coffeeandshit reblogged
Love Like Love
I say I want a tattoo on my ribcage, and what I mean is that I want this moment to stay with me forever beyond ink that will fade with time. I would keep everyone here and let you swim in my lungs, putting your Vampire Weekend posters and string lights up and down my spine. I want to keep this world here, where we drink cheap alcohol and dance to old music, and all I can think is that I feel sorry for Atlas, and the fact that he had to hold up the whole planet, when these people, and this life, are the only things worth holding.
We sit on the floor and watch jeopardy reruns and drink cheap drinks while the world crumbles, eating old chinese food and throwing lo mein at the television when we get the answers wrong on jeopardy. We are young and stupid, and even as we sit here, somewhere in the back of my mind I know, I just know that Rose and Jack are praying we will both jump, Bonnie and Clyde are asking us to run, and we are realizing that these feelings will follow us like a desperate confessor at a lonely altar.
I learned somewhere once that the world hears the words ‘I love you’ more than 8,000,000 times a day, and it’s only too easy to say those words when you’re eighteen and invincible, drunk at 3 am, looking through an anatomy book that talks about the four chambers of the heart, all the while wishing I could keep these moments safe in there.
We sprint under the stars and I feel bad for the stars, for the fact that they are dead light that will never get to know these moments. How could anything possibly matter more than this, this moment when I’m wine drunk staring at the stars, splayed out on the quad with the girls who love each other the way girls do, laughing like they mean it, and going to bat for one another without hesitation.
How could anything possibly matter more than this, this girl with wild hair that wraps around her collar bone, and buries herself in the shadows found in the hollow of boys jawlines, leaving an echo of a laugh in the hollow of their cheek or a quick smile in the pit of their stomach. The girl who runs among gunshots, and when the steel vines of a 9 to 5 job creep up her ankles, she keeps on running, right into the sky. She has bruises on her wrists, like swollen swollen sunsets or stained glass windows, still unbreakable, laughing as she tears the world to bits and shakes the stars from the sky. The girl with the blonde hair who could swim in ichor and come out the same, already shaking the world when she laughs, with eyes so bright she could probably convince God to give her the moon if she asked nicely, just so she could store polaroid pictures and tequila in the craters and dance on top of it.
We’re drunk and I’m telling you about quantum entanglement, the way two atoms on the same wavelength during the Big Bang will forever be on the same wavelength, no matter how much distance or time passes, and how this is how soulmates are made, and when you laugh, all teeth and a spine that carries the story no books can, I can’t help but think that we must share at least a few atoms.
I can’t help but wonder how there are not great monuments to you, how nobody has ran through the streets yelling that there is an eighth wonder of the world, that here it is, these people right here that spill beer on the carpet when we try to waltz and can’t spell ‘Wednesday’ to save their lives. How could I possibly not make the world hear the words ‘I love you’ just a few extra times?
I love you. I love you. I love you.
There's the girl who didn’t mean for any of this to happen, but loves those around her the way Eve loved the apple. She fell in love rather like someone came up behind her, tapped her on the shoulder, and punched her in the face. She loves wholeheartedly, singing into empty wine bottles and laughing so loud the sky might crack just to make room for all of that joy. Of course she never meant to fall in love, she tells you, but perhaps the world had only heard the world ‘I love you’ 7,999,999,999 times that day, and it ended with her smiling during kisses, her brain melting into her teeth only to get closer to the people she loves, smiling all the while. Of course she didn’t mean to love like this.
None of us did. It was all an accident, pure coincidence, some miracle that all of these people are here. You made me believe in miracles, how could I not really? When these people built of dead stars smile like they want to swallow the world, or hold me with bones made of the same calcium that once lived in the bellies of asteroids. We’re all miracles, born to change the world.
You tell me how we were all born to run, and I know if any of us are, it’s you, who would run right off of the edge of the earth just to prove that you could. You tell me about physics class, and how every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and I wonder if that means that whenever you tell the world you love it, if it loves you right back. How could it not? You’re built of granite and gold and goodness, with a heart so big it scrapes against the barrel of your chest.
These people who love like love; there is no other word for it. Loving in a way that fills my lungs, my throat, everything. I love you like blurry polaroid photos that are half obscured with smoke, and when I look at them, I feel bad for Atlas, how he had to carry the whole world when these moments are the only ones that truly mattered.
Why on earth would he bother to hold up relentless seas and cavernous vallies, supporting wars and every single sunrise, when all he had to hold up were these moments, where I’m here trying to waltz around the room with the boy in the flannel shirt who always ends up taking it off, and diplomatically tells you to fuck every single human who makes you feel like you deserve to be anything less than eternally happy. He asks why we don’t have pictures on our social security cards and I laugh so hard I fall into the street, and I secretly think that if there were pictures on social security cards, it would be of these moments where I’m laughing until my chest aches and he’s dancing, smiling the type of smile that reaches your eyes.
These are the moments I want to keep with me, these moments when my heart rearranges itself inside my chest and I could swear that we all have ichor in our veins. These moments when we go streaking in the dark and I am forced to remember how much skin you have, plastered over bone, and I feel guilty that I get to know you and everyone else doesn’t.
These moments where I think you were all born for me, or maybe I was born for these moments, but it doesn’t matter because in every single one of them I say that I love you.
I love you like stars love darkness. I love you like we love drinking and being invincible. I love you like love.
coffeeandshit reblogged
“—tell them that you didn’t come here to make a fuss, or break, or growl, or scream; tell them—crazy sky and stars between—tell them you didn’t come to disturb the night air and throw a fit, then get down in the dark and do it.”
— Ada Limón, excerpt of “Bellow”, in Bright Dead Things
coffeeandshit reblogged
“You don’t have to explain your dreams, they belong to you.”
— (via amargedom)
Point B
When I was younger, the neighborhood kids used to paint the galaxy over my skin. They called my freckles the stars and my birthmarks were sun and moons.
I no longer call them stars, these unchanging points scattered all over my body, reminding me of where I have been and all the places the sun has kissed me. I now call these ‘Point B’. I had solar systems painted over the back of my hands, growing over me from a time before I even knew how to say ‘oh, I know that like the back of my hand!’
Among these freckles, I have scars from the times that I learned that life hit you. I learned that it hits you hard, pushing you to the ground, and waits for you to get back up only so it can kick you in the stomach and knock the wind out of you; but it will remind you that getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they love the taste of air.
I learned that life hits you hard, and learned that no matter how wide I stretched my hands they would always be too small to catch all of the pain I want to stop, all of the pain I want to heal, but I also learned that if you open your mouth wide enough while screaming at the world, a bit of laughter might just spill out and stop just a bit of the pain.
So when life hits you, and you try to catch that unattainable pain in blistered hands and only catch wind, just remember how good that wind feels in your aching lungs and how good it felt to get back up, and remember that there is nothing more beautiful than the way the sun keeps on rising in the morning no matter how many times the darkness pushes it away.
And I promise you, that this world is made of sugar and it crumbles only too easily, but in the moment before it does, don’t be afraid to see how sweet it is, and don’t be afraid to try to rebuild. You will see the best of this world and you will see the worst, so save the sunshine but never look directly at it, and when it rains, don’t be afraid to go out dancing in the rain to the way music drips from swollen thunderclouds.
So when it hurts, and blistered hands ache from only being able to catch wind when you wanted to stop pain, when the world crumbles and the rain soaks you straight to the marrow, when you fall and get the wind knocked out of you and the world no longer feels like a place that you can call home, keep screaming to the world and tasting the sugar and dancing among all of that destruction.
And remember, no matter how many tectonic plates collide every day, and no matter how hard they shake the earth, you will always find the beauty that lies in the unyielding resistance of Point B, and how at Point B there is a girl who is a warrior, a girl who is a worrier, a girl with small hands and big eyes who has never stopped asking the world for more. So when the world no longer feels like a place you can call home, look among the scars of battles won and the stars of galaxies travelled, and return to point B.
Every Scar I Have
Every scar I have is a reminder of all of the times I was ripped from merely existing into being alive. It’s painful. Being alive hurts and it’s terrifying, but my God, I am alive and scarred and it is spectacular.
Every scar I have seems so impersonal. They are ageless and don't bear the same freckles and pores that cover the rest of me in soft skin pressed over bone. Yet at the same time, talking about them feels like I’m sharing a secret, pointing to the pale marks that created a road map over my body, with latitudes of all of the places I fell down and longitudes of all of the places I got back up, whispering the coordinates of all of the ways I’ve healed. I’ll share a secret with you: scar tissue is stronger than skin.
It’s never as pretty, as soft and unmarred, but it stops the bleeding. Of course it isn’t pretty, after all of the cauterizing and bruising, all of the raised marks, raised in defiance of all of the times I brushed shoulders with death, or stumbled in on her, lurking in my wine cellar, popped the cork and drank deeply, and then put her back on the shelf and kept living.
Every scar I have is the echoic memory of a pain I never asked for, that decided to stick around, perched on my shoulder blade or against my calve, occasionally toasting to my survival, to the moments I truly lived that took place in between the hurting and the healing. They toast to the moments in which I was singed, bruised, battered, and furiously alive. They raise glasses and drink champagne to rebuilding, to the stardust that makes my skin, and all the nebulas that had to collapse for these stars to form, all the wreckage that was more birth than destruction.
Every scar I have is more beautiful that demolition, broken and battered and proof that the past was real, a reminder that I didn’t need to feel sorry for myself, that I’d grown into my own personal roadmap of battle armor, all free will and guns blazing, hurtling towards some great beyond, ready to arrive windswept and laughing and telling everyone all the secrets of scars, to toast alongside them to the person that I was with soft skin and toast to the person I had become.
Every scar I have is an ode to all of the ways that the world killed me and all of the ways I still fell in love with life, all the ways that pain lingered in the doorway, and forgot a book or a scarf, and stepped back over the threshold to remind me that I had survived, that I had grown, that I was real and infinitely rebuilding every cell and then some, growing a shield of armor with every skinned knee and bruised hip, where I still learned to dance even with a limp.
Every scar I have is a war cry, and a story and a secret. It is tougher than skin and formed under more pressure than a star. It is a renaissance and a religious text and a fresh start. The scar against my wrist and the base of my skull are oases and holy lands and a reminder of just how strong I am.
Every scar I have is a cosmic journey of the times when I rattled the stars and danced with Hades. They are all of the times I stopped for a moment to encounter who I have been and laugh with who I am becoming.
Every scar I have is a sign of strength, and I intend to earn many more.
coffeeandshit reblogged
You Were The Colour Inside My Eyelids
You met him when he was studying for finals in the library during your senior year of high school. He was half-asleep on the couch, except it was your favorite couch, and he was really fucking tall, so his feet dangled off the end, and you couldn’t even sit anywhere near it, and all the other sections of the library either smelled like death or were used for, well, not-studying.
You sat down next to him, your back pressed against the couch, and he sat up so quickly, it reminded you of a rocket ship. He flailed his long, lanky legs so spastically that it hit you in the nose and you started bleeding all over your computer case.
He swore and used the flannel shirt he had been using as a pillow as a tissue, basically slamming the shirt against your nose, and you swore back at him, and held his shirt to your nose for the next forty-five minutes, which eh spent the first ten of apologizing profusely, and for the rest he let you read what he had been working on before he fell asleep.
His professor had forgotten about the necessity that was finals, and had hellishly decided that all of his students had to write a short story as their finals.
You read it, and after five minutes you had discovered that he was an absolutely glorious writer, and that he couldn’t spell for shit. He had three-quarters of a green spiral notebook all filled up with magnificent words that seemed to have spilled out of the sky, like the sun had been wrung out, like a wet dish rag, and all of it had fallen into scrawly letters in various hues of pens.
The next day you made him buy you coffee, to compensate for the bruise on your nose. You also made him bring the notebook, and once he bought you the coffee, you stole his notebook and began reading over it, occasionally using your bright blue pen to fix a spelling error.
He asked you if you were now his official editor. You stared at him and told him yes. He shrugged and refilled your coffee, you smiled at him and you both fought over who paid the check. You won.
You walked home with him, just so you could keep reading it, and occasionally he would poke you in the rib cage so you wouldn’t run into a street lamp or mail box.
He had to pry it from your hands when you sat down on his neighbors porch to keep reading, because HOLY SHIT HE WAS A FUCKING AMAZING WRITER OKAY. You both laughed when he was trying to pull the notebook out if your hands and he tripped backwards into his mum’s flowers.
You started to hang out more, because he wasn’t a good speller at all, and you needed something as good as this story in your life.
You went to an amusement park, and pooled all your money to give to the carney before you got on the ferris wheel, and you stayed there for two hours, and eventually, you almost forgot about the notebook, and you talked about music.
You took the shit out of his favorite bands because of their weird name, but when you got home you downloaded their album, and it was rather amazing. You never told him though, because even though you were a piece of shit, he was a sarcastic asshole who would make fun of you for being wrong.
Which is exactly what he did when you went to the beach, and threw candy at eachother, and both sat on a giant inflatable dolphin in the sand, when he heard you humming one of their songs. You tipped over the inflatable whale and you called him a jackass of a beaver and he called you an arrogant bitch, and you ran around the beach, and you couldn’t find you umbrella or anything afterwards, but you saw some girls in the ocean with your inflated whale and you threw seashells at them.
When you drove home he told you about how his brother and sister in the military, and how he was proud of them, and so was his whole family, but he just didn’t want to join.
And suddenly he was everywhere, colouring the insides of your eyelids, and filling your heart up with so much happiness it leaked into your bloodstream and got tangled around your veins and ribcage.
He was there at the abandoned train station, with all the half burnt trains still at the station.
He sat in one of the seats and wrote, while you walked up and down the aisle of the cart, talking about your niece, and your sister and her husband who wasn’t nice enough to her.
He was there at a fast food restaurant where they eventually told you to leave, since you had been there for three hours and all you had bought was a small soda.
He was there at a fancy hotel lobby, where you claimed you were meeting someone, both refilling on free coffee, until he was writing with shaking hands and your food was just a tapping blur. A woman that neither of you knew came downstairs, and you walked in step with her until the concierge couldn’t see you.
One night you both ran into eachother at some lame party, so you ended up going into a random room that turned out to be a bathroom, and you sat in the bathtub, and he sat on a mountain of towels, and you talked, and he just made you laugh, and maybe it was the alcohol, but your lungs burned from how happy you were about having a friend like him.
You yelled at the random partygoers and refused to let anyone in the bathroom until you heard someone threatening to break the door down, so you went out the window, and he hurt his leg, and his face went so white it looked like the moon spat at it.
You wanted to tease him, but settled for calling someone and telling them that your lame friend fell out of a window and hurt his leg. He gave you the finger while you gave the doctors his information, not realizing that you somehow knew it as well as you knew the pattern of the spiderweb of blue veins on the back of you hand.
You even partially dragged him into the ambulance, and stole some kids bike outside the party to ride along next to the ambulance.
The next day the doctors said it was a minor break, and you smiled so big that you thought the sky would have to split open just to make room for the happiness. You ran into his room and screamed at him that he was okay, and he screamed back that he knew he was okay. You brought him pudding that entire day, until eventually he dumped it on your head and told you to stop, because all he wanted to do was eat a burrito.
He came over with crutches and you continued editing his book, which you had almost forgotten about. You both talked, and he even tried to play your dad’s guitar and you threatened to smash it over his head.
The cast came off two weeks later, and he got his finals results back, and he ran over, his face sweaty, and out of breath from running, clutching his paper in his sweaty hands screaming that FUCK YES HE GOT AN A!!!
You both screamed and jumped around, and then you both ate popsicles and walked around town, just talking, and occasionally stopping at some old convenience store to buy ice cream or tortilla chips.
You ended up sitting on a back porch at eleven o’clock at night with a cranky old lady yelling that she would call the cops on you, when it started pouring, and you couldn’t find your way back, so you ran around in the rain, laughing, and smiling, and you just felt so happy that it felt like the northern lights had exploded in your stomach.
You finally found your way home, and ordered chinese food to your porch, where you both ate it and debated the various pros and cons of different types of chicken and their sauces.
He ate the last piece of chicken and you you began smacking him with the garden hose, calling him a tin can full of deer piss.
You both ended up falling asleep on the porch until he woke up at one in the morning, screaming that you were graduating next week AND HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE ARE GRADUATING NEXT WEEK I AM NOT PREPARED HELP ME! You told him to go back to sleep, so he threw an empty chinese food container at your head until you sat up and talked him down to a state of sanity.
On the second to last day, you were scared as hell about graduating, and didn’t know what to do, so you found the address of a publisher and made a copy of the notebook, and sent it to her. And then resumed panicking because you were not ready to graduate.
You laughed when he couldn’t find the arm-hole thingies in his graduation robe, and he tied your hair into the tassel in your cap, and neither of you went to a party that night, you grabbed the notebook and went to Macy’s where you both splayed out on the biggest bed you could find and talked about college and how much macaroni and cheese and ramen noodles you would probably both have to eat to have any money whatsoever.
A woman asked you to leave, so you slunk away and sat in a box of giant stuffed animals and talked there instead, until the woman started walking towards you so you sprinted out of the store.
You were helping him pack, and you checked your email on your cell phone and screamed, because the publishers had emailed you back.They wanted to publish it. You told him that someone wanted to publish what he had written, and he dropped a box on his foot and yelled, but didn’t bother to move it. You saw all these emotions flicker across his open mouthed face, and you felt fear stuck in your veins, dark and icy, strangling and piercing.
Finally he screamed because OH MY SHIT ARE YOU SERIOUS! THEY WANT IT!
He picked you up and spun you around and you felt so happy, like the sun had dripped into your chest, and that bright fiery, happiness, was stuck in your chest, you yelled so loud the stars quivered and rearranged the constellations in the very sky.
You both celebrated by singing some old rock song, that you both vaguely knew the tune of, but didn’t really know, jumping around and laughing over your own words.
You wore a nice green dress to the meeting with the publisher, and he wore a button down and jeans, and you told him that it was supposed to be formal, as you looked at his sandals, and he scrunched his eyebrows at that, and stubbed his toe.
During the meeting, he took off his shoes under the desk, and you were both so happy that when they handed you the contracts, he kicked his leg and the shoe hit the ceiling. The publishes looked embarrassed, and ushered us out quickly, telling us to send the contracts whenever possible. You were both so happy that you cried, except he denied crying.
Eight months later, you sat in the coffee-house, and you paid the check again, and you cried again while you looked at the copy of the book, the book that he had written. You opened up the book, and there in small letters it read, ‘For my best friend, who thinks that coffee is an even trade for almost breaking your nose’.
Anikah
Hair that goes in every direction like the imagination is exploding from her head, butterflies that land on long fingers, perfect manicures, blue skies that have never met a cloud, skin that creases after laying your head on the crumpled sheets
Anonymous asked:
What about Maya? ( love your blog, keep it up
bright eyes that never tire and reflect sunsets, hollow hip bones that you thrum your fingers against when your hands are on your waist, light hair that never stays in ponytails, laughing loud in libraries before trying to stifle it
Anonymous asked:
Khushi (for that name thingy) and such a beautiful blog btw!!
Foreign cities and warm hugs. Eye makeup applied with precise hands and flickering lights, cracked sidewalks and old memories. Stacked bracelets and falling in love.
Anonymous asked:
sophie?
Daisy chains and bony ankles. Long limbs that stretch towards the sun, and reach for constellations. Wind chimes and passing notes to friends. Letters kept in a box under the bed and old photos with cherished memories.
Anonymous asked:
Laura
Summer camp and catching fireflies, dipping your feet in a lazy river and loud laughter. Friendship bracelets and bright blue eyes. Freckles that appear each summer like a friend you see once a year. Being young, and being happy.
Anonymous asked:
Orion
A natural disaster, as beautiful as it is deadly. The ocean roaring against a rock, fires lighting up the world, pounding rain causing lights to flicker. Stars on a clear night, the crack of a branch when you're walking alone in a forest.
Anonymous asked:
Sandra
Long hair and longer laughs. Adventures to old music and spinning around a ballroom in a long dress. Flickering candles and stretching out on a plush couch or silk sheets. Freedom. Being young. Falling in love. Living.
Everyone Knows
You don’t know how hard it is for me to breathe properly when you drum your fingers against your cheek. You’ll lean forwards, and I can hear your bones crack from across the room. You say you’re sore from sleeping funny or running up that hill behind the flower shop. You roll your neck out, and I am reminded of a sunstorm, and thunder cracking open the heavens. You will pretend you don’t hear the sound of your own brittle bones made or steel and diamonds, and will drum your fingers against your desk or against your cheek.
I don’t know how hard it is to breathe running four kilometers up a hill. I asked you why you ran the same route, the trail behind the flower shop, and you said you liked the way your legs burned and the way you knew you were almost at the bottom when you smelled flowers or your ankle was tickled by the stretch of daisies.
You don’t know how hard it was to breathe when you came to class with a bloody knee and a scraped elbow, dark circles under your eyes. Of course, you still looked radiant. Not in the sense that you were beautiful, but that even with a bloody knee you were still holding your head up. You looked as though you are made of sea glass and diamonds. You are electric, and when someone asks you why you’re limping, you look like you might just rip their veins out and wear them as bangle bracelets. You whisper to me that you tripped over your cat, and I feel a weight I didn’t know I was carrying lift up off of my shoulder, and my heart seems to swell up so big, my ribcage might just crack open.
I don’t know why we are here. At some dingy chinese food place that will undoubtedly make me throw up later. My stomach already hurts. Or maybe that’s just the way you;re looking at me. Like you have ichor and iron running through your veins rather than blood. I don’t know why we’re here. We could be anywhere. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if when we stood up, I floated away. I am so light headed from looking at you, it is like staring into the sun.
You don’t know where your shoes are. We are in the middle of a field, and my cars tires are matted, and the grass behind us has been flattened. There is music playing so loudly it might just shake the stars right out of the night sky. You are twirling, and twirling. I am just watching you. I don’t know why I haven’t told you I’m in love yet.
I don’t know whether to hold your hands or look away. You are staring at me so fiercely, that I can’t seem to look directly at you. I have to squint. It’s like staring at a swollen sunset, colorful and explosive. I want to be here forever.
The preacher asks me the question. And for once, I know exactly what to do.
“I do.” I say. You kiss me, and everything falls into place.