fresh start.

"of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "it might have been."

 Kurt Vonnegut

a reminder for myself.

"Why do you think you're here, Oskar?"
"I'm here, Dr. Fein, because it upsets my mom that I'm having an impossible time with my life."
"Should it upset her?"
"Not really. Life is impossible."

extremely loud&incredibly close

lock&key.

i tried the key in all the doors,
even though he said he didn't recognize it.
it's not that i didn't trust him,
because i did.
it's that at the end of my search
i wanted to be able to say:
i don't know how i could have tried harder.
[extremely loud and incredibly close - jonathan safran foer]

one more letter.

dear molly,
if you need a reminder.. click here.
i miss you already.
you haven't even left.
you'll be home every weekend.

thanks for picking me up from the airport.
i'm glad you were the first person i spilled my feelings to.
and even though i read a magazine the whole way home..
your passenger seat was full of friendship happiness.
one more thing..

i roll the window down

and then begin to breathe in

the darkest country road

and the strong scent of evergreen

from the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

then looking upwards

i strain my eyes

and try to tell the difference

between shooting stars and satellites

from the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

"do they collide?"

i ask and you smile

with my feet on the dash

the world doesn't matter.

when you feel embarrassed then i'll be your pride.

when you need directions then i'll be your guide.

for all time.

heartsong.

yesterday he looked at me
with a tear in his eye and said i'll always tell you you're my friend.
i hope i don't have to lie.
cause it's clear you love another man.
i said... "you're damn right"
and he said

he said it's crazy
how love stays with me.
you know it hurts me
cause I don't wanna fight this war.
it's amazing to see me reading through this scene
of love and fear and apologies.

he said it's crazy
how love stays with me.
you know it hurts me
that i didn't figure it out before.
and now it's too late for a soliloquy
it's way too late for dignity
it's time for apologies.
[grace potter and the nocturnals. apologies]

i'm jumping..

"there was excitement and the air was filled with the vibration of really joyous life that knows nothing of disappointment and white sorrows and all that." -kerouac

[...so that i can live. there comes a point when you realize that you are no longer sure about anything anymore, but it's okay, because that is where you needed to be all along. the uncertainty of where everything stands is seemingly chaos, but after taking a closer look, there is a beautiful, sentient order to the mystification of love and passion. and i finally feel... okay. with not knowing. with not needing that affirmation.]

run.

whatever that may mean to two people in their 20s.
be it, "can we go somewhere and get lost?"

 i will take either.

98 and 6 degrees of separation.

"the way to my heart?

 just be different.

 am i lonely?

on such a fundamental level it’s ridiculous.

i’m dying from the inside out

and only music is my savior.

and the more i hurt,
the more you sing along -

so beg or choose, but pick one."

- john mayer

liminality.

i'm a space cadet that over thinks everything.
i'm an over-analytical flake.
a slob with OCD.
a fantasy obsessed realist.
my brain is constructed with organized chaos.

i have a fairly broad vocabulary[i think] but i haven't heard the word liminality until now.

i'm reminded of the movie- pheobe in wonderland- about a young girl who lives between two worlds. similar to alice in wonderland, but instead of falling down a rabbit hole and having a whirlwind adventure, pheobe continuously lives in the 'in-between'.

i often feel that this is how i live my life.
This may be the reason i insist on making lists, charts, calendars, organized piles with distinction, reminders telling me not to forget to do something important, with another reminder telling me not to dismiss the previous, until its complete.

how many moments, adding up to hours, days, do i spend trying to find the answer?

there is no up, down, only in between. i work to get the first thing done, but before i can even get the materials out to do so, my mind has wandered hop, skip, and jump, three things past and i must sit and scramble to put the pieces together to find where i am.
it makes it very difficult to get much done.

structure. purpose. goals. ideals. deadlines. assignments. distractions. imagination. self distruction. excuses. shame. exhaustion.

like alice, i beg for a world that isn't the way this one is.
i would love to live among flowers that sang to me. bread&butterflies.
tea parties with no reason, but plenty of rhymes.
but again, i know, much like she eventually did, i'd beg for normalcy, structure and sense.
beg for my feet to land, lightly on the ground, right side up at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
with a way to reach the top again.
or the sense to look up.
toward the light of reality.

liminality, to me, shows that great space between;
my impervious purgatory, the incredible heaven/hell concubinage.
resistance to reality, acceptance of fantasy, allowance of uncertainty.

"if i had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.
nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't.
and contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be.
and what it wouldn't be, it would.
you see?" 
-alice, alice in wonderland

go.

"Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something.

"I feel infinite."

And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest thing they ever heard. Because the sog was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way."

the perks of being a wallflower.stephen chbosky

i will never lay down without a fight.

i've been reading donald miller's "a million miles in a thousand years".
and i mostly feel like i'm looking in a mirror.
or reading about myself.
reading about my family..

"Robert McKee put down his coffee cup and leaned onto the podium. He put his hand on his forehead and wiped back his gray hair. He said, "You have to take your character to the place where he just can't take it anymore." He looked at us with a tenderness we hadn't seen in him before. "You've been there haven't you? You've been out on the ledge. The marriage is over now; the dream is over now; nothing good can come from this."
He got louder. "Writing a story isn't about making your peaceful fantasties come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn't think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it's conflict that changes a person." His voice was like thunder now. "You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That's the only way we change."

a couple of pages later:

"..I wasn't numb anymore. I was allowed to feel the brunt of it. The bones penetrated my chest in a sudden rip, emptying a body of blood down my shirt and onto my lap. The blood pooled in the lap of my pants and seeped into the carpet in my hotel room. I clasped my hand over my heart and knelt between the bed and the television and rolled onto the floor and cried out to God a lamenting demand that he would come and save me from the sorrow that, for the immensity of it, I could only attribute to him in the first place. I didn't want to learn whatever it was he wanted to teach me. I cried out to him an angry petititon for rescue. I doubted him and needed him at the same time. God seemed to me, in that moment, a cruel father burning a scar into my skin with his cigarette. And yet I knew he was the only one with the power to make the pain go away."

i understand nothing in this moment.

my heart feels like it's in a coma.

and further,

 if there was any hope left for love in the romantic sense,

i assure you it's dead.
my trust has been shot down within inches of obliteration.

so, good luck with that.

dear c.s. lewis,

i believe we were meant to be.

wrong time.

wrong generation.

oh well,

i get you.

and from your lips she drew the hallelujah.

if you know my heart
you know it's engulfed in music.
naturally, i have a lists of songs that have changed my life.

leonard cohen: hallelujah
is first.

this song has layers of meaning.
it has over 15 verses, only a few are used in the original.
he performs a different version at every concert.
this song is alluring.
bottomless mystery pours out of it.

it begins as a love song to music itself.
its first verse describes the song’s chord pattern.
the type of progression that might have been sung at high mass.
on the most sacred occasions.

biblical allusions pile up:
david plays his harp to soothe king saul,
and then has an affair with bathsheba.
at the end of the second verse, lyrics become twisted:
a reference to samson and delilah.
and intimations of sadomasochism and death:

“she tied you

to a kitchen chair

she broke your throne,

she cut your hair

and from your lips she drew the hallelujah.”

this song about
 sex, temptation, adultery and religion spirals inward.
it becomes a meditation on the meaning--
or perhaps the meaninglessness--
of life.
the shout of devotion morphs into an ecstatic cry.
then a defeated moan.
the interjection that means “praise ye the lord” turns hollow.
in the end, “it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”

“maybe there’s a god above

and all I ever learned from love

was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.”

the narrative explores how the..
erotic becomes political,
how relationships are defined.
not by trust but by conquest,
 and how lovers become trophies to be discarded.
and, somehow, the survivors hope it will be different next time.
the broken hallelujah is life itself.

next.

genius.

i would have given anything to be a part of this conversation..

"i wonder if it's possible to have a love affair that lasts forever.."

"things have gotten closer to the sun
and i've done things in small doses
so don't think that i'm pushing you away
when you're the one i've kept the closest."

crystalised - the xx

reminder.

everyday.

no really.. are you talking about me?

{gut symmetries by jeanette winterson}

mr. sweet and awful.

"how can someone so inconsistent

mess up so consistently?"

[modest mouse.]