Burning Muse

comakid:

i filled a cardboard box with all of my fuck ups and duct taped it shut and wrote “im sorry” on the side and i carried it to the ocean and i set it down at the edge of the sand and i instagrammed a picture of it and i used the “nashville” filter and then i walked back home.

ghostyouths:

Mathilde
I was not a nice little girl. One time when I was eight I saw a fawn eating dandelions in my backyard. Its legs were spindly, like my friend Clotilde’s legs. Clotilde had three freckles under her left eye that looked like tears; when she laughed it was always because someone else was suffering. She told me she wanted to leave home some day, and I told her that she shared her name with a slave ship.

Ambroise
There was a boy in our class who was a saint—“Saint Eugene.” “Do you know what it feels like to be on fire?” we asked him one day. He said no. That afternoon, with gasoline and matches in hand, we cornered him in a forest with intention to burn. The instant someone laid a hand on him, it rained. He forgave each and every one of us and kissed us on the forehead.

Bernadette
Inside me there are a thousand souls fighting to get out. I walk dirt roads and never cut my feet. In the summer my skin gets darker than my eyes, darker than anything anyone has ever seen. I had a brother, once, whose name was going to be Joseph, but I uttered a curse that killed him in the womb, and now he lives within me.

Otto
They call me a saint, too. We are a generation of saints, I guess. There is something holy in this world we live in. I know because one night I spent three whole minutes staring at a single star. And then it flickered out.

O’Coughlin Farm 1928 [Excerpt from Gold Leaf God]

republicofthebees:

*Inspired by James O’Coughlin / family history *

“Boy—it’s all that sin you been bathin’ in that’s makin’ your mouth taste somthin’ awful.”

James paused his brushing and turned. With what appeared to be great concentration, he studied the old oak floorboards, weathered from years of tread & trod. His eyes then moved to the area rug, a colorful thing his grandparents—or rather grandfather—had purchased from the gypsies on one of their excursions to the city.

As a child he’d stood in awe of it. At night he’d sit on the oak floorboards— the life had not yet been pegged out of them— and listen to the radio shows with his grandparents. He’d never really catch the scratchy words of the man in the box, though, because he’d be too busy picking his own stories out of that rug.

Until he was six he’d been too afraid to step on it for fear his pale skin would drain the color from the vibrant threads just as the color had faded from the barn out back. He’d tried to put the color back in the barn with some left over tomatoes where the paint’d peeled off, but his grandpa’d told him that the world just didn’t turn that way:

“Son, once the color ‘s gone outta somethin’— Hell, once the light ‘s gone outta somethin’— there ain’t no gettin’ it back.”

The boy did not understand this at the time. The light went out every night. During the farm season it went out so early that dinner wouldn’t even be ready before the world went and turned off it’s light. When there wasn’t too much work to be had he’d sneak up to the loft in the big barn where the ricks were kept and open the loft doors as wide as he could manage. At dawn he’d open the doors to the east, at dusk those in the west. This was how he came to have a sense of direction. So the boy would sit and watch God paint the sky—thought that God was a better craftsman than whoever’d made the colorful rug—he would sit and he would think about his mother, wondering if she ever saw God paint the same stretch of sky as he had. Then the boy would thank the Man on the Moon at night—as his house rose and the stars stretched from their sleep—for reminding God to wake the sun up that day. 

The rug once felt a tad bit extrinsic—perhaps that was the source of its beauty—but years had since passed and the vibrant colors had faded, making it seem as if this rug had always had a place on these weathered floorboards.

He resumed brushing and his eyes drifted to the rectangular table, about shin height, atop the rug. It was made of mahogany, by his grandfather—skilfully crafted for the man’s new bride and their soon-to-be-born child, who would grow to become James’ uncle Mark. He had carved a map of the world into the tabletop and somehow managed to procure a sheet of glass—as he was as resourceful as he was sentimental—so it could function as a respectable piece of furniture. He’d said, “Darling, Ah’d give you the world if Ah could, but Ah can’t ‘n this is the next best thing Ah could come up with.”

Grandma always smiled when she told that story. Says she kissed him then and there. Other people were around and everything.

“Ah tell you boy, Ah got some sideways glances at church ‘fore a good month-‘n-a-half after that.”

And then she’d laugh because with age people and things lose their hold over the beholder. Memories are the greatest treasure—but of course no one remembers that until they get older.

James almost gave a half smile. His eyes moved once more, this time to the worn couch behind the table, a lace duvet thrown over each arm and the back at dead center. It was then that he—the boy who hadn’t been a boy for some time now, in his own mind at least—turned his gaze to his grandmother. She was, as expected, sitting in her chair turned slightly away from the rest of the room and toward the bay windows. It was from this woman that James had gleaned his penchant for observation. She held a book in her hand, eyes searching his face—she had probably stayed up all night reading, the woman was uncanny like that. He met her gaze after a second, hesitating because he knew there was no hiding what was in his eyes. She continued:

“Now don’ you go’n act like the good Lord didn’t give me two good eyes and two good cents to rub together or ta put together what Ah been hearin’. That’s the third time you gone ‘n done brushed those teeth a’yours, boy. Ah’m tellin’ ya child, it’s all that sin makin’ your mouth taste somthin’ awful,” she paused to give him a half smile,  ”‘an toothpaste ain’t cheap these days.”

a rose by any other name

kelliopie:

She is a wife, a mother and an independent, all rolled, not-so-neatly, into one.  She is an independent wife - an oxymoron, an age-old dichotomy, but no one had ever saw fit to advise her of such.  No one had ever saw fit to advise her at all.  To enlighten her with the simple truth that one spouse independent and apart from another is not a union of any kind, but the makings of perfect disharmony.  For one to cleave, and the other to stand alone, brings about feelings of chronic loneliness on one and incessant feelings of suffocation and entrapment on the other.  No one felt it necessary to speak of such things to the girl that transcended her destitute community with doctorate level education from Cambridge and first-world culture.  She needed not advice of any type from lesser achieving, uncultured counterparts. 

There was nothing wrong with Rosalyn’s life, nothing that would ripple the surface of the ocean within her.  There were some things she now knows, that she wishes she knew then, but who doesn’t?  With child like faith on shooting stars and pennies tossed in wells, she wished she had taken more time to get to know herself before marriage, or more time to get to know the person she would marry, before marriage.  She wished she knew then that she was not the wife or the mothering type, or maybe just the not-for-this-husband type.  

She leans her fragile frame against that of her newly installed hurricane-proof glass door, as she does each morning, and disappears within herself.  Coffee cradled in both hands, she gazes out onto the ocean.  She is a forlorn figure, envious of the wind’s freedom and the waves’ carelessness.  Much like the frame to her shoulder, she is nothing more than a prop in the life and times of everyone else.  The curtains had closed on the stage play of her life, written, produced and directed by Rosalyn Pete, 25 years ago.  She has since been cast Roselyn White, under the disabled direction of a husband, Blake White.

She takes a sip of coffee and reminisces of the days when she called the takes.  When she was her own and no one else’s.  To be someone else’s is to be weak and slave.  Her mother did not raise her to be a dependent.  And the God, in whom she trusts, did not make her for either. 

Black hole (7th pd exam)

mirelladg23:

My mind is like a black hole, nobody knows whats inside it because theres no ability to get in it. And if we’re telling the truth here, I don’t even know whats in inside it. I think that’s what I fear the most, my mind, and oblivion. I guess you could say Nicholas Sparks and John Green did this to me. I blame them, I blame them for filling impossible thoughts into my head, and I blame them for infatuation me with the thought of someone. Notice I don’t say love, I say someone, I say something.

I can’t remember what its like to feel, its been so long. But when I opened those books, when I flipped the pages, and saw the words I knew I had this violent desire to change. I had just sat there on the cold hardwood floor, dreaming about the way the sunlight would make you look, make it look. And when water touched your hand, the light would shine too bright, thatll hurt my eyes.

But because of my change, I’m almost to a fault. I get absorbed in the thought, in the people, and easily consumed by everything. Everything starts to seem melted on the edges of the hardwood floors I had once sat on. Cracks begin to show, and I could feel the emptiness returning. Now I sit on whats left of these floors.

I used to think I had everything figured out, then I opened my eyes. I was staring at the ceiling, questioning if I was going to do the same thing over and over as I slept. My lips always sealed, I stared at sunflowers, theyre always leaning to the bright side.

I’m on the dark side, the view is nice here. Some people don’t get it, you cant infatuate a person then not want anything to do with them. When you know some ones passion, then you tease them. I hate teases. I hate, I don’t like, I love, I like, these things I cant control. But yet I let them control me. Have you ever seen Alive in Wonderland? Its like that, I have to have some bizzare dream to figure out what I want. But I never figure it out.

As I shut my eyes once again, I can see Wonderland and Narnia. Silly people who cant find wonderland musnt have an imagination. Because Wonderland, is in the black hole. Black hole of my brain, and Lewis Carroll was right, for millions of years.

vitaph0bia:

I remember you subtly, like the sharp contrast on my white cotton sheets when the sun descends and a pale light, a new light, makes the whites angelic and shades the navy blues and army greens into black. I remember you in contour lines of vision, I remember you in trills and fugues. And I remember it: the lights, the smoke, the fog, the glare, and maybe feelings cannot snap but lights can fade and I swear to you that when I think of you, my insides feel like a dry bottle of vodka, like a cracked bottle of gin, alone

I do not know how my tendons have not snapped, how my veins have not suddenly combusted, how I am not Hiroshima and you are not Pearl Harbor. 

Staff note: I am sometimes obsessed with the thought of the butterfly effect. What if?

mostlyfiction:

i read in the news about a man who beat his wife unconscious, because earlier that morning he had forgotten to take his medication that altered his regular behavior. he said that it was an accident. he said that she was asking for it; that she was the one who pushed him to his final breaking point. he said to blame his hands, and not his mind; that his fists had a thought process of their own.

what he didn’t know is that his wife, earlier that morning, wrote him a note, and put it in his favorite work shirt. the note said, “i love you. i will always love you. even when your mind tells your heart that’s its had enough. even when your hands do all the problem solving. i will always love you. even when you forget to make me my morning coffee, because you had more important things on your mind. i will always love you. even when you tell me that you can’t do this anymore, you’ve had enough of this kind of love. i will always love you. you are strong, you are everything, you are the reason that i have yet to let go of hope. i will always love you.”

but her husband was in a rush that morning. he was late for work; so he put on his least favorite work shirt, spilled the scolding coffee that he made for her on his lap, and forgot to take his medication. i sometimes wonder if he would have set his alarm a few minutes early, like he usually did. i wonder if he would have found that note that was stained with love. i wonder what would have happened if he would have remembered to take his medication. and i will always wonder what would have happened that night if he would have just walked away.