My-dearest-giulia - GIULIA

the feel of shaking out your cramping hand as your chopin vinyl comes to end, looking up from your notebook to realize with surprise that the sun had set as you were writing, counting the pages of your notebook you have filled, squinting to decipher your handwriting as it devolved into illegibility at the end, marking in preliminary edits with a bright red pen and a critical eye, laying out the pages on your floor, grinning at the tangibility of your productivity, your success

when remco campert said "poetry is an act of affirmation. i affirm that i live, that i do not live alone."

sometimes i read a phrase in a poem or a story or i see the clouds amble in the sky traced by sunlight or i hear a specific combination of notes on a piano and i just get so overwhelmed with a really specific feeling that i can't really name but i know that this feeling is so human and so tender at its core and that i am a tiny little part of a world so delightfully rich with sensations and i exist to experience this very feeling because it stems from the pure human love for coexistence with the world

Is life not just a scramble to get things done before a deadline that you don’t even know the time of?

To define is to limit, darling.

I never wish to be easily defined.

Day 2: Favorite Poem

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There’s nothing more to say.

The poem ends,

Soft as it began—

I loved my friend.

- Langston Hughes

(Here’s a gorgeous article on the poem)

Marwan & Khaled Fall 2018 Couture

She

She is marble

She is glass—

All that falls to the floor

And cracks

She is snowdrop

She is rose—

All that wilts on its stem

And dies

Why must I compare her

To a flower

Or a statue—

Is not being enough?

She is not delicate

She is not rock

She is human

When she is cut

Blood spills

Is not brown hair

And freckles

And honey-shining eyes

Enough?

For this world

Plainly not.

How could I lead myself to think?

For a moment

For a second

Last night, I told my mother "I wish I was dead" in a fit of rage and winter clouded her eyes. But it wasn't white and it wasn't quiet, it resembled something like helplessness and rage. She was in pain and I knew I hurt her. I wanted to say something, anything, but how do you withdraw a declaration of war? How do you stop the bombs that already destroyed homelands? In that moment I remembered how she always told me that when she was a kid, she was too afraid to sleep with the lights on. Not because she was afraid of monsters, but because she feared her grandmother would die. Because when you're a kid, not seeing it means it doesn't exist anymore. I saw the winter in her eyes again and I knew I had switched off the light, she wasn't angry, she was afraid.

And I also remembered how she always told me I'd always be 3 years old for her, always a child, and for the first time, I heard in the voice of a three year old "I wish I was dead". My heart broke. And I wanted to hug her and hold her, tell her I was sorry, that I didn't mean it. Before I could move a hand, she left the room. The entire evening, I saw myself as she saw me, a 3 year old child. I saw the child hurt herself and cry herself to sleep every week, fight her friends with her tiny hands and two ponytails, I saw her depression and her anxiety, I saw her yell "I wish I was dead" and I knew. I knew. I wanted to shout through the walls, yell and cry and tell my mother that now I KNEW, but I didn't. I wept and wept until I heard a quiet knock and a soft familiar voice whispered, "Dinner is ready".

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire