well it’s been a long time since I used this blog…and I remembered that I’d intoroduce competitions :D
well, I don’t have that many submitters, but please recommend this to other people then we can have a proper competition :)
So the theme is….
WAR
yes, a bit gloomy, but hey it can inspire some really great pieces of writing!
So write about war in any format you wish :)
Poem
Short story
Article
Monologue
Short play
whatever you wish :) good luck
(any queries…send it to my inbox)
My heart is getting in the way of my heart once again
Someone please rip this ironically self distructive beast from my chest
All I want is to be happy
But everytime I tink about you
No matter how hard I try
Or no matter how much I think I’m over you
I keep falling for you
Over and over
When will it end
I see you hurt them
And I’ve felt you hurt me
Maybe there’s some sort of reason
A destiny I’m giving up by getting over you
But why won’t it just happen already
I’ve been dealing with this for much too long
And you’re my bestfriend
And she’s my bestfriend
And you’ll never feel for me the way you do for her
But I can’t help it
I want you
I need you
When I’m around you my heart goes crazy
And however hard it wants to be happy
I want to be happy
I can never be
Because for my happiness
Everyone else’s has to be sacrificed
And it’s not worth all of that
So just end it
End it now
End it all
Please!
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Can’t you see you’re hurting me?
Can’t you see the torn pieces of my soul you ripped with your own hands?
They lie at your feet, and follow you around, whilst you laugh with those ‘friends’,
Those who you hide with, you’re too cowedly to face up to the truth,
You know you’re wrong, but are offended at the accusation,
Can’t you see just how much you are hurting me?
I’m in pieces, a mess,
My eyes are sore from the tears,
My heart is torn to shreds,
I’ve expressed how I feel,
now it’s up to you,
but my friend if you ever really cared,
you’d quit this act without a second thought,
but you can’t do that can you?
Because you’re more of a child than I could of ever thought,
Grow up.
We all just lay here
So vulnerable to the world around us
Ready to shatter at the slightest disturbance
Ready to crack under pressure
We think we’re strong
That we can take anything
But
We’re all so small
We’re all alone
But dispite all this
Life does go on
In order to have a repartee with me, you’ll need to find yourself. Having a bulwark to barricade yourself is only natural, but do speak to me. It seems you’ve caught my eyes with your baroque appearance; Yet, I know nothing about you. Is this an illusion? Have my eyes deceived me? I’ve lost fidelity in myself. Are you worthy? I’ve read many aphorisms about true love. But, why haven’t I found you? In this brevity of life, I’ll give you my all. For as long as an incessant time, I’ll wait.
Love,
It’s not about finding the best of the opposite sex.
It’s about finding a person,
THE Person
that you’ll end up living with for the rest of your life.
Even through the worst of times,
when you’re about ready to quit,
you’ll realize that you have someone.
Someone worth LIVING for.
Dying is easy,
is it as easy to love someone?
enough that you’re willing to live for them?
She came with words, those shards of glass,
Which filled the frame to spy the night,
The fool, for hunger, ate them fast,
So fountains spilled whence came the light.
First struck by flowing honey taste,
The shock had set the eyes to scream,
Finished by the lingering haste,
O how the brevity quenched the stream!
As hearts were slowed, and lies unfold,
The dried and waxy lips remain,
Choking quick on silver cold,
The hollow mouth gives form to pain.
There is no word for a boy who has lost his brother, Elliot says. He wants a word. He does not know how to tell people. How do I tell people? he asks me. But I do not know.
He grew up with an orange tree in his backyard, and every spring there were oranges. He likes to tell a story about the oranges. He tells it to me for the first time sitting on the peak of his roof with his back against the chimney.
I climbed the orange tree, he says. One day at the beginning of the season, when the oranges weren’t quite ripe. And my brother, Danny, he comes walking out across the yard, with a little scarf on his head and everything – he didn’t like being bald, you know. He used to joke about how I better watch out, baldness ran in the family. And he comes under the tree. I didn’t even move, but one of the oranges fell – hit him like whap, on the shoulder. And he looks up, but the oranges are so thick that he can’t see me, and he looks all confused. But you know, I liked the sound, so I dropped another one on him – whap. And another one – whap. And he starts laughing. He doesn’t even know it’s me, you know. But he just starts laughing. He didn’t mind getting hit by oranges, he didn’t care. He thought it was funny.
He just thought it was funny.
Danny was twelve years old. He fought with leukemia for ten years before the chemotherapy stopped working, before everything stopped working. Elliot used to go and sit in his hospital room. He used to bring oranges, too. They ate hundreds of oranges in that room.
Elliot peels oranges perfectly, unraveling the peel like thread from a spool. It comes off in one piece, remains whole in his hand. He is the kind of person who unwraps presents without tearing the wrapping paper. He is the kind of person who wouldn’t have cut through the Gordian knot. He is in love with wholeness.
He does not understand that wholeness is a fantasy, that none of us are whole. That none of us can be.
I have never seen him cry, but I know that he has cried for Danny. He is weighed down by this tragedy. I can see it in the way he peels his oranges – slowly, somberly. I always knew he was going to die, he says. People have been telling me he was going to die since I was seven years old. And, you know, I knew. I knew he was going to die. I thought I was ready.
But, he says. And then he stops. I watch him slide another orange peel off, still whole, and I wait for the sentence to come around again. It doesn’t. But maybe you’re never ready, I say. He splits his orange in half, eats a segment. Yeah, he says. Maybe you never are.
I sit cross-legged on his kitchen floor and he tries to teach me how to peel oranges perfectly. He laughs at the way the peels come apart in my clumsy fingers. He takes the peeled oranges from me. Try again, he says. Try again. I peel oranges until there are no oranges left, and we eat them all, until our fingers are sticky and the floor is littered with torn peels. We’ll try it again sometime, he says. We never do.
He thinks he’ll be a teacher, but he cannot teach me how to peel oranges.
The first time I saw him after Danny died, I tried to explain it: why crescent moons and shattered glass and ashes are beautiful. He didn’t understand. He loves the summer, when everything’s in bloom. He loves trees but not stumps, apples but not cores, stars but not supernovas.
He will not walk through the graveyard with me. He is too afraid of ghosts.
The last thing Danny said to him was I’m not afraid, but Elliot still is. He sits out on the porch at night, leaning against the rail and watching the stars. I find him there once, in a state of unnerving quiet.
Why wasn’t he afraid? he asks me. And I could tell him. I could tell him how the fear is suffocating, how it wears you down and sometimes you just want to sleep. How death is just another word for the end, and there is no pain on the other side, no pain or confusion or tears or fear. I could tell him how sometimes you dream of nothing and all the emptiness is so beautiful that it makes you want to weep. I could tell him how life is hard but standing on the edge of death, you can finally see the shore. How the fight makes you tired and you can’t keep going forever. How climbing onto the shore would be easy, lovely, free. How we are all going to that shore. How some of us will fight the tide and cling to our sinking ships, but how others will climb willingly onto the shore and not look back, never look back.
But I know he will not understand, this boy who loves wholeness and laughter and summer, who peels oranges perfectly and misses his brother more than anything in the world.
Why? he asks me. And maybe I know, but I don’t know how to tell him. So we are quiet, and he is lost, and I wish that I could make him understand that all of us break, and that in the breaking we are infinite and perfect in a way we never can be in wholeness. That our insides are beautiful, our gasping hearts and twisted entrails, and that we cannot hold on forever.
That in the end, fear is empty and the shore is solid and feels like home.
I do not have the words he needs, but I will find them. And maybe he will not be afraid any more.
stilltiedupinsomethingtrue asked: thank you so much! I really appreciate it and think that the concept of this blog is brilliant :)
yay, glad I helped :)
Yesterday, I said it out loud for the first time in my entire life. I told two people, both of whom I had only known for a semester; the first two people that I’ve ever mustered up enough courage to tell. Why? I don’t really know. They didn’t do anything to prove themselves trustworthy or untrustworthy. They hadn’t shown me that they particularly deserved to know the truth about who I really am and what made me this way. I think it was more that I couldn’t hold it in any longer; that I couldn’t deal with having everything bottled up inside me for even a few more minutes. Yesterday, I spoke the words for the first time and today I write them: I was repetitively sexually abused and raped as a child, starting from when I was four, by my mother’s father. The tears flow quietly down my face as I write this, leaving trails of subdued sorrow behind: the first signs of the secrets that I’ve finally allowed to surface from my hidden past. They burn when they hit my dried lips, a shadow of the pain I hold inside. A miniature crack has formed in the dam I’ve built, and these are the droplets that manage to leak through. It hurts that I can’t remember what exactly happened, how many times it happened, how many years it happened or anything. I feel like it gives my story less credibility, and that if I were to talk about it, people would be less likely to believe me because I can’t tell them the graphic details. That’s why I’ve never told anybody in the 14 years since it started. I know the terminology they use as an explanation - repressed memories; motivated forgetting; disassociation. But those words don’t make it hurt any less. Yet the hurt is a blessing because I know being able to relive it would be so much worse. There is this one moment that stands out particularly clear in my mind. I sit at a dinner table picking at a bowl of macaroni and cheese. He’s walking off a big meal, as is my grandmother. They both circle around the downstairs portion of the house, though not together. He stays about half a circle in front of her. I stare at the table trying to make myself insignificantly small, hoping he won’t realize I am there. I tell myself if I stare at the table hard enough, he won’t come near me or talk to me or anything. The bowl is white porcelain with a forest green trim of leaves. There is a chip on the opposite end of where my fork lays. The tablecloth has a slight yellowish tinge right next to my bowl, probably the remnants of my brother’s careless eating. But unfortunately, I can’t become small enough. He pinches my nipple as he walks by and I cringe. He does this with every round he takes, and I shrink lower and lower in my chair, hoping, praying he’ll stop. And he does stop, but not in the way I want. He stops walking, but continues to touch me. He stands there, leering at me and asks if I think we’ll get caught. This is just a game to him, this is just fun; seeing my terror and my pain amuses him…arouses him. His question quickly becomes very important as my grandmother rounds the bend and sees him stepping away from me. Suspicions arise in her mind as she asks me if he had been touching me. I look into her eyes, and then quickly glance away…right into his. I see the warning in his eyes, the reminder of the threat he’d issued when it all started. I look down and tell her that he was just fixing my hair, the first of many lies.
The muffled sound of my footsteps in the freshly fallen snow synchronizes with the rapid beat my heart involuntarily plays as you fall into step with me. We walk together in a profound silence that says everything mere words do not have the power to express. The darkness that protected and enclosed us from the rest of the world slowly starts to fade. Reality is dawning on us and there is no escaping it. The world is catching up to us, and the magic is slipping away. But at least, for now, we are invincible. As the horizon momentarily hovers on the brink of an explosion, we stand at the edge of an infinite nothingness. I feel as though we’ve been here before; as though we’ll be here always. I feel eternity surround us: just you and me locked together in time. As rosy little Dawn paints us a masterpiece, I look over at you and find those beautiful eyes staring into all that I am. All of forever lies, hidden among the shadows of your eyes and, for once, forever doesn’t seem so bad.
stilltiedupinsomethingtrue asked: i wanted to submit something from my blog, but wasn't sure which to pick. They're both based on memories. I'd really appreciate it if you could please pick and post one for me!! :)
1) http://stilltiedupinsomethingtrue.tumblr.com/post/3996720506/i-wrote-this-a-year-and-a-few-months-ago-right
2) http://stilltiedupinsomethingtrue.tumblr.com/post/3139575077/the-muffled-sound-of-my-footsteps-in-the-freshly
Both are really good pieces of writing, the first painted a really vivid picture and I could feel your pain.
The second is amazing and is full of clever imagery.
I think i’ll reblog both, they are both very good :)
A
At the age of nine I sat atop a hill and planned the world. Oh, how poor a plan it must have been, and how sickening those denizens that wrecked it. I speak now bearded; just beard and I sit here, the boy of nine long gone. We speak in contempt, my beard most of all.
Let us revisit this beauteous plan of mine just once more. The sheer mass of it and the vigor with which I inflated it and the height to which my plans would rise and the view I would have so elevated had filled me with such joy. They being so very tall, I being so very small, thus the wonder I would feel looking down upon them all. They would have been ants and I king and queen.
Yet I did not intend to ride my plan into the heavens to rule. I, ever the young scientist, wished to pioneer my own field of study. It was anthropological by nature, perhaps reverse-astronomy. I, the heavenly body, would look down upon humanity. I would pass judgment silently in my journals. I would be with the stars, we fellows studying anthronomy.
Yes, this was my dream, and oh the joy burst from my boyhood at the very thought of my forthcoming ventures. I, Boy, to be a Darwin, a Newton, a Freud, a Galileo, any of them, lesser known or greater; the very idea stroked my ego and it purred. It purred and I did nurse my ego and it grew and it soon walked and talked and came to fruitful adulthood. To be great, to contribute to the continuous academic motion of information in humanity (let us call it the Thought), this is what consumed my youth.
I was not undeserving, either. I studied and studied and read and observed and gathered and analyzed and studied until my psyche demanded periods of nothingness. Even then, I rarely obliged. When I did it was not of my own consent but at the behest of certain Concerned Individuals which do not at this moment require names. I had strong work ethic fueled by desire, by knowing, by ego. Atop my hills I’d perch, notebook and instrument in hand. I’d observe and record and repeat until my eyes were weary. Steeped in dirt and thought I’d wander home and there I’d find a book. Then I would return to cycle one, reading and studying to build foundation, then analyzing and questioning to construct my Thinks.
Tiresome, dangerous, strange they all said. I saw no issues until one instance in which my eyes had fainted and bled. This was shortly before my particular Think which would lead to the planning which now brings bitter sorrow. None of the Concerned would leave me alone, so I gave way and rested a bit. Yet ego and desire and knowing stirred and soon I was rising on hot air just as the plan should have. Up on the air I coasted, my body forcing recovery, back to my hills. This was the most hectic week of all, for I was observing for the particular Think.
Yet all of this sounds as though I were not enjoying. I did indeed enjoy every moment of this said week, as I collected such fascinating data. This was also the week in which I perfected my instrument. My instrument, my darling, my lover! Polyscope I had called her. She was not new, not ground breaking, but she was mine. She had all I needed to see the specimen in all the different ways I could. Binoculars, trinoculars, telescope, spectroscope, kaleidoscope, prisms; all of these were within my polyscope, all accessible at the turn of a crank. That cold brass contained many tools useless to me, but I was always prepared and in that she had kept me warm.
See now how the haze of nostalgia so quickly sweeps in over me? See how my eyes sit glazed at the thought of her? I must not embellish in such detail. This is a history of the plan and Thinks, not an encyclopedia of the Boy, Man, and Beard.
Now where was I in this tale? Ah, yes, Then was where I was.
My body trembled with joy (or weakness, depending on whom you ask) as I sat atop my hills this week. Insight was rampant among the chambers of my mind. I understood “human”, I saw how they greeted, laughed, cried, spoke. I saw…and wrote and sketched and grand it was. In the soil of my pages I had planted seed and out had grown the beginnings of what would be The Human Tree. What a collection! I remember thinking. Surely it was one for the Thought. Surely we could go through with the plan. Surely all was well, surely the purring ego would soon roar with its belly swelled from swallow of greatness.
Just as surely, it would not. It is a fact I have accepted that in accepting my own facts I often reject that they may become fiction. I speak not of The Human Tree. Oh, no, deep rooted that glory remained. I speak of the plan. The plan had failed me.
It should be made entirely clear to all that in no way had I caused failure. The plan was in no way flawed. The plan was perfection. Yet every fool who thinks too much into such a word will surely question the meaning of perfection. And so the Concerned did question, and as if the word were some anagrammatic puzzle to them, they offered a solution to me. They came out with “insanity”. It does not take a man of many letters to see that “perfection” does not in any way become “insanity”. Indeed, it only takes a man of twenty-six letters to see their falsity, and so I know all who read this will stand with me.
“Insane…absolutely…sick…on hills…wasting…the body…tired…fixed.” This is what I heard when the Concerned had approached me. I focused in on but one word from the set, “fixed.” This word was the needle. This was the word that would burst my joy, burst my plan, and then proceed to sew up the remains into the bearded Frankenstein creation that writes. This was the word that sentenced me. The men in the uniforms and their sedatives were the periods- nay, the gloating exclamation points- that finished that sentence.
Æ
“Taken away”, yes, I suppose, one could put it that way. It does seem to evoke a rather negative feeling. Negative events tend to do that, though, so it matters not what name it is given. I was gone from all things. Well, not all, but all that I loved. No observation to be done there, no data to be gathered. They even took my polyscope, said I needn’t such a toy there. A toy! My instrument a toy? I suppose all my Thinks were just the result of a child playing pretend then? No, the Concerned did not understand, and the Thinks were thus condemned, and I isolated.
They did leave me my books. Knowledge to sustain me, to keep my brain from growing weak. I could still learn more; I could still devise Thinks. It would be good practice, working in strict theoretical terms. Oh and it was. I was allowed my journals as well, so I had my records. And I continued to record based on thought. I may have been driven but I was never impatient. Testing could wait until this “fixing” was done. I had all the time now to devise better hypotheses, better tests.
“Gruff…snort…crazy…snarl”, the men in white would bark. “Woof…ruff ruff… arf arf…meal time.” I suppose it does not make sense that they would say thus, and my memory of the “fixing” is a bit rough (ruff ruff), but this is what I heard. And if we must ignore the voices of evil for the benefit of all, ignoring the true speech of these burly hell-spawned beings is no crime at all.
On it went, these primal noises and terrible meals and I reading to escape. I, ever hopeful, began to feel never hopeful. I had read through all I could. I had constructed two Thinks, I was not particularly proud of either, and I could not test regardless. I could feel my once toned mind in danger of fading to the strength of muscle found in a calf raised for veal. So I moped and doodled and thought as hard as I could, fighting to stay keen.
Then, an idea struck me hard on the head.
No, the man in white had struck me. That was it.
“Bark woof… Move along… ruff bark!” I thought he said.
I snarled back and received an odd look and another conk and then I shuffled forward because the pain and thought rushing at me was quite overwhelming. The thought though! My brain was safe from laze. I would study the men in white. Animals though they seemed, they were men. Human they, branches of The Human Tree, the glorious Think that I had not yet bore. They were seemingly unique, too, and my days on the hills had provided data that had made individuality among men so rare, so mythic. I was intrigued and indeed this began a long study, longer than any, other than I, would have liked.
So went days and so went months and so went a year or three and I was studying and my mind was sharp and oh the joy was back. I was youth and the ego napped happily in the warmth of my observance. These men were so brute in manner and thought. Sympathy was rarely present, yet they worked in a position where they were supposed to care for others. They did not. They hardly cared for each other at all.
In fact, subject one (I was calling him Bark at this point), often stole subject two’s (Woof, when I thought of him) lunch. Outside my confinement area and its white (so dull a white I had never seen, nor known possible) walls was a bench on which Woof always placed a tin lunch box. When his break came about, Woof lumbered out to use the restroom, and Bark lumbered in. His nostrils would flare as he caught whiff of the lunch.
“Shhhhh crazy, you didn’t see nothing,” the oaf would say. His speech made me cringe. He would then eat and I would cringe even more when the gobs of food fell into his already dirtied red beard.
Soon Woof would come, wondering where his lunch had gone. He, somehow managing to be even less competent than Bark, would always fall for the same little trick.
“Crazy took it,” snarled Bark, near microscopic bits of food escaping his mouth, “I saw ‘em do it.” Woof would never doubt his oafish friend. And so the ogre would open the door to my holding and beat upon me. Though my brain was saved from veal-like muscular fading, my body was not, and so I was quite easily bruised. As this happened more and more I’d learn where to cover and how to take the punishment in the most efficient way. As this happened more and more Bark learned to laugh harder and more easily sneak the bits of stolen lunch he’d set aside for later.
On the bright side, as this happened more and more my blood began to brighten the dull white walls and break up the monotony of my surroundings the way Woof broke up the bridge of my nose.
