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Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is the hole. When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person. […] Most people find something disturbingly lucid and true in Aristophanes’ image of lovers as people cut in half. All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing, or so it feels to the person in love.

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay.

#fav

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“To survive, I had to stay unfamiliar to myself, neutralized, at arm’s length. Sometimes, I think, all these years later, I’m still hunting the part of myself I exiled.”

Places I’ve Taken My Body; ‘The Broken Country: On Disability and Desire’ by Molly McCully Brown

#fuck

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“Eventually, soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.”

— Robert Brault (via lotteritter)

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There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself.

— Ottessa Moshfegh, from My Year of Rest and Relaxation

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“I plant roots so deeply in the people I love that I always lose a piece of myself when they go.”

— (via naturaekos)

#fuck

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when you come, i am always leaving. isn't that appropriate. you keep asking me - will you stay? where are you going?

i am going home. i am going to find the mountain of my future and scale it. i am going to draw in the dirt and plant something that finally outlives my father. i am going to live.

you are always going in the other direction. your hair, like always, like when i met you - beautiful in the wind. your hands around the sickle of my heart. you know that achilles sings the same song. aching the tune of you cannot survive apart.

i want you to come with. i want to fold you in my pocket and beg your forgiveness. i want to repeat every morning i woke up in your bed. i want to stare into the mirror of darkness and pluck out all the places you fit. my mother suggests i leave you a message. give you a gift. sit with you in the basement and listen to the gorgons sing.

i am giving you space. you will come through when it is right for you. it's the least that i owe you, after all of this.

in the meantime, i'm looking for you in the edge of the garden. i'm looking for you every time i come home. i'm looking for you at the end of my story. i'm looking for you.

i think that you know.

#i am looking for you at the end of my story

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“Often when I imagine you, your wholeness cascades into many shapes. You run like a herd of luminous deer, and I am dark; I am forest.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke (via loveage-moondream)

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Mary Shelley ― Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

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reasons not to kiss her 1.) this sort of love is not allowed. you are both too soft, and the world around you is all knives and chipped teeth 2.) no one ever taught you how to love. your war paint and scarred hands could never hold her like she deserves 3.) no one has ever loved you this full surely you would drown in it all 4.) she belongs in a museum, and you are merely here to gaze. look around you, all the signs scream ‘do not touch’ 5.) she touches you like youre fragile, and if you break you wont be able put yourself together again 6.) she is all bubblegum skies and chapped stick kisses, and you cannot watch the love run out of another persons eyes 7.) if you jump, she might catch you, and then youd have to watch as she tumbled through the dark 8.) her gaze is too gentle. you will not be the one to tell her that not everything can be fixed with a smile 9.) she is so good. she is so good, and you cannot ruin one more good thing 10.) you will not watch her crumble under the weight of your sins. she is too light, too breathless to be caught up in the dizziness of your heart reasons to kiss her 1.) she loves you, and her eyes are closed, and didnt your mother ever tell you not to leave a good thing waiting

lessons in listening to your heart, and not your head (via theycallmedizzy)

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[text ID: You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel. /end ID]

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“I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

— Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

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power

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“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche 

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“(…) I am thirsty for the spring in the valley As for a kiss ungiven and long desired.”

— Sara Teasdale, from Places in “The Collected Poems Of Sara Teasdale”

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“….There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing — for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmon knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens… The spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up.”

— Jerry Waxman (via rosee-viibes)

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Frustration / longing / love