Libraryidealist - Dried Flowers And Art

Philip Levine, “The Mercy”

Giuseppe Pennasilico (detail)

thank god or the universe or whatever for cycles and seasons though like yeah life right now is unbearable. but every two years the olympics come around again, and every december i have christmas and every year there is an autumn where leaves change and fall and the air is crisp. every year has a halloween, and a national pie day, and my cat's birthday, and national star wars day, and the arbitrary date in february when my family watches the princess bride together, and every fall i watch over the garden wall. next year i'll see my second total solar eclipse. there will be new tomatoes next summer and fresh applesauce the season after that. the sun will come back even when march seems like it will never end. don't go yet. it will be your day off soon. the olympics are next year. it'll be someone's birthday soon. everything changes and everything will come back around again, if you stick around to let it.

i have no plans to have children, but if one day i do, i'm going to break that cycle like a motherfucking glow stick.

A war I didn't sign up for.

We're teenage girls, me and my friends. In every sense of the word.

We've got one who loves k-dramas, Tom Holland and makes great almond cake, we've got a tiny one who's sarcasm mutes me every time (to her great delight) and loves anime, we've got one who's the light and laughter of any party, who's soft safety and recently was diagnosed with depression, and we've got a childish and dreaming one who's beautiful, stunning. Everyone tells her. It frightens her.

I haven't seen my friends in a while.

No one's fault, just life. School, tests, a pandemic. So imagine my happiness! Our excitement! When a friend's friend invited us to a party, and we found time to meet up beforehand, to talk! Laugh! Eat pizza!

My friends came. And we laughed. I told them I've never been to a party, that I was pretty nervous. Soft And Safe grinned at me, told me it was fine, the boys that invited us were nice. And guess what? She had kissed one of them!! A drunken make-out, wasn't that cool??!

Then she stopped. Her smile slipped a little

Well, not that cool. She started, sitting there beside my bed.

Not all of it.

And sentence for sentence, Soft And Safe, who I grew up with, who I'd known like the other girls since I was ten, new in town and was adopted into their little group, hesitantly told me a story I'll never forget. Because it taught me life.

Because the boy she made out with was nice.

Until he asked her to kiss him on the cheek for a picture and she felt too uncomfortable and drunk to say no.

Until, when they were kissing alone in a room, he kept trying to put his hand under her shirt, even when she pushed it away.

Until he pulled her onto his lap, crotch pushed uncomfortably against her jeans, and held her waist down.

Until he barked at the girl checking up on Soft And Safe to get out.

Until he put his hand into her pants, and answered "everything is fine, relax", when she told him she didn't like that.

Until he pushed her over the sink.

Until, when she said she didn't want that and that they should go back downstairs, he got back claps and fist bumps from the other boys.

She got her best friend, whom she had rejected a week earlier, call her a slut. He said he could never see her the same way again.

We thought it wouldn't happen to us. But as we sat there in my room, staring at her forced smile, eyes frantic, we realised how she had done everything right.

And it had still happened.

It had happened to me three weeks earlier, at my gym.

And we realised

It wouldn't stop. We wouldn't grow out of it.

Being a woman would be a war we hadn't signed up for.

We went to the party. I saw him. I didn't deck him like I had planned. Because everyone would think I'm the one out of line.

via @/_weloveyou__ on tiktok

Details: Anguish, August Friedrich Schenck - 1876/1880

I'm an intern and my job is to enter addresses from hand-written letters into the database and did you know that Joshua Neumann from Hermannstreet 4, Cologne, has a life too

Oh

He's a principal in a small town. I googled it.

A mid-50s couple donated 100 dollars to our cause and I said that's very generous of you and he shrugged and said is it really

Oh

I guess it isn't really. Not for us.

When I came back after New Year the woman I've been working a lot with saw me in the office kitchen and hugged me.

I googled a scrawled address to decipher it and the town was so pretty I'm going to go there on a day trip with some friends. By train. Like we did 2 years ago.

You know what I'm saying, you know it.

my aunt used to be a beauty pageant kid. had long, beautiful red hair with a curl pattern that made hairdressers jealous. her mother would pay people lots of money to spend hours styling my aunt's hair

predictably, as a young adult, my aunt cut all of her hair off. buzzed down to the scalp. she still keeps it pretty short- long enough for curls to develop, but only on the top of her head. she says she can't stand the feeling of her hair touching her ears or neck.

recently she's started collecting and styling wigs. she'll even wear them, occasionally, to a fancy event or if she just doesn't want to be bothered by distant family when she goes shopping. and she spends hours styling these wigs, even though she doesn't use them all that often.

i asked her about it. she said that sometimes, growth looks a lot like regression with a twist. that she's reclaiming something she enjoyed as a kid, and could have enjoyed more. she said she's practicing having agency, and that it's a skill that doesn't come very naturally for her. having agency, i mean. she's really good at styling wigs.

Gamines by Louise Catherine Breslau (1890), Musée Comtadin-Duplessis.

History will say they were just friends.