how terrible it is / to love something death can touch
1) anne carson, eros the bittersweet // 2) billy-ray belcourt, a history of my brief body // 3) the haunting of bly manor (2020) // 4) lee martens // 5) albert camus, state of siege // 6) death cab for cutie, i will follow you into the dark // 7) mary zimmerman, metamorphoses // 8) the last of us (2023) // 9) hozier, work song // 10) keaton henson, you // 11) madeline miller, the song of achilles // 12) achilles and the body of patroclus, nikolai ge (1855) // 13) emily brontë, wuthering heights // 14) a star is born, i’ll never love again // 15) halsey, graveyard // 16) evanescence, my immortal // 17) the haunting of hill house (2018) // 18) imagine dragons, wrecked // 19) hadestown, wait for me (intro) // 20) carl andreas august goost, orpheus and eurydice (1826) // 21) the mountain goats, no children // 22) fred elwell, the wedding dress (1911) // 23) p!nk, who knew // 24) shannon barry // 25) jamie anderson // 26) wandavision (2021) // 27) taylor swift, seven // 28) franchesca cox // 29) halsey, ya’aburnee // 30) the lovers of valdaro, found in mantua in 2007
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…what does one do with the sense of loss that tailgates their body?
Billy-Ray Belcourt, from This Wound Is a World; “The Oxford Journal”
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"To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you."
Billy-Ray Belcourt
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… what was nostalgia if not a kind of hunger?
Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus
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Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries
Trains are arguably the centre of everything. The sinew of civilisation for muggles and wizards alike. They are where all walks of life converge. Congregate. In synchronised traversal. Shared agony inflicted by the piercing screech of metal on metal, bonding all patrons aboard a carriage. And outside. A passing glimpse of someone you thought you’d never see again. Trains. They change everything.
“You’re still with Timothy McKinnon?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded and took a swig of beer.
“Actually we’re engaged.”
He put down the glass a little too roughly. “Oh.”
Oh.
Lust is so inadequate. And loving exhausts me.
— Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait In Letters
― Margaret Atwood, You are Happy
Lily was breath and bucking hips and grappling fingers. She was a plant in darkness and he was the sun. Light streaming through a window. Hot breath on her neck. He was temptation, salvation. And Lily was nothing if not indulgent.
— Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body
“What’s got her wand in a knot?” Peter asked as Dorcas returned to the other end of the Gryffindor table.
Dorcas shrugged. “She wouldn’t say.” She snatched up a muffin just as James, whose face had maintained a glum quality since the previous evening, pushed hastily from the table and stormed out of the Great Hall.
— Carrie Underwood, Look at Me
COMING VERY SOON TO A CINEMA* NEAR YOU
NOW BEING PUBLISHED ON AO3 ➼ VOILÀ
*cinema = AO3
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To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.
—Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body
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6. the future is already over, but that doesn't mean we don't have anywhere else to go
from ‘We Were Never Meant to Break Like This’ in This Wound Is a World, by Billy-Ray Belcourt
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This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
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“To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.”
— Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body
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“I want to be a bad girl
I want to be a bad girl so there’s a musicality to my rebellion
To be a bad girl is to be one of the most furious things in the modern world
To be a bad girl is to be one of the most admonished things in the modern world
A bad girl is she who has rid herself of the brutalities of socialization
The antithesis of the bad girl is the man who self destructs”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body
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"Don’t we all tell ourselves that what’s inside us, our wanting, is annihilative to this degree? Don’t we all suspect our most volatile yearnings, when freed from the pits of our stomachs, could upend a world? What if desire is one of the few forces that troubles the idea of continuums, meaning we are either entirely absorbed or wrecked by it? Don’t we all have it in us to destroy ourselves?"
Billy-Ray Belcourt, "Outside, People Were Crying, or They Weren't"
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the first time he told me i was beautiful, i thought he was lying. i thought beauty was a plot in a story i had been written out of a long time ago.
This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
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do we have a word to make sense of this kind of loss: a body feeling like it doesn’t belong to you anymore? sometimes the act of enduring itself becomes too much to bear and you forget how to go on in a world that didn’t want you in the first place. how do you mourn something you can still see in the mirror?
Billy-Ray Belcourt, from This Wound Is a World; “An elegy for flesh”
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“If I were to rank my aesthetic concerns, ambiguity would come before veracity.”
-Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body
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He was hers at an existential and cellular level.
Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus
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