“I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive.”
— Laurie Anderson explaining her attraction to Moby-Dick
Physics
Chewed lips and fingernails. Coffee rings on your desk, and books, and pages. A sparrow pauses at your windowsill - it turns to you, and you have the strangest feeling that it understands something that you cannot. The atoms around you seem to communicate. Your eyelashes flutter, your fingers are stained. Who are you. What is this. What is this.
Astronomy
Lying on cobblestone in loose, flowey clothing. Your hands are cold, but something inside you burns, quietly - in your sternum, in your gut, behind your eyes, behind your teeth. Pinpricks of stars on a velvet night, glints of dust on a sun-streak, droplets of rain on a windowsill. All of this, and you, are the same.
Botany
A candle burns on your desk. Scrapbooks are filled with sketches, and pressed flowers, and dried leaves. Vines creep over a stone wall. You drink herbal tea with the bag left in. Tonight you press wax stamps to handwritten letters. You sit and drink the moonlight. You whisper to the plant on your windowsill.
Chemistry
Loose, giddy laughter. Two friends, shrieking and spinning, alone in a dark hall. Ridiculous, unfeasible ideas. Chicken-scratch notes. Walking the halls of an old university, gothic and dead and alive. You spent hours and hours in the lab, so consumed you don’t notice the time pass. It’s dark when you step outside. You tremble with excitement. Tomorrow.
Medicine
Macabre diagrams of skulls and human anatomy on yellowed paper. Your journals are cryptic: the scratched cursive look like clues, the symbols, code. Nights and nights and nights spent awake, exhaustion tugging at your clothes and your eyes and your neck, but your mind buzzes with an electric determination that teeters on madness. Clasped hands, and quiet camaraderie.
Veterinary medicine
Untamed grass on a misty morning, embroidered with wildflowers. You wear an old dress, or a white shirt tucked into loose checked trousers. Dew brushes your ankles. Your fingers card gently over fur. A kiss just barely touches skin. Your mind is sharp, but your heart is open. There is a breeze through the open window.
Technology
City lights. Ideas that swirl - no, prick at you, fine needle points of inspiration that kiss at the base of your neck, your jaw, your head, and you scramble to turn them into something real. Rusty gears turn on an old watch. A quirked eyebrow. You smell rain on the pavement.
Psychology
A lone ballerina spins in an abandoned chapel; a streak of white against darkness. Tea in a vintage teacup, spoon left in, on a neat pile of books. Quiet gasps, soft hands and cursive writing. The echo of footsteps. A hand brushes through your hair. A mist rolls in. You think this dawn looks like a dusk.
Marine Biology
Waves heave and undulate, like a great ribcage swelling with breath. You watch it from a lighthouse, blank faced and austere in a long black coat. A small flame of fear quivers in the hollow of your chest. At the old wooden desk, you work.You lick your lips and taste brine.
click here for part 1: (aesthetics for literature, classics, philosophy, fine art, political science, and history)
harvest mouse 🌾
Old Boy (Dir. Park Chan-wook, 2003). Source
i’m gonna find a museum and wander around its halls until someone poetically falls in love me
Zalipie, Poland by mynaszlaku
https://www.polytechnic.works/