words

Jeanette Winterson – Written on the Body

/ Michelle / Leave a comment

I have spent most of my life thinking about love. I understood early that love could be exciting, extravagant, risky, reckless, heart-racing, heart-breaking, complete, catastrophic, desired and desperate. And I knew that love was like a scent trail and I would follow it. That love could not be a thought-experiment. That love should never count the cost. That the cost is the exchange of the self as a single currency.

I set out to fathom love because I lost it too soon– at six weeks old when I was adopted. Losing love early shapes the idea of love into its opposite: Loss.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Our binary oppositions are too crude. The opposite of love is not hate – in fact love and hate are as close as a pair of hostile brothers, as anyone who has fallen out of love – with a person or a cause, will know.

If love means to gain everything then to lose love is to lose everything.

Maggie Nelson – Bluets

/ Michelle / 1 Comment

Excerpt from Bluets:

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. ‘Love is not consolation,’ she wrote. ‘It is light.’

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”

Rivers

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You tiptoed away into the forest

the leaves fell sylvan green

branches crossed light filtered through

the specks of light turned shadows

 

You looked back at me a moment

I thought I felt your hand against mine

 

it was just the warmth of the sun trickling through the trees.

 

And when the fog lifted

rubble, boots, rivers

the things you whispered still floating in the air

 

I realized that it was just me.

Wooden Stairs

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sitting searching for that

you left those flowers in the hallway

they’re wilted but they still feel like home

pacing up the hall

padded feet and the smell of sunflowers

carried away in the wind

dandelions, they never found their place.

but you’re there as they swirl around me and

you’re there as the waters churn and the ocean

carves at the shore and you’re there

as the sands shift with the tides

and i remember those old piano keys

they’re covered in dust

those stars over that wooden deck we built in the backyard

that fire burning off in the distance and

i feel rain pattering in my quiet thoughts.

but i feel warm when you wrap me in your blanket

and i feel safe in the sunshine of your smile

and i feel home when i walk up those wooden stairs

and i see you standing there.

-mh

There goes my love. 

/ Michelle / Leave a comment

there goes my love
There goes my love
I’m letting it die

I’m letting it fade from inside and slip out from beneath me

And I don’t want to go

But this is where I’m going

I don’t want to go

But I’m letting you fade away

I’m letting your kisses slip from the trace of my lips

I’m letting your touch slip from the curves of my back

And right now it breaks my heart

It breaks my heart that one day it won’t.