Akshay Vasu / Carel Fabritius / Anjum Choudhary / Franz Kafka / Charles Bukowski / Frederick Carl Frieseke

Russell Lee. Movie theater. Southside, Chicago, Illinois. 1941

I can't make you understand. I can't make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I can't even explain it to myself.

— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

““You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.””

— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (via hplyrikz)

hello

Hi.

What has made me speak less with each passing day? I watch the dragonfly escape the lizard by inches and I decide to stay. I want my words and my life to escape death. So every time I try exaggerating my empathy , the insouciance, and the ability to extract only the bad side of my words and my life makes me edge closer to silence. I do not want to throttle my words to death.

The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau, 1865, Claude Monet

“And so it seems that I must always write you letters that I can never send.”

— Sylvia Plath

waiting for the sunlight,

sky hangs heavy,

clotted with clouds,

every minute a drip

into the vast puddle

of waiting.

they told to run—

Just run.

how to escape

when the legs are tied

to the same place,

to the same people,

to the same whatevers.

walking in circles,

feet tracing the same path

to more waiting,

more silence.

in the room

where the walls are made of promises

that never came true.

The words, they fall

from mouths like wet leaves,

unraveling slowly,

and I cannot remember

when I stopped believing them,

but now

they stick to my skin.

Expectations—

they were something bright once,

something I could grasp,

but now they are shards

in the back of my throat,

a choking on what I cannot swallow.

I am the person

who fails them,

who fails myself,

and still I stand,

to crack the earth open

and let me breathe again.

The faces around me

are nothing but mirrors

reflecting silence.

They take,

but give nothing

but their own crumbling edges,

and I keep trying

to hold them together

as if my hands aren’t already

full of cracks.

Every touch is a weight,

a slow erosion of my own spirit,

and still,

I stay.

I stay because it is easier

than the weight

of nothing.

But in this stillness,

In this place

where no one grows,

I am caught—

and I wait,

for the moment

to swallow me whole.