Your Absence Has Gone Through Me Like Thread Through A Needle. Everything I Do Is Stitched With Its Color.

“I am going to marry somebody that makes me feel like a poem.”

— Lee Smith

– Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

when I was younger, I used to think true love was tumultuous and intense. but now, I feel like real love is gentle. passionate in a soft, sweet way. not fireworks and drama, but a love that’s like coming home, the breeze on a still summer day. a balm to the aches of the world.

it sucks right now for both of us but one day we will be swaying in each other’s arm as the homemade stew we are making for dinner bubbles on the stove, the scent of love and warmth fills our cozy cottage that looks just like something from a fairytale.

“I need to stop fantasizing about running away to some other life and start figuring out the one I have.”

— Holly Black; The Darkest Part of the Forest

— Mary Oliver, Entering the Kingdom

I want to run away. Just completely disappear, tell nobody, and become someone entirely new. I can dress in pleated short skirts and blazers, be coy and mysterious enough that everywhere I go people are intrigued and charmed by my mere existence, only to vanish as quickly as I arrived. I want to be known yet unknown. Leave behind my past so I have enough secrets to fuel a thousand rumours about who I am. Maybe that’s good material for being lonely, but is that not how all the best people live and die?

I have drunken deep of joy, and I will taste no other wine tonight.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I am writing to reach you–even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019)

“I don’t know why the memories grow while I shrink. I don’t remember what I wanted to say. I don’t want to say what I remember.”

— Dunya Mikhail, from ‘Buzz’, The War Works Hard (trans. Elizabeth Winslow)