by Jeanette Winterson, from The Stone Gods (via wuthering-heights)
(Source: violentwavesofemotion, via whitebridges)
The Folly of Youth
You would have loved me then
in those untamed days of purple hair and elephant bells
when I was afraid of my very own breasts
but little else.
Our first date would have had us
lifting a flat blue bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 from the corner store
in the enormous back pocket of your skater jeans
and drinking it under a cloud of graffiti in the abandoned racquetball courts in Westgate park
rewarding each other’s toughness for holding back the cough and shudder of malt liquor kickback with bursts of long hard kisses and secrets bitten into necks.
We would have skipped Mrs Bennett’s 9th grade Biology class to trade virginities in your mother’s two job unchaperoned house.
We’d smoke pot and stare at the glow in the dark stars on your ceiling
plastic sheen in daylight until the windows darkened and they smiled back.
We would celebrate at a basement party in a boys house
whose mother punched her maternal time card the day he turned 18
by moving a man with a rent check into the 2nd bedroom and the absence she left on her way to Nevada to finally begin her life.
We would glow like those same sun heavy plastic stars
and not let go of one another’s hand
even and especially when Joey Williams proves himself a lightweight by vomiting a still intact handful of cheese puffs onto the screen door after only 3 Mike’s hard lemonades.
We would be drunk and safe on the folly of youth.
We would be a pair of soft hands here.
We would never think about growing old.
We met instead in the years the hard lessons came to collect.
Where I am alone a calloused fist, God fearing, and begging you not to make a joke of me.
You have only just earned your knee caps and wear them proud and shiny like medals
I cannot possibly ask you to give them up to me so soon,
and I understand this.
After a fertilizer plant exploded in the town of West, Texas
A local news station in Columbus, OH went to interview a farmer living near the Scotts Chemical Plant in Marysville just an hour or so away.
They asked him if in light of this recent tragedy he was scared to live so close to the Chemical Plant
and he said, “Well sure, but this is my home,you cant run away from from everything that might explode.”
And I understand this too.
I am walking home under an awning of college boys grand standing on roof tops
chucking beer bottles onto the lawn.
a home I will not live in this time next week
a home I never quite belonged in no matter how we arranged the furniture
We haunted the attic of this home together for a year.
On Sunday morning 2 men with a truck will come and take all that is mine
away from all that is yours.
In the new house I have already decided to place the bed
that used to be our bed
but is now just my bed
against a wall the way you hated for the way it made you feel trapped
but it always made me feel safe.
Last week you found your house key for the first time in 3 months
while I was at work
and scrawled a love note in ink on the drywall we never got around to painting
I cannot take this with me when I leave here.
My friend Jon says it is a fact
that the frontal lobe of your brain has not yet fully developed
this is the place in the brain where forethought and empathy live
it does not complete development until we are nearly 25
You are 22 now.
Penelope waited 20 years for Odysseus to return to her.
I am not waiting for you
but I am not not waiting for you either
My fully formed frontal lobe tells me it is unlikely you will return
that the smart thing to do is to move on from this explosion
My heart though,
she met your heart somewhere less tame
she thumps on a promise where we grow old together
and
she likes to be called Penelope sometimes.
(via sadurday)
To think of gratitude and to think of thank you cards
instead, the small panic of them, the pressure
to buy the ones with black and white Parisian photograph
covers and the blank insides, ready for your profound message,
you writer, you beautiful liar; you are supposed to be good at this.
So you write, Thank you for the flowers. I don’t know
what to call them, but they are pink and I plan
on taking them to bed with me in your absence. You write,
Thank you for the reminder you’re eight hundred miles away.
You draw pictures of hot air balloons and trolley cars and
inaccurate maps of the United States with dash dashed arrow
routes that point from one stick person holding flowers
to another stick person empty handed.
And when it is too hard to be thankful for anything
other than the fact that at least the two of you aren’t dead yet,
you call, despite the time zone difference and impossible hour,
to say, Walk west so that I can hear your footsteps better.
by “Gratitude,” Leigh Stein (via commovente)
by Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 3 September 1926 (via violentwavesofemotion)
(via wethecommon)
