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#this song belongs to wax figures you can’t change my mind
madguth · 2 years
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Say, do you remember?
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papergardener · 6 years
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After the craziest Dia de los Muertos he’s ever experienced, a very sleepy Hector wanders home to sleep, but there’s people in Shantytown too excited to see him again, and ghosts within his lonely little home that he needs to reassure...
(this can be read as a stand-alone)
Going Home
Héctor went slowly as he wound his way through the sleepy back alleys of the Land of the Dead, hoping to be able to make it home without talking to another soul, still reeling from his talk with Imelda at the theater, after the craziest Dia de Los Muertos he had ever experienced, and he had had quite a few wild experiences over the years. Good God, he was tired… But on the plus side- things were great!
Again he paused as a wide smile split his face at the thought of Coco remembering him, the surge of pride for his great-great-grandson, and the incredible hope that he might have another chance with Imelda, something he had long given up hope on. Still, it was hard to think straight or walk straight with the heaviness in his bones. He badly needed sleep. Fortunately, no one paid him any mind and he was careful not to make eye contact, drifting through the dark world like a half-strung marionette. People rarely paid him much attention anyway, with his tattered clothes and gray bones, and while normally that would be somewhat annoying, at that time it was a relief as he tried not to close his eyes too long and risk falling on his face. His relief only grew as he stumbled down the ramp to Shantytown. He made no attempt to call out to the many skeletons who lingered in doorways and walked along the pathways, hoping to slip by unnoticed. Just a little further… “Héctor?” Someone called out. “Is that you?” He jerked his head up, catching sight of a figure approaching. He squinted then smiled wide, waving his hand high overhead. “Ay, Tio! Man, you would not believe what happened to me.” “Is that Héctor?” A woman called out from a nearby shack, peering out a window. He winced and realized it was far too late at night to be shouting. In a lower voice, he said, “Yeah, just me. Sorry, sorry, just gonna head on home—“ “Hey everyone, it’s Héctor!” she shouted, “He’s here!” “Huh?” He stood by, unsure what was happening as others took up the cry, shouting his name and hurrying towards him. Nervously he stepped back, hoping that he wasn’t in trouble again. “Héctor! You’re still here!” “You’re back, I can’t believe it!” “We thought you were gone!” “Uh what… what’s going on?” he asked, looking from one beaming face to another. “We heard about what happened,” one woman said in a low voice. “That you were murdered.” “And almost Forgotten!” “Word is you really were the one who actually wrote de la Cruz's songs." “Of course he was!” An older woman said, glaring at the other skeleton beside her. “You’d know that already if you paid attention.” Héctor felt a small surge of satisfaction, that people were finally believing what he had been saying for so many years. But he wasn’t in the mood to think about it. “Hey, hey, sorry to break this up but I’m really tired,” he said, stepping away and putting his hands up. “I mean really, really tired.” There were groans from the crowd. “Ah, sorry, sorry. We’ll talk later, definitely! But right now, I gotta get some sleep.” “How can you be so sure you’ll still be here?” one man said, peering at him suspiciously. “You could disappear any moment, you already almost did. Might as well spend it with friends, right?” “I'll be all right,” he said, and truly meant it. Or at least felt it. “My daughter remembers me, and with Miguel back in the Living, I won’t be disappearing so soon.” His voice softened, thinking that he still had time when so many others didn’t. With a few more words and assurances he finally pulled himself away from the crowd and to the quiet familiar pathway to his own shack. It was worn-down and old, black against the night sky, but it was home. He pulled open the door and peered into the darkness before sighing in relief. It was empty. He let his body fall slack, his shoulders drooping so low they nearly came off. “Hey amigos,” he said softly, looking over to names carved into the wall, friends he had promised not to forget. “I’m… I’m back.” His bones creaked as he stepped across to the messy bed against the wall. “Been a crazy night… real crazy,” he muttered, hanging his head. “Ay, ay… I’m so tired. Just…” He flopped down onto the crumpled pile of sheets and blankets, and bowed his head, blinking wearily. How was he still so tired after sleeping all day? “I talked to Imelda,” he said abruptly to the empty room, the memory like a shock every time he thought of it. “I mean… we actually talked, and she listened. Can you believe it? After all this time. All these years and... Oh, I, uh, I met my great-great-grandson, weirdly enough. And he’s all right, don’t worry, he’s not here... Oh yeah, turns out I'd been poisoned... God, I was murdered.” The word was still bitter in his mouth. “But I’m all right,” he said reassuringly. “I’m… I’m still here.”
A new wave of exhaustion swept over him, but this time there was a new, uncomfortable feeling of guilt creeping around the edges. He looked up, peering through the darkness to the etched names upon the wall, and then his eyes fell to the ground where he knew a small dagger lay. It was certainly still there because he had held it just that morning, when he thought his time was finally up. A coldness swept through him. That morning he had been sure he was facing his final day of existence, his final chance…
~~~ On the morning of that Dia de los Muertos, he had woken up gasping, staring into complete darkness. Eventually, he made out the faint outlines of the room and only then confirmed to himself that he hadn’t been Forgotten. Not yet. Bringing his hands before his face, he studied them but couldn’t see any of the golden shimmer, but he had felt it. It had been faint, like a sparking undercurrent beneath the old yellow bones. With a sigh, he pulled a knee up to his chest and leaned heavily on it, as weariness threatened to pull him down. His time was finally up. That day would be his last chance to cross the Bridge, his last chance to see his daughter. Sitting there in the dark familiar room, he knew it was more than that. He could feel his own death approaching, like a stalker in the shadows. His minutes were ticking by, and yet he found himself unable to move, but lay half-bent over himself, and thought a hundred half-thoughts, but mostly was tired. Morning light finally began to peak through the cracks in the wall when he rose to his feet, leaning heavily against a wall as he forced himself to wake up. He looked around the one-room shack, half full of rubbish and half-baked plans, with a ratty desk in a corner and an old hammock, worn chairs and cots against the walls. It was far messier than it should have been, and he had to shuffle aside old fabrics and assorted things as he stepped through it. He had let it fall to ruin over the past few years, not bothering to make an effort when he knew his time would be up sooner than later. Yet there was a rationale to the chaos, somewhat, and at the desk he double-checked that his papers were still there, touching the wax paper cover, the twine string.
The top read: for Coco Rivera. Inside it held a letter. It had taken him multiple tries to write it, and in the end, it was one of the shorter versions. He had written how much he loved her, that he had always loved her, how he wished he could have been there for her. How very sorry he was. Beneath the letters were a stack of papers: his songs. Those that he had written in death and were the most important, the dearest to his heart, they would belong to her. If she wished to burn them, that would be her choice. As likely or not they would be burned anyway on some cold night, or be tossed into the surrounding water and would disappear, just like him. He could only hope his words might reach her: that someone would find them, understand, and seek her out. There should have been a letter for Imelda, but he had given up on writing it. Whatever he might give her, she would burn without sparing a glance and he couldn’t bear that. It was her choice to despise him, he had come to terms with it, and there was nothing he could ever do to change it. Would Imelda know or care if he disappeared? Would anyone? He felt a shiver, not quite gold, but almost. He was already so tired… what if he just lay down? Soon, very soon, he would disappear and his old home would once again be empty, a place devoid of even ghosts. Straightening, he looked up and his eyes came to the familar names carved upon the wall, some by his own hand. The last people who had truly cared for him. “This is it, amigos,” he said in a soft voice. “I know what you mean now, about how tired you get. It'd be nice to just sleep, you know? But this is my last chance. I just want to say goodbye to Coco. I have to try, one more time. But I… I don’t think I’m coming back.” The realization hit him just as the words left his mouth, an uncomfortable truth he hadn’t quite faced. He might never step through that door again. Somehow, that made it seem more real. In the thin silence he stepped to the wall and ran his bony fingers along the names, tracing the crooked letters, feeling the small gouges where the one writing had stumbled. He remembered the last one he had written, a decade before, and the unbearable, crushing loneliness that he was left in. He remembered how badly his hands had shaken as he etched the name, one fumbling stroke at a time because even when the rest of the world forgot them, their names proved they had existed. The only name missing... was his own. He took his small knife from his belt, feeling the weight of it in his hand, pressed the chipped edge against his palm, judged it sharp enough, and gripped it tight. He would have to add his own name to their memorial. Somehow, it seemed important. A small, pathetic attempt to tie himself together to his found familia, people he had loved, and who had loved him in return.
He stood there, one hand pressed against the wood, only faintly conscious of the passage of time, and hesitated. He knew he was fading. There was no question. Once Coco forgot him, he would just… fade. Forever. Finally, with a shuddery exhale, he pressed the tip of the dagger to the dark wood and then stopped, breathing hard and rubbing his hand over his face. This was his final chance to have some small part of him remain in that world. It seemed so important and yet, so meaningless. One day the place and the names would rot away or burn up in smoke, and no one would care. He closed his eyes and let his head fall forward, thudding on the wall, and allowed himself to remember their finest moments together, playing and dancing and laughing, the long nights and hot days on the docks looking out over the water. What would they say if they could see him now? A sudden laugh left him and his hand dropped to his side, the knife thudding on the floor. Almost certainly, they would be telling him to not be such a damn idiot, and to go see his daughter. Hell, they’d probably be telling him to go see Imelda as well, but he knew better than to chance that. But he got the message. Enough self-pity. He had to wake up and take advantage of the little time he had left.
"All right, all right, I hear you," he said grinning, then shook himself awake, his bones rattling around. It made him feel more alive, and that was just what he needed. "I'm not gone yet. One more shot at this. Gonna go borrow a dress from Ceci, head over to the bridge, and try something pretty dumb, honestly. If not that, well, I've got a few more options. What's the worst they can do to me, right?" He glanced around at the shabby shack, his home for so many years, full of memories and carrying the names of his friends. Chances are, he would never return. Just before stepping out, his hand lingered on the door, looking back and thought how empty and cold his home looked. And that it would stay that way. “Adiós...” ~~~
Blinking and faintly looking around the dark room, he was again keenly reminded how very, very close he had been to disappearing for good. If he hadn’t met Miguel, if things had gone the slightest bit wrong… “It’s all right, though,” he muttered, both to himself and to the ghosts that weren't there. “Things are… ok. Good, even. Things are good.” He sighed. He was too tired. “I’ll tell you later,” he whispered as he lay down, setting his hat on the floor. “Promise… I just… need to sleep… gotta wake up in time… meet Imelda…” He closed his eyes and was out before his next breath. After so many years he finally had a second chance, he wasn’t going to let it slip by.
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fabermemorialrink · 6 years
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some mistake, part 7
Last part of chapter two! Chowder’s back, and we meet some new friends!
Also, a quick PSA: if I ever screw up with regards to race/gender/sexuality (or anything else), please don’t hesitate to let me know so I can do better! I want everyone to have a positive reading experience. Thanks!!
Chowder’s reaction to Dex bleeding on his shoes was a complex cocktail of fascination and disturbed worry: the cherry on top of a very informative face journey that Derek studied like visual poetry as Dex caught him up to speed. Like Derek, Chowder emphatically refused to stop visiting, which they proved so often that Dex had to kick them out after they skipped a team game night.
More often than not, Derek and Chowder head over to see Dex together, though there are times when one of them is too busy with work to go. Derek loves being part of a trio, but he also appreciates the time he gets to spend with each of his friends individually. Chowder’s roomie is often out and about socializing, so Derek takes to setting up a base camp on C’s floor, where they study and philosophize together. Most questions are open-ended and profound (who would win in a fight, Mr. Rogers or Elmo? would you rather sleep on legos or have a splinter in your tongue?), but the most important question of all cycles back into rotation every few days:
What’s up with Dex and the forest?
Chowder thinks it’s better not to prod, but Derek can’t leave it alone. It’s a secret, but the kind that Dex is willing to entertain guesses about. He archly shoots down Derek’s suggestions that he might be a woodland nymph like the girls, and repeatedly insists that if he had any kind of therianthropy, he would have already shifted and eaten one of Derek’s limbs in annoyance.
It comes up again in conversation when Derek’s helping Dex cut up invasive vines again. Knowing that the forest is alive puts this activity in a new light; Dex tells him that he knows which plants belong to the woods, and which ones the forest considers a threat, so Derek just follows suit and rips out the roots he’s instructed to. There was a lingering uneasiness at the thought of touching the plants again at first, but they’re in the outer ring, where the light filters in, and Dex promises that if anything tries to grab Derek again, he’ll hatchet it right off. Maybe he should be more freaked out, but he can almost feel the truce between himself and the forest now. At the very least, Dex’s presence always makes him feel at ease.
“How’s it going? Not too tough for your delicate poet’s hands, is it?” Dex calls over across the grove. The sleeves of his plaid shirt have been rolled up, and his hatchet and lantern have been put aside next to Derek’s calc homework that Dex was looking over - dangling from the lantern’s wire handle are his crab keychain and a small bottle filled with a rainbow of miniscule origami lucky stars that Chowder gifted him. There’s dirt all over Dex’s knees and hands, but his posture is loose and he seems content. It's a good look for him.
Derek makes an obscene gesture in his direction. Dex wholeheartedly refuses to believe that Derek would ever drop his gloves during a game, citing Derek’s chill masquerade and elegant piano student fingers which would surely shatter on some goon’s cheekbones. Derek’s not big on fighting either, but he resents the implication that he couldn’t at least hold his own to defend his teammates.
“What, you wanna have a go at me?” Dex says with a grin, straightening up to his full height, which is still obnoxiously taller than Derek.
Derek snorts, kicking a clump of roots and dirt toward him. “Don’t go crying to Chowder when I whoop your ass, you skinny bastard.”
“Right, like you wouldn’t trip over your own head while trying to throw a punch. I’m not going to fight you, pretty boy.”
The way he says those words isn’t much different from the Wicked Witch of the West calling Dorothy ‘my pretty,’ but it causes a curl of embarrassment in Derek’s stomach anyway. Dex does this sometimes - calls Derek pretty in that wry tone of his. But it’s not pointedly sarcastic, like the way he gets when he’s intentionally needling Derek about rich people stuff, so Derek is left wondering what it’s supposed to mean. He knows he has nice eyes, and that he’ll hopefully grow into the good facial features he inherited from his parents, but currently, he’s just kind of plain, and full of teenage awkward. Nothing close to pretty.
Still, when Dex says it with a hint of smile Derek’s dumb guts do a strange twisting thing where he thinks they might turn inside out, accompanied by a tightness in his chest from being put on the spot. Not chill. But it's probably good for him to get it out of his system now, in preparation for the far future when someone really does compliment him so he doesn't look like a total loser.
Still, it always gives him a second of pause, throwing a hiccup into his thought process and leaving him scrambling for words, like now. “Are you a witch?” he winds up asking, apropos of nothing, still stuck on the thought of Dex zooming around on a broomstick and cursing young girls from Kansas.
“Am I a witch,” Dex repeats, raising an eyebrow. Derek almost goes to change the subject, then thinks on it a moment, and decides he actually does want to hear the answer to this.
“Yeah, or a wizard? Or whatever the preferred terminology is.”
Dex’s brow wrinkles, and he shakes his head like Derek is a particularly foolish child. “I’m not a witch, Nursey. Where’d you get that idea from?”
“Never mind. Are you a cryptid?”
“What-”
“Animals or creatures known only through anecdotal evidence, like the sasquatch, or-”
“I know what a fuckin’ cryptid is, you dope, but I’m not some kind of goat man-”
Derek chuckles at the expression Dex is sporting. He looks utterly offended. “I was thinking more like the Dover Demon? Glowing orange eyes, weird-ass hands…”
“You’re dead to me,” Dex laughs. And he pointedly ignores Derek for the next ten minutes until Derek literally jumps on him. He successfully catches him, arms wrapped tight around Derek’s middle, but keels over when his knees give out.
So, no progress on that end, but Derek isn’t going to forget about it anytime soon.
Winter is wild and blustery this year, and Dex decides they can’t meet his friends until after all the snow has passed. Derek tries asking a few times, but Dex always buries his face in Derek’s latest history essay and starts commenting loudly in order to ignore him. There finally comes a day in February where Derek and Chowder show up on Dex’s figurative doorstep bundled to the nines and freshly brewed bribery hot chocolate. The snow isn’t anything more than a crisp flatbread layer under their boots (which Dex has also bled all over) but he still glares crossly at them nonetheless, trying to shoo them back to the dorms until they force feed him some hot chocolate.
“Dex. Bro. French Vanilla Truffle. Extra marshmallows.”
“Alright, fine, fine, get in here.” Dex finally concedes after he swallows three boiling marshmallows whole.
They stop by a spring that begins in the inner ring, though the other end of the water seems to disappear into a haze of shade and foliage. The water is frosted over in shattered panes of ice; Dex crouches down at the embankment and cards his fingers through the weeds as he peers under the surface, but stands shortly after and waves them along.
“She’s not in right now. We’ll have to catch her another day,” he says, and switches on his lantern.
Derek and Chowder link arms when they enter the heart, taking care to follow Dex carefully. Today, the heart is less terrifying, giving off just an aura of general unwelcomeness, but Dex’s steps are sure as ever, like he’s walked this unmarked non-path over the roots and through the maze of trunks a thousand times. They have to readjust to the wildlife noises again, but what’s even weirder is the sound that Derek finally notices coming out of Dex.
It starts off as a kind of uneven hum, but builds up to faint words he can hear when he concentrates.
“Interplanet Janet, she's a galaxy girl…”
“Are you singing Schoolhouse Rock?” Derek asks, trying not to sound as horribly giddy as he feels. He can get Dex to sing with him sometimes: mostly classic rock and Beyonce and pop hits from the mid-aughts. But Dex rarely begins on his own, no matter how much Derek waxes lyrical about his nice voice, which aggrieves Derek to no end.
Dex freezes for a split second, then keeps walking like it never happened. “Uh. It’s been stuck in my head for a while.” Probably since Chowder first started complaining about his independent science paper about new planets, Derek guesses.
“Oh, the grammar ones are the best! I like the adverb song,” Chowder says, starting to hum the starting notes.
Derek can practically see the shock of discomfort running through Dex’s spine, like electricity through a live wire. “It’s catchy, but a little too barbershop for me…”
“Oh my god, they’re not even a quartet,” Derek says in exasperation.
“Still…”
“What about Conjunction Junction?” C suggests next, which Dex agrees easily too, and then they’re off, Dex in a pitchy falsetto and Chowder’s tenor lowered to a raspy growl. Derek holds his breath, not trusting himself not to say something dumb and provoke them into stopping. Chowder has a way of getting Dex to do things that Derek never could in a hundred lifetimes, probably because C has secret mutant powers of persuasiveness and friendship and undetectable bullshittery.
Their duet continues into “Do the Circulation,” complete with Chowder spinning Dex around on his arm in a sloppy swing-dance, and Derek curses the forest gods and anyone else listening for not letting his fucking phone work out here, because when else will he ever get the chance to record this masterpiece? They both just look so charmingly happy, and Derek’s heart swells with it.
He almost forgets where they are until the darkness lightens slightly and the smog of flora opens up into a tiny clearing with a cottage nestled right in the center. It’s the very picture of a stereotypical fairy-tale cottage, covered in climbing ivy and magenta blossoms, built of gray stonework and wooden accents, complete with curved roof tiles and wall mounted lanterns that light the area with a homey glow.
“Uh,” Chowder says, mouth falling open. “So how many houses are hidden in this pocket dimension forest?”
“Not as many as you think,” Dex says, releasing Chowder’s arm, and turning to make sure he doesn’t lose Derek before they enter the house. “Bits? You home? I brought my friends,” he calls, rapping his knuckles against the heavy wood door.
“Come on in!” comes the response, with a slight southern lilt.
Dex pushes the door open and lets the other two in first. The inside is just as adorably quaint as expected from the outside, with a fireplace in the den, cacti on the windowsills and bundles of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, and an enormous kitchen where a very busy blond is hustling back and forth, his arms cradling a glass bowl. The scent of peaches and sugar fills the brightly lit room, and Dex directs Derek and C to sit on a plump gingham couch in front of the fire. Right after they sit, Derek catches sight of three strange objects bobbing their way through the air toward them.
“Um,” Derek says. “I’m not imagining that, right?” He elbows Chowder, who turns to gape at what is apparently a few glasses of iced tea floating their way.
“Y’all like tea, don’t you? And I don’t mean that gritty, bitter nonsense you serve up here-”
“Sweet tea sounds great,” Derek says automatically as a glass settles into his confused hands. Dex catches his own, and guides the last glass into Chowder’s grasp, the other boy being too dazed still to do anything but stare in the direction of the kitchen, where whisks and butter and sugar are spinning in a waltz around Bitty. On the counter, peaches fall neatly into segments, pits falling to the side. Flour begins threading through the air like a curtain of snowfall, obscuring their sight for a moment before it settles down into his bowl, the whisk still dancing.
“Thanks, Bitty,” Dex says, jolting Chowder back to reality. He calls out a thanks as well, before chugging half his glass in one go, and sinking deeper into the couch.
Derek sips slowly at the tea in silence as he starts to piece together the scene before them. Flying objects usually means magic. And magic means...
“Wait a second- Bitty’s a witch? Didn’t you say witches didn’t exist?” he asks, whirling on Dex, who’s leaning casually against the wall.
Dex and Bitty share a look, then a short laugh at Derek’s expense. “I just said I wasn’t a witch. You made your own inferences from that. Wrong ones.”
Bitty shakes his head, sending his bowl to settle gently on the counter with a wave of his hand. “Oh, Dex, you didn’t tell them? Wait just a second, I’ll be right over,” he says while hurrying to wash his hands at the sink.
“Nah, Bits, I thought maybe you’d wanna show ‘em yourself. Though, I think you kinda already have.”
Dex smiles briefly as Bitty dashes around his kitchen in a flurry, before turning back to Derek, who makes meaningful Eye Contact with him, but all he does is scrunch his mouth and shrug.
“What?” he mouths silently back, and Derek throws his hands in the air. Chowder continues to be slowly absorbed by the couch.
Bitty finally arrives, holding three pies in his arms. “Now, Dex never did tell me what your favorite pies are, so we’ll have to make do with these for today, but I promise I'll have something special for you boys next time you come around.” He places the pies - French silk, lemon meringue, and apple - on the table, then waves his hand absently toward the kitchen, summoning plates and silverware.
“I didn't want you flipping out and making a thousand pies. You know you always over-bake when you know guests are coming. Anyway, it's rhubarb for Nursey and honey walnut for Chowder.”
In short order, Derek and Chowder learn that Bitty is much, much older than looks, definitely a witch, and quite possibly the greatest piemaker in all of New England. Bitty preens under their compliments, and has no trouble answering the barrage of questions they pelt him with, or dodging them with practiced southern flair, but he’s much more interested in learning about “Dex’s darling little friends.”
Dex has to finally excuse them so they can leave the forest before it gets dark, but they don’t escape without each of them taking a pie for the road and the promise to return again soon. Bitty starts rattling off all the sweaters and birthday mini pies they’re going to get, and Dex has to physically drag Chowder out the door, since he’s too amiable and polite to know how to leave Bitty’s orbit.
Derek is stopped on his way out by a strong hand to his elbow, and he’s afraid (slash hopeful) that Bitty is going to try and unload another pie on him, but he only gives Derek a smile.
“I just wanted to thank you two for being such good friends to our Dex. I know he can be a bit cantankerous, but I think you’ve really brought him out of his shell, Nursey. All of us in here have noticed just how much he talks about the two of you. I’m glad we could finally meet.”
His approval feels significant, like Derek’s passed some sort of test. Derek swallows, and offers his sincerest smile back. “Thanks, Bitty. He’s- he’s one of us. He’s my best friend.” There’s more he wants to say, but from the way Bitty nods, it seems like he understands even without words.
Dex introduces them to The Falconer and her boys a few days later. She lives in a house on a small outcropping at the edge of the heart, her flock scattered in trees and small satellite houses nearby, except J, who resides with Bitty when he isn’t transformed.
She shakes Derek’s hand with a firm grip, and he trusts her instinctively. Something about her brown eyes and messy bun give her an aura of put-together trustworthiness, and from the way she handles Tater when he swoops down to land on her shoulder, it’s for good reason.
“Only J is actually a falcon,” Dex explains as they sit on her porch watching J and Tater circle each other in the air in the more open space of the inner ring. “Tater’s a white-tailed eagle. Snowy’s a snowy owl.”
“Wow, wonder where he got the nickname,” Chowder snorts, and Dex grins.
“Yeah. There used to be a few others - Thirdy, Marty -  but their curses ended, so they left. Marty, at least, was also a falcon, so that’s where she gets the title, I guess.”
“So they’re just cursed? For thirteen years? Because of some old family bullshit from like a zillion years ago?” Chowder tries to clarify, and Dex nods.
“Something like that. I never really got the specifics, but yeah, it’s like some primogeniture fairy curse thing. The Falconer’s been watching over them in here for decades now, so they always send the next in line back here to roost when he transforms for the first time.”
“And no one’s ever looked into breaking this curse?” Derek asks, raising an eyebrow when Dex just draws his knees up to his chest and makes a non-committal noise.
“Some curses can't be broken.”
“No way, dude. Every clause has a loophole. Every bad deal has a way out. And every curse should be breakable. Otherwise, how could we ever hold onto hope?”
“How could we,” Dex echoes, staring up at the loose feathers that flutter down like errant flakes of snow.
They meet the flock over the course of several days, since their human hours don’t always align with daylight. J, as a human, is reserved and broadly Canadian, but there’s a quiet warmth in his eyes that really comes out when he’s with Bitty. Tater is gregarious and friendly, Snowy more calm and settled, but none of them hesitate to gently chirp Dex when he makes introductions, spouting off things like “finally, we are meeting Dex’s frogs!” and “so this is who you’ve been skipping flight practice to hang out with, eh?”.
“I can’t even fly!” Dex exclaims, and J laughs, leaving the room to help Bits in the kitchen.
“That’s why you shouldn’t skip practice,” Snowy says through a bite of honey walnut pie, and Dex flings a fork at him. It stops in mid-air, accompanied by a “what did I tell you about throwing my good silverware?” from Bitty.
Dex mumbles an apology and sinks back into the couch between Derek and C.
“Hey, why are we your frogs?” Chowder asks, and Dex coughs awkwardly and takes a sip of his tea before explaining.
“Uh, there was a year I rescued some frog eggs and watched over them that spring.”
“Dex watches tadpoles like mother hen, every day sitting at Lardo’s pond,” Tater says, crouching on the rug to imitate Dex staring into the water.
Dex ignores Chowder’s “d’awwww” and mutters out, “Yeah, so now they call any of my rescues ‘frogs’. And you guys are, like, the frogs, I guess. The rest are just people I helped back out.”
“That’s mad adorable. Frogs, C, how about that?”
“It is adorable,” C agrees. Dex buries his face in his hands and they slide in toward him to sandwich him on the couch more securely.
“This was a terrible idea,” he mutters as Chowder rests his head on his shoulder and Derek steals the rest of his coconut cream pie.
Terrible idea or not, Dex does reluctantly bring them to meet the nymphs when winter starts to fade into spring. Camilla, an athletic blonde dryad with a wry sense of humor, shows them her tree: a towering, conical red spruce. Dex points out the nearby tree that J accidentally damaged that time he changed back to a human while perched on a thin branch.
April’s grove of yellow birches is located in the far end of Lardo’s spring, the bare grass underfoot dotted with translucent violet flowers. She regards them sternly as Dex introduces her as a nymph of groves, “not a dryad,” as she emphatically insists.
“Oh, like an alseid?” Derek asks.
“Yeah, actually,” April says, looking almost impressed, her pretty mouth curving with a hint of a smile.
“Of course you would know that,” Dex says.
And Lardo, she whose bro-itude holds no parallel, they finally meet on a slow afternoon after midterms. She emerges halfway from the water to meet them, resting her arms on the bank.
“Your old frogs were cuter,” she says brightly, leaning her cheek against one hand.
“They're plenty cute,” Dex tells her automatically, then pauses, squints, and changes his mind. “No, sorry, you were right. These two are...eh.” He makes an ambivalent motion with his hand, and Lardo nods sagely.
“Disrespectful to say that,” Chowder scoffs, “when you have two of Andover’s most eligible bachelors gracing you with their presence all the time.”
“He’s been over-exposed,” Derek says. “Kinda hurts my feelings, honestly.”
“Well, when you two dreamboats are done complaining, Lardo can give us a tour.” Dex rolls his eyes when Derek tries his best smolder on him and gives him a gentle shove.
Lardo is sweet and sharply funny, and much more knowledgeable about art and literature than Derek would’ve expected from a naiad. Dex explains after another visit that almost all of the forest’s denizens can leave, though whether they want to varies from person to person. The flock tends to travel together, just in case one of them transforms out of cycle. None of the nymphs can travel more than a few miles from their true bodies, but it’s enough to be able to go to the library or the movie theater. They never do meet Jenny or Mandy; all Dex will tell Derek is “they’re around somewhere” whenever he asks.
Over the remainder of sophomore year, they hang out with Dex’s friends several more times. Derek doesn’t know when he starts noticing it, but it feels like he understands Dex better now, after seeing who he is when he’s with the others. It’s not that Dex is a different person, but some of that always present distance that even Derek can’t close disappears when they’re in the heart with his friends.
It’s to be expected, he supposes. They’ve known him longer than Derek has, but still, he wonders when they’ll reach the day when Dex will feel as free around him. Not as long he feels he has secrets he needs to keep, but Derek won’t press it. As it is, he appreciates how much more open Dex already is, now that he and Chowder know about the woods. It feels like they've grown closer.
“What is it? My hair weird or something?” Dex asks when he catches Derek looking one day. He'd just been laughing about something April muttered under her breath as J walked by. Derek had been transfixed for a moment, watching the soft lamplight of Bitty’s porch lanterns casting bronze over Dex’s face while a wheezing cackle escaped his mouth. It's an extremely stupid noise, but it's endearingly free, and Derek feels for a moment like there are no more walls standing between them. Here he is, light-hearted and golden in the darkest part of the woods, and Derek can almost see all of him.
“Nah, just thought I saw a bug,” Derek lies, and Dex frowns.
“Ugh, mosquitoes,” he says, annoyed. “You might want to start wearing bug spray; they're relentless out here, and you have a scratching problem. Better to prepare now, or we’ll have to spend all summer slathering calamine lotion on you.”
Derek agrees absently, thinking about how odd it is that a flower can bloom in the darkness.
When the year ends, Derek returns to the city with a promise to come back with cotton candy, since Dex hasn't had any for well over a decade.
Over the summer, Derek finds himself missing them more than usual. He's overseas with mama for a good chunk of vacation, and doesn't have the chance this year to visit Chowder. August feels like it drags on, and though he loves hanging out with his New York friends, he can't help but wonder what Dex is up to for the summer. At least he can call and skype C, though their time zone difference and Chowder’s bizarre summer sleep schedule make it difficult sometimes.
But Dex could be doing anything. On the nights when no one else is in the apartment but himself, Derek wishes more than ever he could convince Dex to come see him. Maybe he could help cure that guilty brand of loneliness that afflicts Derek even when he's surrounded by people.
Maybe Dex will finally feel like he can be all of himself around Derek.
60 notes · View notes
xxafterthestormxx · 7 years
Note
Prompt: It's Klaus birthday in NOLA and Rebekah secretly sent an invitation for Caroline, because the siblings have a secret bet going on about who's present gonna be the best. After 1000 what does one give to someone who can get whatever he wants :D
Kol is sipping a margarita, splayed out on one of the leather couches in their lounge room when she gets back from her shopping expedition in New Orleans.
The radio is on, playing one of those inane pop tunes that Kol for some reason seemed to love, and his foot is swaying lazily to the beat as he stares up at the fan whirring lazily on the ceiling above them.
“What on Earth are you doing?” She asks of Kol, whose eyes flick towards her, a self satisfied smile creeping across his face when he sees her.
“Celebrating.” Kol says with great relish, taking a sip of his margarita. “Can I offer you a drink, sister?”
“Knowing you you’ve probably spiked it with some sort of sleeping potion, so it’ll be a hard pass this time.” She replies with disdain, remembering the last time Elijah had accepted a drink from Kol, and had then promptly broken out in hives that had taken quite a few days to disappear, and only with the assistance of a witch that owed Elijah quite a few favours.
Kol had ended up with a dagger in his chest for a month before Elijah had deigned to make amends with him.
“God you’re all no fun.” Kol mumbles under his breath, sitting up on the couch and planting his booted feet on the floor. “And since you never asked what I was celebrating, I’m going to tell you anyway.”
“Of course you are.” She remarks dryly, tapping her foot against the floor, cursing the humidity that seemed to hang over New Orleans at this time of the year like an unpleasant shroud.
Already she can feel her hair sticking to the back of her neck, her clothes pressing to her skin unpleasantly. Maybe she could go for a swim a little later.
“Well, as you well know Bekah, Nik’s birthday is coming up. And I know that we all try and one up each other when it comes to buying him a gift. God knows why considering how many times he’s daggered us all… If anything he should be buying us presents to make up for it.” Kol is just thinking out loud now, and she can’t help but sigh, massaging her temples.
In fact, Nik had brought her plenty of gifts to make up for the whole daggering thing, knowing that she was materialistic at heart and was far more likely to respond positively to that than murmured platitudes and constant apologies.
She wouldn’t give up her designer wardrobe, villa in Tuscany, and private island for anything.
“Get to the point.” She snarls as Kol continues to mumble under his breath.
“Fine. I just want to tell you and Elijah that you shouldn’t bother trying this year, because I’ve got him the present to end all presents. The perfect gift.”
“You do?” She asks incredulously, because Kol’s idea of a perfect gift is usually a stripper or a gift voucher to some obscure store.
“I do.” Kol says with another smug smile. “So just don’t even go there this year Bekah. You’re not going to beat me!”
With that, Kol drains the rest of his margarita, falling back to lie on the couch once more.
Justin Bieber starts playing on the radio, and as she marches out of the room to escape the stupidity of the song, an idea begins to form in her mind.
Kol wasn’t going to know what hit him.
“I could get used to this.” Caroline Forbes remarks with a laugh, reclining on the pure white sand as the sun beats fiercely down on her skin.
“I’m not sure about the heat.” Enzo has propped himself up on her elbow next to her, Ray Bans covering most of his features as he takes in the crystalline blue water. “Although it is a beautiful corner of the world.”
She’d been dying to come to Australia for some time now, and she and Enzo had spent the last few months wandering the massive island continent. As she very quickly discovered, there was so much more to Australia than the cosmopolitan city of Sydney.
They went dune boarding at Port Stephens, a little coastal town three hours north east of the capital of NSW. They spent a week on the Gold Coast, checking out the bars and clubs that peppered the famous city.
They spent another week on a cattle ranch in the far flung part of Queensland that no one else ever seemed to go to, made friends with the locals as they had to revert back to animal blood momentarily.
The Northern Territory was amazing, as had been Western Australia. The Barossa Valley had been a favourite, rich wine country with vineyards stretching as far as the eye could see.
Enzo had loved Melbourne, loved the coffee culture and all the hip little laneway bars that were only discovered if you stumbled across them by accident. Someone had suggested the Whitsundays for their next destination, and after looking at some pictures online she and Enzo had very quickly booked one of the resorts there.
The past few days had been spent snorkelling on the Great Barrier reef, reclining on the deck of the sailboat they had hired, swimming in clear blue waters, and sampling some of the amazing food at the various restaurants dotted around the island.
She thanked her lucky stars that she technically couldn’t put on weight now that she was dead and all, so had absolutely no guilt about helping herself to a second or third plate of food at dinner time, washing it down with some wine.
“That it is.” She agrees quietly with Enzo, sipping at her bottle of water, watching clouds scud across the cornflower blue sky.  
Someone whistles at them from the shore line, and she raises her hand in acknowledgement towards the skipper of their boat, sitting up and beginning to gather her belongings, shoving them back into the canvas beach bag she carried with her.
She dusts the sane off her as she and Enzo make their way over to the boat, ankle deep in the cool water before they're being handed up onto the deck.
When she gets back to their room, she’s surprised to see an envelope addressed to her. She hadn’t given anyone an address while she’d been travelling, and so she approaches the envelope with a healthy dose of caution.
Picking it up between two fingers, she gingerly breaks the wax seal on the back, pulling out the parchment within and unfolding it quickly.
Caroline,
My brother is celebrating his birthday this year. Although I’m not particularly eager to see you anytime soon, I know that Nik would like it. Details are within.
Rebekah
She can’t help but cover her mouth, snorting with laughter as she hands the folded up piece of paper to Enzo to read.
“Rather direct, isn’t she?”
“Yes, that always has been her m.o.” She replies with another soft laugh, eyes scanning the contents of the invitation before tossing it onto the bed.
“So are you going to go?” Enzo questions curiously, leaning over to read the invitation as well.
“I don’t know. Maybe?” She answers it like a question, becuase to be honest she's still not half sure herself.
Enzo raises an eyebrow at that.
“Maybe? That's a complete 180 from last year when it was a flat out no. Could it be that your feelings towards the big bad hybrid have changed?”
She hits Enzo on the arm good naturedly.
“It’s not like that. It’ll just be… good to see him.” She trails off lamely, knowing that it's a pathetic excuse if ever she's heard one.
To be honest, she'd been thinking about Klaus a lot more lately. She hadn't seen him in almost a decade, the last time being quite a memorable weekend they’d spent together in Tuscany, when they hadn’t done much more than have sex and drink wine from teh surrounding vineyards.
Most of the weekend had been spent in bed, Klaus determined to show her just how good they were with each other, which they were. Klaus continued to be the best sex of her lfie, and if the infuriating smile that he wore on his face every time he brought her to climax was anything to go by, he knew it as well.
But they both had other priorities. She was content to continue her nomadic lifestyle, discovering some of the far flung and forgotten corners of the world, Enzo in tow more often than not.
Klaus had settled into his life in New Orleans, ruling the city with an iron fist, his siblings still with him.
She’d never been. Setting foot into his city would be sending a message, that she was willing to entertain the idea of a forever with him. And she hadn’t been ready for that yet. But now…
“I can see that your mind has already been made up.” Enzo replies with a slow smile. “Are you sure?”
She just takes a deep breath, squaring her shoulders.
“I’m going to need a dress.”
The party below them is in full swing, members of the supernatural community mingling in the courtyard below them.
Kol leans on the balcony beside her, hair swept artfully away from his forehead, tuxedo clinging to the firm lines of his body. He sips at his drink, glancing at her for a moment.
“Did you even try to get him something this year?” He asks with a chuckle. “You’ve been surprisingly tight lipped this year sister.”
She smooths down the front of her black party dress, raising her own glass to her lips as she takes a drink.
“I tried something different this year. Apparently it didn’t work out.” She notes with a shrug, downing the rest of her drink and setting the now empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter.
Kol stares at her for a long moment, trying to figure out the meaning behind her words.
“Shame.” He pronounces with a shrug. “You’re usually much better at this. Did you order something online and it didnt’ arrive on time or something?”
She just smiles to herself, phone buzzing in her hand.
“Something like that.”
And then she thumbs into the message, reading the two words displayed across her screen.
She’s here.
The doorman of course, had been under strict instructions to keep an eye out for Caroline. He’d been provided with a picture of the baby vampire, one from her Mystic Falls days where she’d been polished and primped and wearing a ballgown.
All the same, Caroline Forbes was rather hard to miss, even dressed in plain clothes with her hair in disarray. She would know because she’d seen the girl in such a state during one memorable run in at the MIkaelson mansion in Mystic Falls.
It hadn’t taken a genius to know exactly why Caroline was doing the walk of shame at such an infernal hour of the morning. The younger girl had blushed, hair falling into her face as she had whispered a soft goodbye before letting herself out into the weak early morning light.
She had mentioned this as an aside to Kol, who had promptly teased Nik about it. Nik had snapped his neck and they hadn’t mentioned it since.
“Am I boring you?” Kol’s voice abruptly interrupts her train of thought, and she locks her phone, eyes flicking up towards her brother, who’s staring at her like she’s just grown a second head. “Where did you go just now?”
She just draws herself up to her full height, snagging another flute of champagne.
“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch brother.”
The doorman is staring at her strangely. She can’t imagine why, because she most certainly does not have lipstick on her teeth (she checked). The navy blue party dress that she’s wearing makes her tanned legs look a mile long, and accentuates the curves of her body.
Her hair, which she had spent a ridiculous amount of time on, was twisted into an elegant up do, and she was wearing a necklace that Klaus had gifted to her during their time in Tuscany.
The short of it was, she looked a million bucks.
“Caroline Forbes.” A voice drawls as she steps into the entrance of the courtyard.
Rebekah Mikaelson hasn’t changed a bit, that bored expression on her face ever present. She’s wearing a killer pair of Manolos and she can’t help but eye off the striking shoes with a bit of jealousy.
“Rebekah.” She finally answers, swallowing around the lump in her throat as Rebekah just smiles, pressing a drink into her hand.
“I didn’t think you were going to come.” Rebekah sips at her own drink as she turns, moving more towards the crowd of people, a few of whom eye them off with barely concealed curiosity. “You know, since I didn’t receive your RSVP or anything like that.”
“Sorry.” She replies to the older vampire, smoothing a hand over her hair. “I was undecided until quite recently. I did send word but apparently you didn’t get the message in time.”
“No matter.” Rebekah waves a hand dismissively. “You’re here now and that’s all that matters.”
Rebekah tilts her gaze upwards towards the balcony, and she follows the line of the Original’s gaze. Kol Mikaelson has a drink in her hand, and is gaping at her with his mouth hanging open rather unattractively.
Within split seconds his gaze lands on Rebekah, eyes narrowing as he raises his drink towards his sister in a toast for some reason.
“What was that about?” She asks Rebekah, who lifts one shoulder in an elegant shrug as the crowd clears momentarily and she spots Klaus from across the room.
He looks entirely at ease in this particular setting, his tuxedo clinging sharply to the lines of his broad shoulders, pants tailored to within an inch of their life. He’s got his head thrown back in laughter as he talks to another man, drink in hand and looking like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“What on earth has he done to his hair?” She hisses towards Rebekah in horror. “It looks atrocious.”
She sees Klaus stiffen at that, and curses his superior Hybrid hearing as his gaze suddenly lands on her, eyes dark.
It’s perhaps the first time that she’s seen him truly caught off guard, and she can’t help but raise her glass to her lips, not realising just how much liquid courage she’d need to fortify herself with for this particular encounter.
The crowd seems to part before Klaus as he moves towards her, Rebekah giving her a gentle nudge, encouraging her to meet him halfway.
If that wasn’t a metaphor for their relationship, she didn’t know what was.
Klaus stops before her, gaze indecipherable as he reaches out, traces a gentle hand along her cheekbone.
The weight of the curious gazes around her is heavy, and she can’t help but lean into his touch as he bends, taking her hand in his, pressing a gentle kiss to it.
He straightens, and his smile is like the sun.
“Hello Caroline.”
It feels strange, being on Klaus’ arm. For a moment, she can’t help but think that Klaus is showing her off, demonstrating his power.
Until he begins introducing her to people, a hand resting dangerously on her lower back, thumb rubbing circles into where her dress does not cover up the skin of her back.
He seems content to take a backseat in their conversation, instead observing silently as she exchanges greetings with various witches and werewolves and vampires.
She sips at her drink as someone else comes to greet Klaus, and it takes a moment for her to realise why this time is so different. Klaus isn’t treating her like an object. He never has, a byproduct of his thousand or so years of existence.
No. Klaus is treating her like an equal, and the thought of that sends a thrill down her spine. So when there’s a break in the conversation she twines an arm around his waist, pressing a quick kiss to his neck.
In response Klaus pulls her closer to him but doesn’t comment, carrying on his conversation effortlessly.
Hours later as the guests begin to filter out into the street, Klaus pulls her in close to her chest.
“What are you doing here Caroline?” He asks in a low voice, tone dangerous. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, of course I am.”
She meets his gaze confidently, hand drifting up his chest to fix the lapel of his dinner jacket.
“I’m here for you Klaus.” She tells him with a smile. “You remember that weekend in Tuscany, when you let me go without a word of protest?”
Klaus’ lips curl into a smirk.
“How could I forget Tuscany?”
“You didn’t push me. And I was grateful for that, even though I did know that you wouldn’t wait around forever for me. And when you kept your distance in the following years, I was grateful. But I also missed not having you around.”
Her eyes drop to the crisp lines of his shirt as her hands drift down towards his waist. His breath is hot against her cheek, and he’s gone unnaturally still as he waits to hear the next words out of her mouth.
“You offered me forever and I wasn’t ready then. But I am now.” She says softly, hands sliding up his chest, twining around his neck as his gaze darkens, mouth hanging open in surprise. “If you’ll still have me of course.
Klaus’ lips against hers is the only answer he provides, the only answer she needs. Klaus kisses her like he’s a starving man, like he’s been deprived of something for so long.
She’s scarcely less eager to return his embrace, missing the feeling of him, the familiar smell of him.
She doesn’t protest when Klaus picks her up in his arms, using his vamp speed to get the from the courtyard to what is undoubtedly his bedroom.
He’s got her pressed up against the closed door before she can even think about it, lips hot against the skin of her neck as he nips at her with a content sigh.
His jacket drops to the floor, and she helps him unbutton his shirt, no doubt in her mind as to the direction that this is heading.
Her hands roam over the skin of his chest, catalouging all the new scars that he’s acquired since she saw him last, hand pausing over a particularly nasty looking scar, no doubt caused by some sort of stabbing.
“You’ll have to tell me that story later.” She murmurs, tipping a finger under his chin and kissing him gently.
“Later.” Klaus agrees in a low voice, hands pausing at the seams of her dress.
She’s reversed their positions in an instant, Klaus pressed up against the door with a surprised look on his face.
“Don’t you dare rip this dress.” She hisses at him, knowing his proclivity for destroying her clothes when he’s in this sort of mood. “I like this one.”
His low chuckle curls around her, a warm feeling in the bottom of her stomach as he turns her gently by the shoulders, a hot open mouthed kiss pressed to the side of her neck.
His hands on the zipper are like fire as he pulls it down slowly, fingers brushing over the exposed skin of her back as he pushes the dress from her shoulders.
It pools at her feet, and she hears his breath hitch in his throat as he runs a gentle hand down her back.
“I’ve missed this.” Klaus murmurs to her, walking her backwards towards his bed, both of them kicking off their shoes, Klaus shucking his socks as they go.
He grips her by the hips, easily lifting her up and tossing her onto the mattress, a giggle escaping her lips as Klaus’s gaze darkens.
“Come here.” She beckons to him as Klaus crawls between her knees, covering her body with his as he takes her into his arms.
The feeling is unfamiliar and familiar all at once, Klaus’ erection pressing into her core as she tangles her lips with his.
A soft moan escapes her as Klaus’ lips scorch a hot trail down her throat, face nuzzling between the valley of her breasts, stubble scratching against her sensitive skin.
“Pants off.” She orders after a momentary pause, Klaus chuckling as he does her bidding.
“A little eager aren’t we?” He asks her with an infuriating smile as he hooks long fingers into the waistband of her panties.
“We’ve got ten years to make up for.” She just breathes, watching as his face softens, hand coming up to cup her cheek delicately as he lines up his body with hers, cock nudging gently at her entrance.
She can’t help but gasp at the feeling, heel nudging at his arse as he smiles down at her.
“We’ve got all the time in the world sweetheart.” He replies before pushing into her heat with one, smooth stroke.
She’s missed this, the feeling of being filled by him, and her eyes roll back into her head at just how good it is, at how good he is.
Klaus had learnt to read her body with an almost eerie sixth sense, and he puts all of his learned knowledge into practice as he sets a rhythm that has her unable to do much more than gasp and hold on for the ride.
Klaus rolls suddenly, reversing their positions as she sways above him, a little startled. Klaus just smiles, still hard inside her as he guides her arms around his broad shoulders, hands hot around her waist as he helps to lift her, guide her up and down.
She’s always loved this position with him, loved the power and the look of awe that always creeped across his face when he saw her like this.
She bends down to kiss him, rolling her hips in a gentle rhythm against his. Klaus’ hand traces down the front of her body, thumb pinpointing her clit with an unerring accuracy.
She shudders a little when he presses there, rhythm broken momentarily as she opens her mouth in a silent moan.
She can feel the tell tale build in her core, the ache becoming almost unbearable as she increases her rhythm, anchoring her hands on his shoulders as he begins to thrust up into her with a look of concentration on his face.
She falls apart in his arms, Klaus catching her, turning and pressing her down into the mattress as he continues to drive into her, the pleasure edging into pain at the sensitivity.
Klaus knows this though, gentles the movement of his hips until it curls low in her belly once more, building impossibly fast to her peak.
They come together this time, her name on his lips as he buries his face into her neck, feels the heat of him inside her.
She runs a hand through his sweat dampened hair, breathing slowly returning to normal as he pulls out and heads for the bathroom, returning in the next few moments with a damp cloth to wipe themselves down with.
When he’s done he pulls her into the circle of his arms, a content exhale as he props one arm under his head, staring up at the ceiling.
They don’t have to say much. They never do in moments like this. But she feels like she has to say this.
“I love you.” She whispers into the skin of his chest, Klaus stiffening momentarily around her before he’s pressing a gentle kiss to the back of her hand, eyes brimming with emotion.
He doesn’t say it back but that’s okay. She knows that he’s felt this way about her for a long time, and she’s not going to get hung up on her insecurities like she used to when it came to him.
The moment is perfect, and she wouldn’t change it for the world.
“I hope you’ve got space in your wardrobe for all my clothes.” She voices out loud suddenly, propping herself up on her elbow to face him.
Klaus’ burst of startled laughter is like music to her hears.
On the lower levels of the house, Rebekah Mikaelson pours herself a victory drink, Kol glowering on the lounge opposite her as the fire crackles merrily away in the hearth.
“Do you concede?” She asks of Kol, who just glares at her, cracking his knuckles a little threateningly.
“I concede.”
160 notes · View notes
ozkamal · 7 years
Quote
"But the problem with me was that as soon as I started thinking about getting it together, I got this mad craving desire to fuck it up." Rebecca Godfrey“I am an over-thinker and an over-feeler. Over-lover. Over- needer. I would flood you. I would drown your respectable standoffishness. I don’t get over things, but I get under them well. I’d love you and you’d soak me through. You couldn’t handle me even if you wanted to.” Rebeka Anne, some people think I’m too much "I just want to pour my soul out onto someone and not have to worry about the mess I've made" "Sometimes I’m certain  those who are happy  know one thing more than us…  or one thing less."  - Anne Michaels “The Weight of Oranges” “I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.” Haruki Murakami “Find something that you’re passionate about, devote your time and energy to it. But make sure what you’re passionate about is not a person, but a thing.”“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.” Anaïs Nin“You have to accept that some people are not made for deep conversations, or for holding you together when you’re about to fall apart, or for keeping you from unzipping your skin, or for talking you out of suicide, or to love you through the worst moments of your life. Some people are made for shallow exchanges, and ridiculous banter, and nothing more. And that’s okay. That doesn’t make them horrible people because they simply aren’t able to handle a storm like you. It doesn’t make you a bad person because you won’t divulge all the gritty details of your horror show. It makes you smart. You have to accept that there will be people that cannot give you what you need. It doesn’t mean they are not worth keeping in your life. You just have to figure out who these ones are before you’re disappointed. And you have to keep them at arm’s length. You cannot expect everyone in your life to understand, to be nonjudgmental, to get it. But that’s okay, because not everyone was made to impart wisdom, or wax-poetic, or speak on politics and the depravity of society, or discuss how crucial it is that the stigma of mental illness be abolished. There are times when you have to get away from all that heaviness. You have to. And you will need superficial conversation about Kim Kardashian’s arse, or a debate on the colour of The Dress. You will need those ones. So don’t go round cutting people off and dropping your friends. You need people for all your seasons. You need people or you won’t survive this.” What my therapist told me this morning“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t as conscious as I am. It would be so much easier.” River Phoenix “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”  Sylvia Plath “I’m tired" “Sleep” “No you don’t understand” Do you understand?“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours–that is what you must be able to attain.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll “Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.” Anna Quindle“It would be that time - late at night - when your ears reach for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open.” Diary - Chuck Palahniuk“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut “I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.” Andrei Tarkovsky “I’m one of those people who believe that words are some of the last forms of magic that exist” Lana Del Rey “She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, “I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”” Haruki Murakami,  Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman “… we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water? Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.” East of Eden - John Steinbeck “I crave so much more than just a physical connection. I crave words and depth. I crave who you are and where you came from, your desires and fears. I yearn to know every inch of you beyond the surface.”“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the…man who walks past [you]…at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…” Timothy Leary  http://ift.tt/2l1RShO have very intense conversations with friends, people I really interconnect with. We talk about politics, important things. I like to talk about ideas and get people to be specific.” Jacqueline Bisset “Date someone who is interested in you. I don’t mean someone who thinks you’re cute or funny. I mean someone who wants to know every insignificant detail about you. Someone who wants to read every word you write. Someone who wants hear every note of your favourite song, and watch every scene of your favourite movie. Someone wants to find every scar upon your body, and learn where each one came from. Someone who wants to know your favourite brand of toothpaste, and which quotes resonate deep inside your bones when you hear them. There is a difference between attraction and interest. Find the person who wants to learn every aspect of who you are, and hold onto them.”I stopped explaining myself when I realized, People only understand from their level of perception“She’s never where she is. She’s only inside her head.” White Oleander by Janet Fitch“What I hate is ignorance, smallness of imagination, the eye that sees no farther than its own lashes. All things are possible. Who you are is limited only by who you think you are.” Egyptian Book of the Dead“I am homesick for a place I am not sure even exists. One where my heart is full. My body loved. And my soul understood.” Unknown you find a woman with a wild heart do not try to tame her. You must adore her recklessly, the way she is meant to be loved. Do not try to quiet her, for her roars will reach far and wide. She has something important to say. Help her say it. Do not get in her way. She stops for no one. Do not try to change the path she has chosen. Learn also to love the wind and let it change you.” C.B. Wild-Hearted Woman “I am not a puzzle to be solved. I am someone to be experienced- a soul to be tasted” jenn satsun“To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground "Never have I dealt with anything more difficult than my own soul."“Sometimes words come out of me and I don’t know where they come from or why. They’re like falling stars tumbling through the universe; bright, burning things that can’t be stopped.” Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”“My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.” Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks “We’re all kind of weird and twisted and drowning.” Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood“I remained to much inside my head and ended up losing my mind.” Edgar Allen Poe “Protect yourself from your own thoughts.” Rumi I try to maintain a healthy dose of daydreaming to remain sane.” Florence Welch “I’m self-sufficient. I spend a lot of time on my own and I shut off quite easily. When I communicate, I communicate 900%, then I shut off, which scares people sometimes.” Björk "Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again." Bernhard Schlink“I’ve always believed one could live many lives…even if just in our imagination. The world is open to us, and each day is an occasion to reinvent ourselves.” Ralph Lauren"I hunger for intensity. For love, affection, for tangible. For ineffable. For infinity. For discovery.  I hunger for knowledge. Life is filled with wanders and wonders. Die knowing something. Die loving something."“I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.” To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father, Donald Miller “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer“I am a jumble of passions, misgivings, and wants. It seems that I am always in a state of wishing and rarely in a state of contentment.” The Sweet Far Thing, Libba Bray “All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.” Julio Cortazar“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your soul. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” Franz Kafka“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music— the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” Henry Miller Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.” Anthony Bourdain “Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning.” Elie Wiesel, Dawn “And like the sea, I’m constantly changing from calm to hell.” Dallas Green “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.” Christopher Morley“I feel so shut out, I’m always homesick. But when I get home. I find it’s something else I’m longing for.” Autumn Sonata “Without deep conversation, my mind becomes restless. I need passion and intellect, it’s a shame that a person often lacks one or the other.”“I didn’t say I liked it. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.” Oscar Wilde, adapted from The Picture of Dorian Gray “I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night”“Loneliness is dangerous. It’s addicting. Once you see how peaceful it is, you don’t wanna deal with people.” Hedonist Poet“I want to be loved and to be left alone.” David Swanger, “My Mother’s Nudes"“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” Emily Dickinson“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things which I dare not confess to my own soul.” Bram Stoker, Dracula“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” Virginia Woolf, The Waves“Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are … bland, tasteless. They’ll never understand what it’s like to read a poem and feel almost like they’re flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart…” Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See “And never have I felt so deeply at one and, at the same time, so detached from myself, and so present in the world.” Albert Camus“My human capabilities aren’t sufficient enough to help translate what my soul wants to express.” JMC“Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.” Jean Baudrillard “We approach the void…but not to fall into it. We want to become intoxicated with dizziness and the image of the fall is sufficient.” Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality“If you’re ever lucky enough to find a girl who is a hopeless romantic with a dirty mind, you should hold onto that. Because she’ll be yours at two in the morning and at two in the afternoon the following day. She’ll kiss you where it hurts and until it hurts. And that’s important. Someone who not only knows how to turn you on but also knows how to treat you right is someone worth a little something… and a little more than usual.”“I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive. Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.” Paul Auster“I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know–unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.” James Kavanaugh“Does she scare you a little? Good. She should make you fear her love, so that when she lets you be apart of it, you won’t take it lightly. She should remind you of the power that beauty brings, that storms reside in her veins, and that she still wants you in the middle of it all. Do not take this soul for granted, for she is fierce, and she can take you places that you never thought you could go; but she is still loving in the midst of it all, like the calm rain after a storm, she can bring life. Learn her, and cherish her, respect her, and love her; for she is so much more than a pretty face, she is a soul on fire.” T.B. LaBerge // Things I’m still learning at 25“Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small.” The Waves, Virginia Woolf"We are meant to discover our authentic nature-- the state of being in which we are inspired by ourselves, turned on, lit up, and excited about who we are."  Debbie Ford“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.” Charles Bukowski “All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life — where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.” Miranda July, from It Chooses You “I want to meet people with fire in them, burning through life like a forest fire, too many people die out and survive on embers.” Adam Zucconi “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.” Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Adrienne Rich“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky.” Jack Kerouac “The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous, and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.” Helen Mirren “I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me…I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person.” Sylvia Plath“I just want to think deeply about things. Contemplate ideas in a pure, free sort of way. That’s all.” Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage “Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.” Charles Baudelaire “You have to be interested. If you’re not interested, you can’t be interesting.” Iris Apfel “I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.” The Help, Kathryn Stockett “Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.” Haruki Murakami,The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle“Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.” Charles Bukowski (from Ham On Rye)“Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.” Haruki Murakami, 1Q84“Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.” High Fidelity - Nick Hornby “For every devious scream in my head there is a divine whisper and it saves me every time.” VàZaki Nada“In man’s memories there are those things that he doesn’t reveal to all, but perhaps only to his friends. And then there are those he won’t reveal even to his friends, but perhaps only to himself, and even then in confidence. But then, finally, there are those that a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and any decent man accumulates quite enough of those things.” Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky“I feel too much. That’s what’s going on. Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel the wrong ways? My insides don’t match up with my outsides. Do anyone’s inside and outsides match up? I don’t know. I’m only me. Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside. But it’s worse for me. I wonder if everyone thinks it’s worse for him. Probably. But it really is worse for me.” Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.” Aldous Huxley“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.”“People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.” Benjamin Alire Sáenz“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that’s ok with them.” Alain de Botton“Let’s clear one thing up: Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people. We hate small talk because we hate the barrier it creates between people.” Laurie Helgoe“Remember that the world began in a manic episode, too. God likes to hoard sharp  things, just like you. We are saving you. And we need to hear it one more time: Who knows best?” Lydia Havens, From the Voices, published in “Pouch” “Keep interested in others; keep interested in the wide and wonderful world. Then in a spiritual sense you will always be young.” Fredric March“fernweh [feyrn-vey]” (noun) This wonderful, untranslatable German word describes the feeling of homesickness for a far away land, a place you have never visited. Do not confuse this with the english word, wanderlust; Fernweh is much more profound, it is the feeling of an unsatisfied urge to escape and discover new places, almost a sort of sadness. You miss a place you have never experienced, as opposed to lusting over it or desiring it like wanderlust. You are seeking freedom and self-discovery, but not a particular home.“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.” Rebecca Solnit“Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.”“I’m very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.” Antonia Fraser“I stay up just late enough until I am just exhausted enough that I can fall into my bed and sink into immediate slumber. Because I can’t stand lying in a bed in a dark room alone with just my thoughts for so many hours and hours.”“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.” Mary Oliver“I crave space. It charges my batteries. It helps me breathe. Being around people can be so exhausting, because most of them love to take and barely know how to give. Except for a rare few.” Unknown“The ability to sit down with another person and talk for hours, about anything and everything, is more attractive to me than anything else.” Koi Fresco“The power to bring me out of solitude – or to push me back into it – had never belonged to another person. It was mine and only mine.” Martha Beck“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.” The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” bell hooks“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplace of existence.” Sherlock Holmes from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle “Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad consciousness and a deep heart. Truly great men, I think, must feel great sorrow in this world.” Fyodor Dostoevsky (from Crime and Punishment)“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” Rainer Maria Rilke"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights“I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin” Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl“He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.” Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights“I’m not totally mad at you. I’m just sad. You’re all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside.” Haruki Murakami “I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, ‘Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?’ or ‘Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?’ But you can’t say that at a…party.” Paul Gilmartin, The Mental Illness Happy Hour“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human. It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!” It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back. It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.” Oriah Mountain Dreamer“I’m half child half ancient.”I am fucking insane but my intentions are gold and my heart is pure“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?” Don DeLillo“Everyone has a 2 AM and a 2 PM personality.”“My problem is that I fall in love with words, rather than actions. I fall in love with ideas and thoughts, instead of reality. And it will be the death of me.” “My nights are for overthinking, my mornings are for oversleeping.”“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood"George Orwell, 1984“‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless, it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.’” Louis C.K.“I’m not the same everyday. There are times where I’m loud and chatty, and there are times when I’m really quiet. I don’t think I can define myself.”“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole.” Richard Siken, Spork Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone“There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought.” Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal from Labyrinths, “Pick my brain. Ask me about my views on something. Dig deeper than the obvious. Let’s make each other think. Show me a different perspective.”“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good.” Roal Dahl "I have the deepest affection for intellectual conversations. The ability to just sit and talk. About love, about life, about anything, about everything. To sit under the moon with all the time in the world, the full-speed train that is our lives slowing to a crawl. Bound by no obligations, barred by no human limitations. To speak without regret or fear of consequence. To talk for hours and about what's really important in life."“Human beings are made of water, we were not designed to hold ourselves together; rather run freely like oceans like rivers” Beau Taplin "You're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.""How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?"I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new and that is ultimately good for the soul. “Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.” Janet Fitch, White Oleander“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” AristotleIt was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.“I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.” Michael Faudet My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover. ~ Falsely yours“I don’t like small talk. Talk to me about life. Talk to me about your scars and the concealer you call your smile. Talk to me about the story behind your favorite song. Tell me about your dreams that sometimes seem too big for the Earth to contain. Tell me what wakes you up in the morning before your alarm clock does. Tell me about what makes shivers run down your spine. Tell me about what makes your eyes light up like the stars I can’t see in New York City. Tell me your story.”“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” Clarice Lispector, A Hora Da Estrela “I appreciate the people who take time to look at the world a little deeper”Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Be curious.” Stephen Hawking"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world. But then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me, who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there, thinking of me too. Well, I hope, that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes it's true. I'm here and I'm just as strange as you.""There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself"
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longexposurelover · 7 years
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"But the problem with me was that as soon as I started thinking about getting it together, I got this mad craving desire to fuck it up." Rebecca Godfrey“I am an over-thinker and an over-feeler. Over-lover. Over- needer. I would flood you. I would drown your respectable standoffishness. I don’t get over things, but I get under them well. I’d love you and you’d soak me through. You couldn’t handle me even if you wanted to.” Rebeka Anne, some people think I’m too much "I just want to pour my soul out onto someone and not have to worry about the mess I've made" "Sometimes I’m certain  those who are happy  know one thing more than us…  or one thing less."  - Anne Michaels “The Weight of Oranges” “I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.” Haruki Murakami “Find something that you’re passionate about, devote your time and energy to it. But make sure what you’re passionate about is not a person, but a thing.”“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.” Anaïs Nin“You have to accept that some people are not made for deep conversations, or for holding you together when you’re about to fall apart, or for keeping you from unzipping your skin, or for talking you out of suicide, or to love you through the worst moments of your life. Some people are made for shallow exchanges, and ridiculous banter, and nothing more. And that’s okay. That doesn’t make them horrible people because they simply aren’t able to handle a storm like you. It doesn’t make you a bad person because you won’t divulge all the gritty details of your horror show. It makes you smart. You have to accept that there will be people that cannot give you what you need. It doesn’t mean they are not worth keeping in your life. You just have to figure out who these ones are before you’re disappointed. And you have to keep them at arm’s length. You cannot expect everyone in your life to understand, to be nonjudgmental, to get it. But that’s okay, because not everyone was made to impart wisdom, or wax-poetic, or speak on politics and the depravity of society, or discuss how crucial it is that the stigma of mental illness be abolished. There are times when you have to get away from all that heaviness. You have to. And you will need superficial conversation about Kim Kardashian’s arse, or a debate on the colour of The Dress. You will need those ones. So don’t go round cutting people off and dropping your friends. You need people for all your seasons. You need people or you won’t survive this.” What my therapist told me this morning“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t as conscious as I am. It would be so much easier.” River Phoenix “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”  Sylvia Plath “I’m tired" “Sleep” “No you don’t understand” Do you understand?“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours–that is what you must be able to attain.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll “Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.” Anna Quindle“It would be that time - late at night - when your ears reach for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open.” Diary - Chuck Palahniuk“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut “I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.” Andrei Tarkovsky “I’m one of those people who believe that words are some of the last forms of magic that exist” Lana Del Rey “She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, “I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”” Haruki Murakami,  Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman “… we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water? Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.” East of Eden - John Steinbeck “I crave so much more than just a physical connection. I crave words and depth. I crave who you are and where you came from, your desires and fears. I yearn to know every inch of you beyond the surface.”“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the…man who walks past [you]…at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…” Timothy Leary  http://ift.tt/2l1RShO have very intense conversations with friends, people I really interconnect with. We talk about politics, important things. I like to talk about ideas and get people to be specific.” Jacqueline Bisset “Date someone who is interested in you. I don’t mean someone who thinks you’re cute or funny. I mean someone who wants to know every insignificant detail about you. Someone who wants to read every word you write. Someone who wants hear every note of your favourite song, and watch every scene of your favourite movie. Someone wants to find every scar upon your body, and learn where each one came from. Someone who wants to know your favourite brand of toothpaste, and which quotes resonate deep inside your bones when you hear them. There is a difference between attraction and interest. Find the person who wants to learn every aspect of who you are, and hold onto them.”I stopped explaining myself when I realized, People only understand from their level of perception“She’s never where she is. She’s only inside her head.” White Oleander by Janet Fitch“What I hate is ignorance, smallness of imagination, the eye that sees no farther than its own lashes. All things are possible. Who you are is limited only by who you think you are.” Egyptian Book of the Dead“I am homesick for a place I am not sure even exists. One where my heart is full. My body loved. And my soul understood.” Unknown you find a woman with a wild heart do not try to tame her. You must adore her recklessly, the way she is meant to be loved. Do not try to quiet her, for her roars will reach far and wide. She has something important to say. Help her say it. Do not get in her way. She stops for no one. Do not try to change the path she has chosen. Learn also to love the wind and let it change you.” C.B. Wild-Hearted Woman “I am not a puzzle to be solved. I am someone to be experienced- a soul to be tasted” jenn satsun“To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground "Never have I dealt with anything more difficult than my own soul."“Sometimes words come out of me and I don’t know where they come from or why. They’re like falling stars tumbling through the universe; bright, burning things that can’t be stopped.” Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”“My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.” Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks “We’re all kind of weird and twisted and drowning.” Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood“I remained to much inside my head and ended up losing my mind.” Edgar Allen Poe “Protect yourself from your own thoughts.” Rumi I try to maintain a healthy dose of daydreaming to remain sane.” Florence Welch “I’m self-sufficient. I spend a lot of time on my own and I shut off quite easily. When I communicate, I communicate 900%, then I shut off, which scares people sometimes.” Björk "Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again." Bernhard Schlink“I’ve always believed one could live many lives…even if just in our imagination. The world is open to us, and each day is an occasion to reinvent ourselves.” Ralph Lauren"I hunger for intensity. For love, affection, for tangible. For ineffable. For infinity. For discovery.  I hunger for knowledge. Life is filled with wanders and wonders. Die knowing something. Die loving something."“I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.” To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father, Donald Miller “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer“I am a jumble of passions, misgivings, and wants. It seems that I am always in a state of wishing and rarely in a state of contentment.” The Sweet Far Thing, Libba Bray “All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.” Julio Cortazar“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your soul. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” Franz Kafka“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music— the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” Henry Miller Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.” Anthony Bourdain “Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning.” Elie Wiesel, Dawn “And like the sea, I’m constantly changing from calm to hell.” Dallas Green “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.” Christopher Morley“I feel so shut out, I’m always homesick. But when I get home. I find it’s something else I’m longing for.” Autumn Sonata “Without deep conversation, my mind becomes restless. I need passion and intellect, it’s a shame that a person often lacks one or the other.”“I didn’t say I liked it. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.” Oscar Wilde, adapted from The Picture of Dorian Gray “I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night”“Loneliness is dangerous. It’s addicting. Once you see how peaceful it is, you don’t wanna deal with people.” Hedonist Poet“I want to be loved and to be left alone.” David Swanger, “My Mother’s Nudes"“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” Emily Dickinson“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things which I dare not confess to my own soul.” Bram Stoker, Dracula“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” Virginia Woolf, The Waves“Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are … bland, tasteless. They’ll never understand what it’s like to read a poem and feel almost like they’re flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart…” Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See “And never have I felt so deeply at one and, at the same time, so detached from myself, and so present in the world.” Albert Camus“My human capabilities aren’t sufficient enough to help translate what my soul wants to express.” JMC“Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.” Jean Baudrillard “We approach the void…but not to fall into it. We want to become intoxicated with dizziness and the image of the fall is sufficient.” Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality“If you’re ever lucky enough to find a girl who is a hopeless romantic with a dirty mind, you should hold onto that. Because she’ll be yours at two in the morning and at two in the afternoon the following day. She’ll kiss you where it hurts and until it hurts. And that’s important. Someone who not only knows how to turn you on but also knows how to treat you right is someone worth a little something… and a little more than usual.”“I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive. Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.” Paul Auster“I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know–unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.” James Kavanaugh“Does she scare you a little? Good. She should make you fear her love, so that when she lets you be apart of it, you won’t take it lightly. She should remind you of the power that beauty brings, that storms reside in her veins, and that she still wants you in the middle of it all. Do not take this soul for granted, for she is fierce, and she can take you places that you never thought you could go; but she is still loving in the midst of it all, like the calm rain after a storm, she can bring life. Learn her, and cherish her, respect her, and love her; for she is so much more than a pretty face, she is a soul on fire.” T.B. LaBerge // Things I’m still learning at 25“Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small.” The Waves, Virginia Woolf"We are meant to discover our authentic nature-- the state of being in which we are inspired by ourselves, turned on, lit up, and excited about who we are."  Debbie Ford“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.” Charles Bukowski “All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life — where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.” Miranda July, from It Chooses You “I want to meet people with fire in them, burning through life like a forest fire, too many people die out and survive on embers.” Adam Zucconi “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.” Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Adrienne Rich“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky.” Jack Kerouac “The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous, and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.” Helen Mirren “I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me…I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person.” Sylvia Plath“I just want to think deeply about things. Contemplate ideas in a pure, free sort of way. That’s all.” Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage “Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.” Charles Baudelaire “You have to be interested. If you’re not interested, you can’t be interesting.” Iris Apfel “I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.” The Help, Kathryn Stockett “Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.” Haruki Murakami,The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle“Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.” Charles Bukowski (from Ham On Rye)“Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.” Haruki Murakami, 1Q84“Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.” High Fidelity - Nick Hornby “For every devious scream in my head there is a divine whisper and it saves me every time.” VàZaki Nada“In man’s memories there are those things that he doesn’t reveal to all, but perhaps only to his friends. And then there are those he won’t reveal even to his friends, but perhaps only to himself, and even then in confidence. But then, finally, there are those that a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and any decent man accumulates quite enough of those things.” Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky“I feel too much. That’s what’s going on. Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel the wrong ways? My insides don’t match up with my outsides. Do anyone’s inside and outsides match up? I don’t know. I’m only me. Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside. But it’s worse for me. I wonder if everyone thinks it’s worse for him. Probably. But it really is worse for me.” Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.” Aldous Huxley“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.”“People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.” Benjamin Alire Sáenz“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that’s ok with them.” Alain de Botton“Let’s clear one thing up: Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people. We hate small talk because we hate the barrier it creates between people.” Laurie Helgoe“Remember that the world began in a manic episode, too. God likes to hoard sharp  things, just like you. We are saving you. And we need to hear it one more time: Who knows best?” Lydia Havens, From the Voices, published in “Pouch” “Keep interested in others; keep interested in the wide and wonderful world. Then in a spiritual sense you will always be young.” Fredric March“fernweh [feyrn-vey]” (noun) This wonderful, untranslatable German word describes the feeling of homesickness for a far away land, a place you have never visited. Do not confuse this with the english word, wanderlust; Fernweh is much more profound, it is the feeling of an unsatisfied urge to escape and discover new places, almost a sort of sadness. You miss a place you have never experienced, as opposed to lusting over it or desiring it like wanderlust. You are seeking freedom and self-discovery, but not a particular home.“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.” Rebecca Solnit“Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.”“I’m very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.” Antonia Fraser“I stay up just late enough until I am just exhausted enough that I can fall into my bed and sink into immediate slumber. Because I can’t stand lying in a bed in a dark room alone with just my thoughts for so many hours and hours.”“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.” Mary Oliver“I crave space. It charges my batteries. It helps me breathe. Being around people can be so exhausting, because most of them love to take and barely know how to give. Except for a rare few.” Unknown“The ability to sit down with another person and talk for hours, about anything and everything, is more attractive to me than anything else.” Koi Fresco“The power to bring me out of solitude – or to push me back into it – had never belonged to another person. It was mine and only mine.” Martha Beck“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.” The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” bell hooks“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplace of existence.” Sherlock Holmes from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle “Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad consciousness and a deep heart. Truly great men, I think, must feel great sorrow in this world.” Fyodor Dostoevsky (from Crime and Punishment)“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” Rainer Maria Rilke"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights“I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin” Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl“He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.” Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights“I’m not totally mad at you. I’m just sad. You’re all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside.” Haruki Murakami “I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, ‘Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?’ or ‘Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?’ But you can’t say that at a…party.” Paul Gilmartin, The Mental Illness Happy Hour“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human. It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!” It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back. It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.” Oriah Mountain Dreamer“I’m half child half ancient.”I am fucking insane but my intentions are gold and my heart is pure“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?” Don DeLillo“Everyone has a 2 AM and a 2 PM personality.”“My problem is that I fall in love with words, rather than actions. I fall in love with ideas and thoughts, instead of reality. And it will be the death of me.” “My nights are for overthinking, my mornings are for oversleeping.”“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood"George Orwell, 1984“‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless, it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.’” Louis C.K.“I’m not the same everyday. There are times where I’m loud and chatty, and there are times when I’m really quiet. I don’t think I can define myself.”“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole.” Richard Siken, Spork Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone“There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought.” Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal from Labyrinths, “Pick my brain. Ask me about my views on something. Dig deeper than the obvious. Let’s make each other think. Show me a different perspective.”“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good.” Roal Dahl "I have the deepest affection for intellectual conversations. The ability to just sit and talk. About love, about life, about anything, about everything. To sit under the moon with all the time in the world, the full-speed train that is our lives slowing to a crawl. Bound by no obligations, barred by no human limitations. To speak without regret or fear of consequence. To talk for hours and about what's really important in life."“Human beings are made of water, we were not designed to hold ourselves together; rather run freely like oceans like rivers” Beau Taplin "You're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.""How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?"I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new and that is ultimately good for the soul. “Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.” Janet Fitch, White Oleander“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” AristotleIt was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.“I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.” Michael Faudet My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover. ~ Falsely yours“I don’t like small talk. Talk to me about life. Talk to me about your scars and the concealer you call your smile. Talk to me about the story behind your favorite song. Tell me about your dreams that sometimes seem too big for the Earth to contain. Tell me what wakes you up in the morning before your alarm clock does. Tell me about what makes shivers run down your spine. Tell me about what makes your eyes light up like the stars I can’t see in New York City. Tell me your story.”“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” Clarice Lispector, A Hora Da Estrela “I appreciate the people who take time to look at the world a little deeper”Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Be curious.” Stephen Hawking"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world. But then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me, who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there, thinking of me too. Well, I hope, that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes it's true. I'm here and I'm just as strange as you.""There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself"
https://soundcloud.com/distant-grand
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