#An Honest Letter to My Writing

[solomonyau]

what it's like inside my mind - Chapter 14 : 'An Honest Letter To My Writing'

If I’m being honest, about what I truly think of you,

I’d believe that this shallow depth of water that run beneath our feet will lead us to submerging ourselves,

Where the constant ticking of the clock will drowned out by blurred gunshots,

Wounds bleeding, gushing from the foresight of eternity

Pleading - to patch of bullet holes that were left within me, 

Filled- by the sorrow of constant sad songs Pulses - beating profusely faster by the minute

Shadows - echoing their cries of being left behind

Ligaments - bursting from their origins of where they were originally attached

Tattoos - bleeding from the needles that carved them

Sown hearts - screaming for their atriums & ventricles

Muscles - cramping at the sight of you 

Now isn’t this all anticlimactic..

I wouldn’t dare call myself a poet yet, for I have yet to surgically remove & repair these lessons that you have bestowed upon me

Giving me the morphing power of a power ranger,

Ranging my scopes, to fight the battles of the unknown, 

Splitting votes, about whether my honesty has been put to rest like the Pope

For better or worse, my message has yet to be sent to you so

If I’m being honest, about what I truly think of you,

I’d paint the world in white, for the monotone brightness that you seem to love so much would break these chains,

Allow the ink from my pen to be swerved on your skin, 

Dowsing colours from these black paintings only known to me,

Painting the world, with a glory of sunshine,

Extension of hands, reaching out to the abyss, 

Grabbing onto flask, to erupt these chemical reactions called love,

So this is my letter to you, 

For when dusk turns dawn, & my skin turns pale

As my withered hands reeks of arthritis, & I have yet learned to fail, 

Just know that these unspoken words of mine were ever so meant to reach the depths of you,

For I have only known to write letters, to the places where I have once left you. 

[kattricia]

Beloved if you could tell me more about how Arcane is a tragic romance staged as a geopolitical collapse in six acts i would love you forever. I find your mind so sexy

okay. i’m going to try and say something semi coherent about this, because you, my beloved mutual asked and i? would die for you.

if we’re going to talk about tragedy, we might as well start with jayce and viktor.  in true tragic fashion, they follow the classical arc to the letter: hamartia (a fatal flaw – hubris, idealism, the belief that their creation could save rather than destroy), peripeteia (the reversal – hextech becoming a weapon rather than a miracle. viktor dying, jayce bringing him back),  and anagnorisis (the moment of recognition – when they realize the cost and the damage. viktor seeing what he’s become and jayce saying what he should have said years ago). and the devastating thing is: these don’t happen separately. they collapse inward, spiral together. the tragedy hits hardest because the fall is of their own making – and because it comes too late. 

if there’s anything i’ve learned from my (very humble and very deeply felt) studies in literature and literary history it’s this: romantic tragedy is not just about heartbreak. it’s about the world collapsing as a consequence of love gone wrong. loyalty, desire, misjudgement and betrayal rippling outward into total ruin. arcane doesnt just tell a tragic love story: it tells five. ten. maybe more. the show is a lattice of relationships – romantic, familial, platonic, political – and every one of them cracks in some way. and each crack runs straight through the city’s foundation somehow.

jayvik may be the most overtly mythic of them all. our science husbands, our gilgamesh and enkidu, our cautionary tale about what happens when affection tries to hold up empire  – but they’re not alone. their spiral isn’t the only one.

arcane, in its very structure, ties systemic collapse to personal grief. every conflict begins in a relationship that couldn’t hold. vi and jinx are antigone and ismene rewritten in gunpowder and neon: sisters locked on opposite sides, loyalty twisted by trauma. mel and ambessa are imperial legacy embodied: the exiled daughter who tried to love her new home, and her mother who thinks love is weakness. caitlyn standing between love, lineage and law. ekko mourning a girl who never got to grow up and jinx is the living fallout of everyone else’s failure to protect her.

even silco and vander – two men who once shared a vision of an independent zaun – become enemies, because one believes revolution requires uproar while the other hopes reasoning might still be enough. and in the end, every character is fighting someone they still remember loving once. no character fights in isolation. every blow lands on someone they once believed in. and that’s why the city burns.

because that’s the thing, right? the show treats interpersonal relationships like structural beams: when they crack, the city does, too. the emotional subplots aren’t really subplots at all: they are the plot. hextech was supposed to be a bridge: between science and magic, between piltover and zaun, between a boy who fell from grace and a man who never got the chance to rise. instead, it becomes the wedge. a miracle turned into a weapon, with the miracle workers on opposite sides of a war they helped create. when the marriage of minds ends in divorce, the whole city pays the price. 

and that’s why we don’t have any neat hero-villain binaries, right? what we do have is people trying to claw their way back to something they lost. a sister, a partner, a version of themselves that they could still forgive. but every attempt to go back costs them something new, again and again. that’s the real tragedy, i think: not just the people lost, but that they keep losing the things they’re trying to save.

if you’ll allow me some nerdy indulgence i’d like to go back to jayce and viktor being our gilgamesh and enkidu by way of hextech. radiant ambition meets terminal wildness. they build a future together and then have to destroy it with their own hands. and the thing is: they don’t fall apart because the love fades, (affection is the one thing holding them together, after all). they fall apart because it festers into betrayal and all the ways they fail to reach each other across the gap that’s widened between them. the tragedy isn’t the end (though i really, really wish they had more time) – it’s everything that leads to it. they hit every note of a classical downfall: a shared dream born of light, warped by power, splintered by grief. their fatal flaws (call it hubris, call it desperation, call it idealism) spiral into the kind of break no apology can fix. and yet, in the end, when everything else is gone, they still choose each other. if antigone dies to bury the one she loves, if gilgamesh carves his grief into stone, then jayce and viktor choose to hold each other in the infinite embrace of the arcane in order to stop what they created from consuming everyone else. not to undo the damage but to stand in its ashes and say: no more.

(aristotle once said that tragedy is supposed to evoke pity and fear, and then purge those emotions through catharsis. this post? may have done the opposite. i have never feared more. i have never pitied harder. and i have certainly not been purged)

[orange-artblog]

joking around was fun but now I did a ~final of Esther‘s design xp

she‘s a supposed Aim (post dark cream) x Axel (errorink) kid made out of the magic of headcanons and inside jokes (/j)

Aim is by @zu-is-here / Axel is by @ari-cuno

anyway I went and had some more fun with her

alsoo this

[littlelav107]

frick it, it's February

time to increase my arospec art <2

[st7arlight]

what are they looking at over there…..

[emilypapen]

i like to think of people as places

I like to think of people as places.

I was just thinking about how when we spend a lot of time at a place, we know how to move around it by heart. I still know my way through my old school, my childhood house, through my childhood friend’s house that I haven’t seen in years, and through the store I used to go to when I was a kid. And even if I tried, I don’t think I could ever forget. Even if I never step foot in any of these places again, I’d know where to go, and how to move around it and find the things I want.

And isn’t it like that with people, too? I don’t think anyone changes so much that you wouldn’t be able to move inside of them like you used to. I think the essential parts never do. So I wonder, if I could take all the people from my past, and turn them into places, would I know where to go?

I’d like to think yes. I’d like to think that that is one of the things that stays with you, once people are gone, like a map. Are the things that once decorated the walls inside of your body untouched? Have they been replaced, moved, or are they still the same? The same things that made me love you? Will you let me roam around you, and see if I find my way back to your heart? Or will you leave me wondering for the rest of my life, hoping that I'm never lost?

[unionizedwizard]

the first time i really experienced the "oh i am getting old huh" phenomenon, i was 21 & tutoring this lovely little 5th grader living down the street - i was helping with her homework and i noticed her handwriting. i went like "oh, they let you write in script at school now?" "what do you mean?" "well back in my day you would get in big, big trouble if you used anything else than cursive handwriting" "what's a "cursive"?". turns out she wasn't taught cursive at all!

which is wild because, like, not only were we not taught script at all, but teachers acted as though using script was some kind of nefarious deviant behavior. i had this friend in 4th grade who kept getting in HUGE trouble all the time because she wouldnt use cursive at all, like, they called her parents and threatened to have her expelled iirc. this was in the mid 2000's lmao

there was a classist element to it - i noticed that teachers were more likely to assume a student was smart and be more magnanimous in their grading if the student used cursive rather than script (which was considered childish, vulgar, and sometimes girly (derogatory)), used a fountain pen rather than ballpoint, and (sometimes, not always) black ink instead of blue (all other colors were generally banned for graded essays but i got away with using brown ink. i used a calligraphy fountain pen though which helped), though sometimes it was the opposite and black ink was banned with only blue ink allowed (go figure). often teachers would explain these rules to us, proudly even (?). the kind of "girly half-cursive/half-script" with curly letters & tiny hearts dotting the i's was also frowned upon and considered vulgar and a mark of stupidity

i'm glad this is changing at the very least but :( cursive is such a good tool tbh it has so much personality also & nothing is more appropriate for fountain pen use than cursive, so i'm sad this is seemingly disappearing...

[coconi]

A-Z Drabble Practice #16

Perhaps it's true what they say, a small voice in the back of Shadow's mind supplies. It is monotone. Clinical. Detached. It doesn't sound like him. But then again, the blood-soaked claws before Shadow's eyes hardly look like his own either.

Shadow doesn't remember what happened. He doesn't need to: he stands unharmed before a faceless body on the ground — still warm, still writhing, still fighting — ready to deliver the final blow. Recognition lies somewhere far beyond reach. Affection farther still.

It is better this way.

Perhaps it's true what they say: the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

(Previous)

[butterfliesoverfeelings]

The Rhythm of Love and Letting Go

Anger is like a flame, burning within us, often mistaken for strength. We tend to feed it, thinking it shields us from further pain, but in reality, it slowly consumes us from the inside. Don’t feed your anger—starve it. When we stop nurturing those painful feelings, we create room for peace. Anger holds us hostage, keeping us trapped in a loop of resentment and frustration. It builds walls, distancing us from the love and care that surround us, which, though often subtle, is ever-present.

Letting go is not a sign of weakness—it’s an act of liberation. Stop holding onto painful feelings. Allow yourself the grace to release what no longer serves you. By doing so, you make room for healing and growth. Understand that love doesn’t always come in grand gestures or in the forms we expect. Each one of us loves you in their own unique ways. Just because it doesn’t look the way you imagined doesn’t mean it’s not there. Sometimes, love is quiet, nestled in small moments, in actions rather than words, and in support rather than displays of affection.

Love, like faith, goes through its waves and tides. It ebbs and flows, rises and falls, constantly shifting like the ocean’s currents. Sometimes, it will feel overwhelming and immense, while at other times, it may feel distant and almost imperceptible. But just as the tides always return, so too does love. You must learn to trust in its rhythm, even when it feels like it’s pulling away from you.

Faith is about trusting what you cannot always see, and love works in much the same way. They both require patience, belief, and the understanding that they are forces beyond our control. You cannot force someone to love you the way you want, just as you cannot control the tides. All you can do is trust that love, like the ocean, is ever-moving, always finding its way back, even when it seems lost.

In learning to release anger and embrace love’s ever-changing nature, you set yourself free. You open yourself up to receiving love in all its varied forms, and you begin to understand that love—like life—is not always straightforward. It requires faith, patience, and above all, an openness to let it come and go as it must. When you surrender to this flow, you not only find peace within but also discover that love was always there, even in its quietest moments.

©butterfliesoverfeelings

[sunb0ts]

hello and sorry to anyone who when telling me about their day or interests get a response from me that possesses both the Wait Time and Average Paragraph Length of a physical letter. like a whole letter written out and sent in the mail. I need to attentively interact with everything you've just told me. it's vital

[the-jellyfish-graves]

I’m proud of you - as if that feeling was contained in the most bountiful and sustainable well in my heart, always able to be drawn from . . . I care for you with what nears the Platonic ideal of unconditional love. I would like to always offer you the option to be as you are, to come as you are, to act as you wish, and to transform as you see fit - to extend my friendship through all of it. That has felt like an easy thing to do; that is, it’s a worthwhile thing to care about you.

[acorrespondence]

@freekicks Oh man I have lots; so many that I’m making this a new post so I don’t clog up that poor person’s replies with 50 messages, haha! Basically, it’s an expansion on the idea that everyone has headcanons/canon details that are absolutely integral to their enjoyment of the story and any transformative works based on it (hard), and headcanons/canon details that they’re fond of but could still get pretty much unaltered enjoyment out of a fic that contradicts them (soft). Obviously all these are just opinions and what I get out of the story isn’t and shouldn’t have to be the same as what anyone else gets out of it.

One thing that sort of falls in the middle of the headcanon/canon divide is Raylan’s age when his mother died. The show contradicts itself on this point several times, and so it’s sort of fungible. I personally find the idea that Raylan’s mother died when he was very young, like younger than Loretta, while it may serve the parallels between them, to be much less compelling than the idea that she died later. It’s just so much more… boring for a character whose mother died when he was ten or so to have a gross misrepresentation of who she was as a person in his mental image of her. It’s much more compelling to me if he held onto that despite direct evidence to the contrary that he was old enough to understand. Of course he’d forget the hatchet story if it happened when he was eight. If it happened when he was eighteen, that opens up a much realer possibility that he just straight up repressed it, which is fascinating. Also, I don’t think it makes sense if he grew up with Helen in the house for the second half of his life there. To me that doesn’t really jive with their current relationship. (And on a less story-driven note, I am fascinated by the idea that, if Raylan’s mother died when he was thirty, he might not have attended her funeral. Because part of him knew it would challenge the version of her he had to remember in order to maintain his black and white perception of the world.)

Obviously, the mine and what it represents is a necessary component (though the time and place less so—my Old Guard au places them in the miners’ strikes of the 30s, and I’ve read a wonderful fic where the mine in question was on a different planet entirely. However, it does have to be placed in Harlan, or whatever approximation of Harlan fits the broader setting). The boys and their relationships with their daddies is another nonnegotiable for me. Specifically, the way they grew up; different times and causes of death for Bo and Arlo can work just as well. If Raylan and Boyd don’t meet until they’re established adults, that immediately kills my interest. Their rich history is so integral to why I’m drawn to the ship in the first place. It’s a hard sell for me to have Boyd leave or Raylan stay directly after the mine, but I’ve been known to make an exception if the story is compelling enough and doesn’t sacrifice characterization.

I think Boyd’s criminal history is important, though the nature of it less so. And even more important is the fact that Boyd never really makes it big as a criminal—making him some kind of fief lord of crime makes him much less interesting to me. His plans only succeed inasmuch as he always manages to survive their unraveling. I think it’s important that he’s spent time incarcerated. I’m not a huge fan of stories where they meet again outside of Harlan and never go back, it takes away the central tension between them and the place that made them that Raylan so struggles with and Boyd embraces so wholly, which for me is a really interesting part of their relationship, this dichotomy. I also don’t care for stories that give them a ton of good friends outside each other, or casual friends who actually know them and hang out with them—they’re too big of assholes for that. Of course, this doesn’t include the characters they’re close with in canon; I love Raylan and Rachel’s friendship, in particular, and their understanding of each other despite their vast superficial differences is fascinating. I guess I should say instead that I don’t buy either of them having typical friendships, period. They’re just too weird and fucked up for that. They trauma bonded at nineteen and it continues to be one of the most important relationships in either of their lives. Winona puts up with Raylan’s relational weirdness for love; no one is doing that for their drinking buddy. So they may have close friendships, but they don’t look the way you’d expect.

I’d never make their relationship uncomplicatedly sweet and unfraught, or sand down the kind of feral edges of it, and I don’t think they’d be much for traditional PDA—I just love the way in canon the physical (and otherwise) manifestations of their intimacy are so outside of what’s expected from buddies OR lovers. In the same vein, I don’t love it when Raylan goes crazy with the terms of endearment, because he doesn’t use them much with his love interests in canon. I have him use them with the girls in heavy heart more as verbal tics he picked up after spending too much time around Boyd, who LOVES to use them, plus I think he models at least some of his displays of parental affection after Helen, who canonically calls him “honey”. I’m fine with Boyd throwing endearments around liberally; I just don’t do it in my own fics because I love the way in canon he twists Raylan’s name itself into almost an endearment. He just can’t stop saying it every other sentence, so why would he give up the chance to say it by replacing it with another word? Plus, it fits in with how weird they are about each other in general.

More broadly, I have never really enjoyed full aus (based on any story) that don’t try to approximate at least the broader beats of place and history from canon, but I really really love stories that manage it. I respect authors who can sort of map canon onto a completely different stage, like the space au mentioned above, so much. I hope that I manage that at least somewhat with catching bullets.

That’s all the big ones I can think of at the moment, though I’m sure there’s more I’ve forgotten (most of the rest fall more under ic-ness vs ooc-ness, which is harder to articulate; “what makes them themselves?” is a much more difficult question). Ultimately, I think probably a lot of these come across through cross-referencing both of my WIPs—basically, if it shows up in both, there’s a very good chance it’s a nonnegotiable for me, and if it changes between the two, then I can obviously live without it.

[stllmnstr]

hey thank you for all your hard work🫡

you’re doin great babe🫶

Aw thank you 🥹 this means a lot!!!!

[thedevotionaltour]

man. thinking about how my insurance is out of network i feel so fucked i have so much money owed in therapy bills. literally over 1k bc of my weird insurance happenings and also bc idk if insurance was even doing its thing before i dont know and just other various things im sure i've forgotten. man.

[mellimagicsblog]

Wrote this depressing sh*t...

I thought this would be therapeutic, but I'm actually more bummed out now than I was before. I wish I could afford a therapist so they could read this, but I'm still unemployed and the whole mental health industry is f**d. I call it, "An Honest Cover Letter:"

Dear Prospective Employer,

My name is Laura Lewandowski. People who know my extended family call me “Laura Lew,” because my dad was “Mr. Lew.” I grew up in my father’s shadow as “the cool teacher” at most of my schools, which at least helped me academically because I didn’t have a choice but to care about my education. When I write these things, I often say that I’ve “worn a lot of hats,” but that’s not accurate. Hats are something you can take off at any time and are actually encouraged to take off in formal situations. What I’ve worn at different jobs are masks, always to play the part of either a supporting actress or a clown. I guess my masks are really convincing, because I’m never asked to take them off after work, and people often tell me that I’m “the happiest person they know” or that I “never get angry.” It’s still really hard to wear masks all day long, multiple days a week, but I always pull through. When your parents, your extended family, and most of their friends are educators, you learn that you must show every adult in your life respect, even if some adults say the most idiotic, heartless things you’ve ever heard. Thanks to my life experiences, I can adapt to just about any audience, though I often resent the crowd I’m performing for.

There was a time in my life where my identity was tied directly to what I like to do, because it kept me distinct from the family education trade. I was an artist and a writer who would sometimes hike around in nature, geek out about science, and read about the paranormal for fun. I even went to school to be an artist. What I didn’t know was that I would start experiencing chronic pain at a much younger age than society told me I would. I now live in fear of my body failing me while working on a project, or writing a long report, or being on a hike; I certainly don’t want to identify as an artist anymore, even if I still make artwork any time my body lets me. Vulnerability makes me ashamed of myself, and being honest about my limitations just makes me feel more vulnerable. Plus, I don’t have nearly the strict limitations of the other disabled people I live and work with regularly. I know I should just suck it up and “do a regular job.”

So, maybe you can give me a regular job where I don’t have to wear a mask - at least not all the time. I need a job where I don’t have to sit with my lack-of-identity for long periods of time, because no paycheck is worth that deep emptiness. We can probably have a few funny conversations at the water cooler (if we have one), and I’ll do my job adequately enough to fit in for eight hours. Then I’ll go home to sleep, get up, and do it all again tomorrow. I’ll never tell you if I’m actually feeling sad about something, so I promise that you’ll be able to focus on important things at work.

Thanks for allowing me to take up some of your valuable time,

Laura Lewandowski

[the-crimson-crows]

jar of stars

The odd thing, perhaps, is that I cannot remember precisely when I began to love you. 

It’s a blur, these memories, accentuated only by sharp events in vivid relief; like the blurred background when you look out the window in a train that only stops when you reach a station. My memories of you are like that, hundreds of small memories that blur together marked by events that I remember well, then going back to small blurs. They lay hidden, dormant, until I lay in bed at night and then they crawl out from their hiding places, telling me small stories of things I never realized I noticed about you. How you look over your glasses when you have that certain smile, the small breath you take before you start a debate. The way you hold yourself with confidence, that faraway look in your eyes when you listen to a song you love and you start to drum the beat with your fingers. 

It’s as if I’ve always known you, illogical as that sounds. I know that there was an actual day I met you, then at some point throughout this I’d realized—oh. I love you. And though I remember that day well, I also have this sense of familiarity with you, as if I knew you before all of this. Perhaps it is my heart that knows you. Perhaps it is some illusion caused by this infatuation, this rose-colored glass that alters my very perception. Perhaps all of this is just a dream, a flashback within those infinitesimally small ten minutes after death. 

And then there was that little jar of stars, made of colorful paper. How you’d smiled when you’d given it, said it was a gift. But I should’ve known that nothing come for free from you, because that’s when I realized that’d you’d stolen my heart a long time ago and that was why I always chased after you. Was it to retrieve my heart, or to merely gaze upon you? I don’t know.

Quite frankly, I don’t know how you managed to take my heart away. I like to think that I keep it in chains, locked away in a small part of me, somewhere dark that I do not dare to venture in, the same place I keep my sins. I tell myself that there is a reason why I do not go there, for the sins that hide there are left in the shadows for a reason; and to wander down there would be to dare uncover secrets I have hidden to collect dust and to never to be touched. 

Did you sneak through these labyrinth-like walls, unchain my heart, and release it from its bonds to leave it aching? Or were these chains, too, just an illusion? Did it just fall out of my chest, and you were there to catch it for me? 

So I suppose now I have no heart. Indeed, I’ve nothing, nothing but your jar of stars that sits on the shelf next to my bed, cast in moonlight and in stars. It sits there in silence, the ghost of you hovering. It sits there reminding me of the thief that has stolen what I thought to be dead. 

Perhaps when you break my heart, when you finally let me have the shattered pieces back, this jar will break, too.