Dating Simulator Where It Starts Normal But It Slowly Becomes Clear That All Of The Romanceable Characters

Lord Henry is the 19th century Andrew Tate.

- Oscar Wilde, 1895

missed time by Ha Jin

Memory

by Margaret Atwood

Memory is not in the head only. It’s midnight, you existed once, you exist again, my entire skin sensitive as an eye, imprint of you glowing against me, burnt-out match in a dark room.

may to december by Megan Fernandes

Sometimes

by Mary Oliver

I.

Something came up out of the dark. It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before. It wasn’t an animal or a flower, unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water, a head the size of a cat but muddy and without ears. I don’t know what God is. I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.

II.

Sometimes melancholy leaves me breathless…

III.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source! Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower. The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

IV.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

V. Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.

VI.

God, rest in my heart and fortify me, take away my hunger for answers, let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved. Let the cathead appear again — the smallest of your mysteries, some wild cousin of my own blood probably — some cousin of my own wild blood probably, in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

VII.

Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn’t amuse me. Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

I don’t want to be the owner of your fantasy, I just want to be a part of your family

I’M GOING BACK TO MINNESOTA WHERE SADNESS MAKES SENSE

by Danez Smith

O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean I stood at the lip of it, dressed in down, praying for snow I know, I’m strange, too much light makes me nervous at least in this land where the trees always bear green. I know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful. Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California? The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea — a field of mirror all demanding to be the sun too, everything around you is light & it’s gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you & it’s so sad, you know? You’re the only warm thing for miles & the only thing that can’t shine.

love poem beginning with a yellow cab by José Olivarez

sneaking onto the reservoir again by Robert Wood Lynn