say it, just say it

File under your mix tape or infinite playlist:
Driving Sun

Listen to the whole Driving Sun mix tape:
http://open.spotify.com/user/1231033109/playlist/2nYbaXpg8S7SlAJZY006Ys

eighteen months

And I don't mind shouting this so loud, that it knocks down stars. That it sounds in ugly places. That I am this one clumsy sentence echoed through all time: I love you.

—Ian William L.

sonder

sonder (n.) the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

—The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows; John Koenig

a woman of war

“As women, when we're children we're taught to enter the world with big hearts. Blooming hearts. Hearts bigger than our damn fists. We are taught to forgive—constantly—as opposed to what young boys are taught: revenge—to get "even". Our empathy is constantly made appeals to, often demanded for. If we refuse to show kindness, we are reprimanded. We are not good women if we do not crush our bones to make more space for the world, if we do not spread our entire skin over rocks for others to tread on, if we do not kill ourselves in every meaning of the word in the process of making it cozy for everyone else. It is the heat generated by the burning of our bodies with which the world keeps warm. We are taught to sacrifice so much for so little. This is the general principle all over the world.

By the time we are young women, we are tired. Most of us are drained. Some of us enter a lock of silence because of that lethargy. Some of us lash out. When I think of that big, blooming heart we once had, it looks shriveled and worn out now. When I was teaching, I had a young student named Mariam. She was only 11 years old. Some boy pushed her around in class, called her names, broke her spirit for the day. We were sitting under a chestnut tree on a field trip and she asked me if a boy ever hurt me. I told her many did and I destroyed them one by one. I think that’s the first time she ever heard the word "destroyed". We rarely teach our girls to fight back for the right reasons.

Take up more space as a woman. Take up more time. Take your time. You are taught to hide, censor, move about without messing up decorum for a man's comfort. Whether it's said or not, you’re taught balance. Forget that. Displease. Disappoint. Destroy. Be loud, be righteous, be messy. Mess up and it's fine—you are learning to unlearn. Do not see yourself like glass. Like you could get dirty and clean. You are flesh. You are not constant. You change. Society teaches women to maintain balance and that robs us of our volatility. Our mercurial hearts. Calm and chaos. Love only when needed; preserve otherwise.

Do not be a moth near the light; be the light itself. Do not let a man’s ocean-big ego swallow you up. Know what you want. Ask yourself first. Decide your own pace. Decide your own path. Be cruel when needed. Be gentle only when needed. Collapse and then re-construct. When someone says you are being obscene, say yes I am. When they say you are being wrong, say yes I am. When they say you are being selfish, say yes I am. Why shouldn't I be? How do you expect a woman to stand on her two feet if you keep striking her at the ankles.

There are multiple lessons we must teach our young girls so that they render themselves their own pillars instead of keeping male approval as the focal point of their lives. It is so important to state your feelings of inconvenience as a woman. We are instructed to tailor ourselves and our discomfort, constantly told that we are "whining" and "nagging" and "complaining too much". That kind of silence is horribly violent, that kind of insistence upon uniformly nodding in agreement to your own despair, and smiling emptily so no man is ever uncomfortable around us. Male-entitlement dictates a woman's silence. If we could see the mimetic model of the erasure of a woman's voice, it would be an incredibly bloody sight.

On a breezy July night, my mother and I were sleeping under the open sky. Before dozing off, I told her that I think there is a special place in heaven where all wounded women bury their broken hearts and their hearts grow into trees that only give fruit to the good and poison to the bad. She smiled and said Ameen. Then she closed her eyes.”

—A Woman of War; Mehreen Kasana

us and you and I city breathing

"I am not a graceful person. I am not a Sunday morning, or a Friday sunset. I am a Tuesday, two a.m. I am gunshots muffled by a few city blocks. I am a broken window during February. My bones crack on a nightly basis. I fall from elegance with a dull thud, and I apologise for my awkward sadness. I sometimes believe that I don't belong around people. That I belong to all the leap days that didn't happen. The way light and darkness mix under my skin has become a storm. You don't see the lightning, but you hear the echoes."

—unattributed

traffichead

The circumstance is that everything I feel is apocryphal and artifice—day-star and elemental—inclement and pale.

I am not telling a story. I am telling one single lonely missing colour.

It feels like a bird on a streetlight at dusk, the smell of hot water, smashing a glass against the wall, a slight static, notched bone.

drain the sea

I bit my cheek, and maybe the night. I am no longer a submarine in a lonely place.

boxxes 1111

origami of peeled, dried skin, little ships

bloodied lips, blood vessels

set on a glass table, pretty

neurotic headache, the dog chained

to a dead dog

song to sound old mail

celebrate us! us.

foreign

"And she tucked herself away in a corner, quiet and foreign to the crowd around her, and all that kept racing through my head is that the best kind of beauty is the kind that is mostly ignored."

—Christopher Poindexter

the child-er night

"I am in love for this night: a warm song clicking through headphones, the caterpillar-fur-spray of rain, streetlights spinning in round—child-er night thrown down to pavement, the kaleidoscope cracked open, to magic shifting."

—Ian William L.

tender is the night

"I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight."

—Tender Is The Night; F. Scott Fitzgerald