Photo booth photos shared by Alice Oseman
She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married
Hamnet - Maggie O’Farrell
No matter how many times i read and finish a book i'll never get used to the feeling of that suffocating hollowness that brews inside me.
That seeping realisation that
that's all it was
a book.
“ ..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
Rain pounded on the roof of the car, plunking out a melody.
“What do you think happiness is?” Theo often asked these unexpected questions, so Alexander wasn’t so very surprised.
“Not crying myself to sleep every night,” the words had slipped out of his mouth as he read his book in an uninterested tone. Now he looked at Theo, weighing his reaction. Theo’s face had a puzzled, maybe worried, expression on it.
“Hm.” He didn’t say anything more. Alexander wouldn’t admit that he’d hoped Theo would. Alexander didn’t know it, but that scene near the brook at midnight all those months ago was playing through his head again. After a bit, Theo continued.
“Are you happy?”
“I don’t know,” Alexander said, looking at the rain crashing down on the window. The melancholy that came every night and used to make him cry in Autumn now only resided in his mind as a dull numbness that visited before he went to bed each evening, but it was there, even still. Theo did not enquire further this time, and the two returned to reading their books, Alexander consumed in a secondhand copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Theo skimming through a book of Sappho’s poems.
Sweet, mellifluous rays of sunlight
seep through every crack, every seam
invading every crevice, every nook
until there is no space for night.
A million threads,
golden as fresh honey,
bright as a thousand suns,
tether me to the sky.
The shine of silk or velvet,
the beauty of a field of dandelions,
the yellow light,
sends a haze over everything,
obscuring all that is not good.
The morning is acissmus,
the night, a palimpsest.
Until you see the stars.
Oh, the stars deserve their own poem.
I cannot do them justice as a simple end to another.
How can one call themselves human without being enamored with the heavens?
It's always: "wanna hang out" but never "hey let's create a secret society and read literature and poetry"