Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi, May 16, 1939

Itō Noe, “From the Diaries” // Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe // Miranda July, The First Bad Man

this bracelet came with the original letter 

addressed to ’ pet ‘ 

christmas 1884.

if we could all stop pretending we are whole, and instead embrace our constant becoming…

Dreamy guestroom in interior designer Howard Slatkin’s Fifth Avenue apartment [x]

A Visit to the Haunted Chamber (edited),1869 - William Frederick Yeames

Troy, Missouri

circa 1892

endless sleep

“Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live. Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds. Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd. Thousands of stories to tell in dozens of languages: the languages of strong features or weak chins, the languages of garish makeup and weird haircuts and startling clothes, fat and bony and hairy languages, the languages of any kind of beauty that’s not white. Nose languages, eyebrow languages, piercing and tattoo languages, languages of blemish and birthmark and scar. When you give up trying to declare yourself acceptable, there are so many new things to say.”

— What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness?, Jess Zimmerman (via xshayarsha)

The desire to be beautiful is giving me brain damage