Day 2: Favorite Poem
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.
- Langston Hughes
(Here’s a gorgeous article on the poem)
"Women, they have minds, they have souls"
"the wholeness after everything toppled."
"I’m so sick of people saying love
is just all a woman is fit for."
"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as understood."
"And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself,
because I could find no language to express them in."
"The poets are always correct,"
"What an effort to keep alive."
"The Revolution will end with the perfection of happiness."
but.
"The stars in their courses"
"fight against us, my friend."
I believe that a morning should never describe a day. Of course, I don’t believe mornings listen to mortal pleas and reasoning, but I try to enact this rule myself. Yet, it is a morning’s nature to bleed into your perception of a day, tint it with sorrow or with beauty. The only times when I forbid myself from enforcing this rule is when my day is unknowingly stricken with a morning of perfect quiescence, an awake before the world has begun to turn. Those rare mornings can feel free to pour through the seams of time and stain the parchment of afternoons and evenings a beautiful shade of rose. I’m quite a hypocrite, I do know.
Rain pounded on the roof of the car, plunking out a melody.
“What do you think happiness is?” Theo often asked these unexpected questions, so Alexander wasn’t so very surprised.
“Not crying myself to sleep every night,” the words had slipped out of his mouth as he read his book in an uninterested tone. Now he looked at Theo, weighing his reaction. Theo’s face had a puzzled, maybe worried, expression on it.
“Hm.” He didn’t say anything more. Alexander wouldn’t admit that he’d hoped Theo would. Alexander didn’t know it, but that scene near the brook at midnight all those months ago was playing through his head again. After a bit, Theo continued.
“Are you happy?”
“I don’t know,” Alexander said, looking at the rain crashing down on the window. The melancholy that came every night and used to make him cry in Autumn now only resided in his mind as a dull numbness that visited before he went to bed each evening, but it was there, even still. Theo did not enquire further this time, and the two returned to reading their books, Alexander consumed in a secondhand copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Theo skimming through a book of Sappho’s poems.
ACHILLES AND THE LONDON BOY:
ArtBreeder Photo Board
Alexander FitzDonald
Theo Fraser
Diana Mayor
I’m not sure if I’m going to continue working on Achilles and the London Boy.
I’m not sure where the plot is going, and I don’t think my characters are really thought-out, so I think I’ll scrap the project. But, I’ve really enjoyed working on it, and I think that a lot of the scenes have promise on their own. Well, I just wanted to let you all know.
I've just learned that some (if not most) people have an internal narrative of their thoughts – almost all of their thoughts are in sentences that they 'hear'
as opposed to other people, like me, who have predominantly abstract non-verbal thoughts. Yes, i can talk to myself in my head if i want, and i often hear a voice when i read (until i get really into the story, at which point the voice disappears), but 99% of my thoughts are completely non-verbal. Like, i'm thinking a million things all the time, but there just aren't words attached to them.
I'm so intrigued by this. Is it always in full sentences? Is it all the time? How do you think two things at once - do the voices overlap, or do you just wait to finish that thought before moving onto the next? i have so much abstract chaos going on in my head at all times, i really couldn't imagine how it could possibly be funnelled into linear sentences???? does it affect how you process things?
my mind has been blown