#spilling my ink

[letlovelightlife]

I make my world small.

I shrink into the already small apartment

And when I leave,

I shrink into an even smaller box

And drive to bigger places where I still feel small.

I make my world small.

There are 2.8 million men in Colorado

But I spend my mind ruminating on three

I make my world small.

I eat the same meals

And never finish the same coffees

I watch the same shows

Until I forget I’m disintegrating

I make my world so small

That I can eventually fold it into my mind

And my mind feels so big that I somehow feel even smaller

This small world has one small circle with only four stops

Time, money, sex, and doubt

I take the same route

But it always ends with me looking up

Lost for a way out

I make my world small

But I never stop looking for bigger things

I meet a woman at a bookstore

And we immediately feel important to each other

She tells me I have to go to Mexico with her

I say I want to,

But money, time, money, time.

I’ll try

I get my own apartment and my world feels enormous.

Until I remember that it isn’t

My father dies

And I make my world smaller

Because I shrink into unexpected mourning.

I meet her again the day after he dies

This time she doesn’t ask if I’m going to Mexico

She tells me, “You’re coming to Mexico”

It is a crack of sunshine that lights my small world

And heats my small home

From March to July

A friend takes me to the airport

And brings me coffee and food and hugs me goodbye.

I am rich.

4 of us enter a villa in the small city of Teotihuacan

Lavender grows everywhere

We are served a 4-course meal

Every day at 3,

And there is a never-ending supply of cinnamon coffee

I am rich.

We walk to the pyramids often

And I realize I am witnessing something

So old, so grand and so wonderful—every single day.

The world feels big and I am expanding

I am sitting in a temazcal on a cactus farm

With the other 3

And an elder we just met.

We are topless

I’ve rubbed fresh aloe steaks all over my body,

Sweat over hot stones for hours,

Smoked his sacred peace pipe,

And cried enough until I could not speak.

My world is thawing out and opening up.

I am rich.

I am staring at a painting that has stunned me silent and left me open-mouthed

Guadalupe dripping in honey

Not only is it beautiful, but it is unreleased and unfinished and I’m seeing it

While next to the artist that made it

I’m stuck in a moment that few will witness

Glued there by the honey

The bees on the canvas stretch my world open.

I’m rich.

In a hammock

I hold a fluffy Siberian cat with big blue crossed eyes.

Clutching my new favorite book in one hand

And petting him with the other.

We are spinning and I’m thinking,

I’m rich.

I’m in a tunnel under the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent

Receiving a private tour of one of the greatest archeological findings in history

This world is so much bigger than I’ve ever imagined

I realize this is the closest to the earth I’ve ever been and probably ever will be.

They let me hold an ancient artifact to my breast and I can’t stop thinking,

I am rich.

I’m terrified, but I take a deep breath and declare

‘I won't die because life is a dream, a beautiful dream.’

From the balloon, the world has never looked bigger.

The specific scent of the air over that sacred land on that early morning with those specific people brings tears to my eyes.

Until I whisper ‘I’m rich’

We are still on the tarmac

But a child on the plane asks ‘Are we on the sky?’

And I smile to myself

I am rich.

Maybe it was the therapy

Maybe it was the mushroom capsules

Maybe it was the friends that fed me to the brim with deep belly laughs

Maybe it was all the animals I held

Or all the prayers in my name

Maybe it was finally being able to hug my family regularly

Maybe it was the long walks with Carol

Maybe it was the stones I held and inhaled

Maybe it was the best sex of my life beginning in my thirties

Maybe it was all the free concerts

Maybe it was the hours spent in the hot springs

Or the Trazodone

Or all that time alone

Maybe it was finally making somewhere my home.

Maybe it was my week in Mexico

The sacred spaces

The steam in the temazcal

The stone doll

Frida’s house and her blue spilled everywhere for miles

Maybe it was the poetry

But I no longer see my life as ‘poor me’

I am rich.

I’m Rich:April Dawn

[soul-from-another-era]

Unconditional love isn't a free pass to hurt me.

[inkskinned]

it is november, and yesterday it felt like it was supposed to be snowing. in boston, november used a winter month, not a fall month. it is supposed to be chilly; rarely capping over 45F. it is a sweater-and-jacket month. it is a "maybe a scarf too" month. in my childhood, november meant blizzards and sleet.

it did not snow. tomorrow the weather predicts a high of 76.

i have spent so many years of my life studying the longterm possibilities of climate change - the culmination of capitalism wreaking havoc on the bodies of people, animals, plants - but every so often i am still shocked by something small and personal.

in a hundred years, when someone goes outside in boston - will they know the feeling of "snow in the air"?

i know it's a learned feeling, a sensation that maybe only longterm experience can teach. a few years ago, i was walking with my friend who had just moved up from the south. i said it smells like snow and she gave me this look like - what the fuck. i said it feels like snow too, which didn't help. she looked up to the bright blue sky and then back at me and then back at the sky. 12 hours later, we had 3 inches. you can just tell if it's going to snow.

except i can't tell, anymore. i stand outside in a tee shirt and watch my dog dance around a lake. we're in a drought and the skin of the water has peeled back twenty meters. the lake is tamed, quiet, puddlelike and sour. my pokemon go app warns there's a weather condition in my area.

my dog gets too hot from running and sits in the water and i want to laugh about his long frame and how awkwardly he sits - and i can't. some simian part of my brain is scratching the walls. it was supposed to snow. it was supposed to snow, but now it's warm instead.

during the last full solar eclipse, the dogs and the birds and the crickets went crazy under utter darkness. we laughed at them then, promising it will all be okay in a moment. but some part of me is still locked in that long night: some animal sensation.

something is wrong, my body says. i can't afford eggs or rent. i go outside to watch a sunset and listen to birdsong. i don't bring a jacket. allergies are killing me this season, allergies i didn't have as a kid. everyone comments that halloween has started to feel strange, offkilter. that it's hard having "holiday cheer." my body thinks it's april, and then it thinks we're in september, and then june.

something is terribly wrong, she whispers. go outside. it is supposed to be snowing.

[pink-heart-writes]

[peaceishim]

[notasoupcompany]

[minimalist-quotes]

Don't make the mistake of being so understanding and forgiving that you overlook the fact that you're being disrespected.

[xnoworneverr]

There’s a reason why we feel lonely even though we aren’t alone. It’s because loneliness is not about how many friends we have or how many people are in the room with us. It’s a disconnection from others. Being social doesn’t cure loneliness, loneliness comes when there is not a single person close enough to see past the illusion to who we really are and what we really feel inside.

[loveelizabeths]

love elizabeth s.

[fairydrowning]

– Noor Unnahar, Instagram account "noor_unnahar"

[TEXT ID: / [Lemons] / My father's mother loved lemons. Years after her passing, / we run out of everything, but never / lemons. / Nothing else shelters grief / better than memory. / It's my father way of saying, / even in your absence, you will be / cared by me. / END ID]

[imalreadyurs]

tell me i’m your favorite

[letlovelightlife]

[soul-from-another-era]

[inkskinned]

the tradwife movement is the same as it has always been - back in the kitchen, back to breeding - it just has better branding.

when i was younger, i hated pink. i was not like other girls. this is now something i'm embarrassed of - this was not me being a "girl's girl."

but it was expressing something many of us felt at the time: i literally wasn't what girlhood was supposed to be. this is a hard thing to explain, but you know when you're not performing girlhood correctly. it isn't as easy as "i liked x when girls liked y" - because there were other girls that liked x, too - but i never figured out exactly the correct way to like x, or to be interested in y.

now there is the divine feminine. this is the same rhetoric it has always been: women are biologically driven to like pink and ribbons and submitting to our husbands.

the problem is that the patriarchy found a better PR team. because yes, actually, i want every woman to have the choice to be a homemaker. i also want her taken seriously for her legitimate home-making labor. i want her to be recognized as also having a job, just unpaid. i want men to have this opportunity, too.

but it is no longer "i made this choice and I love it." instead it is a sixteen-paragraph rant about how selfish it is that my generation isn't having kids. instead it's long videos about how if you feed your children processed foods, you're going to kill them. instead it is "this is what womanhood is supposed to be. i feel bad for any other choices you're making."

the shame spiral is just prettier. it is large houses devoid of personality. it is the implication: if you don't have this, you aren't happy. the solid, everlasting assurance: women are actually supposed to be submitting. this is the default. this is the natural state of things. all other attempts inflict suffering.

but you can no longer say i'm not like other girls. you can no longer reject this image completely. you cannot find it revolting, even if you know that the underbelly is toxic and festering. sure, it is the same repackaged patriarchy. but the internet does not have shades of grey. you should support and reward other women! your disgust is actually internalized misogyny. not because you are seeing a vision of yourself the way they're trying to train you to be. not because you feel her ghost pass within an inch of your earlobe. not because your father will eventually ask you - why can't you be like her?

because they figured out how to make it beautiful: women will sell other women on this idea, and we will find the singular loophole in feminism. sure, she's shaming you in most of her videos. sure, she implies that a different life is obscene. but she just wants you to be happy! you'd be happier if you were listening!

and the whole time you're sitting there thinking: i'd actually just be happier if i had that kind of money.

[leechteethwrites]

[webweabings]

I WANT YOU TO BE MINE. SELFISHLY, THOUGHTLESSLY, MINE

@vaitiolo ; // “Orpheus and Eurydice”, by Virgil; // H.G. Wells, from a letter to Rebecca West (w. April, 1913); // “No, I don’t miss the dissipated night’s”, by Alexander Pushkin (tr. by D.M. Thomas) (1832); // “Blue is the Warmest Color”, by Ghalia Lacroix (2013); // “The Voyage Out”, by Virginia Woolf (1915); // Virgina Woolf; // “Soft Human”, by Emery Allen (2019)