Because You Were Only 5 When You Learnt The Dark Was Something You Should Be Afraid Of And That Night,

hey reblog if you believe that having a different romantic orientation than your sexual orientation is perfectly okay and valid. i want to see something.

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

Interviewer: What difference in usage would you point out in these three languages [Russian, English, French], these three instruments?

Nabokov: Naunces. If you take framboise in French, for example, it’s a scarlet color, a very red color. In English, the word raspberry is rather dull, with perhaps a little brown or violet. A rather cold color. In Russian it’s a burst of light, malinovoe; the word has associations of brilliance, of gaiety, of ringing bells. How can you translate that?

- Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor. Bryan Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, Eds.

She read books like she ran into the woods, each tree consuming her slowly as she disappeared into the green.

“ ..The sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.. ”

- Virginia Woolf “To the Lighthouse” 1927

This very morning, my history professor picked up the book I was reading, looked me in the eye, and said “Don’t read Wuthering Heights.” He then proceeded to walk away and continue class.

In Greek, "nostalgia” literally means "the pain from an old wound”. It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards, it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

Don Draper, “The Wheel”

I’m so sorry that I haven’t been able to post lately, but I’ve just been very busy. For the last two weeks, I’ve had a summer course at a *certain British university*, and now I’m in Italy to visit my family and friends (while also taking French classes in the mornings). Between all that and the insane heat in Europe, I’ve been completely exhausted every night. I’ll try to post more, darlings (aka the two people who like my posts)!

Can any of us really claim to be happy if we haven’t danced in the rain? Held hands with the moon? Had poetry carved to our name? Had our favorite book annotated and presented as a token of full fledged alliance?

the tips of the wings stuck out so I made them into cat ears (her name is either purra bellum or pawra bellum)

This is the only tiktok you'll ever need, I've made about 13 of these and I'm not stopping anytime soon