All this is by way of saying that if love is a state for which no language is ever adequate, yet we keep falling in love and writing about it anyway, then each of us, in our private feelings, resembles a poem waiting for its translator, like a lover who waits for a lover on the steps of a bank or somewhere municipal, knowing how pale and approximate any discussion of feelings will finally be, despite the original’s undeniable power. The nonsensical, or phatic — defined by Jakobson as that which lifts the fish through the ice then gives it nothing to breathe — has perhaps been too little esteemed in translation, or anywhere else: for though I am no O’Hara, just being with you I manage to feel elevated, a trainful of Russians passing over Manhattan, happy to gesture or shout or merely grasp.
— Rodney Koeneke, from “Toward a Theory of Translation”
themotherofcivilization asked: our lives are boring let's move somewhere warm
omg i feel so important i’ve never gotten a message before lolol! i think the best solution is to move to north korea, they’re threatening to blow some shit up and i think we should get behind them. omg totes gonna publish this to feel cool
OH HEY LOOK MY HAIR IS SHORT AGAIN AND IT LOOKS BETTER
HELLO LADIES
she asked me when i find time to be with god and i needed to ask, when do you find time to be with yourself? when do you appreciate the loneliness that comes with being alive, the solitude of being the only you on this planet? what can god tell me that i cannot tell myself? i would much rather be with myself than an asomatous figure who has given me no sign of knowing anything more than i do. i have no questions for god, i have questions for myself, and i plan on answering them tangibly. there is no need to rely on someone who supposedly thought my sins were bad enough to die for when i can rely on myself, on believing in happiness and occasional emptiness. god doesn’t make me laugh daily, i do! why justify my existence on a maybe imagined man entity when every breath i take is a justification of myself? i am here and alive and i will do with this life what i want, and i will trust myself to tell me what that is. my actions will be good because i want them to be, i will be happy because i want to be, and i will exist because i say so.
i want to love you but not
in a cinematic way where
you chase me through decades
until i am convinced of your
forever devotion. our love
will be quiet & serene,
there won’t be fireworks unless
we make them ourselves.
so this is how it works. or sometimes doesn’t work. you fall in love and devote a portion of yourself to him and begin to believe that he is a part of you, that you were made for him and he for you, and these feelings are unique and once in an eternity. you write words that seem to have created only for you to describe your love for him, and sometimes you write things mainly because they sound poetic and lovely, not because you feel so deeply. you begin to forget life without him and grow accustomed to relying on him for happiness, affirmation, and even self worth. you are nothing without him, because you were made for each other. you are the only one for him.
and then you’re not. the bottom drops out of your very existence and for weeks, you cannot breathe. he has stolen your air, your very existence, the ground on which you stand. he is gone and you paint your eyelids black because you feel as though colors do not, should not exist without him. rings of dirt around your bathtub because every day you wash away one more layer of yourself. your grandmother calls but she is decades away waiting for you to be born—because you were never actually alive in this lifetime. at night you rise above yourself and watch the emptiness expand as more of yourself is lost through tears and confusion and loneliness and other cliches that you never thought would apply to your life. you know that you should be stronger than this, you were never this barbie doll of a person. but suddenly you are, and you are so consumed by plastic thoughts that it is not worth it to find a way out.
and then one day you are okay. you speak to a woman weekly who tells you that you are brave and meaningful and important. you have one defining moment where you fall in love with your own existence all over again. except him, because he no longer exists. you leave the house, you call your friends. you feel positive-neutral about the future, most of the time. you make decisions, you speak sentences where the first and last words are not “him.” you rediscover a boy nothing like “him,” and you think about feelings. you consider romance. you begin to believe again, in a more practical way. you kiss him and try oh so hard not to lose your newly found self.
painting the walls of my innards a shade of independence but not redwhiteblue because i am learning to need things on my own and not because of my gender or the place i may call home. filling myself with an ocean of regrets that don’t make sense but only full in a way of not knowing what else i should feel. the sky of my stomach is the color of a faded photograph discovered in the basement of confusion and apprehension, every feeling comes through my stomach so strongly that it threatens to secede from my union every single day, and the most resilient pushing against me is the need to write and create and explain my existence to every being encountered. i am apathetic about so many instances but every morning when i awake there is a poem in my head that pushes against my eyelids the way i imagine created colors and senses push against the perpetually closed lids of a blind man. and i peel words off like the gunk in the corners of my eyes but as usual my viscera is bright red and there is a feeling of mediocrity that pushes much too hard against my skin.
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