Mainromanoff - Anna

i know the mortifying ordeal of being known is real for too many of us, but consider this: someone saw you once and loved your hairstyle. someone loves your laugh, how you scrunch your nose when you find something funny. your birthday could be an old friend’s password. that one song you recommended to your crush a couple summers back could still be their favorite. you are in other people’s birthday party photos. someone could’ve fallen in love with you on public transportation. our lives intertwine beautifully and you, dear human, are a little piece of other people’s fond, lovely memories. part of the ordeal of being known implies the ordeal of being loved. 

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

-Oscar Wilde

Details of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833, by Paul Delaroche (1797-1856)

Julian K. Jarboe, “As Tender Feet of Cretan Girls Danced Once Around an Altar of Love.” Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel

Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

we don’t write poetry because

are there any poems you have on home, if its ok to ask? i feel homesick for a home beyond my reach and thought i could come to you.

“I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

“it’s as if I had to go back home on foot, alone, barefoot not knowing where far away, everybody else went long ago”

— Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream (tr. Beverly Bie Brahic)

“[ON LOSING LOVE]: This is the model I propose. You are arriving home and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart shaped.”

— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters

— James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“‘I’m homesick all the time,’ she said, still not looking at him. ‘I just don’t know where home is. There’s this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes. But it’s like chasing the moon - just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon. I grieve and try to move on, but then the damn thing comes back the next night, giving me hope of catching it all over again.”

— Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon 

“Wickedness has leaked into the home I made, / and I want to burn it down. Sister, tell me / how you stand the murderous fury. You there / still singing, I crave demolishing, to eat / explosives.”

— Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things; “Home Fires”

“At the core of all sighs is a name, a stone from the body’s last lost home.”

— Karen Solie, from “Days Inn,” Short Haul Engine

“To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad?”

— Chen Chen, from “Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet”

“Feeling what we all feel: home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.”

— Richard Blanco, from “Mexican Almuerzo in New England”

— Ross Gay, from Bringing the Shovel Down; “Because”

“I want to ask was there ever one / moment when all of it relented, / when rain and ocean and their own / sense of home were revealed to them / as one and the same?”

— Eavan Boland, from In a Time of Violence

“I: Why not take the shorter way home. HT: There is no shorter way home.”

— Anne Carson, from Men in the Off Hours; “Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)”

You are just another name I still remember, a song I no longer dare to listen to, a voice I can't forget but I will. You're now a stranger I'd never really wish to know, a road I'll never choose, a bridge I'd always burn, a place I'd never visit. You are just a memory I'd never ever like to cherish. I want myself to get rid of every trace of you. All that you left behind is not my mess to carry, no part of you could be a treasure, it's just trash.

—Trashy memories // Sparkandashes (via tumblr)