By Samisrt

"Girl in Pink Dress" by Laura Wheeler Waring 1927

this is a prayer to me

I will get off the bus, and I will go to my girlfriend's apartment, and I will say "I don't think I did it all right, I don't think I remembered everything, but I know I am still good, and I know that I will go back tomorrow and get another chance, and it may not be perfect but the way you say "perfection stops movement " echos through my mind whenever I start to worry too much, and I think all that means that I love myself, and I think it means that you love me, too."

Gordon Mortensen (b.1938, American)

Spring Flowers

Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

Richard Siken

John William Godward - A fair reflection

i like to pretend i already died and asked god to send me back to earth so i can swim in lakes again and see mountains and get my heart broken and love my friends and cry so hard in the bathroom and go grocery shopping 1,000 more times. and that i promised i would never forget the miracle of being here

little by little i will save my life and the rot in my stomach will swell into something sweet and it’ll sit on my tongue and i will think to myself how silly it is to wallow when there is a sun that shines and hands that reach for other hands. little by little i will remember every vessel in me bears the promise that most sweet things shall stay alive for as long as i live alongside them. little by little i will leave my head for the real world and i will fearlessly dangle my feet on tall grass and without hesitance reach for a star knowing with absolute certainty that i can never hold it close or call it mine and that it’ll never love me back or yearn for me half as much. so here we are, me and my hope, and our only means of staying tethered together which is through the little by the little. little by little i will save my life not as some monumental course-altering endeavour of bigness and bravery and prettyness like in the poems… but by simply putting my life in warm clothes.

My dad and I once had a disagreement over him using the adage "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.

So my dad and I agreed, what doesn't kill you doesn't actually make you stronger, but healing does. And if you feel like healing hasn't made you stronger than you were before, you're probably not done healing. You've got to give these things time to set.