creative inspirations? How do the words just flow from you? I long to feel such passion for words and write in those ways. Sending you love and love and love.

i love u but this is not accurate to my experience. i love u but i don't feel that way. i love u but. i am rarely excited to write.

that's the whole secret. i taught myself to sit down and do it anyway. writing is a craft, not just a hobby. in the same way musicians sit down and make themselves run scales - writers need to sit down and just-write-something.

"but it's bad". so what? you don't need to sell it. it just needs to exist so your muscles warm up.

"i have nothing left to say." me neither. i ran out of things to say about 10 years ago.

"i don't know what to do here!" there isn't a right answer. you are leaning in to that feeling, not away from it.

"i hate what i've made." yeah, that happens. keep going anyway. you don't need to like it, you just need to do it.

our brains are plastic and every time we do this, we train ourselves a little bit better. we might not be able to say exactly why we hated something we wrote, but if you write 40 things you hate, your brain starts forming a picture in your subconscious - maybe you actually only like to write about feathers. maybe you're not really into prose. maybe you like gardens. whatever.

and it makes you bored. that's the most important thing. it makes you super, horribly bored. and then you write anyway. writing bored is often annoying but it is also super important. because your brain is going to start looking for new things to say and do. and then , there you go - suddenly you're writing something fun and wild.

and if that doesn't come for a year? whatever. you have had a year of practice. of writing without the wings of inspiration. when it does come, you'll be able to push through parts that would have otherwise stopped you - because you haven't been stopped by worse conditions. you'll have a more interesting language scheme, you'll have a sense of your own style, you'll have a better grasp on body language... and it feels amazing. it's like. taking off the weights around your ankles.

without that year of practice? of slogging? you don't have those muscles. so the first time inspiration sort-of flags, you find yourself unable to finish your writing. or it's not "good enough" so you stop. or you don't love a paragraph, so you stop.

with the year of bad writing, you're like - i don't even care about that stuff, i've made worse, let's keep going. you can make yourself do it.

artists do studies and try different styles. singers do voice lessons and try different genres. dancers put in hours at the gym and then hike to rehearsal. the thing about art is that it is difficult and not all of it is going to come from a place of harmony and passion. it's just about gritting your teeth and grinding through it.

because when you do finally get it? yeah, dude. i promise it's worth it.

[starryshua]

“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne. Details of Abraham Pether’s night visions (1756-1812).

[starryshua]

I’m fine. I got my name back. Spirited Away 千と千尋の神隠し (2001) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

[starryshua]

category is ‘face’ and he wins by a landslide

[starryshua]

Oxford World’s Classics Redesign: Shakespeare

Part I. Tragedies