'god, but life is loneliness'

"Born under different skies we have neither the same thoughts nor the same language - have we, perhaps, hearts that resemble one another?


The mild and cloudy climate from which I come has left me with gentle and melancholy impressions; what passions has the generous sun that has bronzed your brow given you? I know how to love and how to suffer, and you, what do you know of love?
The ardour of your glances, the violent clasp of your arms, the fervour of your desire, tempt me and frighten me. I do not know whether to combat your passion or to share it. One does not love like this in my country; beside you I am no more than a pale statue that regards you with desire, with trouble, with astonishment. I do not know if you truly love me, I shall never know it. You can scarcely speak a few words of my language and I do not know enough of yours to enter into these subtle questions. Perhaps, even if I knew perfectly the language that you speak, I should not be able to make myself understood. The place where we have lived, the people that have taught us, are, doubtless, the reason that we have ideas, sentiments and needs, inexplicable one to the other. My feeble nature and your fiery temperament must produce very different thoughts. You must be ignorant of, or despise, the thousand trivial sufferings that so disturb me; you must laugh at what makes me weep. Perhaps you even do not know what tears are. Would you be for me a support or a master? Would you console me for the evils that I have endured before meeting you? Do you understand why I am sad? Do you understand compassion, patience, friendship? Perhaps you have been brought up in the idea that women have no souls. Do you think that they have? You are neither a Christian nor a Mussulman, neither civilised nor a barbarian - are you a man? What is there in that masculine bosom, behind that superb brow, those leonine eyes? Do you ever have a nobler, finer thought, a fraternal pious sentiment? When you sleep, do you dream that you are flying toward Heaven? When men wrong you do you still trust in God? Shall I be your companion or your slave? Do you desire me or love me? When your passion is satisfied will you thank me? When I have made you happy, will you know how to tell me so? Do you know what I am and does it trouble you not to know it? Am I for you an unknown being who must be sought for a dreamt of, or am I in your eyes a woman like those that fatten in harems? In your eyes, in which I think to see a divine spark, is there nothing but a lust such as these women inspire? Do you know that desire of the soul that time does not quench, that no excess deadens or wearies? When your mistress sleeps in your arms, do you stay awake to watch over her, to pray to God and to weep? Do the pleasures of love leave you breathless and brutalised or do they throw you into a divine ecstasy? Does your soul overcome your body when you leave the bosom of her whom you love? Ah, when I shall observe you withdrawn quiet, shall I know if you are thoughtful or at rest? When your glance is languishing will it be tenderness or lassitude? Perhaps you realise that I do not know you and that you do not know me. I know neither your past life, nor your character, nor what the men that know you think of you. Perhaps you are the first, perhaps the last among them. I love you without knowing if I can esteem you, I love you because you please me, and perhaps some day I shall be forced to hate you. If you were a man of my country, I should question you and you would understand me. But perhaps I should be still more unhappy, for you would mislead me. As it is, at least you will not deceive me, you will make no vain promises and false vows. You will love me as you understand love, as you can love. What I have sought for in vain in others, I shall not, perhaps, find in you, but I can always believe that you possess it. Those looks, those caresses of love that have always lied to me in others, you will allow me to interpret as I wish, without adding deceitful words to them. I shall be able to interpret your reveries and fill your silences with eloquence. I shall give to your actions the intentions that I wish them to have. When you look at me tenderly, I shall believe that your soul is gazing at mine; when you glance at heaven, I shall believe that your mind turns towards the eternity from which it sprang. Let us remain thus, do not learn my language, and I shall not look for, in yours, words to express my doubts and my fears. I want to be ignorant of what you do with your life and what part you play among your fellow me. I do not even want to know your name. Hide your soul from me that I may always believe it to be beautiful."

i'm so sick of being mentally ill

so sick of wondering how long i can outrun this

when im alone youre all i think about

but im never alone very long

how we are haunted, how we are cured

"I sit on the subway hold
my hand. You are not the only one who
goes home and thinks about killing yourself."

"Elsa, what is mourning and can it be
learned. Elsa, how we start to tear from
the middle. When I forget who I am
I put on pearls and spray my perfume. The
only narrative I have running through
my head is I need someone to kiss me.
Like boats shaped like birds set to the west, her
heart will never be rid of its ghosting."

angela veronica wong

“My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance--this is why people tell me secrets--my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound.” 

“We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.” 

we always had world enough

oh, but time

So don't you say to me
That life's a trap
The future is nothing but a tragedy
'cause I'll be out of that window
Yeah, I'll start wishing to die again
Just say we're not walking backwards, kid
And show me to the door
And I'll walk behind
Out into the hot sunlight
Where the world's very much alive
Even when I close my eyes

600 days of sobriety today

mostly thinking about how i used to drink myself to sleep because my heartbeat was too loud

how i drank to still the world when it became overwhelming, to still my brain

how easy it was to create distance, from other people and myself

remembering something someone wrote about addicts and how there is a lack of true connection between us and other people and the world when we are actively addicted. "they have about them the air of elsewhere, that they're looking through you to somewhere else they'd rather be". and of course, that's exactly what we're doing. it's always been about escape. fucked up to think that at the base of it the main reason that i drank for a decade straight was because i was in so much psychic pain that the world sober was literally unbearable.

there is a widely-accepted belief that addiction is messy, loud, unavoidable. that self-harm is so strange and sad and against nature that one who carries it out must be manic, obviously quite mad, forgetting themselves, out of their minds and having public breakdowns. that it will always be unavoidably noticeable to those who interact with the addicted person.
it was always very quiet for me. it was always very methodological. it stilled the world. i'd never stopped time like that before. i've never stopped time like that since. public downward spirals are the face of addiction, but the quiet spaces are where i damaged myself the most successfully. i needed those quiet spaces. no longer feeling the weight of having to appear functional to the waking world, no longer feeling the weight of trying to keep up with a life that was outrunning me. no longer feeling any weight at all

a famous psychologist said that the goal of all life is death. that self destruction is the way in which we express our inescapable 'death instincts'. the only way to beat it is if your 'life instincts' are stronger.
mine never were.
if you chase destruction, the 'elsewhere', you'll always find it.

realising that i haven't kissed anyone in over 6 months, haven't slept with anyone in even longer

alone but not lonely

for the first time in a long time i belong completely and wholly to myself. feeling both the strength and the weight of it

I had done so much injury with this body. How could I want to preserve any of it for eternity, and suddenly I remembered a phrase of Richard’s - about human beings inventing the doctrines to satisfy their desires, and I thought how wrong he is. If I were to invent a doctrine it would be that the body was never born again, that it rotted with last year’s vermin. It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there. Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice’s. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face as personal as a line of his writing: I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man’s body from a falling wall. He didn’t tell me why he was in hospital those three days: Henry told me. That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

i mean...

throughout it all, every single stupid fucked up thing i've ever done, i never wanted to hurt anybody except myself

the innocent-bystander effect, i guess

"as long as theres someone like you and theres someone like me, then theres people like us"

i'm moving to serbia in two and a half days. i keep getting migraines and there is a patch of dry skin on my thigh that keeps returning. i'm convinced that there is something rotting inside of me. when things are going well in my life i think of death. i drive slowly and am scared to merge. i avoid the motorway. i flinch whenever a large vehicle overtakes me. 27 years old and still my all-encompassing pervasive reaction to happiness is the expectation that soon i will be devoured by the wheels of a ten ton truck on the a45.

when i was younger i said the only thing i hate more than people who leave is people who come back

now i just wish everyone would keep returning

i read something along the lines of "i'm not where i want to be but thank god i'm not where i used to be"

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

dark fleeting thoughts