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Shadows and light ~

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Can you do Morpheus for the name aesthetic thing

Morpheus is a siren song, black sand at the beach, the cool neck of a beer bottle, the shudder spark of meeting a beautiful stranger. 

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If you're still doing name aesthetics can I get a Nick or a Logan?

Logan is black and white french film, drunk dancing in your pajamas, the feeling of a warm bath. Nick is a a bouquet of lilies, your favorite brunch place, holding the hand of the person you adore. 

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if you're still doing name aesthetics, could you do allison please?

allison is wet pavement, street lights, the thrum of crowded room and good music playing in the background. neon purple and a dark bruise. 

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Just wanted to elaborate, I'm incredibly awed by your writing, and would be honored if you touched my name with your eloquent words. Thankyou for the time you're dedicating to this, if you're still doing the name thing, could you do Vivien? :3

Vivien is a memory where you taste life twice. Slow-dancing in public with your love. Ice cream in winter time. Where the sun touches the horizon at the start of a new day. 

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For the name aesthetics Eli

Eli is a kindness. A swath of green. Someone I once knew, and then learned to know again. The smell of a bakery at the height of a golden afternoon. 

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Naming My Angels And Demons (A Poem)

(Hi. I’m Justin Martin. Throughout history, in religions both pagan and Abrahamic, there’s a huge value placed on naming things. Knowing something’s true name is a way of either binding it, in the case of demons, or loving it better, in the case of angels. I thought that, as a disabled person, it’d be helpful for me to name some things before I transition to adulthood.)

NAMING MY ANGELS AND DEMONS

By Justin Martin

To the nights when I’m still up at 3 AM wondering what will happen if my child wants to learn how to throw a football, I name you Ambrose.

To the realization, at an early age, that I would have to learn to open even the heaviest of doors, because nobody would ever bother to turn the buttons on, I name you Andronikos.

To the people who, earnestly and without malice, ask me if I have a penis as casually as old ladies ask to borrow cups of sugar, I name you Arcadius.

To the thankfulness that my penis, unlike the vast majority of my body, is still on speaking terms with me, I name you Aristocles.

To the feeling when you see a little girl playing Dance Dance Revolution at an arcade, simultaneously hating her for not realizing the miracle and loving her for never having to, I name you Arsenios

To the moment when a small cousin is climbing on my wheelchair like a jungle gym and I understand that fear, pity, and shame are all adult inventions, I name you Basilious .

To all of the birthday cakes I’ve barely eaten at the parties I’ve barely been invited to, I name you Cassander.

To all of the mothers who forced their children to invite me anyway, but never forced themselves to consider why their children and their society put me on an island, I name you Cyrus.

To the glorious chocolate drop contained within the three second pause after I make a cripple joke, when the audience considered if their laughter would tan them in the afterlife, I name you Demetrius

To the people who decided to call it “The Special Olympics” instead of “The Olympics That Even NBC Won’t Air”, I name you Draco.

To the Center For Disease Control, who all too often seems to have placed a quarantine on any table I sit at, I name you Euclid.

To the people just insane enough to break the quarantine, I name you Eutropius.

To the years where there was mulch around the swings and slides of the playground, where I learned the value of the people who were more comfortable outside of it, I name you Georgios.

To the six seconds before I drift under a surgical knife, exhaling to draw the border between the times when things happen through me and the time when things happen to me, I name you Herodotus.

To comic books, where it is more likely for someone to be bitten by multiple radioactive spiders than it is for them to live happily while disabled, I name you Homer.

To the little battles for dignity, whose cannon-shots are seen in the eyes of people who hear me sing a stave of music or help me set up a decent spare in bowling, I name you Isidore.

To my doctor, who still asks me if I’m having unprotected sex every time we have an appointment, proving that even medical school can’t kill one’s optimism, I name you Kleopatra.

To the constant dread that takes hold when people ask me what I did this weekend and I remember that most people can fit into their cars, I name you Leonidas.

To the realization that my parents felt worse hearing that than I did writing it, I name you Linus.

To all of the energy I subconsciously devote to not looking spastic, I name you Myron .

To whatever force blessed me with the ability to, when told that God will heal my legs, not respond with “is that before or after he fixes your brain?”, I name you Nikon .

To the fear that I’ll want to go around one more time, less limited, I name you Olympos.

To the peace in knowing that if I don’t live to see a just world, I can make sure that my children do, I name you Philon.

Ambrose, Andronikos, Arcadius, Aristocles, Arsenios, Basilious, Cassander, Cyrus, Demetrius, Draco, Euclid, Eutropius, Georgios, Herodotus, Homer, Isidore, Kleopatra, Leonidas, Linus, Myron, Nikon, Olympos and Philon, I cast you into the arms of my great-grandfathers for the sake of the fathers to come.

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Mulch: Recess As A Disabled Kid

Mulch

It starts with a steep downward slant, so that if I were to let go of my wheels, the asphalt would send me careening down to the playground below. In the center of the playground, where it plateaus, a giant map of the world is painted, flanked to the south by twin tetherball sentries. To the north is the sea, wide and apathetic, whose waves would batter me for six years, made not out of water, but of mulch. The swings and the slides are there, so the kids are, too. If I was to try joining them, like I did in the early days, the tires of my manual chair would sink into the pellets, and I’d be completely immobile if I moved more than an inch into them. So my home became the shore between the land and the sea, where I spent a half-hour every day watching people play. I didn’t tell my parents that I cried when I got home, and it stayed that way for a while. After a time, I realized that the playground aides were watching me and probably feeling awful, so I at least moved around a little bit every day and pretended to have fun. I didn’t know how much this would prepare me for life in high school, where they took away the playground, but left the mulch.

The first time that I realized that the mulch could move was in third grade, when my elementary school, unwilling or unable to use the money my family had raised to replace the mulch with a rubberized surface that I could access, erected a boat in the corner of the mulch area, a bright red Play-Skool Stonehenge that was accessible by a rickety ramp and could rock back and forth. It really got the blood pressure pumping, let me tell you, and was the talk of the town amongst every tumbleweed on the playground. Nobody populated it whether or not I made the tenuous climb up there. (A special shout-out, however, goes to the guy that wrote “sex” in black Sharpie along the ship’s starboard bow, as if to consolidate all of the things that I could never have into one place.) I could look over the edge of the boat and see no mulch on any of its four sides, but I knew that the invisible variety of it was still there.

The mulch isn’t visible to most people.  You see it everywhere, but only if you know where to look. You see it when every lunch table fills up except yours until the seventh grade, when a few kids finally push past it and sit with you. You see it when, in gym class, an otherwise-sane teacher with all the subtlety of a Southern Baptists preacher begs people to pick you for their dodgeball team because you’re “the secret weapon, baby! The secret weapon!” You see it when, after watching a play at Bradley, all of the other theater kids make plans to go to a coffee shop that was two minutes from your house, and nobody asks you even though you’re right there.  You see it when small children try to touch your chair at the grocery store, and mothers slap their hands as if theirs tots have just made a covenant with Satan.

You see it, but the problem is that nobody else does. Hardly anyone, while they’re having fun on the swings and slides, or three seats ahead of you on a choir bus while you’re tied down in the back where nobody can hear you, or posting pictures on their Facebook of their homecoming, thinks that they’re leaving you out. I’m sure that the man who put that mulch down had no idea how much it was going to hurt me: in fact, when my parents finally heard about the problem and asked school administrators why the mulch was there in the first place, nobody had a good answer, but nobody was in any hurry to do anything.

That’s not to say that, when kids are forced off of the mulch, they don’t hang out with you. I used to thank God every time snow would come down, and everyone would have to stay inside for recess, when we’d all play games of checkers or build robots out of connectable toy blocks. I’ve somehow managed to fight my genetics enough to be fairly good at bowling with bumpers, and some of the most mulch-destroying moments of my life have been the seconds before a perfect strike, when a tenor who maybe sees me as a little more human than he did two seconds ago helps me set up the perfect angle. But sooner or later, through no fault of their own, everyone who is able to do so drifts back to the more familiar objects, the shinier ones, and there you are on the border looking in again.         

I’m back at my elementary school playground. My freshman year of high school had just ended, and I’ve changed in a hundred ways from the last time I was there. I’m in a power wheelchair, for one thing, sitting next to a boy who I think I might like a little too much and another one who I’d have never guessed I’d spend any time with.  It’s maybe nine o'clock at night, nine-thirty tops, and Ohio is welcoming the beginning of a storm that comes down like the wrath of God, reverberating off of the cheap pastel plastic of the swings and slides like a ten-pound bucket of ping-pong balls spilled over the perimeter of my childhood. I hadn’t come back to make some grand statement: I’d been at a bonfire where a few friends and I had burnt all of that year’s homework. We’d gotten tired of hanging out in someone’s garage, and Hilliard Crossing’s asphalt jungle was about a five-minute walk from there. But here I was, a question and its answer rising in my head to greet each other in tandem: could I go on the mulch now? Yes.

I skated over it as easily as ice. I paused for a second to taste morsels of a rapturous happiness that had come with the rain and the electricity in my wheels. “This is what I’ve worked for”, I thought, “this is finally what I deserve”. And then, though nobody saw, I cried. Now, yes, I could get onto the place I’d wanted to be for so many years, but everybody else had already moved on to some other place with even more pointless mulch around it. I guess I’ll spend the next sixteen years going after wherever that is. landing in another empty playground.

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by all definitions, we were doomed from the start. it was easy to see, even in the dimmest of daylights. we were built to fall apart, all makeshift building blocks and expired craft glue, trying to construct a hopeless home. or maybe we had hope, and we didn’t have anything else. by all definitions, i was in love with you. i refuse to gratify something that was only ever going to fail, but those building blocks were so goddamn easy to fall for. i remember everything we said we would do and never did, all of the “someday’s” we shared and feelings we promised to never let go of. an infinite present. a konfetti rose. an inimitable amount of heartbreak. by all definitions, you forgot. justifying being forgotten is the hardest thing i have ever had to do. i never made peace with it. i opened the softest parts of my heart, left the door open, waited for you to crawl in like you always said you would. i waited, and thieves entered and took all the good parts. i can’t believe i spent so much goddamn time waiting for you. by all definitions, it’s over. i learned how to lock the door, and take back the parts of me you let everyone steal. i learned to never trust the benefit of the doubt. i have blood on my hands, but god, at least i don’t collect hearts like snow globes on a shelf. our hopeless home was never a home at all.

waiting is a disease and it only gets worse by the second (via urbanings)

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A MODERN MUSE; she is everywhere. text messages, last words, love letters, myth - different stimuli beating in the same circadian rhythm. the evidence is damning, and my wrists only write sober. how do you explain a ghost with no name?  

A MODERN MUSE is sixteen poems about what it’s “like to love somebody and what it’s like to lose.” it is constellation sin and girl thighs with wolf marks. it is past midnight heartlust. it is my first chapbook that you can read for free. 

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my neck is a canvas  painted rouge by your mouth and i remember yesterday with the sort of sweetness  reserved for chocolate and good weather — on the brink of leaving, the see you soon imprinted against my jugular, you kissed me and it felt like a promise in disguise / i remember april like — the gentle dampness of your hair post-shower, the warmth of your palms still astonishing — still overwhelming, the slink  of familiar music — getting to know you, bluer than blue — i watched with roses underneath my tongue and hands in my back pockets— dazed, confused, you turned me into a dreamer  —  nineteen and still so kind — i wanted everything and nothing you could give me all at once / i remember may—  like becoming, arriving at the curve of your smile with the singular thought — oh this is how i once thought it would go now — i remember if i could, i’d film the inside of me to show you how my entire body twisted for every litany that fell from your lips in the drowsy curtain of that afternoon — / and here we now exist in the wanting — the waiting — the sharp knife of believing — that i won’t just have to remember one day — the way my hips turn  at the slight glint of teeth —  instead, today i think of tomorrow — and how i am falling again  at the sound of my own name when you’re saying it.

I’M STILL FALLING FOR YOU,  x.v 

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I love your words.Your writing resonates.You have a talent.Everything you type out is so well crafted ,what you create is art

i am so so grateful, this is why i keep writing. i have been, even though i haven’t shared it with you all, but things are coming i promise xx keep the kindness flowing!

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hi hello it’s alec i just wanted to say it’s been a minute but i love you all greatly and will be back soon with new words, kind words, more honest than ever

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chloe

the baby succulent on the corner of your window, tangerine eyes and a summer where you choose to forget everything except her, a bright gateway drug

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I love when you do horoscope aesthetics

:) thank u !

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alec xavier versace omg that could be your new name

ahaha i appreciate this 

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could you please do an aesthetic for sara? it would mean so much to me

sara is wearing yellow boots in the rain, the long way back home, the feeling the stars send you when you look at them too long, the secret passage in your favorite novel, a fresh start