#32
on hurting and loving and living
dear you,
i hope the transition between the seasons has been treating you well, and that you’re being patient and kind to yourself. i wish you many beautiful days and warm feelings in your heart <3
the first day of autumn. the sky so blue, the leaves starting to change colour and the late september light so golden—it feels like hope and endurance and the world is wide open.
over the summer i was trying to come to terms with the fact that acknowledging my feelings doesn’t mean that they control me. i have struggled with living in the grey for the longest time, never knowing how to actually deal with sadness. i always feel like i should be healing and moving forward but healing is not a linear process and it’s okay to struggle. a friend reminded me recently that we are never done healing, and how that can actually be such a beautiful and comforting thing. to get to grow and heal but also feel and be human. our emotions are beautiful and they make us who we are. i just need to be patient and kinder to myself on those days when i wake up with a lump in my throat and i spend too much time in my head and everything feels hard and heavy.
like rilke said, no feeling is final.
lately i’ve been thinking about friendship as chosen family. like i choose you. i love you on purpose.
there was a point a few years ago where i genuinely thought i was just not meant to have fulfilling friendships where i could feel safe and loved and myself. that i was unlovable and wired differently to everyone else. it sounds almost silly now, but it felt incredibly isolating and i grew up feeling very lonely.
it’s also so surreal then, to be surrounded by so much love and warmth now that i can hardly believe it sometimes. it’s such a wonderful feeling to know you are loved by people as much as you love them. old love leaves and new love enters and permeates through pain. and yes, all relationships take work especially realising things about your own self, but people were so right about how when the right people come along, the ways you love them will come so naturally. they make you want to do things and it’s just easy with them. it’s just the most beautiful thing finding a home in people. i wish that for everyone truly.
the world is so beautiful. and i am so excited for the rest for the year.
i'm excited for spending all my time in second-hand bookshops and staring out the train window at the morning light and going to my favourite bakeries/cafes and sitting by the river with my book and watching the boats pass and passing frosty fields at golden hour and going to the market and seeing the new seasonal exhibitions at the art gallery and seeing the leaves change colour and smiling at everyone in the streets and going to vintage/antique stores and lovely crisp autumnal walks in the gardens and visiting the minster and getting myself flowers when i'm sad and baking in the evenings and seeing warm foggy shop windows while walking through the empty streets on a morning and coming out of the library and seeing beautiful sunsets and hugging my friends and walking through the streets at blue hour and visiting the christmas markets and winter light and the quiet of the train in the morning and evening when it’s dark out and everyone’s tired.
i was sat by the river doing a little journal entry voice memo recently, and i realised i did that exactly one year ago too, it was so lovely to see how certain things had changed. i love documenting things. whether it’s pictures or videos or journal entries. i think it’s a form of devotion, whether it’s a place or a person or a moment. it’s so beautiful to want to capture the essence of something forever. it allows for it to be relived through the records we have of them, an archive full of tenderness and love and history.
“i was thinking about how i don’t actually have anything of my own that i can keep. i very luckily have some material things, but every material thing goes away eventually. they can get lost, broken, stolen or just deteriorate, including my body. once i die this will all become nothing. and i was thinking about what do i have that’s really actually mine? that can’t be taken away? and i know this is corny but this love that i feel in me, that i’ve created in me, that i’ve built in me, held on to—it’s mine for as long as i want it, for as long as i don’t give it up or let the world take it away from me. and i really do believe that to love is the best thing i ever did in my life. better than any song i've ever written, any achievement by far. to love is truly the best and most beautiful thing i ever did. and then as i was thinking about that, i started thinking about how sad it was that once i die, i couldn’t leave behind this most beautiful thing that i have. i guess it short of dies with me. so i wanted to write a song about how i wish that when i die i could at least leave all this love behind in the world.”
mitski, on her song ‘my love mine all mine’ on her new album ‘the land is inhospitable and so are we’
ever since i was a child, i have loved the feeling of being on the motorway at night. the long rows of bright lights and watching people pass in their cars, tired in their own little worlds. the liminality of service stations with people mindlessly playing on the slot machines and the sounds of coffee being made and the slow music. crossing paths with people you will probably never see again.
on the night of the harvest moon, i had a shower, did my skincare, and sat in my room listening to my autumn playlist. it was the perfect end to a tiring week.
this is why i love being alive. there is always life to live, people to love, and the moon.
“the world is dark. if i make myself dark, then everything is dark. but if i create a light within myself with love, then at least i have that light to look up to”
mitski, for world cafe
life is kind and cruel and loving and hurtful and rich and extraordinary and uncaring and messy and bountiful and unforgiving and it holds its arms wide open waiting for you to either lean in or let go.
“if you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen i love you joy is coming”kim addonizio, to the woman crying uncontrollably in the next stall
the seasons show us the beauty in letting go, reminding us that sometimes things end. it teaches that change doesn’t come without loss, and maybe there’s freedom in that.
you deserve a life that you don’t have to run from. one that you can hold in your bare hands.
“i could hear my heart beating. i could hear everyone's heart. i could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark”
raymond carver, what we talk about when we talk about love
i feel like i haven’t been very present lately. i find myself spending more time in daydreams, the music i listen to, and losing myself in memories of places and people and things.
“'i am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something i only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones”
franz kafka
the world is loud but i am thinking of its quiet pockets. i am thinking of silence and human noise. of listening to the sound of a heartbeat. how it reveals: joy and pain and the humanness of who we love. it’s scary and loud in the silence of a dark room but it is beautiful. i am thinking of my own heartbeat which sometimes scares me, listening to it. and i notice what comes out of the quiet. maybe it is suffering, or joy. i wonder about doing that with everything i encounter. my hand on the wall of an old building, my arms around a friend. i want to touch what softly persists.
and when you listen to it closely, it hurts. but even the hurting makes a song.
love comes softly.
I just lost one of my best friends, who Im in love with - and I don't know if she's coming back. thank you for this, it's beautiful...it's hope in a time that isn't very hopeful right now.
beautiful <3