star-spun

[star-spun]

She wishes she was like him sometimes.

Always smarter, stronger, braver. Even just braver would’ve been enough. Bravery was the best of him- always holding it together for the rest of the world, soothing others through his own miseries, his failures of health, his surgeries. The failures of some surgeries.

His suit is a little worn, held together by willpower and a deft needle. The thread he used isn’t quite the right colour, its cotton darker than the corduroy brown. He’s had a rough few weeks. The medical bills pile up quickly in this country. He won’t let her help. Looking at him makes her want to beg.

There’s a dullness in his eyes that she hasn’t seen since they were children, a comatose glaze that still brings back memories of sticky summer mornings and the pointed silence of the backyard swingset. Vacant, crystal orb brown, and the pursed set of his lips. It’s his resigned face. She didn’t quite understand when they were younger, but she does now. Their mother’s lips used to purse the same way every time bad news came. Her poor, broken son.

There’s the sound of construction in the background. It feels almost disrespectful. She’s glad he can’t hear it. 

Slowly, he bends and lays down the freshly picked lilacs. Gently, with care, like the act is sacred. 

And he looks and looks and looks. She only looks at him. He’s all she can stand to look at. 

One day, she will be braver. She will be like him. She will.

But as the sand falls over the casket, she’s seven years old again, and her brother is bleeding from both ears. She slips her hand softly into his.

He tugs back like a fish caught on a line. Their fingers intertwine. And there is nothing left to say.

#writing #writers on tumblr #spilled ink #mine #deaf #death #tw death

[star-spun]

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost

#robert frost #poetry

[star-spun]

11:11, the text comes in. Make a wish.

The notification lights up the room the hue of shameful late night youtube bingeing, the fairy lights above the bed sad and pale. It feels exposing as surgical lights, and she wants to claw her skin off.

She's not religious. Not really superstitious either. Neither of them are. But her... she has her own little superstitions. Right sock before the left. No wearing red on game days. Wishes made at 11:11 come true.

She's not superstitious.

I did.

But she is hopeful. And a little pathetic, when it comes to this one girl.

!!! don't tell me or it won't come true ok ly gn

If only she could tell her. Would things be different? Could anything really make a difference?

She's not superstitious. But she waits up in bed night after night for that one text. And she always makes a wish.

And it's always the same one.

#love #writing #writers on tumblr #spilled ink #superstition #unrequited love #mine

[star-spun]

How do you learn not to apologise?

I'm sorry I lashed out. Was too harsh. Overreacted. How do you learn not to apologize for the feelings you show? How do you learn to tell the difference if maybe, maybe, maybe this time it was valid to feel those things?

Even if you could, you'd apologize anyways. Even if you knew you were justified. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. I'm sorry I said these things. Overreacted, overreacted, overreacted.

Because the moment you accept it, the moment you use the word yourself, you're just a girl who overreacted. But if you don't, then you overreact. Overreacted, overreact. And only one of those is in the past tense.

And tense matters, doesnt it? The sun is a star. The sun was a star yesterday. The sun will be a star tomorrow. The sun is a star, from the beginning of its days till death rips the present tense from its cold, burnt up corpse.

The sun is a star. It's first grade grammar: universal truths are always in present tense.

The sun is a star. And in the same tense: She's crazy, they say. Another present tense, another universal truth. Bitches be crazy. And that present tense stitches itself onto your feet like a shadow clinging to the image every time they look at you.

So you apologise. You don't know how not to.

It's okay, they say. Everyone has bad days.

It hadn't been a bad day. You'd done your laundry. You'd made pasta for lunch.

Thank you for understanding, you type back. And the disgust wraps around you a little harder, hurting, nauseating, squeezing another apology right back to your fingertips and ready to go.

You won't need it. Not for a long time. It'll be a long time before your self control cracks enough again to let you even express a negative emotion. You won't let yourself have a reason to apologise.

But again, when have you ever needed a reason?

#apologies #sorry #writing #writers on tumblr #spilled ink #mine #women

[star-spun]

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

— Oscar Wilde.

#not mine #quotes #oscar wilde #books #literature

[star-spun]

The world was tinted in the ochre hues of a storm, air electrified and alight with the scent of its onset. Black clouds rumbled at the horizon, rolling in slowly, and the last slipping rays of a dying sun were obscured entirely, drizzle turning to downpour and atmosphere darkening ominously as if in warning- all very appropriately dramatic, if a tad bit late. It would have been, he thought with morbid carelessness, far more satisfying to behold just a few hours earlier. 

But it had been blazing sunshine that he had seen dance on her fair skin, lighting up the much admired red hair that had always been so fascinating to all who beheld it. It glistened darker in its dampened state, encircling like a halo the pretty face on which the last remnants of a teasing smile still lingered. A nymph of the water, immortal and unattainable. 

It was with a twinge of regret that he thought it, but the girl they would find would have been stripped of her deadly charm, skin inflicted with a fatal pallor. Her body would be bloated and waterlogged, unrecognisable but for that revered red hair, no longer rivalled in its rich hue by the blood that bloomed on her white cotton frock- something a schoolgirl might wear, the picture of innocence. No, the river would have washed her away in every sense of the word. Nobody else would get to see her like this but him- more beautiful than he had ever seen her before.

But perhaps, he thought, that was the point.

#writing #writers on tumblr #spilled ink #mine #dark academia #from the archives

[star-spun]

She can see them even with her eyes open- two shadows woven by moonlight and cast into the rough hewn terrace tiles. Spinning, slowly spinning, soft music filling the night sky, wine drunk laughter in her ear like a secret clinging to the breeze. She had watched the shadows as it happened, long pianists fingers weaving into her own. Fairy lights braided into soft brown hair, brushing against her nose. Their single misshapen shadow on the cracked granite tiles. A single, giddy thought: set in stone. We’re set in stone.

The longing fills up her chest till it hurts, the ghost of the memory filling up her lungs and her heart and her eyes till she wants to scratch it out with her fingernails. The ghosts are everywhere, straggling on the edge of every waking thought in wisps she couldn't quite get a hold of. Misshapen shadows, lingering. They stall her footsteps and hold her frozen on the last stair.

One day, she will lay these ghosts to rest.

But today, she turns on her heel. The shame bites, but the pain would have drawn blood.

And along the terrace railings, her unwatered azaleas wither a little more.

#from the archives #love #heartbreak #writing #writers on tumblr #mine #spilled ink

[star-spun]

summer oranges in a cracked tile balcony

I'm not good at eating oranges But I sit to sometimes anyways On the floor with the day's news spread out at my feet Bitten down nails clawing apart its rough skin I peel off every strand of white That coats it like spider silk And split each slice open at the top Like a dicot in a lab, waiting to be analysed; and with the same gentleness

Take out each seed I fear to hold them between my teeth Fear the bitterness they hold and Fear that I cannot help biting down anyways

Its juice is all over my fingers now It’s been an hour since I sat  I have not yet gotten to eating

I’m not good at eating oranges But I sit to sometimes anyways To feel it wash the taste of blood from my mouth And watch how it stains my hands The colour of sunlight 

#poetry #writing #oranges #perfectionism #mine

[star-spun]

they see you on the floor with your eyelids decaying like crumbling sedimentary deposits and they reprimand with worry, 'you work too much. you've made it your god'. and frayed nerve endings process the thought- maybe. maybe i have. but it doesn't ring wholly true. you've never been religious. you wish you were sometimes, like your mother before you, because she was diseased the same way, and her god saves her. she works and she works and she smiles and she believes and every day, it saves her. but work was never your god, because you never believed you could be saved- not by anyone, not by yourself, not even by your work, really.

work was never your god, work was your worship.

worship isn't meant to save you. worship is meant to tear you apart. the act of devotion is the act of giving yourself up entirely. devotion is torture. devotion is ripping tears into your soul with no promise of any god- no, with more, with no expectation of any god that cares.

"why do you work yourself to death-" faith answers to no logic. faith cannot be helped. faith should not be helped. if it could, it wouldn't be faith. it is eating me alive. it is all i am.

i am diseased with devotion.

#religion #writing #writers on tumblr #spilled ink #creative writing #mine