#time for the richard siken something you love is going to be taken away quote again

[spacemancharisma]

[lakesbian]

been trying to articulate how exactly worm is funny for A While and i still don’t feel like i know exactly how to touch on it but it is so fucking funny. worm is funny in the way accidentally dropping three cartons of eggs onto your floor and then slipping on them like a cartoon character when you try to clean them up is funny. like. worm is funny in the way what this richard siken quote describes is funny

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.” worm is funny in the way that life just fucking sucking and being weird as hell all the time is funny. worm is funny in the way people making dick jokes during the apocalypse because what the fuck else are they going to do is funny. kind of obsessed w/ it

[ayearwithoutwater]

Thirty-eight.

I'm standing outside my former apartment on the Lower East Side and I feel like a failure. Ten years have passed since I lived on Orchard Street, and what do I have to show for it? I could fault the economy, the politicians, the weather, anything—but I'm also a New Yorker, if almost fifteen years a New Yorker makes, and I know I have my fair share of blame to shoulder as well. 

Often, and with reference to my breakup with Henry, my fourth boyfriend, my friends ask me why it has been so difficult for me to move on. In their estimation, I seem unwell. I seem to be dwelling upon the past, and my wounds this time around aren't healing as quickly as they did when I left my other relationships prior. This breakup, they say, maintains a lingering presence, a malignant tumor attached to my psyche. I know it's not their intention to do so, but I hate being treated like damaged goods. Fragile.

I'm not fucking fragile—I'm angry. I'm angry and sad and, worst of all, disappointed. Certain events took place and romantic interests mistreated me in specific ways, and the end result is that I feel vindicated by my disillusionment in people, but it's a hollow victory. There's no prize that I've won. I stand, with my accumulated angst in front of my former apartment complex, confronted by and confronting the person I used to be, left with nothing but my disappointment.

My friends worry about me. Some are even bored of my malaise. It's been years after the fact, and I've gone through at least two other breakups since the one in question, so why does this one have my attention? I've moved on from love before, so what's slowing me down this time? I've retreated back into myself, I'm not putting myself as out there as I did before. Plainly, I'm being anti-social.

There's a quote that circulates quite widely online attributed to Richard Siken, author of Crush, from his 2005 interview with James Hall. Richard said,

Things happen, one after another, world without end. Just because you're self-aware doesn't mean you can change what's happening. Eventually someone is going to break your heart. Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it—you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.

This interview was titled "The Poetry of Hostile Witness" and published by Gulf Coast for their Winter/Spring 2006 issue. The two writers were speaking shortly after the release of Crush, an electrifyingly direct collection of poetry that included works such as "Saying Your Names." It exemplified what Richard explained to be the problem of "limited and inflexible pronouns" when writing about a he and another he, years before the 2007 publication of André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name. The absolutism of named definition is "the desire to point to what's gone, temporarily or permanently," filtering away the "murkiness," as Richard describes. Crush hits with all the immediacy of Jim Grimsley's 1995 novel Dream Boy.

I don't know what true love is, and I don't know if I've ever experienced it. What I can say is that I've experienced the thrill of two people sublimating into mutual subsumption. When two stars collide, anything up to and including a black hole can be the result.

Michael Gray Bulla, another poet, once shared a poem titled "I THINK LOVE IS SOMETHING / THAT HAPPENS TO OTHER PEOPLE" from which the below is excerpted.

You know that love? That falling-to-your-knees love? That where'd-the-water-go love? That hold-me-close-I'll-never-leave-I-know-your-favorite- coffee-creamer love? That what-we-talk-about-when-we- talk-about-love love? You ever felt that? I mean, really felt any of that? / Yeah, tell me again how you feel it. Yeah, tell me again. / how it fills the chest, fills the head, fills the lungs. Tell me again what it means to find God in your sock drawers. Tell me again.

Love-starved. I think I'm love-starved. My body misses, my mind misses, I miss the companionship that I thought I had. It is less about the actual person (Henry, in this case) than it is about the role in my life he fulfilled. I had grand plans for the two of us as we ventured out into the world, carving out a space for us two with our combined gravities, and all of that collapsed in on itself when his presence suddenly became a void. I was liable to fall to the floor crying at any moment, as if narrated by Richard Siken himself, and even as I did it I knew I looked ridiculous to any observer and I cried harder still. As much as identity is relational, I was unavoidably shattered by this breakup more than any other because I had come to define myself by it. This was a period of my life when I had just begun to develop my answers to the questions of a lifetime—Who am I? Why am I?—and Henry's absence crashed my house of cards. I was forced to undergo an ego death, as another ex-boyfriend would term it, that I had wanted to avoid because I was comfortable.

Disappointment has its patterns. I stopped putting myself out there because I withdrew into myself. I no longer felt presentable to the world while I was busy spending time with my emotional self, to figure out how I've been feeling and why. I'd resolved long ago to never fall into the trap of not being self-aware, to avoid self-sabotaging for reasons that would be plainly evident if I invested in actually confronting my issues, but each breakup sent me back to the drawing board with newer and more complex puzzles to solve. Things happened to and scarred me, but I'm fine, I'm alive, it's okay, I'm okay, and it no longer affects my executive functioning or daily life. However, it manifests whenever I'm let down because, simply put and speaking as a gay man, men fucking suck. It isn't that I haven't moved on—it's that I'm perennially disappointed, that I always have hope as a hopeless romantic that the next one won't cause me as much dismay, but instead he inevitably visits worse havoc upon me than any man before him. That is the source of my ennui.

I don't want to come across as unhinged. I don't think I am. I'm merely straightforwardly blunt about the events that occurred and how they've affected me and why I now react to certain things in particular ways, such as not being wanted in the way that I want, in the way that I want to be wanted. My largest piece of emotional baggage is that I never want to undergo the same level of trauma ever again. I try to be optimistic about the suitors that do make it past my pearly gates because I think that I can see their potential, but potential isn't current reality. My friends exhorted me to figure out my cyclical behavior, as if I haven't already been trying, and my answer is that I keep finding myself in this position with men who I wanted to need me when they really needed someone else: Henry needed a therapist, Jim needed an owner, and Beau needed someone who was ready and patient—and I wasn't, no matter how hard I tried to be.

The elephant in the room is that I'm the common denominator of all my failures, which begs the question: What could I be doing differently? Loss may be a fact of life, but I want to no longer feel so bereft. I think I have high standards to which I do my very best to hold myself—nobody can fault me for being a hypocrite if I don't exhibit hypocrisy—but the love I allow myself to accept isn't the love I should accept. It is the material difference between the partner I need versus the one for whom I keep falling because it is easy.

I think I'm too much, I think I'm too intense. I don't think I'm too fragile.

I come in like a tempest.

[just-wublrful]

only one of you is going to make it and you’re afraid it's going to be you, or, alternatively: you are standing by the tragic hero and it is looking rough out there-

( @lasilhouetteinbianco i did it there’s moby. whoo)

A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Ray Belcourt | Antigonick, Sophokles trans. Anne Carson | The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | Doña Juana “la Loca” (1877), Francisco Pradilla | Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin | THE TRAGIC HERO UPON REACHING THE END OF THE SCRIPT REALIZES HE HAS BEEN DEAD THIS WHOLE TIME, Joan Tierney | Wishbone, Richard Siken | Orpheus and Eurydice, George Frederic Watts | Bitter Water, The Oh Hellos | Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare | YOUR LOVE FINDS ITS WAY BACK, Sierra Mulder | Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus (detail, 1905), John William Waterhouse |  Wishbone, Richard Siken | Richard Siken, in an interview with James Hall | Moby Dick, Herman Melville | Weeping Nude (1913-14), Edvard Munch | Love and Pain (1895), Edvard Munch | Metamorphoses, Ovid

[ID: An assortment of various quotes, lyrics, and paintings from a variety of sources.

1. To love someone / is firstly to confess: I’m prepared / to be devastated by you.

2. Ismene: I can help you suffer. // Antigone: No. // Ismene: I can give you reasons not to die. //  Antigone: No.

3. And he took me by the hand. But he was still worrying. “It was wrong of you to come. You will suffer. I shall look like I was dead, and that will not be true...” I said nothing.

4. A painting of a young woman dressed in black. She stands in blank despair beside a casket in an open field. She is surrounded by a procession of numerous mourners, as smoke from a behind her rises into the air.

5. What are we staying here for? How long do you / want to sit in this house, eating your heart out?

6. You are kneeling at the water’s throne / When preparing for an ending scene / It’s important that / Swords drop like anchors / Yours will never rise again / I am watching from the cowberries, or / From your mother’s curtains, as if / Through a burial shroud, or

7. And it’s another wrong-man-dies scenario / and we keep doing it, Henry, / keep saying until we get it right... but we / always win and we never quit.

8. A painting of Orpheus and Eurydice at the entrance to Hades. Orpheus, in a toga, reaches out to catch Eurydice as she goes limp and pale, soul having returned to the Underworld. In the background a dead tree trunk can be seen.

9. I am not a fool entire / No, I know what is coming / You will bury me beneath the tree / I climbed when I was a child

10. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

11. My throat is a beehive pitched into the river. Look! / Look how long my love can hold it’s breath.

12. A painting of Orpheus’ head floating down a river after being torn apart by the Maenads. His face is turned upward, with pale skin and long red hair. His lyre floats beside him, alongside numerous lily pads and lilies.

13. See, we’ve won again / here we are at the place where I get to beg / for it where I get to say, Please,

14. Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.

15. “...Sleeping? Aye, toil how we may, we all sleep on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amidst greenness; as last years scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swathes — Starbuck!” But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away. 

16. A painting of a nude woman sitting upon her bed, hunched over with her head in her hands and legs sprawled. She appears to be weeping. Her long, dark hair, spills around her shoulders and into her lap.

17. A painting of a woman and a man embracing each other. The woman has warm skin and long red hair, which spills over and contrasts with the man’s pale, grey skin. She buries her face into his nape, and he into her arms.

18. But when she saw him in his hapless plight, / though angry at his scorn, she only grieved. End ID.]

[unicyclehippo]

32, 35, and 36 from your writer questions post!

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again?How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

im terrible w remembering specific lines actually? so i don’t have any lines that rly stick with me for Pondering usually it’s just vibes. but now that i have said it there’s this line i love that is actually from a richard siken interview & the idea of it sticks with me i use it myself now & again, not exactly as it was written but the behaviour, the way it makes me feel. anyway, the quote is this:

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”

35. What's your favorite writing rule to smash into smithereens?

i love adjectives i’ll use em liberally i’ll use too many of them i like my stories to be Textured

36. They say to Write What You Know. Setting aside for a moment the fact that this is terrible advice…what do you Know?

this is why i love doing new things bc the advice, i think—to me at least!—isn’t really about those ephemeral things you Know but about writing from a place of knowing. so im not a famous artist but i can pick up a paintbrush & paint a picture & after i have done that i can write things better. i know the artist places their easel where it catches the light. i know what it sounds like when they wash their brushes, & how they leave the balcony door open so they can hear the radio of their neighbour in the apartment below. i know they see the world in colours of mixed paint. i know they have paint smudges in the oddest places even when they were trying to be very neat! i know that ever since they tried to drink paint water, they’ve been careful to always keep their water mug & coffee mug seperate. i know how paint feels slippery on their fingers & then tacky as it dries. i think it’s perfectly fine advice to write what u know—I think it comes from a place of stabilising a story with authenticity so that ur readers will follow u into the bits ur making up.

[thatweirdguyinthebushes]

all my dream smp playlists

as the title says, all my dream smp playlists! all quotes are by richard siken, except for the bee duo playlist, which is quote from the orestia. enjoy!

EDIT: new additions! quackity & tubbo playlist, awesamponk playlist, quackity & schlatt playlist, snowchester/post-doomsday playlist

EDIT: new new addition! a third tubbo playlist, this time in chronological order :)

OVERALL DREAM SMP PLAYLISTS

and they called it freedom (lmanberg playlist. art by qtiq. the three administrations are separated by war instrumentals. songs are ordered chronologically.)

a fresh start, with no past. (dream smp, post-doomsday/snowchester, art by quippso) I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I'd rather quit. I'd rather be sad. It's too much work.

DUO PLAYLISTS

never saw one without the other, did you? (c!tommy and tubbo. art by georgesspotify) but no ones left. you know this and i know this. together we trace out the trail away from doom. there is no hope. there is a trail. i follow you.

make it better. (c!beeduo. art by now_thatwaslie) "I'll take care of you." "It's rotten work." "Not for me. Not if it's you."

you never got to see the lights. (c!niki and c!wilbur. art by salsasscribbles) You wanted to be cremated so we cremated you and you wanted an adventure so I ran and I knew you wouldn’t catch me. You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.

all that matters is that youre alive. (c!quackity and c!tubbo. art by tubbowithagun) Your skin looked blue in the television light. Your teeth looked yellow. Still wet, I lay down next to you. Your arms, your legs, your naked chest, your ribs delineated like a junkyard dog's. There’s nowhere to go, I thought. There’s nowhere to go.

getting to spend time with you aint that bad, huh? (c!awesamponk. art by ) Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is, lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see the blue rings of my eyes as I say something ugly. I never liked that ending either.

I'm never gonna protect you again. (c!quackity and c!schlatt. art by Probably a Plant) A man walks into a bar and says: Take my wife–please. But you take him instead. You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich, and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you and he keeps kicking you.

CHARACTER PLAYLISTS

be worse. (c!niki. art by evenspelledevan) We pull our boots on with both hands but we can’t punch ourselves awake and all I can do is stand on the curb and say Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

he loves me, right? (c!sapnap. art by chjropta) Actually, you said Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.

there is no sunrise inside. (c!sam. art by pnksh1rts) I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.

trust nobody. dont even trust me. (c!quackity) We're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth.

i know what I'm like. that's the issue. (c!wilbur. art by ranbooz) I will turn myself into a gun, because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own.

i dont like who i am around you. (c!tommy. art by jellyilyy) I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me, and I have to search my body for the scars, thinking Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in?

be better. (c!jack manifold. art by robotic-poet.) So, I said, now that we have our dead, what are we going to do with them? There's a black dog and there's a white dog, depends on which you feed, depends on which damn dog you live with.

this is checkmate. (c!tubbo playlist #1. art by beetlle) History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters. History is a little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of.

a good kid, and an even better spy. (c!tubbo playlist #2. art by sad-ist) You're going to die in your best friend's arms. And you play along because it's funny, because it's written down, you've memorized it, it's all you know.

hope for the best, plan for the worst. (c!tubbo playlist #3, art by emikuthecipher, listen in order, seasons separated by c418) Imagine surrender. Imagine being useless. A stone on the path means the tea's not ready, a stone in the hand means somebody's angry, the stone inside you still hasn't hit bottom.

[sp3mily]

omg congrats!!!! could i pls get a ☁️quote and some📜hcs for spemily? thank youuuuu

Heck yes!! Check under the cut :)

📜: Spemily Headcanons!!!

• They speak Russian to each other. Whether it's because they don't want other people to hear/understand what they're saying or because it just feels right to use Russian at the moment. They've got little nicknames for each other (And the team literally desperately tries to figure them out)

• They adore going on walks together. Like individually they both think taking walks are just okay but together, it's great. They walk around parks, they walk to the grocery store, they just go on walks wherever simply because they want to.

• They both like learning and gaining knowledge, so they teach each other bout things they don't know. Emily teaches Spencer Arabic and he teaches her Yoruba. Anything that the other isn't knowledgeable about, they'll teach them about.

• Emily really likes to dance, while Spencer thinks he has two left feet. So she teaches him how to dance and he really enjoys it. So they dance together whenever the mood hits them.

• They have a photo album that they both cherish very dearly. They each took some photos from when they were younger and put them in, then started taking more photos together. They have pictures of them in every state. Every date night, there's a photo. Any milestone, there's a photo. They both write a little message on the back of each picture so that if they ever forget, they'll remember what was happening in the picture or so after they've passed, people will be able to remember them in a special way.

☁️: "Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.” - Richard Siken

I'm a huge Siken fan, I have to start off there. I think he's brilliant and his work is beyond amazing. This is my favorite Siken quote, without a doubt. There's something to it that's both complex and simple and I adore everything about it. I think it's very true as well, I know there've been a lot of times where I'm crying and I just think to myself "I'm crying right now." And then you start looking around at everything and trying to distract yourself and you notice the little things that you hadn't seen before. I think Siken is amazing, you should definitely check his stuff out if you haven't already!

[zukosgay]

alright, what are your favourite richard siken quotes?

BOY, I GOT MANY

You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened. Your co-workers ask if everything's okay and you tell them you're just tired. And you're trying to smile. And they're trying to smile.

but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death. 

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands. 

You miss the point: the face in the mirror is a little traitor, the face in the mirror is a pale and naked hostage and no one can tell which room he's being held in. 

I’ll use my body like a ladder, climbing to the thing behind it, saying farewell to flesh, farewell to everything caught underfoot and flattened.

I’m saying your name in the grocery store, I’m saying your name on the bridge at dawn.

I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me, and I have to search my body for the scars

and with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own.

The heart is monologing about hesitation and fulfillment while behind the red the heart is drowning.

Love, love, go ahead and have another plate of it, it doesn’t run out. Of course, I wonder if they love me back, which is, really, besides the point. I don’t do it to be adored, I do it because my love keeps getting bigger and that’s what happens. 

If the dead are watching, I want them to see us writing, dancing, singing, painting. I want them to see that we still reach out to each other.

but if there is a Truth out there, to be had clearly and definitively, I’m not sure I’m the kind that can get to it; and if I can get to it I’m not sure I should be the one entrusted with it.

I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad

We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. [...]  Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.

I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses.

What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness, it’s only fair.

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder? Difficult, to be confronted with the fact of yourself. Opaque in the sense of finally solid, in the sense of see me, not through me.

This is how you make the meaning, you take two things and try to define the space between them. [...] Let's say that God is the space between two men and the Devil is the space between two men 

Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story. 

I’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue, and final resting

I made this place for you. A place for you to love me. If this isn’t a kingdom then I don’t know what is. 

the thing is: I am always very much in love and very much afraid and nothing else.

We make these ridiculous idols so we can pray to what’s behind them, but what happens after we get up the ladder? Do we simply stare at what’s horrible and forgive it?

My favorite kind of pie is cake. I have a giant umbrella that protects no one. My father is a sadist and I am my father’s son. These statements are not lies but perhaps they lack a certain clarity. // Someone put their hand in my heart and they didn’t take it back out. If I died tonight, no one would notice for weeks. My father is a sadist and I am my father’s son. I learned it well. Do I have the stomach for it? Do you really want to know?

Dad says he means no harm and Mom says she just gets a strong gut feeling sometimes. We’re a family of liars, but psychic and sadist are slanderous words and I don’t have the kind of proof that would hold up in a court of law. [...]  We’ve all revised our histories so many times I wonder what true things will be left to say when I’m finally allowed to say them.

God says, Which one of you fuckers can get to me first?

[endkrp-blog]

                                                        STAFF FILE.

                                                              name    eun taeoh                                                               d.o.b    07/28/1997 (19)                                                               position    lifeguard                                                               room    S02

                      ��                                        welcome to the end.                                                                   kindest regards.

--- first, we inquire: why?

does anyone actively seek out a lifeguard job at some outdated hotel? no, no they don’t. and for taeoh it was no different. what started out as a passion for the sport turned into what most young athletes only dream of: a possible career. taeoh had been put into baseball at a young age, and from there his talent as a pitcher was evident. he’d spend hours out at the diamond with his dad; throwing the ball around and talking about the game. he’d never known anything else outside of his glove, the ball, the red sand and the cap on his head. he was a baseball player through and through: it was obvious to anyone.

then he got to the age where serious decisions had to be made, sticking with baseball being one of them. of course with the amount of promise taeoh showed there’s no way he couldn’t continue, and so he did. baseball was his life, and the high expectations that weighed upon his shoulders only grew as he did. not only was taeoh playing baseball everything to taeoh himself, but it was everything to everyone else. the amount of throwing he did tripled (along with the amount of scouts coming to his games) and things were looking, for lack of a better word, perfect. but anyone can tell you that nothing ever goes as planned, sometimes the plan itself just getting canceled in its entirety.

dead arm, they called it. taeoh knew a lot about the risk of injury when it came to baseball–it was inevitable, really–and so he knew that eventually something would strain, tear, break, anything. what he didn’t expect was for his arm to fatigue to the point where he just couldn’t throw. or rather, throw well. and so in his last year, with his university applications sent out and a variety of scouts’ phone numbers in his phone, taeoh was told to rest. he could always try out for the team next year, right?

with his dreams crushed and his family in tatters over what could be the end to his career, taeoh was sent to recuperate in none other than the lovely jeju-do. it was there that he found the lifeguard job at the end himself (he took lessons a few summers back in order to raise funds for new ball equipment), phoning home to say he’d be staying at the end until his pride arm heals and the next season begins.

--- then, we wonder: what?

there’s a lot of things taeoh desires in life: his arm to heal, his parents to leave him alone for more than two days, the scouts that used to call him every half hour to actually pick up the phone and tell him he hasn’t been left behind. most of all, he wants to get back to the game he loves and for everything to just be okay again. he’s well aware of how idealistic it would be for his arm to heal and for things to revert back, but even so, he wants it. he can’t help it. during his stay at the hotel, he’s hoping–though he’d never admit it–that he can find something outside of baseball to love. it scares him to think that if he doesn’t heal then the only thing that keeps him going will be gone. it was too easy for things to fall apart like that. the time away has only proved he has nothing if he doesn’t have baseball, and that’s no way for someone to live: athlete or not.

so now that he’s forced to go without the sport for an undetermined amount of time, amid his sulking and the job, taeoh’s praying something (or someone) will show him a reason to live again. he’s a baseball player through and through, but he’s also a person. it’s about time he started living like a nineteen year old kid and learn that there’s life outside of the diamond. he doesn’t have much of a choice either way.

--- finally, we demand: who?

“I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.” – Richard Siken

honestly too many quotes and poems from richard siken sparked my muse for taeoh, but i thought this particular quote applied to him the best. taeoh is a go getter: he’s passionate, determined, eager to make his dreams come true. he’s the type to get up at six in the morning every day even when he doesn’t have to. so, when he got dead arm, you can imagine how much turmoil that amounted to in his life. after the diagnosis, that kid slept in ‘til noon and barely made it out of bed for the rest of the day. when one thing has been your entire life for the entirety of your life, then it gets taken away from you in circumstances you can’t escape: nothing makes sense. it’s like he’s been living for nothing. not to mention he’s a kid with a flair for the dramatics so it felt like the end of the world. it was the end of his world, in a way. but of course his injury isn’t the only thing that makes him as a person, but it is his reason for being at the end, and so ultimately this quote encompasses his character and my muse for him the best. aka a lost, disappointed and constantly on the cusp of giving up boy that is doing his best to find the fire inside of himself again.