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A Guide To Exploring Cemeteries

If you remember one thing, remember respect. It does not take kindly to being slighted. 

Always go when the sun is high. There’s a reason they close the gates to the cemetery at night.

Go in a group or go alone, it doesn’t matter. If you offend it there’s no group large enough to save you.

If you must examine the headstones, remember it’s rude to gawk. 

Never, ever touch a gravestone unless you wish to stay forever. The statues had to get there somehow, after all. 

You will see mausoleums carved into the hillside that seem to house something more than mere human remains. Whatever you do, keep walking. It’s still rude to gawk. 

Don’t go too close to the creek. If you see the gravestones leaning towards it, that means it’s hungry. It’ll eat you too if you’re not careful. 

You might see wild raspberries growing in the brambles by the path. Do not eat them. They’re not for you. 

Cemetery birds will not balk at your passing by. They won’t get out of your way, so go around them. If you scare one you will regret it. 

If you get tired, you may sit and rest. Do not linger, and never fall asleep. If you fall asleep it won’t let you wake up. 

Don’t trust anyone you didn’t come in with, especially not the wardens. They’re too far gone, you cannot help them. 

It will pull you in, urging you to go just a bit further up the path, just a little deeper into it’s home. It’s okay to entertain it for a little while, but never overstay your welcome. You’ll know if you do.

The deer is the only warning you’ll get to turn back. Remember, it’s rude to gawk. Simply tip your hat and turn around. 

Take nothing, save for pictures if you must. If you leave something behind, do not go back for it. It wants to make you stay too long. Do not let it. 

You may feel a heaviness come over you as you leave through the gates. This means it’s taken a liking to you. Be extra cautious if you come again, because it’ll want to keep you next time. 

#gothic writing #gothic #eerie #eerie vibes #spooky #graveyard #graves #cemetery #rural cemetery #a guide #mine #my writing #this post was brought to you by my walk through the local cemetery today #as well as by that one abandoned churches post

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Storytelling girl, 

Girl who’d sit with magazines and make up stories in your head about the pretty pictures

Girl whose plotlines of figurines and dolls sprawled all over the basement floor

Girl who’d read so many stories she couldn’t help but make up her own

Storytelling girl, where’d you go?

Artistic girl,

Girl whose drawings covered her room, piles upon paperfulls covering every surface

Girl who’d craft and sculpt and create out of random supplies just for the joy of it

Girl who’d never pass up a chance to make something new with her hands

Artistic girl, where’d you go?

Musical girl,

Girl who’d take pride in learning the piano, small fingers clumsily working the keys

Girl who’d dance loudly and proudly when presented with music and a dance floor

Girl who’d sing whenever she was given the chance to raise her voice

Musical girl, where’d you go?

Modern girl, 

Girl who doesn’t sing much anymore, hearing nothing but flaws when she opens her mouth

Girl who doesn’t have the time to create art she doesn’t like to look at anyways

Girl who doesn’t read stories anymore, much less bring them to life

Modern girl, how much have you lost?

#childhood #girlhood #coming of age #personal #mine #poetry #spilled poetry #spilled ink #spilled emotions #my writing #growing up

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tell me this: if we had met

in another time, in another life

would it be as difficult to love you?

I think of you and the mourning doves

as evening falls on red bricks and broad green leaves

green and gold spread out for our delight

in another time, I would hold your hand in mine

in another life, I would lay beside you

bodies entwined on the soft green grass

gazing at the passing clouds, or perhaps

looking into your eyes, the very shade

of golden light on fruitful soil

both of them boundless and infinite

in another time, in another life

as the sky put on its evening gown

floaty lavender-grey and pastel pink

if you turned and said to me

“it’s beautiful,” maybe I’d reply

“and you are too”

but we are not beings of only golden evenings

in this time, in this life

I have no right to your hand in mine

long before me, you offered a withered rose

and with it, your heart to another

and they took it and hold it to this day

in this time, in this life

I have grown well-acquainted with self-denial

with biting my tongue, and swallowing down

the words I wish I could say to you

I sate myself with thoughts and fantasies

and fond memories of moments spent with you

I love you in the little ways I can

the raspberries, the walking home at night

but I would never dare to do more than little things

in this time, in this life

I believe they are your other half

truly, I do—they are matched to you

they answer what you need in a way I cannot

the two of you are happy with the way things are

and because I love you, I want to see you happy

how could I ever dream of taking that away from you?

but even so, tell me this:

in another time, in another life

if it was just the two of us and no one else

might I lay down beside you then?

#yearning #wlw yearning #sapphic longing #unrequited pining #unrequited love #romanticism #romantic academia #mine #poetry #spilled poetry #spilled ink #spilled emotions #personal

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#not mine #but very well said nonetheless #I write more in my head than I will ever put down

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Being a student in an all girls private academy. Studying hard in the library and sitting across from one of your classes. Neither of you have talked much because one ‘wow she’s so pretty’ and two ‘how would I even be able to strike a conversation with her’. Yet those points don’t matter after a while, and you two are perfectly happy with studying together in the library despite not talking.

Until one day your looking for a book when the bell suddenly rings and you scramble to get your books because you don’t want to be late to your extracurriculars after school. You hardly notice the fact that your study mate has already left and throw your things into your bag, not knowing that she’s hiding behind one of the bookshelves and hoping you read the small note in your notebook. The one you find once you sit down to do your assignments. The one you can’t stop thinking about because you recognize her writing and the words hint at something you hope to be interest.

So you come back the next day and instead of sitting at the same table you usually do, you scavenge for the book she’s written on the note. Which starts your back and forth. It doesn’t take long for you to realize that her specific directions lead to quotes in books around the library. Quotes that act like conversations, poems, love letters— although the latter you aren’t sure of— you’re sure her friends have talked about guys more than once. You don’t get your hopes up, but nevertheless jump to the chance of having some form of communication with her.

It’s fleeting as time passes. It’s yearning. It’s somehow pain and beauty and heartbreak. You see her more often in the halls, on the field, in the cafeteria. Ironically less so in the library, where you feel things are most intimate. Where you both trade notes directing each other on a scavenger hunt, and you hope that the treasure won’t shatter your heart into pieces. You find yourself checking out books to scour for the perfect quote. The one line to tell her, scream to her, your feelings. But there’s a dam in your heart and you wonder if this will end in a way where your feelings spill like a flood through your eyes instead of your lips. Instead of coursing through your veins and giving you the courage to just reach for her once. And not let her slip away.

You think it will end soon, you hear her friends mummer about that weekend, about going out of town to meet people. No doubt guys. It almost compels you to walk past the library doors. But you can’t. This afternoon, something tugs you through the doors, back to the table you two first officially met at. You see a small envelope with your name written in neat writing.

Directions. This time, to the furthest corner of the library, the section no student goes to. You go anyway, with your heart hammering in your eardrums. Not because you fear any ghost that may be rumoured to reside there. No, you fear something much greater. Much more tangible.

She stands there in front of the window. Her hands are glued behind her back as she nervously fidgets with the dark curtains behind her. ‘It’s the colour of mourning.’ She says under her breath when you look at the other curtains, soft reds and lilacs. Her knuckles are white and you audibly try to swallow your nerves, not understanding the vagueness of her words.

But this is the first time she’s ever spoken to you and by god it sounds like heaven to your ears. You’re unsure as to why your heart jumps at her tone, hasn’t she talked like this to anyone else? Perhaps you don’t remember properly.

Your relationship had been built on words until now, it is the one thing you could trust when it came to her. She had a way to make your heart flutter it seemed (was it really going to end so soon?). This afternoon however, as the sun shines directly through the crystalline glass, you realize that quotes from authors and poets won’t convey how she looks under the light.

There’s a moment hesitation, you notice the deep breath she takes as she closes her eyes. You can’t even muster a word before she takes the step forward and her lips crash against yours.

The kiss is messy and awkward. Yet the sparks shoot through your body fry your brain, and you don’t think about anything at all when you wrap your arms around her. In this moment, words won’t convey— will never convey— what you’re feeling, what she’s feeling, and what blooms from the relationship built on notes tucked in notebooks.

#not mine #yearning #can I get a romance like this please? #this was too beautifully written to not rb

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On Dawn and Darkness

Content Warnings: this piece discusses feelings of gender confusion and questioning, but could also be read as feelings of generally questioning one’s identity.

“It’s like dawn coming up,” they said. They told me how it felt to them like their inner world was illuminated by degrees, a slow dawning realization that the lines that had been drawn around them all their life didn’t fit them quite right anymore, so that by the time they stood in the full light of the day it was a simple thing to be free of those lines and start redrawing them on their own terms. It was a gradual thing, a peaceful thing; though it was certainly not easy in a world that lives and dies by immutable lines, the realization did not cause them undue distress. 

Their words struck at something deep within me that night, though it took me a while to realize what it was. “Dawn coming up;” they’re exactly right, that’s exactly what it’s like, except to me the lightening sky in my inner world is the sickly shade of blue on the horizon at an hour of the morning one only sees having been up all night, that harbinger of deadlines and a reminder of too much lost sleep. Each passing day, each degree lighter, fills me with dread and foreboding. I finally see in shades of grey the cracks in the lines and walls the world has built around me, no longer watertight against the great unknown beyond. I have nowhere to hide as the sun rises higher, nowhere to run, no way to avoid it. 

And just like the sunrise after too long spent awake, the change is slow, the change is incremental, but it is inevitable. Would that I could claw the sun from the sky, would that I could grab hold of that flaming disc and wrench it back down below the horizon. I would return to the darkness that I have always known, patch the cracks and ignore the seams. But no might of mine can slow the sun in its rise, no strength of mine can budge it from its path. I can only sit in my crumbling castle and watch as it demands to be acknowledged. It’s this, I think, that scares me most: no matter how fluid and ever-changing people say the lines around us can be, there is still a sense of finality to breaking them down. When those bricks eventually crumble and collapse to the floor, I will have loosed something I cannot put back, leaving me with a pencil and some mortar to try and create something new in its place.

But who am I to wield a pencil anyways? What is the use of light to someone fumbling in darkness their whole life? The sunrise makes me notice things I didn’t before, things I do not doubt as fact, but their explanation is up for debate, and debate it I do. I talk in circles, I cleave in two; half of me surges ahead towards what is becoming clearer and clearer is the truth, half of me pulls me back towards what I have always known. I try to shove the arguers aside but I can still hear their yells no matter what I do to tune them out. God knows I was always terrible at knowing what I want, knowing how I feel; it is my curse to always be in tune to others but never to myself. It makes perfect sense that I should struggle with this, but knowing why I am in turmoil doesn’t make the rough seas any easier to sail. 

And all this happens as the world keeps turning and the sun rises higher and higher. I cower and cling to the shadows where I can, but the web of cracks in the walls keeps getting more and more intricate and I soon have nowhere to hide. I can only try to reconcile what I can, to have a plan for when the sun reaches zenith and the light of the day is fully upon me. On that day, will I be able to stand up on my own terms, and set about drawing a new set of lines? Or will I kneel there, cowering under the relentless light of the sun, the voices still yelling in my head even as my walls crumble and fall around me?

#gender questioning #gender confusion #prose poetry #spilled ink #my writing #mine #personal #original writing #gender crisis #spilled poetry #spilled prose #spilled emotions

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Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog! This is my writeblr, which I’ll mainly be using to post original work. It’ll probably be primarily a mix of poetry and shorter prose pieces, but there may also be excerpts from longer works (if I can ever find the time to make them, that is). 

For those who would like help navigating, there’s a guide to my tagging system under the cut. Otherwise, feel free to explore! My askbox is always open if you have a response to one of my works, a prompt you want me to answer, or anything else, so don’t be shy: I love hearing from people! 

Anyways, enjoy!

Tagging System Guide:

Tags for my work:

#mine: all posts made by me have this tag

#my writing: indicates post was made by me and is a writing piece

#prose, #poetry, etc: describe what kind of writing a work is

#personal: indicates a work deals with my personal life. These are okay to reblog unless stated otherwise. 

#prompt fill: indicates a work is a response to a writing prompt, which will typically be included with the work.

Any relevant content warnings will be stated at the top of the post and tagged.

Works will also carry subject-specific tags and other writing-related tags

Tags for other posts:

#mine: post was made by me but may not be a writing piece

#not mine: post was not made by me

#writer’s process: for works I put a lot of work into, and/or works people want to learn more about, I may make separate posts detailing my inspirations and writing process that have this tag.

#writing prompt: prompt I am saving for later but am not responding to immediately.

Content warnings will be treated the same as on my own work if the post is made by me, they will only be tagged if the post is reblogged. 

Subject-specific and writing-related tags will still be present

This guide isn’t set in stone, my tagging system may change as my blog evolves, in which case I’ll update this list. 

#intro-post #mine #writeblr #writers on tumblr