i feel strongly about this
& you know what it actually IS lifechanging to smile at strangers & say please & thank you & goodmorning & compliment someones outfit & help someone in need & be more accepting of loving other people just because they are other people!!!
Dudddde what if we were foils and you were beautiful and i was ugly and you have revolution in your eyes and i believe in nothing and you chastely drop your eyes at all things that were not the republic and i stare fixedly at all women and you were absolute in your ideas and i was shapeless and you pitied me and i venerated you and you scorned me and i admired you and you disdained me and i loved you. What if in the presence of you i became someone once more, what if i was charmed by your chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature without me being clearly aware of it and without the idea of explaining it to myself occurring, what if i had need of you, what if i were your unaccepted pylades what if bro can you hear me
—light snow, silence, the empty streets, the fog, thrilling cold-so much beauty. Like breathing pure oxygen.
Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980
fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am tired of making a religion out of my suffering’.