62 posts
Latest Posts by quillrosetellsstories - Page 2
Do you ever wish to not exist?
The Way Smell Evokes Memory
On a hot summer afternoon, after a day of playing in the sun but before retiring to play video games, my mother would always shower. She loved spending time with us on those rare free days when all five of her girls were home, and she wasn’t working one of many jobs she held down simultaneously to provide. Our job was to set the living room up, since she didn’t understand and wasn’t willing to learn how to work the equipment. She would emerge in a puff of steam and a waft of perfume. Unwilling to wear shorts outside, those days she was even willing to don a light summer nightdress. We each peeled off at different times in the night, smart enough and independent enough to dictate our own bedtimes. With a yawn, I’d announce my departure. My mother was never short on hugs, pulling me in and holding me, understanding of the importance of that contact. Rich vanilla and rose and a creamy, heavy shea butter: the last things I’d smell for the night.
When riffling through the cabinet before moving out, I discovered the exact lotion she would use. Her ‘yes’ when I asked to take it was distracted, unaware of the significance. Although, I don’t use it much.
Amelie
In a cinderblock bathroom an hour’s bus ride out of the inner-city, there’s a full-length aluminum mirror hanging by two screws. Unrelenting rain pounded on the roof as a girl, twelve, peered into it. Her arms shook, weak from the exhaustion of pulling her way up cliffs. Amelie was on a hiking field trip with her quirky charter school, who believed that traipsing through forests during a spring rain storm was more of a teacher than a chalkboard. The laces of her only pair of tennis shoes lay untied, dripping with mud, but her fingers had grown too icy in the rain to tie them up again. The hem of her jeans was torn where another student had stepped on it while Amelie helped them up a ledge. Her only jacket was dripping onto the floor and torn in several places from burrs and the scrapes of passing sticks. Luckily, Amelie’s shirt was unharmed, but was too flimsy to stop the creep of cold from chilling her to the bone. Her stringy curls would certainly take hours to untangle. Amelie shivered, and looked into her own eyes. Truly the star of the entire appearance was Amelie’s wide grin and the bright, wild look in her eyes that only true adventure could bring.
Forever Writing,
quill rose
manifesting finding a hand written note in the next book you read 📚
People in Dark Academia.
The ones who stay up late at night to finish their favourite books, fingers tracing the lines as they whisper the words. The ones who strut the hallways with their head high as if the world was buring behind them. The ones who write in the dark, tears rolling down their cheeks because oh, they feel too much.
I just wanna get out of my head and find peace
Snow on Poetry Lane
Down University Avenue,
Past the Cub Foods
And the Caribou coffee
Lies Poetry Lane
The words are etched
Onto immoveable concrete
A community’s love bared to the world
Yet the sky tests the citizens,
Opening a flurry of thick flakes
Fitting to the compressed letters
Slowly taking up space.
The prose stands out in white
Glittering under streetlamps
And porch lights.
Feet clad protectively shuffle along the lane
Pausing at the words
Before stepping
Unreading
Packing the snow in deeper.
Gobs of white yet fall
Burying Poetry Lane
Burying the hearts of those
Brave enough to cement the truth
Until one gloved hand
Warmly brushes aside the blanket
Shedding light on the community, and
Poetry Lane, at least for a moment.
A list of nice words we should use more to describe people
Adventurous : willing to undertake new and daring enterprises.
Affectionate : having or displaying warmth or fondness.
Ambitious : having a strong desire for success or achievement.
Amiable : diffusing warmth and friendliness.
Brave : not being afraid of danger.
Considerate : showing concern for the rights and feelings of others.
Courageous : able to face and deal with danger or fear without flinching.
Courteous : characterized by politeness and gracious good manners.
Diligent : characterized by care and perseverance in carrying out tasks.
Empathetic : showing ready comprehension of others’ states.
Exuberant : unrestrained, especially with regard to feelings.
Gregarious : temperamentally seeking and enjoying the company of others.
Humble : marked by meekness or modesty; not arrogant or prideful.
Impartial : free from undue bias or preconceived opinions.
Intuitive : obtained through instinctive knowledge.
Inventive : marked by independence and creativity in thought or action.
Kind : behaving in a caring way towards people
Passionate : having or expressing strong emotions.
Philosophical : meeting trouble with level-headed detachment.
Practical : guided by experience and observation rather than theory.
Rational : having its source in or being guided by the intellect.
Reliable : worthy of trust.
Resourceful : adroit or imaginative.
Sensible : able to feel or perceive.
Sincere : open and genuine; not deceitful.
Sympathetic : expressing compassion or friendly fellow feelings.
Witty : demonstrating striking cleverness and humor.
"I love it when the night sky makes me feel insignificant."
Colleen Hoover | It Ends With Us
[Text ID : "I love it when the night sky makes me feel insignificant."]
6.7%
Attributed to diagnosis
Brought often in late spring
Clearly
Directly
Estimated to be
Factors of illness
Greatly cause internal
Health decline
Immune to physical evolution
Join discussion for fewer storms,
Lies we authored,
Mismanaged medicines; mortality rates
Never revealed
Other
Physical symptoms
Questioning
Realities spread
Surrounding mental illness
Timelines weakened by disease
Unknown and invisible,
View seriously only too late
Winds
Expected
Yearning to blow
0 likelihood of simple and total recovery
i love discovering the hidden gems in my city!
NaNoWriMo Update One
I want to keep updates posted of my progress this month but I find that I'm not keeping track based on word count, but on chapters. I do want to share my breakdown though--
100,000 words total
5 sections of 7 chapters each
20,000 words per section
2,900 words per chapter
This is the outline I'm using, so when I've finished a chapter I assume it falls into this estimate. In the end I'll run a comprehensive count. As long as each chapter is near 3k, I don't fret and move to the next.
So far, I have 8 of 35 chapters finished and it's the 7th day of NaNoWriMo. I could pick up the pace...
A Journey, New Home
In front of me are two steps.
Once taken, two more appear.
Will there ever be
more than two
visible at one time?
Behind me is one step.
On a road I already walked.
Will that step
be any different
if I took it now?
I know what I already walked.
I can strain to see what I have yet to traverse.
Is it better to retreat to the known
when I see one step further
in the unexplored?
Forever Writng
quill rose
Sticky Buns
There were several things about mini-me that were embarrassing. First of all, I was held back in kindergarten for being “too small.” My teachers were worried that me, a tiny brown girl with curly hair bigger than her head, would get bullied if I wasn’t the same size as the other kids. I waited the extra year in hopes of catching up, but I got bullied anyways. Secondly, I was a nerd. Not a cute quiet nerd, mind you, but an obnoxious, always-carrying-a-book-and-reading-aloud-to-herself type of nerd. Finally, and probably most insufferably, I was known as the teacher’s pet. If all of that wasn’t enough, I was that kid. I was the kid in school who peed her pants.
After the first few accidents, Mom found that I was simply unable to ‘hold it’. She chuckled as she wrote the note to my teachers that made it official: I had to go when I said. Because my hand was annoyingly stuck in the air anyways, it made notifying teachers easy. Once I hit middle school, my reputation preceded me. When I wiggled around in my seat like I had ants in my pants, and waved more fervently that normal, the teachers would sigh and point to the door. My wiggly dance down the hall was a sight to see.
Tiny me thought this worked pretty well. I was getting out of class as much as I could want, no questions asked. Since I was a ‘good kid’, I never took this for granted (Of course I did, how could you believe a child?!). Mom and the doctor had other plans for me. Something about getting a diagnosis for what made my bladder weak, but I think the word they were looking for was ‘Loser’. I peed in a cup seven times before starting treatment. Most people never have had to pee in a cup once. I’m jealous.
Homework was not foreign to me. In fact, homework was my favorite pastime (I told you I was insufferable), until the doctor gave me bladder homework. Did you know you could educate your bladder? After weeks of this at-home ball-squeezing and hip-flexing homework, I went back in for testing. My new routine was: get to the pee doctor’s, drink as much water as I could hold, get the cup from my mom, and send my pee away for Science. That day held other plans, for which my mom promised me McDonald’s. Before I even processed how these new plans would help me exactly, five extremely sticky nodes were attached to my butt.
If you’re wondering how terrible it is to be hooked up to the Butt-o-Matic, I couldn’t tell you because I promptly zoned out for the rest of the visit. All I knew was that I was being rewarded for this discomfort with salty fries and a thick shake. I pictured bringing my meal in when I was dropped back off at school, flexing on my classmates with the greasy bag. For once, I would lord over my class.
After a half an hour of doing the exercises with nodes hanging off my butt, I was finished. On my way out, I was offered a Princess Jasmine sticker. Letting my face show my sadness and, blinking at the doctor, I asked if I could also have the Princess Ariel one. The doctor’s face shifted into one of pity. She gave me both stickers.
Mom fulfilled her promise, swinging by the Drive Thru while pulling her Aldi’s employee sweater on. The water I’d had from the water fountain was starting to make its appearance and, since I hadn’t peed in the cup, I had critically miscalculated. As she pulled to the first window to pay, I leapt out of the car, slamming the door shut on my mom’s surprise. I barely made it in time. She was laughing when she swung the car around the front of the building and I came out. “Welcome back, Sticky Buns,” is all she said before driving me the rest of the way to school.
I sauntered into the building with the aromatic McDonald’s bag swinging from my grasp, my tattered Percy Jackson book in the other, and my buns still slightly sticky.
Forever Writing,
quill rose
“Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss” - A.S. Byatt, Possession
@esteejanssens
See more like this.
Her Falling Star
Content Warning: self-inflicted violence
Estrella refused to look away from the sky, especially once she made her last wish on the star that shot across. She waited for another. Too late; her breath quickened. Starlight streamed down hollow cheeks. Estrella refused to take her eyes off the sky, even after the trigger was pulled.
i always send emails!
The amazing digital art of Anato Finnstark
Banana Skirt
Young with fruitful purpose
Blossoming into words-
“I am Woman”
Grown from the seeds of home
Born fruitfully endowed into trial
With berries of milk
Leaves of pink
Curves of bursting corn
“I, a black Woman”
My skin, a peeling
Covering the buds
Blossoming into overt
Speech against the weeds
Who pretend to be flowers
Occluding to capitalize on Sun
Too young
To understand there is enough
For me, too.
~ quill rose
FRIDAY FOLLOWS
blogs to watch // blogs we love
@soulflwremix photographs, old & new 👇🏿
2. Dreamy scenes: @chaseantonio 🌙
3. @grits for high fashion 💄
“you gotta love yourself, baby. if you don’t, who will?”
— sharon g. flake, the skin i’m in
Get to Know the Author <3
Hello!
After a few posts and sharing a few pieces, I thought I'd do a quick introduction. My pen name is quill rose, I use she/her, and I'm 23. My sign is cancer (capricorn moon, scorpio rising), I'm an INFJ, and a writer! My personal identities tie into my writing. My current project is a fantasy series depicting poc and lgbtq characters. In writing, my strengths are dialogue and worldbuilding. I find the most joy in the telling of stories.
Quick favorites:
Movie: Lego Batman
Book: Percy Jackson (I'm counting the series)
Music: AJR and Billy Joel
Author: Yaa Gyasi
Poet: Audre Lorde
Food: Popcorn
Color: Purple
Video Game: Mass Effect (Trilogy)
A few more interests I have aaare: reading, illustration, fashion, cosplaying, jewelry making, journaling, self-care, dancing, and my two cats; Ahsoka and Rex.
Continuing to write from here,
quill rose